New Delhi:

Russia's famed military orchestra Alexandrov Ensemble was amongst the unfortunate 91 who were on-board the ill-fated Russian millitary plane Tu-154, which crashed in the Black Sea soon after take-off from Sochi on Sunday morning.

The choir was en route to Russian military base in Syria to perform on Chritsmas for their counrty's troops stationed there as part of peacekeeping efforts in the region.

Alexandrov Ensemble is an official army choir of the Russian armed forces which was established during the Soviet era. The ensemble consists of a male choir, an orchestra and a dance ensemble.

The Alexandrov Ensemble has entertained audiences both in Russia and throughout the world, performing a range of music including folk tunes, hymns, operatic arias, and popular music.

Also Read: Debris of missing Russian military plane Tu-154 with 91 on-board found in Black Sea: Reports

The groups repertoire has included The Volga Boatmens Song, Katyusha, Kalinka, and Ave Maria. The ensemble has been titled on the name of its founder Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov.

In 1949 the ensemble was officially titled the Twice Red-bannered and Red-starred Ensemble of Song and Dance of the Soviet Army named after AV Alexandrov, so it was no longer called the Red Army Choir in brief, but known as Alexandrov Ensemble".

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A lawsuit against a former deputy mayor shows that thirteen trillion rials ($440 million) of financial irregularities took place under the watch of current parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf when he was the capitals mayor from 2005 to 2017.

Speaking to pro-reform Etemad Online on Saturday, a current member of city council Mohammad Javad Haqshenas implicitly criticized the fact that while the violation was administrative, the former deputy mayor Issa Sharifi is on trial at an Armed Forces Judicial Organization's court.

Both Qalibaf and Sharifi were officers of the Revolutionary Guard.

Haqshenas also said it had been announced in the case that "some money" had been transferred abroad but did not elaborate further.

Issa Sharifi, the most important executive during Qalibaf's mayoralty in Tehran, was arrested in September 2017. Without releasing details, judicial officials say there have been forty hearings in the case so far.

Initially, the judiciary declared Sharifi's charges to be financial but changed it later to espionage.

Referring to a 650 billion rials (approximately $22 million at the time) bribery case, Haqshenas revealed that the money was given to the brother of a former member of parliament, Abolfazl Mousavi. According to Haqshenas, the former Mayor wrote off between 600 and 700 billion rials debt of the MP's brother.

The case of the 650 billion rials bribe was initially raised by Mustafa Mir Salim, an ultraconservative member of the current parliament.

Mir Salim has maintained that the bribe was paid in 2016 to prevent the probe and investigation by parliament into the management of the Tehran Municipality.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for Iran's Judiciary has confirmed that a former member of parliament has been arrested in connection with the case.

An Islamic Revolution Guards Corps' Brigadier General, former Chief of Police, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, is currently the Majles speaker. He has filed a lawsuit against Mir Salim and three journalists who have followed the bribery case.

After Qalibaf was voted out as mayor by a reformist city council in 2017, many corruption cases surrounding his administration came to the surface. City council members alleged that corruption reached hundreds of billions of dollars.

Qalibaf himself has apparently been protected from any legal pursuit. He is close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
MINSK, Belarus  Police in Belarus on Monday detained several leading opposition activists as well as a handful of protesters taking part in a wave of demonstrations challenging the reelection of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko in balloting that they say was rigged.

The Coordination Council, which was set up by the opposition to negotiate a transfer of power, said members Sergei Dylevsky and Olga Kovalkova were detained in the capital of Minsk. Later in the day, the opposition also reported the detention of Alexander Lavrinovich, a strike leader at a major industrial plant.

Police also detained at least five of several hundred people who had gathered in Minsks Independence Square on Monday, the 16th straight day of protests, and another five in other cities, activists said.

The actions signaled Lukashenkos determination to stifle massive post-election demonstrations that have entered their third week. The 65-year-old Belarusian leader, who has been in power since 1994, toted an assault rifle in a show of force as he arrived at his residence by helicopter on Sunday while protesters rallied nearby.

Last week, Lukashenko warned that the opposition councils members could face charges for creating what he described as a parallel government. Prosecutors then opened a criminal inquiry on charges of undermining national security, an allegation rejected by the council.

Several other council members, including Belarus most famous writer, Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, have been summoned for questioning over the protests in an apparent attempt by authorities to intimidate them.

Dylevsky played a leading role in organizing a strike at the Minsk Tractor Plant, one of the multiple labor actions at top factories last week in support of the protests that posed a major challenge to Lukashenko. Lavrinovich led the strike organizing committee at another major factory, the Minsk Wheeled Tow Truck Plant.

Kovalkova is a top associate of the main opposition challenger in the disputed Aug. 9 election, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who entered the race after her husband was jailed and prevented from running. She fled to Lithuania after the vote under official pressure.

Tsikhanouskaya met Monday with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun in Lithuanias capital, Vilnius. In a statement issued by her campaign headquarters, she reaffirmed her readiness for talks on a transition of power to settle the crisis in Belarus. Tsikhanouskaya also thanked the United States for supporting the Belarusian people.

She is a very impressive person and I can see why she is so popular in her country, Biegun said after meeting her. The United States cannot and will not decide the course of events in Belarus, this is the right of Belarusian people.

The U.S. and the European Union have dismissed the election as neither free nor fair and urged authorities to start a dialogue with the opposition.

Sundays anti-Lukashenko demonstration in Minsk drew an estimated 200,000 people pushing for him to step down. A protest a week earlier attracted a similar number in the largest rallies ever held in the former Soviet nation of 9.5 million people.

The demonstrations are challenging the official results of the election, which gave Lukashenko a sixth term with an unlikely 80% of the vote.

The president, who cultivates an air of machismo, has dismissed the opposition as puppets of the West and accused the U.S. of fomenting the unrest.

Video on Sunday showed him getting off his helicopter with a Kalashnikov automatic rifle. He was accompanied by his 15-year-old younger son, who also carried a rifle.

The Belarusian leader commented to his aides that the protesters ran away like rats and then thanked riot police who encircled the presidential residence.

The authorities are afraid of the majority and clearly nervous, said Maria Kolesnikova, a leading member of the opposition council, in describing Lukashenkos actions in the face of the protests.

She described the detentions of her colleagues as crude pressure and an attempt to scare us.

They ignore our proposals for a dialogue and respond with repressions, she told The Associated Press.

The protests were galvanized by a brutal crackdown in the initial days after the election, when police detained nearly 7,000 people. Hundreds were injured when officers dispersed peaceful protesters with rubber bullets, stun grenades and clubs. At least three people died.

Lukashenko on Monday dismissed Belarus ambassador to Slovakia, Igor Leshchenya, who denounced the crackdown and handed in his resignation.

As crowds swelled amid public outrage, the authorities backed off and let demonstrations go unhindered. However, they again bolstered police cordons around the city since last week and threatened opposition activists with criminal charges.

Five demonstrators who set up improvised audio equipment for speakers in Independence Square on Monday evening were detained by police, said Valiantsin Stefanovich of the Viasna rights center. The square has been the epicenter of daily rallies, and police had not intervened for the past 12 days.

Another five protesters were detained in other cities, Stefanovich added, signaling the toughening of the governments stance. With pinpoint repressions, the authorities are trying to neutralize the most active, he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkels spokesman Steffen Seibert criticized the threats against the striking factory workers and deplored the very martial, threatening backdrop which Mr. Lukashenko created on the weekend. He emphasized that a dialogue between the leadership and the Belarus society is urgently needed.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said while visiting Ukraine on Monday that Germany, which currently holds the EU presidency, urged Russia to use what influence it has with Lukashenko to make clear to him that he can no longer get past this dialogue.

U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said that Biegun, the No. 2 U.S. diplomat who is set to visit Moscow on Tuesday and Wednesday, will be urging the Russian government to join us in respecting the democratic rights and aspirations of the Belarusian people, not intervening in that process.

Russia and Belarus have a union treaty envisaging close political, economic and military ties, and Lukashenko said he secured a promise from Russian President Vladimir Putin to provide security assistance, if needed.

The Belarusian leader has sought to rally Moscows support by trying to cast his foes as anti-Russia, although the protesters in Belarus have not displayed anti-Russia slogans.

Putins spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow has shunned contacts with the Belarusian opposition, arguing that such a move would amount to meddling in a neighbors internal affairs.

We consider it wrong and have no intention to do so, at least not during the current hot stage, Peskov said.

Seeking Putins support amid the protests, Lukashenko also has accused NATO of harboring aggressive plans and bolstering its forces in neighboring Poland and Lithuania, and he ordered a massive military exercise near those borders. The alliance has rejected Lukashenkos claims.

Lukashenkos office said he and Putin had another call Monday to discuss the domestic situation in Belarus and the developments on its western frontier. The Kremlin said in its readout of the call that Lukashenko told Putin about his efforts to normalize the situation in the country.



Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov and Jim Heintz in Moscow, Liudas Dapkus in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Geir Moulson and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed.



Follow APs coverage of Belarus at https://www.apnews.com/Belarus
According to rumors, Kim Yo-jong's leadership is, however, temporary. Former aide to South Korean President Kim Dae-jung: recent transfer of functions demonstrates change of power; nothing has been decided on the succession. The doubts of Seoul intelligence. Kim Jong-un had already disappeared in recent months.

Seoul (AsiaNews / Agencies) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is in a coma and his sister Kim Yo-jong is in command of the regime, albeit without full powers. This is according to an August 21 social media post by Chang Song-min, a senior official in the administration of former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung,. Promoter of the "Sunshine Policy", which aimed to improve relations between the two Koreas, Kim Dae-jung led the country from 1997 to 2003. He died in 2009.

Chang claims he obtained the information from a source in China. The transfer of some powers from the leader of Pyongyang to his sister, and to other prominent collaborators, would result in a change in the power structure. Kim Dae-jung's former aide adds that a North Korean leader would give up some of his functions only if he was ill or the victim of a coup.

Chang also maintains that Kim Yo-jong's leadership is only temporary, to fill the current power vacuum: nothing has yet been decided on the succession in the event of Kim Jong-un's death. Seoul intelligence has informed Parliament of a possible new government structure in the North, but has not linked it to a possible illness of its leader.

Kim Jong-un had already disappeared from public view twice between April and May, sparking a flurry of rumors about his health. Some reports even gave him up for dead. North Korea is one of the most reclusive countries, where the flow of news is very controlled. The health of its leader is treated as a matter of high security, given the fear of real or alleged coups.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A grant was approved through the federal Lost Wages Assistance program that will allow New Yorkers laid off due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic to collect an additional $300 in unemployment benefits.

The FEMA grant allows only those New York residents out of work due to the coronavirus to collect an additional $300 per week on top of their regular unemployment benefit, said FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor.

FEMA will work with Governor Andrew M. Cuomo to implement a system to make this funding available to New York residents, he said. FEMA said the timeframe to administer funding to individuals will vary by state/territory.

States/territories must adjust their unemployment insurance system to access these funds and accommodate program requirements, such as claimant eligibility, which may factor into delivery time state/territory systems and capabilities vary, said FEMA in a statement.

Earlier this week Cuomo had told a Rochester news station that New York would not apply for the FEMA funding. However, Robert Mujica, state Division of Budget director, confirmed to CBS6Albany on Friday that New York state would apply for the FEMA grant.

On Aug. 8, 2020, President Donald Trump made available up to $44 billion from FEMAs Disaster Relief Fund to provide financial assistance to Americans who have lost wages due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Sunday, the state of New York agreed to administer a lost wages program for its citizens who are unemployed due to COVID-19.

For four months, any New Yorker who was unemployed received an extra $600 per week as part of the $2 trillion federal stimulus package. The bill, known as The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, was passed by the Senate in March. The extra $600 was added to regular employment checks from the week starting April 5 through July 31.

Twenty-three other states have previously been approved for lost wages assistance. A full list of states are available here.

To learn more about FEMAs lost wages supplemental payment assistance, visit: https://www.fema.gov/fact-sheet/fema-lost-wages-supplemental-payment-assistance.
NOUAKCHOTT (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th August, 2020) The Mauritanian police have released the country's ex-president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, which was detained over alleged corruption-related charges, his lawyer Taghioullah Aida told Sputnik in the early hours of Monday.

Last week, Abdel Aziz was brought in for questioning as part of a parliamentary committee's investigation into corruption-linked offenses during his presidential term from 2009-2019 and was subsequently arrested by the state's watchdog for economic crimes.

"The former president refused to be interviewed by investigators, as he insists on his right guaranteed by the constitution and the immunity granted to him as the ex-president," the attorney said.

The detention was unlawful, the ex-president's lawyer added, noting that Abdel Aziz would not be placed under house arrest.

Several former cabinet members in Abdel Aziz's government and prominent civil activists have filed a joint petition for his release. The petition described the criminal persecution of Abdel Aziz and his family members as politically-motivated.

According to Al Arabiya broadcaster, Abdel Aziz is suspected of unlawfully gifting one of the Mauritanian islands in the Atlantic Ocean to a former Qatari emir. The Mauritanian parliament reportedly obtained documents proving that Abdel Aziz mentioned the gift in correspondence with Qatar's ambassador in Nouakchott.

Abdel Aziz came to power in Mauritania after leading a coup d'etat in 2008, and served as the country's president from 2009-2019.
Planned Parenthood may seize David Daleiden's assets if he can't pay $600K bond

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The man who exposed Planned Parenthood's selling of baby body parts from abortions is facing possible seizure of his assets by the abortion giant if he fails to raise $600,000 in less than two weeks, his lawyer has warned.

U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick ruled Wednesday that that Planned Parenthood could begin seizing the assets of pro-life activist David Daleiden of the Center For Medical Progress and those of his organization unless they manage to pay an appeal bond.

Orrick issued the ruling as he denied post-trial motions from the defendants seeking a reduction of charges after a judgment was rendered against Daleiden, CMP and his CMP colleagues last year related to charges they faced after the release of undercover videos.

Daleiden and CMP released a series of undercover videos in 2015 that purport to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing their willingness to engage in the illegal sale and harvesting of aborted fetal tissue.

While the findings of the undercover videos riled conservatives across the nation, Planned Parenthood claims the CMP videos were deceptively edited.

Last fall, following a civil trial, a jury found CMP guilty of several crimes, including violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, wiretapping and engaging in a civil conspiracy.

The civil trial additionally yielded a judgment ordering Daleiden and other defendants to pay $2.3 million in damages.

In April, Orrick agreed with the jury's decision, finding the defendants jointly and severally liable for those damages.

Throughout the ordeal, Daleiden's attorneys have challenged various judicial moves. They have long maintained that Orrick is not able to adjudicate the matter impartially because of his board service with a San Francisco nonprofit group that houses a Planned Parenthood office.

Peter Breen, senior counsel, for the Thomas More Society, told LifeSite News in a recent interview that the current circumstances are dire.

If we cannot post a $600,000 bond in this 14-day period, Planned Parenthoods high-priced collections lawyers can come after David with asset seizures, garnishments and strip him and the Center for Medical Progress bare, Breen explained, noting it could cripple Daleiden's pro-life advocacy.

They can take everything. They can take all of his possessions. They can even come get his car. When were able to travel again, how would he even have the money to travel? You cant even imagine the tools that shrewd collections lawyers have at their disposal to take every dime you have, or nearly every dime you have, in situations like this.

Breen further elaborated that should the verdict stand, it effectively unravels years of established jurisprudence on undercover investigative journalism. This includes the 1999 decision in Food Lion v. ABC, which held that the truth cannot be a source of monetary damages.

And in this case, it is crystal clear Planned Parenthood didnt even know that David had gone undercover until the videos emerged and the nation was outraged immediately, he said.

The Thomas More Society is reportedly helping Daleiden raise the funds to pay the bond in hopes of securing their right to continue with an appeal and overturn the verdict. Daleiden's attorneys intend to take the case through the federal judiciary to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

Daleiden's plight has received renewed attention not only because of the judgment but also in light of former Vice President Joe Biden's selection of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as his running mate in the 2020 presidential race.

Before being elected to the Senate, Harris was the California attorney general. And in 2016, Harris met with Planned Parenthood executives and allegedly conspired to target Daleiden.

As attorney general, she sent law enforcement agents to raid his home.

Kamala Harris decided to target me and make me the first and only case of a criminal enforcement of the California video recording law, Daleiden said in an interview with Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show Thursday.

Kamala Harris sent 11 California DOJ agents into my one-bedroom apartment in southern California to raid my home to seize the means of publishing the videos, he said. They took the means of publishing speech critical of Planned Parenthood and critical of Kamala Harris public patrons.

Daleiden had previously faced criminal charges in Texas that were related to his undercover investigative work. But those charges were dismissed.

Undercover video is something that is widely practiced in the state of California, Daleiden said Thursday, defending his actions.

Its legal and we were scrupulous to follow the law to a T, recording people  at open public restaurants, crowded public restaurants, where anybody could be expected to overhear.
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Amitabh Bachchan

Mumbai: Amitabh Bachchan said he has started filming the twelfth season of the popular game show "Kaun Banega Crorepati" (KBC) with proper protection amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Amitabh Bachchan

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Bachchan, who recovered from Covid-19 earlier this month, visited the set for the first time since the coronavirus-induced lockdown in March forced shut film and TV shoots.

He on his blog shared his experience of shooting with a minimal crew, all wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) kits.

"It has begun. The chair, the atmosphere... KBC 12. Started year 2000, today year 2020. Unimaginable that the years have passed, that the show has lasted, that the nerves are back. It's a sea of limited blue on set.

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Amitabh Bachchan tweet

"Quiet, conscious, each delegated work routine, precautions, systems, distanced masks, sanitised and the apprehensions of not just what shall happen to the show... but what shall the World look like after this dread Covid-19," Bachchan wrote.

"Recognised faces now unrecognisable and the doubts whether we are in the right place, with the right people but we muster up the fears and be on. There is great consideration and care being extended. All precautions carefully worked out and followed."

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Amitabh Bachchan The actor shared pictures of himself from the shoot, where he was seen in two outfits- a three-piece and a bandhgala suit.

KBC announced in May that it's set to make its selection process completely digital amid the pandemic.
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The newest full-length trailer for the upcoming Showtime miniseries The Comey Rule was released on Monday.

The new trailer gives a fuller view of Brendan Gleeson, 65, who looks just like the 45th president, Donald Trump.

The series, which also stars Jeff Daniels, 65, as James Comey, is focused on dual investigations into Russian interference in the presidential election and Hillary Clinton's private email server.

Picture perfect: Brendan Gleeson, 65, plays an eerie version of President Donald Trump in the new full-length trailer for The Comey Rule, which dropped Monday

The trailer opens with Michael Kelly as Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

McCabe explains to his colleagues that they have to go through '347,000 emails to determine if one of the candidates in that election needs to be indicted' with only 15 days left until the election.

Daniels makes a first appearance as he's briefed over the phone that FBI agents believe Russian cyber interference is trying to 'sabotage Secretary Clinton's campaign.'

The then-FBI director gulps in a later scene as he learns that Trump has won the presidency.

The setup: The trailer opens with Michael Kelly as Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI, explaining the investigation into Hillary Clinton and Russian interference with 15 days to the election

The lead: Daniels makes a first appearance as he's briefed over the phone that FBI agents believe Russian cyber interference is trying to 'sabotage Secretary Clinton's campaign'

Awkward: The then-FBI director gulps in a later scene as he learns that Trump has won the presidency

Next, Gleeson stands in silhouette as Trump while delivering an impeccable impression of his voice.

'No one has ever succeeded like I have,' he says in voiceover.

The president dismissed Comey on May 9, 2017, after he faced widespread criticism for how he handled the investigation into Clinton's private email server.

Gleeson even captures the presidents walk and stance in an infamous scene in which he declares Comey to be 'more famous than me' in front of reporters in the Oval Office.

The trailer then shifts to the investigation into Russian meddling in the election with the release of the Steele Dossier, written by former spy Christopher Steele, which alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Lookalikes: President Trump (pictured right) dismissed Comey on May 9, 2017, after he faced criticism for his 2016 handling of the bureau's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. Gleeson does an impeccable version of Trump's voice and even mimics his mannerisms

Investigator: James Comey (pictured right), who was appointed FBI Director by President Obama, also headed an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election and alleged links between Moscow and the Trump campaign. Jeff Daniels captures his uptight manner

Hard to tell apart: Next, Gleeson stands in silhouette as Trump while delivering an impeccable impression of his voice

Nailed it: Gleeson even captures the presidents walk and stance in an infamous scene in which he declares Comey to be 'more famous than me' in front of reporters in the Oval Office

The Russians: The trailer shifts to the investigation into Russian meddling in the election with the release of the Steele Dossier, written by former spy Christopher Steele, which alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government

A scene where Trump invites Comey over to the White House for a private dinner is shot and scored like an ominous horror film.

'Just the two of us?' Comey asks as he arrives.

'Nobody gets treated as unfairly as I do. It's disgraceful,' Gleeson whispers in Trump's voice. 'I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.'

Next, another character says, 'The president just committed a crime in your presence.'

Chilling: A scene where Trump invites Comey over to the White House for a private dinner is shot and scored like an ominous horror film

Surprised: 'Just the two of us?' Comey asks as he arrives

Complaining: 'Nobody gets treated as unfairly as I do. It's disgraceful,' Gleeson whispers in Trump's voice. 'I need loyalty. I expect loyalty'

The trailer concludes on a fast-paced montage of characters worrying over Comey's approach to the investigation.

'He thinks that being right will save him,' warns one unseen person at the end. 'It won't.'

We also see a roundup of the other cast members, including British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir as President Barack Obama, Holly Hunter as Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and Jennifer Ehle as Patrice Comey, the FBI director's wife, Scoot McNairy as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Peter Coyote as Robert Mueller.

Oona Chaplin, Amy Seimetz and Breaking Bad's Jonathan Banks also appear.

The miniseries was originally scheduled to air in late November, after the election, but director Billy Ray convinced Showtime to move it up to September 27 and 28 in order to let viewers take it into consideration before casting their ballots.

The Comey Rule will be available on Stan in Australia from September 27th.
Foreign-born Australians are more than twice as likely as their native-born neighbours to wear a face mask but a national survey has revealed growing fatigue among all residents towards measures aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus.

A survey of households by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, released on Monday, shows the proportion of people wearing face masks, avoiding crowds or even using hand sanitiser is falling despite the ongoing transmission of COVID-19.

An ABS survey has revealed a drop in the proportion of people taking public health measures to stop the spread of coronavirus, including wearing a face mask. Credit:Rhett Wyman

The ABS found a quarter of people surveyed in June used a face mask, down 2 percentage points on the same question asked in May.

But that 25 per cent was buoyed by foreign-born Australians, of which 40 per cent said they had worn a face mask in the past four weeks. Among native-born Australians, the proportion wearing a face mask fell to 17.5 per cent in June, from 20.4 per cent in May.
By Online Desk

After hitting out at Rahul Gandhi for his alleged 'colluding with BJP' remarks, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal withdrew his previous comments saying that Rahul Gandhi has 'personally informed' Sibal he never said what was attributed to him.

In a tweet, the senior Congress leader said that after Rahul Gandhi's personal clarification he has withdrawn the 'colluding with BJP' tweet.

Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him .



I therefore withdraw my tweet .  Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) August 24, 2020

It all started when, when Kapil Sibal tweeted saying 'Rahul says 'we are colluding with BJP'. Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party. Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP government...last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue!.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is one of the signatories of the letter, had also said that he would resign if any such link is established. He had further added in the CWC meet that the leaders are not questioning Sonia Gandhi but wanted an organisational reform in the larger interest of the party.

ALSO READ | Sonia Gandhi offers to quit as interim Congress chief, Manmohan urges her to continue

Hovever, these allegations were denied by senior party leader Randeep Surjewala who tweeted saying that 'please dont be mislead by false media discourse or misinformation being spread.'

Surjewala had replied to Sibal's previous tweet saying "Rahul Gandhi hasn't said a word of this nature nor alluded to it. Please don't be misled by false media discourse or misinformation being spread. But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather than fighting and hurting each other and the Congress.

Sh. Rahul Gandhi hasnt said a word of this nature nor alluded to it.



Pl dont be mislead by false media discourse or misinformation being spread.



But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather then fighting & hurting each other & the Congress. https://t.co/x6FvPpe7I1  Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) August 24, 2020

Denying the allegations, Congress leader Manickam Tagore tweeted saying "Kapil Sibal ji we all have great respect for you. Congress made you cabinet minister and gives lot of importance. you are NOT inside the CWC. You are reacting to a leak that is false. It does not reflect well on a leader as senior as you are, to react to hearsay!"



These developments come amidst the crucial CWC meet underway in New Delhi to discuss the concerns raised over the Congress party leadership.

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

23 party leaders, including Sibal and Azad, have written a letter to Sonia Gandhi seeking 'full-time' leadership that is active in the field and 'visible' in party offices, dissolution of powers to state units and revamping the Congress Working Committee in line with the party constitution among other changes.

ALSO WATCH:

(Inputs from PTI, ANI)
Ukraine "must not be forgotten" among issues competing for international attention, the statement stresses.

International parliamentarians, representatives of Europe, Canada and Australia, have issued a statement on Ukraine's Independence Day, reiterating support for the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity that "continues to face military violation by the Russian Federation".

It is yet another nation on the European continent "whose borders have been redrawn by force," reads the statement shared on Twitter by MP Stewart McDonald.

 Parliamentarians from Europe, Canada and Australia assert our friendship and solidarity with the citizens of Ukraine on their 29th Independence Day. Peace will come. pic.twitter.com/bzyqZMT1yk  Stewart McDonald MP (@StewartMcDonald) August 24, 2020

"Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea has brought economic hardship to the autonomous republic's citizens and continues to see the human rights of the local population, mostly of Crimean Tatars, violated on a daily basis," the statement says.

"Despite Russia's continued military and hybrid war against the people of Ukraine, the country has continued to pursue a path of democracy, Euro-Atlantic integration and further prosperity for its citizens. This has been a hard path, but the right one," legislators note.

"The international community must continue to stand by Ukraine, by recognising its independence, its territorial integrity and for the right of the people to live peacefully," reads the statement. "We must continue to uphold economic and political sanctions on Russia for its war against the Ukrainian people."

Ukraine "must not be forgotten" among issues competing for international attention, the statement stresses.

Read alsoZelensky congratulates Ukrainians on National Flag Day (Video)"On Ukraine's Independence Day we reassert our friendship with the Ukrainian people and renew our efforts to support Ukraine and its allies to deliver peace within its borders," legislators concluded.

Independence Day in Ukraine
HOLYOKE  The planned sale of the Mount St. Vincent Care Center, owned by the Sisters of Providence Ministry Corp. and managed by Trinity Health Senior Communities, to a Connecticut-based health provider brings into focus how the orders ministry continues despite mergers and acquisitions.

The proposal calls for the closure of Farren Care Center, in the Turners Falls section of Montague, and the transfer of its patients with both medical and psychiatric conditions to the Mount St. Vincent Care Center, which has been a skilled nursing and long-term rehabilitation center.

Both facilities have been ministries of the Sisters of Providence, a congregation of women religious whose founding here dates back to the late 19th century, with Farren becoming part of Trinity Health when Catholic Health East, of which the Sisters of Providence Health System was part, merged to form that Michigan-based system in 2013.

At the time, the congregation created the Sisters of Providence Ministry Corp. as a holding company to oversee some of its remaining subsidiary corporations, which included Mount St. Vincent, Providence Place, Marys Meadow at Providence Place, the Genesis Spiritual Life and Conference Center, in Westfield, as well as Providence Ministries for the Needy.

We formed SPMC to provide a structure to support the Sisters of Providence entities that remained after the coming together of Catholic Health East and Trinity Health, said Sister Kathleen Popko, president of the congregation and chair of the SPMC board.

These remaining entities were relating directly to the Sisters of Providence Congregation. This holding company structure facilitates engagement with and support of these subsidiaries.

She added, SPMC holds certain reserved powers over the subsidiaries for such areas as change of mission or focus, financial matters, such as incurring debt or financial budget approval, and several more."

In addition, SPMC provides supportive services to these entities in several areas such as insurance, Popko said.

SPMC has management contracts with Trinity Senior Services Management (TSSM) for Providence Place and Marys Meadow. SPMC owns these facilities. At some point in the future, The Hillside at Providence, Inc. and Hillside Residence, Inc. will become subsidiaries of SPMC.

TSSM is the management arm of Trinity Health Senior Communities, part of the national Trinity Health network and parent to Trinity Health Of New England Senior Communities.

Providence Place, an independent living and retirement community for those 55 and older, was originally the mother house of the congregation whose ministries included hospitals like Mercy and Providence Behavioral Health, now part of Trinity Health Of New England, orphanages and homes for unwed mothers, and on that hill top outside its doors is a statue of the foundress, Mother Mary of Providence Horan, with the words ... from the hilltop I view the progress the tiny seed has made under the protection of Divine Providence.

Plans are for Trinity Health Senior Communities to close by years end the 122-bed Farren, which is reported as too costly to modernize, and to transfer patients to the 125-bed Mount St. Vincent, for which it has had a four-year operating lease with SPMC since 2018.

The proposal is for SPMC to sell the building to a realty division of Connecticut-based iCare Health Network, which entered into a management consulting services agreement in January with the regional Trinity senior communities division, and for iCare to file an application with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to transfer ownership of Mount Saint Vincent to iCare.

Trinity Health Of New England Senior Communities will file an application with the state DPH to close Farren.

For more than 50 years, the Sisters of Providence have supported the provision of competent and compassionate care for the residents of Mount St. Vincent, Popko said.

This transaction brings to a close the final chapter in Mount St. Vincents rich history. While saddened by this ending, we are consoled that, through collaborative efforts with iCare, continuation of compassionate and quality care for the vulnerable residents of Farren Care Center will be sustained at this site.

The current census at Farren is 105 patients, and the current patient census at Mount Saint Vincent is 75.

Janice Hamilton-Crawford, president of Trinity Health Of New England Senior Communities, said, pending state approval, If we proceed with a closure plan for Farren Care Center, resident choice would be respected when it came time to discuss transfer options.

If the State approves iCare Health Networks proposal for transfer of ownership of Mount Saint Vincent, we will respectfully work through the appropriate process with families and residents to determine where best their care needs can be met, Hamilton-Crawford said in reference to the potential of Mount Saint Vincent becoming a facility for patients with a dual diagnosis of both medical and psychiatric conditions.

She added, There are approximately 135 full-time employees at Farren Care Center.

Pending state approval of the closure plan, Trinity Health Senior Communities Human Resources will work with our colleagues there in terms of severance plans, outplacement services, and assisting them in finding jobs, Hamilton-Crawford said.

Related:
UPDATED 11 a.m. with additional detail about robbery, windows hit; arrest totals from weekend

ST. LOUIS  Two men were critically injured in a shootout in downtown early Monday that also sprayed bullets at the Marriott garage, shattering windows. The shooting began when one man tried to rob the other, police said.

The shooting was about 1:30 a.m. Monday. Downtown was depicted in the Post-Dispatch on Sunday as transforming into a near Wild West on many weekend nights during the summer.

Early Monday, a 35-year-old man had been walking in the 400 block of North Ninth Street when a man in an SUV stepped out of the vehicle and tried to rob him at gunpoint, police Officer Michelle Woodling said. The man in the SUV began shooting at the pedestrian, who pulled his own gun and returned fire. The SUV occupant was hit and drove away.

The pedestrian was shot in the leg and found near North Ninth Street and Washington Avenue.

As police investigated that scene, they were told that a second shooting victim was found a few blocks away  inside an SUV near Lumiere Place Boulevard and Carr street. He had been shot in the leg and groin. Police said they don't know who the second victim is.

Both men were taken to a hospital in critical condition.

The incident is being labeled a first-degree robbery and drug case. After the victims were sent to the hospital, police recovered what they think are narcotics but are waiting for confirmation from a lab, Woodling said.

Several windows at the Marriott garage were damaged by gunfire, police said. The garage is at 419 North Ninth Street. It's called the Marriott garage, but the Courtyard Marriott doesn't own or operate the garage, said the hotel's general manager. He said guests can self-park there.

A garage employee Monday said bullets shattered windows and glass doors at the garage. By 8 a.m., the damaged portions had been boarded up.

No one was hurt by the stray bullets.

The double shooting comes days after St. Louis erected barricades along stretches of Washington Avenue to cut down on speeding and aggressive driving.

Crime has surged this summer in the Downtown neighborhood. Violent crime in downtown reached record or near-record levels in June and July, with 114 assaults happening in June. Thats higher than the last eight Junes in downtown combined.

Over the weekend downtown, a man was shot in knee, another man was robbed and a third person was carjacked in downtown St. Louis.

St. Louis police said officers stopped several cruisers in the Downtown and Near North Riverfront neighborhoods over the weekend too. Police said officers recovered six guns and made several arrests and had a minibike, ATVs and other vehicles towed.

By comparison, police had been more hands-off earlier in the summer because of the pandemic. To slow the spread of the virus, the police force went to no self-initiated activity for six weeks, district commander Capt. Renee Kriesmann has said. Officers were told not to make the pedestrian stops or traffic stops they normally do unless a serious criminal act was being committed. Kriesmann said the officers are back to self-initiated activity now.

Downtown is the city's hub, and some residents and property owners downtown complained that what they perceive as lawlessness is getting worse. Police say June and July were bad but they see crime reaching a plateau and hope statistics for the full month of August are better.

St. Louis police said civil unrest in June played a role in the spike of assaults especially.

Kim Bell covers breaking news for STLtoday.com and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow her on Twitter here.

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Donald Trumps former lawyer will publish a book that exposes the presidents rank criminality and steep illegality and amorality shortly before the November election, according to Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House director of communications.

Mr Scaramucci, who previously served in the Trump administration before he was fired after a turbulent 10 days, told MSNBC that Michael Cohens new book would lay bare the presidents misdeeds with documentary evidence to support his claims.

It is not like Michael is going to say this and the White House is going to discredit him, Mr Scaramucci said in a Saturday interview. He is going to back it up with documentary evidence to show the level of illegality, the repetitiveness of the illegality.

Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and federal fraud charges, has said few know as much about the contents of his book as Mr Scaramucci.

His book, Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump, was set for release in early September  just two months before the presidential election. Cohen has detailed what the book will include about Mr Trump, from alleged golden showers in a sex club to how he supposedly colluded with Russia throughout the 2016 elections.

I know where the skeletons are buried, Cohen wrote in a foreword of the book that was released ahead of its publication, because I was the one who buried them.

Mr Scaramucci has also said that, while the book will contain explosive allegations against Mr Trump, he could not be sure of its impact on the presidents re-election bid.

Because of the volume of books Im not sure how the impact will be, but I will say this: That book is going to be very honest, he said in an earlier interview with MSNBC, adding: Theres documentary evidence. He was the presidents lawyer. Theres tons of, tons of back pages that hes going to supply once that book is published.

Mr Scaramucci also said he believed people are going to shocked at the level of criminality on the part of the president, despite several other books from former Trump aides accusing him of wrongdoing.
A protein highly expressed in lung cancer cells drives resistance to targeted therapies, report researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. In preclinical experiments, the researchers showed that inhibiting the protein caused the death of non-small cell lung cancer cells that had become resistant to therapy.

The MUSC Team was led by Chadrick E. Denlinger, M.D., who was then surgical director of the Lung Transplant Program at MUSC Health, and MUSC Hollings Cancer Center researcher Robert Gemmill, Ph.D., who is a professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine. Denlinger is now division chief of thoracic surgery at Indiana University but continues his collaboration with Gemmill.

Lung cancer accounts for a quarter of all cancer deaths, and non-small cell lung cancer makes up 84% of all lung cancer cases. Targeted therapies can be effective for a time against selected lung cancers, but resistance to these therapies soon develops.

A cancer cell is like a small factory with many moving parts working towards one common goal: survival and reproduction of the tumor at the expense of the patient.

A type of targeted drug, called a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, or TKI, works by inhibiting a specific, vital piece of machinery within the cell factory on which it is dependent. However, the factory has many fail-safes in place and can quickly rely on another piece of cellular machinery to continue to grow and survive, even in the presence of the TKI. The ability of a cancer cell to adapt to a new strategy to survive is called "genetic resistance."

When researchers developed TKIs for the treatment of cancers such as non-small cell lung adenocarcinoma (NSCLC), they had hoped they would become the "magic bullet" to treat the disease successfully.

"One of the benefits of TKIs is that they're much less toxic and are fairly beneficial -- we see a dramatic response and the tumors shrink," said Denlinger. "But a limitation is that these effects don't last very long before the cancer cells evolve new techniques to become resistant to the drug."

Due to such resistance, the survival outcomes for patients receiving TKIs are no better than those for patients receiving conventional chemotherapy. Consequently, the need to find treatments that can overcome that resistance is urgent.

Gemmill's group, which includes Cecile Nasarre, Ph.D., Anastasios Dimou, M.D., and a summer undergraduate, Rose Pagano, recently linked drug resistance in lung cancers to the expression of a cell surface co-receptor Neuropilin 2 (NRP2). Gemmill received pilot project funds from the South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research Institute for his work with NRP2.

"One of the earliest things we discovered was that the NRP2 variant protein, NRP2b, dramatically increased in lung cancer patients who became resistant to therapy," remarked Gemmill. "This gave us the first clue that it becomes upregulated in resistant tumors."

The investigators then performed a series of experiments in which they "knocked down" NRP2b from lung cancer cell lines that were capable of developing TKI resistance.

"When we knock down NRP2b, we lose the surviving drug-tolerant cells," said Gemmill. "And by reducing that population, we believe we will reduce the ability of the tumor to develop genetic resistance."

Next, they explored how NRP2b could be contributing to drug resistance in lung cancer cells. They started with GSK3, a molecule that's involved in many different activities within the cell and has been reported previously to interact with NRP2b during neuronal development. The investigators performed experiments to determine whether NRP2b interacts with GSK3B.

"You can think about GSK3B as a hammer," said Gemmill. "And this hammer has the job of hammering many different nails that are present in the cell. NRP2b is like the hand of the carpenter that directs that hammer to particular nails. NRP2b is using GSK3B as a hammer to drive very specific nails, and we want to stop that because those nails are driving tumor progression."

To better understand the specific nails that NRP2b and GSK3B are driving in lung cancer, the investigators performed experiments in which they measured how well lung cancer cells can migrate and survive in the presence of TKIs in the absence of these two players. With these experiments, they found that NRP2b needs GSK3B to promote cancer cell migration, an essential step in cancer progression, and drug resistance.

Now that the investigators have identified a mechanism by which cancer cells are becoming resistant to treatment, their next step will involve developing inhibitors. More specifically, they will try to develop inhibitors that interfere with the carpenter (NRP2) grabbing the hammer (GSK3B).

"Importantly, these inhibitors should not interfere with other functions of GSK3B, which will reduce potentially harmful off-target effects in a healthy cell," said Denlinger.

Currently, the team is working to test the toxicity and effectiveness of prototype drugs that could specifically disrupt the interaction between GSK3B and NRP2b. They are collaborating on this work with MUSC College of Pharmacy researchers Patrick M. Woster, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Drug Discovery & Biomedical Sciences, and associate professor Yuri K. Peterson, Ph.D.

"Ultimately we could find a way to improve therapy for cancer patients," said Denlinger. "A therapy that could extend the influence of TKIs and potentially reduce metastatic spread and extend the lives of patients."

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Dr. Gemmill, Dr. Cecile Nasarre and Dr. Peterson have patents pending for mimetic peptides for the treatment of cancer.

About MUSC

Founded in 1824 in Charleston, MUSC is the oldest medical school in the South, as well as the state's only integrated, academic health sciences center with a unique charge to serve the state through education, research and patient care. Each year, MUSC educates and trains more than 3,000 students and nearly 800 residents in six colleges: Dental Medicine, Graduate Studies, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy. The state's leader in obtaining biomedical research funds, in fiscal year 2019, MUSC set a new high, bringing in more than $284 million. For information on academic programs, visit musc.edu.

As the clinical health system of the Medical University of South Carolina, MUSC Health is dedicated to delivering the highest quality patient care available, while training generations of competent, compassionate health care providers to serve the people of South Carolina and beyond. Comprising some 1,600 beds, more than 100 outreach sites, the MUSC College of Medicine, the physicians' practice plan, and nearly 275 telehealth locations, MUSC Health owns and operates eight hospitals situated in Charleston, Chester, Florence, Lancaster and Marion counties. In 2019, for the fifth consecutive year, U.S. News & World Report named MUSC Health the No. 1 hospital in South Carolina. To learn more about clinical patient services, visit muschealth.org.

MUSC and its affiliates have collective annual budgets of $3.2 billion. The more than 17,000 MUSC team members include world-class faculty, physicians, specialty providers and scientists who deliver groundbreaking education, research, technology and patient care

About MUSC Hollings Cancer Center

MUSC Hollings Cancer Center is a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center and the largest academic-based cancer research program in South Carolina. The cancer center comprises more than 100 faculty cancer scientists and 20 academic departments. It has an annual research funding portfolio of more than $44 million and a dedication to reducing the cancer burden in South Carolina. Hollings offers state-of-the-art diagnostic capabilities, therapies and surgical techniques within multidisciplinary clinics that include surgeons, medical oncologists, radiation therapists, radiologists, pathologists, psychologists and other specialists equipped for the full range of cancer care, including more than 200 clinical trials. For more information, visit http://www.hollingscancercenter.org

About the SCTR Institute

The South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research (SCTR) Institute, a National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Awards hub, is the catalyst for changing the culture of biomedical research, facilitating sharing of resources and expertise, and streamlining research-related processes to bring about large-scale, change in the clinical and translational research efforts in South Carolina. Our vision is to improve health outcomes and quality of life for the population through discoveries translated into evidence-based practice. For more information, visit https://research.musc.edu/resources/sctr.
Mayra Ramirez remembers the nightmares.

During six weeks on life support at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Ramirez said, she had terrifying nightmares that she couldnt distinguish from reality.

Most of them involve me drowning, she said. I attribute that to me not being able to breathe, and struggling to breathe.

On June 5, Ramirez, 28, became the first known COVID-19 patient in the U.S. to undergo a double lung transplant. She is strong enough now to begin sharing the story of her ordeal.

Mysterious exposure

Before the pandemic, Ramirez worked as a paralegal for an immigration law firm in Chicago. She enjoyed walking her dogs and running 5K races.

Ramirez had been working from home since mid-March, hardly leaving the house, so she has no idea how she contracted the coronavirus. In late April, she started experiencing chronic spasms, diarrhea, loss of taste and smell, and a slight fever.

I felt very fatigued, Ramirez said. I wasnt able to walk long distances without falling over. And thats when I decided to go into the emergency room.

From the ER to a ventilator

The staff at Northwestern checked her vitals and found her oxygen levels were extremely low. She was given 10 minutes to explain her situation over the phone to her mother in North Carolina and appoint her to make medical decisions on her behalf.

Ramirez knew she was about to be placed on a ventilator, but she didnt understand exactly what that meant.

In Spanish, the word ventilator  ventilador  is fan, so I thought, Oh, theyre just gonna blow some air into me and Ill be OK. Maybe have a three-day stay, and then Ill be right out. So I wasnt very worried, Ramirez said.

In fact, she would spend the next six weeks heavily sedated on that ventilator and another machine  known as ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation  pumping and oxygenating her blood outside of her body.

One theory about why Ramirez became so sick is that she has a neurological condition that is treated with steroids, drugs that can suppress the immune system.

By early June, Ramirez was at risk of further decline. She began showing signs that her kidneys and liver were starting to fail, with no improvement in her lung function. Her family was told she might not make it through the night, so her mother and sisters caught the first flight from North Carolina to Chicago to say goodbye.

When they arrived, the doctors told Ramirezs mother, Nohemi Romero, that there was one last thing they could try.

Ramirez was a candidate for a double lung transplant, they said, although the procedure had never been done on a COVID patient in the U.S. Her mother agreed, and within 48 hours of being listed for transplant, a donor was found and the successful procedure was performed on June 5.

At a recent news conference held by Northwestern Memorial, Romero shared in Spanish that there were no words to describe the pain of not being by her daughters side as she struggled for her life.

She thanked God all went well, and for giving her the strength to make it through.

I just felt like a vegetable

Dr. Ankit Bharat, Northwestern Medicines chief of thoracic surgery, performed the 10-hour procedure.

Most patients are quite sick going into (a) lung transplant, Bharat said in an interview in June. But she was so sick. In fact, I can say without hesitation, the sickest patient I ever transplanted.

Bharat said most COVID-19 patients will not be candidates for transplants because of their age and other health conditions that decrease the likelihood of success. And early research shows that up to half of COVID patients on ventilators survive the illness and are likely to recover on their own.

But for some, like Ramirez, Bharat said, a transplant can be a life-saving option of last resort.

When Ramirez woke up after the operation, she was disoriented, could barely move her body and couldnt speak.

I just felt like a vegetable. It was frustrating, but at the time I didnt have the cognitive ability to process what was going on, Ramirez said.

She recalled being sad that her mother wasnt with her in the hospital, not understanding that visitors werent allowed because of the pandemic.

Her family had sent photos to post by her hospital bed, and Ramirez said she couldnt recognize anyone in the pictures.

I was actually sort of upset about it, (thinking,) Who are these strangers and why are their pictures in my room? Ramirez said. It was weeks later, actually, that I took a second look and realized, Hey, thats my grandmother. Thats my mom and my siblings. And thats me.

After a few weeks, Ramirez said, she finally understood what happened to her. When COVID-19 restrictions loosened at the hospital in mid-June, her mother was finally able to visit.

The first thing I did was just tear up, Ramirez said. I was overjoyed to see her.

The long road to recovery

After weeks of in-patient rehabilitation, Ramirez was discharged home. Shes now receiving in-home nursing assistance as well as physical and occupational therapy, and shes working on finding a psychologist.

Ramirez eagerly looks forward to being able to spend more time with her family, her boyfriend and her dogs and serving the immigrant community through her legal work.

But for now, her days are consumed by rehab. Her doctors say it will be at least a year before she can function independently and be as active as before.

Ramirez is slowly regaining strength and learning how to breathe with her new lungs.

She takes more than 17 pills, four times a day, including medicines to prevent her body from rejecting the new lungs. She also takes anxiety meds and antidepressants to help her cope with daily nightmares and panic attacks.

The long-term physical and mental health tolls on Ramirez and other COVID-19 survivors remain largely unknown, since the virus is so new.

While most people who contract the virus are left seemingly unscathed, for some patients, like Ramirez, the road to recovery is full of uncertainty, said Dr. Mady Hornig, a physician-scientist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Some patients can experience post-intensive care syndrome, or PICS, which can consist of depression, memory issues and other cognitive and mental health problems, Hornig said. Under normal circumstances, ICU visits from loved ones are encouraged, she said, because the human interaction can be protective.

That type of contact would normally keep people oriented ... so that it doesnt become as traumatic, Hornig said.

Hopes for the future

COVID-19 has disproportionately harmed Latino communities, as Latinos are overrepresented in jobs that expose them to the virus and have lower rates of health insurance and other social protections.

Ramirez has health insurance, although that hasnt spared her from tens and thousands of dollars worth of medical bills.

And even though she still ended up getting COVID-19, she counts herself lucky for having a job that allowed her to work from home when the pandemic struck. Many Latino workers dont have that luxury, she said, so theyre forced to risk their lives doing low-wage jobs deemed essential at this time.

Ramirezs mother is a breast cancer survivor, making her particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. She had been working at a meat packing plant in North Carolina, for a company that Ramirez said has had hundreds of COVID-19 cases among employees.

So Ramirez is relieved to have her mom in Chicago, helping take care of her.

Im glad this is taking her away from her position, Ramirez said.

Friends and family in North Carolina have been fundraising to help pay her medical bills, selling raffle tickets and setting up a GoFundMe page on her behalf. Ramirez is also applying for financial assistance from the hospital.

Her experience with COVID-19 has not changed who she is as a person, she said, and she looks forward to living her life to the fullest.

If she ever gets the chance to speak with the family of the person whose lungs she now has, she said, she will thank them for raising such a healthy child and a caring person (who) was kind enough to become an organ donor.

Her life may never be the same, but that doesnt mean she wont try. She laughs as she explains how she asked her surgeon to take her skydiving someday.

Dr. Bharat actually used to work at a skydiving company when he was younger, Ramirez said. And so he promised me that, hopefully within a year, he could get me there.

And she has every intention of holding him to that promise.
Ziggi's Coffee Welcomes New Franchisees in Katy, Texas. When we first tried the coffee, we ranted and raved and wondered why we didnt have something like this in Texas.

Ziggis Coffee, which was recently ranked on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies, has signed an agreement with new franchisees, David and Amber King, to open the companys first unit in the state of Texas.

David, an entrepreneur, and Amber, a nurse in the Intensive Care Unit, are residents of Katy, Texas, a booming suburb 30 minutes west of Houston. The two discovered Ziggis Coffee serendipitously while on their honeymoon in Colorado.

When we first tried the coffee, we ranted and raved and wondered why we didnt have something like this in Texas, said Amber. When we returned home and I suggested opening a location of our own, I had no clue David had already been researching the franchise opportunity. It just seemed like fate.

It only took one cup of coffee to pique their interest but their experience from that point on is what sealed the deal.

As we began the education process, we were just so impressed with every person we met, said David. They all took an interest in learning about us and our story. They really put forth the effort to make us feel valued. Its a very genuine, people-focused atmosphere and everything is top notch; very well done and very well thought out.

David and Amber say they are excited to introduce the Katy community to Ziggis Coffee and to make fans out of everyone they serve. The couple will begin with one unit to start and plan to expand from there.

Once this one goes well and weve hit it out of the park, our long-term plan is to expand and build as many as we can before were old and gray, said David.

The Colorado-based company, which specializes in fast and friendly drive-thru service, currently has locations in Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma, and California, with more in development across the country.

The team at Ziggis Coffee is working closely with David and Amber as they seek out viable real estate options for the new locations. Individuals who are interested in franchising with Ziggis Coffee can find more information at http://www.ZiggisCoffee.com/franchise and are encouraged to get in touch with the Franchise Team by filling out an online inquiry form.

About Ziggis Coffee

Ziggis Coffee, recently ranked among the top half of companies on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America, is a leading specialty coffee shop and drive-thru franchise dedicated to serving only the finest sustainably-sourced coffee, uniquely handcrafted drinks, and amazing, locally-made breakfast, lunch and snack options. Founded in 2004, the Colorado-based company is on a mission to elevate the standard of service within the coffee shop industry. From specializing in a variety of great-tasting coffee and food items to providing fast and friendly service, the Ziggis Coffee brand is focused on creating a positive experience that is faster, more authentic and convenient for the demand of consumers seeking higher-quality coffee and food options on the go. In addition to its distinctive menu and superior service, Ziggis Coffee is also committed to making a positive difference in the local communities it serves. With 24 locations nationwide and 48 additional units in development, Ziggis Coffee is positioned to quickly grow its presence in a variety of communities across the U.S.

To learn more about Ziggis Coffee and its franchising opportunities, visit http://www.ZiggisCoffee.com/franchise or follow Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Militants in an audio message claimed to have killed a panchayat member from South Kashmirs Khanmoh village who has been missing since August 9, police said.

Panchayat member Nisar Ahmad Bhat went missing from Shopian and police have been trying to trace him.

A senior police officer said that according to family members, Bhat went to Shopian on Wednesday. Since then he has been missing. He (panch) was booked under PSA in 1995. There are 12 FIR against him and efforts are on to trace him.

The officer, however, said the audio clip seems fake. We are investigating every aspect of this case.

In a 2.56 minute long message purportedly released by militants, they claimed that Bhat has been killed and buried at an unidentified place.

An unidentified person is heard saying that the panchayat member was involved in anti movement activities and had met his fate. We have been after him for a long time and finally got him.

The message claimed that the body wasnt handed over to his family because of Covid-19.

We understand the pain of the family. To avoid the spread of Covid-19, the body wasnt given to his family. The same way, Indian forces after killing our comrades bury them at unmarked graves at unidentified locations, the message said.

Earlier on August 2, Shakir Manzoor, who was working with 162 Territorial Army battalion in south Kashmir was abducted from Kulgam district and his burnt vehicle was found later. Soon after the abduction, police and army had launched a search operation in Shopian and Kulgam areas. However, the jawan could not be traced.

A similar message was released which claimed that Manzoor was killed and buried at an undisclosed location.

In the last two months five BJP leaders including two sarpanches have been killed in different parts of Kashmir. Earlier in July, Congress sarpanch Ajay Pandita was killed in Anantnag district which forced many panchayat members to resign from their parties.

The government also shifted dozens of panchayat members and BDC members, majority of them from the BJP, to safer places after an evaluation of threats from militants.

Soon after taking charge, Jammu and Kashmirs new Lt Governor Manoj Sinha had said adequate security would be provided to panchayat members and political workers in Kashmir.

Sinha was speaking at a function in Srinagar in which a large number of panchayat workers participated and demanded security in the backdrop of attacks on BJP workers in different parts of the Valley.

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Located in the taluka of Vikramgad in Maharashtras tribal district of Palghar, barely 100 kms from Mumbai, the Dedicated COVID hospital, with the intake capacity of 200, is supposed to be the main facility to treat critically ill patients in the district. But the hospital lacks amenities, and the staff is overworked.

Editor's note: This article is the first of a multi-part series which examines how the COVID-19 lockdown has impacted one of the most backward districts in Maharashtra and the most disadvantaged section of the society living on the outskirts of Mumbai. Read part II and part III

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He may have the body and the age for it, but lifting jumbo oxygen cylinders every day is strenuous even for 22-year-old Omkar Bondre. He has sprained his right wrist carrying the cylinders that are just over four feet in height and weigh about 50 kilos when they are empty.

It needs two people to carry one cylinder, he said. We have been doing it for the past two months or so. It is backbreaking.

Bondre has to put in the physical labour because the Dedicated COVID Hospital (DCH) he works at does not have a liquid oxygen plant to keep the central oxygen system functional. They need at least 85-90 such cylinders a day.

Located in the taluka of Vikramgad in Maharashtras tribal district of Palghar  barely 100 kilometers from Mumbai  the concerned DCH, with the intake capacity of 200, is supposed to be the main facility to treat critically ill patients in the district. But the hospital lacks amenities, and the staff is overworked.

On 16 August, when the reporter visited, 155 out of 200 beds were occupied at the Vikramgad DCH, also known as the ReVera hospital. The specialists tending to the patients included a physician, a paediatrician, a nodal officer, an MBBS doctor, a BMS graduate and 65 staff nurses. "We are exhausted," one of them said, requesting anonymity. DCH facility is at the top of the hierarchy. Patients first visit fever clinics. They are then referred to Covid Care Centre (CCC). If the patients do not recover, they are referred to a Dedicated Covid Health Centre (DCHC). And DCH is the last option. We have to be on our toes.

There are only two other DCH facilities in Palghar and they have a capacity of 50 and 30 beds respectively. The three DCH facilities between them are supposed to treat serious COVID-19 patients from Rural Palghar  the belt besides the Vasai Virar Municipal Corporation (VVMC), which has a population of 1.2 million. Rural Palghar has 1.8 million people  and just under 60 percent of it comprises Scheduled Tribe, which is well over Maharashtras 9.4 percent. Palghar in total has a population of 3 million people.

We need more manpower, the staffer at ReVera said. We are working round the clock.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in India, of the 28,703 samples taken in Rural Palghar, 5,672 tested positive and 99 have died  well below Maharashtras 6.5 lakh cases and over 21,000 deaths. Current active cases in rural Palghar stand at 1,422. However, the positivity rate is 19.76 percent and anything above a 10 percent is considered high positivity. For context, the positivity rate in Maharashtra stands at 12 percent.

The shortage of healthcare workers is visible across facilities and hospitals in Rural Palghar and not just at the DCH facilities. The vast divide between the number of staff approved to handle the COVID-19 situation and the actual appointments made, is self-explanatory.

Twenty-six physicians, 18 anaesthetics and 102 medical officers were approved for appointment in Rural Palghar. Not a single one of them has been appointed so far. Out of the 534 approved number of staff nurses, only 68 have been appointed. And merely nine of the 31 lab technicians and 81 out of 194 ward boys have been appointed so far.

It is no wonder then that Bondre, who is one of the 40 Class Four employees working at ReVera, has to put in at least 16-18 hours of work everyday when his offi cial duty hours are supposed to be eight. "We get Rs 400 a day," he said.

Son of marginal Adivasi farmers in the taluka of Wada  24 kilometers from Vikramgad  Bondre worked at a company that made water pumps. I earned Rs 12,000 a month, he said. But I lost my job after lockdown. My parents have suffered losses in the farmland. I have to do something to keep the family afloat. Therefore, he has been at ReVera for the past three months. The authorities have made arrangements for all of us at a hostel nearby.

However, Bondre and his co-workers end up spending little time at the hostel. Throughout the day, they serve the COVID-19 patients  starting from packing their food to disposing the packets, the staff take care of everything. They dust the hospital wards, clean the toilets and bathrooms notwithstanding the perpetual risk of contracting the virus. Six staffers at ReVera have tested positive for COVID-19 so far and they have resumed work after recovering. My parents worry about me all the time, said Bondre.

But the most challenging task is disposing off the bodies. Out of about 1,000 people admitted at ReVera so far, 26 have died. "There is no electric furnace here like you have in Mumbai," said a staffer. Which means the Class Four employees have to take care of the cremation as well.

Bondre said it takes about 5-6 hours to conduct a funeral. We first have to pile up logs of wood while wearing a PPE kit, he said. "Then we have to ensure two family members of the deceased get into their PPE kits. The body has to be wrapped adequately before placing it on the pyre. After the funeral, we have to sanitise their PPE kits and ours. It is a long process."

The health infrastructure of Rural Palghar is inadequate even for normal circumstances, let alone a pandemic. The region does not have a single general hospital. It has nine rural hospitals and three sub-district hospitals with 27 ambulances and 30 hired vans that are used as ambulances. There are 46 Primary Health Centres (PHC) for a population of 1.8 million, which is one PHC for every (just under) 40,000 people. Ideally, it should be one for every 30,000.

Coronavirus reached Palghar late, compared to the other districts of Maharashtra. ReVera got its first COVID-19 patient on 15 May, when Maharashtra had recorded nearly 30,000 cases. About a month before that, an old and unused medical college in the village of Hatne  eight kilometres from Vikramgad town  was converted into the DCH facility. There is no significant facility in Palghar where we could have built a COVID hospital, civil surgeon Dr Kanchan Vanare said.

The authorities had to pick the abandoned college in a remote locality for a DCH. Since this was already a medical college, much of it was already setup, Vanare said. We consolidated on that.

Keeping the infectivity of coronavirus in mind, the consolidation predominantly included bed management, besides plumbing, electric work, civil work and installing doors and windows. However, even three months after receiving its first patient, ReVera, the foremost DCH facility in rural Palghar, is still not able to conduct CT and MRI scans.

The patients, therefore, are taken to Boisar  50 kilometers from Vikramgad  to carry out these two tests. On a normal day, it takes over an hour to get to Boisar from Vikramgad. During torrential monsoons with slippery, potholed and muddy roads devoid of street lights, it takes over four hours to travel back and forth.

Healthcare challenges in the area are exacting under normal circumstances. With a deadly virus and relentless downpour, things get worse. This is something we have never experienced before. Everyday is a new challenge, said Bondre, when his senior interrupted him. He had to leave. There was something wrong with the generator.
Educate yourself

Regarding Letters: Dems hiding the new Biden, (A16, Aug. 21) I have found that the best way to get information about the stands on issues of a political candidate is to visit their official website. Most websites have information on past performance  which is important  but also the candidates positions on issues, policies and plans for the future. The official Joe Biden and Kamala Harris website, for instance, has detailed information describing Bidens positions and plans for the future on more than 45 different topics including health care, jobs, immigration, housing, infrastructure, education, COVID-19, criminal justice reform and climate change, just to name a few. When voters dont take advantage of the opportunities available to us to be informed about a politicians policies and vision for the future, and only rely on information available on television and social media commentary, we do ourselves a disservice as voters and undermine the integrity of the democratic process.

Richard Cate, Houston

Kashmir

Regarding Kashmir needs U.S. in fight for autonomy, (A13, Aug. 18): The column states that in August 2019, India repealed Articles 370 and 35-A of the Indian constitution in flagrant disregard of the UN Security Council. During the past year, Pakistan and China have tried to raise this issue in the UNSC multiple times. Every time, the UNSC stated that it is a bilateral issue and the UNSC had no interest to discuss it. Saudi Arabia and UAE, both Muslim countries, have said that the issue is internal to India and have rejected Pakistans pleas to discuss it in Organization of Islamic Countries meetings several times. Finally, Americans need to know that the prime minister of Pakistan recently called Osama Bin Laden a martyr in the Pakistan parliament. Isnt it clear where terrorists are finding safe harbor?

Ketan R Mehta, Sugar Land

How to reach Sen. Ted Cruz

When a person dials the Washington, D.C. office of Sen. Ted Cruz, they hear a recorded message that says, It is an honor and privilege to serve the great state of Texas, and constituents have the option to speak to a member of staff by leaving a message. Another recorded message informs constituents that, due to the coronavirus pandemic, staff are working remotely and checking voicemails throughout the day. Houston Chronicle, Im writing today to say that this is a communications strategy if and only if staff respond to these messages. If staff do not respond to these messages, Sen. Ted Cruzs strategy can only be described as a non-communications strategy.

Elizabeth Bishop, San Marcos
Whether one agrees with New Mexicos Public Health Emergency Response Act or not, it gives the governor extraordinary, unilateral powers to regulate and close businesses during a public health emergency, including issuing civil administrative penalties of up to $5,000 a day.

So businesses that openly defied Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishams public health orders did so at their own risk.

But communities should fall into a different category. Community leaders who openly defied the governors public health orders did so foolishly, possibly contributing to the spread of the virus at the height of the pandemic. Yet further punishment for entire communities that are struggling to recover from the pandemic closures would be vindictive and short-sighted.

Under the Lujan Grisham administrations plan to distribute federal coronavirus relief funds, local governments can apply for a portion of $150 million in grants from the CARES Act. Of that $150 million, $50 million is earmarked to be distributed by cities and counties as grants to businesses with 50 or fewer full-time employees.

The Department of Finance and Administration is using 10 criteria in scoring the grant applications, including whether the governmental entity closed per the governors order, demonstrate(d) compliance with the Public Health Orders or took enforcement measures.

New Mexico House Minority Leader James Townsend, who questions whether the governor has the legal authority to add strings to federal grants, says Lujan Grisham is using them to exact revenge. For the governor to withhold needed federal dollars to New Mexicos local governments simply to be vindictive in regards to her often arbitrary public health orders is unacceptable, the Artesia Republican says.

If thats what happens, hes right.

Cities and counties have submitted applications seeking a combined $191 million in federal aid for virus-related expense reimbursements, but with only $100 million available for governments, many of them wont get their full request, and some likely wont get anything at all.

Acting Finance and Administration Secretary Debbie Romero is correct when she says the local governments that have been compliant with public health orders have often incurred higher expenses. OK, that should be taken into account when providing money for local governments. But take a city like Roswell, for example. Its City Council voted not to enforce the states public health orders last month. And Mayor Dennis Kintigh told the Journals Dan Boyd the city has applied for roughly $12 million in relief funds. Kintigh says much of the money would benefit local restaurants, hit especially hard by the pandemic.

It would be wrong to punish the restaurants in Roswell that did everything right under the public health order because six of the 10 councilors voted not to play nice.

Every New Mexico business and community should be equally eligible for coronavirus relief funds  they employ, and are made up of, New Mexicans  regardless of how their city council, county commission or sheriff reacted to the pandemic. They each need help, be it to put up a tent for outdoor dining, cover costs of masks and cleaning supplies, or provide internet access for remote learning.

And they need their state to be supportive so they dont join the corona-broke-us-for-good column.

More than 140,000 New Mexicans remain unemployed. Many businesses are shuttered, some forever. Families are struggling with making ends meet while running day cares and K-12 classrooms in their homes. And they turn to their local leaders, whom they might not always agree with, for help during crises because thats why they were elected.

There are 10 criteria on which the local government grants are based. Lets hope criticism or pushback of the emergency orders by a local government is not a factor in their getting help. Like the governor frequently says, were all (supposed to be) in this together.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will be visiting Sudan as well as a number of Middle Eastern nations between August 23-28. During his visit, Secretary Pompeo will meet Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok as well as Sovereign Council Chair General Abdel Fattah el-Burhan in an effort to discuss the United Statess continued support for Sudan's civilian-led transitional government.

Read: Mike Pompeo, Jared Kushner To Visit Middle East To Establish Diplomatic Relations

Read: Pompeo Heads To Mideast As Part Of Trump's Arab-Israeli Push

Pompeo's Sudan Visit

At present, Sudan is on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism and this means that the country has a hard time getting debt-relief as well as attracting international investment. However, Sudans transitional government plans to change that status with Pompeo's visit. The African country has been trying to repair its relations with the United States since it overthrew former leader Omar al-Bashir in April 2019.

As per reports, only last week Sudan fired its foreign ministry spokesman after he termed the Israel and UAE deal a bold step. Under President Omar al-Bashirs government, Sudans relations with the US have reached its historic best. Since Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden is reported to have lived in Sudan for 5 years in the 1990s as a guest of President Omar, the upcoming visit by the US Sec of State represents a big change it the relations between both countries.

In addition to Sudan, Secretary Pompeo will also visit Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. As per the official statement, Pompeo will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem in order to discuss security-related issues as well as Irans malicious influence. He will also meet Crown Prince of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifaat at Manama and then finally the United Arab Emirates, where he will meet with Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi.

Read: Pompeo, Kushner To Mideast As US Presses Arab-Israeli Peace

Read: Iran Sanctions: UNSC Members Unite Against US Over Pompeo's Proposal
Waterloo Regions economy is definitely down in this COVID-19 pandemic. But its clearly not out.

And this weeks news that e-commerce giant Amazon will open a delivery station in Cambridge later this year offers timely proof this is so.

Heres a major player in global technology  one of the so-called Big Four along with Google, Apple and Facebook  and with a torrential revenue stream that spurted out US$280.5 billion last year. And its seized upon Waterloo Region to become a major player in its growing Canadian network of operations.

What this means most of all in the coming months is new jobs  hundreds of them  in a region that lost thousands in this pandemic and where unemployment had soared to a disheartening 12.9 per cent in July.

The federal governments ability to keep Canadas economy on life support in the worst recession in decades can only go so far. This region needs the kind of reliable employment Amazons delivery station will offer. We need the taxes it will pay to local governments that have bled millions of dollars in lost tax revenue in recent months.

We also badly need the vote of confidence it expresses in Waterloo Region. But this community deserves credit, too. Theres more going on in the near future of this region than Amazon, and Amazon knows it.

Waterloo Region shines as an integral part of Ontarios Greater Golden Horseshoe  the biggest economic engine in the country. The Ontario government recognizes were a vital part of this greater region when it sets growth policies.

Location is one of our assets. Its no coincidence Amazon will open its station on Maple Grove Road just a stones throw from Ontarios main street  Highway 401. If your job is delivering goods that someone orders online, the 401 connects you to the rest of southern Ontario and from there to the United States or eastern Canada.

Nor could it have escaped the Amazon brain trust that this region is the western terminus of the Toronto-Waterloo Region High Tech Corridor, home to two fine universities and a college that are already training potential Amazon employees.

No crystal ball can tell us what the regions economy will look like post-pandemic. We do know COVID-19 has killed a lot of local restaurants, bars and nightclubs, while threatening the commercial real estate market because so many people are working from home. We cant say if the jobs that have vanished will ever reappear.

Love it or not  and we realize Amazon has its critics  e-commerce companies like it are on the rise. The pandemic has only accelerated the trend away from shopping in bricks-and-mortar stores and, instead, buying online from home. Other local businesses are also benefiting from changing consumer patterns caused by the pandemic.

RELATED STORIES Waterloo Region E-commerce giant Amazon to open delivery station in Cambridge

For instance, business is booming at Roadtrek, the recreational vehicle company that went bankrupt last year but then reopened in time to cash in on the surge of people wanting its product for safe, physically distanced, vacations. Likewise, Canadian Shield has taken off because it makes the masks and face shields suddenly in high demand for pandemic protection. And pandemic or no, downtown Kitcheners skyline is still punctuated with construction cranes raising new towers.

So, on this occasion at least, celebrate the good things happening in Waterloo Region. Take heart from the communitys resiliency. If you have to be in a pandemic, this is a better spot than most.

And, if you have the chance, echo this newspapers call for the Ontario government to continue investing in local services such as better rail links with Toronto and the new Highway 7 to Guelph. The province should play to its strengths. Waterloo Region is one.
 Whatever initials are given to the wildfires that have been plaguing Northern California, such as the LNU Lightning Complex and the CZU Lightning Complex, I just hope that the continuing unhealthy air from these blazes doesnt send many people toward another set of initials: the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) of a hospital. With the coronavirus pandemic and poor weather conditions occurring simultaneously, everyone in our region should try to limit their outdoor activities.

Freida Heidelberg, Pacifica

Psychological harm

As someone who is transgender, I can relate to Fresh focus on whether racial stress leads to illness (Front Page, Aug. 24). Whether a person experiences discrimination in the workplace or when seeking medical attention because of their age, race or sexual orientation, the effect is psychologically harmful. And when such treatment occurs repeatedly, it leads to stress, depression and health problems. Racism, as well as homophobia and transphobia, have accelerated under the divisive Trump administration. More awareness of these national issues will hopefully cause enough voters to elect a new and more caring president named Joe Biden in November.

Kai Winters, San Jose

More for you Editorial: Bipartisan Senate probe confirms Russia meddling

Betrayal of trust

Regarding A detailed and damning postscript (Editorial, Aug. 22): The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committees report on the Trump campaigns numerous connections with Russian operatives during the 2016 election describes actual incidents that read like textbook examples of collusion (even though Republican members refuse to acknowledge that label). With this, theyre playing a dangerous game of semantics and to them, I would paraphrase William Shakespeare: Whats in a name?

That which we call collusion by any other name would smell as rotten. Whether its called collusion or not, the disloyal behavior described is still unacceptable, so lets talk about behavior instead of labels. The notion of secret cooperation between presidential campaigns and enemy agents is scandalous because the nations security would be put at risk. That the existence of such coordination has always been denied and lied about when exposed later reveals their consciousness of guilt. Unlike the crime of conspiracy, however, collusion isnt in the criminal statutes. Thus, an accused president couldnt possibly be indicted, though collusion is a serious betrayal of public trust that should never be tolerated. Maybe presidents who put their personal interests above the nations dont deserve jail, but they also dont deserve to be re-elected.

Philip Shoemaker, Pittsburg

Cause of wildfires

As a lifetime resident of California, I am accustomed to hearing about wildfires in our state. However, as I have grown up, I have noticed that these fires appear to be causing more and more damage to the environment, as well as to the lives of California citizens. While I appreciate the news coverage of these wildfires, I wonder why more emphasis is not placed on the underlying cause of these devastating fires: climate change. Although wildfires are not new in California, more extreme temperatures and weather conditions caused by climate change have been making them larger and harder to control. A comprehensive solution to climate change must be implemented in order to reduce the frequency and severity of Californias wildfires. The Carbon Fee and Dividend Act (HR763) that has recently been introduced to Congress can help mitigate the damaging effects of climate change by imposing a gradually increasing fee on carbon and a dividend that gives money back to citizens and our economy.

Michelle New, San Francisco

Hire smokejumpers

Regarding Wind-driven blazes shift  new areas threatened (Front Page, Aug. 21): Gov. Gavin Newsom, can you please do these three things: 1): Pin a medal on every firefighter in California. 2): Give a raise to the person in charge of the incidents page on the Cal Fire website. 3): Take a tip from Montana (the state, not Joe Montana) and hire smokejumpers to prevent the next statewide conflagration. The firefighters are not forced to enter the danger zones, so they deserve a medal for putting their lives on the line (fire line) to save our homes and property.

The incidents page on the Cal Fire website does an excellent job of showing the exact location of the fire line (view of the fire commanders) so we can sleep (or not sleep) at night knowing if our homes and property are burning. Smokejumpers can prevent these types of wildfires from getting out of control again by taking a page from the wildfire action plan in Montana. You have the eyes in the sky (satellites) to scan our state after lightning storms, then fly in the smokejumpers to parachute down to put out the fires before they grow out of control.

Curtis Panasuk, Santa Cruz

Commit to action

Regarding Fiber-free convention (Letters, Aug. 22): The letter writer says many of the (DNC) speakers I heard spoke of their hatred for our country for all its sins, bigotry, racial injustice, etc. Really? Was the writer actually listening? Every speaker I heard spoke of their love and devotion to our great country and great desire to work together to make it even better.

The writer must interpret naming issues or problems as some form of hate. Does love of country mean completely ignoring and never talking about issues and choosing to live in a myth that everything is wonderful? I dont think so. I think true love of country is when you can see the reality, good and bad, face the fact there are injustices, stark differences between the values we say we hold dear and the reality many people have to live with, and then commit to work to make it better. You wouldnt call it love if you ignored a family members serious problem (drug or alcohol addiction, perhaps); you would call it neglect or co-dependency. True love faces factual reality and commits to action to make things better. So with loving ones country.

Jamie Harris, Lafayette

Empathy for homeless

Regarding Concept of tolerance (Letters, Aug. 23): Presumably, diners are no longer permitted to protect their space against some street dwellers who, frankly, shouldnt be on the street at all, according to the author. Does he think they deliberately chose to live on the streets? So, the diners have the right to protect their space, but the street people dont? In some developing countries, poor people cluster around outdoor eating places and beg for scraps from diners. Is this what we are coming to?

Judith Lesner, Oakland

Prosecute the looters

After reading Worry grows as looters target California wildfire evacuees (Aug. 23) and Firefighters wallet stolen during Santa Cruz blaze (Aug. 24), about looters during the fires in Boulder Creek, and now a firefighters car being broken into, wallet stolen and bank account drained while this person was fighting the wildfires, I urge the governor and lawmakers to pass legislation for these crimes to carry enhanced penalties, much like using a gun during a crime. One can only hope that karma will step in.
Taiwan on Monday gave the domestic branch of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's e-commerce site Taobao six months to re-register as a Chinese investment rather than a foreign one, or leave, in the government's latest shot against Chinese firms. Amid growing political tension, Taiwan has stepped up oversight of Chinese investment and the operations of Chinese tech firms on the island. Last week it said it planned to stop local sales of Chinese internet television streaming services, though it does not plan to block them. The investment commission of Taiwan's Economics Ministry ...
Joe Biden on Monday called for officers in Kenosha, Wis., to be held accountable in the police shooting of an unarmed Black man on Sunday afternoon.

Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times as officers attempted to prevent him from getting into his car as his children watched from inside the vehicle. Blake, 29, was airlifted to a Milwaukee hospital, where he is in serious condition.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The incident, which was captured on video, sparked an immediate backlash on social media and protests in the streets of the city. Police used tear gas to disperse hundreds of protesters who set fire to multiple vehicles early Monday.

This morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force, Biden said in a statement. This calls for an immediate, full and transparent investigation and the officers must be held accountable.

According to a news release from the Kenosha Police Department, officers were responding to a domestic incident at about 5 p.m. Sunday when the shooting occurred. No further details were released. The Wisconsin Department of Justice, which is investigating the shooting, said the officers involved had been placed on administrative leave.

Garbage and dump trucks were set ablaze near the Kenosha, Wis., courthouse on Sunday. (Sean Krajacic/Kenosha News via AP)

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers condemned the shooting in a statement identifying Blake as the victim.

While we do not have all of the details yet, Evers said, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

These shots pierce the soul of our nation, Bidens statement continued. Jill and I pray for Jacobs recovery and for his children.

A protester confronts police outside the Kenosha Police Department following the police shooting of Jacob Blake on Sunday. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via Reuters)

The former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee has made racial justice and police reform part of his campaign to unseat President Trump.

The president has yet to publicly comment on the shooting.

Equal justice has not been real for Black Americans and so many others, Biden added. We are at an inflection point. We must dismantle systemic racism. It is the urgent task before us. We must fight to honor the ideals laid in the original American promise, which we are yet to attain: That all men and women are created equal, but more importantly that they must be treated equally.

Story continues

___

Read more from Yahoo News:
In 2016, Ruth Whippman published America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks.

In the book, the British author and Berkeley resident argued that this countrys cultural obsession with happiness made us crazy. The more people chased happiness, she said, the more anxious, lonely and depressed people became.

There is one single thing that contributes to our happiness more than anything else by a million miles and that is our relationships with other people, Whippman told me over milky tea in October 2016, about a month before the presidential election.

Back then, we talked about the feigned uproar over Hillary Clintons deleted emails, and the racist and misogynistic buffoonery of the Republican nominee for president. Back then, pandemics were fodder for science-fiction books and film, not reality. Back then, the current presidents election hopes seemed doomed by his hot-mike admission that he gleefully groped and kissed women without consent.

Four years later, another election looms and it feels as though our lives are on the line. Our relationships have been strained because of the coronavirus and social distancing. No wonder Americans are so stressed out, and Im one of them.

If you need help National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: Call 800-273-8255 to reach a counselor at a locally operated crisis center 24 hours a day for free. Crisis Text Line: Text "Connect" to 741741 to reach a crisis counselor anytime for free. See More Collapse

According to a survey by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 41% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition, including symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder. The pandemic has taken a serious emotional and mental toll on our lives, and no amount of positive thinking  or, in the presidents case, wishful thinking  can alter the fact that life will remain strange and dangerous until theres a viable vaccination.

Working and living during the coronavirus has been made harder and more stressful because of the federal governments impotent effort to coordinate an effective response. Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior and public policy at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Heinz College, told me stress and anxiety diminish what were able to process and manage.

We know that when people are stressed ... peoples cognitive bandwidth  their capacity to use all their skills, all their intelligence, all their emotional strengths  diminishes, she said. When our bandwidth narrows, we get more rigid. We dont solve problems well. We might fall back on coping habits that arent the best.

How are we supposed to cope with the fact that more than 175,000 people  175,000  have died from the coronavirus in the United States? The only semblance of control at our disposal is staying inside or wearing a mask outside. This contributes to our sense of fear, isolation and depression.

Even when things are almost back to normal or we have a vaccine thats helping things, theres still going to be residual reactions to this, Melissa Whitson, a professor in the University of New Haven psychology department, told me. People are going to be dealing with the emotional and mental health effects of this for years.

Its really hard not to feel just completely demoralized and completely helpless. Its going to be something thats ingrained in our psyche for a while.

In California, our ability to cope was already taxed before wildfires began torching the state, blanketing the Bay Area in hazy smoke and ash. I dont know about you, but Ive been feeling unmoored lately. I miss stoop hangs, live music and art shows. I really miss hugs.

But my anxiety isnt just from missing people and events. Im deeply concerned about the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on the health, educational and financial outcomes of Black and brown people  people who were left behind by America during the previous financial crisis. Im worried about people whove lost jobs and cant pay rent. Im nervous about the presidents attempts to undermine election integrity.

Im deeply concerned about our future.

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.

I reached out to Whippman to talk about our disarranged lives, and when we spoke last week she quipped that shed be too anxious to write America the Anxious now. For this chat, I didnt ride my bike over to her house. We logged onto Zoom.

When it comes to happiness and anxiety, we see it on this very individualistic level that we can kind of control, she said. That kind of individualistic approach to happiness and anxiety really tended to ignore the fact that we were part of a big system.

To slow the spread of the coronavirus, weve had to rely on each other to follow local guidelines. Weve all had to wear masks.

I think weve realized just how interconnected we all are, and how much we have at stake, and how its not a level playing field, she said. Its not the same experiencing (the coronavirus) as a privileged white woman as it is experiencing it as a Black health care worker or as somebody living in poverty or somebody whos suffering from racial injustice.

Somehow, the president just shrugs it all off  the protests over police brutality and systemic racism, political scandals, his embrace of rabid conspiracy theories and, of course, the still-ravaging pandemic. And on Monday, hell start making his pitch that without his brand of leadership things in America will get worse.

The reality is that this country will plummet to unimaginable depths if hes re-elected. Yeah, I know, the thought of another four years of his callous ineptitude makes me anxious, too.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr
BEULAH, MI  A Wyoming man was arrested in Northern Michigan early Saturday after he allegedly attempted to run over a Washington man.

The 49-year-old man from Lander, Wyoming, told Michigan State Police he believed the 47-year-old man from Silverdale, Washington, was attempting to steal his Ford F-150. The Washington man told police he was turning down the radio, which was playing loud music at 3 a.m.

Around 3 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 22, Benzie County dispatch advised MSP of multiple calls of a man driving erratically on Benzie Boulevard in downtown Beulah. Callers reported a man was chasing another man on foot, and then got in a pickup truck to continue the chase.

Troopers from the MSP Cadillac Post arrived on the scene and found the Ford F-150 parked on the sidewalk and the Wyoming man lying on the ground next to it. He appeared to be resting and was uninjured. The truck had front-end damage. He claimed the man he was chasing had attempted to steal his vehicle.

The Washington man told troopers he woke up to loud music coming from the street. He went outside and found the Ford F-150 parked in the middle of the road with the drivers door open and loud music playing. He turned down the radio, took the keys out of the ignition and placed them on the seat. He then called 911.

At that point, the Wyoming man allegedly came running and screaming toward the Washington man. The Wyoming man chased the Washington man on foot, then got in the truck and continued the chase. Neither man sustained any injuries.

The Wyoming man was arrested for felonious assault. He is lodged in the Benzie County Jail awaiting arraignment.

No further information has been released.

READ MORE:

Brothers found at scene of Alpena County house fire died in murder-suicide, police say

Michigan woman found alive at funeral home after being pronounced dead by paramedics
HOUSTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Summit Midstream Partners, LP (NYSE: SMLP) announced today that its Board of Directors has appointed James Johnston to serve as Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer of Summit Midstream Partners, LP, effective September 4, 2020. Mr. Johnston joins Summit Midstream Partners from Crestwood Equity Partners, where he most recently served as Senior Vice President and General Counsel.

Heath Deneke, President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, commented, "James has a wealth of experience from his more than 23 years of experience as an attorney in the midstream sector and I am pleased that he is joining the Summit Midstream executive team. I am confident that his broad set of legal, regulatory, operational, commercial and transactional experiences will have an immediate positive impact on the business and our ongoing strategic initiatives."

Prior to his role as Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Crestwood Equity Partners, Mr. Johnston served as Vice President, Deputy General Counsel at Crestwood. Prior to joining Crestwood in 2013, Mr. Johnston served as Assistant General Counsel for Kinder Morgan and in various legal and commercial roles of increasing responsibility at Kinder Morgan, El Paso Corporation and Sonat, Inc. from 1997 to 2013.

Mr. Johnston holds a bachelor's degree from Western University in Ontario, Canada and a Doctor of Jurisprudence from Samford University's Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama.

About Summit Midstream Partners, LP

SMLP is a value-driven limited partnership focused on developing, owning and operating midstream energy infrastructure assets that are strategically located in the core producing areas of unconventional resource basins, primarily shale formations, in the continental United States. SMLP provides natural gas, crude oil and produced water gathering, processing and transportation services pursuant to primarily long-term, fee-based agreements with customers and counterparties in six unconventional resource basins: (i) the Appalachian Basin, which includes the Utica and Marcellus shale formations in Ohio and West Virginia; (ii) the Williston Basin, which includes the Bakken and Three Forks shale formations in North Dakota; (iii) the Denver-Julesburg Basin, which includes the Niobrara and Codell shale formations in Colorado and Wyoming; (iv) the Permian Basin, which includes the Bone Spring and Wolfcamp formations in New Mexico; (v) the Fort Worth Basin, which includes the Barnett Shale formation in Texas; and (vi) the Piceance Basin, which includes the Mesaverde formation as well as the Mancos and Niobrara shale formations in Colorado. SMLP has an equity investment in Double E Pipeline, LLC, which is developing natural gas transmission infrastructure that will provide transportation service from multiple receipt points in the Delaware Basin to various delivery points in and around the Waha Hub in Texas. SMLP also has an equity investment in Ohio Gathering, which operates extensive natural gas gathering and condensate stabilization infrastructure in the Utica Shale in Ohio. SMLP is headquartered in Houston, Texas.

SOURCE Summit Midstream Partners, LP

Related Links

http://www.summitmidstream.com


The standard approval process for a new vaccine takes years and requires the observation of large numbers of patients over time to ensure safety and efficacy. The United States and China have both pledged to bring vaccines to market by the end of this year or early 2021, an unprecedented speed that requires gargantuan factory investments before the vaccines have passed safety tests. Now Beijing and Moscow have pushed the timeline up further, with large numbers of citizens essentially being asked to serve as test subjects as an act of patriotism.
Sure, it might be warm Wednesday, but what about the rest of the week?
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.




Six people were arrested Sunday by the Buffalo Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol for illegally being in the United States, according to the agency.

The arrests happened after a foot pursuit "through wooded terrain," with a sixth subject was arrested after a three-hour search, officials said.

The Border Patrol said five of the individuals were Honduran citizens and one subject was a Mexican citizen; officials said four of them had prior deportation records.

ICYMI: Earlier today, US Border Patrol agents from the Buffalo, NY Sector arrested 6 subjects who were unlawfully in the United States. The sixth subject was arrested after a 3 hour search.  https://t.co/2XKyohruck  CBP Buffalo (@CBPBuffalo) August 24, 2020

According to the Border Patrol, agents from the Buffalo Station encountered a subject at a local convenience store, discovered that the he was illegally present in the United States and he was placed under arrest.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 13:38:27|Editor: huaxia

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MANILA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- An explosion ripped through the town plaza of Jolo in the southern Philippine province of Sulu Monday at noon Monday, police said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties yet.

Initial police report said that the explosion took place shortly before 12 a.m. in the vicinity of Barangay Walled City, Jolo, Sulu. Enditem
In shocking news, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been facing ill health and has reportedly gone into a coma. As per multiple reports coming out of the country, his sister Kim Yo Jong is set to take the reins.

The news of ill health comes days after the North Korean dictator announced that owning pet dogs was now banned in North Korea, calling the act of domesticating pooches a reminder of bourgeois decadence.

I assess him (Kim Jong Un) to be in a coma, but his life has not ended, The Korea Herald quoted Chang Song-min, a former aide to late-South Korean president Kim Dae Jung, as saying. A complete succession structure has not been formed, so Kim Yo-jong is being brought to the fore as the vacuum cannot be maintained for a prolonged period," he said. As per reports, the Supreme Leader had delegated part of his duties

Yo Jong has recently emerged as a new face in North Koreas political leadership and is already been touted as a successor to the secretive nations governance. Yo Jong, 32, went viral across media earlier in the year when her brother reportedly fell ill in May, allowing her to step in and take control in his absence.

Here are some frequently asked questions about the elusive North Korean politician.

Who is Kim Yo Jong?

Kim Yo Jong is Jong Uns little sister and of the five offsprings of N Koreas former Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il and Ko Yong-hui. She is currently serving as the first vice director of the United Front Department of the Workers Party of Korea. She was reappointed in her position as an alternate Politburo of the Workers Party of Korea in April 2020 after serving her first term from 2017-19. Since the beginning of the year, Yo Jong was seen taking a leading role in a new, more hard-line pressure campaign against neighbour South Korea, highlighting what analysts say is a substantive policy role that goes beyond being her brothers assistant.

Who is Kim Jong Uns Successor?

Yo Jong has long been rumoured to be Jong Uns sister. The 32-year-old is the only close relative of the North Korean leader to play a public role in politics. During the 2018-2019 flurry of international diplomacy, Kim Yo Jong garnered global attention by leading a delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. Later, she was often seen dashing about to make sure everything went well for her older brother, including holding an ashtray for him at a train station on his way to a summit with US President Donald Trump in Vietnam. But in recent months, Yo Jung seems to have taken on a more hands-on role, especially since the nations anti-South Korean agenda came to the fore.

South Koreas spy agency said the Norths 36-year-old leader had delegated part of his authority to his close aides, including his younger sister. In a private meeting with lawmakers last week, South Koreas National Intelligence Service said that Kim Yo-jong, the first vice department director of the Workers Party Central Committee, is steering overall state affairs on the delegation, though Kim her brother still maintains absolute authority."

Is sister tougher than Kim Jong Un?

The sister of the elusive hard lining leader Kim Jong Un, Yo Jong is known for her tough and tenacious brand of politics, some media reports even citing that she was tougher than the North Korean dictator himself. In May, Yo Jong led the decimation of a Joint Liaison Office between North and South Korea in Kaesong over a diplomatic tussle with the country regarding some dissent flyers that had been flown in by activists questioning Jong Uns policies. Blowing up the liaison office, built-in 2018 to improve inter-Korean communications, was a move both tactical and symbolic. With it, Jong Un not only put herself at the forefront of North Koreas stand on South Korea but also emerged as one of the top leaders in the North Korean politburo after her brother Jon Un himself. The move is symbolic as blowing up a liaison office sends a powerful message. And spearheading the change is the tough Yo Jung. The Supreme Leaders sister previously warned South Korea that she would shut down the liaison office.

How long has Kim Yo Jong been active in North Korean politics?

Yo Jong has worked behind the scenes in North Koreas propaganda agencies, a role that led the United States to add her to a list of sanctioned senior officials in 2017 because of human rights abuses and censorship. In 2018, she became the first of the Kims to visit South Korea since the Korean War and has since been actively involved in the nuclear-armed nations international relations and diplomacy policies. In March, state media carried the first-ever statement by Kim, in which she criticized South Korean authorities. That was followed by several more, including a response to comments by Trump. Rising from the ranks of Jong Uns younger sister to his personal assistant to now his enforcer", experts have even surmised that Yo Jung would be an even tougher, more brutal ruler than her dictator brother. While her direct bloodline ensures her hold over the politburo, her trigger-happy debut has definitely drawn eyes.

Is Kim Jong Un dead or alive?

Reports of the Jungs illness and succession instantly sparked rumours of the death of the 36-year-old leader who has been battling ill health for months now. The leader had disappeared previously in April as he received the treatment after an alleged heart attack. Ill health even kept him from attending the 108th wedding of his grandfather Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea. Korean spokespersons however confirmed to Fox News that the leader had not undergone any surgery in his three-week absence from public life in April. Nevertheless, reports of his alleged ill-health and even death (as some are speculating on social media) have sparked concerns on social media with global curiosity regarding the future of the secretive nation - Who will succeed Kim Il Jong in North Korea? The news of Jong Uns ill health is of special interest to the world as analysts fear a possible destabilisation of peace and status quo in the elusive, nuclear-powered nation.

Who else can succeed Jong Un?

Yo Jongs married her comrade Choe Song, who is the son of a secretary in the Workers Party in 2014. The duo has a son called Choe Ryong-hae, who had initially been touted as No 2 in line after Jong Un, being a male heir to the first Supreme Leader Kim Il Sung. The bombing led by Yo Jong in South Korea after Seouls failure to respond to her warnings, however, fueled speculation about the sister becoming Jong Uns successor in the near future. The UFDWPK VP threatened to bolster its military presence in and near the Demilitarized Zone, a day after blowing up its liaison office with the South, prompting sharp criticism from Seoul amid approval within her party workers and leaders who hailed her for her tough stance.

Will North Korea get its first woman leader?

Will Jong Uns sister become the first woman to rule the deeply male-dominated political sphere of North Korea and emerge its leader? She might just. If so, the shift will mark a landmark moment in the history of the East Asian nation, which has a deeply sexist society and politics. Women often do not share equal status as their male counterparts in corporate and political roles. In 1972, however, Korean government amended the constitution to ensure equal rights for women. If Jong Uns sister indeed becomes the next Supreme Leader of North Korea, a nation dependent on male heirs to further their family name and trade, the leader might end up spearheading a new wave of womens participation in North Korean polity and public life and also lead to empowerment while ensuring their rights.

(With inputs from Agencies)

(This story first appeared on Aug 24 2020)

Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here
The prospect of the UAE now obtaining advanced US weaponry such as the F-35 stealth fighter jet has worried Israel.

The United States will ensure Israel retains a military advantage in the Middle East under any future US arms deals with the United Arab Emirates, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday.

The United States has a legal requirement with respect to qualitative military edge. We will continue to honour that, Pompeo told reporters after a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu said he had been reassured on the issue by Pompeo, who began a Middle East visit that will showcase US support for Israeli-Arab peace efforts and building a front against Iran. It will also include Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

A US-brokered deal on normalising relations between Israel and the UAE was announced on August 13. But there has been some dissent in Israel over the prospect of the Gulf power now obtaining advanced US weaponry such as the F-35 stealth fighter jet.

Pompeo said Washington had provided the UAE with military support for more than 20 years, measures he described as needed to stave off shared threats from Iran  also Israels rival.

Were deeply committed to doing that, to achieving that, and well do it in a way that preserves our commitment to Israel and Im confident that objective will be achieved, Pompeo said.

Bruised by the UN Security Councils rejection of a US draft resolution for extending an arms embargo on Iran, the Trump administration is seeking a snapback of UN sanctions that had been eased as part of a 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran.

We are determined to use every tool that we have to ensure that they [Iran] cant get access to high-end weapons systems, Pompeo said. We think its in the best interest of the whole world.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, warned the US administration against trying to sideline them in the Middle East diplomatic push.

Recruiting Arabs to recognise Israel and open embassies does not make Israel a winner, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said in an interview. You are putting the whole region in a lose-lose situation because you are designing the road for a forever conflict in the region.
A group of 54 former bureaucrats have written to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to perform a serious audit of the implementation of the social media companys hate-speech policy in India in a manner that its India policy head, Ankhi Das, is not in a position to influence investigations.

We are writing to you in the expectation that you will make serious efforts to audit the implementation of Facebooks hate speech policy in India and, while such an audit is underway, ensure that the present Public Policy Head of Facebook, India, is not in a position to influence the investigations, the former All India Service Officers said in a statement on Monday.

The controversy was spotlighted by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month in a report that said Facebook India intervened in content moderation processes to ensure hate speeches by a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader were not taken down  a claim the company has since denied. Facebook India on Friday evening reiterated that it acts in an unbiased manner. WSJ named Ankhi Das in the report.

The 54 former officers include ex-Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers Salahuddin Ahmad, Wahajat Habibullah and Harsh Mander, and former Indian Police Service (IPS) officers Shafi Alam, Vappala Balachandran and K Saleem Ali.

The letter said Facebook had failed to implement its own policy of discouraging hate speech in India, or has implemented it in a clearly partisan manner.

The former officers also highlighted the fact that posts on Facebook have often to led to hate crime in India, including lynchings and torture, primarily of Muslims and oppressed castes.

That this (not censoring hate speech by members of the BJP) seems to have been done to protect Facebooks commercial interests is even more reprehensible We note that such behaviour on Facebooks part has become a subject of debate in other countries as well. Commercial interests at the cost of human lives? If these are the crass calculations Facebook indulges in, it is no surprise that the calculus of hate is spreading like a virus in many parts of the world, the letter said.

Hindustan Times reached out to Facebook for a comment, but had not received a response as of press time.

Hindustan Times on Friday reported that members of at least three opposition parties are backing Congress MP Shashi Tharoors decision to summon officials from Facebook to answer a parliamentary panel over allegations that the social media company acted in a politically partisan manner to benefit the BJP. Facebook has been asked to appear in front of the panel on September 2.
The period of significantly lower petrol and home heating costs enjoyed during lockdown is set to come to an end.

After a series of month-on-month decreases at the pumps, the average cost of both petrol and diesel in Ireland has increased this month, as traffic volumes continue to increase.

LATEST | 61 new cases of Covid-19 with Longford amongst counties listed

According to the AA's latest fuel price study, the cost of a litre of petrol, has increased marginally in the past month, the second successive month in which prices have climbed.

Following a 4.1c increase in July, a litre of petrol has increased by a further 1.6c in the past month now costing 127.5c  up from last months average price of 125.9c. Meanwhile, diesel prices saw a similar increase now costing on average 118.5c per litre compared to last months price of 117.3c.

Despite this increase, both fuels remain significantly below prices seen at the start of 2020, when a litre of petrol cost 144.5c, with diesel costing 135.9c on average.

Also read: Gardai hunt gang armed with knife and batons in aggravated Longford raid

Conor Faughnan, AA Director of Consumer Affairs said: While crude oil prices have increased slightly over the past month, the main factor in the increase we are seeing at the pumps is a significant increase in national and international demand for both fuels.

"The good news, however, is that this increase is not at the same level we saw prices climb by last month and that the cost of both fuels remain significantly below where they were at the start of the year or 12 months ago.

We cant truly know where prices are heading as demand, both home and abroad, is very much linked to restrictions introduced to tackle the spread of COVID-19. If we see a global move to re-introduce lockdown-style restrictions then we could see pump prices fall again, but if schools go ahead with opening and more aspects of society start to open up in the coming weeks, then demand and pump prices could increase.

Also read: Longford schools in huge safety push ahead of return

Following significant drops earlier in the year, crude oil prices have continued to trend upwards - but still remain significantly below levels seen before the COVID-19 outbreak. Currently, Brent Crude Oil is trading at approximately $45 per barrel, up from a price of $43 per barrel in late June. However, this price of crude oil remains significantly below prices of up to $65 per barrel seen in late 2019.

Traditionally, we would see pump prices climb as we come into the late-autumn and winter period as the return of schools, change in weather conditions, and reduced daylight lead to an increase in car usage," said Mr Faughnan. "However, because of the increase in the number of people working from home, it remains unclear how traffic and car usage could change over the coming months.

While traffic levels on our roads currently are largely in line with this time last year, those numbers are being boosted by people holidaying at home and may drop back slightly once the holiday season is over.

Many home heating oil companies have a number of special offers in place to encourage people to stock up for the winter.

Also read: Club Longford hosting golf classic to keep flag flying in face of Covid-19 pandemic
LATEST Aug. 24, 6:45 p.m. Cal Fire officials said that crews made "a lot of progress" on the fires in the CZU Lightning Complex Monday after favorable weather conditions continued.

The moisture and stable winds have helped slow the complex's progress, which now stands at 78,684 acres and 13% containment. For reference, the blaze was at 78,000 acres Monday morning.

276 structures have been destroyed and another 25,000 remain threatened, but Cal Fire officials are optimistic firefighters have turned a corner.

"Today with the weather we had, it really let us get in there and do a lot of good work," Operations Section Team Chief Mark Bunton said during a Monday evening press conference. "We had a lot of progress with the fire  with the clear air today we could fly a lot of aircraft over it."

Aug. 24, 2:45 p.m. Operations Section Team Chief Mark Brunton gave an update on containment efforts related to the CZU Lightning Complex Fire Monday afternoon, explaining that favorable weather and reduced smoke in the area have given fire crews a relief in fighting blazes.

Current strategies to contain flames and "keep them in check" around Ben Lomond are progressing despite terrain challenges, thanks to more resources. Efforts are also being made to preserve state parks in the area.

Down to the south, fire crews have engaged in a planned burn operation with help from air support to "buffer" any progression of the fire heading southward.

"That gives a really good protection for the community of Santa Cruz and the UC campus," Brunton added. "It's not completely bulletproof but its pretty darn good."

Aug. 24, 2:20 p.m. Santa Cruz County has established a 24-hour medical care clinic at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds (2601 E Lake Ave, Watsonville) for those evacuating the CZU Lightning Complex Fire.

Aug. 24, 2 p.m. Santa Cruz County has initiated a volunteer center for those hoping to assist those affected by the CZU Lightning fire. The county asks those interested to register at SCVolunteerCenter.org.

Aug. 24, 1:30 p.m. San Mateo County residents and business owners who sustained losses in the CZU Lightening Complex fire can begin applying for assistance on Aug. 25 by registering online at DisasterAssistance.gov or by calling 800-621-3362 or 800-462-7585 (TTY) for the hearing and speech impaired.

Aug. 24, 1 p.m. California Gov. Gavin Newsom called out the CZU August Lightning Complex at a Monday press briefing as an example of a wildfire that has raged out of control due to climate change. The fire is burning in a coastal area that has historically had a moist landscape "immune" to extreme fire, he said. With temperatures increasing and weather patterns changing, the landscape is drying out and becoming more flammable.

"Whats remarkable about the CZU is this is a coastal fire in forests with lots of redwoods that have never simply seen forest fires like this," Newsom said.

Read more about Newsom's press conference on SFGATE.

Aug., 24, 6:20 a.m. The weather over the Santa Cruz Mountains cooperated overnight, helping firefighters increase containment of the CZU August Lightning Complex.

Containment of the blaze stretching across Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties went from 8% Sunday night to 13% Monday morning. The fire is now 78,000 acres, Cal Fire officials said at a press briefing this morning (watch the briefing here).

As firefighters on the ground conduct investigations in burn areas, the total number of homes destroyed has increased to 231. More than 24,000 structures remain threatened.

Evacuation warnings for parts of Santa Clara County were issued in advance of the anticipated dry lightning storm Sunday "out of an abundance of caution," and on Monday morning, Cal Fire Deputy Chief Jonathan Cox said, "We don't believe there's any imminent threat to Santa Clara County at this time."

Officials also said there's no significant threat to the city of Santa Cruz or the UC Santa Cruz campus at this time.

Remnants of a tropical storm that pushed into Northern California overnight were forecast to deliver a nasty mix of dry lightning and erratic winds and amplify fire activity. Instead, the storm cells mostly carried high amounts of moisture into the region and even dropped small amounts of rainfall. There were no lightning strikes reported in the Santa Cruz Mountains overnight.

A threat for lightning still remains through Monday, especially in the North Bay, but the National Weather Service said the Bay Area has mostly dodged the storm.

"Mother Nature helped us quite a bit," said Cal Fire Incident Commander Billy See.

"The weather wasn't as significant as expected and that has given our crews the opportunity to make great progress," added Cal Fire operations chief Mark Brunton.

Brunton said the focus overnight was on building breaks around the fire's perimeter and crews improved control lines on the north end, protecting the communities of Pescadero, La Honda and Loma Mar. Brunton said along the coast, the fire is "extinguishing itself" due to the high amounts of moisture in the air and lighter fuels on the ground.

The fire is still hung up on the ridge behind Davenport, Brunton said, though it hasn't made a big push into the community. "Once we get more resources, it's something we are going to go directly after," he said.

Crews have built two control lines on the fire's south edge, between Highway 1 and Highway 9 above the UC Santa Cruz campus. "That puts very good protections for Santa Cruz and the UC campus," said Brunton.

The Highway 9 corridor, which encompasses several mountain communities such as Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek, continues to be a challenge with thick vegetation and steep rugged terrain. "We have established some lines," he said. "Are they as robust as we'd like them to be? Absolutely not. They are primary, they were established rapidly to try and keep the fire in check." In coming days, crews will focus on this area.

The San Mateo County Sheriff's Department said six people violated orders and snuck into evacuation zones to check on their homes. "The end result was they had to be rescued," Lt. Saul Lopez said. "We had to redirect resources to get these people out."

One civilian fatality was reported in this fire on Sunday. The body of a 70-year-old man was found near the end of Last Chance Road, close to what is thought to be the person's car, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office said. The man was reported missing early last week in the first days of the fire, but Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office Deputy Chief Chris Clark said fire conditions prevented a helicopter from landing in the area until today. Once the helicopter landed, investigators were able to locate and retrieve the body.

"It has been a tragic day finding a civilian dead," said Cal Fire Incident Commander Billy See. "Our condolences go out to the family."

Investigators are talking to locals and neighbors to see if the man elected to stay in an evacuation zone to protect his property. There are some indications he "may have been trying to escape that fire" when he died, Clark said. The man is not being identified by law enforcement at this time.

Clark said the sheriff's office is investigating four other missing persons reports, and these people were still missing as of Monday morning.

More than 1,500 crews are battling the fire and Cox said the number of firefighters on the incident are increasing daily.

The blaze is burning in highly flammable landscape parched after a year marked by low rainfall. It hasn't seen a fire in years.

"It's so dry it's something we have not seen historically," Brunton said last week. "We're seeing fire we've never seen in the coastal area before, in terms of amount and severity."

Brunton said when he talks to firefighters on the scene, he's heard a common refrain: "We've never seen anything like this."

The blaze was started more than a week ago when a rash of thunder and lightning storms moved over Northern California, sparking hundreds of wildfires that have now burned more than 1 million acres combined.

Amy Graff is the news editor for SFGATE. Email her: agraff@sfgate.com.
President Donald Trump on Sunday evening will announce the emergency authorization of convalescent plasma treatment for COVID-19 patients, according to multiple reports.

The Food and Drug Administrations emergency order will make the treatment more easily available to some patients, The Associated Press reported.

The announcement, set for a 5:30 p.m. news conference at the White House, comes a day after Trump on Twitter claimed, without evidence, that the deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!

The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives! @SteveFDA  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2020

The treatment of antibody-rich blood plasma from patients whove recovered from COVID-19 may provide benefits to infected people, but scientists and physicians are still researching whether it works, proper dosages and how precisely to administer the treatment, AP reported.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, in an interview on Fox News Sunday, said the Trump administration was not going to cut corners on any kind of research we can do, but what we will do is cut the red tape. And what the president was specifically addressing is something that Ive been involved with over the last three or four weeks, is a real frustration with some of the bureaucrats to think that they can just do this the way they normally do it.

According to the AP, administration officials had become frustrated with the pace of vaccine development and plasmas approval as a COVID-19 treatment, but there was no evidence of intentional delays by the Food and Drug Administration.

Meadows told ABCs This Week that weve looked at a number of people that are not being as diligent as they should be in terms of getting to the bottom of it.

This president is about cutting red tape, Meadows added. He had to make sure that they felt the heat. If they dont see the light, they need to feel the heat because the American people are suffering.

Related Content:

Coronavirus in Mass.: Cases, maps, charts and resources
At least 53 cases of the coronavirus have been traced back to an Aug. 7 wedding and reception in Maine that violated attendance limits, state health officials said. A local hospital said Friday one person whose infection has been linked to the event has died.

About 65 people attended the reception at the Big Moose Inn Cabins and Campground in Millinocket, about 70 miles north of Bangor, the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The Maine governor's executive orders limit gatherings to 50 people indoors, 100 people outdoors and fewer if the space cannot accommodate five people per 1,000 feet.

Of the 53 cases linked to the reception, 13 were secondary and 10 were tertiary, Maine CDC spokesman Robert Long told NBC News. In other words, it spread to people who did not attend the wedding or reception, but had close contact with individuals who did.

The inn did not immediately return a request for comment Monday. It was cited for what was called an imminent health hazard, which Long said carries no fine but can result in harsher penalties if state officials determine the venue violated health rules again.

The Big Moose Inn in Millinocket, Maine. (NECN)

The outbreak affected individuals from 4 to 98 years old, officials said.

The Maine CDC advises anyone who attended an event at the inn on Aug. 7, and who has symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, to contact their health care provider.

In a statement Friday, the Millinocket Regional Hospital CEO Robert Peterson said one patient who had been linked to the reception had died. The statement did not identify the patient.

"Our thoughts and sympathies are with her family as they cope with this difficult loss," he said.

The hospital tested 366 people who attended the reception or came in contact with those who did, Peterson said.

All positive patients have been notified, given care instructions, and told to quarantine, the hospital said. Because of the outbreak, the hospital is closed to visitors.

Story continues

The Maine CDC noted that social gatherings  such as weddings and receptions  pose an elevated risk for virus transmission.

The possibility of COVID-19 transmission increases as the number of attendees increases, even when some attendees are indoors and others are outdoors," it said in a statement. "This is because outdoor attendees may reasonably be expected to come indoors and interact with others, increasing the possibility of COVID-19 transmission.

Indoor gatherings pose extra risk compared to outdoor gatherings, because of the challenges of ensuring adequate social distancing and ventilation, the Maine CDC said.

More than a dozen guests who attended a wedding June 20 in The Woodlands, Texas, about an hour outside Houston, tested positive for the coronavirus days later, The New York Times reported this month.

Over the last several months, concerns about the spread of the coronavirus at large gatherings has prompted many couples to cancel or postpone their weddings.

There have been at least 4,356 cases of the coronavirus in Maine as of Monday, with 131 deaths, according to state health data.

People who attend social gatherings should wear face coverings other than when eating or drinking, the Maine CDC said.

The investigation into the reception at the Big Moose Inn is ongoing, health officials said.
(Alliance News) - Catenae Innovation PLC on Monday said its newly appointed marketing agency has converted GBP12,500 of credit with the company for services rendered.

The agency, Markops Ltd, will be issued 342,465 shares in digital media and technology services company Catenae at a 3.65 pence per share price.

Shares in Catenae were up 6.4% at 3.67p in London late Monday morning.

The issue of these shares is subject to approval at an annual general meeting. This AGM is scheduled to take place on September 25.

Following admission, Catenae's enlarged share capital will consist of 221.1 million shares.

Chief Executive Guy Meyer said: "We are pleased that our newly appointed marketing agency, Markops, has chosen to take a stake in the business, which highlights its confidence in the future prospects of the company and aligns itself with our strategy.

"The team at Markops is instrumental in the repositioning of Catenae's business and brand and is helping to inject value into our product set, as well as introducing the company to their corporate networks."

By Anna Farley; annafarley@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
In another tweet, Mboweni wrote: That governor was a good fella. Why do we do these things as Africans? The president of Zambia must give us the reasons why he dismissed the governor  or else hell is on its way. I will mobilise!
Lindell to serve as Chairman of the Board

MALMO, Sweden, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bona (http://mybonahome.com/home.aspx), a global, sustainably-driven company that supplies products for installing, renovating, maintaining, and restoring premium floors, announced today that it has appointed Pontus Cornelius as president and CEO of the company effective January 11, 2021. Kerstin Lindell, the current president and CEO, will shift her role to Chairman of the Board at Bona.



"Pontus is an exceptionally talented leader and will bring strong strategic insight to the company. The board and I welcome him to the team," said Lindell. "It has been an honor to serve as president and CEO at Bona for the past 14 years. From celebrating Bona's 100-year anniversary to entering new categories to riding the waves of varying market conditions, it has been a pleasure working with the smart and dedicated Bona team. I look forward to staying connected in my future role as Chairman of the Board."

On January 11, 2021 Cornelius will step into the role of president and CEO working closely with Lindell the ensure a smooth transition. At this time, Lindell will become Chairman of the Board at Bona.

"As a member of Bona's advisory board since 2017, I've had an inside view of the company's strong growth over the years and its long history of commitment to innovation and sustainability," said Cornelius. "I look forward to working closely with the talented team at Bona and continuing the positive momentum of leading and innovating in the industry for a sustainable future."

Most recently, Cornelius served as president and CEO of Ernstromgruppen AB, a Swedish, privately owned industrial conglomerate focusing on developing B2B companies in various niche industries. Under Cornelius' leadership, Ernstromgruppen expanded into a group of over 30 companies (with a turnover of approximately 250M/1,000 employees) with the common goal of creating sustainable and digital businesses for future generations. Prior to his tenure with Ernstromgruppen, Cornelius worked in leading positions with small and large companies affording him a broad understanding of best practice for business growth. Cornelius, who has worked and lived abroad in Europe, Asia, and the United States, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden with plans to reside in Malmo by early January.

Cornelius continued, "The future is green from both a moral and business perspective. With Bona's long history of innovating sustainable solutions, I look forward to the next decade and beyond as a time to innovate new solutions and future-proof the company."

About Bona

Bona is a family-owned, sustainably driven company that supplies products for installing, renovating, maintaining and restoring premium floors. Founded in 1919, Bona was the first in the industry to offer a full system of waterborne hardwood floor finishing and floor care products. Today, Bona offers products for most premium floor surfaces including wood, tile, vinyl, resilient, rubber and laminate. Bona's turnover is 2.8bn SEK (EUR 257 million) 2019. The head office is in Malmo, Sweden, and the company is represented globally by its 17 subsidiaries, 70 distributors, 600 employees and 5 factories. For more visit www.bona.com (http://www.bona.com).

Contact: Heather Lindemann | Bona

+1 (800) 872-5515

heather.lindemann@bona.com (mailto:heather.lindemann@bona.com)

Asa Vaarala | Aspekta AB for Bona

+46 (0)791 06 56 12

asa.vaarala@aspekta.se (mailto:asa.vaarala@aspekta.se)

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/800c7456-11b6-400f-a4f9-cbf226204353 (https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/800c7456-11b6-400f-a4f9-cbf226204353)
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Billionaire philanthropist Robert Smith, the richest black person in America who paid off the entire student debt of Morehouse's graduating class in 2019, is being investigated by the Department of Justice for potential tax evasion, according to reports.

Smith, 57, is the CEO of Vista Equity Partners and is worth $6billion.

According to sources cited by Bloomberg, investigators are looking into whether he used offshore accounts in the Caribbean to funnel $247million from his fund into his charitable foundation in 2014 without paying tax.

He has not been charged and may not be. According to Bloomberg's sources, he is trying to resolve the issue by paying a settlement.

A spokesman for Vista and Smith declined to comment on Monday morning.

Billionaire philanthropist Robert F. Smith is reportedly facing a criminal investigation over a 2014 transaction of $247million from his private equity fund to a Caribbean company

The fund sent out a letter to investors last week, after Bloomberg made details of the probe public.

According to The Wall Street Journal - which viewed the letter - it confirmed there was an investigation. It said Smith was 'working on reaching an acceptable resolution with the DOJ, which we hope will be achieved in the near future' but that the fund itself was not the sbjct of any investigation.

The issue at hand, the sources say, is whether or not Smith was the owner of Flash Holdings LLC, a company based in St Kitts and Nevits.

Starting in 2014, Flash received $247million from Vista. If Smith owned Flash, he should have paid tax on the money because he is a US citizen.

The money was then paid to Smith's charitable foundation - which has given tens of millions of dollars to universities, museums and African American organizations in the United States.

The Bloomberg sources say that in 2014, Smith approached the IRS asking for amnesty from prosecution, like 56,000 other Americans who failed to report offshore assets.

They turned him down but he was never charged.

The investigation is, according to the sources, linked to a larger probe into Robert Brockman, the CEO of Reynolds and Reynolds.

In May last year, Smith became a national hero by offering to pay off all the student debt of the 2019 graduating class at Morehouse College

The reaction from graduates at Morehouse after Smith announced he would pay off their debt

One of the people cooperating with that investigation is Australian lawyer Evatt Tamine. He has turned over emails and has testified in front of a grand jury in San Francisco three times, the sources say.

It's unclear if he has given any information about Smith or Brockman specifically.

In May 2019, Smith became a national hero by vowing to pay off the student debt of the entire Morehouse graduating class.

'On behalf of the eight generations of my family who have been in this country, we're gonna put a little fuel in your bus.

'Now I've got the alumni over there. This is a challenge to you, alumni. This is my class, 2019. And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans,' he said at the time.

He then extended the pledge to soak up any of the student debt the kids' parents were carrying.

Smith started at Goldman Sachs then was poached to work in private equity. Brockman helped give him a start with a $1billion injection to his fund in 2000.

In 2014, he and his wife of 26 years, Suzanne McFayden, divorced, citing infidelity as the reason.

He went on to marry Playboy model Hope Dworaczyk, 35, with whom he has one child.
A six-member panel formed by the ruling Nepal Communist Party to resolve the bitter intra-party rift has suggested that Prime Minister K P Oli should complete his five-year tenure, while executive chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda be allowed to exercise full executive power over party affairs, a senior party leader said on Sunday. The task force, formed by Oli and Prachanda on August 15 and later endorsed by NCPs powerful Central Secretariat on August 17, was led by the partys General Secretary Bishnu Poudyal.

The panel, which submitted its report to Oli and Prachanda on Saturday, includes Standing Committee members Shankar Pokhrel, Janardan Sharma, Bhim Rawal, Surendra Pandey and Pampha Bhusal.

Although the details of the report has not been made public, it is expected to pacify the intra-party rift which deepened further after Prachanda and senior leader Madhav Kumar Nepal demanded Prime Minister Olis resignation.

According to senior NCP leader and Standing Committee member Ganesh Shah, the panel in its report has suggested that Prime Minister Oli should remain in power for a full five-year term, whereas Prachanda should have full executive power over the partys affairs.

When Oli became prime minister two-and-a-half years ago in 2018, he and Prachanda had reached a tacit understanding to share the prime ministers position turn-by-turn. The panel has suggested the top leaders of the party to adhere to one-man-one-post principle and to promote coordination and collaboration between the two top leaders, Shah said.

However, the report needs to be ratified in the Standing Committee meeting, which is likely to be convened this week, he said. There is no other way to maintain unity in the party at this moment, said Shanker Pokharel, one of the panel members.

However, it is to be seen how the suggestions of the panel will be implemented, Shah said. According to party insiders, Prime Minister Oli is likely to reshuffle his Cabinet as soon as the Standing Committee meeting of the party endorses the panels report to strike a power balance with Prachanda. Oli and Prachanda have held about a dozen meetings to sort out the differences between them. But, as the Prime Minister did not accept the condition of a one-man-one-post, the talks failed. Oli has refused to give up his post as prime minister as well as a co-chairman of the NCP.

A bitter internal feud has been brewing in the ruling NCP after top party leaders, including Prachanda, demanded Olis resignation, saying his recent anti-India remarks were neither politically correct nor diplomatically appropriate. They are also against Olis autocratic style of functioning.

The differences grew further after Oli said that some of the ruling party leaders are aligning with the southern neighbour to remove him from power after his government issued a new political map incorporating three Indian territories of Kalapani, Lipulekh and Limpiyadhura.

The two leaders are also engaged in tightening their grip within the party with the escalation of the intra-party feud.
President Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un meet in Singapore in 2018. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

Days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Barack Obama gave him an urgent warning: North Korea was a serious threat and might soon be capable of marrying a nuclear warhead to a long-range missile that could reach American shores.

Almost four years after that meeting at the White House, as Trump faces the prospect of possibly turning over the presidency to Joe Biden, there is little evidence the danger has been reduced, despite the most sustained and aggressive diplomacy of Trumps tenure.

If anything, North Korea poses a greater threat, according to Korea specialists: The country has tested and developed more weapons; its leader, Kim Jong Un, has become less isolated; and international resolve to confront North Korea has weakened after Trumps three meetings with Kim.

Victor Cha, who negotiated with North Korea for President George W. Bush and was once considered for a top post in the Trump administration, warned in a recent podcast of the big choice thats coming down as North Koreas weapons program advances. Soon, he said, North Korea may reach the point at which American leaders will have to consider tacitly accepting the country as a nuclear power in exchange for limits and verification of Pyongyangs stockpile.

Cha did not advocate that approach, which would be a fundamental change from decades of American insistence that North Korea drop its nuclear program entirely. But the fact that he broached it points to the lack of options America has in dealing with the secretive and autocratic adversary.

North Korea wants to be "like an India or Pakistan," both of which developed nuclear weapons in violation of international anti-proliferation efforts, said Jung Pak, who helped with transition efforts at the CIA when Trump took office and is now an informal advisor to Biden. "Everybody just looks the other way.

Kim needs periodic bouts of tension and military aggression to maintain his rule," Pak said. "So he doesnt want peace.

Story continues

Trump still believes he can campaign on the issue, claiming in an interview in July that if Democrats had gotten in, we would right now be in a war.

There is no way to prove or disprove the assertion, which many Democrats have denied. Danny Russel, an assistant secretary of State for Asia under President Obama, and Pak both said that during Obamas tenure there were tense moments when limited military options were scrutinized.

But Trumps 2017 threat to unleash fire and fury on North Korea was the closest the countries came to a confrontation in recent years, Pak said.

Trumps declaration in 2018, after his first meeting with Kim, that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat rings increasingly hollow, according to experts who served administrations of both parties.

In John Boltons recent memoir about his time serving as Trumps national security advisor, he portrayed Trump as ill-informed about history, unwilling to prepare for talks with Kim and obsessed with media coverage  with the president telling Bolton that he was prepared to sign a substance-free communique, have a press conference to declare victory, and then get out" of Singapore.

Kim and his ruling circle think theyve got Trumps number, said Susan Thornton, who served as acting assistant secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific during Trumps first 18 months in office.

The North Korean autocrat has sent several signals suggesting he wants Trump to win in November, labeling Biden a rabid dog that needs to be beaten. Some Korea analysts believe the North is making a calculated effort to refrain from provoking the United States during the campaign, even as Pyongyang takes aim at South Korea, blowing up a joint liaison office in Kaesong in mid-June.

They want Trump to be able to keep saying he has basically fixed the North Korea situation glossing over the notion that theyre still building up weapons, and theyre still shooting off short-range missiles, said Thornton, who spent 28 years at the State Department.

Neither the Trump campaign nor the Biden campaign has released a plan for dealing with North Korea. The White House declined to allow any official to be interviewed on the record about the potential future of North Korea policy.

Interviews with officials in and out of government and the Biden campaign suggest that if Trump is reelected he will continue his efforts at diplomacy with Kim. Biden would try to firm up international sanctions and cooperation with regional allies, waiting for an opening to restart more traditional low-level negotiations  essentially resuming Obamas approach.

Advisors to Biden also said they would restore pressure on North Korea over its human rights abuses, a contrast with Trumps approach to downplaying Kims record of killings and mass incarcerations.

But even Bidens campaign advisors offered little hope of an easy fix. They said that, near the end of Obamas term, they believed they might have had an opening to make progress. At the time, China and U.S. regional allies had pushed Kim closer to desperation.

But they argue that Trump has squandered the opportunity by giving Kim the international legitimacy he craves and by halting major joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea that Kim views as a threat.

Its going to be a real heavy lift to get us back to a place where were actually advancing interests, said Antony Blinken, Biden's foreign policy advisor, who served in several top positions in the Obama administration.

Advisors did not point to many specific actions Biden took in forming Obamas policy toward North Korea, but they made general note of his leading role in dealing with American allies  South Korea and Japan  as well as with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, each of whose support is necessary for economic sanctions against North Korea to have an effect.

The approach that Biden supported was more along the lines of a war of attrition with North Korea, Russel said. If giving up its nuclear program is the last thing on earth that North Korea wants to do, we need to make it the last thing on earth that North Korea can do in order to survive.

But that approach takes time and sustained effort at keeping together a fragile coalition, and it carries the risk that Kim will keep building nuclear weapons and possibly provoke a military confrontation. North Korea improved its missile capabilities and testing during Obama's presidency.

Although some believe Kim might give up his nuclear weapons if he could stay in power and unlock his countrys economy, others argue he sees weapons as his only leverage, both domestically and abroad, and would never give them up.

Im frustrated that in a sense time ran out on what we were doing, said Blinken, who acknowledged he could not prove the Obama-Biden approach, sometimes dubbed strategic patience, was close to bearing fruit.

Ken Farnaso, the Trump campaigns deputy press secretary, said in a statement that Trump inherited a broken and openly hostile U.S.-N.K. relationship from his predecessors that left North Korea as the preeminent international threat to the United States.

President Trump aimed to deescalate tensions with Kim Jong Un while still applying maximum political and economic pressure on the rogue regime, allowing for two historic summits further demonstrating the administrations commitment to a denuclearized Korean peninsula, he continued.

Trump has repeatedly expressed a willingness to hold another summit. His top negotiator, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, was in the region this month, but North Korea preemptively rejected talks while accusing the United States of hostility.

Cha said in an email that he believed Trump would almost certainly pursue more summits with Kim not because he wants denuclearization but because he loves the media frenzy.

He worries Trump  who has repeatedly complained about the costs of basing American troops in South Korea while trying to drive up the amount that Seoul pays to have them  will seek to pull them out. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the Pentagon had presented the White House with options for reducing the force.

Many analysts believe that would not only ease pressure on Kim, but also fundamentally shift power in the region toward China, while ratcheting up the potential for war.

The North Koreans would much rather see Trump than Biden, Cha added. Trump is the perfect mark: loves the show, doesnt care about substance and hates the alliance  the polar opposite of Biden.
New Delhi, Aug 24 : After the CWC meeting on Monday ended with interim party chief Sonia Gandhi being asked to continue for the time being and an "all is well" vibe given by Congress, the signatories to the letter calling for a change in the party leadership met at Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad's residence.

Former Union Ministers Manish Tewari, Shashi Tharoor, Mukul Wasnik, Anand Sharma and Kapil Sibal reached Azad's residence and met for more than an hour, but it is not clear what transpired there.

In the Congress Working Committee meeting, Sharma, Azad and Wasnik were cornered by Gandhi loyalists, with even former Union Minister Ambika Soni targeting Azad, saying that he has not been without power for decades, so what problem does he have now, sources said.

Sources say that Azad, who is Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha and Sharma, his deputy, may find it tough to continue in their posts now.

However, Sonia Gandhi said that "she does not hold any ill will against any colleague or any other thought of any other nature, for she treats them as part of the family", according to party's chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala.

"Irrespective of however hurtful the remarks in the past many years of any colleague may have been, she maintained that she has always risen above them to keep the Congress family together and to fight for the cause of the people. That is the message she gave to the Congress workers and the leaders," he said.

The Monday meeting of CWC came in wake of the letter written by 23 leaders who questioned the party leadership and was promptly responded by Sonia Gandhi.

"She wrote me a letter on August 20, which contained an indication to 'Begin Deliberation' in order to put in place a process... today itself we decided to have an AICC session at the earliest," said party General Secretary, Organisation, K.C. Venugopal.
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Giancarlo Granda says Jerry Falwell Jr. watched as he had sex with his wife Becki

Jerry Falwell Jr. confirmed on Monday night that he had resigned from evangelical Liberty University - ending a bizarre episode in which he was said to have quit, and then denied it.

Falwell told ABC that his resignation was official, and he was stepping down as chancellor of the Lynchburg, Virginia-based Christian school, after a pool boy claimed the evangelist watched while he had sex with his wife.

A senior school official earlier on Monday night said he had resigned from his leadership post, but Falwell then told several news outlets that he does not plan to leave permanently.

A school official confirmed on Monday - the first day of classes for students - that Falwell had agreed to resign, The Washington Post reported.

Falwell then said the reports of his resignation were 'completely false'.

'I have not resigned. I will be on indefinite leave,' Falwell later told POLITICO.

When a reporter asked a spokesperson for Liberty University whether Falwell had indeed resigned, the spokesperson answered affirmatively.

The university said a statement would be 'forthcoming.'

Reached later on Monday, the spokesperson said: 'I cannot say anything and I can only give a statement from the Board if they give me a statement.'

Falwell said he had told the Liberty Board of Trustees earlier in the summer that he needed a break from work.

He told Virginia Business that the board agreed he take a 'leave of absence' after a 'stupid picture' emerged on Instagram showing him and his female assistant with their pants unzipped and bellies sticking out.

'I don't care what you call it. I've been at this for so many years and under so much stress, I decided I needed a three-month break,' Falwell said.

He said he's 'enjoying it, except for the press.'

The controversy erupted after Giancarlo Granda, 29, spoke out on Monday in an interview with Reuters where he contradicted Falwell's claims that he was trying to extort the pair and had an affair with his wife, and gave more details about his alleged sexual relationship with them.

Granda claims that he had sex with Jerry Falwell Jr's wife Becki several times a year for six years and that he watched 'from the corner of the room'

He said he was 20 when he met the pair in Miami and that starting in March 2012, he had sex with Falwell's wife Becki several times a year in hotel rooms, sometimes while Falwell Jr. watched, until 2018.

'Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,' Granda said.

During that time, the trio went into business together with an LGBTQ-friendly hostel in Miami that Granda runs.

He said that he was used as a 'target' for the couple's 'sexual escapades' and that he was not trying to extort the pair, even though he threatened to go 'the kamikaze route' if they didn't give him what he wanted.

He sat down with Reuters earlier this month. They went to Falwell Jr. with Granda's claims, which is what prompted his statement on Sunday night.

Now 29, Granda described the liaisons as frequent - 'multiple times per year' - and said the encounters took place at hotels in Miami and New York, and at the Falwells' home in Virginia.

On Sunday night, Falwell Jr. - a prominent Trump endorser and one of the most influential right-wing Christians in America - told The Washington Examiner that he and his family were being extorted.

He said Becki had an affair with Granda that he had 'no involvement in', and that he'd chosen to forgive his wife.

Granda claims the opposite.

He showed Reuters texts from Becki where she said she was 'missing him like crazy' and also gave an audio recording of her complaining about hearing about the other women Granda had been intimate with.

Falwell Jr. was also on the call and told him that he was going to make his wife 'jealous'.

Giancarlo and Jerry. They met in Miami in 2012, when Giancarlo was 20

'He's like telling me every time he hooks up with people. Like I don't have feelings or something,' Becki said.

Falwell then chimed in: 'You're going to make her jealous.'

Granda replied: 'I'm not trying to do that.'

He insists he was trying to negotiate a buyout from the hostel business and that he was not extorting the pair.

In one text to them, he said: 'Since you're okay with ruining my life, I am going to take the kamikaze route.

'It really is a shame because I wanted to reach a peaceful resolution and just move on with our lives but if conflict is what you want, then so be it.'

In his statement on Sunday night, Falwell Jr. said, in part: 'Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved...it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about.'

His friendship with the Falwells eventually soured, he said, in part because he wanted to dissolve his ties with the couple and fell into a business dispute with them.

Granda first emerged as a figure in the Falwells' circle two years ago, when BuzzFeed News reported that the couple had befriended Granda and gone into business with him, buying a Miami Beach youth hostel in 2013.

At the time of the BuzzFeed article, a representative of the Falwell family said Granda was 'offered a share' in Alton Hostel LLC because he lived in Miami and would act as a manager of the youth hostel.

Corporate records show that he currently has a stake in that venture.

After Reuters presented its initial reporting early last week to the Falwells, a lawyer for Jerry Falwell, Michael Bowe, said the evangelical leader 'categorically denies everything you indicated you intend to publish about him.'

On Sunday night, however, as Reuters was preparing to publish this article, Jerry Falwell issued a statement to the Washington Examiner in which he said that his wife had had an affair with Granda and that Granda had been trying to extort money from the couple over the matter.

Granda denies any such intent, saying he was seeking to negotiate a buyout from a business arrangement he says he had with the couple.

Granda, circled left, with the family in an undated photo. They met in 2012 in Miami. He runs a hostel they invested in

Granda with the family on a trip to Washington DC in September 2018, before, both sides say, their relationship soured

Jesus Fernandez Sr and Jesus Fernandez Jr sued, alleging that Falwell and Granda cut them out of the deal involving a hostel in Miami, Florida. The deal was settled in 2019

Falwell, picture above with his wife and Trump, flew Granda in 2012 to Liberty University to meet the president

Falwell's statement Sunday to the Examiner said nothing about Granda's account alleging that the evangelical leader had his own role in the affair, and Falwell didn't address questions from Reuters about it.

In the statement quoted by the Examiner, Falwell said that 'Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved.'

News of the entanglement would seem to end the influence of Falwell, a towering figure in the U.S. evangelical political movement.

His 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump helped the twice-divorced New Yorker win the Republican nomination for president.

Falwell, 58, took an indefinite leave of absence earlier this month from Liberty University, the Christian school he has run since 2007.

The leave, announced in a terse statement from the school's board of trustees, came days after Falwell posted, then deleted, an Instagram photo of himself with his pants unzipped, standing with his arm around a young woman whose pants were also partly undone.

Falwell later told a local radio station that the picture was meant as a good-natured joke.

Becki Falwell, 53, is a political figure in her own right.

She served on the advisory board of the group Women for Trump, which advocates for the president's reelection campaign.

She also spoke as part of a panel with her husband and Donald Trump Jr at last year's Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the signature annual gathering of conservatives.

Falwell and others refer to her as 'the first lady of Liberty University.'

The university, based in Lynchburg, Virginia, was founded in 1971 by Falwells televangelist father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The younger Falwell took over in 2007. Today, the university boasts an online and on-campus enrollment that exceeds 100,000 students and holds those who attend to an exacting honor code.

'Sexual relations outside of a biblically ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman are not permissible at Liberty University,' the code reads.

In a statement released Friday, before news of the relationship with Granda became public, Liberty University said its 'decision whether or not to retain Falwell as president has not yet been made.'

Its board of trustees, the statement read, 'requested prayer and patience as they seek the Lord's will and also seek additional information for assessment.'

The Falwell saga came amid growing calls for an overhaul of leadership at the school, where alumni recently launched a campaign urging him to step aside.

'I really think the board of directors should have done this a long time ago, and if there's anybody who needs to go next, it needs to be them,' said Maina Mwaura, a Liberty graduate who helped organize a June letter from black alumni criticizing Falwell.

'This school has become the laughingstock of the country,' Mwaura added, noting that the board could have prevented the current furor had it acted more quickly to rein in Falwell.

The founder's son was given a long leash for poor behavior, Mwaura said, 'because he was the rainmaker' who brought in significant financial resources.

Jerry Falwell Jr.'s full statement on his wife's affair

My family has been blessed with the opportunity to serve Christ and our community over the past 50 years - from when my father founded Liberty in the early 1970's through today. When my father suddenly passed away in 2007, I quickly and unexpectedly went from being the lawyer working in the background on the business aspects of the school to becoming a very public person, having to overcome my fears of speaking in front of audiences of tens of thousands, with many more responsibilities to the Liberty community and to my own family.

My priority was to build on my father's vision and to work hard. Thanks to the help of the Board and the extraordinary Liberty faculty, executives, staff and community, we have ensured the University's sustained growth and financial health while providing the best and most modern on-campus and online educational and spiritual resources to a wider range of students both in person and through digital platforms.

Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved  it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about. After I learned this, I lost 80 pounds and people who saw me regularly thought that I was physically unwell, when in reality I was just balancing how to be most supportive of Becki, who I love, while also reflecting and praying about whether there were ways I could have been more supportive of her and given her proper attention

My commitment to Liberty became and has remained my primary focus - and while I am so grateful and thankful for our collective successes, I also realize in hindsight that there was a toll that this took on me, which extended to my family too. During this time of reflection for us and this especially challenging year, and even more so following the events of the past few weeks, my wife Becki and I agreed that this was the right time for me to share more of our story, because the Liberty community deserves to hear it directly from me and from us.

During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school. We encouraged him to pursue an education and a career and we were impressed by his initiative in suggesting a local real estate opportunity. My family members eventually made an investment in a local property, included him in the deal because he could play an active role in managing it, and became close with him and his family.

Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved  it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about.

After I learned this, I lost 80 pounds and people who saw me regularly thought that I was physically unwell, when in reality I was just balancing how to be most supportive of Becki, who I love, while also reflecting and praying about whether there were ways I could have been more supportive of her and given her proper attention.

I came to realize that while it may be easy to judge others on their behavior, the King James Bible reminds us - 'Thou shalt not commit adultery, but I sayeth unto you, that whoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her in his heart.' In fact, there are ways we may all be sinning, but the Lord believes in this self-reflection.

I was and have always remained fully devoted to Becki and we have shared many private conversations to better understand and support each other and to strengthen our marriage. Thankfully, our love has never been stronger.

Becki and I forgave each other, because while her indiscretion may have been more obvious and apparent, I realized that there were important smaller things I needed to do better too.

In Ephesians 4:32 we learn - 'Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving as God in Christ forgave you.'

We extended the spirit of forgiveness to this man with respect and kindness, both for spiritual and religious reasons, and in the hope that we could help him find his way and allow us to put this behind us, without any harm or embarrassment to our family or to the LU community to which we have dedicated our lives.

Becki and I forgave each other, because while her indiscretion may have been more obvious and apparent, I realized that there were important smaller things I needed to do better too.

During the years that followed, we got to know his family and other loved ones, good people who also really care about him. They shared and confirmed to us that he has periodically demonstrated emotionally unstable behaviors with some destructive tendencies, seemingly in response to his inability to achieve his professional goals. Based on information from other sources, we believe that he may have targeted other successful women in similar ways.

While we tried to distance ourselves from him over time, he unfortunately became increasingly angry and aggressive. Eventually, he began threatening to publicly reveal this secret relationship with Becki and to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies.

While this was very upsetting, we had been advised by trusted legal counsel that it was best to maintain contact with this person, as we tried to manage his increasingly erratic behavior and unreasonable demands while extricating ourselves from him both on a personal level and from that real estate transaction.

It was like living on a roller coaster.

While completely dedicating ourselves to Liberty, we were also suffering in silence during our personal time together, while simultaneously trying to manage and deal with this increasingly threatening behavior, which only worsened over time. We were doing our best to respectfully unravel this 'fatal attraction' type situation to protect our family and the University.

It was like living on a roller coaster...Over the course of the last few months this person's behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public.

Even years after the improper relationship had ended, this person continued to be aggressive with Becki and me in a variety of ways. We finally decided that we had to further withdraw completely from him, which resulted in him stepping up his threats to share more outrageous and fabricate claims about us (under the guise of that business entity).

He clearly moved forward with this plan through a specific member of the media who has continued to badger us, as well as other members of the media, regarding the false claims about the nature of the relationship based on the individual's misrepresentations. Over the course of the last few months this person's behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public.

We have categorically rejected this person's demands while dealing with him and this particular member of the media who seemed just as obsessed with the prurient, untrue aspects of this story, however fantastic.

Even though I continued successfully working with our entire Liberty team to achieve so many of our goals, I am now dealing with things in a way that I should have done before - including seeking to address the emotional toll this has taken. I shouldn't have been afraid to admit my vulnerabilities and to reach out for assistance from the mental health professionals who could have alleviated this pain and stress.

I am committed to speaking out and sharing with others at Liberty the importance of seeking counseling instead of thinking you need to be tough and try to bear these burdens on your own. I am in the early stages of addressing these issues.

Proverbs 3:5-6 says 'trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on thine own understanding in all your ways acknowledge him and he will guide straight thy path.'

The trauma of this experience has brought us to a very challenging point in our lives, but we are strong, our faith in Christ is greater than ever, and with His help and with those in the community who we love and who appreciate the impact of forgiveness, we will get through this. We ask for your prayers and support.

'Bus, meet Becki Falwell....Becki, this is the bus (you're being thrown under)': Disgust at Liberty University's Jerry Falwell for publicly denouncing wife's 'affair' with pool boy when HE 'was complicit and watching in corner'

Jerry Falwell Jr. has been admonished for blaming his family's involvement with a pool boy entirely on his wife and claiming she cheated on him with the younger man when he allegedly watched them having sex.

Falwell Jr., the head of Liberty University, released a statement on Sunday night claiming that only his wife Becki was involved Giancarlo Ganda, a pool boy who the pair met when he was 20 in 2012.

He said Becki and Ganda had an affair and that he'd chosen to forgive her for it, describing it as an 'indiscretion' that caused him to lose 80lbs when he discovered it because he was so upset.

However, Ganda spoke out on Monday to claim that not only did Jerry know about the affair, but that he watched them having sex.

He says he and Becki had sex multiple times a year in hotel rooms around the country for six years.

Now, Falwell - who was put on a leave of absence from the Christian college earlier this year - is being slammed for trying to pin the entire scandal on his wife.

Twitter users erupted in criticism of his 'holier than thou' statement.
MEMPHIS, Tenn., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The U-Haul-owned Memphis Repair Shop at 3020 Lamar Ave. ceased operations on Aug. 17.

The maintenance shop had serviced U-Haul equipment since 1973. As a result of the closing, 25 Team Members will be let go.

Local U-Haul Companies are always exploring opportunities for growth as they pursue means to better meet the needs of customers, but sometimes find it necessary to close or relocate facilities, or cease certain business operations at locations.

Reasons for closures can include: long-term strategic plans; physical plant limitations; shifts in demographics; trends in migration; expansion of the U-Haul neighborhood dealer network; and proximity to new or existing U-Haul stores or shops.

As an essential service provider, U-Haul has remained open throughout the COVID-19 outbreak while offering contactless programs and enhanced cleaning protocols, including added steps for sanitizing equipment between customer transactions. U-Haul products are used daily by First Responders; delivery companies bringing needed supplies to people's homes; small businesses trying to remain afloat; college students; and countless other dependent groups, in addition to the household mover.

Please visit uhaul.com/announcement for more information on how U-Haul is keeping its Team Members and customers safe during the summer moving season.

Find U-Haul store and neighborhood dealer locations near you at uhaul.com/locations.

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Since 1945, U-Haul has been the No. 1 choice of do-it-yourself movers, with a network of 22,000 locations across all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces. U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 offers secure access to U-Haul trucks every hour of every day through the customer dispatch option on their smartphones and our proprietary Live Verify technology. Our customers' patronage has enabled the U-Haul fleet to grow to approximately 176,000 trucks, 127,000 trailers and 41,000 towing devices. U-Haul offers nearly 774,000 rentable storage units and 66.7 million square feet of self-storage space at owned and managed facilities throughout North America. U-Haul is the largest installer of permanent trailer hitches in the automotive aftermarket industry, and is the largest retailer of propane in the U.S.

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A Manitoba man who beat his mother in front of her young children before setting her house on fire has been sentenced to eight years in prison.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Manitoba man who beat his mother in front of her young children before setting her house on fire has been sentenced to eight years in prison.

Earl Harvey Moar, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the January 2018 death of 40-year-old Tania McDonald.

"This was not an impulsive act," Queens Bench Justice Sandra Zinchuk said in a written ruling released earlier this month. "It was a prolonged event which  progressed to a serious and violent assault in front of children and ended  a womans life and ripped a family apart."

McDonald and her five young children had just left their home on O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation when Moar emerged from the house and seriously assaulted her.

Moar returned to the house and stuffed a small mattress and other combustibles inside the oven and stovetop before turning on the appliance and fleeing.

Police arrived to find the house fully engulfed in flames. McDonalds remains were later found in the bathroom. A pathologist determined the cause of death to be smoke inhalation.

Prosecutors had recommended Moar be sentenced to 14 years in prison, and the defence recommended time served plus two years.

It remains unclear how McDonald came to be inside the house. Moar, court previously heard, had no memory of the attack, saying he "got drunk and went crazy."

"There is no evidence as to how or when Ms. McDonald got back inside the residence," Zinchuk said. "Had eyewitnesses been able to place her in the house when the fire was started, the sentencing range would be much closer to that which is proposed by the Crown."

McDonalds death "has had a ripple effect through the entire family," Zinchuk said. "Fortunately, family members have undertaken the task of being unexpected caregivers to traumatized children."

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Moar, described in court records as suffering from significant cognitive and behavioural issues, spent most of his life in Brandon living with his father and had only returned to O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi four months prior to his mothers death.

"Things started well for him initially," Zinchuk said, but quickly spiralled out of control due to Moars escalating drug and alcohol use.

According to court records, Moar was referred to the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba when he relocated to O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi, but was unable to take advantage of counselling as his sister was filling in for the local counsellor.

Prior to his arrest, Moar had been charged with assaulting both his mother and father in separate incidents and was bound by court orders to have no contact with them.

Moar received credit for time served, reducing his remaining sentence to just over four years.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca
Demonstrators in Libyas third largest city rally again to express anger over declining living conditions.

Misrata, Libya  Dozens of people have rallied in Libyas third-largest city, Misrata, for a second consecutive day to denounce corruption and deteriorating public services.

The protest on Monday came a day after hundreds of people took to the streets of Misrata and more than 1,000 gathered in the capital, Tripoli, to voice their anger over similar concerns.

Were here to protest against corruption  to fight for our rights and lack of government services, said 32-year-old Amar Jamil, a demonstrator in Misrata. We dont have anything, the father of two told Al Jazeera.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of millions were spent by the government but people who are sick dont have a place to be treated. People are dying because the money was stolen.

The war-wracked North African country has so far reported more than 11,000 confirmed coronavirus infections and 199 related deaths.

Ceasefire offer

A major oil producer, Libya has been mired in chaos since the 2011 overthrow and killing of longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi. The country has since been divided into two rival camps that are based in the countrys east and west  and that in recent years have been vying for power.

Sami Hamdi, editor of the International Interest, said the protests were an example of an increasingly angry Libyan population whose frustrations with worsening living conditions transcend the traditional divide of east and west.

[It is] a dynamic that is outside the control of international powers, he said.

The conflict escalated in April last year when eastern-based renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar announced an offensive to wrest control of the capital from the United Nations-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA).

Supported by Turkey, the GNA in early June succeeded in repelling Haftar, driving his self-styled Libyan National Army to the coastal Mediterranean city of Sirte  but not without incurring heavy losses.

On Friday, GNA Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj offered a ceasefire and called for the demilitarisation of Sirte, a central city that is located roughly halfway between Tripoli and Haftars bastion city of Benghazi and that is known as the gateway to Libyas main oil terminals.

But protesters in Misrata, a main source of military power for the Tripoli-based GNA, said authorities could not make that call on their behalf.

We want peace but the only people who should decide a ceasefire are the people on the front lines, 35-year-old Abdelmemam al-Asheb said on Monday.

Haftar is a war criminal. He cant be part of any political solution. He is responsible for the oil closures, the thousands who died in Tripoli and all the people who are now displaced, continued the father of two.

Abdelmemam al-Asheb, right, said Haftar cannot be part of the solution because he is responsible for the closure of the countrys oil terminals [Malik Traina/Al Jazeera]

We dont trust Saleh

Despite being on the back foot, Haftar, who is supported by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia and has for months maintained a costly blockade on oil production and exports, turned down al-Sarrajs ceasefire offer, arguing that the move was a stunt aimed at catching the LNA off-guard.

Analysts, however, say his rejection of the deal  a version of which he had accepted in June under the auspices of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo  is informed by the dynamics in eastern Libya.

Aguila Saleh, the speaker of the Haftar-allied House of Representatives in Tobruk and an influential figure with Libyas eastern tribes, has seen his profile rise since the GNAs recent military gains.

He has already expressed support for the ceasefire initiative, and observers say that had Haftar accepted al-Sarrajs offer, it could be interpreted as following Salehs lead.

At the time of the el-Sisi initiative in June, Emadeddin Badi, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said the presence of Saleh in Cairo alongside the Egyptian president and Haftar was an indication of the diminishing patience of the renegade commanders foreign backers.

Theres no other figure that anyone can engage with in the east besides him [Saleh], so its the easiest way of having some form of tribal representatives of the eastern bloc but also a political one, Badi had told Al Jazeera.

Back in the Misrata protest, however, 30-year-old Marwan Alamin said Saleh cannot be trusted.

He may be the only one in eastern Libya who can actually come to a political solution but we dont trust him, said Alamin. He supported Haftars war on Tripoli.

Also on Monday, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) called for an immediate and thorough investigation into the excessive use of force by pro-GNA security personnel in Tripoli during Sundays protest.

UNSMIL said in a statement that the security response resulted in the injury of a number of protesters, without specifying the number of people who were wounded.
New Delhi: Actress Rhea Chakraborty and her family have not yet received summons from the CBI in connection with actor Sushant Singh Rajput's death case, her lawyer said in a statement on Monday morning, adding that they are law-abiding citizens and will appear before the agency when called.

"Rhea Chakraborty and family have not received any summons from CBI so far to attend. No sooner she receives it, she and family will attend as they did before Mumbai Police and ED as law-abiding citizens. No speculations are necessary," said the lawyer's statement.

Sushant's father KK Singh, in an FIR in Patna, has accused Rhea, the actor's girlfriend, of abetment to suicide, besides other offences. She has been questioned twice by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), along with her father Indrajit Chakraborty, her brother Showik. The ED is probing into money laundering aspects in connection with Sushant's death.

The Supreme Court had on Wednesday upheld the transfer of an FIR, lodged by Sushant Singh Rajput's father in Patna against Rhea Chakraborty for allegedly abetting his suicide, to the CBI.

Sushant was found dead in his apartment on June 14. Mumbai Police said he died by suicide.
A man walks past the Stamford Plaza Hotel, used as an isolation hotel from returned travellers from overseas as part of measures against COVID-19, in Melbourne on July 22, 2020. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

Couple in Hotel Quarantine Told They Werent Allowed COVID-19 Test, Inquiry Hears

A couple who stayed at one of Victorias quarantine hotels were refused CCP virus tests throughout their 2 weeks there, the Hotel Quarantine Inquiry has heard.

Professional mixed martial arts fighter Kaan Ofli was quarantined at central Melbournes Pan Pacific hotel from April 9 to 23 with his partner.

Ofli told the Victorian COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry that their appeals for a CCP virus test were declined because neither of them was showing symptoms.

We personally asked for a test, we wanted to get tested  we were told we werent allowed to have a test unless we had symptoms, he said.

Ofli was told by a security guard that there was a floor at the hotel dedicated to people who had tested positive for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus.

During air breaks returnees would interact with each other without wearing personal protective equipment and not keeping 1.5 meters apart, Ofli said.

People were obviously cautious of the virus itself so Im not going to say people were hugging each other.

Ofli and his partner requested tests on day 10, the same day he discovered he wasnt registered at the hotel.

Ofli told the inquiry, The whole 10 days, I wasnt actually in the system.

This was due to an error by the Department of Human Health Services. For 10 days they had to keep calling for basic food and drink needs.

I would feel embarrassed about calling and be like, Hey, can I get another meal or can I get another piece of bread roll or can I have a bottle of water? he said.

The Victorian governments policy up until late June was to only test people showing symptoms. From June 27 Premier Daniel Andrews announced mandatory testing for all returnees before leaving hotel quarantine after it was revealed some had refused to be tested.

Under the state of emergency ruling, the Victorian government was able to enforce a 10-day extension to quarantine for those refusing to be tested.

Victorias Hotel Quarantine Inquiry was launched on July 2 by Andrews after it emerged from an epidemiology report that a significant portion of CCP virus cases came from the program.

Benjamin Peter Howden, director of the Microbiological Diagnostic Unit at the University of Melbourne, told the inquiry that three strains of the CCP virus had been detected since June, and each had been linked to returnees.

A high-level statement would be that over 99 percent of all current cases in Victoria for which we have genomic sequencing data are derived from those three strains, he said.

Since June 1, around the time of the first case at the Rydges on Swanston, there have been 16,966 cases of the CCP virus and 412 deaths in Victoria.

National figures show there have been 24,916 cases and 517 deaths.
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A lost medieval sacristy used by 13th-century monks has been uncovered in the grounds of Westminster Abbey - along with the bones of buried bodies.

Authorities at the abbey plan to construct a building on the site for new visitor facilities, but wanted to fully understand the grounds' medieval footprint first.

Archaeologist Chris Mayo has led the team, who have been working since January, on one of Westminster Abbey's largest archaeological projects.

A lost medieval sacristy used by 13th-century monks has been uncovered in the grounds of Westminster Abbey - along with the bones of buried bodies, including a well preserved monk, pictured

Archaeologist Chris Mayo has led the team, who have been working since January, on one of Westminster Abbey's largest archaeological projects

Authorities at the abbey plan to construct a building on the site for visitor facilities, but wanted to fully understand the grounds' medieval footprint first. The site of the sacristy, pictured

The abbey was built by Edward the Confessor, but the sacristy was only added during construction of the present church built in the 1250s by Henry III

The aim of the dig is to 'uncover the foundations of the Great Sacristy on its North Green, facing the busy Victoria Road', according to The Guardian.

The abbey was built by Edward the Confessor, but the sacristy was only added during construction of the present church built in the 1250s by Henry III.

It was the place where monks kept their vestments, altar linens, chalices and other sacred items used in mass.

Lots of human remains have been discovered, as the site was a burial ground before the sacristy and during the 18th century.

Mr Mayo said there must be 'hundreds if not thousands' of bodies buried across the Abbey.

The site has been used as a burial ground for monks, one of whom has been temporarily uncovered by the team, and still remains in extraordinary condition.

The sacristy was once a domestic dwelling but was demolished in 1740, but was later uncovered in 1869 by architect Sir George Gilbert Scott during a project.

Significant finds include medieval painted wall plaster, which suggest the walls inside were 'hand painted with red, white and black flowers'.

The aim of the dig is to 'uncover the foundations of the Great Sacristy' which was on the abbey's North Green, now facing the busy Victoria Road in Westminster

Significant finds include medieval painted wall plaster, pictured, which suggest the walls inside were 'hand painted with red, white and black flowers'

A stoup was found in the 13th-century foundations and 'was probably used by monks in Edward the Confessor's church to wash their hands as they entered'.

As with many archaeological digs there have also been moments of excitement at particular discoveries, followed by an anticlimax.

A stacked grave was found, which was believed could belong to the regicides, the men involved in the execution on Charles I, whose bodies were taken from the abbey and thrown in a pit under the order of Charles II.

However, the dates meant that this was not a possibility.

A stoup, pictured, was found in the 13th-century foundations and 'was probably used by monks in Edward the Confessor's church to wash their hands as they entered'

Henry III Henry III was born at Winchester Castle on 1st October 1207 and succeeded his father King John in 1216, becoming one of the longest reigning monarchs in English history.

He rebuilt Westminster Abbey in the new Gothic style of architecture to emulate the great churches then being built in France.

He was a devout Christian and promoted luxurious church services, attending mass at least once a day which was unusual for Kings during that period.

Westminster Abbey was originally built by Edward the Confessor in the 11th century, and the reconstruction of the abbey we have now began in 1245 under Henry III's command.

The king wanted to transfer Edward's body to a new shrine where he himself could be buried nearby.

He was recklessly extravagant in the money spent on the Abbey and its lavish decoration - the new Shrine was 45,000, about 15 million in today's money. Advertisement
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Police in the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang have arrested ten young men and women for using narcotics at a birthday party during a social distancing period implemented by authorities to curb the local novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak.

The group of people, aged 19 to 24, were caught partying with loud music inside a rented villa on Vo Nguyen Giap Street in Khue My Ward, Ngu Hanh Son District on Saturday night, officers confirmed on Sunday.

All of them are residents of Da Nang.

Police also found multiple tools for narcotics consumption and a plastic packet containing what officers suspect to be crystal meth.

Officers conducted rapid-result drug tests on the men and women, and all of the results came back positive.

At the police station, the suspects claimed they were throwing a birthday party and had prepared a birthday cake along with crystal meth.

In another relevant case, police in Hoa Cuong Nam Ward, Hai Chau District raided a local house on early Friday morning and found four men and four women drinking and using drugs.

Da Nang is currently the largest COVID-19 epicenter in Vietnam, with 374 local infections recorded in the past month.

Enhanced social distancing measures were previously implemented in Da Nang from July 28 until August 11 to curb the spread of the virus. The period was extended indefinitely on August 12 due to continued community transmission.

Authorities in the coastal city have banned crowded events, shuttered non-essential services, and stopped receiving domestic tourists to prevent the virus from spreading.

Residents are required to stay at home, only going out for essentials such as food, medicine, or work.

Public gatherings outside of schools, offices, and hospitals are limited to two people and a minimum distance of two meters between one another must be maintained.

Vietnams COVID-19 tally is at 1,016, with 568 having recovered and 27 deaths as of Monday morning.

A total of 534 local infections have been confirmed since July 25, when Da Nang recorded Vietnams first community-based COVID-19 case after the country had gone 99 days without any local transmission.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
Egypts foreign minister Sameh Shoukry and French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian affirmed in talks over the Palestinian issue the necessity of upholding the goal of a two-state solution

The foreign ministers of Egypt and France discussed several regional issues in a phone call, including developments in Libya, Palestine and Lebanon, a statement by the Egyptian foreign ministry said on Sunday.

According to the statement, Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian affirmed the necessity of upholding the principle of a two-state solution and the continuation of efforts to achieve a comprehensive and fair solution in the Palestinian cause.

The phone call also addressed developments in the Libyan crisis, where the two ministers welcomed fresh ceasefire announcements by Libyas UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) and Aguila Saleh, speaker of the rival east-based House of Representatives.

They said they considered the move an important step towards achieving a political settlement and the aspirations of the Libyan people in restoring stability and security in the war-torn country.

The ministers also discussed the situation in Lebanon and means to support the country after the deadly blast that killed least 170 people and injured around 6,000 earlier this month.

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As millions of students and teachers return to school amid the coronavirus pandemic, so too will tens of thousands of school nurses who suddenly find themselves on the COVID-19 front lines.

School nurses -- often the sole providers of medical care for dozens to thousands of students -- this year will be executing schools' coronavirus response plans, disseminating information to parents and staff and taking care of students with COVID-19 symptoms, on top of their usual duties.

"We really are sentinels in the school system for students' health and are always looking for trends in symptom presentation for both physical health and mental health needs," said Laurie G. Combe, a registered nurse and president of the National Association of School Nurses. "Being a school nurse is a role that is much more than people perceive it to be."

MORE: Don't skip vaccinations: 8 things pediatricians want parents to know during the coronavirus pandemic

Prior to the pandemic, as many as a quarter of U.S. schools did not have a nurse on site, and fewer than 40% of schools employ a full-time nurse, according to the NASN. Guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that every school have a nurse on site.

PHOTO: A teacher sets up her classroom to restart school at Freedom Preparatory Academy in Provo, Utah, Aug. 13, 2020. (George Frey/Getty Images, FILE)

Gail M. Smith, a registered nurse and director of health services for the Pickens County School System in Jasper, Georgia, compared being a school nurse in regular times to operating a one-person "mini urgent care clinic." In the time of coronavirus, that is multiplied.

"I don't think the community knows in general that we've all been tirelessly working all summer to prepare for students' return," she said. "A lot of work is being done behind the scenes with students' health in mind."

Here are five things school nurses want parents to know as they embark on an unprecedented school year.

1. A visit to the nurse's office will look different

Parents should be prepared for the fact a child's sniffle or complaint of feeling hot may send them to the nurse's office faster than those symptoms may have in the past, according to both Smith and Combe.

Story continues

In many schools, students should expect to be seated at a social distance outside the nurse's clinic while waiting for an assessment. Students with COVID-19 symptoms will be isolated from others seeking more routine medical care.

Students with chronic conditions such as diabetes still will have access to school nurses' care, according to Smith and Combe.

Smith added that school nurses in her district will be repeating what they call the "three Ws": Wear a mask, watch your distance, wash your hands.

2. School nurses need parents' support at home

In Smith's district, school officials are asking parents to screen their children on their own at home.

"We recognize that everyone has a part to play, and the part that parents play is to screen their child before they come to school," she said. "When parents send their child to school or put them on a school bus, they are attesting that their child does not have any symptoms."

MORE: Teacher has more than 700 entries on a spreadsheet tracking COVID-19 in schools

In addition to monitoring for COVID-19 symptoms at home, Combe said it's important for parents to practice healthy safety measures with their kids, like wearing masks and washing their hands.

"I'm asking parents to put their face coverings on at home when they're asking their children to do so, and increasing that time each day so kids become accustomed to that," she said. "And that they practice things like how they keep their mask clean when they take it off to eat."

"And practice washing hands for 20 seconds with soap and water," Combe added. "We're asking children to be doing that more frequently at school, so it's good to practice at home."

PHOTO: Students change classes during the first week of school at Sequoyah High School in Canton, Ga., Aug. 7, 2020. (Zuma Press, FILE)

3. School nurses need support

Combe's organization, NASN, has launched the Safer Return to Schools Coalition that's advocating for $208 billion in federal funding to help provide for everything from more school nurses and mental health staff to material needs like personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies, as well as new HVAC systems to increase ventilation indoors.

"What we're asking for is for the federal government to invest in children," Combe said. "When we keep schools safe, then children can learn in a robust, safe environment."

School nurses, who are typically compensated far less than peers who work in clinics and hospitals, are fearful about their own health, the health of their students and staff and keeping up with the normal pace of the job, according to both Combe and Smith.

Hospitals experiencing a shortage of PPE throughout the pandemic has many school nurses bracing for the worst.

In Smith's district, they are relying on support from local clubs and community partners like hospitals and companies to make sure schools have enough PPE.

"It has been a challenge to get the supplies, but we rely on various sources ... so then if one falls through, we have other avenues," Smith said.

4. Everyone needs to be patient

Both Smith and Combe stressed that parents, educators and school nurses alike will need to show patience in the weeks and months ahead.

"What I'm telling everyone is, it's like we're building a ship as we sail because no one has ever been here before," Smith said. "There are going to be mistakes and changes because [the situation with] COVID-19 changes every day."

"When you're in that phase of life, you've got to give grace and receive grace," she said.

PHOTO: Students wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID19 walking to class to begin their school day in Godley, Texas, Aug. 5, 2020. (Lm Otero/AP, FILE)

"Schools need to recognize that this is such a challenging time for parents who have worked to provide their children's education during school closures," Combe added. "It's been a stressful time for everyone and we need to show a little kindness all around the table."

5. Checking on students' mental health

On a regular basis, school nurses monitor students' mental health and special needs in addition to their physical health.

"School nurses are visiting teachers' virtual classrooms to check in with students, see which students aren't engaged in education and then reaching out to those families," she said. "And they're reaching out to students who may fall in the special education umbrella and receive support at schools like occupational therapy and physical therapy and making sure those connections and therapies are still being made."

5 things school nurses want parents to know about school during the coronavirus pandemic originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Some of the senior Congress dissenters, including Kapil Sibal and Shashi Tharoor, met at their senior colleague Ghulam Nabi Azads house on Monday evening after the CWC debated their letter to the partys interim chief Sonia Gandhi seeking urgent organisational reforms.

Azad, who is Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha, and Sharma, deputy leader of the House, felt humiliated the way their colleagues levied charges against them and their loyalties to the party were being questioned, said sources.

During the meeting, charges levied by some close party colleagues like Ambika Soni and Kumari Selja were also discussed.

The meeting at Azad's residence was held as the press briefing by Congress general secretary KC Venugopal and Randeep Singh Surjewala was ongoing and ended an hour later following which the leaders left for their respective destinations.

It is noteworthy that all the aforementioned leaders were signatories to the letter written by over 20 leaders in which they had sought sweeping changes including "full time" active leadership, a mechanism for collective leadership to guide the party's revival and demanded elections to CWC.

The meeting was also attended by Mukul Wasnik and Manish Tewari, along with some other signatories to the letter who were present in the national capital, sources said.

The leaders discussed the resolution passed at the CWC meeting, which urged Sonia Gandhi to continue as its interim chief till an AICC session can be convened and authorised her to effect necessary organisational changes to deal with the challenges facing the party.

None of the leaders agreed to comment on their deliberations, which took place soon after CWC meet ended.

The CWC in its unanimous resolution after the meeting had said that "CWC makes it clear that no one will be or can be permitted to undermine or weaken the party and its leadership at this juncture".

READ| Sonia Gandhi to continue as interim Congress president; new chief in 6 months

It said the responsibility of every Congress worker and leader today is to fight the pernicious assault on India's democracy, pluralism and diversity by the Modi Government.

The resolution said inner-party issues cannot be deliberated through the media or in public for and urged and advises all concerned to raise such issues only in party fora in the interest of propriety and discipline.

The CWC also asked Sonia Gandhi to continue as the interim president of the party till the next AICC session is convened and further authorised her to make appropriate organisational changes that she may deem fit to take on the many challenges facing the country and the party.

(With ANI Inputs)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  The Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases sought the help of the MVP and Ayala groups for fixed telephone lines for the government's centralized COVID-19 hospital hotline.

Inter-Agency Task Force Spokesperson Harry Roque had surprise guests during his Monday media briefing as he grabbed his phone and rang up businessmen Manny Pangilinan and Fernando Zobel de Ayala to ask their PLDT and Globe to provide stable trunklines for the One Hospital Command Center run by the Department of Health.

The command center coordinates which hospitals in Metro Manila and nearby provinces have vacant isolation or critical care beds for COVID-19 patients to limit sending away patients needing treatment. Currently, the command center can be reached via (02) 886-505-00, 0915-777-7777 and 0919-977-3333.

RELATED: Lung Center critical COVID-19 beds fully occupied, says spokesman

Treatment czar and Health Undersecretary Leopoldo Vega said operators currently use cell phone numbers to take calls, leaving these lines congested as they could only take one call at a time.

Roque rang up Zobel de Ayala first, asking him if Globe can provide dedicated phone numbers for the two call centers operated by Vega's group. The billionaire tycoon said he will let Globe representatives contact Roque's office for the specifics of his request.

Roque also placed his brief call with Pangilinan on speaker phone for the same request. Both asked how many voice lines are needed and said they'd be willing to help.

This comes despite a series of President Rodrigo Duterte's public rants against the two conglomerates, mainly over supposedly unfair water supply contracts that Maynilad and Manila Water signed with the government decades ago. Duterte has also accused the two firms of failing to set up required sewerage lines even if they were collecting such fees from customers.

Duterte came out with a surprise public apology in May, acknowledging the generous donations of the two corporate giants for the local COVID-19 fight. However, he unleashed fresh tirades against the two groups  who also run the mobile networks PLDT, Smart, and Globe  during his fifth State of the Nation Address in July.

RELATED: Duterte tells telcos Smart and Globe to improve services before December
Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar awarded a rare Lifesaving Medal for "actions above and beyond" to a deputy who saved a woman from being crushed by her SUV in May.

Calling him a "true hero," Salazar recognized Deputy Charles Garza Sunday afternoon.

On May 2, Garza was dispatched to a residence near North Bexar County for a welfare check after callers reported hearing a woman screaming. When Garza got to the scene, he found her pinned between two SUVs, with her arm stuck inside the door as the car rolled forward, threatening to crush her between the two vehicles. She had parked at a slight downhill angle but accidently put the SUV in neutral instead of park.

Salazar said that if Garza hasn't acted quickly, the woman's arm and body would have been crushed.

FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox

Though Garza called for additional units to help, he knew he had to stop the SUV, Salazar said. The deputy first attempted to push the SUV, but was unsuccessful so he got into his patrol car and began to push the SUV back until the woman could free her arm.

"We think it is pretty dang heroic," Salazar said in a virtual award ceremony on Sunday. "It is an example of first responders who come to work every day and do it the right way but don't always get the recognition."

Garza said he was humbled and just doing his job.

"I hope everyone in my position would do the same thing," he said.

Taylor Pettaway is a breaking news and general assignment reporter for MySA.com | taylor.pettaway@express-news.net | @TaylorPettaway
Disney Channel has been the starting point for so many actors all over the world, and well, India is not different.

But, I feel like the Indian actors are at least immune to the Disney curse where the teen actors don't completely lose their way after their shows like the American actors did.

And, surprisingly a lot of famous TV actors, and a few Bollywood actors got the start of their career through the over the top Hindi Disney shows or the Hindi remakes of popular Ameican shows.

So, here are a few actors that people might not know appeared in Disney shows before making it big.

1. Tara Sutaria

 Disney

From Cheesy Disney remakes to a big-budget Bollywood production, Tara did make quite a jump and you know what, good for her.

Before she was starring in Student of The Year 2 with Ananya Pandey and Tiger Shroff, she was playing Vinnie, the Indian counterpart of the beloved Maddie from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

She also appeared in the Indian version of Jessie called Oye Jassie portraying the character originally portrayed by Debby Ryan.

2. Vikrant Massey

 Disney

Arguably the most famous Disney export, Vikrant became a household name after the success of Mirzapur. But, before he became one of the biggest OTT series' star, he was playing the role of Aamir in Dhoom Machao Dhoom and on top of acting, he even acted as a choreographer of the show.

3. Shweta Tripathi

 Disney

Before she was acting in critically acclaimed movies and shows like Mirzapur and Masan, she was playing the role of college student Zenia in Kya Mast Hai Life.

4. Jay Bhanushali

 Disney

Wow, this guy has hosted so many reality shows, from Dance India Dance to The Voice Kids, I feel like even he might have lost count. But, before he became seemingly the only option to host shows, and before he was winning Nach Baliye with his wife, he was also acting in Dhoom Machao Dhoom.

5. Maanvi Gagroo

 Prime Video

I'm noticing a pattern here - being a part of Dhoom Machao Dhoom really worked out for a lot of people.

From playing a schoolgirl in the show to being part of a movie like PK and then a starring role in Four More Shots Please!, I think everything is working out for her.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo kicked off his regional tour by meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi today in Israel. Pompeo and Netanyahu discussed the Washington-brokered deal reached with the United Arab Emirates and the prospects of normalizing ties with other Arab and Muslim countries.

After his Israel stop, the secretary of state is set to visit Bahrain and Sudan, where he is expected to raise the renewal of ties with Israel. Senior officials in Sudan have made contradictory statements over contacts with Jerusalem on renewing diplomatic ties. Jerusalem was hoping for Bahrain to follow in the footsteps of the UAE, but some observers believe that after Saudi Arabia's rather chilly reaction to the deal, Bahrain might take its time.

In remarks after the meeting, Netanyahu and Pompeo hailed the UAE-Israel deal, with Netanyahu calling it the alliance of the moderates against the radicals and a boon to peace and regional stability. Netanyahu also said he hoped other countries will follow UAE and normalize ties with Israel. Pompeo stated, I am hopeful that we will see other Arab nations join in this. The opportunity for them to work alongside, to recognize the State of Israel and to work alongside them, will not only increase Middle East stability but it will improve the lives for the people of their own countries as well.

Netanyahus addressed the controversy over the United States selling F-35 fighter jets to the UAE, saying the normalization deal with the UAE did not include Israel's acceptance [of] any arms deal. I don't know of any arms deal that has been agreed upon but our position hasn't changed. Netanyahu said he reiterated his objections to Pompeo, who said he is strongly committed to maintaining Israels security and its military edge over countries in the region.

After Pompeo's meeting with Gantz and Ashkenazi, Israels foreign minister tweeted, "In the meeting, we congratulated [Pompeo] and US President Donald Trump over the upcoming normalization agreement between Israel and the UAE. We also emphasized in the meeting the importance of preserving the IDFs qualitative advantage." Gantz and Ashkenazi, both former IDF chiefs, have criticized Netanyahu for allegedly tacitly agreeing to the United States selling the F-35s to the UAE.

Pompeos visit to Jerusalem opens an Israeli diplomatic blitz to capitalize on the agreement reached with the UAE. Shortly after the meeting with Pompeo, Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the UAE normalization agreement in a phone call. British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab is expected in Israel tomorrow. Much like Pompeo, Raab will meet with Netanyahu, Gantz and Ashkenazi. But Raab also intends to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh. Ashkenazi will fly on Wednesday to Berlin to attend an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers, a first for Ashkenazi as minister. Ashkenazi will update his European colleagues on the UAE deal and discuss sanctions on Iran. Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and US envoy to the region Avi Berkowitz are expected in Israel beginning of September.

The Foreign Ministry has already started preparing to upgrade the Israeli mission in Abu Dhabi  currently a delegation office to the UN International Renewable Energy Agency  to an official embassy. The ministry is now discussing and preparing for the possible normalization of ties with other Muslim and Arab countries.


Incorrect and Misleading Article

Melbourne, Aug 24, 2020 AEST (ABN Newswire) - iSignthis Ltd ( ASX:ISX ) ( FRA:TA8 ) has been made aware of a misleading article published in todays' Australian Financial Review. The article was authored by gossip bloggist, Mr Joe Aston, and referred to a company that is not a customer of iSignthis, and with which iSignthis has not ever had a relationship.The iSignthis customer referred to in the recent statement of claim at paragraph 73 in our Federal Court case VID1315/20191 against the ASXL Ltd is a different company, with a different website address, and is a licensed crypto exchange under the EU regulatory regime.The company referred to in Aston's blog is a Vanuatu FX or CFD dealer, and has no relationship to iSignthis or the iSignthis customer, which is an Estonian exchange.Mr Aston has again not fact checked his article / blog with the Company.The Company will be contacting the publisher today.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.
Of the infinite desires of man, the chief are desires for power and glory -- Bertrand Russell, Power

In this seminal work dissecting the human craving for power, British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russle segregates men broadly in two categories: leaders who appropriate power to their own selves; and the followers or the seekers who derive power from these leaders.

The power flows from the fountainhead and others derive and exercise it in their own little dominions as mandated by the leadership.

The 23 Congress leaders, in their missive to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, seem to indicate their fiefdom is imperilled as the leader is not being able to win or appropriate power to splurge on patronage.

The old order changes, giving way to the new. The transformation though is not always smooth and seamless. China experienced upheavals at every stage of its journey over the last 100 years. Congress party, after all, is of a much older vintage and as behemothal a structure as the CPC. The BJP went through a long and protracted process of transformation to settle leadership issues. The New Labour under Tony Blair succeeded after decades of Tory domination at the hustings.

Leave aside the vassal dominions facing imminent career uncertainties, what matters for the Congress rank and file is the intent of transformation per se; and the new order being envisaged.

The question is: is Congress in the business of power at all?

This brings us back to another of Bertrand Russell's espousal on the third category of people in the power game. To quote Russell:

....but there is a third type, namely, those who withdraw. There are men who have the courage to refuse submission without having the imperiousness that causes the will to command. Such men do not fit into the social structure, and in one way or another they seek a refuge where they can enjoy more or less solitary freedom.

Yogis and saints fall this this category. On the other hand, the will to seek power and govern is the fundamental ingredient of power politics. There are no in-betweens.

A vivid recollection of a meeting with Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav in the heat of 2007 UP Assembly polls at the state Irrigation Guest House across the Yamuna near Jamia comes to mind. The BSP was on a roll that election. Mayawati was coming to power; and it was writ large on Mulayam's face. But never once, not even once did he betray any signs of nervousness or defeatism. He had just returned from the last phase of campaigning and was eloquent on the prospects of his party's victory in Rae Bareilly and Amethi.

Politicians never give up. Never, even with their back to the wall. Even when the chips are down. You learn it the hard way, like the boxer battered and punched day after day, year after year, waiting for just that one opening, when the guards are down to pounce back. To be in contention, always. Always.

This brings us to the next point in contention in the face of the current crisis. Effective strategy and tactics in political power play. It cant be anybody's case that Congress worst-ever performance in the last two LS polls could be the best possible springboard to success in 2024. Is annihilation of the old order and pulverisation of the headquarters through shock and awe bombardment the genesis for the new one?

The select group of 23 in their letter to Sonia Gandhi also seems to question choice of people who have been nominated to key positions in the recent past and their performance thereafter.

For all the ten years that the Congress was in power between 2004 and 2014, Rahul Gandhi stayed away from government and governance. He has sought to build the party organisation. Stem the rot. In the process, he wielded absolute power, both within and outside the organisation. After the 2014 debacle, he has sought to define and lead the partys charge against the Modi government, in LS polls and other provincial polls against the BJP.

Strategy and tactics are critical for the achievement of desired political outcomes. Elections anywhere in the world are about narratives. That's precisely what Congress chief Sonia Gandhi did so well in 2004, when she firmed up her alliances. When she walked all the way to Ram Vilas Paswan's house next door to cement the Bihar combination of Congress-RJD and LJP.

After being the undisputed leader of the Congress for the last quarter of a century, a section has openly questioned the current state of affairs in the party, including some who stood by Sonia Gandhi and played key roles in the last transition of power in 1998.
Atascocita Methodist Church hosts back-to-school parade

Despite being forced to host online services and cancel their annual Blessing the Backpacks event, the Atascocita United Methodist Church (AUMC) was able to pull off a socially distanced parade Sunday, Aug. 9, where hundreds of parishioners and members of the local community drove through a pre-planned route inside the churchs parking lot.

Traditionally, the church holds an annual Blessing the Backpacks, in which students from the local community bring their backpacks to the church and receive a blessing and prayer from church leaders as they enter the new school year. Such an event, given the circumstances surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, would obviously did not take place this year.

Leigh-Anne Williams, pastor of family ministries at AUMC, explained the rationale behind the Aug. 9 parade.

In the past, we have always been very supportive of teachers and students and we have an annual Blessing the Backpacks event, which we unfortunately could not have this year because of the circumstances. We thought it would be fun to have a parade and invite all the teachers and students in the community to be blessed as they begin a very unprecedented school year. We hope all of the teachers working in our schools and their students are able to stay safe and we will be praying for their safety today, said Williams. We have socially distanced cheerleaders (members of the church) applauding teachers and students as they move through the parade.

As the families of teachers and students drove through, they received loud cheers from AUMC members, who expressed their support for all those in attendance. The cheerleaders came equipped with horns, decorative regalia and signs supporting those that drove through.

One of the churchs cheerleaders, Betty Haskins, explained what brought her out to this virtual parade.

The love of the teachers and of the students brought me here today. I have grandchildren in the school district and this is a great way to bless everyone ahead of the school year, said Haskins.

After receiving applause from church members, each student and teacher received a blessing bag from the church and Williams blessed the individuals in every car as they passed through.

Senior Pastor Debra Hawboldt said, Because of COVID-19, we had to do things differently this year. This is an exciting opportunity and it is a great way for our students and teachers to know that we are here to support them throughout these unforeseen and uncertain circumstances.

AUMCs support for local students and teachers did not end with this parade; the church aims to distribute thoughtful packages to teachers across several Humble ISD schools.

We have also made over 1,000 teacher blessing bags that we are going to be taking to public schools throughout the district. We are partners with Oaks, Timbers and Maple Brook elementary schools, as well as Atascocita Middle School, which we will be supporting through these gifts, added Hawboldt.
Were keeping track of the latest news regarding the coronavirus in South Florida and around the state. Check back for updates throughout the day.

After a lengthy coronavirus fight, Miamis Betty Davis back on weather duty at Local 10

Betty Davis

6 p.m.: Have you missed watching Local 10s Betty Davis?

The WPLG chief meteorologist is back on hurricane duty after finally recovering from coronavirus, returning to work Monday, the station announced.

Davis has had a tough battle with COVID-19. She was first diagnosed in early July and was even briefly hospitalized.

Read the full story here.

A Hialeah company owed $3,100 after denying paid sick leave to workers with COVID-19

4:40 p.m.: A Hialeah trucking and transport company got caught violating the Emergency Paid Sick Leave Act part of the federal Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the U.S. Department of Labor announced.

Milum has paid $3,110 in back pay to two employees. According to Labors Wage and Hour investigators, the company refused emergency paid sick leave to two workers getting tested after they thought they might have COVID-19. Even when both tested positive, Milum didnt pay emergency sick leave as provided by the federal law.

To contact Labors Wage and Hour Division Miami office, call (305) 598-66071-866-4-USWAGE(1-866-487-9243). For online information on how to file a complaint, go to the Wage and Hour complaint section of the Department of Labor website.

Read the full story here.

Family says policy of isolating elders is a death sentence for their mother

Rita Thomas celebrated her 95th birthday in February with about 30 of her friends at a Zephyrhills restaurant.

3:30 p.m.: Nan Thomas came home Friday from the car parade at the Zephyrhills assisted living facility where her 95-year-old mother lives, and wept.

Her happy, healthy, active and always smiling mother had become distraught, pale, skinny and a woman who begs to die.

She often doesnt know who anyone is, cant turn on or off her TV, doesnt know how to use the phone, erroneously thinks her parents are alive, cries because she thinks my sister is dead, Thomas said Sunday.

Story continues

She blames her mothers confusion on her constant isolation alone in her room, which Rosecastle of Zephyrhills Assisted Living & Memory Care required after the governor ordered a no-visitor policy at nursing homes and assisted living facilities to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Read the full story here.

Dolphins CEO, Miami-Dade mayor say its safe to open Hard Rock Stadium to fans

2 p.m.: Gov. Ron DeSantis declared Miami-Dade County safe enough to partially fill stadiums for live sporting events as newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Florida hit the lowest single-day amount reported since June 14.

At Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens Monday afternoon, DeSantis discussed a state order that preempts local rules on sporting events, therefore allowing Miami-Dade County, for example, to allow some fans to attend Miami Dolphins and University of Miami Hurricanes games this season

According to the Miami Dolphins, 13,000 fans  or 20% capacity  will be permitted to attend the Dolphins home opener against the Buffalo Bills and the Miami Hurricanes home opener against the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Season-ticket holders get first dibs, according to the Dolphins.

Read the full story here.

Florida adds 2,258 coronavirus cases, lowest single-day count reported since June

1:05 p.m.: Floridas Department of Health on Monday confirmed 2,258 additional cases of COVID-19, bringing the states known total to 602,829. There were also 72 Florida resident deaths announced, bringing the resident death toll to 10,397.

No new non-resident deaths were reported, leaving the non-resident toll at 137.

Mondays newly confirmed cases is the lowest single-day count reported since June. It is also the second day this week that the state reported fewer than 3,000 additional cases. Testing was also down.

Learn more here.

COVID-19 Cases in Florida

Hard Rock Stadium to allow 13,000 fans for Miami Dolphins and Hurricanes home openers

11:25 a.m.: The Miami Dolphins and Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez have decided to permit fans at Dolphins and Miami Hurricanes games this season amid the COVID-19 pandemic, at least in September.

According to the Miami Dolphins, 13,000 fans will be permitted to attend the Dolphins home opener Sept. 17 against the Buffalo Bills and the Miami Hurricanes Sept. 10 home opener against UAB.

Thats well below the stadiums capacity of 65,326, which can be expanded for big events.

Read the full story here.

Refrigerators full of food are popping up on streets around Miami. Heres why

Sherina Jones and a fully stocked refrigerator in front of the Roots Collective in Miami, Florida. Jones set up this community fridge to help the food insecure during the COVID-19 crisis.

10:25 a.m.: Sherina Jones looks forward to opening her refrigerator and finding it empty.

That means someone in Liberty City has found the fridge full of free food she plugged in outside her friends print shop and wont go hungry.

I feel fulfilled every day I come here and see that its empty, she said. It puts a smile on my face to see everything is gone.

Jones, 35, a Carol City native, has taken on the vast problem of food insecurity in South Florida in a direct, targeted and grassroots way: She set up a community refrigerator.

Very simply, these community fridges are set up in public areas where anyone from the neighborhood can take food or donate food.

Hers is one of two community fridges set up in Miami-Dade County in the last two weeks and they aim not to be the last as locals look for ways to address hunger made worse in their communities by joblessness as COVID-19 sweeps across the country. Both of the fridges sit near food deserts  low-income areas, where the closest source of fresh food, like a grocery store, is at least half a mile away.

Read the full story here.

COVID-19 turned their Miami Springs nursing home into a death trap. The virus killed 52

10 a.m.: After the Miami Springs nursing home Fair Havens Center locked down in March, Maria Garcia would still drive 50 miles a day round trip to talk to her esposo through a window.

COVID-19 was sweeping through the nation, and Maria was worried. But her husband, Jose Garcia, better known as Cheo, was fine as far as she could tell. Cheo was a jokester and would play tricks on her, like pretending to be asleep, to lighten the mood.

Then in late April, a private laboratory tested all the residents. The day the results came back, the nursing home reported 86 new positive cases. By the end of August, COVID-19 had claimed 52 residents.

Cheo, 78, was among them, his death dropping the curtain on more than 50 years of marriage to Maria.

What happened at Fair Havens seemed sudden and shocking to family members on the outside. But confidential data viewed by the Miami Herald, May inspection reports and interviews with several staffers shed considerable light on the events that took place behind the facilitys closed doors, leading it to have the second-highest virus death toll in Florida.

Read the full story here.

6-year-old girl youngest to die in Florida from COVID-19 complications, health data shows

9:25 a.m.: A 6-year-old girl from Hillsborough County has died from COVID-19 related complications, making her the youngest person in Florida to die from the disease, according to data by the states health department.

The girls death was included in Fridays toll, according to the Florida Department of Health.

She is the first Hillsborough County resident under age 18 and the eighth child in the state known to have died from the disease, the states data shows.

Read the full story here.

CATCH UP TO START THE DAY

9:20 a.m.: Here are the coronavirus headlines to catch you up on whats happening around South Florida and the state as Monday begins.

 Broward allows restaurants to stay open later, announces new rapid COVID testing site

 Miami-Dade preparing to lift some COVID rules again. Is another spike a given?

 Floridas COVID-19 daily case total is second-lowest since June as state surpasses 600K
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 13:22 514 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c4005e51 1 News Denpasar-Bali,Airport,travel,tourism,Airlines,AirAsia Free

Low-cost carrier AirAsia is to reopen four of its routes from Bali starting Sept. 1, allowing passengers to travel from the famous island destination to Labuan Bajo in East Nusa Tenggara, Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara, as well as Yogyakarta and Surakarta in Central Java.

According to a statement, the move is part of the airline's effort to gradually reopen its popular routes as it enters its third month since resuming operations amid the pandemic.

We continue to work hard to gradually normalize the operations of our customers' favorite routes, starting with our Bali hub," AirAsia Indonesia president director Veranita Yosephine Sinaga said in the statement.

Read also: Indonesian travelers enjoy convenience of COVID-19 testing at airports

Following the reopening plans, the carrier is currently offering a 20 percent discount for flights scheduled between Sept. 1 and Dec. 6, which already include 15 kilograms of checked baggage.

It has also expanded its rapid test stations to 33 locations, allowing its customers to make use of the service, available for Rp 95,500 (US$6.46), by showing their booking code and identity card.

Just yesterday, Citilink also announced the reopening of some domestic routes, including Jakarta-Yogyakarta, Jakarta-Surakarta, Jakarta-Labuan Bajo, Medan-Nias and Jakarta-Bali. (gis/kes)
PCC has said that Sonia Gandhi should continue as Congress president and in case she refuses the request, former party president Rahul Gandhi should immediately take over as AICC president.

Ahead of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting which is scheduled to be held on Monday, Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) has said that Sonia Gandhi should continue as Congress president and in case she refuses the request, former party president Rahul Gandhi should immediately take over as All India Congress Committee (AICC) president.

In a statement, Maharashtra PCC said that a resolution has been passed in a meeting of senior Congress leaders held on Sunday. The statement proposed Balasaheb Thorat, President, Maharashtra PCC and seconded by Ashok Chavan, Maharashtra Public Works Department read that the senior Congress leaders of Maharashtra had unanimously resolved that Sonia Gandhi should continue as Congress president as it is only because of her leadership that their party came in power, she had made several sacrifices to rebuild the party and was still very actively involved in all the decisions pertaining to the party.

It read that Sonia ji took over the party out of compulsion by Congress workers and leaders, after taking charge, she got the Congress in power and in spite of the requests from the all elected MPs to take up the Prime Ministers role, she refused and handed it to Manmohan Singh ji, an eminent economist and a very able senior leader. It read that even now, they desire that she should lead the party in the future as well.

Also read: Sonia Gandhi to step down as Congress chief, asks for selection of a new chief: Reports

Also read: Sushant Singh Rajput case LIVE news updates: Inconsistencies between Pithani, cooks statements

The statement added that, in case, Sonia Gandhi ji refused otheir request they would seek Rahul Gandhi ji to immediately take over as AICC president, under his dynamic leadership, the Congress party would regain the confidence and faith of the public of this country and his valuable leadership would help party workers strengthen the organization. It read that not only the Congress party but the entire country needed Rahul Gandhis Leadership.

An internal dispute had emerged regarding leadership issues in the party after several senior Congress leaders reportedly have written to party interim president Sonia Gandhi raising a 5-Point Agenda to revive the party, emphasising the need for active leadership in the party and raising questions about the partys condition and direction, as well as demanding the election of the Congress Working Committee.There has been a debate in the Congress on the issue of leadership with a section of the party pitching for return of Rahul Gandhi as party president.

Sonia Gandhi completed one year as the partys interim chief earlier this month. She took over the reins of the party for a second time after Rahul Gandhi stepped down as party chief following Congress suffering its second successive defeat in Lok Sabha polls in 2019.

Sections of the party feel that the uncertainty over the leadership issue should end soon as it will help the party take on the BJP-led government more forcefully.

Also read: Centre releases SOP for resumption of film and television production
Serafin-Bazan, a native of Peru, came to the United States in 2008, settling with his family in Port Chester in Westchester County. In his first semester at UB, he majored in medical technology and earned a 3.5 GPA, his brother, Sergio Serafin-Bazan, previously told The News.

Sergio Serafin-Bazan also told The News he believed his brother had been ill with respiratory problems for several weeks and went to an emergency room in Buffalo for treatment sometime in March 2019. While at home on spring break, he also visited an emergency room. That was where a doctor told him he had a bad cold, Sergio Serafin-Bazan said.

Sebastian Serafin-Bazan, who had a dorm room in UB's North Campus, was living in the unfinished basement in the Custer Street residence in April 2019 and was being awakened every few hours while pledging the fraternity, his brother said. Police found his suitcase and backpack in the basement of the house, a police source said.
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was confronted Monday with internal Postal Service data showing a drop in service levels in July, shortly after he took over management of the agency, as Democrats press him to reverse cutbacks ahead of the November presidential election.

"This document shows that these delays are not a myth or conspiracy theory, as some of my colleagues argue," House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney said at the start of a hearing on the post office. "These steep declines did not start in April or May with the coronavirus crisis, but in July when Mr. DeJoy came on board and began making his changes."

The number of Americans using the mail to cast their ballots for the November election is expected to surge because of the pandemic, and President Donald Trump has repeatedly assailed the security of mail-in voting without providing evidence for his claims.

DeJoy's appearance before the House panel is the second of two Capitol Hill appearances in recent days. Postal Service Board of Governors Chairman Robert Duncan is to join DeJoy in testifying at Monday's hearing.

At a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on Friday, DeJoy acknowledged that changes he has overseen to improve efficiency at the post office resulted in delays of mail and, in some cases, medication.

"We all feel bad about what the the dip in our service, the level has been," DeJoy said Friday in response to a question from Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who related the story of a Vietnam veteran who was unable to get an inhaler in time.

DeJoy, a former logistics executive and Trump donor, has said he was implementing changes recommended by earlier studies of problems at the Postal Service. He denied there has been any political interference from Trump.

Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the oversight panel's top Republican, said the Postal Service needs reform, but that will take time and and bipartisanship and not a "political stunt."

"Democrats fabricated a conspiracy theory" about the postal service, Comer said.

Maloney said the Postal Service's own data rebut Republican contentions that Democrats' alarm over post office delays is unfounded. Service levels recently fell 6% to 10%, Maloney said.

She said DeJoy either thought his changes wouldn't cause delays or he recklessly ignored warnings about doing so amid a pandemic and ahead of the election.

"Or, perhaps there is a far simpler explanation. Perhaps Mr. DeJoy is just doing exactly what President Trump said he wanted on national television -- using the blocking of funds to justify sweeping changes to hobble mail-in voting," she said.

The House of Representatives on Saturday passed a bill aimed at rolling back some of the changes DeJoy has overseen that Democrats say could harm the ability of Americans to vote by mail.

The bill also would allocate an additional $25 billion for the Postal Service. It had limited Republican support, passing 257 to 150, with 26 GOP members voting yes.
BT shares were on the up again today after the embattled business emerged as a target for private equity buyers.

Investors piled into the telecoms group on Monday after weekend reports that its flagging value had left it vulnerable to potential takeovers. After closing 7.1 per cent up yesterday, the shares continued their rally with a rise of 2.25p or 2 per cent to 111.25p as traders sensed an opportunity.

BT's value has fallen steadily in recent years and now sits at just 10.7billion  the lowest level in a decade  after a cut to its prized dividend sent shares sinking even further.

Analysts at investment bank Jefferies said that BT looked like a bargain because of the 'stark disconnect' between the value of its assets and its market capitalisation.

In safe hands?: Chairman Jan du Plessis, left, and chief executive Philip Jansen

WILL THESE MEN REALLY DEFEND TITAN? BT's two top bosses oversaw multi-billion pound sales of their last businesses. Chairman Jan du Plessis was previously chairman of South Africa-rooted brewing and beverage giant SABMiller, which was sold to rival AB Inbev, while chief executive Philip Jansen was boss of payments giant Worldpay before it was sold to competitor Vantiv. The pair have vowed to turn BT around and return it to its roots as a 'national champion' of infrastructure. But they may now have to fight off takeover bids for the telecoms giant after its market value crashed to just over 10billion  down from 49billion in 2016. Du Plessis  BT chairman since 2017  is a chartered accountant who was chairman of SABMiller when it was bought by AB Inbev for 79billion in 2016  one of the largest takeovers in history. The 66-year-old later confessed he found it hard to sell the company, which was from his home country and boasted a century-long history. Jansen, 53, is the multimillionaire former boss of Worldpay, who took over from Gavin Patterson in February 2019. The father-of-five led the payment processing firm, owned at the time by private equity, through its 2015 listing and sale to US-based Vantiv in 2017 for 9billion. He made about 30m from that deal and defended the large sum, insisting the money 'is not important to me' because he had already made a fortune from floating the company on the London Stock Exchange in 2015.

Openreach, the division of BT which owns and manages its broadband network, is thought to be worth around 20bn alone  double the value of its parent on the stock market.

Jefferies analysts told clients: 'It is likely that private equity firms are looking closely at BT.'

Potential buyers are thought to include top BT shareholder Deutsche Telekom, while Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has been building a stake in BT this year and Australian investment bank Macquarie reportedly once held talks about buying a stake in Openreach.

Helal Miah, an analyst at The Share Centre, said: 'Any potential bidder may be attracted by the fact that individual businesses such as Openreach are valued far higher than the sum of the parts, with potential bidders coming from the private equity industry.

'The view among some is that if BT is to become a private company, it may be easier to restructure and unlock value than as listed business.'

However, analysts also cautioned that BT's status as a former state-owned monopoly would make it a difficult target. It was privatised under Margaret Thatcher in 1984 but its telephone and broadband network is still seen as critical national infrastructure, meaning any potential takeover will face scrutiny.

And although the Government does not hold a so-called 'golden share' that would allow it to veto such a proposal, the company's investment plans are based on deals reached with ministers and regulators which are predicated on BT's market position and ownership structure.

The company's huge pension scheme deficit could also be an obstacle, with buyers likely to face demands to show how they would plug the hole.

However, fears that BT could be stalked by rivals or buyout firms have still spooked its board, led by chairman Jan du Plessis.

The firm is so worried that it has drafted in investment bank Goldman Sachs to draw up an up-to-date defence strategy, in case it is approached. The company's shares crashed to lows not seen since 2009 this month. They have fallen lower since bosses said in May that they were axing the dividend for the first time since privatisation.

Philip Jansen, chief executive, said the 'exceptionally difficult' decision was necessary so that the firm could continue funding a major upgrade of broadband network while also taking a financial hit from the coronavirus pandemic.

Shareholders will not receive any more payouts until 2022.

BT is rolling out cutting-edge fibre broadband across the UK, a vast effort that will cost about 12billion along with its investment in 5G mobile infrastructure.

But Jansen is betting that the huge spending will lead to bigger profits in future.
A 31-year-old Black man, Trayford Pellerin, was shot by Lafayette, Lousiana police officers at a local convenience store, The Daily Advertiser reported.

Lousiana state police announced an investigation into the incident. Police involved are under administrative leave until further notice.

Pellerin's family is calling for the officers involved to be terminated, according to their attorney.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Police tape is seen outside the White House as several blocks are closed down by the United States Secret Service on March 3, 2018 in Washington, DC. ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images

A 31-year old Black man in Lafayette, Lousiana was shot multiple times outside a local gas station as he was walking away from police officers, the Daily Advertiser reported.

The man, Trayford Pellerin, was fenced in by six police officers as they shot 11 rounds, according to the outlet. The incident was caught on video by a witness who said she was "traumatized" by what she saw.

State police have now issued an investigation into this incident.

According to a Louisiana State Police news release, authorities were called to a local convenience store at 8 p.m. to investigate a "disturbance" where a person  reportedly Pellerin  was armed with a knife on Friday. As police tried to detain Pellerin, he walked away from the scene, the release said. The officers pursued him on foot before deploying their tasers, which police said were ineffective in stopping Pellerin.

The officers then fired shots at Pellerin as he tried to enter a convenience store. Pellerin was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to state police.

The investigation into this incident is ongoing, the news release said.

According to the Daily Advertiser, the officers involved with the shooting have been placed on administrative leave with pay until further notice.

Pellerin's death comes nearly three months after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which had also been caught on video, and led to worldwide unrest.

Following Pellerin's death, protesters gathered on Saturday to demonstrate against excessive use of force by police. The protestors clashed with police after blocking traffic near a police precinct, according to CNN affiliate KATC. Flares and smoke canisters were released on the crowd, the report said.

Story continues

alanah odoms hebert (@Alanah_ACLU) August 22, 2020

One of the lawyers representing Pellerin's family, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, issued a statement on Twitter, calling for the officers involved to be terminated.

"The family, and the people of Lafayette, deserve honesty and accountability from those who are sworn to protect them - the Lafayette Police," Crump, who is known for representing families of Black victims in high-profile shootings like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, said in the statement, "The officers involved should be fired immediately for their abhorrent and fatal actions."

Read the original article on Insider
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It is said that the law is written on the sleeves of the judges, but what if the judges go sleeveless to show their muscles? These days in Pakistan if you are an alleged contemner in a case of contempt of court then your abduction a day before your court appearance could also be an alleged abduction.

On the morning of July 21, I dropped my wife off at the government school where she teaches and sat in my car in front of its walls sending messages on my mobile phone. Suddenly, a pick-up truck fitted with police lights stopped nearby along with some civilian cars, and around 10 men  some in uniform and some in civilian clothes  jumped out and headed towards me.

They pulled me out of my car. I demanded to know why I was being detained and what warrants they had for it, but in response, I got a few punches and a strike with a rifle butt on my head. I was then shoved into one of the cars, handcuffed and blindfolded.

After being physically and mentally tortured and threatened for nine hours at an unknown location, I was dumped by the side of a deserted road. It was quite clear to me that my kidnapping was directly linked to the contempt of court case for which I was due to appear in court the following day.

On July 10, I had tweeted about a Supreme Court ruling, which allowed a judicial probe into a reputable judge, Qazi Faez Isa to proceed. The year before the judge had deprecated the militarys indulgence in political affairs in a ruling regarding the dispersal of the Faizabad sit-in in which the army had participated. According to the ruling, the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) jave gone beyond their constitutional mandate in their actions.

Some, including myself, saw the judicial probe against Justice Isa as a move by the traditionally powerful military establishment to pressure the government into removing an upright judge who is destined to become the countrys chief justice in 2023.

Due to my tweet defending Isa and criticising his colleagues in somewhat harsh language, I was slapped with a contempt of court notice. On July 16, the Islamabad High Court dismissed the court petition against me but strangely, just a few hours earlier, the Supreme Court using its suo moto prerogative  which gives it the power to initiate a case on its own  started a separate contempt case against me on the same charges. It scheduled the first hearing in which I had to appear on July 22.

That day, I went to court, despite still being shaken by the events of the day before. In the courtroom, the judges inquired about the kidnapping and ordered the police chief to submit a report. This was heartening to me, but as the chief justice started dictating the order, a fellow judge suggested that the incident be described as an alleged abduction. My polite protest that such wording would prejudice the report did not help.

The police report about my alleged abduction was issued two weeks later.

Interestingly, while using the words of the judge the police officials in the same report claimed that various departments did not cooperate with the police in securing the necessary evidence to proceed further with an investigation into the abduction. No conclusion was reached in the report, despite the availability of security camera footage of my abduction in front of the school, widely circulated on social and mainstream media.

The judge putting under question whether my abduction actually happened illustrates a dangerous judicial trend in Pakistan of justices making remarks that go beyond the facts and scope of hearings in individual cases. Ironically such remarks often come after the Supreme Court evokes its suo moto powers under the human rights jurisdiction, which is supposed to be used to hold institutions accountable when they fail to uphold human rights. Instead of protecting or enforcing these rights, however, judges end up curbing them.

Politicians and legal experts have been criticising the manner in which this extraordinary judicial power has been exercised. For some, the judges remarks have been a decisive factor in the countrys political power play between the establishment and civilian forces over the last decade. For some, these seemingly innocent and pro-humanity constitutional powers have been weaponised by the judiciary way beyond the intent of the constitution.

The manner in which such powers have long been exercised has seriously jeopardised the right to a fair trial and free speech in Pakistan.

In a recent case, honourable judges of the Supreme Court of Pakistan made some sweeping remarks (non-binding verbal observations during the hearing of a case) against the role of social media in Pakistan. Another honourable judge on the same case said that many countries control social media through laws. These chilling remarks are likely to facilitate the draconian manner in which the countrys controversial cybercrime laws are being abused to muzzle free speech.

This is a horrible scenario for the citizens of a country like Pakistan which is currently reeling under the legacy of long military dictatorships and an unprecedented persecution of journalists, media organisations and their owners.

The superior courts are increasingly and rigidly enforcing contempt of court laws on media and common citizens in Pakistan. At the same time, they are refraining from taking notice of growing incidents of citizens being kidnapped and kept in illegal detention and also the media being intimidated, heavily censored and persecuted.

The situation is so bad that indignation was expressed even by a chief justice in September 2019. During a ceremony held to mark the new judicial year then Justice Asif Saeed Khosa openly admitted that there was a growing perception of reduced political space and a lop-sided process of accountability.

In a recent ruling on the conduct of the National Accountability Bureau, Justice Maqbool Baqar pointed fingers towards the powerful establishment, saying that allegations of the accountability process being abused for political engineering should be given proper attention.

The abuse of the judiciary serves different purposes. In my case, by defending Judge Isa, I inadvertently interfered with the grand plan of the powerful establishment which is scrambling to neutralise all the political, judicial and journalistic obstacles in their pursuit of reshaping the upper echelons of power. Like in all other departments, they aim to get rid of the non-conformist elements in the judiciary. Concerns over Justice Isa, who is constitutionally due to become the chief justice in 2023, are linked to succession in the armys top.

The army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa is expected to retire in 2022 and waiting in the wings to take over is the current ISI chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, who owing to his projected seniority position at that time will be the most likely candidate to succeed him. If Imran Khan continues as prime minister by the time the extended tenure of the incumbent army chief ends in 2022, Lt-Gen Hameed is most likely to be his only choice. The grand planners of the establishment plan a lot but then, as they say man proposes and God disposes, that is, one should always expect the unexpected.

But if Judge Isa takes over as chief justice the following year, he would be particularly incompatible with Lt-Gen Hameed as head of the army. That is because in his 2019 ruling on the Faizabad sit-in, Judge Isa had taken an issue with the political role the ISI had played, along with other military institutions, and advised that they should not exceed its mandate. Hameed had brokered and signed an agreement between the government and the Faizabad protesters as a guarantor, in his then role as a Major-General in the ISI.

The iron fist of the military seems to be wearing the velvet glove of the law. The use of the judiciary to prosecute people who are inconvenient for the establishment has basically shaped a new reality in Pakistan  one of an undeclared martial law.

In the past, four martial laws were proclaimed in the country, typically with televised addresses by military rulers beginning with the words my dear countrymen. But this seems to be an era of the unproclaimed martial law with no pretence of even the infamous Provisional Constitutional Orders (PCOs) which suspended the constitution and which senior justices had to swear an oath under.

Today, no such oath is required. Our judiciary, along with the government, the parliament, and the media are strictly following orders and embracing the policy of dont ask, dont tell about who rules Pakistan.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
As he took the stage on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, President Donald Trump smiled as delegates enthusiastically chanted, four more years!

Now, if you really want to drive them crazy, you say 12 more years, the president said, inspiring some shouts in support of a dozen more years of Trump in the White House.

Delegates at Republican National Convention in Charlotte, NC chant: "Four more years!"



President Trump: "Now, if you really want to drive them crazy, you say 12 more years."



Chanting: "12 more years!"



Full #RNC2020 video here: https://t.co/ZpNptJvTzQ pic.twitter.com/gnVjcAeGjT  CSPAN (@cspan) August 24, 2020

Its not the first time Trump has publicly toyed with the idea of an extended stay on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Just moments after a divided U.S. Senate handed Trump an acquittal on impeachment charges in February, the president took to Twitter to revive a controversial tweet showing a never-ending political campaign.

The tweet features a doctored video of a TIME Magazine cover with a series of campaign yard signs with escalating years, from Trump 2024 to 2028, 2032 and eventually the year 90,000 and 4EVA.

The GOP on Monday officially nominated Trump, who will give an acceptance speech on Thursday from the White House, a controversial move that has drawn fire from ethics experts and watchdogs who express concerns about the potential abuse of government resources for political theater.

The Office of Special Counsel, in a letter sent earlier this month to U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said it determined that the president could hold his GOP nomination acceptance speech on White House grounds. But OSC said White House staff must not be using their official authority or influence to affect an election, which is prohibited under the Hatch Act.

Trump told the crowd Monday that Democrats, who nominated former Vice President Joe Biden last week, could only win if this is a rigged election.

He repeated assertions that mail-in voting could lead to widespread fraud, but election experts say theres no evidence that mail-in voting leads to fraud at levels that could impact a national election. He has previously said hell have to see whether hell accept the election results.

Im not a good loser. I dont like to lose, Trump acknowledged in an interview last month with Fox News Chris Wallace. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I have to see. Im not going to just say, Yes, (to accepting the election results), and I didnt last time either.

President Trump reacts to Mary Trump's new book. Plus, he answers whether or not he will accept the 2020 election results. #FoxNewsSunday pic.twitter.com/KmmGdgzcVY  FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) July 19, 2020

Studies by Arizona State University in 2012 and 2016 found negligible rates of impersonation fraud, according to the The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. The studies showed just 10 cases of voter impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2012, and zero prosecutions of such fraud in a handful of states where politicians claimed it was a serious issue.

The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation found about 200 cases of fraudulent use of absentee ballots over the last 29 years, Roll Call reported earlier this year. In the states with all-mail voting, Hawaii and Utah reported zero, Oregon reported two, Colorado reported only five and Washington six.

Following the official nominating ceremony Monday, the RNC will kick off at 10 p.m. EST. For more information the schedule and speakers, read here.

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A 15-year-old girl and a 28-year-old man have been arrested on suspicion of murder following the death of 54-year-old women at a home in Leamington Spa.

Warwickshire Police found the woman had suffered a serious head injury after they were called to reports of a disturbance in the towns Lillington suburb shortly after 2.30am on Monday.

Officers attempted to resuscitate the victim using CPR, but she was pronounced dead at the scene.

The man and the teenage girl were arrested and remain in police custody, as the Warwickshire force asked the public to help with the murder investigation.

Investigators have warned residents there will be a large police presence in the area around the Valley Road home on Monday as officers carry out their enquiries.

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Chief inspector Caroline Corfield said: The investigation into this tragic incident is in its very early stages and there will be a large police presence in the area throughout the day as we work to establish the circumstances surrounding the womans death.

She added: I would ask anyone who was in the area at around the time of the incident to make contact as they may have information that can help with our enquiries.

We would also like to hear from anyone who may have CCTV or dash cam footage of the surrounding area at the time of the incident.

Anyone with information can contact Warwickshire Police on 101 quoting incident number 34.

Or alternatively information can be passed to the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or via their website.
ANN ARBOR, MI - A Black high school student has filed a complaint with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights alleging she and other Black students face a racially hostile environment at Ann Arbors Pioneer High School.

The complaint was filed in conjunction with a 14-page letter describing in detail the alleged racism the student and other Black students have faced at the school, and how it has interfered with their education. Another complaint was filed by a Pioneer student with the U.S. Department of Education alleging a teachers violations of Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

The student is represented by the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School, which interviewed numerous current and former Black Pioneer High students and students of color before filing the complaint Monday, Aug. 24.

This summer, an ever-increasing array of Americans are realizing what Black Americans have always known: This country has spent generations institutionalizing racism in every facet of American life, including education, the students attorney Liza Davis said. We call on Pioneer to listen to the brave students who have come forward to tell their stories, and to rectify the vile racism pervading its environment. Black Lives Matter.

In the letter, the student and other Pioneer students detail alleged racism experienced at the school, including how one specific teacher:

Insulted Black students and their parents in front of the class.

Humiliated Black students who are struggling in math by putting their grades on a Smart Board for all to see in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Is hostile to students who are members of the Black Student Union as well as its faculty advisors.

Uses coded language against Black students, calling them criminals and delinquents.

Refused to bring her class to the Black History Month assembly because it was a waste of time and complained that it didnt focus enough on how white people made contributions to Black people

Touched Black students in a hostile manner without their consent.

In February, students petitioned that the teacher, Michele Macke, be removed at Pioneer, arguing shes created an unsafe environment. Macke could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Some Pioneer High School students were unhappy the teacher was allowed back in the classroom after a student was grabbed by the arm while trying to retrieve an assignment she missed, leading the teacher to being temporarily put on leave.

Despite a police investigation that resulted in no charges being authorized by the Washtenaw County Prosecutors Office, students believe the incident was an example of the teachers inappropriate handling of a Black student in the classroom.

In the Ann Arbor Public Schools, we stand strongly against any and all acts of racism, bigotry and bias, Ann Arbor Public Schools Spokesman Andrew Cluley said. We will not comment publicly on personnel processes or pending litigation.

Charmelle Kelsey, the mother of the student involved in the incident, said her daughter was grabbed by Macke while trying to pick up the assignment from her classroom, claiming the teacher wouldnt allow her to take it because she had missed the class.

Kelsey claims her daughter had been bullied and called out by name in class by Macke in the past, and was unhappy the incident and her daughter, who suffers from anxiety, have been discussed in the classroom since the teachers return Jan. 30.

The Civil Rights Litigation Initiative asserts that the racism at Pioneer is institutional and not limited to a few individuals. Indeed, it was distressing to hear how many Black students and students of color felt that they were treated as second-class citizens.

The letter further alleges Black students are subjected to a racially hostile environment, citing examples of a class exercise in which a former student alleges they were required to play an online game to see who could own the most slaves.

Other students allege Black students receive harsher punishment for doing the same thing as their white classmates, and that there is unequal enforcement of the school dress code by teachers and hall monitors, particularly against young Black women, who are made to feel ashamed of their bodies.

Davis said she spoke with more than a dozen current and former students over the summer who outlined experiences they had with both Macke and the climate at Pioneer High School, overall.

Theres just this constant sense that theres a distance in how the students are being treated, and the only thing that we can attribute it to is their race, Davis said. Thats really the only difference that theyre seeing between how theyre being treated and how their white classmates are being treated.

In the letter, the CRLI urged Ann Arbor Public Schools officials to take action, by hiring a civil rights organization to conduct an independent investigation of the racial climate at Pioneer, whether the curriculum is culturally responsive to Black students, and whether the faculty and staff reflect the racial and cultural diversity of the school.

The group also asked that the district create a Race Discrimination Complaint system and encourage students to use it and to start a process to terminate the teachers employment.

READ MORE:

Students raise issue with Pioneer High School teacher who grabbed students arm

Learning pods have arrived in Michigan. Heres why theyre causing controversy.

Ann Arbor Public Schools holding firm on plan to start year remotely
OTTAWA: Canadas main opposition Conservative Party on Monday elected Erin OToole, a former cabinet minister and armed forces veteran, to be its new leader and the primary challenger to Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

OToole replaces Andrew Scheer, who failed to unseat Trudeau in an election last year. The right-of-center party struggled in the populous provinces of Ontario and Quebec, which together account for 59% of seats in the House of Commons.

OToole beat out the better known Peter MacKay, who co-founded the party in 2003 and was a high-profile member of former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harpers government, and two other candidates.

While there is no vote looming, Trudeau needs the support of at least one of three opposition parties to stay in power, and a crucial confidence vote on the governments COVID-19 economic recovery plan is expected in late September.

The Conservative Party will be ready for the next election and we will win the next election," OToole said in his acceptance speech, delivered early in the morning after hours of technical delays.

OToole, a 47-year-old father of two, describes himself as a true blue Conservative" and has vowed to put Canada first" while helping families and the economy recover from the coronavirus crisis.

The Liberals quickly accused OToole of wanting to take Canada backward".

This, it said in a statement to supporters, would mean making harmful cuts to services that Canadians count on, rolling back our work to fight climate change, weakening Canadas gun control laws, and much more".

Trudeau will face at least two confidence votes this year but looks set to survive with support from the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP).

Support for the Liberals surged as the government spent hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency aid during the pandemic, but they have lost ground in recent weeks amid an ethics scandal involving Trudeau and his former finance minister, Bill Morneau.

Liberals would get 36.4% of the votes if an election were held today, while the Conservatives would win 29.9%, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corps (CBC) poll tracker, an aggregate of recent surveys.

One of OTooles challenges will be to lure back voters in urban centers such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, which were Liberal strongholds in the past two national elections.

And the winner is Justin Trudeau," tweeted Karl Belanger, the NDPs former national director.

OToole promised to defund the CBC, the public broadcaster, crack down on crime and cut taxes.

In his speech, OToole reached out to left-leaning voters, saying there was room for them in the party.

The son of a retired Ontario politician, OToole was first elected in 2012 and served as veterans affairs minister from February to November 2015.

He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force at 18, working as a helicopter navigator before transferring to the Canadian Forces reserves. He then trained and practiced as a lawyer.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 23:29:39|Editor: huaxia

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MOGADISHU, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations (UN) and its partners have raised concerns about gaps in geographic coverage of testing of COVID-19 cases in Somalia amid daily declines in the number of confirmed cases in August.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its latest COVID-19 Update released on Monday that despite the progress which has been made by the government, there are some districts with no confirmed cases due to lack of testing capacity.

"In Jubaland (southern region), partners report lack of enough ventilators and oxygen machines, lack of a regional laboratory as well as inadequate funding to support Ceel Waaq and Dhobley isolation centers," said the UN humanitarian agency.

It said around 200 out of 838 schools need support to implement protocols and measures to mitigate the pandemic risk in Somaliland.

According to OCHA, in Puntland State of northern Somalia, partners are concerned that the public has largely relaxed adherence to COVID-19 protocols and safety measures, despite cases reaching 400 in the state. Enditem
Bangladesh will restore internet access to nearly a million Rohingya stuck in refugee camps "very soon", the government said Monday, on the eve of the third anniversary of their escape from Myanmar.

Authorities in Bangladesh cut mobile internet access to the sprawling, teeming camps in the country's southeast a year ago, citing security concerns, sparking international condemnation.

Foreign Secretary Masud bin Momen said Monday that the spread of "baseless rumours and misinformation" could create panic and destabilise the camps, where a few Rohingya have been killed in internal clashes in recent years.

"However, responding to the requests from our friends and also for the need of imparting education and Covid-19 response, for greater internet connectivity, we have taken a decision on lifting the restrictions on 3G and 4G mobile networks, which will be effective very soon," Momen said.

The internet clampdown disrupted communications between different camps, as well as with Rohingya still in Myanmar and elsewhere. It also complicated wire transfers of money from the Rohingya diaspora.

Rights groups said the lack of internet access meant misinformation and rumours, particularly about the coronavirus, could spread unverified.

The first infection in the camps was detected in May but fears that the virus could spread quickly have so far not been realised.

Khin Maung, head of the Rohingya Youth Association, said the restoration of internet access was "very good news".

"We can now get regular updates on Covid-19. And we can mobilise people against the activities of the human traffickers," he said.

"With internet connections, we can also communicate with family members who live in Myanmar or other countries."

Some 750,000 Rohingya flooded across the border as they fled a military crackdown in Rakhine state in Myanmar in August 2017 that the UN has likened to ethnic cleansing, joining some 200,000 already in Bangladesh.

With protests banned by Bangladesh - the government citing coronavirus restrictions - the refugees were due to mark what they call "Genocide Remembrance Day" with a day of "silent protest" that organisers say will turn the camps into ghost towns.

(AFP)
TORONTO, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FT Portfolios Canada Co. (First Trust Canada), a privately owned company, announced today the anniversary of the launch of the hedged units of First Trust Cboe Vest U.S. Equity Buffer ETF - August (TSX: AUGB.F) (the fund or August Series). First Trust Advisors L.P. (FTA), well-known for offering a variety of investment services and products since 1991, began offering Target Outcome Funds in 2019 building on its success as the largest actively managed ETF provider, according to Morningstar data, based on total net assets and number of funds offered as of July 31, 2020. The introduction of the August Series marked First Trust Canadas entry into the nascent buffer ETF space, allowing investors upside potential while reducing exposure to downside risk in equities.



The fund seeks an outcome that provides investors with returns (before fees, expenses and taxes) that match the price return of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY or underlying ETF), up to a predetermined upside cap, while providing a buffer against potential SPY losses. The fund is managed and sub-advised by Cboe Vest Financial LLC (Cboe Vest) using a target outcome strategy or pre-determined target investment outcome. On August 21, 2020, the initial Target Outcome Period for AUGB.F concluded and the upside cap for the new Target Outcome Period will be reset to prevailing market conditions. The funds have a perpetual structure and may be held indefinitely, providing investors a buy and hold investment opportunity.

The fund is pleased to announce that the cap, buffer and dates for the next Target Outcome Period are as follows:

TICKER CAP BUFFER OUTCOME PERIOD AUGB.F 14.71% (Gross) 10% 24/8/2020  20/8/2021

If an investor purchases hedged units after the first day of the Target Outcome Period, they will likely have a different return potential than an investor who purchased hedged units at the start of the Target Outcome Period and the buffer the fund seeks may not be available.

First Trust Canada believes a buffer against a level of losses can help investors stay invested during volatile times. The fund offers a way to gain access to outcome-based investingspecifically to buffer against a level of downside risk while allowing growth to a maximum cap eliminating bank credit risk, in a convenient, flexible investment vehicle.

Karan Sood and Howard Rubin, of Cboe Vest, serve as a portfolio managers for the fund. The portfolio managers are jointly and primarily responsible for the day-to-day management of the fund.

For further information: Media Contact: Karl Cheong FT Portfolios Canada Co., 40 King Street West, Suite 5102, Email: karlcheong@firsttrust.ca, 1-877-622-5552.

About First Trust

First Trust Canada is the trustee, manager and promoter of the fund. First Trust Canada and its affiliates First Trust Advisors L.P. (FTA), portfolio advisor to the fund, an Ontario Securities Commission registered portfolio manager and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission registered investment advisor, and First Trust Portfolios L.P., a FINRA registered broker-dealer, are privately held companies that provide a variety of investment services. FTA has collective assets under management or supervision of approximately U.S. $145 billion as of July 31, 2020 through unit investment trusts, exchange-traded funds, closed-end funds, mutual funds and separate managed accounts. For more information, visit www.firsttrust.ca.

About Cboe Vest:

Cboe Vest is the creator of Target Outcome Investments, which strive to buffer losses, amplify gains or provide consistent income to a diverse spectrum of investors. Today, Cboe Vests Target Outcome Strategies are available in mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), unit investment trusts (UITs), collective investment trusts (CITs), and customizable managed accounts / sub-advisory services. For more information about Cboe Vest and the evolution of Target Outcome Investments, visit www.cboevest.com or contact Linda Werner at lwerner@cboevest.com or 703-864-5483.

You should consider a funds investment objectives, risks, and charges and expenses carefully before investing. Contact FT Portfolios Canada at 1-877-622-5552 or visit www.firsttrust.ca to obtain a prospectus which contains this and other information about a fund. The prospectus should be read carefully before investing.

Important Information

The information presented is not intended to constitute an investment recommendation for, or advice to, any specific person. Financial advisors are responsible for evaluating investment risks independently and for exercising independent judgment in determining whether investments are appropriate for their clients

Commissions, management fees and expenses all may be associated with investments in exchange traded funds. Please read the prospectus before investing. Exchange traded funds are not guaranteed, their values change frequently, and past performance may not be repeated.

Cboe is a registered trademark of Cboe Exchange, Inc., which has been licensed for use in the name of the funds. The funds are not sponsored, endorsed, sold or marketed by Cboe Exchange, Inc. or any of its affiliates (Cboe) or their respective third-party providers, and Cboe and its third-party providers make no representation regarding the advisability of investing in the funds and shall have no liability whatsoever in connection with the funds.

First Trust Advisors L.P. is the portfolio advisor to the funds. First Trust Advisors L.P. is an affiliate of FT Portfolios Canada Co., the trustee, manager and promoter of the funds. Financial advisors are responsible for evaluating investment risks independently and for exercising independent judgment in determining whether investments are appropriate for their clients.

Source: First Trust Advisors L.P.

Further information about First Trust Canadas ETFs can be found at www.firsttrust.ca .
SEREMBAN, Malaysia - A Malaysian coroner began an inquest Monday into the death of a French-Irish teen, a year after her body was found near a nature resort where she vanished while on holiday.

Nora Anne Quoirins disappearance from her familys cottage at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on Aug. 4 last year, a day after her family arrived for their holiday, sparked a massive search. Her naked body was discovered on Aug. 13 beside a stream in a palm oil estate about 2.5 kilometres (1.6 miles) from the resort, police say.

Coroner Maimoonah Aid said the inquest is aimed at determining when 15-year-old Nora died, the cause of her death, how she came to her death, and if anyone was criminally involved.

Negeri Sembilan police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop, the first witness, said the investigation showed no criminal element. He said there was no indication Nora was abducted and no ransom demand.

Police believe Nora climbed out of a window on her own, and the autopsy showed she succumbed to intestinal bleeding due to starvation and stress, he said.

Her Irish mother and French father, Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin, say Nora was kidnapped because she had mental and physical disabilities and couldnt have wandered off on her own.

Resort owner Haanim Bamadhaj, who testified via video conference, said Noras parents had told her the teen only had on her underwear when she went missing and that she would hide when she was frightened.

Recalling the night, Haanim, whose house faces the Quorins cottage, said it was peaceful and that her dog, who would bark if there were outsiders, was also quiet.

She acknowledged that a window of the cottage that was found ajar the morning Nora disappeared was faulty and could be opened from the outside. But she said there have never been any criminal break-ins in her property since it opened for business 11 years ago.

A recording of the girls mother calling Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here that was used during the search was played to the court.

The coroner earlier this month visited the resort and the place where the body was found. The inquest, which is set to run until Sept. 4, is to involve 64 witnesses.

The Quoirin family lawyer, S. Sakhty Vell, said Noras parents couldnt attend the inquest due to the coronavirus pandemic but will testify via video conference. A British doctor who conducted a second autopsy on Noras body will also testify remotely, he said.

The Quoirin family has sued the resort owner for alleged negligence. They said in their lawsuit that there was no security at the resort and that a cottage window was found ajar with a broken latch on the morning Nora disappeared.

Nora had poor motor skills and needed help to walk and her mental age was about 5 or 6 years old, her parents said in the lawsuit.

Gurdial Singh Nijar, the lawyer representing the resort, told reporters after the first day of the inquest that the incident was unfortunate but there was no culpability on the part of the resort owner.

Noras parents have welcomed Malaysias decision to hold the inquest after police classified the case as no further action. They said the inquest will be crucial in determining the fullest possible picture of what happened to Nora and how her case was dealt with.
The United Arab Emirates canceled a planned trilateral meeting with the U.S. and Israel last Friday to send a message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his opposition to a pending arms deal between the U.S. and UAE, three sources with knowledge of the matter tell me.

Why it matters: Just days after Israel and the UAE announced a landmark normalization deal, there has already been a spike in tensions.

The backstory: Israeli media reported that, as a condition of the deal, Netanyahu signed off on pending sales of F-35 fighter jets to the UAE. He denied those reports and publicly came out against the potential arms deal.

Israel's status as the only Middle Eastern country to possess the most advanced fighter aircraft in America's arsenal currently gives it a clear technological advantage over other militaries in the region.

But the F-35 deal is a top priority for the UAE, which saw it as linked to the normalization accord with Israel.

Between the lines: The F-35 deal has been under discussion for some time, and Trump administration officials have said the normalization deal makes it more likely to proceed, while acknowledging their obligation to ensure Israel's qualitative military edge in the region.

The Emiratis were under the impression going into the normalization deal that while Netanyahu may have reservations on the F-35 issue, he would not air them publicly, the three sources briefed on the matter say.

They felt Netanyahu's statements  suggesting he had no knowledge of the proposed deal and insisting he'd oppose it  violated the understanding between them.

They were particularly angry that he told members of his Cabinet that he would raise his concerns about the deal with members of Congress.

The Emiratis decided to send a message.

Driving the news: America's UN ambassador, Kelly Craft, invited her Israeli and Emirati counterparts to take part in a trilateral meeting last week at the UN.

It was to be a ceremonial affair  in public, with photos and a joint statement.

All sides confirmed their attendance and were planning the details when the Emiratis suddenly told Craft and the White House they wanted to cancel it indefinitely.

The latest: The F-35 deal came up during Secretary of State Mike Pompeos meetings in Israel today with Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials, and it's expected to be discussed again tomorrow when Pompeo travels to Abu Dhabi.

Brian Hook, the U.S. envoy for Iran, who is traveling with Pompeo, told me in an interview that the Trump administration would achieve two objectives: protecting Israels qualitative military edge and helping the UAE to defend itself against Iran.

The UAE and Israel face the common enemy of Iran. We are going to continue enhancing UAEs defense posture in a way that preserves our security commitments to Israel," Hook said.

"The UAE has agreed to normalize with Israel  its a new relationship. It creates space for more cooperation on security. Any conversations that are needed around Israel's qualitative military edge will take place."

What to watch: The Emiratis plan to hold off on further high-level public meetings with Israel until Netanyahus position is cleared up, the sources tell me.

Emirati officials declined to comment for this story, as did the White House and Israeli Prime Minister's Office.

Go deeper: How the Israel-UAE deal came together
Friend reveals timeline of Nong Mints death

PHUKET: A friend of 20-year-old student Pornpiphat Mint Iaddam, who collapsed and died while running after cheerleading practice session at Phuket Rajabhat University last Wednesday (Aug 19), has come forward to explain the sequence of events leading to Nong Mints death.

deathpolice

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Monday 24 August 2020, 12:55PM

The friend, who asked not to be named, explained yesterday (Aug 23) That the cheerleading practice started at around 5pm. Eleven first-year students were among them, including Nong Mint.

On that day, a senior student taught new dance movements. However, it was made clear that if any of the 11 freshmen made wrong movements during the rehearsal, that all 11 freshmen would have to run laps around the parking lot, the friend said.

The friend did not make it clear whether the same rule applied to any non-first-year students.

During the practice, Nong Mint and the other first-year students made a lot of mistakes and were ordered to run eight laps [of the parking lot], which was around 100 metres per lap, the friend said.

Before having to run the laps, starting at 7pm, senior students gave them a break to rest first. Nong Mint was exhausted, but she did not take a rest, the friend added.

By about 7:20pm, the first-year students were on their seventh lap, and Nong Mint collapsed to the ground and started to convulse, the friend said.

Senior students and friends quickly called the emergency number 1669, and the rescue workers told them to give her first aid until they arrived. While waiting for the rescue workers to come, Nong Mints condition became worse, so friends took her to Vachira Phuket Hospital by motorbike, with a a friend sitting behind her, the friend explained.

After they arrived at the hospital, the friend called Nong Mints family. Shortly after that, a doctor came out and told them that Nong Mint had died.

Lt Col Chana Sutthimas of the Phuket City Police, who is leading the investigation into Nong Mints death, said police had already interviewed many people regarding the young students death.

However, he emphasised that the investigation was still ongoing.

Police are also waiting for the results of an in-depth examination of Nong Mints body by hospital staff. At this stage, no person has been charged, Lt Col Chana added

Phuket MP Sutha Pratheep Na Thalang visited Nong Mints family at their home in Koh Kaew yesterday (Aug 23) and promised that all education costs for Nong Mints 12-year sister, Thanyaporn Milk Iaddam, will be paid for.

The understanding was that after Nong Mint graduated, she would have contributed to the income of the family and help provide financial support for her parents and her sister.

At the home, Mr Sutha spoke to Nong Mints mother, Duangjai Songkaew, 43, who remains bed-ridden with grief and has not been able to speak to anyone about Nong Mint since her death.

Meanwhile, Phuket Rajabhat University this morning (Aug 24) issued yet another press release maintaining that the university is not keeping silent on the death.

The university has maintained that Nong Mints death was not the result of any form of hazing, which by definition is when any new member of a group is singled out to perform any activity that results in psychological or physical harm and which existing members of the group are not required to perform.

Of note, within 48 hours of Nong Mints death the university had already given Nong Mints family B100,000 as compensation. The Bangkok Post reported that the money was to pay for medical bills.
Emmerdale actor Mark Jordon and his partner Laura Norton arrive at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court, where Jordon is charged with assault on a pensioner. (Photo by Jacob King/PA Images via Getty Images)

Emmerdale star Laura Norton is expecting her first baby with former co-star Mark Jordon, the couple have revealed.

The pair met when Jordon joined the cast of the ITV soap as character Daz Spencer, and announced their engagement last year.

The couple will now welcome a baby after sharing the news in an interview with OK! magazine.

Read more: Emmerdale star Mark Jordon 'growled like a mad dog' before biting pensioner, court hears

Norton said: I had tears in my eyes, we're over the moon. It's something I've always hoped would happen.

Jordon added: "In my heart I knew before looking at the test. We both looked at the result and there was so much joy, but for a weird moment we were both deadly silent.

Emmerdale actor Mark Jordon and his partner Laura Norton at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court, where he is charged with assault on a pensioner. (Photo by Jacob King/PA Images via Getty Images)

The baby will be Nortons first child, and Jordons third - he shares Joseph, 22, and Poppy, 19, with ex-wife Siobhan Finneran, who he starred with on 1960s police drama Heartbeat.

Norton, who plays Kerry Wyatt on Emmerdale, added: I hope my instincts kick in. I feel very calm and safe knowing that I've seen what an amazing father Mark is and how brilliant his kids are.

Jordon announced the couples engagement on New Years Day 2019.

He tweeted: Well 2018 had some of the highest highs and the lowest lows. Really got to feel the love of true friends . Feel blessed by the support of my children and elated to have heard the word yes from the most beautiful woman in the world.

Well 2018 had some of the highest highs and the lowest lows. Really got to feel the love of true friends . Feel blessed by the support of my children and elated to have heard the word yes  from the most beautiful woman in the world @lawrencenotrin   Mark Jordon (@JoepopProds) January 1, 2019

However, the actress let slip the engagement wasnt new, as he had proposed over half a year previous.

Story continues

Responding to a message of congratulations on Twitter, she said: I mean .... it was 7 months ago ... but ... youre very cute. Thank you.

Their plans to marry received a blow when Jordon was accused of assaulting an OAP at an Oldham pub in 2018 - charges he was later cleared of.

Read more: Samantha Womack and husband Mark split two years ago but still live together

He told the Sunday People last year: I was at home watching the wedding fund being spent on barristers fees. Watching it dwindle.

But now we can start all over were already discussing plans.

Now Im finally looking forward to whats around the corner.
It's 2020, So Let's Have an Asteroid: Creepy Oregon Coast Science

Published 08/24//20 at 6:11 AM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Manzanita, Oregon)  Sure, why not? Its 2020 after all, a year thats like 365 days worth of Friday the 13ths. Lets throw a scary asteroid into the mix.

NASA recently released information about a small asteroid that will come unusually close to Earth the day before Election Day  November 2. Its called 2018VP1, one of hundreds of near-Earth objects (NEO) that NASA is tracking, in the hopes of spotting astronomical trouble well ahead of time.

This one was discovered way back in 2018, according to NASA. While its relatively small (about six and a half feet in diameter), its made close flybys before, such as back in 2018 when it was about 280,000 miles away from Earth.

Whats slightly unsettling about this one is that its expected to whiz past our home planet a mere 3,100 miles away, razor-thin by space margins. Because of this, NASA has predicted theres about a 1 in 240 chance (0.41 percent) it could hit Earth on the day before election day.

Luckily, NASA has reiterated that since its so small it would likely  the key here is likely - disintegrate in the Earths atmosphere. They didn't rule it out, again putting the "nasty" in this asteroid.

Still, NASA has reportedly plotted three main possible impact points on Earth if it were to survive entry into the atmosphere. That was first reported by CNN and so far NASA has not returned comment to any news media on which places it looked at.

So, for now, as far as Oregon Coast Beach Connection knows theres no threat to the Oregon coast or Washington coastline. And certainly theres no evidence an alien race sent it hurtling at us packed with explosives (yes, were referring to Stargate: SG1).

Then again, it is 2020. So why not throw the Go'auld in there too?

In any case, NASA has emphasized even if it hit Earth theres no chance of large-scale damage. In fact, with two thirds of the planet covered by ocean, theres a decent chance anything that made it through our skies would find itself taking a good swim.

Which again brings us back to the Oregon coast. Hmmmm.

There is an entire network of eyes and equipment above us and around us keeping a lookout for dangerous asteroid impact possibilities. After all, extinction level events have happened before because of this, such as the demise of the last run of dinosaurs. One of those satellites is called NEOWISE, which discovered the comet that graced the skies of Oregon, Washington and the coastlines last month.

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Below: photos of Comet NEOWISE last month / Oregon Coast Beach Connection

















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Allentown, PA (18103)

Today

Cloudy with morning snow ending, then windy and turning colder with falling temps and some afternoon clearing. A coating to 1-2" of snow expected in the morning. .

Tonight

Partly cloudy, windy, and very cold. Wind chills near or below zero later at night.
Minister's quarantine violation takes centre stage in Dewan Rakyat

PARLIAMENT | The discontent over Mohd Khairuddin Aman Razalis quarantine violation has been brought into the Dewan Rakyat today with several opposition MPs taking turns to press the issue of alleged unequal treatment accorded to the Perikatan Nasional minister.

Khairuddin (above), who is the plantation industries and commodities minister, was previously fined RM1,000 for breaching the mandatory 14-day quarantine requirements after he returned from Turkey on July 7.

Mahfuz Omar (Harapan-Pokok Sena) was one of the MPs to raise the issue during the question-and-answer session, saying that the perception is that there is a double standard in the enforcement of the law.

It is as if there is a double standard. The pink wristband makcik and Haji Salleh were punished, but the minister was protected, only compounded RM1,000 when his violation, I was told, he attended at least five programmes, he said in the Dewan Rakyat.

Mahfuz was cut off by Abdul Azeez Abdul Rahim (BN-Baling), who claimed that Khairuddin had gone to Turkey to save the country and brought in RM82 billion worth of investments.

It is unclear where Azeez (photo) obtained this figure from as the government has yet to clarify the exact purpose of Khairuddins trip to Turkey.

Seputeh MP Teresa Kok had previously claimed that Khairuddin was accompanied by his family and government officers to Turkey as well.

Malaysiakini has contacted Khairuddins deputy Wee Jeck Seng to clarify the matter and is awaiting his response.

Khairuddin did not appear to be in the Dewan Rakyat today as the questions directed towards his ministry were answered by Wee instead.

Mahfuz had raised the issue while Special Functions Minister Redzuan Yusof was replying to a question on compliance of standard operating procedure (SOP).

Redzuan then stressed that there were no double standards and that Khairuddin had paid the compound in accordance with the law.

In response, Mahfuz said Defence Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob had said in April that those breaching SOP would be brought to court immediately, instead of being compounded.

Story continues

Redzuan said any questions on what Ismail stated should be directed towards the defence minister himself.

Another opposition MP who brought up Khairuddins breach of quarantine was Lim Lip Eng (Harapan-Kepong) who interrupted P Prabakaran (Harapan-Batu) in the midst of his debate on The Temporary Measures for Government Financing (Coronavirus Disease 2019 [Covid-19]) Bill 2020.

Lim questioned what was the purpose of this bill if there was a minister who purposely violated a law related to Covid-19.

Shouldnt this House urge the minister to resign from his position? he asked.

Other MPs who also brought up this issue earlier during the question-and-answer session included Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad (Harapan-Setiawangsa) and Khalid Samad (Harapan-Shah Alam).

Khairuddin has faced criticism from both sides of the partisan over his breach of quarantine, including from Umno supreme council member Mohd Puad Zarkashi.

Puad had taken issue with those who reacted positively to Khairuddin pledging to donate four months of his wages to Putrajayas Covid-19 fund as penance, as he said this could set a bad precedent.

He had also called for legal action to be taken against Khairuddin.

Though Khairuddin had attempted to defend himself by saying he tested negative for Covid-19, some have criticised the seeming double standards in the enforcement of the law.

The critics have pointed to the disparity between Khairuddins RM1,000 fine and a 72-year-old woman who on Aug 14 was handed a six-month jail term and an RM8,000 fine for breaching quarantine.

There is also an ongoing online petition for Khairuddin to resign from his post over this issue, which at the time of writing, has garnered more than 42,000 signatories.
Bastion in the gourmet capital of Kinsale, Co Cork, another Michelin-starred restaurant

Wilde in The Lodge at Ashford Castle in Co Mayo

With staycations very much in vogue, there has never been a better time for a destination dining adventure in Ireland, says Lucinda O'Sullivan. From the Michelin-starred to the just damn wonderful, these are the kind of places that have gourmets galloping from far and wide. And, you won't just eat absurdly well, you'll also be supporting some of our very best restaurants, which, like everyone else, have been hit hard by the Covid-19 crisis

AIMSIR

They came, they saw, they conquered. Cornwall native Jordan Bailey, ex the three-star Maaemo in Oslo, and his Danish wife, Majken, came to Co Kildare to set up Aimsir at Barry O'Callaghan's Cliff at Lyons and, within six months, garnered two Michelin stars. 'Get there before they get stars and the price trebles', I said in my review. It hasn't quite trebled but it's gone from 105 to 180 for their 15-course tasting menu. Overnight packages; plus lounge 'snacks' at 18.50pp, Wed-Sat. Sunday lunch, 45.

aimsir.ie

ANANDA

The flagship of Asheesh Dewan's Jaipur group in a colourful airy penthouse in Dundrum Town Centre, where young head chef Karan Mittal is creating stunning food that should have already had Michelin sending stars in their direction. Pre-theatre and a la carte menus plus a superb tasting menu, 70, available Fri/Sat.

anandarestaurant.ie

CHAPTER ONE

Ross Lewis's long-standing Michelin-starred restaurant just gets better with time. Now opening at 5pm, Wed-Sat, with a pre-theatre menu, 45, and dinner menus, 85-120. Chef's table also, plus lunch Fri/Sat, 45.

chapteronerestaurant.com

DAX

Olivier Meisonnave's little bit of France, set in a basement on Upper Pembroke St, with Graham Neville as head chef, has superb food and ambiance. Think foie gras and courgette flowers stuffed with Dublin Bay prawns in a lemongrass and ginger bisque. Dinner Wed-Sat, 2-4 course, 5.30pm/6pm or 8.30pm/9pm, 65-89, or Lunch Thurs/Fri, 2-4 courses, 32-48.

dax.ie

L'ECRIVAIN

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Derry and Sallyanne Clarke's legendary Michelin-starred restaurant in a mews on Dublin's Baggot St will be closing at Christmas as they pursue another venture. So don't miss this experience. Dinner Tues-Sat, three courses 85+12.5pc s/c.

lecrivain.com

LIATH

Damien Grey's Michelin-starred Liath in Blackrock Market is a must for anyone interested in cutting edge food. Tables here, due to its tiny capacity, are like gold dust. Multiple-course tasting menu, 120. Plus Wed-Sat from 5.30pm-7pm, there's a three-course menu for just 55.

liathrestaurant.com

RESTAURANT PATRICK GUILBAUD

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Dublin's long-standing two Michelin star restaurant never falters. Dinner, Tues-Sat, 98-160, lunch 55-65. Think ravioli of blue lobster and lacquered Challans duck breast. Lunch on Sat has the best people-watching opportunities.

restaurantpatrickguilbaud.ie

THE GREENHOUSE

With Eamonn O'Reilly at the helm and chef Mickael Viljanen, The Greenhouse achieved its second Michelin star last October. Think langoustine tart, Oscietra caviar, Champagne vinegar. Tasting menus, 140/180. Lunch 65.

thegreenhouserestaurant.ie

VOLPE NERA

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Watch this space for a Michelin star. Barry Sun Jian is delivering exquisite food at Volpe Nera in Blackrock with a fusion of Italian, Spanish and Chinese influences. ALC Dinner Fri/Sat. Lunch Sunday. Great value.

volpenera.ie

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BASTION

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The gourmet capital of Ireland, Kinsale, was delighted when Paul and Helen McDonald won a Michelin star for the town. Their contemporary plates are well balanced in an eight-course menu at 77.50. Dinner Wed-Sun.

bastionkinsale.com

CAMPAGNE

Great French cuisine, in a spacious relaxed atmosphere, at Garret Byrne and Brid Hannon's Michelin-starred Campagne in Kilkenny. It's extraordinarily good value with a three-course dinner menu at 60 including foie gras terrine with Pedro Ximinez jelly. The early bird menu is 40, as is lunch on Sat/Sun. It's the only Michelin-starred restaurant in Ireland doing Sunday lunch.

campagne.ie

CHESTNUT

There's something unique about Rob Krawczyk's little Michelin-starred Chestnut in the dinky West Cork village of Ballydehob. Set in an old-world pub, the eight-course menu at 95 is served Thurs-Sat, and, believe me, you'll remember it.

restaurantchestnutwestcork.ie

DEDE

Ahmet Dede, ex-The Greenhouse and Mews in Baltimore, West Cork, where he achieved a Michelin star, is now running the show at his own restaurant, down the road at The Custom House, creating the Turkish food of his childhood but in a contemporary style. Superb. Three-course menu from Thurs-Sat, 50.

customhousebaltimore.com

LADY HELEN

Set in one of the most beautiful estates in Ireland, the Michelin-starred Lady Helen at Mount Juliet, Co Kilkenny, is a serene experience with exquisite cuisine created by executive head chef John Kelly. Seven-course tasting menu from Tues-Sat, 95.

mountjuliet.ie

LIGNUM

Danny Africano sure put the townsland of Bullaun, near Loughrea, on the map, when he opened Lignum last autumn. It's located in a fab purpose-built Grand Designs type house where everything is cooked over wood. Michelin-worthy stuff, I said on my visit, and yep, I still think so. But then again, who knows with Michelin! Superb 6/8 course tasting menu, 75/95.

lignum.ie

MACNEAN HOUSE

Ireland's best-loved chef Neven Maguire has added a lovely outdoor courtyard to his MacNean House in Blacklion, Co Cavan. Offering lovely food with lovely rooms to match, MacNean is an ideal spot for a staycation. Dinner served Wed-Sun. Tasting menu 89. Sunday lunch 48.

nevenmaguire.com

THE HOUSE

A new team was appointed at The Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore, which sees executive and head chefs Ian Doyle and Adam Kavanagh, both ex the two-star Oaxen Krog in Stockholm, bringing the restaurant forward with some fresh ideas. 6/10-course tasting menus, 95/120, Tues-Sat, with sittings at 6.30pm and 8pm.

cliffhousehotel.ie

THE OAK ROOM

Head chef Michael Tweedie, in less than two years at the Oak Room's stove, pretty smartly achieved a Michelin star for JP McManus's exquisite Adare Manor. Dinner, three-courses, 100, will be luxurious with perhaps foie gras, lobster, or turbot with Exmoor caviar. Eight-course market menu, 120. Open seven days a week.

adaremanor.com

THE LODGE AT ASHFORD CASTLE

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Set on the Ashford Estate, head chef Jonathan Keane's mantra is 'local food with imagination', which he delivers every time, both in the fine dining Wilde's Restaurant and the Quay Bar & Brasserie. His training is classical French but he casts his culinary net far and wide borrowing from Italy and Japan amongst others. Superb accommodation also and various packages to choose from.

thelodgeac.com

THE OLD POST INN

Offering an outrageously pretty setting, in Cloverhill, Co Cavan, Gearoid and Tara Lynch's Old Post Inn is a perfect escape with excellent food and drink to be had. Dinner served, Thurs-Sun 69. Sunday lunch 45.

theoldepostinn.com

lucindaosullivan.com
Kamala Harris, back row from left, with grandparents Rajam Gopalan and P.V. Gopalan and sister Maya Harris. In front are Maya's daughter, Meena, left, and the Harrises' cousin Sharada Balachandran Orihuela.

It was just the Tamil word for auntie, two syllables in a speech by Kamala Harris last Thursday that covered her childhood, heritage and political awakening and culminated in her acceptance of the Democratic Party nomination for vice president.

But "chithi," uttered on a presidential stage for the first time and pronounced correctly at that, set millions of Whatsapp chats ablaze around the world. A photo of a young Kamala and her sister Maya in saris and bindis with their grandparents in India circulated furiously. Nationalistic pride, political optimism and representational joy combined in a celebratory moment that was largely absent when Harris announced her presidential candidacy last year.

For a moment, a lot of us contemplated the idea of a vice president  someday, maybe even a president  shaped by the sacrifice of immigrant parents, who might feel the pain and injustice of country-specific travel bans in their own family, or have some sense of what its like to sip coffee from a Starbucks cup with someone elses simpler-to-spell name on it.

Even I felt my own cynicism fading ever so slightly. Presidential elections, for better or for worse, spark wide-ranging conversations about race. And Harris, an Oakland-born daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, who is both Black and Asian American, possesses an identity so multifaceted that it threatens to make that conversation a little bit smarter.

But presidential elections, for those accustomed to discussing race intelligently, can also be unfortunate markers of how little progress we have made.

And the enduring poverty of our racial rhetoric was on full display the night of Harris nomination, when it seemed no news outlet, poster or commentator could agree on how to identify her, variously describing her heritage as a woman of color, a child of immigrants, Black, Asian American, African American, Jamaican American, Indian American and South Asian.

On social media, I saw people fighting over the way Harris was described and pressing their own claims to her identity, various labels flying like flags over ideological fortresses. Pro-Trump commentators weaponized Harris biography, claiming first that her Jamaican and then her Indian heritage meant that she did not understand the African American experience. Political operatives even tried to sell the absurd and instantly disproved lie that Harris was ineligible for the role because she was the daughter of immigrants. It was a near echo of the attacks that Barack Obama faced during his presidency.

Story continues

Identity is always more complex than the labels used to describe it. When I report in ethnic neighborhoods across the city, I'm constantly reminded that behind the label is a story, and although the label doesn't always fit, the story always makes sense when you hear it.

And I was fortunate to get that chance two months ago, when Harris agreed to appear on our Los Angeles Times podcast Asian Enough.

On our podcast, my co-host Jen Yamato and I talk about Asian American identity and how the labels this country uses often dont fit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Harris was game for the conversation.

We talked about her mothers cooking  Indian, but also barbecue and Italian pasta  and how her mother raised Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, as Black women because she understood that thats how her daughters would be seen.

Harris argued that she was not presenting a confused picture of her identity, as shes often accused of doing  but that it was instead America itself that was confused about race. She described the pressure of choosing between Indian and Black identities as a false choice, an idea I immediately understood as the U.S.-born son of Taiwanese immigrants who feels connections to both countries.

Harris was smooth and occasionally spoke in sound bites as youd expect of a politician as skilled and as experienced as she is. But there were moments when genuine frustration about the labels applied to her cracked through. I didn't go through some evolution about who am I and what is my identity. And I guess the frustration I have is if people think that I should have come through such a crisis and need to explain it. But I didn't, Harris said.

Perhaps our interview was just as much political performance as anything a politician does. But Harris has consistently resisted choosing among the multiple facets of her identity. Instead of putting on the most expedient label available and wearing it like a mask, I saw Harris attempting to explain her complexity.

Identity, and the terms to describe it, are easy targets these days as more people exhausted by our daily outrage cycles tap out of engaging on issues of race.

But if we dont understand race ourselves, we will be manipulated by people who do. Voters from communities of color have long been familiar with the way Democrats and Republicans alike have marketed multiculturalism for votes and political gain, without ever delivering change for those communities. But now race is also a marketing tool, a brand, a trend and a hashtag. We have companies and brands using race to sell us chicken sandwiches, airplane tickets and streaming content.

And our racial picture wont get clearer if we keep coloring with the same three or four dusty, broken crayons. The world is not about to get less complicated. At least half of all children in California have at least one immigrant parent. A Pew study estimated that multiracial people make up 7% of the nations population, and that number is expected to triple over the next few decades  a faster rate of growth than any other racial or ethnic group.

All this is to say: Were going to have to learn some new terms, and also understand that those labels can't tell the full story.

After all, what label would you use to describe the Harris household, where two Black and South Asian daughters grew up dancing to Aretha Franklin in the living room as their Indian immigrant mother prepared dinners of daal, barbecue and beef stir-fry?

I have no idea. And there's something exciting about that.
Macquarie Group-owned data analytics startup Nuix is beefing up its roster of talent as it plots a path to a potential IPO on the Australian Securities Exchange, which could value the company at over a billion dollars.

The Sydney headquartered startup has hired Richard Ledgett, the former deputy director at the National Security Agency, as an advisor to Nuix's subsidiary in the United States, Nuix US Government.

Nuix is used around the world to manage cyber security, risk and compliance threats and investigate fraud using its data analytics engine, which can process over 1,000 different file types to trawl through emails and attachments.

Nuix chief executive Rod Vawdrey is looking to lead the company to an IPO.

Nuix was started by Australian scientist David Sitsky in 2000 and demand for its services has grown significantly since then, driven by greater data volumes and an increased focus on governance, risk, privacy and compliance functions.
FORT COLLINS, Colo.  A Colorado ranger who drowned last week was not wearing his personal flotation device when he is believed to have been caught in strong winds on a reservoir, a county sheriff said.

Larimer County Natural Resources Ranger Brendan Unitt was found Friday morning after an extensive search of the Horsetooth Reservoir near Fort Collins, The Coloradoan reported Sunday.

A Colorado Parks and Wildlife boat found Unitts body in about 12 feet (3.6 meters) of water not far from where his life vest was found by search crews.

Evidence indicated the 27-year-old ranger was checking campsites on the reservoir when he received a request for assistance from other rangers concerning two boaters in distress, Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith said.

Unexpected strong wind gusts up to 35 mph (56 kph) blew in and rangers reported hearing broken radio traffic they believe was from Unitt.

There was no further radio traffic from Unitt and he did not respond to the call to assist the distressed boaters, who were rescued by other rangers.

Rescuers located Unitts patrol boat on the east side of the reservoir. The search included ground crews, boats, drones and aerial support from numerous agencies.
Delhi Police sources have said that ISIS terrorist Abu Yusuf alias Mustaqeem Khan, who was arrested by Delhi Police Special Cell on Friday (August 21), has revealed during interrogation that he was influenced by speeches of radical Islamic preacher Zakir Naik.

Abu Yusuf was arrested following a brief exchange of fire from the section of the Ridge Road between Dhaula Kuan and Karol Bagh. According to Delhi Police, Abu Yusuf ,who belongs to Balrampur in Uttar Pradesh, had planned terror strikes in crowded areas of the national capital.

Delhi Police have recovered several arms and explosives, including an explosive belt, jacket containing explosive packets, cylindrical metal boxes containing explosives, from the arrested ISIS operative's home in Balrampur.

It is to be noted that police had also recovered two Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), weighing approximately 15 kilograms in two pressure cookers, from his possession at the time of his arrest. Besides, a pistol was also recovered from him.

Naik is involved in the preaching of radical Islamic ideology that has influenced the youth in India and abroad in an adverse manner and some of them are found to have been motivated to join extremist organisations such as ISIS.

The 53-year-old controversial preacher left India in 2016 and subsequently moved to Malaysia, which has reportedly granted permanent residency to him. Naik was booked by the Enforcement Directorate in 2016, based on a National Investigation Agency FIR that was registered under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

According to Delhi Police, Abu Yusuf was in touch with ISIS handlers who instructed him to plan terror strikes in India. He had also made passports in the name of his wife and 4 children. Earlier, he was being handled by Yusuf Alhindi who was killed in Syria. Later, Abu Huzafa, a Pakistani, was handling him. Huzafa was also later killed in drone strike in Afghanistan, the DCP Special Cell told reporters. Khan had been under watch for the last year, the DCP added.
A poll of Beltway insiders found that most believe any future coronavirus relief package will provide something close to the $105 billion in education aid that Senate Republicans have proposed, including $70 billion for K-12 education.

The survey conducted by Whiteboard Advisors of 50 to 75 current and former congressional staff, White House, U.S. Department of Education leaders, and other education officials also found that most of those people believe well have to wait several more weeks before a deal is struck on the next aid deal, well into the 2020-21 school year.

First, heres the full breakdown of answers to Whiteboards question about the amount of education funding in the next relief package:

But will there be another relief package from Washington in the first place? Whiteboard asked that question, too. In response, approximately 77 percent of the insiders said that there will be, but that Congress wont pass it until the end of September. Another 12 percent said yes, but that it wont take place until after the election, and 4 percent said it wont be until 2021. And as for the real pessimists: 8 percent said there wont be a Phase 4" coronavirus package at all.

The number of people surveyed by Whiteboard, which regularly does polls of education staffers and officials, isnt huge. And a lot can change in a few days or hours in Washington. But it might reflect a growing consensus about how negotiations will play out.

The Senate Republicans HEALS Act would provide $70 billion to K-12 schools, $30 billion to higher education, and $5 billion for governors to spend on both at their discretion. As we mentioned above, two-thirds of the K-12 money would be conditioned on whether schools provide a plan to provide some face-to-face instruction, a proviso that Democrats have declared dead on arrival. HEALS does not provide direct aid to state and local governments that could offset cuts those governments make to school budgets.

A skinny version of that bill floated by Republicans earlier this week did not alter the basic education funding structure and amounts in HEALS.

A virus bill written by Democrats and passed by the House in May would provide schools $58 billion in direct aid, but more than $900 billion in state and local government aid. The HEALS Act does not provide any such aid. The Whiteboard survey did not ask about possible outcomes for state and local government assistance.

Education officials, lobbyists, and other lawmakers have asked for much more in direct aid for schools than whats in the House or Senate bills. Perhaps the largest ask is from House Democratsmade after that May bill passed the Housewhove said K-12 public schools should get $305 billion .

Read more results from the Whiteboard survey, which also touches on challenges in reopening schools and other issues, in the document below:

Follow us on Twitter @PoliticsK12 . And follow the Politics K-12 reporters @EvieBlad @Daarel and @AndrewUjifusa .
D oughnut retailer Krispy Kremes UK division has said it wants to invest in expanding here, despite closing some stores due to Covid-19 disruption.

The US-headquartered brand, which operates from more than 100 sites in Britain, outlined the expansion plans as it filed accounts that show the company recorded sales growth last year.

In the year to December 2019 UK revenue rose 13.2% to 94.1 million and pre-tax profits were flat at 8.5 million.

This year the firm had to temporarily close its manufacturing and retail sites for the lockdown, and it said its ambitious growth plans were interrupted in the short term.

The retailers strategic report said: The company has carefully considered the potential impacts of the pandemic on the UK economy and as a result has made the decision to close a small number of its retail shops in 2020.

However, it added that it will continue to expand its presence, with plans to open shops in quality, high profile locations this year and beyond.

The firm also said: Investment in digitally enhanced cabinets, further development of ecommerce capability and adding capacity in our manufacturing network will enable the provision of an enhanced customer experience in the longer term.

Krispy Kreme, which was founded in 1937, is ultimately owned by investment group JAB Holding.
In an exclusive interview with NewsX for its special segment 'NewsX A-List, Author Mayank Gaur spoke about his latest book 'What Life Are You From? and much more.

In an exclusive interview with NewsX, author and advertising creative director Mayank Gaur talks about his unusual story of past lives and soul families. I may, out of courtesy, send a RIP message to the family of a bereaved soul, but what I really wish that soul, is Om Sadgati  may you have an auspicious journey to your next life. That is what our ancient Indian culture believes in. In fact, the possibility of other lives and continuity of love appeals strongly to a large number of people of other cultures too, as is evident from the massive, growing global following of Indian gurus, Buddhism, ISKCON (Hare Krishna movement) and path-breaking authors on the subject like Brian Weiss.

In what Mayank intends to be a series of books on the continuity of love over lifetimes, the first story is titled Bunnys Burrow  thats the inscription on the tombstone of a little girl, who in fact takes readers to two of our souls favourite places  childhood, and the afterlife.

I am from an army family and my story is largely based on army life in Mhow cantonment. It takes readers on a nostalgic journey to a time when connectivity hadnt disconnected people yet, he says with a smile.

Also Read: All religion may die but Gandhi religion wont : Raj Upadhyay, Theatre director and artist on his 22 years long journey

Also Read: Fashion is all about emotion, says ace fashion designer Anita Dongre

The broad storyline is as follows: 

Lieutenant Colonel S.S. Narula, a.k.a. Sunny, a giant of a man, has been staggered by a series of bizarre coincidences since he arrived in Mhow cantonment. Now as he stands with moist eyes at the grave of his bestie from childhood, he has no idea of the extraordinary turn his life is about to take.

Little Bunny had shaken up the sleepy army cantonment when she had arrived with her English mum, Debbie, and her Anglo-Indian daddy, Major Robert Hudson, in the late 70s. She was blonde, beautiful, a bundle of mischief and a reservoir of compassion. She was also mildly dyslexic and occasionally made vague allusions that sounded like memories from other lives.

Love, wealth, expensive toys, the freedom to be naughty  Bunny had plenty and more of everything, except time. When she passed away, everyone was devastated. But her story is not over yet. Thirty years later, as the new age of spiritual awakening begins, amazing coincidences will bring her back to her large soul family. And everyone who wept at her grave will realize that grief is not the evidence of separation, it is, in fact, the proof of reunion.

In an intriguing blend of nostalgia, humour, love, tragedy, faith and hope, Which Life Are You From? explores the bandwidth of spirituality without being sermonizing. Its powerful social and behavioral metaphors compel introspection. With it, the author hopes readers will take away the diverse nuances of love, the value of laughter and the essence of spirituality.

Which Life Are You From? is the story your soul has been waiting to hear since ever, says Mayank, with a glint in his eyes.

Also Read: Never give up and embrace change: Pooja Jain Gupta, MD Luxor Groups mantra for young women entrepreneurs
There are unconfirmed reports that Huawei plans to announce the new flagship Kirin chipset in early September (same as it did last year) and now that the company has announced that it will participate in IFA we know the venue for the event. Well, perhaps one of the venues, the Kirin 990 was unveiled at a dual event in Berlin and Beijing last year.

Huawei has not announced the official lineup of products that it will be presenting at IFA, though judging by the poster it will bring smartphones, smartwatches and everything else up to smart TVs.

The biggest question is whether we will see the Huawei Mate 40 series either in full or at least a teaser. The Mates are the phones that will debut the new Kirin chipset but that could prove to be a somber announcement. They could be the last Kirin-powered flagships as TSMC will be barred from fabbing chips for HiSilicon starting from mid-September. Huaweis relationship with Google is also held hostage in the trade war, but that may not be what Huawei wants to talk about.

The keynote is scheduled for September 3 at 12:00 GMT and will focus on Huaweis vision for a seamless AI life. The Kirin with its NPU developed in house is the corner stone to that strategy (as well as smaller Kirins, e.g. the A1 for smartwatches).

Sister brand Honor will be at IFA too, its presentation is scheduled for the next day, September 4. The focus will be smart wearables, tablets and computers, though well likely see a phone or two as well. The topic is similar: Expand your smart life.

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Linkedin Aboeprijadi Santoso (The Jakarta Post) Amsterdam  Mon, August 24, 2020

Happy Merdeka Day! Kartika Sari Dewi Soekarno wrote, conveying her greeting on the 75th anniversary of Indonesias independence, Aug. 17, 2020.

The daughter of president Sukarno and his Japanese wife Ratna Sari Dewi is a former TV journalist in Japan. Now married to a Dutch businessman and living in London, she grew up in Paris and has been educated in the United States.

Like her mother, she still holds an Indonesian passport. My father created this passport by fighting for freedom and social justice.

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Russias Security Service suspends probe into scientist charged with treason

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

11:01 24/08/2020

MOSCOW, August 24 (RAPSI)  The Federal Security Service (FSB) has suspended a preliminary investigation of the case of Viktor Kudryavtsev, a scientist of the Central Research Institute for Engineering Technology (TsNIImash) charged with treason; his travel restrictions have been lifted, according to the scientists attorney Ivan Pavlov.

The security service issued a notification that the investigator had suspended the probe until Kudryavtsev is in better health condition, Pavlov observes; the restriction of travel order was revoked and it is expected that the things sized during the search will be being returned starting next week, the lawyer says.

The scientist had been first detained and had to spend a rather long time in pre-trial detention facility Lefortovo; last September he was freed from detention under a written pledge not to leave country; now these travel restrictions are also lifted.

Kudryavtsev is not the only TsNIIMash scientist detained on treason charges: Sergey Meshcheryakov, 77, was put under house arrest on the same charges; in June 2019 there was detained yet another their colleague Roman Kovalev.

There is no evidence that all of them are defendants in the same case.

Kudryavtsev is accused of disclosure of classified information to the Belgian Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamic, his another attorney Yevgeny Smirnov had told RAPSI earlier. Investigators claim that the researcher has transferred information via email from an unmarked computer. However, the scientist has not worked with such secret documents since late 90s, according to the lawyer.

The researcher, who is 76 years old, pleaded not guilty and refused to testify in the case, Smirnov added.
Morrissey has slammed the NHS after the death of his mother and claimed that doctors missed three chances to diagnose her gallbladder cancer.

The former Smiths frontman made the bold accusations a week after he urged fans to pray for her health and described her as the 'sole reason for all the good and motivational things in my life'.

His mother, Elizabeth Anne Dwyer, 82, initially suffered a stroke but died from gallbladder cancer last week.

Morrissey, born Steven Patrick Frances Morrissey, claims that NHS doctors missed the cancer after 'three extensive head-to-toe examinations' so weren't able to treat her.

Morrissey (pictured with his mother) has slammed the NHS after the death of his mother and claimed that doctors missed three chances to diagnose her gallbladder cancer

In a statement on his website, Morrissey Central, he wrote: 'Following a stroke, her recovery was remarkable.

'She had three extensive head-to-toe examinations by the NHS who could find nothing amiss.

'Four days following the third examination I was told that my mother had three weeks to live.

'Nine days later she had withered and died without any attempt by the NHS to save her life.

'Once the NHS waves you off with paracetamol, get ready to meet your maker.

'The official cause of my mother's death was not the trendy and unquestionable - ''covid'' - but, instead, cancer of the gallbladder

The former Smiths frontman made the bold accusations a week after he urged fans to pray for her health

'How I wish to all gods that my mother had expressed no faith in the NHS.

'She might still be alive today.'

Ms Dwyer lived in Altrincham, a suburb of Manchester, and worked as librarian.

She inspired Morrissey's love of books which eventually led to his becoming a musician renowned as one of the best lyricists.

And Morrissey says she was a bit influence on his animal rights activism. In 2011 he said: 'I would definitely say that my mother started me. She's very active. She often goes on anti-hunt rallies in the UK. She has influenced me very much.'

Morrissey had posted on his website on August 8 asking that his fans 'offer prayers of hope and prayers of intercession for the recovery of Elizabeth Anne Dwyer, who is my mother, who is in trouble'.

Morrissey had posted on his website on August 8 asking that his fans 'offer prayers of hope and prayers of intercession for the recovery of Elizabeth Anne Dwyer, who is my mother, who is in trouble'

He wrote: 'With this broken voice I beseech you, my friends, to offer prayers of hope and prayers of intercession for the recovery of Elizabeth Anne Dwyer, who is my mother, who is in trouble, and who is the sole reason for all the good and motivational things in my life.'

'She is me, and without her vahaan koee kal hal  there is no tomorrow. I ask no more of you for there could be no more to ask.'

Unusually, he then signed off with his full name, Steven Patrick Francis Morrissey.

An announcement on his website said that her funeral will be held in Dublin, where she was born, and that 'all are welcome'.
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Late in the evening of March 5, Prashant Kumar took an unexpected call from his boss at State Bank of India. He was offered the job of rescuing the countrys most troubled private-sector bank, and -- if he accepted -- told to report for work at 8 a.m. the following morning.

The first thing that came to my mind was where was the address, he recalled. I had to Google it.

Kumar had little hesitation in accepting the position of chief executive officer of Yes Bank Ltd., the lender that was teetering on the edge of insolvency before being bailed out that month at a cost of $1.3 billion (Rs 9,750 crore). The only concern came from his wife, who Kumar says was shocked that he had resigned from his safe post at the government-controlled SBI, where he was chief financial officer.

Another failure of a financial institution would have been catastrophic, Kumar said of Yes Banks rescue, which came following the collapse of two shadow lenders. The central bank organised a bailout led by SBI after Yes Bank suffered a run on deposits on concern about its massive bad-loan portfolio.

Confidence of people, customers and even employees was shaken, Kumar said. The bank had a large stressed book. It was a very different challenge than handling money at SBI.

Since starting as CEO, Kumar, 59, has made restoring the faith of Yes Banks depositors a priority. The bank suffered an outflow of Rs 1.04 lakh crore ($13.9 billion) in the six months through March, about half its total deposits.

Kumar set aside an hour a day during the first two months to call depositors to reassure them personally about the banks stability. He spoke to about 10-15 of them daily, stressing that Yes Bank now also had the backing of SBI.

The biggest challenge when I joined was to stop the outflow of deposits, Kumar said. For any bank, having a sustainable deposit base is the most critical ingredient.

Big rescue

SBI and seven other Indian lenders took a combined 79% stake in Yes Bank in March. That has helped stabilise the situation, Kumar said, with deposits rising by about Rs 12,000 crore to 1.17 lakh crore by the end of June. Kumar said he aims to raise deposits to Rs 2 lakh crore by March 2021.

The rescue also helped contain deposit outflows at other Indian banks, though the tensions in the Indian financial sector remain elevated. The fiscally constrained government needs to inject capital into state banks to bolster their balance sheets, and private-sector lenders are queuing up to raise new capital from the equity market to face up to an expected surge in bad loans due to the pandemic.

More reassurance for Yes Bank came from the $2 billion (Rs 15,000 crore) of additional equity capital raised in July, albeit at as much as a 55% discount to the market price. The new capital reduced the rescuing banks combined shareholding to 45%, with SBIs stake dropping to 30%.

But the hefty discount triggered a further plunge in Yes Banks shares, which have fallen more than 90% since the beginning of last year.

And Kumar is still wrestling with the banks bad-loan book. Under previous management, Yes Bank gave loans to companies of debt-laden tycoons including former billionaire Anil Ambani, media mogul Subhash Chandra, and coffee-chain owner V.G. Siddhartha, who took his own life as his company struggled to repay debt last year. The bank also lent to the shadow lender Dewan Housing Finance Corp., which went bankrupt in late 2019.

Yes Banks bad loans rose to Rs 40,700 crore at the end of December, nearly a fifth of its loan book.

We are not against anybody, Kumar said of his discussions with delinquent borrowers. But I will do everything possible in this world to recover my money.

Soon after taking charge, Kumar created a separate stressed-assets team with 100 employees. Hes also considering moving the bad loans into a separate entity with equity investments from specialists in loan resolution.

Kumar said he also wants to focus on lending to retail customers, rather than the big corporate clients that led to the spike in bad loans.

The bank has been able to improve its deposit base and also concluded a much-needed capital raise, said Alka Anbarasu, vice president and senior credit officer in the financial institutions group at Moodys Investors Service.

However, Yes Bank has a long way to go, she said. The lender may find it hard to restore its low-cost current and savings-account deposits to levels before the banks deposit erosion picked up in the middle of 2019, she added.

Five months into his new job, Kumar said hes worked every day, usually doing long hours. He said his sleep has also suffered: He gets about four hours a night.

Things are not easy, including challenges on liquidity, deposits and recovery, he said. I need to deliver.
The Ministry of Finance has granted financial clearance for the recruitment of 18,445 health professionals.

The professionals who are yet to be posted to the various health facilities in the country include 6,348 nurse assistant (clinical) and nurse assistant (preventive) who graduated in 2018.

It will also see some 12,097 degree and diploma nurses and midwives joining the countrys health workforce.

The Finance Ministry, in a letter addressed to the employing agency, the Ministry of Health, said the emolument of the personnel should be charged against the compensation of employee's vote of the Ministry of Health in the 2021 annual estimates.

The Ministry of Health is to ensure that the health professionals have their documents processed on time and placed on the mechanized payroll to enable the Controller and Accountant Generals Department effect payment of their salaries, the letter signed by Deputy Minister of Finance, Abena Osie-Asare, said.

She indicated that the effective date of the appointed personnel should not be earlier than April 1, 2021.

By a copy of the letter the Controller and Accountant General is requested to effect payment of their salaries and make appropriate deductions of social security and income tax to SSNIT and the Domestic Tax Division of Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), it added.

The Finance Ministry said the clearance would expire on December 31, 2021 and cannot be used thereafter.

---Daily Guide
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The All People's Party (APC) has acclaimed Hassan Ayariga as its flagbearer for the 2020 general elections.

He was acclaimed at the partys National Delegates Congress held in Accra on Monday, August 24, 2020.

Mr. Ayariga founded the APC ahead of the 2016 election and has been the partys only flagbearer contestant.

He left the Peoples National Congress, which he represented at the polls in 2012, to form the APC.

This year, he was the only contestant who picked up nomination forms in the APC.

Mr. Ayariga received the endorsement of executives of the party who say he has the foresight to lead Ghanas development.

Speaking to Citi News, the General Secretary for the APC, Mordecai Thiombiano said Ghanaians need the APC to push for all-inclusive governance for development.

If you want to be void of corruption, then you need to let everybody be involved in the nation-building process. You shouldn't limit it just to your political party.

We need to think about Ghana first before political parties. When we think about Ghana first, regardless of your political party or your religious affiliation or your ethnic affiliation, the all-inclusive governance concept will bring everybody together.

Then we look at the action and rule the nation out of national interest and not a parochial interest, Mr. Thiombiano added.

The party is yet to unveil its manifesto but its flagbearer has indicated that a free tertiary education policy will be part of its plans .

Speaking to Citi News earlier on, he said the country needed to build on the gains of the free Secondary Education policy started by the Akufo-Addo administration.

The next government, whether APC or whichever government should continue with free tertiary education, he said.

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If you plan to travel by air, a scenario that stirs COVID fears in four out of five passengers, the airline industry wants you to believe that it is doing all it can to fight viral spread at Newark Airport. The cabins are more tidy. Every surface is disinfected, air filtration systems are cleaned, the concourses and restrooms are scrubbed, and the seats and baggage carousel are often wiped down.

But flyer beware: The lady who vacuums the gate areas, the fellow who handles your bags, and the folks who serve you food and push your moms wheelchair probably have no health insurance, and if they are sick, they cannot afford the cost of a doctor visit and may not know that a COVID test is free in New Jersey.

Still want to fly? There are 10,000 of these minimum-wage workers at Newark-Liberty, and only 13% of them  employed by notoriously frugal contractors like PrimeFlight  are enrolled in their companys insurance plan, because even the cheapest plan takes 20% of their paychecks.

The airlines say thats just their tough luck, but New Yorks lawmakers stood up for the workers at LaGuardia and JFK last month. They passed the Healthy Terminals Act (HTA), which requires employers at the two airports to add a $4.54 benefits supplement above the minimum wage to be put toward health insurance.

In New Jersey, however, the same workers are taken for granted. An HTA bill passed a Senate committee last week, and it has leadership support, but the Assembly version  which has 39 sponsors  has been stuck since February.

Speaker Craig Coughlin, whose compassion is unassailable, insists the stall has nothing to do with pressure from United, its contractors, or its trade groups. And he often brings up his chambers support for minimum wage increases two years ago.

But he is in no haste to move this bill, for reasons that are neither specific nor compelling, much less comprehensible:

Were continuing to evaluate whether to move forward with it, Coughlin said. We give everything a thoughtful review, and I want to make sure that the timing is right. I think its about deciding if and when its right to do.

If he ducked in on the Senate Labor committee hearings two weeks ago, hed know.

He would have heard about the 3 million annual visitors who convert Newark-Liberty into a pathogen paradise, and the workers who risk their health to serve them. Typically, they make too much ($15.60 per hour) to qualify for Medicaid, so the panel heard from a laid-off security guard who has a tumor and can no longer pay for her MS medicine, and a cabin cleaner who cannot afford $137-per-month premium for standard coverage and has discontinued his meds for bipolar disorder.

Everyone should have comprehensive and affordable healthcare, they should be guaranteed earned sick leave and paid family leave and they should not fear of feeling sick or missing a single paycheck.https://t.co/vDRVGtb1Nc  Steve Sweeney (@NJSenatePres) March 27, 2020

According to a recent GAO report on air travel, these employees face the greatest risk of exposure to communicable diseases.

This isnt complicated, said Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, a primary sponsor. They are at great risk and they should have access to affordable health care  especially now, so that the rest of the population isnt infected.

As for the fear that all minimum-wage workers will begin to demand employer coverage, thats true. Lets work to get there someday.

But our state is tethered to this hub. Vice-president Kevin Brown of 32BJ-SEIU, the union that represents 2,300 service workers at Newark-Liberty, put it best: The Port Authority and the state have a proprietary interest in keeping the public safe as it interacts with airport employees. So withholding health care during a pandemic is completely counterintuitive, he says.

No doubt, with air travel down 85 percent globally, US airlines are bleeding cash.

But they just received $53 billion in stimulus money, with more coming  and still they havent rehired most of the thousands they laid off, because they arent sure when the customers will return.

If United and the others want the industry to recover, it might be a good idea to encourage their contractors to provide health coverage for their vulnerable work staff, just so travelers wont be terrified to step into a terminal.

Our lawmakers have the means, motive, and opportunity to require it, as New York did. Now they must summon the courage to use them. Until then, caveat viator.

This editorial has been updated to reflect that COVID testing is free in New Jersey.

Let's get the #HealthyTerminalsAct passed in NJ! Thank you to bill co-sponsor @AswTimberlake for your support - the airport workers who worked day in, day out during the #COVID19 to keep our airports clean and safe need affordable healthcare. @SpeakerCoughlin @NJSenatePres pic.twitter.com/OYBKXA6arm  32BJ SEIU (@32BJSEIU) August 18, 2020

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Tell us your coronavirus stories, whether its a news tip, a topic you want us to cover, or a personal story you want to share.
A temporary medical clinic has opened at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville to address medical needs of evacuees from the SCU Lightning Complex Fires, the Santa Cruz County Emergency Operations Center announced Sunday.

The clinic, operated in conjunction with the California Emergency Medical Services Authority, provides access to a variety of services, including pharmaceutical, and will have physicians on-site to assist patients throughout the day, county officials said.
Adani Group may soon purchase a 74 percent stake in Mumbai International Airport (MIAL) for nearly Rs 15,000 crore.

Adani Group might acquire the 50.5 percent stake of GVK Group in MIAL, and will buy the remaining 23.5 percent from the minority partners, according to a Business Standard report.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.

MIAL operates the Mumbai airport and will also manage the upcoming Navi Mumbai airport. Bidvest and Airports Company of South Africa (ACSA) own 13.5 percent and 10 percent, while Airports Authority of India (AAI) holds a 26 percent stake.

The transaction might put an end to current legal disputes between GVK and the minority partners, the report said.

"There was immense pressure from the lenders on GVK Group, as there were upcoming debt payment schedules of MIAL. The banks were particularly concerned. They felt the parent firm's poor liquidity position  worsening with the effect of COVID-19 on airport business  would make it difficult to repay. The transaction is a positive for everyone," a banker told Business Standard.

The deal with MIAL would make Adani the largest private airport operator in India, after the GMR Group, which operates the Delhi and Hyderabad airports.

The Centre has granted Adani Enterprises the permission to operate the Thiruvananthapuram, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Mangaluru and Guwahati airports through the public-private partnership (PPP) model.
TANZANIA, Tanzania - More than 10,000 Islamic State fighters are estimated to remain active in Iraq and Syria two years after the militant groups defeat, and their attacks have significantly increased this year, the U.N. counter-terrorism chief said Monday.

Vladimir Voronkov told the U.N. Security Council that Islamic State fighters move freely in small cells between the two countries.

He said the Islamic State extremist group  also known as IS, ISIL and ISIS  has regrouped and its activity has increased not only in conflict zones like Iraq and Syria but also in some regional affiliates.

However, in non-conflict zones, the threat appears to have decreased in the short term, he said. Measures to minimize the spread of COVID-19, such as lockdowns and restrictions on movement, seem to have reduced the risk of terrorist attacks in many countries.

Nonetheless, Voronkov said, there is a continued trend of attacks by individuals inspired online and acting alone or in small groups, which could be fueled by ISILs opportunistic propaganda efforts during the COVID-19 crisis.

He said the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the challenges of eliminating the threat of terrorism, pointing to actions by IS and other terrorist groups seeking to exploit the far-reaching disruption and negative socioeconomic and political impacts of the pandemic.

But Voronkov said the pandemics impact on IS recruitment and fundraising activities remains unclear, and there is no clear indication of a change in the extremist groups strategic direction under its leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi.

Turning to Africa, Voronkov said the Islamic State in West Africa Province remains a major focus of ISIL global propaganda, and its total membership of approximately 3,500 makes it one of the largest of the remote `provinces. He said it continues to reinforce links with the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, which remains the most dangerous group in the tri-border area of Burkina Faso, Mali, and the Niger.

While IS only has a few hundred fighters in Libya, he said, they have been exploiting ethnic tensions and represent a potent threat capable of broader regional impact. He also pointed to worrying attacks by the Islamic State Central Africa Province in Congo and Mozambique, including complex attacks and brief takeovers of villages.

In Europe, Voronkov said, the main threat comes from Internet-driven, homegrown terrorist radicalization, citing three ISIL-inspired attacks in France and two in the United Kingdom. He also noted acute concerns ... about radicalization and failed rehabilitation in prisons, and the imminent release of dangerous inmates with a terrorism background or connections.

In Afghanistan, Voronkov said, ISILs affiliate has conducted high-profile attacks in various parts of the country, including Kabul, and seeks to use Afghan territory to spread its influence across the region and to attract fighters who oppose the recent peace agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban.

Elsewhere in Asia, ISIL claimed its first attack in the Maldives in April, he said, and attacks on security forces in southeast Asia occur regularly though government counter-terrorism operations have kept up pressure on the extremists.

Voronkov said the COVID-19 crisis has further complicated the already dire and unsustainable situation of thousands of people with suspected links to IS who are stranded in camps in Syria and Iraq, especially women and children.

Repatriation, prosecution, rehabilitation, and reintegration and the protection of the vulnerable have become ever more urgent, he said.

While some countries have repatriated their nationals, especially children, many have not.

Voronkov reiterated U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres call for all countries to implement international law and bring home all their stranded women, men and children.

The global threat from ISIL is likely to increase if the international community fails to meet this challenge, the head of the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism warned.

U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft said the United States shares the secretary-generals concern and has brought back American citizens and prosecuted them where appropriate.

Despite the Islamic States defeat on the battlefield, she said, we must work together to ensure that the population of detained foreign terrorist fighters as well as their family members displaced in Syria and Iraq do not become the nucleus of an ISIS 2.0.

Russias U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, whose country is Syrias main ally, said the global terrorist threat from ISIL remains high, and its leadership is planning terrorist attacks in the border area between Syria and Iraq.

At the same time, the terrorists do not intend to give up plans to revive the `caliphate in Iraq, he said. ISIL continues to build up its combat potential and is seeking to expand the area and scope of terrorist attacks in the country.

Nebenzia said ISILs organization and tactics suggest that it has now fully transformed into a network structure with a high degree of autonomy of branches and `sleeping cells in various countries and regions of the world.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 14:14:25|Editor: huaxia

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CHENGDU, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- A video of a stray dog retrieving its puppies from a swollen river recently surfaced on social media, arousing widespread sympathy and respect among netizens.

In mid-August, the Minjiang River, which flows through Pengshan District in the city of Meishan, southwest China's Sichuan Province, flooded due to a torrential rain that had lashed the province. A mother dog and a litter of five puppies, believed to be strays, were trapped on a grassy island in the middle of the river.

Xiang Qinggui, an avid swimmer and a citizen of Pengshan, rescued the mother dog and one of its puppies.

"I heard many people say the dogs were trapped in the river as I worked on equipment in a winter swimming base nearby, so I waded through the water and brought the dogs to the shore without much thought," said Xiang.

Some passers-by also joined in the dog-rescuing mission. They waded through the water and saved two puppies with a string bag.

As Xiang was preparing to venture into the river again to save the remaining pups, he was dissuaded by the police and citizens who feared the risk was too high.

At that very moment, the mother dog took the three rescued puppies to a safer place and ran back to the shore.

"The mother dog appeared very anxious as it saw the remaining stranded puppies. It bypassed the police, jumped into the river and carried its fourth puppy to the shore in its mouth after a persistent search," citizens at the site were quoted as saying.

In quick succession, the mother dog returned and carried its last puppy through the raging current of the river and set it down on the shore.

As all the six dogs arrived safely ashore, rounds of applause erupted from the onlookers.

At present, the mother and its puppies have been adopted by Ren Hongqiong, a loving citizen of Pengshan.

"I was at the scene when the dog-rescuing mission was conducted. The dogs were soaked through. I took them home as I am a dog lover, and also I have a yard to raise them in," said Ren, adding that she named the mother dog "Wangwang."

After learning the story, the public security bureau of Pengshan reached out to Ren to help her register her new pets.

Ren's life now is filled with joyous barks as the dogs cavort and gambol at her feet. Enditem
Police are currently in attendance at security alerts in Belfast and Londonderry.

In Belfast an alert is ongoing on the M1 at the Kennedy Way roundabout.

The M1 is closed in both directions between Lisburn and the Broadway intersection.

Motorists are advised to avoid the area and to seek alternative main routes for their journey.

The alert in Derry is in the Lecky Road area of the city.

Motorists are again advised to avoid the area and seek alternative routes for their journey.

"There are no further details at this time," a PSNI spokesperson said.
President Donald Trump speaks as White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (R) listens prior to Trump's Marine One departure from the South Lawn of the White House July 29, 2020 in Washington DC, for a campaign trip to Texas. Alex Wong/Getty Images

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows defended President Donald Trump describing the Food and Drug Administration as part of a "deep state" conspiracy that is slowing coronavirus treatment development to affect the November presidential election.

Meadows said in a "Fox News Sunday" interview that Trump was "right to call" out the agency in a stroke of "unprecedented action."

Trump is slated to announce a "breakthrough" coronavirus treatment Sunday evening, which Meadows said on ABC's "This Week" would put the "heat" on the agency, where "there are a number of people that do not see the same sense of urgency as he sees."

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows defended President Donald Trump's unsubstantiated accusation that the Food and Drug Administration is part of a "deep state" conspiracy to hold up the development of a treatment for the novel coronavirus.

Trump took aim at the agency in a tweet on Saturday, where he wrote that the agency was "making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics" and "obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd."

Business Insider's Dan Whateley previously reported that Trump has frequently used the term "deep state" to dismiss people and agencies around him as responsible for trying to hamper his administration, and there is no evidence the agency is delaying the development of treatments or vaccines to impact the presidential election.

Meadows said in a "Fox News Sunday" interview that "bureaucrats" were to blame for the delays, and the White House was poised to "cut the red tape."

"We're not going to cut corners on any kind of research we can do, but what we will do is cut the red tape," Meadows said. "And what the president was specifically addressing is something that I've been involved with over the last three or four weeks, is a real frustration with some of the bureaucrats to think that they can just do this the way they normally do it."

Story continues

The White House official told host Chris Wallace that Trump was "right to call" out the agency in a stroke of "unprecedented action."

"We are facing unprecedented times, which require unprecedented action," Meadows said. "This president is right to call it out, and I can tell you that the announcement that's coming today should have been made several weeks ago."

Though experts have said since the spring that a coronavirus treatment or vaccine would take until at least early 2021 to be safe for mass consumption, Meadows said Trump would announce a "breakthrough" coronavirus treatment Sunday evening.

Meadows told ABC's "This Week" in a Sunday morning interview that the announcement would put the "heat" on the agency, where "there are a number of people that do not see the same sense of urgency as he sees."

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany previously touted the "breakthrough" in a Saturday night tweet, which said Trump would appear at a 6 p.m. news conference on Sunday with Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn.

Read the original article on Business Insider
A team of medical experts sent by the Chinese government to South Sudan on Friday embarked on experience sharing with their local counterparts in a bid to strengthen the east African nation's fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since arriving in South Sudan on Wednesday, the Chinese medical expert team shared experience with frontline health workers and members of the country's COVID-19 taskforce headed by Vice President for Service Cluster, Hussein Abdelbagi.

The team also visited South Sudan's main COVID-19 testing and treatment facilities to learn more about the country's battle against COVID-19.

"The team has learnt a lot of experience from the local health professionals and also the Chinese team gave some advice on how to improve safety of health professionals," Chinese Ambassador to South Sudan, Hua Ning told Xinhua in Juba.

The eight-member team from China's Anhui Province consists of experts in the medical fields including laboratory technology, infection, insensitive care, public health, and nursing.

During their nine-day mission, the Chinese medics will share knowledge and experience with senior South Sudanese government officials, local health experts, medical institutions and also train South Sudanese medical staff on COVID-19 response.

Hua said the medical team will engage several stakeholders in South Sudan in a bid to forge a common front in tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

"The Chinese team will discuss with the South Sudanese colleagues to see how they can work together and make the preparation even better," Hua said.

South Sudan's total confirmed COVID-19 cases stood at 2,497, with 47 deaths and 1,293 recoveries as of Thursday. Enditem




Gerald Hines, the billionaire Texan property developer who built the Lipstick Building in Manhattan and skyscrapers that transformed Houston's skyline in the 1970s and 1980s, has died. He was 95.

He died Sunday, according to his firm's website.

His company, closely held Hines Group, helped develop Goldman Sachs's Jersey City tower and Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the city's tallest building, which it sold to Boston Properties.

Hines Group oversaw more than $133 billion in property and asset management holdings at the end of 2019, including properties in more than 200 cities across two dozen countries. Hines and his family have amassed a net worth of about $2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

"His firm will always be among the top 10 real-estate companies in the world as far as I'm concerned," said John Guess, president of Houston-based Guess Group Inc., a real-estate services company. "They're well respected and a safe haven for a lot of institutional investors."

Gerald D. Hines was born Aug. 15, 1925, in Gary, Indiana. He graduated from Purdue University in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Later that year, he moved to Houston to work at Texas Engineering Co., where he designed air conditioning systems. In the 1950s, while still a partner there, Hines built a 5,000 square-foot building for his neighbor. By 1957 the sideline had enough business to allow him to leave his job and set up as a full-time developer.

His big break came in 1966. Holding a set of bronze door handles, Hines walked into a meeting with Shell Oil Co. executives. Dropping them on the boardroom table, he proposed a 50-story tower his upstart firm was planning in Houston and vowed the entire development would be built to the same quality as the pristine fittings, according to "The Offshore Imperative," Tyler Priest's 2007 book about Shell.

The pitch worked. Shell signed on as the anchor tenant for the young developer's first skyscraper and ended up relocating its U.S. headquarters to the site from New York. The coup gave Hines the credibility and cachet to rebuild Houston's skyline, completing the trapezoidal headquarters of Pennzoil Co. in 1975 and the 75-floor Texas Commerce Tower in 1982 that became the city's tallest building.

The company became known for using the world's top architects to construct eye-catching structures. Hines exported this approach nationally and then globally, completing New York's oval Lipstick Building in 1986, Mexico City's Del Bosque office complex in 1997 and Barcelona's Diagonal Mar shopping center in 2001.

"We look for outstanding designs and ways to differentiate our product," Hines said at a talk at Harvard University in 2012. "When you want the best tenant at the highest price, he wants the best product."

Hines sought to minimize the firm's exposure to any single project or market. After the oil bust of the 1970s, he increasingly found partners who took equity stakes in his projects, protecting his company's balance sheet from the whipsaws of the real estate market.

Heavyweight Partners

His son Jeffrey took over as president in 1990 and led the way in attracting institutional capital to the real-estate sector. Today, Hines Group increasingly resembles a private equity firm, deploying the funds of its limited partners, who include the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. A large proportion of its business is now focused on earning fees from investing and managing third-party properties rather than relying on the large-scale developments typified by its hustling founder in its early projects.

Hines had two children, Jeff and Jennifer, with his first wife, Dorothy Schwarz. His second wife, artist Barbara Fritzsche, had two children Serena and Trevor.
One view of the site plan for the planned Sparkboro Wellness marijuana store at 1017 Simonds Road. The business plans 19 parking spaces on the site. The entrance to the Steinerfilm property with the yellow former garage at 1017 Simonds Road in the distance to the left. PreviousNext

Williamstown Zoning Board Issues Third Special Permit for a Pot Shop



The former garage at 1017 Simonds Road. Sparkboro Wellness plans to preserve the building envelope but eliminate the second floor, creating vaulted ceilings. WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.  The Zoning Board of Appeals on Thursday issued the town's third special permit to operate a marijuana retail shop.

Sparkboro Wellness, which lists a Pittsfield business address and Steve Pennisi as president, obtained the necessary town permitting to operate a store in a former garage at 1017 Simonds Road (Route 7).

The town already has one cannabis shop in operation, Silver Therapeutics on Main Street (Route 2). A second applicant, operating under the business name Elev8, holds a special permit to open a second Main Street shop but still needs to come back to the ZBA for a site plan review.

Sparkboro still has to complete the approval process with the Cannabis Control Commission in Boston, but the local permitting was completed in a two-hour hearing and a unanimous vote by the board on Thursday night.

Sparkboro was represented in Thursday's hearing by Williamstown attorney Don Dubendorf and engineer Charlie LaBatt of Guntlow and Associates.

The testimony and the board's questions focused less on the nature of the business and more on the potential impact of developing the site and ensuring that development met town codes where possible and provided mitigation when not.

In other words, it was discussed as any other retail business might be.

One abutter did bring concerns before the board, but she said her comments stemmed from the potential impact of a retail operation next door to her home she rents as a residence.

"I'm not against cannabis," said Maura Taylor, who owns the home at 1025 Simonds Road. "But the activity  I could end up losing potential real estate income from this business being there. Prior to my purchasing this home, there was a family that lived [at 1017 Simonds Road]."

ZBA member Rob Matthews pointed out that while there may be impacts from revitalizing the commercial property next to Taylor's, both are in the town's Planned Business zoning district.

"That might be true, but [a business] is something allowed by right in that zone," Matthews said. "That could become a garage tomorrow."

Town Planner Andrew Groff told the ZBA that the area in question has been zoned planned business for decades.

The board was able to address some of Taylor's concerns by pointing to a site plan by the applicant submitted that shows Sparkboro's lighting plan abides by the town code by not allowing measurable light crossing the northern boundary of the 1017 Simonds Road property.

And although the applicant already had expressed a preference to use warmer, 3,000 Kelvin lighting that produces less glare, the ZBA specified the 3,000 Kelvin fixtures as a condition of Sparkboro's permit.

The board also was able to address Taylor's concern that vehicles entering the north entrance to Sparkboro's property might cut through an easement that 1017 Simonds Road shares with its neighboring parcel. The board included in its order that Sparkboro will use curbing or some other modification to ensure that does not happen.

The only other concern raised to the ZBA was a written communication from the counsel of Steinerfilm, Inc., which expressed a worry that cars pulling in and out of the Sparkboro lot would negatively impact employees entering and leaving the manufacturing facility by its access road, located at the south end of 1017 Simonds Road.

Nobody from Steinerfilm attended Thursday's virtual hearing to address the ZBA on the matter.

Dubendorf said there was ample evidence to show that Sparkboro would not exacerbate traffic problems on a stretch of a road where southbound traffic is transitioning from 45 mph to 35 mph.

He pointed to a recent Simonds Road traffic study taken south of the intersection with Bridges Road, the "Cozy Corner" intersection south of the 1017 Simonds Road, that showed 5,500 vehicle trips per day.

Dubendorf noted that since so many of the vehicles that travel that stretch of Simonds Road/Route 7 actually turn on and off the U.S. highway at Bridges, it is reasonable to infer that the number of existing vehicle trips past 1017 Simonds Road is even higher.

The applicant, meanwhile, estimates 224 car trips per day to the planned Starkboro location.

"Even if you double that number, you're below the 10 percent trigger under our bylaw of traffic addition," Dubendorf said.

In other business on Thursday night, the ZBA approved an enclosed mud room and carriage house-like storage building for a residence on Latham Street, which is in the Village Business District.

The homeowner was before the board because the single-family home represented a pre-existing non-conforming use in the zone.

"We normally deal with extensions of nonconforming uses by businesses in residential districts," Groff told the board. "This is the opposite."
High-life musician Lucky Mensah has said he supported the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the year 2008 because the leader of the party then Prof. Evans Atta Mills appeared vulnerable and pitiful at the time.

According to the Musician, he was not really a politician but in 2016 during the campaign, he realized that almost everyone in the Creative Arts sector supported Akufo-Addo while Professor Mills was left in the corner.

He added during a one on one interview with this reporter, that top musicians like Daddy Lumba, K.K Fosu, Kwabena Kwabena, A Plus and some others neglected the late Professor John Evans Fiifi Atta Mills for Akufo Addo.

He revealed that from the way the late Prof Mills was walking alone and how he used to address people, plus the fact that he was a Fante, he felt pity for him so when the election went for a second round, he just decided to enter the studio and record a song for him.

As to why he has now decided to do music for the ruling New Patriotic Party and join president Akufo-Addos campaign, he noted that the late Prof Atta Mills deceived him and did not fulfill the promises he gave to Ghanaians, whiles John Mahama also collapsed his business.

"I am a bread baker apart from being a Musician, but during John Mahamas time my business collapsed so I decided to vote and do a song for Akufo-Addo who promised free SHS and also to fix dumsor which he has fulfilled."
An online appeal for public assistance to fund the legal defence of Julian Assange has won significant support. In the space of a few days, hundreds of people from around the world have signalled their opposition to the attempted US prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder for his exposures of American war crimes.

The crowdfunding effort was launched last Thursday by Stella Moris, Assanges partner and the mother of his two young children. The initial target of 25,000 was surpassed within some 48 hours and the fundraiser appears set to exceed its revised goal of 50,000.

An image of Assange with Moris used to promote the fundraiser

The response is further evidence of the broad international support for Assange among workers, students, young people and intellectuals which finds no expression within the official political parties in the US, Britain and Australia, or in the corporate media.

It also testifies to the manner in which the British and US authorities have run roughshod over legal norms in a bid to prevent any challenge to their attempt to destroy the WikiLeaks founder. Violations of Assanges legal and democratic rights have blocked him from participating in his own defence, and the costs associated with challenging them are substantial.

In the statement announcing the appeal, Moris, who is herself an internationally-respected human rights attorney, summed up the issues of law and democratic principles at stake in Assanges threatened extradition from Britain to the US.

Moris began by pointing to the politically-motivated and illegitimate character of the 18 US charges against Assange, 17 of them under the US Espionage Act.

Assanges crime, Moris wrote, is to have reported on matters the US would rather have kept hidden from view. He helped expose war crimes and human rights abuses. He revealed the killing of unarmed civilians and the torture of innocent people. No-one has been held responsible for the serious crimes Julian has exposed. If he, an Australian citizen living in the UK, can be successfully prosecuted, so too can journalists and publications everywhere.

She elaborated on the broader implications of the attempt to prosecute Assange for lawful publishing activities.

From 2010 to 2017, the US administration of President Barack Obama ruthlessly persecuted Assange and impanelled a secret Grand Jury to concoct charges against him.

The Obama administration however, apparently concluded that prosecuting the WikiLeaks founder would be politically inexpedient and could trigger a constitutional crisis because it would mean that every newspaper publishing the same data should be prosecuted too.

The Trump administration from the outset had targeted Assange and charged him under US laws which date back 100 years, during which time they have never been used to prosecute any publisher or journalist. The US legislation allows for no defence of public interest.

Moris said this was inseparable from the broader authoritarian agenda of the Trump administration, writing: The politics of the intention are clear; brought by an administration that refers to the press and whistleblowers as the enemy and news of importance as fake.

Moris reviewed some of the attacks on Assanges rights by the British and US authorities. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Assange had been confined to his cell for at least 23 hours per day, without visits, including from his family.

A few weeks out from final extradition hearings, set to begin on September 7, the US issued a new superseding indictment, over a year after it was required to submit its final charge sheet.

As the WSWS has documented, the superseding indictment contains no new charges or evidence. The additional material is substantially based upon the testimony of two US Federal Bureau of Investigations informants, one of whom has previously been convicted of impersonating Assange and stealing tens of thousands of dollars from WikiLeaks.

The new indictment extends the assault on press freedom, presenting WikiLeaks assistance to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as illegitimate and raising the prospect of a broader US dragnet against other members of the publishing organisation.

A WSWS perspective last week noted that the late filing of the new indictment confronted Assanges legal team with the impossible choice of whether to accept the further sabotage of their clients case by proceeding with the September hearings or prolong the endangerment of his life with more months in prison through an appeal for a delay.

In a blatant legal abuse, the WikiLeaks founder has still not been rearrested on the basis of the superseding indictment, so he is being held in Belmarsh Prison on a lapsed charge sheet.

Moris outlined the vast undertaking faced by Assanges defence. Investigating and understanding the detail, even before the threatened new indictment, is like climbing the Himalayas whilst the person most able to contribute is locked in a prisonand disabled, mentally and physically, from the level of engagement he wants and needs to give, she wrote.

Moris noted that while Assanges defenders were receiving minimum remuneration or working pro bono, the sheer volume and range of work required, means that we need to continue to raise funds to cover the mounting costs, which had exceeded 500,000 already.

Appealing for public assistance to meet the challenge, she concluded: We all recognise the responsibility placed upon us, and what is at stake, and express our gratitude to anyone who feels able to contribute.

As of this writing, 940 people had pledged a combined 41,972. A substantial proportion appears to have been raised from small donations of less than 50, indicating the involvement of working people.

Comments from some donors point to the sentiments that underlie the support for Assange.

One wrote: Julian Assange is the canary in the coalmine of the ever growing dystopian nature of governance around the world. If we can save him, we may still have a chance to turn things around. Investigative journalism must not become a crime!

Another commented: Im afraid of the future where this can be done to a journalist. Without access to information, we cannot protect ourselves from existential challenges, like crimes against the environment, democracy, consumer protection, generating refugees in wars for profit and big corporate and financial crimes.

Many expressed their appreciation to Assange. One donor wrote: Julians heroism is inspirational. More than any other individual in history, he has shone a light on the truth. His prosecution has backfired on his persecutors and they are the ones who will be judged.

Supporters from the US said the attempted prosecution of Assange was a frontal attack on their own First Amendment rights. Donors from Australia condemned the refusal of Labor and Liberal-National governments to defend the WikiLeaks founder, despite the fact that he is an Australian citizen and journalist. Some French contributors simply wrote Je suis Julian Assange.

The outpouring is an indictment of the corporate media internationally. Their coverage has followed a perverse law of inversion: the greater the attacks on Assanges legal and democratic rights, the less they have written.

This underscores the extent to which official publicationsenjoying the closest ties with the political, military and intelligence establishments, and largely staffed by self-advancing upper middle-class careeristshave dispensed with any genuine defence of press freedom.

It also demonstrates the degree to which the latent public support for Assange has been suppressed by a range of political forces This includes the pseudo-left, which abandoned the WikiLeaks founder years ago, as well as the British Labour Party, the Bernie Sanders wing of the US Democratic Party, the trade unions and all the official parties in Australia, from Labor to the Liberal-Nationals and the Greens.

The fundraiser is further confirmation that a campaign in defence of Assange and fundamental liberties must orient to the working class, the constituency for democratic rights and opposition to imperialist war.

The emerging social and political struggles of workers around the world are directed against the very forces that have spearheaded the WikiLeaks founders persecution, which is aimed at establishing a precedent for the repression of all opposition.

To donate to Assanges legal defence, follow this link: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/julianassange/
ARCHIVED - Six further boatloads of Algerian migrants add 73 to weekend total



This brings the total of irregular migrants to 132 for the weekend

Image; Cruz Roja humanitarian aid

During the last week the Region of Murcia has continued to receive boatloads of irregular migrants from Algeria, as migrant transit centres and the borders of Algeria and Morocco remain closed, so Spain is unable to repatriate arrivals on Spanish shores through the normal channels.

This year the number of migrations to Spain has been lower than normal, due prinicipally to the restrictions caused by Covid-19, but in recent weeks there has been an upsurge in activity as organised crime gangs take advantage of the opportunity to bring increased numbers of economic migrants into Spain.

The desire to seek a better life and try to find employment is understandable, as unemployment is high in Algeria, the country is suffering from severe economic problems, and opportunities, particularly for young people, are extremely limited. Political opposition against the current regime has lead to public protests and an increased level of dissatisfaction within the country, leading many particularly young people to look at Europe as potentially offering better opportunities.

The number of crossings by Algerians has increased dramatically recently; the Frontex border force said last week about crossings on the Western mediterranean route There were around 1 500 detections of illegal border crossings in the Western Mediterranean in July, 84% more than in the previous month.Despite the rise last month, the total for the first seven months of 2020, was less than half the figure from the same period in the previous year at 6 100.

The number of Algerians, who accounted for one out of every two detections on this route this year, was seven times the figure from a year ago. 

All of the migrants intercepted recently off the Murcian coast have been Algerians.

This latest batch of boats comprised 73 people in six boats on Sunday, bringing the total of irregular migrants arriving in the Region of Murcia to 132 in two days, four of the vessels intercepted southeast of the Monte de las Cenizas regional park, in Cartagena, while the other two were located off the coasts of Cartagena and Aguilas. All of those intercepted were taken to the port of Escombreras and handed over to the National Police and the Red Cross for PCR testing, the results of which will be available in around 48 hours.

Until then, the immigrants will be isolated with the travelling companions from their specific boat, and should any prove to be Covid positive, they will be hospitalised and their travelling companions quarantined for 14 days.



A busy week for Cruz Roja and the coastguard:

Last Friday evening and Saturday morning twelve boats containing a total of 138 migrants were detected off the Cartagena coastline.

3 of the migrants had to be rescued by firemen and a helicopter from the regional CEIS fire and rescue service after their boat landed in a rocky area with poor access and they attempted to climb Monte de las Cenizas.

The two men and one woman had to be airlifted from the side of the mountain.

Seven of the new arrivals later tested positive for covid.

As the week wore on there were four further lots of arrivals; on Wednesday evening 37 migrants reached Murcia in three boats; on Wednesday morning ten out of 30 were detained after a boat landed on El Portus beach at 11am in the morning and its occupants scattered in the surrounding coutryside, much to the surprise of beachgoers. Police only managed to locate 10 of the 30 in the boat, three of whom tested positive for covid. The others were never located.

On Thursday evening a further 48 migrants arrived in four boats. The interceptions took place after 10 pm, when four boats with 8, 11, 14 and 15 irregular migrants on board, respectively, were sighted southeast of Monte de las Cenizas, in Cartagena.

On Friday evening and the early hours of Saturday morning, a further six boats containing 81 migrants were detected off the Murcian coastline.

NB: The migrants are referred to as irregular immigrants by the EU; the Spanish media tend to call them sin papeles meaning those with no paperwork entering the country illegally, others refer to them as illegal migrants. The phrase irregular migrants is used on MT in an attempt to convey that these are not refugees, but economic migrants, in this case from Algeria, entering Spain and the EU in an illegal fashion, without passports or documentation and without any legal right to enter the EU as Algeria is not an EU member and there is no migration agreement between the two countries.

Donate to Cruz Roja; Humanitarian work to ensure those arriving in Spain are treated with dignity is undertaken by the humanitarian organisation Cruz Roja. If you would like to donate, here is the link: Cruz Roja Espanola

Further reading

EU Action plan against Migrant Smuggling 2015/2020 Click to read

EU Directive f2008/115/EC Common standards and procedures in EU Member States for returning illegally staying third country nationals. Click to read

FRONTEX european coast guard and border control agency. This explains more about the migration issue and shows the different routes taken. Our routes here are the "Western Mediterranean" routes used principally by Moroccans And Algerians.Click Frontex
Washington: President Donald Trump says he helped break through a regulatory "logjam" to grant emergency authorisation of convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19, despite his own scientists calling for more studies to definitively show whether it works.

The announcement, at a news conference where Trump was flanked by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, drew criticism from physicians and scientists who said their statements misled the public by overstating the evidence behind the therapy.

Stephen Hahn, commissioner of food and drugs at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), centre, speaks during a news conference at the White House as President Trump and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar look on. Credit:Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg

"I watched this in horror," said Eric Topol, an influential physician and scientist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. "These are basically just exploratory analyses that don't prove anything. It's just extraordinary to declare this as a breakthrough. . . . All this does is jeopardise ever getting the truth."

The Infectious Diseases Society of America released a statement noting that while there are "some positive signals that convalescent plasma can be helpful in treating individuals with COVID-19", the society believed its benefits needed to be demonstrated in clinical trials that randomly assign patients to receive either plasma or a placebo before it is authorised for wider use.
ByteDance investors are in talks to use their stakes in the Chinese technology firm to help finance their bid for its popular short-video app TikTok, according to people familiar with the matter. ByteDance has been in talks to divest TikTok's North America, Australia and New Zealand operations to potential acquirers, including Microsoft Corp and Oracle Corp. President Donald Trump has ordered the Chinese company to sever ties with the social media app in the United States, citing concerns over the safety of the personal data it handles.

Some ByteDance investors, including investment firm General Atlantic, are vying to own large stakes in the TikTok assets for sale, the sources said. Under their restructuring plan, Microsoft or Oracle could receive a minority stake in the assets, the sources added.

The TikTok assets for sale could be worth between $25 billion and $30 billion, the sources said. To help fund their bid, the ByteDance investors are discussing exchanging some or all of their stakes in the Chinese company with equity in the TikTok assets, according to the sources.

The ByteDance investors' plan faces long odds and significant hurdles, the sources said. Trump administration officials have said they expect a major U.S. company to lead the TikTok deal and ringfence the app technologically from ByteDance. A U.S. government panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), has to sign off on any deal that ByteDance reaches.

Nevertheless, the push by some ByteDance investors for a bigger role in the TikTok deal underscores their efforts to give the Chinese company more options and avert a fire sale. Some of them had to convince ByteDance's founder and CEO Yiming Zhang to let go of TikTok, the sources said.

Also read: TikTok to take legal action against Trump administration over app's ban in US

Microsoft remains the lead bidder for the TikTok assets because of its deep pockets and technical capacity to design new algorithms for TikTok that will be separate from ByteDance and its Chinese short video app Douyin, according to the sources. Microsoft is working on a blueprint on how TikTok would be separated operationally from ByteDance after a deal is reached, which the Redmond, Washington-based company has said it hopes to ink by Sept. 15, the sources added. CFIUS would then monitor the implementation of the deal under a lengthy transition period, according to the sources.

The sources requested anonymity because the matter is confidential. TikTok and General Atlantic declined to comment, while ByteDance, Microsoft and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment. As relations between the United States and China deteriorate over trade, Hong Kong's autonomy, cybersecurity and the spread of the novel coronavirus, TikTok has emerged as a flashpoint in the dispute between the world's two largest economies.

While TikTok is best known for its anodyne videos of people dancing and going viral among teenagers, U.S. officials have expressed concerns that information on users could be passed on to China's communist government. Trump has said he would support an effort by Microsoft to buy TikTok's American operations if the U.S. government got a "substantial portion" of the proceeds, but has also said there are other credible buyers such as Oracle.

Also read: Unusual for US to get any cut from TikTok sale, says WH Economic Advisor

CRACKDOWN ON CHINESE-OWNED APPS

The White House has stepped up its efforts to purge what it deems "untrusted" Chinese apps from U.S. digital networks. Beyond TikTok, Trump has also issued an order that would prohibit transactions with Tencent Holding Ltd's messenger app WeChat.

Earlier this year, Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd sold Grindr LLC, a popular gay dating app it bought in 2016, for $620 million after being ordered by CFIUS to divest. ByteDance acquired Shanghai-based video app Musical.ly in a $1 billion deal in 2017 and relaunched it as TikTok the following year. ByteDance did not seek approval for the acquisition from CFIUS, which reviews deals for potential national security risks. Reuters reported last year that CFIUS had opened an investigation into TikTok.

Also read: Oracle holds preliminary talks with ByteDance; enters race to buy TikTok

TikTok said last week it planned to file a lawsuit against an Aug. 6 executive order by Trump prohibiting transactions with the app and ByteDance. ByteDance was valued at as much as $140 billion earlier this year when one of its shareholders, Cheetah Mobile, sold a small stake in a private deal, Reuters has reported. The start-up's investors include Japan's SoftBank Group Corp.
In 1971, he married Margaret Maggie Chase. They had two sons: John and Henry, who is married to former President George W. Bushs daughter, Jenna. In 1973, Hager contracted polio and as a result was wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life. But he made the decision early on not to let the wheelchair define or limit him.

While working as an executive for the American Tobacco Company in Richmond, he became active with the Republican Party of Virginia. He was elected lieutenant governor in 1997, and later served as director of Virginias homeland security under Democratic Gov. Mark Warner. Former RTD reporter Tyler Whitley noted of him that where one or more Republicans gather, Hager would likely be there.

In 2001, Hager ran for governor, but lost his bid to then-Attorney General Mark Earley. In 2004, Bush appointed him assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Educations Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services. Hager resigned in August 2007 following his election as chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia. He served as party chairman for one year but was forced from the seat in 2008 by a staunch conservative candidate when the state GOP began its hard turn to the right.
Street food is an indispensable part of Saigon culture and life, a highlight that leaves a deep impression on visitors to the city, now named after Vietnams beloved President Ho Chi Minh.

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Consumers have turned to online shopping in droves since the second wave of COVID-19 struck, and local street food businesses have taken different initiatives to survive and not be left behind.

Though the number of diners has fallen by up to 70 percent, this business remains open so the owners can pay rent and wages.

After trying different ways to survive, the owner decided to move to online sales with home delivery and has introduced a host of attractive promotions.

Since COVID-19 returned at the end of July, ordering food and beverages via smartphone apps has become increasingly common and been a lifesaver for the catering industry in general and street food vendors in Ho Chi Minh City in particular.

No matter their size, however, food businesses must focus on pandemic prevention measures for both customers and delivery staff.

Many businesses have set up strict prevention measures for serving diners in-house, such as wearing face masks, taking temperatures, and using hand sanitiser.

Thanks to quickly making changes to adapt to the new business conditions during the pandemic, the online food market has enabled local people to still enjoy their favourite street food while saving the citys culinary industry./.VNA

Migrant workers struggle to survive amid second COVID-19 outbreak Migrant workers in HCM City are seeking part-time work to compensate for reduced hours after the second COVID-19 outbreak.
Recently President Trump called off the scheduled review talk by the US and China on the trade deal last week saying I dont want to talk to China right now. Is the trade deal a good remedy for the unbalanced trade relations with China or is it going to facilitate a further integration with China that will eventually harm the American people?

Trade Deal or De-couple? Does Trump Have a Dangerous Hope?  Zooming In | The China Angle

Welcome to Zooming Ins China Angle, I am Simone Gao. Recently the Trump administration has expressed satisfaction with how China has been purchasing US agricultural products. However, the president called off the scheduled review talk by the two parties on the trade deal last week saying I dont want to talk to China right now. Does the president still want a trade deal with China? Is the trade deal a good remedy for the unbalanced trade relations with China or is it going to facilitate a further integration with China that will eventually harm the American people? Lets start todays inquiry by hearing these words from President Trumps national economic advisor Larry Kudlow.

In another fox news interview, Kudlow said China has been buying more agricultural products than we have even seen before. In 2017, the peak year for Chinas purchase, the American farm products they bought occupies 20% of its entire agricultural imports. This year, that number jumps to 40-45%.

However, Even if China can buy enough soybeans, corn or pork to meet its promises on agriculture, its unlikely it can buy enough oil and gas to meet those on energy. The airplane orders will also drop due to diminished travel.

Nevertheless, the president and ambassador Lighthizer were happy about the progress so far, thats why the president tweeted that the trade deal is intact.But, just last Saturday, the president called off the scheduled trade deal review talk by the two parties. He simply said: I dont want to talk to China right now.

What made the president not want to talk to China right now? We dont really know for sure.

What we do know is that on one hand, China ramped up buying US farm products, on the other hand, they keep stealing U.S. intellectual properties. And the newest development is they put in serious efforts to compromise Trumps 2020 presidential bid.

Since June, fake social media accounts from a pro-Chinese Communist Party spam network called Spamouflage Dragon have posted a wealth of English-language videos that attacked the Trump administration and its foreign policy.

Starting mid-July, English-language videos popped up on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, bashing the Trump administration for its policy on China, its handling of the pandemic, the racial inequality, and its threat to ban TikTok.

Headlined in Chinese but with English subtitles, All of these videos were poorly made, marked with language errors, awkward automated voice-overs, and posted by fake accounts with AI-generated profile pictures.

It is no secret that the Chinese Communist Party prefers Joe Biden over Donald Trump for 2020. What they are doing now is likely a common strategy best described in a Chinese idiom as pretending to advance along one path while secretly going along another. That is: they want to use the trade deal to pacify president Trump just enough that he wont proceed with real devastating measures against the Communist regime. Meanwhile they do their best to damage the chances that Trump will be reelected. They wait for Biden to become the president to redo or scratch the trade deal.

At this point, I think it is critically important for the president to rethink the whole U.S.-China trade deal in order to make a final decision on whether the U.S. should de-couple from Communist China. There are two things that have to be considered in this evaluation process. First, whether China will honor the entire trade deal, especially whether they will be able to make the structural changes that America demands. Second, if they cant make those structural changes, will a more integrated U.S. and Chinese economy that might result from the phase one trade deal hurt America.

Lets start with the first one. Can China make the essential structural changes to its economy. I have talked about this in my very first China Angle. I believe the Chinese Communist Party can not and will not make these changes because those practices are fundamental to whether the Chinese Communist Party can stay in power.

Why? Think about it in this way. A real market economy requires certain qualities from its corresponding political system. The most important ones are individual rights, private property rights, a strong rule of law, and a limited government. These qualities fundamentally contradict how the communist party rules. In a Communist society, there is no such concept of individual rights and private property. Everything and everyone either belongs to the Party or is controlled by the Party or both. There is no independent rule of law. The Party is above the law.

You have the state-owned enterprises in China, but even the private companies are tightly controlled by the Party. They need to have good relations with party elites in order to obtain good contracts and seek protection.

Have the Chinese people tried to change their political system? Yes, they have. The sincerest and most daring effort for political reform from the Chinese people and some of the open-minded Communist leaders resulted in a bloody crackdown. Yes, I am talking about the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement. Deng Xiaoping in the end chose the Party rule over peoples yearning for democracy. Students and Chinese citizens were massacred.

After Tiananmen, Chinese communist leaders successfully channeled the countrys energy into pursuing one goal: money. Political reform is past tense.

Now the Trump administration is demanding structural changes to US-China trade relations. What does it really mean to the Chinese Communist Party? It means they have to change the way they run the Chinese economy, change the way they run the country and essentially change how the Communist Party stays in power.

Lets take state subsidies, for example. China has been subsidizing its state-owned and state directed industries for years. The cost of Huaweis 5G deployment is 40 percent lower than the next European bidder because of such subsidies. It is one of the key reasons why Chinese companies outperform their competitors worldwide.

Huaweis success is the result of a communist party commanded industrial policy. It is the manifestation of the paramount power of the Party. It is how the communist party envisions, under its leadership, the country will achieve Made in China 2025 and eventually replace America as the worlds economic and technological leader. It is how the Party rules and how China works.

How can they easily give that up? In fact, under Xi Jinping, the Party is tightening control of Chinas economy and the Chinese people. The Party is reversing privatization by installing more Party apparatus in private sectors, and by developing AI and surveillance technology, the Partys grip on the Chinese people is tighter than ever.

If the Chinese Communist Party fundamentally wont fulfill the entire trade deal, why are they purchasing more agricultural products from the U.S.? like I said before, I am afraid what they are really trying to do is to use the trade deal to pacify President Trump just enough that he wont take further steps to cut off the CCPs lifeline.

The president has already put sanctions on Huawei that made it unable to continue its production of high-end smartphones. Sanctions on top Chinese officials over Hong Kong and Xinjiang sent a big shock wave to the political circle. Kicking Chinese companies out of the American financial market cuts their cash supplies. The next step is to put sanctions on financial institutions who have business dealings with the Chinese and Hong Kong officials who are already sanctioned for human rights violations. What sanctions will those be? It is likely cutting these banks out of the U.S. dollar denominated system, also called the SWIFT system. If that happens, the banks would no longer be able to perform U.S. dollar based transactions which will be a death sentence to these banks. Theoretically, America can put such secondary sanctions on all Chinese banks and financial institutions that have been implicated in human rights abuses. If these sanctions took place, the Chinese economy would take a fatal blow.

Beijing definitely does not want the President to take steps like that. In fact, rumors just came out of the Beidaihe resorts where the current and previous Chinese Communist Leaders meet to discuss and decide on important state affairs. The rumor had it that the leadership has decided to be tough on 3 areas and soft on 3 other areas. They need to be tough on the Chinese people, on propaganda and on Hong Kong, but be soft on the United States, on the west and on the actions the party takes.

If the rumor is true, that will explain why the CCP increased purchasing of the American agricultural products  they did so to get the presidents hopes up. The hope that China is willing to fulfill the trade deal and what the president has been fighting for is within reach.

But that hope is dangerous.

We already talked about why the Chinese Communist Party wont make those structural changes.

The real danger comes when on one hand, the CCP does not intend to honor the entire deal, but on the other hand, it gets the American economy further intertwined with the Chinese economy. For example, one of the main items in the phase one trade deal is to get China to open up its financial market. While it means wall street will be able to make more money from China, it also means that the American capital will pour into China to sustain the livelihood of the Chinese economy and the Chinese Communist Party since the main industrial sectors in China are controlled by the several families of the CCP leadership. When the full merge happens, the Chinese economy will be so tied to the U.S. economy that the failure of the Chinese economy will jeopardize the financial security of the average Americans. We all know that the U.S. federal pension funds, teachers retirement funds, and university endowments are all funding Chinese companies, and many of those companies pose national security concerns, are human rights abusers and conduct fraudulent practices. The scale of this investment is increasing rapidly and quickly approaching one trillion dollars and beyond. By then the Chinese Communist Partys lobbying power in the American government will be so strong that anything against the CCP will not stand a chance.

Another worrying factor is that the Chinese Communist Party is quickly catching up on military capabilities. According to Michael Pillsbury, Senior advisor in the Department of Defence and president Trumps chief China advisor, China is surpassing Americas weapon systems one after another. Pillsbury said if the U.S. engages in a war with China on the South China sea, the U.S. will likely win a short battle if it lasts less than two days. If it lasts more than 2 days, China will probably win because of its logistics advantages. Former intelligence head of the pacific fleet James Fanell also told me that there is uncertainty about whether the U.S. will be able to protect Taiwan if China invades Taiwan.

So if the U.S. is intertwined with China economically, and their military power surpasses ours, the U.S. will have no means to contain China, let alone protect the world.

This is a possible scenario. It has not happened yet, but we are quickly approaching that threshold. America has a small window right now to really fight back and get on top again. But China is using the trade deal to numb us. To make us have a false hope. A dangerous false hope. We need to be aware of that. This has been the China Angle. I am Simone Gao, thanks for watching and see you next time.
Violence against protesters in Iraq has been rising sharply in recent days, especially after Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi traveled to Washington for the second round of the country's strategic dialogue with the United States.

Immediately after returning from the United States, Kadhimi traveled to Basra with a number of his ministers to follow up on the rising violence against protesters in the oil-rich southern province.

He visited the family of Riham Yacoub, a female doctor and activist who was assassinated in Basra on Aug. 19.

Speaking to Yacoub's family during his visit, Kadhimi said, I swear by the blood of the martyr (Yacoub) that the criminals will not escape punishment no matter how long it takes, and that the blood of the martyr Hisham al-Hashimi and the martyr Tahseen Osama (a female activist killed in Basra by unidentified gunmen on Aug. 19) will not be wasted.

Kadhimi had made the same promise when he visited the family of murdered Iraqi analyst Hisham al-Hashimi on July. 6. No one has been charged with his killing, nor have the results of any investigation been released.

This rise in the number of assassinations comes in conjunction with dissatisfaction expressed by some Iraqi militias with Kadhimi's trip to the United States and the lack of a timetable for the departure of US troops. Although US President Donald Trump repeated earlier claims that US troops will eventually leave Iraq, those calling for an imminent withdrawal nonetheless criticized Kadhimi, and the militias resumed their attacks inside Iraq.

The Iraqi government's failure to bring the perpetrators of these recent assassinations to justice has led many public figures and groups to call for taking up arms to protect protesters and activists.

Famous Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi, who in 2014 won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, published a Facebook post on Aug. 20 calling on Iraqi tribes to take up arms to defend protesters, who are being killed in southern provinces.

O brave warrior tribes! Where are your arms and your courage for your protesting children who are killed in daylight and in cold blood? Saadawi wrote. If the government is not undertaking its responsibility to protect the citizens, are you unable to protect your children from these criminal gangs?!

Omar al-Jammal, a prominent activist, tweeted on Aug. 22, It is now time to form The Revolution Protection Brigades and stop the killers of the October heroes  referring to those participating in the ongoing protests that started last October. He also posted on his Facebook page: Take up your arm into your pocket and protect yourself  they had killed Hisham al-Hashimi and Riham Yacoub and many others before you.

Following the increase in assassinations and the call to take up arms, several tribal men from Muthanna governorate appeared in a video on Aug. 23 holding weapons in their hands, condemning the recent assassinations and declaring their readiness to protect the protesters against the killers.

The current situation is very similar to the Sunni uprising in 2013 before the rise of the Islamic State that took over a third of Iraq in the middle of 2014. The uprising started when groups of civil protesters began demanding their civil rights in Sunni provinces in northern and western Iraq.

At the time, the Shiite religious authority in Najaf expressed full support to the protesters and their legitimate demands, calling upon former Prime Minister Nouri al-Malikis government to respond to their demands and avoid using violence against them.

But Maliki's government not only neglected their demands but also suppressed protests by violent methods, leading to hundreds being killed in Hawija in Kirkuk province and other Sunni areas. This came in conjunction with a rise of unidentified gunmen killing activists and public figures in the Sunni areas. These developments gradually led to rising sympathy toward armed groups calling for confrontation with the government forces and unidentified militias. Finally, the expansion of chaos and violence prepared for the quick fall of Sunni areas into the hands of terrorist groups.

The current protests have also been following the same patterns. The civil, peaceful protests that started last year have faced severe violence, and the government turned deaf ears to it despite the support of the religious authority in Najaf. The violence and chaos have been increasing, while the government is unable to impose order and stop the violence, identify the perpetrators and prosecute them.
Kim Jong Un has reportedly given his sister Kim Yo Jong partial authority to oversee "general state affairs" in order to ease the North Korean leader's workload. Reports also suggest that the Supreme Leader might be in a coma and that is why his sister has taken over.

If the reports are to be believed, Kim Yo Jong will become the first female leader in the extremely male-dominated political scenario in North Korea. And while Yo Jong is just replacing her brother, she is often considered to be more dangerous than him.

Case in point: It was Kim Yo Jong who was behind the blowing up of the symbolic Joint Liaison Office between North and South Korea in Kaesong in June.

The move is symbolic as blowing up a liaison office sends a powerful message. And spearheading the change is the tough Yo Jung.

READ: All About Kim Jong Uns Tough' Sister Kim Yo Jong Who May be First Woman Leader of North Korea

READ: Kim Jong Un 'Mocking' Death Frequently Has Given Internet New Life With Memes

Kim Yo Jong as the world's first female dictator is a terrifying idea though, especially since she has made it abundantly clear that she intends to carry forward her brother's legacy as the Supreme Leader. Yet, for many around the world, it has been a little difficult to look past her gender.

Women politicians have always been viewed with a differential lens of bias-- with dollops of sexism. While the underlying tone is always that of doubt, whether the woman in question will be able to fit the shoes of her male predecessors. Perhaps, that is why great female politicians of the world like Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel and Hilary Clinton have had to fight twice as hard and scream twice as loud to make their voices heard - to merely be considered as equal with their male counterparts.

That is also perhaps why we weren't shocked to see that around the world, people were searching for nude photos of Kim Yo Jong. According to Google Trends, there has been a spike in search for "Kim Yo Jong Nude" in the past 24 hours. Some have also been searching for Kim Yo Jong Feet. In India, people have been desperately Googling to come across "hot pics" of the politician.

Take a look:

Photo: Google Trends Photo: Google Trends

Kim Yo Jong may not be nicer than her brother. She may be twice as more dangerous. She may run a dictatorial regime more stringent and more authoritative than her brother ever did. And that is terrifying. But that does not justify sexualising and objectifying her.

North Korea has always been staunchly patriarchal. Women in North Korea are expected to abide by gender norms which dictate that they stay at home and take care of the family. Accounts of women who managed to defect and escape the country show that domestic abuse and gender violence is common in the country.

An interesting report by CNN talks about how Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo Jong's father, Kim Jong II, had probably refrained from naming his daughter his successor fearing gender bias.

According to the report, Kim Jong II had always spoken highly of his daughters who he believed were more intelligent than his sons. In fact, reports suggest that Kim Jong II was not too keen on his sons and did not approve of their activities either. On the contrary, he was extremely fond of his youngest daughter, Kim Yo Jong.

But when it came to naming his successor, the former ruler chose the conventional route. But now, decades later, Kim Yo Jong is finally emerging as the new leader of North Korea, a role even her father would have approved of. Yet, clearly the world is unable to accept the fact that a woman too could be dictator - strict, authoritative and commanding, traits not commonly attributed as "feminine", especially in a patriarchal society.
The ballot box as Pandoras Box By Michael R. Shannon

You can add another item to the list of shortages in our current age of the China Flu. Political trust is harder to find than disinfectant wipes. With the suspicion level this high, one would think political leaders on both sides would be working hard to make sure the November election runs smoothly and results up and down the tickets are reported quickly. Unfortunately, this time suspense may be killing us before and after the polls close. The Washington Post (better known here as the WoePost) once again has the bad news. In an analysis of the upcoming presidential election the headline reads: Barring a landslide, what's probably not coming on Nov. 3? A result in the race for the White House. With the exception of the victory by Donald Trump in 2016, nothing could be better calculated to create suspicion among the losers of the presidential contest than delaying the final result for a week or more. Voters want the results of elections to be clear, prompt and final. Waiting while ballots are counted in some backroom only creates suspicion that someone is monkeying with the count. The cause of the predicted delay is yet another reform of the voting process by busybody dogooders that only serves to divide the electorate and make elections more expensive. Conditions that are the exact opposite of what the left claims to want. Our culprit here is mail balloting. Voting by mail doubles the cost of elections for candidates at a minimum and makes money  along with its handmaiden, wealthy candidates  all that much more important. Before the advent of mail balloting and early voting the greatest expenditures for candidates occurring in the final two weeks of the election just prior to election day. Thats when voters began to really focus on making their decisions. Mail and early voting expands that highexpenditure window by at least two weeks and sometimes four. When the window for persuading voters doubles in length, so do the expenditures. I worked in the very first mailonly election in Colorado. Research showed in the past about 8 percent of the electorate voted. The mail ballot upended that. Polling showed 17 percent were likely to cast a mail ballot and even worse, there was no way to predict which voters would be among the 17 percent. Instead of concentrating communication efforts on frequent voters and new registrations, my client had to mail EVERY voter EVERY time we communicated. The cost to conduct the campaign exploded. Mail balloting is also anonymous and atomized. Instead of meeting at the polling place on election day in a community effort to reaffirm our public commitment to democratic participation, voters are isolated, connected only by the glue on the back of a postage stamp. Thanks to the Flu Manchu, this is shaping up to be an electionbymail and bureaucrats arent prepared. In Kentucky, nearly 1 million voters requested mail ballots, vastly more than the roughly 50,000 voters who usually vote absentee. In New York, roughly 10 times the number of ballots mailed four years ago have been requested for Tuesday's primary. Beginning the mail count on election day is going to produce extraordinary delays in tabulating final results. As the WoePost says counting isnt easy, for a process that includes opening envelopes, verifying voter identity and scanning ballots into machines. The Democrat secretary of state in Pennsylvania identified the problem and convinced the legislature to allow her to begin counting mail ballots the morning of election day. It wasnt enough. It still took 10 days to complete the count. In a primary election where the results are intramural this lengthy delay will cause grumbling, but not insurrection. In a general election, for all the marbles, this delay is courting disaster. The real solution to the delay dilemma is to revert to inperson voting with limited absentee voting. The stopgap solution  which will require new law in state legislatures  is to make the final day for postmarking a mail ballot at least one week before election day. Mail ballots should be counted on a daily basis as they arrive, thus avoiding a democracy cram session where all ballots are counted the night of the election. The daily count must be absolutely secret  with felony penalties for leaking information  and the mail ballots retained in a secure location in the event of a recount. That way on election night after in person ballots are counted, the mail totals are added and voters know the outcome that evening. None of that will happen. Election bureaucrats are too hidebound and legislators arent focused on the problem. Unless there is a landslide for either President Trump or Gropey Joe Biden the nation will be hit with another divisive controversy that will further alienate an angry electorate. Michael R. Shannon is a public relations and advertising consultant with corporate, government and political experience around the globe. He is a dynamic and entertaining keynote speaker. He can be reached at mandate.mmpr (at) gmail.com. He is also the author of Conservative Christian's Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now with added humor!). Home
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 11:56:13|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- A group of Republicans opposing U.S. President Donald Trump will hold an alternative event starting on Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina to the upcoming 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC).

Organized by former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, a conservative who ran for governor in 2008 as a Republican, the four-day gathering is called "Convention on Founding Principles"

"I've got a far better and informative alternative to the RNC - watch the Convention on Founding Principles," Orr tweeted on Sunday.

Speakers include former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017; former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci; and former CIA director Michael Hayden.

This year's RNC is going to kick off on Monday in Charlotte, where over 300 delegates will meet in person to nominate Trump for a second term.

Trump, who plans to deliver an acceptance speech at the White House on Thursday night, will make a stop in Charlotte on Monday, according to the White House.

Multiple protesters against the RNC were arrested on Friday and Saturday nights in Charlotte. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that police officers used their bikes to put crowds back and pepper spray on those who advanced on them.

The RNC comes three days after the conclusion of the virtually-held 2020 Democratic National Convention that officially nominated former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden for president. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 15:07:25|Editor: huaxia

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SEOUL, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Six more U.S. soldiers in South Korea tested positive for COVID-19 amid the rising worry about a recent surge in locally confirmed cases, the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) said Monday.

The USFK said in a statement that six USFK service members were confirmed with the virus after arriving in South Korea between Aug. 10 and 21.

Four service members arrived at Osan Air Base aboard U.S. government-chartered flights from the United States on Aug. 10 and 19. Osan Air Base is located in Pyeongtaek, 70 km south of Seoul.

Two service members arrived at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, on commercial flights from the United States on Aug. 12 and 21.

The confirmed patients have been transferred to designated isolation facilities at Camp Humphreys or the Osan Air Base, both in Pyeongtaek.

The total number of infections among the USFK-affiliated personnel rose to 166, according to Yonhap news agency.

It came amid the growing worry here about the recent surge in locally confirmed cases.

In the latest tally, South Korea reported 266 more cases of COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total number of infections to 17,665.

The daily caseload fell below 300 for four days, but it grew in triple digits for 11 straight days owing to infections in Seoul and its surrounding Gyeonggi province linked to church services and a massive rally in mid-August.

"Despite the recent confirmed cases, USFK remains at a high level of readiness with less than 1 percent of its active duty service members currently confirmed positive with COVID-19," the USFK said. Enditem
Police arrest stolen vehicle suspect who fled, entered occupied home

The homeowner was able to get out of the home safely, but Aberdeen police are now negotiating the surrender of the suspect.
Why it matters: Since 2016, Facebook has had to deal with the problem of election interference. We can expect it to happen again this November, but rather than coming from the likes of Russia, the social network is preparing for post-election meddling from President Trump.

Since admitting that foreign powers used the platform to influence the 2016 election through misinformation campaigns, Facebook has implemented a number of solutions to try and address similar problems occurring again: War rooms, postcards, new policies, collaboration with intelligence agencies, and more.

The New York Times reports that Facebook employees are now running through different post-election scenarios as part of its efforts to battle election interference, including attempts by Trump and his team to call the results into question.

Citing people with knowledge of Facebooks plans, one scenario being prepared for is Trump using the service to delegitimize the results and wrongly state he won another four-years in office. He could also claim the results are invalid due to the use of mail-in ballotsan allegation that got him into trouble with Twitter last May.

Facebook will have to tread carefully to avoid accusations of censorship and conservative bias, of course. Unlike Twitter, it has never flagged any of Trumps tweets, priding itself as a platform for free speech; it was only a few months ago that Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook does not want to be an arbiter of truth.

Zuckerberg has reportedly told staff that should any politician try to claim victory early on the site, it would consider adding a label explaining that the results were not final. Theres also talk of a Kill Switch for political advertising, which would turn off all political ads after November 3 if the election outcome was not immediately clear or the results are disputed.

Trump is no fan of Facebook, and this news will likely sour the president's relationship with social media firms even more. The lengths to which Big Tech will go to obstruct President Trump truly know no bounds, said Trump campaign spokeswoman Samantha Zager. Facebook is a social media website  not the arbiter of election results.
State premiers are being blamed for splitting communities with border closures that put jobs at risk, prompting federal Coalition MPs to ramp up calls for intervention to ease the controls.

The backbench demands add to pressure for national principles to fix the problem, as the Business Council of Australia and other industry groups slam the "patchwork" of different rules across the country.

Federal MPs and business groups are pushing governments to be clearer about border restrictions.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison urged state and territory leaders to avoid border controls unless they were essential for health, in another sign of federal concern at the damage to the economy.

But Mr Morrison has been unable to convince the states and territories to scale back their restrictions despite discussions about how to define coronavirus "hotspots" in the cities and regions.
Flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress, John Dramani Mahama says the Akufo-Addo-led government is responsible for the growing disenchantment with Ghanas democratic system among the citizenry.



He said, One of my disappointments especially with the Nana Addo administration is that they have shaken the belief of our people in our democratic system; because theyve created the impression that for politics the end is just to gain power.



And so just say whatever you think the people will want to hear and get political power for yourself, and once you get it whether you deliver or dont deliver you dont really care.



However, he says unlike the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and its leadership, he delivers the truth and tries not to build castles in the air for constituents when communicating his vision and plans for them.



One of the things Ive tried to stand by is the truth. And not to overly raise the expectations of people but say exactly what vision I have and how I intend to achieve it. And the thing about me is Im a realist, he said.



However, he bemoaned the actions of the Akufo-Addo led administration while accusing it of being responsible for the diminishing faith in the countrys democratic process.



Youll notice that until recently a lot of people if you ask them, even most of the opinion polls that have been done, if you look at it comparatively from Rawlings, Kufuor, Atta Mills, my time, the number of people who said they wont vote was minimal.



Since Akufo Addo came into office, the number of people who say they wont vote has risen because they believe that politicians are taking them for a ride. And so they extend it to the whole political class but they dont realise that it is a particular administration that made promises that they knew they couldnt achieve, the NDC flagbearer stated in an interview, Sunday.

Source: Myjoyonline.com









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Retired Wing Commander IK Khanna who trained the Indian Air Force's first batch of female pilots, says the Netflix film Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl is inaccurate. In an opinion column for The Print, he wrote that under his watch, all women pilots were treated as equals, and "No one had to run to their room to change as shown in Gunjan Saxena."

He wondered if the film's screenplay was shared with the IAF before the film began shooting. Sharing a few details Khanna revealed, "I was one of the instructors back in July 1994 when the first batch of seven women pilots arrived at the Air Force Station at Yelahanka, Bengaluru, to commence training on IAF transport aircraft. Gender bias has been part of Indian society for ages, but women have been part of the defence services in many fields for years."He added, "And to believe that Gunjan Saxena, or for that matter any other woman pilot, was subjected to arm wrestling-as the film on her shows!"

Sreevidya Rajan Revealed She Is The First Female IAF Pilot After the film's release on August 12, one of the coursemates of Gunjan Saxena, Sreevidya Rajan revealed that she was the first female IAF pilot to enter a war zone and not Gunjan. She went on to claim that contrary to the film Gunjan was not the only lady pilot to be posted at the Udhampur base. Sreevidya's Facebook Post Sreevidya wrote in a Facebook post, "In the movie, Gunjan Saxena was shown as the only lady pilot to fly in Kargil operations. This is factually incorrect. We were posted together to Udhampur and when the Kargil conflict started, I was the first woman pilot to be sent along with the male counterparts in the first detachment of our unit which deployed at Srinagar." Gunjan Saxena Released On Netflix On August 12 Since the release of Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, several veterans of the IAF have slammed the film for a negative portrayal of the Indian Air Force.

Gunjan Saxena: Sreevidya Rajan Reveals Why She Didn't Raise Objections Before Film's Release

Gunjan Saxena Reacts To Sreevidya Rajan's Claims Of Being First Female Combat Pilot
AMHERST  The Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield has sold its Newman Catholic Center on the grounds of the University of Massachusetts for $12.5 million to the university.

The money will be used to construct a new center on land across the street that the university will ground lease to the diocese for $2.1 million for 99 years, according to a statement on the centers website.

Until the new center opens, the diocese will lease space in the current building from UMass.

The deal with the University of Massachusetts Building Authority is said to have been negotiated over five years, and to be mutually beneficial.

The three-story, 58,000-square-foot building includes a chapel, banquet hall, library and classrooms and was built in 1963, the year of the universitys centennial when enrollment was starting to expand along with residential construction.

Its location at 472 North Pleasant Street, where its neighbors include the Isenberg School of Management, is today considered a southeastern gateway to the campus.

UMass spokesman Edward Blaguszewski is quoted on the website as referring to the centers location as one of significant long-term strategic importance to the campus.

The Rev. Gary Dailey, who has served as director of the center for the diocese, called construction of a new center an exciting new opportunity for our campus ministry, which has seen growth in recent years and one that ensures our presence on the UMass campus for many years to come.

The announcement by Archbishop-designate Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis, who has served as Springfield bishop since 2014 until his recent appointment in St. Louis where he will be installed Aug. 25, expressed gratitude for the completion of the transaction.

I am most grateful to the countless diocesan and university officials, along with Father Gary Dailey and his staff, who have all worked so diligently to bring this complex transaction to completion, Rozanskis statement said in part.

I am especially grateful to Colebrook Realty for their efforts on behalf of the diocese, guiding and advising us throughout the years of negotiations. I am happy we were able to bring this exciting endeavor to fruition as one of my final official acts, one which will be a blessing to our diocesan church for generations to come.
The Trump administration's latest effort to use COVID-19 rapid tests  touted by one senior official as a "turning point" in arresting the coronavirus's spread within nursing homes  is running into roadblocks likely to limit how widely they'll be used.

Federal officials are distributing point-of-care antigen tests  which are cheaper and faster than tests that must be run by a lab  to 14,000 nursing homes to increase routine screening of residents and staff. The initial distribution targets nursing homes in hot spots and those with at least three COVID-19 cases, senior Trump administration officials said in July, hailing it as a tool that could root out asymptomatic carriers who might still infect others.

But there's a hitch: Two manufacturers that have received Food and Drug Administration authorization and whose instruments are being delivered  Becton, Dickinson and Co., known as BD, and Quidel  say their antigen tests are intended for patients with symptoms, calling into question how valuable the tests would be for broad screening purposes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 40% of infected people may be asymptomatic.

"It's important always to use a diagnostic in the way that it has been designed to be used," said Elizabeth Talbot, New Hampshire's deputy state epidemiologist. "We simply don't know how [the tests] will perform in persons who are asymptomatic."

Perhaps the highest-profile example of the problem occurred in Ohio this month, when Gov. Mike DeWine had no symptoms and tested positive for COVID-19 with Quidel's antigen test. Within hours, the Republican governor's diagnosis was reversed after he got a PCR test.

"People should not take away from my experience that testing is not reliable or doesnt work," DeWine said on CNN after his false-positive diagnosis. "The antigen tests are fairly new," he said. "Were going to be very careful in how we use it."

The bigger problem is false-negative results, which show someone isn't infected when they actually are. BD's false-negative rate  how often a test incorrectly says someone isn't infected  is about 15%; Quidel's is 3%.

Quidel and BD say their tests are intended to be used for people within the first five days of showing symptoms. A spokesperson for BD said its test should not be used on asymptomatic individuals. Quidel through a spokesperson deferred to FDA guidelines, which allow asymptomatic testing in certain scenarios.

"For routine surveillance, this is a great tool and these are our best tools that we have available," said Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, on a July call with nursing home officials, according to a recording obtained by KHN. Seema Verma, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, on the call referred to the effort as a "turning point" in the fight against the virus.

A month after the initial announcement, the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act to bump its contracts with the two companies to the front of the line and expedite shipments. BD will send roughly 11,000 devices and 3.75 million tests to nursing homes; Quidel and HHS declined to answer questions about its volume.

As states and the federal government move to mandate COVID testing inside nursing homes, whose patients are deemed highly vulnerable to infection and severe complications, several industry officials have said they hoped to use the tests on asymptomatic people. But many states restrict the use of antigen tests or still require lab-based testing because of accuracy concerns.

If a person with a negative test result has to default to getting a more accurate PCR test, "then we simply have just added time and cost," Talbot said. "That's a problem."

Officials said the antigen test announcement caught them by surprise, underscoring the administration's chaotic testing strategy. Separate from the federal effort, 10 states have banded together through the Rockefeller Foundation to secure 5 million tests from the two companies in hopes of curbing the virus's spread this fall.

After nursing homes receive an initial batch of tests  each facility gets between 150 and 900  they would have to buy future supplies. Medicare will cover the costs of diagnostic tests but not expenses for routine surveillance.

"I just have a lot of skepticism," said Brendan Williams, president of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes and assisted living facilities in the state. "Basically you're giving some lousy tests for nursing homes and you're making them pay for them. I don't see that as a win; I see that as a risk."

Public health experts have become increasingly vocal that frequent rapid testing is the best tool for stopping the virus  which has killed more than 174,000 Americans including tens of thousands in nursing care  rather than relying on more accurate lab-based tests that have been plagued by delays and shortages. In a call this month with the industry, Verma estimated that half of the country's nursing homes have experienced cases.

"I don't see an avenue where these will not help to stop transmission chains, and I don't see another option on the table for us," said Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a proponent of rapid tests. "It is what we need to be doing right now."

"This is better for the folks in our buildings, without a doubt," added Jason Belden, director of emergency preparedness and physical plant services for the California Association of Health Facilities.

In theory, antigen tests can serve dual purposes  diagnosing a person with a suspected infection or screening a group of people to more quickly identify sick individuals. The tests by Quidel and BD, under their FDA authorizations, can be used on certain asymptomatic individuals, including those suspected of having COVID-19 after exposure to an infected person. The companies would need additional FDA authorization to screen any asymptomatic person regardless of whether they're suspected of being sick, according to agency guidelines.

The CDC has suggested antigen tests could be useful in high-risk settings if performed repeatedly. It said there was limited data to guide using them to screen asymptomatic people.

Nonetheless, HHS recommends universal screening of nursing home residents at least once and regular screening of staff regardless of symptoms, said agency spokesperson Mia Heck, citing the fact that COVID-19 viral loads are similar between patients with and without symptoms. "Only one test in the U.S. is authorized for asymptomatic individuals," she said, referring to a PCR test from LabCorp, "yet the overwhelming majority of testing is being done on asymptomatic individuals."

"If the world were ideal we'd say, 'Oh, we want the more accurate test.' But the more accurate test takes forever to get the results back," said Peter Van Runkle, executive director of the Ohio Health Care Association, which represents the state's nursing homes.

All targeted nursing homes will receive tests by the end of September, according to federal officials, who recently announced that facilities in states with a positivity rate of at least 5% must test staff each week.

"I don't see this as a federal strategy so much as a stopgap method to bring a little relief to nursing homes," said Katie Smith Sloan, president of LeadingAge, which represents nonprofit nursing homes. "It's really tragic that we are where we are right now."

Boosted by $71 million in federal funds for Quidel and $24.3 million for BD, Quidel plans to produce 1.8 million tests weekly by September; BD will produce similar volumes by October.

"The situation is much too urgent to wait a few months so we can put bows and lipstick on the program. So we're going to build this plane a little bit while we're flying it," Giroir told nursing homes in July. "Just work with us. We want to get you what you need. And then in September, October you can get what you want."

States take different approaches in deploying antigen tests in nursing homes; in at least seven  including California, Illinois and Maryland  officials say PCR tests should still be used to confirm results or to screen patients without symptoms. In Massachusetts, nursing homes must use PCR tests to meet surveillance requirements.

In Maryland, "our goal is to screen out staff who are positive as quickly as possible, particularly asymptomatic folks," said Dennis Schrader, chief operating officer of the health department.

Maryland nursing homes can use antigen tests for weekly staff testing if there isn't an outbreak. But if at least one person tests positive for the coronavirus, all staff and residents must be tested with PCR tests.
MARLBOROUGH  A motorcyclist is in critical condition after a crash on Route 2 in Marlborough, according to Connecticut State Police.

State Police said the driver was airlifted by Lifestar to Hartford Hospital after crashing into the median guard rail near Exit 13. They said troopers and the Marlborough Volunteer Fire Department responded to the scene of the accident just after 5 p.m. Sunday afternoon.
Lee Anne McPeake Bliss, 61, of Goodlettsville, Tennessee, formerly of Chattanooga, went home to be with the Lord on Saturday, August 22, 2020.

Lee Anne had lived most of her life in the Chattanooga area where she was a 1976 graduate of East Ridge High School. After high school, Lee Anne attended Middle Tennessee State University graduating in 1980 with a bachelors degree in Business Administration. Lee Anne worked for Quaker Oaks, AT&T, and recently retired from Caterpillar Financial Services in Nashville. For the past 20 years Lee Anne lived in the Nashville area and she attended Long Hollow Baptist Church in Hendersonville, Tn. Lee Anne loved people and was known for her kind heart and helping others. She loved to entertain, dance, go shopping, and she loved to cook.

She was preceded in death by her parents, Ennis and Yvonne McPeake.

Survivors include her husband of 13 years, Vincent Bliss; step-children, Michael Bliss and Isabella Bliss; brother, Russell McPeake; sister, Glenda (Mark) Goins; nieces, Hayley (Jimmy) Icard and Sarah Goins; great niece, Marley Icard; and numerous special friends, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

A Celebration of Life will be held on Friday, Aug. 28, at 7 p.m. in the South Crest Chapel with Mike Gilley officiating. The family will receive friends at the funeral home Friday from 4 p.m. until the funeral hour.

There will also be a reception/gathering of family and friends on Saturday from 4-7 p.m. Central time at the home of Vincent and Lee Anne.

Social distancing guidelines will be observed. Live streaming of Lee Annes service will be available on the funeral home website for those unable to attend.

Condolences may be shared at lane-southcrestchapel.com.

Arrangements are by the South Crest Chapel of Lane Funeral Home and Crematory, Rossville.
In his op-ed Troops in Chicago? Heres why that would only exacerbate the chaos. (Aug. 21) and in summarizing the findings of his research team, my colleague Dr. Robert Pape writes that, DHS deployment is strongly associated with a period of increased violence. One might react to that by thinking: No kidding! If violence increases or if there are indicators that this will be so, the Department of Homeland Security might get deployed. That is, it could be that the increase in violent unrest in Portland may be the cause for the DHS deployment. The commentary suggests the reverse: DHS deployment causes violence.
FRANKFURT/AACHEN. Since the beginning of the pandemic, research groups have been working on methods to detect SARS-CoV-2 viruses in wastewater to be used to monitor the degree of COVID-19 transmission among the population. The idea is simple: since infected people shed SARS-CoV-2 viruses in their faeces, wastewater samples could give an indication of the infection numbers among all the residents connected to a wastewater treatment plant. Given sufficient sensitivity, these analyses could function as an early-warning system for authorities, allowing early detection of local case increases within the catchment area of a treatment plant.

A consortium of Frankfurt virologists, ecotoxicologists and evolution researchers, and water researchers from Aachen have now shown for the first time in Germany that SARS-CoV-2 genetic material can be detected in treatment plants using modern molecular methods. Analyses revealed 3 to 20 gene equivalents per millilitre of raw wastewater in all nine treatment plants tested during the first pandemic wave in April 2020. This concentration level was also measured in studies in the Netherlands and the USA.

The researchers were astonished that older retention samples from the years 2017 and 2018, before the outbreak of the pandemic, also delivered signals. Extensive method validation revealed that the gene primer erroneously registered not only SARS-CoV-2, but other non-disease causing coronaviruses in wastewater as well. The current method, developed specifically for SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, has been confirmed through gene sequencing.

The method can be now employed for what is called wastewater-based epidemiology: the measured viral load of a treatment plant allows conclusions on the number of COVID-19 infected individuals in the catchment area. In the largest treatment plant, 1,037 acute cases were estimated in the catchment area for a viral load of 6 trillion (6 x 1012) gene equivalencies pro day; in smaller treatment plants with viral loads lower by two orders of magnitude, 36 cases were estimated.

The sensitivity is sufficient as an early warning system to indicate whether the action value of 50 incidents per 100,000 residents has been exceeded. Earlier hopes that the precision would be sufficient to determine the estimated number infected people not reported through laboratory diagnosis have not yet been fulfilled. However, the scientists believe that further improvements in the methods are possible.

In vitro cell tests have shown that the SARS-CoV-2 fragments verified in the wastewater are non-infectious. However, due to the high loads and low retention capacity of conventional treatment plants, the behaviour of SARS-CoV-2 in the water cycle should be investigated more deeply. The authors of the study are working on making their knowledge available for an application of the method soon, with the goal of achieving a close cooperation between health ministries, environmental ministries, treatment plant operators and professional associations.

###

The research team was formed on the initiative of the non-profit Research Institute for Water and Waste Management at RWTH Aachen (FiW), the Institute of Environmental Engineering at RWTH Aachen (ISA), the Institute for Medical Virology at University Hospital Frankfurt (KGU) and Department for Evolution Ecology and Environmental Toxicology at the Institute of Ecology, Evolution and Diversity at Goethe University Frankfurt, and is supported by six water boards in North Rhine-Westphalia, the LOEWE Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics (TBG) and the University of Saskatoon in Canada.

Publication: Sandra Westhaus, Frank-Andreas Weber, Sabrina Schiwy, Volker Linnemann, Markus Brinkmann, Marek Widera, Carola Greve, Axel Janke, Henner Hollert, Thomas Wintgens, Sandra Ciesek. Detection of SARS-CoV-2 in raw and treated wastewater in Germany - suitability for COVID-19 surveillance and potential transmission risks. Science of the Total Environment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141750, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720352797

Further information

University Hospital Frankfurt

Institute for Medical Virology

Prof. Dr. Sandra Ciesek through

University Hospital Frankfurt Press Office

Tel. +49 69 6301 86442

kommunikation@kgu.de

Goethe University Frankfurt

Institute of Ecology, Evolution and Diversity

Dept. Evolution Ecology and Environmental Toxicology

and LOEWE Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics (TBG)

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Henner Hollert

hollert@bio.uni-frankfurt.de

Research Institute for Water and Waste Management at RWTH Aachen (FiW)

Dr. sc. Frank-Andreas Weber

weber@fiw.rwth-aachen.de

RWTH Aachen University

Institute of Environmental Engineering (ISA)

Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Thomas Wintgens

wintgens@isa.rwth-aachen.de

Current news about science, teaching, and society can be found on GOETHE-UNI online (http://www.aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de)

Goethe University is a research-oriented university in the European financial centre Frankfurt am Main. The university was founded in 1914 through private funding, primarily from Jewish sponsors, and has since produced pioneering achievements in the areas of social sciences, sociology and economics, medicine, quantum physics, brain research, and labour law. It gained a unique level of autonomy on 1 January 2008 by returning to its historic roots as a "foundation university". Today, it is one of the three largest universities in Germany. Together with the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Mainz, it is a partner in the inter-state strategic Rhine-Main University Alliance. Internet: http://www.goethe-universitaet.de

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The woman who has accused Prince Andrew of having sex with her when she was underage has said the royal deserves to be outed in a new documentary.

Virginia Giuffre claims the prince had sex with her on three occasions, including when she was underage in the US, and when she was trafficked by convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew, 60, denies the allegations.

In a documentary to air this week Giuffre says the prince tried to guess her age before comparing it to the age of his daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.

She said: Before he abused me, when we just met, Ghislaine does this guessing game and he guessed right, I was 17 and he compared me to his daughters, saying, Oh, my daughters are a few years younger than you.

Virginia Giuffre, the Duke of York's accuser, has claimed Andrew played a guessing game about her age when they first met and compared her to his daughters. (Crime+ Investigation/PA)

Read more: Why The Crown will never feature Meghan, Harry or Prince Andrew  according to the creator

She added: With Prince Andrew, I am happy to talk about him because he abused me, he participated in a sexual-trafficking operation with one of the most prolific sex-trafficking operators in the world the entire time.

Andrew deserves to be outed, he deserves to be held accountable, he is an abuser.

The documentary is one of a four-part series looking at the stories of those who claim to have survived Epstein.

Epstein took his own life in prison as he awaited trial for sex offence charges.

His alleged accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is awaiting her own trial on charges of procuring teenage girls for Epstein to abuse. She denies the charges.

The documentary speaks to journalists, women who say they survived Epstein and former friends of the disgraced financier.

Lady Victoria Hervey, a model, socialite and former friend of Epstein, said: Jeffrey definitely enjoyed the idea of being friends with the Queens son.

Andrew, just gone through a divorce, theres this American who wants to fly him around the world and introduce him for people. It was probably an escapism for him.

Andrew no longer carries out royal duties like assisting with state visits, as done here with Ivanka Trump in 2019. (Reuters)

Read more: Prince Charles to give up Duchy Organics farm as non-royal tenant takes over

Story continues

Lisa Philips, another of the women who was abused by Epstein, said she never met Prince Andrew but had one friend who did, who confided in her.

She said: She told me, Jeffrey instructed her to go into a room and have sex with Prince Andrew.

She told me, Jeffreys not really who he says he is.

Jeffrey didnt want to talk about it. But he said he needed to have something on people.

Andrew stepped down from public royal duties in November 2019 after a disastrous interview with the BBC about his friendship with Epstein.

He has since been caught in a war of words with US prosecutors, as he claims he has offered to help the investigation but they say he has not been in touch.

Model Lady Victoria Hervey, here in June 2019, also appears in the documentary about Epstein. (Getty Images)

Read more: What has Prince Andrew said about his friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell?

Of the allegations, Giuffre added: Naming someone like Andrew, all of a sudden, the world cared.

Last year, the Duke of York released a statement which read: It has become clear to me over the last few days that the circumstances relating to my former association with Jeffrey Epstein has become a major disruption to my familys work and the valuable work going on in the many organisations and charities that I am proud to support.

Therefore, I have asked Her Majesty if I may step back from public duties for the foreseeable future, and she has given her permission.

I continue to unequivocally regret my ill-judged association with Jeffrey Epstein. His suicide has left many unanswered questions, particularly for his victims, and I deeply sympathise with everyone who has been affected and wants some form of closure.

I can only hope that, in time, they will be able to rebuild their lives. Of course, I am willing to help any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations, if required.

Surviving Jeffrey Epstein will be shown on the Crime+Investigation channel with a double episode on 25 August at 9pm, followed by parts three and four the following evening on 26 August at 9pm.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. - With cheers of "four more years" and several standing ovations, Republicans here nominated President Donald Trump for a second term with unanimous support. The president crossed the delegate threshold when the roll call got to New York.

"We have crime ravaging our streets," said New York Republican Party chairman Nick Langworthy as the state delivered its 94 delegates. "That is what America will see if a Biden-Harris regime runs our country."

Unlike the Democrats' virtual showcase last week, Republicans held their roll call in person.

"Only President Trump will eliminate the coronavirus and rebuild the economy," said North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley at the start of the roll call.

Some delegation leaders loaded their remarks with praise for the president and criticism of the Democratic ticket. Arkansas's delegation added that in 2016, Trump had defeated "former resident Crooked Hillary," Alabama's delegation touted that its voters had the "highest approval of President Trump" of any state, and while Arizona's delegation praised the "miles and miles and miles of big, beautiful wall" built by the president.

"He isn't defunding the police; he is defending the police," said Florida GOP chairman Joe Gruters, introduced as the party leader in Trump's adopted home state. "Americans want an operator at the other end of that 911 call."

Other delegations talked up their history, or the job growth they'd seen before the pandemic, confidently talking about how the president would restore it. David Bossie, a presidential ally and RNC committeeman from Maryland, described the state as "home to the Underground Railroad," while MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, leading Minnesota's delegation, said that "disastrous Democratic leadership" had been exposed by this summer's unrest. The pandemic was sometimes shorthanded as the "China plague" and "Wuhan virus," and other Republicans often got praise from the floor.

"They have completely transformed our judicial system," said Kentucky RNC committee member KC Crosbie, touting both Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "Just imagine what they can do in another term."

The roll call, which typically occurs on the Tuesday of a four-day convention week, had been moved up to keep some party business in Charlotte before prime-time RNC programming anchored in Washington. Delegates paused midway through to hear from Vice President Mike Pence, who hinted that the president would stop by before his speech in western North Carolina this afternoon.

Pence, who was formally renominated as vice president earlier Monday, made an unscheduled appearance at the convention center, delivering a pep talk to delegates and pledging to "work my heart out" to ensure a second term for Trump.

"So men and women of the Republican National Convention: It's on. Now is the time," Pence said during brief remarks that came amid a break in the roll call vote to renominate Trump.

Pence is scheduled to deliver a longer address Wednesday night from Fort McHenry in Baltimore.

On Monday, he teased that Trump would also be stopping by the proceedings in Charlotte, saying, "I got a feeling you might just see a friend of mine at the Republican National Convention today."

Pence rattled off several issues on which he said Republicans differ from Democrats, including support for gun rights, support for the police and opposition to abortion.

"I couldn't be more proud to be a vice president who stands without apology for the sanctity of human life," Pence said.
NEW HAVEN  An off-duty New Haven firefighter injured by gunfire on Saturday has been released from the hospital and is expected to make a full recovery, police said Monday.

New Haven fire, American Medical Response, New Haven police and Hamden police responded at approximately 7:15 p.m Saturday to a 911 call of a person shot outside a residence on Shelton Avenue between Read Street and the Hamden line near Goodrich Street.

Board of Fire Commissioners Chairman Steven Cousin said he was informed that the victim had been walking to a convenience store when he heard gunshots and then realized he had been hit. Cousin said the firefighter appears to have been an innocent bystander.

Arriving emergency medical responders treated the gunshot victim on scene and an ambulance transported the 28-year-old New Haven man to Yale New Haven Hospital. New Haven and Hamden officers located evidence of gunfire in the roadway and on the sidewalk. Officers held a crime scene on a portion of Shelton Avenue in New Haven and Hamden.

New Haven Police Department Major Crimes detectives canvassed the neighborhood Saturday night and Sunday morning.

My office was notified immediately by the dispatchers at the Public Safety Access Point, New Haven Fire Chief John Alston said. We were shocked to hear of the incident and are grateful for the rapid emergency medical services provided to our member.

A special thank you to the members of New Haven Fire Department Engine 8, the New Haven Police Department, Public Safety Access Point, and Hamden Medic Matt Kellick. The members of Engine 8 were placed off-duty after this ordeal, to assist them with processing the stress and trauma of responding to a critical emergency involving one of our own.

This highlights our concerns and frustrations with gun violence in our city. We are grateful our member is stable. We are here to support him and his family during this trying time of trauma and healing. Our prayers are for a speedy recovery, Alston said.

Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to contact the New Haven Police Department at 203-946-6304. Callers may remain anonymous.
Actor Rhea Chakrabortys lawyer has said that she and her family have not received any summons from the Central Bureau of Investigation as the agency investigates the Sushant Singh Rajput death case. If they receive a summon, they will appear before the agency, lawyer Satish Maneshinde said.

Rhea Chakraborty and her family have not received any summons from the Central Bureau of Investigation, so far. If they receive a summon, they will appear before the agency: Satish Maneshinde, lawyer of actor Rhea Chakraborty, the lawyer said in a statement.

Sushants father filed a case of abetment to suicide and siphoning off funds against Rhea, his girlfriend, in Patna in July. The case is now being investigated by a special CBI team that is in Mumbai. Based on the FIR, the Enforcement Directorate has also filed a case against the actor.

On Sunday, the CBI team questioned Sushants friend Siddharth Pithani, cook Neeraj Singh and domestic help Deepesh Sawant at the DRDO guest house in Mumbai and later visited the actors flat in Bandra along with them, an official said.

Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant arrived separately at the DRDO guest house in Kalina area of Santcaruz, where the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) officials probing the case are staying, an official said.

These three persons, who were present in the flat when Rajput (34) was found hanging in his room on June 14, were questioned for about five hours, following which the CBI sleuths took them to the late actors residence at Mont Blanc Apartments in suburban Bandra around 2.45 pm, he said.

Forensic science experts were also part of the CBI team which visited Rajputs residence, the official said. Mumbai Police officials were also present at the actors house, he added.

After spending three hours at Rajputs flat, the central agency team left the place along with Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant. The trio was again taken to the DRDO guest house in the evening for interrogation, the official said.

On Saturday also, the CBI team accompanied by Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant visited the late actors house in Bandra to reconstruct the sequence of events before he was found dead.

Another CBI team on Saturday visited the state-run Cooper Hospital in the city, where autopsy had been performed on Rajputs body. A third CBI team had visited the Bandra police station to meet Mumbai Police officials who were investigating Rajputs alleged suicide earlier. On Friday, the CBI officials had recorded the statements of Pithani and Neeraj.

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Bangladesh to lift Rohingya internet ban 'very soon' A Rohingya worker walks across a bamboo bridge in Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia, Bangladesh

Bangladesh will restore internet access to nearly a million Rohingya stuck in refugee camps "very soon", the government said Monday, on the eve of the third anniversary of their escape from Myanmar.

Authorities in Bangladesh cut mobile internet access to the sprawling, teeming camps in the country's southeast a year ago, citing security concerns, sparking international condemnation.

Foreign Secretary Masud bin Momen said Monday that the spread of "baseless rumours and misinformation" could create panic and destabilise the camps, where a few Rohingya have been killed in internal clashes in recent years.

"However, responding to the requests from our friends and also for the need of imparting education and COVID-19 response, for greater internet connectivity, we have taken a decision on lifting the restrictions on 3G and 4G mobile networks, which will be effective very soon," Momen said.

The internet clampdown disrupted communications between different camps, as well as with Rohingya still in Myanmar and elsewhere. It also complicated wire transfers of money from the Rohingya diaspora.

Rights groups said the lack of internet access meant misinformation and rumours, particularly about the coronavirus, could spread unverified.

The first infection in the camps was detected in May but fears that the virus could spread quickly have so far not been realised.

Khin Maung, head of the Rohingya Youth Association, said the restoration of internet access was "very good news".

"We can now get regular updates on COVID-19. And we can mobilise people against the activities of the human traffickers," he said.

"With internet connections, we can also communicate with family members who live in Myanmar or other countries."

Some 750,000 Rohingya flooded across the border as they fled a military crackdown in Rakhine state in Myanmar in August 2017 that the UN has likened to ethnic cleansing, joining some 200,000 already in Bangladesh.

With protests banned by Bangladesh -- the government citing coronavirus restrictions -- the refugees were due to mark what they call "Genocide Remembrance Day" with a day of "silent protest" that organisers say will turn the camps into ghost towns.

sa/stu/leg
Most of us have vivid memories of at least one fearsome teacher.

But even though many can be scary when they want to be, they also have the good humour to point out when they've messed up.

Bored Panda has compiled some of the funniest teacher fails from English-speaking countries across the world.

They include a teacher's pet dog who ate their entire class's assignments and a children's word search which mistakenly included an expletive.

Here FEMAIL brings you a selection of the best ahead of 'back to school' month in September.

Bored Panda has compiled some of the funniest fails by teachers. One, from an unknown location, shared a photo of the aftermath after their pet dog munched their entire class's homework assignment

A parent, believed to be from the US, shared what were meant to be depictions of the letter J which had been stuck to their son's pre-school wall. Unfortunately they also looked a little inappropriate

This teacher, from Australia, accidentally included a swear word in a word search they made for their class

This US student shared how their substitute teacher had used an eraser to try to remove writing from the class whiteboard - with little success

This teacher, believed to be from the US, confessed they had put frozen lamb organs onto a cart to let them thaw - and forget that the blood would go everywhere when they defrosted

This teacher, from Texas, told how they invented a game called 'beat the balls' to replace Hangman. But while her class was trying to guess the word 'grassland', a rather rude phrase ended up on the board

This teacher, from Nashville, Tennessee, was helpfully told by a student she had put the answers to her class's homework on the back of it

This embarrassed science teacher, from an undisclosed location, revealed they accidentally said 'orgasm' instead of 'organism' to her class of 30 13-year-olds

When copying goes wrong: This UK-based teacher photocopied some music but accidentally cut the B in 'Brass' off. They explained: 'Bad photocopying on my behalf. The year 6s found it hilarious'

This teacher, from an unknown location, accidentally killed the class fish, who were named Barrie, Clyde and Bubbles. They apologetically wrote on Instagram: 'Welp. I killed the class pets today'

Redditor Tangoxx, who is also a teacher, from an unknown location, posted a photo of their laptop, which had all their notes on, in the process of updating just before their first ever class was about to begin

Teacher Kristy Murphy Moore, from Pennsylvania, accidentally posted a link to a shelf she bought on Amazon instead of the presentation her class was meant to be looking at

This teacher from London confessed that, after lecturing his class about not rocking on their chairs, he missed his chair 'spectacularly' when trying to sit down

Guilt-ridden teacher Kaleigh, from the US, admitted they ate a doughnut given to them by a pupil because she thought it was for her. It turns out the little girl just wanted her to keep it safe for when snack time came around

This American professor sent an angry email to his students because nobody turned up to his class. But he then had to issue a grovelling apology when he remembered the course was online, not in-person
OTTAWA, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today Grace Atkinson, Executive Director of Jusoor, announced that the Right Honourable David Johnston, the 28th Governor General of Canada, will deliver the keynote address during Jusoors 2020 virtual graduation ceremony. Fifty-one of Jusoors Syrian scholars around the world will celebrate their graduation at 12 p.m. EDT Saturday, August 29.



5.6 million people have fled Syria since 2011. A general estimate places the total participation of Syrians aged 18-24 in higher education at less than 3%. Next year sees the 10 year anniversary of the war in Syria, yet the future is still far from certain for almost all Syrian youth.

Since 2011, Jusoor has supported more than 650 Syrians impacted by the civil war to continue their education at universities and schools around the world. 51 Jusoor Scholars are graduating this year from 20 institutions in 8 different countries including: Canada, Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Portugal, Qatar and the US.

Each Jusoor scholar has left behind family and friends in war-torn Syria to achieve their dreams of a quality education, and to secure a better future. A common theme in their journeys is a determination to succeed, to triumph over adversity.

It is an honour to be celebrating these scholars and their formidable achievements. To have such brilliant examples of resilience, dedication, and excellence in this time of uncertainty and flux is incredibly inspiring, said the Right Honourable David Johnston.

I was grateful to be given the opportunity to pursue my higher education when so many other Syrians werent. I felt that I was a representative of Syrian women and had the responsibility to do well no matter what difficulties I faced, said Jusoor Scholar Bushra Jbawi, who completed a Masters in Applied Computing at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada.

As keynote speaker, Mr. Johnston brings years of experience as a champion for education and innovation, and is sure to inspire Jusoors class of 2020 graduates, said Leen Al Zaibak, Co-Founder and Director of Jusoor.

About Jusoor

Founded in 2011, Jusoor (meaning bridges in Arabic) is an international non-governmental organization with the mission of Investing in Syrias Youth for a Better Tomorrow. A leading global actor in educational and entrepreneurial programs for Syrian children and youth, to date, Jusoor has enabled more than 650 Syrian students to complete their university education and enrolled 7,000 children in its education centers in Lebanon.

About The Right Honourable David Johnston

The Right Honourable David Johnston was Canadas 28th governor general. During his mandate, he established the Rideau Hall Foundation (RHF), a registered charity that supports and amplifies the Office of the Governor General in its work to connect, honour and inspire Canadians. Today, he is actively involved as Chair of the Rideau Hall Foundation Board of Directors; serves as an Executive Advisor at Deloitte; and, Global Advisor to Fairfax.
Former Punjab Chief Minister and senior Congress leader Rajinder Kaur Bhattal, whose name figured in the list of 23 leaders, who demanded an "active, full-time and visible" party president, said on Monday that their communication should not be seen as dissent, but good suggestions were given in party's interest.

Another signatory to the letter, former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, however, declined to comment on the party's "internal matters".

Bhattal said that Sonia Gandhi had been made interim president of the Congress last year. "That was less than two years after she voluntarily relinquished the top post in favour of her son Rahul Gandhi who refused to continue as Congress chief (after the 2019 general election defeat), the former Punjab CM said.

After her tenure (as interim chief) came to an end on August 10, Congress had said that Sonia Gandhi will continue in the post till such time a "proper procedure" is implemented in the "not too distant future" to elect a party chief.

"She (Sonia Gandhi) had said that she will continue for one year and her tenure was to come to an end on August 10. Rahul ji had earlier said that he does not want to continue as party chief.

"In light of these things, we had given our suggestions (in the letter). Those who have read the full contents of the letter know that we have praised Sonia Gandhi and her leadership," Bhattal told PTI.

She said that despite the tragedies Sonia Gandhi faced on the personal front - losing her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi and husband Rajiv Gandhi - "she moved on and effectively guided the Congress and formed government at the Centre twice".

"Soniaji's leadership is acceptable to all, but we had said that a working group be formed under her which will be directly answerable to her. This was our demand, there is nothing wrong, it was not dissent, it was a suggestion letter, we gave good points to make the party strong," said the senior Congress leader.

On the other hand, when asked about the letter during an informal chat, Hooda replied, "I won't make any comment on the party's internal matters." He, however, said the Congress needs to be strengthened.

The Congress Working Committee on Monday urged Sonia Gandhi to continue as its interim chief till an AICC session can be convened and authorised her to effect necessary organisational changes to deal with the challenges facing the party. At an over seven-hour long meeting, which took place in the backdrop of more than 20 party leaders seeking an immediate organisational overhaul and a collective leadership, Gandhi is said to have offered to quit but was requested by the party's top decision-making panel with over 50 members to stay on.

Bhattal said, "We had suggested that a working group should be formed under her and an AICC session should be summoned. We always accepted Sonia ji's leadership and never were any question marks raised. We have been well wishers of the Nehru-Gandhi family, which made sacrifices for the nation's sake." She said that Sonia Gandhi ran things quite smoothly being at the helm.

"But she had herself said last year that she will be there for one year. It is good that she will continue now," Bhattal said.

Bhattal said assembly elections are due in Punjab in over a year, polls in other states are going to take place in coming months and the suggestions they gave was to strength party for the elections also.

Asked why then there has been criticism to their letter, Bhattal replied: "Sometimes, things get misinterpreted in the media. We all want that Congress should be further strengthened. It is a grand old party which first fought for the country's freedom and then ran the country for all these years. To speak for strengthening the party, I think there is nothing wrong in that."
Artem Chigvintsev, 38, was cut from Dancing with the Stars in 2019, much to his surprise.

Today, the Russian native and new father, announced on Good Morning America he will return for the 29th season of the show.

Finally the news is out!  Im back on @DancingABC who will my Celeb be?



Im dedicating this Season 29 of DWTS to my baby boy  #dwts pic.twitter.com/KoR8tBIG0e  Artem Chigvintsev (@artemchigvintse) August 24, 2020

OMG! @artemchigvintse (and new dad) is returning to the dance floor on @DancingABC!



See the full list of Pros here: https://t.co/aOIgnLMpX3#DWTS pic.twitter.com/RsMPO9kls8  Good Morning America (@GMA) August 24, 2020

Chigvitsev said he is dedicating this season to my little boy.

He is engaged to former WWE star Nikki Bella, 36, who gave birth to their son in July.

Finally the news is out. It was so hard to keep a secret but yes I am back on Dancing with the Stars season 29.

This year has been absolutely incredible for me for a lot of various reasons. One of them is getting engaged and I have a newborn baby which I adore and love so much. And of course the cherry on the cake is getting Dancing with the Stars.

I cant wait to get into that ballroom and just teach, perform, thats what I do, thats what I love and I just want to say thank you so much to all the fans for all your continued support through all of this. I just want to make you proud. So tune in Sept. 14.

DWTS has a new host this year, Tyra Banks. Banks replaced longtime host Tom Bergeron and his co-host, Erin Andrews.

Other pro dances for season 29 include Brandon Armstrong, Alan Bersten, Sharna Burgess, Cheryl Burke, Val Chmerkovskiy, Sasha Farber, Jenna Johnson, Daniella Karagach, Keo Motsepe, Peta Murgatroyd, Pasha Pashkov, Gleb Savchenko, Emma Slater and Britt Stewart.

And, we know that Bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristowe will be a contestant. Her selection was announced by The Bachelor host Chris Harrison on the June 15 episode of The Bachelor: The Greatest Seasons - Ever!

Chigvintsev appeared on Dancing with the Stars seasons 18-20 and 22-27.

The 29th season of Dancing with the Stars starts at 8 p.m. Sept. 14 on ABC. You can stream ABC on Hulu Live TV and fuboTV.

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Shimla, Aug 24 : In a bid to revive the coronavirus-hit tourism industry, the Himachal Pradesh Cabinet on Monday relaxed stringent conditions imposed amid the Covid-19 pandemic on stay of tourists in the hill state.

However, the stipulation of interstate e-movement passes will continue to be enforced but its issuance will be streamlined to avoid harassment to visitors.

The Cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur also decided to reduce the minimum stay of the tourists to two days from five days.

Also, the government relaxed the norm for the tourists to bring along Covid-19 negative reports/certificates.

"Earlier, the Covid-19 negative report were not to be more than 72 hours old before the visits. Now, the time has been increased to 96 hours," Urban Development Minister Suresh Bhardwaj told the media here after the Cabinet meeting.

"After reviewing the central government's latest guidelines, we have decided to streamline the issuance of Covid passes for movement to and fro the state. It will be hassle-free and issued within the time frame fixed by the Deputy Commissioners concerned," Bhardwaj said.

"No one can enter the state without an e-pass. All interstate movement will be monitored through the prevailing registration process. Any person keen to visit Himachal can enter his particulars on this software and he will get permission on priority," he added.

However, the state's decision is contrary to last week's Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla's directive to the states to make sure that there are no restrictions on interstate and intrastate movement of persons and goods during the ongoing unlocking process.

The Home Secretary on August 22 cited Unlock 3.0 guidelines of July 29 while asking the state governments and administrations of Union territories not to stop people on their respective borders.

Earlier, hoteliers had rued that the tourism industry crisis was getting deeper as all tourism units were closed since March 21.

They said that the state government had permitted to reopen the hotels in Unlock 3.0 but the rules under which the tourists were allowed to come to Himachal were stringent. The tourists were thus not showing interest in visiting the hill state, said a statement by Shimla-based Tourism Industry Stakeholders Association.

Members of the hospitality industry told IANS that they had never seen such disaster in recent times as the arrival of tourists to Himachal had almost stopped, and that the hotel bookings had vanished as the state closed its borders and imposed the lockdown.

Himachal Pradesh is a major tourism destination for people from across India as well as abroad, with the tourism sector's contribution to the state GDP pegged at around seven per cent.

The state's tourist footfall last year increased to 172.12 lakh, including 3.83 lakh foreigners, from 164.50 lakh in 2018. The highest tourist arrival in 14 years was 196.02 lakh in 2017.
The Congress has been rocked yet again by a controversy arising from internal differences, this time in the shape of a letter laying out an agenda of organisational reform in the party signed by many senior Congress leaders.

The Congress has been rocked yet again by a controversy arising from internal differences, this time in the shape of a letter laying out an agenda of organisational reform in the party signed by many senior Congress leaders.

The problem lies not in having debate and difference within a party  that is not just par for the course, it is desirable. The issue is how to manage these, so that they contribute positively to its development. In the case of the Congress, which has always been ideologically and structurally a broad church, this point is even more valid.

The question then is why differences are threatening to derail the party altogether. The issues in the foreground at the moment relate to organisational health and political tactics. The letter sent to Sonia Gandhi, to all intents and purposes the partys interim president, which has thrown the party into a tumult and occasioned a Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting today (24 August), is mostly about organisational issues.

First off, it must be clarified that the letter was signed by leaders across the spectrum, spanning multiple lines of divide, mainly the so-called generational one: thus, Kapil Sibal, Anand Sharma and Ghulam Nabi Azad, alongside Milind Deora, Jitin Prasada and Sandeep Dikshit. There seems to be another, albeit extremely subtle, if not actually arcane, distinction: that between Gandhi-Nehru family loyalists and the adherents of, more particularly, the current torchbearer of the dynasty, Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi.

The latter group, which includes luminaries such as Rajya Sabha MP Rajiv Satav, general secretary in charge of organization KC Venugopal, Lok Sabha member Manickam Tagore, seems to have construed this letter to be an attack on Rahul and deplored it from that standpoint. Tagore has reportedly called it a betrayal. It was reported today that Rahul had intervened during the CWC meeting to say that the letter had been sent in collusion with the Bharatiya Janata Party. Sibal reacted with a furious tweet, but took it down when Rahul apparently called him to deny having said anything of the sort.

Till this point, the pro-Rahul and distanced-from-Rahul strands seem separable. But it also appears that some have construed the letter to be an attack against Sonia as well, if n0t primarily, because the letter talks of a full-time and effective leadership, visible on the ground; collective decision-making; and, a thorough overhaul of the organization, including elections to the CWC and the revival of the Parliamentary Board, at one time a vital organisational cog subordinate only to the working committee.

There are suggestions that Sonia has taken the critique personally. But from what can be gathered at this point, it does not appear that the criticism is either ad hominem, or, in fact, directed at Sonia in the first place. The list of names affixed to the letter does not suggest that the signatories are against her as such: thus, apart from the names already mentioned, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, rehabilitated by Sonia after being sidelined by Rahul, Shashi Tharoor, Renuka Chowdhury and Veerappa Moily.

A simpler explanation, which will probably not resonate with Rahuls group, is that the letter genuinely wishes to bring to the table issues that must be resolved if the Congress is to go forward, though leaking the letter to the media could hardly have been in good faith. It is possible that there is some dissatisfaction with Rahul amongst the older leaders because he operates in and through an exclusive sort of a cabal, mostly consisting of the younger leaders. We shall return to this point in just a bit.

Whatever the factional alignments, the fact that the letter was sent and then leaked to the media means that the problems facing the party can no more be ignored. The drift has to be arrested and the CWC will have to do that if not on Monday itself, then much, much sooner, rather than later.

The starting point has to be the election of a full-time president. Once Sonia gives the party a deadline, the CWC will have to get moving. The problem, of course, is Rahul. Let us assume that most, or all, Congress leaders and members honestly think he is the best leader available. If that is the case, he should be prevailed upon to go through due process and be elected president of the party. But, it appears, Rahul is neither ready to rescind his objections to leading the party, nor does he want any other Gandhi to take the job.

Rahul cant possibly be unaware of the fact that the party is waiting for him. Thus, what he has been doing for over a year amounts to stringing the Congress along. The party will have to make do with a provisional president, in the terms used in the party constitution, till he makes up his mind to make a grand re-entry onto the stage. Cant the Congress leadership see that this completely untenable? Especially since the person whos left holding the fort, Sonia, is obviously unable to devote enough time and energy to the job because her health does not permit it.

It is actually worse than untenable because not only is Rahul stringing the party along, he is actually giving it all the cues without taking any responsibility. Since, Sonia is not fully functional, Rahul is exercising de facto power without being accountable. A recent example is the final resolution to the Rajasthan crisis, which happened only after rebel MLA Sachin Pilot held talks with the Gandhi siblings. Whatever some sections of the Congress may think, this is hardly a conscionable or effective way to run a party, because the likelihood is that senior leaders who do not have a place in the charmed circle are seriously cheesed off at being unofficially sidelined.

We must also remember that the current crisis is not exactly a bolt from the blue. It was prefigured at a meeting of Rajya Sabha members convened by Sonia at the end of last month, in the course of which Satav and Venugopal launched an attack on the record of the second United Progressive Alliance government, which could easily be construed as a frontal attack on both Sonia and Manmohan Singh. Barely had the dust settled, following a clarification from Satav early this month, was the letter under discussion sent, though the media got wind of it later. In the absence of an elected leader, a settled leadership, and transmission protocols, it becomes difficult to deal with factionalism and infighting, which plague even the most disciplined of organizations, as opposed to genuine debate and dissent.

There are no obvious hurdles to electing a new president: the Congress constitution lays down in detail the procedure to be followed in electing the partys president, while also providing for the appointment by the CWC of a provisional one to meet an emergency arising from the death of resignation of an incumbent (Article XVIII). Given that Sonias one-year interim term is over and that the Congress has been without an elected, full-time leader for almost 15 months, the letter sent to Sonia must be seen as a blessing out of disguise rather than a conspiracy or an attack on the party at one of its weakest moments, as many, including Rahul, at the CWC meeting, have been describing it.

The only construal of a further refusal by Rahul to switch from the backseat to the wheel is that he truly doesnt want to become president in the current conjuncture, which will mean that the party will be compelled to look afield for a new president. That could be party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, if the gravitational pull proves of dynasty proves ineluctable, or someone else.

But the person who takes the wheel has to be elected, because that will provide the new president greater legitimacy and traction. If the Congress has to re-emerge as a genuine, national Opposition party, this will have to be just the beginning. The hard work of rebuilding the party in the wide swathes from which it has been wiped out, beginning with the Hindi heartland, will have to follow, as will, as the signatories to the letter have apparently written, the task of uniting a fractious opposition.
While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country, Evers said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 20:34:52|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- China reminded some U.S. politicians that blindly engaging in anti-Communist and anti-China political manipulation is unpopular and doomed to fail.

The more times they lie and cheat, the more people with a sense of justice will see their true colors clearly, a spokesperson with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday.

Spokesperson Zhao Lijian made the remarks at a daily press briefing when asked to comment on recent remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who once again attempted to smear the Communist Party of China (CPC).

"First of all, I would like to correct the premise of Pompeo's statement," Zhao said, adding that China-U.S. relations are facing serious difficulties at present, and the United States is responsible for all this.

Some U.S. politicians are trying to suppress China because they are afraid of China's development. The more severe the U.S. suppression, the more it proves China's success.

Zhao stressed that China will never seek hegemony, but it never fears power politics.

"We are committed to working with other countries to build a community with a shared future for mankind. In contrast, some U.S. politicians are engaging in political bullying, economic bullying, military bullying, and discourse bullying everywhere. They are increasingly spurned by the international community and by Americans who see through their tricks."

"Is the United States still behaving like a big country?" he said.

Regarding what the U.S. President Donald Trump has said about the possibility of U.S. decoupling from China, Zhao said the development of China and the United States is not an either-or relationship. There is no need to exclude each other.

They may well lend hands to each other and support each other in their undertakings, he said.

"China and the United States should develop their relations by cooperation rather than decoupling, and assume their due responsibilities towards the world," he said.

China's policy stance on the development of China-U.S. relations has been consistent, maintaining a high degree of stability and continuity.

"At the same time, we are also ready for relations to go through ups and downs. We urge some U.S. politicians to correct their mistakes, return to rationality, correctly view and handle China-U.S. relations, stop harming China's interests and smearing and attacking China, and push the relations back on the right track as soon as possible," he said. Enditem
Charrisse Jordan is one of the former stars of The Real Housewives of Potomac. The reality TV personality has made a couple of appearances during season 5 of the show and is involved in a big storyline. It was revealed on the Bravo series that theres a vicious rumor about Monique Samuels and her marriage. The latter pointed the finger at Jordan and shes now firing back and revealing the person that started it all.

Monique Samuels and Charrisse Jordan | Tommy Garcia/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

What is the rumor being spread about Monique Samuels?

The ladies of RHOP are not messing around and season 5 started off with major tension among them. Candiace Dillard celebrated her one-year wedding anniversary and invited the girls to a party. Among some of the attendees was Jordan, who Samuels avoided. The two had a fallout during season 3 of the show and their friendship has suffered even more since then.

Charrisse has been facilitating nasty rumors about me and my family. Why would I wanna be around that? Samuels said during a confessional on the show.

Gizelle Bryant facilitated viewers giving context into the feud between Samuels and Jordan. She said that there is a rumor that Samuels cheated on her husband with her personal trainer.

RELATED: RHOP: Robyn Dixon Backtracks Shady Comment About Candiace Dillard in Season 5 Premiere

Monique Samuels talks about the rumors

Although Samuels did not want to talk about the rumors on the show, she did go on Instagram Live to clear up the mess with fans. During the broadcast, the Bravo star talked about a meeting where some of her co-stars were plotting to drop a bombshell.

Gizelle is planning to go to [the] reunion to tell people Chase isnt Chriss and that you were cheating on him and thats not his baby, Samuels said that Karen Huger told her.

According to Samuels, Bryant wanted to say that her newborn was not her husbands.

How disgusting is it? You can say whatever you want about me, but to talk about my child? Samuels added. If someone were to talk about anyone of Gizelles daughters or even the illegitimates from her ex, she would go berserk. To bring up my childs name, when you know the mess aint true, how low and disgusting is that.

RELATED: RHOP: Monique Samuels Drags Gizelle Bryant, Calls Her Illiterate and Fans React

Was Charrisse Jordan involved?

Jordan is now firing back at the allegations that she helped the rumor spread. The former Housewives star is now breaking her silence and denying she facilitated everyone with the tea.

[Monique]s best friend started a rumor, OK? I had nothing to do with the rumor, Jordan told Hollywood Life referring to Samuels friend Gigi.

RELATED: RHOP: Monique Samuels Explains Why She Almost Quit Season 5

The best friend told everybody from production to corporate, to the cast, so who did I tell? And she knows that her friend was doing this but what she thought was I was going to come on the show and use that as an end.

Samuelss husband, Chris, said on the Instagram Live broadcast that he wanted to confront Jordan but thats not something the latter wants to do.

Im never going to get into an argument or anything with Chris. I dont argue with men, she said.

The Real Housewives of Potomac airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET on Bravo.
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An AES power plant, which is fueled with natural gas, has been the subject of controversy for decades in Redondo Beach. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

State officials are poised to decide whether four gas-fired power plants along the Southern California coast should keep running past 2020, in the first major energy decision for Gov. Gavin Newsom's administration after this month's blackouts.

The aging, inefficient facilities are being required to close under a policy meant to end the environmentally damaging use of ocean water for power plant cooling. But energy regulators have been pushing since last year to delay the retirement deadlines, warning that insufficient power supplies could cause Californians to lose electricity on hot summer evenings  the exact situation millions of people found themselves in during two evenings of brief rotating outages.

Even before the blackouts Aug. 14 and 15, the debate over how and when to close the coastal gas plants offered a preview of challenges California will increasingly face as it accelerates its transition away from planet-warming fossil fuels.

One way or another, the coastal plants will close. But climate change activists want to see them shuttered as quickly as possible. AES Corp., a Virginia-based company that owns three of the four facilities, says they're still needed for a few more years to help facilitate the transition to 100% clean energy.

Now that debate has been vaulted into the political spotlight.

We cannot sacrifice reliability as we move forward in this transition, Newsom said last week, as he urged Californians to use less electricity to avoid the need for more rolling blackouts. Were going to be much more aggressive in focusing our efforts and our intention in making sure that is the case.

"We failed to predict and plan [for] these shortages, and thats simply unacceptable," the governor added.

Poor planning helps explain why the State Water Resources Control Board is set to vote next week on three-year shutdown extensions for natural gas plants in Huntington Beach, Long Beach and Oxnard, and a one-year extension for a facility in Redondo Beach.

Story continues

When the water board approved a rule phasing out seawater cooling in 2010, it gave utilities and their regulators a full decade to come up with replacement energy for these particular gas plants.

But only last year, after California's power grid operator began warning of looming capacity shortfalls on summer evenings, did the state's Public Utilities Commission order companies such as Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric to buy thousands of megawatts of new supply.

The utilities are responding to that mandate by adding lithium-ion batteries, which can store excess solar power during the day and distribute it at night. But it will take several years to get all those batteries online. That's why energy regulators asked the water board for a deadline extension for the gas plants.

Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand, who opposes any extension for the gas plant in his city, doesn't understand how energy regulators weren't prepared for this moment.

"They've known the retirement date for all of these plants for the last 10 years," he said. "What happened with the planning?"

Your support helps us deliver the news that matters most. Subscribe to the Los Angeles Times.

Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand has fought for years to shut down the gas-fired AES power plant in his city. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

In the long run, utilities should be able to keep the lights on without gas, said Stephen Berberich, president of the California Independent System Operator, which runs the power grid for most of the state.

But doing so will require much more battery capacity than the few thousand megawatts in the works right now, along with many more solar panels and wind turbines to charge those batteries. Other clean energy technologies and more robust conservation programs could also help.

The key, Berberich said in an interview, is ensuring there's enough energy supply at all hours of the day and night, including when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

"You dont necessarily have to have a gas fleet to do that," he said.

California is aiming for 60% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% climate-friendly power by 2045, although activists say a faster transition is needed to avert the worst consequences of global warming. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has endorsed a national standard of 100% clean electricity by 2035, a decade ahead of California's target.

Nearly two-thirds of California's retail electricity supply came from climate-friendly sources such as solar, wind, hydropower and nuclear last year. But in-state gas plants still account for about one-third of supply.

The fuel is especially important in the evening, when gas plants ramp up after sundown to replace the power from large solar farms and rooftop solar panels.

"The worst possible thing would be to just continue to limp along on gas instead of doing the work that we need to do," said Deborah Behles, an attorney representing the California Environmental Justice Alliance. "We need to procure more renewables and more storage. Thats what the utilities need to be doing, and not relying on these gas plants."

The proposed shutdown delay for the Redondo Beach gas plant has proved especially controversial.

Officials in Redondo and neighboring Hermosa Beach have argued that California can do without the facility because it contributes a tiny amount to statewide energy reliability.

They've also pointed out that nearly 22,000 people live within one mile of the gas plant, more people than live near the coastal facilities in Huntington Beach, Long Beach and Oxnard combined. Gas plants are less polluting than coal but still emit lung-damaging particulate matter.

The gas-fired power plant in Huntington Beach is owned by AES Corp. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

In a partial concession to the local opposition, the grid operator and other energy agencies told the water board in May they could support a one-year extension for the Redondo plant, rather than the three years they requested for the other facilities.

Berberich said his support for an extension of just one year hasn't wavered after this month's blackouts.

But he warned another extension could potentially be necessary if California doesn't bring enough new power supplies online in 2021. He called for the state's Public Utilities Commission to make sure that doesn't happen by ordering utilities to buy additional clean energy.

"We owe it to the community there to do the right thing," Berberich said.

AES Corp., which owns and operates the Redondo Beach facility, sold the site earlier this year to a developer who hopes to build retail and commercial space along the waterfront. But the deal allows the energy company to keep operating the facility for up to three years, depending on what the state water board allows.

The company is asking for three years. Lisa Krueger, president of AES United States, said a longer extension would allow the Redondo gas plant to serve as an "insurance policy" for California as the state adds cleaner power sources. She provided a chart showing the facility successfully ramped up and down to meet surging electricity demand last week.

"What these units did was exactly what theyre expected and supposed to do," she said.

A chart provided by AES shows how the Redondo Beach gas plant ramped up to provide electricity generation in California as demand surged from Aug. 13-18. (AES Corp.)

The Ormond Beach gas plant in Oxnard has been a sore spot for the local community, too.

Environmental justice activists helped kill Puente Power Project, a planned gas plant that could have worsened an ongoing legacy of pollution in the predominantly Latino, low-income city. But Ormond was a tougher battle.

Oxnard ultimately struck a deal with the facility's owner, GenOn Energy Inc., to support a three-year extension in exchange for the company setting aside $25 million to pay for tearing down the plant. City officials are hopeful that getting rid of the hulking industrial facility will help clean up a waterfront that is already home to a massive wetlands restoration project.

"I personally would like to see everything changed tomorrow, but I know thats unrealistic, Oxnard City Council member Carmen Ramirez said. "I think the city is making a good choice here. We see something in compensation for having that plant to continue to run for three years."

The state water board is scheduled to vote on the shutdown extensions at its Sept. 1 meeting. Newsom's office didn't respond to a request for comment on whether the governor plans to weigh in.
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Linkedin Dzulfiqar Fathur Rahman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, August 25, 2020 09:12 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c40125f5 1 Business COVID-19,Jokowi,economic-contraction,CORE-Center-Reform-Economics,Hendri-Saparini Free

The governments handling of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economic front is not timely and lacks focus compared with other countries that fare better, like South Korea and Vietnam, an economist has said.

Hendri Saparini, founder of the Center of Reform on Economics (CORE) Indonesia, said Friday that both South Korea and Vietnam had been focused on flattening the curve prior to the peak of the pandemic, including by enforcing a lockdown or strict physical distancing. The two countries focused on economic policies only after checking the virus spread.

Read also: Nine reasons you can be optimistic that a vaccine for COVID-19 will be widely available in 2021

We have not reached the peak yet, and there are a lot of economic policies already, so I think [that explains] why the funding needs keep rising, Hendri said in a virtual talk on Friday. This is of particular [concern] because our response is not timely and lacks focus. Moreover, the financing is very costly.

While trying to re-emerge early from its pandemic restrictions, Indonesia is seeing an upward trend in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases without any signs of slowing down on top of the deepest economic slump since 1999.

On Sunday, the government reported 2,037 new confirmed cases, bringing the total to more than 153,500. As many as 6,680 people have died because of the virus, while 107,500 people have recovered.

The pandemic caused the economy to contract by 5.32 percent year-on-year (yoy) in the April-June period with household spending falling 5.51 percent yoy and investment plummeting 8.61 percent yoy.

President Joko "Jokowi" Widodos administration formed a national committee to handle both the pandemic and its economic impact. The government has allocated more than Rp 695 trillion (US$46.8 billion) in stimulus funds to handle the pandemic and shore up the economy.

Vietnams economy still managed to grow slightly, by 0.36 percent annually, in the second quarter of the year, while South Korea booked a contraction of 3 percent yoy, both performing better than Indonesia.

Separately, an epidemiologist from Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta, Bayu Satria Wiratama, said Sunday that Indonesia's response to the COVID-19 outbreak had not been successful. He cited two main factors for this conclusion: a lack of discipline in following health protocols and a failure to improve testing capacity.

"Despite the government continuously urging the public to wear masks, maintain physical distance and wash hands frequently, many government-organized events failed to enforce such protocols," Bayu told kompas.com.

Read also: Discourse: Not just about pouring out money: Sri Mulyani discusses pandemic response

This situation, he added, set a bad example for the public, causing many to ignore health protocols. He said it was important for the government to deliver a consistent message to the public by setting a good example.

Besides the lack of discipline, Bayu also believed the government had failed to improve testing capacity, patient quarantine measures and contact tracing.

"Previously, the government said it would increase its testing capacity to 10,000 per day, but to this day it has not been able to meet that target," he said.

"Singapore for instance, got COVID-19 under control by conducting massive and quick testing and tracing. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the government has done little contact tracing for each confirmed case," he added. (nal)
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko vowed new steps to crack down on opponents after more demonstrations against his 26-year rule brought tens of thousands of people in to the streets of the capital and other cities over the weekend demanding his resignation.

Police detained two members of the opposition's coordinating council in Minsk Monday as they sought to organize a strike at one of the country's largest factories.

On Sunday, more than 100,000 people gathered in and around Independence Square in Minsk, despite phalanxes of riot police and barbed-wire barricades spread across the city. Police patrols on main highways leading to Minsk slowed incoming traffic, making it harder for protesters from other parts of the country to reach the capital.

Lukashenko was shown on state television flying into his Minsk residence in a helicopter carrying an automatic rifle and clad in a bullet-proof vest, with his 15-year-old son, similarly armed, in tow. He basked in pledges of support from riot police guarding the residence.

The former Soviet collective farm boss is confronting the biggest challenge to his rule after claiming a landslide in the Aug. 9 election, which triggered protests and international condemnation of the vote. Opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who fled to Lithuania after the results, has been spurring followers to take to the streets, while urging foreign powers not to intervene.

Russia, Belarus' closest ally, warned Western countries to stay out of the conflict after congratulating Lukashenko on his election victory. The U.S. and EU have denounced that vote. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun is in Lithuania Monday to discuss the situation. He meets Russian officials Tuesday in Moscow.

The Kremlin is still concerned by signs of "external intervention in Belarus' affairs," spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday, declining to specify what countries he was referring to. He said that the Kremlin is not in contact with the opposition's coordinating council and that to do so would amount to intervention on the part of Russia. While he conceded that opposition leaders haven't made anti-Russian statements, he said the Kremlin remains more impressed with politicians in Belarus who support closer ties with Moscow.

The opposition that backed Tikhanovskaya's bid for the presidency is seeking to reassure Russia that any change of power wouldn't necessarily push Belarus closer to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Russia signaled on Sunday that it isn't convinced. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Tikhanovskaya of harboring an allegedly anti-Russian political agenda, telling a forum near Moscow that he also supports a constitutional reform plan by Lukashenko as "very promising."

Opposition groups call that offer inadequate.

Lukashenko's government has sought to play up the geopolitical stakes in the conflict. Monday, the Defense Ministry said its helicopters repulsed an incursion by eight balloons carrying anti-government slogans from NATO-member Lithuania.

Supporters of the protests there had gathered near the border and released the balloons. Lithuania, for its part, accused the Belarusian helicopters of violating its airspace, according to a statement from its Foreign Ministry.

In Belarus, opposition leaders have called on workers across the country to go on strike to build pressure on the regime, while Lukashenko vowed to shut any factories where work stoppages took place. Two leaders of the strike movement at the Minsk Tractor Plant, known as MTZ, were detained Monday, the opposition said. The two are also members of the coordinating council that Tikhanovskaya has formed for dialog with the regime.

Efforts to broaden the strikes appeared to be struggling under pressure from management and the security services. "It's Brownian motion to which we are trying to bring some order," said Siarhei Antusevich, Deputy Chairman of Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions, which is trying to organize strike committees into a single national entity.

After an extremely brutal crackdown on protesters in the first days following the vote failed to scotch the opposition movement, Lukashenko has stuck mainly to shows of force, with riot police not confronting protesters and military drills on his western border, and public derision for his critics.

Lukashenko "is sure that he can rewind to the beginning, let the protests blow off steam, punish some and intimidate others and return his old control over the country," political analyst Artem Shraibman wrote on the Tut.by news website Monday. "That's another illusion but to recognize that, Lukashenko will need new, more convincing signs that the country he's used to no longer exists."
In July 2020 South Korea finally retired the last of its UH-1 (Huey) helicopters. Since 1968 South Korea has operated 129 UH-1Hs., which flew 792,000 hours since 1968 when the first ones were acquired. In 1978 the last UH-1H was acquired and put into service. Since then most of the UH-1Hs have gone out of service due to accidents or because they simply wore out. By 2010 only about fifty were still in service and fewer than twenty were flyable.

At that time the South Korean Army had nearly 600 helicopters, and 40 percent of them were dying of old age. Since the 1990s South Korea had spent billions modernizing its armed forces with new tanks, warships and aircraft while army helicopters remained at the bottom of the acquisitions list. Since the 1990s most new weapons were locally built because of all the technical and military technologies South Korea has mastered in the last few decades. Not just so South Korea could produce its own modern weapons, but so weapons could become a major export item.

South Korea had, since the 1990s, built weapons production capabilities for world class warships, warplanes, armored vehicles and infantry weapons. Since the 1980s a South Korean firm had been building UH-60H and MD-500 helicopters under license and after 2000 South Korea firms went ahead with developing and producing their own helicopter designs. In 2010, when the South Korean KUH (Korean Utility Helicopter) first flew, the army had fifty UH-1H transport helicopters that were over 40 years old, and 120 MD 500 light attack gunships that were over 30 years old.

The government preferred to build replacement helicopters in South Korea, using South Korean designs. That was not possible given the number of older helicopters in need of replacement and the time it took to design, develop and produce a new South Korean design. Since the 1970s, nearly a hundred UH-1s and MD 500s have been lost to accidents, and that accident rate increases the older these birds get. To avoid that, older helicopters deemed too risky to fly were grounded and retired. For these helicopters a refurbishment would cost nearly as much as a new helicopter. South Korea developed a plan to build nearly 250 KAHs to replace the last UH-1Hs and expand the number of medium transport helicopters in service, plus buy 150 French H155s to replace the aging 260 MD-500s built between 1976 and 1988.

The KUH, nicknamed "Surion," carries two pilots and 11 passengers. It can be armed with 7.62mm machine-guns. Some 60 percent of the components are made in South Korea. The 8.7-ton KUH can hover at up to 3,000 meters and has a top speed of 240 kilometers an hour. South Korea spent a billion dollars developing the KUH, and it was designed for civilian and military use. South Korea becomes only one of 11 countries that produces helicopters. Full scale production began in 2012 and as of 2020 half the 240 Surions ordered had been delivered.

Currently most of the nearly 600 South Korean Army helicopters were built in South Korea. The first were the 257 MD-500 built under license during the 1970s and 1980s. This was followed in the 1990s by 138 UH-60Ps. Since 2012 120 of 250 KUHs have been built in South Korea. Other types of helicopters are too complex, and the South Korean Army only needs small quantities of them. That is not enough to justify the cost of having new ones designed and built in South Korea. These include 33 CH-47 heavy helicopter transports and the hundred AH-64 helicopter gunships. Only 36 of the AH-64a are in service with the rest arriving between 2022 and 2028.

The UH-60, AH-64 and CH-47 are very successful designs that are combat proven and very popular with many export customers. Other nations have had problems designing and building competing designs. While many nations have designed competitive replacements for the UH-1 and MD-500 designs, creating competitive replacements for the UH-60, AH-64 and CH-47 has, so far, resulted in a lot of failures and near-misses. South Korea proved successful in building exportable armored vehicles, warships and aircraft by choosing models that would be profitable via sales to the South Korean military and likely to obtain some export orders. That has worked, although so far the KUH has had a hard time gaining export customers because of competition from existing European designs and cheaper Russian equivalents like the Mi-17. Even China has not yet broken into the helicopters model, so South Korea can take some satisfaction in that.
The Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting saw fireworks with almost all the members coming down heavily on the 23 dissenting leaders for writing a letter to party chief Sonia Gandhi and leaking that to the media.

Four of the 23 dissenters - Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mukul Wasnik, Anand Sharma and Jitin Prasada - were isolated at the CWC meeting as members lashed out at them for challenging Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.

These four leaders along with 19 others, including Kapil Sibal, Manish Tewari, Shashi Tharoor, Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Prithviraj Chavan, in their letter to Sonia Gandhi sought a complete overhaul of the organisation, demanded formation of a parliamentary board and maintained that the Gandhis will always be an integral part of a collective leadership.

A Congress functionary said the letter was triggered by apprehension among these leaders that the party high command might name a third person such as Mallikarjun Kharge or KC Venugopal as the interim chief till internal elections are held as both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are not keen to occupy the post. They wanted to scuttle that move and ensure that a leader acceptable to all occupies the post, he said.

The CWC meeting started with Venugopal reading out Sonia Gandhis letter addressed to him on August 20, asking him to initiate the process to elect a new president.

Addressing the meeting, Sonia Gandhi told Azad that he had sent her the letter on August 9 and then a reminder on August 17. It was hurtful. You know me so well, Azad sahib. How could you think that I will take any decision on the leadership issue without consulting party leaders? You could always come and meet me. I retired long ago. I dont want to hang on to this chair. So whats the motive of this letter? a CWC member quoted her as having said at the meeting.

For his part, Rahul Gandhi questioned the timing of the letter. It was written at a time when my mother was in hospital and you attacked her when she was at her weakest and also when the party was vulnerable, fighting the BJP in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, the CWC member quoted him as having said.

Challenging her authority and talking about the collective leadership was an insult to her. I never wanted her to be the Congress president. She too didnt want to become again, Rahul Gandhi is said to have told the meeting.

Rahul Gandhi also asked Azad how the letter was leaked when it was written on the covering note that there is only one copy that was handed over to the Congress president and all other copies were destroyed.

Party treasurer Ahmed Patel criticised the dissenters. Naming Azad, Wasnik and Sharma, he said they are occupying key posts in the party and should not have written such a letter.

I had advised you not to write any letter but you still went ahead. Do you want Sonia Gandhi to sit at home? Are you doing any favour to the Gandhis by saying they too will be part of the collective leadership? One may be angry over certain decisions in the party but that doesnt mean you start writing letters. I too am out for the last three years but that is ok, Patel is said to have told them.

You are talking about the collective leadership. When you met Baba Ramdev at the airport, did you go after consulting the then Prime Minister (Manmohan Singh) and the Congress president (Sonia Gandhi)? Patel said.

Sibal along with Pranab Mukherjee had met Ramdev at the Delhi airport in June 2011 to dissuade him from launching a fast.

Patel also told Sharma that he should have realised what he is writing when he drafted the letter.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said urged Sonia Gandhi to continue on the post till Rahul Gandhi becomes the president.

Former defence minister AK Antony said if Sonia Gandhi is unwilling then Rahul Gandhi should take over. Weakening the high command is weakening the party. How can my colleagues write such a letter? This is cruel and unfortunate.

Ambika Soni demanded action against dissenting leaders. She said when the party can take action against block and district leaders for indiscipline why cant it do the same against these leaders who first wrote the letter and then leaked it. She also told Azad that he became the J&K chief minister only because of Sonia Gandhi. Referring to Sonia Gandhis meeting with Rajya sabha members, she said Rajeev Satav never questioned Manmohan Singh. Why did you all bring it up on twitter? What does it mean?

Wasnik insisted that he is a party loyalist and would never go against the Gandhi family. I owe a lot to Sonia Gandhi. How can anyone say that we did it when she was in hospital? I wish her a long life. Nobody can question my loyalty to the Congress party. I am ready to face any action.

Sharma said the letter is not against the Gandhis but only seeks to point out to certain issues in the Congress. I joined the Congress at the age of 18 years and will die as a Congressman.

When Azad was explaining the reason behind the letter, Adhir Ranjan Choudhary intervened and said You are making lame excuses and defending the indefensible. At this point, Sonia Gandhi asked Adhir to switch off his mike and not to speak out of turn.

Jitin Prasada too said he was ready to accept the CWC decision in letter and spirit and whatever action it takes against him. We had flagged certain organisational issues and in no way it was against the Gandhis.

RPN Singh praised Sonia Gandhi for being available 24x7 to guide the party during Jharkhand elections. We won the elections. Secondly, I want to tell all CWC members that we should all learn politics from Sonia Gandhi. He also told the members that it is surprising that they dont put forth their viewpoint in the CWC which is the appropriate party forum for raising such issues.

Ajay Maken said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, home minister Amit Shah and the BJP are afraid of Rahul Gandhi only and asked him to assume the reins of the party immediately.

Rajeev Satav said he is pained that 3 of the 23 dissenters were former Youth Congress presidents and know very well how the organisation functions. Sonia Gandhi has never taken any decision without consulting the leaders.

Tariq Hameed Karra demanded that Sonia Gandhi should be made lifetime president of the party. He described the move by senior leaders as less of an internal desire and more of an external design to create an alternative leadership in the Congress and the move to declare her as lifetime president would defeat that external design.

A Chella Kumar said when Article 370 was abrogated in Jammu and Kashmir, three former chief ministers were put under detention. People keep asking us why the former Congress chief minister (Ghulam Nabi Azad) had not been detained and was roaming freely. To this, Azad told him to check the Rajya Sabha records as he was the only opposition leader to have attacked Modi in the House.

Jitendra Singh said there are many Jaichands or traitors in the Congress.

Some people reminded the dissenters that how many people they used to meet when they were ministers.

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By the order of the Prosecutor General of Armenia, Deputy Prosecutor General, Third-Class State Advisor for Justice Davit Melkonyan was dismissed after submitting a resignation letter and stating that he will be working at the Faculty of Law at Yerevan State University and will be more involved in the fields of science and teaching.

During the session of the Advisory Board of the Prosecutor Generals Office today, Prosecutor General Artur Davtyan expressed gratitude to Mr. Melkonyan for his great contributions and dedicated efforts and wished him success.

Davtyan also informed that, by his order, Melkonyan will be appointed chairperson of the to-be-established Scientific-Methodical Council at the Prosecutor Generals Office. He also nominated Prosecutor of Yerevan Gevorg Baghdasaryan as Deputy Prosecutor General, and the nomination was unanimously approved by the members of the Advisory Board. By Davtyans order, Gevorg Baghdasaryan has been appointed Deputy Prosecutor General.

Baghdasaryan graduated from the Faculty of Law of Yerevan State University, has served as a prosecutor in several courts, and on July 11, 2018, by the order of the Prosecutor General, he was appointed Prosecutor of the city of Yerevan.
For most parents, to say the the COVID-19 pandemic has been stressful would be a dramatic understatement. The combination of financial pressure, loss of child care and health concerns is exceedingly challenging for families. Mental-health problems are expected to rise dramatically as a secondary effect of COVID-19 and the measures that have been put in place to contain it.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

For most parents, to say the the COVID-19 pandemic has been stressful would be a dramatic understatement. The combination of financial pressure, loss of child care and health concerns is exceedingly challenging for families. Mental-health problems are expected to rise dramatically as a secondary effect of COVID-19 and the measures that have been put in place to contain it.

The potential long-term consequences on children from increased parental stress, anxiety and depression are only beginning to be understood. However, past research tells us that the children exposed to these problems are more likely to experience mental-health problems themselves, in addition to developing an increased risk of learning and behaviour problems and reduced economic mobility throughout their lives.

We need to develop an approach that helps parents now and protects childrens futures.

Escalation in parental anxiety and depression

In our current studies, we report that pregnant mothers and those with young children are experiencing three- to five-fold increases in self-reported anxiety and depression symptoms. A history of mental illness, current domestic conflict and financial stress were associated with worse mental health across multiple child age groups. These figures are especially concerning because young children are highly vulnerable to maternal mental illness due to their near total reliance on caregivers to meet basic health and safety needs.

High rates of parental mental illness combined with children spending more time at home owing to COVID-19 present multiple risks, including alterations in childrens stress-system function, higher rates of physical health problems and cognitive impairments.

Parenting stress associated with mental illness can lead to negative interactions, including harsh discipline and being less responsive to childrens needs. For parents, depression contributes to health problems and low quality of life. Suicide is a leading cause of death for women of child-bearing age that we expect to increase should high rates of mental health problems continue to be unaddressed.

Mental health system needs urgent improvement

The World Health Organization (WHO) and other child welfare leaders highlight the critical nature of prioritizing parent mental-health services so that parents can build their capacity to fulfil childrens health and development needs.

Addressing parental mental illness not only mitigates harmful effects on child health but builds childrens capacities to manage other stressors, such as school transitions and other unpredictable events.

Effective treatments exist for parental mental illness; however, the high barriers to accessing standard care have become even higher during COVID-19. Existing barriers such as the high cost of psychotherapy and child-care demands have been exacerbated due to physical distancing, closure of existing services and closure of daycares and schools.

Shifting treatment options to evidence-based online formats has also been slow and requires substantial investments for large-scale delivery and program refinement in response to current needs. Another problem is that most existing telehealth models do not simultaneously treat parental mental illness and parenting risks, despite substantial evidence for the importance of addressing both.

Notably, parent mental illness is disproportionately experienced in racialized communities that face both racism and systemic oppression. Failing to address the mental-health and parenting needs at both the population level and in response to community-identified needs will only perpetuate intergenerational health inequities, such as those experienced by Indigenous and Black Canadians.

Small steps that may help

Although many of the causes of parents poor mental health are out of our control, there are small steps you can try right now:

Reaffirm that your emotions make sense. This is an unprecedented time of difficulty that comes with stress, sadness and anxiety. You are not alone in these feelings and wondering about what comes next. Many other parents are similarly feeling distressed and trying to problem solve how to care for themselves and their families.

Talk about your feelings. Sharing your emotions with supportive partners, friends, family members and service providers can be helpful. Brainstorming and problem solving with others can alleviate stress and improve your mood. Just the simple act of sharing can help normalize the fact that youre working hard and still having a hard time feeling well.

Practise self-compassion. Too often we are kind to others and cruel or dismissive of our own distress. Its important to prioritize your own well-being and self-care. If youre experiencing stress, anxiety or depression, talk to and treat yourself like you would a friend. Many people are not used to treating themselves compassionately, but there are resources available to help you cultivate self-compassion.

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.

Seek professional help. If you are having persistent thoughts of self-harm, hopelessness or an increase in alcohol or substance use that is difficult to manage, dont wait to ask for support. If your low mood or anxiety affects your functioning at home, with friends or at work for two weeks or more, seeking additional help to work through challenges could be important to get to the place youd like to be.

Urgent action needed on key risk factors

Immediate action is needed to address key risk factors across family, community and policy levels.

The time is now for the development of a national perinatal and family mental-health strategy. Early intervention investments are expected to yield high health and economic benefits by preventing the long-term consequences of parental mental illness from becoming embedded in childrens biological and behavioural development.

Investing in family mental health and parenting support now and on multiple fronts, before problems are entrenched, will yield enormous payoffs. It is one governments must prioritize as part of the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Leslie E. Roos is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Manitoba. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen is an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Calgary.

This article was first published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca.
As the Nobel laureate's wife and muse Mercedes Barcha dies, looking at the couple's love and relationship.

Mercedes Barcha, the widow, muse and gatekeeper of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who played a crucial role in the publication of his breakthrough novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, died 15 August at her home in Mexico City. She was 87.

Her death was confirmed by her son Rodrigo Garcia, who said she had suffered from respiratory problems for many years.

Mercedes and Gabo, as the couple were known, were living in Mexico City in 1965 when Garcia Marquez began work on One Hundred Years of Solitude, the hypnotic, time-bending tale of the mythical village of Macondo, based on the area of Colombia where both had grown up.

For more than a decade, Garcia Marquez had been eking out a living as a journalist  a passionate leftist, he spent a year at the New York office of Prensa Latina, the Cuban press agency  while banging out short stories and novellas. For 18 months, he had holed up in his office at their home while Barcha kept the landlord and the world at bay. When he emerged in late 1966, he later recalled, she asked, Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.

She then pawned her hair dryer and the couples blender so she could pay the postage to send the manuscript to his Argentine editor. The book  a South American Genesis, as many would call it, or an intricate stew of truths and mirages, as Garcia Marquez wrote, in which priests levitated and flowers rained from the sky  would go on to sell nearly 50 million copies.

One Hundred Years of Solitude and many of the other novels and collections Garcia Marquez published in the decades to follow would be among the rare literary works to enjoy both popular and critical success.

Its themes and characters swirled throughout all his books: savage political violence, passions romantic and otherwise, ghosts, family secrets, idealistic questing madmen and, always, the practical yet mystical women who grounded them  female avatars inspired in one way or another by Barcha, a sharp-witted beauty he had fallen for when they were children.

Toward the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, as the history of Macondo begins to unravel, Garcia Marquez wrote, The old woman who opened the door with a lamp in her hand took pity on his delirium, and insisted that no, there had never been a pharmacy there, nor had she ever known a woman with a slender neck and sleepy eyes named Mercedes.

Mercedes permeates all my books, he once said. Theres traces of her everywhere.

He called her the manager of the crisis department, Garcia said, sometimes without him even knowing what the crisis was.

Mercedes Barcha Pardo was born 6 November, 1932, in Magangue, Colombia. Her father, Demetrio Barcha, was a pharmacist; her mother, Rachel Pardo, was a homemaker. The oldest of seven children, Mercedes grew up in Sucre and then Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where her family moved to avoid the political violence that convulsed the region at midcentury.

There, home on holiday from convent school, she re-met Garcia Marquez, who was writing for a local newspaper. As the story goes, he had proposed marriage the moment he saw her back in Sucre, when she was nine and he was 14. From the start he found her beautiful and enigmatic, with an illusionists talent for evading questions, as he wrote in his 2003 memoir, Living to Tell the Tale.

When Garcia Marquez was sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent, he wrote to Barcha regularly. After his newspaper was shut down, he found himself broke in Paris, living in a hotel room and working on a manuscript. Her photo on the wall and a red Olivetti typewriter were among his only belongings.

Upon his return to South America in 1957, he paid Barcha 500 pesos (the equivalent of about $130, or about $1,200 today) to return his letters  she wouldnt give them up without a prize  and promptly destroyed them. He was years away from being famous, Garcia said, but he was always very particular about their lives being private. He didnt want the paper trail.

The two married in 1958. On the day of the wedding, Barcha waited to put on her wedding dress until he had driven up. Its not that she doubted him, Garcia said, but she had the superstition and the pragmatism of people from a certain world that said, Theres a one-in-a-million chance that a bridegroom might not appear for his wedding. So it was just in case.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, and as his fame increased, with the attendant demands on his time, so did his wife's role as crisis manager and chief of staff.

Their friend Jorge Eduardo Ritter, who had been Panamas ambassador to Colombia, described Barcha as akin to a presidents adviser. She let him know what he needed to know, he said. She was more informed than he was, having read all the newspapers while he worked each morning.

If she had neglected to give him money for lunch, Ritter continued, He would say, Mercedes didnt give me cash, so you will have to pay.

When his novel Love in the Time of Cholera was published in English in 1988, Garcia Marquez told Pete Hamill, who wrote about him for Vanity Fair, You write better with all your problems resolved. You write better in good health. You write better without preoccupations. You write better when you have love in your life. There is a romantic idea that suffering and adversity are very good, very useful for the writer. I dont agree at all.

The couple had homes in Mexico City and Cuernavaca, Mexico; in Barcelona, Spain; in Paris; in Cartagena and Barranquilla, Colombia; and, rather problematically, in Havana, a so-called protocol house lent to them by Fidel Castro, to whom Garcia Marquez remained a loyal friend, confounding almost everyone. Because of their friendship, the US government denied Garcia Marquez a visa until President Bill Clinton, a fan, invited him to Marthas Vineyard in 1995.

Even in that friendship, apparently, Barcha had the upper hand. As Garcia Marquez told Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker, who profiled him in 1999, Fidel trusts Mercedes even more than he does me.

It was one of those epic marriages, Anderson said in a phone interview. Mercedes ran the practical side. She unmoored him from the quotidian exigencies of everyday life.

Each of their homes, he recalled, was identically decorated, with white furniture and carpets, modern art, the same clothes in the closet and the same Apple computer.

Theres a Spanish phrase: polo a tierra, the thing you ground a house with, Anderson said. She was his grounding, his connection to the earth.

She was also insatiably curious about the world and its goings-on; they both were, he added, and they were wise-eyed in this very intrinsic way. They came from a similar part of Colombia, from these little backwater river towns where violence was a fact of everyday life.

Garcia said his parents had this idea of marriage that was also a kind of complicity. It wasnt just the love; it was the things that were just between the two of you.

People say she was the gatekeeper, he continued. I think thats a little facile. There is a gatekeeper when there is a gate to be kept. She was comfortable playing the bad guy, but if my father wasnt picking up the phone, it wasnt because she was keeping him away from it. It was because he was not going to take your call today.

In addition to Garcia, a film and television writer and director, Barcha is survived by another son, Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, an artist and graphic designer; and a brother, Eduardo Barcha.

Garcia Marquez, who died in 2014, often said, If Mercedes dies first, Im going to move to a hotel.

The couple known as Mercedes and Gabo, Garcia said, were a funny combination of private and gregarious, with friends from all generations and social strata, and throughout the decades they remained socially indefatigable. For her 80th birthday, Barcha gave herself a pair of blue suede shoes and danced all night.

I left the party at 2 am, Garcia recalled, and she kept going.

 Featured image: Mercedes Barcha and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Photo via Twitter.

Penelope Green c.2020 The New York Times Company
TikTok logos are seen on smartphones in front of a displayed ByteDance logo in this illustration taken November 27, 2019.

ByteDance investors are in talks to use their stakes in the Chinese technology firm to help finance their bid for its popular short-video app TikTok, according to people familiar with the matter.

ByteDance has been in talks to divest TikTok's North America, Australia and New Zealand operations to potential acquirers, including Microsoft and Oracle. President Donald Trump has ordered the Chinese company to sever ties with the social media app in the United States, citing concerns over the safety of the personal data it handles.

Some ByteDance investors, including investment firm General Atlantic, are vying to own large stakes in the TikTok assets for sale, the sources said. Under their restructuring plan, Microsoft or Oracle could receive a minority stake in the assets, the sources added.

The TikTok assets for sale could be worth between $25 billion and $30 billion, the sources said. To help fund their bid, the ByteDance investors are discussing exchanging some or all of their stakes in the Chinese company with equity in the TikTok assets, according to the sources.

The ByteDance investors' plan faces long odds and significant hurdles, the sources said. Trump administration officials have said they expect a major U.S. company to lead the TikTok deal and ringfence the app technologically from ByteDance.

A U.S. government panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), has to sign off on any deal that ByteDance reaches.

Nevertheless, the push by some ByteDance investors for a bigger role in the TikTok deal underscores their efforts to give the Chinese company more options and avert a fire sale. Some of them had to convince ByteDance's founder and CEO Yiming Zhang to let go of TikTok, the sources said.

Microsoft remains the lead bidder for the TikTok assets because of its deep pockets and technical capacity to design new algorithms for TikTok that will be separate from ByteDance and its Chinese short video app Douyin, according to the sources.

Microsoft is working on a blueprint on how TikTok would be separated operationally from ByteDance after a deal is reached, which the Redmond, Washington-based company has said it hopes to ink by Sept. 15, the sources added. CFIUS would then monitor the implementation of the deal under a lengthy transition period, according to the sources.

The sources requested anonymity because the matter is confidential. TikTok and General Atlantic declined to comment, while ByteDance, Microsoft and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

As relations between the United States and China deteriorate over trade, Hong Kong's autonomy, cybersecurity and the spread of the novel coronavirus, TikTok has emerged as a flashpoint in the dispute between the world's two largest economies.

While TikTok is best known for its anodyne videos of people dancing and going viral among teenagers, U.S. officials have expressed concerns that information on users could be passed on to China's communist government.

Trump has said he would support an effort by Microsoft to buy TikTok's American operations if the U.S. government got a "substantial portion" of the proceeds, but has also said there are other credible buyers such as Oracle.
S wathes of people made the most of a rare opportunity to pose on an empty Tower Bridge over the weekend as the London landmark was closed to traffic.

The famous drawbridge got stuck open after it was hit by a technical fault on Saturday.

Before the problem was fixed on Sunday afternoon, tourists had 24 hours to take full advantage of the car-free bridge.

People were snapped jumping into the air and smiling in the deserted road.

People were snapped jumping into the air and smiling in the deserted road / PA

Bridge and groom Jenny Nguyen and Tony Cao, from Vietnam, also paid a visit to the bridge for a once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity.

Another man was captured lying down in the middle of the road which is usually traversed by around 21,000 cars a day.

Bridge and groom Jenny Nguyen and Tony Cao, from Vietnam also descended on the bridge for a one-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity / PA

The famous bridges arms lift around 850 times a year over the River Thames but they got stuck on Saturday afternoon after opening to let a ship pass through.

Queues of motorists and pedestrians were left waiting for at least an hour from both directions.

A witness said: "According to the security radios we overheard there are multiple failures."

People were snapped jumping into the air and smiling in the deserted road / PA

City of London Police said engineers rushed to fix the bridge as drivers were urged to avoid the area.

Its Twitter account said: "Tower Bridge is currently closed to pedestrians and traffic, due to a mechanical fault."

One social media user said: "I've been stuck here for nearly an hour now... #TowerBridge."

Another commented: "Yep, tower bridge definitely stuck! One side started to come down but the other didn't! #towerbridge #londontraffic."

The bridge connects the Square Mile financial district to Southwark.

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In 2005, police closed the bridge for 10 hours after a technical problem meant the arms could not be lowered.
No one save such a party: BJP on Congress crisis

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Aug 24: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday took a jibe at the Congress, remarking that with even senior leaders now being accused of 'colluding' with the BJP, 'no one can save such a party'.

"When Scindia ji raised his voice, he was accused of colluding with BJP. Now when leaders like Ghulam Nabi Azad and Kapil Sibal are demanding full-time party chief, they're also being accused of colluding with BJP. No one can save such a party", the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said today.

Another BJP leader Uma Bharti has offered a piece of advice to the Grand Old Party. Speaking to reporters, the BJP leader said that the political dominance of the Gandhi-Nehru family is over and Congress should return to the real 'swadeshi Gandhi without any foreign element.

Congress workers demand party chief to be from Gandhi family, not outsiders

"Gandhi-Nehru family's existence is in crisis, their political dominance is over, Congress is finished.. so who stays in what position hardly matters now... Congress should return to the real Gandhi, the real 'swadeshi' Gandhi without any foreign element," said Uma Bharti.

The crucial meeting of the Working Committee started here amid divisions in the party over the leadership issue.

Rahul Gandhi in his speech also questioned the timing of the letter, which was sent to Sonia Gandhi when she was in Gangaram hospital and under medication

Sonia Gandhi asks Congress to find a new president, says won't remain the president | Oneindia News

"It is the CWC and not the media where we put out our thoughts and discuss," he is learnt to have said at the meeting," he said.

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

Around 20 party leaders had written to Sonia Gandhi demanding a full-time, visible president and overhauling of the organisational structure including elections to the CWC and reconstitution of the Parliamentary board.

There has been a huge outpouring of support for the Gandhis with party leaders from across the country urging her to continue as party chief or appoint Rahul Gandhi to the post.
France's interior minister has vowed to deport the family of a Bosnian Muslim girl who was allegedly beaten and had her head shaved for dating a Christian.

The 17-year-old was left with a broken rib and multiple bruises after the attack in Besancon, 70 miles north of Geneva, on Monday last week.

While investigations are still underway, minister Gerald Darmanin has warned the girl's father, mother, uncle and aunt will be deported once the case has left court.

'They will be taken back to the border because they have no reason to be on our soil,' he tweeted.

Gerald Darmanin, France's interior minister, has vowed to deport the girl's relatives because 'they have no reason to be on our soil'

The case began several months ago when the girl, who came to France from Bosnia and Herzegovina with her family in 2017, began dating the Christian boy in secret.

Fearing reprisals from her family, the girl fled to go and live with the 20-year-old boy on August 13, Le Parisien reports.

Four days later, she agreed to go back to her family home alongside the boy and his parents to try and reconcile.

But, she told police, her family instead attacked her - with her relatives kicking and punching her in the head and body.

The girl claims her father then took a pair of shears and asked her uncle to cut off her long hair.

Her boyfriend ran out of the house and called police, who arrived on the scene a short time later.

The girl's family are accused of trying to hide her from officers, who eventually found her and arrested the father, uncle, mother and aunt.

The girl was left with a broken rib, bruising and a shaved head after the attack last week in the city of Besancon (pictured), 70 miles north of Geneva

The four have now been charged with violence against a minor, while the girl has been placed in protective custody.

The case caused outrage on social media, with minister for citizenship Marlene Schiappa saying the family should be 'shamed'.

Mr Darmanin described the attack as 'barbarism' and vowed 'the most severe sanctions' - before saying the family would be deported.

Tensions remain high between Bosnian Muslims - also known as Bosniaks - and Christians, 25 years on from the Bosnian War.

The conflict, which took place over three years during the break-up of Yugoslavia, was fought along largely ethnic and religious lines, between Bosniaks, Orthodox Christian Serbs, and Catholic Croats.

In 1995, some 8,000 Bosniaks were killed by Serb forces in the Srebrenica massacre - the worst mass-killing in Europe since the Second World War.

A survey by Pew Research in 2015 found that just 15 per cent of Bosnian Muslims would be comfortable with their son or daughter marrying a Christian.
Dr. Nathan and Dr. Tempany both bring extensive experience navigating unique challenges in prostate research, said Dr. Amit Vohra, Co-Founder, and CEO of Promaxo. Their perspectives will be invaluable as we scale and enhance our MRI guided product portfolio.

Medical imaging, robotics, and AI technology company Promaxo, Inc. (Promaxo), announced Dr. Senthil Nathan and Dr. Clare Tempany as new key members of Promaxos advisory board. They bring specialized expertise in urology, radiology and prostate cancer research to navigate the future direction and further development of image-guided diagnosis and treatment capabilities.

Dr. Nathan and Dr. Tempany both bring extensive experience navigating unique challenges in prostate research, said Dr. Amit Vohra, Co-Founder, and CEO of Promaxo. Their perspectives will be invaluable as we scale and enhance our MRI guided product portfolio.

Dr. Nathan works at the University College Hospital and the Royal Free Hospital in London, as well as serves as a trustee among numerous educational organizations, including the SNJ Educational & Charitable Trust, the SNJ Education Fund, and the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation.

Having witnessed the value of robotic techniques in urology and been part of the Imperial College team that carried out the worlds first true robotic surgery, I recognize the critical role MRI can play in streamlining prostate cancer treatment, said Dr. Nathan. I look forward to working with Promaxo to innovate this industry.

Additionally, Promaxo welcomes Dr. Clare Tempany, who is the acting Medical Director and Chair of several international clinical trial committees, namely PI-RADS, ECOG-ACRIN in prostate MRI, and MRgFUS for uterine fibroid treatment. Having served as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins Medical Institution as well as the largest womens hospital in the US, Dr. Tempany will provide invaluable insight toward Promaxos medical developments.

I have been performing interventions under traditional MRI for almost a decade, pioneering the development of prostate cancer diagnosis, and image-guided therapy. I am incredibly impressed with the improvements the Promaxo team has accomplished with their in-office system, said Dr. Tempany. Promaxo is at the forefront of medical innovation and Im excited to be part of it.

Promaxos advisory team now includes 17 experts that cover everything from clinical development and industry forecasting to early market development and market launch. The deep skill sets and industry expertise of this combined team have aided in Promaxos rapid growth over the past 18-months.

About Promaxo, Inc.

Promaxo was founded by a team of entrepreneurs and healthcare innovators to develop a minimally-invasive and patient-centric MRI and robotic platform. Based in Oakland, California, and backed by over 60 patents, the companys mission is to improve lives through state-of-the-art medical imaging, robotics and AI capabilities. With a compact and adaptable MRI, Promaxo is redefining the standard of care by improving the quality and speed of patient screening and interventions. The Company has formed numerous long-term and strategic partnerships with investor groups as it prepares to enter the US market.

To learn more about the technology behind the MRI system and its scope, visit: Promaxo.com.

LinkedIn: Promaxo

Twitter: @Promaxo

Facebook: Promaxo

Media Contact:

Lindsey Hill

Jive PR + Digital

e: lindseyhill@jiveprdigital.com

m: 951.566.6413

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MONTAGUE  A 35-year-old Worcester man died of what is believed to be a drowning Saturday in the Connecticut River.

Welman Hernandez-Diaz was pulled from the river by rescue workers. There is no foul play suspected in his apparent drowning, said Mary Carey, spokeswoman for Northwestern District Attorney David E. Sullivan.

Hernandez-Diaz was swimming with a group of people Saturday morning at the Rock Dam swimming area. Friends reported he had gone under the water before noon and did not resurface, she said.

Montague Fire and Rescue, Montague Police and Massachusetts State Police all responded to the drowning, she said.

The state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will determine the official cause of death for Hernandez-Diaz, Carey said.

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Explainer: How Sexual Harassment is different from Sexual Assault

Man attempts sexual assault on American woman in Tamil Nadu

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Chennai, Aug 23: A man allegedly attempted to sexually assault an American woman in Tamil Nadu's Tiruvannamalai on Sunday, following which he was arrested, the police said.

The man, a native of Namakkal, who was roaming around the temple town falsely claiming to be a saint "attempted to sexually assault" the woman, a senior police official said.

"We are questioning him, investigation is going on and nothing more could be divulged now," news agency PTI quoted the senior official as saying.

Delhi sexual assault case: Kejriwal says girl still fighting for life, urges people to pray for her

Reportedly, the woman was staying in a rented accommodation in pursuit of spiritualism.

Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu, dotted with several ashrams, is popular for the ancient Sri Arunachaleswara temple and many spiritually inclined people have made this town their home.

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Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 9:21 [IST]
In a major success, troops of Border Security Force in West Bengal apprehended one cattle smuggler on the international border between India and Bangladesh in Murshidabad. Jawans of 141 Battalion deployed on Indo-Bangladesh in Murshidabad caught the Indian smuggler and rescued 4 cattle when he was smuggling them into Bangladesh on the intervening night of August 23 and 24, 2020.

"At about 7:30, the vigilant troops of the BSF observed suspicious movement of 4 to 5 miscreants on the river Ganga. Troops challenged them and asked to surrender, but instead of surrendering, they all tried to escape by jumping into the water. The bravehearts of the BSF chased them and could succeed in apprehending one whereas remaining escaped taking advantage of the darkness The apprehended smuggler was trying to go to Bangladesh along with cattle. He was taken into custody and 4 cattle were rescued from smugglers," said a senior BSF officer in West Bengal.

Read: Hit Hard By COVID-19 Outbreak, Bengal Weavers Migrate To Other Places For Jobs

Cattle smuggler identified

On being questioned by the Intelligence Branch of the BSF, the trafficker called himself an Indian citizen. It is reported that he is identified as Ahsan Ali, a 25-year-old man from a village named Devanapur in Malda. The apprehended smuggler was working as a laborer in Kerala, who came back to his village due to no work after lockdown and got involved in the smuggling activities to earn easy money with a fellow smuggler of his village.

Read: Bengal COVID Tally Climbs To 1,38,870 With Record 3,274 New Infections

"Ahsan Ali has disclosed the names of other smugglers who are running the syndicate of cattle smuggling, including two Bangladeshis named Rahman and Tojulu who are residents of Rajshahi in Bangladesh. The names of these two Bangladeshi smugglers were also disclosed by other apprehended smugglers last week." said a senior BSF officer who also said that a Samsung mobile along with an Indian and Bangladeshi sim card were recovered from the apprehended smuggler.

Read: South Bengal Districts Likely To Witness Heavy Rain From Monday

The apprehended Indian smuggler along with the rescued cattle and mobiles have been deposited at the Police Station Sagar Para for further legal proceedings after lodging the FIR against the smugglers.

Read: Mamata Banerjee Reiterates Her Stand On NEET, JEE Exams, Urges PM To Reconsider Move
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 12:18:41|Editor: huaxia

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KABUL, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- At least three Afghan national security force members were killed and six others wounded after a Taliban suicide car bomb targeted Dih Yak district's office in eastern Ghazni province early Monday, provincial government spokesman confirmed. Enditem
WASHINGTONThe Republican National Convention kicked off Monday with a prayer.

Let us acknowledge the many gifts that God has bestowed upon us, starting with a president and vice-president that reflect the values of our founding fathers and are willing to fight for those values, Jay Shepard of Vermont said to the assembled delegates. Help us all follow President Trump, he prayed.

That set a thematically appropriate tone for a convention this week that is less about a political party than it is about one man. Four years ago, Trump was an outsider to the GOP, steamrolling his way to the nomination over a lineup of Republican establishmentarians and ideological stars, and the convention featured moments that displayed that tension  as when Sen. Ted Cruz failed to endorse Trump in his speech. In 2020, Trumps takeover is total, and the convention reflects it.

An example? For the first time in its history, the Republican party will offer no election platform  a motion from the partys platform committee substituted instead a resolution pledging the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his administration and for his America-first agenda.

Trumps campaign elaborated a bit in a second-term agenda entitled Fighting for You!. It lays out his priorities in 50 bullet-point items, including Return to normal in 2021 on coronavirus and Teach American exceptionalism under education.

A campaign official said Monday that more would be heard about that agenda over the course of the convention. Delivering the message will be members of Trumps family and of his administration. Three of four nights feature headlining speeches by Trumps (Don Jr. on Monday, Melania on Tuesday and the president on Thursday). Most political conventions feature a parade of party luminaries and elder statesmen; Bidens nominating convention last week had appearances by every living former Democratic president and the past four nominees. This years Republican convention wont hear from any previous presidents or nominees; instead, it will largely feature Trump loyalists from Congress, government departments and his own staff.

Allegiance to Trump himself seems to be a theme of the convention. So what does the party stand for, other than the glorification of the president? Thats the question asked by Politicos Tim Alberta, who found a party that had long prided itself on principles of small government, free trade, low taxes and conservative social values now stands for little besides conflict with the Democrats, in the image of its president. The party of Lincoln and Reagan ought to have something big and bold to offer the country, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a Republican, told Alberta, but its got way too many grifters selling grievance politics.

The convention is offering a dose of that, too, including appearances by the St. Louis couple who were arrested after waving guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, and the student who sued CNN and the Washington Post after being branded a racist during a visit to Washington, DC.

But mostly the convention will feature Trump himself, in person. Hell accept the nomination in a speech from the lawn of the White House. On brand for this president, its a location that shatters traditions (and, some suggest, laws) around the separation of government and campaigning. And hell appear on every night of the proceedings, although he wont speak on all of them, according to party officials.

He spoke Monday afternoon. As the delegate roll call was underway  held in person in the convention hall in Charlotte, NC, rather than virtually, as at the Democratic convention  Trump took the stage in an unscheduled visit after hed technically secured the nomination. Four more years! the delegates chanted.

If you want to really drive em crazy, you say 12 more years, Trump said to applause and laughter.

Earlier in the day, campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh had promised a positive and uplifting convention, saying, The president is about the most optimistic person that Ive ever met.

But in his nearly hour-long stream of consciousness speech Monday, the president opened and closed his remarks  and spent considerable time in between  warning that the Democrats are trying to steal the election, and repeated his unsubstantiated warnings that mail-in balloting is a postal scam.

His meandering remarks were reminiscent of his rally speeches. He bragged about a first term he said had unified the country behind success, and about the enthusiasm of his base. He painted his opponents as radicals who will raise taxes, take away guns, and outlaw oil and gas. He critiqued cable television programming decisions, promised (as he so often has) that an end to the COVID-19 crisis is just around the corner (the vaccine is going to come very, very soon,) and suggested current lockdowns are part of an attempt by some states to make him look bad. He said a whole lot of things that fact-checking has shown to be untrue.

Which is to say, he brought a big dose of familiar Trump to the roll call. In this unscheduled appearance hours before any official television programming was scheduled to start, he made a long, rambling speech likely to grab the headlines from the conventions first day.

As he left the stage, the song YMCA played over the loudspeakers. The delegates got up and danced like drunken aunts at a family wedding. This is Trumps party, completely. Its Trumps Republican party, too.

Correction  Aug. 25, 2020: This article was edited to note that Sen. Ben Sasse represents Nebraska.

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(Alliance News) - James Benamor, founder of Amigo Holdings PLC, is seeking to return as chief executive despite having recently offloaded much of his majority holding, the Financial Times reported on Friday.

In April, majority owner Richmond Group Ltd's Benamor, called for the sub prime lender's entire board to be ousted after saying the company is "committing slow motion suicide", but shareholders rejected Benamor's resolutions.

Amigo and Benamor settled their dispute in June, with Benamor deciding to sell his entire 61% stake in the company.

In a Friday blog post, the FT said: "Benamor said he wanted to return to the company to lead an international expansion while fighting what he described as 'unethical' UK authorities."

Under Benamor's plan, the FT reported, incumbent Chief Executive Glen Crawford would keep control of Amigo's UK-regulated Amigo Loand Lts subsidiary, focusing on cost cutting and shrinking debt, as well as embarking on a judicial view of the Financial Ombudsman Service's handling of customer complaints.

For its financial year ended March 31, Amigo posted revenue of GBP294.2 million, up 8.7% from GBP270.7 million recorded the year prior. However, pretax loss was GBP37.9 million swinging from a profit of GBP111.0 million. Net loan book was GBP643.1 million, down 9.1% from GBP707.6 million.

The deterioration in its financials was driven by an increase in complaint volumes, resulting in a complaints cost of GBP126.8 million compared to a cost of GBP100,000 in financial 2019. The company has set aside a complaints provision of GBP117.5 million to handle complaints compared to no provision as at the end of financial 2019.

Benamor himself would take over parent company Amigo Holdings to build new businesses in markets that, the FT quoted, "unlike the UK regulated market, enjoy fair and stable rule of law".

"Benamor had previously been reported to be planning to establish an international rival to Amigo after he first left the company's board in 2018," the FT noted.

https://www.ft.com/content/89f25b52-8ef4-41db-99dd-b52cf4c039c0

By Anna Farley; annafarley@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
The royal commission into aged care has rebuked the federal government for failing to act on persistent problems across the sector, with new research sparking a clash in Parliament over measures that might have saved lives.

In a rare statement ahead of their final report, the royal commissioners said the government had ignored calls to require more public reporting of the quality of care in order to fix the system.

Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck apologised in the Senate for not knowing how many residents and staff had died from outbreaks. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

Commissioners Tony Pagone and Lynelle Briggs said Australia needed unbiased quality measurement to act on a research paper showing the better work done in New Zealand, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and other countries.

"Without it, problems are hidden from sight and not addressed," they said in a statement about performance checks. "It is unacceptable that in 2020 the aged care system is still without this.
Approximately 56 journalists in Peru have died from the coronavirus, the Head of the Lima Association of Journalists said Friday.

Ricardo Burgos said there is a chance the number could be higher - there were 18 more deaths but it wasn't possible to determine whether the cause was COVID-19.

Burgos criticised employers of journalists in the industry, alleging they didn't supply proper protection equipment.

"Many of the fallen colleagues have died due to the negligence of their employers," he said.

Ivan Bravo, a cameraman who defeated COVID-19, knows how precarious the conditions are among his colleagues.

"Many of our colleagues died in the line of duty, because this is our job, to go where others flee, we can't step back, it is very sad, its a pain in our hearts not to see many of our partners," said Bravo.

According to Health Ministry information, thousands of death certificates list COVID-19 as one of several causes of death.

But they were not included in the country's official toll because the victims didn't have a coronavirus test before dying.

Peru currently ranks 9th in the world in terms of virus deaths and currently has more than 400,000 cases, according to John Hopkins University.

If the suspected cases are confirmed, the country could rank 5th behind Mexico, which has recorded 46,000 deaths.
Wellington: The man who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 looked his surviving victims and their families in the eye on Monday as they recounted the horror of a massacre that prosecutors said he planned carefully to cause maximum carnage.

Australian Brenton Tarrant, 29, has pleaded guilty to 51 murder charges, 40 charges of attempted murder and one charge of committing a terrorist act in relation to the massacre in the city of Christchurch that he livestreamed on Facebook.

Brenton Tarrant, seen in a 2019 courtroom drawing, appears via video link in court from a maximum security prison in Auckland. Credit:AP

He faces a life prison term, possibly without parole in what would be a first for the country, when a High Court judge sentences him later this week.

Handcuffed and dressed in grey prison clothes, Tarrant sat with hands clasped for most of the morning's proceedings. He showed little emotion, and looked directly at those delivering victim impact statements.
Jerusalem, Aug 24 : Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he has agreed to postpone a looming budget deadline, preventing the fourth national elections in less than two years.

"Now is the time for unity, not for elections," he said in a broadcast press conference on Sunday, Xinhua news agency reported.

Netanyahu said he will back a bill to push the deadline for approval of the state budget by 100 days. "This compromise deal is the right answer to the Israeli economy at this time," he said.

Under Israeli law, if the government does not approve a state budget within 90 days after it is formed, the parliament automatically dissolves. The deadline this time would have expired on Monday night.

Netanyahu and the main partner in his power-sharing government, Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Blue and White party, should have agreed on the national budget by Monday at midnight.

The new bill would give them 100 more days to reach an agreement over the budget.

Netanyahu is facing a criminal trial over charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases. He has denied any wrongdoing.

His trial began in June but he has refused to step down from office, despite weekly protests where tens of thousands of Israelis across the country call him to resign.
Multiple wildfires are burning in the greater North Bay. Cal Fire is referring to them collectively as the LNU Lightning Complex. LNU stands for Cal Fire's Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit, and you can find the latest evacuation info here. A map of the fire is available here. The biggest fires are:

Hennessey Fire (merged with Gamble, Green, Aetna, Markley, Morgan, Spanish and Round): Napa County, 294,602 acres, 29% contained

Walbridge Fire (merged with Stewarts): Sonoma County, west of Healdsburg, 54,403 acres, 7% contained

Meyers Fire: Sonoma County, north of Jenner, 2,360 acres, 96% contained

---

LATEST: Aug 24, 8:15 p.m. The LNU Lightning Complex expanded to 351,817 acres with 25% containment on Monday night.

For reference, the blaze was at 350,030 acres at 22% containment Monday morning. Favorable weather conditions continued into Monday, and while Cal Fire officials still expect some expansion of the complex, "significant growth" is no longer expected.

The fire has killed five civilians and destroyed 908 structures. 30,500 structures are still threatened at this time.

Aug 24, 3:45 p.m. Evacuation orders in two different zones in Sonoma County have been downgraded to evacuation warnings.

In map grid 1D1 (map can be accessed here), the following areas are now under evacuation warnings:

-East of the Sonoma Coast

-North of the Russian River

-West of Myers Grade Road

-South of Fort Ross Road



In map grid 1D2, the following areas are now under evacuation warnings:



-East of Myers Grade Road

-North of the Russian River

-West of Cazadero Highway

-South of Fort Ross Road

Individuals returning to their homes must use Highway 1 as Highway 116 remains closed east of Cazadero Highway.

Aug 24, 2:50 p.m. Cal Fire officials said Monday that fire crews currently do not have the infrastructure to take donations from the public.

"We greatly appreciate the public's support and desire to donate, but we do not have the infrastructure to accept any donations, especially food," Cal Fire said in a statement. "This is carefully regulated in fire camp by health and safety ordinances, and adheres to COVID-19 regulations. In lieu of donations, please contact your local Red Cross or other organizations to see if they are accepting assistance for those in need, or for information about how you can help those evacuated."

Aug 24, 2:45 p.m. The following evacuation orders in Napa County have been downgraded to evacuation warnings:

- Soda Canyon Rd. from Loma Vista to 3700 Soda Canyon Rd.

- Atlas Peak from the Bubbling Wells Pet Cemetery to 3683 Atlas Peak Road

Aug. 24, 11:30 a.m. Officials announced Monday another body has been found in the aftermath of the LNU Lightning Complex fire.

The fatality occurred in Solano County, bringing the civilian death toll for the fire to five. Three have died in Napa County and two in Solano. No other details about the death were provided.

Aug. 24, 11 a.m. Cal Fire incident chiefs are "feeling confident" about making gains on the enormous LNU Lightning Complex fire today.

With the red flag warning canceled and more favorable firefighting conditions, aircraft are expected to fly this afternoon. Cal Fire officials warned residents they may see large smoke columns today; this is due simply to weather conditions allowing for smoke to rise skyward, and fire crews are on the ground monitoring the situation.

Some parts of Napa, Solano, Sonoma and Yolo counties are expected to be repopulated today. For full evacuation orders and changes, visit here.

---

A red flag warning was cancelled by the National Weather Service Monday, but crews on the LNU Lightning Complex in the North Bay are still prepared for the possibility of dry lightning Monday morning and afternoon, as thunderstorms move across Northern California.

Remnants of a tropical storm that pushed into Central California overnight were forecast to deliver a nasty mix of dry lightning and erratic winds and amplify fire activity. The storm cells traveled across Monterey County and pushed across the Santa Cruz Mountains, but they mostly carried high amounts of moisture into the region and even dropped small amounts of rainfall, helping suppress fire activity. Although the warning for high winds and lightning storms has now expired, the NWS still urges vigilance.

"Stay weather aware as weak cells are still over the North Bay; however, most moisture has moved north of our area and instability has decreased giving us confidence to let the warning expire early," the NWS said Monday at 9:30 a.m.

That National Weather Service said the Bay Area has mostly dodged the storm.

"Theres still a chance of an isolated thunderstorm, generating gusty, erratic winds and lightning for San Francisco Bay and the North Bay through the morning," said NWS meteorologist Will Pi. "It looks like the instability on this one was far less than the one we had last week. This is a more typical summer thunderstorm."

Noah Berger/Associated Press

The LNU Complex, the second-largest fire in California history, saw moderate growth overnight with favorable weather allowing crews to focus on harnessing the blaze.

The complex of fires was 341,243 acres with 21% containment before nightfall Sunday, and as of this morning it was 350,030 with 22% containment.

The Walbridge Fire, which was 0% contained on Sunday morning, is now up to 5%; the blaze west of Healdsburg in Sonoma County. The Meyers Fire, north of Jenner in Sonoma County, is now 95% contained. Five damage assessment teams will be going into the burn areas of the Walbridge Fire today to determine how many structures were damaged or destroyed.

Officials cautioned residents to be ready to evacuate at a moment's notice, as dry lightning could spark fires and high winds could quickly spread them.

"I can't stress enough the importance of being prepared to leave," Cal Fire unit chief Shana Jones said Sunday.

"If that tingling on the back of your neck says 'I need to leave,' then please do so," she added. "Do not wait to be ordered to do so."

Four civilians have died  three in Napa County and one in Solano County  871 structures have been destroyed and 234 are damaged, as of Monday morning. Over 30,000 structures remain threatened.

Noah Berger/Associated Press

If the weather turns unfavorable Monday, Cal Fire officials say that preventing any new fires from erupting into large blazes will become their immediate priority, so residents may see resources pulled from fires already burning near them.

Over 1,800 fire personnel are at the LNU Lightning Complex with more arriving from out of state. Fifteen engines from Washington and 25 from Oregon arrived over the weekend. Jones said the LNU fire is the state's No. 1 priority for getting more resources. "Despite the increase in resources, we are definitely far from getting these fires handled," Jones said Sunday.

Click here for evacuation information from Cal Fire and find more evacuation details below:

Sonoma County: Find latest evacuation information at SoCo Emergency.

Napa County: Find evacuation information at Napa County Office of Emergency Services.

Lake County: Sign up for evacuation information with Lake County here.

Solano County: Evacuation information on the Solano County website.

Yolo County: Evacuation information on the Solano County website.

For updates on the complex, check the Cal Fire website.

Amy Graff is the news editor for SFGATE. Email her: agraff@sfgate.com.
An AFL WAG has shared the heartbreaking moment she was told she'd lost her unborn baby.

Lauren Gibbs, who is married to Adelaide Crows' star Bryce Gibbs, found out she was pregnant in June when the footy star was in the AFL hub on the Gold Coast.

In a moving tribute posted to Instagram on Saturday the couple revealed the miscarriage and wrote: 'Its crazy how much you can love somebody that you have never met before.'

Lauren Gibbs (right) revealed the devastating miscarriage was 'heartbreaking' (pictured with her husband and two children Charlie and Madison-Rose)

Ms Gibbs shared a photo on Instagram of her two children (pictured) in matching pyjamas saying she had been excited 'to be joined by another little one'

Lauren described her extreme sadness and distress at the loss but said the couple has been supporting each other.

'Sometimes Bryce is the strong one for me. On other days, Im providing that support for him. As a team we navigate it,' Lauren told The Advertiser.

Lauren and Bryce have two children together, Charlie, five, and Madison Rose 11 months, and were expecting their baby in the new year.

'I still get a lump in my throat talking about it and the grief comes in waves.

'Any other kind of loss we grieve, and thats done in public with friends around to provide support, but a miscarriage is often so much more private and done in silence, which makes it so emotionally challenging,' said Lauren.

She first revealed the heartbreaking loss in an Instagram post last week and said she started making matching pyjamas for her children as they would be joined by another little one in the new year.

Lauren said that although she is upset, she would prefer to talk about things than suppress it as it helps her cope.

'The response has been overwhelming, really positive and comforting. So many people have reached out to send their condolences but also share their own personal experiences, which is empowering.'

Ms Gibbs said talking about her experience had helped her (pictured with her husband and two children)

Ms Gibbs thanked her 'wonderful' family and friends and said she was 'grateful for my two little ones who make my world better every single day'

Lauren wrote on Instagram: 'I know I am not alone in this and speaking about my miscarriage has certainly helped.

'Thank you to all my wonderful family and friends. Grateful for my two little ones who make my world better every single day.'

The couple, who have been together for 12 years, got married in November 2018 in the Barossa Valley.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 24

By Jeila Aliyeva - Trend:

Entrepreneurs from Afghanistan bought petroleum bitumen and diesel fuel in foreign currency during an auction at the State Commodity and Raw Materials Exchange of Turkmenistan last week, Trend reports with reference to Turkmenistans State News Agency.

In addition, businessmen from Russia, Turkey and Afghanistan bought high density polyethylene in foreign currency.

Furthermore, terry products and cotton yarn became the subject of transactions of businessmen from Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in foreign currency.

The total amount of transactions in foreign currency exceeded $4.9 million.

Transactions in Turkmen manat were also made on the exchange. Thus, entrepreneurs of the UAE, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Canada purchased cotton yarn worth more than 4.2 million Turkmen manat ($1.2 million).

Also, Turkmen entrepreneurs purchased high-density polyethylene, cotton fiber, cotton lint in the amount of over 3.3 million Turkmen manat ($955,191).

In general, 35 transactions were registered on the exchange over the past week.

The state commodity exchange of Turkmenistan was established on July 29, 1994. It is the most important agency of state regulation of export-import operations.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @JeilaAliyeva
Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, granted an emergency-use authorization for investigational convalescent plasma in hospital patients, which will expand access to the therapy. Earlier this month, two other leading health experts in the administration, Anthony S. Fauci, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, reportedly expressed reservations about such a step, on grounds that the research is still too preliminary. Dr. Hahns agency went ahead, and Mr. Trump brushed aside reservations, saying there might have been a holdup, but we broke the logjam over the last week, to be honest. This came a day after Mr. Trump baselessly accused the FDA of impeding enrollment in clinical trials for coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics for political reasons, blaming some shadowy deep state for trying to delay until after the November elections.
By Express News Service

KOLKATA: The Union government has agreed to accept West Bengal governments proposal to redeploy five companies of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in Junglemahal, which were withdrawn ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and sent to Jammu and Kashmir.

The state government requested the Centre in the wake of the state intelligence wings information that movement and concentration of Maoists are being seen in part of the Junglemahal after a gap of nine years.

After the Centre informed the state government that it would withdraw one company of CRPF from Junglemahal, the West Bengal home department wrote a letter raising its objection. The state is yet to receive the centres reply.

Presently, 23 companies of CRPF are deployed in four districts -- Jhargram, West Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura. The state Intelligence Branch came to know a group of Maoists visited some villages along Bengal-Jharkhand border area on August 14 night and with the support of the villagers they hoisted black flags on Independence Day.

ALSO READ | Maoists in Bengal's Junglemahal break silence after 9 years, hoist black flag on Independence Day

Meanwhile, the CPI (Maoist) broke the silence and expressed its views and stance on the issue of Bengals present political scenario after a gap of eight years. In an interview published in Laal Chingari, the outlawed outfits mouthpiece, Kishan, the secretary of the Eastern Regional Bureau (ERB), criticised Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and accused her of suppressing voices against her using the state machinery.

"She is following the same footprints that the CPM, Bengals erstwhile ruling party, left behind. Trinamool Congress has adopted a strategy which doesnt protect poor peoples interests," Kishan said in the interview.

The Maoist leader also urged the outfits Bengal functionaries to participate in the anti-establishment movements under the banner of frontal organisations.
Bill Gates has opened up about the importance of educators while reflecting on the teacher who made the biggest impact on his own life.

Speaking with CBS News for a segment celebrating teachers who will teach remotely and in the classroom amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Microsoft co-founder revealed that he credits his fourth grade teacher, Mrs Blanche Caffiere, for sparking his love for learning.

Great teachers help students get excited about learning, the billionaire philanthropist said. Mrs Blanche Caffiere, a teacher at View Ridge Elementary School in Seattle was that kind of teacher for me.

According to Gates, when he entered Mrs Caffieres class, he was a very shy fourth-grader with a messy desk and terrible handwriting.

As a student, Gates said he also tried to hide his love of reading, for fear he would be mocked by his classmates.

Recommended This is how parents and teachers feel about schools reopening

I tried to hide the fact that I loved to read because I was worried it would look strange to my classmates, he said, before recalling how Mrs Caffiere pulled me out of my shell by sharing her love of books.

She pushed me to read challenging ones and then asked me interesting questions that made me think about what Id read, the tech entrepreneur said. She listened to what i had to say.

According to Gates, looking back on his experience as a student of Mrs Caffieres, theres no question that her guidance helped inspire his love of learning - and instilled in him the importance of teachers.

Looking back on it now, theres no question that she helped spark my love for learning and helped to inspire the Gates Foundation's work to help every child in America get the benefit of great teachers, the 64-year-old said.

Later in the video, Gates said he wanted to "thank you" to the teachers who are welcoming students back to their classrooms either virtually or in person.

"You're changing lives and doing amazing work," he said.

This is not the first time Gates has reflected on the late Mrs Caffieres impact. In 2016, he wrote about her in a blog post titled: A teacher who changed my life, in which he said he had been able to thank her for the important role she played in my life, stoking my passion for learning at a time when I easily could have gotten turned off by school before she died in 2006.

During the segment, notable figures including Chelsea Clinton, Josh Groban and LeVar Burton also reflected on the teachers whod made the biggest impact on their lives.

Im so profoundly grateful to Dr Sadie Mitchell, who was my first-grade teacher at Forest Park Elementary School in Little Rock, Arkansas, Clinton said, explaining that Dr Mitchell set the bar for what an extraordinary teacher should be.

According to Groban, he wanted to thank his high school theatre teacher Norman Cohen for giving him his first lead role in a play as well as his musical theatre teacher, while Burton said his most inspirational educator was his third-grade teacher Mrs Twig in Hanau, Germany, who used to ask him to read to the class while she stepped out to make a cup of tea because he was the best reader in his class.

It was the first time in my life that somebody outside of my family recognised that I was good at something, Burton said.

"Thank you to the great teachers and the arts teachers out there who are bringing a spark of humanity into our classrooms when we need it in this world more than ever," Groban concluded.
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Middle Belt Forum

Press Statement

The attention of the Middle Belt Forum (MBF) has been drawn to invitations extended by the Department of State Service (DSS) to the former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and presidential candidate of the African Democracy Congress (ADC) in the 2019 polls, Dr. Obadiah Mailafia, over his recent interview with Nigerian Info 93.3FM.

Going by the startling revelations disclosed by the Oxford Economist that attracted outrage from within and outside the country, Dr. Mailafia would, after his initial appearance at the Jos office of the DSS, insist that he stood by the media interview. Few days later, he was re-invited by the secret police in Jos, and later banned from speaking to the media on the matter.

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Considering these invitations by the DSS to this patriotic Nigerian who is a distinguished son of the Middle Belt, we are worried that after appearing before the secret police twice without a fail, another invitation was issued to Dr Mailafia on Friday August 21, 2020 by the Nigeria Police requesting him to appear before them tomorrow, Monday August 24, 2020 in Abuja.

In what may be seen as subtle acts of intimidating alternative voices, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. Rt. Hon. Ghali Umar NaAbba, was also a guest of the secret police in Abuja last Monday where he was grilled over his media interview in which he was quoted to have called for self-determination for Nigerians.

Looking at the travails of both Rt. Hon NaAbba and Dr. Mailafia in the hands of security agencies over their comments on national issues, there seems to be a deliberate ploy to stifling alternative voices. As a Forum representing all ethnic nationalities in the North, for which the Oxford Economist is a member, we call on the police to stop further harassment of both the former Speaker and ADC presidential candidate whose comments were only meant to serve as wake-up calls for the nations security agencies to tackle the raging insurgency and grave insecurity shredding our country.

The MBF is in constant touch with Dr Mailafia since his ordeal in the hands of the DSS, and are completely kept abreast of the matter. As a Forum, we are worried that there are attempts by some unscrupulous people to either change the narratives or ridicule the source of Dr. Mailafias disclosure as unreliable.

The Forum wishes to declare that Dr. Mailafias disclosure is in tandem with realities on the ground. We challenge the nations security forces to stop rural killings and ensure the safe return of our sacked communities now in various Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps back to their ancestral lands.

Just last Wednesday in Zuru, Kebbi State, the Inspector General of the Police, Mr. Mohammed Adamu, disclosed that security agencies have discovered that banditry rocking our nation has assumed an international dimension, with Nigerien, Sudanese, Malian and Libyan bandits, among others, unleashing terror on Nigerians. Is that disclosure by the IG not in tandem with Mailafias disclosure?

We call on both the DSS and the Police to stop further harassment of Dr. Mailafia and concentrate on their core mandates of securing lives and property of citizens. We condemn a situation where the police are simply engaged in persecuting those who are raising their voices to call the attention of Nigerians and securities agencies to the real enemies of our nation.

In exposing the sinister plot of our enemies, Dr Mailafia has not committed any crime. What the security agencies should do now is to thoroughly deploy Mailafias disclosures and bring to an end the devious plans of destroying our country. We call on all patriotic Nigerians to rise up and mount pressure on security agencies to stop further assault on Dr. Mailafia who has truly demonstrated his patriotism to his Fatherland as contained in his disclosures.

Signed:

Dr. Pogu Bitrus

(NATIONAL PRESIDENT)

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-23 19:11:16|Editor: huaxia

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CANBERRA, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Australia has recorded more than 500 coronavirus deaths seven months after diagnosing its first case of the virus.

As of Sunday afternoon there had been 502 deaths from COVID-19 in Australia, an increase of 17 from 485 on Saturday.

All 17 of the deaths were in Victoria and 11 were linked to aged care facilities. It takes Victoria's death toll to 415.

It has taken six days for Australia's death toll to rise from 400 to 500.

By comparison it took seven days for the toll to climb from 300 to 400 and nine days for it to rise from 200 to 300.

As of Sunday afternoon Australia had confirmed 24,812 cases of COVID-19, and the number of news cases in the last 24 hours is 216, according to the latest figures from Australian government's department of health.

Of the new cases, Victoria confirmed 208, the state's highest tally in three days.

"Within Victoria, 46 of the new cases are linked to outbreaks or complex cases and 162 are under investigation," said a statement from the Department of Health and Human Services in Victoria on Sunday.

The department also said that there are 1,616 active cases relating to aged care facilities and 536 active cases among healthcare workers in the state.

New South Wales recorded four new cases and Queensland, where restrictions on gathering sizes were reimposed on Saturday over fears of community transmission of the virus, has confirmed two more.

Paul Kelly, Australia's acting chief medical officer (CMO), said on Saturday that he was "very confident" that authorities in Queensland would prevent mass outbreaks of the virus similar to those in Victoria.

"We don't have any outbreaks in aged care right now but with that cluster of cases, we believe that there is a need to really think and work closely together to prevent that happening and to respond if it does happen," he said. Enditem
Its back to the class for students at Holy Name of Jesus School in Lower Paxton Township.

This morning, students at the private school filed off buses and were dropped off at the school along Allentown Boulevard for the first day of school. Along with the traditional backpacks and notebooks, students wore another back-to-school essential for 2020 - face coverings.

Central Dauphin School District students on Monday were also among the first in Central Pennsylvania to return to school after a long absence.

Across the region, schools are starting to reopen and due to the coronavirus pandemic, the school year will look like no other. Many districts are offering flexibility for families by offering a choice between hybrid and online learning.

Other districts whose students were to return to their classrooms Monday included Millersburg, Upper Dauphin, Susquenita and West Perry.

East Pennsboro students are returning to school, but not to their classrooms. The district had been planning to begin the school year with some in-person instruction, but announced earlier this month that it was forced by a shortage of staff to start the year with all-remote instruction.

West Shore School District, which plans to begin the year with all-remote instruction, will hold its first day of classes Tuesday, and Halifax and Newport school districts will welcome students back to in-person classes that day.

Many more districts in Dauphin, Cumberland, Perry and Lebanon counties will return to school on Aug. 31 and Sept. 8.

All districts have received the same guidance from the state Department of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so many of the plans are similar, but there are differences as each district tries to address its own, unique needs amid the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Mala Buni, the chairman of the national caretaker/extraordinary committee of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), has tasked the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, and Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, to end the conflict amongst members in Rivers and Bayelsa chapters of the party.

The struggle for dominance between Messrs Amaechi and Magnus Abe led to factions in Rivers State and also cost the party its chances in the 2019 governorship election, thus giving the PDP incumbent governor, Nyesom Wike, an easy re-election.

Also, the Bayelsa APC lost what could have been its most pronounced win for 2019 as the Supreme Court sacked its governor-elect, David Lyon and his deputy, Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo, on the ground of submitting inconsistent information to the countrys electoral body, INEC.

Mr Buni, as part of his reconciliatory move to reposition the party in the South-south, held a meeting at the partys national secretariat in Abuja on Monday. He urged the duo to reconcile members ahead of the bye-elections scheduled to hold in Bayelsa and Cross-Rivers.

READ ALSO:

At the meeting which was held close door, Governor Mai Mala Buni charged the ministers to work together and lead the partys efforts to reconcile aggrieved party members and reposition the Party, particularly in the South-south region.

Ahead of the Governorship elections in Niger Delta states of Edo and Ondo as well as legislative By-Elections in Bayelsa and Cross River states, Governor Mai Mala Buni charged the Ministers to play lead roles in bringing together party members and stakeholders to ensure that the APC is victorious, the party said in a statement released after the meeting.

Speaking with journalists at the secretariat, Mr Amaechi, in company of Mr Sylva, said they have decided to work together in actualising the partys goal for the region.
The Covid-19 positivity rate has started rising again in Delhi, with 7.4% of all tests conducted in the last week coming back positive, the highest this number has touched in over a month, suggesting that Delhi may be facing a fresh challenge to control an outbreak it had contained to a considerable extent.

Positivity rate  the fraction of tests that return positive -- is a crucial metric as experts say it shows how widespread the virus is in the community, and when coupled with an increase new cases, indicates that the virus is spreading fast.

The Capital added 1,061 new cases and 13 new deaths according to the governments Monday bulletin, taking the total number of infections in the city to 162,527 and fatalities to 4,313, according to Delhi governments health bulletin on Monday.

In terms of the single-day positivity rate, 8.9% of samples tested on Sunday came back positive. This is the highest proportion in nearly a month-and-a-half. Around 10.3% of tests came back positive on July 13  when cases in the Capital were dropping from the peak. To be sure, single-day positivity rates can be influenced by low testing figures that are generally reported on weekends. This is why experts generally look at average positivity rate, which shows a clearer trend.

The developments come as the number of daily tests in Delhi continued their steady drop from peak levels  11,910 samples were tested on Sunday, with 8,084 (67.9%) of these being antigen, or rapid tests. Though the number of tests generally reduces on Sundays and holidays, at its peak, the city conducted 24,592 tests a day on August 8. The seven-day average for tests stands at 17,985 -- off the peak of 21,660 for the week ending July 10.

With daily tests hitting a plateau, the average positivity rate has started inching up in the past few weeks. The number, which had dropped from a peak of 31.4% in mid-June to 5.7% at the end of July, was 7.4% in the past week  the highest since July 19, or 36 days ago.

When asked about the positivity rate and the increasing number of infections, Delhis health minister Satyendar Jain, said in his daily media briefing that the infection rate in the Capital is still below 10% and under control.

We see the infection rate in ranges of 5-10%, 10-20%, 20-30%, and so on. As on date, the infection rate is well below 10%, whereas Delhi has also seen a time when the infection rate had hit 40%. The current variation of 1-1.5% we are seeing these days is understandable and keeps happening. It is just day-to-day variation, Jain told reporters.

According to recommendations by the World Health Organization (WHO), the positivity rate from a region that has a comprehensive testing programme should be at or below 5% for at least two weeks before it can be considered that the outbreak is under control in the region. In case the positivity rate rises, WHO recommends increasing testing numbers for prolonged periods of time till the number drops below 5%. Delhi has never dropped below this threshold.

To be sure, Delhi has consistently had one of the highest testing rates in the country. The city has conducted over 75,947 tests per million residents against the national average of 26,935.

The Capital was the first major hot spot in the country to have successfully reined in the outbreak last month. At the end of June, the city was reporting over 3,400 cases every day at an average, which then dropped in the 900s in the first week of August. But a recent spurt in cases has meant that this number has been steadily rising again and currently stands at over 1,300 new cases a day. HT reported on Sunday that the new-case trajectory in Delhi is currently at a months high.

There were 1,200 new recoveries reported on Monday taking the total number of people who have recovered to 146,588.

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Tens of prisoners attacked guards with rocks and grabbed a gun as they tried to flee the Farafangana prison.

Twenty inmates have been killed in a shoot-out with police during a prison breakout in Madagascar on Sunday.

Madagascars justice ministry said tens of prisoners attacked guards with rocks and grabbed a gun as they tried to flee the Farafangana prison in the southeast of the Indian Ocean island.

Thirty-seven of the 88 who managed to escape were captured by the police and army while eight were wounded in the shoot-out.

Thirty-one inmates are still on the run, the ministry said, vowing to boost security at all penitentiaries across the country.

Mass prison escapes are not uncommon in Madagascar.

In 2016, approximately 40 detainees broke out of a high-security prison in Toliary in southern Madagascar.
As expected, TikTok has filed a lawsuit against the US government to challenge a proposed ban against the service. Specifically, TikTok says the executive order signed by President Trump on August 6th is without any evidence to justify such an extreme action, and without any due process. The company says it disagrees with the characterization of TikTok as a national security threat and that the Trump administration ignored all of TikToks efforts to address those concerns.

Unsurprisingly, TikTok said it would have preferred to continue conversations rather than turn to litigation, but the company feels its hands are tied at this point. With the Executive Order threatening to bring a ban on our US operations  eliminating the creation of 10,000 American jobs and irreparably harming the millions of Americans who turn to this app for entertainment, connection, and legitimate livelihoods that are vital especially during the pandemic  we simply have no choice, TikTok wrote in a statement.

Specifically, TikTok says that it has already gone to great lengths to show a commitment to the US market, noting that its key personnel are all Americans based in the US, thus not subject to Chinese law. Furthermore, the company stores data not in China but in servers located in the US and Singapore. Finally, TikTok also has built software barriers that the company says keeps TikTok user data separate from other products from ByteDance, TikToks parent company.

TikTok also outlines the concern that the executive order bans activities that are not an unusual and extraordinary threat, something thats required by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). TikTok says that the IEEPA has been cited by the administration for justification of the ban.

The company says that it has spent nearly a year working in good faith to give the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States requested details and information about TikToks business  information it says is being completely disregarded. Ultimately, it sounds like TikTok is claiming it has worked closely to provide the US government plenty of details on how it works to show it isnt a threat and that all that information hasnt been taken into account with the August 6th executive order.

TikTok has been preparing for this day since the executive order went public. At the time, the company said it was shocked by the move and that it would explore all remedies available to fight the White House ban on the app. The question now is whether the US courts will give a stay on the ban and whether theyll side with TikTok over the White House.
Erin O'Toole has won the leadership for the Conservative Party, promising to present a vision to make Canada more prosperous and reaching out to broaden the party's base of supporters.

After a six-hour delay due to glitches with the ballots, O'Toole took 57 per cent of the votes on the third and final ballot, compared to 43 per cent for second-place contender Peter MacKay.

O'Toole claimed victory after taking support from Leslyn Lewis, who finished with a surprisingly strong performance but dropped off on the second ballot. Derek Sloan dropped off after the first ballot.

In his acceptance speech, O'Toole promised to work to unite the party, champion Conservative values, and hold Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to account.

"We must continue to point out Liberal failings and corruption, but we must also show Canadians our vision for a stronger, more prosperous and more united Canada," he said.

"Canada can and must do better and Conservatives will work hard to earn the trust and confidence of Canadians in the next election."

Acknowledging the party needs to broaden its base to win the next election, O'Toole reached out to all Canadians in all regions of the country and from diverse backgrounds.

"I believe that whether you are Black, white, brown or from any race or creed, whether you are LGBT or straight, whether you are an Indigenous Canadian or have joined the Canadian family three weeks ago or three generations ago," he said.

"Whether you're doing well or barely getting by. Whether you worship on Friday, Saturday, Sunday or not at all  you are an important part of Canada and you have a home in the Conservative Party of Canada."

Watch | Erin O'Toole says he'll fight for Canadian families in first speech as Conservative leader:

Results delayed for hours

The results were delayed by several hours because the machine used to open ballot envelopes damaged several thousand voting cards.

Story continues

The technical glitch left the four candidates vying for the party's top job waiting in limbo throughout Sunday evening until the final result was announced shortly after 1 a.m. ET Monday.

Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Former Conservative deputy leader and leadership campaign co-chair Lisa Raitt said the ballots, which were mailed in a sealed envelope inside another envelope, were being opened automatically.

"What's been happening is the machine is ripping or cutting some of these ballots," she said.

Up to 4,000 ballots that were damaged had to be either taped back together or manually remarked on a new ballot. Scrutineers from all camps view the ballot and agree on the result, so there is no risk of the integrity being compromised, Raitt said.

Scrutineers spent all day Sunday tabulating the results. Nearly 175,000 ballots were cast in a mail-in system out of about 270,000 eligible members  the highest number of votes in the party's history.

The envelopes were smaller than the last race, contributing to the tearing issue. The electric envelope opener is partially or totally ripping some ballots, requiring volunteers to tape the cards back before they were reviewed by scrutineers and fed into the counting machines.

Kory Teneycke, who served as director of communications for former prime minister Stephen Harper, said the technical glitches could damage the brand of a party that prides itself on managerial competence.

"It's an embarrassing lost opportunity to get a clear, clean message out and to profile whoever the next leader is going to be," he told the CBC's chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton.

Party in 'great shape': Scheer

Earlier Sunday evening, party members honoured outgoing Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer in a video montage tribute.

In a farewell speech, Scheer urged party members to stand united, to reach out to new supporters and to challenge "leftist" figures. He took aim at big government, mainstream media "bias" and "establishment elites."

WATCH / Andrew Scheer delivers farewell speech:

"In times like these, it is even more important for every single Conservative to stay united and do everything we can to work together to spread our message of hope," he said.

"It doesn't matter what kind of Conservative you are. Our party needs all of you and we need you to go out and find more people who share our beliefs. Please stay involved. Be bold. Think. Challenge the mainstream media. Don't take the left-wing media narrative as fact."

CBC

The challenge ahead is to find new ways to connect with people and attract new supporters, he said.

"Millions of Canadians share our Conservative values, they just don't all know it yet," Scheer said.

David Stewart, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, said O'Toole's victory speech suggests he understands the need to deliver a positive message and to reach out to a broader base of voters.

"The Conservatives have badly underestimated Trudeau in two elections, and have to be careful not to assume that the current controversies will dominate the next election," he said in an email. "O'Toole has to define himself to non-Conservative Canadians and understand that Trudeau is a strong campaigner and seems to have the ability to connect with Canadians that sometimes Conservatives seem to struggle with."

'Growth mindset' required

Jonathan Malloy, a political science professor at Carleton University, said O'Toole's most pressing task is to get the party in a "growth mindset" that widens its appeal to voters beyond its core supporters in order to defeat the Liberals.

O'Toole's strategy was focused on existing party members and activists and being a "true blue" conservative, but he must change that tack to broaden the support base.

He must also manage the challenging issue of social conservatism in the party.

"The Sloan and Lewis candidacies have shown the resilience of the social conservative wing of the party. Yet it is a minority, probably in the party, and certainly among the general public," he said by email.

"Harper tried hard to tamp down social conservatives in the party, but also generally avoided the issue, and was reasonably effective at steering the party through these issues by just not engaging with them. Scheer tried to do the same. However, opinion has shifted in Canada so far, particularly on LGBT rights, that avoidance is not good enough  voters demand a clear stance."

WATCH / How the Conservative leadership ballots are counted:

A snap election is possible for the fall, as Trudeau prorogued Parliament until Sept. 23. A new session will begin with a throne speech and a confidence vote on the government's agenda.

Memorial University political science professor Alex Marland said the new leader must foster a united public front.

"Every leadership contest sows internal divisions that require repair," he said.

Marland said the new leader would be wise to prioritize cultivating caucus buy-in for staying on message in public forums by engaging caucus members in policy development, reaching out individually to MPs and seeking advice from former party leaders.

"Many people think that the main work of the leader of the official opposition is to take on the prime minister, and ready the Conservatives to score points against the Liberals on given issues. The truth is much less glamorous," he said. "The main immediate work is to build internal cohesion in private so that the caucus and the party can move forward as a united team in public."

The Conservative leadership race unfolded during a global pandemic. The traditional town halls, rallies and other events were mostly cancelled due to physical distancing and other public health guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

There were four candidates in the race to replace Scheer:

Leslyn Lewis

Lawyer Leslyn Lewis is a political newcomer. Her family immigrated to Canada from Jamaica when she was five. She has practised law for nearly 20 years and has multiple degrees, including a master's degree in environmental studies and a PhD from Osgoode Hall law school. A social conservative, she would have become the first Black woman to lead a Canadian national political party. She has said she decided to run to promote party unity and national unity, and wants the Conservative Party to be a "big-tent party" where people are free to hold divergent beliefs.

Peter MacKay

MacKay is a lawyer and former Conservative cabinet minister in Stephen Harper's government. He led the Progressive Conservative Party when it merged with the Canadian Alliance to form what is now the Conservative Party of Canada in 2003. In Harper's cabinet, he held several top portfolios, including defence, foreign affairs and justice. During the campaign, MacKay said he would take "bold action" to get Canada's economy back on track as it recovers from the global pandemic.

Erin O'Toole

O'Toole served as minister of veterans affairs under Harper, and most recently served as the party's foreign affairs critic. He finished third in the last Conservative leadership race in 2017. After 12 years serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, O'Toole earned his law degree and worked as a corporate lawyer. He has said his focus will be to create jobs and revive Canada's economy if elected leader.

Derek Sloan

Sloan is an Ontario MP who attended law school at Queen's University after owning and operating several small businesses. The social conservative has denounced what he calls the erosion of free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of conscience in Canada, and the "politically correct culture." He said he would rescind the carbon tax and gun ban and pull Canada out of World Health Organization if elected party leader.
National Hurricane Center

Besides storms in the Gulf of Mexico, analysts are looking at trouble in Libya as an oil market factor this week. In the broader view, however, the price of oil looks to be stuck in a holding pattern.



The National Hurricane Center downgraded Marco to a tropical storm, though warned of life-threatening floods in southern Louisiana. Forecasters expect to issue hurricane warnings later in the day for now Tropical Storm Laura, which is expected to make landfall in Louisiana by early Thursday.



As of Sunday, the U.S Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement reported personnel were pulled from 114 production platforms, or about 18 percent of the regional offshore total. For production, a little more than half, or some 1.1 million barrels of oil per day, was idled by storm activity. Refineries may be a bigger concern as the region accounts for 54 percent of total US refining capacity, though softer demand due to the pandemic may provide a cushion.



Softer demand, meanwhile, may help explain why the price of oil has lingered around $45 for Brent for much of August. Vandana Hari, founder and CEO of Vanda Insights in Singapore, described oil as trading in a zombie zone.

FINALLY: Rig count rises for first time since March



This is a good time to remind ourselves that 2020 is a year bookended by an outbreak of a catastrophic pandemic and the US presidential election, she said in an email. Markets will now have to reckon with a zombie zone meshing the two occurrences.



Giovanni Staunovo, a commodities analyst at UBS in Switzerland, demand will outstrip supply in the second half of year and into 2021 because of output cuts by global producers, although prices wont move much. He expects Brent crude, the international benchmarek to hold at current levels through the second half of the year.



Elsewhere, Libya has moved from black swan to albatross. One of Africas largest oil producers, Libya has been unable to hold to its 1 million barrels per day achieved under Moammar Gadhafi because of its civil war. due to strains of civil war. Last week, the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli called for a cease-fire, leading to expectations that production and exports could recover. Given the spotty track record though, Anas Alhajji, an independent energy markets expert in Dallas and former chief economist at NGP Energy Capital Management, said he wasnt buying into that scenario.



There is no reason to believe that Libyan oil is flowing back to the market soon, he said.
IRELAND'S only surviving wooden sail cargo vessel - restored in Limerick - revived a tradition lost a century ago on Sunday.

The Ilen embarked on a symbolic series of sustainable wind-powered supply trips to islands on the south and west coasts.

The ship, built in Baltimore in West Cork in 1926, is Irelands last wooden cargo vessel with a hold, and heir to a centuries-old trading tradition which is now being revived worldwide as an eco-friendly sustainable alternative.

The two-week voyage of cargo and community left Baltimore with a cargo of locally produced cheese, coffee and whiskey to pick up gin at North Harbour on Cape Clear Island  from where the vessel originally left for the Falklands, crewed by locals Con and Denis Cadogan.

The cargo ketch served for over 70 years transporting sheep and goods between the Falkland Islands before being brought back to Ireland 20 years ago and restored by a team led by Limerick man Gary MacMahon.

The rotating crew of four will sail to Kilrush Creek Marina on Thursday and then on to Foynes Island on Saturday, home to its original designer Conor OBrien who died there in 1952.

The Ilen then travels up the Shannon estuary to Limerick on August 31 where locally craft produced Ishka water, Limerick beer and whiskey will be loaded for the journey to Kilronan in the Aran Islands on September 2.

More supplies will be unloaded at Dingle on Sept 5 before the Ilen completes its journey to Cork Harbour on September 7 to deliver the remainder of its cargo.

Ilen now serves as a community floating classroom and cargo vessel  last year visiting 23 ports and making a transatlantic crossing to Greenland as part of a relationship-building project to link youth in Limerick city with youth in Nuuk, West Greenland.

"The Ilen is a community and training project, and is part of a growing fleet of sailing ships around the world providing an alternative and more environmentally friendly way of delivering cargoes," said Gary MacMahon.

"Here in Ireland we have loads of wind, but just one ship that can harness it and the tide to deliver products in a sustainable manner.

"This symbolic voyage is looking to educate people that we have a network of small ports arounds the coast and the islands which were built in the 19th century for this purpose, and can be used again for eco-trading.

"This method of cargo delivery was phased out due to the expansion of the road network in the 1920s and 30s, with the last delivery under sail alone taking place in the Shannon Estuary in 1953," he continued.

Gary said all over Europe, sail cargo deliveries are springing up and people are using the trade winds to travel to Madeira and the Caribbean, bringing back rum and coffee.

"Worldwide, eco-trading is a growing movement and serious design time is being put into designing full sized modern cargo ships that can harness the wind and reduce fossil fuel use and air pollution," said Gary.
U.S. Census questionnaires have been mailed out to the country's households, but some groups, including immigrants, are at higher risk of not being counted. Read more

Once again, President Donald Trump is using the U.S. Census, an institution that is at the very core of our democracy and explicitly supposed to represent all of us, as a weapon to score cheap political points and distract from his failed leadership by harming immigrants.

We at CASA, an immigration rights organization, stood up to the Trump administration once already as plaintiffs in a lawsuit to prevent the administration from adding a citizenship question to the census. We are also fighting this latest in a series of attacks on our immigrant communities in court.

This action isnt only cruel, its blatantly unconstitutional. The 14th Amendment, passed in the wake of the Civil War to ensure that the formerly enslaved had citizenship and equal protection under the law, explicitly charges the census with counting the whole number of persons in each state.

The post-Civil War amendments are the bedrock upon which many of our hardest-fought freedoms lie, and Trumps attack on the 14th Amendment not only clearly violates the letter of the law. It is antithetical to its spirit of fundamental fairness and equality.

 READ MORE: 2020 Census efforts are targeting Philadelphia area households that havent responded

CASA represents primarily low-income immigrants, a growing but often overlooked and underresourced demographic in Pennsylvania. Like many other marginalized communities  including rural households, communities of color, and people experiencing homelessness  immigrants are at greater risk of not being counted in the census. At CASA, we understand exactly what is at stake if the count isnt accurate.

Billions of dollars are apportioned to the states based on the census count. Pennsylvania receives over $39 billion in annual funding from the 55 largest federal programs that rely on census data to calculate funding, according to George Washington Universitys Institute of Public Policy. This money funds things like health care, infrastructure, support for small businesses, and more.

Federal dollars account for roughly one-third of Pennsylvanias annual budget. If there is an undercount, those formulas will be locked in for 10 years, seriously harming the states fiscal outlook at a time when COVID-19 has decimated a budget that has historically had structural deficits, and the federal government is doing nothing to help state and local governments.

We also understand the challenges of getting a full and accurate count, even when it isnt being conducted during a pandemic by a president who has tried to politicize and undermine the process at every turn.

Historically, the most marginalized among us have been the least likely to respond to the census. Thats why we joined the Keystone Counts coalition, a statewide group of community organizations working diligently to make sure every Pennsylvanian is counted.

 READ MORE: Census 2020: The danger of undercounting Pennsylvanias Latino and immigrant communities | Opinion

Members of the Keystone Counts coalition began our census outreach in 2019, doing extensive research to find the best ways to encourage people to complete the census, and began in-person outreach last fall. In March, COVID-19 forced us to adapt since we couldnt be out knocking on doors anymore, so we started reaching out to folks via text, phone calls, and social media. No matter what happens, we will not abandon this important work.

There are plenty of practical reasons to support a full and accurate count in the 2020 Census, but there are also powerful symbolic reasons to support it for the communities we serve. Our membership is predominantly Latinx, which is currently the fastest-growing demographic group in central Pennsylvania. Being counted is the first step to building power and being represented by leaders who look like us and share our lived experience.

It is no surprise by now that this administration would do anything it can to deny the existence of millions of hardworking immigrants in this country, and the strength of regions that have welcomed them as neighbors, but we will never stop fighting to ensure that all of us count.

Every. Single. One of us.

Maria Gutierrez is a union labor and public relations leader from Puerto Rico, where she worked for more than 20 years leading efforts to improve working and living conditions for Puerto Rican workers. She is CASAs membership field director for Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, overseeing a U.S. Census outreach program to educate hard-to-count Latinx and immigrant communities about the importance of the census. She writes from York.
A Monaghan councillor is quarantining at her Donegal holiday home having returned from a trip to Lanzarote which is not on the governments green list.

Monaghan radio station Northern Sounds is reporting that Cllr Cathy Bennett (SF) confirmed to the station that she and her family are adhering to government guidelines. According to Northern Sound news, Cllr Bennett said she took the holiday because it wasnt possible to secure a refund from the airline.

Because Lanzarote is not on the governments travel Green List, a 14-day period of restricted movement is required upon return to Ireland.

The former Cathaoirleach of Monaghan MD said she was spending the period in her holiday home in Rossnowlagh where she walks the beach daily.

There has been ongoing concern in Donegals tourist hotspots - in particular, Rossnowlagh - about the huge number of visitors since the coronavirus crisis began.

Furthermore, international travel is supposed to be for essential reasons only under current guidelines.

The councillors actions have led to much anger and criticism in Donegal as well as in her own county of Monaghan, and indeed right across the country.
Less than one year after Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper announced that the Air Force was pursuing "self-flying cars," the service's top leaders gathered in Austin, Texas, to watch one take flight.

The vehicle in question is the single-passenger Hexa, an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) platform that consists of an open cockpit seat surrounded by a honeycomb of small rotors. Made by LIFT Aircraft, the 18-rotor Hexa is being marketed commercially as a flight experience available to all consumers, no pilot's license required.

Read Next: This New Air Force Training Center Will Prep Pilots for War with China and Russia

The Air Force demo flight took place Aug. 20 at Camp Mabry, a Texas military base. Surrounded by spectators, the Hexa took off, piloted by Matthew Chasen, CEO of LIFT.

The demonstration was organized under the Air Force's Agility Prime initiative, according to an Air Force release. Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., and Chief Master Sergeant. of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass gathered together with hosts from the Texas National Guard and AFWERX personnel to view the flight.

LIFT Aircraft, a Texas-based Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract recipient, is one of the first companies partnering with Agility Prime and the Air Force for "Air Race to Certification," the release states.

After Roper stated at the Air Force Association annual convention in Sept. 2019 that the Air Force was interested in pursuing flying car technology, the service has moved quickly to make that vision a reality. Roper told reporters in April the Air Force wanted to acquire 30 flying cars over the next decade.

Launched by the Air Force in April, Agility Prime is a non-traditional program seeking to accelerate the commercial market for advanced air mobility vehicles. It also aims to leverage unique testing resources in collaboration with the government for distributed logistics and disaster response, according to its website.

"Agility Prime is a program with a vision of world impact," Barrett said during the program's launch. "The thought of an electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle -- a flying car -- might seem straight out of a Hollywood movie, but by partnering today with stakeholders across industries and agencies, we can set up the United States for this aerospace phenomenon."

"We now have over fifteen of the leading aircraft manufacturers in the world applying to partner with Agility Prime, with many of them already on contract," Col. Nathan Diller, AFWERX director and Agility Prime lead, said during the visit. "This flight today marks the first of many demonstrations and near term flight tests designed to reduce the technical risk and prepare for Agility Prime fielding in 2023."

-- Hope Hodge Seck contributed.

-- Bing Xiao can be reached at bingxiao2020@u.northwestern.edu.

Related: Air Force Wants 30 Flying Cars in Next 10 Years
Hesperco TM capsules can be taken to support immune system

Valeo Pharma enters into agreement with Ingenew Pharma Inc.

MONTREAL, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - Valeo Pharma Inc. (CSE: VPH) (FSE: VP2) ("Valeo" or the "Company"), a Canadian specialty pharmaceutical company, announced today that it has filed for a Natural Product Licence with Health Canada for its unique bioflavonoid formulation, HespercoTM. HespercoTM capsules contain a powerful antioxidant that can be taken for immune system support.

In April 2020, Valeo entered into a collaboration and licensing agreement with Ingenew Pharma Inc. ("Ingenew") for the development, manufacture and commercialization of HespercoTM. Ingenew is responsible for providing clinical and scientific data to support the market positioning, commercial and communication campaigns for HespercoTM.

"Pending Health Canada's approval, we are poised to proceed with the commercialization of HespercoTM capsules", said Steve Saviuk, President and CEO. " Ingenew's ongoing expansion of scientific data as well as the development of new clinical data will provide further evidence of Hesperco'sTM effectiveness in providing support for the immune system"

Commenting on its partnership with Valeo for HespercoTM, Pierre Laurin, President and CEO of Ingenew, said: "There is a strong scientific and medical rationale for the use of HespercoTM capsules to support the immune system and potentially fight off symptoms associated with coronaviruses such as the one that causes COVID-19. Thousands of compounds have been evaluated since the start of the pandemic and the active compound in HespercoTM capsules has been repeatedly reported to be one of the best candidate to interfere with the mechanisms SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect our cells. Furthermore,the modulation, by active compound in HespercoTM, of multiple inflammatory mediators has long been recognized in the scientific litterature and it may play an important role in controlling potentiallythe exuberant inflammatory response or cytokine storm observed in severely affected patients. Our scientists' review and analysis of the extensive amount of data published which support the potential benefits of HespercoTM in COVID-19 has provided the basis for the development of HespercoTM clinical strategy and program".

About Ingenew Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Ingenew Pharma is a biopharmaceutical company focused on addressing unmet medical needs and serving patients and families affected by serious and debilitating illness. Its primary therapeutic areas of interest include oncology, neurology, urology and dermatology. Ingenew's current research and development efforts are evaluating proprietary preparations and delivery systems designed to improve the clinical efficacy and reduce toxicity and side effects associated with standard of care. At Ingenew Pharma, we leverage the extensive and successful track record of our scientists and apply adaptive-creative research & development principles to advance tangible and affordable medical solutions, Hesperco being a good example. Hesperco is a trade mark owned by Ingenew Pharma and used by Valeo Pharma under a license agreement. ( www.ingenewpharma.com)

About Valeo Pharma

Valeo Pharma is a specialty pharmaceutical company dedicated to the commercialization of innovative prescription products in Canada with a focus on Neurodegenerative Diseases, Oncology and Hospital Specialty Products. Headquartered in Kirkland, Quebec Valeo Pharma has all the required capabilities and the full infrastructure to register and properly manage its growing product portfolio through all stages of commercialization. For more information, please visit www.valeopharma.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements about Valeo's objectives, strategies and businesses that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are "forward-looking" because they are based on our current expectations about the markets we operate in and on various estimates and assumptions. Actual events or results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements if known or unknown risks affect our business, or if our estimates or assumptions turn out to be inaccurate.

NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATIONS SERVICES PROVIDER HAVE REVIEWED OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

SOURCE Valeo Pharma inc.

Related Links

http://www.valeopharma.com


Meghan Markle reportedly demanded $90 million and threatened the British royal family with a tell-all, according to a news outlet.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had flown out of the United Kingdom and settled down in the United States for a quieter and more peaceful life.

Skepticism

The bashing and tell-all narratives of the Duchess of Sussex tabloid staples so Gossip Cop is immediately dubious.

This narrative originated from a February cover story of the National Enquirer alleging that "Meghan will demand a stunning $90 million settlement in return for keeping silent" regarding the royal family, reported Mimic News.

Igniting Fears

The US report indicated that the royal family fears that the duchess will demand money to alleviate her from publishing a tell-all that could paint the prominent family in a very unfavorable light.

According to an anonymous source to the tabloid, "Apparently Meghan told friends that life behind the palace walls is toxic and even accused the royals of sexism and racism."

"The royals fear that she'll want $90million from the coffers to finance their new life in return for keeping her mouth shut!" reported New Idea.

Markle is claimed to be threatening to sit down for a revealing TV interview regarding her relationship with her blue-blood in-laws. It does not matter that Markle is not planning to shake down Queen Elizabeth II which is the version of "Mean Meghan" that North Americans are coming to be aware of.

Independence

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex had a public renouncement of their membership as senior working royals of the royal family, opting for financial independence. This was initially announced in January.

Also Read: Prince Harry, Meghan Markle's New Mansion Features 16 Bathrooms, 9 Bedrooms, Cinema and Spa

The source explained on Meghan Markle threatening the royals, "Apparently, Meghan told friends that life behind the palace walls is toxic and even accused the royals of sexism and racism," reported Meaww.

Prince William, Kate Middleton Against the Alleged Demand

Prince William and Kate Middleton are reportedly against this hush money, saying Prince Harry and Markle do not deserve a dime.

The insider noted that Markle has deviously planned it since she married Prince Harry, adding that she does not fit in the royal family and given the moniker "Diva Duchess" for being demanding.

Prince Charles Reportedly Upset

Prince Charles is reportedly upset if this does transpire as he has "secretly funneled millions of his own money to bankroll Harry and Meghan's luxury lifestyle."

Prince Harry with an estimated worth of $35 million and Markle with an estimated worth of $5 million have reportedly been planning the separation from the royal family for over six months.

A Grain of Salt; Not to Be Taken Seriously

Micky advised that one should take the news regarding Meghan Markle demanding funds and threatening the royal family with a grain of salt due to the fact that there is no evidence supporting the claim.

The anonymous source cited by the National Enquirer was alleged as a "high-level courtier."

Related Article: Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Broke? Royal Couple Reportedly Becoming Homeless

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
On this day, the same day that the Swiss school year starts, an unprecedented week is beginning in watchmaking history: a watchmaking fair is taking place in the heart of Geneva at the end of August, in the grand hotels and on the lakeside, facing the Jet d'Eau. Initiated in the spring, following the cancellation of Baselworld and the physical cancellation of Watches & Wonders Geneva, the Geneva Watch Days salon was born, against all odds. These four days of exhibition (from 26 to 29 August) will take place with the blessing of the city of Geneva, which is supporting the event, and will bring together around twenty brands in the official area, around which will be grafted a dozen others exhibiting outside of the official salon. The public will have free access to the exhibition area of the ephemeral structure to admire some of the novelties of the Geneva Watch Days brands: Breitling, Bvlgari, De Bethune, Gerald Genta, Girard-Perregaux, H. Moser & Cie., MB&F, Ulysse Nardin and Urwerk are the founding brands, which have extended a welcoming hand to ArtyA, Ateliers Louis Moinet, Bovet, Carl F. Bucherer, Czapek & Cie., Ferdinand Berthoud, Maurice Lacroix and Reuge.



Whether independent or belonging to groups, major brands or top-flight craftsmen, their common denominator lies in their desire to seduce and never give up, despite the crisis affecting the industry as a whole. Invited on the steering committee to follow the process since the creation of the Geneva Watch Days in March, GMT magazine can testify to the resilience and open-mindedness of the managers of the brands involved (see here). What an example of resilience and solidarity in a watchmaking landscape in crisis!



In parallel to the official Geneva Watch Days tent, all the brands will welcome their retailers and the media in small groups in the suites of neighbouring hotels or in their boutiques (see the respective locations on www.gva-watch-days.com). With an average of 10 new products per brand, we will be able to admire, discover, handle and feel around 200 watches and as many little pleasures! Even if the editorial teams at GMT and WorldTempus have always kept in touch with watch designers over the past few months, by visiting them or welcoming them to their premises, one has to go back to Dubai Watch Week in November 2019 to see so many new products at once. Count on us to share them with you on Wednesday. There is already talk of a 6th world record of finesse at Bulgari and the collaboration between H. Moser & Cie. and MB&F. Finally, we also have a thought for the enthusiasts on the other side of the Atlantic, deprived of this international experience, but who will normally be able to go to the SIAR, the formidable watchmaking show in Mexico City, which is announcing its continuation in October this week, and which WorldTempus will also bring you to experience.
Some students of Prince Academy in Chikun local government area of Kaduna state have been abducted.

The students who were preparing for their examination were abducted on Monday morning.

The gunmen were said to have first raided houses in Damba-Kasaya community in Chikun LGA before heading to the school.

Bawa Wakili, a resident of the community, said the gunmen came in a large number like they always do and were shooting sporadically throughout the operation.

Wakili, who lamented the security situation in rural communities, said he relocated to Damba-Kasaya a couple of months ago after an attack on Rumana Gbagyi, his village, still in Chikun LGA.

They abducted many people in the village, then they went to Prince Academy and abducted many of the students who were receiving lessons for their JSS3 exams, he said.

I cannot say how many people were kidnapped, but they went away with many people. Soldiers who came to the rescue , turned back after some few kilometres, leaving some of the villagers who accompanied them to rescue the victims.

The villagers, not knowing that the soldiers had withdrawn, kept pursuing the bandits in the bush, the bandits fired at them and one person was killed.

Mohammed Jalige, spokesman of the Kaduna state police command, could not be reached for comments as his mobile phone was switched off.

Chikun is one of the Kaduna LGAs that has recorded multiple attacks.

Few days ago, gunmen broke into a hotel in Damishi community in Chikun, abducting six people including, two nursing mothers and their babies.

Earlier on Monday, Amnesty International said bandits have killed at least 1,126 villagersacross Nigeria in 2020 alome.

In a new report, the human rights watchdog said the killings were carried out from January to June 2020 during which about 380 people were also abducted by the bandits.
A congressional candidate suing the state is pushing for a 10-day extension of the mail-in voting deadline in the Sept. 1 state primary because of the delays caused by operational changes at the U.S. Postal Service. But state attorneys argue an extension would complicate their ability to meet subsequent election deadlines.

State attorney Anne Sterman argued in a Supreme Judicial Court hearing Monday that the deadline for mail-in ballots to be received by Sept. 1, set by the COVID-19 voting law, is crucial to the states timeline for counting votes, processing appeals and undergoing recount efforts. She argued an extension could ultimately prevent them from meeting a federal deadline to mail ballots to military service members and other citizens overseas.

Whether or not the petitioners for this court agree with every choice the legislature made in enacting these reforms, those choices were rational and they pass constitutional muster, Sterman said. The relief that the petitioners seek would prevent the secretary from complying with the federal law requirement to send ballots to military and overseas voters by Sept. 19 and would interfere with the ability to administer the general election.

Attorneys representing Becky Grossman, a Democratic congressional candidate vying for the seat vacated by Rep. Joe Kennedy III, filed a lawsuit last week challenging the deadline calling for ballots postmarked by Sept. 1 that arrive later to be counted in the primary.

Jeffrey Robbins, an attorney representing Grossman, cited U.S. Postal Service and state officials who have suggested the states current deadlines for vote-by-mail applications dont give the agency enough time to mail the ballots to and from voters in time for them to arrive by Sept. 1. He argued that essentially deprives voters from the right to cast their ballots.

The math simply guarantees that people will not even get their ballots even in time, let alone be able to get their ballots back [to local election clerks] in time, he said.

Sterman said voters are not disenfranchised as they still have a menu of options, albeit a more limited one. She said voters can check the status of their ballots online, contact the Secretary of States office and, in the worst case scenario, vote in-person as well just in case.

Preserving that full menu of options, she added, would create a domino effect at Secretary William Galvins office, preventing them from meeting subsequent obligations during the election season.

The next major deadline is for the state to send absentee ballots to service members, eligible family members and other citizens overseas at least 45 days before federal elections under the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act.

At least 1 million registered voters in Massachusetts requested mail-in ballots for the state primary, according to Galvins office.

The states shift to mail-in voting in light of the coronavirus pandemic comes as the U.S. Postal Service struggles with several operational changes, including the removal of several mail sorting machines in Massachusetts.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, testifying in a virtual hearing before the Republican-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said there are no plans to reinstall mail-sorting machines that have recently been removed from service, CNBC reported.

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SCHENECTADY  Nearly three dozen county employees from across various departments are headed for early retirement next month.

County Manager Rory Fluman told the Times Union Monday that 33 county workers requested the early retirement package. Each employee will receive a $10,000 payment as an early retirement incentive plus an additional payout based on years of service. To qualify, employees had to have at least 10 years on the job and be at least 55 years old, the age the state sets for a person to be eligible for retirement..

He said the program was aimed at full time county staffers with 10-, 20- or 30-years experience. An employee with 10 years in received an extra $2,500. The amount was doubled for a person with 20 years on the job, and set at $10,000 for anyone with a tenure of 30 years or more.

Employees interested in the deal  a cost saving move proposed earlier this year against the backdrop a projected multi-million budget gap caused by the huge revenue losses tied to the coronavirus pandemic  had from July 1 to Aug. 15 to notify the county. The retirements take effect Sept. 30, Fluman said.

We didnt deny anyone, he said. Were not necessarily looking to refill these positions this year and wait until next year so right off the bat there is our employer savings.

Like in many communities in New York and the nation, COVID-19 had a tremendous human and financial toll in Schenectady County.

As of late last week, 44 people in the county had died from the coronavirus.

When it comes sales tax collections, the amount of revenue dropped by $4.2 million for the first six months of this year compared to the same time last year.

And the temporary closure in March of Rivers Casino & Resort dealt another fiscal blow to the county.

Every month that casino is closed, the county does not receive $250,000, Fluman said.

Last month, Rivers announced it would be laying off 1,000 workers who had been on furlough. It is unclear when Rivers Casino and other casinos closed during the pandemic will be allowed to reopen.

Faced with a $40 million budget gap, Albany County last week offering employees a $15,000 buyout.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Fluman said there is a consensus among government officials about the incredible financial crisis brought on the pandemic. The economic blow is far more devastating than the so-called Great Recession of the late 2000s.

Everyone agrees this is worse than 2008, the impact thats going to have on our local government, he said, referring to the stock market and real estate crashes that triggered the nation's last recession.

He said the county may have itself consider furloughs if tax revenue continue to fall.

"If the economic situation continues to get worse, that's the only point in which we would consider the next steps, which would be furloughs," he added.
An increase in ecommerce has also led to an increase in chargeback fraud. In addition to the customary friendly fraud, were seeing an unprecedented uptick in chargebacks related to delivery and service issuesa situation that could become the new normal in retail.

According to a recent report from Adobe, COVID-19 has massively accelerated the growth of ecommerce; total online spending in May 2020 reached $82.5 billion, up 77% from May of 2019. Adobe estimates that under normal circumstances, that much growth would have taken four to six years.(1) With this enormous increase in online sales will come an enormous increase in chargebacks, says Monica Eaton-Cardone, co-founder and chief operating officer of Chargebacks911. In addition to the customary friendly fraud, were seeing an unprecedented uptick in chargebacks related to delivery and service issuesa situation that could become the new normal in retail.

The growth of service-related chargebacks, says Eaton-Cardone, stems from a combination of heightened ecommerce volume, an expectation of timely fulfillment of these new orders, and merchants struggle with COVID-based personnel shortages.(2) Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis this spring, chargebacks based on service have overtaken friendly-fraud chargebacks, which represent 60% to 80% of all issuances.(3)

Another factor that could be worsening the situation, notes Eaton-Cardone, may be contactless payments, which have risen sharply in the U.S. since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.(4) Both consumers and merchants, she says, need to be aware of the potential for illegitimate charges as fraudsters become more adept at stealing contactless access to accounts.

Despite these caveats and the still-difficult surrounding circumstances, says Eaton-Cardone, there is good news in todays situation for merchants and their customers alike. While U.S. retail sales for the second quarter of 2020 were 8.1% below those of the third quarter of last year, sales for June 2020 were up 7.5% over June 2019.(5) This is a new day for retail, she says. Merchants, banks, and consumers need to adopt, and abide by, updated procedures that are fair to all concerned.

Merchants, says Eaton-Cardone, should first and foremost emphasize clarity in their customer relations, communicating effectively about potential delays or other issues, and being accessible at all hours across all channels of interaction. At the same time, she says, merchants need to take steps to mitigate risk wherever possible. This means optimizing practices to prevent avoidable delays, as well as using tools, like our proprietary technology, to screen transactions effectively and stop fraud.

About Chargebacks911:

Chargebacks911 empowers businesses to combat constantly evolving fraud tactics and mounting customer disputes that directly threaten profitability. Chargebacks911 has pioneered effective, industry-leading solutions designed to reduce chargeback fraud, alleviate processing costs, mitigate risk and recover revenues. The companys unparalleled expertise and proprietary technology have earned five consecutive CNP Customer Choice Awards for Best Chargeback Management Solution, three successive AI Lions Den Awards for Best Airline Industry Solution, and Gold and Silver Stevie Awards from the American Business Awards (ABA). With innovative and highly scalable services ranging from Intelligence Source Detection (ISD) to Tactical Representment, Chargebacks911 uncovers the true source of chargebacks, battles unjustified disputes, rescues lost revenue, safeguards reputations, and defends against relentless, ever-changing cyberthreats. Chargebacks911 considers themselves to be a hero to the payments industry, nemesis of fraudsters and trusted protector of over 2.4 billion transactions per year, representing clients worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.chargebacks911.com

1. Koetsier, John. COVID-19 Accelerated E-Commerce Growth '4 To 6 Years'. Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 13 June 2020, forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/12/covid-19-accelerated-e-commerce-growth-4-to-6-years/.

2. Chargebacks and COVID-19: Answering the Frequently Asked Questions. ThePaypers, thepaypers.com/thought-leader-insights/chargebacks-and-covid-19-answering-the-frequently-asked-questions--1242321.

3. Eaton-Cardone, Monica. When the Coronavirus Fades, Chargebacks Will Still Be a Threat. PaymentsSource, PaymentsSource, 8 June 2020, paymentssource.com/opinion/when-the-coronavirus-fades-chargebacks-will-still-be-a-threat.

4. Rooney, Kate. Contactless Payments Jump 40% as Shoppers Fear Germs on Cash and Credit Cards, Mastercard Says. CNBC, CNBC, 29 Apr. 2020, cnbc.com/2020/04/29/mastercard-sees-40percent-jump-in-contactless-payments-due-to-coronavirus.html.

5. ORegan, Sylvia. US Retail Sales Up 7.5% in June 2020 - The Real Deal. The Real Deal New York, 16 July 2020, therealdeal.com/2020/07/16/retail-sales-up-7-5-in-june-as-stores-reopen/.


Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday (August 24) countered the opposition`s charges, raised through a no-confidence motion by Congress party, and said the issues raised by them in Assembly prove that they lack confidence about what they are claiming.

CM Pinarayi Vijayan said, "UDF does not have unity and there are issues within their front. They have lost the people`s support. They are disturbed by all this. I doubt that they brought the no-confidence motion to cover up all this."

Kerala CM further said, "People do not trust UDF. In Congress, another no-confidence is being discussed in AICC (All India Congress Committee). Senior Congress leaders are accusing each other of being BJP agents. Congress has hit such a low that they cannot even elect a leader."

Earlier Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) moved a no-confidence motion against the CPM-led government in Kerala with the Opposition Leader in the Legislative Assembly Ramesh Chennithala supporting the motion.

Congress MLA VD Satheesan moved no-confidence motion against Kerala government, alleging that the gold smuggling mafia used Kerala Chief Minister's Office to run their operations in the state.

Chennithala said, "As the ruling party has the majority we know that the no-confidence brought by United Democratic Front (UDF) will fail. But Pinarayi Vijayan government has completely lost the confidence of people of Kerala,"

Leader of Opposition Chennithala further said: "When I raised issues in which M Sivasankar, former principal secretary to CM, was involved in the gold smuggling case, Pinarayi Vijayan said I was raising baseless allegation against an honest official. Pinarayi Vijayan should make clear is he still holds the same opinion. All issues I raised against the government have proved right."

The UDF leader accused the government stating that in Life Mission Project Rs 4.20 crore was given as commission for a Rs 20 crore project.

"The government is neck-deep in corruption. KT Jaleel who flouted all norms and has links with gold smuggling accused is being protected by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. Jaleel, to cover up his act, brought in religion. I want to ask whether this is the communist method. Why is Pinarayi Vijayan hesitant to ask for his resignation letter?" he questioned.

Meanwhile, MK Muneer, IUML MLA and deputy opposition leader in the assembly said that the Chief Minister is acting as if he is unaware as regards reports of the accused in gold smuggling case wielding influence in his office.

Opposing the no-confidence motion, Health Minister KK Shailaja recounted the state`s efforts in tackling the COVID-19 situation effectively.

She said, "After COVID-19 was reported, medical service corporation carried out an excellent work to procure necessary health precaution materials including PPE kits. There was no shortage in Kerala as the state had stocked PPE kits that were procured during the outbreak of Nipah."

Shailaja added, "We created a cluster management strategy and now coastal management strategy is being carried out to contain the COVID spread. In the initial phase, Kerala was able to successfully contain the disease. But after the lockdown was lifted, with the expatriate population returning the number of cases began to increase in the state."
JAKARTA -- Indonesian police will investigate a massive blaze that ravaged the attorney generals office building in Jakarta on Saturday night, the capital citys police spokesman Yusri Yunus said.

Images from the scene showed flames engulfing multiple floors of the six-storey building in south Jakarta after 7.00 p.m. on Saturday, with the Jakarta fire department dispatching 65 fire engines and more than 200 firefighters to extinguish the blaze.

The fire is still cooling down. When that is finished the national police forensic laboratory will begin their investigation, Yunus told Reuters on Sunday.

Indonesian authorities said that no one was injured in the blaze.

The incident sparked concern among Indonesian social media users, with some speculating the fire may have been linked to high-profile investigations that were underway.

Hari Setiyono, spokesman for the attorney generals office (AGO), declined to speculate on the cause of the fire, saying the AGOs case files were safe as they were stored in a separate area untouched by the fire.
Former Rajasthan Congress chief Sachin Pilot on Sunday said most of the party workers would like to see Rahul Gandhi take over as the president of the grand old party. "Mrs Gandhi and Rahul ji have shown what it means to sacrifice for the greater good of the people and the party. Its now time to build consensus and consolidate. Our future is stronger when we're united. Most Congress workers would like to see Rahul ji take over and lead the party," he said in a tweet.

Pilot's comments came ahead of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting in New Delhi on Monday, where the leadership issue is likely to be discussed. While around two dozen Congress leaders, including some former ministers, have written to party chief Sonia Gandhi for an overhaul of the organisational structure and changes in the leadership, some leaders close to Rahul Gandhi have written to the CWC, pressing for the Gandhi scion's return as party chief.

Also read: Sonia Gandhi responds to Congress leaders' letter; says ready to step down as party president

Also read: Railways earned Rs 561 crore in fines from ticketless travellers in 2019-20
(Newser)  All eyes are trained on Nov. 3, expected to be the most chaotic election in modern US history. Now, a new possible wrench that has some worried the battle may be prolonged way past Election Day, as well as about disenfranchisement. The Washington Post reports that nearly 535,000 mail-in ballots used in the primaries in 23 states were rejected, either because they didn't get to their destination in time; due to voter error, such as a missing signature; or because of other technicalities, such as signatures not matching up to those on record, or even things like torn envelopes. NPR has a chart that includes 30 states, with a total of 550,000 rejected ballots, and it notes that figure is "almost certainly an underestimate." Either way, it's far more than the 319,000 or so ballots dumped in the 2016 general election, about 1% of the total 33.4 million ballots cast by mail.

story continues below

This year, 195 million Americans qualify to send ballots by mail in the general, upping the risk for an even higher number of rejections, especially for first-time voters or those who've never filled out a mail-in ballot. Of special concern: swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which Donald Trump won by about 80,000 votes. Per the Post's count, the primaries this year in those three states led to more than 60,000 mail-in ballots being tossedand it's expected many more people will come out for the general there than in the primary. All of this could disproportionately disenfranchise young voters and voters of color, who studies have shown are more likely to have their ballots spurned. "If the election is close, it doesn't matter how well it was runit will be a mess," an MIT expert tells the paper. "The two campaigns will be arguing over nonconforming ballots." (Read more mail-in voting stories.)
The death has occurred of Rev. Dr. Donal Daly

Maynooth, Kildare / Fermoy, Cork

Daly, Rev. Dr. Donal, SVD (Maynooth, Co. Kildare and Fermoy, Co. Cork), August 22nd 2020, died, peacefully, after a long illness, at Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown. Former Lecturer in Philosophy in the SVD Faculty of Philosophy (Donamon), Pontifical University of Maynooth and the University of Maynooth. Beloved brother of the late Mary Walsh (nee Daly), Fermoy. Sadly missed by his nieces and nephews, Maria, Tim, Mike, Eleanor, Tony and Paula, grandnieces, grandnephews, first cousins, relatives and friends, Divine Word Missionary confreres and former NUIM Colleagues.

Requiescat In Pace.

Due to current government guidelines regarding public gatherings, a private funeral will take place. Those who would have liked to attend the funeral but cannot due to current restrictions, please feel free to leave a message in the condolence book below.



The death has occurred of Teresa Mc Gee (nee Cosgrove)

New Road, Straffan, Kildare / Cootehill, Cavan

The death has occurred of Teresa Mc Gee (nee Cosgrove) New Road, Straffan, Co. Kildare, formerly Bridge St., Cootehill, Co. Cavan. August 23rd 2020 peacefully in the loving care of her family at her home. Predeceased by her loving husband Peter, her parents Eddie and Elizabeth, and brother Vincent. Deeply regretted and sadly missed by her loving family, sons Martin, Padraig and Thomas, daughters Geraldine and Sandra, sisters Marion and Adeline, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, extended family and a large circle of friends.

MAY SHE REST IN PEACE

Due to Government and HSE regulations, Teresa's funeral and burial will be private to family and close friends please. Restricted to 50 people. Funeral cortege will leave her home on Tuesday at 11 o'clock with prayers outside St. Bridget's Church, Straffan (via Kingscourt, Shercock, Station Road, New Line and Market St.) to arrive at St. Michael's Church, Cootehill, for 2 o'clock funeral Mass, followed by burial in St. Michael's Cemetery, Cootehill.

House strictly private please. Those who would like to attend but due to the current restrictions cannot, please leave a message for the family in the condolence section below.

The Mc Gee family would like to thank you for your cooperation and consideration at this difficult time.

Family flowers only please. Donations if desired in memory of Teresa to Kildare Palliative Care Team c/o any family member or Mullen's Funeral Directors, Cootehill, Co. Cavan. Webcam link is https://churchmedia.tv/camera/st-michaels-church



The death has occurred of Kathleen (Cathy) Mulhall-Ging (nee Ross)

1660 Ballitore, Athy, Kildare

Kathleen (Cathy) Mulhall - Ging Nee Ross, 1660 Ballitore, Athy, Co. Kildare. August 23rd 2020 in her 94th year, peacefully at St Vincent's hospital, Athy. Deeply regretted by her loving husband Kevin, son John, daughters Clare and Patti, sons-in-law, daughter-in-law, grandchildren, great grandchildren, relatives and friends.

Reposing at her son John and daughter-in-law Trish's residence. House private please. Kathleen's funeral will take place on Tuesday morning, 25th August, at 11.00am in the Church of Ss Mary and Laurence Crookstown followed by burial in the adjoining cemetery.

Due to current guidelines regarding public gatherings, a private funeral will take place. Those who would have liked to attend the funeral but due to the current restrictions cannot, please feel free to leave a message for Kathleen's family in the condolence book at the bottom of the page.

May Kathleen rest in peace



The death has occurred of Anthony (Tony) Kiernan

Ovidstown, Straffan, Kildare

Kiernan, Anthony (Tony), Ovidstown, Straffan, Co. Kildare, August 20th 2020, peacefully at Naas Hospital, beloved son of the late Martin & Mary & brother of the late Jacinta & Colette, deeply regretted by his loving brothers Brian, Fintan, Ray, James & Enda, sister Deirdre, brothers in law, sisters in law, nieces, nephews, relatives and friends.

Rest In Peace

Funeral arrangements later.



The death has occurred of Sr. Mary Murphy

Presentation Sisters, Kilcock, Kildare / Cavan

Murphy Sr. Mary, Presentation Sisters, Kilcock and formerly of Castlerahan, Co. Cavan. 20th August 2020 peacefully in the tender care of the Sisters and staff, Shalom Nursing Home, Kilcock, Co. Klidare. Predeceased by her parents John and Mary, her brothers Patrick, Terry and John Joe. Deeply regretted by her brothers Peter and Benny, her nephews Johnny Gerard and John, Johnnys wife Sharon and son Patrick, her nieces Mary, Jackie and Patricia, grandnieces, grandnephews, Presentation Community in Ireland, India and Pakistan; extended family and friends.

Rest in Peace

A Mass to celebrate Sr. Marys life will be held at a later date.

In accordance with government guidelines on public gatherings, a private burial will take place.



The death has occurred of Paddy SHEEHAN

Celbridge, Kildare / Ringsend, Dublin

Sheehan (Celbridge and formerly of Ringsend)  Aug 20, 2020, (peacefully), surrounded by his loving family, at Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, Paddy, beloved husband of Lorena and dear father of Christopher and Amanda; Sadly missed by his loving wife, son, daughter, sister Ann-Marie, brothers-in-law, sister-in-law, grandchildren Nathan and Luca, nephews, nieces, relatives and friends.

Due to current Government guidelines regarding public gatherings, a private funeral will take place. Those who would like to join the private funeral service remotely by webcam can do so by clicking on https://www.celstra.ie/live-feed/ on Tuesday at 11am. Those who would have liked to attend the funeral, but due to current restrictions cannot, please feel free to leave a message in the Condolence Book below. Family flowers only please. Donations, if desired, to Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown. House private please.

The death has occurred of Michael (Mick) WHELAN

Kilteel, Kildare

Whelan (Kilteel) - Aug 22, 2020, (peacefully), surrounded by his loving family, at Tallaght University Hospital. Michael (Mick), beloved husband of Marie and dearly loved father of Susan, Richard, Michael and Ruth; Sadly missed by his loving wife, sons, daughters, sisters Mary and Betty, daughter-in-law, brothers-in-law, grandchildren Kate, Emily and Vincent, nephews, nieces, relatives and friends.

Due to current Government guidelines regarding public gatherings, a private funeral will take place. Those who would have liked to attend the Funeral, but due to current restrictions cannot, please feel free to leave a message in the Condolence Book below.
YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan has sent a condolence message to Georgian Premier Giorgi Gakharia over the tragic car accident in Dusheti region. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister, the message says,

Your Excellency,

I was deeply grieved to learn of the tragic car accident in Dusheti region that left many innocent victims.

Condoling with you and the brotherly people of Georgia, I express my sympathy and support to victims families. I wish the wounded a speedy recovery.
Last night (August 23, 2020), actress Kangana Ranaut's tweet received flak on Twitter by many netizens. The actress shared her opinion on 'caste system' of India, and tweeted, "Cast system has been rejected by modern Indians, in small towns every one knows it's not acceptable anymore by law and order its nothing more than a sadistic pleasure for few, only our constitution is holding on to it in terms of reservations, Let Go Of It, Lets Talk About It."

Kangana's tweet didn't go down well with many netizens, and they started slamming the actress. While some were outraged by her tweet, others trolled the actress for sharing her opinion on every topic under the sun.

A user wrote, "Kangana Ranaut is The Biggest Hypocrite and Opportunist lady in the World. She is not fighting for Sushant...She is fighting for RSS. #Boycott_Kangana."

Another user wrote, "Alomost 100% people of lower caste SC,ST,OBC were exploited by the upper class people, Lower class people in remote areas are still being harassed in the country in the name of caste. "KANGANA DISRESPECTED LOWER CASTE COMMUNITY" #Boycott_Kangana."

"#Boycott_Kangana she and her sister are the bigots. She shamelessly supported genocide of muslims remarks. She is the most bitter and negative person of this planet @KanganaOffical," wrote another netizen, miffed with Kangana's tweet.

"SC, ST, OBCs form almost 70% of the Indian population and face inhumane levels of discrimination. And Kangana Ranaut has been repeatedly calling all of us unworthy, and unqualified. I call for a complete boycott of this ill-informed vile woman. #Boycott_Kangana," tweeted a user, supporting #BoycottKangana hashtag.

A user also called Kangana loudmouth and tweeted, "There is always a big difference between being forthright and being a loudmouth. The lady belongs to the latter species. #Boycott_Kangana.

Kangana Ranaut On Her Infamous KWK Episode: I Was Just Kind Of Teasing Karan Johar

Well, Kangana reacted to all the negativity around her and tweeted, "Wonderful #Boycott_Kangana trending,       ,         . (The mice are coming out of their holes. Well, the mafia will try whatever it can)."
Lightning largely spared the Bay Area starting late Sunday as three major wildfires that began with last weeks storms continued burning, averting fears that flames could worsen with another storm.

Most of the Bay Area dodged a bullet, National Weather Service meteorologist Roger Gass said.

The National Weather Service canceled a red flag warning for the region on Monday morning, saying that most moisture has moved north of our area and instability has decreased giving us confidence to let the warning expire early. The warning was originally scheduled to end at 5 p.m. on Monday.

Overnight, the heaviest and most widespread thunderstorm activity overnight was over the Central Valley and into the Sierra Nevada. The Tahoe area had a lightning storm around 4:30 a.m. and winds of 45 miles per hour, the National Weather Service reported.

Nearly all lightning spared Bay Area, though there were strikes in Central Valley & western Sierra foothills that may have sparked new fires, UCLA climate expert Daniel Swain tweeted Monday morning.

What happened? Well, there was *plenty* of elevated convection just above everywhere, but it wasn't *quite* deep enough to generate much lightning. Models were slightly off with timing, and may have underestimated smoke effect, and that made all the difference, according to Swain, who also emphasized that the region was not totally out of the woods.

Temperatures will hover around the mid-70s inland and across the East Bay, reaching the mid-90s in cities like Livermore.

Winds werent predicted to hamper the ongoing firefights, with no strong wind event expected for the next several days, he said.

Fire Tracker Follow wildfires across the state Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California

At 9 a.m. Monday, air quality was unhealthy in much of the North Bay and parts of the East Bay.

Overall, the region breathed a sigh of relief that the storm was not as bad as the previous weekend. That earlier storm, which ushered in thousands of lightning strikes, was a totally anomalous event, said Brian Garcia, a National Weather Service metereologist. None of us in the office can ever recall an event like last weekend. The latest storm, though not something he sees every year, is much more usual.

Still, any storm carries some significant threats given that huge wildfires started a week ago are still raging and the fact that were pretty much running on (empty) with resources in our state, Garcia said.

Ryan Kost and Dominic Fracassa a San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com dfracassa@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost @DominicFracassa
NOTE: The Press Council has not upheld a complaint about this article. Read the full adjudication here.

Nothing to see here. That was the resounding message from the icare board directors and senior executives who fronted a parliamentary hearing into its performance on Monday.

Their comments were reminiscent of banking royal commissioner Kenneth Haynes observation in his final report about a wide gap between the public face NAB seeks to show and what it does in practice".

In NABs case the chairman and chief executive resigned soon after the conclusion of the royal commission. But in the case of icare, only former chief executive John Nagle has fallen on his sword. That resignation came after it emerged his wife had a contract with icare that wasnt properly disclosed.
China has been giving a vaccine candidate for the coronavirus to the countrys key workers for over a month, a Beijing official has said.

The Chinese government had launched emergency use of a potential COVID-19 vaccine on July 22, Zheng Zhongwei, a director from the National Health Commission, told state broadcaster CCTV on Saturday.

The announcement comes as China is developing at least eight vaccine candidates as it determines to become the first country in the world to roll out a successful vaccination for the pathogen.

China has been giving a vaccine candidate for the coronavirus to the countrys key workers for over a month, a Beijing official has said. The file picture shows a volunteer receiving a potential COVID-19 vaccine produced by the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Beijing's top coronavirus adviser has claimed that some of China's COVID-19 vaccines could be ready to use as early as autumn. This file picture taken on April 29 shows an experimental vaccine for the COVID-19 that was tested at the Sinovac Biotech facilities in Beijing

Zheng, the Chinese health official who is leading the countrys vaccine development for the disease, revealed the move during a CCTV programme on August 22.

He claimed that the government had authorised emergency use of a potential coronavirus vaccine on key workers including medics and border officials since late July.

The health official also said that they are considering to scale up the programme on people working in food markets, public transport and hospitality to prevent a possible virus outbreak in the autumn and winter.

His claim comes as Dr Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has also previously said that China's first coronavirus vaccine could be ready by September.

The Chinese health official, Zheng Zhongwei (pictured), who is leading the countrys vaccine development for the disease, revealed the move during a CCTV programme on August 22

Zheng Zhongwei claimed that the government had authorised emergency use of a potential coronavirus vaccine. The file picture shows a volunteer receiving a potential COVID-19 vaccine produced by the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech in Indonesia on August 14

The purpose is to build an immunity barrier in our key workers, Zheng added. Once it is built, it will safeguard the operation of a whole city.

It remains unclear which vaccine candidate has been administered and how many people have been involved in the programme announced by the Chinese official.

The news underscores the enormous stakes as China competes with US and British companies to be the first with a vaccine to help end the pandemic - a feat that would be both a scientific and political triumph.

Last month, the head of China's CDC, Dr Gao Fu, revealed that he has been injected with an experimental coronavirus vaccine.

He also said that taking the jab himself was an attempt to persuade the public to follow suit when one is approved.

China is developing at least eight vaccine candidates as it determines to become the first country in the world to roll out a successful vaccination for the pathogen. The file picture shows Chinese President Xi Jinping learning about the progress on the research into COVID-19 vaccine candidates during a visit to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences on March 2

In June, Dr Gao was a coauthor on a paper introducing one candidate, an 'inactivated' vaccine made by growing the whole virus in a lab and then killing it. That candidate is being developed by an affiliate of state-owned SinoPharm.

The company previously said in an online post that 30 employees, including top executives, helped 'pre-test' its vaccine in March, before it was approved for its initial human study.

Scientists vehemently debate such self-experimentation, because what happens to one or a few people outside a well-designed study is not usable evidence of safety or effectiveness.

A state-owned Chinese company injected employees with experimental shots in March, that even before the government-approved testing in people - a move that raised ethical concerns among some experts, according to The Associated Press.

Chinese state media have also reported that employees of state-owned companies going abroad are being offered injections of the vaccine.
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - For Zeng Sheng, the manager at Shanghai Maiyi Arts, this autumn should have been a boon for business: with the U.S. presidential election, demand for the centre's wax replicas of Donald Trump should have been off the charts.

Instead, the spread of the coronavirus has halted new orders and stalled overseas travel, including to and from the United States. He is now holding off on producing a replica of Joe Biden.

"Tourist sites, amusement parks, houses of famous people are temporarily not open," Zeng said. "Since they can't resume work, we can't get new orders."

Shanghay Maiyi Arts was founded in 2012 as a manufacturer and supplier of wax figures.

Located in the outskirts of Shanghai, about an hour's drive from the city centre, its exhibition hall also doubles as makeshift museum, where guests can pose next to replicas of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, martial arts star Jackie Chan, and others.

Zeng says that by 2019, the company was shipping up to 700 figures annually to customers, with about one-third going overseas.

The virus, however, hit orders twice: first in China, when factories and tourist sites closed, and then overseas. Business remains about two-thirds its normal size, Zeng says.

Zeng says that the hardest part of making a replica is the face. It can take a month alone to design and sculpt perfect features.

The company uses specialists to make a replica's hair and clothing. It can take three months to bring a figure to fruition, from start to finish.

Although Trump is the company's best-selling model in the United States, in China, the top seller is something closer to home: a replica of a security guard, asleep and slumped in a chair, brings in the most orders.

Last year the shop produced 16 Trump wax statues, six of which went abroad.

(Reporting by Josh Horwitz. Editing by Gerry Doyle)
Taron Egerton has dismissed rumours that he could play Wolverine as just fan stuff.

The Rocketman star said while it was flattering that people think he could be a fit for the part, there is no truth to reports he could take over the role from Hugh Jackman.

He told GQ Hype: That anyone thinks I would be good for the part is really flattering. I love Marvel, but its just fan stuff. There is no grounding for those rumours.

Jackman previously told Variety that a conversation hed had with TV star Jerry Seinfeld had indirectly helped him decide to step away from the role after 17 years.

Welsh star Egerton also spoke about the importance of theatres reopening following the coronavirus pandemic.

He told GQ: My instinct is to say its imperative we get people back in theatres, but not at the expense of public health. I dont know how you get 500 in a theatre safely.

For me, though, Ive wanted to get back on stage for a long time and when somethings not there, you want it more. London theatre is a huge part of its economy and character, but whats more alarming is provincial theatre.

For somebody like me, who came up through Aberystwyth Arts Centre, if that facility dies, my little sisters wont have that opportunity and thats really tragic.

Video of the Day

He said returning home to Wales had been a nice antidote, adding: As much as I enjoyed last year, with all the craziness, its nice to step away from the limelight. Ive enjoyed being in my hometown. I feel like a member of a community.

Expand Close Taron Egerton has spoken to GQ Hype (GQ). / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp Taron Egerton has spoken to GQ Hype (GQ).

Egerton won a Golden Globe earlier this year for his portrayal of Sir Elton John in Rocketman, but missed out on an Oscar nomination.

He continued: Rocketman was very exciting. I met Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt. But its good to get back to reality.

I like being down the road from my mum. I like being down the road from my little sisters. Its very important for my sanity. I love Hollywood, but I like to withdraw back to something that feels more normal.

The full GQ Hype interview is out now.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - August 24, 2020) - MAX RESOURCE CORP. (TSXV: MXR) (OTC PINK: MXROF) (FSE: M1D2) ("Max" or the "Company") announces that the Company has granted an aggregate of 2,680,000 incentive stock options ("the Options") to consultants, officers and directors of the Company. The Options are exercisable for a period of five years from the date of grant at a price $0.21 per share. The Options have been granted under and are governed by the terms of the Company's incentive stock option plan.

CESAR Stratabound Copper-Silver Project - Overview

The wholly-owned CESAR project in north east Colombia lies along a 120-kilometre sediment-hosted copper-silver belt that resembles the Kupferschiefer in Poland. The CESAR region enjoys major infrastructure. Mining operations include Cerrejon, the largest coal mine in Latin America, jointly owned by global miners BHP Billiton, XStrata and Anglo American.

Important highlights and exploration activity on multiple fronts:

AM North consists of a broad 11-kilometre continuous zone of stratabound copper-silver mineralization and is open in all directions. The copper-silver zone also contains a high-grade area with varying intervals grading 4.0 to 34.4% copper + 28 to 305 g/t silver (July 29, 2020). Two bulk samples extracted from each end of the 1.8-km discovery horizon, returned 10.5% copper +79 g/t silver and 3.5 % copper + 29 g/t silver (May 21, 2020).

The AM South zone occurs 40-km SSW of the AM North zone, within the same mineralized trend. The copper-silver zone extends over an area of 4-kilometres by 3-kilometres, and remains opens laterally. The cumulative strike length of the open-ended AM South horizons exceeds 5.8-kilometres, returning highlight values of 5.8% copper and 80 g/t silver from 0.1 to 25-metre intervals, suggesting significant size for these horizons (July 14, 2020).

The Fathom Geophysics initial results from the technical study are expected soon. This study is funded by the Company together one of the world's leading copper producers. These studies focus on mapping stratigraphic features, distinct rock types and alteration-zones, which will assist in highlighting stratabound copper-silver mineral horizons over the CESAR target zone (May 13, 2020);

Story continues

Geochemical and metallurgical programs by the University of Science and Technology ("AGH") of Krakow, Poland are well underway (May 26, 2020). AGH will bring to the CESAR project their extensive knowledge of KGHM's world renowned Kupferschiefer copper-silver deposits in Poland;

Ongoing structural analysis of the CESAR target zone is being conducted by Ingenieria Geologica Universidad Nacional de Colombia ("IGUN") in Medellin, with the assistance of the Max field team;

In respect to the CESAR project, the Company has entered two non-exclusive confidentially agreements; the first with one of the world's leading copper producers (May 13, 2020) and a second with a Global Miner (July 21,2020);

The in-country exploration team has now renewed field activities.

Our in-country field team is now mapping, sampling and confirming the continuity of the mineralized horizons and expanding the zones of AM North and AM South.

EBAY Palladium-Platinum Project - Summary

The EBAY palladium-platinum project, located 30-km SE of Matagami in the Abitibi Region of Quebec, Canada, is underlain by the Archean Bell River Complex, a layered mafic intrusion measuring 65-km by 15-km and 5-km thick. Max has entered into an Option Agreement pursuant to which the Company may acquire a 100% interest of EBAY (May 12, 2020).

Highlight exploration of ballast pit sampling between 2000 to 2008 returned: 4.9 g/t palladium-platinum from a 4 to 5-metre wide zone; 3 g/t palladium + 1.4 g/t platinum + 0.12 rhodium in 2005; 2.5 g/t palladium-platinum from a newly discovered 500-metre long zone in 2006. The Company cautions investors that grab samples are selected samples and are not necessarily representative of mineralization.

EBAY drilling in 2006 intersected 1.90 g/t palladium-platinum over 3-metres from 80.5 to 83.5-metres. Further drilling discovered a new zone comprising 600-metres of strike, 120-metres deep, 6.7 to 31.1-metres wide, open in all directions, with highlight values of 2.52 g/t palladium-platinum. Subsequent aero-magnetic survey extended the target zone to 4.8-km of strike (March 25, 2020).

Choco Platinum Gold Project - Summary

CHOCO gold-platinum project (250 sq.km) is located 120-km SW of Medellin Colombia, within a district with historical production of 1.5Mozs of gold and 1.0Mozs of platinum (1906-1990) by Choco Pacific Mining. Compilation of historical records revealed the potential for related PGE's particularly palladium and rhodium. In addition, recent field work in 2019 by Max resulted in concentrate values of 114 g/t platinum and 341 g/t gold (April 16, 2019). Source: R.J. Fletcher and Associates (2011) Review of Gold and Platinum Exploration and Production in Choco Province Colombia Part 3. Private Report for Condo to Platinum NL.

About Max Resource Corp.

With its successful exploration and management team, Max Resource Corp. is advancing its stratabound Kupferschiefer type copper-silver project in Colombia, that has potential for the delineation of large-scale mineral deposits attractive to major partners.

Tim Henneberry, P Geo (British Columbia), a member of the Max Resource Advisory Board, is the Qualified Person who has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release on behalf of the Company.

For more information visit: https://www.maxresource.com/

For additional information contact:

Max Resource Corp.

Tim McNulty

E: info@maxresource.com

T: (604) 290-8100

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.

Except for statements of historic fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements including, but not limited to delays or uncertainties with regulatory approvals, including that of the TSXV. There are uncertainties inherent in forward-looking information, including factors beyond the Company's control. There are no assurances that the commercialization plans for Max Resources Corp. described in this news release will come into effect on the terms or time frame described herein. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by law. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties that could affect financial results is contained in the Company's filings with Canadian securities regulators, which filings are available at www.sedar.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/62375
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped its recommendation that travelers overseas or out of state quarantine for 14 days because of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to USA Today, the CDC instead advises travelers to follow state, territorial, tribal and local recommendations or requirements after travel. Previous guidelines recommended a 14-day quarantine for those returning from international destinations or areas with a high concentration of coronavirus cases.

In Pennsylvania, the state Department of Health, recommends that residents that travel to the following states self-quarantine for 14 days after returning - Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

The CDC recommends travelers check the status of their destination as far as the number of reported cases of coronavirus and the state guidelines for self-quarantine.

Travel increases your chance of getting and spreading COVID-19. Staying home is the best way to protect yourself and others from COVID-19.

You can get COVID-19 during your travels. You may feel well and not have any symptoms, but you can still spread COVID-19 to others. You and your travel companions (including children) may spread COVID-19 to other people including your family, friends, and community for 14 days after you were exposed to the virus, the CDC says.

If you do travel, the CDC recommends wearing a face covering, maintaining six feet of social distance, washing your hands often or using hand sanitizer and avoiding contact with anyone who is sick.

The CDC says you should continue those precautions after you return and taking your temperature if you feel ill.

READ MORE

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Maharashtra Congress leaders passed a resolution, stating that Sonia Gandhi should continue as the party president. The resolution said that in case she refuses to do so, Rahul Gandhi should take over as the Congress chief.

The resolution was passed during a virual meeting presided over by AICC general secretary Mallikarjun Kharge and hosted by party secretary Sampath Kumar. "Senior Congress leaders of Maharashtra have hereby unanimously resolved that madam Sonia ji Gandhi should continue as the Congress President as it is only because of her leadership our party came to power," the resolution read.

"She has made several sacrifices to rebuild the party and is still very actively involved in all the decisions pertaining to the party," it said. "After taking charge, she got the Congress in power and in spite of the requests from the all the elected MPs to take up the Prime Minister's role, she refused and handed it over to Shri Manmohan Singh ji, an eminent economist and a very able senior leader," the resolution read.

Also read: Sonia Gandhi responds to Congress leaders' letter; says ready to step down as party president

"Even now, we desire that she should lead the party in the future as well. And in case she refuses our request, we would seek Shri Rahulji Gandhi to immediately take over as the AICC president. "Under his dynamic leadership, the Congress party will regain confidence and faith of the public of this country and his valuable leadership will help party workers strengthen the organisation. Not only the Congress party but the entire country needs Rahul Gandhi's leadership," it added.

The resolution was proposed by state Congress chief Balasaheb Thorat and seconded by PWD minister Ashok Chavan. The resolution comes in wake of reports that Sonia Gandhi has expressed desire to step down as the interim president. However, the report has been denied by the AICC.

The Congress Working Committee meeting is scheduled to be held on Monday.

Also read: Most Congress workers would like Rahul Gandhi to take over, says Sachin Pilot
Renters are expected to fall into difficulty as wage supports are withdrawn, according to a survey from the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI).

To-date the residential rent sector has largely been protected from the worst impacts of the global pandemic through the use of both income and rental supports.

However, around 8pc of tenants have failed to pay their monthly rent as a result of Covid-19, according to the report.

As rental supports are reduced it is likely that the figures for rent arrears will grow, TJ Cronin, SCSI vice president, said.

Its also likely that the rental market for young professionals and students will be especially impacted because of Covid although as with house sales, the market will be underpinned by the well documented lack of supply, he added.

Meanwhile, two thirds of agents reported that property values had remained unchanged compared to pre-Covid-19 times.

Nonetheless, 28pc reported that values had declined.

Three out of four agents said that purchase inquiries had increased or remained the same compared to pre-Covid-19, while 63pc of respondents said there had been an increase or similar number of property viewings.

Elsewhere, Mr Cronin said he believes the dramatic rise in home working as a result of Covid-19 has made home ownership even more attractive in the post pandemic era.

One of the trends we are seeing is increased interest in out of town properties which can facilitate home working, he said.
Piers Morgan has slammed trolls who criticised him for mocking Boris Johnson's decision to carry his son in a baby carrier.

The Good Morning Britain host, 55, took to Twitter and shared a snap of the Prime Minister, 56, carrying his four-month-old son Wilfred in a baby harness while out walking with his fiancee Carrie Symonds, 32, and their dog Dilyn.

Alongside the photo, taken during Boris' holiday in Scotland, Piers penned: 'Least surprising news of the Millennium: the man whose woeful handling of the pandemic crisis has been so pathetically weak... needs a papoose to carry his baby.'

However, the post, which has since garnered over 4, 900 likes, received quite the mixed reaction - with many criticising Piers' use of the word 'papoose.'

Piers Morgan (pictured on Good Morning Britain) has slammed trolls who criticised him for mocking Boris Johnson's decision to carry his son in a baby carrier

Boris Johnson, 56, was seen carrying his son Wilfred in a baby harness while out walking with his partner Carrie Symonds during their holiday in Scotland (pictured)

Taking to Twitter, the TV presenter penned: 'Least surprising news of the Millennium: the man whose woeful handling of the pandemic crisis has been so pathetically weak... needs a papoose to carry his baby' (pictured)

One annoyed follower wrote: 'Please stop using the outdated, racist word papoose (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papoose).

'The correct terminology is a baby carrier (or sling if it is a non-structured carrier).'

However, unimpressed Piers hit back: 'Why are wokies so exhausting? It seems a contradiction in terms...' before adding: 'A papoose is not racist...

'Your attempt to make it racist is in itself... racist.'

In response to one woman's criticism of the word 'papoose,' Piers penned: 'Why are wokies so exhausting? It seems a contradiction in terms' (pictured)

However. the disagreement didn't stop there as when the woman went on to thank Piers for 'amplifying' her message, he retaliated: 'All I amplified was your absurd virtue-signalling. A papoose is not racist.'

She then went on to accuse the TV presenter's 'usage of the word' as being 'racist,' to which he responded: 'No, your attempt to make it racist is in itself... racist.'

Piers proceeded by sharing a photo of the iconic Athena poster which shows a topless male model holding a baby, and captioned it: 'World's most popular poster... now imagine him using a papoose.'

Another soon waded on on the debate and wrote: 'So today we learned that - shock horror - @piersmorgan either a terrible parent who never carried a child anywhere or must have a chronically bad back from doing so without a supportive sling - which may account for his mood. Slings - for those with a backbone.'

The father-of-four proceeded by reassuring his follower that he has always been a hands-on dad and penned: 'Many thanks for your concern over my parenting skills.

'Given that I've been one to 4 children for 27 years... and you to one for precisely 9 months, I'd probably steer clear of playing the Baby-Whisperer card if I were you.'

He continued: 'Mate, I changed so many nappies I ended up being able to do it all one-handed whilst conducting a business call with the other.'
No-one is better placed than the BBC to carry Britains voice and values to the world, the corporations outgoing director-general Lord Tony Hall has said.

In his final speech in the role, Lord Hall championed the value of public service broadcasting (PSB) in post-Brexit Britain, saying that success will mean drawing on all our considerable international assets. And that means unleashing the full global potential of the BBC.

Addressing the online Edinburgh TV Festival, he said: The debate about the role of public service broadcasters is important, vital and necessary.

Outgoing BBC Director General, Tony Hall, will be giving an exclusive address as one of his final public appearances as DG. Watch live at 09:20 #EdTVFest pic.twitter.com/AM4bWJiamc  Edinburgh TV Festival (@EdinburghTVFest) August 24, 2020

Public service values have never been more needed. The public service broadcasting ecology we have in this country is unique. And it works.

He added: People outside this country envy what we have. PSBs are under threat everywhere  of course we always need to adapt and reform, yet we are a vital part of any countrys culture.

Lord Hall said the raft of disinformation online has made the BBCs role as a new provider more crucial, adding: Its right at the heart of this duty to help bring the nation together.

The forces of disinformation and social media tend to feed on fracture and drive polarisation.

Theyre often specifically designed to exploit division for commercial or political gain; to unsettle societies or undermine democracy.

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What we do, as a PSB, is a force in the opposite direction. Our goal is to help strengthen society and build bridges by making sure all voices and perspectives are heard.

He continued by saying that that the international reach of the BBC is crucial to any vision of Global Britain, adding: My goal, when I arrived at the BBC, was to double our global audience to reach 500 million people by 2022  our centenary year. With two years to go, we are today reaching 468 million people each week.

We have plans in place to double that ambition  to reach a global audience of one billion people by the end of the decade. But it needs extra investment from Government and that bid is with them right now.

No-one can do more to carry Britains voice and values to the world.

Independent research shows theres an exceptionally high correlation between places where people are aware of the BBC and places where people think positively about the UK. We even help UK trade.

This could hardly be more important as Britain sets out to forge a new relationship with the world, based on an ambitious vision of Global Britain.

Success will mean drawing on all our considerable international assets. And that means unleashing the full global potential of the BBC.

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Lord Hall also reflected on his seven years at the helm of the corporation, saying: I dont need to remind you, seven years ago we were an organisation in crisis. It was in the wake of the Savile scandal, there were failings over executive pay-offs, there were fundamental questions hanging over our future.

Today were an organisation transformed, inside and out.

Were leaner and more efficient than ever. Our overheads are at industry-leading levels  just 5% of our total costs, meaning 95% goes on programmes and services.

Seven years ago we had an in-house production operation in decline. Today we have BBC Studios  the most-awarded British production company in the UK.

He added: There is no doubt in my mind that PSBs can do more than ever for the UK in the years ahead.

We have to keep banging the drum for what only we can deliver. The role we can play in helping to find the answer to so many of the biggest issues now facing society.

From division and polarisation, to the rise of fake news and disinformation, to our creative and cultural strength, even to helping society safely navigate a path through the Covid crisis.

This years Edinburgh TV Festival will take place from August 24 to 27 in a digital format.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has assented to the Ghana Communication Technology University Bill, which now makes the institution of higher education, formerly known as the Ghana Telecom University College, a full-fledge university.



The university thus becomes Ghanas 12th public-funded university.



Parliament passed the Ghana Communication Technology University Bill, 2020 on Friday June 12, 2020.



Read also: Parliament passes Ghana Communication Technology University Bill



The Act seeks to establish a university that is nationally and internationally recognised as leader in the application of information technology to education and other sectors of the economy.



The university until the privation of the Ghana Telecom (now Vodafone Ghana) used to be the state-owned telecommunication companys training school.



It played a leading role in enhancing teaching and training at the tertiary level, had its roots in the Ghana Telecom Flagship Training Centre which was the first of its kind in West Africa.



It was delinked from Vodafone and established with the name Ghana Telecom University College and had since provided long and short-term education and training in information communication technology (ICT) for diverse stakeholders, both in Ghana and the West African sub-region.



The training centre progressed steadily through de-regulation and privatisation to become the source of teaching and certification in telecommunication engineering in Ghana and in West Africa.



In March 2012, the name of the university college was changed to Ghana Technology University College to reflect the transformation that had taken place and the introduction of new programmes in business and information technology.



It was granted an accreditation by the National Accreditation Board on March 30, 2006 and officially inaugurated on August 15, 2006.







Source: graphiconline.com









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In September and October 2019, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg warned about the dangers of using rival tech giant TikTok. According to a report on August 23, that was a deliberate attempt to turn Washington against the company, almost a year after Zuckerberg launched his own version of TikTok called Reels.

Zuckerberg's fear

TikTok has gained more than 100 million users in the United States, and it is widely seen as a threat to Facebook in terms of social media dominance.

Instagram, which is now a part of Facebook, launched its version of TikTok on August 5, and it was named Reels. The company went after the stars of TikTok with massive followings and thousands of views and offered them money to switch over to Reels.

In September 2019, Zuckerberg held a series of meetings with politicians, including Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who is known to have the ear of President Trump.

Also Read: Biden's Presidential Campaign Prohibits Staff to Use TikTok

In October 2019, Cotton and Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok and its alleged dangers.

That inquiry led President Trump to worry about the social media platform. He has now told the owners of the Chinese tech company to accept an offer to buy the company or be banned from the United States.

In the same month, Zuckerberg spoke at Georgetown University, describing TikTok as "being at odds with American values."

Days later, he expressed his concerns about China during a dinner at the White House with Trump, Jared Kushner and Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and a backer of Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.

However, according to Facebook spokesman Andy Stone, Zuckerberg does not remember talking about TikTok during his dinner at the White House. His team also reached out to the members of Congress who are tough on China.

Zuckerberg allegedly asked them why TikTok is allowed to operate in the United States when there are a lot of American companies, including his own, can't operate in China.

In November 2019, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, met with Zuckerberg and said in a hearing that TikTok threatens the privacy of children in America.

American Edge

Facebook as created an advocacy group called American Edge, and it has started running ads extolling U.S tech companies for their contributions to the country's economy, national security and cultural influence.

Meanwhile, the CEO of TikTok, Kevin Mayer, accused Facebook of trying to unfairly crush the market competition. He posted on a blog post on Newroom back in July that the companies must focus their energies on fair and open competition in service of their consumers rather than attacking competitors.

TikTok stars admitted that they had been offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to switch to Reels before it launched. Instagram was also offering to pay for the production of the videos.

Facebook issued the TikTok stars with non-disclosure agreements to stop them from discussing the details of the deals.

A spokesperson of Facebook told The Journal about the alleged "grabbing of talent" and said that they have reached out to a diverse range of creators about Reels in several countries where it is being tested.

None of the TikTok stars who have been approached by Facebook was named, but one male user with millions of followers on TikTok told The Wall Street Journal that he would join Reels after being offered with a hefty sum of money.

Related Article: Donald Trump Plans to Ban TikTok for Allegedly Providing China Sensitive Information

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The video call service Zoom reported partial outages Monday morning, causing problems on the first day of classes for many U.S. schools as the tech company rushed to resolve the issue.

The company said it had identified the issue that was preventing users from starting and joining meetings, and was working on a fix. It said the problem caused users to be unable to authenticate to the Zoom website.
The country's COVID-19 task force, Operation Warp Speed, is urging its partners to be ready to start distributing the COVID-19 vaccine by Nov. 1.

Wes Wheeler of the delivery giant United Parcel Service said that the date is the first concrete goal set for companies working with the White House-led task force.

Wheeler added that UPS and other partners would start test delivery runs in September.

Operation Warp Speed make up government agencies such as the Center for Disease Control Protection, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture.

The initiative aims to fasten the rapid production of COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines. Its goal is to deliver 300 million doses of vaccine by January.

United Parcel Service is working as a consultant to Operation Warp Speed, according to Wheeler. It expects to be involved with the government and private drug manufacturers in the logistics of the distribution of the vaccine and storage.

U.S. President Donald Trump earlier said that he expects a vaccine to be released "very soon." Making the Nov. 1 distribution date ever more significant.

There has been speculation that he might launch an "October Surprise," counting on the release of a COVID-19 vaccine, in hopes to top the ballot box on Nov. 3.

FDA and other top government said only science and data will be taken into account in deciding if a vaccine is accepted.

Peter Marks, the director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said on Thursday that he had faced no political pressure to release a vaccine without sufficient data on its safety and efficacy.

Marks added that he would resign if that happened.

FDA said it might release the first vaccine as an Emergency Use Authorization rather than the full licensing process, adding that if that has enough data on safety and efficacy.

Marks said they have to balance the need to see a biologics license application, adding that it has thousands of pages.

"With a lot of different analyses, many of which will not be directly relevant for a decision of whether or not to make the vaccine available," Marks was quoted.

Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine

Moderna announced, on Aug. 11, its supply agreement with the U.S. government for the first 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine.

So far, the drug developer said that it has 13, 194 enrolled participants in the ongoing late-stage 30,000-volunteer U.S. trial testing its COVID-19 vaccine.

The company said that 18 percent of the participants are Black, Latino, American Indian, or Alaskan Indian.

These are the ethnic groups that are massively hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company began the study of its vaccine candidate in July and expected to complete it in September.

Moderna has never brought a vaccine to the market. It received nearly $1 billion from the U.S. government from its partnership.

"Today's award of up to $1.525 billion is for the manufacturing and delivery of 100 million doses of mRNA-1273 including incentive payments for timely delivery of the product," Moderna was quoted in its partnership statement.

Check these out:

Latin American Scientists Collaborate to Develop COVID-19 Vaccine, Believing No One Else will Rescue Them

Coronavirus Vaccine Trials Have Been Slow to Recruit Latino People

COVID-19 May Be in Your Blood If Body Exhibits These Scary Signs
Three of the four accused arrested by the NRI police for stealing trucks have now tested positive for Covid-19.

The two undertrials with their accomplices stole at least three trucks from Navi Mumbai after they were released on bail on June 29, due to the Covid-19 situation.

On July 30, the men allegedly stole a truck from Nhava Sheva and stole a container from Panvel on August 8. They struck the third time by stealing the truck in Ulwe, said police.

Police learnt that the four accused men, two of whom are in their mid-twenties and two others, aged 41, stole the truck from Ulwe in the early hours of August 16 by hot-wiring the truck.

Two of them met in Taloja prison, where they were lodged in separate theft cases from APMC and Taloja police stations. After they were released on bail on June 29, they decided to steal trucks, as both of them had previously worked as truck drivers. With two other accomplices, they would travel in an autorickshaw and identify parked trucks along the highways in Navi Mumbai and steal it at night, an officer said.

Based on CCTV footage and informant network, police managed to trace two of the men in Nerul and arrested them last week. The other two men were planning to sell the truck in Pune, from where they were nabbed.

The accused had scrapped two vehicles but we were able to nab them before they sold the Ulwe vehicle. Three of them have multiple cases of theft against them dating back to 2014, said Samir Chaskar, an assistant inspector at NRI Coastal police station.

The police have recovered the truck worth 30 lakh from the accused men.

Soon after their arrest, the four accused were tested for Covid-19 as per protocol. Three of them have been tested positive. The accused are admitted at Vashi Hospital and Indiabulls quarantine centre.

The officers and constables who have come in contact with the accused have quarantined themselves and will be tested for the infection in two days, the officer said.

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In the wake of the George Floyd killing and other incidents of racially motivated police violence, communities across the country are examining the practices of their local police departments more closely. Some are undertaking comprehensive training and education programs to address racial bias on their forces.

New research conducted in Vermont shows that, while anti-bias police trainings resulted in small improvements in some police departments in the state, they did not by and large alter police behavior.

The research, conducted by University of Vermont Economics professor Stephanie Seguino, Cornell University visiting associate professor Nancy Brooks and Pat Autilio, data analyst, examined data from eight Vermont police departments and builds on a 2017 statewide study of police traffic stops in Vermont.

In the earlier study, using 2015 data, researchers found that Black drivers were four times more likely and Hispanic drivers three times more likely to be searched by police than white drivers. Despite the higher search rate, Black and Hispanic drivers were less likely to be found with contraband compared to white drivers. Arrest rates of Black drivers were also disproportionately higher.

The new studies examine police stops by agencies in seven Vermont towns and cities and by the Vermont State Police, using four additional years of data, including 2019.

The studies found that racial disparities in traffic stop outcomes have persisted, with Black drivers still much more likely to be stopped and searched than white drivers and less likely, in all but one town, to be found with contraband during a search.

In addition, stop rates for all drivers were found to vary widely across agencies, which affects the magnitude of the disparate impact on Black drivers.

In some cases, disparities have widened since the 2017 study was published.

For town by town data, see table at the end end of the press release here: https://www.uvm.edu/uvmnews/news/new-study-despite-years-training-police-departments-vermont-still-exhibit-widespread

The fact that such little progress has been made can be disheartening but speaks to the depth of the challenge. "Racial bias in the United States is systemic, and negative stereotypes about people of color are deeply rooted," Seguino said. "Without sustained attention and commitment, the problem is very difficult to eradicate."

The research studies did show evidence of modest progress in some police departments.

The Vermont State Police has been a leader in investing in training and the use of data; after the earlier study, the agency dramatically improved the quality of its data collection to detect racial disparities. While the 2019 data for the state police showed a widening of some disparities, that followed several years of gradual declines in disparate outcomes. South Burlington has also seen declines in arrest and search rate disparities.

While the earlier study prompted some agencies to engage in anti-bias training and other measures to address racial disparities in policing, other agencies across the state have been slow to act on the racial disparities found in the data.

A key factor in reducing unequal treatment is leadership's commitment to eliminating unjustified disparities and addressing officers' racial bias," Seguino said. "Colonel Birmingham of the Vermont State Police and Chief Burke of South Burlington Police Department have articulated that commitment. The Vermont State Police has gone a step further by using traffic stop data as a way to hold a mirror up to itself, sharing results with its troopers, and linking performance evaluations of its commanders to their effectiveness in promoting bias-free policing.

The data suggest that such efforts show promise but may require more time to bear fruit in closing racial gaps. "Recent attention to the problem of anti-Black bias in policing," Autilio said, "has the potential to hasten change."

The fact that the traffic stop disparities are widespread in Vermont, a state known for its progressive attitudes and policies, is telling, Brooks said.

"It makes clear that racial bias and negative racial stereotypes permeate our country, regardless of where you are," she said. "No state is immune."

###

All agency studies are available at: https://www.uvm.edu/cas/economics/profiles/stephanie-seguino
Nine months after acquiring sophisticated fighter jets from Russia, the Armenian military has contracted a Russian defense company to modernize its older combat aircraft.

Armenias Defense Ministry signed on Monday a relevant agreement with Russias United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) at a ceremony in Moscow attended by Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan.

A ministry statement said UAC will repair and upgrade Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft that formed until recently the backbone of Armenias small Air Force. It released no financial or other details of the deal.

UAC is a state-owned holding company that comprises Russias leading civilian and military aircraft manufacturers.

Su-25, also known by the NATO reporting name Frogfoot, went into service with the Soviet Air Force in the early 1980s and has been repeatedly modernized since then. Russias official TASS news agency reported last year that the latest upgraded version of the low-flying warplane will be equipped with new target sighting and precision bombing systems.

The Armenian Air Force has 15 or so such aging jets designed for close air support and ground attack missions. It was significantly reinforced late last year by four Sukhoi Su-30SM fighter jets purchased from Russia.

Su-30SM can perform a much broader range of military tasks with more long-range and precision-guided weapons. It is a modernized version of a heavy fighter jet developed by the Sukhoi company in the late 1980s. The Russian military first commissioned Su-30SM in 2012.

Tonoyan told reporters in January that Armenia will receive more such jets soon. He had said earlier that the Armenian military plans to have 12 Su-30SMs in the coming years.

Russia has long been the principal source of military hardware supplied to the Armenian army. Membership in Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) allows Armenia to acquire Russian weapons at knockdown prices and even for free.
7 Moncler Fragment x Converse Chuck 70. (PHOTO: Moncler)

Our editorial team is dedicated to finding and telling you more about the products and deals we love. If you love them too and decide to purchase through the links below, we may receive a commission. Prices were correct at the time of publication.

SINGAPORE  Luxury French brand Moncler is giving us many reasons to love shoes more. Under its Moncler Genius creative hub, a symposium of designers give their unique take on Moncler, by merging fashion with the world of experience. Each collection will carry a dedicated launch date, that rolls out ceaselessly throughout the year.

This time, we will be seeing the 7 Moncler Fragment x Converse Chuck 70 as part of this years drop. Crafted by the godfather of Japanese streetwear, Hiroshi Fujiwara, this marks the first footwear collaboration between 7 Moncler Fragment and Converse.

7 Moncler Fragment x Converse Chuck 70. (PHOTO: Moncler)

Fujiwara is known as one of the founding fathers of Tokyos Harajuku scene and holds influence over contemporary design and streetwear culture like few others.

For the 7 Moncler Fragment x Converse Chuck 70 design, Fujiwara delivered refined touches to the product, while giving a modern ode with premium materials and nuanced detailing.

The shoes come in two-tone black, and white colour-block elements and both Moncler and Fragments unmistakable insignias finalise the design at the heels.

The 7 Moncler Fragment x Converse Chuck 70 will be available on 1st September in select Moncler boutiques and from 3rd September at Converse.com and select retailers. The shoes retail at S$170 a pair.
A woman has died and a man is fighting for life after they were both hit by the same car in separate incidents, police have said.

A man, 51, has been arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving and serious injury by dangerous driving following the crashes in Bolton on Sunday.

A blue Land Rover TD4 was travelling along Chorley Street at about 4pm when it mounted the pavement and hit the 50-year-old woman, who died at the scene, Greater Manchester Police said.

Failing to stop, the car then continued onto St Georges Road and then Chorley New Road, where it collided with a 36-year-old man who was standing at a traffic island, police said.

The man was taken to hospital where he remains in a critical condition.

Detective constable Emma Kennedy said: This is a dreadful incident where two members of public have been struck by the same vehicle a short distance apart.

Specialist officers are looking after the families of both victims at this devastating time.

Our thoughts remain with the family of the woman who has very sadly died, and with the family of the man who remains critically ill in hospital.

It is absolutely essential that anyone with information, who saw the car prior to or shortly after these collisions makes contact with police.

If you have CCTV or dash-cam footage that can assist us, please also get in touch as soon as possible.

Police said the driver was arrested at the scene of the second collision and remains in custody for questioning.

Anyone with information is asked to contact police on 0161 856 4741 or via Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.


The constant churn of our own politics obscured last week an event that should have gotten more attention in the U.S. because it was a moment of hope for a more peaceful future.



We are talking about the historic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, a piece of classic diplomacy that signals progress toward lasting peace in the Middle East.



The accord between the two countries promises full normalization of relations in exchange for Israel ending the contested plan to annex occupied territory in the West Bank.



For Israel, the deal means a third Arab nation, including Egypt and Jordan, has recognized it diplomatically and will engage openly in relations. UAE and Israel have had dialogue for years in an open diplomatic secret. But the formalization is important to Israel in a part of the world where many want it wiped from the map.



For UAE, the deal means a bilateral relationship that could lead to greater trade and commerce both with Israel and throughout the world.



Most important for everyone, the accord represents another wedge against the continued and growing threat of Iran. It is hard to overstate how dangerous and destructive Iran has become both regionally and throughout the world.



Israel has understood this for a very long time, as have the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. Throughout the broader Arab world, Iran's role in sowing discord and strife is getting greater attention. For UAE and Israel, opening diplomatic ties comes down to challenging a common foe.



As Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former Iranian official, was quoted: "In the eyes of the Arab street, Iran is now the enemy. We are finding ourselves in a situation where our neighboring Arab countries are turning to Israel to confront Iran."

That's why this is a game-changer for the world, something the Trump administration deserves credit for.



"This deal is a significant step towards building a more peaceful, secure and prosperous Middle East," President Donald Trump said during an Oval Office press conference. "Now that the ice has been broken, I expect more Arab and Muslim countries will follow the United Arab Emirates' lead."



The president is right. Other gulf states could follow UAE, a step that would be an important breakthrough for regional peace. And even in Saudi Arabia, there is potential movement toward greater cooperation with Israel.



In all of this, the Palestinian people must be considered. First, it was crucial that Israel step back from its plan to annex the occupied West Bank. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bluster over this plan was a local political play. This lets him step back while saving face.



Palestinians deserve a state of their own, and a two-state solution is crucial to lasting peace in the region. But such a peace is unlikely to bloom if Israel is in a constant posture of self-defense. Normalizing relations throughout the Arab world prior to a lasting settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian question will bring about that settlement more quickly, not less.



All the world should hope for this, as well as a new day for Iran, when its dangerous regime is replaced with true leaders who seek peace and prosperity for their own people as well as the region they live in.





This editorial appeared at the Dallas Morning News and was distributed by Tribune Content Agency.




(Alliance News) - The following is a summary of top news stories Monday.







COMPANIES







Bunzl lifted its interim payout - and reinstated a previously skipped dividend - as it posted a surge in profit but forecast challenging trading conditions in the second half of 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For the half year ended June 30, Bunzl posted pretax profit of GBP245.4 million, up 22% from GBP200.5 million. This was as revenue surged 7.0% year-on-year to GBP4.85 billion from GBP4.53 billion. The London-based company said its performance was driven by a strong demand for Covid-19 related personal protective equipment, including masks, sanitisers, gloves, disinfectants, coveralls, disposables wipes, face shields and eye protection. An interim dividend of 15.8p was declared, up 1.9% from 15.5p paid out last year. Also, as a result of the better-than-expected trading performance during the first half of the year, Bunzl said it has decided to reinstate and pay the final dividend for 2019 at the same level as originally proposed of 35.8p.







Telecommunications firm BT Group is preparing to defend itself against takeover approaches, according to Sky News. BT has asked bankers at Goldman Sachs to update its bid defence strategy in recent weeks. However, Sky said the former UK state monopoly has not yet received a formal approach from any potential suitor.







Pearson said it has hired Andy Bird as chief executive. Bird, a current non-executive director at the education publishing firm, was most recently at Walt Disney, responsible for its non-US businesses as Walt Disney International chair. He joined Disney in 2004 and led an expansion of the international unit into a digital-focused business. Before joining Disney, Bird held senior positions at AOL Time Warner. His new role as CEO is set to begin October 19. Until then, current boss John Fallon will continue on as chief. Fallon will remain as an advisor until the end of 2020.







Rio Tinto stripped Chief Executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques of USD3.5 million after the company destroyed a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal heritage site to expand an iron ore mine in Australia. The Anglo-Australian firm blasted rock shelters in the Juukan Gorge in Western Australia's remote Pilbara region on May 24, destroying one of the earliest known sites occupied by Australia's indigenous people. The board-led review found Rio Tinto had obtained legal authority to blast the sites but doing so "fell short of the standards and internal guidance that Rio Tinto sets for itself". It found "no single root cause or error" directly led to the destruction, rather it was "the result of a series of decisions, actions and omissions over an extended period of time". Rio Tinto Chair Simon Thompson said there had been "numerous missed opportunities over almost a decade" and the company had failed to respect local communities and their heritage.







JD Wetherspoon said it expects to make a loss in its most recent financial year, both before and after exceptional items relating to the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdown. The company also fought back against what it called "irresponsible and untrue" media reports and comments by UK members of Parliament about the pub chain's operations in the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdown. Wetherspoon hit out at a "large number of harmful media misrepresentations" in the national press and on social media. It said claims that it was "allowing overcrowding" at its pubs were "irresponsible and untrue". Chair Tim Martin said that Wetherspoon predicts it will record a loss for its financial year ended July, before and after exceptional items, and that "some of these exceptional items will be related to the Covid pandemic".







MARKETS







London shares were higher on hopes for an alternative treatment for Covid-19, alongside the fast-tracking of AstraZeneca's vaccine in the US. BT was the best performer in the FTSE 100, up 5.2%. US stock market futures were pointed to a higher open.







FTSE 100: up 1.8% at 6,108.05

FTSE 250: up 0.8% at 17,710.14

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ECONOMICS AND GENERAL







US authorities announced an emergency authorization for doctors to use blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients as a treatment against the disease that has killed over 176,000 in the US. The move by the US Food & Drug Administration comes as President Donald Trump faces intense pressure to curb the contagion that has hobbled the world's largest economy and hurt his prospects for re-election in November. The plasma is believed to contain powerful antibodies that can help fight off the disease faster and help protect people from being seriously hurt by it. "This product may be effective in treating Covid-19 and...the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product," FDA said in a statement. While the treatment has already been used on patients in the US and other nations, the extent of its effectiveness is still debated by experts and some have warned that it could carry side effects.







Trump is considering bypassing normal US regulatory standards to fast-track an experimental coronavirus vaccine from the UK, the Financial Times reported. The Trump administration is considering options which include allowing the US Food & Drug Administration to award an emergency use authorisation in October to a vaccine being developed by pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and Oxford university, should results from a study being carried out prove successful. The Oxford vaccine is among a handful globally to have reached the Phase 3 stage.







Republicans are ready to formally nominate Trump for re-election at a scaled-down convention kick-off in Charlotte that begins a week-long effort to convince the American people that the president deserves a second term. Despite the ongoing pandemic, delegates will hold an in-person roll-call vote in a ballroom at the Charlotte Convention Centre in North Carolina before attention turns to prime-time programming. It is a sharp contrast to the approach of Democrats, who created a roll call via video montage from states across the country to avoid a large-scale gathering last week at their well-received virtual convention.







Trump has again said he is willing to largely end trade with China, known as decoupling. "If they don't treat us right, I would certainly do, I would certainly do that," Trump said when asked about decoupling during an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday. "We get nothing from China," Trump added. The president has been increasingly bellicose with China, saying that he no longer values the US interim trade deal with Beijing, and referring to the novel coronavirus as the "China Virus." The president in June previously said he would consider ending the US's economic relationship with China. Relations between Washington and Beijing have been tense since Trump took office, initially largely over trade and intellectual property disputes, and spiralling downwards as the coronavirus pandemic worsened.







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TikTok on Monday sued U.S. President Donald Trump over his executive order banning transactions in the United States with the popular short-form video-sharing app, calling it a pretext to fuel anti-China rhetoric as he seeks reelection.

TikTok and its parent ByteDance Ltd rejected what they called the White House's position that it was a national security threat, saying they had taken "extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok's U.S. user data."

They also called Trump's call in his Aug. 6 executive order for a TikTok ban a means to further his alleged "broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric" ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, where Trump is seeking a second term.

"We do not take suing the government lightly," TikTok said in a blog post. "But with the Executive Order threatening to bring a ban on our U.S. operations ... we simply have no choice."

The White House referred a request for comment to the U.S. Department of Justice, which had no immediate response.

TikTok and ByteDance are seeking a permanent injunction to block Trump from enforcing his Aug. 6 order.

The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court names Trump, the U.S. Department of Commerce and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as defendants.

Amid growing distrust between Washington and Beijing, Trump had for weeks complained that TikTok was a national security threat that might share information about users with the Chinese government.

His Aug. 6 executive order called for banning transactions with the app after 45 days.

Trump issued a separate executive order on Aug. 14 giving ByteDance 90 days to divest TikTok's U.S. operations and any data TikTok had gathered in the United States.

Reuters reported last week that TikTok had been preparing a legal challenge.

ByteDance had acquired Shanghai-based video app Musical.ly in a $1 billion transaction in 2017, and relaunched it as TikTok the following year.

TikTok said the Trump administration violated its constitutional right to due process by banning the company without notice.

It accused Trump of misusing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets the president regulate international commerce during a national emergency.

Trump had in May 2019 invoked that law to stop alleged efforts by foreign telecommunications companies to conduct economic and industrial espionage against the United States.

The Trump administration have said Americans should be cautious in using TikTok. Under a law introduced in 2017 under President Xi Jinping, Chinese companies have an obligation to support and cooperate in China's national intelligence work.

But TikTok said Trump's Aug. 6 was not rooted in genuine national security concerns or supported by the emergency he had declared a year earlier.

It called the order "a gross misappropriation of IEEPA authority and a pretext for furthering the President's broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric in the run-up to the U.S. election."

ByteDance has been in talks to sell TikTok's North American, Australian and New Zealand operations to companies including Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Oracle Corp (ORCL.N).

Those assets could be worth $25 billion to $30 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.

Before buying TikTok, ByteDance had not sought advance approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews acquisitions for potential national security risks.

CFIUS later opened an investigation, and according to TikTok "repeatedly refused" to engage with ByteDance before saying it had found national security risks associated with the purchase.

ALSO READ: Vietnamese tech firm sues TikTok, alleging copyright infringement

ALSO READ: ByteDance investors seek to use stakes to finance TikTok bid

ALSO READ: TikTok to take legal action against Trump administration over app's ban in US
Researchers investigating a protein linked to certain cancers have found a potential double-whammy to treat both cancer and inflammatory diseases.

The Natural Killer Cell Granule Protein (NKG7) is a protein used by the bodys immune system to deliver toxic agents from immune cells to foreign cells in the body, especially cancer cells.

Researchers have shown the protein NKG7 (shown in green inside immune cells) attacks cancer cells but also causes inflammation. Credit:QIMR/ Teija CM Frame

It has previously been identified as a potential candidate to be developed using immunotherapy, and now researchers have shown in animal models it could have a wide range of uses.

Professor Christian Engwerda, the acting head of QIMR Berghofers infectious diseases program, said they found the protein could be turned on or off depending on the situation.
The living-room area of the three-room villas in An Lam Retreats Ninh Van Bay

One of the leading local hotel companies, An Lam Retreats has just launched its newest resort in the central province of Khanh Hoa, a famous tourist destination in Vietnam.

The launch of the three-room villas offers a whole new world of fun and relaxation for visitors to the resort heaven Ninh Bay, Nha Trang city.

The resorts design revolves around four factors, including nature, wide-open space, privacy, and traditional values. These values were the bedrock for the creation of the three-room villas. Moreover, the use of raw, natural materials like wood, stone, and rattan-bamboo provide an elemental setting to the luxury offered within. Drawing inspiration from both the architecture of Vietnam's ancient royal palaces and Western stylistic elements, An Lam Retreats Ninh Van Bay sends tourists on a journey honouring cultural values, rich in unforgettable personal experiences.

The sea-front three-room villas are not only a space for relaxation, they are pieces of art in themselves, windows into the heart and soul of the designer who strove to create a space guests can call home on the embrace of the wild nature.

An Lam Retreat is a spectacle while the sun sets over Ninh Van Bay

Visitors will forever recall the traditional Vietnamese features like wood pillars, Bat Trang ceramics, and elaborate wood carvings that give the villas and the entire resort a rustic and authentic Vietnamese feel. A personal haven in this setting, the living-room area was designed with cosiness and luxury in mind, leading to the three bed rooms that all boast breath-taking beach and ocean views.

The smart electric system allows customers to control electronics with utmost comfort. The infinity pool near the beach is an ideal place to kick back and find release in the cool waters while enjoying the spectacular scenery.

The sun setting over Ninh Van Bay is a sight to behold, especially from the comforts of a villa. Relishing in the play of orange and pink streaks on the water with a cocktail or a pool-side dinner is a real treat for romantic getaways or family gatherings alike.

Escape the pressure of life for a moment to sit beside your family and loved ones in nature's embrace. With a special discount of VND35.5 million ($1,543) a night for groups of four or VND47.5 million ($2,065) for six, tourists could enjoy a dinner party in villas, BBQ at the nearby waterfall, and watch the sunset from a catamaran  and make a plethora of other unforgettable memories.
The Delhi governments special camps to help construction workers register for a state-run welfare fund kicked off to a slow start on Monday even as several assembly constituencies were yet to start the drive.

The camps that began from 10am on Monday will continue till September 12. Day one saw a lot of family members turn up at the centres on behalf of the construction workers. The office of labour minister Gopal Rai told HT that the government will focus on areas such as Burari, Karawal Nagar, Badarpur, Najafgarh, Matiala, Babarpur and so on as most construction workers stay there.

The special drive comes after the Delhi High Court (HC) on May 2 directed the Delhi Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board, which is under the aegis of the labour department of the Delhi government, to take steps to renew the membership of all the workers, in a bid to cushion their lockdown-induced loss of earnings. The court had observed that over 500,000 construction workers in Delhi, who fell off the safety net under the watch of the citys welfare board, cannot be deprived of benefits just because they were unable to renew their annual registration.

Also Read: Delhi govts welfare fund for construction workers: All you need to know

At 12pm in Matialas Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya (SKV), a dozen people gathered around the counter. After an hour, only three of the 12 were found eligible. There was one paan seller, others were mostly street vendors and hawkers. We explained to them that this drive is only for construction workers and to be eligible one would need a certificate from the construction company or builder where the person is employed, said Gulab Singh, the MLA from Matiala constituency.

Sudesh Rai, a worker who was registered at the Matiala camp, said he works in a housing project of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers brought here me. Now I am told I can avail of nearly 18 different assistance schemes including 51,000 for the wedding of my daughter and 2 lakh to my family if I die on duty, he said.

Construction workers, including plumbers and electricians employed in the construction sector, painters, tile workers and security guards aged between 18 and 60, are eligible for registration under the scheme. They must possess a photo identity card, a bank account number, a residential proof for Delhi and other documents to prove that they have worked in the construction sector for at least 90 days in the 12 months prior to the registration, said an official in charge of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led governments initiative.

In Najafgarh, a camp in another Delhi government school saw several women stand in line, most of whom were related to the concerned applicant. The camps will function five days a weekfrom Monday to Friday between 10 am and 4 pm.

A tent has been set up for people to sit comfortably and wait for their turn, keeping in mind social distancing norms. A facility for drinking water has also been made available at the centre. Due to Covid-19, a lot of workers are yet to return from their home states, because of which the numbers continue to be low. Such camps will have to be set up at regular intervals to help more construction workers register, said Kailash Gahlot, the state transport minister and MLA from Najafgarh.

When asked about the number of people who have been registered so far, the labour ministers office said, It has just been over three hours since these camps opened. We have not yet compiled the number of people who have turned up across the 70 assembly constituencies. But the aim is to spread the word to as many people as possible so that in the next few days, the number of applicants increases. The main role in this is that of the MLAs.

But the story was very different in the constituencies with legislators from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Karawal Nagar MLA and senior BJP leader Mohan Singh Bisht said no such camp was set up in his constituency as on Monday. I have not been informed about this drive by the Delhi government. There has been absolutely no communication. We shall continue doing whatever is possible at our own level, he said.

In Badarpur, another area with a large number of construction workers, the scenario seemed bleak. Ramvir Singh Bidhuri, the area MLA and leader of opposition in the Delhi assembly, said he got to know about the governments initiative through the full-page newspaper advertisements on Monday.

The advertisement mentions most of the schools through acronyms only. How will a humble worker understand the location of the camp? In Karawal Nagar, the camps location has been given as GGSSx-1. There are 18 schools in my constituencies and so I sent my workers to each school in order to find out where the camp has been set up. But we could not find any till now, Bidhuri said.

He suggested that the government send an official communication to him as the leader of opposition so that all the BJP MLAs are informed about the drive and necessary steps are taken.

Every state has a welfare board which runs an array of beneficial schemes, funded by the cess collected from projects under the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Cess Act, 1996.

In Delhi, the board started disbursing 5,000 a month during the nationwide lockdownwhich has been imposed since the end of March in a bid to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and triggered a mass job loss in the realty sectorto the bank accounts of the enrolled workers.

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To my surprise, Jack Cashill's new book, Unmasking Obama, couldn't be more relevant to the political struggle facing us today. In 2020, as in 2008 (and throughout the two Obama presidential terms), the key to political power is what must be called "information warfare" (my term, not Jack's) between the mighty establishment media and the feisty conservative alternative media, which Jack likens to the samizdat underground commentary in the old Soviet Union. It is the process of the unmasking of the phony propaganda peddled by the all-powerful establishment by the resource- and prestige-poor "Lilliputians" (an appropriation of Jonathan Swift's work that the satirist surely would approve of) that is the heart of the book.

The narrative history presented in Unmasking Obama is captivating. Jack takes readers along with him as he was both a participant in the warfare and a historian of it, digging up parts of the elusive truth about the real Barack Obama in the face of derision and obstruction that came his way. But Jack is far from the sole hero of the story of the warfare. Because of his literary detective work, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Bill Ayers wrote the autobiographical book, Dreams from My Father, that first established Obama as a serious intellect, Jack enjoyed access to many of the most formidable truth-tellers about Obama. The book's prologue, in fact, begins with a phone call Jack received in 2011 from a then little-known lawyer named Michael Cohen, acting as a lawyer for Donald Trump.

Unmasking Obama takes the reader through the major aspects of the fraudulent picture of Obama that was painted by the media and political establishments and details how the truth was uncovered and often partially suppressed by the retaliatory efforts launched in response. It often resembles detective fiction in the drama of the struggle to get at the truth and the struggle to prevent that. I hesitate to call it beach reading, for it is not in any sense fluff, intended to while away time. But it is vastly entertaining and thought-provoking, and the 218 pages fly by rapidly.

Today, exactly the same struggle is underway between the Lilliputians seeking to uncover who really is running the front-man candidacy of Joe Biden and the shadowy movement that is looting and destroying our cities and the coordinated might of the mass media that spends 95% of its time pushing a party line that Trump is an unprecedented threat to human civilization and Joe Biden an amiable and pragmatic centrist.

Future historians, if there are any left still interested and able to dispassionately understand how America came to the current point of crisis, will find the story told in Unmasking Obama a very helpful guide. If journalism is the "first draft of history," Unmasking Obama is a well considered second draft, adding crucial perspective and assessment of the consequences of the real-time reports. You don't have to wait that long, though. It went on sale last week, and is well worth your time.
The plan, unveiled on the first day of the Republican convention, promises more America First policy if Trump wins.

The campaign for President Donald Trump, who will face off against Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the United States presidential election, has released his second-term agenda.

The bullet-point list, which centres around 10 policy areas, comes on the first day of the Republican National Convention, which will culminate in Trump accepting the partys nomination from the South Lawn of the White House.

Themed fighting for you, the Trump campaign says the policy priorities reflect Trumps boundless optimism and certainty in Americas greatness.





The policies also reflect the America First message that had defined Trumps previous campaign and his presidency to date.

The outlined goals remain sceptical of international institutions and trade deals, call for winding down endless wars and promise a clampdown on undocumented immigrants and those applying for citizenship who require public support. When it comes to education, Trump promises to teach American exceptionalism.

The plans also focus heavily on creating jobs, recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, and continuing to roll back regulatory restrictions on the energy sector. They also reflect Trumps law and order 2020 campaign messaging in calling for bringing violent extremist groups like Antifa to justice while doing away with cash bail reforms.

The campaign has said Trump will offer further details on the plans during the convention. Amid criticism over his handling of the coronavirus and racial justice protests, Trump has said he will seek to present a more upbeat perspective on current affairs than Democrats, who widely portrayed the president as an existential threat to the country.

Here are the recently released policy priorities for a Trump second term:

Jobs

Create 10 million new jobs in 10 months

Create 1 million new small businesses

Cut taxes to boost take-home pay and keep jobs in the US

Enact fair trade deals that protect American jobs

Made in America Tax Credits

Expand opportunity zones (which provide tax advantages for some investments in low-income areas)

Continue deregulatory agenda for energy independence





Eradicating COVID-19

Develop a vaccine by the end of 2020

Return to normal in 2021

Make all critical medicines and supplies for healthcare workers in the US

Refill stockpiles and prepare for future pandemics

Ending reliance on China

Bring back 1 million manufacturing jobs from China

Tax credits for companies that bring back jobs from China

Allow 100 percent expensing deductions for essential industries like pharmaceuticals and robotics that bring back their manufacturing to the US

Withhold federal contracts for companies that outsource to China

Hold China fully accountable for allowing the virus to spread around the world

Healthcare

Cut prescription drug prices

Put patients and doctors back in charge of our healthcare system

Lower healthcare insurance premiums

End surprise billing

Cover all pre-existing conditions

Protect Social Security and Medicare

Protect veterans and provide world-class healthcare and services





Education

Provide school choice to every child in the US

Teach American exceptionalism

Draining the swamp

Pass Congressional term limits

End bureaucratic government bullying of US citizens and small businesses

Expose Washingtons money trail and delegate powers back to people and states

Drain the globalist swamp by taking on international organisations that hurt US citizens

Defending police

Fully fund and hire more police and law enforcement officers

Increase criminal penalties for assaults on law enforcement officers

Prosecute drive-by shootings as acts of domestic terrorism

Bring violent extremist groups like Antifa to justice

End cashless bail and keep dangerous criminals locked up until trial

Illegal immigration and protecting US workers

Block illegal immigrants from becoming eligible for taxpayer-funded welfare, healthcare, and free college tuition

Mandatory deportation for non-citizen gang members

Dismantle human trafficking networks

End sanctuary cities (in which local authorities do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement) to restore our neighbourhoods and protect our families

Prohibit American companies from replacing US citizens with lower-cost foreign workers

Require new immigrants to be able to support themselves financially





Innovate for the future

Launch Space Force, establish a permanent manned presence on the moon and send the first manned mission to Mars

Build the worlds greatest infrastructure system

Win the race to 5G and establish a national high-speed wireless internet network

Continue to lead the world in access to the cleanest drinking water and cleanest air

Partner with other nations to clean up our planets oceans

America First foreign policy
The system began the school year virtually, with plans to reassess the health situation after nine weeks. Some schools were pivoting to other platforms such as Google Classroom, said Ian Smith, a spokesman for the district. Early Monday afternoon, he said he had watched a high school math class on Zoom. The teacher said there had initially been a disruption and they were contacting students through other means, and when Zoom came back up,they reassembled on that platform.
BURTON, MI -- The driver of an Aunt Millies bread truck is expected to be OK after the vehicle left Interstate 69 and wound up in murky waters near Kelly Lake Park in Burton.

Burton police officers responded around 10:15 a.m. Monday, Aug. 24, to eastbound I-69, east of Center Road, for a person in the water.

Burton Police Chief Brian Ross said it appears the male driver suffered a minor medical episode.

The bread truck went off the interstate and traveled approximately 200 yards before it stopped in a murky area just west of the lake.

The driver walked away from the truck, Ross told MLive-The Flint Journal.

He was transported to a local hospital for evaluation.

Two lanes of eastbound I-69 were temporarily closed as police handled the situation.

Burton firefighters, Genesee County Sheriffs Office paramedics, and Michigan State Police assisted at the scene.

More on MLive:

Man dies when vehicle leaves road, rolls over multiple times in Lapeer County field

1 killed, 1 in serious condition after shooting outside Flint bar

Woman ejected in Shiawassee County rollover crash dies from injuries
Scientists are currently working on the launch of the Tianqin-2 satellite to test key technologies for space-based gravitational wave detection. These include the main technologies for use in next-generation gravity satellites.

The Tianqin Project, China's independent space-based gravitational wave detection program, attracted much attention during a recent meeting to discuss the frontiers of space science during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, attended by dozens of Chinese experts in space science.

Professor Ye Xianji, from the Tianqin Research Center for Gravitational Physics affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University, noted at the meeting that intersatellite laser interferometry (ILI) -- one of the core technologies to undergo on-obit testing by the Tianqin-2 satellite -- is a key technology for next-generation gravity satellites.

"China is at the same starting line as the U.S. and Germany in accelerating breakthroughs in next-generation gravity satellite technology and competing for the lead in this regard," said Xu Houze, an academician from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Xu expects the smooth advancement of the Tianqin-2 satellite program so as to achieve China's independence, safety and leading position in gravity satellite technology.

Gravity satellites are critical to the national economy and people's livelihood, according to Zhong Min, researcher at the Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, CAS. Zhong added that the experimental data to be provided by Tianqin-2 through ILI testing will be used to help build global gravitational field models with high precision and high spatiotemporal resolution.

This advancement is expected to serve various sectors including geodesy, geophysics and national security, and also help address global challenges such as climate change and disaster prevention and mitigation, Zhong said.

Zhang Lihua, chief designer of the Tianqin-1 satellite, noted that Tianqin-1 completed all its tests with better results than expected. He is counting on Tianqin-2 to make a major technological breakthrough in testing high-precision ILI and thereby innovations in the application of high-precision gravitational field.

Experts from the Tianqin Research Center said that breakthroughs had been achieved in the key technologies of the Tianqin-2 satellite, with both the required technology and research personnel in place.

The Tianqin Project consists of four stages, and aims to deploy three satellites in orbit around 100,000 km from the Earth to detect space-based gravitational waves.

Tianqin-2 is being jointly developed by Sun Yat-sen University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology as well as Aerospace Dongfanghong Satellite Co., Ltd., among others. It is currently in its third phase, with the satellite to test the key technologies of the second stage of the whole Tianqin Project.

Content created in partnership with Science and Technology Daily.
analysis

West African leaders from regional bloc Ecowas kick off a high-stakes mission to Mali on Saturday in a bid to reverse Tuesday's military coup. Member heads of state want ousted leader Ibrahim Boubacar Keita to be reinstated, but Malians have cheered his resignation. It is the latest sign of the widening schism between the bloc and civilians.

A delicate balancing act lies ahead for the Ecowas delegation as it tries to restore constitutional order to Mali, while at the same time acknowledging the public's desire for change.

The architect of that mission is former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan.

He was the mediator between ousted leader Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and an opposition coalition, known as the June 5 Movement, during last month's talks that failed to end the deadlock.

Jonathan has said he hopes Saturday "to help the search for solutions" after this week's coup, and will be flanked by the president of the Ecowas Commission, Jean-Claude Kassi Brou, and Niger's foreign minister, Kalla Ankourao.

A junta official told AFP that the envoys would be received "with pleasure... it is important to talk to our brothers."

However, chances of a breakthrough appear slim reckon analysts, largely due to a misunderstanding between Ecowas and ordinary Malians.

Crossing red line

"The mediation by Ecowas has been ongoing, they've met with all different stakeholders but they have not integrated at all the claims of civil society and opposition parties," says Sten Hagberg, a professor in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Those claims include an end to escalating corruption, the embezzlement of public funds and access to education. Demands, which in Hagberg's view, have been largely ignored.

"None of this has been integrated in the mediation attempts, because the stepping down of the president is a red line they cannot cross," he told RFI.

The 15-member bloc is composed of leaders who are also facing demands for reform in their own countries, and who fear that Mali's collapse could set a precedent in the region.

MALI-Can Ecowas be a voice for the Malian people?-Sten Hagberg, professor at Uppsala University

In the cases of Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire, their presidents have altered the rules to allow them to stay in power beyond their mandated terms.

"Many people in Mali and elsewhere in West Africa say that Ecowas is almost like a labour union of presidents," continues Hagberg.

The coup in Mali has put Ecowas' reputation as a champion of democracy to the test.

"People are saying we need an Ecowas of West African peoples not of presidents," he said.

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Paying high price

While Malians have expressed widespread support for the military coup, it has been met with almost universal condemnation abroad.

This paradox can be explained by the country's security crisis, which has spilled over into neighbouring countries such as Burkina Faso and Niger.

"The security crisis in Mali since 2011-2012 has led to a situation whereby for the international community, the stability of Mali is key," says the Uppsala University professor, referring to fears that Mali's conflict is driving illegal migration to Europe.

"But on the other hand who is paying the price? It's the Malian people. There are no schools that have opened in months if not years. The public health service is not working. Even the army has been lacking military equipment and these are the people who are fighting terrorist groups."

For Hagberg, the international community has "invested everything in Keita" for the price of stability.

It is a price that Malians are no longer willing to pay.
With only about 1,900 daycare programs available for Connecticut preschoolers, the Lamont administration is scrambling for additional space, including possibly allowing summer camps to remain open into the school year, so parents can go back to work.

I think that a lot of parents are going to find themselves in a bind, Gov. Ned Lamont said Monday. It depends on how many schools open, at least K through [fifth grade], full-time.

Beth Bye, commissioner of the state Office of Early Childhood, said that the class limit for child care programs was recently raised to 16 kids, which brings the total available slots to about 60 percent of the pre-virus total. There are more than 180,000 state children ages four and younger, and 280,000 ages five to 11, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The total number of day care openings has fluctuated during the coronavirus pandemic, Bye said, noting that its low was 1,400 and it is now at its pandemic high. But it will not be enough, she and Lamont conceded. Lamont said that during a call Monday with child-care providers, their concern and anxiety was palpable. Bye thanked the governor for making free COVID tests available to providers.

We take this seriously as well, Lamont said. Were there to back them up, as regards what they need in terms of masks, what they need in terms of disinfectant, what we can do to make sure that they are continuing to provide service safely for those most in need in child-care facilities.

Bye noted that 70 percent of households with kids under the age of 12 need child care in order for the parent to go to work. These are really challenging times for parents and programs, said Bye, a former state senator, adding that child-care facilities have excelled at public health measures, use of personal protective equipment (PPE) including keeping classes together in isolated cohorts, as well as hand washing.

It was probably safer in day care than it was in the general population, Lamont said. If you take the necessary precautions.

As of the end of Juy there were 37 COVID-19 cases among provider staff and 10 in the child population. Some research has shown that children pass the illness to others in greater numbers than had been thought.

These child care workers are right there on the front line, taking care of the children of nurses and doctors and food service workers, making sure that our essential functions could continue at the height of the pandemic, Lamont said. We kept our day care open during the height of the pandemic. Some other states didnt do that.

Theyre anxious, Bye said. They still need the PPE. They need enhanced guidance. And its a really stressed field right now, financially. Were really proud of the providers.

While $100 million in state and federal funding has been invested in daycare during the pandemic, Bye said Connecticut is looking for another $100 million to $300 million from Washington.

Were really looking to communities to listen to parents and to find ways to support the families at this time, Bye said, adding that letting camps extend and open in the school year would add needed capacity. Also, allowing family child care programs to accept school-age children in private homes would help. Those are things we are working on as well with the office of the governor. Were really going to have to have some local solutions as well.

On Monday, Lamont announced no new coronavirus fatalities were reported over the weekend, with the death toll remaining at 4,460. There was a net increase of three COVID patients statewide for a total of 57 hospitalizations.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT

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President Donald Trump Sunday announced the emergency-use authorization of convalescent blood plasma as a treatment for COVID-19, a move that will enable all hospitals to deploy the popular but not well proven therapy.

At a news conference a day ahead of the Republican National Convention, Trump called the Food and Drug Administration authorization a breakthrough thats about life and death, not politics. The authorization was issued a few days after he complained the FDA was guilty of politically motivated delays.

This is a powerful therapy that transfuses very, very strong antibodies from the blood of recovered patients to help treat patients battling a current infection, said Trump, who added later in the news conference that the political logjam was broken in the past week. Todays action will dramatically expand access to this treatment.

The authorization comes less than a week after UTHealth and Baylor College of Medicine began enrolling participants in more rigorous studies investigating the therapy, studies many scientists thought were needed to facilitate greater use of the treatment. Because of the lack of such data, the FDA last week put the plan to issue the emergency-use authorization on hold.

The treatment is based on the premise that transfusing plasma from patients whove recovered from a virus transfers its healing powers, contained in antibodies made by the immune system to attack the infection. First used during the 1918 Spanish Influenza, it has become one of the go-to treatments for the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Some experts immediately criticized the emergency authorization, arguing the evidence for the therapy remains inconclusive without results from a test randomly assigning participants into one group that receives blood plasma and another that gets a placebo or some standard of care. Some who said they think it will provide a benefit said it is far from the breakthrough Trump touted would be announced earlier in the weekend.

Im very disappointed in the FDA and with the political intervention, said Dr. Paul Klotman, president of Baylor. We need the right randomized study to determine efficacy. Every time we do something that isnt proven there is the potential to waste time, money and lives.

Klotman, who called the authorization premature, noted that it was made despite advice to the contrary by the directors of the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It was reportedly those two  Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, respectively  whod convinced the FDA to put a hold on an emergency use authorization, arguing the existing data is not strong enough.

But Dr. James Musser, a Methodist professor of pathology and genomic medicine who has led the Houston hospitals research with the therapy, said Sunday the FDA made the best decision it could with the available data. Methodist and Mount Sinai in New York were the nations first U.S. hospitals to provide the therapy, both transfusing patients with plasma on the same night in March.

There have been a variety of trials, all pointing in the same direction  that blood plasma with high levels of antibodies and given early in the disease benefit patients, said Musser. Its important to get randomized trials done, but theyre not perfect.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Blood plasma therapy for COVID-19 patients coming to more Houston hospitals

Ed Jones, the head of the Houston Methodist Research Institute last week expressed disappointment that the expanded access was delayed. He said Methodist was eager to deploy the therapy at its suburban hospitals, which arent able to make available to patient therapies in clinical trials, like hospitals in the Texas Medical Center.

Trials involving plasma therapy include one by Methodist published in the Journal of Pathology earlier this month. It found that 136 patients who received plasma were more likely to be alive four weeks later than 251 patients who did not receive it. The latter group did not receive a placebo; researchers instead compared patients who got plasma with similar patients based on medical records.

Dr. Stephen Hahn, the director of the FDA, touted at the news conference that studies of the therapy have found a 35 percent survival benefit, which he called pretty significant.

Much of the work was through a large trial led by the Mayo Clinic. About 35,000 COVID-19 patients got plasma in that trial, which also did not involve a placebo. Like the Methodist trial, patients who got plasma in it were compared with similar patients not enrolled in the trial.

But despite the emergency authorization, there will be limits to access to the therapy, simply because plasma is derived from blood donations and cant be ramped up into millions of doses like a synthetic drug. Though Trump said donations have doubled since the administration launched a campaign urging recovered patients to donate, blood bank officials around the nation have lamented their supply is limited.

Peter Hotez, a Baylor infectious disease specialist, called the authorization a modest benefit, noting the limited availability of plasma and the need to give it in adequate amounts and early in the course of disease. But he acknowledged the emergency authorization should reduce the amount of paperwork and time required to get access to the therapy.

On HoustonChronicle.com: FDA fast tracking makes Houston Methodist one of first hospitals to treat COVID-19 with recovered patients blood

In the authorization letter, FDA officials stressed the therapy is still under investigation.

Convalescent plasma should not be considered a new standard of care for the treatment of patients with COVID-19, said the letter. Additional data will be forthcoming from other analyses and ongoing, well-controlled clinical trials in the coming months.

The FDA, which has issued many emergency-use authorizations during the pandemic, can always rescind such orders. It did that with hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug Trump and others advocated for COVID-19 that was ultimately found to be ineffective in trials.

New York University and Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine are leading the new randomized, placebo-controlled study, considered the gold standard of drug testing. UTHealth joined that study last week.

This is exactly the study we need to be doing to determine once and for all if this therapy works, said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, study co-investigator and infectious disease specialist at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. Physicians have been using the therapy to try to save patients during the pandemic, knowing its safe but not knowing if it really works. Now, were going to find that out.

Ostrosky, also an infectious disease doctor at Memorial Hermann, said he expects UTHealth will finish enrollment of patients by the end of the year. It expects to supply about 400 of the trials 1,300 patients.

In addition, UTHealth and Baylor are both participating in other randomized trials about Covid. Those will test whether the therapy works in outpatient settings to prevent the onset of the disease in uninfected people exposed to a COVID-positive patient; and to prevent the progression of the disease in people experiencing mild to moderate symptoms but not yet resulting in hospitalization.

Both institutions have just begun enrolling patients in both those trials, which are led by Johns Hopkins University researchers.

Sundays announcement followed significant pressure by Trump to speed up the FDA process for approving vaccine and therapies for COVID-19, including a Tweet Saturday that said the deep state, or whoever, at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after Nov. 3.

At Sundays news conference, Trump said the effort removing unnecessary barriers and and delays had put the United States years ahead of its usual schedule and Hahn said 17,000 FDA staffers have worked day and night to make it happen.

Chronicle wire services contributed to this report.

todd.ackerman@chron.com
Irish broadcaster RTE has told the Republic's new Government that it forecasts a deficit of 36m (32m) for 2020, with Covid-19 significantly deepening the financial crisis at the organisation.

In a confidential outlook statement for 2020, it originally forecast net losses of 10.7m (9.6m) for the current year, the Sunday Independent has revealed.

But the deficit was expected to increase by 25m (22m) given falls in licence fee income and ad revenue.

The forecast was submitted to brief newly appointed ministers on the state of the organisation's finances in late June.

However, a spokesman for the state broadcaster said that its finances had improved in recent weeks and that it now hoped to report a lower deficit for year end.

According to the forecast submitted to Government in June, revenues for 2020 were originally expected to hit 351m (315m), up from 342m (307m) in 2019, due mainly to a 9m (8m) in additional funding granted by the Government via the licence fee.

However, the revised figures show that commercial income was expected to plunge 31m (28m) to 114m (102m) compared with the hoped for 145m (130m).

And RTE was factoring in a 24m (22.5m) shortfall in licence fee income on its original 2020 figures.

This would represent a 55m (49m) shortfall on RTE's revenue expectations with the organisation outlook revising down income to 296m (266m).

However, this shortfall is somewhat mitigated by an operating costs reduction of 25m (22.5m). RTE had already committed to a number of cost savings last December and continues to reduce outgoings.

Since the stark warning, RTE's commercial and licence fee income has improved and the organisation now believes that the deficit will be smaller than has been flagged to the new Government. The document also revealed that RTE expected be to benefit from the wage subsidy scheme to the tune of 5m.
Three Wisconsin children were sitting in a car when police shot their father multiple times as he tried to get into the vehicle Sunday afternoon, according to an attorney representing the family.

The Black man, identified by the governor as 29-year-old Jacob Blake, was taken to a hospital in serious condition after the caught-on-video shooting in Kenosha.

The circumstances leading up to the shooting remain unclear, but witnesses said Blake was unarmed and had tried to break up a fight between two women when cops shot him seven times in the back.

We all watched the horrific video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back several times by Kenosha police, civil rights lawyer Ben Crump said in a statement Monday.
High-level Taliban delegation in Pakistan for Afghan peace process

International

pti-Madhuri Adnal

Islamabad, Aug 24: A high-level delegation from the Talibans political office in Doha arrived in Pakistan on Monday to discuss the way forward in the Afghan peace process with the Pakistani leadership.

The Taliban delegation led by their political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is visiting Islamabad at the invitation of the country's foreign office. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters that he would meet the Taliban delegation on Tuesday.

Kashmir is Indias internal matter says Taliban

He said that Pakistan was playing a facilitating role on the Afghan issue which led to a peace agreement between the US and the Taliban and now it's up to Afghans to decide the way forward.

The next logical step is intra-Afghan dialogue, which should be started at the earliest, he said, adding that China was also supporting the Afghan peace process. The majority of Afghans believe the only way forward is through reconciliation but the decision to reconcile has to be taken by Afghans themselves, Qureshi said.

He said the people in Afghanistan desire peace and stability but there are some spoilers, who want to disturb peace in Afghanistan.

The Afghan Taliban spokesperson also confirmed that a delegation led by Mullah Baradar is visiting Islamabad and other capitals to discuss the Afghan peace efforts. This is the second visit of Mullah Baradar to Pakistan in the last 10 months. He visited Islamabad in October last year when President Donald Trump abruptly called off the peace talks with the Taliban, citing the militant group's continued attacks against the US-led foreign forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistan at that time had arranged a meeting between the Taliban delegation led by Mullah Baradar and US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. That meeting had helped the process to be back on track, which eventually culminated in the landmark deal signed between the US and the Taliban on February 29.

US-Taliban deal is like Pakeezah movie: Jaishankar

The deal envisages a roadmap for the US troops withdrawal in return for the Taliban agreeing not to let Afghan soil be ever used again by any terrorist group. The visit of the Afghan delegation comes as preparations are being made to kick start the next phase of Afghan peace process, which is the intra-Afghan talks.

The intra-Afghan dialogue has been delayed for months because of differences between the Afghan government and the Taliban over the release of Taliban prisoners. Recently, the final hurdle was removed when Afghan Loya Jirga - tribal grand assembly - endorsed President Ashraf Ghani's move to free the remaining 400 Taliban prisoners. The development has now paved the way for the much-awaited intra-Afghan dialogue, media reports said. The first round is expected to take place in Doha, capital of Qatar.
The Indonesian island of Bali has bowed to the inevitable and will remain closed to foreign tourists until the end of 2020.

For months, local government officials have insisted Bali would reopen to overseas tourists on September 11. It began allowing domestic tourists to visit on July 31.

Earlier this month the Minister for Maritime and Investment Affairs Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan supported the reopening, though he subsequently back-tracked.

A passenger is welcomed at Denpasar airport in Bali after the resort island reopened its borders to domestic tourists on July 31. Credit:AP

Bali's economy is heavily reliant on foreign tourists and has been smashed by the coronavirus pandemic with hotel occupancy rates dropping by up to 95 per cent. The decision to keep the borders shut will be a significant further blow for the large number of people dependent on jobs in tourism.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 17:11:38|Editor: huaxia

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TIANJIN, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Angiola Rucci, a senior manager at Triumph Asia Co., Ltd., an Italy-based event planning company, has been busy shuttling between exhibition venues in Shanghai, as five events are lined up in the east China metropolis this month.

"Exhibition projects of many companies at home and abroad got postponed or canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, our business in China has been back on track. In August alone, we have five projects in Shanghai," said Rucci, who had to undergo a 14-day quarantine upon arrival in north China's Tianjin Municipality.

In compliance with China's epidemic control regulations, Rucci and some 200 passengers on the flight NO942 from Italy to Tianjin underwent quarantine after arriving at the Tianjin Binhai International Airport. She said many of the passengers on board were foreign employees returning to work in China.

As soon as she finished the quarantine on Aug. 14 and tested negative in nucleic acid test results, she left for Shanghai. A day later, she waltzed her way at the launch venue of a modern motorcycle in red and black under the limelight.

Maria Criscuolo, chair and CEO of Triumph Group International, the parent company of Triumph Asia Co., Ltd. said, the company's staff are returning to China. She is confident about the Chinese market and the company's business in the country.

"China has done a great job in epidemic prevention and control. Special entrances and lounges have been assigned for inbound passengers at the airport. We were picked up by designated vehicles upon arrival," Rucci said.

The mother of a one-year-old baby has been able to attend online meetings while looking after her child during the quarantine. "In addition to three meals a day, we were provided with abundant fruits and vegetables. They also prepared a baby bed for me," Rucci added.

"I could not see their faces under the hazmat suits, but I could feel they were considerate and thoughtful," she said.

Elena Faoro, 41, who was on the same flight with Rucci, said in fluent Chinese that she has been working and living in China for 17 years. She volunteered as an online interpreter for other inbound passengers and helped them communicate with medics at the quarantine site.

"The attendants and medics always responded promptly to our requirements, and tried their best to help everyone solve problems," Faoro said.

She said quarantine staff took their temperatures, helped them buy daily necessities, delivered three meals a day on time, disinfected the corridors and regularly removed garbage.

"I read books, did indoor exercises and dealt with the company's business during quarantine," said Faoro, who has returned to her company for producing clothing materials in east China's Jiangsu Province.

"Our overseas orders incurred a loss of about 50 percent due to the epidemic in the first half of the year. But, we are determined to continue developing the Chinese market and seeking new business partners in China," Faoro said.

She believes that as more and more foreign companies resume production in an efficient and orderly manner in China, they would inject great impetus into the global economy. Enditem
HARARE, Zimbabwe - A Zimbabwean journalist who has been held in prison for more than a month has been denied bail for the third time, while police continue arresting government critics.

Journalist Hopewell Chinono should remain in jail, a Harare magistrate ruled Monday. Chinono is awaiting trial for allegedly encouraging people to participate in an anti-government demonstration planned for July 31, but which was foiled by police and military. He has been in custody since his arrest on July 20. His trial date has not yet been set but he will return to court for a routine remand hearing in September.

I will be strong. I am fine, said Chinono from inside a prison van as he arrived at court Monday.

Roslyn Hanzi, one of his lawyers, said prison authorities have barred the lead lawyer in the case, Beatrice Mtetwa, from visiting or consulting with Chinono, who is being held at Chikurubi, a maximum security prison known for its harsh conditions and which is usually reserved for hardcore criminals and government critics.

A court recently ruled that Mtetwa, a prominent human rights advocate, should step down as Chinonos lawyer, accusing her of being responsible for comments posted on a Facebook page, although she denied that she has any control over the page.

They are essentially stripping Hopewell Chinono of his right to legal representation at all levels, said Hanzi.

Hanzi said arrests of critics of President Emmerson Mnangagwas government and the ruling ZANU-PF party, which intensified in July, have continued unabated.

Zimbabwes courts have been hearing cases of lawyers, nurses, journalists and politicians who are among scores arrested for criticizing the government, assisting activists or demanding better working conditions, according to lawyers.

The latest arrests include that of Job Sikhala, a member of parliament for the main opposition MDC Alliance party who had been in hiding for weeks after being accused of mobilizing anti-government protests. Another opposition legislator, Prince Dubeko Dube, has been charged with inciting violence after he gave employees of a supermarket two face masks marked with the words ZANU-PF must go.
Malaysian authorities have opened an inquest into the death last year of Franco-Irish teenager Nora Quoirin

Malaysian police insisted Monday there was no indication a French-Irish teenager was kidnapped from a jungle resort, as an inquest began into the girl's death following her disappearance while on holiday.

The body of Nora Quoirin, a 15-year-old with learning difficulties, was discovered unclothed last year after a massive hunt through the rainforest but authorities said there was no sign of foul play.

However, her parents -- who believe there was a criminal element to her death, as they say the teen would not have wandered off alone -- pushed for an inquest and authorities agreed.

At the start of proceedings on Monday, senior police official Mohamad Mat Yusop described how he inspected the bungalow where the girl and her family were staying and saw nothing suspicious.

"There was no indication the victim was kidnapped," he told the inquest in the city of Seremban, which is set to hear from some 64 witnesses, including the teen's parents.

"We did not receive any telephone calls -- usually in this kind of case we will get a call to say the victim has been kidnapped and is in the hands of certain people, and they would demand a ransom.

"I believe the missing person actually climbed out of the window," Mohamad added.

A second witness, resort owner Haanim Ahmed Bamadhaj, said the latch of the window the teen is believed to have climbed out of was broken, and there was no CCTV at the site.

Two windows from the bungalow were shown in court, one of which had a broken latch.

Quoirin's disappearance from the Dusun Resort south of Kuala Lumpur, where she was staying with her London-based family, triggered a 10-day hunt involving helicopters, sniffer dogs and hundreds of searchers.

Her body was discovered close to the jungle retreat and an autopsy found that she probably starved and died of internal bleeding after spending about a week in the dense rainforest.

- 'Distraught' -

Mohamad, the police chief of Negeri Sembilan state, told the court how he immediately ordered a search after being informed on August 4 last year that the girl was missing.

Story continues

"I assured the father we will use all our resources to find the missing girl."

The voice of the girl's mother calling "Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here" was played to the court -- a recording that was used during the hunt to try to lure her out of the jungle.

Ahead of the inquest, the teen's parents Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin described it as "a crucial element in the fight for truth and justice for Nora".

"We hope that all avenues surrounding Nora's disappearance will be fully explored and not just the theory which the police has always favoured," they told AFP in a statement.

Earlier this month, the coroner went to the Dusun Resort and visited the area where the body was found, police said.

The teenager's Irish mother and French father are not present at the inquest because of the coronavirus pandemic but are following it via a video-conferencing platform.

Other expected witnesses include hikers who found her body and a British forensics expert, who will join by video link.

jsm-sr/fox
The former wife of the so-called "Ogre of the Ardennes" has told police investigators that her husband abducted, raped and murdered nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin, who vanished without trace on her way home from school 17 years ago. Fresh DNA evidence and a supermarket receipt from 2003 now support her claim.

Michel Fourniret, the man serving a life sentence for a sequence of sexual attacks and murders dating back to the 1980s, is now 78 years old and suffers from memory loss.

Until recently, Fourniret had consistently denied any responsibility for the abduction and death of Estelle Mouzin, despite in 2004 confessing to sexual crimes and the murder of nine people, eight females and one male.

In 2018, he admitted two other murders of young women in 1988 and 1990.

'Beyond my capacity to remember'

Estelle Mouzin was nine when she disappeared in January 2003 while walking home from school in the town of Guermantes, 30 kilometres east of the French capital Paris.

During routine questioning earlier this year, Fourniret for the first time admitted that it was possible he was the killer of the little girl, adding that "the circumstances, the events, the way things happened" were beyond his capacity to remember.

Asked if he had brought the kidnapped child to an deserted family house in the north-eastern Ardennes region, the self-confessed rapist and serial killer replied that the accusation was "reasonable...not improbable", claiming that he could not be more precise.

Asked if he could say where he might have buried Mouzin, Fourniret replied, "It's very difficult...I haven't a clue."

Former wife makes formal accusation

In January, Fourniret's former wife, Monique Olivier, herself serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 28 years for her role in some of the abductions and killings, said her then-husband was guilty of Mouzin's murder.

Olivier told police that Fourniret abducted Mouzin from Guermantes on 9 January 2003 and took her to Ville-sur-Lumes, 200 kilometres away in the Ardennes department, where he held her captive, raped and strangled her. She was unable to provide police with any indication as to where her husband had disposed of the body.

Earlier this summer, a detailed police search of the unoccupied house, which formerly belonged to Fourniret's sister, failed to find any trace of the missing girl.

However, traces of DNA found in the building appear to confirm that Mouzin was indeed held there. A receipt for food from a local supermarket, dated two days after her disappearance, was also found during the search, supporting Fourniret's ex-wife's claim that he was at the house at the time.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention, more than 300 delegates gathered in Charlotte, N.C., to formally nominate President Trump as the partys presidential candidate. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
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Only one Covid-19 victim whose death was announced by NHS England over the past week was under the age of 40, according to official data.

NHS figures show 90 per cent of the patients who died from the illness after testing positive were over 60  including half who were at least 80 years old.

It comes as Britain today posted four more coronavirus deaths, with government statistics showing the average number of people dying from the infection each day has now stayed in single figures for almost a week.

Department of Health data reveals nine Brits are succumbing to the life-threatening illness each day, on average. The rate has been consistently dropping since the end of April and hasn't risen despite a spike in cases over the past six weeks.

For comparison, six laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 deaths were declared yesterday and three last Monday. More than 1,000 deaths were being announced daily during the darkest days of the UK's coronavirus crisis.

Data shows only 64 coronavirus fatalities were registered in Britain over the past week  a fraction of the 6,600 recorded in the deadliest seven-day spell of April 7 to 13. Only one of the victims in English hospitals in the past week is known to be under the age of 40.

Government data released today also revealed another spike in cases. Health chiefs revealed another 853 patients have been diagnosed with Covid-19  up from the 713 recorded last Monday.

It means the rolling seven-day average of daily cases now stands at 1,043  a figure that has risen every day since Friday, when it dropped to below 1,000 for the first time in over a week. The rate has almost doubled since before lockdown restrictions were eased at the start of last month, with an average of 546 cases on July 8.

But Britain has yet to suffer a spike in fatalities or hospital admissions, suggesting the spike in cases is down to more testing in badly-hit areas. Doctors say the rise in cases is largely down to younger people getting infected, who studies have shown face less risk of dying or becoming severely ill from Covid-19.

In other coronavirus developments in Britain today:

Pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom, deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries claimed;

Seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school which has now been shut until at least next week to undergo a deep clean;

Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track;

Quarantine travel restrictions could be slashed from 14 days to less than a week under plans to introduce testing on arrival at UK airports.

Only one of the victims in the past week is known to be under the age of 40, according to an analysis of NHS England data

PUPILS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE HIT BY A BUS THAN GET COVID-19, DEPUTY CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER CLAIMS Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, today said children were more likely to be hit by a bus than catch coronavirus at school Pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom, the deputy chief medical officer claimed today. Dr Jenny Harries said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus. Meanwhile, Education Minister Nick Gibb this morning insisted parents will be fined if they refuse to send their children back to school next week. He also said the Government is sticking by its advice to teachers that they do not need to wear masks despite a growing row with unions over staff safety. Public Health England data has shown that teachers are more likely to be infected than their pupils, after one in 23,000 students tested positive during the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays. Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September. The Prime Minister said in a video posted on his Twitter account that he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health. He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed' Advertisement

The most up-to-date government coronavirus death toll  released this afternoon  stood at 41,433. It takes into account victims who have died within 28 days of testing positive.

Ministers earlier this month scrapped the original fatality count because of concerns it was inaccurate due to it not having a time cut-off, meaning no-one could ever technically recover in England.

More than 5,000 deaths were knocked off the original toll. The rolling average number of daily coronavirus deaths dropped drastically  from around 59 to fewer than ten.

The deaths data does not represent how many Covid-19 patients died within the last 24 hours. It is only how many fatalities have been reported and registered with the authorities.

And the figure does not always match updates provided by the home nations. Department of Health officials work off a different time cut-off, meaning daily updates from Scotland and Northern Ireland are out of sync.

The toll announced by NHS England every day, which only takes into account fatalities in hospitals, doesn't match up with the DH figures because they work off a different recording system.

For instance, some deaths announced by NHS England bosses will have already been counted by the Department of Health, which records fatalities 'as soon as they are available'.

Department of Health officials also declare new Covid-19 cases every afternoon. Today they revealed another 853 Brits had tested positive for the life-threatening disease.

It means around 1,040 Britons are being diagnosed with the disease each day. For comparison, fewer than 550 cases were being recorded each day, on average, at the start of July.

The spike in cases  alongside a resurgence of the virus in Europe  prompted fears of a second wave. But top experts have insisted the rise is merely down to more testing in badly-hit areas.

The updated figures come as England's deputy chief medical officer claimed today that pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom.

Dr Jenny Harries said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus.

Meanwhile, Education Minister Nick Gibb this morning insisted parents will be fined if they refuse to send their children back to school next week.

He also said the Government is sticking by its advice to teachers that they do not need to wear masks despite a growing row with unions over staff safety.

Public Health England figures have shown teachers are more likely to be infected than pupils, after one in 23,000 students tested positive during the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays.

MATT HANCOCK'S 'OPERATION MOON SHOT' PLAN TO TEST 4MILLION PEOPLE A DAY The Health Secretary is said to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year. Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track. The Health Secretary is said to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year. Currently the NHS and private testing centers have a capacity of around 326,000, although because of the current level of infection, only around 190,000 are being carried out. A massive expansion of the testing regime is seen as a key requirement of easing lockdown measures further as the public continue to be wary of a return to workplaces. But the scale of the plan will raise some eyebrows after Mr Hancock's struggles throughout the pandemic to dramatically up the testing rate. His test and trace scheme, run by Tory peer Baroness Harding, has also come in for major criticism. 'It is at an embryonic stage and it's going to take a hell of a lot of work. It is nicknamed Operation Moon Shot because that is what a moon shot is like: it seems very hard but it's important and we want to land it,' a source told the Telegraph. Advertisement

Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September.

In a video posted on Twitter, the Prime Minister said he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health.

He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed'.

Number 10 remains under pressure over its handling of the return of schools. Tory MPs have complained ministers have left it 'very late' to persuade parents it is safe.

Mr Johnson's plea came hours before it was revealed that seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school which has now been shut until at least next week to undergo a deep clean.

All staff and children at Kingspark School in Dundee, which reopened along with other schools in Scotland on August 12, have been told to self-isolate for two weeks.

NHS Tayside confirmed positive cases among three 'community contacts' linked to the cluster at the school, which has about 185 pupils aged between five and 18.

All pupils at the school, which was purpose built in 2009, have additional support needs - with many also having additional physical disabilities or medical problems.

Kingspark School was closed last Wednesday and all parents received a joint letter from the local council and NHS at the end of last week to keep them updated.

In other developments today, Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track.

The Health Secretary is understood to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot', with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year.

Currently the NHS and private testing centers have a capacity of around 326,000, although because of the current level of infection, only around 190,000 are being carried out.

A massive expansion of the testing regime is seen as a key requirement of easing lockdown measures further as the public continue to be wary of a return to workplaces.

But the scale of the ambition will raise some eyebrows after Mr Hancock's struggles throughout the pandemic to dramatically up the testing rate.

His test and trace scheme, run by Tory peer Baroness Harding, has also come in for major criticism. Data released last Friday showed the number of close contacts reached had fallen to its lowest ever level.

'It's going to take a hell of a lot of work. It is nicknamed Operation Moon Shot because that is what a moon shot is like: it seems very hard but it's important and we want to land it,' a source told the Telegraph.
Sixty-five days after the death of Bollywood star, Sushant Singh Rajput, the Supreme Court on August 19 removed the uncertainty over the outcome of inquiries into the case. Maharashtra and Bihar, which were pitted against each other, were waiting for the verdict with bated breath.

Rajputs family was aggrieved with the Mumbai Police over the slack pace of the probe, while his former partner Rhea Chakraborty and her kin considered the charges levelled against her as fabricated and politically-motivated. The constant barrage of statements from various politicians only added to the confusion. The Supreme Court used its plenary powers to order the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe to ensure justice, in view of the vitiated atmosphere surrounding his death.

Indeed, Sushants death has raised some uncomfortable issues for Indias democracy. It has also exposed the distortions that exist in every institution, particularly the media, which has flouted every editorial and journalistic norm in its reportage, and police and investigative agencies, which have allowed the politicisation of what should have been a straightforward investigation.

For one, there has been a debate on the issue of jurisdiction. Maharashtra laid claim to it because the incident took place in Mumbai, while Bihar argued that the consequences of the incident ensuing in Patna entitled its police to file the first information report (FIR).

The Supreme Court decided that the Patna police had the right to register the FIR and investigate, on the basis that criminal breach of trust could take place both in Patna and Mumbai. The decision will have repercussions for the future. FIRs will be filed across the country, in places far from that of the occurrence of crimes, forcing courts to settle the jurisdiction issue.

There are issues pertaining to the FIR lodged by Rajputs father, particularly the silence right after the incident in a statement to Mumbai Police. But this is not to absolve the Mumbai Police. The Mumbai Police system, which is of 1864 vintage, failed to strike the balance between a rigorous, impartial investigation while remaining attuned to the growing attention to the case.

Rajputs death touched a chord in many people. Further, there was huge empathy for Rajput within Bollywood and outside, due to his film contracts allegedly being terminated.

And of course, there was the Bihar election and the fact that his death rapidly assumed political overtones in a state starved of film icons.

This is not to endorse the popular mood, nor is it to suggest that police investigation should be guided by the popular mood. But an awareness of the wider ecosystem is important because of its implications on a particular case. That is where Mumbai Police faltered.

With resentment building up, the case could have been handed over to the crime branch, and an officer from Bihar in the Maharashtra cadre inducted into the team to liaise with Rajputs family. Regular briefings should have been conducted to allay misgivings, just as it was done in the Sheena Bora case. The police commissioners briefing was held in Sushants case, but it was a case of too little too late. And the treatment of a Bihar Indian Police Service officer on duty in Mumbai took away whatever support Mumbai Police had in the matter, arousing suspicion and distrust.

Some disturbing signals emerge from this case. The first is that of police leadership ceding space to political masters on a purely professional matter of jurisdiction. The Bihar chief minister, Nitish Kumar, intervened to get the FIR filed. The police chiefs of the two states could have resolved this matter among themselves. If the Mumbai Police had responded favourably, the Bihar Police may have forwarded the zero FIR to Mumbai for investigation. The absence of police coordination allowed politicians to air their views on matters which should have been strictly within the polices domain.

Second, television channels played a deeply irresponsible role, undermining the mental health dimension in the case, violating the right to privacy of many individuals, acting as the prosecutor and judge and holding people guilty, besmirching reputations  either because they were motivated by political considerations or commercial considerations or both.

Third, new-age policing involves bigger responsibilities for the police. In the Right to Information era, where transparency and accountability are the hallmark of a democracy, people need to be kept informed. And the peoples police must be accountable only to the law. In this case, while one set of police officers was too voluble, another was too reticent. What the public wants in such cases is information based on facts at regular intervals.

Last, a case of suicide, irrespective of who it involves,should have triggered a countrywide debate on mental health  and the need to understand the nature of the health challenge, have empathy for those who suffer from it and remove the stigma associated with it, and create a supportive environment for its treatment.

Indias public discourse, and institutions mandated to handle such sensitive matters, have fallen short.

Sushant Singh Rajput deserves dignity and peace in death, not acrimonious debates or shrill campaigns of calumny and division.

Yashovardhan Azad is a former IPS officer and Central Information Commissioner

The views expressed are personal
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows got into a heated exchange with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" over QAnon.

Days after President Donald Trump said in a White House press briefing that followers of the right-wing conspiracy group "love our country," Wallace pressed Meadows on the group the FBI has labeled a domestic terror threat.

"Does the president disavow, does he condemn QAnon?" Wallace asked.

Meadows told Wallace he finds it "appalling" that he brought up the topic when there is a litany of other issues to address, claiming he had to use Google to actually "figure out what it is."

The conspiracy movement, which has been tied to several violent incidents and believes without evidence that Trump is fighting an evil "deep state" of elite figures, is not a "top 20 priority" for the administration, Meadows said.

"If you want to talk about conspiracies, let's get back to talking about how the FBI and others within the FBI spied on the Trump campaign," Meadows said. "If it's a hate group, I can tell you this president is not for hate!"
Connecticut Republicans moved to strip former Congressman Christopher Shays of the state partys highest honor this week in retribution for his pledge of support for Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump.

GOP leaders briefly entertained a motion Wednesday night to rescind the Prescott Bush Award that was presented to Shays in the early 1990s, Hearst Connecticut Media has learned. The honor is named after the late patriarch of the Bush political dynasty, which has overwhelmingly rejected Trump.

But the unprecedented measure was ultimately withdrawn from consideration by the 72-member Republican State Central Committee, with opponents arguing that it would draw negative attention to the party.

That did not stop GOP leaders from admonishing Shays, who represented the southwestern part of the state in Congress from 1987 until he lost in the 2008 tsunami of Barack Obama.

It shows total contempt for the Connecticut primary voters for any Republican to come out and say theyre supporting Hillary Clinton after Donald Trump won overwhelmingly in the primary, said Andy Wainwright, a State Central Committee member from Stamford and alternate delegate for Trump to this summers GOP national convention in Cleveland.

Standing his ground

Shays stood by his endorsement earlier this month of Clinton, which put the political maverick back in the national spotlight, including appearances on MSNBC and CNN.

Our party has lost its way, said Shays, who was aware of the reprisal attempt. So I guess the only thing that they could take from me is that I have a plaque. What they cant take away ... was a recognition for what I had done for the party back then.

This is not the first time Shays has infuriated Republicans when it comes to the Clintons. In 1998, he voted against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Chris has been an apologist for the Clintons criminal activity for decades, said Edward Dadakis, a State central member from Greenwich. The Republican Party has done a lot for him over many years. The least he can do is say, thank you, and keep his mouth shut. But stripping him of an old Bush dinner award makes no sense, and thats why state central took no action.

The Bush Award, named for the late U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush, the father of former President George H.W. Bush and grandfather of former President George W. Bush, is presented for distinguished service to the GOP during the state partys annual fundraising dinner in the late spring.

Past recipients include Linda McMahon, the former WWE chief executive and two-time Senate candidate; former Gov. M. Jodi Rell and former state Senate Minority Leader John McKinney.

The list, as Shays pointed out, also includes former Gov. John G. Rowland, who resigned from office in 2004 and went to prison for accepting bribes from state contractors.

No, Im not an apologist for the Clintons, but Im faced with the fact that my party has nominated a very dangerous candidate to be president of the United States, Shays said. To me, there is no comparison between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. ... Donald Trump has no moral compass and Hillary Clinton has a very shaky moral compass.

How can you support her?

The motion to strip Shays of the partys highest honor was introduced by Westport Republican Allen Levy, who was an alternate delegate for Trump at the national convention in July. A request for comment was left Friday for Levy.

Allen is fairly right-wing kind of guy, very comfortable with Trumps outrageous behavior, Shays said. He actually called me when Trump was at Sacred Heart (University, on Aug. 13) and clearly had his speakerphone and said, I understand youre supporting Hillary. He said, How can you support her? I thought, hes one reason why Im happy to be supporting Hillary Clinton.

Shays endorsement of Clinton is reminiscent of estranged Democrat Joe Liebermans embrace of GOP Senate colleague John McCain during the 2008 presidential race. During this years primary, which Trump won by a landslide in Connecticut, Shays backed former House colleague and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Shays, a former Bridgeport resident who grew up in Darien and represented Stamford in the state Legislature, has had his share of differences with the Clintons as well. When Hillary Clinton was in the Senate, she campaigned multiple times for Democrat Diane Farrell against Shays. Shays has also referred to Clinton as an enabler of her husbands immorality.

State GOP Chairman J.R. Romano said he was disappointed the inner-workings of party meetings were getting more attention than the ongoing military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran.

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JERUSALEM: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday said he hoped other Arab countries would soon establish diplomatic relations with Israel as he kicked off a Mideast tour to build on the momentum of the recent U.S.-brokered deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Pompeo spoke during a joint statement with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, the first stop on a multi-country tour of the region following the Aug. 13 agreement by Israel and the UAE to establish diplomatic ties.

I am hopeful that we will see other Arab nations join in this," Pompeo said. The opportunity for them to work alongside, to recognize the state of Israel and to work alongside them will not only increase Middle East stability, but it will improve the lives for the people of their own countries as well.

The Israel-UAE agreement delivered a key foreign policy victory to President Donald Trump as he seeks reelection and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.

Both Pompeo and Netanyahu criticized the lack of international support for the U.S. demand for the restoration of U.N. sanctions against Iran.

After failing to extend an arms embargo on Iran, the Trump administration has been pushing at the Security Council to have snapback sanctions imposed over what Washington says is Irans violation of the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from that agreement in 2018.

We are determined to use every tool that we have to ensure they cant get access to high-end weapon systems, Pompeo said. The rest of the world should join us."

Earlier this month, the U.S., Israel and the UAE announced the deal to establish full diplomatic relations, which also requires Israel to freeze its plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank sought by the Palestinians as part of their future state.

Netanyahu called the agreement a boon to peace and regional stability that heralds a new era where we could have other nations join.

He also said the agreement does not include Israels acceptance of the sale of sophisticated weaponry to the Emirates.

President Donald Trump said last week that the U.S. is now reviewing an Emirati request to buy advanced F-35 warplanes. The announcement has triggered some criticism that Netanyahu, even if he did not explicitly agree, may have acquiesced to advanced weapons sales to the UAE without consulting with defense officials.

Pompeo said the U.S. was committed to maintaining Israels qualitative military edge and would be reviewing arms deals with the UAE.

Pompeo later met Netanyahus partner in the government, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, as well as Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi.

After his Israel stop, Pompeo was slated to visit Sudan, the UAE and Bahrain, with additional stops in the Gulf possible, the State Department had said. In Sudan, the secretary of state said he would push for deepening the Sudan-Israel relationship.

Sudans state-run SUNA news agency said Pompeos visit, the first by a secretary of state since 2004, would focus on Khartoums ties with Israel and U.S. support for Sudans political transition and internal peace efforts.

Sudan is now on a fragile path to democracy after a popular uprising led the military to overthrow former autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in April 2019. A military-civilian government rules the country, with elections deemed possible in late 2022.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab was also arriving in Jerusalem on Monday for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials in an effort to press for renewed dialogue and a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict. Raab and Pompeo were expected to meet late Sunday.

Ahead of Pompeos arrival, the Israeli military said it struck militant targets in the Gaza Strip early Monday in response to incendiary balloons launched into Israel the day before. It was the latest exchange as tensions have intensified in recent weeks.

The army said it bombed military posts and an underground infrastructure belonging to Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules Gaza. There were no immediate reports of any casualties.

Militants affiliated with Hamas have launched scores of incendiary balloons into southern Israel in recent weeks, scorching hundreds of acres of land, in a bid to pressure Israel to ease the blockade imposed since Hamas took control of the territory in 2007. On Friday, Palestinian militants launched 12 rockets at Israel, nine of which were intercepted, in the largest outbreak of violence in recent months.

Israel has responded to the balloons and rocket fire with airstrikes targeting militant positions.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars and numerous smaller skirmishes in the past 13 years. Last week, Egyptian mediators visited Gaza to try and bolster the informal truce between Israel and Hamas that has largely held since the 2014 war in Gaza.

___

Associated Press writer Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
President Donald Trump signs executive orders extending CCP virus economic relief, during a news conference in Bedminster, N.J., on Aug. 8, 2020. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

3 More States Get Approval for Trumps Enhanced Unemployment Payment

Three additional states were approved for the enhanced unemployment payment made possible by President Donald Trumps recent executive order.

New York, Alaska, and Georgia were approved, according to Sunday announcements by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is processing applications.

All three states chose the option that will see the unemployed get $300 weekly on top of regular unemployment payments. The money is coming entirely from the federal government.

Two governors chose the alternative: a $400 weekly boost, with $100 paid for by the state.

Twenty-six states have now gained approval from FEMA to gain enhanced unemployment payments.

Those states are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Vermont.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks at the St. Nicolas National Shrine during an event in New York City, N.Y., on Aug 3, 2020. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

A number of others have filed applications and are waiting for them to be processed, or have made public the intention to file an application.

Those are Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington state.

Delaware officials announced Friday that the state was applying for the $300 per week boost, even as Labor Secretary Cerron Cade criticized Trump.

While Delaware will be applying for these funds to support workers unemployed due to no fault of their own, I need to be perfectly clear; President Trumps plan is a Hail Mary that is unnecessarily complicated and will be a nightmare to implement quickly, Cade said in a statement.

One of the challenges with this new program is that states are being directed to pay these benefits through FEMA rather than the traditional unemployment sources which we have been using since this crisis began. These funds cannot intermingle. Therefore, states will have to establish new systems which must interface with our existing unemployment rolls to determine eligibility. This could take weeks to get operational.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, announced the same day that his state was filing for the lower enhanced payment option, while blaming stalled negotiations on a congressionally-approved extension of federal payments on Republicans.

There is still time for Congressional Republicans to pass a good and practical solution that simply extends the extra weekly benefit, and I urge them to act now, he said in a statement.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks during a press conference before the vote on the Delivering for America Act to protect the postal system, on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Aug. 22, 2020. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

But Republicans have signaled theyd be willing to pass narrow bills like on aimed at bolstered unemployment payments. More than 100 Democrats signed a letter last week urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to schedule a Saturday vote on legislation that would resume $600-a-week payments to the unemployed, but she refused.

Washington states Employment Security Department said Thursday it would apply for the enhanced assistance from Trumps executive order no later than Aug. 21.

We will implement this as quickly as possible to distribute the extra payments to Washingtonians once our application is approved, Commissioner Suzi LeVine said in a statement.

Officials in Virginia and Connecticut also submitted papers late last week.

South Dakota is the only state to officially decline any assistance, saying they dont need it because of low unemployment.

Officials in 12 statesFlorida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Wyomingstill arent sure whether they will apply for the assistance.
Zelenskiy Says Fresh Election In Belarus With Observers Would Calm Political Crisis

August 23, 2020

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says that, if he were in Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka's place, he would call fresh elections in one month with international observers present.

"Let's imagine that I am confident about myself, I am confident in the people's vote, that I am a confident person. How can I calm everyone down?" Zelenskiy said.

"I would definitely say: 'In one month there will be a new vote. And I am running for the new election. Whoever wants to run -- go ahead!'"

He added that he would invite in "all international observers."

Euronews released excerpts of the interview on August 23 ahead of the broadcast of the full interview on August 25.

The Ukrainian leader's remarks came after the European Union and other Western countries said they did not recognize the result of an August 9 presidential election giving Lukashenka 80 percent of the vote.

Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the main opposition candidate, has claimed that she was the true winner. She has since departed for Lithuania, saying she fears for her safety, amid mass protests in Minsk and other cities.

Zelenskiy said any candidate should be allowed to run in a repeat election.

"I'd tell the people of Belarus: 'Please, elect whoever you want,'" he said. "And after that result, there would be no more questions. I'm convinced about it."

It would be a way to avoid bloodshed, he said and would "be fair and would make history."

Based on reporting by Euronews

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/zelenskiy -fresh-election-belarus-observers-calm- political-crisis/30798607.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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A powerful Senate committee on Monday unanimously paved the way to seat the first Black woman on New Jerseys highest court.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-0 to make Fabiana Pierre-Louis a state Supreme Court justice, setting her up to be confirmed by the full Senate Thursday.

This nomination is truly the honor of a lifetime, said Pierre-Louis, a 39-year-old daughter of Haitian immigrants.

Experience as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorneys office, and as a defense lawyer with a private firm set her up to be fair judge, she said, and she cited a sexual assault case she lost as a prosecutor as evidence of her integrity in the face of likely defeat.

I was never afraid of taking on the difficult cases if I believed that it was the right thing to do, she said.

Democratic senators lauded her resume and historic nomination throughout the hour-and-forty-five minute hearing.

Committee chair Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, said he initially believed she was too young, but he changed his mind after speaking with the nominee, her colleagues and adversaries.

Your experience belies your age, he said. I havent found one person to say one thing negative about this nominee, and that is hard.

Pierre-Louis also said her personal history gave her a well of experience to draw upon.

Her seven-member family once lived in a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, she said, before moving to Irvington. English was not her first language, and she said her work ethic came from seeing her dad drive a New York City taxi and her mom move patients at a hospital. She later received financial aid for college from the states Educational Opportunity Fund, which helps students from educationally and economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Pierre-Louis sidestepped questions about how she viewed certain cases or the role of the state constitution, saying it would be inappropriate to comment on issues she may rule on in the future. One lawmaker asked if she agreed with the analogy that a judge should only act like an umpire, calling balls or strikes and not advocating for one team.

I think it simplifies the role of a judge, she said about the comparison. If you put ten umpires in a room and they look at the same close pitch, half might say its a ball, half might say its a strike.

Republicans used part of the hearing to rail against past Supreme Court decisions and recent executive orders from Gov. Phil Murphy, echoing frequent conservative concerns that the court is too liberal and oversteps its authority.

After critiquing a series of rulings concerning affordable housing in Mount Laurel, state Sen. Gerald Cardinale, R-Bergen, even asked Pierre-Louis if she was a communist. She said she was not.

Cardinales colleague, state Sen. Michael Doherty, R-Warren, continually returned to an orange ribbon Pierre-Louis wore the day the governor announced her nomination.

Pierre-Louis said she believed the ribbon was only in honor of gun violence victims, since June 5 was National Gun Violence Awareness Day.

Doherty said the ribbon was a clear symbol for Orange Ribbons for Gun Safety, a Florida-based nonprofit advocating for enhanced background checks, raising the age for purchasing a gun and other common-sense gun safety laws.

Wearing the ribbon either showed bias for certain policies, Doherty said, or poor judgement for wearing a symbol without vetting it, and he lambasted her for not being big enough to apologize.

Fabiana Pierre-Louis smiles during a during a news conference where she was nominated to the New Jersey Supreme Court by Gov. Phil Murphy, Friday, June 5, 2020, in Trenton, N.J. (Chris Pedota/The Record via AP, Pool)AP

When asked for clarification about the ribbons intention, Murphy spokeswoman Alyana Alfaro pointed to an earlier statement by the governor saying orange was worn in solidarity with victims and survivors. Alfaro did not respond to questions about who proposed wearing the ribbon or if it was purposely tied to a specific group.

But Pierre-Louis ultimately won over the critics. Both Doherty and Cardinale voted yes, and Cardinale said she was pretty close to a perfect candidate.

Pierre-Louis was joined Monday by her husband, two young sons and other relatives. She would be only the third Black Supreme Court justice in New Jerseys 244-year history.

She was nominated by Murphy to replace Justice Walter Timpone, who reaches the mandatory retirement age of 70 in November. Timpone and Pierre-Louis are both Democrats, meaning the court will likely continue to have three Democrats, three Republicans and one independent.

Pierre-Louis must serve seven years before lawmakers consider giving her lifetime tenure, at which point she could influence the court for decades.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Sophie Nieto-Munoz contributed to this report.

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CAIRO: The Syrian government said an explosion on a main gas pipeline traversing the Middle East on Monday was the result of a terrorist attack, and the United States said it suspected Islamic State militants of carrying out the sabotage.

The blast caused a blackout across Syria, but power was gradually being restored, officials said.

It took place on the Arab Gas Pipeline between the towns of Ad Dumayr and Adra, northwest of the capital Damascus.

Assessments show that the explosionwas the result of a terrorist attack," Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem said, quoted by state news agency SANA. He did not provide further detail.

In Geneva, the U.S. envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, said there had been an upsurge in Islamic State activity in the southeast of the Syrian desert. Islamic State lost its last territory in Syria in March 2019 but pockets of fighters remain.

We are still looking into (the explosion). But it was almost certainly a strike by ISIS," Jeffrey told reporters at the start of U.N.-sponsored talks on the Syria conflict.

The Arab Gas Pipeline system extends from Egypt into Jordan and Syria. Syrian state-run Ikhbariya TV channel showed footage of a large fire after the explosion. The channel said later the blaze had been extinguished.

A Damascus resident said power had returned to the city.

In 2013, much of Syria was hit by a power cut after rebel shelling hit a gas pipeline.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
A man who allegedly set fire to a woman in Perth's southern suburbs on Sunday afternoon will face court on Wednesday.

Police charged the man after the incident that happened in Medina.

Officers say the 37-year-old doused the woman and part of a lounge room in petrol before setting both alight.

The woman, who is in her 20s, ran from the house, with neighbours able to put out the flames and call emergency services.
New Delhi: The Central Government has constituted a National Council for Transgender Persons to monitor and evaluate impact of policies designed for the transgender persons.

"In exercise of the powers conferred by section 16 of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 (40 of 2019), the Central Government has constituted a National Council for Transgender Persons vide notification dated 21st August 2020," said the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment.

The Union Minister of Social Justice & Empowerment will be Chairperson (ex-officio) and Union Minister of State for Social Justice & Empowerment will be Vice-Chairperson (ex-officio).

The National Council shall perform the following functions, namely:

(a) To advise the Central Government on the formulation of policies, programmes, legislation and projects with respect to transgender persons;

(b) To monitor and evaluate the impact of policies and programmes designed for achieving equality and full participation of transgender persons;

(c) To review and coordinate the activities of all the departments of Government and other Governmental and non-Governmental Organisations which are dealing with matters relating to transgender persons;

(d) To redress the grievances of transgender persons; and

(e) To perform such other functions as may be prescribed by the Central Government.

The other members of the Council include representatives of various Ministries/Departments, five representatives of transgender community, representatives of NHRC and NCW, representatives of State Governments and UTs and experts representing NGOs.

A Member of National Council, other than ex officio member, shall hold office for a term of three years from the date of his nomination.
Holby City star Alex Walkinshaw is reportedly dating his co-star Natasha Morgan, after splitting from his wife of 10 years, Sarah Trusler.

The actor, 45, and his new rumoured girlfriend were seen together for the first time earlier this month as sources claimed the blonde has been 'enjoying visits' at his new flat near Borehamwood.

According to The Sun, the TV star, who plays Adrian 'Fletch' Fletcher in the medical drama, is believed to have separated from the mother of his two children 18 months ago.

New couple? Holby City star Alex Walkinshaw is reportedly dating his co-star Natasha Morgan, after splitting from his wife of 10 years, Sarah Trusler

On their alleged relationship, an inside told the publication: 'Alex and Natasha grew close after meeting on set. They really hit it off and she likes to ask him for advice on her career. She has been comforting him after splitting from his wife.

'Its obviously a huge change for Alex and she has helped support him through that. He has been focusing on his character in Holby City and his craft as an actor. He loves his job and its been a great outlet for him.'

The pair looked as though they were comfortable in each other's company as they engaged in conversation during a stroll in a car park.

Break up: The actor, 45, is believed to have separated from the mother of his two children 18 months ago (pictured in November 2012)

Stepping out: The TV star and his new rumoured girlfriend were seen together for the first time earlier this month

Famous face: The media personality plays Adrian 'Fletch' Fletcher in the medical drama (pictured in July 2012)

Getting to know each other? Sources claimed the blonde has been 'enjoying visits' at his new flat near Borehamwood

Low-key: Natasha cut a casual figure in a stone-coloured jacket while Alex opted for a striped jumper

An onlooker added: 'Alex and Natasha looked comfortable and relaxed in each others company as he puffed on a cigarette and she smiled at something he said.'

The website claimed Natasha has played minor roles in Holby City, Made In Chelsea and even as a barmaid and market shopper in EastEnders.

The ex-Bill star, who has returned to work in recent weeks amid the coronavirus lockdown, shares two children, aged 16 and 14, with make-up artist Sarah.

In their element: The pair looked as though they were comfortable in each other's company as they engaged in conversation during a stroll in a car park

Background: The ex-Bill star, who has returned to work in recent weeks amid the coronavirus lockdown, shares two children, aged 16 and 14, with make-up artist Sarah

The former couple tied the knot in June 2009 at the Queen's House in Greenwich, with actors Rene Zagger and Scott Maslen serving as the thespian's best men.

Alex and Sarah met in 1999, when he was engaged to someone else and she had a boyfriend at the time.

The media personality was previously accused of sending messages to former glamour model Jill Demirel, 44, behind his wife's back in 2014.

Brief break: On another day, the former Waterloo Road star was seen puffing a cigarette

Love life: Alex and his former spouse Sarah met in 1999, when he was engaged to someone else and she had a boyfriend at the time

MailOnline has contacted Alex's representative and a Holby City spokesperson for further comment.

Barking native Alex rose to prominence as PC/Sgt/Insp. Dale Smith on The Bill from 1999 until 2010, before going on to play Fletch in Casualty and Holby City.

On his current storyline, which sees the director of nursing battle cancer, the TV star told What's On TV: ' The emotional scenes have been very challenging to film but Kaye (Wragg) makes things easier because she gives so much.

'Youd be hard pushed to find someone who hasnt had a brush with cancer  this storyline is good, bad, happy and sad and its important we show all that.'
Good Morning America

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of his inauguration, President Joe Biden held a formal news conference at the White House Wednesday, answering reporter questions on his handling of the pandemic, the economy and legislative agenda, characterizing the country as unified -- but not as much as it could be -- and raised eyebrows by saying Russia was likely to invade Ukraine. "It's been a year of challenges, but it's also many years of enormous progress," Biden said to begin, ticking through his administration's successes before fielding questions from reporters. With Biden facing the limits of what he can accomplish with an evenly-divided Senate, unable to get either his signature social spending package or major voting rights reform through Congress in recent weeks, and with the pandemic still raging well into its second, his approval rating in polls has hit an all-time low.
Google's cloud division is investing $100 million in Amwell, formerly known as American Well, a company that builds technology for virtual doctors' visits. The company has filed to go public, and Google's investment will be a concurrent private placement at the IPO price.

As part of the partnership, Amwell will move parts of its business from Amazon Web Services, which it currently uses, to Google Cloud. Specifically, Amwell is selecting Google cloud as its "preferred global cloud partner" and moving some video performance capabilities to that platform, the companies said in a press release. The two companies will also cooperate on technology and build out a dedicated sales effort to expand Amwell's footprint in the sector.

All of the major technology companies are vying to sign health-care customers, including insurance plans and hospitals, as they slowly shift from on-premise systems to the cloud.

Google Cloud's Aashima Gupta, the company's director of global healthcare solutions, said she expects to see continued usage of telehealth because of "more favorable reimbursement coverage and consumers looking into this as a viable option." With more people than ever avoiding seeking in-person medical help at hospitals and clinics, usage of tools for virtual visits has skyrocketed in recent months.

Gupta said that in the future, the two companies plan to add more machine-learning capabilities to the service. "Imagine you're in a virtual waiting room, and instead of a clipboard there's a conversational AI helping you," she said.

Amwell told CNBC in May that it's seen a 1,000% increase in visits due to coronavirus and closer to 3,000% to 4,000% in some places. In its IPO filing, the company said revenue had increased 77% in the first six months of 2020, compared with the same period a year ago, from $69 million to $122 million. However, its net loss nearly tripled over the same period, growing from $41 million in the first six months of 2019 to $111 million in the first half of this year.

Meanwhile, Amwell faces strong competition from Livongo and Teladoc, two companies that recently merged in an $18.5 billion deal. With Livongo on board, Teladoc is now selling an expanded set of services, including tools to monitor patients with chronic health conditions such as diabetes and hypertension.

Google Cloud's largest customers in the $3.5 trillion medical sector include health systems such as Mayo Clinic and Ascension. Some of these customers also use Amwell for their telehealth services. Others rely on rivals such as Teladoc, MDLive and Doctor On Demand.

Amwell currently works with about 2,000 hospitals, 55 health plans and 36,000 employers.
KALAMAZOO, MI  A 19-year-old Kalamazoo woman who was charged in a fatal-and-run is back in court after having the charges against her initially dismissed.

Marquisha Canda, accused in the April 27 death of 46-year-old Anita McClendon, was arraigned Monday, Aug. 24, for a second time in the case.

Canda is being charged with one count of operating a vehicle without a license causing death, and leaving the scene of an accident resulting in serious impairment or death, according to court records. The charges are the same ones that were dismissed without prejudice at an Aug. 6 preliminary examination hearing in Kalamazoo County District Court.

Related: Charges dismissed against driver accused in hit-and-run death of Kalamazoo woman

I do not believe that there has been any evidence provided this afternoon to indicate that Ms. McClendon died because of the injuries from the vehicle, Kalamazoo County District Judge Kathleen Hemingway said when dismissing the charges.

In part, Hemingway said, she reached her decision because there was no pathology report to establish a relationship between McClendons death and the vehicle.

Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting told MLive his office reauthorized charges against Canda just four days after they were dismissed by the judge. A warrant for Candas arrest was issued and she turned herself in Monday, Aug. 24.

Canda was arraigned Monday by Kalamazoo County District Judge Richard Santoni, according to court documents. Santoni has been assigned to be the new judge of record in the case.

Getting said his office plans to introduce McClendons pathology report at Candas next preliminary hearing.

When asked why the pathology report was not presented as evidence at the Aug. 6 hearing, the prosecutor said his office did not feel it was necessary to bring that evidence forward at that point in the case.

When we prepare for the preliminary exam we use our experience to determine what evidence we think will be necessary for the preliminary examination, Getting said. Obviously, Judge Hemingway is the one who actually gets to make that decision and she felt that additional evidence was necessary.

So, we will provide that evidence.

At a preliminary hearing, it is the prosecutors job to show there is enough probable cause a crime has been committed to proceed with a case against the defendant. If the prosecutor is successful, the judge may then rule to bind the case over from District Court to Circuit Court.

Canda was driving the vehicle that struck McClendon the night she died, police said.

Related: Woman, 46, killed in Kalamazoo hit-and-run remembered as charismatic

McClendon had been laying in the road prior to being run over, according to testimony by an officer who viewed surveillance footage from a nearby party store that was not introduced as evidence in court.

Candas attorney, Donald Sappanos, argued at the Aug. 6 hearing that not only was there no evidence presented as to what caused McClendons death, but there was nothing presented that proved his clients vehicle was behind that cause.

A Michigan State trooper who testified at the Aug. 6 hearing stated that upon investigation of the undercarriage of Candas vehicle, there was body tissue and blood located. He also testified there was damage to the undercarriage of the vehicle consistent with McClendons injuries.

No DNA evidence was submitted at the preliminary exam hearing. Getting told MLive last week that it has understanding that the biological samples collected when inspecting the car have since been submitted for DNA analysis.

According to her autopsy report, obtained by MLive through a Freedom of Information Act request filed after the Aug. 6 hearing, McClendons manner of death was classified as accidental. The cause of death was multiple injuries, according to the report.

Among McClendons injuries were fractures to all her ribs, her bilateral clavicle and two vertebrae.

In addition to numerous other bruising and hemorrhaging, McClendon also had lacerations to her right and left cardiac atria, ascending aorta, lungs and liver, according to the report.

Santoni set a $5,000 personal recognizance bond at Mondays arraignment. Canda, according to jail records, was released from the Kalamazoo County Jail Monday afternoon.

She is due back in court for a probable cause conference on Sept. 8.

Also on MLive:

Back-to-school conundrum amplified in Michigans hardest-hit communities

Black Lives Matters demonstrators and counter-protesters clash over Civil War statue in Allendale

Michigans budget shortfall likely smaller than expected, but big challenges still loom
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump is levelling unfounded attacks on his Food and Drug Administration and distorting the science on effective treatments for COVID-19.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 23/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this image from video, Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden, speaks after the roll call vote during the second night of the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020. (Democratic National Convention via AP)

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump is levelling unfounded attacks on his Food and Drug Administration and distorting the science on effective treatments for COVID-19.

Heading this week into the Republican National Convention, he asserted that the agency is slow-walking vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus in a bid to undermine his November reelection effort. Theres no evidence of that, and one of his former FDA commissioners on Sunday rejected the accusation as groundless.

Trump also suggested anew that hydroxychloroquine is a proven and effective treatment for the coronavirus. It isnt. And Sunday evening, he announced emergency authorization to treat COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma, a step he hailed as a historic breakthrough even though the treatment's value has not been established.

His weekend torrent of false and misleading claims follows a Democratic National Convention in which Joe Biden and his allies spun an assortment of facts to their benefit, omitting inconvenient truths such as Barack Obamas record of aggressive deportations and swift action by a Republican president to save the auto industry more than a decade ago.

A look at the past week's rhetoric, also covering the Pledge of Allegiance, the U.S. Postal Service and more:

CORONAVIRUS

TRUMP: The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!  tweet Saturday.

THE FACTS: No one has produced evidence that anyone at the FDA is delaying any treatment or vaccine for the coronavirus.

During the pandemic, Trump has frequently contradicted or undercut the guidance of his government health experts, including at the FDA, and has asserted that a vaccine for COVID-19 could become available before the November election. But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the governments top infectious diseases expert, has said he is cautiously optimistic that a vaccine will be ready by early next year and that even then, it would not be widely available right away.

Under White House orders, federal health agencies and the Defence Department are carrying out a plan to deliver 300 million vaccine doses on a compressed timeline. That will happen only after the FDA determines that one or more vaccines are safe and effective. Several candidates are being tested.

The push for a speedy vaccine has drawn concern from some scientists that the White House will put pressure on U.S. regulators to approve a vaccine before its ready.

A top FDA official who is overseeing COVID vaccine trials had vowed to resign if the Trump administration approves a vaccine before it is shown to be safe and effective. Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, made his promise during a conference call earlier in the month with pharmaceutical executives, government officials and others, Reuters reported Friday.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn has said his agency will not be influenced by any political pressure and will make decisions based solely on good science and data.

One of Trump's former FDA commissioners, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said the president's charges are unfounded.

I firmly reject the idea they would slow-walk anything or accelerate anything based on any political consideration or any consideration other than what is best for the public health and a real sense of mission to patients, Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS Face the Nation.

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TRUMP, announcing the emergency authorization for plasma treatment: Very historic breakthrough ... that will save countless lives."  statement Sunday.

THE FACTS: That remains to be seen. The treatment's effectiveness has not been proved. It will take more research to know if it works well enough to merit FDA approval. There have been promising signs but no conclusions.

FDA chief scientist Denise Hinton made that clear, saying COVID-19 convalescent plasma should not be considered a new standard of care for the treatment of patients with COVID-19. Additional data will be forthcoming from other analyses and ongoing, well-controlled clinical trials in the coming months.

The announcement on the eve of Trump's Republican National Convention raised suspicions among some scientists, who recalled Trump's overeager endorsement of other measures against COVID-19.

Conspicuous timing, said Benjamin Corb of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. President Trump is once again putting his political goals ahead of the health and well-being of the American public.

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TRUMP, on the FDA revoking emergency use authorization of hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19: Many doctors and studies disagree with this!  tweet Saturday.

THE FACTS: Trumps continued promotion of the anti-malaria drug for COVID-19, with or without the antibiotic azithromycin. has been repeatedly dismissed by his own health experts.

Numerous rigorous tests of hydroxychloroquine, including a large one from Britain and one led by the National Institutes of Health, concluded that the anti-malaria drug was ineffective for treating hospitalized coronavirus patients.

Trumps health agencies as well as Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, have cautioned that taking hydroxychloroquine to stave off the virus could be dangerous due to side effects. If the president is to be believed, he took the drug himself.

Adm. Brett Giroir, the administrations lead official on testing, made clear this month he does not recommend the treatment and said people need to move on" and talk about what is effective.

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TRUMP on New Zealand and the coronavirus: They had a massive breakout yesterday.  remarks Thursday in Old Forge, Pennsylvania.

TRUMP: False. New Zealand has had nothing resembling a massive outbreak or, as he also put it during the week, even a big surge or a big outbreak.

New Zealand reported five to 13 new cases each day in the past week, as of Friday. The U.S. reported an average of some 46,000 per day during the week.

Trump is unhappy that New Zealands success in controlling the virus, through its tight and early rules on distancing and closures, has been used for unfavourable comparisons with his pandemic response. New Zealand went for several months without any new, confirmed cases of locally spread COVID-19 before infection started showing up again in small numbers.

The infection, as of Friday, had killed 22 people in New Zealand and 174,000 in the U.S.

Thats a rate of 4.5 deaths per million in New Zealand and 532 per million in the U.S.

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ON DEMOCRATS

TRUMP: The Democrats took the word GOD out of the Pledge of Allegiance at the Democrat National Convention. At first I thought they made a mistake, but it wasnt. It was done on purpose. Remember Evangelical Christians, and ALL, this is where they are coming from-its done. Vote Nov 3!  tweet Saturday.

THE FACTS: Thats a misleading accusation. The central programming of the convention featured the entire pledge, complete with under God.

The first night of the Democratic National Convention, Bidens grandchildren said the pledge, followed by the conventions chorus of The Star Spangled Banner. On the second night, its stated by a diverse group of Americans; same with the third night. On the fourth night, its recited by Cedric Richmond Jr., the son of Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana. Under God was in each rendering. The convention also devoted a segment to showcasing Bidens religious faith.

During two caucuses before the evening conventions started, the Muslim Delegates and Allies Assembly and the LGBTQ Caucus meeting, both Tuesday, left out under God, from the pledge. The partys series of caucus meetings was livestreamed but not part of the prime-time convention broadcast.

The pledge was written in 1892 and altered in the 1920s. Under God was added in 1954, when President Dwight Eisenhower encouraged Congress to do so. Those two words have prompted a debate at times over whether people who do not practice religion should be expected to pledge allegiance to a country under God.

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IMMIGRATION

BARACK OBAMA: We are born of immigrants. That is who we are. Immigration is our origin story.  convention video Wednesday celebrating immigration, showing historical scenes and one that appeared to be of Trump's border wall.

BARACK OBAMA: I understand why a new immigrant might look around this country and wonder whether theres still a place for him here.  convention speech Wednesday.

THE FACTS: The facts here are not in dispute. But an omission stands out: Obama aggressively enforced border controls and deported nearly 3 million people.

He changed his approach, acting without Congress in 2012 to let people who came to the U.S. illegally as children stay and work legally in the country.

Still, that year was Obama's high mark for deportations, more than 400,000, far outpacing Trump's deportations in each of his first three years.

This whole immigration video was like putting salt on the wound, tweeted Erika Andiola, an advocate from RAICES, an immigration legal services group in Texas. Narrated by Obama? Come on.

She said: I am angry because it was his administration who almost deported my mother and then Trump came to try to deport her again.

Immigration activist Julissa Natzely Arce Raya, author of My (Underground) American Dream," saw hypocrisy at work, after the video of Estela Juarez, the 11-year-old girl whose mother was deported to Mexico.

Obama did a lot of things right, but not immigration, he didnt get that right, she tweeted. I promise you, tonight there is a Estela whose mom was deported by Obama.

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MICHELLE OBAMA, on Americans: They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages.  Democratic convention on Aug. 17.

THE FACTS: The reference to cages is misleading and a matter that Democrats have persistently distorted.

Trump used facilities that were built during the Obama-Biden administration to house children at the border. They are chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily housed, separated by sex and age.

At the height of the controversy over Trumps zero-tolerance policy at the border, photos that circulated online of children in the enclosures generated great anger. But those photos, by The Associated Press, were taken in 2014 and depicted some of the thousands of unaccompanied children held by Obama.

When that fact came to light, some Democrats and activists who had tweeted the photos deleted their tweets. But prominent Democrats have continued to cite cages for children as a distinctive cruelty of Trump.

The former first lady was correct, however, in addressing the removal of children from parents at the border.

The Obama administration separated migrant children from families under certain limited circumstances, like when the childs safety appeared at risk or when the parent had a serious criminal history. Family separations as a matter of routine came about because of Trumps zero tolerance enforcement policy, which he eventually suspended because of the uproar. Obama had no such policy.

___

TRUMP: Joe Biden has pledged to abolish immigration enforcement.  rally Tuesday in Yuma, Arizona.

THE FACTS: No he hasn't.

Biden has been notably outspoken in arguing that crossing the U.S. border illegally is a crime and should remain punished as such in federal court. He did not endorse immigration plans supported by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and other former presidential candidates that sought to decriminalize illegal border crossings and make doing so only a civil offence.

In addition to misrepresenting Bidens agenda, Trump ignored the fact that the Obama-Biden administration vigorously deported people, drawing fierce criticism from some advocates for immigrants.

___

TRUMP: They want to take the wall down, they dont want to have borders.  Arizona rally.

THE FACTS: No, Biden is not pushing to take down the wall or erase borders.

Bidens immigration plan does not include money for new border fencing, and he isnt calling for any new walls. But he hasnt proposed taking down what's there.

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ECONOMY

BIDEN: Nearly one in six small businesses have closed this year.  acceptance speech Thursday.

THE FACTS: That appears to be in the ballpark but is misleading. What he didn't say is that most of those businesses planned to reopen or already have.

In a MetLife and U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey at the end of July, 86% of small businesses reported that they were fully or partially open. Among those that remained shut, most planned to reopen when they could. Overall, small businesses expressed guarded optimism while worrying what would happen if another wave of the coronavirus comes.

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GRETCHEN WHITMER, Michigan governor: In 2009, the Obama-Biden administration inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The auto industry  on the brink of collapse. A million jobs at stake. But President Obama and Vice-President Biden didnt waste time blaming anybody. ... They brought together union members, companies and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and they saved the auto industry.  Democratic National Convention on Aug. 17.

THE FACTS: She's assigning too much credit to the Obama administration for saving the auto industry. What Obama did was an expansion of the initial, pivotal steps taken by Obamas predecessor, George W. Bush.

In December 2008, General Motors and Chrysler were on the brink of financial collapse. The U.S. was in a deep recession and U.S. auto sales were falling sharply, in part because the 2008-2009 financial crisis made it harder for would-be auto buyers to get a car loan. GM, Chrysler and Ford requested government aid, but Congress voted it down.

With barely a month left in office, Bush authorized $25 billion in loans to GM and Chrysler from the $700 billion bailout fund that was initially intended to save the largest U.S. banks. Ford decided against taking any money. After Obama was inaugurated, he appointed a task force to oversee GM and Chrysler, both of which eventually declared bankruptcy, took an additional roughly $55 billion in loans, and were forced to close many factories and overhaul their operations.

All three companies recovered and eventually started adding jobs again.

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IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

TRUMP: This deal funneled tens of billions of dollars to Iran  $150 billion, to be exact  plus $1.8 billion in cash. ... He (Obama) gave $1.8 billion in cash.  news briefing Wednesday.

THE FACTS: This is a familiar and hyper-distorted tale. There was no $150 billion payout from the U.S. treasury or other countries.

When Iran signed the multinational deal to restrain its nuclear development in return for being freed from sanctions, it regained access to its own assets, which had been frozen abroad. Iran was allowed to get its own money back. The deal was signed in 2015; Trump has taken the U.S. out of it.

The $1.8 billion is a separate matter. A payout of roughly that amount did come from the U.S. treasury. It was to cover an old IOU.

In the 1970s, Iran paid the U.S. $400 million for military equipment that was never delivered because the government was overthrown and diplomatic relations ruptured. After the nuclear deal, the U.S. and Iran announced they had settled the matter, with the U.S. agreeing to pay the $400 million principal along with about $1.3 billion in interest.

___

TRUMP: And we got nothing, except a short-term, little deal. A short-term, expiring.  news briefing Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Trumps wrong to suggest the deal had no impact before he withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018.

Iran was thought to be only months away from a bomb when the deal came into effect. But during the 15-year life of most provisions of the accord, Irans capabilities are limited to a level where it cannot produce a bomb. The deal also includes a pledge by Iran never to seek a nuclear weapon.

The International Atomic Energy Agency and his administration itself had confirmed Iran was complying with the terms before Trump pulled out of the deal.

The pact does gradually lift some restrictions, including limits on centrifuges that were due to expire in 2025.

After the 15 years are up, Iran could have an array of advanced centrifuges ready to work, the limits on its stockpile would be gone and, in theory, it could then throw itself fully into producing highly enriched uranium. But nothing in the deal prevented the West from trying to rein Iran in again with sanctions.

___

JOHN KERRY, former secretary of state: We eliminated the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon.  Democratic convention on Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Thats taking it too far. The threat was deferred, not eliminated. That reality was baked into the deal negotiated when Kerry was Obamas secretary of state. The accord limited Irans capabilities to a level where it could not produce a bomb, but most provisions were to expire after 15 years.

___

POSTAL SERVICE

TRUMP: One of the things the Post Office loses so much money on is the delivering packages for Amazon and these others. Every time they deliver a package, they probably lose three or four dollars. Thats not good.  remarks on Aug. 17 to reporters.

THE FACTS: Thats not true.

While the U.S. Postal Service has lost money for 13 years, package delivery is not the reason.

Boosted by e-commerce, the Postal Service has enjoyed double-digit increases in revenue from delivering packages, but that hasnt been enough to offset pension and health care costs as well as declines in first-class letters and marketing mail. Together, letters and marketing mail in recent years have comprised up to two-thirds of postal revenue.

In arguing that the Postal Service is losing money on delivering packages for Amazon, Trump appears to be citing some Wall Street analyses that argue the Postal Services formula for calculating its costs is outdated. A 2017 analysis by Citigroup did conclude that the service was charging below market rates as a whole on parcels. Still, federal regulators have reviewed the Amazon contract with the Postal Service each year and found it profitable.

To become financially stable, the Postal Service has urged Congress for years to give it relief from the mandate to prefund retiree health benefits. Legislation in 2006 required the Postal Service to fund 75 years worth of retiree health benefits, at an estimated cost of $5 billion per year, something that the government and private companies don't have to do.

In the most recent quarter, for instance, package delivery rose 53% at the Postal Service as people homebound during the pandemic shifted online for their shopping. But the gain in deliveries was offset by the continued declines in first-class mail as well as costs for personal protective equipment and to replace workers who got sick during the pandemic.

The biggest factor was the prepayment of retiree health benefits, which Congress imposed and only Congress can take away.

As a quasi-government agency, the Postal Service also is required under law to provide mail delivery to millions of U.S. residences at affordable and uniform rates. It does not use taxpayer money for its operations and supports operations with the sales of stamps and other mail products.

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TRUMP: We want to make sure that the Post Office runs properly and it hasnt run properly for many years, for probably 50 years. Its run very badly. So we want to make sure that the Post Office runs properly and doesnt lose billions of dollars. remarks on Aug. 17 to reporters.

THE FACTS: Trump offered no evidence of broad mismanagement at the Postal Service that dates back 50 years.

The Postal Service started losing billions, as Trump put it, after the 2006 law mandating health prefunding took effect. Those billion-dollar payments, which coincided with the 2007-2008 Great Recession and a wider shift toward online bill payments, pushed the Postal Service into the red. Excluding those health payments, it has finished each year with revenue surpluses for most of the past decade.

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Associated Press writers Mike Stobbe and Jonathan Lemire in New York, Colleen Long, Christopher Rugaber and Matthew Daly in Washington and Amanda Seitz in Chicago contributed to this report.

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EDITOR'S NOTE  A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.

___

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apnews.com/APFactCheck

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck
Ahead of the recently released trailer for The Batman, Danny DeVito shared his thoughts on Colin Farrell, who will portray The Penguin in Matt Reevess forthcoming film.

DeVito famously played the well-dressed villain  whose real name in the comic series is Oswald Cobblepot  opposite Michael Keaton in the 1992 movie Batman Returns.

Asked by Collider if he had any helpful tips for the Irish actor, who made his debut as The Penguin this weekend in the films first trailer, DeVito revealed, I havent spoken to him since, but Im really looking forward to it.

The Matilda star said he has high hopes for Farrells rendition of the role, stating, I think that no matter what, hes going to be great because hes a great actor.

The only thing he has to worry about is that Oswald Cobblepot will show up at his house, DeVito joked before adding his signature Penguin grunt.

Colin Farrell as The Penguin in Matt Reeves The Batman (Warner Bros/YouTube)

Farrell made headlines when the first trailer for The Batman dropped on Sunday (23 August). Fans were shocked to see the 44-year-old's dramatic transformation.

The In Bruges star looked completely unrecognisable with the help of prosthetics. One Twitter user wrote, Wait is Twitter messing with me or is this really Colin Farrell as Penguin in the Batman trailer?

The trailer also gave fans a closer look at Robert Pattinson in the titular role, as well as Zoe Kravitzs Catwoman. Actors John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard and Andy Serkis will also star in the highly anticipated movie.

Due to pandemic-related delays, The Batman will be released in October 2021.
Panaji:

Though the tourism industry is still reeling under demonetisation aftermath, Goa is all set to usher in the Christmas festivities with all churches in the coastal state planning midnight mass on Saturday.

The usual hustle and bustle in the markets across the state remained unaffected despite demonetisation, as people were seen crowding the places to buy goodies and other decorative items required to deck up the house for Christmas.

"There is no much crowd in the tourism belt these days. Despite being Christmas weekend, the flow of tourists is very usual. The aftermath of demonetisation is still looming large over the tourism industry," Domnic Pereira, who owns two guest houses one in Calangute and another at Baga told PTI.

Though the business remained low key in the coastal belt, it failed to dampen the spirit of Christmas in those areas. The market of Mapusa and Panaji was flooded with the people lining up for Christmas related purchases. 'Made in China' masks of Santa Clause and star lanterns donned the market of Panaji. "There is no option for China made products.

They are cheap and come in different varieties. We buy China products but that does not make us less patriotic. Give us an option and we will buy Swadeshi," Mario Albuquerque, a teacher at local school, said. Albuqurque along with his wife was at Panaji market shopping for the Christmas.

"The schools are now having vacation so children are at home. They are busy preparing cribs,? he said. The state which was erstwhile Portuguese colony has 27 per cent Christian population which will be attending midnight masses on Saturday.

The lanes and by-lanes of the state are dotted with the Cribs, depicting Birth of Lord Jesus. 'Live' cribs are in fashion this year with youth trying their best to attract maximum eyeballs for their creation.

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This is an excerpt of "Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind" by Anthony Esolen.

We want to believe that our words can alter reality: we want to believe that we can, by linguistic magic, negate the Word through whom all things were made, and the things themselves. You shall be as gods, said the serpent (Gen 3:5). Hence the battle in our day is theological, whether we wish to admit it or not. If a man claims to be a woman, which he can never be, and demands to be addressed as such, he is not merely asking for right etiquette. He is demanding that we enter his delusion, or his lie. It is not true. He is demanding that believers in God fall in worship of an idol. Some idols are hideous, like Moloch, and some are beautiful, like Dionysus. The Hebrew prophets did not care. They did not condemn the idols for their style. They condemned them for being false. We have names for people who accustom themselves to speaking what they know to be untrue. We call them scoundrels or cowards. That a certain realm of our lives  the technological  is held mostly immune from our falsehoods does not necessarily make things better. We are scoundrels and cowards, with airplanes, computers, and bombs.

It may seem odd, meanwhile, that a chapter about bodies should begin with a discussion of words. But the unreality of the transgender movement, set ablaze by the wildfire of the sexual revolution generally, depends for its existence upon the supposition that realities depend upon words, so that whoever controls the language controls the universe. It is as if we could say same-sex marriage, and hey presto, there would be such a thing, or as if a man could declare himself to be a woman, and so it is. It is as if we were gods, as he who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning promised us.

Sometimes whole societies make long forays into madness, but such a situation cannot endure, and people return to something like sanity. Consider this business of a transgender movement. There are people of either sex who believe that they are really members of the other. How they can know this, no one says. It is a mere feeling, usually a feeling of intense dissatisfaction or disgust with ones own sex and ones body. It is like anorexia in that regard: as when young women who are nothing but skin and bones feel they are fat and see only fat, and they starve themselves to get rid of what does not exist.

Adults in the grip of this sexual delusion are now encouraging children to join them. They are subjecting the children to irreversible mutilation of the body, castrating little boys and performing mastectomies on teenage girls, to live a fantasy, a pretense. For there are well over six thousand physical differences between males and females, and all the surgeries can do is to mimic some appearance of the opposite sex, such as make chin hair grow on females or swell the breasts of males with fat. Some males have themselves castrated and then ask surgeons to trowel out a cavity in the crotch to mimic a vagina. Some females have the pin-the-tail operation, to be fitted out with a mock membrum virile. The whole movement is ghastly.

I once heard from a man, a former professor of art. His job was to teach anatomical drawing, and he got into trouble when he tried to correct the work of some students who could not draw the male and female bodies correctly. He tried to explain the difference between the male pelvis and the female pelvis, in width and in how the bones open out. When he asked a female art professor to let him know how he might talk about such things without giving offense, she replied that anatomy was a male construct and that art students, especially the feminists, need have nothing to do with it. He told me that he soon left that line of work. Who knows how many artists will have had their talents thwarted by such political nonsense? Leonardo could draw a human body. These artists cannot. Leonardo studied anatomy, with painstaking exactitude. These artists have not. Hence, they will draw forms that will be like sagging bridges. Sane people, when we have sane people again, will notice it and evaluate the work accordingly. But living in Unreal has made it hard for us to imagine anything else.

And the nonsense is everywhere.
A police officer stands guard outside the Al Noor mosque ahead of the first anniversary of the Christchurch mosque shootings in Christchurch in March 2020

The Australian white supremacist who murdered 51 Muslims in last year's New Zealand mosques shooting showed no emotion as his sentencing hearing opened Monday with horrific details of an atrocity prosecutors said was meticulously planned to inflict maximum casualties.

Brenton Tarrant wanted "to have shot more people than he did", the court was told at the start of the four-day sentencing, held amid tight security and in front of bereaved families and wounded survivors.

The court heard how the heavily-armed Tarrant opened fire on men, women and children as he live-streamed the attack on social media, ignoring pleas for help, and driving over one body as he moved from one mosque to the next.

When he saw a three-year-old clinging to his father's leg, Tarrant shot him "with two precisely aimed shots," prosecutor Barnaby Hawes told the court.

Tarrant has pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder, 40 of attempted murder and one of terrorism over the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch in March last year.

Lawyers expect the 29-year-old to be the first person jailed for life without parole in New Zealand.

Tarrant was arrested as he drove to attack a third mosque in Ashburton, about an hour south of Christchurch.

Wearing grey prison clothing and surrounded in the dock by three police officers, the Australian remained silent, occasionally looking around the room, as Hawes delivered a chilling summary of facts, and members of the Muslim community recounted the impact on their lives.

"He admitted (to police) going into both mosques intending to kill as many people as he could," Hawes said.

"He stated that he wanted to have shot more people than he did and was on the way to another mosque in Ashburton to carry out another attack when he was stopped," he said.

"In his interview, the defendant referred to his attacks as 'terror attacks'.

Story continues

"He further stated the attacks were motivated by his ideological beliefs and he intended to instil fear into those he described as 'invaders' including the Muslim population or more generally non-European immigrants."

- 'Brainwashed terrorist' -

Abdiaziz Ali Jama, a 44-year-old Somali refugee, saw her brother-in-law Muse Awale shot dead, and said she continued to suffer mental trauma.

"I see the images and I hear the constant sound rata-rata-rata -- the sound of the gun shooting -- in my head," said Jama, echoing the words of several speakers.

"I have flashbacks, seeing dead bodies all around me. Blood everywhere," added a son of Ashraf Ali.

Gamal Fouda, the Al Noor mosque Imam, said he was standing in the pulpit "and saw the hate in the eyes of a brainwashed terrorist" before telling Tarrant: "Your hatred is unnecessary."

The court was told Tarrant arrived in New Zealand in 2017 and based himself in Dunedin, 360 kilometres (220 miles) south of Christchurch, where he built up a collection of high-powered firearms and purchased more than 7,000 rounds of ammunition.

He also bought military-style ballistic armour and tactical vests.

Two months before the attack, he drove to Christchurch and flew a drone over the al Noor mosque, filming the grounds and buildings, including entries and exits and made detailed notes about travelling between mosques.

On Friday, March 15 2019 he left his Dunedin address and drove to Christchurch armed with a range of high-powered weapons on which he had written references to historic battles, figures of the Crusades and more recent terror attacks and symbols.

He had ammunition pre-loaded into magazines, as well as modified petrol containers "to burn down the mosques and said he wished he had done so," Hawes said.

Dressed in military-style camouflage clothing including a full tactical vest with the front pockets containing at least seven fully loaded magazines and a scabbard holding a bayonet-style knife, he mounted a camera on his helmet to record the attacks.

In the minutes leading up to the storming of the al Noor mosque, he sent his radical 74-page manifesto to an extremist website, alerted his family to what he was about to do and sent emails containing threats to attack the mosques to numerous media agencies.

Tarrant is representing himself at the hearing. Judge Cameron Mander has imposed reporting restrictions to prevent his using the court as a platform for extremist views.

Mander is expected to hand down a sentence on Thursday.

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Buffalo, N.Y.  Two Buffalo craft breweries have dropped a beer they collaborated on after learning the name and label may be offensive to people of the Hindu faith.

Pressure Drop Brewing and Big Ditch Brewing Co. are discontinuing the beer they called Aqua Shiva after a protest led by a Nevada-based Hindu activist. Shiva is one of the three major deities or gods in Hinduism.

The label depicted a caricature of the Hindu deity.

We very recently became aware that our collaborative beer, Aqua Shiva, was offensive to Hindus, the breweries said in a statement released by Rajan Zed, the Hindu activist who led the protest. We deeply apologize to the Hindu community for this poor choice of our beer name and artwork. We simply did not put enough time into thinking about this beer name and artwork and what the use of the name Shiva means to the Hindu community. This beer is discontinued and will never be made again "

Zed, president of Universal Society of Hinduism, thanked the brewers for their quick decision to discontinue the beer.

Zeds news release said Lord Shiva is highly revered in Hinduism and is meant to be worshiped in temples or home shrines and not to be used in a re-imagined version for pushing beer or to adorn beer cans.

Breweries should not be in the business of religious appropriation, sacrilege, and ridiculing entire communities, Zeds statement said. It was deeply trivializing of divine Hindu deity to be displayed on a beer can."

Zed has also led campaigns asking bars and restaurants to stop using depictions of Hindu religious figures in their decor.

Aqua Shiva was a hazy, New England-style double IPA, and was part of a series of deity themed beers made by Big Ditch and Pressure Drop. Others in the series have included Aqua Jesus and Aqua Buddha.

Buffalo's Pressure Drop and Big Ditch Brewing have stopped making a beer that uses the name of the Hindu deity Shiva.

Hinduism is the oldest and third largest religion of the world with about 1.1 billion adherents worldwide, Zeds statement said. There are about 3 million Hindus in the United States, he said.

MORE ON NEW YORK BREWERIES

Upstate craft breweries join Black is Beautiful effort to support racial justice

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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.
ST. JOHNS, N.L.On Duckworth Street in St. Johns, N.L., shoppers were compliant, if not outright enthusiastic, about the indoor mask-wearing order that entered into effect across the province Monday.

Newfoundland and Labrador has enjoyed a summer with relaxed restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and fewer than a dozen reported cases of the illness. Health authorities last week declared no active cases of COVID-19 in the province.

Ron Linegar, chef at Caines Grocery & Deli, said hes heard complaints about the mask order being overkill with such little transmission in the community. But, he said, wearing a mask is an easy gesture of respect for others during the crisis.

Just get over it. Its not too hard, Linegar said Monday outside the store, wearing a blue mask.

The deli has been serving customers throughout the pandemic, and Linegar said masks are another way to take care of them. For me, its more than just Im told to wear it, he said. I want to wear it for the customers.

Mask-wearing is mandatory for everyone above the age of five, in all indoor public places across the province, such as retail stores, public transportation, fitness centres and movie theatres. People with certain health conditions are exempt.

On Monday, the few shoppers and workers on Duckworth Street who braved the heavy rain sported masks as they dashed from their cars to the stores.

Ceanne Giovannini has been wearing a mask since the beginning of the pandemic, she said, as she is battling cancer. Giovannini said the order makes her feel safer. I love the fact that we have to wear one, she said.

Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Janice Fitzgerald, surprised the public when she announced the measure last week.

She said authorities are trying to make mask-wearing widespread before schools reopen and people begin interacting more and in larger numbers.

This will give people time to get used to wearing them and hopefully will reduce the spread ... so that we dont get a second wave, Fitzgerald told reporters last week. Thats what we want, ultimately.

People can be fined for violating the order but Fitzgerald said the emphasis will be on education rather than enforcement.

Newfoundland and Labrador last reported a case of COVID-19 Aug. 10. The province has reported 268 cases since the pandemic began and three deaths linked to the coronavirus.

Fitzgerald noted last week that the public has been generally compliant with her public health orders.

Emma Vatcher, another downtown shopper, said shes become used to wearing her mask at work in the service industry. But she wondered why the rule wasnt put in place in the spring when cases peaked in the province.

I feel like it should have been mandatory to wear them earlier on in the year, she said. But at the same time theyre kind of expecting a second wave to happen. If this can prevent a second wave from being really bad I think its worth it.

The order hasnt gone without opposition.

Small groups of protesters gathered outside the provincial legislature over the weekend with signs decrying the medical tyranny of the mask-wearing order. Protesters said the directive infringes on personal freedoms. One person came out to protest outside the legislature Monday afternoon.

The order has also attracted some scrutiny because mask-wearing rules are stricter for the general public than for students and teachers in public schools.

Masks must be worn on buses but only high school students will be required to wear masks, and only in common areas.

The provinces largest school district will provide reusable masks to all students and teachers, but the Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers Association still took issue with the discrepancy.

The NLTA is concerned with looser public health protection for children and teachers compared to the strict public health expectations that all people use masks when in public spaces, it said in a statement last week.
iStock/JONGHO SHIN(LOS ANGELES) -- After President Donald Trump accused the the Food and Drug Administration for standing in the way of testing new vaccines to treat COVID-19, the FDA handed the president a victory by issuing an emergency order allowing blood plasma from those previously infected with the virus to treat hospitalized patients.

The treatment, known as convalescent plasma, will use the yellow liquid isolated from blood donations from those who have recovered from the virus and use the antibodies found in the plasma to treat those still struggling against COVID-19.

While the treatment has not been scientifically proven to assist in recovery, initial trials showed promising results and gave health officials a glimmer of hope.

Doctor Peter Marks, FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director, said, "We believe that there will be enough people that will benefit from this, potentially, this being a potentially lifesaving treatment that it's worthwhile doing."

FDA Commissioner Doctor Stephen Hahn added, "We're encouraged by the early promising data that we've seen about convalescent plasma." The commissioner also added that plans to issue the emergency order was not an about face following criticism from the president, adding, "This has been in the works for several weeks ... We issued the EUA when we concluded the risk-benefit ratio was appropriate."

President Trump touted the FDA's action at a press conference on Sunday, "Todays action will dramatically expand access to this treatment," adding that "Im pleased to make a truly historic announcement in our battle against the China virus that will save countless lives."

Critics maintain that the president's insistence of calling COVID-19 the "China virus" is racist.

COVID-19 has killed over 176,000 Americans and infected almost 5.7 million people in the U.S., according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
The training program called Train the Trainer will be conducted virtually from August 24 to August 29 2020.

Microsoft is creating a new program in India to build quantum computing skills among the in the academic community in India. To achieve this target, the company on Monday launched a new program called Train the Trainer in India on Monday.

Microsoft is hosting the Train the Trainer program in collaboration with Electronics and ICT Academies at Malaviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT), Jaipur and National Institute of Technology, Patna. As ta part of this program, the educational institutes and the company together will train 900 faculty from universities and institutes across India through E& ICT Academies at Institutes of National Importance such as IIT Kanpur, IIT Guwahati, IIT Roorkee, MNIT Jaipur, NIT Patna, IIIT-D Jabalpur, and NIT Warangal, equipping them with knowledge about quantum computing.

The company will be utilising Azure Quantum, which is an open cloud ecosystem built on Azure that enables developers to access diverse quantum software, hardware, and solutions from Microsoft and its partners, for upskilling the academia about quantum computing.

Microsoft said that the quantum training program through the E &ICT Academies supports an initiative by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to enhance the skills of the academicians in imparting next level technological skills for future generations. Key themes that will be covered include in the program include an introduction to quantum information, quantum concepts such as superposition and entanglement, processing of information using qubits and quantum gates, as well as an introduction to quantum machine learning and quantum programming. It will also cover practical coding for participants using Microsoft Q# & Quantum Development Kit.

The training program will be conducted virtually from August 24 to August 29 2020.
In an interview with the Sunday weekly Journal du Dimanche, French Health Minister Olivier Veran said he feared an increase in contamination from the youngest to older, more fragile people, and that the Covid-19 epidemic was not over.

French Health minister Olivier Veran stressed that "the majority of transmissions are now made in festive situations of the youngest, where social distancing and other hygiene measures are not respected".

This comes as France recorded an increase in the number of coronavirus infections in recent days.

"The virus circulates four times more in people under 40 than in people over 65," Veran told the weekly JDD newspaper.

He said that young people don't always have obvious symptoms, which means they think they are not affected.

Epidemic never stopped

"If the circulation of the virus accelerates further among the youngest, it could infect the elderly, who more often contract more severe forms of the disease".

"We must at all costs avoid this situation which would put our health system under strain and would be extremely problematic".

There have been concerns that young people have continued to act in a carefree manner, for example, not wearing masks in crowded public places, flouting a rule which is now applied in most large cities across France.

The epidemic "never stopped," he went on.

"It was only checked during the confinement and then the progressive easing of lockdown."

700,000 tests per week

"We are in a risky situation," he said, adding that 3,602 new positive infections were confirmed on Saturday by health authorities.

There were 4,771 new cases on Thursday and 4,586 on Friday.

He also refuted any notion that the virus had somehow mutated into a less dangerous version, addressing rumours.

"There is no scientific argument to support this theory," he said, emphasising the need for extreme vigilance.

"The risk, is that, after gently removing the lid of the saucepan, the water boils again".

He went on to point out that France is now ahead of other European countries such as Germany, Italy and Spain when it comes to testing.

"We have just gone past the 700,000 tests per week mark," he said, "which represents a bit more than 1 percent of the population."

"We could reach 1 million tests a week if necessary."
A smirking paedophile has pleaded guilty to more child sex offences committed after he was publicly shamed for driving 40 miles to meet what he thought was an 11-year-old girl.

At Belfast Crown Court, David Nixon admitted attempting to incite a child to commit a sexual act, ordering her to send him sexual images, and attempted sexual communication with a minor.

The pervert, who has an address at Loughside Drive in Ballynahinch, was remanded in custody last week and will be sentenced at a later date.

Nixon's latest crimes were committed in September 2019 while he was on police bail for trying to arrange a meeting with what he thought was an 11-year-old girl.

The 50-year-old creep was living in Dungannon at the time of the December 2017 offences and drove for more than an hour to Ballymena bus station to see the schoolgirl.

However, he was instead ambushed by a paedophile hunting group who live-streamed the confrontation on social media. They produced details of online conversations Nixon had with the child, who was in fact an adult decoy, detailing the multiple sex acts that he wanted. Asked to explain himself, the predator said: "These are just fetishes. Okay, I have fetishes."

During the conversation with the paedophile hunters, Nixon confessed to sending naked images of himself to the decoy who repeatedly told him she was 11 years old.

He also demanded that she stay online and talk to him, desperately adding: "You promised me you wouldn't go off-line. I want to talk with you without you disappearing again. Do you like me? You are beautiful. Is it okay for me to say that to you?"

Nixon also claimed to be falling in love with the girl and lied about his age, saying he was 30. He smirked throughout the confrontation with the paedophile hunters, laughing at some points which he put down to "nerves".

Nixon was sentenced to four months in prison in January of this year having pleaded guilty to attempting to meet a child following sexual grooming, and attempted sexual communication with a child.

He was also put on the sex offenders' register for seven years and banned from having contact with kids and limited use of the internet for a five-year period.

But while out on police bail, brazen Nixon got up to his old tricks, sending messages of an extreme sexual nature to what he thought was a child and demanding photographs of his victim. What he did not know was that the schoolgirl was another decoy with the police handed a dossier by the group behind the sting operation.

Nixon is now facing yet another prison sentence when he appears in the dock of Belfast Crown Court again next month.
SPRINGFIELD  Officials said Monday the number of new coronavirus cases over the weekend in Springfield was in the single digits, marking the lowest number since the pandemic began six months ago.

There were four new cases of COVID-19 reported on Friday, one new case on Saturday and three on Sunday, said Mayor Domenic J. Sarno, during the weekly coronavirus update at City Hall.

It was the first time that less than 10 cases were reported over a Friday-through-Sunday stretch since late March, Sarno said.

The trend of low numbers is absolutely fantastic, Sarno said.

Sarno praised residents, city department heads and rank-and-file workers for helping to contain the number of known cases.

One death related to COVID-19 did occur, bringing the total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Springfield to 131, Health Commissioner Helen R. Caulton-Harris said.

There were total of 32 new cases of coronavirus in Springfield from Aug. 17-23, as compared to 53 cases the prior week, despite an increase in testing, Caulton-Harris said.

In contrast, new cases in Springfield often surpassed 50 a day since March and peaked at 104 new cases on April 23, according to records.

Dr. Mark Keroack, CEO and president of Baystate Health, and Dr. Robert Roose, chief medical officer of Mercy Medical Center, said they continued to have a low number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients during the past week.

Keroack said as of Monday there were 17 patients hospitalized at Baystate Medical Center with COVID-19, including two in intensive care, as compared to 16 last Monday.

At Mercy, there were two patients hospitalized with COVID-19, including one in intensive care, Roose said.

The city officials and hospital representatives urged people to continue their vigilance with coronavirus precautions including wearing masks, frequent handwashing and social distancing.

Caulton-Harris said the last time that new coronavirus cases in Springfield were in the double digits was Aug. 17, when there were 12 cases.

No one is trying to be punitive, Caulton-Harris said, regarding the local and state requirements for COVID-19 safety. Were trying to get through this together. Thats our goal.

Related Content:
 Read the full article on Motorious

Forget the presidential limo, these are the real beasts.

Surviving in Antarctica and the Arctic Circle is a challenge that requires specialized equipment, and that's especially true when it comes to the vehicles required to traverse some of the harshest and coldest terrain on the planet. For the U.S. government's National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs, exploring Earth's extreme regions just got a little easier thanks to a trio of highly modified Toyota off-road vehicles, which are all named after female explorers with ties to Iceland, Greenland and the U.S.

Image Credit: Gufinnur or Palsson via Office of Polar Programs

Not many details were provided about these Toyotas, but all three rigs were built by Arctic Trucks. They all have similar looks with roof racks, snorkels and wide fender extensions to accommodate the massive 44-inch tires mounted on 17 inch wheels.

The coolest of the three is definitely Louise  a Toyota Hilux converted into a 6x6. This monster truck is the cargo hauler of the bunch with the standard cargo box replaced by a flat bed. The name for this truck comes from Louise Arner Boyd, an American who explored Greenland and the Arctic starting in the 1920s.

Image Credit: Dave Haney via Office of Polar Programs

Barbara and Gudrid are identical Toyota Land Cruiser 78 Troop Carriers with the front bumpers removed allowing for a super-high (if not perfectly vertical) approach angle. Barbara was named after Barbara Hillary, an American who became the first black woman to reach both poles. She traveled to the North Pole in 2007 at the age of 75, and four years later she traveled to the South Pole; she passed away in 2019. Gudrid is named Gudrid 'the Far-Travelled' Thorbjarnardottir, an Icelandic explorer.

Image Credit: Dave Haney via Office of Polar Programs

Source: National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs

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West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday (August 24) urged the Centre to postpone NEET, JEE 2020 and said that the exams should not be held until the situation is conducive again. It is to be noted that NEET is scheduled on September 13 and JEE-Mains will be held from September 1-6.

"With the Education Ministry's directive to conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sept, I would again appeal to Centre to assess risk & postpone these exams until the situation is conducive again. It's our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students," CM Banerjee was quoted as saying by ANI.

The West bengal chief minister noted that in her last video conference with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she had raised objections against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020 as it could expose the students to the risk of getting infected with coronavirus COVID-19.

On Sunday (August 23), former Congress president Rahul Gandhi had urged the Centre to listen to the 'Mann Ki Baat' of students and address the concerns of those students who have been demanding postponement of the entrance examinations.

"Today lakhs of students are saying something. Their opinion on JEE, NEET exams should be heard and the government should arrive at an acceptable solution," tweeted Rahul Gandhi.

          NEET, JEE                  GOI must listen to the #StudentsKeMannKiBaat about NEET, JEE exams and arrive at an acceptable solution.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) August 23, 2020

On Saturday (August 22), Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia had also requested the Central government to cancel JEE and NEET admission exams and find an alternative arrangement for admissions due to the prevailing COVID-19 situation.

It may be recalled that on Friday (August 21) the National Testing Agency (NTA) has confirmed that the JEE (Main) exam and NEET (UG) will be held as per scheduled.
An injured great horned owl was rescued from a construction site near the Great Wolf Lodge in Colorado Springs on Monday morning, the state De
Wetherspoon, Tesco and Lidl have banned beef sourced from a concrete mega farm amid evidence of appalling cruelty and abuse.

Cattle reared in sheds on the US-style factory farm suffered severe lameness, making it painful and difficult to walk.

Secret filming showed stockmen beating and abusing the animals at the unit, which operates from concrete-floor lots rather than green fields in a so-called zero grazing system.

One violently threw a bucket at the head of a young bull sending him crashing to the floor.

Workers are heard discussing the poor state of the animals, suggesting that in the past some had been dying left right and centre.

The images were captured at Berryfields Farm, Daventry, which is understood to rear more than 4,000 bull calves a year.

Wetherspoon, Tesco and Lidl have banned beef sourced from a concrete mega farm in Daventry (pictured) amid evidence of appalling cruelty and abuse

One stockman violently threw a bucket at the head of a young bull (pictured) sending him crashing to the floor

One cow is sent toppling to the floor after a stockman threw a bucket at its head in the concrete mega farm

As a result of the revelations, the farm has been suspended from the Red Tractor scheme, whose logo on packs is designed to be a guarantee of high standards for consumers.

Cattle from the farm are transported to a Foyle Food Group slaughterhouse at Melton Mowbray. The resulting steaks, mince and joints are sold on to customers, who include Wetherspoon, Tesco and Lidl.

Wetherspoon has been heavily involved in the governments Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which offers cheap meals to diners.

Spokesman Eddie Gershon said the pub chain would no longer be taking any meat from the farm.

He said: We take animal welfare seriously and audit all our food suppliers regularly.

We are concerned about the allegations and have made this clear to Foyle Food Group.

Secret filming showed stockmen beating and abusing the animals (pictured) at the unit

The images (one pictured) were captured at Berryfields Farm, Daventry, which is understood to rear more than 4,000 bull calves a year

Tesco said: These are disturbing and unacceptable images. We require all our suppliers to uphold high animal welfare standards, and have immediately suspended this farm.

Lidl confirmed it has also suspended taking beef sourced from the farm following the allegations.

Historically, bull calves from dairy cows have been shot soon after birth because they had little value. However, they are now an increasingly important source of cheap beef in the catering, takeaway and supermarket trade. Farmers argue this is kinder than simply disposing of them.

Filming was carried over a five month period by the Animal Justice Project. Spokesman, Claire Palmer, said it reveals a catalogue of abuse and neglect.

She said: Abusing cows by punching, kicking, throwing buckets in their faces, and hitting them with pipes can never be a kind option.

Prof Andrew Knight, Veterinary Professor of Animal Welfare and Ethics, at the University of Winchester, said: Lameness causes severe, long-term pain.

Cattle reared in sheds on the US-style factory farm suffered severe lameness, making it painful and difficult to walk

Filming at the concrete mega farm (pictured) was carried over a five month period by the Animal Justice Project

I was concerned to see significant numbers of severely lame cattle. Lameness may be caused by unsanitary flooring, due to bacterial infection

He added: Also very concerning was the abuse by workers. A bucket was violently thrown at a cows face, animals were struck with plastic piping, and subjected to swearing and yelling.

A second veterinary expert, Molly Vasanthakumar, said: The handling of cattle is extremely distressing. This physical abuse is totally unacceptable.

A spokesman for Red Tractor said: We were shocked and appalled by the footage of animals being mistreated. Poor animal health and welfare is always unacceptable.

As soon as we were made aware of the footage, we launched an investigation.

As a result of the revelations (one image of a cow, pictured) the farm has been suspended from the Red Tractor scheme, whose logo on packs is designed to be a guarantee of high standards for consumers

Due to breaches of our standards relating to animal welfare and livestock transport, Berryfields Farm certification from our scheme has been suspended.

The Foyle Food Group, which is based in Northern Ireland, did not respond to requests for comment, however it told customers: Given the on-going investigation we have taken the decision to suspend any supply from this supplier until we can gain information from Red Tractor on the situation.

The farm involved is managed by John Bell, who is well known in the farming community and has served on a number of industry bodies. He did not respond to requests for a comment.

It is understood the animals at the centre of the cruelty allegations were owned and reared by a third party business. Mr Bell is said to have given this third party instructions to remove its stock from the farm.
The Taliban's chief has finalised a negotiating team that is to have sweeping decision-making powers in upcoming intra-Afghan negotiations, the top Taliban negotiator told The Associated Press.

Maulvi Hibatullah Akhunzada hand-picked the 20-member team, 13 of whom come from the Taliban's leadership council  around half of the council's total members.

The negotiating team will have the authority to set agendas, decide strategy and even sign agreements with the political leadership of the Afghan government in Kabul, lead Taliban negotiator Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai told AP.

This is a powerful team...All decision-making powers are with the negotiation team, Stanikzai said.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who signed the peace deal with Washington on February 29 paving the way for America's troop withdrawal and the eventual intra-Afghan negotiations, will keep the powerful post as head of the Taliban's political office in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar.

The critical intra-Afghan talks, which were laid out in the peace deal signed in February, were expected to begin Aug. 20 but have been plagued by relentless delays.

The talks are intended to set a road map for post-war Afghanistan. They will include a permanent cease-fire, the rights of minorities and women, constitutional changes and the fate of tens of thousands of armed Taliban and militias loyal to Kabul-allied warlords.

The first round of talks seemed imminent earlier this month, when a traditional grand council or jirga approved the immediate release of the remaining Taliban prisoners in government custody.

Some diplomats optimistically told the AP that negotiations could begin as early as August 10. But the government then defied the jirga decision, demanding the Taliban free 22 commandos in their custody before freeing the remaining Taliban.

We will be ready for negotiations in the near future, Stanikzai, the lead Taliban negotiator, said. Now we urge the US to convince the other side to end their excuses, release prisoners as soon as possible and come to the negotiation table.

Suhail Shaheen, spokesman for the Taliban's political office, said last week that the Taliban had freed the 1,000 prisoners they had promised, and that he was not aware of the commandos.

According to the deal Washington signed with the Taliban, the Afghan government was to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, and the Taliban were to free 1,000 government and military men.

Under the US-Taliban agreement, the withdrawal of American troops does not hinge on the success of intra-Afghan talks, but instead on commitments made by the Taliban to combat terrorist groups and ensure Afghanistan is not used as a staging ground for attacks on the US and its allies.

Since signing the agreement, the Taliban have held to a promise not to attack US and NATO troops, but have carried out regular attacks on Afghan security forces.

By November, less than 5,000 U.S. soldiers are set to be in Afghanistan, down from about 13,000 prior to the February agreement.

On Sunday Baradar, head of the Taliban political office, was travelling to Pakistan from Doha, just days after Islamabad issued fresh orders implementing the 2015 UN sanctions against the Taliban as well as a number of other outlawed groups.

It wasn't immediately clear who Baradar would be meeting or the purpose of his visit, but Pakistan has been pressing for an early start to intra-Afghan negotiations.
WASHINGTON - In her Republican National Convention speech, Kimberly Guilfoyle described herself as a first-generation American, citing her mothers Puerto Rican roots.

But Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and its residents are U.S. citizens.

Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign adviser and the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., cited her family history on Monday to make the case that she knows how dangerous a socialist agenda would be for the nation.

She says her mother was a special education teacher from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, while her father, whom she described as also an immigrant, came to this nation in pursuit of the American dream. Her father is from Ireland.

Now, she says, I consider it my duty to protect that dream.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

Kimberly Guilfoyle describes herself as a first-generation American, but also notes that her mother is a special education teacher from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and its residents are U.S. citizens.

Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign adviser, cited her roots to make the case that she knows how dangerous a socialist agenda would be for the nation.

She says, my father, also an immigrant, came to this nation in pursuit of the American Dream. Now, I consider it my duty to fight to protect that dream.

Guilfoyle advocated for Trump on the opening night of the Republican National Convention.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

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HERES WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MONDAYS REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION:

 Republicans nominate Trump, who questions election integrity

 AP-NORC poll: Trump faces pessimism as GOP convention opens

 Pompeo shattering precedent, sparking fury with RNC speech

 St. Louis couple, in RNC speech, defends show of weapons

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Follow APs election coverage at https://apnews.com/Election2020

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HERES WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott says he is living the American dream and cites the evolution of the Southern heart as the reason he, as a Black man, was able to win a primary election against a son of Strom Thurmond.

Scott, the only Black GOP senator, was the closing speaker at the Republican National Convention on Monday. He recounted growing up in a single-parent household and failing out of ninth grade before finding a mentor and becoming a small-business owner.

The senator says any insinuation that America has gone backward is false. He talked about his 2010 primary win against Paul Thurmond, son of the segregationist senator, in a congressional race.

He says, In an overwhelmingly white district, the voters judged me not on the colour of my skin but on the content of my character. He says, We live in a world that only wants you to believe in the bad news, racially economically and culturally polarizing news.

Scott says America isnt fully where we want to be. But he says, I thank God almighty we are not where we used to be.

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Donald Trump Jr. is ridiculing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with name-calling in a fiery speech to the televised Republican National Convention.

But more broadly, President Donald Trumps eldest son is painting his fathers opponent for the presidency as part of a movement aimed at stripping the nation of its most basic freedoms.

In the past, both parties believed in the goodness of America, the younger Trump says. This time, the other party is attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded, citing freedom of thought, speech, religion and the rule of law.

Mocking Bidens past meetings with Chinese leaders as vice-president, he calls the Democrat Beijing Biden and pokes at his decades in the Senate and previously unsuccessful presidential bids by calling him The Loch Ness Monster of the swamp.

But the younger Trump offered a full-throated support of his fathers campaign theme that protests for racial justice are lawless, violent mobs intent on toppling long-honoured past leaders.

He says, Its almost like this election is shaping up to be church, work and school versus rioting, looting and vandalism.

___

Kimberly Guilfoyle apparently didnt get the memo when GOP leaders declared that Americans would hear an uplifting message at this weeks Republican National Convention.

Guilfoyle, who is Donald Trump Jr.s girlfriend and a Trump campaign adviser, gave the loudest speech of the night Monday. She shouted at times and warned that Democratic leaders want to destroy this country.

She says, They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think, and believe, so they can control how you live!

At another point, she said of Democrats, Dont let them step on you. Dont let them destroy your families, your lives and your future. Dont let them suppress future generations because they told you and brainwashed you and fed you lies that you werent good enough!

Guilfoyle finished the speech with a broad smile and upraised arms, saying that Trump is the leader who will rebuild the promise of America.

The best is yet to come! she declared.

___

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is recounting how states like her native South Carolina have rebounded from racist violence, saying, America is not a racist country.

During the first night of Republicans national convention, the former South Carolina governor said Monday that, in much of the Democratic Party, its now fashionable to say that America is racist.

Referencing the 2015 shooting of nine Bible study attendees by a white man at a historic Black church in Charleston, Haley noted that South Carolina didnt erupt into the violence seen after some shootings of Black Americans in other cities.

Haley also took a spin off the Black Lives Matter movements terminology, saying that the lives of Black police officers shot in the line of duty, Black small-business owners affected during rioting and Black kids whove been gunned down on the playground  their lives matter, too.

Haley is seen as one of the rising stars in the Republican Party, with a recent move back to South Carolina and a memoir sparking conversation that she may mount a presidential run of her own, possibly as soon as 2024. She says President Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence have my support.

___

A white St. Louis couple criminally charged for waving guns during a Black Lives Matter protest outside their home says Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would invite unchecked lawlessness into American suburbs.

Mark and Patty McCloskey on Monday at the Republican National Convention reinforced the theme outlined in President Donald Trumps campaign ads. The Republican is painting his opponent as complicit with rioting and violence that has taken place in some cities in recent months amid racial justice protests, the vast majority of which have been peaceful.

Patty McCloskey says, They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning. She says the actions would bring crime, lawlessness and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban neighbourhoods.

She says, These are the policies that are coming to a neighbourhood near you,. She adds, Your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats America.

___

Parkland father Andrew Pollack says he believes the safety of your kids depends on whether President Donald Trump wins a second term.

Pollacks 18-year-old daughter, Meadow, was killed in February 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. He spoke Monday at the Republican National Convention and credits Trump for forming a school safety commission that issued dozens of recommendations designed to make schools safer.

Pollack blames a culture of leniency that failed to hold the gunman accountable for many transgressions that occurred before the shooting, which killed 17 people. He says gun control laws didnt fail his daughter, but people did.

Pollack blames the school for ignoring those warning signs. He also says far-left Democrats implemented a policy designed to reduce school suspensions that he says blames teachers for student failures.

___

A Black Democratic lawmaker in Georgias state legislature says hes supporting President Donald Trump because theyve made improvements benefiting the Black community.

During the opening night of Republicans convention Monday, state Rep. Vernon Jones said all hell broke loose when he announced his support for Trump. But Jones said he stands by his decision in part because Trump has backed initiatives including increased funding for HBCUs, criminal justice reform and the most inclusive economy ever.

Jones says, The Democratic Party does not want Black people to leave the mental plantation on which theyve toiled. He added, Black voices are becoming more woke and louder than ever.

Earlier, former NFL star Herschel Walker said it hurts my soul to hear anyone refer to Trump as a racist, adding its a personal insult that people would think I would have a 37-year friendship with a racist.

___

Ohio congressman Jim Jordan is describing an empathetic moment he shared with President Donald Trump, part of an effort that aides said is aimed at presenting a side of the president many Americans dont see.

At the Republican National Convention on Monday, Jordan recounted a phone conversation with Trump as the Ohioan was en route to visit his grieving family after Jordans nephew died in a car accident.

Jordan says he asked Trump if hed like to say hello to the boys father.

Jordan adds: For the next five minutes, family and friends sat in complete silence as the president of the United States took time to talk to a dad who was hurting. Thats the president I know.

Jordans story comes a week after nightly vignettes of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Bidens connection with people who have lost spouses, children and jobs, part of an empathetic narrative the party built to contrast with Trump.

___

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel is scoffing at Democrats choice of actor Eva Longoria to host one night of their convention, suggesting they couldnt find a real housewife.

McDaniel dismissed Longoria, a star of Desperate Housewives, on Monday as a famous Hollywood actress who played a housewife on TV. McDaniel said, Im actually a real housewife and a mom from Michigan.

It echoed a comment made by Trump last month when he warned The Suburban Housewives of America in a tweet that a Joe Biden presidency would destroy your neighbourhood. He warned of an invasion and said he had scrapped a program to allow low income housing in the suburbs.

But McDaniel herself is an executive with a full-time job running a nationwide political organization with a multimillion-dollar budget.

___

The leader of the pro-Trump organization Turning Point USA is calling the president the bodyguard of Western civilization.

Kirk said at the start of the evening portion of the Republican National Convention on Monday that President Donald Trump had reclaimed the U.S. government from the rotten cartel of insiders that have been destroying our country.

He says, We may not have realized it at the time, but this fact is now clear: Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization.

He added that Trump was elected to defend and strengthen the American way of life.

___

President Donald Trump will appear at the opening night of the Republican National Convention in a taped video with six former hostages freed during the Trump administration.

A campaign official said Monday that the former prisoners are among more than a dozen religious or other people whose release the Trump administration helped broker. They are Michael White, Sam Goodwin, Pastor Andrew Brunson, Joshua and Tamara Holt, and Pastor Bryan Nerran.

The convention is also set to feature a speech from the parents of Kayla Mueller, who died while a prisoner of the Islamic State group.

White, a Navy veteran, was imprisoned in Iran. Brunson, an evangelical pastor, was imprisoned in Turkey, Goodwin was held in Syria, the Holts in Venezuela and Nerran in India.

Trump has championed his hostage release program, which was led for years by now-national security adviser Robert OBrien.

___

A forklift has damaged a brick walkway at the national monument Fort McHenry, where Republicans were building a stage for Vice-President Mike Pences appearance for the partys national convention.

A national parks advocacy group expressed outrage at the damage, saying stewardship of national monuments should be nonpartisan and professional.

National Park Service spokesperson Stephanie Roulett confirmed the damage in an email Monday. She says the damaged bricks dated from a 1930s restoration at the fort.

Built in 1798, Fort McHenry and the Americans in it successfully defended Baltimore Harbor from the British Navy in the War of 1812. The scene inspired Francis Scott Key to write The Star-Spangled Banner. The U.S. designates the fort as a national monument and historic shrine.

This month, the Maryland Republican Party asked for and got a special-use permit from the National Park Service to use the fort as a backdrop for Pences political address Wednesday during the Republican National Convention.

___

Republicans will have about 8,000 Roman candles, shells, comets and other fireworks ready to shoot into the sky around the Washington Monument on Thursday to celebrate President Donald Trumps acceptance of the presidential nomination.

The National Park Service said Monday that it had approved the fireworks permit to mark the renomination of the president, who has demonstrated a fondness for big pyrotechnics and fetes at national monuments.

The permit details the fireworks that are planned. The parks service said the Republican National Committee would be responsible for all costs of the show as well as for reimbursing the agency for its work overseeing the event on Thursday, the last day of the Republican National Convention.

Mike Litterst, spokesperson for the National Park Services National Mall, said Monday that the service has received no permit requests so far for protests timed to the convention.

___

President Donald Trump says without evidence that the coronavirus is fading, a claim that he has been making for months.

In the toss-up state of North Carolina, Trump spoke on a tarmac in Fletcher to several hundred cheering supporters  the majority not wearing masks  after he addressed delegates at the Republican National Convention in Charlotte.

Trump says the nation will put this horrible incident coming from China behind us and we will have the vaccines very soon, but its going to be fading, and it is starting to fade.

The U.S. coronavirus death toll and case count have been climbing for months. More than 176,000 Americans have now died of the coronavirus, by far more than any other country.

Trump predicted positive third quarter results for the U.S. economy and said next year would be even better.

After brief remarks, Trump drove to Mills River, where he was to tour Flavor First Growers and Packers and speak at a Farmers to Families food box distribution program.

Along the motorcade route to Mills River, some people expressed their disapproval of Trumps presidency. One man, wearing a mask, held a cloth banner that said: Mr. Trump Spewing Lies. Spreading COVID.

___

President Donald Trump is accusing Democrats of using voters concerns about COVID-19 to steal the upcoming presidential election.

Trump told delegates at the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday that the only way Democrats can win is if this is a rigged election.

Until he won, Trump also warned that the 2016 election was going to be rigged.

He says Americans know how to keep themselves safe from the coronavirus and can go to the polls, eliminating the need to mail in their ballots. He said, without providing evidence, that that creates fraud.

Voter fraud has proved exceedingly rare. The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.

Trump says other votes will be harvested by people going door-to-door to collect ballots that voters have not submitted. In addition, he says some states are not verifying signatures on ballots. He did not provide evidence for those claims.

___

President Donald Trump is championing the stock market, telling delegates at the Republican National Convention that if hes not reelected, the country will go in a horrible direction.

He said Monday that the upcoming presidential election is the most important in the history of the United States. He says, Our country can go in a horrible direction or in an even greater direction.

He says the U.S. economy was humming along at high levels before the coronavirus pandemic. Trump condemned governors who are continuing to keep their states shut down to stem the spread of the virus.

It was a jab at his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who has said that further shutdowns are needed to battle the virus.
PLA holds concentrated military drills to deter Taiwan secessionists, US

Global Times

By Liu Xuanzun Source: Global Times Published: 2020/8/23 18:42:32

Possible outbreak of military conflicts not restricted to one region: experts

The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has announced four concentrated military drills across three major Chinese sea regions in the coming days, following a recent announcement of consecutive, realistic drills in the Taiwan Straits and at its north and south ends aimed at deterring Taiwan secessionists and the US.

Pressing the island of Taiwan from both the north and south ends, the simultaneous exercises in the South China Sea, the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea will demonstrate the PLA's high level of combat preparedness, Chinese mainland military experts said on Sunday.

The drills are expected to hone in on the PLA troops' cross-regional joint combat capability, because if military conflicts break out, they will not likely be restricted to one sea region, but interconnected, they said.

According to a navigation restriction notice released by the local maritime safety administration in Guangzhou on Sunday, the PLA will hold military exercises in the waters of the South China Sea, off the southeast coast of South China's Guangdong Province, from Monday to Saturday.

Also in the South China Sea, military drills will be held in waters off Hainan Island's southeast coast, also from Monday to Saturday, the Hainan Maritime Safety Administration announced on Friday.

In the Yellow Sea north of the island of Taiwan and the East China Sea, the PLA is holding large-scale, live-fire exercises from Saturday to Wednesday in a vast region of waters east of Qingdao, East China's Shandong Province, and Lianyungang, East China's Jiangsu Province, said a notice issued by PLA Unit 91208 and local maritime authorities on Friday.

Additionally, live-fire drills will also be held in the Bohai Sea in a fan-shaped area from Monday to September 30, the Tangshan Maritime Safety Administration announced on Friday.

The four simultaneous military drills in three major Chinese sea regions mean the island of Taiwan will be hemmed in by PLA exercises from both the north and the south, and taking into account the drills in the Taiwan Straits and at its north and south ends announced on August 13, the PLA is conducting major exercises in all of its four major sea regions with Taiwan in mind in August, analysts said.

The announcements did not provide further details regarding the drills.

Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Sunday that the drills are likely to feature anti-ship, air defense and anti-submarine exercises.

The drills could also be joint exercises that feature multiple military branches based in different regions of the country, Song said, noting that this could mean that these exercises could be linked to the recent consecutive, realistic drills in the Taiwan Straits.

In addition to the PLA Navy, other forces like the PLA Army, Air Force, Rocket Force and Strategic Support Force could also be involved, analysts predicted.

The PLA should not prepare for battle in just the East China Sea and the Taiwan Straits, but in all Chinese sea regions, because the goal of these drills should be joint operations, and troops from Northern, Eastern and Southern Theater Commands should be capable of cross-regional joint combat, Song said.

If military conflicts in the Taiwan Straits break out, they will not likely be restricted to one sea region, but interconnected, Song stressed.

Continued US provocations

Chinese mainland analysts said that the PLA drills will not only demonstrate capabilities and act as a deterrence, but also give strong responses to recent US military activities in the Taiwan Straits.

Even after the PLA's drills in the Taiwan Straits, the US continued to send warplanes and warships to the area, including the USS Mustin destroyer that sailed through the Taiwan Straits on Tuesday and multiple types of reconnaissance aircraft and B-1B bombers that flied near the island over the past week.

Additionally, the US Pacific Air Forces sent four B-1 bombers and two B-2 bombers in simultaneous missions on Tuesday in the Sea of Japan and the Indian Ocean, with some aircraft coordinating with the USS Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group near Japan at one point, US military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported on Wednesday.

It is also very rare for the PLA to announce so many drills in such a short period of time. While the PLA conducts frequent, routine exercises according to schedule, many of them are usually not revealed to the general public, analysts said. The concentrated announcements can be seen as a strong signal, they noted.

Li Jie, a Beijing-based naval expert, told the Global Times on Sunday that the concentrated PLA drills could serve as further warnings to Taiwan secessionists and the US, and show that the PLA is prepared and capable of effectively safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity in all sea regions.

While the East China Sea would become the main battlefield in a possible reunification-by-force operation, the South China Sea and the Yellow Sea will likely also become involved. The drills in the Bohai Sea might involve the testing of new missiles, Li estimated.

The PLA drills are expected to be real combat-oriented, including how the maritime battle would flow, what kind of challenges might occur, and what actions the militaries of the island and the US might take, Li said, noting that Taiwan secessionists and the US should not have any illusion that their provocative actions hitting below the Chinese mainland's bottom line can succeed.

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The beverage industry has urged the government to remove aerated drinks fromthe sin tax category and reduce rate on juice-based drinks under the regime.

Reduction of taxes on juices would give a boost to local horticulture sector and improve the lives of farmers, from which the industry sources fruits, Indian Beverage Association (IBA) said in a statement.

IBA in a letter to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who also heads the Council, has suggested placing the packaged drinking water in a lower slab of 12 per cent from the existing 18 per cent.

The aerated beverages are currently placed under the highest slab of 28 per cent with a compensation cess of 12 per cent.

"This high GST levy of 40 per cent on aerated beverages is against the stated policy of the government to maintain parity between pre-GST and GST regimes," IBA said, adding that aerated beverage is the only product in the entire food category subjected to compensation cess.

It has also urged to revise "the juice-based drinks from the current GST slab of 12 per cent to 5 per cent to give a boost to the local horticulture sector and improve the lives of farmers".

IBA represents the non-alcoholic beverage industry and major industry players including - Coca-Cola India, Pepsico India Holdings, Dabur India, Red Bull India, Tetra Pak India, Pearl Drinks, Bengal Beverages are its members.

According to the industry, it has been badly impacted during the March-June period due to COVID-19-induced lockdowns.

Preliminary assessments done by IBA for the full year of 2020 indicates a contraction of around 34 per cent in the industry, which is estimated to be around Rs 70,000 crore.The industry has already suffered losses of around Rs 1,200 crore on account of product/ingredients expiring due to limited shelf life.

"The Indian beverage industry not only suffered in the peak summer months but is expected to suffer in the near future because of a diminished out-of-home consumption which contributes significantly to beverage sales," the association said.

Out-of-home channels, including hospitality, tourism, cinema, railways and airlines still remain restricted.

"For this reason, many countries extended relief to their local beverage industry," it added.

According to IBA, GST rate for chocolates (preparations containing cocoa) was reduced from 28 per cent to 18 per cent. Similarly, other food products like sugar-boiled confectionery have also received GST tax reduction.

"Despite several industry requests, however, aerated beverages continue to be in the highest tax bracket. This sector feels that this discriminatory tax treatment needs to be corrected and seeks consideration of the points brought out in this note," it said, adding that "aerated beverages are not luxury product".

The GST Council is scheduled to meet on August 27 to discuss the compensation payout to states and the opinion of the Attorney General on the legality of market borrowing to meet revenue shortfall. Besides, a full-fledged meeting of the Council will be held on September 19.

Under the GST structure, taxes are levied under 5, 12, 18 and 28 per cent slabs.

On top of the highest tax slab, a cess is levied on luxury, sin and demerit goods, and the proceeds from the same are used to compensate states for any revenue loss.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Manila, Aug 24 : At least nine people were killed and 17 others injured in twin blasts in the Philippines' Sulu province on Monday, the military said.

In an initial report, the military said the first explosion occurred at around 12 noon in front of a grocery store along a busy street in Jolo, the capital of Sulu province, reports Xinhua news agency.

About one hour after the first blast, a second explosion rocked a church, about 70 metres away from the first blast scence.

More details were awaited.
YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. The meeting of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan with the members of the ruling My Step faction of the Parliament kicked off at the headquarters of the Civil Contract party.

My Step faction head Lilit Makunts told reporters that there is no planned agenda for the meeting.

This is the factions regular meeting with the Prime Minister. Each month the faction is holding such a meeting. There is no planned agenda, it will be formed on the spot, she said.

Reporting by Norayr Shoghikyan; Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
NEW ORLEANS  The Gulf Coast braced Sunday for a potentially devastating hit from twin hurricanes as two dangerous storms swirled toward the U.S from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Officials feared a history-making onslaught of life-threatening winds and flooding along the coast, stretching from Texas to Alabama.

A storm dubbed Marco grew into a hurricane Sunday as it churned up the Gulf of Mexico toward Louisiana. But, Marco's intensity was fluctuating, forecasters said, and the system was downgraded to a tropical storm Sunday night.

Another potential hurricane, Tropical Storm Laura, lashed the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and was tracking toward the same region of the U.S. coast, carrying the risk of growing into a far more powerful storm.

Experts said computer models show Laura could make landfall with winds exceeding 110 mph, and rain bands from both storms could bring a combined total of 2 feet of rain to parts of Louisiana and several feet of potentially deadly storm surge.

"There has never been anything we've seen like this before, where you can have possibly two hurricanes hitting within miles of each over a 48-hour period," said Benjamin Schott, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service's Slidell, Louisiana, office.

The combination of the rain and storm surge in a day or two means "you're looking at a potential for a major flood event that lasts for some time," said weather service tropical program coordinator Joel Cline. "And that's not even talking about the wind.''

Marco has weakened to a tropical storm as of late Sunday.

Where precisely Marco was headed  and when the storm might arrive  remained elusive Sunday.

President Donald Trump approved Louisiana's request for federal help related to the pair of storms, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a news release Sunday.

He had submitted the request to Trump and the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Saturday.

Trump also approved an emergency declaration for Mississippi, according to a White House news release late Sunday.

Marco was initially expected to make landfall Monday, but the National Hurricane Center said that "a major shift" in a majority of their computer models now show the storm stalling off the Louisiana coast for a few days before landing west of New Orleans  and likely weakening before hitting the state. However, skeptical meteorologists at the center were waiting to see if the trends continue before making a dramatic revision in their forecast.

Marco is a small storm that may be pushed westward along the Louisiana coast, delaying landfall but worsening storm surge, Cline said.

The prospect of piggybacked hurricanes was reviving all-too-fresh memories of damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005. The storm has been blamed for as many as 1,800 deaths and levee breaches in New Orleans led to catastrophic flooding.

"What we know is there's going to be storm surge from Marco, we know that that water is not going to recede hardly at all before Laura hits, and so we've not seen this before and that's why people need to be paying particular attention," Edwards warned at a Sunday briefing.

Along the main drag on the barrier island of Grand Isle, south of New Orleans, Starfish Restaurant manager Nicole Fantiny could see an exodus of people driving off the island.

"They are all packing up and leaving," she said.

Fantiny wasn't planning to leave, at least for Marco, but she was anxious about the possible one-two punch from both storms. Her husband works with the town's fire and police departments, so she said they are always among the last ones to leave.

"My house was built in 1938 so I think we're good," she said hopefully.

Marco had been expected to dance above and below hurricane status after hitting the 75 mph-wind mark Sunday afternoon.

"The central Gulf could be really under the gun between Marco and Laura in back-to-back succession,'' said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. "Certainly both of these storms can impact New Orleans significantly. It just remains to be seen if the track for Laura tracks a bit to the west."

Tropical Storm Laura's track has shifted some today, and it could make landfall Thursday in Louisiana just days after Marco.

University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy warned that anyone in New Orleans should be alarmed by the threat. At issue from possible dual hits: whether the levee system can withstand the stress, he said.

In New Orleans, the city's aging drainage system has been a particular point of concern in recent years after an intense 2017 storm flooded streets and raised questions about the system's viability.

Because the city is surrounded by levees and parts are below sea level, rainwater must be pumped out to prevent flooding. Any storm system that sits over the city and dumps rain for extended periods of time, or bands of rain that come in rapid succession, is a cause for concern.

New Orleans resident Matthew Meloy and two friends loaded a van with cases of bottled water in the parking lot of a New Orleans Walmart Sunday. He said they still have a lot of storm preparations ahead.

"Check the batteries, flashlights, stocking up on food and trying to park the car on the highest point possible we can find," he said. "I already spent like 40 minutes this morning filling up the tanks in the cars."

Tourists were strolling through the New Orleans French Quarter under overcast skies as workers boarded up shop windows. Louisiana corrections officials were evacuating 500 inmates from a jail in Plaquemines Parish, near the coast, to another facility in preparation for the storms.

In Kenner, just outside New Orleans, resident P.J. Hahn said checkout lines in a Sam's Club reached to the back of the store, while authorities said 114 oil and gas producing platforms in the Gulf have been evacuated as the storms churn toward the Louisiana coast.

Because of strong winds from the southwest, Marco may attain and then lose hurricane status before it hits land, meteorologists said. But those winds could be gone when Laura ventures to the central Gulf, where the usually bathtub-warm water is a degree or 2 (0.5 to 1 degree Celsius) warmer than normal, Klotzbach said.

The warmer the water, the stronger the fuel for a hurricane.

"It, unfortunately, might peak in intensity about landfall. That's the one thing I worry about with this one," MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel said of Laura. His multiple computer simulations show a decent chance of winds of more than 110 mph (177 kph) for Laura at landfall, as do other computer models.

The key for Laura's future is how it survives Cuba. Originally forecast to rake over almost the entire length of the island and potentially weaken, the storm late Sunday moved further south, skirting the island. If that continues, it is more likely to come out strong enough to power up over the favorable environment of the Gulf of Mexico, Klotzbach said.

If that continues, Laura could hit further west in the Gulf, possibly into Texas instead of Louisiana, he said. If it hits Louisiana that would break the record for two named storms hitting the state so close together. The current record is five days apart in 1885, Klotzbach said.

And there's one long-term possibility that adds to the risk. As Laura moves north after landfall into Oklahoma, there's a chance it will be caught up into the jet stream, travel east and emerge over North Carolina and return to tropical storm status, McNoldy and Klotzbach said.

By Sunday night, Laura was 125 miles (200 kilometers) southeast of Camaguey, Cuba, with 60 mph (95 kph) winds moving west-northwest at 21 mph (33 kph). Marco was 185 miles (295 kilometers) south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River, with 70 mph (110 kph) winds, moving north-northwest at 12 mph (19 kph).

In Empire, Louisiana, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of New Orleans near the mouth of the Mississippi River, shrimp, oyster and fishing boats line the docks. It was eerily quiet Sunday evening, as most fishermen had already secured their boats. Mike Bartholemey was putting extra blocks of wood under his recently dry docked 50-foot (15-meter) shrimp boat "Big Mike," out of his concern that hurricane winds might topple his boat to the ground.

In Venice, a fishing town on the Mississippi River, shrimper Acy Cooper was up early Sunday to move his three shrimp boats from the harbor into the bayous nearby to ride out the storm. It's the same area where he moored his boat during Hurricane Katrina.

The boat survived; his house in Venice did not.

___

Rebecca Santana, JeffMArtin and Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press wrote this story. Martin reported from Marietta, Georgia. Borenstein reported from Kensington, Maryland. AP reporter Stacey Plaisance in New Orleans; and photojournalist Gerald Herbert in Empire, Louisiana, also contributed.
A woman has told her 17-year-old neighbor to 'go back to her own country' during a heated exchange on a suburban street in Virginia.

A video, taken by the victim, shows the unidentified woman confronting her outside her home believed to be in Gainesville.

The woman is seen laughing before telling the girl: 'Why don't you go back to your own f***ing country?'

The girl, named as Tatiana in her TikTok profile, replies: 'I was born here so this is my country.'

It's not clear what sparked the row.

The unidentified woman is seen launching a tirade on the 17-year-old victim before a man comes to drag her away from the home in Gainesville, Virginia

The angry woman then says: 'You wouldn't act that f***ing way.'

The victim tells her: 'Is that how I'd act? Because you need to find a new country if that's how it is.'

A man and woman holding a dog are seen standing in the distance as the tirade continues.

The man then approaches the woman and tries to calm her down as she shouts back at Tatiana: 'Come out here and say it from the mother f***ing top.'

The video, which was uploaded on Tik Tok by user @tatianasaa02 has since gained over 336.1K views leaving users horrified at the woman's behaviour (pictured: Tatiana's profile ususally features videos of her dancing)

The video, uploaded on Tik Tok by user @tatianasaa02, has since gained over 336.1K views leaving users horrified at the woman's behaviour.

One said: 'On behalf of the white folks I'm sorry! We're not all like that. I promise.'

Another added: 'Now that's how you handle a Karen'

Meanwhile, one wrote: 'She can't think of anything else to say, getting tired of people like her saying that.'
A cowardly assassin killed an innocent mother-of-nine and her nephew in a botched revenge hit after rivals shared a 'trophy' image of their attack on him via Snapchat, a court heard.

Obina Ezeoke, 28, allegedly crept into a family home and shot 21-year-old student Bervil Kalikaka-Ekofo in the back of his head while he slept in bed as part of a 'vendetta of violence'.

He then blasted the victim's aunt Annie Besala Ekofo, 53, in the chest when she came out of her bedroom dressed only in her underwear in the early hours of 15 September 2016, jurors heard.

Student Bervil Kalikaka-Ekofo, 21, (left) was shot in the back of the head by the assassin, prompting his aunt Annie Besala Ekofo, 53, (right) to investigate. She was shot in the chest

The assassin is thought to have crept into the flat in East Finchley, north London before killing the two victims - with neither being intended targets

Neither Bervil nor Annie were the intended targets, the Old Bailey was told.

The accused double killer is facing his fourth retrial for two counts of murder.

Ezeoke insists he was on the Grahame Park Estate, Edgware, on the night of the killings at the flat in Elmshurst Crescent, East Finchley.

The estate is said to have been the backdrop of a longstanding feud between a group involved with Ms Ekofo's son Ryan Efey, 22, and another, linked to Ezeoke.

Prosecutor Mark Heywood told jurors that the accused killer had travelled to Elmshurst Crescent in search of Mr Efey but shot his mother and cousin instead.

The accused killer was found by police 'left for dead' with a broken eye socket during an altercation on 9 February 2014 connected to the rivalry, it was said.

A 'trophy' photograph which was taken by his attackers and shared widely on the social media platform Snapchat was later allegedly found on the phone of Kaydean Efey, Ryan's older brother.

Mr Kalikaka-Ekofo (left) was a student and was visiting the flat for one night only at short notice. Annie Besala Ekofo (right) was a mother-of-nine who came to the UK with her husband in 1991 from the Congo

Summing up the prosecution case, Mr Heywood said today: 'On 9 February 2014, Mr Ezeoke was attacked, seriously attacked, as were those two who were with him. This was no half baked fight, someone went for him in a serious way.

'A photograph was taken to humiliate him and then it was posted and circulated, and one of the phones which received it was that of Kaydean Efey.

'That trophy relating to Ezeoke remained on the handset. His eye socket was broken.'

The prosecutor urged jurors to see Ezeoke as somebody willing to 'escalate' the shared hostility in such a deadly way.

Mr Heywood added: 'It really boils down doesn't it to a very small group of people.

'It's common ground that this arises from Grahame Park estate, from a history of antagonism, violence between people there and the Efey family.

'That's agreed. There's no doubt that that's what lies behind all this. The question is who fits into the category of someone who could escalate and take it to this degree?'

Ezeoke, of no fixed address, denies two counts of murder.

The trial continues.
Cyberbullying is a growing problem in today's increasingly plugged-in world, with one in four children reporting they've been harassed or bullied online.

A Finnish tech company is hoping to create a kinder virtual space with a font that covers profanity in text-editing software, such as Word or Outlook, with a blur.

Using machine learning, The Polite Type is capable of spotting insulting phrases and replaces derogatory terms with inclusive language.

For example, 'You are stupid' becomes 'You are silly,' while 'I hate you' is changed to 'I disagree with you.'

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Helsinki-based TietoEVRY has developed The Polite Type , an open-source font that blurs curse words and rewrites hurtful language. More than 35 percent of cyberbullying victims develop some kind of social anxiety, and nearly one in five report difficulty sleeping because of it

Derogatory terms referring to race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity are replaced with straightforward words describing that group.

The company says this marks the first font to incorporate blurring as a tool to censor hate speech.

'We want bullies to rethink the words they use and the actual meaning behind them,' said TietoEVRY spokesperson Kia Haring.

'Bullying is especially damaging when it comes to children and young people. Young people don't have the same psychological tools as adults do to deal with hateful comments, and it can leave long-lasting emotional scars,' she added.

If a user attempts to type an English-language swear word that is in the font's database, it will be replaced with a digital blur. Mean-spirited phrases, meanwhile, are automatically replaced with softer sentiments - 'You are stupid' becomes 'You are silly,' for example. Derogatory terms referring to race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity are replaced with straightforward words describing that group

'I hope that our cause acts as a wake-up call for all audiences to consider how bullying could be tackled.'

TietoEVRY says it supports free speech and the right to disagree, but insists hate speech 'is not a valid way to voice disagreement.'

Haring says being respectful should be the 'default option' online and off.

Free to download, The Polite Type is compatible with most word processing programs. It also works when you're offline.

The initial vocabulary of some 1,800 words was developed in collaboration with Finnish teens, along with the Children and Youth Foundation and several nonprofits that work to promote diversity, inclusion and anti-racism.

Its open-source format means new words and phrases will be added as more people and institutions download and use the font.

Free to download, The Polite Type is compatible with most word processing programs. It also works when you're offline. The initial vocabulary was developed in collaboration with Finnish teens, along with nonprofits that work to promote diversity and inclusion

More than a third of bullying takes place online, according to UNESCO. Children are logging on at younger and younger ages, especially as the pandemic has made remote learning more common and in-person socializing rarer.

Over 35 percent of cyberbullying victims develop some kind of social anxiety, according to TietoEVRY, and nearly one in five report difficulty sleeping because of it.

For now, The Polite Type only works on text-editing programs, not social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram.

TietoEVRY sees it as an educational tool - for kids, parents, and educators - rather than a quick fix.

'We alone can't solve this issue,' said Haring, 'but we can raise awareness  and maybe we can inspire new and improved ideas.'
Innovation projects in transportation and transit were the focus of this years Georgia Smart Communities Challenge winners.The program, which is led by Georgia Tech, selected three cities and a county to participate in this years round of funding to advance initiatives to develop pedestrian plans for Clayton County. They include a traffic monitoring and communication system in Valdosta, a data science project in Savannah and a system to more efficiently move transit vehicles in Sandy Springs via traffic signals.This year marks one of the most competitive selection processes in that the proposals were stronger and more developed in their smart city plans and work, said Debra Lam, managing director of Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation at Georgia Tech. We think this is due to the national trends as well as the local sharing and experience within Georgia.In Sandy Springs, part of the greater Atlanta metro region, transportation officials are in the process of developing a traffic signal priority system to give emergency vehicles the green light. A similar system will be developed for transit vehicles traveling a busy bus route connecting to a rail station serving the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA).Weve talked about ways to collaborate more closely with our regional transit providers for years, said Kristen Wescott, traffic and transportation unit manager for Sandy Springs.This is really about testing things that are already underway and how we might use them more effectively, and also in an integrated way ... not just looking at emergency vehicle response, but also with transit, she added.The city wants to include about 12 to 14 signals in the project. However, the final number of signals is still being finalized.Cities pitch their ideas directly to the Georgia Smart Communities program, often forming multi-sector partnerships with other agencies, jurisdictions, businesses or nonprofits. A team of external and internal judges made up of academics, former government officials, and others from industry are part of the selection process, Lam explained.Our main criteria is how the community can use research, technology, and data to make sustainable, community impact, she added.Another project will use Georgia Techs Geographic Information System to collect sidewalk data in Clayton County. The project will collaborate with local cities, as well as groups like the Rotary Club of Lake Spivey and Clayton County.In Valdosta, a new traffic monitoring system will connect 128 traffic signals to improve transportation efficiency and safety.And in Savannah, the university will partner with several city departments like the departments of Information Technology and Housing and Neighborhood Services to develop a city data and analytics platform to better manage blighted buildings and put them on a path for redevelopment.A big part of our mission is to help serve the communities in the state of Georgia, said Michael Hunter, a professor in civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech. A lot of our students actually end up going into either the private or the public sector, and working with these agencies, or at these agencies. So it ends up being a great experience for the students as well.Editors Note: Comments from Georgia Tech were attributed incorrectly in an earlier version of this story.
China is actively pursuing investment in Azerbaijan through the Belt and Road Initiative to take advantage of its strategic position in central Asia, experts said, even as Baku maintains rigid limits on foreign capital inflows, thwarting Chinese efforts to invest in the service sector.

Beijing has used the ongoing bilateral negotiations on Azerbaijans prolonged World Trade Organisation (WTO) membership process to open up access for projects under its belt and road plan to grow global trade.

Rather than seeking a purely export-import trade deal, China has been seeking market access commitments from other belt and road countries seeking to join the WTO since announcing its plan to grow global trade in 2013, according to international trade lawyer Julien Chaisse.

Get the latest insights and analysis from our Global Impact newsletter on the big stories originating in China.

The Azerbaijani government is seen to be slow walking its efforts to join the WTO so that it can maintain barriers that safeguard the state-supported monopolies that control the countrys underdeveloped service sector, particularly financial and business services, as well as telecommunications.

The basic idea is that China is using the WTO accession process to leverage interest towards the Belt and Road Initiative to obtain greater commitments from existing and potential [belt and road] nations

Julien Chaisse

Chaisse, who has handled some negotiations for Azerbaijan, said Chinas demands for market access were one of the stumbling blocks for Azerbaijan, even though the requests did not go against WTO rules.

Talks with China are not believed to have stopped entirely, although there are obstacles around how much market access is suitable.

The basic idea is that China is using the WTO accession process to leverage interest towards the Belt and Road Initiative to obtain greater commitments from existing and potential [belt and road] nations. China is not offering any [trade deal] as part of WTO accession but  on the contrary China is requesting market access commitments from candidate countries such as Azerbaijan, Chaisse said.

Story continues

Chinas trade commitments from potential accession countries are becoming more pronounced since the [Belt and Road Initiative] launch in 2013, with increasing and sometimes onerous expectations of the acceding countries.

The main belt and road project involving Azerbaijan is the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, a land transport network stretching from China and Southeast Asia to Europe, part of Chinas effort to replicate the ancient Silk Road route between China, the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

Chinas focus on Azerbaijan started with its oil and gas resources before the launch of the belt and road strategy, Anar Valiyev, a Baku-based public affairs researcher, said, although it was the Belt and Road Initiative that really kicked off its interest some five years ago.

Azerbaijan State University of Economics lecturer Bahruz Babayev said Azerbaijan, located at the crossroads of the East and West, offers China an advantageous location and logistic opportunities to accommodate Chinese exports coming through Central Asia and the Caspian Sea.

And the [Belt and Road Initiative] overlaps with the strategic interests of Azerbaijan, therefore it is perceived as a welcome initiative, he said.

It is seen locally as a mutual win for both countries, with the plan enabling Azerbaijan to boost its domestic market particularly as a transit hub, Babayev added.

The Azerbaijani market is highly monopolistic. Thus, it creates unfavourable conditions for everyone

Anar Valiyev

Aside from the exports of oil and gas, Azerbaijan wants to offer transport services such as port and rail facilities for shipments moving between western China and Europe on the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route.

Transport time from China to Europe along the so-called middle corridor, one of the six official routes of the New Silk Road, is significantly quicker than transport by sea, as well as offering an alternative to the route through Russia.

Current government policy in Azerbaijan is therefore both a blessing and a curse for China in that it provides support for the belt and road strategy, but also shuts out Chinas market access efforts that would be boosted by WTO membership.

And even if Azerbaijan is willing to offer more access, its structure of the domestic economy would complicate Chinese investment.

It is not the case that Azerbaijan does not want to give China [market] access. Simply, the Azerbaijani market is highly monopolistic, said Valiyev added. Thus, it creates unfavourable conditions for everyone.

For now, as it focuses on its own economy, Azerbaijan appears to be in no hurry to join the WTO, having started the process in 1997.

I think the time has not yet come. This is due to the fact that the bulk of our exports is still oil and gas and you do not need to be a member of the WTO to export these products, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev said in December.

Instead, our main task is to develop the non-oil sector, increase local production, and protect our domestic market. If we become a member of the WTO, our producers may face major problems. It is possible that large quantities of low-quality imported products will come to Azerbaijan and take market share, causing harm to local producers.

The coronavirus outbreak has also put another spanner in the works on the WTO membership, as Azerbaijan is now focusing on deepening its oil and gas sales to Europe, Babayev from the Azerbaijan State University of Economics said.

We are selling [more] oil and gas to Europe in the next three months  we would be interested in the WTO, but it probably wont happen in the next five years, Babayev said.

China does not have a political agenda in the region due to its geographical distance. Chinese projects are therefore considered in purely economic terms

Anar Valiyev

Azerbaijans business sector, though, would welcome more Chinese investments, according to Baku-based public affairs researcher Valiyev.

There are currently around 119 companies in Azerbaijan relying on Chinese capital, with one of the most recent, a US$300 million injection into a tyre factory in Azerbaijan by the China National Electric Engineering Company, which was signed during the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in April 2019.

Both the Azerbaijani public and political establishment contend that China does not have a political agenda in the region due to its geographical distance. Chinese projects are therefore considered in purely economic terms, Valiyev added.

Baku-based carpet maker and distributor Murad Muradov said his main interest was in securing more capital to expand his business.

Of course if the [WTO membership] brings additional foreign investment to Azerbaijan, the membership would [also] be good, he said.

More from South China Morning Post:

This article China working with Azerbaijan on belt and road transport route even as Baku restricts investment first appeared on South China Morning Post

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SPRINGFIELD  Federal prosecutors said Monday they still expect to file additional charges against former state Rep. Luis Arroyo, D-Chicago, and a judge scheduled a hearing in 60 days so that Arroyos defense attorney has time to review voluminous information in the case.

During a brief status hearing that was conducted by telephone Monday, U.S. District Judge Steven Seeger scheduled the next hearing for 10:15 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27.

Arroyo did not take part in Mondays hearing. He was represented by his defense attorney, Michael Gillespie.

We do still have that expectation, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Stetler said during the hearing. Thats (been) communicated with Mr. Gillespie on other issues as well. My understanding is that hes still working his way through some voluminous discovery. The government has also agreed to provide some supplemental discovery to the defense.

Prosecutors first indicated in June that additional, related charges could be forthcoming.

Arroyo was charged in October 2019 with one felony count of bribery for allegedly attempting to pay $2,500 to an unnamed state senator, with promises of more to come, in exchange for the senators support of gambling legislation that would have benefitted one of Arroyos lobbying clients. The senator was wearing a wire at the time for federal investigators.

Chicago-area media outlets, citing unnamed sources, have reported that the unnamed state senator was Terry Link, a Democrat from Indian Creek in Lake County, although Link has strongly denied any involvement. Link was recently charged in an unrelated case with tax evasion for filing a false 2016 federal tax return.

Arroyo has pleaded not guilty to his charges, but he resigned his office Nov. 1, just ahead of a special House investigative hearing to determine whether he should be expelled from the General Assembly.

In addition to serving in the Illinois House, Arroyo operated a lobbying business that lobbied the city of Chicago on various matters. According to court documents, Arroyo was pushing for legislation to authorize the use of sweepstakes machines  video gaming devices that are similar to slot machines but which have not specifically been legalized in Illinois.

The criminal charge against Arroyo flowed out of a sprawling federal investigation into alleged political corruption that has focused on Chicago-area Democrats. That probe has also renewed calls in the General Assembly for sweeping ethics reform in the General Assembly, but lawmakers so far have not enacted any substantive legislation.

During their fall veto session last year, lawmakers passed a bill establishing a Joint Commission on Ethics and Lobbying Reform, which was supposed to issue a report with recommendations for reform in March, but its work was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Monday, House Republicans demanded meetings of that commission resume immediately.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:20:53|Editor: huaxia

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NEW DELHI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Indian government Monday signed an agreement worth 500 million U.S. dollars with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to improve the network capacity, service quality and safety of the suburban railway system in Mumbai, the capital city of Maharashtra, officials said.

"The government of India, the government of Maharashtra, Mumbai Railway Vikas (development) Corporation and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) today signed a loan agreement for a 500 million U.S. dollars Mumbai Urban Transport Project-III to improve the network capacity, service quality and safety of the suburban railway system in Mumbai," a statement issued by the Ministry of Finance said.

According to officials, the project is expected to increase network capacity in the region with the reduction in journey time and fatal accidents of commuters.

"This project will assist in improved mobility, service quality and safety of passengers of the suburban railway system of Mumbai, by providing faster, more reliable and higher quality transport services compared to road-based transport," said Sameer Kumar Khare, a senior official from the finance ministry.

"This project represents another major step in supporting our member countries in their efforts to provide transport capacity while removing transport bottlenecks and thus improving the daily commuting experience of millions of Mumbaikars (residents of Mumbai)," AIIB Vice President D J Pandian said. Enditem
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Nam Tai Property Inc. ("Nam Tai" or the "Company") (NYSE Symbol: NTP) is pleased to announce that Towers A, B and C of Nam Tai Technology Center have received Gold precertification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) v4 Building Design and Construction: Core and Shell Development (CS) rating system. This precertification represents a strong endorsement of the Company's commitment to high-performance green building and acknowledges the efforts Nam Tai has made on this important development project.

"We are pleased to have received this precertification, which represents a recognition of our commitment to provide tenants with a healthy, comfortable, environmentally friendly, intelligent and safe business environment," said Ying Chi Kwok, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer, "We have long been advocates of green development, low carbon impact and the health and well-being of our tenants, and are glad to see the market and the industry continue to embrace these important values. Our goal is for Nam Tai Technology Center to embody these concepts by implementing practical, measurable strategies and solutions to achieve high performance and natural resource savings. This includes the integration of environmentally friendly processes, materials, resources, water savings, efficiency enhancements and more, creating an overall atmosphere of health and indoor environmental quality. Going forward, Nam Tai will continue to strive to be the new benchmark for eco-friendly project development to provide the best possible office environment for our tenants with the least ecological impact."

Upon completion, Nam Tai Technology Center will utilize cutting-edge outdoor air volume monitoring system, carbon dioxide detection systems and variable refrigerant volume air conditioning systems to create a healthy, comfortable and efficient indoor environment. The estimated comprehensive energy saving rate is expected to reach 19% under the LEED energy efficiency optimization framework. This will be achieved through optimized equipment selection and control procedures and by constraining the level of energy consumption within the standard range set by Shenzhen City, which will also reduce operation and maintenance costs. Water conservation and efficiency will also be improved through the use of non-traditional water sources and the adoption of lower water flow appliances, with the indoor water saving rate expected to reach 45% compared with the LEED baseline building.

Nam Tai Technology Center commenced construction of the main structure in July 2019 and obtained the Property Ownership Certificate in November 2019. Construction of the Center's basement and main structure is currently ongoing. The completed project will include three industrial office buildings, one dormitory and additional business space, and, once completed, the Company expects that Nam Tai Technology Center will receive LEED gold certification.

About LEED

The LEED rating system, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, is the foremost program for buildings, homes and communities that are designed, constructed, maintained and operated for improved environmental and human health performance. A building can achieve LEED certification under various rating systems of LEED after undergoing a technically rigorous process, including the incorporation of green strategies to achieve enhanced efficiency and healthy indoor environments. Through energy savings, water reservation, CO2 emission reduction, and improvement of indoor environment quality, resource services and other aspects, this process is fundamentally changing the design, construction and operation of buildings and communities.

About Nam Tai Property Inc.

We are a real estate developer and operator, mainly conducting business in Mainland China. Our main land resources are located in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area ("Greater Bay Area") and Wuxi, China, of which the three plots in Shenzhen will be developed into Nam Tai Inno Park, Nam Tai Technology Center and Nam Tai Inno Valley. We plan to build these technology parks into landmark parks in the region and provide high-quality industrial offices, industrial service spaces and supporting dormitories to the tenants. Based on the experience of developing and operating technology parks and an industrial relationship network accumulated over the past 40 years, we have also exported the operation model of technology parks to other industrial properties. Through an asset-light model, we have leased industrial properties for repositioning and business invitation. We will also expand the commercial and residential property business in China as an auxiliary development strategy of the Company. As the growth prospects of China maintain, we shall seize development opportunities in the Greater Bay Area and other first- and second-tier cities in China, and continue to strengthen and expand the business of industrial real estate, and commercial and residential properties. Nam Tai Property Inc. is a corporation registered in the British Virgin Islands and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (Symbol: "NTP"). Please refer to our corporate website (www.namtai.com) or the SEC website (www.sec.gov) for our press releases and financial statements.

Forward-looking Statement and Factors that Could Cause our Share Price to Decline

Certain statements included in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "might", "can", "could", "will", "would", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "forecast", "intend", "plan", "seek", or "timetable". These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, may include projections of our future financial performance based on our growth strategies and anticipated trends in our business and the industry in which we operate. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations about future events. There are several factors, many beyond our control, which could cause results to differ materially from our expectation. These risk factors are described in our Annual Report on Form 20-F and in our Current Reports filed on Form 6-K from time to time and are incorporated herein by reference. Any of these factors could, by itself, or together with one or more other factors, adversely affect our business, results of operations or financial condition. There may also be other factors currently unknown to us, or have not been described by us, that could cause our results to differ from our expectations. Although we believe the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. These forward-looking statements apply only as of the date of this announcement; as such, they should not be unduly relied upon as circumstances change. Except as required by law, we are not obligated, and we undertake no obligation, to release publicly any revisions to these forward-looking statements that might reflect events or circumstance occurring after the date of this press release or those that might reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

SOURCE Nam Tai Property Inc.

Related Links

http://www.namtai.com


URBANA, Ill. - Chances are you've heard of or even taken probiotics: supplements delivering "good microbes" to the gut, providing a wide range of health benefits. If you're really up on your gut health, you may also be aware of prebiotics: supplements designed to fuel the good microbes already living in our guts.

The next wave of gut-health supplements, known as synbiotics, essentially combine pre- and probiotics. To keep research and development efforts on the right track, an international panel of experts - including two from the University of Illinois - recently redefined the term and developed guidelines on the scientific investigation of the supplements.

The consensus report, published in Nature Reviews: Gastroenterology & Hepatology, is expected to serve as the definitive reference in the development of new synbiotic products.

"Synbiotics are starting to gain traction in the marketplace, but there's a lot of confusion around the term, even among scientists," says Kelly Swanson, consensus panel chair and professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at Illinois. "The panel's main goal was to clarify what synbiotics are and provide guidance for future research and innovation."

The general idea of synbiotics was first proposed in 1995 when prebiotics were defined. But the concept was left open to interpretation, and since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates supplements loosely, companies can sell products that may or may not provide health benefits.

"This consensus statement provides guidance for different stakeholders, including scientists in academia and industry, consumers, and even journalists. We want to remind each group that these terms should be used consistently, avoiding sensationalizing or overstating health claims," says Hannah Holscher, panel member and assistant professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Illinois.

The updated definition for synbiotics is "a mixture comprising live microorganisms and substrate(s) selectively utilized by host microorganisms that confers a health benefit on the host."

The terms prebiotic and probiotic have their own definitions and standards. By omitting those specific terms from the definition of synbiotic, the expert panel allows for the use of microorganisms and selectively utilized substrates that may work together to elicit a health benefit but may not fit the definitions of pre- and probiotics when administered independently.

"The old definition of synbiotic included pre- and probiotics, which may have restricted innovation," Holscher explains.

Pre- and probiotics can still be combined under the new definition, as long as they're tested together and shown to still provide positive, if not necessarily related, health outcomes. For example, a prebiotic might aid in digestive health while a probiotic may boost immunity after a flu vaccine. As long as they still provide those benefits in the host, they can be considered complementary synbiotics.

"The key there is testing. Even if the pre- and probiotics work separately, there could be some antagonism when put together. So really, they need be tested together in the target animal or human. We don't want companies just randomly throwing things together," Swanson says.

In contrast, the ingredients in synergistic synbiotics are additive, working together to produce a single, targeted health benefit. These are most likely to be made with novel ingredients not already categorized under the current definitions of pre- and probiotics.

"In synergistic synbiotics, the substrate would support probiotic survival," Holscher says. "For example, providing an energy source for the probiotic or changing the microbiome to support the survival of the probiotic."

In either case, testing the ingredients together is critical. The consensus panel lays out testing protocols for multiple hosts, including humans, pets, and livestock animals, and encourages researchers to consider the effects of age, health status, sex, and other important factors.

With better guiding documentation, the market for synbiotics is likely to grow. But before plunging into the new supplements, the researchers advise consumers to consult with medical professionals to choose the right product for their specific needs.

"Just because there's a pre-, pro-, or synbiotic on the market, that doesn't mean they'll work across the board from infants to adults to geriatrics, from heart disease to gastrointestinal health. They're all really there for a specific purpose," Swanson says.

Holscher adds, "The question is not whether you should take a pre-, pro-, or synbiotic. The question is, 'what do you need those products to do?' We know a lot about the specific health outcomes of these products, so it's a matter of finding what you need rather than thinking of them as a blanket cure-all."

###

The article, "The International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP) consensus statement on the definition and scope of synbiotics," is published in Nature Reviews: Gastroenterology & Hepatology [DOI: 10.1038/s41575-020-0344-2]. Authors include Kelly Swanson, Glenn Gibson, Robert Hutkins, Raylene Reimer, Gregor Reid, Kristin Verbeke, Karen Scott, Hannah Holscher, Meghan Azad, Nathalie Delzenne, and Mary Ellen Sanders. The panel was supported by the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics.

The Department of Animal Sciences and the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition are in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois.
WASHINGTON: Kellyanne Conways departure from the White House comes at an inopportune time for President Donald Trump, who will be losing one of his most vocal advocates and loyal aides just months before an election expected to be close.

Conway, a counselor to the president and former campaign manager, said late Sunday that she would step down from her White House position to focus on her family life, which has been thrust into the public sphere because of sharp disagreements with her husband, George, over Trumps fitness for office.

George Conway also said he was taking a break from his Twitter account and stepping back from his role in the Lincoln Project, a group that is working to defeat the Republican president in his Nov. 3 election contest against Democrat Joe Biden.

The announcements by the couple came after their 15-year-old daughter, Claudia, said on Twitter that she was seeking emancipation." Claudia has been an outspoken critic on social media about her parents views.

Kellyanne Conway has been one of Trumps longest-serving aides in a White House that has experienced multiple waves of turnover and personnel drama during the former New York businessmans time in office.

It will be a big hole, a big blow to us," White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told CBS News in an interview on Monday. He said the decision was all about making a priority for family. Thats what this president is all about. Thats what Kellyanne Conways about."

Trump trails Biden in public opinion polls ahead of the election. The presidents campaign is hoping to regain momentum during the four-day Republican National Convention, starting on Monday, at which Conway has said she was slated to speak.

Conway acknowledged differences with her husband but said the two agreed about caring for their children.

We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids. Our four children are teens and tweens starting a new academic year, in middle school and high school, remotely from home for at least a few months," she said in a statement.

Conway, who has been involved in leading the administrations efforts to address opioid addiction, has recently been a part of the presidents coronavirus task force and an advocate for reopening schools.

George Conway, a conservative lawyer who co-founded the Lincoln Project, said he remained passionate about its mission.

In a public feud with Kellyanne Conways spouse last year, Trump called him a wack job" and a husband from hell", prompting George Conway to say Trump was mentally unfit for his office.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
President Donald Trump pauses while speaking during a media briefing in the James Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington on Aug. 23, 2020. (Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

Trumps Second-Term Agenda Includes Ending Reliance on China, Illegal Immigration

President Donald Trump would push to stop Americas reliance on China and end illegal immigration if elected to a second term, according to an agenda released by his campaign on Sunday.

The set of core priorities for a second term includes action on jobs, COVID-19, and healthcare.

Trump wants to create 10 million new jobs in 10 months, enact fair trade deals that protect American jobs, and expand opportunity zones.

The goal of developing a vaccine for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus by the end of the year was reiterated, along with what appeared to be a new priority: returning to normal in 2021.

Ending reliance on China includes giving tax credits to companies that bring back jobs from the country, not giving federal contracts to businesses that outsource to China, and holding China fully accountable for allowing the CCP virus to spread around the world, according to the agenda.

Trump told Fox News in an interview released earlier Sunday that the United States could decouple from China.

Trump would also work toward blocking illegal immigrants from becoming eligible for taxpayer-funded welfare, healthcare, and free college tuition as part of a larger plan to extinguish illegal immigration, or people entering the country without permission, which is currently a misdemeanor.

Other priorities in that sphere include mandatory deportation for non-citizen gang members, requiring new immigrants to be able to support themselves financially, and ending so-called sanctuary cities, which have lax enforcement of immigration laws.

Trump will also work on bringing troops home from around the world, establishing a permanent presence on the moon, and holding violent extremist groups like Antifa to account.

President Trumps boundless optimism and certainty in Americas greatness is reflected in his second-term goals and stands in stark contrast to the gloomy vision of America projected by Joe Biden and Democrats, the Trump campaign said in a statement.

Former Vice President Joe Biden accepts the Democratic presidential nomination during a speech delivered for the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention from the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., on Aug. 20, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Trump told Fox that he will deliver a very, very positive message during the upcoming Republican National Convention.

Over the weekend, the Republican National Committee (RNC) said it unanimously voted to forgo convening a committee to update its platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement.

If the committee had met, it would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the partys strong support for President Donald Trump and his administration, the RNC said in a resolution (pdf).

Joe Bidens campaign didnt respond to a request for comment.

The Democratic presidential nominee said in his Democratic National Convention speech last week that he would implement a national strategy to combat COVID-19, including developing and deploying rapid tests and producing medical supplies and protective equipment in America versus China or other countries.

Biden promised to create 5 million new manufacturing and technology jobs. And he said hed build on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The nominee previously said hed reinstate the individual mandate, which forced Americans without health insurance to pay a tax.

Other priorities outlined on Bidens campaign website include ending the opioid crisis, making community college free for all families earning below $125,000, and reversing essentially all of the actions Trump has taken on immigration.
A group of people on Saturday, besieged the house of Private Legal practitioner, Mr. Ishmael Kofi Tekyi Turkson pleading with him to contest the Agona West Parliamentary Election as an Independent Candidate in the upcoming December 7, polls.



According to them, they believe that Lawyer Turkson was the one and only person who could salvage Agona West Constituency from its present state.



The group made up of chiefs, artisans, market women, businessmen and women, clergy, the unemployed youth and supporters of different political spheres converged in his house to persuade him to represent them in parliament.



Mr Kofi Mensah, spokesperson, said Lawyer Turkson had the pedigree to unify and develop the area because he is a visionary leader and also understood the role education played in development.



Lawyer Turkson is an inspirer to the whole Agona West Constituency, he added.



According to Mr Mensah, the candidature of Lawyer Turkson would go a long way to boost the confidence of the entire Agonaman, because he grew up from Swedru Zongo and had practiced as a lawyer for over three decades.



He described Mr Turkosn, a former Assemblyman for Dwenho Electoral Area, a surburb of Swedru as a disciplined man who during his tenure as an Assemblyman, run a transparent administration and allowed himself to be audited.



He left a good legacy worthy of emulation and also an indelible mark as a former Regional Chairman of a political party.



The Spokesperson said Lawyer Turksons excellent performance in local governance alone was enviable, inspiring many to vouch for him to do the work, he said.



Mr Mensah stated that the Lawyer was not only affable but also a team player, seen as a redeemer who could develop the Constituency to greater heights.



He urged the people of Agona West to vote him as Member of Parliament (MP) in the upcoming December 7, polls.



Lawyer Turkson later accepted the request and assured the group that he would not disappoint them, but run a matured and disciplined campaign devoid of insults and names calling and advised the group to imbibe that traits.

Source: GNA









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The Sultan of Sokoto, Saad Abubakar has paid a private visit to the Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai. The Sultan, upon his arrival...





The Sultan of Sokoto, Saad Abubakar has paid a private visit to the Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai.

The Sultan, upon his arrival at the Government House, held a closed-door meeting with Governor El-Rufai.

Also in the meeting were some government officials including the Senator representing Kaduna North in the National Assembly, Suleiman Abdu-Kwari.

The Sultans visit comes barely 24 hours after Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the former Emir of Kano, visited the Governor to discuss issues bothering on security.

El-Rufai disclosed that the meeting with the Sultan was to discuss the security challenges in Southern Kaduna and other parts of the state.

He said he received advice and encouragement from the Sultan towards finding a lasting solution to the security challenges in the state.

The Governor said he appreciates the Sultan for his fatherly visit and support in ensuring that peace returns to the state.

Communities in Southern Kaduna have recently witnessed a surge in violent attacks by bandits, leaving several people dead and properties destroyed.
Aerobic exercise clearly benefits young adults with major depression, and a Rutgers-led study suggests it may be possible to predict those who would benefit from behavioral therapy with exercise.

"Our study needs to be replicated, but the precision medicine approach of predicting who may or may not benefit from exercise as an antidepressant is provocative," said senior author Brandon L. Alderman, an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "We also need to know whether exercise has a similar antidepressant effect in younger adolescents and in adults with more treatment-resistant forms of depression who have not responded well to traditional treatments, including antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy."

Unique to this precision medicine study, published in the journal Psychological Medicine, is an assessment of cognitive control and reward-related brain activity, two facets of brain function that are impaired in people with depression. Like previous studies, this one showed that aerobic exercise helps young adults with major depression.

Cognitive control means processes that allow adjustments in behavior to help achieve goals and resist distractions. Reward processing (or reward-related brain activity) reflects the response to rewarding stimuli or outcomes and the ability to process and then modulate your response to positive and negative outcomes, such as loss. Deficits in reward processing have been linked to multiple psychiatric conditions, including major depression, and may reflect anhedonia - the loss of interest in or inability to experience pleasure in cases of depression.

Many people with major depression, a complex disease, do not respond favorably to evidence-based treatments. Depression symptoms include feelings of hopelessness, irritability, fatigue, difficulty concentrating and thoughts of suicide, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. People suffering from depression often seek effective treatment using a trial-and-error approach. They move in and out of various treatments, including antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapies, according to Alderman.

The Rutgers-led team studied 66 young adults with major depression, focusing on aerobic exercise and its impact on depressive symptoms. Three times a week for eight weeks, some participants did moderate-intensity aerobic exercise and others did light-intensity stretching. Depression symptoms were reduced by 55 percent in the aerobic exercise group versus 31 percent in the light-intensity stretching group.

While aerobic exercise did not influence reward processing or cognitive control, people with better reward processing when the study began were more likely to successfully respond to exercise treatment.

###

The lead author is C.J. Brush, who earned a doctorate at Rutgers and is now at Florida State University. Rutgers co-authors include Anthony J. Bocchine and Andrew A. Ude, both doctoral students, and Kristina M. Muniz, a former undergraduate research assistant who is now at the University of Virginia Health System. A scientist at Purdue University contributed to the study.
In May, Toronto kindergarten teacher Maija Kimens was already preparing for a return to school in September amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

She brainstormed solutions for her classroom: purchasing toy dividers, individual Ziploc bags for each student, and a button with a picture of her face to remind children what she looks like while shes wearing a mask.

Kimens always invested personal funds in the classroom, she said. To her, it was a home away from home.

But by late June, the 54-year-old teacher had stored those items away for good.

Kimens said she made the abrupt decision to retire early from her 32-year career because of safety concerns after Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced Ontarios early back-to-school plan, which included three different scenarios for a safe return to classes.

The government demonstrated that their approach is very discombobulated, Kimens said, adding the information teachers received was vague.

She was worried about the impact on students, and also feared catching COVID-19 and spreading it to her immunocompromised parents, who are in their 80s, as well as her 60-year-old husband.

Many teachers and parents have voiced similar concerns for their own families, pointing to overcrowded classrooms, limited ventilation in older buildings and a lack of clarity on how each school will implement safety measures in classes and other common spaces.

For Kimens, Ontarios decision to send younger children in particular back to school in September amid the uncertainty was overwhelming.

Im still having sleepless nights, Kimens said in retirement. Im very worried, anxious and concerned about the welfare of the staff and students in the school.

Having worked in a few different Toronto schools, she recalled seeing classrooms that had no air conditioning, some with windows that barely opened, and others with no windows at all. She also worries about how many people each child will come into contact with during the school day.

The reality is any staff or child in school will be basically in a rotating Spirograph, Kimens said.

Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO), said Kimens concerns have been echoed by many in the 83,000-member union through letters sent to him regularly.

A survey conducted over the summer by ETFO, Hammond added, revealed that around 70 per cent of Ontario elementary school teachers are anxious about returning to the classroom.

Theyre concerned about the conditions theyre going to be teaching under, Hammond said, adding teachers have expressed worry about their own mental health and well-being as back to school unfolds in September.

The choice to retire for Kimens was not an easy one: It took me a good half-hour to hit send on my resignation letter, because it was a very tough, emotional decision.

She isnt alone.

In the United States, a USA Today/Ipsos poll in May found that 20 per cent of American teachers likely wouldnt return to the classroom if schools reopen in the fall, while 10 per cent said they were considering leaving the profession altogether in an EdWeek Research Center poll around the same time.

There have been no similar surveys in Canada, though Dan Madge, a spokesperson for the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, said in an email that retirements are actually down slightly compared to recent years. The number of retirements we see fluctuates from year-to-year based on a number of factors personal to each member, he said.

Some teachers are considering taking an unpaid leave instead of leaving the profession altogether, said Harvey Bischof, president of the 60,000-member Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF).

Im well aware of members who are looking to work remotely if at all possible and others who, absent that opportunity, would not return and take unpaid leave, Bischof said. He added, however, that those options are extremely limiting for teachers.

For the vast majority of families, they cant afford to go without that income, Bischof said. What it means is that their choices get narrowed down drastically, which in many cases means returning to work under conditions they dont feel safe in.

Bischof said he wouldnt be surprised if educators choose not to return or retire later in the year. It all points to a plan that simply hasnt inspired sufficient confidence in educators or in parents, he said.

Based on conversations with colleagues, Kimens thinks the number of retiring teachers could increase by December.

It will really depend on their school, their school board, school community and how the pandemic unfolds as the school year progresses, she said.

She hopes school boards will not only address the concerns of teachers in the classroom, but also provide resources to support their mental health and well-being: I think thats an area that was overlooked even before COVID  We need to be feeling sound in order to help our communities cope with this.

Hammond said most school boards have an employee assistance program that provides access to psychiatrists, psychologists or counsellors. They also have mental health benefits through their Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan.

He acknowledges those resources are limited, however, when looking at the broad effect of COVID-19 on teachers mental health.

ETFO has since been lobbying for the creation of a trauma care program that can be accessed by teachers after the pandemic subsides, Hammond said.

There has since been no commitment yet by the Ontario government to create this program, Hammond said. But the union will continue to ask the province for dedicated support for teachers mental health.

Kimens realizes that retiring early is a luxury not many teachers can afford. Shes lucky, she says, that her mortgage is paid off, her children have finished university and her husband is retired.

Our lifeboats are very different, Kimens said. Some of us have lifeboats with very tangible supports  and others have lifeboats that are sinking.
The World Tourism Organisation's (UNWTO) Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili said the organisation is willing to cooperate with Egypt to ensure the optimal benefit from Egypts tourist destinations.

The organisation wants to benefit from the Egyptian model to develop tourism through comprehensive institutional reform, the chief of the UN body told Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi during a meeting in Cairo on Monday.

Pololikashvili, chief of the UNWTO, the United Nations agency responsible for promoting tourism, has affirmed the organisation's willingness to foster cooperation with Egypt and to help ensure the optimal use of Egypts tourist attractions, the Egyptian presidency stated.

Egypt has resumed international flights on 1 July after three months of suspension due to the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, adopting a host of strict preventive measures.

Pololikashvili hailed Egypt's efforts to gradually restore foreign tourism.

He highlighted Egypts "unprecedented support" of the tourism sector -- being a vital pillar of the Egyptian economy -- including the facilities and incentives provided for investors to enable them to deal with the pandemic with the least losses possible.

El-Sisi welcomed Pololikashvili's visit, which is his first outside Europe since the spread of the pandemic.

The president reviewed with the Georgian chief the strategy Egypt has adopted to revive tourism in accordance with precautionary measures set by the countrys tourism ministry in coordination with the relevant authorities.

The Egyptian strategy aims at reviving tourism while ensuring the safety of tourists and workers in the sector, El-Sisi noted.

He explained Egypt has taken structural measures to rejuvenate tourism, such as merging the ministries of tourism and antiquities during the latest cabinet reshuffle in late 2019. It also implemented a number of projects in the sector, such as Galala city in the northeastern governorate of Suez, New Alamein city in the northwestern governorate of Matrouh, and the Arts and Culture City in the New Administrative Capital, east Cairo.

The projects also include Gizas Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Old Cairos Fustat, and a religious project, named The Greater Disclosure over the Land of Peace in the Sinai Peninsula.

The president hailed UNWTOs continuous support of the tourism sector regionally and internationally and its efforts to revive tourism after it was hard-hit by the spread of the coronavirus.

El-Sisi and Pololikashvili reviewed a number of prominent projects in Egypt, including various tourism attractions in new urban communities, as well as numerous museums and the project to develop historical Cairo, the Egyptian presidency spokesman said, highlighting the role of these projects in promoting Egypt's cultural and historical heritage.

Pololikashvili said he saw some of the mega projects that have been implemented in line with the highest international standards in tourism.

The meeting, which was attended by tourism and antiquities minister Khaled El-Anany, was followed by another with Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly.

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New virus cases with unknown infection routes, coupled with the pace of virus spread in South Korea, are emerging as major challenges in the country's fight to curb nationwide outbreaks.



The country's daily new virus cases have been in the triple digits for 11 consecutive days. What is worrisome is that the number of untraceable virus cases has been piling up at alarming rates, further complicating health authorities' efforts to trace and isolate potential cases.



South Korea reported 397 coronavirus cases, the highest total in more than five months, on Sunday. The number of additional new coronavirus cases sharply slowed to below 300 on Monday, but the country is still bogged down with a series of cluster infections continuing in the greater Seoul area and other major cities.



Jeong Eun-kyeong, the director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), has said that the peak has yet to come citing the large number of cases with unknown infection routes as a major risk factor.



"Investigation into these cases could lead to confirmation of other cluster infections, so I would say the epidemic is still at a critical situation, and we expect the number of confirmed patients to continue to increase for a while," she said in a daily briefing on Sunday.



The number of patients with unknown infection routes came to 451 from Aug. 9-22, or 18.5 percent of the total 2,440 cases confirmed during the cited period, according to the KCDC.



The number is up from 8.3 percent recorded in the previous two weeks, when 39 of the 470 newly confirmed COVID-19 patients had unknown transmission routes.













In the past week alone, an average of 268.4 daily cases was reported, and the ratio of untraceable cases reached 20.2 percent.



Health authorities said it is a sign that control over the virus spread may be tougher than before.



The spike in the number of elderly patients is another source of concern as they are more vulnerable to the new virus.



Of the patients identified in the past two weeks, 773, or 32 percent, were aged 65 or older. The number of COVID-19 patients in critical condition also rose by two to 32 on Monday.



Since Aug. 14, the country has witnessed spiking cases in the greater Seoul area, mostly traced to a conservative protestant church in Seoul and an anti-government march on the Aug. 15 Liberation Day.



Over the past 11 days, a whopping 2,893 new cases were identified across the nation.



The latest uptick in the number of new infections has been ringing an alarm bell as they were mostly reported from Seoul and its surrounding Gyeonggi Province, home to half of the country's 51 million people.



With all of South Korea placed under Level 2 in the three-tier social distancing system now, health authorities said they will be forced to consider raising it to the highest notch unless the spread of the virus is contained this week.



"We are currently facing a serious situation on the verge of a large-scale nationwide pandemic," Jeong said, urging citizens to stay home and follow the social distancing guidelines. (Yonhap)
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.
The White House in Washington, D.C. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A majority of stock market strategists polled by CNBC expect Democratic candidate Joe Biden to win the U.S. presidential race  but they're significantly split on what the election would mean for stocks. Fourteen of 20 strategists surveyed by CNBC picked a Biden victory over Donald Trump. Half of the 20 strategists expect the S&P 500 to decline in the first month following election day  though not all those who foresee a stock market slide picked Biden. Five of the 20 expect a rally, four predicted a range-bound market, and one declined to answer.

Trump will carry most of the red states, however I believe he will lose Florida (and) that will carry Biden to victory. Market strategist

Eight said they expect a decline of 5% for the S&P 500 in the first month after the election  with three of that group picking Biden, two picking Trump, and two predicting a contested election. Two strategists forecast a 10% decline for the S&P 500 after the election  one of them picked Biden, the other Trump. CNBC offered the strategists anonymity in exchange for their views; 19 of the 20 respondents were based in the United States, with one based in the Asia-Pacific region. The email-based survey took place last week. The White House did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment.

Taxes

Some attributed a negative market reaction to Biden's proposed tax policies. "If Biden wins and the Democrats take the Senate, the first major move in 2021 will be lower as the taxation agenda takes shape," said one analyst.

Another said that the market reaction will depend on how the Senate races flesh out: "If Democrats win the Senate with Biden winning the (White House), then a market rally will probably be harder to come by than if Biden wins and the Senate stays Republican, as he will less likely be able to pursue his tax agenda unchecked under this scenario." Only three of the 20 survey participants expect a clear, uncontested Trump victory. One respondent said it will be the battleground state of Florida that will decide the incumbent president's future. "Trump will carry most of the red states, however I believe he will lose Florida (and) that will carry Biden to victory," that person told CNBC. While some market players are on edge because Biden's tax policies, others said they feel a comprehensive response to the health crisis and proposed investments in clean energy and infrastructure could offset negative investor sentiment.

Trump victory  or a contested election

When asked what the market's reaction to a Trump victory would be, 11 respondents said the S&P 500 could rally 5%. Another five said the market would remain range-bound. Some argued that while President Trump has been good for the capital markets during his first term, the upside for markets is capped into 2021, as his limitations on trade and immigration could hurt economic output.

A big risk for the markets remains its lofty valuations, strategists said, with news on the vaccine front offering the only support for markets at record highs. Respondents clearly were concerned about the possibility of a contested election. When asked about the implications such a conflict would pose for markets, 11 analysts predicted a decline of 5-10%, and five others said the selloff could be worse than 10% on the S&P benchmark. In 2000, the campaigns of President George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore clashed over a vote recount in the state of Florida. The Supreme Court intervened, and the contest was finally settled in early December for Bush  more than a month after election day.

Picking ranges for the S&P 500

CNBC quizzed the 20 market-watchers about where they expect 2020 to end for the S&P 500. The index finished last Friday at a record 3397.16. Eight analysts cited a range of 3400-3600 as their December 2020 target for the index. Five called for a range of 3000-3200, which would mark a decline of between roughly 6-12% from current levels. Valuations and uncertainty around the coronavirus pandemic were reasons cited for that negative outlook. Three strategists picked the S&P 500 finishing above 3600. Two said it would come in below 3000.

China
The U.S. forces have brought 40 truckloads of military gear and armored vehicles from Iraq to U.S. bases in Syria's northeastern province of Hasakah, a war watchdog reported Sunday, Trend reports citing Xinhua.

The military gear crossed into the Syrian territory through the al-Walid border crossing from the Iraqi Kurdistan region on Saturday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The shipment is the latest to reach U.S. bases in Hasakah.

On Aug. 7, U.S. armored vehicles entered areas in northeastern Syria and reached U.S. bases in the region.

The United States maintains several bases in areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Hasakah.
THE GOAL: McMaster Universitys Centre of Excellence in Protective Equipment and Materials was initially assembled in response to Canadas surging demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) when hospitals were facing massive shortages. The team of scientists, engineers and clinicians hopes to become a critical research hub for designing the next generation of PPE.

THE TEAM: At the peak, there were 25 to 30 faculty members gathered from the engineering and health sciences departments, all led by professors Ravi Selvaganapathy, Dr. Alison Fox-Robichaud and John Preston, an associate dean with the faculty of engineering.

THE TIMELINE: When university labs shut down in March, the team immediately started setting up a local PPE supply chain. By the first week of April, theyd already helped a Hamilton auto company shift its production line to make surgical masks. The team hope to shift their priorities from the emergency response centre to the forefront of innovation in the next generation of PPE, but theyre awaiting funding to take that next step.

On Thursday, March 19, Fox-Robichaud called longtime collaborator and colleague Selvaganapathy: Weve got a problem, said the director of medical education at Hamilton Health Sciences.

The World Health Organization had, only days before, declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and a worldwide shortage of PPE was imminent.

When China shut down, it was clear to us that we were gonna have a PPE supply issue, she said.

As the world struggled to contain the spread of COVID-19, the bleak realities of the global supply chain were laid bare. Factories manufacturing PPE, primarily based in Asia, were shuttered, and export bans on the life-saving gear began to ripple across continents as the virus made its way west.

Selvaganapathy and Fox-Robichaud acted quickly to assemble a team of engineers and clinicians from McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences, and they began to shift what was then an almost entirely outsourced industry to their own campus.

We were quite nimble  and so we were able to ramp up very quickly with the equipment that we had, said Selvaganapathy, the centres director and a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering.

The centre initially received $300,000 in funding from McMasters engineering department, but it has been run entirely on a volunteer basis.

And since March, the team has quickly established itself as an essential resource hub in the field of researching and developing PPE.

Weve worked with 35 to 40 companies, including government agencies  in everything from testing and validating the efficacy of PPE, to completely transitioning a companys manufacturing line, said Selvaganapathy.

The centres lab was also one of the first in Canada where masks could be tested; before that, almost all testing in North America was done in the U.S.

We are still the most comprehensive test facility available in Canada, covering the most number of tests required, Selvaganapathy said.

The long-term goal is to become a centre of innovation for next-generation PPE. Fox-Robichaud and Selvaganapathy explained what that would look like:

How have you been able to localize the supply chain so quickly?

Funding from the engineering department got the centre initially up and running, but it was the unique collaboration between the universitys engineers and physicians, who were able to test-drive new PPE in clinical settings and provide real-time feedback, that ultimately gave them an edge.

I would tell them no, this model is too tight, or yes, but can we make this one more breathable? said Fox-Robichaud.

Selvaganapathy, who was equally astonished at the pace at which the research was moving from the lab to the assembly line, cited an example of a graduate student who found a flaw with the special nebulizer equipment being used to testing mask filtration. Within two months, the student found a solution.

He spent a couple of months working on this project and made a design modification that the company, who has been in this business for 30 years, was able to benefit from.

What areas of innovation are needed?

One of the key areas the centre identified is building sustainable PPE that is both sourced and manufactured from non-fossil-fuel contributing industries, and is either biodegradable or reusable.

For the sustainable mask, we have shown that filters made of paper with a nanofibre porous film are an effective filter, Selvaganapathy said, explaining it can be added to something as biodegradable as tissue or a piece of paper.

Another key area is designing masks specifically for long-term wear, something practising physician Fox-Robichaud has a personal interest in.

I saw colleagues, health-care workers at the end of the shift with rashes on their faces from long-term wear, she said. Some actually couldnt come into work  their skin was that bad.

Most masks used in hospital settings, such as the vaunted N95, were not designed with long-term wear in mind, but rather for short-term use in industrial settings for fielding out things like silica dust and asbestos, Selvaganapathy explained.

PPE have been used for short durations of time but, in the changed scenario, we are using them all the time, he said. So that means that the design of PPE is completely different from what its currently being used for.

Fox-Robichaud also hopes to innovate masks to fit different face shapes or to accommodate different religious practices. For instance, creating a mask for women who wear hijabs or men with long beards.

I ultimately think that our engineering colleagues are rethinking an industry that has probably not changed much in the last four to five decades, she said.

What has given you hope that youre on the right path?

One of the teams earliest success in finessing a local PPE supply chain came when they partnered with the Woodbridge Group, an Ontario company that manufacturers automotive materials like foam seating and headliners.

They had a foam that was used for automotives and it had very poor filtration capacity, Selvaganapathy said. Somewhere between 45 or 50 per cent filtration from a particulate efficiency perspective. (By comparison, the filtration efficiency against particulate aerosols for the polypropylene used in N95 masks is 95 per cent or greater.)

But with some tweaking and design assistance from the centre, the company was able to repurpose the factories to supply surgical-level masks. .

Another area where the team was able to innovate on the fly was by creating a new face shield, test driven with Fox-Robichauds clinicians at Hamilton General Hospital. The new design meant that surgeons and anesthesiologists could intubate infectious patients without fear of their necks being exposed in a risky scenario that produces a lot of aerosol generation.

It combines a clear plastic for the face and a wraparound filter membrane for the surrounding head and neck region, explained Selvaganapathy. The fabrication is simple and low cost, and it can allow people to see the face clearly while providing the benefit of the mask.

What are the obstacles preventing you from achieving your long-term goals?

Run as a volunteer effort, the centre now finds itself at an inflection point, said Selvaganapathy. As labs begin to open back up, and faculty and students return to their original research, the ability to keep the pace is unsustainable. Right now, were actually turning away some companies just because we dont have the manpower to handle it at this time, he said.

Funding is whats going to take this to the next level, said Selvaganapathy, who has applied for grant money from both the federal and provincial governments. If we dont necessarily receive any other form of funding support, (the centre) will still run on a volunteer effort, but on a much smaller footprint.

Funders, said Fox-Robichaud, need to understand that this is a need thats not going to disappear.
To help respond to climate change, the federal and territorial governments are putting nearly $27 million into retrofitting public buildings in the South Baffin region with energy efficient technologies.

Canada will put $18.3 million toward the South Baffin Energy Management Project and the government of Nunavut is spending $8.6 million, according to a news release Thursday.

In the region, 45 buildings will be upgraded with new LED lighting, solar panels and water saving infrastructure. There will be 300 jobs created, says federal Northern Affairs Minister Dan Vandal.

"Over the lifetime of the project, we'll see a reduction of about 24,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the equivalent of removing approximately 7,000 cars off the road for an entire year," he said, using an estimate based on car use in Southern Canada.

The project was approved in August 2019 and is set to finish by March of 2022.

It was too close to the election to announce the project last year, Vandal said, but "the project was so important we started it without an announcement," he said.

The retrofits are part of Canada's efforts to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050.

Justin Tang/The Canadian Press

The Nunavut government is administering the upgrades through it's Department of Community and Government Services.

"The era of Ottawa deciding everything in northern territories is over," Vandal said.

Solar hot water systems

The retrofits will also see solar hot water systems installed and will help seal off windows and doors in buildings to make them more air tight. Both federal and territorial buildings will be upgraded. The money could be used in schools, Vandal said.

In a statement, Nunavut Premier Joe Savikataaq said the changes will decrease Nunavut's carbon footprint.

"The government of Nunavut is working hard to combat any negative effects by enhancing the use of reusable-energy resources and implementing new energy-efficient equipment and technologies to reduce our climate change footprint," Savikataaq said.

Vandal made the announcement on behalf of Environment and Climate Change Canada. The federal money is coming through a Low Carbon Economy Leadership Fund.

"We know climate change is occurring in the North three times faster than it is in the South," Vandal said. "The work is ongoing. The jobs are being created as we speak."
Annerino, an incoming senior at Auburn University, was already engaged with the center for some anxiety she felt during her junior year. Although she and her therapist had ended the sessions at a good place, Annerino, who rode out the first few weeks of the outbreak at home with her family, sought out the centers resources after returning to campus in April.
The longest-serving advisor to President Donald J. Trump, Kellyanne Conway received news that her 15-year-old daughter took to social media to announce that she will be pushing to be emancipated.

Im officially pushing for emancipation. buckle up because this is probably going to be public one way or another, unfortunately. Welcome to my life, Claudia Conway tweeted on Saturday after learning that her mother would speak at the Republican National Convention.

Im devastated that my mother is actually speaking at the RNC. Like, devastated beyond compare, she tweeted.

Emancipation is a legal process through which a minor child obtains a court order to end the rights and responsibilities that the child's parent owe to the child such as financial support for the child and decision-making authority over the child. There can be either a partial or complete emancipation.

im devasted that my mother is actually speaking at the RNC. like DEVASTATED beyond compare  CLAUDIA CONWAY (@claudiamconwayy) August 23, 2020

Conway announced Sunday that she would be leaving the White House at the end of the month.

She cited a need to spend time with her four children in a resignation letter she posted Sunday night. Her husband, George, had become an outspoken Trump critic and her family a subject of Washingtons rumor mill.

We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids, she wrote. For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.

im officially pushing for emancipation. buckle up because this is probably going to be public one way or another, unfortunately. welcome to my life  CLAUDIA CONWAY (@claudiamconwayy) August 23, 2020

In the District of Columbia, minors can be emancipated if certain legal requirements are met and the court finds that it is in the best interests of the minor. Once emancipated, any legal limitations that are generally attached to minors are extinguished. For example, the emancipated minor can sign a lease contract, according to D.C. Divorce Line Online.

Generally, laws prohibit minors under 16 or 17 years of age from filing a petition under any circumstances. The minor may also be required to be living on her own and be self-supporting at the time she files the petition, the D.C. legal advice website states.

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.

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Germinator provides a 100% safe and non-toxic sanitizing and disinfecting process, utilizing breakthrough technology scientifically proven to help reduce the threat of harmful bacteria and viruses. We are thrilled to have been awarded a vendor contract within TIPS, said Jeff Gill, CEO of Germinator. This contract reduces the hassle and speeds up the process for organizations, allowing us to immediately begin sanitizing and disinfecting to help facilitate a safe and efficient reopening.

A national leader in a fast-growing industry, Germinator Mobile Sanitizing and Disinfecting is proud to announce that they were recently awarded a contract by The Interlocal Purchasing System (TIPS).

Based in Texas and consisting of over 11,000 Members, The Interlocal Purchasing System, more widely known as TIPS, is a successful and growing national purchasing cooperative. TIPS is a department of Region 8 Education Service Center, a governmental entity, located in Pittsburg, Texas. When permitted by law - instead of customers expending time, money, and resources on the extensive competitive bidding process - the use of TIPS permits public entities to quickly select and purchase work directly from Germinator since the company has already been competitively procured according to applicable state and federal bid laws.

We are thrilled to have been awarded a vendor contract within TIPS, said Jeff Gill, CEO of Germinator. The current pandemic has created a difficult situation for school districts and organizations who are trying to figure out how to reopen safely and in a timely manner. This vendor contract reduces the hassle and speeds up the process for these organizations, allowing us to immediately begin thoroughly sanitizing and disinfecting to help facilitate a safe and efficient reopening.

In addition to the TIPS contract, Germinator was recently awarded a vendor contract with TexBuy Purchasing Cooperative, which enables the company to perform work for the 62 school districts in Region 16 and additional districts and entities throughout the state of Texas.

Germinator provides a 100% safe and non-toxic sanitizing and disinfecting process, utilizing breakthrough technology scientifically proven to help reduce the threat of harmful bacteria and viruses similar to the novel coronavirus. Germinator is revolutionizing the industry, recently introducing the addition of ATP monitoring to its service offerings as part of a now patent-pending methodology. ATP monitoring allows Germinator to test surfaces for the potential presence of living microorganisms in as little as 10 seconds prior to sanitizing and disinfecting.

The companys two-step process first sanitizes and disinfects surfaces and then provides surfaces with long-lasting protection against the growth of odor-causing bacteria, other types of bacteria which cause stains and discoloration, fungi such as mold and mildew, and algae.

The first step - Genesis - harnesses the power of hypochlorous acid (HOCl) to destroy bacteria, mold, mildew, viruses and odors caused by bacteria. HOCI is a non-toxic, near-neutral pH, hospital-grade sanitizer and disinfectant. The second step applies the Germinator's Shield - an invisible microbial coating that protects surfaces for an extended period of time against the growth of mold, mildew and odor-causing bacteria. Both products are EPA registered and safe for humans, pets and the environment. The companys highly trained field specialists employ best practices using electrostatic sprayers and wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as appropriate.

Upholding the highest standards of sanitization and disinfecting, Germinator makes claims that are scientifically supported and within EPA regulations. Germinators research and process are validated by the Germinator Scientific Advisory Board. The board is made up of key leaders such as Dr. Roscoe M. Moore, Jr - who was an Assistant to the United States Surgeon General for five administrations - and Dr. David Miller, the Protocol Chair of University of Rochester Center for AIDS Research Community Advisory Board.

Dr. Miller, supports Germinators process by saying, "The Germinator Genesis platform and the Shield microbial barrier application are at the forefront for facilities' remediation of infectious diseases. This allows patients, providers, consumers, and commuters to have a high degree of confidence in the facility's safety, which is an absolute necessity during the current COVID-19 pandemic."

Germinator was founded in 2015 with the vision of providing a safe, effective and non-toxic method of proper sanitizing and disinfecting for businesses and households.

The company continues to expand across the country, providing communities with a proactive solution to help free environments from harmful germs, bacteria, and viruses. With Germinator, society can now have peace of mind and the freedom to live or work in a sanitized and disinfected environment. For more information, visit http://www.thegerminator.com.


A car dealership burns after being set on fire amid rioting in Kenosha, Wis., early Aug. 24, 2020. (Drew Hernandez/@livesmattershow)

Chaos in Wisconsin City as Rioters Burn Buildings, Attack Police

Rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, burned buildings, looted stores, and attacked police officers overnight on Aug. 23.

The mayhem prompted the city and county to issue a curfew until 7 a.m.

A public safety alert urged business owners to consider closing due to numerous arm[ed] robberies and shots fired calls.

Video footage showed a number of businesses torched by rioters, including a car dealership.

The agitators clashed with police, attacking them with fireworks and other objects.

Rioters smash windows at the Kenosha County Administration Building during unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via Reuters)

At one point, a group blocked a sheriffs vehicle from moving as one brandished a rifle.

Graffiti sprayed around the city suggested Black Lives Matter activists were involved in the chaos. Rioters were chanting black lives matter over and over and over again, Drew Hernandez, an independent reporter who was on the ground, said in a video message.

Kenosha is located about 40 miles south of Milwaukee and 60 miles north of Chicago, next to Lake Michigan.

The rioting came hours after a black man, Jacob Blake, was shot by police officers when he allegedly resisted arrest. He was rushed to the hospital in serious condition.

Blakes brother told Lauren Linder, a TMJ reporter, that Blake underwent surgery and was in the intensive care unit.

Blakes family urged people to remain peaceful.

The state Department of Justice is probing the shooting.

According to court records, Blake had an arrest warrant issued in July for trespassing, third-degree sexual assault, and disorderly conduct.

Up close look at the car dealership fire set by BLM arsonists in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/Mv1CC7htiD  Drew Hernandez (@livesmattershow) August 24, 2020

BLM rioters vandalizing and looting stores in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/tGHbDzzGzu  Drew Hernandez (@livesmattershow) August 24, 2020

The Kenosha Police Department said that officers were sent to a portion of 40th Street just after 5 p.m. for a domestic incident.

That response ultimately led to an officer-involved shooting, according to police officials.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said Blake was shot in the back multiple times in broad daylight.

While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country, Evers said in a statement.

I have said all along that although we must offer our empathy, equally important is our action. In the coming days, we will demand just that of elected officials in our state who have failed to recognize the racism in our state and our country for far too long, he added later.

A man on a bike rides past a city truck on fire outside the Kenosha County Courthouse during unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via Reuters)

Everss office didnt immediately respond to an inquiry regarding the potential use of state troopers or the National Guard to quell the unrest.

Republican President Donald Trump twice over the weekend said the federal government would help states and cities deal with rioting, if officials ask for assistance.

Would bring in National Guard, end problem immediately. ASK! he wrote on Twitter about the continued mayhem in Portland, Oregon.

These riots are an antigovernment movement from the Left that are all in Democrat run cities. The mayors have got to let their police do what they know how to do. Would be very easy to suppress or, call in the Federal Government. We will solve problem fast! he wrote in another tweet.

Federal officers helped deal with anarchy in Portland in July until Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, agreed to send state troopers to assist police officers in responding to the rioting. State troopers later left after the district attorney who oversees the city announced a new policy to presumptively drop some charges against demonstrators.
South Carolinians have no way to know how many patients have died inside each of the state's hospitals, given the health department says it is not collecting the information and many hospitals are choosing to remain tight-lipped about the number of deaths inside their walls.

Patients are left with few concrete pieces of evidence they can use to decide where to seek care if they get sick. In the midst of the pandemic, it is not possible to find out whether different hospitals have done a better job than others of treating COVID-19 patients.

The Post and Courier's open records request to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control on the topic was denied. DHEC staff said hospitals' daily reports are too inconsistent to make the calculation.

The department also doesn't know the difference between a hospital refusing to answer the question on the required daily form and reporting zero deaths.

Meanwhile, research into the topic is scarce given how new the virus still is.

Dr. Shruti Gupta, a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, is one of the lead authors on a first-of-its kind study looking into mortality inside a sample of the nation's intensive care units.

The research confirmed what many have likely read in the news already: Older people; men; those with diabetes, heart disease, cancer or obesity are all at a higher risk of dying of COVID-19. But it also found that patients who went to hospitals with fewer intensive care beds had a greater likelihood of dying.

In South Carolina, those hospitals are concentrated in the state's more rural areas.

Gupta said it is difficult to speculate about why that might be, but a safe guess would be the difference in resources available to smaller hospitals. More data is needed to draw firmer conclusions. That data is difficult to come by, and Gupta said it was only possible this time around with a large research team and wide cooperation from 65 hospitals.

"It's hard to rely on public health departments to collect this level of granular data," she said.

Studying mortality on a hospital level will come down to more than simple fractions. Many factors feed into which hospital a patient chooses, how sick they are when they seek care and how well-equipped each facility is to care for its charges.

The Medical University of South Carolina agreed to share its numbers with the newspaper, and the results show a wide variance between the Charleston medical center and its outlying hospitals in Florence, Mullins, Lancaster and Chester.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, MUSC says 67 patients have died out of 563 total discharges. In Florence, its next-largest hospital, 71 patients of 362 discharges have died  a considerably higher rate.

In the month of July, Trident Health saw 44 deaths between its Summerville and North Charleston medical centers, which was "off the charts," said Dr. Lee Biggs, chief medical officer of the health system.

One problem, Biggs said, is the lack of a novel treatment for coronavirus disease. Once people enter critical condition, doctors' options fall off.

"In most facilities' experience, it's the beginning of the end," Biggs said. "Those stories that you see on television of a four- or five-week ICU stay, where a person miraculously walks out of the hospital, are a needle in the haystack. The simple reality is that for every one of those stories there's hundreds of stories where people aren't having that same experience."

That is why it is so important to heed public health warnings to wear masks and socially distance, he noted.

Colleton Medical Center, a smaller hospital connected to Trident Health through its mutual private owner, said it had seen 122 COVID-19 positive patients and 19 deaths as of Wednesday.

Further complicating the mortality numbers is the fact that hospitals will vary on their decisions to move patients into hospice or end-of-life care, which could also skew any numbers available.

Internally, hospitals are using a few tools to judge how well they're doing with COVID-19 patients, said Dr. Mitchell Siegan, chief medical officer of acute care at Roper St. Francis Healthcare.

The nonprofit health system declined to provide the number of patients who had died at its four hospitals. Siegan, however, said he would not hesitate to choose Roper St. Francis if he were in the position of a patient.

"I firmly believe you have the best chance of a good outcome by coming here," Siegan said.

He said Roper St. Francis has been taking some of the sickest patients from other hospitals, and the system now has a well-oiled COVID-19 team that includes specialists and nurses trained for the task. The hospital's participation in clinical trials also means its specialists can use experimental drugs and treatments.

Hospitals are getting better at treating COVID-19, Siegan said. Lessons learned are as simple as keeping patients from laying on their backs to improve lung function.

Prisma Health, a nonprofit system and the state's largest operator of hospitals, declined to provide death numbers to the newspaper, though it did disclose 2,553 COVID-19 patients have been hospitalized in its facilities since the beginning of the pandemic. On the question of deaths, however, a spokeswoman said they would defer to DHEC.

Editor's note: A previous version of this article stated Trident Health saw 44 COVID-19 deaths in one week; the figure is for the month of July.
Oregon Coast Aquarium Fully Re-Opens on Monday with New Exhibit

Published 08/23//20 at 4:11 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Newport, Oregon)  After months of painfully being shut down, then a soft re-opening a couple of weeks ago, Newports Oregon Coast Aquarium is ready to go full bore. The famed attraction opens up in its entirety on Monday.

We are ready and eager to have our indoor exhibits open, said Carrie Lewis, President/CEO of the Aquarium. While some areas will remain closed, such as the play area and cafe, we are eager to provide a wonderful experience for our guests, once again.

Since the initial partial opening earlier this month, only outdoor exhibits had been available. Now they have something new to show off.

During the extended closure, the team was busy remodeling a new Indo-Pacific Coral Reef exhibit. When the public returns, they will be the first to see this colorful new exhibit.

With special thanks to long-time Aquarium board member and supporter, Al Gleason, we were able to start transforming our Oregon Kelp Forest exhibit into a warm water Indo-Pacific Coral Reef, Lewis sadi. Mr. Gleason long believed that our guests should have the opportunity to see the tropical environments of the Pacific Ocean in contrast to our beautiful Oregon Coast exhibits.

Gleasons gift was matched by the aquariums dedicated volunteers who youll see talking about this exhibit on your next visit.

The Indo-Pacific has some of the most stunning and diverse reefs in the world. Attendees have the opportunity to get up close to observe fascinating animals and beautiful corals. These include the colorful tropical fish such as the yellow tang, birdnose wrasse, yellowband angelfish, sea goldies and many more, there are all kinds of shifting and shimmering fish waiting to catch your eye.

The health and well-being of our staff, volunteers, guests and animals is our top priority, said Lewis. We are limiting the number of guests per day, all tickets must be purchased online, social distancing and face coverings are required.

Meanwhile, on top of the other pandemic precautions, there is a one-way pathway throughout the aquarium, hand sanitizer stations will be along the way, and high-touch objects have been removed. The aquarium said that although Lincoln County is still in phase one, Oregon has allowed the opening of zoos and museums.

See www.aquarium.org for more information about the visitor experience and how to purchase tickets. 2820 S.E. Ferry Slip Rd., Newport, OR. aquarium.org, 541-867-3474.

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South Africa: Parliament welcomes Gauteng water interventions

The Portfolio Committee on Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation has welcomed progress made by the Department of Water and Sanitation to address the challenges of pollution in the Gauteng municipalities of Emfuleni and the City of Tshwane.

Commending the progress made in the two municipalities during a virtual meeting held on Friday, committee chairperson Machwene Semenya noted the amount of work that has been done since the committees visit to these areas a few months ago.

This follows incidents of the discharge of wastewater into both the Vaal River and the Apies River.

However, Semenya said there was a need to visit the two areas again to ascertain the veracity of the improvements that were reported on.

Regarding security of water infrastructure, Semenya urged the department to ensure that the companies appointed to secure infrastructure, including employees, are subjected to a thorough vetting process.

The credibility of the companies providing security at the infrastructure projects is of paramount importance to ensure that the right calibre is being employed, Semenya said.

In addition, the committee noted good progress made in Emfuleni Local Municipality to repair critical pump stations, and rising mains to make them compliant with their effluent discharge licence conditions.

Water and Sanitation Gauteng provincial head, Sibusiso Mthembu, said the department has made interventions relating to securing and safeguarding the infrastructure, while repairing bulk networks to eliminate spillages.

These efforts will achieve operations and maintenance levels required to minimise and stop the pollution of the Vaal River, Mthembu said.

Spillages have become a longstanding challenge to businesses and communities in the area.

Regarding the upgrade and refurbishment of the Rooiwal Wastewater Treatment Works (WWTW) in Tshwane, the committee was informed that a number of challenges had already been addressed.

These include the emptying and cleaning of digesters, as well as the stripping and removal of old filter belts and pressers at the dewatering building, which is almost complete.

The committee also noted significant work being conducted to ensure the successful completion of the refurbishment to improve the quality of the effluent being discharged into the Apies River.

Water and Sanitation Deputy Minister, David Mahlobo, thanked the committee for fostering and encouraging cooperation between the different spheres of government through the inter-governmental relations process.

Mahlobo said the role the committee played in resolving some of the impasse has made a huge impact in this regard.

He condemned the disruption of projects by people who demanded 30% of the total amount of the funds earmarked for the project, saying communities should be mobilised to also deal with acts of vandalism, which are criminal.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. Issues relating to Armenias foreign policy and reforms agenda were discussed during the meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and the ruling My Step faction members of the Parliament, Faction head Lilit Makunts told reporters.

They were ongoing discussions. We discussed foreign policy issues, the agenda of reforms and common value approaches, she said.

Makunts informed that they also discussed the coronavirus pandemic, but the meeting didnt touch upon the issue of nominating candidate for the Constitutional Court judge by the government.

Earlier today PM Nikol Pashinyan and the My Step faction members held a meeting at the headquarters of the Civil Contract party.

Reporting by Norayr Shoghikyan; Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan


24 August 2020, 7:00am, Antwerp (Berchem), Belgium: VGP NV (VGP or the Group), the Antwerp-based European provider of high-quality logistics and semi-industrial real estate, today announces the results for half-year ended 30 June 2020:

Operating performance resulting in a net profit of  196.9 million Result positively affected by the entering into a new 50:50 joint venture with Allianz Real Estate in respect of VGP Park Munchen  20.1 million worth of signed and renewed lease agreements during H1 2020, bringing total annualised rental income to  165.2 million (+6.6% YTD) 1 Delivered 12 projects for a total of 190,000 m 2 of lettable area in first half of 2020 33 projects under construction for a total of 795,000 m 2 of lettable area as of 30 June 2020 Total portfolio value increased to 3.23 billion (+16.6%YTD) 1 VGP invested in its future pipeline with 1.17 million m 2 of new land bought and a further 1.97 million m 2 committed subject to permits

Impact of Covid-19 remains limited so far All our construction activities have resumed in full The impact on rental payments is very limited: nearly all due payments were received on time with very limited rental payment reprofiling

Broadened partnership with Allianz through launch of third joint venture for VGP Park Munchen

Balance sheet further strengthened through 200.0 million capital raising reducing gearing to 35.0% as of 30 June 2020

VGPs Chief Executive Officer, Jan Van Geet, said: Despite the challenging market environment due to the various Covid-19 lockdowns, we have achieved many new milestones during the first half of 2020. Demand for our buildings remained strong resulting in a broad-based and mostly pre-let construction pipeline. Furthermore, our new joint venture with Allianz in our VGP Park Munchen has taken our cooperation to a next level and made our balance sheet stronger than ever before.

Jan Van Geet added: We have acquired a couple of big trophy land plots during the period, despite fierce competition on the market, thanks to the agility of our team and our reputation. I expect these land plots to be the main driver of value creation going forward as we already register a lot of appetite for these new locations.

Story continues

Jan Van Geet concluded: We permanently focus on opportunities to continue to expand our portfolio pipeline; besides, we are working hard to become a major supplier of renewable energy for our tenants.





FINANCIAL AND OPERATING HIGHLIGHTS

New leases signed

Signed and renewed rental income of  20.1 million driven by 200,000 m of new lease agreements signed, corresponding to  11.4 million of new annualised rental income 2

During the period for a total of 164,000 m of lease agreements were renewed corresponding to  8.8 million of annualised rental income of which 30,000 m ( 1.7 million) related to the own portfolio and 134,000 m ( 7.1 million) related to the joint ventures 3 . Renewed contracts within the joint ventures portfolio included various prolongations by 1-5 years.

Terminations represented a total of  1.2 million or 25,000 m, all within the joint ventures portfolio

The signed annualised committed leases represent  165.2 million4 (equivalent to 2.84 million m of lettable area), a 6.6% increase since December 2019.

Construction activity

A total of 12 projects completed delivering 190,000 m of lettable area, representing 9.9 million of annualised committed leases (as of 24 th of August 2020 this has increased to 311,000 m 2 of lettable area)

Additional 33 projects under construction which will create 795,000 m of future lettable area, representing 49.5 million of annualised leases once built and fully let  the portfolio under construction is 73.4% pre-let

Implications of Covid-19

VGPs business is progressing well in 2020 despite the Covid-19 pandemic. The entire VGP team has been operational throughout the crisis with full access to central systems. None of the VGP workforce has been furloughed and the Group has not taken any government support.

The lockdown measures implemented by governments across Europe to combat the spread of the virus resulted in widespread disruption across many sectors of the economy. In some cases, this has impacted the operations and cash flows of VGP's customers, which has in some limited cases affected the level of rent we were able to collect from such customer. VGP has worked constructively to support customers facing genuine cash flow challenges by offering to reschedule rental payments or reprofiling. None of our customers so far has requested to return their rented space.

Land bank has continued to expand

Acquisition of 1.17 million m of development land and a further 1.97 million m2 committed subject to permits which brings the remaining total owned and secured land bank for development to 6.89 million m, which supports 3.12 million m of future lettable area.

A further 0.85 million m of new land plots identified which are under negotiation and having a development potential of 0.41 million m of future lettable area.

Setup of new business line VGP Renewable Energy driving increase in photovoltaic investments

In July 2020, our first photovoltaic project was delivered in Nijmegen, Netherlands (1.5MWP) and further 16 photovoltaic projects are under construction for total 17.6 MWP. This is split between Germany (10.4MWP) and the Netherlands (7.2MWP). In addition, several pipeline projects are currently being identified in Germany and Spain. As of year-end 2019 we had 16.5MWP installed on VGPs roofs which are owned and operated by third parties.

Expansion of partnership with Allianz Real Estate through launch of third joint venture

In June 2020, VGP and Allianz Real Estate entered into a new 50:50 joint venture for the development of VGP Park Munchen. This is the third joint venture with Allianz Real Estate.

The managerial and governance setup of the new partnership is similar to the first two joint ventures between the two partners with VGP serving the new joint venture as its sole asset, property and development manager. Contrary to the two existing joint ventures which concentrate on the acquisition of income-generating assets developed by VGP, this new joint venture will initially be focussed on the development of VGP Park Munchen.

Once fully developed the park will consist of five logistic buildings, two stand-alone parking houses and one office building for a total gross lettable area of approx. 270,000 m 2 . The park is almost entirely pre-let to KraussMaffei Technologies and BMW. BMW has formally taken the decision to also move its competence centre for batteries to VGP Park Munchen. This will result in the park being 100% pre-let. This new lease contract is currently being exchanged with BMW.

There are currently already 3 buildings and 2 parking houses under construction. The delivery of the first building to BMW occurred at the beginning of August 2020. The subsequent completions are scheduled to occur in November 2020 (1 parking house), 1 building (currently under negotiation) by mid-2021 with all but one of the remaining buildings being delivered by November 2022. The last building is expected to be delivered by the beginning of 2026.

Balance sheet further strengthened through capital raising whilst two additional joint venture closings are anticipated before the end of the year

On 21 April 2020 VGP successfully completed an offering of new shares for a total consideration of 200.0 million by means of a private placement via an accelerated bookbuild offering to international institutional investors.

In the offering a total of 2,000,000 new shares (approximately 10.8% of VGP's outstanding shares on completion of the offering) were placed at an issue price of 100.00 per share, representing a discount of 4.58% compared to the last traded price of the Groups share on 21 April 2020 of 104.8.

In line with their pre-commitments, Little Rock SA, controlled by Mr Jan Van Geet, and VM Invest NV, controlled by Mr Bart Van Malderen, have each subscribed for 33.81% and 20.16% of the new shares respectively, and received full allocations.

In terms of further expansion with the joint ventures we anticipate two additional closings before the end of 2020. The seventh closing with VGP European Logistics (first joint venture) is anticipated with a transaction value 5 of >150 million as well as the second closing with VGP European Logistics 2 (second joint venture) with a transaction value of >  200 million

These steps will ensure VGP can maintain its financial purchasing power and to be able to finance the investment pipeline and to benefit from additional investment opportunities.

KEY FINANCIAL METRICS

Operations and results H1 2020 H1 2019 Change (%) Committed annualised rental income (mm) 165.2 129.3 27.8% IFRS Operating profit (mm) 217.9 96.1 126.7% IFRS net profit (mm) 196.9 75.0 135.7% IFRS earnings per share ( per share) 10.19 4.04 152.3%





Portfolio and balance sheet 30 Jun 20 31 Dec 19 Change (%) Portfolio value, including joint venture at 100% (mm) 3,231 2,771 16.6% Portfolio value, including joint venture at share (mm) 2,167 1,897 14.3% Occupancy ratio of standing portfolio (%) 99.9 99.8 - EPRA NAV per share ( per share) 52.42 39.89 31.4% IFRS NAV per share ( per share) 50.28 37.66 33.5% Net financial debt (mm) 685.8 604.2 13.5% Gearing6(%) 35.0 37.2 -

CONFERENCE CALL FOR INVESTORS AND ANALYSTS

VGP will host a conference call at 10:30 (CEST) on 24 August 2020

The conference call will be available on:

Belgium: 0800 58228 (toll free) / +32 (0)2 404 0659

UK: 0800 358 6377 (toll free) / +44 (0)330 336 9105

US: 866-548-4713 (toll free) / +1 323-794-2093

Confirmation Code: 3420218

A presentation is available on VGP website:

https://www.vgpparks.eu/en/investors/publications/





CONTACT DETAILS FOR INVESTORS AND MEDIA ENQUIRIES

Martijn Vlutters

(VP  Business Development & Investor Relations) Tel: +32 (0)3 289 1433 Petra Vanclova

(External Communications) Tel: +42 0 602 262 107 Anette Nachbar

Brunswick Group Tel: +49 152 288 10363

ABOUT VGP

VGP is a leading pan-European developer, manager and owner of high-quality logistics and semi-industrial real estate. VGP operates a fully integrated business model with capabilities and longstanding expertise across the value chain. The company has a development land bank (owned or committed) of 6.89 million m and the strategic focus is on the development of business parks. Founded in 1998 as a family-owned real estate developer in the Czech Republic, VGP with a staff of over 230 employees today owns and operates assets in 12 European countries directly and through three joint ventures with Allianz Real Estate (VGP European Logistics, VGP European Logistics 2 and VGP Park Munchen). As of June 2020, the Gross Asset Value of VGP, including the joint ventures at 100%, amounted to 3.23 billion and the company had a Net Asset Value (EPRA NAV) of 1,079 million. VGP is listed on Euronext Brussels and on the Prague Stock Exchange (ISIN: BE0003878957).

For more information, please visit: http://www.vgpparks.eu

Forward-looking statements: This press release may contain forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the current views of management regarding future events, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. VGP is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release considering new information, future events or otherwise. The information in this announcement does not constitute an offer to sell or an invitation to buy securities in VGP or an invitation or inducement to engage in any other investment activities. VGP disclaims any liability for statements made or published by third parties and does not undertake any obligation to correct inaccurate data, information, conclusions or opinions published by third parties in relation to this or any other press release issued by VGP.







1 Compared to 31 December 2019; inclusive of Joint Ventures at 100%

2 Of which 160,000 m ( 8.3 million) related to the own portfolio

3 Joint ventures refers to VGP European Logistics, VGP European Logistics 2 and VGP Park Munchen, All three 50:50 joint ventures with Allianz Real Estate

4 For joint venture at 100%

5 The transaction value corresponds to purchase price (at fair market value) for the completed income generating buildings which are transferred to the respective joint venture.

6 Calculated as Net debt / Total equity and liabilities





Attachment




The Israeli army on Monday said it retaliated against unrest at the border with the Gaza Strip, firing at Hamas facilities in response to incendiary balloon attacks on Sunday.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF), said military posts and underground infrastructure in Gaza belonging to Hamas were hit in retaliation.

According to Palestinian security circles and eyewitness reports, two observations posts in the Eastern parts of the cities of Rafah and Khan Younis were hit, causing material damage but no casualties.

After a coronavirus-related lull, Palestinians stepped up cross-border attacks from Gaza, including what Israel described as balloon terrorism, setting ablaze agricultural fields in Southern Israel with incendiary balloons.

However, observers believed the attacks could be a means to exert pressure on Israel to allow payments from Qatar to Gaza, as well as on Qatar to continue financially supporting the coastal enclave.

Israel suspended fuel shipments and closed its border crossings with the Gaza Strip in response to the attacks, resulting in the only power plant in the Gaza Strip being shut down for lack of fuel.

It also restricted the fishery zone on Gazas coast.

ALSO READ: Israel responds to Gaza rockets with strikes on Hamas targets

The Hamas movement that rules the Gaza Strip is considered a terrorist organisation by Israel, the U.S. and the EU.

Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War, but unilaterally pulled out its army and evacuated its settlements in the Strip in 2005.

Israel, however, continues to control Gazas borders, along with Egypt. Israel frequently closes crossings in response to rocket fire and violence along the border.

(dpa/NAN)
More than 540,000 mail ballots were rejected during primaries across 23 states this year - nearly a quarter in key battlegrounds for the fall - illustrating how missed delivery deadlines, inadvertent mistakes and uneven enforcement of the rules could disenfranchise voters and affect the outcome of the presidential election.

The rates of rejection, which in some states exceeded those of other recent elections, could make a difference in the fall if the White House contest is decided by a close margin, as it was in 2016, when Donald Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by roughly 80,000 votes.

This year, according to a tally by The Washington Post, election officials in those three states tossed out more than 60,480 ballots just during primaries, which saw significantly lower voter turnout than what is expected in the general election. The rejection figures include ballots that arrived too late to be counted or were invalidated for another reason, including voter error.

The stakes are high as the most chaotic presidential election in memory collides with a pandemic, which has led 20 states to expand or ease access to voting by mail as a public health measure.

Election experts said that the combination of the hotly contested White House race and millions of first-time mail voters could lead to a record number of ballot rejections and trigger a searing legal war over which are valid - and who is the ultimate victor.

"If the election is close, it doesn't matter how well it was run - it will be a mess," said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at MIT who studies election data.

"The two campaigns will be arguing over nonconforming ballots, which is going to run up against voters' beliefs in fair play," he said.

President Trump has already cast doubt on whether he will accept a loss to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and has repeatedly stoked unfounded fears about voting by mail. Top campaign advisers are also mapping out a post-election strategy centered in part on challenging mail ballots that do not have postmarks, as The Post previously reported.

Citing news coverage of rejected ballots last month, Trump called the situation "a mess" and predicted that the presidential race will be the "most rigged election in history."

For Democrats and voting rights advocates, rejected ballots are a serious concern because they raise the potential for many people to be disenfranchised - not because they reflect widespread corruption or election tampering.

Both sides agree that the race for the White House could come down to a fight over which mail ballots are counted.

Democratic lawyers and election officials in more than three dozen states are now pushing to limit the reasons a ballot can be rejected, which studies have found tend to disproportionately invalidate ballots from younger voters and voters of color. Recent mail backlogs at the U.S. Postal Service have put additional weight behind efforts to count ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive late, among the most common reason for rejections. While some states have changed their rules, others have not or are stuck in litigation.

The number of mail ballots rejected in 23 states in this year's primaries outstrips the nearly 319,000 mail and absentee ballots that were thrown out nationwide in the 2016 general election. The number of tossed ballots four years ago amounted to 1% of the roughly 33.4 million mail ballots cast that fall, according to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

About 195 million Americans are now eligible to cast ballots by mail for the Nov. 3 election - at least 83% of voters, according to a Post tracker. Some states are poised to begin sending voters mail ballots for the fall elections as soon as next month.

But the ease of casting a ballot from home also means more opportunities for people to make mistakes in filling out the forms, or for mail problems to delay the ballots' return to election officials.

"Any time you see a dramatic increase in participation in any kind of voting, what you also see come along with that is folks who are maybe new to that process, who aren't incredibly clear on the rules," said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat and president of the National Association of Secretaries of State.

The shift toward mail voting is also testing election systems across the country, magnifying antiquated state rules about ballot rejection and the lack of a process in many jurisdictions for voters to fix problems with their ballots.

Studies have found that votes cast by mail, a process that involves several steps and more opportunity for error, are more likely to be rejected than those cast in person at polling locations.

This year, voting in New York emerged as a cautionary tale after problems with absentee ballots plunged two congressional races into chaos for six weeks before winners were declared. In the 12th Congressional District, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat, defeated two-time challenger Suraj Patel by about 3,700 votes; roughly 13,000 ballots were declared invalid in the race, many with missing or late postmarks.

The record use of mail balloting this year has meant that many Americans are grappling for the first time with the idea that their vote did not count.

Among them was Philadelphia resident Stephanie Fusco, 26, who got a notice in June that the ballot she cast in Pennsylvania's presidential primary that month for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was rejected. The reason given: election workers "could not obtain" her required signature from the ballot.

"I was absolutely irate when it happened," said Fusco, who worked as a medical technologist until she was furloughed because of the pandemic. "I did everything well before the deadline, and I know that I signed it. I signed it on the little box on the envelope."

- - -

The Post found that 534,731 ballots were disqualified in 23 states in the 2020 primary season; a similar analysis by NPR tracked 558,032 ballots that were rejected in 30 states. A large share of the rejected ballots tracked by The Post were in two jurisdictions: California, which threw out more than 102,000, and New York City, which tossed more than 84,000.

In eight battleground states, more than 125,100 ballots were rejected by election officials in this year's primaries, according to data compiled by The Post. The states were Florida, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Post totals include the number of ballots rejected in a primary held in each state this year, including several that took place before the novel coronavirus emerged as a serious concern in the United States. The figures almost certainly understate the number of rejections for several reasons, including failures by some counties to report their data.

Testifying Friday before a Senate panel, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy called the swift handling of election mail his "sacred duty" and promised that ballots would be delivered in time for counting across the country.

"The Postal Service will deliver every ballot and process every ballot in time that it receives," he said.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, predicted that the number of rejected ballots in her state could double in November compared to this month's primary, when 10,694 votes were disqualified. Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes in 2016.

About 6,400 of the ballots thrown out this month arrived by mail after Election Day, the state's deadline for receipt, amid reports of Postal Service backlogs in the state.

Benson has called on the legislature to amend the law to allow such votes to count in November if they are postmarked by Election Day, even if they arrive up to two days later.

"If that doesn't change and if there are no other changes, we're facing a scenario where we could have to reject a number of otherwise valid votes sent through the mail that are delayed through no fault of the voter, because of the Postal Service or some other snafu," she said last week on a call with voting rights activists. "So those voters could be disenfranchised, and that number could exceed the margin of victory for a number of races, statewide and local."

Trump has criticized Benson, accusing her of creating opportunities for voter fraud by sending absentee ballot applications to all registered voters before the primary.

Benson said she anticipates "significant challenges, particularly in Michigan, to the result of the election and the sanctity of the process" in November.

"We're prepared to fight to ensure the public can have confidence that the results for our elections, whatever they may be, are an accurate reflection of the will of the people," she said.

The possibility that millions of Americans could be voting by mail for the first time probably will exacerbate confusion this year.

Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida, has found that Floridians who cast ballots in person in the 2016 and 2018 general elections were twice as likely to have their mail ballots rejected in the 2020 presidential primaries than those who voted by mail in the two prior contests.

"Experience matters," he said of the mail voting process. "So we can apply that across the country - if you lack experience voting by mail, the odds of you casting a ballot that doesn't count will go up."

"We're going to see those [rejection] rates skyrocket even more" in November, he said.

Smith's research also found that ballot rejections can disproportionately affect younger voters and voters of color.

In Florida, where mail ballots were rejected at a rate of a little more than 1% in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, the rate of rejection for ballots cast by 18- to 21-year-olds was more than eight times greater than for voters older than 65, he said. Similarly, the absentee ballots of Black and Hispanic voters were more than twice as likely to be rejected as those of White voters, his research shows.

Such disparities exist across the country. In Michigan, Benson noted recently that Black, Brown and Asian American communities in the state see higher rates of ballot rejection.

"We need to educate about how to ensure that those votes are counted," she said.

- - -

Reasons for rejection vary. The failure to provide a signature or to return the ballot on time tend to be the most common problems, according to state data.

"A lot of people don't follow instructions," said Gerry Cohen, a member of the Wake County Board of Elections in North Carolina, which reviews every problematic ballot to determine whether it is valid.

In this year's primary, "one voter sent in his ballot and it was rejected because he hadn't signed it at all," he said. "We sent a new ballot the next business day. He returned his new ballot four days later and didn't sign it either."

Voters are often not familiar with all the rules for completing mail ballots - or the unintentional errors that can disqualify them, such as a stray mark by a voter's pen. In Kentucky, tearing off a perforated flap on the inner ballot envelope means your vote won't count. In Wisconsin, a tiny tear in the envelope itself can invalidate the ballot, even if it is repaired by tape.

Stewart said many rules stem from 19th-century concerns about vote-buying and other types of fraud.

Some states add another layer of protection against voter fraud by requiring that the signature on the ballot envelope match the voter's signature on file with the government. While the practice is widely accepted and employed by states such as Colorado and Washington that offer universal mail voting, lawsuits have claimed that uneven training and enforcement in some jurisdictions can lead to false ballot rejections.

In at least 20 states, voters must be notified and given the chance to fix or "cure" signature problems that could invalidate their ballots. But the rules vary in the rest of the country, and some voters are never told that their ballots did not count.

Requiring ballots returned through the mail to carry a postmark with the date is another safeguard, used to prevent ballots from being counted after the deadline. But the Postal Service is not required to postmark every piece of mail, creating problems for election officials who receive ballots without an official date stamp.

Democrats and voting rights groups are now waging court battles to ensure that absentee ballots are not discarded on technicalities, pushing to require that ballots postmarked by Election Day be counted and to make signature-matching laws more voter-friendly. In response to litigation, Minnesota and Pennsylvania agreed this month to count ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within a certain window. And in Indiana, a federal judge ruled that election officials cannot reject ballots for dissimilar signatures without notifying voters.

Republicans have countered with their own litigation, arguing that strict signature-matching rules and voter identification requirements are necessary to prevent fraud. They have opposed Election Day postmark rules, claiming they result in invalid, late-cast ballots being counted.

"Overhauling the way Americans vote less than 80 days out will only spread chaos and confusion," Republican National Committee spokeswoman Mandi Merritt said in a statement.

States are trying to keep rejection numbers down in a variety of ways: public education campaigns encouraging voters to return their ballots early; pressure on DeJoy, as well as additional coordination with postal officials; new ballot drop boxes; online ballot tracking; redesigned ballots; and streamlined ballot instructions.

In Wisconsin, election officials are offering options for voters to return their ballots by mail or in person, depending on their comfort level, said Reid Magney, spokesman for the state election commission.

The state has added mail bar codes this year through which voters can track the ballot as it is delivered and sent back to the clerk to be counted.

There is also a major voter education effort underway to teach voters how they can cast absentee ballots, including through a series of two-minute videos online.

"Time is our friend with all of this," Magney said. "Our hope is that by getting people to act early, that's going to be a big help."

Other states have adopted new policies.

This month, the Virginia Board of Elections approved a regulation allowing absentee ballots to be counted even if the postmark is missing or defective. Ballots returned by mail in the state must arrive by noon Nov. 6 to count.

A similar rule drew a legal challenge this month from the Trump campaign and the RNC after it was enacted in Nevada.

North Carolina in May loosened its witness requirement for absentee ballots during the pandemic, allowing ballots to count if they are signed by one witness instead of two or a notary.

Still, Allison Riggs, interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, called the bill a "Band-Aid over a gushing arterial wound." The group filed suit and won a ruling Aug. 4 that the state must provide a cure process to help voters fix mistakes that otherwise would lead to their ballots being rejected.

Riggs estimated that if voter participation rates are similar to 2016, about 115,000 ballots will be saved by the ruling.

While North Carolina is among the roughly 30 states without a signature-match requirement, roughly 25 ballots were still rejected during the primary under the code "signature different," Riggs noted. Another roughly 1,700 ballots were coded as spoiled, with the specific reason unclear.

"It's pretty troubling," Riggs said. "If North Carolina poll workers and election workers aren't really clear on the rules and how to apply them and there isn't a lot of standardized guidance, that handful of essentially discrepancies - that can turn into some big numbers come November."

- - -

For voters who learned that their ballots were tossed this year, the experience was deeply demoralizing, shaking their faith in the system.

Fusco, the Philadelphia voter who tried to vote for Sanders, said that when she heard her ballot was rejected, she tried to call the elections office but got no answer.

Finally, Fusco received a reply by email from a city official who said she failed to sign her name on the ballot envelope, according to messages reviewed by The Post. After Fusco insisted this was wrong, the official said she had signed, but the signature was only her initials, whereas the signature on her voter registration record was her full name.

"I've been using my initials as my signature for the past several years," she said. "We bought a house and that is my signature. It's on my license. It's how I've been signing my name for years. My registration record is probably from when I was 18. . . . I don't know how you can expect signatures to stay the same for so many years."

"Making this process so painstakingly difficult is a form of voter suppression," she wrote in a reply to the official.

Philadelphia officials said 3.8% of ballots cast by mail for the June primary were rejected. "The Board [of Elections] makes every effort to accept every ballot they can in accordance with the law," the city's deputy commissioner, Nick Custodio, told The Post in an email. "Voters have the opportunity [to] appeal individual decisions directly to the Board itself."

Fusco, now working as a freelance illustrator, said she was uncomfortable making a formal appeal during the pandemic because she feared it would require attending an in-person meeting. But now, she said, she feels compelled to cast a ballot in person in November to ensure that it counts.

"I have no idea what that is going to look like," she said. "It's scary. It's almost like, even if I do go vote in person, is it going to matter? Even if I do put myself at risk, is it going to matter?"

- - -

The Washington Post's Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Antonio Olivo and Jada Yuan contributed to this report.
CHARLOTTE, N.C.  Political celebrities and cable news stars were supposed to fill the streets. Hotels thought they would hit capacity. Rooftop bars expected to book up with late-night parties, and nearby restaurants anticipated an endless crush of customers. There were plans for live music concerts and fireworks.

Instead, uptown Charlotte, the official home of the 2020 Republican National Convention, was nearly deserted as the meeting to formally nominate President Donald Trump as the GOP presidential nominee kicked off Monday morning.

On the eve of the convention, restaurants around the Charlotte Convention Center remained closed. Street signs and storefronts, which would normally be covered in RNC signage, displayed social distancing guidelines. A truck with an anti-Trump billboard in its bed drove around the uptown area, but aside from a few reporters and police officers, no one was there to see it. A few scattered demonstrations took place around the city ahead of the event  but as Republicans arrived in the uptown area, there were no protesters in sight.

"It's empty. Even the locals aren't around," said Vinay Patel, principal at SREE Hotels, which includes 12 hotels in the Charlotte area, two of which are within minutes of the Charlotte Convention Center, where Republicans gathered.

"It is a very eerie feeling," Patel said, adding that all 12 of his Charlotte hotels had been contracted with the RNC.

The coronavirus pandemic upended everything.

Trump, intent on holding an in-person convention, announced in June he would move the RNC to Jacksonville, Florida, after North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper did not promise that Republicans could hold a full-scale convention due to the pandemic.

Republicans scrapped the Jacksonville plans as the virus in Florida worsened. They eventually settled on holding just the procedural portion in Charlotte, with North Carolina officials granting the RNC an exception to the 10 person limit on indoor activities, moving the high-profile speeches to Washington.

Story continues

And event after event  ranging from a prayer breakfast at the Billy Graham Library, to a luncheon honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment that guaranteed women the right to vote  was called off.

We pretty much had to cancel everything we had on our plate," said John Lassiter, CEO of Charlottes RNC 2020 host committee.

Image: Republicans Hold Virtual 2020 National Convention (Travis Dove / Pool via Getty Images)

Lassiter had planned a massive 12,000-person "welcome party" for Sunday night that would have spilled into three large ballrooms and showcased different parts of North Carolina.

In the "mountain" section, guests would listen to bluegrass music and eat western North Carolina barbecue. In Piedmont, the urban center, they would sample craft beers and food trucks. In the "east," attendees could find vinegar-based barbecue and beach music.

In our mind, it would have been the best political convention in U.S. history," said Lassiter.

The scaled-down RNC cuts especially deep for Charlotteans who know first-hand the kind of energy and money a political convention can bring to a city.

The Democrats selected Charlotte in 2012 for their convention to renominate President Barack Obama. The event drew 35,000 people to the city, and roughly 1,200 different events took place.

The DNC that year brought in more than $160 million  the most net-positive economic impact ever produced by a single Charlotte event, according to the mayors office at the time.

That economic boon is almost entirely missing this year.

Republicans planned to have just 336 delegates in Charlotte, six from each state and territory, for procedural business and roll call. While 15,000 members of the media flooded Charlotte in 2012, the RNC this time around was closed to all but a few reporters. Those in town did not plan to stay past the Monday events.

Download the NBC News app for alerts and all the latest on the Republican convention.

The Fortune 500 executives, lobbyists, U.S. ambassadors, foreign trade representatives, and others who were expected to travel to Charlotte did not show.

The EpiCentre shopping center, which in 2012 served as the media hub of the DNC, was almost entirely empty as Republicans convened Monday.

The EpiCentre in uptown Charlotte, once the media hub of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, was deserted on the eve of the 2020 Republican National Convention. (Lauren Egan / NBC News)

BlackFinn American Saloon, a restaurant in the EpiCentre, sold tables at $500 in 2012 for fans of MSNBCs Morning Joe to watch the program be broadcast live. CNN turned a Mexican restaurant into "CNN Grill."

Mary Jayne Wilson, the director of operations at Amelies French Bakery in Charlotte, handled breakfast catering for the Morning Joe set in 2012, and remembered that week as very intense and great for business.

Its definitely different this year. We had a lot of potential," Wilson said, adding that she had been in talks with three different news organizations to rent out her space for the week. We were making big plans to do big things.

There were several places hanging onto the RNC as a way to gain some revenue to survive a little longer, she continued. Obviously that's not happening.

Patel also lamented the week as a missed chance, especially for small businesses.

This was an opportunity  a light at the end of the tunnel considering the pandemic  for some revenue to come back," Patel said.

I held out hope until the very end, until the day they announced they were going to Jacksonville," he added. "I was very frustrated."
The Victorian Liberal Party will launch a forensic investigation into branch stacking allegations to determine whether members signed up in the past five years are genuine members.

The sweeping review of the party's membership, rules and practices was announced by state director Sam McQuestin after a specially-convened meeting of the powerful administrative committee to address the crisis facing the branch.

Michael Sukkar (left) and Marcus Bastiaan. Credit:The Age

The meeting  chaired by President Robert Clark and attended by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg  voted to summon several operatives, including a staffer and a recruiter, named in this masthead's reporting. The committee requested them to explain their actions at a future meeting, a procedure that could lead to their suspension or expulsion.

At Monday night's meeting, officials loyal to Mr Bastiaan did not vote for a five-year audit and advocated a shorter timeframe of one or two years. Former president Michael Kroger did not vote for the motion that included the five-year audit because it did not call for an investigation into the source of memos, phone recordings and emails leaked to The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes.
Canadian savers want to retire with enough funds to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle in their golden years.

COVID-19 and the Great Recession

The pandemic arrived just as many people started to feel like they were getting back on track after the challenges created by the Great Recession.

To say its frustrating is an understatement. However, market crashes also provide investors with unique opportunities.

Top-quality stocks normally sell off with the broader market during a correction. In fact, many top stocks fall to levels where they offer attractive long-term prospects for above-average returns.

Investors who already own positions in these stocks can take advantage of the dips to add shares to their holdings. New investors get a great opportunity to enhance a diversified retirement portfolio.

Lets take a look at one top Canadian dividend stock that has delivered impressive gains for investors over the years and should continue to be solid picks for a personal pension fund.

Bank of Nova Scotia

Bank of Nova Scotia (TSX:BNS)(NYSE:BNS) is Canadas third largest bank. It is somewhat unique among its peers due to the large international operations focused on Latin America.

The company invested billions of dollars in the past decade to build market share in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Chile. COVID-19 continues to hit Latin America hard, and this might be the reason Bank of Nova Scotia still trades well below the 2020 high.

Near-term volatility should be expected, but the outlook in coming years is positive for these markets. The four members of the Pacific Alliance trade bloc rely heavily on strong commodity markets to support economic growth. Oil is important for Mexico and Colombia. Copper is a main driver of growth in Peru and Chile.

Copper prices rose steadily over the past five months and now trade near a two-year high. Oil bounced, as well. Analysts say oil could soar in the next five years, as improved demand runs into the impact of massive cuts in capital investment.

Story continues

Risks?

Ongoing risks remain over the coming months, as the impact of the pandemic lockdowns becomes more apparent. Loan deferrals and government aid programs will expire, and defaults are expected to rise when this happens.

Another coronavirus wave or renewed lockdowns could force Bank of Nova Scotia and its peers to set more cash aside for potential loan losses.

Opportunity

Bank of Nova Scotia trades near $44 per share right now compared to a 12-month high above $76, so there is decent upside opportunity on an economic rebound.

At the time of writing, the dividend provides a 6.5% yield. The payout should be safe.

Bank of Nova Scotia has the capital to ride out the recession and the ongoing challenges already appear priced into the share price. The overall business remains profitable, even in these difficult times. Economic recovery in Canada appears to be on track. Latin American operations should benefit from a surge in commodity prices driven by global stimulus efforts.

Returns

Warren Buffett says investors should be greedy when everyone else is fearful. A quick look at the long-term chart of Bank of Nova Scotia suggests this is true.

The bank survived every major financial crisis in the past century. It will get through the pandemic as well.

Patience rewards buy-and-hold investors. A $10,000 position in Bank of Nova Scotia 25 years ago would be worth about $195,000 today with the dividends reinvested.

The bottom line

Advisors recommend building a balanced investment portfolio.

Bank of Nova Scotia is just one stock among many in the TSX Index that delivered fantastic long-term returns. A $100,000 position in such stocks just 25 years ago would be worth more than $2 million today with the dividends reinvested.

The post Retirement Tip: How to Turn $10,000 Into $195,000 in 25 Years appeared first on The Motley Fool Canada.

More reading

The Motley Fool recommends BANK OF NOVA SCOTIA. Fool contributor Andrew Walker has no position in any stock mentioned.

The Motley Fools purpose is to help the world invest, better. Click here now for your free subscription to Take Stock, The Motley Fool Canadas free investing newsletter. Packed with stock ideas and investing advice, it is essential reading for anyone looking to build and grow their wealth in the years ahead. Motley Fool Canada 2020
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Korea and Japan have been at odds over whether to terminate the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA). Korea made it known that it was considered terminating it in retaliation to Japan's trade controls, but ultimately did not give notice of a cancellation to Japan, in effect renewing the agreement for the coming year. / gettyimagesbank



By Kang Seung-woo



Korea and Japan appear to have calmed tensions over whether to keep their intelligence-sharing pact intact as the date for its cancellation passed without any action from either country.



This is a complete about-face from last year when the neighboring countries engaged in a harsh diplomatic spat over the issue, initiated by Tokyo's tightened controls on exports to Seoul. At that time Korea suspended its withdrawal following a U.S. request to maintain the pact, or the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA).



Opinions are rampant that this time it would not have been easy for the government to have again raised the issue of canceling the GSOMIA as it is facing tough internal and external political and diplomatic situations.



Korea believes it can end the GSOMIA at any time because the Moon Jae-in administration has simply suspended its decision to end the pact. But the Japanese government said Monday that it would strengthen cooperation and collaboration in the field of security with Korea to contribute to regional stability. This is in line with the GSOMIA which states that without notice of annulment 90 days in advance from one country to the other, it is automatically renewed every year. The agreement was signed on Nov. 23, 2016.



"Considering the current security environment in the region, it remains important for the agreement to continue to operate stably," Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said in a press briefing.



The foreign ministry here only reiterated its earlier stance. "The Korean government suspended the GSOMIA termination notice on the premise that we can terminate the GSOMIA at any time, and upon the understanding between the two nations, we can revive the termination process and end the pact at any time," a ministry official said.



The government's reluctance to raise the issue may mainly be due to a possible backlash from the United States, which is in an ongoing diplomatic row with China. Washington wants to present a united front with Korea and Japan against China, using the GSOMIA, but under the circumstance, Korea terminating the agreement could bring about a stronger reaction from Washington than last year.



In addition, with the U.S. presidential election scheduled for November, the government here does not want to give the U.S. another diplomatic headache.



Domestically, the Moon administration cannot afford the time to deal with the GSOMIA issue amid the recent resurgence of coronavirus here, as it has been forced to focus on bending the curve of COVID-19 infections. This is the same situation facing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose approval rating has fallen to 36 percent in the most recent poll there, and the second-lowest since his return to power in 2012, due to his slow handling of the virus pandemic, according to Japan's Kyodo News.



"If Korea once again raises the issue of canceling the GSOMIA, its relations with the U.S. may be strained given the U.S. values the GSOMIA. In addition, ahead of the presidential election, the frayed ties between Korea and Japan may place Trump in the hot seat (in terms of his foreign policy), so the Korean government may have considered such factors," said Kim Yeoul-soo, chief of the Security Strategy Office at the Korea Institute for Military Affairs.



He also said given that the Abe administration is taking advantage of the GSOMIA issue for political ends  as does the Korean government  The Japanese prime minister is refraining from raising the matter as it will not help him extend his time in office.


GRAND RAPIDS, MI  When the time came for Emily Lorden to decide whether she would send her 6-year-old son, Jack, back to school this fall during the coronavirus pandemic, she didnt think twice.

The East Grand Rapids mom said she knew face-to-face learning was the only way to go.

Ive never considered not sending him to school, said Lorden, about her son heading into first grade this year at Breton Downs Elementary School. I think its really good for him to get that human interaction. He has missed his friends a lot  he thrived in that environment.

On Monday, Aug. 24, Lorden was one of dozens of Breton Downs Elementary parents congregating outside the building waiting to send their youngsters inside for the first day of school.

Roughly 86 percent of parents within the East Grand Rapids Public Schools district decided to send their students back to school this fall for in-person learning amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The district also is offering virtual learning this year, which 14 percent of parents took advantage of.

The district is one of four public schools in Kent and Ottawa County that had students back in class for in-person as well as online learning on Monday.

Students at Grandville Public Schools were thrilled to be back and adapted well to the districts new rules on Monday, said Cummings Elementary School teacher Kristyn Mulder.

We were worried obviously about how kids would do with the masks, and they did wonderful, they rose above the occasion, the sixth grade teacher said after the first half-day was completed. Kids usually are quite resilient, and they did a great job.

Mulder said she was a little nervous about in-person learning amid the ongoing pandemic. But after the first day, she felt confident in the safety procedures put in place by the district.

I was nervous at first, but once I got here, I really felt much better than I thought I would, she told MLive. I feel like this is the best place for these kids right now.

Although everyone wore masks, smiles were still contagious as students lined up to be escorted by their teachers into the building at Breton Downs, 2500 Boston Street.

Kids waved hello excitedly to peers they hadnt seen in over six months  since schools across the state closed because of the pandemic.

Parents were not allowed inside the school to maintain social distancing, so families took photos and said their goodbyes in the schools parking lot.

Saying goodbye to her son was bittersweet, Lorden said. Overall, she said she felt the same emotions as any other first day of school.

Im feeling the same mix of emotions I would regardless of the pandemic, she said. Im excited because hes excited, but Im a little sad because hes going to be gone. Weve had so much time together since school was done.

For East Grand Rapids mom Courtney Cinglie, sending her 7-year-old son back to school was never really a question.

After having the experience of virtual learning in the spring, it was tough, Cinglie said. I think at this age, they really bond through their teachers and he really missed that human connection.

If (our kids) wanted to go back to school, we were going to make that happen the best we can.

Courtney Cinglies son, Carter, is entering first grade at Breton Downs this year. Carter was most excited about finally getting to play on the big playground this year, his mom said.

Masks are required all day at East Grand Rapids schools, except during meal times, said Superintendent Heidi Kattula.

K-5 students who opt for in-person learning will attend school five days a week, while grades 6-12 will attend school in-person for half of the day and virtually for the other half, with the school day split between cohorts to maintain social distancing.

At Cummings Elementary, the first day of school was filled with the same excitement and nerves as any other school year.

Cummings Principal David Martini said its been a whirlwind planning the upcoming school year. But overall, hes excited to welcome students back again to the elementary school, at 4261 Schoolcraft Street.

Its been a lot of work, but Ill be honest  its good to be back at work, he said.

Grandville administrators have spent months planning the districts back-to-school plan, which offers both in-person and virtual classes.

The district hired additional teachers this year, who will focus on teaching students virtually, while other teachers will be dedicated to in-person learning.

About 80 percent of Grandville Public Schools families chose to send their students for in-person learning this year, while 20 percent opted for virtual learning, Superintendent Roger Bearup said.

Bearup said hes confident both students and staff will maintain proper social distancing to be safe this year.

He called the upcoming school year a partnership between students, parents and teachers, as everyone works together to wear masks and social distance properly this year.

I feel confident that everyone will work together on this, he said.

Our teachers are great teachers and they will be a great role model for our students, and same with our parents. Kids are sponges. Theyre great learners and they rise to the occasion.

Heidi Larsen, who has two kids in the Grandville district, including one at Cummings said she thinks the district is prepared.

They are all really excited to come back to school after being gone for so long,' Larsen said. They miss all their friends but as parents we are all still nervous.'

The two other districts that reopened Monday with in-person and online classes Monday were Kelloggsville and Hudsonville. Northview, Lowell, Caledonia, Holland, Sparta, Allendale, Jenison, and Kent City are also slated to have students return to the classroom this week.

While schools across the state are gearing up for the start of the school year, the first day of school will look different for each local school in the coming weeks.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is leaving it up to local districts to decide how they will reopen, after last week signing legislation outlining expectations for schools reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The statewide plan doesnt require districts to offer in-person education options to be eligible for state funding, although districts must maintain minimum levels of teacher-student interaction in virtual settings.

Across Kent County, each districts learning plan varies. Grand Rapids Public Schools will conduct online-only classes for at least the first nine weeks of the year starting Aug. 25. The school district is the largest in West Michigan, with 15,343 students projected for the upcoming year.

Rockford and Kentwood schools began the school year remotely Monday. Both will transition to providing the option of in-person learning on Sept. 14 and Sept. 8, respectively.

Forest Hills Public Schools will offer both in-person and virtual learning when the district starts school Aug. 31.

Catholic schools in the Diocese of Grand Rapids began school with face-to-face classes Wednesday, Aug. 19. Less than 10 percent of families in the school system chose virtual learning.

To help you navigate this complicated fall, were pleased to offer you a simpler way to get all of your education news: Our new Michigan Schools: Education in the COVID Era newsletter delivered right to your inbox. To receive this newsletter, simply click here to sign up.

More on MLive:

So far, so good says principal as Grand Rapids Catholic school students returned to class

Learning pods have arrived in Michigan. Heres why theyre causing controversy.

Back to school is total chaos for Michigan parents

Saginaw school board approves switch to online start of classes
New Delhi:

Seven months after President Barack Obama visited the historic Japanese city of Hiroshima where the atomic disaster brought about an end to the World War II, his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe is paying his respects at the site where the brutal conflict began.

Prime Minster Shinzo Abe is travelling to Pearl Harbor, where he and Obama hope to underscore the alliance between their two nations - 75 years after the Japanese surprise attack that brought America into history's bloodiest war.

The two leaders are meeting Tuesday in Hawaiian state capital Honolulu, on the archipelago's Oahu island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The visit has particular resonance for Obama, who was born in Hawaii and spent much of his childhood and adolescence here. Abe and Obama will visit the wreck of the USS Arizona, where 1,177 sailors and Marines died. The ship's rusting remains, still visible, are now a memorial.

On December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy," as then president Franklin D. Roosevelt said, Japan's General Isoroku Yamamoto unleashed a devastating attack on PearlHarbor's "Battleship Row."

The assault caught the Americans off guard, and the Japanese sunk or heavily damaged eight US battleships.

The two-hour offensive killed 2,403 Americans in all and injured more than 1,100 others. An explosion in the Arizona's ammunition stocks sealed that ship's fate.

Just as when Obama visited Hiroshima, the purpose of Abe's tour is not to question decisions made three-quarters of a century ago, or to offer an apology, rather to pay homage tothe victims and encourage historical reflection.

"It puts a bookend in some ways to this open US-Japan conversation about the past and the war," said Japan expert Sheila Smith from the Council on Foreign Relations.

"It puts us on a very different pedestal on the reconciliation side of things which I think is important for the region to see."

In Hiroshima in May, during a speech given to a completely silent crowd, Obama launched an impassioned plea for a worldwithout nuclear arms and he wrote a message in the visitor book at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

"We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons," he wrote.

More than 16 million Americans served in uniform from 1941 to 1945 - more than 400,000 were killed. Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima marked the beginning and end of the conflict between Japan and America, but it is impossible to compare the two. One was an attack on the heart of US navalpower in the Pacific, the other an atomic bomb over a city.

But each event has cemented itself in the hearts and collective memories of the people, and both places remain hallowed sites of pilgrimage to this date.

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Landowners in fire-prone areas will be required to carry out hazard-reduction burns on their properties as part of the Berejiklian government's response to the Black Summer bushfires.

A report from the independent inquiry into NSW's catastrophic bushfires, which killed 25 people, was signed off by cabinet on Monday night, with the government to accept all 76 recommendations.

RFS Firefighter Jade Garrett from Killara brigade takes part in a hazard-reduction burn in Westleigh, in Sydney's north. Credit:Nick Moir

The government's response to the inquiry, led by former NSW Police deputy commissioner Dave Owens and former NSW chief scientist Mary O'Kane, is expected to come with "significant financial costs", a senior government source who has read the report said.

The report recommends that hazard reduction burns be greatly increased and take place closer to at-risk communities, an issue which has divided the Coalition.
Mr Joseph Kofi Adda, the Minister of Aviation, has assured that major safety challenges at the Wa Airport would be addressed to guarantee the safety of flights.

These safety challenges include the interference of Radio and Telecommunication masts with airline communication systems and navigation service devices.

The others are the inability of aircrafts to refuel at the airport; the need for two additional aprons and a new control tower.

Mr Kofi Adda, who visited the Wa Airport, said the challenges must be addressed to ensure the airport met the standards set by the Civil Aviation Authority and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).

The Aviation Minister, who is also the Member of Parliament for the Navrongo Central Constituency in the Upper East Region, said because of the interference, the airport management had reduced the length of the runway to 70 metres to enable landing of aircraft.

He said on the relocation of the masts would enable the airport to have the full length of 2,000 metres to ease the difficulty associated with the landing of aircraft.

He said the Ministry would work with the National Communication Authority (NCA), adding that by the end of August 2020, they would be clear on the timelines for the relocation.

He said he had given his commitment to parliament that Ministry will undertake the relocation if the owners of the masts failed to do it on their own.

However, the Ministry would charge them for the cost of the removal.

On the communication system interference, Mr Kofi Adda said the challenge made it difficult for the pilots to communicate well with the civil aviation navigation officials at the airport.

He noted that the current Apron was small for its purpose, saying reports from the Ghana Air Force was that they could not park their helicopters there when an aircraft was coming to land, hence the need to provide two additional Aprons.

The Aviation Minister noted that the plan to improve safety at the airport was part of President Nana Akufo-Addo's agenda to provide infrastructure to enhance effective and efficient operations.

Mr Kofi Adda said the commercial airlines stopped flying to the region due to COVID-19 and the lack of passengers.

He expressed hope that when the government reopens the airport for international airlines by early next month, passengers would be available for the airlines to resume operations.

On encroachment at the Wa Airport, the Aviation Minister noted that the Ministry was in touch with the Regional Lands Commission to ensure they were removed.

---GNA
Pictured: Amerjit Singh Cheema, who allegedly stroked a woman's leg with his bare foot on a BA flight from Mumbai to London

A British Airways passenger was forced to hide in an aircraft toilet after the man sitting next to her drunkenly stroked her bare leg with his foot, a court heard.

Amerjit Singh Cheema, 43, allegedly boarded BA flight 198 from Mumbai to London Heathrow on January 22 after 'encountering' a woman at the Indian airport.

Prosecutors claim he stroked the woman's leg with his bare foot before boarding the intercontinental flight, and carried on harassing her in the air.

Cheema, who ended up sitting next to the alleged victim, is said to have stroked the woman's hand, winked and poked his tongue out at her.

The woman felt 'vulnerable' and 'trapped' in the aircraft and got up to hide in the toilet, Ealing Magistrates' Court heard.

But as she crossed the aisle, drunken Cheema allegedly leaned out and stroked her again with his foot and elbow, it was said.

Arlene De Silva, prosecuting, said: 'In relation to the sexual assault matter the defendant is said to have stroked the hand of the female that was sitting next to him.

'This happened because of a prior encounter at the airport, where they first encountered, where he stroked her leg with his bare foot.

'Once on the aircraft he winked at her and stuck out his tongue at her.

Cheema, 43, allegedly boarded BA flight 198 from Mumbai to London Heathrow on January 22 after 'encountering' a woman at the Indian airport. Pictured: Another British Airways flight in Mumbai

'Then when she was going to the toilet he stuck out his elbow and his foot and touched her again.

'She felt vulnerable in a place where you're trapped and you can't get away.'

Ms De Silva said Cheema was 'disruptive' while on board and began parading down the aisle repeatedly with a large rucksack on his back.

She said: 'This happened together while being drunk and being very disruptive on the aircraft, he was walking up and down the aisle with a rucksack on disturbing passengers.

'He was making derogatory comments towards cabin crew, the crew talked about smelling alcohol in his breath.'

Cheema pleaded not guilty to all allegations and told the magistrates' he wanted a crown court trial - despite being advised a magistrates' trial would be suitable.

The woman felt 'vulnerable' and 'trapped' in the aircraft and got up to hide in the toilet, Ealing Magistrates' Court (pictured) heard

Bench Chair Tony Delliston told him: 'You are granted unconditional bail, and you are to appear at Isleworth Crown Court on 16 September at 2pm for your first hearing.

'If you do not go back to court at that date and time you could be committing a further offence and your sentence could be greater.'

Cheema, from Leicester, denies two counts of sexual assault on a female.

He also denies behaving in threatening, abusive, insulting or disorderly manner towards a member of the aircraft crew, and entering an aircraft when drunk.

He was bailed ahead of his appearance at Isleworth Crown Court on September 16.
CHICAGO  Nothing happened, except the same ol' shouting.



That was the big news from Friday's special City Council meeting  a gathering called by a collection of ward bosses regularly at odds with Mayor Lori Lightfoot over, well, almost everything.

In case you missed it, Aldermen Ray Lopez, Leslie Hairston, Anthony Beale and Anthony Napolitano cited a rarely used parliamentary move to force the first meeting successfully called by the City Council since the late Mayor Richard J. Daley was in office.

[COMMENTARY]

The attempt sought to force a public discussion on whether city leaders should ask the governor to send in the National Guard as added protection against further looting amid national civil unrest and to debate the city's budget woes. But it got shot down by Lightfoot's allies, deferred to City Council committees to be discussed another day.

There were moments of heated rhetoric reminiscent of the Council Wars during the late Mayor Harold Washington's administration  only milder and virtual, with the mayor's majority controlling the day.

"This is not a dictatorship," Beale said, demanding to be heard.

Lightfoot dismisses Beale and Lopez, among her most frequent council critics, accusing them of grandstanding to get media attention. The mayor and Lopez, you might remember, have engaged in a public war of words that I wouldn't use within earshot of my mother.

Lightfoot made it clear at a previous council meeting that she thinks Lopez is "100 percent full of s---."

"F--- you, then," was Lopez's response to the mayor.

It's entertaining political theater but does little to help a city in chaos beyond providing distractions from an unfortunate truth: Some aldermen feel left out of City Hall's response to the converging crises of coronavirus and civil unrest.

So, I asked the mayor if there was anything that could be done to mend the rift with her detractors, Lopez chief among them. Maybe a "peace circle"? I suggested.

Story continues

Lightfoot laughed and made a joke at the expense of an unrepentant muckraker.



"Mark Konkol suggesting a peace circle. Let me just pause on that for a second," she said.

Maybe you think it's a silly idea to expect a big-city mayor and her City Council critics to sit crossed-legged on the floor with restorative justice experts to squash bitterness and overcome rifts that have resulted in F-bombs, grandstanding and political stalemates.



But I don't. I learned about the power of peace circles from Robert Spicer, the restorative justice expert who brought the safe-space conflict resolution strategy to Fenger High School as a means to settle disputes between feuding students.

More than decade ago, when Richard M. Daley was mayor, Spicer and a collection of activists conducted a peace circle with Chicago Board of Education officials over three days that led to eliminating a zero-tolerance discipline policy that inequitably impacted Black students.

Restorative justice expert Robert Spicer was an early pioneer of peace circles at Fenger High School. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

"I'm gonna tell you straight up. They laughed at me, too," Spicer said of the initial response to an effort to convince the Chicago Board of Education that a better way to settle disputes than zero-tolerance suspensions, expulsions and arrests was to sit feuding kids on a rug in a safe space, speaking only when they held a rock in their hands.

"They said I was crazy, and the kids were going to tie me up in that rug and hit me upside the head with the rock."

Instead, those early peace circles at Fenger reduced serious disruptive behavior nearly fivefold. They also inspired the ongoing push for more social workers and fewer police in Chicago public schools as part of the effort to end the so-called "school-to-prison pipeline."

When you sit in a peace circle, Spicer said, everyone is equal. Two trained facilitators help guide tense discussions, reminding participants of their common values. The goal is to build trust necessary to mediate big problems.

More than personalities and political agendas, Lightfoot and Lopez are at odds over a big problem. City Hall sources call it the "Burke Factor"  as in Alderman Ed Burke, the powerful Southwest Side boss facing bribery charges as part of an ongoing federal corruption probe.

Almost from the moment Lightfoot took office, the mayor has accused Lopez of "carrying the water" for Burke.

Some people say the move to force Friday's special meeting without the mayor's permission seemed to have the fingerprints of Burke, a master parliamentarian, all over it.

Lopez told me he talked with Lightfoot about her assertion that he acts as Burke's council surrogate in an attempt to "bury the hatchet" after they hurled dirty words at each other this spring.

It didn't work. Lightfoot still dismisses almost everything Lopez says and avoids mentioning Burke's name in public. And Lopez says the mayor is suffering from "paranoia that prevents her from working with someone she thinks is intellectually inferior," referring to himself.

But Lightfoot and Lopez have plenty in common, too. They're both Democrats, racial minorities and partners in same-sex marriages. As far as anyone can tell, they want some of the same things: safer streets and a more equitable city.

For that, each of them has been a target of criticism, and worse. Threats get made against Lightfoot and her family daily, and she takes heavy criticism from the police and teachers unions and President Donald Trump and his loyalists who see her as an enemy. Three times in July, Lopez had bricks thrown through the windows of his home and 15th Ward office after clashing with local gang members.

While political insiders might get a chuckle at the suggestion that a peace circle could end their conflict, Spicer sees an opportunity for the mayor to set a powerful example to a city at war with itself.

"Resolving conflict peacefully is what's on our mouths and hearts and minds. The conflicts between gangs. Instead of getting the guns and shooting, call in the peacekeepers," Spicer said.

"As Chicago's first African American, openly gay mayor, Lori Lightfoot has the tools to show leadership on that. If she's willing to sit in the circle with aldermen, and they come out of there with unity that they can disagree on certain things, but on other issues are ready to work together, there's no telling what effect that's going to have on the city of Chicago, a world city. And there's no telling what effect that might have on the world."



All that he's saying is give the peace circle a chance.

What do you say, mayor?

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots.

More from Mark Konkol:

This article originally appeared on the Chicago Patch
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 18th August, 2020) The personal representative of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, George Shaaban, has praised Russia's assistance to Beirut in tackling the consequences of the devastating port explosion during his meeting with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

Bogdanov hosted the meeting in Moscow.

"During the conversation, they discussed the public, political, social and economic situation in Lebanon, aggravated by the devastating explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4 this year. George Shaaban expressed high appreciation of Russia's practical assistance in eliminating the consequences of this disaster," the ministry said in a press release.

Moscow has pledged solidarity with the Lebanese people and asserted "principled support of Lebanon's sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and domestic stability," as stated in the press release.

On August 4, the Lebanese capital was rocked by an exceptionally powerful blast which sent shock waves miles away from its epicenter in the port of Beirut. Entire districts adjacent to the port area were destroyed. The toll of casualties from the blast is still being updated as some 30 people yet count missing. As of Monday, 171 people were confirmed killed and more than 40,000 others injured.

The Lebanese government said the blast was caused by some 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate, which was confiscated by the port authorities back in 2014 and stored in violation of safety protocols for the years since. This reignited nationwide mass protests against poor governance standards and economic mismanagement.

On August 10, the Lebanese government of Hassan Diab stepped down after lasting less than a year in office.
Without going into specific concepts or approaches contained in the performance index of the programme, available records/reports show that the majority of the countries including Nigeria performed below average in the United Nations introduced Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, which lasted between the year 2000 and 2015. And was among other intentions aimed at eradicating extreme poverty and hunger as well as achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health among others.

And, It was this reality and other related concerns that conjoined to bring about 2030 sustainable agenda- a United Nation initiative and successor programme to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)- with a collection of 17 global goals formulated among other aims to promote and cater for people, peace, planet, and poverty. And has at its centre; partnership and collaboration, ecosystem thinking, co-creation and alignment of various intervention efforts by the public and private sectors and civil society.

What calls for emphasis here is that more than any other event in recent history the response to global bodies by Non Governmental Organizations/Civil Society Groups has taught the world and Africa in particular positive lesson not just in words but in the areas of developmental support.

Take as an illustration, Ishita Roy, Tanzil Al Raquib, Amit Kumar Sarker, while writing on an article entitled; Contribution of NGOs for Socio-Economic Development in Bangladesh and published on the Science Journals of Business and Management, among other praises for NGOs noted that nowadays Non-Governmental Organizations or NGOs have become an extensively discussed theme in the third world countries as well as vastly in social business world. Bangladesh is no exception.

The NGOs have appeared as the savior of countless number of people without food, cloth, education and basic health facilities. Bangladesh is one of the top thirteen underprivileged countries. With the record of being the most densely populated country on earth and feeble manpower competency, Bangladesh is facing massive challenge to meet up the demand of her ever-increasing population. Hence NGOs in Bangladesh can continue playing the role of catalyst in the attainment of sustainable economic growth and development provided, an endurable, warm and dependable relationship is there between the Government and NGOs where both are working for the benefit of the people with numerable activities.



With the above fact in view, it becomes a troubling development that at a time NGOs are globally applauded for working based on the assessed need and demand of the people, organizing, creating awareness and incubating development oriented programmes among the people, has become a ripe time for Gov. Aminu Masari of Katsina State, to place a ban on NGOs from IDPs camps in the Katsina state.

According to news reports, Masari while giving the order recently at the Army Special Super Camp IV, Faskari, warned Non Government Organizations against going into any of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps in the state under any guise. We will not allow these NGOs under whatever guise into our IDPs camps. We know that the fight against bandits and banditry is not over but we can handle our displaced persons adequately because we have sufficient food, clothing, shelter and security for them while we strengthen efforts in restoring security for them to return to their respective homes.

Why this recent declaration by the Governor calls for concern is that it was a similar asymmetrical feeling towards NGOs in the country that led to the recent announcement by Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila during a debate on a motion brought under matters of urgent public importance on funding for security agents, that; it has become imperative to revisit the NGO bill due to the activities of NGOs in the North-eastern part of Nigeria. Particularly, as the Nigerian Army recently accused some international humanitarian organisation operating in North-east Nigeria of allegedly aiding and abetting Boko Haram terrorists.

The bill in question was first submitted to the 8th Assembly, and seeks regulation of non-profitable organizations (NPOs) in Nigeria and demands for the establishment of a regulatory Commission that every NGO must be registered with, and sets out the requirements and procedure for registration.

Clear enough, there is no peripheral reason to accuse these public officials of blind ambition or power grab. Nevertheless, there are, strong evidence to think otherwise.

First and most fundamental is that Governor Masari did not recognize the fact that before taking a decision that has a far-reaching effect on the generality of the people, the public officer must write down each point of uncertainty, estimate the probability of a positive or a negative outcome in each case, and access the probable impact on the overall result if each decision should end in a negative outcome.

Secondly, Masari like Femi Gbajabiamila were unmindful of the fact that NGOs are not just another platform for disseminating information, foodstuff and other relief materials that can be controlled at will. Rather, they are viable platforms for pursuing peace, truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas; in the same way, that government is a decentralized body for the promotion and protection of the peoples life chances. It is a platform, in other words, for development that the government must partner with.

Instead of placing ban on NGOs, a major concern that one should have expected the government to address is the experts belief that, proliferation of NGOs in any given nation is an indication of the weakness of its public sector. Haiti, the first country in the Western hemisphere, to gain independence and to abolish slavery is today widely regarded as a Republic of NGOs, competing with India for the highest rate of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) per capita in the world is but a perfect example.

Away from the above, comes the practical importance of NGOs in Nigeria.

To demonstrate this fact, it was in the news that the Kukah Centre (TKC), some months ago, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), with the Institute of Peace Studies and Conflict Management (IPSCM) of the Taraba State University, Jalingo, Taraba state. In my views, it was neither the government precedence nor their well-ordered behaviour in the past that prompted the development but the NGOs corporate culture of compliance with the United Nations 2030 sustainable agenda which has at its centre; partnership and collaboration- and alignment of various intervention efforts by the public and private sectors and civil society

The MOU going by reports was the high point of a one day conference by The Kukah Centre in partnership with (IPSCM) supported by the Department of International Development (DFID) from the UK, and has as objective; tackling conflict and ensuring sustainable peace and development in Taraba and beyond.

In a similar declaration by the organization during a four-day workshop tagged Interfaith Dialogue and Engagement for Christians and Muslims in Minna, Niger State, to introduce skill acquisition centres in the Northern part of the country where about 10 million Almajiri children will acquire vocations of their choice.

If the above facts are anything to go by, what I feel should be the preoccupation of a responsive government is to; find ways these NGOs works can integrate into those of the public sector since the state is weak. Most importantly, find answers to how they can effectively perform their responsibilities in such a way that will impact positively more on the lives of Nigerians as it is obvious that all strata of government can no longer single-handedly shoulder the crushing weight of infrastructural and socio-economic development in the country. What they (NGOs) need is support and not regulation.

Utomi Jerome-mario is a Lagos-Based Media Consultant.
On Jan. 29, Gov. J.B. Pritzker used his State of the State speech to declare: The old patronage system needs to die  finally and completely.

Heres the Pritzker assault on patronage: Not one significant anti-corruption bill; Pritzker is in court trying to roll back critical ethics rules; he filled his administration with clouted hires.

Just one week after Pritzkers State of the State speech, a federal court-appointed patronage watchdog reported his administration was blocking open communication with her office.

We believe these new restrictions imposed by the Governors Office are unproductive to the previously cooperative efforts of the parties to eliminate unlawful patronage, reform state employment practices and implement lasting improvements, court monitor Noelle Brennan wrote.

The governors spokeman responded that the allegation Pritzker had reversed the cooperation of past governors was false: There are no new restrictions, and the state will be responding in court shortly.

More than five months passed. The only news about Pritzker and patronage came from a WBEZ report showing Pritzker hired 35 people from Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigans clout list. They collectively earn $2.5 million a year from board appointments and state jobs.

The report also found Democratic state Rep. Luis Arroyo and state Sen. Martin Sandoval got in on the action before being indicted on corruption charges. Pritzker gifted state transportation jobs to allies of both men, who were key to passing Pritzkers year one agenda: a $45 billion infrastructure package funded by doubling the gas tax, a progressive income tax constitutional amendment, and the most expensive state budget in Illinois history.

On July 14, Pritzkers court response finally came.

He said there was no patronage problem in Illinois executive branch of government. And he asked to scrap a federal anti-patronage consent decree in place since 1972.

Pritzkers lawyers stated his office instituted an independent and vigorous oversight structure to prevent patronage.

Three days later, House Speaker Mike Madigan was implicated in a bribery scheme in which Commonwealth Edison executives said they hired and paid his cronies $1.3 million to curry Madigans favor on rates and regulations worth $150 million to the power utility. Madigan had extended government patronage to utility companies, even telling ComEd which meter readers to hire, the companys prosecution agreement states. Federal investigators are making the same patronage inquiries about Madigan and AT&T.

Pritzker detests patronage. Pritzker blocks efforts to find patronage. Pritzker participates in patronage when Madigan tells him to. Pritzker wants to scrap 48 years of patronage safeguards in the executive branch because patronage is under control in his administration.

Patronage and Madigan? Well, thats not Pritzkers problem. He refused to call on the speaker to step down from the speakership or his post as chairman of the state Democratic party.

It would be laughable if it werent so serious, said state Rep. Grant Wehrli, R-Naperville. Here we find ourselves in Illinois corruption and pay-to-play politics are in the news almost on a weekly basis, if not daily, and this is clearly a step in the wrong direction.

Pritzker is having his Mission Accomplished moment. Patronage is far from dead in Illinois, and it will take more effort, not less, to kill the very deep roots of Illinois system of winning friends and influencing people by giving them public jobs at taxpayer expense.

Maybe instead of a $3.7 billion fair tax increase, some patronage hires should join Illinois long unemployment line?

Brad Weisenstein is editor at the Illinois Policy Institute. Before that he spent more than 30 years as an editor at his hometown newspaper. He wrote this column for The Center Square.
A supervisor with Metropolitan Public Defender said the group supports a Washington County judges decision to stop hearing cases involving the public defense agencys lawyers.

Mary Bruington said Washington County Circuit Judge D. Charles Baileys recent actions and statements regarding lawyers for Metropolitan Public Defender strongly indicate that recusal is the appropriate outcome.
The Pound Sterling Euro (GBP/EUR) exchange rate edged -0.2% lower flat on Monday morning, leaving the pairing trading at around 1.1070.

Sterling continued to remain under pressure at the start of the week after last week saw it slump more than 1% on a mix of Brexit pessimism and a stronger US Dollar.

Last week saw the UK and European Union make little progress towards reaching a post-Brexit trade agreement. Both sides chief negotiators blamed the other for the current stalemate as the clock continues to tick away to the end of year deadline.

Speaking at a news conference after talks, the blocs chief negotiator, Michel Barnier noted:

Those who were hoping for negotiations to move swiftly forward this week will have been disappointed.

Barnier also added:

This week, once again, as in the July round, the British negotiators have not shown any real willingness to move forward on issues of fundamental importance for the European Union. And this despite the flexibility which we have shown over recent months.

Although, Barniers British counterpart, David Frost noted a trade deal was still possible and it was still the governments goal, but it would not be easy to achieve.

In a statement, Frost noted:

There are [...] significant areas which remain to be resolved and even where there is a broad understanding between negotiators, there is a lot of detail to work through. Time is short for both sides.

British officials noted that the UK was willing to talk about any issue, while the EUs insistence the country must accept its position on state aid and fisheries meant the bloc was responsible for slowing down the latest round of talks.

Added to this, the Pound struggled after reports revealed the countrys public debt soared above 2 trillion for the first time as the government increased spending to help Britains economy cope with the coronavirus crisis.

The UKs official budget forecasters increased their estimate for the size of the public debt pile at the end of the current financial year. This came after data showed on Friday that debt had passed 100% of economic output for the first time.

Meanwhile, traders will remain focused on this weeks Kansas City Fed annual symposium where Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell is expected to discuss monetary policy. Riskier assets such as the Pound could benefit from a hawkish Fed this week.

Although, the single currency could benefit from further US Dollar weakness and make further gains against Sterling during the week.

Pound to Euro Outlook: German GDP and Business Climate in Focus

Looking ahead to Tuesday, the Euro (EUR) could suffer losses against the Pound (GBP) following the release of the final German GDP growth rate data.

If the latest German growth data reveals the blocs largest economy has slumped, with GDP suffering a double-digit contraction, it will weigh on single currency sentiment.

However, the Euro could edge higher later in the day following a slew of data from Ifo which is expected to show improvements in August.

If the latest Ifo Business Climate improves more than expected in August despite the resurgence of coronavirus cases in the country, EUR will make gains. This could leave the Pound Euro (GBP/EUR) exchange rate trading lower.
The United States Republican Convention starts later today, to conclude on August 27, with US President Donald Trump as the show stopper.

I had been present, as Indias Ambassador, at both the Democratic (Philadelphia) and Republican (Cleveland) conventions in 2016. A senior Republican told me in Cleveland that they were unfortunately about to nominate a candidate who could lose to Hillary Clinton, but were happy that the Democrats were going to nominate the one who could lose to Trump. This captured the visceral negativity towards Clinton in sections of the US electorate.

The conventions this time, in a COVID-19 era, are quite different. They are normally occasions for thousands of party activists to converge, be enthused for the final phase of campaigning and get out the vote efforts. There are a large number of parallel analytical and strategy briefings, discussions on prospects and trends in US politics, and intense networking between leaders, party workers, scholars, journalists and other invited guests. All that is missing this time, with outreach done virtually or in front of restricted audiences.

A well-accepted strategy in US politics is to first define your opponent, in terms that are favourable to you, and then attack their failings and dangers for the voting public. The Democrats, at their 2020 Convention last week, sought to define Trump in terms similar to 2016, but magnified by his behaviour and performance as US President.

He was now described as incapable of governing, callous, focused on personal gain, weakening US alliances, cosying up to authoritarian leaders even when they worked against US interests.

There were, however, no specific criticisms of Trumps policies on Iran and China, where he has some bragging rights before the US public. Both Joe Biden and Trump have political vulnerability on China. As Vice-President, Biden had described Chinas rise as good for US and world. Trump has on several occasions referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a good friend and, according to former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, sought China to buy more farm produce from US, to help himself electorally.

However, the Trump administration has taken many more steps against Chinese trade and technology malpractices than any administration since the opening to China by Richard Nixon in 1971, and establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979. Similarly, a tough approach on Iran, and the recent historic midwifing of diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, will go down well with sections of the Jewish and evangelical voters.

In January, it appeared that Trump would campaign heavily on economic achievement. US economy had grown well in his watch, and unemployment was at historically low level of around 3 percent. All this changed from March, as COVID-19 infections forced shut downs, US economy went into negative territory, and unemployment crossed 10 percent levels. Trump is also vulnerable on his response to COVID-19, initially denying that it would have any major impact, promoting unproven medication, and generating confused messaging on preventive strategies, with US now leading the world at 5.5 million infections and nearly 200,000 deaths.

Despite trenchant criticism of Trump on many fronts, his base, at around 40 percent of the population, has remained loyal to him. They see him as more responsive to their concerns on loss of jobs through globalisation or immigration. He has also tapped into white racist sentiment, and will seek to project himself as a law and order President to appeal to those unnerved by recent large scale anti-racism protests.

For India, a Trump or a Joe Biden presidency will present varying opportunities and challenges, even though the broad trajectory of the relationship will remain positive. Building on the bipartisan consensus since 2000, through the Republican and the Democratic Presidents, Trump has advanced the ties, including through higher level technology transfers and defence cooperation, convergence on China strategy, and visited India in February, the final year of his term which is normally devoted to electoral campaigning.

That said, he has taken unexpectedly harsh measures on trade, removing the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) benefits, imposing tariffs on steel and aluminium imports on national security grounds, and restricted or suspended H1B visas till end of this year. Biden and his VP running mate Kamala Harris came out with a very supportive message for India on August 15, pledging responsiveness to Indias regional and border related concerns. One can expect, however, some dissonance on climate change and human rights issues.

Once the conventions are over, the final lap will begin, marked also by presidential and vice-presidential debates. People, including in India, will be closely watching Harris, who has shown mettle as a prosecutor, and in Senate hearings. There is growing anxiety in US that if the margin is close, there could be serious disputes, delayed results, and further dent to US soft power.
MFA: Armenia has no preconditions for border delimitation

621 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Paris to have place named after Hrant Dink

Armenias Parakar enlarged community residents protesting outside government building

Turkey opposition party MPs petition for parliamentary inquiry into Hrant Dink assassination

France, Germany, Italy and Spain call on Israel to halt construction in East Jerusalem

Armenia parliament speaker in US, meets with Nancy Pelosi

Iranian MFA: Relations between Iran and Russia have moved into a new diverse, intensified direction

Biden says invasion of Ukraine will be disaster for Russia

Newspaper: Armenia PM Pashinyan plans to hold Presidents office

Newspaper: Opposition Armenia bloc, led by ex-President Kocharyan, starting new processes

Taliban PM calls on Muslim countries to be first to formally recognize their government

Saudi Arabia records lowest temperature in 30 years

Erdogan's visit to Ukraine scheduled for February 3

Russian peacekeeping contingent establishes order of passage through Lachin corridor

French Senate votes to ban hijab at sporting events

Armenian FM: All necessary conditions to be created for Demarcation Commission work

Olaf Scholz: Borders in Europe cannot be changed by force

Lavrov presents Armenian Ambassador to Russia, with the Order of Friendship

Bill Gates warns of pandemics far more serious than COVID-19

Macron: EU countries must work together on agreement for stability and security

Turkey Central banks and UAE sign agreement worth almost $5 billion

Blinken: Western countries need unity to stop Russian aggression against Ukraine

Iranian President performs evening namaz in Kremlin after talks with Putin

Turkish police detain women protesting price hikes in hygiene products

Delegation headed by Chief of the Cypriot National Guard General Staff has meetings in Armenia

Merkel refuses job in UN structure

Greece receives the first batch of French Rafale fighters

NEWS.am daily digest: 19.01.22

Azerbaijan hopes Pope to mediate in relations with Armenia

Talks between presidents of Russia and Iran start in Kremlin

Armenian FM: This is not first time Baku makes nonconstructive statements

Ombudsman: I urge not to give in to Azerbaijani manipulations, to visit Artsakh

Armenian FM: Armenia passes a package of proposals to Azerbaijan

France names the main favorite of presidential election

Garo Paylan concludes address in Turkey parliament in Armenian

Russian Foreign Ministry believes there is no risk of large-scale war in Europe

Dollar goes up in Armenia

Sharmazanov: Armenia ex-President Sargsyan did not decide to hold press conference, he did not change his mind

Blinken: Russia has plans to increase force on Ukraine borders

:       

Azerbaijani military participate in Turkish drills

Taliban say all conditions for recognizing legitimacy of government are met

Azerbaijan MFA statement distorts events of Armenian massacres in Baku 32 years ago

Karabakh ombudsmans office: Azerbaijans anti-Armenian, genocidal policy has clear chronology

US official, Barzani are photographed against backdrop of Greater Armenia and Kurdistan map

Armenia ex-defense minister, army General Staff chief, some others criminal case court hearing kicks off

FM: Most important direction continues to be international recognition of Artsakh

Armenia revenue committee chief on opening of Turkey border: Shall we live with closed borders? In fear?

US selects Los Angeles to host Summit of the Americas in summer 2022

Karabakh Foreign Minister: Return of refugees can only be like mirror

Iranian president arrives on official visit to Moscow

All CSTO peacekeepers leaves Kazakhstan

Artsakh Foreign Minister: Unacceptable to bracket NKAO and NKR together

Karabakh FM: Format of OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs' visits needs to be restored

Media: Air communication between Turkey and Armenia will start on February 2

Artsakh FM: Azerbaijan attack on Karabakh will mean attack on Russia

Gold prices hardly change

American professor angers Erdogan's son-in-law

Hovhannes Khachatryan is elected Armenia Central Bank Deputy Governor

15 years pass since Hrant Dink assassination

563 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Guterres offers Merkel job at UN

Armenian church revamped in Iran

World oil prices going up

Newspaper: ECHR rulings increase after Armenia revolution in 2018

Newspaper: Armenia ex-President Sargsyan to give interview instead of press conference

Azerbaijan MFA falls into hysterical rage by France FM statement

The Pope to donate 100,000 to help migrants on border of Belarus and Poland

Fourth vaccine against COVID-19 is not enough for Omicron

World is on verge of country defaults

French Foreign Ministry considers unacceptable Azerbaijan statements about Pecresse

US to return two valuable artifacts over 4,000 years old to Iraq

Germany may consider halting Nord Stream 2 if Russia attacks Ukraine

Israel successfully completes test of anti-ballistic missile system

Plane landing in Sochi struck by lightning

Putin and Aliyev discuss Ukraine situation

Greek PM Mitsotakis threatens Turkey with sanctions

Handelsblatt: US and EU abandon idea of disconnecting Russia from SWIFT international payment system

Artsakh President meets representatives of non-governmental organizations

Avalanche kills person in Iran

Erdogan says he is pleased with decline in volatility of lira

NEWS.am daily digest: 18.01.22

Turkey and Azerbaijan to start laying gas pipeline to supply Nakhichevan

UK begins to supply Ukraine with anti-tank weapons

Armenian PM holds meeting on Armenia's Transformation Strategy until 2050

Nagorno-Karabakh: Remains of another Armenian soldier found in Jrakan region

Tehran to not accept any border change in South Caucasus

Dollar holding relatively steady in Armenia

Armenia special representative: Future process depends on Turkeys constructiveness degree

Erdogan: Gas from Mediterranean to Europe can only be pumped through Turkey

Iranian Consul General discusses customs cooperation in Nakhijevan

Inecobank brings Apple Pay to customers

Parliament vice-speaker says he is familiar with Armenia proposals on border demarcation commission work

US Secretary of State to visit Kyiv

Russia, Iran and China to hold joint naval drills

OSCE Chairmanship on Aliyev statement: We reiterate our full support to Minsk Group Co-Chairs

Artsakh NSS denies rumors about penetration of Azerbaijanis into Karabakh villages

Indonesian parliament approves bill to relocate capital

Armenia PM to Bulgaria colleague: Our interstate relations are marked by continuous development of cooperation
KENOSHA, WI  The morning after Kenosha police shot and seriously wounded Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, the city woke up to the aftermath of a night of protests and civil unrest.

News of Sunday's shooting quickly spread after an eyewitness posted video of the police shooting on Twitter. (As a caution to viewers, the content of the video contains graphic and dramatic footage.)

In the video, Blake is seen walking away from officers around a parked SUV. The video shows Blake with his back turned and officers pointing guns at him. At one point in the video, Blake is seen opening the SUV's driver's door.

>> National Guard Called To Kenosha Following Jacob Blake Shooting



A moment later, the video captures an officer trying to hold Blake's shirt. Video shows Blake pulling away, and several officers firing multiple gunshots at him. Video shows Blake collapsing into the driver's seat of the car.

Blake is currently in intensive care at Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee after he was transported there Sunday via Flight for Life.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers tweeted Sunday night about the shooting in Kenosha, saying: "Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kathy and I join his family, friends, and neighbors in hoping earnestly that he will not succumb to his injuries."



Protesters overnight took to the streets of Kenosha, with some causing damage at a scale beyond what local residents on the street Monday morning could ever recall seeing.

A bystander takes a photo of a burned-out Kenosha service truck Monday outside the courthouse. (Scott Anderson)

Local authorities parked garbage trucks to the left and right of the courthouse along 56th Street to help guard the public building from further damage.



Armed police in riot gear stood before the front steps of the Kenosha County Courthouse, which was closed Monday for safety precautions.

Kenosha police guard the courthouse Monday. (Scott Anderson)

On Monday morning, the burned-out hulks of several garbage trucks remained. Others had smashed-out windows.



The Kenosha County Administrative Building just west of the courthouse had its storefront windows smashed in. Workers from Rasch Construction swept up the glass, ever mindful that pepper bullets were mixed in with the shards. "It'd ruin your morning," one worker told Patch as he was sweeping up the front walk.

Story continues

A worker from Rasch Construction cleans up in front of the Kenosha County Administrative Building. (Scott Anderson)

A block south, workers were hurriedly boarding up the first-floor windows of Reuther Central High School in the event Monday night sees more unrest.



The former Mangia Wine Bar on Sheridan Road was torched overnight. (Scott Anderson)

Mangia Wine Bar, just south of the courthouse at 5717 Sheridan Road, had closed in January just before the COVID-19 pandemic. The building was torched and smashed during the overnight unrest, leaving a charred restaurant space and wrecked storefront as shards of glass lay on the ground Monday.

The most dramatic of all the damage from overnight occurred at the Car Source used car dealership a block farther south at 59th Street and Sheridan Road. The car lot, which typically held about 50 cars at the busy downtown intersection, was destroyed as some protesters set the entire car lot's inventory ablaze late Sunday into early Monday.

About 50 cars at The Car Source used car lot were destroyed overnight. (Scott Anderson)



Fire crews walked among the charred frames of cars, trucks and SUVs as bystanders looked in astonishment at the extent of the damage.



Several police cars sustained smashed windows and body damage in the unrest overnight.

The courthouse on Monday had been tagged in black and red graffiti, much of which was profane and directed against law enforcement.

A message written by protesters on the front of the Kenosha County Courthouse. (Scott Anderson)

A message written on the courthouse's south facade read, "They kill us because they fear us. Honor the dead."



This article originally appeared on the Mount Pleasant-Sturtevant Patch
The agent of Gabriel Magalhaes has revealed the defender has turned down 'more lucrative offers' ahead of his impending transfer to Arsenal.

The Lille defender was on his way to London on Monday to complete a medical - which he is said to have passed - ahead of a 27m switch to the Gunners.

The Brazilian centre half has been a man in demand this summer with a host of clubs across Europe interested in signing the 22-year-old, including Manchester United and Napoli.

Gabriel Magalhaes' agent has said he has turned down more lucrative offers to join Arsenal

Guilherme Miranda confirmed Magalhaes has been tempted by Mikel Arteta and Edu's project

It is believed the Serie A side matched Arsenal's bid, but his agent Guilherme Miranda has confirmed the north London side are set to win the race after the player was tempted by the project of boss Mikel Arteta and technical director Edu rather than by the finances involved.

Journalist Freddie Paxton posted quotes from Miranda on Twitter which read: 'Arsenal was nowhere near the best proposal [money wise].

'Gabriel chose them over more lucrative offers because Edu convinced us of the project. It's 100% because of Edu Gaspar and Arteta.'

Magalhaes is set to become Arsenal's second new Brazilian signing this summer after Willian joined on a free transfer after leaving London rivals Chelsea.

The centre-back has also attracted interest from Manchester United and Napoli this summer

But it appears Arteta's men are set to sign Magalhaes in a move believed to be worth 27m

He will however have to undergo a 14-day quarantine period due to the government's coronavirus restrictions on travel from France once an imminently expected announcement is made by both clubs.

That means he will have to miss the Community Shield clash against Liverpool on Saturday.

Moreover, Arsenal also confirmed the permanent signings of defenders Cedric Soares and Pablo Mari on Monday.
The 2019 Silver Sneakers Instructor of the Year can barely complete one pushup now.

Known for his shapely calves and strong build, Eliot Perez has lost 20 pounds  mostly muscle  since he contracted COVID-19 in early July and spent nearly four weeks, over two separate stays, in the hospital.

When he was first admitted, his symptoms were flu-like and he couldnt catch a breath. His second hospital stay was because of blood clots that formed during his illness.

The native Houstonian took the coronavirus seriously. In June, he returned to his job teaching fitness classes at the Greater YMCA of Houston, but he wore his face mask and didnt take unnecessary risks. He lives with his 74-year-old mother and most of his students are senior citizens.

The virus found him anyway.

I was pretty shocked when I got it. It was a Wednesday night and I was starting to feel slightly fatigued; I couldnt do a whole class and had to leave early, Perez said. Theres social distancing at the gym, so I didnt let anyone get close to me. I started to get sweaty, so I went home and showered and went straight to bed.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Houston native Eliot Perez named SilverSneakers Instructor of the Year

He woke up the next morning, July 1, with a fever and thought, Oh my gosh, I think Im infected.

On the Fourth of July weekend, the daily state death rate was in the low 200s. More than 4,000 Texans had died from the virus, and there were more than 370,000 cases statewide. In Houston alone, the overall case count reached nearly 90,000 that weekend.

Perez needed to get tested, but finding a testing location was nearly impossible, he said. Many of the city and county sites were booked or had closed early. The soonest he could be tested was July 8; a few days later, an email notified him that he was positive for COVID-19.

At that point, his mother had left Houston for San Antonio to stay with Perezs sister, who took her to get tested. Thankfully, his mothers results were negative.

However, Perez health deteriorated daily, and eventually, a good friend drove him to the emergency department at Memorial Hermann Northeast Hospital in Humble. Due to virus protocol, Perez said he had to walk in alone while his friend stayed in the parking lot.

Once in the emergency department, he experienced a coughing attack, which prompted nurses to place him in a temporary room to get him away from everyone, he said. His vital signs worsened; every time he tried to stand, he got dizzy and couldnt breathe.

Perezs ability to shift the mood of a room is part of what makes him a successful fitness instructor. Between coughing attacks and vital checks, he noticed a frantic nurse.

I asked her if I could give her some words of encouragement and a prayer, Perez said. I felt that if I die today, Im going to continue to do what Eliot does to make people feel better. Im a firm believer that being positive and optimistic can be a great healer.

His hospital experience was equal parts excruciating and monotonous. His blood was drawn at least twice a day; he received different medications twice a day and he received a painful shot to his stomach once a day.

Renew Houston: Get the latest wellness news delivered to your inbox

Then he was transferred to the intensive care unit where he was placed on a breathing machine, which he said felt like a blowing hair dryer in his face. At first, he couldnt breathe, but he eventually found his cadence.

The worst messages he received in person or over text message: How are you feeling?

How the f*** do you think Im feeling? Perez said. I have to wear this mask, my blood is drawn twice a day and my legs are looking skinny. My muscles went first, and thats when it hit me that this is a really serious condition. My whole life flashed before me, and it gave me a revelation.

Perez was determined to get well because he felt that God had a bigger mission for him.

His oxygen levels improved, and he was moved to a normal room and started receiving convalescent plasma therapy.

Perez was discharged on July 21, about one week after he was admitted. He was coronavirus-free, but his troubles were nowhere near over.

Four days later, he could barely walk and one of his ankles swelled intensely. His friend again drove him to the hospital, where doctors found a blood clot in his right leg and more around his lungs.

Perezs final diagnosis included COVID-19, acute respiratory failure with hypoxia, rhabdomyolysis, pulmonary embolisms, sepsis and Type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Im blessed to be alive, but I went through a shocking depression at home, Perez said. A friend looked at me and said its a miracle that Im here, and apparently God has a mission for me.

It will take time, and likely rehabilitation, before he can go back to teaching his seniors at the Y. But hes using this break to help educate his followers and friends on social media, even though it can be traumatizing to relive the details.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Here's what post-COVID rehab looks like

Since he doesnt have health insurance, Perezs continued recovery is precarious. Family, friends and students have been helping with medical costs, including a $400 inhaler and blood thinners to stave off clots.

But hes no victim, he said. He will get back to teaching and choreographing as soon as hes strong enough. Its about endurance, but its also about grace under pressure.

Wonder Woman is my favorite superhero because she is willing to fight for those who cant fight for themselves, he said. I will watch an old episode with Lynda Carter and see the way she was graceful with everybody after she caught the bad guys. Shes a fighter, and she shows grace before and after a fight. Being graceful and showing mercy is important.

julie.garcia@chron.com

twitter.com/reporterjulie
It is my understanding that South Carolina doesnt now allow no-excuse absentee balloting.

In order to vote by mail, you must qualify under rules set out in the absentee voting statute. I qualify because I am over 65.

Because of news reports about possible delays in the delivery of mail, I called the Berkeley County Board of Registration and Elections to ask what I needed to do to get an absentee ballot.

Here are the S.C. Election Commission rules for voting by mail:

1. To get an application, you can go online, or call or email your county voter registration office. You will be mailed an application.

2. Complete, sign and return the application to your voter registration office as soon as possible but no later than 5 p.m. four days before the election. You can return the application by email, mail, fax or personal delivery.

3. Voters who applied early will be mailed an absentee ballot about 30 days before the election.

4. Vote and return the ballot to your county voter registration office by 7 p.m. on the day of the election by mail or personal delivery. Be sure to sign the voters oath and have your signature witnessed. Anyone can witness your signature. A notary isnt necessary.

To mail, place the ballot in the envelope marked ballot here-in and place that envelope in the return envelope.

This procedure involves considerable time in transit and depends on prompt delivery by the Postal Service.

Because of anticipated delays in mail delivery, the importance of this years election and problems related to the pandemic, its advisable for eligible voters who want to vote absentee to contact their countys election board to request a ballot as soon as possible.

WILLIAM KOPIS

Seven Farms Drive

Daniel Island

Stop shark fin sales

We recently celebrated Shark Week.

These impressive animals are apex predators like wolves and grizzly bears.

As such, they deserve our protection. Sharks are endangered by fishermen who remove their fins at sea and throw the sharks overboard to drown, starve to death or be eaten by other fish.

The global shark fin trade deals in as many as 73 million sharks annually.

Shark finning is illegal in U.S. waters, but fins can still be bought and sold through much of the country. Demand drives shark finning and is analogous to harvesting elephant tusks and rhino horns, which results in a similar population decline and jeopardizes a species survival.

In November, the U.S. House passed bipartisan legislation to ban the sale of shark fins in the United States. Now its time for the Senate to make it a reality.

Economically, sharks are worth more alive.

A 2017 study found that spending by divers for recreational shark encounters in Florida totaled more than $221 million and supported over 3,700 jobs, resulting in a $377 million industry.

By contrast, total revenue for shark fins across the entire U.S. in 2019 was $585,874.

Please contact Sen. Tim Scott and urge him to help pass the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act (S.877).

RICHARD DAWSON

Out of Bounds Drive

Summerville

Keep beach rules

The IOP City Council recently relaxed some of its parking restrictions so our neighbors in Mount Pleasant and other communities can enjoy the beach. Here are three things to keep in mind:

1. The population of Mount Pleasant has doubled in the past 20 years. The land mass of the IOP and the size of our beach has not. Hopefully, one day our City Council will be able to determine, as do Charleston parking garages, that there comes a time on a given day to declare us full. We just cant handle any more. Its not you ... its us.

2. If you need to go to the bathroom before you leave, use the ocean instead of our bushes.

3. You brought your disposables with you, so please take them home with you and dont leave them for our city employees to clean up.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

JIM THOMPSON

Fairway Village Lane

Isle Of Palms

Avoid neck gaiters

Neck gaiters made of stretchy materials have been proven grossly ineffective as protection from COVID-19. .

Studies by Duke University and Florida Atlantic University have shown such coverings may indeed be less effective than no mask at all.

Despite these findings, about a third of the folks I encounter in my brief visits to the store are wearing them, including customers, vendors and employees.

Up to this point, who knew? But now we know, and employers need to be at the forefront advising and warning workers that neck gaiters are not acceptable.

Appropriate masks should be distributed and a date certain set to end to the use of these accessories.

Forewarned is forearmed.

If you find yourself 6 feet away from someone wearing a neck gaiter, be safe and make it 12.

DANNY CROOKS

Harbor Oaks Drive

James Island
Liberal education, Leo Strauss reminds us in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, is not the opposite of conservative education, but of illiberal education. Illiberal education is that which imposes and enforces an orthodoxy, whereas genuine liberal education necessarily involves an openness to and consideration of a wide spectrum of different and often conflicting points of view.

Liberal education in this sense has been dying at universities for decades now, but nowhere is the idea of liberal education more dead than the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt has announced a new required course for all new students: Anti-Black Racism: History, Ideology, and Resistance. The online syllabus is quite long and takes a while to get through. Here is the complete course overview (with my bolded highlights):

In the wake of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and many others in recent months, activists and scholars in the United States have taken to the streets, the workplace, and classrooms to decry anti-Black racism and call attention to the ongoing devaluation of Black lives in the U.S. and globally. The wave of uprisings that have swept the nation and globe represent part of a long struggle of anti-racist organizingone that can be traced back hundreds of years. This multidisciplinary course seeks to provide a broad overview of this rich and dynamic history. Built around the expertise of Pitt faculty and Pittsburgh area activists, this course will introduce students to the established tradition of scholarship focused on the Black experience and Black cultural expression. It also seeks to examine the development, spread, and articulations of anti-Black racism in the United States and around the world. The course will grapple with three key areas of inquiry: the roots, ideology, and resistance to anti-Black racism. Each unit will be focused through readings, lectures and discussions. First, we will explore the roots of anti-Black racism in the United States, drawing connections to African history, the history of slavery, and the Transatlantic Slave trade. Second, the course will grapple with the ideology of anti-Black racismthe ideas that undergird the creation of racial hierarchies, often shaped by pseudo-science and eugenics. Third, the course will highlight the theme of resistance, paying close attention to the range of political strategies and tactics Black activists and their allies have employed in their effort to obtain a more just and equal society here and internationally. Significantly, the course employs an intersectional analysistaking into account how race is interwoven into other categories including ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality and nationality. We will use a variety of scholarly disciplines spanning the Humanities, Social Sciences, the Arts, Science and Public Health to explore these themes to help students understand how anti-Black racism functions in U.S. society.

Several observations:

 As you go through the week-by-week subjects and required readings, you notice right away that the reading material starts from the very far left and goes off the edge from there. The 1619 Project shows up for duty, of course, and the course culminates with the supposed anti-racist agenda of Ibram X. Kendi. If you really want to grasp how radical the course reading list is, consider this omission: Ta Nahesi Coates isnt on the reading list. Let that sink in for a moment. When Coates isnt radical enough for you, you know youve really fallen off the edge of a flat-earth worldview.

 Needless to say, there is no inclusion, even in the optional recommended readings, of black intellectuals or authors who offer serious critiques of the current orthodoxy on racism, such as Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, Wilfred Reilly, Jason Riley, Carol Swain, William B. Allen, Deroy Murdock, George Yancey, Danielle Allen, Randall Kennedy, Stephen Carter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, or Roland Fryer. (Many of these writers are not conservatives, but will be scorned anyway.) So much for diversity and inclusion. Theres nothing multidisciplinary about this course.

 Also missing from the reading list are classic black authors such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright. Perhaps the most shocking omission of all: Martin Luther King, Jr. Forget about the Letter from the Birmingham Jail. Among significant modern black historians missing from the syllabus is John Hope Franklin. Its apparent that no author who wrote before Black Lives Matter was founded is worthy of inclusion.

 There is something odd about how the ferment of the current moment is focused exclusively on the black experience. Never mind the talk of intersectionality. Thats just academobabble. What about hispanics? Native Americans? Or the people we used to call white ethnics (i.e., Irish, Jews, slavs, Asians, etc)? All these groups suffered from racism and discrimination in American history. Will there be any study of the Chinese exclusion acts? The No Irish Here signs in the northeast? Discrimination against Jews in college admissions? They are mostly a sideshow in our current anti-racist moment. Again, so much for diversity and inclusion.

Remember the old saying that liberal ideas are so good they need to be mandatory? Heres the kicker, from the FAQ page:

Ive been auto-enrolled in PITT 0210. Can I drop the course? For all full-time, first-year students in the fall 2020 semester on the Pittsburgh and Bradford campuses, the course is mandatory. You cannot drop it.

It gets better. This is a one-credit course. One credit. I doubt many first-year students will bother with all the reading and class sessions (fully online of course because of COVID) for one measly credit. This course is a disgrace.

Heres a better idea. Students should boycott the course. It is one more sign of the unseriousness of this course that it is ungraded: it is a S (for Satisfactory)/No Credit grade. Let the faculty give you NC. If enough students record an NC for a measly 1-credit course, the administration will get the message that this blatant coercion into ideological indoctrination is unacceptable to its customers. (Pitt, a public university, charges about $20,000 a year just for tuition for in-state students. The website doesnt include room and board costs.)

Where are the trustees? Turns out there are 78 trustees, which indicates it is not a serious oversight body, but one many people join simply for the honor of it. (One of Pitts trustees is former Republican governor Richard Thornburgh. He should resign forthwith.) The chair of the Pitt board of trustees is Thomas E. Richards, the retired CEO of CDW corporation. No contact information or emails are available for any of the trustees, but parents of Pitt students, or prospective Pitt students, ought to make their views known.

Especially the view that they are crossing Pitt off their list of universities theyll consider attending.

Chasera worthy article just out from Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic: Anti-Racist Argument Are Tearing People Apart.
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Nearly 70% of New Jerseyans are in favor of legalizing cannabis, according to the most recent poll  making it likely voters will pass the ballot referendum to do just that on Nov. 3.

What are the social and economic impacts to your community is something the states city mayors and other municipal officials have been discussing since before Gov. Phil Murphy made expanding the medical marijuana program and legalizing recreational weed a campaign promise more than three years ago.

Communities are slowly getting themselves around to the idea that medical cannabis is OK, but theyre definitely not there when it comes to recreational, said Alixon Collazos, a cannabis market consultant at The BGill Group.

Even though theres been a growing acceptance of medical cannabis, especially after it was deemed an essential service during the pandemic, Collazos says towns are still hesitant to allow it in their communities because the plant still carries a lot of stigma.

Cannabis may not be right for every town, Fanwood Mayor Colleen Mahr, a past president of the state League of Municipalities told NJ Cannabis Insider earlier this year. Thats why its important to create a regulatory structure conducive for appropriate locations and protections where its inappropriate.

On Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., Mahr and Collazos will join several industry insiders during the forum Cannabis Legalization and Your Town.

Presented by The BGill Group,this symposium, which will be livestreamed on Zoom, will will cover many of the questions communities have about the plant, how will state regulations affect home-rule, and what are the societal impacts  including the social justice aspect and the economic benefits municipalities stand to gain.

The program, moderated by NJ Cannabis Insiders Justin Zaremba, will also feature an introductory Q&A with Jeff Brown, the head of the Department of Healths state medical cannabis program.

Other featured speakers include:

Jennifer Cabrera, who serves as counsel at Vicente Sederberg and co-manages the firms New York office. In this role, she helps clients with regulatory and commercial matters relating to cannabis and hemp with a focus on New York and New Jersey markets.

Stacey D. Udell is the director of valuation, litigation and forensics for the Mid-Atlantic Region of HBK Valuation Group. Shes a core member of HBKs Cannabis Industry Group and has helped cannabis entities develop strategies to maximize the value of their firms.

Scott Rudder is the founder and president of New Jersey CannaBusiness Association, the states largest cannabis trade group. Rudder is a veteran, who served as state Assemblyman and a mayor. He had also led business development efforts for Lockheed Martin Corporation with a focus on energy systems and radar programs.

For the Tuesday event, audience members will be able to post questions during the webinar. Priority given to municipal officials. To reserve tickets, go to https://njcannabisinsider.nj.com/wp/conferences/

NJ Cannabis Insider is a weekly subscriber-based trade journal produced by NJ Advance Media, which has also produced several live events.

For more information, you may reach us via email here.
By Echo Wang and Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - TikTok and one of its employees on Monday separately sued U.S. President Donald Trump's administration over his executive order banning transactions in the United States with the popular short-form video-sharing app, calling it a pretext to fuel anti-China rhetoric as he seeks re-election.

Culver City, California-based TikTok and its Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd rejected what they called the White House's position that it was a national security threat, saying they had taken "extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok's U.S. user data."

They also described Trump's call in his Aug. 6 executive order for a TikTok ban as a means to further his alleged "broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric" ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, where Trump is seeking a second term.

"We do not take suing the government lightly," TikTok said in a blog post. "But with the Executive Order threatening to bring a ban on our U.S. operations ... we simply have no choice."

Patrick Ryan, a technical program manager at TikTok, sued the Trump administration over concerns that he and his 1,500 colleagues, including many on employment visas, will lose their jobs next month if Trumpas order is enforced.

"These are not decisions that belong to the government," Ryan said in an interview. "It's not okay to even consider."

Alex Urbelis, a lawyer representing Ryan in the lawsuit in San Francisco federal court, said the order suffered from "unconstitutional vagueness" and deprived TikTok employees of due process.

The White House referred a request for comment to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to comment on the company's lawsuit and did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ryan's case.

TikTok and ByteDance are seeking a permanent injunction to block Trump from enforcing his Aug. 6 order. They allege the Trump administration violated their constitutional right to due process by banning the company without opportunity to respond to accusations.

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They also allege Trump lacked proper legal authority to issue the order, saying he misused the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets the president regulate international commerce during a national emergency.

Trump had in May 2019 invoked that law to stop alleged efforts by foreign telecommunications companies to conduct economic and industrial espionage against the United States.

The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court names Trump, the U.S. Department of Commerce and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as defendants.

Amid growing distrust between Washington and Beijing, Trump had for weeks complained that TikTok was a national security threat that might share information about users with the Chinese government.

His Aug. 6 executive order called for banning transactions with the app after 45 days.

Trump issued a separate executive order on Aug. 14 giving ByteDance 90 days to divest TikTok's U.S. operations and any data TikTok had gathered in the United States.

Reuters reported last week that TikTok had been preparing a legal challenge.

ByteDance had acquired Shanghai-based video app Musical.ly in a $1 billion transaction in 2017, and relaunched it as TikTok the following year.

TikTok, best known for short videos of people dancing that are popular among teenagers, had 92 million monthly users in U.S. as of June and 689 monthly users globally as of July, according to the lawsuit.

The Trump administration has said Americans should be cautious in using TikTok. Under a law introduced in 2017 under President Xi Jinping, Chinese companies have an obligation to support and cooperate in China's national intelligence work.

But TikTok said Trump's Aug. 6 was not rooted in genuine national security concerns or supported by the emergency he had declared a year earlier.

It called the order "a gross misappropriation of IEEPA authority and a pretext for furthering the President's broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric in the run-up to the U.S. election."

ByteDance has been in talks to sell TikTok's North American, Australian and New Zealand operations to companies including Microsoft Corp and Oracle Corp.

Those assets could be worth $25 billion to $30 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.

Before buying TikTok, ByteDance had not sought advance approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews acquisitions for potential national security risks.

CFIUS later opened an investigation and on July 30 issued a letter stating it found national security risks associated with the purchase. But it "repeatedly refused" to engage with ByteDance's proposals to address concerns, including a nonbinding letter of intent to sell to Microsoft presented earlier July 30, according to the lawsuit.

(Reporting by Echo Wang and Jonathan Stempel in New York; additional reporting by Joshua Franklin in New York, Diane Bartz and Raphael Satter in Washington and Paresh Dave in San Francisco; Editing by Alistair Bell amd Tom Brown)
Beachgoers at Scarborough Bluffs in Ontario on June 30, 2018. (Boris Kasimov/Flickr)

Large Section of Scarborough Bluffs Collapses, No One Injured

A large portion of the Scarborough bluffs stone face collapsed into Lake Ontario on Sunday, but no one was injured, Toronto Police say.

Just before 4 p.m., a significant chunk of the stone face near Lookout Point came crashing down. Beachgoers beneath the cliffside scrambled for their lives.

Video posted on social media shows a giant dust cloud sweeping over people on the beach.

Witnesses told police they heard explosion-like sounds when the chunk of cliff collapsed.

The Toronto Police Service said on Twitter that no one was injured.

Toronto Fire District Chief Stephan Powell said its common for pieces of the cliff to separate and fall.

Its a sand structure, stuff falls all the time, Powell told CBC. Thats why we caution people not to climb it.

Lookout Point has been cordoned off and police advised people and boaters to stay clear of the area.
PRESS RELEASE  The live stream of the Official Ceremony of the 75th WWII Commemoration will be available to people around the globe beginning at 8:30am HST on September 2nd. Airing on the 75th WWII website, Facebook-live, on participating networks and at locations around the world, it will honor the veterans who served in WWII and all of those who supported their efforts.

In consideration of the current COVID-19 situation in Hawaii, and to help assure the health and safety of the veterans of our Greatest Generation, the extremely difficult decision was made to further limit attendance to the Official Commemoration Ceremony on September 2nd to WWII veterans who live in the state of Hawaii. However, efforts are being expanded in the global live streaming to incorporate and honor those veterans from outside Hawaii who had hoped to attend.

The end of WWII launched a wave of innovation and a commitment to peace and global friendship. It was a time of great hope. We look to the example of our veterans from that time as we face the challenges of today, said Gov. David Y. Ige.

This national commemoration was established through legislation authorizing it under the Department of Defense. National Co-chairpersons Bob and Elizabeth Dole and presenting sponsor Linda Hope who represents the Bob Hope Legacy as part of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation, have led the efforts. Salute Their Service, Honor Their Hope is the theme of the Commemoration in Hawaii in recognition of the veterans and civilians who participated in WWII and contributed to the actions that led to the end of the war.

We look forward to honoring our World War II veterans whose service demonstrated the selfless actions of the Greatest Generation. These heroes not only served to protect and defend our nation, but liberated hundreds of millions of freedom-loving people, laying the foundation for the rules-based international order that exists to this day, said Adm. Phil Davidson, Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Paramount to the success of the 75th Commemoration is the health and safety of all those involved.

Legacy of Peace Aerial Parades to celebrate the service and honor the sacrifice of our WWII veterans will be visible to residents around Oahu. These flights will feature 17 WWII warbirds  14 that were carried on the USS Essex and 3 that are in Hawaii  on August 29th, August 30th, and September 2nd. The specific times and flight routes will be covered in a subsequent press release.

We have been honored to be a part of the monumental efforts of all those who dedicated themselves to the formation and development of events planned for the 75th WWII Commemoration and whose goal was to honor WWII veterans in person, said Co-Chairs Maj Gen Darryll Wong, USAF (Ret) and CAPT Steve Colon, USN (Ret). With the ability to bring people together severely curtailed, we are dedicated more than ever to salute our WWII veterans with virtual participation and live-streaming to a local and global audience.

Another aspect of the commemoration, the 1st to Fight: Pacific War Marines movie premiere, has also been cancelled. However, the WWII Foundation is making several documentary films available through the 75th WWII Commemoration website.

The virtual events may be seen by people around the world. For details of how to join the commemoration from afar, go to the official website at 75thwwiicommemoration.org
More than 300 protesters marched on a Portland Police Bureau precinct in Northeast Portland late Sunday. Police lined up far from protesters but eventually declared the gathering a riot in response to an increasingly provocative crowd.

Police did not respond except with verbal warnings until an awning on an abutting building was lit on fire, at which point officers used munitions, including tear gas, to scatter the crowd. The fire was quickly extinguished.

It was a change in the police response from just two days earlier, when lines of police officers intercepted a similar march before it even reached the precinct.

Nearly two-dozen people were arrested during the Sunday demonstration, which marked the 88th night of Portland protests over police violence. The protests were touched off by the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in late May.

Earlier Sunday, video emerged on social media that showed police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooting a Black man multiple times as he tried to get into a vehicle, setting off mass protests there. Protesters in Portland chanted the mans name, Jacob Blake, as they marched to the police building.

POLICE STAY BACK: As protesters arrived at the police precinct around 10 p.m., police announced on a loudspeaker that Northeast Emerson Street was closed to the public, and that protesters who entered the street leading the to the precinct could be arrested or hit with crowd-control munitions.

Police vehicles were stationed at least 100 feet from the street where protesters gathered. Some protesters removed police tape and traffic cones posted to block off the precinct entrance.

Police also warned against throwing objects, but within an hour the space between protesters and police was strewn with water bottles and broken glass. At one point, a large firework exploded near the police line.

Around 10:30 p.m., police declared an unlawful assembly in response to thrown objects and lasers shined at officers, the agency said.

Items thrown toward officers included pieces of ceramic, rocks, glass bottles and at least one balloon filled with feces, according to police. Officers on the roof of the building were hit by rocks, police said, and a piece of ceramic cut a lieutenants hand.

Police cars were also hit by thrown bottles, paint bombs, rocks and heavy metal screws, according to police.

PROTESTERS ADVANCE ON POLICE: Over a loudspeaker, police ordered protesters to leave to the south. Protesters remained and inched closer to police, pushing burning dumpsters foot by foot toward the police line, though the two sides remained distant.

Shortly after 11 p.m., police declared a riot.

FIRE PROMPTS POLICE RESPONSE: Minutes later, an awning on an adjacent building was set ablaze. As a person tried to put out the fire with a handheld extinguisher from the roof, police deployed distraction grenades and tear gas canisters, temporarily scattering the crowd.

Just after 11:30, police officers emerged to scatter the remaining crowd, about 200 strong, and make arrests. That pattern repeated several times as the night wore on.

Portland protests continued for the 88th consecutive night as a group of several hundred gathered outside the Portland Police Bureau: North Precinct on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020. Mark Graves/Staff

NEARLY TWO-DOZEN ARRESTED: Officers arrested 23 people during the demonstration. Those arrested were booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on suspicion of charges including disorderly conduct, interfering with a peace officer and rioting.

Two are accused of assaulting a public safety officer, and another is accused of attempted assault, according to police.

Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced earlier this month that his prosecutors wont pursue demonstrators accused of interfering with police, disorderly conduct, criminal trespass, escape or harassment if the allegations dont involve deliberate' property damage, theft or force against another person or threats of force, Schmidt said.

Schmidts office also wont prosecute people on a riot accusation alone. Prosecutors will proceed with a riot case only if it includes an accompanying allegation of specific property damage or use of force, he said.

EARLIER IN THE WEEKEND: Dueling demonstrators faced off Saturday in downtown Portland, drawing a large crowd and intermittently breaking into violent scuffles for more than two hours. Portland police issued warnings that went largely ignored by the two factions: one aligned with a so-called Back the Blue rally and the other a Black Lives Matter counter-demonstration, which together drew hundreds to the few blocks surrounding the Multnomah County Justice Center at noon.

Later Saturday, Portland police repeatedly blocked a march to an East Portland police building before officers ultimately used force to break up the crowd. Police said they decided to advance after people in the group shot paintballs and threw objects at the building.

-- The Oregonian/OregonLive

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 appears to be more deadly than the flu, but experts warn that a direct comparison is difficult. The similarities between the viruses could cause some complications when flu season soon begins, but the same basic prevention strategies apply for both. And a flu vaccine may guard against simultaneous infections.CDC images
- By Praveen Chawla





Monish Pabrai invested in 4.73 million shares of Seritage Growth Properties (NYSE:SRG) in the 2020 second quarter. During the quarter, shares traded for an average price of $10.04 each. He previously sold out of the stock three years ago.

Why Is Pabrai Buying Seritage?





Given that Pabrai owned the stock before, I think it is logical to assume that he knows the company well and has pounced on it because he sees it as very undervalued.

Other guru owners

Hotchkis & Wiley, a value-oriented mutual fund company, has also added about 11% to its Seritage stock holdings in the quarter as the stock took a dive.

Why Is Pabrai Buying Seritage?

Another notable value investor who has recently added to Seritage holdings is Guy Spier of Aquamarine Capital. Gurufocus shows that other Gurus holding Seritage include Third Avenue Management (Trades, Portfolio) with 594,279 shares (which reduced its investment by -8.8% during the quarter) and Mario Gabelli (Trades, Portfolio) with127,500 shares (after reducing the position by -22.45% during the quarter).

Value buy or value trap?

Seritage is selling at less than a third of the market value investors assigned to it prior to the Covid-19 crisis. Based on the median price-book ratio, the REIT appears to be selling at fire-sale prices. Thus, should we join Monish Pabrai is pouncing on this investment? Or is the risk of walking into a value trap too high?

Seritage is a real estate investment trust (REIT) which was spun out of Sears Holdings five years ago (June 2015) as rights offering to Sears stockholders. Sears Holdings has declared bankruptcy in October 2018 and Seritage is in the process of cutting off all remaining ties with its former parent. The value of Seritage derives from the redevelopment potential of the former Sears properties spread across the U.S. Edward Lampert (Trades, Portfolio), the former chairman of Sears Holdings, is also the chairman of Seritage.

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The REIT's portfolio consists of over 30 million square feet of existing buildings and approximately 2,500 acres of parking lots and developable land. Seritage owns assets in 44 U.S. states, with the highest concentrations in California, Florida, Texas and the Northeast. These denser markets where the company owns and controls 10-15 acres of contiguous, unencumbered land is a unique and very valuable asset. Many of these sites sit on the front of major shopping nodes, with road networks and much of the physical infrastructure already in place.

Over the last several years, Seritage has completed or commenced 106 projects. Almost all of these projects involved tearing down existing buildings or turning enclosed space to the outside. The strategy is to sell off smaller and less desirable locations and redeploy funds into developing properties in wealthier areas with better potential.

Why Is Pabrai Buying Seritage?

Seritage's business strategy

Seritage's primary objective is to create value for its shareholders through the re-leasing and re-development of the majority of its wholly-owned properties and Joint-Venture properties. It seeks to do so by:

1) converting single-tenant buildings (currently or formerly occupied by Sears or Kmart prior to redevelopment) into multi-tenant properties at a higher rent

2) develop its urban landholdings (it has 2,800 acres of land or an average of 13 acres per site) through mixed-use (retail, residential, office, etc.) densification

3) leverage existing and future joint venture relationships with leading real estate and financial partners (Seritage owns 50% interest in 28 JV Properties, including 23 properties in joint ventures with leading regional mall REITs and five properties in joint ventures with other institutional partners).

Balance Sheet

Why Is Pabrai Buying Seritage?

Seritage has approximately $1.6 billion in long term billion debt on the balance sheet compared to $139 million in cash.

Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio)'s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)(BRK.B) holds all of its long term debt as a term loan. On July 31, 2018, Seritage entered into a Senior Secured Term Loan Agreement providing for a $2.0 billion term loan facility with Berkshire Hathaway Life Insurance Company of Nebraska. The Term Loan Facility provided for initial funding of $1.6 billion at closing and includes a $400 million incremental funding facility. The Term Loan Facility matures on July 31, 2023.

The following is a summary of key points from Seritage's financials over the last four years.

Fiscal Year Revenue (mil) YOY (%) EPS Debt/Equity Cash (mil) DPS YOY (%) Shares (mil) 2019 169 -21.5 -3.20 2.19 139 0.25 -75.0 56 2018 215 -10.9 -4.17 2.05 533 1.00 0.0 56 2017 241 -3.1 -2.38 1.52 242 1.00 0.0 56 2016 249 - -1.25 1.45 52 1.00 - 54







The company's Cash Flow from Operations is currently negative (not a great position to be in) and it has discontinued its dividend. Seritage earned a loss of $8 million in cash flow last quarter.

Why Is Pabrai Buying Seritage?

Closing thoughts

It looks like to me that Monish Pabrai is betting that Seritage will be able to sell enough of its properties so that it can continue to fund the development of its remaining higher value properties and be able to renew Berkshire's term loan and line of credit.

Pabrai usually invests in potential multi-baggers, and the upside here is likely several times his buy price. If Pabrai bought the stock in May, he could already be up by about 100%.

However, it is clear that there is a lot of risk in this investment due to most of its projects still being in development, especially if the economy worsens and Seritage is unable to get access to capital. This could force it into bankruptcy, wiping out the equity.

Disclosure: The author does not own Seritage stock at the time of writing.

Read more here:

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The Republican National Convention on Monday formally re-nominated President Donald Trump as the party's presidential candidate for the November 3 election.

IMAGE: US President Donald Trump speaks at the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Photograph: Jessica Koscielniak/Pool via Reuters

Trump, 74, who faces a formidable challenge from former Democratic vice president Joe Biden, 77, is scheduled to deliver his acceptance speech from the South Lawn of the White House on August 27.

The once in four-year GOP (Grand Old Party) convention is being held in virtual mode due to the raging coronavirus pandemic.

A small part of the official business of the convention is being held at Charlotte in North Carolina.

Trump was re-nominated following a roll call of votes from elected Republican Party delegates from all the 50 States.

Vice President Mike Pence, 61, was also re-nominated as the running mate of Trump.

Making a surprise appearance at the drastically cut-down Charlotte convention, Trump described the November polls as the 'most important election' in the history of the US.

The country can go either in a 'horrible' or a 'greater' direction, he said, urging his supporters to be watchful of the activities of his opponents.

Trump alleged the Democrats are 'trying to steal the elections' through mail-in-vote just like they 'spied' on his campaign in 2016.

"It is a disgrace to our country," he said.

"Now they are doing which is more dangerous. They are stealing millions of votes," Trump alleged and asserted that he is going to win the election, unless it is a 'rigged' one.

"We have tremendous enthusiasm. We have a record enthusiasm. They (Democrats) have no enthusiasm," Trump said.

China will own the US if the Democrats are voted to power in the November. election, he said.

"They (Democrats) are using COVID-19 to steal the elections. The US will never forget it has suffered due to the virus coming from China," Trump said.

"We will not be taking 'God' out of the Pledge of Allegiance like the Democrats did," he said, slamming the Democrats.

"Our country will never be a socialist country," Trump asserted, amidst a huge round of applause from the delegates.

This election, he said, has far greater enthusiasm than ever.

Pence also made a surprise appearance at Charlotte where the roll call vote was done. He will deliver his formal acceptance speech on Wednesday.

"We will be taking our case to the American people this week," Pence said soon after he and Trump were re-nominated by the party for the November election against the Biden-Harris Democratic ticket.

"It's going to be four more years. We are going to make America great again. Again," a confident Pence said.

Earlier, Trump's re-election campaign released a set of core priorities for a second term under the banner of 'Fighting for You!'

Trump's boundless optimism and certainty in America's greatness is reflected in his second-term goals and stands in stark contrast to the gloomy vision of America projected by Biden and Democrats, the Trump campaign said.

Among top promises made by the Trump campaign for the second term included creating 10 million new jobs in 10 months, developing a vaccine for coronavirus by year end and return to normal in 2021.

The Trump campaign has also pledged to bring back one million manufacturing jobs from China, tax credits for companies that bring back jobs from China, no federal contracts for companies who outsource to China and hold China fully accountable for allowing the coronavirus to spread across the world.

In the second term, the campaign promises to block illegal immigrants from becoming eligible for taxpayer-funded welfare, healthcare, and free college tuition; mandatory deportation for non-citizen gang members and dismantle human trafficking networks.

The campaign has also pledged to prohibit American companies from replacing US citizens with cheaper foreign workers and require new immigrants to be able to support themselves financially.

Reiterating its commitment to a 'America First Foreign Policy', the campaign also promises to stop endless wars and bring troops home, get allies to pay their fair share, maintain and expand US' unrivaled military strength, wipe out global terrorists who threaten to harm Americans and build a great cybersecurity and missile defence systems.

On the first day of the convention, Trump's son Donald J Trump Jr would be the star speaker along with former India-American US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, and many others.

The speakers are expected to highlight the achievements of the Trump administration in the three-and-a-half years and launch a blistering attack on Democratic rivals Biden and Kamala Harris.

Led by Trump, the Republican leaders are expected to continue to accuse Biden of being taken by the radical left.

Economy, law and order and freedom is on the ballot, Pence said setting the tone of the speakers over the next four days.

Other speakers include Senator Tim Scott, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, congressmen Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
On Thursday Cole got a call from a man who said he saw Solomon at a home construction site just an eighth of a mile from her house.

She and her husband rushed to bring Solomon home.

The tortoise was tired, hungry and caked in mud, but seems to be in good health after his odyssey. He's a vegetarian and was able to eat grass, dandelions and other flowers while he was away.

She said she is taking him to the vet on Monday to be sure he's OK and is watching him like a hawk until then.

Cole said she gave Solomon a big bowl of his favorite foods once he got home, including collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower and watermelon rinds along with some bananas and carrots.

Cole isn't sure how Solomon got loose, but they've reinforced his area to keep it from happening again. She's talked to the Nashville Zoo and a local rescue group about fitting Solomon with GPS in case he does take off again.

For now, it seems that Solomon's wandering days are behind him.

"People are surprised to know that he's very attached to his humans and he's very happy to be home," she said.

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Police in northern Vietnams Mong Cai City on Sunday arrested a group of 11 wanted Chinese citizens allegedly renting a house to operate online gambling activities, ten of whom entered the country illegally.

On Friday last week, Mong Cai policen officers coordinated a raid on a house in Hai Yen Ward on suspicions of illegal activities and caught red-handed a group of 11 Chinese nationals gambling and organizing gambling on Chinese sites.

Police seized four laptops, ten bank cards issued by Chinese banks, 63 unused Chinese SIM cards, eight Wi-Fi routers, and other relevant items.

Ten of the 11 detainees were found to have entered Vietnam unlawfully.

According to a preliminary investigation, via a local resident in Mong Cai, the Chinese suspects had rented a house where they installed equipment to conduct illegal gambling and set up online casinos on Chinese platforms.

Working with their counterparts in Chinas Dongxing City, Mong Cai investigators found that the group of foreigners were being wanted by Dongxing police after being accused of organizing online gambling.

After completing the necessary proceedings, Vienamese police officers handed over the detainees along with the seized exhibits to Dongxing police on Saturday evening as per a crime prevention cooperation agreement between the two sides.

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It was May 2003. The photographer and I were in a grocery store parking lot in the better part of Washington, DC. We chain-smoked and waited for disaster to strike. When the police scanner crackled we cranked up the car and headed across town, over the Anacostia River to one of the most chronically violent sections of the city.

We found a small brick apartment building awash in red and blue police lights. An ambulance idled by the curb. Someone had been shot. As we walked in, we felt a knot of pressure to capture something our editors could use. We pressed every button in the elevator, and stuck our heads out to listen for the sounds of a crime scene ringing through the concrete hallways.

They were on the third floor. A bunch of first responders clustered around a doorway. They waved us off. We retreated to a stairwell, then eventually thought better of it and went outside to wait and smoke. Id always thought of our notebooks and cameras as all-access passes to just about anywhere we wanted to go, no matter how private. But it had started to feel like entitlement. A way to invade the worst moment of someones life.

Neighbors stood outside, too, in the heat. They speculated about the victims age. It felt as though wed shown up uninvited at a wake. The first time we saw her, she was wheeled out in a silent procession, her bloody head almost completely covered in gauze and bandages, a bag attached to her mouth. Breathing, one medic said to another, but theres brain matter.

We trailed the paramedics for a bit, gathering what we needed. She was twenty-one. Thats all I could find out. I had literally chased an ambulance. But I was on deadline. I needed a body. The city had given me one.

One of the residents asked us to leave. Instead of considering what had prompted the request, I puffed out my chest and sputtered about how I was just doing my job, that I had a right to be there. The scene from that night made up the last three paragraphs that went along with a photo-essay. Before it was published I had moved on to the next assignment.

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I still dont know what happened that night, or who the woman was.

THE GROCERY STORE where we had camped out is long gone. So is the police chief, Charles H. Ramsey, who is now a nationally recognized reformer. I had trouble finding the story in the archives. It only surfaced in my own memories as protests about the treatment of Black communities by the police struck America in recent weeks.

There have been calls to redefine policing. To defund departments or at least attempt to make them less lethal and more accountable. But if we are going to change the way police departments operate, we also need to rethink how we cover them.

I had held down the crime beat since right after college, from the tail end of the crack era to the dawn of vegan bakeries and bars with artisanal ice. As an alt-weekly journalist, I had a lot of advantages that daily crime reporters didnt. In my first few years on the beat, there were more than seven hundred murders in DC. I wasnt required to cover any one of them. I could go pretty much wherever I wanted.

For my first cover story, I wrote about a police officer killing a Black teenager. With facts on our side and an editor backing me up, we didnt mince words. The allure of the beat was powerful. It was exciting to do something that appeared to be vaguely dangerous and righteous.

My purview became all the excesses of the war on drugs: police brutality, dubious searches, false arrests, and a backlog of unsolved murders that continued to haunt loved ones in the most ignored and least powerful parts of the city. I didnt have to rely on cops for scoops. Public defenders and civil attorneys had documents, and a few were generous enough and pissed off enough to share with a young reporter who got outraged a lot.

But Ive gone back and reread some of those old stories, and Ive come away with a nagging disappointment in what I didnt cover, what I didnt say, and the assumptions I made. I may have documented police abuses, but the victims of police brutality rarely got to tell their stories beyond their encounters with the police. On the page, they were often little more than the sum of their injuries and their settlement checks.

I didnt realize it, but I worked in a system, with rules. As much as my stories challenged the police, I often wrote from their point of view. I explained how their bad actions resulted from a lack of legitimate oversight or the grind of policing during the crack epidemic. I did not offer those they policed the same courtesy. When I read some of my crime stories now, I think I sound like a cop.

Police reporting, like policing itself, is still very much shaped by the crack epidemic and the hysteria that fueled that era. I thought of the cop Id done my first expose on back in the late nineties. When a supervisor questioned his rough ways, the cop thumped his chest with his fists and declared that he was a man of personal valor and that theres a war being fought on the streets! In 2020, cops still see themselves as soldiers, and their beats as war zones. They still earn respect via the sheer number of arrests they make.

Cop reporting is still tethered to the police scanner. Reporters churn out crime brief after crime brief that contain little more than addresses and bodies. They still run stories where the police and the prosecutors are the only sources. This is how well-intentioned journalists turn into mouthpieces for authority.

The crime beat is still kept separate from beats such as education and child welfare and the economy, even though we know how those can influence crime rates. Behind every rap sheet is a series of institutional failures that are never held to account, let alone regularly covered. The drug wars acute humiliations and bewilderingly inhumane policies take a toll that is rarely explored consistently (reporters still think drug courts are examples of good reform). Reporters have described George Floyds criminal recordincluding a decades-old drug bustas if it had any bearing on his murder.

Newsroom budget cuts and layoffs mean there is even less time to fact-check a police press release or corroborate an allegation of abuse. Local TV and blogs often dont even try. The people in despairfrom police violence, stop-and-frisk procedures, and unsolved crimesbarely register. You dont get a moment to second-guess.

Crime reporting shouldnt end when the courts get involved. Dailies should stop serving up stories announcing the arrest of an individual unless they commit to covering the case to its conclusion. Investigative journalism, not to mention the Innocence Project, has shown how sunshine can expose quack science, prejudice, and corruption. But those kinds of stories take time, funding, and lengthy public-records fights.

We also need more reporters with lived experience. This means hiring those whove endured the criminal justice system firsthand, whether theyve done time in our prison system or felt the long reach of our probation system. This may do more to change the beat in fundamental ways than anything else. Theyre going to ask questions all the well-intentioned Ivy League essayists never think to ask. They understand the dynamics of the criminal justice system. They can take us to places other reporters dont ever get to see.

We have some things going for us. In the late nineties, it was extremely hard to report on killings perpetrated by the police. Finding detailed information could take years, and even then eyewitnesses might be reluctant to open up. Now there is body cam as well as eyewitness cellphone footage. We need to learn to get better access to both.

As a society, we have a better understanding of trauma, entrenched poverty, housing instability, and underfunded schools and how they shape every aspect of our criminal justice system. We need to make a habit of treating the school social worker, the needle exchange volunteer, the legal aid attorneys, as sources equivalent to those with a gun and a badge.

LONG AFTER MY DAYS ON THE BEAT, certain blocks triggered memories. The corner of 17th and Euclid Street NW where Id spent a month reporting on a notorious crew of drug dealers. The spot along East Capitol Street where I met a senior citizen the cops had planted drugs on. The alley in Lincoln Heights where that unhinged cop killed a teen. Just like a cop, I had war stories. But Id also remember the heaviness, the way tragedies stuck to neighborhoods long after reporters had gone, the way these tragedies left them with unwanted legacies.

I didnt always get it right even when I knew better. But I started to when I met a mother whose twenty-year-old son had been killed in a drive-by shooting. His death had merited two sentences in a police department press release. The case had gone unsolved going on six years.

I spent months with the mother, Patricia. She eventually talked openly about the toll her sons death had taken on her mental health, as well as the times she had been hospitalized. While I was reporting the story, her sons best friend checked himself into a psych ward. Eventually I left the police beat entirely to cover mental health and other social services on a full-time basis.

Before Patricias story was finished, the photographer and I went to her house to take some pictures. I sat on her bed. She played me a grainy videotape of her sons funeral. She had memorized every moment on that tape. She quoted lines of Scripture before they were read aloud. She was still annoyed at the way the priest tucked her son in and shut the coffin. She lip-synced along, through her tears. I knew I could never get close to explaining her pain. I also knew I had to try.

ICYMI: Stop using officer-involved shooting

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Jason Cherkis covered police and crime for more than a decade at the Washington City Paper. He is currently a freelance journalist and is working on a book about suicide for Random House.
Arapahoe Community College President, Dr. Diana Doyle

Arapahoe Community College President, Dr. Diana Doyle

Denver, CO, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arapahoe Community College (ACC) president, Dr. Diana Doyle, has announced plans to retire at the end of the academic year in June 2021.

In an age where the average tenure for a community college president is just 3.5 years, Dr. Doyle will serve triple the standard length of time with over 11 years come next summer, and conclude a remarkable 43-year career in higher education.

Serving alongside this extraordinary team of faculty and staff, impacting our communities, and helping ACC build its remarkable trajectory has been the job of a lifetime, and I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to make such a difference in the lives of students, said Dr. Doyle. The work we do is truly transformational, and I am energized  especially now  to support students and our team as we continue to meet hardship with care, resourcefulness and innovation.

Dr. Doyles leadership and vision have produced exceptional results for students, the college and the surrounding community throughout her tenure. Under her guidance, ACC has spearheaded a variety of innovative efforts focused on student success that include launching three health service-related Bachelors degree programs, establishing support services for veterans and students with disabilities, expanding workforce training and apprenticeship opportunities, and growing solid online learning programs - well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Notably, Dr. Doyle was the driving force behind years of planning and partnership that led to ACCs geographic expansion and the building of a state-of-the-art campus, called the ACC Sturm Collaboration Campus at Castle Rock. From the outset of its opening, the Collaboration Campus was recognized regionally for providing a unique world-class educational environment for learning and workforce training.

Dr. Doyle has also been successful in securing millions in new funding and philanthropic resources to bolster student scholarships and support services, and has cultivated countless industry partnerships to provide best-in-class career training opportunities for career and technical education students.

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Dr. Doyle was selected as the recipient of the NASPA IV-West Presidential Excellence Award in 2018, the Phi Theta Kappa Shirley B. Gordon Presidential Award of Distinction in 2016, and the State Student Advisory Council (SSAC) President of the Year in 2014. She also received the NASPA Foundation Pillar of the Profession award for outstanding contributions to college student success in 2010.

Prior to her appointment at ACC, Dr. Doyle served as the Executive Vice President of Learning and Student Affairs at the Community College of Denver. She has also served in leadership roles at Western Nebraska Community College, Colorado School of Mines, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Illinois State University.

Chancellor of the Colorado Community College System (CCCS), Joe Garcia, credited Doyle with substantial positive impact on the lives of students, the regions economy, and the greater higher education community.

We have been fortunate to not only have Dr. Doyle at the helm of ACC for the past decade, but also as an incredible thought leader who has paved the way for significant change in how post-secondary education is delivered to meet and support the needs of todays students, said Garcia. I know I speak for our entire system when I express our deep appreciation for her transformational work and tireless dedication to student success.

CCCS will launch a national search in the coming months to attract a world-class leader for ACCs next president, and is committed to an inclusive search process that will solicit input from the colleges faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community.

###

About Arapahoe Community College

Arapahoe Community College (ACC) provides innovative and responsive educational and economic opportunities in an accessible, inclusive environment that promotes success for students, employees and the communities it serves. ACC offers classes online and at campuses in Littleton, Parker and Castle Rock, serving students throughout Arapahoe County, Douglas County and south metro Denver. ACC has seven academic pathways for students to explore, connect and succeed, as well as guaranteed transfer programs to all four-year Colorado public institutions.

About the Colorado Community College System

The Colorado Community College System (CCCS) is the states largest system of higher education, delivering more than 1,000 programs to over 125,000 students annually through 13 colleges and 40 locations across Colorado. Our open access mission ensures all Coloradans who aspire to enrich their lives have access to quality higher education opportunities. The System Office provides leadership, advocacy and support to the colleges under the direction of the State Board for Community Colleges and Occupational Education (SBCCOE). Join us in changing the way Colorado goes to college.

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CONTACT: Fiona Lytle Colorado Community College System (720) 393-9824 Fiona.Lytle@cccs.edu




This Coto de Caza, CA, home is a place where wine has been thrown and insults have been hurled through the sun-kissed air.

Yes, the residence of Vicki Gunvalson, the original member of the "Real Housewives of Orange County" who started the whole phenom, is now on the market for $3,350,000.

Located behind gates, the five-bedroom, 4.5-bathroom, 5,456-square-foot home was built in 1995 and has been updated throughout.

However, fans know that the true highlight of the property is the backyard. Outside, you'll find a massive pool, waterfall, rock water slide, kitchen, and outdoor entertaining area that any Bravo aficionado will recognize.

It's where her castmate Tamra Judge memorably unleashed a full glass of merlot right in Jeana Keough's face.

Back inside, the home's interiors are fancy and also offer their fair share of drama, thanks to high ceilings, crown moldings, and custom paint. The home's formal living and dining rooms look like ideal spots for any sort of on-camera confessional.

The enormous, light-filled kitchen is where Vicki has whipped up meals for her family and her beau. The master suite features a separate sitting area with fireplace and glam bathroom.

The home sits on a full acre and offers views of the surrounding hills from the backyard and upstairs balcony.

Exterior of home in Coto de Caza, CA realtor.com

Entry realtor.com

Living room realtor.com

Kitchen realtor.com

Dining room realtor.com

Family room realtor.com

Office realtor.com

Master suite realtor.com

Sitting area realtor.com

Master bathroom realtor.com

Pool realtor.com

Vicki is still living in the place, waiting for it to sell. The office, featuring a light ring and "star" to stand on, are hints that she's still in residence. She also recently made a video showing her getting everything organized for the move, and naturally, plugging two companies along the way.

"If my house ever sells, they're gonna pack it and unpack it," Gunvalson says, showing off the home's meticulously organized pantry.

Here's a video tour of the home she posted on Aug. 13.

If you're ready to whoop it up like Vicki in this "Real Housewives"-approved abode, be prepared to fork over a few million bucks.

Gunvalson, 58, was an integral part of the success of the Orange County franchise and appeared on the show for 14 seasons, dating back to the show's premiere in 2006. In January, she announced her departure from the popular reality show.

She recently purchased a condo in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, toured another beach property in June, and said that it's "Time for a change." Now she's ready to follow through with the sale of her O.C. home base.

The post 'Real Housewives' Star Vicki Gunvalson Selling Her Orange County Home for $3.35M appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
The Tata Group is working on a new super app that will attempt to offer the groups wide range of products and services within one smartphone application for consumers. It is expected that the super app that the Tata Group is working on will be ready for launch by early next year. This comes at a time when Amazon has been expanding its product offerings in India, with the latest addition being the ability to buy digital gold via Amazon Pay. Reliance Industries Ltd has also aggressively raised around $20 billion from as many as 13 foreign investors, including tech companies Facebook, Google and Qualcomm, and has significantly upgraded the MyJio app to offer a lot more functionality and features over the past few updates.

The Financial Times reports that Tatas new super app platform will combine the groups services in one place. It will be a super app, a lot of apps in apps and so on . . . We have a very big opportunity, says Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, which has businesses in Financial Services, Automotive brands, Telecom, Tourism, Aerospace and Defence as well as Consumer and Retail spaces. These include the car brand Jaguar Land Rover. The Tata businesses are valued at $113 billion in terms of revenue, and the businesses include direct to home (DTH) satellite TV service Tata Sky, home broadband service Tata Sky Broadband, the jewelry business Tanishq, the Indian Hotels Company which runs the Taj Hotels & Resorts, consumer appliances brand Voltas Beko, offline stores under the Croma brand, financial services Tata AIG and Tata Capital as well as retail brands Zara and Starbucks.

It is believed that the Tata Group wants to put a variety of their services, including food, groceries, fashion and lifestyle, consumer electronics, consumer durables, financial services and insurance as well as education, healthcare and bill payments within one app. The latest numbers by CounterPoint research suggest India has as many as 620 million internet users and that number is expected to use to around 850 million by the year 2022.

The Tata Group, depending upon how you count, touches several hundred millions of consumers in India, if you take consumers who are walking in everyday into a Tata facility, says Chandrasekaran. Tata has recently created a new consumer goods company which looks after the food and beverage offerings, which includes Tetley Tea along with coffee, spices and salt, and also launched Tata Digital platform to push new tech ventures.
The rift within the Congress party was out in the open during the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting that commenced on August 24 after 23 top leaders wrote to interim chief Sonia Gandhi seeking an organisational overall, among other things.

The virtual meeting started with Sonia Gandhi, 73, announcing her decision to step down as interim president. The drama unfolded as the leaders from the faction who had written the letter came under attack from a rival group comprising leaders who support Sonia Gandhi. Rahul Gandhi, who quit the party presidents post last year after the 2019 general election rout, reportedly took strong exception to the letter. He called it ill-timed and said the whole exercise was done in collusion with the BJP, much to the annoyance of letter-writing faction of the party.

CWC Meeting LIVE Updates

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh was first among the leaders urging Sonia Gandhi to reconsider her decision. Another senior leader AK Antony was next to join the clamour, terming the letter cruel. He said if Sonia Gandhi doesnt continue, Rahul Gandhi should take over.

In response, senior leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Kapil Sibal, both former Union ministers and part of the group that wrote the letter, said they were upset by Rahul Gandhis collusion with the BJP remark. While Sibal went public and tweeted he had never made a statement in favour of the BJP on any issue. Azad, offered to resign, reports suggested.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala was, however, quick to deny Rahul Gandhis statement.

Sh. Rahul Gandhi hasnt said a word of this nature nor alluded to it. Please dont be misled by false media discourse or misinformation being spread. But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather than fighting & hurting each other & the Congress, he tweeted.

Soon, Sibal withdrew the tweet critical of Rahul Gandhi. Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him. I therefore withdraw my tweet, he tweeted.

Later Azad told a news channel that he had no issues with Rahul Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi but had offered to resign on others' charges.

Apart from Sibal and Azad, the leaders who had signed the letter included Shashi Tharoor, Anand Sharma, Prithviraj Chavan, Vivek Tankha, Mansh Tewari, Milind Deora, Renuka Chowdhury, Verappa Moily, among others.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Amarinder Singh, Mallikarjun Kharge, PL Punia, KC Venugopal, and AK Antony, among other leaders, are present at the meeting.

Apart from Manmohan Singh and AK Antony those siding with Gandhis include Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot. V Narayanasamy, chief minister of Puducherry also echoed a similar sentiment as his fellow Congress chief ministers Before the meeting, former Madhya Pradesh Chief Ministers Digvijaya Singh and Kamal Nath also tweeted in support of Sonia Gandhi.

"Any suggestion or insinuation that Mrs. Sonia Gandhis leadership is in question is absurd. I appeal to Mrs. Sonia Gandhi to give strength to the Congress Party by continuing as President and lead the Congress, Kamal Nath said.

Digvijaya Singh, like many other leaders, suggested that Rahul should take over as president. If Sonia ji does wish to step down then Rahul ji should accept the post of President while giving up his stubbornness, he said in a tweet.

Political analysts following developments foresee a turmoil within the Congress party. Either there will be a clear rift within the party or some prominent leaders will quit, Sanjay Kumar of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) told Moneycontrol.

In 1999 too, when Sonia Gandhi stepped down from the post of the president what followed was a resignation spree of Congress leaders, including Digvijaya Singh in Madhya Pradesh, Sheila Dikshit in Delhi, Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan apart from a pan-India agitation against her decision to step down. On May 24, 1999, Sonia Gandhi, however, withdrew her resignation and three dissenting leaders, Sharad Pawar, PA Sangma and Tariq Anwar were expelled from the party for six years.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-23 22:52:02|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- The 20th National Science and Technology Week kicked off in Beijing on Sunday.

With a parallel venue in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the National Science and Technology Week this year will focus on achievements in fighting the COVID-19 epidemic with science and technology.

The year 2020 marks the 20th anniversary of the event. The content and forms of activities are different from the previous ones due to COVID-19 prevention and control.

The theme of the week is "prevailing over an epidemic with science and technology, and empowering the country with innovation." During the week, science popularization events will focus on showcasing the significant role of science and technology in China's battle against COVID-19.

Online platforms are expected to be the frontline of this year's events. A "cloud exhibition hall" for the National Science and Technology Week was launched for the first time (http://scitechweekvr.people.com.cn), demonstrating China's achievements in innovation, poverty alleviation, and its battle against COVID-19 with science and technology.

With technologies like VR and 5G, the public can see the exhibition at home.

In the coming week, more than 10 major demonstration activities, including "science night", "science popularization assistance to Tibet", and the "national science popularization commentator contest" will be carried out.

Launched in 2001, the National Science and Technology Week has been held for 19 consecutive sessions, becoming the most influential popular science event in the country.

The closing ceremony will be held on Aug. 29 in Wuhan. Enditem
Lydian Armenia has informed that it has filed a lawsuit against independent MP Arman Babajanyan for slander.

The company has filed this lawsuit in connection with one of Babajanyans interviews during which he had said, "...corrupt and criminally obtained permits," "... that criminal dealof Amulsar, of Lydianwas organized entirely by former corrupt chains," and had used similar expressions about the Amulsar gold mine project of Lydian.

The respective statement disseminated by the company also reads as follows, in particular: "Not only have such statements not been proven for more than two years, but in some cases they have already been qualified by the court as slander.

In the case of Arman Babajanyan, the fact of such irresponsible statements is more worrying, as it is not about an activist or a demonstrator, but about an NA [National Assembly] MP representing the RA [Republic of Armenia] legislative power and engaged in lawmaking activities.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 02:52:39|Editor: huaxia

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by Marwa Yahya

CAIRO, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Egypt has recently intensified its foreign aid in a display of solidarity in times of crisis, a move termed by Egyptian political experts as "aid diplomacy" that seeks to promote bilateral relations and enhance the global role of the most populous Arab country.

"Sending aid to many countries recently unveiled Egypt's new diplomatic approach adopted to enhance bilateral ties with different countries," said Tariq Fahmy, a professor of political science with Cairo University.

This will certainly further highlight the diplomacy's role in the international and Arab issues, Fahmy noted.

Egypt has opened an air bridge for sending humanitarian aid to Lebanon in the wake of the massive explosions at Port of Beirut on Aug. 4, which killed at least 177, injured about 6,000, and left as many as 300,000 homeless.

On Monday, Egypt dispatched its 10th aid flight loaded with 28 tons of food and medical supplies to Lebanon's capital.

On Aug. 19, a military plane carried 14 tons of vitamins, antibiotics, sedatives, antipyretic drugs and surgical supplies to Sudan, where floods killed at least 63 and displaced thousands others.

As part of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's 100 Million Healthy Lives initiative, Egypt has pledged to treat 250,000 Sudanese citizens from Hepatitis C virus.

On Aug. 14, Cairo agreed with Khartoum to treat the victims of the Sudanese uprising in Egyptian hospitals and decided to increase academic scholarships for the Sudanese medical cadre members.

Later, Egypt opened a medical center in Juba, capital of South Sudan, and sent medical aid to help control the spread of COVID-19.

Amid the global coronavirus pandemic, Egypt also sent medical aid to Italy, the United States, Palestine, and Kenya.

The medical and food supplies from Egypt have contributed to changing the "untrue" Egyptian image "as a country of limited potentials," Fahmy noted.

Gamal Bayoumy, a former assistant to the Egyptian foreign minister, said foreign aid creates a convenient climate for better ties between Egypt and the recipients.

Most of the aid went to Africa, which will push the Egyptian-African ties forward and help Egypt restore its pioneering role in Africa, added Bayoumy. Enditem
Kasautii Zindagii Kay 2 has been hitting the headlines these days because of Parth Samthaan! Apparently, the actor who plays the lead role of Anurag Basu in the show, has submitted his resignation. A few reports suggested that the makers are upset with Parth's unprofessional behaviour, but are trying to convince him to stay back. But looks like that might not happen! As per the latest report, the makers are preparing for Parth's exit, and the writers and director are asked to develop alternate tracks for him.

A source was quoted by TOI as saying, "Parth was supposed to shoot for his sequence on Friday but he didn't turn up that day and his portions could not be shot. While Saturday and Sunday were off for the whole cast and crew because of Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations, the shoot has resumed today."



The source further revealed that Parth came back on the sets today (August 24) and was shooting, but strangely he did not interact with anyone on the sets. The source added that the actor came to give the shot and then went back.

As per reports, the director and writers of the show have been asked to develop alternate tracks for Parth. The source added, "Since no one knows what is going to happen once the resignation period for Parth ends, which is somewhere in September mid, the writers and director have been asked to develop alternate tracks for Parth, which is either he is going abroad or he will meet with an accident. The tracks will not be introduced immediately but just in case things don't work out between Parth and Ekta (Kapoor), being ready in advance till a replacement is found for him will help everyone."

Also Read: Parth Samthaan And Erica Fernandes' Kasautii Zindagii Kay 2 To Go Off Air?

Also Read: KZK 2 Makers Upset With Parth Samthaan's Unprofessional Behaviour? Is Erica Fernandes Quitting?
PERTH, Western Australia, Aug. 23, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Perseus Mining Limited (Perseus or the Company) (TSX & ASX: PRU) is hosting an investor webinar/conference call to discuss its FY20 Full Year Results, which are anticipated for release around 8:30am AEST on Wednesday August 26, 2020.



Australia: Wednesday August 26, 2020

(Perth  7:00am)

(Sydney/Melbourne  9:00am)

Canada: Tuesday August 25, 2020

(Toronto  7:00pm)

(Vancouver  4:00pm)

UK: Wednesday August 26, 2020

(London  12:00am)

Webinar

Register for the investor webinar at the link below:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_uuVUKsSJT-ywWIPEAvxyHg

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. To ask a question on the webinar, please use the Raise Hand function within Zoom.

Conference Call

To join the webinar via telephone, please use one of the below numbers and enter ID: 861 3701 6133

For higher quality, dial a number based on your current location:

Australia

+61 8 6119 3900

+61 8 7150 1149

+61 2 8015 6011

+61 3 7018 2005

+61 7 3185 3730

Hong Kong

+852 5808 6088

Singapore

+65 3165 1065

Canada

+1 778 907 2071

USA

+1 669 900 9128

New Zealand

+64 9 884 6780

United Kingdom

+44 203 901 7895

Additional international numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kvsfa5uem

Enter *9 to ask a question on the call. You will be briefly unmuted to ask your question.

A recording of the conference call will be made available via Perseuss website at www.perseusmining.com

The conference call will feature Managing Director Jeff Quartermaine and Group General Manager BD and IR Andrew Grove.

This announcement was approved for release by Jeff Quartermaine, Managing Director and CEO.

To discuss any aspect of this announcement, please contact:

Media Relations: Nathan Ryan at telephone +61 4 20 582 887 or email nathan.ryan@nwrcommunications.com.au (Melbourne)




Sydney residents are on high alert after a shopper with COVID-19 visited several locations in the city's inner west including a Westfield shopping centre.

NSW Health issued a warning after the infected person went to the Westfield shopping centre in Burwood between 6pm and 7pm on Thursday, August 20, before visiting the Kmart and Woolworths stores inside.

The same person also visited the Service NSW centre in Burwood between 2.30pm and 3pm on Friday, August 21.

Residents are on high alert after a Sydney shopper with COVID-19 visited the Westfield shopping centre in Burwood (pictured) on Thursday, August 20

While inside the Burwood shopping centre the infected person visited the Woolworths (pictured) and the Kmart between 6pm and 7pm on Thursday, August 20

Anyone at those locations within the time frame is considered a casual contact and should monitor for symptoms and immediately isolate and get tested if they appear.

The warning comes as NSW recorded another four coronavirus cases on Sunday, bringing the state's total to 3,796 with 54 deaths.

Of the four cases confirmed on Sunday, one is a hotel security guard who was previously reported as a case on Saturday.

He worked at the Marriott Hotel in Sydney and tested positive after a week-long testing blitz on contacts after another security guard tested positive on August 14.

The other cases reported on Sunday included two travellers in hotel quarantine and one linked to the Apollo Restaurant cluster in Potts Point.

The alert comes as NSW recorded four coronavirus cases on Sunday bringing the state's total to 3,796 (Sydney residents pictured)

The infected shopper also attended the Service NSW centre in Burwood between 2.30pm and 3pm on Friday, August 21 (cleaner pictured disinfecting shopping trolleys)

'While case numbers have remained low this week, the virus continues to circulate in the community and vigilance must be maintained,' a NSW Health statement read.

'It is vital that high rates of testing continue in order to find the source of the cases still under investigation and to identify and stop further spread of the virus.'

There are currently 90 COVID-19 cases being treated by NSW Health with seven in the ICU and five on ventilators.

Meanwhile 86 per cent of cases being treated by NSW Health are in non-acute, out-of-hospital care.
Both have been charged with three counts of first-degree murder and one count each of aggravated arson and concealment of a homicidal death. The first two charges are class X felonies and the third a class 3 felony.
LONDON, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Virgin Atlantic's creditors will vote on a 1.2 billion pound ($1.6 billion) rescue plan on Tuesday in a crucial test of the airline's ability to survive in an industry devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Virgin Atlantic agreed the deal with shareholders and creditors in July to secure its future beyond the coronavirus crisis.

The airline, which is 51% owned by Richard Branson's Virgin Group and 49% by U.S. airline Delta, said it remains confident in the restructuring plan and is on track to finalise its solvent recapitalisation in the first week of September.

Tuesday's vote of affected trade creditors includes nearly 200 suppliers that the airline owes more than 50,000 pounds to. It needs 75% support of the overall outstanding value of money owed at a hearing at London's High Court.

If successful, another UK court hearing will be held on Sept 2 to approve the plan, and a procedural hearing is scheduled for Sept 3 in the United States.

Should the creditors fail to support the plan, the judge can still rule that it is in their interests for it to go ahead.

Virgin Atlantic has had to close its base at London's Gatwick Airport and cut more than 3,500 jobs to contend with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has grounded planes and hammered demand for air travel.

Global airline body IATA has said that the industry will not return to pre-crisis levels until 2024.

Although the likes of Germany and the United States have given bailouts to major carriers, Virgin Atlantic agreed a private-only restructuring deal after Britain said state support would only be considered after all other avenues had been exhausted. ($1 = 0.7645 pounds) (Reporting by Alistair Smout; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
President Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center on August 24, 2020 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Chris Carlson-Pool/Getty Images)

Trump Formally Nominated by GOP for President

President Donald Trump was officially nominated as president for a second term Monday during the GOP convention, easily securing enough delegates to move forward.

Trump ran mostly unopposed for the nomination, and it was announced following a roll-call at the partys convention site in Charlotte.

In an address in Charlotte, Trump said Democratic officials will try to rig the election in November, saying that its the only way former Vice President Joe Biden could win.

The only way they can take this election away from us if its a rigged election, Trump said. Were going to win this election.

The Republican convention comes about a week after Democrats, in a mostly virtual event, nominated former VP Biden to take on Trump in November. Republicans sought to hold a partially in-person convention.

Donald Trump will defend our fundamental freedoms, preserve our American way of life, and work day and night to build our economy back to the historic levels of growth, Ronna Romney McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee chairwoman, said Monday during the event.

Earlier on Monday, Vice President Mike Pence was nominated by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and received unanimous support from the Republican delegates. Walker alleged that Pences Democratic counterpart, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), is to the left of [Sen.] Bernie Sanders, who is a self-described socialist.

Joe Biden and the Democratic party have been taken over by the radical left, Pence said in Charlotte, adding that they will raise taxes, provide abortion on demand, and allowed unfettered immigration.

Today is about four more years, Pence told the delegates. This week we will take our case to the American people.

Trump will also visit a facility in North Carolina that produces food boxes as part of a COVID-19 aid program.

Republican National Convention speeches will start later on Monday, including remarks from Donald Trump Jr., House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

Pence is scheduled to deliver his nomination speech at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, while Trump will deliver his remarks from the White House on Thursday.

Some of the speakers on Tuesday include First Lady Melania Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Eric Trump, Nicholas Sandmann, and more.

On Wednesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), South Dakota Kristi Noem, Kellyanne Conway, Lara Trump, are slated to speak.

And on Thursday, Housing Secretary Ben Carson, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ivanka Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, UFC president Dana White, and several more will speak.

Trump announced in June that he would move the in-person Republican National Convention to Jacksonville, Florida, but those plans were ultimately scrapped as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreak worsened in Florida. Republicans eventually settled on holding a part of the convention in Charlotte.
According to Kim Lowe, one of Avisen's founding shareholders and its CFO: "Abby will be a great addition to the Avisen Team. She brings a practical head for solving her client's problems which will mesh well with Avisen's existing clients. With the addition of Abby, Avisen will be at three female lawyers  Lisa Ankel Holter, Abby and myself. As we continue to build out the Avisen Team, we think it is critical that our lawyer mix is reflective of the clients we serve." About joining Avisen, Abby adds: "I am excited to continue growing my practice alongside such an incredible group of attorneys. Avisen's practical, collaborative approach to the work we do, and the passion the attorneys here bring for their clients every day, made the decision to join this team an easy one."
Yang arrived in Busan on Friday and met with Suh at the Westin Chosun hotel on Haeundae Beach, where he "explained Beijing's stance about the latest situation in U.S.-China relations," Cheong Wa Dae spokesman Kang Min-seok told reporters.

Meeting in Busan, the two sides also agreed that Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit South Korea as soon as the coronavirus epidemic eases.

Top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi on Saturday asked national security adviser Suh Hoon for support in intensifying diplomatic tensions with the U.S.

China apparently wants Korea at least not to remain on the fence over U.S. efforts to rein in Huawei and establish an international supply network that excludes China, as well as Beijing's handling of protests in Hong Kong and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Suh told Yang that "coexistence and friendly cooperation between the U.S. and China are important for peace and prosperity."

Cheong Wa Dae said, "China confirmed that [South] Korea is a priority country for President Xi to visit." It added that the two sides agreed to make it happen as soon as the epidemic eases and conditions permit but mentioned no date.

China did not directly refer to a visit by Xi but merely mentioned that both sides agreed on the need to exchange visits by high-ranking officials. Diplomatic sources said China wants to use Xi's potential visit as leverage to influence Korea's stance in the disputes.

U.S.-China tensions have reached new heights. The meeting lasted around five hours and 50 minutes, including lunch.

Seoul asked China to help jumpstart stalled inter-Korean dialogue. Sources said a considerable amount of time was spent discussing North Korean issues.
Their mission was simple, if a little underripe.

Under the cover of darkness, two men in hoodies drove through the Montreal residential neighbourhood of Bois-Franc as their unsuspecting targets slept soundly through the night.

As daylight came over the cul-de-sac on Monday morning, many residents woke up to find a perplexing present on their doorsteps.

Nearly every house on the street had been bestowed a whole watermelon, each accompanied by a cryptic yet irreverent message.

First name: Walter. Last name: Melon, one Post-it note read. Many of the fruit favours were simply marked enjoy or watermelon.

Speculation ran rampant in a neighbourhood Facebook group. Some suspected the watermelons had been tampered with, while others struggled to surmise the fruits significance.

But it turns out the motive behind the stunt was neither sinister nor symbolic.

We were really interested in doing something chaotic yet good for the community, said Evgeny Patvakanov, who pulled off the produce prank alongside partner-in-crime and cameraman Victor Rene de Cotret.

The 20-year-old students, who call themselves the watermelon men, said the grocery giveaway is part of a series of well-intentioned shenanigans theyve filmed for the evgeny YouTube channel.

Patvakanov said their latest gambit was inspired by a social media post proposing that the best way to leave a mark on a strangers life is to leave a watermelon on their doorstep.

Why a watermelon? Patvakanovs best guess is that the durable rind prevents damage during drop-offs.

But as with many internet phenomena, he believes the inscrutability of the gesture may be the point. Its great for content, he said.

With clicks and likes in their sights, Patvakanov and de Cotret went grocery shopping. Three stores and $150 later, Patvakanovs convertible was filled to the brim with 50 watermelons.

The duo drew stares as they drove around town, handing out the occasional watermelon to someone on the street.

Clad in all black, they decided to strike Bois-Franc at 1 a.m. Were redistributing the wealth, Patvakanov tells the camera.

The YouTube video features a montage of Patvakanov and de Cotret scampering from home to home on a slapstick mission to deliver watermelons without detection.

They feared their cover was blown when the automatic porch lights were triggered at one house. A few drops later, the lights flashed on again  this time manually. Someone was awake.

Patvakanov and de Cotret disposed of the remaining watermelons and hopped into the car. As they sped off, they saw the red and blue lights of emergency vehicles seemingly headed toward the scene.

Based on the communitys reaction, Patvakanov and de Cotret believe their operation proved to be fruitful.

They achieved one of their objectives in attracting the attention of local news site MTL Blog, which posted a story seeking out the watermelon man.

More importantly, de Cotret said he and Patvakanov showed that mischief doesnt have to be mean-spirited.

Unlike many YouTube pranks that turn unwitting passersby into the butt of the joke, de Cotret said he and Patvakanov devise schemes that are meant to surprise and delight.

Especially now, theres not a lot of random joy in life, Patvakanov said. This seemed like a very wholesome and friendly way of thanking people.

The troublemakers said they have a few more tricks up their sleeves, and while they cant reveal their secrets, theyre thinking big, round and juicy.

Once we get a budget upgrade, well be able to do a bigger scale, Patvakanov said.

Like a U-Haul truck full of watermelons.

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The United States should not view China as another Soviet Union because China has no military alliances to challenge the U.S., unlike the Warsaw Pact that went head-to-head with the Western NATO alliance in the Cold War, said Chinas former ambassador to Washington.

Many have been comparing moves by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump over the last year as the launch of a new Cold War, similar to the one that saw U.S.- and Soviet-led blocs square off against each other for the better part of four decades after the end of World War II. That metaphor got extra clout earlier this month when U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech where he said China was posing a threat that was in some ways more dangerous than a Cold War 2.0

From the perspective of our approach, we do not have a military bloc, which is totally different from the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, Zhou Wenhong told state broadcaster CCTV in an interview that aired on Saturday. The United States should not regard our country as a second former Soviet Union.

Zhou said Pompeos speech in Prague earlier this month, where the China hawk declared the previous U.S. policy of engagement with China as a failure, has proven to be a one-man show without anyone echoing the refrain.

At the same time, Zhou also acknowledged that Sino-U.S. ties may never be able to go back to their past form of the last three decades, since Washington now sees Beijing as a rival and political opponent rather than a partner.

China has been telling the U.S. that We will not replace you and have no intention of challenging you, he said. But the problem is whether the U.S. will listen.

Following disputes on everything from technology transfers to trade imbalances and who should be responsible for the global pandemic, most observers say China-U.S. relations are now at their lowest point since the two nations normalized diplomatic ties in 1979. At that time when the two countries began their rapprochement in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon took the step seeking to gain mutual benefits.

But such common interests have changed greatly over years, according to Zhou. When the two sides started to cooperate, both were seeking to gain leverage over the Soviet Union for different reasons, he said. The partnership satisfied both under such conditions, with China seizing on the relationship to also advance its objective of opening to the outside world as U.S. companies got to explore Chinas vast market, according to Zhou.

But concerns over a rising China gradually emerged in America in the 1990s after common geopolitical interests faded with the end of the Soviet Union. After that, the relationship switched to one of more pure economic cooperation.

The dynamics of China-US relations come down to whether or not Americans can accept the peaceful rise of a partner like China, Zhou said. Although China is still far behind the United States, Americans are nervous about the narrowing gap.  [Washington] feels like  if we dont do something about it, China will become another U.S.

Zhou also pointed out that the American public is hardly unified the current hawkish China policy being seen from the Trump administration. He pointed to an open letter opposing Trumps approach, which has been signed by nearly 200 leaders from different sectors of U.S. society since last year.

Of course, it might be difficult to change Trumps mind. But, the hope is that more Americans will speak up despite the electoral incentives, he said, referring to the upcoming U.S. presidential election when anti-China rhetoric tends to get louder.

Zhou urged Washington to learn how to get along with China, a country in peaceful development, given that the rise of China is actually inevitable.

It may be difficult to build a good relationship between China and the U.S due to great discrepancies in social and political systems, but we cant damage it, he said. China and the U.S. are both nuclear powers. It would be a disaster if the political relationship breaks down.

Contact editor Yang Ge (geyang@caixin.com)
A Starbucks in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, closed due to virus infections, in this Aug. 18 photo. The cafe reopened Monday after a two-week suspension. Yonhap



By Bahk Eun-ji



Starbucks and other coffee chains here have emerged as a blind spot in the country's ongoing struggle to contain the coronavirus, according to health experts Monday. They said the authorities should force those operating coffee shops to take more aggressive measures to prevent COVID-19 infections among customers, and if new infections continue to occur, cafes should be closed, just as PC rooms and buffet restaurants have been shut down.



Early last week, the government enforced Level 2 social distancing measures including the closure of facilities in which the virus could spread most easily, such as PC rooms, nightclubs, karaoke rooms and buffet restaurants. However, cafes and restaurants are not included on the list of high-risk facilities even though outbreaks tied to such places have been reported in the capital area.



Experts warn that people need to be cautious when they visit coffee shops, otherwise the government will likely enforce measures such as banning customers from sitting in cafes and only allowing takeout orders.



"It could lead to serious consequences if the infection control rules are not followed in coffee shops  as you can see from the outbreak that took place at a franchise cafe in Gyeonggi Province, near Seoul. Without cooperation from citizens, the government will need to take stronger measures to stop people from using them," said Jacob Lee, professor at the Infectious Disease Department of Hallym University Kangnam Sacred Heart Hospital.



As of Monday, 65 cases have been linked to a Starbucks in Paju. Earlier this month, more than 15 cases were reported in connection to a Hollys Coffee in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.



Closed spaces especially pose a high risk of infection. Disease control authorities also said air conditioning may raise the risk of infection in closed environments.



In the case of the Starbucks outbreak in Paju, health authorities suspect the air conditioning could have potentially aided the spread of the virus. According to Paju officials, the initial customer who had COVID-19 visited the store and sat close to an air conditioner on the second floor of the shop, and it is believed the virus was transmitted by the air-conditioner breeze.



Referring to the Starbucks case, Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) chief Jeong Eun-kyeong said "The people infected with the virus were not infected through aerosol transmission, but droplet transmission which is fairly possible in such a confined space. In addition, the virus could have spread via hand contact as well."



In an effort to contain the virus at its stores, Starbucks officials said the company follows infection control rules such as reducing the number of tables and seats at the stores to increase the distance between customers and prevent too many people from gathering. To promote awareness of the importance of wearing masks inside Starbucks, an announcement encouraging customers to wear masks is played regularly throughout the day at each store.



"It is actually difficult to draw the line between customers drinking and having conversations, but we strongly advised our employees to guide users of our stores to wear a mask while they are staying inside," a Starbucks official said.


Laci and Scott Peterson are shown in an undated photo. (Modesto Bee)

The California Supreme Court on Monday unanimously overturned the death penalty for Scott Peterson, who was convicted of killing his wife, Laci, and their unborn son in 2002.

In a decision written by Justice Leondra Kruger, the state's highest court said the death sentence must be removed because the trial judge wrongly discharged prospective jurors who expressed opposition to capital punishment but said they would be willing to impose it.

The court left in place the guilty verdict and said prosecutors could retry Peterson on the penalty if they wished.

"Before the trial began, the trial court made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection that, under long-standing United States Supreme Court precedent, undermined Petersons right to an impartial jury at the penalty phase," Kruger wrote.

The court said the rules for dismissing potential jurors based on concerns about the death penalty were well established by Peterson's trial.

"Jurors may not be excused merely for opposition to the death penalty, but only for views rendering them unable to fairly consider imposing that penalty in accordance with their oath," Kruger wrote.

Instead of just dismissing the prospective jurors, the judge should have permitted them to be questioned so their views could have better been explored, the court said.

"As the present case demonstrates, an inadequate or incomplete examination of potential jurors can have disastrous consequences as to the validity of a judgment," Kruger wrote.

In addition to challenging the removal of prospective jurors, Peterson had argued that massive pretrial publicity deprived him of a fair trial.

Peterson's trial was moved to San Mateo County after a judge found he could not get a fair trial in Modesto. Peterson's appellate lawyer argued the trial should have been moved again after questionnaires of more than 1,000 potential jurors in San Mateo County showed many already were convinced Peterson was guilty.

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But the court said the publicity was so widespread that moving the trial to yet another county would not have mattered.

"Precisely because this case was the subject of such widespread media attention, it is unclear what purpose a second change of venue would have served," the court said. "The publicity the Peterson trial generated, like the trials of O.J. Simpson, the Manson family, and any number of other so-called trials of the century before them, was intrinsic to the case, not the place."

Prosecutors in Stanislaus County must decide whether to try once again to seek the death penalty or agree to commute the sentence to life without possibility of parole.

John Goold, a spokesman for the Stanislaus County district attorney's office, said prosecutors were still examining the ruling Monday and had not yet decided how to proceed.

"We are going to have to review the decision and get together with the victim's family before any decision is going to be made," Goold said.

Cliff Gardner, Peterson's appellate lawyer, appeared doubtful Monday that prosecutors would seek a new trial on the penalty. He said the California Supreme Court was now reviewing a separate habeas corpus challenge filed on behalf of Peterson that contained "new forensic and eyewitness evidence of innocence."

"In deciding whether to seek a new death sentence, the question for prosecutors now is whether they can prove Mr. Peterson culpable for this crime to even a single juror seated through a fair jury selection process," Gardner said.

Peterson is confined at San Quentin prison, where scores of inmates have been infected by the coronavirus and several have died. Asked if Peterson had contracted the virus, Gardner said only: "He is doing fine now."

The California attorney general's office, which argued the case for prosecutors, declined to comment.

Laci Peterson, 27, was due to give birth in four weeks when she disappeared on Christmas Eve. Scott Peterson told police he had left their Modesto home that morning to go fishing in Berkeley.

Nearly four months later, Lacis remains and the body of her unborn son, with the umbilical cord still attached, washed up on a rocky shore on San Francisco Bay. A passerby walking a dog found them a few miles from where Scott Peterson said he had gone fishing.

Laci's disappearance sparked a massive search. At first her family did not suspect Scott. That changed after a massage therapist named Amber Frey told police that she and Peterson had been dating, and that he had told her his wife had died. She then secretly recorded calls with him for the police.

Police arrested Peterson in San Diego County. He had bleached his hair and goatee and was carrying $15,000 in cash.

Prosecutors told jurors that Scott either strangled or suffocated his wife on the night of Dec. 23, 2002, or the following morning. He wrapped her body in a blue tarp, put her in the back of his boat, affixed anchors to her and dropped her in the bay, they said.

Mark Geragos, who defended Peterson at trial, argued Laci had been kidnapped by strangers who dumped her in the bay to frame her husband.
Usually University of North Georgia (UNG) students noisily meet and greet their fellow classmates and faculty in the first week of the fall semester. But this year has not been usual.

With social distancing measures in place for this semester, UNG is offering a mix of face-to-face, fully online and hybrid courses that enable students to have a blend of in-person and online instruction. On the first day, to get students familiar with course information and UNG's digital learning platform, many courses held the first meeting online. Students on campus purchased books, got their IDs, visited the library or Rec Center, or grabbed a snack or meal.

In the days since, in-person classes have operated with limited occupancies and some classes, like music, have met outdoors. These sights are part of the new normal designed to create a safe and healthy educational space for UNG students to learn and experience college life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Our students arrived on campus under new guidelines for the health and safety of our university community, which is our top priority," UNG President Bonita Jacobs said. "We are committed to giving students the best possible education experience as we adhere to CDC and state public health guidelines."

To accomplish this, UNG students, faculty, staff and campus visitors are urged to follow safety precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In addition to social distancing, precautions include wearing a face covering, washing hands often, and conducting a daily self-check before coming to campus.

Ryann Carter, a senior pursuing a degree in history, checked her temperature and made sure to have her mask before driving to the Dahlonega Campus.

Ryann Carter, a senior pursuing a degree in history, said she checked her temperature and made sure to have her mask before heading to the Dahlonega Campus.

"Usually the parking deck is full and finding a spot can be challenging, but it was much emptier than typically expected for the first day of classes," Carter, a 21-year-old from Gainesville, Georgia, said.

She and her friends walked around campus to chat with people as they stood 6 feet apart. Once inside, she noted the hallways were noticeably quieter. Despite the difference, Carter is glad to be back for her final year.

Dr. Robert Robinson, director of Multicultural Student Affairs (MSA) at UNG, is also glad to be back on campus.

"It was quite exciting to see students who I haven't seen in a while and getting back to some sense of normalcy," Robinson said. "We have additional protocols to follow for their safety, so we don't have students (hanging out) in the office. That is regrettable, because I selfishly miss the office being full."

Robinson and other Student Affairs staff are connecting with students virtually. He said plans are in the works to introduce all freshmen to the MSA and UNG clubs virtually.

The College Assistance Migrant Program completed its orientation program in person with social distancing guidelines to foster student engagement. Betzy Romulo, a sophomore pursuing a degree in communications with a multimedia journalism concentration, said it gave her a taste of college life.

"Being in a classroom with other students was refreshing," said the 18-year-old from Moultrie, Georgia. "We were seated 6 feet apart, and we were constantly reminded of the guidelines and what was expected of us."

For more information regarding campus guidelines and operational updates, visit ung.edu/together.
Check out the companies making headlines midday Monday:

Apple  The company gained 1.2% in volatile trading, following last week's strong rally that pushed its market value above $2 trillion. The gains also came ahead of its 4-for-1 stock split, which takes effect on Aug. 31. The stock hit a new intraday high of $515.14 on Monday, bringing its 2020 gains to more than 70%.

Tesla  Shares of the electric vehicle company slid more than 1%, giving up an earlier gain of nearly 4% that pushed shares to a new all-time high. The stock is up 40% this month amid broad investor enthusiasm for the name.

Best Buy  Best Buy shares rose nearly 3% after Raymond James reiterated its "strong buy" rating on the shares and hiked its price target on the equity to $135 from $100 per share. The electronics retailer's stock is up more than 33% this year as Covid-19 lockdowns sparked demand for at-home tech such as monitors, televisions and computers.

Pinterest  Pinterest shares fell 3.8% after Citi downgraded the image-sharing platform to neutral from buy. The bank said it has turned more cautious on the company after the outperformance this year and said its valuations are not "compelling." Pinterest has gained 76% this year.

Deere  The farm equipment company rose 3% after Bank of America upgraded the stock to buy from neutral. BofA said in a note that Deere's position as an industry leader and attractiveness to ESG investors should boost the stock's valuation. Argus Research also raised its target price on the stock.

Churchill Downs  Shares of the thoroughbred racetrack company lost 1% after Susquehanna downgraded the stock to neutral from positive. Analysts said Churchill Downs has "limited upside" after its announcement that it would not have spectators at the Kentucky Derby due to the coronavirus.

American Airlines, Delta, Norwegian Cruise Line, Carnival  Shares of airlines and cruise operator companies rose broadly as the daily count of U.S. coronavirus cases declines and the Trump administration approved an emergency treatment for the virus. American Airlines rose 10.5% and Delta gained 9.3%. Carnival and Norwegian Cruise Line gained 10.2% and 7.6%, respectively.

Lululemon  Lululemon shares rose 2.1% after an analyst at Susquehanna raised his price target on the stock to $426 per share from $360 per share. The new price target implies a 12-month upside of 15.5% from Friday's close of $368.75. "Underlying momentum continues to build faster than most peers as headwinds from the crisis slowly abate," the analyst said.

Medtronic  Medtronic advanced 1.4% after the company increased its dividend for fiscal second quarter to 58 cents per share, representing a 7% year-over-year increase.

CNBC's Jesse Pound, Pippa Stevens, Maggie Fitzgerald, Yun Li and Tom Franck contributed to this report.
TORONTO, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CF Energy Corp. (TSX-V: CFY) (CF Energy or the Company, together with its subsidiaries, the Group), a leading new energy service provider in the Peoples Republic of China (the PRC or China) would like to announce the following business update:



The Company noticed that Hainan Province has recently announced the Hainan Energy Comprehensive Reform Proposal. In the proposal, the integrated smart energy development and the electric vehicle market development are among the highly encouraged items on the agenda. The proposal also sets out the policy for comprehensive reform of existing energy market from proprietary driven to an open market system to encourage more private investments and competition in the energy industry. Management will continue to closely monitor more detailed local guideline changes, explore opportunities which such changes may bring and take proactive actions to mitigate potential challenges that the Company may face.

About CF Energy Corp. (Previously known as: Changfeng Energy Inc.)

CF Energy Corp. is a Canadian public company currently traded on the Toronto Venture Exchange (TSX-V) under the stock symbol CFY. It is an integrated energy provider and natural gas distribution company (or natural gas utility) in the PRC. CF Energy strives to combine leading clean energy technology with natural gas usage to provide sustainable energy to its customer base in the PRC. In 2009, CF Energy was recognized as being one of Chinas the Top Ten Most Influential Brands in the Natural Gas Industry and in 2019, ranked amongst the 2019 TSX Venture 50 top performers on the TSXV for the 2018 year.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Corporate Investment Relations

Investor.relations@changfengenergy.cn

Charles Wang

Executive Assistant to CEO & Chair of the Board

Zhaoyu.wang@changfengenergy.cn

Frederick Wong

Director of the Board

fred.wong@changfengenergy.cn

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, Forward-Looking Statements). All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included or incorporated by reference in this document are Forward-Looking Statements, including statements regarding activities, events or developments that the Company expects or anticipates may occur in the future. These Forward-Looking Statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking words such as will, expect, intend, plan, estimate, anticipate, believe or continue or similar words or the negative thereof. No assurance can be given that the plans, intentions or expectations or assumptions upon which these Forward-Looking Statements are based will prove to be correct and such Forward-Looking Statements included in this news release should not be unduly relied upon. Although management believes that the expectations represented in such Forward-Looking Statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Such Forward-Looking Statements are not a guarantee of performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance or achievements or developments expressed or implied by such Forward-Looking Statements. These factors include, without limitation, no significant and continuing adverse changes in general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets. Readers are cautioned that all Forward-Looking Statements involve risks and uncertainties, including those risks and uncertainties detailed in the Corporations filings with applicable Canadian securities regulatory authorities, copies of which are available at www.sedar.com. The Company urges readers to carefully consider those factors. The Forward-Looking Statements included in this news release are made as of the date of this document and the Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any Forward-Looking Statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities legislation. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such.

Neither 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.
It was a week in which Majorca finally woke up to the depressing and rather astonishing news that the tourist season was effectively over. The travel warnings about the Balearics and the coronavirus from Britain and Germany effectively meant that it was a question of thank you and goodnight and see you next year.

The impact was almost instant. Hotels which had just opened were pondering closing down and there were fears that some parts of the island would effectively become ghosts towns. Majorca was in shock. The question now is how is the island going to survive over the winter without German or British tourists during the summer.

It is a big question because these two nationalities account for the bulk of all tourists who come to Majorca. Initially it was thought that it would be a short term move with the quarantine rules being relaxed in Britain and Germany but this hasn't been the case. There is no sign that the governments in London or Berlin are going to go back on their initial travel warning. So what can Majorca do? Well not a lot really just try and make the best out of a bad situation. Some criticism has been levelled at the Balearic government and to be honest they are not completely blameless but it is a worldwide problem.

When we first went into lockdown back in March I always thought that it was going to be a very difficult season despite upbeat comments from the industry. In the end the situation couldnt be any worse, no tourists from Britain and Germany and no sign that they could come back any time soon. It is a question of things can only get better.
Foreign tourists won't be allowed to visit Bali for the rest of 2020 due to coronavirus concerns, its governor said, scrapping a plan to open up the Indonesian island from next month.

The holiday hotspot re-opened beaches, temples and other tourism spots for domestic visitors at the end of July and had said it would let foreign tourists return on September 11.

But the plan has now been cancelled over concerns about Indonesia's mounting virus cases and with many foreign nationals subject to travel bans in their home countries.

Jakarta is also yet to lift its ban on foreign tourists entering Indonesia.

"The situation in Indonesia is not conducive to allow international tourists to visit Indonesia, including...Bali," the island's governor I Wayan Koster said in an official letter dated Saturday.

"The central government supports (Bali's) plans to recover tourism by opening the doors for international tourists. However, this requires care, prudence, not to be rushed, and requires careful preparation," it added.

He did not give a new date for allowing foreign tourists to visit.

The volume of flights to and from Bali plummeted during the global pandemic, leaving hotels empty and restaurants struggling to survive.

Bali has recorded some 49 deaths and just over 4,000 cases of coronavirus.

"New cases are under control, the recovery rate is increasing and fatality rate is under control," Koster said.

Nationwide, Indonesia has seen at last 6,680 virus deaths with more than 153,000 confirmed cases, but the real toll is widely believed to be hidden by limited testing.

bur-pb/am/fox
More counties came off Californias COVID-19 watchlist over the weekend after posting declines in cases, transmission rates and hospitalizations for three consecutive days.

Orange, Mono and Sierra counties were removed from the list after meeting six safety thresholds that state officials established to measure the spread of the virus, as well as hospitalizations and capacity in hospitals' intensive care units.

Being placed on the list forces counties to close various types of indoor activities, but being removed from it does not immediately allow the three counties to open up more widely. Indoor operations at nail salons, barbershops and fitness centers, among other businesses, must remain closed until the state's top health officer revises the order that spells out the rules for the watchlist.

For the last few weeks, state health officials have been promising to release updated guidelines for the watchlist following the discovery of a technical glitch in the states database of test results that prompted officials to suspend the use of the list.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday that guidance was expected to be released this week.

Removal from the list does give a county the ability to reopen schools for in-person learning. If a county remains off the monitoring list for 14 days in a row, schools teaching any grade level would have the green light to reopen. No county has met that bar, in part because the watchlist was frozen after the glitch.

Sierra County was most recently added to the list, on Aug. 17, whereas Orange and Mono counties have been on it for more than a month. While the watchlist was frozen, local officials in both counties expressed frustration with a lack of communication from the state about the timing and requirements for removal from the monitoring chart.

The issue for us and perhaps many counties is how to get off the list when the metrics are below the state thresholds for the required 14 days, Mammoth Lakes public information officer Stuart Brown said in mid-August. We have been unable to get any clarification from the state, and [its] even harder now with Dr. Sonia Angells departure.

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Angell, Newsoms director of the California Department of Public Health, resigned Aug. 9 , days after the state revealed problems with its database. State epidemiologist Erica Pan took over as the acting health officer following the resignation.

Thirty-five counties currently are on the states watchlist, Newsom announced at a news conference Monday. At least one  Amador  is slated for removal as early as Tuesday. To be removed from the list, a county must show that fewer than 100 people per 100,000 have tested positive for the virus, the rate at which people test positive for the virus is below 8%, and the number of people hospitalized has not climbed more than 10% over a three-day period. In addition, more than 20% of intensive care beds in hospitals and 25% of ventilators have to be available.

"We are seeing a decline in the overall monitoring list," Newsom said, stressing that progress made in populous areas such as San Diego County, which was removed from the list last week, and Orange County is particularly noteworthy.

Last week, Newsom said San Francisco County was expected to come off the list soon. But a week later, the county remains on the list for COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and hospital capacity that exceed the states required metrics.

Some counties, including Santa Clara, reduced their virus counts enough to be removed from the state watchlist, only to be added back when their numbers climbed again.

Los Angeles County remains on the state's watchlist for a case count that exceeds 200 infections per 100,000 people. Last week, Los Angeles Countys chief medical officer said new coronavirus cases might drop below 200, the minimum at which officials can apply for waivers to reopen elementary schools.

During a news briefing Monday, Los Angeles County's health officer, Dr. Muntu Davis, reported 13 additional coronavirus-related deaths and 1,198 more cases in the county. Davis emphasized the need for residents to maintain social distancing practices and avoid gatherings outside of individual households  behaviors that have contributed to the overall decline in daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths the county has seen in recent weeks.

Daily hospitalizations decreased by 45% from a peak of more than 2,200 in mid-July, according to data released by the county Monday. Officials also reported that while the county saw about 3,200 new cases per day in mid- to late July, as of Aug. 22 there has been a weekly average of 1,400 daily new cases.

"If we can maintain this lower transmission, it means we could begin to think about schools reopening," Davis said.

Asked whether officials are concerned that the county could see a sharp surge in cases after the approaching Labor Day weekend, as happened following Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, Davis said health officials are engaging in discussions with city mayors about steps that may need to be taken to prevent another post-holiday jump in infections.

"Its always a concern if people are going to be around others who are not part of their household," he said.


EQS-News /

Press Release (For immediate release) Stock code: 2386 SEG Announces 2020 Interim Results Seizing Market Opportunities to Continue Improving Operating Results (23 August 2020, Hong Kong) SINOPEC Engineering (Group) Co., Ltd. ("SEG" or the "Company", together with its subsidiaries collectively known as the "Group") (stock code: 2386) today announces its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2020 (the "Reporting Period"). In the rest half of 2020, confronted with this unprecedented difficult situation and the complicated and ever-changing domestic and international environment, the Company braved all the difficulties and actively carried out the "one hundred day campaign to address the tough challenges and to improve performance" initiative, focusing on epidemic prevention and control and on production and operation, emphasizing work resumption, strengthening project process control and improving the level of intensive management, achieving hard-won business performance. During the Reporting Period, the Group recognized a revenue of RMB23.797 billion, a period-on-period increase of 4.9%, and the profits attributable to equity holders of the Company were RMB1.260 billion, with a period-on-period increase of 5.1%. After due consideration of the Company's earnings, return to the Shareholders and the needs for future sustainable development, the Board recommended a 2020 interim dividend of RMB0.113 per Share, representing an increase of 4.6% on a year-on-year basis. Payout ratio reached 40%. Seizing market opportunities and achieved significant results in market development. In the first half of 2020, the Group seized the opportunity of alleviated epidemic situation in China, closely followed the transition of the domestic petrochemical industry and grasped the market opportunities of steady advancement of the "seven major national petrochemical industry bases" and the "four world-class refining and petrochemical bases of Sinopec Group". Meanwhile, thanks to long-term hard work in overseas markets such as in the Middle East, Russia and Central Asia, the Group achieved a breakthrough in overseas market. During the Reporting Period, the value of new contracts entered into by the Group was RMB36.638 billion, representing an increase of 10.3% on a period-on-period basis. Devoting itself to epidemic prevention and control and actively fulfilled its social responsibilities, the Group built the first meltblown fabric production line of Sinopec in only 12 days, and built the world's largest meltblown fabric production base in Sinopec Yanshan Petrochemical Company and Sinopec Yizheng Chemical Fiber Co., LTD. within 76 days. Continuous enhancement of project management capability and guarantee successful implementation of the projects. To ensure projects were implemented efficiently, orderly and safely, the Group fully leveraged its overall advantages by overall planning and optimising resources, worked hard to control the cost of subcontracting and procurement, and the safety, quality, progress and cost of the projects were under fully control. As at the end of the Reporting Period, the Group's backlog was RMB107.834 billion, representing an increase of 13.5% compared to that as at 31 December 2019, and was 2.06 times of the total revenue of RMB52.261 billion in 2019. Steady progress in research and development and numerous fruitful results in technological innovation. The Group worked hard to successfully organise the collaboration of major technologies and the implementation of technological innovation projects, made full use of the distinctive advantages of the R&D center in the development of engineering technology and continuously strengthened the collaboration with well-known licensors in the world. The Group received a total of 20 scientific advancement awards in scientific innovation and engineering construction fields at the provincial and above level, among them, the project "Development and Application of Packaged Technologies for Ultra-low Sulfur Emission and Resource Utilization of Sulfide-bearing Waste Gas from Refining and Chemical Industry" won the second prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2019. Chairman of SEG, Mr. Yu Renming, said: "In the first half of 2020, the global economy suffered heavy losses from the pandemic and the plummeted oil price, the Petrochemical Industry is facing severe challenges. Confronted with these difficulties, we have been focusing on epidemic prevention and control and on business operation, and established work resumption orderly since the first quarter of the year. In the second quarter, we actively responded to Sinopec Group's initiatives and carried out the "one hundred day campaign to address the tough challenges and to improve performance", achieving hard-won business performance and growth during the first half of the year. For the second half of 2020, the prevention and control of domestic epidemic has become the new normal, economy will accelerate back to its normal track. The previously suppressed and stagnant demand of petroleum and petrochemical products is expected to be released rapidly. We will seize favorable market recovery opportunities, stick to the long-term perspective and enhance our capabilities. We will further carry out the campaign to improve performance, take effective measures to enhance profitability, to continuously enhance our core competitiveness and promote the sustainable development of the Company, so as to deliver returns to shareholders, society and employees." Business Review and Highlights Significant results in market development During the Reporting Period, fully grasped the market opportunities and made full use of its overall advantages in Industry chain, service chain and technology chain, the Group vigorously expanded the market. During the Reporting Period, the value of new contracts entered into by the Group was RMB36.638 billion, representing an increase of 10.3% on a period-on-period basis; out of which, the value of newly signed domestic contracts amounted to RMB30.094 billion, representing a decrease of 3.1% on a period-on-period basis, and the value of newly signed overseas contracts amounted to approximately RMB6.544 billion, representing an increase of 200.6% on a period-on-period basis. During the Reporting Period, the Group continued to develop market in the PRC and strive to explore new business in new fields and new areas. The Group entered into new contracts for a number of large projects in the PRC, such as Zhenhai Refining and Chemical Ethylene Expansion Project with a total contract value of approximately RMB10.565 billion; Sinopec Tianjin Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Project Expansion Project (Phase II) Receiving Terminal Project with a total contract value of approximately RMB3.183 billion. During the Reporting Period, the Group continuously strengthened the cooperation with international engineering companies and strengthened overseas outlets, improved the deployment in overseas markets. Thanks to the long-term hard work in key markets, the Group has made a breakthrough in overseas market. The major overseas projects newly signed include: Saudi Aramco Crude Oil Transportation Pump Station Upgrade Project with a total contract value of approximately USD386 million; Russian Amur AGCC Polyolen Project with a total contract value of approximately USD256 million; and Hengyi Brunei PMB Project Design Contract with a total contract value of approximately USD47 million. In addition to above projects, the Group followed up with several projects in oil refining, petrochemicals, new coal chemicals, environmental protection and energy saving fields, which are expected to enter into new contracts in the future. Successful Implementation of Major Projects Continuous enhancement of project management capability During the Reporting Period, the Group established a key project work coordination group, to maintain close communication with the project owners and tighten the coordination of key projects; the Group intensified early planning, optimized management process, and enhanced in-process quality control; focusing on efficiency and progress, the Group implemented the "triple warning" for progress deviation, revenue deviation and budget deviation, rectified the deviation in a timely manner, and strengthened project process management and closed-loop management to ensure smooth implementation of all projects; optimising the design workow and professional division interface, the Group strengthened standardized design, modular design, and modular construction to improve design and construction efficiency; the Group carried out project management trainings and contract management trainings, implementing the advanced management concepts and management processes of international projects. During the Reporting Period, the Group further improved the subcontracting management system, strengthened the cultivation of strategic subcontractors, and dynamically evaluated the operational effectiveness of the QHSSE system of strategic subcontractors, optimized the allocation of subcontracting resources; the Group developed subcontracting resources and information sharing platform, realised integrated management of subcontractor resource pool and subcontractor assessment, reduced subcontracting management costs; the Group guaranteed the supply of materials for various projects, actively explored ways to improve procurement efficiency and cost reduction, improved standard procedures, document templates and management regulations of procurement further improved procurement management for domestic and overseas projects. Continuous promotion of innovation and technological advancement During the Reporting Period, the Group has signed 158 new contracts for the scientific research programs, covering new energy sources, new materials, and energy saving and emission reduction technologies required for the development of petrochemical market. During the Reporting Period, the Group's key R&D programs were steadily advanced. The project "Solid Superacid C5, C6 Isomerization Technology Development and Industrial Test" has gone through the plant start-up stage and is now under adjustment, entering the calibration preparation stage; the project "Research and Demonstration of Packaged Technologies for Safe and Reliable Large-ux Plasma Treatment of VOCs" has been completed and is expected to be delivered in the near future; the project "Integration and Development of High Slag Content and Low Emission Heavy Oil Catalytic Cracking Technology" has gone through the start-up for some units; and other key research projects have been advanced as scheduled and are under overall control. During the Reporting Period, the Group completed 271 new patent applications, among which, 163 or 60.1% applications were invention patents applications. Besides, the Group completed 192 newly licensed patents, 66 of which were invention patents. During the Reporting Period, the Group received a total of 20 scientific advancement awards in scientific innovation and engineering construction fields at the provincial and above level, among them, the project "Development and Application of Packaged Technologies for Ultra-low Sulfur Emission and Resource Utilization of Sulfide-bearing Waste Gas from Refining and Chemical Industry" won the second prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2019, 14 projects won the annual Sinopec Science and Technology Progress Award, and 3 projects won quality engineering awards at different levels. The application of digital engineering has achieved initial success During the Reporting Period, the Group vigorously promoted digital transformation and smart upgrade. According to the "data + platform + application" model, the Group combed the "three-in-one" scenario of business ow, phased management process ow and production tool ow in the whole life cycle from project tracking to project operation, prepared the information and digital development planning framework of the 14th Five-Year Plan, and comprehensively scheme the overall plan of the Group's digital transformation. During the Reporting Period, the Group focused on the integration of industry and finance, deepened ERP application, promoted comprehensive budget management, and established and optimized an operation management platform; paying special attention to digital delivery the Group developed in-depth application of digital factory production line through an engineering cloud APP; focusing on smart factory services, the Group deepened the application of engineering master data, explored the integrated application of equipment domains, and participated in the construction of petrochemical intelligent cloud. Market and Business Outlook Looking forward to the second half of 2020, the global economy is still facing great challenges. The "long tail effect" of the epidemic and the trend of "anti-globalization" have a profound impact on global development. Financial market is subject to accumulated risks, and the uncertainty of international oil prices becomes prominent, resulting the market competition increasingly fierce. However, China's economy still has great potential and momentum, and the fundamentals of long-term improvement have not changed. With continuous improvement of the epidemic situation, the demand recovery is expected to accelerate. The Group will stick to the long-term perspective, strive to find new chances amidst the crisis, create new leads in the changing situation, take initiatives in grasping the domestic and international market opportunities, and give full play to the advantages of collectivization, integration and scale to continuously enhance the core competitiveness of the enterprises and promote the sustainable development of the Group. In the future, the development of the energy industry will adjust the pace with improved quality and efficiency, and the pattern of refining and chemical industry will constantly change. Projects of the "seven major national petrochemical industry bases" and Sinopec Group's "four world-class refining and petrochemical bases" will continue to move forward. Investments from private sector will remain active, and international energy giants such as Exxon Mobil, BASF and SABIC are poised to enter the Chinese market. Focusing on the development orientation of "Whole Life Cycle Service Provider from Project Tracking to Project Operation", the Group will strengthen its traditional advantageous businesses in oil rening and petrochemical industries and continue to establish overall solutions for industries of natural gas, new coal chemicals, environmental protection and energy saving, and build an innovation system with technological innovation as the core, focusing on key points, optimizing resources, implementing the policies in a classified and targeted manner, and jointly promoting the development of various business segments. Meanwhile, the Group will continue to closely track the market opportunities in countries and regions along the "Belt and Road" and continuously improve the competitiveness of overseas business and increase the anti-risk ability. Summary of Financial Data and Indicators Prepared in Accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS") Unit: RMB'000 Items As at 30 June 2020 As at 31 December 2019 Changes from the end of 2019 (%) Total assets 67,497,829 67,873,748 (0.6) Total equity attributable to equity holders of the Company 27,549,243 27,265,976 1.0 Net assets per share attributable to equity holders of the Company (RMB) 6.22 6.16 1.0 Unit: RMB'000 Items For the six months ended 30 June Changes over the same period of 2019 (%) 2020 2019 Revenue 23,797,156 22,682,018 4.9 Gross profit 2,191,775 2,371,953 (7.6) Operating profit 1,150,453 1,101,143 4.5 Profit before taxation 1,562,823 1,513,464 3.3 Net profit attributable to equity holders of the Company 1,260,191 1,198,685 5.1 Basic earnings per share (RMB) 0.28 0.27 5.1 Net cash flow generated from operating activities (1,962,757) (4,964,239) (60.5) Net cash flow generated from operating activities per share (RMB) (0.44) 1.12 (60.5) Items For the six months ended 30 June 2020 2019 Gross profit margin (%) 9.2 10.5 Net profit margin (%) 5.3 5.3 Return on assets (%) 1.9 1.7 Return on equity (%) 4.6 4.5 Return on invested capital (%) 4.7 4.5 Items As at 30 June 2020 As at 30 June 2019 Asset-liability ratio (%) 59.2 59.8 ~ End ~ This press release is issued by PRChina Limited on behalf of SINOPEC Engineering (Group) Co., Ltd. About SINOPEC Engineering (Group) Co., Ltd. The Group is a leading energy and chemical engineering company in the PRC with strong international competitiveness and can provide domestic and overseas clients with overall solutions for petrol refining, chemical engineering, aromatics, coal chemicals, inorganic chemicals, pharmaceutical engineering, clean energy, storage and transportation facilities, environmental protection and energy saving, and other industry sectors. The Group can provide overall industry chain services including engineering consulting, technology licensing, project management contracting, financing assistance, EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) contracting, as well as design, procurement, construction and installation, lifting and transportation of large equipment, pre-commissioning, start-up, digital delivery and digital factory. After more than 60 years of continuous development, the Group currently has an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, three academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and nearly 10,000 high-quality professionals. The Group has extensive project management and implementation experience, and owns and cooperatively owns advanced patents and know-how in core business areas. The Group has delivered on schedule hundreds of modern factories with enormous investment, complicated process, advanced technology and high quality to clients in more than 20 countries and regions around the world. The Group has long- term and steady cooperative relationships with large energy and chemical enterprises at home and abroad, maintains an extensive and stable client base, and enjoys remarkable industrial influence and social reputation. In the future, the Group will embrace the development positioning of "a service provider for the whole life cycle from project tracking to project operation", continue to focus on the development strategies of "energy and petrochemical-oriented, innovation-driven, globalization-targeted and value-focused", promote international expansion, differentiated evolution, digital transformation, smart upgrade, strengthen the exploration and development in the field of renewable energy and new materials, and create a new momentum in achieving the corporate vision of "building a world-leading engineering company" Disclaimer This press release includes "forward-looking statements". All statements, other than statements of historical facts that address activities, events or developments that the Group expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including but not limited to projections, targets, other estimates and business plans) are forward-looking statements. The Group's actual results or developments may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors and uncertainties, including but not limited to the price fluctuation, possible changes in actual demand, foreign exchange rate, market shares, competition, environmental risks, possible changes to laws, finance and regulations, conditions of the global economy and financial markets, political risks, possible delay of projects, government approval of projects, cost estimates and other factors beyond the Group's control. In addition, the Group makes the forward-looking statements referred to herein as of today and undertakes no obligation to update these statements. Investor and Media Enquiries: SINOPEC Engineering (Group) Co., Ltd. - Office of the Board Liu Jingjing /Zheng Zhexia Tel: (86) 10 5673 0523 / (86) 10 5673 0525 Email: seg.ir@sinopec.com PRChina Limited Liting Chen / Alice Yip / Sherry Ren Tel: (852) 2522 1838 / (852) 2522 1368 Fax: (852) 2521 9955 Email: seg@prchina.com.hk



File: SEG Announces 2020 Interim Results Seizing Market Opportunities to Continue Improving Operating Results



24/08/2020 Dissemination of a Financial Press Release, transmitted by EQS Group.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



Media archive at www.todayir.com


For the first time, more than 1 million Massachusetts residents plan to vote by mail in an election, a product of the new law that lets people mail in absentee ballots without a reason other than fear of catching COVID-19.

Yet complications with the U.S. Postal Service have raised questions from voting rights advocates, political candidates and state officials about whether some mail-in ballots might arrive too late to be counted in the Sept. 1 state primary.

While people have until Wednesday to apply to vote by mail, the post office might face delays in sending that application to local election officials, sending the ballot back to a voter and sending the filled-out ballot back to a city or town with a postmark by Sept. 1.

The U.S. Postal Service has removed several mail sorting machines in Massachusetts, WGBH reported last week, and state officials are calling on voters to hand-deliver their ballots for the Sept. 1 state primary in case they dont arrive by mail in time to be counted.

Still, voters have some options left to vote in the state primary and the Nov. 3 general election despite the threat of a pandemic. Heres what to know:

What are my options as of now?

You can apply to vote by mail until Wednesday, Aug. 26. Those applications are being accepted by mail, hand delivery, email or fax to local elections officials. Applications can also be dropped into a designated lockbox in some cities and towns. Close to 200 drop boxes have been set up in communities across the commonwealth. The location of the election offices and drop boxes can be found on the state website.

You can also vote at an early voting site or on Election Day. Early voting for the state primary began Saturday and continues through up until Sept. 1.

Polling places are open between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. for state primaries and elections, though towns are allowed to open as early as 5:45 a.m., according to the Secretary of States website. Those in line when polls close at 8 p.m. must be allowed to vote.

If I apply now, will I get my ballot in time?

Thats the question hovering over the state primary schedule this week. State officials urge people to expedite the process by hand-delivering applications or ballots, in large part due to the recent chaos at the U.S. Postal Service.

Applications must be received by the local election official by 5 p.m. Wednesday, according to state statute.

Those who have received and sent back their ballots can track its status on Track My Ballot website created by the Secretary of States office. Some who have applied are still waiting on their mail-in ballots.

Becky Grossman, a Newton city councilor running for the congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Joe Kennedy III, is challenging the new vote-by-mail laws requirement that election clerks count ballots received by Sept. 1, even for eligible voters who applied to vote by mail by Wednesdays deadline. Grossmans attorneys argue the deadline also disenfranchises voters whose ballots were postmarked before the Sept. 1 election but never arrived due to operational issues at local post offices.

In a Supreme Judicial Court hearing Monday, state attorney Anne Sterman said voters who worry their mail-in ballot wont be counted in time can cast their ballots in-person at an early voting site or a polling place on Sept. 1.

If someone is not certain whether mail-in vote would be counted, although they might prefer for obvious and understandable reasons to avoid human contact, they can still go in and vote in-person at an early voting site in which there ought to be less traffic and fewer people or, worst case scenario, on Election Day, Sterman said. Your vote will only be counted once.

Can a ballot postmarked by Sept. 1 be counted if it arrives late?

The vote-by-mail law that took effect this summer allows ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 but received later by local election officials to be counted, but it does not allow as much leeway for the primary.

Ballots for the Sept. 1 primary must be received by the local election clerks an hour before polls close on Election Day, according to state statute.

U.S. Postal Service General Cousel Thomas J. Marshall told Galvins office in a July 30 letter that the state laws requirements and deadlines regarding vote by mail appeared to be incompatible with the Postal Services delivery standards.

To the extent that mail is used to transmit ballots to and from voters, there is a significant risk that, at least in certain circumstances, ballots may be requested in a manner that is consistent with your election rules and returned promptly, and yet not returned in time to be counted, the letter states, adding that most domestic First-Class mail is mailed two to five days after it is received by the USPS.

Grossmans attorneys cited the July 30 letter as they ask a judge to make local election officials accept ballots postmarked by Sept. 1 and received up to 10 days later.

It is obvious that uncountable Massachusetts voters will be denied the right to vote even if they comply with Massachusetts law, states an emergency petition filed earlier this month.

Sterman, the states attorney, argues that voters will not be disenfranchised as they will still have other ways to cast a ballot up to Sept. 1  even voting again in-person for fear that the mail-in ballot wont be counted.

What about for the general election?

Eligible residents who havent registered to vote missed the deadline for the state primary but can still register to vote ahead of the Nov. 3 election. The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 24. Thats also the deadline to apply for a mail-in ballot for the general election.

The vote-by-mail applications sent to households across Massachusetts let voters select whether they want a mail-in ballot for the primary or the general or both. That application can be mailed back, emailed, faxed or hand delivered to local election officials.

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Ann Marie Pumphrey, New Head of School of Bishop Hoffman Catholic School, Fremont, Ohio Unification is paramount looking forward and in fulfilling the BHCS mission  unifying our Catholic community, our families, our resources, and around a common goal of developing tomorrows best and brightest .

The Governing Board of Bishop Hoffman Catholic School announced the selection of Ann Marie Pumphrey as Head of School on August 20, 2020. In this role, Mrs. Pumphrey will direct the day-to-day management of school operations, implement strategic initiatives, and create a vision for the successful fulfillment of the school mission.

The Head of School (HoS) is the top administrative leadership position of the Bishop Hoffman Catholic School (BHCS) system, established by the Diocese of Toledo and comprised of an early development center/preschool, K-5 school, junior high school academy and high school. Pumphreys key responsibilities in the position will include advancing the ministry of Catholic education to students, supervising financial activities, directing marketing communications, and, implementing advancement and capital campaign strategies. She will also supervise BHCS principals and staff, and oversee activities required to maintain school accreditation, Diocesan regulatory requirements and BHCS Governing Board policies.

A native of Northwest Ohio, Pumphrey most recently served as Vocational Special Education Coordinator at Vanguard Technology Center in Fremont. On her selection as BHCS HoS, she stated: Im extremely honored to have been chosen as Head of School. As a parent of a BHCS student and someone deeply passionate about education and my Catholic faith, Im appreciative to the Governing Board and ad hoc recruitment committee not only for selecting me, but for the commitment to the Catholic community they demonstrated with such an in-depth search process. Pumphrey also offered insight on her vision for BHCS and surmounting challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic: Unification is paramount looking forward and in fulfilling the BHCS mission  unifying our Catholic community, our families, our resources, and around a common goal of developing tomorrows best and brightest . Regarding the current health crisis, there is nothing more important than the safety and well-being of our students and staff, and communication and logistics are vital. We want to make sure everyone is healthy and well informed, and students have the ability to be taught and learn in a safe environment.

Darcy Woolf, BHCS Governing Board Chair, commented on Pumphreys appointment to HoS: Bishop Hoffman is thrilled to have a professional of Ann Maries caliber who thoroughly embodies our values and principles join and lead our system. Her commitment to Catholicism, combined with her extensive and diverse experience as both an educator and administrator will be instrumental as she leads us in the continued fulfillment of our mission.

Bishop Hoffman Catholic School system was founded in 2010 by the Diocese of Toledo by consolidating the three Fremont Catholic parish schools of St. Ann, St. Joseph, and Sacred Heart  along with St. Joseph Central Catholic High School. Today, the system serves students Pre-K to 12 grade levels from a broad community of families throughout Sandusky, Ottawa and Seneca counties in Northwest Ohio. For more information, contact Ann Marie Pumphrey, Head of School, at ampumphrey@bishop-hoffman.net or visit bishop-hoffman.net
The production of milk products and imports have recorded increases in the first six months of the year, over the similar period of 2019, the milk market being dominated by multinational companies, show the results of a study conducted by the Tara Mea [My Country] Cooperative, given on Monday to the public.

According to the quoted source, raw milk imports increase in the first six months (57.4 pct), reaching 72.212 tons, compared to 50,552 in the same period of 2019. In June 2020, imports stood at 9,473 tons, compared to 6,019 tons in June 2019.

The data centralized by the Tara Mea Cooperative reveals the fact that cheeses represent a market dominated by foreigners. The main players on the cheese market are the companies Hochland, Savencia, Covalact, Lactalis, Albalact, who own nearly half the market from the value point of view on the IKA segment. The most important 100 pct Romanian brands are Solomonescu and Tara Mea, which are in the top of Romanian consumer preferences.

According to the same study, the production of milk for consumption, in the first semester, was of 183.245 tons, by 20,333 tons (+12.5 pct) more than the similar period of 2019. In June, production reached 27,479 tons, a drops by around 2,000 tons compared to the previous month.

The study also reveals that the Bio market is growing. "Even if bio products at this time have a share of only a few percent in the total of the milk market, the development of the segment in the last period is not to be neglected. The big producers also started looking with higher and higher interest towards this niche, in the context of consumers becoming more and more interested in food that is as natural and healthy as possible," claim the authors of the study.

The Tara Mea Cooperative owns three milk and milk product factories in Berca (Buzau County), Arad (Arad County) and Barlad (Vaslui County), each delivering 100 tons of milk products per month.
Oppo Reno 5 Series Might Pack Upcoming Snapdragon 775G, Snapdragon 860 Chipsets News oi-Tanaya Dutta

Oppo recently announced the Reno 4 Pro in the country. Now, it seems the company has started working on its Reno 5 series. A new leak reveals the names of the handsets. The Reno 5 series are likely to offer three handsets including the Reno 5, Reno 5 Pro, and the Reno 5 Pro+.

The tipster further mentioned that the company might use the unannounced Snapdragon 775G and the Snapdragon 860 chipsets for the Reno 5 series. As per the leak, the Oppo Reno 5 might come with the unannounced Qualcomm Snapdragon 775G SoC. On the other hand, both Reno 5 Pro and the Reno 5 Pro+ are expected to offer the unannounced Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 SoC.

The Snapdragon 775G SoC is said to come as an upgrade to the Snapdragon 765G. The rumors of the Snapdragon 860 chipset came to fore earlier this month. Nothing is known from Weibo at this time except the names of the processors. Notably, the company also did not comment on this matter.

To recall, the Oppo Reno 4 Pro packs the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G SoC. The handset features a 6.5-inch full-HD+ Super AMOLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate. For battery, the device gets its fuel from a 4,000 mAh battery along with 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 fast charging.

On the other hand, Oppo is gearing up to launch the Oppo A53 in India on August 25. The handset launched in Indonesia last week and it is expected to come in the country under Rs. 15,000. The Oppo A53 comes with a 6.5-inch HD+ punch-hole display with a refresh rate of 90Hz.

It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 SoC coupled with 4GB RAM. Running on Android 10 OS with ColorOS 7.2 custom skin on top and the A53 offers a triple camera setup. The camera setup includes a 16MP primary camera and it has 16MP selfie shooter.

Best Mobiles in India

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Inc. magazine revealed that White Glove is No. 846 on its annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economys most dynamic segmentits independent small businesses. Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.

White Glove is poised for tremendous growth according to CEO, Evan Kramer. Making the Inc. 5000 list this year is a reflection of the hard work and innovation by our founders and employees. White Glove is now going through a period of growth to develop technology-enabled marketing services in order to deliver a wider-variety of Done-For-You products for Advisors  getting new, better and awesome clients. We are honored to be part of this group of companies and look forward to maintaining pace of growth to move up the rankings annually. The demand for all types of professional advisor services, especially financial planning, is at an all-time high. White Glove is well-positioned to deliver the right solutions to the market in order to match consumers with professional advisors with the right user experience and result.

Not only have the companies on the 2020 Inc. 5000 been very competitive within their markets, but the list as a whole shows staggering growth compared with prior lists as well. The 2020 Inc. 5000 achieved an incredible three-year average growth of over 500 percent, and a median rate of 165 percent. The Inc. 5000s aggregate revenue was $209 billion in 2019, accounting for over 1 million jobs over the past three years.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region and other criteria, can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000. The top 500 companies are also being featured in the September issue of Inc., which became available on newsstands August 18.

The companies on this years Inc. 5000 come from nearly every realm of business, says Inc. editor-in-chief Scott Omelianuk. From health and software to media and hospitality, the 2020 list proves that no matter the sector, incredible growth is based on the foundations of tenacity and opportunism.

The annual Inc. 5000 event honoring the companies on the list will be held virtually from October 23 to 27, 2020. As always, speakers will include some of the greatest innovators and business leaders of our generation.

White Glove is a tech-enabled marketing services company that, through its proprietary done-for-you platform, makes it easy for professional advisors to succeed with client-getting strategies, such as educational seminars, webinars, direct leads and appointments, social media management and other digital media. Backed by Quadruple Guaranteed seminars and webinars, advisors pay only for performance. Advisors can grow their business without spending extra time booking venues, setting up webinars, generating leads and appointments, following up with workshop registrants or keeping social media channels updated with great content. White Gloves tech-enabled done-for-you programs are meant to be an extension or replacement for advisor marketing departments  doing the hard work and aligning on performance and results. For more information, visit whiteglove.com.

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000

Methodology

The 2020 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2019. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2019 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

About Inc. Media

The worlds most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.

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Mahatma Gandhi's sartorial strategy was always simple. His simplistic clothing, as we know it, made quite a fashion statement back in the day. It was Gandhi's decision to let go of stiched clothing and come to a mere waist-covering dhoti and a shawl, that made him an international icon. This epoch-making decision made many people take Gandhi's route.

 YouTube/City news

Besides that, Mahatma Gandhi used to always wear his gold-plated glasses. Recently though, the same glasses that were worn by him were put up for auction and they were sold for 260,000 which sums to approximately Rs 2.5 Crore. This took place in the UK, when these glasses were seen sticking out from a letterbox, at the auction house, said BBC.



 YouTube/City news

This rare item was then bought by an American collector. The original price for the same was set for 15,000, but since the item attained a lot of interest from various countries, it finally sold at a price, which was 20 times higher than its original price. This became one of the highest bid of all times.



The staff at East Bristol reported that these glasses were dropped by a man, who claimed that they were a gift to his uncle by Mahatma Gandhi.

Andrew Stowe, one of the auctioneers said These glasses have been lying in a drawer for the best part of fifty years. The vendor literally told me to throw them away if they were no good. Now he gets a life-changing sum of money,

 YouTube/City news

He further added, A colleague of mine picked them up, ripped open the envelope and found a brief note inside saying, These glasses belonged to Gandhi, give me a call. I read the note, carried on with the morning duties, and then around lunchtime I thought, Well lets give this gentleman a call, lets see what the story is."



These glasses have been in the vendor's family for over a century. It is said that the seller's uncle was working with Gandhi in South Africa with the British Petroleum. Auctioneer further said that it can be presumed that these glasses were a gift for some good deed.

 YouTube/Sreedhar Mania

Not just that, but back in 2009, even Vijay Mallya bought several items used by Gandhi at an auction for around Rs 9.3 Crores. The items included, his glasses, leather sandals, pocket watch, a brass bowl and plate.



Speaking of Gandhiji's glasses, they were quite iconic and resonated with his personality. The Windsor-style glasses created a fashion moment and were common during the 1900s.
Why the Kerala Gold Smuggling case is an act of terror

Kerala Gold Smuggling: Need to probe abroad to unearth full racket says NIA

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Kochi, Aug 24: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) probing the sensational gold smuggling case in Kerala has said an investigation has to be conducted abroad to unearth all conspirators in the crime.

It has also said steps have been taken for issuing Blue corner notices against four accused currently in UAE through Interpol to secure them for investigation.

"Investigation revealed that the absconding accused Fazil Fareed (A3), Rabins Hameed (A 10), Sidhiqul Akbar (A 15), and Ahammed Kutty (A 20) are in UAE.Therefore, NBW (non-bailable warrant) against them has been obtained from this NIA court.

Four who helped procure gold in Kerala smuggling case arrested

Steps have been taken for issuing Blue notices against them through Interpol to secure them for investigation," the agency said in a report submitted in the special NIA court here on Friday.

A Blue corner notice is issued to locate or obtain information about a person in a criminal investigation.

In the report, the NIA reiterated that the investigation discloses that the accused had earned profit from the offence and proceeds of smuggling could be used for terror funding.

It said the investigation conducted so far revealed that the accused had conspired and sourced gold in large quantities from abroad on multiple occasions earlier and smuggled it through various airports, especially in Kerala.

Investigation has to be conducted abroad and interrogation into roles of high profile individuals and Consulate officials is also necessary to unearth all conspirators in this crime, the NIA said.

It said the accused have used various social media platforms to communicate with co-accused and suspects for committing the offence.

The seized digital devices of the accused have been forwarded to C-DAC Thiruvananthapuram for cyber forensic analysis.

"Investigation had also revealed the larger conspiracy involving influential people both in India and abroad behind this crime and that the racket has already transported bulk quantities of gold from Middle East through diplomatic baggage and sold it clandestinely to various people, with the intention of threatening economic security of India," the NIA said.

Kerala Gold Smuggling: There is evidence says court while rejecting Swapnas bail plea

The NIA submitted the report seeking judicial custody of four arrested accused-- Mohammed Anwar, Hamzath, Samju and Hamjad---in connection with the case.

The court allowed the agency's plea and sent them to judicial remand yesterday.

The NIA said it is clear that accused had conspired to damage the monetary stability of India by destabilising the economy by smuggling large quantity of gold from abroad and it is suspected that they had used the proceeds of smuggling for financing terrorism through various means.

"Their deliberate act of using the diplomatic baggage of UAE as a cover for smuggling may have serious repercussions to the friendly relations with UAE and it is prejudicial to the monetary and economic security of India as well.

Further, the involvement of other people in this crime as well as the end users and beneficiaries of this crime need to be ascertained," the agency said.

Gold worth nearly Rs 15 crore was seized by the Customs at the airport in the state capital on July 5 and the NIA was entrusted with the probe after the state government asked the Centre to order an appropriate investigation.

Other central agencies including the Customs and Enforcement Directorate are also probing the matter.

The NIA has already arrested three key accused-- Swapna Suresh, Sandeep Nair and Sarith-- in connection with the case.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 10:11 [IST]
For residents of these agrarian communities raining seasons are often bittersweet. While the rain leaves their crops nourished and their harvest bountiful, it often causes a nearby Weru River to overflow its banks leaving the community flooded.

Also, the overflowing river makes it impossible for residents to take their farm produce to the popular Malete and Olowu markets.

Despite budgeting N144 million in five years, the only bridge connecting these villages to the nearest motorable road has continued to suffer neglect.

In 2015, the then-senator representing Kwara North, Shaaba Lafiagi, elected the construction of a bridge over the flood-prone Weru bridge into the annual Zonal Intervention Projects (ZIP) at the sum of N45 million.

The project was to be handled by the Lower Niger River Basin Development Authority, (LNRBDA) a federal agency under the Ministry of Water Resources.

The project was also reinserted in 2016 at the sum of N44 million. Another N10 million naira and N45 million naira were allocated to the project in 2017 and 2018 respectively and tagged "Completion of Weru Bridge and Rehabilitation of Approaching Road in Moro LGA of Kwara North Senatorial District".

But five years after the first contract for the bridge was awarded and N144 million disbursed, the project lies abandoned.

Dashed hope

When Needs Technologies Limited, the contractor in charge of the construction of the bridge started work in 2015, residents of the communities were hopeful that their perennial worry was finally coming to an end. But their hope was short-lived as Needs Technology soon stopped work and moved its construction equipment out of the site.

Afusat Omoniju, a nursing mother and cassava farmer, said a large chunk of her harvest becomes rotten due to the difficulty in transporting her crop to the market.

"Whenever it is the raining season that we ought to take our harvest to nearby villages or Malete to sell, we won't be able to. Weru River would be (so) flooded that drivers won't want to come. It is only motorcyclists that ply this place during this period and they charged exorbitantly.

"Other villagers won't be able to cross to our side and vice versa. The abandoned bridge is really undermining our activities. Now, our cassava is getting spoilt because we could not get them to the market. There is no vehicle, and there is a limit to what okada can convey," she said.

It rained the night before this reporter visited the villages. The river had breached its bank and completely covered a makeshift wooden bridge built by residents as substitute the abandoned bridge.

To the right of the makeshift bridge, lay the decrepit uncompleted bridge. Youth were seen making quick money by ferrying people and their commodities across the river for N50 per trip.

If one considers that the main road leading to the village is in a deplorable state, the abandoned bridge, the fact that the villages have never had electricity and potable water, the communities seem separated from civilisation.

Auditor-General's report

In 2016, the situation of Weru Bridge caught the attention of the Auditor General of the Federation. In his audit report, the contract for the construction of the bridge was awarded to Needs Technologies Limited at the sum of N98.7 million on 10th November 2015, with a completion period expected to last for 12 (twelve) months.

The report by the AGF, further, revealed that contrary to extant regulations stipulating 15 per cent as mobilisation fees, the sum of N26.8 million representing 27 per cent was paid to the contractor as mobilisation fee. A further payment of N16.8 million was made as preliminary expenses, including N2.9 million without proof of expenditure.

In 2018, an UDEME report of the project revealed that work stopped for over a year, exposing residents of the communities to untold hardship.

Residents speak, recount losses

With a cutlass dangling in his left hand, Yusuf Salman, a resident of Omoniju, was on his way from his farm when this reporter accosted him.

As he led this reporter to his residence, he narrated the travails he faces to get his farm produce to Malete market. He said residents have since resigned to fate as they have lost hope that the bridge will be completed any time soon.

"We have been looking forward to when the bridge would be completed, but it seems there is no hope the project would ever be completed. It was started during the tenure of Abdulfatai Ahmed as well as this road. We were told it would also be constructed. Apart from disrupting our farming, it has also claimed lives. We don't know what is stalling it. Although some of us have motorcycles, and that has been helping in conveying our farm products to other villages, particularly Malete or Alapa market, how about others?" he asked.

For Ismail Nurudeen, another resident of Omoniju, the road leading to the villages is also a source of constant worry for the inhabitants. He said the abandoned bridge has also undermined the economy of the surrounding villages.

"The abandoned bridge is giving our means of livelihood a hard knock. We can't transport our farm produce to the ,arket anymore, especially whenever it rains.

"What we were told by the contractor was that they couldn't proceed with the construction because the government has not paid them. When you get to the bridge, you'll agree with me that no human should be subjected to the kind of suffering we face here."

Residents of Oluwu, one of the surrounding villages in the area, have to travel for three hours to get to Malete market to sell their farm produce. The trip would have taken an hour if the bridge had been constructed.

The leader of Olowu community, Abdulwahab Salman, said he has repeatedly written to the government asking for help, but nothing has happened.

Mr Salman said politicians only come to the village during elections "when they need the votes of the people but vanish into thin air afterwards."

Due to the flooded river, many school children have stopped going to school as their parents would rather have them stay home or help them with farming instead of risking their lives.

"The hardship we face cannot be compared to that faced by our children whenever it rains. Even before COVID-19, our children have (had) stopped going to school because it would be suicidal to attempt to cross the river to school when Weru is flooded" Mr Salman, a resident of Omoniju said.

Contractor reacts

When contacted, the managing director of Needs Technologies Ltd, Tajudeen Abdul, absolved his company of blame in the delay in the construction of the bridge. He blamed the paucity of funds and what he termed "unnecessary court trial".

After the court dispute, which was raised by an unsuccessful bidder for the project, was closed, Mr Abdul explained his men had returned back to work.

"The project has been completed. You can go there; the bridge has been completed. In fact, let me forward the pictures to you. What happened exactly is that we only construct(ed) the bridge," he said.

He promised to forward pictures of the completed bridge to this reporter. But when he sent the pictures via WhatsApp messaging App, the new development only captured the removal of the supporting wood on the concrete deck and painting of the hand-rail.

"The bridge used almost four years before we could complete it, and ordinarily, we shouldn't use more than two years. But the Senator didn't have the money to put down N100 million at a time, that was the problem we first had with the project. Apart from that, we had to deal with the court case. We were sued by a man who said he was the one that should be awarded the contract. As such, we were ordered by the court to stop the project," he said.

In 2018, Mr Shaaba reinserted the project into the annual zonal intervention projects to ensure the completion of the bridge as well as the rehabilitation of the approaching road at the sum of N45 million.

However, Mr Tajudeen claimed the rehabilitation of the road was not awarded to his firm.

"I told the senator that the amount budgeted would not complete the project. We all know the amount they were selling cement, iron rods when the project was awarded which nobody is ready to supplement or pay. I told the Senator that additional money would have to be appropriated to enable us to fill the two sides for easy passage along the route.

"It was later in 2018 that the Senator inserted the completion of the bridge and rehabilitation of approaching road for the two culverts at the sum of N45 million so that we can fill it up and do 500 metres each way. But basin (referring to the agency) refused to award it to us. We don't know where the money went. We have completed the bridge; nothing concerns us with the approaching road. We only did what we were paid for. The agency should be held responsible for that of the approaching road."

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Insufficient funding, our bane - Agency

When reached for comment, the (LNRBDA) said the project was delayed in large part due to insufficient funding.

A breakdown of the amount budgeted and released between 2015 - 2018 showed that while a sum of N45 million was appropriated for the project in 2015, only N14.8 million was released for the year.

In 2016, another sum of N44 million was earmarked further for its construction, but only N36.6 million was the amount released for the year.

Although a sum of N6.4 million was released out of an appropriated sum of N10 million for the year 2017, no amount has so far been released for 2018 which captured the completion and rehabilitation of the approaching road despite a total sum of N45 million being the amount earmarked for the year.

Although no provision was made for the completion of the project in the 2019 and 2020 budget, the agency says it is working with the incumbent senator representing the district, Sadiq Umar, "to facilitate the appropriation of funds for the completion of the project as well as made provision for the rehabilitation of the approaching road next year as the 1,518m3 borrowed material provision to earth fill around the bridge abutment is insufficient to fil the bridge abutment to level and improve these section to put the road into effective use."

"There was no appropriation for the project in 2019 and 2020 financial year, hence, the N4.7 million outstanding payment for the contract in the interim payment certificate approved since October 2019 could not be settled by the Authority. The total sum of N88 million has so far been paid to the contractor for certified work, out of the contract sum of N98.7 million with an outstanding balance of N4.7 million," the agency disclosed.

The agency, therefore, said it is working to ensure that the contractor returns to the site for the completion of the bridge adding that he had done 98.9 per cent of the job.

This investigation was done as part of the UDEME project.

UDEME(www.udeme.ng) is a social accountability platform that tracks the implementation of developmental projects and how funds released for such projects are spent.
Under pressure to offer solutions as Chicago reeled from days of widespread looting earlier this summer, Mayor Lori Lightfoot promised help was on the way for small businesses that had been ransacked. City Hall would spend $10 million to create the Together Now fund, ask philanthropists to chip in more, and funnel the cash to shop owners the first-term mayor said had been most affected over the last few days.
MELBOURNE, Australia, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- PelicanCorp today announced Wyoming's 811 Call Before You Dig operation has selected PelicanCorp OneCallAccess as their new 811 Platform. The OneCallAccess software solution will enhance One Call operations across Wyoming state. The Wyoming 811 program has retained Pass Word Inc. to operate its 811 Call Center and technical support.

"OneCallAccess is a fully managed One Call Operation Management solution for e-Ticket and Call Center operations," said Duane Rodgers, CEO, PelicanCorp. "Hosted by PelicanCorp in a high availability cloud environment, it manages all One Call tickets from any location and any time, leveraging advanced web and mobile-based technologies. OneCallAccess is built using a unique mapping platform, enabling the most accurate ticket capture on the market."

PelicanCorp worked directly with Pass Word to configure its OneCallAccess solution to meet the specific requirements of the State of Wyoming. The combination of PelicanCorp's OneCallAccess solution and Pass Word's expertise in support and call center operations will revolutionize the process for handling One Calls throughout the state.

"We are happy to continue our partnership with PelicanCorp on the Wyoming win," said Rod Bacon, President, Pass Word, Inc. "Our One Call Service operation provides highly trained customer service staff with expertise based on 35 years in the industry. In combination with PelicanCorp's global damage prevention experience, our expertise is the perfect fit to enhance the Wyoming One Call operation."

The Pass Word team worked tirelessly in partnership with PelicanCorp to ensure they achieved the goals set out for Wyoming. The new system is slated to begin accepting new locate requests via the website in November of 2020.

"We are moving into this new phase of technology to meet the needs of our membership and the public," said Jan M. Warren, BSL and Executive Director of One-Call of Wyoming. "Infrastructure protection and public safety are our top priorities; it's simply why we exist. This partnership brought to us by our vendors will ensure that our state regulatory requirements are being met while providing our users with the best up-to-date technology and services."

To learn more about OneCallAccess, visit www.PelicanCorp.com.

About Pass Word, Inc.

In 1936, Pass Word began providing answering service to doctors and other mobile customers. Technology to serve those mobile customers evolved and we evolved with it. Call Center services now embrace traditional messaging, very complex dedicated services like Call Before You Dig, Night Attendant Service for complex institutions, and very specialized Catalog Sales requiring specific product knowledge. Wireless has evolved to provide paging service over four states with nationwide affiliation, added broadband Wi-Fi, and licensed microwave services. Learn more at PassWordInc.com.

About PelicanCorp

PelicanCorp is the Global Leader in Damage Prevention Solutions built specifically for the protection of essential infrastructure. PelicanCorp connects people, applications, and devices through a unified platform to help industry professionals manage risk and build quality projectssafely, on time, and within budget. PelicanCorp has a diversified business model built on 40 years of experience protecting billions of dollars of global assets. PelicanCorp is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, with offices and operations around the globe. Learn more at www.PelicanCorp.com or follow PelicanCorp on LinkedIn.

Media Contact:

Denny Michael

PelicanCorp

[email protected]

SOURCE PelicanCorp

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Less than a week after taking steps to enforce UN Security Council sanctions against hundreds of terrorists, Pakistan on Monday invited a Taliban delegation led by one of the UN-designated leaders for talks on Afghanistans troubled peace process.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and deputy political chief of the group, was among the scores of Taliban and Haqqani Network operatives named in a statutory regulatory order issued by Pakistans Foreign Office on August 18 to enforce the UN sanctions, which include a freeze on assets, a travel ban and ensuring they cannot access weapons.

Baradar and the delegation of senior Taliban leaders arrived in Islamabad from Doha in Qatar on Monday, and are expected to hold talks with Pakistans civilian and military leadership.

Pakistans recent move to enforce the UN sanctions, which also apply to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) founder Hafiz Saeed, Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar and hundreds of terrorists, was widely perceived as having been taken with an eye on an upcoming assessment of the countrys counter-terror financing regime by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The assessment is expected in October.

People familiar with developments said the invitation to the sanctioned Taliban leader underlined Pakistans reluctance to sincerely take action against terrorist individuals and entities.

How can one take the notification they issued on August 18 seriously when this is the next step taken by them? said one of the people cited above.

Baradar, currently one of the Talibans main negotiators, had signed the peace deal with the US in February. He was arrested in the Pakistani port city of Karachi in 2010 and was released from prison in 2018 as part of Islamabads efforts to wield greater influence in the Afghan peace process.

Pakistans statutory regulatory order of August 18 states that a request to extradite Baradar to Afghanistan is pending in the Lahore high court, and that he was a member of the Talibans Quetta Shura (council).

Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen tweeted on Monday that Baradar and his delegation were visiting Islamabad at the invitation of Pakistans foreign ministry for talks on developments in the Afghan peace process, and relaxation and facilitation of peoples movement and trade between the two countries.

Taliban officials visit other countries to further positive relations and convey the groups stance on the peace process. These visits were postponed due to the spread of Covid-19 but the series has been resumed now, he said.

Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told a news conference on Monday the talks with the Taliban were aimed at bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan. I invited them and will have a detailed meeting with them tomorrow (Tuesday), he said.

Qureshi also said the Taliban leaders were visiting Pakistan at Islamabads invitation and the process wouldnt be hampered by the UN sanctions.

Sameer Patil, fellow for international security studies at Gateway House, said Pakistan was more intent on protecting its political interests than cracking down on terror.

FATF began increasing the pressure on Pakistan after several attacks by anti-India terrorist groups based in Pakistan. Since then, Pakistan has taken some steps to show it is acting on FATFs action plan. But it will keep on protecting its political interests, over and above what it does for FATF, he said.

This invitation to Mullah Baradar shows it is doing exactly that. Once global pressure eases, there is no guarantee that Pakistan will continue with even these token restrictions, he added.

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Leading e-commerce focused SaaS platform Unicommerces impact report on the e-commerce industry throws light on the performance across verticals and key trends shaping the sector. The report, E-commerce Trends Report 2020, extensively covers trends related to e-commerce growth, region-wise consumer demand, return orders and D2C trends and how it affects the industry in the post COVID-19 world.

Also read: Impact of COVID-19 on E-commerce: Redefining Digital Strategies

The report focuses on the growth of e-commerce in India, along with detailing out changing consumer behaviour and the industry response to address the newly emerging e-commerce trends. First of its kind, the report also throws light on the D2C approach and omni-channel solutions adopted by the e-commerce players, which will significantly shape the supply chain ecosystem in India, and impact the industry in the long run. Additionally, the report also touches upon the initial e-commerce recovery across different segments as India prepares to enter the post COVID-19 world and comprehends its impact on different aspects of the e-commerce ecosystem like returns, shipping, developing brand websites and technology adoption.

Key highlights of the report:

E-commerce in the post COVID-19

After the lockdown was announced, the problem of limited availability and fear of getting infected created a new shift in consumer behaviour and their buying patterns leading to a new wave of online consumers.

The overall e-commerce has not just recovered but witnessed an order-volume growth of 17% as of June 2020

The consumer buying patterns and preferences have changed significantly with categories like health & pharma and FMCG & agriculture seeing a surge and exponential growth, with the rise number of first-time online Shoppers

After e-commerce resumed operations post COVID-19, the return rate has seen a dip of ~10-30% depending on the category. The reduced return can be attributed to the new safety norms, increasing demand for essential products, which are generally non-returnable. However, it will be interesting to see if the trend of lower returns continues in the long term

There is an increasing trend of consumers buying directly from brands' websites. Retail brands are now strengthening their online capabilities and opting for different approaches to connect with consumers

In the last one year, there has been a considerable growth of 65% for brands developing their own website, which led to an increase in self-shipped orders. However, the percentage of self-shipped orders declined from 35% in February 2020 to 30% in June 2020. The decline in self- shipped orders can be attributed to brands trusting marketplace logistics due to better service levels and lower unpredictability during current uncertain times.

Brands going direct to consumer

As the e-commerce ecosystem matures in India, there is an increasing trend of brands going directly to consumers to offer a great experience to its patrons. While the brands have created their own website, the brands continue to sell on the marketplace as it still drives the majority of the order volume

The number of consumers shopping directly from the brands website is increasing at much faster pace than marketplaces. Brand websites have witnessed 88% order volume growth as compared to 32% order volume growth on marketplaces

The top 3 segments that have seen an increasing penetration of D2C brands are Beauty & Wellness, Fashion & Accessories and FMCG & Agricultural sectors.

In the last one year, there has been a considerable growth of 65% for brands developing their own website, which has also led to an increase in self-shipped orders

Indias e-commerce annual growth pre-COVID

Indias e-commerce sector has been on a constant growth, the e-commerce order volume saw a growth of ~20% while the GMV witnessed a surge of ~23% with an average order size of ~INR1100

Beauty & wellness is one sector that has witnessed an unprecedented order volume growth of ~130% followed by FMCG & agriculture and health & pharma with a growth of 55% and 38% respectively. These are emerging sectors with potential to accelerate e-commerce growth in India

Rising demand from hinterland of India

All leading e-commerce companies are focusing on cities beyond the metropolitan cities. Currently, Tier 2 and beyond cities contribute around 66% of the total online consumer demand in India and this share is expected to rise in the coming years

Tier 3 and beyond cities witnessed 53% growth, making it the fastest-growing region. Its also observed that the top 5 cities of Tier 3 contribute only ~22% of the overall Tier 3 order volume, however in metros the top 5 cities constitute 90% of overall order volume

The top 3 states, by e-commerce volumes, are Delhi NCR, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, and they constitute 65% of overall consumer demand

Return orders on decline

Managing returns is an integral part of running an e-commerce business. The total percentage returns (as a percentage of forward dispatches) saw a decline of ~13% as compared to last year and it constitutes ~17% of the overall order volume as compared to ~20% in the previous year

E-commerce companies have invested extensively to reduce COD returns as they constitute large part overall returns. The return percentage on COD orders have reduced from 27% in 2019 to 20% in 2020 and for prepaid orders, the total return has decreased from 12% in 2019 to 11% in 2020. Even after such remarkable reduction in COD returns, it's still almost 2X returns on prepaid orders

Another interesting trend observed is Tier II and beyond cities have seen a significant reduction of ~23% in overall returns. This change can be attributed to increasing, technology adoption improved last-mile delivery and customer centric return policies

Commenting on the report release, Kapil Makhija, CEO, Unicommerce, said, As the world is grappling with the effects of COVID-19, the e-commerce industry in India has seen a major boost since the beginning of this year. With this report, we wanted to throw light on the enormous growth opportunity that lies for the ecommerce industry in India. With changing consumer buying patterns and preferences, rise of new first time online users, increased focus on digitisation by retailers, brands opting for D2C model, etc., we are confident the e-commerce industry will emerge as the most promising market across the globe with tremendous growth potential in the future. We at Unicommerce are committed towards simplifying e-commerce selling and this report is a vital step in the same direction. Through this report, we aim to decode the changing consumer patterns, and provide detailed insights on delivery and returns so that it can help the brands and e-tailers plan their e-commerce strategy much more comprehensively.

With e-commerce at its all-time high, Unicommerce is uniquely positioned to provide e-commerce supply chain technology cloud solutions to help industry players of all sizes to manage their business efficiently. Established eight years ago, Unicommerce is a market leader processing over 20% of Indias e-commerce volume in the country and works with leading online players across segments. The company processes 700k+ order items per day, amounting to $2.5 billion+ GMV for over 10,000 registered customers across India, Middle East and Southeast Asia.
ENEOS Corporation registered to buy 13 million shares of Petrolimex, increasing the ENEOS's already major shareholding

ENEOS  a Japanese leading energy group (formerly JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy)  has recently registered to buy 13 million treasury shares of Petrolimex.

The move aims to lift its ownership at Petrolimex, strengthen its foothold in the burgeoning Vietnamese market, and capitalise on the countrys potential.

Before the transaction, ENEOS Corporation did not own any Petrolimex shares but it is linked with JX Nippon Oil & Energy Vietnam, a major shareholder that owns more than 103.5 million, accounting for approximately 8.73 per cent of Petrolimex.

In addition, Toshiya Nakahara, a member of Petrolimexs Board of Management, is also part of the key personnel at ENEOS Corporation.

Previously, JXTG has formally changed its name to ENEOS as part of a corporate restructuring to address the oil industry's imminent shift to a low-carbon society. Its core unit, refinery and gas station operator JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy, was renamed to ENEOS Corporation.

Petrolimex (HSX: PLX) previously notified the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange that it will sell 13 million treasury shares or 1.1 per cent of the outstanding shares between August 27 and September 25.

In general, experts still believe Petrolimex 12-month target stock price would benefit thanks to growth in retail energy demand, expansion of more profitable directly-owned gas stations, and greater use of convenience stores to boost revenue from the gas station network.
The Board of Directors of Saudi Arabian Military Industries (Sami) has appointed Eng Walid Abukhaled as CEO of the company.

The decision comes following his role as Acting chief executive officer and is based on his proven ability and competence to manage the companys business effectively during the past months.

The Board recognised Abukhaleds nearly 30-year-long global experience in defence and military industries, during which he held several leadership positions, most prominently CEO for the Middle East at defence giant Northrop Grumman, Deputy Minister of Industrial Affairs at the Saudi Ministry of Commerce and Industry, President and CEO of General Electric in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and Chairman of the Operations Board and Director of Strategic Investments Group at BAE Systems in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.

Samis Board wished Abukhaled success in his new role, expressing their confidence in his leadership of the company for the next stage.

Launched in May 2017, Sami is a state-owned military industries company that is mandated to develop and support the military industries in Saudi Arabia and enhance its self-sufficiency.

Aiming to be among the top 25 military industries companies in the world by 2030, Sami is playing a key role in supporting the localisation of 50% of the kingdoms total government military spending, working under the directives outlined in the Saudi Vision 2030.--Tradearabia News Service
By PTI

KOLKATA: Former Meghalaya governor Tathagata Roy, who has expressed his desire to return to active politics in West Bengal, on Sunday said that he wants to rejoin the BJP within a couple of days.

Roy, a former West Bengal BJP president, had earlier said that he is willing to accept any role the party entrusts him with.

"I will meet the state president (Dilip Ghosh) with regard to my joining the party, which I expect to do within a couple of days," Roy told reporters at the NSC Bose International Airport here after arriving from Shillong.

The Assembly poll is due in West Bengal in April or May next year.

Roy was the state BJP president from 2002 to 2006 and a member of the party's national executive between 2002 and 2015.

He was appointed as the governor of Tripura in May 2015 and later took over as the governor of Meghalaya in August 2018.

Satya Pal Malik, who succeeded Roy, was sworn in on August 19.


By John J. Metzler





A visit by an American secretary of health to an East Asian ally would seemingly not register much media attention, especially during the summer. But in the age of global coronavirus and the deadly spread of COVID-19, health certainly matters. So when U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar arrived in Taiwan on a four-day fact-finding mission, the highest-level visit by a U.S. government official since Washington broke diplomatic ties with the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1979, people took careful note.







The stunning symbolism of a large blue-and-white jet emblazoned with the words "United States of America," touching down at Taipei's downtown Songshan Airport, with a close backdrop of the capital's skyline, reaffirmed Washington's growing, if still unofficial, friendship with Taiwan.







There were many ironies here, none of which were lost on the Beijing communists who predictably huffed and puffed. Taiwan, whose government has unfairly faced political ostracism despite the island's global business links, has basked in the well-earned glory of being on the cutting edge of health efforts to contain the coronavirus.







Though Taiwan is internationally praised for its genuine democracy and socioeconomic success, it's less known that the small New Hampshire-sized island ranks equally well on the health and medical services scale. Taiwan is one of the few places that had the capacity to contain and control COVID-19 quickly when it spread from the Chinese mainland.







Since the onset of the virus, Taiwan, with a population of 23 million and despite its proximity to China, has registered just 484 COVID-19 cases with seven fatalities. Similarly South Korea, with a larger population of 51 million, has had 17,655 cases with 309 deaths as of Monday.







Notably Taiwan has an excellent public health policy and level of preparedness as well as gains from previous experience with epidemics such as SARS back in 2003.







During a meeting with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, Secretary Azar said, "It is a true honor to be here to convey a message of strong support and friendship from President Trump to Taiwan," adding, "Taiwan's response to COVID-19 has been among the most successful in the world, and that is a tribute to the open, transparent, democratic nature of Taiwan's society and culture."







Secretary Azar stressed, "This visit represents an acknowledgement of the United States and Taiwan's deep friendship and partnership across security, economic, healthcare and democratic open transparent values," he added, "about reaffirming our connections with Taiwan and the important role Taiwan plays in public health."







To deliberately spoil the moment, two Chinese communist fighter jets earlier skirted Taiwan's airspace in the mid-Taiwan Straits before being shooed away.







Later, Secretary Azar praised the Taipei government's efforts. "Taiwan's approach to combating the virus through openness, transparency and cooperation stands in stark contrast to the country where the virus began." He warned, "The Chinese Communist Party had the chance to warn the world and work with the world on battling the virus. But they chose not to, and the costs of that choice mount higher every day."







Speaking separately, Taipei's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu stressed that Taiwan faces an increasingly tough situation as China continues to politically pressure it into accepting "conditions that would turn Taiwan into the next Hong Kong."







Here's part of Taipei's dilemma, trying to create diplomatic space in an environment where the rival People's Republic of China has blocked Taiwan from participating in international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO). Early in the COVID crisis, China was blithely assuring WHO's director general and officials that the Wuhan virus would not transmit to humans.







Beijing has used its position in the WHO to politically and recklessly "control the narrative" over many infectious diseases which started on the Chinese mainland such as SARS and COVID-19.







Shortly after Secretary Azar's visit, the Trump administration gave the green light to long-awaited sales of F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan. The purchase of 66 of the latest model F-16 jets by Taiwan marks the first American sale of new F-16s since 1992 when then-President George H. W. Bush approved orders of 150 F-16s. Is the defense deal just coincidental?







And on the diplomatic front Taiwan is awaiting a large political and commercial delegation from the Czech Republic. The Senate President, the Mayor of Prague, parliamentarians and business figures will visit Taiwan to strengthen relations.







Given Beijing's reputation in the pandemic era, democratic Taiwan now basks in the limelight.







) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of "Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China."



John J. Metzler ( jjmcolumn@earthlink.net
The China Film Administration, which is part of China's Central Publicity Department and the China Association for Science and Technology, has released a new official set of moviemaking guidelines titled, "A Few Opinions on the Promotion and Development of Science Fiction Movies." As Variety reports:

To make strong movies, the document claims, the number one priority is to "thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping Thought." [] This includes creating films that "highlight Chinese values, inherit Chinese culture and aesthetics, cultivate contemporary Chinese innovation" as well as "disseminate scientific thought" and "raise the spirit of scientists." Chinese sci-fi films should thus portray China in a positive light as a technologically advanced nation. [] The country should "encourage the research and development of VFX's underlying core technology and platform tools with independent IP rights," it said, as well as "support the R&D and industrialization of key technologies in the fields of film digital content processing and digital copyright protection." It should also "support the R&D, production and use of Chinese-made high-precision film equipment." International exchange should be encouraged in the context of furthering these goals.

The People's Republic of China has had a bit of a science fiction renaissance in recent years  and thanks to books like The Three Body Problem and films like The Wandering Earth, it's found a foothold in the US as well. Some of this is due to government directives to  as evidenced in the film guidelines above  use content creation to stimulate imaginations in a way that drives scientific innovation. Some of it is due to, well, life in China. As The New York Times writes:

It's no surprise that sci-fi is booming in China, where the breakneck pace of technological transformation can feel surreal. Economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens out of poverty, and brought extreme wealth to the upper and political class, but technology has also become a tool of state oppression. Some Chinese factories have outfitted workers with devices that measure brain-wave activity to monitor their emotional fluctuations and alertness. Bird-shaped drones have been used to surreptitiously spy on citizens, and surveillance through facial-recognition technology is widespread. On social media and messaging apps, posts containing certain banned words are automatically censored. China is now also leveraging its technology to conquer the solar system: After lagging behind in the space race for decades, the nation recently made a historic landing on the far side of the moon, where it has plans to build a permanent research base, and aims to have a rover exploring Mars next year. "In China, there's this official propaganda position that science fiction is about imagination and this is what the future is all about," [Author Ken] Liu told an audience in New York in April, when he appeared on a panel with Chen Qiufan at the Museum of Chinese in America and spoke about the growing popularity of Chinese science fiction. "In reality, much of the most interesting science fiction is much more subversive," he continued. "It is a kind of wry commentary on what is happening in society. And because so many things are changing in China so rapidly, science fiction feels like oftentimes the most realistic way to describe what's happening."

The People's Republic of China has become a major market for US films  to the point, some would argue, that some of them even pander or self-censor in order to secure a potential Chinese theatrical release. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the country tried to break into the international movie industry itself.

Chinese science fiction in general does bring a much-needed diversity of perspective, experience, and narrative to the world, and that's a net-positive. Even if these PRC government-issued guidelines look a little Draconian  something which is weirdly kind of science fictional itself, if not wholly unsurprising.

China Issues Guidelines on Developing a Sci-Fi Film Sector [Variety]

Chinese Film Authorities Put Sci-Fi at Heart of "Movie Superpower" Plan in New Guidelines [Allison Jiang / Radii China]

How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction [Will Dunn / New Statesman]

How China Became a Sci-Fi Powerhouse [Emily Feng / Foreign Policy]

How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America [Alexandra Alter / The New York Times]

Why sci-fi could be the secret weapon in China's soft-power arsenal [Jing Tsu / The Financial Times]

How China is using science fiction to sell Beijing's vision of the future [Aynne Kokas / The Washington Post]

Image: Screenshot from The Wandering Earth trailer
"After hundreds of hours of successful ground and chamber testing, NGJ-MB's first Growler flight test marked a significant achievement for the program toward Milestone C and IOC," said Annabel Flores, vice president of Electronic Warfare Systems for RI&S. "It's a testament to the technology and the collaborative efforts of the RI&S team with the Navy's engineering, integration and test teams."

The first flight took place August 7, 2020, at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, meeting all objectives. Future mission systems flight testing will demonstrate weapons system control, power generation, and electromagnetic compatibility between jammer and aircraft, as well as the performance of NGJ-MB's high-capacity digital waveform generation and active electronically scanned arrays in flight against a variety of targets. Data from these flight tests on the Growler will inform Milestone C  the Navy's decision to start NGJ-MB production.

The flight follows more than 600 hours of ground testing of Engineering Development Model, or EDM, pods. At the Naval Air Stations Patuxent River and at Point Mugu, California, EDM pods underwent anechoic chamber testing  a special facility designed to absorb electromagnetic waves  to measure the jammer's radio frequency power and beam-steering capabilities.

In addition to mission systems testing, the program is expected to begin aeromechanical flight testing shortly to assess aircraft flying qualities and performance, following previously completed ground vibration, static load, and wind tunnel testing. These tests will also evaluate the effects of the air flow environment on the pod, as well as noise and vibration behavior.

To date, RI&S has delivered 10 EDM pods: six mission systems pods and four aeromechanical pods. A total of 28 pods will be delivered under the EMD contract.

About Raytheon Intelligence & Space

Raytheon Intelligence & Space delivers the disruptive technologies our customers need to succeed in any domain, against any challenge. A developer of advanced sensors, training, and cyber and software solutions, Raytheon Intelligence & Space provides a decisive advantage to civil, military and commercial customers in more than 40 countries around the world. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, the business generated $14 billion in pro forma annual revenue in 2019 and has 35,700 employees worldwide. Raytheon Intelligence & Space is one of four businesses that form Raytheon Technologies Corporation.

About Raytheon Technologies

Raytheon Technologies Corporation is an aerospace and defense company that provides advanced systems and services for commercial, military and government customers worldwide. With 195,000 employees and four industry-leading businesses  Collins Aerospace Systems, Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon Intelligence & Space and Raytheon Missiles & Defense  the company delivers solutions that push the boundaries in avionics, cybersecurity, directed energy, electric propulsion, hypersonics, and quantum physics. The company, formed in 2020 through the combination of Raytheon Company and the United Technologies Corporation aerospace businesses, is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Media Contact

Felipe Dominguez

C: (310) 227-3826

[email protected]

SOURCE Raytheon Technologies
A Newark detective died this weekend due to the coronavirus, making him the 13th police officer in the state to die from the virus, according to the New Jersey State PBA.

Irving Callender, who joined the Newark police force in 2006, died from complications due to the virus Saturday, the city said. He was 43.

Detective Callender has been assigned to my office, serving faithfully and with an unwavering commitment to excellence, since I took office, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said in a statement. He was a lifelong Newarker who loved his city, loved his family, and gave his life for both. The entire city is shaken and all of us will mourn his loss collectively.

We have lost another #Hero. Newark Police Detective Irving Callender, who died yesterday as a result of complications due to COVID-19. He is the 13th New Jersey officer to die from disease. Please pray for his family, friends, and Department. pic.twitter.com/Fz4LBA6enc  New Jersey State PBA (@NJSPBA) August 23, 2020

Callender started his career as an officer in Newarks 5th precinct. He later became a member of the Street Crimes Unit before joining the Mayors Executive Protection Unit in 2014, according to the city.

This is an incredibly sad day for Detective Callenders family, for the Newark Police Division and for Mayor Barakas office, Newark Police Director Anthony Ambrose said. We have lost a great man and a tremendous colleague. Our hearts are broken.

Callender is survived by his wife and two sons.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Joe Atmonavage may be reached at jatmonavage@njadvancemedia.com.
Britain's largest supermarket Tesco on August 24 said it will create an additional 16,000 permanent jobs to support the exceptional growth in its online business and may even increase the number of roles as the lockdown boosted its sales.

"The supermarket expects the majority of these roles to be filled by colleagues who joined on a temporary basis at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but who now want to stay with the business permanently," the company said.

Tesco said the roles will include 10,000 pickers to assemble customer orders and 3,000 drivers to deliver them, along with a variety of other roles in stores and distribution centres.

At a time when companies including high-street retailers, hotels and airlines have laid off tens of thousands of workers to cut costs, UK supermarkets have had to take on additional staff to deal with more demand for deliveries and groceries at home.

Discount supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl said last month they will create an additional 1,200 and 1,000 jobs respectively this year in the UK, as the two companies continue to open more stores and drive market share gains.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Ahold Delhaize NV, a major operator of supermarket chains in the United States and Europe, said earlier this month that its brands hired more than 45,000 employees globally in the second quarter.

British grocery sales had surged during the pandemic, but slowed down in the 12 weeks ended Aug. 9 as shopping habits eased back towards normality after months of lockdown, according to market researcher Kantar.

Follow our full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug.24

Trend:

Azerbaijan fully ensures its own and regional energy security, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Science and Education Bakhtiyar Aliyev told Trend.

Aliyev stressed that after Azerbaijan gained independence, as a result of the aggression of Armenia and the foreign forces supporting it, the country's powerful economic potential, began to collapse.

"The [previous] leaders of Azerbaijan who ruled during the period from 1988 until the adoption of the Act of Independence in 1991, as well as from 1991 to July 1993, dragged the country into chaos and poverty, putting it on the brink of destruction, the chairman said. By showing political will, giving preference to the decisive demands of the people , Heydar Aliyev returned to political power and ensured the country's transition from anarchy to stability, and then to the stage of growth and development.

According to him, the "Contract of the Century", signed in 1994, played the role of a guarantor of Azerbaijan's independence, social well-being, security and development.

Namely on its basis the reconstruction of the energy infrastructure of Azerbaijan began. We remember well that in the 1990s, electricity was supplied in the country with frequent breaks. In some places, power outages lasted several days, he reminded. Owing to the far-sighted policy of the national leader Heydar Aliyev, the energy system of Azerbaijan was created with the aim of meeting the country's needs for electricity from local resources.

Since 2003, as a result of the successful and large-scale strategy of President Ilham Aliyev, energy security in Azerbaijan has been fully ensured and the country has turned from an energy importer into an exporter," he also said.

As Aliyev pointed out, currently Azerbaijan can export energy to neighboring countries - Russia, Iran and Georgia, as well as through Georgia to Turkey and from there to the European market.

At present, the total generating capacity of the Azerbaijani energy system is about 7,000 megawatts. Half of them has been created over the past 17 years. In 2015, the decree of President Ilham Aliyev started to a new stage of reforms in the field of energy security began," he noted.

With the establishment of Azerishig OJSC by the order of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan dated February 10, 2015, the scope of these reforms covered the entire country, he said. Today, one of the main factors in ensuring the rapid development of our economy is the creation of a powerful energy infrastructure and its continuity of operation. Azerbaijan is a country with strong potential not only in the post-Soviet space, but also in Eastern Europe. Along with the uninterrupted supply of electricity to the population in Azerbaijan, the creation of new sectors of the economy, high-tech industrial enterprises and, as a result, reliable employment of the population is ensured, Aliyev added.

We believe that the reforms successfully carried out in Azerbaijan will fully strengthen our state, ensure sustainable and long-term economic development and a high standard of living," concluded the chairman.
Britney Spears has revealed her love of crystals, that are a huge trend in the world of mindfulness, and how she has turned to collecting them throughout the pandemic to get through troubled times.

On Monday, the 38-year-old pop star shared the cover of The Crystal Bible by Judy Hall, a guidebook that looks into the 'spiritual, mental, emotional and psychological' effects of crystals, as well as how you can use them to heal.

Britney - whose infamous conservatorship was just extended until February 2021 - explained that she recently used to them pray to find 'more guidance and grace' as well as using them in her past when she felt nervous before doing interviews.

Healing: Britney Spears reveals she's turned to collecting healing crystals during the pandemic and amid her conservator battle, in a lengthy Instagram post on Monday

'Call me weird if you want but I really love crystals and rocks !!!!' she began her post, adding: 'During this pandemic I've had more time to myself so I started a collection of crystals and I now have 33.'

She then detailed how she uses them to pray and meditate every day, writing: 'For instance, yesterday I prayed to find more confidence and grace .. asking my spiritual guides to guide me  I usually also burn incense to clear the energy !!!'

Britney continued: 'I even used to hold a small rock in my pocket when I was nervous for interviews for good luck.'

Collecting crystals: Britney explained that she's recently used the precious stones to pray for 'guidance'

Crystal healing is often considered to be a pseudo-scientific alternative to medicine, with believers claiming they have healing powers, although naysayers counter that there is no science to support this claim.

However, crystal healing has been used throughout history by a variety of cultures, and has been around since the Middle Ages in Europe.

Britney recently received support from the American Civil Liberties Union, as she continues to be held under her conservatorship, which she has previously described as being 'too controlling.'

'People with disabilities have a right to lead self-directed lives and retain their civil rights,' the ACLU tweeted last week. 'If Britney Spears wants to regain her civil liberties and get out of her conservatorship, we are here to help her.'

The pop star filed paper in Los Angeles Superior Court last Tuesday asking the court to end her father Jamie Spears's conservatorship which essentially gives him control of her finances and career decisions.

Fans: Britney recently answered questions by fans, though many flooded the comments section with more pertinent queries such as the #FreeBritney movement

The 68-year-old has been his daughter's legal guardian since her very public meltdown 12 years ago - an arrangement the superstar's loyal fans have blasted claiming she is being manipulated and controlled.

Due to health reasons, Jamie was forced to temporarily hand over the reins last year to Jodi Montgomery, who was already working as Britney's care manager meaning she assesses the star's needs and works with healthcare professionals to help her get the right treatment.

Britney is now fighting to keep Montgomery as her conservator, the court records show.

#FreeBritney protesters descended on the court Wednesday in support of the star after worried fans have been sharing conspiracy theories online in recent months claiming Britney is being held against her will.

Pop star: Britney pictured at the 2015 ESPYS in Los Angeles

Dancing sensation: Spears shared a clip of herself dancing around in a black sports bra and yellow shorts on Monday
Sushant Singh Rajput Death Anniversary: A Timeline of the of events that have transpired so far

At least 6 members of Sushant Singh Rajputs family killed in road accident in Bihar

CBI probe day 4: Rhea Chakraborty likely to be interrogated today

India

oi-Briti Roy Barman

Mumbai, Aug 24: After flatmate Siddharth Pithani and the domestic staff, CBI might interrogate Sushant Singh Rajput's girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty today who have been accused in the actor's death.

A team of CBI has reached the Waterstone resort today as well. They had visited the resort yesterday but did not get permission to investigate.

The resort is the place where Sushant Singh Rajput had spent two months for his spiritual healing after his return from Europe tour. CBI is trying to determine how Sushant was behaving when he was staying there.

The actress claimed that she left Sushant's house on June 8th after they had a big fight. She had also claimed that since the actor's sister was supposed to visit him, Sushant himself asked her to leave.

Congress gave him everything and he left, Digvijaya Singh on Jyotiraditya Scindia

CBI lilely to grill Neeraj Singh and Dipesh Sawant as it found some 'inconsistencies' in their statements after three times interrogation.

The CBI team took the late actor's personal staff back to his flat in Bandra for further questioning and to recreate the crime scene again on Sunday.

Also, Rajput's accountant Rajat Mewati was interrogated by the CBI on Sunday and will be questioned on Monday as well regarding the late actor's activities on June 13 and 14.

Rajat Mewati has already been grilled by the ED team in the money laundering case filed by the late actor's father K K Singh. Earlier, a statement was released by Rajat in which he alleged 'black magic' done by Rhea Chakraborty.

The CBI team is investigating the cause of the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput after Supreme Court's verdict of transferring the case of alleged suicide to CBI. Rajput was allegedly found dead at his apartment in Mumbai on June 14.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 10:42 [IST]
The Berlin International Film Festival will scrap separate prizes for women and men next year in favour of gender neutral awards.

Organisers said today the new performance awards will be in place for the 2021 festival, due to be held in February.

The ceremony awards the prestigious Golden Bear for the best film and a series of Silver Bears for other categories, which usually include Best Actor and Best Actress.

Officials said those prizes will now be replaced with a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance and a Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance.

Winners of the 70th Berlin Film Festival celebrate with their awards on stage on February 29 2020

The most recent UK recipients for Best Actress and Best Actor were Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay in 2015 after the pair starred in 45 Years

In a statement, the co-heads of the festival, Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, said 'not separating the awards in the acting field according to gender comprises a signal for a more gender-sensitive awareness in the film industry.'

Last year, German film star Paula Beer was crowned Best Actress for her performance in Undine, while Italy's Elio Germano won Best Actor for his role in Hidden Away.

The most recent UK recipients for Best Actress and Best Actor were Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay in 2015 after the pair starred in 45 Years.

In other changes to the festival, the flagship Alfred Bauer Prize, which is named after the festival's founding director, will be permanently retired.

The prize was suspended this year due to revelations about Bauer's role in the Nazis' film-making bureaucracy.

The Berlin Film Festival, one of the industry's biggest events in Europe, normally draws 480,000 filmmakers, movie stars and fans into the cinemas of the German capital.

Last year the UK's Helen Mirren was the recipient of the festival's honorary Golden Bear award

Officials also sought to quash fears over the decision to hold a physical event next year in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

The two directors stressed the need for a 'lively relationship with the audience.'

'In times of the corona pandemic, it has become even clearer that we still require analogue experience spaces in the cultural realm,' they said, noting that other festivals have also resumed holding physical rather than virtual events.

The 2021 festival is scheduled for February 11-21, and this year's festival was one of the last major events that took place before the coronavirus pandemic largely shut down public life in Germany.

Cannes, the world's biggest cinema showcase, usually held in May on the French Riviera, was abandoned following a two-month lockdown in France to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
The California Supreme Court on Monday overturned the 2005 death sentence for Scott Peterson in the slaying of his pregnant wife but said prosecutors may try again for the same sentence if they wish in the high-profile case.

It upheld his 2004 murder conviction in the killing of Laci Peterson, 27, who was eight months pregnant with their unborn son, Connor. Investigators said that on Christmas Eve 2002, Peterson dumped the bodies from his fishing boat into San Francisco Bay, where they surfaced months later.

Peterson contends his trial was flawed for multiple reasons, beginning with the unusual amount of pretrial publicity that surrounded the case," the court said. We reject Petersons claim that he received an unfair trial as to guilt and thus affirm his convictions for murder.

But the justices said the trial judge made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection that, under long-standing United States Supreme Court precedent, undermined Petersons right to an impartial jury at the penalty phase.

It agreed with his argument that potential jurors were improperly dismissed from the jury pool after saying they personally disagreed with the death penalty but would be willing to follow the law and impose it.

While a court may dismiss a prospective juror as unqualified to sit on a capital case if the jurors views on capital punishment would substantially impair his or her ability to follow the law, a juror may not be dismissed merely because he or she has expressed opposition to the death penalty as a general matter, the justices said in a unanimous decision.

SCOTT PETERSON (Justin Sullivan / Pool via AP)

Peterson, who is now 47, contended on appeal that he couldnt get a fair trial because of the massive publicity that followed, although the proceedings were moved nearly 90 miles (145 kilometers) away from his Central Valley home of Modesto to San Mateo County, south of San Francisco.

Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager did not immediately say if she would again seek the death penalty.

Story continues

Peterson was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his wife and the second-degree murder of their unborn son.

Investigators chased nearly 10,000 tips and considered parolees and convicted sex offenders as possible suspects.

Peterson was eventually arrested after Amber Frey, a massage therapist living in Fresno, told police that they had begun dating a month before his wifes death, but that he had told her his wife was dead.

He also had contended on appeal that the trial court erred in deciding whether jurors and the defense were properly allowed to test whether Petersons new boat would likely have capsized if he dumped the weighted bodies over the side.
China has authorised emergency usage of Covid-19 vaccines developed by some select domestic companies, a Chinese health official has said. An emergency use authorisation, which is based on Chinese vaccine management law, allows unapproved vaccine candidates to be used among people who are at high risk of getting infected on a limited period.

"We've drawn up a series of plan packages, including medical consent forms, side-effects monitoring plans, rescuing plans, compensation plans, to make sure that the emergency use is well regulated and monitored," Zheng Zhongwei, head of China's coronavirus vaccine development task force, told state-run CCTV on Saturday.

One month has passed since China officially launched the urgent use of COVID-19 vaccines on July 22, while the vaccines were going through clinical trials, Zheng said. Recipients who got their first dose since then revealed they had few adverse reactions and none reported a fever.

According to China's Law on Vaccine Management, when a particularly severe public health emergency occurs, vaccines in clinical trials can be used in a limited scope to protect medical and epidemic prevention personnel, border officers and other people working in stable city operations, Zheng said.

Also read: China's Sinopharm rejects high prices for COVID-19 vaccine; not to cost over $144.2 for two shots

State-run Global Times has previously reported that employees of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) preparing to go abroad and frontline medics have been offered two choices of domestic inactivated vaccine candidates developed by Sinopharm for urgent use. On Thursday and Friday, Sinopharm signed cooperation agreements on phase III clinical trials of inactivated vaccines with Peru, Morocco and Argentina.

Zheng noted that for the next step of preventing a possible outbreak this autumn and winter, vaccines' availability will be extended to people working in food markets, transport systems and services industries. The number of people being vaccinated on an urgent basis may reach hundreds of thousands across China, considering that personnel in wider sectors are being offered free injections, said Tao Lina, a Shanghai-based immunology expert, on Sunday.

"But it's difficult to give an accurate figure since the Chinese military has begun mass vaccinations but has not released details," Tao said. Wu, an employee of a state-owned company handling overseas construction projects along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Asian and African countries, told the Global Times on Sunday that all staff in her firm have been offered inactivated vaccine injections on a voluntary basis for free.

Wu, who took the vaccine on August 7 along with many of her colleagues, said she did not experience any adverse reactions, similar to everyone else in her group. "My colleagues and I felt only a little dizzy on the afternoon of the vaccination, but we got over it pretty quickly. There was no local redness, swelling or pain, and we did not hear of anyone reporting a fever," said Wu, who will take her second dose on day 28 after the first shot.

Also read: COVID-19 vaccine: China's Sinovac to provide up to 40 million doses to Indonesian govt

"People seem to be relaxed over the vaccination as most of us feel confident in domestically developed vaccines," she said. One of Sinopharm's inactivated Covid-19 vaccines on August 13 was revealed to have had a low rate of adverse reactions for patients in phase I and II clinical trials, while also demonstrating immunogenicity results.

The inactivated vaccine will be effective against all detected strains of the virus at least as of mid-July, with lower chances and degrees of adverse reactions than same-type vaccine candidates under research, Yang Xiaoming, head of Sinopharm, told the Global Times in an earlier interview.

Yang said on Saturday that more than 20,000 people in the United Arab Emirates had taken inactivated Covid-19 vaccines developed by Sinopharm in phase III clinical trials, which have shown a high level of safety. The efficacy of the vaccine is under observation. "The phase III trial in the UAE has had no reported cases of side effects so far," Yang said, adding that "volunteers joined faster than expected and the vaccine was well worth the wait".

Also read: COVID-19 pandemic: WHO lambasts 'vaccine nationalism' in last-resort attempt against hoarding
Turkey's Oruc Reis seismic vessel, escorted by Turkish navy ships, in the eastern Mediterranean - Anadolu Agency

The risk of conflict between Greece and Turkey in the Aegean is likely to escalate this week after Ankara said a Turkish vessel prospecting for oil and gas on the seabed would remain in the region until Thursday.

The Oruc Reis exploration vessel, escorted by warships, had been expected to withdraw from the area on Sunday but the Turkish government said it would continue conducting seismic surveys, in a move that further antagonises already tense relations with Greece.

Athens says the vessel, along with two auxiliary ships, is illegally exploring its waters and continental shelf.

In such a volatile situation, a miscalculation by one side or the other could have serious consequences.

More than ever before, the latest cycle of escalation risks spiraling into a multinational conflict, Michael Tanchum, a senior fellow at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Studies, wrote in Foreign Policy recently.

Observers around the world fear that any further escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean could set off a Euro-Middle Eastern maelstrom.

Turkey's Oruc Reis seismic research vessel - Getty

Earlier this month, a Turkish frigate collided with a Greek frigate during a clumsy manoeuvre, in what the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, claimed was a provocation but which Athens said was an accident.

In a growing standoff which is pulling in other powers, the United Arab Emirates sent four F-16 fighters to take part in military exercises with Greek forces off the island of Crete on Monday.

France has already sent a frigate, a helicopter carrier and Rafale fighter planes to the region to back up Greece, as tensions with Turkey rise to a level not seen since 1996, when the two countries nearly went to war over the disputed Imia islands in the Aegean.

Heiko Maas, Germanys foreign minister, will try to mediate the dispute on Tuesday, traveling to both Athens and Ankara.

Berlin regrets Turkey's decision to extend prospecting for oil and gas, a government spokesman said.

Story continues

The longstanding tensions between Greece and Turkey have been worsened by a maritime doctrine dubbed the Blue Homeland adopted by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkeys increasingly belligerent president.

Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan - Getty

It envisages Turkey having a much greater say in the exploitation of the waters off its coastline, including areas claimed by Greece and Cyprus.

Greece and Turkey are both members of Nato but a military confrontation in the eastern Mediterranean would shatter the alliance, according to retired Rear Admiral Cem Gurdeniz, who helped outline the Blue Homeland strategy more than a decade ago.

"If Greece pulls the trigger, it will be the end of Nato," he told AFP in Istanbul, implying that Turkey would withdraw from the alliance.

"European countries should put pressure on Greece so that it abandons" some of its maritime claims, he said.

He accused President Emmanuel Macron of adding fuel to the fire by sending French forces to the region and said Turkey should not just have a stronger presence in the Mediterranean but also the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and even the Atlantic.

Ankara feels it has been shut out of lucrative oil and gas exploration by deals forged between Greece, Egypt, Cyprus and Israel.

The proximity of many Greek islands to the Turkish coastline makes mediating between the two countries competing claims extremely complex.

The tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo, for instance, lies just 1.2 miles off the Turkish coastline  so close that there is an annual swimming competition between the island and the Turkish town of Kas.

Tensions were exacerbated in November when Turkey signed a maritime demarcation agreement with the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord in Libya, marking out a vast zone of interest in the eastern Mediterranean that impinged on the waters around Crete.

Athens countered that deal earlier this month with a rival demarcation agreement it drew up with Egypt.
Cliff Sims, the Alabama native who wrote a tell-all book about his time in the White House, is back on President Trumps team, according to media reports.

ABC News is reporting Sims is supervising speech writing for the Republican National Convention, including handling remarks that will be made by the presidents children Donald Trump Jr. and Tiffany Trump.

Cliff is a staunch supporter of my father and his America First agenda. He fought to elect President Trump on the 2016 campaign and has done a terrific job as Alabama co-chair of Trump Victory this year, Trump Jr. told ABC News. Im excited that hes now working with the convention team to help make this years RNC a gigantic success.

Founder of the conservative blog Yellowhammer, Sims took a leave of absence from that job in 2016 to work for the Trump presidential campaign. In 2017, he was named Assistant to the President and Assistant Communications Director for White House Message Strategy. He later left the White House amid claims of tensions with other staff.

Sims later wrote the bestseller Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, prompting the president to refer to Sims as a low-level staffer and a mess. Sims later filed suit against the president, alleging him of violating his first amendment rights.

That suit was dropped.
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Linkedin Michel Comte (Agence France-Presse) Ottawa, Canada  Mon, August 24, 2020 07:50 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066febf47 2 World Canada,justin-trudeau,conservatives,politics Free

Canadian conservatives will reveal Sunday their pick for a new leader and main contender to challenge liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in possible snap elections.

Four candidates vied to replace outgoing Andrew Scheer, including two former ministers, the first Seventh-day Adventist ever to be elected to parliament, and an outsider seeking to become the first black woman to lead a major federal political party in Canada.

Frontrunner Peter MacKay, 54, was looking to mark his triumphant return to politics following a five-year hiatus.

After leading Canada's foreign, defense and justice departments in the last Tory administration from 2006 to 2015, he ducked the limelight.

He has faced a strong challenge for the party leadership from former air-force navigator and former veterans affairs minister Erin O'Toole, 47, who ran twice previously for the job.

Both have touted a need for the party to broaden its appeal to progressive voters, with a focus on jobs and the economy, but also to pitch a clear climate plan, which has been lacking from the Tories.

"I will be Canada's jobs prime minister," MacKay told public broadcaster CBC, promising "a real environmental plan."

He also pledged if he becomes prime minister to ban China's Huawei from Canada's 5G networks, and a tax overhaul.

Toppling Trudeau

The coronavirus pandemic made campaigning for the Tory leadership a challenge, preventing the usual gladhanding and engaging with stakeholders.

Balloting by mail replaced the spectacle of a leadership convention with balloons and streamers, and Canadians have shown little interest as they contended with the virus.

Forcing snap elections to challenge the Liberals would be an equally hard sell in the midst of the worst economic crisis since World War II.

The next opportunity will be at the end of September when Trudeau seeks parliament's support for massive new social and environmental spending to steer Canada out of its economic slump.

The Tories, however, would need the backing of at least two other parties to topple the minority government.

Married to an Iranian-born former beauty queen, with whom he has three children, MacKay was first elected to Parliament in 1997 representing his father's old Nova Scotia electoral district.

As leader of the Progressive Conservatives, he made a deal with Stephen Harper and his Canadian Alliance to merge the two parties and unite the right.

But its loss to Trudeau in 2015 underscored a need to expand its base in rural and western Canada.

"We need more urban and suburban Canadians to see that their values of liberty, family and equality have always been at the core of the Conservative Party," O'Toole said.

Dark horse

Pundits suggested Leslyn Lewis as leader could reinvigorate the party.

The Jamaican-born lawyer does not speak French, does not have a seat in parliament, and is not well known, having only once ran for public office.

In the 2015 election, she was parachuted in to replace an appliance repairman bounced from the Tory slate mid-campaign after he was caught on an investigative television show urinating into a homeowner's coffee mug while on a service call.

Lewis scored relatively well in that ballot, but lost to the Liberal candidate.

She represents a resurging social conservative wing of the party, having voiced opposition to gay marriage and abortion, and saying she would seek to restrict access to recreational cannabis, which was legalized by the Trudeau administration in 2018.

She also reportedly believes climate change is overblown.

Social conservatism, also espoused by Adventist candidate Derek Sloan, is a tough sell to Canadians, with two-thirds of voters having supported progressive parties in the last ballot.

Sloan, 35, has courted controversy, suggesting that homosexuality is a choice, while opposing mask-wearing and mandatory vaccinations.

"Many Canadians don't share and are even afraid of social conservative views," commented Carleton University professor Jonathan Malloy.
TRIFED launches `Trifood' projects in Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh

Union minister for tribal affairs Arjun Munda today e-launched two Trifood projects - tertiary processing centres for minor forest produce of TRIFED - to be located in Raigad, Maharashtra and Jagdalpur in Chhattisgarh.

Being implemented by TRIFED, under the ministry of tribal affairs in association with the ministry of food processing (MoFPI), Trifood aims to enhance the income of tribals through better utilisation of and value addition to the minor forest produce (MFPs) collected by the tribal forest gatherers. To achieve this, as a start, two processing units for Minor Forest Produce will be set up.

The unit in Raigad, Maharashtra that will be used for value addition to mahua, amla, custard apple and jamun and will produce mahua drink, amla juice, candy, jamun juice and custard apple pulp.

The multi-commodity processing centre in Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh will be used for the processing of commodities like mahua, amla, honey, cashew, tamarind, ginger, garlic and other fruits and vegetables. These would be made into mahua drink, amla juice, candy, pure honey, ginger-garlic paste and fruit and vegetable pulp.

Lauding the efforts of those involved in reviving the flagging economic condition of the tribal food gatherers Arjun Munda called for holistic development of tribal people based on the biodiversity of tribal life that should be preserved and enhanced. He said that this project will help in promoting tribal entrepreneurship. He lauded TRIFEDs efforts in particular in this project, which not only ensures that this bio-diversity is maintained but also forges backward and forward linkages, while promoting the development of the tribals.

TRIFED, as the nodal agency for the upliftment of the tribals, has been putting in place several initiatives to alleviate their distress in these unprecedented times. He encouraged the officials working on this ambitious initiative on ground so that this can be replicated across the country. He opined that DMs and DFOs can play a very important role in tribal development.

The mechanism for marketing of minor forest produce through minimum support price (MSP) and development of value chain for MFP, in particular, has emerged as a beacon of change in these unprecedented times and has positively impacted the tribal ecosystem.

Implemented by TRIFED in association with state government agencies across 21 states, the scheme has injected more than Rs3,000 crore directly in the tribal economy so far. In May this year, the government announced a hike in the minimum support prices of MFPs by up to 90 per cent and the inclusion of 23 new items in the MFP list.

This flagship scheme of the ministry of tribal affairs, which draws its strength from The Forest Rights Act of 2005, aims at providing remunerative and fair prices to tribal gatherers of forest produces.

The Van Dhan Vikas Kendras/ tribal start-ups, also a component of the scheme, further complements MSP as it has emerged as a source of employment generation for tribal gatherers and forest dwellers and the home-bound tribal artisans. A total of 1,205 tribal enterprises spread across 18,500 SHGs have been established to provide employment opportunities to 3.6 lakh tribal gatherers and 18,000 self-help groups in 22 states. The crux of the programme is that it ensures that the proceeds from the sales of these value-added products go to the tribals directly.

The Trifood project aims to converge both the components in its desired merits. In association with MoFPI, the units that will be set up under the scheme for creation of backward and forward linkages under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana, will procure the raw material from the Van Dhan Kendras in the state. The fully processed products will be sold across the country in Tribes India outlets, and franchisee stores. TRIFED also plans to identify and train tribal entrepreneurs who can also sell the products.

With systems and processes being put in place to make the procurement of MFPs and their processing and value addition a round-the-year process, TRIFED is working towards the successful implementation of the Trifood project and other upcoming ones, so that tribal lives and livelihoods can be transformed and incomes secured.
New Delhi: A team of CBI officials arrived at the Waterstone Resort in Mumbai for the second time for investigation. Rhea Chakraborty, his girlfriend, had allegedly made Sushant Singh Rajput stay here for two months and had also called a spiritual healer. The CBI today has called the spiritual healer for interrogation at the resort. He had met Sushant on November 22 and 23.

Meanwhile, as per sources, the CBI officials present at the resort want to know:

 The duration and frequency of Sushant's arrival and stay at this resort.

 Who accompanied him

 Who all had visited him during his stay?

 Payment of the stay was made by whom?

 Did Rhea ever visited this place again after Sushant

 CCTV footage of the same date if available.

CBI is also questioning and taking statements of a few staff of the resort.

The CBI sleuths on Sunday questioned Sushant's flatmate Siddharth Pithani, cook Neeraj Singh and domestic help Deepesh Sawant in connection with the actor's death case for several hours. These three persons were present in the flat when Sushant was found dead.

Later in the day, the officials visited Sushant's flat in Bandra along with Siddharth Pithani, Neeraj Singh and Deepesh Sawant. Forensic science experts were also part of the CBI team which visited Sushant's home.

This was the second time the CBI officials visited the 34-year-old actor's home. On Saturday also, the CBI team accompanied by Siddharth Pithani, Neeraj and Deepesh visited Sushant's house to reconstruct the sequence of events before he was found dead.

The Supreme Court had on Wednesday upheld the transfer of an FIR, lodged by Sushant Singh Rajput's father in Patna against Rhea Chakraborty for allegedly abetting his suicide, to the CBI.

Sushant was found dead in his apartment on June 14. Mumbai Police said he died by suicide.

Later, Sushant Singh Rajput's father filed a police complaint in Patna, accusing Rhea Chakraborty and her family of abetting the actor's suicide and misappropriating his money.
A tumultuous year for an Auburn auto supplier, which saw it announce an expansion only to begin closing weeks later, is suddenly up again.

Wheel, performance tire and accessories company Wheel Pros today announced it has acquired the Borbet Manufacturing Facility in Auburn and plans to create 300 full-time jobs.

It was the latest news for a plant that inked a nearly $24 million expansion in March, only to announce the plant would be shuttered weeks later with the coming of the coronavirus pandemic. There were 250 people employed there at the time the plants closure was announced in April. The aluminum wheel production facility opened in 2003 and had been owned by the Germany-based Borbet since 2008.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed. Wheel Pros bills itself as the only branded automotive aftermarket wheel supplier with cast wheel manufacturing capabilities in the United States. It already has cast wheel manufacturing operations in York, S.C.

The Auburn plant will be converted to an aftermarket wheel manufacturing facility under Wheel Pros ownership. Wheel Pros expects to begin production of cast wheels within a few months and shortly thereafter reach run-rate production of approximately 1.5 million wheels annually across its manufacturing footprint, the company announced.

There is great talent in Auburn and we look forward to working together with the community there, Jody Groce, president and co-founder of Wheel Pros., said.
This brings the total number of positive tests in the country to 28,116.

The total number of COVID-19 related deaths in Ireland still stands at 1,777,

It comes as yesterday a further 61 cases were confirmed and no new deaths were announced by NPHET.

There are currently six people in ICUs being treated for the virus and a further 27 in hospital.

NPHET said of the cases confirmed today: 80 are men while 67 are women, 71 per cent are under 45 years of age, 60 are confirmed to be associated with outbreaks or are close contacts of a confirmed case and 14 of the cases were identified as community transmission.

Dublin is the worst hit county today with 73 cases while there are 17 new cases in Kildare, 12 in Offaly, 11 in Wicklow, nine in Limerick and the remaining 25 cases are in Carlow, Clare, Cork, Donegal, Galway, Laois, Louth, Meath, Monaghan, Tipperary and Wexford.

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The HSE is working to identify any contacts the patients may have had to provide them with information and advice to prevent further spread.

School settings

The issue of Covid-19 in children was of particular concern at the briefing today seeing as schools are set to reopen soon. Speaking about today's figures, Dr. Ronan Glynn, acting chief medical said:

Evidence from the ECDC and international experience to date suggests that children do not commonly transmit COVID-19 to other children or adults in school settings.

Internationally, where schools have been reopened, schools have not been a significant driver of community transmission.

He said we all have a role to play in keeping this virus at low levels which is key to protecting our education system over the coming weeks.

Dr. Cillian DeGascun, the director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory (NVRL), also said at he briefing that it is known thay children can get multiple respiratory tract infections over the winter period and as a result could require repeated tests. He said "therefore, NPHET, HSE and NVRL are continuing to assess alternative testing methods for children."

Speaking about the same issue, Dr Siobhan Ni Bhriain, consultant psychiatrist and Integrated Care lead with HSE, said: There will be cases in school aged children just as there have been throughout the pandemic."

She says that when these occur public health teams will lead the response to limit further transmission- as has been the case in other settings throughout this pandemic.




From VOA Learning English, this is the Health & Lifestyle report.

On Google, one of the most-searched questions related to the coronavirus is: Can it spread through the air?

The answer? Yes. It is possible.

World Health Organization (WHO) officials have said it is possible for COVID-19 to spread in the air under certain conditions. One of these conditions is poor indoor ventilation.

Ventilation is the movement of air through a space -- especially an indoor or enclosed space. We also describe ventilation as air flow.

Experts say poor ventilation may help the coronavirus stay in the air longer. Fresh air, scientists note, break up virus droplets. And this reduces the chances of transmitting, or spreading, COVID-19.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States says that good ventilation with outside air can help reduce airborne contaminants, including viruses, indoors.

Such findings are changing safety requirements for workplaces. VOA Learning English recently wrote about this issue.

But what about in our homes? What can we do to improve air flow where we live?

The EPA website lists several ways to increase ventilation in our homes. It also states that, in general, the greater the number of people in an indoor environment, the greater the need for ventilation with outdoor air.

Open windows and doors

Of course, opening windows and doors is one easy way to let in natural air. However, that may not be enough to increase natural ventilation indoors. If inside and outside temperatures are similar and there is little wind, natural ventilation may be limited.

You can get better air flow by opening windows or doors at different sides of the home. This is called cross-ventilation. Open the highest and lowest windows in a home at the same time. This can be especially helpful if the windows are on different floors in a building.

If your windows open at the top and bottom, open the top of one window and the bottom of another. If you only have one window in a room, open both the top and bottom part way. This will increase air flow.

However, experts warn not to open windows and doors that may cause other health risks. For example, do not open windows if they let in a lot of air pollution. And be sure not to open windows that a child could fall from.

Use fans

Fans are also an easy way to move air around. But simply putting one in the middle of a room might not be enough. Here are more suggestions from the EPA.

Bathroom and kitchens fans are (usually) designed to blow out indoor air. This removes contaminants from the air. So, turn on these fans, if you have them, when the room is in use. Or if possible, keep them running most of the time.

Use portable fans -- ones you can move around -- with open doors or windows. A fan facing a window blows air out of a room. A fan placed away from a window draws air into a room.

Also, you can use many fans  blowing air out of one window and drawing it in from another. If you only have one fan, it should blow air in the same direction that the air is naturally moving. However, to help reduce risks of airborne transmission, do not have the fans blowing directly from one person to another.

When using fans of course be careful of small children. Keep them out of reach of little fingers. Also, make sure the fans will not fall over.

Use air conditioners and other equipment

The EPA website also suggests using window air conditioners that have an outdoor air intake. But, it is important to know that some window air conditioners do not have outside air intakes.

A homes heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system is called the HVAC system. HVAC filters and air cleaners are designed to remove pollutants or contaminants from air that passes through them. Experts say that air cleaning and filtration can help reduce airborne contaminants, including particles containing viruses.

The EPA website says if your homes HVAC system has an outside air intake, open it. Experts advise you to closely look at your HVAC systems information. You may need an HVAC professionals help to make sure your system is running correctly.

Sometimes, ventilating with outdoor air is difficult. For some people, opening windows and doors is not possible because of high temperatures, pollution, or safety risks. In these cases, portable air cleaners may be helpful.

Use other best practices

Portable air cleaners and HVAC filters can reduce indoor air pollution. But they cannot remove all pollutants from the air.

Experts remind us that improving ventilation is just one way to lower the risk of COVID-19. Ventilation should be used along with other best practices suggested by health experts. These practices continue to be social distancing, wearing face masks, cleaning surfaces, and washing hands often.

And thats the Health & Lifestyle report.

Im Anna Matteo.

Anna Matteo wrote this story for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

Quiz - Good Air Flow May Help Protect You From COIVD-19 Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz

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Words in This Story

droplet  n. a very small drop of liquid

contaminant  n. something that makes a place or a substance (such as water, air, or food) no longer suitable for use

fan  n. a machine or device that is used for producing a current of air

draw  v. to let air flow through : to cause to move by pulling

air conditioner  n. to equip with a device for cleaning air and controlling its humidity and temperature

air intake  n. any opening, etc, through which air enters, esp for combustion or cooling purposes : a device that allows air to flow into a machine

filter  n. a device that is used to remove something unwanted from a liquid or gas that passes through it

best practices  n. a procedure that has been shown by research and experience to produce optimal results and that is established or proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

Wildflower International  a small, woman-owned firm in Santa Fe  is one of six companies included in a multiyear $975 million U.S. Department of Defense contract to help fight global terrorism through intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance services with unmanned aircraft systems.

Earlier news stories, including one in Saturdays early edition of the Albuquerque Journal, incorrectly reported that Wildflower was the sole contract awardee.

When first asked about the award last week, president and CEO Kimberly deCastro told the Journal she expects Wildflower to win the lions share of the $975 million at stake in the DOD contract. But Wildflower will face stiff competition on future task orders under the multi-party contract, which only offers the six awardees a right to bid on DOD requests for products or services.

Wildflower, a homegrown company that deCastro launched in 1991, provides information technology products and services to government entities.

In 2018, the company expanded into drone surveillance and data collection services. It competed against some major corporations like Boeing for inclusion on the DOD contract.

We were the dark horse, the odd person out  a small, woman-owned business that no one would have expected to be on the list of winners, deCastro told the Journal.

Since 2018, Wildflower has acquired a fleet of unmanned aerial systems from Arizona-based UAS engineering firm SpektreWorks. Its hired and trained pilots and personnel, growing its workforce from about 80 in early 2019 to 111 now.

Wildflower pilots are expected to deploy to global hotspots to collect data under future task orders for the DODs Special Operations Command, deCastro said. Most Wildflower managers will coordinate missions from a company flight operations center in Santa Fe, but deCastro plans to directly deploy, at least initially, with pilots in the field, something shes never done before.

Competition for the contract was stiff, and deCastro was one of only three women among some 150 participants at the initial DOD presentation for bidders in November 2018.

It was a brutal process throughout, deCastro said. Were just a small Santa Fe company, yet they chose us to help protect vital U.S. interests.

The multiyear contract includes some very large competitors, such as L3Harris Technologies, a global aerospace and defense company with $18 billion in annual revenue and 48,000 employees.
Its spokesman, Ahmed Mismari, said the LNA was ready to respond to any attempted attack on its positions around the coastal city of Sirte, and Jufra, to the south

The eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA) dismissed a ceasefire announcement by authorities in the capital, Tripoli, as a marketing stunt on Sunday, saying rival forces were mobilising around front lines in the centre of the country.

Its spokesman, Ahmed Mismari, said the LNA was ready to respond to any attempted attack on its positions around the coastal city of Sirte, and Jufra, to the south.

Mismari's comments were the first by the LNA after the announcement on Friday of a ceasefire and a call for the resumption of oil production by Fayez al-Sarraj, who heads the Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, in the west.

"The initiative that Sarraj signed is for media marketing," Mismari said during a briefing for journalists. "There is a military build-up and the transfer of equipment to target our forces in Sirte."

"If Sarraj wanted a ceasefire, he would have drawn his forces back, not advanced towards our units in Sirte."

Mismari made no reference to a parallel ceasefire call also issued on Friday by the head of Libya's eastern-based parliament, Aguila Saleh.

Saleh has gained influence compared to LNA commander Khalifa Haftar since Turkish military support for the GNA forced the LNA to retreat from a 14-month offensive on Tripoli in June.

For more than five years, Libya has been divided into rival camps based in the east and west of the country.

The LNA has received backing from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia, in a conflict that has become an arena for regional rivalries.

There has been little fighting since June. In the past, both sides have accused each other of quickly violating truces and using them to rearm.

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The amount of customers who visit the establishment fluctuates from week to week, with some weeks slower than others.

I think this year its been really weird for everyone, Nick Marcum, co-owner of Asgard Axe Throwing said. Some weeks are really good, some weeks are really bad. You just dont know.

Asgard Axe Throwing is taking several precautions with the pandemic and following the health guidelines issued by the state and county. Bigger groups, like a business looking to host an employee party or a family reunion, can schedule an event this fall. Because of the facilitys large size, if the group has 50 or more people, Asgard Axe Throwing will close to the public for social distancing.

Besides the outside, Mitchell said there are also plans to develop the restaurants 3,000 square foot lower level inside the building from a storage area into a new attraction. The new addition could come in spring 2021, he said. He didnt release any further details because it is still in the works.

Its going to be fun, Mitchell said of the coming attraction. Its going to be great. Its going to be something more of a draw to the downtown Dells.
Kirsty Wark has hit out at the growing Cancel Culture that has seen JK Rowling come under fire  warning of an incredibly dangerous mob mentality.

Activists have called for a boycott of the Harry Potter author over her views on transgender rights.

BBC Newsnight presenter Miss Wark, 65, labelled such actions as wrong and said critics should engage with the writer instead of shunning her completely.

Miss Wark told the Sunday Times Magazine: Obviously there are lots of people who feel very hurt by what JK Rowling wrote.

BBC Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, 65, has warned calls to cancel people like JK Rowling are part of an incredibly dangerous mob mentality

'But not publishing her? Locking away? Thats not the way to deal with it. You have to engage. I think there is a real issue about cancelling people.

Its a really, really worrying aspect of our society, because it encourages a kind of mob mentality, which is completely fed by the internet and can become incredibly dangerous.

She said people risked being found guilty in the court of public opinion.

Cancelling people for making controversial statements will lead public discourse down a dangerous road, she said.

However, Mrs Wark showed some sympathy for those who dont have the privilege of a large platform in the first place.

Activists have called for a boycott of the Harry Potter author JK Rowling over her views on transgender rights

She said: If you were a young person whos feeling really insecure, and you had no money to make your voice heard, well, maybe it was about the fact that she has a voice and you feel you dont have a voice.

Maybe youd feel she had the privilege of a voice. I think some people have more of a voice than others.

She added: Its very hard for some people to find a voice. If they dont have the education and so forth.

And if they find themselves without access to the education, and without the wherewithal or friendships or family to help them through things - the feeling that they are in the wrong place in their body and they want to transition - its tough for them.

I cant imagine what that would be like.
The head doctor of the Siberian hospital that first treated the Russian politician says his team saved Navalnys life.

Doctors at the Siberian hospital that first treated Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny said on Monday that they had saved his life but that they had not found traces of poison in his system.

Navalny, a longtime opponent of President Vladimir Putin, fell gravely ill on Thursday after what his allies believe was a poisoning and was airlifted to Germany for treatment on Saturday.

We saved his life with great effort and work, head doctor Alexander Murakhovsky told reporters at a news conference in the Siberian city of Omsk.

If we had found some kind of poison that was somehow confirmed then it would have been a lot easier for us. It would have been a clear diagnosis, a clear condition and a well-known course of treatment, said Anatoly Kalinichenko, a senior doctor at the hospital.

The Russian doctors did not say on Monday what specifically they had done to save Navalnys life or what they had treated him for.

Last week, they said they had diagnosed him with a metabolic disease possibly brought on by low blood sugar.

Navalny is a longtime opponent of President Vladimir Putin [File: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters]

The doctors denied they had come under pressure from authorities while treating Navalny.

Navalnys allies had accused doctors of holding up his medical evacuation to Germany. The doctors initially said Navalny was not in a fit state to be transported for treatment.

Jaka Bizilj, founder of Germanys Cinema for Peace Foundation, told mass tabloid Bild over the weekend that Navalny, who is being treated in a German hospital, would survive.

He said: Navalny will survive poison attack, but be incapacitated for months as a politician.

But Kira Yarmysh, Navalnys spokeswoman, said there were no new details about the politicians condition and that only she or the doctors treating him would be able to provide reliable information.
Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management already sends a huge number of its MBAs into technology fields. Now the school is investing even more in tech as a future home for its graduates. In response to unrelenting demand for MBAs with expertise in AI and data science, Kellogg is partnering with Northwesterns McCormick School of Engineering to offer a 15-month, five-quarter, accelerated joint MBAi, beginning in September 2021.

More than 25% of Northwestern Kelloggs MBA Class of 2019 went into the tech industry, higher than the total output at all but seven of the 36 schools in the United States and Europe examined recently by Poets&Quants. Kelloggs share of tech MBAs has grown 67% in five years, up from 15% in 2015. The school has a popular Data Analytics pathway in both its one- and two-year MBA programs, a certificate in Management for Scientists and Engineers, and a slate of executive programs in business operations and technology management.

But the demand for tech talent keeps growing  so when Kelloggs Francesca Cornelli was contacted by McCormick Dean Julio Ottino immediately upon her taking the deanship last year, she didnt hesitate to agree about a collaboration on a new analytics-focused program. The MBAi will marry best-in-class management principles with strategic technical engagement, according to the Kellogg Schools description, allowing for students to advance their careers and lead organizations and industries at the intersection of business, technology and science.

I think the Dean of McCormick Julio Ottino will tell you that as soon as I arrived, he sent me an email saying, I think we should do a program together in the space of analytics, and I immediately embraced it, Cornelli tells P&Q. And so this is really the result, the child over one year when youre brainstorming and trying to work together. Kellogg and McCormick already have a program together, which is the MMM, so we have a lot of relationships with them. I think its a very typical characteristic that Northwestern schools work together very well. And I think that its an advantage.

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MBAiS FIVE QUARTERS INCLUDE 10-WEEK EXPERIENTIAL SUMMER

Eric Anderson, Kelloggs Hartmarx professor of marketing and director of the Center for Global Marketing Practice, is the director of the new MBAi program. Kellogg photo

The dual-degree Masters in Management and Manufacturing, known as the MMM program, was launched in the early 1990s. The two-year program integrates business education with design innovation and gives graduates both an MBA from Kellogg and an MSDI from the Segal Design Institute.

In five quarters between September and December, students in the new MBAi will take customized courses in machine learning, robotics, computational thinking for business, how data science and artificial intelligence drive innovation, and more  making the MBAi the only top-tier accelerated degree offering comprehensive coursework and experience that wholly integrates AI and data science with business in a blended learning environment. The degree was created to address a need for MBAs who can lead strategic, business-driving innovation, while comprehending the complexities of the technologies involved. Eligibility requirements include four to six years of work experience in technical roles such as product owner, project manager, data scientist, software engineer, or R&D associate; or an undergraduate STEM degree or major.

Were excited, says Eric Anderson, Hartmarx professor of marketing and director of Kelloggs Center for Global Marketing Practice, who will direct the new MBAi. He says the genesis of the program began five years ago when he was teaching senior executives in AI and analytics, helping them build out organizations and create organizational muscle in that space. And what we realized in numerous conversations with hundreds and hundreds of executives is that everybody recognized the promise of AI analytics, but they continue to struggle with delivering and scaling successful business outcomes. And this was a huge challenge.

The MBAi includes this interesting wrinkle: an experiential summer quarter where students gain work experience in a full-time, 10-week summer internship and engage with industry leaders, all while continuing their studies through 2-credit evening-and-weekend classes. The quarter concludes with an immersion experience in San Francisco that includes company on-site visits, industry networking events, case competitions, and more.

Prospective students can apply to the inaugural class of the MBAi program by October 21 for Round 1; January 6, 2021 for Round 2; or April 7, 2021, for Round 3. Cost: Kellogg and McCormick are in the process of finalizing tuition information and will share this as soon as possible in the weeks ahead.

YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE CULTURE INSIDE THE ORGANIZATION

B-schools are giving more and more attention to the demand from industry for graduates with business analytics skills, and the decline of what were once flagship MBA programs has sparked the rise of smaller, more specialized programs that take one year rather than two. In the past five years, most schools big and not-so-big have launched specialized masters in business analytics or concentrations, certificates, and other approaches that give those looking to work in fintech or data science or management analysis or any number of occupations a plethora of choices in the space. Add to that joint degrees of the kind Kellogg and McCormick are now launching.

One of alums told me, Well, actually I sit on boards and thats the challenge companies face: They have to introduce data analytics, they have to introduce AI or other types of technology, they know they have to do it but they dont know how to go about it,' says Cornelli, who is now beginning her second year as Kelloggs dean. And thats the challenge everybody faces. Others were venture capitalists and they say, This is the people we need. This is the type of company we are creating. So really we felt the why, I wouldnt say obvious, but it was clear to me there was that need. I thought the cooperation between us and McCormick was crucial in doing something that.

The collaboration was crucial, Anderson tells P&Q, because the science has far outpaced businesss ability to adopt the technology.

So we have tremendous new models when it comes to neural networks or machine learning, he says. Theres been tremendous examples, but putting those into a business and getting them to work in an operational environment and then scaling them turns out to require that you change how decisions are made. You have to change the culture inside the organization. You might have to change the structure. And so it requires firms to adapt, and theyre struggling with that.

And thats where the idea for this program came about: that if we want to train the leaders of the future, they need to be able to understand the business challenges are that you will face as you start to implement these technologies at the same time. You cant really do that unless you have a deep toe in the water when it comes to the technology.

McCORMICK DEAN: MBAi OFFERS INTENSIVE CURRICULAR & TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY EXPERIENCES

In a news release announcing the new program, McCormick School Dean Ottino expressed delight in the new partnership with Kellogg, noting the schools now nearly 30-year-old partnership in the MMM and their shared interests in research.

We are delighted to partner with Kellogg on this program, Ottino says. Through a combination of intensive curricular and technology industry experiences, students will be prepared to lead teams that are heavy in technology capabilities and guided by strategies rooted in business needs and return on investment.

Adds Sara Sood, the Chookaszian family teaching professor in computer science at McCormick: As part of the department of computer sciences growth, we have made efforts to further connect with education and research efforts across campus. The MBAi program is an important next step to leveraging computer science and other areas of considerable strength at McCormick to educate individuals prepared to lead innovation.

DONT MISS THESE MBA PROGRAMS ARE THE TOP FEEDERS TO THE TECH INDUSTRY  FOR NOW and KELLOGG POSTS RECORD MBA PAY WITH JUMP IN PE JOBS

The post Kellogg Makes Another Big Tech Investment With New MBAi appeared first on Poets&Quants.
Washington:

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have sent their final Christmas salutations from the White House, highlighting common values uniting Americans of all faiths.

The idea that we are our brothers keeper and our sisters keeper. That we should treat others as we would want to be treated, Michelle Obama said.

Those are values that help guide not just my familys Christian faith, but that of Jewish Americans, and Muslim Americans; nonbelievers and Americans of all backgrounds, the president added.

The Obamas seasonal greeting comes at a time when America is deeply divided after a brutal presidential campaign that pitched populist Donald Trump and his frequently incendiary rhetoric against Hillary Clinton.

The Obamas appeared jovial in their greeting, showing a flashback to the filming of their first Christmas message in 2009, when the president couldnt stop giggling.

Barack Obama also used the address to re-cap his time in office, saying the country was much stronger than it had been than when he succeeded George W Bush.

Together, we fought our way back from the worst recession in 80 years, and got unemployment to a nine-year low, he said.

We made America more respected around the world, took on the mantle of leadership in the fight to protect this planet for our kids, and much, much more. As is custom, the couple also thanked US troops and their families.

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Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung speaking during a virtual media doorstop on Friday (21 August).

SINGAPORE  The move to allow visitors from Brunei and New Zealand to visit Singapore more freely is a step towards reviving Singapores aviation sector amid the COVID-19 pandemic, said Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung on Friday (21 August).

All in all I think this is a small, cautious step to start to reopen aviation and resuscitate Changi Airport, as well as (Singapore Airlines), he said during a virtual media doorstop. Ong added that the state of Singapores aviation sector also affects its economy.

The multi-ministry COVID-19 taskforce announced earlier Friday that, from 8 September, travellers from Brunei and New Zealand will be able to enter Singapore without having to serve Stay-Home Notices (SHNs).

This is contingent upon such travellers having been in either Brunei or New Zealand for 14 consecutive days prior to their arrival in Singapore. They will also be tested for COVID-19 upon entry and will only be allowed to continue with their activities once they have received a negative result.

I believe we can strike a good balance between keeping Singapore safe and travellers here safe, as well as reviving the air traffic sector, said Ong, who noted that both countries had an infection rate of well below 0.1 cases per 100,000 members of the population.

He added that there would be a manageable number of travellers coming in from both countries, with two weekly flights from Brunei that can transport a maximum of 500 passengers, and four weekly flights from New Zealand, which can take a maximum of 1,200 passengers.

Remember, as a small, open economy, to survive weve got to keep our borders open. To earn a living, weve got to have connections with the world. And to thrive and prosper, we must be an aviation hub, said Ong.

While the arrangements with Brunei and New Zealand are currently unilateral, Ong said that this does not preclude the possibility of negotiating reciprocal green lane arrangements with such low-risk countries and even upgrading them to travel bubbles or travel corridors.

Story continues

If you think of Singapore, 200 years ago we also unilaterally became a free port. In the early 80s, when we first built Changi Airports Terminal 1, we also unilaterally opened up our skies.

And when we were promoting free trade... we also unilaterally removed most of our tariffs... So it really is an invitation to the world (that) were open for business... and that has always been our posture, said Ong.

Stay in the know on-the-go: Join Yahoo Singapore's Telegram channel at http://t.me/YahooSingapore

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WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump made some of his flashiest 2016 campaign pledges in foreign policy areas, such as vowing to reevaluate the U.S. relationship with NATO, abandon a landmark nuclear deal with Iran and bring U.S. troops back from forever wars."

The Republican president, a former businessman from New York who boasts about his deal-making skills, has delivered on some of his pledges, while partially meeting a few others. Some he has so far completely failed to achieve.

If Trump is defeated in the Nov. 3 election by Democratic rival Joe Biden, the new administrations hardest challenge will be to restore the global standing and trustworthiness of the United States, analysts and former U.S. and European officials say.

Biden, vice president under President Barack Obama, will be taking over a scarred transatlantic relationship, deep antagonism with China and sanctions-dominated pressure campaigns against Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

Here is a look at some of the key policy priorities of the Trump administration and potential challenges for Biden:

CHINA

A central theme in Trumps 2016 campaign was to accuse China of ripping off" the United States while vowing to seal a fair trade deal with Beijing that would help American businesses and create U.S. jobs.

After almost two years of tit-for-tat trade war with the worlds second largest economy, Trump has so far managed a stalled first phase of such an agreement.

Meanwhile, Washington and Beijing have slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of each others goods and the global spread of the coronavirus from China has soured bilateral ties to their worst level in decades, raising fears of a new Cold War.

Washington has acted against Beijing on multiple fronts: It ended the special status of Hong Kong, sanctioned top officials over human rights abuses and sought to ban Chinese technology companies from operating in the United States.

A Biden administration would have little option but to maintain the hard stance, analysts say, but would likely seek to dial down some rhetoric to create room for engagement.

IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

In 2018, the Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, saying he could strike a better one. He also launched a maximum pressure" campaign to choke off Tehrans sources of income.

Despite almost two years of sanctions on everything from oil revenue to minerals and Irans central bank, Washington has yet to force a change of behavior by Tehran and bring it back to the negotiating table. Instead, escalating tensions have carried the two nations to the brink of war.

Biden has said he would deal with Iran through diplomacy and re-enter the agreement, but only if Iran first returned to compliance with the deals restrictions on its nuclear program.

NATO & TRANSATLANTIC TIES

Trump has repeatedly complained about the failure of many NATO partners to meet defense spending targets. He has also questioned the continued relevance of the organization created in 1949 at the start of the Cold War with Russia.

His attacks soured ties with several European allies, but more members of the alliance have now increased spending to meet its target of two percent of GDP.

This year, Trump vowed to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany, accusing Berlin of taking advantage of the United States while not meeting its NATO obligations.

Analysts say repairing the transatlantic alliance will take time, but should be one of the easier tasks awaiting a potential Biden administration.

BRINGING TROOPS HOME

Trump promised in his 2016 campaign to stay out of foreign wars and bring home U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, Americas longest war, which is now in its nineteenth year.

Washington has begun cutting troop numbers in Afghanistan after striking a deal with the Taliban in February that envisaged the withdrawal of all U.S. troops. This depends, however, on talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which have stalled.

Trump also ordered a pullout of U.S. troops from Syria. The decision was repeatedly watered down by aides and the military, but numbers have still been reduced by more than half.

PARIS CLIMATE DEAL

One of Trumps most controversial decisions was his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, something he had repeatedly vowed to do during the 2016 campaign.

Trump said the agreement imposed draconian" financial and economic burdens on the United States and vowed to negotiate a better one.

A new agreement has not materialized. The Biden campaign said he would recommit to the original Paris deal and lead an effort to get major countries to toughen their domestic targets.

MIDDLE EAST

Trump delivered on his 2016 campaign promise to relocate the U.S. Embassy in Israel to divided Jerusalem. The move was slammed by most of the Arab world but won praise from the Israeli government and its supporters, as well as evangelical Christians.

His wider Middle East Peace plan was rejected by Palestinians as it allowed Israel to maintain control of long-contested West Bank settlements, but received some encouraging reviews from several Arab states.

One, the United Arab Emirates, this month normalized ties with Israel in a historic deal brokered by the United States, a move that many analysts saw as a foreign policy win for Trump at a time when he has been trailing Biden in polls.

NORTH KOREA

Trump surprised the world by entering unprecedented talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He made no progress in persuading Kim to give up his nuclear weapons, but some believe his ice-breaking diplomacy could be a building block for a future administration.

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Pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom, the deputy chief medical officer claimed today.

Dr Jenny Harries said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus.

Meanwhile, Education Minister Nick Gibb this morning insisted parents will be fined if they refuse to send their children back to school next week.

He also said the Government is sticking by its advice to teachers that they do not need to wear masks despite a growing row with unions over staff safety.

Public Health England data has shown that teachers are more likely to be infected than their pupils, after one in 23,000 students tested positive during the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays.

Boris Johnson, fresh from his holiday to Scotland last week, today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September.

The Prime Minister said in a video posted on his Twitter account that he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health.

He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed'.

The Government remains under pressure over its handling of the return of schools with Tory MPs today complaining ministers have left it 'very late' to persuade parents it is safe.

Mr Johnson was back in Downing Street today after a week-long holiday in Scotland last week

Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, today said children were more likely to be hit by a bus than catch coronavirus at school

Teachers are far more likely to spread Covid than children, says leading scientist as figures show just 1 in 10,000 schools have been hit by outbreaks Teachers are far more likely to spread Covid-19 than children, according to a leading scientist. Shamez Ladhani, a paediatric infectious diseases specialist at Public Health England (PHE), said that school staff will maintain social distancing rules during work but are more likely to break them outside the classroom. It comes as data shows just one in 10,000 schools have been hit by a virus outbreak since they reopened in June. Separate analysis revealed only one in 23,000 children were infected. A PHE analysis found 70 children out of 1.6million who had returned to school in June tested positive for Covid-19. Another 128 members of staff tested positive. And only 30 outbreaks were confirmed at 23,400 reopened schools. The analysis, published yesterday, said the majority of cases linked to outbreaks were in staff and warned that school staff needed to be 'more vigilant for exposure outside the school setting to protect themselves, their families and the educational setting'. Dr Shamez Ladhani, paediatric infectious diseases specialist at PHE, who headed the monitoring of England's schools, told The Times: 'We need to educate the educators. 'There's a clear need for a duty of care outside the school setting so staff need to protect themselves, and in turn other staff and pupils.' He added: 'Staff are very good at social distancing and infection control in the classroom, but upon leaving the school environment these measures are more likely to be broken, potentially putting themselves and their colleagues at risk.' Advertisement

Many pupils in England have not been to class since March, when schools were closed except to look after vulnerable children and those of key workers.

Schools in Scotland reopened earlier this month, while those in Northern Ireland will welcome pupils again on Monday. English and Welsh schools will follow suit in September.

The Government today stepped up its efforts to prepare for the return of pupils as Dr Harries suggested the risk coronavirus poses to pupils is actually very small.

She told Sky News: 'Every time a parent sends their child off to school, pre-Covid, they may have been involved in a road traffic accident  there are all sorts of things.

'That risk, or the risk of seasonal flu, we think is probably higher than the current risk of Covid.'

Her comments sparked controversy on social media as some accused her of 'shockingly superficial thinking'.

Dr Harries also told the BBC: 'No environment anywhere we can say is 100 per cent risk free so I think we need to make that clear.

'But it clearly is very confusing for parents at the moment and so all the UK chief medical officers and deputy chief medical officers right across Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England have looked at the evidence and put that down on a statement so that parents can understand the risk.

'We think that the risks for children in schools is exceptionally small from Covid but the risks of not attending school are significant.'

Mr Gibb said this morning that all pupils must return to the classroom and that fines will be issued to parents who refuse to comply.

He said: 'Fines for non-attendance have always been a last resort for head teachers and schools.'

On the crunch issue of whether teachers should wear masks, Mr Gibb said the current guidance against doing so will remain in place.

He said: 'We are always led by the scientific advice. What the current advice is is that if a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July, all of the hygiene pleasures I have been talking about, then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils.'

Asked if he believed the guidance could change, he said: 'We always listen to whatever the current advice is from Public Health England, the chief medical officers, we always adhere to that advice.'

Unison is one a number of unions who have called for teachers to be allowed to wear a mask or face covering.

'It's still unclear why government guidance won't allow them, when they're recommended for other workplaces,' the union said.

It comes as a huge outbreak in Covid-19 cases has been confirmed at four schools in the Dundee region in recent days - just

Public Health England data showed the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays resulted in just one in 23,000 children catching coronavirus.

Some 70 children tested positive out of more than 1.6 million who were in class, with many confirmed as having the disease actually being asymptomatic.

But some 128 staff members tested positive, with most transmission believed to have taken place between adults.

However, while staff are more likely to be infected than pupils they are no more likely to be infected than the general population.

The Government's handling of the schools return, and last week's debacle over A-level and GCSE results, has sparked Tory MP fury.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, told The Telegraph schools and parents needed a 'clear message' that it is 'completely safe to return'.

'They have left it very late and the debacle of exam results means parents don't trust the Government any more,' he said.

Sir Iain urged Mr Johnson to 'lead, galvanising his inner Churchill' in order to reverse the Government's fortunes.

Mr Johnson is urging parents to send their children back to school and in a video posted on his Twitter account this morning, he said it is 'absolutely vital' that classes restart full time across England next week.

Schools in Scotland reopened earlier this month, while those in Northern Ireland will welcome pupils again on Monday. English and Welsh schools will follow suit in September.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith has warned that ministers have left it 'very late' to persuade parents to send their children back to school and that trust had been damaged by the A-level results fiasco

'It is vital for their education, it is vital for their welfare, it is vital for their physical and indeed their mental wellbeing, so let's make sure all pupils get back to school at the beginning of September,' he said.

'I think parents are genuinely still a bit worried about their children contracting coronavirus.

'All I can say is the risks are very, very, very small that they will even get it but then the risks that they will suffer from it badly are very, very, very, very, very small indeed.'

The PM had said in a statement issued overnight that there is a 'moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely'.

The UK's chief medical officers yesterday issued a joint statement seeking to reassure parents that it is safe to send their children back to school.

They said 'very few, if any' children and teenagers would come to long-term harm from the virus solely by attending school, while there was a 'certainty' of harm from not returning.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Mr Johnson's commitment to get all children back to school was at 'serious risk' after a 'week of chaos' over exam results.

Huge Covid outbreak shuts Dundee school as SEVENTEEN staff and two pupils test positive - just two weeks after classes restarted in Scotland

Seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school which has now been shut until at least next week to undergo a deep clean.

All staff and children at Kingspark School in Dundee, which reopened along with other schools in Scotland on August 12, have been told to self-isolate for two weeks.

NHS Tayside confirmed positive cases among three 'community contacts' linked to the cluster at the school, which has about 185 pupils aged between five and 18.

All pupils at the school, which was purpose built in 2009, have additional support needs - with many also having additional physical disabilities or medical problems.

Kingspark School was closed last Wednesday and all parents received a joint letter from the local council and NHS at the end of last week to keep them updated.

The outbreak in Dundee was revealed as a leading Public Health England scientist revealed teachers are far more likely to spread Covid-19 than children.

Health officials confirmed a single positive case has also been linked to the primary 2A class at St Peter and Paul's School in Dundee.

A positive case has also been linked to Happy Times out-of-school club at Downfield Primary School in the same city.

The NHS also confirmed that a child attending the nursery at Newburgh Primary School was now isolating at home with other household members.

One concerned mother said news about a case at one of the nurseries in Dundee was 'every parent's worst nightmare'.

She added: 'It's a very worrying development and there's a great level of concern as you'd expect from parents with children at the nursery.

'I have been advised that my child is to isolate for 14 days from the first day they came into contact with the confirmed case, however older siblings will still be required to attend the primary school.

'There's a lot of confusion and anxiety among parents I've spoken to about the situation but we'll follow the advice we've been given.'

Dr Ellie Hothersall, consultant in public health medicine with NHS Tayside, said: 'Since the identification of positive cases at Kingspark, a detailed contact tracing programme has been under way and these linked cases are being identified because of those concerted efforts of Test and Protect.

All staff and children at Kingspark School in Dundee (pictured today) will now self-isolate

'We must do everything we can to protect all of our communities against Covid-19 and that is why we have issued the guidance to self-isolate.

'By taking this action we are containing any further spread of infection.we know this may cause anxiety to some parents and children but we must do everything we can to ensure we keep people safe.'

Elsewhere, a member of staff and two pupils at High Blantyre Primary School in South Lanarkshire have tested positive for Covid-19.

NHS Lanarkshire said adults and children connected to primary three or primary four had been asked not to attend class.

They will be offered testing on Wednesday and asked to self-isolate until they receive confirmation of a negative result.

Dr Josephine Pravinkumar, consultant in public health medicine, said: 'We are aware that there will be concern among both children and their parents at this time.

'We would like to reassure the local community that appropriate measures are being implemented.

'Individuals should stay off school or work and get tested if they or their close contacts experience any Covid-19 symptoms, such as a cough, fever or loss of taste or smell, even if they are mild.'

Shelagh Mclean, Fife Council's head of education and children's services, said: 'We are following public health advice and talking with our colleagues in NHS Fife about actions required regarding Covid-19.

'With their direction, we are taking all appropriate actions, including that relating to Test and Protect and contact with any confirmed case linked to one of our schools.

'A joint letter, from us and the NHS, was issued to all parents and carers in Fife at the end of last week to keep them informed.

'We've also issued a comprehensive list of questions and answers to help with any questions that they may have, and reminded them of their responsibilities around quarantining at www.fife.gov. uk/schoolcovidfaqs'

Meanwhile restrictions have been placed on care homes across Tayside as authorities try to stem the spread of a coronavirus outbreak.

Indoor visits to the premises are due to restart across Scotland today, if deemed safe to do so.

However, the Tayside Incident Management Team (IMT) said this was not possible given the ongoing management of the cluster associated with the 2 Sisters factory, as well as other localised cases in the area.

Dr Emma Fletcher, associate director of public health for NHS Tayside, said: 'The NHS Tayside Health Protection Team and colleagues in the three Health and Social Care Partnerships in Angus, Dundee and Perth and Kinross, together with other partner agencies, determined that the reintroduction of indoor visiting should not go ahead in Tayside at this time due to the ongoing situation at the factory and a number of other clusters and positive cases.

'We know that this will cause a level of anxiety and disappointment amongst care home residents and their loved ones, however we must ensure that we do everything we can to protect care home residents, staff and their families as we continue to address the challenges that Covid-19 presents.'

There have been 110 positive cases linked to the factory cluster, including 96 workers and 14 community contacts.

All staff and their households, including children, have been ordered to self-isolate until August 31. That measure is in force even if they have a negative result.

Dr Fletcher added: 'The increase in positive cases linked to the factory again today is in line with what we expected and we continue to undertake detailed contact tracing of all cases to ensure everyone fully understands what action they must take.

'Over the last week in Tayside as a whole, more than 2,500 tests have been taken at the testing sites across the area, including the two dedicated facilities in Coupar Angus and Dundee brought in specifically to support testing of 2 Sisters factory workers.

'Hundreds of workers have attended for testing and given the volume of testing which has now been completed, we expect positive cases to continue to rise in the coming days as tests are processed and we receive the results.'

Meanwhile Boris Johnson has pleaded with parents to send their children back to the classroom as he takes charge of the drive to get all UK schools open next week.

The Prime Minister warned last night that pupils risk permanent damage to their future life chances if they continue to stay away.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 24

By Elnur Baghishov  Trend:

About 1.45 trillion rials (about $34.5 million) has been paid to wheat farmers in Iran's Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province (southwestern Iran) from the beginning of current wheat harvesting season April 4 to August 23 in Iran, director of Government Trading Corporation (GTC) of Irans branch in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, Abolhassan Sadaghat Kish said, Trend reports citing the corporations website.

The director stressed that so far, more than 58,750 tons of wheat worth 1.48 trillion rials (about $35.2 million) have been purchased from farmers in the province. About 98 percent of these funds were paid to farmers.

Sadaghat Kish added that 2,320 tons of rapeseed has been purchased in the province so far. The volume of purchased rapeseed increased 267 tons in comparison to the same period last year.

The price of ordinary wheat to be purchased from farmers in the current planting year is set at 25,000 rials (about 59 cents), and of durum wheat - at 26,000 rials (about 61 cents) per kilogram for the current Iranian year (began March 20, 2020). The price of rapeseed is set at 46,600 rials (about $1.1) per kilogram.

Several agricultural goods, including wheat, tea, rice, and other products are purchased from farmers by a state company under a guarantee in Iran.
A Tibetan community leader and his nephew were arrested this weekend in Qinghais Tridu county after defying Chinese authorities by advising local Tibetans not to sign away their rights to grazing land, Tibetan sources said.



Bu Dokyab, 63, and his nephew Gyaltsen, 43, were taken into custody on Aug. 21 by Chinese police while eating at a restaurant in Yushu prefectures Tridu county and were taken to the countys Detention Center 683, a local source told RFAs Tibetan Service.



Authorities did not release a statement regarding the arrests of the two men, residents of Chakchok village in neighboring Chumarleb countys Chigdril township, RFAs source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.



But Tibetans living in the area suspect it had to do with their open defiance of a government order, RFAs source said.



Recently, Chinese authorities held a meeting in Chumarleb to talk about confiscating the land, and Bu Dokyab during the meeting advised the people there not to give up their ownership of the land, saying that this would destroy their livelihood, the source said.



He said that surrendering their deeds to the land would prevent them from ever passing anything down to future generations.



Also speaking to RFA, a second source said that Bu Dokyab had spoken strongly against nomads giving up their rights to their land, reminding his listeners that anyone surrendering their deed to government authorities would lose their way to make a living.



Dokyab is a unit leader in his village and is a very generous man who often gives his help to poor nomads who are in need, the second source said. He even petitions the government when local government assistance to the poor does not reach them in time.



Because of his interventions to secure local families government subsidies, he has already been detained twice by the Chinese police, the source said.



Land deeds revoked



Several counties in Qinghai have called public meetings this year regarding land rights, with officials issuing advisories and distributing documents canceling peoples ownership of their land, the source said.



Before this, the Chinese promised that the land belonged to the local people, and that no one could interfere with their rights for 50 years.



But beginning this year, the land deeds have been revoked, and this has left the local Tibetans very concerned, he said.



Development projects in Tibetan areas have led to frequent standoffs with Tibetans who accuse Chinese firms and local officials of pilfering money, improperly seizing land, and disrupting the lives of local people.



Many result in violent suppression and intense pressure on the local population to comply with the governments wishes, with protest leaders frequently detained and charged under cover of a Chinese campaign against so-called underworld criminal gangs in Tibetan areas.



Reported by Pema Ngodup for RFAs Tibetan Service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney.
The Batsonaa Divisional Police Command has in a swoop arrested six persons for possessing narcotic drugs popularly known as Wee.

Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Effia Tenge, Head of Public Affairs Unit (PAU), Accra Regional Police Command has told the Ghana News Agency.

DSP Tenge said the operation was part of measures to avert and reduce criminal activities within the division and its environs.

She said "Batsonaa Divisional Command under the auspices Of the Divisional Commander, Chief Superintendent of Police Mr Julius Kpeberson led teams to swoop on narcotic drug peddling bases at Cambodia near Baatsonaa and arrested six suspected criminals."

She said one Isaac Nkrumah alias "Thunder," is the kingpin in the drug business in the area.

She said items retrieved from him were eight (8) compressed slabs of plants materials suspected to be narcotic drugs, one hundred and thirty five (135) wraps of leaves suspected to be Indian hemp, thirty eight (38), sachets, all containing dried leaves suspected to be narcotic drugs, one hundred and twenty nine pieces of plant materials also suspected to be narcotic drugs.

She said the police also seized from him a black polythene bag containing a quantity of dried leaves suspected to be narcotic drugs and items suspected to be used in processing the drugs.

The GNA gathered that suspects had been detained and exhibits retained for investigation.

Meanwhile in a related development, the Baatsonaa Divisional Commander also on August 21, 2020 at about 1723 hours conducted swoops in alleged ghettos and drug peddling areas in the environs and arrested 24 suspects between the ages of 18 and 33 years consisting of 23 males and one female.

DSP Tenge said substances suspected to be narcotic drugs were also retrieved from these suspects.

She said they were being screened for further action.

GNA
On August 21, 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari appointed Pauline Tallen as the Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development.

The ministry, founded in 2005, has as its key objective the stimulation of action to promote civic, political, social and economic participation of women, coordinating and monitoring womens programmes; providing technical and financial support for women amongst others.

Ms Tallen was appointed at a time when challenges faced by women in the country were, and are at record high. Some of these challenges includes domestic violence, low inclusion of women in politics, child marriage, female mutilation amongst others.

On assuming office, the newly appointed minister promises to tackle these challenges and also advocate for increased girl child education.

A PREMIUM TIMES review of the ministers first year in office shows some efforts made.

Violence against women

The spate of violence against women surged in the past one year. This covers rape, sex trafficking, molestation at public and private offices, beating and other forms of violence.

During the lockdown period, there was a steady rise in gender-based violence as over 3,600 rape cases were recorded across Nigeria within this period. It was reported that each state in country reported not less than 100 cases of rape.

One of the efforts already in place to curb the rate of gender-based violence in the country is the Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) act.

Signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari in May 2015, the VAPP Act is the single law in place that transcends the criminal and penal code in ensuring justice and protecting the rights and properties of victims of sexual and gender-based violence across the country.

Unfortunately, only 15 out of the 36 states of Nigeria have domesticated this Act.

In all of these, one of the major achievements made in the last one year is the passage of the anti-sexual harassment bill to curb issues of violence in the country.

Gender inclusion in politics and governance

When Ms Tallen assumed duty, the women group expected her to deepen advocacy for the implementation of the 35 per cent affirmative action for gender inclusion in politics and governance.

One year after, this is yet to be achieved as the inclusion of women in governance both at the state and federal level is still low.

At the time Ms Tallen was appointed, only seven of 43 ministers in Mr Buharis cabinet were women, that is 16.2 per cent.

Available data shows that the most women-inclusive government since 1999 was that of Olusegun Obasanjo. Eight of the 27 ministers in his cabinet were women, which stands at 29.6 per cent.

In the recently concluded Ondo and Edo polls, women were poorly represented in the entire process  from the different committees to the aspirants and final candidates.

However, Ms Tallen would still need some years if she is to bridge these inequalities between men and women in the political space.

Women empowerment

Women are the engine of the economy and must be carried along to improve the economy. Once women are empowered, the economy changes.

We will make(an) impact if we are able to improve on the life of the vulnerable woman. Support them with income-generating activities, there will be peace and development, the minister said, following her appointment.

Although efforts may have been made to achieve this, there is no significant evidence of women empowerment during her one year in office.

Majority of women, especially those in rural areas, are still living in extreme poverty.

However, a major achievement is the completion of the women affairs headquarters in Abuja.

Girl child education

Ms Tallen identified the girl child education as one of her major focuses.

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The key word I want to dwell with is the girl child education, because most of the vulnerable women are uneducated. If a girl is uneducated, there is nothing she can do. She becomes vulnerable in the hands of men, Ms Tallen said.

According to the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF), one in every five of the worlds out-of-school children is in Nigeria.

About 10.5 million children aged 5-14 years are not in school, according to the international agency.

It will definitely take more than one year to bridge this gap by putting more children in school

Rating

The national president of the Initiative For Womens Accelerated Development In Africa (INWOAD), Evelyn Onyilo, said Mr Tallens performance can be rated as good, but noted that more milestones can still be achieved.

For anyone that has been following the women affairs activities, you will know that she is a time-tested personality in the Nigerian political space and especially in gender issues. So, when she was appointed to be the minister, some of us saw it as a welcome development.

One major symbolic achievement is the fact that she was able to complete a two-decade project, the Headquarters of the ministry of women affairs and social development.

Women in Nigeria now have a house that they can call their own.

And one important issue is the fact that she has been able to mobilize Nigerian women to speak with one voice. She holds regular sessions and meetings with women groups and shes been able to at least make women have a sense of belonging in the scheme of things.

Though we are not at the finished line yet, we know that she is doing all she can to make sure women are included in the governance of this country, she said.

She noted that Pallen has been talking about ending sexual and gender-based violence and mobilising action.
States like California and Colorado may grab all the headlines when it come to cannabis, but it's Oklahoma's medical market that's seeing the fastest growth in the U.S.

This year, the state has added an average of 13,425 new medical cannabis users per month -- "a number that no other U.S. market has come close to," according to cannabis research firm BDSA. In fact, Oklahomans bought more medical marijuana in the first half of this year than in all of 2019, according to tax collection data. BDSA now sees the state's sales reaching $1 billion by 2022, a 14% jump from the firm's April forecast.

This growth is being driven in part by light-touch regulation that makes it much easier to start a medical marijuana dispensary than in other parts of the U.S. While medical cannabis was only legalized after a state referendum in 2018, BDSA sees nearly one in 10 Oklahomans -- almost 400,000 -- carrying the cannabis cards that let them shop at dispensaries by the end of the year.

That's a far cry from the next busiest U.S. medical market, New Mexico, with just 5.3% of its population seen having access to cannabis by year end.

"This is one of the most interesting markets in the country," said Peter Barsoom, who opted to expand his Colorado-based edibles brand 1906 to Oklahoma, instead of a state like Oregon or California.

While Oklahoma's market is technically medical only, the state makes cannabis easy to obtain. Any adult with a physician's signature qualifies for a marijuana patient card. That contrasts with states like Minnesota, which spells out the specific conditions that are required.

"It's almost de-facto adult use," said Jay Czarkowski, founding partner of marijuana consulting firm Canna Advisors. "It's so liberal."

The state also allows cannabis in all its forms, from edible gummies to sprays and vaping products.

It's not just Oklahoma where usage is growing. The pandemic has sparked greater cannabis use across the country, with Curaleaf Holdings Inc. Chairman Boris Jordan reporting in July demand is at an all-time high and the consumer base is expanding.

Overall, individual states have become more important to cannabis companies, and markets like Virginia, Utah and West Virginia are expected to be some of the fastest growing in the next year. Some recreational markets are also experiencing accelerated growth as marijuana laws relax across the country. But among those allowing medical use, Oklahoma stands out.

There's a flip side to Oklahoma's light regulatory hand. The state doesn't place any limits on the number of dispensary licenses it issues, unlike some other states, and dispensary startup fees of $2,500 are among the nation's cheapest. These loose regulations mean there's been a flood of new players, and some fear saturation.

Keith Laird, who moved from Denver two years ago to open Okie Kush Club in Norman, Oklahoma, said it's the easiest state to open a dispensary. But "it's the toughest state, though, once you're open, to be successful," he said, citing the crowded marketplace.

As of January, Oklahoma had more than 2,200 medical dispensaries. While comparisons with other states are complicated by varying rules on medical and recreational use, only Oregon had more outlets per capita at the beginning of the year. But there's already been some thinning of the herd in Oklahoma, with the count since falling to 2,073 as of Aug. 3.

For cannabis producers supplying the state's market, the key to Oklahoma is finding the most profitable dispensaries while simultaneously expanding widely enough to generate name recognition, 1906's Barsoom said.

"Chaos breeds opportunity," said Allison Krongard, co-founder of Her Highness, which sells luxury cannabis accessories for women. However, the rapid growth isn't going to last, she said. "Once it all shakes out, I'm sure it will not be so free flowing."
The cost of extra IT equipment to enable civil servants to work from home during the lockdown has topped 2m.

Around half of staff have been operating remotely in recent months due to the Covid-19 crisis.

Nearly 23,000 people are employed across the various Stormont departments, with more than 11,000 temporarily based off site.

That is now coming under growing scrutiny, with a member of Stormont's finance committee calling for a return to the office.

TUV leader Jim Allister said: "If we can send schoolchildren and teachers back to the classroom - and I fully support that - then I think we want to avoid a scenario that could present civil servants as a breed apart."

The Department of Finance released details of civil servants working from home after a Freedom of Information request.

It states that 22,793 staff are employed across the various departments.

Just 4,504 - around one in five - was on site, with 11,241 working remotely, as of June.

The 7,000 others include those unable to work on site or remotely, and staff on annual leave, sick leave or "special leave". Most - nearly 5,000 - of these were in the Department for Communities.

The Department of Finance had a 36m IT budget last year.

It spent an additional 2m on equipping staff for home working.

A spokesperson said over 6,000 laptops were purchased, along with software to support remote working including video conferencing.

Mr Allister said: "The number of civil servants working from home is phenomenal. I would question if it still needs to be at the level it is.

"With working from home on that scale, there will be costs for equipment.

"The point of increasing concern is the lack of urgency in getting civil servants back to the office."

Mr Allister has submitted Assembly questions around civil servants' productivity while working from home.

He added: "In a workforce of that size, there may be some who are less eager to pull their weight outside the office."

Earlier this month it emerged that Economy Minister Diane Dodds had written to the head of the Civil Service David Sterling calling for staff to return to offices to boost town and city centre economies.

Mrs Dodds said "one of the greatest drivers of footfall in Belfast city centre would be if Northern Ireland Civil Service staff are back at work".

Alison Millar, general secretary of the Nipsa trade union, said that, where possible, civil servants should work from home.

She said: "Not all civil servants had the IT (laptops etc) in the initial few weeks; however, over a relatively short period of time thousands of civil servants were provided with the appropriate IT to allow them to work from home.

"In the main the vast majority are working effectively from home using their employer-provided IT.

"It is not ideal. However, from a health and safety perspective Nipsa would fully support home-working given the rise in the R number, and the fact that the Executive and PHA guidance states that where you can work from home, you should continue to work from home.

"Home is the safest place to be at the moment."

The Department of Finance said: "The number of staff who can safely work within our offices has been considerably reduced to comply with social distancing, which has proven to be the most effective means of preventing the spread of the virus.

"Throughout this crisis, our staff have worked remotely to ensure the provision of vital services and support to a wide range of people, including those members of society and businesses impacted by Covid-19.

"Over 6,000 laptops were purchased and associated software to support remote working including video conferencing and increased network capacity to ensure the continuation of public services including payment of benefits and other vital government services throughout the duration of the crisis.

"This unprecedented shift to remote working in the NICS has had the effect of enabling the workforce to be more flexible, working remotely and delivering new ways of working that has the potential in the longer term to deliver savings on office accommodation and improve productivity."
Inc. Magazine releases the Inc. 5000 each year which is a list of the most successful independent small businesses and the 2020 list ranks Carnivore Meat Company at #2241 nationally and #23 among Wisconsin businesses recognized.

"We have an incredibly dedicated workforce that has helped us achieve great results over the past year, and we're honored to be recognized again by Inc. Magazine,," commented Lanny Viegut, Carnivore Meat Company CEO and Owner. "We implemented a number of sustainability initiatives along with efficiency improvements that contributed to our overall success. This, combined with the new brand introduction of Nature's Advantage, gave us some great momentum that we will continue to build upon."

Carnivore Meat Company brands are sold in over 6,000 pet specialty stores, online at Chewy and Amazon and exported to 14 international markets. In addition to its branded products, the company provides private label, co-pack services and ingredient components for other brands globally.

"The companies on this year's Inc. 5000 come from nearly every realm of business," says Inc. editor-in-chief Scott Omelianuk. "The 2020 list proves that no matter the sector, incredible growth is based on the foundations of tenacity and opportunism."

Although 2020 brought many challenges, the year also brought opportunities to connect with local and industry communities through Carnivore Meat Company's COVID-19 response initiatives which included a Vital Relief Challenge and the donation of the use of UV equipment to help local healthcare workers and first responders.

"Our pandemic response made us much stronger and more unified as a company and within the community," Viegut stated. "Our team pulled together to achieve some phenomenal results."

Despite the difficult business environment facing brick-and-mortar retailers this year, Carnivore Meat Company launched a new frozen dog food line, Vital Essentials FUSION, that is intensely consumer focused, delivering quality product at an exceptional value-based price point. In addition to this new product launch, the company forged new partnerships with Wisconsin-based Festival Foods to distribute its Hemp Chews throughout the state and with Costco to launch its newest brand, Nature's Advantage, throughout the Midwest.

"Our innovative new product lines and expanding product reach puts us in a great position to answer the demands of our newest generation of pet parents," Viegut says. "It's an honor to be named among the fastest growing private companies in America based on our efforts to enhance the lives of pets through quality nutrition."

Methodology

The 2020 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2019. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2019 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.'s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000 .

About Carnivore Meat Company

Carnivore Meat Company is an award-winning manufacturer of premium raw frozen and freeze-dried pet food and treats. The Green Bay, Wisconsin company's rapidly growing brands include Nature's Advantage, Vital Essentials, VE RAW BAR and Vital Cat, which are distributed to over 6,000 retailers nationwide, in 14 international markets and online to Chewy.com, Amazon, PetFlow.com and others. Long considered a raw pet food pioneer, the company's freeze-dried products division supplies private label, co-packing and ingredients to customers globally. Carnivore Meat Company is family owned and has been recognized for its growth accomplishments and manufacturing excellence with a number of awards in recent years, including Greater Green Bay Chamber Growth Award, Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year Award, Governor's Export Achievement Award, Greater Green Bay Chamber Manufacturing Award of Distinction and Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies. www.carnivoremeat.com

Media Contact: Melissa Olson | [email protected]

Dir: 920-367-4063 | Cell: 920-615-2460

Mail: Vital Essentials, P.O. Box 9227, Green Bay, WI 54308-9227

SOURCE Carnivore Meat Company

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Indias largest commodity exchange the Multi-Commodity Exchange of India Ltd (MCX) on August 24 launched the countrys first bullion index, MCX iCOMDEX Bullion , or Bulldex.

The index will track the real-time performance of the gold (1kg) and silver (30kg) futures contracts.

The weigthage of gold is 70.52 percent and the remaining 29.48 percent is silver. The weights will be rebalanced every January.

The product will help market participants to optimise their asset allocation through portfolio diversification due to its low correlation to equity. The real-time index values will also act as the perfect benchmark that can be replicated with low tracking error for passive investment strategies and help in managing portfolios efficiency, MCX MD & CEO PS Reddy said.

The bullion index futures contracts expiring in the months of September, October and November are now available for trading.

The contract has a lot size equal to 50 times of underlying MCX iCOMDEX Bullion Index. The tick size (minimum price movement) for the contract is Re 1.

The contracts will be settled in cash at the expiry of each contract.

The final settlement price will be the underlying index price arrived at based on Volume Weighted Average Price of the constituents of the underlying index between 4pm and 5pm on the expiry day of the futures contract.

The exchange has waived the transaction fee for the first three months.
India Meteorological Department (IMD) has issued a red category warning for Rajasthan, Saurashtra and Kutch region for Monday. The region is likely to record extremely heavy rain (over 20 cm). On Sunday as well, parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan like Udaipur, Porbander, Kandla etc recorded heavy rain.

Also read: Mumbai breaches 1,000 mm rainfall mark in August

A low pressure area is currently lying over central parts of south Rajasthan, according to IMDs Monday morning bulletin. It is very likely to move westwards across west Rajasthan during next two days and become less marked thereafter.

However, the associated cyclonic circulation is likely to meander over south Rajasthan neighbourhood region for the subsequent 2-3 days. The monsoon trough (line of low pressure) is active and south of its normal position (Ganganagar to Bay of Bengal). It is likely to remain active during next 2-3 days.

Due to these favourable conditions, extremely heavy rain is very likely over south-west Rajasthan and Gujarat on August 24.

Heavy to very heavy rain is very likely over east Rajasthan over west Rajasthan on August 25 and 26 and over Saurashtra and Kutch on August 15.

Another low pressure area has formed over North Bay of Bengal on Monday. Low pressure areas are the main rain bearing system during monsoon which bring a lot of rain to the core monsoon region (parts of central and east India). Due to its development, rain is likely to increase over east and central India once again.

Heavy to very heavy rain is very likely over Odisha during August 24 to 26 with extremely heavy rainfall in parts of the state on August 25; over Gangetic West Bengal during August 25 and 26 and Jharkhand during August 26 and 27.

Due to convergence of lower level easterlies from Bay of Bengal and south-westerlies from Arabian Sea, rainfall activity is likely to also increase over northwest India from August 25: Jammu & Kashmir, Gilgit, Baltistan, Muzaffarabad & Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh are likely to record heavy rain from August 25 to 28 and Uttarakhand to record heavy to very heavy falls during August 25 to 28.

Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh are likely to record widespread and heavy rain on August 26 and 27.

Overall monsoon rain over the country since June 1 has been 7% excess. It has been 6% excess over east and northeast India, 14% deficient over northwest India, 13% excess over central India and 26% excess over south Peninsula.
(Alliance News) - Safestay PLC on Monday said it is in talks with lender HSBC to obtain another waiver on its debt covenants as it expects to breach these at the next test date of December 31.

Shares in Safestay were down 11% at 12.00 pence in London in late morning trading.

The London-based company, which owns and operates a brand of hostels, obtained a waiver in May on covenants for its GBP22.9 million HSBC debt facility. The waiver was until the end of December.

However, Safestay expects it will breach the historic debt service and historic interest cover covenants at the December test date. It is therefore in talks with the lender for a possible waiver of these covenants at the next test date "and for a longer period thereafter". There is no guarantee such talks will be successful.

Safestay also is pursuing a government-backed loan under the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme that would replace the HSBC facility.

As at August 18, Safestay had GBP4.1 million of a GBP5.0 million HSBC overdraft left undraw, meaning it has negative GBP900,000 in cash.

Given its current base case scenario, the company models that it will have negative GBP4.6 million in cash in February 2021, within its GBP5.0 million overdraft facility. However, if its low-case scenario assumptions apply, then it would have a funding shortfall by the end of January.

The base case assumes all hostels re-open by October, with 25% occupancy for August and September, compared to 90% in 2019. It expects this to rise to 30% in the final quarter and 40% in January and Feburary 2021. In 2019, fourth-quarter occupancy was 65%. Safestay also assumes that average occupancy will be 5% lower than in 2019 for the rest of 2021.

The low case assumes all hostels except London Kensington Holland Park and Barcelona Gothic, re-open by October. These two would instead open in 2021. It also assumes 20% occupancy for August and September, falling to 15% in the final quarter on the assumption of a second wave of Covid-19 infection, with 25% occupancy in January and February of 2021.

The low case also assumes average occupancy will be 15% below 2019 for the rest of 2021.

Safestay's hostels break even when average occupancy hits around 57%, the company noted, with both the base and low case suggesting this level will be hit starting from March 2021.

With the addition of the six hostels acquired in 2019 and 2020, Safestay said it foresees a return to 2019 revenue levels in 2021, despite the occupancy drop.

Safestay said it is "investigating alternative options to maintain its cash requirements within the GBP5 million limit pursuant to the overdraft with HSBC".

The firm owns freeholds of hostels in York, Glasgow and Pisa that could be sold or be subject to a sale and lease back agreement.

"The group might also contemplate the early termination of the leases which are anticipated to generate losses in the next months, subject to an agreement being reached with the relevant landlords. The board is considering a range of options in relation to the business, including raising equity, but the board is mindful of giving all shareholders the opportunity to participate in any such equity raise," Safestay said.

It added: "The directors remain confident of securing additional funding to continue to support the business and emerge as one of the winners post the pandemic."

In terms of current trading, Safestay's Berlin hotel reopened in May and its Vienna hostel in June, with all other hostels to have reopened by Friday this week except London Kensington Holland Park and Barcelona Gothic. These will only reopen once there is enough demand to allow profitable operation of more than one London hostel and two in Barcelona.

In July, 30% of Safestay's bed stock was available and 16% was occupied. Average occupancy for its bed stock increased to 24% of available bed stock in the first week of August and 27% in the second.

Under normal circumstances, 28% of Safestay's business is from group bookings months in advance and 72% is from individual bookings made an average of two months in advance. However, the current business is now essentially made up of last minute bookings, making it harder to predict future bookings.

Chair Larry Lipman said: "This is a challenging period but I am confident that in time we will get back to normal. We are working closely on a range of options to strengthen our financial position, which may not be required but will be an additional comfort to have. We know we have a good cash generative business and while the current market is challenging we have a clear strategy for addressing it and as importantly for moving back to being fully operational."

A more detailed trading update will be provided alongside Safestay's interim results on September 24.

By Anna Farley; annafarley@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has wished BJPas senior most leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee on his birthday. The veteran leader turned 92 on Sunday.A



aWishing our most beloved & widely respected Atal ji a happy birthday. I pray that he is blessed with good health and a long life,a PM Modi tweeted.A

PM Modi also shared a video of Vajpayee meeting him in his younger days.

See what Atal ji does when he meets a party Karyakarta. This simplicity and warmth of Atal ji we all cherish, pic.twitter.com/qhw7W27MWS a Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) December 25, 2016

aAtal ji's exemplary service & leadership has had a very positive impact on India's growth trajectory. His great personality is endearing,a PM tweeted.

A In 2015, Modi Government declared Atal Bihari Vajpayeeas birthday as the Good Governance Day and the government plans to launch a slew of schemes to commemorate the day this year.A

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
E ducation and exams giant Pearson today hired a Walt Disney executive on a $10 million-plus pay deal to replace outgoing boss John Fallon, who has battled to turn around the struggling company.

Pearson oversees exams in the UK and was last week forced to recalculate the BTec grades it oversees after the government U-turn on re-grading GCSE results.

Today it appointed Andy Bird to be its chief executive on a pay deal including an award of $9.7 million of Pearson shares which it said was needed to lure him from the US-style wages he has enjoyed during his career.

Bird joined Disney in 2004 and expanded its International division, overseeing its transformation into a "digital-first" organisation focusing on delivering its content direct to people's homes online.

Pearson highlighted this element of his career because Fallon has faced a long, uphill battle in turning Pearson from an old-fashioned school and college books publisher into an Internet business.

Pearson has found it difficult to find a replacement for Fallon as the Covid crisis made it harder to schedule interviews.

Chairman Sidney Taurel praised Fallon's rein and said: "Andy brings a wealth of international consumer experience as well as significant expertise in building brands, transformational change and driving digital innovation."

Prior to his time at Disney, Bird was a senior executive at AOL Time Warner and was previously at Piccadilly Radio and Virgin Broadcasting Company.

Bird was paid a salary and bonuses in the double-digit millions of dollars in the US, which would not have been acceptable in the UK, so Pearson has devised a deal whereby if he buys shares in the group, it will match that over three years.

Bird will buy shares worth $3.75 million in return for which Pearson will gift him $9.7 million of stock over three years. The stock will vest according to his performance.

His salary will be $1.25 million plus $200,000 in lieu of pension payments. Potential bonuses could reach $3.75 million a year and the long term incentive plan from 2021 could hit the equivalent of $3.75 million a year.

The co-investment plan has been created in consultation with big shareholders but will have to be approved of by all investors at a special shareholder meeting.

Bird will start in October.

Taurel first approached Bird for the job last year, shortly after he was ejected from the Disney organisation in a shake-up prior to it taking over Rupert Murdoch's studio assets. However, Bird said he wanted a career break and turned down the offer.

Pearson made him a non-executive director earlier this year instead and, during his initiation programme, he decided to go for the CEO role after all.

"He saw the opportunities here and got really excited about that," said Taurel.

Asked about the school exams fiasco, he said: "It has been a difficult situation for everyone and we feel feally sorry for all the kids anxious to get their grades."

He refused to comment on how he felt the Government and Ofqual, the regulator, had performed.
After spending much of the first round finding success coming from behind, the Boston Bruins took control early and never trailed to make a statement in Game 1 against the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The Bruins, outplayed, outshot and outscored the Lightning, but had to sweat through anxious moments caused by two late goals from Victor Hedman, in their 3-2 win that gave them a 1-0 series lead Sunday at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.

Game 2 is Tuesday at 7 p.m.

Charlie Coyles absurd eye-hand coordination created another goal and gave the Bruins a 1-0 lead after the first period. Brandon Carlos shot from the right point was ticketed for Andrei Vasilevskiys catching glove on his left hand. He had a clear look at a shot that was traveling in a straight line.

Coyle had a good look too. He didnt just tip the shot, but used the blade of his stick like the palm of his hand and turned the puck and pushed it into the net on the other side of Vasilevskiys head.

Im glad my parents signed me up for little league when I was younger. Sometimes thats the way it is, Coyle said. You want to score any way you can. Some good  Its shot mentality, right? And then rebounds come out. Sometimes you get a little lucky. Had that one on March [Brad Marchand] a few games ago and Brando just put one to the net. And stick around the net, good things happen. You take it any way you can.

The Bruins power play, which sputtered in the first period purred in its first opportunity of the second. Playing the point as the fourth forward, David Krejci collected the puck just inside the blue line on near the middle of the ice. He cycled around right wing faceoff circle and threaded a perfect past to David Pastrnak who was camped on the dot in the left wing circle. He once timed the shot into the sliver of space between Vasilevskiys elbow and the post to make it 2-0, 4:34 into the second.

Jaroslav Halak faced his toughest test to that point when the Lightning went on the man advantage shortly after. None of the three saves he made (Brandon Carlo and Sean Kuraly blocked shots too) were outstanding, but he was in good position throughout so they didnt have to be.

The sequence seemed to put him in rhythm.

Tampa had a goal waved off with 10:24 left as Tyler Johnsons stick was well above his shoulders and the cross bar when he batted it by Halak.

Brad Marchand forecheck effort despite going one against three bore fruit. Even after he lost the puck, Patrice Bergeron picked the pocket of Tampa defenseman Ryan McDonagh and tapped the puck to Pastrnak.

Pastranak fed the puck to Marchand, who alertly circled back to the net and tapped it in, 77 seconds into the third period.

(Bergeron) has a gift that  the way he reads the game and his stick positioning and his ability to read plays, theres just very few guys in the league that have that ability on the defensive side of things. Lots of guys are good offensively and can cheat and pick pucks off, Marchand said of his long-time linemate. He does it from a defensive standpoint. He creates so many opportunities out of our zone, through the neutral zone and on the forecheck, the way he did where hes picking pucks and lifting sticks. Just his back pressure is incredible. That goal was all him, his forechecking there, a great read. Thats why hes going to be a Hall of Famer.

Victor Hedman broke up Halaks shutout when his his slap shot skipped off Charlie McAvoys pads by the goalie with 11:10 left to make it 3-1.

He scored again with 1:14 left, but the Bruins held on.

Halak finished with 35 saves.

HIGHLIGHTS:

Pregame:

First Period

Bruins 1, Lightning 0

Second period

Bruins 2, Lightning 0

Third period:

Bruins 3, Lightning 0

Heddy comes through!  pic.twitter.com/iYGniDn24K  Tampa Bay Lightning (@TBLightning) August 24, 2020

Bruins 3, Lightning 2

Related content:

Watch Bruins Charlie Coyles absurd eye-hand coordination give Boston a 1-0 lead over Tampa Bay in Game One (video)

Bruins, Lightning eager to lock horns, These are the series that guys want to be part of according to Brad Marchand

Bruins goalie Dan Vladar says hes ready if needed: Im confident Ive done everything I could to be ready
Press Release

24 August 2020

Four Seasons Hotel Washington, DC celebrates the 40th anniversary of Race to Beat Cancer with a week-long virtual race to benefit MedStar Washington Hospital Center's Washington Cancer Institute. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the race in DC and the 20th year of partnership with MedStar Washington Hospital Center's Washington Cancer Institute.

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Enrolment is now open for participants to sign up to run or walk their 1k, 5k, or 10k distance on any day, at any time, and anywhere during the race window, which is open from September 26 to October 3, 2020. Registration varies between USD 25 and USD 65, dependent on the length of the course, with all proceeds (and additional donations) going towards Medstar Washington Hospital Center's Cancer Institute. For more information, and details for signing up click here.

"Race to Beat Cancer is one of the most important events of our year at Four Seasons Hotel Washington, DC. For 40 years our team and the DC community have mobilised to race to help fund cancer research and clinical trials," says David Bernand, Regional Vice President and General Manager, Four Seasons Hotel Washington, DC. "Together, we have raised more than 2.7 million dollars for Medstar Washington Hospital Center and have grown the race to nearly 1,000 participants. More than ever, we need your help. Please make any size donation to join us in breaking the 3-million-dollar barrier of money raised to fight cancer!"

"This annual event raises critical funding for cancer research at Washington Cancer Institute at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Last year was our most successful year yet as we raised nearly 500,000 dollars," says Christopher Gallagher, MD, Medical Director of Cancer Services of the Washington Cancer Institute. "Creating a virtual race is the best and safest decision we could make given the circumstances and considering health and safety for all. We will continue to bring excitement, inspiration, hope and gratitude to those supporting cancer survivors and those being treated."

The Washington Cancer Institute, a part of MedStar Washington Hospital Center, is the largest program in the Greater Washington, DC area that provides access to innovative and cutting-edge cancer therapies to the region's underserved patient populations. During this challenging and uncertain time, the Washington Cancer Institute has been a leader running one of the largest COVID-19 convalescent plasma programs in the country.

Four Seasons Hotel Washington, DC continues to serve its guests and patrons with respect to the latest government guidelines, and in adherence to Four Seasons Lead with Care program. For more information, call +1 202 342 0444.
The aunt of a California truck driver, who penned a tragic last Facebook post just a day before dying from the coronavirus, has also passed away from COVID-19.

Tommy Macias, 51, who lived in Los Angeles, said he caught the killer virus at a party in early June as coronavirus restrictions in the state were eased.

Macias died just a month later after admitting in his post that he 'f**ked up' by not wearing a mask and failing to keep a distance from people and saying he felt guilty for putting his family at risk.

And on Sunday morning, his aunt, Jessie Prieto, of Avondale, Arizona, passed away at the age of 76, according to AZ Family.

Shortly after her nephew's death, Prieto spoke with the news outlet and said: 'I was in hysteria. I couldn't control myself because it couldn't happen to him.

Jessie Prieto (left in the hospital before her death, and right), the aunt of a California truck driver, who penned a tragic last Facebook post just a day before dying from the coronavirus, has also passed away from COVID-19

At the time, Prieto also encouraged others to wear a mask and physically distance just like her nephew did in his last message.

According to AZ Family, Prieto's son, Jerry, said that his mom started having symptoms just days after the interview.

He said they took her to a local hospital where she received an oxygen tank before being released back home.

Jerry said her condition then started to worsen and they rushed her back to the hospital, where she died on Sunday.

He recalled how he thanked his mother for everything that she did for him and told her 'not to worry about anything'.

Jerry said he told her that he's going to 'make her very proud' and that 'I love her'.

'All she could do was nod her head,' her grieving son told the news outlet.

Tommy Macias, 51, (left), caught the coronavirus at a party in early June before being rushed to hospital on June 21 (right), where he died just a few hours later

A day before he was taken to a hospital he uploaded this message to Facebook, admitting he 'f**ked up', begging people to wear masks in public, and praying for his own survival

He said he's not sure how his mother caught the virus, adding that she took every precaution, which included wearing a mask.

Jerry said that 10 of his family members eventually tested positive for the virus, including himself.

'I'm going to miss her a lot. She's my best friend,' Jerry said, before encouraging others to wear a mask.

Prieto died more than two months after her nephew passed away.

And just a day before he died, he penned a Facebook post urging people to wear a mask and socially distance.

Macias penned his last Facebook post on June 20, writing: 'Some of you know, but most don't. I f***ed up and went out a couple of weeks ago and I contracted the coronavirus.

'Monday I tested for it and it was confirmed on Thursday. Because of my stupidity I put my mom and sisters and my family in jeopardy. This has been a very painful experience.

'This is no joke. If you have to go our wear a mask and practice social distancing. Don't be a f***ing idiot like me.

'Thank you to all my friends who have brought me food, and to everyone who has been there for me.

'Hopefully with God's help I'll be able to survive this. I love you all.'

The US now has more than 5.7 million coronavirus cases and at least 176,000 deaths, the most of any country in the world

Macias was rushed to hospital the following day around 11am after struggling to breathe. A final photo in the hospital shows him being given oxygen with a mask.

Some time between 6pm and 7pm doctors put him on an invasive ventilator. Two hours later he died.

Gustavo Lopez, his brother-in-law, told NBC that from March until early June, Macias was following guidelines and only going out when necessary.

However, in early June Macias traveled 70 miles to Lake Elsinore to attend a party with a large group of others.

Included in the crowd was a friend, who Lopez did not name, who had tested positive for coronavirus and knew about the diagnosis.

But because he did not have symptoms, the person thought he could not infect other people.

Lopez said he next saw Macias on June 11, shortly after the party, when he 'didn't look right' and appeared to be very sweaty.

It was around that time that Macias informed people at the party of his diagnosis, prompting others to get tested.

Macias took a test on June 16, which came back positive on June 18.

More than a dozen people who also attended the party have since come back positive for the virus.

Lopez said: 'I think what he wanted people to know, this is a real thing. It's serious, and it kills people.'

Macias, who was affectionately known as 'Big Sexy', did not marry and did not have children. His friends and family remembered him as a big-hearted man who was always willing to help others.

He is survived by his mother, two sisters, four nieces and two great-nieces.

California is currently one of the worst-hit states with coronavirus in the US.

Due to the spike in cases beginning in June, California Gov Gavin Newsom was forced to roll back reopening plans.

The US now has more than 5.7 million coronavirus cases and at least 176,000 deaths, the most of any country in the world.
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump is promising to outline an optimistic vision for America at this weeks Republican convention. But hell be speaking to a public deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country and overwhelmingly dissatisfied with his and the federal governments handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Most Americans think there isnt enough being done to help individual Americans, small businesses or public schools as the pandemic stretches on, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Overall, just 31% of Americans approve of Trumps leadership on the pandemic, a significant drop from 44% approval in March, when the virus began sweeping through the United States.

The publics negative assessment of how Trump is handling the crisis puts him on the defensive as his November face-off against Democrat Joe Biden nears. One of Trumps challenges as his convention opens on Monday night is to convince Americans that anything about his response to the pandemic will change or improve if voters give him four more years in office.

Yet Trump has shown little willingness to acknowledge that a course correction of any kind is needed. Hes repeatedly cast the virus as all but defeated, even when cases were sharply increasing, including in states he needs to win in November. Hes also insisted the U.S. has vastly outperformed other countries in tackling the pandemic, despite the fact the U.S. has the most confirmed cases (more than 5.7 million) and most confirmed deaths (more than 176,000) of any country in the world.

To be persuasive, there needs to be a strategy and not just rhetoric, Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said of Trumps challenge this week.

The president heads into his four-night nominating convention with an overall approval rating of 35%. Thats down from 43% in March but still within range of where Trump has been for much of his presidency. Where he falls within that range as Election Day nears could make a difference to his reelection prospects.

His support continues to be driven overwhelmingly by Republicans, with 79% approving of his job performance compared with just 5% of Democrats.

Trump must also contend with Americans persistently negative view of the countrys direction as he asks voters to stay the course instead of handing the reins over to Biden. The AP-NORC poll finds that just 23% think the country is heading in the right direction, while 75% think its on the wrong path.

Republican strategist Gail Gitcho said the national mood makes it imperative for the president to strike an optimistic tone during his convention.

The most important time for optimism is when pessimism is rampant, said Gitcho, who advised Sen. Mitt Romneys 2012 presidential campaign. Thats when it is most needed and works best.

The presidents highest marks continue to come on the economy: 47% of Americans approve of his stewardship of the economy, though that, too, is down from 56% approval in March. Trump is expected to lean hard into his economic credentials during the convention, arguing that when the pandemic subsides, he can again lead the country into a period of sustained growth and job creation.

Trumps advisers are also seizing on remarks Biden made last week in which he said he would shut the country down to stop further spread of the virus if thats what public health experts recommend. They believe Americans are weary of pandemic restrictions and focused instead on ways to safely keep the economy up and running.

Biden, in an interview with ABC News, said he would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus.

As the country grapples with how to keep businesses afloat and open schools for in-person learning, Americans see little help flowing to those who need it most. Two-thirds of Americans say the government is doing too little to help the individuals and small businesses. A similar share thinks the government needs to do more to help public schools with their finances.

The poll was conducted after Congress left for its August recess without passing a new round of pandemic assistance. House Democrats approved a $3 trillion relief package that included money for schools, state and local governments and other entities, but Republicans balked at the price tag and some of the provisions. Its unclear whether lawmakers can break the logjam when they return to the Capitol in September.

The lack of action on Capitol Hill appears to have contributed to Congress sinking approval rating. Just 13% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing during the pandemic, down from 31% in March. The federal government as a whole has also taken a hit with the public, with approval down from 38% in March to 23% now.

Americans remain more positive in their views of how state governments are handling the pandemic, with 44% approving of their states performance. Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans to approve of state government, 51% to 41%.

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,075 adults was conducted Aug. 17-19 using a sample drawn from NORCs probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

___

Online:

AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Soon after his introduction to the now wildly popular soap opera General Hospital, Dante Falconeri, played by Dominic Zamprogna, became a fan favorite. Zamprognas portrayal of the character helped him bag two Daytime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor over the years.

Zamprogna exited General Hospital in 2018 citing personal reasons. Over time, the actor has made it clear that he would be happy to step back into the shoes of Dante Falconeri. In the past few months, Zamprogna has hinted his return to General Hospital, and even though it took longer, Dante Falconeri is back in Port Charles. Read on to find out more about his return.

Dominic Zamprogna and Julie Marie Berman | Rick Rowell/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images) DOMINIC ZAMPROGNA, JULIE BERMAN

Who is Dante Falconeri?

Dante Falconeri was introduced to the series General Hospital as an undercover officer under the alias Dominic Pirelli. His job was to investigate the mob boss, who happened to be his father, Sonny Corinthos. During his time working for the mob, he developed a love interest for Lulu Spencer, who would go on to be his wife and mother of his children.

However, his secret identity gets blown when the Port Charles Police Department arrests him, and he has to tip them of his identity. As he attempts to capture Sonny, the mobster shoots Dante just in time for his mother, Olivia Falconeri, to let Sonny know that he had shot his son.

Why did Dante Falconeri leave General Hospital?

RELATED: General Hospital Fans Want Bryan Craig to Return Somehow

When Dante learns that Sonny is his biological father, he is stunned at the revelation and angered at the fact that his mother, Olivia, hid the truth about his paternity. He, however, comes to terms with reality and even tries to cover for Sonny to prevent him from going to jail.

When Dantes wife gets shot, Sonny aids his son in finding who his wifes shooter was. Sonny tracks Dante to Turkey after him and his wife leave port Charles in fear of their lives. In Turkey, Dante works undercover for a villainous Raj Patel, and when he tries to escape, he ends up killing Patel in self-defense.

Dante is eventually reunited with his wife, but his internal scars are more profound than those on his body. Dante ends up suffering from PTSD and decides to skip town to protect his wife and children. Spencer ends up filing for a divorce which Dante doesnt contest, in a bid to cut everyone off from his life and deal with his own demons.

In an interview with Michael Farman TV, Dominic Zamprogna, who plays Dante Falconeri, stated that his decision to leave the cult show was based on his reservations. At the time, he had doubts about his acting abilities and decided to take a break from everything to focus on growing as a person and actor.

Dominic Zamprognas return to the General Hospital

On today's original episode of General Hospital, fan-favorite Dominic Zamprogna  better known as Dante Falconeri  is making a surprise return to Port Charles. https://t.co/lcRAKsDH7x  Entertainment Weekly (@EW) August 3, 2020

Zamprogna first hinted in an interview with Soaps of Depth that he had missed General Hospital and wouldnt mind reprising his role. He stated that he was open to a contract and added that there was so much potential in his character, especially with the plot development since he left.

Zamprogna returned for one episode in 2018 and 2019, and with the look of things, it seems that the actor is set to reprise his role one more time in August of 2020.

Dante Falconeris return has received so much fan support

Been running into a lot of #GH fans lately. I see you, and guys are awesome. Just saying. pic.twitter.com/IsrKEPptbe  Dom Zamprogna (@dom_zamprogna) March 3, 2020

Although the decision to bring back Dante Falconeri isnt a solid one yet, fans cant wait to see their favorite protagonist again on television. As it so happens in many shows, especially soap operas, there is a possibility that Dante could be recast as fans could see a fresh face playing the role.

Fans are, however, not excited about having a new person play Dante. Zamprogna hinted in one Twitter post that he would be making a comeback. Fans are abuzz about the possibility of his return, with many asking for a more permanent one this time.

The soap opera General Hospital airs every weekday on ABC.
In a world where everyone, from doctors to flight attendants and political leaders, is struggling with the usage of masks, a designer based in Goa has developed a modular mask-cum-face shield prototype that comes with a single strap and is comfortable to use. The prototype can bring much-needed relief for those who need it the most amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Deepak Pathania, an industrial designer based in South Goa, has designed a unique, Multi-Mask for complete protection from Covid-19 which he said will be a one-stop for future mask requirements.

The face shield fits onto the mask and stays in place attached to it which is strapped onto the face. This makes it possible for the user to simply slip it on or take it off if the face shield is not required.

Also read: US announces emergency authorization of plasma treatment against Covid-19

The face-shield could simply be slipped on to the mask when required without any straps. The users speech was not muffled as it only flows through the filter, bypassing the face shield. All parts of the mask could be washed easily and hence minimised bio-waste. The mask could also be customised later with fittings like electronic filter, audio/video recording etc making it future-ready, Pathania said.

Pathania is collaborating with a Pune-based design company to help with the final design, tooling and production process.

Pathania, who honed his skills at the National Institute of Design, has already applied for a patent for this device after checking if a similar mask has been devised anywhere in the world.

His newly set-up company, Med Interventions and Beyond Pvt Ltd, is currently at the incubation stage at the Centre for Incubation and Business Acceleration, Goa (CIBA).

The idea was to make the product compete with the best in the world. Crowdfunding platforms have a category for products in the prototype stage and it is important to spread the word because pre-selling a product is a good way to generate capital and also get feedback on the product, its acceptability and pricing, Pathania said.

The Multi-Mask has been featured on the US-based crowdfunding site, Indiegogo to help attract funds for its manufacturing.
When the Citizens United decision that said the federal government cant censor political speech came down back in 2010, many Democrats said it was literally the worst decision since Dred Scott, because it would allow for big money to sway an election. Remember that the issue presented in the case was a documentary film, Hillary: The Movie, produced by the non-profit Citizens United group.

Well, Democrats must feel differently now, as Showtime released today the trailer for a two-part dramatization of The Comey Rule, which, judging from the trailer, recycles the long-discredited Russia hoax. No matter: it is clear from this trailer that it is an anti-Trump film, being released within the 90 day window before an electionthe window of restriction that the Supreme Court struck down in Citizens United. Big money trying to influence an election, eh? I wonder how much this production cost. If the Supreme Court had upheld this provision of the McCain-Feingold Act, Trump could likely sue successfully to have the release of this film enjoined.

Remember this the next time a liberal complains about Citizens United or big corporate money in politics.
24th August 2020

Runtime 14:20





London South East interviewed 7digital CEO Paul Langworthy just after the latest contract win with a global technology company was announced. He wasn't able to tell us much about it other than it further proved their global capability, robustness and scale as "the best in the business". Paul told us that "its as much about the opportunity ahead of us as what we have achieved already".

His mantra is that we are consuming music differently Post-Covid, and new markets for streaming music are emerging. "These include home fitness, the way that music is consumed in social media, and artists who have lost their main touring revenues and are desperate for new revenue models and ways to monetise their art".

Home fitness, a 94 billion dollar industry is a good example. "People are increasingly exercising at or from home and consuming music is part of that experience - and I don't believe its going to go away. We can supply music to multi-billion dollar Enterprise Home Fitness companies with money to spend and invest on exciting music strategies".

7digital recently signed their second agreement with the music video app Triller, who have the most downloaded music video app in 50 countries. Triller are a significant player in this space, and it was sufficient to drive the share price 100% higher on the day.

"The new agreement is for 18 months and commercial terms are confidential, however we charge Triller an access fee to our platform and we have useage fees on top of that. Their success drives success for 7digital as well. Their main rival is TikTok and its well know TikTok have problems in the US".

The share price shot up again when President Trump signed up for Triller, possible researching for an alternative to Chinese-controlled TikTok. "It's true, even President Trump has a Triller account" confirmed Paul. "What that does do is cement Triller's position at the top table of social media platforms".

7 digital has an 80 million strong music back catalogue and it provides streaming services to global clients. In Paul Langworthy's words, "7 digital is about enabling innovation and growth within the music industry for our clients and their customer base. Our business model is about offering access to our platform, often for a monthly access fee, and then on useage. As for strategy, its about taking advantage of the new opportunities which are out there."

#7digitalgroup

#7dig

#music streaming

#PaulLangworthyCEO

#digital

#HomeFitness

#Artists

#music catalougue

#Triller

#DonaldTrump

#TikTok
Grounds need to be find for holding local elections in Donbas, Germany's foreign minister believes.

Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has announced main topics to be discussed at the upcoming meeting of Normandy Four (Ukraine, Germany, France, and Russia) top diplomats this September, an UNIAN correspondent reports.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv on August 24, the German Foreign Minister noted that in the context of the upcoming meeting in the Normandy format at the level of foreign ministers, scheduled for September, the agreements should be recalled, reached by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France at their summit in Paris in December 2019.

In particular, this concerns the proclaimed ceasefire and control mechanisms for monitoring compliance with the truce. "This is about strengthening and enhancing the truce, and we are talking about this. How to find a mechanism, how to track truce violations," explained Maas.

He noted that it is necessary to make every effort to help the population of Donbas living in extremely difficult conditions.

Read alsoKey to Donbas peace held in Moscow  KulebaMaas added that the main appeal to the parties to the armed conflict is not to soften efforts toward settlement.

He also noted the need to open additional crossing checkpoints along the contact line. "We have agreed on many projects that need to be implemented, and a number of social and economic topics were also discussed in Paris, on which we will be actively working," Maas said.

He added that after clarifying the progress on the said issues, it will be possible to discuss political aspects, including the implementation of the Steinmeier formula, the holding of local elections, the transfer of powers on the eastern border, and the designation of functions for the military.

"These are matters that should be discussed in the Normandy format at the level of foreign ministers," Maas said.

Also, the German minister stated that it was necessary to create grounds for holding local elections in Donbas.

Maas noted that there are different approaches to and visions of holding local elections in Donbas, but noted he was convinced that they should eventually take place.

Read also"Steinmeier formula", explained"It's about the timing. That is, it is necessary to create grounds for holding these elections, while how this procedure will be clarified remains unclear. There is a provision in Minsk agreements. That's what we're talking about, but there are different approaches. But all parties should be ready to talk about this," he said.

Maas has expressed hope that a positive solution will be found to the issue, which he intends to discuss with his French counterpart in the coming weeks.

Normandy Four talks: background

On August 22, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that a meeting of advisors to the Normandy Four leaders would be held August 28, followed by a foreign ministers' meeting and a summit of N4 leaders.

The Kremlin announced the preparation of a meeting of aides to the Normandy format leaders.

Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba has said the country is interested in preserving the Normandy-Minsk infrastructure on Donbas settlement.
fibrillation manage their symptoms, according to research presented today at ESC Congress 2020.1

Atrial fibrillation is the most common heart rhythm disorder. One in four middle-aged adults in Europe and the US will develop the condition, which causes 20-30% of all strokes and increases the risk of death by 1.5-fold in men and 2-fold in women. Reduced quality of life is common, and 10-40% of patients are hospitalised each year.2

Symptoms of atrial fibrillation include palpitations, racing or irregular pulse, shortness of breath, tiredness, chest pain and dizziness.

"The symptoms of atrial fibrillation can be distressing. They come and go, causing many patients to feel anxious and limiting their ability to live a normal life," said study author Dr. Naresh Sen of HG SMS Hospital, Jaipur, India.

This study investigated whether yoga could ease symptoms in patients with atrial fibrillation. The study enrolled 538 patients in 2012 to 2017. Patients served as their own controls. For 12 weeks they did no yoga, then for 16 weeks patients attended 30-minute yoga sessions every other day which included postures and breathing. During the yoga period, patients were also encouraged to practice the movements and breathing at home on a daily basis.

During both study periods, symptoms and episodes of atrial fibrillation were recorded in a diary. Some patients also wore a heart monitor to verify atrial fibrillation episodes. Patients completed an anxiety and depression survey3 and a questionnaire4 assessing their ability to do daily activities and socialise, energy levels and mood. Heart rate and blood pressure were also measured. The researchers then compared outcomes between the yoga and non-yoga periods.

During the 16-week yoga period, patients experienced significant improvements in all areas compared to the 12-week non-yoga period. For example, during the non-yoga period, patients experienced an average of 15 symptomatic episodes of atrial fibrillation compared to eight episodes during the yoga period. Average blood pressure was 11/6 mmHg lower after yoga training.

Dr. Sen said: "Our study suggests that yoga has wide-ranging physical and mental health benefits for patients with atrial fibrillation and could be added on top of usual therapies."

###

Notes to editors

Authors: ESC Press Office

Mobile: +33 (0)7 85 31 20 36

Email: press@escardio.org

The hashtag for ESC Congress 2020 is #ESCCongress.

Follow us on Twitter @ESCardioNews

Funding: None.

Disclosures: None.

References and notes

1Abstract title: Yoga could reduce the burden and symptoms of atrial fibrillation as well as medication related side effects and the complications with cardiac ablation.

2Kirchhof P, Benussi S, Kotecha D, et al. 2016 ESC Guidelines for the management of atrial fibrillation developed in collaboration with EACTS. Eur Heart J. 2016;37:2893-2962. doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehw210.

3Goldberg Anxiety and Depression Scale.

4Short Form 36 Health Survey Questionnaire (SF-36).

For more information about atrial fibrillation, visit. https://www.afibmatters.org/.

About the European Society of Cardiology

The European Society of Cardiology brings together health care professionals from more than 150 countries, working to advance cardiovascular medicine and help people lead longer, healthier lives.

About ESC Congress

ESC Congress is the world's largest gathering of cardiovascular professionals contributing to global awareness of the latest clinical trials and breakthrough discoveries. ESC Congress 2020 takes place online from 29 August to 1 September. More information is available from the ESC Press Office at press@escardio.org.
Qu Jiali, born in a village of Hailun city, Heilongjiang province in northeast China, one of the world's three major chernozem regions, has not only achieved individual career success but made a major contribution to poverty elimination.

Born into a farming family, and after serving in the army for two years in Liaoning province (also in the northeast) in the 1980s, Qu returned to his hometown and contracted for 3000 mu (200 hectares) of land to cultivate maize.

"Although a profitable industry now, grain growth back then was a loss-making sector. My grandpa was very upset about my decision to leave the army and return to the land, but I just wanted to come back where my families lived," said Qu.

It wasn't all plain sailing. "At the beginning, with neither a distributor nor a good local market, a large portion of my corn was left to rot in the field," Qu recalled with a sigh.

But he didn't give up. He traveled by train from Heilongjiang as far as Shanghai with a rice cooker and a bag of corn on his back, aiming to approach as many distributors as possible. He promoted his corn by letting distributors taste the boiled corn for free initially.

Qu's corn business didn't see a turnaround until 2004 when a large distributor in Shanghai ordered 120,000 cobs of corn from him.

Now, Qu Jiali has become a household name in the corn business in northeast China. His corns have been exported to Japan and South Korea.

On top of offline sales, Qu began to go online in 2018. By the end of 2019, he had sold more than 11 million cobs of corn through e-commerce platforms.

Qu has led a better life himself and wanted the same for his fellow villagers.

Relying on the nutrient black soil in his hometown, Qu Jiali turned to a new type of corn that could be eaten raw and whose selling price was three times higher than the regular type. He distributed seeds to villagers and provided them with technical guidance for free.

After the harvest, to introduce more of the villagers' corn onto the market, Qu went on to seek assistance from the poverty relief initiative launched by the e-commerce giant Alibaba. By virtue of the e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall as well as the corn-promoting livestreaming, as of August, 2019, more than 4 million cobs of corn had been sold online, with turnover exceeding 12 million yuan (about US$1.74 million).

In 2019 alone, thanks to the maize growth, 2107 poverty-stricken families registered in Hailun city saw their annual per capita income increasing by 1000 yuan (US$144.6). Some impoverished villagers living alone had an annual income growth of 8000 yuan (US$1156.8).

The 65-year-old villager Zhao Xiulian, with almost no income after her husband passed away two years ago and her only son was absent, earned nearly 6000 yuan (US$867.6) from the corn sale in 2019.
TikTok looks like it is ready to launch a legal challenge executive order from the U.S. As reported by Reuters, the order prevents transactions with the popular video app and its parent company.

Rumours circulated last week that TikTok had plans to challenge the order. We know its workers are disappointed in the decision and have filed their own suit against the Trump administration.

However, despite the companys anger towards the order, plans to deal with it are already underway. A number of companies are interested in purchasing TikTok. The most recent of which to join the race is Alphabet, the parent company of Google. They join Microsoft and Oracle in talks to take over TikToks U.S. operations.

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TikTok ready to fight the executive order

Despite plans to sell the U.S. portion of the company, TikTok still has not given up hope of mounting a legal challenge to the executive order.

The executive order gave TikTok and ByteDance 90 days to divest the U.S. operations. Trump issued the order on August 15, however, this legal challenge pertains to an earlier order issued on August 6.

The order instructed the Secretary of Commerce to create a list of transactions by ByteDance that they should ban after 45 days.

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The short video company will argue that the orders use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act deprives it of due process. TikTok also plans to contest the White Houses classification of the company as a threat.

TikTok still exploring legal options

As things stand it is unclear as to which court TikTok will file this lawsuit. The sources that came up with this story requested to remain anonymous. ByteDance also refused to comment on this specific issue.

This legal challenge would not change the fact that ByteDance would have to divest the app in the U.S. As it does not pertain to the Aug. 14 order nothing would change on this front.

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However, what this does mean is that ByteDance will try to use as much legal ammunition at its disposal. The plan being that to prevent sale negotiations turning into a fire sale.

Trump and his administration have said it would support efforts for Microsoft and Oracle to purchase TikTok. This is on the condition that the U.S. government got a substantial portion of the proceeds.

As the 90 day countdown ticks closer expect more twists and turns as TikTok try to make things as hard as possible for the U.S. A sale still remains likely but what form that sale takes is currently anybodys guess.
LEGNAGO, Italy  Raffaele Leardini, 72, slipped on his pink linen shirt, buttoned it up to the middle of his chest, combed back his hair and set off on Thursday with his wife to Caribe, their favorite outdoor dance hall. When they arrived, they found the club open but the dance floor sealed off with red and white tape.

What is this? asked Mr. Leardini, a retired mechanic. They cant do this.

But they have. In an attempt to limit a resurgence of the coronavirus, Italy has banned dancing in nightclubs and outdoor dance halls.

As in other countries around the world, new cases in Italy are being driven by young people, with several clusters traced back to nightclubs crowded with maskless patrons. Yet the new rules aimed at stopping young people from gathering en masse have also swept up older Italians for whom an evening at the dance hall is a cherished part of life.

As lockdown measures were lifted, Caribe reopened in July  with many new and hard-to-enforce rules. Only married couples or stable affections, which had to be declared in writing, could dance together. Masks were required on the dance floor, as partners clasped sanitized hands after registering their names and having their temperatures taken.
President Donald Trump has agreed to a deal in which Oracle and Walmart will take a minority stake in a U.S.-headquartered company called TikTok Global. ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, says it will have an 80% stake.

TikTok revealed specific U.S. and global monthly active user details for the first time in its lawsuit challenging the U.S. government over an effective ban that is set to take place next month.

In the filing, TikTok revealed its monthly active users have grown nearly 800% since Jan. 2018, when the application was used by about 11 million Americans. About a year later, that figure had more than doubled to about 27 million. By June 2020, months into pandemic quarantines, TikTok's total number of U.S. month active users had soared to more than 91 million. More than 100 million Americans are monthly active users today, the company said earlier this month. The company also revealed it has more than 50 million daily U.S. users.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- A World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement panel published its report in the U.S. countervailing duty case against unfairly subsidized Canadian lumber imports. Unfortunately, this WTO panel report represents the latest example of judicial overreach within the WTO seeking to undermine the U.S. trade laws, which makes it harder for U.S. producers to address unfair trade. Proper enforcement of the U.S. countervailing duty laws under the U.S. trade laws are essential for U.S. industry, workers, and their communities to combat unfairly subsidized imports. Canada's unfair trade practices in softwood lumber are well documented, and the harm these practices cause to the U.S. forestry industry and workers is undisputed.



U.S. Lumber Coalition Executive Director Zoltan van Heyningen expressed deep disappointment that "the WTO panel with this report, like other WTO Appellate Body and panel reports, has added to U.S. obligations and diminished U.S. rights, addressing issues it has no authority to address, taking actions it has no authority to take, and interpreting WTO agreements in ways not envisioned by the WTO Members who entered into those agreements."

"While this decision is not binding upon the United States, and thus has no immediate effect on the ongoing Commerce Department proceedings, these deeply flawed WTO panel reports undermine the credibility of the entire WTO system and are harmful to U.S. workers and their communities who depend on the full and effective enforcement of the U.S. trade laws," added U.S. Lumber Coalition CoChair Jason Brochu.

"The U.S. government must reject this blatant attempt by a WTO panel to diminish U.S. rights and the panel's attempt to deviate and expand from original WTO obligations," said Brochu.

Concluded Brochu, "the U.S. Lumber Coalition deeply appreciates the efforts by the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to combat the judicial activism of the WTO and strongly supports USTR's demands for systemic changes to the WTO dispute settlement system."

About the U.S. Lumber Coalition

The U.S. Lumber Coalition is an alliance of large and small softwood lumber producers from around the country, joined by their employees, and woodland owners, working to address Canada's unfair lumber trade practices. Our goal is to serve as the voice of the American lumber community, and effectively address Canada's unfair softwood lumber trade practices, including its gross underpricing of timber. For more information, please visit the Coalition's website at www.uslumbercoalition.org .

CONTACT: Zoltan van Heyningen [email protected] | 202-805-9133

SOURCE U.S. Lumber Coalition

Related Links

https://uslumbercoalition.org


Atlanta: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden says he will follow public health advisers advice if they called for a national shutdown should he take office and the coronavirus remains a high threat.

I would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives. We cannot get the country moving until we control the virus, Biden said in an interview broadcast Sunday night on ABC News.

The running mates ... Kamala Harris with Joe Biden at the Democratic Convention. Credit:AP

Asked specifically whether hed push to shutter economic activity if scientists said it was necessary, Biden replied: I would shut it down.

The former vice president's remarks came as part of his first joint interview with vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The pair accepted their partys nominations during a virtual convention last week. On Monday, Republicans begin their convention to nominate Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for a second term.
OTTAWA: Canadas main opposition Conservative Party on Monday elected Erin OToole, a former cabinet minister and armed forces veteran, to be its new leader and the primary challenger to Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

OToole replaces Andrew Scheer, who failed to unseat Trudeau in an election last year.

In the leadership race, OToole beat out the better known Peter MacKay, who co-founded the Conservative Party in 2003 and was a high-profile member of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harpers government, and two other candidates.

The campaign was overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic. The results, announced in a virtual convention broadcast from Ottawa, were delayed at least five hours by mechanical problems with the machines opening nearly 175,000 ballot envelopes.

While there is no vote looming, Trudeau needs the support of at least one of three opposition parties to stay in power, and a crucial confidence vote on the governments COVID-19 economic recovery plan is expected in late September.

The Conservative Party will be ready for the next election and we will win the next election," OToole said in his acceptance speech, delivered after 1 a.m. ET (0500 GMT).

OToole, a 47-year-old father of two, describes himself as a true blue Conservative" and has vowed to put Canada first" while helping families and the economy recover from the coronavirus crisis.

A member of parliament from the most populous province of Ontario, OToole had twice before lost bids to lead the party. He takes over as Trudeaus Liberals lead in national polls.

Support for the Liberals surged as the government spent hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency aid during the pandemic, but they have lost ground in recent weeks amid an ethics scandal involving Trudeau and his former finance minister, Bill Morneau.

Liberals would get 36.4% of the votes if an election were held today, while the Conservatives would win 29.9%, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corps poll tracker, an aggregate of recent surveys.

One of OTooles challenges will be to lure back voters in urban centers such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal that have more parliamentary seats than rural areas. They were Liberal strongholds in the past two national elections.

OToole must make inroads into the urban ridings and suburban ridings" and be able to appeal to swing voters who held their noses and voted for the Liberals" last year, said Shachi Kurl, executive director of non-profit polling group the Angus Reid Institute.

In his acceptance speech, OToole reached out to left-leaning voters, saying there was room for them in the Conservative Party.

The son of a retired Ontario politician, OToole was first elected in 2012 in a by-election and served briefly as veterans affairs minister in Harpers cabinet from February to November 2015.

OToole joined the Royal Canadian Air Force at 18, working as a helicopter navigator before transferring to the Canadian Forces reserves in 2000.

He then pursued a law degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, returning to Ontario upon graduation and working as a corporate lawyer.

He and his wife Rebecca have two children.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Explosion at Natanz nuclear facility act of sabotage: AEOI spokesman

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 5:43 PM

The spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) says a recent explosion at Natanz nuclear facility in central Iran has been an act of sabotage, but its details will be announced later.

"Security investigations confirm that the move was an act of sabotage, and what is certain is that an explosion took place at Natanz," Behrouz Kamalvandi said in an exclusive interview with Al-Alam news network on Sunday.

He added that Iranian security officials will reveal "in due time" more details about the explosion, including how it took place and what explosives were used.

On July 2, Iran said an incident affected a shed under construction at the Natanz complex, but it caused no casualties and failed to stop enrichment work at the facility.

Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) said later that the "main cause" of the incident at the country's Natanz nuclear facility has been determined and will be announced at an appropriate time.

SNSC Spokesman Keyvan Khosravi said that experts from different sectors started investigating "different hypotheses" about the incident at the Natanz site in central Iran immediately after its occurrence, and have determined its main cause.

"Due to some security considerations, the cause and manner of this incident will be announced at a proper time," he added.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Kamalvandi stated that Iran is currently producing more than three tonnes of heavy water, part of which is exported to other countries, including some European countries. He, however, refused to name those European countries, so that they would not come under pressure from the United States.

The AEOI spokesman pointed to the forthcoming visit to Iran by Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and expressed hope it would help address both sides' concerns.

Kamalvandi explained that the IAEA has requested access to two Iranian sites, one of which is located near the central city of Shahreza in Isfahan Province and the other is situated near Tehran.

The AEOI spokesman said Iran has never been opposed to the agency's access to its nuclear sites, but "believes that the IAEA's inquires must be based on serious evidence and documents."

He emphasized that inquires based on allegations made by spies and similar sources will never be accepted by Iran, and giving additional access to the IAEA is conditioned on the premise that such access will put an end to such inquires for good and ever.

Kamalvandi added that Iran has no confidential information hidden from the IAEA about its nuclear activities, noting that the agency chief's first visit to Tehran is aimed at discussing cooperation within the framework of the Safeguard Agreement and the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

In a post on Twitter on Saturday, Iran's permanent representative to Vienna-based international organizations Kazem Gharibabadi said the UN nuclear agency chief will visit Tehran to discuss ongoing interactions and cooperation between the country and the atomic watchdog.

He added that the trip comes upon an invitation from the Iranian government, adding, "We hope this visit will lead to reinforced mutual cooperation."

In a post on his Instagram account on Sunday, Gharibabadi said the Monday visit to Tehran by the IAEA head has nothing to do with the United States' latest effort to use the so-called snapback mechanism to restore UN sanctions against Tehran.

"This visit is not related to the so-called snapback mechanism and does not come at the US' request. Grossi's trip [to Iran] takes place on the basis of Iran's invitation," he added.

The visit takes place over two months after the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution on June 19, put forward by Britain, France and Germany  the three European signatories to the landmark nuclear agreement.

The resolution, the first of its kind since 2012, urges Iran to provide the IAEA inspectors with access to two sites that the trio claims may have been used for undeclared nuclear activities in the early 2000s.

The Islamic Republic rejects any allegations of non-cooperation with the IAEA, insisting that it is prepared to resolve potentially outstanding differences with the nuclear agency.

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Here are todays top news, analysis and opinion. Know all about the latest news and other news updates from Hindustan Times.

Adityanath orders increase in number of hospital beds for Covid-19 patients

Chief minister Adityanath on Monday directed officers concerned to increase the number of beds in Covid-19 hospitals in Uttar Pradesh in such a manner that there would always be a surplus of beds at these facilities, the chief ministers office said in a statement. Read more.

CWC meet: Sibal backtracks after reacting to colluding with BJP remark

Amid the fireworks in the Congress Working Committee (CWC), a friction between the veterans and Team Rahul played out publicly on Twitter for a few minutes on Monday when partys communication chief RS Surjewala rejected old warhorse Kapil Sibals allegations that Rahul Gandhi accused some seniors of colluding with the BJP during the high-voltage CWC discussions. Read more.

Salman Khan performs Ganpati visarjan with family members, distributes sweets to everyone. Watch video

Salman Khan and his entire family and a few industry friends came together at Sohail Khans house on Sunday for the Ganpati visarjan. While Salmans younger sister Arpita Khan led the ritual of Ganpati visarjan, the Khan brothers came together to lend a hand in immersing the Ganesha idol in a tub filled with water. Read more.

Netflix Indias Bollywood cast for Lucifer is something you cant miss

If youre an avid audience of fantasy sitcoms, you may have come across the popular Netflix show Lucifer. Starring Tom Ellis as the charismatic Devil, the show has created a buzz among netizens. The first part of season 5 dropped on August 21, and people are already swooning over it. Read more.

Turned down Deputy CM post offered by Congress: Jyotiraditya Scindia

BJP leader Jyotiraditya Scindia has lashed out at the Congress party. While addressing party workers in Gwalior, Scindia revealed that he had been offered the Deputy Chief Ministers post by the Congress party but he did not accept it since he wanted to work for the people. Read more.

Bipasha Basu shares perfect Monday workout motivation as she misses the energy of a gym

Procrastinating workouts have been a constant, courtesy endless weeks of staying at home during COVID-19 lockdown but Bollywood diva Bipasha Basu feels excuses are easy to create but wont help. As she misses the energy of a gym, the Dangerous star gave fans a glimpse of her high-intensity exercise session at home. Read more.

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About 70,000 direct jobs are expected to be created in the Bekwai Municipality, the Adansi Asokwa District and the Adansi South District, all in the Ashanti Region, through community mining.

In addition, 30,000 indirect jobs will be created when all community mining or small-scale mining concessions in the areas become fully operational.



In all, a total of 120 concessions, covering an area of 3,000 acres, have been released by the National Minerals Commission to small-scale miners in the three districts.



Launch



Speaking at the launch of the community mining programme in the Ashanti Region, the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr Kwaku Asomah-Cheremeh, cautioned the miners not to involve foreigners in their operations.



He said community mining or small-scale mining was the sole preserve of Ghanaians and as such foreigners, irrespective of their origin, were not allowed.



Mr Asomah-Cheremeh said community mining was instituted for all Ghanaians, mainly residents of various communities where gold would be mined in a sustainable manner in order to curb the activities of illegal miners and the wanton destruction of the nations water bodies and forest reserves.



He thus called on the concessionaires to abide by their code of ethics and ensure that they reclaimed the land after mining.



He also advised them not to stray into areas that had not been allocated to them and further appealed to the district assemblies and traditional authorities in the districts concerned to closely monitor activities of the small-scale miners in their areas.



Training



He said to ensure that the miners mined sustainably, they were taken through small-scale mining studies at the University of Mines in Tarkwa where they were taught basic skills in mining and land reclamation.



The Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the National Mineral Commission, Mr Martin Ayisi, urged all those interested in mining to go through the right processes for acquiring a licence before venturing into the sector.



He said the launch of community mining should not be misconstrued to mean legalisation of galamsey or illegal mining.



He said every concession must be approved by the commission, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and consented to by the district assembly and traditional authorities.



MCE



In his welcome address, the Municipal Chief Executive Officer of Bekwai, Mr Kwaku Kyei Baaffour, advised the people, who intended to mine, to ensure that they reclaimed the land after mining and adhered to all the regulations guiding the sector to ensure that the lands were not degraded.



He said it behoved the miners to ensure that the lands were protected and the water bodies were clean.



On behalf of the districts, he pledged the readiness of the assemblies to monitor the activities of the miners and ensure that they complied with all the regulations governing the sector.

Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Hemant Kashyap, 61, former journalist, is on mission mode to turn his native Bastar district in Chhattisgarh greener. This is his payback time to the district after working for a vernacular newspaper for decades.

On the occasion of the 74th Independence Day on August 15, he started a campaign called Bastar Abhar in Bilori village. The idea was to encourage the villagers to plant saplings in the name of each family member registered in the ration card.

I have started this campaign from village Bilori and more than 1,200 saplings have been planted so far. My aim is to cover each and every village of Bastar district in the next one year, Kashyap said.

The total population of Bilori gram panchayat is 2,561 and ration cardholders are 683. While the districts total population is 8,34,375, around 6,98,864 of them are still living in villages.

Also read: Chhattisgarh CM writes to centre, seeks funds for bridges

I have been flooded with calls following the success of the campaign at Bilori village. They have been calling me to start the campaign in their villages. I am calling this campaign Bastar Abhar. The state government is offering several benefits to those who live in rural areas. Planting a sapling is acknowledging doing our bit for the environment and society. The concept is to make the Bastar district and villagers realise that trees are life, said Kashyap, who is also a member of Chhattisgarh Wildlife Board.

Bastar Abhar has received an overwhelming response from people belonging to all walks of life. Help is at hand for Kashyap - from sarpanchs to state forest officials.

I have never seen villagers so motivated towards planting saplings. Everyone is planting a sapling and also taking a pledge to protect it, said Umman Baghel, a sarpanch of Bilori village.

Kashyap has done his preliminary homework of mapping the districts demographic profile.

Our district has 414 ration shops, of which 366 are located in rural areas. A total of 1,63,868 people have ration cards. If they plant fruit-bearing saplings in their villages, the initiative will not only increase their income but will also make our district greener, he said

Bastars forest cover has consistently decreased because of persistent felling of trees through the years.

The state government is giving pattas (rights) on forest land due to which logging is rampant in tribal-dominated districts. The government does engage in afforestation drives but those are few and far between as compared to logging activities. Besides, they rarely plant fruit-bearing saplings, said the former journalist.

Somaru, a resident of Bastar district, said that the Bastar Abhar campaign would empower the tribals in the district.

The initiative will give us additional income, as most of the saplings being planted belong to the fruit-bearing category. Also, our dependence on the jungle for fruits will come down, said Baghel.

Shahid Khan, chief conservator of forests (CCF), Chhattisgarh, said the forest department is supporting the Abhar campaign.

Awareness will be created among the public in a bid to ensure that every ration card holder plants a sapling in his village and also takes responsibility to protect it. It is a commendable initiative and the demand for saplings will be met from the nursery run under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, (MGNREGA), 2005. The district can become green if Bastar Abhar succeeds, said Khan.

Indrajit, chief executive officer (CEO), Zila Panchayat, said Bastar Abhar would be launched at every gram panchayat of the district.

Bastar Abhar will help villagers to develop an emotional relationship with trees that will make the district greener. We will provide all support to the campaign, he added.

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Interim Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Monday offered to quit, asking the Congress Working Committee to initiate the process for selecting a new party chief, sources said.

In her opening remarks at the meeting, called in the wake of a section of leaders seeking a "full time and visible" Congress president, Sonia Gandhi made the offer to quit saying she had given a detailed reply on the issue to All India Congress Committee general secretary K C Venugopal.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who spoke after Gandhi, urged her to continue, so did former defence minister A K Antony, with both the veterans criticising the letter by some party leaders, including Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik, who are a part of the CWC, the party's highest decision-making body.

Sources said Sonia Gandhi referred to Azad and others twice during her brief address and the issues raised by them.

She also handed over a detailed reply to Venugopal, who read out its contents at the CWC meeting in which Gandhi sought to be relieved from the post.

Sources added that Rahul Gandhi in his speech also questioned the timing of the letter, which was sent to Sonia Gandhi when she was in Gangaram hospital and under medication.

"It is the CWC and not the media where we put out our thoughts and discuss," he is learnt to have said at the meeting, the sources said.

The crucial meeting of the Working Committee started here amid divisions in the party over the leadership issue.

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

Around 20 party leaders had written to Sonia Gandhi demanding a full-time, visible president and overhauling of the organisational structure including elections to the CWC and reconstitution of the Parliamentary board.

There has been a huge outpouring of support for the Gandhis with party leaders from across the country urging her to continue as party chief or appoint Rahul Gandhi to the post.
Baghdad, Aug 24 : The US-led international coalition forces, tasked with fighting the Islamic State (IS) terror group, has handed over a military base in Taji Camp near Baghdad to Iraqi forces, state-media reported.

"The coalition forces handed over the site No.8 at al-Taji Camp which was used to train and equip Iraqi forces by Australian, New Zealand and American forces," the Iraqi News Agency (INA) quoted Tahseen al-Khafaji, spokesman of the Iraqi Joint Operations Command, as saying on Sunday.

The military site was handed over to the Iraqi forces in the presence of a representative of the prime minister, who signed the minutes of the handover, al-Khafaji said, noting that other sites will be handed over to the Iraqi side according to a timeline.

The Al-Taji Camp is a huge military base containing an airbase where some US troops are stationed, Xinhua news agency reported.

On August 20, the INA reported that the US-led coalition forces will withdraw from Iraq in three years.

During his recent official visit to the US, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi agreed with American officials "on forming a special team to discuss mechanisms and timings for the redeployment of the US-led international coalition forces outside Iraq".

On Aug.ust18, al-Kadhimi and his delegation headed to Washington at an official invitation of the US government, during which he held a series of meetings and attended the second session of strategic dialogue between the two countries.

Earlier, the international coalition forces handed over several military sites to the Iraqi security forces in central and northern the country.

The relation between Baghdad and Washington has witnessed a tension since January 3 after a US drone struck a convoy at Baghdad airport, which killed Qasem Soleimani, former commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy chief of Iraq's paramilitary Hashd Shaabi forces.

The tension pushed the two sides to hold a round of strategic dialogues on June 12, during which the US confirmed that it does not seek permanent military presence in the country and that over the coming months Washington would continue reducing forces from Iraq and discuss with the government of Iraq the status of remaining forces.

Over 5,000 US troops have been deployed in Iraq to support Iraqi forces in battles against the IS, mainly for training and advisory purposes.
KU Kappa Sigma just proved that brotherhood cant be quarantined by reporting their largest pledge class since 2014, the national fraternity leaders said on Twitter.

Becky Defends Bros

Confrontation caught on camera outside KU fraternity house raises concerns LAWRENCE, KS (KCTV) -- A video going viral this weekend shows a Lawrence man as he says he was being harassed and having a drink thrown at his face by KU students. He claims it was the consequence of taking a wrong turn.

Social Media Bullying Vs. Frat

Video shows KU fraternity party despite COVID-19 concerns As calls continue for the University of Kansas to delay in-person classes, a video making the rounds on social media shows why some are concerned.Video posted to Facebook over the weekend shows a party at a Kappa Sigma fraternity house in Lawrence. In the video, you can see dozens of people are at the gathering.

CRACKDOWN: Rock Chalk Double No-So-Secret Probation

KU Chancellor issues cease-and-desist orders for two fraternities LAWRENCE, Kan. - After two fraternities hosted social activities this weekend, in violation of county COVID-19 regulations and university polices, KU Chancellor Douglas Girod has issued cease-and-desist order to two fraternities - Kappa Sigma and Phi Kappa Psi. He's also issued 14-day public health bans for the members of these organizations.

A quaint debate over fading middle-class values dominated the Sunday news afternoon . . .Crying over college parties and spilled beer concerned a great many adults desperately awaiting the return of B.S. jobs amid the growing fear of coronavirus . . .This pity response angered even more progressives for some reason . . .Here's the roundup . . .Developing . . .
Israel has bombed the coastal Palestinian strip, which is ruled by Hams, almost daily since August 6

Palestinians attach an incendiary device to inflated plastic bags and condoms to be directed and flown towards Israel, near Rafah along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. (AFP)

Jerusalem: As US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo started a Middle East tour in Israel on Monday, Islamist group Hamas called on regional leaders to "break their silence" on Israel's blockade of Gaza.

Israel has bombed the coastal Palestinian strip, which is ruled by the group, almost daily since August 6, while balloons carrying fire bombs and, less frequently, rocket fire have hit Israel from Gaza.

In retaliation for the balloon attacks and the widespread blazes on farms and scrubland they have caused, Israel has tightened its 13-year blockade of Gaza's two million inhabitants.

It has banned Gaza fishermen from going to sea and closed its goods crossing with the territory, prompting the closure of Gaza's sole power plant for want of fuel.

Hamas in a statement called the closure of the Kerem Shalom crossing a "crime against humanity" and called on the international community and "decision-makers in the region" to "break their silence to bring an end" to the blockade.

Hamas also said that the normalisation of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates helps "maintain crimes and violations" against the Palestinians.

Pompeo touched down in Tel Aviv Monday morning to kick off a five-day trip to the Middle East.

His visit will focus on Israel's normalising diplomatic ties with the UAE, seen as a betrayal by many Palestinians, and urging other Arab states to follow suit.

Earlier Monday the Israeli army said it had again hit Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight, in retaliation for incendiary balloon and rocket attacks launched from the Palestinian enclave.

An Egyptian delegation has been trying to broker a return to an informal truce.

"During the day, explosive and arson balloons were launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel," an army statement said.

"In response ... fighter jets, tanks and aircraft struck military posts and underground infrastructure" belonging to Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip, it said.

On Thursday night, Gaza militants fired a dozen rockets at Israel, which responded with air strikes on a rocket-manufacturing plant and underground infrastructure.

Egypt has acted to calm repeated flare-ups of violence in recent years to prevent any repetition of the three wars Israel and Hamas have fought since 2008.
Rio Tinto investors are questioning the board's commitment to ensuring accountability over the destruction of the 46,000-year-old Aboriginal rock shelters in Western Australia's Pilbara after a two-month review limited penalties to executive bonus cuts.

The mining giant on Monday said the board-led review had concluded chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques, iron ore boss Chris Salisbury and corporate affairs boss Simone Niven would lose their short-term bonuses for 2020, but no one would be stood down.

Chairman Simon Thompson said the review, which revealed systemic flaws but "no single root cause or error", had concluded the three executives' failures were of "omission rather than commission" as they had not been aware of the rock shelters' cultural value prior to detonation.

Rio Tinto chairman Simon Thompson has backed CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques in the fall-out from the Juukan Gorge disaster. Credit:Eddie Jim

"If JS, Chris and Simone had been aware of the significance of Juukan and had not acted, then I think the consequence would have been very different," he told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
KFC is to pause the use of its classic Finger Lickin' Good slogan after 64 years as it admitted that the message 'doesn't quite fit' following the coronavirus outbreak.

The company has released new images of advertising posters and packaging with the well-known slogan blurred and pixelated.

It said the slogan will return 'when the time is right' but it will shift its messaging in the meantime.

Scroll down for video.

KFC is to pause the use of its classic Finger Lickin' Good slogan after 64 years as it admitted that the message 'doesn't quite fit' following the coronavirus outbreak

And a new TV advert for the chain shows lots of the blurred images and ends with the text, 'You know that thing we always say? Ignore it. For now.'

The restaurant chain closed its sites temporarily in March as a result of the pandemic but has now reopened the majority of its restaurants with more stringent health and safety policies in place.

'We find ourselves in a unique situation - having an iconic slogan that doesn't quite fit in the current environment,' said Catherine Tan-Gillespie, global chief marketing officer at KFC.

The company has released new images of advertising posters and packaging with the well-known slogan blurred and pixelated

It said the slogan will return 'when the time is right' but it will shift its messaging in the meantime

'While we are pausing the use of It's Finger Lickin' Good, rest assured the food craved by so many people around the world isn't changing one bit.'

The chain has more than 900 restaurants across the UK and Ireland and employs 27,000 staff.

Kate Wall, head of advertising at KFC UK and Ireland, said: 'People often say that it's the second movie that's hardest to get right. The follow-up, the next step. And we are facing the same conundrum at the moment.

'How do you follow a slogan that's lasted for 64 years and is as iconic as ours?

In a press release, a KFC spokesman said: 'Don't worry, the slogan will be back. Just when the time is right'

'Well, we know we can do it with a little help from our friends. And you'll be hearing more from us on this soon.'

In a press release, a KFC spokesman said: 'Don't worry, the slogan will be back. Just when the time is right.

'In the meantime, watch this space on how you can help us find a temporary replacement.'
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has issued a warning of heavy to very heavy rain in the districts of south Bengal, including Kolkata, because of a low pressure developing over the Bay of Bengal.

Also read: Overnight rain wreaks havoc in Chandigarhs periphery

This is the second low pressure to form in less than a weeks span and meteorologists apprehend that this could lead to a flood-like situation in some districts of south Bengal.

The coastal districts of East Midnapore, South 24 Parganas and North 24 Parganas would bear the maximum brunt of the rain. Kolkata is also expected to receive heavy rain.

We are apprehensive that the water level in many rivers would rise. There are chances that low lying areas would get inundated. Urban areas, including Kolkata and its outskirts, could face water logging and traffic congestion, said Sanjib Bandyopadhyay deputy director general of the IMDs regional weather forecasting centre in Kolkata.

A low pressure that formed last week had triggered heavy rain in some districts of south Bengal. As the rain coincided with the spring tide, the coast areas witnessed high waves and the rivers swelled.

A few hundred families had to be evacuated at Sagar in South 24 Parganas after river water gushed into the villages. River water had also entered villages in Bankura, North 24 Pargana, East Midnapore and Burdwan. In Bankura some villages were virtually cut off as the river water started flowing over a bridge.

A second low pressure is expected to form on August 24. We are expecting rain till August 27. The intensity of the rain would be maximum on August 25 and 26. The coastal districts would receive the maximum rain on these two days, said a senior officer.

The IMD has advised fishermen not to venture into the sea as strong winds could lash the coastal areas.
Power was cut across Syria on Monday after a major gas pipeline exploded in an incident described as a terrorist attack by Syria and attributed almost certainly to ISIS by the United States.

The Arab Gas Pipeline between the towns of Ad Dumayr and Adra, northwest of Syrias capital of Damascus, exploded early on Monday local time, causing a massive blackout across the country.

The fires at the pipeline have been extinguished, the state news agency SANA reported later in the day, describing the blast as a result of a terrorist attack. Power was gradually being restored, according to SANA and to Syrias Caretaker Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resource, Ali Ghanem.

According to Ghanem, the blast on the Arab gas pipeline resulted from a terrorist attack, and power stations were expected to be supplied with gas in the coming hours.

Power has already been restored to some vital facilities such as hospitals in the capital Damascus, Caretaker Minister of Electricity, Mohammad Zuhair Kharbutli, told SANA.

Earlier in the day, Kharbutli told Syrian television that this was the sixth explosion on the pipeline in the region, SANA reported.

The United States is looking into the incident in Syria, but it is almost certainly an attack by Islamic State, said James Jeffrey, U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement and the Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

We are still looking into that. But it was almost certainly a strike by ISIS, Jeffrey told reporters in Geneva, as carried by Reuters.

Islamic State had fought with U.S.-backed forces for control over oilfields in Syrias oil-rich area, mostly in the Deir Ezzor province, but ISIS lost its last stronghold in the country early last year.

According to Jeffrey, ISIS activity is on an upsurge in Syrias southeast desert area, Reuters reported.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The California Supreme Court on Monday overturned the death penalty for Scott Peterson, who was found guilty in 2004 of killing his pregnant wife, Laci, in a notorious case that became fodder for the tabloids and cable news and spawned at least one made-for-TV movie.

The court upheld Mr. Petersons conviction, but it said that the trial judge had made mistakes that hindered his right to an impartial jury during sentencing.

We reject Petersons claim that he received an unfair trial as to guilt and thus affirm his convictions for murder, the court said. But before the trial began, the trial court made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection.

The court said prosecutors could again seek the death penalty for Mr. Peterson at a new hearing.

Prospective jurors whose views on capital punishment would impair their ability to follow the law could be dismissed as unqualified, the court said. But jurors could not be dismissed simply for having expressed opposition to the death penalty.
New Delhi, Aug 24 : The Delhi High Court on Monday sought response from the Delhi Police and others over a plea filed by JMI scholar and Delhi riots accused Asif Iqbal Tanha seeking inquiry against police officials for leaking information to some media houses.

A single judge bench of the High Court presided by Justice Vibhu Bakhru issued notice to Delhi Police, Zee Media Corporation, OpIndia and two social media platforms Youtube and Facebook over a petition filed by Asif Iqbal Tanha, a student of the Jamia Milia Islamia who was arrested in a case related to communal violence in northeast Delhi during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in February.

While posting the matter for further hearing on September 11, the bench said, "I agree it's not an acceptable behaviour by some of the officials who have done this and advocate Rajat Nair (representing the Delhi Police) will agree with it." During the course of hearing, advocate Siddharth Aggarwal appearing for the petitioner said that while the trial court was considering the bail plea of his client, the timing of publication of articles in the media was such that it was not only prejudicing the public mind but also the trained mind which was hearing the bail application.

The petition said Tanha was aggrieved by various publications reporting that he has confessed to orchestrating the Delhi riots and alleged that he was coerced to sign certain papers in the effective custody of police.

Tanha, who was arrested in May, is currently lodged in judicial custody in the Delhi riots case. Tanha, a third-year student of BA in Persian language, was earlier arrested in connection with the violence in the Jamia area during a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December last year.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison during a press conference at a residential building site in Googong on April 04, 2019 in Canberra, Australia. (Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images)

Australian Business Leaders Must Take Lead in Upskilling Staff

Chief executives, not human resources departments, need to take charge of reskilling workers faced with rising unemployment because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report says.

Consultants PWC is warning people without a job now might be unemployed for a long time if they dont upskill.

They say upskilling needs to happen in the workplace or via short courses.

Australia has an excellent system of full qualifications for those at the start of their career, however those who are looking for a new skill during their career need more options, PWCs Tim Rawlings says.

The report shows that even before the pandemic one-in-five jobs, or 2.7 million Australians that have jobs, could be completely replaced by automation by 2034.

The report commends the federal government for acting through the Job-Trainer package but says business must also step up, suggesting CEOs take responsibility rather than leaving it to the HR department alone.

The government has recognised what we need, and what business wants, a more agile and nimble way of upskilling people with recognisable qualifications earned during their career, Rawlings says.

Colin Brinsden
New Delhi: Train travel from big railway stations is likely to become expensive as passengers will have to pay on the lines of airports. The national transporter will soon collect railway tickets as well as user development fee (UDF) at major railway stations, according to sources.

The Railway Ministry is expected to come out with a notification for the station user fees by December 2020, the sources told Zee News.

This will be applicable when big railway stations will be equipped with all modern facilities under the redevelopment project through private players, who will then start commercial operations of these stations.

The major stations expected to be covered under the redevelopment project are Mumbai, Jaipur, Habibganj, Chandigarh, Nagpur, Bijwasan, and Anand Vihar.

The ministry has chalked out a plan to redevelop major stations with modern and passenger facilities on the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model. The participation of private players will be invited through a bidding process under this project.

The private players will in return be able to earn through commercial complexes and station user fees from these major railway stations.

The government has also started the bidding process for Mumbai CST station after the in-principle approval of Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC).

Request for qualification (RFQ) for the redevelopment of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (Mumbai) on PPP has been invited by IRSDC vide NIT published on August 20.

The RFQ document is available on http://irsdc.enivida.com/. The pre-bid conference is scheduled to take place on September 22, 2020, while the application due date is October 22, 2020.
Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko warned Monday opposition protesters who challenge the official vote results extending his 26-year rule will face a tough crackdown, deriding them as "sheep" manipulated by foreign masters.

Dozens were injured and thousands detained hours after Sunday's vote, when police brutally broke up mostly young protesters with tear gas and flash-bang grenades.

Rights activists said one person died after being run over by a police truck  which authorities have denied.

The 65-year-old former state farm director asserted the opposition was being directed from Poland and the Czech Republic.

Election officials said Monday Lukashenko won a sixth term in office with over 80% of the vote, while opposition challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya got 9.9%.

Tsikhanouskaya dismissed the official results as a sham and vowed to dispute them, and the opposition is planning new protests in the capital, Minsk, and other cities later in the day.

The brutal police crackdown drew harsh criticism from European capitals and will likely complicate Lukashenko's efforts to mend ties with the West amid tensions with his main ally and sponsor, Russia.
Calif. pastor resigns from city council before hosting communion attended by hundreds

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A California pastor resigned from his position on city council one day before he tested statewide social distancing orders by holding an in-person communion at his church.

The city of Thousand Oaks confirmed in a statement this week that Councilman Rob McCoy, who served on its city council since 2015, has resigned. McCoy is also the pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Newbury Park.

The Thousand Oaks Acorn reports that McCoy officially resigned from his position on Saturday evening, hours before he held Palm Sunday communion with members to mark the beginning of Holy Week.

With bans on gatherings of 10 people or more in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the church abided by social distancing rules and only allowed 10 people at a time to enter the church building to receive communion.

Palm Sunday and Resurrection Sunday are critical, McCoy said in a video announcement to his congregation. [We are] paralyzed and considered non-essential though we would have liquor stores considered essential, cannabis distribution considered essential.

Across the country, abortions are considered essential, he added. Is the Church going to sit back and say, Well, we will be relegated to non-essential, though we feed people and that is essential physical food?

An online announcement informed congregants not to show up for the 11 a.m. service, which was online only. But after the service from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, church members were invited to partake in communion.

To not allow us to have communion is not proper, McCoy said in the video. To consider it non-essential is not acceptable.

The church placed arrows on the ground to direct people to the communion and help them remain 6 feet apart. The church also advised people to refrain from physical greetings.

Once inside the building, congregants were allowed to pick up the communion elements for themselves and take a seat in a chair in the sanctuary while maintaining proper social distance from others.

Loaves of bread were also available for people to take if they were in need or to hand out to those who might be in need. Bathrooms were closed and congregants were told to touch nothing other than the communion elements.

The church also provided a way for people to drive behind the church to take communion.

According to McCoy, the church followed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. He suggested that coming for communion would not be much different from people waiting in line at a grocery store or Costco.

He vowed the church would not violate a single CDC ordinance.

Many in the nation would disagree with that and would find disagreement with us. But the truth of the matter is we have the Bill of Rights, McCoy said. The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no law restricting or prohibiting the free exercise of religion. This is critical to us.

We are essential, he continued. Essential for the simple fact that God called us to this. Now, we want to honor Caesar and render unto Caesar what is Cesars. We want to respect social distancing and want to respect everything that is expected of us. But we still want to have access to what is a sacrament in the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church as well.

McCoy explained why communion is considered a sacrament.

A sacrament is a practice instituted by Christ Himself, McCoy explained. We found in Luke 22:19, Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them saying, This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.

The church urged all those who are considered high risk, sick or have been in contact with someone who is sick to stay at home

According to the Los Angeles Times, hundreds of people cycled through the church for communion on Sunday, though only 10 people were allowed in the church at one time.

After congregants left their chairs to exit the sanctuary, the chairs were sprayed with disinfectant.

The communion drew protesters who lined up their cars and honked their horns in opposition to the church defying stay-at-home orders instituted in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Los Angeles Times reports.

In California, there have been over 17,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 452 related deaths as of Wednesday afternoon, according to statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins University & Medicine.

A copy of McCoys resignation letter to the Thousand Oaks City Council, which was obtained by the newspaper, explained that McCoy resigned because he was in conflict.

I have no desire to put our community at risk and will not, McCoy was quoted as writing. However this is portrayed, please know I am obligated to do this.

Thousand Oaks Police Chief James Fryhoff told the Los Angeles Times that officers were on hand for the event to ensure that congregants were keeping a safe distance from one another. He said that the biggest concern was ensuring that there wasn't a large number of people gathering at the church.

Thousand Oaks Mayor Al Adam said in a statement commenting on McCoys resignation that McCoy was a voice of strength and healing as the city recovered from two tragedies  the Borderline massacre and the Woolsey Fire.



I appreciate his contributions and wish him and his family well, Adam said. While these circumstances are unfortunate, the remaining members of the Council and I are very much focused on moving forward.
Charlottesvilles Human Rights Commission plans to send a letter to the University of Virginia urging President Jim Ryan to hold classes online.

The commission discussed the coming return of students and its impact on the spread of the coronavirus locally during its meeting Thursday.

Bringing 10,000 bodies to a small town poses a risk and were seeing it at the universities that have already opened, Commissioner Kathryn Laughon said.

The commission is largely an advisory and community outreach panel, while also investigating discrimination complaints.

Online classes for undergraduates start Tuesday. Undergrads are expected to move into university housing starting Sept. 3, with classes to switch to in-person on Sept. 8.

Undergraduates who live off-Grounds, about two-thirds of students, have been asked to delay their return until next month.

Graduate and professional students already have moved back to the area to attend in-person classes.

Several universities across the country already have reverted to online classes after seeing outbreaks of COVID-19.

UVa officials have set a deadline of this Friday for determining if the semester will go fully virtual.

Its just a concern for a lot of the population in Charlottesville and especially the older seniors in the community or anyone who has any health issues, said Commissioner Ann Smith.

UVa has said that students must follow strict guidelines on and off Grounds to slow the spread of the virus, including no gatherings with more than 15 people, wearing a mask inside and outside and maintaining six feet of distance from others. Officials have said that non-compliance will result in sanctions.

Local government officials already have sounded the alarm about students returning to the area, but havent sent any formal communications to university officials urging them to change course.

This is putting the staff of the university at risk, Laughon said. Its putting the residents of the city at risk.

Joint meeting postponed

In other business, the commission discussed a planned joint meeting with the City Council that has now been delayed.

The meeting was scheduled for this Tuesday. The two bodies havent held a joint meeting since October 2018.

The meeting was meant to discuss the future of the commission and the Office of Human Rights, along with potential changes to beef up the authority of both entities.

The commission and office have been scrutinized since inception, with some saying they dont do enough to investigate complaints and others faulting the City Council for limiting their powers.

The changes under consideration include hiring a director for the office with legal and civil rights credentials, as well as the office and commission jointly conducting one major study on systemic discrimination per year.

Mayor Nikuyah Walker said the meeting was delayed to allow time for the city to hire a deputy city manager for racial equity, diversity and inclusion. The position will oversee the Office of Human Rights and the Police Civilian Review Board.

I dont think it would be very productive because we dont have a lot of the answers that you all will be looking for, Walker said of holding the meeting this week.

Commission chair Shantell Bingham said the decision makes a ton of sense to me and that the point of the meeting was to have everybody at the table.

We all know that our city needs to do better, she said. And we all know that we need to hire people who are capable of doing that work.

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Health official: Omicron cases 'just skyrocketing here in the community'

As of Jan. 18, McLaren Northern Michigan had 23 COVID-19 inpatients at the Petoskey-based hospital, which included 10 in critical care units and 13 in non-critical care units.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRoses plan to provide postage paid envelopes with all blank absentee ballots requested by voters is on hold for three weeks, after state lawmakers denied his request to consider the proposal on Monday.

LaRose, a Republican, had sought for the Ohio Controlling Board to approve his request to spend up to $3 million on the postage. But state legislators who sit on the controlling board asked for additional time to study the issue. John Fortney, a spokesman for Senate president Larry Obhof, a Medina Republican, said Monday their concerns include whether the plan would be carried out equally in all 88 counties.

I think the lawmakers want to have a broader, more in-depth conversation about how that program will be applied, Fortney said.

Senate Republicans hold two of the seven seats on the controlling board. Meanwhile, House Republicans who hold two additional seats seem to oppose the request.

Republican House members voted on this policy issue in HB680, and there has not been a change in position since that vote, said Taylor Jach, a spokeswoman for House Speaker Bob Cupp, a Lima Republican.

Last week, LaRose announced his plans ask the controlling board to OK spending up to $3 million to pay for postage for the pre-addressed envelopes that arrive with every blank absentee ballot. The House voted in June to forbid LaRose from providing postage as part of HB680, a larger elections bill, but the legislation has stalled before the Senate. The money would come from LaRoses internal budget, thanks to what his office said is higher than expected revenues from business-filing fees.

LaRoses plan now is to request controlling board approval on Sept. 14, the week after his office plans to mail absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in Ohio. That would leave about three weeks for elections workers to apply postage to the ballots before the first batch of blank ballots goes out on Oct 6 to voters who have requested them. Early, in-person voting also begins on Oct. 6.

Merle Madrid, LaRoses chief of staff, told state lawmakers Monday that delaying the request will create a tight timeline.

But were confident that our boards of elections with support perhaps from other county agencies and perhaps the poll workers who are being trained can appropriately affix that postage to those return envelopes prior to being mailed to the voter, said Madrid, who appeared before the controlling board to address an unrelated issue.

Voting by mail is common in Ohio, which began sending blank absentee ballot requests to all registered voters in 2012 for that years presidential election. About one-fifth of ballots are cast by mail in a typical election.

But elections workers have reported record-setting interest in voting by mail this year, and LaRose now estimates could account for half of all ballots counted in November. Thats led to concerns that a flood of ballots could overwhelm the mail system, leading to delivery delays. LaRose and other elections officials recommend that voters interested in voting by mail fill out their request forms as soon as possible, and then act quickly to return their completed ballots.

State Rep. Jack Cera, a Belmont County Democrat who sits on the controlling board, said Monday that offering pre-paid postage will make the process go more smoothly. Voting by mail has become a heated elections issue as Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have sought to block efforts by Democrats to expand it amid the coronavirus pandemic.

I hope that in three weeks, the legislature through this board will agree to stand up and help the voters of Ohio as we move forward towards the election, Cera said.

Read LaRoses original request to the controlling board:

Read other Ohio elections news on cleveland.com

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose tries different tactic to pay postage for Nov. 3 absentee ballots

Ohio among states warned by U.S. Postal Service that mail-voting deadlines could disenfranchise voters

Ohio elections chief faces two new lawsuits 95 days out from the November general election

Ohio House passes bill restricting future changes to elections
HAVANA, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Habanos, S.A. has launched the Ramon Allones Allones No. 2 2019 Limited Edition worldwide at an exclusive event hosted by its UK distributor Hunters & Frankau. This is the first time ever in the history of Limited Editions that a new release has been showcased virtually.

To view the Multimedia News Release, please click: https://www.multivu.com/players/uk/8764551-habanos-presents-ramon-allones-allones-no2/

The wrapper, filler and binder leaves carefully selected for the production of Allones No. 2, made "Totalmente a Mano con Tripa Larga"- Totally Handmade with Long Filler-, come from the renowned Vuelta Abajo* area, in the region of Pinar del Rio*, Cuba*. These have undergone a minimum two-year ageing process.

Ramon Allones has been one of the most famous Habanos brands since its foundation in 1837 and is one of the oldest in the Habanos, S.A. portfolio. The brand is celebrated for being the first to present its Habanos in decorated boxes. These Habanos are characterised by their intense and complex flavour.

Ramon Allones Allones No. 2 ("Vitola de Galera"-Factory Name- Campanas, 52 ring gauge x 140 mm long) is marketed in a unique, elegant, dark-green box designed especially for the brand, holding 10 Habanos.

Thanks to this event organised by Hunters & Frankau a total of 600 guests were offered the opportunity to participate simultaneously in the first exclusive online tasting of this Limited Edition. Each participant was given a launch pack containing a Ramon Allones Allones No.2 Limited Edition Habano; a 50-ml measure of Hine Cigar Reserve cognac together with a branded glass; custom-made chocolates produced specially to pair with the Ramon Allones Allones No.2; a Participation Certificate; a Tasting Sheet along with a brief description; and other accessories.

Hunters & Frankau has been the exclusive Habanos, S.A. distributor in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Gibraltar and the Channel Islands since 1990. Founded in 1790, this is the most important premium cigar trading company in the United Kingdom with an extensive distribution network that comprises specialised stores, wine merchants, hotels, restaurants, bars and nightclubs.

*(P.A.O.) Protected Appellations of Origin

Contact: Carla Llado, Tel: +34-93 201 10 28, [email protected]

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1231452/Habanos_Ramon_Allones_Allones_Cigar.jpg

Related Links

http://www.habanos.com/en/



SOURCE HABANOS SA
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:13:07|Editor: huaxia

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JERUSALEM, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Israel will allocate 47 million new shekels (13.8 million U.S. dollars) for the purchase of electric buses, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said Monday.

These buses will join 80 electric buses previously purchased with government support of 27 million new shekels.

It is another step for full transition from polluting and noisy diesel buses to clean, quiet electric buses, with the aim that from 2025 every new municipal bus in Israel will be electric.

"Electric buses do not have combustion engines. They do not produce air pollution, and produce less than half of the greenhouse gas emissions than diesel buses", the ministry explained.

Surveys conducted by the Ministry found that riders, drivers, and residents who live near bus routes all prefer electric buses to diesel-fueled buses. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 05:55:25|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- A local health official expressed concern about "the lack of mask wearing and social distancing" at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Charlotte, North Carolina on Monday.

Mecklenburg County Health Director Gibbie Harris said in a statement to local ABC affiliate WSOC that she has shared the concern with RNC officials after noticing that delegates were notably not wearing masks or maintaining distance during Monday's event.

"I have been assured that they are working hard to address these issues," Harris continued. "All attendees agreed to comply with the requirements prior to attending and were informed that these requirements would be enforced. "

Through a spokesperson, Harris additionally told WSOC that she hopes the RNC's inability to follow the rules does not result in additional COVID cases in communities, stressing that the inability to follow the plan will make it more difficult to approve similar requests in the future.

North Carolina officials granted the RNC an exception to the 10-person cap on indoor activities. Just a few reporters were invited to the convention floor.

On Monday, the first day of the RNC, 336 delegates gathered inside the Charlotte Convention Center for a roll call vote that formally nominated sitting President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for the 2020 Republican presidential ticket.

The delegates received tests and temperature checks and were instructed to wear a mask and practice social distancing.

Both Trump and Pence made an appearance at the convention center for remarks on Monday.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation" that convention officials were doing everything necessary to prevent the spread of coronavirus among attendees.

"We tested everybody before they came to Charlotte, we tested everybody onsite," McDaniel said. "We are doing things that allow people to live their lives, have a convention and do it in a healthy and safe way."

The rest of the RNC convention, which will run through later this week, will be largely virtual. But Trump's acceptance speech from the White House South Lawn on Thursday night is expected to have a visible live audience.

The RNC has been largely scaled back due to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump had planned to move his acceptance speech to Jacksonville, Florida but he later called it off after infections surged in "The Sunshine State." Enditem
The former general manager of Virginias on King, who over the course of a two-hour call with Charleston County 911 narrated a violent workplace scene that culminated with the fatal shooting of the restaurants chef, has filed a lawsuit in connection with the 2017 hostage situation.

Thomas Schiller claims Virginias on King, its restaurant group, Holy City Hospitality and affiliated companies were negligent in more than two dozen ways, including by hiring a worker with a lengthy criminal record and failing to properly supervise him.

According to the lawsuit, Thomas Burns was kept on staff due to the lack of substitute help and in order to continue profiting from his work despite his behavior and the threat he posed to others and members of the public at large.

Representative of Virginias on King did not return messages seeking comment.

Prior to being hired by Virginias on King in 2016, Burns had served a 20-year prison sentence for attempted murder and faced charges including assault and several drug counts. He was charged with murder in connection with the shooting of Shane Whiddon but died of complications from a police snipers wound before standing trial.

Schillers lawsuit alleges that Holy City Hospitality fired Burns by phone after a co-worker accused him of sexual harassment. Human Resources Director Amanda Grant then texted Burns to say his last check would be mailed and he shouldnt come to the restaurant.

By that time, the suit continues, Mr. Burns was already in Virginias kitchen, pointing a gun at a Virginias employee. Schiller hid under an office chair during the rampage, at one point whispering, Help me to the 911 dispatcher who took his call.

For his emotional distress stemming from the incident, Schiller is seeking unspecified damages.

Virginias on King Management Inc., Holy City Hospitality LLC, Holy City Hospitality Management Inc., Bennett Hospitality Management LLC, Sand South LLC and Grant were also named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed earlier this year by Whiddons widow, Shannon Whiddon.

In her suit, Whiddon claimed her husbands death could have been prevented by more rigorous hiring and firing procedures.
Analysis Strong Rivalries Shape Politics in Myanmars Rakhine State

Residents ride bicycles in Rakhine State's ancient capital Mrauk-U. / Zaw Zaw / The Irrawaddy

With less than three months until people vote for a new government, it will be interesting to see how the general election turns out in Rakhine State, which has been gripped by armed conflicts and rivalries between local parties.

Thirteen political parties including the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), the Arakan National Party (ANP), the Arakan League for Democracy (ALD) and the Arakan Front Party (AFP) have registered to run in November.

The Rakhine State Election Sub-commission said it plans to open nearly 2,600 polling stations in Rakhine, which has some 1.64 million voters.

Challengers in the ring

The ANP, a major party in Rakhine State, has chosen younger candidates instead of prominent politicians like U Oo Hla Saw and U San Kaw Hla, who is the current speaker of the Rakhine State parliament.

The ALD, which is a historically strong party, has also chosen younger and educated candidates instead of seasoned politicians like U Aye Tha Aung.

The AFP, led by the son of Dr. Aye Maung, who is currently imprisoned on a high treason conviction, is also building up momentum based on his electoral victory as an independent candidate over other parties in 2018 by-election in Rathedaung Township.

The rivalry will be quite intense. People in different areas support different parties. So, they may win in their strongholds, the chairman of Kyaukphyu Rural Development Association, U Tun Kyi told The Irrawaddy.

ANP vs. AFP

The AFP will field 42 candidates in the November election. AFP vice chairman U Kyaw Zaw Oo said that its main rival is the ANP. The AFP looks to represent the voices of the people rather than aspiring to hold office in Rakhine State, he asserted.

We need a voice to speak up boldly for Rakhine people during this stormy period as a result of the fighting. We mainly intend to have lawmaker[s]  back up that voice, he said.

Analysts suggest that it will be a tightly contested race between the two local parties in northern Rakhine. One of the ANP leaders, U Tun Aung Kyaw, is confident that the ANP can secure electoral victory if elections can be held in northern Rakhine, where government troops are fighting a Rakhine ethnic armed group, the Arakan Army (AA).

As it is likely that a coalition government may emerge at the Union level after the 2020 poll, the ANP is hoping that it will be able to take the helm of the Rakhine State government then.

Meanwhile, three of its members have submitted resignations to join the AFP and contest the November election on its ticket. But the ANP rejected their resignations, and as the Political Parties Registration Law bars individuals from being a member of two parties, the three will have to run as independent candidates.

NLD vs. ALD

The ruling party NLD will run candidates in all the constituencies across Rakhine State, according to vice chairman U Soe Lay of the NLD Rakhine State chapter.

He declined to answer when asked how many seats the party thinks it can win in Rakhine State, and which party it thinks will be the main rival. Analysts suggest that the NLDs main rivals will be the ANP and the AFP in northern Rakhine and the ALD in southern Rakhine.

The NLD enjoys widespread support in Thandwe, Gwa, Taungup, Yanbye and Manaung townships in southern Rakhine where the ALD has fielded new faces.

Dr. Tin Mar Aung, a former personal secretary of NLD chairwoman Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, will run for a seat representing Taungup Township in the Rakhine State parliament on the ticket of the ALD.

Im ethnically Rakhine. I am also engaged in surveys in Mrauk-U, and serve in the Rakhine Welfare Association. I know what is happening in Rakhine.  So, I decided to contest in Rakhine State so that I can take an active part [in political affairs], she said.

Her NLD rival in Taungup Constituency 2 is Rakhine State NLD Central Executive Committee member U Min Aung, a former state municipal affairs minister who is currently a lawmaker in the Rakhine State parliament. The rivalry has already drawn the widespread attention of political analysts before the race begins.

ALD General Secretary U Myo Kyaw said the party assigned Dr. Tin Mar Aung to run in Taungup to post a new milestone in the history of the Rakhine parties.

Rakhine parties have never won in places like Thandwe District in successive periods. We considered the situation and we assigned Dr. Tin Mar Aung because we believe we will be able to reach a new milestone in the political history of Rakhine with her candidacy, U Myo Kyaw told The Irrawaddy.

The NLD faces certain challenges. Local people have a negative view of the NLD government due to the ongoing conflict between government troops and the AA. NLD Central Information Unit secretary Monywa Aung Shin admitted that the party is unlikely to repeat its 2015 victory in Rakhine this time.

It is likely we will have to struggle in all regions including Rakhine in this years election, he told The Irrawaddy.

The NLD was unable to secure a single seat in northern Rakhine in 2015, but managed to achieve success in the southern part of the state, securing a seat in the Upper House, four seats in the Lower House and nine seats in the Rakhine State parliament, including the Chin ethnic affairs minister position.

Political infighting

The ALD was established before the 1990 elections. In 2013, the party merged with the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, which was founded before 2010 elections, in response to demand from Rakhine communities. The new party, the ANP, which was the result of a merger between the two, won the most seats in the 2015 poll in Rakhine State.

Following the infighting within the party, a faction left the ANP and re-established the ALD in 2017. ANP chairman Dr. Aye Maung also submitted his resignation, and was working to establish a new party known as the AFP when he was arrested and given long-term imprisonment under high treason charges for remarks deemed to be supporting the AA. His son has since then led the AFP.

Public interest low

Public interest in the coming election has declined due to several factors including the imprisonment of Dr. Aye Maung, the NLD governments Rakhine State policy, and the poor performance of Rakhine State government, said some locals.

But other locals disagree. They said the fact that parties have fielded new candidates has attracted public attention.

However, hundreds of thousands of villagers in northern Rakhine do not have time to check voting lists and their voting rights. They only care that they are still alive when the day ends.

There is no discussion of election among the grass-roots. There is no public interest. We will wait and see if people will change their minds when the election draws near, said chairman U Maung Saw of Mayu Region Development Association in Rathedaung Township, whose rural areas have been the battleground for past few months.

Some Rakhine people have become fed up with the election process partly because of some who have entered politics for their personal benefit rather than their political beliefs, said director U Khaing Kaung San of the Wun Let Foundation.

Taking a look at political parties, there are more candidates that want to be lawmakers than those who really want to do politics. As they are not interested in party politics, and are only competing with each other to become lawmakers. This makes me think that this could be the beginning of the destruction of politics in Rakhine State, he said.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko

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As Republicans gather in Charlotte to formally nominate President Donald Trump for a second term, their hopes of winning North Carolina could hinge on a poor, rural county 100 miles away and one of the nation's largest Native American tribes that lives there.

Robeson County, home to the Lumbee, is one of the most diverse rural counties in the U.S. A majority of voters are minorities. Four years ago, after decades of reliably backing Democrats, they swung for Trump.

"In 2016, people were focusing on the governance of this country and what was happening on a policy side. I think it's a little different now," said Joshua Malcolm, chief justice of the Lumbee Tribal Supreme Court and a former chairman of the North Carolina board of elections.

"This is about personalities," he said of the 2020 race. "People are fed up and they want a government that works."

PHOTO: Joshua Malcolm, chief justice of the Lumbee tribal supreme court and former North Carolina state elections chairman, says growing numbers of Lumbee voters are registering as 'unaffiliated' with any party. (ABC News)

With the county a COVID-19 hot spot and facing a worsening economic crisis, the Lumbee, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and ninth-largest nationally, are being tested like never before and hoping their political clout can deliver much-needed financial help.

"It's bad. It's really bad," said Tammy Maynor, the Lumbee director of government affairs who's leading the tribe's response to the coronavirus surge.

"The deaths are high as well," Maynor said. "The sad part, and why this is so important, is that we need to test more and continue to test because there's lots of people walking around who have it, who are asymptomatic."

When ABC News Live visited one of the testing sites late last month, test kits purchased by the Lumbee were in short supply along with federal funding, which is contingent on federal recognition the tribe does not have.

PHOTO: With help from global charities, the Lumbee tribe is testing as many of its 55,000 members as it can for COVID-19. The community has seen a surge of cases since May. (ABC News)

"What people don't understand is that with federal recognition comes health care, comes free education -- and those are the things that we are in need of right now," said Lumbee health care worker Grace Oxendine, one of a dozen volunteers conducting the testing.

Story continues

While the Lumbee have lived along the Lumber River in southeast Carolina for centuries, the government has rejected their claims of tribal identity and sovereignty. A unique history of intermarriage with freed slaves and members of other tribes has led to a complicated ancestral picture -- difficult to document, difficult to prove to the government that it meets tribal recognition standards.

North Carolina has fully recognized the Lumbee as one of eight state tribes since 1885, but without federal recognition the tribe lacks the same legal rights and benefits awarded to others. When Congress passed $8 billion for tribal COVID-19 relief in the spring, the Lumbee didn't get one cent.

"I can only speak for the Lumbee, but right now we're struggling," said tribal chairman Harvey Godwin, Jr., when asked whether the Trump administration has delivered for the tribe.

MORE: Navajo community left to fight COVID-19 with limited resources

PHOTO: Tribal chairman Harvey Godwin has been leading the effort to win the Lumbee full federal recognition in Washington, which would unlock legal status and access to federal services. (ABC News)

With help from global charities, including actor Sean Penn's CORE and celebrity chef Jose Andres' World Central Kitchen, the tribe is testing, feeding and educating as many of its 55,000 members as it can.

Every day for nearly two weeks this summer, tribal members are handing out fresh produce, PPE and teaching supplies at pop-up aid centers. The median household income in Robeson County is just $33,000, according to the Census Bureau, and nearly half of all homes don't have high-speed internet.

MORE: Efforts to raise profile of Native American voters paying off in 2020 campaigns

Proudly self-reliant, the Lumbee made clear they don't want a handout. Many are fiercely patriotic, and dozens have served in the military. The tribe never took up arms against the U.S. government.

"This is our country too, and we're going to defend it because it's our country. It's our land," said Godwin.

The Lumbee community has found limited success in Washington. FEMA recently completed repairs on a dam along the tribe's sacred lake that was breached during Hurricane Matthew in October 2016, resulting in catastrophic flooding that devastated families. But tribal leaders are still negotiating the bill.

PHOTO: ABC News' Devin Dwyer walks with Lumbee tribal administrator Freda Porter and chairman Harvey Godwin along a newly repaired dam on a sacred lake at the tribe's cultural center in Pembroke, N.C. (ABC News)

"We felt very good about the assistance we got with this project," said tribal administrator Freda Porter. "We just need to get it closed out and paid for."

Godwin credited the state's congressional delegation, a mix of Republican and Democratic leaders, with seeing the project through -- a sign, he said, the Lumbee are emerging as a political force that crosses party lines.

"People are moving now more to 'unaffiliated,'" Chief Justice Malcolm said of Lumbee voters. "People are dissatisfied on both sides."

Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Robeson County by about 4 to 1, according to state voter registration records. Unaffiliated voters make up nearly a third of those registered in the county.

"We are a swing tribe," said Godwin, "which I think is good for all the Indian Country for us to be this way."

PHOTO: The Lumbee of southeastern North Carolina have called the land along the Lumber River home for centuries, but the federal government has denied their claims of tribal identity and sovereignty, excluding them from legal status and federal services. (ABC News)

In 2016, Trump clinched North Carolina's 15 electoral votes with a 173,000 vote margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton. The 2020 race is shaping up to be even closer, with Trump virtually tied with former Vice President Joe Biden in the latest state polling averages compiled by FiveThirtyEight.

To have influence in November, the Lumbee need to turn out. Historically, few vote by mail. By one estimate, just 20% of eligible Lumbee voters are registered.

"We're going to work our hardest to make sure everybody knows what's going on," said Donna Semans, a nonpartisan grassroots organizer with Four Directions, a Native American voting rights group. "On reservations, the way things work is word of mouth. You want people to know stuff? You have to be on the ground to let people know things because they're very busy."

PHOTO: Robeson County, N.C., is one of the poorest and most diverse counties in the state. Nearly half of families do not have broadband internet access at home. (ABC News)

The pandemic makes that person-to-person work of getting Lumbee to the polls even harder.

"COVID is really muddying the waters, but we're resilient people. We're gonna push through and make sure our voice is being heard," said Alexis Raena Jones, a Lumbee recording artist and former contestant on "American Idol" now working to boost voter registration.

"Living in the white man's world, as Indigenous people, it's hard to really get our story out there because people tend to forget who we are as a people and who we are as a race," Jones said.

PHOTO: Lumbee artist Alexis Raena Jones, a former contestant on American Idol, is among the tribe's young people working to boost voter registration ahead of the 2020 election. (ABC News)

At county election headquarters, officials are scrambling too.

"By the time late summer rolls around, I'm sure we'll be busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest," said county elections chief Tina Bledsoe, who has overseen voting in Robeson County for more than 25 years.

Her team is still sourcing PPE for poll workers and new voting booths to keep people more than 6 feet apart.

"It's crucial," Bledsoe added. "As you know, we'll be in the spotlight."

MORE: Investigator details alleged North Carolina election fraud scheme

PHOTO: Robeson County elections chairwoman Tina Bledsoe has been overseeing voting in the county for more than 25 years. Her team is still sourcing PPE for poll workers and new voting booths to keep people more than 6 feet apart on Nov. 3. (ABC News)

The Lumbee appear to be in the center of that spotlight, possibly determining whether North Carolina goes red or blue. Many Lumbee remain loyal to Trump.

"Lumbees gravitate toward somebody who speaks a little different," said tribal councilman Jarrod Lowery, a Republican, who said Trump has a good shot here in November. "He's not a politician, and you get the understanding that if he says something, he kind of means it, and he's very different."

Lowery dismissed Trump's divisive and racist rhetoric promoting "white power" and attacking Sen. Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas."

"Not that we're sitting around calling people 'Pocahontas,' but, you know, you laugh at what he says and we kind of feel like he says things offhand, you know, to be funny," Lowery added.

PHOTO: Tribal councilman Jarrod Lowery, a Republican, says many Lumbee voters remain loyal to President Donald Trump despite the pandemic, economic crisis, and continued lack of full tribal recognition by his administration. (ABC News)

Jones disagreed: "I cannot speak for all my Lumbee people, but to hear the things that [Trump] has said and his viewpoints on Indigenous people, on women, on the LGBTQ community, it's kind of hard to really agree with some of his views."

While less than enthusiastic about Joe Biden, Jones said she plans to vote for him.

"When we're living in the greatest country in the world, and we have the caliber of presidential candidates that we have now? It's frustrating to say the least," she said.

PHOTO: To have influence in the November election, the Lumbee need to turn out. By one estimate, just 20% of eligible Lumbee voters are registered, and historically few vote by mail. (ABC News)

That frustration has some analysts closely watching the Lumbee vote as a potential 2020 wildcard.

"Everything is on the line," said Godwin. "How we're gonna go forward as a people. How we're going to go forward with social injustice, with the pandemic, with health, with the economy -- rebuilding it, with small business, everything. Everything has been affected by what we're going through now, and everything's on the line."

ABC News' Jackie Yoo and Jon Schlosberg contributed to this report.

We are a swing tribe: Lumbee wield political clout in North Carolina originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
WASHINGTON - Canadian lumber producers cheered the latest decision Monday from the World Trade Organization on Canada's long-standing dispute with its largest trading partner over exports of softwood lumber  a finding the United States quickly denounced as unfair, biased and flawed.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Softwood lumber is pictured at Tolko Industries in Heffley Creek, B.C., Sunday, April, 1, 2018. The U.S. trade representative is taking issue with the latest decision from the World Trade Organization on Canada's long-standing dispute with its largest trading partner over exports of softwood lumber. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

WASHINGTON - Canadian lumber producers cheered the latest decision Monday from the World Trade Organization on Canada's long-standing dispute with its largest trading partner over exports of softwood lumber  a finding the United States quickly denounced as unfair, biased and flawed.

The WTO dispute-resolution panel declared that the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission were wrong in 2017 when they imposed countervailing duties on Canadian softwood lumber exports, having concluded that Canada's regulated forestry industry amounts to an unfair subsidy for Canadian producers.

In particular, the panel agreed with Canada's argument that Commerce made a number of errors in determining the benchmark Canadian timber prices it used to determine whether producers north of the border were paying adequate stumpage fees to the provinces.

"For more than three years, our industry has paid billions of dollars in countervailing duties that (Monday's) decision confirmed should never have been paid in the first place," B.C. Lumber Trade Council president Susan Yurkovich said in a statement.

"This report is a scathing indictment of the U.S. Department of Commerce's subsidy findings and the biased process it followed in reaching them."

U.S. trade ambassador Robert Lighthizer, long a vocal critic of the WTO's dispute resolution system, had a different perspective.

"This flawed report confirms what the United States has been saying for years: the WTO dispute settlement system is being used to shield non-market practices and harm U.S. interests," Lighthizer said in a statement of his own.

"The panel's findings would prevent the United States from taking legitimate action in response to Canada's pervasive subsidies for its softwood lumber industry."

The 2017 flashpoint over countervailing duties was just the latest flare-up in a cross-border trade dispute that has raged between the two countries for nearly 40 years.

U.S. producers have long argued that Canada's system of provincially regulating stumpage fees, which are paid to the Crown in exchange for the right to harvest timber, unfairly subsidizes an industry that is privately owned and operated in the U.S., with pricing set by the competitive marketplace. As a result, the U.S. argues, imports of Canadian lumber should be subject to countervailing duties.

"Canada remains unequivocal: U.S. duties on Canadian softwood lumber are completely unwarranted and unfair," International Trade Minister Mary Ng said in a statement.

"U.S. duties on Canadian softwood lumber must not persist. They have caused unjustified harm to Canadian industry and U.S. consumers alike. U.S. home builders rely on Canadian lumber, and the current record-high lumber prices are hurting the economic recovery in both countries."

Easier said than done, B.C. Premier John Horgan appeared to acknowledge Monday.

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"While this decision is a victory for B.C.'s lumber producers, immediate relief is unlikely," he said. "Our work continues until we bring an end to the unfair U.S. duties on Canadian softwood lumber exports."

The WTO report, which comes less than two months after the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement formally replaced the NAFTA trade deal, also follows the U.S. decision to restore 10 per cent national-security tariffs on exports of Canadian aluminum. The U.S. has accused Canada of violating the terms of the agreement that saw steel and aluminum tariffs lifted in 2018.

Similarly to the aluminum sector, Canadian exports fill a critical role in the U.S., where demand for lumber significantly outstrips domestically available supply.

"For three decades, we have been saying that the U.S. trade remedy process is flawed. Unfortunately, this is just the latest chapter in the ongoing attack on the Canadian lumber industry," Yurkovich said.

"Each of the prior two lumber disputes ended with neutral, international tribunals issuing rulings that forced Commerce to rescind their flawed and unsupported subsidy findings for similar reasons. (Monday's) decision is an important step towards, what we expect, will be the same result."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 24, 2020.
A new poll shows Republican voters disagree with the majority of the country over President Donald Trumps handing the COVID-19 pandemic.

A poll conducted by CBS and YouGov released on Sunday asked a series of questions to 2,226 registered voters. When asked how things are going in the country, 73% of respondent said very badly or somewhat badly.

Republicans, however, believed the country is in a better position than it was four years ago due to the leadership of Trump. A majority of Republicans, 53% said things are going very well or somewhat well when asked the same question.

Specifically, when asked about Trumps handling of the coronavirus, 50% of respondents said very bad. Another 8% said somewhat bad. Meanwhile, 53% of Republicans said the president is doing a very good job. Another 33% said he was doing a somewhat good job.

Among Democrats, 85% said the president was handling the situation very badly.

As of Sunday afternoon, more than 176,000 Americans had died due to coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Overall, 69% of respondents said the number of deaths linked to the coronavirus was unacceptable.

However, 57% of respondents who identified as Republican said the deaths were acceptable, compared to 90% of Democrats who said the death toll was unacceptable. Sixty-seven percent of independents found the number of COVID-19 deaths unacceptable.

Republicans said they felt the number was lower than the totals being reported, while Democrats said the total number of deaths was higher.

The handling of the coronavirus pandemic led 61% of respondents to say the economy is in very bad or fairly bad condition. Again, Republicans disagreed, as 67% said the condition of the economy was very good or fairly good.

The poll also asked how Americans felt about the Black Lives Matter movement. Overall, 46% of respondents said they agreed to some extent. Among Democrats, 88% agreed to some extent while only 18% of Republicans agreed.

Of those asked, 81% of Republicans said too much attention is being paid to the issues of discrimination within the country. Overall, 44% of respondents said too much attention was being paid. Twelve percent of Democrats said too much attention was being paid to discrimination issues.

Ahead of this weeks Republican National Convention, the poll asked what voters wanted to see. Ninety percent of Americans said they want to hear about positive things regarding Trump and Vice President Pence rather than criticism of his opponents former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris.

On Sunday, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said the RNC would focus on the American people and demonstrate a real difference between the presidential candidates.

Related Content:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Since the spread of COVID-19, China has had difficulty keeping a positive business image. Many nations and companies have been looking for manufacturing alternatives outside of China. As COVID-19 continues to shake up the apparel manufacturing sector, two African-American millennials hope to claim their stake in market share. The Kassa Trade Organization, or Kassa Trade, was founded in early 2020 with the goal of bringing apparel manufacturing into the 21st century.

Kassa Trade works directly with factories, in South America, so that they are able to minimize costs and provide lower prices to retailers and designers who need inventory. Retailers who have worked with Kassa Trade have the ability to refill their previous orders via text message, making the process quick and simple.

"We saw too many issues with how small-to-medium-sized retailers purchased their inventory," says Bowei Oki, Vice President and Co-Founder. "Retailers are overpaying wholesalers to attain their products. Retailers who attempt to reach out to factories directly, typically do it via Alibaba. The ability to communicate and gauge quality on Alibaba can be difficult. We wanted to make the process simple and remove the headache."

Kassa Trade has also adapted its business to accommodate the social media and ecommerce industry. They offer the "Influencer Program" to any social media influencer who wishes to capitalize off their audience. Through the program, social media influencers are able to create their own clothing line to sell directly to their audience. The process is all handled by Kassa Trade, with no upfront cost to the client.

"Social media influencers are getting paid a small fraction to promote other brands," says Phil Dawit, Managing Principal and Co-Founder. "If they were to create their own products to sell, they would be able to keep ownership of any ecommerce revenue generated from their platform. We understand that some social media influencers are afraid to risk the investment in creating a clothing line or product, and that is why we have made this process free. There is no financial risk upon entry for the client, but they have the opportunity to exit with the lion's share of profit."

The Kassa Trade Organization was founded by childhood friends, Bowei Oki and Phil Dawit. Oki and Dawit are members of the African diaspora who have settled in the Washington Metropolitan Region. Oki is a Nigerian immigrant who moved to the United States via Canada. He is an industrial engineer who holds experience working in the supply chain industry. Dawit is the son of Ethiopian immigrants and the first American born member of his family. He holds experience working in the commercial real estate industry.

To learn more about the Kassa Trade Organization, visit their website at kassatrade.com

Media Contact

Bowei Oki

[email protected]

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Washington D.C.: Former US Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday (local time) hit out at President Donald Trump over the handling of coronavirus pandemic.

"President Obama and I established a White House office to prepare our nation for future pandemics. Donald Trump eliminated it -- and we've been paying the price every single day," Biden, who is also the Presidential nominee of Democratic Party said in a tweet.

According to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University, the number of coronavirus cases in the US stands at 5,700,487 while the death toll has risen to 176,774.

As a measure to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, Democratic Party's presidential candidate Joe Biden had on Friday said he would shut the country down if scientists recommend so.

In an interview to ABC, Biden said, "I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists. I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus."

This comes after US President Donald Trump urged the country to reopen businesses and educational institutions despite the surge in COVID-19 cases.

In July, Trump said, "We're very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open... We're going to be putting a lot of pressure to open the schools in the fall."

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

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The sabotage-reconnaissance group of the Armenian armed forces made an attempt to commit a provocation in the direction of the Goranboy district of the front on August 23 at about 05:45, according to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry website.



As a result of the resolute actions of the units of the Azerbaijan Army stationed in this direction, the enemy, suffering losses, was forced to retreat.



During the battle, the commander of the Armenian sabotage group, according to the initial interrogation, First Lieutenant Gurgin Alberyan was taken prisoner.



"We declare once again that the military-political leadership of Armenia bear all responsibility for the aggravation of the situation at the front," the ministry said.
The 19-year-old candidate for the Kansas Legislature who admitted to sending revenge porn and bullying girls online when he was in middle school plans to withdraw as the Democratic nominee, he announced on Sunday.

The candidate, Aaron Coleman, said on Twitter that he had decided to withdraw from the race to focus on taking care of my family & surviving the COVID Great Depression. He added that his father was in the hospital.

I regret my past actions and hope to continually learn from them as I grow into the person I hope to be, he said.

Mr. Coleman did not immediately respond to messages left by phone and through Twitter.

Last week Mr. Coleman, a dishwasher and community college student, defeated a seven-term incumbent, Stan Frownfelter, by 14 votes in the Democratic primary for the 37th District seat in the Kansas House of Representatives. The final count was 823 to 809.
A policy that excludes damages caused by physical abuse does not take a property insurer off the hook for a claim by an insured who agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit stemming from injuries caused by an alleged assault, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled.

The high court said in an Aug. 13 ruling that the term is too ambiguous to bar coverage for the incident, which involved a physical altercation that started during an argument about a record-breaking fish.

The case is Dorchester Mutual Insurance Co. v. Krusell.

Timothy Krusell was a 23-year-old trustee with an ownership interest in his parents house, which was insured by Dorchester Mutual. Shortly after midnight on Sept. 13, 2014, he and a college friend were walking in downtown Newport, Rhode Island and struck up a sidewalk conversation with 62-year-old Robert C. Haufler and Hauflers companion.

Haufler was discussing a record-breaking swordfish he had caught, but Krusell was skeptical. At some point he pushed Haufler, who lost his balance and fell onto a parked automobile before striking the pavement. The fall caused permanent injury to Hauflers right arm.

Krusell said he acted defensively because he was startled when Haufler suddenly raised his cellphone up to his face  although he later learned that the older man was trying to show him a photo of the fish. Haufler said the younger man ran from several feet away to attack him. Police charged Krussel with assault of a person over 60 causing grave physical injury.

The judge handling the criminal case hinted that he would be less likely to sentence Krusell to jail if a civil settlement was reached. He and his parents agreed to a settlement after being told that the case might go to trial within days. They agreed to pay Haufler $750,000, expecting $500,000 of that to be paid by Dorchester Mutual.

The judge reduced the charge to simple assault and put the case on hold for one year. The charge would be expunged in one year if Krusell did not commit any crimes during that period.

Dorchester Mutual denied the Krusells insurance claim because the policy excluded coverage for intentional acts and injuries caused by physical abuse were also excluded. A Superior Court judge found that no coverage was owed because of the physical abuse exclusion.

The Supreme Judicial Court took up the case from there, rather than allow the matter to go before the intermediate Appeals Court.

In its analysis, the high court said the history of policy language that excludes physical abuse, sexual molestation and corporal punishment is important to understand the meaning. Those exclusions were inserted into policies by insurers after they defended themselves from numerous claims against institutions that were accused of negligently allowing molesters to prey on children.

The court said the dictionary definition of abuse includes any actions that cause physical harm, but that meaning would make no sense in an insurance context. A homeowner who spilled hot coffee on a guest, for example, could be denied coverage for the injury because it was caused by abuse.

The high court said the term abuse is often used to connote misuse of power, such as by a teacher or a spouse.

The term routinely has been applied to conduct causing harm to a vulnerable type of victim, where the alleged abuser may be responsible for the vulnerable individuals care, the court said in a 6-0 decision written by Justice Barbara A. Lenk.

The court concluded that the policys use of the term physical abuse was ambiguous, so the wording must be interpeted in favor of the policyholder. The court reversed the trial courts ruling to dismiss the case.

The high court, however, rejected the Kusells counterclaim alleging that Dorchester Mutual had violated state laws that require insurers to settle claims in good faith. The court said the insurer was not aware that Kusell had denied he intentionally attacked Haufler until the familys attorney submitted a report from a forensic psychologist shortly before a settlement was reached.

The court said it has no opinion on whether the policys intentional acts exclusion applies. It remanded the case to the trial court, meaning that question may have to be answered by a jury.

Haufler, a family law attorney, died in January 2017, according to an obituary posted on Legacy.com. He had been a lifelong sportsman and was buried privately at sea.

Topics Carriers Abuse Molestation Property
Mount Rainier National Park in Washington, United States took to Twitter on August 20 to share the good news that wolverines had returned to the reserve after over 100 years. They shared the news by posting an almost 35-second-long video, recorded by Travis Harris, showing the animals frolicking in the greenery.

Video of three wolverines at the end of a snowfield then running through a meadow into a forest, reads a line of the caption shared alongside the post. Check out this mesmerising clip of the animal which is extremely rare in North America, according to the National Park Services website.

Wolverines Return to Mount Rainier National Park After More Than 100 Years, News Release: https://t.co/qmCkTDsFAU



Video of three wolverines at the end of a snowfield then running through a meadow into a forest. Credit: Travis Harris -kl pic.twitter.com/ALwJoAOmTG  MountRainierNPS (@MountRainierNPS) August 20, 2020

Since being shared on the micro-blogging platform, this tweet has captured netizens attention. It currently has over 6,600 likes and more than 2,100 retweets. The clip has collected over 1.6 lakh views.

Here is how tweeple reacted to the share. One person said, That is awesome. Another individual wrote, Awesome! Will need to keep my eyes open for them and hope to get lucky.

Amazing and powerful creatures. Great to see them making a comeback! read one comment on the thread. A Twitter user proclaimed, This is very cool, and we cannot say we disagree.

Mount Rainier National Park Superintendent, Chip Jenkins, also shared his excitement regarding this return of the wolverines. According to the National Park Services website, he said, Its really, really exciting. It tells us something about the condition of the park that when we have such large-ranging carnivores present on the landscape that were doing a good job of managing our wilderness.

What are your thoughts on this?
The two closest Institutes of Technology to Laois, attended by hundreds of Laois students, have been awarded over 800,000 between them to buy laptops for loan to students this Covid-19 affected academic year.

The laptops will be loaned to students during the academic year in order to facilitate their academic work at home.

Athlone IT has been awarded 272,480 of the funding to operate a means-tested laptop loan scheme.

IT Carlow has welcomed 529,694 in a grant by Minister Simon Harris for student laptops to assist online learning.

An application process aimed at assisting disadvantaged students will be opened to registered students who meet the eligibility criteria for the scheme mid-September.

The president of Institute of Technology Carlow, Dr. Patricia Mulcahy, has welcomed the announcement by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD of 529,694 - the highest allocation to any institute of technology - to assist with online learning for students of the Institute.

The fund, announced by the Minister, will allow for the purchase of some 17,000 laptops across the sector and is part of an overall funding of 15million for student devices earmarked by the Minister. For Institute of Technology Carlow, it allows for the procurement of some 700 laptops and other equipment for students as the college embraces hybrid learning in the new academic year.

Dr. Mulcahy commented, The pandemic has resulted in a changed college experience. The new academic year will see a move to hybrid learning at IT Carlow with students combining in-class and online learning for which they will need to access laptops and other equipment. This funding will allow for more equal access to education.

The initiative is a laptop loan scheme with a means tested application process. In accordance with HEA Guidelines, priority will be given to registered students with no access to laptops and other equipment from targeted under-represented groups as outlined in the National Access Plan; specifically, students disadvantaged by socio-economic barriers, mature students, lone parents, those with disabilities and ethnic minorities.

Students will be provided with information on the laptop loan scheme, and the application process, shortly after they register for the academic year in late September.

Commenting on the funding, Minister Harris said, This funding will work to ensure disadvantaged students will have access to the technology they need to complete their education. However, we must also recognise that many students and their families have fallen on hard times as a result of COVID-19. We must ensure they do not fall behind in their studies and ensure they can access this support fund also. We still have significant work to do to address the digital divide in Ireland but this will go some of the way to doing that.

The grant funding for the devices will be provided to higher education institutions through the Higher Education Authority (HEA) and to education and training boards through SOLAS. The bulk order of laptops was organised by HEAnet, which provides internet connectivity and ICT services to education bodies throughout Ireland.
Fabiana Pierre-Louis, a daughter of Haitian immigrants, is on track to become the first Black woman to sit on New Jerseys highest court, serving at a time when the state and the country remain deeply divided over racial and economic injustice.

Ms. Pierre-Louis, 39, will also be the only Black judge currently seated on the New Jersey Supreme Court and, as its youngest member, could serve for as many as three decades.

A former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey, Ms. Pierre-Louis was nominated by Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, to the post in June, as protesters across the nation, outraged by the death of George Floyd while in police custody, were demanding criminal justice reform.

The State Senates Democrat-led Judiciary Committee confirmed Ms. Pierre-Louiss nomination on Monday at a hearing where lawmakers noted the groundbreaking nature of her appointment, as well as her potential to shape the courts decisions for the next 30 years.
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The global dewatering pumps market size is expected to reach $10,133.4 million in 2026 from $6,374.1 million in 2018, growing at a CAGR of 5.9% from 2019 to 2026.

Dewatering is a process that helps to eradicate water from solid material or soil through centrifugation, filtration, wet classification, or alike solid-liquid separation methods. A dewatering pump is specially designed to handle sediment-laden water from a construction site, sediment basin, or an excavated area.

Several benefits offered by dewatering pumps such as abrasion resistance & enhanced operational proficiency and implementation of stringent energy-saving government regulations to monitor the manufacture of pumps are the key factors that propel the growth of the global dewatering pumps market. In addition, rise in construction activities globally is projected to fuel the development of the industry. Moreover, worldwide increase in consumption of oil & gas products is expected to boost the market growth

Request for Report Sample: https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/sample/13234

. However, uneven prices of raw materials is the major challenge faced by the vendors operating in the dewatering pump industry, thereby hampering the market growth. On the contrary, upsurge in demand for water & wastewater management is anticipated to offer lucrative opportunities for the players in the dewatering pumps industry.

The global dewatering pumps market is segmented based on type, application, and region. On the basis of type, the market is categorized into the submersible dewatering pump and non-submersible dewatering pumps. The submersible dewatering pump segment is anticipated to dominate the global dewatering pumps market in the upcoming years. By application, the market is segregated into construction & agriculture, oil & gas, municipal, mineral & mining, and others. The construction & agriculture segment is projected to dominate the global dewatering pumps market throughout the study period.

The global dewatering pumps market is analyzed across four geographical regions, which includes North America (U.S., Canada, and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, and rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (Japan, China, Australia, India, and rest of Asia-Pacific), and LAMEA (Latin America, Middle East, and Africa). Asia-Pacific is expected to hold the largest market share throughout the study period, however, LAMEA region is expected to grow at the fastest rate.

COMPETITION ANALYSIS

The key market players profiled in the report of dewatering pumps market include Atlas Copco, EBARA Corporation, Flowserve Corporation, Grundfos, Gorman-Rupp, ITT INC., KSB SE & Co., Sulzer Ltd., The Weir Group PLC, and Xylem. Other companies operating in the market are Honda Power Equipment, BBA Pumps, Designed & Engineered Pumps, Ruhrpumpen, Atlantic Pumps Ltd, Tsurumi Pump, Veer Pump, Wacker Neuson, Mersino Dewatering, Kirloskar Pumps, and Zoeller Pumps.

Many competitors in the dewatering pumps market adopted product launch as their key developmental strategy to improve their product portfolio and sustain the intense competition. For instance, in January 2018, Gorman-Rupp introduced an innovative ValuPrime Line, which is an economical priming-assisted submersible dewatering pump.

KEY BENEFITS FOR STAKEHOLDERS

 The report provides an extensive analysis of the current and emerging dewatering pumps market trends and dynamics.

 In-depth market analysis is conducted by constructing market estimations for the key market segments between 2018 and 2026.

Request for Report Discount: https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/discount/13234

 Extensive analysis of the market is conducted by following key product positioning and monitoring of the top competitors within the market framework.

 A comprehensive analysis of all the regions is provided to determine the prevailing opportunities.

 Key market players within dewatering pumps market are profiled in this report, and their strategies are analyzed thoroughly, which help to understand the competitive outlook of the air filtration media industry.

GLOBAL DEWATERING PUMPS MARKET SEGMENTS

BY TYPE

Submersible Dewatering Pumps

 Non-submersible Dewatering Pumps

BY APPLICATION

 Construction & Agriculture

 Oil & Gas

 Municipal

 Mineral & Mining

 Others

BY REGION

 North America

o U.S.

o Canada

o Mexico

 Europe

o Germany

o France

o UK

o Russia

o Rest of Europe

 Asia-Pacific

o Japan

o China

o Australia

o India

o Rest of Asia-Pacific

 LAMEA

o Latin America

o Middle East

o Afric

KEY PLAYERS

 Atlas Copco

 Ebara Corporation

 Flowserve Corporation

 Grundfos

 Gorman-Rupp

 ITT INC.

 KSB SE & Co.

 Sulzer Ltd.

 The Weir Group PLC

 Xylem

More Info of Impact Covid19@ https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/covid-19-analysis/13234
BROOKLYN, NY  Seven more Brooklyn restaurants have had their liquor licenses pulled for ignoring rules meant to help stop the spread of the coronavirus crisis, the governor said Monday.

Seven spots in Bushwick and Crown Heights were among the 14 bars and restaurants to have their liquor licenses temporarily suspended by the New York State Liquor Authority this week, the latest round in a crackdown by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office on pandemic-related rules.



"My message to bar owners is the same: this is about protecting the health of your employees, your patrons, and the public writ large," Cuomo said. "These are serious violations, and we are taking aggressive action because there are simply no more excuses for non-compliance."

At least 25 bars and restaurants in Brooklyn have now had their licenses suspended so far as a task force of investigators prompted by videos of late-night, maskless partiers make surprise inspections across the state.

Perhaps the most egregious violations in the latest round of suspensions were at La Perla Del Ulua Restaurant on Melrose Street, where investigators found 37 people drinking and dancing "shoulder-to-shoulder" at an unauthorized DJ set-up.

The restaurant had "effectively created an illegal outdoor nightclub" with the dance party outside of its restaurant, the governors office said. Inspectors  who visited after an 11 p.m. curfew for any outdoor dining  also found people drinking inside, despite the face that indoor dining still isn't allowed in New York City.

Restauranteurs have pleaded with officials to allow indoor dining in recent weeks to help the industry survive as weather grows colder. But Gov. Andrew Cuomo has pointed to a lack of compliance with coronavirus safety measures, among other factors, for reasons allowing dining inside is still risky.

People were also found drinking or eating inside other restaurants that lost their liquor licenses, including Mally's Deli & Grocery on Knickerbocker Avenue, La Fogata Restaurant and Cafe on Gates Avenue, New Heights on Schenectady Avenue, NY Pizza Cafe & Spanish Food Restaurant and El Salvador Restaurant de Marina, both on Myrtle Avenue.

Story continues

At Izzy's Fried Chicken on Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights, the diners were in a makeshift indoor space that was enclosed "without the approval of the SLA or the NYC Department of Buildings," the governor's office said.

Several of the restaurants were also serving drinks without food or had employees without face masks, according to the governor's office.

Under orders from the governor, establishments can only serve alcohol to people ordering "substantial food" and indoor dining still isn't allowed in New York City.



Other Brooklyn spots that have had their licenses pulled include a Bed-Stuy restaurant with a hookah shed in the backyard, "party boat" in Red Hook and a Sheepshead Bay bar with a 150-person party on the roof.



This article originally appeared on the Bed-Stuy Patch
Montgomery County officials continue to urge residents to prepare for Tropical Storm Laura while taking precautions due to COVID-19.

With Montgomery County still in the forecast track of the storm, officials from the Montgomery County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management continue to monitor its progress and want residents to be prepared.

The trajectory of the storm  which is expected to make landfall Wednesday night into Thursday morning as a Category 2 hurricane with 105-mph winds  remains uncertain, said National Weather Service forecasters.

Laura kind of keeps bouncing back and forth, said Meghan Ballad Arthur, information officer for the county office of emergency management. Weve been told that its going to make landfall as a Category 2 hurricane, but were not quite sure what those wind speeds are going to look like or what Montgomery County is going to get.

Ballard Arthur suggests that residents cut down branches on their property that could cause damage if they fall, move patio furniture and other items inside where they wont be blown away, and stock up an emergency preparedness kit that includes water for seven days, food, and necessary items for pets. Storm preparation tips are available at gov.texas.gov/hurricane.

For residents who live in an area prone to flooding, Ballard Arthur urges them to come up with a plan in case they cannot stay in their homes. With the coronavirus still present in the county, she recommended that residents avoid packed shelters if possible, and stay stocked up on masks and hand sanitizer. Grocery pickup or delivery for children is another way to remain socially distanced.

Just because theres a hurricane coming we dont need to forget the protocols we put in place to keep us safe from the coronavirus, she said.

Last year, when Montgomery County was hit by Tropical Storm Imelda, the majority of the damage from the storm was on the east side of the county. At this time, Ballard Arthur said, its still too early to know what part of the county could be affected.

The office of emergency management is on the phone with the National Weather Service every few hours trying to get a tentative count on expected rainfall, which will be what affects the east side of the county most.

Laura, at this time, is moving rather quickly, so were not going to see a Harvey that just sits on us and rains for days and days, its going to be a little bit more of a wind storm like we saw with (Hurricane) Ike, Ballard Arthur said. Its hard to say what part of the county to be more worried about than the other, just because when youre looking at the track its still very uncertain where in the cone Laura is going to come.

When planning for storms, San Jacinto River Authority General Manager Jace Houston said they prepare for the worst and hope for the best. With the incoming storms, even as things are changing rapidly, Houston said current forecasts do not anticipate so much rainfall that the lake level will have to be lowered.

Lake Conroe, right now, is almost 15 inches below its normal level (of 201 feet), so we have a lot of space to catch rainfall before we would even have to have a release of the reservoir, Houston said. So were in a good position going into this storm.

The latest predictions that Houston had seen were anticipating 4 inches of rain at the most. He encouraged people to monitor the storms to be prepared to leave, if necessary, and to stay as safe as possible. Residents can monitor rainfall levels around the lake at sanjacinto.onerain.com.

On Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration in ahead of Tropical Storm Marco and Tropical Storm Laura, to authorize the use of all available resources of state government and of political subdivisions that are reasonably necessary to cope with this disaster.

The order applies to 23 counties, but does not include Montgomery.

Tropical Storm Marco has prompted storm surge and storm warnings in Louisiana and Mississippi. The storm is expected to dissipate and weaken on Monday and Tuesday, so Texas and Montgomery County should feel very little impact from Marco.

On Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency granted an emergency declaration request ahead of the storms.

jamie.swinnerton@chron.com
Were talking about abolishing ICE, and were talking about abolishing prisons, he said in Old Forge, Pa., on Thursday. And thats, the only thing theyre not abolishing are taxes, because your taxes are going to go up at a level that youve never even heard of before. If you want a vision of your life under [a] Biden presidency, think of the smoldering ruins in Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the bloodstained sidewalks of Chicago, and imagine the mayhem coming to your town and every single town in America.
The Trump administration plans to block a proposed copper and gold mine near the headwaters of a major U.S. salmon fishery in Alaska, six people described as familiar with its plans told Politico on Saturday.

The administrations rejection of the Pebble Mine project is expected to come after Trump faced pressure to stop it from GOP mega-donor Andy Sabin, Bass Pro Shops CEO Johnny Morris and the his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., Politico reported.

With any government, whether it be Obama or Trump, nothing is certain until it happens, and thats just the nature of this beast, Sabin, who has spoken with the president about the proposed mine, said in an interview with Politico. But Im fairly certain that youre going to get good news.

On Thursday, a spokesman for the project said a decision on whether it should proceed could still be weeks away as work continues on a wetlands mitigation plan. Mike Heatwole, with the Pebble Limited Partnership, told The Associated Press that the company is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to finalize the plan. The agency did return messages seeking comment Saturday.

Pebble Limited Partnership CEO Tom Collier disputed the Politico report,

We firmly believe that the implication pushed by Politico that the White House is going to kill the project is clearly in error, likely made by a rush to publish rather than doing the necessary diligence to track down the full story, Collier said in a statement. We categorically deny any reports that the Trump Administration is going to return to an Obama-like approach that allowed politics to interfere with the normal, traditional permitting process. This president clearly believes in keeping politics out of permitting  something conservatives and the business community fully support.

The head of one of the nations biggest environmentalist groups said he believes the Trump administration will stop the project.

Pebble Mine has always been the wrong mine in the wrong place, Collin OMara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said in a statement, This decision marks a key step to save Alaskas Bristol Bay  the worlds most important salmon fishery which supports more than 14,000 jobs  from billions of gallons of toxic tailings inevitably leaching into its pristine waters. Stopping Pebble Mine was the right decision by the Obama administration in 2014 and we thank the Trump administration for making the right decision today.

Politico reports that three officials say the Army Corps of Engineers office in Alaska plans to hold a conference call on Monday with groups connected to the proposed mine to discuss the decision. Politico says an administration official confirmed the call.

The report of a decision to stop the project comes despite an environmental review the developer of the Pebble Mine saw as strongly in its favor.

The corps final environmental review of the project in southwest Alaska, released in late July, stated that under normal operations, the alternatives it looked at would not be expected to have a measurable effect on fish numbers and result in long-term changes to the health of the commercial fisheries in Bristol Bay. The corps stressed the review was not a decision document.

Pebble critics had blasted the corps review as deficient, while the Pebble Limited Partnership, which is seeking to develop the mine and is owned by Canada-based Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., saw it as a laying the groundwork for approval.

Pebble critics saw last-minute public support for their cause from Donald Trump Jr. and Nick Ayers, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence and a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, who promoted the conservation angle. Collier has played up the presidents efforts to promote development.

Every other major project developer and investor in the world is watching whether this administration delivers on its promise to eliminate political influence from permitting, Collier said in early August.

The mine, long a source of controversy and litigation, was seen by many as getting a second wind under the Trump administration. The U.S. Environmental Protection, under the preceding Obama administration, proposed restricting development in southwest Alaskas Bristol Bay region, which it described as supporting the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world and containing significant mineral resources. Salmon also is a key part of the culture of Alaska Natives who call the region home.

But the agency never finalized the restrictions and, under the Trump administration, allowed the Pebble partnership to go through permitting.

Pebble lauded the shift, arguing its project should be allowed to be vetted through a permitting process and not pre-emptively vetoed. Mine critics, however, feared politics were getting in the way of science.

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Calldrip Inc. 5000 Its an honor to be recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in America for a second year in a row. This is a testament to the hard work of our team and their commitment to delivering value to our customers. - Koby Jackson, CEO

Inc. Magazine Unveils Its Annual List of Americas Fastest-Growing Private Companiesthe Inc. 5000

For the 2nd Time, Calldrip appears on the Inc. 5000, Ranking No. 1928 With Three-Year Revenue Growth of 219%.

Inc. magazine today revealed that Calldrip is No.1928 on its annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economys most dynamic segmentits independent small businesses. Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.

Its an honor to be recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in America for a second year in a row. This is a testament to the hard work of our team and their commitment to delivering value to our customers. - Koby Jackson, CEO

Not only have the companies on the 2020 Inc. 5000 been very competitive within their markets, but the list as a whole shows staggering growth compared with prior lists as well. The 2020 Inc. 5000 achieved an incredible three-year average growth of over 500 percent, and a median rate of 165 percent. The Inc. 5000s aggregate revenue was $209 billion in 2019, accounting for over 1 million jobs over the past three years.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000. The top 500 companies are also being featured in the September issue of Inc., available on newsstands August 12.

The companies on this years Inc. 5000 come from nearly every realm of business, says Inc. editor-in-chief Scott Omelianuk. From health and software to media and hospitality, the 2020 list proves that no matter the sector, incredible growth is based on the foundations of tenacity and opportunism.

The annual Inc. 5000 event honoring the companies on the list will be held virtually from October 23 to 27, 2020. As always, speakers will include some of the greatest innovators and business leaders of our generation.

About Calldrip

For more than 10 years, Calldrip has been dedicated to helping businesses respond immediately to new inquiries. We have leveraged this experience to develop our Shopper Engagement Solution that has been embraced by thousands of customers worldwide. We create meaningful connections at the peak moment of interest to launch the sales process with momentum. The privately held, fast-growing company is based in Farmington, Utah. For more information, visit https://www.calldrip.com.

Contact:

Aaron Parsons

(801) 877 1111

marketing@calldrip.com

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000

Methodology

The 2020 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2019. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2019 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

About Inc. Media

The worlds most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.
The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) is alleging that the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) deceived Ghanaians by capturing non-existent infrastructural projects as part of its achievements.

According to the NDC, its fact-check on the Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumias presentation on the NPP governments infrastructural achievements show there were a number of ghost projects captured.

Addressing journalists on Monday, August 24, 2020, the NDCs National Communication Officer, Sammy Gyamfi outlined some of what they term as ghost projects which have been uploaded on the governments delivery tracker website.

The governments delivery tracker has it that, a rural electrification project has been undertaken at the Mpataban township in the Asante Akyem Constituency in the Ashanti Region. This is a lie. No such project has been undertaken by this government. No electricity has been extended to that township. There is no truth in that. The people sleep in darkness. So that claim by the government delivery tracker is a ghost project. It doesnt exist. Again, they claim on the governments delivery tracker of having constructed the Asuoso to Derma Tekyimantia road in the Bono East Region is yet another palpable falsehood as no such road exists.

There is no road by that name in the Bono East Region. So this is a clear ghost project which has been counted as part of the over 17,000 so-called projects they claim they have delivered. That should let you appreciate the fraudulent claims they [NPP] have made in this country. The claim by this government of the re-roofing a cluster of schools at Akantan in the Eastern Region is another lie. No such project has been undertaken, Sammy Gyamfi said. Governments claim

Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia disclosed that, out of 17,334 infrastructural projects initiated by the Akufo-Addo government in various parts of the country, 8,746 of them have been completed while the remaining are ongoing.

Dr. Bawumia made this known at the government's 3rd town hall meeting and results fair held at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Science on Tuesday, August 18, 2020.

The Vice President said the projects are in sectors including sanitation, agriculture, education, security, and sports.

We have completed 8,746 [projects] and there is 8,588 ongoing, Dr. Bawumia said.

He noted that plan for the development of all the infrastructural projects was informed by a study done by the NPP ahead of the 2016 elections and formed the basis for its manifesto.

He added that the initiated projects are targetted at meeting the needs of poor and deprived communities while contributing to the economic growth at the macro level.

Our focus has been to provide infrastructure for all. That has been the focus. And our approach to infrastructural development in Ghana has been two-fold. First, to provide the infrastructure needs of the poor and deprived communities at the micro-level like water, toilets, clinics, electricity, markets and so on. Many governments have ignored this historically. Second, our approach is to provide for the broader infrastructural needs of the economy at the macro level to drive economic growth, Dr. Bawumia noted

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Mumbai, Aug 24 : Choreographer-filmmaker Remo Dsouza on Monday donated blood at Mumbai's famous Lalbaugcha Raja Ganpati Utsav.

The blood donation camp at Lalbaug during the Ganesh Chaturthi festivity is well known, and Remo posted on Instagram his experience of taking part in the activity.

"Bappa has always showered his blessings on us. I was very lucky that I could this year give instead of asking ....a very good initiative by @lalbaugcharaja blood donation and plasma donation drive," Remo wrote.

Along with it, he has uploaded a few pictures of him giving blood.

Remo also donated kits that comprise mask, head cover, alcohol wipes, gloves, shoe covers and sanitisers.
Ask any RHOA fan who their all-time favorite cast member is and Phaedra Parks is on the list. Parks is known for her wit and ability to shade her co-stars with ease. Her absence from the show is a thorn in the side for many fans. As rumors about her return continue, former RHOA producer Carlos King says Parks is so popular because she serves as a contradiction of herself.

Phaedra Parks | Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

RHOA producer Carlos King says Phaedra Parks is a fan favorite because shes a contradiction of herself

In an exclusive interview with The Jasmine Brand, King speaks about Parks dual personality and why she resonates so much with viewers.

The thing about Phaedra that people love, that I also loved is the fact that she was such a contradiction of herself, King explains. She was a church lady who wore the church hats and she was a southern belle. But she also used to wear the freakiest bikinis when we had the cast trip, like talking about sex and, you know like all of those things that she had going for herself.

Source: YouTube

RELATED: An Update On Past Housewives of Atlanta

Kings assessment of Parks rings true for many fans. Despite her success as a powerful celebrity attorney and her astute education, her choice in a spouse was shocking to many.

Parks ex-husband, Apollo Nida, spent years in prison prior to their nuptials. Her marriage was under constant criticism from her co-stars, with many viewing her marriage as a contradiction to her lifestyle.

As it turns out, Nida did not steer clear of crime and a judge sentenced him to eight years in prison for crimes related to financial fraud. As a result, Parks ended the marriage.

Viewers also questioned Parks judgment of her co-stars, namely Kenya Moore, who Parks accused of lusting after Nida. Throughout her time on the show, Parks constantly berated Moore as immoral.

There are numerous rumors of Nidas extramarital activities. Rumors about Parks infidelity also made the show.

King also describes Parks as iconic.

Rumors surface that Phaedra Parks may return to RHOA

Producers fired Parks from the series after seven seasons on the show. The decision came following the revelation that Parks acted as the mastermind behind a damaging rumor about her former BFF, Kandi Burruss.

Parks alleged that Burruss plotted to sexually assault another co-star, Porsha Williams, while under the influence of drugs. The nasty rumor played out during season 9 until Williams admitted Parks involvement during the reunion.

Source: YouTube

RELATED: RHOA: What Has Phaedra Parks Been Up To Since Leaving the Show?

Andy Cohen says Parks termination was due to Parks not owning up to nor appearing apologetic for her actions. The rest of the cast also refused to film with her.

Burruss has been adamant that shed quit the show if Parks returns, but the buzz is that Parks will be brought back as a supporting character.

In a recent interview with People Magazine, Parks says RHOA viewers can keep hope alive in regards to her return. Parks is not against returning, but says shes happy with or without being a peach holder.

According to The UK Sun, producers want Parks back to spice things up, as Parks remains a fan favorite for her jazzy one-liners. Producers also believe Parks makes things more interesting with the cast
Waggl retained a spot on the Bay Area Newsgroups List of Top Workplaces in the San Francisco Bay Area for the second consecutive year "At Waggl, weve never worked harder because weve never more clearly seen the importance of our mission to empower the Voice of the Employee," said Michael Papay, Co-founder and CEO, Waggl.

Waggl, the most powerful Employee Voice platform for strategic business and HR leaders, today announced that it is the recipient of two prestigious awards for corporate growth and culture. For the second consecutive year, Waggl has earned a place on the Inc. 5000 2020 list of the Fastest Growing Private Companies in the United States, with three-year revenue growth of 314% percent. In addition, Waggl retained a spot on the Bay Area Newsgroups List of Top Workplaces in the San Francisco Bay Area for the second consecutive year, ranking #5 for Small Companies.

Im as proud as Ive ever been of our Waggl team, said Michael Papay, Co-founder and CEO, Waggl. The passion, commitment, and resiliency of our team has been remarkable these past few months. Weve never worked harder because weve never more clearly seen the importance of our mission to empower the Voice of the Employee. Moving forward, we will continue to balance rapid growth with a keen focus on creating a great employee experience, as weve seen that into a great product, trustworthy brand, superior customer focus, and strong performance and shareholder return.

The annual Inc. 5000 list is the most prestigious ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economys most dynamic segment  its independent small businesses. Microsoft, Dell, Dominos Pizza, Pandora, Timberland, LinkedIn, Yelp, Zillow, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.

Waggl was also named as a Top Workplace of 2020 by the Bay Area Newsgroup, based solely on employee feedback gathered through an anonymous survey, measuring several aspects of workplace culture, including alignment, execution, and connection, among others. Top Workplaces is more than just recognition, said Doug Claffey, CEO of Energage. Our research shows organizations that earn the award attract better talent, experience lower turnover, and are better equipped to deliver bottom-line results. Their leaders prioritize and carefully craft a healthy workplace culture that supports employee engagement.

These award wins come on the heels of two more significant very significant award wins in August 2020. Waggl received a 2020 Stevie Award for Great Employers in the category of Most Innovative Use of HR Technology During the Pandemic for its Putting People First initiative. Waggl was also honored for its technology advancements by Lighthouse Research and Advisory, which named the Waggl Engagement (WE) Solution as the Best Innovative or Emerging Tech Solution in Talent Management. The WE Solution serves as a critical component of the essential productivity suite for all workplaces, remote or in-person, by helping organizations harness the collective intelligence of their people. By delivering actionable insight, fresh perspective, and tangible knowledge to leaders and teams, the WE Solution helps organizations streamline and elevate their Employee Voice programs.

In Q120, Waggl was recognized for the third consecutive year as one of the Best Places to Work in the San Francisco Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times, Silicon Valley Business Journal, ranking #8 for smallest companies. The company also received major accolades for corporate culture and growth from Forbes as one of Americas Best Startup Employers, and from Financial Times as one of The Americas Fastest Growing Companies 2020. In 2019, Waggl placed #15 on the San Francisco Business Times Fast 100 list of the fastest growing private companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company was named as Employee Engagement Vendor of the Year by the 2019 North American Employee Engagement Awards, and was also recognized by the 9th Annual Best in Biz Awards as Best Local Company of the Year for the San Francisco Bay Area. Co-founder and CEO Michael Papay was named as a recipient of the 2019 Founders to Watch award by The Startup Weekly, a leading independent source of news and insights for business builders.

To learn more about Waggl, please visit https://www.waggl.com/.

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# # #
Former US Vice President on Sunday (local time) hit out at President over the handling of pandemic.

"President Obama and I established a White House office to prepare our nation for future pandemics. eliminated it -- and we've been paying the price every single day," Biden, who is also the Presidential nominee of Democratic Party said in a tweet.

According to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University, the number of cases in the US stands at 5,700,487 while the death toll has risen to 176,774.

As a measure to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, Democratic Party's presidential candidate had on Friday said he would shut the country down if scientists recommend so.

In an interview to ABC, Biden said, "I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists. I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus."

This comes after US President urged the country to reopen businesses and educational institutions despite the surge in COVID-19 cases.

In July, Trump said, "We're very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open... We're going to be putting a lot of pressure to open the schools in the fall.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has announced the State of Emergency will be in place for 18 months and lockdown restrictions will be extended beyond September.

This is despite the state recording its lowest rise in COVID-19 infections in seven weeks with 116 new cases and 15 additional deaths on Monday.

Mr Andrews said the state could not afford to lower the restrictions, and would extend the State of Emergency to 18 months in September, giving the government the power to impose further lockdown restrictions.

'It is not an unlimited extension, it is nothing more than a recognition that this virus won't be over on September 30,' the premier said.

'I would love nothing more for there to be no need for any rules on September 14, but I don't think that is the reality.'

While the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 only allows a State of Emergency to operate for six months, the premier said amendments are being made to change it.

This is to ensure restrictions such as mandatory masks and the strict lockdown can continue to be implemented throughout the state.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has announced that the State of Emergency will be in place for 18 months and lockdown restrictions will be extended beyond September

While the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 only allows a State of Emergency to operate for six months, the premier said amendments are being made to change it. Pictured: COVID testing at a drive through clinic in Ballarat

Victoria reported its lowest rise in COVID-19 infections in seven weeks with 116 new cases and 15 additional fatalities on Monday. Pictured: Collins St in Melbourne's CBD quiet and deserted on August 23

Mr Andrews said the state could not afford to lower the restrictions, and would extend the State of Emergency to 18 months in September. Pictured: A person wearing a face mask walks past Victoria Police, Airforce and ADF personnel outside of the Melbourne Museum

'That is the legal instrument that allows rules about face masks, about COVID safe work plans in workplaces large and small, that is the legal instrument that sits behind density limits in pubs and cafes and restaurants,' he said.

'Things like a positive person, someone who has got this virus, and required to isolate at home.'

'We will extend the state of emergency provisions within the public health and well-being act for a maximum of a further 12 months.'

Mr Andrews said the decision to ask parliament to extend the restrictions was about 'protecting everyone' in Victoria.

'They will need to be in place after September 13. I wish that wasn't the case. Even if there had not been a second wave these rules would still need to be in place,' he said.

'Because there is not a jurisdiction in the world that is going to just be going back to absolute normal, where there are no limits on restaurants, no limits in cafes, no masks at all, no need to isolate if you've actually got this.'

'All of those very commonsense provisions they need when you're beyond the 13 September. The law doesn't quite provide for that. We want to make a change.'

If there is no vaccine within 12 months, the state's restrictions may have to be extended again.

Medical staff conduct a COVID-19 test on a patient at the drive through coronavirus testing facility in Ballarat on Friday

It comes as halfway through lockdown, Victoria's chief health officer Brett Sutton has defiantly declared he won't let the state's hard-fought COVID-19 gains slip

'We would be in a similar position to now where we would have to go back to the Parliament. No-one is asking for an unlimited five years, 10 years, run forever. 12 months we think is appropriate. That is to say it is foreseeable,' he said.

Poll Is the State of Emergency extension over the top? Yes No Unsure Is the State of Emergency extension over the top? Yes 1575 votes

No 564 votes

Unsure 130 votes Now share your opinion





'I hope we are wrong in predicting this will still need rules in 12 months. Hopefully we have got a vaccine by then.

'But even then, the vaccine will take time to develop, manufacture, administer, and the efficacy of the vaccine, what is the life-cycle of that, does it protect you for three months, six months, here, forever, the whole notion of boosters, those sorts of things.

'So this is nothing more or less than a logical extension in time, changing the law of the state to ensure it is equal to the challenge of state faces.'

The embattled state recorded its lowest amount of new COVID-19 cases on Monday since July 5, when 67 people were diagnosed.

The latest fatalities bring the state's COVID-19 death toll to 430 and the national figure to 517.

The number of new cases is almost half Sunday's figure of 208.

WHAT STATE OF EMERGENCY MEANS The State of Emergency provides the Chief Health Officer with additional powers to issue directions to help contain the spread of coronavirus and keep Victorians safe. 'Expanding the powers of the chief health officer will allow us to better protect public health and give our hospitals, GPs and other industries the best fighting chance we can,' Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said. Under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 the chief health officer can have their powers expanded in four ways: Any person or group in a particular area can be detained to eliminate or reduce a serious risk to public health The movement of people within the emergency area can be restricted People can be prevented from entering an emergency area Authorised officers can make any direction considered reasonably necessary to protect public health The 'emergency area' could be defined by the chief health officer and could contain a street, suburb or the state. Advertisement

Police check permits and ID of drivers at a checkpoint in Little River for traffic coming from Melbourne into Geelong

Victorian Liberal MPs have accused Mr Andrews of 'loving power' and compared him to a dictator.

Housing spokesman Tim Smith said: 'Andrews is out of control. He's attempting to make himself a dictator, giving himself more power than any modern head of government has ever had.

'This is genuinely scary.'

His colleague Matthew Guy added: 'Daniel Andrews is totally out of control and loving authoritarian power a bit too much.'

James Newbury MP told Daily Mail Australia he was concerned by how much power the proposed law-change would hand Mr Andrews.

'Total power should not be unaccountable. Victorians want to do the right thing but that shouldn't allow any politician to have permanent power,' he said.

Free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs said the state of emergency should end on 13 September to prevent further draconian lockdowns.

Gideon Rozner, Director of Policy, said an extension would mean 'months of lockdown with no parliamentary vote or democratic oversight.'

He told Daily Mail Australia: 'Daniel Andrews has used emergency powers to put Victorians through the most stringent, cruel and ultimately unsuccessful lockdown measures anywhere in Victoria.

With 3,920 so-called mystery cases, Prof Sutton warned restrictions would not be lifted in full until community transmission is eradicated (Man wearing a mask in Ballarat)

Healthcare workers continue to test for Coronavirus at the MyDoc Healthcare drive through testing station during COVID-19 in Bendigo

Victoria has reported its lowest rise in COVID-19 infections in seven weeks with 116 new cases and 15 additional fatalities on Monday (Women wearing masks in Ballarat)

'He simply cannot be trusted with these powers indefinitely and must take his hands off our democracy.

'A long term extension to the state of emergency means long term unemployment, misery, and loss of basic freedoms and rights.'

Director of Policy at the Institute of Public Affairs, Gideon Rozner has also slammed the premier's extension of restrictions.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

'The State of Emergency powers must end on the 13 of September,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'Daniel Andrews has used emergency powers to put Victorians through the most stringent, cruel and ultimately unsuccessful lockdown measures anywhere in Victoria. He simply cannot be trusted with these powers indefinitely.'

'Daniel Andrews must take his hands off our democracy.'

Mr Rozner said it is important that politicians are transparent and 'accountable to Victorians'.

'A long term extension to the state of emergency means long term unemployment, misery, and loss of basic freedoms and rights.'

Victorians could be living with mandatory mask rules into the Summer with the premier telling residents they could be in place for a while.

'If I'd just take you back, before masks became mandatory the general advice and request that we were making of Victorians when you are out and about for a lawful purpose and you feel, you are not confident you will be able to maintain that 1.5 metre distance, please wear a mask,' Mr Andrews said.

'I think that the notion of mandatory mask wearing, at least in those circumstances, think that will be with us for a while.'

'And, yes, that will be challenging when it comes to the hot weather.'

But halfway through lockdown Victoria's chief health officer defiantly declared he won't let the state's hard-fought COVID-19 gains slip.

Brett Sutton had predicted on Sunday that numbers could dip below 150 this week.

He added although the daily case numbers had been 'jumping around', he expected a continued downward trajectory, and was still upbeat when new cases went back above 200 on Sunday.

'We're not going to see 300 and 400 (cases) again in Victoria under my watch, at least,' he told reporters on Sunday.

'We're applying a strategy that is driving cases down.'

While Prof Sutton predicted numbers could dip below 150 this week, he said restrictions would not be lifted in full until community transmission was eradicated.

He also said Melburnians would be wearing face masks in public beyond the easing of Stage Four.

Mr Andrews said masks would remain part of life for a long time, along with careful hand-washing and physical distancing.
Saudi-Led Coalition Says Intercepts Houthi Drone, Missile in Yemen

Sputnik News

03:11 GMT 23.08.2020

Yemen's Houthi militia has launched dozens of drone and missile strikes against military bases, airports, and cities inside Saudi Arabia in recent years.

Early Sunday, the Coalition to Restore Legitimacy in Yemen forces intercepted and destroyed an explosive-laden drone and a ballistic missile launched by the Houthis toward Saudi Arabia, coalition spokesman colonel Turki al-Malki said.

The drone and the missile were launched toward civilians and civilian objects in Saudi Arabia's south, the spokesperson added.

He also accused the Houthi movement of using civilians and civilian objects to shield the launch site of the missile.

Fighting between the coalition and the Houthis escalated in May after a ceasefire introduced amid the coronavirus outbreak expired.

For over five years, Yemen has been engulfed in an armed conflict between the government forces, led by President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, and the Houthi rebels. Despite the support from the Saudi-led coalition, the government troops have failed to regain control over Houthi-controlled areas in the north.

 Sputnik

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Say what you will about Kamala Harris  and Republicans, of course, are  the lady knows how to fashion and use a shank.

Ask Joe Biden.

In the Democratic primary, when all the candidates were ganging up on poor Joe, Kamala was the one who went straight in for the kill.

No dilly-dallying on her part. She unsheathed her racism shank and went to work.

Oh, she didnt exactly say, in so many words, that Joe is a racist.

In fact, she was careful to say she doubts he is.

Then she proceeded to imply otherwise. Thats how adept the lady is with a shank.

Some Biden backers at the time felt that the weapon she resorted to was more like a machete. One Biden campaign aide denounced her attack as outrageous.

But it must be said in all fairness to Kamala that she was well within the mainstream of the Democratic Partys rules of discourse when she let fly with her innuendoes of racism. Its a rare day in politics when suspected racists arent rounded up and perp-marched before the media.

Racism, racism, racism. Its the all-purpose, ever-handy denigration these days. Its the tar brush thats guaranteed to leave an indelible mark on your foe.

Once smeared with the insinuation, how do you ever prove youre not a racist? The insinuation puts you on the defensive  as poor Joe found out.

Its a standard, go-to tactic in Democratic circles today to hint, without actually saying so, that any who dare to doubt your policy prescriptions are irredeemable, Klavern-cleaving crackers  toothless, terbacky-dribblin, Deliverance-style, cretin stereotypes.

White supremacists.

Thus in a candidate debate Kamala proceeded to characterize Joe in terms that cast him as being of the same low ilk as South Africa apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd or Alabama segregationist Bull Connor.

She portrayed poor Joe as a composite redneck, as an all-rolled-into-one, textbook bigot. Although  again  she didnt say it in so many actual words. The trick is to suggest it, not say it.

Poor Joe was left standing there on stage, stammering and bleeding. He finally managed to mumble a few lame words in his own defense.

Kamala, he objected feebly, had made a mischaracterization of my position, across the board.

Sorry, Joe, too late. The shank had left its mark.

A moaning, wailing media Greek chorus at the time dramatized its conclusion that poor Joe surely would never be able to survive the vivisection number Kamala had done on him.

And he very nearly didnt. But he did survive. And Kamala didnt.

She became one of the first candidates to fizzle and flop in the Democratic primary.

Whereupon she whined that she had been the victim of her partys seething prejudices against females and people of color.

Her own party! Democrats! A reactionary gang of lowly racists and male chauvinists!

Although Joe prevailed over her, youd think hes surely still smarting over the shank job Kamala did on him. Unless, perhaps, as Republicans keep suggesting, his dwindling cognitive faculties have mercifully spared him the terrible memory of the savaging he suffered at her hands.

Kamala started out with a shiv thrust thats become a familiar maneuver in Democratic knife politics: She accused Joe of having once uttered hurtful words. Ah, yes, hurtful. The worst kind of all.

Hurtful words, being of a highly amorphous category, are virtually impossible to defend yourself against when theyre attributed to you.

Kamala put on her best, vulnerable, fairer-sex, damsel-in-distress pout when she used the word. Hurtful. Oh boo-hoo. Sniff, sniff.

Joe had been cruelly hurtful in telling how, as a senator, hed gotten along even with the Senates notorious segregationist Democrats in cooperating to get things done.

Kamala still was not yet finished with her victim after carving an R on his forehead, an R standing for . . . well, you know what for.

She went on to say that Joe had hurtfully opposed racial busing as a way to integrate schools, a charge that implied hes really a closet Kleagle, along the lines H.L. Mencken described in Sahara of the Bozart.

Well, now, in fact didnt many people  black and white  oppose busing? Yes indeed they did. But that fact didnt deter Kamala. She proceeded to shank poor Joe over busing anyway.

She declared: There was a little girl in California  sniff, sniff  who was part of the second class to integrate her public school. She was bused to school every day. And that little girl  boo-hoo  was me.

Kamala delivered the rehearsed line with just the right amount of emotion, with a slight tremor in her voice.

Poor Joe was left standing there exposed, the Orval Faubus or Lester Maddox of Kamalas tear-jerker anecdote. Kamala then proceeded to twist in the racial shiv.

Do you agree, she demanded, that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?

A flustered Joe finally muttered, nonsensically: I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.

But, hey, in fact didnt the U.S. Department of Education actually not even come into existence until 1980, after busing had been all but abandoned as a school-desegregation policy?

Kamala, however, was brooking no dissent on the busing issue.

She declared: I will tell you that on this subject it cant be an intellectual debate among Democrats.

So now it might be wondered: Is racial busing going to be exhumed and reinstated as the partys favored policy? Dont hold your breath waiting for the media to pursue that question.

It may be that Kamala felt compelled to go to her racial shank against Joe to demonstrate her bona fides as a person of color.

Shes not, you see, a person of African color herself. And that can be problematical in a party that obsesses over gradations of pigmentation and frets endlessly over other ancestral esoterica.

In any event, after carving Joe up as a reincarnation of George Wallace, Kamala gave her victim an even more merciless evisceration when the campaign trail led into Nevada. There she went after Joe as a creepy groper of females.

Four women associated with the Democratic Party  determined evidently to stop Joes nomination  had expressed their belated concerns over his inappropriate touching. That was the delicate term they used to describe his allegedly distressing libidinal impulses.

With lethal instinct, Kamala went right for the shank again. She eagerly endorsed the womens ambiguous insinuations. She declared: I believe them and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it.

She didnt even bother to show poor Joe a minimal measure of mercy by adding something like, Of course, Donald Trump has been accused of far worse.

Put down as a suspected, loathsome pervert, the chastised Joe meekly vowed to strive henceforth to, um, respect womens space.

In whats surely the mother of all ironies, huffy womens groups have suddenly rallied to Kamalas pro-active defense, now that shes on the partys ticket.

They have put out a warning that theyll tolerate no criticism whatsoever of Kamala that might remotely be construed as misogynistic. The media have been put on notice, although this surely was not necessary.

The suggestion seems to be that dear, sweet, frail, feminine Kamala may not be capable of withstanding the late hits and horse-collar tackles of a rough-and-tumble presidential campaign, may not be up to competing on the same playing field with the guys.

Are they kidding? Kamala the Shankstress?

Given that she learned the tricks of the trade from the master of ruthless politics  from her one-time paramour and mentor, legendary California political boss Willie Brown  its doubtful in the extreme that shes ever gonna need the extra protection of the harridan community.

Political pundits left and right are still theorizing on Bidens motivations for naming Kamala as his running mate.

Some say its her access to big-dollar California donors, to party movers and shakers, to Wall Street.

Some say its her readiness to rumble, her willingness to be the tickets nasty answer to a nasty Donald Trump  her facility with a shank.

Yet a third theory is that shell be able to appeal to the intellect of the Democratic Partys high-minded progressive set, the partys doctoral-degree demographic, in a way that befuddled, inarticulate Joe could never hope to.

But she appears to appeal to the intellect the same way comedian Richard Pryor once said the mafia does. (He said the mafias way of appealing to the intellect is to tell you: Youre a smart guy, you surely know how hard its gonna be to walk without knees.)

Kamala will have the distinct advantage of bringing underworld-style political enforcement skills to the ticket. Shell be free of the need to fuss over obligations of restraint, this thanks to her gender.

At the same time, her male foes will be deterred from fully responding in kind, this thanks to their gender. Its just the way things are, its the social custom.

Kamalas willingness and readiness to engage in shank politics calls to mind a possibly applicable story told of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

According to the story, Johnson was asked why he had decided to retain as FBI director the menacing J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was infamous for his compromising files on Washingtons top political figures. Johnson is said to have replied: Id much rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

Joe presents himself as a man of simple and sincere motivations, a non-threatening fellow incapable of guile. Maybe when he reflected on the way Kamala had carved him a new one, he was simply afraid not to put her on the ticket.

In any case, whether it was the aim or not, Kamala brings to the ticket certain attack skills that can make sure the election is a referendum on Trump.

She can keep Trump on the defensive and in the forefront as the elections main issue. Her attacks can chum the waters where the media sharks lurk and keep them occupied chasing down and feeding on yummy little Trump tidbits.

All in all, whether by design or random luck, the seemingly bumbling, bewildered Joe has made a shrewd vice-presidential pick, one that just might be able to nudge him across the Nov. 3 finish line as the victor.

Providing, that is, Joe and Kamala can avoid becoming the central issue themselves. Given the abandonment of impartiality by a large swath of the Fourth Estate, that eventuality seems all but guaranteed.
He will not be able to dodge questions from the opposition, the press, or his own party forever, he said. At some point, he will have to come clean and explain why, if he intends to stay, he is in fact still fit to perform the duties of his office during an especially trying time for Japan.
Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Donald Trump reportedly wants to bypass health regulations to approve a coronavirus vaccine before the US election.

He wants to give a vaccine being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca emergency use authorization, allowing it to be rolled out in the US without meeting full regulatory approval, according to the Financial Times.

A representative for the Department of Health and Human Services said suggestions that the US Food and Drug Administration would fast-track the vaccine being developed in the UK were "absolutely false."

Trump on Saturday accused the FDA of trying to delay a vaccine to hurt his chances in the November 3 election.

The UK government insists it will gain first access to Oxford's vaccine if it is approved.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump reportedly wants to fast-track approval of an experimental coronavirus vaccine being developed in the UK so it can be used in the US before the presidential election.

In a bid to secure a coronavirus vaccine before November 3, Trump wants the US Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorization to the vaccine being developed by Oxford University in the weeks leading up to the election, even if it does not yet have full regulatory approval, the Financial Times reports, citing unnamed sources.

The Oxford vaccine, being developed in partnership with the pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, is set to be trialed on 10,000 volunteers in the coming weeks; however, US health authorities have indicated a vaccine must be successfully trialed on 30,000 volunteers to receive authorization.

Two senior figures in the Trump administration last month told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a meeting that the president wanted to bypass these requirements by granting the vaccine emergency use authorization, an unnamed source briefed on the meeting told the Financial Times.

The two figures  the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin  reportedly said they expected a vaccine to receive emergency use authorization before the election and possibly as early as next month.

Story continues

A Treasury representative denied that Mnuchin made comments regarding AstraZeneca in that meeting and said he "is also not aware of any plans the FDA may have regarding any emergency use authorization for any potential vaccine, beyond what he has heard publicly stated."

Michael Caputo, a representative for the Department of Health and Human Services, denied that the FDA would grant a vaccine emergency use authorization before the election, calling the idea "absolutely false."

He told the Financial Times that the stated objective of developing a vaccine by the first quarter of 2021 had not changed and that talk of one being available to the public in October was a "lurid resistance fantasy." Caputo said: "Irresponsible talk of an unsafe or ineffective vaccine being approved for public use is designed to undermine the president's coronavirus response."

At the same time, President Donald Trump has publicly expressed a desire to have a vaccine sooner. On Saturday, Trump accused the FDA  with no evidence  of trying to delay a coronavirus vaccine until after the election for political purposes.

In a tweet that tagged Dr. Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, Trump said: "The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!"

Pelosi on Saturday said the president's tweet was "very dangerous" and that "even for him, it went beyond the pale in terms of how he would jeopardize the health and wellbeing of the American people."

Dr. Anthony Fauci previously warned about the dangers of insufficient testing

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a news conference on July 24. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Oxford researchers are considered to be leading the race to produce a fully tested vaccine and have agreed with AstraZeneca to produce up to 2 billion doses. The team, led by Dr. Sarah Gilbert, began human trials for the vaccine in April, at which point she said a vaccine could be proved effective by as early as September.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has urged caution about Oxford's front-running status, however, reflecting the fact that most vaccines fail to receive regulatory approval.

"You've got to be careful if you're temporarily leading the way versus having a vaccine that's actually going to work," he told the BBC last month in comments reported by Bloomberg.

Fauci, the top US infectious-disease expert, also warned about the danger of fast-tracking a coronavirus vaccine after Russian President Vladimir Putin this month announced that Russia had approved a vaccine and hoped to begin mass production soon. Russia's vaccine has not completed its phase 3 trials, which are considered key in demonstrating the safety and efficacy of a vaccine and are usually completed before regulatory approval is given.

Fauci said while the US had numerous vaccines in development, "if we wanted to take the chance of hurting a lot of people or giving them something that doesn't work, we could start doing this, you know, next week if we wanted to  but that's not the way it works."

German Health Minister Jens Spahn has also warned about the risks of rolling out a vaccine to the public before carrying out sufficient testing. Speaking about the Russian vaccine, he said: "It can be dangerous to start vaccinating millions, if not billions, of people too early because it could pretty much kill the acceptance of vaccination if it goes wrong, so I'm very skeptical about what's going on in Russia."

A spokesman for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday dismissed the possibility of the US gaining first access to the vaccine, ahead of the UK, by bypassing its normal procedures.

"We've been clear throughout that we will only roll out a vaccine once it's been deemed safe and effective by our regulators," the person said.

"AstraZeneca have entered a number of agreements with other countries, but we've been clear once it's been found to be effective, we've signed a deal for 100 million doses and once it's effective, the UK will get first access."

Read the original article on Business Insider
New Delhi, Aug 24 : Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat said on Monday that if diplomatic talks with China over the border issue fail, then military options are on the table.

"The military option to deal with the transgressions by the Chinese is still on but will be considered only if the talks at the diplomatic and military level fail," said General Bipin Rawat.

He however, refused to share what military options India is looking upon.

The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops are sitting at various disputed and friction points along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

They have refused to disengage since mid-July and have started construction work on those disputed junctions.

Apart from that they have been raising unacceptable points before India.

To deal with the emerging situation, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Saturday held a meeting with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and the top military brass to discuss the situation at the border with China.

Talks between India and China remain deadlocked.

India has to move around three additional formations to reinforce the border.

Singh held the review meeting with Doval, Rawat and the three service chiefs on the prevailing situation at the LAC in Eastern Ladakh where Chinese troops are still camping.

"The meeting happened for almost one-and-a-half-hours in South Block," said a source.

The de-escalation of troops at the LAC has stopped for now as the disengagement talks between India and China have hit a roadblock.

China has refused to move back from its present military position north of the Pangong Tso and Depsang.

The PL) has refused to pull back eastwards from the 8-km stretch it has occupied from Finger-4 to Finger-8 by building scores of new fortifications there since early May.

The mountain spurs jutting into the lake are referred to as Fingers in military parlance.

China has also increased its troop deployment at Lipulekh, the place that became a trigger for strained relations between New Delhi and Kathmandu.

Lipulekh is a tri-junction between India, Nepal and China situated atop the Kalapani Valley.

China has changed the status quo on the LAC at various places. India has objected to it and is taking up the matter with China at all levels.

Both the countries are locked in a more than three-month-long standoff at multiple points, hitherto unprecedented, along the border.

During the meeting, it was also discussed that Beijing has started troop and material build-up in depth areas across the 3,488-km LAC.

India has found that China has deployed troops, artillery and armour in three sectors of the LAC -- western (Ladakh), middle (Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh) and eastern (Sikkim, Arunachal).

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Duty of all to work in partys interest says Shashi Tharoor

Will consider returning as Congress chief says Rahul Gandhi at CWC

Sonia Gandhi offers to resign as party chief, asks CWC to start process to elect new chief

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Aug 24: Soon after the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meet began, Sonia Gandhi on Monday asked the party workers to relieve her as the interim chief of the Congress party.

Sonia Gandhi asks Congress to find a new president, says won't remain the president | Oneindia News

Sonia Gandhi referred to the letter by Ghulam Nabi Azad, among others, while offering to quit as party chief. She also called for start of process to select the new party president. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh and senior leader A K Antony criticised the letter by some leaders seeking leadership change.

Explained: What happens if Sonia Gandhi steps down from her post in the CWC meeting?

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

Massive support poured for the Gandhis on Sunday after the "pro-reform" leaders went public, with Congress chief ministers leading the calls for Sonia Gandhi to stay until Rahul Gandhi takes charge.

Almost all Lok Sabha MPs of the party have written to Sonia Gandhi expressing solidarity and urging her to continue in her post or instal Rahul Gandhi.

Several state units including Delhi and Rajasthan passed resolutions favouring the leadership of Gandhis after a letter from a section of senior party leaders demanded sweeping reforms in the party, going to the extent of questioning the current CWC's ability to guide the party in the fight against the BJP.

Ironically, at least three of the dissenters are themselves part of the same CWC. These include Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma and Mukul Wasnik.

Several party leaders, while supporting the continuation of Gandhis at the helm, accused those behind the letter of playing into the hands of the BJP and attempting to weaken the party at a time when there was a need to close ranks against the NDA government.

This is the second challenge to Sonia Gandhi's leadership after the one in 1999 when the then leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Sharad Pawar challenged her foreign origins in order to keep her from being named the party's prime ministerial face in the general elections that year.

Sonia Gandhi had resigned in the CWC, which rejected her move unanimously bringing her back as party president. While Sonia went on to become the longest-serving Congress president, Pawar and rebels had to quit to form the NCP.
A meeting of the foreign ministers from the Normandy Four countries, i.e., Ukraine, Germany, France, and Russia, may be held in September, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has said.

The agenda for the meeting may include the Steinmeier formula, local elections in Donbas, the transfer of responsibilities on the Russian-Ukrainian border, and the powers of Armed Forces personnel, Maas said.

"In order for us to meet in the Normandy format in September at the level of foreign ministers, all parties involved realize that we need to meet not to repeat what was achieved at the Paris summit, but to discuss how to put these decisions into practice. On the one hand, there's a ceasefire, on the other hand, there are mechanisms that should be used to exercise oversight. This also applies to the opening of additional crossing points," Maas said at a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv on Monday.

"Certain steps have already been taken" on this matter, and there is a range of social and economic issues that were discussed in Paris, he said.

"In other words, if we succeed on this issue and if we actively work on it at the level of foreign ministers between the [German] Chancellery and the Office of the President [of Ukraine], then we will also have the opportunity to discuss political issues, i.e., the so-called Steinmeier formula, when regional elections will be held, in what way responsibilities on the border will be transferred, and what powers military personnel will have. These are the matters that should be discussed in the Normandy format at the level of foreign ministers," Maas said.
It should come as no surprise that due to COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns, with people staying home more, screen time has increased massively. The majority of our survey respondents in the UK (82%) and NA (72%) said that their social media consumption has increased significantly during the pandemic. Because right now we cant enjoy many of the social activities we are so accustomed to, many are probably using social media as their personal outlet to connect with others, said Suzin Wold, SVP of Marketing, Bazaarvoice. Many consumers are looking to social media to escape the doom and gloom of todays news cycle.A Some of the top types of content people are looking for include influencer content, shopping content, humorous content, recipe content, and updates from friends and family. People want content that will not only bring them some joy during these tough times, but will also provide them with information, or a service.

The increase in the use of social platforms has many brands heading directly into the space. Not a bad thing, but Wold warns that social networks and social marketing arent the same navigable spaces as other publishing hubs. And, according to Wold, that makes influencer campaigns a natural fit  because social media influencers have an engaged following ready for content.

Now is as good a time as any to pair up with influencers, as influencer content is a type of content people are specifically looking for right now on social media. But, brands must be sure that the content provided is appropriate and not tone deaf. If done correctly, influencer marketing can pay off in a big way. In fact, 70% of North American survey respondents and 74% of UK respondents agreed that reviews from social media influencers impact their purchase decisions, said Wold.

Nearly three-quarters of North American consumers say theyre now visiting branded social pages prior to making a purchase. These consumers also note that they have noticed the uptick in content surrounding social justice initiatives from brands. Wold believes this change in the type of content being created and engaged with will have a long-lasting impact not only on social media consumers but on brands within the social space. The key, of course, is to continue creating the kind of content people want.

There are certainly platforms that are more important in terms of e-commerce. Of our survey respondents who prefer to shop on social media, 84% in North America and 92% in the UK said they shop from Instagram. The second most popular platform in both regions was Facebook. But all social media platforms have the power to influence a customer to purchase, whether that is on the app directly, on a brands website, or in a brands store. A majority of consumers in both North America (62%) and in the UK (66%) agree or strongly agree that a brands social media presence influences their decision to purchase, said Wold.
General election in the eyes of a voter By Vinodini Jayawardena View(s): View(s):

In the presidential election in November last year, 13.38 million or 83.72 percent of the registered voters cast their franchise. In the August 5 parliamentary election, only 12.34 million or 75.89 percent of the registered voters voted. The voter apathy is further vindicated by the number of rejected votes.

The number of rejected votes at the 2019 presidential election was 135,452. At the August 5 parliamentary election, the third highest polled was the rejected votes 744,373 (4.58% of the total votes). That is 600,000 more than the presidential election rejected votes. Effectively, 1.6 million voters (10 percent of total voters) who cast their vote in the presidential election chose to stay at home or spoiled their votes. Can this be due to:

complications in the ballot paper,

deliberate manipulation

too many independent groups

voters were unaware of how to cast their vote especially the elderly

being at quarantine centres

stuck out of the country due to the pandemic

protest vote  anti-government or anti-other parties?

Electronic voting technology

In the August 5 general election, those in quarantine centres could not vote and, therefore, we should look at introducing a mobile voting system or an electronic voting technology. Electronic voting technology is ideal for Sri Lanka to speed up the counting of votes (especially the preferential votes) and to declare the results faster. This would reduce the cost of paying staff to count votes manually; provide improved accessibility for disabled voters; voters saving time and cost by being able to vote independently from their location. This may increase overall voter turnout and citizens living abroad will be enabled to cast their votes.

Proportional Representation system

The Proportional Representation system was introduced to ensure broader representation by candidates from political parties and independent groups and to prevent any party obtaining a majority so that the parliament will have an equally vibrant opposition to check and balance the government. The Sirimavo Bandaranaike government (1970-77) ruled for seven years because it had a two-thirds majority. J.R. Jayewardene won a five-sixth majority in 1977 and brought a new Constitution to introduce the Executive Presidency which has now become a bane to this country. In 2010 Mahinda Rajapaksa government received a strong electoral mandate and it introduced the 18th Amendment. In all these three instances, democracy were doubly challenged.

With the PR system many small parties were formed based on race, religion, language and other identities. Currently its a norm that these parties contest as an alliance and go solo in areas they have a majority voter base. For instance, the SLMC and the ACMC contested alone in Batticaloa and Ampara districts respectively while being part of the SJB alliance in other districts; the SLFP which contested as part of the SLPP-led alliance in most districts contested separately in Jaffna and got a seat; the SLMC and the ACMC forged together the MNA and won a seat in Puttalam. This may be a way of collecting more seats and having an eye on a bonus seat.

Magical figure

The SLPP was fortunate to receive a strong electoral mandate in the recent parliamentary election. If by chance it fell short of the magical figure of 113 seats then the bargaining starts with loads of paybacks to buy over parliamentarians. In similar situations the minority parties hold the carrot to break or make governments. Parliamentarians too, once elected, forget to voice the aspirations of their vote bases and settle for plum luxuries.

In Sri Lanka, DNA studies reveal that the major ethnic groups in the island namely Sri Lankan Tamils, Sinhalese (Upcountry and Low Country) and Veddahs are genetically related. Therefore parties based on race, religion, language or other identities should be discouraged. Every citizen must breathe and think as Sri Lankans. In such inclusiveness, politics based on petty agendas that have sown division in our society will be a past and a national undertaking to develop our country will be visible.

In the parliamentary election, the people have spoken loudly and clearly and given the SLPP power with 145 seats. With power comes great responsibility and we hope that the President and parliament will deliver this to the people so that this victory sets the stage for an era of reviving the economy from the present plight and all citizens can enjoy a peaceful and prosperous life in Sri Lanka.

Economic revival

The Government needs a team of experts to develop a recovery strategy. The team should comprise qualified and credible experts, with international experience.

They should provide the government with independent advice on formulating an economic recovery strategy, monitor outcomes and suggest short-term and long-term policy corrections. The opposition too should put away petty agendas aside and cooperate with the government and similarly see that the rights of all people are respected through implementation of good governance measures.
The Pirates announced Monday that theyve claimed right-hander Carson Fulmer off waivers from the Tigers and designated outfielder Guillermo Heredia for assignment in order to open a spot on the roster.

Pittsburgh will be the third team in 2020 to try its hand in helping Fulmer to right the ship. The 26-year-old was selected by the White Sox with the No. 8 overall pick back in 2015. At the time, the Vanderbilt star was viewed as a potential high-end starter or at the very least a high-probability late-inning reliever. But hes struggled virtually every step of the way since Triple-A, pitching to an ugly 5.39 ERA in parts of four seasons there and a less-palatable 6.57 mark in 101 1/3 MLB frames. The Tigers claimed him last month after the White Sox designated him for assignment.

Fulmers average fastball in 2020 sat at 92.3 mph  a far cry from the rightys college days, when scouting reports pegged him as touching 97 mph with regularity. He boasted elite spin rates on his four-seamer and curveball as recently as last season, though, and Fulmer did manage a career-best 12.8 percent swinging-strike rate in this years tiny sample of 6 2/3 innings with the Tigers. Thats about all that went right for Fulmer, but the pitching-hungry Pirates were quick to snap him up on waivers in hopes that their staff can coax something more out of him. Fulmer is out of minor league options, so hell need to stick on the Bucs big league roster or else be designated for assignment a third time.

As for Heredia, he signed a one-year, $1MM contract with the Pirates over the winter but hasnt delivered for the club. The 29-year-old appeared in just eight games and tallied a mere 18 plate appearances earlier this year before being optioned to the clubs alternate training site. Clearly the team wasnt happy with what it saw there.

Heredia has appeared in 390 Major League games, mostly with the Mariners, and posted a combined .239/.317/.339 batting line. As a solid outfield defender with a bit of speed and a career .275/.338/.400 batting line against lefties, he can be a useful bench piece when hes at his best, but he wont get that opportunity with the Pirates, it seems. Pittsburgh will have a week to trade Heredia, release him or attempt to run him through outright waivers. Hed have enough service time to reject the outright assignment, but doing so would mean forfeiting the remainder of his guaranteed salary.
Her husband, George T. Conway III, a prominent conservative lawyer who has become an outspoken critic of Mr. Trumps, said Sunday on Twitter that he was stepping back from the anti-Trump group he has been advising, the Lincoln Project. Mr. Conway said he would also take a hiatus from his Twitter account, where he regularly criticizes the president and his aides.

The Conways have known Mr. Trump for nearly 15 years, meeting him in New York when he was a real estate developer. In 2011, when Mr. Trump was considering running for president, Ms. Conway, then a pollster with her own company, was one of the people Mr. Trump consulted with about a possible campaign.

Since the 2016 campaign, when she served as Mr. Trumps final campaign manager, Ms. Conway has been one of the presidents most visible defenders, winning his admiration for animated sparring sessions with cable news hosts  and earning criticism and derision from the presidents detractors. Ms. Conway also advised Vice President Mike Pence when he was the governor of Indiana.

During her time at the White House, she has asserted herself when other senior administration officials, including Jared Kushner, the presidents son-in-law, and aides who have long since departed, like Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, and Reince Priebus, Mr. Trumps first chief of staff, have tried to minimize her. She has stepped into the void by helping to shape communications strategy and speaking to reporters when the White House has had few aides willing to defend the president or his policies publicly. Most recently, she has attended all of the coronavirus task force briefings, and encouraged Mr. Trump to restart his daily news conferences.

Mr. Trump and his family members have defended Ms. Conway even as her husband, who had initially been tapped for a job in the administration, became an outspoken critic of the president, accusing him regularly of having narcissistic personality disorder.








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MARKHAM /CNW/ - Infra-red(IR)/AI technology, created by Canadian company Longan Vision in partnership with Convergence Health Care Solutions (CHCS), enables distanced temperature taking at a number of facilities in the GTA, including a long term care (LTC) facility in Markham.

Along with its own proprietary remote monitoring system, CHCS has had this technology already in operation at the Mon Sheong LTC facility in Markham, ON, helping the facility achieve zero COVID-19 infections.

The technology bundle of two infra-red cameras with computer interface enables the reception desk in any building to take the temperature of visitors up to eight people and residents from up to 18 feet (5.4metres) away, clearly displaying the temperature of all the people measured within its capture radius. This platform will make invasive, handheld thermometers obsolete. A live media demonstration was held at the Mon Sheong LTC facility in Markham on August 20th at 11 am.

"This has made it possible to use innovation to make things easier and more efficient," says Tim Kwan, Chairman of the Mon Sheong Foundation (MSF), which operates 11 seniors' facilities in the GTA. "It provides peace of mind for staff, residents and visitors alike, and saves nurse and PSW (personal support worker) time," he adds.

Founded by Jasmine Wang and Steven Wang, CHCS was created to provide innovative solutions for seniors which include an IoT(Internet of Things) system that can constantly monitor to detect falls, sudden changes in heart rate, blood oxygen level, or distress calls providing ample time for effective assistance for LTC residents. Such an IoT system is currently being piloted at Mon Sheong Private Care.

About the Mon Sheong Foundation (MSF)

MSF, one of the largest charities in Ontario, currently operates three LTC facilities, four senior living facilities and two private care facilities. Another LTC facility with more than 300 beds is being built in Stouffville. For more information, please go to www.monsheong.org

About Convergence Health Care Solutions (CHCS)

The main mission of CHCS is to empower seniors with AI, machine learning and big data to improve the quality of care at LTCs and senior homes in Canada. CHCS provides an AI-driven platform and IoT solutions that connect all smart devices to advance the state of senior care. After careful and extensive research, CHCS found an infra-red temperature screening system is the least evasive and most cost effective method in the market. This is an effective preventative measure for Covid-19 infection when we enter reopening stages.

About Longan Vision

Based in Hamilton, ON, Longan Vision engineers products that keep people safe. Longan Vision specializes in applying thermal imaging hardware and optical technologies to provide robust, state-of-the-art solutions. The flagship product of Longan Vision is the Fusion Vision System (FVS).
(Natural News) Intelligent, skillful doctors and brave, compassionate nurses are doing their best to respond to the many challenges of the current covid-19 crisis. Despite their valiant efforts, covid-19 will never be solved through the portals of todays medical system because Western medicine has been strategically engineered, over several decades, to profit from sickness and vanquish healing modalities.

The origins of Western medicine go back to John D. Rockefeller and a band of oil tycoons who expanded their business operations by hijacking U.S. medicine supplies, by controlling the information taught at U.S. medical schools, and by persecuting doctors and suppressing natural medicines that had worked for hundreds of years. The current suppression of chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, chlorine dioxide, zinc, artemisinin (sweet wormwood), glycyrrhizin, flavonoids, and other immune system-supporting vitamins is just the tip of the iceberg, revealing how greedy pharmaceutical companies harm human lives for profit, hindering patient outcomes.

Todays error-prone medical system is the product of petroleum tycoons who suppressed botanical medicines

When it was discovered that petroleum could be manufactured into patentable, highly profitable drugs, Rockefeller seized the opportunity to expand his petroleum business, infiltrating U.S. medicine with highly addictive coal-tar drug formulations. Rockefeller bought a German pharmaceutical company that manufactured chemical weapons for Adolf Hitler, and he quickly put it to use, infiltrating U.S. medicine supplies with an assembly line of sickly, immune-suppressant drugs that contribute to infectious disease complications, chronic diseases and cancers that are occurring at rapid pace today.

New coal-tar formulations were developed to suppress symptoms in patients. These drugs never addressed the whole individual and led to new cycles of side effects and health problems that made the entire medical system more profitable.

Hundreds of years of healing wisdom buried by Rockefellers domineering, coal-tar drug submission system

Rockefeller used his growing fortune to control Congress, coercing U.S. representatives to denounce natural healing modalities as unscientific quackery. As he took control over the American Medical Association, Rockefeller offered large grants to medical schools as long as they taught his version of medicine and treatment. It wasnt long before profitable drugs replaced the un-patentable molecules from nature that had been studied and used with success for hundreds of years. As medical curriculum became controlled, the science of medicine and its progress were buried. The use of nutrients and specific phyto-chemicals and their combinations were forbidden in medical schools. Over time, medical professionals became ignorant of the ways in which the body healed, adapted and how the mind and heart played a role in the process.

The original medicines were erased from medical textbooks, and doctors that tried to pass on this wisdom to save lives, were swiftly persecuted by the Rockefeller-controlled media. The media attacks were so severe, they led to the persecution of doctors. These doctors who refused the Rockefeller model were stripped of their license, arrested and jailed. Rockefellers petroleum-based drugs replaced hundreds of years of phyto-chemical compounds and botanical medicines that were instrumental in helping people recover from infectious disease and other health issues.

The pharmaceutical industry now spends billions of dollars annually to influence laws, policies and public perception, perpetuating the John D. Rockefeller way. Covid-19 cannot be solved entirely by this system, nor can any infectious disease be erased because the origins of this system are the root of the problem. The truth is that medical error is the third leading cause of death in America, consuming more lives than covid-19, while in many ways contributing to the overall mortality rate of this infectious disease.

For more on helping the immune system to help prevent sickness, visit ImmuneSystem.News.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalPedia.com

NaturalPedia.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:39:44|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- UN Undersecretary-General for UN Counter-Terrorism Office Vladimir Voronkov on Monday called for attention to new challenges brought by COVID-19 to counter-terrorism efforts.

"This pandemic environment raises several strategic and practical challenges for counter-terrorism," Voronkov told the Security Council.

The Islamic State (IS) and other terrorist groups seek to exploit the far-reaching disruption and negative socio-economic and political impacts of the pandemic. Strengthening collective action and international counter-terrorism cooperation must remain a priority during and after the pandemic, he said.

Since the start of the year, there have seen contrasting regional disparities in the threat trajectory. In conflict zones, the threat has increased, as evidenced by the IS regrouping and increasing activity in Iraq and Syria. In non-conflict zones, the threat appears to have decreased in the short term. Measures to minimize the spread of COVID-19, such as lockdowns and restrictions on movement, seem to have reduced the risk of terrorist attacks in many countries, said Voronkov.

Yet, there is a continued trend of attacks by individuals inspired online and acting alone or in small groups, which could be fueled by the IS opportunistic propaganda efforts during the COVID-19 crisis, he warned.

The pandemic's impact on recruitment and fundraising activities remains unclear, as its socio-economic fallout could exacerbate conditions conducive to terrorism and increase the medium- to long-term threat, both within and outside conflict zones, he said.

Meanwhile, there is no clear indication of a change in the IS strategic direction under its new leader. Command and control arrangements between the IS core and its remote "provinces" have continued to loosen, thereby strengthening regional affiliates, he said. Enditem
Rescue workers search for survivors after four-storey building containing nursing home and family apartments topples.

Rescuers have stepped up a desperate effort to find survivors buried under the rubble of a collapsed building in Indias largest city, Mumbai, as the death toll rose to at least 17.

The four-storey building in Mumbais eastern suburb of Ghatkopar housed a nursing home on the ground floor and three to four families on each of the other floors.

Seventeen have died and 28 people have been rescued, Tanaji Kamble, a disaster management spokesman for Mumbais civic administrative body, told AFP.

The disaster on Tuesday morning was the latest to highlight poor construction standards in India.

The Ghatkopar building is at least 40 years old.

READ MORE: Deadly building collapse in western India

The building wasnt on the list of dilapidated buildings, Mumbai Mayor Vishwanath Mahadeshwar told reporters on Tuesday.

We will investigate whether the building fell because of an alteration in the structure.

Search and rescue operations went on amid sporadic rain showers on Wednesday.

There was a hospital at the basement of the building that was conducting renovation work, which could have led to the collapse of the building, Prakash Mehta, housing minister for the western state of Maharashtra, told reporters.

The chief minister of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, ordered an investigation into the latest incident after reports that renovation work was going on at the site at the time of the collapse.

READ MORE: Death toll rises in Mumbai building collapse

Mumbai is particularly vulnerable with millions forced to live in cramped, ramshackle properties because of rising property prices and a lack of housing for the poor.

A dilapidated building left 12 people dead when it collapsed near the city in August 2015. Nine people died the same month when another old three-storey building collapsed in monsoon rain in the Mumbai suburb of Thakurli.

In 2013, 60 people were killed when a residential block came crashing down in one of Mumbais worst housing disasters.
The recent increase in COVID-19 cases was expected as Toronto moved into Stage 3 of re-opening, but everyone needs to keep following safe practices to avoid the kind of resurgence experienced in other parts of the world, medical experts warned Monday.

Its entirely predictable, said epidemiologist Dr. David Fisman, of the University of Torontos Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

He said that recent increases were lower than they would have been had people not abided by the city bylaw that makes it mandatory to wear a mask in indoor public places, but the increased contact permitted under Stage 3 does give the virus more opportunity to spread.

Thats just how this goes  its not magic. More contact, more transmission, said Fisman.

Toronto entered Stage 3 on July 31, allowing most businesses to re-open with social distancing protocols in place.

Since then, by any measure, the rate of new COVID-19 infections in the city has been on the rise.

According to the Stars count, which is based on the citys daily public updates, Toronto averaged 26.4 new infections each day last week. Thats the most for any seven days since late July and more than double the 13.1 cases per day the city averaged the last week Toronto was in Stage 2.

The latest Toronto Public Health data, which is based on the health units internal database, shows a similar increase this month  the seven-day average has risen from 15.9 to 25 cases a day so far in August. TPH says it considers the seven-day average a better reflection of the situation than any single days given total.

Whether the recent increase signals a long-term upswing heading into the fall is less clear. The rate of new cases is still a long way from the pandemics peak in Toronto  the seven-day average hit a high of nearly 230 cases a day in late May.

Previous case spikes have been followed by equally steep drops, and even considering the recent increase, Torontos rate of infection is near the lowest it has been since late March.

Can we do better, absolutely? But we could also be doing a lot worse, too, said epidemiologist Dr. Isaac Bogoch, infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto and Toronto General Hospital.

In a perfect world wed want this continuous decline until we truly have no new cases. Elimination would be amazing, but its probably not that feasible given the size of the city the density of the city, the disparities income that exist, and of course, how contagious this infection truly is.

While the numbers are at these levels, the disease is easier to manage  test results are returned more quickly, contact tracing can be conducted rapidly, and fewer resources need to be allocated to keeping the illness under control.

But people have to continue social distancing, wearing masks and washing their hands, and businesses and organizations need to maintain safe conditions in the workplace, Bogoch said.

If we all do our jobs, well do okay and well get through this in a much smoother manner, but if this chain is broken at any part, or multiple parts, well be in for some turbulent times.

Other jurisdictions in Canada, including parts of Alberta and B.C., have experienced resurgences, and so have other countries around the world, including Spain and South Korea.

Dr. Eileen de Villa, Torontos Medical Officer of Health, said Monday that whether or not Toronto has to reinstate more stringent rules does not depend on any single factor.

Risk will go up as more and more people interact with each other. I think thats the very simple reality of our circumstances. Thats why its so important that we continue to maintain those public health measures as much as we are tired of doing so, she said.

There were 33 new cases of COVID-19 in Toronto on Monday, de Villa said. There have been 1,165 deaths in the city so far.

Ed Tubb is an assignment editor and a contributor focused on crime and justice for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @edtubb

Francine Kopun is a Toronto-based reporter covering city hall and municipal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KopunF
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 23:45:34|Editor: huaxia

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GENEVA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Three members of the "small body" of the Syrian Constitutional Committee, who are currently attending the new round of peace talks here, have tested positive for COVID-19, the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria said in a statement on Monday. Enditem
Russia's FM: Belarusian opposition members who left for West seek 'bloodshed'

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 3:56 PM

Russia has accused Belarusian opposition members, who have left the country for West amid violent protests over election results, of seeking "bloodshed."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Sunday that Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya who left the country for West two weeks ago, had been "pressured" as she started to make more statements in English recently, Russia's RIA news agency reported.

The Russian foreign minister further noted that it is impossible to prove that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko did not win the vote in the absence of international observers.

Lavrov said Moscow calls for the launch of a genuinely broad national dialogue in Belarus following weeks of large-scale rioting in the Eastern European country.

Despite President Lukashenko's pledge to take "stringent measures" to defend his country's territorial integrity against the protests, the opposition leader warned that Lukashenko should "step away" and "it is better for everybody".

Lukashenko defeated Tikhanovskaya in the August 9 presidential poll by winning over 80 percent of the vote, according to the official Central Election Commission.

Rejecting the election results, Tikhanovskaya then departed Belarus for neighboring Lithuania and established a Coordination Council for the transition of power in Belarus amid raging protests that led to violent clashes with police and arrest of thousands.

EU foreign ministers threatened last week to prepare new sanctions against the Belarusian officials over what they described as "violence, repression and the falsification of election results."

The Belarusian president has expressed concern about foreign meddling in the internal affairs of his country. Last week, he warned about potential military action by US-led NATO against Belarus.

EU pledges money for "Belarus people" in clear act of interference

In a related development, the European Union has said that it would provide financial support to the Belarusian "people" amid ongoing protests, vowing to sanction those responsible for "repressing" the results of the presidential election.

The comments were made by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at a joint press conference with European Council President Charles Michel, following a video conference of the European Council members on the situation in Belarus.

"First, on the support. We already provide a lot of support to Belarus through the Eastern Partnership. But now, it is more important than ever to be there for the Belarus people and to reprogram money away from the authorities and towards civil society and vulnerable groups. The European Commission will mobilize now an additional EUR 53 million to support the Belarusian people in these challenging times", von der Leyen said in a statement.

"But as we increase our support to the people of Belarus, we must be firm with those that rigged the elections", she said, adding that "there was unanimous support for the EU to be working on sanctions against those responsible for what is taking place".

Von der Leyen further said the EU stands ready to accompany "peaceful democratic transition of power in Belarus", noting that it supports the opening of dialogue between Belarusian authorities and the opposition.

An emergency European Union summit on Belarus was held on August 19, during which leaders of 27 EU states, as well as heads of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council approved a concluding statement that says the EU does not recognize the outcome of the Belarusian election and further demands a transparent probe into police violence.

The EU and the US have long accused Lukashenko of human rights violations because of his close ties with Russia. The European bloc has also used those allegations to impose sanctions on the 65-year-old president but removed them in 2016.

President Lukashenko hit out at the US and its allied European nations, saying they are sponsoring violent protests by opposition supporters across the country following his landslide re-election victory.

"The US is planning and directing it, and the Europeans are playing along," BelTA news agency quoted Lukashenko as saying Friday.

"A special center" has been set-up near the Polish capital of Warsaw for the effort", the Belarusian president noted.

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TikTok on August 24 sued US President Donald Trump over his executive order banning transactions in the United States with the popular short-form video-sharing app, calling it a pretext to fuel anti-China rhetoric as he seeks re-election.

TikTok and its parent ByteDance rejected what they called the White Houses position that it was a national security threat, saying they had taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikToks US user data.

They also called Trumps call in his August 6 executive order for a TikTok ban a means to further his alleged broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric ahead of the November 3 US presidential election, where Trump is seeking a second term.

We do not take suing the government lightly, TikTok said in a blog post. But with the Executive Order threatening to bring a ban on our US operations...we simply have no choice.

The White House referred a request for comment to the US Department of Justice, which had no immediate response.

TikTok and ByteDance are seeking a permanent injunction to block Trump from enforcing his August 6 order.

The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court names Trump, the US Department of Commerce and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as defendants.

Amid growing distrust between Washington and Beijing, Trump had for weeks complained that TikTok was a national security threat that might share information about users with the Chinese government.

His August 6 executive order called for banning transactions with the app after 45 days.

Trump issued a separate executive order on August 14 giving ByteDance 90 days to divest TikToks US operations and any data TikTok had gathered in the United States.

Reuters reported last week that TikTok had been preparing a legal challenge.

ByteDance had acquired Shanghai-based video app Musical.ly in a $1 billion transaction in 2017, and relaunched it as TikTok the following year.

TikTok said the Trump administration violated its constitutional right to due process by banning the company without notice.

It accused Trump of misusing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets the president regulate international commerce during a national emergency.

Trump had in May 2019 invoked that law to stop alleged efforts by foreign telecommunications companies to conduct economic and industrial espionage against the United States.

The Trump administration have said Americans should be cautious in using TikTok. Under a law introduced in 2017 under President Xi Jinping, Chinese companies have an obligation to support and cooperate in Chinas national intelligence work.

But TikTok said Trumps August 6 was not rooted in genuine national security concerns or supported by the emergency he had declared a year earlier.

It called the order a gross misappropriation of IEEPA authority and a pretext for furthering the Presidents broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric in the run-up to the US election.

ByteDance has been in talks to sell TikToks North American, Australian and New Zealand operations to companies including Microsoft Corporation and Oracle Corporation.

Those assets could be worth $25 billion to $30 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.

Before buying TikTok, ByteDance had not sought advance approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews acquisitions for potential national security risks.

CFIUS later opened an investigation, and according to TikTok repeatedly refused to engage with ByteDance before saying it had found national security risks associated with the purchase.
The unique mantis shrimp is a fascinating crustacean that has incredible characteristics, not the least of which is its impressive punch. It is not a shrimp, nor is it a mantis. It is merely 10 centimeters or four inches in length.





Incredible Characteristics

It has a weird set of eyes that can detect cancer even before any symptoms show up. Furthermore, it has a fantastic appendage.

The eyes may be its weirdest features, but its punches are even more mysterious. They are fearsome because they are the fastest ever recorded in an ocean animal. It can punch 23 meters each second with a force of 1,500 newtons each punch.

David Kisailus, the material scientist from the University of California, says that if a human does that, they can break their fist. It impressed the researchers and prompted them to study the animal.

When the research team carefully examined the creature, they discovered that the animal had a coating made of impact-resistant nano-particles. This enabled it to use its appendage for reckless punching, with its coating dissipating the brunt of the force and absorbing it.

Some other mantis shrimp species can even use their claws in a spring-loaded hammering function. These smasher mantis shrimps employ split-second smashing movements to hit hard-bodied crab and snail prey, cracking open their tough shells to access the soft tissues inside and eat them.





READ: Giant Panda Gives Birth at Smithsonian National Museum





Past Studies on the Animal

Scientists have known these abilities from previous studies, which examined the various ways that the animal effectively uses their clubs. Some researchers even used the mantis shrimp and its equipment to create durable materials that are not presently found in nature.

According to the research team in their new study, the past researches showed the capacity of the animal comes from its helicoidally-arranged, alpha-chitin, mineralized fibers with a herringbone architecture.

According to the team, these past studies provided insights on the toughening mechanisms of the appendage. However, they still haven't shed light on how the mantis shrimp copes with the strenuous, high rate, and multiple impact effects it feels from its clubbing movements.





The New Study

The research team published their results in the journal Nature Materials. In the study, the researchers utilized atomic force microscopy and transmission electron microscopy to look into the minute surface composition of the club of peacock mantis shrimps (scientific name Odontodactylus scyllarus). They discovered that its coating is composed of a dense mineral hydroxyapatite matrix configured in a nano-crystal structural formation.

As the animal hits a surface, its hydroxyapatite matrix configuration rotates, while the nano-crystal structure gets fractured which then reforms slowly afterward.

Kisailus says that with lower rates of strain, its particles get deformed, which then recover after the stress is gone. With high tension, however, the particles instead get stiff and get fractured in the interfaces of the nano-crystal. They break, but they then open new surface points which serve to dissipate significant energy.





READ ALSO: Female Biker Attacked by Bison for Getting Too Close to Herd





Future Applications

The mechanism is better than artificially engineered stiffening and dampening materials. As it is better than most technical ceramics and metals, the future shows promise regarding other applications. Kisailus says similar articles can enhance surfaces in vehicles, armor, and helmets.





From the initial discovery of its forceful punch, the mantis shrimp now deserves a closer look and further research.





READ NEXT: Department of Fish and Wildlife Says Freshwater Jellyfish Exist in Kentucky

Check out for more news and information on Mantis Shrimp on Nature World News.
The Bay Area caught a rare break Monday when an anticipated flurry of lightning strikes never materialized, and more help poured in from out of state to quell three gigantic wildfires covering the region.

Yet the scale of damage from those blazes is coming into focus, as they devour houses and forests at a ferocious pace with little containment.

We are essentially living in a megafire era, Santa Clara Cal Fire Unit Chief Jake Hess said Monday, describing out-of-control wildfires that grow more complicated and destructive by the year. He warned that early and large evacuations will become more common as emergency crews scramble to keep up.

Even on a day of relative calm, the winds could shift at any moment, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday, linking the massive fires to climate change. The new conditions  short springs, arid summers and intense weather  are precipitating fires like we havent seen in modern recorded history, the governor said.

Heavy thunderstorms skipped over the Bay Area Sunday night, sparing residents the lightning strikes that sparked hundreds of wildfires last week, creating the current crisis. Instead, the tempests dumped water and a bit of lightning over the Central Valley and in the Sierra Nevada. The Tahoe region endured a lightning storm around 4:30 a.m. and winds of 45 mph.

Most of the Bay Area dodged a bullet, said Roger Gass, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Ten new fires started in other parts of the state, but the onslaught was not nearly as bad as anticipated. And with the weather cooling a bit, the California fire battle  now being waged with more than 14,000 firefighters and more than 2,400 engines  is getting a much-needed assist from nature.

Newsom added that the state has housed 2,211 evacuees in hotel rooms and 17 shelters across the state. And he said California issued safety protocols to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in those shelters, including requiring a health screening upon entrance. Masks and social distancing are also mandatory.

But for fire crews in the Bay Area, it was the lack of lightning and even a little rain that fell that made the biggest impression. That was good news for the thousands of overstretched firefighters battling blazes in the north, east and south parts of the Bay Area, giving them no new big fires to contend with  just the existing ones, which were bad enough, even though crews made some progress overnight.

Weve had a lot of success, and obviously Mother Nature helped us quite a bit with moisture, increased humidity and reduced winds, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Assistant Chief Billy See said Monday at a briefing on the CZU Lightning Complex fires in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties. We will continue to progress as long as the conditions continue to improve.

That conflagration grew only a tad, to 78,684 acres, and containment expanded to 13%. Two hundred seventy-six structures have now been destroyed in both counties, and 25,000 others remainthreatened. More than 77,000 people have evacuated from the fire zone.

So far, the fire has claimed one fatality  73-year-old Tad Jones, who died in a remote area near the end of Last Chance Road. He was apparently trying to flee and was found near his vehicle, said a spokesman for the Santa Cruz Sheriffs Office. Four people in the county are missing.

In the North Bay, stretching down to Solano County, the LNU Lightning Complex  the second most widespread blaze in state history  reached 350,030 acres by Monday, with 22% containment. Cal Fire reported Monday that one more person had also been found dead in that fire, in Solano County, but further details were not available. Cal Fire had previously confirmed four earlier deaths.

Chris Waters, Cal Fire operations section chief, said that overall, conditions had improved in several areas of the fire  particularly in the Meyers Fire north of Jenner. Containment had improved to 95% with 2,360 acres burned. Sonoma County has not reported any deaths or missing people.

Weve got a pretty good handle on that one and were starting to think about repopulating the area, Waters said. He also said crews were working on getting Highway 1 in that area reopened.

Also within the LNU complex, the massive Hennessey Fire in the eastern zone now sits at 293,602 acres, with 26% containment, Cal Fire said.

None of that progress, however, could minimize the heartbreak left behind by the rampaging blazes.

It was utter devastation Monday near Spanish Flat, an area tucked next to the picturesque Lake Berryessa. The entire landscape was charred, and melted street signs stood on the side of the winding roads.

Firefighter Brandon North, 25, said his parents mobile home burned to the ground in a fire that tore through the area last week. It was a cruel irony for him, a firefighter, to have to evacuate his own neighborhood, and then watch his parents home go up in flames.

Ive been to big fires before out of county, he said. But its just a little different when its your front yard.

In Vacaville, Ken Albers slowly shuffled through his torched showroom Monday, passing three of his 16 classic Chevrolets, paint melted and charred, destroyed like the rest of his home.

The 72-year-old retired land surveyor had lived on the 5-acre property for 30 years with his 72-year-old wife, Marci. They were both lifelong collectors. Marci lost her 500 Ginny dolls, stamp collection, antiques, and Ken lost his 500-piece toy train set and 200 plastic car models. And all the classic Chevys melted and roasted  eight were Corvettes.

Its pretty devastating, Ken said. Theres nothing left of the house but the chimney.

The SCU Lightning Complex of fires raging in Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara and several other counties grew to 347,196 acres, with just 10% containment. Twelve structures have been destroyed, and 12 more damaged, Cal Fire reported. Its the third-biggest fire in state history in terms of area burned.

Despite Mondays dawning with no local lightning strikes, Bay Area fire and weather officials cautioned that there was still some danger of dry lightning hitting throughout the day, and that the region remained stretched thin on firefighting crews because of the unexpectedly huge spread of the blazes.

Meanwhile, with fire smoke clogging the air nearly everywhere, air quality remained unhealthy in parts of the East Bay Monday, though it improved a bit throughout the Bay Area as a whole.

The worst air quality in the region, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, was in Livermore, Pleasanton, Concord and Vallejo. Each of those cities reported unhealthy levels of particulate matter from wildfire smoke.

Those readings were at least improvements over Sunday, when Livermore and Pleasanton experienced hazardous levels of pollution, the worst rating. San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose all reported moderate air quality.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Dustin Gardiner, Ryan Kost and Dominic Fracassa contributed to this report.

Kevin Fagan, Trisha Thadani, Matthias Gafni and Rachel Swan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com, tthadani@sfchronicle.com, matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com, rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron, @TrishaThadani, @mgafni, @rachelswan
MUMBAI: A team of CBI officials probing the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput on Monday (Augsut 24) once again visited Mumbai's Waterstone Resort. This is the second visit of the CBI to the resort since Sunday.

On August 23, the CBI team was there for over two hours, trying to determine how Sushant behaved during his stay at the place.

According to reports, Sushant's girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty had allegedly made the late actor stay at the resort for nearly two months and had also called a spiritual healer. The spiritual leader had met Sushant on November 22 and 23.

The CBI today called the spiritual healer for interrogation at the resort.

As per sources, CBI officials will look for the following clues at the Waterstone resort:

 The duration and frequency of Sushant's arrival and stay at this resort.

 Who all accompanied Sushant during his stay to the resort.

 Who all had visited the actor at the resort.

 Who made the payment for the stay at the resort.

 Did Rhea ever visit the resort after Sushant left from here.

 CCTV footage of the resort during Sushant's stay.

CBI is also questioning and taking statements of a few staff of the resort.

According to reports, CBI officials will on Monday continue to interrogate Sushant's flatmate Siddharth Pithani in connection with the case.

The probe agency sleuths had on Sunday questioned Pithani, Sushant's cook Neeraj Singh and domestic aid Deepesh Sawant for several hours. These three persons were reportedly present in the flat when Sushant was found dead.

Later in the day on Sunday, officials visited Sushant's flat in Bandra along with Pithani, Neeraj and Deepesh Sawant. Forensic science experts were also part of the CBI team which visited Sushant's home.

This was the second time CBI officials visited the 34-year-old actor's home. On Saturday also, the CBI team accompanied by Siddharth Pithani, Neeraj and Deepesh visited Sushant's house to reconstruct the sequence of events before he was found dead.

The Supreme Court had on Wednesday upheld the transfer of an FIR, lodged by Sushant Singh Rajput's father in Patna against Rhea Chakraborty for allegedly abetting his suicide, to the CBI.

Sushant was found dead in his apartment on June 14. Mumbai Police said he died by suicide.

Later, Sushant Singh Rajput's father filed a police complaint in Patna, accusing Rhea Chakraborty and her family of abetting the actor's suicide and misappropriating his money.
Many things can easily be explained with reasonable, logical, yet simple analysis. That is the purpose of this article: to explain what 5G is and to refute the notion that 5G causes coronavirus. Last week, I got a couple of the I hear 5G can even cause cancers and coronavirus so beware of technology.

Theres this theory that 5G can cause you to fall sick. That theory came about when the map of 5G Towers got superimposed with the map of COVID-19 infection cases. It looks almost like everywhere you find a 5G Tower, youll find coronavirus cases. And it really is true, the maps do look alike.

But one doesnt cause the other. 5G doesnt cause coronavirus.

Thing is, population density maps also show similar concentrations and if you take a minute and think it through, just a little, youll find that 5G Towers are built in places where you find more people. And coronavirus cases have a high tally in higher populated areas than say, a village. Sometimes, we need to pause and ask ourselves is there a simple, logical explanation to this theory. So it helps to know what actually 5G is.

What IS 5G?

5G is primarily a software-defined network. This means that while it wont replace the use cables entirely, it could replace the need for them, by largely operating on a cloud instead. This will allow it to have 100 times the capacity of 4G, dramatically improving internet speeds.

For example, to download a 2-hour film on 3G takes about 26 hours. With 4G technology it should take about 6 minutes. With 5G the movie would be downloaded in about 3.6 seconds. If you lived through the period of LimeWire with all of the hustle and joy that accompanied downloading a 3MB song in 60 minutes, this is even more futuristic that youd have envisioned.

Response Times will be Much Faster.

But its not just internet capacity that will be upgraded with the introduction of 5G. Response times will also be much faster. The 4G network responds to our commands in about 45 milliseconds (0.045sec). With 5G, it would take around 1 millisecond (0.001sec). That is 400 times faster than the blink of the eye.

Smartphone users will enjoy a more streamlined experience. For a world that is increasingly dependent on the internet just to function, a reduction in time delay is critical. Almost everything is about the internet now. At first, the internet was confined to computers. Then the use of mobile phones became synonymous with using the internet. Now we have TVs, fridges, even watches that have internet functionality.

5G will make Progressive Innovation functional.

Self-driving cars, for instance, is a very tangible example of an innovation that clearly demonstrates why and how imperative the role of 5G is in innovation and global advancement in many fields. This is because some new technologies can only be properly introduced to the mainstream public when paired with 5G technology.

Self-driving cars require a continuous stream of data. The quicker that information is delivered to vehicles that have no human being driving it, the better and safer they can run. Without that dependability of quick and smooth data flow, the car as a machine without timely instructions through data transfer will malfunction in many ways. It wouldnt be much of a self-driving car.

The above example is one instance of how 5G could become the connective tissue for the internet of things. Technological advancement will largely depend on the reliability that 5G will bring. 5G technology will spark an industry that will grow 3 folds by 2025, linking and controlling not just robots, but medical devices, industrial equipment, and agricultural machinery.

5G will provide Personalised Web Experience.

5G will also provide a much more personalised web experience using a technique called network slicing. Network slicing is a way of creating separate wireless networks on the cloud, allowing users to create their own bespoke network.

You will be able to customise your own bandwidth requirements amongst others stuff too. Because, for example, an online gamer would need faster response times and greater data capacity than a user that just wants to check their social media.

Personalising the internet will also benefit businesses.

At big corporate events, like the ones that happen at Movenpick and Kempinski all the time, there is always a massive influx of people that congregate in one area using data-heavy applications. But with 5G, organisers could pay for an increased slice of that network, boosting the internet capacity, and thus improving the attendees overall online experience.

This goes for government functions too. Think of the Independence Day celebrations and how much data is consumed at such events. Think of how many people look down on their phones at the concert shows of Shatta Wale and Sarkodie to upload concert snippets to social media. Think of the streaming of church services.

Basically, wherever theres huge gathering, massive data is consumed. With 4G, consumption is at the same rate as it would be anywhere else. With 5G, organisers could pay network providers for a bigger slice of bandwidth so that while you are attending the program, you will consume data and use the internet at a much faster rate.

So when can we start using 5G?

Well, in Ghana, not yet. I keep reading some rumours but nothing conclusive. South Korea and the United States have already started the service. In the US, as the first half of last year came to a close, every major cellular network was officially offering 5G services to its subscribers. But the 5G coverage is not across the whole of the United States.

Mobile giants like HUAWEI and ZTE have also been getting ready to launch big 5G trials. The fierce brouhaha between the US Government and Huawei concerning a trade ban from Washington that inadvertently hurt the HUAWEIs 5G ambitions showcase just how pivotal the introduction of 5G is on a national scale. The race to effective rollout has been a hot one.

5G was created years ago. It has been talked up ever since because of all of its amazing applications. Yet it is estimated that even by 2025, the network will lag behind both 4G and 3G in terms of global mobile connections. Why?

5G requires higher costs to set up.

5Gs mainstream existence faces multiple hurdles. The most significant of these, of course, is cost. According to some experts, 5G could cause network operators to tear up their current business models, in order for the introduction of 5G to make business sense.

Im no expert, but 3G and 4G should have been relatively than 5G cheaper to set up. This is because they were able to roll out on existing frequencies on our countrys radio spectrum. However, for 5G to work properly, it would need a frequency with much bigger bandwidth. This would require brand new infrastructure and its accompanying costs.

Some analysts believe that the extensive building and running costs will force operators to share the use and management of the 5G mobile network. It is already happening. This has been less of an obstacle for countries like China.

The Chairman of China Telecom, Ke Ruiwen, said last year, Co-building and co-sharing would bring great savings in capital expenditure, operating expenditure, as well as improve resource utilization. The company had reached a tentative agreement with its rival, China Unicom, to jointly build a 5G network and share parts of the infrastructure. This has the potential to cut multi-billion dollar equipment orders from vendors. When two share one, theres no need for separate one for either.

The West and 5G

The advancement of 5G in countries like China may be at the expense of the West, where there has been concerns about Asias 5G program. Last year, leaked memo from the US National Security Council to the White House called for a nationalised 5G network to keep the US ahead of their global competitors.

Some dismiss the idea, but other experts predict that by 2025, nearly 50% of all mobile connections in the US will be 5G, a greater percentage than any other country or region. It is however still much more likely that much of the West will have a more gradual approach to 5G, driven by competition but with a more sequenced style of development, a few regions at a time.

Ghana and 5G

The mobile networks have called for the acquisition of a 5G spectrum, in line with the continuous evolution of the communications industry worldwide. It is interesting that while Ghana operates the 4G network, very few use it.

The Communications Minister, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, was spot on last year when she asserted that It is only a matter of time before connected 5G devices will be on our streets and homes, and we have to look and plan ahead and look at the kind of infrastructure we need to put in place to support this evolution taking place.

She again said last year, All the major equipment manufacturers are deploying the 5G offerings currently. Theres a 10-year evolutionary cycle between the various levels of deployment of spectrum. So we are on the verge of transitioning from 4G to 5G. It will take a while before it trickles down to our part of the world but Im excited that we are working with Nokia to begin the trials. Ive asked Huawei and they have said that their 4G equipment is scalable through software upgrades and so its 5G ready.

So 5G is coming!

Obviously many of us will have our first 5G experience through our smartphones. 5G could even change how we get the internet at home and at work, because the wireless network will replace the current system of phone lines and cables.

When 5G does establish itself and fulfil its supposed potential, its most compelling influence may be better appreciated when we analyse how it connects us to everything else.

It may not happen overnight, but 5G is coming! AND IT DOES NOT CAUSE COVID-19.

Hit me up on social media and lets keep the conversation going! I read all the feedback you send me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Go to bit.ly/maxwrites to read all my previous articles.

Have a lovely week!
Charlize Theron has been enjoying some quality family time with her daughters, as they quarantine at home.

And the Academy Award winner is getting back to her professional life, as well as her social life, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

She cut a hip look Sunday in a grey tie-dye button-down jumpsuit, as she took daughters Jackson and August to dinner with friends at celeb favorite Nobu in Malibu.

Dinner attire: Charlize Theron cut a hip look Sunday in a grey tie-dye button-down jumpsuit, as she took daughters Jackson and August to dinner with friends at celeb favorite Nobu in Malibu

The 45-year-old paired the loose-fit number with a brown fedora, tortoiseshell clubmasters, gold necklaces and a pair of brown Birkenstock sandals.

She carried a brown leather handbag, while taking precautions against COVID-19 in a floral face mask from Werkshop.

Theron also carried a colorful children's backpack, as she was accompanied by Jackson, eight, August, five, and what appeared to be her mother Gerda Maritz in a face mask.

She recently threw a virtual party for her 45th birthday, which was attended by Jackson and August, whom she rarely posts about on social media.

Accessorizing: The 45-year-old paired the loose-fit number with a brown fedora, tortoiseshell clubmasters, gold necklaces, a Werkshop face mask, and a pair of brown Birkenstock sandals

Family outing: She was accompanied by Jackson, eight, August, five, and what appeared to be her mother Gerda Maritz in a face mask

The Atomic Blonde star adopted Jackson from South Africa in 2012, before adopting August in 2015.

She revealed last month on the podcast InCharge With DVF that her desire to adopt went back to when she was a child.

Theron told host Diane von Furstenberg: 'My mom has a letter that I wrote to her when I was 8 years old. In the letter I ask her if we could, for Christmas, go to an orphanage and adopt a brother or sister for me.

'Shes like, "You never asked me to have another baby. You never asked me to have a little brother or sister for you. You just immediately went to adoption."'

Birthday girl: Theron recently threw a virtual party for her 45th birthday, which was attended by Jackson and August, whom she rarely posts about on social media

Proud mom: The Atomic Blonde star adopted Jackson from South Africa in 2012, before adopting August in 2015

Single and fabulous: She's been raising her daughters with the help of Maritz, but she revealed that August wants her to start dating (pictured in February, 2020)

The Bombshell actress has been raising her daughters with the help of Maritz, but she revealed that August wants her to start dating.

She recounted: 'My little one said something like, "You need a boyfriend." And I said, "Actually, I dont."

'And shes like, "But you know what, just like, you need a boyfriend, you need like a relationship." And I was like, "I am in a relationship. Im in a relationship with myself right now."'

Theron dated Sean Penn, 60, from 2013 to 2015, and she revealed back in June that their rumored engagement was just that.
Emirates has decided on its preferred mix of new Boeing wide-body planes, with the focus likely to be on smaller aircraft rather than jumbo jets following a slump in demand amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a report said.

The Dubai-based carrier has been pushing to swap more of Boeings behemoth 777X jets - of which it has ordered 115 - for 787 Dreamliners. Emirates has finalised its position on the composition of the intake, Chief Operating Officer Adel Al Redha said in an interview recently, said the Bloomberg report.

Negotiations are ongoing, including on the timing of the plane deliveries, Al Redha said.

Emirates prefers to take the smaller Dreamliner sooner rather than later as it offers better seat capacity at a time when demand for international travel is flagging, he said.

Boeing wants to hand over the larger 777X first, the COO said, in line with an agreement made before the coronavirus tore up the plans of airlines around the world. I think Boeing would prefer to deliver the 777s before 787 because that is a new program for them, Al Redha said. The Chicago-based planemaker declined to comment, said the report.
US Economy Expanded in July but at Slower Pace, Fed Says

The U.S. economy continued to expand in July, though at a slower pace than in June, suggesting a trend of slower but still above-average economic growth as the country continues its fitful rebound from the lows of the CCP virus fallout, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago shows.

The Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) came in at 1.18 in July, down from 5.33 in June, according to an Aug. 24 release. Economists polled by FactSet expected the index to register a substantially higher value of 4.0, so the Feds figures are a surprise to the downside.

Still, since a positive index reading reflects growth above trend, while a negative reading corresponds to growth below trend, the current number of 1.18 suggests slower but still well-above-average growth, the Fed stated.

Positive contributions to the index were made by production-related indicators, including in manufacturing.

Its not surprising to see a pickup in manufacturing as the economy has started to reopen, even though pockets of the country have pulled back on their reopenings, said Lindsey Bell, chief investment strategist at Ally Invest. Its an encouraging sign and it supports the upside we have seen in the markets.

Separate IHS Markit survey reports released last week showed that in August, U.S. business activity snapped back to its highest levels since early 2019, as companies in both manufacturing and services sectors saw a resurgence in new orders.

Personal consumption and housing also made positive contributions to the Fed index, but only slightly, dropping to 0.02 in July from 0.42 in June. Personal consumption contributes around 70 percent to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).

Last weeks home sales data for July showed deals rising at a record pace for the second straight month, providing another glimmer of growth in Americas economy.

Employment-related indicators contributed 0.38 points to the Fed index in July, down from 1.94 in June. This reflects a possibly weakening trend in the labor market, in line with recent nonfarm payroll and jobless data, which shows that the economy added 1.8 million jobs in July after adding a record 4.8 million in June, while the unemployment rate fell by 0.9 percentage points in July after falling by 2.2 percentage points in June.

Last week also brought a Labor Department announcement of a rise in U.S. jobless claims, while Federal Reserve minutes released on Aug. 19 showed officials worried that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus would continue to be a drag on the economy.

Fed officials said that prospects for further substantial improvement in the labor market would depend on a broad and sustained reopening of businesses. In turn, such a reopening would depend in large part on the efficacy of health measures taken to limit the spread of the virus, the minutes show.

Another measure of note in the Chicago Feds data is the so-called diffusion index, with readings above minus 0.35 historically associated with economic growth.

The diffusion index surged to 0.62 in July from 0.14 in June, suggesting economic growth continues to rise.

A Reuters survey of more than 110 economists taken Aug. 1420 found that respondents believe the U.S. economy would grow 18.8 percent on an annualized basis in the third quarter, after shrinking a record 32.9 percent in the last quarter.
Visitors to the India Mobile Congress 2019 look around at the Samsung Electronics' booth in this Oct. 15, 2019 photo. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics



By Baek Byung-yeul



Samsung Electronics is expected to have a small but meaningful benefit from the Indian government's plans to exclude Chinese network equipment makers  Huawei and ZTE  from its plan to launch 5G network trials this year, industry analysts said Sunday.



They said the Indian government's possible ban on the Chinese vendors would help improve Samsung's position in the lucrative 5G network equipment business. Samsung is the world's fourth-largest 5G equipment maker behind Huawei, Ericsson of Sweden and Nokia of Finland.



However, they added it is too soon to say whether the Korean tech company will be buoyed by the Huawei ban as the Scandinavian makers are expected to fill the gap, and India has not even kicked off preliminary work such as conducting test operations and holding an auction for 5G network frequencies.



"It remains to be seen whether Samsung Electronics will actually benefit from the Indian government's possible ban on Chinese vendors," an industry official familiar with the matter said. "India has not yet launched its auction process for 5G network frequencies and mighty European suppliers such as Ericsson and Nokia have large market shares."



The Indian authorities were expected to exclude Huawei and ZTE from its 5G operator trials on national security grounds due to prolonged tensions with China, according to media reports. Bloomberg said India's Ministry of Communications was set to restart the approval process for 5G trials with restrictions applied that would block the Chinese companies from competing.



The move comes after an India-China border conflict and is in line with the Indian government's recent decision to ban apps and services made in China including popular video app TikTok. India ordered local telecom operators and internet service providers to block access to these services.



Samsung has been chosen as one of the equipment suppliers for local telecom operators' 5G trials. According to local Indian media the Economic Times, Reliance Jio Infocomm, the largest telecom operator there, has filed a government application to conduct its 5G trials with Samsung.



Samsung provided its 4G or LTE network equipment to Reliance Jio Infocomm, which started its LTE service in 2016. The Indian telecommunications company also reportedly submitted another application to conduct 5G trials independently using its own equipment.



Bharti Airtel is expected to team up with Scandinavian makers Ericsson and Nokia, as the No. 2 telecom operator will run 5G trials in the Kolkata and Bengaluru regions.



While Huawei has had the largest share in the 5G network equipment market, the company is expected to lose its dominance due to the prolonged trade dispute between the U.S. and China. In July, the British government announced it would also phase out Huawei from its 5G network over looming national security concerns.



According to data provided by U.S.-based market tracker Dell'Oro, Huawei had the largest share in the 5G equipment market with 35.7 percent in the first quarter of 2020, followed by Ericsson with 24.8 percent, Nokia with 15.8 percent and Samsung with 13.2 percent.



Samsung has been trying to expand its influence in the market rapidly. In the past several months, the company has secured four new 5G contracts including ones with Videotron in December, U.S. Cellular in February and New Zealand telecom Spark in March.



The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute expects the global market size for 5G network equipment to grow to around $37.8 billion this year, and this will keep increasing as 5G is forecast to provide service coverage to more than 40 percent of the world's population by 2024.


Sibanye-Stillwater and Wits collaborate on face shields project

Sibanye-Stillwater collaborates with Wits to produce face shields for frontline health workers in the Groups South African operations.

The face shields are made by student and community volunteers from the Wits School of Mechanical, Industrial and Aeronautical (MIA) Engineering, in a partnership between Sibanye-Stillwater and Wits University`s Digimine. In response to the COVID-19 challenges, Sibanye-Stillwater donated a laser cutter and material to the Digital Makerspace team at the Wits TMG Makerspace, Wits Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct to produce personal protective equipment (PPE).

To date, the volunteers have produced 6700 shields from the Braamfontein campus at no cost, which have been distributed to Sibanye-Stillwaters SA mines and community members. This project has been used as a training platform, to enable the transfer of skills. The volunteers are working on producing face shields from recycled plastic to reduce the impact on the environment.

The Group will distribute 3700 face shields to health facilities around its operations in Gauteng, Free State and North West provinces. The MIA team has produced and distributed 27 000 face shields in aid of frontline health and community workers. The University has collaborated with several partners that have contributed towards the production of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Tanya Schonwald, Development Specialist at Wits expressed gratitude for the ongoing partnership with Sibanye-Stillwater which, will yield positive impact in the mining community and in society. It is imperative that we always work collectively, but particularly in challenging times, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Our partnership is based on the principle of contributing to the well-being of all in our country and we are proud to be a part of this team. We wish to extend a special gratitude to the team at Wits TMG Makerspace, who spent countless hours producing PPE to keep us safe, she said.

Chief Executive Officer of Sibanye-Stillwater said that he is pleased that their investment in innovation is delivering results and has contributed towards our social and health efforts to support local communities during COVID-19.

This contribution is in addition to our donation of PPE and sanitisers to clinics and hospitals in areas around our operations and in the Eastern Cape Province. We will continue to look for opportunities to support our communities and health facilities to reduce the spread of COVID-19, he added.
Just after the Libertarian Partys presidential candidate spoke at Huntsvilles Big Spring Park on Sunday afternoon, one of the events organizers was issued a citation by Huntsville police.

Jo Jorgensen, a senior lecturer in psychology at Clemson University in South Carolina, paid a visit to the Rocket City to host an event called the Rally for Justice and Peace. Jorgensen is running along with Libertarian vice-president nominee Jeremy Spike Cohen.

Tom Hopf, a Libertarian coordinator for the event and a Huntsville City Council candidate, received the citation from police after the event. According to the citation seen by Al.com, Hopf allowed the use of a microphone and a speaker during the rally which violates the citys noise ordinance. According to the ordinance, noise cant be heard from more than 25 feet away of the event.

The ordinance was explained to Hopf before the event, but Hopf said organizers had to use the speakers so people could hear Jorgensens speech while maintaining social distancing regulations prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.

That was the most important (thing) to me. With the amplified sound, we could enjoy the shade and really spread out and socially distance, Hopf said.

Tom Hopf, a Libertarian Huntsville City Council candidate for District 5 Huntsville, receives a citation from Huntsville police on Sunday, Aug. 23. Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian candidate for president, hosted a rally in Big Spring Park on Sunday. Police said the rally violated the city's noise ordinance.

Despite the citation, the mission to introduce people to Jorgensen and her platform went on peacefully as planned. Ballotpedia describes the party as believing in little government control in peoples lives. During the 2012 presidential general election, the party received 1.27 million votes, which was one percent of the popular vote. During the 2016 election, the number increased to more than 4.48 million votes, and about three percent of the popular vote.

Jorgensen laid out her platform in front of a crowd of about 70 people at the park. The first thing she will do if elected president: bring the troops home. U.S. military troops is deployed in 150 countries around the world. Jorgensen said she wants to bring the troops back home and turn the U.S. into an armed, but neutral country like Switzerland. She said this would not only save the country money but will also promote peace around the world.

In every single election, candidates promise peace, but they only deliver more war, Jorgensen said. Our military must be trained to defend our shores, but we have to stop meddling around the world. We need to make peace with our world neighbors.

While talking to the media, Jorgensen described how she would have handled the Coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed 1,944 lives in Alabama as of Sunday. She said she would have gotten rid of roadblocks in the Federal Drug Administration which she said prevented additional testing in the U.S.

We could have had dozens of testing kits being sold in the United States that we couldnt get, Jorgensen said. In fact, there are still testing kits that other countries can use that we cant. So testing is the way to stay ahead of it.

She said she also would have pushed harder to make sure everyone was tested whether they showed symptoms or not.

If we would have tested everybody, we would have known who needed to stay home, who could go out to work and we wouldnt have lost the tens of millions of jobs that we have lost. Many of them that arent coming back.

Libertarians dont believe Americans should be forced to pay taxes to provide social services. Instead, citizens should be allowed to make voluntary donations. Hopf used the U.S. Space and Rocket fundraiser as an example. Due to loss of income caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the center needed $1.5 million to keep doors open. Donations poured in from all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and 36 countries around the world. The center met its goal within a week after both Boeing and technology giant SAIC donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cause.

Jorgensen promised to get rid of the federal taxes so that citizens can use that extra money however they chose. Its time to take money out of the government and back to the people who have earned it, she said.

Another issue that received praised was her plan to end mass incarceration, which she believes was caused by the federal governments war on drugs. She said the war on drugs disproportionately incarcerated people of color and destroyed the relationship between communities and law enforcement. She wants to federally decriminalize all drugs and encourage states to treat drug use as a health issue instead of a criminal issue.

We should allow the medical community to deal with substance abuse issues in a way that salvages lives instead of throwing them away, Jorgensen said. I will pardon anyone convicted on the federal level of victimless crimes.

While talking with the media, Jorgensen criticized President Donald Trumps decision to send federal troops to Portland, Oregon in early July in response to the protests ignited following the police killing of George Floyd. Federal agents used tear gas and rubber bullets on the protesters and Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that federal agents pulled some protesters into unmarked vans. Multiple Oregon officials, including Portlands mayor and Oregons governor, accused Trump of using the protests and troops to appeal to his base for reelection. Reports state that protests became peaceful again after federal forces left the city in late July.

Jorgensen said she is aware of the protests that occurred in Huntsville in early June which ended with police deploying tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protesters. If elected, Jorgensen said she would defund federal involvement in local policing, which would mean ending the supply of surplus military equipment, like tanks and tear gas, to federal, state local, law enforcement.

What happens is the federal government takes our money and whether we like it or not they spend the money on tear gas and rubber bullets and they give it back to local police communities, Jorgensen said. Now we have (the police) fighting the war on drugs, which we are losing, and getting into every aspect of our lives. Now, it has become such an us-versus-them mentality. So, the federal government just needs to stay out of Huntsville polices business.
The Maharashtra Congress is largely standing by the Gandhi family to continue handling the reins of the party, even though three prominent signatories to the letter sent by senior Congress leaders to party president Sonia Gandhi seeking full-time leadership are from the state.

The letter was signed by 23 leaders, including states former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and former union ministers Mukul Wasnik and Milind Deora. After the letter became public, prominent Congress leaders in Maharashtra, including state Congress chief Balasaheb Thorat, former chief minister Ashok Chavan and others, pledged their support to the Gandhi family and even demanded that Rahul Gandhi should return at the helm. Congress minister Sunil Kedar warned dissidents that the party cadre will not let them move anywhere in the state if they do not apologise to the Gandhi family.

Late on Sunday evening, the Maharashtra Congress passed a resolution requesting Sonia Gandhi to continue as the Congress president.

In case, she refuses our request, we would seek Shri Rahulji Gandhi to immediately take over as AICC president...Not only the Congress party but entire country needs Rahul Gandhis leadership, said the resolution proposed by Thorat and seconded by Ashok Chavan. The meeting was held on an online platform in the presence of AICC general secretary Mallikarjun Kharge who is in charge of Maharashtra.

Rahulji should now lead the Congress.... Sonia jis struggle and hard work is an inspiration for members of Congress, like us. Until Rahul ji takes over as full-time president, Sonia ji should lead the Congress family as the interim president, said Thorat.

Leadership of the Gandhi-Nehru family is essential to keep the country and Congress united. They have been great custodians of the party and it has been proven many times in history. It is crucial that the party moves forward with this reality in mind, said public works minister and former chief minister Ashok Chavan. CWC will take appropriate decision about the post of Congress president, but the popular voice within the party suggests that Shri Rahul Gandhi ji should take charge as the president, he said.

The three dissenters from state chose not to comment as the CWC meeting was in progress in Delhi. One of them, on condition of anonymity, said they had only demanded a full-time president. Our letter is clear. We have requested some changes and a full-time president who also should be available to party workers. We are very happy if Mrs Gandhi or Rahul ji takes over full time. If Sonia ji is not ready, then Rahul ji must withdraw his resignation and say that he is willing to be the Congress president full-time and will be available to workers. Our concern is that if both are not ready, then something has to be done, he said.

I wholeheartedly support Hon. Sonia Gandhi ji as president. It is shameful of Mukul Wasnik, Prithviraj Chavan and Milind Deora to raise questions on the leadership of the Gandhi family. These leaders must apologise for their act immediately. Otherwise Congress workers will see how they move in the state freely, Kedar said in a series of tweets.

The three leaders are yet to respond to the criticism made by Kedar, an MLA from Nagpur district.

Vijay Wadettiwar, another Congress minister in the state government, went on to say that they would quit state government the moment Rahul Gandhi orders them to do so.

The government wouldnt have been formed if Rahul ji didnt approve of the coalition. Even today if he takes up the party chief position and decides to quit the government, we will move out the very next moment, he told reporters.

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T ests may not show up an asymptomatic Covid-19 carrier, according to Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHOs technical lead on the pandemic. So some of the British tourists set to race home as Croatia odds-on to join quarantine red list  (Jonathan Prynn, Standard, August 20) could have infected, or been infected by, people in Croatia. Last week they were on standby to scramble home and some might have brought the virus back to Britain.

A small percentage of other people are also scrambling to Britain. Desperate human beings mostly from Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran or Syria  all among the worlds most dangerous countries. Little welcome for young asylum seekers, who risk death trying to cross the Channel  but Covid-19: come on in.

David Murray

Editor's reply

Dear David

The Governments quarantine system has proved itself a ludicrously blunt instrument. Ministers place an entire country on the red list  ignoring all regional variations in cases  with just a few hours notice. The inevitable stampede home causes huge stress to families and the 14-day stay-at-home rule inflicts fresh damage on the travel industry. Other countries such as Germany and Iceland have shown that an efficient compulsory testing system, perhaps combined with a shorter quarantine period, can prove far more effective.

Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Business Editor

Peak-time free travel for pupils

Talk is going on about removing free travel for children from October. A lot of people state that they cannot afford to pay for their children to travel to and from school. There is an answer to this  let the children keep the passes but make them valid 7am to 9am and 3pm to 5pm to get to and from their points of education. This will also prevent children gathering in gangs after school.

Steve Caldwell
5 notable Republicans who've endorsed Joe Biden over Trump

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Coinciding with the first day of the Republican National Convention, the Biden presidential campaign has released a list of over two-dozen prominent Republicans that have endorsed the Democrat former vice president Joe Biden for president.

The endorsements from former Republican members of Congress were announced via an email sent Monday morning to Biden campaign supporters announcing the Republicans for Biden outreach initiative.

In a strong rebuke to the current administration, these former members of Congress cited Trumps corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course as a reason why they support Biden, stated the campaign in the email.

These former Members of Congress are supporting Joe Biden because they know what's at stake in this election and that Trump's failures as President have superseded partisanship.

Republicans for Biden aims to get more members of the GOP who feel disaffected by the president to vote Democrat in November.

The list of former GOP Congressmen is the latest high-profile example of notable Republicans and other members of the GOP publicly proclaiming their support for Biden.

The following pages list five prominent Republicans who have endorsed Bidens presidential campaign.

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Burma NGO Activities Restricted in Myanmars Rakhine State Amid COVID-19 Spike

Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State, amid COVID-19 fears. / Min Aung Khine / The Irrawaddy

Mandalay  As COVID-19 cases in Rakhine State are increasing, the state government has restricted international organizations working with the United Nations, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other non-governmental organizations from holding training sessions, meetings and educational programs.

The order on Friday was addressed to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, ICRC and other NGOs said no events could be held, especially at camps for internally displaced people (IDP) and in COVID-19 hotspots, until coronavirus is controlled in the state.

The Rakhine minister for security and border affairs told The Irrawaddy the restrictions are to control mass gatherings to prevent the virus spreading.

Important work, such as distributing food, medicine and protective equipment and urgent health care, are allowed. However, [NGOs] must follow the COVID-19 preventive measures set by the Ministry of Health and Sports, said Colonel Min Than, the military-appointed state security and border affairs minister.

The order bans direct contact with IDP camp dwellers and the states residents if NGOs are distributing food and goods. Instead they should leave deliveries with the camp authorities and the municipal administration staff.

The order follows confirmed coronavirus cases reported by NGO staff in Rakhine State.

Relief Internationals Myanmar office announced on Sunday that three of its staff from Mrauk-U tested positive in the last week, that its offices in the state were closed and all work suspended.

It is said it is working in the state to support residents and IDP camps. It said its infected staff traveled to camps in Mrauk-U two weeks ago and had not been abroad. They had visited Mrauk-Us town center, IDP camps and the state capital, Sittwe. They are receiving treatment in Mrauk-U general hospital.

A staff member from an NGO in Sittwe is also tested positive on August 19 and is being treated at Sittwes hospital.

The order is to reduce contact and avoid mass gatherings to prevent the virus spreading. We dont know how long this will take because it depends on the COVID-19 situation, Col. Min Than added.

Before the cases in Rakhine State, Myanmars last domestic transmission was a 24-year-old man in Kyauktaw Township in Rakhine State. He tested positive on July 16, despite having no travel history or reported contact with confirmed patients.

As of Monday, Myanmar had reported 463 confirmed COVID-19 cases with six deaths and 341 recoveries.

In Rakhine, 45 transmissions have been reported in a week.

You may also like these stories:

Myanmars Rakhine State Capital Under Curfew as COVID-19 Cases Spike

Myanmar Peace Conference Ends With Participants Praising Meaningful Principles, Post-Election Plan

AA Abducts Two Monks, Two Novices From Monasteries in Myanmars Rakhine State: Abbot
Iran Says Downed Ukrainian Passenger Plane Hit By Two Missiles 25 Seconds Apart

August 23, 2020

Iran says analysis from the black boxes of a downed Ukrainian passenger plane shows it was hit by two missiles 25 seconds apart and that those on board were still alive after the first strike.

The announcement by the head of Iran's Civil Aviation Organization on August 23 marks the first official report on the contents of the cockpit voice and data recordings, which were sent to France for reading in July.

Tehran has said it accidentally shot down the Ukrainian airliner in January, at a time of tension with the United States. All 176 people aboard the plane were killed.

"Nineteen seconds after the first missile hit the plane, the voices of pilots inside the cockpit, indicated that the passengers were alive ... 25 seconds later the second missile hit the plane," Touraj Dehghani-Zanganeh was cited as saying by state television.

Iran has been in talks with Ukraine, Canada, and other nations that had citizens aboard the downed plane, and who have demanded a thorough investigation into the incident.

"The data analysis from the black boxes should not be politicized," Zanganeh said.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps shot down the Ukraine International Airlines flight with ground-to-air missiles on January 8, just after the plane took off from Tehran, in what Iran later acknowledged as a "disastrous mistake" by forces on high alert during heightened tensions with the United States.

Iranian and Ukrainian officials have held talks on compensation for families of the victims. Another round of talks is set for October.

Based on reporting by AP and Reuters

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-downed-ukrainian-plane -two-missiles-25-seconds/30798232.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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The former Secretary to the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM), Charles Cromwell Nanabanyin Bissue has refuted suggestions that President Akufo-Addo was unaware that the NPPs manifesto contained a promise to build an airport and a harbour in Cape Coast.

On Friday, a day before the NPPs manifesto launch in Cape Coast, President Akufo Addo in response to a question on whether the central region needed an airport in an interview on ATL FM said a critical need assessment must be carried out first before an airport can be constructed in the Central Region.

The response of the government should be that the matter has been thoroughly examined and the need has been established. That is the process the Ministry of Aviation is going through.

We have to be able to decide for ourselves whether the need for the airport can be justified when you have Accra, you have Kumasi, you have Takoradi, you have Tamale whether on the coast with Accras presence theres the need for an additional airport, the president said.

However, launching the partys manifesto on Saturday, Dr Bawumia announced that the party will construct an airport and a harbour in cape coast if the party is re-elected.

After the announcement by the Vice President, a section of Ghanaians have questioned whether the president was unaware of the contents in the manifesto.

But speaking in an interview on the Morning Starr, Mr Bissue who is also the General Secretary of the NPP in the Western region said the president was just keeping his cards to his chest.

I think the President was keeping his cards close to his chest with regards to giving Cape Coast an airport.

---starrfmonline
Congress: 5 presidents from Nehru-Gandhi family, 13 from outside since independence

India

pti-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Aug 24: As a leadership crisis grips the Congress, experts having chronicled the country's oldest political party said on Monday that it may be theoretically possible for the party to have a president outside the Nehru-Gandhi family, but not practically.

The party's history shows that it has had at least 13 presidents from outside the Nehru-Gandhi clan since independence as against five from its first family. However, the family members have been at the helm for a much longer period of time as against the others.

Sonia Gandhi to remain as interim Congress chief for few months: Reports

Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have headed the party for the majority of the period since independence. Sonia Gandhi, who has been its longest-serving president, offered to quit at a stormy CWC meeting on Monday after a letter from more than 20 party leaders sought organisational reforms and a collective leadership, but she was urged to stay on as the interim chief till a full-time president is appointed.

Congress president post, who will lead if not the Gandhis? Big developments | Oneindia News

Among the leaders outside the Nehru-Gandhi family, J B Kripalani, B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, Purushottam Das Tandon, U N Dhebar, N Sanjiva Reddy, K Kamaraj, S. Nijalingappa, Jagjivan Ram, Shankar Dayal Sharma, D.K. Barooah, K B Reddy, P V Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri have headed the party.

The debate over whether a person from outside the Gandhi family was re-ignited last week when Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, in a year-old but recently published interview, endorsed her brother Rahul Gandhi's stand on a non-Gandhi president for the Congress, saying there are plenty of people capable of leading the party.

Rasheed Kidwai, senior journalist and writer of the book "24 Akbar Road", said the key issue before the party today is about the political leadership which has always been with the Nehru-Gandhi family. "In the first general election, the slogan was 'A vote for Nehru is a vote for the Congress'. Even 2004 onwards, Sonia Gandhi wielded the political leadership that now resides with Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka. So the political leadership of the Congress has by and large always been with the Gandhis and even non-Gandhi presidents have owed allegiance to them," he told PTI.

Asked if a non-Gandhi can run the party with the Gandhi family retaining the overall leadership, he said, "Theoretically yes, practically no." Sanjay Kumar, Director at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, said the tenure of Gandhi family presidents cannot be compared with non-Gandhi family presidents as there would be stark difference in the quantum of tenures.

Congress workers demand party chief to be from Gandhi family, not outsiders

"A person from the Gandhi family is both an asset and a liability for the party. The person would be an asset as he/she acts as a glue for the party which keeps the party together. They are also a liability and that liability is coming to the fore more prominently now as the Gandhi family has not been able to inspire voters and leaders of the party," Kumar told PTI. He opined that it is going to be very difficult for a non-Gandhi president to function in the prevailing situation as various factions could emerge and the pulls and pressures would be very high.

Sanjay K Pandey, a political commentator and a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), echoed similar views, saying it will be very difficult for a non-Gandhi president to work with the family having a dominant imprint on the party. "Unless the Congress devises a mechanism to deal with such a scenario, the future of the party is not very bright," he said.
Fears appear to be gripping fishermen at the Tema Canoe Beach in the Greater Accra over disappearance of canoes and its crew at high seas.

The fishermen reportedly set out for sea in canoes when they lost contact with their colleagues.

Four Ghanaian canoes with their crews which have supposedly gotten missing at high seas are yet to be found.

According to the fishermen, several fishermen with canoes searched for the lost canoes and crew but in vain.

Fishermen at the Tema canoe basing say they are beginning to live in fear following the second disappearance of canoe and its crews in less than a year.

Information available to DGN Online indicates that there is the need for a collaborative and highly intensified security along the West African coast as fisher folks say criminal activities on the sea including piracy is very much on the increase.

The fishermen who say sometimes their outboard motors do fail them on the high seas which can lead to lost of life if no help comes the way of the victims are also not taking the issues of possible pirates attacks out of the unfortunate disappearance of the recent two canoes and crews.

Nii Odamitey, Chief Fisherman of Awudum at the Tema Landing Beach, has called on government through the ministry of fisheries, and marine security agencies to intensify security in the country's territorial waters to help protect lives and properties at sea.

The Chief Fisherman further appealed to government to focus on marine security and rising issues before the country is taken by surprise.

For his part, the Executive Director of Center for International Maritime Affairs Albert Fiatui, noted that it has become necessary for government to revisit the implementation of the maritime security act 2004 and also collaborate with nearby countries to bring crime on high seas to an end.

He also called for retooling of the various institutions in the marine sector to police the country territorial waters.

Daily Guide
Amanda Kloots took to Instagram Sunday with an emotional short of herself and late husband Broadway actor Nick Cordero, who died at 41 of COVID-19 complications last month.

'I found this on Nicks phone,' the fitness pro, 38, told her 580,000-plus followers. 'I dont remember him taking this picture but know exactly where we are here.'

Kloots, who is mother to son Elvis Eduardo, one, with the late Tony-nominee, added, 'I really miss sleeping next to him, cuddling into his shoulder and having someone to hold,' with an emoji of a heart.

Touching: Amanda Kloots took to Instagram Sunday with an emotional short of herself and late husband Broadway actor Nick Cordero, who died at 41 of COVID-19 complications last month

In the image, the Bullets Over Broadway star was clad in a denim shirt and sported a goatee while Kloots napped behind him.

Cordero fought a valiant three-month battle against the disease, as his right leg was amputated and he shed 65 pounds amid the 95-day health battle.

Kloots has been candid about her family as Cordero fell ill with pneumonia in late March, sharing regular updates to her Instagram account.

Earlier this month, she shared that she moved with Elvis into a home in Southern California's Laurel Canyon that Cordero had bought for the family in a coast-to-coast move.

Giving: The fitness pro has shared her life on social media amid the family tragedy

New beginning: Kloots and her son have moved into a home in Southern California's Laurel Canyon that Cordero had bought for the family in a coast-to-coast move

She wrote on the social media site: 'Night 1... we got this. Thank you Nick,' adding, 'I thought Id be terrified but its oddly been comforting..... I think this is because I know this was Nick's dream and today Elvis and I are bringing that dream to life.'

In addition to Cordero's tragic story, the pandemic has had a devastating impact on Broadway, darkening the famed street amid the New York City shutdown, while playwright Terrence McNally died March 24 at 81 due to complications from the deadly virus.

As of Sunday, on a global level, 808,676 people have died amid 23,420,418 positive diagnoses worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. The death total for COVID-19 in the U.S. was at 176,802 people, with 5,701,679 total positive diagnoses.
The flag-bearer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), former President John Dramani Mahama says he will prosecute all persons involved in the Power Distribution Services (PDS) deal that took over the running of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).



According to him, some persons very close or related to the president (President Akufo-Addo) were involved in the structuring of PDS deal, which he says has caused the country to lose so much money to the benefit of some individuals.



He said "There is enough evidence to investigate the PDS deal" and that "If I become President, we will investigate PDS."



Mr Mahama said this in post he shared on his Facebook page on Sunday, August 23, 2020.



According to him, the period that ECG was handed over to the PDS, all the monies they (PDS) collected had not been accounted for, and that "The people of Ghana deserves to know what happened with PDS."



He was of the view that people cannot "pocket state money and walk freely."



Background



The government through the Ministry of Finance and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) Limited suspended the concession agreement with PDS Ghana Limited on July 30, 2019. This was announced by the Minister of Information, Mr Kojo Oppong Nkrumah.



Mr Oppong Nkrumah said the decision followed the detection of fundamental and material breaches of PDS obligation in the provision of Payment Securities (Demand Guarantees) for the transaction which have been discovered upon further due diligence.



The government explained that the suspension of the PDS agreement was in the interest of the public, and to protect the assets of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) worth over $3 billion.



According to President Akufo-Addo, the decision to make the suspension of the PDS agreement public was for the country to know exactly what is going on, and, therefore, hold the government to account for its stewardship.







Source: graphiconline.com









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Currently, the majority of single-mode optical fibre imports come from China

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The Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) on August 24 recommended a 10 percent safeguard duty on single-mode optical fibre imports. This duty would be imposed over a one-year period as it found that there has been a significant surge in imports for the product.

This decision came after Sterlite Technologies and Birla Furukawa Fibre Optics, approached the DGTR and said they were unable to compete with imports and regain their market share.

The DGTR also conducted a probe following an application filed by the firms.

Currently, the majority of single-mode optical fibre imports come from China. In fact, the imports increased from 1,903 FKM in FY 17 to 9,918 FKM in FY19.

The basic customs duty on the product is 15 percent.

Imports are undercutting the prices of the domestic industry, and is preventing the increase in price, which otherwise would have occurred in the absence of dumped imports. Imports are causing price suppression in the market, the DGTR said in its findings.

Additionally, in a separate notification, the directorate suggested a provisional anti-dumping duty of $266.37- 275.08 per metric tonne on soda ash imported from the US and Turkey.

While the DGTR is an investigation arm under the commerce and industry ministry, it is finally up to the finance ministry to take a call on imposing the duty.

(With inputs from PTI)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 00:03:27|Editor: huaxia

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People stand in front of an empty tour and travel office in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. on Aug. 21, 2020. (Photo by Michael Tewelde/Xinhua)

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Africa surged to 1,178,770 as the death toll from the pandemic rose to 27,592, Africa CDC said on Sunday.

ADDIS ABABA, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Africa surged to 1,178,770 as the death toll from the pandemic rose to 27,592, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said on Sunday.

The number of people who recovered from their COVID-19 infections rose to 899, 802 as of Sunday, said Africa CDC, a specialized healthcare agency of the African Union (AU) Commission, in its latest situation update.

South Africa currently has the most COVID-19 cases, which hit 607,045. The country also has the highest number of deaths related to COVID-19, at 12,987.

Egypt, which has the second highest COVID-19 cases in the continent, neared the 100,000 mark on Sunday. Egypt confirmed 97,237 COVID-19 cases and 5,243 deaths, followed by Nigeria with 51,905 cases and 997 deaths, Africa CDC said.

Ghana and Morocco also represent the fourth and fifth spot in terms of positive cases, it was noted.

The southern Africa region is the most affected area in terms of confirmed cases, followed by northern Africa and western Africa regions, it said.

On Saturday, the Africa CDC urged the continent to avoid coronavirus "prevention fatigue."

Vendors wearing face masks sell vegetables at a market in Lusaka, capital of Zambia, on Aug. 18, 2020. (Photo by Martin Mbangweta/Xinhua)

The urgent call was made by John Nkengasong, Director of the Africa CDC, who noted "a slight decrease" in COVID-19 infection rates on the continent, and said this "gives some signs of hope that we are beginning to bend the curve slowly," an AU statement issued on Saturday quoted Nkengasong as saying.

The Africa CDC Director, however, cautioned the continent "to maintain and increase the use of masks, social distancing, and to ramp up testing, even as countries begin to ease lockdown measures."

"We do not want the population to show prevention fatigue," Nkengasong said, adding that "we are dealing with a delicate virus that can easily flare up again very quickly, as has been witnessed in other parts of the world."

The Africa CDC, specialized healthcare agency of the AU, also announced this earlier week that Africa is working towards "trusted testing" for COVID-19 to protect travel and borders.

This will entail mutual recognition of certified COVID-19 testing among all member states, to allow for smooth movement across the continent.

Nkengasong said the Partnership for Increased COVID-19 Testing (PACT) "will be used to enhance surveillance in different economic sectors."

The continental PACT initiative, which was rolled out in June when the continent had conducted under 400,000 tests, had a target of 10 million tests across the continent.
Former governor



Tathagata Roy, who has expressed his desire to return to active in West Bengal, on Sunday said that he wants to rejoin the BJP within a couple of days.

Roy, a former West Bengal BJP president, had earlier said that he is willing to accept any role the party entrusts him with.

"I will meet the state president (Dilip Ghosh) with regard to my joining the party, which I expect to do within a couple of days," Roy told reporters at the NSC Bose International Airport here after arriving from Shillong.

The Assembly poll is due in West Bengal in April or May next year.

Roy was the state BJP president from 2002 to 2006 and a member of the party's national executive between 2002 and 2015.

He was appointed as the governor of Tripura in May 2015 and later took over as the governor of in August 2018.

Satya Pal Malik, who succeeded Roy, was sworn in on August 19.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
According to a new report from Korea, the Samsung Galaxy S21 may feature an S Pen. Thats not all, though. That very same report claims that the Galaxy Note series may be going away completely.

Needless to say, the S Pen stylus is the key differentiator between the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note series devices. It has been that way ever since the beginning, but in this day and age, thats even more pronounced.

Why? Well, the Galaxy S and Note series devices are quite similar in every other way. The Galaxy Note devices used to be quite a bit bigger than the Galaxy S devices, and were different in a number of ways.

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Thats not the case anymore. The size difference is no longer there, and if not for the S Pen, well the two lineups would be too similar. Maybe thats the thinking behind this report, if Samsung is truly thinking of killing the Note lineup.

The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra may be the only Galaxy S device to feature the S Pen in 2021

This report claims that only the Galaxy S21 Ultra will feature the S Pen, though. The other Galaxy S 2021 series devices will not, it seems.

The Samsung Galaxy S21 series is expected to arrive in Q1 next year. It will probably launch in February or March, if Samsung plans to stick to its release cycle.

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The company is yet again expected to release three devices as part of the lineup. Those devices are Samsung Galaxy S21, S21, and S21 Ultra, if something doesnt change.

The report goes on to state that the Galaxy Z Fold lineup may take the Galaxy Note lineups place. Samsung may be getting ready to release the Galaxy Z Fold 3 with the S Pen next year.

Wed take this report with a grain of salt if we were you. Why? Well, the Galaxy Note series of devices are immensely popular, and killing off such a popular lineup of devices may not be the best idea.

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Samsung ships a lot of Note devices every year, so

There may be some logic behind what this report is saying, but were not sure Samsung is ready for such a move. Samsung usually ships around 10 million of its Note devices in a couple of months, from where they launch (August) to the end of the year.

On the flip side, the company is betting big on foldable smartphones. The Galaxy Z Fold 2 managed to peak interest in many people, and Samsung may think its time to take the next step.

If the S Pen arrives to the Galaxy S series, or just the Ultra model from that series, the Galaxy Note series may end up being replaced by the companys Fold devices. Well see, but take the information with a grain of salt, as already mentioned.
Samsung started seeding the latest iteration of its One UI to the original Galaxy Z Flip. It's not a drastic overhaul but the new version does bring several neat features.



Changelog

For instance, you can now request a password for the Wi-Fi if one of your contacts is already connected to the same network. Another cool addition is to the default Samsung keyboard, which can now search on YouTube directly so you are not limited to Google searches.

The Pro Video mode of the default camera app now allows you to choose the integrated microphone while recording or an external microphone (either Bluetooth or connected to the USB-C port).

The update with build number F700U1UEU2BTGE requires a 1,157MB download and also delivers Google's August security patch.

Via
Medics wearing PPE kits stand at the entrance of the KIMS hospital as they shift COVID-19 patients to other hospitals due to shortage of oxygen cylinders, in Bengaluru. PTI Photo

Bengaluru: It's not just the shortage of liquid oxygen that the Karnataka government needs to look at after the transfer of patients from KIMS to seven other hospitals. It needs to look at the shortage of remdevisir in government hospitals and small private hospitals.

With the surge in the number of Covid-19 cases the demand for remdevisir is on the rise with patients attendants having to run to pharmacies at government hospitals to buy the medicine. The situation is worse in tier II cities like Raichur and Bijapur.

One health volunteer said patients from tier 2 cities like Raichur and Bijapur are coming to Bengaluru for treatment as the situation is bad there.

Remdesivir is given to patients with severe respiratory illness when their oxygen saturation dips below 94%. The antiviral drug comes in 100 mg vials. The Karnataka State Drugs Logistics and Warehouing Society currently has 22,600 vials of remdesivir in stock.

In Bengaluru, the big corporate hospitals corner supplies of remdisivir as soon as they arrive. If any stock is left over, it is distributed to smaller hospitals like Shifa, ESI and HBS.

A senior government doctor at ESI hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Deccan Chronicle that there is a huge shortage of remdevisir and "sometimes we ask the patients' attendees to procure it."

He added, The situation is horrific, he said.

Dr Suryanarayan, the Covid nodal officer at the ESI Hospital said, The drug comes in 100 mg vials and a patient needs five courses of the drug. On the first day we give 200 mg followed by 100 mg on subsequent days.

One patients attendant said, My brother was admitted to the ESI hospital. The hospital clearly said that there was no stock of remdesivir and that it would take a day for them to procure the drug. Somehow I had to source it from Victoria hospital.

Remdesivir is not available in pharmacies, it can only be procured at hospitals or the national helpline from where it can be procured.

Even private hospitals are facing a difficulty in procuring the drug. "Although there is a process to get it through DHO or through SAST channels they are very difficult to procure. When the doctors/hospitals explain this problem to patients, many times the attendants offer to procure it themselves. We do not refuse it if they procure it. We are all in this together," said Dr Jagadish Hiremath, CEO of Ace Suhas Hospital.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young has described a proposed development of the Australian War Memorial as a soulless monstrosity in response to architects begging federal politicians to reject the plans.

The AWM's planned $500 million expansion would massively increase its gallery space, allowing it to mount larger exhibitions on modern conflicts, including Afghanistan and Iraq, and peacekeeping. It controversially involves demolishing the award-winning Anzac Hall, which is less than two decades old.

The project, announced in late 2018, has come under fire from former directors, historians, and even some veterans.

Architects have criticised a planned redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial. Credit:Artist impression

Greens spokeswoman on arts Senator Hanson-Young believes it is a waste of money that goes against the spirit of what the Memorial should be about.
Toto Wolff has rejected suggestions Mercedes' 2020 car is benefitting from having a flexible rear wing.

Already under fire for allegedly pushing technical secrets to Racing Point, the latest accusation is that the rear wing of the German team's dominant 2020 car bends exceedingly at speed.

"We don't have a flexible rear wing," team boss Wolff told motorsport-total.com.

"I don't know what kind of pictures they've seen, but we're not even trying to get anywhere near any grey area, especially with flexible parts.

"Maybe they should be looking elsewhere," he added.

(GMM)
WASHINGTON - The Republican National Convention will be heavy on members of President Donald Trump's family as well as conservative congressional allies of the president, senior administration officials and viral stars who have gained fame and a following on the right.

The lineup of speakers, released by the president's campaign on Sunday, will feature at least one person from Trump's family - many of whom work either at the White House or on his reelection efforts - on each of the four nights of the convention. Trump himself is scheduled to speak Thursday night.

"Over four nights, President Trump's 2020 Convention will honor the great American story, the American people that have written it, and how President Donald J. Trump's Make America Great Again agenda has empowered them to succeed," the campaign said in a statement announcing the list.

Ivanka Trump, a senior adviser to the president, will be introducing her father before his formal acceptance address on Thursday, according to a White House official. The White House said Ivanka Trump's appearance at the RNC will be in her personal capacity and thus does not violate federal law barring government workers from political actions.

"Like all government employees, she is free to engage in political activity in her personal capacity," White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said. "The White House worked with the Office of Special Counsel to ensure that her appearance was in full compliance with the Hatch Act."

Unlike the Democratic National Convention, which concluded Thursday, none of the GOP's living former presidents or presidential nominees are scheduled to appear at the RNC. Former president George W. Bush is missing from the list, as is 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, now a senator from Utah who was the sole Senate Republican to vote to convict Trump on one article of impeachment in February.

Also absent from the lineup released Sunday are several Republican senators locked in competitive races, including Susan Collins of Maine, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who also faces a tough reelection campaign, will be speaking Wednesday evening.

Several governors will be speaking, including female Republican Govs. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, but several other GOP governors who have been the strongest defenders of Trump as they are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic in their states - Brian Kemp of Georgia, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas - are not scheduled to appear, according to Sunday's list.

Some Trump Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, also will address the convention, a move that critics have argued further blurs the lines between the presidential campaign and official business.

The appearance of Pompeo, who will speak at the RNC as he is traveling abroad, has drawn particular criticism because of his role as the nation's chief diplomat. On CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel declined to say whether the federal government would be reimbursed for Pompeo's appearance at a political event.

"I'm not confirming anything having to do with Secretary Pompeo's trip," McDaniel said. "I am just saying the programming, the staging, everything that we're doing will be paid for by the Republican National Committee and the campaign."

Also scheduled to speak are Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who made headlines in June when they stood outside their mansion in a gated community and pointed guns at protesters marching past them. The McCloskeys were each charged last month with one felony count of unlawful use of a weapon.

On Monday night, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. and his partner, Kimberly Guilfoyle, are scheduled to speak. Other speakers include the McCloskeys, McDaniel, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was killed in the Parkland, Fla., shooting in 2018 and has advocated for school safety measures while defending gun rights.

Tuesday's lineup includes first lady Melania Trump and the president's children Eric and Tiffany Trump, as well as Pompeo, Reynolds, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. Bondi was tapped by the White House to work on defending Trump during his impeachment trial.

On Wednesday, Eric Trump's wife, Lara Trump, will speak, as will Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., Ernst and Noem are among the other speakers.

Aside from the president, other speakers on Thursday include Carson, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., who left the Democratic Party last year to join the GOP amid the Democrats' impeachment effort.

Another featured speaker on Thursday will be Alice Johnson, whose life sentence for federal drug and money-laundering charges was commuted by Trump in 2018 after personal urging and lobbying from reality television star Kim Kardashian West.
Town of Onondaga, N.Y.  Two Syracuse men were arrested last week on charges that they recently burglarized three Central New York homes.

John Jackson, 40 and Dante Scott, 20, face numerous charges after deputies say they broke into two town of Onondaga homes, as well as a third residence in Solvay.

The two were arrested following a Aug. 16 burglary in the 4900 block of West Seneca Turnpike, said Onondaga County Sheriffs Sgt. Jon Seeber, a department spokesman.

Around 5:52 p.m. that day, the homeowner reported that someone had broken into her house and stole over $1,000 in electronics and jewelry. The suspect fled the area before deputies arrived, but was seen by the homeowner and a witness getting into an occupied SUV parked down the street.

A short time later, deputies located the vehicle on Valley Drive in Syracuse and took the two men into custody. The homeowner and witness positively identified the occupants, Seeber said.

After an investigation, Jackson and Scott were linked to two other burglaries that also happened on Aug. 16, Seeber said.

In one, video surveillance showed the suspects damaging a screen door at a residence in the 4000 block of Onondaga Boulevard. They then entered the mudroom and stole footwear. The suspects also damaged the homeowners motorcycle while attempting to take it, Seeber said.

The third burglary happened in the 200 block of Fifth Street in the village of Solvay. In that case, a weed eater and other items were taken from a garage, Seeber said.

Jackson and Scott were each charged with two counts of second-degree burglary, two counts of fourth-degree grand larceny, two counts of second-degree criminal mischief, two counts of fourth-degree criminal mischief and two counts of petit larceny in connection to the town of Onondaga burglaries.

Both were also charged by Solvay police with second-degree burglary and petit larceny, jail records show.

They were both arraigned in Centralized Arraignment Court and sent to the Onondaga County Justice Center. Scott is being held on $10,000 cash bail/$20,000 bond, while Jackson is being held without bail, due to also being charged with violating his parole.

Jackson was previously convicted of second-degree burglary and was released from prison to parole supervision in February, state corrections records show.

This is not Jacksons first run-in with law enforcement since being released from prison in February. In May, he was charged with stealing a car from an auto auction business in Cicero, which deputies say he crashed soon after while speeding away from the business.

Contact Jacob Pucci at jpucci@syracuse.com or find him on Twitter at @JacobPucci.
In a significant announcement, the World Health Organisation on Monday laid the roadmap on the global access of coronavirus vaccine by different sections of society.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that initially it is expected that there will be a shortage of the vaccine around the world.

"It is important to provide the vaccine to those at highest risk around the globe," he said adding that healthcare workers at the frontline would be its first recipients.

They are "critical to saving lives and stabilising the overall health system", he said, adding that it would be followed by those above the age of 65 because they are facing a higher "risk of dying" from the virus.

A recent study in the UK and the US showed that healthcare workers risk of contracting COVID-19 could be three times more than that of the general population.

Data collected by Amnesty International shows that, globally, over 3,000 healthcare workers have died from COVID-19. The Indian Medical Association pegs the figure at 196 in the country ever since the outbreak of COVID-19.

Two rounds of meetings have been held by the National Expert Group on Vaccines in India to discuss the way forward in terms of procurement of the vaccine and how it will be eventually distributed.

The government, while remaining tight-lipped on the strategy, has indicated that there is a possibility of the economically weaker sections of society would get the first shots because of the disadvantage they are at owing to their weakened owing to prolonged malnourishment and poverty.

The WHO also said that as capacity builds further, the next stage of the vaccine roll-out would depend on each country's vulnerability to the virus.

The international body further said that a number of vaccines are in the final stages of the trial and efforts are on to ensure two billion doses of safe effective vaccines by the end of 2021.

It sounded off the chances of vaccine nationalism which the body says will help the virus. Hence, the need for the COVAX facility which has been designed to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

According to WHO, about 172 countries are engaging with the COVAX facility, and more funding and binding commitments are needed.

The facility is designed to ensure risks are pooled and prices of the vaccine kept low.

COVAX is co led by the GAVI vaccines alliance, the WHO and the CEPI  which is the coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. At present, it covers nine candidates of COVID-19 vaccines said the WHO.
Rates of Covid-19 have tumbled in nine out of the 10 worst-affected areas in England in the past week, showing signs the country's outbreak is still shrinking.

The numbers of people being diagnosed with the coronavirus has been rising in recent weeks, raising fears that England is headed for a deadly second wave.

But experts say this could simply be down to more accurately targeted testing picking up more cases where there are outbreaks.

Official NHS figures, however, suggest infection rates fell in all of England's Covid-19 hotspots in the most recent week.

Between August 15 and August 21 the case rates per 100,000 people fell by an average 17 per cent in the 10 worst affected areas, headed by a drop of nearly half (44 per cent) in locked-down Blackburn with Darwen.

The rate of infection rose only in one area - Stoke-on-Trent - where the number of cases by a worrying 49 per cent to 27.4 per 100,000.

It remains highest in Oldham, Greater Manchester, where 57.3 people are infected per 100,000 - around one in every 1,700 people.

The rate of Covid-19 infection has fallen in all but one of the 10 worst affected areas in England, NHS data shows, with a week-on-week drop of 44 per cent in Blackburn and Darwen

The number of officially diagnosed people in the UK has been increasing in recent weeks but experts say this might be because targeted testing is catching a greater proportion of people who have the virus, even if there aren't actually more of them

HOW ARE COVID-19 RATES CHANGING IN HARD-HIT AREAS? Place name Cases per 100,000 people % change week-on-week Oldham Blackburn Leicester Manchester Swindon Bradford Rochdale Bury Stoke Calderdale 57.3 49.7 42.8 40.2 38.3 37.4 35.9 30.5 27.4 25.7 -40% -44% -27% -19% -3% -33% -13% -5% +49% -36% Advertisement

The rates of infection in England now vary widely across the country with some areas still badly hit by the virus while others are almost Covid-free.

Worst-affected areas tend to be in the North and Midlands with the exception of Swindon, data shows, while cases are lower in across the south.

According to statistics published by NHS Digital, Oldham, Blackburn with Darwen, Leicester and Manchester are the worst affected places, each with more than 40 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 people.

Following them, with between 30 and 39 cases, are Swindon, Bradford, Rochdale and Bury.

And with between 25 and 29 cases per 100,000 are Stoke-on-Trent, Calderdale and Salford.

But cases fell in all those places, except Stoke, in the third week of August, suggesting that local lockdowns and increased testing are helping to keep a lid on smaller outbreaks.

In Oldham the case rate fell by 40 per cent in a week, while it dropped by 27 per cent in Leicester, 36 per cent in Calderdale, 33 per cent in Bradford and 19 per cent in Manchester.

Much of the North West around Greater Manchester still faces tough restrictions on where people can mix with other households and which businesses can open, and there is a targeted local lockdown in Leicester.

Promising trends in the NHS figures add to good news from the Office for National Statistics testing survey data published last week.

The ONS estimated that there are now just 2,400 new cases of Covid-19 per day in the entire UK, a drop of a third from 3,800 the week before.

Statisticians at the Government-run agency said that while cases had been on the climb since July - prompting fears of a second wave - the epidemic's upward trajectory had now been stopped in its tracks.

CASES HAVE BEEN GOING UP... BUT HOSPITALS ARE EMPTY, TOP DOCTOR SAYS Hospitals are empty despite coronavirus cases having gone up over the past month - and it could be because the most vulnerable to the disease have already died, an intensive care specialist claimed today. Dr Ron Daniels, a consultant in the West Midlands, said there are barely any Covid-19 patients being admitted despite government infections showing cases had risen throughout July. More than 1,000 Britons are testing positive for the life-threatening disease each day, on average, data shows - but the figures appears to have started dropping. There are fewer than 100 daily hospital admissions for the virus. For comparison, up to 5,000 people were diagnosed daily during the darkest days of the crisis in April, and as many as 2,500 of these patients needed hospital care. However, hospital admission figures at the height of the crisis need to be treated with caution because they were inflated due to a counting error, it emerged last night. Dr Daniels believes the recent spike in infections is due to young people catching the coronavirus more, who are unlikely to get severely ill and need hospital care. And older and vulnerable populations may have already had the disease and died, or are being more cautious in fear of catching Covid-19. Other scientists have theorised the coronavirus has mutated to become less deadly, but this is 'slightly optimistic' in Dr Daniels' eyes. Advertisement

The team calculated that 2,400 new infections are occurring in England each day, which they admitted was 'lower than the previous week'.

But they said: 'Our modelling suggests that there is not enough evidence to say at this point there has been a fall in incidence in the most recent week.'

Instead, the statisticians claimed the outbreak has 'levelled off'. For comparison, the ONS estimated that around 4,200 people were getting infected each day at the end of July.

Official data in recent weeks has shown that cases of coronavirus in the UK have been increasing again after a lull in July.

After more than six weeks recording fewer than 1,000 cases per day from June 27 to August 8, the Department of Health's testing programme has since recorded over 1,000 new diagnoses on 12 days out of 16.

And in the past month the daily average number of people diagnosed each day has surged, rising from 668 per day on July 24 to 1,043 on August 24.

Despite this, there has not been a spike in the number of people needing hospital treatment or people dying.

Experts say testing may simply getting more accurate now that it is more widespread, and that it shows a greater proportion of the true cases, even if there aren't actually more of them.

Professor Duncan Young, an Intensive Care Medicine expert at the University of Oxford, said: 'There are at least three possibilities for the rising test-positive case rate compared with hospitalisations.

'One: More people overall are being tested, but the proportion of the population (prevalence) is steady, so it is simply that more cases are being detected.

'Two: The proportion of tested individuals that are positive is rising (i.e. there are really more cases).

'Three: The tracing system has caused more patients who are at higher risk to be tested (because of exposure) meaning there were more positive tests in those tested but maybe not in the population.

'It could also be a mix of all three.

'If you look at the test and trace stats... the positive rate went from 1.12 per cent to 1.54 per cent over the same period. Thus the test numbers have gone up by nearly 20 per cent whilst the positive rate went up only slightly.

'It is therefore very possible that the increase in cases is mostly related to increased testing, but will a small additional effect from the increased prevalence.'

The Office for National Statistics estimates 2,400 people are contracting the disease every day, down 37 per cent from the 3,800 the previous week

Only ONE Covid-19 victim in English hospitals was under 40 last week and 90% were over the age of 60, data reveals as health chiefs post four more deaths

Only one Covid-19 victim whose death was announced by NHS England over the past week was under the age of 40, according to official data.

NHS figures show 90 per cent of the patients who died from the illness after testing positive were over 60  including half who were at least 80 years old.

It comes as Britain today posted four more coronavirus deaths, with government statistics showing the average number of people dying from the infection each day has now stayed in single figures for almost a week.

Department of Health data reveals nine Brits are succumbing to the life-threatening illness each day, on average. The rate has been consistently dropping since the end of April and hasn't risen despite a spike in cases over the past six weeks.

For comparison, six laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 deaths were declared yesterday and three last Monday. More than 1,000 deaths were being announced daily during the darkest days of the UK's coronavirus crisis.

Data shows only 64 coronavirus fatalities were registered in Britain over the past week  a fraction of the 6,600 recorded in the deadliest seven-day spell of April 7 to 13. Only one of the victims in English hospitals in the past week is known to be under the age of 40.

Government data released today also revealed another spike in cases. Health chiefs revealed another 853 patients have been diagnosed with Covid-19  up from the 713 recorded last Monday.

It means the rolling seven-day average of daily cases now stands at 1,043  a figure that has risen every day since Friday, when it dropped to below 1,000 for the first time in over a week. The rate has almost doubled since before lockdown restrictions were eased at the start of last month, with an average of 546 cases on July 8.

But Britain has yet to suffer a spike in fatalities or hospital admissions, suggesting the spike in cases is down to more testing in badly-hit areas. Doctors say the rise in cases is largely down to younger people getting infected, who studies have shown face less risk of dying or becoming severely ill from Covid-19.

In other coronavirus developments in Britain today:

Pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom, deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries claimed;

Seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school which has now been shut until at least next week to undergo a deep clean;

Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track;

Quarantine travel restrictions could be slashed from 14 days to less than a week under plans to introduce testing on arrival at UK airports.

Only one of the victims in the past week is known to be under the age of 40, according to an analysis of NHS England data

PUPILS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE HIT BY A BUS THAN GET COVID-19, DEPUTY CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER CLAIMS Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, today said children were more likely to be hit by a bus than catch coronavirus at school Pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom, the deputy chief medical officer claimed today. Dr Jenny Harries said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus. Meanwhile, Education Minister Nick Gibb this morning insisted parents will be fined if they refuse to send their children back to school next week. He also said the Government is sticking by its advice to teachers that they do not need to wear masks despite a growing row with unions over staff safety. Public Health England data has shown that teachers are more likely to be infected than their pupils, after one in 23,000 students tested positive during the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays. Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September. The Prime Minister said in a video posted on his Twitter account that he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health. He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed' Advertisement

The most up-to-date government coronavirus death toll  released this afternoon  stood at 41,433. It takes into account victims who have died within 28 days of testing positive.

Ministers earlier this month scrapped the original fatality count because of concerns it was inaccurate due to it not having a time cut-off, meaning no-one could ever technically recover in England.

More than 5,000 deaths were knocked off the original toll. The rolling average number of daily coronavirus deaths dropped drastically  from around 59 to fewer than ten.

The deaths data does not represent how many Covid-19 patients died within the last 24 hours. It is only how many fatalities have been reported and registered with the authorities.

And the figure does not always match updates provided by the home nations. Department of Health officials work off a different time cut-off, meaning daily updates from Scotland and Northern Ireland are out of sync.

The toll announced by NHS England every day, which only takes into account fatalities in hospitals, doesn't match up with the DH figures because they work off a different recording system.

For instance, some deaths announced by NHS England bosses will have already been counted by the Department of Health, which records fatalities 'as soon as they are available'.

Department of Health officials also declare new Covid-19 cases every afternoon. Today they revealed another 853 Brits had tested positive for the life-threatening disease.

It means around 1,040 Britons are being diagnosed with the disease each day. For comparison, fewer than 550 cases were being recorded each day, on average, at the start of July.

The spike in cases  alongside a resurgence of the virus in Europe  prompted fears of a second wave. But top experts have insisted the rise is merely down to more testing in badly-hit areas.

The updated figures come as England's deputy chief medical officer claimed today that pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom.

Dr Jenny Harries said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus.

Meanwhile, Education Minister Nick Gibb this morning insisted parents will be fined if they refuse to send their children back to school next week.

He also said the Government is sticking by its advice to teachers that they do not need to wear masks despite a growing row with unions over staff safety.

Public Health England figures have shown teachers are more likely to be infected than pupils, after one in 23,000 students tested positive during the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays.

MATT HANCOCK'S 'OPERATION MOON SHOT' PLAN TO TEST 4MILLION PEOPLE A DAY The Health Secretary is said to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year. Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track. The Health Secretary is said to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year. Currently the NHS and private testing centers have a capacity of around 326,000, although because of the current level of infection, only around 190,000 are being carried out. A massive expansion of the testing regime is seen as a key requirement of easing lockdown measures further as the public continue to be wary of a return to workplaces. But the scale of the plan will raise some eyebrows after Mr Hancock's struggles throughout the pandemic to dramatically up the testing rate. His test and trace scheme, run by Tory peer Baroness Harding, has also come in for major criticism. 'It is at an embryonic stage and it's going to take a hell of a lot of work. It is nicknamed Operation Moon Shot because that is what a moon shot is like: it seems very hard but it's important and we want to land it,' a source told the Telegraph. Advertisement

Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September.

In a video posted on Twitter, the Prime Minister said he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health.

He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed'.

Number 10 remains under pressure over its handling of the return of schools. Tory MPs have complained ministers have left it 'very late' to persuade parents it is safe.

Mr Johnson's plea came hours before it was revealed that seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school which has now been shut until at least next week to undergo a deep clean.

All staff and children at Kingspark School in Dundee, which reopened along with other schools in Scotland on August 12, have been told to self-isolate for two weeks.

NHS Tayside confirmed positive cases among three 'community contacts' linked to the cluster at the school, which has about 185 pupils aged between five and 18.

All pupils at the school, which was purpose built in 2009, have additional support needs - with many also having additional physical disabilities or medical problems.

Kingspark School was closed last Wednesday and all parents received a joint letter from the local council and NHS at the end of last week to keep them updated.

In other developments today, Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track.

The Health Secretary is understood to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot', with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year.

Currently the NHS and private testing centers have a capacity of around 326,000, although because of the current level of infection, only around 190,000 are being carried out.

A massive expansion of the testing regime is seen as a key requirement of easing lockdown measures further as the public continue to be wary of a return to workplaces.

But the scale of the ambition will raise some eyebrows after Mr Hancock's struggles throughout the pandemic to dramatically up the testing rate.

His test and trace scheme, run by Tory peer Baroness Harding, has also come in for major criticism. Data released last Friday showed the number of close contacts reached had fallen to its lowest ever level.

'It's going to take a hell of a lot of work. It is nicknamed Operation Moon Shot because that is what a moon shot is like: it seems very hard but it's important and we want to land it,' a source told the Telegraph.
Last Monday, I parked my car outside the school where I teach for the first time in 5 months. As I opened the trunk and started to gather the items I brought home to continue to work, I looked up and, out of nowhere, a rainstorm quickly unleashed big droplets from the sky. There was no umbrella in the car because the morning forecast indicated 0% chance of rain. I placed my books and computer under my arm and sprinted, arriving at the front door wearing rain-soaked clothes and a sardonic smile. The emblematic irony was an unwelcome feeling.

This is where on Friday, March 13, the clouds of COVID-19 shuttered my and all Pennsylvanias schools. This week, the unpredictability regarding what will happen this fall has reemerged. Local districts will open over the next three weeks with plans  a mix of in-person, hybrid, and online instruction  as varied as they come. And some have already completely changed those plans.

Preparing for the school year has proven to be as difficult as prognosticating summer storms. There is no doubt that the 2020-21 school year will produce challenges like hail.

Teachers will face many obstacles. Some teachers schedules are still in flux (to not know what subjects and grade levels to plan for in late August is frustrating); others have yet to learn districts plans until they arrive at in-service. Uncertainty has led to little more than shoulder shrugs. For others who are older or at high-risk, the fact that local educators have already contracted the virus is beyond unnerving. And we have no idea what substitute teaching, already a weak point in the education facade, looks like this upcoming year.

Administrators and school boards have worked relentlessly shore up reopening plans. It has required more than a bit of ingenuity and elbow grease. Line items have been created in budgets to buy thousands of computers or to breathe life into new deliveries of instruction. Theyve stemmed the tide of charter schools summer circuit of self-congratulatory press releases and increased numbers. Each plan has been followed with countless swells of criticism as they try to make the least bad decision. And we used to think making a snow-day call was difficult.

Most notably, some students and families have weathered a tornado at home. Mental health services and support networks have been on pause for kids. Their parents might be part of the 13% of unemployed Pennsylvanians or have watched their small businesss revenues fall. Someone who they love and are in close contact may be at high-risk, and the thought of returning to school makes them beyond uneasy.

But if there is any shelter in the storm, it is that your public-school teachers are still committed to providing the best education for our students. We will push for safe teaching conditions because they are safe learning conditions. We will do our best to accommodate for some semblance of in-person normality as soon as it is attainable. We will make the most of it, no matter what or when it is. We will fight hard for what our students and schools deserve, which is a great education.

That is why we are incredibly busy behind-the-scenes. We have been working all summer to fashion a new way through the storm that involves more technology and yet more interpersonal, relationship-centered learning. Where possible, we have pulled up our seat to the table of decisions being made to be part of the solution and not the noise. No matter how strong the torrent of whatever comes, we are prepared for what comes next. And if we are not, we will work diligently to shift our focus just as quickly as we had in March, ensuring our students bright futures remain the sun in the sky that we work under.

On my way to a teachers rally in Lancaster County, I saw that sun emerge and shine a bright rainbow in the sky so low it felt like I could touch it. Though the clouds remained just as darkly present, I could focus on little more than that rainbow. That is how I and many other teachers feel about this school year as we await our students return. The emblematic irony was a welcome feeling.

Jake Miller is a teacher in the Cumberland Valley School District.
Thousands of oil and gas operations, government facilities and other sites have won permission to stop monitoring for hazardous emissions or otherwise bypass rules intended to protect health and the environment because of the coronavirus outbreak, The Associated Press has found.

The result: approval for less environmental monitoring at some Texas refineries and at an army depot dismantling warheads armed with nerve gas in Kentucky, manure piling up and the mass disposal of livestock carcasses at farms in Iowa and Minnesota, and other increased risks to communities as governments eased enforcement over smokestacks, medical waste shipments, sewage plants, oilfields and chemical plants.

The Trump administration paved the way for the reduced monitoring March 26 afte r being pressured by the oil and gas industry, which said lockdowns and social distancing during the pandemic made it difficult to comply with pollution rules. States are responsible for much of the oversight of federal environmental laws, and many followed with their own policies.

APs two-month review found that waivers were granted in more than 3,000 cases, representing the overwhelming majority of requests citing the outbreak. Hundreds were approved for oil and gas companies. AP reached out to all 50 states citing open-records laws; all but one, New York, provided at least partial information, reporting the data in differing ways and with varying level of detail.

Almost all those requesting waivers told regulators they wanted to minimize risks for workers and the public during a pandemic  although a handful reported they were trying to cut costs.

The Environmental Protection Agency says its clemency does not authorize exceeding pollution limits. Regulators will pursue those who did not act responsibly under the circumstances, EPA spokesman James Hewitt said in an email.

But environmentalists and public health experts say it may be impossible to determine the impact. The harm from this policy is already done, said Cynthia Giles, former EPA assistant administrator under the Obama administration.

EPA says it will end the clemency this month.

Story continues

The same day EPA announced its new policy, Marathon Petroleum asked Indiana for relief from leak detection, groundwater sampling, spill prevention, emissions testing and hazardous waste responsibilities. Indiana declined to issue a comprehensive waiver but agreed to consider individual requests.

We believe that by taking these measures, we can do our part to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus, Tim Peterkoski, Marathon's environmental auditing head, told Indiana.

Marathon also won permission to skip environmental tests at many of its refineries and gas stations in California, Michigan, North Dakota and Texas.

Spokesman Jamal Kheiry said Marathon continued emissions monitoring and other activities and usually met deadlines.

In New Mexico, Penny Aucoin, a resident of the oil-rich Permian Basin, said that since the pandemic began she and her husband have asked regulators to investigate what they feared could be dangerous leaks from one of the many oil and gas companies operating near their mobile home.

Theres nobody watching, Aucoin said.

Maddy Hayden, New Mexicos environmental spokesperson, said her agency stopped in-person investigations of citizen air-quality complaints from March to May to protect staff and the public but would respond to emergencies.

Almost every state reported fielding requests from industries and local governments to cut back on compliance, often for routine paperwork but also for monitoring, repairs and other measures to control hazardous soot, toxic compounds, heavy metals and disease-bearing contaminants.

Manufacturer Saint-Gobain, whose New Hampshire plant has been linked by the state to water contaminated with PFAS chemicals, asked to delay smokestack upgrades that would address the problem. The company cited problems the companys suppliers and contractors have faced because of the coronavirus.

State Rep. Rosemarie Rung said the company was just dragging their feet.

The APs findings run counter to statements in late June by EPA official Susan Bodine, who told lawmakers the pandemic was not causing a significant impact on routine compliance, monitoring and reporting and that industry wasnt widely seeking relief from monitoring.

Separately, EPA enforcement data shows 40% fewer tests of smokestacks were conducted in March and April compared with the same period last year, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a network of academics and non-profits.

Hewitt, the EPA spokesman, pointed to the economic downturn and said closed facilities couldn't test smokestacks.

EPAs policy was primarily related to record keeping, training and flexibility in the timing of routine inspections," said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, which pushed for the policy. He said the industrys pollution equipment continues to operate.

Oil and gas companies in Arkansas received a blanket, months-long waiver for safety testing temporarily abandoned wells and other activities.

Alaska authorized delayed inspections at dozens of massive tanks used to store petroleum, let companies defer drills designed to ensure they can quickly respond to major oil spills, and promised leniency for some air pollution violations stemming from the outbreak.

In Wyoming, regulators gave breaks on air emissions rules in about 300 cases, mostly for oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil and Sinclair.

It wasnt just huge industries.

As supply chains broke down, Minnesota granted more than 90 waivers on how many animals could be stuffed into feedlots, potentially raising risks of water contamination from manure. Farms and landfills in Iowa received variances to allow for the mass burial and composting of livestock.

Michigan approved or was reviewing requests from several cities to delay replacing lead water pipes or testing for lead, spurred in some instances by the Flint water crisis.

Eric Schaeffer, former EPA civil enforcement director under President George W. Bush, dismissed assurances that reducing monitoring wouldnt lead to a surge in pollutants.

Its like saying were going to remove the radar guns and remove speedometers, but you still have to comply with the speed limit, said Schaeffer, now head of the Environmental Integrity Project advocacy group.

___

Knickmeyer reported from Oklahoma City, Bussewitz from New York City, Flesher from Traverse City, Mich., Brown from Billings, Mont. and Casey from Boston.
For over 20 years, Kyle Russell ran and organized the annual blood drives for The Woodlands United Methodist Church, impacting the lives of 41,000 people in the community. To honor him, the church and the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center presented him with a lifetime achievement award and organized a four-day blood drive.

Russell joined TWUMC in 1992 and started serving as chair of the church blood drive in 1995. He stepped down last year. Over the 23 years that he ran the blood drive, the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center received over 13,670 units of blood from the churchs efforts.

On Sunday, the first day of the drive, Russells family and friends, members of the church and representatives from the blood center presented Russell with his lifetime achievement award and thanked him for his many years of service.

We want to say thank you, said John Hull, pastor of missions ministry for TWUMC said at the ceremony. We are so grateful for what you have done, you have changed so many lives.

It was a good ride, Russell said. I couldnt have done it without the team members who are here today.

The blood drive started Sunday but will continue through Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Loft building on the TWUMC campus.

Russell was asked to take over the blood drive duties after the previous organizer stepped down because he had been a longtime donor even then, often with his company. He stressed that he was not the only person that deserves thanks for the success of the blood drives. His team of volunteers was a vital part.

I just thought it was a good cause to support, Russell said. It wasnt much more difficult for me to be a chairperson than it was for me to be a member of the team, so I just kept doing it. The longer I did it, people decided that I knew so much that it would be difficult for them to take over, so I knew I was going to have a hard time getting someone to take my place.

The drives, he said, were fun. Friends and fellow church members would come to donate, making it a community event and a great way to catch up with each other. The dedication of the volunteers means that Russell cant remember running a drive without enough volunteers.

The Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center was started in 1975 to make sure hospitals in the area were stocked with blood. The mission continues today, and during COVID-19 times the need remains even as donations and drives have lessened.

Our mission is to partner with the community and Kyle is the embodiment of that, said Kevin Shipley, Director of Donor Recruitment for the blood center.

Currently, because of the pandemic, blood drives for the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center are only taking donations by appointment, and masks are required. Shipley is encouraging anyone who has already had COVID-19 and is two weeks out from recovery to donate. Antibodies for the virus are being used to treat current patients.

Kyle is an amazing man and his passion for the blood drive has exceeded most volunteers that come our way all the time, Hull said. He has worked tirelessly to affect the lives of what the blood bank tells us is over 41,000 people through his efforts.

Interested donors can find all the details about setting up an appointment at a drive near you at giveblood.org

jamie.swinnerton@chron.com
When can your landlord come into your apartment or house? Read more

 This article is part of our guide to tenants rights in Philadelphia. Got a question? Ask us using the form at the bottom of this article.

Most renters in Pennsylvania arent unfamiliar with an occasional visit from their landlord  particularly if something in their home needs fixing, or their lease term is coming to an end and new tenants need to check out the space. After all, these are usually normal, mundane parts of renting.

What are the rules about when can a landlord come into your home, and what amount of notice is required in Pennsylvania? Renters and landlords in the commonwealth have some rights in these situations, and there is some recourse if those rights are being violated.

But like with many landlord-tenant situations in Pennsylvania, the answers arent exactly simple ones. Weve gathered some important information and advice on landlord entry in Pennsylvania, from your rights as a tenant to what to do if the situation escalates. Check out the basics below:

What does your lease say about landlord entry?

If your landlord needs to enter your home or apartment, or has been doing so already, the first thing you should do is read your lease. Many leases will have a clause in them that defines under what circumstances your landlord can enter your space, the amount of notice needed before entering, and the times of day they can do so.

For example, your lease might list common reasons why your landlord might want to come inside your home, including making or inspecting for repairs, showing your unit to prospective new tenants, and emergencies, like a flood or fire.

Those lease terms have to be reasonable, says Mike Carroll, a senior attorney with Community Legal Services of Philadelphias housing unit. Reasonable hours, he says, could generally be understood to be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 24 hours notice is commonly suggested. It is also not uncommon for landlords to provide written notice before entry.

One complication: Pennsylvania landlord-tenant law does not directly define exactly what is reasonable and what isnt, whether that be reasons for entering, amount of notice, or times of day.

Most renters have it in their lease, Carroll says. Many will have something in there, so if it is in there, it becomes an analysis about whether it is reasonable.

What right does your landlord have to enter?

Your landlord generally cant come into your home whenever they feel like it, though some may believe they have that right, Carroll says. Thats rooted in a few important legal decisions in Pennsylvania, including a 1974 Pennsylvania Supreme Court case known as Commonwealth v. Monumental Properties, Inc.

That case says that when a landlord leases a property to a tenant, the law regards the lease as equivalent to a sale of the premises for the term. Carroll says that means that if you sign a lease, your landlord is giving you, for that period of time, all rights except the right to sell or destroy the property. So Carroll argues, unless there is a clause about entry in the lease, landlords have no right to go in without your permission  except in the case of an emergency.

If the landlord is passing by and sees smoke or water, there is no court I know that will sanction the landlord for going in if they knock and no one is home, he says. But there is no automatic right to go in if you feel like it.

You should, however, try to accommodate your landlord if they need to enter your apartment for repairs and showings. Carroll suggests speaking with the landlord and coming to an agreement on ground rules for entry if your lease does not state any, and getting any agreement in writing.

What about your rights as a tenant?

As a renter, you have a right to privacy in your home, which is covered by a legal doctrine called the implied covenant of quiet enjoyment. That means that you can use and enjoy the space youre renting without undue interference by other people, including your landlord.

Quiet enjoyment prohibits the landlord from doing anything that is unreasonable, Carroll says. It is a remedy that the tenant has if the landlord is doing things like coming in without permission or notice.

As the Housing Equality Center of Pennsylvania notes in its renters rights guide, rent payments dont just cover having a home to stay in  they also ensure the right to enjoy the premises without reasonable and excessive intrusions by the landlord. However, make sure you try to follow whatever your lease says about landlord entry  because, as Carroll says, many elements in these situations are up to contract law and the lease.

Sit down and try and work it out  say, Look, weekends are better for me, he says. If things break down, you are looking at the lease.

What if your lease  or rights  are being violated?

If you cant resolve a problem with landlord entry, and you feel your rights as a renter are being violated, there is recourse.

If you need advice, start by calling the Philly Tenant Hotline at 267-443-2500 or CLS at 215-981-3700.

If there is a pattern of harassment or you are being threatened, Carroll says, you could consider filing a complaint with the Philadelphia Fair Housing Commission. This is especially true, he adds, if your landlord is making sexual, racial, or ethnic comments, or threatening to evict you. In those cases, Carroll says, it may be possible to get an injunction that prevents your landlord from entering the property.

If things escalate to potentially criminal conduct, like threats of physical harm, or your landlord illegally entering your home and taking your property, Carroll suggests calling the police or the District Attorneys Office. While not unheard of, those situations, he adds, are toward the end of last resorts.

I dont want to stir the criminal pot needlessly, Carroll says. But sometimes it is necessary. Its important when people are threatened with physical harm.

Expert sources:

Mike Carroll, J.D., senior attorney with Community Legal Services of Philadelphias housing unit.

 READ MORE: Your rights as a tenant: Check out our tenants' rights guide.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the citys push toward economic justice. See all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.
Evacuation orders were issued Tuesday for over 385,000 people in the Texas cities of Port Arthur, Galveston and Beaumont and for 200,000 others in another 200,000 in Calcasieu Parish, southwest Louisiana, ahead of Hurricane Laura's expected arrival this week, per AP.

Why it matters: It's the largest evacuation to take place in the U.S. during the pandemic and comes as the U.S. marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Laura was strengthening over the central Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday night and was expected to make landfall in the U.S. as a Category 3 storm.

A tweet previously embedded here has been deleted or was tweeted from an account that has been suspended or deleted.

What to expect: "The hurricane should approach the Upper Texas and southwest Louisiana coasts on Wednesday night and move inland near those areas late Wednesday night or Thursday morning," the National Hurricane Center said in its 7 p.m. forecast, noting it was packing winds of almost 85 mph "with higher gusts."

"Significant strengthening is forecast during the next 36 hours, and Laura is expected to be a major hurricane at landfall. Rapid weakening is expected after Laura makes landfall."

Of note: Laura has killed at least 20 people and razed homes across the Caribbean, the BBC notes.

The state of play: President Trump has granted requests from the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi and Texas to issue federal emergency declarations. All three governors have declared states of emergency.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) urged residents to take COVID-19 precautions, ensuring they have masks and sanitation supplies if they do leave home.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said at a news briefing on Saturday: "We are in unprecedented times. We are dealing with not only two potential storms in the next few hours; we are also dealing with COVID-19."

The big picture: Laura formed near the Leeward Islands on Friday morning. AP reports the storm on Saturday left some 200,000 customers without power and over 10,000 with no water in Puerto Rico after downing trees in the south  an area still recovering from 2017's Hurricane Maria and which was hit by a series of earthquakes earlier this year.

Former tropical storm Marco formed in the northwestern Caribbean last Friday night. It was upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane on Sunday but made landfall in the U.S. as a tropical depression near the mouth of the Mississippi River , where it lashed communities with heavy rains and tropical storm-force winds late Monday before weakening overnight.

Editor's note: This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates.
Move over, Watson.

An artificial intelligence algorithm this month beat a human fighter pilot during a simulated dogfight, DARPA officials revealed. This human-machine showdown comes as the military puts more of its pilots in a digital cockpit, rather than a physical one, for qualifications and training.

During the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-hosted AlphaDogfight challenge last week, Maryland-based Heron Systems came in first place among eight companies who pitted their AI-powered simulated aircraft against one another for two days straight. Then, Heron's system on the third day beat an F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot "in five straight simulated dogfights in the man-vs-machine finale," the organization said following the finals.

Read Next: This New Air Force Training Center Will Prep Pilots for War with China and Russia

The companies that took part were Aurora Flight Sciences, a subsidiary of Boeing Co.; EpiSys Science; Georgia Tech Research Institute; Heron Systems; Lockheed Martin Corp.; Perspecta Labs; PhysicsAI; and SoarTech. The trial took roughly a year to plan, DARPA officials said.

Heron beat Lockheed for the top spot among the companies, according to Col. Dan "Animal" Javorsek, DARPA program manager for the event and former F-16 pilot. Aurora, Heron Lockheed and PhysicsAI were among the finalists.

Heron's tactics throughout the three-day competition, such as an "aggressive gun maneuver," gave them the upper hand, Javorsek said during a live-stream on YouTube.

The AI-powered aircraft used other confrontational moves during the simulation, such as directly flying toward one another at a close, 100-foot range without letting up until the last possible second -- a high-stakes game of chicken.

But these maneuvers went beyond the scope of how human pilots train to face off at the elite Air Force Weapons School -- the service's version of Top Gun -- at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, Javorsek said.

"We're performing complex physics in a dynamic environment," added Banger, the F-16 pilot who squared off against Heron in the final round. The pilot was only identified by his call sign.

"I'm trying to solve for angles and different closures, airspeed differences, etc., to arrive at a position where I can employ my weapon or whatever I choose [to employ] onto an enemy aircraft," Banger said during a phone call with reporters.

The fighter pilot's goal is to maximize the jet to arrive at a point where it can shoot to win the fight, he said.

But the AI ultimately secured its victory without allowing Banger the chance to fire back. He was forced to use all his time on evasive maneuvers, he said, which were ultimately unsuccessful.

Javorsek said AI algorithms cannot totally replicate the way pilots train or get ready for a head-to-head fight with enemy aircraft or new threats posed from adversaries such as Russia or China. But employing an AI adversary -- a system that learns and self-corrects in real-time -- will make pilots more aware of how they can and should think differently while up in the air.

"When you look at these artificial intelligence games that are played ... what you find is that the artificial intelligence community has been experimenting with what started in board games [such as] chess, 'Go,' and very rapidly within the last 10 years moved [these strategies] into real-time video games," Javorsek said, recapping the first two days of the competition.

While chess is a battle focusing on maneuvers to eliminate the king, Weiqi, more commonly known as Go, forces the player to focus on position, encirclement and counter-encirclement.

Training with AI may also give human pilots more confidence in the technology down the road, particularly as the Pentagon looks to pair manned fighters with algorithm-driven "Loyal Wingman" drones, he said.

"That's what we really tried to leverage in what we designed here," Javorsek said.

AI has been successful before in battle simulations: During an aerial demonstration in 2016, a program dubbed Alpha proved its worth during a simulated wargame using "mixed combat teams of manned and unmanned air fighters to operate in highly contested environments."

The DARPA experiment falls into the agency's larger Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, which aims to automate some air-to-air combat training in the future.

The increased focus on simulation comes as military leaders, particularly in the Air Force, work to overhaul the pilot training curriculum and augment flight hours with virtual reality training on the ground.

Air Education and Training Command last month introduced a simulator-heavy experiment, known as UPT 2.5, at some of its training bases.

If successful, the service will then gradually cut back its use of the T-1 Jayhawk, the aircraft used for advanced training of student pilots learning to fly cargo, tanker or command-and-control aircraft, in favor of the simulator-only course.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

Related: Air Force 1st Lieutenant Beats 4-Star Dad in Livestreamed Dogfight Game
The self-exiled presidential challenger hopes dialogue with Lukashenko government will start soon.

Belarusian opposition presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who has led the biggest challenge to President Alexander Lukashenkos 26-year rule, expressed her hopes to start a dialogue with the authorities, she told Polish Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

Belarus is facing its biggest political crisis since the breakup of the Soviet Union, with tens of thousands of demonstrators rejecting Lukashenkos victory in an August 9 vote his opponents say was rigged.

Opponents of Lukashenko established a body, the Coordination Council, last week with the stated aim of negotiating a transfer of power.

Belarus launched a criminal case, accusing the Council of an illegal attempt to seize power and on Monday, three council members were arrested.

The aim of the Council is to run a dialogue with the current authorities. I hope that dialogue will take place soon. However, the first condition is the release of political prisoners, Tikhanovskaya told Gazeta Wyborcza daily in an interview published on Monday.

Belarus is facing its biggest political crisis since the breakup of the Soviet Union [Tatyana Zenkovich/EPA]

Tikhanovskaya, a political novice, emerged as the consensus opposition candidate after better-known figures, including her jailed activist husband, were barred from standing.

She fled to neighbouring Lithuania after the August 9 vote.

Tikhanovskaya said she would not run again if a new election were held, but expected her husband might. She would see herself working in human rights organisations, she said.

It is too early to talk about it though. The main goal is a new election, she said.
Oregon man caught in Lyon County with $760,000 of marijuana
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry have been at the center of many controversies since beginning their historic relationship. With their unprecedented decision to step away from their royal duties in order to live a life better suited to their personalities and less firmly in the spotlight, the pair have definitely reshaped the way that people talk about their marriage.

As the growing family settles into their new life in America and their new placement in the world of fame, fans are still interested in little tidbits about how it all began. One thing fans might wonder is who said I love you first.

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have an adorable relationship

RELATED: Meghan Markles Biggest Royal Faux Pas Labeled Her Tactless  But She May Have Had No Choice

There have been critics of Meghan and Prince Harry from the very beginning of their relationship. Its undeniable that some of these criticisms have been rooted in racist reactions to Meghans racial background.

Setting aside the bigoted response for a moment, though, many fans were absolutely smitten with this couple and their adorable relationship. The pair met through a mutual friend in 2016. At the time, Meghan was an actor on the show Suits, and she went on a blind date with Prince Harry while visiting London.

Each was adorably oblivious to one anothers famous lives. Prince Harry didnt watch Suits; Meghan didnt follow the British royal family. Despite their famous backgrounds, they were just two people getting to know one another.

After their first blind date, they met again at the same restaurant the next night. Their third date definitely upped the ante. Prince Harry flew Meghan to Botswana, and the couple spent five days together. A year and a half later, they were engaged, and their gorgeous wedding took place in May 2018.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex ruffled feathers

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle | Andrew Milligan  WPA Pool/Getty Images

From pretty much the moment the wedding started, it was clear that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were not going to be beholden to royal protocol. Meghan was constantly scrutinized for the little ways that she refused to follow the royal rules, and many people praised the couple as progressive thinkers who were challenging outdated norms. The wedding was also full of little moments of PDA that demonstrated just how much this pair truly adored one another.

Once Baby Archie joined the family, it seemed that there was a shift in the response to the public. Meghan had already faced a lot of cruel headlines and negative attention in her royal role, but the Duke and Duchess seemed less able to tolerate the mistreatment once their son was born.

As the public angrily demanded more and more access to the family, Prince Harry  likely remembering how he tragically lost his own mother in part due to aggressive paparazzi  became even more protective of their privacy.

Who said I love you first?

Now that the pair has made the shocking decision to step away from royal duties entirely in order to protect their privacy and live their lives the way they want, fans are even more interested in this story tale marriage. Clearly, their love for one another and the family theyre building was enough to give up a guaranteed life of fame and luxury, so it must be made of some very powerful love.

Speaking of love, a new book about the couple purports to share some details about their earliest days together. As Glamour reports, the couple exchanged I love yous just three months into their new relationship.

Who said it first? According to an upcoming book  and the authors say they got it straight from one of Meghans close friends  Prince Harry was the first to confess his love. However, Meghan immediately said it back. Shortly after that, the pair started planning their future together.
Over seven lakh people had registered on a government portal, which was launched by the Modi government last month, between August 14 and August 21, however, 691 got jobs. The ASEEM (Aatmanirbhar Skilled Employee Employer Mapping) portal that was launched by the Centre on July 11 has seen registration of over 69 lakh individuals in just 40 days.

As per data by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, just 2 per cent of the 3.7 lakh candidates who registered on the portal have actually been employed, The Indian Express reported.

Besides, around 69 lakh migrant workers had registered on the portal, but only 1.49 lakh were offered jobs. However, only 7,700 could join work.

The Ministry said that the portal is not just for migrant workers. The list includes self-employed tailors, electricians, field-technicians, sewing machine operators, courier delivery executives, nurses, accounts executives, manual cleaners and sales associates.

According to the data, there is shortage of workers in states that had witnessed an exodus of migrant workers such as Karnataka, Delhi, Haryana, Telangana and Tamil Nadu.

The demand for work among migrant workers has risen by 80 per cent in just a week (3.78 lakh from 2.97 lakh during August 14-21), however, there is just 9.87 percent increase in their employment (7,009 to 7,700  during this period). The number of registered people on the portal too has increased by 11.98 per cent  61.67 to 69 lakh in the week ending August 21.

Our skilled youth will be able to play an important role in accelerating the development journey of India. To accelerate self-reliance and Skill India Mission of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to connect the youth in the country with new employment opportunities, our ASEEM portal will surely give impetus to our continuous efforts to bridge supply and demand in the market. Our skilled workforce will ensure increased productivity and better outcomes for our industries, " Mahendra Nath Pandey, Minister of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, told The Indian Express.

Healthcare, logistics, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), retail and construction are top sectors offering about 73.4 percent of jobs on the portal.

The ASEEM portal data show that under the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan, launched in 116 districts by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June, women constitute only 5.4 per cent of job seekers.

The portal has 514 companies registered, out of which 443 have posted 2.92 lakh jobs. However, only 1.49 lakh have been offered to aspirants, as per the data. Of the total jobs posted on the portal, over 77 per cent are in Karnataka, Delhi, Haryana, Telangana and Tamil Nadu, shows the data.

The number of active companies that have posted at least one job on ASEEM has slightly increased to 443 from 419 in the week that ended on August 21.

For trained/skilled workers is concerned, 42.3 per cent of people who had registered on the portal are from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Delhi.
WASHINGTON  The U.S. Army plans to field its cloud in the sky for the current aviation fleet by the end of fiscal 2024, according to the services Program Executive Office Aviation.

Other transaction authority contracts through the Army Contracting Commands New Jersey center were awarded to three vendors in July, and they will hit the ground running to conduct analysis for an Aviation Mission Common Server, or AMCS, Army spokesman David Hylton said in a statement sent to Defense News on Aug. 24.

Those vendors are Elbit Systems of America, Mercury Systems, and Physical Optics Corp. The OTA contracts totaled roughly $3.3 million. An OTA is a contracting mechanism used for rapidly prototyping.

Defense News first reported the Armys plans to develop and field AMCS last year.

Maj. Gen. Thomas Todd, then-program executive officer for Army aviation, told Defense News that since the current fleet will most definitely fly alongside future aircraft as they are fielded, a common server on board every aircraft will be important to store, process and then quickly transport data.

The Army aims to field a future attack reconnaissance aircraft and a future long-range assault aircraft by 2030.

The server will be a stack of storage, data processing and transport capability that is very much a flying cloud, Todd said. The AMCS will reside inside every aircraft. It has to reside in every aircraft because there has to be onboard processing and storage power, he added, noting that it will be the engine that drives the associated user interface and apps as well as provide connectivity to the network.

The Army plans to take about 13 months to conduct analysis and move through the design phase. Once the service is through the design phase, it will conduct a demonstration and qualification of the capability delivered over roughly nine months, Hylton said.

The three vendors had contract kickoff meetings at the end of July, according to Hylton.

Story continues

The contracts cover only the analysis phase of the effort. The next stage will cover a preliminary design followed by a critical design stage. A demonstration will be held as the fourth stage of the plan. In the final stage, the Army will conduct qualification testing.

At the end of the final stage, the Army will receive production-representative AMCS prototype hardware line-replaceable units, components and software, Hylton said.

The government reserves the right to perform a downselect at the end of each stage, he said, but the Army was not clear if only one vendor would make it all the way to the end or if multiple vendors could end up supplying production-ready prototypes.

The user interface will be built upon technology developed by Northrop Grumman for the Victor-model Black Hawk, Todd said last year. The V model is an L-model UH-60 with a digital, modern cockpit like the M model, the latest Black Hawk variant, but not with a M models price tag.

Additionally, the interface in a V model can take on new capability through apps, like a smartphone. The Army is integrating the same user interface into the M-model Black Hawks, Todd said at the time.

The effort to build the server is part of a larger project to ensure the current fleet is ready to fight in multidomain operations. The Army wants to obtain multidomain dominance by 2035.

We took a look at Army Futures Commands guidance on exactly what those combat aviation brigades would have in them and what would be enduring. For example, the Apache would be there indefinitely, Todd said. We also found that the requirements for data, the transport of and use of was exponential. So ultimately its a problem that exists for the entire fleet, so we need to get after, at a minimum, making the enduring fleet compatible with future vertical lift, if not more capable.
Stocks to watch today: Here is a list of top stocks that are likely to be in focus in Monday's trading session based on latest developments. Investors are also awaiting April-June quarter earnings that are scheduled to be released today. Companies set to announce their earnings are Suzlon, IRB Infra, LIC Housing Finance, NOCIL, Scooters India and Globus Spirits.

Share Market News Live: Sensex rises 100 points, Nifty at 11,371; NTPC, Asian Paints, HDFC Bank top gainers

ICICI Lombard: The company has announced signing a definitive agreement to acquire Bharti Enterprises-promoted Bharti AXA General Insurance for Rs 4,600-crore, in all stock transaction.

Phoenix Mills: The company had raised Rs 1,100 crore through its QIP. The government of Singapore was the biggest investor in the share sale, contributing Rs 450 crore, almost 41% of the total amount.

Granules India: The US-based subsidiary of the pharma company has received approval from the USFDA for its Ramelteon tablets used for treatment of insomnia.

Dixon Technologies: Company Board of Directors have approved raising of funds by way of issuance of any instrument or security, including equity shares, fully / partly convertible debentures, NCDs, Foreign Currency Convertible Bonds, warrants or any other combination thereof, in one or more tranches for an amount not exceeding Rs 200 crore, subject to necessary approvals.

Oil India: Company reported its second quarterly loss in its history, of Rs 48.61 crore during the April-June quarter, as compared with a net profit of Rs 624.80 crore in the same period of the previous financial year.

A2Z Infra Engineering: Company recieved work order worth Rs 104 crore for fibre installation from Airtel's group company.

Indiabulls Housing Finance: The company reported a 66% dip in net profit at Rs 273 crore during the April-June quarter, as compared with a net profit of Rs 802 crore in the same quarter of the previous fiscal.

Union Bank: Bank reported a standalone net profit of Rs 333 crore for the April-June quarter, as against Rs 381 crore in the same period of the previous fiscal.

Godfrey Phillips: Company reported a 53.56% decline in its consolidated net profit to Rs 55.09 crore for the April-June quarter, as against Rs 118.63 crore in the same quarter a year ago.

Company's total income from operations fell 41.33% to Rs 503.60 crore, during the April-June quarter, as compared with Rs 858.49 crore in the same period last fiscal.

PNB: The state-owned bank reported a standalone net profit of Rs 308 crore for the quarter ended June even as provisions for bad loans doubled.

Sun Pharma: Company recieved US FDA approval for Methylphenitdate Hydrochloride.

Dewan Housing Finance Corporation (DHFL): Company reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 70.10 crore for the April-June quarter, as against a loss of Rs 215.47 crore in the same quarter of the previous fiscal.

Earnings Today: Suzlon, IRB Infra, LIC Housing Finance, NOCIL, Scooters India and Globus Spirits are among of the companies which will announce their April-June quarter earnings today.
By Andre Damon

August 23, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - Over the past week, the American public was subjected to an eight-hour infomercial, officially termed by the Democratic Party a convention, in which the long-time political reactionary Joe Biden was packaged simultaneously as the great American everyman and a miracle cure for Americas problems.

Amid celebrity cameos, empty platitudes, and unconvincing personal anecdotes, the vast majority of this weeks telethon was devoid of any actual discussion of program and policies. Behind the hoopla, however, there are significant conflicts within the ruling class, centered primarily on issues of foreign policy.

These conflicts were partially revealed on Tuesday night, when the convention aired a pre-recorded segment featuring a group of seven military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who claimed that the Trump administration was not fighting the US wars in the Middle East and pursuing its conflicts with Russia and China aggressively enough.

Commenting on Trumps Middle East policy, Brett McGurk, in charge of the US operations in the Middle East under Obama, said, Our military had a policy to maintain our presence in Syria, which Trump went on to abandon. He concluded, Its shameful.

Rose Gottemoeller, former Deputy Secretary General of NATO, concluded that Trump hasnt been standing up to Russia and China at all. Another State Department official added, Thanks to Donald Trump, our adversaries are stronger, and bolder.

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Following the segment, General Colin Powell added that Biden will make it his job to know when anyone dares to threaten us, he will stand up to our adversaries with strength and experience. They will know he means business. The business for which Powell is best known is the destruction of Iraq and the death of one million of its inhabitants, based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction.

These themes were expanded upon in a letter published Friday by a group of 72 high-level intelligence and military officialsand war criminalsheaded by former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, declaring their support for Biden.

The first of the letters ten bullet points states that Trump has called NATO obsolete, branded Europe a foe, mocked the leaders of Americas closest friends, and threatened to terminate longstanding US alliances. As a result, the letter concludes,  Donald Trump has gravely damaged Americas role as a world leader.

In other words, the present administration has undermined the fundamental geostrategic aims that have led the United States into three decades of war: The effort to control the Eurasian landmass, including the Middle East.

In the four years since Trump became the Republican nominee, a ferocious conflict has been raging within the ruling class, centered on differences over foreign policy, and in particular the hot war being waged between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian forces in its Eastern regions after the US-backed coup in 2014.

Instead of focusing on the conflict with Russia that has been the preeminent concern of much of the foreign policy establishment, the Trump administration has been preoccupied with stunting the economic growth of China while building up US military capabilities to fight a war in the Pacific.

But here, too, the military and intelligence figures aligned with the Biden campaign feel that the White House has been ineffective. As two of the letters signatories wrote in an article in Foreign Policy magazine, Trump has confronted China by starting trade wars with everyone else rather than involving other imperialist states. Major democratic powers including Japan, France, and Canada are desperate to work with the United States to blunt Chinas predatory technology policies.

From the standpoint of the ruling class, it is primarily these differences over foreign policy, not domestic policy, that are being fought out in the election. Facing the greatest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression, domestic policy has been conducted on a largely bipartisan basis. The CARES Act, which sanctioned the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street while starving testing and contact tracing, passed unanimously in the Senate and by an unrecorded voice vote in the House.

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs, one of the main journals of US geopolitics, lays out some of the concerns of the dominant factions of the state. After nearly four years of turbulence, the lead editorial states, the countrys enemies are stronger, its friends are weaker, and the United States itself is increasingly isolated and prostrate.

Its concern is that Trump has proven an unreliable steward of the interests of the ruling class abroad. Dragging his party and the executive branch along, the president has reshaped national policy in his own image: focused on short-term advantage, obsessed with money, and uninterested in everything else.

The magazines lead story declares that Trumps unstable and erratic foreign policy has resulted in a situation in which China is wealthier and stronger, North Korea has more nuclear weapons and better missiles and Nicolas Maduro is more entrenched in Venezuela, as is Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

From the standpoint of the Biden campaign, the solution to all of these crises is to reassert American dominance and leadership over its traditional allies in Europe and Japan in order to pursue a more aggressive US policy against Russia and China. The United States must again be the world hegemon.

The central focus of the new administration will be reclaiming Americas place in the world through the reassertion of American exceptionalism, stated Joe Biden adviser Jake Sullivan in the Atlantic .

Earlier this year, Biden published an article entitled Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. In that article, he declares, that to counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliances military capabilities sharp. At the same time, the United States needs to get tough with China. The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China.

But while the latest issue of Foreign Affairs may be titled The World Trump Made, the geopolitical debacle facing the United States did not spring from Trumps head. Trump did not make the world. Rather, the worldand, specifically, the crisis of American imperialismmade Trump.

The decline in the hegemonic position of the United States extends over a period of decades and was already evident prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. The dissolution of American imperialisms Cold War adversary was seized on by the strategists of the American ruling class to declare a unipolar moment. The United States could utilize its unrivaled military power to counter its declining economic position through force.

The endless series of wars launched by the United States over the past three decades have destroyed entire societiesin Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, among others. But they have failed to reverse US imperialisms fortunes. Moreover, they have profoundly distorted and brutalized American society itself: a process of which the fascistic Trump administration is an expression.

Even prior to Trumps inauguration, there were growing tensions between the US and its erstwhile allies in Europe. The coronavirus pandemic and the disastrous response of the ruling class to ita policy that has been bipartisanhas further eroded the global position of American capitalism.

American imperialism confronts intractable problems, and first among them is the growth of social opposition within the United States itself. Among the considerations motivating support for the Biden campaign within the ruling class is the hope that it can somehow establish a broader base for imperialist aggression abroad. The promotion of identity politics is aimed at further integrating privileged sections of the upper middle class behind the project of global domination. This is what Kamala Harris represents.

A Biden/Harris administration will not inaugurate a new dawn of American hegemony. Rather, the attempt to assert this hegemony will be through unprecedented violence. If it is brought to powerwith the support of the assemblage of reactionaries responsible for the worst crimes of the 21st centuryit will be committed to a vast expansion of war. Trump and Pompeo are barreling headlong toward a conflict with China. Bidens critique of this disastrous course is that the United States needs to get tough, whether against Russia, China, Afghanistan, Syria, or everywhere in between.

The American ruling class, moreover, confronts in the growth of the class struggle the most serious threat to its geopolitical ambitions.

Whichever course is ultimately determined by the election, US imperialism has, as the World Socialist Web Site warned in the run-up to the Iraq war, a rendezvous with disaster. All factions of the US state are united on a course of action that will lead to the deaths of countless millions. The struggle against war will not go forward through the selection of either Trump or Biden, but through the independent struggle of the working class.
Thank you for tuning in to episode 87 of The CUInsight Experience podcast with your host, Randy Smith, co-founder of CUInsight.com. This episode is brought to you by our friends at PSCU. As the nations premier payments CUSO, PSCU proudly supports the success of more than 1,500 credit unions.

Over the last few months, credit unions have had to adapt to new ways of interacting with their members. On this weeks episode, Im talking with Christina OBrien, President and CEO of Robins Financial Credit Union in Georgia, about how her team has weathered the storm and why the pandemic has changed the way members will interact with credit unions in the future.

Christina is having a great first year as President and CEO, despite having to deal with a global pandemic. Listen as she shares how she got her start in credit unions, how shes grown as a leader during the pandemic, and what she believes credit unions need to change to stay relevant in the financial services industry. She also shares her thoughts on why credit unions cant be afraid to change how they do business.

In the leadership and life hacks portion of the show, Christina and I talk about her leadership style, how it has changed over the years, and what her process is for making difficult decisions. We discuss a common myth about leadership, mistakes young leaders make, and building a good team. We also learn that when Christina has a day off, she likes to unplug with her family in a boat in the middle of a lake or work on one of her many DIY home-improvement projects.

Through the rapid-fire questions, we learn that Christina wanted to be an attorney when she grew up, and that Dr. Seuss Oh, the Places Youll Go! is her go-to book to give to anyone graduating high school or college. We also learn that she never seems to sing the right words to songs. Christinas final thoughts are to go for it and never turn down an opportunity given to you. This conversation was a ton of fun. Enjoy!

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Books mentioned on The CUInsight Experience podcast: Book List

How to find Joanne:

Christina OBrien, President and CEO of Robins Financial Credit Union

www.robinsfcu.org

Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn

Show notes from this episode:

A big shout-out to our friends at PSCU, an amazing sponsor of The CUInsight Experience podcast. Thank you!

Check out all the outstanding work that Christina and her team at Robins Financial Credit Union are doing here.

Check out Macon Magazine article about Christina here

Shout-out: Robins Financial Credit Union Executive Team

Shout-out: John Rhea, Former President and CEO of Robins Financial Credit Union

Shout-out: Christinas Family

Shout-out: Jill Nowacki

Book mentioned: Oh, the Places Youll Go! by Dr. Seuss

Shout-out: Christinas Grandson

Previous guests mentioned in this episode: Jill Nowacki (episodes 4, 18, 37, 64 & 82)

In This Episode:
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A 2018 phone call where Jerry Falwell Jr. tells the pool boy his wife had been having an affair with not to make her jealous with stories of dating other women has emerged.

It comes hours after Falwell Jr. claimed he had no knowledge of their romance and after pool boy Giancarlo Granda, 29, contradicted him, claiming he sometimes watched them having sex.

Granda spoke out on Monday in an interview with Reuters where he contradicted Falwell Jr's claims that he was trying to extort the couple, and gave more details about his alleged sexual relationship with them.

He also gave Reuters a recording of a phone call between him and Becki where Jerry is in the background. She complains in the phone call about hearing about his dating life, and said she was in tears 'for a day' after he had sex with a Tinder date and ordered her an Uber home.

Jerry chimed in on the call, saying: 'You're going to make her jealous Gian.'

It undermines Jerry's claims that he did not know about the affair when it happened and that it made him 'upset' afterwards. He claims he lost 80lbs as a result but that the family decided to keep in touch with Giancarlo because he was extorting them and they felt they could control the situation.

Giancarlo said he was 20 when he met the pair in Miami and that starting in March 2012, he had sex with Falwell's wife Becki several times a year in hotel rooms, sometimes while Falwell Jr. watched, until 2018.

'Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,' Giancarlo said.

During that time, the trio went into business together with an LGBTQ-friendly hostel in Miami that Giancarlo runs.

TRANSCRIPT Becki to Jerry: Gian's been very busy. His new thing is like telling me every time he hooks up with people, like I don't have feelings. Jerry: You're going to make her jealous Gian Becki: A week ago I was in tears for a whole freakin' day. He was like "I hooked up with this girl on Tinder and I got her an Uber" and I'm like completely depressed. Giancarlo: Come on.. Becki: Maybe the more you tell me the more I'll get used to it. Giancarlo: You don't care about me anymore Becki... Becki: Uh yeah really? Obviously Giancarlo: I just tell you because you're my best friend. Becki: I know, I'm trying to be OK. I'm like, accepting that position, but I'm kind of... so yeah. I'm trying to. I've taken a lot. I've moved on, I've matured. Giancarlo: Yes Becki: I'm not as crazy as I used to be I would think, I don't think. Giancarlo: No... you're perfect. Becki: Yeah... gotta keep that up...This is new.. even before when you weren't dating somebody it just kind of threw me for a loop Advertisement

He said that he was used as a 'target' for the couple's 'sexual escapades' and that he was not trying to extort the pair, even though he threatened to go 'the kamikaze route' if they didn't give him what he wanted.

He sat down with Reuters earlier this month. They went to Falwell Jr. with Giancarlo's claims, which is what prompted his statement on Sunday night.

Now 29, Granda described the liaisons as frequent - 'multiple times per year' - and said the encounters took place at hotels in Miami and New York, and at the Falwells home in Virginia.

On Sunday night, Falwell Jr. - a prominent Trump endorser and one of the most influential right-wing Christians in America - told The Washington Examiner that he and his family were being extorted.

He said Becki had an affair with Giancarlo that he had 'no involvement in', and that he'd chosen to forgive his wife.

Giancarlo claims the opposite.

He showed Reuters texts from Becki where she said she was 'missing him like crazy' and also gave an audio recording of her complaining about hearing about the other women Giancarlo had been intimate with. Falwell Jr. was also on the call and told him that he was going to make his wife 'jealous'.

'Hes like telling me every time he hooks up with people. Like I dont have feelings or something,' Becki said.

Jerry then chimed in: 'You're going to make her jealous.' Giancarlo replied: 'I'm not trying to do that.'

He insists he was trying to negotiate a buyout from the hostel business and that he was not extorting the pair.

In one text to them, he said: 'Since youre okay with ruining my life, I am going to take the kamikaze route.

'It really is a shame because I wanted to reach a peaceful resolution and just move on with our lives but if conflict is what you want, then so be it.'

In his statement on Sunday night, Falwell Jr. said, in part: 'Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved...it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about.'

His friendship with the Falwells eventually soured, he said, in part because he wanted to dissolve his ties with the couple and fell into a business dispute with them.

Giancarlo first emerged as a figure in the Falwells circle two years ago, when BuzzFeed News reported that the couple had befriended Granda and gone into business with him, buying a Miami Beach youth hostel in 2013.

At the time of the BuzzFeed article, a representative of the Falwell family said Granda was 'offered a share' in Alton Hostel LLC because he lived in Miami and would act as a manager of the youth hostel. Corporate records show that he currently has a stake in that venture.

After Reuters presented its initial reporting early last week to the Falwells, a lawyer for Jerry Falwell, Michael Bowe, said the evangelical leader 'categorically denies everything you indicated you intend to publish about him.'

On Sunday night, however, as Reuters was preparing to publish this article, Jerry Falwell issued a statement to the Washington Examiner in which he said that his wife had had an affair with Giancarlo and that Giancarlo had been trying to extort money from the couple over the matter. Giancarlo denies any such intent, saying he was seeking to negotiate a buyout from a business arrangement he says he had with the couple.

Granda claims that he had sex with Jerry Falwell Jr's wife Becki several times a year for six years and that he watched 'from the corner of the room'

Giancarlo and Jerry. They met in Miami in 2012, when Giancarlo was 20

Giancarlo, left, with the family in an undated photo. They met in 2012 in Miami. He runs a hostel they invested in

Giancarlo with the family on a trip to Washington DC in September 2018. That year is when both sides say their relationship soured

Jesus Fernandez Sr and Jesus Fernandez Jr sued, alleging that Falwell and Granda cut them out of the deal involving a hostel in Miami, Florida. The deal was settled in 2019

Falwells statement Sunday to the Examiner said nothing about Giancarlos account alleging that the evangelical leader had his own role in the affair, and Falwell didn't address questions from Reuters about it. In the statement quoted by the Examiner, Falwell said that 'Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved.'

Falwell, picture above with his wife and Trump, flew Granda in 2012 to Liberty University to meet the president

News of the entanglement could pose a fresh threat to the influence of Jerry Falwell, a towering figure in the U.S. evangelical political movement.

His 2016 endorsement of Donald Trump helped the twice-divorced New Yorker win the Republican nomination for president.

Falwell, 58, resigned as president from Liberty University, the Christian school he had run since 2007, after initially taking indefinite leave of absence earlier this month.

The leave, announced in a terse statement from the schools board of trustees, came days after Falwell posted, then deleted, an Instagram photo of himself with his pants unzipped, standing with his arm around a young woman whose pants were also partly undone. Falwell later told a local radio station that the picture was meant as a good-natured joke.

Becki Falwell, 53, is a political figure in her own right. She served on the advisory board of the group Women for Trump, which advocates for the presidents reelection campaign. She also spoke as part of a panel with her husband and Donald Trump Jr at last years Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the signature annual gathering of conservatives. Jerry Falwell and others refer to her as 'the first lady of Liberty University.'

The university, based in Lynchburg, Virginia, was founded in 1971 by Falwells televangelist father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The younger Falwell took over in 2007. Today, the university boasts an online and on-campus enrollment that exceeds 100,000 students and holds those who attend to an exacting honor code.

'Sexual relations outside of a biblically ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman are not permissible at Liberty University,' the code reads.

In a statement released Friday, before news of the relationship with Giancarlo became public, Liberty University said its 'decision whether or not to retain Falwell as president has not yet been made.'

Its board of trustees, the statement read, 'requested prayer and patience as they seek the Lords will and also seek additional information for assessment.'

Jerry Falwell Jr.'s full statement on his wife's affair

My family has been blessed with the opportunity to serve Christ and our community over the past 50 years - from when my father founded Liberty in the early 1970's through today. When my father suddenly passed away in 2007, I quickly and unexpectedly went from being the lawyer working in the background on the business aspects of the school to becoming a very public person, having to overcome my fears of speaking in front of audiences of tens of thousands, with many more responsibilities to the Liberty community and to my own family.

My priority was to build on my father's vision and to work hard. Thanks to the help of the Board and the extraordinary Liberty faculty, executives, staff and community, we have ensured the University's sustained growth and financial health while providing the best and most modern on-campus and online educational and spiritual resources to a wider range of students both in person and through digital platforms.

Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved  it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about. After I learned this, I lost 80 pounds and people who saw me regularly thought that I was physically unwell, when in reality I was just balancing how to be most supportive of Becki, who I love, while also reflecting and praying about whether there were ways I could have been more supportive of her and given her proper attention

My commitment to Liberty became and has remained my primary focus - and while I am so grateful and thankful for our collective successes, I also realize in hindsight that there was a toll that this took on me, which extended to my family too. During this time of reflection for us and this especially challenging year, and even more so following the events of the past few weeks, my wife Becki and I agreed that this was the right time for me to share more of our story, because the Liberty community deserves to hear it directly from me and from us.

During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school. We encouraged him to pursue an education and a career and we were impressed by his initiative in suggesting a local real estate opportunity. My family members eventually made an investment in a local property, included him in the deal because he could play an active role in managing it, and became close with him and his family.

Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved  it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about.

After I learned this, I lost 80 pounds and people who saw me regularly thought that I was physically unwell, when in reality I was just balancing how to be most supportive of Becki, who I love, while also reflecting and praying about whether there were ways I could have been more supportive of her and given her proper attention.

I came to realize that while it may be easy to judge others on their behavior, the King James Bible reminds us - 'Thou shalt not commit adultery, but I sayeth unto you, that whoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her in his heart.' In fact, there are ways we may all be sinning, but the Lord believes in this self-reflection.

I was and have always remained fully devoted to Becki and we have shared many private conversations to better understand and support each other and to strengthen our marriage. Thankfully, our love has never been stronger.

Becki and I forgave each other, because while her indiscretion may have been more obvious and apparent, I realized that there were important smaller things I needed to do better too.

In Ephesians 4:32 we learn - 'Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving as God in Christ forgave you.'

We extended the spirit of forgiveness to this man with respect and kindness, both for spiritual and religious reasons, and in the hope that we could help him find his way and allow us to put this behind us, without any harm or embarrassment to our family or to the LU community to which we have dedicated our lives.

Becki and I forgave each other, because while her indiscretion may have been more obvious and apparent, I realized that there were important smaller things I needed to do better too.

During the years that followed, we got to know his family and other loved ones, good people who also really care about him. They shared and confirmed to us that he has periodically demonstrated emotionally unstable behaviors with some destructive tendencies, seemingly in response to his inability to achieve his professional goals. Based on information from other sources, we believe that he may have targeted other successful women in similar ways.

While we tried to distance ourselves from him over time, he unfortunately became increasingly angry and aggressive. Eventually, he began threatening to publicly reveal this secret relationship with Becki and to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies.

While this was very upsetting, we had been advised by trusted legal counsel that it was best to maintain contact with this person, as we tried to manage his increasingly erratic behavior and unreasonable demands while extricating ourselves from him both on a personal level and from that real estate transaction.

It was like living on a roller coaster.

While completely dedicating ourselves to Liberty, we were also suffering in silence during our personal time together, while simultaneously trying to manage and deal with this increasingly threatening behavior, which only worsened over time. We were doing our best to respectfully unravel this 'fatal attraction' type situation to protect our family and the University.

It was like living on a roller coaster...Over the course of the last few months this person's behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public.

Even years after the improper relationship had ended, this person continued to be aggressive with Becki and me in a variety of ways. We finally decided that we had to further withdraw completely from him, which resulted in him stepping up his threats to share more outrageous and fabricate claims about us (under the guise of that business entity).

He clearly moved forward with this plan through a specific member of the media who has continued to badger us, as well as other members of the media, regarding the false claims about the nature of the relationship based on the individual's misrepresentations. Over the course of the last few months this person's behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public.

We have categorically rejected this person's demands while dealing with him and this particular member of the media who seemed just as obsessed with the prurient, untrue aspects of this story, however fantastic.

Even though I continued successfully working with our entire Liberty team to achieve so many of our goals, I am now dealing with things in a way that I should have done before - including seeking to address the emotional toll this has taken. I shouldn't have been afraid to admit my vulnerabilities and to reach out for assistance from the mental health professionals who could have alleviated this pain and stress.

I am committed to speaking out and sharing with others at Liberty the importance of seeking counseling instead of thinking you need to be tough and try to bear these burdens on your own. I am in the early stages of addressing these issues.

Proverbs 3:5-6 says 'trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on thine own understanding in all your ways acknowledge him and he will guide straight thy path.'

The trauma of this experience has brought us to a very challenging point in our lives, but we are strong, our faith in Christ is greater than ever, and with His help and with those in the community who we love and who appreciate the impact of forgiveness, we will get through this. We ask for your prayers and support.

'Bus, meet Becki Falwell....Becki, this is the bus (you're being thrown under)': Disgust at Liberty University's Jerry Fallwell for publicly denouncing wife's 'affair' with pool boy when HE 'was complicit and watching in corner'

Jerry Falwell Jr. has been admonished for blaming his family's involvement with a pool boy entirely on his wife and claiming she cheated on him with the younger man when he allegedly watched them having sex.

Falwell Jr., the head of Liberty University, released a statement on Sunday night claiming that only his wife Becki was involved Giancarlo Ganda, a pool boy who the pair met when he was 20 in 2012.

He said Becki and Giancarlo had an affair and that he'd chosen to forgive her for it, describing it as an 'indiscretion' that caused him to lose 80lbs when he discovered it because he was so upset.

However, Giancarlo spoke out on Monday to claim that not only did Jerry know about the affair, but that he watched them having sex.

He says he and Becki had sex multiple times a year in hotel rooms around the country for six years.

Now, Jerry - who was put on a leave of absence from the Christian college earlier this year - is being slammed for trying to pin the entire scandal on his wife.

Twitter users erupted in criticism of his 'holier than thou' statement.
Buying the Williams team cost the British team's new owners EUR 152 million, according to Bloomberg.

Having slumped to the very back of the field last year, the Grove based team announced last Friday that it has been acquired by private investment firm Dorilton Capital.

"This may be the end of an era for Williams as a family owned team, but we know it is in good hands," said team boss Claire Williams.

Bloomberg reports that New York-based Dorilton Capital paid EUR 152 million for Williams, with EUR 112 million of that finding its way into the hands of shareholders after subtracting debt and transaction costs.

Leo Turrini, an Italian F1 insider, said the deal is "the end of an era".

"Among those whom Enzo Ferrari called the garagisti, Frank Williams and Colin Chapman were probably the greatest," he wrote on his Quotidiano blog.

"Quietly, I believe the team's long decline was cruelly ushered in by the Ayrton Senna tragedy," Turrini added.

"I know that Williams won after that, but there are episodes that divert the course of history."

(GMM)
"The creators of the "genocide" concept, the authors of our moral, historical and territorial claims to our neighbors, glorifying the sacrificial image of the Armenian people, in fact, are our ruthless and insidious enemies," this opinion was expressed by well-known researcher of the Middle East history Philip Ekozyants in the video uploaded to YouTube.

"The genocide of the Armenian people is happening right now, they are trying to evict the Armenian people from the real world, using forgery and falsification of historical events. And they do it quite successfully. Unfortunately, we, Armenians, are participating in our own genocide. The process of genocide has not begun a hundred years ago, as we used to think, as they try to convince us. A hundred years ago, a great evil was committed against our people and for all the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. This evil acts were committed for several long years. It ended and remained in our hearts forever. And the genocide of our people began 30 years later, in the 1940s. And it began in the very appearance of the word and concept of genocide. It continues to this day," Ekozyants says.

According to him, the essence of this "genocide" is that they are trying to resettle the Armenian people from the real world to the virtual world: "First, they managed to convince us that we have nothing in common with the peoples closest to us, our neighbors, with our blood relatives. Second, they convinced us that the well-known history of the Armenian people of the last 400 years, that is, the entire Ottoman period, is not our history; that all these 400 years we were not citizens of the great Ottoman Empire, which is a rich, a powerful and enlightened state, but disenfranchised slaves. Of course, this is not the case. I am sure, Armenian brothers, that together we will figure it out and find the truth and those who are deceiving us."

The expert claims that instead of the true history, virtual antiquity, virtual greatness that have nothing to do with reality, were planted on the Armenian people: "As a result of this psychohistorical violence against our people, we have become enemies to ourselves and do not even notice it. With our surreal claims and requirements to neighboring peoples, especially to the Turkish people, we have become outcasts in our immediate geographic environment. We cannot understand that the creators of the "genocide" concept, the authors of moral, historical and territorial claims, so beautifully praising the sacrificial image of the Armenian people, in fact, are our insidious and ruthless enemies. For tens of years we have been wandering the world, bearing this concept of genocide, invented by completely alien to us people, like a heavy cross.

At the end of the 19th century, the Turks were made our enemies. At the end of 20th century - the Azerbaijanis. And now they are already inoculating the hate virus against the Russian people very successfully

"During this time, the concept of genocide literally merged with us. It has become a member of every Armenian family. It settled in our souls, sucking the lifeblood out of our people. We have become withdrawn, embittered people, we are ready to destroy everyone who does not like our fictional world, a world in which we are the oldest, the greatest, the most wrecked. Thank God, there are enough people among the Armenians who have managed to keep their minds clear. I am sure and I know that our people must regain their memory, return all their relatives, accept it as it is. These are the Turkish people and the Azerbaijani people, and the Russian people. I listed them in the same sequence in which they were torn away and continue to be torn away from our people. No matter how hard it is, we need return our real, natural family. If we do not do this, I am sure we will perish, dissolve," Philip Ekozyants said.

The expert also responded to numerous commentators who ask him not to speak on behalf of the entire Armenian people: "I never spoke and will never speak on behalf of the entire Armenian people. I speak on my own behalf, I express my thoughts here, hoping that that very adequate part of the Armenians will hear me. I undertake the responsibility to show what exactly is the virtuality of our antiquity, our ancient greatness, and also to answer the main question - who is deceiving us and why. "

"Our people, like all other peoples on earth, of course, have an ancient history. But, alas, nothing or almost nothing is known for certain about it. I have already repeated many times, God forbid, I will repeat many times that we had a strong and independent state. It was called the Ottoman Empire, and we were the Ottomans of the Armenian faith. We, Armenians, had no other reliable states. Certainly there were no states, the heirs of which would be one single Armenian people. I will detail the truth about our past, based only on the confirmed facts known to us. "
DOYLESTOWN >> A man and woman will face decades in state prison for the repeated sexual assault of three children under the age of 13, abuse that they also filmed in more than 40 videos of child pornography. Leonard F. Hewitt Sr. 51, and Krystyn Anne Smock, 40, both of Bristol Township, committed the acts for more than four years...
New regulatory framework aims to put all companies who qualify for a listing under the same rules, regardless of their corporate structure and where they sell their shares
Upcoming political events in the Bay Area. Events take place online unless otherwise noted:

WEDNESDAY

Fires town hall: East Bay Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna and Eric Swalwell hold a town hall meeting on the California fires, with Fremont Fire Chief Curtis Jacobson and Cal Fire Unit Chief Jake Hess. 3 p.m. Join meeting here.

Race and equity: A discussion on systemic racism and ways to create a more just and equitable community. Panelists include William Armaline of the SJSU Human Rights Collaborative; LaToya Fernandez of YouthHype; Chava Bustamante of Latinos Unidos for a New America; and Zahra Billoo of the Council on American Islamic Relations. Hosted by San Jose Spotlight. 4 p.m. More information is here.

Womens suffrage centennial: Perspectives on how women can lead the country and further democratic values. Speakers include Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan, She the People founder Aimee Allison, League of Women Voters of San Francisco president Alison Goh, suffrage historian Jennifer Helton and journalists Marisa Lagos of KQED and Elaine Elinson. Hosted by the League of Women Voters. 5 p.m. More information is here.

Katie Hill: Former congresswoman and author of the new book She Will Rise: Becoming a Warrior in the Battle for True Equality, on her story. Hosted by the Commonwealth Club. 6 p.m. More information is here.

Women Take the Stage: An evening of music and speakers celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. Free. 6 p.m. More information is here.

Congestion pricing: A town hall meeting on the idea of implementing congestion pricing for driving in San Francisco. Hosted by the San Francisco County Transporation Authority and Mannys. 6 p.m. More information is here.

THURSDAY

Virtual march on Washington: Two days of events marking the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, with an agenda prioritizing equity, justice and equal opportunity. More information and schedule are here.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy: House GOP leader in conversation about Californias future with Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California. 9:30 a.m. More information is here.

Coronavirus vaccine: A discussion on the progress toward a vaccine and issues surrounding its distribution and degree of effectiveness, with Dr. Cristina Tato of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Hosted by Mannys. 5:30 p.m. More information is here.

S.F.s first suffrage march: The story of the first known San Francisco march for womens right to vote, and the women who led it. Presented by Evelyn Rose, director of the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project. Hosted by the San Francisco Public Library. 6 p.m. More information is here.

SATURDAY

Silicon Valley Pride: Day One of a virtual Pride celebration, beginning at 9 a.m. More information and events are here.

SUNDAY

Silicon Valley Pride: Day Two of a virtual Pride celebration, beginning at 10 a.m. More information and events are here.

TUESDAY

Threats to democracy: Social trends that have often threatened U.S. democracy over the years, and how the nation has overcome them or been weakened. Speakers include Suzanne Mettler, American institutions professor at Cornell University, and Robert Lieberman, political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. Hosted by the Commowealth Club. 3:30 p.m. More information is here.

SEPT. 2

Trey Gowdy: Former GOP congressman from South Carolina discusses his book Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Using the Power of Questions to Communicate, Connect, and Persuade. Hosted by the Commonwealth Club. More information is here.

SEPT. 3

Racism in the Castro: San Francisco Pride and the Commonwealth Club host a discussion on racism and discrimination in San Franciscos Castro neighborhood as part of the Lavender Talks series. Noon. More information is here.

SEPT. 8

Erin Brockovich: Activist discusses how people and communities can take collective action to safeguard the environment. Hosted by the Commonwealth Club. 9:30 a.m. More information is here.

John Bolton: President Trumps former national security adviser talks about the administration and his new book, The Room Where It Happened. Hosted by the Commonwealth Club. 10:30 a.m. More information is here.

Populism and nationalism: How right-wing populism boosts once-marginalized threats like white supremacy and anti-immigration fervor. A discussion with Lawrence Rosenthal, founder of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, and Arlie Hochschild, UC Berkeley professor emerita and author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hosted by the Commomwealth Club. 12:30 p.m. More information is here.

Sen. Chris Murphy: Connecticut Democrat discusses his book The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy. Hosted by the Commonwealth Club. 5 p.m. More information is here.

SEPT. 9

S.F. D7 candidates: Candidates for San Francisco supervisor in District Seven  Emily Murase, Joel Engardio, Myrna Melgar and Vilaska Nguyen  in a debate hosted by sf.citi. 5 p.m. More information is here.

SEPT. 12

Flipping Texas: A Zoom event in support of Democratic candidates for the Texas state House, Sharon Hirsch and Akilah Bacy. Sponsored by Sister District CA Peninsula. 6 p.m. More information is here.

To list an event, please email Chronicle politics editor Trapper Byrne at tbyrne@sfchronicle.com
HOUSTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- KBR (NYSE: KBR) has been awarded two contracts by Ningxia Baofeng Energy Group Co. Ltd (Baofeng Energy) for its 500KTA coal to olefins project & 500KTA C2-C5 comprehensive utilization project to be built in Ningdong Town, Lingwu City, Ningxia, China.

Under the terms of the contracts, KBR will provide process technology licensing and process design packages for this project, which will have an annual production capacity of one million tons of olefins. Once completed, the complex will be the largest single-train methanol to olefins (MTO) plant in the world.

KBR will use a combination of its best-in-class SCORE steam cracking and MTO recovery technologies to achieve Baofeng Energy's project objectives of highest yields and lowest capital investment. The SCORE steam cracking unit will convert the ethane and propane feedstock into ethylene and propylene, which are later separated and further purified in the MTO recovery section to ensure the quality needed to produce polymer grade ethylene and propylene. The MTO recovery process utilizes KBR's commercially-proven technology, which in addition to superior performance provides CAPEX and OPEX advantages over other technologies.

"We are proud that Baofeng Energy has selected KBR for this breakthrough world-scale MTO complex," said Doug Kelly, KBR President, Technology Solutions. "This award is a reaffirmation of our continued commitment to helping our clients maintain their competitive edge through technological advancements and delivering the best return on their investments."

For more than 50 years, KBR's Technology Solutions business unit has been delivering the technologies, flexible solutions and expertise that petrochemical manufacturers rely on to produce ethylene, propylene, acetyls, phenolics, vinyls and other specialty products from a variety of feedstocks in a safe, efficient, and sustainable manner.

About KBR

KBR is a global provider of differentiated professional services and solutions across the asset and program life cycle within the government services, technology and industrial sectors. KBR employs approximately 37,000 people worldwide (including our joint ventures), with customers in more than 80 countries and operations in 40 countries.

KBR is proud to work with its customers across the globe to provide technology, value-added services, and long-term operations and maintenance services to ensure consistent delivery with predictable results. At KBR, We Deliver.

Visit www.kbr.com

Forward Looking Statement

The statements in this press release that are not historical statements, including statements regarding future financial performance, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the company's control that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: the outcome of and the publicity surrounding audits and investigations by domestic and foreign government agencies and legislative bodies; potential adverse proceedings by such agencies and potential adverse results and consequences from such proceedings; the scope and enforceability of the company's indemnities from its former parent; changes in capital spending by the company's customers; the company's ability to obtain contracts from existing and new customers and perform under those contracts; structural changes in the industries in which the company operates; escalating costs associated with and the performance of fixed-fee projects and the company's ability to control its cost under its contracts; claims negotiations and contract disputes with the company's customers; changes in the demand for or price of oil and/or natural gas; protection of intellectual property rights; compliance with environmental laws; changes in government regulations and regulatory requirements; compliance with laws related to income taxes; unsettled political conditions, war and the effects of terrorism; foreign operations and foreign exchange rates and controls; the development and installation of financial systems; increased competition for employees; the ability to successfully complete and integrate acquisitions; and operations of joint ventures, including joint ventures that are not controlled by the company.

KBR's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K, any subsequent Form 10-Qs and 8-Ks, and other U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings discuss some of the important risk factors that KBR has identified that may affect the business, results of operations and financial condition. Except as required by law, KBR undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason.

SOURCE KBR, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.kbr.com


Two people were killed, while 18 others are feared trapped as a five-storey building collapsed in Raigads Mahad tehsil on Monday evening. Three NDRF teams from Pune have been rushed to the spot.

The National Disaster Response Force said the incident took place around 6:50 pm when the building in Kajalpura area collapsed. Rescue teams have been moved with all necessary CSSR equipment, canine squad, etc." it added.

Seventy people were able to vacate the building just before it came down like a pack of cards, district collector Nidhi Choudhary said. She added that an FIR has been filed against builders, engineers and contractors as prime facie it appeared that substandard material was used for the construction of the building.

A police statement said that the building comprised around 47 flats. Maharashtra cabinet minister of state Aditi Tatkare said that 17 people have been rescued, and local rescue teams are already on the site.

Expressing shock over the incident, former CM Devendra Fadnavis, Home Minister Amit Shah and Union Minister Prakash Javadekar said that they were praying for the occupants safety.

Shocked to hear about the building collapse incident at Mahad (Raigad) where many are feared trapped.Praying for everyones safety. ()      .        .   ,   Devendra Fadnavis (@Dev_Fadnavis) August 24, 2020

The collapse of a building in Raigad, Maharashtra is very tragic. Have spoken to DG @NDRFHQ to provide all possible assistance, teams are on the way and will be assisting with the rescue operations as soon as possible. Praying for everyones safety. Amit Shah (@AmitShah) August 24, 2020

Very sad to hear building collapsed in Raigad, Maharashtra. I wish all the people will be rescued at the earliest. Prakash Javadekar (@PrakashJavdekar) August 24, 2020

Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray spoke to MLA Bharat Gogawale and Collector Nidhi Chaudhary to inquire about the incident. He has assured them that all possible support will be extended for speedy rescue and relief works. Deputy CM Ajit Pawar said that he has ordered operation on war footing".

A Reuters report quoted authorities as saying that 28 people were pulled out by rescue teams amid heavy monsoon rains and local residents had joined the operation at the disaster site in Mahad, an industrial town about 200 km (125 miles) south of Mumbai.

Local TV channels showed footage of the debris with locals and police trying to salvage the trapped people. The TV footage also showed at least one ambulance leaving the area as people surrounding it made frantic phone calls.
BENZIE COUNTY  A Wyoming man is in the Benzie County Jail awaiting arraignment after being arrested for felonious assault.

Around 3 a.m. on Aug. 22, Benzie County dispatch reported they received multiple calls of a man driving erratically on Benzie Boulevard in downtown Beulah. It was reported a man was chasing another man on foot and then used his vehicle to chase him down.
PHOENIX - Nearly 200 tents stand inches apart on the scorching gravel lots, many covered in blankets for an extra layer of relief from the desert sun. Outside, their occupants sit on hot ground or in folding chairs, nearby palm trees providing no shade. Despite 12-foot-square sections painted in the gravel, there is little social distancing for Phoenixs homeless population.

Created by local officials in late April as a temporary solution for some of the estimated 3,700 unsheltered homeless, the fenced-in lots on the edge of downtown promised round-the-clock security, social distancing and access to water and toilets. But residents complain that hygiene supplies have become scarce, and measures meant to contain the spread of COVID-19 are not enforced.

We have been, like, ignored, said 61-year-old Elisheyah. Theres no safety, nothing to guarantee you can be safe out here.

Homeless people are one of the most vulnerable populations in the COVID-19 pandemic, yet theyre largely invisible victims of the crisis. Very little is known about how they are faring in part because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development -- the main federal agency overseeing homeless programs -- has not required its national network of providers to gather information on infections or deaths. Thats despite the fact that unlike other high-risk, congregate-living groups, such as nursing home residents or prisoners, homeless people interact more with the public.

___

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State Universitys Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

___

At the start of the pandemic, researchers warned that at least 1,700 of the countrys estimated 568,000 homeless people could eventually die of COVID-19. The administrations homelessness czar told Congress in July there had been just 130 homeless deaths, noting that was significantly lower than had been originally projected.

However, the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism tracked at least 153 homeless deaths in the same time period in just six areas with large homeless populations -- San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle and Phoenix -- and found at least 206 deaths nationwide by early August.

This country for a long time has written off the lives of people experiencing homelessness, said Dr. Margot Kushel, a nationally recognized homelessness expert and medical professor at the University of California, San Francisco. And now it is literally the thing that is really going to make it very difficult to control this pandemic.

Kushel called the pandemic a crisis within a crisis, noting that most homeless people are usually in poorer health and, with widespread closures, had lost access to services providing food, water and shelter.

The Howard Center spent three months investigating COVID-19s impact on homeless people, analyzing data to predict which homeless populations around the country would be most vulnerable. It identified 43 counties that would likely struggle in the pandemic, several of which, such as Imperial in California and Maricopa in Arizona, went on to develop some of the highest infection rates in the country. Reporters also interviewed more than 80 professionals working in homelessness, epidemiology and public health, as well as homeless people in hot-spot areas, who described their daily struggles. And because homelessness is typically a problem left to local communities to address, reporters filed 140 public records requests to the vulnerable counties and their major cities to learn more about their responses to the crisis.

Congress allocated more than $4 billion for homeless-specific programs as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and made billions more available at the discretion of federal and state officials.

But more than four months after passage of the CARES Act, the Howard Center found HUD had given communities access to less than one-third of the money allocated, and even those with access to funds were still waiting on federal guidelines on how to spend the money. Cities and counties can access the funds directly or seek reimbursement for approved expenditures after signing grant agreements with HUD.

When the money does arrive, not all of it may be used to help homeless people. Some homelessness professionals fear local governments will direct the majority of the money to homeless prevention, helping people stay in their homes.

Ann Oliva, HUDs former deputy assistant secretary for special needs, said it was politically and operationally easier to focus on eviction prevention for people who are in housing, and who are, unfairly, often seen as more worthy of assistance than people who are experiencing homelessness. But, she added, We have to do both.

HUD did not respond to Howard Center questions about the delays, including on spending guidelines.

A patchwork response

Many have criticized the federal government for not providing a co-ordinated response to the pandemics impact on homeless people, as well as more resources for testing and tracing. Some have also advocated for racially equitable COVID-19 responses. By early August, people of colour, who represent about 24% of the general population, comprised about 61% of all COVID-19 infections and 50% of all deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We have been left county by county, city by city, to cobble together a public health response to something that is on par with the Spanish flu in terms of its infectiousness and potential lethality, said Marc Dones, executive director of the National Innovation Service, a public policy organization focused on racial equity. To simply step out of the role, to step out of the responsibility in this moment feels like a fundamental abdication of the purpose of government.

At the start of the pandemic, the Howard Center found, some communities quickly responded, forming working groups to address both the housing and health needs of their homeless populations, and securing emergency housing, such as hotels, trailers and even convention centres, to prevent communal spread.

In early March, for example, the homelessness prevention and response co-ordinator in Colorado Springs, Colorado, arranged cross-departmental meetings with public health and nonprofits and, in just three weeks, an emergency isolation shelter with 100 beds was constructed.

San Diego opened its convention centre as an emergency shelter, testing site and meal distribution hub on April 1 and, by early August, had sheltered 2,780 homeless people. Internal records show the city spent approximately $2.8 million a month on the makeshift shelter, and expects to spend $3 million a month through the end of the year.

Others were slow or failed to respond.

The city manager in Sanger, California, opposed housing homeless people possibly infected with COVID-19 in emergency trailers in his town before he was ordered to take them by the county public health department, records show. Before the trailers arrived, city manager Tim Chapa appealed to the City Council. He said the citys shelter may not have the capacity to provide adequate medical support service to identified COVID + homeless, he recounted in an April 17 email to a county official. Chapa said the trailers would be better in Fresno, where they ended up later that day.

In Daytona Beach, Florida, efforts to convert an old building into permanent housing for homeless residents failed, despite the project having funding and county support. Jeff White, executive director of Volusia/Flagler County Coalition for the Homeless, Inc., and another non-profit leader argued that using COVID-19 funds to develop permanent supportive housing was better than paying for hotel rooms, which would be basically burning money. White told the Howard Center he moved on to another plan after city officials gave him kind of a non-response that didnt show support for the project.

Leaders in El Centro, the main city in Californias Imperial County, repeatedly but unsuccessfully sought the countys help with a testing program. As to the homeless population, they are not going to enact anything unless there are any positive results within the population. They are not doing any pre-emptive activities, Adriana Nava, El Centros community services director, wrote to her colleagues on March 19.

Overall, records showed, localities faced two major problems in addressing the pandemics impact on their homeless populations: a lack of readiness to work across departments dealing with both housing and health and insufficient data and testing to know who was getting sick and where.

All states have been at a disadvantage in their response to C-19 because the federal government has failed to adopt a unified, nationwide strategy. In fact, the national strategy seems to be let states handle it, Barbara DiPietro, senior policy director for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, said in an email. This is the least efficient, most wasteful way to approach a crisis.

___

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State Universitys Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, an initiative of the Scripps Howard Foundation in honour of the late news industry executive and pioneer Roy W. Howard. For more see http://azpbs.org/covid-homeless.
Over the weekend, San Antonio's most famous tourist attraction was trending on social media  and not for a good reason.

The Alamo was named the worst attraction in Texas, according to Instagram influencer Matt Shirley's followers.

Shirley asked his nearly 400,000 fans for the worst attraction in each state. He then uploaded a map of the results, writing "don't blame me" in the caption.

On Twitter, many defended the Alamo after Shirley published the map Thursday.

"I will fight anyone who bad mouths the Alamo," @kDubbs_17 tweeted.

"Matt, your IG followers can suck it. The Alamo is amazing," @seankent wrote on Twitter.

Some, however, agreed with Shirley's Instagram followers, calling the historic landmark "unimpressive."

"The Alamo is, truly, unimpressive. But I will personally punch whoever nominated the Grand Canyon (for Arizona) in the face," @JessicaHuseman tweeted.

"The Alamo's definitely the least memorable thing in Texas," @blockwonkel tweeted. "It's not 'Remember the Alamo!' It's 'Remember the Alamo?'"

Shirley's tweet garnered more than 2,000 retweets and nearly 12,000 comments as of Monday afternoon.

Other "worst attractions" included the Hollywood sign in California, Bourbon St. in Louisiana and the Gum Wall in Washington state.

Priscilla Aguirre is a general assignment reporter for MySA.com | priscilla.aguirre@express-news.net | @CillaAguirre
Hezbollah Says Downs Israeli Drone After It Violated Lebanon's Airspace

Sputnik News

00:38 GMT 23.08.2020

BEIRUT (Sputnik) - The Hezbollah militant group says it has downed an Israeli drone on the border between Lebanon and Israel.

According to a Hezbollah statement, the drone violated Lebanon's airspace near the southern village of Ayta ash Shab, located about 1 kilometre (0.6 miles) northeast of the Israeli border.

The Lebanon-based group and political party Hezbollah said the downed drone was now in its possession.

Meanwhile, the IDF said that their glider fell on Lebanese territory during an operation on the border with Lebanon.

At the start of this month, the Israel Defence Forces said a drone was downed in the country's north, on the border with Lebanon.

Tensions between Israel and Lebanon have been on the rise after Hezbollah announced that one of its members was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the south of Syria's capital Damascus in July. In response, Hezbollah issued an official warning of retaliation. Meanwhile, Israel has boosted its military presence along the border with Lebanon and Syria.

 Sputnik

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Vietnams oldest zoo struggles

to meet its daily running cost

of $7,740 a day

Location: Ho Chi Minh City

The 150-year-old zoo

was built in the French colonial era

and has a long history with locals

(SOUNDBITE) (Vietnamese) DIRECTOR OF THE ANIMALS DEPARTMENT, MAI KHAC TRUNG TRUC, SAYING:

"Regarding history and culture, this place was established by the French in the year 1864, so it has a long history that is rooted in the childhood of many citizens in this city and the surrounding areas."

As visitors number dwindled due to lockdown

the zoo called for donations

and received $100,000 within two days

Staff have taken a 30% pay cut

and started growing food for its residents

The zoo has also started selling fertilizer to farmers

and grown flowers to sell to the public

(SOUNDBITE) (Vietnamese) 22-YEAR-OLD ZOO VISITOR, HUYNH THI NHU VI, SAYING:

"I can see that the animals here are not having enough food, and I know that the employees here have taken pay cuts to help the animals, so today I came here to do the same thing, to contribute to improving the situation with the animals food."
MBABANE  Legislators spent a little over E5 million on trips in the past financial year.

Even though Senate President Lindiwe Dlamini was identified as one presiding officer who frequently travelled to New York, several other legislators frequent the list of external trips undertaken by the lawmakers. The list includes Speaker Petros Mavimbela, who is also Mhlambanyatsi MP, Motshane MP Robert Magongo, Mhlume MP Victor Malambe and Deputy Speaker Phila Buthelezi, who have been on three or more international assignments. The list is contained in the Parliament Annual Performance Report for the Financial Year 2019/2020.

Clerk to Parliament Ndvuna Dlamini, when he appeared before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last Monday, alleged that he was not in control of some of the trips undertaken by the lawmakers as some of them were sanctioned by the presiding officers.

Performance

He further stated that there were some legislators who were frequent travellers and said metaphorically that they live on planes. The performance report reflects that the Senate president travelled to New York twice last year. The first trip was on February 21, 2019 where she attended a Parliamentary Hearing at the United Nations. The objective of the trip was to provide a platform for reflecting on global issues such as climate change, migrants and refugees. According to the report, the president was in the company of Assistant Clerk Isabel Ngubeni.

The clerk (Ndvuna) confirmed that those were the trips which had been undertaken during the last financial year. I grounded some of the trips because there was no money, said Dlamini on Friday.

He said he would respond to the Senate presidents allegations against him before the PAC. The Senate president again travelled to New York on September 22, 2019, where she attended a Women Political Leaders (WPL) 2019 Concordia Annual Summit. The summit provided a unique platform to reach decision-makers and opinion-formers in the public, private and non-profit sectors, and advance partnership solutions to the worlds most challenging issue. Part of the delegation included Senator Princess Ntfombiyenkhosi and Linda Pearl Dlamini, who was the committee clerk.
Former President John Dramani Mahama has strongly defended his promise to legalize the commercial use of motorcycles popularly called 'okada' in Ghana if he is elected President on December 7.

Mr Mahama in an address to chiefs and people of Kpando in the Volta Region as part of his tour of the region said he recognizes the benefits of the 'okada' business to the many families that depend on it, hence his promise.

Currently, the use of motorbikes and tricycles for commercial purposes in any form is against Ghana's Road Traffic Regulations 2012 (L.I 2180).

Some members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) have criticized Mahama over the promise describing it as hypocritical and an attempt to lure Ghanaians to vote for him.

But speaking in an interview on XYZ TV, John Mahama who is also a former President said his promise is because okada it has provided more jobs than any government policy.

This is a service that has come to stay. Whether you legalize it or not you cannot stop it and so why behave like the ostrich and bury your head in the sand. These okadas have created more jobs in this economy than any government job-related policy. It has created more jobs than NABCo, it has created more jobs than YEA and all those artificial job creation programs.

He further argued that legalizing the trade will enable government to save the riders from constant harassment from the police since they are currently operating illegally.

These young people are living under harassment because it is illegal and so the police harass them; they stop them from time to time and take money off them and all that. And so, my suggestion is that we should legalize it and regulate it to make it safer by training the riders, ensuring that the riders observe all the safety precautions and provide a helmet for the passenger.

The former President also indicated that by regularizing the commercial use of motorcycles, riders will be easily identified to ensure that they go by all traffic regulations.

We must be able to identify that this is a commercial motorcycle so that we can ensure that they are following the rules and they must obey all traffic regulations. You can't pick a passenger and get to a red traffic light and ride through. So, I say let's legalize, lets regularize because it has created sustainable jobs and people are earning an income out of this.

Mr Mahama further argued that the okada business is the only means of transport in some deprived parts of the country.

I think that a lot of our policymakers look at job creation at a certain level, they don't realise the impact that certain segments do in creating sustainable jobs. And like I said, whether we like it or not, that transport segment of boys riding motorbikes for a living, especially in the rural areas where people cannot afford to buy cars and run regular transport services it is the motorcycles that transport everything from goods to human beings, and it has come to stay.

---citinewsroom
Earlier this year, Google said that it was to give 1m in cash to Irish charities and community organisations to help them deal with issues arising from the pandemic (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Google Ireland is to give 4 million worth of advertising credits and grants to small businesses, government agencies and NGOs.

The tech giant, which employs 8,000 people in Dublin, also says that it will provide free training to 40,000 people in digital skills by the end of 2021.

The pandemic has resulted in some specific challenges for Irish businesses and we felt Google has the expertise to help, said Alice Mansergh, director of small businesses in Google Ireland.

Read More

Through our Grow with Google programme, we will help SMEs and NGOs grow their digital skills, empowering them to adapt and operate effectively within the confines of the current environment. Despite the ongoing uncertainty, we want to show that having an online presence can have a transformative impact on offline businesses.

Google says that 8,000 Irish people have already enhanced their digital skills through the Grow With Google program, which offers hundreds of free training programs and is aimed at teaching people how to get their businesses online.

The Dublin Chamber of Commerce and The Gaelic Players Association are also to partner with Google to make additional digital skills training accessible.

Earlier this year, Google said that it was to give 1m in cash to Irish charities and community organisations to help them deal with issues arising from the pandemic.

Charities and local development organisations named were FoodCloud, Alone, Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, A Lust for Life, Ringsend Community Services Forum and South Dublin Community Partnership. The cash was pledged by Googles philanthropic arm, Google.org.
The future of Soho and Fitzrovia as the 'beating heart' of London is in doubt as offices across the capital remain largely empty - as restaurateur Jeremy King slammed Sadiq Khan over the 'damaging' congestion charge.

The locations are known around the world as the centre of British advertising, film and TV production.

But reluctant employees are continuing to work from home amid the coronavirus crisis, leaving desks empty and many workplaces nearly deserted.

Even so, Soho's pubs and restaurants are showing signs of recovering from the lockdown, due in part to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

Jeremy King, co-founder of Corbin and King which owns restaurant the Wolseley, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme Eat Out to Help Out had been a 'very positive measure' amid a 'lack of confidence' about going into central London.

But he added: 'I'm still flabbergasted, absolutely incredulous at the imposition of a, not only a higher congestion charge but extending the hours to seven days a week up until 10 o' clock at night. There is no measure which could be more damaging, I feel, than that, in collaboration with the others.'

Pictured: Diners in Frith Street, Soho, August 11. While restaurants are seeing customers return, the future of Soho and Fitzrovia as the 'beating heart' of London is in doubt as offices across the capital remain largely empty

Jeremy King said Eat Out to Help Out had been a 'very positive measure' amid a 'lack of confidence' about going into central London

Mr King, who has not reopened all of his restaurants, added that 'in time' other eateries would be able to open but other factors would make it difficult.

'The rent arrears are piling up and whilst restaurants are safeguarded until the end of September from being evicted, and some landlords are acting with absolute integrity... there are other landlords, and I have one myself who are hell-bent on getting every penny.'

He added: 'I'd really appreciate if the government could help us with more than guidelines - there are a lot of people who don't adhere to guidelines.'

Mr King added that while many could successfully work from home, now was not necessarily a time of 'creativity'.

'People crave the company of others... this is why you even see people take their laptops and sit in clubs, solo at tables, it's not about sitting at your dining table, you need a sense of community.'

While Soho's pubs and restaurants show signs of recovering from the lockdown, due in part to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, workers are still reluctant to go back to their desks (pictured: People out drinking in Soho)

TomTom traffic data charts show traffic around commuter times are still lower than in 2019

Who is Jeremy King, founder co-founder of Corbin and King? London restaurateur Jeremy King co-founded popular celebrity haunt The Wolseley in Piccadilly with his business partner Chris Corbin. As well as The Wolseley - loved by the likes of Kate Moss, Kylie Minogue and Katy Perry - and Colbert, a high-end French cafe, Jeremy and Chris have Fischers, Soutine, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zedel. Jeremy and Chris previously owned The Ivy - whose regulars include Hollywood stars and was a favourite of the late Princess Diana and Princess Margaret - as well as Le Caprice and J Sheekey's, but sold them in 1998. Jeremy, who contracted Covid-19 early but fought off the infection, started off as a banker before entering the restaurant business. He worked for catering company Searcy's and, at age 21, became their youngest manager. He went on to work for various companies - including restaurant Joe Allen where he was Maitre d'Hotel. He received an OBE in 2014 for voluntary services to the Arts and for services to the Hospitality Industry. Advertisement

Founder of TV and film audio production company SNK Studios, Seb Juviler, is now calling for extensions on business rate exemptions and Government discounted travel into central London to help bring staff back to work.

Mr Juviler told the Evening Standard: 'This area has always been part of the beating heart of London from the Sixties onwards, and I hope it will thrive once again and continue to be a creative, special place. If that were lost though, it would be a tragedy.'

Roughly half of the workforce of SNK - which has worked on TV programmes Peaky Blinders and Noughts + Crosses - have returned.

Mr Juviler added: 'The vibrancy that emanates from the creative industries and people who work in them spreads far and wide into everyone's lives... It affects the look, the feel, the eccentricity, food, fashion and beyond. We'll be left with a bunch of banks and (mostly empty) offices. Very dull.'

Raoul Shah, who runs the Fitzrovia marketing agency Exposure, said the area needed its 'social energy' back, adding that some of the best creative work takes place 'over a cuppa, in the pub, or just taking a stroll' - which working from home does not allow.

Mr Shah says addressing high rents would benefit businesses, while expanding pedestrianised areas to make more covered seating could boost restaurants.

Johnny Hornby, who co-founded advertising group The & Partnership, argues that coronavirus has sped up the trend away from creative ventures and towards corporate businesses dominating the area.

Chief executive of media firm The Outernet, Philip Bourchier O'Ferrall, says Soho's 'greatest export' was arguably its creativity, and now people need an 'exceptional reason' to go out.

Changing tack! Now No10 urges WORKERS to ask their bosses if they want to come back to the office - as NatWest and Virgin Money make plans to keep staff working from home on a regular basis

No10 said businesses had a obligation to offer staff 'Covid-secure workplaces'

NatWest is among banks telling staff they will not return to offices this year

The rise in home working sparked fears for ancillary service industries

Downing Street said today workers who want to return to their workplace should put pressure on their bosses to allow it.

No10 said businesses had an obligation to offer staff 'Covid-secure workplaces' if they cannot work from home amid reports many City firms are plotting to retain home working into 2021.

NatWest is among banks that has told staff they will not return to offices in London and elsewhere this year, while Virgin Money is considering not bringing back some workers at all.

Additionally, the head of human resources at Swiss-owned bank UBS predicted that the future would see more flexible working patterns, including more working from home.

The rise in home working sparked fears for the future of businesses and workers in ancillary service industries reliant on commuters.

Asked if the return of English schools next week should herald a wider return to work, the Prime Minister's deputy official spokesman said: 'We have been clear that if you can't work from home you should speak to your employer and it is up to employers to provide Covid-secure workplaces so people can attend work where needed.'

Natwest is among banks telling staff they will not return to offices in London and elsewhere this year

UBS and Virgin Money are considering not bringing back some workers at all

Matt Hancock launches plan to test four MILLION people daily Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track. The Health Secretary is said to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year. Currently the NHS and private testing centers have a capacity of around 326,000, although because of the current level of infection, only around 190,000 are being carried out. A massive expansion of the testing regime is seen as a key requirement of easing lockdown measures further as the public continue to be wary of a return to workplaces. 'It is at an embryonic stage and it's going to take a hell of a lot of work. It is nicknamed Operation Moon Shot because that is what a moon shot is like: it seems very hard but it's important and we want to land it,' a source told the Telegraph. Advertisement

Nat West Group has told told City staff not to expect a return to the office this year, the Financial Times reported.

It also claimed Virgin Money's non customer-facing staff have been told they may work from home the majority of the time.

Lloyds Bank is also said to be examining the best use of its office space.

Stefan Seiler, the human resources chief at Swiss bank UBS told the FT: 'We have proven that working from home is possible for most roles.

'What is clear is that there will be more working from home, we will see more flexible work arrangements.'

It came as London mayor Sadiq Khan faced criticism over his perceived failure to persuade people to return to their places of work.

Natwest announced in July that said that an estimated 50,000 of its employees will work from home into 2021.

Earlier this month it was revealed fewer British office workers have returned to their workplace than in any other major European country.

Little more than a third (34 per cent) of UK staff were back at their desks, with the remainder continuing to work from home.

This contrasted with 83 per cent of French office staff and 70 per cent of Germans, according to a survey by researchers at investment bank Morgan Stanley.

However, their analysis found that Britons who have returned to their offices are doing so for more days a week than continental rivals.

Almost half (46 per cent) of UK workers who have returned are working at least five days a week from their office, far more than in France, Germany, Italy or Spain.

The figures come amid a high street bloodbath with retailers experiencing massively reduced footfall.

Test and Trace online booking flaw sends people on 350-mile round trip for Covid test The NHS Test and Trace system has faced fresh criticism for a flaw in its online booking system which tries to direct people to test centres more than 100 miles away. Some people with coronavirus symptoms who try to book a test online are directed to centres which would take them more than three hours to reach by car. A person from Ilfracombe in Devon who has symptoms of Covid-19 - including a persistent cough, fever or loss of sense of taste or smell - is directed to a test centre in Swansea when they try to book a test online. This would see them drive past centres in Taunton, Bristol and Cardiff on their six-and-a-half hour round trip, driving 175 miles in each direction. People in Felixstowe, Suffolk, have been directed to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, with the Government coronavirus test booking website saying it is just 13.8 miles away. However, the journey is 40 miles by car, taking almost an hour to get from one place to another. And people in the region with symptoms of Covid-19 would be forced to drive past their closest test centre in Ipswich on their way to Clacton. Labour said problems with the booking system should be resolved as a 'matter of urgency'. One person from Felixstowe who tried to book a test online told the PA news agency: 'If I was travelling by boat, then Clacton would be my nearest test centre. 'I tried to book online but was only given the option of going to Clacton so I called 119. The operator got the same results. 'They told me that it is not just my region - some people in Newcastle are being directed to test centres in Scotland instead of ones in the city. 'I have symptoms so am going to get them checked out. But I can imagine that others would be put off by the prospect of two hours in the car - while driving past their actual nearest centre.' Another example shows that a person in Gosport, Portsmouth, is directed to the test site at Chessington World of Adventures, in Greater London, rather than a Covid-19 drive-through test site in Portsmouth. Driving from Gosport to the Portsmouth centre takes around 26 minutes for the 11-mile trip, while driving from Gosport to Chessington takes almost an hour-and-a-half for a 67-mile journey. A person with Covid-19 symptoms in Weston-super-Mare is directed to a testing centre in Cardiff - which takes more than an hour in the car. However, there is a drive-through testing site at Bristol airport around 25 minutes away. Some people with a Southampton postcode are being directed to Swindon - around a four-hour round trip. Problems with the booking system have been highlighted from early on in the crisis but it appears that glitches in the system - which seem to disproportionately affect those on the coast - are yet to be rectified. Labour said it was 'hugely disappointing' that the issues were still occurring and called on the Government to address the issues as a 'matter of urgency'. Shadow health minister Justin Madders said: 'From the first days when testing centres were being rolled out, we have heard stories of people being sent unfeasibly long distances just to get a test, but for this to be still happening at this stage is hugely disappointing. 'Quick and easy access to testing are cornerstones of an effective test and trace system but once again the Tories seem unable to get the basics right. 'They must solve these problems as a matter of urgency.' Advertisement

Face masks chaos as Nicola Sturgeon is poised to order children to wear mouth coverings in Scottish school corridors and communal areas - as Boris rules them OUT for teachers and pupils

Nicola Sturgeon today signalled secondary school pupils and staff in Scotland will be asked to wear face masks when they travel between classes - as Number 10 ruled out a similar move in England.

The Scottish First Minister said her government is consulting on exactly when and where the coverings will be required as she cited concerns about ventilation issues in corridors and communal areas.

However, Downing Street said there are 'no plans' for the UK Government to change its approach to the issue in England.

The Prime Minister's deputy official spokesman said the wearing of masks would risk 'obstructing communication' while ministers insisted face coverings are 'not necessary' if guidance on school hygiene is followed.

The difference in approach is likely to cause confusion among parents and pupils as all four of the home nations try to get schools back up and running.

Nicola Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that her government is consulting on requiring pupils to wear face masks when travelling between classes

Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to school in England next week. Downing Street has ruled out forcing pupils and staff to wear masks

Education is a devolved issue which means the administrations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can adopt their own policies.

The UK government's current guidance for England does not recommend teachers or pupils should wear face masks.

But Ms Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that Scotland's Education Secretary John Swinney is in the final stages of consulting with teachers and councils on the issue.

She said recommendations would not include pupils wearing masks while in the classroom.

The move follows requests from some schools north of the border for pupils to wear face coverings.

Ms Sturgeon said: 'We're consulting on this specific measure because, firstly, mixing between different groups is more likely in corridors and communal areas - increasing the potential for transmission.

'Secondly, crowding and close contact in these areas is more likely and voices could be raised, resulting in greater potential for creating aerosol transmission.

'Finally, there's also less scope for ventilation in these areas.'

She said decisions are yet to be made on whether the guidance would apply to school transport and that decision will be made in the coming days.

Asked if the UK Government would follow Ms Sturgeon's lead on the issue, the PM's deputy official spokesman said: 'There are no plans to review the guidance on face coverings in schools we are conscious of the fact that it would obstruct communication between teachers and pupils.'

Earlier, the UK Government's Schools Minister Nick Gibb had said masks are 'not necessary' for teachers or pupils.

He told the BBC: 'We are always led by the scientific advice. What the current advice is is that if a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July, all of the hygiene pleasures I have been talking about, then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils.'

Asked if he believed the guidance could change, he said: 'We always listen to whatever the current advice is from Public Health England, the chief medical officers, we always adhere to that advice.'

Unison is one a number of unions who have called for teachers to be allowed to wear a mask or face covering because of staff safety concerns.

'It's still unclear why government guidance won't allow them, when they're recommended for other workplaces,' the union sai
The dilemma of whether Christians should study other religions is a question as old as the early days of the church, and it has come up again and again over the centuries. The gospel is, after all, the only way to salvation (John 14:6; Acts 4:12; 1 John 5:1112). Gods Word is truth (John 17:17). Furthermore, false religion is actually considered demonic (1 Cor. 10:21).

So is there truly any benefit to learning other religions or can it only be detrimental to believers? Should a follower of Christ study anything that is not truth? Could it ruin your relationship with God?

The answer is both yes and no.

Studying other religions can be a powerful and useful tool, however it also can be harmful if not done correctly. Here are some of the positives and benefits to studying other religions, so you can best decide what is right for you.

It can expand your own faith in God...

Contrary to popular belief, studying other religions can help you grow your faith in God. It can be enjoyable to learn about other religions as a means of affirming your faith in God. You can build yourself up as a believer who will bring glory to God, and possibly others to Christ.

While Christianity is arguably the biggest religion in the world, it certainly isnt the only one. There will be atheists, Buddhists, and the like that you will encounter throughout your life. These people might want to challenge your beliefs as a Christian. Do you have answers to their questions? Are you able to really stand up for what you believe in? This is where studying other religions can be beneficial.

When you have those real encounters with people of other faiths, you can begin to see how much your faith actually means to you. You can prove to yourself further how much you do trust God, and dont have any desire to fall into other lifestyles.

2 Timothy 2:15 commands us to "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth." However, saying you "just have faith in God" isn't a bullet proof answer. It's convenient to say, but testing yourself in other cultures and religions can help you prove to yourself you really believe it.

Furthermore, it can give you the confidence to share your faith with others when you know how deep rooted it is in your heart. You can live up to Jesus commands to share Christianity with those you encounter, despite them not always agreeing with you. Many that follow other religions dont understand Christianity like you do, because they only see it through a distorted societal lens (much like you possibly not understanding Islam correctly due to only seeing what is on the news). In other words, we can study what is going on in the minds of our non-Christian neighbors so we can communicate the gospel in a way that, hopefully, makes sense to them.

When armies study the battle plans of the enemy, they want to know how the other general thinks and what his normal battle plans and tactics are. The more you know about the way the enemy operates, the better you are able to defeat or counter them. There is great value in studying other religions because it gives us the knowledge to know what they believe in and to have a greater understanding of why they believe it.

Perhaps the most remarkable example of Paul knowing and using pagan religion to help make the gospel clear to his hearers came during his stay in Athens on his second missionary journey (Acts 17). He knew pagan literature well enough to quote it from memory, and could speak to them in terms they understood. Paul would never say that paganism was a valid means of access to God in any way. He knew paganism quite well, however, and he used that knowledge in his evangelism.

Learning other religions, reading books on evolution and testing your beliefs by reading blogs on atheism can be helpful because it gives us a greater understanding of why others believe what they believe. If we dont know what they believe in comparison to how a person can be saved, we wont know how to contrast and compare any of the differences.

...but it also can hurt your faith.

Not all Christians have the capacity to dive head first into studying other religions. Think of it as going to the gym. Newcomers never come to a bench press and do their entire body weight on the first day. It takes time and effort to do it right.

It is recommended that one studies other religions and rebuttals to Christian beliefs with the help of other believers. Many Christians that study attacks to Jesus or start dabbling in other religions do so alone and it shakes their faith completely. They go into studying other religions without first having a secure, permanent foundation in Christ.

When their beliefs are then challenged, they waver and crumble. They dont know how to properly respond, and instead of turning back to Jesus to learn the truth they get sucked in to atheism or other religions.

However, when guided by a mentor through proper reasoning and accurate and verified information, it will become more beneficial to continue to study. They can help you make sure you are staying focused on the true reason you are studying. In addition, when questions come up that make you doubt your faith, you have a trusted source that can help you identify how Jesus would respond.

To understand the beliefs and faiths of others does not only strengthen and verify our faith but also helps us lead others of different faiths to Christ. We must be ready to give an answer when an answer can lead others to the truth.
Tens of Thousands Rally in Belarus, Call for Lukashenko to Resign

By VOA News August 23, 2020

Tens of thousands of people rallied in the Belarus capital Sunday and called for President Alexander Lukashenko to resign after disputed election results, a postelection crackdown, and a heavy military presence in the city.

Protesters, many wearing and waving the opposition's colors of red and white, chanted "freedom" and "we will not forget, we will not forgive" as they walked in the Minsk city center. They briefly gathered near the president's residence before dispersing peacefully.

While state media reported about 20,000 protesters took part, opposition-leaning media put the estimate at nearly 100,000 protesters, the French news agency reported.

The demonstrations began after the Aug. 9 election, in which Lukashenko claimed 80% of the vote. The results drew claims of fraud by opposition parties.

IT company director Yan Tamulyonok told the Associated Press he has been going to the protests each day to demand fair elections and freedom of speech. He said he believed the vote was rigged by the law-enforcement agencies and security services, who then violently dispersed protests.

The protests are seen as the biggest challenge Lukashenko has faced since he began to rule the Eastern European country of 9.5 million 26 years ago.

Lukashenko, seen on state media Sunday wearing body armor and carrying a rifle, called demonstrators "rats."

Previously, he has used riot police to disperse rallies, but Reuters witnessed no clashes between police and protesters Sunday.

However, in the 15 days of protests, more than 7,000 people have been detained and hundreds beaten by police. Two people were killed in the postelection protests in Belarus, it has been confirmed.

The EU and United States have criticized the vote and condemned the postelection crackdown.

Ahead of Sunday's rally, the Defense Ministry announced the army would take responsibility for protecting national memorials from protesters.

In a statement, the ministry said any unrest near such monuments and statues would no longer be responded to by police forces but by the army.

The statement came as army personnel were spotted being transported into Minsk in military transporters.

Thirty-one years ago, on August 23, 1989, an estimated 2 million people joined arms across the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in a protest against Soviet rule that became known as the "Baltic Way." Protesters formed a 600-kilometer-long human chain from Vilnius, Lithuania, to the Belarusian border. Two years later, the Baltic states would achieve their freedom.

On Sunday, mass protests were held in Lithuania and Latvia, and were scheduled to occur in Estonia and Prague, as a show of support for Belarus across the Baltics.

Organizers in Lithuania Sunday estimated up to 50,000 people took part in their rally. In Latvia, hundreds marched along the Belarus border, the French news agency reported. Elsewhere, human chains were planned in Estonia and Prague.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the opposition candidate who fled to Lithuania after the election and claimed to have won from 60 to 70% of the vote, said Saturday that Belarusians must "struggle for their rights" and not be distracted by Lukashenko's claims that the country was under military threat.

Also, it was announced Saturday that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun will visit Lithuania and Russia next week for talks on the Belarusian postelection crisis.

Tsikhanouskaya's team said Saturday that Biegun would meet the opposition candidate in Lithuania.

RFE/RL contribute to this report.

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US Secretary of State kicked off his four-country trip starting on Sunday, the US State Department said in a statement.

Pompeo will travel to Israel, Sudan, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from August 23 to 28, State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said in a statement, Xinhua news agency reported.

Pompeo's first stop is Israel, where he will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on regional security issues and "establishing and deepening Israel's relationships in the region," according to the statement.

During his stay in Sudan, Pompeo will meet with Sudanese leaders to "discuss continued US support for the civilian-led transitional government and express support for deepening the Sudan- relationship."

The top US diplomat will then travel to and the UAE.

Pompeo's visit comes after and the UAE agreed to the full normalization of relations earlier this month, which was brokered by the United States.

According to the deal, agrees to suspend its plan to annex parts of the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank.

US President Donald Trump, who first touted the deal on Twitter, said earlier that the two sides would have an "official" signing ceremony at the White House in the next few weeks.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said last week that the peace deal between the UAE and Israel "is a stab in the Palestinians' back."

Abbas called on all Arab countries to abide by the Arab Peace Initiative, launched in 2002, which stipulates that the Arabs can only normalize relations with Israel after the Palestinian issue is resolved.

--IANS

rt/

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Yes, they want a bloody revolution, and in Portland, the dress rehearsal is underway. Downtown has been sacked, and the revolutionaries have taken to the streets of residential neighborhoods, terrifying residents. The message is clear: police cannot protect you, so shut up and let the new powers-that-be run things.

Yesterday, the Portland Police Bureau seemed to confirm that message, that they are powerless to stop the revolution. At RedState, Shipwreckedcrew wrote about the absence of police in a violent clash between Antifa/BLM forces and "Back the Blue" forces, said to include The Proud Boys:

[T]here was a noticeable lack of Portland Police in any of the videos of the two groups clashing. Late today came an explanation for their absence  there were insufficient police resources available to the shift commanders to do anything to intervene in the incident that involved well over 100 protesters from both sides. (snip) That, my friends, is the declaration by Portland PD that they are unwilling to intervene in a conflagration they do not believe they can stop. The events of the past two months have slowly drained Portland PD's resources through attrition of manpower. (snip) [There] was an ominous development with the clash between the two groups  the presence of numerous firearms  both handguns and long guns. (snip) Portland PD has confessed that it is running out of the capacity to deal with violence in the city on a 24-hour basis. There are going to be some hours during the day when insufficient police resources will be unavailable [sic] to separate the two sides. Episodes like today are likely to repeat, maybe grow in size, and involve more weapons and greater violence employed by each against the other. The District Attorney announced two weeks ago his office was not going to prosecute "riot" related crimes. That caused the State Police to pull their personnel out of Portland. It sure does not appear that the local and state authorities have a plan to turn the tide here. This may eventually come down to a steel-cage death match that each side seems to want to have. After today's escalation, it might come faster than expected.

Over the weekend, another group of revolutionaries symbolically spoke of their bloody intentions in unmistakable imagery: a guillotine.



Twitter video screen grab.

The victim of the guillotine here is a teddy bear, standing in for Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, whose overall capitulation to the rioters has earned him no gratitude or charity. This is not playful symbolism; it is bloodlust, finding preliminary expression. One of the great lessons of the Holocaust is "When someone tells you he wants to kill you  take him seriously."

One seasoned observer who takes it seriously is Abe Greenwald, who has written a paywalled article in Commentary titled, "Yes, this is a Revolution":

The battle for the survival of the United States of America is upon us. It has not come in the form of traditional civil war. There are no uniformed armies, competing flags, or alternate constitutions. (snip) If it wasn't clear in late May and early June, it should be well understood by now that we are in the throes of a genuine revolution of the most extravagant sort. Like messianic revolutionaries of the past, the revolutionary mob of the 21st century is out to "remake the world." Their compass is "no longer pointed at one thing." It's aimed in all directions at once. As Thomas Paine said approvingly of France in 1791, "it is the age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for." A mission so grandiose demands the most radical assault on the current order, and changing the world begins with changing one's country. So it was in France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and China in 1949. And this is especially so if one's country is seen as the seat of the present evil and is also the most powerful nation on the planet. This is, then, most fundamentally a revolution against the United States of America and all it stands for. In revolutions... the purpose of confession is not to elicit forgiveness but to further the purge.

To date, not a single national Democrat has spoken out against the revolutionaries. They think they will run things when the dust settles, apparently. They are as foolish as Maximilien Robespierre, the French Revolutionary leader who ended up in a guillotine when the radicals outpaced him in their demands.

The upside of the inability of mobs to self-censor is that President Trump has the opportunity and guts to lay out exactly who the forces are that want to run America, and the inability of the Democrats to stand up to them. Should Joe Biden win the election, he and the handlers who pull his strings would fare no better than the Portland teddy bear standing in for Mayor Wheeler. Bloodlust is never sated by confession and concession, as Greenwald's final comment quoted above instructs us.
When asked to express the importance of God in their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not at all important, and 10 being very important, Americans rated Him at an average of 4.6 in 2017  down from 8.2 in just over a decade, according to an excerpt of Ingleharts book, Religions Sudden Decline, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
Charleston's 350th Commemoration

In 2020, the City of Charleston and its citizens will commemorate its 350th anniversary of the arrival of English settlers from Barbados to Charles Towne Landing in 1670 and share Charlestons full and accurate story up to the present day. Throughout the year, we will honor the customs, diverse cultures, and rich heritage through a deep reflection and true representation of the citys history.
San Francisco: The second and third-largest fires in California history are expected to grow in the next few days as a new thunderstorm system moves over the state, producing dry lightning and gusty winds.

Crews from across the US, military planes and National Guard troops poured into California on Sunday to join the fight against two dozen major wildfires burning across the state, as officials warned of more dry lightning storms approaching.

The worst of the blazes, including the second and third largest wildfires in recorded California history, were burning in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, where more than 200,000 people have been told to flee their homes.

A firefighter with the California Office of Emergency Services monitors spot fires on Big Ridge, seen smoldering in the background, during the Walbridge portion of the LNU Lightning Complex fire in Sonoma County, California. Credit:Philip Pacheco/Bloomberg

The thunderstorms are anticipated Monday and Tuesday as moisture from what was once Hurricane Genevieve streams northeastward, where it will encounter intense August heat over California. The storms are expected to produce lightning strikes but little rain, which, given the extremely dry vegetation at the end of the summer dry season, is capable of touching off new fires.
Russia's Foreign Minister Calls Washington's Conditions for Preserving New START Treaty Unrealistic

Sputnik News

15:25 GMT 23.08.2020

SOLNECHNOGORSK (Sputnik) - The United States put forward unrealistic conditions for preserving the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a youth forum in the Moscow region on Sunday, calling talks with the US on the treaty exhausting.

"They are now holding such exhausting negotiations with us on keeping the START treaty in force. We proposed to extend it for five years, as provided by the document, without any preconditions. The US in negotiations, held by my deputy Sergey Ryabkov last week in Vienna with US Special Presidential Envoy [for Arms Control Marshall] Billingslea, insists on conditions that, to be honest, are simply unrealistic, including the requirement that China definitely join this document or some future document", Lavrov said.

According to the diplomat, the result of the talks on preserving the treaty is still unclear, but Russia, in any case, will not meet Washington's requirements, including those regarding China's participation in the treaty.

"If the US sets preconditions, which cannot be simply implemented  for example, we must persuade China, we will not do this, we respect the Chinese position  then let this treaty expire", the minister stressed, adding that this will mean the loss of the last instrument that regulates the situation with nuclear weapons.

The minister added that Washington would make a huge mistake if did not make efforts to preserve the treaty.

"We are sure that we are able to protect ourselves, so there should be no concern in this regard, and we will be ready to resume talks since the very beginning, from scratch, but it will be a very big mistake if our US colleagues decide to destroy the last document [in the field of nuclear weapons]", the diplomat said.

Lavrov also said that though the situation in the sphere of strategic stability did not inspire optimism, Russia was ready to continue the dialogue with the United States, including on new weapons systems, on a reciprocal basis.

Following the Vienna talks earlier in August, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said that the priorities of the two countries are "very different" at the moment. According to the diplomat, US did not rule out extending New START, but declined to record this intention. As for Russia, it is not ready to extend the treaty at any cost, Ryabkov noted.

A Sputnik

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Nicola Sturgeon today signalled secondary school pupils and staff in Scotland will be asked to wear face masks when they travel between classes - as Number 10 ruled out a similar move in England.

The Scottish First Minister said her government is consulting on exactly when and where the coverings will be required as she cited concerns about ventilation issues in corridors and communal areas.

However, Downing Street said there are 'no plans' for the UK Government to change its approach to the issue in England.

The Prime Minister's deputy official spokesman said the wearing of masks would risk 'obstructing communication' while ministers insisted face coverings are 'not necessary' if guidance on school hygiene is followed.

The difference in approach is likely to cause confusion among parents and pupils as all four of the home nations try to get schools back up and running.

Nicola Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that her government is consulting on requiring pupils to wear face masks when travelling between classes

Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to school in England next week. Downing Street has ruled out forcing pupils and staff to wear masks

Sports teacher Tina Dahl provides safety regulation rules to students on the first day back to school in Sweden on August 21

Students disinfect their hands as they queue for lunch at the canteen at the Ostra Real public school in Sweden on their first day back since schools shut in March

THE TRUTH ABOUT FACE MASKS: WHAT STUDIES HAVE SHOWN Research on how well various types of masks and face coverings varies but, recently, and in light of the pandemic of COVID-19, experts are increasingly leaning toward the notion that something is better than nothing. A University of Oxford study published on March 30 concluded that surgical masks are just as effective at preventing respiratory infections as N95 masks for doctors, nurses and other health care workers. It's too early for their to be reliable data on how well they prevent infection with COVID-19, but the study found the thinner, cheaper masks do work in flu outbreaks. The difference between surgical or face masks and N95 masks lies in the size of particles that can - and more importantly, can't - get though the materials. N95 respirators are made of thick, tightly woven and molded material that fits tightly over the face and can stop 95 percent of all airborne particles, while surgical masks are thinner, fit more loosely, and more porous. This makes surgical masks much more comfortable to breathe and work in, but less effective at stopping small particles from entering your mouth and nose. Droplets of saliva and mucous from coughs and sneezes are very small, and viral particles themselves are particularly tiny - in fact, they're about 20-times smaller than bacteria. For this reason, a JAMA study published this month still contended that people without symptoms should not wear surgical masks, because there is not proof the gear will protect them from infection - although they may keep people who are coughing and sneezing from infecting others. But the Oxford analysis of past studies- which has not yet been peer reviewed - found that surgical masks were worth wearing and didn't provide statistically less protection than N95 for health care workers around flu patients. However, any face mask is only as good as other health and hygiene practices. Experts universally agree that there's simply no replacement for thorough, frequent hand-washing for preventing disease transmission. Some think the masks may also help to 'train' people not to touch their faces, while others argue that the unfamiliar garment will just make people do it more, actually raising infection risks. So what about cloth coverings? Although good quality evidence is lacking, some data suggest that cloth masks may be only marginally (15 per cent) less effective than surgical masks in blocking emission of particles, said Babak Javid, principal investigator at Cambridge University Hospitals wrote in the BMJ on April 9. He pointed to a study led by Public Health England in 2013 which found wearing some kind of material over the face was fivefold more effective than not wearing masks for preventing a flu pandemic. The study suggested that a homemade mask 'should only be considered as a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals, but it would be better than no protection'. Advertisement

Education is a devolved issue which means the administrations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can adopt their own policies.

The UK government's current guidance for England does not recommend teachers or pupils should wear face masks.

But Ms Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that Scotland's Education Secretary John Swinney is in the final stages of consulting with teachers and councils on the issue.

She said recommendations would not include pupils wearing masks while in the classroom.

The move follows requests from some schools north of the border for pupils to wear face coverings.

Ms Sturgeon said: 'We're consulting on this specific measure because, firstly, mixing between different groups is more likely in corridors and communal areas - increasing the potential for transmission.

'Secondly, crowding and close contact in these areas is more likely and voices could be raised, resulting in greater potential for creating aerosol transmission.

'Finally, there's also less scope for ventilation in these areas.'

She said decisions are yet to be made on whether the guidance would apply to school transport and that decision will be made in the coming days.

Asked if the UK Government would follow Ms Sturgeon's lead on the issue, the PM's deputy official spokesman said: 'There are no plans to review the guidance on face coverings in schools we are conscious of the fact that it would obstruct communication between teachers and pupils.'

Earlier, the UK Government's Schools Minister Nick Gibb had said masks are 'not necessary' for teachers or pupils.

He told the BBC: 'We are always led by the scientific advice. What the current advice is is that if a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July, all of the hygiene pleasures I have been talking about, then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils.'

Asked if he believed the guidance could change, he said: 'We always listen to whatever the current advice is from Public Health England, the chief medical officers, we always adhere to that advice.'

Unison is one a number of unions who have called for teachers to be allowed to wear a mask or face covering because of staff safety concerns.

'It's still unclear why government guidance won't allow them, when they're recommended for other workplaces,' the union said.

The World Health Organisation and UN children's agency Unicef advise that children aged 12 and over should wear a mask under the same conditions as adults, in particular when they cannot guarantee at least a one-metre distance from others and there is widespread transmission in the area.

England's deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries said the evidence on whether children over 12 should wear masks in schools was 'not strong'.

Dr Harries told Sky News that in children under 15 'compliance is very poor' and other measures being taken in schools - such as children sitting side by side or back to back meant masks were not needed.

'We also need to think through the sort of psychosocial effects of masks for children, it's a learning environment, and we need them to learn for life,' she added.

Labour's shadow education secretary Kate Green said the issue of masks in schools should be kept under review.

The WHO and Unicef suggested that face shields may be an alternative in situations such as speech classes where the teacher and pupils need to see each other's mouths.

The WHO/Unicef guidance states children aged five and under should not be required to wear masks.

For children aged six-11, consideration should be given to factors including whether there is widespread transmission and the potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and development.
Before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube made their entry in the media market, the PatnaDaily had already registered its presence in...
It may be arrogant to say a state-of-the-art chip that outclassed the theoretical limits of 5G doesnt matter. But its definitely arrogant to even refer to it as 6G. Try to keep both of those things in mind as we explore todays story from the Nanyang Technological University.

The Singaporean institute just reported a major breakthrough in wireless technologies. It comes in the form of a new chip that quite literally performs better than 5G could ever hope to. More specifically, it managed to hit 11Gbps in a controlled (lab) environment test.

5G, on the other hand, peaks at 10Gbps in theory and much less in practice. Take Verizons industry-leading 5G service, for example  third-party testing has its real-world performance peak at around 800Mbps. And thats for millimeter-wave 5G, the kind you have to deploy so deliberately that it might as well be classified as a contributing factor to shareholder depression.

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Sure, Verizons 5G service and rivaling solutions will all get better over the years, much like LTE did and continues to do. Theyll never get 11Gbps better, though. But NTU scientists already found a solution to this milestone  terahertz (THz) waves. Found may be a bit of a strong word, though. They put together a tiny chip that can transmit them, but we obviously knew the result in advance.

That is, its not like the relationship between bandwidth volume and data transfer rates is a mystery. Well, at least not in the circles that have a tendency to use the term 6G in 2020. Because the magic of digital modulation allows us to leverage analog MHz signal to break digital data transfer records.

The 6G is still far away

Thats it. Terahertz transmissions are 6G as much as flying cars are the next step after ditching oil. It might be, but were so far away from making it work that its just as likely to be 7G. Those numbered Gs dont really mean anything either. Not unless theyre ratified by an internationally recognized standards body.

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And while the NTU is a renowned bastion of knowledge that will likely be involved in defining 6G in some capacity, its hardly doing so today. Granted, media coverage is at least as much to blame for this achievement being overblown as its authors are. But at least you can understand people taking pride in their accomplishments.

Or even big companies talking the talk to appease investors. The 6G hype, however? That needs to die really fast because if 5G excitement was early to start generating momentum circa 2015 (it was), 6G will burn us out before the inevitable 5G price hikes get a chance to.
Coronavirus transmission rates in Victoria have plummeted to their lowest point since June and the seven-day average for new cases has dipped below 200 for the first time in more than a month.

Victoria recorded 116 new cases of coronavirus on Monday, its lowest daily tally in seven weeks. Fifteen more people died, all of whom were linked to outbreaks in aged care.

Medical professionals perform COVID testing at a drive-through clinic. Credit:Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

Every 10 people who have the virus are now infecting an average of five other people, which has resulted in a decline in the number of new infections.

Deakin University epidemiology chair Catherine Bennett said the reproductive factor, which measures the rate at which those infected transmit the virus onto others, was hovering at 0.5, based on her calculations.
The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre to ensure that Indian students in the Gulf who have to appear in the September 13 National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) are allowed to travel to India by special flights operating under the Vande Bharat Mission to bring home Indians stranded abroad.

Close to 4,000 students in the Middle East who have to appear in NEET for admission to medical and dental courses had pinned their hopes on a petition in the Supreme Court filed by a social worker, Abdul Azeez.

The petition filed on behalf of 21 such students demanded opening of NEET examination centres in Dubai, Doha and Qatar, as has been done by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for holding the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission to engineering schools every year. Azeezs demand was rejected by the Kerala high court on June 30 and the top court was hearing an appeal against the decision.

Both the NTA and the Medical Council of India (MCI) were opposed to setting up examination centres abroad. An MCI affidavit stated that holding the examination in different time zones will compromise the uniformity of the NEET examination.The Centre had submitted that the time was too short to consider the request of the petitioner; the process of identification of exam centres, appointment of invigilators, and transport of question papers requires careful planning and execution. The government was also concerned about possible leakage of question papers as it would not have any control over the examination centres abroad.

The bench of justices L Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and S Ravindra Bhatt asked solicitor general Tushar Mehta to consult the concerned government departments and ensure the overseas students appearing for NEET are allowed to travel by the Vande Bharat special flights. Before the Kerala high court, the ministry of external affairs had stated that students are eligible to take Vande Bharat flights.

The petitioner represented by advocate Harris Beeran also sought a relaxation in the 14-day mandatory quarantine period. The bench refused, saying, We are afraid such a direction cannot be made as it involves public health of citizens pertaining to state governments. Beeran pointed out that in Kerala, the quarantine period has been extended to 28 days. At his request, the bench allowed the petitioner to approach the state government, seeking a relaxation in the quarantine period.

The bench favoured having online examination for NEET beginning next year in order to avoid hassles for students faced with similar situation in the future. The bench told MCI, Why are you not having NEET online when JEE is online and can be written from examination centres abroad. There are a number of students in the Gulf, Singapore and Malaysia appearing for NEET. Why cant you think of something for next year? It will avoid troubles for so many people studying abroad.

MCI counsel Gaurav Sharma told the bench that he will convey the suggestion to the Board of Governors of MCI.

Less than 20 days remain for the NEET examination and for those students in the Gulf who have to appear in both NEET and JEE, it will be a hard choice, Beeran said.

Nealry 60% of students writing NEET have to appear in JEE as well. This examination will be held online and offline from September 1 to 6. If they manage to take a flight after this, there is hardly a chance for them to appear for NEET exam in India. The bench understood the predicament of such students, but refused to pass an order because no student faced with such a situation appeared before the court.
A kebab shop is under investigation after a video emerged showing dozens of young revellers dancing and breaking social distancing rules.

The footage from Shah Kebabs, at the Brunswick Street Mall, in Fortitude Valley, in Brisbane, was filmed on August 23 and shows dozens of people singing and dancing to Endor's song Pump It Up.

In the short clip staff behind the counter were also seen dancing along to the song during the early-morning gathering.

Queensland Police are investigating Shah Kebabs, located in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley, after footage emerged showing dozens of revellers singing and dancing in the shop on August 23 (pictured) despite COVID-19 restrictions being in place

Queensland Police confirmed to Daily Mail Australia they were investigating the incident but no fines have been issued as of Monday afternoon.

An employee of the kebab shop told The Courier Mail 'it wasn't a party' and the large crowd was the result of licensed venues nearby closing for the night.

'At three o'clock the nightclubs closed and everyone came here,' the employee said.

Queensland Police Service Deputy Commissioner Steve Gollschewski described the scene as 'disappointing'.

'The message to all of those persons - and a lot of them are young people ... is have a think before you go out and think about the impacts of your not abiding by social distancing in the community and what that means,' he said.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Shah Kebabs for further comment.

The shocking footage emerged as Queensland recorded one new coronavirus case in the last 24 hours bringing the state's total to 1,106 with six deaths.

An employee of Shah Kebabs said the large crowd descended on the shop after all the nearby nightclubs closed (revellers pictured in Shah Kebabs in Brisbane)

Meanwhile on Sunday the State Government issued a health alert for 40 locations, centred mainly around Logan, south of Brisbane, after nine new COVID-19 cases in the region.

The new cases were linked to Brisbane's Youth Detention Centre in Wacol, 24km west of Logan, after a centre worker was diagnosed with the virus on August 19.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has so far ruled out imposing further virus restrictions on businesses.

'We have no concern about that at the moment at all,' she told reporters.

'So please do not be alarmist about that because the businesses have COVID-safe plans in place.'

More than 200 of 500 staff at the Wacol centre had tested negative and more than 110 youths had returned negative results, the premier said.

Health authorities are prioritising testing at the detention centre after all the 127 detainees were placed in lockdown on Wednesday evening.
Babies exposed to levels of air pollution within EU standards develop poorer lung function as children and teenagers, according to research presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress. [1] The study also suggests that some of the risk from exposure to pollution can be reduced if babies are breastfed for at least 12 weeks. A second study presented at the Congress [2] shows that adults who are exposed to air pollution, even at low levels, over a period of decades are more likely to develop asthma.

Researchers say their findings indicate that more needs to be done to reduce levels of air pollution to protect children's developing lungs and prevent asthma in adults.

The first study was presented by Dr Qi Zhao from IUF - Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine in Dusseldorf, Germany. He told the virtual conference: "Evidence is growing that exposure to air pollution is a threat to children's respiratory health. However, most studies have looked at the effects of recent exposure to pollution.

"Babies' lungs are especially vulnerable because they are growing and developing, so we wanted to see if there are longer-term impacts for babies who are exposed to air pollution as they grow up."

The study included 915 children living in two regions of Germany: Munich and Wesel. The children had tests to measure their breathing at the ages of six, ten or 15 years. The tests recorded how much air they could breathe out after taking their deepest breath (called forced vital capacity, or FVC) and how much air they could breathe out in one second (called forced expiratory volume in one second, or FEV1). When these measurements are lower it suggests that breathing is restricted or obstructed and can indicate conditions such as asthma.

Researchers compared these measures with estimates of the levels of pollution in the areas where the children lived in the first year of life, taking account of other factors that are linked to poorer lung function, such as whether the children's mothers smoked.

They found that the higher the levels of air pollution babies were exposed to, the worse their lung function was as they grew into children and teenagers. They saw an even bigger impact on lung function in children who developed asthma. The results also suggested some of the damage linked to air pollution was reduced in babies who were breastfed.

Dr Zhao added: "Our results suggest that babies who grow up breathing polluted air, even at levels below EU regulations, have poorer breathing as they grow into children and adults. This is worrying because previous research suggests that damage to lungs in the first year of life can affect respiratory health throughout life."

The second study included 23,000 Danish nurses who were recruited to the study in either 1993 or 1999. Researchers used data from the country's National Patient Register to see whether the nurses were ever referred for asthma treatment. They compared this information with levels of two air pollutants - nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) - and the levels of road traffic noise where the nurses lived. The researchers took into account other factors that are linked to asthma, such as smoking and obesity.

They found that while noise pollution was not linked to rates of asthma, there was a link between long-term exposure to air pollution and the likelihood of being diagnosed with asthma. There was a 29% rise in asthma risk for each increase in PM2.5 of 6.3 micrograms per cubic metre. And there was a 16% rise in asthma risk for each increase of NO2 of 8.2 micrograms per cubic metre.

The levels of air pollution that the nurses were exposed to was relatively low compared to many European cities, averaging around 18.9 micrograms per cubic metre for PM2.5 and 12.8 micrograms per cubic metre for NO2. The current European standards for PM2.5 and NO2 are 25 and 40 micrograms per cubic metre, respectively.

The research was presented by Shuo Liu from University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He told the conference: "The fact that we found a link with asthma, even at relatively low levels of exposure, suggests that there is no safe threshold for air pollution. This is strong evidence that our regulations on air pollution need to be stricter if we want to prevent cases of asthma."

Thierry Troosters, who was not involved in the study, is President of the European Respiratory Society and Professor in Rehabilitation Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium. He said: "These studies are concerning because they suggest the air we breathe is having a detrimental effect on adults and on babies' developing lungs. We all want to breathe clean air, and parents want to do all they can to help their children grow up to be healthy, but we have limited control over the quality of air where we live.

"These findings suggest that current regulations, such as the EU limit values for air pollution, are not safe enough and we need to do more to protect children from the potential harms of air pollution. Previous research has shown that up to 67,000 cases of childhood asthma could be avoided every year in Europe if countries would meet the World Health Organization air quality limit values, which are lower than the EU's current standards, so it is essential that we reduce exposures. Collectively these data - along with others - feed into the ongoing discussions among the WHO and in Europe to adapt the air quality recommendations."

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The meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the partys highest decision-making body, saw some angry outbursts from party leaders who criticised a letter written by some of their colleagues to Sonia Gandhi asking for overhaul of the party.

Those who want Gandhi to continue as party president said that the timing of the letter was not correct.

Among these leaders is Rahul Gandhi, who according to people aware of the developments, said that the letter was written at a time when the Congress president was ill and the party was fighting to contain the crises in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Another senior leader AK Antony said weakening the high command is weakening the party, according to one of the leaders present at the CWC. He also slammed the Congress leaders who wote the letter, the leader said on condition of anonymity.

Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, who has stood behind the Gandhi family and want Sonia Gandhi to continue as president, said that he is hurt by the letter. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh also urged Gandhi to continue as party chief.

Sonia Gandhi, meanwhile, asked CWC members to begin deliberations towards the process of transition to relieve her from the duty of party chief, according to people aware of the developments.

In the virtual meeting, Gandhi asked the CWC members to proceed with the process of electing a new president.

She was appointed as an interim president on August 10 last year after Rahul Gandhi stepped down as Congress chief, taking the responsibility for partys disastrous defeat in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Various leaders including Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot, former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath, leader of the Congress party in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Karnataka unit chief DK Shivakumar have requested Sonia Gandhi to continue as party president.

There is a section in the party who is demanding Rahul Gandhis return as Congress chief.
New research suggests that Black patients may have less pain and anxiety when treated by a physician of their own race

When doctors are the same race as their patients, it can sometimes forge a sense of comfort that helps to reduce anxiety and pain, particularly for Black patients, new research from the University of Miami suggests.

In a study recently published in the academic journal Pain Medicine, and led by Steven R. Anderson, recent psychology Ph.D. graduate, and Elizabeth Losin, assistant professor of psychology, groups of non-Hispanic white, Hispanic, and Black patients participated in a simulated doctor's appointment. Patients were given a mildly painful series of heat stimulations on their arm by a medical trainee playing the role of a doctor to simulate a painful medical procedure. Participants indicated how intense their pain was throughout the procedure and researchers also measured the patients' physiological responses to the painful experience using sensors on the patients' hands.

Some of the patients were paired with a doctor who identified as the same race and ethnicity as they did, which is called "racial/ethnic concordance," while others were not. After the experience, researchers compared the pain levels of the group paired with same race/ethnicity doctors with those paired with a doctor of a different race/ethnicity. The most intriguing results came from the Black patients who were paired with Black doctors.

"Black patients paired with Black doctors reported experiencing less pain across several types of measures than Black patients paired with Hispanic or non-Hispanic white doctors," said Losin, who leads the Social and Cultural Neuroscience lab.

Additionally, Losin said that data from the sensors showed the Black patients' physical responses to pain were also lower when they were paired with a doctor of their own race.

"This provides some evidence that Black patients were showing a benefit of having a doctor of their own race at multiple levels--showing pain relief in both their communication and their physiology," Losin said.

The idea to investigate the role of racial concordance in the doctor-patient relationship came from previous research that shows that there are major disparities between racial and ethnic groups in terms of the level of pain experienced from medical conditions and procedures, according to the researchers.

Typically, Black and Hispanic populations report more pain from medical conditions and in pain research studies, compared to non-Hispanic white populations. Also, previous research has suggested that when a patient has a doctor who shares their demographics in terms of gender, race, or language, it can influence peripheral health outcomes like the patient's satisfaction and their adherence to medication. That led Losin's team to investigate whether racial/ethnic concordance between doctor and patient would go deeper to affect the patient's pain level as well.

"There are fewer studies about doctor-patient concordance and its effect on direct health outcomes like pain," Losin said.

To understand why Black patients experienced reduced pain and pain-related bodily responses with a doctor of the same race, the researchers delved into some of the introductory surveys given to the patient participants, Anderson noted, and found a big clue.

"The factor that really differentiated the Black patients from the other groups was that Black patients were much more likely to say they had experienced racial or ethnic discrimination or were currently concerned about it," he said.

What's more, the Black patients who reported experiencing and worrying more about discrimination showed the greatest reductions in their bodily responses to pain when they had doctors of their own race, Anderson said.

"Together these findings suggest that perhaps one reason why Black patients may have had a reduced physiological response to pain when they had Black doctors was because they were less anxious about the possibility of being discriminated against," Losin said. "We know that anxiety is closely tied to pain."

Although non-Hispanic white and Hispanic patients were included in the study as well, whether or not they had a doctor of their own race didn't seem to make a difference for their pain. This was what the study authors expected for the white patients but found surprising for Hispanic patients, who also have been found to report more pain than non-Hispanic whites in previous research studies.

One possible reason Hispanic patients didn't show the same pain reduction benefit of having an own-race doctor as Black patients did, is that on average the Hispanic patients didn't actually perceive the Hispanic doctors to be more similar to them in terms of their race or ethnicity than the Black or non-Hispanic white doctors. This is likely due to the high cultural and national heterogeneity among Hispanic/Latino Americans and suggests more research is needed into what factors related to the doctor-patient relationship may help decrease pain for Hispanic patients.

Losin and Anderson said their study highlights a potential benefit of having more Black physicians in the medical profession: it could mean a reduction in pain disparities.

As of 2019, only around 5 percent of physicians identified as African American and Hispanic respectively, which means that most Black patients will rarely get to experience the benefits of seeing a physician that looks like them and understands their life experiences.

"Physician diversity initiatives are often seen as beneficial for improving patient comfort and satisfaction, but with our study we have evidence that there may be direct health consequences to not having a diverse work force as well," Anderson said. "Our study speaks to the importance of physician diversity in improving health outcomes."

###
Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who switched parties after opposing President Donald Trumps impeachment, landed a speaking role at this weeks Republican National Convention.

Former Gov. Chris Christie is chairing the states shrunken convention delegation, which will gather in person in Charlotte Monday for the traditional roll call of the states to renominate Trump, who then is expected to show up afterwards.

And U.S. Sen. Cory Booker will be speaking this week as well, serving as one of five Democratic officials tapped to respond to the GOP gathering.

This years traditional convention activities will be sharply curtailed due to the coronavirus pandemic, which also forced the Democrats to convene virtually and scrap plans to gather in Milwaukee to nominate Joe Biden for president.

Instead of 49 delegates from New Jersey, for example, there will be just six eligible to attend: Christie, state party chair Doug Steinhardt, national committee members Bill Palatucci and Ginny Haines, Morris County Republican Chairwoman Laura Marie Ali and Edward Walsh.

The roll call is to begin at 9 a.m. Monday. The rest of the convention is to run from 8:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. each evening.

Other than Monday mornings nominating session, the action, including Trumps Thursday night acceptance speech from the White House grounds, will take place elsewhere rather than before a packed convention hall of cheering delegates.

That includes the speech by Van Drew, R-2nd Dist., on the final night of the four-day convention before Trumps address. Also speaking that night will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Ivanka Trump.

Trump and Van Drew swapped compliments and appeared on stage together during a January political rally in Wildwood.

But his ties to the president have caused both the Cook Political Report and Inside Elections to lower his chances of retaining the seat to 50-50. His Democratic challenger is educator Amy Kennedy, part of the iconic Democratic political family.

On Monday, two of Trumps most ardent defenders in Congress, Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Matt Gaetz of Florida, will speak along with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and Donald Trump Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Potential 2024 Republican White House hopeful Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, also will speak Monday, while another potential future GOP presidential candidate, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, will speak Thursday.

First lady Melania Trump and Eric and Tiffany Trump are on Tuesdays agenda, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.

Wednesdays speakers include Vice President Mike Pence, who will be speaking from Fort McHenry in Maryland. Thats the fort where, after our flag was still there following a British bombardment during the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key wrote The Star Spangled Banner.

Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, who grew up in the Atco section of Waterford Township, also will speak that night, along with Pences wife Karen, U.S. Sens, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Joni Ernst of Iowa, former Acting National Intelligence Director Richard Grenell and Eric Trumps wife Lara.

Were going to talk about the American story, about all the accomplishments that weve had over the last four years with President Trump and what the presidents second-term vision is going to look like, Trump campaign senior advisor Jason Miller said Sunday on NBCs Meet the Press.

Trump also will make an appearance each night, Miller said.

Unlike the Democratic convention, though, there wont be any former presidents or presidential nominees speaking at the GOP gathering.

U.S. Housing Secretary Ben Carson and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky are the only former 2016 Republican presidential candidate set to speak. Democrats heard from Booker, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang and others who lost to Biden this year.

And Van Drew is the only high-profile ex-Democrat listed, while numerous Republicans, including former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the Democrats.

The president has made a lot of enemies along the way, former Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., said Sunday on ABCs This Week.

Trumps initial demand for a traditional convention with cheering crowds led Republicans to move the event to Jacksonville, Florida, after North Carolina officials required them to follow health guidelines designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, such as limiting the number of people in the arena.

A COVID-19 outbreak in Florida after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis reopened the states economy scuttled those plans.

Delegates who traveled to Charlotte were tested for COVID-19, and will be required to have daily temperature checks, wear masks and social distance.

Were doing the things that are allowing people to live their lives, have a convention, and do it in a healthy and safe way, which most Americans are doing going back to work, as theyre going to the grocery store, as theyre going to hospitals, McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, said Sunday on CBSs Face the Nation. This is a realistic way of opening up our country and doing it in a healthy and safe way, and the Democrats are saying, Shut it all down. 

Booker, D-N.J., will be one of several high-profile Democrats tapped to join a daily response to the GOP convention, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Rep. Val Demings of Florida and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Booker and Whitmer will speak Tuesday on the economy, his topic at the Democratic convention. He had a similar role at the GOP event in Cleveland four years ago, where he called the speeches a perversion of hatred.

Last week, Donald Trump said, Our economy is doing good, while 40 million Americans are at risk of losing their homes, Booker said in his speech. Thirty million arent getting enough food to eat and 5.4 million people have lost their health care because of this crisis. He has failed us.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com.
Visitors walk along a pond behind the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Center on the campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, on Dec. 2, 2018. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

NASA Researcher Arrested for Allegedly Hiding Ties to China

A Texas A&M University (TAMU) professor has been arrested and charged in connection with hiding his funding from China while working as a researcher for NASA, the Justice Department announced on Aug. 24.

Cheng Zhengdong, 53, a professor of engineering at TAMU for years, deliberately concealed his ties to Chinese universities, a Chinese company, and state-backed talent plans, while at the same time leading a research team for NASA, prosecutors allege. Under the terms of his grant from NASA, Cheng was prohibited from collaborating with Chinese institutions, the department added.

Prosecutors said Cheng was also able to gain access to NASA resources relating to the International Space Station, and leverage that to advance his standing at the Chinese university. They said Cheng personally received $86,000 in funding from NASA, and was part of a team that received a $747,000 grant from the organization.

He was arrested Aug. 23 and was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, and making false statements. He faces a maximum of 20 years in prison if found guilty of wire fraud, and a maximum of five years each for the other two offenses.

The arrest is the latest in a long line of prosecutions against researchers in the United States accused of hiding their affiliations to Chinese talent plans and institutions, often while receiving U.S. taxpayer-funded grants. U.S. officials have long warned that state-backed recruitment programs, such as the Thousand Talents Plan, incentivize foreign scientists and researchers to transfer technology and know-how to China.

China is building an economy and academic institutions with bricks stolen from others all around the world, said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick for the Southern District of Texas. While 1.4 million foreign researchers and academics are here in the U.S. for the right reasons, the Chinese Talents Program exploits our open and free universities. These conflicts must be disclosed, and we will hold those accountable when such conflict violates the law.

Cheng was a director of the Soft Matter Institute at the Guangdong University of Technology (GDUT) in the southern city of Guangzhou from 2012 to 2018, and was employed as a special hire at GDUT from 2011, according to the complaint. The director role entitled him to 10,000 yuan a month ($1,400), court documents said, citing a contract. As a special hire, he was paid a total of 412,000 yuan ($59,600) from 2011 to 2016, the complaint said.

From December 2017 to August 2019, Chen was also hired as a visiting professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUST), which provided him the monthly salary of 50,000 yuan ($7,200) plus housing and travel allowances, court documents said. SUST also provided him 100,000 yuan ($14,450) every three months for his research.

In 2014, Cheng co-founded a Chinese company, Foshan City Ge Wei Technology Co., an enterprise dedicated to designing and making microfluidic chipsdevices that contain tiny amounts of fluid for processing or visualizingand affiliated with GDUT, the complaint stated. He filed at least two patents as a result of his work with this company and GDUT, it added.

Prosecutors said Cheng also was a participant in two Chinese talent plans and applied for the Thousand Talents Plan at the China University of Science and Technology in the eastern city of Hefei.

The complaint said Cheng lied to TAMU and NASA about these affiliations.

Earlier this year, the former chairman of Harvard Universitys chemistry department, Charles Lieber, was indicted on charges related to making false statements about his participation in the Thousand Talents Plan and receiving $2.25 million in Chinese funding over three years. Prosecutors said that Lieber had received more than $15 million of federal funding since 2008.

In July, longtime University of Arkansas professor Simon Saw-Teong Ang was indicted on 42 counts of wire fraud connected to failing to disclose his ties to the Thousand Talents Plan, while receiving funding from NASA.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 18:49:46|Editor: huaxia

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NAIROBI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan police on Sunday night killed eight suspected burglars in the industrial area of the capital, Nairobi.

The robbers were killed by police officers after they were reportedly found stealing machinery from a store at Sihra Coffee Machinery Service and Gensham Wood Enterprises warehouses, Nairobi county police commander Rashid Yakub confirmed on Monday.

When challenged to surrender, Yakub said, the robbers started firing at the police officers, who fired back.

A truck loaded with assorted heavy machinery was recovered at the scene, as were two homemade pistols and machetes.

The police said those who were shot dead were men in their late 20s.

Cases of armed robberies have escalated this year across Kenya, some occurring in crowded streets in downtown Nairobi and its environs, according to traders and security guards. Enditem
Netanyahu said Sunday he and Pompeo would talk about 'expanding the circle of peace in our region'

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Israel on Monday to start a five-day Middle East tour focused on Israel's peace deal with the United Arab Emirates and pushing other Arab states to follow suit.

Pompeo, wearing a face mask in the colours of the US flag, was due to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and in coming days also visit Sudan, Bahrain and the UAE, the State Department said.

In Jerusalem, Pompeo and Netanyahu were due to discuss "regional security issues related to Iran's malicious influence" and "establishing and deepening Israel's relationships in the region," the State Department said.

Netanyahu said Sunday he and Pompeo would talk about "expanding the circle of peace in our region ... We're working on peace with more countries, and I think there will be more countries -- and in the not-so-distant future."

Israel had previously only signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.

President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan, announced in January, forsees cooperation between Israel and those Arab countries.

The pro-Netanyahu daily Israel Hayom said on Sunday that direct talks with the UAE on the wording of the deal were close to starting and that "a full agreement could be reached within a month" with a signing at the White House.

Bahrain, Oman, Sudan?

Under the US-brokered agreement announced on August 13, Israel pledged to suspend its previous plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, without saying for how long.

The Palestinians have slammed the UAE's move as a "stab in the back" while their own conflict with Israel remains unresolved.

The UAE ambassador to Washington, writing in Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper, argued that closer ties would benefit everybody and "help move the region beyond the ugly legacy of hostility and conflicts, towards a destiny of hope, peace and prosperity".

Israel remains technically at war with Sudan, which for years supported hardline Islamist forces.

The State Department said Pompeo would meet Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok during his tour, to "express support for deepening the Sudan-Israel relationship".

Pompeo will also meet Bahrain's Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa before meeting UAE foreign minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, it said.

Saudi Arabia, in keeping with decades of policy by the majority of Arab states, has said it will not make peace deal until Israel has signed a peace deal with the Palestinians.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online

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SOUTHFIELD, MI - She was pronounced dead by paramedics even though she was still alive. A 20-year old Southfield woman was reportedly discovered still breathing at a funeral home.

According to a report from WDIV-TV, Local 4 News, paramedics declared the woman dead on Sunday morning after she was found in cardiac arrest inside her Southfield home.

The Southfield Fire Department released this statement to WDIV-TV about the incident:

At 7:34 a.m. on August 23, 2020, Southfield Fire Department paramedics arrived at a home in Southfield on a call for an unresponsive female. When paramedics arrived, they found a 20-year-old who was not breathing. The paramedics performed CPR and other life reviving methods for 30 minutes. Given medical readings and the condition of the patient, it was determined at that time that she did not have signs of life.

Because there was no indication of foul play, as per standard operating procedure, the Oakland County Medical Examiners Office was contacted and given the medical data. The patient was again determined to have expired and the body was released directly to the family to make arrangements with a funeral home of their choosing.

The woman was taken to James H. Cole Funeral Home in Detroit where an employee then reportedly found her still breathing. The funeral home had this to say to WDIV-TV about what happened:

After receiving clearance from the Oakland County Medical Examiners office, she was transported to our funeral home. Upon her arrival at the funeral home, our staff confirmed she was breathing and called EMS.

Theres no word on how the woman is doing. The rest of the statement from the Southfield Fire Department said personal information on the patient is not being released to respect the privacy of her family.

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DUMAIR, Syria - An explosion early Monday struck a gas pipeline in a Damascus suburb, causing a huge fire and cutting off electricity throughout Syria, state media reported, citing the countrys electricity and oil ministers.

The oil minister, Ali Ghanem, said the explosion struck the line that feeds three power stations in southern Syria, calling the incident a cowardly terrorist act. Ghanem spoke to journalists who visited the blast site near the suburb of Dumair, northeast of the capital.

Syrias oil and gas infrastructure has been hit over the past years by acts of sabotage, but no one has ever claimed responsibility for such attacks. The nine-year civil war, which has killed more than 400,000 people, has also badly affected oil and gas fields, many of which are outside government control.

The state news agency SANA quoted Electricity Minister Zuhair Kharbotli as saying the explosion on the Arab Gas Pipeline occurred after midnight Sunday between the northeastern Damascus suburbs of Adra and Dumair.

He said it was the sixth time the pipeline was hit. Technicians are working to fix the problems and electricity should be restored in the coming hours, he said.

Ghanem, the oil minister, said the pipeline was attacked in this same desert area six times in recent years. He said it pumps some 7 million cubic meters of natural gas to power stations that supply much of Syria with electricity.

U.S. Syria envoy James Jeffrey said the attack was almost certainly a strike by the Islamic State group. The extremists were driven from the last bit of territory under their control in Syria last year, but sleeper cells continue to carry out sporadic attacks.

Jeffrey said there has been an upsurge in IS activities in desert areas in eastern and southeastern Syria near the border with Jordan and Iraq.

The U.S. envoy is in Geneva for the start of U.N.-mediated talks involving the Syrian government, opposition and civil society. They plan to discuss a possible new constitution, part of a process has produced few concrete results so far.

IS militants have claimed responsibility for attacks over the past months that killed scores of government troops as well as members of the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

In December, near-simultaneous attacks believed to have been carried out by drones hit three government-run oil and gas installations in central Syria. One of the attacks targeted the oil refinery in the central city of Homs.

In January, bombs planted underwater off Syrias coast exploded, damaging oil facilities used to pump oil into one of the countrys two petroleum refineries.

Syria has suffered fuel shortages since last year. Western sanctions have blocked imports, while most Syrian oil fields are controlled by Kurdish-led fighters in the countrys east.

Information Minister Imad Sara said the aim of these attacks is to pressure government supporters to demand that the state make concessions to its rivals. He added that what was not taken by war will not be taken by dialogue or explosions.

___

Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

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BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

By Ilkin Seyfaddini - Trend:

Uzbekistan intends to take up a significant share of the UAE(United Arab Emirates) foreign labor market, Trend reports citing Podrobno.uz news agency.

"A major diversification program is being developed in cooperation with the UAE. The program aims to reduce the number of migrants from certain countries and increase the number of migrants from Central Asia, namely, from Uzbekistan. In March 2020, members of the UAE government visited Uzbekistan, during which agreements were signed between Labour Ministry of Uzbekistan and Emirati employers," First Deputy Employment and Labour Minister Erkin Mukhitdinov said at a meeting of the International Press Club in Tashkent.

According to him, Uzbekistan currently plans to open training centers for Uzbek migrants in Tashkent and Syrdarya covering three areas - hotel service, nursing home service, and taxi driving.

" To work in the UAE, Uzbeks will need to know at least 500-600 English words and about 300 Arabic words, in addition to IT legislation," Mukhitdinov said.

---

Follow author on Twitter: @seyfaddini
GREENWICH - A run in Greenwich organized by Stamford civil rights group Justice for Brunch honored Ahmaud Arbery on Sunday, the six-month anniversary of his death.

Arbery, a Black man, was shot and killed by three white men while he was jogging near his home in Georgia on Feb. 23, 2020. The 2.23-mile run was symbolic of the date of his death.

Justice for Brunch head of operations Tim Frazier asked runners to be mindful of the civil injustices of the world while participating in the #IRunWithMaud 2.23-mile run on Sunday in Greenwich.
ST. MARYS  Police have recovered the body of a 63-year-old Kitchener man from the St. Marys Quarry.

OPP divers had been searching the waters of the quarry after the man went missing while snorkeling on Sunday.

The family of the deceased has been contacted and our heartfelt condolences go out to his family and all loved ones, the Stratford Police Service tweeted on Monday afternoon.

Stratford Police Const. Darren Fischer said the man was snorkeling in the quarry with family and friends Sunday afternoon.

He went underwater and was not seen for several minutes, he said. Lifeguards at the quarry began a search for the man and called police.

Officers conducted a search, but it was called off in the evening after they couldnt find him. The OPP dive team was called.

Fischer said the quarry is three to 10 metres deep and there is no current.
The study, which was published in the Medical Journal of Australia, reported that of the 79 unborn children during the fire, who were studied between two and four years after the Morwell fire in 2014 had increased incidences of coughing, wheezing, and cases of respiratory infections.

Young children exposed to the smoke from the fire were found to be less affected, but the children used asthma inhalers more often, the study also revealed.

READ: California Fire: More Wildfires Burning as 10,800 Lighting Strikes Sparks New Fire





Climate Change Impacts on Pregnant Women and Young Children

The study compared the parental reports on the effects of air pollution to 81 children exposed to the smoke, and the unborn children whose symptoms showed years later. The health of children born from mothers exposed from the fire smoke, and children not exposed to the fire were also examined and compared.

Dr. Fay Johnston of the Menzies Institute for Medical Research at the University of Tasmania led the research. She and her team warned that climate change had fanned increased incidences of bushfires, thereby exposing more people to smoke and making pregnant mothers and their unborn children more vulnerable.

READ ALSO: Texas Plastic Plant Fire Releases Toxic Plume That Could Burn for Days





Significance of the Study

There had been several studies on the impacts on the health of long-term exposure to air pollution. Still, little there are very few studies on the effects on the health of short-term exposure to air pollution on high levels, especially on pregnant women, according to the Deputy Director of the Menzies Institute for Medical Research and a co-author of the study.

The authors also warn that climate change would likely bring more severe air pollution incidences from bushfires. Thus pregnant women and young children should be given utmost consideration in public health responses.

Dr. Jo McDubbin, a pediatrician, said that the findings are significant because it indicates that children and the families of those affected by the fires cannot be ignored. The study also affects entire Australia because of the impact of the recent bushfires, she added.

The Hazelwood Coal Mine Fire in Morwell

The fire started on February 9, 2014, from an act of arson that ignited a fire in the entire Morwell. The smoke from the fire blanketed the community as a whole. The town experienced inferior air quality from the smoke and ashes for 20 days prompting officials to advise vulnerable people such as young children, pregnant women, and people with respiratory diseases to leave the area as the fire was expected to burn for two more weeks. The fire was contained on March 25, 45 days since it started.

READ NEXT: New Study Shows Sea Level Rise Will Devastate Cities in California

Check out for more news and information on Respiratory Health on Nature World News.
Scranton, PA (18503)

Today

Snow this morning will give way to partly cloudy conditions this afternoon. Morning high of 35F with temps falling to near 15. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 90%. Snow accumulations less than one inch..

Tonight

Considerable cloudiness. Low 7F. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph.
Students of St. Cyprian's Anglican JHS 'A' in Kumasi today, Monday, 24 August 2020, rejected President Nana Akufo-Addo's free hot meal served them.



The students said the food was "not tasty" and was "salty".



"We are not prisoners to be served with this food," some of the students who spoke to Class News said, adding: "Even prisoners will reject this food."



One of them said: "We thought they were going to serve us good food. Nana Akufo-Addo should abrogate the contract with the caterer and give it to my mother; she can cook it."



Some of the students who collected the food threw it away after their first taste.



The students, however, did not blame the President for the poor food but the caterer who was given the contract.



The headmaster of the school, Mr Stephen Adjei, said the food was delivered to all the 55 students but the teachers were neglected.



In his 15th COVID-19 address to the nation on Sunday, 16 August 2020, the President said all the candidates sitting the Basic Education Certificate Examination this year will enjoy one free hot meal a day.



Most final-year university students have already completed their examinations, and, by 18th September, SHS 3 and JHS 3 students would have finished their respective final examinations of WASSCE and BECE.



As a result of reports I have recently received that some final-year JHS students were going hungry, in complying with COVID-19 protocols, I have just instructed the Minister of Gender, Child and Social Protection to begin preparations to ensure that from 24th August up to 18th September, all five hundred and eighty-four thousand (584,000) final-year JHS students, and one hundred and forty-six thousand (146,000) staff, both in public and private schools, be given one hot meal a day, the President said.



This is to ensure full observance of the COVID-19 safety protocols, he explained.

Source: classfmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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With a median price-to-earnings (or "P/E") ratio of close to 20x in New Zealand, you could be forgiven for feeling indifferent about Rakon Limited's (NZSE:RAK) P/E ratio of 19.4x. Although, it's not wise to simply ignore the P/E without explanation as investors may be disregarding a distinct opportunity or a costly mistake.

Earnings have risen firmly for Rakon recently, which is pleasing to see. One possibility is that the P/E is moderate because investors think this respectable earnings growth might not be enough to outperform the broader market in the near future. If that doesn't eventuate, then existing shareholders probably aren't too pessimistic about the future direction of the share price.

Check out our latest analysis for Rakon

pe

We don't have analyst forecasts, but you can see how recent trends are setting up the company for the future by checking out our free report on Rakon's earnings, revenue and cash flow.

Is There Some Growth For Rakon?

There's an inherent assumption that a company should be matching the market for P/E ratios like Rakon's to be considered reasonable.

If we review the last year of earnings growth, the company posted a terrific increase of 18%. Still, EPS has barely risen at all from three years ago in total, which is not ideal. So it appears to us that the company has had a mixed result in terms of growing earnings over that time.

Comparing that to the market, which is predicted to shrink 2.9% in the next 12 months, the company's positive momentum based on recent medium-term earnings results is a bright spot for the moment.

With this information, we find it odd that Rakon is trading at a fairly similar P/E to the market. Apparently some shareholders believe the recent performance is at its limits and have been accepting lower selling prices.

The Key Takeaway

The price-to-earnings ratio's power isn't primarily as a valuation instrument but rather to gauge current investor sentiment and future expectations.

Story continues

We've established that Rakon currently trades on a lower than expected P/E since its recent three-year earnings growth is beating forecasts for a struggling market. When we see its superior earnings with some actual growth, we assume potential risks are what might be placing pressure on the P/E ratio. One major risk is whether its earnings trajectory can keep outperforming under these tough market conditions. At least the risk of a price drop looks to be subdued, but investors seem to think future earnings could see some volatility.

It is also worth noting that we have found 2 warning signs for Rakon that you need to take into consideration.

If P/E ratios interest you, you may wish to see this free collection of other companies that have grown earnings strongly and trade on P/E's below 20x.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.



Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
Big Blue Swim School, one of the nations fastest-growing swim school franchises, recently ranked 3,750 among Inc. magazines 2020 list of 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America.

"We all know that 2020 has been a challenging year, but we have still been fortunate enough to sign deals since COVID-19 hit, and we have found ways to adjust our Dive-in Days and swim school operations to be socially distanced so that we can continue our franchise development efforts, said CEO Chris Kenny. Receiving this ranking is truly an accomplishment that everyone at Big Blue can feel proud of."

This achievement places the swim lesson franchise in elevated company, joining companies such as Microsoft, Timberland, Vizio, Intuit, Chobani, Oracle, and Patagonia who have been recognized in years past.

Since launching in 2009, Big Blue has approached swim instruction holistically, imparting confidence and self-esteem in students while providing parents with feedback on their child's progress. In addition, Big Blues turnkey operations, capacity planning and kid-friendly 90-degree pools have quickly established the brand as an impressive player in the fragmented swim lesson franchise segment. The Big Blue investment opportunity and proven business model appeal to multi-unit and semi-absentee franchise partners looking to maximize their time and their capital. The brand positions franchise partners for success with a proprietary enterprise system, top-tier franchisor support, a strategic growth strategy and strong unit economics.

With this winning model, Big Blue has already sold 74 units in 15 states to qualified franchise partners, and the brand is well on its way to achieving its goal of 150 pools signed by the end of 2021. Moving forward, Big Blue is positioned to be the market leader in an industry valued at $3 billion annually.

ABOUT BIG BLUE SWIM SCHOOL

Big Blue Swim School was founded in 2009 by competitive swimmer Chris DeJong. The first location opened in Wilmette, Illinois, followed by four additional Chicagoland schools. In 2017, Level 5 Capital Partners acquired a stake in the brand. Through that investment, Big Blue plans to grow through franchising to 150 pools by 2021. Big Blue Swim School's real estate expertise, strong brand, proprietary technology, and leadership support, coupled with its best-in-class consumer offerings, position its franchise partners for long-term success. To learn more about franchise opportunities with Big Blue Swim School, visit http://YourBigMomentStartsHere.com.
YEREVAN.  No reference was made to the matter of the governments nominating its candidate for a judge of the Constitutional Court; neither questions were asked nor was special reference made. Lilit Makunts, the head of the majority My Step faction in the National Assembly (NA) of Armenia, stated this in a talk with journalists Monday, after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyans meeting with the faction.

She added that there was no discussion on a merger of the Constitutional Court and the Court of Cassation either.

As for the possibility of the government nominating Edgar Shatiryan as a candidate for a judge of the Constitutional Court, Makunts said as follows, in particular: "The My Step faction cannot make a decision on who will be the governments candidate for a judge of the Constitutional Court."

She stressed that since Shatiryan's candidacy is being discussed as a possible candidate, the My Step faction considered it expedient to meet with him. "There have been issues that had arisen in the past also in connection with [his] resigning from membership in the Corruption Prevention Commission," Makunts added.

And to the question as to when a special session of the parliament will be convened to elect the three new judges of the Constitutional Court, she responded. "As far as I know, no special session is planned. If it is necessary, this session will be convened on the initiative of the NA president."
Parents whose children will take the bus to school this fall are expected to notify Niagara Student Transportation Services by Tuesday of their plans for the first day of school.

Lori Ziraldo, executive director for the busing company, is in charge of ensuring health and safety protocols are followed.

I think that were doing well, given all of the new guidelines that we have to work to this year, she said.

NSTS has released its back-to-school plan on its website.

The plan outlines key points parents should consider when choosing whether to opt in to transportation.

Students are required to participate in the mandatory opt-in process, said Ziraldo. If a parent doesnt complete the school board questionnaire, they will not be allowed on the bus.

A process that used to take two to three days in previous years will now take a week, said Ziraldo.

Plans change, said Ziraldo, who said parents can still get kids on a bus schedule after the year starts. Should a parent wish to opt-in to transportation at a later date, it is a weekly process. Our routes are required to be static for a whole week.

The plan said parents have until 3 p.m. every Monday to notify the service they are opting in to transportation. Their intentions will be confirmed on Wednesday with an official plan coming into effect the following Monday.

Nancy Daigneault, executive director of the Ontario School Bus Association, said an area of concern for members of the association is the age of drivers.

Many are over 60 years of age and could opt out of work because of being at higher risk of contracting severe cases of COVID-19.

Ziraldo is confident in NSTSs ability to attract, train and support its bus drivers.

We have a bus driver for every route, she said.

Were monitoring it regularly. We knew that every bus plan that we established needed to factor in the demographics of our bus drivers, said Ziraldo.

For our bus drivers in Niagara, 51 per cent are over the age of 55. Bus drivers will be wearing a Level 1 face mask, a face shield, and they will have hand sanitizer available for their use.

Ziraldo said health and safety is the main priority for both drivers and students.

All students who board a school bus will be assigned a seat.

Students will be required to complete the COVID-19 self-assessment before going to the bus stop, said Ziraldo. To get on the bus, students in grades 4 to 8 will be required to wear a face mask. Students in grades JK to 3 will be encouraged to do so as well.

When students reach their assigned seats, they will not be allowed to touch windows.

Bus drivers will be opening windows to maximize ventilation and airflow on the bus, Ziraldo said.

Windows will be left open regardless of the weather; rain or snow. It is expected that when students arrive at the bus stop, they will be dressed for the weather. This will only be select windows.

There are 32,000 students eligible to receive transportation to and from District School Board of Niagara and Niagara Catholic District School Board schools.

Ninety per cent of vehicles serve more than one school, said Ziraldo. We will double and triple run some buses.

The bus service opened its parent portal on Aug. 17.
India needs to take note of China's assertiveness in implementing the national security law in Hong Kong as also its recently exhibited sensitivity to criticism of Xi Jinping by the Indian media, notes former senior RA&W officer and China expert Jayadeva Ranade.

IMAGE: A supporter of the Apple Daily reads a copy of the newspaper to support media mogul Jimmy Lai, founder of the Apple Daily, after he was arrested by the national security unit in Hong Kong, August 11, 2020. Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

There is simmering discontent in Hong Kong after Beijing imposed the National Security Law.

This has the potential to boil over.

If it does, it would raise doubts over the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist party's claims over Hong Kong and Beijing's oft-touted 'one country, two systems' formula as the panacea for the reunification of Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan with the mainland.

Already, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has publicly questioned the validity of the 'one country, two systems' formula.

Troubles in Hong Kong or the emergence of an active dissident movement would be a major embarrassment for Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist party.

IMAGE: Supporters hold copies of an issue of the Apple Daily newspaper and shout slogans as Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon and Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai, who was arrested under the new national security law, leaves the Mong Kok police station after being released on bail, August 12, 2020. Photograph: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

The national security law passed by China's national people's congress standing committee on June 30, 2020, amidst considerable concern and controversy in Hong Kong, effectively confirms Beijing's control over Hong Kong including its judiciary.

It violates the provisions of the handover in 1997 and the guarantees given by China under the 'one country, two systems', allowing Hong Kong to retain some fundamental rights.

The national security law provisions are sweeping and extend to persons even outside the region accused of offences against the Hong Kong special administrative region.

They also stipulate stricter control over the services of foreign countries, international organisations, NGOs and foreign news agencies.

The after effects of the national security law were felt immediately, with Hong Kong-based experts saying it will have a severe impact on freedom of expression and reports of people deleting Facebook posts.

There were repercussions abroad too with American professors advised to exercise caution while teaching courses.

At Princeton university, students in a Chinese politics class will use codes instead of names to protect their identities while in Amherst a professor is considering anonymous online chats so students can speak freely.

IMAGE: Hong Kong media tycoon and Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai is escorted by the police to the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club for evidence collection as part of the ongoing investigation under the national security law, August 11, 2020. Photograph: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

Apprehensions have grown after the arrests of Apple Daily owner Jimmy Lai and 23-year old democracy activist Agnes Chow on August 10.

Indicating the mood in Hong Kong, many residents came out in a strong show of support and purchased extra copies of the Apple Daily -- whose sales jumped five-fold!

The paper declared 'Apple Daily will fight on!'

A student union representative placed an advertisement declaring: 'Through blood, toil, tears and sweat, we will strive on.'

'However difficult it may be, Hong Kongers will eventually restore our city.'/

IMAGE: Hong Kong democracy activist Agnes Chow speaks to the media after being released on bail from the Tai Po police station, August 11, 2020. Photograph: Billy H C Kwok/Getty Images

Many pro-democracy activists including Simon Cheng, a former employee of the British consulate in Hong Kong, have sought asylum in the UK where they announced plans to establish a 'parliament-in-exile'.

One pro-democracy activist said 'People will not bow to this suppression ... there will be all sorts of innovative and symbolic acts.'

People have been urged to make purchases from shops that support the pro-democracy movement.

The determination of the pro-democracy activists and huge pro-democracy marches suggest the ground is fertile for disruptive protests in Hong Kong.

IMAGE: A woman holds a poster showing British consulate worker Simon Cheung, who was detained by Chinese officials, at a gathering outside the British consulate in Hong Kong to petition the British government to assist in his release, August 21, 2019.

Cheung is now in Britain and hopes to establish a 'parliament in exile'. Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

The Communist party-owned Global Times (August 17) reacted to the developments, warning that 'Hong Kong secessionists fleeing to the UK and promoting the "parliament in exile" severely breach' the national security law and 'that those people, along with UK organisations or individuals who sponsored them, will face legal punishment no matter their whereabouts and face severe sanctions from China'.

The warning was repeated by China's Ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming.

Whether the UK -- which hasn't yet shown the spine to confront China -- will support a 'parliament-in-exile' will be a major factor determining whether Hong Kong acquiesces to the national security law.

IMAGE: Pro-Beijing protesters take part in a demonstration outside the United States consulate in Hong Kong, August 4, 2020. Photograph: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

The US had threatened sanctions against officials in China and Hong Kong taking active part in framing or implementing repressive policies against the people.

This is likely to make many Hong Kong officials, who have properties and funds in the US, Canada etc, vulnerable.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam's younger son Joshua Lam Yeuk-hay, who was pursuing a PhD in mathematics at Harvard, has had to leave Boston and return to Hong Kong.

The US has now withdrawn trade benefits which will adversely impact Hong Kong's trade.

It mandated that all goods made in Hong Kong for export to the United States will need to be labelled as 'Made in China' after September 25, 2020.

Such restrictions could impact Hong Kong's position as the window for China's imports of dual use technology and equipment at a time when the US is already squeezing the supply of critical hi-tech items to China.

On August 19, the US state department notified that agreements providing for the surrender of fugitive offenders, transfer of sentenced persons, and reciprocal tax exemptions on income derived from the international operation of ships, had been suspended or terminated.

IMAGE: Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen speaks to the media in Taipei, August 12, 2020. Photograph: Ann Wang/Reuters

Taiwan has added an international dimension to these developments.

Boldly backing the pro-democracy movement, Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen on June 18 announced formation of the 'Taiwan-Hongkong Services and Exchange Office' to assist Hong Kong residents coming to Taiwan.

On June 30, she tweeted 'China's disregard for the will of Hong Kong's people proves that "one country, two systems" is not viable.'

'Many things have changed in #HongKong since 1997, but #Taiwan's commitment to supporting those #HKers who want freedom & democracy has never changed.'

With this, Tsai confirmed unacceptability of the 'one country, two systems' formula putting a question mark on China's plans for reunification.

The potential for discontent in Hong Kong to evolve into long-term civil disorder will be a concern for the Communist party leadership.

Such a movement could undermine Xi Jinping's position and make it difficult for the Communist party to justify the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland.

At the least, it will delay the 'China Dream'.

India too needs to take note of China's assertiveness in implementing the national security law as also its recently exhibited sensitivity to criticism of Xi Jinping by the Indian media.

It would be prudent to examine and terminate any agreements/MoUs with China assuring the return, or incarceration, of individuals sentenced to imprisonment by China.

Jayadeva Ranade, former Additional Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, is the President, Centre for China Analysis and Strategy.

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/ Rediff.com
Black newborns in U.S. 3 times more likely to die when looked after by White doctors: study finds

By Jacqueline Howard - CNN

August 23, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - Black newborn babies in the United States are more likely to survive childbirth if they are cared for by Black doctors, but three times more likely than White Babies to die when looked after by White doctors, a study has found.

The mortality rate of Black newborns in hospital shrunk by between 39% and 58% when Black physicians took charge of the birth, according to the research, which laid bare how shocking racial disparities in human health can affect even the first hours of a person's life.

By contrast, the mortality rate for White babies was largely unaffected by the doctor's race.

The findings support previous research, which has shown that, while infant mortality rates have fallen in recent decades, Black children remain significantly more likely to die early than their White counterparts.

Researchers from George Mason University analyzed data capturing 1.8 million hospital births in Florida between 1992 and 2015 for the new study, which was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, also known as PNAS.

When cared for by White physicians, Black newborns were about three times more likely to die in the hospital than White newborns, the researchers found. That disparity dropped significantly when the doctor was Black, although Black newborns nonetheless remained more likely than White newborns to die.

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"Our study provides the first evidence that the Black-White newborn mortality gap is smaller when Black MDs provide care for Black newborns than when White MDs do, lending support to research examining the importance of racial concordance in addressing health care inequities," co-author Rachel Hardeman said on Twitter.

"Black babies have been dying at disproportionate rates since as long as we've collected data. The time is now to change this and to ensure that Black infants are afforded the opportunity to thrive."

It's already known that Black infants have 2.3 times the infant mortality rate as White infants, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health.

And a report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which covered the period between 2000 to 2017 and was published in June, found that Black infants still have more than twice the risk of dying as White infants.

"Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases, and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns," the authors wrote. "The findings suggest that Black physicians outperform their White colleagues when caring for Black newborns."

The authors did not speculate about the reasons behind the trend, but wrote: "Taken with this work, it gives warrant for hospitals and other care organizations to invest in efforts to reduce such biases and explore their connection to institutional racism."

"Reducing racial disparities in newborn mortality will also require raising awareness among physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators about the prevalence of racial and ethnic disparities," the researchers added.
AKRON, Ohio  South Dakota state troopers on Monday morning arrested an Akron man accused of shooting into a homeless camp near the Towpath Trail, as well as shootings in Indiana and West Virginia.

Timothy Sargent, 42, has been charged with attempted murder, felonious assault and weapons under disability in connection with the Akron shooting on Aug. 17, in which a 29-year-old man was hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds, and is expected to survive, according to police and court records.

Sargent is also a suspect in the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Rebecca Tomlinson, who was found dead Aug. 18 near railroad tracks on Akrons West Side, according to police.

The West Virginia State Police also identified Sargent as a suspect in a fatal shooting in Milton, West Virginia, on the morning of Aug. 19, according to WCHS-TV in Charleston. A 62-year-old man was fatally shot, and crashed on U.S. 60.

According to the U.S. Marshals Service, Sargent is a suspect in a shooting in New Albany, Indiana on the evening of Aug. 19. Three family members had just finished hiking in OBannon State Park when a man in another vehicle fired shots into their car. Two adults were hospitalized with gunshot wounds, and were reported by police to be in stable condition. A 16-year-old girl in the backseat was not shot, but she was injured when the familys car crashed after the shooting.

The Marshals Service said Sargent traveled with 20-year-old Savannah Emich, of Akron, who has also been charged in connection with the shooting in Indiana. She was arrested on Monday morning in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, along with Sargent.

The task force here in Ohio worked around the clock with its local partners and law enforcement across the country to locate and apprehend this pair of violent individuals, U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott said in a news release.
Max India is betting big on senior care business, and plans to invest over Rs 300 crore to set up a chain of assisted living facilities, home care services and residential complexes for the elderly.

The senior care business has been a mega trend in India for the last few years," Rajit Mehta, MD and CEO of Antara, told Moneycontrol on Monday. Antara is a wholly owned subsidiary of Max India.

"The senior care business is worth $10 billion - $12 billion. We have a vantage position because senior care requires competencies across healthcare, insurance, hospitality and real-estate, Mehta said.

In assisted living facilities, residents live in independent rooms or apartments, but receive help with day-to-day activities like bathing, dressing, preparing meals, and taking their medicines.

The blueprint

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Mehta said the Antara is targeting about 4 million of the elderly population, with an income of Rs 15 lakh-plus, in the northern, western and southern parts of the country.

Antara is planning 35-40 Care Homes in the next three years, of which 10 are expected to be Memory Care Homes for those suffering from Dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Currently, Antara operates two main lines of businesses - residential complexes for seniors and assisted care services. The residential flats are sold like any other real-estate venture, but are built for seniors.

The assisted care services are provided on a monthly rent. The rent ranges up to Rs 1 lakh, depending on the size of the apartment and the services being opted.

The first Antara community was launched in April 2017 in Purukul, Dehradun, with 190 apartments, spread over 14 acres of land.

In 2020, it launched a new senior living facility in Sector-150, Noida. With 340 apartments in its first phase of development, it will cater to the social, recreational, educational, wellness, and health-related needs of senior citizens aged 55 years and above and will be ready for possession by 2024.

Though building residences for senior care is still nascent in India, global companies such as Columbia Pacific Group and Genesis Rehabilitation Services have started operations in the country in the last few years.

COVID-19 impact

Mehta says the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the demand for senior living units and assisted care services facilities in India, as the elderly, especially those living alone, have been forced to remain indoors without adequate support for their daily needs such as medicine, groceries, and, above all, social interaction.

The sample apartment was launched in Noida during COVID-19. The concept and brand found resonance, and we have sold about one-third of the inventory," he said.

Asset light model

All the future projects of Antara would operate on the asset light model or leasing premises than owning properties. We want to find developers who contribute land as well as do the construction. Our competency is in designing, sales and operations," Mehta said.

Business expansion

Mehta said Max India has enough cash to fund the business expansion.

"Antaras inventory and capital invested are about Rs 357 crore. In addition, there are assets worth about Rs 500 crore in Max India, cash worth Rs 400 crore from the sale of Max Bupa and commercial real-estate worth Rs 100 crore," Mehta said.

"About Rs 850-900 crore, the underlying value of Max India, is about Rs 150- Rs 160 per share," Mehta added.

A report by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in October 2019, Unlocking the Potential of the Senior Consumer Market, predicts that Indias senior population will increase to 300 million by 2050. Census 2011 suggests that the share of elders as a percentage of the total population in the country will increase from around 7.5 percent in 2001 to almost 12.5 percent by 2026 and surpass 19.5 percent by 2050.

There are 10,500 senior living residences across India today. This is expected to go up to 75,000 in the next 10 years, but this is not sufficient to meet the needs of the elderly population, which is a growing segment that do not have access to any comprehensive care structure at the moment, the CII report said.

Business reorganisation

After Max India reorganised its business in June 2020, following the acquisition of the hospital business by private equity firm KKR, its hospital assets were merged into Max Healthcare.

Under the deal, Max India agreed to demerge its non-healthcare business units, Max Bupa Health and Antara Senior Living, into a separate company. Max India sold its stake in Max Bupa in December 2019.

The resultant Senior Care and other businesses of Max India were demerged on June 15, 2020. It will be relisted on stock exchanges later this week as Max India Ltd.

The new Max India is a holding company of two businesses -- Max Group's Senior Care business, Antara, and a skilling company, Max Skill First.

Each shareholder has received one share of new Max India with a face value of Rs 10 for every 5 shares of the erstwhile Max India, which had a face value of Rs 2 each.

The senior care business, housed under Antara, will be the flagship company, following the sale of the hospital business.
Manitobans concerned about racism in their businesses and organizations are invited to participate in anti-racism workshops sponsored by the Islamic Social Services Association.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitobans concerned about racism in their businesses and organizations are invited to participate in anti-racism workshops sponsored by the Islamic Social Services Association.

Titled Racism: Reject and Respond, the two-day professional training events are intended for people working in health care, education, law enforcement, human resources, social services and justice.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS files ISSA executive director Shahina Siddiqui says educational workshops support diversity.

Topics to be covered include religious bigotry, unconscious racism, colonialism and its impact, systemic racism and subtle and overt racism, among others. Participants will also come away with a tool to help them audit racism in their workplaces.

"We need more education in order to deal with diversity," said Shahina Siddiqui, executive director of the ISSA. "Racism causes much harm, whether it is conscious or unconscious."

For some people, this means dealing with stereotypes they may have about people from other religions, ethnic groups or races.

For Siddiqui, as a Muslim, this means dispelling ideas that all Muslims are terrorists, all Muslim women are oppressed or that Muslim men are culturally and religiously domineering and violent toward their wives.

If non-Muslims "hold those kind of biases" towards the Islamic community, Siddiqui wonders how they provide help and support.

"If a Muslim comes for help, how can they do case planning if they have those biases?" she asks.

Siddiqui is quick to point out its not only Muslims who have these experiences; other groups, and especially Indigenous people, also have many stories to tell of how racism affects their lives.

She also acknowledges that as an immigrant to Canada she had to deal with her own racism toward other groups.

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"I had my own biases, and had to face them," Siddiqui said, adding, "We all need to have these difficult conversations."

The goal of the workshops is not to blame people, she said.

"Its about making things right and empowering people to do better. It is not about judging people. We want to get to the heart of what racism is, how it plays out in organizations, and how we can begin to promote change," Siddiqui said.

Currently, the workshops are planned to be held in-person, with a limit of 25 people for each one and all pandemic safety protocols and guidelines followed. If provincial guidelines change, organizers will consider an online option.

Registration for the workshops, which will be held Sept. 24-25, Oct. 29-30 and Nov. 5-6, is now open. The cost is $400 per person. Go to www.issacanada.com for more information, or call 204-944-1560.

faith@freepress.mb.ca
In 1880 Dr. R.I. McElrees Wine of Cardui hit the pharmaceutical market as a menstrual relief product for women. Confident of its anticipated success, the developer of the product made an agreement with the purchasers of the alcohol-laced product that if they were not satisfied with its promised result that they would get their money back. Allegedly 6,500 ladies reported being cured of the vapors or fallen womb syndrome and the company immediately received an initial shipment of 7,000 bottles.

The Chattanooga Medicine Company was founded on Feb. 21, 1889, and started operations in an unpretentious two-story brick building on the muddy, unpaved Market Street in Chattanooga.

The principal founder of the company was former Union soldier from Illinois, Zeboim Cartter Patten. His fellow charter members were H. Clay Evans, Theodore G. Montague, Fred F. Wiehl and Lew Owen, who were all successful businessmen in other endeavors.

In 1882, Dr. McElree (he is also referred to as Reverend McElree in some writings) sold his product to the Chattanooga Medicine Company where it was originally marketed as McElrees Cardui, The Womans Tonic.

After prohibition passed in 1919-1920, the ingredients were listed as Blessed Thistle, Golden Seal, and 19 percent alcohol (38 proof). Surprisingly Congress had passed on Nov. 18, 1918, the temporary Wartime Prohibition Act, which banned the sale of alcoholic beverages having an alcohol content of greater than 1.28 percent (2.56 proof).

When the McElrees Cardui was sold to the Medicine Company it flourished with sales and profits. In this era women were not the only ones that benefited from the magic elixir. Men had bouts of melancholy and women suffered from the vapors, which was described as attacks of hysteria, mania, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, withdrawal syndrome, fainting, and mood swings of PMS (ladies know what this is).

The main ingredients of this magical tonic were potassium (51.9 percent), salt (16 percent) and a varying amount of alcohol that fluctuated up to 23.3 percent alcohol (46.6 proof).

Prior to hitting the jackpot with Wine of Cardui, the Chattanooga Medicine Companys best seller had been Black Draught laxative product but sales had fallen recently until Wine of Cardui came along and helped the company. Patents to the Black Draught had been bought by Mr. Patten in 1879.

Chattanooga often has been called the Buckle of the Bible Belt and the consumption of Wine of Cardui allowed the large teetotaling Baptists, Methodists, and other fundamental religious groups to take Cardui for medicine purposes and remain faithful to their religion.

Some of the advertising materials pertaining to the product are informative with glowing reports from female users:

Mrs. C.M. Ladd wrote: I take great pleasure in telling you and affected women that I owe my life, my health and my happiness to Wine of Cardui. After my marriage my health broke down and, after having tried several physicians and several kinds of medicines, I was given up to die. I had heard of Wine of Cardui and decided to try it. I began to receive benefit at once, and now I am well and strong and our home has two fine little boys to make it bright and happy.

However, the product did have its detractors. Over time it was analyzed by physicians and was the subject of lawsuits claiming it had no medicinal value. However, it was determined that non-alcoholic ingredients were in large enough quantities to really be medicinal and it was the 19 percent alcohol that had an effect on masking the symptoms and making the patients feel better.

In 1916, the Chattanooga Medicine Company, which made Wine of Cardui, brought a successful libel suit against the American Medical Association for its claims that the business was built on deceit and that the product was a vicious fraud. During an adjournment of the court in April 1916, in Chicago, company owner John A. Patten was seized with acute intestinal pain  he was rushed to the hospital and operated on, but unfortunately died.

At this unexpected incident, a personal suit brought by Patten lapsed, but he and his brother had also brought a partnership suit for $100,000 and, once the funeral was over, the case continued. The verdict, after the jury had been out a week, was in favor of the Chattanooga Medicine Company  it was awarded damages of one cent. Both sides could claim a victory of sorts. As the California State Journal of Medicine pointed out in August 1916, it is permissible to suggest that the American Medical Association will hardly find its prestige diminished among good citizens by its opposition to the sale of proprietary medicines containing a marked percentage of alcohol.

In reporter Mary Braswells Looking Back column in the Albany (Georgia) Herald dated April 27, 2014 she covers the subject of Wine of Cardui in an informative and humorous way, with several comments on the advertisements touting the production and encouraging mothers to give their daughters, beginning at age 12, one dose of Wine of Cardui each morning to head off female problems.. such care was needed to help a girl develop into attractive womanhood and equip her for the duties of a wife and mother. (May 1901)

Unfortunately, the present Drinking Under Age Statutes prohibit such consumption.

* * *

Jerry Summers



(If you have additional information about one of Mr. Summers' articles or have suggestions or ideas about a future Chattanooga area historical piece, please contact Mr. Summers at jsummers@summersfirm.com
A state appeals court has upheld a jurys $645,000 damage award to the family of an Alameda man who was arrested by the California Highway Patrol, swallowed what proved to be a lethal dose of methamphetamine and was taken to jail rather than a hospital.

CHP officers said 20-year-old John Cornejo told them he was chewing gum, they had no reason to suspect it was drugs, and he declined offers of medical treatment. But the court said one officer reported seeing a plastic baggie in Cornejos mouth, another reported that the substance Cornejo chewed and swallowed was suspected to be drugs, and the CHP found a methamphetamine pipe in the car.

Based on that evidence, a judge allowed the suit to go to a jury, which found the officers largely at fault. Jurors assessed the damages at $827,000 and found Cornejo 22% responsible for his own death, reducing the familys damage award to $645,000.

The state appealed the verdict, arguing that officers have no legal duty to seek medical care for an arrestee who, while suspected of drug use, shows no symptoms and declines offers of care. But the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said Cornejos need for such care, and officers obligation to provide it, were questions properly submitted to the jury under the circumstances of this case.

Once in custody, an arrestee is vulnerable, dependent, subject to the control of the officer and unable to attend to his or her own medical needs, Presiding Justice J. Anthony Kline said in a 3-0 ruling Friday. He noted that Cornejo, in order to request or consent to medical help, would have had to admit illegal drug use.

Michael Bracamontes, a lawyer for Cornejos parents, said the ruling is important because it clearly states that police have a duty to provide medical care for arrestees when officers believe medical care is required.

The CHP stopped Cornejos car, driving with fog lights but without headlights and carrying three passengers, on an Oakland street during predawn hours in March 2015. Officers said he had no drivers license. As they started to pat him down, they said, he put his right hand in front of his mouth and started chewing something, which he told them was gum. They said they told him to spit it out, and instead he swallowed it and tried to run away.

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Officers arrested Cornejo and took him to the nearby Glenn Dyer Detention Facility, where the deputy who booked him said he appeared to be under the influence of drugs. Another deputy said he spoke with Cornejo four times that morning and told him medical help was available, at the jail or a hospital, but was turned down each time.

Shortly afterward, he was found on the floor of a holding cell, shaking and foaming at the mouth. Cornejo died of methamphetamine intoxication in a hospital the next day. A physician who testified for his parents said that if Cornejo had been taken to the hospital after his arrest, he probably would have survived.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
DCD Wind Towers was perfectly positioned to be a South African success story in the renewable energy field, but government indecision and delays crushed the company.

The company was registered in 2011 when DCD Group saw an opportunity to start a renewable energy company in South Africa.

It broke ground in May 2013 and construction for the new DCD Wind Towers factory started soon afterwards.

By April 2014, the factory was fully operational and the first wind tower section was delivered in September 2014.

The company had a bright future in the renewable energy market and employed 172 people at its peak.

Many of these employees came from the local community who were upskilled for free by DCD Wind Towers.

DCD Wind Towers GM Alta-Mari Grebe told MyBroadband they used unemployed people from the local community who received training and became part of the assembly team.

Many employees who started as receptionists or assembly personnel received additional training to move into more senior positions.

With an abundance of wind power in the Eastern Cape and the governments clean-energy drive, DCD Wind Towers was perfectly positioned for growth.

This all changed when the government changed its focus to a nuclear power deal with Russia, which left power purchase agreements unsigned.

DCD Wind Towers contracts were largely dependent on the signing of these power purchase agreements.

The delay meant the company went into standstill during 2016.

With no work the company went into a major cashflow crisis and employees were placed on short time, Grebe said.

The delays and uncertainty around the countrys future forced DCD Wind Towers to close its doors in May 2019. The companys machinery was auctioned off in June 2020.

Government warned about the impact of delays

The closure of DCD Wind Towers and the loss of jobs in the sector should not come as a surprise.

The SA Renewable Energy Council (SAREC) warned the government in December 2016 that the South African economy was is in jeopardy of losing 15,000 jobs.

SAREC said at the time if Eskom did not follow through with its legal obligations to finalise power purchasing agreements, it could have severe financial consequences.

Since 2011, the Department of Energys renewable energy initiative has outsourced a sizeable amount of its energy infrastructure development to the private sector.

DCD Wind Towers R300 million factory was built based on the Department of Energys renewable energy initiative.

It scaled up production to provide equipment to new state-commissioned wind farms, but the delay in Eskom signing new power contracts brought the factory to a standstill.

Grebe said in February 2017 that the facility was expected to close within months unless the new agreements were signed.

This was exactly what happened.

DCD Wind Towers in 2014

DCD Wind Towers auction in June 2020

DCD Wind Towers report in 2019



Now read: South Africa is in deep financial trouble
Mumbai, Aug 24 : A 9-year old girl, who was shot in her leg during the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 and dreamt of becoming an IPS officer to crush terrorism, is now running from pillar to post for sheer survival.

On the verge of being thrown out on the streets due to financial constraints, the survivor -- Devika Natwarlal Rotawan, now 21 -- has filed a petition in Bombay High Court against the alleged apathy of the Maharashtra government for not extending the aid that was promised to her family.

The prime prosecution eyewitness in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, it was the plucky girl's telling testimony against Ajmal Amir Kasab that finally led to his hanging on November 21, 2012 in Pune's Yerawada Central Jail.

It is now 12 years since that harrowing night -- when she was at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus with her father Natwarlal and brother Jayesh -- when Pakistani terrorists struck.

She was in the main hall of the train terminus waiting to catch a train to visit her brother Bharat living in Pune when all hell broke loose at around 9.50 pm as the terrorists fired indiscriminately and hurled grenades at passengers.

As the terrified Rotawans attempted to escape, a bullet from the terrorist's Ak-47 rifle pierced her right leg and she collapsed unconscious and bleeding.

Much later, Devika woke up in hospital and over the next six months, she underwent six surgeries and required months of post-operative care to help her walk normally.

In her plea, filed through prominent New Delhi-based lawyer Utsav Bains, she said that subsequently, many central and state government officials visited her tiny tenement in south Mumbai, learnt that her father did not have a permanent source of income and the family's financial condition was very poor.

"At that time, I was promised a home under the EWS quota and financial help for education, etc, but the monetary compensation of Rs. 3.5 lakh was spent on my medical and post-operative care," Devika told IANS.

Devika said in the petition that she and her family got nothing as promised, besides the medical expenses and the small compensation that was spent her medical care.

She said her father is aged and bedridden, lost his job recently due to the Corona pandemic lockdown, her brother Jayesh is also facing many serious medical issues and unemployed, while the Pune-based Bharat has severed links with the family.

"The worst is that the landlord of the tenement in Bandra east is now losing patience as we have not paid the rent for over one year. I studied in the IES New English School, Bandra east, and did my HSC from Siddharth College this year," Devika said.

In the past, she made appeals to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and says that ex-Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis proved to be an angel extending an aid of Rs 10 lakh that was spent on the treatment for tuberculosis.

Last month, on July 19, she made another representation to the Chief Secretary of Maharashtra, seeking a house under the EWS quota, but got no response, said Bains.

Out of sheer desperation, Devika has now moved the Bombay HC for justice in the form of a EWS quota house and financial aid for her academic future.

"During the trial, she identified Kasab and her testimony along with her father's statement, was heavily relied upon by the Special Court which finally convicted him," said Bains in the petition.

"The matter is likely to come up this week and I shall argue it from Delhi given the pandemic guidelines,a Bains told IANS.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at: q.najmi@ians.in)
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

By Ilkin Seyfaddini  Trend:

From the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak abroad, in China, the Government of Uzbekistan has put measures in place to be better prepared, Head of the WHO Country Office in Uzbekistan, Doctor Lianne Kuppens told Trend in an interview.

As she said, WHO worked from early January onwards jointly with the Ministry of Health and other ministries to be prepared for the COVID-19 virus.

Together with the Ministry we tried to be prepared in many different areas including having hospitals prepared, intensive care units prepared, get health workers trained in the whole country to identify cases and be able to take care for them. We prepared and got ready for testing and testing facilities, for putting people in isolation as needed, having quarantine facilities established for all those who have been in contact with COVID-infected people, having surveillance system addressed and so on, she said.

According to her, measures taken by Uzbekistan to fight the coronavirus pandemic are quite sufficient but taking into account the scale of the problem, the current resurgence of cases, there is a need to continue investing in all the Public Health measures and not relax.

Coronavirus exposed health system weaknesses all over the world, including Uzbekistan. Dozens of patients at the same time requiring urgent medical assistance at hospitals placed enormous pressure on the health system, including medical staff as well as hospital management. Adequate stocks of medicines, experienced health workers, trained laboratory specialists, treatment protocols - all these aspects are equally important and need lots of investment, Kuppens said.

She stressed that the Government of Uzbekistan continues to work with all partners to improve the countrys health system.

Currently, the situation is slowly improving. For several days, there has been a downward trend in the number of new cases and it might indeed mean we are seeing a stabilization of the situation and hopefully a further decrease of new cases, said Head of the WHO Country Office in Uzbekistan.

---

Follow author on Twitter: @seyfaddini
Q My husband passed away in October 2019. The attorney who wrote our wills started the probate proceedings a few weeks later. I also requested some changes to my will in March. The last email communication I had with her was June 18. She hasn't answered any of my email messages and didn't return my phone call. What do I need to do to get the probate and codicil completed?

A: Your attorney might have caught the virus or come down with some other illness which would explain the lack of response.

If she works at a law firm with other lawyers and employees, you would think that someone else would have picked up the slack, but that does not always happen. You should therefore make a call or visit her office to see if there is a good explanation.

If that gets you nowhere, or if your attorney is a solo attorney with no support staff, then you probably have no option but to get the State Bar of Texas involved by filing a grievance against the attorney. You can find the forms and procedures at www.texasbar.com.

At that website, the first example of lawyer conduct which justifies the filing of a grievance is: "The lawyer does not return client phone calls, emails, or letters."

You might need to hire a different lawyer to finish up the work she had started.

Q: A couple of years ago, I filed a Texas Transfer on Death Deed and named my daughter as the beneficiary. I have learned there will be a two-year waiting period after my death before my daughter can sell my home. Is this true? Also, does my daughter need to file any other documents or notifications with local authorities after my death in order to sell the property? I am sole owner of the property and unmarried.

A: The two-year wait exists because that is how long creditors have after your death to seek payment from the estate's assets, including your home.

Many articles have been written on this subject warning that most title companies will refuse to issue title insurance for the full two years. But fortunately, there are actually many title companies that simply will check for debts which exist when the house is sold, and they will insure title if it appears that no problems will arise.

If you are concerned about this potential two-year problem, there are alternatives available. You could revoke the Transfer on Death Deed, and instead create a revocable trust or sign a Lady Bird deed. You could also take the more traditional route of letting your house pass under your will through probate. Your daughter should be able to sell it within a few weeks of your death.

The information in this column is intended to provide a general understanding of the law, not legal advice. Readers with legal problems, including those whose questions are addressed here, should consult attorneys for advice on their particular circumstances. Ronald Lipman of the Houston law firm Lipman & Associates is board-certified in estate planning and probate law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. Email questions to stateyourcase@lipmanpc.com.
Syria: UN, Constitutional Committee to meet in Geneva

(ANSAmed) - GENEVA, AUGUST 24 - A meeting of the Syrian Constitutional Committee began in Geneva on Monday with members of the Syrian government and the main oppositional forces. The meeting is the first in nearly nine months and is taking place under the auspices of UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen, who days ago invited the delegations to begin "substantial discussions". The Constitutional Committee is charged with modifying the constitution of the country in conflict and is made up of 15 representatives each from three delegations: Syrian government, opposition, and civil society. The current meeting is taking place under strict health measures and is scheduled to last all week.Pedersen tweeted that he met on Sunday with the heads of the three delegations. "I am looking forward to a week of substantial discussions on the agenda and moving the process forward," he tweeted.(ANSAmed). (ANSA).




South Korea ordered most schools in capital Seoul and its surrounding regions to shut due to a resurgence in coronavirus cases.

Scientists are expressing some doubts about the Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19 patients. In a Sunday news briefing, President Donald Trump touted the treatment as a "breakthrough." Former FDA chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC that while there was enough data to justify the authorization, the treatment is not a "home run."

Here were some of the biggest developments on Monday:
Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia resumed on Monday negotiations mediated by the African Union (AU) on the points of contention over the rules of filling and operating the disputed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), said the Egyptian irrigation ministry.

The legal and technical committees of each of the three countries convened on Monday to negotiate the draft proposals compiled by the three sides last weekend.

A preliminary report on the points of contention and agreement between Cairo, Khartoum, Addis Ababa over the filling and operation of the GERD was compiled on Friday.

The legal and technical committees of the three sides are scheduled to work on the compiled report until next Friday with the target of reconciling viewpoints over the points of contention to reach a binding accord.

The committees will prepare a report to be submitted to South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa, the current AU chair by the end of this week.

AU-sponsored tripartite talks over the multi-billion-dollar project were launched last month as the talks between the three countries had reached deadlock last year, and so did negotiations sponsored by the US and World Bank in February.

The AU talks stumbled from 27 July to 3 August after Ethiopia announced it reached the first year filling target by retaining 4.9 billion cubic metres of water in the dams reservoir despite the lack of accord on the rules of filling the controversial project with Egypt and Sudan.

The downstream countries are seeking a legally binding deal on the filling and operation of the dam.

The talks stumbled once again earlier this month after Sudan called for the suspension of meetings for internal consultations after Addis Ababa's proposal that contained guidelines for filling the GERD.

Egypt said the draft proposal put forward by Ethiopia lacked the guidelines for operating the dam, any elements indicating a binding deal, or a legal mechanism to settle disputes.

Sudan threatened earlier this month to withdraw from the talks if Ethiopia insisted on linking an agreement on the dams filling to a deal on sharing the waters of the Blue Nile.

The mega-dam, built 15 kilometres from the Ethiopian border with Sudan, has been a source of contention between the three countries. Cairo fears the project will significantly cut its crucial water supplies from the River Nile, while Sudan fears it could endanger the safety of its own dams.

Ethiopia says the massive project, which it hopes will make it Africas largest power exporter, is key to its development efforts.

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Fast-food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken have censored their famous slogan and told customers worldwide to forget it - at least for now.

Fans of the Colonels fried chicken already know the recipe of 11 secret herbs and spices is Finger Lickin Good, but KFC is urging their customers to avoid licking their fingers during the current coronavirus pandemic.

The slogan has been in use for 64 years and is globally recognised, however it will be paused in advertising around the world effective immediately.

The famous slogan is being censored due to the coronavirus pandemic. Source: Supplied

In a media release, KFC said the wording doesnt feel quite right.

We find ourselves in a unique situationhaving an iconic slogan that doesnt quite fit in our current environment. While we are pausing the use of Its Finger Lickin Good, rest assured the food craved by Aussies isnt changing one bit, KFC Australias Chief Marketing Officer Kristi Woolrych said.

In all seriousness, we think its important to take a moment to have a little fun during these tough times, but rest assured we'll still be providing Finger Lickin Good chicken and a responsible experience for our amazing KFC family and customers, here and around the world.

KFC says the slogan will be back - when the time is right.

The fast-food giant announced the slogan will be paused worldwide. Source: Supplied

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.
Coronavirus LIVE Updates: Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Monday tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Taking to Twitter, Khattar appealed to all his colleagues and associates, who had come in contact with him over the last week, to get themselves tested and also requested his close contacts to move into strict quarantine immediately.

I was tested for Novel Corona Virus today. My test report has returned positive.I appeal to all colleagues and associates who came in my contact over the last week to get themselves tested. I request my close contacts to move into strict quarantine immediately. Manohar Lal (@mlkhattar) August 24, 2020

India reported over 61,000 new cases in the last 24 hours, taking the total cases count to over 31 lakh. 61,408 new cases and 57,468 recoveries takes tally to 31,06,349 including 23,38,036 cured/discharged/migrated cases. 836 new fatalities take the death toll to 57,542, reports the Health Ministry.

Sources said to accelerate the process of developing and manufacturing safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in the country that can be easily accessible and affordable for the public, a 'Mission COVID Suraksha' has been proposed to be set up with a corpus of nearly Rs 3,000 crore.

Piloted by the Department of Biotechnology, the proposed mission will focus on end-to-end vaccine development from clinical trial stage to regulatory facilitation to manufacturing, sources added.

Here are the live updates on the coronavirus pandemic:

 Haryana Assembly Speaker Gian Chand Gupta and two BJP MLAs tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday, two days before the monsoon session is set to begin here, Health Minister Anil Vij said. Gupta is in home isolation and his health is stable, says Panchkula Civil Surgeon Jasjeet Kaur.

 Bengal BJP Chief Goes Into Self-Isolation | West Bengal BJP President Dilip Ghosh goes into self-isolation after his driver and security guards test positive for Covid-19. He also cancels all his meetings and scheduled political programmes for the next three days.

 The government has decided to allocate money from the PM-CARES Fund Trust for establishing 500-bed Covid-19 Makeshift Hospitals at Patna and Muzaffarpur, Bihar by DRDO. The 500-bed hospital at Bihta, Patna will be inaugurated today and the 500-bed hospital at Muzaffarpur will be inaugurated very soon, tweets Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These hospitals have 125 ICU beds with ventilators and 375 normal beds each. Each bed also has oxygen supply. The doctors and paramedical staff will be provided by the Armed Forces Medical Services.

PM-CARES Fund Trust has decided to allocate funds for fight against COVID-19 by way of establishment of 500-bed COVID-19 Makeshift Hospitals at Patna & Muzaffarpur, Bihar by DRDO. This will go a long way in improving COVID care in Bihar. pic.twitter.com/AAPEIDDcRc  PMO India (@PMOIndia) August 24, 2020

 Singer SP Balasubramanyam's son SP Charan issues a statement on his father's health and says the former has tested negative for Covid-19 and is doing fine. He is also expected to get discharged from the hospital soon.

 Testing Update | According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), a cumulative total of 3,59,02,137 samples have been tested up to August 23 with 6,09,917 samples being tested on Sunday.

 India's Tally Rises Over 31 Lakh | India reported 61,408 new Covid-19 cases, 57,468 recoveries and 836 deaths in the last 24 hours. With this, the total COVID-19 tally rises to 31,06,349 including 23,38,036 cured/discharged/migrated cases and 57,542 deaths: Union Ministry of Health

 American authorities announced on Sunday an emergency authorisation for doctors to use blood plasma from recovered coronavirus patients as a treatment against the disease that has killed over 176,000 in the US. The development comes after Trump expressed unhappiness at the slow pace of approval for coronavirus treatments. The plasma is believed to contain powerful antibodies that can help fight off the disease faster and help protect people from being seriously hurt by it, news agency AFP reported.

 'Pleased to Make Truly Historic Announcement': Trump | "Today I am pleased to make a truly historic announcement, in our battle against China virus, that will save countless lives. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has issued an emergency use authorisation for a treatment known as convalescent plasma," US President Donald Trump said.

#WATCH Washington, DC: US President says, "Pleased to make a truly historic announcement, in our battle against China virus, that will save countless lives. FDA (Food & Drug Administration) has issued an emergency use authorisation for a treatment known as convalescent plasma." pic.twitter.com/LMKfI1SQSJ  ANI (@ANI) August 23, 2020

 The French health ministry on Sunday reported 4,897 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, marking the highest daily level since the end of a two-month lockdown in May to combat the pandemic. The ministry said the total coronavirus deaths in the country had risen by one in the past 24 hours to 30,513, Reuters reported.

 Odisha on Sunday registered its highest single-day spike of 2,993 COVID-19 cases and 10 more deaths due to the infection. With this, the state's COVID-19 death toll has mounted to 409 and the infection tally reached 78,530, a health official said.

 COVID-19 Cases Reappear at Singapore's Largest Dormitory | Around 4,800 workers have been issued a stay-home notice at Singapore's largest foreign workers' dormitory after fresh coronavirus emerged there. The Sungei Tengah Lodge dormitory was among the largest COVID-19 clusters in Singapore with over 2,200 confirmed cases before it was declared cleared of the disease by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) last month. On Sunday, 58 fresh coronavirus cases were confirmed in the dormitory, a day after a new COVID-19 cluster emerged there.

 Meghalaya's Covid-19 tally goes up to 1,929 | At least 12 more people,including nine security personnel, tested positive for COVID-19 in Meghalaya on Monday, taking the northeastern state's tally to 1,929, a health department official said. Of the new cases, 10 were reported from East Khasi Hills district and two from Ri-Bhoi, Health Services Director Aman War said.

 Jharkhand's COVID-19 tally rises to 30,178 | Jharkhand's COVID-19 tally rose to 30,178 on Monday as 967 more people tested positive for the infection, while nine fresh fatalities pushed the state's coronavirus death toll to 320, a health bulletin said. The fresh infections have pushed the number of active cases in the state to 9,722, while 20,136 people have recovered from the disease, it said.
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Getting office workers back to their desks should be as big a priority as getting children back to the classroom, senior Tories warned last night.

Boris Johnson yesterday led a Government push to ensure all school children return to class next week, saying it was vitally important that months of patchy home learning finally came to an end.

But, with Downing Street near-silent on the economic ruin being caused to town centres by the working from home culture, senior Tories urged the Prime Minister to also speak out on the need for white collar workers to get back to their desks.

A string of banks and financial institutions yesterday confirmed they did not expect most staff to return to the office until next year, leaving shops in town centres and business districts without customers for months to come.

The back to school push could free up millions of parents to return to work next month.

Boris Johnson yesterday led a Government push to ensure all school children return to class next week, saying it was vitally important that months of patchy home learning finally came to an end

But Downing Street yesterday indicated there were no plans for a Government drive to get office workers back to their desks. A No 10 spokesman said it was a matter for employers and staff.

Senior Tories last night urged the PM to make a personal intervention on the issue and pressure big firms to get their staff back to work.

Former minister Steve Baker said: If our cities are going to thrive then everyone who can needs to be back in the office.

'Otherwise, all the businesses that service office staff are facing severe difficulties, with big knock-on effects for the wider economy.

I hope that, as well as getting children back to school, the Prime Minister will find ways to incentivise employers to get their staff back to work as quickly and safely as possible.

Mr Baker said shareholders should be asking questions about why City firms which had invested huge sums in trophy offices were now encouraging staff to work from their spare bedrooms.

Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 committee of backbench Tory MPs, said: Getting children back to school is critically important for their educational and social development, but it is also key to freeing up parents to get back to work.

Conservative MP Mark Pawsey (top left) for Rugby speaks during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London. Downing Street yesterday indicated there were no plans for a Government drive to get office workers back to their desks. A No 10 spokesman said it was a matter for employers and staff

London Mayor Sadiq Khan was yesterday accused of deepening the plight of businesses in the capital by increasing the citys congestion charge. Pictured taking the tube to Oxford Street

'And getting people back to work is just as necessary if we are going to avoid even worse economic consequences from the pandemic than we are already facing.

City firms struggle  but London mayor RAISES congestion levy London Mayor Sadiq Khan was yesterday accused of deepening the plight of businesses in the capital by increasing the citys congestion charge. Restaurateur Jeremy King said he was flabbergasted by the Labour mayors decision to hike the congestion charge during the pandemic at a time when businesses in the city centre are already crippled by a lack of custom. Mr King, whose group includes The Wolseley in Mayfair, said city centre restaurants were now facing so many challenges which seem to heap up upon us that it seems very difficult to see a way through. He told BBC Radio Fours Today programme that such restaurants would continue to struggle until we get people back into the offices, until we encourage people to have that same confidence to go on the Tubes. He added: And indeed I am still flabbergasted, absolutely incredulous, at the imposition of not only a higher congestion charge but extending the hours to seven days a week up until ten oclock at night. There is no measure which could be more damaging. Mr Khan hiked the daily congestion charge in June by 30 per cent from 11.50 to 15 a day as part of a bailout deal with the Government. The hours the charge is enforced were temporarily extended from 6pm to 10pm and now also apply at weekends. Allies of the mayor insist the punitive increases were forced on him by the Government in its bailout. But businesses have accused him of ignoring their plight. Earlier this month, a string of restaurateurs urged him to get out of his bunker and help encourage people back into the city centre. Advertisement

Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith also urged the PM to intervene. He said the Government should set an example by ordering civil servants back to their desks immediately.

Sir Iain added: We have got to get people back to their offices  it is critically important for the economy and it is perfectly safe. Mr Johnson is said to be privately frustrated by the slow pace at which civil servants are returning to work after months at home.

The PM ordered officials to draw up plans for a return to work in July, but No 10 was yesterday unable to say how many officials are now back at their desks.

A Whitehall source said: Getting people back to work is something the PM feels strongly about. It is slowly happening in Whitehall but not at the pace we would want.

Yesterday, a string of banks and financial firms confirmed plans to let staff work from home more often, in spite of calls to help revitalise city centres.

Virgin Money, Lloyds, Metro Bank and UBS are among the companies reviewing how often staff must visit the office, following months of remote working during the pandemic.

However the moves come as figures underline the continuing toll on city centres, with visitor numbers to UK shops last week still 30.7 per cent lower than a year ago.

In central London, shopper numbers were 61.2 per cent lower, while in other regional cities they were down by 49.8 per cent, data firm Springboard said.

The dramatic fall in commuters is hammering city-based businesses, with many pushed to the brink by the pandemic. The Governments official work from home guidance was dropped in July. But No 10 yesterday indicated there were no plans for a big back to work push as schools return next month.

Asked about the PMs message to big city firms thinking about delaying a return to the office until next year, a No 10 spokesman yesterday said: We want employers to speak to their employees and, where they can, create a Covid-secure workplace.

It is for them to speak to their employees about going back to work, or working from home if preferable. But top businesses are pressing ahead with plans for more remote working.

NatWest, formerly known as Royal Bank of Scotland, and Standard Life Aberdeen have already told staff they do not need to return until next year at the earliest.

And yesterday Virgin Money said it is also not expecting them to return until 2021, with the bank looking at plans to let back-office staff carry on working remotely most of the time.

Virgin is Britains sixth-biggest bank and has 8,500 workers.

Under proposals for more flexible working, the firm says offices in Glasgow and Newcastle could be converted into collaboration hubs used mainly for meetings and other face-to-face occasions.

Lloyds, which currently has 50,000 staff working from home, will be testing out different types of flexible working arrangements in October. Metro Bank yesterday said it was reducing the number of London offices it has from two to one, after just 4 per cent of staff working from home said they wanted to go back to the office full time.

It has told 1,500 employees they do not need to return until 2021, when they will then work at home for at least three days a week.

Tesco plan to hire 16,000 as online shopping booms

by Matt Oliver City Correspondent for The Daily Mail

Tesco is to take on 16,000 more staff to help cope with the huge growth in online shopping.

The supermarket giant said the new jobs included 10,000 staff to pick orders from shelves and another 3,000 delivery drivers.

It has launched the recruitment drive after demand for home deliveries exploded during the coronavirus crisis.

As people were forced to stay indoors under lockdown, the number of Tescos online customers soared from 600,000 to almost 1.5 million.

Rival supermarkets have reported similar surges in demand, with upmarket online grocer Ocado predicting earlier this year that the shift in customer behaviour will be permanent.

Yesterday Jason Tarry, Tescos UK and Ireland boss, said: Since the start of the pandemic, our colleagues have helped us to more than double our online capacity, safely serving nearly 1.5 million customers every week and prioritising vulnerable customers to ensure they get the food they need. These new roles will help us continue to meet online demand for the long term, and will create permanent employment opportunities for 16,000 people across the UK.

The new jobs announced by Tesco are on top of another 4,000 permanent posts the supermarket has already created since the start of the pandemic.

Tesco said the new jobs included 10,000 staff to pick orders from shelves and another 3,000 delivery drivers (file image)

However, the firm expects the majority of the extra roles to be filled by staff who joined the company on a temporary basis in recent months. Around 47,000 temporary workers joined Tesco at its peak during the pandemic, although most of these roles have since ended.

Tesco said roles will first be offered to temporary staff still with the business, with remaining roles then filled by new recruits.

The hiring spree is a bright spot in an otherwise bleak period for jobs. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 250,000 workers have been laid off by British firms, an audit by the Daily Mail has found.

Some of the worst affected sectors include retail, hotel accommodation and travel.

High street stalwarts which have slashed thousands of jobs include Marks & Spencer, Boots, John Lewis and Debenhams.

John Lewis, which has been the firm favourite of middle-class consumers, has also announced plans to cut down on womens fashions. The Mail reported yesterday how it will instead focus on homeware and financial services to boost its fortunes.

And the crisis in the jobs market is set to deepen over the coming weeks, as the furlough scheme which has kept out-of-work staff in pay since the beginning of lockdown, draws to a close.

Economists are warning of mass layoffs across the country as the Government scheme starts shifting the burden of pay back to employers in September.

The Treasury will cut off all support at the end of October.

The Bank of England has forecast that unemployment will rise to 7.5 per cent by the end of the year, affecting around 2.5 million people.
(Natural News) Witnesses are reporting that Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Portland were involved in assaults on multiple people during the riot on Sunday, August 16. One man, who was beaten by a small BLM mob, even had to be rushed to the hospital with serious injuries after he was knocked unconscious.

They were marching around saying it. They said it repeatedly. They were doing this because this is BLM, this is Black Lives Matter, said Kalen DAlmeida, a reporter for Scriberr News.

The people that were there, they were there to hurt somebody.

Another reporter, Drew Hernandez, spoke to Fox News about how he witnessed the same event and believe that the man the BLM rioters assaulted was simply defending another person who was also being beaten and robbed. The victim drove away in his truck as he and the person he saved were being attacked.

I think he just felt extremely threatened, said Hernandez. They chased him  until he finally crashed. When they finally caught up to him, they went nuts.

This was violent, extremely violent. Sometimes I forget Im walking the streets of an American city in the Northwest. Sometimes it feels like youre walking in a third world country.

One female live streamer who was at the scene of the crime was even threatened by one rioter. Do not record things that dont matter to Black Lives Matter, she was told.

BLM rioters started multiple fights throughout the night

Witnesses to the crime said that the incident started when several Black Lives Matter rioters in the area suddenly became upset at a man for filming near the Multnomah County Justice Center, where the organization has been holding their nightly rioting since it began back in late May. This group tried to eject the man from the riot, which led to a confrontation as several people in the area stood up for the man.

At another point during the rioting, at around 10:30 p.m., a man who had driven his truck to the area and parked it nearby came to the aid of one of the people who were assaulted by the mob. This prompted the rioters to turn on him, and they started issuing threats. A woman he was with was punched several times and was tackled to the ground.

When the man returned to his truck, the BLM mob surrounded it and started banging on it to force him to leave. In videos recorded of the incident, one person could be heard shouting He didnt do nothing! as the rioters tried to destroy the truck and attack him while he was in his seat.

The man was forced to drive off. However, because of the chaos of the incident, he ran away from he was unable to drive properly for too long. This is compounded by the fact that the BLM rioters chased after his truck as he was driving away. The man crashed into a tree and then a building.

They basically chased down his truck, caused him to crash, pulled him out of the car, started going through his car and just started assaulting him in the street, said DAlmeida. It was just horrific.

Afterward, the violent mob went up to the truck and dragged the man out of it, tackling him to the ground as he begged for help. He was repeatedly assaulted while sitting on the ground or lying on his back. At one point he gets punched repeatedly while trying to call his wife.

I aint trying to hurt no one, he pleaded.

By the end of the whole ordeal, the man was rendered unconscious, with a large wound on the back of his head. The mob could also be seen going through the contents of his truck.

According to a report released by the Portland Police Bureau (PPB), officers were unable to take the victim away immediately because they encountered a hostile crowd. Another squad of PPB officers had to arrive before they could secure the scene and get the victim to a hospital.

I hope the guy is alive, said DAlmeida. Im just hoping I didnt videotape a murder.

Rioters in Portland encouraged by new liberal district attorney

When asked about why the Black Lives Matter riots in Portland are getting worse, DAlmeida believes that the mob is heartened by the arrival of Multnomah Countys new district attorney, Mike Schmidt, who announced that he would be dropping a majority of cases involving crimes committed during the riots. (Related: BREAKING: Oregon State Police abandon Portland after local left-wing D.A. refuses to pursue criminal charges against rioters who attack law enforcement.)

DAlmeida says that the lack of a strong will to prosecute cases against rioters is enabling this sort of stuff to go on, night after night after night.

Schmidt said in a statement that assaults will not be tolerated and that his office is coordinating with the PPB to investigate the incident. However, Brent Weisberg, a spokesman for the DAs office, declined to comment on how many cases the office will follow through on since Schmidts new policy was announced, which means that there is no telling if the perpetrators of this event will even be sent to prison.

The rioting in Portland is getting worse the longer it is drawn out. Learn more about the latest incidents in this crime-infested city by reading the articles at Rioting.news.

Sources include:

TheEpochTimes.com

FoxNews.com

NYPost.com
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

By Ilkin Seyfaddini - Trend:

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Uzbekistan increased to 39,065, Trend reports with reference to the statistics of the Uzbek Ministry of Health.

To date, 34,987 patients have fully recovered in the country, while 275 have died.

Under the instructions of President of Uzbekistan, unlimited movement of vehicles as well as local air rail traffic in Uzbekistan was resumed since August 15, 2020.

In addition, from August 17, 2020, Tashkent resumed public transport traffic.

Citizens are required to wear a medical mask when entering the bus, otherwise, passengers will not be allowed on the buses.

Moreover, from August 20, 2020, clothing and building material markets, large shops, gyms, fitness clubs and swimming pools resumed operations.

The first case of coronavirus infection in Uzbekistan was detected on March 15 in the laboratory of the Research Institute of Virology; it was an Uzbek woman who returned from France. The Ministry of Health later announced that her son, daughter, husband and grandson also tested positive for coronavirus.

The outbreak in the Chinese Wuhan city - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019.

---

Follow author on Twitter: @seyfaddini
In the wake of the latest police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, protesters armed to the teeth with semi-automatic rifles have faced down an armored personnel carrier, amid widespread rioting, looting and violence.

In a disturbing escalation of tensions, several heavily armed and armored protesters surrounded the police BearCat vehicle in the early hours of Monday morning. At one point, an officer is seen opening the hatch on the roof and throwing a tear gas grenade to disperse the crowd.

BREAKING: Rioters corner police with assault weapons in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/TzBz9tk1i5  Drew Hernandez (@livesmattershow) August 24, 2020

Kenosha quickly transformed into a war zone in the wake of an altercation on Sunday, in which 29-year-old Jacob Blake was shot at close range  reportedly at least seven times  by a Kenosha police officer during an alleged domestic incident.

Elsewhere in the city, flaming barricades constructed with torched vehicles were erected, amid reports of widespread looting.

It should alarm you how normal this is. Another night of rioters doing whatever they want. This time in Kenosha, Wisconsin. pic.twitter.com/Ivt7HH5htt  The Columbia Bugle  (@ColumbiaBugle) August 24, 2020 Black Lives Matter rioters torch vehicles at a car dealership in Kenosha. Its out of control. pic.twitter.com/6FWl0JYNF7  Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 24, 2020 BLM rioters not holding back by vandalizing and looting local businesses here in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/wzfWq9OlUU  Drew Hernandez (@livesmattershow) August 24, 2020 BLM rioters break into a store and take a TV and its cash register then mob the register for its petty cash in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/RAhRQTpPHb  Drew Hernandez (@livesmattershow) August 24, 2020

Meanwhile, footage was shared on social media purporting to show a police officer in the city being struck in the head by a missile and dropping immediately to the ground.

Footage of officer getting knocked out with a brick in Kenosha. pic.twitter.com/zZYypCgyja  Nick  (@BotchlaUS) August 24, 2020

Hundreds of people have taken to the streets in defiance of a police-mandated curfew order, which warned of numerous arm[ed] robberies and shots fired calls.

Local media are reporting that rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails have all been thrown at police amid widespread violence in the city, as dispatchers and officers on the ground struggle to respond to the sheer volume of calls during the apparent night of rage.

Also on rt.com Riots & looting in Kenosha, Wisconsin as police reportedly shoot black man in the back SEVEN TIMES (VIDEO)

Chants of I can't breathe! This is what democracy looks like! and No justice! No peace! rang out while protesters faced off against police as chaos reigned elsewhere in the city.

Tear gas was deployed to disperse a crowd which gathered outside a local police station, while another protester group besieged the city courthouse, covering it with graffiti before starting a small fire inside.
Mycology megascience is gaining popularity as fungi study emerges from the shadows of previously more popular scientific fields.

Western science has largely neglected the study of fungi because it was only recently that technologies became available to allow full investigation of fungi. In addition, fungi did not have their own kingdom prior to the 1960s and were considered less important in the past.

READ: Saving Giant Panda at the Expense of Leopards, Snow Leopards, Wolves, and Asian Wild Dog





Sheldrake's Passion for Fungi

Rupert Sheldrake's son, Merlin Sheldrake's new book Entangled Life could revolutionize our perception of the fungal world. It presents the complex science of mycology from a Cambridge University tropical ecology Ph.D. degree holder.

He worked on Panama forests' underground fungal networks with a principal research interest in mycorrhiza. These are the fungi that are usually symbiotic with plants. They produce hyphae, which are tubes gossamer-fine in configuration and which weave the cellular plant root tips, joining separate plants to each other through an underground fungal network. It is a highly intricate, collaborative, and vast structure.

The fungi's hyphae make the mycelium, which is the branching mass which makes specialized structures or organs, the most popular of which are the mushrooms we know so well.

Sheldrake is adept at explaining complex ideas into easily understandable concepts. He is passionate about mycology and he believes we will soon discover their crucial part in our environment. He also sees fungi as playing a significant role in creating new technologies in the fields of sustainable food, building materials, product packaging, alternative leather, and waste management.

READ ALSO: The Mysterious Relationship Between Truffles and the Birds That Love Them





Plant Dependence on Fungi

Ninety percent of all plants depend on their mycorrhizal networks, and plants are the "foundation" which sustains the life of everything on Earth.

Sheldrake says industrial mechanized farming massively damaged plants' microbial symbiotic relationships. He says that fungi feed plants and protect them from diseases. They also protect soil integrity and are carbon conduits. Carbon is the main component of soil, helping it retain moisture and keeping it fertile.

Fungi Help Develop Technology

Researchers now take advantage of fungal intelligence. In Japan, in particular, slime mold designs transport networks. The power of computers is agonizingly slow compared to the speed by which these organisms rapidly find possibilities and arrive at optimum paths. From these processes, scientists can develop algorithms and benefit and apply them in industries.

This doesn't even scratch the surface of all the possibilities and ways by which fungi can help us. The untapped potential is huge. To put it into context, only six to eight percent of all the fungi in the world have been presently identified.

Some Fungal Facts

The mushrooms of some species can discharge spores explosively at a speed 10,000 times as fast as the speed of space shuttles. Some species can push through asphalt roads and lift heavy pavement stones. A hypha as big as our hand is thought to be capable of lifting a weight of eight tons. A mycelium within one gram of soil can reach a length of ten kilometers if laid end to end.

Indeed, the mycology megascience can open up vast fields and sub-fields of knowledge and endeavor that may not even yet be imaginable today, as we study fungi more and benefit from them.

READ NEXT: The Evolution of Rain's Distinct Scent and Its Role in Bacterial Propagation

Check out for more news and information on Mycology on Nature World News.


Work is underway on the Delhi government's hospital management information system, and it will be completed within a year, Chief Minister said here on Monday.

Launching a mobile application and a web-based online OPD registration and appointment system of the Dada Dev maternity hospital through video-conferencing, the chief minister said other should also adopt the system.

"Women patients will no longer need to wait in long queues and now, can register and get doctors' appointment through this app. There should be no crowding in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and social distancing needs to be maintained," he said.

Kejriwal said the was integrating its hospitals, Mohalla clinics and polyclinics through the hospital management information system (HMIS), and the process will be completed within a year.

Once established, the HMIS will do away with long queues and crowds at the government hospitals, he said.

The chief minister also said the bed capacity at the Dada Dev hospital was being increased from 106 to 281, and this would be completed soon.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Gov likely to levy customs duty on solar gear: report

The government is expected to levy customs duty on solar modules, cells and inverters amidst competing demands by manufacturers and traders to save their business from collapse, according to some reports.

The Narendra Modi government in its urge to ensure that the domestic manufacturers get an additional push to expand capacities is likely to levy import duty on solar gear. The government wants to give an impetus to greater self-sufficiency with its emphasis on `Atmanirbhar Bharat.

A CNBC report citing sources said while the government proposes to levy customs duty on solar modules, cells and inverters, it may exempt bid out solar projects from the customs duty hike.

The report cited detailed discussion on the issue by the prime minister's office (PMO), revenue department, commerce and the ministry of new and renewable energy on 20 August and that the levies will made effective soon.

"The proposal, which has been cleared post discussions with PMO, is to levy 10 per cent basic customs duty on solar modules and 20 per cent on solar inverters from October 2020, which will then be hiked to 40 per cent on solar modules and 25 per cent on solar cells from 30 July 2021," the report stated citing multiple sources.

It may be noted that the government had recently extended 15 per cent safeguard duty on solar cells, modules and inverters till 29 July 2021.

"The measures come with a backdrop to reduce India's import dependence on Chinese products as close to 80 per cent of the imports of solar cells, modules and inverters are from China," sources added.

Union power minister RK Singh had, in July, said India needed to restrict import of power equipment as it posed security threat to the power system in the country. Singh had highlighted that the government is pushing for measures to make India self-reliant in both power and solar power sectors.

"We have decided not to buy any power equipment from China. We are going to release a list of prior reference countries which will include China and Pakistan. The government will not give any permission for imports from prior reference countries. Import from any other country will be inspected under stringent norms because the power system is a sensitive system," Singh had said.

"The power systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks because of Trojan and malware. This can also lead to power shutdown, and then communication lines will be impacted and lead to a database crash in manufacturing, defence industries, etc. Most of the equipment imported is made in India. I urge even states to not use power equipment which is made in China," he added.

India imported power equipment worth Rs71,000 crore in FY19, and about Rs21,000 crore worth equipment alone was imported from China. The country has a target of 175 GW of renewable capacity by 2022, of which 100 GW target is for solar capacity.

Imports have undermined domestic capacity available with solar power equipment manufacturers such as Vikram solar, Adani group, Tata Power, Moser Baer and BHEL.

India imported solar cells and modules worth $1.3 billion from China in FY2019-20. Domestic manufacturers have demanded a level playing field to compete against cheaper imports.

All India Solar Industries Association (AISIA) has urged the government to impose at least 50 per cent basic customs duty (BCD) on solar equipment with immediate effect to ensure domestic manufacturers survival.

AISIA said that Indian solar manufacturers had been struck with their exports witnessing a significant downfall due to coronavirus-prompted disruption. The BCD can give further impetus to the Prime Ministers Vocal for Local movement and help the manufacturers strengthen their position in the domestic market.

However, import-dependent special economic zone (SEZ), are opposed to the levy of import duties as it would hurt buying of cells and modules from the SEZ units by those in the domestic tariff area.

Solar equipment makers have pointed out that solar factories in SEZs will have to shut down if the government levies a basic customs duty (BCD) on the import of solar cells and modules without providing a level-playing field to these manufacturing units. SEZs house around 43% module making units and 63% of cell making facilities.

If the BCD is imposed, those in the domestic tariff area who buy cells and modules from the SEZ units will have to pay the duty under the 2005 SEZ Act.
The COVID-19 cluster at Brisbane Youth Detention Centre has grown to 10 cases, after another person tested positive on Monday.

The cluster now includes five workers at the centre and five relatives of workers, with no evidence of widespread community transmission.

Deputy Premier and Health Minister Steven Miles said while it was a relief only one more person had tested positive overnight, there was "a long way to go in managing this cluster".

"We need to test more people, 6834 tests in the last testing period is not enough for us to be assured that we are finding all of the cases that are out there."
Bill de Blasio unveiled a new school learning plan Monday, allowing teachers in New York City to hold classes outdoors as more than 750,000 students prepare to return to for in-person learning across the Big Apple next month.

During his daily press briefing, de Blasio said he hoped the scheme would help to open up a whole new world of learning when classes resume on September 10.

The mayor said principals will be able to set up classrooms in their schoolyards, or even request additional space in city parks, playgrounds or on sidewalks beginning from Monday.

However, it will be up to school to teachers and principals to best determine how to orchestrate outdoor lessons safely.

At this stage, the city will reportedly be prioritizing the needs of the 27 hardest-hit neighborhoods from COVID-19, in addition to the schools who have limited or no usable outdoor space to utilize on campus grounds.

While weather remains a concern, de Blasio advised teachers to make the most of outdoor spaces when conditions permit.

We know the disease doesn't spread the same outdoors, de Blasio said Monday. Starting today we empower our principals to make the maximum use of outdoors. It's up to them, if that's what they think works for their community.

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Bill de Blasio unveiled a new school learning plan Monday, encouraging teachers in New York City to hold classes outdoors as more than 750,000 students prepare to return to for in-person learning in the Big Apple next month

When quizzed whether hed considered delaying the September 10 school start date to allow more time for teachers to plan for the new initiative, de Blasio said the city would be moving forward as planned.

The mayor added some principals have already identified potential outdoor spaces to utilize, and said he didnt think the scheme would be cost-prohibitive.

The new learning plan comes after de Blasio faced mounting pressure from parents and local elected officials to leverage outdoor spaces to provide additional room for in-person schooling.

Last week, City Council Member Brad Lander held a rally at City Hall with parents, teachers and a group of students to encourage the city to use some outdoor gathering spaces to teach, as opposed to the traditional classroom setting in an effort to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

We heard those voices that said, Could we do something different under these circumstances? The answers is yes. And this will apply to our public schools, our charter schools, private and religious schools, learning bridge schools you name it, one standard for all, the mayor said.

De Blasio said it would be up to teachers and principals to best determine how to orchestrate outdoor lessons.

We want to give schools the option to do as much outdoors as they can, the mayor said. Starting today, we empower our principals to determine the maximum amount they can do outdoors.

On prioritizing the neighborhoods worst-affected by the pandemic, de Blasio said the city owed it to those communities, for they have suffered so much, we owe it to them to make sure they get every possible advantage going forward.

The mayor said principals will be able to set up classrooms in their schoolyards, or even request additional space in city parks, playgrounds or on sidewalks beginning from Monday

While weather remains a concern, de Blasio advised teachers to make the most of outdoor spaces when conditions permit (pictured: People wear protective face masks at the Washington Square Park fountain during Phase 4 of re-opening)

The new learning plan comes after de Blasio faced mounting pressure from parents and local elected officials to leverage outdoor spaces to provide additional room for in-person schooling

The mayor said while outdoor learning is far from the perfect solution, it should add flexibility for educators and an effective alternative way of teaching for many schools.

City Council Member Lander applauded de Blasios announcement Monday, writing: Outdoor space in streets, parks, and playgrounds will give schools much needed flexibility as they plan to safely bring our students and teachers together this fall -- for outdoor lunch, gym, recess, instruction, and related services. I'm grateful to the city leaders who listened to our pleas for this common sense plan to increase the footprint of our schools at this urgent.

The subject as to whether schools in New York City should reopen for a mixture of in-person and virtual lessons next month remains a fiercely contested topic of debate.

A growing number of other major school districts, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Newark in New Jersey, have all opted for all-virtual starts to the school year.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo appeared to stoke the controversy on Friday when he said he was still unsure whether hed be sending his children back into school for in-person lessons next month.

This is a risky proposition no matter how you do it ... let's be honest, Cuomo said. You're bringing a lot of people into a congregate setting. Do you have the testing? Do you have the tracing? Do you have the social distance requirements? We've seen schools open, we've seen colleges open and get into trouble in one week, so there's a lot of questions to answer before, but that's the dialogue we're having now, and again, if it's not a smart plan, then it shouldn't happen.

Mayor de Blasio, however, remained resolute about the New York Citys reopening plans Monday, insisting it has the strongest schools reopening plan in the country and improves on plans shown to work across the world.

We've created a new gold standard, he continued. We've combined them into one strategy for safety for all.

Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to provide a mix of in-classroom and online learning across New York City from September 10. The Mayor is pictured above last Wednesday with Richard Carranza, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, at Brooklyn's New Bridges Elementary School

Those who decided against in-school instruction can transition into a blended schedule at various times during the academic year. Those who opted-in from the off-set will also be permitted to return to remote learning upon request.

The citys infection rate has remained below one percent for the last 17 consecutive days

So far, nearly three-quarters of the citys school student have applied to return for in-person classes on September 10.

The students will attend lessons on campus for between one to three days per week  depending on each schools available resources  with no more than 10 students at one time, who will take turns in classrooms on an alternating pattern.

Meanwhile, 26 percent  or nearly 300,000 families  requested that their children continue to learn remotely full-time and not return to class when school resumes after summer break.

Around 85 percent of the school systems 75,000 teachers also intend to return, while the remaining 15 percent will be conducting digital-only classes.

City Hall pledged to upgrade classroom ventilation systems in schools across the city, as well as overhauling cleaning regimes and implementing a mandatory face covering policy for all staff and students.

Hand-washing and hand-sanitizer stations will also be located throughout the school buildings.

Those who decided against in-school instruction can transition into a blended schedule at various times during the academic year. Those who opted-in from the start will also be permitted to return to remote learning upon request.

Individual classes and schools may be closed temporarily should students or teachers test positive for COVID-19 at any stage. All of the citys 1,800 schools will be shut down if the citywide positivity rate exceeds an average of three percent over a seven-day period.

The citys infection rate has remained below one percent for the last 17 consecutive days.

In total, New York City has suffered 237,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began in March, with 23,658 deaths.

The students will attend lessons on campus for between one to three days per week  depending on each schools available resources  with no more than 10 students at one time, who will take turns in classrooms on an alternating pattern

New York City has suffered 237,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began in March, with 23,658 deaths.

If at least two COVID-19 cases are confirmed in different classrooms at a school, the mayor's plan calls for the school to be closed for 14 days. If one or two linked cases are recorded in the same classroom, then only that classroom must close for 14 days.

In addition to the blended learning plan, the city is also calling for random temperature checks for students and teachers, with a 14-day mandatory quarantine order for anyone who tests positive.

New York City teachers on Wednesday threatened to strike or bring legal action unless the city government addresses specific safety demands like a more rigorous COVID-19 testing plan and protocols for isolating students who show symptoms of the virus.

The union has called on the mayor to address ventilation issues in school buildings and implement stricter procedures on busing students, in addition to demands for increased testing students and staff.

'The minute we feel that the mayor is trying to force people in to a situation that is unsafe... we go to court, we take a job action,' said Michael Mulgrew, president of the union representing the city's 133,000 teachers, adding that a 'job action' could include a strike.
In Retrospect: News from the Jan. 20, 1922 and Jan. 19, 1972 Souderton Independent
Bay League boys and girls basketball teams will play five league games and then there will be a tournament to determine seeding for CIF-Southern Section playoffs.
The Trump administrations efforts to require airlines to collect contact tracing information from U.S.-bound international passengers has stalled, five people briefed on the matter told Reuters on Friday, adding such a mandate is unlikely this year.

Major airlines and administration officials have held talks for months over a long-standing effort by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to mandate the collection and reporting of tracing information from passengers arriving to the United States from foreign destinations.

In June, Reuters reported the White House had tasked an interagency working group with adopting an interim solution that could be in place by Sept. 1 as the issue gained urgency with the coronavirus outbreak.

Privacy Concerns

After a White House meeting this week, airline and U.S. officials, who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity, said no plan is likely to be adopted and in effect before the end of 2020. Some government officials have raised privacy concerns about moving forward with any contact tracing requirements.

White House spokesman Judd Deere said Friday the White House continues to work with the airlines on the best solution to protect the health and safety of the public not only during this ongoing pandemic but for future ones as well.

A spokeswoman for Airlines for America, a group representing American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and others, said Friday the group continues to work collaboratively with the federal government to implement contact tracing. We believe contact tracing is a key measure that will instill confidence for the traveling public that airlines and the federal government are prioritizing their health and safety.

The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.

The debate over how and what data should be collected from passengers to quickly identify and contact people exposed to the coronavirus has dragged on for months.

In February, the CDC issued an interim final rule to require airlines to collect five contact data elements from international passengers, including phone numbers, and electronically submit them to Customs and Border Protection to facilitate contact tracing.

That has not been enforced. Airlines protested, arguing they could not provide such information, especially from passengers booking tickets through third-party websites.

Airlines backed setting up a website and mobile application for passengers to send contact information directly to the CDC.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

Topics USA Aviation Politics
ABP is carrying out Covid-19 testing of all staff at its Cahir and Clones plants after a number of positive cases.

ABPs meat plants in Cahir and Clones remain open, the company insisted yesterday. However, farmers have struggled to get cattle booked in for slaughter at Cahir, and the company admitted that no animals were killed at the Tipperary plant yesterday or today.

ABP confirmed that it was carrying out Covid-19 testing of all staff at both plants, after a number of positive cases.

Covid-19 testing at ABP Clones will start today. The company tested all of its staff in Cahir last Friday after nine cases of Covid-19 were confirmed at the site.

Two staff members in Clones have tested positive for Covid-19 in recent days.

ABP claimed that testing was a precautionary measure that will be carried out by a private company in conjunction with the HSE. ABP stated that it will continue to take direction from both the HSE and HSA in relation to the Covid-19 outbreaks.

Site access

It has also introduced a range of measures at sites, including limiting site access to essential personnel, temperature checks at the entry to the site, staggered break times, and perspex partitions where appropriate.

It comes as the dairy sector says milk processing will not be disrupted as a result of the ongoing threat from Covid-19 after confirmation by Glanbia that two further workers tested positive for the virus at its liquid milk plant in Ballytore, Co Kildare.

This brings to six the number of workers that have tested positive at the Glanbia facility, following the four last week.

Conor Mulvihill of the dairy sectors representative body, Dairy Industry Ireland (DII), said all processing facilities were fully operational across the country and there had been no disruption to milk intakes.

The industry has been preparing business continuity planning for Covid since January and there has been a huge national effort by suppliers, transporters, staff and management to ensure every drop of milk in the country was collected and processed, Mr Mulvihill said.

We are confident that this record can continue, he insisted, adding that it was imperative that milk processing continued in all circumstances.

Mr Mulvihill said DII members were working closely with local health authorities and following all appropriate advice.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  Joint Task Force Sulu Commander BGen. William Gonzales said 14 died, while 78 people were wounded after two explosions in Jolo, Sulu on Monday.

Gonzales told CNN Philippines News Night that of the deaths, six were civilians, seven from the Armed Forces of the Philippines, and one from the Philippine National Police-Special Action Force.

Meanwhile, there were 48 civilians injured, three local PNP, and three PNP-SAF. Latest count from the 11th Infantry Division noted that 24 were wounded from the AFP.

It noted that the authorities killed and injured were doing security patrols in the area which is frequently visited by civilians.

Gonzales said investigation is still ongoing to confirm who or what group was behind the bombings. He also confirmed that no third explosion occurred.

Earlier, Western Mindanao Command chief Lt. Gen. Corleto Vinluan Jr. said they are now chasing the suspect, Abu Sayyaf bomb expert Mundi Sawadjaan, who was also responsible for the church and the military camp bombings last year.

He said they have been following the suspect since May.

He also noted that the two related explosions involved an improvised explosive device, with the first one planted in a motorbike, while the second one was perpetrated by a female suicide bomber.

The Joint Task Force Sulu, AFP together with the PNP and Local Government Unit of Sulu condemn in strongest term the terroristic act perpetrated by the terror group Abu Sayyaf, the 11th Infantry Division said in a statement.

On Monday, the Police Regional Office Bangsamoro Autonomous Region (PRO BAR) reported an explosion that happened at 11:53 a.m. in Brgy. Walled City inside a Paradise Food Shop.

The Jolo Municipal Police Station has placed cordon at the area.

As police operatives were processing the first blast, a second explosion occurred at around 1 p.m. in front of a nearby Development Bank of the Philippines branch in the same barangay.

Investigators are now tracking down the suspects and establishing the motive behind the two incidents, police said.

Teams have been deployed to check for possibly more explosive devices, they said.

With this, Jolo Mayor Kerkhar Tan has placed the municipality under total lockdown until investigation on the two bombing incidents is completed. Entry and exit to and from Jolo is prohibited except on some special cases, he said in an advisory.

The Philippine Coast Guard also declared red alert in the entire Southwestern Mindanao to include Zamboanga, Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.

PCG authorities are also instructed to be attentive when it comes to securing points of entry like ports and harbors.

These explosions occurred near the bombing incident that happened in the towns Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in January 2019 that killed 18 people.

PNP chief Archie Gamboa said in a statement that he has directed the PRO BAR to secure the area and expedite investigations to hold all those responsible accountable before the law.

Palace, UN condemn Jolo twin blasts

The Palace, through Presidential Communications Sec. Martin Andanar, denounced the twin attacks in Jolo that led to deaths and injuries of some individuals.

Grave acts against humanity, such as these, have no place in our society, especially as we continue to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, said Andanar in a statement.

Malacanang assured the perpetrators of the bombings will be held accountable and prosecuted by applicable laws.

The United Nations echoed the Palaces call of prosecuting the suspects, saying such attacks against civilians are always unacceptable.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) has called for an investigation following a heavy-handed intervention by law enforcement agencies during a demonstration in Tripoli on Sunday
Jerry Falwell Jr. has been admonished for blaming his family's involvement with a pool boy entirely on his wife and claiming she cheated on him with the younger man when he allegedly watched them having sex.

Falwell Jr. released a statement on Sunday night claiming that only his wife Becki was involved Giancarlo Ganda, a pool boy who the pair met when he was 20 in 2012.

He said Becki and Giancarlo had an affair and that he'd chosen to forgive her for it, describing it as an 'indiscretion' that caused him to lose 80lbs when he discovered it because he was so upset.

However, Giancarlo spoke out on Monday to claim that not only did Jerry know about the affair, but that he watched them having sex.

He says he and Becki had sex multiple times a year in hotel rooms around the country for six years.

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Jerry Falwell Jr. with his wife Becki

Twitter users exploded with criticism of Falwell Jr. for trying to pin the scandal on his wife

Now, Jerry - who was put on a leave of absence from the Christian college earlier this year - is being slammed for trying to pin the entire scandal on his wife.

Twitter users erupted in criticism of his 'holier than thou' statement.

They slammed him for not only trying to pin the debacle on his wife, but also for telling students at Liberty University to refrain from sex when he may have been participating in it outside of his marriage. He resigned as president of the school on Monday.

On Sunday night, Falwell Jr. released a lengthy statement to The Washington Examiner, claiming he and his wife were being extorted.

He did not name Giancarlo, but said the person had an affair with Becki.

He said the young man had also tried to do the same to other families, by targeting high profile women, and that he was a 'predator'.

He said the family decided the only thing to do was to go public with their side of the story.

It came after a Reuters journalist, who Granda had been working with, confronted the family to ask for their comments on his claims.

Granda says he and Becki had a consensual affair, starting when he was 20 in 2012, and lasting until 2018.

He claims Jerry knew about it and sometimes 'watched from the corner of the room' while they had sex.
TROY, N.Y.  According to Rensselaer County officials, the COVID-19 pandemic is taking a toll on the equipment within the Rensselaer County sewer system.

Officials said the problem spans back several weeks, and there has been a sharp uptick in the number of face masks, rubber gloves, and cleaning wipes in the waste stream. These objects can get caught in the filtration equipment and cause serious jams and equipment failure.

The COVID-19 outbreak has required widespread use of PPE. Unfortunately, some of that PPE can be improperly disposed, and clog sewer lines. This can add costs and delay service, along with potentially hurting the environment. Residents can greatly help the situation by properly disposing PPE in the trash, not down the drain, Rensselaer County Executive Steve McLaughlin stated on how residents should properly discard those items.

The Rensselaer County Legislature said it has invested more than $80 million across the past decade to make upgrades to the sewer plant and its six pump stations. These pump stations have been completely overhauled with efficient pumps and motors, new generators, and upgraded screening equipment to catch debris in the wastewater.

It is these new bar screens that capture and filter out larger objects, but sometimes masks, gloves, and wipes make it through. These items tend to clump up and jam the working mechanisms of plant equipment, and often result in decreased performance or equipment failure.

We have invested over $80 million in improving our county sewer system over the last several years. Many of those improvements were mandated by New York state, and have helped clean the Hudson River. We need the publics help to keep masks, gloves, and wipes out of our sewer system, Rensselaer County Legislature Majority Chairman Michael Stammel stated.

The New York state mask mandate for public places has resulted in used masks being discarded on streets and in parking lots.

Wearing masks is vitally important for our health and safety, and they should be disposed of properly. They should not be flushed, or tossed into the street, where they might end up in a storm drain, and make their way into our sewer system, Legislator Tom Grant explained.

Items like masks, sanitizing wipes, and rubber gloves wreak havoc on our equipment at the sewer plant. Our staff has to clear out jammed equipment to keep our plant running, and to keep waste from entering the Hudson River, Legislator Robert Loveridge noted.

We are proud of the fact that our state-of-the-art plant can turn wastewater into water that is clean enough to drink before it is discharged into the Hudson River. In order to keep the plant working properly, we need to do our part to keep, mask, gloves, wipes, and other foreign objects out of toilets and storm drains, Vice-Chair of the legislature Kelly Hoffman added.
By Humeyra Pamuk and David Brunnstrom

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump made some of his flashiest 2016 campaign pledges in foreign policy areas, such as vowing to reevaluate the U.S. relationship with NATO, abandon a landmark nuclear deal with Iran and bring U.S. troops back from "forever wars."

The Republican president, a former businessman from New York who boasts about his deal-making skills, has delivered on some of his pledges, while partially meeting a few others. Some he has so far completely failed to achieve.

If Trump is defeated in the Nov. 3 election by Democratic rival Joe Biden, the new administration's hardest challenge will be to restore the global standing and trustworthiness of the United States, analysts and former U.S. and European officials say.

Biden, vice president under President Barack Obama, will be taking over a scarred transatlantic relationship, deep antagonism with China and sanctions-dominated pressure campaigns against Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

Here is a look at some of the key policy priorities of the Trump administration and potential challenges for Biden:

CHINA

A central theme in Trump's 2016 campaign was to accuse China of "ripping off" the United States while vowing to seal a fair trade deal with Beijing that would help American businesses and create U.S. jobs.

After almost two years of tit-for-tat trade war with the world's second largest economy, Trump has so far managed a stalled first phase of such an agreement.

Meanwhile, Washington and Beijing have slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of each others' goods and the global spread of the coronavirus from China has soured bilateral ties to their worst level in decades, raising fears of a new Cold War.

Washington has acted against Beijing on multiple fronts: It ended the special status of Hong Kong, sanctioned top officials over human rights abuses and sought to ban Chinese technology companies from operating in the United States.

Story continues

A Biden administration would have little option but to maintain the hard stance, analysts say, but would likely seek to dial down some rhetoric to create room for engagement.

IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

In 2018, the Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, saying he could strike a better one. He also launched a "maximum pressure" campaign to choke off Tehran's sources of income.

Despite almost two years of sanctions on everything from oil revenue to minerals and Iran's central bank, Washington has yet to force a change of behavior by Tehran and bring it back to the negotiating table. Instead, escalating tensions have carried the two nations to the brink of war.

Biden has said he would deal with Iran through diplomacy and re-enter the agreement, but only if Iran first returned to compliance with the deal's restrictions on its nuclear program.

NATO & TRANSATLANTIC TIES

Trump has repeatedly complained about the failure of many NATO partners to meet defense spending targets. He has also questioned the continued relevance of the organization created in 1949 at the start of the Cold War with Russia.

His attacks soured ties with several European allies, but more members of the alliance have now increased spending to meet its target of two percent of GDP.

This year, Trump vowed to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany, accusing Berlin of taking advantage of the United States while not meeting its NATO obligations.

Analysts say repairing the transatlantic alliance will take time, but should be one of the easier tasks awaiting a potential Biden administration.

BRINGING TROOPS HOME

Trump promised in his 2016 campaign to stay out of foreign wars and bring home U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, America's longest war, which is now in its nineteenth year.

Washington has begun cutting troop numbers in Afghanistan after striking a deal with the Taliban in February that envisaged the withdrawal of all U.S. troops. This depends, however, on talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which have stalled.

Trump also ordered a pullout of U.S. troops from Syria. The decision was repeatedly watered down by aides and the military, but numbers have still been reduced by more than half.

PARIS CLIMATE DEAL

One of Trump's most controversial decisions was his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, something he had repeatedly vowed to do during the 2016 campaign.

Trump said the agreement imposed "draconian" financial and economic burdens on the United States and vowed to negotiate a better one.

A new agreement has not materialized. The Biden campaign said he would recommit to the original Paris deal and lead an effort to get major countries to toughen their domestic targets.

MIDDLE EAST

Trump delivered on his 2016 campaign promise to relocate the U.S. Embassy in Israel to divided Jerusalem. The move was slammed by most of the Arab world but won praise from the Israeli government and its supporters, as well as evangelical Christians.

His wider Middle East Peace plan was rejected by Palestinians as it allowed Israel to maintain control of long-contested West Bank settlements, but received some encouraging reviews from several Arab states.

One, the United Arab Emirates, this month normalized ties with Israel in a historic deal brokered by the United States, a move that many analysts saw as a foreign policy win for Trump at a time when he has been trailing Biden in polls.

NORTH KOREA

Trump surprised the world by entering unprecedented talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He made no progress in persuading Kim to give up his nuclear weapons, but some believe his ice-breaking diplomacy could be a building block for a future administration.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Mary Milliken and Daniel Wallis)
Pearls decorated sandals are the must have for this summer, said Eva Moldovanidou, custom-made sandals designer adding that soft colors such as beige, light gold, white and light brown are dominant this year. The good thing about an attractive pair of sandals is that you can simply combine it with just a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and really look instantly fashionable. Moldovanidou says.

Eva Moldovanidou affirmed that unfortunately the coronavirus has affected all sectors of economy especially the fashion industry, which might be considered as a secondary need. At this moment everyday people who have been affected economically from the coronavirus pandemic, will first buy food for their family and then buy new shoes. But flat, comfortable and stylish sandals are essential, for example in Greece, most of the islands have cobbled streets so you will need comfortable pair of sandals yet fashionable and trendy.

All over the world, this season will be quite different from what we were used to, but for walking we need more comfortable and practical sandal designs, consequently we have designed more comfortable sandals with an anatomic sole that you can wear all day and night.

The talented Eva moldovanidou described her style as being unique for every woman as they are custom-made, she usually use raw materials and fabrics such as leather while creating the Sundali collection. The styles rang from modern, classic, bohemian and ethnic. The designs can cover every need for every age group and style. Each sandal I make is better than the previous one. She added.

Eva recommended that sandals with beige and gold colours and some pearls can be worn from day to night and be always in style.

Most of my handmade sandal designs are inspired from the ancient Greek culture and many of my ribbons have ancient Greek patterns like the meander symbol but with a modern perspective, which is also one of my best seller.

Unfortunately the rhythm of our life is very fast and we have a lack of time to actually go for shopping. The future now is for online shopping, which is faster and easier. The disadvantage is that you can not check the quality and the size of the product, hence you have to opt for good designer. Moldovanidou says.

According to Moldovanidou, women do not need to follow every fashion trend and they can choose what is suitable for them. Every woman is unique with her own distinctive style; you can not wear something just because it is in fashion and does not suit you. The special thing about my sandals designs is that we create our own unique fashion.

Speaking about her inspiration, Eva assured that each woman that orders her pair of sandals inspires her, also living in Greece gives her a lot of inspiration; the sea, the sun, the blue sky and the picturesque islands give a boost to her creativity, where she also got the inspiration of her collection name; Sundali by E.creations.

I studied marketing and economics at the university of Patras in the Peloponnese and I am a manager of a hotel in Rethymno in Crete. I always liked crafting things so at one point I had some left over materials from something I was making and an old pair of leather sandals and just decorated it, and then I uploaded it on my Facebook page, and that is how the story begins. She says.

I started making sandals for friends and suddenly I was asked to give an interview on a website and then they called me to speak about my creations on the Greek TV, that is how the journey begun. More and more people found out about my sandals and now I am shipping sandals all over the world, said Eva Moldovanidou describing her success story.

Everything is done by me, from the communication with the customers, the designs, the decorations, the photos and the social media. Moldovanidou emphasized adding that it is a full time occupation. I have a workshop that you can visit and choose your custom- made unique design, or otherwise we can communicate online and exchange photos of the desired style and decoration matching your new sandal. She says.

She assured that she like the personal contact and communication she has with every customer looking for special design from her Sundali collection. I like this magical moment when I make women feel unique. Moldovanidou said.

Every sandal for me is a new challenge as I have to fulfill every womans needs and imagination, especially when it comes to brides; I have to make the best sandal that match with their wedding dress on their special day. Moldovanidou says.

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Case over slander of Great Patriotic War veteran against Navalny shelved

 RAPSI

16:28 24/08/2020

MOSCOW, August 24 (RAPSI)  A justice of peace on Monday suspended hearing of a case against Alexey Navalny over his statements about veteran of the Great Patriotic War Ignat Artemenko because of the defendants illness, the spokesperson of Moscows Babushkinsky District Court Alexandra Savelyeva told RAPSI.

Last week, a plane departed from Tomsk to Moscow with Navalny onboard urgently landed in Omsk after the blogger became heartily sick. He was taken to a hospital in coma. Later, he was transported to Berlin. Russian medics said no poison was found in the bloggers body.

In early June, Russia Today TV channel published a video where the 93-year Artemenko and other respondents were reading the Constitution preamble. Following that, Navalny released a video with comments on his social networks insulting the veteran.

Navalny was charged with slander. If convicted he could face up to 200 hours of community service. Navalny pleads not guilty.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 17:11:28|Editor: huaxia

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Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics staged a drone light show on Saturday evening to welcome students back to school. Nearly 300 drones lit up the night sky, performing various formations.
Local officials from Brazoria to Jefferson Counties warned residents Monday to prepare for a hurricane to make landfall as Tropical Storm Laura strengthens in the Gulf of Mexico, bound for southeast Texas or southwestern Louisiana.

Houston-area leaders urged residents in coastal areas to be ready to evacuate at a moments notice, while the mayor of Port Arthur ordered a mandatory evacuation for the 50,000 residents of that city and Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick said he anticipated doing the same for coastal areas. Galveston officials urged residents to vacate vulnerable areas of the barrier island.

Laura churned off the western tip of Cuba Monday afternoon and is expected to intensify Tuesday before coming ashore in Texas and Louisiana late Wednesday as a Category 2 hurricane with 105-mph winds, according to the 4 p.m. forecast from the National Weather Service.

The agency could not rule out a Category 3 storm, and on Monday afternoon issued a hurricane watch from Port Bolivar to Morgan City, La.

On its current track, the worst of the storm would pass east of Houston, but officials warned even a slight change in direction could place the nations fourth-largest city in Lauras path.

A difference of 50 miles for a storm that traveled 2,000 is not that big of a job and that would make all the difference in the world to us here, Galveston County Judge Mark Henry said.

President Donald Trump approved an emergency declaration requested by Gov. Greg Abbott, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide assistance and reimbursement for evacuations, shelters and more. Abbott also activated 70 members of the Texas National Guard to assist.

The greatest threats Laura poses are high winds and a storm surge of 7 to 11 feet, National Weather Service meteorologist Dan Reilly said.

Officials assured the public the storm bears little resemblance to Hurricane Harvey, the sluggish superstorm that dumped more than 50 inches of rain on parts of the region three years ago this week.

We do not expect this storm to stall, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said. From all indications it will come through.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said residents should prepare hurricane kits and check which evacuation zone they live in. Hidalgo said residents in coastal areas should be ready to leave at a moments notice, as any evacuation order likely would come sometime Tuesday.

Complicating matters is the COVID-19 pandemic in the state, which peaked in July and has killed more than 11,000 Texans. The virus continues to spread uncontrollably and Harris County remains at its highest threat level, which calls for residents to stay home if possible, telecommute to work and avoid unnecessary contact with others.

Here we go again, said Hidalgo, whose brief tenure already has included a series of chemical fires, Tropical Storm Imelda and an outbreak of contagious disease. This has been a tough year for us.

The county judge said crews are on standby to clean up debris and investigators are prepared to monitor potential industrial pollution during the storm.

In Galveston, residents hastened preparations for the storm. Hurricane Ike pounded the island in 2008. Laura is following a similar path, traversing the gulf east to west from Cuba.

The Galveston Island Beach Patrol removed lifeguard towers and trash cans from the citys beaches. Chief Peter Davis issued a red flag warning Monday afternoon  which urges children and poor swimmers to stay out of the water  as wave heights increased. He expected to leave the warnings up through the weekend.

We want to plan for worst-case scenario, Davis, 38, said of a Category 2 or 3 hurricane. Weve got it down. But its always dangerous and its always scary because you cant really predict these storms with any certainty.

Miles Delgado and his twin brothers, Sam and Max, hosed down their 42-foot boat Twisted Sisters, which they planned to take out of the Galveston Yacht Basin and store on the mainland. He canceled trips for the charter fishing business the trio works for through the rest of the week.

I have a feeling this isnt going to be that bad, said Delgado, a 25-year-old Houston resident, before noting Harvey initially was not devastating. Well just see.

Hidalgo said an evacuation order mostly likely would apply only to residents near the coast. More than 100 people died during a disastrous evacuation of about 2.5 million Houston-area residents as Hurricane Rita approached in 2005. That storm ultimately turned east and missed the city.

Evacuation is not an option for some residents, however, such as those who own livestock.

In Silsbee, north of Beaumont and in the current path of the storm, Tatika Leckelt said she had no way to transport the 20 goats her family relies on for income. She said she is most worried about high winds.

We will stay here and ride it out, that way if a tree comes down and they happen to get out or whatever, Ill be able to get a handle on it and recoup all of them, Leckelt said.

Two named storms are swirling in the Gulf of Mexico currently, the first time that has happened since 1933.

The second, Tropical Storm Marco, headed for Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday, leaving Texas mostly untouched.

The good news is Marco will have little to no impact on the Houston, Galveston region, said Francisco Sanchez, Harris Countys deputy emergency management coordinator. We are almost primarily focused right now on the uncertainty of Laura.

Ben Wermund, Julian Gill, Anna Bauman and Alejandro Serrano and the Beaumont Enterprise contributed reporting.

zach.despart@chron.com
As new advancements transform end-to-end business processes, it is poised that newer technologies will redefine business landscapes and automate end-to-end business processes by 2022. One such innovation making waves in the energy and utilities industry is the 'smart grid' technology. Smart grids, along with data analytics, offer promising, new opportunities that can help redefine business processes. With a rise in sensors being embedded in smart meters, there is also a rise in the overlap data generation. And to capture and analyze these data sets, energy companies are now turning to smart grid data analytics to gauge variables, like the amount of energy distributed from smart meters and smart networks. According to Quantzig, smart grid data analytics is going to have a significant impact on the energy sector and its associated processes.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200824005004/en/

Benefits of Smart Grid Data Analytics (Graphic: Business Wire).

Book a FREE Demoto know more about how Quanztig can help you collect and analyze smart grid data from multiple endpoints.

At Quantzig, we understand that new challenges are bound to emerge due to these transformations within the energy and utilities sector. To help our clients make the most of the new digital opportunities, we've designed a holistic end-to-end digital transformation solutions portfolio that focuses on merging data-driven insights with technology to drive smarter decision-making and better outcomes.

Using a combination of predictive analytics, data dashboarding, data visualization, and machine learning, we enable improvements in service levels, reduction of downtime risks, and deployment of better predictive maintenance strategies. Request a FREE proposal to learn more.

Why Quantzig? 120 + 1500+ 550+ 15+ Global clients including Fortune 500 companies Comprehensive projects Data scientists and analytics experts Years of experience

Detailed information about Quantzig's analytics capabilities can be accessed at https://bit.ly/31ce1BC

Benefits of Smart Grid Data Analytics

1: Collect and analyze data to improve the quality of service

2: Enhance energy transmission

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5: Improve energy management

A detailed study helped Quantzig understand the impact that smart grid analytics is going to have on the future of the utilities sector. The study unraveled hidden insights behind the energy infrastructure in today's modern world. With enormous amounts of data being generated in the utilities and energy sector, there is a growing need for deploying advanced analytics platforms that can capture and analyze data. However, selecting the right platform is crucial as it empowers utilities companies to distribute resources more efficiently, cut costs, and discover better ways to serve customers. With smart grid data analytics, businesses will be better positioned to make the most out of the data produced.

At Quantzig, we have a cross-functional team that comprises of researchers, analytics experts, and data scientists who assist our clients in implementing solutions that can move the needle. Speak to our analytics expertsright away!

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to keep abreast of the emerging trends in data and analytics.

About Quantzig

Quantzig is a global analytics and advisory firm with offices in the US, UK, Canada, China, and India. For more than 15 years, we have assisted our clients across the globe with end-to-end data modeling capabilities to leverage analytics for prudent decision making. Today, our firm consists of 120+ clients, including 55 Fortune 500 companies. For more information on our engagement policies and pricing plans, visit: https://www.quantzig.com/request-for-proposal

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200824005004/en/

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Namita Bajpai By

Express News Service

LUCKNOW: Three people were arrested late on Monday evening for allegedly shooting a TV journalist Ratan Singh, 45, in Phephna village under Phephna police station area of Ballia district earlier in the day.

Journalists from the entire district put up a huge protest at the national highway number 31 and raised slogans against the district police after the killing.

As per Additional chief secretary, home, Awanish Awasthi, three persons including the main culprit Dinesh Singh were arrested in connection with the incident. The other two persons arrested along with Dinesh Singh were Arvind Singh and Suneel Singh. All three were the neighbours of the slain journalist and the murder was a result of an old land dispute between the two sides.

ADG (law and order) Prashant Kumar said that Ratan had a land dispute with his neighbour, Dinesh Singh. On Monday, the two had a verbal dual which later took an ugly turn and Dinesh shot Ratan and fled away, said Kumar. The district police chief was present on the spot and supervising the case, he said.

Preliminary probe has suggested that the two parties had fought over a piece of land in their village in December 2019. Both the parties had lodged a cross-FIR in the case. On Monday, the victim had placed his haystack which ensued in a verbal spat, following which the opposite party started beating him. To save his life, the scribe ran away from the scene. The miscreants chased and shot at him," said DIG, Azamgarh Range, Subhash Chandra Dubey.

The DIG clarified that the murder was not a result of any story or report covered or shown by the journalist. Meanwhile, Ballia SP Devenra Nath sent Phephna station officer Shashi Mauli Pandey to lines for dereliction of duty.
At least 13 people were crushed to death or asphyxiated as partygoers tried to flee a Lima nightclub after it was raided by police for hosting a party in violation of coronavirus restrictions.

At least six were injured, including three police officers, as around 120 people tried to escape the Thomas Restobar club in Lima's Los Olivos district on Saturday night (local time) as police arrived to break up the event, which neighbours had reported, national police and government officials said.

The club's owners, a married couple, were detained, the Interior Ministry said.

At least 13 people were crushed to death as partygoers tried to flee a Lima nightclub after it was raided by police for hosting a party in violation of coronavirus restrictions. Source: Getty

In an earlier statement, the ministry blamed the deaths on the "criminal irresponsibility of an unscrupulous businessman."

The partygoers had become trapped between the only entrance door, which was closed, and a staircase leading to the street, police said.

Of the victims, 11 were men and two were women between the ages of 20 and 30.

Of the victims, 11 were men and two were women between the ages of 20 and 30. Source: Getty

Peru ordered the closure of nightclubs and bars in March and banned extended family gatherings on August 12 to fight what is Latin America's second highest COVID infection rate, according to a Reuters tally. A Sunday curfew is also in effect.

Peru's women's minister, Rosario Sasieta, called for harsh penalties for the club's owners.

"I ask for the maximum sanction for the owners of this place, which has really been irresponsible, and we are talking about a malicious homicide for profit," Sasieta told journalists during a visit to the site on Sunday morning (local time).

Representatives of the nightclub were not immediately available to comment. Source: Reuters

"Knowing that there is a health emergency, knowing that not even at home you can meet with relatives who do not live there, you have the irresponsibility of opening a place for 120 people to enter?" Sasieta added.

Representatives of the nightclub were not immediately available to comment.

Story continues

At least 23 partygoers were detained by police as part of their investigation, the interior ministry said.

Peru had recorded a total of 585,236 coronavirus cases as of Saturday, double the number reported on July 2, while the known death toll has risen to 27,453.

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.
A tobacco industry ad alleges that SB793 would criminalize menthol cigarettes, "giving special treatment to the rich, and singling out communities of color." Advocates for the bill have blasted those claims as inaccurate, responding with another ad that argues flavored tobacco products have been heavily marketed to communities of color and pose disproportionate health risks to Black residents. (Joe Raedle, Getty Images)

Supporters of legislation to ban the sale of flavored tobacco in California are speaking out against a new advertising campaign from tobacco companies that claims the bill discriminates against Black and Latino smokers, saying that the ads disingenuously portray the industry as an ally of communities of color.

The tobacco industry ad, which calls the bill "politics at its worst," alleges that the measure would criminalize menthol cigarettes, "giving special treatment to the rich, and singling out communities of color."

Advocates for the bill have blasted those claims as inaccurate, responding with another ad that argues flavored tobacco products have been heavily marketed to communities of color and pose disproportionate health risks to Black residents.

On Monday, a group of Black leaders, including academics, and youth activists held a press conference on Zoom to denounce the opposition ad campaign as an attempt by the tobacco industry to deceive lawmakers and the public.

Its critical that the Black community and particularly the Black faith community stand up to the lies, misinformation and the fake news that is being promulgated by big tobacco, said the Rev. John E. Cager III, pastor of the Ward African Methodist Episcopal Church Los Angeles.

The measure, Senate Bill 793, was introduced by state Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo) partly in response to a surge in the use of electronic cigarettes by minors who are attracted to candy- and fruit-flavored vaping products. In 2019, some 5 million middle- and high-school students reported having used e-cigarettes in a recent 30-day period, an increase from 3.6 million the year before, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

California would be the second state after Massachusetts to ban flavored tobacco and would follow many local jurisdictions, including Los Angeles County, that have already taken that step.

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SB 793 cleared a key hurdle on Thursday when the Assembly Appropriations Committee sent it to the Assembly floor for a vote, despite a warning by the state Department of Tax and Fee Administration that such a proposal could cost $218 million next year in lost tobacco-related taxes.

The California Legislative Black Caucus has not taken an official position on SB 793, but four of the eight members have either voted for the bill or signed on as co-authors.

Flavored tobacco is a gateway to a lifetime of addiction with tobacco being one of many destructors of Black health, said state Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), a member of the caucus, in a statement after she voted for the bill when it passed the Senate.

Assemblywoman Autumn Burke (D-Los Angeles), who is also a member of the caucus, voted for the bill in committee but added that she would like to see more efforts that deal with the root causes of poverty, which is directly tied to tobacco use.

I see folks banging a drum that claims to protect Black and brown people, but once again criminalizing their choices when we should be creating opportunities and incentivizing better choices, Burke told her colleagues during a debate.

At a state Capitol hearing on the bill earlier this month, some 200 people on both sides of the issue testified.

The argument that the bill would cost the state tax revenue did not sway bill supporters including Cager.

I dont want the state to collect blood money on the back of dead African Americans, he told the legislators at the hearing.

Rev. K.W. Tulloss, president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles and Southern California, told lawmakers he does not want kids to smoke, but said he opposes the bill because of its ban on menthol products, which he noted are popular with Black smokers, while exempting hookah, premium cigars, and some pipe tobacco.

What we see here is this bill disrespects our community of color and their preference, while it exempts hookah products on behalf of the Middle Eastern cultures, Tulloss said. If you put a ban on menthol, it will criminalize this product.

Other opponents of the bill, which include the California Black Chamber of Commerce and Bishop R. Terrell Douglas, Sr., president of the Inglewood Ministerial Alliance, say they worry that outlawing the sale of menthol tobacco products could lead to more confrontations between police officers and young Black men. Tulloss cited the case of Eric Garner, a Black man who died in police custody in New York in 2014 after he was stopped for allegedly selling single cigarettes on the street.

Former California state Sen. Roderick Wright has voiced similar concerns.

The television ad by the tobacco industry, which was paid for by RAI Services Co., an affiliate of tobacco giant Reynolds American, turned up the heat on the debate by alleging the bill criminalizes the sale of menthol cigarettes, the choice of Black and Latino smokers.

The ads have infuriated some Black leaders, who say they are a cynical tactic by the tobacco industry and do not represent the opinions of many Black residents in California.

Dr. Valerie Yerger, a founding member of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council, and an associate professor in health policy at UC San Francisco, said the tobacco industry has targeted the Black community for marketing of menthol increasing the damage done to the health of Black people.

SB 793 is not a racist policy, Yerger said during Mondays news conference. It will save lives and reduce health care costs, especially for African Americans.

The tobacco industry has spent more than $3.1 million lobbying in California during the last year and a half, including $1.8 million spend by Reynolds and tobacco firm Altria.

Juul Labs, a leading e-cigarette maker, and industry group Vapor Technology Assn., spent a total of $1 million more on lobbying during the period. The Cigar Assn. of America paid lobbyists $144,000, while the Premium Cigar Assn. spent $84,000, and the Hookah Chamber of Commerce had $50,000 in lobbyist bills.

When a similar bill stalled last year, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network reported that the tobacco industry had given more than $2.2 million in campaign contributions to state officials since 2014.

Hill disputes the argument that his legislation will lead to more police conflicts with smokers in communities of color, saying the ban is on sales by retail stores. Nothing in SB 793 makes it illegal to possess menthol cigarettes, he said, so police officers would have no reason to stop people on the street.

San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton, who is Black, denounced the television ad blitz Wednesday as deceptive.

Tobacco companies have been allowed to market their deadly products in our communities without regard for Black lives and health for far too long," he said. "Californias lawmakers must join us and protect the next generation of Black and brown lives from deadly nicotine addiction.

Supporters of the bill cite findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that tobacco use is a major contributor to the three leading causes of death among Black people  heart disease, cancer, and stroke. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 85% of all Black smokers smoke menthol cigarettes, with studies showing that menthol makes it easier to start tobacco use and harder to quit.

U.S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, is among the supporters of Hill's legislation.

Recent incidents of police brutality against Black Americans have forced our nation to confront racism and injustice in its many forms, Bass wrote in an op-ed column in the Sacramento Bee. As we continue to push to protect Black lives, we must put an end to one of the most pernicious destroyers of Black health and lives: deadly menthol cigarettes and the tobacco industrys decades-long targeted marketing to our kids and communities.

A coalition of health and community groups called the Tobacco-Free Kids Action Fund responded to the Reynolds American ad with its own television spot that played extensively on Sacramento stations this week.

In the ad, spoken word artist SixFootah the Poet says that menthol cigarettes put my mother in the ground, challenging lawmakers to provide Black children "the same protection as the kids in the suburbs do."

So you want to ban all flavors except for the ones that take Black lives away? she asks in the ad.

The coalition airing the ad includes the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council, which is co-chaired by Phillip Gardiner, who is retired from the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program at the University of California Office of the President.

Gardiner said he doesnt think hookah and premium cigars should be exempted, but he dismisses the argument that a ban on menthol is discriminatory against the Black community.

Frankly, at this time nothing could be more helpful in saving Black lives and ensuring that Black lives matter than getting menthols and flavors out of California, he said.
More snow on the way in Pennsylvania; here's how much to expect
Vietnam ranked 86th in a new e-government ranking by the United Nations, but the country has ambitious plans to become a digital society by the next decade.

Both public and private sectors seized opportunities to accelerate innovation during the pandemic, but there had already been some successes before then.

Conditions are favorable for businesses especially in the tech sector, but legal barriers, security issues, and a global recession are challenges to be considered.

On July 10, 2020, the United Nations released its E-Government Survey 2020. With an overall score of 0.66 on the E-Government Development Index (EGDI), Vietnam moved up two places from last year and was ranked 86th among 193 member states. Though Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei, and the Philippines scored higher, Vietnam has so far already made some substantial improvements on e-governance and hopes to be among the top four Southeast Asian nations by 2025.

Vietnam Briefing looks at Vietnams recent performance as measured by the index, how it fits into the countrys broader digitalization strategy, and the impacts on business and future development.

COVID-19 a catalyst for digital transformation

The EGDI measures the scope and quality of online services, the status of telecommunication infrastructure, and the existing human capacity of a countrys e-governance. The 2020 ranking is led by Denmark, South Korean, and Estonia. According to the UN, 65 percent of member states are at the high or very high EGDI level. While income level is a predictor for e-government performance, a countrys political will, strategic leadership, and commitment to advance digital services can also improve its ranking.

Governments around the world have responded to the pandemic by launching innovative digital tools to disseminate information, perform contact-tracing, provide healthcare services, and facilitate working and learning from home. Such is certainly the case in Vietnam, where government portals have been put to greater use and saw significant surges in traffic.

Both the public and private sectors are committed to boosting Vietnams digital healthcare capacities. In addition to the existing host of services and platforms provided by different health tech start-ups, a remote medical examination and treatment app called Bluezone was launched. Developed by telecommunications conglomerate Viettel, Bluezone can store information on individuals who have been in close contact with a COVID-19 positive user and alert them about the risk of infection.

Vietnams broader effort at digitalizing the country

Although e-government initiatives are now more critical than ever, Vietnams efforts predate the pandemic and are part of a larger long-term plan to become a digital country.

On September 27, 2019, the government approved Resolution No.52-NQ/TW, the first comprehensive resolution outlining policies and targets for Industry 4.0 development. Two months later, the national public service portal, an electronic platform for online public services was launched after nine months of development. The government expects that the portal will help it save more than US$182,000 per year.

In June 2020, the National Digital Transformation Program by 2025 was approved, aiming to create a digital government, digital economy, and digital society while establishing globally competitive digital businesses. The programme builds on previous efforts to turn Vietnam into a digital society over the next decade, notably establishing national databases, making government services available online, and continuing to develop and increase access to 4G and 5G networks across the country.

Though the government has set ambitious targets, Vietnam has several favorable conditions for a digital transformation. There are hopes that the country will continue to register impressive economic growth rates. Revenues from the IT sector in 2019 reached US$112.5 billion, double of 2015. IT products such as mobile phones and computers are among Vietnams top exports.

Finance, banking, insurance, healthcare, and many other sectors will benefit from a growing middle class. Graduates of technology and data science fields will provide the needed high-quality labor force. Furthermore, because information and technology systems in Vietnam are still relatively new compared to those in Europe or the US, a digital transformation in Vietnam has lower risks and can be done faster.

Why it matters for business

With e-government and more broadly digital transformation being top priorities, businesses can expect several positive spillovers. According to the UN and World Bank reports, a high e-government index is correlated with a high business environment index. In turn, a good business environment attracts high-quality investors, facilitate technology transfer and exchange of management practices, enhance transparency and reduce corruption.

More directly, the National Digital Transformation Program promotes the development and widespread use of e-commerce platforms in enterprises and in the community. It also aims to give greater incentives and support for start-up development and encourages large companies to make use of new technologies and commercial activities.

The program intends to shift the economy from assembly and processing of high-tech goods to manufacturing in line with a Made in Vietnam strategy launched in May 2019 to foster 100,000 tech firms and make Vietnam a technological powerhouse.

Hence, businesses can continue to expect investment incentives for science and technology-related firms in the coming years.

The path ahead: challenges and opportunities

Such a large project as a digital overhaul in government, business and society will inevitably encounter some challenges. The new Law on Investment allows some investors to establish a company without first obtaining an investment registration certificate (IRC), which creates favorable conditions for foreign investors to set up tech or innovative start-ups. However, the legal framework for investment will need to be clarified to support investment.

Cybersecurity is also a concern, not only for the protection of data and regulation of online content but also for investment. Under Vietnams Cybersecurity Law, companies have to store data within the country, hand over data, and take down sensitive posts if requested to do so by the government. These requirements can have negative implications for investor confidence, opportunities for local businesses, and overall economic growth.

While Singapore and Indonesia are the traditional start-up hubs in Southeast Asia, many are seeing Vietnam as the next leading ecosystem. The country has a few homegrown success stories, such as its first-ever unicorn start-up VNG, payment app Momo, and e-commerce platform Tiki. As demand for online shopping grew during the pandemic, Tiki was able raise $130 million in a deal by Northstar Group, a private equity fund.

However, looking forward the competition for fundraising deals may be fierce among both local and regional players. The global recession may reduce the appetite for investing, while the number of talented entrepreneurs and innovators keeps growing.

Finally, it is also important to remember that a digital transformation will not happen overnight. If successful, continued and sustained efforts at promoting tech innovation in all aspects of society will help Vietnam steadily climb world digital rankings in the upcoming years.
Vietnam has highest rate of SMEs in Southeast Asia with expansion plans

Fifty two percent of small and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam have investment plans this year regardless of Covid-19, the highest ratio in Southeast Asia, a survey has found.

The regional average is only 36 percent, according to the survey by Singapores United Overseas Bank, Irish professional services company Accenture and American market data and analytics firm Dun&Bradstreet.

In Vietnam, 63 percent of SMEs plan to invest in technology, 37 percent in machinery and plants and 49 percent in developing employees skills.

Forty six percent in Vietnam postponed growth plans due to the pandemic while 2 percent have no plans, the survey of 1,000 SMEs in five countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, released late last week found.

Ninety percent of Vietnamese SMEs expect a fall in revenues this year due to the severe impact of the Covid-19 outbreak compared to 88 percent overall.

Vietnam had the highest satisfaction (68 percent) with the governments measures to resolve the crisis, followed by Thailand (47 percent) and Indonesia (45 percent).

Fifty two percent of Vietnamese SMEs showed optimism about post Covid-19 economic recovery while 22 percent were pessimistic and the rest said they were not sure.
KENOSHA, Wis. - Anger over the shooting of a Black man by police spilled into the streets of Kenosha for a second night Monday, with police again firing tear gas at hundreds of protesters who defied a curfew, threw bottles and shot fireworks at law enforcement guarding the courthouse.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

KENOSHA, Wis. - Anger over the shooting of a Black man by police spilled into the streets of Kenosha for a second night Monday, with police again firing tear gas at hundreds of protesters who defied a curfew, threw bottles and shot fireworks at law enforcement guarding the courthouse.

The southeastern Wisconsin city became the nation's latest flashpoint in a summer of racial unrest after cellphone footage of police shooting Jacob Blake  apparently in the back, as he leaned into his SUV while his three children sat in the vehicle  circulated widely on social media Sunday. The 29-year-old was hospitalized in serious condition.

The shooting drew condemnation from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who also called out 125 members of the National Guard on Monday after protesters set cars on fire, smashed windows and clashed with officers in riot gear the previous night.

Police first fired tear gas Monday about 30 minutes after the 8 p.m. curfew took effect to disperse protesters who chanted, No justice, no peace as they confronted a line of officers who wore protective gear and stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the courthouse entrance. But hundreds of people stuck around, screaming at police and lighting fires, including to a garbage truck near the courthouse.

Tensions had flared anew earlier Monday after a news conference with Kenosha Mayor John Antarmian, originally to be held in a park, was moved inside the citys public safety building. Hundreds of protesters rushed to the building and a door was snapped off its hinges before police in riot gear pepper-sprayed the crowd, which included a photographer from The Associated Press.

Morry Gash / The Associated Press A small group of Black Lives Matter protesters pray near the sight of a police shooting Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Kenosha police shot a man Sunday evening, setting off unrest in the city after a video appeared to show the officer firing several shots at close range into the man's back.

Police in the former auto manufacturing centre of 100,000 people midway between Milwaukee and Chicago said they were responding to a call about a domestic dispute when they encountered Blake on Sunday. They did not say whether Blake was armed or why police opened fire, they released no details on the dispute, and they did not immediately disclose the race of the three officers at the scene.

The man who said he made the cellphone video, 22-year-old Raysean White, said he saw Blake scuffling with three officers and heard them yell, Drop the knife! Drop the knife!" before the gunfire erupted. He said he didn't see a knife in Blake's hands.

The governor said he has seen no information to suggest Blake had a knife or other weapon, but that the case is still being investigated by the state Justice Department.

Morry Gash / The Associated Press Burned out vehicles are seen Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Many of the cars were set on fire during protests Sunday night after a police shooting in the city.

The officers were placed on administrative leave, standard practice in a shooting by police. Authorities released no details about the officers and did not immediately respond to requests for their service records.

Evers was quick to condemn the bloodshed, saying that while not all details were known, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said the officers must be held accountable.

CP In this image made from video, protesters gather near the site of a police shooting, Sunday, Aug. 23 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Officers deployed tear gas early Monday in an effort to disperse hundreds of people who took to the streets following a police shooting in Kenosha that also drew a harsh rebuke from the governor after a video posted on social media appeared to show officers shoot at a Black mans back seven times as he leaned into a vehicle. (WDJT-TV via AP)

This morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force, he said, just over two months before Election Day in a country already roiled by the recent deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Those shots pierce the soul of our nation."

Republicans and the police union accused the politicians of rushing to judgment, reflecting the deep partisan divide in Wisconsin, a key presidential battleground state. Wisconsin GOP members also decried the violent protests, echoing the law-and-order theme that President Donald Trump has been using in his reelection campaign.

As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident, Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha police union, said in a statement. He called the governors statement wholly irresponsible.

Morry Gash / The Associated Press A small group of Black Lives Matter protesters hold a rally on the steps of the Kenosha County courthouse Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Kenosha police shot a man Sunday evening, setting off unrest in the city after a video appeared to show the officer firing several shots at close range into the man's back.

The shooting happened around 5 p.m. Sunday and was captured from across the street on the video posted online. Kenosha police do not have body cameras but do have body microphones.

In the footage, Blake walks from the sidewalk around the front of his SUV to his driver-side door as officers follow him with their guns pointed and shout at him. As Blake opens the door and leans into the SUV, an officer grabs his shirt from behind and opens fire while Blake has his back turned. Seven shots can be heard, though it isnt clear how many struck Blake or how many officers fired.

White, who said he made the video, said that before the gunfire, he looked out his window and saw six or seven women shouting at each other on the sidewalk. A few moments later, Blake drove up in his SUV and told his son, who was standing nearby, to get in the vehicle, according to White. White said Blake did not say anything to the women.

Police in riot gear stand outside the Kenosha County Court House Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Kenosha police shot a man Sunday evening, setting off unrest in the city after a video appeared to show the officer firing several shots at close range into the man's back. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

White said he left the window for a few minutes, and when he came back, saw three officers wrestling with Blake. One punched Blake in the ribs, and another used a stun gun on him, White said. He said Blake got free and started walking away as officers yelled about a knife.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, representing Blakes family, said Blake was simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident.

Police did not immediately confirm either man's account.

A small group of Black Lives Matter protesters hold a rally on the steps of the Kenosha County courthouse Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Kenosha police shot a man Sunday evening, setting off unrest in the city after a video appeared to show the officer firing several shots at close range into the man's back. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

Blakes partner, Laquisha Booker, told NBCs Milwaukee affiliate, WTMJ-TV, that the couples three children were in the back seat of the SUV when police shot him.

That man just literally grabbed him by his shirt and looked the other way and was just shooting him. With the kids in the back screaming. Screaming, Booker said.

Blakes grandfather, Jacob Blake Sr., was a prominent minister and civil rights leader in the Chicago area who helped organize a march and spoke in support of a comprehensive housing law in Evanston, Illinois, days after the 1968 slaying of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Burned out vehicles are seen Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Many of the cars were set on fire during protests Sunday night after a police shooting in the city. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

Rachel Noerdlinger, publicist for the National Action Network, told The Associated Press that the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke Monday to Blake's father, who called the civil rights leader for his support. Blake's father will speak at Sharptons March on Washington commemoration on Friday, Noerdlinger said.

Karissa Lewis, national field director of Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 150 Black-led organizations that make up the broader Black Lives Matter movement, said the shooting was yet another example of why activists have called for defunding police departments.

Theres no amount of training or reform that can teach a police officer that its wrong to shoot a Black man in the back seven times while his children watch, Lewis said in a statement first shared with the AP.

Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian tries to speak to protesters Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

Online court records indicate Kenosha County prosecutors charged Blake on July 6 with sexual assault, trespassing and disorderly conduct in connection with domestic abuse. An arrest warrant was issued the following day. The records contain no further details and do not list an attorney for Blake.

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It was unclear whether that case had anything to do with the shooting.

Crump, who has also represented the Floyd and Taylor families, said Blakes family has asked that demonstrations in response to his shooting remain peaceful.

Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian tries to speak to protesters Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

They dont believe violence to be the solution, he said.

For more than 100 years, Kenosha was an auto manufacturing centre, but it has now largely been transformed into a bedroom community for Milwaukee and Chicago. The city is about 67% white, 11.5% Black and 17.6% Hispanic, according to 2019 Census data. Both the mayor and police chief are white. About 17% of the population lives in poverty.

___

Webber reported from Fenton, Michigan. Associated Press reporters Scott Bauer and Todd Richmond in Madison, Wisconsin, Jeff Baenen in Minneapolis, Aaron Morrison in New York City and Mike Householder in Kenosha contributed.
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Zareen Khan says people still assume Salman Khan helps her find work: "I cannot be a monkey on his back"
Public health measures designed to slow the spread of coronavirus have 'turned the airline industry on its head' and could see it change forever, a new study claims.

A team of industry experts say that, in future, airlines are going to see a spike in passengers wanting direct flights between major cities rather than making a layover in packed hub airports, where there is a greater risk of catching Covid-19.

Researchers from City, University of London, IE University, Spain and the University of Sydney examined the possible impact of Covid on Ultra Long Haul (ULH) flights.

To be classed as a ULH flight it has to last at least 14 hours per leg and fly direct from one major global city to another, according to the research team.

These flights are more efficient, and safer than flights requiring a layover but will likely always remain at a premium price, said lead author Linus Benjamin Bauer.

He believes that, in future, people will make more direct long-distance flights with support from domestic feeder transport networks linking to major airports.

A team of industry experts say that in future airlines are going to see a spike in passengers wanting direct flights between major cities rather than making a layover in packed hub airports where there is a greater risk of catching Covid-19

Covid-19 has sent shockwaves throughout the aviation industry, pushing a myriad of liquidity-strapped airlines into administration or part-government-ownership.

This has led to a strange phenomenon - a notable rise in long-haul flights connecting locations around the world without a change midway through the journey.

Some of this has been led by the fact a number of airlines had the opportunity to 'test out' the logistics of operating ULH flights, through repatriation and cargo delivery trips during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

This gave them unique data that helped show these flights were viable and potentially led to an increased desire to launch future routes.

TEN OF THE LONGEST NON-STOP FLIGHTS AROUND THE WORLD Newark - Singapore: Singapore Airlines - 18:30 hours (9,534 miles) Auckland - Doha: Qatar Airways - 17:40 hours (9,032 miles) Perth - Heathrow: Qantas - 17:25 hours (9,009 miles) Auckland - Dubai: Emirates - 17:05 hours (8,823 miles) Los Angeles - Singapore: Singapore Airlines - 15 hours (8,770 miles) Houston - Sydney: United Airlines - 17:30 hours (8,596 miles) Dallas/Fort Worth - Sydney: Qantas - 16:50 hours (8,577 miles) New YorkJFK - Manila: Philippine Airlines - 16:30 hours (8,520 miles) San Francisco - Singapore: United Airlines - 16:25 hours (8,446 miles) Johannesburg - Atlanta: Delta Airlines - 16:03 hours (8,439 miles) Advertisement

Bauer said these longer routes are likely to become much more common in future, as they offer a competitive advantage that could outperform other business models.

However, while some of it will be at the expense of the current layover network, it won't kill it off entirely as tourists are still more likely to opt for the cheaper 'Hub and Spoke' flights.

'Our argument is that ULH will increase in relevance, whilst H&S will reduce, which at a net level, will see less larger planes travel and an overall capacity reduction in global air travel by extension,' said co-author Daniel Bloch.

'It is likely that this reduction in net seat capacity will invariably push up prices of long-haul journeys, especially now as airlines have retired and phased out their larger aircrafts like the A380s and 747s.'

Combined with a strong domestic feeder system - through more local flights between the major long-haul airports - ULH operations could be the future of the industry - especially for business travel.

'The move will simultaneously produce higher seat-load factors and yields, heightened network flexibility, and unique health benefits tied to its ability to bypass densely populated hub airports,' Bauer explained.

'If one thing seems certain about the implications of the Coronavirus, it is that aviation will likely never come to resemble its recent, former self.'

In fact, it will look very different to anything suggested in predictions before coronavirus - including more very long flights mixed with domestic networks.

For the Perth-London service, for instance, Qantas relies on a strong domestic feeder network in Australia, Bauer explained, saying this connects Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide with Perth and then on to London.

For the Seattle-Bangalore flight, the carrier American Airlines would rely on the strong domestic feeder network of its partner Alaska Airlines.

From the European perspective, a strong pan-European feeder network to large hubs such as Heathrow, Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle would be required.

Direct UHD flights 'seek to directly connect cities in far reaching corners of the Earth', according to the research team.

They work by leveraging the enhanced capabilities of new-age aircraft, thereby saving time-sensitive passengers hours of total travel-time when compared to a traditional one-stop, Hub & Spoke itinerary.

Qantas operate a number of long-haul direct flights including between Perth, Australia and London Heathrow

These flights include trips between Perth, Australia and London as well as journeys that connect Singapore with New York - each taking at least 14 hours per leg.

'Despite often commanding a price premium, Ultra Long Haul became an especially preferable option among corporate travellers,' the team wrote.

This in turn worked to shape the available network of ULH routes around the world and led to these services proving to be a better option for time-sensitive travellers.

'During and after the pandemic, well witness an increase in demand for direct services - driven by the health-conscious passengers and elderly people with higher willingness to pay,' Bauer told MailOnline.

This would allow them to avoid large hubs in the Middle East or South East Asia due to COVID-19, as well as reduce the impact from jet-lag.

'The future rise in ultra long-haul flights along the Kangaroo Route (Australia-Europe) will have an impact on tourist-driven long-haul journeys,' he said.

'However, [the impact] will be limited since the leisure passengers arent one of the main targeted customer segments.'

Ultra long-haul operators like Qantas position themselves in the premium market segment by commanding a higher fare for the direct flight.

To compensate for the higher price, airlines offering long direct flights tend to use customer service and reliability as an added benefit to passengers.

'In this case, the feasibility of premium pricing is influenced by competition, customer perception of value, economic conditions and the dynamics between the relevant city pairs,' said Bauer, an aviation analyst.

By taking the last point into account, the worsening of the US-China relations, potentially accelerated by COVID-19, could lead to a boost in US-India relations and new direct routes between the two nations.

These flights are more efficient, and safer than flights requiring a layover but will likely always remain at a premium price, said lead author Linus Benjamin Bauer

'These developments could stimulate a myriad of new economic activities, which could thereby generate demand for new ULH services between the West Coast of the US and India,' the team wrote.

There is also interest in connecting more European locations such as Manchester, Frankfurt and Rome directly to Australian cities without a layover.

The key selling points of ULH appear to not only maintain the characteristics necessary to survive the COVID-19 era, but to become increasingly attractive as the industry attempts to return to some new form of normalcy, the authors explained.

AIR TRAVEL WAS A 'MAJOR' DRIVER IN SPREAD OF COVID-19, STUDY FINDS Covid-19 outbreaks have been worse in areas with major airports and large numbers of travellers passing through them, according to a global report. The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) said the spread of the disease was 'highly correlated' with air travel. It claimed the UK was a prime example of where constant flights, both domestic and international, had 'facilitated contagion'. The IEP's Global Peace Index report said: 'The flow of air passengers across and within country borders has been a major contributor to the spread of the virus'. A director at IEP, Serge Stroobants, said: 'The countries most impacted are countries that are really participating in global trade in the globalised world and the interconnected world.' 'These are countries in which you will find a large airport hub, giving the potential to people to travel from one country to the other. 'That's why, for example, the region of Milan in Italy, Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, London and New York, those big international hubs created more exchanges and more potential for the virus to grow.' Advertisement

Any health risks from these 14+ hour flights - such as dehydration, jetlag and lack of movement can be offset with modern cabin design and the benefits of avoiding Covid-19 hotspots including busy hub airports 'outweigh these risks', the team said.

'To this end, whereas ULH may have previously been steadily growing in popularity prior to the onset of the pandemic, there is now strong reason and evidence to believe that the implications of the Coronavirus will accelerate the acceptance and use of the point-to-point, ULH approach.'

The team believe that the coronavirus crisis provided a foundation for airlines to test out their ability to deliver these longer and more direct services.

A myriad of carriers conducted a range of special repatriation and cargo flights, which comfortably fell into the Ultra Long-Haul bracket.

This included, but was not limited to the likes of, El Al, SWISS Airlines, and Air Tahiti Nui, each of which each conducted record breaking ULH flights.

Importantly, these ULH flights provided both airlines and governments alike with the ability to deliver people back to their countries' of origin and maintain vital global supply lines, all in a safe and direct manner given the operations ability to bypass otherwise risky or infected stopover points.

In turn, due to the numerous new ULH operations having been conducted throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, more airlines than ever before have obtained otherwise inaccessible sets of data on the nature of such services.

As a direct result, this might spark even further interest in ULH operations from airlines who now recognise both the value in, and their ability to, deliver such services in a more scaled and commercial context.

'Ultra long-haul flights will remain a premium product with premium pricing, targeting a premium segment,' Bauer told MailOnline.

'The fundamental objective is to pitch a better bid for customers business than competitors are pitching by offering perceptibly more customer value to targeted customer segments,' he said.

During the post COVID-19 recovery phase in the upcoming next years, well witness an increase in fares on long-haul flights - including ULH services, said Bauer.

There will be an overall change to the whole airline industry in future - a mixture of more point-to-point flights and and feeder journeys - but an overall decline.

Researchers say a move towards more direct long-haul travel will require a more robust regional network of feeder routes - linking smaller airports with the larger hubs

'Well witness a drop in overall air travel in the short- and medium-term (subject to COVID-19 developments), however, the demand for travelling by plane will ultimately return to the long-term growth trajectory (2025 and beyond),' Bauer said.

Overall, with optimisation over scale set to become the gold standard for aviation, airline business models will be forced to adjust accordingly to the new-normal.

'While we have shown that higher load factors and yields would make the ULH business model more commercially viable than both traditional Hub and Spoke and low cost carrier operations, we have also presented a series of health benefits that come with ULH services,' the authors wrote.

'Not only would ULH passengers be able to bypass busy international hubs, within which physical distancing may become an issue once traffic builds up again, but also on-board an ULH service whereby distancing is easier to implement given the aircrafts' lower configuration levels.'

Things are going to get more expensive though, according to Bloch, who said it will take some time for the number of people flying to go back up to 2019 levels and things will become more expensive in the meantime.

'Its clear that many companies and industries are eagerly waiting to be able to freely travel for work again, of which there is significant pent up demand,' he said.

'To this end, ULH flights invariably appeal to this demographic due to its efficiency, their ability to work and rest uninterrupted, as well as its health benefits.'

He said ULH will become more relevant, hub and spoke less relevant and an overall reduction in capacity across the entire global air travel network.

'So at a simplistic level, yes, we would expect fewer flights overall, with a higher proportion of them being ULH than before,' said Bloch.

The findings have been published in the Journal of Air Transport Management.
GBP/AUD Exchange Rate Falls as Hopes on Coronavirus Treatment Boost Australian Dollar

The Pound to Australian Dollar (GBP/AUD) exchange rate dipped by -0.2% today, with the pairing currently trading around AU$1.820.

The Australian Dollar (AUD) benefited from a surge in risk-sentiment today, with the risk-averse Aussie benefiting from US President Donald Trumps authorisation of the use of blood plasma treatment for Covid-19 patients.

Joshua Mahony, Senior Market Analyst at IG, commented:

Markets have kicked off the week in style, with the FDAs decision to approve the convalescent plasma coronavirus treatment raising hopes that we could see a vaccine fast-tracked before long.

With no notable Australian economic data due out until later this week, the Aussie has benefited from the risk-on market mood today.

Pound (GBP) Sinks as Concerns Grow Over Brexit Developments

The Pound (GBP) remained subdued this week, with fears growing over the prospect of a possible no-deal Brexit post-December 31st. This follows comments from the EUs Chief Negotiator, Michel Barnier, who said that UK-EU negotiations were unlikely to materialise a post-Brexit trade deal.

Mr Barnier commented:

Today at this stage, an agreement between the UK and the EU seems unlikely. I simply do not understand why we are wasting valuable time.

Sterling has also continued to struggle due to growing doubts over the UKs economic recovery from the Covid-19 crisis.

Last Friday saw the release of the latest UK PMIs, with the flash Markit Services PMI for August beating forecasts and edging up from 56.5 to 60.1.

Duncan Brock, the Group Director at CIPS, commented on the report:

However, as the UK heads for the deepest recession in living memory, any celebration is premature as firms moved from the protection of furlough schemes to the harsh reality of job shedding with employment levels declining at their fastest since May. Reducing headcount was a quick fix for many firms struggling to maintain strong supply chains and their position in the marketplace amidst higher raw material and import costs.

GBP/EUR Forecast: Could a Breakthrough in Brexit Talks Buoy Sterling?

Pound (GBP) investors will be looking ahead to Tuesdays release of the UK CBI Distributive Trades Survey for August. Any improvement could give a boost to the GBP/AUD exchange rate.

Australian Dollar (AUD) traders will be looking ahead to Wednesdays release of the Australian construction work done figure for the second quarter. However, if this confirms consensus and falls by -5.8%, then we would see the Aussie suffer.

The GBP/AUD exchange rate will continue to be driven by Brexit developments this week. Any signs of a consensus on a possible trade deal emerging between the UK and the EU would buoy Sterling.
The three largest taxpayers contributed 2.256 billion in total to the state coffers.

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Companies active in the energy and automotive sector have paid the highest corporate tax to the state coffers.

This stems from the recent analysis published by the FinStat company. It revealed that the Slovak pipeline operator Eustream paid the most on corporate taxes, followed by the SPP Distribucia gas distribution company and the Bratislava-based carmaker Volkswagen Slovakia.

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The three companies paid altogether 2.256 billion to the state budget by August 20, which is 400 million less than last year, the TASR newswire reported.
New Delhi: The country's largest bank, State Bank of India (SBI), is likely to get a new chairman soon as Rajnish Kumar's tenure ends on October 7, 2020.

A virtual interview for the post is slated to be held on August 28. As per a top Finance Ministry source, the four managing directors (MDs) of the bank will appear for the interview.

"Earlier, three MDs of SBI -- Arijit Basu, Dinesh Khara and SC Setty -- were informed about the interview. But now the fourth, Ashwani Bhatia, who recently resigned as SBI Mutual Fund MD and surprisingly took over as the fourth MD of SBI on Monday (August 24), has also been told to appear for the interview," the source said.

"Although all the aspiring candidates have been intimated by the concerned authority on the telephone, no official communication for the interview has been sent to them. Selection for the post is expected to take into account their performance and seniority. The interview will be conducted by the government-recommended Bank Boards Bureau," the source added.

While the interviews are for the chairman's position, the bank will soon have a vacancy for an MD too after Arijit Basu retires at the end of October.

The present chairman incumbent, Rajnish Kumar, is on extension post-retirement. Asked about speculation that Kumar could be given a further extension, the Finance Ministry source said a decision would be taken only after the interviews. Taking Kumar's age into consideration, it is said that chances of another extension for him are bleak.

In 2016, Kumars predecessor Arundhati Bhattacharya too had received an extension because SBI was completing its merger with five associate banks. Kumar, 62, took charge on October 7, 2017. As per the statute, the chairman or CEO of a public sector bank can continue in service till the age of 65.
A young man will stand trial over the death of his baby son after pleading not guilty to a charge of murder.

Joseph William McDonald is alleged to have fatally injured seven-week-old son Lucas late last year. Lucas was admitted to a hospital in Benalla on October 25 and was then transferred to the Monash Children's Hospital, where he died on October 29.

Joseph McDonald. Credit:Victoria Police

Mr McDonald was seen leaving the Clayton hospital on the day his son died and handed himself into a police station in the days afterwards, following a public appeal for information on his whereabouts.

On Monday the 23-year-old from Benalla appeared before Melbourne Magistrates Court and pleaded not guilty to a single charge of murder. He opted to waive his right to a pre-trial committal hearing.
Washington: Republicans are planning an "optimistic and upbeat" four-day national convention that paints a positive picture of America's future following a pandemic that has claimed more than 170,000 lives and put tens of millions of people out of work.

President Donald Trump is hoping to use the prime-time spectacle to change the trajectory of an election campaign in which he trails Democratic nominee Joe Biden by an average eight points in the polls.

Intimately involved in the preparations: US President Donald Trump will appear every day of the Republican National Convention. Credit:Bloomberg

Trump is expected to make appearances each night and the former reality TV star has reportedly been intimately involved in planning the event which takes place from Tuesday to Friday AEST.

The official program of speakers released by the Republican National Committee is heavy on members of Trump's family, conservative allies of the President and non-politicians who have become prominent figures in the US culture wars.
CALIFORNIA  As California took 233 more lightning hits overnight, firefighters managed to contain multiple smaller fires as the SCU Complex Fire took the mantle of second largest fire in state history. Weather conditions remained more favorable than last week, but crews maintain vigilance for more strikes Tuesday.

Amid scorching heatwaves and ash peppering counties across the state, Cal Fire said Tuesday morning that the 1.25 million acres burned over the last few weeks makes the fires collectively larger than the State of Delaware.

More than 13,233 lightning strikes have hit California since Aug. 15, igniting more than 650 new wildfires, which have now burned more than 1.25 million acres. More than 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes, and seven have died in the catastrophic blazes, which have overwhelmed firefighters in California.

Fire crews are shorthanded and overwhelmed this season, with only 14,000 firefighters and 2,400 engines are currently battling 17 major fires.

In his Monday briefing, Newsom acknowledged this and said more aid will be arriving within 48 hours.

2,500 Lightning Strikes: SEE

According to Newsom, 375 engines have been requested from out of state, with eight en route from Montana. He added that 91 engines arrived in the past few days from Arizona, Indiana, New Mexico, Texas, Oregon, Utah and Washington. Additional National Guard Support will also be arriving from four states.

This satellite image provided by Maxar Technologies shows an overview of the SCU Lightning Complex wildfires, Saturday, Aug. 22, 2020, in California. Maxars WorldView-3 satellite is equipped with a Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) sensor that penetrates the smoke and enables users to detect active fires, hot spots and accurately map and measure burn areas. With SWIR imagery, burned vegetation appears in shades of orange/rust colors while healthy (not burned) vegetation appears in shades of blue. Active fires and hot spots glow orange/yellow. (Satellite image  2020 Maxar Technologies via AP)

"We are in a different climate, and we are dealing with different climate conditions that are precipitating fires that we haven't seen in modern recorded history," Newsom said at his Monday afternoon briefing.



Compared with 2019, California has already significantly tipped the scales in total acres burned and number of wildfires this year, Cal Fire said Monday morning.

"An astonishing 2,700 more wildfires have occurred this year than last, with an additional 1.4 million acres burned during the same time period," the agency said Monday in a news release.

Story continues

The SCU Complex Fire surpassed the the LNU Complex Fire overnight, which had gained 27 percent containment Tuesday morning. Having burned 363,772 acres at 10 percent containment, the SCU Fire has taken the mantle of second largest wildfire in California history.

Meanwhile, firefighters battling smaller fires such as the Salt, Hills, Jones, Elsmere and Post fires finally found success in the last 24 hours, nearly containing all of them.

The CZU fires had started to make some significant headway in suppressing the fires in the Santa Cruz mountains Monday, upping the containment to 17 percent. However, the fire had destroyed 330 buildings  twice the amount from yesterday.



A 70-year-old man was found dead in Santa Cruz County on Sunday night, bringing the death toll to seven this fire season.

"This is a coastal fire ... in the forest with a lot of redwoods that have simply never seen forest fires because of the weather conditions," Newsom said of the CZU Fire.

As 289 new lightning strikes kept firefighters on edge Sunday night, crews continued to battle the lightning complex fires and hundreds of other blazes burning over 1 million acres Monday.

Although forecasted thunderstorms were not as severe as predicted, 10 smaller fires broke out Sunday, which Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday was to be expected.

SEE ALSO: CA Wildfires Ignite Political Firestorm



The two largest fires, the LNU Lightning Complex and SCU Lightning Complex, are considered the second- and third-largest fires in state history. As of Monday, the LNU fires had scorched 350,030 acres with 22 percent containment, and the SCU fires had burned 347,196 acres with 10 percent containment.



With 2,211 evacuees in shelters, college dormitories and hotel rooms, there has been some anxiety surrounding COVID-19 and how to enforce social distancing in congregate shelters.



As Newsom visited several shelters in Northern California, he confirmed that temperature checks have been required as well as screening questions, strict mask-wearing guidelines and, in some facilities, tents set up to create barriers between households. Air purifiers are also being used in shelters and camps for fire crews.

However, he said the majority of evacuees are staying in non-congregate shelters such as the 31 hotels that have become available around Northern California and some college dormitories.

Although the National Weather Service called off the Red Flag Warning in the Bay Area, the warning is still in effect for much of Northern California as crews continue to be wary of more lightning strikes Monday.

The National Weather Service was forecasting hot, dry conditions, dry lightning and heavy wind gusts of up to 65 mph in Northern California this week; so far, the thunderstorms have been somewhat mild.

Evacuation orders and warning have been lifted in the following zones on the #RiverFire pic.twitter.com/qnsRyvi7Em

 CAL FIRE BEU (@CALFIREBEU) August 24, 2020

"This dry lightning will likely hamper efforts to contain the current fires and may spark new fires," Cal Fire said in a statewide news release Sunday.

Cal Fire predicts that lightning storms could persist in October and an above-normal fire potential could persist through October in Northern California.

Seven have died in the out-of-control fires, 115,000 have evacuated their homes, and more than 3,488 structures have been destroyed. The fires have hampered air quality up and down the state, prompting officials to issue evacuation warnings and air quality advisories.

More evacuation orders were issued in Alameda County at 3 a.m. Sunday, forcing thousands to flee from their homes and business fronts from the SCU Lightning Complex.

Newsom also secured more federal assistance from President Donald Trump on Saturday.

The Presidential Major Disaster Declaration is expected to help citizens in impacted counties by offering access to crisis counseling, housing and unemployment assistance as well as legal services. It will also provide federal assistance to help state, tribal and local governments fund fire agencies, recovery and other protective measures.

#LakeFire All evacuation orders for this incident will be lifted on August 25, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. Please drive safely as emergency vehicles may still be working in the area. There is no access from the south on Lake Hughes Road. @Angeles_NF pic.twitter.com/svUVKw5a4F

 L.A. County Fire Department (@LACoFDPIO) August 24, 2020

Have an emergency supply kit ready in the event of an evacuation:

Facemasks & sanitation supplies

3 days supply of non-perishables

3 gallons of water per person

Prescriptions

Clothing

Flashlights

Important documents



https://t.co/4IHPDeOfBA pic.twitter.com/wjxFdPQ0rb

 Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) August 23, 2020

"Thank you to the President for your partnership and granting this urgent Major Disaster Declaration," Newsom said in a news release Saturday. "California is battling two of the largest fires in our history and has seen nearly 600 new fires in the last week caused by dry lightning strikes. These are unprecedented times and conditions, but California is strong  we will get through this."

According to Cal Fire, the military is also supporting the effort with several C-130 aircrafts equipped with fire fighting systems that double as air tankers.

These Surreal Photos Demonstrate The Severity Of CA's Wildfires



"The hots are getting hotter. The dries are getting drier. Climate change is real," Newsom said as he addressed the wildfires in a video recorded for the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night. "If you are in denial about climate change, come to California."



Here are some of the major fires that were burning in California as of Sunday night, according to Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service:

SCU Lightning Complex

363,772 acres and 10 percent contained as of 8:14 a.m. Aug. 25

Start Date: Aug. 18

20 fires in the complex

Marsh 3,000 acres as of Aug. 24

Canyon/Reservoir (merged) 285,485 acres as of Aug. 24

Deer 3,104 acres as of Aug. 24

Counties: Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin, Stanislaus

Location: Multiple locations throughout Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties

Multiple evacuations ordered

READ MORE: South Bay Shelter Opens For CZU, SCU Fire Evacuees

READ MORE: More Evacuations And A Perfect Storm

LNU Lightning Complex Fire

352,913 acres with 27 percent containment as of 7:10 a.m. Aug. 25

Hennessey Fire (Merged Fires  Gamble, Green, Aetna, Markley, Spanish, Morgan, Round): Hennessey Ridge Road in Napa County, California. The fire was 293,602 acres and 26 percent contained Aug. 24

Walbridge Fire (merged with Stewarts): West of Healdsburg. The fire was 54,068 acres with 5 percent containment Aug. 24.

Meyers Fire: North of Jenner. The fire was 2,360 acres and 95 percent contained as of Aug. 24.

Start Date: Aug. 17

Counties: Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Yolo, Solano

READ MORE: LNU Lightning Complex: Fires Hit 350K Acres with 22% Containment

CZU August Lightning Fire



78,869 acres, 13 percent contained as 8:18 a.m. Aug. 25

Start Date: Aug. 17

Warnell Fire has now merged with CZU Lightning Fire

Counties: San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties

Evacuations in place

READ MORE: Firefighters Begin To Make Progress On CZU Lightning Complex Fire

READ MORE: Thieves Target California Firefighter  Then Came The Scammers

River Fire



48,424 acres, 33 percent contained as of 8:28 a.m. Aug. 25

Start Date: Aug. 16

County: Monterey

Location: Pine Canyon and River Road, east of Salinas

Evacuations in place

Read More: Immediate Evacuations Issued For Carmel And River Fires

Carmel Fire

6,695 acres, 30 percent contained as of 8:21 a.m. Aug. 24

Start date: Aug. 16

County: Monterey

Evacuations in place

Location: Cachagua Road and Carmel Valley Road, south of Carmel

Read More: Immediate Evacuations Issued For Carmel And River Fires

Moc Fire, Tuolumne County

2,800 acres, brush, 40 percent contained as of 8:36 a.m. Aug. 25

Evacuations in place

Apple Fire

33,424 acres, 95 percent contained as of Aug. 18

Start Date: July 31

County: Riverside

Location: Off of Oak Glen Road and Apple Tree Lane, north of Cherry Valley

READ MORE: Apple Fire Burn Area Mapped, Spared From Flooding and Mudslides

BTU/TGU Lightning Complex Fire

3,527 acres and 40 percent contained as of Aug. 24

Start Date: Aug. 17

Elkhorn 33,720 acres

Ivory 13,000 acres

Potters (5-4) 927 acres

Counties: Butte, Tehama and Glenn counties

Location: Southwest of Red Bank Road

Lake Fire

31,089 acres and 65 percent contained as of 8:07 a.m. Aug. 25

Start Date: Aug. 12

County: Los Angeles

Location: Lake Hughes Road and Prospect Road, southwest Lake Hughes

North Complex Fire

41,880 acres, 5 percent contained as of Aug. 24

Start Date: Aug. 18

County: Plumas

Location: Flemmings Sheep Camp

Evacuations in place

Holser Fire

3,000 acres, 80 percent contained as of Aug. 25

Start Date: Aug. 17

County: Ventura

Location: Holser Canyon Road and Piru Canyon Road, south of Lake Piru

READ MORE: Holser Fire 95 Percent Contained: Ventura County Fire

Salt Fire

1,789 acres, 100 percent contained as of Aug. 25

Start Date: Aug. 18

County: Calaveras

Location: Salt Springs Valley Reservoir

Hills Fire

2,121 acres, 100 percent contained as of 9:10 p.m. Aug. 24

Start Date: Aug. 15

County: Fresno

Location: Highway 33 and Sutter Avenue, south of Coalinga in Fresno County

Woodward Fire

2,487 acres, 5 percent contained as of Aug. 24

Start Date: Aug. 18

County: Marin

Location: Point Reyes National Seashore

Evacuations in

READ MORE: Woodward Fire Prompts Evacuation Orders In Marin County

Dolan Fire

Jones Fire

705 acres, 78 percent contained as of 7:37 a.m. Aug. 25

Start Date: Aug. 17

County: Nevada

Location: Jones Bar Road, Yuba River Drainage, northwest of Nevada City

Evacuation in place

Elsmere Fire



200 acres, 100 percent contained as of Aug. 24

Start Date: Aug. 3

County: Los Angeles

Location: Elsmere Grapevine Road and Santa Clarita Truck Trail, Newhall

Post Fire

120 acres, 100 percent contained as of Aug. 24

Start Date: Aug. 2

County: Los Angeles

Location: Northbound I-5 and Highway 138, south of Gorman in Los Angeles County

(As Cal Fire's website has been down intermittently, here are some alternate places to find the latest information on fires burning across California: The National Forest Service's Fire Map I Cal Fire's official Twitter account I Cal Fire's Official Facebook page)

State, federal, local, and military resources are on the front lines aggressively battling the dynamic wildfires across California. As they continue their efforts, you can do your part to plan, prepare, and stay aware. Learn more at https://t.co/sWZPp02O9t. pic.twitter.com/OattIdjyAl CAL FIRE (@CAL_FIRE) August 21, 2020

This article originally appeared on the Across California Patch
Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 24 : The Kerala Assembly on Monday passed a resolution against the leasing of the Thiruvananthapuram International Airport to Adani Enterprises. This as the Congress-led opposition accused Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan of running with the hare and hunting with the hound.

The state government had on Friday approached the High Court to stay the Centre's move to lease out the international airport.

It was last week that the Centre decided to lease out the Thiruvananthapuram airport under the PPP model for 50 years to Adani Enterprises. Both the state government and the state opposition vehemently opposed the move.

Based on the initial reactions, Vijayan called an all-party meeting. Barring the BJP, all others opposed this and the Chief Minister wrote two letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to hand the airport to the state government-backed company that had bid for it, but lost out to Adani Enterprises.

On Monday in the Assembly, Vijayan moved a resolution to this effect. Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala, in his speech targeted the state government for what he alleged was a dubious deal between his government and Mumbai-based law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, who were the legal consultants of the Kerala government company KSIDC, which bid for the Thiruvananthapuram airport.

One of the partners of this firm is the father-in-law of Gautum Adani's son Karan Adani.

"Vijayan government says one thing and does exactly the opposite. They cheated the people of Kerala by engaging this law firm, which had a role with Nirav Modi (diamond dealer). This law firm's relation with Adani is also now out in the open. Even though we will support the resolution moved by the Chief Minister, he should not have cheated the people of Kerala," said Chennithala.

An angry Vijayan shot back and said it was most unfortunate the way the opposition spoke about this.

"They (opposition) are trying to create a smokescreen and unlike them, whatever we do is like an open book and the people of Kerala know it too. The opposition thinks we are also like them and engage in undesirable things, but we don't do any such things. This law firm only did the legal vetting and they never ever had any role in quoting the figure," said an angry Vijayan.

In February 2019, the financial bid for privatising five airports in the country was opened and it was won by Adani Enterprises.

The Kerala government through one of its companies too placed a bid, but the Adani firm won it by quoting a bigger amount. While the Kerala government bid for Rs 135 per passenger, the Adani firm quoted Rs 168.
Tropical Storm Laura is currently crossing Cuba and is expected to move into the southeastern Gulf of Mexico overnight. There are still lingering uncertainties about its exact path, but here are five keys takeaways from the latest forecast:

The National Hurricane Center's 4 p.m. update showed the storm's center making landfall along the western Louisiana coast, near the Texas border, Wednesday night into Thursday morning. It is expected to strengthen to a hurricane, possibly as strong as a Category 2, before then.

Hurricane conditions are possible by late Wednesday anywhere from Port Bolivar to west of Morgan City, Louisiana. A hurricane watch has been issued for that area. If the storm path shifts further southwest, additional hurricane watches may be needed farther south along the Texas coast.

On Laura's current track, Houston could avoid the worst of the winds, waves, and rains, writes meteorologist Eric Berger of Space City Weather. He cautioned that the forecast is far from certain, and the storm's path could still shift.

Based on the current forecast models, Galveston Bay and Part Bolivar could see a storm surge between 2 to 6 feet.

The mayor of Port Arthur ordered an evacuation beginning Tuesday morning for the 55,000 residents of that city on the Texas-Louisiana border. City of Galveston leaders issued a voluntary evacuation for residents in low-lying areas and on the west end of the seawall.
BRADY ANDERSON, Chariho, Wrestling, Sophomore; Anderson finished first in the 152-pound weight class at the Griswold Midseason Invitational tournament. Anderson went 3-0 in the tournament, pinning all of his opponents in the first period. Anderson is 10-4.

LYDIA LASKEY, Stonington, Gymnastics, Senior; Laskey finished first in all four events in meets against NFA and Westerly. Laskey had an all-around score of 33.75 against NFA and 34.60 against Westerly.

RILEY PELOQUIN, Westerly, Girls Basketball, Sophomore; Peloquin scored 22 points and had 19 rebounds in two games. Peloquin is averaging 7.6 points and 7.5 rebounds a game for the Bulldogs.

DEONDRE BRANSFORD, Wheeler, Boys Basketball, Sophomore; Bransford scored 25 points and had 28 rebounds in a pair of Wheeler victories. Bransford is averaging 10.6 points and 12.1 rebounds per contest for the Lions.

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Home Search ICH Glitzy Convention Conceals Emerging One-Party Tyranny By Mike Whitney August 23, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - Here are a few takeaways from the Democratic Convention: The Democrats are running on the same platform they ran on in 2016. The Democrats put style above substance, flashy optics above ideas or issues. The Democrats think that hollow tributes to diversity and inclusion will win the election. The Democrats have abandoned white, working class voters opting instead for people of color. The Democrats have learned nothing from Hillary Clintons defeat in 2016. In 2016, Democrat front-runner, Hillary Clinton lost the election because she failed to see her support was eroding in the key Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump won all three states with a measly 77, 651 votes total. All three states were expected to go Democrat but flipped to the GOP due to Clintons support for free trade and immigration policies that cost jobs and imposed unwelcome demographic changes on the working people of those states. The Democrats and Hillary have never accepted the factual version of how the election was lost. Instead, they fabricated a conspiracy theory about Trump colluding with Russia. Although the Mueller Report proved that the claims of meddling were baseless, Clinton and the Dems continue to trot them out at every opportunity. On Tuesday at the convention, Hillary again reiterated the lie that Trump stole the election. She said: Vote like our lives and livelihoods are on the line, because they are. Remember: Joe and Kamala can win 3 million more votes and still lose. Take it from me. We need numbers so overwhelming Trump cant sneak or steal his way to victory. The determination on the part of the Democrats to mischaracterize what actually happened in the election is not a trivial matter. It suggests that deception is central to their governing style. Party leaders do not think their supporters are entitled to know the truth but rather believe that events must be shaped in a way that best serves their overall political interests. For Democrats, lying is not a personal failing, but an opportunity for enhancing their grip on power. This is from an article in The Guardian: Donald Trumps electoral college victory rests on the shoulders of more than 200 so-called pivot counties across the US. That is, counties that voted for Barack Obama only four years earlier. The most decisive of these swings occurred in Pennsylvanias Luzerne county, nestled in the north-east part of the stateThere, voters gave Trump a nearly 20-point victory after going for Obama by almost 5% in 2012. But Trumps win in Luzerne was also noteworthy for its magnitude. His 26,000 vote plurality in Luzerne comprised almost three-fifths of his plurality in the state as a whole, and with it Pennsylvanias 20 coveted electoral votes. (The Forgotten review: Ben Bradlee Jr delivers 2020 lessons for Democrats, The Guardian) Critical battleground states tilted in Trumps favor because Democratic policies had decimated their communities and eviscerated their standard of living. Author Ben Bradlee Jr. explains this phenom in his book The Forgotten which should be required reading at the DNC. Heres a clip from the review at the Guardian: The Forgotten documents the ravages of deindustrialization, lost jobs, crime and drugs. It captures the sense of displacement tied to a changing and less monochromatic America. Once upon a time, Luzerne was home to coal and textiles, dominated by Protestants from Wales and Catholics from Ireland and continental Europe. Not any more. Luzerne is poorer and smaller, for many a less recognizable place. Not surprisingly, immigration and Nafta come in for constant criticism. (The Guardian) This is the real reason Hillary was defeated. Russia had nothing to do with it. The Dems abandoned the white working-class people who had always voted for them and began to cobble together their Rainbow coalition. No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media Get Our Free Newsletter When Hillary denounced these people as Deplorables, it forced more of them to join Trump team. The rest is history. Heres more from the same article: In the absence of a recession, however, the party stands to face the same electoral map it did in 2016. In fact, Ohio now looks an even tougher nut to crack. Much as the Democratic base loathes the president, reality cannot be wished away. Luzerne would be a good place for the party to start addressing this reality. (The Guardian) The point were trying to make is that the effectiveness of the Democrat Convention can only be measured in terms of its impact on potential voters. So, why have the Dems shrugged off any effort to reach out to the people who could help them win? Its not that complicated. The Dems are merely abandoning the people who, they believe, will leave anyway as their globalist economic agenda becomes more apparent putting more downward pressure on overall living standards. Its worth noting, that when Obama left office in 2016, this process was already well-underway. According to a Gallup poll, 71 percent of the people said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going. (in Obamas last year.) Only 27 percent said theyre satisfied. So, even though Obamas personal approval ratings remained high, his handling of the economy was extremely unpopular. (except on Wall Street, of course.) During this same period, the PEW Research Center conducted a survey titled: Campaign Exposes Fissures Over Issues, Values and How Life Has Changed in the U.S which showed why Trump was steadily gaining on Hillary. Here are a few excerpts from the report: Among GOP voters, fully 75% of those who support Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination say life for people like them has gotten worse GOP voters who support Trump also stand out for their pessimism about the nations economy and their own financial situations: 48% rate current economic conditions in the U.S. as poor. Within the GOP, anger at government is heavily concentrated among Trump supporters  50% say they are angry at government Among Republicans, a majority of those who back Trump (61%) view the system as unfairamong Trump supporters, 67% say trade agreements are bad thing Half of Trump supporters (50%) say they are angry at the federal government. Anger at government  and politics  is much more pronounced among Trump backers than among supporters of any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat (Campaign Exposes Fissures Over Issues, Values and How Life Has Changed in the U.S, PEW Research Center) So, a higher percentage of Trump supporters think they are getting screwed-over by an unfair system. They think free trade only benefits the rich, they think the government is unresponsive to their needs, they think the system is rigged, and theyre really, really mad. So, which speaker at the Democrat Convention addressed the concerns or complaints of white working-class people who now almost-universally harbor these same feelings?? No one, because no one in the Democrat party plans to do anything about these issues, in fact, just the opposite. Now that the Dems have been subsumed by Wall Street and their big globalist donors, things are going to get dramatically worse for working people who will see a vicious attack on essential social services and programs as soon as the election is over. The massive build-up of debt by mainly Democrat Governors who deliberately drove their states into bankruptcy at the behest of Faucis Vaccine Gestapo will now be met by a growing demand for austerity on a scale unlike anything weve experienced in the last century. The country is being prepared for an excruciating restructuring that will create a permanent underclass that will provide an endless source of sweatshop labor for the multinational carpetbaggers. Those jobs will likely go to members of the Dems rainbow coalition while white, working class people in Americas heartland with their strong sense of patriotism will be seen as a potential threat to the emerging new order. Its clear that the Dems anticipate resistance to their plan by the contemptible way they have branded struggling workers as white nationalists and racists. But is it true or are the Democrats and their deep-pocket allies preemptively denigrating these people and supporting BLM rioters to head-off growing resistance to their strategy of total control through widespread mayhem, decimation of the economy and extermination of the American middle class? Author CJ Hopkins summed it up like this in a recent article at The Unz Review: What we are experiencing is not the return of fascism. It is the global capitalist empire restoring order, putting down the populist insurgency that took them by surprise in 2016. The White Black Nationalist Color Revolution, the fake apocalyptic plague, all the insanity of 2020  it has been in the pipeline all along. It has been since the moment Trump won the election. No, it is not about Trump, the man. It has never been about Trump, the man GloboCap needs to crush Donald Trump not because he is a threat to the empire, but because he became a symbol of populist resistance to global capitalism and its increasingly aggressive woke ideology . It is this populist resistance to its ideology that GloboCap is determined to crush, no matter how much social chaos and destruction it unleashes in the process... (The White Black Nationalist Color Revolution, CJ Hopkins, The Unz Review) Bingo. It is the populist resistance to global capitalism that is the defacto enemy of the Party elite, the same elites who conspired with senior-level members of the Intelligence Community, the FBI, the DOJ and the Obama White House to spy on the Trump Campaign, infiltrate the presidential transition, and to try to topple the elected government. And while the coup plotters have still not been brought to justice, they are now within spitting distance of their ultimate objective, which is seizing executive power and using it to crush the fledgling opposition, impose a one-party system of government, and transform America into a corporate superstate ruled by Global Capital. Heres a clip from an article by Gary D. Barnett at Lew Rockwell: By the end of this next planned phase of the virus scare, a global reset of the world economy will be ready to launch. This reset will be mammoth in scope, as everything we have known will be restructured.  Those out of work in the final stage will most likely stay out of work, pushing the dependency state to new levels sought by the ruling class.  Controlling the population will be a key component of the plan, including population size, birth rates, movement, and personal contact among individuals. The elimination of normal human interaction is sought, and this is only the beginning. The ultimate goal is total control, and every tool in the box of the tyrants will be used to gain that control. Restraint by the ruling class will be non-existent, as this staged reset is now going forward at a very accelerated pace. (The Economic Insanity of This Coronavirus Pandemic Plot and the Coming Global Reset, Lew Rockwell) The coup plotters have chosen the candidates they want to carry out the next phase of their operation. All they need now is to win the election. Mike lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com. - " Source " - The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Post your comment below See also Humor : Honest US Postal Service Ad The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. 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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 20:50:14|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- China's grain inventory has been kept at a high level, with abundant government grain reserves and policy reserves, an official with the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration said on Monday.

The ratio of China's grain inventory to consumption far exceeds the warning level designated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the stockpile of rice and wheat, two staple grains of the country, can feed the whole population for more than one year, the official said in an interview with Xinhua.

Thanks to bumper harvests in the past years, as well as strong grain reserves, China has managed to keep grain prices at a generally stable level amid fluctuations in international prices, the official noted.

The country will step up the protection of arable land and stabilize grain output, while enhancing management of grain reserves, the official said. Enditem
Biden Says Not Concerned If Trump Announces Vaccine Days Before Election: Itd Be Wonderful

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said on Aug. 23 that he is not concerned that President Donald Trump could announce a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus vaccine days before the Nov. 3 election.

Biden made the remarks in response to a question from ABC World News Tonight host David Muir, who asked Biden to comment on the presidents forecast earlier this month that a vaccine for the CCP virus vaccine could be readily available in the United States by the end of the year, or in some cases, before the 2020 presidential election.

No, Im not concerned. I would hope that theyd be able to have the vaccine, Biden said Sunday in his first joint interview with his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).

Now, most of the medical guys and women I talked toI get advised four times a week for an hour and a half from the leading health care providers and immunologists in the countryand they tell me thats highly unlikely to be able to do that, Biden continued.

But if God willing it happened, itd be wonderful.

Biden said his concern is whether or not the CCP virus vaccine will be made widely available and be accessible to all people.

It has to be thoroughly transparent, he said. The entire medical community has to understand what was done, how the vaccine was developed, what test did it go through, so that people have confidence in it.

Trump, when asked on the Geraldo Rivera radio program on Aug. 6 when a vaccine might be ready, said, Sooner than the end of the year, could be much sooner.

Sooner than November 3? he was asked.

I think in some cases, yes possible before, but right around that time, Trump said.

Later at the White House, Trump said he was optimistic a vaccine would be available around that date. When asked if it would help him in the election, he said, It wouldnt hurt. But Im doing it, not for the election; I want to save a lot of lives.

The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives! @SteveFDA  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2020

Top government health officials have said corners would not be cut in the race to find an affective vaccine to fight the virus. Three vaccines are currently in phase 3the final stageof clinical trials with AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer.

The president said during a White House press briefing on Aug. 14 that more than 100 million doses of a vaccine are expected to be available before the end of the year and 500 million doses ready shortly thereafter.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. government infectious diseases official, told Reuters on Aug. 5 that there might be an indication that at least one vaccine works and is safe by year end.

The Trump administration earlier this month struck a deal valued at up to $1.525 billion with Massachusetts-based drugmaker Moderna to secure 100 million doses of its potential CCP virus vaccine. Modernas price per dose comes to around $30.50 per person for a two-dose regimen. Its vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273, is on track to be completed in September, the company said this month.

Under the agreement, the U.S. government will also have the option to purchase another 400 million doses of the vaccine candidate from Moderna.

It is part of the U.S. governments Operation Warp Speeda national effort to quickly develop and deliver a safe and effective vaccine and therapeutics to combat the CCP virus. Trump has also secured partnerships with Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi, and GlaxoSmithKline to support the large scale manufacturing of the vaccine candidates. He has also said that the full power and strength of military will be behind supporting the logistics of distributing any authorized vaccine so that everybody can take it.

Under Operation Warp Speed, weve shaved years off of the time that it takes to develop a vaccine and weve done it while maintaining the FDA gold standard for safety, Trump said in a statement this month.

Mimi Nguyen Ly and Reuters contributed to this report.
New York, Aug 25 : US President Donald Trump vowed to continue the America First agenda after winning renomination at the Republican National Convention on Monday, setting the stage for the November showdown with Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump made a surprise appearance interrupting the roll call of votes after enough had been recorded for his renomination and defended his record in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic and building the economy besides criticising Biden.

He said he would bring jobs back to the US and continue his tariff battle with other countries -- both of which would impact India.

Trump, who has overwhelmed the Republican Party and rewritten the rules of political engagement and set the country on a new conservative and nationalistic path, takes on Biden with his liberal platform in one of the most divisive campaigns.

Trump won 2,550 votes of delegates elected in the primaries -- the intra-party elections.

Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld ran against Trump in the primaries, but was crushed by the Trump juggernaut and received just one vote.

Trump accused the Democrats of "using Covid to steal the election" by introducing universal mail-in votes in some states that he said can be manipulated by the Democrats and asked his party members to watch out. Under this system, every voter in those states would get postal ballots even without requesting for them.

While the convention was in progress, a panel of the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives was holding a hearing with Postmaster General Louis Dejoy, whom they accused of dismantling the postal system to disrupt the postal balloting.

Trump boasted about his economic record of low unemployment and high stock market prices that ground to a halt with the Covid-19 pandemic and said it is now getting back on track.

"We will never forget what China did to the US by spreading coronavirus and not alerting the world in time about it," he said.

While the US was advancing in 2020, "China had the worst year in decades," he said.

He warned that "China will own this country" if Biden wins because of his previous record and his son Hunter Biden's ties with Chinese government-linked businesses netting him millions.

Trump is trailing Biden by 7.6 per cent in the aggregation of national polls by RealClearPolitics, but the post-convention bump in polls that has usually happened did not occur for the Democrats this time.

State representatives announcing the votes during the roll call listed what they said were Trump's victories in confronting China, rebuilding the military, bringing back jobs to the US and confronting the trade inequalities and criticised Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris as radical socialists.

The vote for Trump's renomination was held at a scaled-back convention in Charlotte because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unlike at the Democratic Party convention, where the nomination of Biden was done with digital fanfare at a night-time session, the Republicans nominated Trump at the opening session in the morning.

Delegates at the convention declared their state's votes in person but the nomination process was more routine and lacked the colour and the local backgrounds that the Democrats presented.

Vice President Mike Pence, who was earlier renominated by voice vote, also interrupted the roll call of votes when Trump's votes were just short of a majority mark with a speech promising to "drain the swamp" of Washington.

He laid out what he said were his and Trump's achievements and attacked Biden and Harris for representing the "radical left".

He said that Biden was outsourcing leadership to Harris, who he said was from the far-left, even more liberal than Bernie Sanders, who is a self-styled socialist.

Pence, who is a former Governor of Indiana, was picked by Trump to be his running mate in the 2016 elections that they won against the odds.

The Republican convention follows a more traditional format with day-long sessions, holding the main events at night featuring star speakers. Trump, in a departure from tradition is scheduled to speak on all four days of the convention and not just on the last day, Thursday, to accept the nomination.

The Democratic Party's convention that was held last week entirely virtually was a digital virtuoso performance that the Republicans will have to match to catch the eyes of the voters.

Unlike the Democrats, the Republican convention has a hybrid model with 336 delegates present physically at the convention site representing the 2,551 who were elected at the party primaries across the US, while others will be participating remotely.

The holding of the convention was marred by controversy after North Carolina's Democrat Governor Roy Cooper turned down Trump's demand to hold a full convention, with several thousands participating without full Covid-19 precautions.

Trump said the conventnion would be moved to Jacksonville, Florida, but had to abandon that plan and return to Charlotte and agree to the Covid-19 restrictions.

The convention began with a Catholic prayer that included an anti-abortion statement.

Abortion is a hot issue in US politics in which Democrats support abortion rights, while Republicans want to outlaw it.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter at @arulouis)
CHARLOTTE  As North Carolina saw a significant jump at the pump, making the nations top 10 largest weekly changes while South Carolina continues to be a part of the top 10 least expensive markets.

With two storms threatening the gulf coast region, its likely to see a spike in gas prices, said Tiffany Wright, spokesperson, AAA  The Auto Club Group in the Carolinas. If platforms and rigs are offline for a long period of time, supply could tighten and prices could very well be impacted.

On the week, North Carolinas average increased a total of seven cents, sitting at $2.03. This is five cents more than a month ago and 36 cents cheaper than a year ago. South Carolinas average increased a total of two cents, sitting at $1.92. This is two cents more than a month ago and 32 cents cheaper than a year ago.

Mondays national average is $2.18, increasing by one cent on the week. That is the same price as a month ago and 41 cents cheaper than a year ago.
On Sunday, the United States sent China a message. Be concerned. Be very concerned.

On Sunday, the United States sent China a message.

Be concerned. Be very concerned.

As Washington and Beijing's relations continue to deteriorate, William Brent Christensen, the US envoy to Taiwan, joined Taiwan's independence-leaning president Tsai Ing-wen at military memorial service.

The fact that neither Christensen nor Tsai spoke at the annual event for soldiers killed by Chinese bombing in 1958 on Kinmen, a Taiwanese-controlled island near the mainland coast  or that Washington has no official relationship with Taiwan, which split with the communist-ruled mainland in 1949 following a civil war  is immaterial.

With Donald Trump fighting for his political life against Joe Biden and the US president desperate to be seen as "tough on China" in all avenues combined with Tsai, after a landslide victory in January, warning China against threats of force against the self-governed island, it is possible that Beijing could be facing its biggest challenge to its domination in its own backyard.

Nothing has been more of a constant irritant to China than Washington's support for Taiwan's democratically-elected government. Leave aside the poke in the eye to Beijing that Washington, despite no formal relationship with Taipei, is its top supplier of arms and that the US' stated Taiwan policy is "strategic ambiguity".

That Sunday's unusually high-profile event  broadcast live by some Taiwan TV channels  coming just days after Taiwan released a video of its troops fending off attacks from the mainland will not go unnoticed by Beijing's foreign policy mandarins (who have thus far offered no comment).

As per the South China Morning Post, Taiwan's defence ministry issued this statement accompanying the video: The most egotistical country can thoughtlessly provoke a war and the most ignorant government can be caught in the flames of war.

It further added that the "repeated provocation and intimidation" by the People's Liberation Army would not work but only have only the effect of triggering the wrath and antipathy of Taiwan's people and hurt peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan is clearly feeling it.

Its bold statement and video come on the heels of the US finalising a sale of 66 F-16s to it and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar becoming the highest-ranking US official to visit Taiwan since 1979 (prompting a Chinese protest).

Which doesn't much sound like the United States is pursuing its policy of "strategic ambiguity".

How Taiwan came to exist

Taiwan, whose more than 23 million people are squeezed onto a mostly mountainous island roughly the size of Maryland, has only 15 diplomatic allies, all smaller nations. However, it issues its own passports, has a foreign minister and maintains its own military and legal system. Economically, it is an important hub in the global high-tech supply chain.

Most of the islands residents are descendants of migrants who began arriving from Chinas Fujian province in the 1600s when Taiwan was a Dutch colony. The emigration flow grew after Taiwan was incorporated into China under the Qing Dynasty later in the 17th Century, but Taiwan was not given formal status as a Chinese province until 1885.

A decade later, it was transferred to Japan, which ruled it as a colony until the end of World War II. It then split again from China in 1949 after Chiang Kai-shek relocated his Nationalist government to the island after being driven off the mainland by Mao Zedongs communists. Aiming to retake power on the mainland, Chiang and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, maintained martial law on the island until 1987, when the democratic Opposition began to gather its strength.

Tensions with China

Talks in 1992 ended the long, formal silence between Taipei and Beijing, but tensions have risen and fallen since then. Fearful that Taiwan was headed for a declaration of formal independence, China lobbed ballistic missiles into the seas north and south of the island ahead of the first fully democratic presidential election in 1996.

The tactic was seen as backfiring badly, with Chinas bete noire, the pro-independence Lee Teng-hui, winning handily and the US Navy deploying two aircraft carrier battle groups in waters near the island in a demonstration of Washingtons determination to follow through on its own legal requirement to consider threats to Taiwan a matter of grave concern.

Beijing claims Taiwan as its own territory, to be annexed by force if it deems necessary. It demands that Taiwan recognise the 1992 consensus that it says recognized Taiwan and the mainland as part of a single Chinese nation, though defined separately as the Peoples Republic of China or the Republic of China, Taiwans official name.

Things between Taiwan and China seem to be coming to a head since Tsai's landslide election victory in January, which signalled strong public support for her tough stance against Beijing.

She wasted no time in warning communist-ruled China, which views Taiwan as a renegade province, not to try to use threats of force against the self-governed island.

US-China relations

How would one describe the relationship between the United States and China?

To steal a phrase from Facebook: "It's complicated".

Since Bill Clinton took office in the 1990s, critics have accused the United States of going soft on China in hopes of accessing their large market.

From granting of most-favoured status to China's admission into the World Trade Organisation to Beijing now being the second-largest holder of US debt (behind Japan) the countries have indeed come a long way as George W Bush and Barack Obama followed Clinton.

After Donald Trump taking office in 2016, the relationship saw peaks and valleys before completely nose-diving since the coronavirus pandemic, which Trump has derisively dubbed the 'Wuhan Flu'.

Attitudes within the United States' Congress and military also seem to be changing.

As per this Voice of America piece, an increasing number of military analysts and members of Congress are now arguing that the United States needs to revisit its policy for Taiwan's defence.

"It might actually make war even more likely, emboldening Xi Jinping and the CCP to undertake military action against the island by deluding themselves into thinking the U.S. might remain on the sidelines," Michael Hunzeke, a professor at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government, told VOA in an email.

For once, it seems the Trump administration may be ahead of the curve.

China's response to United States' manoeuvrings will be watched closely.

With inputs from agencies
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan has said that if everything goes well, India would get a vaccine against the novel coronavirus by the end of this year.

Three COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including two indigenous ones, are in different phases of development in India.

The phase-one human clinical trials of the two indigenous COVID-19 vaccine candidates, one developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with ICMR and the other by Zydus Cadila Ltd, have been completed and the trials have moved to phase-two, ICMR Director General Dr Balram Bhargava had said recently.

The Serum Institute of India, which has partnered with AstraZeneca for manufacturing the COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed by the University of Oxford has been permitted for conducting its phase two and three human clinical trials in India.

It is likely to start the trials next week.

In a tweet in Hindi, Vardhan said on Saturday, "I hope that if everything goes well, India will get a coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year."

Meanwhile, the apex health research body, ICMR, is in the process of developing an online vaccine portal which will provide information related to COVID-19 vaccine development in India and abroad, with the majority of the updates in several regional languages in addition to English.

The aim of creating the website is to provide all information and updates relating to the COVID-19 vaccine development on one platform as all the information in this regard is scattered as of now, Samiran Panda, Head of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases at ICMR, told PTI on Saturday.

The idea behind making the updates available in regional languages is to make sure that every citizen is able to access the information.

The portal is likely to be functional by next week, Panda said.

With a single-day spike of 69,239 infections, India's COVID-19 caseload mounted to 30,44,940 on Sunday, while the death toll climbed to 56,706 with 912 fatalities being reported in 24 hours, the data updated at 8 am showed.
Two large lakes in the western United States have white rings around them. These circles show how sharply water levels are dropping. They are a warning that the 40 million people who use water from the Colorado River face a much drier future.

The Colorado River supplies seven U.S. states and Mexico. The seven states are Colorado, Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. People use its water in large U.S. cities such as Denver, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

Colby Pellegrino is with the Southern Nevada Water Authority. He told The Associated Press: The future of the river is going to be drier than the past. All the climate models and the current drought suggest that, he said. Every sector is going to have to learn how to do more with less.

Many laws and agreements govern the use of the Colorado Rivers water. In 1944, for example, the United States signed a treaty with Mexico to guide water sharing between the two countries.

But even within the U.S., there are different agreements on how water is used. Twenty-two tribes in the Colorado River Basin have water rights that have been confirmed by courts, notes the Congressional Research Service. These agreements allocate  or divide and give out  amounts of water.

The Colorado River supplies enough water for 15% of total U.S. crop output and 13% of total livestock production. It also supplies Lake Mead and Lake Powell  the two largest man-made reservoirs in the United States.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation oversees much of the Colorado Rivers water supplies. It recently released estimates that suggest Lake Powell and Lake Mead will drop 5 meters and 1.5 meters, respectively, by January 2021. The numbers are in comparison to water levels in January 2020.

Even with the drop, Lake Meads levels will likely stay above the point at which water cuts take place in Arizona and Nevada. In other words, officials will have more time to prepare for when such cuts may be necessary.

Since 1990, the population of the Las Vegas area has more than tripled. Las Vegas gets nearly 90% of its water from the Colorado River. But the area has been able to use far less water than it is allocated.

The Las Vegas area has done this by reusing almost all water used indoors and replacing nearly 790,000 square kilometers of grass with desert-friendly plants.

In other areas, officials are working to find different water sources for growing cities and farms. In Arizona, where nearly 40% of the water supply comes from the Colorado River, officials need to find other water sources, notes Ted Cooke of the Central Arizona Project.

Once Lake Meads water levels sink low enough, Arizona will have the most painful cuts of any state based on a priority list  first rural farmers, then eventually cities.

Its at least a couple of decades until were saying, We dont have one more drop for the next person that comes here, he said. But people certainly ought to be aware that water... is expensive and, with climate change, going to get even more expensive.

I'm John Russell.

Sam Metz reported on this story for The Associated Press. John Russell adapted it for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________



Words in This Story

sector  n. an area or part of something; a part of an economy that includes certain jobs

livestock  n. farm animals

reservoir  n. a large lake that is used to supply water

triple  v. to become three times as great or as many

priority  n. something that is more important than other things and that needs to be done or dealt with first

decade  n. a period of 10 years

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Calling it "a truly historic announcement," U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday hailed a federal government emergency authorization for use of convalescent blood plasma that he declared would "save countless lives" of coronavirus patients.

Trump and his health secretary, Alex Azar, at a briefing for reporters, noted a 35-percent decrease in mortality among those younger than 80 who were not on a respirator, a month after receiving the treatment early in the course of their disease.

"We dream in drug development of something like a 35-percent mortality reduction," Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said alongside the president. "This is a major advance in the treatment of patients."

Convalescent blood plasma comes from patients who have recovered from the coronavirus and is rich in antibodies. It has been used to treat tens of thousands of COVID-19 patients in the U.S. Just before the president's comment, the Food and Drug Administration announced it has authorized -- but technically not fully approved -- the use of blood plasma containing antibodies from patients who have recovered from COVID-19.

That announcement came a day after Trump, on Twitter, declared that "The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics."

In his tweet he said: "Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!" Trump was referring to the date of the presidential election in which he faces former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee.

The commissioner of the FDA, Dr. Stephen Hahn, told reporters that the agency had determined that the blood plasma treatment was worth granting the emergency authorization following an analysis of 20,000 of the 70,000 patients who had received the treatment, as well as based on other studies.

A "35-percent improvement in survival is a pretty substantial clinical benefit," he added. "We've seen a great deal of demand for this from doctors around the country."


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VR Education Holdings PLC - Waterford, Ireland-based virtual reality education and enterprise training - Hires Harry Kloor as non-executive director, effective immediately. Kloor is a US-based entrepreneur and scientist who has acted as an advisor to the National Aeronautics & Space Administration. He is chief executive officer and co-founder of Beyond Imagination, "a company seeking to build general-purpose robotic humanoids", according to VR. Mike Boyce will step down from the VR board on Monday next week after two and a half years "to pursue other business interests".

Current stock price: 12.00 pence

Year-to-date change: up 60%

By Tom Waite; thomaslwaite@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Prince Philip is perhaps one of the most interesting members of the British royal family. He was a prince without a home and when he wed Queen Elizabeth II in 1947, he was penniless and without any real titles or claims. Still, the Duke of Edinburgh found solace in the Royal Navy, a role that he would have to leave when the queen stepped into power in 1952.

Though the prince has never been king, hes been seen as a dutiful partner to the queen for well over seven decades. In fact, it is said that he is the head of the royal familys household in that he rules his family with an iron fist.

Yet, the duke hasnt exactly escaped rumors about his alleged infidelity. In fact, hes addressed it head-on in the past.

RELATED: Did Prince Philip Ever Cheat on Queen Elizabeth

Prince Philip had a wild party streak

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth IIs father, King George VI, and her ascension to the throne, there was reportedly a ton of tension between herself and the prince who felt that he was cast aside in a helpmate role. Netflixs The Crown depicts this tension very well.

In fact, is has been reported that the Duke of Edinburgh, lashed out by indulging in some rather wild partying. In his book, Prince Philip: The Turbulent Early Life of the Man Who Married Queen Elizabeth II, Philip Eade writes that the duke was known as The Naked Waiter. It was rumored that he enjoyed rip-roaring stag parties. Allegedly Prince Philip once served dinner to some guests wearing only a mask and a tiny lace apron.

There were also whispers that the princes wild streak included other women.

RELATED: Prince Philip Once Explained Why He and Prince Charles Have Always Struggled to Get Along

Rumors spread that Prince Philip cheated on Queen Elizabeth II

Though The Crown never says so explicitly, the series does allude to the fact that the prince enjoyed the company of other women. He was rumored to have had an affair with stage performer Patricia Kirkwood when the queen was eight months pregnant. The rumor ruined Kirwoods career after the duke entered the dancers dressing room and they were seen having dinner and dancing into the early morning hours.

The duke also had a close friendship with Sacha Hamilton, Duchess of Abercorn. According to Icons the pair were seen holding hands in the Bahamas. The duchess tried to clarify their friendship, but she only made it worse. Its complicated and at the same time quite simple, she told reporters. [Philip] needs a playmate and someone to share his intellectual pursuits.

The Baltimore Sun also reported via Vanity Fair that Prince Philip was romantically involved with an unnamed woman whom he met on a regular basis in the West End apartment of a society photographer.

RELATED: Prince Philip Cheating Rumors While Queen Elizabeth Was 8 Months Pregnant Ruined Actresss Career

Prince Philip had a lot to say about those cheating rumors

Despite all of these reports and rumors, Prince Philip has adamantly denied all accusations of infidelity.

Privately, he will say, How could I?' Mike Parker, the dukes first Private Secretary told The Telegraph in 2004. Ive had a detective in my company, night and day, since 1947.

Still, no marriage or relationship is perfect. During his 50th anniversary celebration with the queen in 1997, the duke said, I think the main lesson we have learnt is that tolerance is the one essential ingredient in any happy marriage You can take it from me; the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.
A file photo of burning debris in a riot affected area in Delhi on February 25. (Image: Reuters)

Bloomsbury Indias decision to withdraw a book on Delhi riots has miffed many authors who have announced to withdraw their books which were to be published by the publication.

The book, Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story by authors Monica Arora, Sonali Chitalkar and Prerna Malhotra, was scheduled to be published in September. However, on August 22, Bloomsbury India announced that it will not publish the book after there was outrage over a virtual pre-publication launch, which it said was being organised without its knowledge.

The backlash to the publishers decision to pull out began almost immediately. Sanjeev Sanyal, Indias Principal Economic Advisor and author of several books, said he would never publish a book with Bloomsbury India.

Listen: Work near home the new WFH says WeWork India CEO Karan Virwani

A few weeks ago, I had raised the issue of how a tiny cabal controls Indian publishing and constantly imposes ideological censorship. We have just witnessed one example of how this insidious control is wielded, said Sanyal.

Retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and author Sanjay Dixit announced that he has terminated his contract with Bloomsbury India for his yet-to-be-released book.



Announcement: I have terminated my contract with @BloomsburyIndia for my due to be released book Nullifying Article 370 and Enacting CAA (20.09.2020 release), and assigned it to @GarudaPrakashan - please do not place pre-orders on the @BloomsburyBooks title now. August 23, 2020





3. If Bloomsbury does not retract its decision, my co-author and I have decided that we will return the substantial advance paid to us by Bloomsbury for our forthcoming book.

We cannot allow our book to be published by a house that does not respect Freedom of Expression. pic.twitter.com/nwTvC3Soue  Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) August 22, 2020

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) professor and author Anand Ranganathan said he and his co-author will return the advance paid to them by Bloomsbury for their forthcoming book if it does not retract its decision, adding that they cannot allow their book to be published by a house that does not respect Freedom of Expression.

Author Sandeep Deo also announced that he was withdrawing all his books from Bloomsbury India in a tweet in Hindi.



The spectre of 'cancel culture' now looms over #India . The mob that forced the cancellation of 'Delhi Riots 2020' is no different from the Nazi mob that burned books. The publisher is the collaborator. Name, shame and shun @BloomsburyIndia

Signs of Fascism? This IS Fascism. pic.twitter.com/Iel4tO8oav

 Kanchan Gupta (@KanchanGupta) August 22, 2020

Kanchan Gupta, a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, called Bloomsbury Indias decision fascist.

Author Amish Tripathi, too, objected to the publishers decision. In his tweet, Tripathi said, Deplatforming is as bad as burning a book.



If you are an author who believes that only books of your ideological side should get published, then you are an extremist.

If you control the platform, then deplatforming is as bad as burning books.

The answer to a book is another book. Deplatforming is sophistry.  Amish Tripathi (@authoramish) August 23, 2020

A day after Bloomsburys announcement, Garuda Prakashan said it would publish the book. Garuda Prakashan, which claims to promote "indic narrative", said the book was expected to hit the stands within 15 days.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 08:23:22|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

- - - -

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Brazil on Sunday reported it registered 494 deaths from COVID-19 in the previous 24 hours, the lowest number of fatalities in a single day since May 31.

According to the Ministry of Health, the figure brought the total death toll to 114,744.

- - - -

SANTIAGO -- Chile's Ministry of Health on Sunday reported a total of 397,665 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection and 10,852 deaths from the disease.

According to the ministry, in the previous 24 hours, tests detected 1,942 new cases and 60 more patients died.

- - - -

ADDIS ABABA -- Ethiopia's confirmed COVID-19 cases reached 40,671 after 1,638 new cases were confirmed on Sunday, the country's Ministry of Health said.

The ministry said in a statement that 16 more patients succumbed to illnesses related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought the total number of COVID-19 related deaths in the East African country to 678.

- - - -

NAIROBI -- Kenya on Sunday hailed China for the support it has provided to strengthen the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rashid Aman, chief administrative secretary of the Ministry of Health, said that the Chinese government and organizations have supported Kenya in terms of donating critical medical supplies to boost response to the pandemic.

- - - -

CAIRO -- Egypt confirmed on Sunday 103 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total cases registered in the country since the outbreak of the pandemic to 97,340, said the Health Ministry.

Meanwhile, 19 patients died from the novel coronavirus, bringing the death toll to 5,262, while 809 others were cured and discharged from hospitals, increasing the recovered cases to 65,927, the ministry's spokesman Khaled Megahed said in a statement.

- - - -

ANKARA -- Turkey's number of COVID-19 cases increased by 1,217 to 258,249 on Sunday, Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said.

Meanwhile, 19 people died in the past 24 hours, taking the death toll to 6,121, Koca tweeted. The number of severe cases is still increasing, he said, noting that the rate of pneumonia patients is at the limit of control. Enditem
Cops in Wisconsin "must be held accountable" after shooting a Black man in the back in front of his young children, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said Monday.

Police shot Jacob Blake, 29, multiple times in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday as he opened the door to a vehicle where, an attorney hired by his family said, his three children sat. Blake was taken to a Milwaukee hospital and is stable after coming out of surgery, NBC News reported.

The officers involved were placed on administrative leave as an investigation takes place, the Wisconsin Department of Justice said Monday. It was not immediately clear how many officers shot Blake.

The shooting, the latest in a string of police violence against Black Americans captured on video this year, sparked uproar and protests against systemic racism in Wisconsin. Democratic politicians called not only for justice for Blake but also for changes to address systemic racism at the root of excessive use of force against Black people.

"This calls for an immediate, full and transparent investigation and the officers must be held accountable," Biden said in a statement Monday.

"These shots pierce the soul of our nation. Jill and I pray for Jacob's recovery and for his children," the former vice president continued. "Equal justice has not been real for Black Americans and so many others. We are at an inflection point. We must dismantle systemic racism. It is the urgent task before us."
The National Communication Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Sammy Gyamfi says the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has deceptively crafted its 2020 manifesto to mislead Ghanaians to vote for them.



According to him, the 2020 manifesto of the NPP offers no hope to Ghanaians and that the manifesto was purposely designed to deceive Ghanaians to vote for the party in the upcoming December polls.



He said the NPP cannot be trusted to keep its manifesto promises since the last manifesto the party used in the 2016 general elections, only 14 per cent has been fulfilled.



One would have thought that Saturdays charade of a manifesto launch by the NPP would have been preceded by an honest and sincere apology to the Ghanaian people by President Akufo-Addo himself for failing to honour an overwhelming majority of his promises such as has never been seen in the annals of Ghanas history, he said.



He added: But as usual, he chose the path of deception in the hope that he will be second time lucky with well-decorated lies and political chicanery. God being so good, he has been exposed so much such that every Ghanaian who followed the manifesto launch knows that the entire exercise was a scam calculated for votes and nothing more.



Mr. Gyamfi who was addressing the media at the partys headquarters in Accra on Monday, August 24, 2020, as part of the partys weekly press briefing said, if the party could only fulfill 14 per cent of its 2016 manifesto, then Ghanaians should not be entrapped by the content of the partys 2020 manifesto.



According to him, One thing that has made this grand deception more manifest is the 2020 manifesto promise of President Akufo-Addo to construct an ultramodern Airport at Cape Coast.



Why deception?



He explained that In an interview on Cape Coast-based Atlantic FM on Friday, 21st August, 2020 ahead of their manifesto launch, President Akufo-Addo made the point that an airport in Cape Coast is not yet justified given the close proximity of Cape Coast to the Capital City of Accra and Takoradi both of which have airports. Yet, in less than 24 hours at the manifesto launch in Cape Coast, his Vice. Dr. Bawumia announced a promise to the people of Cape Coast that they will build an ultramodern airport and habour for them if elected.



That, Mr Gyamfi, thinks begs the question as to what sort of feasibility was conducted on the Cape Coast Airport project between the time President Akufo-Addo spoke on Atlantic FM and the manifesto launch. Just like this knee-jerk deceptive promise, the entire 2020 manifesto of the NPP is a 419 promise intended for votes and not meant to be kept.



He has, therefore called on President Akufo-Addo and his Vice, Dr Bawumia, to apologize to the people of Cape Coast and the entire nation over what he described as a 419 manifesto.



In all humility, we will like to implore the good people of Ghana to dismiss this 419 NPP manifesto ab initio. This is because, President Akufo-Addo, his Vice Dr. Bawumia and the entire NPP establishment cannot be trusted to deliver on their promises. If President Akufo-Addo could break 86% of his first term manifesto promises when he knew he will be seeking a second mandate from the Ghanaian people, then how many of his latest 2020 manifesto promises will he break if elected, now that he will not be seeking another mandate from Ghanaians again? Your guess is as good as mine.



NDC Manifesto



He said the NDC will on Monday, August 31, 2020 launch its manifesto in Accra, and that the partys position on the construction of an airport for Cape Coast will be known.

Source: Graphic.com.gh









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YECHANG, China - There are many challenges to applying facial recognition technology to animals: Pigs don't have distinguishing features and cows often want to lick the cameras. But there is an advantage: Farmyard inhabitants tend not to complain about impingements on their civil liberties.

Having mastered facial recognition for humans to an alarmingly precise degree, even picking out wanted criminals from huge crowds, Chinese tech whizzes are turning their attention to furrier faces.

"We've been using it for sheep, pigs and cows," said Zhao Jinshi, who studied at Cornell University and founded Beijing Unitrace Tech, a company developing software for the agriculture industry.

"For pigs, it's more difficult because pigs all look the same, but dairy cows are a bit special because they are black and white and have different shapes," Zhao said as he checked on the technology installed in a pilot project here at a farm in Hebei province, outside Beijing.

China has led the world in developing facial recognition capabilities. There are almost 630 million facial recognition cameras in use in the country, for security purposes as well as for everyday conveniences like entering train stations and paying for goods in stores.

But authorities also use the technology for sinister means, such as monitoring political dissidents and ethnic minorities.

One Chinese AI company, Megvii, which has been blacklisted by the Department of Commerce for alleged involvement in the Chinese government's repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang, is applying its technology to a program to recognize dogs by their nose prints. Other tech companies around the world have had a go at identifying chimpanzees, dolphins, horses and lions, with varying degrees of success.

Chinese entrepreneurs see an opportunity to apply this know-how to agriculture as farms become bigger and more commercialized, and as the rural population ages, limiting the number of people able to do manual work.

For humans, facial recognition works by measuring distances between features like eyebrows and lips. But for cows, the software detects patterns and shapes on the animals' faces and hides. With 50 photographs from different angles, Zhao's software can tell a Daisy from a Bessie.

Farmers load information such as health conditions, insemination dates and pregnancy test results into the system, which syncs up with cameras installed above troughs and milking stations. If everything works, farmers can amass valuable data without lifting a finger.

"We can monitor how long the cow is drinking for, how much it's eating, how many times a day it visits the trough," Zhao said as the cows walked in a row from their outdoor pen toward the milking shed.

Signs of illness or unusual behavior can be detected using artificial intelligence and treated quickly by a human, rather than relying on farmers to inspect the herd for potential problems.

"This system is very powerful and it will definitely make our work easier," said He Ye, the manager of the farm in Hebei province. The farm has to buy the cameras, but Zhao's company has been providing the technology for free while it irons out the wrinkles.

"When the weigh scale is installed, I will be able to monitor them in real time," he said. If a cow shows symptoms of illness or any other problem, He gets an alert on his phone.

This kind of information for each animal used to be collected from electronic tags punched through their ears or worn around their ankles. The problem was that the cows were always trying to remove them - and often succeeding.

It's a challenge to install the cameras in a farmyard, where there is water and mud everywhere. But even more challenging is the fact that cows are very curious, said Zhao.

"If you make a little change, they will notice it. If you put up a sign or change anything at all, the cow will notice," he said. Then the cow will often try to nuzzle or lick or otherwise check out the new item.

This initiative fits nicely with the Hebei provincial government's goal to double milk production within two years and improve safety.

"The milk industry has completely changed," said He, the farmer. "The standards for milk production increased so much - it's become must more rigorous, with requirements about sterilization and other sanitation regulations."

Long before the coronavirus - which scientists believe began in bats then jumped through an intermediate host, probably pangolins, to humans working in an exotic meat market - China was known for low food standards and repeated scandals, such as melamine added to baby formula.

Millions of pigs were culled during a swine flu outbreak over the past year, and there have been several cases of bubonic plague, linked to marmots.

China is now paying more attention to food hygiene. With the spread of the coronavirus, China's government has banned the trade and consumption of wildlife such as civet cats and bamboo rats.

"Intelligent farming" is beginning to change how the agricultural sector operates, and China's technological giants are getting in on the action, focusing on pork, China's favorite meat.

Alibaba, the tech behemoth, has been developing voice recognition technology for pigs to try to detect if the animals are in pain or trouble, while online retailer JD.com has been working on an A.I.-powered system to develop feeding plans for individual pigs.

This kind of technology could be useful on farms, said Gosia Zobel, a scientist with AgResearch, a New Zealand government institute.

"There are obvious constraints - like the technology working properly on farm, appropriately validating what is being monitored, and data handling - but these challenges are worth tackling if they bring animal welfare benefits," she said.

While farmers in other parts of the world are increasingly turning to technology to offset aging populations and labor shortages, China is mainly motivated to produce more domestically, said Salah Sukkarieh, a professor of field robotics at the University of Sydney.

"These technological advances are driving individual plants to get the most out of each square meter of land, to increase yields and reduce variability," Sukkarieh said. "In China, this is mostly about food security and growing more on its national land."

China feeds 22 percent of the world's population with only 10 percent of the world's arable land. That creates extra incentive for China to improve food standards and production, including through the use of advanced technology.

If only those cows would leave the cameras alone and the pigs would develop more distinguishing features.

- - -

The Washington Post's Wang Yuan contributed to this report.
Agbor Nkongho cuts 50th birthday cake flanked by loved ones WhatsApp

Human Rights Lawyer Felix Agbor Anyior Nkongho alias Agbor Balla celebrated his 50th birthday with a glittering gala at the Buea Mountain Hotel, attended by his family, friends, collaborators, and well-wishers.

The Founder/President of the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, CHRDA, arrived at the dinner Sunday night in a sleek dark suit, white shirt, black bow tie, and black shoes flanked by his exquisitely-dressed friends with three cakes in front of them  one in Arsenal colours.

After the cutting of the birthday cake and receiving kind wishes for the hundreds that showed up for the celebration, Agbor Nkongho showed his appreciation for the crowd by clapping his hands together and bowing his head, as well as taking photos with them.

Wining, dining and dancing crowned the golden jubilee of the human rights lawyer.

Felix Agbor Anyior Nkongho is a Virgo, born on Sunday, August 23, 1970. He was raised in Great Soppo Buea and attended the famous Saint Josephs College Sasse.

He is a Barrister at Law of the Supreme Court of Cameroon and Nigeria. He graduated from the University of Yaounde with an LLB in English Private Law, after which he attended the Nigerian Law School in Lagos wherein he graduated with a BL Second class Upper Division with a 1st Prize in Civil Procedure.

He was enrolled as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria in December 1996. He holds two masters degrees  an LLM (Cum Laude) in International and European Comparative Law at Vrie Universiteit Brussels and also earned an LLM (Cum laude) in International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law from the University of Notre Dame, USA on May 21, 2006.

Agbor Nkongho also holds a Diploma in Public International Law at Academy of International Law, Hague, Holland, and a Diploma on Theory and Practice of Conflict Prevention in Africa, the University of Leipzig, Germany.

Agbor Nkongho worked as a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for International Law University of Brussels, Associate Legal Officer at the International Criminal Court for Sierra Leone, Legal Officer Trial Chamber International Criminal Court for Sierra Leone, Human Rights Officer United Nations mission in Afghanistan, Legal Officer United Nations Police in DR Congo and Legal Officer UN Mission in Afghanistan.

He created the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in 1998 and in 2005 it was transformed to the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa upon a meeting with other African students of the LLM program at Notre Dame University, USA.

He is the Vice President of the African Bar Association in charge of Central Africa, past President of Fako Lawyers Association (FAKLA), and the Founder and Chairman of the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA). Agbor Nkongho is equally founder and leads Agbor Nkongho Law Firm in Buea, Cameroon.

Felix Agbor Anyior Nkongho is a human rights lawyer, the first Chairperson of the Southern Cameroons European Coordinating Committee (SCECC), and led a delegation with ace human rights activist, Albert Mukong to the President of the EU Commission to discuss the Anglophone problem.

Agbor Nkongho has worked on several cases of marginalized and victims of human rights abuses. He led a peaceful strike action of lawyers and teachers to protest against the hyper centralized and majority French-speaking government in Cameroon, which undermines the Common Law System and Anglo-Saxon Educational system of the minority Anglophones in Cameroon.

Agbor Nkongho was President of the now outlawed Cameroon Anglophone Civil Society Consortium (CACSC) which was comprised of teachers, trade unions, and lawyers of the Common Law System who called for a return to Federalism as a system of government which will address structural discrimination and marginalization of Anglophone people. The Anglophone Consortium was tasked to dialogue with the government on the Anglophone problem and negotiate a solution.

Agbor Nkongho was arrested on January 17, 2017, after several failed attempts by the government of Cameroon to negotiate a short-term solution to the Anglophone problem with him.

Agbor Nkongho was charged with terrorism, rebellion to incite civil war, revolution, contempt against the State, and secession which carried the death penalty. His arrest marked a wave of street protests, radicalization, and demonstrations demanding his release. The government's response was a brutal crackdown which further radicalized the population and many started demanding independence for the Anglophone regions.

The United Nations through Francois Lonseny Fall, Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA) visited Agbor Nkongho in Kondengui Maximum Security Prison and later called on the government of Cameroon to release him. Amnesty International, University of Notre Dame, The African Bar Association, The Law Society of Upper Canada, Front Line Defenders, Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada, International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales, Common Law Lawyers Association, Fako Lawyers Association and Central Africa Human Rights Defenders Network (REDHAC) actively advocated and called for his release.

On August 30, 2017, President Paul Biya issued a decree, stopping legal proceedings against Felix Agbor Anyior Nkongho and several others arrested who were facing trial before the military court.

As part of broad consultations after his release from jail, Agbor Nkongho held a meeting with all-party parliamentary groups in the UK House of Lords and discussed the Anglophone crisis at Chatham House.

Barrister Agbor Nkongho clocks 50 (c) Facebook

He was consulted by Rt Hon Patricia Scotland QC, Commonwealth Secretary-General, and Harriett Baldwin, UK Minister of State for Africa during separate official visits to Cameroon to discuss solutions to the Anglophone crisis. He met with Ambassador Peter Henry Barlerin, U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Cameroon to discuss solutions to the Anglophone crisis.

Upon request by US Congress Foreign Affairs Committee, Agbor Nkongho presented a written statement for Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations Subcommittee Hearing on the Crisis in the Republic of Cameroon. He addressed the Canadian House of Commons Committee on International Human Rights. He recently issued a joint appeal for peace with German MP, Dr. Christoph Hoffman. He equally recently briefed a high level German Parliamentary Delegation in the presence of the German Ambassador to Cameroon

Agbor Nkongho has written extensively on: "The Right of the Southern Cameroonians to

Self-determination under International Law", "An Appraisal of the Special Court for Sierra Leone", Referral of Sudan to the International Criminal Court, "The Law as a Mechanism for Women Discrimination in Sub-Saharan Africa". He is a member of Cameroon Bar Association, Nigerian Bar Association, International Bar Association, Hague Academy of International Law.

As an activist he advocated for non-violent change and through his organization, Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, he has documented thousands of cases of human rights abuses and violence in Cameroon while proposing a political and humanitarian solution to the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon to avoid civil war or genocide.

Agbor Nkongho received the Award of Excellence by The Cameroon Returnees, he was honored with the African Public Impact 2018 by African Achievers Award, and he was awarded the Mandela Human Rights Prize and recently honored with the Guardian Post Newspaper with the award of Human Rights Achievement of 2018.

He served as Instructor at the Department of Law, the University of Buea from June 2, 2015, to May 6, 2020.
As the president spoke in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday shortly after delegates formally renominated him, a hodgepodge of journalistic strategies emerged.

CNN took the most drastic approach, cutting away from Mr. Trump in the middle of his remarks to Republican delegates. This is a sad thing to say, the anchor John King told viewers, but a lot of what you just heard from the president of the United States is wrong, misleading and outright lies. Wrong, misleading and outright lies. CBS also interrupted Mr. Trump with an analysis from the correspondent Major Garrett.

MSNBC carried the entirety of Mr. Trumps speech live, opting for real-time analysis in on-screen graphics. When the president asserted that only a fraudulent election could result in his defeat in November, a caption read: Without Evidence, Pres. Trump Claims He Will Only Lose the Election If It Is Rigged.

After Mr. Trump finished, the NBC News anchor Chuck Todd ticked through a lengthy fact-check, noting that the speech was filled with so many made-up problems about mail-in voting that if we were to air just the truthful parts, we probably could only air maybe a sentence, if that much.

Fox News carried the presidents speech live, but did not offer a correction to Mr. Trumps false claims. The anchor Harris Faulkner later asked a guest, the Trump campaign spokeswoman Erin Perrine, to back up some of the presidents assertions; Ms. Perrine offered no concrete evidence to do so.
ALTON  Few people showed up Monday for Congressional candidate Ray Lenzis postal stop in Alton, but the Democrat still had plenty to say to those who were there.

Lenzi has accused his Nov. 3 opponent, U.S. Rep. Mike Bost, R-Murphysboro, of little action in support of the postal service. Bosts vote Saturday to give the postal service $25 billion more to manage COVID-19 and mail-in vote challenges did not change Lenzis mind Monday.

He (Bost) speaks out of both sides of his mouth, like Trump, Lenzi said at a Monday noon stop at Altons main post office. His postal service support is mild and tepid at best. His little, weak vote across the aisle is minimal.

Hes trying to have it both ways, and were not going to allow it, Lenzi said.

Lenzis comments came as he concluded a four-day tour of 17 post offices in the 12th Congressional District, that began Aug. 19, culminating with morning stops in Granite City, Wood River and Alton.

His visit came two days after Bost, on Saturday, said he has consistently supported the U.S. Postal Service and worked to ensure it has the resources necessary to fulfill its constitutional mission. But he added that, while he supported the additional funding, he shared President Donald Trumps concerns over the process in place to count mail-in ballots in November.

An Alton resident at Lenzis Alton stop said it took six to seven days for their great-grandson in Springfield, Illinois, to receive a birthday present mailed through the postal service.

Lenzi said U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, has said he will not bring up the emergency postal funding bill in the Senate and Trump has said he would veto it.

We love our postal carriers, Lenzi said. We give them cards at the holidays with money in it to show our appreciation. We stand with our essential workers, and this pandemic has really shown us who the essential workers are.

Lenzi said Bost should vote to approve emergency legislation to prevent the postal service from dialing back service. Lenzi also noted unsupported claims by Trump of potential voter fraud with mail-in ballots.

When have we ever had an American president who says any election that he doesnt win is, by definition, illegitimate? Lenzi said.

This is unconscionable, Lenzi said. Its the eighth article of the Constitution. The postal service is meant to tie the country together. Thats why we had post roads.

Lenzi said the postal service assaults are in line with Trumps close ties to Russia and the attempt to bring Ukraine into the middle of international relationships.

Were almost immune to it, and to mess with our mail delivery in the age of a pandemic, how cruel is that? he asked.
President Donald Trump used his first speech at the Republican National Convention on Monday to declare again that he is not going to lose Texas in November.

Trump, who is scheduled to speak multiple times during the four-day convention, took time to assure delegates that Democrats cannot win Texas because of their positions on climate change that will cost the state oil and gas jobs. He said Democrats are for no religion, no guns, no oil and gas.

I dont think youre going to do too good in Texas with that sort of platform, Trump said.

Trump added that George Washington could come back from the grave with Abraham Lincoln as his running mate, and youre not going to win the state of Texas if you have no oil, no guns and no religion.

Texas Democratic Party officials almost immediately responded by reminding the public of the toll COVID-19 has taken on the state, a point the party intends to make regularly during the final 70 days of the election. More than 11,000 Texans have died, and more than 3 million people in the state remain out of work.

All because of Donald Trumps leadership, said Abhi Rahman, spokesman for the Texas Democratic Party.

Although no Republican has lost Texas in a presidential election in 44 years, public polling has shown a close race in 2020. Trump carried Texas by 9 percentage points over Hillary Clinton in 2016, but Democrats have pointed to surging voter registrations and a close U.S. Senate race in 2018 as evidence that this year is going to be a lot closer.

TRUMPS TEXAS GROUND GAME: Why Donald Trump is confident hell carry Texas again

Trump also warned about a rigged election if he loses in November and declared that his administration has done more than any presidential administration in history.

Because of COVID-19, Republicans are holding a stripped-down version of a typical national convention, with most convention-goers attending virtually. Still, there is a delegation of Texans in Charlotte, N.C., site of the convention, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who announced to the crowd that all the states delegates were awarded to Trump.

On behalf of our entire delegation, we cast all 155 votes for my friend and the only hope that every American in the country has for true liberty and true freedom and true opportunity: Donald J. Trump for president of the United States of America, Patrick said.

CRENSHAW SPOTLIGHT: Houston Rep. Dan Crenshaw gets starring role at Republican National Convention

Trump has made clear hes betting big on the oil and gas industry to assure hell win Texas again in November. Just last month, he was in Midland speaking at an oil rig, warning that the zealots, radicals and extremists are trying to shut down your industry.

While the Texas economy has undoubtedly diversified over the last 20 years, the oil and gas industry is still a dominant force. Last year, more than 428,000 Texans worked directly in the industry, according to the Texas Oil and Gas Association.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has called for addressing climate change. But during the Democratic National Convention last week, Biden stressed that his $2 trillion proposal includes funding that would lead to good, high-paying union jobs in the energy sector for people as fossil fuels are phased out over time.
Lukashenko orders 'stringent measures' to confront NATO on Belarus border

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 8:33 AM

Belarus's President Alexander Lukashenko has ordered the army to take "stringent measures" against NATO troops, who are "seriously stirring" near the country's borders.

Inspecting military units near Belarus's border with Poland, Lukashenko said he ordered his defense minister to defend western Belarus, as NATO troops in Poland and Lithuania were deployed near their borders with Belarus.

"It involves taking the most stringent measures to protect the territorial integrity of our country," he said.

The president visited the Grodno region ahead of large-scale military exercises planned for the end of this month.

NATO, however, rejected that it deployed troops to the region, saying the US-led military alliance "poses no threat to Belarus or any other country and has no military buildup in the region."

Lukashenko has already expressed concern about foreign meddling in the internal affairs of his country.

Last week, he warned about potential military action by NATO against Belarus.

He blames the US and its European allies for sponsoring violent protests by the opposition, which contests the re-election of Lukashenko in the August 9 presidential vote.

"The US is planning and directing it, and the Europeans are playing along," Lukashenko said on Friday.

The Belarus president said the opposition was trying to stage a coup against his government.

The European Union (EU) this week rejected his re-election and vowed to levy sanctions against the country.

Tikhanovskaya will not run for president

Opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who fled to Lithuania after losing the election to Lukashenko, said on Saturday that she will not run for president again.

"During the campaign I didn't see myself as a politician but I pushed myself forward," she said. "I don't see myself in politics. I am not a politician."

Tikhanouskaya, 37, who was an English teacher, entered the presidential race after authorities jailed her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger who intended to run.

She admitted that she had received calls from foreign governments including Canada, the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and others.

Lukashenko won Belarus' presidential election earlier this month by a landslide, securing a sixth term in office.

Opposition supporters have been alleging vote rigging and have staged rallies in protest.

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iStock/WachiwitBY: CATHERINE THORBECKE and LUKE BARR



(WASHINGTON) -- TikTok has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the government's pending ban of the popular video-sharing app, the company announced Monday.



The company said in a statement that the executive order announcing the ban, signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month, has the potential to strip the rights of its community "without any evidence to justify such an extreme action, and without any due process."



The app, where users share short video clips with music, has exploded in popularity in recent months, especially among Gen Z-ers, and has an estimated 65 million to 80 million users in the U.S.



"Now is the time for us to act," TikTok said. "We do not take suing the government lightly, however we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our community and employees."



The company argued that the executive order banning TikTok with "no notice or opportunity to be heard" is a violation of the Fifth Amendment.



Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 6 giving ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, 45 days to sell the video-sharing app before it's banned in the country. The president has repeatedly said the app is a security threat because of its Chinese owners.



"TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories," the executive order states. "This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information -- potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage."



TikTok argues in its complaint, however, that the executive order "is not rooted in bona fide national security concerns."



"Independent national security and information security experts have criticized the political nature of this executive order, and expressed doubt as to whether its stated national security objective is genuine," the company said in court documents.



TikTok expressed concerns over the president's "demands for payments," as Trump has suggested that Microsoft would have to pay the U.S. government if it went through with purchasing the app. It also argued that it has taken "extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikToks U.S. user data, including by having TikTok store such data outside of China (in the United States and Singapore) and by erecting software barriers that help ensure that TikTok stores its U.S. user data separately from the user data of other ByteDance products."



Moreover, TikTok claims the Trump administration has "ignored" the lengths TikTok has gone to demonstrate its "commitment" to the U.S. market.



The ban has rattled some free speech advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union.



"Banning an app like TikTok, which millions of Americans use to communicate with each other, is a danger to free expression and technologically impractical," the ACLU tweeted earlier this month.



"To truly address privacy concerns with companies like TikTok, Congress must ensure that ANY company that services US consumers cannot hand over our data to any government without a warrant or equivalent," it added in a follow-up tweet. "Letting the president selectively ban platforms isnt the solution."



ABC News' Libby Cathey, Mark Osborne and Sarah Herndon contributed to this report.



Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread across the world, air travel restrictions are slowly being eased in some regions. Now, a new report published in the JAMA Network Open journal in August 2020 shows that the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) can spread among passengers on international flights unless proper precautions are taken.

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Tourist Group with Contact History

The paper reports a viral transmission event on a commercial Tel Aviv-Frankfurt flight on March 9, 2020, with 102 passengers on board.

This included a 24-member tourist group, who had had contact a week before the flight with a hotel manager subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19. None of the tourists had been diagnosed with the infection before the flight, and none wore masks or took other precautionary measures to limit transmission. The flight lasted over 4.5 hours.

The tourist group was medically tested at the airport destination, with a throat swab being taken for SARS-CoV-2 testing as well. All the passengers were later interviewed over the phone after 4-5 weeks. Contacts with COVID-19 positives were enquired about, as well as any symptoms or a history of being tested for the virus prior to the interview.

All passengers who had occupied seats within 2 rows of the index cases in the flight were offered antibody testing for SARS-CoV-2 IgG, as well as to any passenger who reported symptoms. All positive and borderline results were confirmed by plaque reduction neutralization test (PNRT).

Positives Detected Among Contacts

The researchers found that 7 of the 24 tourists were positive for the virus on the throat swab test on arrival. Four of them had symptoms on the flight, while 2 had not yet developed symptoms, and the seventh remained asymptomatic.

Of the remaining 78 passengers, 71 were interviewed, and 13 of them supplied samples for serum testing, at 6-9 weeks after the flight. One of the patients reported a positive viral RNA test by polymerase chain reaction at 4 days after the flight, despite the absence of symptoms. The investigators carried out the antibody test 7 weeks from the flight date, at which point it was positive, as well as a positive PNRT. The patient in question had no contact with any COVID-positive patients either before or after the flight.

Two Secondary Cases

Seven other passengers had symptoms potentially indicating COVID-19, within two weeks of taking the flight, including headache and myalgia, and hoarseness, from 5 days of flying. This patient had been in quarantine for two weeks from the day after landing and had no contact with known COVID-positives. He also had not been tested before. The antibody test and the PNRT were positive and borderline, respectively.

The other six samples from symptomatic patients, and an additional five samples from asymptomatic passengers, were uniformly negative except for one borderline positive by antibody testing but with a negative PNRT.

The researchers were unable to rule out the in-flight transmission of the virus in one symptomatic patient who had already been in contact with a known case, and 46 asymptomatic passengers with no testing. They concluded that two transmission events might have occurred from the 7 index cases who tested positive on arrival at the destination airport. They were unable to narrow down the time of transmission to before or after the flight.

Respiratory Droplet Transmission

Transmission by respiratory droplets can occur if passengers are close to an index case, as well as depending on how passengers and crew members move about, how they deposit fomites, and how they move towards and through the departure gate. In the current study, both the secondary cases were seated within two rows of one of the index cases.

Airflow from the cabin took place from ceiling to floor and from the front to the back of the plane may have contributed to this low rate of transmission. This could have been further reduced by the wearing of masks  possibly. Thus, the study shows that airborne transmission may occur in a flight, and from data on SARS and influenza, such transmission may occur beyond a distance of two rows from an index case.

Earlier Incidents

This case supports the findings of an earlier study published on the preprint server bioRxiv*, which showed that in-flight transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is a real risk. After a flight, laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 were reported in 12 patients, of whom 10 were admitted to hospital, between January 25 to February 28, 2020. All the infected individuals were passengers rather than flight crew, who wore masks and may, therefore, have been protected. The median age of the infected group was 33 years, and 70% were female.

Of the 12, 9 patients tested positive on the initial test, but only half of them had positive findings on chest CT. All had a mild infection and were hospitalized within 2 days of symptom onset. Two of the positives remained asymptomatic and did not develop any chest CT scan signs throughout the course of the infection.

In this older study, the researchers drew attention to the role of asymptomatic infection in promoting transmission, when individuals are on a single flight for several hours. They said, The risk of in-flight transmission can vary widely, depending on whether people wear masks, on the physical proximity to the index patient(s), the stage of illness and number of index patient(s), the type of air-ventilation system, the size of the aircraft cabin, and the duration of the flight. They also pointed out the role of air travel in spreading the virus globally. They pointed to the possibility of mass transmission of the virus on such flights, particularly when precautions are not taken.

Stringent Combined Interventions Most Effective

And in another paper published in the journal The Lancet, research highlighted the importance of interventions such as quarantine of infected patients and their contacts, and preventing contacts between infected and susceptible adults at their workplace are the most effective interventions for restricting transmission of a viral respiratory illness. This study modeled viral spread under various COVID-19 control regimes in Singapore at 80 days, after reaching the 100-case mark of community transmission, assuming various levels of transmission and symptoms.

With an R0 of 1.5, 2, and 2.5, the median number of infections by day 80 was about 280,000, 727,000 and over 1.2 million, respectively, in the absence of any intervention. With combined control measures, the reduction in the median number of infections was over 99% to only 1,800 cases at R0 of 1.5, and by 93% and 78% when the R0 is 2 and 2.5, respectively. If only quarantine was implemented, this would yield 15,000 cases, the case numbers being reduced by 95% for R0 =1.5.

These simulations assume that about 7.5% of infections are asymptomatic. They assumed that asymptomatic cases infect only half the number that symptomatic cases do.

When the proportion of asymptomatic cases rises, to about 50%, as many as 277,000 infections may arise with combined interventions, rather than 1,800 cases at baseline, with an R0 of 1.5, thus, asymptomatic case proportion plays a crucial role in determining the optimal control strategy.

Implications

When most infections are symptomatic, quarantine and social distancing should be promoted at workplaces and schools. Adults should be targeted in the following program, since they are less likely to absent themselves when sick, from the workplace, compared to sick children attending school. This is confirmed by the observation that symptomatic adults continued on their tour using a commercial flight, exposing others to the risk of infection.

The earlier flight-related viral transmission study promoted travel bans, strict screening to detect symptomatic cases before the flight, and universal mask use during the flight, as well as two weeks of quarantine for all individuals who become symptomatic on the flight. These papers make it clear that more study is urgently needed before air travel restrictions are released, to put guidelines in place that will limit the risk of such viral spread around the world.

Source
Identifying the brain circuits affected in these "lesional" cases of mania, in addition to contributing to understanding the underlying mechanisms, could help find more effective treatments for bipolar disorder. A team of scientists from Portugal and the USA have now announced significant progress in the matter.

People suffering from bipolar disorder experience periods of depression alternating with bouts of mania, during which patients, among other symptoms, may become euphoric, irritable, need less sleep, and talk in an excited and accelerated manner, haphazardly rushing from one idea to the next. But what is less known is that mania is not only associated with bipolar disorder, but can also be the result of brain injury caused, for instance, by head trauma or stroke. The biological explanation for the emergence of this so-called "secondary mania" following brain injury, as opposed to the "primary" mania characteristic of bipolar disorder, has remained elusive. Indeed, previous studies have concluded that many different lesions, in different and seemingly unrelated areas of the brain, can cause mania.

Nonetheless, these lesions seem to have one thing in common: they are usually located in the right hemisphere of the brain, sometimes called the "emotional" brain, the dysfunction of which has been associated with several emotional disorders. While right-sided predominance of lesions was confirmed earlier this year in a systematic study by researchers at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown (CCU) Neuropsychiatry Unit, led by Albino Oliveira-Maia, that study also confirmed that lesions were distributed across multiple brain areas in that hemisphere. This supported the possibility that lesions leading to mania may have a specific common denominator, other than occurring in a given brain side or brain area, namely at the level of the brain circuits that are affected.

In their latest development, published today (August 24th 2020) in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the scientists at the Neuropsychiatry Unit, working in an international collaboration with colleagues from Harvard Medical School, used a novel neuroimaging method, called Lesion Network Analysis, to construct a connectivity map of brain lesions associated with mania. More precisely than ever, this map highlights the circuits connecting brain lesions that induce mania.

The authors thus confirmed that, while no single brain area is lesioned across all cases of secondary manic episodes, lesions are mostly connected to a specific group of regions in the cortex that regulate mood and emotions.

"Lesion locations associated with mania were identified using a systematic literature search and mapped onto a common brain atlas" the authors write in their paper. "The network of brain regions functionally connected to each lesion location was computed [using functional magnetic resonance images from 1,000 subjects] and contrasted to those obtained from lesion locations not associated with mania [from a group of 79 patients]".

"We found that lesion locations associated with the onset of mania are characterized by a strong connectivity to three right-sided areas, namely the orbitofrontal cortex, inferior temporal cortex, and frontal polar cortex", summarizes Goncalo Cotovio, first author of the study, a psychiatry resident and graduate student working under the supervision of Oliveira-Maia, one of the senior authors of the study. These regions have been described, among others, to be included in the so-called limbic circuit, a network in the brain that has been consistently associated with mood regulation and emotional processing. "Furthermore, this unique pattern of functional connectivity was similar across independent groups of patients, and was distinct from those of other neuropsychiatric syndromes", adds Cotovio.

Stimulating the brain to treat affective disorders?

"Although we still don't know whether primary mania [characteristic of bipolar disorder] predominantly involves the same brain regions and networks, studying lesional mania may be a valuable approach to understand the neuroanatomy of primary mania in bipolar disorder, since it may highlight brain areas and networks that have been missed in other studies", Oliveira-Maia points out. "This work may thus contribute towards the development of clinically relevant diagnostic tools, and to find potential brain targets for stimulation treatment of bipolar and other disorders, for example using the technique known as 'repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation' or rTMS." Repetitive TMS is a non-invasive, painless technique, most widely used for treatment of resistant depression, but also indicated for the treatment of patients with other neuropsychiatric disorders. In repetitive TMS treatments, an electromagnetic coil is applied to a precise location on the head of the patient, to deliver electromagnetic pulses that are capable of modifying neuronal activity in the target brain area. Several brands of these machines have been approved for therapeutic use in the USA, and there is one such machine at the CCU since 2017.

"High frequency rTMS to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex may be beneficial in mania, with some right prefrontal sites appearing to be more effective than others", explains Cotovio. "Our results might be used to guide future brain stimulation trials for mania, since we suggest an optimal target in the right prefrontal cortex, and alternative sites in the right orbitofrontal cortex and right inferior temporal cortex. Confirmation of these potentially therapeutic targets will obviously require clinical validation."

Finally, given that mania can also occur as a rare complication of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), another neuromodulation treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders, the authors explored if their mania lesion network map was consistent with differences in DBS-induced mania risk according to stimulation site. "Our results indeed suggest that the same brain circuits may be disrupted by brain lesions and by DBS stimulation sites associated with the occurrence of mania", says Cotovio. And Oliveira-Maia concludes: "future work should address the possibility of using this approach to improve planning of DBS treatments and thus avoid such debilitating side-effects".

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A sign reading "Heroes Work Here" is displayed in a window of the Maple Pointe Assisted Living facility in Rockville Centre, New York, on June 9

A sign reading "Heroes Work Here" is displayed in a window of the Maple Pointe Assisted Living facility in Rockville Centre, New York, on June 9 Credit - Johnny MilanoBloomberg/Getty Images

Since the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, one of the groups that has been repeatedly identified as essential is home care workers, those who provide assistance with activities of daily living to the elderly, chronically ill and persons with disabilities. It has been encouraging to see this profession finally recognized as a heroic one; public officials from Gavin Newsom to Andrew Cuomo to Joe Biden have thanked them for their service and advocated for their safety over the last few months. But what has gone unsaid is that we, as a country, have treated home care workers as decidedly inessential, due in large part to the professions roots in slavery.

Modern home cares origins are in the antebellum South, where enslaved Blacks, almost always women, took care of the day-to-day needs of white families. After the Civil War, the profession of domestic worker gradually replaced slave and domestic servant in the lexicon, persisting through the Jim Crow era into the 1930s, when Congress first debated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as part of FDRs New Deal. At the time, southern representatives refused to pass the legislation if protections for domestic workers  and other majority Black professions  were included. Representative J. Mark Wilcox of Florida put southern lawmakers concerns thusly: [T]hose of us who know the true situation know that it just will not work in the South. You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it. Not only would such a situation result in grave social and racial conflicts but it would also result in throwing the Negro out of employment and in making him a public charge. There just is not any sense in intensifying this racial problem in the South, and this bill cannot help but produce such a result.

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The carve-out that emerged from those congressional debates has existed, in one form or another, until modern times. In 1974, Congress finally amended the FLSA to include private home care workers, but a year later the U.S. Department of Labor interpreted that amendment to exempt them. Then, as now, these workers are classified as companions, and in many cases are not eligible for minimum wage, overtime or paid time off. It is surprisingly easy to trace our collective disregard for this profession not only to slavery, but to the widespread systemic racism that has persisted in its wake.

The history of home care should be a stark example to our elected leaders of how racism can and has shaped policy for millions of people, yet startlingly little has been done to correct these historic wrongs: home care workers are still primarily women, 62% are people of color, and with a median income of $16,200, they are paid one of the lowest wages in the country.

The coronavirus pandemic has finally brought many of these issues to light, in part because home care workers are dealing with our most vulnerable population yet cant afford the PPE that would help them to prevent infection and spread of COVID-19. Beyond that, many if not most of them work more than one job to make ends meet, a significant and meaningful risk to themselves, their families and those they care for.

These examples should be an embarrassment to our elected leaders, who to this point have provided little more than lip service to the 2.3 million home care workers in this country, a number that will swell by about 1.2 million (or 36%) by 2028 if we are to meet the needs of our aging population. Put simply, home care will soon be one of the most in-demand and worst-compensated jobs in the U.S.

If you want to correct the wrongs of historic and systemic racism, home care is a good place to start. Joe Biden has made increased federal funding and tax credits for long-term care workers a central part of his economic plan. That is an encouraging start, but at a minimum those workers also need higher wages, hazard pay and paid time off to ensure they are taken care of now and in the future. In addition, due to the 1974 companionship exemption, home care workers do not have easy access to retirement benefits. Allowing them to pay into and receive Social Security is essential to legitimizing this as the life-saving profession that it is. These workers also need job training for specific conditions like Alzheimers and diabetes, which will become much more prevalent as our aging population grows, with home care workers bearing much of that burden. Finally, home care workers face significant incidence of workplace violence, aggression, sexual harassment and discrimination. We need to create a system for reporting these abuses and remedying them through government oversight.

Home care workers have been made to suffer through more than a century of racist policies with little to no recourse. Taken together, these solutions will bring stability, mobility and dignity to some of our countrys most essential workers, along the way attracting more to join a profession that desperately needs reinforcements.
Saudi Arabias Energy Ministry inked an agreement on Sunday expressing full support for the building and increased coordination of a $500 billion megacity on the Red Sea.

The memorandum of understanding, signed by the megacity project's chief executive officer Nadhmi Al-Nasr and the kingdoms Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud, underscored the countrys push for renewable energy and economic diversification.

The city, known as Neom, will cover about 10,000 square miles of desert and coastline bordering Saudia Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, and hopes to attract serious international investment as its a cornerstone in the Saudi Vision 2030 plan that calls for reducing the countrys dependency on oil.

The prince stressed in a press release through the Saudi Press Agency the projects focus on utilizing renewable resources to generate electrical energy and the production of hydrogen and to open a way for its global export.

Sunday's pact outlined the identification of renewable energy projects, creating an electrical grid, and developing and installing artificial intelligence technologies.

Why it matters: In 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the megacity at the Future Investment Initiative. Neom will operate independently from any existing government framework, with its own tax and labor laws and an autonomous judicial system of judges reporting directly to the king and operating under Sharia, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The grand plans are a key piece in Saudi Vision 2030, which calls for a major reduction of dependency on oil as well as a diversification of the kingdoms economy. Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of oil in the world. But a recent collapse in the global oil market has strained output, as the countrys crude oil export dipped to a record low in June.

Internally, Neom concerned local tribes who would have to be forcibly relocated. And investment in Saudi projects by the international community was in flux after the October 2018 assassination of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Whats next: In July, Neom signed an agreement with ACWA Power and Air Products, a US-based company, to build the largest green hydrogen and ammonia plant in the world. Through Neom, the kingdom hopes to become one of the worlds leading producers and exporters of energy from renewable sources.

The project is slated for completion in 2025.

Know more: Al-Monitor correspondent Sabena Siddiqui reviews how the coronavirus pandemic and oil crisis is pushing foreign workers away from the Gulf states.
Nicole Dozois, 40, was arrested at home along 130th Avenue in North Largo, near to Tampa Bay, in the early hours of Sunday morning

A woman was arrested in Florida yesterday after she allegedly beat her father after becoming incensed by his excessive flatulence inside their home, police documents show.

Nicole Dozois, 40, was arrested at home along 130th Avenue in North Largo, near to Tampa Bay, in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Police were called to the home just after 2am when Dozois reportedly became angry with her father, Michael Dozois, due to his flatulence while she was trying to sleep.

According to police, Dozois and her 59-year-old father share a bedroom inside the home.

A heated argument ensued between the pair, with the verbal altercation allegedly quickly turning physical.

Dozois then reportedly punched her father numerous times in the face, an affidavit says.

Police were called to the home just after 2am when Dozois reportedly became angry with her father, Michael Dozois, due to his flatulence and a heated argument ensued.

The exchange of words then quickly allegedly turned physical, with Dozois punching her father numerous times in the face, an affidavit documents.

The attack left the victim Michael with a bloodied left eye and scratches all over his neck.

Dozois was arrested and detained on charges of domestic battery. She was booked into the Pinellas County jail and later released on her own recognizance.

The 40-year-old pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charge and has been ordered to have no further contact with her father, the Smoking Gun reported.

Dozois has previously been arrested on charges of theft and probation violations.

She was also arrested in 2018 for allegedly punching her sister in the head inside the same Largo home.

Prosecutors, however, later declined to pursue domestic battery charges against her.
Like a puppy chasing its tail, some new investors often chase 'the next big thing', even if that means buying 'story stocks' without revenue, let alone profit. But as Peter Lynch said in One Up On Wall Street, 'Long shots almost never pay off.'

In contrast to all that, I prefer to spend time on companies like KB Home (NYSE:KBH), which has not only revenues, but also profits. While profit is not necessarily a social good, it's easy to admire a business that can consistently produce it. While a well funded company may sustain losses for years, unless its owners have an endless appetite for subsidizing the customer, it will need to generate a profit eventually, or else breathe its last breath.

See our latest analysis for KB Home

How Quickly Is KB Home Increasing Earnings Per Share?

The market is a voting machine in the short term, but a weighing machine in the long term, so share price follows earnings per share (EPS) eventually. It's no surprise, then, that I like to invest in companies with EPS growth. Impressively, KB Home has grown EPS by 33% per year, compound, in the last three years. As a general rule, we'd say that if a company can keep up that sort of growth, shareholders will be smiling.

I like to take a look at earnings before interest and (EBIT) tax margins, as well as revenue growth, to get another take on the quality of the company's growth. KB Home maintained stable EBIT margins over the last year, all while growing revenue 6.9% to US$4.7b. That's a real positive.

You can take a look at the company's revenue and earnings growth trend, in the chart below. For finer detail, click on the image.

In investing, as in life, the future matters more than the past. So why not check out this free interactive visualization of KB Home's forecast profits?

Are KB Home Insiders Aligned With All Shareholders?

It makes me feel more secure owning shares in a company if insiders also own shares, thusly more closely aligning our interests. As a result, I'm encouraged by the fact that insiders own KB Home shares worth a considerable sum. With a whopping US$76m worth of shares as a group, insiders have plenty riding on the company's success. That's certainly enough to make me think that management will be very focussed on long term growth.

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Should You Add KB Home To Your Watchlist?

Given my belief that share price follows earnings per share you can easily imagine how I feel about KB Home's strong EPS growth. I think that EPS growth is something to boast of, and it doesn't surprise me that insiders are holding on to a considerable chunk of shares. Fast growth and confident insiders should be enough to warrant further research. So the answer is that I do think this is a good stock to follow along with. Still, you should learn about the 4 warning signs we've spotted with KB Home .

You can invest in any company you want. But if you prefer to focus on stocks that have demonstrated insider buying, here is a list of companies with insider buying in the last three months.

Please note the insider transactions discussed in this article refer to reportable transactions in the relevant jurisdiction.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.



Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway talks to reporters about the coronavirus, at the White House in April. Conway is leaving the White House at the end of the month. Read more

WASHINGTON  Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump and one of his longest-serving aides, is leaving the White House at the end of the month.

Conway, whose title is counselor to the president, was Trumps third campaign manager in 2016 and the first woman to manage a presidential campaign to victory. She joined the White House at the start of Trumps term and has been one of his most visible and vocal defenders.

Conway informed Trump of her decision Sunday night in the Oval Office.

Her husband, George Conway, a conservative lawyer and outspoken critic of the president, is stepping back from his role on the Lincoln Project, an outside group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump in November. He will also take a hiatus from Twitter, the venue he has often used to attack the president.

In a statement, Conway, a South Jersey native, called her time in the Trump administration heady and humbling, and said she and George were making the decision based on what they think is best for their four children.

We disagree about plenty, she wrote of herself and her husband, but we are united on what matters most: the kids. Our four children are teens and tweens starting a new academic year in the middle school and high school that will be conducted remotely from home for a least a few months. As millions of parents nationwide know, kids doing school from home requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times.

Conway continued: This is completely my choice and my voice. In time, I will announce future plans. For now, and for my beloved children, it will less drama, more mama.

Conways high school-age daughter had drawn attention for tweets about her parents and politics.

On Sunday, she tweeted that social media was becoming way too much so she had decided to take a mental health break.

See yall soon, she wrote. Thank you for the love and support. No hate to my parents please.

Conways announcement comes on the eve of the Republican National Convention as Trump seeks to gain momentum for a tough reelection battle ahead.

She has been intimately involved in the convention planning, and will be speaking Wednesday night about the theme of everyday heroes. She spent Saturday at the campaign headquarters in her personal capacity.

 READ MORE: In Kellyanne Conways blueberry country, some are grumbling about Trump (from 2017)

Conway outlasted many of her colleagues from the campaign and the White House to become one of Trumps longest-serving aides, proving herself to be a survivor in a workplace that has had historic levels of turnover.

The Conways became an object of fascination as George Conway ramped up his criticism of the president in 2018 while Kellyanne Conway remained a top adviser to Trump.

George Conway has written, among other things, that Trump is not mentally fit to be president.

The president has voiced anger at times about George Conways comments, calling him a a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell.

Before making her decision, Conway had been in discussions with the Trump campaign. Senior advisers on the campaign had suggested she take a leave of absence from the White House to join Trumps reelection effort, and anticipated a significant role in which she would travel to two states a day between now and the election.

But Conway said she could not envision herself in that role right now, spending so much time away from her family.

In her statement, Conway also expressed her gratitude to Trump; his wife, Melania; Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen; as well as her colleagues in the administration.

The incredible men, women and children Ive met along the way have reaffirmed by later-in-life experience that public service can be meaningful and consequential, she wrote. For all of its political differences and cultural cleavages, this is a beautiful country filled with amazing people. The promise of America belongs to us all.

Conway brought attention at times, particularly over her flouting of a law, the Hatch Act, that prohibits public employees from using their official capacity to conduct political activity.

In March 2018, the Office of the Special Counsel said she violated federal law on two occasions by making public comments supportive of one candidate and against another before a special Senate election in Alabama in 2017.

The White House dismissed the finding, saying Conway was reflecting the views of the president.

 READ MORE: Trump says he wont fire Kellyanne Conway for violating Hatch Act, defends her free speech (from 2019)

Conway was a frequent guest on television programs, known for her defense of the president and sharp put-downs aimed at his opponents.

She drew criticism for an appearance early in the Trump administration when she defended then-press-secretary Sean Spicer after he falsely stated that Trumps swearing-in ceremony drew the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.

She told NBC Newss Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that Spicer was using alternative facts, a phrase that critics of the administration have continued to highlight as evidence of Trump and his White House not being honest with the public.

Conway, a veteran GOP pollster and strategist, joined the Trump campaign in July 2016 after working for a super PAC that supported Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and was highly critical of Trump.
Delta Air Lines Inc DAL plans to resume more than 50 international flights for winter 2020 and summer 2021 as air-travel demand gradually improves and travel restrictions ease.



The airline will resume daily services between Seattle, WA and Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai. In April 2021, the carrier expects to restart flights connecting Minneapolis, MN with Seoul-Incheon. Delta also intends to expand its footprint in Japan by offering service from seven U.S. cities to Haneda, Tokyo by summer 2021.



In China too, the carrier expects to boost service in response to uptick in demand. The Atlanta, GA-based carrier currently operates four weekly flights to Shanghai from Detroit, MI and Seattle. It expects to increase flights between these routes, subject to government approval. Additionally, in summer 2021, Delta plans to operate daily services connecting Shanghai with Detroit, Seattle and Los Angeles, as well as daily flights between Sea-Tac and Beijings new Daxing Airport, subject to government approval. Further, the airline plans to bring back daily service between Los Angeles and Sydney in 2021.

Delta Air Lines, Inc. Price

Delta Air Lines, Inc. Price

Delta Air Lines, Inc. price | Delta Air Lines, Inc. Quote





This September, Delta plans to reinstate flights between Atlanta and Lagos; Boston, MA and London-Heathrow as well as those connecting New York-JFK with Accra, Barcelona, Madrid and Rome. Additionally, in October, the carrier will add services between New York-JFK and Brussels, Dublin, Frankfurt, Zurich and Paris-Charles de Gaulle. Flights between Boston and Paris will be reinstated in November. The carrier will also add back services to Paris from its focus cities of Cincinnati, OH and Raleigh-Durham, NC.



After months of international flight suspensions due to coronavirus-led travel restrictions, this gradual resumption of international services is encouraging. To attract passengers, Delta is undertaking significant safety measures such as using state-of-the-art air-circulation systems that filter more than 99.99% of particles, including viruses. The carrier is also blocking all middle seats through Jan 6, 2021, simultaneously putting a cap on the number of passengers per flight.

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Zacks Rank & Key Picks

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A large number of American schools will not be able to provide laptops to students who are learning virtually this fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic partly because of the Trump administration's sanctions on China over its treatment of Uighur Muslims, it was reported.

Schools across the United States are facing shortages and long delays, of up to several months, in getting this year's most crucial back-to-school supplies: the laptops and other equipment needed for online learning, an Associated Press investigation has found.

The world's three biggest computer companies, Lenovo, HP and Dell, have told school districts they have a shortage of nearly 5 million laptops, in some cases exacerbated by Trump administration sanctions on Chinese suppliers, according to interviews with over two dozen US schools, districts in 15 states, suppliers, computer companies and industry analysts.

As the school year begins virtually in many places because of the coronavirus, educators nationwide worry that computer shortfalls will compound the inequities - and the headaches for students, families and teachers.

Four pallets of Lenovo Chromebook laptops sit in a Denver Public Schools warehouse after arriving on Friday. Schools across the United States are facing shortages and long delays in getting this year's most crucial back-to-school accessories: the laptops and other equipment needed for online learning

Computer companies in the United States said the shortages have been exacerbated by the Trump administration's decision to impose sanctions on China over its treatment of Uighur Muslims

The US sanctioned Chinese companies it says were implicated in forced labor or other human rights abuses against the Uighurs, a Muslim minority population concentrated in the Xinjiang region in northwest China. Uighur children are seen above in Xinjiang in August 2018

'This is going to be like asking an artist to paint a picture without paint. You can't have a kid do distance learning without a computer,' said Tom Baumgarten, superintendent of the Morongo Unified School District in California's Mojave Desert, where all 8,000 students qualify for free lunch and most need computers for distance learning.

Baumgarten was set to order 5,000 Lenovo Chromebooks in July when his vendor called him off, saying Lenovos were getting 'stopped by a government agency because of a component from China that's not allowed here,' he said.

He switched to HPs and was told they would arrive in time for the first day of school August 26.

The delivery date then changed to September, then October. The district has about 4,000 old laptops that can serve roughly half of students, but what about the rest, Baumgarten asks rhetorically.

'I'm very concerned that I'm not going to be able to get everyone a computer.'

Chromebooks and other low-cost PCs are the computers of choice for most budget-strapped schools.

Tom Baumgarten, superintendent of the Morongo Unified School District, looks at a laptop with a cracked screen at Twentynine Palms Junior High School in Twentynine Palms, California, on Tuesday

The delays started in the spring and intensified because of high demand and disruptions of supply chains, the same reasons that toilet paper and other pandemic necessities flew off shelves a few months ago.

Then came the Trump administration's July 20 announcement targeting Chinese companies it says were implicated in forced labor or other human rights abuses against a Muslim minority population, the Uighurs.

The Commerce Department imposed sanctions on 11 Chinese companies, including the manufacturer of multiple models of Lenovo laptops, which the company says will add several weeks to existing delays, according to a letter Lenovo sent to customers.

School districts are pleading with the Trump administration to resolve the issue, saying that distance learning without laptops will amount to no learning for some of the countrys most vulnerable students.

'It's a tough one because I'm not condoning child slave labor for computers, but can we not hurt more children in the process?' said Matt Bartenhagen, IT director for Williston Public Schools in North Dakota, a district of 4,600 waiting on an order for 2,000 Lenovo Chromebooks.

'They were supposed to be delivered in July. Then August. Then late August. The current shipping estimate is "hopefully" by the end of the year.'

The Denver Public Schools district, the largest in Colorado, is waiting for 12,500 Lenovo Chromebooks ordered in April and May.

The district has scrambled to find machines, settled for whatever is available and is handing out everything they get to students that need them.

Still, when school starts Wednesday, they will be about 3,000 devices short, says Lara Hussain, an IT director for the district.

'We were promised devices. Our students need devices. And as a result of not receiving devices we will have students starting the school year unable to participate. Its unconscionable,' said Hussain.

Baumgarten (pictured above on Tuesday) was set to order 5,000 Lenovo Chromebooks in July when his vendor called him off, saying Lenovos were getting 'stopped by a government agency because of a component from China that's not allowed here,' he said

Lenovo had informed Denver and other districts over the spring and summer of supply chain delays.

In late July, Lenovo sent a letter to customers to say the 'trade controls' announced by the Commerce Department would cause another slowdown of at least several weeks.

'This delay is a new development and is unrelated to supply constraints previously communicated,' Matthew Zielinski, president of Lenovo North America said in the letter, which referred to the sanctions on a Chinese supplier, Hefei Bitland Information Technology Co. Ltd.

The letter listed 23 Lenovo models for education and corporate customers made by Bitland.

'Effective immediately, we are no longer manufacturing these devices at Bitland,' the letter said, adding that Lenovo is working on 'a transition plan' to shift production to other sites.

A Lenovo official told Californias Department of Education the company has a backlog of more than 3 million Chromebooks, said Daniel Thigpen, the departments spokesman.

Lenovo declined to respond to repeated questions from AP seeking confirmation of the backlog and details on the numbers of devices delayed, replying only to deny a question on whether computers were seized by US customs, as some schools were told by suppliers.

US government agencies said they have no knowledge of the computers' whereabouts and also deny any were seized.

Jason Rand cuts open the shrink wrap around a pallet of Lenovo Chromebook laptops as they sit in a Denver Public Schools warehouse after arriving on Friday

'US Customs and Border Protection does not have any record of detained laptops matching this description,' the agency said in a statement.

The Department of Commerce said it added Hefei Bitland to its so-called Entity List, which restricts the export and in-country transfer of items by sanctioned companies.

'It does not apply to the importation of Chromebooks from China,' the department said in a statement, adding, however, 'we should all agree that American school children should not be using computers from China that were produced from forced labor.'

There are no nationwide tallies on the numbers of laptops and other devices that schools are waiting for.

The Associated Press found that some of Americas biggest school districts are among those with outstanding orders of Chromebooks, other laptops or hotspots for internet connections, including Los Angeles, Clark County, Nevada, Wake County, North Carolina, Houston, Palm Beach and Hawaii, the nations only statewide school district.

A recent poll of California's 1,100 districts showed schools across the state are waiting on at least 300,000 backordered computers, said Mary Nicely, a senior policy advisor to the state superintendent.

A survey in Alabama found that about 20 schools were waiting on 33,000 computers, said Ryan Hollingsworth, director of the School Superintendents of Alabama.

Smaller districts in Montana, New York, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio, New Hampshire and elsewhere are also waiting on laptop orders, with delivery dates that have become moving targets.

Some of the school districts, like Los Angeles, say the outstanding orders are for replacement devices and all students who need a computer will have one.

Many districts are asking parents with the means to buy devices for their children but realize that's not an option for many families.

It's also not an easy task with supplies at commercial stores running out.

A handful of Lenovo Chromebook laptops sit in shipping boxes in an empty warehouse used for distribution by Denver Public Schools on Friday

Best Buy's website shows 36 models of new and used Chromebooks priced under $500, the low-cost models that are popular for students. As of this week, 33 of those models were sold out.

The backlog and delays have become so widespread that some students will be forced to start the semester without an essential piece of technology for remote learning, said Michael Flood, senior vice president of Kajeet, which works with more than 2,000 school districts in the US and Canada.

Some school administrators told Flood their laptop and Chromebook suppliers hope deliveries will only be delayed by a month or so. But others are being told their machines may not be available until early 2021.

The shortage stems from exceptionally high demand at a time when the personal computer industry is still recovering from pandemic-driven precautions that shut down the factories of major PC suppliers in China during February and March.

Just as the supply chain started ramping back up, new orders poured in from huge companies and government agencies with large numbers of employees working from home - in addition to school districts scrambling to secure machines, said Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner Inc., which closely follows the PC industry.

'The bottom line is everyone seems to want a laptop or Chromebook right now and there just isn't enough supply of it,' Kitagawa said.

'It's a case of very bad timing.'

To make matters worse, many school districts underestimated their needs during spring ordering, assuming that traditional in-person classes would resume in the fall.

In California, most schools were planning for some form of in-person classes in the fall but only learned in July that wouldn't be possible, when Governor Gavin Newsom effectively ordered the majority of schools to start with remote learning.

It created a mad dash for computers.

Tom Quiambao, director of technology for the Tracy Unified School District in Northern California, said he and his vendor contacted HP directly to ask why his July order for 10,000 HP laptops would take three months to be delivered.

He was told, 'HP is short 1.7 million units of laptops' because of production shortages in a variety of components made in China, including processors, touchscreens, motherboards and others, Quiambao said.

An HP spokeswoman declined to confirm or deny that number, saying only 'we are continuing to leverage our global supply chain to meet the changing needs of our customer.'

Dell offered a similarly brief response to detailed questions about a backlog.

'We can't comment on demand and supply specifically,' Dell said in an emailed statement, adding the company was seeing increased orders due to virtual learning and trying 'to fulfill orders as efficiently as possible.'

With so many customers ordering laptops at the same time, PC manufacturers may be put in the uncomfortable position of deciding who gets them first, said Linn Huang, an analyst for the research firm International Data Corp.

Those kind of pecking orders threaten to push small school districts to the back of the laptop line.

That's part of the problem for the central Texas district of Abilene, where they are waiting for 6,000 Dell Chromebooks, ordered in May and June but not expected until November.

'In Texas, there are over 1,200 school districts and they're all ordering,' said district spokesman Lance Fleming.

Schools are trying to get disinfecting supplies, too.

'Who would have ever thought that computers and Clorox Wipes would be on the same level of need in our country.'
Dozens of revellers ignored social distancing rules introduced in the wake of Covid-19 to pack into a small dance tent at a sold-out music festival in Hertfordshire.

The one-day festival took place at Colesdale Farm on Sunday after the event was postponed due to forecast thunderstorms a week earlier.

La Fiesta had a series of social distancing measures in place amid the coronavirus outbreak, but footage from the weekend shows dozens of Britons crammed together inside a small tent.

In a clip from the sold-out event, party-goers are seen dancing at close quarters as they clutch paper cups inside an open-sided gazebo.

There appears to be little social distancing taking place inside the shelter, with men and women forced to brush against each other to move around inside the space.

Dozens of revellers ignored social distancing rules introduced in the wake of Covid-19 to pack into a small dance tent at a sold-out music festival in Hertfordshire. Pictured: Attendees at La Fiesta on Sunday

Other footage from Sunday shows seating placed in small clusters in front of an outdoor stage, with guests sectioned off from others with colourful bunting.

It comes as another 1,041 people tested positive for coronavirus on Sunday, bringing Britain's total caseload to 325,642.

According to a Covid-19 statement posted on the La Fiesta website, outdoor social interactions between attendees 'should be limited to a group of no more than two households of up to six people from different households.'

Organisers also explained they would keep a temporary record of all guests for 21 days to assist with the NHS Test and Trace service, which was introduced to contain outbreaks of the virus.

La Fiesta had a series of social distancing measures in place amid the coronavirus outbreak, but footage from the weekend shows dozens of Britons crammed together inside a tent

La Fiesta said attendees would have their temperatures taken on arrival, with cleaning stations in position around the site and 'strict safety measures' in place

It was also said that attendees would have their temperatures taken on arrival, with cleaning stations in position around the site and 'strict safety measures' in place.

The festival, which was set to take place on August 16 but postponed due to forecast thunderstorms, featured a line-up of live DJ sets alongside games and street food.

Colesdale Farm has previously hosted events for 5,000 attendees, but it is unclear how many were at La Fiesta on Sunday.

Another sold-out music festival is set to take place at the Cuffley farm on August 30.

Professor Jim McManus, director of public health at Hertfordshire County Council, previously explained the county's Local Resilience Form (LRF) had been working with organisers of La Fiesta and a second festival which took place on Saturday.



Other footage from Sunday shows seating placed in small clusters in front of an outdoor stage (pictured), with guests sectioned off from others with colourful bunting

In a clip from the sold-out event, party-goers are seen dancing at close quarters as they clutch paper cups inside an open-sided gazebo

In a statement given after the event was postponed, he told the Welwyn Hatfield Times: 'The public health team  alongside police, fire, Welwyn Hatfield Borough council and the environmental health team  have been working closely with the organisers who have postponed Saturday and Sunday's events to the following weekend (22 and 23 August).

'We will continue to support the organisers with a multi-agency approach going forward in relation to all future planned events.'

Hertfordshire Police also confirmed they were aware of the event and had worked with LRF to 'ensure public safety.'

La Fiesta and Colesdale Farm have been contacted for comment.

It comes as another 1,041 people tested positive for coronavirus on Sunday, bringing Britain's total caseload to 325,642.

Yesterday's figure - which is one higher than last Sunday's 1,040 - marked another weekend of soaring figures after 1,288 tested positive on Saturday and 1,033 on Friday.

Six more people died yesterday after contracting the disease across all settings - including care homes, hospitals and the wider community - bringing the UK's total death toll to 41,429.

Figures released on Sunday are usually smaller due to a delay in processing over the weekend.

Wales reported two deaths and 20 cases while Scotland has reported no deaths but 83 new cases.

This weekend saw the UK's biggest Saturday case rise in eight weeks after 123 new Covid-19 diagnoses in Scotland caused figures to soar.
Home Search ICH Navalny Was Not Poisoned By Moon Of Alabama August 23, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - On Thursday morning the Russian rightwing and racist rabble rouser Alexey Navalny fell ill during a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. He eventually went into a coma. The plane had to be rerouted for an emergency stop in Omsk. Navalny was brought into a clinic and put on a ventilator. Meanwhile his spokeswomen Kira Yarmysh claimed, without evidence, that Navalny had been poisoned: Yarmysh believes Navalny, who showed no symptoms prior to the flight, was "poisoned with something mixed into his tea as it was the only thing he drank this morning. In the middle of the journey, she wrote later, he began sweating, went to the toilet, and apparently lost consciousness for a period. RIA Novosti reported that Navalny did not eat or drink anything on the flight. The doctors in the intensive care unit in Omsk had difficulties to stabilize Navalny. A number of tests were made but no poisons were found. Yesterday evening the patient had stabilized. On request of his family he was transported to Germany where he is currently undergoing treatment. The hospital in Omsk said that Navalny had experienced severe hypoglycemia: The head physician of the Omsk emergency hospital, Alexander Murakhovsky, said that Alexei Navalnys condition was caused by a sharp drop in blood sugar. Hypoglycemia is also known as diabetic shock: When a person experiences diabetic shock, or severe hypoglycemia, they may lose consciousness, have trouble speaking, and experience double vision. Early treatment is essential because blood sugar levels that stay low for too long can lead to seizures or diabetic coma. Hypoglycemia can sometimes happen rapidly and may even occur when a person follows their diabetes treatment plan. A diabetic shock happens when someone with diabetes has taken too much insulin or has eaten too little. My father had diabetes and I have seen him experiencing this problem several times. He always carried a piece of sugar with him to use it as soon as he felt the first symptoms. My mother taught me the basic first aid I would have to to apply should my father be unable to help himself. Thankfully I never had to use it. No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media Get Our Free Newsletter It is important that the measures are taken immediately. A prolonged coma can lead to brain damage. As Navalny was on a plane up in the air it took quite a while to get him into a hospital. His prolonged coma may have created additional damage to his body. People with diabetes usually learn how to control their blood sugar level. I have found no information that Navalny actually has diabetes but that does not say much as it is not something people usually talk about. I am not aware of any medication or poison that rapidly lowers the blood sugar level and can be applied secretly. It would also be stupid to use such in an attempt to kill someone as the attacked person simply has to eat something to negate the effect. /Update/ Intellinews reports that Navalny has diabetes: Navalny said himself that he suffered from diabetes in 2019, giving some credence to this explanation. /end update/ The 'western' media jumped onto the 'Navalny was poisoned' claim to heap the usual trash on Russia. They also claimed that Navalny is the 'opposition leader' in Russia even as he polls at 2% which is lower than the leader of the communist party and several other real opposition politicians. Nor is Navalny a 'liberal'. He is a rightwing nationalist and racist who sees Cechen and other non-Russian people as cockroaches that should be killed (vid). In an interview with the Guardian Navalny confirmed those views: Several years ago, [Navalny] released a number of disturbing videos, including one in which he is dressed as a dentist, complaining that tooth cavities ruin healthy teeth, as clips of migrant workers are shown. In another video, he speaks out in favour of relaxing gun controls, in a monologue that appears to compare migrants to cockroaches. I ask him if he regrets those videos now, and hes unapologetic. He sees it as a strength that he can speak to both liberals and nationalists. But comparing migrants to cockroaches? That was artistic license, he says. So theres nothing at all from those videos or that period that he regrets? No, he says again, firmly. The 'western' media also try to connect the 'poisoning' of Navalny to Russia's President Vladimir Putin. That makes no sense at all. Navalny is no danger to Putin and is actually useful for him as he keeps other 'liberals' busy with nonsensical ideas. During the last years Navalny has made some enemies by uncovering corruption cases. His latest one was about the local governor of Tomsk. It was also the reason why he had flown there. Should Navaly become the victim of a crime the suspects should be sought there. - " Source " - The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Post your comment below See also The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Search Information Clearing House === The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Click Here To Support Information Clearing House Your support has kept ICH free on the Web since 2002. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.
Lancaster police have arrested a man who allegedly drove off with a police detective hanging from the vehicle before leading other officers on a chase and eventually crashing.

Police said Josue Medina is charged with offenses including aggravated assault, fleeing and eluding police, recklessly endangering another person and various traffic offenses.

Police said the incident happened Saturday evening after a police detective saw Medina drive past and recognized him as someone wanted for failing to appear for a DUI trial.

According to a police report, Medina got out of his vehicle and reached inside another vehicle before being approached by the detective. Upon being told he was under arrest, Medina allegedly exited from the opposite side of the vehicle, got back into his own vehicle and drove off as the officer reached inside and tried to prevent it from shifting into drive. The detective was treated and released from the hospital and has returned to work, according to the police report.

Police say Medina drove on a sidewalk, struck the detectives vehicle and then led other officers on a chase through northeast Lancaster, eventually causing a crash with other vehicles that were turning into Belmont shopping center.

Police say Medina then ran across Route 30 and up an embankment before officers caught him.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo with Democratic Republic of the Congo President Felix Tshisekedi in Washington, D.C on April 3, 2019.

analysis

A new military agreement has underscored a budding friendship between the US and DR Congo, alongside speculation about the establishment of a US command center. But experts say it's too soon to draw conclusions.

For a long time, relations between the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) were far from cordial. DR Congo's long-time ruler, Joseph Kabila, clung to power with increasing urgency in the last few years of his presidency, causing his country to slide even deeper into diplomatic isolation.

But ever since Felix Tshisekedi took office in 2019, relations with the US are warming up. A new high point towards reconciliation took place in early August when both countries agreed to pursue military cooperation. Among a list of other agreements, Congolese officers are set to be trained in the US in the future.

For Stephanie Wolters, an expert on DR Congo at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg, the agreement underscores the growing importance for the Tshisekedi government to maintain ties with the US.

"It's a political relationship that they have," she told DW. "Since Tshisekedi became president in 2019, the US has been the most actively supportive international player in the DR Congo. We have seen a number of high-level officials going to Kinshasa over the last year and a half and the US ambassador is very active and visible."

This friendship has gone so far as Tshisekedi endorsing the so-called Trump peace plan -- a proposal from US President Donald Trump to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. But how does the Congolese president benefit in this duo?

At first glance, the new military cooperation agreement should be considered a minor step forward, says Wolters. Nevertheless, Tshisekedi sees the agreement as a positive sign for future relations. In the past, the Americans found it difficult to work with the Congolese.

"Many [Congolese] generals and officers have committed human rights violations and human right violations are also regularly committed by the rank and file," Wolters explains. "But the bottom line is, the Americans are huge supporters of Tshisekedi. They've been encouraging him to go after some of the more corrupt in the government and in the military and there is very visible and public support for this."

Speculation over US headquarters in Africa

An even more far-reaching alliance with the US is also currently being discussed in DR Congo. The military agreement between the two countries has led to speculation about a possible relocation of the headquarters of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). The US Department of Defense recently announced its intention to move AFRICOM headquarters from its previous location in Stuttgart, Germany, as part of the reorganization of the US armed forces in Europe.

Congolese MP Mohamed Bule, the former deputy defense minister and a retired army general, suspects Washington may rethink the AFRICOM headquarters issue based on the recent military agreement with DR Congo, referring to rumors that the DR Condo has already been mentioned as a possible location for the new headquarters back in 2008.

"It was the US that asked for AFRICOM to be set up in our country," he told DW. "So it depends on them to use this resumption of military cooperation to revive the issue."

Tshisekedi seeking international support

Frank Gollwitzer, a former Bundeswehr officer who currently works with the Hanns Siedel Foundation (HSS) in Kinshasa, says DR Congo is becoming more open to Western influence.

"Due to the past, DR Congo is allergic to Western units in the country," he told DW. "Over the past century, various Western units and troops have cavorted [through the country], so they don't want any foreign soldiers there and even regularly ask that UN missions be scaled down."

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From AFRICOM's point of view, setting up headquarters in DR Congo would not have any advantages, says Gollwitzer. A location in Africa may be out of the question for the US. According to statements from the US Department of Defense to AFRICOM employees in Stuttgart, a suitable location is currently being sought in Europe or the United States.

For Gollwitzer, the military agreement between the Trump and Tshisekedi administrations is another sign of change in Congolese-American relations, which began shortly after Tshisekedi took office in 2019.

"[Tshisekedi's] first trip after his election was to the US," explains Gollwitzer. Domestically, Tshisekedi is in a weak position: His party is in the minority in both the parliament and the senate and most of the general staff are still loyal to Kabila who, after 18 years as president, is still able to pull a few strings. But with the support of the US, Tshisekedi could strengthen his position abroad, as well as in his own country's military.
Under-fire Gavin Williamson today broke cover to guarantee every school in England will be supplied with coronavirus home tests to hand out to parents when they reopen next week.

The Education Secretary used an interview to pledge that teachers would be able to send ill children home with a kit so that a family member can use it to quickly determine whether they have Covid-19.

Staff will also be allowed to use the swab kits under guidance that says they should be handed out by teachers 'where they think providing one will significantly increase the likelihood of them (the ill person) getting tested.'

Under guidance issued by the Department for Education, if the child tests negative either using a home kit or after visiting a testing centre they can return to school with the minimum of disruption.

If they test positive they quarantine at home while the school takes steps to limit the spread.

But many have questioned whether every school getting Covid-19 home testing kits before September is an achievable feat in the first place - with sceptical parents vowing to hold the Education Secretary to his word.

General Secretary of the Teachers' Union Dr Patrick Roach said: 'We wait with interest to see more detail about the Education Secretary's promise of home testing kits for use by schools.

'It is important that this latest announcement from Ministers delivers on substance and that there is an adequate supply of testing kits to help keep schools safe not just on the first day back at school but throughout the term and beyond.

'Priority access to Covid-19 testing for pupils and staff has to be a central part of a plan to reopen schools fully and safely.

'The Government must also make clear to parents that where a child has any of the symptoms of Coronavirus they must be kept at home.'

Gavin Williamson today guaranteed that all schools in England will have home testing kits to give out to parents when they reopen next week

The Government has stepped up its efforts to persuade parents to send their children back to the classroom in September and Mr Williamson said this afternoon it is the 'right time' for students to resume their classes.

He also insisted schools will only close again following localised outbreaks as an 'absolute last resort'.

But he remains under intense pressure after his handling of the Government's A-level and GCSE results fiasco.

Asked if he could guarantee that all schools in England will get the testing kits by the time they reopen next week, Mr Williamson replied: 'Yes.'

But Downing Street said there are 'no plans' for the UK Government to ask pupils to wear face masks in class.

Nicola Sturgeon today signalled secondary school pupils and staff in Scotland will be asked to wear face masks when they travel between classes .

The Scottish First Minister said her government is consulting on exactly when and where the coverings will be required as she cited concerns about ventilation issues in corridors and communal areas.

Coronavirus self-tests require the patient to put the swab into the back of their throat and then a short way into their nostril to try and pick up the viruses, which live in the airways

Mr Williamson is under massive pressure over a slew of education cock-ups this summer which have sparked calls to quit

Sports teacher Tina Dahl provides safety regulation rules to students on the first day back to school in Sweden on August 21

Students disinfect their hands as they queue for lunch at the canteen at the Ostra Real public school in Sweden on their first day back since schools shut in March

How will the school testing regime work? Parents and guardians will be expected to conduct the coronavirus home test on their children. According to the Department for Education guidance issues, if a child becomes unwell at school with Covid-like symptoms, whey are to immediately be sent home with a test kit issued by the school. The child and family members should immediately isolate as a precaution, while waiting for a test result. If the child tests negative for the virus they can return to school with the minimum of disruption and the family members can end their own quarantine. The guidance notes: 'They could still have another virus, such as a cold or flu  in which case it is still best to avoid contact with other people until they are better.' If the pupil tests positive they and their families quarantine at home while the school takes steps to limit the spread. The quarantine period is 10 days or until they no longer have symptoms. The guidance adds: 'Based on the advice from the health protection team, schools must send home those people who have been in close contact with the person who has tested positive, advising them to self-isolate for 14 days since they were last in close contact with that person when they were infectious. 'Close contact means: direct close contacts - face to face contact with an infected individual for any length of time, within 1m, including being coughed on, a face to face conversation, or unprotected physical contact (skin-to-skin); proximity contacts - extended close contact (within 1 to 2 metres for more than 15 minutes) with an infected individual; travelling in a small vehicle, like a car, with an infected person.' Advertisement

UK Ministers stressed that it would be compulsory for pupils to attend classes, with the risk of fines for parents who did not comply - although Mr Williamson said they would only be used as a last resort.

Local authorities can fine parents 120 - cut to 60 if paid within 21 days - over a child's absence from school, with the threat of prosecution if they fail to pay.

Mr Williamson said: 'In terms of fining, we would ask all schools to work with those parents, encourage them to bring their children back, deal with concerns that they have and fining would be very much the last resort, as it has always been.'

The beleaguered Cabinet minister has said he wants to continue in the role long into the future but there was fresh speculation over his position at the weekend after it was claimed he had cancelled a key meeting to go on holiday to Scarborough the week before the exams crisis.

His intervention today came after Boris Johnson issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom as he said he knew some were 'still a bit worried' about the restart.

He said it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health that they go back and that the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed'.

Meanwhile, deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries said pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom.

Dr Harries said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus.

The Government said in its school reopening guidance that 'by the autumn term, all schools will be provided with a small number of home testing kits that they can give directly to parents/carers collecting a child who has developed symptoms at school'.

The kits will also be available to staff who have developed symptoms while at work.

However, some head teachers have reported that they still have not received the tests, just a matter of days before they are supposed to reopen.

He was also asked whether he expected schools to be shut in the event of a localised outbreak of the virus.

He told ITV: 'We would expect to see schools closed as the very last resort. We know that children have missed out on so much by not being in school.

'We know that children have missed being with their friends and being with their teachers and having the opportunity to learn in wonderful classrooms such as this.

'So we would see schools closing as the absolute last resort.'

But many have questioned whether every school getting Covid-19 home testing kits before September is an achievable feat in the first place - with sceptical parents vowing to hold the Education Secretary to his word

Huge Covid outbreak shuts Dundee school Seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school in Dundee just two weeks after schools in Scotland reopened following lockdown. All staff and children at Kingspark School in Dundee, which reopened along with other schools in Scotland on August 12, have been told to self-isolate for two weeks. NHS Tayside confirmed positive cases among three 'community contacts' linked to the cluster at the school, which has about 185 pupils aged between five and 18. It has now been closed until at least next week in order to undergo a deep clean. All pupils at the school, which was purpose built in 2009, have additional support needs - with many also having additional physical disabilities or medical problems. Kingspark School was closed last Wednesday and all parents received a joint letter from the local council and NHS at the end of last week to keep them updated. Advertisement

Mr Williamson said the Government has asked teachers to plan to be able to educate children from home if a school has to be closed.

'We've seen in Leicester, where there was a local lockdown, when action does need to be taken more widely than just that school, we will be willing to do that,' he said.

'In our guidance, what we've asked schools to do is make sure that they are planning to ensure that actually children do not miss out on their education if they're not in school and they are continuing to educate when they're at home.'

Mr Williamson added: 'At every stage, we've followed the advice of chief medical officers and we saw just at the weekend the chief medical officers for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland saying it is now safe for youngsters to return back to school and actually there's more harm done to those youngsters by them not being in school.

'That's why it's the right time for children to come back.'

Mr Williamson was facing fresh scrutiny after he reportedly cancelled a key meeting to go on holiday in Scarborough the week before the A-level exams fiasco, according to The Sunday Times.

The Education Secretary addressed the claims in a tweet as he said he had been in 'constant communication' with officials while he was away.

He said: 'I cancelled our family holiday abroad this year to focus on the challenges COVID-19 created for the education sector.

'Over the summer, I went to see family in Scarborough for the first time since lockdown, and while there I was in constant communication with the Department.'

Many pupils in England have not been to class since March, when schools were closed except to look after vulnerable children and those of key workers.

Schools in Scotland reopened earlier this month, while those in Northern Ireland will welcome pupils again on Monday. English and Welsh schools will follow suit in September.

The Government today stepped up its efforts to prepare for the return of pupils as Dr Harries suggested the risk coronavirus poses to pupils is actually very small.

Public Health England data showed the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays resulted in just one in 23,000 children catching coronavirus.

Some 70 children tested positive out of more than 1.6 million who were in class, with many confirmed as having the disease actually being asymptomatic.

But some 128 staff members tested positive, with most transmission believed to have taken place between adults.

However, while staff are more likely to be infected than pupils they are no more likely to be infected than the general population.

The Government's handling of the schools return, and last week's debacle over A-level and GCSE results, has sparked Tory MP fury.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, told The Telegraph schools and parents needed a 'clear message' that it is 'completely safe to return'.

'They have left it very late and the debacle of exam results means parents don't trust the Government any more,' he said.

Sir Iain urged Mr Johnson to 'lead, galvanising his inner Churchill' in order to reverse the Government's fortunes.

Mr Johnson is urging parents to send their children back to school and in a video posted on his Twitter account this morning, he said it is 'absolutely vital' that classes restart full time across England next week.

'It is vital for their education, it is vital for their welfare, it is vital for their physical and indeed their mental wellbeing, so let's make sure all pupils get back to school at the beginning of September,' he said.

'I think parents are genuinely still a bit worried about their children contracting coronavirus.

'All I can say is the risks are very, very, very small that they will even get it but then the risks that they will suffer from it badly are very, very, very, very, very small indeed.'

The PM had said in a statement issued overnight that there is a 'moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely'.

The UK's chief medical officers yesterday issued a joint statement seeking to reassure parents that it is safe to send their children back to school.

They said 'very few, if any' children and teenagers would come to long-term harm from the virus solely by attending school, while there was a 'certainty' of harm from not returning.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Mr Johnson's commitment to get all children back to school was at 'serious risk' after a 'week of chaos' over exam results.

Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries says pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus than catch Covid Pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom, the deputy chief medical officer claimed today. Dr Jenny Harries said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus. Meanwhile, Education Minister Nick Gibb this morning insisted parents will be fined if they refuse to send their children back to school next week. He also said the Government is sticking by its advice to teachers that they do not need to wear masks despite a growing row with unions over staff safety. Public Health England data has shown that teachers are more likely to be infected than their pupils, after one in 23,000 students tested positive during the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays. Boris Johnson, fresh from his holiday to Scotland last week, today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September. The Prime Minister said in a video posted on his Twitter account that he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health. He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed'. The Government remains under pressure over its handling of the return of schools with Tory MPs today complaining ministers have left it 'very late' to persuade parents it is safe. Advertisement

Face masks chaos as Nicola Sturgeon prepares to order children to wear them in Scottish school corridors and communal areas - while Boris rules them OUT for English teachers and pupils

Nicola Sturgeon today signalled secondary school pupils and staff in Scotland will be asked to wear face masks when they travel between classes - as Number 10 ruled out a similar move in England.

The Scottish First Minister said her government is consulting on exactly when and where the coverings will be required as she cited concerns about ventilation issues in corridors and communal areas.

However, Downing Street said there are 'no plans' for the UK Government to change its approach to the issue in England.

The Prime Minister's deputy official spokesman said the wearing of masks would risk 'obstructing communication' while ministers insisted face coverings are 'not necessary' if guidance on school hygiene is followed.

The difference in approach is likely to cause confusion among parents and pupils as all four of the home nations try to get schools back up and running.

Nicola Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that her government is consulting on requiring pupils to wear face masks when travelling between classes

Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to school in England next week. Downing Street has ruled out forcing pupils and staff to wear masks

Education is a devolved issue which means the administrations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can adopt their own policies.

The UK government's current guidance for England does not recommend teachers or pupils should wear face masks.

But Ms Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that Scotland's Education Secretary John Swinney is in the final stages of consulting with teachers and councils on the issue.

She said recommendations would not include pupils wearing masks while in the classroom.

The move follows requests from some schools north of the border for pupils to wear face coverings.

Ms Sturgeon said: 'We're consulting on this specific measure because, firstly, mixing between different groups is more likely in corridors and communal areas - increasing the potential for transmission.

'Secondly, crowding and close contact in these areas is more likely and voices could be raised, resulting in greater potential for creating aerosol transmission.

'Finally, there's also less scope for ventilation in these areas.'

She said decisions are yet to be made on whether the guidance would apply to school transport and that decision will be made in the coming days.

Asked if the UK Government would follow Ms Sturgeon's lead on the issue, the PM's deputy official spokesman said: 'There are no plans to review the guidance on face coverings in schools we are conscious of the fact that it would obstruct communication between teachers and pupils.'

Earlier, the UK Government's Schools Minister Nick Gibb had said masks are 'not necessary' for teachers or pupils.

He told the BBC: 'We are always led by the scientific advice. What the current advice is is that if a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July, all of the hygiene pleasures I have been talking about, then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils.'

Asked if he believed the guidance could change, he said: 'We always listen to whatever the current advice is from Public Health England, the chief medical officers, we always adhere to that advice.'

Unison is one a number of unions who have called for teachers to be allowed to wear a mask or face covering because of staff safety concerns.

'It's still unclear why government guidance won't allow them, when they're recommended for other workplaces,' the union said.

The World Health Organisation and UN children's agency Unicef advise that children aged 12 and over should wear a mask under the same conditions as adults, in particular when they cannot guarantee at least a one-metre distance from others and there is widespread transmission in the area.

England's deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries said the evidence on whether children over 12 should wear masks in schools was 'not strong'.

Dr Harries told Sky News that in children under 15 'compliance is very poor' and other measures being taken in schools - such as children sitting side by side or back to back meant masks were not needed.

'We also need to think through the sort of psychosocial effects of masks for children, it's a learning environment, and we need them to learn for life,' she added.

Labour's shadow education secretary Kate Green said the issue of masks in schools should be kept under review.

The WHO and Unicef suggested that face shields may be an alternative in situations such as speech classes where the teacher and pupils need to see each other's mouths.

The WHO/Unicef guidance states children aged five and under should not be required to wear masks.

For children aged six-11, consideration should be given to factors including whether there is widespread transmission and the potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and development.
Listed real estate agency McGrath has returned to black, posting a net profit of $700,000 for fiscal 2020, and appointed a new CEO, as the business' founder, John McGrath, predicts home prices will pick up once domestic borders reopen.

A clamp down on expenses, short term executive pay cuts and a streamlining of internal company-wide IT systems helped steer the group into firmer ground for the year ended June 30, 2020, having posted a net loss of $9.7 million in the previous corresponding period. McGrath also received a JobKeeper benefit of $2.2m during the period.

Meanwhile, McGrath chief executive Geoff Lucas has stepped down after leading the business through a period of transition, which saw the consolidation of franchise offices, a new headquarters and a turnaround at its company-owned operations. He joined McGrath as the CEO in February 2018 after a management and board reshuffle.

Edward Law has been appointed as the new CEO of the listed real estate group McGrath Ltd

"It has been pleasing to lead this team through a period of regenerating the McGrath business and the turnaround marks a new beginning for the company," Mr Lucas said.
This article will be updated throughout the week with coronavirus case counts and other need-to-know information about the pandemic in San Antonio.

COVID-19 numbers: To avoid another post-holiday spike in coronavirus cases, residents are being urged by Bexar Coutny officials to continue social distancing and avoid gathering with others outside their households. The San Antonio Metropolitan Health District reported 110 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, continuing a downward trend as the spread of the coronavirus slows.

August 29

COVID-19 numbers: The city of San Antonio reported an additional 208 cases of COVID-19 Saturday as the spread of the virus continued slowing for another week. As of Saturday, 46,291 in total had tested positive for coronavirus since the onset of the pandemic more than five months ago. The city verified 13 deaths on Saturday, growing the toll to 793.

August 28

COVID-19 numbers: The number of Bexar County residents who have been infected with novel coronavirus soared past 46,000 Friday with 272 new cases reported, the highest one-day increase since Aug. 12. The countys death rate continues to be among the highest in the state; the Metropolitan Health District verified 13 more deaths from the virus Friday

Dr. Bryan Alsip, chief medical officer at University Health System, said the upcoming Labor Day holiday will be a natural experiment in how the disease spreads or doesnt spread.

August 27

COVID-19 numbers: The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Bexar County continued to rise Thursday as the Metropolitan Health District verified 13 new deaths. Mayor Ron Nirenberg reported 45,811 people have now tested positive, up from 45,622 Wednesday.

San Antonios hospitals are still considered to be under high stress, but the numbers continue to improve; there were 412 people with COVID-19 in the hospital, down from 436 Wednesday.

Marriott lays off half its staff: The JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort & Spa, one of the regions premiere luxury hotels, is laying off 462 workers, or half its staff, according to affected employees. Downtown Marriott properties are also cutting staff.

COVID-19 deaths higher per capita in Bexar: Bexar County has suffered more deaths per capita from COVID-19 than any other large urban area in Texas, according to state and federal data. The reason for this grim distinction, experts say, is a majority Latino population thats older and more likely to suffer from underlying conditions that increase the risk of dying from COVID-19, including obesity, diabetes and heart and chronic kidney disease.

August 26

COVID-19 numbers: San Antonio officials reported 134 new cases of COVID-19 and 13 more deaths on Wednesday. The numbers signaled that the virus is spreading more slowly.

The Texas Department of State Health Services listed 1,007 COVID-19 deaths in Bexar County as of Wednesday  253 more than Metro Healths total. Local officials say those 253 deaths are under investigation to verify that the patients lived in Bexar and had tested positive for the virus.

August 25

COVID-19 numbers: San Antonio and Bexar County reported a modest 124 newly diagnosed coronavirus cases Tuesday, indicating continued local progress on bringing infections down from the large numbers recorded earlier this summer.

That includes 16 more deaths reported Tuesday, which occurred between July 21 and Aug. 18.

August 24

COVID-19 numbers: For the first time in months, a key indicator of novel coronavirus infections in Bexar County dropped below 10 percent on Monday. The positivity rate measures the proportion of people tested for COVID-19 who turn out to have the virus. San Antonio Metropolitan Health District on Monday reported 109 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the total in Bexar County to 45,364.

Students unable to contact school: Thousands of students in Northside Independent School District on Monday were unable to log on for their first day of school courses, possibly due to a Zoom outage. We are aware of an issue affecting the MyNISD portal. We are working with our vendor on a resolution. Thank you for your patience, district officials wrote on its social media pages about an hour after it posted a video of Superintendent Brian Woods welcoming students back to school.
'Israel's suspension of annexation is an essential step towards a more peaceful Middle East,' Raab said

British foreign minister Dominic Raab will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas this week to press for renewed dialogue between their governments to pursue a negotiated two-state solution.

"The UK remains committed to Israel's security and stability, and the recent normalisation of relations between Israel and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) was an important moment for the region," Raab said in a statement on Monday.

"Israel's suspension of annexation is an essential step towards a more peaceful Middle East. It is important to build on this new dynamic, and ultimately only the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority can negotiate the two state solution required to secure lasting peace."

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Lafayette Parish residents are urged to voluntarily evacuate ahead of two storms in the Gulf.

Based on the latest forecast track, Hurricane Marco is expected to have minimal impact on the Acadiana area, but Tropical Storm Laura is now expected to become a category 3 hurricane, according to a statement from Mayor-President Josh Guillory.

Laura has the potential to cause flooding and bring sustained hurricane-force winds which could cause extensive damage.

Residents south of Interstate 10 should consider voluntarily evacuating, while residents south of Highway 90 are strongly encouraged to evacuate, the statement said.

"Residents should prepare their homes and property and gather personal belongings, including an emergency supply kit, and are encouraged to leave the area by Tuesday afternoon."
Two weeks have passed since President Donald Trump announced that he would sidestep a congressional stalemate to deliver $400 in extra weekly benefits to tens of millions of unemployed Americans  a short-term fix meant to replace the $600-a-week emergency federal supplement that expired last month.

Since then, as more details of the plan  known as Lost Wages Assistance  have emerged, so have problems with finding the funding and getting it to the hands of those who need it. What is now clear is that the federal supplement is $300 a week, not $400. And by Thursday, only one state, Arizona, had started paying out.

Here is what we know.

The federal government is offering an extra $300 a week to unemployed workers.

Trump is using money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which normally provides disaster relief. The additional $100 was supposed to be supplied by states, but most are struggling to meet other expenses. Tax revenues have been sinking at the same time that costs  like precautions to curb the spread of the coronavirus  have soared. Ultimately the administration said the states basic benefit payments could be counted toward their $100 share.

Montana is the only state so far to choose the $400 option, according to FEMA.

Jobless workers with the smallest benefits will not get the supplement.

Only people who qualify to receive at least $100 in unemployment benefits each week  either through the regular state program or a federal pandemic assistance program  are eligible for the extra federal funds.

In Colorado, for example, the rule leaves out 6% of those receiving unemployment pay  or roughly 28,000 people, said Cher Haavind, deputy executive director of the state Department of Labor.

One state has declined to take part. South Dakotas governor, Kristi Noem, announced last week that her state would forgo the federal funds, saying they were not needed because South Dakota had recovered 80% of its job losses.

There are widespread delays.

Each state is supposed to administer the new supplement, just as it processes regular state unemployment insurance and federal pandemic jobless benefits.

In the spring, when state unemployment systems were overwhelmed with claims, there were delays of weeks or even months because computer systems had to be updated and reprogrammed, and staff members trained. Now states must again work out how to process a new program while they keep existing benefits flowing. New claims for state jobless benefits unexpectedly jumped in the most recent weekly report to 1.1 million.

On a conference call with reporters Thursday, John P. Pallasch, assistant secretary for employment and training at the Labor Department, said it could take some states up to six weeks to figure out how to get a program up and running.

As of Saturday, funds had been approved for 23 states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Vermont. Keith Turi, a FEMA official, said on the call Thursday that the initial approvals were for three weeks. Well add additional weeks from there as needed, he said.

Most states, though, are still reviewing the rules issued by the federal government to determine how to carry them out.

Florida is mulling the best course of action that will preserve the states financial stability while providing important assistance to Floridians in need, said Cody McCloud, press secretary to Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Ohio plans to apply but is considering what it needs to do to upgrade its systems, said Bret Crow, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

States have until Sept. 10 to apply for the funds.

The extra benefit is likely to run out after five weeks.

To finance the program without a congressional appropriation, Trump set it up to draw from federal disaster funds  a limited pool  and the administration said that no more than $44 billion would be spent.

According to estimates from FEMA and the Labor Department, that sum will cover four or five weeks of payments to unemployed workers who are eligible. The funds are supposed to be retroactive to Aug. 1, so recipients might be paid only through early September.

Congress is at an impasse on longer-term support.

Trump acted after Democrats and Republicans were unable to work out a deal on supplemental benefits before the August congressional recess. Democrats have steadfastly supported restarting the $600 weekly booster that ended last month. Republicans have pushed for a smaller supplement  initially proposing $200 a week, arguing that bigger sums discourage people from returning to work.

Studies by economists across the political spectrum have concluded that the additional benefits have not deterred job seekers. The latest, by the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago, found that despite anecdotal reports of people turning down jobs, very few workers would not have returned to work if given the opportunity. For most, the temporary nature of the supplement, the difficulty of finding another job, and concerns about career setbacks and permanently lower wages outweigh the short-term financial gain. And workers who reject job offers are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits.

Nearly 30 million people are receiving some form of jobless benefits. At the end of June, there were roughly 5.9 million job openings.

Economists said the emergency federal checks this year have kept the economy functioning, fueling spending that has supported restaurants, retailers and other businesses. The $600-a-week supplement injected roughly $70 billion a month into the economy between April and July, almost 5% of total household income.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has called for an end to all forms of modern day slavery to pave the way for full enjoyment of human rights by all rural and urban poor, the rich, the downtrodden, the displaced and the homeless.

Executive Secretary of the Commission, Mr Tony Ojukwu, made the call on the eve of the 2020 International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (IDRVS).

In a statement by the Assistant Director Corporate Affairs and External Linkages Department, NHRC, Fatima Agwai, the executive secretary, noted that despite the abolition of slave trade several decades ago, many countries including Nigeria "are still grappling with other forms of modern day slavery."

She identified human trafficking, sexual slavery, child/forced labour, prostitution, enlistment of minors in military service, servitude or removal of organ for pecuniary benefits, Osu, Ohu and other cast systems as modern day slavery.

Ojukwu observed that the theme of this year's remembrance, "Confronting Slavery's Legacy of Racism Together", is apt given the fact that racism plays a critical role in promoting slavery.

International Day of Remembrance of Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade is observed on August 23 annually.

According to him, the long-term effects of transatlantic slave trade, which also have some trappings of racism, still reverberate across various societies globally.

He said all hands must be on deck to fight the menace saying it is high time humanity came to terms with the tenets of human rights targeted at enhancing human dignity, equality and respect for fundamental freedoms.

He stated that relevant sections of the 1999 Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and other regional and international human rights instruments to which Nigeria is a signatory, all condemn slavery in all its ramifications.

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Ojukwu accordingly decried the disturbing trend where young Nigerian men, women and girls are trafficked to various parts of the world including Saudi Arabia, Italy, Libya etc in the name of searching for greener pasture only for them to become stranded and face various forms of inhuman and degrading treatments.

He said the commission "is working assiduously with relevant agencies to stem the tide of all forms of modern day slavery, servitude and other related practices."

He also condemned the action of some parents locking up members of the families in solitary and inhuman confinement for years with little or no food thereby denying them of their human rights.

The executive secretary urged members of the public to be vigilant and report any suspected migration, child abuse/molestation and the attendant human rights violations to the commission, NAPTIP or the police, for necessary interventions accordingly.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

Trend:

The world's biggest energy companies are interested in producing renewable energy in Azerbaijan today, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said during his speech at the meeting with power engineers after viewing the construction of a 330/220/110 kV Gobu substation with a capacity of 1,000 megawatt and laying of a foundation stone for a 385-megawatt Gobu Power Station, Trend reports.

I can note that despite the negative impact of the pandemic on the economy of practically all countries  the economic recession in some developed countries is even at the level of 10-15-20 percent  I believe that the economic situation in Azerbaijan in seven months of this year is satisfactory, the economy has decreased by only 2.8 percent. However, we must also take into account that the oil price has dropped, which has a negative impact on our economic development. At the same time, as a result of the OPEC+ agreement, our production has slightly decreased as well. However, there is growth in industry, including the non-oil industry, and this growth constitutes 13 percent in the first seven months of this year. These are the realities of today's Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev said.

He noted that we are using and should continue to use our energy potential to the maximum.

It is gratifying that the world's biggest energy companies are interested in producing renewable energy in Azerbaijan today, and this interest is already being realized. At the beginning of the year, relevant documents were signed with two large international companies on the construction of solar and wind power plants with a capacity of 440 megawatts, the head of state said.

Azerbaijani president noted that the creation of 440 megawatts of renewable energy in Azerbaijan, with the state of Azerbaijan not spending a single manat of its own, is a manifestation of confidence in us, a manifestation of confidence in the future, stable future and development of Azerbaijan.

At the same time, I would like to inform local and foreign companies that we are determined to continue our work on the production of traditional energy sources. We are inviting foreign and local investors to build thermal power plants, we want to attract them. We also want to involve them in the construction of hydropower and other renewable energy plants. If there is such an interest, I think that this issue can be resolved in a short time because a lot is being done in the field of investment in Azerbaijan and the business environment is improving, President Ilham Aliyev said.
Sunday Shodipe, a 19-year-old man accused of involvement in the rape and murder of some female residents in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, has narrated how he escaped from police custody.

Mr Shodipe, on Sunday, addressed journalists on how police negligence gave him the opportunity to run away.

PREMIUM TIMES earlier reported that he escaped from custody over a week ago. He was, however, recaptured on Sunday.

The Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, in a statement signed by the force spokesperson, Frank Mba, said the notorious suspect was re-arrested in Bodija area of Ibadan.

He also warned against "any form of complacency on the part of the operatives of the Oyo State Police Command, stressing that all hands must be on deck to bring the case to a positive and successful closure."

But speaking on how he escaped, Mr Shodipe said he ran away from Mokola police custody where he was detained when he was ordered to take his bath by the Divisional Police Officer (DPO).

PM News reported that the suspect said he jumped the fence when the police officer asked to monitor him was not paying close attention.

"The new female DPO asked Officer Funsho to allow me to take my bath. He cautioned me not to try to escape but I managed.

"I escaped when I saw him discussing with another person. I climbed the borehole pole and jumped the fence. The people living in the area saw me when I escaped but they did not raise any alarm," he narrated.

This newspaper reported that no fewer than three female residents in Akinyele area of Ibadan were raped and killed during the coronavirus lockdown.

More such cases were reported across Nigeria.

Following public outcry, the government vowed to implement strict action against rape. Some states in the country have passed laws on incarceration, life imprisonment and death as punishment for rape.
Syracuse, N.Y.  Jimmia Mia Chamberss family said they were in shock Sunday after learning she had been killed earlier that morning on Syracuses North Side.

They already know the pain of losing a loved one to gun violence.

Mias little brother, Johnny Chambers, and her cousin, James Game Mike, were previously gunned down in the city of Syracuse.

Johnny Chambers was 16 years old on Feb. 24, 2007 when he was fatally shot as he left a birthday party on Berger Avenue. Two people were charged in connection with his homicide.

Then, in July 2018, Mias 36-year-old cousin, James Mike, was fatally shot in a parking lot in the 200 block of Furman Street. A 24-year-old was later charged with Mikes murder.

Weve been through too much, Mias cousin Lonya Moore said. Its sad.

Syracuse police are still searching for whoever shot Chambers in the stomach at about 2:40 a.m. Sunday on the 100 block of Josephine Street, near Butternut Street, Syracuse police spokesman Sgt. Matthew Malinowski said.

Chambers was rushed to Upstate University Hospital after the shooting and pronounced dead.

Syracuse police found multiple spent casings at the scene, but they have not made any arrests in the homicide, Malinowski said.

Family members also say theyre searching for answers.

Were all in the dark, said Moore, who described herself as Mias favorite, special cousin. She dont live her life with gun violence. We dont know where this is coming from. We dont know if it was meant for her, if she was an innocent bystander.

Mia Chambers, who would have turned 35 on Sept. 21, was the oldest of four children, and the only daughter of Rashida and Jimmy Chambers II, of Syracuse, her family said. She was born and raised in Syracuse, but at 13, she briefly lived with family in Detroit, Michigan. Chambers returned home to Syracuse when she was 16.

Family members said Chambers attended Bryant & Stratton College for a short time and previously worked in customer service. She also worked with children at the Syracuse Boys & Girls Club, but was currently unemployed, Moore said.

Chambers never married and didnt have children of her own, but she was raising a family members 1-year-old, Bella. The family member was on drugs and had to give up Bella, so Chambers stepped up and agreed to take care of the baby when she was 1 day old, Moore said. (Another family member is now caring for Bella.)

She was a kind person, Moore said of her cousin. She would help whenever she could. She was definitely loved.

Chambers is survived by her parents, Rashida and Jimmy Chambers II, of Syracuse; brothers, Jeremy Chambers and Jimmy Chambers III, both of Syracuse; paternal grandmother, Janice Watson; maternal grandfather, Norman Wright, of Syracuse. She is predeceased by her youngest brother, Johnny; paternal grandfather, Jimmy Chambers Sr.; and maternal grandmother, Michelle Bliss.

Family members are still planning her funeral and waiting for answers.

For this to happen  for her to be murdered  we dont understand why, Moore said. We are all in shock.

Syracuse police ask anyone with any information about the homicide to call them at (315) 442-5222.

Have a tip or a story idea? Contact Catie OToole: cotoole@syracuse.com | text/call 315-470-2134 | Twitter | Facebook
Photo: The Canadian Press Palestinian workers load food supplies distributed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) at the Sheikh Redwan neighborhood of Gaza City, Tuesday, March 31, 2020. The Hamas-run Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip on Monday, Aug. 24, 2020 announced the first cases of coronavirus spread through the community, raising fears of an outbreak in the impoverished territory blockaded by Israel and Egypt. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Authorities in the Gaza Strip on Monday announced the first coronavirus cases spread through the community, raising fears of a potentially devastating outbreak in the impoverished Palestinian territory blockaded by Israel and Egypt.

Until now, all the cases reported in Gaza were linked to quarantine facilities for residents returning from abroad.

The Health Ministry said four people from the same family have tested positive for the virus in central Gaza and investigations were underway to track the source of the infection. A full lockdown was imposed on the al-Maghazi refugee camp, where the family lives.

The ministry said a woman from Gaza who was allowed to travel to Jerusalem for medical treatment tested positive. Health workers in Gaza then tested her family members, revealing the four cases.

The Islamic militant Hamas group, which rules Gaza, announced a 48-hour curfew in the entire territory, closing businesses, schools, mosques and cafes.

Hamas seized control from rival Palestinian forces in 2007. In response, Egypt and Israel imposed a crippling blockade on the territory, which is home to some 2 million Palestinians.

Israel says the blockade is needed to keep Hamas from importing and manufacturing arms. Hamas and Israel have fought three wars and countless skirmishes in the last 13 years.

Tensions have risen in recent weeks as Palestinian militants have launched incendiary balloons and rockets across the Gaza frontier. Israel has responded with airstrikes on targets linked to Hamas. There have been no deaths or serious injuries on either side.

The recent attacks were co-ordinated by Hamas to pressure Israel to ease the blockade. Instead, Israel has closed Gaza's sole commercial crossing and its fishing zone. The territory's only power plant was forced to shut down for lack of fuel, leaving most Gazans with just four hours of electricity a day.

Gaza's heath infrastructure has been hollowed out by years of war and isolation, and would be ill-equipped to cope with a major outbreak. Gaza's health facilities only have around 100 ventilators, more than half of which are already being used.

The discovery of the local cases comes despite months of strict efforts taken to prevent community transmission.

Since March, Hamas has imposed mandatory isolation for 21 days at designated quarantine centres for all those returning by way of Israel and Egypt. Authorities have detected 109 cases in the quarantine facilities since March, and 72 of them have recovered. The only fatality in Gaza was a woman who had underlying health problems.

The coronavirus causes mild to moderate symptoms in most patients, who recover within a few weeks. But it is highly contagious and can cause severe illness or death, particularly in older patients or those with medical conditions.

The apparent success in keeping the virus out had led to the lifting of virtually all measures to contain it. Schools recently reopened, and wedding halls and mosques have been operating normally for more than two months.
Gov. Tom Wolfs administration said Monday nine counties bear watching because they have a higher rate of coronavirus infections, including some in central Pennsylvania.

On the upside, the rate of positive cases continues to drop statewide. Across Pennsylvania, 3.4% of those tested for the coronavirus were positive, down from 4% the previous week. This week, fewer counties are marked as areas of concern by the Wolf administration.

Our percent positivity decreased significantly this week, representing the fourth straight week that the percent positivity has decreased, Gov. Tom Wolf said in a statement Monday. This is a testament that our actions are working, but we still have more work to do.

The Wolf administration said in the counties that bear watching, at least 5% of those tested for COVID-19 were shown to be positive for the virus.

The nine counties identified as areas of concern are: Perry (9.1%), Huntingdon (7.8%), Northumberland (7.3%), Indiana (7.1%), Union (5.9%), Susquehanna (5.7%), York (5.5%), Beaver (5.3%), and Blair (5.0%).

The previous week, 15 counties were marked as places to watch. Dauphin, Berks and Franklin counties are among those that dropped off the list of counties that bear monitoring. The administration has provided weekly updates on counties that are areas of concern.

The governor and Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine continue to stress the importance of wearing masks and social distancing to limit the spread of the virus. They have said its especially important to help ensure schools can offer at least some in-person classes. Some schools opened their doors today, while others will resume classes in the next couple of weeks.

Risks of transmission

The Wolf administration also updated guidance on the risk of transmission of the virus in counties statewide. State officials are asking school districts to use the risk assessment in guidance for opening and in responding to positive cases in their schools.

Statewide, 45 counties are considered at moderate risk of transmission of the virus, including all of central Pennsylvania, while 21 counties are considered to be at low risk. Only one county - Union - is considered a substantial risk of transmission.

Moderate risk: Adams, Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Berks, Blair, Bucks, Butler, Cambria, Carbon, Centre, Chester, Clearfield, Columbia, Crawford, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Erie, Fayette, Franklin, Huntingdon, Indiana, Lackawanna, Lancaster, Lawrence, Lebanon, Lehigh, Luzerne, Lycoming, Mercer, Mifflin, Monroe, Montgomery, Montour, Northampton, Northumberland, Perry, Philadelphia, Schuylkill, Snyder, Susquehanna, Washington, Westmoreland and York.

Low risk: Bedford, Bradford, Cameron, Clarion, Clinton, Elk, Forest, Fulton, Greene, Jefferson, Juniata, McKean, Pike, Potter, Somerset, Sullivan, Tioga, Venango, Warren, Wayne andWyoming

Schools are taking different approaches to the new year. Some schools, such as Harrisburg, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, will begin the year with remote learning. Others are starting with in-person classes or a mix of face-to-face instruction on certain days and online education on others.

Travel guidance

The Wolf administration also announced Monday that Arizona is removed from the list of states where residents were asked to self-quarantine for up to 14 days upon returning to the Keystone State. No new states were added to the list.

Statewide, more than 129,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus and more than 7,500 deaths have been tied to COVID-19, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health. More than two-thirds of the states coronavirus deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes.

The health department estimates 80 percent of those who have been infected have recovered. The department considers patients to have recovered when they are 30 days past the date of infection or the development of symptoms.

The number of new cases has dropped in August, after climbing steadily in late June and throughout July. The state hasnt reported more than 1,000 new cases in a single day in a month.

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BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24



By Jeila Aliyeva - Trend:

Both the Singapore Business Federation (SBF) and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Turkmenistan (CCIT) should jointly, encourage, promote and facilitate economic cooperation among their respective business communities to the mutual interests of both sides, as well as encourage the exchange of trade delegations, experts and economic discussion and support the follow up of such visits, Ho Meng Kit, Chief Executive Officer of SBF told Trend.

The memorandum of understanding between the two sides should help develop the relations even further, he said.

Ho Meng Kit pointed out that knowledge exchange, with a flow of reciprocal economic information and data, is also one of the main features in the memorandum in which SBF and Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Turkmenistan should seek to achieve.

The intention of this memorandum of understanding is to establish a practical framework for developing stronger business relations between the two parties, and to set forth the cooperation procedures that can enhance the implementation of reciprocal economic benefits.



In addition, the CEO noted that this memorandum of understanding will benefit both Turkmenistan and Singapore businesses, paving the way for SBF to collaborate with CCIT, and vice versa..

Furthermore, he said that due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, both SBF and CCIT have been unable to finalize plans to collaborate further.

Generally, talking about business environment in Turkmenistan, the SBF noted that Turkmenistan represents one of the three key markets in Central Asia, together with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

"Coupled with a large agriculture base, Turkmenistan possesses great potential, and offers many business opportunities for overseas investors," he said.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @JeilaAliyeva
The Kaduna State Government on Saturday said that it has relaxed curfew in Kauru and Zango Kataf Local Government Areas of the state.

The Commissioner for Internal Security & Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, said this in a statement in Kaduna.

Mr Aruwan said that security agencies had advised the state government about the persisting danger of attacks and reprisals, especially in Zangon-Kataf LGA.

However, the security assessments also acknowledged that there were promising signs of serious efforts at rapprochement between the Atyap, Hausa and Fulani communities of Zangon-Kataf Local Government Area.

"As efforts to diminish perils to communities and promote peace continue, the Kaduna State Government has accepted the recommendation to relax the curfew in Kauru and Zangon-Kataf LGAs.

"Curfew hours will now be from 6.00 p.m. to 6.00 a.m., effective from today (Saturday, August 22)."

According to him, this decision completes the relaxation of the 24-hour curfew imposed from June 11, to help contain security challenges initially in Kauru and Zangon-Kataf, but later extended to Kaura and Jema'a Local Government Areas.

(NAN)
Announces Completion of Phase One of the 2020 Soils Sampling and Announces Non-Brokered Private Placement

Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - August 24, 2020) - Nicola Mining Inc. (TSXV: NIM) (FSE: HLI), (the "Company" or "Nicola") is pleased to announce that it has completed the first phase of the soil sampling program (the "2020 Program") at its wholly owned Treasure Mountain Property, a fully-permitted high grade silver mine located approximately 90 minutes to its Craigmont Mill. This first phase included 304 of the planned 530 B-horizon soil samples collected over the MB zone and to the southwest (Figure 1). During the soil sampling program, five outcrops were identified hosting mineralized vein material which were sampled via surface grab samples and shallow drilling, via portable drill. The locations indicate a potential strike length of mineralization of approximately 1.2km, that had previously not been tested by the Company. The soil samples are currently undergoing analysis at MSA Labs in Langley, British Columbia. All rock and drill samples have been submitted for analysis at ActLab, in Kamloops, British Columbia. Both labs are independent commercial laboratories that are ISO 9001 certified and ISO 17025 accredited.

Figure 1: Treasure Mountain Property with completed historic (grey) and recently completed soil samples (black).





To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4873/62335_f8e16de9b4ad395b_001full.jpg

The 2020 Program objective is to complete the 2019 soil program which was cut short due to inclement weather[1]. Complimentary to the soils program, the Company has revisited reported locations of silver-bearing veins on the property identified in historic literature of the area. A total of five outcrops of sphalerite-galena-chalcopyrite bearing veins (Figure 2 and 3) form a potential mineralized corridor of approximately 1.2 km strike length (Figure 2) was identified. These sites include the Cal Vein, which was sampled as part of the 2019 soils program[2].

Figure 2: Map of vein outcrop and portable drill sites along the mineralization trend.





To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4873/62335_f8e16de9b4ad395b_002full.jpg

Figure 3: Examples of mineralized vein identified on Treasure Mountain Property





To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4873/62335_figure3.jpg

The second phase of the 2020 Program aims to complete the planned soil sampling program.These results are very encouraging as they identify the potential for other mineralized structures, outside of the Treasure Mountain underground mine workings, that were previously underexplored by preceding operators on the property.

The Company also announces a non-brokered private placement financing (the "Offering") of up to 5,000,000 (each, a "Unit") at a price of $0.13 per Unit for gross proceeds of up to $650,000. Each Unit consists of one common share of the Company (each, a "Share") and one-half of one share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a "Warrant"). One Warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one additional Share of the Company at a price of $0.20 per Share for a period of two years from closing of the Offering

No finders' fees will be payable in connection with the Offering.

All securities issued in connection with the Offering will be subject to a statutory hold period expiring four months and one day after closing of the Offering. Completion of the Offering is subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. The aggregate gross proceeds from the sale of the Offering will be used for general working capital.

None of the securities sold in connection with the Offering will be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and no such securities may be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements. This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

Qualified Person

Michael Frye, P.Geo, a consulting geologist to the Company, is the independent qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects for the technical disclosure contained in this news release.

About Nicola Mining

Nicola Mining Inc. is a junior mining company listed on the TSX Venture and Frankfurt Exchanges that maintains a 100% owned mill and tailings facility, located near Merritt, British Columbia. It has already signed four mill profit share agreements with high grade gold producers. The fully-permitted mill can process both gold and silver mill feed via gravity and flotation processes. The Company also owns 100% of the New Craigmont Project, a high-grade copper property, and an active gravel pit that is located adjacent to its milling operations.

About Treasure Mountain Property

Nicola Mining Inc. owns 100% of the Treasure Mountain Property, an approximately 7,000-acre silver deposit consisting of: 51 mineral tenures, comprising 21 legacy claims: 100 cell units, and five crown grants for a total of approximately 2,850 hectares.

The Company continues to maintain the option of reopening Level 1 in order to extract silver mill feed from Stope 2 and continues to monitor silver prices prior to reconsidering reopening the mine. The Property also has 3 highly prospective targets:

MB Zone located approximately 1.5km from the underground mine workings on the undrilled Northern slope of the mountain. JK Vein/Eastern Zone located approximately 1.0 km from the underground mine workings. Jensen Portal located approximately 100 m west of the Level 3 Portal and previously mined in the 1920's.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Peter Espig"

Peter Espig

CEO & Director

For additional information

Contact: Peter Espig

Phone: (778) 385-1213

Email: info@nicolamining.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" under applicable Canadian securities legislation that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results, performance, prospects, and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the expectations of management regarding the proposed Offering, the expectations of management regarding the use of proceeds of the Offering, closing conditions for the Offering, the expiry of hold periods for securities distributed pursuant to the Offering, and Exchange approval of the proposed Offering. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements including that: the Company may not complete the Offering on terms favorable to the Company or at all; the Exchange may not approve the Offering; the proceeds of the Offering may not be used as stated in this news release; the Company may be unable to satisfy all of the conditions to the Closing; and those additional risks set out in the Company's public documents filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Although the Company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements, which only apply as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. Except where required by law, the Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

[1] Nicola Mining Inc. News Release 23 January 2020. Nicola Mining announces results of 2019 soils sampling program at Treasure Mountain property (https://nicolamining.com/nicola-mining-announces-results-of-2019-soils-sampling-program-at-treasure-mountain-property/)

[2] Nicola Mining Inc., 21 February 2020. Nicola Mining announces 2019 rock samples results at Treasure Mountain Silver Mine property (https://nicolamining.com/nicola-mining-announces-2019-rock-samples-results-at-treasure-mountain-silver-mine-property/)

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/62335
The United States government is calling all hospitals to report new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases and report key coronavirus statistics to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This comes after the move from the Trump administration in July, ordering hospitals to report data to a central database in Washington.

Now, the CDC is working to build a revolutionary new data system for COVID-19 hospital data collection, which will help collate all relevant data about the pandemic that has infected more than 5.7 million and claimed over 176,000 lives in the U.S.

However, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has denied the move to revert the reporting to CDC, citing that they are working with the health agency to assist in data collection.

Image Credit: Lipik Stock Media / Shutterstock

Hospital data system

In July, the Trump administration mandated all hospitals to report relevant data on new COVID-19 cases to a central database in Washington. The move by the government received criticism from medical experts and public health groups.

Weeks after the change of data handling for COVID-19, lawmakers demand answers on the reporting change. Due to inconsistencies in the data being reported, the lawmakers urge the Trump administration to reverse the decision to divert COVID-19 data away from the CDC.

We urge you to reverse this decision, restore this data collection role to the CDC, and take all necessary steps to ensure that essential data is collected and publicly reported free from political interference, the Chairs wrote. We are concerned that this decision may represent yet another example of the Administrations continuing politicization of public health during the coronavirus pandemic, they added.

On July 10, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) directed hospitals to stop reporting coronavirus hospitalization data to the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) site, which was used to report data on infectious disease hospitalizations for more than a decade. Effective July 15, all hospital data regarding COVID-19 cases were directed through TeleTracking Technologies, a private company that has signed a $10 million contract in April 2020.

The lawmakers emphasized that the technology used by the private company does not appear to be more advanced than what the CDC has used for years.

Like NHSN, the new database relies on manual data entry with inherent reporting delays, as opposed to the automatic reporting technology that experts have called for. Experts have also raised concerns that HHS does not have the same expertise as CDC in analyzing and reporting this type of critical data, the lawmakers said.

Back to the CDC

Now, the HHS has reversed its decision to change the way hospitals report critical information about COVID-19 cases to the government. Deborah Birx, the White Houses coronavirus coordinator, announced that the current system under which hospitals report new cases is solely an interim system and that the reporting would soon go back to the CDC.

Birx added that they are working with the CDC to build a revolutionary new data system for COVID-19 monitoring in the U.S.

However, the HHS has recently denied the article, according to an update by Gizmodo, saying it is bringing the responsibility back to the CDC. The data collection system will still be processed through HHS, while the CDCs involvement will be limited to the development of an automated reporting process to ease the burden of daily reporting by hospitals.

Further, the HHS spokesperson did not respond to why Birx said that the data reporting decision would be reversed and given back to the CDC.

Coronavirus global toll

The global coronavirus toll has now reached more than 23.35 million cases, with more than 807,000 people who have died from the infection. With the skyrocketing cases in the United States, Brazil, and India, along with other South American countries, the cases are still expected to rise in the coming weeks.

Brazil and India report high infection cases, with more than 3.6 million and 3 million cases, respectively. Other countries with a high number of confirmed cases include Russia, with more than 954,000 cases, South Africa, with at least 609,000 cases, Peru, with more than 585,000 cases, and Mexico, with more than 560,000 cases.

From all the confirmed cases, more than 15 million people have already recovered.
The Nigerian authorities have left rural communities at the mercy of rampaging gunmen who have killed at least 1,126 people in the north of the country since January, Amnesty International said today.

The organisation interviewed civilians in Kaduna, Katsina, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba and Zamfara states, who said they live in fear of attacks and abductions as insecurity escalates in rural areas. Many of those interviewed described how security forces often arrive hours after attacks have ended, even when officers have been given information about impending attacks. During one attack in Unguwan Magaji in Kaduna state, security forces arrived at the scene but left when they saw the sophisticated ammunition the attackers were using. By the time they returned, at least 17 people had been killed.

Amnesty International has documented an alarming escalation in attacks and abductions in several states in north-west and north-central Nigeria since January 2020. Worst affected are villages in the south of Kaduna State, where armed men killed at least 366 people in multiple attacks between January and July 2020.

Terrifying attacks on rural communities in the north of Nigeria have been going on for years. The ongoing failure of security forces to take sufficient steps to protect villagers from these predictable attacks is utterly shameful, said Osai Ojigho, Director of Amnesty International Nigeria.

In addition to the security forces failure to heed warnings or respond in time to save lives, the fact that no perpetrators have been brought to justice leaves rural communities feeling completely exposed. The President claims he has repeatedly tasked security agencies to end the killing so that Nigerians can go to bed with their eyes closed, but clearly nothing has changed.

Houses burned, villagers abducted

At least 77 people have been killed since January 2020 in the ongoing communal clashes between the Jukun and Tiv ethnic groups in Taraba state, northeast Nigeria. The ethnic conflict between Jukun and Tiv ethnic groups has been on and off since the early 1990s as authorities consistently failed to end the conflict.

On 28 May, at least 74 people were reportedly killed in Sokoto state, when gunmen attacked four villages in Sabon Birni Local Government Area.

According to witnesses interviewed by Amnesty International in Kaduna, Plateau and Katsina states, the attacks are well coordinated. Attackers stormed villages on motorcycles and heavily armed. They shoot sporadically at people, set houses on fire, steal cattle, destroy farm produce and abduct villagers for ransom.

Most villagers told Amnesty International that the government left them at the mercy of their attackers. They complained of receiving little or no help from security officials during attacks, despite informing them prior or calling for help during attacks. They lamented that, in most cases, the security forces arrived hours after attacks.

A witness to an attack in Unguwan Magaji in the southern part of Kaduna said:

During the attack, our leaders called and informed the soldiers that the attackers are in the village, so the soldiers did not waste time and they came but when they came and saw the type of ammunitions the attackers had they left. The following morning so many soldiers came with their Hilux pick-up trucks to see the dead bodies.

Escalating violence in southern Kaduna

In response to increasing violence in the south of Kaduna State, the State Governor imposed a 24-hour curfew in affected communities in June 2020, but attacks have continued. Violence has been on and off in southern Kaduna since the aftermath of 2011 elections and authorities have failed to both end the violence or bring the perpetrators to justice.

On 6 August at least 22 people were reported killed when gunmen suspected to be herders attacked four communities in Zangon Kataf Local Government Area of the state.

More than 100 people were killed in July during 11 suspected coordinated attacks in Chikun, Kaura and Zangon-Kataf Local Government Areas of the state. At least 16 people were killed in Kukum-Daji on July 19, 2020, in an attack that lasted for five minutes, when attackers shot sporadically at villagers.

A farmer in Kukum Daji whose son was killed during the attack informed Amnesty International:

My son was 20 years old, he had just gotten admission at University of Jos. He was at home due to the Corona pandemic, then the attack happened. When I saw his dead body, my body became very weak, I started feeling dizzy, I thought I was going to fall, my whole body was on fire but there was nothing I could do, I just told myself that am leaving everything to God. I will never be happy again in this life for losing this boy. His death has really affected me.

Some victims of the recent attacks in southern Kaduna told Amnesty International that security forces were absent during most of the attacks, arriving only hours after the attackers had left. In rare cases when security forces arrived during attacks, they often came with inadequate intervention.

Katsina: Humanitarian crisis looms

The violence has forced many farmers and their families to flee their homes. In Katsina state, at least 33,130 people are now in displacement camps, and others have gone to stay with relatives in urban areas. Thousands of farmers could not cultivate their farms during the 2020 rain season because of fear of attacks or abduction.

These attacks have caused massive displacement and food insecurity in the affected states. The majority of the people in these communities depend on farming for their livelihoods, but they are now too afraid to go to their fields, said Osai Ojigho.

This is pushing the region to the brink of a major humanitarian crisis. The Nigerian authorities failure to stem the violence is costing peoples lives and livelihoods, and without immediate action many more lives may be lost.

A 50-year-old farmer in Batsari Local Government Area of Katsina State told Amnesty International:

Our village has been attacked several times. Not once, not twice, but 10 times. To farm is even a problem, the bandits have stopped us from going to our farms, we only cultivate the farms close to the house but our farmland in the bush, we can no longer go there to farm, they stopped us from going there. My family farm that was not cultivated this year is more than 300 hectares of land.

Abductions

At least 380 people have been abducted for ransom during attacks in Kaduna, Niger, Katsina, Nasarawa and Zamfara states in 2020, mostly women and children. Largely, relatives of those abducted sell all their belongings to pay ransom to the gunmen and those unable to pay are mostly killed.

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According to a witness, at least 17 women were abducted on 20 July in Safana Local Government Area of Katsina State, in an attack that lasted for almost three hours.

Arrested for Daring to Seek for Better Protection

Not only has the government failed to take the steps needed to stop these attacks, police regularly punish those who dare to ask for more protection. Amnesty International has documented how farmers, rights groups, and activists are subjected to intimidation, arrest and torture for speaking out against the attacks or asking government to help protect the people.

On 8 August at least 3 people were arrested during a peaceful protest at Refinery Junction, Kaduna South, and on 18 June, at least 20 protesters were arrested and detained for days by police in Katsina State.

On 17 June, Nastura Ashir Sharif  an activist was arrested for speaking out against the killings and leading protests calling for an end to the rising insecurity in the country.

On 10 April, a youth from the Oureedam community in the Bassa area of Plateau State was arrested after complaining that security forces had arrived late to an attack. He said he was beaten and was made to roll on a wet floor. He was eventually released when a lawmaker representing his community intervened.

In their response to these attacks, the Nigerian authorities have displayed gross incompetence and a total disregard for peoples lives. Arresting people who dare to ask for help is a further blow. Instead of arresting critics, the authorities should be seeking urgent solutions to this crisis and doing all they can to prevent further attacks, said Osai Ojigho.

Amnesty International is calling on Nigerian authorities to independently investigate all these deaths and ensure accountability by bringing the perpetrators to justice. Spate of these killings is an evidence of failure of authorities to protect the people. Inability of authorities to bring attackers to justice is fueling dangerous conspiracy theories that only escalate the violence.

The government has an obligation to protect its population. The rising death toll in the north of Nigeria shows just how badly the authorities are failing in this responsibility.

Background

Rising insecurity in several states in the north of Nigeria, including Kaduna, Katsina, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba and Zamfara states, has left thousands dead.

Amnesty International Nigeria has been monitoring the banditry attacks and clashes by herders and farmers since 2016. In December 2018 we published a report, based on years of research, that documents the violent clashes between members of farmer communities and members of herder communities in parts of Nigeria, particularly in the northern parts of the country.
by Ngoc Lan

Whilst respecting social distancing rules, Cao Xa parish offers daily prayers and Masses via social media. Priests visit families and confess the faithful. Parish council members pray with family groups.

Phu Cuong (AsiaNews)  Located in the Diocese of Phu Cuong (southern Vietnam), Cao Xa parish has more than 3,000 members. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the local parish priest has worked hard to find new ways to engage in pastoral outreach.

Across the country, the coronavirus outbreak does not seem to be stopping. After months of lockdown with no deaths, more than a thousand cases and 25 deaths have been reported since late July.

In the Diocese of Phu Cuong, Bishop Giuse (Joseph) Nguyen Tan Tuoc urged all 103 parishes to find ways to remain in communion and unity with the Church, pray to God and Mother Mary for the end of the pandemic, and strengthen love in the family and for one other.

Fr Phero (Peter) inh Quang Manh Hung, a Dominican friar, is parish priest in Cao Xa. Since the pandemic broke out, he has celebrated Mass seen live online every day.

We cannot go to church and attend Mass directly, he explained, but we can listen to the Word of God every day through the parish's live stream.

For this reason, he has urged his parishioners to pray and share experiences via the parishs website and Facebook page.

One parishioner, Ms Dung Nguyen, for example wrote, Lord, deliver us from this epidemic, heal the sick, bless those who serve coronavirus patients.

Another one, Hoa, a young woman who in the parish choir, said that she prays to Our Lady: Mother Mary, protect our family and the world, keep them safe in your hands. Mother Mary, help priests and keep them safe.

Young people, above all, feel the seriousness of the situation, and express their sadness at not being able to participate directly in the Mass and share parish life in person.

However, If we remain sad, we wont know how to solve our problems, said Fr Phero. For now, we have to keep social distancing and follow the online Mass.

Following the bishop's suggestion, priests have incorporated family visits in their pastoral outreach action. In some cases, they have been joined by members of the pastoral council.

Some residents of the Vietnam Martyrs area in Cao Xa parish were moved by the visit of the priests and the parish council. After the visit, the priests confessed us and then gave a blessing to all of us. We also prayed together in front of an altar in the house.
Kareen "Troy" Troitino spent all of July working in a prison medical facility just as the coronavirus was surging through Miami's Federal Correctional Institution, where the number of confirmed cases ballooned from a handful of prisoners to nearly 100 in a matter of days. When he returned to work at FCI Miami in August, he was caught off guard when the prisoners welcomed him back with a laudatory uproar he said "sounded like the Super Bowl."

Word had circulated among prisoners in the 1,000-person low-security facility that Troitino, a corrections officer and union president, was telling reporters, lawmakers and managers that despite assurances, the Bureau of Prisons' response to the coronavirus pandemic was endangering the lives of federal employees and prisoners alike.

Troitino, who spoke to The Washington Post as a representative of his union, acknowledged that prisoners and guards don't always find themselves on the same team; but in a pandemic, everyone's fates are intertwined.

"All of us are trying to survive," Troitino said. "Your health affects me, and vice versa. Inmates and staff, we do not feel safe."

Troitino is among the federal workers suing the government for hazard pay over what they say are risky conditions they're forced to work under during the pandemic - but he's hardly a disgruntled worker. When the BOP announced Aug. 5 it had moved into phase 9 of its covid-19 action plan, prisoners and their advocates panned the news as the bureau's attempt to create the impression that the virus is under control in facilities while papering over a deepening health and safety crisis.

BOP Director Michael Carvajal has dismissed scrutiny of the bureau as "misinformation." During a June Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on covid-19 best practices for prisons and jails, Carvajal testified that the bureau was well-prepared and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had praised the bureau after evaluating unspecified facilities in the early months of the pandemic. As of June 1, Carvajal said 1,650 federal inmates and 171 bureau staff had tested positive.

Less than 12 weeks later, those numbers grew to 11,953 prisoners and 1,436 staff, with more than 120 combined deaths, according to UCLA's Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project.

Covid-19 cases are proportionally higher and have spread faster in prisons than in the outside population, said Brendan Saloner, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who is studying the issue. Saloner told The Post federal public defenders contacted his team with troubling details from clients. "Their contention is that it's worse in the BOP than in the state prisons," he said.

People inside the facilities aren't the only ones at risk from an outbreak, Saloner added; as seen with other congregant facilities such as nursing homes, outbreaks in a prison inevitably spread back outside through staff, vendors and furloughed prisoners.

"Prison isn't Vegas - what happens there doesn't stay in there," he said.

- - -

Interviews with a dozen federal prison employees, prisoners, lawyers and health and legal experts who monitor correctional facilities, as well as reviews of lawsuits and petitions filed by prisoners and collected from the UCLA data project, show the ways by which the pandemic has exacerbated existing problems in federal prisons; they range from overcrowding and staff shortages to a lack of transparency around policies for personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing.

"It's a complete disaster," said Rob Norcross, an inmate at the minimum-security satellite camp at FCI Jesup in Georgia. The bureau's stated guidelines about sanitization and social distancing don't comport with reality, Norcross said: Prison camp inmates are barred from using hand sanitizer, lack cleaning supplies and have nowhere they can move to to create space.

"When it comes in, it spreads like wildfire because we can't distance ourselves," he said. The prison-provided PPE is of little protection, either. "They gave us non-reusable masks. I have the same masks from four and a half months ago."

Norcross told The Post he tested positive for covid-19 in July and was quarantined in a dorm with 78 other coronavirus-positive prisoners, according to a court filing. The infection made his head "feel like bowling ball," and he lost his sense of taste and smell to the point where he couldn't detect a whiff of bleach.

Since recovering, Norcross wrote in petitions seeking compassionate release - he has underlying health conditions - that he has developed breathing problems and has been unable to get medical attention. An Aug. 7 appointment came and went without anyone seeing him.

Norcross's complaints mirror those in a July report by the DOJ's Office of Inspector General about conditions at a federal prison in Lompoc, Calif.: The OIG reported several issues, including a shortage of medical staffers to address prisoner health concerns and instances where prisoners who clearly exhibited covid-19 symptoms were not tested. The areas where the Lompoc facility scored the lowest were related to adequate PPE supply for staff and prisoners, and adequate soap or hand sanitizer for prisoners.

Now Norcross's concern is that he could catch the virus again or die of complications from his first infection before he can go home to his family. He is still waiting for a judge to rule on his release.

- - -

Troitino, the Miami prison guard, said the virus has spread so efficiently through federal facilities because of inconsistent protocols that are almost always reactive rather than preventive. Troitino said prisoners were only getting tested if they had a fever - a testing threshold that hobbled the early months of the U.S. coronavirus response on the outside, before it spread to prisons.

"The strain of the virus we got in the facility shows no fever," Troitino said. "Most inmates complain of extreme low energy, a headache, can't get out of bed, vomiting, diarrhea."

Emery Nelson, a BOP spokesman, told The Post via email that prisoners are typically tested when they're considered symptomatic, in quarantine, as part of random testing or because they are being monitored because they are in a certain sub group that may be exposed; results can take as few as 10 minutes for a rapid test (which can be less accurate), or as long as two weeks when processed by a commercial lab.

Those protocols don't go far enough for lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who sent Carvajal letters demanding answers on testing and transparency. Warren and several congressional Democrats introduced a bill Aug. 6 that would require federal and local corrections facilities to collect and report comprehensive data on covid-19 infections and deaths.

"Covid-19 is out of control in prisons and jails across the country - and the Trump Administration has failed to effectively manage this pandemic and protect the health and safety of incarcerated people, correctional staff, and the general public," Warren said in the past week in a statement to The Post.

UCLA Law's Sharon Dolovich, who leads the Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project, echoed Warren's criticism of the bureau, noting the data it does publish on coronavirus cases and deaths is non-comprehensive and opaque.

"The culture of secrecy that's been allowed to develop in the nation's prisons and jails over the past 40 years is antithetical to these institutions' status in a democratic society," she said. "We have government officials who act as if this is their private information."

Troitino, the Miami prison guard, said he's not sure how much more uncertainty his fellow prison workers can take; guards are eligible for retirement at age 50 and plenty are eyeing the door. He blamed the BOP for a lack of leadership and warned the poor working conditions that have been exacerbated by the pandemic will continue to thin the ranks in already-understaffed facilities.

"All I hear is, 'As soon as I'm eligible, I'm out,' " he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 14:06:56|Editor: huaxia

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TRIPOLI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) on Sunday expressed concern over the reported escalation of the situation in the city of al-Asaba, some 120 km west of Tripoli, including the killing of a civilian as well as arbitrary arrests and detentions.

"UNSMIL expresses its concerns at ongoing developments in the city of al-Asaba and neighboring localities, including reports of one civilian killed, a number of arbitrary arrests, detentions and the apparent forced lockdown of the city while the civilian population is already under strain," UNSMIL said in a statement.

"UNSMIL calls for an immediate de-escalation and for all involved to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law, including to allow full freedom of movement and immediate access to health facilities," the statement said.

UNSMIL urged that those arrested be handed over to relevant judicial institutions and those who are arbitrarily detained be immediately released.

Forces of the Tripoli-based UN-backed government on Sunday announced launching a security operation in al-Asaba and the nearby areas "to impose security and arrest a number of wanted persons in the area." Enditem
WASHINGTON/CHARLOTTE, N.C.: Republicans formally backed President Donald Trumps re-election on the first of four days of a scaled-back convention meant to highlight his pre-pandemic record and sow doubts about Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

Trump formally secured the votes he will need to claim the partys renomination in Charlotte, North Carolina, where party members are meeting amid a coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 176,000 Americans, erased millions of jobs and eroded the presidents standing among voters. https://reut.rs/3gmsJKJ

The partly virtual, partly in-person extravaganza studded with Trump family members will feature the president speaking every day, even as protesters target the convention site.

It marked a contrast with Democrats, who opted for a entirely virtual format to nominate Biden, a former vice president, and running mate Senator Kamala Harris. That change was intended to reduce the risk of the virus being spread at the political event.

The choice in this election has never been clearer, and the stakes have never been higher," Vice President Mike Pence told attendees at the start of the Republican convention.

Biden, 77, is leading Trump, 74, in opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election. Biden and his fellow Democrats portrayed Trump as a force for darkness, chaos and incompetence, while stressing the Democrats diversity and values like empathy" and unity."

Republicans said their convention would offer a more hopeful message, with an emphasis on law and order," gun rights, tax cuts and the forgotten" men and women of America.

Republicans opted not to vote on a traditional platform document detailing their policy goals, instead saying that it supports what Trump is doing. Trumps campaign released a series of bullet-point goals, including a promise to create 10 million new jobs in 10 months."

In another contrast with the Democratic event, which featured all three living former Democratic presidents, and prior nominees, the Republican event will not include speeches from that partys past living president or candidates.

Neither former President George W. Bush nor 2012 Republican presidential nominee Senator Mitt Romney, who voted to convict Trump at the presidents impeachment trial, plan to speak. Also absent from the schedule are several Republicans facing close elections in November, including Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

With the pandemic not yet under control, good news has been in short supply for Trump. His performance as president was sharply criticized by Biden and former President Barack Obama at the Democratic convention.

Bidens campaign said Trump would attempt to change the subject, delivering more desperate, wild-eyed lies and toxic division, in vain attempts to distract from his mismanagement," according to spokesman Andrew Bates.

What they wont hear is what American families have urgently needed and been forced to go without for over seven consecutive months: any coherent strategy for defeating the pandemic."

BREAK WITH TRADITION

The president, a former reality television star, plans to hold several live events with in-person audiences during the Republican convention, in contrast to Democrats, who showed pre-taped segments or delivered speeches in mostly empty venues to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Trump traveled on Monday to North Carolina, the venue for the scaled-back event. Trumps planned daily speeches are a break with the tradition of the nominee keeping a low profile before an acceptance speech on the conventions final night.

During the roll-call vote on Trumps renomination, David Bossie, a longtime Republican operative who announced Marylands nomination vote, in an apparent slip-up described his state as home of the Underground Railroad, and two of our greatest segrega-, abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman."

Overnight, demonstrators and law enforcement clashed for a third straight night near the Charlotte Convention Center with police using pepper spray on the crowd. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in a statement that officers arrested five people late on Sunday.

On Tuesday, Trumps wife, Melania, will give a speech from the White House, while Pence follows on Wednesday from Baltimores Fort McHenry historic site.

Trump will accept his partys nomination on Thursday night before a crowd on the White House South Lawn. Democrats have criticized the move as a partisan use of public property.

Trump has four days to make two cases: One is we know what we are doing and have done a great job, obviously interrupted by the virus,'" said Constantin Querard, president of Grassroots Partners, an Arizona-based conservative political consultancy.

And then you have to knock the Democratic ticket for being as far-left as they are," he said.

Trump, who uses pejorative nicknames to demean his opponents, previewed his attacks on Biden, whom he frequently derides as Sleepy Joe," in a rebuttal address after the Democratic convention finished last week.

Peter Trubowitz, a professor at the U.S. center of the London School of Economics, said he expected Republicans to launch a full-throated attack on Bidens fitness to be president" throughout the convention.

It will be less about his age  and more about questioning his independence from Democratic constituencies that the Trump campaign is defining as radical, socialist, and a threat to law and order,'" he wrote.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
It comes as Ms Tikhanovskaya ran against incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko who many refer to as Europes last dictator and was forced to flee the country after he claimed 80 per cent of the vote in a result condemned by the European Union.

Ms Tikhanovskaya has close links to Ireland, having spent many childhood summers living with an Irish family in Roscrea, Co Tipperary as one of the Chernobyl children provided with recuperation as their health was impacted by 1986 nuclear disaster in neighbouring Ukraine.

Had a warm phonecall with Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya to express Irelands solidarity with the... Posted by merrionstreet.ie on Monday, August 24, 2020

Mr Martin said he had a warm phone call with Ms Tikhanovskaya to express Irelands solidarity with the people of Belarus in pursuit of democracy and human rights.

Advertisement A piece of her heart and soul will always be in Ireland and she remembers with gratitude Irelands help down through the years.

The Taoiseach said that Ms Tikhanovskaya said a piece of her heart and soul will always be in Ireland and she remembers with gratitude Irelands help down through the years.

Ms Tikhanovskaya was catapulted into the global political spotlight after entering the Belarusian presidential race in the place of her husband, a popular vlogger, after he was jailed by authorities in the country earlier this year.

The English-teacher turned politician refused to accept the result of the Belarusian election and said she made the difficult decision to flee to Lithuania for her children, following two nights of violent protests in Belarus amid allegations of vote-rigging.

Protests demanding the resignation of the current president are currently continuing in the country, with authorities having recently detained three leading opposition activists who helped spearhead the demonstrations.

The move signals President Alexander Lukashenkos determination to stifle the massive demonstrations that have entered their third week, following Sundays demonstration in Minsk which drew an estimated 200,000 people.

The protests were galvanised by a brutal post-election crackdown, which saw nearly 7,000 people detained and hundreds injured after police dispersed peaceful protesters with rubber bullets, stun grenades and clubs.

Additional reporting by Press Association.
Dividends plunged by 209bn during lockdown in a 'tragedy' for savers  with companies in Britain and Europe the worst affected.

Investors in British firms saw their income fall by 14billion  or 54 per cent  from April to June, making the UK the sixth worst-hit nation in the world.

Cuts: Investors in British firms saw their income fall by 14billion  or 54 per cent  from April to June

By contrast, payouts in the US have increased, according to a quarterly report published today from the asset manager Janus Henderson. Dividends in Germany fell by 22.8 per cent.

The cuts made it the worst quarter since the financial crisis. Bank of England pressure led to the likes of Lloyds, RBS, Barclays, HSBC, Santander and Standard Chartered cancelling their payouts.

Insurers such as Aviva, RSA and Direct Line followed suit over fears of massive payouts caused by the virus. The rout was completed by Shell, which halved its dividend for the first time since the Second World War. Two weeks ago, BP also cut its dividend after posting a 5.1billion quarterly loss.

Experts said British firms paid a larger proportion of profit out as dividends, compared to other nations, and they were using the pandemic as a 'reset'. Other sectors, such as hospitality and travel businesses, are being forced to reassess how much debt they hold on their balance sheet.

Ben Lofthouse, of Janus Henderson, said: 'Coronavirus has been a very tragic situation... for people who rely on dividends to help pay for things. Countries like the UK and France have been significantly impacted.'

Russ Mould, from the investment platform AJ Bell, said: 'Such a substantial loss of income will have been a huge blow to investors.'
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 21:00:39|Editor: huaxia

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VIENNA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Austria is expelling a Russian diplomat in connection with industrial espionage, local media reported on Monday.

According to the Austrian Press Agency, the Austrian Foreign Ministry has confirmed that the diplomat must leave the country by Sept. 1, saying that his behavior does not comply with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations without providing more details.

Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung reported that the Russian diplomat had carried out industrial espionage "for years" in a high-tech company with the support of an Austrian citizen.

In reaction, the Russian embassy in Vienna on Monday said it was outraged by "this unfounded decision made by the Austrian government," which "damages the constructive Russian-Austrian relations."

"We are sure that a corresponding response from Moscow will not be long in coming," it added. Enditem
BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 24



By Jeila Aliyeva - Trend:

With high-quality inputs (including seeds), knowledge and expertise (circular agriculture, improvement of local production methods and the functioning of the chains), the Netherlands can contribute to a better situation with regard to food security in Turkmenistan, The Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality of Netherlands told Trend.

The cooperation of the Netherlands and Turkmenistan are mostly focused on the agricultural sector, said the ministry

"The Netherlands has limited, but constructive bilateral trade relations with Turkmenistan," added the ministry.

As earlier Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Netherlands told Trend, the Netherlands see opportunities for further strengthening economic ties with Turkmenistan.

As reported, currently, Turkmenistan and the Netherlands are actively cooperating in various spheres of agriculture.

For example, Turkmenistans Sahabatly economic society has concluded an agreement for the purchase of 65 heads Holstein cows from the Netherlands. In addition, Turkmenistan receives roses from Netherlands - The Nurly Meydan company is the largest supplier of Dutch roses in the Turkmen market.

Aside from the agricultural sector, the cooperation is active in other sectors.

Turkmenistan and the Netherlands' Damen Shipyards Gorinchem company, specializing in the development and construction of vessels for each market segment from tugs to luxury yachts discussed prospects of cooperation on May 21, 2020.

During the mentioned discussion, both sides confirmed their intention to establish long-term cooperation. The parties discussed specific areas of partnership, as well as prospects for implementing joint projects in the relevant industries.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @JeilaAliyeva
San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Singapore  each of these major global cities relate in that they are major hotbeds of innovation. These cities hustle and bustle for a reason: critical meetings on the state of the nations future were being conducted, entrepreneurs and idea makers were putting their heads together to invent new technologies, and whiz kids met over cups of coffee to discuss startup ideas.

There is something about the physical environment and face-to-face interaction within such ecosystems that enables humanity to formulate and execute game-changing innovations. Yet, in a step toward making remote work a permanent future, Facebook, Google and Siemens told their employees that they can work from home until July 2021. The nature of many jobs has changed, with remote work becoming the next normal. This shift towards digital by default and remote-first structures has been cranked to its maximum capacity across the country, causing innovation to take on a new face.

However, there are claims that physical isolation of employees could potentially hamper product development and innovation. In a Bloomberg Opinion piece, Tyler Cowen wrote, Even as tech companies grow more essential, the geographic distribution of company activity will also make them less unique. Theyll start to resemble a typical cross-section of the workforce, with all of the routines and bureaucracy that most other companies experience. Theyll have less fire in the belly to disrupt and overturn previous institutions. Clearly, the disjointedness of the whole situation can have a negative outcome on enterprises and idea-making. Regardless of this fact, people seem unbothered. In fact, the article also claims that 60 percent of Americans would like to continue working from home, even after the pandemic subsides.

Another study by Google on remote workers found no difference in the effectiveness, performance ratings or promotions for individuals and teams whose work requires collaboration with colleagues around the world versus Googlers who spend most of their day to day working with colleagues in the same office.

IBM, the pioneer of teleworking, eliminated almost all of its office work years ago, and then released a report entitled Challenging the modern myths of remote working, the evidence for the upside of teleworking. Already in 2014, they boasted about their innovative modern business model with over 40 percent of their employees working remotely. Remote work has the potential to destroy innovation hotspots like Silicon Valley, as it has prompted entrepreneurs to disperse themselves across their respective countries at an ever-increasing rate.

Offices have been ditched for Discord Servers, Zoom, Slack Channels and the like. Over the last few months, multiple news sources have confirmed that people are drifting away from cities towards urban and rural areas. Could this pandemic really decentralize tech opportunities away from just a few hotspots, such as San Francisco and New York?

According to Bloomberg CityLab, cities that traditionally havent been known as innovation hubs have begun to institute incentive programs to lure tech workers to work from home in a new location. The article further states, "Employees are proving to their bosses that remote working isnt only possible, its preferable  at least for now  and the prospect of a work-from-anywhere future now seems less hypothetical. So instead of trying to lure whole companies with economic development incentives, more cities are beginning to target individuals who suddenly have the agency to pick a city on its merits, not its employers.

These developments have major implications for the global innovation landscape as a whole. Just like Florence in the 16th century, creativity never stopped. These new challenges may change places like New York City and Silicon Valley  or even destroy them  but it will probably emerge somewhere else in a different form.

It is also important to mention that trust between partners is of the essence when it comes to collaborative invention. David Shrier, program director at Oxford Cyber Futres, wrote for Raconteur: Research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown successful innovators build a foundation of trust around micro-interactions that occur in the workplace. And the Allen Curve shows that if you dont see someone face to face, you dont collaborate with them. Therefore, remote work has cut off a vital part of how humans invent and make ideas  and that is trust in a physical setting.

However, to say that remote work will spell the end of innovation is hyperbole. As per Raconteur and Professor Bernd Irlenbusch, who co-led a study titled Innovation and communication media in virtual teams: an experimental study, by the University of Cologne and Leibniz University Hannover, Previous research has shown that creative performance is significantly lower when there is no face-to-face communication. However, the current lockdown has fostered the adoption of new technologies to conduct collaborative tasks when team members work from home. Video conferencing can mitigate the gap in creative performance.

People will still need trust and real relationships to develop ideas, especially because creativity comes in surges and often unexpectedly. We will work remotely but human contact is part of our DNA and we will need to establish new routines with augmented reality (such as social online meetings) that can be put in place to foster collaboration and more human-like meetings instead of solely relying on cold, unemotional online meetings.

The most important takeaway that emerges from all of this information is that, as a result of our current challenges, the innovation landscape will never be the same. Remote work means that a new species of entrepreneur has emerged, and those who adapt fastest will be best-suited moving forward.

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A HIV drug combination used to treat some coronavirus patients could cause their hearts to slow down or stop completely, doctors have warned.

A 67-year-old given lopinavir/ritonavir  which is being used experimentally around the world  needed a pacemaker to recover from his episode.

The man, who had high blood pressure and coronary artery disease, was given the drugs after catching Covid-19 and ending up in hospital.

And within days the unnamed patient in the case report  at a hospital in Singapore  saw his resting heart rate drop from 84 beats per minute, within the healthy range, to below 30.

His blood pressure also dropped to a dangerously low level and doctors had to fit a pacemaker to restore his heart to a healthy function.

The medics have now warned the drug combination  marketed as Kaletra  should be used with caution in patients who already have heart problems.

It is still not clear whether lopinavir/ritonavir  an antiviral which can prevent viruses from reproducing  protects against Covid-19. But studies suggest it could shorten recovery time.

But it is a known possible side effect of the drug that it can interfere with the heart, causing it to slow down and even stop because it interferes with electrical signals in the body.

A 67-year-old coronavirus patient almost died after his heart stopped when he was given a promising drug (pictured, lopinavir/ritonavir - brand name Kaletra) in a bid to cure his disease

Kaletra is one of dozens of drugs being trialed on Covid-19 patients around the world.

However, the World Health Organization announced at the beginning of July that it was no longer recommending the drug's use because it 'produced little or no reduction in the mortality of hospitalised Covid-19 patients when compared to standard of care'.

In the report from experts in the National University Health System in Singapore, the unidentified coronavirus patient was given the drug 10 days after he developed Covid-19 symptoms when his condition severely deteriorated.

His heart rate, which had started off at a healthy 84bpm, plummeted to 30bpm just three days after he was given the drug and his blood pressure dropped to dangerous levels. A normal rate is between 60 and 100.

WHAT IS LOPINAVIR/ RITONAVIR? Lopinavir/ritonavir is a fixed-dose combination medication used mainly for the treatment and prevention of HIV. It combines lopinavir - a substance that helps to stop viruses from being able to reproduce inside the body - with ritonavir - a substance that slows the breakdown of the lopinavir. It was first approved as a single medication in the US in 2000 and is currently on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines. It is taken as a capsule or in a solution but can also be injected. The drug is known to produce a number of adverse side effects including: Diarrhea, headache, weakness, nausea, vomiting, stomach upset, drowsiness, dizziness, a bad taste in the mouth, trouble sleeping, skin rash, and changes in the shape or location of body fat (especially in your arms, legs, face, neck, breasts, and waist). There are other more serious side effects caused by the drug, one of which is bradyarrythmia (when the heart slows below 60bpm). Advertisement

Doctors were forced to attach him to a temporary electric pacemaker to regulate his heartbeat, something the authors of the report deemed to have been life-saving  especially during a pandemic when precious seconds could be lost while doctors put on protective equipment before resuscitating a dying patient.

The authors wrote: 'This could be life-saving as delays in attending to emergencies are expected, due to the need to don personal protective equipment.'

Even the pacemaker struggled to regulate the patient's heartbeat and backups were needed throughout the rest of the day but the medics didn't reveal exactly why this happened.

Doctors then decided to take him off the drug and his heart rate stayed stable over the next two days. He then fully recovered.

In hindsight, the experts have said doctors should think carefully about whether to give Kaletra to Covid-19 patients who already have heart problems, and to consider putting pacemakers in straight away if they do decide to use the treatment.

The heart problem suffered by the man is known as a bradyarrhythmia  a sudden drop in the heartbeat because of an interruption to the electrical signals which control the organ's tempo.

Bradyarrhythmia can cause the blood pressure to drop and oxygen levels to fall, leading to dizziness, fainting, shortness of breath, chest pain and tiredness.

Lopinavir/ritonavir can trigger this because it works by blocking electrical signals.

Because of the way it works the drug can block the hERG gene (The Human Ether-a-go-go gene), which helps to regulate heart beats, from being able to work properly.

In rare cases, HIV patients have suffered heart blocks - when the organ slows down and in severe cases, stops beating because of an interruption in the electric impulses that the brain sends it - after taking the drug.

Doctors in France found in July that administering the drug caused bradyarrthymia in nine out of 41 Covid-19 patients after 48 hours of administration.

Once doctors stopped giving the patients the drug, their heart rates went back to normal.

They wrote: 'After cessation of lopinavir/ritonavir, no further bradyarrhythmias were observed.'

The authors noted that 'current evidence on the efficacy and safety of any protease inhibitors for treating Covid-19 infection is debated'.

One study from January at the Jin Yin-Tan Hospital in Wuhan - the centre of the outbreak of coronavirus - found there was no difference between coronavirus patients treated with lopinavir ritonavir compared to those given 'standard care'.

The authors split a group of 199 coronavirus patients into two groups of 100 and 99. The group of 99 patients was given lopinavir/ritonavir.

The authors noted that there wasn't a significant difference in the time it took patients to recover and in roughly the same number of people in each group died.

They concluded that this showed using the drug was not beneficial. However, a review of the study noted that coronavirus patients who were given the drug had shorter stays in ICUs and shorter hospital stays in general.

The review added that there were also fewer complications in the group that was given lopinavir ritonavir and the only patients who had to be taken off the drug were ones who suffered severe gastrointestinal effects.

The most recent report, published in the Journal of Microbiology Immunology and Infection, suggests that if lopinavir/ritonavir is used then a pacemaker should be attached before just in case it causes a massive reduction in heart rate.

They believe their patient is the first reported case of a coronavirus sufferer needing a temporary pacemaker because of long gaps between heartbeats.

However they noted that one patient previously had a problem with electrical signals getting to his heart and it stopped beating.

And another two cases were found who suffered from similar problems and an arrhythmic heartbeat.

Tests of lopinavir + ritonavir have come amid a global scramble to find drugs that work on Covid-19 patients to reduce their risk of dying.

Only one drug so far has been proven to work - a 5 steroid called dexamethasone.

An Oxford University scientist who led a British trial of the drug, Professor Peter Horby, said that every eight people treated with the drug could save one life and cost just 40 in total.

It could save up to 35 per cent of patients relying on ventilators - the most dangerously ill - and reduce the odds of death by a fifth for all patients needing oxygen at any point.

And another drug initially developed to treat Ebola, remdesivir, has also shown promising results when treating Covid-19 patients.

Gilead Sciences, a California-based company that developed the drug, reported that af ter 11 days patients taking the drug showed small signs of improvement.





It was the first medicine approved by the NHS to specifically treat coronavirus patients, and UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said at the time that the approval had been the 'biggest step forward' so far in treatment of the disease.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 13:02:22|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- China announced a series of proposals to promote Lancang-Mekong cooperation on Monday as Premier Li Keqiang attended the third Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) leaders' meeting in Beijing via video link.

"Starting from this year, China will share the Lancang River's hydrological data for the whole year with the Mekong countries," Li said at the meeting.

He noted that China will work with other LMC countries to establish a Lancang-Mekong Water Resources Cooperation Information Sharing Platform to better tackle climate change and natural disasters such as floods and droughts.

On promoting connectivity, Li proposed synergizing the LMC with the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, which traverses western China and connects Southeast Asia with the Eurasian continent.

"Greater synergy between the LMC and the New Trade Corridor will make trade routes more convenient and enable the leveraging of more resources from western and southwestern China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, and thus channel more inputs to the Mekong countries," said Li.

Regarding the ongoing global anti-pandemic efforts, Li said once developed and deployed in China, COVID-19 vaccines will be provided to Mekong countries on a priority basis.

Lancang and Mekong differ in name, but refer to the same river. It is called the Lancang River in China, while in its downstream after flowing out of China's Yunnan Province, it is called the Mekong River, running across Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Linked by mountains and rivers, the six LMC countries feature cultural similarities, enjoy profound traditional friendship and share closely inter-connected security and development interests.

The LMC mechanism was launched in March 2016, as the first LMC leaders' meeting was held in Sanya in south China's Hainan Province. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 04:35:21|Editor: huaxia

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SANAA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- A court controlled by Yemen's Houthi rebels in the Yemeni Red Sea port city of Hodeidah on Monday sentenced 16 men to death for allegedly spying for Saudi Arabia, Houthi-run al-Masirah TV reported.

The television did not identify the defendants, but said that they are Yemenis and the court convicted them for espionage that led to the killing of top Houthi leader Saleh al-Sammad in April 2018 by a Saudi-led coalition airstrike in Hodeidah.

There was no comment yet from the coalition-backed Yemeni government.

The ruling was the latest in a series of closed-door trials of political opponents held by the Houthis.

Yemen has been mired in civil war since late 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthi group seized control of much of the country's north and forced the Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbuh Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.

The Saudi-led military coalition intervened in the Yemeni conflict in March 2015 to support Hadi's government.

The war has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced over 3 million and pushed more than 20 million to the brink of famine. Enditem
Overcoming Chatbot Negativity

Advances in AI bring challenges

When the King County Public Health Department began fielding questions about COVID-19 in the spring, its call center was flooded with queries. In the early stages, we were getting questions about anything and everything, says Annie Kirk, a program manager in the King County Health Department. Not a lot was known, and there werent a lot of places to get information.The call center, which was staffed by public health nurses and volunteer medical professionals, was primarily focused on supporting patients who needed to be isolated or placed into quarantine units. To keep the center from being flooded with calls, Kirk worked with IT staff and a vendor to quickly stand up a COVID-focused chatbot The software platforms, which use artificial intelligence to respond to human questions, have become a key part of state and local governments rapid pivot during the pandemic, particularly as call centers were inundated and many agencies sent their workers home. Three-quarters of states are now deploying chatbots to respond to COVID-related challenges , including assistance with applications for unemployment insurance and fielding questions about symptoms and testing, according to the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO).For example, when volume at its call centers exceeded a million calls in March, the Texas Workforce Commission quickly stood up its own chatbot . Named Larry to honor the commissions former executive director, the bot has responded to 6 million questions about unemployment benefits since its launch on April 1. In Missouri, a proposed $16 million plan to support call centers with chatbots over several years moved more quickly to standing up the technology in four departments to meet immediate needs.It helps you be resilient, says Eric Roche, budget officer for the city of Pearland, Texas. If your building loses power, the bots in the cloud and available 24/7. If you need to launch a similar one, you can copy and paste it and have it up and running quickly.Before the pandemic, chatbot technology was part of a larger push towards tools powered by the emerging field of artificial intelligence, joining autonomous vehicles and facial recognition among much-touted use cases for governments.Chatbots are the top use of AI in the enterprise, according to Gartner, and the research and advisory company placed the technology squarely at the peak of inflated expectations in its annual hype cycle review of government technology adoption in 2019. The pandemic may have since established proven use cases that could move the technology further along the adoption curve more quickly, but key limitations remain to be addressed  both on the technology and organizational fronts.Even with rapid advancements in AI, too many government solutions are still for the most part answering known questions with known answers for anonymous users, says Forrester Principal Analyst Ian Jacobs. Thats fine if you need the address of a planning office, but not fine if youre trying to check on approval of the planning variance you applied for.More than half (54 percent) of U.S. users have negative perceptions of interacting with chatbots, according to Forrester research. Jacobs doesnt mince words when asked why.Chatbots sucked and people hated them, he says. The public sector was no different than any other domain. In fact, they may have been worse because resource-strapped agencies at the local level didnt have the resources to invest.Even so, government solutions are rapidly evolving. Roche jokes that one of Kansas Citys first bots didnt exactly endear itself with the citys PR staff. The reason? Its name  Trashbot. But the phone-based bot and its Snowbot sibling allowed people to automatically report missed garbage pickups and icy roads over the phone, saving $9,000 in the first four months and reducing wait times, says Roche, then the Missouri citys chief data officer.Roche developed Kansas Citys first chatbot in 2017, a Facebook Messenger assistant focused on providing easier access to the citys open data project . Despite the ease of launching the chatbot  creating it took two weeks and didnt require writing a single line of code  the challenge was that it became really hard to keep up to date and add new information to, says Roche. When we created the other bots, we had a plan to keep technical debt at bay.But as technology improves, government officials have to be prepared to anticipate new challenges. When Kansas Citys voice bots expected yes or no responses to questions, for example, they often stumbled on a common regional colloquialism: yup.There has to be someone vigilantly monitoring it, says Roche.Many recently launched government chatbots have been purpose-built for specific departments and topics  Knoxvilles chatbot, for example, launched in March focusing on just two areas: COVID-19 and the Census . However, Forresters Jacobs believes that ultimately government chatbots should aim to provide 311-style information across all agencies or departments. Doing so would provide a consistent experience  and the same answers to the same questions across the entire government.To that end, the city of Williamsburg, Va., upgraded its text message-based chatbot to a Web version in July. The transition to the Web expanded use by 2,000 percent in the first few weeks, in large part because the chatbot was available on every page of the city's website, not via a text number that citizens had to track down in order to use the service.As a smaller city, Williamsburg doesnt have a 311 service or call center, so the chatbot has played a key role in helping citizens quickly find answers to common questions and to place field service calls. IT Director Mark Barham gives the upgraded technology high marks for handling the wider range of questions fielded online to date, but notes that more advanced AI is a necessity for chatbots to understand and respond to all requests. You have to have some type of machine learning associated with these, because theyre not going to give you the right answer all the time, he says.AI is making great strides in improving chatbot technology, in part by training and learning from past responses and navigating longstanding data headaches like the inconsistent formatting of addresses. However, some of the technologys improvements open the door for new challenges.With the adoption of technologies like OpenAIs GPT-3 , a text-generating algorithm that can generate uncannily human writing, erroneous answers will be tougher to flag. Roche likens the AI-generated text to high school papers with a mix of facts and misstatements and outright lies that are still passable reading.As with printed and online materials, governments will have to contend with developing chatbots capable of conversing in multiple languages. Chip, the city of Los Angeles chatbot, now supports more than 50 languages, but for many governments ensuring nuanced real-time translation of complex subject areas such as COVID-19 symptoms will require extra care. Were very specific about the agencies we work with on translation to make sure those are truly accurate, King County's Kirk says.The next generation of chatbots will identify specific users and provide personalized answers to complex questions, such as the status of a zoning application or a specific fine or fee, according to Jacobs. But getting to that point will require governments to address two key challenges that are slowing development of other services. First, they will have to tackle the identity management issues that also are a necessity for one-stop Web portals capable of handling functions across multiple departments and agencies. Second, they will have to digitize and map out complex processes and workflows in ways that AI-powered chatbots can navigate.Vendors are doing pieces of that in the commercial market, but the public sector is lagging behind, Jacobs says. Thats only partially limited by the state of AI and more by all of the things before it  being able to map out complex governmental processes, understanding rights and responsibilities, and being able to absorb entire regulatory frameworks. Thats the bigger problem going forward.As AI becomes more autonomous in training itself, governments also will have to think about implicit bias that may be unintentionally reflected in the historical data or feedback that the chatbots draw from, says Roche. Is it giving everyone across the city the same answers, or is it giving people at different income levels different answers? he asks. People hear about implicit bias and think theres nothing they can do about that. There is  but it takes the right staff.A largely untapped opportunity will be using chatbots to empower governments own employees, allowing human call center employees, for example, to tap into the bots to quickly get answers that help them serve citizens better, Jacobs argues. Were starting to hear more about that in the private sector, he says.And while much attention is being placed on AIs ability to help chatbots train themselves, government leaders can see how these lessons learned can be brought to bear on improving other services. In Williamsburg, Barham learned the top questions posed to the chatbot involved business licenses, which sent him to examine the citys website.It means they cant find the information on their own, he says. We have to look at how were aligning information.And listening to chatbots can help governments prepare for whats next. In King County, public health officials monitor the questions posed to its COVID-19 chatbot daily. Doing so, says Kirk, has helped get a sense of new and emerging questions to get a sense of what the publics thinking about on any given day.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday warned the U.S. that playing the Taiwan card would destabilize the Taiwan Straits, saying it should abide by the one-China principle.

The so-called U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation history is the "shameful" moment with the U.S. trying to stop the reunification of the mainland and Taiwan, Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the ministry, told reporters at a daily briefing.

On Sunday, the chief of American Institute in Taiwan, Brent Christensen, took part in an event along with Taiwan's leader Tsai Ing-wen on Kinmen island, which sits a few kilometers off the Chinese mainland's Fujian Province, to mark a military clash between the mainland and the island 62 years ago.

Speaking at the event, Christensen said this commemoration reminded people that "today's U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation builds on a long and proud history."

Zhao said the security cooperation between the U.S. and Taiwan authorities that Christensen advocated is a "shameful history."

"We urge the US to abide by the one-China principle, stop official interactions with Taiwan, make no attempts to change the nature of the relations, and avoid seriously endangering Sino-U.S. relations, as well as peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits."
Berlin: Tests conducted on Russian dissident Alexei Navalny at a German hospital indicate that he was poisoned, but doctors say they do not believe his life is at immediate risk.

The Charite hospital said in a statement that the team of doctors who have been examining Navalny since he was flown from Siberia and admitted on Saturday have found the presence of "cholinesterase inhibitors" in his system.

Alexei Navalny's supporters believe his tea was poisoned. Credit:AP

Cholinesterase inhibitors are a broad range of substances that are found in several drugs, but also pesticides and nerve agents. However, doctors at Charite said at the moment the specific substance to which Navalny was exposed is not yet known.

"The patient is in an intensive care unit and is still in an induced coma. His health is serious but there is currently no acute danger to his life," the hospital said in a statement.
Portland police said they arrested 14 people overnight after officers were hit by rocks, bottles and paint balls, following violent clashes between rival groups of demonstrators that roiled the citys downtown area earlier in the day.

Police said they declared a riot just before midnight on Saturday after a group of about 250 people, many of them wearing black and carrying shields, helmets and gas masks, tried to march on a government building that has often been the scene of violence during nearly three months of nightly protests.

Crowd control munitions were used, but not tear gas, the police department said in a statement on Sunday.

Demonstrations against racism and police brutality have swept the United States since the death in May of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Earlier on Saturday there were scuffles in downtown Portland between anti-racism protesters and right-wing demonstrators. Participants clad in body armor and helmets traded punches and blasts of pepper spray as police officers mostly looked on, according to video of the clashes posted on social media.

President Donald Trumps administration in July deployed federal forces to deal with the protests in Portland. On Friday, he denounced the demonstrations as crazy and said cities run by Democrats had descended into chaos. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is a Democrat.

Portland police said this week that they have declared a riot at least 18 times since May 29.

On Sunday they said the 14 people arrested were booked into jail on charges including rioting, assaulting a public safety officer, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.
We are excited to work with Summit Salon Academy Kansas City to make higher education even more accessible

National American University (NAU) is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with Summit Salon Academy Kansas City (SSAKC) in Independence, MO, to enhance educational opportunities for SSAKC graduates.

The relationship between the two institutions allows SSAKC graduates to continue their education in an NAU Online degree program, including a bachelor degree in Management, and an associate degree in Health and Beauty Management. Under the agreement, NAU will provide SSAKC graduates the opportunity to participate in online classes at a reduced tuition rate and study when and where they choose.

National American University has a long history of working with community and technical colleges to help working adults and other non-traditional students take the next step in their education and career journey. We are excited to work with Summit Salon Academy Kansas City to make higher education even more accessible to SSAKCs degree-seeking students, commented Dr. Ronald Shape, National American University President.

For more information, please contact Amanda Oppel at 816.412.7702 or aoppel@national.edu.

About National American University

Regionally accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, National American University has been preparing students for careers in technical and professional fields for nearly 80 years, with over 20 years of online education experience. Today, NAU offers online doctoral, masters, bachelors associate, diploma, and certificate programs, including programs in Health Care Management, Business, Accounting, Technology, Criminal Justice, and Strategic Security.

About Summit Salon Academy Kansas City

Summit Salon Academy Kansas City is a professional salon academy and beauty school that is located in Independence, MO. Offering courses in Cosmetology and Esthetics, plus Instructor Training and Continuing Education, SSAKC utilizes a performance-based system to teach future service providers how to provide an exceptional guest experience and enhance their earning potential. Summit Salon Academy Kansas City marries this performance-based methodology with the latest technical training to provide an innovative and advanced Cosmetology and Esthetics School experience.
Young radio amateur in the UK press

The i newspaper has published an article about amateur radio by Rhiannon Williams featuring one of the new generation of radio amateurs, 10-year-old William M7WHB



Interest in amateur radio (also known as ham radio) is booming across the UK, as hundreds of new enthusiasts discover the joy of transmitting signals over specially allocated frequency bands to make new friendships and even communicate with satellites.



One new enthusiast is William, a ten-year-old from near Blackpool. While many were baking sourdough and considering going for a run, William was chatting with new friends thousands of miles away over the radio waves.



The article has an archive picture from 1964 of the impressive Moon Bounce (EME) dish used by Peter Blair G3LTF at Chelmsford in Essex.



Read the article at

https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/coronavirus-young-radio-enthusiast-friends-lockdown-600641



What is Amateur Radio?

http://www.essexham.co.uk/what-is-amateur-radio



Free online amateur radio training course

https://www.essexham.co.uk/train/foundation-online/
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 18:08:26|Editor: huaxia

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SHANGHAI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The major public areas of two international airports in Shanghai will get full 5G network coverage before the third China International Import Expo (CIIE) kicks off in November.

An agreement to this effect was signed Monday between Shanghai Airport Authority and four major telecom firms. It aims to boost the development of 5G network and applications at Shanghai Pudong International Airport and Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport.

By the end of July, Shanghai had built more than 25,000 5G outdoor base stations and over 31,000 5G indoor small stations. All outdoor central urban areas and key suburban areas in the city have been covered by 5G network.

With around 10 billion yuan (about 1.4 billion U.S. dollars) investment in the construction of 5G network, Shanghai plans to build 30,000 outdoor base stations and 50,000 smaller indoor ones this year.

Supported by 5G network, the Internet of Things will help the two airports in Shanghai improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. Passengers are expected to receive push notification services covering various travel scenarios based on 5G network and big data. Enditem
Hyderabad, Aug 25 : The Congress party units in both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh came out fully in support of the Gandhi family in the wake of developments at the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on Monday.

Party's Telangana unit chief Uttam Kumar Reddy hailed the decision of Sonia Gandhi to continue as the party President for next six months. He said in the next All India Congress Committee (AICC) session, Rahul Gandhi would be elected the party chief.

The Andhra Pradesh unit of the Congress also welcomed the decision of Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the party for next six months and wished that Rahul Gandhi return as the party chief.

Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) President Sake Sailajanath said Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi should continue to lead the party.

Earlier in the day, he wrote a letter to Sonia Gandhi requesting her to continue as "there is no other leader in the Congress to give a strong leadership." "The APCC unanimously resolved and holds a strong belief that you should continue to lead the party as Congress President at this crucial juncture. But if you have made up your mind otherwise and a change is inevitable, I believe that Rahul Gandhi ji should come forward and take up the responsibility of Congress President since the party needs him to lead the struggle from the front as the country faces the biggest challenge ever to its secular democracy and the Constitution," he said.

"I wish to strongly reiterate the fact that currently no other leader in the Congress can give the party a strong leadership and any move to deprive the party of an able, visionary and courageous leadership would give advantage to the divisive and dictatorial forces. Moreover, Rahul ji had already proved that he had guts and the commitment to take on the treacherous enemy with courage and conviction and that he was fully competent to lead the party to success," Sailajanath added.

Top Congress leaders in both the states were closely following the developments in the CWC meeting through the day and were unanimous in their support for Gandhi family.

They slammed those who dashed off the letters before the CWC meeting calling for "continuous and visible leadership". Uttam Kumar Reddy, who is also a Member of Parliament, said the leaders could have used the other platform to express their opinion.

Reddy had said that only the Gandhi family can hold the party together. He had also said that in the event of Sonia Gandhi stepping down as the party President at CWC meeting, Rahul Gandhi should immediately take over.

Reddy, a staunch Rahul Gandi supporter, had described him as a leader who is humble, courageous, visionary, a leader who fights the fascists and a leader who stands up for the weak.

Several leaders said it can only be Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi who can lead the party at the crucial juncture in the fight against the divisive forces.

Party's national spokesperson Sravan Dasoju had also wished that Rahul Gandhi come forward to lead the party.

However, the leaders declined to comment on the reported developments in the party meeting including the criticism of letter-writers by Rahul Gandhi, who reportedly accused them of colluding with the BJP.

"Since the party has denied the reports, it is not proper to comment on them," said a senior leader.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
If youve kept an eye on technically-illegal automotive feats during the pandemic, you may have noticed something: the record time for the Cannonball Run has been broken. A lot. And now, a new record has been set, and the team who did it were working, in part, on eclipsing their own earlier record.



At Road & Track, Bob Sorokanich has the details of the latest record-setting drive. The amount of time that it took them to drive from New York to Los Angeles? 25 hours, 39 minutes. Accordng to the report, the teams average speed was 112 miles per hour.

The team who set the record, Arne Toman and Doug Tabbutt, had previously set an earlier version of the record in November. The car that theyd used for that run was damaged in an accident, and they opted to modify an Audi S6 so that it could undertake the journey. Also among the modifications: making the exterior more closely resemble that of a police car.

If youre curious about the details, Toman offers plenty of specifics on his website. It can be thrilling to read the details of Cannonball Runs, though it might be a bit less so to see a car jet past you at 175 miles per hour, the top speed achieved by the record-setting team this time out.



The Road & Track article notes that, based on Toman and Tabbutts press release, the record they set in November has been broken no less than 5 times. The pandemic prompting a golden age for Cannonball Runs may be one of its most surreal qualities.



Subscribe here for our free daily newsletter.

The post Once Again, Theres a New Cannonball Run Record appeared first on InsideHook.
Halton police are investigating after a SUV crashed into the front of a Spruce Avenue home in Burlington Saturday afternoon.

The incident took place just after 4 p.m.

Burlington fire department and Halton EMS all responded to the scene.

The male driver suffered no injuries, but the house sustained significant structural damage.

A structural engineer from the City of Burlington has been requested to attend to check the structural integrity of the damaged house.
Russia and Turkey have signed a contract on the delivery of the second batch of tough S-400 air defence missile system and the countries are now discussing finances in the deal.

Head of Russia's state arms seller Rosoboronexport Alexander Mikheyev said the contract has been signed and sides are deliberating on the financial arrangement of implementing the contract.

In September 2017, Russia and Turkey had signed a loan agreement for the supply of S-400 air defence systems. Following the deal, the US suspended deliveries of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey.

Washington claimed that the S-400 deal is incompatible with Ankaras military equipment and might compromise the operations of the new fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets. Turkey, however, refused to back down, leading to strained ties with the US.

Under the 2017 contract, Turkey received a regiment of S-400 air defence missile system. The S-400 'Triumf' is said to be the most advanced long-range air defence missile system of its kind. It can engage targets at a distance of 400 km and at an altitude of up to 30 km.

READ | Turkey's Ambition To Become Maritime Powerhouse Intensifies Tensions In Mediterranean

India prepares to promote Defence products for exports

Meanwhile, India is preparing country-wise profiles of defence products and platforms to promote their exports and the government will stand "side by side" with the domestic industry in this endeavour through diplomatic channels, a senior Defence Ministry official said. Raj Kumar, secretary, Department of Defence Production, said that the domestic defence industry will hold web interactions with the representatives of friendly countries to figure out what kind of products and platforms they require.

READ | Greek FM: Turkey Threat To Peace In Mediterranean

"We are preparing country-wise profiles of products, weapons and platforms which are probably needed by our friendly countries. So we are now planning to start web interaction led by the industry," Kumar said. "That country's defence attache, our DPSUs (defence public sector undertakings), industry, will then figure out what is in the store for us to promote there for exports," he said.

Kumar said the government will be standing side by side with the domestic industry through its defence attaches, embassies and diplomatic channels to promote exports.

To promote indigenous production, the Defence Ministry on August 9 announced restrictions on import of 101 weapons and military platforms including light combat helicopters, conventional submarines and cruise missiles under a staggered timeline till 2024.

READ | Defense Minister Opens Russian Military Expo "Army 2020"

READ | Taiwan's Defence Ministry Showcases Military Power Amid Heightened Tensions With China

(With inputs from agency)
New Delhi, Aug 24 : The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a plea for directions to the Centre and state governments on the formulation of a national policy to provide uniform ex gratia compensation to families of coronavirus victims.

A bench headed by Justice Ashok Bhushan noted that each state had a different policy on such compensation as per its financial condition.

Advocate Deepak Prakash, representing petitioner Hashik Thayikandy, argued that compensation was necessary for frontline corona warriors like doctors, nurses, and paramedical staff etc.

He contended that thousands of persons had died in India due to the virus, alleging that the kin of victims were "not getting equal compensation".

He pointed out that while the Delhi government gave Rs 1 crore to frontline staff fighting coronavirus, others offered merely Rs 1 lakh.

The petitioner pointed out that a majority of the country's population is falls in financially weak category, wherein the entire family was dependent on only one earning member.

"The state of the world is akin to an emergency, being war-like in nature; therefore, it is imperative to provide ex gratia compensation as a mode of relief measure and financial assistance to those families who have lost their loved ones to COVID-19," the petitioner pleaded.

The bench said that it was not inclined to hear the plea and would dismiss it. Then, the counsel sought to withdraw the plea.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
US hands over base to Iraqi troops amid calls for withdrawal

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 10:21 AM

US troops and their allies have withdrawn from the Taji base north of Iraq's capital Baghdad and handed it over to Iraqi security forces.

The pullout took place on Sunday following several rocket attacks targeting the military base.

"The movement of coalition military personnel is part of a long-range plan coordinated with the government of Iraq," the US military said in a statement, adding that the Taji base held up to 2,000 forces, most of whom departed this summer.

The remaining US troops, it said, will depart in the coming days after finalizing the handing over of equipment to Iraqi security forces.

The US military further said that Sunday's withdrawal was the eighth transfer of a foreign portion of an Iraqi base back to local forces.

Major General Tahseen al-Khafaji, the spokesperson for Iraq's joint operations, confirmed that the Taji base "was being used to train, prepare, and rehabilitate the Iraqis by Australian, New Zealand, and American forces."

"It will now be dedicated for the usage of the Iraqi security forces," he told the Iraqi News Agency.

Meanwhile, al-Dijlah TV reported that Taji's training sites had been handed over to the Iraqis and the remaining sites will follow as scheduled.

Anti-US sentiment has been running high in Iraq since Washington assassinated top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and the second-in-command of the Iraqi popular mobilization units, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in January.

Following the attack, Iraqi lawmakers unanimously approved a bill on January 5, demanding the withdrawal of all foreign troops.

More than 17 years after the US invasion of Iraq, President Donald Trump said Thursday the United States would eventually withdraw all American troops from the conflict-ridden nation, though he did not provide a timetable.

"At some point, we obviously will be gone," Trump said in his meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. "We look forward to the day when we don't have to be there," he added before the two men met privately.

There are currently about 5,000 troops in Iraq. Their assignments include alleged counter-terrorism operations and training Iraqi security forces.

Throughout their battle with foreign-backed terrorists, several Iraqi officials and military commanders came forth to reveal that US troops were in fact assisting the terrorists.

Trump told reporters before his meeting with the Iraqi leader that the US military had very few troops left in Iraq, but was there to help the country if neighboring Iran should do anything.

He said US companies were involved in many prospects in Iraq's oil business, as al-Kadhimi declared his country open for American businesses and investment.

Al-Kadhimi took office in May amid growing tensions between the United States and Iraq.

Iraq's government objected to the Trump-authorized drone strike in January while Gen. Soleimani was visiting Baghdad.

The assassination inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq and prompted calls for the withdrawal of US troops.

Trump threatened Iraq with sanctions if the country's leaders followed through on threats to expel US forces over the drone strike.

Armed Iraqi factions on Thursday threatened to target US interests in the country after Trump declined to give a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq during an Oval Office meeting with al-Kadhimi.

A statement issued by armed groups calling themselves the "Resistance Factions" criticized the agenda of al-Kadhimi's meetings which did not include the immediate implementation of the decision to remove US troops from the country.

"Al-Kadhimi must make the implementation of the decision of the Iraqi people his top priority," the statement said.

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When students return to Nora Forester Elementary School in person after Labor Day, if the coronavirus pandemic continues its downward spiral, they will be greeted by their lively librarian who brings her pet lizard to school and a cheerful principal and vice principal eager to lead their young charges on a new adventure.

That might be expected at a school where the mascot is a fire-breathing dragon named Blaze.

Principal Kelly Mantle, 54, said its the students who drive the Northside ISD schools creative curriculum.

Its really all about the kids, Mantle said. All those little people look to you for everything.

This is a school where children might earn money in class and decide whether to rent or buy their desks for a personal finance lesson or perhaps choose to sit on a floor mat instead of a traditional chair.

In the front foyer, murals of a castle and medieval chamber tower overhead. Blaze looms over the castle wall with a fiery message of high expectations at the school located at 10726 Rousseau near Potranco Road.

Billy Calzada /Staff

The mural represents the overall essence of the school, Mantle said. You walk in and youre lured in by the majesty of it all.

The kids start school today  virtually  but more than a few teachers cant wait to be able to be with them in class again.

Gina Rechterman, 34, a kindergarten dual-language teacher, said she misses the face-to-face interaction. Thirty percent of the students at Forester are bilingual.

As a parent and as a teacher you have to be there for them, Rechterman said.

Vice Principal Ileana Perez, 35, said teachers and students stayed connected through virtual meetings in the summer, so kids could see kids and teachers could see the kids.

The administrators hosted three virtual town halls with parents to discuss changes in store for students. Perez said an NISD survey showed 30 percent of parents wanted their children physically back in school.

Forester is one of 80 Northside ISD elementary schools. Last year, it had about 880 students and 50 teachers. Like schools across the city, Foresters faculty and staff spent the summer fine-tuning policies, safety practices and lines of communication.

Mantle said the new school year is all about teachers making connections with their pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students.

With the family that we built internally, theyre ready for it, thats what they do, she said. Its all about learning their likes and dislikes, then you move forward with that in mind.

Leonora Morales, the schools PTA vice president, was ready for classes to start, even though her children will do virtual learning at home for now.

She said she misses driving her children, Maximus, 6, and Arianna, 7, to the campus, as she did her daughter, Alessandra, 13, when she attended Forester.

Billy Calzada /Staff

The schools PTA vice president said the group has received complements from parents about the schools approach to learning.

Morales, 35, said she loved one teachers finance lesson, where students earned play money to rent or buy their desk to understand the difference between renting or owning a home.

When classes shifted to virtual learning she was worried, but felt better when her sons teacher called at 10 p.m. to help him with a Spanish lesson.

Forester is more than a school, its a family, Morales said. So many members of the staff have become like family to us. They treat these kids like their own.

Mantle said each classroom is like each instructors personal house. Teachers can offer their students flexible seating, such as sitting on a floor mat, scoop chairs or around a wooden spool table.

Everybody has that sense of welcome to my home, come on in, Mantle said. It individualizes it to that teacher, yet becomes such a welcome space.

Librarian Kat Lowe reflects the schools out-of-the-box approach. Its not uncommon for the librarian to have her bearded dragon, Link, perched on her shoulder. She has a full-sized drum kit set up behind the counter and is known to happily bang out a riff when a kid asks.

And theres no shushing in this library, while living out loud is encouraged.

Billy Calzada /Staff photographer

Of course, the novel coronavirus looms large, and Lowe has enlisted students to help her ward off germs with a flux de-germinator that uses UV-C light to disinfect returned books. Shes stocked Cootie Stations with hand sanitizer.

Everyone here loves what they do, Lowe, 48, said. They bring joy when they come to work and that makes a huge difference. The people who are here genuinely love to be here.

Were very proud of this place, Mantle said. Its the people that you work with that make this school so awesome.

When the school closed for the pandemic, the administrators kept faculty and staff connected through Zoom conference calls with activities such as a 3-minute scavenger hunt.

They also had a reverse parade for fifth graders promoted to sixth grade. Parents drove the students to the school where teachers cheered the caravan of cars as it passed by.

The bond between Mantle and Perez transcends work hours. Its not uncommon for them to text each other about an idea that popped into mind minutes after theyve left for the day.

When I started working here we put 100 percent trust in each other, Perez said, and we were pretty similar in what we want for kids. Well do whatever it takes, even if thats working late at night or coming in on weekends. Kelly is one of those people you would do anything for because she would do anything for you.

The administrators bond has grown even stronger as they join educators across the city to teach their students in an unprecedented school year.

Were going to let everyone know we can do this, Mantle said. We can and we will.

vtdavis@express-news.net
Protests have erupted in Ras al-Ayn, the first coronavirus related death has been recorded in Idleb, the Turkish army have struck the regime in Aleppo and Hasssakeh have demanded the removal of the US. Catch up on everything that happened over the weekend.

1. The local council in the Turkish-held Ras al-Ayn region has suspended its work in protest over the refusal to appoint of one of its members as director of the border crossing, Anadolu reported. The council had nominated several names for the position, including a member of the council, a Turkish national and a former police officer, Mahmoud Khaled Sheikhmousa, and lawyer and former leader of the Free Syrian Army, Saleh al-Rafan. However, all the proposed names were rejected by the al-Hamza division, which controls the western part of the city, where the border crossing is located, sources say.

2. A rebel bastion in the Idleb region of northwest Syria has recorded its first death from the novel coronavirus, a health official said Friday. Emad Zahran, spokesperson for the health directorate in rebel-held areas of Idleb province, told AFP that the death of an 80-year-old displaced woman living in a camp in the town of Sarmada was recorded Tuesday. She suffered from severe renal insufficiency and high blood pressure, he said. Authorities have carried out contact tracing, taken swab samples for testing and asked those concerned to self-isolate, Zahran added.

3. The Turkish military launched a new attack in the northern countryside of Aleppo Governorate on Saturday, a source told Al-Masdar News from the administrative capital. Al-Masdar reported that the Turkish military utilized their artillery launchers to target the Syrian army and Peoples Protection Units (YPG) near the key town of Tel Rifaat in northern Aleppo. The source said there were no casualties reported by the Syrian Arab Army, nor have they responded to this latest attack by the Turkish Armed Forces in the Aleppo countryside.

4. A demonstration was held in Hassakeh Governorate village of al-Bajariyah on Saturday, demanding the US-led International Coalition withdraw from Syria. According to Al-Masdar, the demonstration was attended by dozens of villagers, who not only called for the US-led Coalitions withdrawal, but also, condemned their attack on a Syrian army checkpoint earlier this week. The attack that was carried out by the US-led Coalition targeted the Syrian Arab Armys checkpoint inside the town of Tel al-Dahab.

5. One of Britains most notorious jihadis is believed to have been killed in Syria. Siddartha Dhar, who was born in London, died with his wife Aisha during the siege of Islamic States de facto capital Raqqa in June 2017, a new book claims. The Daily Mail reported that the fate of the couples five young children, including one born after they fled to Syria, is not known. The claims about Dhar, who was nicknamed Jihadi Sid, are made in a book about al-Muhajiroun, the extremist group led by hate preacher Anjem Choudary, written by American counter-terrorism expert Douglas Weeks.

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.
South Africa: SA COVID-19 death toll surpasses 13 000

The number of COVID-19 cases has reached 609 773 in South Africa after 2 743 new cases were identified on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the death toll has now jumped to 13 059 since the outbreak in March.

Of the new 72 new COVID-19 related deaths, 41 are in Gauteng, 12 in KwaZulu-Natal, 11 in the Eastern Cape and eight in the Western Cape.

We convey our condolences to the loved ones of the departed and thank the healthcare workers who treated the deceased, said Health Minister, Dr Zweli Mkhize.

The provinces with the highest number of infections include Gauteng with 206 018 cases, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with 109 841, Western Cape 104 588 and Eastern Cape 85 203.

Free State has 34 980 cases, North West 24 301, Mpumalanga 23 100, Limpopo 12 563 and Northern Cape 9 129.

Fifty cases remain unallocated.

The number of those who have recovered stands at 506 470, which translates to a recovery rate of 83%.

The information is based on the 3 553 425 tests done to date, with 18 358 conducted since the last report.

In an interview on eNCA on Sunday, Mkhize said the country might be over the surge.

The plateau has started. In the Western Cape, its been over two months. Cases in KwaZulu-Natal are also decreasing. That is indicative of a promising time, he said.

However, Mkhize said the real risk government is worried about is resurgence if people neglect precautionary measures.

The message we are sending is for everyone to take personal responsibility, he said, adding that other countries have had to re-impose restrictions.

We will have to do the same if people start behaving complacently. We hope we dont have to go in that direction. It is a decision that is not taken lightly. We do think its possible for people to exercise social behavioural changes.

Mkhize pleaded with the nation to focus on containment measures such as wearing of masks, washing hands regularly, sanitising and maintaining social distancing.

Globally, as of 23 August, there have been 23 057 288 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 800 906 deaths reported to the World Health Organisation.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Honourable Ministers, Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,

Thank you for joining us for this week's Member State briefing.

Today we will be hearing presentations from His Excellency Dr Osagie Ehanire, Minister of Health of Nigeria and His Excellency, Deputy Health Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Dr Abdullah Assiri.

Both ministers will share their experiences and lessons learned from the COVID-19 response.

We will also hear presentations on the epidemiological situation from my colleagues, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove and Dr Boris Pavlin.

First, let me give you a brief update.

Globally, there are now almost 22 million reported cases, and almost 776,000 deaths.

Despite these mounting numbers, there are signs that countries are now much better prepared to respond to COVID-19.

Most countries now have a preparedness and response plan and a risk communication and community engagement plan in place.

And all countries now have laboratory testing capacity.

At the same time, we see some worrying gaps.

Only about half of countries have a national infection prevention and control program and standards for water, sanitation and hygiene in all health care facilities.

Only one-third of countries have a national policy and guidelines on infection prevention and control for long term care facilities.

And only about one-quarter of countries have a health occupational safety plan for health care workers.

Two-thirds of priority countries report that they have postponed at least one vaccination campaign due to the pandemic.

=====

As each of your countries works on its own response, I'd like to take this opportunity to say that by working together, we are protecting each other.

It is natural and right that political leaders want to protect their own people first.

But in a global pandemic, none of us are safe until all of us are safe.

As I said in Tuesday's press briefing, I am deeply concerned about the potential for vaccine nationalism to exacerbate both the pandemic and the inequalities of our world.

The resolution you adopted at the World Health Assembly in May calls for universal, timely and equitable access to health products, and recognizes the role of extensive immunization as a global public good.

As new diagnostics, medicines and vaccines become available, it's critical that countries don't repeat the mistakes early on in the response, when some countries hoarded supplies.

Since May, WHO has been in extensive discussions to develop a new framework to guide fair and equitable access to diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.

As part of the ACT Accelerator, the COVAX Global Vaccines Facility is the critical mechanism for joint procurement and pooling risk across multiple vaccines.

Earlier this week I sent a letter to every Member State encouraging you to join the COVAX Facility.

This is not just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do.

Sharing finite supplies strategically and globally is in each country's national interest.

The fastest way to end the pandemic and reopen economies is to start by protecting the highest risk populations everywhere, rather than the entire populations of just some countries.

No one country has access to all the research and development, all the manufacturing capacity and all the supply chain for all essential medicines and materials.

We all need each other.

Under the COVAX Facility, we propose allocating vaccines in two phases.

In phase 1, doses will be allocated proportionally to all participating countries simultaneously to reduce overall risk.

In phase 2, consideration will be given to countries' in relation to threat and vulnerability.

Front line workers in health and social care settings will be prioritized, as well as adults over 65 years old and those others who are most vulnerable.

A phase 1 allocation that builds up to 20 percent of the population would cover most of the at-risk groups.

If we do not protect these highest risk people from the virus everywhere and at the same time, we cannot stabilize health systems and rebuild the global economy.

=====

Finally, I'd like to update you on the timing of the special session of the Executive Board.

In consultation with the EB Chair Dr Harsh Vardhan, who is joining us again this week, we will convene the EB to discuss the ongoing response and the implementation of the terms of Resolution WHA73.1.

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Given the existing schedule of global intergovernmental meetings, such as the United Nations General Assembly and the WHO Regional Committee meetings, we have agreed on the earliest possible dates, which are the 5th and 6th of October.

I am hopeful that the co-chairs of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, Her Excellency former President Sirleaf and the Right Honorable former Prime Minister Clark, will update the board during the special session.

Next week we will be presenting the SCORE for Health Data Technical Package - a one-stop solution to strengthen health information systems worldwide, and Member States capacity to generate timely, reliable and actionable data.

But in addition to that, since the every week/every Thursday meeting is for you, any recommendations you have or any suggestions you have on what we should discuss, it will be your day.

So please suggest or recommend anything you would like to discuss on Thursdays, and we will prepare the every Thursday meeting based on your needs and recommendations.

Now, please join me in welcoming our presenters from Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.

I thank you.
The events over the last several months are reminders of the need for meaningful police reform to rebuild trust between communities and the Chicago Police Department. The city must take a more holistic approach to public safety that requires understanding and addressing the social issues that underlie unrest. The City Council needs to pass civilian oversight and honor our commitment to the consent decree. We owe it to the people of Chicago to repair the publics relationship with its public servants and to give residents a voice in how their community is policed.
Congress flag falls off while being hoisted by interim president Sonia Gandhi [Video]

Divisive ideologies anchored in hate causing havoc on secular fabric of our society: Sonia Gandhi

Goa Congress hails Sonia Gandhis leadership

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Panaji, Aug 24: Ahead of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on Monday, senior party leaders from Goa on Sunday hailed leadership of Sonia Gandhi during the COVID-19 crisis and demanded she and former party president Rahul Gandhi be supported for their work.

Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) president Girish Chodankar and Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat have issued separate statements in support of the Gandhis.

Chodankar said the demand for restructuring the party is "absurd" at a time when Gandhis are fighting to help the people facing the wrath of coronavirus on one side and "trying to save democracy of our great nation".

Stormy CWC expected: Sonia Gandhi likely to step down

"@INCIndia is the First Family of India and the movement that provides strength and sanity to the Nation.

After @RahulGandhi resignation it was SmtSoniaGandhi who took charge despite all odds.

"Making internal communication public of our family is unethical, unfair and destructive. Especially when @INCIndia is the only party keeping a selfish Govt in check," Chodankar tweeted.

"It's only @RahulGandhi who is fighting against @narendramodi and his reign of greed, terror and injustice. We should stand unitedly with our President and support #RahulGandhi who is exposing misdeeds," he added.

Kamat said Sonia Gandhi has led the Congress party by keeping everyone united during the (COVID-19) crisis.

"Let us discuss how to strengthen her and Rahul Gandhi's hands to defeat the divisive BJP," he said.

"The efforts of Rahul Gandhi of exposing the shortcomings of the BJP government needs to be strengthened in the interest of the country," Kamat stated.

Sonia Gandhi asks Congress to find a new president, says won't remain the president | Oneindia News

Ready to step down as Congress president: Sonia Gandhi tells aides after letter row

The senior Congress leader said Sonia Gandhi had always extended him support when he was chief minister of Goa.

"I appealeach and every Congress worker in Goa to solidly stand by the leadership of Gandhis," he stated.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 9:32 [IST]
24.08.2020 LISTEN

Deputy general secretary of the National Democratic Congress NDC, Peter Boamah Otukunor has expressed his disappointment in the New Patriotic Party (NPP) over the level of insults hurled at former President John Mahama during the launch of their manifesto in Cape Coast on Saturday.

Mr. Peter Boamah Otukunor said, instead of the NPP to be bold to tell Ghanaians what is in their manifesto, they decided to rather use the big opportunity to lambast the former president of the Republic of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama who is the flagbearer for the NDC for two solid hours.

He said this attitude of the NPP should be condemned because this is not the first time they have disrespected the former president.

Last Saturday during the launch of the NPP manifesto at the University of Cape Coast in the Central Region, President of the Republic of Ghana Nana Addo Dunkwa Akuffo Addo threw three jabs at John Dramani Mahama.

The three jabs, he recalled were in quotes: "If Destroying the economy is Maham's concept of sense, then I prefer the NPP's;" JM's Free Senior High School credibility is zero;" and "It took them long to find Naana, they still don't have a manifesto," end of quote.

Responding to this is what Mr. Peter Boamah Otukunor termed as a disrespect to the former president which doesn't need to be tolerated in the country.

Speaking on Nhyira FM's morning show in the Ashanti region, he said all this the NPP is doing shows they don't have anything good to offer Ghanaians so they should vote against them in the 2020 elections.
On Monday, August 24, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario issued an update in regard to the strangles situation which has been affecting racing at Leamington Raceway.

The contents of the update appear below in both English and French.

Update on Strangles Case  Exposed horse tested positive, additional controls in place.

A horse stabled at Leamington Raceway has tested positive for Strangles. This horse had previously tested negative but had been in contact with the original Leamington case. The horse was contained when clinical signs were first noted and removed to an isolation facility this morning.

There has been no evidence of transmission beyond this second horse and horses have been monitored closely since Strangles was first identified. Measures are in place to closely monitor the health of horses at Leamington and an isolation area has been made available at the facility. The horses on the property have been identified as a high health group, where monitoring and recording of temperatures at least twice daily, and other clinical signs of Strangles should continue.

In discussions with AGCO Senior Manager, Veterinary Services, Dr. Adam Chambers, Dr. Scott Weese of the University of Guelph and Leamington Veterinarian Dr. Bernard Ferguson, a plan was agreed pertaining to the horses in the affected barn.

Horses in this barn will require negative tests results to be allowed to race or qualify. The positive horse will need three negative tests over at least a two-week period, while other horses will require either one or two negative tests, based on exposure risk.

Racing at Leamington can continue with appropriate biosecurity measures in place.

Horses at the other two barns at Leamington can race and qualify, but trainers and racetrack officials shall monitor and record temperatures twice daily, and other clinical signs of Strangles.

Strangles is a highly contagious and serious infection of horses and other equines caused by the bacterium, Streptococcus equi. There is no such thing as zero risk. It is found in racehorses, including those without exposure to the known positive cases. Horse people are reminded to remain vigilant and institute appropriate biosecurity measures and should consult their veterinarians for advice.

Please refer to Industry Notices (link below) for more information.

The AGCO will continue to monitor the situation and any further developments will be reported.

 Strangles in Horses - Factsheet

 AAEP Infectious Disease Guidelines: Strangles

Mise a jour sur le cas de gourme - Un cheval expose a ete teste positif, des controles supplementaires ont ete mis en place.

Un cheval loge a lhippodrome de Leamington a ete teste positif pour la gourme. Ce cheval avait auparavant ete teste negatif mais avait ete en contact avec le cas original de Leamington. Le cheval a ete confine lorsque des signes cliniques ont ete constates pour la premiere fois et a ete emmene dans un centre disolement ce matin.

Il ny a pas de preuve de transmission au-dela de ce deuxieme cheval et les chevaux sont suivis de pres depuis que la gourme a ete decelee pour la premiere fois. Des mesures sont en place pour surveiller etroitement la sante des chevaux a Leamington et une zone disolement a ete mise a disposition dans letablissement. Les chevaux sur la propriete ont ete identifies comme  groupe de surveillance de sante elevee , ou la surveillance et lenregistrement des temperatures au moins deux fois par jour et des autres signes cliniques de la gourme doivent se poursuivre.

Lors de discussions avec le chef des services veterinaires de la CAJO, le Dr Adam Chambers, le Dr Scott Weese de luniversite de Guelph et le Dr Bernard Ferguson, veterinaire de Leamington, un plan a ete convenu concernant les chevaux de lecurie concernee.

Les chevaux de cette ecurie devront presenter des resultats de tests negatifs pour etre autorises a courir ou a se qualifier. Le cheval positif devra subir trois tests negatifs sur une periode dau moins deux semaines, tandis que les autres chevaux devront subir un ou deux tests negatifs, en fonction du risque dexposition.

Les courses a Leamington peuvent se poursuivre avec les mesures de biosecurite appropriees en place.

Les chevaux des deux autres ecuries de Leamington peuvent courir et se qualifier, mais les entraineurs et les responsables de lhippodrome doivent surveiller et enregistrer les temperatures deux fois par jour, ainsi que les autres signes cliniques de la gourme.

La gourme est une infection tres contagieuse et grave des chevaux et autres equides, causee par la bacterie Streptococcus equi. Le risque zero nexiste pas. On la trouve chez les chevaux de course, y compris ceux qui nont pas ete exposes aux cas positifs connus. Il est rappele aux eleveurs de chevaux de rester vigilants et de mettre en place des mesures de biosecurite appropriees, et de consulter leurs veterinaires pour obtenir des conseils.

Pour plus dinformations, veuillez consulter les avis a lindustrie (lien ci-dessous).

La CAJO suivra la situation et tout nouveau developpement sera signale.

 La gourme du cheval - Fiche Technique

 AAEP Infectious Disease Guidelines: Strangles (PDF) - en anglais seulement
How to Manage a Successful Brokerage  sponsored by First National

Moderator: Elena Robinson, Regional Sales Manager, Excalibur

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That openness to learning is incredibly important now as the industry navigates unchartered waters. No one has all the answers because no one has operated through a pandemic, but many brokers have novel perspectives and have adapted well. Gaining access to perspectives outside your own firm may be highly relevant to your situation. As a lender, we see a variety of well-managed brokerages in action. It is impressive to watch what they do, but also interesting to note that they do things differently from each other.
It may well be the biggest catch yet by the Montgomery County Precinct 2 Constables Office. And the recent seizure of a 60-foot-long jet at the Conroe-North Houston Regional Airport required deputies take a different route.

It is not a common thing for us to do, although we have seen airplanes in the past during seizures, said Pct. 2 Lt. Greg Thomason, adding, this is the biggest plane that weve ever seen.

No taxes were paid by the planes purchaser, leading to it being levied July 30 by deputies, according to Thomason.

But the 1977 Lockheed 13 Jetstar II was not removed from where it was stationed as usually happens with property levied by the constables office. Instead, it was locked down in place at an airport hangar.

Airport personnel were aware of the seizure thanks to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security contact there. Pct. 2 had six members on site, Thomason explained.

We didnt have to move it or carry it somewhere else, he said.

Cable was put through the landing gear to keep it in place and complicate efforts to take it out. Since flight and maintenance logs were removed by deputies, tampering with the aircrafts placing would be a violation of Federal Aviation Administration regulations, he added.

That plane cannot move an inch without those on board, Thomason said of the logs.

The aircraft appeared to be grounded for about three to four years and was in polished condition, Thomason observed.

The jets luxurious cabin fits around 12 to 16 passengers, and is filled out by retro-style navy corduroy seats, dark wood trim and carpeting embellished with fleur-de-lis.

Though this plane was an exceptional seizure, Precinct 2 regularly levies big, mobile property. Only some time ago, Thomason pointed out, deputies seized dump and scraper trucks from a road construction company.

Seized property is usually taken to a storage facility while a court determines ownership with the winning party paying moving and housing expenses, Thomason explained.

Other than tax liens, Precinct 2 also seizes property in civil suit cases.

By law, deputies can try to levy on 10 times the amount ruled against a defendant in a judgment since seized property does not auction off for its actual worth, Thomason explained.

However, the law limits what can be seized, Thomason continued. Exemptions include a defendants house if it is their main homestead or their vehicle if it is their only one.

Theres some steps put into place that were not gonna leave somebody destitute, he said.

In his 19 years heading up Precinct 2, Constable Gene DeForest has never been sued for his deputies seizing property, according to Thomason. This is extraordinary because the highest rate of lawsuits against agencies in the area and the county stem from property seizures, Thomason said.

Measures by deputies in seizing property are very strict and stringent because it is the highest area of liability for (a) constable, he said.

jose.gonzalez@chron.com

twitter.com/jrgzztx
No fewer than 415 Nigerians were killed in various violent attacks across Nigeria in July, according to a report by a non-governmental organisation, Nigeria Mourn.

In its recent report, titled "Violence Incidents Report: July 2020", Nigeria Mourn, which tracks incidents of violent killings across the country, said the cases were recorded in 21 states.

The group uses newspaper reports and family sources to gather its findings.

The latest report shows that Kaduna, Borno and Katsina had the highest number of killings in July.

The report listed the casualty figure for each of the 21 states as follows:

Kaduna - 139, Borno - 113, Katsina - 80, Kogi - 17, Nasarawa - 13, Taraba - 10, Benue - 9, Ebonyi - 8, Zamfara - 7, Plateau - 5, Edo - 2, Akwa Ibom - 2, Lagos - 2, Oyo - 1, Imo - 1, Rivers - 1, Cross River - 1, Ogun - 1, Bayelsa - 1, Delta - 1 and Kebbi -1.

In terms of perpetrators of the violence, the report states that 185 people were killed by suspected armed bandits, 123 were killed by Boko Haram/ISWAP, 67 were killed by armed herdsmen, 26 died in communal conflicts, six persons died in isolated attacks, six deaths were caused by extrajudicial killings and two linked to cult clashes.

The report also shows that 283 of the victims were civilians while 132 were security personnel.

Earlier reports by the organisation showed that 731 persons were killed in June while 356 people died in various violent attacks in May.

As the insecurity across the country continues, Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, on Saturday, asked the federal government to allow citizens to carry guns to protect themselves against.

A similar call was made in 2018 by a former Zamfara senator, Kabir Marafa, that gun use should be liberalised for self-defence.

However, that view appears a minority view as it was rejected by the Senate when Mr Marafa raised it, while it has also not been considered by the federal government.
Tehran, Aug 24 : Head of Iran's Civil Aviation Organization has revealed details from the country's final report on the Ukrainian passenger plane crash that took place near Tehran in January.

According to the data extracted from the plane's flight recorders, the aircraft's parameters were normal until the impact of a first missile at 6.14 a.m. on January 8, Xinhua news agency quoted Touraj Dehghani Zangeneh as saying on Sunday.

After the impact, the black box inside the flight cabin continued to record the voices of four people of the crew who noticed the situation was "abnormal" and tried to retake control of the aircraft.

The recording stopped 19 seconds later, before a second missile was shot 25 seconds after the first strike.

Because the first missile explosion sent shrapnel into the plane, disrupting both the CVR and FBR aircraft's black boxes, it was not possible to analyze the activity and effects of the second missile, Dehghani added.

The data was extracted in France between July 17-24, in presence of representatives of the US, Ukraine, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, without technical difficulties.

Dehghani Zangeneh thanked the French Civil Aviation Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for its cooperation.

The Ukraine PS752 flight was hit by Iranian missiles after taking off from Tehran, killing all 176 people onboard.

Iran said that its forces "accidentally" shot down the plane.
Teachers are far more likely to spread Covid-19 than children, according to a leading scientist.

Shamez Ladhani, a paediatric infectious diseases specialist at Public Health England (PHE), said that school staff will maintain social distancing rules during work but are more likely to break them outside the classroom.

It comes as data shows just one in 10,000 schools have been hit by a virus outbreak since they reopened in June. Separate analysis revealed only one in 23,000 children were infected.

A PHE analysis found 70 children out of 1.6million who had returned to school in June tested positive for Covid-19. Another 128 members of staff tested positive. And only 30 outbreaks were confirmed at 23,400 reopened schools.

The analysis, published yesterday, said the majority of cases linked to outbreaks were in staff and warned that school staff needed to be 'more vigilant for exposure outside the school setting to protect themselves, their families and the educational setting'.

Teachers are far more likely to spread Covid-19 than children, according to a leading scientist (File image)

Dr Shamez Ladhani, paediatric infectious diseases specialist at PHE, who headed the monitoring of England's schools, told The Times: 'We need to educate the educators.

'There's a clear need for a duty of care outside the school setting so staff need to protect themselves, and in turn other staff and pupils.'

He added: 'Staff are very good at social distancing and infection control in the classroom, but upon leaving the school environment these measures are more likely to be broken, potentially putting themselves and their colleagues at risk.'

Boris Johnson has pleaded with parents to send their children back to the classroom as he takes charge of the drive to get all schools open next week.

The Prime Minister warned last night that pupils risk permanent damage to their future life chances if they continue to stay away.

Mr Johnson, who tomorrow morning will return to No10 following his summer break, is in a race against the clock to get schools ready and persuade parents they are safe in time for the start of the new term.

The Government faces a big test to deliver on its promise to get all children full-time back following its shambolic handling of A-level and GCSE results.

Many pupils in England have not been to class since March, when schools were closed except to vulnerable children and those of keyworkers.

Prime minister Boris Johnson poses during a visit to St Josephs Catholic School in Upminster to see how new Covid-19 preparedness plans had been put in place earlier this month

Mr Johnson is racing the clock to get schools ready and persuade parents they're safe

Just 1 in 10,000 schools were hit by virus cases when their doors opened again Just one in 10,000 schools had a virus outbreak when they reopened in June, a major study has revealed. The research by Public Health England also found that out of one million children who attended pre-school and primary schools during this time, only 70 became infected with Covid-19. Youngsters were far more likely to catch the virus at home from their parents than in the classroom, the authors concluded, suggesting that schools were safer than their own homes. The authors, whose research analysed all outbreaks in educational settings in England in June, stressed that pupils were unlikely to pass the virus onto each other in classrooms and also that there were 'very few' cases of them catching it from or passing it on to teachers. There were a total of 30 outbreaks in schools reported during June  where two or more people were infected  which was just 0.01 per cent of the total number open, or one in 10,000. There are 24,323 schools in England. These outbreaks affected 70 children and 128 staff, showing teachers were at higher risk. The authors also found that 20 of the 30 outbreaks occurred through teachers passing it on to each other, or on to pupils. Only two outbreaks involved children passing it onto each other. The authors wrote: 'Students mostly acquired the [Covid-19] infection at home, usually from a keyworker or healthcare worker parent. Most children were asymptomatic and only identified as part of contact tracing after their parent developed Covid-19. 'Reassuringly, we found very little transmission between the students. Additionally, there were very few transmission events between staff and students.' Public Health England is due to publish a second study, which is expected to show that older pupils are much more likely to catch the virus than younger children. The findings are based on a very small number of schools which experienced outbreaks but they are nonetheless likely to raise concerns amongst teaching unions and the parents of secondary school pupils. Advertisement

Mr Johnson declared that there was a 'moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely' as he insisted that the return was guided by the Government's scientific and medical experts.

'We now know far more about coronavirus than we did earlier this year,' he said.

'As the chief medical officer has said, the risk of contracting Covid-19 in school is very small and it is far more damaging for a child's development and their health and wellbeing to be away from school any longer.

'This is why it's vitally important that we get our children back into the classroom to learn and to be with their friends.

'Nothing will have a greater effect on the life chances of our children than returning to school.'

His comments came after the UK's chief and deputy chief medical officers issued a joint statement seeking to reassure parents that it was safe to send their children back to school.

They said 'very few, if any' children and teenagers would come to long-term harm from the virus solely by attending school, while there was a 'certainty' of harm from not returning.

And teachers were not at any increased risk of dying compared to the general working-age population.

Professor Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, added: 'The chances of many children being damaged by not going to school are incredibly clear and therefore the balance of risk is very strongly in favour of children going to school because many more are likely to be harmed by not going than harmed by going, even during this pandemic.'

He said local lockdown measures would be used if school reopening leads to a rise in infections, with the possibility of national restrictions if necessary.

Every school will be provided with coronavirus testing kits so they can quickly check pupils, when they reopen in September.

Ministers have given the green light for the resumption of breakfast and after-school clubs to provide extra childcare so more parents can get back to work.

Teaching unions last night insisted that they supported the return to full time education, but still issued grim warnings about the Government's strategy.

The National Education Union said it wanted ministers to spell out exactly what will happen if there is an outbreak.

Joint general secretary Kevin Courtney said: 'School staff, parents and pupils are being sorely let down by government because of a lack of a Plan B and of ensuring robust track trace and test is in place. We believe the Government is negligent in the extreme.'

A Daily Mail poll on Saturday revealed the strength of feeling among voters about the need to get pupils back into the classroom full-time.

Seventy-eight per cent said it should be the Government's top priority if it is safe to do so.

Given the choice of whether schools should reopen or pubs remain open if only one was allowed, 80 per cent said they would choose schools, while 13 per cent opted for pubs.

Professor Chris Whitty said the chances of many children being damaged by not going to school are clear and so the balance of risk is very strongly in favour of children going to school

Professor Whitty also warned that it was unlikely that a vaccine would be available by the end of this year.

He said there was a 'reasonable chance' of one being ready for next winter, 2021/22.

'I would be delighted if it came earlier rather than later but I'd be quite surprised if we had a highly effective vaccine ready for mass use in a large percentage of the population before the end of winter, certainly before this side of Christmas,' he said.

'I think if we look forward a year I think the chances are much greater than if we look forward six months and we need to have that sort of timescale in mind.'
The government said the decision of home quarantine, or home isolation of a COVID-19 patient, should be made by health professionals after proper assessment of the home condition, but the practice has not been followed.

Most homes where COVID-19 patients are quarantined have never been visited by a healthcare worker, reported Mint, citing officials in the Union health ministry.

The step to recommending home quarantine was opted due to the scarcity of healthcare providers, lack of infrastructure and resources, amid the rising novel coronavirus infection.

Government policy specifically mentioned that the decision of home quarantine or isolation would be made by health professionals after proper assessment of the home condition. However, this was not followed in all the cases, Dr Jugal Kishore, professor and head, department of community medicine, Safdarjung Hospital, told the publication.

The doctor said it has been seen that patients, who are isolating at home, recovered and a lot of government resources were saved. However, continued monitoring and safety measures should have been instituted, apart from allowing home isolation, for further control of COVID-19, Kishore was quoted as saying.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Follow our LIVE blog for the latest updates of the novel coronavirus pandemic

Suresh Sharma, head, Population Research Centre, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University, termed home quarantine a 'good option'. However, he was quick to add that it is not suitable for every part of the country such as in urban slums, especially in Delhi and Mumbai, where the living spaces are very small.

India's COVID-19 caseload has surged past the 31-lakh mark with a single-day spike of 61,408 COVID-19 cases. Recoveries surged to 23,38,035, pushing the recovery rate to over 75 percent, according to the Union health ministry data. The death toll climbed to 57,542 with 836 fatalities being reported in a span of 24 hours, the data last updated at 8 am on August 24 showed.

The COVID-19 case fatality rate has declined to 1.85 percent, while the recovery rate has risen to 75.27 percent, as per the ministry's data.

Follow our full coverage on COVID-19 here
The health ministers of Israel and the United Arab Emirates spoke by telephone Monday to discuss cooperation in the fight against the novel coronavirus, Emirati state media reported.

The call between Emirati minister Abdul Rahman Al-Owais and his Israeli counterpart Yuli Edelstein came after the announcement on August 13 that the two nations would normalise ties in a historic US-backed deal.

The two ministers discussed ways to "strengthen cooperation in the medical field" related to the pandemic, the official Emirati agency WAM reported.

They spoke about possible scientific and medical partnerships including vaccine trials and treatments as well as a possible exchange of delegations, it said.

Even before their move to normalise ties, which makes the Gulf state only the third Arab country to seek to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel, firms from both countries had agreed to collaborate against the respiratory disease.

Two Israeli defence companies signed a deal with an Emirati company in July to develop a non-invasive coronavirus screening test which could produce results in minutes.

State-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the country's largest aerospace and defence firm, as well as the government's Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, last month signed the memorandum of understanding with Abu Dhabi-based technology company Group 42.

And earlier this month, the UAE's APEX National Investment and Israel's TeraGroup signed an agreement to jointly develop research and studies on the novel coronavirus, WAM reported.

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A representative for Balvin confirmed on Monday that he would no longer perform at the event, but no details were provided. In a pre-taped video released almost two weeks ago, Balvin revealed he contracted COVID-19 and that it impacted him heavily and made his life difficult. While he accepted an award at Premios Juventud 2020, he told viewers: This is not a joke ... Its very dangerous. Take a lot of care of yourselves.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug.24

By Nargiz Ismayilova - Trend:

Azerbaijan exported 764,528 tons of oil and petroleum products to Ukraine in the first half of this year, the Azerbaijani State Statistics Committee told Trend.

According to the committee, in the reporting period the export value of the mentioned products was 2.4 times more than from January through June 2019 (329,209 tons).

Moreover, the oil and petroleum products were exported to Ukraine in the amount of 202.1 million manat ($118.8 million), while in the 1st half of 2019, the total export of the products rose by 27.5 percent (158.5 million manat or $93.2 million).

In the first seven months of 2020, most of the volume of oil along with gas condensate was exported in the amount of 16.9 million tons, which is 1.4 million tons (7.6 percent) less compared to the same period of 2019. Meanwhile, 16.2 million tons of the exported oil was produced by AIOC consortium, and 700,000 tons of exported oil accounted for SOCAR.

(1 USD = 1.7 AZN on Aug. 24)

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @IsmailovaNargis
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa addresses the nation on measures to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, April 2020.

analysis

In a seven-page letter, President Cyril Ramaphosa read the riot act to rank-and-file ANC members about corruption on 23 August. This followed a letter by ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, also cracking the whip against corruption. But the letters suggest that the party isn't as much at war against graft as it is in a battle with itself.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has, once again, drawn a line in the sand against corruption by ANC high-fliers in a seven-page letter to party members asking for their help in achieving the party's stated objectives of rooting out the scourge.

In the letter dated 23 August, he writes "the best-known form of corruption" was tenders to friends and family. This comment follows ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule's defence earlier this month of government contracts to his children, when he told News24 there was no law prohibiting family members of ANC leaders from doing business with the state. "Tell me one leader of the ANC who has not done business with government," Magashule added.

200823 Letter to ANC Members

Ramaphosa's letter comes amid growing public outrage over Covid-19 corruption, which included the awarding of tenders to politically connected businesspeople for personal protective...
GRISWOLD, Conn. (AP) -- In May of 1854, the Ray family of Jewett City was frantic.

The large farming family was dying from a devastating disease that caused strong young adults to waste away. Consumption, now known as tuberculosis, was spreading through its ranks with a vengeance.

The family had exhausted traditional means of prevention and were left with one recourse: exhume the bodies of two sons who died from the disease and burn them "on the spot," as a local newspaper recounted some eight years after the event.

The Rays believed they needed to kill the dead to keep them from feeding on the living.

Last Thursday, state Archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni and municipal historian Mary Deveau were to take visitors on a walk through history and discuss the plight of the Ray family and what are now known as the Jewett City vampires. The walk was the final stroll sponsored by The Last Green Valley's Walktober celebration.

"People were frightened. It was a final effort to save the living," Bellantoni said of the practice.

Griswold and Bellantoni both hold prominent places in what folklorists describe as the New England vampire belief.

In the early 1990s, two boys sliding down a gravel bank in Hopeville dislodged two skulls.

In total, 29 graves were found in the unmarked Walton family cemetery. Bellantoni discovered something strange inside the coffin marked "JB-55."

The skeletal remains of a man, buried possibly in the 1790s, had been dismembered. His skull had been severed from the spine, turned to face downward and placed in the chest. The two femur bones were positioned in the form of an "X" across the chest just below the skull -- skull and crossbones.

JB's bones had been disrupted roughly five years after he died. Imprints on the bones showed that consumption had ravaged his body. Two nearby bodies, those of IB-46, a woman and NB-13, a child, also died from the disease.

A graduate student in Bellantoni's research team recalled the story of the "Jewett City vampires," the Ray family, who lived just 2 miles from the Walton farm.

Researchers believe JB's bones were rearranged in a desperate effort to prevent him -- or stop him -- from escaping his grave to feed upon stricken family members.

Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell, the leading researcher into New England vampires and author of the book "Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires," has learned of dozens of incidents of exhumed consumption victims in his 30 years of research.

JB is the only case offering visual confirmation of the practice.

"Right there you have actual physical evidence of the disease along with the evidence of the vampire practice," Bell said. "Too bad we don't have more information about JB or the people around him. That's the problem with so many of these cases."
Many residents of Ikoyi-Ile, Orire Local Government, Oyo State, were on Saturday injured in a clash between them and herdsmen in the area.

The residents, most of them farmers, had threatened to resort to further self-help if the Oyo State government failed to protect them from suspected herdsmen they alleged had been terrorising their community.

The farmers alleged the herders had killed one of them, raped their minors, destroyed their farmlands and had been terrorizing their community, giving them sleepless nights.

A chieftaincy title holder in the local government, the Babalaje (chief trader) of Agbe, Chief Joseph Oyekola, told our correspondent that the herdsmen were "seriously disturbing" the farmers in the community and urged he state government to intervene.

Oyekola said, "We don't know what to do. If we take any step to revenge, it might lead to bloodshed. We want the government to take the necessary steps. Our king, who is supposed to defend us, has failed in his duties; he is now supporting the herdsmen against us.

"Herdsmen cut off the hands of one of our workers on the farm. They destroyed our farm produce. Another farmer was macheted on the head and some others were injured, while two of our minors were raped."

A farmer, Usman Daudu, alleged that herdsmen destroyed 20 hectares of his farmland on which he planted maize, yam and tomato, adding they also injured him on the head with cutlasses as he attempted to chase them away.

Another farmer, Dominic Gbegbi, said the herdsmen destroyed his produce and macheted him 14 times when they invaded his farm with their cows.

The Onikoyi of Ikoyi-Ile, Oba Abdul-Yekeen Atilola Oladipupo, however, said that he had been making efforts to initiate peaceful co-existence between the farmers and herders in the area.

Oba Oladipupo said, "We have tried to resolve the issue many times because it's difficult to separate farmers from herders. We have been living together for a while. I have taken a lot of steps on the matter to find a lasting solution to it, but it seems my efforts are not enough, so we need government's intervention.

"I've had series of meetings with all the Baales (local chiefs) around me to find a permanent solution to the issue. In fact, I even had meetings with the Assistant Inspector-General of Police and the Commissioner of Police and they assured me they would come to our aid."
DOHA, Qatar, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Swifthold Foundation, which was defrauded by Sheikh Fahad bin Ahmad bin Mohamed bin Thani Al Thani, a member of the Qatari Royal Family, and his Qatari company, Fast Trading Group, has been patiently waiting for the Qatari Enforcement Court to enforce Swifthold's $6 billion U.K. High Court Judgment since the Qatari Trial Court issued a Writ of Execution to formally recognize the Judgment in Qatar in the Summer of 2019.

In February 2020, the defendants filed an appeal with the Enforcement Court to seek a stay of the enforcement proceedings and to declare the enforcement proceedings invalid. In addition, he filed an appeal of the underlying recognition of the U.K. High Court Judgment with the Court of Appeal in Qatar.

On August 18, 2020, the Enforcement Court dismissed the defendants' appeal and now the enforcement of the U.K. High Court Judgment can continue unabated. According to Delta Capital Partners, the American litigation finance and support firm that the foundation has retained, this should be one of the last remaining hurdles to overcome before Swifthold can expect to collect significant proceeds from the defendants.

Delta's CEO, Christopher DeLise, stated, "It has been a long wait to resolve this appeal due to COVID-19, but we are very pleased by the Enforcement Court's ruling and are anxious to continue enforcement of the judgment against the defendants. The defendants' appeals were without merit and filed at the last minute solely to try to delay the inevitable and therefore we are now optimistic that the Qatari court will enforce without further delay."

As of today, no hearing has been set for the Court of Appeals hearing, but Delta and Swifthold's Qatari counsel believe the outcome will ultimately be the same if the courts follow established Qatari law and procedure and continue to respect international law.

Delta's CEO closed by commenting, "We are confident that the Qatari Court of Appeals will dismiss the defendants' appeal and Swifthold will finally have justice and the compensation it so rightly deserves in the very near future. "

For additional information, please visit http://sheikh-fahad-judgment.com/.

SOURCE Delta Capital Partners
BLUE BELL, Pa., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) today announced a relationship with Inspire Health Alliance, a U.S.-based healthcare company, to support Inspire's offer of real-time COVID-19 registration, testing and access control that is both cost effective and scalable to organizations of any size.

The solution combines content from Inspire and Unisys for companies looking to bring their employees back to offices, manufacturing facilities and transportation hubs, and students, faculty and staff back to schools. The portable, point-of-care testing machines, along with licensed healthcare administrators, are capable of administering both COVID-19 antibody and antigen tests, with test results available in under 15 minutes.

As a security and IT services partner to Inspire Health Alliance, Unisys is offering Unisys Stealth software and security services, systems integration capabilities and onsite technical support and field services to protect the COVID-testing machines, and data from the machines, in support of the solution and testing at a national scale.

"COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on people's health, well-being and economic livelihood," said Chris Kloes, vice president, Unisys Security Solutions. "Providing near real-time testing is a critical step in an organization's approach to improve safety as we restart our businesses and schools. Through this arrangement, Unisys is able to complement Inspire's robust COVID-19 testing at a scale and with the security, onsite integration and logistics management not yet seen in the market today. We are proud to join this meaningful effort and do our part to help get America back to work."

Program Supports Identification Authentication to Prevent Impersonation

These point-of-care COVID testing machines are able to be deployed at the entryways to America's offices, factories and schools, at the scale necessary for the country to restart their lives. Performed independently by clinical technicians, the AFIAS Rapid COVID-19 Antibody Tests utilize blood from a finger prick, as opposed to having to draw blood via a needle. The nurse-assisted test measures for both COVID-19 antibodies (i.e., did you have it) and COVID-19 antigens (i.e., do you currently have it). Once the testing has completed, the organization can determine the actions to take based on the test results with their policies and applicable law. The antigen test has been presented to the FDA for approval and is in the final stages of completion.

"Bringing America back to work and school safely requires an effective testing strategy combined with monitoring, timely communication and active engagement of personnel, students and other participants in the community. Security and scale are two of the biggest success factors in deploying technology-enabled solutions for workplace or school health and safety," said Ricardo A. Salas, managing partner at Inspire Health Alliance. "We are thrilled to partner with Unisys to deliver both and are now taking orders for delivery effective the week of September 14."

Unisys Stealth(identity), the company's biometric identity management software, is available to verify an individual's identity during enrollment and that each test is administered to the right person, preventing any possibility of impersonation. Biometric identity, combined with a negative test result, may be integrated into building management systems, where capable and feasible, to allow for physical access.

Unisys' security portfolio offerings also include Unisys Stealth micro-segmentation software that quickly isolates devices or users at the first sign of compromise, while reducing attack surfaces by encrypting all communication between Stealth-protected assets and cloaking the assets from unauthorized users. Unisys recently announced that Stealth received a U.S. government certification from the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) to protect information as it flows between Stealth-enabled endpoints, a certification that is recognized by governments in 31 member nations including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Malaysia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

For more information on the new COVID-19 testing program, please watch this video or visit www.unisys.com/backtowork. For more information on Unisys security offerings, go to www.unisys.com/stealth.

About Unisys

Unisys is a global information technology company that builds high-performance, security-centric solutions for the most demanding businesses and governments. Unisys offerings include security software and services; digital transformation and workplace services; industry applications and services; and innovative software operating environments for high-intensity enterprise computing. For more information on how Unisys builds better outcomes securely for its clients across the government, financial services and commercial markets, visit www.unisys.com.

Follow Unisys on Twitter and LinkedIn.

RELEASE NO.: 0824/9786

Unisys and other Unisys products and services mentioned herein, as well as their respective logos, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unisys Corporation. Any other brand or product referenced herein is acknowledged to be a trademark or registered trademark of its respective holder.

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SOURCE Unisys Corporation

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Description

GIS  24 August 2020: A site visit, for members of the press, was held on Saturday 22 August 2020 to take stock of the progress of works underway for the cleaning-up of areas affected by the oil spill following the grounding of MV Wakashio at Pointe dEsny. Representatives of media organisations were accompanied by specialists from the United Nations (UN) and the visit, organised by the National Crisis Committee, was monitored by the National Coast Guard.

The delegation visited several places, namely, Mahebourg Waterfront, Bois des Amourettes and Ile aux Aigrettes.

According to the Humanitarian Affairs Officer from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Mr Pierre Gelas, the aim of the site visit is to allow members of the press to see as well as observe at first-hand what type of operations are being carried out by the authorities at the different regions which have been hit by the oil spillage. The visit is important so as to prevent the spread of fake or erroneous information on the international front which can be harmful for the countrys reputation, he pointed out.

For his part, the UN Oil Spill Expert, Mr Matthew Sommerville, highlighted that, since the surface of the lagoon has been cleaned up, operations are now focused along the affected shore line. There is no specific date for the completion of the clean-up operations but obviously, Government wants this to be done as soon as possible and in conformity with set standards, he underlined. Moreover, Government is working on a programme to monitor the regeneration of nature and to ensure that this exercise is not delayed, he added.

In addition to the clean-up operations, the National Environmental Laboratory and the Albion Fisheries Research Centre are carrying out daily tests to monitor air and water quality in areas affected by the oil spill which resulted from the grounding of the bulk carrier MV Wakashio.
Nonprescribed fentanyl and stimulants were the primary contributors to overdose mortality, while few people had prescribed opioids in their systems, according to new toxicology research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

"With health professional organizations introducing guidelines to reduce prescribing of opioids and other controlled substances, understanding the relative contribution of prescribed substances and illicitly obtained substances to overdose deaths is key to developing effective programs to reduce overdose mortality," writes Dr. Alexis Crabtree, BC Centre for Disease Control and the University of British Columbia, with coauthors.

The postmortem study looked at deaths from drug overdoses identified by the BC Coroners Service between 2015 and 2017 with 1 or more illicit drugs. The deaths were linked to the person's prescription medication history in British Columbia's PharmaNet database. Of the total 2872 deaths, toxicology results were available for 1789 deaths, in which the majority (85.5%) had 1 or more opioids present. However, only 8.7% of individuals had taken prescribed opioids, and methadone and buprenorphine, used in opioid agonist therapy, were rarely detected in postmortem toxicology.

Of the deaths linked to nonprescribed opioids, fentanyl or fentanyl analogues were found in 79% of cases. Stimulants were found in 71% of deaths, almost all nonprescribed. Of the deaths in which benzodiazepines were detected, 63% had not been prescribed.

Death rates from illicit drugs increased more than fourfold between 2014 and 2018, which has been attributed to the contamination of the illicit drug supply. Over the past 5 years, British Columbia has had the highest rates of deaths from illicit drug use in Canada.

"[P]rescribing policies are insufficient to address the current overdose crisis in Canada and additional strategies are needed," write the authors. "Physicians should be encouraged to practise patient-centred opioid prescribing."

They suggest removing barriers to medically supervised opioid agonist therapy to provide a safer alternative to illegal drugs and supporting harm reduction organizations to provide care to people using nonprescribed medications.

In a related commentary, Dr. Mark Tyndall, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, writes, "In the last 5 years, the major responses to the overdose crisis have been to reverse overdoses through harm reduction programs, build a better addiction care system, and create better housing and social services. Although these may be important actions and aspirations in the long term, they will not address the current emergency. Unless there is a radical change in our approach to the epidemic, overdose deaths will continue unabated. It is time to scale up safe supply and decriminalize drug use."

"Toxicology and prescribed medication histories among people experiencing fatal illicit drug overdose in British Columbia, Canada" is published August 24, 2020.

###
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio -- In a prime example of regional collaboration responding to the needs of a global pandemic, nearly $200,000 worth of personal protective equipment -- PPE -- will be distributed among 33 Cuyahoga County communities.

The roughly $177,500 allocation from the Federal Emergency Management Agencys Assistance to Firefighters COVID-19 Grant Program requires an additional 10 percent match from the participating communities that will be reimbursed to the City of Shaker Heights once council accepts the funding Monday (Aug. 24).

"As with many FEMA grant opportunities, making application in a coordinated manner through a regional partnership has a higher likelihood of being approved for federal funding," as opposed to a single agency applying, Shaker Heights Fire Chief Patrick Sweeney stated in a memo to council.

Generally, one municipality needs to act as the lead agency on the application and fiduciary agent for the group if the grant is awarded, as Shaker agreed to do, "with much assistance from the city Law Department," Sweeney noted.

The PPE consists of the highly sought N95 masks, as well as surgical masks, eye protection, shoe covers and gowns.

"This safety equipment has been identified as essential for firefighters providing emergency medical care to residents in our communities (especially during the coronavirus health emergency)," Sweeney said.

Consolidated effort

While taking the lead role is not entirely selfless on Shakers part -- the city will pay a local match of $868 for 562 N95s, more than 4,500 surgical masks, 51 eye protectors, 3,369 shoe covers and 1,123 gowns, worth a total of $8,368 -- there are other cities getting considerably more:

-- Cleveland Heights, receiving more than $14,000 worth of PPE -- 926 N95s, 7,500 surgical masks, 78 eye protectors, 5,558 shoe covers and 1,853 gowns, for a local match of $1,428

-- Lakewood, more than $13,800 worth of safety supplies, including 889 N95s, 7,200 surgical masks, 90 eye protectors, more than 5,300 shoe protectors and 1,778 gowns, at a community cost share of $1,381

-- East Cleveland, $12,458 worth of equipment, good for more than 818 N95s, 6,620 surgical masks, 46 eye protectors, almost 5,000 shoe covers and over 1,600 gowns, all for $1,245

-- Strongsville, $12,192, with a $1,219 local match to receive nearly 800 N95s, 6.422 surgical masks, 61 eye protectors, 4,759 she covers and 1,586 gowns

-- Beachwood, $10,000 worth of safety gear, including 679 N95s and 5,500 surgical masks, 42 eye protectors, more than 4,000 shoe covers and 1,359 gowns, for $1,037

But receiving the most FEMA funding far and away in this round was the City of Euclid, pulling in more than $21,000 worth of PPE -- nearly 1,400 N95s, almost 11,200 surgical masks, 79 eye protectors, close to 8,300 shoe covers and 2,759 gowns, for a community cost share of $2,103.

The FEMA procurement, based loosely on population and call volume, goes right down the list of 33 municipalities to the Village of Gates Mills, getting $514 worth of PPE, including 24 N95 masks and assorted gear for $51, and Woodmere, $705 in PPE, including 34 N95s, for about $70.

The ordinance was to be presented as emergency legislation to allow the Shaker Heights Fire Department to purchase the PPE as quickly as possible during the current pandemic.

With the application and Memorandum of Understanding signed by some of the individual fire chiefs and local officials back in early June, the grant also allows them to obtain additional PPE for up to six months while using federal guidelines for equipment reuse.

More individual allocations

Along with the separate 10 percent community cost shares, other individual fire department allocations from FEMA will be going to Brooklyn ($5,460); Brooklyn Heights ($1,263); Chagrin Falls ($3,345); Cuyahoga Heights ($1,150); Highland Heights ($3,264); Highland Hills ($1,438); Independence ($3,875); Lyndhurst ($5,136); Mayfield Heights ($8,179); Mayfield Village ($2,174); and Middleburg Heights ($6,415);

Newburgh Heights ($1,186); North Olmsted ($8,507); North Royalton ($6,530); Oakwood Village ($3,874); Olmsted Township ($3,923); Orange ($2,153); Pepper Pike ($2,360); Richmond Heights ($4,133); Rocky River ($6,066); Seven Hills ($2,477); Solon ($6,502); University Heights ($4,610); and Warrensville Heights ($6,604).

At Shaker council's Aug. 7 Safety and Public Works Committee on Aug. 7, Councilman Sean Malone "wanted to make sure that this grant would not place undue administrative responsibilities on the city."

In addition to the considerable help already provided by the Law Department, Sweeney said that future administrative duties will be minimal and managed mostly by the Shaker Heights Fire Department.

The FEMA grant was then presented to the City Finance Committee on Aug. 17, where citizen member Linda Lalley asked what would happen if another community was unable to provide the 10 percent local match to reimburse Shaker.

"If a city was unable to meet its financial match obligations, the equipment that was secured for that department would be made available to other communities willing to pay their required match," the Aug. 24 council memo stated.

For a more complete individual breakdown of the community funding allocations by FEMA, visit https://www.shakeronline.com/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/2702?fileID=5486 and scroll down.

Read more from the Sun Press.
Oil rose on Monday as a twin storm front threatened major disruption to oil operations in the Gulf of Mexico, while ongoing concerns over the economic impact from the pandemic kept gains in check.

Futures for October in New York rallied as much as 0.8%, after falling 1.1% on Friday. More than half of US Gulf of Mexico production was shut down as of midday Sunday as the region prepared for two approaching hurricanes. The systems, Marco and Laura, are coming from different directions and have the potential to cause billions of dollars in damage.

The US recorded less than 1,000 coronavirus deaths for the first time in five days, but flare ups around the world continue to hamper efforts to kickstart an economic recovery. Authorities across Europe are dealing with a resurgence of cases, while South Korea is considering new restrictions to combat a fresh outbreak there.

Drillers in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico are roaring back, putting an additional 10 rigs to work last week for the biggest jump in activity this year. But despite the jump, overall drilling is still mired at levels not seen since the early days of the shale boom more than a decade ago.

US benchmark crude futures have risen for the past three weeks amid a steady decline in domestic crude and gasoline supplies, and tentative signs that demand is returning. Still, virus cases continue to surge around the world and cautionary signals are emerging over the state of a global economic recovery.

Libyas National Oil Corp. said Friday that it welcomed the countrys new cease-fire agreement and the nation should be able to resume exports when all of its facilities are freed from military occupation, threatening to unleash supply at a time when the OPEC+ alliance is easing output curbs.

On a brighter note for demand, US oil exports to China are set to reach a record next month in a sign that Beijing is stepping up purchases to meet its commitments under a landmark trade deal.
By Ebrahim Harris

SEREMBAN, Malaysia (Reuters) - A Malaysian court opened an inquest on Monday into the death of an Irish teenager whose body was found near a jungle stream, 10 days after she went missing during a family holiday at a rainforest resort.

The naked body of Nora Anne Quoirin, 15, who suffered from learning difficulties, was found in a ravine near the Dusun resort in Seremban, about 70 km (44 miles) south of the Malaysian capital in August last year.

Police ruled out abduction as a motive, saying they had found no sign of foul play, but her family questioned the findings and said she had never before left them voluntarily.

The inquest aimed to answer questions including "when and where did the deceased die, how and in what manner the deceased came by her death, and ... whether there is any person who was criminally concerned in the cause of death", coroner Maimoonah Aid told the court.

Government lawyer Muhamad Iskandar Ahmad said 64 witnesses were expected to be called during the two-week inquest at the Seremban Coroners Court.

Quoirin was from London and had an Irish mother and French father.

The family will not attend the inquest but the hearing is being streamed online.

Authorities had previously said an autopsy established that Quoirin had died from internal bleeding, probably caused by prolonged hunger and stress. She had suffered intestinal damage and died two or three days before her body was found, officials said.

The forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy found some small scratches on Quoirin's legs but ruled that they would not have contributed to her death, police said.

The family feared a criminal connection to the disappearance, saying she had special needs and had never before left them voluntarily, a British victims' group, the Lucie Blackman Trust, said last year.

(Additional reporting by Rozanna Latiff in Kuala Lumpur; Writing by Ed Davies; Editing by Robert Birsel)
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's 10-week tenure as head of the 500,000-employee federal agency has been fraught almost from the start.

He was installed by an all-male, mostly white board of governors dominated by President Donald Trump's appointees. He presided over a series of controversial moves - moving to cut overtime hours while removing blue mailboxes and trimming mail-sorting capacity as part of a reorganization plan. Democrats accused him of taking steps that could hinder mail-in voting ahead of an election in which the public is nervous about voting at polling places because of the coronavirus. Even as DeJoy agreed under pressure to postpone the restructuring, saying he wanted to avoid any appearance of an impact on the election, criticism has mounted.

DeJoy at a Senate hearing Friday defended his management of the agency. He said there's been no attempt by Trump or his administration to interfere with Postal Service operations in order to thwart voting by mail.

"As we head into the election season, I want to assure this committee and the American public that the Postal Service is fully capable and committed to delivering the nation's election mail securely and on-time," DeJoy told senators. "This sacred duty is my number one priority between now and election day."The service on Friday announced a bipartisan committee led by Democratic board member Donald Moak to oversee mail-in voting. The panel will "reinforce the strong commitment of the Postal Service to the mail as an important part of the nation's democratic process," the agency said in a news release. DeJoy is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee today.

The swirl of events has cast a harsh spotlight on the usually obscure USPS board of governors, subjecting it to the sort of scrutiny that corporate America has long faced - defending controversial decisions against a barometer that measures the diversity, transparency and biases of the decision makers. The Republican-controlled board leads an organization that is 40% minority, 40% female and is one of the nation's largest employers.

"The postal service is literally like America" in the makeup of its work force, said Rep. Brenda Lawrence, a former letter carrier. "We have been challenged in diversity in our upper ranks." She said Trump filled senior positions with Republican loyalists, rather than with "people who could actually do the job."

The U.S. Postal Service, enshrined by the U.S. Constitution as vital to a strong nation, and later given a monopoly and a mandate to serve all citizens, has been subject to attacks from Trump because of what he says are over-generous shipping rates for Amazon.com Inc., headed by Jeff Bezos. Bezos owns the Washington Post newspaper, and its editorial stand has been highly critical of the president.

More recently, Trump has claimed - without proof - that the post office won't be able to process millions of mail-in ballots amid the pandemic, tainting the outcome of the presidential election. As the controversy has grown, social media has focused on the homogeneity of the postal board, plastering their faces and contact information across the internet.

The 1970 Postal Act took the U.S. postmaster general out of the president's cabinet and placed the role under the jurisdiction of the Postal Service's board, whose members serve on staggered terms in an attempt to limit the influence of any one president. The nine-member USPS board is appointed by the president, but the nominees are traditionally selected by Senate leaders, with no more than five affiliated with one party. The board selects the postmaster general and, in conjunction with the postal chief, appoints the deputy postmaster, which brings the full board to 11 members.

When Trump took office, he inherited a unique opportunity to reshape the service: The board had no presidential appointees for the first time since its formation in 1971. That was in part because Sen. Bernie Sanders had been blocking some of the proposed new members in protest over the appointees' positions on privatization of the post office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would only bring forward a full slate at that time, with unanimous approval, so the seats stayed vacant, said Sander's staff director Warren Gunnels. Once Trump was elected, McConnell brought his nominees to a vote and the quorum was possible, Gunnels said. The difference was that Senate rules changed and made it much easier for candidates to be approved by the Senate, even with objections, said a senior leadership aide who asked not to be named in order to speak about sensitive negotiations.

The last time the board had six members, in 2012, there was one woman and one Black governor - Thurgood Marshall Jr., the son of the former U.S. Supreme Court justice.

"Over the last 10 years, to the extent that there's been a board at all, most of the time it has not had a quorum and has been highly dysfunctional," said Paul Steidler, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute who writes about Postal Service operations. The board now has six Senate-approved members in addition to DeJoy: five White men and one man who was born in Cuba. DeJoy, a wealthy businessman and major Trump campaign donor, has not selected a deputy.

Robert Duncan, one of four Republicans appointed by Trump now heads the board. The other Republicans are John Barger, an investment banker; Roman Martinez IV, a former Lehman Brothers managing director; and William Zollars, the former head of logistics company YRC Worldwide Inc. The two Democrats, appointed with input from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are Ron Bloom, an investment banker who specialized in representing unions; and Moak, a former member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Schumer's staff did not respond to a request for comment on the appointments.

The absence of women stands in stark contrast with the boards of major U.S. corporations. Women last year made up about 26% of the directors at S&P 500 Index companies, while people of color held about 19% of the board seats, according to executive recruiter Spencer Stuart Inc. The USPS referred reporters to the biographies of the board of governors and the statement on the hiring of the postmaster general when asked about the board diversity. The board members did not respond to requests for comment. The board's lack of diversity is "a concern," said Henry Gibson, national president of the African-American Postal League United for Success, a group that says it mentors Black and other postal managers. "We do believe there are a lot of qualified minorities that would be able to do an outstanding job on the board."

The barrage of criticism about the Postal Service has not been lost on America, said Victoria Sakal, managing director of brand intelligence at Morning Consult, which measures affinity for 4,000 brands, including the USPS. The USPS ranked first in 2020, up from sixth place in 2019. But in the past several weeks, as DeJoy implemented his proposed changes and Trump upped his attacks, favorable sentiment has shown signs of eroding, particularly among people who identify as Democrats.

"It can lead to this unraveling of strength of sentiment of the brand if you start to be seen as aligning with one party or another," Sakal said. Trust in the Postal Service has fallen among all Americans, but has declined more among Blacks and Hispanics.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced concerns about disparate election impacts in a statement last week. "All of these changes directly jeopardize the election," she said, "and disproportionately threaten to disenfranchise voters in communities of color."
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is reportedly in a coma and his sister Kim Yo Jong is set to take over the seat in the Hermit Kingdom's regime based on the statements of a South Korean diplomat.

According to late South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung's former aide, Chang Song-min, the North is concealing the truth regarding the current condition of its leader. He also added that the dictator's health is already deteriorating and that Kim Jong Un is currently in a state of comatose.

Speculations about the health of the dictator follow his lack of public appearances in the past months. Based on a report by Fox News, Chang Song-min stated that his current assessment of the North Korean leader is that his life has not yet ended but is currently in a state of comatose, The New York Post reported.

Read also: Kim Jong Un Orders Confiscation of Pet Dogs in North Korea, Dog Meat to Solve Food Shortage?

Powers Delegated to Dictator's Sister

As the dictator's health continues to worsen, Song-min stated that his 32-year-olf sister and confidante Kim Yo Jong is first in line to the seat of the regime. He also added that some of the supreme leader's powers have been transferred to his sister.

However, he added that a complete succession by Kim Yo Jong has not yet been formed. The dictator's sister is currently being little by little brought in to the affairs of the nation as it is possible that Kim Jong Un's situation may further deteriorate.

According to Fox News, the claims of the South Korean diplomat comes not a week after North Korea released pictures of the dictator present in a government meeting last Thursday.

On top of this, earlier this week, news claiming that the dictator himself has delegated some of his powers to his sister circulated. According to the reports, Kim Yo Jong has been appointed as second in command in the Kim regime.

After the said promotion, Kim Yo Jong has been put in charge of the policies of North Korea regarding its relations with the US and South Korea. Based on a statement from spy chiefs, Kim Jong Un has named his sister the de-facto deputy on these matters.

However, despite the delegation of some powers to Kim Yo Jong, her brother remains as North Korea's absolute authority. It was also stated that the main reason of the turning over of some powers was to relieve the dictator of some of the stresses of ruling the Hermit Kingdom.

The dictator is now said to be at around 36 years old has only made a handful of appearances this year. Back in April, it can be recalled that he was not seen in public for more than two weeks which caused speculations regarding a heart operation that went wrong putting him in a critical condition. Several reports have even claimed that the dictator has died.

But the rumors of his death were immediately erased after Pyongyang released images of the supreme leader attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony in a fertilizer factory through the state media.

News about the dictators worsening condition comes weeks after North Korea faced tragedies due to floods that wiped out its food supply prompting a shortage.



Related article: Kim Yo Jong Gets More Powerful in NoKor as Kim Jong-Un Delegates Part of his Authority to Her

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Theatres might be closed for now but there will be audiences desperate for an artsy fix by the time Covid is banished to the dustbin of history. As such, we've picked out some of the lovely new venues that will be carrying the torch and providing new opportunities and experiences in the future.









The PurpleDoor

Virtually designed frontage for The Purple Door

( PurpleDoor and the architect is Constructive Thinking)

Liverpool is set to receive a brand new performance space at the start of 2021, which emphasises a laid back, relaxed environment where punters can come and go, heading over to the bar if they want some refreshments. It truly feels like a remarkably novel initiative.

Why is it exciting? Here's the kicker  all shows are free to watch, with the venue earning money through bar takings and more. A new model for a new era.





Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Theatre Royal Drury Lane

 Andrew DuPont

The West End venue is currently being refurbished ahead of its spring 2021 reopening, when Frozen will run with Samantha Barks and Steph McKeon in the leading roles. The theatre's front of house (currently an 1812 Greek Revival design by Benjamin Wyatt), stage facilities and dressing rooms will be reconstructed and the complex itself will become part of a destination venue known collectively as "The Lane", with new bars and a restaurant that will be open to the public all day.

Why is it exciting? The 60 million restoration project will also reconfigure the auditorium so that it can play in the round as well as the traditional proscenium format.





Bolton Octagon

The Octagon Theatre, Bolton



The swish venue has had a multi-million pound revamp, with a new studio space being added to what is already a beloved theatre in the heart of Bolton. The versatile 300-400 seater space has long been responsible for some stellar productions, and its 2021 season (though sadly postponed in part, looked set to continue this).

Why is it exciting?: The venue has confirmed it will be back in December with shows set to follow from spring next year.





Ovalhouse travels down the road to Brixton

A mock-up of the new Ovalhouse venue in Brixton



It closed its doors on the site just opposite The Oval at the end of 2019  after a Demolition Party Season that allowed artists to dismantle parts of the building as part of their creative process  and is now moving down the road to a brand-new, purpose-built theatre in Brixton in 2021, where it will be rechristened Brixton House.

Why is it exciting? The new venue will have two performance spaces, seven rehearsal studios and supporting facilities to help give Brixton House a sustainable future as a major south London programming venue.





Greenwich Festival Theatre on the site of a former Grade II-listed art deco building

Proposed design for Greenwich Festival Theatre

 Gravity Design

The new venue was announced last summer by theatre producers Selladoor Worldwide (Bring It On) and is scheduled to open in spring 2021. The building will occupy the site of the former Borough Halls, a Grade II-listed art deco building, constructed in 1939. It will boast two performances spaces  a 650-seat main stage and a 240-seat studio space  as well as a brasserie bar and rooftop terrace open to the public.

Why is it exciting? The south east London venue will be used by Selladoor Worldwide as a programming and producing venue, with an artistic leadership and development team who will create and launch new work with an eye for touring and transferring to other venues across the globe.





Bridge Theatre co-founders bring second venue to King's Cross

A CGI rendering of the new theatre in King's Cross

 AHMM

After the success of their current venture just a stone's throw from Tower Bridge, Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr  who together ran the National Theatre for 12 years  are planning a second venue in Facebook's new offices in 2021. The Bridge Theatre opened in 2017 and has played host to such stars as Maggie Smith, Laura Linney, Ben Whishaw and Zoe Wanamaker. The new, as yet unnamed venue, is marked to open in winter 2021, a 600-seat adaptable auditorium situated on Lewis Cubitt Square, adjacent to London's Coal Drops Yard.

Why is it exciting? The new theatre will be designed by the award-winning Haworth Tompkins in collaboration with TAIT. The architects have been behind the creation of some of the country's most iconic arts centres, including Battersea Arts Centre, the Young Vic and the current Bridge Theatre.





The Nimax Theatre on the site of the old Astoria

Architect's rendering of the proposed plans near Tottenham Court Road



With plans for this new, in-the-round theatre  on the site of the old Astoria building, which was demolished to make way for the new Tottenham Court Road Crossrail station  announced, it will be the first of its kind in the West End. The venue is due to open in November 2021, with a 600-seat capacity and development costs of 25 million.

Why is it exciting? It will be the first West End theatre to open since the Gillian Lynne Theatre, known as the New London Theatre when it was launched 50 years ago.





Shakespeare North

An artist's impression of Shakespeare North



For too long fans of the Bard in the north have had to travel down to Stratford-upon-Avon or London for a dedicated Shakespeare venue. Until now. The Shakespeare North Playhouse, a new theatre and education hub in Knowsley, Merseyside, has been granted planning permission.

Building work has commenced on the 19 million building which will house a 350-seat theatre built to designs drawn by Inigo Jones in 1629. It will be the only replica in the world of Jones' indoor Jacobean Court Theatre.

Why is it exciting? Need you ask? The Jones connection, a beautiful new playhouse for the north west, continued investment in the preservation and promotion of Shakespeare's work...





The King's Head Theatre in Islington Square

Architect's impression of King's Head Theatre in Islington Square



It's not moving far  right behind the current pub in fact  but the King's Head Theatre is having a big upgrade! London's oldest pub theatre is planning on celebrating its 50th year by relocating, from its 110-seater black box location in the back room of the King's Head Pub to the multi-million-pound new development in Islington Square.

Why is it exciting? The new venue will boast an 85-seater studio and a 250-seat auditorium, securing the future of a fringe theatre institution for many more years to come.





A new cultural hub with Reading Rep Theatre

Architect's impression of Reading Rep Theatre



Eight years ago, the Reading Rep was founded with a 1,000 gift  it has since created 20 productions from a 60-seat studio space in Reading College. Now, it is expanding into a larger, more permanent home after playing to 100% capacity audiences over the last 12 months. The new theatre, on the site of a former Salvation Army building, will contain a 158-space auditorium and front of house facilities. The company is about to break ground and is aiming to move in to the new space early next year.

Why is it exciting? The new venue will allow the company to produce and present theatre to more children, young people and vulnerable adults in the local community  in 2018, they reached over 15,000 individuals.





Southwark Playhouse returns to London Bridge

Architect's impression of new Southwark Playhouse venue at Elephant and Castle

 Safavi PR

25 years after it was first founded and Southwark Playhouse is just a few steps away from a permanent, secure home. First underneath the old London Bridge and now in Newington Causeway, the venue is looking to move to two new permanent spaces  a flagship location in Elephant and Castle (coming in early 2021), and back into the old London Bridge Station arches as part of the new redevelopment.

Why is it exciting? The split will generate three new performance spaces  a 200-seat and a 150-seat space in London Bridge for nurturing new and emerging work, and a 300-seat flexible space dedicated to main house shows in Elephant and Castle.





Woolwich Works

"Woolwich Works"

 Agnese Sanvito

A massive redevelopment in Woolwich will completely transform the arts presence in the area  featuring a 1200 seated or 1800 standing performance venue, an external courtyard for performances, five studios, which will also be used for performances and rehearsals spaces and a cafe, bar and spaces for community groups as well as to hire for weddings, parties, conferences and events.

Why is it exciting? There are vibrant companies including Punchdrunk set to make their home at the space, which aims to be one of the foremost arts institutions in the capital. It opens next year.
Harpreet Bajwa By

Express News Service

CHANDIGARH: Just two days ahead of the monsoon session of Haryana Assembly, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar tested positive for COVID-19.

Haryana on Monday recorded 1074 fresh cases of virus infection, taking the state's tally to 55,460.

Khattar has urged his colleagues who came in contact with him over the past week to get tested for the virus. "I was tested for Novel Corona Virus today. My test report has returned positive. I appeal to all colleagues and associates who came in my contact over the last week to get themselves tested. I request my close contacts to move into strict quarantine immediately," Khattar shared on Twitter.

Sources said that Khattar was admitted to Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) on Monday evening. After getting his CT scan done, Khattar moved bcak to his official residence and is stable. "His condition is stable but as a precautionary measure Khattar has been shifted to PGIMER," said an official in the Chief Ministers Office.



A senior doctor in PGIMER said, "Khattar's CT scan report came normal thus, he went back to his official residence. He requires special care as he is diabetic".

Khattar's earlier test report came negative for COVID-19 on Thursday, two days after he had attended the meeting with Shekhawat over the Sutlej Yamuna Link canal issue in New Delhi.

Speaker Gian Chand Gupta and two BJP MLAs have also tested positive of COVID-19, confirmed Minister Anil Vij. Last week, Gupta issued orders that only those who test negative for coronavirus would be allowed to attend the session from August 26.

Earlier, eight security personnel deployed with Khattar and a senior functionary close to him had tested positive for the novel virus.

As per the medical bulletin issued by the state till today 55,460 cases of COIVD-19 reported of these 45,405 discharged and 613 people have died. The recovery rate in the state is at 81.87 per cent and the fatality rate is 1.11 per cent. While the positivity rate is 5.68 per cent and doubling rate is 33 days.
NEW YORK: Joe Bidens Democratic Party just pulled off the first national convention of the coronavirus era, an all-virtual affair that felt like an extended infomercial at times but was praised by Republicans and Democrats alike for its production value and outreach to voters across the political spectrum. Bidens prime-time speech earned bipartisan approval as well, aided, perhaps, by the rock-bottom expectations Republicans helped set by spending much of the year questioning the former vice presidents mental acuity.

Now its President Donald Trumps turn.

With Election Day just 10 weeks away, the Republican president has four nights of prime-time television to convince Americas pessimistic electorate that he deserves another four years in office. Given the out-of-control coronavirus pandemic and the sagging economy, it will be no easy task.

___

THE BIG QUESTIONS

Can Trump expand?

Were about to see whether Trumps GOP has the capacity or willingness to expand his coalition beyond his base. Its an essential question for the Republican president. Pollsters in both parties say that there simply arent enough Trump base voters out there to ensure he wins reelection.

The convention program suggests that the president will continue to seize on the nations cultural divides, particularly around issues of racial injustice and policing. This may motivate his largely white base, but its unlikely to help him improve his standing among women, college-educated voters or minorities who have turned against him.

But the Republican convention will also feature a collection of more diverse Trump supporters. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator, is scheduled to deliver Mondays opening address; and Alice Johnson, a Black nonviolent drug offender Trump pardoned in 2018, is set to appear on Thursday.

Such voices could be significant if theyre able to break through the higher-profile figures on the conservative media circuit planning to deliver red meat for the presidents base.

Can the GOP convention meet the Democrats bar?

Whether they agreed with the message, leaders in both parties complimented Bidens team for hosting a well-run convention despite unprecedented logistical challenges. Maybe it doesnt matter to many voters, but such execution speaks to a candidates ability to govern under difficult circumstances.

Trumps 2020 campaign has been run much more professionally than his first, but a deep sense of chaos continues to haunt Trumps presidency. With time running out to improve his standing, Trumps team can ill afford any embarrassing stumbles that could stain what is typically the most scripted week of a presidential campaign.

Convention bounce for Biden?

Its no secret that presidential campaigns typically get a modest polling bounce after their conventions. Its also no secret that the television ratings for last weeks Democratic convention were down significantly compared with four years earlier. Bidens campaign insists that the online numbers made up for the drop in TV viewership, but it remains to be seen whether the overall ratings will help Bidens polling numbers.

Its worth noting, of course, that Biden has held a significant polling lead over Trump for much of the year, so he doesnt exactly need a big bump. But pollsters on both sides tell us the race was narrowing, at least a bit, heading into last weeks convention. And given Trumps surprise victory four years ago, Democrats are desperate for any advantage they can get.

Were particularly interested in whether Democrats are any more excited to vote for Biden instead of just voting against Trump. As weve stated here repeatedly, it is a distinction that could matter in a close election.

How do Republicans address the pandemic?

More than 176,000 Americans have been killed by COVID-19 under Trumps watch. Roughly 1,000 people are still dying each day.

Trump has consistently downplayed the threat of the coronavirus. But with the eyes of the nation on him this week, he and his party will be under intense pressure to acknowledge the worst public health threat in a century in a responsible and reassuring way.

Mondays program will feature a Montana coffee shop owner who received federal loans to pay her employees during the pandemic. Trump will need more than that to reassure an anxious nation.

Can Bidens team execute?

As the political world focuses on the messaging and stagecraft of the Republican convention, Bidens team has a week alone to focus on the grunt work of identifying and persuading the people it needs to turn out to vote this fall.

Its a difficult task under the best of circumstances, but this year offers the most complicated get-out-the-vote challenge in modern history as voters navigate shifting state election laws in the midst of the pandemic. Democrats have largely avoided face-to-face voter contact given health concerns, but with early voting set to begin next month in several states, its unclear if phone calls, texts and mail will get the job done.

___

THE FINAL THOUGHT

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy committed to delivering election mail securely and on time last week, but its impossible to ignore the mounting problems at the federal agency responsible for delivering tens of millions of mail ballots.

The latest: Food is rotting and animals are dying because of postal delays, including nearly 5,000 baby chickens shipped to Maine farmers last week.

Over the weekend, the Democrat-led House, backed by more than two dozen Republicans, approved a $25 billion package to strengthen the U.S. Postal Service. Senate Republicans are expected to kill the measure, and if they dont, Trump has promised a veto.

Given the potential impact on voting, its getting harder and harder to understand the Republicans resistance.

___

2020 Watch runs every Monday and provides a look at the week ahead in the 2020 election.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
A lawyer for the pro-Biafra group, IPOB, has said there will be accountability, a day after a deadly clash between security agents and members of the group reportedly left many dead.

The State Security Service said two of its operatives were killed in an unprovoked attack Sunday in Emene, Enugu, but the Indigenous People of Biafra denied the claim, saying 21 of its members were massacred by state agents as they held a peaceful meeting.

Whoever takes the life of an IPOB member is taking the life of an Igbo and therefore will ultimately account to Ndigbo. Its not a threat; its a fact, the lawyer, Aloy Ejimakor, said in a statement Monday.

IPOB, a group that has been outlawed by the Nigerian government, has been agitating for a sovereign state for the Igbo in Nigeria. Several of its members have been killed in the past by security officials, including Nigerian soldiers, who clamped down on their activities.

Mr Ejimakor, in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES, said, A famous Nigerian politician once said (in spirited defense of the Yoruba) that before I became a Nigerian, I was Yoruba. And another one said: We will write this for all to read. Anyone, soldier or not that kills the Fulani takes a loan repayable one day no matter how long it takes.

The Yoruba has, in moderation, said his own. The Fulani has, in extremism, said his own. Let me now, as an Igbo, say my own, and here it is: Whoever takes the life of an IPOB member is taking the life of an Igbo and therefore will ultimately account to Ndigbo. Its not a threat; its a fact.

Mr Ejimakor, who said the IPOBs gathering in Emene was peaceable exercise of their constitutional rights, rejected the views that those killed are just IPOB members.

He added, Yes, they might be IPOB members. But guess what? Everybody in the former Eastern Nigeria who disagrees with the fratricidal mess that has become Nigeria is an IPOB member, overtly or covertly.

They dont have to carry a registration card for you to be certain that they are IPOB members. All you need to do is to talk with them to convince yourself that they are IPOB members.

An IPOB member is simply any Eastern Nigerian (especially the Igbo) who will rather have Biafra than a Nigeria that eats her children, especially her Igbo children. And they are in the millions; they are legion; some are above ground; some are in sleeper cells. And they are not miscreants; they are the Igbo gentry, the elites, the masses, the warts and all.

Continuing, the lawyer said, And to be sure, they were Igbos before they became Nigerians. And even as Nigeria notoriously disdains the Igbo but still wants to keep him in Nigeria, the Igbo remains an Igbo for now and forever, alive or dead. Nobody can change that. No subliminal narrative of just IPOB can change that.

Therefore, while its correct to say that those killed are members of IPOB, its wrong to slant it in a way that seeks to detach them from the whole. That whole is mainly Ndigbo, a people that are not terrorists but are branded as such; a people that do not bear arms but are treated as such and thus extrajudicially murdered at the slightest excuse.

Mr Ejimakor insisted that those responsible for the killing of IPOB members would be held to account within or at the appropriate forum outside Nigeria.

There shall be no statute of limitation stopping it. And sovereign immunity will not be a shield but a sword, he said.

I say it advisedly, not as the Special Counsel to the IPOB and Nnamdi Kanu (which I am), but as an Igbo who is personally wounded and bereaved any time an innocent Igbo life is taken by rulers of a Nigerian State that will rather pardon a terrorist and kill the unarmed Igbo, while foolishly thinking that there will be no consequences.
and have signed a contract on the delivery of the second batch of formidable S-400 air defence missile system.

"The contract has been signed," the Head of Russia's state arms seller Rosoboronexport Alexander Mikheyev said, replying to the corresponding question, reported TASS.

The sides are now discussing "the financial arrangement of implementing the contract," he specified.

and signed a loan agreement for the supply of S-400 air defence systems in September 2017. This resulted in the US suspending deliveries of F-35 fighter jets to its NATO ally.

The decision strained ties with the US as Washington refused to provide with the aircraft, claiming that the S-400 deal is incompatible with the alliance's military equipment and might compromise the operations of the new fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets. Ankara, however, refused to back down.

According to TASS report, under the contract announced in 2017, Turkey received a regiment set of S-400 air defense missile system.

The S-400 'Triumf' is considered the most advanced long-range air defense missile system of its kind which can engage targets at a distance of 400 km and at an altitude of up to 30 km.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In brief: Several Asian manufacturers looking to diversify supply chains have partially shifted production lines to India, Vietnam, and Taiwan. This trend started as a result of the US-China trade war and only accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, with Mexico as the next hot property.

The trade war between China and the US over the last two years has spurred tech giants like Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Lenovo, Dell, and HP to look for alternative manufacturing locations. Tariffs on electronics made in China are hurting their bottom lines, and OEMs also want to be prepared for any future economy-busting pandemics like Covid-19.

Most companies favor shifting production to other Asian countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and India. Others like Nintendo, Apple, and Amazon have already started making accessories and lower-end products outside of China. At the same time, India is poised to become a manufacturing hub for higher-end products thanks to increased efforts to build the necessary infrastructure.

According to a Reuters report corroborated by El Economista, at least two Asian manufacturing companies are planning to expand to a different location closer to the US. Foxconn and Pegatron, who are among Apple's largest supply chain partners, plan to build new iPhone factories in Mexico. Both manufacturers are negotiating with lenders. They are expected to make their decisions by the end of the year. Foxconn already operates five factories in Mexico producing things like TVs, set-top boxes, servers, and medical equipment.

Overall, the plans are part of a trend dubbed "near-shoring," where manufacturing giants are scrambling to move production closer to the end market. The US government has been looking into ways to encourage this behavior by offering incentives for firms that move production to the US, Latin America, or the Caribbean. These efforts have produced little effects so far, with Foxconn looking to start small at its Wisconsin factory by building robotic coffee houses and ventilators.

Image credit: Reuters
These bestselling spot stickers can clear up pesky pimples in record time. (Getty Images)

Yahoo Lifestyle is committed to finding you the best products at the best prices. We may receive a share from purchases made via links on this page. Prices were correct at the time of publication.

Wearing a face mask for long periods of time has really wreaked havoc on our skin, making us prone to breakouts  or maskne as its now known.

The term, coined by Elizabeth Ardens Consulting Dermatologist Dr Dendy Engelman, is used to describe spots caused by wearing a face covering.

Why does it occur? Well, face masks tend to trap in lots of hot air when you breathe or talk - something many of us find uncomfortable.

This trapped air creates a humid, warm environment under your mask, and in these conditions bacteria can thrive.

So, given that its likely well be wearing masks when out and about for the foreseeable, we decided it was time to look for a skincare quick-fix in the meantime.

And we found it - for just 5.99.

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The transparent patches have been designed to blend in with your skin and mean you can pop one on and not worry that others will notice (especially when hidden beneath your face mask).

Underneath the patch, the hydrocolloid technology creates a moist environment, which is the optimum conditions for your spot to heal.

Buy it: Dots for Spots Original Acne Absorbing Pimple Patches | 5.99 from Amazon

Each pack contains 24 spot stickers, which are suitable for all skin types as they are fragrance-free, sulphate-free, phthalate-free, alcohol-free and paraben-free.

The reviews, all 1,800 of them, speak for themselves.

I have seen this product advertised a lot and Im suffering with bad skin at the moment due to wearing a mask everyday, one shopper wrote. These are honestly one of the best things I have ever bought.

I had a massive spot that hadnt quite come to a head yet, I popped one of these on and in four hours it was virtually gone. I also used one on a spot I squeezed and it took the remaining stuff out of the spot and reduced the redness and swelling I caused by squeezing it.

Story continues

I would recommend these through and through! I dont mind the price tag as it does the job well.

Another added: For me, the best thing is that these stickers are almost invisible and calm down the appearance of the spots massively.
Thousands of college students from across the Lake Houston area fired up their laptops for their first Lone Star College - Kingwood classes this morning. Students began the semester online, although a limited number of in-person courses will begin on Sept. 8.

There are about 1,200 class sections planned for the fall semester, 54 percent of which will be completely online while 29 percent are hybrid, meaning at least half the class will be online with at least one in-person class. Only 17 percent of their courses are face to face this semester, according to LSC-Kingwood President Katherine Persson.

The 17 percent of courses that are face to face are mostly limited to critical needs, such as healthcare, fire science and process technology classes. Face masks are required and temperature checks are some of the precautions in place on campus.

EDUCATION: Harvey's destruction preps Lone Star-Kingwood for online classes during coronavirus

Although Sarah Hirsch, a professor of nursing at LSC - Kingwood, had reservations about returning to in-person learning, she said she is confident in the protective measures in place and has seen clear communication from leadership. For nursing in particular, the risk of being exposed to something is taken into consideration every day they go to work.

Ive been with Lone Star for over eight years now, and I know that its a solid program. And we all want to get back to the way things were or to creating our new normal, Hirsch said. Students as well as faculty miss that face to face interaction.

They have created a platform for those beyond their first year of learning to partially participate in a virtual clinic, which simulates a real day on the job and counts toward their required clinic hours.

However, some lessons have to be taught in person, she said.

Theres some things that the virtual environment cant provide in terms of teaching skills. And they can watch videos, but its something different from the side by side teaching them how to fold a catheter in and to be able to correct technique, Hirsch said. So I know were all eager for that, but I (also) know that everybody wants to proceed with an abundance of caution.

EDUCATION: Houston-area schools lost contact with tens of thousands of students during COVID, TEA data shows

Persson said the college system is following CDC guidelines for in-person courses.

What I can ensure our employees as well as our students is we are doing everything possible to ensure their safety, (by) very strictly following CDC guidelines, Persson said. We have successfully worked from home for most of the summer. They have the equipment to do that, and were keeping in touch with students and we do that with email, with direct phone calls.

Rochelly Enamorado will be graduating from LSC-Kingwood in May with an associate in teaching. She said she is confident about succeeding with online education, which is predominately how she is learning right now.

The future educator is currently working at The Academy at Rowland Ballard, a preschool in Kingwood where she will be practicing precautions, such as using hand sanitizer, taking temperatures, wearing masks, cleaning and social distancing.

I feel pretty confident honestly as long as we wear our mask and keep our distance and continue to wash our hands. I feel like we will be fine, Enamorado said. And I miss school honestly  I miss the environment. I miss communicating with my professors face to face and with my peers. It gets a little boring at home.

Meanwhile, Ryan Mitchell is a second year graphic design student at LSC-Kingwood and works at the Veterans Resource Center on top of his schooling. The military veteran spent 12 years in active duty in California but wanted to be at home once his first son was born, so he moved back to Houston with his wife. He said he has felt supported throughout the process.

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All of his classes are set up for the hybrid learning option, where his first eight weeks will be online and then he will return to campus for in-person learning. After the spring semester caused students to pivot their learning style, Mitchell learned how to get used to online instruction even though he works better in a classroom environment.

For him, its just one more hurdle this year.

In the back of my head, yeah, theres a little worry. But from what Ive seen with businesses and even with the school, because I know some of the advisors are back on campus, and theyre practicing social distancing and taking their temperatures, Mitchell said. There is still a little worry, but I think the campus is going to do everything they can to make sure everyones safe, so Im ready to go back for sure.

Cleveland resident Catrice Porter, 17, only has two out of her five dual credit classes in person this semester at LSC-Kingwood as she completes her coursework through homeschooling.

While she herself is not at high risk, she lives with a family member who is and plans to be careful while on campus. As a home school student herself, she recommends learning online platforms.

I would suggest taking every opportunity you can to learn how to use more online platforms because I know that I had an English class last semester where it was mandatory to go to a seminar where we learned how to use online sources. With Lone Star, there are plenty of sources they have that are free for students, Porter said. So I would suggest taking advantage of that and using it to the best of your ability because this semester will be hard because we cant be in the library too much and online tutoring, Im sure, can only go so far.

savannah.mehrtens@chron.com
Simon Coveney has taken over the brief formerly held by Paul Kehoe, who launched probe

An Independent investigation has been launched into bullying allegations in the Defence Forces cadet school at the Curragh Camp in Co Kildare.

It was initiated after a protected disclosure from someone working at the school.

The disclosure was made to former defence minister Paul Kehoe, who appointed a senior counsel to examine the complaints.

Treatment

A cadet did not make the allegations. They came from a more senior officer who was concerned about the treatment of new recruits.

Mr Kehoe ordered an independent investigation into the claims in his last week in office.

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The terms of reference for the investigation were drafted by Department of Defence officials and a senior counsel was appointed to oversee the review.

Such allegations are usually investigated internally by military personnel, with an independent probe seen as a significant development.

The Department of Defence, which is currently part of Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney's portfolio, confirmed an investigation had been launched.

"The minister has appointed a senior counsel to review matters pertaining to the conduct of training in the cadet school," a department spokesperson said.

"The review is under way and, therefore, the matters remain confidential."

The Defence Forces also confirmed an investigation is under way, in an almost identically- worded statement.

"The Defence Forces can confirm that the Defence Minister has appointed a senior counsel to review a matter pertaining to the cadet school," a spokesperson said.

"Given that the review is ongoing, it would be inappropriate to comment further."

Mr Kehoe refused to comment when contacted.

The details of the investigation are unclear, but it is believed to relate to how new cadets are being treated.

The Defence Forces website says the cadet school's aim is to prepare recruits "morally, mentally and physically" for their role as leaders in the Irish Army.

It says it will imbue students with the Defence Forces' "values of respect, loyalty, selflessness, physical courage, moral courage and integrity".

"The objective of the course, the development of leaders of character and competence, is reflected in the concept of developing the whole person," it says.

"This concept requires the provision of the opportunity for increasing self-confidence, inculcating pride in achievement, developing physical and mental endurance and providing a foundation for intellectual growth."

It is not the first time bullying allegations have been made within the Defence Forces.

Sexual

Three years ago, it was reported that officials had investigated 10 cases of bullying and sexual harassment within a two-year period.

Between 2014 and September 2017, seven complaints of bullying were made, while three sexual harassment complaints were recorded.

Records show that in 2014, five complaints of bullying were made by Army personnel, while two incidents of sexual harassment were reported.

The following year, two complaints of bullying were made, while up until September 2016, one instance of sexual harassment was reported.
Air quality across the Bay Area hovered at unhealthy levels Monday, as raging wildfires pumped hazardous smoke into the skies and increased the dangers associated with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The worst places to breathe Monday were spread across the region, including San Pablo, Concord, Redwood City, East Oakland, Pleasanton, Napa and Vallejo, all of which reported dangerous levels of PM2.5, the particulate matter found in wildfire smoke, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

Some doctors near fire zones reported an uptick in patients with respiratory issues over the weekend, while others expect to see more in the coming weeks.

The worsening air conditions come at a time when health experts warn that smoke, colliding with COVID-19, will make it even harder for people with chronic conditions such as asthma or lung disease to breathe. Those exacerbated conditions could make those infected with the virus even sicker.

Were very concerned that now we have two major public health crises converging at the same time, said Dr. Ronn Berrol, the medical director of the emergency department at Sutter Healths Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland.

Historic blazes have worsened air quality across the Bay Area, with no end in sight as fires remain mostly uncontained. On Sunday, Livermore and Pleasanton reached hazardous levels of pollution, the worst rating according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The air improved slightly Monday, but unhealthy levels of PM2.5 were still reported across the Bay Area, particularly in the North Bay, East Bay and parts of the Peninsula. In San Francisco, West Oakland, and Berkeley, the air was unhealthy for sensitive groups.

National Weather Service meteorologist David King said Monday that winds could decrease smoke and haze around the San Francisco peninsula, but given the size of the LNU and SCU lightning complex fires, the Central Valley and areas farther east will likely still be very smoky. King did not estimate when Bay Area skies would clear up.

While theres little evidence yet to show that smoke makes you more susceptible to the coronavirus, theres mounting proof that it could make you more seriously sick if infected, and studies have shown that chronic pollution can increase the likelihood of dying from COVID-19. Doctors also feared that pollution could cause coughing, which spreads the virus.

Hospitals in Oakland and the North Bay, bordering some of the largest fires in Californias history, hadnt noticed more patients coming in with respiratory issues by Monday. But doctors pointed out that in past fires, more patients showed up at least a week and sometimes months after fires started, with trouble breathing, heart palpitations or even heart attacks.

In east San Jose, where the SCU fire has been burning just a few miles away, Regional Medical Center has seen an increase in respiratory patients since Friday, Dr. Paul Silka, head of the emergency department, said Monday. The smoke compounds risks for people with COVID-19, he said.

I am anticipating these people will have a more rapid decline, Silka said. Last week, the hospital sent home a patient with mild COVID-19 symptoms only to have them return two days later in much worse condition.

Regional Medical Center has beefed up its resources to care for these patients, getting more medication, ventilators and personal protective equipment, and will be testing everyone with respiratory symptoms for the coronavirus. Silka urged anyone with trouble breathing or pain in their chest to not wait to come to the hospital until it was too late.

Dr. Bruce Deas, director of the emergency department at Healdsburg District Hospital, which is prepared to evacuate as the LNU fire burns west of town, expressed the same concern as bad air quality and public health warnings keep people home.

We have seen over the last few months, especially in the last month, patients who had COVID-19 and stayed home and got very sick, Deas said. Obviously its better for them to be in the hospital.

For some Bay Area residents already at risk, air quality may push them out of the area entirely. Smoke from the CZU Lightning Complex fires consuming the Santa Cruz Mountains was so bad overnight in the Los Gatos hills that Nick Weidner, 64, had to wake up several times to use an inhaler to manage his asthma.

Breathing is difficult. Eyes burning and irritated, he said in a message Monday morning. He has a history of lung disease and hasnt left home in months to protect himself from the coronavirus. The weather forecast promised to push smoke away from his home by the evening, but if it changed, he and his spouse planned to leave for Humboldt County to escape the dangerous air.

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 of Monday, the first major wildfires since the coronavirus pandemic began had been burning for a week with no relief in sight.

The longer this goes on, the more we would be concerned about the effects of the wildfire smoke on COVID-19, said Dr. John Balmes, a professor of medicine at UCSF and environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley. The combination of what we know about air pollution and chronic exposures makes us worried about the confluence of the current bad air quality from wildfire smoke and risks for exacerbation and progression of the disease.

Experts urge residents to stay inside, seal windows and doors, get air filters or set your central ventilation system to recirculate, and wear a mask outside (an N95 is most effective). But some workers need to go outside, where they face greater risks.

Jay Alfonso, a steelworker in Pittsburg, makes sure to wear a mask when going to work in the mill, but is worried about the long-term health effects of breathing in the smoke.

It burns, it dries my eyes out and its burdensome on our throats, Alfonso said. I don't know if this is going to create any future problems.

There's just no getting away from the smell. When you look at the sky, everything is just so hazy and you see a constant red sun in the sky. It's almost like we're living on Mars, Alfonso added. I've never seen fires like this in all my years of being here, at least this close to home.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Roland Li contributed to this report.

Mallory Moench and Vanessa Arredondo are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@mallorymoench
US President Donald Trump again used the term China Virus for the novel coronavirus that has created a pandemic across the world.

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump announced emergency authorisation to treat COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma -- a move he called a breakthrough.

In his speech, Trump said, I am pleased to make a truly historic announcement in our battle against the China virus that will save countless lives, and added the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorisation of convalescent plasma.

The announcement came after White House officials complained there were politically motivated delays by the FDA in approving a vaccine and therapeutics for the disease that has upended Trump's reelection chances.

The authorisation of convalescent plasma therapy makes it easier for some patients to obtain the treatment but is not the same as full FDA approval.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

The blood plasma, taken from patients who have recovered from the coronavirus and rich in antibodies, may provide benefits to those battling the COVID-19 disease. But the evidence so far has not been conclusive about whether it works, when to administer it and what dose is needed.

Follow our LIVE blog for the latest updates of the novel coronavirus pandemic

This was not the first time when Trump called the novel coronavirus as Chinas virus.

In March, he had said that China is responsible for the spread of the novel coronavirus and called the COVID-19 as the "Chinese Virus".

He, later, insisted the term was accurate because the virus originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

The virus that first emerged in China's Wuhan city in the Hubei province in December 2019 has spread to at least 188 countries, infecting 2.33 crore people and has claimed 8.07 lakh lives, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker.

Follow our full coverage on COVID-19 here
With the focus on work from home, Harshit Kumar, a software engineer working in Gurgaon and paying a rent of over Rs 20,000, recently decided to buy a housing unit in a gated residential complex in Meerut. He is not the only one.

COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased demand for houses in tier-II and -III cities due to reverse migration but majority of this housing stock consists of low rises and plotted developments.

A few developers are targeting homebuyers who belong to these Tier-2 cities and are offering low-rise condominiums and affordable plots which have seen increased demand over the last few months.

A recent India Housing Report has said that over 65 percent of the flat constructions in the smaller cities (less than a million population) are either single- or double-storied flats, in comparison to 38 percent in the case of top metropolitan areas.

Flats have emerged as an affordable housing option and are a key component in the supply of rental housing in smaller towns. Almost half of the flats in smaller towns are used for residential rental purposes. As compared to metros, a higher share of flats in smaller towns (8.5 percent) is also used as employer-provided housing.

Unlike in major cities, low rises in Tier-2 towns are popular after plotted developments, says Manoj Gaur, managing director, Gaursons.

AlphaCorp is offering residential plots in Karnal and Meerut. It has adopted a two-pronged strategy that includes residential low-rise condominiums and commercial office spaces.

People from metro cities are also migrating to tier 2 cities and demand for real estate is increasing. We at Alpha-Corp are targeting homebuyers from metros who belong to these cities and/or are thinking of either moving back or buying a second home for themselves, as typically their own houses in Tier-II cities have multiple stakeholders. In last few months of the pandemic, we have seen an increase in traffic more on digital platforms for tier-II cities thus increasing the response therein manifold, said Santosh Agarwal, CFO, AlphaCorp

In Karnal, we have recently launched affordable plots under Deen Dayal Jan Awas Yojana (DDJAY) scheme which has seen great demand. As per our internal market research, our target audience in tier-II cities prefer independent houses and low-rise apartments respectively for Karnal and Meerut, he told Moneycontrol.

In Meerut, the company is offering 2 and 3 BHKs where sizes vary from 1453 sq ft (135 sq m) to 1743 sq ft (162 sq m) and prices range between Rs 56 and Rs 65 lakh.

In Karnal, the plot sizes vary from 900 sq ft to 8730 sq ft. Prices vary from Rs 19,000 to Rs 22,000 per sq yard depending on the location of the plot and the category.

Supertech Group, which has projects in Meerut, Dehradun and Pant Nagar, has also seen an increase in demand for its high-rise developments and plotted developments during the pandemic.

With several companies adopting the work-from-home culture during the pandemic, many professionals from these towns are now preferring to buy houses close to their families. While the younger generation prefers high rises, seniors in these towns go in for plotted developments, says R K Arora, chairman, Supertech Limited.

In a pandemic situation, the medical safety of low-rise development inhabitants is also a lot easier to manage. At the end of the day, high-rises are mass housing developments.

That said, in many areas of India's congested metros, high-rises are the only affordable option for people with constrained budgets - and indeed, there will usually be no options for low-rise buildings among the fresh supply coming in.

Basically, high-rises allow builders to reduce their land costs and churn out more units on a single plot. Skyscrapers are therefore more cost-effective for buyers on a unit-to-unit basis, says Prashant Thakur, director and head, Research, ANAROCK Property Consultants.

Mudassir Zaidi, Executive Director  North, Knight Frank India, is of the opinion that while many employees working in big cities may have gone back to their hometowns, it has not resulted in sales of residential units as work from home is still a transitory concept.

The ramifications of work from home are still being understood. The trend of people buying houses in their hometowns is yet to be established as they already have a place to live back home, he told Moneycontrol.

As for formats in these Tier-2 towns, buyers generally prefer low rises compared to high rises in major cities, he says.
The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation announced Monday a new precautionary fish consumption advisory on Parksville Reservoir on the Ocoee River in Polk County. This lake is also known as Ocoee Number 1.This advisory is due to elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in catfish species. Other fish species are not impacted.TDEC advises that pregnant women, nursing mothers and children avoid eating the fish species included in the advisory and that all others limit consumption to one meal per month.Other recreational activities such as boating, kayaking, swimming, wading and catch and release fishing carry no risk. Rafting on the Ocoee River does not expose citizens to PCBs.By all measures, the Ocoee River including Parksville Reservoir is one of Tennessees most dramatic water quality success stories, TDEC Deputy Commissioner Greg Young said. Forty years ago, Parksville Reservoir was so toxic that few fish could live in it and local residents knew not to bother fishing there. There were no fish to catch in the lake because of the over 100-year history of water quality impacts from copper mining in the Copper Basin.However, modern environmental regulations and the restoration of the Copper Basin led to enough water quality improvement in the Ocoee that fish began to return to Parksville Reservoir. Now fish thrive in the lake but have been exposed to the legacy chemicals in the sediment. One of these chemicals is PCBs.In the last 20 years, the Tennessee Valley Authority collected and analyzed fish in Parksville Reservoir in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2017. These fish tissue data are the basis of the new advisory. The lake will again be sampled in 2020.We issue these advisories so the community can make informed decisions about whether or not to consume the fish they catch, Deputy Comm. Young said. Unlike do not consume advisories that warn the general population to avoid eating fish from a particular body of water altogether, precautionary fish consumption advisories are specifically directed to sensitive populations such as children, pregnant women, nursing mothers and those who may eat fish frequently from the same body of water.TDEC will post warning signs at public access points on Parksville Reservoir and will work with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Cherokee National Forest to communicate this information to the public.
Melissa Doyle looked downcast while taking her daughter, Talia, for a driving lesson in Sydney on Monday, just three days after being dropped from Channel Seven.

The veteran broadcaster, 50, who was given her marching orders on Friday after 25 years at the network, was seen attaching L-plates to the family Volkswagen before taking her 16-year-old for a spin around the neighbourhood.

She had worry and disappointment etched on her face, and it was clear that she was taking her redundancy hard, despite her glowing statement last week thanking her colleagues for their 'constant support'.

Looking glum: Melissa Doyle looked downcast while taking her daughter, Talia, for a driving lesson in Sydney on Monday, just three days after being dropped from Channel Seven

Melissa dressed casually in tight black leggings, a white T-shirt and a purple winter jacket.

She completed her outfit with a pair of comfortable black sneakers, and wore her hair in a ponytail.

After taking Talia for a driving lesson, the former Sunrise host hopped back into the driver's seat and drove her daughter to school.

Glum: The veteran broadcaster, 50, who was given her marching orders on Friday after 25 years at the network, was seen attaching L-plates to the family Volkswagen before taking her 16-year-old for a spin around the neighbourhood

On Friday, Seven announced that Melissa had left the network after 25 years.

During her career, she had hosted several of Seven's flagship programs, including Today Tonight, Sunrise, 7News, Sunday Night and The Latest.

Her departure is believed to be the result of the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit Seven particularly hard.

According to industry website Radio Today, Melissa will continue hosting her weekend show on Nova-owned station Smooth FM.

Hard times: She had worry and disappointment etched on her face, and it was clear that she was taking her redundancy hard, despite her glowing statement last week thanking her colleagues for their 'constant support'

Dressing for comfort: Melissa dressed casually in tight black leggings, a white T-shirt and a purple winter jacket, and completed her outfit with a pair of comfortable black sneakers

As news broke of her departure from Seven, Melissa said in a statement: 'For 25 years, I have called Channel Seven home. I've had the privilege to share stories that mattered, meet incredible people and be there for significant moments in history.

'I am incredibly proud of the work I have done and appreciative of the trust and warmth our viewers have shown me.

'I want to thank the consummate professionals I have worked with along the way, in particular our Chairman Kerry Stokes for his constant support.

'I leave Seven with a great deal of pride, satisfaction and gratitude.'

Mum duties: After taking Natalia (left) for a driving lesson, Melissa hopped back into the driver's seat and drove her daughter to school

Melissa first joined Seven's Canberra bureau as a political reporter back in 1995. She then moved to Sydney, working as a newsreader on the 11AM program.

She went on to become one of Sunrise's first hosts, before the breakfast show was temporarily axed in 1999 and brought back the following year.

She rejoined the program in 2002, and also hosted a string of other shows for the network, including Today Tonight.

'I leave Seven with a great deal of pride': On Friday, Seven announced that Melissa had left the network after 25 years

The mother of two announced she was leaving Sunrise in June 2013, departing in August that same year.

At the time, her departure was described by the network as a 'resignation', but it's widely believed she was pushed out. She was replaced by Sam Armytage.

Melissa remained with the network, however, presenting Seven Afternoon News and Seven News at 7.

In 2015, she was announced as host and senior correspondent for Sunday Night, but the current affairs show was cancelled in October 2019, as a cost-cutting measure.
We dont know how long this is going to be sustainable, Mr. Anokye said. Im always positive about things. I dont want to say we have to close down, but maybe we will have to let go of some employees.

Other agents, like the owner and sole employee of Sabye Travel, have taken drastic steps to reduce expenses. The agency, started in New Jersey and now run out of the owners home in Virginia, specializes in travelers to and from Thailand, many of whom live in the New York area.

We dont eat out anymore, no more discretionary spending, no buying anything thats not completely essential, said the owner, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Apiwat, because he was concerned that his other job might be jeopardized if his employer found out about his travel business.

He said the pandemic had obliterated his busy season, which can generate more than $150,000 in income and usually starts in April with Songkran, the Thai New Year celebration, and continues through September. He said he refunded customers who had booked travel months in advance, and canceled plans to market tours to Thailand.

Still, after months of gloom, some agents are seeing signs that people are starting to travel.

It just will take a little time to open back up and get where it was, said Sunita Seegobin, who is from Guyana and who opened Sunita Travel Agency with her husband, Naresh, in Queens in 2007.

Some agents said their services might be even more valuable amid shifting travel restrictions, quarantine rules and other concerns.

Mr. Anokye compared consulting a travel agent with visiting a dentist.

Do you go to the internet to search how to take your tooth out? he said.
Vodafone Ghana Foundation has relieved patients receiving medical treatment in some of the major hospitals across the country of their medical bills as part of activities to mark this years World Humanitarian.



The gesture forms part of the companys Homecoming initiative, which is meant to settle the medical bills of financially challenged patients who prolong their stay at the hospital due to settling their inability to their indebtedness.



At what it described as the middle belt virtual launch of the Vodafone Homecoming Initiative in Accra last Wednesday, the Head of Vodafone Ghana Foundation, Rev. Amaris Nana Adjei Perbi, said: For our middle belt initiative, a total of nine health institutions have been identified as beneficiaries with their selection based on whether the hospital is a major facility in the region, the population the facility serves and the availability of insolvent patients at this institution.



From these nine health facilities, a total of 106 patients will be discharged with medical conditions of these patients running the gamut from bone fractures to ulcers, he noted.



He explained that the project, which is targeted at 300 beneficiaries across the 16 regions in the country, completed its Phase 1 Homecoming initiative in the Northern Belt with the discharge of 96 insolvent patients across six health facilities a month ago.



Beneficiary hospitals



Beneficiary hospitals in the Ashanti Region are the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital and the Kumasi South Regional Hospital.



In the Bono Region, he mentioned the Sunyani Regional Hospital and in the Ahafo Region the Asunafo South District and Goaso Municipal hospitals, as well as the Holy Family Hospital for the Bono East Region.



In the Oti Region, our beneficiary hospitals are the Worawora Government Hospital and the Jasikan District Hospital and finally in the Western North Region, we have the Bibiani Government Hospital, he said.

Substantial impact



Rev. Perbi added that the foundation would continue to make substantial impact in provision of health care as it commenced phase two of the initiative for the Middle Belt.



Beyond the payment of the medical bills, all beneficiaries will either be registered onto the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) or will have existing cards renewed.



Rev, Perbi explained that to ensure the safety of these beneficiaries during this pandemic, they would also be provided with nose masks and sanitiser.



The Vodafone Foundation as the leader in health and also known for supporting both government and community agenda in relation to health issues will ensure that we sustain our relevance in the community and connect them for good. We are very ready to save lives and ensure all our heath projects are beneficial to the country, he added.



Appreciation



The Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, commended Vodafone Ghana Foundation for the initiative which he said had provided relief to beneficiaries, adding that it is important that we encourage people to register on the NHIS to reduce cost of health when they are sick.

Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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MIDDLETOWN  U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., spearheaded a rally Monday at the Silver Street post office to show support for union workers and call for more funding from the Trump Administration to help the agency deal with effects of the pandemic.

Connecticuts junior senator was joined by Mayor Ben Florsheim, state Sen. Matt Lesser and state Rep. Quintin Phipps, as well as postal service union leaders and a retired mail carrier, according to a release.

Postal service employees are front-line workers who put their lives on the line every day to keep the economy running, according to Murphy. We owe a debt of gratitude to you. Im sorry that just as you are in the middle of responding to a pandemic, and being out there operating on the front lines, youre brought into this manufactured controversy around the upcoming election.

Postal workers should be supplied with all the protective equipment needed, not only to keep themselves safe, but their customers as well, Murphy said, the the release.

 ... Unfortunately, you are being given less, and youre having a pay cut, or youre having a technology trim, and its certainly making it much more difficult for you to do the job that you love. ... in those very dark days when nobody was open, the mail was still being delivered, he said.

Murphy and his colleague, U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., wrote a letter addressing the general problems since Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was appointed, and joined his colleague U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., in a letter focused on USPS operations as it related to election mail delivery times that could potentially slow absentee ballots, the release said.

Murphy is a co-sponsor of the Postal Service Emergency Assistance Act, which would provide up to $25 billion in emergency financial relief for the USPS to cover revenue losses and operational expenses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It would allow the USPS to prioritize the purchase of personal protective equipment for employees and to conduct additional cleaning and sanitizing of its facilities and vehicles, the release said.

We rely on the Postal Service in normal elections, and were going to rely on you even more this election, Murphy said, echoing the mayors words.

You have to send in a request for a ballot, you got to get that ballot back, and you got to turn around and send it a second time. And still, thats how voters chose to vote, and thats whats going to happen in the general election as well, and we need a fully functioning post office, Murphy said.

The House passed legislation that drew bipartisan support last weekend, giving $25 million into the Postal Service to require the suspension of all changes, said the senator, who is joining with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., to demand both Congress and the Senate reconvene to deal with the issue.

The number of Republicans who voted for it in the House gives you an idea of how many Senate Republicans would end up voting for this bill if it came to the Senate floor, said Murphy, who acknowledged the agency could greatly benefit from efficiencies.

But this is still a service. This is a core function of the federal government. Very few functions of the federal government are spelled out in the United States Constitution, Murphy said.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), University of Lagos (Unilag) chapter, has described the election an acting vice-chancellor of the university by its Senate as a major step by the Federal Government to restore peace to the troubled institution.

The comment came on a day the senior staff association of the school criticised the process.

ASUU chairman of the chapter, Dele Ashiru, reacted to the election of Folashade Ogunsola as the Acting Vice Chancellor of the university.

Mr Ogunsola was elected on Monday by the Unilag Senate.

The Federal Government had on Friday directed the Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Governing Council of the university, Wale Babalakin, and the Vice-Chancellor, Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, to recuse themselves from official duties pending the outcome of a special visitation panel to the university.

SEE ALSO:

The Federal Government also directed that the Senate of the university should convene to nominate an acting vice-chancellor from among its members for confirmation by the Governing Council.

The governing council had, on August 12, removed Mr Ogundipe as the Vice-Chancellor over alleged misconduct.

I want to say we are very satisfied with the conduct of todays election which has brought forth Prof. Folasade Ogunsola as the Acting Vice Chancellor; she was prior to todays election, the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Development Services), he said.

The election followed due process. Senate met and nomination taken. Senate has spoken loud and clear on its choice on who to lead them.

This whole process is a right step in the right direction. We want to thank President Buhari for the intervention.

We, therefore, call on the university community to join hands with the newly-elected Acting Vice Chancellor to move the university forward.

I will also like to state that with this election, calm has returned to the campus, the unionist said.

According to him, members of the university community are awaiting the inauguration of the visitation panel.

l believe that all parties concerned will have a day with justice.

Earlier, a mild drama occurred as the Senate members were shut out of the venue of the election based on a memo by the Registrar of the university, Oladejo Azeez.

The memo pasted at the venue of the election read in part: Re-Notice to Senate Meetings

The above matter refers: Please note that the message contained below has been sent to senate.

This is to inform senate members that no meeting of senate has been summoned.

Members should await proper notice of meeting after the Federal Government has clarified some issues germane to the meeting.

It follows that you are not to make use of any of your facilities available for any meeting until otherwise advised.

NAN reports that it took the intervention of the Federal Ministry of Education to get the venue opened for the election.
Mamata Banerjee upset after not being allowed to speak during PMs meet

JEE Main, NEET 2020: Mamata Banerjee urges Centre to postpone exams

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Kolkata, Aug 24: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi postpone the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) examinations that are scheduled to be held in September.

Banerjee, in a series of tweets on Monday morning, said she was vocal about the issue during the last video conference of chief ministers with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"In our last video conference with PM Modi, I had been vocal against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020, which had a huge potential to put student lives at risk," Mamata Banerjee tweeted.

Govt should consider concerns of students on NEET, JEE: Rahul Gandhi

"With the Education Ministry's directive to conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sept, I would again appeal to Centre to assess risk and postpone these exams until the situation is conducive again. It's our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students," Mamata Banerjee's tweet further read.

Meanwhile, several politicians cutting across the party lines, have joined students and parents from across the country in demanding postponement of the competitive exams.

On August 17, the Supreme Court of India dismissed a plea for postponement of JEE Main and NEET 2020. The court allowed the Naitonal Testing Agency to go ahead with its plan to conduct the entrance exams in September as planned.

The JEE (Main) is scheduled to be held between1 and 6 September, while the JEE (Advanced) on 27 September. The NEET will be held on 13 September.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 17:28 [IST]
Despite the toll of almost a thousand deaths from COVID-19 complications, only 10 of the 36 states in Nigeria have teams of trained staff for handling COVID-19 burials, a report has found.

The latest Health Preparedness Index for states published by SBM, Nigeria's leading intelligence platform, made this disclosure.

It is not clear yet how coronavirus infected bodies can transmit the virus, but forensic experts believe a lack of guidelines and contingency planning could trigger a chain infection, especially among mourners.

They believe that corpse mismanagement has serious implications for broader efforts to contain COVID-19, and for grieving families.

Nigeria recorded its first fatality from the virus about 24 days after its index case, an Italian national, was confirmed on February 28.

As of Saturday, the number of confirmed deaths from the virus had reached 997.

All the states in Nigeria and the federal capital, Abuja, have reported at least two fatalities.

The NCDC had put in place an interim guideline for the safe management of copies in the context of COVID-19.

According to the guideline, only burial team members that have been trained in Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) and safe burial practices can handle corpses and conduct burials. The team should have resources such as PPE, body bags, disinfectant and appropriate transportation.

The guidance document also stated how corpses should be prepared and conveyed by the burial team to ensure the safety of burial attendees.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) also issued an elaborate guide for COVID-19 burials.

Early signs of abuse of hygienic and physical distancing protocols during funerals came in April during the burial of President Muhammadu Buhari's Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari.

Despite the government's initial announcement that the burial would be conducted in private in compliance with safety guidelines, several clips showed brazen disregard of the NCDC guidelines and the WHO advisory at the event.

The Report

Majority of states are yet to constitute burial teams, the SBM report, containing data collated in late June, showed.

"It would mean that the backlog of the dead to be buried will keep rising, clogging temporary mortuary facilities across the country and creating a crisis to rival the challenges the country has faced with testing and contact tracing", said Ikemesit Effiong, head of research, SBM Intelligence.

The report tagged 'Nigeria's COVID-19 journey, mid - 2020' covered a range of health and economic issues in response to Nigeria's fight against COVID-19, from health preparedness to economic measures designed to mitigate the effect of a prolonged lockdown.

The report identified measures by federal and state governments, highlighting a state by state health preparedness index.

According to the data, 26 states do not have at least a burial team and or identified and trained staff in place.

Of the 26 states, 17 do not have any of the above.

They include Nassarawa; Ogun; Osun; Oyo; Bayelsa; Enugu; Ebonyi; Anambra; Abia; Cross Rivers; Ekiti; Taraba; Ondo; Kogi; Kano; Imo; and Bauchi.

While the following nine states of Sokoto, Kebbi, Rivers, Yobe, Niger, Gombe, Adamawa, Delta, Jigawa, Akwaibom said they have a burial team, the researcher could not find any trained staff in the teams.

Only 10 states: Lagos, Borno, Kaduna, Edo, Katsina, Benue, Kwara, Plateau;and Zamfara have identified and trained a burial team, according to the report.

Lack of Cohesion

Health experts blame the lack of cohesion between the NCDC response strategy and that of the state governments for the gaps in dead body management which have been further exposed by the SBM report.

The NCDC is supposed to coordinate the national response to epidemics and pandemics. But the infectious disease outfit has not been able to work fully with state authorities.

States such as Cross River and Kogi have continued to dispute NCDC statistics on COVID-19 as state and federal officials have mutual suspicion.

Tolu Fakeye, a public health physician, said while states are to coordinate safe burials, it is the role of the NCDC to monitor the process.

"The problem is that the NCDC needs the buy-in of the 36 states - with differing concerns and contexts - to effectively execute a coherent COVID-19 burial strategy. It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off", said Mr Effiong, the SBM researcher.

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"A burial team which coordinates all of the burial arrangements are an important part of ensuring that viral exposure is contained while family and loved ones pay their final respects to their deceased. It will be hard for a state to say it is seriously fighting COVID-19 if it does not have such a team.

"For us, compliance with this along with other metrics will indicate the kind of progress that Nigeria needs to have in order to tackle COVID-19.

"We have an extensive network of contacts and researchers across every state who studied each government's response and rated them across a number of markets and indicators.

"The states can clearly do much better. A situation where some states governors were initially in denial about COVID-19 or spoke of religious practices and herbal concoctions to the detriment of NCDC guidelines set them up for mediocrity at the best and abject failure in some notable cases. Many Nigerians who have COVID-19 would have been protected if more sensible heads had prevailed", Mr Effiong said.

He said the SBM report was made with the backing of OSIWA (The Open Societies Initiative for West Africa).
NEW YORK, NY / ACEESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / Next Wave Marketing is an online media provider for businesses, corporations, and individuals looking to establish their online digital presence and credibility in the marketplace. The company was founded in 2019 by CEO Ben Deveran, they currently operate in Connecticut as a privately held marketing agency. With moderate growth in year one, the agency went through trials and service testings before stumbling across their pivotal market share in online media publications. Ben Deveran stated "In year one we mainly were looking to grow awareness and understanding of the online marketplace, we tested beta service offerings and campaigns to learn what models were more likely to succeed. The importance in the startup phase of figuring out market psychology and what's most valuable to our customer has allowed us to excel now in year two as a company."

Closing out Q4 of 2019 was an important building and learning experience for Deveran, who sits on the board of directors of Next Wave Marketing. At just 19 the company had yielded over 250,000.00 in total revenue. The growth came with lessons to be learned, at the time our company's main mission was to impact as many customers with our detailed offerings as possible. What we failed to do at the time was factor in our cost of goods sold and our various outside service expenses. Ben went on to say "During this time I learned a lot about business and the importance of your bottom line. Not going to college and learning the basics of net profitability forecasting and daily proforma sheets left me in an uncomfortable state of mind operating a business with full time employees and 5 figures in revenue coming a month."

To top it off the business suffered a loss of two other initial equity holders and operators of the company in late December. Deveran knew at this time that in order to ensure the company's growth for years to come it was time for him to step up. After all expenses had been paid out in December 2019 the company had its first negative P&L, Deveran stated "If anything December of 2019 was a great experience to be had especially over peanuts and not any serious number. The negative month made us not profitable in 2019 helping out with our tax filing 7 months later in July 2020."

Story continues

Moving forward in 2020, Deveran began reviewing service buckets by which had the most potential to grow and be built into a service model. With past experience Deveran knew the most appealing way to sell to his market share was by offering detailed offerings in packages with different pieces of team members factored into building a relationship and making sure the customer was getting a desired outcome out of their investment with the company. Needing to raise the net of the company in order to operate and to get out of its deficit, Deveran began selling online publications to the same customers he had already acquired for mostly social media related services. The decision turned out to be a great success as the company went on to have its best month in company history closing out January of 2020 with 72,000.00 in revenue. The change struck a new journey for Next Wave Marketing which would end up taking the next 4 months to develop.

Combining Next Wave Marketing's initial success with its new highlighted offer was going to require building out an effective model. Over the course of the unpredictable pandemic which impacted every business and industry across the world Deveran alleviated most of the companies overhead expenses and staff and began building a new model that would combine the companies past success and lessons with the optimistic future Deveran wanted to develop. It was during this time that Deveran began connecting with outside vendors and service providers that he wanted to partner with to build a new model with online publications that would give our market an easy access to quality articles in large household publications with high ranking SEO and mobility for advertising.

By June of 2020 and moderate growth, the company had built a decent cash position to move forward with the new model that had been created. The summer of 2020 factored to be one of the companies most successful tenures where now sitting at the end of August 2020 the company has generated 220,000.00 in revenue in just 90 days. The detailed success wasn't really built until July where the company had it's best sales month ending the month at 86,000.00 in total revenue.

Deveran stated "The growth of Next Wave Marketing over Q3 of 2020 is arguably our most impressive achievement as a company to date. We as an organization have worked tirelessly to accommodate our growing market share and customer base. It has been a blast to grow, especially knowing where we've come from and the shortcomings we've faced in the past."

The company is accompanied by its current staff which includes Eli Pasternack Head of Marketing, Matt Veretto Sales Director of Next Wave Marketing, Kiley Almy Head of Writing and Publications, Jordan Butler Head of Acquisition, Raymond Jabagjorian Content writer, Brian Breach Sales associate and CFO Zack Alvarez.

With great growth over Q3 of 2020 Next Wave Marketing has grown its monthly revenue by 190%, with much to thank for its talented staff. The company's goals for the rest of 2020 heading into Q4 list to continue to stay on track for 1 million in revenue over the course of the next 12 months, factoring in of course its impressive 42% net profitability currently with its total operational costs. Deveran plans to operate at this level over the course of the next 12 months to establish the company's cash position organically. Heading into 2021 the company looks to expand its market share and awareness into different parts of the country and world. To date the company has serviced businesses, corporations, and individuals in The United States, Brazil, Paraguay, Jamaica, The United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, France, and UAE.

The company also plans to establish its operating origins in the North East, more specifically Fairfield county with a future headquarters in Manhattan in years to come. By doing so, Next Wave Marketing hopes to be known by the community as an organization for talented business professionals to search for job opportunities while joining a competitive community that actively seeks and is motivated to achieve both individual and business orientated goals.

To learn more about Next Wave Marketing and their goals for the rest of 2020, please view our website. Click here.

CONTACT:

Kiley Almy

contact@nextwavemktg.com

Next Wave Marketing

SOURCE: Next Wave Marketing





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/603022/A-Detailed-Outlook-For-Next-Wave-Marketing-And-Its-Projections-For-The-Future




First American Financial Corporation FAF is well-placed to gain from high premiums, strategic buyouts and prudent capital deployment.



The company has a favorable VGM Score of B. VGM Score helps to identify stocks with the most attractive value, best growth and the most promising momentum.



The stock has seen its estimates for 2020 and 2021 move up nearly 19.5% and 12.6%, respectively in the past 30 days, reflecting investor optimism.



The company delivered an earnings surprise in each of the last four reported quarters with the average beat being 20.84%. Its earnings per share have grown at a five-year (2015-2019) CAGR of 24%.

Factors Driving First American

This Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) title insurer continues to benefit from higher revenues driven by increased direct premiums and escrow fees, agent premiums, and net investment income. Revenues increased at a five-year (2014-2019) CAGR of 4.6%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the companys 2020 and 2021 revenues is pegged at $6.42 billion and $6.47 billion, respectively, indicating an increase of 3.5% and 0.7% from the year-ago reported figure. We believe growth in mortgage origination activity and increase in domestic title orders closed by the companys direct title operations are likely to drive revenues in the days ahead. Strong revenues have contributed to the companys margin expansion as well.



Purchase activity declined as stay-at-home orders were issued due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, due to the strong market fundamentals, which include lower mortgage rates and moderate home price appreciation, the company expects improvement in purchase activity in the near term.



Moreover, the company continues to undertake strategic acquisitions to reinforce its core business and expand its valuation and data businesses. In March 2020, it acquired Docutech, which reflected its commitment to grow its core business and its dedication to improve the home-buying experience and drive digital transformation of the real estate settlement process. Information and other revenues increased in the first half of 2020 driven by new acquisitions. The company remains focused on making acquisitions in order to meet its risk-adjusted return target.



First American remains focused on growing its core title and settlement business while maintaining profitable market share, developing value-added services that reinforce customer relationships, providing banking services to agents to improve their risk profile and improve returns, expanding coverage of property data elements and geographies, investing in long-term growth in Canada, Europe, and Australia, growing home warranty business as well as looking for new opportunities where it has strategic advantage.



Furthermore, investors should be impressed by its disciplined capital management. The company has increased its dividend at a seven-year (2014-2020) CAGR of 24.2%. Its current dividend yield of 3.5% is higher than the industry average of 0.5%, which makes the stock an attractive pick for yield-seeking investors. First American aims 54% payout ratio in 2020, given its cash flow generation capabilities and investment opportunities. It has $96 million remaining under its share repurchase authorization.



Return on equity (ROE), reflecting the companys efficient utilization of its shareholders funds to generate earnings, has been increasing over the past several years. Its trailing twelve months ROE of 14.3% betters the industry average of 6.2%. The company aims 12-14% return on equity over the long term.



Further, the companys solvency position looks strong. Its cash and cash equivalents of $1.5 billion as of Jun 30, 2020 are sufficient to meet debt obligations. Its debt level was $1 billion as of Jun 30, 2020. Also, total debt to capital of 18.1% compares favorably with the industrys measure of 21.3%. As of Jun 30, 2020, the company had $700 million available on its revolving credit facility. Further, it expects debt-to-capital ratio in the range of 18%-20%.



First Americans times interest earned, a measure to identify the company ability to service debt, of 17.8 is good when compared with the industrys average of 8.5, implying that its earnings are sufficient to cover interest obligations.



First American has an impressive Value Score of A. Back-tested results show that stocks with a Value Style Score of A or B when combined with a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 offer the best opportunities in the value investing space.



However, shares of First American have lost 12.8% year to date, compared with the industrys decline of 10.8%. Nevertheless, strong fundamentals such as growing direct premiums, escrow fees and agent premiums as well as effective capital deployment should help shares bounce back.

Story continues

Other Stocks to Consider

Investors interested in property and casualty industry may also look at Donegal Group Incorporation DGICA, Fidelity National Financial Inc., FNF and The Allstate Corporation ALL, each carrying a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.



Donegal provides personal and commercial lines of property and casualty insurance to businesses and individuals. The company beat estimates in each of the last four quarters, with the average surprise being 86.44%.



Fidelity National provides various insurance products in the United States and offers title insurance, escrow, other title related services and home warranty insurance. It surpassed estimates in each of the last four quarters, with the average surprise being 32.13%.



Allstate provides property and casualty, and other insurance products in the United States and Canada. It surpassed estimates in each of the last four quarters, with the average surprise being 25.24%.

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Unidentified armed men rob MitaCCUL Screenshot from CCTV video

The President of the Mitanyen Cooperative Credit Union Limited, MitaCCUL, has shed light on Fridays armed attack at the institutions head office at Sonac Street Bamenda.

In a press release dated Saturday, the Management of Mitanyen Cooperative Credit Union Limited said on Friday 21 st August 2020, its Head Office at Sonac Street Bamenda was victim of an attack by unidentified armed men between the hours of 9:45 am and 10 : 00 am 

The President of MitaCCUL who signed the press release without his name said the incident happened at a time when MitaCCUL Management and members have continued to observe neutrality during this crisis.

Although the management of the Credit Union failed to disclose how much was taken away by the armed men, they however said speculations on social media regarding the extent of the material loss are not consistent with reality.

We thank God that with the security measures already in place, no human casualties were recorded and the material lost was greatly mitigated contrary to unverified speculations especially on social media, the press release read in part. We therefore take this opportunity to further inform the entire membership and the general public that despite the attack, operations continued in full confidence shortly after and there is no cause for alarm.

The Management of MitaCCUL congratulates all persons who have stood by the Credit Union during this period and calls on each and every one to kindly desist from negatively exploiting the said incident.

As security forces battle armed separatists seeking to create a state called Ambazonia, insecurity has peaked in Bamenda, capital of the North West Region.

CCTV footage making rounds on social media suggests that five unidentified armed men staged Friday's robbery attack at MitaCCUL. They arrived on board a RAV4 jeep, ordered the yellow-cloth security guard into the bank before making away with an undisclosed sum of money.

Security forces are believed to have opened investigations into the incident although authorities in the region have since maintained sealed lips.
The Senate of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka, has elected the deputy vice-chancellor in charge of development services, Folasade Ogunsola, as the institutions acting vice-chancellor.

She is the first female to be so appointed in the history of the 58-year-old ivory institution.

Mrs Ogunsola, a professor of medical microbiology and first child of Nigerias first professor of Geography, Akin Mabogunje, was also the first female provost of the universitys college of medicine, Idi-Araba.

She defeated her opponent and a deputy vice-chancellor in charge of management services, Ben Oghojafor, with a wide margin. She scored 135 votes as against Oghojafors 31 among the senate members.

A total of 167 professors were accredited for voting while one vote was voided, PREMIUM TIMES learnt.

This newspaper earlier reported that the senate meeting would hold today purposely to appoint an acting VC as instructed by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Mr Buhari, who acted in his capacity as the institutions visitor, had also set up a seven-member visitation panel to look into the crisis rocking the university.

In a statement issued on Friday to announce the presidents recommendations, the director of press at the federal ministry of education, Ben Goong, noted that the panel would be inaugurated by the minister, Adamu Adamu, on Wednesday.

Ahead of the panels inauguration, the senate was mandated to immediately convene to nominate an acting vice-chancellor from amongst its members for confirmation by the governing council.

Registrar opposes council meeting

But a memo by the universitys registrar, Oladejo Azeez, was addressed to the head of the management of the universitys auditorium not to make the venue available for the senate meeting.

A copy of the memo seen by PREMIUM TIMES noted that that; No meeting of senate has been summoned. Members should await proper notice of meeting after the federal government of Nigeria has clarified some issues germane to the meeting.

It follows that you are not to make any of your facilities available for any meeting until otherwise advised, the memo added.

Irked by the development, the senate reportedly sought approval from the national universities commission (NUC) and the federal ministry of education before it commenced the process.

A member of the senate who asked not to be named as he was not authorised to talk to journalists, told our reporter on the phone that; The meeting started with Professor Ogunsola briefing the Senate that the meeting was convened after due process was followed and that authority was granted by both the NUC and the education ministry.

The source added that Mrs Ogunsola recused herself from anchoring the meeting and that the leader of the senates team to Abuja on Thursday, Chioma Agomo, was validly nominated to chair the meeting.

In her acceptance speech, Mrs Ogunsola, who doubles as the chairperson of Infections Control Africa Network, and member of the Lagos State COVID-19 task force, thanked the professors for entrusting her with what she described as a huge responsibility.

She was quoted as saying; Electing me the acting vice-chancellor at such time the university is going through so much is a big task. But it is a task for all of us, and I appeal to you to help rewrite the story of this great university for good.
A contract on the delivery of the second batch of S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems to Turkey has been signed and the sides are discussing the contracts financial terms, Head of Russias state arms seller Rosoboronexport Alexander Mikheyev told reporters on Sunday, TASS reported.

"The contract has been signed," the chief executive said, replying to the corresponding question.

The sides are now discussing "the financial arrangement of implementing the contract," he specified.

The Rosoboronexport chief said that the timeframe of implementing the contract would depend "on our partners readiness to finally resolve the procedural issues with the financing of this project,"
BERLIN - Alexei Navalny, the prominent Russian opposition figure and Kremlin critic, was poisoned, Berlin's Charite hospital said in a statement Monday, citing clinical results.

Although the exact substance that poisoned Navalny is not yet known, it is believed to be a cholinesterase inhibitor, Charite's statement said, adding that the effect of the toxin - blocking cholinesterase, an enzyme needed for the proper functioning of the nervous system - was confirmed several times by independent laboratories.

The hospital said that "another broad analysis has been initiated" and that Navalny remains in a medically induced coma but "there is no acute danger to his life." He is being given atropine, a medication used to treat certain types of nerve agent and pesticide poisonings.

"Longer-term effects, especially in the area of the nervous system, cannot be ruled out," the statement said.

Navalny, 44, was stricken Thursday during a flight to Moscow from Siberia. His spokeswoman and others quickly claimed that he was the latest victim of a state-ordered poisoning, a method used before in attacks linked to Russian agents by Western intelligence officials and others.

One such attack also featured a cholinesterase inhibitor: The deadly Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok was used in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his adult daughter, Yulia, in Britain two years ago.

Cholinesterase inhibitors are found in drugs used to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, but certain classes can be used in pesticides and as nerve agents for biowarfare, according to the National Institutes of Health. The chemical can be delivered orally; Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh. said she suspected the tea he purchased at an airport cafe Thursday morning was laced with toxin because it was the only thing she saw him ingest that day.

Atropine is the most common treatment for poisoning by a cholinesterase inhibitor. Patients who are managed immediately after poisoning tend to respond positively, but delays in treatment can lead to adverse outcomes, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Navalny was loudly moaning in pain and then lost consciousness during Thursday's flight to Moscow, prompting the pilot to make an emergency landing in Omsk, where Navalny spent two days in a hospital. At the urging of his family, Omsk doctors approved Navalny's release on Friday so he could be flown to Germany aboard an ambulance aircraft next morning.

Charite hospital's conclusion contradicted doctors in Omsk, who repeatedly said there was no evidence that Navalny was poisoned. One diagnosis they suggested was that Navalny's condition was caused by a steep drop in blood sugar.

"The poisoning diagnosis was one of the first to be suggested, including by paramedics," Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief physician of Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, told reporters Monday. "This is why the patient was taken to the toxicology department. If we had found any confirmation of poisoning, things would have been much easier for us."

"We received definitive answers from two laboratories, which said they did not detect any chemical or toxic substances they could describe as poisons or poisoning products," Kalinichenko added.

Navalny's associates were critical of his treatment last week by the medical staff in Omsk, accusing physicians of initially blocking his move to Berlin because they faced pressure from authorities seeking to hinder investigation into the incident.

Chief doctor Alexander Murakhovsky said at a news conference Monday that the hospital "made quite an effort to save Alexei Navalny's life, there can be no doubt about it."

Asked about a photo posted on Twitter by Yarmysh, Navalny's spokeswoman, showing three unidentified men in plain clothes sitting in his office who Yarmysh claimed were members of Russia's security services, Murakhovsky said: "I can't say who that was."

Since arriving at Charite, Navalny has been under the protection of Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office, which also provides security for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other government officials. That doesn't usually extend to private citizens, but German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said Monday that an offer to help had been extended on "humanitarian grounds" and at the request of Navalny's family.

"It was clear after his arrival that security measures had to be put in place because we are dealing with a patient who was likely the target of a poison attack," Seibert said, adding that other Kremlin critics have been poisoned in recent years.

Pyotr Verzilov, a member of the Pussy Riot protest group, accused Russian military intelligence of responsibility for his suspected poisoning in 2018. After being initially hospitalized in Moscow, he was also transferred to Charite for treatment. No traces of poison were found in his system, but hospital staff said there was no other explanation for his condition.

Navalny, who was barred from running for president in 2018, has no shortage of ill-wishers in Russia. For nearly a decade, his Anti-Corruption Foundation produced written and online video reports exposing graft and other wrongdoing by President Vladimir Putin's allies. Last year, Navalny and his team launched its "Smart Vote" initiative, which helps voters identify which candidates have the best chance of beating out those aligned with Putin's United Russia party.

"Given Mr. Navalny's prominent role in Russia's political opposition, the authorities there are now urgently called upon to clarify this act to its fullest, and with complete transparency," Merkel and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a joint statement. "Those responsible must be investigated and held to account."

- - -

Khurshudyan reported from Moscow.
A massive cluster of fires burning across several counties including Sonoma, Napa and Solano became the second largest in California history Sunday, as firefighters and residents braced for a potential new round of lightning storms that could bring wind gusts and spark new blazes across Northern California.

The LNU Lightning Complex is one of three groups of wildfires that are spreading through dry fields and forests and threatening communities in and around the Bay Area. Firefighters have had a difficult time containing the unprecedented siege of blazes sparked a week ago during a round of thunderstorms that brought lightning but little rain amid a record-setting heat wave.

A group of fires raging in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and several other counties, the SCU Lightning Complex, became the third largest in state history and prompted new evacuations overnight Saturday and warnings for parts of Fremont, Pleasanton and Livermore.

South and west of there, the CZU Lightning Complex slowed somewhat in its push through the Santa Cruz Mountains. But it remained within striking distance of several small towns, including Boulder Creek.

Tens of thousands have been evacuated and hundreds of homes burned, and four have died in the Bay Area. The fires were sending smoke into Bay Area cities, making for some of the worst air quality the region has seen. Many parks were closed Sunday because of the smoke, another disruption for Bay Area residents already cooped up for months during the coronavirus pandemic.

Conditions early Sunday were calm and favorable to making progress, and Cal Fire officials reported slight increases in containment on several fronts. But they warned that it could take weeks to get control of the blazes. There are too few firefighters and not enough equipment to handle this many fires of this magnitude simultaneously.

Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle

Cal Fire representatives said that the LNU, which stands for Lake Napa Unit and has burned 347,630 acres in Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Solano counties, and was 21% contained by Sunday evening.

Were going to be here for a while: weeks and possibly longer, Cal Fire Unit Chief Shana Jones said at a Yolo County news conference Sunday afternoon. Right behind the LNU in size is the SCU Lightning Complex  which had burned more than 340,000 acres of Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties.

Either or both could soon surpass the Mendocino Complex fires, which burned swaths of Mendocino, Lake, Colusa and Glenn counties in September 2018, was contained at 459,000 acres, having destroyed 280 structures.

Between these fires that are rimming the Bay Area in a giant pincer move, Cal Fire was spread so thin that local departments in Yolo County had to start the fight before Cal Fire could free up its own crews.

As Cal Fires unit chief, I dont remember a time that this occurred, Jones said.

Alameda County had largely been spared from evacuation orders until Sunday morning, when the SCU Lightning Complex got closer to homes in the foothills east of Fremont and south of Livermore.

The evacuations orders spread as 25 mph wind gusts picked up in the evening. Firefighter Ryan Cramer, who has been working the SCU fire since Tuesday, said his crew cant help but feel spread thin because of a lack of air support and too few engines as California battles a host of fires simultaneously.

Its just a large expansive area, and not the normal amount of resources, Cramer, 44, said. These fires are growing, and growing and growing.

Late Sunday afternoon, Cal Fire was trying to bolster its forces by hiring as many volunteer, military or out-of-region firefighters and equipment as possible ahead of Sunday nights expected thunderstorm.

Now Playing: Chronicle photojournalist Gabrielle Lurie captures the smoke from California State Route 1 on Thursday, August 20. The CZU August Lightning Complex fires have burned about 50,000 acres, 0% containment as of Friday afternoon, Aug. 21, 2020. Video: San Francisco Chronicle

This is absolutely instrumental: If there are any cooperators out there that we have not reached out to or have slipped through the cracks, get to the Alameda County Fairgrounds to our 10 oclock cooperators meeting, Cal Fire unit chief Jake Hess said. This is going to be a very long-term incident  and our troops are exhausted.

Also burning out of control but slowing slightly Sunday was the CZU Lightning Complex in coastal San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, which had burned 71,000 acres and was 8% contained. A number of communities remained under threat.

Im definitely nervous about my shop, said Justin Acton, 36, the owner of Boulder Creek Pizza & Pub, who had evacuated from his home in Ben Lomond to Santa Cruz. I keep looking at the fire on the map and see it getting closer and closer.

Already, though, with at least 129 homes destroyed by the CZU fires as of Sunday morning and more burning throughout the day, things wont be the same for area residents. As many as three of Actons employees dont have houses to go back to.

Theres going to be some change, Acton said. Im hoping that the core of the community stays here, but this was a big thing and it could really shake some people out.

Officials on Sunday announced the CZUs first known fatality. The victim was found in a remote area of Last Chance Road just southwest of Big Basin Redwoods State Park.

Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle

Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Chief Deputy Chris Clark said it took a helicopter to retrieve the remains.

I dont want to be standing up here, nor does our office want to be recovering people that are victims of fire, Clark said at a news briefing. We got into this job to help people. ... I think its one of the darkest periods weve been in with this fire.

CZU officials later in the day issued a list of evacuation warnings for the western region of Santa Clara County, including ones for Foothills Park and the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve.

Fire Tracker Follow wildfires across the state Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California

Nowhere was the battle line drawn as heavily as in western Sonoma County, where Guerneville on the Russian River had been evacuated while nearby Healdsburg had not.

The normally touristy wine town was mostly quiet Sunday afternoon, the presence of fire indicated only by the smoky haze in the air and the sound of helicopters whirring overhead as they shuttled water to the Walbridge Fire, part of the LNU complex, to the west of town.

That calm stood in stark contrast to fire hot spots just miles outside of town where residents have been evacuated with homes and property burned and ash still falling like fresh snow. On Mill Creek Road, a short drive out of town, small fires still poured from destroyed tree stumps and smoke billowed out of the ground as if coming from the earth itself.

Helicopters swung low over the road to a nearby property to fill huge buckets of water and immediately head back to the fire, making dozens of trips. Some structures have been badly damaged by the fires along Mill Creek Road, with vehicles and other abandoned belongings blackened and charred.

The firefight was also raging further north near Lake Sonoma, where the hilly terrain is blanketed with smoke like thick fog. The area was also closed to public access and a deserted Lake Sonoma Bridge stretched across the water seemingly into smoky nothingness.

On a ridge overlooking the lake, a team of Cal Fire firefighters were resting in a parking lot stained pink and red with fire retardant from aerial tankers after coming off a 24-hour shift. They said good progress had been made protecting some homes nearby, but some areas near the lake would likely still burn. That area is mostly seeing flareups during the afternoons when the sun heats vegetation and some of their recent work has involved hiking the hillsides near the lake to out spot fires before they could spread further, the firefighters said.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag fire warning starting at 5 a.m. Sunday through 5 p.m. Monday, and while weather service forecasters said the thunderstorms would probably begin early Sunday evening and potentially last until early Monday, the lightning strikes were not expected to be as severe as last weekend.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District extended its Spare the Air alert through Wednesday. Air quality is expected to be unhealthy, with the heaviest impacts in the East Bay and Santa Clara Valley, according to the agency.

By Sunday afternoon, air quality in Pleasanton and Livermore reached levels considered hazardous, the worst rating in the Bay Area so far in this smoke siege year far. Air quality in Concord, Vallejo, Napa, San Rafael and San Pablo reached very unhealthy levels, and it was unhealthy in several other areas.

Even San Francisco, insulated from the fires, was smoky Sunday morning. At the Fort Mason Center Farmers Market, everybody was masked up and shoppers could barely make out Marin County to the north. By midday, a golden haze had covered the city, suggesting late autumn, not mid-summer.

But an onshore flow of ocean air had been starting and stopping and shortly after noon, there seemed to be a positive development when the first forlorn foghorn finally blew on the Golden Gate Bridge.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Rusty Simmons contributed to this report.

Sam Whiting, Kurtis Alexander, Chase DiFeliciantonio and Rusty Simmons are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com, kalexander@sfchronicle.com, chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.com, rsimmons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF, @kurtisalexander, @ChaseDiFelice, @Rusty_SFChron
The Borno State Independent Election Commission (SIEC) has today lifted the COVID-19-induced ban on political party activities ahead of the upcoming local government council elections.

The chairman of the commission, Abdu Usman, announced this at a press conference in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital.

The commission had slated June this year, for the conduct of the elections, but the elections were suspended indefinitely due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr Usman said the commission had decided to lift the ban on political activities having reviewed the situation in the state.

I have the privilege to address the media today on the resumption of political activities in Borno State, he said.

It is also to resume full political activities to entrust full democratically elected leaders at the grassroots or the third tier of government.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 affecting the previous election calendar, Mr Usman said that November 28 has now been fixed for council elections in the state.

Modalities have been put in place with the timetable for the electoral process, which is being kick-started today, he said.

READ ALSO:

The Borno SIEC chairman said all protocols established by Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC) would be followed strictly during the elections.

He explained that additional funds had been sought to provide face masks and hand sanitisers for the commissions staff while on duty.

We will ensure that all polling units and electoral offices are supplied with hand sanitisers, and facemasks are provided for our staffers in all polling units.

We are going with all the COVID-19 protocols as established b the NCDC. And we have received the manual for conducting elections during COVID-19 pandemic, which we are going to abide by strictly.
After remaining for more than three months behind bars, an 84-year-old man accused of rape will finally walk out of jail after a DNA test declared that he is not the father of a child born of a minor girl he was said to have abused sexually.

On Monday, a bench, headed by Justice Sanjay K Kaul, ordered the octogenarians release on bail upon receipt of the DNA report from the West Bengal police that confirmed the child born in July was not his.

"The DNA report does not show that the appellant is the father of the child born. In view of the aforesaid, we have no hesitation in saying that the appellant should be enlarged on bail on the terms and conditions to the satisfaction of the Trial Court," said the bench.

Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, representing the accused in the case, also demanded a compensation. He contended that it was a landlord-tenant dispute which was used by the girl and her father to implicate his client in the false case of rape.

At this, the bench said it would be open for the octogenarian to take necessary steps in accordance with law claiming compensation. Last month, the court had sought the DNA report to ascertain paternity of the girl child, who was born on July 5.

Booked under the POCSO Act, the accused had maintained that his advance age is itself a proof in medical science that he is incapable of sexual intercourse. He called himself impotent and sterile.

But the report, submitted by police officers in the top court, had then held there is nothing to establish the accused is incapable of sexual activities.

Sibal had then said his client was willing to undergo any medical examination, including DNA and paternity tests, to prove his innocence.

The senior counsel stressed that the test should be done as soon as possible since his client is in jail since May 12, and that his health has been deteriorating. In June, the Calcutta High Court had dismissed the bail plea, considering the gravity of the crime.

The accused had claimed the 14-year-old girl and her family are tenants, and had disputes over payment of rent because of which the false charges were slapped against him.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:03:32|Editor: huaxia

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ACCRA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- When confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic, face masks undoubtedly serve as shields to guard the general public, however, used ones pose a threat to the environment and public health.

While being made compulsory to wear in public, masks have been seen haphazardly strewn on pavements and other public places in Ghana's various towns and cities. According to experts, those used masks lying around in the open posed risks to public health.

In the West African country, most of the solid waste, including medical ones generated in the Greater Accra region are dumped at the about 15-hectare Kpone landfill site, near the port city of Tema.

Ernest Kwabena Anorson Agyawan, landfill manager for the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA) told Xinhua in an interview his outfit receives all kinds of solid waste, including medical wastes.

"Generally, we receive municipal waste, which comprises domestic, residential, industrial, hospital, and all kinds of waste. The mask that has come into the system now, we don't also have a treatment plant or a kind of equipment that will do sorting of such waste, so we are still receiving it in bulk and dumped in the various cells," said Agyawan.

The manager enumerates the hazards that come in handy for personnel of the landfill site amid the pandemic and appealed for the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) to aid them in their work.

"There are all kinds of waste that come here from hospitals, from productive industries and all chemicals mixed with the solid waste come here. We are inhaling a lot and some are inoculated into our system through the dust and exposure to the environment, " said Agyawan, adding that they should be given PPEs like helmets, long-sleeved apparels and safety boots regularly.

William Timbillah, a 25-year-old solid waste collector, uses his motor tricycle to collect waste from the homes of residents here for a living. Being exposed to the mountains of solid waste mixed with abandoned medical supplies, William was worried that there would be a possibility that he could be infected.

Just like Timbillah, other solid waste collectors and scavengers who were at the site were not fully protected.

In the meantime, many health experts also voice their standpoints that the pandemic has presented an opportunity for the West African country to relook how it disposes of its medical wastes to avert a possible health threat.

Being fully aware of the potential spread of the pandemic through the improper disposal of face masks, the TMA said it has put in place measures to protect people.

Alfred Baah, solid waste manager for the TMA, told Xinhua the assembly has done enough education to sensitize residents about the proper disposal of the used face masks.

"We now have 240 litter bins being placed at vantage points and at the end of the day, a vehicle will come to collect the waste and deliver them to the final disposal site," the manager said. Enditem
(Newser)  One of the teenagers running for office in Kansas is exiting the race amid a scandal. Aaron Coleman, 19, had previously admitted to abusing girls online, including via online bullying, blackmail, and revenge porn, the AP reports. He initially insisted he had changed, the Wyandotte Daily reports; he was 14 years old and in middle school when he engaged in the behavior. But the controversy grew, Law and Crime reports, and ultimately Coleman said he would drop out of the race to become Kansas state representative for the 37th District Sundaythough he made no mention of sexual harassment in his official statement. Rather, he said, his father has been hospitalized for the past 10 days. "I have no choice but to use medical hardship to take my name off the ballot and allow the Democratic precinct people to choose the next nominee," he said.

story continues below

Coleman upset seven-term incumbent Rep. Stan Frownfelter in the primary; Frownfelter has said he will run in the general election as a write-in candidate. Coleman would have been the only candidate actually appearing on the ballot; Republican Kristina Smith is also running as a write-in candidate. Democrats had been backing away from Coleman amid the revenge porn scandal, and the chief of staff to Kansas' House minority leader tells the Kansas City Star there was a "sense of relief" Coleman decided to withdraw. In a series of tweets during the wee hours Sunday, Coleman said "feminism hasnt got a chance so long as Donatism remains on the march. The progressive circular firing squad has done more to uphold the status quo than conservatives could have ever dreamed of." But he also added, "I regret my past actions and hope to continually learn from them as I grow into the person I hope to be." (Read more Kansas stories.)
The pandemic, which closed theaters around the world, wreaked havoc on the premiere dates of movies like Tenet and Wonder Woman 1984.

But unlike dozens of other movies, Unhinged, a gritty action film starring Russell Crowe, will indeed have a theatrical release in the United States this summer, signaling a return to business for Hollywood.

The original plan was for a July 1 premiere. The date was pushed back twice more before the film was scheduled to appear on Friday in more than 1,800 theaters in the United States and Canada, a release that came about largely because of the stubbornness of Mark Gill, an independent film producer who was hellbent on getting it to the big screen.

Unhinged will be the largest new offering in North American theaters this weekend, when 26 percent of theaters in the United States and Canada are scheduled to be open, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners, a trade association.
A mechanism is being developed to fulfill this mission. In keeping with the acronym mania of multilateral organizations, the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator is sponsoring Covid-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX), an initiative aimed at ensuring poor countries as well as rich ones get the same access to vaccines once they are licensed. COVAX is largely implemented through Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Of that list, it is Gavi you should remember, because it is one of historys most dramatic humanitarian success stories. By helping poor countries buy and distribute vaccines over the past 20 years, Gavi has quietly prevented about 13 million deaths.
National Council of Catholic Women Publishes 100 Year History

NEWS PROVIDED BY

National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW)

Aug. 24, 2020

ARLINGTON, Va., Aug. 24, 2020 /Christian Newswire/ -- In 1920, there were more than 5,000 Catholic women's organizations nationwide--organizations that would eventually become the first NCCW affiliates. The purpose, as described by the US Catholic bishops at its founding, was to give Catholic women a common voice and an instrument for united action--not to replace the work of any existing woman's group but rather to stimulate their growth and unify them.

And so, in the same year American women earned the right to vote, the National Council of Catholic Women was born when nearly 200 Catholic women from around the country assembled on March 4, 1920 in Washington, DC, to unite and fortify their efforts in service to God and the Church! The NCCW mission is to support, empower, and educate all Catholic women in spirituality, leadership and service.

Did you know:

*The first meeting on March 4th, 1920, was held at the National Catholic Community House in Washington, DC, with 126 voting delegates representing 13 of the 14 Catholic Ecclesiastical Provinces

*On May 7, 1921, the Board of Directors approved the creation of the National Catholic Service School for Women that held its first classes in November, 1921. Today, the National Catholic School of Social Services is housed at the Catholic University of America

*Mother Teresa's first trip outside of India was to speak at the 1960 NCCW Convention in Las Vegas

*The NCCW Executive Secretary was present at the signing of the Equal Pay Act by President John F. Kennedy in 1963

Discover all this and more in a fascinating historical retrospective and stunning coffee table book

"The research for this book has been a three-year journey. It has taken me through documents so fragile touching them could possibly destroy them, hundreds of photographs, magazine articles, bylaws, historical documents, and many conversations," says author Andrea Cecilli, Executive Director of the National Council of Catholic Women.

To purchase a copy of the centennial history book, visit the online store at nccw.org. If you would like to interview Jean Kelly, the President of NCCW or Andrea Cecilli, Executive Director, please contact Laraine Bennett at 703.224.0990 or email lbennett@nccw.org

SOURCE National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW)

CONTACT: Laraine Bennett, 703-224-0990, lbennett@nccw.org

Related Links

nccw.org
I recently met with Miles Murphy to discuss his new role as CEO at Wunderman Thompson and was hugely impressed by his eagerness to familarise himself with the local media and marketing landscape, priortising relationship building, albeit online.

Miles Murphy, CEO at Wunderman Thompson

Congrats on your role! How do you feel about it?

How and when did this come about? And comment on the timing given the lockdown/global crisis.

Comment on the impact of Covid-19 on the agency and the industry.

If brands cut all marketing spend in year one of a recession, it can take up to five years to catch up with those that maintain spend through the downturn.

What does your role entail?

What excites you most about the agency and your role in particular?

Comment on the current state of the industry, how the industry has responded to the crisis and Wunderman Thompson in particular, and how you plan to navigate the agency through this.

As a creative business, we will always need inspirational spaces to meet, create and engage with each other and our clients. But I expect our offices will become more like brand homes that staff, clients and partners dip into when they want to connect in a more emotional way than what can happen on Zoom.

What do you love most about your career and your industry or sector?

Any career highlights you're particularly proud of?

Tell us a bit about your experience, founding Liquorice (now Digitas Liquorice) and a bit about your time at Publicis Groupe Africa and how this has equipped you for your new position.

I think Ive always had an entrepreneurial streak in me. When I was nine-years-old growing up in California, I started selling coffee and doughnuts to commuters going to the petrol station early in the morning. Throughout school and university, I always had a couple of different hustles on at any one time.



So, when I moved to SA 15 years ago and founded my own agency, I think I instinctively drew on that inner hustle in me. But I also learned to love the vibrancy of South Africa and its people. Its that energy, warmth and gees of SA that made my entrepreneurial dream possible.

Ewen Sturgeon said you have experience leveraging breakthrough creativity, data and emerging technology to inspire growth for clients and partners, and bringing together pioneering businesses to create something new and unique. Please elaborate.

Tell us about your 100-day plan.

What are you most enjoying so far?

Whats currently at the top of your to-do list (at work)?

What are you reading/watching/listening to?

Tell us something about yourself not generally known?

He joined the agency in April from Publicis Groupe Africa, where he was asked to stay on as COO following its acquisition of the agency he founded in 2005, now known as Digitas Liquorice.Thanks! I feel honoured, inspired and energised!I am enthused by the scale of ambition here at Wunderman Thompson. We are a part-creative agency, part-consultancy and part-tech company. Weve pulled together some of the best-of-breed specialist legacy agencies in SA: JWT, Aqua, Cerebra, Mirum, Applogix, Acceleration and The Hardy Boys. Together, we have one of the most formidable marketing service businesses in the industry, covering advertising, design, digital marketing, social media, technology, ecommerce, data and consulting.My 600+ colleagues at Wunderman Thompson SA are passionate, problem-solvers, diverse and are exceptionally talented. They represent all the expertise that we offer our clients. The debate is open, honest and lively, but once we agree on a plan, we are a united front. They are one of the joys of this new role, and I feel humbled to be working with them.Last year, the global leadership of Wunderman Thompson started talking with me about taking on the South African CEO role. They wanted someone who had seniority, breadth and depth of experience, and entrepreneurial drive. They were looking for someone to help deliver on the agency promise  to inspire growth for ambitious brands, through end-to-end customer experience of creativity, digital, data and technology.My first official day was just a few days after lockdown started, so like all of us, Ive had to pivot. I tore up my plan for my first 100 days and have had to be far more agile in my approach.From a business perspective, our clients, staff and partners continue to work so well under unprecedented pressures. My focus is to protect the safety, wellbeing and livelihoods of my colleagues, assure clients that we are here to help them through these challenging times and continue to produce world-class work.My team has been so great in getting ahead of the curve on this. We started moving to remote working several weeks before lockdown, so by the time it began, our teams were already set up, working remotely and firing on all cylinders.Remote working is challenging for a creative business with lots of extroverts. Still, Im amazed at how well its working. Were actively working to minimise staff burnout, ensuring that all of us have enough time and space to do our work and teach kids, juggle home-office space and deal with the stress of working from home.Clearly, the pandemic and lockdown-induced recession are causing a significant hardship for the whole industry, and in a recent report by Wunderman Thompson, How brands win in a recession, we plotted out a three-phase framework for navigating the current business storm: react (in the short-term), respond (in the mid-term), and rebuild (in the long-term). One of the key takeouts was that if brands cut all marketing spend in year one of a recession, it can take up to five years to catch up with those that maintain spend through the downturn. So where possible keeping your brand front-of-mind, excelling in customer service, delivering on your brand promise and getting it right in digital channels and e-commerce is key to success.My main role is to first ensure that we have a clear and compelling vision that helps our clients grow, and secondly, to support my team to grow and deliver on our vision.My vision is to position Wunderman Thompson SA as the leading tech-enabled integrated agency with creativity and innovation at its core.The people and the work. Its what gets me up at 5am to get through my morning workout before a full day of Zoom meetings.It is such an honour to work with such exceptional experts: from brand strategists to software developers; from social media marketers to creative innovators; and from customer experience consultants to digital media professionals. Their passion for innovation and growth for our clients is energising.Acceleration is the keyword that comes to mind.The lockdown has sped-up all the trends that our industry was already facing, and that puts Wunderman Thompson firmly in a leadership role. The pandemic has fast-tracked our clients adoption of technology-enabled communication channels and e-commerce, so we are seeing significant growth in these disciplines.I also think the lockdown has made a lot of us re-evaluate the role of the office in our industry. Many of us have realised that we can be just as effective at working remotely and improve our work-life balance. So, well need more flexible working spaces that allow those who need and want to work in an office to do so, but support and encourage remote working too.In parallel, we will need to work twice as hard as leaders to keep our colleagues and clients feeling connected and supported when they are not in the office, and our global colleagues are learning that they dont need all their creative or technology teams in their own countries. This opens up a huge opportunity for us to promote our South African creative and tech skills to work in a distributed model for network clients worldwide.The work and the people. Seeing my team grow and produce great work for our clients is what its all about.If I look back over my career, I think one of the key themes is that I tend to thrive when I can help people and brands navigate through disruptive change.Currently, the marketing services industry and brands are facing significant forces of change: the rise of e-commerce; the demand from consumers for brands with purpose; the power of data; and the fragmentation of media. Building an agency that can help brands win during all this change is what we are about at Wunderman Thompson.When I moved to South Africa in 2005, I founded Liquorice, a digital agency whose purpose was to help brands win in the early years of the digital revolution. By the time I sold the business to Publicis in 2014 it was a leader in that space, and before that, when I started my career as a management consultant at PWC in the UK, I helped brands win as whole industries were privatised and Eastern Europe opened up to the world.I then took my commercial consulting skills to the advertising world in leadership roles in the Lowe Group and Grey in the UK, helping them adapt to a world challenged by the consulting firms fighting for access to the C-suite.Each time, I built on my past skills but learned new ones. I guess the trick is to never get complacent.Running the African network for Publicis helped me hone my skills of managing and motivating a big complex business while remaining grounded. And it also enhanced my love for this great continent of ours.Ewen was running Digitas Internationally when Publicis acquired my agency in 2014, and he was my boss for four years after that. Hes a really inspirational leader and gave me the support and freedom to double the size of the business during that time.We both have a shared vision for Wunderman Thompson, which pulls together all the key skills that brands need from a partner so they can grow, and I think my hybrid background of management consultant, client, tech entrepreneur and creative leader helps me understand and lead all the component skillsets that the successful agency of the future needs to win.People who have worked with me tend to comment on how organised and driven I am. So, I guess its not surprising that in a couple of months leading up to me taking on my new role at Wunderman Thompson Id created a 100-day plan to make sure I could hit the ground running and quickly make a positive impact. However, as the days of March progressed and Covid-19 and lockdown became a reality, it became clear to me that I would have to adapt. So, when I started my new role just a couple days after the lockdown, I adopted a more agile plan.One of the biggest challenges was getting to know all my staff, clients and partners remotely. Developing trusting relationships on Zoom is a challenge. But I have to say that everyone has been super welcoming and in an odd way, I feel like Ive got to know more people better and more quickly than I would have expected to before lockdown.My leadership team and I quickly co-created a strategy for the agency that focused on five key areas: people and transformation; agency brand; creativity and product; client growth and operational excellence. We then track progress weekly and constantly course-correct to ensure we respond to the constantly changing market.Watching young talent thrive. So many people have helped me along in my career that I want to do the same. For example, Ive set up a weekly creative bravery session for young talent to share their ideas with my Exco and me. These sessions are truly inspirational.Sorry, I sound like a bit of a broken record  but looking after people and producing great work.by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of clothing company Patagonia, shows how you can create an ethical business model by being a brand with purpose.. I wish I could have been as brave and charming as Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) when I was in school!I can touch the tip my nose with the tip of my tongue.
The Environment Agency  Abu Dhabi (EAD), in collaboration with Bee Breeders, one of the world's leading architecture competition organisers, have announced the winners for two main competitions that were launched at the end of last year.

The competitions included the design for two of UAE capital's major projects - the Abu Dhabi Flamingo Visitor Centre in the Al Wathba Wetlands Reserve and the Mega Dunes Ecolodge in the Arabian Oryx Protected Area.

The top three winners of the Abu Dhabi Flamingo Visitor Centre include: Petr Janda, Anna Podrouzkova and Katerina Tsponova from the Czech republic in first place with a project called To See and Not Be Seen. In second place were Wenqi Huang and Yi Yan from the US with their project called Incubator.

Laurent Herbiet and Giordana Rojas from Mexico with a project called The Dune clinched the third spot for the Abu Dhabi Flamingo Visitor Centre to be come up within the Al Wathba Wetland Reserve.

Established in 1998, the Al Wathba Wetland Reserve is a nature reserve consisting of both natural and man-made bodies of water located 40 km southeast of central Abu Dhabi. Covering a total of 5 sq km, the wetlands comprise wetlands, sabkhas (salt flats), fossilized sands and dunes, and are densely packed with animal and plant life.

The most spectacular of which is the flamingo population, who flock to the reserve in their thousands to enjoy the warmth during the winter months, with some remaining all year round.

For Mega Dunes Ecolodge competition, the top three winners were: Giuseppe Ricupero, Egidio Cutillo, Stefania Schiro and Enrico Capanni from Italy with a project called Heritage Machine followed by Natalia Wrzask and Rolando Rodriguez-Leal from Mexico with The Rub' Al Khali Oculus project in theseciondf place.

While in third place, the authors were: Ahmad Nouraldeen, Luca Fraccalvieri, Jana Semaan and Lama Barhoumi from Lebanon with their project - Desert Lens.

The Mega Dunes Ecolodge will come up within the Arabian Oryx Protected Area, which is home to the largest population of Arabian Oryx in the world. Spanning over 5,900 sq km, it is located in the southern region of the UAE, bordering Saudi Arabia and Oman.

The majority of the Arabian Oryx Protected Area consists of sand sheets and dunes, with some mega dunes and gravel plains with dwarf shrub vegetation located throughout the area.

According to EAD, all the winners were selected on the basis of their designs being cost-effective, environmentally responsible and energy-efficient for remote areas with limited road access.

"The participation in both these architectural competitions was exceptional. We received 237 design entries for the Flamingo Visitor Centre and 117 designs for the Mega Dunes Ecolodges," remarked Ahmed Al Hashemi, the acting executive director of the Terrestrial and Marine Biodiversity Sector.

"Due to the presence of so many distinguished proposed projects, it was a challenge for the jury to select the final winners. The winning designs were all eco-friendly and aligned with the sustainability needs stipulated by EAD, as part of our vision of establishing green buildings in the emirate of Abu Dhabi," stated Al Hashimi.

"EAD will work with the participants who have the winning designs to finalize the project designs and prepare them for any future executive work," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
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Steel Strips Wheels share price rose more than 3 percent intraday on August 24 after the company bagged export orders from Europe and the US.

The company has bagged firm export orders for over 3,200 wheels for EU Truck and US Mobile Home Market to be executed in September from its Chennai plant.

Total value is around $57,000 and similar orders are expected in times to come from other regular customers as the market regains normalcy.

At 11:35 hrs Steel Strips Wheels was quoting at Rs 486.85, up Rs 11.35, or 2.39 percent on the BSE.

The share touched its 52-week high Rs 798 and 52-week low Rs 317.35 on 20 September 2019 and 20 May 2020, respectively.

Currently, it is trading 38.99 percent below its 52-week high and 53.41 percent above its 52-week low.

The share price surged 47 percent in the last 3 months.
A Management Consultant and Communications Specialist Willian Dowokpor, and Brigitte Dzogbenuku, an Entrepreneur, have filed their nomination forms to contest the flagbearership slot for the Progressive Peoples Party (PPP) ahead of the 2020 General Election.

Only the two filed by the close of nominations on Friday, August 21, though five persons reportedly picked forms.

Paa Kow Ackon, National Secretary of the Party told the Ghana News Agency that two other persons, one Dr Francis Obeng, a United States of America based Physician and F.T. Adjei, a foreign-based Legal Practitioner could not file due to the closure of the border in line with COVID-19 restrictions.

He said George Nana Boadi, a Mechanical Engineer who also picked a form failed to meet the deadline.

Papa Ackon said Madam Dzogbenuku, being the only lady would enjoy a 50 percent waiver on her nomination fees, a condition the Party instituted to encourage the active participation of women and persons with disability.

He disclosed that the National Committee of the Party would meet Monday, August 24, to take key decisions including the date for vetting of the candidates and election modalities.

Papa Ackon said the PPP was seeking political power to implement an agenda for change built on the four pillars of Stewardship, Education, Healthcare and Jobs.

We will implement the agenda using the spirit of inclusiveness, full participation of women and the youth; and above all a leadership that is incorruptible, he added.

---GNA
California retail stores would be banned from selling menthol cigarettes if legislation advanced Monday by the state Assembly is approved by the Senate and the governor. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

The California Assembly on Monday approved a ban on the retail sale of flavored tobacco products in the state, with supporters saying it is needed to reduce smoking and vaping by minors and others attracted by flavors that include fruit and menthol.

Supporters of the legislation blasted a new advertising campaign from tobacco companies that claims the bill discriminates against Black and Latino smokers, saying that the ads disingenuously portray the industry as an ally of communities of color.

The tobacco industry ad, which calls the bill politics at its worst, alleges that the measure would criminalize menthol cigarettes, giving special treatment to the rich, and singling out communities of color.

Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), the chairwoman of the California Legislative Black Caucus, said it is racist for the tobacco industry to claim the bill discriminates against Black people by prohibiting the sale of menthol cigarettes in the state.

I am insulted that the tobacco industry would make an effort to make us believe that mentholated cigarettes are part of African American culture, and that this is a discriminatory piece of legislation against Black people, Weber said during the floor debate.

The Senate had previously approved the measure, but it must go back to that house for expected approval of amendments that exempt hookah products, premium cigars and some pipe tobacco.

Its the most deadly consumer product ever created, Assemblyman Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg) said during Mondays short floor debate. In a perfect world, there would be no exemptions to this bill, but we all know we dont live in a perfect world.

The Assembly vote was 50-0, with Republican lawmakers withholding their votes and citing concerns that it would take away desperately needed tax revenue as tobacco sales decline and that several exemptions were approved to win a majority vote.

Assemblyman Heath Flora (R-Ripon) said the bill will be ineffective if it does not cover hookah products, cigars and cannabis.

Story continues

If we actually cared about the kids, we would deal with some of the other industries as well, Flora said.

The bill's author, state Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), said he reluctantly accepted amendments to legislation that had never gone beyond the committee level in the Assembly in previous years. He said his measure seeks to address an increase in tobacco use by young people by outlawing store sales of flavored products including cigarettes, many cigars and chewing tobacco, as well as electronic cigarettes and flavored vaping products.

Hill argued that banning flavored tobacco  including candy- and fruit-flavored e-cigarette products  is essential to address an upsurge in vaping and other tobacco use by minors.

A 2018 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 67% of high-school students and 49% of middle-school students who used tobacco products in the prior 30 days reported using a flavored tobacco product during that time, Hill noted.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) said there is a reason tobacco products are sold with flavors including menthol, cotton candy and gummy bears.

These flavors are marketed to kids and people of color to ensure tobacco companies have a clientele on the hook for life, Rendon said.

If the measure is signed by the governor, California would become the second state to ban the sale of flavored tobacco.

In the days leading up to the vote, the tobacco industry had run television ads saying SB 793 singled out communities of color because it bans menthol.

Advocates for the bill have blasted those claims as inaccurate, responding with another ad that argues flavored tobacco products have been heavily marketed to communities of color and pose disproportionate health risks to Black residents.

On Monday, a group of Black leaders, including academics and youth activists, held a news conference on Zoom to denounce the opposition ad campaign as an attempt by the tobacco industry to deceive lawmakers and the public.

Its critical that the Black community and particularly the Black faith community stand up to the lies, misinformation and the fake news that is being promulgated by big tobacco, said the Rev. John E. Cager III, pastor of the Ward African Methodist Episcopal Church Los Angeles.

In a recent committee hearing, the bill was opposed by the Rev. K.W. Tulloss, president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles and Southern California.

He said he does not want kids to smoke, but said he opposes the bill because of its ban on menthol products, which he said are popular with Black smokers, while exempting other flavored tobacco including hookah and premium cigars.

What we see here is this bill disrespects our community of color and their preference, while it exempts hookah products on behalf of the Middle Eastern cultures, Tulloss said. If you put a ban on menthol, it will criminalize this product.

In arguing against the bill, Tulloss cited the case of Eric Garner, a Black man who died in police custody in New York in 2014 after he was stopped for allegedly selling single cigarettes on the street.

On Monday, Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Alameda) disputed the claim of some opponents that banning flavored tobacco sales would create more confrontations between the police and Black and Latino residents. Bonta noted the bill bans retail stores from selling the products, not possession or use of flavored tobacco.

Supporters of the bill recently began airing their own television ad, in which spoken word artist SixFootah the Poet says that menthol cigarettes put my mother in the ground, challenging lawmakers to provide Black children the same protection as the kids in the suburbs do.

So you want to ban all flavors except for the ones that take Black lives away?" she asks in the ad.

The legislation is supported by the American Lung Assn. in California, American Heart Assn. and American Cancer Society.

The bill was opposed by business groups including the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Retailers Assn. and the California Fuels and Convenience Alliance, which represents some 12,000 convenience stores.

A representative of the alliance testified in a recent committee hearing on the measure that it would hurt small businesses that are struggling to recover during the COVID-19 pandemic and deprive the state of needed tax revenue.

Such firms will face significant economic hardship if you move forward with this proposal, said Jacque Ayers, a manager at Winchester Fuels, a market and gas station in Temecula.
Eversource managers confirmed Monday during a daylong hearing that Connecticut electricity customers are paying $124 million more than what the utility projected they would for electricity generated this year by the Millstone nuclear power plant.

In short, the grid saw a drop in electric load this summer but customers did not see a corresponding drop in their energy bills.

The admission came after a call by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., that Eversource be broken up, arguing it has failed in its responsibilities as a public service company in holding down prices while ensuring a reliable flow of electricity to Connecticut customers.

On Monday afternoon, Gov. Ned Lamont emphasized other approaches the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority can consider, including incentive programs in Maryland he suggested have been effective in aligning utility interests with the customers they serve as well as penalties for failing to perform on key metrics.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a spike in home electricity use this summer as workers kept air conditioners going during successive heat waves. But the overall New England grid saw a drop due to offices and other commercial facilities ratcheting down power consumption.

A formula Eversource uses to forecast the cost of electricity led the utility to estimate erroneously what customers ended up paying under a new power purchase agreement mediated last year by the Lamont administration, Eversource managers said Monday after being pressed by PURA Commissioner Marissa Gillett for clarification.

PURA held the hearing to query Eversource managers on high bills customers have received this summer, including through an increase in the price paid for power generated by the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford. Some Eversource customers called PURA out during the hearing for approving the Millstone increase without foreseeing the impact on summer bills.

Gillett expressed concern that Eversource has not reconciled changed pandemic electricity consumption patterns with the billing rates allocated between households and businesses. Eversource has not updated its sales forecast since last December, a manager confirmed.

Theres been concern that residential customers ... are footing the bill for commercial customers, Gillett said during the hearing. If we are not adjusting the sales forecast, I think they may be right.

Attorney General William Tong called Monday for Eversource to forgo a planned rate hike next year.

Doug Horton, director of revenue requirements for Eversource, said the utility is not over-collecting revenue beyond what PURA authorized it. He added the utility is open to reevaluating the frequency with which it reconciles forecasts with actual electricity use, and to move the timing of rate changes from July when bills tend to spike with hot weather.

Theres no way we could have anticipated what is happening in 2020 when we were devising the forecasts, Horton said. We are not able to change our rates without some process.

Dan Ludwig, sales and revenue forecasting manager for Eversource, said the company still lacks clarity on what the coming months will bring with regard to electricity use.

The big challenge ... is we have never experienced what COVID will do for sales in the winter period, Ludwig said. We will make our best judgment on what to include, but at the end of the day its going to be a high-level estimate.

Penni Conner, chief customer officer for Eversource, acknowledged what she called lax communication to warn customers of the likelihood of higher bills.

We did recognize they were going to be higher than usual, Conner said. More needs to be done  I concur.

State Sen. Matt Lesser, D-9th, argued Monday that PURA can set aside the Millstone contract on what he described as a force majeure power under its authority, saying the COVID-19 pandemic represents a triggering event due to the higher electricity costs homeowners are absorbing as they turn up air conditioning while working from home, or waiting for job opportunities after getting laid off.

Were now paying the cost of keeping that nuclear plant in business  and that is not fair, Lesser said. You can set aside that contract that raised everyones electric rates.

Eversources general counsel did not commit immediately to any renegotiation of the Millstone power purchase agreement with Dominion, including spreading out the payment period, but promised to submit a legal brief outlining its position. A Dominion attorney on hand for the hearing declined the opportunity to ask questions of Eversource during time reserved for cross-examination of managers.

Many public officials and customers used the opportunity to vent about Eversources response to Tropical Storm Isaias, which knocked down lines throughout the state to leave hundreds of thousands of customers without power, some for a week. PURA is planning another set of hearings to address Isaias response by Eversource and the United Illuminating subsidiary of Avangrid.

Blumenthal suggested PURA consider the model of the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative or another form of public ownership of the states grid, arguing CMEEC has proven more responsive through affiliates like South Norwalk Electric & Water and the Third Taxing District in East Norwalk and others in eastern Connecticut.

I think the time for tinkering is over  we need to think big about becoming smaller, more responsive and smarter, Blumenthal said Monday. I think we ought to eliminate the system of guaranteed profits for Eversource and link rates to performance.

PURA has left the docket open for public comments through Wednesday which can be filed via email to pura.executivesecretary@ct.gov under the subject header Docket No. 20-01-01 Comments.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
Apple has started assembling the latest iPhone SE 2020 smartphone in India at Wistron facility in Bengaluru, after it was launched in April. This comes after the company started assembling the iPhone 11, locally in India at the Foxconn plant near Chennai. The company started selling the iPhone 11 that was assembled in India few weeks back, and the iPhone SE 2020 assembled locally should be available sometime next month.

The iPhone 11 did not see any price reduction, so it is doubtful if the new iPhone SE will get a price cut immediately. Producing the new iPhone in India could possibly save Apple import duties.

In the past, Apple has manufactured the iPhone Xs, iPhone SE (2016) and the iPhone 7 in India. Earlier reports said that Apple is looking to produce the iPhone 11 Pro models in Foxconn, Chennai. This would mark a significant shift in iPhone production out of China and into India, where Apple is drawn to the benefits of the Governments Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme.

In a statement Apple said:

iPhone SE packs our most powerful chip into our most popular size at our most affordable price, and were excited to be making it in India for our local customers.
(Natural News) Staunch Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has announced that cities that cut their police budgets will have their property taxes frozen. The move comes after Austin recently defunded its police department in a misguided attempt to protest against alleged police brutality.

On Tuesday, August 18, Abbott outlined a legislative proposal that will discourage cities from cutting spending on police. He also spoke up about the city of Austin, which recently slashed its police budget.

Abbott warned that any city that defunds police departments will have its property tax revenue frozen at the current level. He noted that these cities wont be allowed to increase property tax revenue again.

Defunding means defunding

When asked to elaborate, Abbotts office didnt specify what counts as defunding in the coming legislation. They also didnt elaborate on whether this applies to any dollar reduction in a police budget or a proportion, or to services relegated to other departments.

Spokesman John Wittman said that [defunding] means defunding and that the legislature will draft a bill on this and it will go through the legislative process. Abbott also shared that he would support a bill to make this happen when the Texas Legislature starts its biennial session in 2021.

Even alleged activists cant agree on what constitutes defunding. While some want to outright end or deeply slash police departments, there are those who claim defunding involves redirecting a portion of police money to other things like social workers, education and job programs, or moving functions to other departments.

The war for local control

Abbotts threat to freeze city property taxes was spurred by countrywide riots denouncing police brutality in America and an increase in crime in certain cities. So-called protesters are also demanding reductions in police budgets. (Related: Austin City Council defunds the police  reduces police budget by 34%, or $150 million.)

In Texas, the matter is just one of many in a long-waged war over local control between Republican leaders of the state and the Democratic leaders of bigger cities like Austin that are often more politically liberal.

Last Thursday, August 13, the Austin City Council authorized a budget for the fiscal year beginning October 1 that cut $21 million from the $434.5 million 2020 police budget or a 4.8 percent reduction. The council also moved $80 million in services to other city departments from the police department like internal affairs, certain administrative functions and a forensics lab that had a history of mismanagement.

Public safety comprises 70 percent of Austins general fund.

Mayor Steve Adler explained that at least $20 million would be used to address homelessness, improve emergency medical services and employ more mental health first responders.

Adler, a Democrat, claimed that the move will help make Austin safer. According to Adler, the public shouldnt expect the police to be social workers because they need to focus on crime.

Cutting spending on police wont make cities safer

Abbott believes that any move to defund police is a dangerous one. He cited a Wall Street Journal analysis of an increase in homicides in major U.S. cities this year.

According to the review, out of the 15 largest cities, Austin had the highest percentage increase in murders since 2019. While the murder rate is still low compared with previous decades, other types of serious crime have decreased in the last few months.

The Wall Street Journal analysis of crime statistics among the 50 largest cities in America revealed that reported homicides have increased by 24 percent this year, totaling 3,612. While other violent crimes like robbery went down, shootings and gun violence also increased.

Abbott warned that it would be unwise to defund the police when crime is on the rise.

Sources include:

WSJ.com 1

WSJ.com 2

WSJ.com 3
If you order steak and they bring you a hamburger, shouldnt you get a break on the price?

That would apply even if the situation was out of the restaurants control (a world-wide shortage of steak, perhaps). And even if the chef managed to whip up a very tasty burger. It just wouldnt be the same.

Something similar is about to happen to hundreds of thousands of college and university students across Canada.

Theyll be returning to classes in September, and theyll be finding that what they ordered months ago isnt on the menu anymore.

Instead of the rich, on-campus, in-person experience they expected, the great majority will be getting something quite different. Rather than meeting and mingling with their teachers and fellow students, theyll find themselves at home, parked in front of their laptops, trying to get the most out of an array of online courses.

We know why; like everything else, post-secondary life has been turned upside-down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Online teaching is clearly safer, and education-as-usual is too risky this fall.

Yet students and their families arent being offered any break on the price of this very different and frankly inferior experience.

Universities and colleges arent reducing tuition for online-only courses. In fact, many of them are going ahead with previously planned increases in tuition this fall.

In Ontario, tuition was cut 10 per cent last year by the Ford government, and then frozen. But in the rest of the country, its going up. At the University of Manitoba, by an average of 3.75 per cent in September. By 3 per cent at Dalhousie in Halifax, and 2 per cent at the University of British Columbia. Some professional schools, like law and dentistry, are hiking tuition even more.

The universities say theyre in a bind. Even though students wont be gathering in classrooms and hanging out in libraries, they say their costs havent gone down. They have to keep paying their staff and maintaining their buildings, and theyve had to pour millions into developing ways to put courses online.

Theyre also facing a potential crisis in one area thats become vital to their finances: international students. They pay at least double, and sometimes much more, for tuition than Canadian students and universities have consciously sought out students from other countries as rich sources of revenue.

As a result, the number of international students at Canadian colleges and universities has tripled over the past decade. COVID-19 travel restrictions mean many of them couldnt physically attend even if they were allowed to, and universities worry many may balk at paying hefty fees for online courses offered multiple time zones away.

So its easy to sympathize with the plight of university administrators trying to balance their budgets in tough times. Theyre struggling to deal with the fallout from the pandemic like everyone else.

But students and their families shouldnt be left to fill the gap on their own. They shouldnt be required to pay the same, or even more, for an educational experience they didnt sign up for.

Attending university or college is about more than straightforward acquisition of knowledge. Online teaching can accomplish some of that, maybe a lot in certain areas and with students who are mature and highly motivated to learn.

But students, through no fault of their own, will be missing out this fall on so many other aspects of the post-secondary experience  meeting people from other parts of the country and the world, exploring all sorts of extra-curricular activities, having your worldview challenged and changed. And, lets face it, simply being away from the prying eyes of parents in dorm rooms and cheap apartments.

Universities should, at the very least, roll back tuition increases while the pandemic persists. Better yet, they should cut tuition and the provinces, backed by Ottawa, should fill the gap as it is for so many other COVID-19 costs.

Students are being served burgers this year, and their bill should take that into account.
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The US forces have brought 40 truckloads of military gear and armored vehicles from Iraq to US bases in Syria's northeastern province of Hasakah, a war watchdog reported Sunday.

The military gear crossed into the Syrian territory through the al-Walid border crossing from the Iraqi Kurdistan region on Saturday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The shipment is the latest to reach US bases in Hasakah.

On Aug. 7, US armored vehicles entered areas in northeastern Syria and reached US bases in the region.

The United States maintains several bases in areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Hasakah.

The Syrian government has repeatedly slammed the US troops present in Syria as forces of occupation, saying they entered the country without the consent of the Syrian government.

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One brisk night in March last year, more than 15,000 of New York City s great and good (plus a few fortunate members of her press) flocked to a former wasteland on Manhattan s West 34th Street, now a glittering paean to prosperity, a glass-and-steel altar of conspicuous consumption.

Inside the vast walkways of the billion-dollar Hudson Yards development , champagne cocktails flowed from bars every few metres, and oysters and lobster rolls were thrust into our hands as marching bands and dance troupes whooped up the well-heeled crowd  in a shopping mall. A glamorous and upscale shopping mall, admittedly, with arts venues and luxury apartments attached, but a shopping mall all the same.

Twelve months later, almost to the day, Hudson Yards closed its enormous, inordinately expensive glass doors. In the space of four days, as coronavirus swept in, the city went from advising employees to work from home to forcibly shutting all non-essential shops, along with offices, schools, museums, galleries, libraries, theatres, cinemas, bars and restaurants, until further notice.

AFP via Getty Images

Five months on, those glass doors remain firmly closed, and New Yorks mayor, Bill de Blasio, has said there is no timeline for reopening malls. Department store Neiman Marcus, the anchor tenant at Hudson Yards, has filed for bankruptcy, prompting speculation as to whether the glittering development can ever recover.

Across the former shopping mecca of Manhattan the outlook is bleak. The ordinarily bustling pavements of Fifth Avenue are deserted, the lights off in many of the biggest stores, including the Victorias Secret flagship, shut since March, which has not been paying its $937,000 monthly rent. Downtown, high-end SoHo department store Barneys has closed for good. Retailers are abandoning Manhattan in droves, deeming it unsustainable; rents remain colossal, while the city is a ghost town, empty of office workers and tourists.

Broadway is officially shuttered until 2021  tumbleweed and trash blow through an eerily empty Times Square  and with indoor dining still not permitted in the city, many restaurants, perhaps the citys greatest draw in recent years, remain closed. Even the subway system is struggling; lockdown has led to a drop of more than 90 per cent in numbers of passengers.

Midtown should, at least, receive something of a lifeline this week with museums, including Moma and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, permitted to reopen today (with face coverings, 25 per cent capacity and social distancing).

AFP via Getty Images

But New York anticipated 67 million visitors in 2020, a fifth of them from overseas; in the second week of July, the occupancy rate of city hotels was just 37 per cent, down from more than 90 per cent in recent summers.

The current US travel ban, instituted in March, prohibits non-permanent residents from entering the country from Europe, China or Brazil. Meanwhile, with Covid rates in more than half of all US states still spiking, anyone wanting to travel to New York from 32 of the nations 50 states, including California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, must quarantine for two weeks on arrival.

Getty Images

The irony, given NYs former pariah status in the spring  when, at the peak of the virus 600 people a day were dying in the city, and 1,000 across the state  is lost on no one.

Domestic travellers flying into the citys three airports must complete a quarantine form on landing or face a $2,000 fine. And should they be found breaking from their quarantine (as an acquaintance did last month) even heftier fines may be levied. Theres little chance of sneaking over the border by land, either. Earlier this month, the city began erecting checkpoints at bridges, tunnels and train stations to enforce the same quarantine rules as apply to those incoming by air.

Certainly, the citys streets have been silent and empty this summer. In my neighbourhood of Brooklyn Heights, a historic district of elegant brownstones, an estimated 40 per cent of residents moved out in the first month of coronavirus. New leases in Manhattan plunged 62 per cent in May as the exodus began to bite.

Many escaped to second homes, or parents homes, while the citys elite splashed out on renting houses upstate or by the beach. One Manhattan textile tycoon reportedly spent almost $2 million renting an 11-bedroom mansion from March until September, while Rihanna is said to have paid $415,000 for a month at a Hamptons house.

The Hamptons / Getty Images

Most of those fleeing the city initially presumed that exile would last a couple of months at most. Now, New York States governor, Andrew Cuomo, is begging the super-rich to return to help the city recover. Theyre in their Hamptons homes  I talk to them literally every day. I say, When are you coming back? Ill buy you a drink. Ill cook, he quipped recently.

Out in the Hamptons, though, the economy is booming. Private, socially distanced Pilates classes cost $200 a throw, while West Village Italian restaurant Carbone has launched a pick-up service, with food to be finished at home, for $2,000 a month. And for those who do need to pop into town on business, private helicopter and seaplane company Blade is launching a Hamptons commuter pass from September. For $965 a month, clients can buy unlimited trips between there and NYC for $295 one-way (full-price: $795).

However, with waiting lists for private schools in the Hamptons now full, education/childcare might be the juiciest bait to lure families back. New York schools can reopen from next week, most on a hybrid model, with lessons partially in-person and partially online. But classroom attendance will still be limited to only one to three days a week, leaving the problem of childcare for working families for the remaining days.

One friend is considering what she calls a reverse housewife summer commute, leaving her financier husband to work remotely from their second home in upstate New York, while she and their five-year-old daughter spend their weekdays in the city, where she can start kindergarten several days a week.

UnSplash

Another friend, who recently relocated to Washington DC  where the small private school in which they had enrolled their five year-old for this autumn will now not reopen before 2021  is considering moving back to Brooklyn for a spell, simply so their son can start school.

One argument cited against a return to the city is the rise in violent crime; shootings are up 76 per cent this year, compared with the same period in 2019. Last weekend 43 people were hurt in 32 shooting incidents in a 24-hour period; there were four shootings in the same time period on the same weekend in 2019. De Blasio has cited the devastation to the citys economy and jobs caused by Covid plus a slowdown in the courts and a lack of trials. The NYPD has attributed it to the bailing of suspects arrested on gun charges to try to stem the spread of Covid in jails  a policy which, they say, has created a permissive atmosphere, especially among gang members.

Lest it all look too gloomy, there have been positive outcomes of the pandemic. Outdoor cafe culture, never much of a thing in New York owing to strict licencing restrictions, is flourishing; sidewalks and parking spots can now be commandeered for creative seating, while hundreds of streets throughout the city have been closed to create space for streateries. Wandering through the West Village on a humid August night, where alleyways are filled with cafe tables and festooned with fairy lights, theres a new, twinklingly European vibe to the city. (Though what works beautifully on balmy summer nights works less well in frigid February.)

The pandemic has also made a pin-up of our paternalistic Democratic governor, Cuomo, whose 11am daily briefings, delivering the latest morbid data on jazzy PowerPoint slides became appointment viewing, his strict but soothing leadership a salve to our spiralling anxiety. And having steered the city through the eye of the storm, he isnt about to let things slide. Dont make me come down there, he regularly warns (swoon), in response to maskless youths partying in public.

The governors approval rating, which topped 87 per cent at one stage of the pandemic, shows little sign of dropping, and though he denies any interest in running for president, polls have him pegged as a frontrunner for 2024. Meanwhile, though, the staunchly Democratic city is braced for anything to happen nationwide on November 3.

REUTERS

The morning after the 2016 election, having barely slept, on my way from Brooklyn into Manhattan, a young woman standing near me on the subway collapsed in tears. I instinctively put my arms around her, and she sobbed into my shoulder, as several other strangers joined us in a spontaneous group hug.

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New York is resilient. New York is tough. But New York also sticks together. And, eventually, New York always bounces back.
Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD, has announced up to 17,000 laptops will be distributed to third level students to assist with online learning.

IT Sligo has been awarded 263,885 to procure laptops for students to assist in remote learning. The grant is part of a 15m fund for student devices announced today as part of a 168m fund for the higher education sector.

The significant grant will help disadvantaged students to continue studies during the current pandemic restrictions that will require more remote learning for students.

This funding has already allowed higher education institutions and further education institutions place a bulk order of 16,700 devices for students across third level.

Speaking today, Minister Harris said: Covid-19 has disrupted many aspects of our lives. For students in third level, it has resulted in a changed college experience.

This new academic year will mean many students will be attending courses online and will need access to devices. This investment will allow us to help 16,700 students access laptops and will ensure they can keep up to date with their studies.

It will also go some way to bridging the digital divide, support students and ensure equality of access to education.

President of IT Sligo, Dr Brendan McCormack welcomed the announcement of the grant by Minister Harris;

This grant will give our students an equal opportunity to study remotely. Many students have been severely hit by this pandemic not being able to find summer work and others have had to self isolate due to underlying health issues. Todays announcement will help those who have been disadvantaged by this pandemic and we very much welcome Minister Harris announcement.

The 168m funding package includes an additional 10 million for access supports which complements the IT support package. Students in higher education institutions experiencing exceptional financial need can apply for support via their local access office.

The devices will be distributed through targeted lending schemes run by the institutions. In the higher education sector, this will be overseen by Student Access Offices. In the further education and training sector, this will be overseen by the Education and Training Board (ETB) management.

Minister Harris added: The focus will be on ensuring disadvantaged students will have access to the devices.

But we must also recognise many students and their families have fallen on hard times as a result of COVID-19. We must ensure they dont fall behind in their studies and ensure they can access this support fund also. We still have significant work to do to address the digital divide in Ireland but this will go some of the way to doing that.

The grant funding for the devices will be provided to higher education institutions through the Higher Education Authority (HEA) and to education and training boards through SOLAS. The bulk order of laptops was organised by HEAnet, which provides internet connectivity and ICT services to education bodies throughout Ireland.

Students will be advised by the Institute of the application process/ criteria in due course.
WESTPORT  Firefighters responded to a fire at a residence on Maplewood Avenue Sunday evening, according to officials.

In a release, Westport Fire Department Assistant Chief Jeff Gootman said they received the call for service at 8:19 p.m. reporting a couch fire within a residence. He said firefighters arriving at the scene found smoke throughout the house and a smoldering couch.

Firefighters quickly removed the burning couch and debris from the house, Gootman said.

According to Gootman, the department responded with three engines, one ladder truck and the shift commander. He said nobody was displaced from the fire, adding there was limited smoke damage throughout the house.

Gootman said the fire is under investigation by the Westport Fire Marshals Office.
Republicans opened their scaled-back national convention Monday with a roll call vote to formally renominate President Donald Trump to top the Republican ticket in November.

The overall theme of the convention, "Honoring the Great American Story," highlights "the promise and greatness of America" and Trump's "leadership and what he has planned for the future," a Trump campaign official said. Each night will also have a sub-theme; on Monday, it is "Land of Promise."

MORE: 2020 Republican National Convention: Split between 2 cities, Trump to accept nomination from White House

The presidential nomination, seconding speeches and roll call took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday morning.

PHOTO: The room is set and delegates begin to arrive for the first day of the Republican National Convention, Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte. (Travis Dove/The New York Times via AP, POOL)

ABC News Live will kick off primetime coverage each day at 7 p.m. ET on the network's streaming news channel, and primetime coverage will air from 10-11 p.m. ET each night of the convention on the ABC Television Network.

The following are highlights from the first night of the RNC:

11:51 p.m. 3 key takeaways from night one of the Republican National Convention

Against a backdrop of a struggling economy and more than 170,000 lives lost to the coronavirus, Republicans on Monday painted an ominous picture of what losing the White House would mean for the country.

It may not have been the traditional, crowd-filled production the president and his party originally wanted to celebrate, but the first night of the Republican National Convention featured a slew of speakers, videos, and even appearances from the president himself. Through it all, the president's party offered haunting interpretations of the current political and cultural landscape.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks to delegates in the Charlotte Convention Center's Richardson Ballroom in Charlotte, N.C., Aug. 24, 2020. (Travis Dove/Pool via Reuters)

Event organizers said the first night of the convention would serve as a table setter for the next three days, and the following three takeaways from the first night of the RNC could continue to play out over the rest of the week.

Read more of the key takeaways:

Story continues

MORE: 3 key takeaways from night 1 of the Republican National Convention

11:38 p.m. Trumps convention sells optimism  based on grievance and fear: ANALYSIS

The hero of this story is President Donald Trump. The story only works if he could lose -- and that such a loss would be very, very bad.

The question looming over the Republican National Convention and beyond is whether the broader nation will listen to a rewritten tale with fear at its core -- or whether this week is mainly Trump supporters telling themselves what they want to hear.

As told through night one of the mainly pre-taped convention, Trump's leadership has already taken the nation through to the other side of the crisis caused by COVID-19 -- the "China virus," as it was repeatedly called Monday.

The country is back on the move -- yet that progress is threatened by former Vice President Joe Biden and the agenda he would empower. On that path, or so the story goes, are shutdowns, riots, crime, higher taxes, economic ruin and even an entirely different nation.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence stand on stage during the first day of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Aug. 24, 2020. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

Republicans found broad unity in prosecuting a case against Biden, almost treating him as if he was the incumbent instead of a former vice president who has been out of office for four years. There's a concerted effort to focus on the economy -- one of the few issue areas where Trump is perceived to have a natural advantage, according to polling.

But distortions of what Biden and his running mate want are tougher to sell when the realities of Trump's America are this stark. This summer of illness, disruptions, racial tensions and economic strife serve as the counterweight -- and they don't need week-long conventions to be felt in people's lives.

Read more of ABC News Political Director Rick Klein's analysis:

MORE: Trumps convention sells optimism  based on grievance and fear: ANALYSIS

11:09 p.m. Sen. Tim Scott: The election is 'about the promise of America'

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., giving the keynote speech said the United States has been tested in 2020.

"From a global pandemic, to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, 2020 has tested our nation in ways we haven't seen for decades," he said.

"While this election is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden  it's about the promise of America."

Sen. Tim Scott: "From a global pandemic, to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, 2020 has tested our nation in ways we haven't seen for decades." "While this election is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden  it's about the promise of America." https://t.co/yCMVM35FpQ pic.twitter.com/E5okU5iYVs  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2020

"Its about you and me, our challenges and heartbreaks, hopes and dreams. Its about how we respond when tackling critical issues like police reform," he said. "Do we want a society that breeds success, or a culture that cancels everything it even slightly disagrees with? I know where I stand, because you see, I am living my mothers American Dream."

Scott went on to talk about how his parents divorced when he was 7 and how he lived in a two-bedroom house with his grandparents, mother and brother.

"My mom worked 16 hours a day to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. She knew that if we could find the opportunity, bigger things would come. I thought I had to use football to succeed in life, and my focus on academics faded away. I failed my freshman year of high school -- four subjects: Spanish, English, world geography and civics," he said.

"But even while I was failing the 9th grade, my mother always said, 'when you shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you will be among the stars.' She never lost faith in me, even when I lost faith in myself. Because of her encouragement, I went to summer school and caught up," he continued.

PHOTO: Sen. Tim Scott addresses the Republican National Convention at the Mellon Auditorium on Aug. 24, 2020, in Washington. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

He then turned to how he eventually started a successful small business and eventually ran for Congress in 2010 in the district is based in Charleston, South Carolina, where the Civil War started and against "a son of our legendary Sen. Strom Thurmond."

"You may be asking yourself how does a poor black kid, from a single parent household, run and win a race in a crowded Republican primary against a Thurmond?" he asked. "Because of the evolution of the heart -- in an overwhelmingly white district -- the voters judged me on the content of my character, not the color of my skin."

"The truth is, our nations arc always bends back towards fairness. We are not fully where we want to bebut thank God we are not where we used to be," he continued.

Scott urged viewers to look beyond what the candidates have said.

"This election is about your future, and its critical to paint a full picture of the records of Donald Trump and Joe Biden," he said.

10:54 p.m. RNC speakers, more than a dozen times, say Dems want to defund police

Despite Joe Biden's comments to ABC "Good Morning America" co-anchor Robin Roberts on Friday that he doesn't want to defund police, Monday night's speakers have warned that Democrats will defund police and law enforcement more than a dozen times.

"No matter what the Democrats say, you and I both know when we dial 9-1-1, we don't want it going to voicemail. So defunding the police is not an option," Donald Trump Jr. said most recently.

Read more:

MORE: Fact Check: Both Biden and Trump say their rival wants to defund the police

ABC News' Benjamin Siegel

10:46 p.m. Donald Trump Jr. compares father to Biden's 'past half-century' in the 'swamp'

Donald Trump Jr. focused his speech on what his father has done as president with what Joe Biden has done in his long career in "the swamp."

"If you think about it, Joe Biden's entire economic platform seems designed to crush the working man and woman. He supported the worst trade deals in the history of the planet. He voted for the NAFTA Nightmare. Down the tubes went our auto industry. He pushed TPP. Goodbye manufacturing jobs. Beijing Biden is so weak on China that the Intelligence Community recently assessed that the Chinese Communist Party favors Biden. They know he'll weaken us both economically and on the world stage," he said.

Earlier this month the director of the National Counterintelligence Security Center said in a statement that China, Russia and Iran are working to influence the upcoming election, but while the statement said China "prefers" that Trump -- who it sees as "unpredictable" -- does not win reelection, it did not mention Biden specifically.

PHOTO: Donald Trump Jr., speaks as he tapes his speech for the first day of the Republican National Convention from the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, Aug. 24, 2020. (Susan Walsh/AP)

"Biden also wants to bring in more illegal immigrants to take jobs from American citizens. His open border policies would drive wages down for Americans at a time when low-income workers were getting real wage increases for the first time in modern history. He's pledged to repeal the Trump Tax Cuts, which were the biggest in our history," he continued. "After eight years of Obama and Biden's slow growth, Trump's policies have been like rocket fuel to the economy and especially the middle-class. Biden has promised to take that money back out of your pocket and keep it in the Swamp. But that makes sense, considering Joe Biden is basically the Loch Ness Monster of the Swamp. For the past half-century, he's been lurking around in there. He sticks his head up every now and then to run for president, then he disappears and doesn't do much in between."

Donald Trump, Jr.: "Biden has promised to take that money back out of your pocket and keep it in the swamp. That makes sense though, considering Joe Biden is basically the Loch Ness Monster of the swamp." https://t.co/waDl94SEvb #RNC2020 pic.twitter.com/j5xYHxuZC1  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2020

"So if you're looking for hope, look to the man who did what the failed Obama-Biden administration never could do and built the greatest economy our country had ever seen -- and President Trump will do it again," he said.

10:37 p.m. FiveThirtyEight: RNC, like DNC, wants to project unity

Both parties worried about appearing divided following 2016's conventions, which included booing of some Democratic speakers and Sen. Ted Cruz failing to endorse the nominee. The lack of an audience minimizes some of this, but it seems like the parties are both trying to portray unity, according to Seth Masket, a professor of political science and director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver.

The lack of internal division is especially apparent given some of the major moments from 2016, which included upset delegates and the Cruz admonition to "vote your conscience." Overall, I think that is a benefit for Trump in 2020, according to Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and professor of political science at Michigan State University.

More from our partners at FiveThirtyEight:

MORE: RNC, Day 1: Live Updates And Analysis

10:28 p.m. Nikki Haley: 'America isn't perfect. But the principles we hold dear are perfect'

Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley started her remarks by quoting another former ambassador, "'Democrats always blame America first.' The year was 1984. The president was Ronald Reagan. And Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's words are just as true today."

"Joe Biden and the Democrats are still blaming America first. Donald Trump has always put America first. He has earned four more years as president," she said. "It was an honor of a lifetime to serve as the United States ambassador to the United Nations. Now, the U.N. is not for the faint of heart. It's a place where dictators, murderers and thieves denounce America, and then put their hands out and demand that we pay their bills. Well, President Trump put an end to all that. With his leadership, we did what Barack Obama and Joe Biden refused to do. We stood up for America, and we stood against our enemies."

Nikki Haley: "Joe Biden and the Democrats are still blaming America first. Donald Trump has always put America first and he has earned four more years as president." https://t.co/waDl94SEvb #RNC2020 pic.twitter.com/1bPiQKr6cf  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2020

She then looked back at her time as governor of South Carolina.

"When Joe was VP, I was governor of the great state of South Carolina. We had a pretty good run. Manufacturers of all kinds flocked to our state from overseas, creating tens of thousands of American jobs. People were referring to South Carolina as 'the beast of the southeast,' which I loved," she said. "Everything we did happened in spite of Joe Biden and his old boss. We cut taxes. They raised them. We slashed red tape. They piled on more mandates."

Haley went on to talk about how she grew up as a "brown girl in a black and white world."

"In much of the Democratic Party, it's now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country. This is personal for me. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. They came to America and settled in a small southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari," she said. "We faced discrimination and hardship. But my parents never gave in to grievance and hate. My mom built a successful business. My dad taught 30 years at a historically black college. And the people of South Carolina chose me as their first minority and first female governor. America is a story that's a work in progress. Now is the time to build on that progress, and make America even freer, fairer, and better for everyone. That's why it's tragic to see so much of the Democratic Party turn a blind eye toward riots and rage."

She said it doesn't have to be like this.

"America isn't perfect. But the principles we hold dear are perfect. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America. It's time to keep that blessing alive for the next generation. This President, and this Party, are committed to that noble task. We seek a nation that rises together, not falls apart in anarchy and anger. We know that the only way to overcome America's challenges is to embrace America's strengths," she said.

10 p.m. Guilfoyle: 'This election is a battle for the soul of America. Your choice is clear'

Kimberly Guilfoyle, quoting a theme Joe Biden has used throughout his campaign, said that the election is a battle for the soul of America and the choice is clear.

"Biden, Harris and their socialist comrades will fundamentally change this nation -- they want open borders, closed schools, dangerous amnesty and will selfishly send your jobs back to China, while they get richer! They will defund, dismantle and destroy America's law enforcement. When you are in trouble, and need 911, don't count on the Democrats. As a first generation American, I know how dangerous their socialist agenda is," she said.

PHOTO: Kimberly Guilfoyle, the National Chair of the 'Trump Victory Finance Committee' and girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., delivers a speech to the largely virtual 2020 Republican National Convention, from Washington, Aug. 24, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

"If you want to see the socialist Biden/Harris future for our country, just take a look at California. It is a place of immense wealth, immeasurable innovation and immaculate environment  and the democrats turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets and blackouts in homes. In President Trump's America we light things up, we don't dim them down. We build things up, we don't burn them down. We kneel in prayer and we stand for our flag. This election is a battle for the soul of America. Your choice is clear," Guilfoyle continued. "Do you support the Cancel Culture, the cosmopolitan elites of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden -- who blame America first? Do you think America is to blame? Or, do you believe in American Greatness, believe in yourself, in President Trump, in individual and personal responsibility?"

She added, "America, it's all on the line. President Trump believes in you. He emancipates and lifts you up to live your American Dream."

"Like my parents, You can achieve your American Dream. You can be that shining example to the world," she said.

9:48 p.m. Mark McCloskey 'We're not the kind of people who back down,' neither is Trump

Mark and Patty McCloskey, who went viral after they stepped outside their St. Louis home with guns as protesters walked past, spoke to the RNC Monday night.

"We're speaking to you tonight from St. Louis, Missouri, where just weeks ago you may have seen us defending our home as a mob of protestors descended on our neighborhood," Mark McCloskey said.

"What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country. And that's what we want to speak to you about tonight," Patty McCloskey said.

PHOTO: Patricia and Mark McCloskey speak during the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention, Aug. 24, 2020. (Republican National Convention)

Mark McCloskey continued, "Whether it's defunding the police, ending cash bail so criminals can be released back out on the streets the same day to riot again, or encouraging anarchy on our streets, it seems as if Democrats no longer view the government's job as protecting honest citizens from criminals, but rather protecting criminals from honest citizens. Not a single person in the out-of-control mob you saw at our house was charged with a crime. But you know who was? We were. They've actually charged us with a felony for daring to defend our home."

The McCloskeys who have claimed they were defending their St. Louis home from a "mob of protesters," were charged last month with felony unlawful use of a weapon for brandishing guns during a peaceful demonstration outside their mansion.

"It is illegal to wave weapons in a threatening manner at those participating in nonviolent protest," the St. Louis prosecutor said in a statement at the time.

"You know we're not the kind of people who back down. Thankfully, neither is Donald Trump," Mark McCloskey said.

"When we don't have basic safety and security in our communities, we will never be free to build a brighter future for ourselves, for our children, and for our country," Patty McCloskey said in conclusion. "That's what's at stake in this election. And that's why we must re-elect Donald Trump."

MORE: Gun-wielding St. Louis couple charged with felony over unlawful weapons

9:41 p.m. Andrew Pollack: 'I truly believe the safety of your kids depends on whether this man is re-elected'

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, spoke about Trump's response to the shooting and school security and disciplinary laws.

"I never wanted this to become a political spectacle but it did. And I never wanted to meet the president like this but I did," he said. "I was invited to the White House. The truth is -- I had just buried my daughter -- I wasn't really interested in public event like a tour or a photo-op. I was interested in answers and solutions, so if the president wanted to meet me personally, I said I'd go. They said, 'of course, that was his plan.' At the White House, my family and I told him about Meadow. I told him what we knew. I told him that his administration needed to take a closer look at what went wrong and why. And I got to see who he really is. He's a good man and a great listener. And he cuts through the BS."

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the 2018 Parkland school shooting: "I learned that gun control laws didn't fail my daughter. People did  the school didn't just miss these red flags, they knowingly ignored them." https://t.co/xnIrUonMrN #RNC2020 pic.twitter.com/ctXTRSUFcG  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2020

Pollack continued, "Then, the President did what he said he said he would do: he took action. He formed a School Safety Commission that issued dozens of recommendations to make schools safer. But I'll bet you never heard about that. Instead, the media turned my daughter's murder into a coordinated attack on President Trump, Republicans, and the Second Amendment. In fact, when President Trump asked me to sit next to him when he announced the commission's findings, the media's first question wasn't about protecting kids. It was about the government shutdown. President Trump turned to me and said, 'can you believe these people, Andy? We're trying to talk about school safety, and this is what they do?' But I could believe it. After my daughter's murder, the media didn't seem interested in the facts. So I found them myself. When I learned that gun control laws didn't fail my daughter. People did."

"I truly believe the safety of your kids depends on whether this man is re-elected. I hope you'll join me in helping to make that happen," Pollack concluded.

9:33 p.m. Herschel Walker on his deep, personal relationship with Trump

Former NFL player Herschel Walker talked about his deep personal relationship with the president.

"Most of you know me as a football player. I'm also a father, a man of faith, and a very good judge of character. I have known Donald Trump for 37 years. And I don't mean we just casually ran into each other from time to time. I'm talking about a deep personal friendship," he said.

PHOTO: Former NFL player Herschel Walker speaks by video feed during the largely virtual 2020 Republican National Convention broadcast from Washington, Aug. 24, 2020. (Republican National Convention via Reuters)

"It hurts my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald. The worst one is "racist." I take it as a personal insult that people would think I would have a 37-year friendship with a racist. People who think that don't know what they are talking about. Growing up in the deep south, I have seen racism up close. I know what it is. And it isn't Donald Trump," Walker continued. "Just because someone loves and respects the flag, our National Anthem, and our country doesn't mean they don't care about social justice. I care about all of those things, and so does Donald Trump. He shows how much he cares about social justice and the black community through his actions. And his actions speak louder than any stickers or slogans on a jersey."

9:28 p.m. Jim Jordan: 'He truly cares about people'

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said he's "busting his tail" to get the president re-elected because he appreciates something most American's never see: "how much he truly cares about people."

"He's taken on the swamp, the Democrats, the press, and the Never Trumpers. And when you take on the swamp, the swamp fights back. They tried the Russia hoax, the Mueller investigation, and the fake impeachment. But despite this unbelievable opposition, look what this president has accomplished," he said.

"I love the President's intensity and his willingness to fight," Jordan continued.

Jordan then described how after his nephew Eli died in a car crash, he was on the phone with the president and walking into Eli's parents' house.

"We talked about a few issues. And then he asked how the family was doing. I said they're doing 'OK, but it's tough.' The President said 'Yeah. Losing a loved one's always difficult, and it's really tough when they're so young.' I then said 'Mr. President, I'm actually walking into their house right now. Obviously, they don't know I'm talking to you. But if you'd be willing to say hello to Eli's dad, you'd make a terrible day a little less terrible,' Jordan recalled. "'What's his name?' the president asked. I walked through the door, and said 'Todd, the President wants to talk to you.'"

PHOTO: Rep. Jim Jordan speaks during the first day of the Republican convention at the Mellon auditorium on Aug. 24, 2020, in Washington. (Republican National Convention via AFP/Getty Images)

"For the next five minutes, family and friends sat in complete silence, as the president of the United States took time to talk to a dad who was hurting. That's the president I know. That's the individual who's Made America Great Again and who knows America's best days are in front of us," he concluded. "And that's why I'm busting my tail to help him get re-elected. I'm asking you to do the same."

PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks with supporters who are essential workers during the 2020 Republican National Convention, Aug. 24, 2020. (Republican National Convention)

9:17 p.m. Trump honors frontline workers from White House

Trump made his first "surprise" appearance at the RNC to honor frontline workers from the White House.

President Trump speaks with professionals and first responders  from health care workers to postal workers  who have been on the front lines of the COVID-19 fight: "We want to thank you and all of the millions of people that you represent." https://t.co/W8ryvmLyKy #RNC2020 pic.twitter.com/9YjRdORJ1R  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2020

9:09 p.m. Ronna McDaniel: RNC will show how Trump's policies have 'uplifted Americans of all backgrounds'

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the convention would show how Trump's policies have "uplifted Americans of all backgrounds and empowered them to reach their full potential in life."

PHOTO: Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel gestures as she arrives to speak to the largely virtual 2020 Republican National Convention in a live address from Washington, Aug. 24, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

"Four years ago President Trump started a movement unlike any other, and over the next four days we will hear from a few of the millions of hardworking, everyday Americans who have benefited from his leadership," she said.

"At stake in this election is far more than two competing governing philosophies  two very different visions are being presented for our future. Democrats have chosen to go down the road to socialism. We see it a different way, and this week we are going to show the American people a different way. President Trump and Republicans are fighting for the values that have defined our country from the beginning -- liberty, justice, equality -- and our convention is going to celebrate everything that makes America the greatest nation on Earth," she continued.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel on being "only the second woman in 164 years to run the Republican Party": "Unlike Joe Biden, Pres. Trump didn't choose me because I'm a woman. He chose me because I was the best person for the job." https://t.co/yCMVM35FpQ pic.twitter.com/GcW9WLpqmA  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2020

8:59 p.m. Gaetz: 'We didn't start the fire. And weakness in the White House won't stop it.'

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., opened his remarks with a slam on Joe Biden's limited daily schedule before comparing the Democratic presidential nominee to Trump.

"I'm speaking from an auditorium emptier than Joe Biden's Daily Schedule," he said.

"We see the choice clearly: Strength or weakness. Energy or confusion. Success or failure," Gaetz continued. "And Biden knows failure. His own defense secretary said, 'Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy and national security decision for nearly four decades.' He believes in war without winning, war without end. President Trump doesn't want us in distant deserts. He wants to fight to save America here and now."

PHOTO: Rep. Matt Gaetz speaks during the 2020 Republican National Convention, Aug. 24, 2020. (Republican National Convention)

At the Democratic National Convention, Gaetz said the Democrats promised to stop the madness, "But we didn't start the fire. And weakness in the White House won't stop it."

"So what do we do? How about not settling for violence in our neighborhoods or at our border? Not settling for second-best to cheating China? And not settling for another round of bad decisions by basement-dwelling Joe Biden?" Gaetz continued. "Americans don't settle. We advance. We don't live in basements. We explore the frontier, the horizon, and the stars."

"America is not just an idea or a Constitution, it is our home," he concluded. "We must protect our home with unbreakable Made-in-America Strength -- strength I see every day in President Donald Trump."

Rep. Matt Gaetz: "Donald Trump, like all builders, is a visionary. That which is built in the mind is even more powerful than the brick and mortar that holds it together." https://t.co/yCMVM35FpQ pic.twitter.com/jlsEOcM3qP  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2020

8:43 p.m. Charlie Kirk: 'Trump is the bodyguard of western civilization'

Charlie Kirk, who runs the pro-American student organization Turning Point USA, said he was speaking in his personal capacity as a 26-year-old.

"I have a chance to view the state of our country as someone who sees the angst of young people and the challenges facing new parents forming families. I am here tonight to tell you -- to warn you -- that this election is a decision between preserving America as we know it, and eliminating everything that we love," he said.

"We may not have realized it at the time, but this fact is now clear: Trump is the bodyguard of western civilization," he continued. "Trump was elected to protect our families -- our loved ones -- from the vengeful mob that wishes to destroy our way of life, our neighborhoods, schools, church, and values. President Trump was elected to defend and strengthen the American way of life. The American way of life means you follow the law, you work hard, you honor God, you raise your kids with strong values, and you work to create a civil more stable country and life for the ones you love."

PHOTO: President of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk speaks during the 2020 Republican National Convention, Aug. 24, 2020. (Republican National Convention)

Kirk went on to describe the 2020 election as the most important since 1850 when Abraham Lincoln was elected.

"This election is not just the most important of our lifetime -- it is most important since the preservation of the Republic in 1865. By reelecting Trump, we will ensure that our kids are raised to love America, not taught to hate our beautiful country," he said. "Young kids will get so excited about the founding of our country, parents will have to calm their kids down at the dinner table because they are fired up about the brilliance of Jefferson, the toughness of Teddy Roosevelt, the strategic insight of Patton, the perseverance of Lincoln, the humility of Washington, or the ingenuity of Benjamin Franklin."

8:37 p.m. Ex-RNC Chair Michael Steele joins The Lincoln Project

Former RNC chair Michael Steele, who's been an outspoken critic of President Trump, has joined the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project as a senior adviser.

Steele, the first Black RNC chair, served in the role from 2009-2011.

"The chair behind the Resolute Desk has always been bigger than any political party," Steele said in a news release. "Sadly, we have witnessed its occupant devolve into preying upon fears and resentments with narcissism that nurtures only chaos and confusion. Leadership is needed now more than ever and I am proudly committed to resetting the course of our nation, standing once again for the future of my Party."

-- ABC News' Will Steakin

8:30 p.m. Scott: Mail-in ballots in Florida work

Florida Sen. Rick Scott spoke with ABC News Live ahead of the RNC primetime programming Monday night.

He was asked about the president's attacks on mail-in voting and whether they could undermine confidence and hurt Trump in states like Florida, where many seniors vote by mail.

"I hope not because we have mail-in ballots in Florida. It works," Scott said.

"I hope not because we have mail-in ballots in Florida. It works," Sen. Rick Scott tells @TomLlamasABC when asked if Trump's attacks on mail-in voting could undermine confidence and hurt the president in states like Florida where many seniors vote by mail. https://t.co/13JiNUAbsL pic.twitter.com/WnhVfeQXat  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 25, 2020

8:25 p.m. Mary Bruce: RNC will have 'very different feel' and tone from the DNC

ABC News Senior Congressional Correspondent Mary Bruce compares the RNC to last week's DNC.

"This convention is going to have a very different feel and a very different tone from what we saw last week with Democrats," she said on ABC News Live.

"This convention is going to have a very different feel and a very different tone from what we saw last week with Democrats," @marykbruce says ahead of the first night of #RNC2020. https://t.co/SLOF32ABAG pic.twitter.com/EVHw9zXZ4c  ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) August 25, 2020

8:19 p.m. Late change: Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle speeches pre-taped and not live

A late change from the RNC: Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, who were slated to speak live, are instead on tape.

The RNC has worked to have more live elements than the Democrats at last week's mostly virtual Democratic National Convention, and the president has made a point to say that live is better than tape, criticizing former first lady Michelle Obama for pre-taping her speech that aired a week ago.

8:17 p.m. Chris Christie: Trump campaign needs to be 'more optimistic and less dire' starting with Republican National Convention

Former New Jersey Governor and ABC News Contributor Chris Christie told the hosts of ABC News' "Powerhouse Politics" podcast on Monday that he hopes that President Donald Trump lays out an agenda at the Republican National Convention because he believes that has been the biggest failing of the Trump campaign so far.

Christie said the Trump campaign cannot run the same way they did in 2016 and he hopes that changes this week, especially Thursday night when Trump is set to give his acceptance speech.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks as delegates gather during the first day of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

"And so they have to do it differently this time. It has to be more optimistic and less dire. It has to be one that talks about what they want to do and how they want to leave the country at the conclusion of their eight years in," Christie told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl and Political Director Rick Klein. "I think quite frankly, that the Trump campaign has not done well on either of those fronts. And I'm hoping that's going to start to change this week, especially on Thursday night."

MORE: Chris Christie: Trump campaign needs to be 'more optimistic and less dire' starting with Republican National Convention

-- ABC News' Terrance Smith

8:08 p.m. Democratic campaign launches 'Republicans for Biden' as Flake, former GOP lawmakers endorse him

On the first day of the RNC, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris picked up support from 27 former GOP members of Congress, including former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, an outspoken critic of the president before and after he retired from Congress in 2018. It's the latest act of defiance from Republicans against the sitting president who represents their party.

Later in the day, Flake personally addressed his decision to vote for the first time in his life for the Democratic candidate in a firm address aimed at his fellow conservatives.

"After the turmoil of the past four years, we need a president who unifies rather than divides. We need a president who prefers teamwork to tribalism. We need a president who summons our better angels, not a president who appeals to our baser instincts. That's why we need Joe Biden," Flake said in live-streamed remarks straight to the camera.

Read more:

MORE: Democratic campaign launches 'Republicans for Biden' as Flake, former GOP lawmakers endorse him

-- ABC News' Molly Nagle and John Verhovek

PHOTO: Some of the items from the delegate gift bag are shown during for the first day of the Republican National Convention, Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte. (Chris Carlson/AP)

8:02 p.m. North Carolina to be a crucial battleground state in 2020

With the RNC kicking off in in North Carolina Monday morning, ABC News Chief Global Affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz spoke to voters in the battleground state about what they think of the president's performance.

"I was really expecting ... our administration to take lead on this," said Cassandra Brooks, on the Trump administrations coronavirus response.

"I was really expecting...our administration to take lead on this."  Cassandra Brooks, on COVID response With #RNC2020 kicking off in N.C., @MarthaRaddatz spoke to voters in the battleground state about what they think of the president's performance. https://t.co/SLOF32ABAG pic.twitter.com/JYLGYsu0fK  ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) August 24, 2020

Read more:

MORE: North Carolina to be a crucial battleground state in 2020

7:57 p.m. Former Trump staffer who penned tell-all book and sued the president, back working on Republican Convention

Cliff Sims, a former aide to President Donald Trump, who sued the president after writing a brutal tell-all book about his time in the Trump White House called "Team of Vipers", is back on the Trump team, serving an important role overseeing speechwriting for the upcoming Republican National Convention.

Sims is not only supervising speech writing for the convention, but multiple sources tell ABC News he is also spearheading the efforts for remarks by the president's children, including Donald Trump Jr. and Tiffany Trump.

Read more:

MORE: Former Trump staffer who penned tell-all book and sued the president, back working on Republican Convention

-- ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl, Will Steakin and Terrance Smith

7:53 p.m. Where do we stand now that the DNC is over and the RNC begins?: ANALYSIS

What have we learned and where do we stand today, after the Democratic National Convention, on the day the Republican National Convention begins?

The first virtual convention turned out rather well, and from my vantage point was more compelling when you listened to the key speeches without applause lines written in and audience interruptions. Conventions really hadn't changed much in the last 150 years, and maybe it was time to begin to update the model.

PHOTO: A delegate listens as Vice President Mike Pence speaks on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center on Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte, N.C. (Travis Dove/Pool via Getty Images)

As we look forward to the GOP convention, let's see if they can pull off the speeches in an equally compelling way without technical glitches and with limited audience reaction.

What is the strategic imperative for President Trump and the GOP' at their convention? I would suggest it is not in bashing Biden, but in building up Trump's approval rating.

Read more:

MORE: Where do we stand now that the DNC is over and the RNC begins?: ANALYSIS

-- ABC News Political Analyst Matthew Dowd

7:43 p.m. Scalise: Once past the pandemic, Trump will be in position to rebuild economy

The first night of the RNC is themed "Land of Promise" and ABC News' Linsey Davis asked House Minority Whip Steve Scalise what promises he would be making to the American people who have filed for unemployment amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"We've got to get through this pandemic, but as we do, you're going to see this president better positioned to rebuild that economy again," Scalise said on ABC News Live Prime.

"We've got to get through this pandemic, but as we do, you're going to see this president better positioned to rebuild that economy again," House Minority Whip @SteveScalise says, about the president's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. https://t.co/SLOF32ABAG #RNC2020 pic.twitter.com/83stZZB1UP  ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) August 24, 2020

7:33 p.m. Pompeo to speak at RNC in unprecedented move critics call inappropriate

While he is overseas on an official trip, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo will address the Republican National Convention in his "personal" capacity, the State Department said Sunday, blurring the lines between the two in an unprecedented -- and critics say inappropriate -- way.

Pompeo will be the first sitting Secretary of State to deliver a speech to a party's political convention in modern times, although he is not the first to play a public role.

Slated for Tuesday evening, his speech has already sparked a wave of backlash, with critiques that the top U.S. diplomat is supposed to represent all Americans and not play a role in party politics and that the speech violates department protocol, if not U.S. law.

"As secretary of state, I am obliged not to participate in any way, shape, fashion, or form in parochial, political debates. I have to take no sides in the matter," Colin Powell said in 2004, skipping the Republican National Convention while serving under George W. Bush.

PHOTO: Gen. Colin Powell speaks on the second night of the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 18, 2020, from Washington, D.C. (Democratic National Convention)

Powell, a Republican, endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden in this year's election.

Read more:

MORE: Pompeo to speak at RNC in unprecedented move critics call inappropriate

-- ABC News' Conor Finnegan

7:23 p.m. ABC News' 2020 interactive election map

Who will win in November? See how the Electoral College could play out with ABC News' 2020 interactive election map:

7:17 p.m. Trump steamrolls norms with White House convention speech, raising ethics concerns

President Donald Trump has set the stage for a norms-busting political event that has transformed the White House into a backdrop for his campaign, raising ethical questions as he steamrolls over precedent.

PHOTO: Staging and lighting is set up on the South Lawn of the White House on Aug. 24, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Kathleen Clark, an ethics lawyer and professor at Washington University Law School in St Louis, said in an interview with ABC News that the convention amounts to a "four-day extravaganza of unethical conduct."

Read more:

MORE: Trump steamrolls norms with White House convention speech, raising ethics concerns

-- ABC News' Jordyn Phelps and Ben Gittleson

7:10 p.m. RNC request for fireworks at Washington Monument on night of Trump's acceptance speech approved

The National Park Service earlier Monday said it had approved a request from the RNC to hold a fireworks show at the Washington Monument on Thursday, the night Trump formally accepts his party's nomination in a speech.

"The applicant is responsible for production of the event and all associated costs," said Mike Litterst, spokesman for the National Mall and Memorial Parks, National Park Service, in a statement announcing the approval. "Additionally, per policy, the National Park Service will recover from the RNC all costs incurred as a result of the activity, including NPS administrative costs for permit preparation and management of the event, and monitoring of the activity to ensure compliance with the conditions of the permit."

The fireworks are slated to begin about 11:30 p.m., according to the permit application.

Other than marking the end of the GOP convention, the display would also come hours before thousands of people are expected for a civil rights march timed for the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.

ABC News' Stephanie Ebbs

7 p.m. Monday night's speaker lineup:

The Trump campaign released its speakers list for the first night of the convention. Below is the order they're expected to appear:

Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA Rebecca Friedrichs, public school teacher Tanya Weinreis, coffee shop owner Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. Kim Klacik, Republican candidate running for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings' 7th Congressional District seat in Maryland RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel Amy Johnson Ford, nurse practitioner Dr. G.E. Ghali, oral surgeon Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio Herschel Walker, former NFL athlete Natalie Harp, advisory board member for the Trump campaign Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones Andrew Pollack, father to Meadow who was killed at the Parkland, Florida, massacre Mark and Patricia McCloskey, St. Louis attorneys who pointed guns at protesters this summer Kimberly Guilfoyle, senior adviser to the Trump campaign Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La. Sean Parnell, Republican candidate for Pennsylvania's 17th Congressional District Maximo Alvarez, Cuban immigrant and businessman Former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley Donald Trump Jr., the president's son Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.

PHOTO: People listen as President Donald Trump speaks on stage as he visits the Republican National Committee convention site, Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte. (Evan Vucci/AP)

1:50 p.m. Republicans nominate Trump to second term

The Republican Party has officially renominated Trump for president with a total of 2,550 delegates -- all of the delegates available.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel took the stage to officially declare Trump and Pence as the Republican nominees for president and vice president.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy then took a swipe at Biden, saying, "The difference between our convention and the DNC is that our nominees show up."

Biden and other speakers at last week's Democratic National Convention did not travel to the host city of Milwaukee due to coronavirus concerns.

The president will formally accept the nomination from the White House on Thursday night.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

12:45 p.m. Trumps makes first RNC appearance

Just before Trump arrived at the Charlotte Convention Center, Florida State Sen. Joe Gruters, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, announced the state's 122 votes for Trump. Though Trump was already well over the top when Florida announced its delegates, the RNC put up a graphic prepared for the moment when Trump secured the required number.

Then Trump took the stage.

After suggesting his supporters chant "12 more years" instead of "four more years," the president declared the country's economic recovery was in a "super V-shape" and fired off attacks against mail-in voting, claiming Democrats are "trying to steal the election from the Republicans" by expanding access to mail-in ballots, which millions of Americans are relying on amid the pandemic.

"This is the greatest scam in the history of politics, I think, and I'm talking about beyond our nation. They act like they are aggrieved by saying this, saying such a horrible thing, we are not patriotic by saying this. No," Trump said. "We voted during World War I. We voted at the voting booth during World War II. The pandemic we are doing very well -- and people know how to handle it -- look at the crowds. They are doing very well. It's very safe."

Shouts of "four more years" break out as Pres. Trump begins remarks after being renominated at the RNC. "If you want to really drive them crazy, you'll say '12 more years,'" Trump tells the crowd. https://t.co/Yy5Oqy2xtt pic.twitter.com/EGEIDO3V1h  ABC News (@ABC) August 24, 2020

Trump's accusations came while Democratic lawmakers back in Washington grilled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over controversial operational changes to the Postal Service which Democrats argue were designed to slow the mail and help him win reelection.

"What they're doing is using COVID to steal an election. They're using COVID to defraud the American people -- all of our people -- of a fair and free election," Trump claimed. "We can't do that. Don't let them give you the post office stuff."

MORE: Democratic campaign launches 'Republicans for Biden' as Flake, former GOP lawmakers endorse him

The president also said that "China will own our country" if Biden is elected, before repeating a familiar claim that he has done for the Black community than anyone.

"Nobody has done more for the historically Black colleges and universities than Donald Trump. Nobody, nobody has done more for the African-American community," Trump said, with the exception of President Abraham Lincoln, he added.

Notably, Trump's political opponent Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, is the first HBCU graduate to be nominated for national office by a major political party.

Before he concluded his remarks, Trump again hinted that Democrats will take the election away -- the same claim Democrats make about Republicans.

"This is the most important election in the history of our country. Don't let them take it away from you," he said.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump addresses the first day of the Republican National Convention after he delegates voted to confirm him as the Republican 2020 presidential nominee for re-election in Charlotte, Aug. 24, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

12:15 p.m. Republicans reach threshold to renominate Trump for president

After Pence wrapped his remarks, the roll call vote continued with Nevada, whose 25 delegates technically put Trump over the top to have enough votes to once again secure the nomination.

Florida, Trump's adopted home state, was the only state moved out of alphabetical order, which would have allowed for the state to put Trump over the top -- but it was Nevada's delegate on the screen when Trump surpassed the 1,276 delegate threshold to win the nomination.

With Nevada, 1,284 delegates have renominated Trump as the party's nominee, surpassing the 1,276 delegate threshold to win the nomination, based on an ABC News analysis of the delegate count.

Despite Florida not being seen at the microphone to announce the state's 122 delegates, nor the secretary officially announcing a record of the votes, those votes were included in the RNC's delegate tally.

The president is expected to speak briefly in Charlotte but will formally accept the nomination on Thursday night, when he delivers his speech from the White House South Lawn.

MORE: Biden to ABC's David Muir on raising taxes: 'No new taxes' for anyone making less than $400,000

11:48 a.m. Trump touches down in Charlotte, Pence takes the stage

As Trump touched down in Charlotte, Vice President Mike Pence took the stage in the convention center to deliver remarks.

"It is a joy to be with you at the 2020 Republican National Convention here in North Carolina," Pence said. "I heard there a unanimous vote a little bit earlier, and I'll have more to say that at Fort McHenry on Wednesday night."

Pence also teased Trump's incoming appearance, saying, "You might just see a friend of mine at the Republican National Convention today because we wanted to say 'thank you.'"

Pence's speech was primarily a call to action to vote in November to preserve conservative values.

"This movement led our nation back in 2016. And I just know each and every one of you, we're going to do your part this year to reelect this president and reelected Republicans with strong sound conservative principles every day," he said.

PHOTO: Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, Aug. 24, 2020. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

11 a.m. Roll call vote to renominate Trump underway

The convention has begun a state-by-state roll call vote on the renomination of the president.

After tests and temperature checks, 336 delegates representing 50 states, five territories and Washington, D.C., are participating in the process from inside the ballroom of the Charlotte Convention Center. They have been asked to wear masks and practice social distancing.

Trump was nominated by Michael Whatley, the chairman of the North Carolina GOP, and Florida State Sen. Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party.

MORE: Former Trump staffer who penned tell-all book and sued the president, back working on Republican Convention

Mike Lindell, founder and CEO of My Pillow who recently said he met with Trump in the White House in July and discussed an unproven COVID-19 therapeutic, cast Minnesota's delegates for Trump in the roll call.

Trump and Pence are scheduled to land in Charlotte around the time delegates plan to announce the results of their vote and are expected to make an appearance at the convention.

10:14 a.m. Republicans renominate Pence for VP

Delegates renominate Pence with a unanimous vote Monday morning ahead of their roll call vote on Trump.

Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker delivered a brief speech making the nomination.

The unanimous voice vote received a standing ovation from RNC delegates.

PHOTO: Delegates gather for the first day of the Republican National Convention, Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte. (Travis Dove/The New York Times via AP, POOL)

8 a.m. GOP forgoes party platform, to 'enthusiastically support' Trump agenda

The Republican National Committee will go without a traditional policy platform at the GOP convention, saying it will instead "continue to enthusiastically support the president's America-first agenda."

In a statement issued Sunday, the RNC said it adopted a resolution Saturday to go without a platform citing difficulties presented by the coronavirus pandemic.

MORE: Coronavirus live updates: 1st long-lasting disinfectant approved by EPA

"The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement," the RNC said.

The decision is roiling some Republicans who argue that the old platform is outdated and not reflective of the current views of the president or the party. Four years ago in Cleveland, Ohio, the party adopted a strict, conservative platform around issues of gender and sexual orientation against the efforts by some of the party's more moderate faction to soften the language.

The announcement also follows a vote in June, where the committee decided to adopt the 2016 platform for November's presidential election.

Convention speakers:

PHOTO: Armed homeowners Mark T. and Patricia N. McCloskey stand in front of their house as they confront protesters marching to St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson's house on June 28, 2020. (Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS via Newscom)

Those scheduled to speak on the first night include:

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, R-La. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the United Nations Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel Democratic Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA Kimberly Guilfoyle, national chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee Mark and Patricia McCloskey, St. Louis couple that went viral after waving their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters Donald Trump, Jr., eldest son of the president

As previously reported by ABC News, Trump is expected to be a part of the programming for each night of the convention.

ABC News' Kendall Karson, Terrance Smith, Rachel Scott, Will Steakin and Elizabeth Thomas contributed to this report.

RNC 2020 Day 1: GOP formally nominates Trump to 2nd term originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
The apparent attack on a key gas pipeline that led to a massive power outage across Syria was likely the work of the Islamic State (IS), US Envoy for Syria James Jeffrey said Monday.

The explosion was almost certainly a strike" by IS, Jeffrey told reporters in Geneva, adding that the United States was still looking into the cause. The senior State Department official is in the Swiss city representing the United States at United Nations-facilitated talks aimed at drafting a new constitution for Syria.

Jeffrey pointed to an uptick of militant activity in the eastern and southeastern regions near the Iraqi and Jordanian borders with Syria. Hundreds of American troops are based in the country to assist local partner forces, including the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, with preventing an IS resurgence.

A video posted by Syrian state TV shows firefighters working to extinguish the flames (Source: YouTube/SANA)

No one has claimed responsibility for the massive fire that engulfed the Arab Gas Pipeline early Monday, which according to local media, caused no casualties but did result in much of the country losing power.

State-run SANA news agency quoted Electricity Minister Mohammad Zuhair Kharboutli, who said the explosion caused a drop in gas pressure at the Deir Ali power plant, leading to the widespread blackouts. Technicians worked to gradually restore the power on Monday.

Situated between the towns of Al Dumair and Adra, the 1,200-kilometer export pipeline carries Egyptian natural gas into Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Kharboutli said the blast Sunday was the sixth time the pipeline had been targeted since the civil war erupted in 2011.

SANA also quoted Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem, who said the explosion was "a terrorist attack," a term Damascus uses to describe actions by the rebel groups seeking to oust the government.

Nearly a decade of fighting between the Russian-backed government and the opposition has taken a toll on Syrias oil and gas infrastructure. In 2013, the government accused the opposition of firing on a gas pipeline near the international airport in Damascus, leaving the capital and large portions of southern Syria without electricity.

More recently, the government blamed terrorists for an underwater attack in January that targeted its offshore oil facilities in Tartus province. Alleged drone attacks in December hit an oil refinery in the central city of Homs, the government said.

Syria has limited access to fuel. International sanctions have choked off shipments to areas under government control, and most oil fields are now in the hands of the US-backed Kurdish forces, who seized them from the Islamic State in 2017.

This story contains reporting from Agence France-Presse.
EastEnders actress Samantha Womack reveals she secretly split from her husband Mark in 2018 after nine years of marriage.

The Soap star, 47, confirmed the couple have been separated for a while but are cohabiting 'happily' with their children Benjamin, 19, and Lili Rose, 15, at their Bedfordshire farmhouse.

In a new interview, the thespian, who is also stepmum to Mark's son Michael, 25, from a previous relationship, insisted they're amicable and are in 'no rush' to change their unconventional living situation.

Break up: EastEnders actress Samantha Womack reveals she's split from her husband Mark after 11 years of marriage (pictured in 2014)

The media personality told OK! magazine: 'Our family home is big enough and we're co-existing happily. There's no rush to change things.

'But now feels like the right time to be honest and admit we're no longer together. It would be naive to say that moving on has been easy for us both. It's not an easy route but we've always been honest with each other about everything.'

The TV star, who met the Emmerdale actor, 59, on the set of Liverpool 1 back in 1998 and tied the knot in May 2009, admitted she wants to be 'best friends' with her ex's future partners as they've started to see other people since their break-up and even give each other dating advice.

Samantha and Mark started their romance soon after their respective marriages ended.

The blonde called it quits from Junfan Mantovani in 1998 after just one year of marriage, while the Liverpool native was married to Mary Therese McGoldrick from 1995 until 1997.

Close: The soap star, 47, confirmed the couple have been separated for a while but are 'cohabiting happily' with their children at their Bedfordshire farmhouse (pictured in 2013)

Early beginnings: The TV star met the Emmerdale actor, 59, on the set of Liverpool 1 back in 1998 (pictured in 1998)

Samantha revealed talks of a split started 'about four years ago' as her husband wanted to lead a 'quiet life' while she is 'more out there'.

Despite being separated for quite some time, the theatre star insisted they've had 'some of their best times together' as a family during the coronavirus lockdown.

The mother-of-two candidly confessed she feared she and Mark 'failed' as a couple, but is content their son and daughter are 'happy that we're happy' as they're 'soulmates' and 'still love each other'.

Earlier this year, Murphy's Law star Mark appeared on Lorraine Kelly to discuss his new stint on Emmerdale, but kept mum on his split from Samantha.

'We're soulmates': Samantha and Mark have taken things slow when it comes to divorcing legally, and are even considering getting a house abroad (pictured in 2000)

'We wanted to find the right time': In March, the Murphy's Law star appeared on Lorraine to discuss his new stint on Emmerdale, but kept mum on his split from Samantha (pictured)

Return to TV: Mark started playing new policeman Di Malone earlier this year (pictured with Katherine Dow-Blyton as Harriet Finch)

The Brighton-born star said that they had sat down with their kids to decide when was the right time to announce the news publicly, with friends and family already being aware of the breakdown of their marriage.

Samantha and Mark have taken things slow when it comes to divorcing legally, and are even considering getting a house abroad and having two places to live.

Just days earlier, news surrounding her close pal and former co-star Rita Simons' split from her husband of 14 years, Theo Silveston, emerged.

The couple, who haven't been living together for two years, have decided to officially divorce, the Daily Star reports.

Helping hand: The blonde said her former on-screen sister Rita Simons has been supporting the couple (they played Ronnie and Roxy Mitchell on EastEnders, pictured in 2013)

Shock divorce: Just days earlier, news surrounding her close pal and former co-star Rita's split from her husband of 14 years, Theo Silveston, emerged (pictured in 2013)

The 43-year-old's representative confirmed the divorce proceedings to the publication on Friday and suggested that she is doing well, despite the unfortunate news.

They said: 'Rita and Theo have been separated for almost two years and Theo moved out of the family home some time ago.

The insider added: 'The split has been a big change for Rita, but she knows it's the right decision.

It's over: The agent of the 43-year-old confirmed the couple have separated after they began 'growing apart' and they actually haven't lived together for two years

Rita shares twin daughters, Jamiee and Maiya, 14, with her hairdresser husband who she tied the knot with in 2006 after apparently meeting through a mutual friend when they were just 19.

Theo runs the award-winning, Kink hair salon in London, and he reportedly moved out of their family home in Elstree, Hertfordshire in 2018.

Another source claimed that the I'm A Celeb star is sure she has made the right decision and intends on putting their family home up for sale.

Moving on: The couple allegedly met through a mutual friend at the age of 19 and despite the split they remain amicable and plan to co-parent their twin daughters, Jamiee and Maiya, 14,

According to the source, she is looking forward to a fresh start and a future full of new possibilities.

In May, Rita cryptically implied she had been in a bad place as she wrote on Instagram: 'I've been to dark places in the last few years.'

She divulged that she was battling problems in her personal life and admitted that she has finally found 'healing' and 'peace'.

Dedication: Back in May, the I'm A Celeb star showed off her jaw-dropping physique as she credited working out during lockdown with helping her 'heal' from personal problems

Rita credited working out during lockdown with helping her 'heal' from personal problems.

She wrote: 'I haven't been too vocal on social media during lockdown..not about my own life anyway But I wanted to share this with you...before lockdown I was 100% a workaholic and 1000% stressed out.

'I was trying to deal with work and personal problems at the same time. I've been to some pretty dark places in the last few years both mentally and physically but I don't tend to shout about it. (Apart from the insomnia!)

Sensational: Rita displayed her washboard abs in a vest top and leggings as she hailed the benefits of exercise for lifting her out of a 'dark' mental space

Honest: The lengthy Instagram caption detailed her struggles with her mental health during lockdown and previously

'Irony is that in these last few months, where the world is more messed up than ever and I've been forced to stop working, I have had the time to heal, to spend more time at home with my kids.

'In no way do I want to detract from the real s**t, and the hero's, the frontline workers and the families who have lost loved ones, but the truth is we all have our own unique version of lockdown.

'Some have it worse than others. No, this has not been 'the great leveler' (thanks madge) infact it has shown so much inequality amongst us. But MY Lockdown has meant I have found peace. And I am grateful for that.'
The Youth Christian and Muslim Forum of Nigeria (YCMFN) says allegations of Christian genocide in Nigeria by All-Party Parliamentary Group in the United Kingdom (APPG) is false and misleading.

Instead of paint religious element behind violence in the country, the inter-faith forum rather advised the UK parliamentarians to concern itself with the sanctity of all human lives irrespective of religion or ethnic biases and see to doing enough in collaboration with the Nigerian government to halt any further killings anywhere in the country.

YCMFN made this strong stand known in a virtual press statement on Saturday signed by its National President, Pastor Phillip Attah.

A recent report by APPG on 'Freedom of Religion and Belief, Nigeria: Unfolding Genocide?', had alleged religious colouration in Boko Haram, banditry and other violent attacks across the country.

However, YCMFN said such claims are biased and one-sided malicious narrations from those who do not wish the nation well.

While admitting the security challenges in the country, the inter-faith group rejected the attempts to attach religious dimension, acknowledging the progress made under President Muhammadu Buhari.

"We consider it most distasteful for anyone to attempt to coin a narrative that 'Christians are actually the target of this murderous group'. Worst of all is the attempt to rope the government of President Buhari into this, or perhaps the attempt to drag the armed forces of Nigeria and sister security agencies into the evil religious narration," Pastor Attah disclosed.

The statement partly reads; " Nigeria no doubt is battling some security challenges that have been ongoing for a while now. What we, however, want to set straight is the fact that the killings going on are largely religion blind. Are there killings that involve Christians? The answer is yes, Christians are certainly murdered in Nigeria, but the fact remains out there that this evil terrorist has killed more Muslims and are in fact killing more Muslims.

"These terrorist are despicable savages that know no one. So long as you don't support their extreme version of Islam, of which many Muslims in Nigeria don't support you are regarded as an enemy and become a target of their killings.

" We know some mischievous elements will want to play the religious card with the ongoing security challenge, we worry less about them, since many of the perpetrators of this narrow and unfortunate narrative do so for their own pecuniary gain.

"We are however concerned about our friends outside the country who may not be well informed about the intrigues and the realities of these security challenges and may want to fall for the one-sided narration of some mischief-makers.

"President Buhari's campaign was anchored on the return of peace to the troubled northeast region and indeed everywhere else in Nigeria. This promised he has been able to fulfil to an extent with the help of the great men and women of the armed forces.

" Before the coming on board of this government almost 14 local government areas were under the total control of the terrorist group less than 18 months in an office all territories hitherto held by the terrorist have been recovered and normalcy returned to most of these areas.

" There cannot be any doubt about the government's sincerity in the battle against insurgents and all other forms of criminality going on in the country. The president has made more funding available for the welfare and procurement of required tools to eliminate the terrorist.

" Whilst we admit the security challenges are not gone. We totally reject the attempt by enemies of the state to bring a religious dimension to the current security challenge because it is totally false and only an attempt to whip up religious sentiments to further divide us and distract us from our focus on taking out the terrorist who are the real enemies of the people.

" In the north-west region of the country where the killings are now most rampant due to activities of bandits and kidnappers, 90% of the victims are Muslims, should we then say they are being killed because they are Muslims? Take Zamfara State for example with one of the highest numbers of deaths in the North West yet over 98% of those killed there are Muslims. So would anyone now say Muslims are being targeted in the north for a genocide?

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" Yes, the people killed in Zamfara are Muslims but they were definitely not killed because of their faith. The same way many Christians must have been killed in the many years of these terrorist activities but not all were killed because of their faith.

" Take the middle belt, for example, there have been decades of clashes between herders and farmers over the years, unfortunately except we collectively sit and find long-lasting solutions, peace may remain elusive in that region. There are several reasons for the conflict in that region".

The Youth Christian and Muslim Forum of Nigeria, however, called on " all Muslims and Christians across the country to unite and promote peace and unity amongst ourselves".
SCHWENKSVILLE  If you walked into The Duck Inn Taproom today, a thriving family-friendly restaurant and bar thats located right on the banks of the Perkiomen Creek on Route 29 in Perkiomen Township, youd have no idea what type of hell the owner and his loyal staff endured just a few short months ago. In []
>>> No new COVID-19 case announced on August 22 morning



>>> Localities strengthen measures to cope with spread of COVID-19

Among the new cases, a 52-year-old man in Lien Chieu district had close contact with a previously confirmed patient.

Another man, 60, from Thanh Khe district is a member of the management board of Lau Den Market.

Of the three female patients, the 38-year-old one from Thanh Khe is a trader at Tan Lap Market while the others, 69 and 51 years old respectively residing in Thanh Khe and Hai Chau districts, are traders at Sieu Thi Market.

All the markets with the new cases are located in Thanh Khe district.

The five patients are undergoing treatment at the Hoa Vang temporary hospital in Da Nang.

Also on August 22, 16 patients treated at this hospital were given the all-clear, bring the total number of recoveries to 563.

16 COVID-19 patients treated at the Hoa Vang temporary hospital were given the all-clear on August 22, 2020. (Photo: the Ministry of Health)



So far, Vietnam has recorded 672 local infected cases of COVID-19 and 25 deaths linked with the disease.

Among those still under treatment, 41 have tested negative for the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 once, 62 twice, and 35 others thrice.

There are 104,793 people having close contact with confirmed cases or coming from pandemic-hit regions under quarantine at present, including 2,195 in hospitals, 32,168 in other quarantine sites, and 70,430 at home or accommodation facilities.
Arrow has tremendous reach, in both the commercial and public sectors, and will help ensure that our partners, and mutual customers experience the full value of our cybersecurity solutions.

Ericom Software, a leader in Zero Trust Browser Isolation and Secure Access solutions, today announced a new distribution agreement with technology provider Arrow Electronics. Arrows enterprise computing solutions business will represent Ericoms award-winning Ericom Shield Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) cloud service, Ericom Application Isolator for VPN security, and Ericom Connect secure remote access security solution to its entire ecosystem of channel partners and customers in the United States and Canada.

Ericom Shield Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) cloud service prevents ransomware, advanced web threats, and phishing attacks from reaching user endpoints by executing active web content in a remote, isolated, cloud-based container. Whether users browse to a malicious site independently or by clicking a URL embedded in a phishing email, they are completely safe since no web content is ever executed directly on their devices. Only safe-rendering information representing a website is sent to a devices browser, providing a secure, fully interactive, seamless user experience. Websites launched from URLs in emails can be rendered in read-only mode to prevent users from entering credentials for additional phishing protection. Attached files are sanitized before being transmitted to endpoints, ensuring that malware within downloads cannot compromise users devices. Gartner recently noted growing demand for RBI solutions, and RBI is included as a key capability in their Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) security framework.

The agreement makes Arrow the newest member of Ericoms channel partner and distribution network. Arrow is a prominent provider of security solutions from leading vendors that integrate with Ericom Shield RBI. Under the distribution agreement, Arrow will offer Ericom Shield, Ericom Application Isolator, as well as Ericom Connect secure remote access software, to customers in the United States and Canada.

Ericom Software is delighted to work with Arrow, who has a tremendous track record in enabling, developing and growing business through its customers," said Michael Santacross, Director of Channels, Americas, at Ericom Software. "Arrow has tremendous reach, in both the commercial and public sectors, and will help ensure that our partners, and mutual customers experience the full value of our cybersecurity solutions.

About Ericom Software

Ericom Software provides businesses with secure access to the web and corporate applications, in the cloud and on-premises, from any device or location. Leveraging innovative isolation capabilities and multiple secure access technologies, Ericoms solutions ensure that devices and applications are protected from cybersecurity threats, and users can connect to only the specific resources they are authorized to access.

Ericoms platform of browser isolation, remote access, secure connectivity, mobility, and virtualization technologies enhances cybersecurity and productivity while reducing cost and complexity for tens of thousands of businesses and millions of end users worldwide. The company has offices in the US, UK, and EMEA, and a global network of distributors and partners.

For more information about Ericom and its products, visit http://www.ericom.com. You can also follow Ericom Software on our blog, as well as on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Campus News

Magazine recognizes innovative UB biosciences diversity program

In the summer of 2019, these undergraduates from throughout the U.S. came to Buffalo to participate in CLIMB UP, UB's biosciences diversity program.

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM

At the heart of CLIMBs success is our passion for helping students and junior scientists develop into tomorrows scientific leaders. 

CLIMB, an innovative and comprehensive diversity program at UB that provides intensive mentoring experiences for biosciences students from undergraduate through postdoctoral levels, has received an award from INSIGHT into Diversity magazine.

The magazines 2020 Inspiring Programs in STEM Award honors colleges and universities that encourage and assist students from underrepresented groups to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

CLIMB (Collaborative Learning and Integrated Mentoring in the Biosciences) was founded at UB in 2009 by Margarita Dubocovich, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, and senior associate dean for diversity and inclusion in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Since then, it has supported and mentored 469 summer undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers throughout the U.S., nearly half of whom (44%) were from underrepresented backgrounds, to help advance their careers through intensive research experiences at UB.

UBs CLIMB program has three divisions:

CLIMB-UP (Undergraduate Program) provides undergraduate students from diverse groups from institutions throughout the U.S. with the support they need to adapt and thrive in summer research at UB, and guides them toward graduate and professional careers in the biosciences.

CLIMB-HI (High Impact) helps PhD students at UB improve communication and professional skills needed to be a successful scientist.

CLIMB-NS (Next Step) is aimed at helping postdoctoral scientists advance toward a fulfilling career and leadership in their field.

In July 2020, the new cohort of PhD students participating in the CLIMB-HI program successfully started the program virtually as a result of the pandemic.

Dubocovich was inspired to start the CLIMB programs because of her own background growing up in rural Argentina, where advancing to complete professional or scientific careers was not encouraged, an environment similar to other students from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds.

In her experience, the desire to pursue a scientific career in that kind of environment can be very isolating. At UB, the CLIMB programs are carefully designed to provide intensive and customized experiences  with an emphasis on mentoring by prominent UB scientists  for students from the undergraduate through postdoctoral level.

According to Dubocovich, the programs philosophy is to help all students who are excited about doing scientific research succeed at every level so that they can keep advancing.

At the heart of CLIMBs success is our passion for helping students and junior scientists develop into tomorrows scientific leaders, she said.

CLIMB will be featured along with the other award recipients in the September 2020 issue of INSIGHT into Diversity magazine.

Inspiring Programs in STEM Award winners were selected by INSIGHT Into Diversity based on efforts to inspire and encourage a new generation of young people to consider careers in STEM through mentoring, teaching, research, and successful programs and initiatives.

We want to honor the schools and organizations that have created programs that inspire and encourage young people who may currently be in, or are interested in, a future career in STEM, said Lenore Pearlstein, owner and publisher of the magazine. We are proud to honor these programs as role models to other institutions of higher education and beyond.
Police Chief William McManus largely limited the use of so-called no-knock warrants in mid-June, weeks after the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police ignited protests and calls for reforms in policing in the U.S.

The change  which wasnt widely known until last week, when it was detailed in a city memo  came as leaders in other cities, including Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Louisville, Ky., banned the tactic in which police officers forcibly enter homes without warning to serve warrants.

No-knock warrants are used for two purposes: searching for evidence and making arrests. Until recently, no-knock search warrants were reserved primarily for narcotics cases. No-knock arrest warrants were used in high-risk cases involving murder, aggravated assault and sexual assault suspects.

Now, no-knock search warrants are completely off the table, McManus said Monday. No-knock arrest warrants will be used only where exigent circumstances pose a serious safety risk to the general public or officers.

The decision to suspend the use of no-knock warrants was made to better protect the public and officers, he said. Reducing the potential for serious bodily injury or death outweighs the need to recover illegal drugs or contraband.

The use of such warrants gained widespread notoriety this year after Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was shot eight times by police officers executing a no-knock search warrant at her apartment in Louisville.

The three officers, who used a battering ram to enter Taylors apartment, were in plainclothes. After a brief exchange, Taylors boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired his gun, believing that the officers were intruders. The police returned fire, striking Taylor.

The officers were investigating two men  one of whom had a prior relationship with Taylor  suspected of selling drugs at a home more than 10 miles away. No drugs were found in Taylors apartment, a lawyer representing Walker later said.

Taylors death, which received national publicity after Floyds death in May, has led to widespread calls to ban no-knock warrants. Police reform activists have also called for officials to arrest the officers who were involved in Taylors death.

One of the officers has been fired. So far, none of the officers has faced criminal charges.

In San Antonio, the maneuver has also been associated with the 2018 killing of 18-year-old Charles Chop Chop Roundtree  though, technically, the officers who shot and killed Roundtree were not executing a warrant.

In Houston, the use of no-knock warrants faced criticism after two homeowners were killed and five officers were injured in a no-knock raid on a suspected drug house.

The case agent who led the raid was later accused of lying about a drug purchase that served as the basis for the warrant. Several former cops are facing criminal charges.

In recent years, the San Antonio Police Department has significantly reduced the use of no-knock warrants, from 44 in 2017 to 29 in 2019, according to the departments count. In the first six months of this year, police have executed about eight no-knock warrants, police said.

Obviously, progress has been made, but what were trying to do is prevent another Charles Roundtree from happening, Mayor Ron Nirenberg said Monday during a meeting of the City Councils governance committee.

The incident involving Roundtree occurred about 1:25 a.m. Oct. 17, 2018, as he and his friends Davante Snowden and Taylor Singleton, both 24, sat inside a West Side home talking, listening to music and surfing the web.

Three SAPD officers entered the reported drug house to investigate an alleged assault. Police say Snowden reached for a gun in his waistband, prompting Officer Steve Casanova to fire at him.

The bullet went through Snowdens buttocks and struck Roundtree in the chest. The young father of an infant son was pronounced dead at the scene. A Bexar County grand jury later declined to indict Casanova.

Roundtrees family has sued the city, accusing Casanova of failing to properly identify himself as a police officer. It says Casanova, on duty and in uniform, opened the door to the house, shined a bright light and opened fire.

Snowden was later found not guilty on a charge of felon in possession of a firearm.

Saving lives

Nirenberg and other members of the governance committee discussed the use of no-knock warrants, an issue that was brought to the panels attention by District 2 Councilwoman Jada Andrews-Sullivan. She submitted a request June 22 to discontinue the SAPDs use of no-knock warrants.

We need to do everything we can within our policies to make the community a safer and equitable place, Andrews-Sullivan said. This request is about saving lives. Its about making sure we are not taking a life that is not yet meant to be taken.

Her request for a council discussion was supported by council members Melissa Cabello Havrda, Roberto Trevino, Ana Sandoval and Rebecca Viagran.

In response to Andrews-Sullivans request, city staff submitted a memo last week noting that McManus suspended the use of no-knock search warrants and limited no-knock arrest warrants a few days earlier, on June 16.

McManus said SAPD is revising the General Manual with the updated no-knock warrant policy. It will likely be completed by next month, he said.

But some council members questioned whether no-knock warrants should be used at all  and what constitutes exigent circumstances.

District 9 Councilman John Courage asked whether other agencies that SAPD partners with, including the FBI and the Bexar County Sheriffs Office, have similar policies and what officers would do in instances when those agencies initiated a no-knock raid.

Any member of our agency wouldnt participate in a no-knock raid led by another agency, McManus said.

Also Monday, the governance committee discussed the use of chokeholds and neck restraints.

Instructors at the Police Training Academy have not taught the two maneuvers for 20 years  if not longer  after a number of suspects, most of them unarmed, died at the hands of police in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Years later, in San Antonio, a suspect died after being placed in a chokehold by an officer.

In 2014, SAPD banned the use of chokeholds and neckholds, except in cases where theres an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to an officer or a bystander.

Andrews-Sullivan questioned whether that should be the case. District 5 Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales wanted to know what alternatives officers have.

If youre behind a suspect, the suspect cannot cause harm or danger, Andrews-Sullivan said.

McManus said he opposed any change to the existing policy. He said that when an officer is fighting for their life, a range of tools should be available.

At the end of the meeting, the committee decided to continue the conversation during a public safety committee meeting Tuesday.

City Manager Erik Walsh said Mondays conversation was a good step. He said McManus is reviewing a number of department policies, including use of force, in light of police reform calls nationwide.

There are a lot of things that have been put into motion, Walsh said. I think it would be a good idea to summarize all these different issues that were dealing with to make sure council is aware of it.

Emilie Eaton is a criminal justice reporter in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Emilie, become a subscriber. eeaton@express-news.net | Twitter: @emilieeaton
Chairman of Sudan's Sovereign Council Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan on Monday accused unnamed trends of attempting to "kidnap" the popular revolution in Sudan and dismantle the army.

"There are some trends which want to kidnap the revolution and we in the armed forces will not allow that. The armed forces have sided with the people not with a party," said Al-Burhan addressing the army officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers at Wadi Seidna military area in Omdurman, north of the capital Khartoum.

"We will remain to be patient because the Sudanese people chose to be patient." added Al-Burhan, who is also the Commander-in-Chief of the Sudanese armed forces.

He further said that after about a year since the establishment of the transitional government, no change has been made.

Al-Burhan said the armed forces will not carry out a coup against people's revolution or allow the revolution to be "kidnapped," saying "we are the protectors of the people."

A transitional government of military and civilian components assumed the rule in Sudan following the ouster of the regime of former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.

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A total of 84 people have been killed and thousands of homes collapsed in the torrential rains which hit the country recently, Sudan's National Council for Civil Defense said, Trend reports citing Xinhua.

"Thousands of homes have collapsed, while 84 people have been killed and 29 others injured throughout the country's states since the beginning of the rainy season," Abdul-Jaleel Abdul-Rahim, spokesman of the National Council for Civil Defense, said in a statement.

"The rains have also killed 5,329 heads of cattle with partial collapse of 26,739," he added.

Abdul-Rahim further urged the citizens who live near the banks of the Nile to be alert and adopt the necessary precautions.

Sudan often witnesses floods caused by heavy rains from June to October.
From mini unmanned aerial vehicles to fire detection systems and bullet proof vehicles to tank transporters, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has come out with a list of 108 systems and sub-systems that it will help the Indian industry design and develop to strengthen the local defence ecosystem.

A DRDO delegation met defence minister Rajnath Singh on Monday and briefed him on the 108 defence items identified for local production by the industry to achieve self-reliance in the defence sector, a defence ministry spokesperson said.

It will also allow the DRDO to sharpen its focus on advanced technologies, the defence ministry said in a statement.

This initiative will pave the way for the Indian defence industry to develop many technologies towards building an AtmaNirbhar Bharat, the defence ministers office tweeted.

The other items on the list prepared by the DRDO are NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) shelters, missile canisters, navigation radars, satellite navigation receivers, mine-laying equipment and armoured engineering reconnaissance vehicles.

The DRDO will also provide support to the domestic industry for the design, development and testing of these systems, the ministry said.

All the requirements of these systems by R&D establishments, armed forces and other security agencies can be met through development contracts or production orders on suitable Indian industry. This will allow the DRDO to focus on design and development of critical and advanced technologies and systems, the statement added.

The present industry base of the DRDO consists of 1,800 micro, small and medium enterprises, defence public sector undertakings, ordnance factories and large-scale industries.

On August 9, the government announced that it will ban the import of 101 different types of weapons, systems and ammunition over the next five years, a significant step on the long road towards achieving self-reliance in the defence sector.

The negative import list included artillery guns, light military transport aircraft, conventional submarines and long-range land attack cruise missiles.

The detailed list of equipment published by the defence ministry has spelled out that the embargo on import will kick in between December 2020 and December 2025 for different categories of military hardware.

The military hardware on the negative import list includes assault rifles, sniper rifles, short-range surface-to-air missiles, beyond visual range air-to-air missiles, corvettes, missile destroyers, light combat helicopter, ship-borne cruise missiles, light combat aircraft, a variety of radars and different types of ammunition.
Several people are feared dead after security agents clashed when members of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB in Enugu.

The clash, at Emene axis, caused chaos in the area.

It happened on Sunday morning, sending church goers running from services.

Witnesses said it began after policemen invaded Emene's Community Secondary School, where IPOB members were meeting, for a dispersal and arrest.

IPOB members are reported to have resisted and overpowered security officials.

A reinforcement, with over a dozen patrol vans of armed security comprising police, army and DSS was called in.

Gunshots and teargas fumes are reported in the area along old Abakaliki Road.

Pictures have emerged ostensibly from the incident showing some men laying dead on the street.

The police is yet to comment.
U.S. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, left, and U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean, said in a Friday letter to the head of the Pennsylvania National Guard that they are concerned about the command climate at the Horsham Air Guard Station. Read more

Two Philadelphia-area congresswomen are asking the head of the Pennsylvania National Guard to address allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation at the Horsham Air Guard Station following an Inquirer investigation last month.

U.S. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a former Air Force officer and founder of the Servicewomen and Women Veterans Caucus, and U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean, whose district includes the base, wrote in a Friday letter to Maj. Gen. Anthony Carrelli that they were troubled by the allegations in the article and those made by two former employees on the base who have reached out to them.

Despite its different structure, the National Guard is not immune from the cultural challenges facing our military, especially when it comes to sexual harassment, misconduct, and retaliation, Houlahan and Dean wrote to Carrelli, who as adjutant general is responsible for supervision of the states Army and Air National Guard units.

The National Guard did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. Houlahan, a Democrat from Chester County, represents Pennsylvanias 6th Congressional District; Dean, a Democrat from Montgomery County, represents the 4th.

 READ MORE: Rape jokes, vindictive culture in old boys club at Horshams Air National Guard Station

Last month, The Inquirer reported on allegations of rampant sexual harassment and discrimination within the bases 111th Attack Wing and a pattern of reprisal against those who speak out about that or other acts of misconduct.

The Horsham base is home to a control center for MQ-9 Reaper drones flying overseas. Formerly the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Willow Grove, its pilots flew the A-10 Warthog Thunderbolt.

Marianne Bustin, the bases former sexual assault response coordinator, told The Inquirer last month that Air Guard leaders made a mockery of her program and terminated her in June following what she said was a campaign of retaliation by leaders.

There is an abuse of power and control there, Bustin said after she was fired. Its a few of these leaders against everyone else. You either comply and youre in, or you dont and youre out. Theyll come after you and close ranks, and youre done.

Interviews with seven other current and former Horsham employees backed Bustins claims.

Separately, The Inquirer reported, Lt. Col. Oliver Barfield, former commander of the bases largest unit, alleged in a July congressional memo that the bases top officer, Col. William Griffin, had fostered a vindictive culture of unprofessional retaliation against those who speak out where the ends always justify the means.

Barfields memo does not deal with sexual harassment. He said he faced retaliation from Griffin for filing a report with the inspector general about a technical issue, a units organizational alignment.

I have worn the uniform for over 21 years at seven other permanent duty stations and during four combat deployments, wrote Barfield, who recently left the base. I have never experienced anything close to this.

The two freshmen representatives wrote in their letter to Carrelli that Bustin and Barfield have reached out to their offices for assistance and are prepared to talk with investigators about their experiences.

We are especially concerned for what these allegations, if corroborated, would mean for the command climate at the Horsham Air Guard Station and our ability to recruit and retain talented personnel in our National Guard, the congresswomen wrote.

The U.S. military has struggled for decades to address sexual assault and harassment, in particular since the 1991 Tailhook scandal, in which 83 women and seven men were found to have been assaulted during a Navy convention weekend. Yet, reports of sexual assault in the military continue to increase.

The issue has received new attention this summer following the death of Spc. Vanessa Guillen at Fort Hood, Texas. Guillen, 20, had told her family she was being sexually harassed but did not believe she could report it without facing retribution. Authorities say she was killed by a male soldier.

Guillens death prompted the Army to review the command climate and culture at Fort Hood.

On Saturday, the Army said that Sgt. Elder Fernandes, 23, a Fort Hood soldier missing since Wednesday, had reported abusive sexual contact and had recently been transferred. Fernandes had been in contact with the units sexual assault response coordinator, an Army spokesperson said.
Monday, August 24, 2020

Jax Wants His Person Backbut Instead Hes Alone and Lonely in Out of the Dog House

by Sandy De Lisle and Stephanie Itle-Clark

Illustrated by Nina Robichaud



Jax used to live a cushy life inside a house with fuzzy blankets and a comfy chair. Suddenly his person can no longer care for him, and he finds himself living in a strangers backyard and missing his best human friend.

He misses his warm bed, squeaky ball, and bowls with his name on them. Most of all, though, he misses his persons gentle scratches under his chin and the way he said, Good boy, Jax.

Will the kind animal control officer succeed in helping Jax get out of the doghouse and into the warm home of his new family? Find out in Out of the Dog House, perfect for ages 8 and up. Out of the Dog House is great for classroom and humane education efforts, too, and includes educational information and questions to provoke classroom discussion.

Available in Paperback and Kindle, coming soon in Audiobook. Just $12.97 Paperback and $3.97 Kindle; plus, its available as part of your subscription to KindleUnlimited, too.



Buy in Paperback | Buy on Kindle

P.S. All our books are readily available on every Amazon site worldwide. Simply search for the title in your Amazon browser or the paperbacks ISBN of 978-1-946044-81-5

About the Authors

Sandy De Lisle is a lifelong animal lover, former classroom teacher, author, filmmaker, and currently serves as senior manager of content development for the ASPCAs Pro Learning department.

Her first childrens book, Hens for Friends, was published by Gryphon Press.

Stephanie Itle-Clark is a former public-school developmental reading teacher and is the founder and president of the Academy of Prosocial Learning where she supports prosocial and empathy education and provides resources and professional development for educators.

Stephanie is the author of Tiffany Rolls On, Olivers Big Problem, Flock of Friends, and the editor of the forthcoming Humane Education in Higher Education.

She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their pack of tiny rescue dogs.

About the Illustrator:

Nina Robichaud is an artist, former veterinary assistant, and IT professional. In her free time she tends to her island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, draws animals, and spoils her rescues Penelope the black cat and Jager the leonberger mix.

Nina is the illustrator of Out of the Dog House and Harley Saves the Day. Check out her art Instagram @neenz.art for more animal illustrations.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:48:38|Editor: huaxia

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QINGDAO, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua on Monday called for solid efforts to stabilize foreign trade and foreign investment.

Hu, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks at a symposium in east China's coastal city of Qingdao, which focuses on stabilizing foreign trade and investment in key provinces and cities in northern China.

Hu stressed that local authorities should work hard to keep foreign trade and investment stable amid a grave and complicated international environment.

He urged the provinces and cities to open further to the outside world, and enhance services for businesses to add impetus to the stable development of foreign trade and investment.

Before the symposium, Hu visited foreign trade firms and the Qingdao part of China (Shandong) Pilot Free Trade Zone to learn about production and operations of companies. Enditem
Losing your house is obviously one of the worst things that can happen to someone and for a lot of people in California, that nightmare is becoming a reality. One such man who is currently suffering through this terrible misfortune is Hank Hanson.

Currently, Northern California west of the state capital in Sacramento and east of the San Francisco Bay, are going through a lightning siege, which is basically summer thunderstorms that produce little or no rain but instead have resulted in about 12,000 lightning strikes. More than 13,700 firefighters are fighting the blazes across the area.

 AP

Because of the fires, 81-year-old Hank Hanson lost his dream house he worked on for decades. He said, "It started pouring toward us like a waterfall."



Thankfully, the electricity went out before disaster struck and woke up the man and his wife who were able to escape before anything worse could happen to them.

 AP

But reportedly, he talked about the fire like an adventure and was even excited while explaining his escape. He was, understandably, sad when he said that he's not planning on rebuilding, though.



He said, "I worked on it for 30 years. It was pretty nice. I wouldnt want to do it on a lesser scale, and I dont got time to top the old one."

 AP

Well, that's the spirit, I guess. He already has some plans for the place where once his house stood. He plans on turning it into a park and a campground for him and his friends to enjoy, and honestly, that sounds pretty great.



The one great thing about the entire thing is how his tomatoes managed to survive the ordeal. He said, "They escaped the whole deal. About the only thing I have left in the world is tomatoes."

 AP

But, he did joke about how deers might have got to them by now.


In a bid to provide



employment to migrant workers who returned to the state in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government will take up forestry projects worth Rs 602 crore under the scheme in the current fiscal, a minister said on Sunday.

The government has decided to spend more funds under the rural job guarantee programme for the interest of migrant labourers, state and Environment Minister B K Arukha said.

"The department has formulated forestry projects of Rs 602 crore, which have been approved by the Convergence Committee for the 2020-21 fiscal," he said.

Last year, the department had spent Rs 70 crore in forestry projects under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

The projects include plantation, conservation works, and construction of road, he said, adding that the forest road repairing works will be taken up for the first time under the programme.

"Under this scheme, the plantation will be executed in 40,000 hectares of area. So far, Rs 65 crore fund has been utilised, and 35 lakh man-days have been generated till August 15 in the current fiscal as against the last year's total utilisation of Rs 86 crore," the minister added.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
TikTok is expected to sue the Trump administration Monday over its move to ban the app, in what's likely to be an explosive and closely watched court battle.

Why it matters: The Trump administration has given ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, a deadline to divest its U.S. operations or else see its massively popular social video app banned.

Driving the news:

TikTok confirmed Saturday that it plans to sue directly over the impending ban.

TikToks suit is expected to come later Monday, sources told Axios.

TikTok has said there was no due process in Trump's abrupt move to ban the app.

Between the lines: The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the government action against TikTok was preceded by an aggressive behind-the-scenes lobbying push by Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Meanwhile: A group representing WeChat users, per the Wall Street Journal, has sued over Trump's planned ban of the messaging platform, also used for a raft of other functions by people in China and those who do business in the country.
A local farmer abducted, raped and buried a nurse who went missing while jogging in Arkansas last week, officials say.

Sydney Sutherland, 25, was reported missing on August 19 after she failed to return home from an afternoon jog and she was found dead near her home in Newport, Arkansas on Friday.

Third generation farmer Quake Lewellyn, 28, of Jonesboro, was charged with her murder.

On Monday police said during a probable cause hearing that Lewellyn spotted Sutherland on the highway as he was driving, doubled back, and abducted her then drove three miles away to a farm to rape her.

On Monday police said farmer Quake Lewellyn, 28, (left) abducted, raped, then buried 25-year-old nurse Sydney Sutherland after he spotted her on her afternoon jog on August 19

Lewellyn was silent on Monday and wore a bullet-proof vest and an orange prison jumpsuit as he walked up to the Jackson County courthouse for his probable cause hearing

Lewellyn was silent on Monday and wore a bullet-proof vest and an orange prison jumpsuit as he walked up to the Jackson County courthouse for the hearing.

Authorities said he confessed to her killing when they questioned him about Sutherlands disappearance.

Arkansas State Police agent Mike McNeal took the stand and explained how Lewellyn was traveling westbound on County Road 41 when he saw Sutherland walking by and turned around to abduct her.

He forced her in the back of his pick-up truck, drove about three miles to a farm where he raped her, killed her, then buried her body, according to KAIT.

This still shared from Ring footage of a family member is believed to be the last picture of Sutherland and was taken just 90 minutes before she went on a run near her home Wednesday

Lewellyn pictured wearing bullet proof vest and orange jumpsuit for the brief hearing on Monday where authorities said he confessed to Sutherland's killing. Officials said Friday the arrested suspect was known to the victim but the nature of their relationship was unclear

#HappeningNow: Quake Lewellyn has arrived at the Jackson County Courthouse. He will appear before Judicial District Circuit Judge Harold Erwin. @Region8News pic.twitter.com/CMsFXfvSbu  Jurnee Taylor (@_JurneeTaylor) August 24, 2020

Police found Sutherland's body following a three-day search operation using K-9 units and helicopter crews.

She was last seen running on State Hwy 18 between Newport and Grubbs around 3pm on Wednesday. On Friday a body was found and those remains were identified as Sutherlands over the weekend.

The brief hearing did not address how Sutherland died. Sutherlands family was present at the courthouse.

The judge found cause to charge Lewellyn and he was ordered to be held without bond until his next court date on October 1.

In 2016 Lewellyn, a Tuckerman High School graduate, was named as Jackson County Farm Family of the Year alongside his father Michael and grandfather Donald.

Quake told ArkansasOnline.com: 'Ive always worked on the farm. I began driving a yellow Ford,  hauling seed for dad. We all have our own farms, but we help each other out.'

Dad Michael added: 'We are a true family farm. From my dad, Donald, to me, to my son, Quake.' The family are said to own 5,800 acres in four counties.

In 2016 Lewellyn, a Tuckerman High School graduate, was named as Jackson County Farm Family of the Year alongside his father Michael and grandfather Donald.

The alleged suspect 28-year-old Quake Lewellyn being taken into custody on Friday

Police on Friday the arrested suspect was a farmer from Jonesboro and was known to the victim, but the nature of their relationship is unclear.

Prior to Friday, police had discovered Sutherland's iPhone about a quarter-mile from her home. She was reported to have gone on running with her phone and Apple Watch.

Sutherland worked as a nurse, according to her Facebook page, and lived with her boyfriend.

The sheriff confirmed there was no indication of any issues with her boyfriend when the search was launched.

She worked at Harris Medical Center in Newport, where co-workers described her as bright and outgoing.

Sutherland shared regular photos to Facebook of her work as a nurse. Pictured in her scrubs

Sydney was last seen running on State Hwy 18 near her home at around 3pm on Wednesday

'Shes very close to her family,' her co-worker Jennifer Eddington told WMC5 before she was found.

'We just know that she wouldnt leave on her own without contacting somebody, thats not her nature at all.'

The sheriff has praised the local efforts in the search for Sutherland in what was a 'very tragic case'.

'Its taken a toll, it really has,' he said.

'Just because I know the people of this county. I know this family personally. I know this young lady personally. Ive known her and watched her grow up. It hits me personally.'
Once a booming industry, which later spiralled downwards, iron ore mining in Karnataka has been plagued by scams, restrictions and export ban for over a decade. According to industry estimates, over the last decade Karnataka has lost over Rs 29,000 crore in revenues due to the export ban.

With phased re-opening of category A & B mines amid various compliances such as resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R), limited quantity extraction and dumping, the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) in its report has noted substantial improvement in the environmental parameters in the three large mining districts - Chitradurga, Bellary and Tumkur - in Karnataka.

In a report filed to the Supreme Court on June 29, CEC sides with allowing exports of iron ore fines and pellets. The southern chapter of the apex body of the mining industry, the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries (FIMI), has also urged Karnataka's Mines and Geology department to appraise the Supreme Court on of the current situation and permit export from the state.

Also read: Coal India seeks extension of freight concession for coal

With the SC keen to hear the views of the state government on the export ban issue, FIMI has made several representations to the state urging it to file its views on the matter. Also over the last several months, miners and industry body representatives have had several rounds of meetings with the state government to push for export ban lift.

While there is no export ban of iron ore from other states in India, the restriction placed on Karnataka mines has not just resulted in piling of surplus stock but also low price realisation. Currently, a third of the mined iron ore is sold to the single largest steel company JSW steel in Torangal in Bellary, which miners believe has tilted the market price unduly in favour of buyers.

With the iron ore sale now streamlined through online bidding, HM Khayum Ali, FIMI southern chapter and also a former additional director of the mines and geology department, Karnataka, explains that the price discovery is far from being fair. "Nearly 85% of the iron ore is getting sold at low base prices that buyers would quote, else it doesn't get sold," he says.

Also read: NMDC raises iron ore rates by Rs 300 to Rs 2,950 per tonne with immediate effect

According to FIMI, the value of captively consumed iron ore which is fixed by the Indian Bureau of Mines (IBM), has forced lessees to resort to distress sale. According to FIMI in 2018-19, approximately 6.67 MMT of iron ore was imported into the state as a substitute for locally produced iron ore, which resulted in pile up of 8 MMT of old stocks. "The IBM index price for Karnataka for the period of Jan 2018 - May 2019, iron ore prices have gone down in Karnataka by -18.7%, while for Odisha and Chhattisgarh, it has only reduced by -2.7% and -7.7% respectively," added Khayum.

The CEC report to SC also states the present maximum permissible annual production limit of iron ore mines from 37 mines in Chitradurga, Bellary and Tumkur is approximately 32 million metric tonne (MMT). With 5 new leases becoming operational, the annual production of iron ore from 2012-22 is expected to be over 35.72 MMT.

Also read: Hindalco to supply 1.2 million tonnes of bauxite residue to UltraTech Cement
WASHINGTON - Kellyanne Conway, one of President Donald Trumps most influential and longest serving advisers, announced Sunday that she would be leaving the White House at the end of the month.

Conway, Trumps campaign manager during the stretch run of the 2016 race, was the first woman to successfully steer a White House bid, then became a senior counsellor to the president. She informed Trump of her decision in the Oval Office.

Conway cited a need to spend time with her four children in a resignation letter she posted Sunday night. Her husband, George, had become an outspoken Trump critic and her family a subject of Washingtons rumour mill.

We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids, she wrote. For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.

She is still slated to speak at the Republican National Convention this week. Her husband, an attorney who renounced Trump after the 2016 campaign, had become a member of the Lincoln Project, an outside group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump.

The politically adversarial marriage generated much speculation in the Beltway and online. George Conway also announced Sunday that he was taking a leave of absence from both Twitter and the Lincoln Project.

Kellyanne Conway worked for years as a Republican pollster and operative and originally supported Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primary. She moved over to the Trump campaign and that August became campaign manager as Stephen Bannon became campaign chairman; Bannon was indicted two days ago for fraud.

Conway cited a need to help her childrens remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic as a need to step away from her position. She had remained a trusted voice within the West Wing and spearheaded several initiatives, including on combating opioid abuse.

She was also known for her robust defence of the president in media appearances, at times delivering dizzying rebuttals while once extolling the virtues of alternative facts to support her case. Conway was also an informal adviser to the presidents reelection effort but resisted moving over to the campaign.

Her departure comes at an inopportune time for Trump, who faces a deficit in the polls as the Republican National Convention begins on Monday. Her exit was first reported by The Washington Post.
* Euro zone periphery govt bond yields http://tmsnrt.rs/2ii2Bqr

By Yoruk Bahceli

AMSTERDAM, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Safe-haven German bond yields ticked up after their longest decline this year as risk appetite on Monday as hopes for a coronavirus treatment boosted risk assets.

Global shares rose on Monday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorised the use of blood plasma from recovered patients as a coronavirus treatment option.

Safe-haven German 10-year yields were up around 1 basis point to -0.50% in early trade after falling for six consecutive sessions last week, the longest decline since January.

Italy's 10-year bond yield fell 2 basis points to 0.99% .

Without data releases to move the market on Monday, attention was turning to a speech by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Thursday, where he will discuss the banks monetary policy framework review.

Later on Monday, investors will watch the European Central Bank's weekly publication of the breakdown of its conventional bond-buying programmes, which have remained subdued in recent weeks during summer trading.

"The Bund is back towards a more bullish path, and this is likely to remain the bias at the start of this week. The market is eyeing up what's to come in September, and in EGBs (European government bonds) this will mean supply, but also the ECB becoming more active with their QE (quantitative easing) programs," analysts at Mizuho told clients.

"This pick-up is more likely in the first week of September than the one coming, but the market will be pre-empting this buying."

The 10-year Bund yield fell below -0.50% last week after holding above that level for nine days, as investors grew risk averse.

In the primary market, Belgium is scheduled to re-open a 10-year bond via auction.

(Reporting by Yoruk Bahceli, editing by Larry King)
Berlin: German federal authorities have taken over the police protection of prominent Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny who is being treated at a Berlin hospital for suspected poisoning in Siberia.

"The state has initially taken over the police protection of Alexei Navalny," a government spokesman said.

Germany's criminal police office are responsible for protection of government officials, as well as foreign guests during state visits.

Navalny, who is still fighting for his life, was taken ill on a flight to Moscow on Thursday and flown to Germany on Saturday for emergency treatment at Berlin's Charite hospital.
Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan met with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu in Moscow on Sunday to discuss the situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone and Armenias close military ties with Russia.

The two men held talks on the sidelines of a security forum timed to coincide with the start of the annual International Army Games organized by the Russian military.

The Armenian Defense Ministry said they discussed the aftermath of last months deadly fighting on Armenias border with Azerbaijan and the current situation there as well as the Armenian-Azerbaijani line of contact around Karabakh.

Davit Tonoyan emphasized that the aggressive rhetoric of some countries and steps of military nature taken by them are aimed at destabilizing and militarizing the regional situation, read a ministry statement.

Tonoyan appeared to refer to not only Azerbaijan but also Turkey which has blamed Yerevan for the border clashes and voiced support for Baku in unusually strong terms. Ankaras reaction, strongly condemned by the Armenian government, has raised the possibility of Turkish military intervention in the Karabakh conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against attempts to further heighten tensions in the conflict zone when he spoke with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan by phone on July 27.

Russia has up to 5,000 troops stationed in Armenia. Successive Armenian governments have regarded the Russian military presence as a crucial deterrent against possible Turkish aggression.

The clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces broke out on July 12 and continued for several days, leaving at least 17 soldiers from both sides dead. Russias Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that active Russian mediation helped to stop them.

According to the Defense Ministry statement, Shoigu and Tonoyan also discussed bilateral ties and reached understandings on upcoming steps towards military cooperation between their countries. The statement did not elaborate.

The Russian Defense Ministry similarly gave no details of their discussion of pressing issues of bilateral cooperation in the military sphere.

Tonoyans press office also reported that during his latest trip to Moscow the Armenian defense minister will meet with top Russian defense industry executives and government officials overseeing Russian arms exports. Russia has long been the principal sources of weapons and other military hardware supplied to the Armenian army.
(CNN)  The deadly California wildfires have burned over 1 million acres  and there's no end in sight as thousands of firefighters struggle to contain the blazes and more emerge.

Hundreds of fires were started by lightning, Cal Fire spokesman Steve Kaufmann said. There were approximately 12,000 lightning strikes that started 585 fires in the state over the past week. A total of 1.1 million have burned in the state with more than 13,000 firefighters working the fires, he said.

Firefighters have been struggling to contain the massive blazes that have killed at least four people. Two fires -- the 341,243-acre LNU Lightning Complex Fire in the northern Bay Area and Central Valley, and the 339,968 acre-acre SCU Lightning Complex Fire largely east of San Jose -- are among the state's three largest wildfires in recorded history.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Saturday the state has received a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration due to the fires burning in the Northern part of the state. This means President Donald Trump released federal aid to supplement recovery efforts in areas affected by the wildfires.

Those areas include Lake, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma, and Yolo counties, according to a White House statement. The SCU fire is now the 2nd biggest fire in state history while the LNU is the third.

Some firefighters are working 24-hour shifts

Though more than 13,000 firefighters are battling the flames -- some on 24-hour shifts -- there are too many fires and not enough resources to prevent more homes from being torched, Cal Fire officials have said.

One of the reasons for a resource shortage: Fewer prison inmates than usual are helping, because of early releases during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Inmate firefighters "are an integral part of our firefighting operations," Cal Fire spokeswoman Christine McMorrow said. The early releases have meant 600 fewer inmate firefighters are available this fire season compared to last year.

Firefighters are worried about forecasts that say dry thunderstorms -- featuring lightning but little rain -- could spark more fires and spread existing ones Sunday through Tuesday.

At a media conference Sunday, Incident Commander Sean Kavanaugh said the LNU Lightning Complex Fire and SCU Lightning Complex Fire had burned roughly 680,000 acres.

"Right now, both of these fires are sitting at number two and number three as the largest incident in the state. To have both of those going off at the same time is saying something ... it gives us the magnitude of what has happened here in the last week here in the state."

Kavanaugh said that 96% of Cal Fire's engines were engaged in fighting fires, with additional resources coming in from outside agencies, including fire engines from Washington state and Oregon.

But he said resources would be redirected for new fires: "If we do get a new start, we have to pull resources. That is very difficult to do but we do have to do it. We have to make sure we do not get new starts up and running on us."

At the same briefing, Fire Unit Chief Shana Jones warned residents to be ready for possible evacuation.

"Tonight, or today, a weather red flag warning was issued which encompasses pretty much the entire northern half of the state of California and central coastal areas for lightning and erratic winds," she said. "So, what I'm asking from all of you is -- with the weather predicted, the red flag warning issued -- I can't stress enough the importance of being prepared to leave."

Fires cause more death and destruction than all 2019

California wildfires have caused more deaths and destruction so far this year than in all of 2019. Last year, wildfires charred a total of 260,000 acres and killed three people, according to Cal Fire.

The National Weather Service has issued air quality alerts for parts of at least six states: California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado and New Mexico. These alerts warn of moderate to heavy smoke, and advise people -- especially those with heart disease or respiratory illnesses -- to consider staying indoors and limiting outdoor activity.

And as tens of thousands of people heed evacuation orders, they're weighing the risk of coronavirus infections as they decide whether to head to official shelters.

Nearly 41,000 residents in Sonoma County were under evacuation warnings or orders Saturday, officials said.

On top of that, about 8 million people in parts of California, southern Oregon, Montana and southern Utah were under red flag warnings. This means "warm temperatures, very low humidities, and stronger winds are expected to combine to produce an increased risk of fire danger," according to the National Weather Service.

This story was first published on CNN.com 'Deadly California wildfires scorch more than 1 million acres with no end in sight'
VMware VMW is slated to release second-quarter fiscal 2021 results on Aug 27.



For the quarter, total revenues are expected to be $2.80 billion, suggesting 6% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP earnings are expected to be $1.44 per share.



The Zacks Consensus Estimate for quarterly earnings has been steady over the past 30 days at $1.45 per share, suggesting a decline of 9.4% from the year-ago periods reported figure.



Further, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for revenues is pegged at $2.80 billion, indicating a 14.9% rise from the year-ago reported number.



The companys earnings beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate in three of the past four quarters, missing the same in one, the average earnings surprise being 7.7%.



VMware, Inc. Price and EPS Surprise

VMware, Inc. Price and EPS Surprise

VMware, Inc. price-eps-surprise | VMware, Inc. Quote

Lets see how things shaped up prior to this announcement.

Key Factors to Note

VMwares expanding product portfolio is likely to have driven its top line in second-quarter fiscal 2021. Solid adoption of cloud, NSX, vSAN, EUC and security solutions is expected to have driven top-line growth.



The Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company is benefiting from the ongoing cloud-based digital transformation. Markedly, the companys strategy to build strong partnerships with the likes of International Business Machines IBM, Amazons AMZN cloud-computing arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft MSFT is helping it expand customer base in the cloud space. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



The momentum is expected to have continued in the to-be-reported quarter. Moreover, strong demand for VMware Cloud on AWS solution is likely to have aided top-line growth.



Notably, VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service that brings VMware Cloud Foundation to AWS, with optimized access to AWS services. The solution is available across 17 AWS regions, globally. As of June 2020, total VMs were up 3.5 times and total number of hosts was up 2.5 times year over year.



Furthermore, acquisitions of Pivotal Software and Carbon Black are expected to have been instrumental in driving VMwares revenues during the period under consideration.



Nevertheless, VMwares second-quarter fiscal 2021 results are expected to bear the brunt of declining IT spending and a sluggish demand environment due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Story continues

Key Q2 Developments

During the quarter, VMware announced its plans to acquire Octarine, an early-stage startup. Octarines innovative security platform for Kubernetes applications helps simplify DevSecOps and enables cloud-native environments to be intrinsically secure from development through runtime.



Moreover, the company acquired Datrium to expand its VMware Site Recovery disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering.



The company alsoannounced the general availability of vRealize Automation Cloud Service in Singapore. Further, VMware introduced an integrated feature in vSphere 7 that will enable enterprises to deliver elastic infrastructure on-demand for AI and machine learning applications.



Further, VMware announced the expansion of its VMware Ready for Telco Cloud program, formerly known as the VMware Ready for NFV program. The enhanced certification program enables VMware partners to test the interoperability and readiness of their Virtual Network Functions and Cloud-Native Network Functions with the VMware Telco Cloud platform. It also enables VMware partners to accelerate onboarding and deployment of their 5G-ready services on the VMware Telco Cloud platform.



Additionally, VMware was selected as the cloud platform by DISH Network to deploy its 5G, cloud-native Open Radio Access Network on Jul 31.

Dell Intents to Spin-off VMware Stake

On Jul 15, Dell Technologies announced that it is planning to spin off its 81% equity-ownership interest at VMware. The deal is expected to not materialize before September 2021.

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One person was killed and dozens feared trapped after a five-storey apartment building collapsed late Monday in western India, officials said.

Estimates of the number of missing people range from 51 to 200, according to various local officials.

The collapsed structure comprised 47 flats, police in the town of Mahad -- 120 kilometres (75 miles) south of Mumbai in Maharashtra state -- said in a statement.

The cause of the accident was not immediately clear, but building collapses are common during India's June-September monsoon, with old and rickety structures buckling under the weight of non-stop rain.

Three rescue teams with specialised equipment and sniffer dogs have been deployed to the scene, a statement from India's National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) said, with Home Minister Amit Shah tweeting that he was "praying for everyone's safety".

NDRF spokesman Sachidanand Gawde told reporters that emergency workers had retrieved the body of one victim, while Mahad police said at least 70 people were believed to be trapped under the rubble.

"Fifteen injured people have been rescued and taken to hospital," the police said in a statement.

Local residents and police combed through tin sheets, metal rods and other wreckage in a desperate search for survivors as ambulances ferried victims to nearby hospitals.

Mahad legislator Bharat Gogawale told the local TV9 Marathi channel that early estimates seemed to suggest that "over 200 people are stuck inside".

"Our primary goal is to rescue as many people as possible who are trapped under the debris," Gogawale said.

An unnamed official with the Maharashtra state Disaster Management Unit later told the Press Trust of India that 51 people were missing.

Some 70 people fled to safety when the building began to buckle, Nidhi Choudhari, an official in the district where Mahad is located, told PTI.

"We also came to know that many families are not residing in the building as they went to their native places due to the coronavirus-induced lockdown", Choudhari told PTI.

Story continues

- 'Scary situation' -

Local politician Manik Motiram Jagtap told TV9 Marathi that the structure was 10 years old and built on "weak" foundations.

"It fell like a house of cards," Jagtap said.

"It is a scary situation."

As night fell, emergency workers used cranes to try and remove the rubble as relatives anxiously waited for news of their loved ones.

The office of Uddhav Thackeray, the state's chief minister, said on Twitter that he had been in touch with local representatives in the area.

"He has assured them that all possible support will be extended for speedy rescue and relief works," the tweet said.

The monsoon plays a vital role in boosting agricultural harvests across South Asia. But it also causes widespread death and destruction, unleashing floods, triggering building collapses and inundating low-lying villages.

The death toll from monsoon-related disasters this year has topped 1,200, including more than 800 lives lost in India alone.

The accident brings yet more bad news for Maharashtra, which has already been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis, with the state accounting for over a fifth of India's more than three million infections.

The pandemic has also cast a shadow on the ongoing Ganesha Chaturthi festival, with Hindu devotees ordered to sharply scale down celebrations and rituals honouring the much-loved elephant god in a bid to limit the spread of the virus.

vm-amu/ch/dw
Jerry Falwell Jr. says he was depressed after wife had affair, man blackmailed family

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Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., who is currently on an indefinite leave of absence from the Christian college after a series of public embarrassing acts, revealed Sunday that he had been depressed after his wife, Rebecca, had an affair with a young man who then blackmailed his family.

During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school. We encouraged him to pursue an education and a career and we were impressed by his initiative in suggesting a local real estate opportunity. My family members eventually made an investment in a local property, included him in the deal because he could play an active role in managing it, and became close with him and his family, Falwell said in a statement to the Washington Examiner late Sunday.

Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved  it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about, he explained.

Falwell did not identify his wifes former lover but previous reports identify him as Giancarlo Granda, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, who was 21 at the time he met the Falwells. Granda met the Falwells while working as a pool boy at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach. That relationship would eventually result in the Falwells investing in a gay-friendly youth hostel they purchased in 2013 for $4.7 million.

According to the Miami Herald, the investment led to even more trouble as Falwell settled a lawsuit last October brought by 28-year-old lawyer Gordon Bello for an undisclosed monetary sum over the hostel deal. Bello claimed in the lawsuit that he and his father, Miami builder Jett Bello, pitched Falwell on the hostel idea after Granda, a high school friend, introduced them.

Granda, who flew with the Falwells on corporate jets and traveled to Liberty University in 2012 to meet now President Donald Trump (a keynote speaker at the university at the time), was granted a 25% share in the South Beach real estate deal. Bello argued that he was promised a similar share.

He further noted that he met Falwells wife through Granda and formed a personal relationship with her before he met the now suspended university president in the lobby of the Loews Miami Beach for the alleged pitch meeting in 2012, the Miami Herald noted.

In his statement Sunday, Falwell explained how he lost 80 lbs after learning of his wifes affair. The couple, he said, forgave each other, because while her indiscretion may have been more obvious and apparent, I realized that there were important smaller things I needed to do better too.

The forgiveness would soon extend to Granda, Falwell explained, with respect and kindness, both for spiritual and religious reasons, and in the hope that we could help him find his way and allow us to put this behind us, without any harm or embarrassment to our family or to the LU community to which we have dedicated our lives.

After getting to know Granda and his family more, Falwell explained, he learned that he has periodically demonstrated emotionally unstable behaviors with some destructive tendencies, seemingly in response to his inability to achieve his professional goals.

He also suggested that Granda may have targeted other successful women in the same way he targeted his wife. Falwell said he and his wife tried to distance themselves from the former pool boy but things devolved into a fatal attraction type situation.

While we tried to distance ourselves from him over time, he unfortunately became increasingly angry and aggressive. Eventually, he began threatening to publicly reveal this secret relationship with Becki and to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies, Falwell explained. It was like living on a roller coaster.

Over the years, Falwell said, Granda stepped up threats against him and his family when they decided to withdraw completely from him. He threatened "to share more outrageous and fabricate claims about us (under the guise of that business entity).

He clearly moved forward with this plan through a specific member of the media who has continued to badger us, as well as other members of the media, regarding the false claims about the nature of the relationship based on the individuals misrepresentations. Over the course of the last few months this person's behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public, Falwell revealed. We have categorically rejected this persons demands while dealing with him and this particular member of the media who seemed just as obsessed with the prurient, untrue aspects of this story, however fantastic.

Falwell explained that he is now addressing his mental health needs triggered by the ongoing saga in a healthier way and is trusting God to get through it.

I shouldnt have been afraid to admit my vulnerabilities and to reach out for assistance from the mental health professionals who could have alleviated this pain and stress. I am committed to speaking out and sharing with others at Liberty the importance of seeking counseling instead of thinking you need to be tough and try to bear these burdens on your own. I am in the early stages of addressing these issues, he said.

Falwell agreed with Libertys board earlier this month to take an indefinite leave of absence from his roles at the university.

The board's decision came after Falwell apologized for posting a photo of himself at a costume party on a yacht during his family's vacation that showed him wearing a T-shirt and jeans that were unzipped to expose his abdomen and underwear. His right hand was around the waist of his wife's assistant, who was wearing a tank top and unzipped shorts.

A group of 50 ministers who graduated from Liberty University are now calling on the school's leadership to permanently remove Falwell from his post.
(Photo : SANA/Handout via REUTERS) Firefighters spray water on the fire that resulted from an explosion on the Arab Gas Pipeline between the towns of Ad Dumayr and Adra, northwest of the capital of Damascus, Syria, in this handout released by SANA on August 24, 2020. (Photo : REUTERS/Diaa Al-Din) Smoke rises after what activists said were air strikes by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Arbeen, in the eastern Damascus suburb of Ghouta, March 8, 2015.

On late Sunday night, Aug. 23, Syria's main gas pipeline called Arab Gas Pipeline exploded. The explosion resulted in the place's 'national blackout.' The United States envoy currently looking at the situation told media that the incident was 'almost certainly' made by the Islamic State or ISIS.

ISIS attack again?

Three power stations in Syria recently exploded, resulting in a 'national blackout' experienced in the nation over Sunday, Aug. 23.

Investigators in the scene observed that a missing large chunk piece of the pipeline was missing. This was thought to be the main reason for the explosion. Officials in Syria called the sudden explosion as 'terrorist attack,' including Syria's oil minister, Ali Ghanem.

He also noted that the Arab Gas Pipeline was already targeted for the sixth time, counting the recent one. Electricity coming from the pipelines was already fixed, and the nation already gained their power back.

But, who's the culprit behind this massive explosion?

The United States Syria Envoy James Jeffrey was quoted by Reuters, accusing the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as the main suspect behind the explosion.

"We are still looking into that. But it was almost certainly a strike by ISIS," Jeffrey told reporters in Geneva at the start of U.N.-sponsored talks of the Syrian Constitutional Committee.

The US envoy also mentioned that 'ISIS' activities are now increasing over time.

Adding, "In Syria, particularly the Badia Desert south of the Euphrates ... we're seeing an upsurge of ISIS activity."

Is it possible that this was an ISIS attack?

The U.S. envoy no longer elaborates on his statement regarding the ISIS attack, or how he concluded the statement.

In 2018, Al Jazeera reported that Russia, in partnership with the Iran-backed Damascus government, already wiped off the presence of the last ISIS rebels from Dumeir, a town about 40km (25 miles) northeast of Damascus.

However, the groups immediately returned to the city around the Badia desert, after their expulsion in the area.

Also not coincidental, Syria had already experienced a number of explosions for the past months.

In Dec., three government-run oil and gas installations in central Syria exploded due to the presence of unknown flying drones.

A month after that, the Syrian government mentioned about divers planting explosives near the Mediterranean Coast, but it was stopped.

So far, investigations about the explosion are still ongoing.

ALSO READ: [VIRAL] Beirut Explosion: Never-Before-Seen Explosion Video Went Viral on Social Media

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Written by Jamie Pancho

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Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops 28 times, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijani Defense Ministry.

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 the withdrawal of its armed forces from Nagorno Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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The emotionally charged event saw some participants crying and others applauding veterans of the war against Russian-backed separatists

Tens of thousands of people, many of them veterans in uniform, joined an unofficial march in Kiev to mark Ukraine's Independence Day on Monday, after the president refused to organise a traditional military parade.

It was the second year in a row that Volodymyr Zelensky, who came to power in 2019 on promises to end the six-year war in the east with Russian-backed separatists, decided not to hold the parade.

The president has said military hardware should be on the frontline, not on display in the capital.

Veterans of the conflict organised a march of their own, walking through the centre of the capital alongside relatives and well-wishers, waving blue and yellow national flags.

The emotionally charged event saw some participants crying and others applauding veterans of the war, which has claimed some 13,000 lives.

Some held up pictures of soldiers from their families killed in the conflict, as the crowd chanted "Thank you!" and "Glory to Ukraine!"

Many marchers not in military uniform wore traditional embroidered shirts, which in recent years have become a patriotic Ukrainian symbol.

"With this march, we are proving that not only the military but all of society values and respects Ukrainian traditions," 60-year-old Vasyl, a camouflage-clad veteran, told AFP.

The march was held despite the coronavirus pandemic, with only some of the participants wearing masks as requested by organisers.

At an official ceremony earlier in the day, Zelensky expressed hope for peace efforts underway to resolve the conflict, promising a military parade "after we return all our people and all our territories".

The day marks the anniversary of the Ukrainian parliament's declaration of independence during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

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Kim Jong-un in coma, sister to take over says South Korean diplomat

International

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Pyongyang, Aug 24: North Korea's Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un is in coma and his sister is posed to take over, Chang Song-min, a former aide to South Korea's late president Kim Day-Jung said.

Kim Jong Un is in coma, not dead says North Korea watcher | Oneindia News

Song-min took to the social media to say that Kim Yo-Jong has been made the de facto second-in-command. He said no leader in North Korea would entrust the leadership to anyone unless he was too sick to rule or was removed through a coup.

Kim Jong Un did not have surgery says South Korea

He said that the authority and responsibility have been delegated to Kim Jong-un's sister for managing relations with the US and South Korea. He added that he had got this information from a source in China.

"I assess him to be in a coma, but his life has not ended. "A complete succession structure has not been formed, so Kim Yo-jong is being brought to the fore as the vacuum cannot be maintained for a prolonged period," he said in an interview with The Korea Herald.

He also said that the photos that were released recently of the Supreme Leader were fake. This year the rumour mills were abuzz as Kim had made fewer public appearances. There were speculations of his death as well due to a failed heart surgery.
The test reports of the 38 volunteers who were given the first dose of anti-Covid vaccine in Uttar Pradeshs Kanpur have shown promising results. The vaccine, known as Covaxin, has been developed by Bharat Biotech.

Samples from the volunteers were taken on August 14, exactly two weeks after the vaccine was injected into them at Prakhar Hospital in the city as per the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) guidelines.

Prakhar Hospital is one of two private hospitals in Uttar Pradesh that were chosen for human trials of the vaccine.

The inputs shared with us can fill anyone with a lot of hope; the results are very encouraging, said Dr JS Kushwaha, chairman of the hospital.

The anti-bodies developed are well beyond expectations. If this holds in future tests, too, we may have our vaccine by the end of the year, he said.

The second sample of this batch, and the first sample of the second batch of 32 people, would be taken on August 28.

The samples were sent to the National Institute of Virology (NVI) where they were tested on the lines of the ICMR guidelines. The experts here said they were expecting good results as none of the participants complained after they were given the vaccine.

The hospital had set up a team of specialists to monitor the participants, with whom they spoke twice in a day in the past three weeks. The day they were given the vaccine we had them with us for three hours against the two hours as specified. No one complained of any side effects then, nor did they in three weeks, the experts said.

That was a positive sign and the test results have vindicated what we were feeling, he said.

The process for the human trial of the vaccine had begun in July with the hospital screening nearly 100 individuals who had listed for the programme. Their blood samples for coronavirus and anti-bodies were taken and tested twice at the ICMR recognised labs.

It was done to make sure that the participant was healthy and that the level of anti-bodies could be matched after the vaccine given. The data was analysed at the NIV and shared with the hospital where the vaccines were given.

The hospital has planned a trial on 100 volunteers in two stages.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:34:53|Editor: huaxia

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TEHRAN, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Iran's confirmed novel coronavirus cases rose to 361,150 on Monday after an overnight registration of 2,245 new infections, Iran's Ministry of Health and Medical Education announced.

Sima Sadat Lari, the spokeswoman for the Iranian ministry, said at her daily briefing that out of the new cases in the past 24 hours, 1,132 have been hospitalized.

The pandemic has so far claimed 20,776 lives in Iran, up by 133 in the past 24 hours, said Lari.

Besides, 311,365 have recovered and been discharged from hospitals while 3,848 remain in critical condition.

She added that 3,062,422 lab tests have so far been carried out in Iran.

The spokeswoman said that 26 Iranian provinces, out of 31, are either in the high-risk or alert condition.

Iran announced its first cases of COVID-19 on Feb. 19.

Iran and China have offered mutual help in combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

In mid-February, at the early stage of the coronavirus outbreak in China, Iran lit up the Tehran Azadi (Liberty) Tower to show its solidarity with China, and donated 3 million masks to China.

In return, China has delivered several shipments of medical supplies to Iran. On Feb. 29, a five-member Chinese medical team visited Iran for a month-long mission to help Iran fight the pandemic. Enditem
In this 2005 photo, Scott Peterson is escorted by two San Mateo County Sheriff deputies as he is walked from the jail to a waiting van in Redwood City, Calif. Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif.  The California Supreme Court on Monday upheld the conviction but overturned the 2005 death sentence for Scott Peterson in the slaying of his pregnant wife, and said prosecutors may try again for the same sentence if they wish in the case that attracted worldwide attention.

Laci Peterson, 27, was eight months pregnant with their unborn son, Connor, when she was killed. Investigators said that on Christmas Eve 2002, Peterson dumped their bodies from his fishing boat into San Francisco Bay, where they surfaced months later.

Peterson contends his trial was flawed for multiple reasons, beginning with the unusual amount of pretrial publicity that surrounded the case., the court said. We reject Petersons claim that he received an unfair trial as to guilt and thus affirm his convictions for murder.

But the justices said the trial judge made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection that, under long-standing United States Supreme Court precedent, undermined Petersons right to an impartial jury at the penalty phase.

It agreed with his argument that potential jurors were improperly dismissed from the jury pool after saying they personally disagreed with the death penalty but would be willing to follow the law and impose it.

While a court may dismiss a prospective juror as unqualified to sit on a capital case if the jurors views on capital punishment would substantially impair his or her ability to follow the law, a juror may not be dismissed merely because he or she has expressed opposition to the death penalty as a general matter, the justices said in a unanimous decision.

They rejected Petersons argument that he couldnt get a fair trial because of the widespread publicity that followed, although the proceedings were moved nearly 90 miles (145 kilometers) away from his Central Valley home of Modesto to San Mateo County, south of San Francisco.

Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager did not immediately say if she would again seek the death penalty.

Peterson, who is now 47, was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his wife and the second-degree murder of their unborn son.

We are grateful for the California Supreme Courts unanimous recognition that if the state wishes to put someone to death, it must proceed to trial only with a fairly selected jury, Cliff Gardner, Petersons appellate attorney, said in an email.

His well-known trial attorney, Mark Geragos, said he objected at the time to what he said was clear error in jury selection.

Geragos said he does not expect prosecutors to retry the penalty phase. Frankly, I think the only reason that they sought the death penalty was to get a guilt-prone jury panel, he said.

California has not executed anyone since 2006 because of legal challenges to the way it would carry out the death penalty, and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has a moratorium on executions for as long as he is governor.

That moratorium helped lead other California prosecutors to negotiate a plea deal in the more recent high-profile Golden State Killer case. Former police officer Joseph DeAngelo was sentenced to multiple life terms on Friday in exchange for his guilty pleas to 13 murders and 13 rape-related charges.

After Peterson's death, investigators chased nearly 10,000 tips and considered parolees and convicted sex offenders as possible suspects.

Scott Peterson was eventually arrested after Amber Frey, a massage therapist living in Fresno, told police that they had begun dating a month before his wifes death, but that he had told her his wife was dead.

He also had contended on appeal that the trial court erred in deciding whether jurors and the defense were properly allowed to test whether Petersons new boat would likely have capsized if he dumped the weighted bodies over the side.

Peterson can still argue that he was unfairly convicted, using evidence that was not considered at his trial, and if that fails can try again in federal court.

While we are disappointed that such a biased jury selection process results in a reversal of only the death sentence, we look forward to the Courts review of the new forensic and eyewitness evidence of innocence, Gardner wrote.

Geragos said he expects Peterson will eventually be exonerated. Were halfway there, he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 02:35:53|Editor: huaxia

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BAGHDAD, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi Health Ministry on Monday reported 3,980 recoveries from COVID-19 during the day, the highest in single day since the outbreak of the disease.

A statement by the ministry said that 3,644 new COVID-19 cases were detected during the past 24 hours, bringing the total nationwide infections to 207,985.

It also reported 91 fatalities during the day, raising the death toll to 6,519, after using 24,039 testing kits across the country during the day, and a total of 1,457,665 tests have been carried out since the outbreak of the disease.

In a separate statement, the ministry announced that it has treated some 15,000 COVID-19 infections with plasma extracted from the blood of the recovered people since the outbreak of the virus.

It said that it has made a great success with using the blood plasma of recovered patients, which contains anti-bodies, in treating other infected people with coronavirus.

Iraq has been taking a series of measures to contain the pandemic since February when the first coronavirus case appeared in the country.

China has been helping Iraq fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

From March 7 to April 26, a Chinese team of seven medical experts spent 50 days in Iraq to help contain the disease, during which they helped build a PCR lab and install an advanced CT scanner in Iraq's capital Baghdad.

Since March 7, China has also sent three batches of medical aid to Iraq. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:44:09|Editor: huaxia

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GENEVA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The latest Syrian Constitutional Committee meeting opened here on Monday morning has been suspended after three members of the committee tested positive for COVID-19, according to the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria.

"Following a constructive first meeting, the Third Session of the Constitutional Committee is currently on hold. The Office of the Special Envoy will make a further announcement in due course," the office said in a statement.

The office said on Monday afternoon that three members of the Syrian Constitutional Committee "small body," who are currently attending the new round of constitutional talks here, have tested positive for COVID-19

"Having informed the Swiss authorities and the United Nations Office in Geneva, immediate measures have been taken consistent with protocols to mitigate any risks, and tracing of anyone who may have been in close contact with affected persons is underway," it said.

According to the office, the Syrian committee members were tested before they traveled to Geneva, and they were tested again on arrival. Mask-wearing and strict social distancing measures were in place when they met at the UN headquarters in Geneva on Monday.

Ahead of the convening of the latest Syrian Constitutional Committee, UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen met with the heads of delegations respectively from the Syrian government, the opposition and the civil society.

"I am looking forward to a week of substantial discussions on the agenda and moving the process forward," he said on Sunday on Twitter.

Earlier on last Friday, the UN special envoy told a press conference in Geneva that he wishes the upcoming Syrian peace talks to be handled correctly so as to build confidence and bring hope for the Syrian people.

The UN official also told reporters that a nationwide ceasefire and efforts to improve the economic situation during the COVID-19 pandemic will also be important topics for future talks.

The Syrian Constitutional Committee, which comprises representatives of the Syrian government, the opposition, and civil society, was officially launched in Geneva on Oct. 30, 2019, and then held two rounds of sessions last November, without making any major progress. Enditem
The little girl is a celebrity herself, as her Instagram account accumulates more than 200 thousand followers. In each image, the toddler enchants everyone with her smile and her confidence in front of the camera.

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Kenya Moore, 49, is a very happy and lucky mother as she is very proud of her beautiful little daughter. It is for this reason that she does not hesitate to show it at every opportunity she has. Brooklyn is a loved and very happy girl as can be seen in her photographs.

Despite the isolation and the change in the way of life that the pandemic has imposed on everyone, the toddler receives the love of her mother in full hands.

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In the last photo of her personal account, Brooklyn flashes her smile as she rides her stroller. Her mother wrote for her: Have a happy day!

Moores and little Brookyns fans were taken as usual with the toddlers adorableness and they took to the comments section of the post to express their emotions about it.

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She is sooooo sweet, an enthusiastic commenter wrote as a reply to the image. Too much cuteness, was a second persons opinion. Such a beautiful and happy little girl, a third person observed.

PROBLEMS FROM THE BEGINNING

Brooklyn's parents, Moore and Marc Daly couldn't find a way to get along and stay together. After a brief courtship and a secret wedding in 2017, many thought that with such a romantic start, the love they professed would last for many years.

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However, soon after they were married, problems began to emerge. Moore identified their difficulties as communication problems. She commented on this during season 12 of Real Housewives of Atlanta, explaining that they couldn't speak without Daly yelling and getting angry.

HER DAUGHTER FIRST

It seems that regardless of how their marriage ended, both Moore and Daly have stepped up to learn to get along, not with the intention of getting their marriage back but in the interest of doing what is best for their daughter.

Actress Kenya Moore attends Sally Beauty in store appearance on May 04, 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. I Image: Getty Images.

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Brooklyn deserves what every child deserves - parents who think about their well-being and balanced emotional development. That is why her parents are working hard to co-parent together.

Although it seems they have decided to leave their relationship behind, Moore encourages Daly to be an active part of her daughter's life. The couple's only daughter was born in November 2019 after a complicated pregnancy and an emergency c-section.

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HIDDEN OR PROHIBITED THINGS

Moore also confessed that the lack of intimacy in their marriage influenced their breakup too. She wanted to be happy and did everything in her power to make them both happy. But at the end of their relationship, Daly expressed himself by saying that he hated being married.

In addition, Moore commented that during their marriage she felt out of her husband's life. There were many things about her ex-husband that she was never a part of.

For example, she was forbidden to speak to his parents. It was definitely not a good way to build a strong or even a family.
Computers are in, and clothes are out.

In simpler times, back-to-school shopping trips were a frenzy of finding the right-colored shoes and leggings and accessories. Now, with most Houston-area districts launching virtually, parents and teachers face choices around buying costly electronics for an uncertain school year.

Debates over how best to educate the citys children during the pandemic rage on. Most will start with some sort of online learning program, with many split over when to return for in-person schooling. That uncertainty will reveal itself in back-to-school shopping patterns, analysts predict. Some districts started school this week, others will start next week and some delayed their school start until after Labor Day.

Virtual starts to the school year mean many will families defer clothing costs, said Jeff Buhr, a retail analyst and partner with accounting and consulting firm Deloittes Houston office. But the cost for new electronics and other home learning needs are expected to displace that savings.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Houston-area schools lost contact with tens of thousands of students during COVID, TEA data shows

Deloitte predicts a 17 percent year-over-year drop in spending for clothing and traditional school supplies, and a 28 percent increase in sales of computers and electronics needed for virtual learning. The firms annual survey found that 51 percent of parents surveyed will spend money in new ways that supplement their childrens education, such as tutors and online tools.

Parents werent pleased with the coronavirus-era impacts on the classroom, he said, and it doesnt seem like theyre impacting all children equally.

Households that had computers provided to them will likely see less spending on school supplies this year than earlier years, given savings on back-to-school clothes. Others, like Meagan Clanahan, who has twin 10-year-olds at Katy ISD, sprung for laptops for multiple children and watched the familys annual back-to-school budget double.

Before COVID we were mainly concerned about, what will we wear for back to school, she said, noting back-to-school shopping cost her and her husband around $1,000 this year. Id probably spend less than half of what I just spent.

The National Retail Federation, a trade group, predicts families with children will spend an average of about $789 for back-to-school supplies this year, up from $697 last year. Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of research for the Greater Houston Partnership, said the figure is likely to be $100 to $200 lower in Houston, where prices tend to be cheaper.

With jobless rates soaring, virtual learnings cost stokes fear for low-income families that may not be able to meet the rising costs of virtual learning.

On HoustonChronicle.com: 10 superintendents pen letter opposing Hidalgo's guidance for reopening Harris County schools

A similar shift may be in store for teachers.

Rachel Wadler, a music teacher at Travis Elementary School just north of downtown, shopped for a faster laptop last week at Best Buy to ease her virtual start to the school year. Her choice: an HP Pavilion.

She considered a more expensive computer, but her budget is restricted to the $1,000 her mother gave her for the purpose, and she wanted to save funds for a desk.

In earlier years, shed simply shop for some new clothes  items she felt comfortable sitting on the floor and moving around the classroom in. This year, she said shell be spending much more to set up a home office where her kitchen table used to be.

It used to be clothes, and now its a desk, she said with a shrug.

Across the board, both rural and city customers have shown interest in devices like laptops, tablets and routers, to name a few, said Matthew Smith, a spokesman for Best Buy. Additionally, more rural customers have shown an interest in cell phone boosters, as some rural customers are in dead zones without strong service.

A Spring Branch mom, Andrea Junkin, said she works in information technology and so was able to get electronics for her kids to use in virtual classrooms. Since she was spared the tech expenses, shopping this year has been less costly than normal, especially given last years leftovers, she said.

The uniforms is the biggest difference, because they didnt get to use their clothes, she said. Their uniforms are still intact.

Texas Inc.: Get the best of business news sent directly to your inbox

Many families reported plans to order online and pick up in-store  a shopping trend accelerated by the pandemic. Big-box stores like Walmart, Best Buy and even department stores like Macys are ramping up their curbside pickup services to meet shifting demands.

Vicky Yip, who has three children in Houston ISD, said she did all of her shopping online this year, which was new for her. Shes already spent several hundred more than usual and may need to buy another computer for her two younger children to share, so shes cutting corners where she can.

She said it feels this year that her back-to-school shopping is never done. Learning at home is still so new for her family, she said, so she finds herself buying items she never knew shed need. Like an electric pencil sharpener.

I did not realize children went through so many pencils, she said.

amanda.drane@chron.com
The spokesman for rogue general Khalifa Hifters self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) rejected a UN-backed call for a cease-fire put forth by Libyas Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA).

Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Mismari alleged Sunday that last weeks call for a cease-fire by western Libyas Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj was a ruse. There is a military buildup and transfer of equipment to target our forces in Sirte, Mismari said during a press conference.

If Sarraj wanted a cease-fire, he would have pulled his forces back, not advanced toward our units in Sirte, Mismari said, adding that the LNA was prepared to fight any advance toward Sirte.

Mismari did not acknowledge Aguila Salehs acceptance on Friday of the GNAs cease-fire invitation. Saleh, the head of eastern Libyas parliament, is aligned with Hifters forces but has limited influence over them.

A day prior, western Libyas High Council of State, an advisory council to the Tripoli-based government, ruled out any future political cooperation with war criminal and terrorist Khalifa Hifter.

The LNAs cease-fire rejection is the latest setback in international efforts to stabilize Libyas conflict. US officials have said a rare opportunity has emerged in recent weeks, as multiple rival foreign governments involved in the conflict  including Turkey, Russia and Egypt  expressed openness to working to settle the conflict.

Last week, Sarraj unexpectedly announced he had ordered GNA troops to stand down, just days after Turkeys presidential spokesman and adviser, Ibrahim Kalin, told Al-Jazeera that Ankara was open to working with Russia to reach a political settlement in Libya.

Sarraj on Friday called for a demilitarization of Sirte, a restoration of Libyas oil production and equitable sharing of oil revenues through the Tripoli-based National Oil Corporation.

Egypts President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi praised the call, after having threatened to militarily intervene if Sarrajs side pressed its attack eastward toward Egypts border.

For months, the GNA, backed by Turkeys military and Syrian mercenary fighters, had been vowing to redouble its counteroffensive that has rolled back Hifters eastern forces from the outskirts of Tripoli.

The GNA repeatedly vowed to assault the coastal city of Sirte and central Libyas Jufra, both held by Hifters forces, unless the LNA withdrew from the areas. Mismari said last week the LNA would not withdraw from Sirte.
Dosa comes in various types: Masal Dosa, Ghee Podi Dosa, Cheese Dosa, Plain Dosa, Onion Dosa etc. Yet, social media presents us with an eccentric type of dosa: Dosa topped with red sauce pasta and grated cheese. Yes. you read that right.

The lockdown has seen many people coming out with their bizarre food trial videos, which have either left people in awe or straight up disgusted. This too, does not seem to be any different.

A Twitter user, @India_Maharaj, took to the social media platform to share the video of a dosa being cooked on a frying pan. Then eventually the red sauce is prepared on it and pasta is added too. At the end some grated cheese is sprinkled on the dish and then the dosa is cut into small rolls at the time of serving.

ALSO READ: After Idli in Chai, Video of Chicken Tikka Soaked in Tea Has Left Netizens in Splits

Captioning the video he said, "Tamil Friend jab iss type ka dosa Dekhta bahut Gaaliya deta hai (When a Tamil friend sees this type of dosa, it's sure he is going to curse us)."

Tamil Friend jab iss type ka dosa Dekhta bahut Gaaliya deta hai pic.twitter.com/CVNPEHutTz RDX (@India_Maharaj) August 22, 2020

It was not surprising that the merging of south Indian cuisine with that of Italain, didn't quite settle well with netizens, who seemed to be pretty grossed out.

Dosa , Pasta , Pizza    YUVRAJ (@BHARATIYASEEKER) August 22, 2020

After seeing Dosa is trending After seeing 'Why Dosa' is trending  Concept Holidayz (@ConceptHolidayz) August 23, 2020

Ye dosa hai  Deputy (@JhoothaChal) August 22, 2020

This is nowhere near a Dosa. Fusion Frankie at best. Hemant Gaulechha (@HemantGaulechha) August 23, 2020

Geez.. Pasta.. Ketchup.. Mayo.. To be eaten with rice batter.. Gross. I am not even a Tamilian Maya (@Sharanyashettyy) August 23, 2020

Dosa to wahi khatam ho gaya tha jab usney ketchup dala.  RAHUL (@brickmetal) August 22, 2020

ALSO READ: After Oreo Bhajiya, Bizarre Recipe of Chocolate Maggi Has Left a Bad Taste Among Desi Twitter

Last year in another bizarre video, a person dunking a piece of idli in a cup of tea went viral.
Teens from Mass. church hold car wash, raise thousands of dollars for Beirut relief

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A congregation in Massachusetts has raised money through a car wash and through their website to help the victims of the recent massive explosion in Beirut.

St. George Orthodox Church of Boston held the car wash on Saturday, with the youth raising thousands of dollars while cleaning a couple hundred vehicles.

The Very Rev. Timothy J. Ferguson, head pastor of the church, told The Christian Post that the congregation felt inspired to hold the charitable event due to the many personal ties to Lebanon.

Our community, my parish that is to say, is about 60% immigrants from Lebanon. And so there were a lot of people who were directly affected by the explosion that took place there, explained Ferguson.

So they wanted to reach out and respond. It was an initiative on the part of the teenagers, the young people in the parish.

While the car wash charged $10 per vehicle, Ferguson noted, many drivers gave way more than what was asked, with donations passing the $7,000 mark and still being added through the churchs online donation page.

They cant physically get up and go there, so they know that those funds are being used for what they would do had they been given the chance to go there, the pastor said.

Donations will go to helping to rebuild homes, to take care of people who are in need of food, clothing, and so forth, with it being managed through the local organizations in Beirut, he explained.

Earlier this month, a large explosion occurred in a port in the major Middle Eastern city of Beirut, resulting in approximately 200 people killed and around 5,000 injured.

The large explosion was the result when hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate were ignited; an investigation into the exact cause of the blast is underway.

After the tragedy, Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab announced his resignation, which came not only in response to the explosion but also major anti-government protests.

I declare today the resignation of this government, said Diab, citing huge corruption as a problem at a press conference, ABC News reported. May God protect Lebanon.

Many churches and aid organizations have poured resources into the city, among them the evangelical Christian humanitarian group World Vision.

Rami Shamma, field operations director for World Vision-Lebanon who was around 18 miles away from the explosion, told CP in an earlier interview that emotional care was needed in addition to physical aid.

They have either experienced it or seen it. People are talking about it, yelling about it, crying about it, said Shamma to CP.

The trauma is stacked up and thus we support in psychological first aid and guiding parents for children living through this difficult time.
A $2 million bond was set Aug. 24 for a suspect accused of shooting a man multiple times during a Willoughby hotel robbery.

Justin Hood, 19, of Cleveland was arrested Aug. 20 in connection with an Aug. 2 shooting at the 4166 Route 306 Red Roof Inn.

Hood was featured Aug. 10 as a Fugitive of the Week by the U.S. Marshals Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force. He was arrested by task force members who allegedly found him hiding in a basement in the 3600 block of E. 143rd Street in Cleveland, according to a Marshals news release. He was then taken straight to the Willoughby Police Department for questioning.

Willoughby police said on Aug. 10 that the victim had been released from the hospital and was recovering at home.

Hood is facing charges in Willoughby Municipal Court of first-degree felony aggravated robbery and second-degree felony felonious assault, according to court records.

A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Aug. 27, according to court records.

The $2 million cash or surety bond was set by Municipal Court Judge Marisa L. Cornachio. If Hood posts bond, he is prohibited from possessing firearms and will be on GPS monitoring.
Indian Air Force (IAF) Chief Rakesh Kumar Singh Bhadauria on Monday launched a mobile application, "MY IAF", that will provide career-related information to those who want to join the Indian Air Force, read an official statement. The app was launched by Air Chief Marshal Bhadauria at Vayu Bhawan as part of the 'Digital India' initiative.

"The application, developed in association with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), provides career-related information and details for those desirous of joining the IAF," the statement said.

It added, "The user-friendly format of the app serves as a single digital platform interfacing the users with the details of the selection procedure, training curriculum, pay and perks etc for both officers and airmen in the IAF."

The application is available on Google Play store for android phones and is linked to the IAF's social media platforms. It also provides glimpses into the history and stories of valour in the IAF, the statement added.

The first batch of five Rafale jets, which recently arrived at the Ambala airbase, have already proven their mettle with successful weapons firing at a test range after arrival. When the first batch of Rafales arrived at Ambala on July 29, the IAF had said that a final induction ceremony will be held in the second half of August and that efforts are focused on operationalisation of the aircraft at the earliest.

The first batch of five incoming Rafale fighter jets landed at the Ambala Air Force base around 3.14 PM on July 29, 2020, amid a ceremonial welcome and unprecedented security. The squadron of Rafale jets has been stationed at the Ambala airbase in Haryana. The fleet of five jets comprises three single-seater and two twin-seater aircraft.

The jets will be inducted into the IAF as part of its No. 17 Squadron, also known as the 'Golden Arrows'. Nearly four years ago, India had signed an inter-governmental agreement with France to purchase 36 Rafale jets under a Rs 59,000-crore deal to boost the IAF's combat capabilities.

The aircraft is capable of carrying a range of potent weapons. European missile maker MBDA's Meteor beyond visual range air-to-air missile and Scalp cruise missile will be the mainstay of the weapons package of the Rafale jets.

Of the 36 jets, 30 will be fighter jets and six will be trainers. The trainer jets will be twin-seater and they will have almost all the features of the fighter jets. The IAF has undertaken major infrastructure upgrades at the Ambala base for the deployment of the first Rafale squadron.

Built in 1948, the airbase is located on the east side of Ambala and is used for military and government flights. The airbase has two squadrons of the Jaguar combat aircraft and one squadron of the MIG-21 'Bison'. Air Force Marshal Arjan Singh was the first commander of the base.

The Mirage fighters that were used for the airstrike in Balakot in Pakistan in February 2019 after the Pulwama terror attack had taken off from here.
A ghost town in Cyprus's Turkish-controlled north will be resettled and thrown open to investment, in an apparent bid to win international recognition of the self-declared Turkish Cypriot state as Ankara pursues energy claims in contested waters off the island's shore.

Greek Cypriots who dominated the area before its 1974 takeover by the Turks will be among those able to reclaim lost property as the plan -- branded as an economic stimulus program -- gets underway.

"There should be dialogue between the two communities on the island on all issues: Varosha, property issues and energy resources around the island," a spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ibrahim Kalin, said in an interview on Saturday.

"If the Greek Cypriots want to come, claim their property, pay for it, run businesses, etc., it will be possible," once legal issues are resolved, Kalin said.

Varosha, near the port of Famagusta, had been the island's premier tourist resort before it was abandoned and sealed off following the Turkish takeover of northern Cyprus, which isn't recognized internationally. Investment in trade and tourism in the town would imply recognition of Turkey's control, and the plan to reopen it threatens to deepen growing strains with Cyprus and its ally Greece over natural gas drilling rights in the eastern Mediterranean.

In the immediate term, at least, Turkish Cypriots are likeliest to benefit from any economic activity in the town, where ruined beachfront apartment buildings, villas, a fur shop and an Alfa Romeo dealer are partly overrun by tangles of ivy.

Ersin Tatar, the prime minister of the breakaway Turkish enclave, told CNN-Turk that more than 200 applications to reclaim properties in Varosha have been submitted and are being reviewed. Turkey's army, which seized northern Cyprus in the wake of a failed coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece, kept Varosha closed and uninhabited after its Greek-speaking residents abandoned it.

Tensions in the region flared in August after Turkey resumed exploration and launched naval exercises in an area of the eastern Mediterranean where its claims are contested by Cyprus. Ankara on Monday extended seismic work by its research vessel, the Oruc Reis, through Aug. 27 in the contested waters.

German-mediated negotiations with Greece collapsed after the Athens government announced a maritime delimitation agreement with Egypt on Aug. 6, similar to a Turkey-Libya deal in December. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is expected to arrive in Turkey on Tuesday in a new mediation attempt.

Turkey Confronts EU With New Energy Survey Off Cyprus Coast

"We will continue our exploration work in the eastern Mediterranean in areas which we believe belong to the Turkish continental shelf," Kalin said, while noting Turkey doesn't have an immediate drilling plan.

"We do not want to see any escalation and tensions in the eastern Mediterranean," he said, adding that any discovery in those waters should be shared by all.
NDC Member of Parliament for Adaklu Constituency in the Volta Region, Kwame Agbodza Governs has rubbished claims that the large number of accident cases recorded in major hospitals are caused by Okada operators (Motorbikes as commercial transport).



Report by the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) has indicated that Okada operators cause more harm than good  hence, its legalisation is questionable.



This comes at the back of NDCs flagbearer, John Dramani Mahamas promise to legalize the operation after insisting that it create more jobs for Ghanaians than the Nation Builders Corps (NaBCo) and the Youth Employment Agency (YEA).



But Kwame Agbodza Governs, in an interview with NEAT FMs morning show Ghana Montie, argued that the Association is painting a bad picture of the riders  something he described as unfortunate.



If a car knocks an Okada driver down, it doesnt necessarily mean the Okada driver was at fault, he said.









Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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An Israeli soldier prepares an Elbit Systems Skylark I unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or drone) for take-off near the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel. (AFP)

Jerusalem: As US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo started a Middle East tour in Israel on Monday, Islamist group Hamas called on regional leaders to "break their silence" on Israel's blockade of Gaza.

Israel has bombed the coastal Palestinian strip, which is ruled by the group, almost daily since August 6, while balloons carrying fire bombs and, less frequently, rocket fire have hit Israel from Gaza.

In retaliation for the balloon attacks and the widespread blazes on farms and scrubland they have caused, Israel has tightened its 13-year blockade of Gaza's two million inhabitants.

It has banned Gaza fishermen from going to sea and closed its goods crossing with the territory, prompting the closure of Gaza's sole power plant for want of fuel.

Hamas in a statement called the closure of the Kerem Shalom crossing a "crime against humanity" and called on the international community and "decision-makers in the region" to "break their silence to bring an end" to the blockade.

Hamas also said that the normalisation of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates helps "maintain crimes and violations" against the Palestinians.

Pompeo touched down in Tel Aviv Monday morning to kick off a five-day trip to the Middle East.

His visit will focus on Israel's normalising diplomatic ties with the UAE, seen as a betrayal by many Palestinians, and urging other Arab states to follow suit.

Earlier Monday the Israeli army said it had again hit Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight, in retaliation for incendiary balloon and rocket attacks launched from the Palestinian enclave.

An Egyptian delegation has been trying to broker a return to an informal truce.

"During the day, explosive and arson balloons were launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel," an army statement said.

"In response ... fighter jets, tanks and aircraft struck military posts and underground infrastructure" belonging to Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip, it said.

On Thursday night, Gaza militants fired a dozen rockets at Israel, which responded with air strikes on a rocket-manufacturing plant and underground infrastructure.

Egypt has acted to calm repeated flare-ups of violence in recent years to prevent any repetition of the three wars Israel and Hamas have fought since 2008.
Conservative Saudi Arabia is seeking to boost female employment and has appointed 10 women in senior roles at Islam's holiest sites, according to authorities

Saudi Arabia has appointed 10 women in senior roles at Islam's two holiest sites, authorities said Sunday, as the conservative petro-state seeks to boost female employment.

The appointment of women in senior positions at religious institutions is rare in the Islamic kingdom, which is in the midst of a wide-ranging liberalisation drive spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The women were appointed in the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina across various departments, including administrative and technical, according to statement released by the general presidency for the affairs of the two holy mosques.

The recruitment drive was aimed at "empowering Saudi women with high qualifications and capabilities", the statement said.

The two holy mosques previously recruited 41 women in leadership positions in 2018, according to Saudi media.

Prince Mohammed has sought to boost employment for women as part of his "Vision 2030" plan, which is aimed at diversifying the kingdom's economy and ending its addiction to oil.

The number of working women in Saudi Arabia reached 1.03 million in the third quarter of 2019, 35 percent of the total workforce, compared to 816,000 in 2015, according to official figures.

In other reforms, women in the kingdom are now allowed to drive cars, cinemas have reopened and genders are permitted to mix at events, including concerts, and in public places.

But the reforms have also been accompanied by a crackdown on dissent.

Saudi Arabia has detained and put on trial a dozen women activists who long campaigned for the right to drive, sparking widespread condemnation.

Some of the activists allege they were tortured and sexually harassed by interrogators.

bur-ac/hkb
Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, NJ, USA) plans to enroll 60,000 volunteers in a Phase 3 trial for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate that is set to begin in September, making it the largest, late-stage trial for testing a potential coronavirus vaccine.According to the US governments clinical trial database, the purpose of the study is to demonstrate the efficacy of the companys potential coronavirus vaccine, Ad26.COV2.S, in the prevention of molecularly confirmed moderate to severe/critical COVID-19, as compared to placebo, in SARS-CoV-2 adult participants. In pre-clinical studies, Johnson & Johnsons investigational adenovirus serotype 26 (Ad26) vector-based COVID-19 vaccine had elicited a robust immune response as demonstrated by neutralizing antibodies, successfully preventing subsequent infection and providing complete or near-complete protection in the lungs from the virus in non-human primates (NHPs).A J&J spokesman told CNBC that the Phase 3 trial would enroll up to 60,000 healthy people ages 18 and older across nearly 180 locations in the US and other countries. The enrolment is double that of leading vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer who are also set to conduct their own Phase 3 trials. Pfizer has completed enrolment of more than 11,000 people and Moderna has reportedly signed up 8,374 participants in the first three weeks of its own trial. Additionally, AstraZeneca, which is also conducting the Phase 3 study of its coronavirus vaccine candidate in the UK, Brazil and South Africa, has enrolled about 8,000 participants in the UK, and vaccinated about 3,000 volunteers in Brazil and 900 participants in South Africa. Johnson & Johnsons Phase 3 trial is expected to start around September 5 in which participants will be randomly selected to receive a dose of the potential vaccine or a placebo to determine its safety and effectiveness. Researchers will follow the participants for more than two years.Our Phase 3 program is intended to be as robust as possible, could include up to 60,000 participants and will be conducted in places with high incidence rates, J&J spokesman Jake Sargent said in a statement to CNBC. We are using epidemiology and modeling data to predict and plan where our studies should take place and expect that to be finalized soon.
S upermarket group Tesco has said it will create 16,000 new permanent roles in the UK to support the growth in its online business.

The roles are on top of the 4,000 permanent positions already created since the start of the coronavirus crisis.

Some 10,000 pickers will be sought to assemble customer orders, and the chain is looking to recruit 3000 drivers. Other roles will be in stores and distribution centres.

Tesco, which currently employs around 300,000 people in the UK and Ireland, said it expects the majority of the roles to be filled by staff who joined on a temporary basis at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but who now want to stay with the business permanently.

The retailer serves close to 1.5 million customers a week online, up from around 600,000 at the start of the pandemic.

In the first quarter to May 30 Tesco delivered 12.6 million orders.

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Tesco said as the online business continues to grow, the number of new roles may increase further in the coming months.
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New York  The Green Climate Fund has approved US$25.6 million in new funding for an innovative climate resilience project in Sudan, designed to promote agriculture, health, and food and water security.

Led by Sudans Higher Council for Environment and Natural Resources with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the five-year project will provide training, deliver equipment, rehabilitate land for sustainable use, introduce new climate-resilient practices, and construct infrastructure for water storage, build wells and dams. Around 1.2 million people from subsistence farming and nomadic pastoralist communities across 9 states will directly benefit from the initiative, along with additional 2.5 million people expected to be indirectly benefitted.

"Addressing the impact of climate change is a collective responsibility. We as a Government recognise this global responsibility and are committed to protecting the people of Sudan from the risks we are currently facing, said Sudans Prime Minister, Dr. Abdalla Hamdok. Left unchecked, climate change will derail our nations efforts to end poverty and conflict across the country.

With Green Climate Fund financing, and support from UNDP, the Sudanese Government is working to build resilient economies and livelihoods. This will help us minimise the impact of COVID-19, and put our people and planet first.

The initiative comes at a time when climate threats are looming large - leading to variations in rainfall and temperatures across Sudans arid and semi-arid drylands, pushing lives and livelihoods in peril. Poverty is deepening with the country already in conflict, and additional challenges posed by COVID-19.

Working at national and local levels, the new project will help Sudan address significant challenges. This project will improve health, food and water security for 3.7 million people in Sudan, safeguarding them against the worsening, life-threatening impacts of a changing climate, while building resilience and infrastructure for the vital agriculture sector, said UNDP Resident Representative, Selva Ramachandran.

At the same time, together we will ensure institutional and community capacity is improved, vulnerable groups like women and youth receive targeted support, and Sudans natural resources are protected.

Professor Rashid Hassan, Secretary General of the Higher Council for Environment and Natural Resources, said: We are proud to launch this project, supporting the Sustainable Development Goals and Sudans Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement. Importantly, it is a country and community-led initiative: the people and areas receiving support, and the needs being addressed, were identified after a comprehensive consultation process involving Federal and State authorities, communities, NGOs, the private sector, research institutions and relevant unions.

The project leverages US$15 million in co-finance from Sudans Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and UNDP grant of $540,000. UNDPs support for the initiative is part of its efforts to drive a new Green Deal in Sudan, ensuring climate protection and mitigation, including the introduction of renewable energy in agriculture, health and rural communities; and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

###

Additional notes to editors

The Building resilience in the face of climate change within traditional rainfed agricultural and pastoral systems in Sudan project will support 138 villages across West Darfur, Central Darfur, East Darfur, Western Kordofan, South Kordofan, Kassala, Red Sea, Northern, and Khartoum states.

Links for further information:

About UNDP

UNDP partners with people at all levels of society to help build nations that can withstand crisis, and drive and sustain the kind of growth that improves the quality of life for everyone. On the ground in nearly 170 countries and territories, we offer global perspective and local insight to help empower lives and build resilient nations. www.undp.org.

About GCF

The Green Climate Fund (GCF), the worlds largest fund dedicated to climate finance, supports developing countries to reduce their carbon emissions and strengthen their resilience to climate change. Set up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2010, GCF is an operating entity of the UNFCCCs Financial Mechanism that also serves the Paris Agreement. GCF drives climate finance to where it is needed most: in the Least Developed Countries, Small Island Developing States, and African States.
"We think there's a First Amendment interest in providing continued access to that app and its functionality to the Chinese-American community," Michael Bien, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, said Saturday.

In the lawsuit, they asked a federal court judge to stop Trump's executive order from being enforced, claiming it would violate its U.S. users' freedom of speech, free exercise of religion and other constitutional rights.

The complaint, filed Friday in San Francisco, is being brought by the nonprofit U.S. WeChat Users Alliance and several people who say they rely on the app for work, worship and staying in touch with relatives in China. The plaintiffs said they are not affiliated with WeChat, nor its parent company, Tencent Holdings.

Some U.S.-based users of WeChat are suing President Donald Trump in a bid to block an executive order that they say would effectively bar access in the U.S. to the hugely popular Chinese messaging app.

Trump on August 6 ordered sweeping but vague bans on transactions with the Chinese owners of WeChat and another popular consumer app, TikTok, saying they are a threat to U.S. national security, foreign policy and the economy.

The twin executive orders -- one for each app -- are expected to take effect September 20, or 45 days from when they were issued. The orders call on Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who is also named as a defendant in the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance lawsuit, to define the banned dealings by that time. It remains unclear what the orders will mean for the apps' millions of users in the U.S., but experts have said the orders appear intended to bar WeChat and TikTok from the app stores run by Apple and Google. That would make them more difficult to use in the U.S.

"The first thing we're going to seek is a postponement of the implementation of the penalties and sanctions - a reasonable period of time between explaining what the rules are and punishing people for not complying with them," Bien said.

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, said Saturday saying it plans to mount a legal challenge against the executive order that President Trump issued against the popular video app. WeChat, which has more than 1 billion users, is less well-known than TikTok to Americans without a connection to China.

Mobile research firm Sensor Tower estimates about 19 million U.S. downloads of the app. But it is crucial infrastructure for Chinese students and residents in the U.S. to connect with friends and family in China and for anyone who does business with China.

Within China, WeChat is censored and expected to adhere to content restrictions set by authorities. The Citizen Lab internet watchdog group in Toronto have said WeChat monitors files and images shared abroad to aid its censorship in China.

Even so, the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance complaint argued that losing access to the app would harm millions of people in the U.S. who rely on it, noting it is the only app with an interface designed for Chinese speakers. "Since the executive order, numerous users, including plaintiffs, have scrambled to seek alternatives without success. They are now afraid that by merely communicating with their families, they may violate the law and face sanctions," according to the complaint.
(TNS) - Signs of a problem within Californias power system emerged a full day before the blackouts hit.Trader Dov Quint sat in his basement outside Boulder, Colorado, scouring the states day-ahead power market for opportunities to profit from Californias heat wave. He saw something strange: Prices for electricity to be delivered the next day  the day of the blackouts  were nearing $1,000 a megawatt-hour, more than 26 times higher than last years average.The last time that happened, in July 2018, the forecast for demand had been much higher. Something was amiss  were energy supplies lower than usual?In Folsom, California, system operators for the states vast electrical grid were looking at the same numbers  and forecasting a significant power shortfall starting at 6 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 14.They had a full day to act. And yet, when Friday evening rolled around, nearly 2 million Californians were plunged into darkness in the first rolling blackouts to hit the state since the energy crisis 20 years ago. Without warning, utilities cut power to blocks of communities in a bid to save the states electric grid from cascading power failures amid the worst heat wave in generations.Theres plenty of blame to go around, from the states grid operator who failed to prevent the crisis in spite of market signals presaging it, to regulators who for years ignored pleas from power generators to line up more emergency resources, to a human-led climate crisis thats producing extreme, unpredictable weather. Breakdowns across the board resulted in a power emergency that could have implications for how the state manages electricity from here on out.On that Friday morning, grid operators werent panicking  yet. While the heat was certainly driving up demand, they had seen far worse days, such as in July 2006 when demand hit an all-time high of 50.3 gigawatts during a deadly heat wave.The California Independent System Operator, which runs most of the states grid, asked neighboring utilities if they had any extra power to spare, John Phipps, director of real-time operations at the ISO, said at a public meeting the following Monday. But there was none. If utilities had any extra supplies, they were keeping them to themselves in case they needed the power as the heat intensified. So the ISO sent out an alert asking residents to conserve.108 DEGREESBut as temperatures rose, peaking at 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Sacramento, California, demand climbed and supply looked more and more inadequate.Gas users began pulling fuel from the Aliso Canyon storage facility, operated by Sempra Energys SoCalGas utility and which supplies gas-fired power generators. That was an unusual move for the time of year, according to traders, but the supplies likely cushioned the shock to power prices in Southern California.At 2:56 p.m., a gas-fired plant unexpectedly tripped, sucking 475 megawatts of power from the grid. The state ordered power suppliers to fire up reserve gas units to make up the difference, Phipps said.But there wasnt enough reserve gas generation to go around. The state, guided by one of the most ambitious climate policies in the U.S., had retired 9 gigawatts of gas capacity  enough to power 6.8 million homes  over the past five years. The state is also looking to shut down Aliso Canyon, which has been operating at reduced capacity after the biggest gas leak in U.S. history was discovered there in 2015.The ISO had been warning state regulators for years that there werent enough power supplies during the net peak period in summer and that it faced a potential shortfall of 4.7 gigawatts in the evening hours starting in 2020, said Steve Berberich, head of the grid operator. While the California Public Utilities Commission, which is responsible for making sure the states big investor-owned utilities buy enough power, has approved 3.3 gigawatts of new capacity, that wont come online until 2021.The commission pushed back on Berberichs comments, saying utilities and other power distributors had procured the resources that were required to meet the demand forecasts on Friday and Saturday, according to spokeswoman Terrie Prosper.This is a shared responsibility, and we are working with our sister agencies to better understand why this occurred, she said.SOLAR SETSBy the late afternoon Friday, when the states substantial solar production began to drop off as the sun set, California ISO grid operators in its control room in Folsom knew they were in trouble.The renewable supply was falling, and there wasnt enough gas to replace it. The only recourse left was to import power from neighboring states. Unfortunately, imports on a major transmission line connecting Northern California to resources in the Pacific Northwest had been curtailed as grid operators across the region lined up supplies due to the extreme heat, according to Wood Mackenzie analyst John McMahon and the ISO.Another problem emerged, too: In order to import power through the Energy Imbalance Market, which schedules deliveries across regions in real-time, California had to pass whats called a flexible ramping sufficiency test  a way of proving that it isnt overly dependent on imports to meet demand.The ISO failed the ramping test at 15-minute intervals from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., according to data reviewed by Bloomberg. That reduced imports by about 446 megawatts during the peak demand hour.The grid operator had warned about imports before, saying in June that the state could be vulnerable to blackouts if there was a regional heat wave that limited supplies from neighboring states.We have told regulators over and over again that imports were drying up and more imports should be contracted for, Berberich said. That was rebuffed.The commission made changes to the way its forecasting imported energy that will go into effect in 2021, said Prosper.ROLLING BLACKOUTSPower prices surged, making that Friday the most profitable day ever to sell electricity from a gas-fired plant to the grid  until the following Monday, when prices rose even more, according to McMahon.With no more resources to tap, the shift manager in Folsom declared a Level 3 emergency at 6:36 p.m.  which meant the state needed to use rolling blackouts to keep the whole grid from crashing. It was the first time California had to use such an extreme measure since the energy crisis of 2000 and 2001, when hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses went dark, power prices surged to a record and the states largest utility was forced into bankruptcy.Utilities Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Southern California Edison Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. cut power within minutes, using software that rotated outages in blocks throughout their service territories. They had little time to warn customers what was coming.In Santa Clarita, California, the ventilation system at the Salt Creek Grille tripped and the eatery quickly filled with smoke, killing 70% of that nights business. Forty miles away, 82-year-old Bob Proulx and his wife found themselves trapped in a more than 90-degree house when their air conditioner unexpectedly shut off and the garage door wouldnt open. Further south, Yasmine Hairat looked up from her laptop to find every light in her neighborhood had gone dark.We had no notice, said Jennifer Chadwick, director of sales and marketing for the Salt Creek Grille. We looked at each other and said, Oh my God another thing. Can anything else happen?The lights were only out for a few hours, but the blackouts werent over yet  and they added to a long list of miseries for Californians already grappling with the most coronavirus cases in the country, the worst unemployment rate in the West, and rampant wildfires displacing tens of thousands of people.ROUND TWOOn Saturday, it happened all over again.Grid operators began the day confident they could avoid another round of outages. Demand was lower than the day before, and supplies appeared sufficient. But shortly after 5 p.m., a 1-gigawatt wind farm suddenly went down. An hour later, a natural gas unit shut. Nearly 1 million people lost power.Over the next few days, as the heat wave persisted, the risk of more blackouts loomed large. At one point, the ISO warned it might have to shed 4.4 gigawatts, blacking out as many as 10 million people. But by then, big electricity users had started cutting back their energy use in respond to personal pleas from people in Gov. Gavin Newsoms office. It was enough to put an end to the outages, for now.In a letter sent to Newsom late Wednesday, the heads of the agencies that oversee the states electricity system said they would investigate what went wrong. One question repeatedly comes up. Why did this happen when California has seen much hotter days, and much higher demand? Put simply, experts say, it was a problem years in the making  from killing gas plants without replacing them to designing a market thats more focused on thwarting manipulation than incentivizing back-up generation.Regulators, grid operators, utilities and industry experts all saw this moment coming. They just didnt think it would get here so fast.I thought this was going to be a 2021, 2022, 2023 problem, said Quint, who formerly worked as a senior market engineering specialist at the ISO. From here, the ramp is only going to get steeper and its not going to go away.2020 Bloomberg NewsVisit Bloomberg News at www.bloomberg.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
MBABANE  Some mortuaries are starting to worry about the high death rate in the country as a result of COVID-19.

While they are still able to deal with the situation, they worry about their handling capacity should the situation worsen. They said there were a lot of uncertainties on how the fatalities due to COVID-19 would stretch them. Currently, the mortuaries confirmed that they were receiving about 80 per cent of confirmed COVID-19 cases but there were challenges in that some of their clients were received as suspected cases only to be later confirmed positive.

Concern

As of yesterday, there were a total of 85 COVID-19-related deaths in Eswatini. The Ministry of Health has also noted with concern the increasing number of deaths due to COVID-19.

B3 Group Eswatini Director Dan Zikalala said they received one or two bodies of people who died of COVID-19 per week and were still able to manage the corpses. He said they were still within their carrying capacity. However, he said they were concerned about the number of deaths in the country, which continued to increase.

Zikalala said there was uncertainty on how much the COVID-19-related deaths could stretch them and if they would be able to meet the demand. He added that the burden of handling COVID-19 bodies was costly for them as they catered for all the expenses. Zikalala said they had to meet additional requirements, including personal protective equipment (PPE) and body bags which were not there before the virus. He said most of the equipment was in limited supply as it was in demand worldwide.

Chief Operations Officer for United Holdings, an associate of Dups Holdings, Muzingaye Ndlovu said they were receiving a number of bodies of people who died of COVID-19 and treating every case as a COVID-19 case. Some of our clients are economical with the truth, more so when the deceased is fetched from home rather than a health facility, Ndlovu said.

He said they had enough carrying capacity for accommodating the increasing COVID-19-related deaths happening lately. We have the largest carrying capacity in Eswatini, said Ndlovu. He said the TB Hospital in Manzini was also assisting in sharing the load since most of the bodies were kept there but once they were full, the spillover was then shared with them.


The Kerala assembly on Monday unanimously passed a resolution urging the Centre not to lease out the Thiruvananthapuram international airport to Adani Enterprises.

The lone Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member O Rajagopal walked out of the house after he was denied permission to speak in the assembly. Later, police arrested BJP state president K Surendran and many party leaders for staging a dharna outside the assembly seeking the resignation of chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

Moving the resolution the CM said the Centre should re-examine its decision and allow it to run the airport as a special purpose vehicle in which the state government has a majority stake.

For the last two years the state has been opposing the move. I have written twice to Prime Minister Modi. Still it was handed over to a private entity ignoring the states protest. The Kerala assembly unanimously urges the Centre to reconsider its decision, the CM said introducing the resolution.

Last week the Kerala government had moved the High Court to stay the decision and it is expected come up before the court in a couple of days. It also called an all-party meet to oppose the decision. But Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor had supported the Union governments decision saying the private participation will help usher in much-needed development.

While supporting the resolution opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala said there was a criminal conspiracy to hand over the airport to the Adani group after the government appointed a legal agency to manage the bidding which was represented by the same industrial group. On Sunday, state industry minister EP Jayarajan said the government was not aware of the legal agencys background.

We want the government to examine this serious lapse. It is strange while the government opposed Adani groups takeover, one of the sister companies of the same group was engaged for bidding for the airport. It is a serious conflict of interest, said Chennithala.

The state government has been opposing the privatization of the airport vehemently and fought many legal battles but the court refused to interfere in it saying it was part of a policy decision. In February 2019, the government-owned Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation (KSIDC) had participated in the open bidding for the airport but Adani Enterprises quoted the highest and won it. Union Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri had criticized the states move saying it was not right to oppose the move after losing the bid.

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A Black man was hospitalized in serious condition after police shot him several times in the back as he opened the door of a parked vehicle in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Graphic video of the shooting emerged on social media late Sunday, sparking angry protests that prompted the city to declare an emergency curfew.

The man was later identified as Jacob Blake, 29, according to Governor Tony Evers, who said Blake was "shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight."

"While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country," Evers said in a statement.

The shooting, which is now under investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, occurred around 5 p.m. Sunday when officers responded to calls of a domestic incident. A 911 dispatcher reported that a complainant said Blake wasn't supposed to be there, and that he had taken the complainant's keys and refused to give them back.

Jacob Blake / Credit: Handout

Video shows Blake walking away from officers who are pointing their weapons at him. He approaches an SUV and opens the driver's side door when an officer grabs his shirt and subsequently fires at least seven shots into his back.

Officers provided medical aid to Blake, who was transported to a hospital in Milwaukee, the state's Department of Justice said. Two of the officers involved were placed on administrative leave.

The shooting comes amid nationwide outrage over the fatal police shootings of Black Americans. Protests across the country have pushed for policing reform following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

Attorney Benjamin Crump, a prominent civil rights lawyer retained by Blake's family, told CBS News that Blake is now in stable condition. Crump said three of Blake's children  ages 3, 5 and 8  were inside the SUV when their father was shot by police. The family was out celebrating one of the children's birthdays.

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"These kids, these babies, are gonna have psychological issues for the rest of their entire life," Crump said.

Crump added that Blake was attempting to de-escalate a fight between two other people when officers arrived at the scene, drew their weapons, and tased him. "We will seek justice for Jacob Blake and for his family as we demand answers from the Kenosha Police Department," Crump said in a statement.

An eyewitness who captured video of the shooting told CBS News that before he started filming, one officer had Blake in a headlock and another was punching him in the ribs. A female officer tased Blake, the witness said.

The witness added that Blake scuffled with police before the shooting and that he heard an officer tell Blake to "drop the knife"  although the witness said he never saw Blake holding a knife.

The shooting sparked outrage in Kenosha, which is located nearly 40 miles south of Milwaukee, as protesters gathered at the scene of the shooting on Sunday night. Several businesses in the area were vandalized and about 50 cars were set on fire at a local car lot, CBS affiliate WDJT reported.

Kenosha County on Monday implemented a second straight night of curfew for residents. Governor Evers also deployed 125 members of the state's National Guard to support local law enforcement in an effort to "protect critical infrastructure" and maintain public safety.

"I know folks across our state will be making their voices heard in Kenosha and in communities across Wisconsin," Evers said in a statement. "Every person should be able to express their anger and frustration by exercising their First Amendment rights and report on these calls to action without any fear of being unsafe."

There were tense standoffs between police and protesters Monday outside the county courthouse after the city's curfew went into effect, according to WDJT. Several dozen bottles were reportedly thrown at police, who deployed tear gas and fired back with rubber bullets.

Mola Lenghi contributed reporting.

29-year-old Black man in Wisconsin hospital after being shot in the back by police

Chief of staff Mark Meadows on Trump's RNC speech, stimulus talks and Kellyanne Conway's departure

The case against Russian agents accused of interfering in the 2016 election
Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, who are the most admired people in America?

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A group of New Jersey teenagers who broke into a petting zoo and abused animals by riding on donkeys and putting lipstick on a pony fled when the owner chased them away after seeing images of their antics on social media.

Jimmy Abma, a fourth-generation farmer whose family has owned Abmas Farm in Wyckoff, New Jersey, for more than 80 years, received a message on his phone at around 10:30pm on Saturday.

It showed a young girl riding on a miniature donkey.

Abma recognized the animal, which he confirmed to be his after seeing that the Snapchat image also had the caption Abmas Farm attached toward the bottom.

A young girl identified as a 17-year-old student-athlete at River Dell High School in Bergen County, New Jersey, was photographed riding a miniature donkey at the barnyard petting zoo of Abma's Farm in nearby Wyckoff, New Jersey, on Saturday night

The owner of Abma's Farm, Jimmy Abma (above), received the image of the girl riding the donkey at around 10:30pm on Saturday night. That's when he sped toward the petting zoo and chased the teens away

Abma closed the barnyard on Monday so that veterinary staff could do a wellness check on the animals. The image above shows one of the animals being tended to by a veterinarian

Abma's Farm has been owned and operated by the family for more than 80 years

He also grew concerned since the miniature donkeys on his property are not big enough to support the weight of a teenager.

Obviously, were closed, so that raised a concern to me right off the bat, that theres people trespassing, the animals are somewhat in danger and I just need to figure out whats going on, he told WCBS-TV.

Abma, who lives on the property, said he immediately ran outside and chased at least half a dozen youngsters off of his property, which includes a barnyard petting zoo, a farm, and a supermarket.

He was shocked to discover that the gates to the petting zoo were open and some of the animals had been traumatized.

One pony had lipstick spread on its face.

Abma said on Monday that all of the animals have been accounted for

Couple of the animals you couldnt even get close to, Abma said.

They were all skittish. They were all jumping around.

We did a full count on the animals and were still trying to account for all of them so its just a frustrating thing.

He added: These animals, they have the ability to kick and rear up and they have the ability to bite you.

Abma also said he noticed two teens trying to shoplift items from his supermarket.

As he dialed 911, the two teenagers ran off.

Whatever these kids did they need to be held responsible for it, Abma told WABC-TV.

At the end of the day, this is our house, this is our yard, this is our livelihood.

On Facebook, Abma wrote that all of the animals were accounted for and that the barnyard would be closed on Monday so as to allow a veterinarian to come to the property to conduct a wellness check.

Abma posted an image on Facebook on Monday showing a veterinarian checking up on one of the donkeys.

Law enforcement officials told WCBS-TV that investigators know the individuals involved.

A Wyckoff Police Department detective declined to comment when reached by DailyMail.com.

Abma said several of the animals were left traumatized by the experience

A local newspaper, Daily Voice, reported that the young girl photographed while riding on the miniature donkey is a 17-year-old student-athlete enrolled at River Dell High School in Bergen County.

Calls to the high schools went unanswered on Monday evening.

Abma said he was appreciative of the outpouring of support from the community.

Everybody has been concerned, everybody is concerned about the animals, the well-being of everything that has gone on, said Abma.

Everybody wants us to bring these kids up to speed and make sure that they have to deal with what they did.

'The investigation has been turned over to the Detective/Juvenile Bureau, [which is] working in conjunction with Tyco Animal Control to identify all the parties,' Detective Lt. Joseph Soto said.

'If anyone has any information, please contact the Wyckoff Detective Bureau at 201-891-2121 or detectives@wyckoffpolice.org.'
Song Hong Garment (MSH) has yet to make provisions for the hundreds of billions of dong worth of export turnover earned from its biggest client in the US who is declaring bankruptcy.

MSH has released its audited finance report for H1 2020, showing problems that may arise as its partners parent company has filed for bankruptcy and it will close all of its stores.

The garment company sold products to orders from New York & Company (buyer) through a buyers partner  Easy Fashion Macao Offshore Limited (Easy Fashion).

Under the agreement between MSH and the buyer, the payment of debts related to the sale transactions are implemented through Easy Fashion. The payment term for these debts is 90 days.

As of June 30, 2020, the companys receivable balance from the transactions of selling products to New York & Company had reached VND219 billion, or $9.4 million. Of this, the accounts receivable within the term were VND55.2 billion and the overdue accounts receivable (less than 3 months) were VND163.8 billion.

As of June 30, 2020, the companys receivable balance from the transactions of selling products to New York & Company had reached VND219 billion, or $9.4 million. Of this, the accounts receivable within the term were VND55.2 billion and the overdue accounts receivable (less than 3 months) were VND163.8 billion.

On July 13, 2020, RTW Retailwinds Inc, the holding firm of New York & Company, filed for bankruptcy after falling into insolvency.

MSHs board of directors anticipated that the bankruptcy will affect the possibility of recovering these accounts receivable. At the moment when the finance report was made, the company was working with Easy Fashion and lawyers on the debt collection.

MSH reported net revenue of VND962 billion in Q2, a decrease of 17.4 percent compared with the same period last year. Its post-tax profit decreased by 56 percent to VND58 billion. Meanwhile, the H1 profit was VND122 billion, a decrease of 44 percent. Sixty percent of the pre-tax profit plan was implemented after half a year.

Vinatex (VGT, UpCom), another big garment producer, is also facing difficulties. At the 2020 shareholders meeting, VGT board of management submitted to the shareholders a plan on obtaining revenue of VND14.64 trillion, a decrease of 27 percent. Its targeted pre-tax profit is expected to drop by 50 percent to VND381 billion because of the Covid-19 pandemic and divestment from some subsidiaries.

Vinatex reported net revenue of VND7.046 trillion in H1, a decrease of 15 percent compared with the same period last year, pre-tax profit of VND289 billion, a decrease of 22 percent.

Forbes has released the list of 200 outstanding listed small and medium enterprises with revenue of less than $1 billion in Asia Pacific in 2020.

The enterprises in the list must meet the conditions in revenue and profit growth rates, low debt ratio and effective corporate governance.

Six Vietnamese names are found in the list, including Cen Land (HoSE: CRE), Dohaco (HoSE: DHC), Navico (HoSE: ANV), Phat Dat Real Estate (HoSE: PDR), Taseco (HoSE: AST) and Thien Long Group (HoSE: TLG).

FPT Group of Truong Gia Binh has made public the business results for July and the first seven months of the year. The net revenue in July was VND2.347 trillion, up by 4 percent, and pre-tax profit was VND434 billion, up by 9 percent compared with the same period last year.

The revenue was VND15,598 trillion in the first seven months and the post-tax profit of the holding company was VND1.922 trillion.

V. Ha

Garment, footwear and woodwork companies look forward to receiving orders in H2 After half a year of struggling to survive difficulties caused by Covid-19, Vietnamese enterprises are hoping that more orders will come over the next six months.
Noted Malayalam filmmaker A B Raj, also known as A Bhaskar Raj, who had been active in the world of movies for over three decades since 1951, died at his residence in Chennai on Sunday, film industry sources said.

The 95 year-old director died of cardiac arrest, according to his son-in-law Ponvannan. Raj is survived by three children, including noted actor Saranya Ponvannan.

Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan condoled his death.Born in Madurai in 1925, Raj started his film career in the late 1940s under the guidance of T R Sundaram.He went to Sri Lanka in 1951 and during his 10-year-long stay in the islandnation, directed 11 Sinhalese movies, FEFKA (Film Employees Federation of Kerala) Directors Union said in a statement in Kochi.

Condoling his demise, FEFKA Directors Union said that the veteran filmmaker, whose parents belonged to Alappuzha in Kerala, had directed around 50 Malayalam films between 1968 and 1985. Kaliyalla Kalyanam was his first Malayalam movie.

Also read: Rupal Patel reacts to viral Rasode Mein Kaun Tha video: I am humbled and honoured

Sasthram Jayichu Manushyan Thottu, Pachanottukal, Kazhukan, Irumbazhikal, Light House and Thaalam Thettiya Tharattu are the other popular Malayalam movies directed by Raj.

Ormikkan Omanikkan, directed in 1985, was his last Malayalam movie. Raj has also directed Tamil films. Vijayan condoled the demise of Raj, saying he has made notable contributions to the Malayalam film sector.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop
An excavator at a Rio Tinto site in Pilbara, western Australia, the region where a historic cave heritage site has been destroyed. Photo: Rio Tinto

The chief executive of Rio Tinto (RIO.L) will lose his performance-linked bonus this year over the destruction of an Indigenous heritage site in Western Australia, according to the company.

The FTSE 100 (^FTSE) mining giant faces a parliamentary inquiry in Australia over the caves, an important site for the Puutu, Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) peoples. The caves showed evidence of continued inhabitation for 46,000 years.

The Anglo-Australian company published the findings on Monday of its boards own review into the damage caused by the expansion of an iron ore mine at Juukan Gorge, in the Pilbara region.

The review found some of Rio Tintos systems, decision-making processes and governance failed to work as they should have.

The company said there had been no single root cause or error that directly led to the site being blown up. It was the result of a series of decisions, actions and omissions over an extended period of time, underpinned by flaws in systems, data sharing, engagement within the company and with the PKKP, and poor decision-making.

READ MORE: Traditional owners say Rio Tinto knew the importance of caves

Jean-Sebastien Jacques, chief executive of Rio Tinto since 2016, as well as the chief executives of its iron ore and corporate relations will not receive their performance-related bonuses this year under its short-term incentive plan. A 2016 award Jacques had been due to receive next year under its long-term incentive plan will also be reduced by 1m ($1.3m).

It is clear that no single individual or error was responsible for the destruction of the Juukan rockshelters, but there were numerous missed opportunities over almost a decade and the company failed to uphold one of Rio Tinto's core values  respect for local communities and for their heritage, said Simon Thompson, chairman of Rio Tinto.

We will implement important new measures and governance to ensure we do not repeat what happened at Juukan Gorge and we will continue our work to rebuild trust with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.

Story continues

Pilbara, the region of western Australia where Rio Tinto iron more expansion led to the destruction of an historic Indigenous Australian heritage site. Photo: Rio Tinto

READ MORE: 90,000 UK travel jobs axed or at risk since virus hit

The company has previously pledged $50m to recruit and retain more Indigenous staff in the aftermath of the destruction, saying it did not have enough in leadership roles.

The review said the company should also strengthen its processes, oversight and auditing to ensure heritage issues receive equivalent priority to safety and operational performance.
The Health Minister has drawn the ire of Derry representatives for his inaction around mental health provision in the city.

Sinn Feins Karen Mullan has voiced her disappointment and concern at the unwillingness of Robin Swann to provide essential funding to keep Derrys Community Crisis Intervention Service (CCIS) running.

While the SDLPs Mark H Durkan said like everything asked for in the North West it has become a whole battle.

He described the service as a huge success which has been a literal lifeline to many.

Bereaved local families, activists and organisations campaigned for a service of this kind for years.

CCIS provides a safe space for those in crisis from 8pm on Thursdays until 8am on Sundays when many other services are not operational.

It is run by Extern NI from the Holywell Building on Bishop Street.

People experiencing a mental health crisis are referred to the service by the PSNI and Foyle Search & Rescue or attend of their own volition.

Individuals receive immediate support forgoing the need to attend a busy hospital Emergency Department.

They are also directed to additional support services if necessary.

An independent Ulster University report found the service to be cost-effective.

Figures released by the Western Trust demonstrate the need for enhanced mental health provision in the city.

At the end of June 585 people were waiting more than nine weeks to access adult mental health services.

There were 478 young people waiting more than nine weeks to access child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), as of June 20.

Foyle Search & Rescue has also responded to many emergency incidents in recent months despite a period of lockdown.

UNTHINKABLE

Karen Mullan said the minister has declined requests from her and party colleagues to meet to discuss the need to fund the CCIS and mental health services in the city.

She added: Derry City and the North West area a is being neglected by the Minister and his unwillingness to invest in mental health support services.

The Community Crisis Intervention Service is a service dealing with individuals who are facing a crisis and need de-escalation.

This crisis can be due to a mental health episode or as a result of substance misuse.

All these issues fall firmly under the remit of the Department for Health and as such the minister.

I call on Minister Swann to provide the funding for the Intervention service and investment in mental health provision in the City.

In June the health minister visited Derry where he announced 32,000 of additional funding to keep the service running for three months.

Mark H Durkan said it is impossible to measure the positive impact it has had and he shuddered to think about what could have happened without it.

He continued: We were able to convince the Minister to extend funding on an interim basis.

We have to remember that tackling the mental health crisis is an Executive priority so its not just one for the Department of Health.

Theyve made positive noises but that has to be backed by action and for me it is unthinkable that this service wouldnt be funded moving forward.

The Foyle MLA said it is unacceptable for service users and hard-working staff to keep getting word of short extensions and that a permanent commitment must be made.

A spokesperson for Derry City and Strabane District Council acknowledged that the funding provided would allow for the temporary continuation of the service.

However, councillors are of the view that the Department of Health and other government departments should consider a long-term funding arrangement.

In response, a DoH spokesperson said: The additional funding provided by the Department of Health enabled Derry Crisis Intervention Service to continue until the end of September 2020.

Correspondence from Extern has been received today requesting additional funding to support the service until the end of March 2021. This is currently being considered."

If you feel in crisis and need support or if you have observed someone who is in distress and may come to significant harm through self-harm and suicidal behaviour please call CCIS on: 028 7126 2300

If you need to speak to someone urgently, please call Lifeline on 0808 808 8000, the Samaritans or attend your local Emergency Department.
Kamala Harris is not a left radical or a Marxist  I wish she were

Within moments of Joe Biden announcing Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Trump campaign and the American right-wing propaganda machine began portraying the California senator as a far-left radical of the Marxist variety.

Kamala Harris has long been firmly lodged on the right-wing of the Democratic Party, which Richard Nixons former strategist Kevin Phillips accurately described as historys second most enthusiastic capitalist party.

Theres nothing wrong with being a leftist (I am one), but the charge (I might say compliment) is ludicrous and undeserved. Harris has long been firmly lodged on the right-wing of the Democratic Party, which Richard Nixons former strategist Kevin Phillips accurately described as historys second most enthusiastic capitalist party.

As both a Bay Area prosecutor (1990-2003) and California Attorney General (2003-2016), the Big Business-backed Harris earned a reputation as a friend of the police and an agent of racially disparate mass incarceration. She boasted of her high felony conviction rates, achieved with significant violations of defendant rights. She fought back any attempts to change Californias vicious prison system, institute a criminal justice reform and abolish the death penalty.

She even resisted a court order to release low-risk inmates by arguing that it could cost California an important source of cheap labour to be used, at risk to their lives, to fight wildfires for $2 a day.

She was hardly the progressive prosecutor she claimed to have been when announcing her presidential candidacy in 2019.

Anyone who thinks Copmala Harris was a criminal justice progressive should watch a short TED-style talk she gave on behalf of racist mass incarceration at the Chicago Ideas Week conference in 2015. One really must take in her derisive voice and body language as she launched into a scornful attack on reformers supposedly naive call to move taxpayer money from mass imprisonment to education:

We all have these posters [sarcastic posture] in our closet [pained look on face] that is attached to a stick that we sometimes will cart out when were talking about criminal justice [...] and we run around with these signs [disdainful face] [...] Build More Schools, Less Jails! Build More Schools, Less Jails! And we walk around everywhere  Build More Schools! We protest [mocking face, hand pretending to hold up a placard] [...] Put money into education, not prisons! [loud mocking squeaky voice]. Theres a fundamental problem with that approach, in my opinion. And its this: [] You have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door.

Attorney General Harris and her multimillionaire white husband had three padlocks on [their] front door because the class rule and racial oppression system she spent her adult life serving and protecting had reached such stunning levels of savage inequality that the top tenth of the American One Per cent possessed as much combined wealth as the nations bottom ninety per cent while the median household black-white wealth gap had reached six black cents on the white dollar. These disparities were only worsened by the giant racist mass arrest and incarceration regime that she and her future presidential running mate Joe Three Strikes Biden did so much to advance.

During her very brief stint (2017 - present) in the Republican-controlled US Senate, Harris has tried to develop a progressive persona by speaking on behalf of liberal causes such as immigration reform, marijuana legalisation and increased pay for schoolteachers. She scored more points with liberals by aggressively questioning Trumps right-wing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In her disastrous and prematurely concluded presidential campaign, Harris clumsily tried to play the great game of American politics  the manipulation of populism by elitism (Christopher Hitchens)  by inauthentically posing as a candidate of the people. She briefly took up Bernie Sanders call for Medicare for All but then reversed herself on ending private health insurance in favour of a federally financed system. She promised to protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients from deportation and opposed Trumps border wall with Mexico, but, tellingly, failed to vote against Trumps network of immigrant detention camps along the US-Mexico border. She backs a boosting of the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, but says nothing about how such an increase would leave millions of workers poor while ineligible for food stamps, housing subsidies and Medicaid.

Harris has also been a big player in the Democrats Russiagate campaign, demanding Trumps impeachment, not for his chilling violations of the US Constitution or his nativist persecution of immigrants, but for being an alleged Russian stooge. That has earned her points from the US national security establishment.

Vice presidential candidate Harris will make no calls for a real Green New Deal, genuinely progressive taxation, or single-payer health insurance (Medicare for All), which the arch-corporatist Biden says he would veto  this, even though single-payer is backed by seven in 10 Americans. Biden chose her because she will be safely on board with the corporate agenda while her deceptive progressive pretension and her nonwhite and female identity cloak her loyalty to an American System run by and for the mostly white corporate, financial, and imperial establishment.

Its an old game in American politics: Democrats posing as populists and progressives when theyre owned by the nations imperial ruling class.

The Republicans are also playing an old game: absurdly labelling corporate and imperial Democrats totalitarian, radical leftists, Marxists, socialists, and communists. From the New Deal (1932-1940) on, not a single Democratic president or presidential contender (no matter how militantly corporate, imperial, and anti-communist/-socialist), has escaped this paranoid-style charge from the American right. (The deeply conservative Barack Obama was ludicrously described as a socialist, a Marxist, and even a Marxist-Leninist by the Tea Party right, even as he governed in strict accord with the interests of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military-industrial Pentagon System.)

Its a bit harder than usual for the right to make the neo-McCarthyite charge stick on Biden. Hes an old and conservative, racially problematic white man with a long congressional and vice-presidential record as an abject warmonger and a tool of the corporate class. Things are different with Harris. As a more recent arrival on the national stage, a product of the supposedly radical San Francisco Bay area, and a black female, Harris is much easier to sell to the Republicans disproportionately rural, white, and male voting and street-fighting base as a radical, big-city threat.

Its all very ironic. As with Obama, Harriss identity attributes help conceal her captivity to the capitalist profits system that the right religiously supports. At the same time, as neither of the two major US parties will ever admit, the United States could use a good dose of the socialism that Kamala Harris and other top Democrats are absurdly accused of supporting. Like something straight out of, well, Marx, the nations capitalist ruling class is grinding the American democratic experiment into arch-plutocratic dust, rendering longstanding majority-progressive public opinion irrelevant while wealth and power concentrate yet further upwards, and millions of ordinary Americans are thrown out of work, off health insurance, and into poverty and misery in the middle of an epic pandemic.

RT  Russia Today
Three police officer who were shot while responding to a home invasion in Maryland were ambushed, the chief said last night.

The officers were responding to a reported home invasion about 6.30 pm at an address in Hyattsville, a city about 32 miles southwest of Baltimore, police said.

'Within seconds of arriving, they were under fire,' Prince George's County Interim Police Chief Hector Velez said. 'They were ambushed.'

Two of the three officers shot were 'saved' by their vests, Velez said.

The officers were responding to a reported home invasion about 6.30 pm at an address in Hyattsville, a city about 32 miles southwest of Baltimore, police said (pictured: police at the scene last night)

One officer was struck in the chest and had injuries to an arm and a leg. Another officer was shot in the back. The third officer was wounded in the foot.

The officers returned gunfire, and two men were in custody. The men were not injured, police said.

Mr Velez also said the officers provided themselves with 'self-care' after being shot, which allowed them to be transported to a hospital for further treatment.

'They're gonna be fine,' Valez said. 'They are in good spirits, they are concerned about each other.'

The chief added: 'This is the call you hope you never get, and we were just so shaken tonight to have gotten the call that three of our officers had been shot.

'All three of these officers are nothing short of heroes.'

Governor Larry Hogan tweeted: 'We are all extending our prayers to the three officers shot tonight in Prince George's County. @MDSP has offered its full support for the investigation.'
STORY LINK Pound New Zealand Dollar Exchange Rate News: GBP/NZD Bouyed as NZ PM Laments Frankly Terrible Year

New Zealand Dollar (NZD) Dented by Coronavirus Concerns

Pound (GBP) Subdued amidst Fears of Unemployment Cliff-Edge

GBP/NZD Exchange Rate Forecast: Dip in NZ Trade Balance to Weigh on the Kiwi?

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The New Zealand Dollar (NZD) opens this week on the back foot against the Pound (GBP) and majority of its other peers in light of concerns over New Zealands coronavirus situation.Having recorded zero community transferred cases through the most of summer, New Zealand has found itself back in lockdown over the past couple of weeks amidst a sudden spike of new infections.Speaking today, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that lockdown measures in Auckland, the country's biggest city, will be extended for at least another week, as the country seeks to contain its outbreak again.Ardern said:We know it's been tough. I know there are many who've found it harder this time. In a world where 2020 has frankly, been terrible, we are strong, we have been kind, and we are doing really well... if any one country knows how to bounce back, it is us.Included in this will be the requirement for masks to be worn on public transport.Ardern added:If Covid can spread on a bus, and we know masks make a difference, let's wear masksFurther limiting the appeal of the Kiwi in early trade today was the publication of New Zealands latest retail sales index, after Stats NZ reported a record fall in domestic sales growth in the second quarter.At the same time, the Pound (GBP) is find only limited support today, amidst growing concern that the UK is facing an impending employment crisis.From next week, businesses will need to start contributing toward the wages of employees' furloughed as part of the UKs job retainment scheme.From September the government will be covering 70% of wages, leaving employers to cover the other 10% to top it up to 80%.Then from the start October this will become 60% from the government and 20% from employers, before the entire scheme is wrapped up at the end of that month.While the furlough scheme has kept people employed through the coronavirus crisis, now that businesses are going to have to start covering wages, analysts are warning that redundancies are inevitable, with millions of people set to lose their jobs when the scheme ends in October.GBP investors fear this surge in unemployment could severely slow the rate of the UKs economic recovery as it curbs household spending and economic activity.Looking ahead, the Pound to New Zealand Dollar (GBP/NZD) exchange rate could trend higher on Tuesday, with the publication of New Zealands latest trade figures.This is expected to show a narrowing of the countrys trade surplus with a fall in exports, something which could limit the appeal of the Kiwi.Meanwhile, the Pound remains threatened by Brexit uncertainty as the last round of talks ended in deadlock, with the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier warning that a deal seems unlikely, as stoking concerns the UK is hurtling towards a no-deal Brexit.

International Money Transfer? Ask our resident FX expert a money transfer question or try John's new, free, no-obligation personal service! ,where he helps every step of the way, ensuring you get the best exchange rates on your currency requirements.

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San Francisco has reached a settlement with grocery-shopping company Instacart to pay almost three-quarters of a million dollars to 985 Instacart gig workers in lieu of health care contributions and paid sick leave benefits that the city requires companies provide for employees  even though Instacart classified the workers as independent contractors.

While the case does not set a precedent and Instacart did not admit wrongdoing, its still a significant development in the battle over classifying gig workers.

Overwhelming, the case was about gig workers who were being misclassified, said Pat Mulligan, director of the S.F. Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, which pursued the action. We actively enforce San Francisco labor laws whenever we feel there are violations, including at app-based employers.

The office has other active investigations ongoing but he declined to say if it is pursuing other gig companies such as Uber and Lyft.

In the case of Instacart, which hires gig workers to shop in grocery stores and then deliver the groceries to customers homes, it was pretty clear-cut that the workers met the citys definition of employees, Mulligan said.

Instacart, which is headquartered in San Francisco, declined to comment.

The battle over gig-work status has become more pitched since Januarys enactment of AB5, the states gig-work law, and Dynamex, a 2018 California Supreme Court decision that underlies AB5. Both say companies cannot claim that workers are independent contractors unless they pass an ABC test: A, the workers do tasks free from company control; B, the workers do tasks not central to a companys core business; and C, the workers have independent enterprises in that line of business.

The Instacart case covered from the third quarter of 2013 to the second quarter of 2016, so it predates both Dynamex and AB5. An earlier standard called Borello was in place at that time.

We felt confident that under either Borello or the ABC test, these individuals met the standard of being employees, Mulligan said. The statewide movement around (AB5 and Dynamex) helped our ability to settle this.

That movement includes a variety of lawsuits alleging misclassification against gig companies by California government attorneys and agencies. None has yet been resolved.

Instacart was sued last year by San Diegos city attorney over the issue. Although a judge issued a temporary injunction ordering Instacart workers to be reclassified as employees in San Diego, that order is on hold pending an appeal.

Les Tso of San Francisco worked for Instacart during the time the case covered. He said the company exerted control over the freelance shoppers as if they were employees.

For instance, when workers signed up for shifts but no grocery orders were coming in, Instacart required them to wait two hours before giving up the shifts, he said, even though they werent getting paid for that time.

When shoppers had corporate orders with lots of heavy cases of water, Instacart would say, Just make two trips, he said. Thats employee-ish. That kind of stuff would make you pull your hair out.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

Also, if he had several deliveries to make, the company would dictate the order, even when it made no geographical sense, he said. In one such instance it was like zig-zagging all over the city  North Beach to Potrero Hill, the Mission, back to the Marina, he said. It was really frustrating.

Chet Allen of San Francisco, who also worked during the case period, had similar thoughts.

When you clocked in, sometimes youd be sitting around for a period of time (waiting for orders), sometimes 20 minute up to a few hours, he said. We didnt get paid unless we shopped. It wasnt our fault they werent sending over new orders. Given the fact that we werent employees, (getting paid for our time) was not guaranteed. It was unfair.

The citys settlement agreement with Instacart calls for the company to retain records San Francisco could use for a future investigation. The city agency would not start any potential investigation until at least July, however.

That gives time to see what happens with the ongoing lawsuits, as well as with an initiative called Proposition 22 that is on the November ballot. Instacart, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates, are asking voters to leave their drivers and couriers as independent contractors who are entitled to some earnings guarantees and benefits.

Instacarts exact payment in the case is $727,985. A small amount ($3,772) will cover city investigation costs, and the rest will be disbursed by San Francisco this week directly to Instacart workers. Exact amounts will vary depending on how many hours they worked. Mulligan said payments to workers will range from a few dollars to $9,000.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
Goddard well-known in Grand Island

Lucy Goddard was well-known to law enforcement and the community. In December 1910, she was at the center of a well-publicized trial for "conducting a house of ill repute."

The trial took several days and incited so much interest that, in order to seat all the spectators, it had to be moved from the police courtroom to the council chambers.

Neighbors testified to Lucy's reputation and to men calling at their homes at all hours because they had come to the wrong address. One neighbor told her landlord that her family was moving because of activities at hte Goddard house.

Frank Hoagland, Grand Island's police chief from 1907 to 1911, testified that Goddard's reputation was that of an indecent woman.

Two taxi drivers testified to having delivered men to the Goddard house on West 14th Street on several occasions. Several men testified to having spent the night frequently at Goddard;s home.

One man testified that, after spending the night with Goddard on different occasions, he was surprised to learn she was a married woman.

Other men from the community, some prominent, contradicted that testimony, testifying that the men were not being truthful.

In the end, Goddard was found guilty, and her reputation as a "fallen woman" was firmly established.

 Compiled from The Independent files
People seen along Orchard Road on 19 June 2020, the first day of Phase 2 of Singapore's re-opening. (PHOTO: Dhany Osman / Yahoo News Singapore)

SINGAPORE  The Ministry of Health (MOH) confirmed 87 more COVID-19 cases in Singapore as of noon on Sunday (23 August), taking the countrys total to 56,353.

Of the latest cases, one is in the community, 13 are imported and the remaining 73 are workers residing in dormitories who are undergoing quarantine.

The sole community case (No. 56372) is a 38-year-old Vietnamese man who was detected under enhanced community testing to test all individuals aged 13 and above who are diagnosed with acute respiratory infection at first presentation to a doctor. Epidemiological investigations of the case are in progress.

Overall, the number of new cases in the community has remained stable at an average of two cases per day in the past two weeks. The number of unlinked cases in the community has also remained stable at an average of one case per day in the past two weeks.

Amongst the 13 imported cases, five (cases 56399, 56400, 56401, 56402 and 56403) are Singapore permanent residents who returned to Singapore from India on 11 August. Two (cases 56396 and 56397) are dependants pass and long-term visit pass holders who arrived from India and the Philippines on 11 August. Two (cases 56374 and 56375) are work permit holders currently employed in Singapore who arrived from the Philippines on 11 August.

Another two (cases 56373 and 56404) are students pass holders who arrived from India on 11 August. The remaining two (cases 56369 and 56408) are short-term visit pass holders who were allowed entry into Singapore as one has been seeking medical treatment in Singapore and the other is the parent and caregiver. They arrived from Bangladesh on 21 August.

All the cases had been placed on 14-day Stay-Home Notice (SHN) upon arrival in Singapore.

There are currently about 13,500 workers who are still serving out their quarantine period. These workers will be tested when their quarantine ends.

A new cluster at Homestay Lodge at Kaki Bukit Avenue has been found with five cases.

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Around 4,800 workers have been issued a Stay-Home Notice (SHN) as a precautionary measure to determine their health status, the authorities said on Sunday, a day after a new COVID-19 cluster was reported at Sungei Tengah Lodge.

Over 54,000 cases discharged

With 244 more patients discharged from hospitals or community isolation facilities on Sunday, 54,164 cases  some 96 per cent of the tally  have fully recovered from the infection.

Most of the 76 hospitalised cases are stable or improving, while none is in critical condition in the intensive care unit.

A total of 2,086 patients with mild symptoms or are clinically well but still test positive are isolated and cared for at community facilities.

Apart from 27 patients who have died from COVID-19 complications, 15 others who tested positive for the virus were determined to have died from unrelated causes, including three whose deaths were attributed to a heart attack and another four, whose deaths were attributed to coronary heart disease.

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CPA Statement in solidarity with the Haft Tappeh & Oil industry workers

Freedom for all political prisoners

The Communist Party of Australia, CPA is concerned at reports that the Haft Tappeh & Oil industry workers have not been paid their wages forcing them to strike for their basic rights and against the privatisation of essential services that would affect the Iranian people in general.

The CPA gives its full solidarity and support for the Haft Tappeh and Oil industry workers in Iran as they struggle for their own jobs, wages and rights and against privatisation that will worsen the lot of working people in Iran.

We support the workers and their demands including:

Arrears payment, and their insurance renewal;

The return of their expelled co-workers;

The release of political prisoners, and putting an end to the privatisation.

We demand the release of all imprisoned workers and call for an immediate stop to the harassment, arrests, torture and clampdown on the rights of these workers in struggle and all Iranian workers.

In working class solidarity,

International Department

Communist Party of Australia

19th August 2020
Items procured by the Akwa Ibom State Government for distribution to vulnerable people as palliatives against the impacts of the COVID-19 restrictions were grossly insufficient , findings have suggested,

The findings, based on investigation conducted in the oil-rich Niger Delta state, including interviews with civil society activists, residents and partisans, provide an explanation for the promise-delivery gap regarding the COVID-19 palliative items in the state.

Measures to contain the virus had made governments to restrict movements, thereby significantly halting most socio-economic activities. In Nigeria, where many people depend on going out daily to scrape together some money to survive, the restrictions exacerbated peoples hardship.

It was against the background that the state government in Akwa Ibom announced measures to provide palliative items for the vulnerable citizens impacted by the restrictions. This was done by several other states, supported by corporate and individual philanthropists.

I did not receive anything, Itoro Abasi, 69, said, reacting to the governments palliative promise. Mr Abasi is the head of one of the 11 family units that form Ikot Okwot, a community in Nsit Ubium LGA of the state.

The Secretary to the State Government and Chairman Akwa Ibom State COVID-19 Management Committee, Emmanuel Ekuwem, in a signed publication published in a local newspaper, Midweek Pioneer, of June 24-25, announced a total cash donation of N298.1 million from the Niger Delta Development Commission, and individual and corporate philanthropists.

According to Mt Ekuwem, non-cash donations included medical items and 4,895 bags of rice, of which 1,400 are 50kg and the rest 5KG, from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, the Goodluck Jonathan Foundation, the Federal Government, Greenwell Technologies and Allcare Health Services.

In addition, 1,450 5kg bags of Semovita, 450 cartons of spaghetti and 100 units of 50kg bags of garri were received as well as 250 smoked fish donated by the Catfish and Allied Fish Farmers Association to support the state towards cushioning the effects of COVID-19 pandemic.

Similarly, Guinness Malt Nigeria presented 2,000 cases of malt drink. The state also got 800 cases of Pepsi drink, apart from 2,000 cases of Aquafina water and 500 units of 50cl cartons of water donated by Coca Cola.

Got nothing

Mr Abasis claim was just a window to lamentations of others whose expectations following the governments promise were unmet.

Mrs. Inyang Archibong

Inyang Archibong, a 65 year-old widow in Nsit Ubium LGA, trades in local gin at the Oron Jetty  on the river boundary between Akwa Ibom and Cross River states.

The time the government asked us not to go out, I stayed at home but I did not receive anything from the government, Mrs Archibong said. That is why I have to come out to sell to have something to eat. I heard that some people were given some food items but I didnt see anything.

She said the closure of borders over the pandemic adversely affected her business and appealed to the government for financial support to enable her buy food and basic items.

Peace Okon, an unmarried hairdresser from Nung Atai in Oron LGA on her part, bitterly complained that everything is totally down due to the pandemic as there was no financial inflow again as a result of low patronage.

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This has affected my business and I didnt see anything called palliative, although I heard they gave rice, but they shared it in PDP. Its only PDP members that told me that they received one cup, some will say they received 2 cups of rice, Ms Okon claimed.

Too little to go round

Mr Abasis son, Gideon, is the vice president of the youth of the Ikot Okwot community. He said the food items that reached the village were too small to be distributed.

Peace Okon, a trader

We got information that we should come out to see the gift from the government but when we got there, what we saw could not be shared to individuals, he said. As a result, the village head directed that the items be shared to orphans. So we gave each family 15 cups of garri and two cups of flour.

Sunday Ukem, a commercial cyclist, has a family of seven. He told PREMIUM TIMES at Nung Udoe Junction at Ibesipo Asutan in Ibesipo Local Government Area that he received five cups of beans, three cups of rice and a little measure of flour from the items sent to the village. They gave everybody in my village; everybody got something, he said.

Mr Ukem said all he got did not feed his family for a day. But he was lucky that he could continue working during the lockdown. He combines his motorcycle taxi work with farming.

Emmanuel Friday, another commercial motorcyclist in Abak, has a family of nine. Riding okada is all that he does and was thus severely affected when the lockdown forced him to stay at home for more than three months. He said the governments palliatives offered his family only little relief.

They gave a cup of rice to each woman. Because they could not give to everybody, only women who registered with the woman leader got the palliative. It was my community that decided to share to women.

Civil society, traditional chief allege politicisation

The chairman of Civil Liberty Organisation in the state, Franklyn Isong, criticised the composition of the states palliative committee on COVID-19 and the modality adopted for the ineffective distribution that failed to impact the targeted poor.

Mr Isong said the initiative was unintentionally programmed to fail considering that the committee members were drawn from the ranks of political appointees like commissioners, lawmakers, local government chairmen and secretaries; parties loyal to the ruling party, apart from the representatives of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, and village heads.

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He observed that a committee of such nature with the exclusion of civil society and the media would not deliver on its mandate.

It was like a political party giving out palliative; it wasnt like a government giving out palliatives to its citizens, said Mr Isong.

Mr Isong said that the palliative items did not trickle down to the vulnerable that deserve them. The people who were more than downtrodden did not get it because it was based on political patronage, compensation or party arrangement, he said.

In the same vein, the Akpaha Oro, Ulo Uye, the second-in-rank to the monarch of Oro Nation comprising five local government areas and treasurer, Council of Oro Traditional Rulers, told PREMIUM TIMES that the distribution was politicised.

Unless you are a member of the PDP, then the palliative does not come to you. It couldnt go round, and the little they had was shared out on party basis.

Mr Uye explained that at the point of mobilising the people for the exercise, the Oron council had assured the people that there would be discrimination in any form but were surprised when it got the feedback from those sent to monitor the process that sharing was done among who voted PDP or voted APC. So they just selected their PDP people and started distributing.

PDP disagrees

However, the spokesperson for the ruling PDP in the state, Ini Obong, dismissed the allegations that membership of the palliative committee was politicised; noting that appointees of government stopped acting for the party the moment they were appointed. HE said the PDP like other parties had no representation on the committee.

However, Mr. Obong said although the items were meant for the most vulnerable people, due to the sudden outbreak of COVID-19, wealthy citizens who ordinarily should be excluded from the scheme also became exposed that they had to lay claims as taxpayers needing support.

Palliatives is meant for the vulnerable people but when you find well-to-do-people coming to share palliatives and you say no, this is what government is bringing and they said even they themselves have become vulnerable by the reason of COVID-19, what do you do? he queried.

Mr Obong claimed that enough food items were sent to communities but distribution, which was not done by the government but multi-level sectoral stakeholders, could be another challenge.

The PDP spokesperson concluded that since no government made budgetary provision for the pandemic, it would take emptying the coffers of the state to sufficiently provide support for the citizens.

The opposition APC chairman, Ini Okopido, told PREMIUM TIMES, before his death in August, that he heard about the insignificant palliative from the state government through the social media.

A few people said they got one cup of rice and garri or what have you, Mr Okopido had said.

Nothing came of the efforts to get an official from the government. Calls and messages sent through SMS and WhatsApp to the Secretary to the State Government and the Chief Press Secretary to Governor Udom Emmanuel, Ekerete Udoh, by the reporter were not answered and replied.

The state government had on April 14 declared a lockdown to curtail the spread of COVID-19 in the state and promised to provide food items to poor residents to enable them to cope during the lockdown. But findings at local communities indicate that the target poor were largely shortchanged.

From five cases on April 1, the states cases have risen to at least to 271 in the third week of August, 220 of which have been treated and discharged
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Ukraine must remain sure that the border with Belarus is safe.

Ukraine is interested in an independent and democratic Belarus, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba says.

"Ukraine is interested in an independent democratic Belarus, therefore any further strengthening of Russia's position in Belarus does not meet the national interests of Ukraine," Kuleba said at a joint press conference with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in Kyiv on August 24, an UNIAN correspondent reports.

Read alsoZelensky calls for revote in Belarus"We have a very long border with Belarus, and we must be sure that at least this part of the border remains safe for our country, that this is a friendly border," the foreign minister explained.

Belarus protests: Kyiv's reaction, row with Minsk

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on August 15 said it generally shared the position expressed by the European Union regarding the recent presidential elections in Belarus. The European Union said it did not recognize the election outcome, and agreed to consider sanctions for election fraud and violence against protesters.

The Ukrainian diplomacy said that the officially declared results of presidential elections in Belarus "do not inspire confidence in Belarusian society," stopping short of declaring whether they recognize the election result.

Lukashenko has repeatedly and without proof accused Ukraine, among other countries, of unfriendly moves against Belarus. Also, he called Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking for support in resolving the crisis. Russia said "comprehensive support" would be provided upon request.

On August 17, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba recalled the Ambassador to Belarus for consultations in Kyiv, dubbing Minsk's actions "unacceptable".

On August 19, Alexander Lukashenko, whose legitimacy following the latest election has not been recognized by the EU and a number of states, has publicly warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, among other foreign leaders, against "fomenting riots," while providing no backing for his allegations.

Ukrainian border guards said they were strengthening controls on the Belarus border given the mounting tensions in the neighboring state.
Ghana's former High Commissioner to India, Sam Pee Yalley, has called on the Ghana Education Service to find a lasting solution to the reopening of schools amidst the coronavirus pandemic.



According to him, the longer the children stay at home, the more they begin to adopt strange behaviors.



Speaking on UTVs Adekye Nsroma, Sam Pee Yalley recounted how he met one of his grandchildren mimicking cartoons.



I was shocked to see one of my grandchildren mimicking cartoon characters. Thus if they jump she will jump, if they sleep she will do samesomething that is developing at a very wrong age.



By now they should have been singing rhymes but due to covid-19 and its issues they are mimicking cartoons. What I am saying is that, within the period a lot of things are happening, the children are learning wrong because from 6am to 6 pm all they do is to watch cartoons and it is not a healthy practice for a nation, he lamented.



He therefore called on Ghana Education Service (GES) to collaborate with the television stations to develop children program content to help the children as they dialogue for lasting solutions.





Source: Josephine Acheampomaa/[email protected]









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Children are more likely to get the flu or be in a car crash than catch coronavirus in schools, a government adviser has said.

Englands deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries said pupils risk of catching the flu or being involved in a road accident are higher than contracting COVID-19 at school.

Her comments came as Boris Johnson urged parents to send their children back to school when they reopen next month.

The prime minister said the risk of children contracting coronavirus in school is very small.

On Monday, Dr Harries told Sky News: The long-term harms of children not attending school significantly, we think, outweigh those potential risks.

England's deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries said the risk to children of catching coronavirus in school is 'very small'. (PA)

"No environment is completely risk-free. Every time a parent sends their child off to school pre-COVID they may have been involved in a road traffic accident, there are all sorts of things.

"In fact that risk, or the risk from seasonal flu, we think is probably higher than the current risk of COVID."

She added: "Obviously, parents' worst nightmare would be the death of a child, and we know that is an exceptionally rare event.

"We also know that children very rarely get serious disease and get hospitalised, and when children do get infection it is usually very mild and sometimes asymptomatic.

"So overall, the risk to the child themselves is very, very small."

The UKs chief medical officers have issued a joint statement seeking to reassure parents that it was safe to send their children back to school.

Dr Harries warned that teachers are more likely to contract COVID-19 on their coffee break than in a classroom.

The transmission from younger children  when teachers are perhaps more likely to be closer to them  is much lower.

Actually in the studies that have been done so far, the risk probably of transmission between staff, rather than to or from children, is the one that teachers perhaps should be focusing on  so its going off for a coffee break, you know, dropping your guard down.

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I have previously spoken about the moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely, and I would like to thank the school staff who have spent the summer months making classrooms Covid-secure in preparation for a full return in September. (1/4)  Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) August 24, 2020

Dr Harries said a scenario where all schools across the country would be forced to close again was unlikely.

However, individual schools could close if they are in an area that is subject to a local lockdown, she said.

Schools in Scotland reopened earlier this month, while those in Northern Ireland welcomed pupils again on Monday. English and Welsh schools will follow suit in September.

On Monday, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders union NAHT, said fining parents for not sending children back to school would not be helpful and would risk the relationships teachers have with families.

Boris Johnson has urged parents to send their children back to school next month. (PA)

He told BBC Breakfast: We can engage with those that still have a lack of confidence hopefully without fines.

On Sunday, Johnson said: As the chief medical officer has said, the risk of contracting COVID-19 in school is very small and it is far more damaging for a childs development and their health and wellbeing to be away from school any longer.

A Public Health England (PHE) analysis, published on Sunday, found there were 67 single confirmed cases, four co-primary cases (two or more linked cases diagnosed at the same time) and 30 outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools during June.

It said the majority of cases linked to outbreaks were in staff and warned that school staff needed to be more vigilant for exposure outside the school setting to protect themselves, their families and the educational setting.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Johnsons commitment to get all children back to school was at serious risk after a week of chaos over exam results.

Coronavirus: what happened today

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KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA - Media OutReach - 24 August 2020 - Over 75 per cent of Malaysian businesses have embraced at least one FinTech product or service over the past 12 months, according to findings from a new regional survey of business FinTech usage by global professional accounting organisation CPA Australia.









Bryan Chung FCPA (Aust.), Chairman of the Digital Transformation Committee, CPA Australia Malaysia Division





Mobile payments and digital wallets were the most widely adopted FinTech in Malaysia in the past 12 months, with 63 per cent of businesses surveyed indicating usage. This trend is likely to continue in the next 12 months.

"The increased popularity of mobile payments and digital wallets goes hand in glove with the Government's efforts to increase the use of e-wallets amongst the B40 and M40 through cash transfer programs, as part of its transition to a high value-added, high income economy", says Bryan Chung FCPA (Aust.) Chairman of the Digital Transformation Committee at CPA Australia Malaysia Division.

Overall, FinTech adoption in Malaysia was driven by the need to increase business efficiency, with more than five-in-10 respondents (56.3 per cent) identifying this as an important benefit in using FinTech. Four-in-10 (40.4 per cent) businesses adopted FinTech as a means to adapt to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Just over a third (34.4 per cent) saw the use of FinTech as a way of reducing costs.

Of concern though is that one-in-four businesses surveyed do not expect to use FinTech in the next 12 months with the majority of these being businesses with 50 or fewer employees.

"Small businesses may not have a sound understanding of the benefits of FinTech to their organisations. More needs to be done to improve small business understanding of what FinTech solutions might be good for their businesses."

Survey respondents were most concerned about cybersecurity and data privacy. FinTechs need to address these concerns if they are to see greater adoption of their products or services.

Story continues

"Greater consideration also needs to be given to increasing technology expertise at the board and senior management level to ensure better understanding of risks and benefits of FinTech. Including FinTech in the terms of reference of a board-level committee should help the highest levels of companies to stay informed of new trends in this type of technology," Chung adds.

Survey results showed that there was an increase of 13.9 per cent in the number of businesses in Malaysia using FinTech lending, compared to Singapore's 8.2 per cent. As at December 2019, the Securities Commission reported that RM 633m peer to peer lending was raised through 8102 successful campaigns.

"Start-ups, like other businesses, have been hard hit by COVID-19. As such, alternative financing platforms are critical to their survival and growth as their limited track records would likely render them ineligible to meet bank lending criteria," says Chung.

While Islamic Fintech appears to be in its infancy, with Bank Negara Malaysia's support, there is potential for growth both locally and regionally. "With the right skills, support and infrastructure, Malaysia is positioned to take Islamic FinTech to mainstream acceptance among ASEAN markets and beyond," says Chung.

To capitalise on new opportunities from the digital economy, Chung advises businesses to deepen their own FinTech talent pool by retraining existing staff and by using innovative technology tools to secure new talent.

About the survey

The survey was conducted by CPA Australia from 23 June to 14 July 2020. A total of 573 responses were received from accounting and finance professionals in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore, with 151 respondents from Malaysia.





For an infographic of the results, visit here.





About CPA Australia

CPA Australia is one of the world's largest accounting bodies, with more than 166,000 members working in 100 countries and regions and supported by 19 offices globally. Our core services to members include education, training, technical support and advocacy. Employees and members work together with local and international bodies to represent the views and concerns of the profession to governments, regulators, industries, academia and the community. Visit cpaaustralia.com.au
Yemen warns Saudi-led coalition of 'great pain' amid escalation in bombardments

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 7:22 AM

Yemen has warned the Saudi-led coalition waging war on the country of "great [impending] pain," as the aggressor countries ramp up their strikes.

Yemeni Defense Minister Major General Mohammad Nasser al-Atifi said Yemen's allied defense forces were prepared to take their counterstrikes to the "stage of great pain" for the aggressor countries, Yemen's al-Masirah television network reported on Saturday.

"The countries of the aggression are the ones who started this war on our country, and if it continues, we will control the end of this war," Atifi said.

The Saudi-led coalition invaded Yemen in March 2015 to subdue a popular uprising that had toppled a Riyadh-friendly regime. The major aggressor countries are Saudi Arabia itself and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The United States provides intelligence and logistical assistance, including with the provision of advanced weaponry.

The Yemeni minister said, "We are in an advanced stage of readiness, capable of confronting the technology of aggression" and negating its effects.

Saudi-led escalation

Al-Masirah also reported on Saturday that the Saudi-led coalition had carried out as many as 42 new air raids in Yemen's northern al-Jawf and Ma'rib Provinces over the previous 24 hours.

The invaders also struck Sa'ada Province  which is situated to the west of al-Jawf  twice during that same period.

Yemen's Liaison and Coordination Officers' Operations Room also said that the aggressor countries had committed 79 violations of a ceasefire for the vital port city of al-Hudaydah in the west within the same time span.

The operation room monitors an agreement reached in Stockholm in 2018 that obliges the Saudi-led coalition to stop its attacks against Yemen and respect a ceasefire for Hudaydah.

Yemen fights back

Amid the escalation, the Yemeni defense forces successfully thwarted an attempted advance by the coalition in the southwestern al-Dhale Province, fighting off the invaders for seven straight hours and killing and injuring dozens of them.

A spokesman for the Saudi-led forces, Turki al-Maliki, said the Yemeni forces had launched drone and missile counterstrikes against Saudi Arabia, and he claimed one explosives-laden aerial vehicle traveling toward Saudi Arabia's southwestern Jizan region had been downed on Sunday.

Daesh ringleader in Yemen killed

Separately, the Yemeni military said it had delivered a heavy blow to Saudi-backed terrorists during a recent operation in the southwestern al-Bayda Province.

The operation killed Daesh's ringleader in Yemen, Abu Walid al-Adani, alongside four other ranking members of the terrorist group, al-Masirah said.

The network identified the others as Adani's administrative officer, the outfit's "security chief," and "head of finance," as well as one of the founders of the terrorist outfit in the country.

Spokesman for the Yemeni Armed Forces Brigadier General Yahya Saree had on Friday said the al-Bayda operation targeted "al-Qaeda and Daesh [terrorists], who enjoyed the support of the Saudi-led coalition."

Citing a security source in the Yemeni capital Sana'a, al-Masirah said the Daesh figures, who were first besieged during the operation, sought to target the Yemeni forces in a suicide attack. They failed, however, prompting a firefight during which all of them were killed, the source added.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is reportedly in a coma and his sister Kim Yo-jong will be exercising de facto control over national and international matters, several media outlets said quoting a former aide of South Koreas late president Kim Dae-jung.

Chang Song-min, who served Kim Dae-jung as a political affairs secretary and as head of the state affairs monitoring office, reportedly claimed in a social media post that no North Korean leader would entrust any of his authority to another person unless he was too sick to rule or was removed through a coup.

I assess him (Kim Jong Un) to be in a coma, but his life has not ended, he was quoted as saying by The Korea Herald. A complete succession structure has not been formed, so Kim Yo-jong is being brought to the fore as the vacuum cannot be maintained for a prolonged period, he added.

Watch | Kim Jong-Un reportedly in coma, sister Kim Yo-jong may take over: Key details

Chang claims to have secured the information from a source in China that Kim is comatose.

According to the South Korean daily, Seouls spy agency told lawmakers in a closed-door meeting about a ruling system that Kim seemed to have set up following which he shall share authority and responsibility with his most trusted aides. The National Intelligence Agency, however, said that the new system is not associated with any serious health issue.

Changs claims come months after the North Korean dictator had not made a public appearance amid speculations of his deteriorating health. He was last seen presiding over a Workers Party politburo meeting on April 11 before a top security adviser to the Souths President Moon Jae-in downplayed rumours and said Kim Jong Un was alive and well.

He was then seen cutting the ribbon at the opening of a fertilizer factory on May 2, KCNA reported.

However, Chang has claimed that all photographs of Kim released by North Korea in recent months were fake.

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As the Republican National Convention got under way Monday, Former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, alongside more than two dozen former Republican members of Congress, endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The Biden campaign announced that the former lawmakers joined its new Republicans for Biden program, also launched Monday, part of the campaigns efforts to engage with Republicans considering voting for Biden.

Several of those on Biden campaigns list had previously announced their support for the former vice president, including former Pennsylvania Representative Charlie Dent and former senators Gordon Humphrey and John Warner, of New Hampshire and Virginia respectively.

Most notable was Jeff Flake, who clashed with President Donald Trump during his time in the Senate and has made headlines since for his vocal opposition to the president.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post last September, Flake pushed Republicans not to support Trumps bid for a second term, writing that the president had proved to be so manifestly undeserving of the highest office that we have.

Flake was expected to make remarks Monday afternoon on his support for Biden, according to the Biden campaign.

The announcement was the latest in the Biden campaigns strategy to attract moderate and conservative voters by showcasing notable Republican supporters.

Among the Republicans who spoke at the Democratic National Convention last week were former governors John Kasich and Christine Todd Whitman, of Ohio and New Jersey respectively, former Secretary of State Colin Power and former New York Representative Susan Molinari.

In a statement to Fox News, the Trump campaign dismissed the Monday announcement of Republican support for Biden.

Joe Biden has been a failure in the Washington Swamp for a half century, so no one should be surprised when Swamp creatures gather to protect one of their own, said Trump campaign Communications Director Tim Murtaugh.

President Trump has unprecedented support  over 95 percent  among real Republican voters and is also making strong inroads in Bidens core Democrat constituencies, like Black Americans, Latinos, and union members. President Trumps record of success for all Americans will carry him to victory in November.

The Trump campaign will feature some of its own converts at the Republican National Convention, including New Jersey Representative Jeff Van Drew, who said last year he was switching to the Republican Party. Trump himself is scheduled to appear on every night of the convention.
Gaborone, Botswana (PANA) - Botswana has restricted the importation of baked goods, to stimulate the establishment and development of micro, small, medium and large enterprises operating the bread and confectionary services
DUBAI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 24th Aug, 2020) His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, announced that the Hope Probe, the Arab worlds first mission to another planet, travelled fifth of its journey to the Red Planet one month after its historic lift-off from Japan.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum shared two images from the Hope Probes star-tracking camera and tweeted, "The Hope Probe is officially 100 million km into its journey to the Red Planet. Mars, as demonstrated in the image captured by the Probes Star Tracker, is ahead of us, leaving Saturn and Jupiter behind. The Hope Probe is expected to arrive to Mars in February 2021."

"In less than 170 days, we will celebrate the probes entry into the Red Planets orbit. It will be a path-breaking achievement in the history of global Mars missions."

He noted that "the Emirates Mars Mission will create a giant leap in the countrys space technologies and open new horizons towards other space missions."

He added, "the next phase requires investments in science for the benefit of mankind. We need young people to lead us towards further scientific breakthroughs."

The Hope Probe has so far travelled 20 per cent of its 493-million-kilometre journey to the Red Planet since its successful lift-off from Japans Tanegashima Space Center on July 20, 2020.

The 100-million-km milestone comes after the probes successful completion of its first trajectory correction manoeuvre TCMs that marked the firing of its six Delta-V thrusters. The probe will perform a number of further trajectory control manoeuvres, to reach its scheduled Mars Orbit Insertion, MOI, less than 170 days on February 2021, coinciding with the UAEs Golden Jubilee celebrations.

Currently travelling at a speed ranging between 110,400 km/h to 122,400km/h, the Hope Probe has already travelled fifth of its journey, equivalent to 130 trips from the Earth to the moon.

The probe will automatically reduce its speed to 18,000 km/h as it gets closer to Mars.

This phase of the probes journey marks the testing of the three advanced science instruments mounted on the probe that work simultaneously to capture complete data from Mars. The first is an infrared spectrometer to measure the lower atmosphere and analyse the temperature structure. The second is a high-resolution exploration imager that will provide information about ozone levels and depth of water ice in the atmosphere, while the third, an ultraviolet spectrometre, is set to measure oxygen and hydrogen levels.

The Hope Probe will provide the first truly global picture of the Martian atmosphere as it orbits the Red Planet throughout one full Martian year of 687 days.

With the help of the mounted three devices, the probe will provide answers to long-standing questions about the Red Planet as it will be the first to study the Martian climate throughout daily and seasonal cycles. It will observe the weather phenomena in Mars such as the massive famous dust storms that have been known to engulf the Red Planet, as compared to the short and localized dust storms on earth.

The Mars Hope Probe will examine the interaction between the upper and lower layers of the Martian atmosphere and causes of the Red Planets surface corrosion, as well as study why Mars is losing its upper atmosphere.

Exploring connections between todays Martian weather and the ancient climate of the Red Planet will give deeper insights into the past and future of Earth and the potential of life on Mars and other distant planets.

The Emirates Mars Mission team has amassed success in ensuring the Hope Probe launch was on track despite the global COVID-19 outbreak. The team had quickly readjusted execution plans, while adhering to the necessary logistical and technical guidelines ahead of the historic launch that took place on July 20th, 2020, from Japan at 1:58 am UAE time.

The Emirates Mars Mission team, which includes 200 Emirati engineers and specialists, had built the orbiter in six years, at half the duration and cost of conventional missions. The Mars mission is part of the UAEs contribution to global space exploration efforts and adds a new dimension to human knowledge.

A team of Emirati experts are tracking the Mars orbiters journey at the ground station of the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center located at Al Khawaneej. The team is supervising the probes control operations, and receiving signals and data from the probe.

Once it enters the Red Planets orbit, the will send back more than 1,000 gigabytes of new Mars data to be shared with over 200 research centres for free across the world. The missions wider objective involves inspiring youth across the world to pursue science-based fields and spark their interest in technology, space engineering and advanced sciences as the main pillars of the future knowledge-based economy. The pursuit instils a culture of innovation and opens up new opportunities in the modern labour market.

So far, the mission has attracted 60,000 students to join its diverse educational programmes, developed 200 new technologies and helped publish 51 research papers and build 66 parts of the probe in the UAE.
From time to time, Branford residents visiting the town hall with a tax issue approach the window and ask Roberta Gill-Brooks if they can speak to the person in charge.

Im the person in charge, Gill-Brooks, whos serving her second term as tax collector, tells them, as she recounted at a recently livestreamed program titled Black in Branford: A Perspective in a Time of Awakening held by the Blackstone Library.

The first Black woman to run for office in Branford when she was first elected tax collector almost three years ago, Gill-Brooks has deep roots in the town, which is 90.1 percent white and 1.2 percent Black residents, according to the 2019 census.

Her great, great grandfather, John Williams, settled in the town in 1910 as part of a recruitment effort by Malleable Iron Fittings that drew the first Black families to Branford. Her father, Robert Gill, served the Branford Police Department for 44 years, including nine as its police chief. Her mother, Dorothy, has been active in community life for years.

As tax collector, Bobi, as Gill-Brooks is known, has set herself apart with her high level of service and quiet dependability, said First Selectman James Cosgrove. For her second term, she was cross-endorsed by both political parties.

When Gill-Brooks stood up on a chair at the early-June Black Lives Matter rally on Branford Green and promised to tell you how a little Black girl who was blessed enough to grow up in a town like Branford sees this whole thing from a personal perspective, people took notice.

We might have assumed that the respect and success that Bobi and her family have enjoyed has insulated her from all the injustice and pain, moderator and former state Rep. Lonnie Reed said at the outset of the program. We would be wrong.

Gill-Brooks agreed. I dont think anyone goes looking for racism or expecting it, it just has a way of sneaking up on a person of color, even in a town like Branford, she said.

Even, it seems, with parents who sought to build in her a sense of her intrinsic worth, managing to find her a Christie doll, Barbies first Black friend, as well as picture books with girls that looked like her, she said.

She recalled, when she was in second grade, a parent opening the door to a birthday party. Seeing her, there was a pause of surprise because she didnt know her daughter had a Black friend, she said. It wasnt unlike what she experienced, decades later, while campaigning door to door with a few of the other candidates on her team, who were white.

I learned to let one of them ring the doorbell, or I rang it and stepped back, because I could just sense the discomfort, she said. That could just be because people dont want people knocking on their door, I get that, but if youve been Black as long as I have, you pick up on some things, just to be on the safe side.

Its that impulse, too, that has her on alert on how she speaks to her customers, she said. I love helping people find ways to work around their budgets, particularly my seniors.  That said, Im always mindful that I am Black and a lot of people are not used to this so make sure you are professional, make sure you are kind, make sure you are fair.

That kind of heightened caution doesnt stop when shes off-duty. Im very careful when Im in a store to make sure my hands are out where people can see them, she said as an example.

All that takes a toll. You just get used to carrying it, theres no, Im going to take a break from that because you cant, theres no, Im not going to worry about that today because you cant, she said. Its just there.

At times, it gets heavier than others, like now, she said, referring to the killing of George Floyd. It also happened a few years back when her oldest nephew, in a case of mistaken identity, was pulled over in California and pinned to the ground, with guns drawn by the police.

That was the catalyst for a letter her father wrote to her three sons and three nephews from the standpoint, she said, of a loving grandfather but also a police officer, that included what they should do if stopped by police.

Regardless of how wronged you feel, he wrote, you must do whatever you can to prevent anything from reaching an escalation point.

Despite the letters impact, Gill-Brooks said she still worries about all her men, not least her son Kyle, whos 25, very, very bright, but on the spectrum. He also loves Skittles.

When Trayvon Martin was killed while carrying home a bag of Skittles from a 7-Eleven, all I could imagine was Kyle coming out of a convenience store with a bag of Skittles, and having an officer stop him, mistaken identity, and him not understanding because he didnt do anything.

These are the kind of fears that you live with all the time but you cant let consume you but you also cant let too far out of your sight, she said.

Despite the reality that its a terrifying time and an exhausting time to be Black, shes optimistic. I have to be, she said. Weve come way too far to turn back.

While Gill-Brooks said shes pinning her hopes on the next generation, she perhaps underestimated her own role as part of the solution, as Blackstone Library director Karen Jensen later noted.

Theres a reason the program has been viewed more than 2,000 times since its broadcast, she said. Bobi has distinguished herself both by her groundbreaking position as the first Black female elected official in Branford and her willingness to speak so honestly and eloquently about her experience.

That seemed particularly true when, toward the end of the program, someone asked how it feels to walk into a room full of white people.

After I did it the first time, it was easy, she said after a pause. I just turn it up a notch. I remember whose daughter I am, whose sister I am, and in that moment, I remember whose mother I am, and then I just step in and do my thing.

Black in Branford: A Perspective in a Time of Awakening may be viewed at https://www.facebook.com/BlackstoneLibrary/videos/687162532141386/?vh=e&extid=hkuCVmdVil0MSnJm&d=n

Lisa Reisman may be reached at lisareisman27@gmail.com.
On Thursday, the Texas Education Agency and the Texas Department of State Health Services released data on confirmed COVID-19 cases at the public school district level for the first time.

Public schools are required to report positive COVID-19 cases on school campuses. The data is updated each week on the DSHS website.

READ ALSO: Coronavirus updates: 155 new cases, no new COVID-19 deaths in Bexar County

Since Aug. 2 through the week ending Sept. 20, DSHS and TEA reported 3,445 cumulative positive student cases and 2,850 positive staff cases statewide.

In San Antonio, three of the largest school districts reported more than 80 COVID-19 cases combined for students and staff. In Bexar County, public schools were allowed to return to in-person instruction starting Sept. 8. However, virtual learning is still an option.

Scroll below for a breakdown of the COVID-19 cases for all the major San Antonio-area public schools. Districts are listed in alphabetical order. There was no data on Brooks Academy of Science & Engineering, Lackland ISD and School of Science & Technology Discover.
US President Donald Trump's re-election campaign has announced a set of core priorities for his second term ahead of the four-day 2020 (RNC) set to begin from Monday.

The priorities, under the banner of "Fighting for You", will focus on jobs, eradicating Covid-19, healthcare, education, immigration, innovation, foreign policy, and other areas, Xinhua news agency quoted the campaign as saying on Sunday night.

If re-elected, Trump has vowed to create 10 million new jobs in 10 months, develop a vaccine against the coronavirus by the end of this year, establish permanent manned presence on the Moon, and send the first manned mission to Mars, among others.

The campaign also said Trump will continue to pursue his "America First" foreign policy.

The President "will further illuminate these plans during his acceptance speech Thursday", it said.

"Over the coming weeks, the President will be sharing additional details about his plans through policy-focused speeches on the campaign trail."

Trump's speech to accept the 2020 Republican presidential nomination will be delivered on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday night despite criticism that he should not use a federal property as the backdrop for a campaign event.

This year's RNC will kick off on Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Over 300 delegates, a small portion of the total, will meet in person there to formally nominate Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for the 2020 Republican ticket.

The Republican National Committee said on Sunday that it "has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform".

The committee "enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden administration", said a statement.

"The 2020 will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 "

Party platforms are traditionally used to lay out the party and candidate's ideas, beliefs and goals.

In 2016, the Republican platform was 54 pages long.

This year's Democratic platform is 91 pages long.

Former Vice President Joe Biden formally accepted the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nominee on the final night of this year's Democratic National Convention last week.

Presently, Biden leads Trump by 7.6 percentage points nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Trump, however, has repeatedly dismissed polls showing him falling behind.

--IANS

ksk/
Wilkes-Barre, PA (18701)

Today

Light snow this morning giving way to partly cloudy conditions this afternoon. Morning high of 35F with temps falling to near 20. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 70%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy. Low 9F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.
Chris Hemsworth is certainly a superstar when it comes to his Hollywood acting career, but he's also a super dad to his three children.

The Thor star, 37, was spotted out and about with his brood in New South Wales' idyllic coastal town of Byron Bay on Thursday.

The barefoot Australian actor was seen carrying his injured twin son, six, through town, as the little one sported white bandages wrapped over his small hands.

Super dad! Australian actor Chris Hemsworth was spotted carrying his injured twin son during barefoot stroll in Byron Bay with his three children on Thursday

Chris and Spanish actress wife Elsa Pataky share daughter India, eight, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan, six.

Despite one of the twin sons appearing to have injured himself recently, the family were in good spirits during the outing.

The youngster placed his arms around his strong father's torso while wearing an adorable red cap with the words 'Koala Lover' written on it.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Chris and Elsa's management for comment.

Keeping it casual: The barefoot Australian actor kept a low profile as he ran errands with the couple's three children - daughter India, eight, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan, six

'Home schooling them is an absolute challenge': In April, Chris revealed he was struggling to get their three children to concentrate on their studies at home

The barefoot Australian actor kept a low profile as he ran errands with the couple's three children and was dressed casually a grey T-shirt and black boardshorts.

While he didn't appear to be wearing anything overtly flashy or designer, he did complete his look with a pair of stylish shades and a green cap.

Just like their famous father, the children also went barefoot for the outing.

What's in the bag? Chris appeared to have a heavy bag while walking near a bottle shop in the local area

In April, Chris revealed he was struggling to get their three children to concentrate on their studies while homeschooling amid the coronavirus pandemic.

'Home schooling them is an absolute challenge. It's three hours of negotiation and maybe 20 minutes of actual work,' he said at the time.

The star, who was self-isolating with his family in their $20million Byron Bay mansion, added: '[My children] just crave interaction with other kids so much, obviously, and that's a challenge.'

Affordable fashion: Chris didn't appear to be wearing anything overtly flashy or designer, with his O'Neill board shorts likely retailing for $70

Hollywood past: Chris and his wife Elsa Pataky relocated to New South Wales from Los Angeles in 2014, and haven't looked back since

Despite being Hollywood megastars, doting parents Elsa and Chris are very hands-on with their children and are regulars at the school gate.

The couple relocated to New South Wales from Los Angeles in 2014, and haven't looked back since.

Elsa previously told Stellar in 2017 that she enjoyed the more laid-back lifestyle in Byron Bay and was happy to be treated more like 'a local' than a celebrity.
A quarter of a million dollars. Gone. Soon, Ill need to come up with a few hundred thousand dollars to reopen and get back on track since the COVID-19 closures of my restaurants. Yet, I wouldnt have traded any of this money for what it allowed me: the time to become a father.

For the past five months, my daughter Helena and I have spent every day together. Shes 19 months old, but for the first 13 months of her life I was a zombie. I did my best to catch her for bedtime baths, kisses good night, and nightly feedings but on my one day off a week I was sleepwalking  home but in a haze. This is the curse of being a chef parent. It was my own curse growing up with two parents who each owned a small business.

When I was 5, I was old enough to help file paperwork in their offices. At seven, I began helping my grandmother prepare dinner. After the Berlin Wall fell, my grandmother left the former Soviet Union and came to live with us in Alameda. I got to know my parents only in snippets. Im still doing so. I worry that Helena will grow up with a father who gives more of himself to an industry than he does to her.

This immigrant mentality is common. We work hard to provide a better life for our children. Its the sacrifice of the small business owner. Coronavirus was a blessing in disguise. It forced me  and millions of people like me  to stop and reevaluate what we were working for.

With all that has happened in 2020, it seems like this will be a year of radical change. This includes my industry. For most of my career I found success by working for free. Either by working as a stagiaire (the culinary form of an internship) or simply clocking the hours  many of them off the actual clock. This was the norm and the long painful time on my feet was a badge of honor.

The restaurant world has been living on the backs of low and unpaid labor for too long. It has perpetuated inequities within many of our favorite dining establishments and held people back from any kind of career path. The system negatively impacts immigrants and people of color much more than white people. Cooking daily for my daughter, and being there for simple things like naps, gave me the mental space to reflect on the deep systemic issues baked into our industry.

When you visit your favorite restaurant, bakery, bar, food truck or cafe, its not the food and drink that youre paying for  its the human lives behind each element. It might be easy to overlook them when they arent guest facing, but they are arguably more essential. These people are risking their lives by showing up to work when everyone else has the luxury of sheltering in place. Thats why small bars and restaurants now need a lifeline, like the program proposed in the Restaurants Act. Having access to grants, not loans, would help us ensure we can stay closed until its safe to reopen, as well as providing funds for new expenses like personal protective equipment for our staff.

Once restaurants reopen (if they reopen), we need to pass along a greater percentage of our costs to the guest. In order to create self-sustaining businesses, we must raise our prices by at least 30% to 40%. Numbers like these will allow us to pay a living wage to our low-paid workers. It will also give small business owners a safety net.

This will be at its core a marketing experiment. If we give guests the information, will they continue to support us? Raw materials  vegetables, cheese, olive oil  will see increases up to 20% so that we can represent the true cost. If you dine with me at Che Fico, your check may also include a 15% labor or dine-in charge. This is not a tip. This is meant to cover additional staff and supplies that inside service will require. If you order take-away from Che Fico Alimentari that charge may be replaced by a 3% disposables charge. This will pay for packaging and, in our case, our plan to partially pledge a carbon offset for the extra waste. Free things  compostable plastic utensils, natural sugar packets, biodegradable to-go containers  cost money, even more so now that we must include PPE to keep everyone safer.

Our cities can help their local restaurants by launching educational initiatives to help customers learn more about the real cost of doing business. States can help by making all hourly employees eligible to receive tips. If it means we do away with whats called a tip credit, then Im all for it but there needs to be parity in how we distribute gratuity to all of our staff.

It may mean that as a nation we go out to dinner less and eat at home more. In fact, I welcome that. I recently started a YouTube channel filled with videos of me making some of my favorite recipes. Maybe I even make it look easy, but running a restaurant isnt easy, and by dining out less, we can bring back the specialness of dinner out. So much of the dining public has become cynical and skeptical. This stems from overstimulation and an overabundance of options.

Food media has to take more responsibility, too. Writers and influencers have helped foster an environment of fear. Restaurants worry about charging too much and then feeling the wrath of food writers, but rarely (if ever) does a restaurant review include context like whether the restaurant pays a living wage, what their commercial rent is, or if there are social good programs.

Whats on the plate is no longer the only metric we need to be judged on. Restaurants should be measured by their sourcing methods. If its local, then talk about the producer, too. The media has fostered an overly competitive environment that rewards chefs for spending every waking hour in their restaurants instead of putting their kids to bed at night. If I can change, so can the media.

During our COVID-19 closures, not one week has gone by without my partner Matt and I agonizing over our future. This isnt new. Our entrepreneurship journey, going on six years now, has been dark with few signposts along the way. Its even more murky as we enter what will undoubtedly be a challenging recession.

Despite this, weve decided that before we reopen we will create a path to partnership for employees that want it. Well offer profit-sharing potential for all employees when we hit our goals as a business. We currently do this with our landlord, and its fostered a relationship built on support and trust. Once we can return to full capacity, the majority of our employees will be given a raise. Seems crazy to give people a raise when everything is so uncertain, right? Well, if we cant change the way our industry treats our most valuable assets then why reopen at all?

We are not the only introspective restaurateurs determined to change our business model and take care of our employees. In March, I joined the Independent Restaurant Coalition. We represent 500,000 independent restaurants across the country whose businesses have been jeopardized by the pandemic. Together, my colleagues and I have spent hours on the phones convincing representatives across the country to pass the Restaurants Act. This $120 billion industry-specific revitalization fund would allow restaurants to keep their doors open.

When this global pandemic is behind us, Che Fico and Che Fico Alimentari will be back. The restaurants will look different but I believe that our community and our team will support us in raising the bar. A new normal where the entire team can prosper. I hope my colleagues in the industry and beyond take this call to arms as its intended, a call for solidarity and empowering change. Its time to throw away the old mindset that equates success with sacrifice.

COVID allowed me to see the importance of human life, and as we re-enter society lets not forget that lesson.

David Nayfeld is chef and partner of Che Fico and Che Fico Alimentari in San Francisco. Twitter: @DavidNayfeld
The U.S-led coalition in Iraq Sunday handed over to the army of the Middle East country the Taji military base outside capital Baghdad amid pledge by President Donald Trump to pull out international forces within three years.

Taji military facility, located 85 km north of Baghdad is the most important training of the Iraqi forces by the coalition which entered the country in 2014 to fight the Islamic state group (ISIS) under an agreement with the Iraqi government.

The base is the seventh this year to be handed over to Iraqi forces. The pullouts were ignited amid increased attacks by pro-Iran militias on the military facilities controlled by U.S-led coalition. The attacks have shot up following the assassination early this year of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a drone attack in Baghdad.

Also last week, President Trump on receiving Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Washington vowed to wrap out the withdrawal of the international coalition within three years.

There are currently about 5,000 US forces along with another 2,500 soldiers in Iraq under the US-led coalition.
The Chairman of Parliament's Roads and Transport Committee, Samuel Ayeh-Paye is wondering why the flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama is now interested in revamping Okada (Motorbike) business when voted into power again.



He claims the former Presidents administration nearly collapsed the business when a law was proposed to parliament by his government to ban the operation of Okada business.



Former President Mahama introduced the law to ban Okada in 2012. And I remember very well that Okada riders demonstrated against the law but nothing was done to review it then. Why is he pretending the NPP is against their operations? Mahama is just desperate for power, Samuel Ayeh-Paye told NEAT FMs morning show Ghana Montie.



His comment follows Mahamas claims that the okada business had created more jobs for Ghanaians than the Nation Builders Corps (NaBCo) and the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) put together  after questioning why the trade has been branded illegal.



This is a service that has come to stay. Whether you legalise it or not, you cannot stop it and, so, why behave like the ostrich and bury your head in the sand. These Okadas have created more jobs in this economy than any government job-related policy.



It has created more jobs than NABCo, it has created more jobs than YEA and all those artificial job creation programmes, Mr. Mahama said in his promise to legalise the trade when voted into power.





The Transport Ministry on Tuesday, March 26, 2019, revealed that they are considering a review of the law that bans the use of motorbikes (Okada) in the country for commercial purposes.Deputy Transport Minister Titus Glover said section 128 of the road traffic regulation Act will be reviewed.According to him, the use of motorbikes for commercial work is providing jobs for most of the youth and the need to review the regulation."They are helping because in their operations there are no jobs available if he is using the motorbike not to commit a crime but to provide a service for a fee even though the laws say that it is illegal to some extent he is doing a job, putting money on the table of his family, it's creating some jobs for the youth, so look at this side of regulation 128," he noted.Receiving the news, the Okada riders say it's a step in the right direction and this will motivate more unemployment youth to join the trade.

Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Kenneth Atkinson, founder of international audit agency Grant Thornton and Vice Chairman of the Vietnam Tourism Advisory Board, said economists are warning that the new COVID-19 outbreak could overshadow the past optimistic forecasts about Vietnams short-term economic growth.

However, he still believed that Vietnam remains attractive to international companies.

Most foreigners living in Da Nang believed that the Vietnamese Government took swift and effective actions to combat COVID-19, both earlier this year and at present.

A foreign web designer said the Vietnamese Government is doing its best to prevent the new pandemic outbreak and current countermeasures are very important.
This story is part of a Metroland-wide series on drugs, guns and human trafficking happening along the major highways that run through our communities. For more on this topic visit Highway Pirates  guns, drugs and human trafficking.

Organizations dedicated to helping victims and stopping human trafficking agree that education on the issue and awareness of what to watch out for are key when it comes to changing the tide in this battle.

People who are victims and survivors come from all walks of life, so its important to not make assumptions about who may be targeted, said Jennifer Moore, executive director at Dufferin Child and Family Services. We need to continue with public education and encourage parents to talk with their youth about this issue.

An important facet to helping prevent victims from being trafficked in the first place or helping those already entrapped is knowing the kinds of behaviours, activities, and cues to watch for.

(Be aware) if they are more secretive, seem worried, or are hanging out with new friends that they dont want you to meet, said Pina Marino, VCAO & programs manager for Caledon/Dufferin Victim Services (CDVS). If they are sad, distracted, angry, or fearful, that would be a good time to talk.

Often, those trying to earn their trust in order to manipulate and traffic them will engage in activities that are designed to create deep romantic or other relational feelings from the victim. The trafficker will shower them with compliments, gifts, and create a relationship where they feel loved, convincing the victim they only have their best interests in mind.

Traffickers are very manipulative and use many means of grooming, to the extent that sometimes victims do not understand what they are a part of until they feel they have no way out, said Moore.

Another facet of manipulation comes through the showering of expensive gifts or financial incentives.

Typically, its a money-motivated thing, explained Detective Staff Sergeant Coyer Yatemen, manager of the Anti-Human Trafficking Investigation Coordination Team with the OPP. In the recruitment stage, a victim could be getting lots of gifts that they cant afford or cant explain how theyre getting them. They may talk about lots of money but never really have that money.

He added that especially once theyve started being trafficked, they can be convinced that they get a share of that money, even though in reality its going to their pimp.

The money can go through their hands pretty quickly, from clients, to themselves, to their trafficker, so they get the impression that they are making a lot of money and having a lot of access to money, he said. When it comes down to it they really dont have the money, because its taken from them.

Just being able to see the signs isnt enough to help break victims free from being trafficked however, for a large number of reasons. They may fear for their lives if they leave, or their trafficker may have threatened harm to family, friends, and other loved ones if they try to leave.

These issues play into a psychological hold over victims, and can create a significant challenge for police and organizations attempting to help them break free or assist in taking down their traffickers.

Its the difficulty of victims being able to leave their exploitative situation without having that psychological pullback, said Det. Staff Sgt. Yateman. Those are some of the extreme challenges for us.

Another challenge is often the secretive nature of trafficking, which is what criminals count on to be able to continue operating.

Trafficking is a very under reported crime that is carried out in the shadows, noted Marino. Men who purchase sex drive up the demand, especially for young girls who are lured into this dangerous world.

Despite these challenges, hope is not lost. Not only does being aware of these issues help, but knowing which organizations can provide help and making sure that information is widely available provides safe escape options for victims.

Locally, DCAFS provides services and supports in collaboration with a number of community partners like Family Transition Place and CDVS. Recently, they collectively submitted a grant application which would allow for ongoing community education and awareness, as well as counselling and wraparound support for trafficking victims 18 and under.

Victim Services is a major player in providing assistance, with agencies across the country that have been mandated to support victims of trafficking as well as their family.

We administer a program through the Ministry of the Attorney General, which provides financial assistance to eligible victims for basic needs, recovery at treatment centres, counselling, and more, added Marino. We will help them find the help they need, provide safety planning, and information they can use.

We have victim supports all across Ontario that are readily available and trained, including officers who are trained and dedicated to human trafficking, said Det. Staff Sgt. Yateman. There are also numerous programs, such as Ontario introducing the restraining orders that can be placed from a victim or depending on their age by their family against the trafficker, even without charges or criminal charges.

As more avenues of assistance become available to help victims and prosecute traffickers, the more that can be done to stop this horrifying crime.

For more information on initiatives being taken by the Province of Ontario, visit https://www.ontario.ca/page/human-trafficking. If you or someone you know needs immediate help, contact the Ontario Provincial Police by dialing 911, Dufferin Child and Family Services, Caledon/Dufferin Victim Services, or Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline, which operates 24-7 at 1-833-900-1010.

This reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.
JDS leader and former Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy on Sunday (August 23) slammed the Ayush Ministry Secretary for allegedly asking non-Hindi participants to leave a training programme if they do not understand the language properly.

Kumaraswamy asked whether the Secretary had done this with "shameless excitement" to impose Hindi. The former Karnataka CM also asked how much more people of other languages have to sacrifice in India for not knowing Hindi.

In a series of tweets in Kannada, Kumaraswamy asserted that the unity of the country is dependent on constitutional federalism and every Indian language is part of the federal structure.

"When such is the situation, isn't asking people to go out of the training programme for not knowing to speak in Hindi, a violation of the federal system? anti constitution?" he asked.

Kumaraswamy demanded immediate action against Ayush Ministry Secretary, who according to the JD(S) leader has "obsession for Hindi supremacy".

The controversy started few days ago after yoga and naturopathy practitioners and master trainers were allegedly asked to leave a Webinar organized by the Central govermnents Ayush Ministry by Secretary Rajesh Kotecha.

In a video that is not independently verified, Kotecha is seen speaking in a mix of Hindi and English language, those who need English can leave. I dont speak English very well, I will speak in Hindi. In all there were about 37 participants from Tamil Nadu (each representing a district), who were deputed by the state government.

The event was organized by the Morarji Desai Institute of Yoga, which falls under the Ministry of AYUSH, Government of India. Attendees from Tamil Nadu allege that the event was held in Hindi, right from the very start.
Chief minister Adityanath on Monday directed officers concerned to increase the number of beds in Covid-19 hospitals in Uttar Pradesh in such a manner that there would always be a surplus of beds at these facilities, the chief ministers office said in a statement.

The state government was committed to providing the best treatment to all Covid-19 patients, Adityanath reiterated at a meeting in his residence to review the pandemic and the unlock situation.

For providing the best treatment to Covid patients, ensure that the hospitals are well equipped. The patients must get quality treatment facilities, he said according to the statement.

But do not merely increase the beds. The increase in beds should be supplemented with arrangement of all necessary medical equipment and human resources, he said.

He reiterated that all districts must keep their integrated command and control centres in the utmost active mode and make them function efficiently for coordinated Covid-19 management.

Through these integrated control and command centres, keep in touch on a regular basis with the patients who are in home isolation. Monitor their health status regularly, using the system. At the same time, keep all ambulances fully active for transporting Covid patients. Pay special attention to Lucknow and Kanpur Nagar districts vis-a-vis Covid-19 management, he said.

The chief minister observed: Contact tracing is helping keep Covid-19 spread under control. So, do more and better contact tracing. Speed up door-to-door survey to detect anyone with Covid symptoms. If need be, create more door-to-door survey teams and set targets for them.

He also asked officials to invoke the National Security Act (NSA) against those who resort to black-marketeering of fertilizer and said all farmers must get the required quantity of fertilizer, the statement added.

Invoke NSA against those who put fertilizer in the black market, he said.

Touching upon investments to shore up the economy amid the pandemic, the chief minister asked the officers and departments concerned to keep in touch with investors, sort out their problems and issues.

Talking about waterlogging in Noida and Greater Noida following heavy rain, Adityanath asked the officers concerned to evolve a system to prevent such situations in the future.
How this ISIS operative from Mangaluru lured her victims and converted them to Islam

To strike in Delhi, ISIS operative stocked up 19 dangerous items

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 23: The police have recovered 19 items from the ISIS operative who was arrested on Saturday by the Special Cell of the Delhi police.

From an ISIS flag to materials meant to make explosives were recovered from the house of Abdul Yusuf Khan alias Abu Yusuf, He is a resident of Balrampur in Uttar Pradesh.

ISIS operative nabbed in Delhi had planned an August 15 strike

Deputy Commissioner Pramod Singh Kushwaha said that the operative was arrested with Improvised Explosive Devices by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police. He said that the arrest took place following an exchange of fire at Dhaula Kuan.

His handlers were Yusuf Al-Hindi and Abu Huzafa. Al-Hindi, it may be recalled was killed in Syria. Abu Yusuf was the owner of a cosmetic shop in Uttar Pradesh. He was radicalised online following which he got in touch with his handlers. He was asked to carry out an attack, following which he was to go to Syria. He had already readied passports for his wife and four children. Following the attack, he and his family were to fly into Syria, the police have learnt.

He was instructed by his emir to strike on August 15. He was, however, unable to do so owing to heavy security. He had decided to put his plan on hold and strike at another time. However concrete intelligence led to nabbing, following which a major strike was averted.

ISIS operative concealed IED in pressure cooker, planned lone wolf attack in Delhi

The police had received information about his movement in the ridge area between Dhaula Kuan and Karol Bagh. Following this, a trap was laid to nab him.

What was recovered from Abu Yusuf:

One Brown colour jacket containing 3 explosive packets which were removed safely. One Blue colour check design jacket containing 4 explosive packets which were removed safely. Each explosive packet, removed from jackets, is wrapped with transparent tape which contains explosive and cardboard sheet pasted with ball bearings and electric wires are coming outside from it. One Leather Belt containing explosive 3 Kg approximately. Total 8-9 Kg explosives in 4 different polythenes. Three cylindrical metal boxes containing explosive and electric wires wrapped with transparent tape. Two cylindrical metal boxes in which ball bearings were pasted. One Wooden broken box (target practice) One ISIS Flag 30 Ball Bearings of different diameters. One packet containing 12 small boxes containing ball bearings. Two Lithium Batteries of 4V each. One Lithium Battery 9V. Two cylindrical metal boxes One Ampere meter Yellow colour Two iron blades, attached in parallel to each other, connected to electric wires from both sides One wire cutter Two mobile chargers Table alarm watch attached with electric wires One Black colour tape
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DANBURY  After a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases, officials are adding three coronavirus testing session in Danbury.

The move comes after Mayor Mark Boughton advised residents to limit their activities over the weekend.

Close to 2,300 city residents have had the virus since March. From Aug. 2 through Thursday, Danbury reported at least 178 new coronavirus cases, according to the state Department of Public Health on Friday.

Fourty-four additional cases among Danbury residents were reported Friday, according to Boughton.

In an email to Hearst Connecticut Media, the mayor said eight more residents had tested positive for the virus on Sunday.

According to the Community Health Center, testing is available at its Danbury location on 8 Delay St. Monday to Friday from 9 a.m to 1 a.m. There will also be a testing session on Monday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Broadview Middle School.

The CHC said another testing session will be held on Tuesday at Rogers Park Middle School from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. It said test results are available in two to three days and a CHC provider will call or text to discuss positive results.

Regarding long lines of cars at a COVID-19 testing center in Danbury, Boughton said the city had done extensive outreach to get people to come in and be tested. He said most people are following health guidlines and his request to limit their activity over the weekend.
Police in combat gear are seen near the site where a motorcycle rigged with a bomb exploded in Jolo, southern Philippines, one of two explosions there blamed on Islamic State-linked Abu Sayyaf Group militants that left at least 14 people dead and about 75 others injured, Aug. 24, 2020.

Updated at 9:47 a.m. ET on 2020-08-24

Two powerful bomb blasts believed to be set off by Islamic State-linked militants, including one detonated by a female suicide bomber, killed at least 14 people and wounded scores more  many of them civilians  on Jolo Island in the southern Philippines on Monday, authorities said.

The bombings in Jolo, a hotbed of the pro-IS Abu Sayyaf Group, were the deadliest to strike the capital of Sulu province since a double-suicide attack left at least 23 people dead at a local church in January last year.

Mondays blasts killed six civilians, seven soldiers and a police commando, while 75 other people  including at least 48 civilians, 21 soldiers and six police officers  were injured, according to the latest update figures from the militarys Western Mindanao Command.

We together with our counterparts are still determining the details of the explosion through a post-blast investigation, said Maj. Gen. Edgard Arevalo, the spokesman for the military.

At the moment, our troops on the ground are evacuating and providing treatment for the casualties while securing the area, he said.

A witness, Rex Enojo, said he was loading a truck with crates of food when the first blast occurred.

I fell to the ground and stayed there for several minutes, Enojo, 28, told BenarNews. When he stood up, he said, he saw the carnage  bodies on the ground and windows of nearby stores shattered.

There were four bodies I saw lying outside a fast food shop and people were running, he said, adding that as soon as he started running, he heard a second explosion.

He said he went back in time to see a wounded police commando and civilians being carried away.

The first improvised explosive device was rigged to a parked motorcycle, which exploded in front of the Paradise Food Plaza in a village called Walled City at 11:53 a.m., according to a military report.

The first blast took place along Serrantes Street, close to a military truck, officials said.

Moments later, a second blast went off meters away, on the other side of the street. A woman suicide bomber is believed to have carried out the second bombing.

After the first bomb rigged to the motorcycle went off, a woman tried to get close to the commotion, said Lt. Col. Ronaldo Mateo, spokesman for the Philippine Armys 11th Infantry Division.

A female suicide bomber detonated herself as a soldier stopped her from entering the cordoned off area, Mateo said, adding that the identity and nationality of the alleged suicide bomber was still being determined.

The attacks were most likely the work of Mundi Sawadjaan, a suspected Abu Sayyaf bomb-maker who was the target of a manhunt by the military in recent weeks, according to Mateo.

The Armys 11th Infantry Division as well as the Joint Task Force Sulu has since placed Jolo under lockdown, the military said.

We advise the public to stay calm but be vigilant to monitor and report any suspicious persons or items or unusual activities in the area, Arevalo said.

In Manila on Monday evening (local time), the presidential palace said that authorities were investigating to identify the individuals of groups behind these dastardly attacks.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the explosion incidents in Jolo, Sulu today, which left scores dead and wounded, including soldiers, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said in a statement.

This motorcycle was used in Mondays twin bomb attack in Jolo, southern Philippines, Aug. 24, 2020. [Handout photo from Armed Forces of the Philippines]

Mundi Sawadjaan is believed to be a nephew of Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan, the leader of the Philippine branch of the Islamic State (IS) terror group, who took over that role after Isnilon Hapilon was killed during fighting with government forces at the end of a five-month siege by militants in southern Marawi city in 2017.

Philippine authorities blamed Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan for orchestrating a twin suicide bombing by an Indonesian couple that killed nearly two dozen people at a church in Jolo in January 2019.

In June 2020, the military said that four members of an intelligence unit were on the trail of Abu Sayyaf suicide bombers in the area, when they were killed in an apparent misencounter with the police. Early this month, five suspected associates of Mundi Sawadjaan were caught allegedly plotting attacks in Jolo, but the mastermind bomber eluded arrest.

Maj. Gen. Corleto Vinluan, the regional military commander, said Mondays attack was planned and carried out to take advantage of the military being distracted as it helped the government in efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

He is the only one capable of executing such attacks, Vinluan said of Mundi Sawadjaan.

In Manila, Vice President Leni Robredo also condemned the attack while the country was dealing with COVID-19.

This attack is even more horrific in the context of the pandemic, when the imperative is to pull together to address the damage already wrought on our health, economy, and way of life. To kill in such a manner, in these times, regardless of motivation, is inhuman, she said in a statement.

Froilan Gallardo and Richel V. Umel, and Jeoffrey Maitem and Mark Navales, contributed to this report from Cagayan de Oro city and Cotabato City, Philippines.
A hellish nightmare has engulfed the West Coast of the United States. Record breaking heat waves, fire and lightning storms have led to the outbreak of over 600 fires throughout the state. The nation's largest and most populous state, and a global breadbasket, has been turned into a deadly inferno fueled by extreme heat waves and weather conditions that sparked fires which have decimated land areas larger than the state of Rhode Island. Currently some 13,700 firefighters are battling the blazes, air pollution is at hazardous levels and at least six lives have been lost.

The dead include a helicopter pilot who crashed while dropping water on blazes in Fresno County, a still unidentified family of three in Napa County, a male Solano County resident and a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) utility employee working in the Vacaville area.

Two firefighters in Marin County nearly lost their lives on Friday after they were surrounded by flames from the Woodward fire. By chance, a helicopter was nearby and rescued them with minutes to spare. Had it not been for that helicopter there, those firefighters would certainly have perished, said Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick.

Scorched homes and vehicles fill Spanish Flat Mobile Villa following the LNU Lightning Complex fires in unincorporated Napa County, Calif., Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Rare August thunderstorms last week above the Northern California Bay Area produced more than 20,000 lightning strikes that hit trees and vegetation, at a time when vegetation is at its driest, resulting in fires and complexes of numerous fires that have merged into major conflagrations in parts of the state. As of Saturday night, more than 140,000 people in the Bay Area have been evacuated while many are choosing to stay behind and attempt to protect their home from approaching walls of fire.

The group of fires known as the L.N.U. Lightning Complex in Napa Valley, burning across the counties of Sonoma, Lake, Napa, Yolo and Solano is the second largest fire in California history. Fire has burned through more than 341,000 acres and consumed 845 buildings and damaged another 230 and is only 17 percent contained as of midday Sunday.

At least 20 fires continue to rage East of Silicon Valley, also known as the S.C.U. Lightning Complex group fires, affecting locations in Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties. The S.C.U complex fires have grown to 339,968 acres and are now the third largest fire in state history, primarily overtaking less-populated areas. They are only ten percent contained.

The CZU Lightning Complex started August 16 from lightning strikes in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties. The complex has charred 71,000 acres, 24,000 structures are threatened, and it is eight percent contained as of Sunday. The River Fire in Monterey County has scorched 42,583 acres, up from 10,000 acres Wednesday, and is 12 percent contained.

The Lake Fire near Lake Hughes in Los Angeles County has continued to burn since August 12 when it began near the Angeles National Forest. So far, it has destroyed 12 structures and 21 outbuildings, damaged six structures and threatens 1,329 others, and has consumed a total of 30,763 acres. By Sunday evening it was only 52 percent contained. Full containment is not expected until early next month.

81-year-old Vacaville resident Hank Hanson lost everything in the fires. He told the Independent, Tuesday night when I went to bed, I had a beautiful home on a beautiful ranch... By Wednesday night, I have nothing but a bunch of ashes.

Added to this is the painful devastation of Big Basin Redwood State Parkthe oldest in California where 1500 to 1800-year-old living redwood giants and remains of their over 2,000-year-old ancestors became towering kindling over the weekend.

While the extent of the devastation has already hit near records, CAL FIRE expects conditions to worsen this week with dry heat, low humidity, and potential dry lightning expected to begin Sunday and continue over the next several days with another round of thunderstorms that will produce little rain. The National Weather Service issued a red-flag warning of extreme fire danger from 5 a.m. Sunday to 5 p.m. Monday, stretching from Sonoma County all the way through Monterey County.

Hundreds of thousands have been ordered to flee their homes as dozens of wide scale evacuation orders have been called in many areas throughout dozens of counties. Schools and fairgrounds have been hastily turned into shelters. In the time of COVID-19, residents have been forced to flee one deadly situation to another, leaving behind homes and all possessions to enter into crowded fairgrounds and school sitesmany of which are at capacity.

More than 77,000 people were forced to evacuate due to the CZU August Lightning Complex Fire in Santa Cruz County, but the main evacuation center is at max capacity due to COVID-19 social distancing with seventy-nine evacuees and their families living in tents inside the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. The vast majority are forced to live in their cars or rely on family. State provided hotel vouchers were quickly depleted. Evacuee Liz Jackson told KGO-TV ABC News 7, "We are frustrated and desperate... feeling like we're not in control, it's been horrible.

Hazardous smoke from the hundreds of fires is flooding the Bay Area and Southern California, endangering the respiratory health of millions of residents in the metropolitan areas. In San Jose, Concord and Vallejo, the air quality index has surpassed 150, threatening everyone in the region.

Many residents have chosen to stay behind to battle the flames and risk their lives, with the full knowledge that if they lose their homes, they will struggle for years with displacement, insurance battlesassuming they are coveredand the rebuilding of a life from scratch under economic conditions akin to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Cheryl Martin, a 61-year-old high school teacher in Santa Cruz County, told the Washington Post that she and her husband packed up to flee their home on Tuesday when the smoke became so unbearable that she needed a mask in the house. Her husband waited until she was on the freeway to tell her he was going to stay behind to try to save their home. Only on Thursday did he end up fleeing at the last minute, when he could see glowing flames approaching.

Daron Wyatt, public information officer for the California Interagency Emergency Response Team, told reporters, Thats one of the biggest problems is people decide that they want to stay that theyre not in great danger and then if it does, the situation does change, the firefighters have to shift their focus from fighting the fire to try to protect life.

The fact that many are choosing to risk their lives or face destitution in a terrible economic crisis is a complete indictment of the capitalist system. In fact, thousands were never made whole and are still homeless and displaced from the record-setting wildfires in 2018 which claimed 84 lives, wiped out the entire town of Paradise, California and produced apocalyptic scenes of people forced to exit their vehicles and run for their lives on gridlocked highways as flames engulfed rows of cars.

It was only in June of this year that PG&E, the Northern California energy utility, pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter and one felony count of unlawfully causing the devastating Paradise fire. The agency routinely failed to inspect and repair its power lines for years and attempted to declare bankruptcy to escape its debt obligations and other legal liabilities.

While the annual fires are portrayed as being purely environmental and unpredictable, nothing could be further from the case. Like clockwork, every year the fire season arrives between April and October, and every year lasts longer, but also like clockwork the state is always unprepared, with firehouses grossly underfunded and understaffed, while annually the summers get hotter, vegetation drier, and more days with extreme weather are added every season, the result of manmade climate change, which is causing more frequent and severe heat waves in the region and ever larger wildfires across the West.

The current heat wave throughout the state is extremely deadly and breaking records. The temperature at Death Valley National Park hit a scorching 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 Celsius) last week, marking what is likely the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. In coastal Santa Cruz, temperatures reached 107 degrees Fahrenheit (41.7 Celsius) and along the agricultural Central Valley they exceeded 110 degrees F (38.3 C).

Exposing the poor state of infrastructure, many utility companies have enforced rolling blackouts in the middle of the deadly heat wave, cutting power to 130,000 people in southern California and 220,000 people in the Central Coast and Central Valley areas.

The journal Environmental Epidemiology estimated that across the US, some 5,600 deaths are attributable to heat annually. Extreme heat disproportionately affects farm and agricultural workers, children and the elderly, with the vast majority of deaths in poor and working class neighborhoods that lack access to cool spaces. Heat stroke is the leading cause of work-related death among farm laborers.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee predicts that wildfire blackouts could be Californias new normal for the next 10 to 30 years, or even longer. A 2019 University of Southern California environmental study found that the number of extreme heat daysthose with temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheitwill more than double by 2070 in urban South Los Angeles.

So far in 2020 there have been over 6,000 wildfires of varying sizes throughout California, including the hundreds that are currently burning, compared to over 8,000 in 2019. Despite the predictability of the annual fires, there is nowhere near the number of fire crews, airplanes and helicopters needed to put out the fires. While the state relies on over 2,200 cheap prison laborers to risk their lives battling fires for $2-5 dollars a day, many are currently unavailable due to an early release initiative aimed at limiting the spread of coronavirus in the states prisons.

California Governor Gavin Newsom reported Saturday that his office has sent for firefighters from the East Coast and Australia, cynically stating that These are unprecedented times and conditions, but California is strongwe will get through this. In line with the push to reopen schools and the economy, Newsoms callous statement amounts to an acceptance of mounting devastation and death from wildfires.

Newsom recently proposed cutting $681 million from the state budget for environmental protection.

The state has systematically cut funding for social infrastructure, fire department budgets continue to be slashed, and nothing has been done to mitigate the wildfire danger.

In the wealthiest state, home to 154 billionairesthe largest number in the USas well as Silicon Valley and the Hollywood film studios, the resources more than exist to adequately prepare for the annual fire season by injecting billions into the fire departments, upgrading the states aging energy infrastructure and carrying out controlled burns to clear dry vegetation, but these are not the priorities of the ruling elite.
Format for print or mobile

USA/Global: Divest from Violent Policing and Endless Wars, Part One

AfricaFocus Bulletin

August 24, 2020 (2020-08-24)

(Reposted from sources cited below)

Divest from Violent Policing and Endless Wars: Invest Instead in a New Social Contract, Part One

by William Minter and Imani Countess*

* William Minter is the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin. Imani Countess is an Open Society Fellow focusing on economic inequality. This essay is part of a series entitled Beyond Eurocentrism and U.S. Exceptionalism: Starting Points for a Paradigm Shift from Foreign Policy to Global Policy, which began in January 2020. Thanks to Catherine Sunshine for editing the essays in this series.

The Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 have been the largest wave of protests in American history, according to calculations by the New York Times. They have erupted across the country in red states and blue states, in big cities and suburbs and small towns. This uprising, sparked by racial disparity in police violence, is playing out against a national backdrop of striking racial inequality in Covid-19 illnesses and deaths. Multiple surveys have documented significant recent shifts in public opinion on race, including among many white Americans.1

Going beyond a long history of failed reform efforts will be difficult. But the debate has been intensified and deepened with calls for action at local, state, and federal levels to defund the police and invest in positive rather than punitive programs to ensure public safety. The Justice in Policing Act, passed in June by the US House of Representatives, offers a limited set of reforms. The broader scope of activist demands is illustrated by the Breathe Act, proposed by the Movement for Black Lives, which calls for divesting federal resources from incarceration and policing and investing in new approaches to community safety.2

Such a comprehensive approach, with massive budget implications, is unlikely to win approval even from a majority of Democrats in Congress. But it sets a visionary benchmark for a direction that is increasingly accepted. This direction is reflected in incremental steps being taken in localities around the country, from major cities such as San Francisco to smaller communities such as St. Petersburg, Florida.

Protesters and even some establishment figures, their voices amplified by the mainstream media, warn that current efforts will again fall short unless the nation confronts its legacy of white supremacy, so deeply rooted in history. Symbolic measures are coming first. Confederate monuments and flags, at the forefront of the debate, represent the nations original sin of slavery. But statues of Columbus have also been targeted for removal, reflecting the recognition that white supremacy is also based on the nations other historical sin: conquest. Andrew Jackson, celebrated by President Trump, symbolizes these twin pillars of white supremacy; his statue was recently removed from the Mississippi city named for him.

The current wave of protests in the United States has received intense exposure in the global media. The whole world is watching, as it was during the massive protests of the Vietnam War years. The response abroad reflects the empathy and solidarity that many people feel with respect to Black struggles for justice in the United States. But there is also a recognition that anti-Black racism is global and not confined to any one country. This racism shows itself in the treatment of Africans and Afro-descendants in a wide range of countries, even those without large Black populations, such as China. It is reflected in the position of the African continent in the global hierarchy, and in the racial hierarchy within global institutions.

Protesters outside the United States insist that the history and practices of their own countries must also be questioned. As Kenyan analyst Nanjala Nyabola wrote in Foreign Affairs, the police in Kenya and other African countries continue the colonial practice of institutionalized brutality. In Europe, where demonstrators have denounced police violence and racism, protesters toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Liverpool, England. Police killings amid pandemic shutdowns in Kenya and South Africa have raised the question of whether Black Lives Matter to African governments; so has the ongoing police violence against civilians in Nigeria.

Despite the heightened attention to police violence in recent years, reporting and statistics from around the world are patchy and inconsistent. Even global human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, only feature systematic documentation for a few countries, despite the existence since 1979 of an international code of conduct for law enforcement officers. It is generally recognized that police violence is a common feature of authoritarian regimes and of countries engaged in civil wars. But the reality of police violence, disproportionately inflicted on the most vulnerable, is often hidden from public view in most if not all countries around the world.

Nevertheless, looking at the United States in comparative perspective, three points are clear. First, the country consistently ranks highest among developed countries in killings by police relative to population. Second, the pattern closely parallels that of other white settler societies and other countries that were part of European colonial empires, most notably the extreme cases of South Africa and Brazil. And third, global police practices during the 20th and 21st centuries have been and are still deeply influenced by the U.S. example, both through official government links and through the U.S.-based International Association of Chiefs of Police.

In the following section, we review briefly the significant changes in the narratives about police violence and racism that have taken place in recent months. These changes are the result of scholarly critique and activist protests that have mounted steadily for more than a decade.

In a second part of this essay, sent out separately, we first sketch some of the key stages in the evolution of white supremacy and state violence stemming from slavery, conquest of a continent, and overseas empire building. We then look at how the current framework for global military security, prominently including but not limited to the United States military, reflects a destructive logic similar to that of domestic policing.

Changing the Narrative on Police Violence and Racism

In mid-August the Civiqs daily tracking poll showed that support of Black Lives Matter among registered voters overall was still at almost 50%, compared to 37% opposition. But among whites, levels of support first rose to exceed opposition 44% to 34% before dipping again to 40% support against 46% opposition. Among white Republicans in particular, opposition to Black Lives Matter dipped to a low of 59% in late May, but rose again by mid-August to 78%.

Even if the November election sweeps new leadership into the White House and Congress, entrenched racism within the police and other institutions of power will pose a formidable obstacle to change. And even as protests continue, unexpected events and Republican messaging may fuel the backlash in favor of white racism. The movement, it is clear, must have staying power if it is to accomplish its goals.

The foundation for such staying power consists has been built by than a decade of work by scholars and activists, and on the intersection of Black Lives Matter with a wide range of issues and organizations. It is not concentrated in only one organization but in mutually reinforcing local and national networks sustained and expanded by personal connections, by social media, and by common narratives.

Recent surveys of scholarship undergirding demands for radical change in policing cite dozens of authors.3 One could fill a small library with widely praised books on police violence and racism published in recent years, beginning in 2010 with The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and The Condemnation of Blackness by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, both recently republished. Other noted titles include White Rage (2016), by Carol Anderson; From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (2016), by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor; and Making All Black Lives Matter (2018), by Barbara Ransby. In The End of Policing (2018), Alex Vitale provides a concise account of how the expansion of policing in recent decades has accentuated rather than ameliorated the fundamental problems.

In the early years of President Obamas first term, the most visible protests were from the right, with the rise of the Tea Party. This pattern reflected and intensified the long-standing white backlash against the civil rights advances of the mid-1960s. The murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the acquittal of his murderer in 2013, however, sparked what came to be called #BlackLivesMatter. That movement grew rapidly after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. And it has continued to grow, forcing widespread media and public recognition of the reality of disproportionate and unjust police violence against Black men and women. Significantly, the movement, with Black women and LGBTQ people playing central roles, has also modeled an inclusive vision aimed at justice for all, across all the barriers of structural inequality in society.

Also essential to the impact and sustainability of the Black Lives Matter protests is the fact that the movement is rooted in long-standing local campaigns against police violence. To cite just one example, the police station at Homan Square in Chicago had been notorious since the 1960s for systematic brutality, including torture. The abuses were exposed publicly in 1983, and in 1993 the commander, Jon Burge, was fired. In 2014, following appeals from Chicago activists, the United Nations issued a condemnation citing violation of international anti-torture statutes. And in 2015, sustained community campaigns led to a Chicago city council resolution approving a reparations package. In 2020, victims were still waiting for a promised memorial to be constructed.

It is local organizers in Chicago and in cities and towns around the country who have kept Black Lives Matter campaigns going, even during times when the national spotlight was focused elsewhere. At the national level, the Movement for Black Lives, a broad coalition of national organizations and local groups, issued in 2016 a platform of demands, including community control of law enforcement agencies and an end to the war on Black people. Many similar demands were echoed in the plans for criminal justice reform outlined by Democratic presidential candidates, particularly Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Even more significantly, activists in other social movementsas well as majority of the Democratic Partyhave increasingly been forced to recognize that fighting systemic racism must be part of their agenda as well.

Thus when high school students led national protests for gun control after the killing of 17 people in 2018 in Parkland, Florida, young Black activists reached out to them about the killings in their own communities. Gun violence, the Black youth made clear, is not just a matter of school shootings, but of pervasive racism, a point that the white activists acknowledged. These protests marked a turning point in national opinion, and by the end of 2019, polls showed solid majorities for common-sense gun control measures such as universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons. Gun control activism also primed the young protesters for participation in a wider movement.

The Sunrise Movement, focused on the climate crisis and the Green New Deal, has been composed mainly of young white people, along with some non-black people of color. But its activists have stated explicitly that climate justice implies a commitment to fight environmental racism. It is no accident that local hubs of the Sunrise Movement have been actively engaged in the latest round of Black Lives Matter protests.

The overt racism of the Trump administration has encouraged violent threats and actions by its white supremacist supporters. This in turn has spurred anti-Trump forces to recognize that combating racism is essential to the mobilization against him. The persistent organizing work of the Black Lives Matter network prepared the ground for the participation of many whites, especially youth and women, in anti-racist efforts. Organizational networks such as the Indivisible Movement were also ready to reinforce the message in the streets and in local political arenas.

Credit: WDRB News

As protests continue in communities around the country, such as those in Louisville, Kentucky, around the murder of Breonna Taylor, there are many reminders that opposition to reform remains strong. Indeed, the response to protests in Portland, Oregon, shows the ominous potential for federal intervention deliberately aimed at inciting further violence. The images of heavily armed local police and federal agents on the streets of Portland and other American cities have prompted much discussion of the militarization of law enforcement. Through an array of programs, the U.S. government funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in military surplus to local police departments each year.

The notion of policing as a war, in which more lethal force will lead to more security, is not a recent development, but is deeply rooted in U.S. history. The police and the military share the countrys legacy of white supremacy and violence against racial others, which has also given rise to mob and individual violence by white civilians. Both domestic law enforcement and the conduct of foreign wars continue to reflect the history of conquest, slavery, and U.S. empire of earlier centuries.

For the second part of this essay, go to http://www.africafocus.org/docs20/viol2008-2.php

Notes

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

Current links to books on AfricaFocus go to the non-profit bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshores and also provides commissions to affiliates such as AfricaFocus.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please write to this address to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about reposted material, please contact directly the original source mentioned. To subscribe to receive future bulletins by email, click here.
DAKAR, Senegal  Africa is set to announce that it has stamped out wild poliovirus after a three-decade campaign against a disease that once paralyzed 75,000 children on the continent every year.

The achievement is a major step toward ridding the globe of the virus that causes the disabling  and sometimes deadly  disease of polio: Only Afghanistan and Pakistan are still reporting cases.

Future generations of African children can live free of wild poliovirus, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organizations director for Africa, said in a briefing on Monday. She said 1.8 million cases of polio-related paralysis had been prevented over the past 24 years.

But the victory has a hollow note.

Every year, hundreds of people across Africa are still being infected with circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus, which can infect people in areas where there is only partial vaccination. African cases of the vaccine-derived strain, which results in the same symptoms as the wild kind, increased to 320 last year from 68 in 2018, and could rise again in 2020 because many vaccination campaigns were paused during coronavirus lockdowns.
LATEST Aug. 24, 10 a.m. The National Weather Service cancelled a Red Flag Warning for Monday as the chance for lightning and high winds has decreased significantly.

"Stay weather aware as weak cells are still over the North Bay; however, most moisture has moved north of our area and instability has decreased giving us confidence to let the warning expire early," the NWS said.

Aug. 24, 6 a.m. The Bay Area has mostly been spared by thunderstorms passing over Northern California as remnants of a tropical storm pushed into the area overnight.

National Weather Service forecaster Will Pi said as of 6 a.m. on Monday, only a couple of lightning strikes had been spotted in Santa Clara County and winds haven't picked up as much as expected.

"Theres still a chance of an isolated thunderstorm, generating gusty, erratic winds and lightning for San Francisco Bay and the North Bay through the morning," Pi said. "It looks like the instability on this one was far less than the one we had last week. This is a more typical summer thunderstorm."

The monsoonal moisture pushing into the region led to some scattered rainfall; some of the highest rainfall totals were Healdsburg measuring .01 and Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains recording .04 inches.

Rainfall was good news for the region where dozens of wildfires have raged over the last week, but NWS forecaster Brian Garcia said the rain will not suppress the blazes.

"Its nothing that is truly going to help firefighting efforts," Garcia said, "Its nothing thats going to moisten the fuel and prevent wildfires. We may get one or two showers that put down a few hundredths of an inch in a few locations."

Hurricane Genevieve dumped massive amounts of rain on Mexico's southern Baja California Peninsula earlier this week and has since fallen apart. Remnants of the storm have been moving northward this weekend.

Pi said while the Bay Area mostly dodged the lightning, the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada Range experienced more thunderstorm activity.

A week ago an unusual weather setup for summer brought nearly 12,000 lightning strikes to California in 72 hours, sparking more than 500 wildfires, with about two dozen of those becoming massive conflagrations. The acreage of all the fires currently burning in California was more than 1 million as of Saturday, Cal Fire officials said. Last night, a very different scenario unfolded.

Amy Graff is the news editor for SFGATE. Email her: agraff@sfgate.com.
China has launched the first of four most advanced warships it is building for Pakistan amid deepening defense and economic ties between the two allied nations.

The development comes as both the countries are locked in border tensions with their mutual neighbor India.

The Pakistan Navy said Sunday that Chinese state-owned Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai held the launching ceremony for the Type-054A/P frigate, with top officials from the service in attendance.

The Navy said in a statement the vessels are state of the art frigates equipped with modern surface, subsurface and anti-air weapons and sensors. These ships will significantly contribute in maintaining peace and security in our area of responsibility, it added.

The statement did not mention the cost of military vessels, but reported estimates are more than $350 million each.

Once constructed, the ships will be one of the largest and technologically advanced surface platforms of the Pakistan Navy fleet, boosting its capability to respond to future challenges, the service said.

The Chinese builder is expected to deliver all four units to Pakistan by 2021, which Chinese media said could double the combat power of the Pakistan Navy fleet.

Pakistani officials said the Type-054A/P frigate is in service with Chinas Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and recognized as its backbone.

China and Pakistan are jointly producing various military-related hardware, including the JF-17 multirole combat aircraft, demonstrating the strong mutual defense ties.

Economic ties

The two allies in recent years have also cemented economic cooperation under Beijings global infrastructure Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The BRI-related China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has brought nearly $30 billion in Chinese investment over the past six years, building Pakistani roads, ports and power plants.

Critics, however, see the investments as a burden on heavily indebted Pakistan.

U.S. officials have termed CPEC loans as a debt trap for Islamabad, though Pakistan and China dismiss the criticism, saying it has stemmed from a lack of information and misunderstandings about the collaboration.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is due to visit Islamabad later this year that Pakistani officials say will boost the BRI-linked economic cooperation. Xi was expected to visit Pakistan in May but the trip was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi last week hosted his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, for a bilateral strategic dialogue, where the two sides agreed to push ahead with new mega projects under CPEC. They include a $6.8 billion railway program to improve Pakistans main railway line, known as Main Line 1 (ML1), which runs for nearly 1,900 kilometers.

Both China and Pakistan reaffirmed the vitality of the time-tested and all-weather strategic cooperative partnership between the two countries, a post-meeting joint statement said.
DGAP-News: AKASOL AG / Key word(s): Half Year Results/Quarter Results



The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

AKASOL AG: Revenue growth in Q2 in spite of COVID-19 - strong second half of the year expected Darmstadt, Germany, August 24, 2020 - AKASOL AG (hereinafter "AKASOL"; the "Company"; ISIN DE000A2JNWZ9) - a leading German developer and manufacturer of high-performance and high-energy lithium-ion battery systems as well as a supplier of Turnkey Solutions - records revenue growth of 27.5% compared to the first three months of the year, in spite of economic effects in the second quarter, and reached decisive milestones for continued, sustainable growth. In addition to the planned massive expansion of production capacities, important projects for the further development of existing and new products were also advanced, to further strengthen AKASOL's technological leadership in the field of high-performance lithium-ion battery systems for the commercial vehicle market. "In the past six months, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have posed unprecedented challenges for numerous companies all over the world, including AKASOL and our customers. Given the challenging environment, the fact that our revenue of EUR 18.2 million during the first half of the year has remained roughly the same as previous year's EUR 19.2 million is a solid result. But it falls well short of our original projections for the level of business development in the first half of 2020 that would have been possible if not for COVID-19. Nevertheless, based on what we now know following in-depth dialog with our customers, our Company's dynamic prospects for growth remain intact. Looking toward the second half of the year, both our customers and we ourselves see clear signs of making up for revenue not realized during the first half of the year. This is supported not least by the on-time, as scheduled rollout of the second generation of battery-system series," according to Sven Schulz, CEO of AKASOL AG. "So far, customers have adjusted their call-ups of products only minimally for the full year of 2020, in spite of a critical assessment of the overall situation. AKASOL thus expects a significant recovery in business in the second half of the year. "Through the targeted implementation of various measures, we have successfully ensured the operational efficiency of the Company in the past months while at the same time ensuring the best possible health protection for our employees. In addition, we were not forced to interrupt our business operations or resort to short-time work during the second quarter. The Company is thus robustly positioned to continue to pursue its strategy of expansion in the months ahead, even under COVID-19 conditions," Schulz added. Confirmed by long-term delivery agreements with series customers, AKASOL is continuing to pursue strategically important major investments and development projects. At the beginning of the year, the Company commissioned its second series-production line ("Langen II") at the series-production location in Langen (in the German state of Hesse), where the second generation of the AKASystem OEM PRC-type lithium-ion battery system has been produced in series since the second quarter. The new system, which has been delivered to the two series customers of AKASOL since July, offers 30% more energy and equal performance data in the same installation space as the first generation and provides the added appeal of significantly lower costs. At the same time, the completion of the new headquarters and Gigafactory 1 including the test and validation center in Darmstadt has so far been on schedule, so that the relocation will begin in autumn. Further developments, and the assembly lines for what are referred to as "Turnkey Solutions" (development of complete solutions), which in the future will be produced in series in Gigafactory 1, are also at a very advanced stage. The first delivery of the so-called "Powerpacks" (complete solution consisting of a powerful and robust battery system including heating and cooling devices, pre-installed in the underfloor housing) for Alstom's worldwide unique hydrogen-powered train, the Coradia iLint, is still scheduled for the second half of 2020. In the area research and development, AKASOL used the capacity gained due to customers' suspension of operations and continued its work on existing development projects while at the same time acquiring new customer projects. For instance, one of the world's leading bus manufacturers has commissioned the Company to develop the third generation of battery systems for its vehicles. In addition, since early 2020, 50 fuel-cell trucks of a globally operating Asian manufacturer of commercial vehicles have been successfully involved in fleet testing of AKASOL battery systems. Negotiations are still ongoing to expand the cooperation with this Asian customer. During the second quarter, in spite of the tensions around COVID-19, the subsidiary AKASOL Inc., located in Hazel Park, Michigan (Detroit Metropolitan Area, USA), began construction of the first North American production facility. The facility it will cover an area of 5,000 sqm and have an annual maximum production capacity of up to 400 MWh. The Company ran into difficulties during commissioning in the second quarter, as the specialists who had been hired to set up and assist with commissioning of the production line were prevented from entering the US due to restrictions in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of the consistent digitalization of business processes, and in response to these circumstances, the American employees used augmented reality glasses on site. This, in tandem with real-time support from colleagues in Germany, enabled the smooth set up of the production equipment possible. "Regarding the year as a whole, we currently do not expect significant reductions in call-ups of products by our customers. As a result, we have carefully produced battery systems in stock. This is an investment in rapid-delivery capacity for the remainder of 2020," Carsten Bovenschen, CFO of AKASOL AG, points out. "In light of an expected rebound in our business during the second half of the year, we expect the total revenue to be in the range of EUR 60 to 70 million in 2020." Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) for the second quarter of 2020 totaled to around EUR -4.5 million (Q2 2019: EUR -0.1 million); this is below the initial management forecast, which, before the pandemic became known, had predicted lower losses in the second quarter and the first half of the year. At the beginning of the reporting period, this trend was forecast to reflect the influence of one-off expenses that took the form of measures for necessary structural development. As events unfolded, the global spread of the coronavirus and its consequences for the global economy also weighed on earnings at AKASOL, particularly because finished products and development services could not be delivered to customers - and, as a result, could not be invoiced - due to nearly two months of plant closures between mid-March and late May. However, the AKASOL Management Board anticipates a positive operating EBIT margin in the second half of 2020 and an improvement in earnings when viewed over the full course of the year. The trend in revenue and EBIT currently forecast by AKASOL assumes no further significant new negative impacts on the global economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.



The 2020 half-year report is available for download online at

https://www.akasol.com/en/quarterly-reports. Contact: AKASOL AG, Isabel Heinen Telephone: +49 (0) 6103 48567-26 e-mail: isabel.heinen@akasol.com

About AKASOL AKASOL is a leading German developer and manufacturer of high-performance lithium-ion battery systems for use in buses, commercial vehicles, rail vehicles and industrial vehicles, as well as in ships and boats. With nearly 30 years of experience, AKASOL is a pioneer in the development and manufacture of lithium-ion battery systems for commercial applications. Shares of AKASOL AG stock have been traded on the Prime Standard segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since June 29, 2018. With headquarters in Germany, AKASOL operates a production plant in Langen (in the German state of Hesse), where its production capacity of up to 300 MWh per year is set to expanded to up to 800 MWh by 2020. Based on information available to AKASOL, this is Europe's largest facility for the production of lithium-ion battery systems for use in commercial vehicles. From 2020 onwards, each year, it will be able to produce battery systems for up to 3,000 fully electric buses, or for up to 6,000 medium-sized commercial vehicles, depending on the battery size. AKASOL systems are manufactured to the industry standards of leading OEM customers. Its current customers include two of the world's leading manufacturers of commercial vehicles, Alstom, Bombardier, Rolls-Royce Power Systems (MTU Friedrichshafen) and many more. The AKASOL product portfolio is technology-independent. This way, working on the basis of individual customer requirements, the Company can use the best battery cells and the best battery chemistry. DISCLAIMER



Statements contained herein could be deemed to constitute what are referred to as "forward-looking statements." Forward-looking statements are identifiable by the use of words such as "could," "will," "should," "plans," "expects," "anticipates," "estimates," "believes," "intends," "envisages," "aims" or the negative form of these terms, or corresponding modifications and comparable terms. Based on current expectations, forward-looking statements involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors as a consequence of which actual results, degrees of capacity utilization, developments and successes achieved by the Group, or on the part of the branch of industry in which it operates, might turn out to be materially different from the results contained or implied herein. The faith placed in forward-looking statements should not be unreasonably high. The Group will not update or review any forward-looking statements published herein in light of new information, future events or for any other reason.

24.08.2020 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases.

Archive at www.dgap.de


Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:08:09|Editor: huaxia

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BRUSSELS, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The European Commission on Monday adopted a series of proposals to make rules of origin in trade agreements with 20 partners of the European Union (EU) more flexible and business-friendly.

The aim is to enhance trade with partners in the neighboring Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) region and contribute to economic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, a Commission press release said.

Following adoption by the European Council, the new rules could take effect during the first half of 2021 subject to progress in the talks with the countries and regions concerned.

Under the new provisions, product-specific rules on access to preferential treatment would become simpler. Tolerance for non-originating materials (whose country of origin is not the same as the country in which that material is used in production) would increase from 10 percent to 15 percent.

Another new element is that the operations or "value-added" necessary for a good to be entitled to preferential origin can be split between several countries or regions. This "full cumulation" will facilitate the integration of supply chains within the PEM zone, said the Commission.

The new rules would apply alongside those of the current PEM Convention. A review of the Convention has been ongoing since 2012.

Business and industry will have the option to apply the new rules or the current PEM ones, whenever this suits them, the media release stated.

The proposals would impact the EU's trade agreements with 20 regional partners from Iceland to Switzerland, from Turkey to Lebanon, as well as eastern European partners like Georgia and Ukraine.

The EU's trade with these partners was worth 677 billion euros (799 billion U.S. dollars) in 2019, which is almost half of the EU's preferential trade. Enditem
Sokoto State Governor, Alhaji Aminu Tambuwal yesterday disclosed that the problem of banditry and kidnapping had largely been tackled in the state, putting an end to a vicious cycle of insecurity that engulfed the state for months.

Tambuwal, Chairman of the People's Democratic Party Governors' Forum, added that internally displaced persons (IDPs) had started returning home now that insecurity had ended and peace restored in the eastern part of the state.

He gave this update yesterday when he paid an unscheduled visit to former President Olusegun Obasanjo at the Presidential Library Complex in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital alongside five of his special advisers.

In a statement by Obasanjo's Special Assistant on Media, Kehinde Akinyemi, Tambuwal said: "We have established peace in the eastern part of the state where we have a problem of banditry, kidnapping and criminalities.

"Peace is returning and people are back to their farms and villages. Those in the IDPs camps are back in our homes and villages now. We are doing our best as a state government to ensure that we engender security.

"We are doing our best to provide development and employment for our people. We are doing our best as a government to ensure that we engender security and provide development opportunities for Sokoto people."

During the visit, Tambuwal described Obasanjo as a statesman, who is still relevant for consultations on issues of governance and challenges in the country.

After more than one and half an hour private session with the octogenarian, Tambuwal explained that the purpose of the visit was to recognize Obasanjo as an elder statesman and accord him the respect he deserves.

The Sokoto governor said: "It is always good for us to come and see how he is doing, pay our normal homage to him as a respected leader in this country and consult him on very many issues of governance.

"We brought him the greetings of the good people of Sokoto State. We continue to learn from and drink from his great wealth of experience; and his fountain of knowledge in his years of governance and challenges of today."

He prayed for the good health of the former resident and Nigerians in general, noting that the people of Nigeria would continue to learn from him.

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The governor hinted that they had a successful parley and he was happy that the elder statesman was in high spirits despite the Convid-19 atmosphere.

He said: "You know Baba is our leader, statesman. It is always good for us to come around to see how he is doing, pay homage and consult him on very many issues of governance, that is why we have come this afternoon.

"We brought him the greetings and felicitations of the good people of Sokoto state. We shall continue to learn from him, drink from his wealth of experience and fountain of his knowledge and wisdom on issues of governance and challenges of today.

"We pray that God Almighty shall continue to give him good health as I have met him today, and may him and all of us survive this Covid-19," he said.

The governor, who arrived at about 2.30pm and left at 3.30pm.
Greg Hayter wasnt about to let a global pandemic ruin the fifth edition of the Vic Hayter Memorial at Clinton Raceway and all the momentum his family has built in the last four years honouring his father and the many things he loved.

When track general manager Ian Fleming suggested they could put the race off for a year, Greg said he wouldnt hear of it.

I said, No, no. It carries on as normal, Greg said of the August 30 event that supports both the Ontario Standardbred Adoption Society and the Stratford-Perth Humane Society. I think the bigger thing that this has developed into is not so much honouring Vic and his name and the man he was, but more so the things that he enjoyed and his values. That would include horses, that would include the people that either come to the track or the people that work with the horses. Plus, the Humane Society and the (Ontario) Standardbred Adoption Society. All those things were very important to him.

Not to sound cheesy or anything, but the day started off as a memory to him, but I think it's evolved more into a memory of all the things that he stood for.

Last year, the Hayter family raised the purse of the race to $15,000 and also paid for lunch for all the horsepeople in the backstretch. The purse has remained the same for 2020 and the free lunch will again be provided for those in the paddock.

Once again, we're going to treat all the horsepeople to lunch. I think that's important because my father loved the horsepeople and loved spending time with them.

Vic, who owned many hotels, but is perhaps best known for operating The Arden Park Hotel and Festival Inn in Stratford, Ont., died of cancer in February of 2016. He was 77. Managing his hotel business took up most waking hours, but Vic always made time for Clinton Raceway. He owned Standardbred for 38 years.

He worked seven days a week, but every Sunday at 12:30 hed be home to pick up my mother and theyd go to Clinton Raceway, Greg said when the race debuted in 2016. Dad was involved with horses since 1978 and even as kids, when we lived in Lucan, we used to always go to Clinton Raceway on Sunday afternoons. The last 15 years or so, mom and him used to go every Sunday and theyd sit right by the finish line.



Sizzlen Hot Herbie, pictured after winning the 2019 edition of the Vic Hayter Memorial Trot. Sizzlen Hot Herbie, pictured after winning the 2019 edition of the Vic Hayter Memorial Trot.

In 2019, Greg spoke of one day turning the Vic Hayter Memorial Day into a crowd-pleasing harness racing event similar to the famed Little Brown Jug in Delaware, Ohio, which draws more than 40,000 fans annually, or the Vincent Delaney Memorial in Ireland, which is another fan favourite.

A bustling crowd wont be possible at Clinton this year due to strict COVID-19 restrictions on crowd sizes, but having just a small handful of spectators hasnt deterred Greg from the long-term goal, which is one of the reasons the family wanted the race to go ahead in 2020  to keep the momentum going.

The ultimate goal of the day is still the same, Greg said. I don't know if it will ever get to that. I highly doubt it, but I'm hoping to have it as my own mini version of the Jug one day.

The August 30 card will begin at 1:30 p.m. and the races can be viewed via www.clintonraceway.com.

(Clinton Raceway)
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has reportedly considered buying a small stake in TikTok. The Mountain View company wanted to invest in the popular video-sharing app as part of a broader group bid. However, the effort fizzled in recent days, Bloomberg reports citing people familiar with the matter.

According to the report, a group of companies including Alphabet has had a discussion about forming a consortium to invest in TikTok. Alphabet wasnt leading the talks but wanted a minority, non-voting stake in the Chinese social media app.

Its unclear who was at the forefront of this nascent consortium and why the talks ended so early. However, Alphabet hasnt ruled out participating in future bids, the report cites a person who chose to remain anonymous.

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Alphabet may still consider investing in TikTok

TikTok is facing a ban in the US, unless ByteDance, the Chinese owner of the app, sell off the business to some American company. Microsoft emerged as the early candidate interested in acquiring the companys arms in the US and a few other countries.

The Trump administration had given a deadline of until mid-September for TikTok to strike a deal or face ban. While this decision was lauded by many, there were some backlashes as well. People working in the US arm of the company also expressed an understandable dissatisfaction with the decision. The American government has now extended the deadline until November 12, 2020.

Along with Microsoft, Oracle and Twitter have also shown interest in buying out TikTok in the US. And now, it appears there are many more interested candidates. However, Microsoft is so far the only company to publicly confirm the talks with ByteDance. Its unclear how far the discussions from other potential bidders have gone.

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As for Alphabet, the company was seeking to buy a stake on TikTok through one of its investment arms. It already has a private equity arm called CapitalG which has backed Chinese firms. So theres still a possibility of it investing in TikTok. The company itself is unlikely to acquire TikTok US as a whole, and for many reasons.

Any company buying TikTok in the US would be subject to severe regulatory scrutiny. Google is already facing several investigations for potentially anticompetitive behavior. Its $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit last November is yet to get regulatory approvals.

Additionally, Google already has a similar service in the form of YouTube. Although TikTok is all about short-form videos, YouTube is also working on a similar Shorts product thatll offer the same purpose.

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Both Alphabet and TikTok declined to comment on the recent reports.
OTTAWAErin OToole and his campaign team are facing some big decisions with the spectre of a federal election campaign looming.

OToole pitched himself to Conservative voters as someone who would be ready to take on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on day one.

But with the Liberals having prorogued Parliament just before the Conservatives leadership vote, day one for the new leadership team was less flashy than a House of Commons dust-up.

It was spent in back-to-back briefings and meetings with outgoing leader Andrew Scheers Opposition Leaders Office (OLO), as OTooles team considers key staffing decisions and strategy. Scheers office confirmed the outgoing and incoming leaders held a working lunch while senior members of their respective teams worked on the handover.

Unlike Scheer, who was thrust into question period one day after securing the leadership in May 2017, OToole will have weeks to set up his team, reach out to caucus, and begin the work of introducing himself to the broader electorate.

OToole secured the partys leadership on the third ballot early Monday morning, after hours of the party sorting out issues with ballots damaged by their envelope opening machines.

We must continue to point out Liberal failings and corruption but we also must show Canadians our vision for a stronger, prosperous and more united Canada, OToole told supporters after he finally took the stage around 1:30 a.m. Monday.

Now the real work begins. We could be into an election campaign as soon as this fall. But as more than 260,000 passionate Conservatives have already shown in this record-breaking leadership amidst a pandemic, the Conservative party will be ready for the next election.

OToole was born in Montreal, but spent most of his youth in Ontario. He joined the Canadian Armed Forces, where he flew search-and-rescue missions out of Halifax. After the military, OToole studied law at Dalhousie University, later working as a lawyer in Toronto before running in a 2012 byelection in Durham. He won and joined Stephen Harpers cabinet, where he served as veterans affairs minister until the government fell in 2015.

In 2017, he made his first run for the party leadership, finishing a strong third behind Scheer and Maxime Bernier.

In the 2020 race, the affable MP from a riding just east of Toronto surprised many on Parliament Hill with a much more aggressive stance. In an interview earlier this summer, he claimed nothing had changed.

Everything Im running on in this campaign I ran on three years ago, he said. Am I more animated? Am I more frustrated? Am I more concerned about the future of the country? Absolutely.

Heading into Sundays leadership reveal, his team knew that if he held front-runner Peter MacKay to under 40 per cent support on the first ballot, OToole would have a good chance at snapping up down-ballot support from the two other leadership contestants, Derek Sloan and Leslyn Lewis. MacKay finished the first round in first place  but with just 33.5 per cent.

Lewis made an impressive jump in support to 30 per cent on the second ballot  very nearly eclipsing MacKay, who advanced a mere 1.3 points, but not enough to overtake him. When her support then flowed to OToole on the third ballot, it delivered him a convincing victory.

OToole enjoyed broad support across the country  particularly in Quebec  to push him to victory. He also won with a significant margin over MacKay  57 per cent to just under 43 per cent  which will allow him to avoid some of the questions that Scheer faced about his mandate after winning a razor-thin victory in 2017.

But OToole still faces questions, chief among them being who he will select to lead his team in the OLO and at the Conservative partys headquarters where election readiness will be the overriding concern. OTooles leadership team was filled with experienced players who may not want to head back to the gruelling, largely thankless life of political staffing.

OToole will also have to reach out to the Conservative caucus  including many MPs and senators who supported MacKay  to smooth things over after a particularly divisive leadership campaign. Hes expected to reach out to his former leadership rivals and their teams to try and heal those wounds.

I think (Leslyn Lewis) will have a discussion with Erin and see what he envisions, but yeah, shes interested for sure in continuing on. Shes developed the appetite for this, said Steve Outhouse, Lewiss campaign manager, in an interview with the Star Monday.

Shes ready to do some work to grow the party and keep the coalition together.

Lewis, who ran as a social conservative candidate, could be a boon for OToole in his big-tent approach to the Conservative coalition.

But he also faces other challenges on his right. While the Wexit movement has been dismissed by many political observers, Conservative strategists are starting to see it as a real threat. While OToole enjoyed the endorsement of Jason Kenney, he remains a Montreal-born Ontario MP, and will need to work to convince the partys Western caucus and grassroots that hell fight for their interests.

In a phone call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday, OToole said Trudeaus upcoming throne speech  which the prime minister said will be used to reset the governments priorities in the COVID-19 context  needs to address Western alienation.

OToole called on Mr. Trudeau to outline a plan to address real and serious national unity concerns in the speech from the throne, said a statement released by his campaign after the call.

OToole will also have to decide very quickly what course hell chart for the party, with Trudeau releasing what is expected to be a left-leaning mission statement in next months throne speech.

Theres the logistical side of the (OLO), the campaign team, the caucus, but theres the more strategic side. The throne speech, to me is the real test (for OToole), because that could well set the tone for what his approach to the leadership will be, said Kate Harrison, a Conservative commentator and vice-president at Summa Strategies.

We could just rail against the throne speech for the sake of it  or adopt a tone like we saw last night, which was a little more forward thinking, recognizing that its not good enough to just not like Justin Trudeau.
D owning Street has played down the prospect of food and water shortages this winter if a no-deal Brexit coincides with a second wave of coronavirus.

A leaked document outlining the Government's emergency planning for a reasonable worst-case scenario painted a stark picture about the impact of both Covid-19 and a no-deal Brexit coinciding.

A Cabinet Office dossier, leaked to The Sun newspaper, warns that the Navy may be needed to stop British fishermen clashing with illegal European fishing boat incursions.

The military may be drafted in to airdrop food to the Channel Islands under the emergency plans drawn up by the Government.

Town halls could go bust and troops may have to be drafted on to the streets if the economic toll causes public disorder, shortages and price hikes, according to the leaked dossier.

It also says parts of the UK may face power and petrol shortages if thousands of lorries are stranded in Dover while shortages of medicines caused by port blockages could lead to animal diseases spreading in the countryside.

Freight lorries queue to leave the Port of Dover in Kent (file photo) / PA

But a Number 10 spokesman sought to downplay the document and its contents on Monday.

He said: That report is not a forecast or a prediction of what we think will happen, but  as you would expect any responsible government (to do)  we prepare for all eventualities.

Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures 1 /81 Coronavirus hits the UK - In pictures A deserted Westminster Bridge PA A man wearing a face mask or covering due to the COVID-19 pandemic, walks past customers sat outside a restaurant AFP via Getty Images Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Runners pass cardboard cutouts of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William during the London Marathon in London AP An empty escalator at Charing Coss London Underground tube station Jeremy Selwyn Electronic bilboards displays a message warning people to stay home in Sheffield PA A sign is displayed in the window of a student accommodation building following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mancheste Reuters People take part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions, in Londo AP People sing and dance in Leicester Square on the eve on the 10PM curfew Reuters Hearts painted by a team of artists from Upfest are seen in the grass at Queen Square, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Bristol Reuters Graffiti reads 'good luck and stay safe', as the number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow around the world, under a bridge in London Reuters A sign is pictured in Soho, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London Reuters Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures, during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, London AP A person runs past posters with a message of hope, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Manchester REUTERS Riot police face protesters who took part in a 'We Do Not Consent' rally at Trafalgar Square, organised by Stop New Normal, to protest against coronavirus restrictions in London AP An image of The Queen eith quotes from her broadcast to the UK and the Commonwealth in relation to the Coronavirus epidemic are displayed on lights in London's Piccadilly Circus PA Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images Durdle Door in Dorset Reuters Captain Tom Moore via Reuters Mia, aged 8, and Jack, aged 5, take part in "PE with Joe" a daily live workout with Joe Wicks on Youtube to help kids stay fit who have to stay indoors due to the Coronavirus outbreak PA An NHS worker reacts at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS Reuters Goats which have taken over the deserted streets of Llandudno @AndrewStuart via PA Tobias Weller PA Novikov restaurant in London with its shutters pulled down while the restaurant is closed London Landscapes: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, central London. Matt Writtle A newspaper vendor in Manchester city centre giving away free toilet rolls with every paper bought as shops run low on supplies due to fears over the spread of the coronavirus PA Theo Clay looks out of his window next to his hand-drawn picture of a rainbow in Liverpool, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue Reuters A young man cuts another man's hair on top of a closed hairdresser in Oxford Reuters General view of the new NHS Nightingale Hospital, built to fight against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London via Reuters Jason Baird is seen dressed as Spiderman during his daily exercise to cheer up local children in Stockport, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters A woman wearing a face mask walks past Buckingham Palace Getty Images A man holds mobile phone displaying a text message alert sent by the government warning that new rules are in force across the UK and people must stay at home PA Medical staff on the Covid-19 ward at the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, in Wales, as the health services continue their response to the coronavirus outbreak. PA Prime Minister Boris Johnson taking part in a virtual Cabinet meeting with his top team of ministers PA A shopper walks past empty shelves in a Lidl store on in Wallington. After spates of "panic buying" cleared supermarket shelves of items like toilet paper and cleaning products, stores across the UK have introduced limits on purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have also created special time slots for the elderly and other shoppers vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour PA Mia, aged 8 and her brother Jack, aged 5 from Essex, continue their school work at home, after being sent home due to the coronavirus PA Children are painting 'Chase the rainbows' artwork and springing up in windows across the country Reuters Social distancing in Primrose Hill Jeremy Selwyn A general view of a locked gate at Anfield, Liverpool as The Premier League has been suspended PA Homeless people in London AFP via Getty Images A piece of art by the artist, known as the Rebel Bear has appeared on a wall on Bank Street in Glasgow. The new addition to Glasgow's street art is capturing the global Coronavirus crisis. The piece features a woman and a man pulling back to give each other a kiss PA The Queen leaves Buckingham Palace, London, for Windsor Castle to socially distance herself amid the coronavirus pandemic PA A general view on Grey street, Newcastle as coronavirus cases grow around the world Reuters Matt Raw, a British national who returned from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, leaves quaratine at Arrowe Park Hospital on Merseyside PA Britain's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty (L) and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance look on as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) news conference inside 10 Downing Street Reuters The ticket-validation terminals at the tram stop on Edinburgh's Princes Street are cleaned following the coronavirus outbreak. PA Locked school gates at Rockcliffe First School in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear PA A sign at a Sainsbury's supermarket informs customers that limits have been set on a small number of products as the number of coronavirus (COVID-19) cases grow around the world Reuters Jawad Javed delivers coronavirus protection kits that he and his wife have put together to the vulnerable people of their community of Stenhousemuir, between Glasgow and Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" Getty Images A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A pedestrian walks past graffiti that reads "Diseases are in the City" in Edinburgh AFP via Getty Images Staff from The Lyric Theatre, London inform patrons, as it shuts its doors PA A quiet looking George IV Bridge in Edinburgh PA A quieter than usual British Museum Getty Images A racegoer attends Cheltenham in a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com A commuter wears a face mask at London Bridge Station Jeremy Selwyn A empty restaurant in the Bull Ring Shopping Centre Getty Images A deserted Trafalgar Square in London PA Passengers determined to avoid the coronavirus before leaving the UK arrive at Gatwick Airport Getty Images

In terms of food and water we have a robust and resilient sector and we are not anticipating that will change.

The classified document, dated July 2020, further warns that if trade restrictions triggered by a no-deal Brexit are combined with floods, flu and another coronavirus wave, then hospitals may be overwhelmed.

UK and EU negotiators warned there has been little progress during the latest round of post-Brexit trade deal talks last week and time is running out to broker a deal before the transition period comes to a close at the end of the year.

Scientists are fearful that the winter months could bring about a second wave of coronavirus in the UK.

Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said on Sunday: We got Brexit done with a great deal in January and we are working flat out to make sure the United Kingdom is ready for the changes and huge opportunities at the end of the year as we regain our political and economic independence for the first time in almost fifty years.

Part of this work includes routine contingency planning for various scenarios that we do not think will happen, but we must be ready for come what may. Whether we trade with the EU on terms similar to Canada or to Australia, a brighter future awaits as we forge our own path.

A Government spokeswoman added: At the end of the year we will be outside the single market and the customs union, whatever the outcome of negotiations, and intensive planning is under way to help ensure that businesses and citizens are ready to take advantage of the opportunities and changes that will bring.

This includes launching a comprehensive communications campaign to make sure everyone knows what they need to do to prepare.

As a responsible Government we continue to make extensive preparations for a wide range of scenarios, including the reasonable worst case.

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This is not a forecast or prediction of what will happen but rather a stretching scenario. It reflects a responsible Government ensuring we are ready for all eventualities.
Motorola has announced a new smartphone, the Moto G9. This is the companys brand new mid-range smartphone, and it got announced in India.

The Motorola Moto G9 features a flat display, and a waterdrop display notch. Its chin is a bit thicker than the rest of its bezels on the front, while all of its physical buttons are placed on the right side.

The Motorola Moto G9 comes with a headphone jack

A 3.5mm headphone jack is a part of the package here, its placed at the top of the device. This smartphone features four cameras overall, three of them are on the back.

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All of those cameras are a part of the same camera module which is centered on the back. Along with three cameras, youll notice an LED flash inside that camera module as well. A fingerprint scanner sits right below the phones cameras.

The back side of the device is curved towards the side. We still do not know what materials Motorola used to make this phone, but its possible were looking at polycarbonate (plastic), and not glass. Were still not sure.

Now, this phone feature a 6.5-inch HD+ (1600 x 720) LCD Max Vision display. Its a fairly large display, and its flat. The phone is fueled by the Snapdragon 662 64-bit octa-core processor. The very same chip OnePlus upcoming mid-range phone is rumored to include.

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The Moto G9 comes with 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB of expandable storage. You can expand this phones storage up to 512GB via a microSD card.

A huge battery is included here

A large 5,000mAh battery is also a part of this package. You can recharge that battery using Motorolas 20W Turbopower charging. That charging may not be as far as some other charging technologies, but keep in mind this is a budget phone. The phone does not support wireless charging, by the way.

There are two SIM card slots included here, and one of them is a hybrid one. You can use either two SIM card slots at the same time, or one SIM card slot and use the other to include a microSD card.

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The phone is splash resistant thanks to P2i coating. This handset support 4G LTE with VoLTE, and you can use it on both SIM cards at the same time. Bluetooth 5.0 is also included.

A 48-megapixel main camera (f/1.7 aperture) sits on the back of this phone. It is backed by a 2-megapixel macro camera (f/2.4 aperture), and a 2-megapixel depth camera.

A single 8-megapixel camera (f/2.2 aperture) sits on the front side of the device. The phone measures 165.21 x 75.73 x 9.18mm, and weighs 200 grams. That large battery is the main reason this phone is so heavy.

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The Motorola Moto G9 comes in Forest Green and Sapphire Blue color options. The phone is priced at INR11,499 ($154) in India, and will go on sale from August 31. It remains to be seen if this phone will make its way to other markets, but it probably will.
President Trump claims TikTok could be used by China to track the locations of federal employees, build dossiers on people for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage

Video app TikTok on Monday said it had filed a lawsuit challenging the US government's crackdown on the popular Chinese-owned platform, which Washington accuses of being a national security threat

As tensions soar between the world's two biggest economies, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance -- effectively setting a deadline for a sale of the app to a US company.

"Today we are filing a complaint in federal court challenging the Administration's efforts to ban TikTok in the US," the company said in a blog post.

TikTok argued in the lawsuit that Trump's order was a misuse of International Emergency Economic Powers Act because the platform -- on which users share often playful video snippets -- is not "an unusual and extraordinary threat."

The executive order "has the potential to strip the rights of that community without any evidence to justify such an extreme action," the suit contended.

"We believe the Administration ignored our extensive efforts to address its concerns, which we conducted fully and in good faith even as we disagreed with the concerns themselves," TikTok said.

TikTok's kaleidoscopic feeds of short clips feature everything from dance routines and hair-dye tutorials to jokes about daily life and politics. The app has been downloaded 175 million times in the US and more than a billion times around the world.

Trump claims TikTok could be used by China to track the locations of federal employees, build dossiers on people for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

The company has said it has never provided any US user data to the Chinese government, and Beijing has blasted Trump's crackdown as political.

The US measures come ahead of November 3 elections in which Trump, behind his rival Joe Biden in the polls, is campaigning hard on an increasingly strident anti-Beijing message.

gc/bgs
Iran says analyzable data retrieved from downed Ukraine plane

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 10:38 AM

Head of the Civil Aviation Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced the retrieval of some "analyzable" data from the black box of a Ukrainian passenger plane that was accidentally downed near Tehran in early January and left more than 170 people dead.

Touraj Dehqani Zanganeh said in an interview with Iran's Fars News Agency on Sunday that following the incident, the plane's black box was analyzed at the Civil Aviation Investigation Bureau in France and representatives from the US, Ukraine, France, Canada, Britain and Sweden  the countries whose citizens lost their lives in the crash  were present during the process.

Stressing that a representative from International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) was also present to facilitate cooperation between the countries, Dehqani Zanganeh said, "The data was retrieved and turned into analyzable information."

Elaborating on the data, the Iranian aviation official underlined that the Ukrainian passenger plane's black boxes have only 19 seconds of conversation following the first explosion, though the second missile reached the plane 25 seconds later.

Dehqani Zanganeh argued that the first missile explosion had sent shrapnel into the plane, likely disrupting the plane's recorders.

Pointing to the situation in the cockpit, the official said there were three crew members and one instructor there, all of whom were piloting the plane until the last minute due to unusual conditions.

"Given the fact that the cockpit was cut off 19 seconds after the explosion and the second missile was fired 25 seconds later and reached the aircraft, no analysis of the performance and effects of the second missile can be obtained from the aircraft's black boxes because parts of the first missile and its impact on the plane caused the simultaneous disconnection of the CVR and FDR boxes within 19 seconds," Dehqani Zanganeh noted.

The official said the retrieved information has been provided to the representatives of the relevant countries to submit their safety and technical analyses to the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization within the framework of ICAO standards.

Dehqani Zanganeh underlined that such measures are aimed at preventing similar incidents, and any political use of this process which could overshadow the investigation process.

With 167 passengers and nine crewmembers on board, Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 crashed outside Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on January 8, moments after take-off.

Iranian authorities acknowledged that the plane had been downed due to human error at a time when Iran's air defenses were on high alert due to increased hostile American aerial activity in the aftermath of the US assassination of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, the former commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps.

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Joaquin Phoenix was out and about on Sunday with a pair of mismatched socks, as he awaits the birth of his first child.

The 45-year-old actor (born Joaquin Rafael Bottom) was spotted out and about in West Hollywood on Sunday afternoon.

The Joker star was seen after getting in a workout, as he and fiancee Rooney Mara are expecting their first child.

Mismatched: Joaquin Phoenix was out and about on Sunday with a pair of mismatched socks, as he awaits the birth of his first child

The Gladiator star was spotted wearing a plain black t-shirt and black shorts, along with two vastly different socks.

He was also carrying a water bottle while stepping out in low-top Converse sneakers for his workout.

The actor was wearing one set of sunglasses with another pair tucked into the neck of his shirt, while wearing a blue face mask covering his mouth and nose.

Out and about: The Gladiator star was spotted wearing a plain black t-shirt and black shorts, along with two vastly different socks

While neither Phoenix nor Mara have spoken publicly about the pregnancy, it was first reported that the couple is expecting in May by Page Six.

The couple, who have always been notoriously private about their personal lives, are said to be expecting the child by the end of August or the beginning of September, though no due date has been confirmed.

They reportedly started dating back in 2016, after first meeting on the set of their 2015 film Her, and they moved into a Hollywood Hills mansion together in 2018.

Pregnancy: While neither Phoenix nor Mara have spoken publicly about the pregnancy, it was first reported that the couple is expecting in May by Page Six

Phoenix won his first Oscar in March for his critically-acclaimed performance in Joker, playing the iconic DC Comics villain.

He had previously been nominated three other times, in 2001 for Gladiator, 2006 for Walk the Line and 2013 for The Master.

He also took home the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild awards for portraying Arthur Fleck/Joker in the Warner Bros. film.

Oscar winner: Phoenix won his first Oscar in March for his critically-acclaimed performance in Joker, playing the iconic DC Comics villain

Awards haul: He also took home the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild awards for portraying Arthur Fleck/Joker in the Warner Bros. film

Phoenix will next be seen on the big screen in the upcoming indie film C'mon C'mon from writer-director Mike Mils (Beginners, 20th Century Women).

The film, which is currently in post-production, centers on an artist who embarks on a road trip with his young nephew.

The film also stars Gaby Hoffman, Jaboukie Young-White, Elaine Kagan and Woody Norman, which is expected to be released later this year.
Three of Australia's leading religious voices have written to the Prime Minister with their concerns that the COVID-19 vaccine will be "ethically tainted" by aborted fetal cells.

Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Glenn Davies and Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Australia Makarios Griniezakis raised concerns about the deal with AstraZeneca that would ensure Australians would be among the first in the world to receive the Oxford University COVID-19 vaccine if human trials are successful.

They asked the government to pursue similar arrangements for alternate vaccines that are not "morally compromised".

In the past, cell lines from humans and fetuses have been used in successfully creating the Rubella component of the MMR vaccine and a chickenpox vaccine called Varivax.
Hippocampus nalu [CREDIT: Richard Smith]

By Douglas Main

In waters off eastern South Africa, a group of researchers, including Research Associate of Zoology and Entomology at Rhodes University, Professor Louw Claassens, have found a new species: a pygmy seahorse about the size of a grain of rice.

The finding shocked them because all seven species of pygmy seahorse, except for one in Japan, inhabit the Coral Triangle, a biodiverse region of more than two million square miles in the southwestern Pacific. This one lives 5,000 miles away, the first pygmy seahorse seen in all of the Indian Ocean and the continent of Africa.

It's like finding a kangaroo in Norway, says Richard Smith, a marine biologist based in the United Kingdom and co-author of a new study on the species, known as the African or Sodwana Bay pygmy seahorse. The second name refers to the location where it was found, a popular scuba-diving spot close to the Mozambique border.

The new species looks somewhat similar to other pygmy seahorses, except that it has one set of spines on its back that have sharp, incisor-like points on the tips, says co-author Graham Short, an ichthyologist at the California Academy of Sciences and the Australian Museum in Sydney. In contrast, the other similar pygmy seahorses have flat-tipped spines.

We really don't know what these spines are used for, Short says. Many species of seahorses in general are spiny, so their presence could be possibly due to sexual selectionthe females may prefer spinier males.

The surprising discovery, described in a study published May 19 in the journal ZooKeys, shows how little we know about the ocean, particularly when it comes to tiny creatures, the authors sayand that there are likely many more pygmy seahorse species to be identified.

A gift from the sea

Dive instructor Savannah Nalu Olivier first stumbled upon the creature in Sodwana Bay in 2017, while examining bits of algae on the seafloor. The bay is known for having many species of rare fish, sharks, and sea turtles.

She shared photographs of the fish with her colleagues, and in 2018 they made their way to Smith, who, with colleague and Research Associate of Zoology and Entomology at Rhodes University, Louw Claassens, collected several specimens of the animal at depths of 40 to 55 feet.

The researchers have named the new seahorse Hippocampus nalu, after Olivier, whose nickname is appropriately Fish. (Shes also a Pisces.) In the South African languages Xhosa and Zulu, nalu roughly translates to here it is.

I told her that this was a gift from the sea, says Louis Olivier, Savannahs father, who owns a scuba diving outfit called Pisces Diving Sodwana Bay. He adds hes super stoked about her discovery.

Mysterious anatomy

Smith sent several specimens of the new species to Short, who analyzed their genetics and body structures using a CT scanner.

His research revealed that, like other pygmy seahorses, the newly found animal has two wing-like structures on its back, rather than one, as in larger seahorses. These wings in general serve an unknown purpose for seahorses.

Also like other pygmy seahorses, the African species has only one gill slit on its upper back, instead of two below each side of the head, like larger seahorsesanother mystery.

That would be like having a nose on the back of your neck, Short says.

But the new seahorse is unique from its tiny kin in that it was found living in turf-like algae, amid boulders and sand. Sodwana Bay has large swells, and the little seahorses appear to be comfortable being swept about, says Smith, who observed a pygmy seahorse get covered in sand and then wriggle its way out.

They regularly get sand-blasted, says Smith, who wrote a book about sea creatures called The World Beneath. Other pygmy seahorses, which stick to the calmer waters around coral reefs, are more dainty. But this [species] is built of sturdier stuff.

Like other pygmy seahorses, the African version is thought to eat tiny copepods and crustaceans. It also is well camouflaged to match its surroundings.

Many more to find

This finding demonstrates that there are still many discoveries to be made in the oceans, even in shallow waters near the coast, says Thomas Trnski, head of natural sciences at the Auckland Museum in New Zealand, who wasnt involved in the study. Almost all pygmy seahorses have been discovered in just the last 20 years, he adds.

The only pygmy seahorse found outside the Coral Triangle is the Japanese pygmy seahorse, also known as the Japan pig, first described in August 2018.

Although populations of regular seahorses have fallen in many areas because of harvesting for use in traditional Chinese medicine and the aquarium trade, thats not an issue for pygmy seahorses because they are difficult to find, Short says. That being said, some of these species have very low population densities, and theres not enough data to get a good sense of how many there are, Smith adds.

These fish can spread only very short distances via the current. The study suggests that Hippocampus nalu diverged from the ancestors of all known pygmy seahorses species more than 12 million years ago.

This means that it is extremely likely that there are many more species of pygmy seahorses yet to be discovered in the western Indian Ocean and beyond, Short says.

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/05/new-pygmy-seahorse-species-discovered-africa/

Source: National Geographic

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 23:40:16|Editor: huaxia

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PHNOM PENH, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Cambodian scholars voiced their support for Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's remarks delivered at the third Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) Leaders' Meeting via video link on Monday.

In his speech, Li said China will give priority to providing COVID-19 vaccines to the Mekong countries once a vaccine is developed and put into use.

He also announced that China will share the annual hydrological information of the Lancang River with Mekong countries starting from this year, to better address climate change as well as floods and droughts.

On promoting connectivity, Li proposed synergizing the LMC with the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, which traverses western China and connects Southeast Asia with the Eurasian continent.

Chheang Vannarith, president of the think tank Asian Vision Institute in Phnom Penh, said Li's remarks reflected China's commitment to help the LMC countries fight the pandemic and to boost socio-economic recovery in the post-pandemic era.

"China has shown responsible leadership in helping other LMC member countries to mitigate and recover from COVID-19," he told Xinhua.

"Promoting transparency such as sharing hydrological data is critical to building mutual understanding and trust among the LMC members," he said.

Vannarith added that linking the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation with the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor will contribute to enhancing inter-regional connectivity between Southeast Asia with the Eurasian continent.

Joseph Matthews, senior professor at the BELTEI International University in Phnom Penh, said Li's remarks truly showed China's efforts to assist the LMC countries towards building a community of shared future of peace and prosperity.

"Premier Li's words are a sign of relief for LMC countries," he told Xinhua. "It also shows China's attitudes and conviction towards its neighbors who are connected by mountains and rivers and always stand together through thick and thin."

Li's pledge to set up special funds to promote public health under the framework of the LMC Special Fund is also a sign of China's compassion and care for the wellbeing of its neighbors, Matthews said.

"I strongly believe that the LMC, under the joint efforts by all parties, will become an example of sub-regional cooperation, a vivid practice of building a new type of international relations, and a preview of the community of shared future for mankind," the professor said. "It will help attain the Lancang-Mekong dream that will benefit all people in the sub-region, undoubtedly."

Uch Leang, head of Department of Asian, African and Middle East Studies of the International Relations Institute of Cambodia, said the meeting's outcome would serve as a roadmap for the LMC countries to continue their socio-economic development towards a sub-region of peace and shared prosperity.

"The meeting has significantly contributed to the promotion of mutual trust and understanding among the LMC countries," he told Xinhua.

The meeting has shown that the LMC leaders are committed to addressing the impacts of the pandemic in the spirit of solidarity, mutual help and support, he added.

"I myself really appreciate China for its efforts in producing COVID-19 vaccines and I'm delighted to learn that China will give LMC countries priority access to COVID-19 vaccines once one is developed and put into use," he said.

Lancang and Mekong differ in name, but refer to the same river. It is called the Lancang River in China, while in its downstream after flowing out of China's Yunnan Province, it is called the Mekong River, running across Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Linked by mountains and rivers, the six LMC countries feature cultural similarities, enjoy profound traditional friendship and share closely inter-connected security and development interests.

The LMC mechanism was launched in March 2016, as the first LMC leaders' meeting was held in Sanya in south China's Hainan Province. Enditem
Creighton University disclosed Monday that it had 40 new coronavirus cases and the University of Iowa reported a whopping 111 as campuses opened throughout the region.

Although there appears to be no common reporting procedure and some colleges use different timelines, the start of a new semester clearly triggered new cases at numerous colleges. Creightons figures were for the week ending Aug. 22 and Iowa said its were for the week beginning Aug. 18.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln reported fewer than 25, the University of Nebraska at Omaha five from Aug. 9 to 21 and Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska, recorded nine active cases.

The University of Nebraska at Kearney said that as of Monday, six students and two employees were listed as coronavirus-positive. And as of early this week, Iowa State University said it had 204 coronavirus cases within the 10-day isolation period.

University administrators have said they are eager to hold classes in person because students prefer the on-campus experience to the online classes most colleges used when the coronavirus outbreak intensified in March.
WASHINGTON - Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump and one of his longest-serving aides, is leaving the White House at the end of the month.

Conway, whose title is counselor to the president, was Trump's third campaign manager in 2016 and the first woman to manage a presidential campaign to victory. She joined the White House at the start of Trump's term and has been one of his most visible and vocal defenders.

Conway informed Trump of her decision Sunday night in the Oval Office.

Her husband, George Conway, a conservative lawyer and outspoken critic of the president, is stepping back from his role on the Lincoln Project, an outside group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump in November. He will also take a hiatus from Twitter, the venue he has often used to attack the president.

In a statement, Conway called her time in the Trump administration "heady" and "humbling," and said she and George were making the decision based on what they think is best for their four children.

"We disagree about plenty," she wrote of herself and her husband, "but we are united on what matters most: the kids. Our four children are teens and 'tweens starting a new academic year in the middle school and high school that will be conducted remotely from home for a least a few months. As millions of parents nationwide know, kids 'doing school from home' requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times."

Conway continued: "This is completely my choice and my voice. In time, I will announce future plans. For now, and for my beloved children, it will less drama, more mama."

Conway's high school-age daughter had drawn attention for tweets about her parents and politics.

On Sunday, she tweeted that social media was "becoming way too much" so she had decided to take "a mental health break."

"See y'all soon," she wrote. "Thank you for the love and support. No hate to my parents please."

Conway's announcement comes on the eve of the Republican National Convention as Trump seeks to gain momentum for a tough reelection battle ahead.

She has been intimately involved in the convention planning, and will be speaking Wednesday night about the theme of "everyday heroes." She spent Saturday at the campaign headquarters in her personal capacity.

Conway outlasted many of her colleagues from the campaign and the White House to become one of Trump's longest-serving aides, proving herself to be a survivor in a workplace that has had historic levels of turnover.

The Conways became an object of fascination as George Conway ramped up his criticism of the president in 2018 while Kellyanne Conway remained a top adviser to Trump.

George Conway has written, among other things, that Trump is not mentally fit to be president.

The president has voiced anger at times about George Conways comments, calling him a "a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell."

Before making her decision, Conway had been in discussions with the Trump campaign. Senior advisers on the campaign had suggested she take a leave of absence from the White House to join Trump's reelection effort, and anticipated a significant role in which she would travel to two states a day between now and the election.

But Conway said she could not envision herself in that role right now, spending so much time away from her family.

In her statement, Conway also expressed her gratitude to Trump; his wife, Melania; Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen; as well as her colleagues in the administration.

"The incredible men, women and children I've met along the way have reaffirmed by later-in-life experience that public service can be meaningful and consequential," she wrote. "For all of its political differences and cultural cleavages, this is a beautiful country filled with amazing people. The promise of America belongs to us all."

Conway brought attention at times, particularly over her flouting of a law, the Hatch Act, that prohibits public employees from using their official capacity to conduct political activity.

In March 2018, the Office of the Special Counsel said she violated federal law on two occasions by making public comments supportive of one candidate and against another before a special Senate election in Alabama in 2017.

The White House dismissed the finding, saying Conway was reflecting the views of the president.

Conway was a frequent guest on television programs, known for her defense of the president and sharp put-downs aimed at his opponents.

She drew criticism for an appearance early in the Trump administration when she defended then-press-secretary Sean Spicer after he falsely stated that Trump's swearing-in ceremony drew "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration."

She told NBC News's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd that Spicer was using "alternative facts," a phrase that critics of the administration have continued to highlight as evidence of Trump and his White House not being honest with the public.

Conway, a veteran GOP pollster and strategist, joined the Trump campaign in July 2016 after working for a super PAC that supported Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and was highly critical of Trump.
New Delhi, Aug 24 : The Supreme Court on Monday granted bail to an 84-year-old man, accused of rape, after noticing that the DNA report had established that he is not the father of the child born to the rape victim.

A bench comprising Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Ajay Rastogi noted that counsel for the octogenarian has a copy of the DNA report, and the report shows that he is not the father of the child. "In view of the aforesaid, we have no hesitation in saying that the appellant should be enlarged on bail on the terms and conditions to the satisfaction of the trial court", said the bench.

The top court also observed that the counsel for the appellant has submitted that it is out of a landlord-tenant dispute that a false case has been filed and that he should be given appropriate compensation.

"If that be the position, it is for the appellant to take necessary steps in this behalf in accordance with law claiming compensation in accordance with law," said the top court.

The man was booked under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, for allegedly raping a minor, who delivered a baby on July 5. The Calcutta High Court denied bail to the accused hence he moved the top court seeking relief.

The accused contended in his plea that he is willing to get a DNA test done to establish that he is not responsible for the pregnancy of the daughter of the complainant. He contended before the top court that he has been a victim of a false case by the complainant who is his tenant and due to non-payment of rent there was a dispute between them.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the accused, had contended before the top court that he is 84 years old and incapable of sexual activities. Sibal said the accused was also willing to undergo a DNA test. The bench then directed him to undergo a DNA test.
BERLIN: Germany said on Monday it had placed Alexei Navalny under guard in hospital after determining that the long-time critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin had most likely been poisoned while campaigning in Siberia.

Navalny collapsed on a plane on Thursday last week after drinking tea that his allies said they believe was laced with poison. He was flown to Germany for treatment on Saturday.

The suspicion is that Mr. Navalny was poisoned given that unfortunately recent Russian history has had several such suspected cases," German Chancellor Angela Merkels chief spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told journalists.

Because one can say with near certainty that it was a poisoning attack, protection is necessary," Seibert added.

Russias government made no immediate comment on the German statement. The Kremlin said on Friday it was still unclear what caused Navalny to fall ill and that initial tests did not show he was poisoned.

The incident could further strain Russias fraught relations with its European and NATO neighbours, who have accused it of mounting attacks on dissidents in Europe in the past - accusations that Russia has dismissed.

Doctors at the Siberian hospital that first treated Navalny said earlier on Monday they had saved his life but that they had not found traces of poison in his system.

If we had found some kind of poison that was somehow confirmed then it would have been a lot easier for us. It would have been a clear diagnosis, a clear condition and a well-known course of treatment," senior doctor Anatoly Kalinichenko told reporters in the Siberian city of Omsk.

The Russian doctors did not say what they had treated him for. Last week they said they had diagnosed him with metabolic disease possibly brought on by low blood sugar.

The doctors said they had not come under pressure from authorities while treating Navalny.

Navalnys spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said on Monday supporters had reported what they described as a suspected poisoning to the Russian police and Investigative Committee as soon as Navalny fell ill.

The police and Investigative Committee were not immediately available for comment.

Navalny has been a thorn in the Kremlins side for more than a decade, exposing what he says is high-level graft and mobilising crowds of young protesters.

He has been repeatedly detained for organising public meetings and rallies and sued over his investigations into corruption. He was barred from running in a presidential election in 2018.

(Additional reporting by Anton Zverev, Andrey Kuzmin and Tom Balmforth in Moscow; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
UPDATED

A federal judge has ruled against the U.S. Department of Education in a lawsuit over how much coronavirus aid public schools must set aside for private school students.

Public school groups and officials argued that the interim final rule from the department unfairly deprives their schools and disadvantaged students of crucial funding during the pandemic.

In a preliminary injunction halting enforcement and implementation of the rule while she considers the case pitting Washington state against the Education Department, U.S. District Court Judge Barbara J. Rothstein harshly and repeatedly rejected the departments arguments. She said that the agency subverted the intent of Congress and hurt students most affected by the pandemic, and that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos did not have the authority to issue the rule in the first place.

The Education Departments interim final rule , publicized in June and formally issued in July, pushes school districts to reserve money under the CARES Act, the federal coronavirus stimulus plan, for services to all local private school students, irrespective of their backgrounds. That represents a major departure from how education law typically governs that arrangement, in which federal money for whats known as equitable services goes to disadvantaged, at-risk private school students.

But Rothstein attacked DeVos rule as blind to the realities of this extraordinary pandemic and the very purpose of the CARES Act: to provide emergency relief where it is most needed.

Forcing the State to divert funds from public schools ignores the extraordinary circumstances facing the State and its most disadvantaged students, she said.

The injunction in the case, issued Friday in the Western District of Washington, represents a setback for the department and a win for public school advocates. Rothstein does not explicitly limit her injunction to the state; however, in a court filing Monday in a separate lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Education said its position is that the injunction applies only to Wahsington state and not nationwide.

Either way, it could be a bad sign for the department in two other lawsuits about the rule , even if its power to change spending decisions on the ground is unclear.

On Monday, department spokeswoman Angela Morabito declined to comment on the preliminary injunction itself. The pandemic affected all students and the CARES Act requires federal funds help all students, Morabito said. We are following the law. Most importantly, our rule treats all students equally. Its unfortunate that so many favor discriminating against children who do not attend government-run schools.

In a statement Saturday, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the chairman of the House education committee, applauded Rothsteins ruling and asked DeVos to abandon its unlawful equitable services rule and finally provide schools the clarity and resources they need.

The Departments Convoluted Reading

The fight between DeVos department and public schools over this issue has been remarkably divisive during pandemic-driven uncertainty for schools. Its been underscored by the Trump administrations ongoing pressure for schools to resume in-person classes. And its revived splits over the extent to which DeVos attention and actions should focus on traditional public schools.

DeVos and the department have justified the rule by arguing that the virus has hurt students of all backgrounds, regardless of where they went to school. Public school officials and congressional Democrats have countered that the rule improperly diverts money from disadvantaged students to ultimately benefit private schools, and that it defies the intent of Congress.



Rothstein sided with the second group.

The nature of this pandemic is that its consequences have fallen most heavily on the nations most vulnerable populations, including its neediest students, she stated. The funding provided throughout the CARES Act, and in particular to schools, is desperately and urgently needed to provide some measure of relief from the pandemics harms, many of which cannot be undone.

Rothstein pointed to separate CARES funding intended primarily for small businesses that private schools could access .



The department not only willfully misinterpreted the CARES Act, according to Rothstein, but the law never gave the department the authority to write the rule in the first place. Based on other parts of the law, she added, Congress therefore knew how to delegate such authority but declined to do in this instance.

She also said lawmakers clearly intended CARES money to be allocated based on a subset of private school students, not all of them, and that the Departments convoluted reading essentially creates an ambiguity to justify resolving it.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate education committee, said this summer he differs from the department on how the law handles the issue.

Originally, the departments interpretation of the law was included in nonbinding guidance released in April. The interim final rule, released after much public controversy, technically gives districts two options for handling the situation, but ultimately it puts significant pressure on states to allocate equitable services aid for private school students.



The department gives districts the option of setting aside CARES money just for a smaller group of disadvantaged private school studentsbut in order to do that, they must first agree to use CARES aid only at Title I schools, which have relatively large shares of students from low-income households.

Rothsteins order prohibits enforcement of the nonbinding April guidance as well as the July rule.

The rule affects roughly 8 to 10 percent of the CARES Acts $13.2 billion for public schools. However, with the 2020-21 school year well under way in many districts, its not clear how such an injunction, it it takes affect nationwide, might affect local school districts decisions about CARES aid. Critics of the departments approach have said for months that it has sown uncertainty in school districts.

A coalition of states, led by California and Michigan, filed a similar lawsuit against the CARES rule last month in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; several large school districts subsequently joined that suit as plaintiffs. A lawsuit headlined by the NAACP and others followed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Read Rothsteins preliminary injunction below:

Photo: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos speaks during a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the Department of Education building July 8. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

Follow us on Twitter @PoliticsK12 . And follow the Politics K-12 reporters @EvieBlad @Daarel and @AndrewUjifusa .
Corona del Mar High School in Newport Beach (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

As county coronavirus case loads drop, the prospect of reopening schools improves. Last week health officials granted school reopening waivers to 30 elementary schools in Orange County. L.A. County's chief medical officer said local coronavirus numbers may soon drop enough to consider elementary school waivers as well.

But what are the requirements for waivers? And most important, what will it take to reopen all elementary, middle and high schools in your county?

Here's what you need to know about California's school reopening requirements.





The state prohibits reopening K-12 schools in counties on its coronavirus watchlist.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in July that any county that is on the monitoring list cannot open K-12 schools for in-person classes, including all public, private, charter and faith-based schools.

Any of the following factors could prompt the state to place a county on the list:

More than 100 cases per 100,000 residents over the last 14 days, excluding prison cases;

More than 25 cases per 100,000 residents over the last 14 days AND a positive test-result rate of more than 8% over a seven-day period.

Increases in hospitalization rates and decreases in availability of intensive-care unit beds and ventilators.

There is a waiver process for elementary schools to open earlier.

Newsom allowed for a school district superintendent or director of a charter or private school to apply through their local health agency for a waiver to reopen school for grades K-6 only. The waivers acknowledge the difficulties young children encounter with online learning.

One key waiver metric calls for the county's 14-day COVID-19 case rate to be at or below 200 per 100,000 residents. Health officials in L.A. County, where the case rate is well above that, have said they will not issue waivers but will reconsider their decision once the number falls to an acceptable level.

According to guidelines laid out by the California Department of Public Health, waiver applicants must consult with labor, parent groups and community-based organizations.

Story continues

They must also submit plans that include small, stable class sizes; rules for social distancing; protocols for how to handle outbreaks; a plan for testing if exposures do occur; and criteria for when to close, among other information. District approval would be required for any school that seeks the waiver. The plans must be posted publicly.

Local health officers must review epidemiological data and consult with the state before granting a school its waiver.





K-12 schools can open only after their county is off the watch list  and it's complicated.

Schools may begin the process of reopening after their county has remained off the state watch list for 14 days.

Schools that do reopen must have COVID-19 prevention and response plans in place, including promoting healthy hand hygiene, requiring face coverings for all staff and students in the third grade and above, maintaining distance inside and outside of the classroom, checking for signs and symptoms of COVID-19, and having a plan in place for when someone becomes sick.

If a school reopens and the county in which it is located gets placed back on the state's monitoring list, the school does not automatically have to close, under state guidelines.

The threshold for closing schools depends on the number of COVID-19 cases and percentage of teachers, students and or/staff who test positive  and on guidance from the local health agency. The state guidelines say that if a teacher or student in a classroom tests positive, those exposed  likely the entire class  should be sent home and the classroom closed for cleaning and disinfection.

The state guidelines say school closure "may be appropriate" when there are multiple cases in multiple cohorts at the school, or when cases within a 14-day period hit at least 5% of the total number of teachers, students and staff, depending on the size and physical layout of the school.

A school district should close if 25% of its schools have closed due to COVID-19 within 14 days.

Times staff writer Rong-Gong Lin II contributed to this report.
To help educators and their students understand and manage their emotions as they navigate these unprecedented and uncertain times, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in collaboration with the Connecticut State Department of Education, and several professional educational organizations in the state, will offer a free virtual SEL course to all Connecticut school staff working in any preK12 school setting, roughly 100,000 people in all.

This first-of-its kind free, statewide opportunity is being funded by a grant from Dalio Education, one of the Centers largest supporters since 2016. The effort was announced August 14 during a virtual roundtable discussion facilitated by John King Jr., president and CEO of the Education Trust and former U.S. Secretary of Education, with participants including Connecticut governor Ned Lamont and president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten.

The 10-hour self-paced course, Social and Emotional Learning in Times of Uncertainty and Stress: Research-Based Strategies, is being designed by Marc Brackett, founder and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and will be hosted via the Coursera app. Coursework features experts in the fields of psychology, education, and research at the Center and begins in late September. The course will be available on a rolling basis through the end of the 2020 calendar year and participants will earn a certificate of completion for a non-credit course authorized by Yale University. Pre-registration has opened, and Brackett will join other Connecticut educational leaders for a live opening session webinar on August 25 at 4 p.m. on the Centers YouTube channel. Additional information about the course and how to register can be found here.

Read more of our coverage on the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and its approach to SEL here.
By Azernews





By Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijani manuscript will be included in UNESCO's World Memory Register.

The inclusion was discussed during working meetings between the Institute of Manuscripts and UNESCO.

Initiated by the UNESCO Headquarters and the South Korean National Commission for UNESCO, the meeting was chaired by experts from the Netherlands, Azerbaijan, Australia, South Korea and Australia, Azertag reported.

Chairman of Azerbaijan's commission for UNESCO World Memory Program, the head of the Institute of Manuscripts Teymur Karimli presented the 19th century manuscript to UNESCO experts.

The national commission also included the head of International Relations Department Nigar Babakhanova, deputy director for Scientific Affairs at the Institute of Manuscripts professor Pasha Karimov, Scientific Secretary and associate professor Azizagha Najafov.

At the meeting, Nigar Babakhanova spoke at both the main and plenary sessions on the manuscript inclusion and brought to the attention of UNESCO experts archival documents that would facilitate an objective assessment.

After scientific evaluation, another Azerbaijani manuscript might be included into UNESCO's World Memory Register in the next few months.

In addition, four manuscripts kept at the Institute of Manuscripts - Rustam Jurjani's "Zahireyi-Nizamshahi", Abulqasim Zahravi's "Al-maqalatus-salasim", Abu Ali ibn Sina's "Al-Qanun fit-tibb" and Muhammad Fuzuli's "Divan" have been already included in the register.

Azerbaijan and UNESCO have been enjoying successful cooperation since1992. In 2003, the parties signed the framework agreement on cooperation in the areas of culture, science, education and communication, which allowed Azerbaijan to become one of the donors of UNESCO.

Many Azerbaijan's cultural sites have been included into UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Icherisheher (Old City), Maiden Tower and Shirvanshah's palace were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000, while since 2007 the Gobustan National Historical-Artistic reserve was also listed among these heritages.

Sheki, a significant city at the crossroads of the historic Silk Roads was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List during the 43rd session of the World Heritage Committee held in Baku.

In 2017, UNESCO recognized Azerbaijan's dolma as the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Art of crafting and playing with kamancha, presented jointly by Azerbaijan and Iran, was also inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

UNESCO successfully celebrated the 600th anniversary of the death of the great Azerbaijani poet and thinker Imadaddin Nasimi and the 200th anniversary of the first settlement of Germans in Azerbaijan last year.




By Ye Tianle

The situation in Eastern Europe's Belarus in the past few days has attracted close attention in the international community as the large-scale street protests reminded people of a "color revolution" and fueled worries over the future of Belarusian President Lukashenko. In the process, the unanimous campaigning for the protesters and condemnation of the Lukashenko regime by European and American countries rings alarms.

The west has viewed Lukashenko as the "last dictator in Europe" ever since Belarus gained independence, accusing him of dictatorship and his country of lacking democracy and freedom. After Belarus' presidential election in 2010, the west sanctioned the country on the grounds of Lukashenko's arrest of political prisoners, and has since resumed the "color revolution"ploy to support the protectors on the one hand and denounce the election for being unfair and unjust on the other hand, threatening to further sanction the country.

Countries like Poland and Czech directly demanded Lukashenko's resignation, US President Donald Trump said he would be following the situation closely and Secretary of State Pompeo asked for a re-election, the UK denied the election results and French President Macron called for the EU to support the protesters. Belarus' neighbor Lithuania took in the exiled Belarusian presidential candidate SvetlanaTikhanovskaya and urged the EU to step up sanctions against Belarus.

In addition, foreign media have been adding fuel to the flames by spreading disinformation such as "Lukashenko fled overseas" and "five protesters were killed". Not only has the west heaped pressure on Lukashenko through official channels and the media, but it has secretly provided material support to the protesters. Yuri Karayev, Belarus' Internal Affairs Minister, said some protesters were bribed by western forces to take to the street for 30-60 Belarusian rubles. Sources also revealed that Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who is currently overseas and has decided to retire, has adopted a tough stance again as a self-proclaimed "national leader" thanks to western instigation.

Suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic and economic meltdown, western countries still have the energy and nerve to interfere in other countries' internal affairs despite their complete failure in pandemic response. The yellow vest protest movement sweeps France, the riots against racial discrimination are still gaining momentum across the US, and protests are common occurrences in Poland and Czech, with the number of casualties and scale of conflicts much bigger than that of Belarus. Yet in western leaders' statements, protesters in their home countries are "rioters" but those in other countries are "peaceful citizens"; the police suppression of riots in their countries is "maintaining stability" but that in other countries is "trampling on democracy" and "abuse of violence".

No matter how the Belarus situation will unfold, it is sure that the motive behind western countries' beating the drum for the protesters is not as simple and righteous as they claim.

(The author is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Eurasian Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.)

Disclaimer: This article is originally published on china.com.cn and translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
Two people were given the shots on the first day, to make sure all the correct systems and protocols were in place, said Dr. Richard Novak, professor and chief of infectious diseases at the universitys Department of Medicine. The plan is to scale up the process by Wednesday so 20 people a day can get the shots.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been poisoned, medical tests carried out by German doctors have indicated.

In a statement the Berlin hospital where he is being treated revealed extensive tests pointed to 'intoxication by a substances from the group of active substances called cholinesterase inhibitors'. Further analysis to identify the exact chemical is ongoing.

'The outcome remains uncertain but long-term effects, especially to the nervous system, could not be ruled out', they said.

Cholinesterase inhibitors are drugs that can increase communication between nerve cells in the brain. They are sometimes used to temporarily improve or stabilise the symptoms of people with dementia.

Common side effects of cholinesterase inhibitors include vomiting, muscle cramps, headache and hallucinations.

Certain chemical classes of pesticides work against bugs by interfering with, or 'inhibiting', cholinesterase but they can also be poisonous to humans.

The Kremlin said it was unclear what caused Navalny to fall ill and that initial tests did not show he was poisoned, as his aides had charged.

The politician's supporters have accused the Kremlin of masterminding a plot to poison Navalny, who is one of Vladimir Putin's fiercest opponents.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned, doctors in Germany said medical tests have indicated. They said the substance was a type of cholinesterase inhibitor

He is under armed guard at the Charite hospital in Berlin. Above is his wife Yulia visiting the hospital earlier today. She did not speak to reporters

Navalny was flown into Germany on Saturday from Omsk Emergency Hospital No.1 in Siberia. He had been treated there by doctors since falling ill on Thursday

What's a cholinesterase inhibitor? Cholinesterase inhibitors are chemicals that prevent the breakdown of the neuro-transmitter acetylcholine. They do this by blocking the site where the neurotransmitter attaches to the enzyme, according to the US-based Agency for Toxic Substance & Disease Registry. This leads to an excessive build up of acetylcholine in joints and nerve cells. Symptoms of the poisoning include muscle rigidity, vomiting and hallucinations. Source: US Agency for Toxic Substance & Disease Registry. Advertisement

Navalny is being treated in an intensive care unit under armed guard at the Charite hospital in Berlin for his own protection.

He is in an artificial coma and receiving the antidote atropine, they said.

Angel Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert wouldn't comment on Navalny's condition today but the German government's coordinator for eastern European affairs, Dirk Wiese, told the public broadcaster ZDF this morning he was 'currently critical, but stable'.

Navalny's team lodged a request to launch a criminal probe with Russian authorities last week, but the Investigative Committee is yet to open the case.

Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician in Moscow and ally of Navalny, urged law enforcement to investigate 'an attempt at a life of a public figure' and include Vladimir Putin in their enquiries.

'It is Putin who benefits from these endless assaults,' she said.

Russian doctors at the Siberian hospital where he was treated today denied claims they had been pressured into saying they found no trace of toxins in his system.

The office of chief doctor Alexander Murakhovsky was packed with police and plain-clothed officers when Navalny was moved into the hospital, Omsk Emergency Hospital No.1, according to journalists.

'I can't tell you who they were,' the chief doctor said. 'I had a lot of people in my office, after all (Navalny) is a political figure.

'I can't say they did anything. They just came and asked what was going on.'

The politician is feared to have drunk tea laced with poison after he became ill on a flight to Moscow from Siberia. Above, the last picture of Mr Navalny before he collapsed

His supporters insist he was poisoned, but doctors in Omsk said a metabolic disorder was the most likely diagnosis. He is pictured on a stretcher in Omsk prior to his transfer to Germany

Continuing to deny allegations that hospital authorities were lent on by the Kremlin, he claimed: 'We saved his life with great effort and work.

'There was no influence on the treatment of the patient a priori and there couldn't have been any.

'We didn't agree diagnoses with anyone. There was no pressure on us from any doctors or any other forces.'

Senior doctor Anatoly Kalinichenko alleged during the press conference: 'If we had found some kind of poison that was somehow confirmed then it would have been a lot easier for us. It would have been a clear diagnosis, a clear condition and a well-known course of treatment.'

His wife Yulia Navalnaya made an appeal to Vladimir Putin to permit Mr Navalny's medical evacuation to Germany after Russian health authorities initially said he was too ill to fly

Chief doctor of the Omsk hospital that treated Navalny Alexander Murakhovsky, left, and head physician and deputy Anatoly Kalinichenko. They denied claims they were pressurised by the Kremlin into saying that they had detected no traces of poison in his blood

Navalny was moved from Siberia to the Charite hospital in Berlin, Germany, on Saturday after his allies said the hospital was ill-equipped and that they did not trust the doctors.

His movements while he was in Siberia were studied 'extensively' by government surveillance, Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets has reported.

Sources said he was followed to meetings in Tomsk, the apartment where he was staying, collecting receipts from a shop and even during a short trip out of town for an evening swim in the Tom river.

His press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, complained that the police surveillance was 'absolutely obvious' during a stopover in Novosibirsk.

'The security services are inclined to believe that if the events connected to a poisoning did take place, then they probably occurred at the airport or in the plane,' the newspaper wrote.

'His movements and contacts in the city were studied thoroughly.'

Navalny, a long-time critic of Putin, is pictured above at a march in memory of murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in February 2020

Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin have been accused of masterminding the poisoning. They are yet to respond to the allegations

The Charite hospital said it would not comment on his illness until test results were evaluated, only confirming he was still in a coma but 'stable'.

His wife Yulia Navalnaya arrived at the hospital on Sunday to visit her husband. Top aide Leonid Volkov also visited the hospital but did not speak to reporters.

Mr Navalny became ill on a flight to Moscow from Siberia on Thursday and was taken to hospital after the plane made an emergency landing.

While his supporters and family insist he was poisoned, doctors in Omsk said a metabolic disorder was the most likely diagnosis.

Russian health authorities said tests had not shown poison in his system and initially resisted a transfer to Germany, saying he was too ill to fly.

The dissident's supporters said this was a ploy to allow the poison to leave his system.

An independent Russian news report at the weekend cited sources in security agencies who said Mr Navalny under intense surveillance during his trip to Siberia.

Moskovsky Komsomolets published details of the surveillance of his every movement, including what he and his associates ate, who he met, his credit card records, shopping receipts, where he stayed, what vehicles he travelled in and even a night time swim in a river.
Haryana agriculture minister JP Dalal on Monday slammed the opposition, accusing it of misleading farmers over three ordinances related to the farm sector.

Interacting with mediapersons in Rohtak on the sidelines of a programme, Dalal said these ordinances will help in increasing the farmers income.

The opposition is misleading the farmers that the minimum support price (MSP) will not be given after the implementation of these ordinances. I want to make it clear that the MSP system will continue to stay. Now, the farmers could sell their produce from any place and at any corner of the country. The state mandis and state laws will stay intact, he added.

BJP confident of winning Baroda bypoll

Dalal, who is also the BJPs election in-charge for the Baroda byelection, said his party was confident of winning this seat.

The opposition is making false claims that the BJP-JJP government will fall after the bypoll. We have the support of 55 legislators and the byelections result will not affect anything. The people of Baroda want to go ahead with the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, he said, while addressing a gathering in Barodas Kathura village.
TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / GlobeX Data Ltd. (OTCQB:SWISF)(CSE:SWIS) ("GlobeX" or the "Company"), the leader in Swiss hosted cyber security and Internet privacy solutions for secure data management and secure communications, is pleased to announce that its SekurSafe security and communications solution has joined the new RE/MAX Marketplace an online platform offering a vetted list of more than 100 technology and business services to RE/MAX agents and brokers. SekurSafe is GlobeX's secure document management, secure email, password manager and collaboration cloud suite. The agreement covers worldwide territory and will start with all agents and brokers of RE/MAX in the USA nationwide and Canada effective immediately.

Alain Ghiai, CEO of GlobeX Data said: "We are very happy to work with RE/MAX, one of the largest International real estate franchises in the world. SekurSafe helps protect both realtors and their clients' confidential data as all real estate transactions include financial and other high value confidential data. The password manager lets realtors create and store complex passwords and increase security, and our Swiss hosted data backup and file share provides confidentiality with the highest degree of privacy. Our SekurMail solution, included in SekurSafe, helps all emails using our proprietary SekurSend feature remain secure and private as show in our short video. Emails can be set with password protection, read limits and self-destruct timers. Clients can reply to agents/brokers in the same manner, without having to purchase SekurSafe. We look forward to growing SekurSafe's usage within the RE/MAX community worldwide."

SekurSafe appears in the RE/MAX Marketplace under several categories such as: Backup & Security, Communication & Collaboration, Document Management, and also classified in the marketplace as a solution for Agents, Brokerages and Teams. SekurSafe offers 4 separate package plans in the RE/MAX marketplace: SOLO for 1 user at US$9.00/month or US$99.00/year, TEAM for 5 users at US$49.00/month or US$539.00/year, SME for 25 users at US$249.00/month or US$2,749.00/year and ENTERPRISE for 50 users at US$449.00/month or US$4,939.00/year.

BEC attacks and email phishing attacks have increased exponentially in in the last few months and the unprecedented situation of the COVID-19 pandemic has put global businesses under pressure to provide secure remote business management tools for their employees. This has created an increased awareness for secure cloud business services such as SekurSafe and its encrypted email service SekurMail. According to a study called sponsored by IBM called Cost of Data Breach 2020 the average cost of a data breach is US$3.86 million. All real estate transactions involve communications between agents/brokers and their clients, whether via email or file share of confidential documents or information. SekurSafe, with its Swiss hosted proprietary technology, ensures that all sharing and transfer of documents, and email communications, to and from agents/brokers and their clients, remain secure and private and shielded from any BEC attack, email phishing attacks or in-transit attack.

"RE/MAX is committed to providing the tools, technology, and training agents need to thrive in any market," said Jason Tang, Executive Director, Technology Partnerships. "Every vendor in the RE/MAX Marketplace is carefully selected for quality of product and commitment to customer service. GlobeX was a natural fit, and we're excited to offer their SekurSafe solution to our network."

GlobeX's Data privacy solutions are all hosted in Switzerland, protecting users' data from any outside data intrusion requests. In Switzerland, the right to privacy is guaranteed in article 13 of the Swiss Federal Constitution. The Federal Act on Data Protection ("FADP") of 19 June 1992 (in force since 1993) has set up a strict protection of privacy by prohibiting virtually any processing of personal data which is not expressly authorized by the data subjects. The protection is subject to the authority of the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.

Under Swiss federal law, it is a crime to publish information based on leaked "secret official discussions." In 2010 the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland found that IP addresses are personal information and that under Swiss privacy laws they may not be used to track Internet usage without the knowledge of the individuals involved.

About GlobeX Data Ltd.

GlobeX Data Ltd. is a Cybersecurity and Internet privacy provider of Swiss hosted solutions for secure data management and secure communications. The Company distributes a suite of secure cloud-based storage, disaster recovery, document management, encrypted e-mails, and secure communication tools. GlobeX Data Ltd. sells its products through its approved wholesalers and distributors, and telecommunications companies worldwide. GlobeX Data Ltd. serves consumers, businesses and governments worldwide.

On behalf of Management

GLOBEX DATA LTD.

Alain Ghiai

President and Chief Executive Officer

+1.416.644.8690

corporate@globexdatagroup.com

For more information please contact GlobeX Data at corporate@globexdatagroup.com or visit us at https://globexdatagroup.com.

For more information on SekurSafe visit us at: https://www.sekursafe.com .

For more information on Sekur visit us at: https://www.sekur.com .

Forward Looking Information

This news release contains certain forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws ("forward-looking statements"). All statements other than statements of present or historical fact are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "achieve", "could", "believe", "plan", "intend", "objective", "continuous", "ongoing", "estimate", "outlook", "expect", "project" and similar words, including negatives thereof, suggesting future outcomes or that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations; they are not guaranteeing future performance. GlobeX cautions that all forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond GlobeX's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the future of the Company's business; the success of marketing and sales efforts of the Company; the projections prepared in house and projections delivered by channel partners; the Company's ability to complete the necessary software updates; increases in sales as a result of investments software development technology; consumer interest in the Products; future sales plans and strategies; reliance on large channel partners and expectations of renewals to ongoing agreements with these partners; anticipated events and trends; the economy and other future conditions; and other risks and uncertainties, including those described in GlobeX's prospectus dated May 8, 2019 filed with the Canadian Securities Administrators and available on www.sedar.com. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, GlobeX undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.

SOURCE: GlobeX Data Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/602848/REMAX-Selects-GlobeXs-SekurSafe-for-Secure-Email-and-Data-Management-Solutions
CBI sleuths on Sunday questioned actor Sushant Singh Rajputs friend Siddharth Pithani, cook Neeraj Singh and domestic help Deepesh Sawant at the DRDO guest house in Mumbai in connection with his death and later visited the actors flat in Bandra along with them, an official said.

In the morning, Mr. Pithani, Mr. Neeraj and Ms. Sawant arrived separately at the DRDO guest house in Kalina area of Santacruz, where the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) officials probing the case are staying, an official said.

These three persons, who were present in the flat when Rajput, 34, was allegedly found hanging in his room on June 14, were questioned for about five hours following which the CBI sleuths took them to the late actors residence at Mont Blanc Apartments in suburban Bandra around 2.45 p.m., he said.

Forensic science experts were also part of the CBI team that visited Rajputs residence, the official said.

Mumbai Police officials were also present at the actors house, he added.

On Saturday also, the CBI team accompanied by Mr. Pithani, Mr. Neeraj and Ms. Sawant visited the late actors house in Bandra to reconstruct the sequence of events before he was found dead.

Another CBI team on Saturday visited the State-run Cooper Hospital in the city, where autopsy had been performed on Rajputs body.

A third CBI team had visited the Bandra police station to meet Mumbai Police officials who were investigating Rajputs alleged suicide earlier.

On Friday, the CBI officials recorded the statements of Mr. Pithani and Mr. Neeraj.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the transfer of an FIR, lodged by Rajputs father in Patna against actor Rhea Chakraborty and others for allegedly abetting his suicide, to the CBI.

After Rajput was found hanging in his apartment in June, the Mumbai Police registered a case of accidental death.

Later, Rajputs father filed a police complaint in Patna, accusing Ms. Chakraborty and her family of abetting the actors suicide and misappropriating his money.
New York, Aug 24 : The Republican National Convention started on Monday by unanimously renominating Vice President Mike Pence for the office in the November elections at a scaled-back convention in Charlotte because of the Covid-19 pandemic without his presence.

The convention's Permanent Chair Kevin McCarthy, who is the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, declared Pence's election after a voice vote.

Unlike at the Democratic Party convention, when the nomination of Kamala Harris as its vice-presidential candidate was done with digital fanfare at a night time session, the Republicans took up the nomination as the first substantial order of business at their convention's start on Monday morning in a matter of fact manner.

President Donald Trump's renomination is scheduled to be taken up later.

Pence, who is a former Governor of Indiana, was picked by Trump to be his running mate in the 2016 elections that they won against the odds.

After Pence's election was announced, Convention Chair Ronna McDaniel blasted the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Harris, training on them the usual party ammunition that their election would lead to higher taxes, open borders and a breakdown in law and order.

Tongue-in-cheek, she quoted Hillary Clinton's remarks at the Democratic convention that everyone should "vote like our lives and our country depend on it", and said that was why they had to turn out in support of Trump.

The Republican convention follows a more traditional format with day-long sessions, while holding the main events at night featuring star speakers. Trump, in a departure from tradition, is scheduled to speak on all four nights of the convention.

The Democratic Party's convention that was held last week entirely virtually was a digital virtuoso performance that the Republicans will have to match.

Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans are holding a hybrid convention with 336 delegates present physically at the convention site representing the 2,551 who were elected at the party primaries across the US, while others will be participating remotely.

The holding of the convention was marred by controversy because North Carolina's Democrat Governor Roy Cooper turned down Trump's demand to hold a full convention, with several thousands participating without full Covid-19 precautions.

Trump said the convention would be moved to Jacksonville, Florida, but had to abandon that plan and return to Charlotte and agree to the Covid-19 restrictions.

The convention began with a Catholic prayer that included an anti-abortion statement.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter at @arulouis)
Joining us for the fun was my sister, Anne, her husband, Steve, and my 5-year-old nephew, Conroy. And fun is exactly what they brought. Steve is a kid at heart, and Anne is like the best camp counselor you could ever ask for. So between the two of them, our vacation transformed into a kind of sleep-away camp for the kids. We had a glow stick dance party, cooked smores over the fire pit, had an afternoon to tie-dye crafts, ate more kid-friendly snacks than you could shake a stick at and  the piece de resistance  rode water bumper cars.

Even the midweek rainy day that kept us indoors was transformed into a summer movie marathon. We lazed around watching Summer Rental, Meatballs, One Crazy Summer and Jaws. I had no idea that underdog besting rich guy jerk in regatta racing was such a go-to plot device in the 1980s.

The kids also caught  and named  a menagerie of creatures. There was Oyster the crawdad (mind-boggling, I know, but thats what my Mara decided). Then there were the three baby snapping turtles named Snappy, Cappy and Happy. The toad who Conroy dubbed Hoppy (are you starting to see a theme?). And then the escape artist green frog the kids agreed should be called Patty, which was a nod to the grandma back home in Omaha.
By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK, Aug 24 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit accusing Denmark's Danske Bank A/S and four former top executives of defrauding shareholders by hiding and failing to stop widespread money laundering at its former Estonian branch.

U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan said shareholders in the proposed class action failed to sufficiently plead that the bank improperly reported revenue derived from money laundering or downplayed its supervision failures.

She also said the plaintiffs, led by four pension funds in New York and Massachusetts, failed to show that Danske acted recklessly or with conscious disregard that its statements were false and misleading.

"They allege in a conclusory way that defendants and employees of (Danske) received reports contradicting public statements, and fail to connect any of those reports to specific representations by specific persons," Caproni wrote.

The plaintiffs had sought damages for investors who lost money in Danske's American depositary shares from Jan. 9, 2014 to April 29, 2019.

They sued four months after Danske said in September 2018 that an internal probe had uncovered about 200 billion euros ($236 billion) of payments made from 2007 to 2015 through its Estonian branch, with many payments appearing suspicious.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Danske's lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Claims against former Chief Executive Thomas Borgen, former Chairman Ole Andersen and two former chief financial officers were also dismissed.

Authorities in several countries began investigating the suspicious payments made through the Estonian branch, and Estonia ordered Danske to exit the country. The bank has also faced investor litigation in Denmark.

The case is Plumbers & Steamfitters Local 773 Pension Fund vs Danske Bank A/S et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 19-00235.

(1 euro = US$1.18) (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Islamabad, Aug 24 : Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the head of the Afghan Talibans political office in Doha, is going to visit Pakistan along with a delegation to discuss the way forward in the Afghan peace process, according to a Foreign Office official.

"Yes, we have invited the Afghan Taliban delegation to visit Pakistan to discuss the way forward in the Afghan peace process," Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri, the Foreign Office spokesperson, told The Express Tribune on Sunday.

He, however, neither confirmed the dates of the visit nor shed light on composition of the delegation.

This will be the second visit of Mullah Baradar to Pakistan in the last 10 months.

He visited Islamabad in October 2019 when US President Donald Trump abruptly called off the peace talks with the Taliban, citing the militant group's continued attacks against the US-led foreign forces.

Pakistan at that time had arranged a meeting between the Taliban delegation led by Mullah Baradar and US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad.

The intra-Afghan dialogue has been delayed for months because of differences between the Afghan government and the Taliban over the release of Taliban prisoners.
An innovative new training programme has been launched to recruit new talent into the UK's growing egg industry.

Despite being the UKs fastest growing protein sector, there is a shortage of people coming into the egg sector and little training is currently available.

In response, the British Egg Academy has been launched to help those looking to get a foothold in the sector.

It is delivered in partnership with Chippindale Foods  Morrisons own integrated egg operation  as well as numerous companies who are specialists within the industry.

The UK egg sector is worth over 1 billion to the UK economy and plays an important role in feeding the population.

Richard Pearson, Head of Agriculture at Chippindale Foods, said demand for eggs was growing, fuelled in part by younger consumers who recognise eggs as an affordable and sustainable protein.

However, he noted there was a general shortage of young people and new entrants ready to undertake roles in the industry.

The UK egg sector is a fantastic place to work and there are so many opportunities right throughout the supply chain, he said.

But weve also recognised a shortage of training to equip and inspire people to undertake roles throughout the sector.

Mr Pearson explained that as a 'proactive industry', Chippindales and its industry partners were keen to make something happen.

He said that partnering with 29 other groups - including Bishop Burton College which will be delivering the course  to devise a programme tailored to the requirements of the modern egg sector would equip students with key skills.

Through a balance between classroom education and hands-on experience, he said the course aims to offer the best of both worlds and present the breadth and variety of opportunities available.

The year-long course equips students with a Level 2 Diploma in Agriculture with training and work-based learning from the 30 supporting companies.

Andrew Black, Business Development Assistant Principal at Bishop Burton, said: The Egg Academy is a completely unique concept  it really is something we havent seen done before.

The interest weve received from industry has been phenomenal and its enabled us to create a programme specifically tailored to the industry to showcase the wealth of knowledge, specialism and opportunities.

Mr Black explained that a progressive combination of both classroom and practical learning was key to the development of academy.

As a result, students can expect to gain insights from specialists from the supply chain, including experts in welfare, genetics, policy and construction  both within and beyond the college environment.

This course will provide students with both an accredited qualification and the opportunity to learn through doing which will be a huge asset to students and employers alike, he said.
The deal also sets conditions  linked to Taliban commitments to fight terrorism  for the U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan, which would end the longest-ever U.S. military engagement. U.S. troops have begun withdrawing and by November, fewer than 5,000 American soldiers are expected to still be in Afghanistan, down from 13,000 when the deal was signed.
Police have arrested four 14-year-olds after a schoolboy was stabbed in the back near a primary school in Essex.

Essex police confirmed that a girl and three boys were arrested after the attack near Briscoe Primary School in Pitsea today and all four remain in custody for questioning.

The boy, who is thought to be 12, was airlifted to hospital to be treated for stab wounds in his back.

Detective Inspector Stewart Eastbrook, of Essex police, said: 'This was a nasty incident on a young boy and our officers were on scene quickly to carry out enquiries and a search of the area.

A schoolboy has been rushed to hospital after he was stabbed near a primary school in Essex after reportedly being attacked by a gang armed with a hammer

'We are continuing to piece together information to establish the circumstances behind the incident and we believe those involved are known to each other.

'Officers remain in the area speaking to witnesses and gathering information to help with our investigation, and we'd like to thank members of the public who have spoken to us already.

'There were a number of people in the area at the time and we'd like to speak to anyone who saw what happened or has any mobile phone or CCTV footage that could help us with our enquiries.

'I know this incident is very concerning for local residents and I would ask anyone with concerns or information to please speak to officers who are at the scene and on patrol in the area.'

Emergency workers rushed to the scene at around 2pm after the child was stabbed in an alleyway in a broad daylight attack.

An air ambulance landed in a nearby school playing field to rush the boy to the Royal London Hospital to be treated for his injuries.

Hi injuries were described as serious but not life-threatening.

Police have now placed a cordon across the alleyway on a residential street.

The boy, who is thought to be 12, was airlifted to hospital to be treated for stab wounds after the attack near Briscoe Primary School in Pitsea today

Witnesses claimed the boy had been attacked by a gang who also hit him with a hammer, the Braintree and Witham Times reported.

A spokesperson for the East of England Ambulance Service said: 'An ambulance, a rapid response vehicle, an ambulance officer vehicle and Essex and Herts Air Ambulance were called to an address in Pitsea following reports that a child had been stabbed.

'One boy with stab wounds was transported by air ambulance to the Royal London Hospital.'

Essex Police has been approached for comment.
London teenager Nora Quoirin's body had 'no serious scars or injuries' to her feet, even though the teenager was wearing no shoes when she vanished from a resort in Malaysia, an inquest heard.

The 15-year-old's disappearance sparked a ten-day search through dense rainforest involving helicopters, sniffer dogs and hundreds of volunteers.

But police said foul play was not involved when her naked body was found by hikers beside a small stream about 1.6 miles from the Dunsun rainforest resort. They subsequently closed the case.

Officials pointed to an autopsy claiming she had succumbed to intestinal bleeding from starvation and stress after spending a week in the rainforest.

Her heartbroken parents Meabh and Sebastien argued their daughter, who had learning difficulties, would never have wandered away alone and demanded an inquest, which opened today.

A lawyer working for the couple highlighted the fact that Nora - who was not wearing shoes when she went missing - had no injuries to her feet, even though she was found one kilometer away from the family's villa.

The lawyer said: 'She was found unclothed, without footwear yet there were no serious scars or injuries to her soles?'

Local police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop - who was the first witness called to the inquest in Seremban today - agreed and said Nora had 'only some minor bruises', The Mirror reports.

The inquest into the death of London teenager Nora Quoirin opened today a year after her naked body was found in a jungle in Malaysia. She is pictured above in a family photo

Local police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop was the first witness called to the inquest in Seremban today, held a year after she disappeared

Parents Meabh and Sebastien demanded an inquest after arguing their daughter would not have wandered off. They are pictured calling for their daughter with a megaphone last year

Mr Yusop added: 'There was no indication the victim was kidnapped.

'We did not receive any telephone calls - usually in this kind of case we will get a call to say the victim has been kidnapped and is in the hands of certain people, and they would demand a ransom.

'I believe the missing person actually climbed out of the window.'

When he first met the family, Mr Yusop said they were 'distraught' and that he 'assured the father we will use all our resources to find the missing girl'.

He told the court that he immediately ordered a search after being told she was missing on August 4 last year.

The voice of the girl's mother calling 'Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here' was played in court - a recording that was used in the search for the girl.

Police officers pictured leaving the court today. The local police chief was the first of 64 witnesses called to the inquest to give evidence

The 15-year-old's disappearance sparked a ten-day hunt through the rainforest involving helicopters, sniffer dogs and hundreds of volunteers

A second witness, resort owner Ahmed Bamadhaj, told the inquest that the latch of one of the windows in the bungalow where they were staying was broken.

Pictures of the two windows in the hotel room were shown to the court, including the one with a broken latch. There is no CCTV of the site and the area is not lit up so guests are able to 'see the stars'.

The Dusun resort, based deep in the rainforest of Negeri Sembilan, consists of seven self-catered bungalows with a maximum capacity of 20 adults.

As many as 64 witnesses are expected to be called to the court including the hikers that found her body, a British forensic expert, Nora's parents and police officers.

Opening proceedings today, Coroner Maimoonah Aid said: 'We are here to answer a few questions - who is the dead person, when and how she died and whether anyone was responsible.'

Maimoonah visited the Dusun and the place where the body was found earlier this month in a trip the Quoirin family's lawyer described as 'quite thorough'.

The inquest will be calling 64 witnesses to the courthouse, pictured, in Seremban

A map shows the Dusun Resort near Seremban in Malaysia where Nora disappeared last year

Ahead of the inquest, the teenager's parents described it as 'a crucial element in the fight for truth and justice for Nora'.

'We hope that all avenues surrounding Nora's disappearance will be fully explored and not just the theory which the police has always favoured,' they said.

They were not present at the inquest because of the coronavirus pandemic but will be interviewed by the coroner via video-link.

Nora disappeared from the resort on August 4 last year.

Her parents have previously said their daughter could not have wandered off on her own as she had poor motor skills and needed help to walk. They also said that her mental age was about five or six years old.

A police officer searches for Nora in August last year following her disappearance

In a statement issued by the Lucie Blackman Trust, a charity which helps British families in crisis overseas, they said in January: 'It is crucial to understand how Nora came to be found where she was.

'As a vulnerable child, with significant physical and mental challenges, we strongly refute any conclusion that Nora was alone for the entire duration of her disappearance.

'We have repeatedly asked the police to clarify answers to our questions in this regard - and we have been repeatedly ignored.'
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson (R) welcomes US President Donald Trump (L) to the NATO summit at the Grove hotel in Watford, northeast of London on December 4, 2019.

The U.K. government has denied a report that it plans to end a tax on digital companies to help it secure a trade deal with the U.S.

A report in the U.K. newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, said Finance Minister Rishi Sunak was looking to reverse a recent decision over a digital tax in order to please American companies and politicians, and to help both nations reach a trade deal.

However, a spokesperson for the U.K. Treasury told CNBC Monday: "We've been clear it's a temporary tax that will be removed once an appropriate global solution is in place  and we continue to work with our international partners to reach that goal."

The U.K. government had said previously, despite pressure from the United States, that it would only replace its digital levy once there was an international agreement on how to tax digital giants  something that has not yet happened.

The U.S. has criticized the levy on different occasions and decided in June to start a formal probe into countries with digital taxes or those looking to implement one, including the U.K., Italy and Brazil. The U.S. administration believes that a digital tax disproportionally impacts American companies.
If India is today a Hindu nation, it is also a tinderbox in which the self is defined by the perpetual hatred of others.

On August 5, Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for a Hindu temple in the northern city of Ayodhya. This fulfilled the orders of Indias Supreme Court, which last November awarded a victory to those who have long been campaigning to build a temple there, in place of a Mughal-era mosque that was demolished by a right-wing Hindu mob in 1992. The speculation that the mosque was built on the ruins of an ancient temple marking the mythological birthplace of the epic hero Ram remains unproven.

The groundbreaking ceremony for the temple was set on that particular date to commemorate the altering of the countrys constitution to justify a shift from indirect to direct colonialism in the disputed Muslim-majority region of Jammu and Kashmir exactly a year ago.

The temple construction in Ayodhya, just like the constitutional amendment that revoked the Indian-administered Kashmirs limited autonomy, is a calculated move by the Modi government to consolidate the new majoritarian polity in India.

Today, we are witnessing the final stages of the project to remake India into a Hindu nation, but little is being said about the fabulous falsehoods and cunning sleights of hand that this ambitious project was built upon.

Colonial origins

The word Hindu is a Persianate derivative of Sindhu, Sanskrit for the Indus River. Only during Indias colonial encounter in the 19th century did Hindu become an ascriptive label for a wide range of practices and ideas across South Asia that do not fall within the three world religions labelled Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. But this term defined by negation did not mean much to those located within a mosaic of Indic ritual and philosophical traditions that lacked a holy book based on divine revelation.

Scholars have attributed the invention of Hinduism as much to men from dominant castes who sought to reform and remake a colonised society as to colonial missionaries. These 19th-century reformers sought to go back to ancient texts such as the Vedas or the Upanishads to propose a de-ritualised, quasi-monotheistic creed for a modern India. Such a move mimicked the textualist methods of the Protestant Reformation, and the then fashionable European efforts to appropriate ancient Sanskrit spiritual texts to construct an Aryan race identity.

The reformers were answering British criticisms of Indic polytheisms as beastly and superstitious. They enthusiastically embraced the colonial view of Muslims being wholly separate from Hindus, ignoring the accommodations and intermixing over centuries that had produced shared ritual, intellectual, sartorial, culinary, and musical traditions between the two groups.

As the reforming Hindu men worked to draw sharp lines between Hindus and Muslims, the newly emerging print media became their accomplice. The adoption of the Nagri script by reformist groups such as the Arya Samaj contrasted with the shared orality of a public sphere defined by the Hindustani language. Devanagari, the divine Nagri as it became known, also started to be used alongside Urdu and English in the new world of print technology, helping reformists in their efforts to create a distinct Hindu identity.

Then, as it is now, the chief obstacle to transforming India into a Hindu nation was the caste system which divided society into strict hierarchical groups. To accommodate the lower orders of society, the conservatism of the Brahmins, the traditional priestly class who sit atop the rigid caste hierarchy, had to be diluted. But to de-brahminise Hinduism would have dissolved the abstract new polity of the reformers imagination into a melange of lived traditions across the localities and regions of India.

From the colonial to the post-colonial

A century ago, the arrival of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the political scene provided a solution to the reformers dilemma. Gandhi claimed that his religion as much as that of most Hindus was Sanatan Dharma, the perennial faith, not the new-fangled textual abstractions put forward by the reformers. Caste, he argued, was a necessary evil in the subcontinental life. It could neither be wished away nor reformed out of existence.

A hierarchical society, suggested Gandhi, could learn to be humane and to avoid excesses. Vertical hierarchies could be held together by horizontal alliances between those of similar rank, whether at the top or the bottom. Hindu and Muslim elites could be tied together by common interests of peace and prosperity just as the Hindu and Muslim masses were held together by shared solidarities of class and occupation.

The Gandhian solution to the problem was largely embraced by the anti-colonial movement in India led by the Congress party. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who led the campaign for a separate state of Pakistan, had also endorsed the Gandhian solution in British India, but he was prescient to realise that its appeal would wane steadily with modernisation once the fortunes of Indian Muslims were placed at the mercy of a consolidated Hindu majority.

The principal critics of the Gandhian solution  anti-caste thinkers such as Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and theorists of Hindu nationalism such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar  preferred a modern and egalitarian solution to the problem faced by the 19th-century reformers. Both Ambedkar and Savarkar sought equality in politics and society, not hierarchy. Yet Ambedkar reposed his faith in new constitutional liberalism derived from the French and American constitutions. Savarkar endeavoured, by contrast, to create a new political religion, called Hindutva (Hindu-ness) to unify India along the lines of the Italian Risorgimento.

In the early decades after independence, the Congress governments balanced the hierarchical accommodationist view proposed by Gandhi with modernism rooted in equal citizenship regardless of caste or faith. This was an era in which all were equal citizens of India, even Kashmiris, even if long-standing social hierarchies remained intact. Elite Muslims and Christians featured prominently in public life just as they had done in the colonial era.

With economic liberalisation and neoliberal globalisation since 1980, the old hierarchies have been shaken up. The myriad castes that constitute Indian society have been shattered into infinitesimal fragments, which have given rise to fractalised identities vying for equality at the expense of each other. The centrifugal force in pursuit of equality in public life led to dissensus, not a new national consensus.

In response, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), particularly under Modi, has revived Savarkars vision of Hindutva as a political religion, albeit in a distinctly populist vein. Ones religious beliefs and practices matter less in Hindutva than an absolute commitment to a Hindu rashtra or polity. The fractalised selves of post-liberalisation have been brought together by the centripetal force of electoral rituals, digital media, and a new Hindu state, all of which offer an insurgent sense of equality.

Political Hinduism

Rhetorically, the Hindu rashtra is opposed to discrimination based on caste for political Hindus. Modis own humble origins and his rise to power are presented as clinching evidence of a new egalitarian modernism. But, in practice, Hindutva is willing to accommodate the everyday oppressions that define Indian society. In effect, some are more equal than others. Conservatism is now couched increasingly in the modern semantics of class (rich and poor) rather than in traditional caste terms.

Those who do not identify as political Hindus  Muslims, Christians, leftists, anti-caste activists  are the new objects of discrimination and exclusion. In principle, if individuals from these groups embrace Hindutva, they, too, would be considered political Hindus. The lines are, in sum, permeable, and everything is negotiable in the new Hindu polity.

At least for now, the Hindu rashtra is a highly personalised regime, almost a cult, in which Modi is the state and countenances no opposition, not even from the judiciary or the central bank. Civil society, the media and academia are treated with suspicion because they breed dissent. Through a mix of carrot and stick, the media have been compelled to voice propaganda, and prominent journalists, activists, and academics have been arrested or bullied into silence.

The electoral system is now dominated by a single political party committed to Hindutva, namely, the BJP. Other parties, including the Congress, have been compelled now to speak the language of Hindutva and acquiesce in the new political religion.

Oddly enough, we know little about the ritual lives and personal beliefs of Modi or his predecessors. The new political religion of Hindutva seems to define itself almost entirely by negation vis-a-vis the Muslim (or Christian) Other. Other Indic traditions defined traditionally in opposition to Hinduism  Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism  are simply seen as Hindu offshoots.

The territorial boundaries of the nation are sacralised in Hindu India. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Kashmir, where long-standing legal arrangements have been forcibly undone. These violent rituals of integration are meant to build communitas among political Hindus, the true citizens of the new polity. Settler colonialism is now expected to complete this process of national integration.

Kashmiri Muslims as colonial subjects stand metonymically for all Indian Muslims. The project of subjugating religious minorities is now regarded as a sacred duty in the service of the nation.

By contrast, ethnic minorities in northeast India are encouraged to negotiate the terms of their political assimilation within Hindu India. In response to activists claims about indigenity in these regions bordering China and Myanmar, the BJP now claims that all Indigenous peoples of India are Hindu, and all Hindus are, by definition, indigenous to India.

Hindutva is, undoubtedly, an abstract political religion, stripped of contextual or historical depth. This is precisely what the colonial-era reformers and Savarkar had dreamed of: an all-India Hinduism that reins in the problem of caste via the dazzling dream of equal citizenship. Not only is a Hindu rashtra now a reality, but the Muslim Other has been subjugated within it. The inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, much like the colonisation of Kashmir, has accomplished both tasks in the highly symbolic and theatrical world of Hindutva.

If India is today a Hindu nation, it is also a tinderbox in which the self is defined by the perpetual hatred of others. Whenever Indias youth tire of this majoritarian politics of hate, they will reflect on the paths not taken to make their country a prosperous, equitable, and decent.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Chinese excursions entering Japanese waters is a clear violation, and it will not be as easy with Japanese subs ready to meet the Chinese under the water. This is only one of the cats and mouse games the Chinese play in coercing the Japanese who are not standing by anymore.

Beijing takes a crack at trying to intimidate Japan, but what it got is the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) resolving to stop China. The JMSDF is using its submarine to butting heads with PLAN under Japanese seas.

A class of its own with a specialty in anti-submarine warfare, their navy is far better than the PLAN with their noisy subs compared to China which is reliant on stolen technology and reverse engineering, Japan submarine technology is second to none. But the PLAN is fighting quantity versus quality. Think tanks are analyzing how the JMSDF will respond, reported Forbes.

Japanese have detected loud PLAN subs a lot. When a Chinese sub thought it can sneak around, the Japanese Navy scrambled helicopter-carriers, two destroyers, and maritime patrol aircraft. A Chinese sub is the intruder with its interests in the East China Sea.

In a press release, the JMSDF reported the intruding sub got detected at the northeast of Amami Oshima, June 18. The location of the underwater ping is along islands between Japan and China. The Chinese sub was slinking in the length of the first island chain, on the underwater barriers that separate China from the Pacific. It lingered there for several days.

Also read: Chinese Submarines Using Underground Base in Hainan Island Captured in Satellite Photos

An orchestrated move of all Chinese assets is to coerce others illegally in territorial disputes. The white paper alleged that China is increasing sorties to force their way into a status quo around the Senkakus. China says it is theirs, hence their roguish attitude.

The paper says that JMSDF will gather information and reconnaissance through its submarines all over territorial waters. What the Japanese meant is going on the defensive. Instead of just a passive response, they will monitor and hound Chinese subs and warships to give the PLAN a wake-up call. With its rambunctious behavior, the PLAN will not be tolerated by painting Chinese assets and letting them know.

Tokyo is beefing up their sub-force to have 16 and another 6 to make them 22 in all. China has more subs which makes it harder for Japanese subs despite their technological refinement. Still, to negate numerical superiority, the Japanese forces will keep more submarines in force. All units will actively seek out Chinese intruders in patrols and defense as its primary operation.

Tokyo has the first sub with Lithium-Ion batteries that allows it to stay longer underwater. Compared to the use of Air Independent Power (AIP), this is less effectively used by both nations. The paper says it will keep Japanese subs operating at persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), powering subs with it is beyond what the Chinese have now.

In 2004, the Chinese sent a nuclear sub into Japanese waters, which was a violation of international law. Not all of China's 46 subs are modern, but they were using espionage, stealing design and technology. Another incident in January 2018, A Plan sub violated Miyakojima Island and the Senkaku Islands but the Chinese denied it.

When the last Soryu Class submarine, Toryu is ready for service next year as it will add more units, making it hard for more Chinese excursions met by Japanese subs.

Related article: Japan Defense Chief Told Chinese Military to Back Off From Senkakus

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
After decades of absence, Atlantic Salmon are back in the Miminegash River.

Danny Murphy is the co-ordinator for the Roseville/ Miminegash Watersheds Inc., a non-profit group that takes care of some of the rivers and streams in western P.E.I.

Murphy has volunteered with the group since 2007 and has worked as the co-ordinator for the last 12 years. Hes also an avid angler. In the fall of 2018, he caught a fish he didnt recognize.

What is this? Murphy recalls asking himself, before texting a photo of the catch to P.E.I.s freshwater fish biologist, Rosie MacFarlane.

Thats a salmon parr, she texted back. Let it go.

He wasnt the only fisherman to catch one of the precious salmon that year, so MacFarlane came out to electrofish the area.

A common way to sample fish in rivers, electrofishing sends an electric current through the water and stuns fish so they can be caught in a net and identified before getting re-released into the water.

MacFarlane and her team found eight salmon parr in a 200-metre stretch of the Miminigash River in that 2018 survey.

Everybody was pretty excited over that, to see them back in a river where they had been missing for 20-plus years, said MacFarlane.

There used to be a salmon run in the Miminegash in the 1960s, but the fish dwindled over time and an extensive study of rivers in 2001 and 2002 found none remained.

Murphys 2018 find wasnt just a coincidence, he found salmon parr again in 2019.

The watershed group has posted signs along the streams to make anglers aware of the difference between salmon parr and brook trout. By law, salmon parr and smolts must be released back to the water.

We never caught any adult salmon yet, but they were here. The babies didnt just appear, said Murphy.

If anyone does catch an adult salmon, Murphy asks for it to be released.

Its so important to the river right now.

The Miminegash is the only south-draining river in the West Prince region that has salmon, and its not exactly clear why, said MacFarlane.

These parr may be the result of a strong salmon run throughout the Maritimes in 2011, she said.

Salmon, even though they return to their natal rivers, they do tend to stray a little bit, she said. When their numbers are high like that, you do get more straying.

Roseville Pond Natural Area

 The Little Miminegash River system flows into Roseville Pond at the edge of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

 Hunters approached the Roseville/Miminegash Watersheds Inc. to see if they could team up to create an area that would be safe for waterfowl to nest.

 Establishing the official natural area meant years of work contacting landowners to make sure they were on board.

 The group has invested many seasons of work to improving the access road, installing a floating dock and constructing a four-kilometre walking trail with stunning views of the pond, beach and dunes.

 It took lots of help from the community and funding partners, but the watershed group achieved a park located off Rte 14 In Roseville.

Another possibility for the return is that there were always really low numbers in the river system and enhancement activities helped the population rebound.

The group has been working very diligently on the Miminegash river and nearby streams in their watershed area for quite some time. Theyre very dedicated, theyve got local people that truly care about the rivers in their area.

Some of the work that has made a real difference is just getting the branches opened up, said MacFarlane.

Work on the rivers and streams can take years to show impacts on water quality and work began on the stretch where the salmon were found back in 1992. At that time, an electrofishing survey found a total of only 72 fish in a seven-kilometre stretch of river, said Murphy.

The river was beaver-impacted right from the brackish water, said Murphy.

Beavers make dams that widen the river and remove tree-cover. The water heats up too hot for salmon to survive.

The thing they need the most is a rocky stream bottom, said MacFarlane. They like to have some deep pools to rest in, but they have to have gravel and cobble stream beds in order to lay their eggs and for them to successfully hatch their young. For those young juvenile fish to have the habitat they pretty much need exclusively rocky-bottom rivers. So, what the group has done is provide more of that flowing water and clean rocky bottom. Thats paid off.

Murphys goals are simple, plant trees, remove blockages and improve water flow to help the river stay cool and clear. Its not easy work, but after nearly 30 years, the results are here in the shape of the salmon parr.

Thats why finding the salmon is so important to us, said Murphy.

The Miminegash is one of just a couple dozen of rivers with salmon on P.E.I. MacFarlane said there used to be more than 70.

Were starting over in building the salmon population, said Murphy.

After the 2018 discovery, Murphys team is more focused than ever on restoring the salmon habitat.

Were starting over in building the salmon population, said Murphy.

And he has good help.

I love this type of work, outside, said Daniel Gavin. The 2020 Westisle Composite high school graduate is in his third summer of stream work with Murphy.

You feel like youre doing something useful in the world, he said.

Gavin hopes to take the Wildlife Conservation Technology course at Holland College in the fall.

This summer, the group has installed temperature loggers in several locations. A hand-held YSI meter on loan from the P.E.I. Watershed Alliance gave Murphy a better picture of water health by measuring nitrogen, pH, oxygen and salinity in the rivers in the area.
The Southern Poverty Law Center building is reflected in the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., on Thursday March 14, 2019.

MONTGOMERY, Ala.  Republican National Committee delegates approved a resolution this past weekend condemning the Southern Poverty Law Center, calling the Montgomery, Alabama, based organization "a far-left organization with an obvious bias."

"The SPLC is a radical organization, and that the federal government should not view this organization as a legitimate foundation equipped to provide actionable information to DHS or any other government agency," said the resolution, which challenged the legitimacy of the organization to identify hate groups.

The SPLC, which conducts investigations and engages in civil rights litigation, said in a statement Sunday that the resolution gave "comfort to hate groups" and accused the RNC of being selective in its condemnation.

While the Republican Party approved this resolution, notably, it did not denounce organizations that promote antisemitism, Islamophobia, neo-Nazis, anti-LGBT sentiment or racism," said Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the SPLC, in a statement. "It only criticized the SPLC for challenging hate groups that have found a place in the Republican Party."

Previously: Margaret Huang to lead SPLC as new president and CEO

Latest clash between SPLC, conservative groups

The resolution was the latest clash between the SPLC and conservative groups over the SPLC's Hatewatch list, which tracks radical and extremist groups. Conservatives accuse the SPLC of pursuing a partisan agenda and sweeping up groups with a conservative agenda with explicitly racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.

The SPLC says groups with "beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics" make the list, and say their criteria is similar to the FBI's definition of a hate crime.

The RNC resolution cited the presence of the Family Research Council (FRC) on the list, accusing the SPLC of leading to a 2012 shooting at the FRC.

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On Aug. 15 of that year, a man armed with a pistol and two magazines of ammunition shot a security guard in the arm at the FRC headquarters in Washington, D.C. before the guard subdued him.

The suspect, Floyd Corkins, said he found the address of the FRC  which says "homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it as it is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects"  through the SPLC website.

Tony Perkins, the president of the FRC, accused the SPLC at the time of "inciting hatred, and in this case a clear connection to violence."

The SPLC said at the time it "condemned all acts of violence" and defended its listing of the FRC on the list, citing statements from members of the group that falsely asserted that LGBTQ individuals are more likely to engage in child abuse than heterosexual ones.

The RNC resolution also condemned former President Barack Obama's administration of giving the SPLC "the ability to provide input to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)" and acting "upon their request that the federal government formally identify individuals and organizations as 'hate groups.' "

A 2017 Politico profile of SPLC founder Morris Dees said SPLC coordinated with the federal government during the Obama administration, though the profile did not provide details. Erik Olvera, a spokesman for the SPLC, wrote in an email Monday that "nobody currently on staff recalls that." Olvera also said the resolution's assertion that it designates "persons and organizations" as hate groups was untrue.

"The RNC is mistaken in their claim that we designate individuals as 'hate groups,'" he wrote. "We have never done that and we are clear in our hate group FAQ that we do not."

The SPLC resolution was part of several approved this weekend ahead of the Republican National Convention, which began Monday morning. The RNC also approved resolutions defending the federal celebration of the Christopher Columbus holiday; condemning "cancel culture" and reaffirming its support for President Donald Trump. The RNC chose not to adopt a platform for the 2020 election.

Follow Montgomery Advertiser reporter Brian Lyman on Twitter: @lyman_brian

An official start: Trump secures delegates for nomination at Republican National Convention

Kellyanne Conway is leaving her job at the White House to focus on family: George Conway stepping away from Lincoln Project

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Republican National Committee condemns Southern Poverty Law Center
The Taliban's chief has finalised a negotiating team that is to have sweeping decision-making powers in upcoming intra-Afghan negotiations, the top negotiator told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Maulvi Hibatullah Akhunzada hand-picked the 20-member team, 13 of whom come from the Taliban's leadership council around half of the council's total members.

The negotiating team will have the authority to set agendas, decide strategy and even sign agreements with the political leadership of the Afghan government in Kabul, lead negotiator Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai told AP.

This is a powerful team...All decision-making powers are with the negotiation team, Stanikzai said.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who signed the peace deal with Washington on February 29 paving the way for America's troop withdrawal and the eventual intra-Afghan negotiations, will keep the powerful post as head of the Taliban's political office in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar.

The critical intra-Afghan talks, which were laid out in the peace deal signed in February, were expected to begin Aug. 20 but have been plagued by relentless delays.

The talks are intended to set a road map for post-war They will include a permanent cease-fire, the rights of minorities and women, constitutional changes and the fate of tens of thousands of armed and militias loyal to Kabul-allied warlords.

The first round of talks seemed imminent earlier this month, when a traditional grand council or jirga approved the immediate release of the remaining Taliban prisoners in government custody.

Some diplomats optimistically told the AP that negotiations could begin as early as August 10. But the government then defied the jirga decision, demanding the Taliban free 22 commandos in their custody before freeing the remaining Taliban.

We will be ready for negotiations in the near future, Stanikzai, the lead Taliban negotiator, said. Now we urge the US to convince the other side to end their excuses, release prisoners as soon as possible and come to the negotiation table.

Suhail Shaheen, spokesman for the Taliban's political office, said last week that the Taliban had freed the 1,000 prisoners they had promised, and that he was not aware of the commandos.

According to the deal Washington signed with the Taliban, the Afghan government was to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, and the Taliban were to free 1,000 government and military men.

Under the US-Taliban agreement, the withdrawal of American troops does not hinge on the success of intra-Afghan talks, but instead on commitments made by the Taliban to combat terrorist groups and ensure is not used as a staging ground for attacks on the US and its allies.

Since signing the agreement, the Taliban have held to a promise not to attack US and NATO troops, but have carried out regular attacks on Afghan security forces.

By November, less than 5,000 U.S. soldiers are set to be in Afghanistan, down from about 13,000 prior to the February agreement.

On Sunday Baradar, head of the Taliban political office, was travelling to Pakistan from Doha, just days after Islamabad issued fresh orders implementing the 2015 UN sanctions against the Taliban as well as a number of other outlawed groups.

It wasn't immediately clear who Baradar would be meeting or the purpose of his visit, but Pakistan has been pressing for an early start to intra-Afghan negotiations.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)


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The lawsuit alleges female laborers assigned by Alternative Staffing as temporary line workers were regularly subjected to sexual harassment at the plant. In July 2019, a petition signed by 50 workers was submitted to Voyant and the staffing agency alleging employees were touching us in our private parts, making obscene gestures and comments and creating a hostile work environment, the lawsuit alleges.
Bazaar Corporate Radar | Feb 22, 2021, 12:00 AM IST

Bazaar Corporate Radar

Bazaar Corporate Radar is your window into the minds of top CEOs, Boardrooms, global economists, fund managers and sector analysts. If it?s making news, you?ll find it on Bazaar Corporate Radar.
NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION, IN WHOLE OR IN PART DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN AUSTRALIA, CANADA, JAPAN OR THE UNITED STATES DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN AUSTRALIA, CANADA, JAPAN OR THE UNITED STATES OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN WHICH THE RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION WOULD BE UNLAWFUL. THIS ANNOUNCEMENT DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN OFFER OF ANY OF THE SECURITIES DESCRIBED HEREIN.

Reference is made to the stock exchange release from Hexagon Composites ASA ("Hexagon" or the "Company") published on 24 August 2020 regarding a contemplated private placement and intention to spin off and list Hexagon Purus.

The Company announces that it has raised approximately NOK 907 million in gross proceeds through a private placement (the "Private Placement") of 18,329,064 new shares (the "New Shares"), at a price per share of NOK 49.5. The subscription price represents a discount of 2% to the market close on 24 August 2020. The final transaction size of the Private Placement was increased from up to NOK 800 million to 10% of the outstanding share capital (or approximately NOK 907 million at the subscription price) based on substantial demand from high quality institutional investors in the Nordics and internationally. The book was multiple times oversubscribed. The Private Placement took place through an accelerated bookbuilding process managed by Carnegie AS and Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (publ), acting as Joint Bookrunners (together the "Managers") after close of markets on 24 August 2020.

The net proceeds of the Private Placement will be used to fund the initial development phase in Hexagon Purus underpinning the Companys strong commitment to invest in hydrogen opportunities, as well as support general corporate purposes within g-mobility.

The new shares to be issued in connection with the Private Placement will be issued based on a Board authorization granted by the Company's general meeting held 22 April 2020. The new shares allocated in the Private Placement will be settled through a delivery versus payment transaction on a regular T+2 basis by delivery of existing and unencumbered shares in the Company that are already listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange pursuant to a share lending agreement between the Managers, the Company and Flakk Composites AS. The shares delivered to the subscribers will thus be tradable upon delivery. Following registration of the new share capital pertaining to the Private Placement, the Company will have 201,619,712 shares outstanding, each with a par value of NOK 0.10.

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The Company has considered the Private Placement in light of the equal treatment obligations under the Norwegian Securities Trading Act and Oslo Brs' Circular no. 2/2014. The Company is of the opinion that the waiver of the preferential rights inherent in a private placement is, taking into consideration the time, costs and expected terms of alternative methods of securing the desired funding, in the common interest of the shareholders of the Company.

For more information, please contact:

David Bandele, CFO, Hexagon Composites ASA

Telephone: +47 920 91 483 | david.bandele@hexagongroup.com

Karen Romer, SVP Communications, Hexagon Composites AS

Telephone: +47 950 74 950 | karen.romer@hexagongroup.com

About Hexagon Composites ASA

Hexagon delivers safe and innovative solutions for a cleaner energy future. Our solutions enable storage, transportation, and conversion to clean energy in a wide range of mobility, industrial and consumer applications, including light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, ground storage, distribution, marine, rail and backup power solutions.

About Hexagon Purus

Hexagon Purus, a Hexagon Composites company, enables zero emission hydrogen and battery electric mobility for a cleaner energy future. Hexagon Purus is a world leading provider of Hydrogen Type 4 high-pressure cylinders, battery packs and vehicle systems integration for fuel cell electric and battery electric vehicles (FCEV and BEV) including hybrid mobility applications on light, medium and heavy-duty vehicles, transit buses, ground storage, distribution, marine, rail, aerospace and backup power solutions.

Learn more at www.hexagongroup.com and follow @HexagonASA on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Important information:

The release is not for publication or distribution, in whole or in part directly or indirectly, in or into Australia, Canada, Japan or the United States (including its territories and possessions, any state of the United States and the District of Columbia). This release is an announcement issued pursuant to legal information obligations, and is subject of the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act. It is issued for information purposes only, and does not constitute or form part of any offer or solicitation to purchase or subscribe for securities, in the United States or in any other jurisdiction. The securities mentioned herein have not been, and will not be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "US Securities Act"). The securities may not be offered or sold in the United States except pursuant to an exemption from the registration requirements of the US Securities Act. The Company does not intend to register any portion of the offering of the securities in the United States or to conduct a public offering of the securities in the United States. Copies of this announcement are not being made and may not be distributed or sent into Australia, Canada, Japan or the United States.

The issue, subscription or purchase of shares in the Company is subject to specific legal or regulatory restrictions in certain jurisdictions. Neither the Company nor the Managers assume any responsibility in the event there is a violation by any person of such restrictions.

The distribution of this release may in certain jurisdictions be restricted by law. Persons into whose possession this release comes should inform themselves about and observe any such restrictions. Any failure to comply with these restrictions may constitute a violation of the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.

The Managers are acting for the Company and no one else in connection with the Private Placement and will not be responsible to anyone other than the Company providing the protections afforded to their respective clients or for providing advice in relation to the Private Placement and/or any other matter referred to in this release.

Forward-looking statements: This release and any materials distributed in connection with this release may contain certain forward-looking statements. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they reflect the Company's current expectations and assumptions as to future events and circumstances that may not prove accurate. A number of material factors could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5 -12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.




The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is not particularly beneficial to health, body and mind, to say the least. Even those who are not susceptible to getting infected like children and young adults, are caught up in the whirlwind of unprecedented changes. They might not be the ones whose health is being primarily affected, but the lifestyle change that has occurred is bound to take its toll.

Recent studies show that young adults, in particular, are getting more depressed and anxious as SARS-CoV-2 uproots whatever budding life plans theyd been nursing, whereas studies done by the University of Bristol with 13 to 14-year-olds show a drop in their anxiety levels as compared to what they had been last October.

Researchers from the University of Bristol surveyed 1,000 secondary school children in South West England, and they were quite surprised by the significantly lower rates of anxiety in teenagers, especially considering the global pandemic. The biggest question raised by this survey was about the negative impact of the school environment on the mental health of children being significantly more damaging than a worldwide pandemic.

In the UK recently, there has been talk of reopening schools, as Professor Chris Whitty, the UKs chief medical adviser, said that not returning to school will most likely be more harmful to children than the coronavirus. He was quoted saying in an interview with BBC that, the chances of children dying from Covid-19 are incredibly small - but missing lessons damages children in the long run.

It was only after this announcement that this survey was conducted by Emily Widnall and Dr Judy Kidger. The lead author of the study Emily Widnall said in an interview with BBC, With the whole world in the grip of a devastating pandemic, which has thrown everyones lives into turmoil, the natural expectation would be to see an increase in anxiety. While we saw anxiety levels rise for a few of our participants, it was a big surprise to discover quite the opposite was the case for many of them.

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Leading up to the 2020 edition of National Caretaker Appreciation Day virtual events taking place on the weekend of September 18 - 20, Standardbred Canada will profile caretakers from across the country in our Faces of Racing series.

The series continues with a profile on Fiona Reynolds of Burlington, Ont.



It takes a special person who dedicates his/her life to taking care of others, but there are very few special people who devote themselves to not only caring for humans but for horses as well. One such person is Fiona Reynolds.

I compare caretakers to front-line health workers. There is nobody more important than the person giving the direct care. I think its wonderful Caretakers are being recognized for their very important role in a race horses career, Reynolds explained.

Fiona has been working as a caretaker since she was 17 years old, and it all started after moving her saddle horse to a Standardbred farm in St. Johns, Newfoundland, and she hasnt looked back since. She cared for horses up until 1985, when she decided to make the move from horses to humans and become a long-term care RPN (Registered Practical Nurse) for Halton Region. Although she now works with people full-time, she cant keep herself away from the horses. On her off days and holidays, Fiona works for Vanderkemp Racing Stable at Ideal Training Centre, near Acton, Ont., and ensures she is available to paddock in the evenings.

Lets meet Fiona Reynolds in this video produced by Standardbred Canadas Hailey Saunders with video contributions from Dianna Vanderkemp and her some Zach.

After working over three decades in the industry as a caretaker, Fiona has had the opportunity to work for and learn from several different trainers. I look up to anybody that I have worked for in the barn. From Jim McDonald, Archie McNeil, John Burns, Mike Vanderkemp, Jeff Byron, to Tony Alagnas barn. Everyone I have worked for I have learned from, and everyone has a different way of doing things.

Reynolds looks forward to stakes season and find that its a very exciting time. I have been able to paddock some really nice horses over the summers, and for the first time in a very long time I was able to participate in breaking a couple of babies with Mike Vanderkemp, and watching them come along and start to race is so exciting.

Shes had many great moments during her career in racing but cites a three way tie for her most memorable moment. Winning the inaugural Peter Haughton Memorial with Sokys Atom, a 45-1 long shot and more recently paddocking two Breeders Crown winners Ramona Hill and American History in one weekend! How does that happen??

(Faces of Racing photo courtesy John Watkins)
When the pandemic first hit, 61-year-old Jackie Potter worried about how she would see her doctor or get basic necessities.

The Hamilton resident reached out to St. Matthews House, a non-profit group providing support for child care and seniors.

The groups Seniors First Response Team helped deliver groceries and an air-conditioner to her home. They also gave her a shield to wear in place of a mask because of medical conditions that affect her breathing.

I have one worker that calls me once a week and asks me how Im doing, said Potter. It helps my mental state a lot.

Potter is among many seniors who struggled with the effects of the provincewide lockdown, unsure how to get groceries or stay connected with loved ones. Federal support gave a boost to local organizations providing seniors help, but the demand continues to grow.

The calls are increasing every day, says Renee Wetselaar, executive director of St. Matthews House, who noted the deliveries are made in partnership with CityHousing Hamilton.

In May, the Canadian government announced $20 million in additional funding to support organizations helping isolated seniors during the pandemic. The United Way Halton & Hamilton has administered almost $208,000 toward 16 projects under the program.

St. Matthews House is one of them. The group received $20,000 to perform wellness checks and deliver food and other items to 500 isolated seniors.

Stella Lehto is a 66-year-old Hamilton resident who chairs the seniors centre advisory committee at the YWCA. Hers was one of the more than 100 homes who received a care hamper in June from YWCA Hamilton with food, exercise equipment and activities.

It was just like getting a big hug, Lehto said.

Robin Mech, the supervisor of YWCA Hamiltons 55+ Active Living Centre, said the goal was to make a connection with seniors who might otherwise feel isolated.

The YWCA received almost $6,000 from the federal program and although their goal was to reach 100 households, Mech says they exceeded that by far, noting that many recipients shared the hamper items with friends.

We still get calls, she said. Theres definitely demand and even more so for some form of face-to-face connection.

Evelyn Myrie, president of the Afro Canadian Caribbean Association, noted its important to provide help to senior residents in a culturally relevant way.

As seniors age, they tend to go back to their first language, the food their familiar with and all the cultural nuances that theyre more comfortable with, she said.

The association received almost $72,000 from the federal Emergency Community Support Fund  created to help community groups support vulnerable people during the pandemic  to help isolated seniors in Black communities with food, housing, and social needs.

The group performs wellness checks for members and gives grocery vouchers to seniors for Caribbean and African stores. Where members are unable to buy their own groceries, they group offers delivery.

We believe that its important that they have comfort in these times, Myrie said.

Brad Park, president and CEO of United Way Halton & Hamilton, said while the federal grant helped offset some of the need in the community, there was more demand than the funding could support. He believes it will be an ongoing challenge to address the needs of seniors in the long-term.

The issues are only going to get bigger as the population continues to age, he said. We have to find new ways to support this population  Were not through the pandemic yet.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has urged Ghanaians to retain the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in government in light of its sterling performance over the last three- and-a- half years.



Former President Mahama is seeking a second term in office after losing in 2016, and will lock horns with President Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for the third consecutive time when the nation goes to polls on December 7.



According to him, it was important for Ghanaians to reject former President John Dramani Mahama and his National Democratic Congress (NDC), since they had nothing more to offer the nation.



Addressing party supporters at the NPP manifesto launch at Cape Coast over the weekend, President Akufo-Addo described the eight year rule of the NDC, with Mr Mahama as Vice President from 2009 to 2012 and as President from 2012 to 2017 as disastrous.



I know that the NDC Presidential Candidate, His Excellency John Dramani Mahama believes and says often that Ghanaians have a short memory. And he must hold strongly to his beliefs, otherwise, I doubt he would have summoned the courage to be seeking another term after the disaster that was his presidency.



Ghanaians might have short memories, but not short enough for us to have forgotten the broken-down freezers, irons and other household equipment, thanks to the five years of dumsor. Our memories are not short enough to forget that the economy, under him, was such a wreck that there was a ban placed on all recruitment into our public service.



Our memories are not short enough to forget that teachers taught for three years and were only paid for three months. Our memories are certainly not short to forget that he brought our entire financial services system to near collapse, he said.



President Akufo-Addo said he took pride in the fact that he had been able to implement free Senior High School (SHS) and TVET, and that parents and guardians would no longer force their wards to stop school at Junior High School level due to financial difficulties.



He said Ghanaians had no reason to believe the NDCs recent position in support of free SHS, adding that members of the party, in their eight year rule, rubbished the idea of a free SHS and indicated that it would destroy the countrys educational system if implemented.



When they were in office, they had a hard time trying to run even their watered-down version of their so-called progressively free education. Then the former president said he would review it and now we hear him say that it has come to stay he said.



The President said Mr Mahama had no credibility in his new position on the free SHS and urged Ghanaians not to entrust the future of the countrys children in the hands of the former president who, in eight years in office as Vice President and later President, made no effort to implement it.



In the same way, he said the countrys agriculture could not be entrusted in the hands of the former President because he left farmers on their own, without any support to make their business as profitable and fulfilling as it should be.



President Akufo-Addo said even in times of crises, his administration had managed to pay the 6 months water bills of all Ghanaians, subsidized electricity for all Ghanaians for three months, and provided hot meal daily to all JHS 3 students who are going to write their exam in the midst of the pandemic.



We thank God that the pandemic did not strike under his presidency, when there was no money in the national kitty to pay teachers and nurses allowances, he said.



While urging Ghanaians to give him an overwhelming endorsement on December 7, to enable his government to continue the good work, President Akufo-Addo pledged to ensure that the upcoming election would be conducted in an atmosphere of peace and stability.

Source: The Ghanaian Times









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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" " It looks inviting, but this abandoned mine in New Caledonia, in the South Pacific, may be hazardous to your health. Peter Essick/Aurora/ Getty Images

Unfortunately, most mines remain abandoned waste sites. Cleaning up an old mine can be costly. Congressional testimony in 2006 concluded that it would take nearly $72 billion to clean up just the abandoned hardrock mines in the United States [source: Earthworks]. (These are mines that produce heavy minerals like silver, gold, uranium and other metals, located largely in the Western U.S.) Faced with such an expense, many mining companies found that it's cheaper to simply abandon their mines. As time passed, land leases lapsed, records were lost and the original ownership of the mines became unclear. In short, no one was held accountable for the waste sites.

Old mines pose two types of hazards: physical (like that mine shaft your friend fell into on the last page) and environmental (like the piles of tailings that leach toxins into water supplies). To fully remediate -- remove hazards from -- an abandoned mine site, both problems have to be addressed.

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Physical hazards like mine shafts and vertical entries (called adits, which some intrepid explorers find irresistibly appealing) have to be covered with heavy metal slabs. Some covers include openings that allow bats in and out of the mine. Old equipment left to rust on the site has to be disassembled and carried off.

Addressing the environmental risks of mine sites is a bit trickier. In the U.S., stiff penalties are levied against anyone who violates the Clean Water Act. This includes people and governments that undertake abandoned mine cleanup, in which they may accidentally introduce toxins into water bodies while removing mine tailings from a site. In 2006, legislation was proposed to exempt people from prosecution who wanted to clean up abandoned mine sites, so long as they werent affiliated with the mines creation or operation [source: Salazar]. The legislation didnt pass.

In an effort to help remediate abandoned mines on government-owned lands, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) created the Abandoned Mine Lands (AML) program. The BLM cleans up contaminated sites and sequesters tailings that cant be safely moved. Between 2000 and 2008, the BLM cleaned up and secured more than 3,000 abandoned mines [source: BLM].

But why not hold the mining companies responsible for their messes? The U.S. government already thought of that, mandating an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)superfund -- a coffer that mining companies pay into to cover costs associated with future cleanup. However, the fees dont usually fully cover the costs -- leaving taxpayers to make up the difference [source: Earthjustice]. And theres a loophole in the federal law that releases bankrupt mining corporations from responsibility of cleanup costs.

Some mine owners run responsible operations. In 1986, the Department of the Interior created an award for excellence in reclaiming land following coal surface mining. Since then, operators have become more creative with their businesses. Many clean up their sites as they operate, while some landscape former sites and even redevelop mining factory buildings into commercial spaces, like lofts and retail stores [source: Harvard].

Based on the success of these projects, a new step in addressing abandoned mines has been added -- reclamation. After the physical and environmental hazards are removed, the land is reclaimed. Vegetation is introduced again, and old buildings may be preserved. This process allows the area to return to its natural state.

For more information on mining and other related topics, visit the next page.
SEATTLE, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- GreaterGood.com announced today that it has delivered over 700,000 protective masks to frontline workers, including those directly fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and those providing critical support services. The 20-year-old organization is on track to reach one million mask donations this fall 2020 with its Mask a Million Challenge, supporting medical, nursing home, home health and shelter workers; as well as community service workers, educators and students in need. The mask donation program allows people to contribute to this goal in a variety of ways: Site visitors can participate free of charge by clicking a button on one of 10 'Click-to-Give' websites, shoppers can add an extra donation for no charge when purchasing from the "Buy One, Give a Mask" collection and other store actions, and by donating directly.

Help us donate 1,000,000 masks to protect our frontline heroes!

"Early on in this crisis we collaborated with our longtime suppliers to meet the immediate needs of medical professionals fighting COVID-19 and other frontline workers by supplying them with free personal protective equipment. As a company we have always been committed to protecting the health of people, pets and the planet. This pandemic has only strengthened our resolve to provide help when and where it's needed most, and our incredible customers, donors and readers have shown that they want to help our frontline heroes," said Tim Kunin, CEO and Co-Founder of GreaterGood.

"We continue to support our flagship programs helping people, pets, and the planet. As part of that effort, we need to keep volunteers and program teams safe, and during this unprecedented challenge, our top priority is to support the people and communities impacted by COVID-19 and those fighting on the front lines," said Ashley Andersen Zantop, COO of GreaterGood. "We feel it's critical to provide support to those who need it most and to those who work every day to protect others. Sourcing protective masks and donating them to health care professionals and other frontline relief workers through the Mask a Million challenge makes it easy for everyone to help."

750,000+ Masks Donated & Counting

Since launching the mask donation program in late March, GreaterGood has donated over 750,000 N95, KN95 and 3-ply disposable and medical-grade masks. Masks have been delivered directly to hospitals, nursing homes, food delivery centers, shelters and organizations across 44 states and Puerto Rico, in over 160 locations.

"We are so inspired by our community members who are rallying to help us fight COVID-19. Donations of personal protective equipment are especially meaningful for our frontline employees, who strive every day to create a safer, healthier Michigan." - Marschall S. Runge, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president for medical affairs for the University of Michigan; dean of the U-M Medical School; and CEO of Michigan Medicine

About GreaterGood

GreaterGood.com is a suite of charitable websites that launched in 1999 with The Hunger Site. It has since grown significantly to become a powerful fund-raising vehicle for worthy causes in the U.S. and around the world. GreaterGood empowers people everywhere to affect positive change by making ordinary online actions extraordinary. Since 1999 GreaterGood has proudly invested over $50 million in developing inclusive economic opportunities around the world and funded more than $60 million in charitable donations to causes that help people, pets, and the planet.

Media Contact:

Ashley Andersen Zantop

Chief Operating Officer

[email protected]

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No sooner had Superintendent Brian Woods welcomed Northside Independent School District students to their first day of school when the online portal crashed, keeping thousands from access to their virtual courses.

As the largest school district in Bexar County kicked off the new year, Zoom Video Communications experienced worldwide partial outages affecting its video meeting and webinar services, according to the companys website.

Today was not the first day of school we imagined. Im sorry, Woods wrote in an email to students, parents and staff. It will get better. We will get better.

Students will not be counted absent Monday, he added.

Required Reading: Get San Antonio education news sent directly to your inbox

The outage affected other area school districts and universities. In North East ISD, where the second week of virtual school was beginning, principals and teachers began discovering around 7:30 a.m. that they couldnt start or join video meetings, said Aubrey Chancellor, district spokeswoman. Elementary school students were due to log in at 8 a.m., while the middle and high school start times were later.

The outage initially affected tens of thousands of elementary students, Chancellor said. Principals sent out alerts to parents with workarounds, which teachers also posted to the Google Classroom or Seesaw interface students saw when they logged in. Some were told to work on assignments without a teacher videoconference, while others used Microsoft Teams, a program similar to Zoom.

The workarounds were in place by the time older students logged on, Chancellor said. Zoom sent out an update at about 11:30 a.m. that the problem had been fixed on the companys end.

Fair to say it was hit or miss today for the majority of the morning, Chancellor said. We need to expect those hiccups along the way, but we have those Plan Bs and different ways to connect in the event that something like this happens, so learning is still taking place.

The Zoom company first received reports of users being unable to join or start video meetings early Monday and by midmorning was deploying a fix, it said.

On ExpressNews.com: The lessons San Antonio teachers, parents learned during remote learning in spring during coronavirus pandemic

The outage affected schools nationwide, which use Zoom to hold remote classes.

There was no widespread disruption in San Antonio ISD, where students mostly use the Canvas learning management system and a relatively small number use Zoom, said Leslie Price, district spokeswoman.

Were only aware of minor issues, Price said. We had just a few calls to the help desk.

An hour before the outage, Northside ISD had posted a video of Woods welcoming students back to school.

I think that youre going to have a fantastic day, Woods said. I hope everything in distance learning works out for you.

Northside had taken measures prior to Monday to ensure all systems were in place and that all vendors were aware of our first day requirements, spokesman Barry Perez said in an email. District officials worked throughout the day with the vendor to resolve the issue, Woods said in his email. Issues of lack of bandwidth or network failure were ruled out, he said.

A temporary link was posted to the districts website so students could still access some of their courses. Northside ISD also has a student hot line to address technical issues at 210-397-0020 during the following hours: Monday - Thursday: 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Sunday: 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Danielle Echeverria, a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer, contributed to this report. Krista Torralva covers several school districts and public universities in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Krista, become a subscriber. Krista.Torralva@express-news.net | Twitter: @KMTorralva
Catalonia bans gatherings of more than 10 people Ban remains on smoking and alcohol consumption in public

(ANSAmed) - ROME, AUGUST 24 - The Generalitat de Catalunya, the regional government of Catalonia in Spain, has decided to prohibit gatherings of more than 10 people both in public and private, said Generalitat President Quim Torra, according to Spanish daily La Vanguardia. He said a ban will remain in place on smoking and alcohol consumption in public places, as well as the use of social distancing and face masks for coronavirus prevention.(ANSAmed). (ANSA).




CHICAGO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago (FHLBank Chicago) today announced more than $900,000 was awarded through its Community First Capacity-Building Grant Program to 21 nonprofit community development lenders working in Illinois or Wisconsin.



Below is a list of the grant recipients and the FHLBank Chicago member financial institutions with whom they partnered with to receive a grant. Grants are used to help strengthen a nonprofit community development lender's financial position, operational efficiency, and/or human capital to support the affordable housing and/or economic development programs the organization provides to the local communities in which they, and the member financial institution, serve.

Recipient Member Institution Accion Chicago First Eagle Bank ACTS Housing North Shore Bank, FSB Berwyn Development Corporation Byline Bank CAP Services, Inc. BMO Harris Bank, N.A. Cinnaire Lending Corporation Associated Bank, N.A. Community Investment Corporation Associated Bank, N.A. Community Ventures First Eagle Bank Entrepreneur Fund Associated Bank, N.A. First American Capital Corporation Bay Bank First Nations Community Financial Jackson County Bank Fox Valley Habitat for Humanity Oxford Bank & Trust Habitat for Humanity Lakeside Wisconsin Bank & Trust Habitat for Humanity Oshkosh Associated Bank, N.A. IFF CIBC Bank USA LISC Chicago First Midwest Bank Movin' Out, Inc. BMO Harris Bank, N.A. Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago Inland Bank and Trust NiJii Capital Partners, Inc. Associated Bank, N.A. SomerCor Glenview State Bank Wild Rivers Habitat for Humanity Community Bank of Cameron Wisconsin Women's Business Initiative Corporation BMO Harris Bank, N.A.

"Through our Community First Capacity-Building Grant Program, we are investing in the strength of nonprofit community development lenders," said Katie Naftzger, Community Investment Officer, FHLBank Chicago. "Now more than ever, nonprofit lenders are providing critical products and services to diverse communities throughout Illinois and Wisconsin. We look forward to seeing the social and economic return on these investments in the communities our members serve."

This year's award recipients are using the funds to support the development and expansion of loan products, information technology upgrades, improvements to organizational policies and procedures, and the professional development of staff and boards of directors. Recipients were evaluated based on mission, strategy to increase community development lending within Illinois and Wisconsin, diversity of populations served, and proposed uses for the grant funds.



About the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago

The mission of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago is to partner with our member institutions in Illinois and Wisconsin to provide them competitively priced funding, a reasonable return on their investment in the Bank, and support for community investment activities. FHLBank Chicago is one of 11 Federal Home Loan Banks chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1932 to promote homeownership. Our members include banks, thrifts, credit unions, insurance companies, and community development financial institutions throughout our District. To learn more about FHLBank Chicago, please visit fhlbc.com or follow @FHLBC on Twitter. "Community First" is a registered trademark of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.

SOURCE Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago

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Karen Warren, Staff / Houston Chronicle

Offshore companies have started to evacuate workers from production platforms and drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico ahead of Hurricane Marco and Tropical Storm Laura.

Workers have been evacuated from 114 offshore production platforms, about a fifth of the 643 platforms in operation in the Gulf of Mexico. Companies also have either evacuated personnel from or moved 13 drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, half of the 26 rigs in operation in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which oversees offshore oil and gas production.
Monday, August 24th, 2020 (10:48 am) - Score 1,587

Apparently you can never have too many alternative full fibre broadband ISP networks, so here are two more with separate plans to expand across the United Kingdom in the near future  Westnetworks Innovations (WestWiFi) and FACTCO (Ecodial). Both providers already have some presence in the market.

Both of the aforementioned operators have recently applied for Code Powers from Ofcom (here and here), which can help to speed-up the deployment of new fibre optic networks and cut costs by reducing the number of licenses needed for street works to take place.

We should add that Code Powers are also a requirement before operators like this can make use of Openreachs existing cable ducts and poles (Physical Infrastructure Access) to run their own optical fibre cables.

Westnetworks

Well start this off with Westnetworks, which is perhaps better known to some by its sibling ISP brand WestWiFi, which operates a superfast wireless broadband network in rural parts of Somerset (England). However, the operator is now planning to extend their hybrid network  combining a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network and a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) access network  into other parts of the county (both homes and businesses).

The coronavirus measures have prevented [them] from using [their FWA] method of network deployment. To ensure that it is not adversely affected by coronavirus measures in the future, it has changed its deployment strategy. In future, it will deploy standalone masts on private land and also extend its FTTP access network, said Ofcom. Sadly thats all the information we get for now.

FACTCO

Next up we have FACTCO, which until now has tended to focus on bringing FTTP broadband to businesses. For example, the operator last year helped to deploy a full fibre network down the Shambles street in the city of York (here) and earlier this year they extended 10Gbps capable connectivity across Liverpools (Merseyside) Baltic Triangle area (here). On top of that theyve also built some networks around parts of Newcastle and Northumberland.

Under the new plan the provider is aiming to expand their network in order to serve predominantly rural areas in Wales, more of northern England and Scotland. Interestingly the expanded network would serve homes and businesses, which suggests that theyre going beyond their business connectivity roots. The FACTCO website does mention offering FTTP for homes, but there are no packages, online order forms or coverage details.

The main focus for this will be on areas that are predominantly served by older copper line broadband technologies (speeds of sub-30Mbps) and where the Building Digital UK programme has yet to go. As usual well now be adding these two operators to our Summary of Full Fibre Build Progress.
When demonstrators in Springfield, Massachusetts marched to protest against heavy-handed law enforcement in the wake of George Floyd's death it was entirely peaceful. No rocks were thrown at the police, no cars were turned over and no one was arrested in the state's third largest city.

"The citizens of Springfield have a good working relationship with the cops," said Army Special Forces veteran and retired Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Cutone.

And he should know -- he can take at least some of the credit for reworking the entire relationship.

Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Cutone walks with local children on their way to a school bus stop in Springfield, Mass. (Michael Cutone/The Trinity Project)

Cutone split his time between the Army Guard and the police force, gathering decades of experience along the way. Eventually he started to see where lessons learned in his military career could apply to the toughest streets of Massachusetts.

"I was in the Guard, so when I got active duty orders, I would put on the green hat," Cutone says. "I'd be gone six months, a year, then I'd be back in my trooper uniform. It was two different worlds but I loved both of them."

Swapping between jobs kept him in touch with both the fundamentals of counterinsurgency overseas and the hard work of policing an area stateside. And it led him to wonder: what if he paired the best of both methods into a program for home?

In a time where calls to "defund the police" are growing louder, Cutone's method of police work is now getting more funding from state and federal lawmakers. It's called C3 Policing and it doesn't take the police out of the community, it puts the needs of a community first.

"Community members are your greatest resource," Cutone says. "In the Army, you don't survive that well if you're embedded in a hostile community, so you go win over the local population."

Michael Cutone and Tom O'Hare, one of The Trinity Project's C3 instructors, while deployed to Afghanistan with U.S. Army Special Forces in 2013. (Provided by Michael Cutone)

If Cutone's choice of words sounds familiar to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, that shouldn't be a surprise. "C3" means Counter Criminal Continuum and it's basically the application of the Army Special Forces' counterinsurgency tactics used in the Global War on Terror to violent crime and gang activity in American cities.

In 2009 the crime rate in Springfield was three times the rate in the State of Massachusetts as a whole.

"In the north end of the city, you hand open-air drug selling, gang members carrying SKS rifles out in the open and it culminated in three shooting and two murders in a week," Cutone says.

Cutone asked his State Police sergeant if he could do a dismounted patrol -- to walk around the streets 12th worst city in America in his State Trooper uniform. It was unheard of. Somehow, his sergeant agreed.

He began walking the streets, talking to people, buying a cup of coffee here, a pastry there. It dawned on Cutone that maybe law enforcement is approaching street crime in the wrong way. So he continued to walk the streets, engaging the population the way Army Special Forces taught him.

He went to community meetings to build legitimacy within the populace and eventually approached the city's deputy police chief with his background and ideas. When the chief agreed to hear him out, Cutone wrote up an entire action plan for a small community in the North end of the city, using the eight building blocks taught by the Army.

Among these were "work by, with and through the local population" and "Detect, degrade, disrupt and dismantle criminal activity" -- counterinsurgency maxims proven time and again overseas. Citizens began to meet police officers and interact with them. Eventually the local police force established a C3 Department and hand-picked C3 officers to begin to integrate themselves into the fabric of the community.

After retiring from both the Army and Massachusetts State Police in 2020, Cutone, with fellow State Trooper and Special Forces soldier Thomas Sarrouf, co-founded The Trinity Project, a police engagement consultancy and training company that trains officers in C3 Policing, using counterinsurgency to take back U.S. streets..

While "counterinsurgency" may bring to mind images of soldiers kicking in doors and raiding houses, Cutone said C3 is about building legitimacy through community partnerships using 8 core principles developed through the counterinsurgency techniques taught to American Special Forces:

Legitimacy is crucial to achieving our goals

You must understand the environment (the ground truth)

Unity of effort is essential

Intelligence drives operations

Prepare for a long-term commitment

Local factors are primary

Security under the rule of law

Gangs and drug dealers must be separated from their cause and support

"When you call the cops to come fix a problem, that's just a transactional relationship," Cutone says. "It's not transformative. We are starting with a message to counter the gang's message, offer services and create pressure points on these gangs to make it impossible to operate."

The end result is transformational. Since Cutone began his style of policing, the annual crime rate of Springfield has decreased 6% every year. While the city is still not quite the bastion of law and order, things are beginning to turn around.

Some of the proof is seen outside the raw data. For example, more outside investment is beginning to come into the area. Buildings are no longer left vacant, businesses are coming in and drug dealers are no longer active in the open. C3 operations are even expanding to the rest of the city.

Cutone and his staff at the Trinity Project are ready to bring community engagement through C3 Policing to any city ready to think outside the box.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.

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BROWNSVILLE, Texas  Efforts by officials in one South Texas county to delay the start of face-to-face classes due to the coronavirus pandemic could face a legal challenge on claims of religious freedom.

Cameron County, which has been one of the many COVID-19 hot spots in South Texas in recent months, has delayed in-person classes at public and private K-12 schools until after Sept. 28.

But attorneys for two private religious schools have told the county that the order is unlawful and goes against Republican Gov. Greg Abbotts June 26 executive order superseding the authority of local governments to issue orders aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus if they conflict with the governors own orders, the Brownsville Herald reported.

Laguna Madre Christian Academy in Laguna Vista and Calvary Christian School of Excellence in Harlingen plan to open for face-to-face classes on Aug. 31 and Sept. 8, respectively.

Last month, Abbott said Texas counties dont have the power to preemptively shut down campuses to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Abbott said that power rests with local school boards and state education officials.

Jeremy Dys, an attorney with Plano-based First Liberty, which represents the two schools, told officials in a letter that any effort by Cameron County to enforce its unlawful order  will be viewed as an affront to the religious liberty of (the two schools) and met with the strictest legal defense.

Daniel N. Lopez, an attorney for Cameron County, said in an Aug. 20 letter that officials were not opposed to granting Laguna Madre Christian Academy an exemption because the school is small and it came up with a plan that meets state guidelines for reopening.

But Calvary Christian School is bigger and its reopening plan was still being reviewed, officials said.

Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino Jr. said First Liberty is misconstruing the countys order regarding schools as an attack on religious freedom.

This is not a political or religious issue. This is health and safety and protection of our children issue. I dont understand their rationale in wanting to put their children and teachers at risk, but I guess thats their decision to make  not one I would make, said Trevino, the countys top elected official.

The number of reported coronavirus cases in Texas increased by 3,493 and there were 104 more deaths due to COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, Texas health officials reported Sunday. Officials reported 5,186 people were hospitalized due to the virus.

There are a reported total of 577,537 virus cases and 11,370 deaths, although the true number of cases in Texas is likely higher because many people have not been tested and studies suggest people can be infected and not feel sick.

State health officials reported 114,391 active cases of the virus and that 451,776 people have recovered.
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Jodi Magness Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth gives Jews and Christians a look at the complicated times in the Holy Land when King Herod, Jesus and the Roman occupiers were making history.

Sue Monk Kidds novel The Book of Longings is a fictional account of a woman who married Jesus. Although set in a distant place and time, the struggles of the central character to accommodate her religious beliefs to oppressive and dangerous times is relevant to today.

In The Antidote for Everything by Charlottes Kimmery Martin, doctors fight efforts in a hospital and medical group owned by a conservative religious church to get rid of gay and transgender patients.

In Lee Smiths Blue Marlin, the teenage girl who is the lead character explores her growing and changing faith. She tries to make a deal with God in which she will do a good deed each day if he will bring her parents back together.

These books and others that "Bookwatch" will feature have religious connections, but in a surprise for me, the Souths Christ-haunted landscape shows up most vividly in books by two popular writers of legal thrillers.
Boris Johnson defied calls to return amid the A-level results fiasco earlier this month which left his Education Secretary Gavin Williamson hanging onto his job.

Mr Williamson pushed on with using the exams algorithm in England until he came under cross-party fire after nearly 40% of A-level students had their results downgraded.

Asked if Mr Johnson regretted the Governments handling of exam results this year, and if the PM was personally sorry about the way things had panned out, a Number 10 spokesman said: The PM is of course sorry for any distress that has been caused  Our focus has been and will be ensuring that students can move onto the next phase and ensuring kids can get back to school next week.

Now is the time to get kids back to school. pic.twitter.com/yMxw595KUr Advertisement  Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) August 24, 2020

He added: So, as the Education Secretary set out and as weve said a few times now, were of course sorry for any distress and anger that was felt by students around the awarding of exam results this year.

The Education Secretary acknowledged that it was a difficult time and apologised for the distress caused.

Mr Williamson was facing fresh scrutiny after he reportedly cancelled a key meeting to go on holiday in Scarborough the week before the A-level exams fiasco, according to The Sunday Times.

It is understood he was visiting his parents and is said to have kept in contact with the Department for Education during the trip.

Gillian Keegan, an education minister, was criticised after sharing photographs of herself in France as the results drama unfolded.

Mr Williamson appears to have liked several of the pictures.
(Newser)  The headlines are irresistible: "Asteroid headed for Earth the day before Election Day" (Fox13) and "NASA: Asteroid headed toward Earth before November election" (the Hill). And they are technically true: An asteroid named 2018VP1 is indeed heading our way, and it will be closest on Nov. 2. But the less sexy part is that NASA says it "poses no threat to Earth!" For one thing, the asteroid is tiny as these things go, not quite 7 feet long, and NASA figures it has just a 0.41% chance of entering Earth's atmosphere on election eve. "Considering the stakes and the year we're all having, maybe a 1 in 240 chance still feels a little high for comfort," writes Jacinta Bowler at Science Alert. "We get it." But there's still no need to worry.

story continues below

The asteroid is so small that if it does enter our atmosphere, it would burn up before hitting the ground, says NASA. This particular space rock comes our way every two years, and NASA estimates it will fly within 4,800 to 260,000 miles of Earth, per Business Insider. For context, the outlet notes that the International Space Station is 254 miles above us. The bigger asteroid worry might be those we don't know about. For instance, NASA said last week that one the size of an SUV came within 1,830 miles of Earth, the closest such flyby on record. Scientists didn't know the newly named 2020 QG existed until it was gone. (The one that doomed the dinosaurs was particularly lethal because of its flight angle.)
A former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, has spoken of how a former governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu, raised money for then-candidate Muhammadu Buhari to win the 2015 presidential election.

Mr Lawal, who was removed from office for alleged misappropriation of funds, disclosed this in an interview with Punch Newspaper on Sunday.

He stated that it was Mr Tinubu who raised funds for the All Progressives Congress (APC) to defeat the then President, Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), in 2015.

Mr Lawal argued that Mr Buhari and his supporters had no money to win an election except "ideas, zeal and fanaticism".

"Tinubu, who had his tentacles spread across the corporate world, was the only man who knew where and how to raise the funds needed. He was the one that reached out to all the 'big men' who were at the time scared of the then President Goodluck Jonathan. These were all rich men that depended on the government's patronage. But somehow, Tinubu was able to persuade some of them to support Buhari. We had so many experiences, Timipre Sylva (now Minister of State for Petroleum Resources) and I thought we could do it but found out we couldn't until Tinubu came in and we won the election," he said.

Mr Lawal said Mr Tinubu spent enormous money "out of his pocket" to finance the party's campaign. He said Mr Tinubu was responsible for the lobby of a U. S. consultant who handled President Barrack Obama's campaign and they did the same for Nigeria's current president.

"That was when you started seeing Buhari wearing a suit, and in Igbo, Yoruba and Kanuri attire. It was then people started to see Buhari as a family man with his beautiful daughters. The strategy was to transform his image and show a humane, loving and trustworthy person. It helped us. At some point during our strategy sessions, the consultants asked us: why don't you allow Buhari's wife to come out so that she can be contrasted with Dame Patience Jonathan? When you do that, you would have won the election already, they said. She provided a contrast to the former First Lady."

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Speaking on the crisis rocking the APC, he argued that persons with selfish interest were against Adams Oshiomhole, the immediate past chairman of the party.

Mr Lawal also spoke about the battle between the Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, and the suspended acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) Ibrahim Magu.

"When I was removed as SGF, the general outcry was that because of my closeness to Buhari, they wanted to weaken my flanks so that they could come after me. But now in the case of Magu, the narrative is that corruption is fighting back... I used to joke that if you are a thief and you are caught by Magu, nobody can release you unless you cut off his hands", he said.
High drama at Congress meet over Rahul Gandhis colluding with BJP remark

India

oi-Deepika S

Delhi, Aug 24: High drama was witnessed as at the Congress Working Committee meeting over former party president Rahul Gandhi's purported remark that some of the signatories of the letter calling for sweeping reforms within the party were "colluding with the BJP" even though the Congress later denied he made any such statement.

Top Congress leaders are deliberating on the issue of leadership during the meeting of the party's top decision-making body that will be held virtually.

Explained: What happens if Sonia Gandhi steps down from her post in the CWC meeting?

Sonia Gandhi made the offer to quit. As she asked to be relieved from Congress chief's post.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, meanwhile, led the charge as he reportedly accused dissenters of colluding with the BJP.

Senior leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, one of the signatories of the letter to party chief Sonia Gandhi, offered to quit all posts if the charge was proven while senior leader Kapil Sibal said he had never made statement in favour of BJP in last 30 years.

CWC meet: Key highlights

Interim Congress chief Sonia Gandhi has requested the party to relieve her from her current role.

Former Prime Minister and senior Congress leader Manmohan Singh, AK Antony have requested Gandhi to continue in her current role.

Rahul Gandhi questioned timing of letter to Sonia Gandhi.

He criticised leaders for going public with issues concerning the party. We need to discuss problems at CWC and not in the media.

Rahul says writing a letter to Sonia Gandhi for reforms in party leadership was done in collusion with BJP.

Reponding to Rahul Gandhi remark, Ghulam Nabi Azad said that he would resign if he was in any manner doing this to help the BJP or doing it at its behest.

Rahul Gandhi says " we are colluding with BJP " Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party. Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP Govt. Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue. Yet " we are colluding with the BJP "! Tweeted Kapil Sibal.

After his tweet objecting to Rahul Gandhi's accusation, Kapil Sibal tweeted again to inform that he was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him.

Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala denied reports of Rahul Gandhi's accusation that leaders who wrote the letter seeking dissolution of powers to state units and revamping the CWC did so in collusion with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Reportedly, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra came down heavily on dissenters at the CWC meet.

Priyanka Gandhi also took on Ghulam Nabi Azad as she says what you are saying is opposite of what is in the letter.

Ahmed Patel while speaking at the meeting proposes Rahul Gandhi to take over as party president.

Several party leaders, while supporting the continuation of Gandhis at the helm, accused those behind the letter of playing into the hands of the BJP and attempting to weaken the party at a time when there was a need to close ranks against the NDA government.

This is the second challenge to Sonia Gandhi's leadership after the one in 1999 when the then leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Sharad Pawar challenged her foreign origins in order to keep her from being named the party's prime ministerial face in the general elections that year.

Sonia Gandhi asks Congress to find a new president, says won't remain the president | Oneindia News

Sonia Gandhi had resigned in the CWC, which rejected her move unanimously bringing her back as party president. While Sonia went on to become the longest-serving Congress president, Pawar and rebels had to quit to form the NCP.
The International Federation of Women Lawyers -Ghana, (FIDA-Ghana), on Monday appealed to the National House of Chiefs to initiate a national exercise leading to the elimination of all outmoded traditional customs.



FIDA-Ghana, particularly, called on Togbe Afede XIV, the President of the National House of Chiefs to lead the process in evaluating traditional customs and usages to eliminate customs that amounts to torture, and were socially harmful resulting in the threat to the liberty and security of women and girls.



A statement signed by Ms Afua Adotey, FIDA-Ghana President and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra explained that the role of the National House of Chiefs in eliminating harmful traditional practices was rooted in Article 272 (c) of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana.



The Article provides that the National House of Chiefs shall, undertake an evaluation of traditional customs and usages with a view to eliminating those customs and usages that are outmoded and socially harmful.



The statement said both the Constitution and international law gives the National House of Chiefs carte blanche to overturn cruel and inhumane traditions and ultimately to modify customs that are a clear breach of the realization of the human rights of women and girls.



This is the only way to stop the recurring traditional incidents of harm and sometimes death against women and children in Ghana.



The appeal by FIDA-Ghana, comes against the backdrop of the recent lynching of the 90-year old Madam Akua Denteh in the Savannah Region, who was accused of being a witch.



The statement said the general condemnation of the atrocious lynching of Madam Denteh was an indication of the nations abhorrence to such practices.



However, the reality of the situation was that it could happen again, and so the country needed to halt this age old practice which is replete with multiple rights violations.



The stigma of being in witch camps where young girls who accompany older women to the camps are unable to progressively attain physical, mental and social development to their fullest potential, calls for an intensive scrutiny of our customs and usages, the FIDA-Ghana statement sated.



It expressed regret that there had been a regular reportage of incidents of dehumanizing customary practices and usages.



FIDA-Ghana said the issue of witch camps had been a stain on Ghanas human rights records, which had also gained the attention of the global community as the countrys periodic reports to the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee had been flagged up always and recommended to Ghana, to modify some of its practices.



The statement said the State had an obligation to protect its citizens, as pointed out in Article 26 of the Constitution, which prohibits all customary practices that dehumanize or were injurious to the physical and mental wellbeing of a person.



While admitting that the State alone could not deal effectively with the situation, FIDA-Ghana said it acknowledged that a number of traditional rulers have taken bold steps to eliminate some harmful traditional practices against women and children in their traditional councils.

Source: GNA









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(AFP) Video app TikTok said on Saturday it will challenge in court a Trump administration crackdown on the popular Chinese-owned service, which Washington accuses of being a national security threat.

As tensions soar between the world's two biggest economies, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance  effectively setting a deadline for a potential pressured sale of the viral video sensation to a US company.

"Even though we strongly disagree with the Administration's concerns, for nearly a year we have sought to engage in good faith to provide a constructive solution. What we encountered instead was a lack of due process as the Administration paid no attention to facts and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses," TikTok said in a statement.

"To ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and users are treated fairly, we have no choice but to challenge the Executive Order through the judicial system," it said, adding it expects to file its suit next week.

TikTok's kaleidoscopic feeds of short video clips feature everything from hair-dye tutorials to dance routines and jokes about daily life. It has been downloaded 175 million times in the US and more than a billion times around the world.

Trump claims TikTok could be used by China to track the locations of federal employees, build dossiers on people for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

The company has said it has never provided any US user data to the Chinese government, and Beijing has blasted Trump's crackdown as political.

The US measures come ahead of November 3 elections in which Trump, who is behind his rival Joe Biden in the polls, is campaigning hard on an increasingly strident anti-China message.

Trump and China

Trump has increasingly taken a confrontational stance on China, challenging it on trade, military and economic fronts.

Microsoft and Oracle are possible suitors for TikTok's US operations.

Reports have said Oracle  whose Chairman Larry Ellison has raised millions in campaign funds for Trump  was weighing a bid for TikTok's operations in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The Trump administration has also given ByteDance a 90-day deadline to divest in TikTok before the app is banned in the United States.

The measures move away from the long-promoted American ideal of a global, open Internet and could invite other countries to follow suit, analysts told AFP previously.

"It's really an attempt to fragment the Internet and the global information society along US and Chinese lines, and shut China out of the information economy," Milton Mueller, a Georgia Tech professor and founder of the Internet Governance Project said previously.
He has repeatedly blamed Western interference, claimed the protests were backed by the United States and accuses NATO of building up troop concentrations in Poland and Lithuania on Belarus western border, which the alliance denies. He also claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was willing to offer security assistance to his government to quell the protests if he asked for it.
Three persons suspected to be robbers have been arrested by the Tesano Police for possession of two locally made pistols.

They also had in their possession other implements suspected to have been stolen from a robbery escapade.

Deputy Superintendent of Police, Effia Tenge, Head of Public Affairs Unit of the Accra Regional Police Command gave their names as Ato Kwamina, 26, Isaah Emmanuel, 20 and Ibrahim Abubakari, 21.

Effie Tenge in a statement said, on August 19, 2020, at about 0230 hours, security details were at Abeka Junction Operation Calm Life Snapcheck duties when they spotted the suspects in a commercial vehicle heading towards Accra.

They were highly suspected by the police and a search conducted on the suspect discovered the offensive weapons to which they admitted ownership, she said.

DSP Tenge said other items found on them included six (6) live BB cartridges, one Toshiba laptop, one wristwatch, one small cutter, a screwdriver, two mobile phones and two power banks.

She said the suspects are currently in custody and assisting with investigations.

---citinewsroom
Many questions remained unanswered Monday afternoon, the day after Kenosha, Wis., police officers opened fire on an unarmed Black man as he opened the door to his car on Sunday evening, firing at least seven shots into his back while his three children were inside the vehicle, according to civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who represents the man and his family.

The man, identified by Crump and media reports as Jacob Blake, is in stable condition in a Milwaukee hospital, said Crump. The shooting has drawn condemnation from former Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro, Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and led to a violent protest in Kenosha. On Monday, Evers called out the National Guard to keep order in the city.

Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kathy and I join his family, friends, and neighbors in hoping earnestly that he will not succumb to his injuries.  Governor Tony Evers (@GovEvers) August 24, 2020

Blakes family is devastated, Crump told Yahoo News. You can only imagine the psychological trauma his children are going to have.

The shooting occurred after police responded to a domestic incident sometime after 5 p.m., the department said in a news release Sunday. The precise time was unspecified, but video shows it was in daylight. A clip posted to Twitter shows Blake walking to the drivers side of an SUV with two officers, including one who has a firearm pointed at Blakes back, following closely behind.

An officer appears to pull at Blake as he opens the door. Then one officer shoots Blake in the back. The second officer appears to shoot too, the video shows. Screams can be heard in the background.

We see on the video that they did not deescalate the situation, Crump told Yahoo News. It seems like they escalated it. And its just shocking that you see them shooting all those shots at Mr. Blake, who seems to be walking away from them. He didnt seem to be posing a threat to them at all.

Story continues

A man confronts police outside the police department in Kenosha, Wis., during protests following the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, on Sunday. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA Today via Reuters)

What led to the shooting is unclear. Its also unclear why officers had their guns drawn on Blake and why he was walking toward the vehicle. Kenosha police have not commented on the shooting beyond Sundays release. Yahoo News reached out to the department for additional information.

Crump acknowledged that much is unknown about the shooting. Ill be getting into Wisconsin tonight, he said on Monday afternoon, and from there we hope to get more answers. The family is outraged, and they are demanding that the officer who shot [Blake] in the back be immediately terminated.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said the officers involved have been placed on administrative leave. The Wisconsin Department of Justice is leading the investigation, Kaul said in a statement.

When DCI [Division of Criminal Investigation] is the lead investigating agency of a shooting involving a law enforcement officer, the statement said, DCI aims to provide a report of the incident to the prosecutor within 30 days. The prosecutor then reviews the report and makes a determination about what charges, if any, are appropriate. If the prosecutor determines there is no basis for prosecution of the law enforcement officer, DCI will thereafter make the report available to the public.

The president of the local police union said the video doesnt tell the whole story.

As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident, Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha police union, said in a statement to the Associated Press.

The shooting of Blake led to a protest in Kenosha, a city south of Milwaukee, during which protesters confronted officers, set cars on fire and smashed windows, the AP reported. The city set a curfew until 7 a.m. Monday and advised 24-hour businesses to close. Another curfew will start at 8 p.m. Monday and last until 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Garbage and dump trucks were set ablaze on Sunday by rioters near the Kenosha County Courthouse, where they had been set up to prevent damage to the building. Still, the structure was damaged and was closed on Monday. (Sean Krajacic/Kenosha News via AP)

The shooting comes as the nation remains embroiled in racial unrest after the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, and amid emotionally charged calls in many U.S. cities to rethink how the police function and operate in society.

Crump said city officials need to take steps to calm the community. That is all on the leadership of Kenosha, he said. If they provide transparency and accountability, then I think people will accept due process of the law  they will accept equal justice. But if they try to justify this unjustifiable shooting, in front of Blakes three young boys, then I think protesters have every right to express their righteous anger in the form of their First Amendment rights.

The chief concern of Crump and Blakes family, the attorney said, is Blakes survival.

We want to make sure that Jacob Blake survives  that he doesnt succumb to this shooting. So right now the main concern is the health and welfare of him and his family.

Thumbnail credit: Courtesy of Benjamin Crump

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:
1. Republicans renominated President Trump on the first day of their convention.

Mr. Trump, making his case for re-election as the Republican National Convention kicked off in Charlotte, N.C., continued to attack mail-in voting and leveled unfounded accusations of misconduct against Democrats.

Theyre using Covid to steal the election, he said in an inflammatory speech after his nomination as the partys presidential candidate in the November election. Above, Mr. Trump speaking to delegates in Charlotte earlier today. Vice President Mike Pence told delegates the economy is on the ballot. We have live updates here.

Despite rising coronavirus rates, job losses and vanishing savings, Mr. Trumps approval ratings on the economy remain durable. Our reporter looked at the factors raising the presidents standing on the economy.
A federal appellate court has affirmed a $1.2 million jury award to a woman who broke her arm after tripping over a bucket on a cruise ship. That may have been the least significant part of the ruling in Higgs v. Costa Crociere S.P.A. Co.

In the same decision, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals abolished a longstanding practice by South Florida federal judges to limit medical damage awards in maritime cases to the amount paid. Whats more, the panel upheld jury instructions that told jurors they could assume the cruise line was trying to hide something because it had concealed evidence.

Houston personal injury attorney Robert Chaffin said its been a long fight for his client, Michigan resident Joyce D. Higgs, who is now 73. Two juries have awarded damages of more than $1 million. He said the company that owns Costa Cruises didnt offer his client a penny for her claim until trial.

Cruise lines, when dealing with injured people, kind of take a hard line, he said during a telephone interview. They make you work for your money, if you know what I mean.

Higgs tripped over a bucket filled with dirty water after loading her plate at the breakfast buffet while abroad the Costa Luminosa on Christmas Eve, 2014. She said the bucket was placed behind a corner, so she did not see it as she turned. The fall broke her humerus and caused a permanent shoulder disability, Chaffin said.

Chaffin sued the Italian cruise line, Costa Crociere, for negligence at its home base in South Florida and won at trial. A jury awarded about $1.1 million in damages and deducted 15% to account for Higgs degree of fault. The 11th Circuit overturned the award, finding that the trial judge had inappropriately excluded evidence that Higgs had fallen down several times before.

The case went to trial again, this time with evidence about Higgs alleged propensity to fall presented to the jury.

Chaffin said while he prepared for trial, Costa did not disclose during discovery that one of its security employees, Kavita Kamble, had investigated Higgs accident and had taken photographs of the scene. Higgs grandson, who was also on the cruise along with several other family members, tried to take photographs but cruise line staffers blocked his access. The grandson, however, was able to see Kamble taking photos.

When responding to discovery requests, the cruise lines attorneys said there were no photographs taken of the scene. Incensed, Higgs attorneys filed a motion for discovery sanctions. Costa argued that Kambles photos were privileged.

U.S. District Judge James I. Cohn granted Higgs sanctions motion, saying the discovery violation was egregious. He approved instructions that the jury may make an adverse inference because the cruise line did not reveal Kambles investigation or her photographs.

The second jury also found in Higgs favor and awarded about $1.1 million in damages for pain and suffering, plus about $61,000 for medical costs.

Costa appealed the verdict, arguing that the jurys findings were not supported by evidence and that the jury instruction had unfairly prejudiced the jury against it.

The 11th Circuit disagreed.

The evidence showed that a Costa employee placed a bucket  more than one foot tall and filled with dirty water  behind a blind corner in a highly-trafficked breakfast buffet pathway, the appellate court said. That this placement would pose a danger of tripping would have been obvious to anyone, including to any employee who knowingly placed the bucket there.

The appellate panel also upheld the jury instructions, saying Costas failure to reveal the identify of Kavita Kamble, despite the district courts order to disclose all evidence, was a serious violation of discovery rules.

Indeed, because Costa concealed her identity throughout the first trial and disclosed it only two weeks before the second, Higgs has never had the opportunity to depose her, and we still do not know what she might have said, the panel said.

Higgs filed a cross-appeal that raised the issue of medical damages. The jury found that Higgs should be awarded the amount that doctors billed for her injury  about $61,000  not the $16,000 that her health insurer, United Healthcare, paid for her treatment.

Chaffin said it is the practice of judges in the South Florida District to limit medical damage awards to the amounts actually paid. He said he had appealed rulings that imposed limits a few times before, but Higgs case was the first time his argument was addressed in a ruling.

The 11th Circuit said courts have long held that damage awards should not be offset by amounts paid by third parties. For example, if a womans car is destroyed by an accident, it should not matter that her rich uncle bought her a new car to replace when determining the amount of damages. The principle is known as the collateral source rule.

The appellate panel said a jury award for medical damages should not be reduced because the injured party had purchased insurance that covered those costs; plaintiffs are entitled to recover the reasonable value of treatment for their injuries, regardless who pays for the expenses.

On the other hand, determining the value of medical services is a tricky question because medical providers habitually bill for far more than they are paid. The panel said the amount paid for services can vary greatly depending on contracts that have been negotiated by health insurers.

Some courts have found that awarding damages based on the amount billed will lead to large overstatements of value, and so have limited awards to the paid amounts. But the 11th Circuit said limiting recovery to the amount actually paid would in effect result in uneven recoveries for plaintiffs who suffered similar injuries. For example, a person who receives care through Medicare would be paid less because the federal government drives a harder bargain than private insurers.

The court said it also would not oppose allowing defendants to enter into evidence the amount that a plaintiff actually pays for medical services.

For these reasons, we hold that the appropriate measure of past medical expense damages in a maritime tort case is the amount determined to be reasonable by the jury upon its consideration of all relevant evidence, including the amount billed, the amount paid, and any expert testimony and other relevant evidence the parties may offer, the court concluded.

Chaffin said the ruling will be important in future cases where medical damages are in question. Its a big thing, he said.

The rule adopted now is that both parties can offer evidence as to the reasonable and necessary costs of the medical procedures/services involved, he explained in an email. Jury could conceivably award full amount of bills, amount of bills actually paid or something in between. Pretty much a new rule for methodology of awarding medical costs but it makes good sense.

The cruise lines attorney, Richard J. McCalpin in Miami, did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Topics Florida
As the world waits with bated breath for the COVID-19 vaccine that will save us all, heres a gentle reminder that COVID-19 isnt the only disease that can befall us right now.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) recently announced enhanced subsidies for recommended vaccinations in Singapore under the National Childhood Immunisation Schedule (NCIS) and the National Adult Immunisation Schedule (NAIS) from 1 Nov 2020.

Basically, the enhanced subsidies will make it more affordable to get the recommended vaccinations in Singapore. Childhood developmental screening at all CHAS GP clinics and polyclinics will also be free.

Immunisation has been the key to reducing infection rates of many diseases, and even eliminating some that had previously wreaked havoc on the world. Vaccinations like the BCG not only help to protect the individual, but also aim to wipe out certain diseases completely. Approach your doctor for medical advice when you think about whether you should get that jab. Also, consider the fact that you could be protecting not just yourself, but future generations too.

Vaccination co-payment fees for Singaporean adults at CHAS GP clinics

Type of vaccination Pioneer Generation cardholders Merdeka Generation / CHAS Blue / CHAS Orange cardholders CHAS Green cardholders / everyone else Hepatitis B (HepB) (Adult) $9 $19 $38 Human papillomavirus (HPV2)  $23 $45 Influenza (INF) (trivalent or quadrivalent) $9 $18 $35 Measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) $9 $18 $35 Pneumococcal conjugate (PCV13) $16 $31 $63 Pneumococcal polysaccharide (PPSV23) $10 $20 $40 Tetanus, reduced diptheria and acellular pertussis (Tdap) $10 $20 $40 Varicella (chickenpox) (VAR) $11 $23 $45

All the above vaccinations are free for children, wherever applicable.

To qualify for the subsidies in the above table, you have to visit a CHAS GP clinic. Here is the full list of CHAS clinics.

By the way, its also worth noting that Medisave withdrawal limits have been raised for people with complex chronic conditions. From January next year, you can withdraw up to $700 (an increase from $500) per year to manage conditions under the Chronic Disease Management Programme (CDMP) which consists of 20 conditions including diabetes, hypertension and stroke.

Story continues

Vaccination subsidies at Singapore polyclinics

Service Singapore Citizens Permanent Residents NCIS vaccinations 100% 50% NAIS vaccinations Household monthly income per person $2,000 and below, OR annual value of home for households with no income $21,000 and below 75% 25% Household monthly income per person over $2,000, OR annual value of home for households with no income more than $21,000 50%

The NCIS schedule sets out the recommended vaccinations for kids, while the NAIS schedule sets out those for adults.

You must call ahead of time to make an appointment to be sure that the polyclinic you picked has the necessary vaccine.

What are the National Childhood Immunisation Schedule (NCIS) and National Adult Immunsiation Schedule (NAIS)?

The NCIS (for children) and NAIS (for adults) schedules contain lists of vaccines of preventable diseases that are recommended by the government.

The government reviews the vaccination schedules regularly, taking into account the burden the disease poses on the local population, the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, as well as cost-effectiveness.

The NCIS includes some vaccinations that are made compulsory at birth, namely diphtheria and measles. Surprisingly, the BCG is actually not compulsory at birth, but almost 100% of children in Singapore have had it. Thanks to the BCG, tuberculosis and meningitis are now almost unheard of in young people in Singapore.

As adults, were past the age of having to go for compulsory school health checkups, so most of us dont really worry about getting vaccinations anymore. But if you look at the NAIS schedule, youll find that there are some vaccines that could be well worth getting.

For instance, the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination protects women from cervical cancer, which is one of the few cancers that are almost completely preventable. The recommended age for the HPV vaccine is 18 to 26 years old, so its worth considering while you still can.

Hepatitis B is another condition that might be worth vaccinating against as it can cause liver damage and liver cancer, and can be transmitted from mother to infant or through household contact.

Benefits of getting vaccinated

When a virus or bacteria (an antigen) enters your body, your bodys response is to produce antibodies to try to fight the infection. When it comes to certain diseases like chickenpox, the immune response can be long-term  that means that every time your body encounters this particular type of antigen, it remembers that it has to make antibodies.

A vaccine introduces antigens into your body in order to trigger a release of antibodies. These antigens are either weakened or dead, so they wont make you sick. Now that your body has learnt how to create antibodies when it encounters this particular type of antigen, youll be immune to future infections.

Vaccinations not only stop you from getting sick if you encounter certain types of antigens, but also help to eradicate or at least contain contagious diseases within society. Some diseases like smallpox have been completely wiped off the face of the earth thanks to vaccines.

No matter how healthily you eat or how regularly you exercise, your immune system is not likely to be strong enough to defend against many of the serious infectious diseases targeted by the recommended vaccines.

With the implementation of recommended immunisation programmes, Singapore has been largely free from certain diseases that plague some developing countries. For instance, tuberculosis is pretty much unheard of among young Singaporeans thanks to the BCG. It used to be a major problem and many older Singaporeans who might have been infected earlier can still develop symptoms in the future.

What about the dark side of vaccines frequently touted by anti-vaxxers? After all, many vaccines do come with a very slight risk of complications. In Singapore, the Health Sciences Authority is responsible for regulating them to make sure that they do more harm than good.

In the case of many serious contagious diseases, the benefits of getting vaccinated outweigh the slight risk of something going wrong. Certainly, in the case of Covid-19, its going to be necessary to get large segments of many populations vaccinated so that healthcare systems and economies can recover.

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Chicken Pox in Singapore  Vaccination vs Treatment Costs

The post Vaccination In Singapore  A Guide To Costs And Government Subsidies appeared first on the MoneySmart blog.

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Acquisition joins together the channel management industry's two top technologies

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Impartner, the world's most-award winning, most complete channel management platform and Partner Relationship Management (PRM) provider today announced it has completed the acquisition of the Through Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) business from partner marketing automation solutions provider, TIE Kinetix (AEX: TIE). With the acquisition, which includes TIE Kinetix's full suite of contemporary Brand Control and Demand Generation technologies, Impartner now offers the industry's most holistic channel management platform with unparalleled breadth and depth to help companies accelerate the performance of their channel.

"The short list of new-age partner management and marketing solutions gets even tighter as these two top companies merge their best-of-breed offerings and create a new channel management technology powerhouse," said technology analyst firm Research in Action's Research Director, Peter O'Neill, who is author of a recent global study on Channel Marketing and Enablement SaaS and Software (CME). In the report, Impartner and TIE Kinetix came out No. 1 and No. 2 respectively, as rated by 1,500 business decision-makers. O'Neill is widely known in the channel technology space, given his most recent role with Forrester where for 12 years he directed the firm's research on B2B Marketing organization, process and automation topics, including the Forrester TCMA Wave.

"Now, more than ever, companies need their partners to truly be an extension of their businesses and amplify their voice in markets where they can no longer be physically," said Joe Wang, Impartner CEO. "Adding what is inarguably the most contemporary, usable and easily adoptable TCMA to help our customers market through their partners is part of our ongoing commitment to deliver the industry's most sophisticated, future-proof channel management platform."

The divestiture allows TIE Kinetix to focus on its core EDI-Integration technology and 100 percent digitalization of the supply chain. Proceeds from this transaction will be used to invest and grow the core EDI-Integration business. "We could not be more excited to have Impartner incorporate this technology and the talented team that supports this business into what is already the fastest-growing, most complete and award-winning channel management company worldwide," said TIE Kinetix CEO Jan Sundelin.

The TIE Kinetix purchase is one of a string of acquisitions by Impartner in recent years to expand its channel management technology portfolio, including Tremolo, to automate vendor delivery of customized news to partners, and Amplifinity, which gives customers a way to formalize management of non-traditional 'shadow channel' partners, the industry's fastest-growing segment.

Impartner will integrate TIE Kinetix solutions within its robust channel management technology platform. For a demo of Impartner's full suite of solutions and how they help accelerate indirect revenue, click here.

About TIE Kinetix

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Perhaps the pandemic can have the positive effect of providing local employment to scores of migrant workers who otherwise would have no choice but to sweat it out in cities far away from home.

The rhetoric of learning to live with the pandemic has been circulating for a while now.

It appears that, in some ways, as though the Central government subscribes to a similar view. They took a month to ramp up several facilities in rural areas before the Shramik Express ferried migrant workers back to their native states.

It was a given that the returnees would require adequate employment opportunities in order to sustain a living in the in the hinterlands. The Garib Kalyan Rozgar Abhiyan (GKRA) was launched on 20 June, 2020 by the prime minister with an aim to provide jobs to migrants from 116 districts across Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha and Jharkhand.

This initiative has been planned to last for 125 days for starters. Halfway through the time period of this scheme, the government has managed to create more than 22 crore man-day jobs in total and 35, 99,171 employments daily on an average.

Some of the activities that were chosen to employ individuals were those that find prominence in rural areas. For example: construction of wells, farm ponds, and also the formation of cattle, goat and poultry sheds along with vermicomposting.

Across 25 sectors, 9831.37 works are completed under this programme per day, and the frequency only looks set to increase in the coming couple of months.

These 116 districts were identified to have witnessed the arrival at least more than 25,000 migrant workers.

More importantly though, the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship had undertaken a skill mapping exercise along with the states to provide job opportunities to labourers close to their residences.

More than two weeks before the initiation of the Rozgar Abhiyan, the Uttar Pradesh government had already created a database for the specific skills in which 23,00,000 migrant workers specialised.

Some inconsistencies were reported in the same later on, but that is rather unavoidable with the sheer volume of individuals being documented.

At around the same time, Jharkhand mapped of 2, 50,056 labourers and deduced that 70 percent of them were skilled whilst the rest (72,871) were unskilled.

The Hemant Soren-led state would probably not be able to formulate jobs for all of them. But, at least a verifiable evidence of particular expertise of every migrant worker will allow them to source out that data to industries, private firms and public sectors and streamline a supply chain of these individuals appropriately.

Furthermore, this project has also literally moved in mission-mode so far. The GKRA involves 12 different ministries and departments, takes into account 290 nodal officers totally including 117 district collectors.

Its implementation is spread across in states from opposite ends of the country and aims to provide its benefits to the people in the lowermost strata of the society.

As mentioned beforehand, this Abhiyan required a meticulous mapping of millions of workers too. And yet, the government managed to set it in motion within a couple of days from its official announcement.

In a country that has faced troublesome bureaucratic hurdles for minute tasks, this initiative managed to surpass several obstacles to give out immediate employment.

There were some talk regarding politicisation of the scheme, considering that 54.31 percent of the districts benefitting from it belong to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Railway Board chairman Vinod Kumar Yadav had claimed in May that 80 percent of the shramik trains terminate in these two states, which also caused clogging and congestion in the network causing delays in the route.

The manpower and labourers belonging to these regions from the heartland is arguably unmatched, so they need to be primarily focused in this initiative.

Three non-Bharatiya Janata Party ruled states are a part of the plan too. Bhupesh Baghels complaint of Chhattisgarh not being included in the plan is understandable.

However, the claim that the Central government wronged West Bengal through its exclusion is abominable. Mamata Banerjees non-cooperation right from rejecting the approval for Ayushman Bharat Yojana, PM Kisan Samman Sidhi to creating hindrances for a better frequency of shramik trains leave her no standing to officer excuses.

Even this time around, Banerjees government apparently did not share district-wise data of migrant workers and cried foul play later on.

The GKRA needs to scale up operations soon though. On an average, it creates 31,027.33 daily employments in each district currently. However, if 67 lakh migrants indeed returned to the concerned 116 regions, then there might be a necessity to almost double up operations to generate 57,758 jobs per day.

Also, the Abhiyan has an outlay of 50,000 crore at its disposal. Until now, 35.96 percent of those funds have been utilised. The last shramik train operated on 9 July, when the GKRA was in operation for 20 days already.

Perhaps the initial low numbers were because of the fact that all migrants hadnt returned back for some part since it began functioning.

It also needs to be noted that MGNREGA recorded 86.3 percent more beneficiaries in these 116 districts in May 2020, as compared to same month in 2019. So, some chunk of the returnees might be opting for MGNREGA for their livelihoods too.

Rural economy has been consistently picking up over the last few months. Tractor sales, fertiliser consumption, and area sown under summer crops in June specifically have increased considerably.

The last sentence of the latest PIB release on the GKRA stated, The stage is set for a longer term initiative for jobs and livelihoods for those who choose to stay back.

The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected so many.

Perhaps it can have the positive effect of providing local employment to scores of migrant workers who otherwise would have no choice but to sweat it out in cities far away from home.
You had better have your face masks at the ready as you go shopping or even head out to the beach as new restrictions under level orange of the provinces Pandemic Response System kick in today.

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This article was published 24/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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You had better have your face masks at the ready as you go shopping or even head out to the beach as new restrictions under level orange of the provinces Pandemic Response System kick in today.

The restrictions, aimed at getting COVID-19 under control in the Prairie Mountain Health region, include mandatory mask wearing in all indoor public places and any public gatherings and a reduction in group sizes to no more than 10 people indoors and out.

Exceptions can be made for medical reasons and a persons age.

You also wont be able to take in a movie at the local theatre or gamble at Sand Hills Casino until the new restrictions are lifted.

That wont happen for at least two weeks  the incubation period for COVID-19.

The change in restrictions do not include workplaces, religious ceremonies or retail establishments such as restaurants, where transmission levels are much lower.

However, numerous Brandon businesses have already taken it upon themselves to mandate masks in their establishments, so best to have one handy when you head out shopping.

Starting on Saturday, masks or face coverings will be mandatory at all Real Canadian Superstore locations, according to a post from the company.

The new restrictions go beyond shopping, as well.

If youre planning to borrow a book or a movie, masks will be required starting today in all Western Manitoba Regional Library branches.

In a social media post, the library said it is up to the discretion of caregivers if children under 10 wear masks. Meanwhile, the City of Brandon is requiring residents to wear face masks  which they must provide themselves  at all of its civic facilities starting today until further notice.

In a news release, the city said signage with instructions will be posted at the entrances of its facilities.

Rather than attending civic facilities in person, the City of Brandon says it has a number of alternative service delivery options. A list can be found on the citys website at brandon.ca/payment-options.

Orange (restricted) is the second-highest level in the colour-coded Pandemic Response System that was unveiled last Wednesday.

It indicates community transmission of COVID-19 is occurring and public health measures are being taken to manage the negative impact on human health and/or the health system.

The other levels are:

 Red (critical): Community spread of COVID-19 is not contained and/or there are significant strains on our health-care system;

 Yellow (caution): Community transmission is at low levels. This is the level the rest of the province is currently under;

 Green (limited): The spread of COVID-19 is broadly contained. Vaccine and/or effective treatments for COVID-19 are available.

 brobertson@brandonsun.com
Police said officers were called to the scene to remove an out-of-control family member, who was suspected to be under the influence of a controlled substance. One family member reported being assaulted and both family members wanted the man removed from the house.

The man allegedly was observed brandishing various objects as weapons inside the house. He then started to barricade the doors, close window coverings and turn off the lights.

Officers standing outside by the back door were suddenly met with the male opening the door with a large knife in his hand, according to a GIPD news release. Two different less lethal options were deployed with no adverse effects on him. The male was given multiple commands to drop the knife and when he charged at the officers, the officers used deadly force to stop the threat and save themselves from serious injury. Officers immediately attempted first aid while GIFD Paramedics and Fire Department responded to the scene. The male was pronounced dead at the scene when GIFD Paramedics arrived on scene.

GIPD does not investigate its own officer-involved shootings. A request was made to the South Central Area Law Enforcement Services to conduct an independent investigation. Investigators with the Buffalo County Sheriffs Department are leading the investigation with assistance from the Hastings Police Department, Kearney Police Department, the Dawson County Sheriffs Office and the Nebraska State Patrol. The Hall County Attorneys Office also is assisting with the investigation.
President Nana Akufo-Addo, on Friday commissioned the Casa de Ropa Potato Factory, a project under Government's 1-District-1-Factory (1D1F) initiative.

Performing the sod-cutting ceremony, President Akufo-Addo described the day as a very happy for the Central Region, and, indeed, for Mother Ghana, especially as he had, on the same way, also commissioned the Ekumfi Fruits and Juices Factory, in Ekumfi.

This afternoon's ceremony is in fulfillment of the promise by Government, in partnership with the private sector, to set up at least one medium to large scale enterprise in every district of Ghana, the President said.

Congratulating the management of Casa de Ropa for the progress they made, and for being able to process orange fleshed sweet potato into puree, which are further processed into biscuit, bread, crisps and chips, using improved production technology, he noted that 1,150 direct and indirect jobs have been created by the factory.

Another milestone achieved by the factory is the fact that women currently constitute more than 80 percent of the workforce, as a result of a deliberate policy to empower women. As the African Union Gender Champion, I commend management for this decision, he said.

President Akufo-Addo applauded the decision taken by Casa de Ropa to be a Center of Excellence, through the collaboration with Universities and other agricultural institutions, to create a platform for research and knowledge sharing between academia and industry.

This Factory, gradually, is positioning itself as one of the most innovative food processing companies in the country, with the potential to expand its operations to take advantage of the domestic market for processed food as well as the African market, he added.

The President continued, Government remains committed to supporting private sector operators, like Casa de Ropa, to become globally competitive, and, thereby, take advantage of market integration frameworks such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), whose Secretariat has been established and commissioned in Accra.

Commending the management of Casa de Ropa Ltd for their diligence and commitment to enhance the potential of sweet potato as a new cash crop for farmers in Ghana, the President also commended EXIM Bank for granting a financing facility of about GH14 million in support of the project, under the 1D1F programme.

Meanwhile, prior to commissioning the Factory, President Akufo-Addo visited the site of the Mumford Landing Site, a project with commenced on 16th November 2019.

With the topographic and geophysical surveysone hundred percent(100%) complete, and work on the breakwater is seventy percent (70%) complete, prefabrication of the concrete blocks for the quay wall begins in September 2020, with dredging work for the approach channel and port basin starting in December.

According to the Minister for Transport, Kwaku Ofori Asiamah, the Mumford landing site will be completed in June 2021, and will have the following facilities also attached to the site: an administration building, fish market, net mending hall, ice making plant, fuel depot, day care centre, toilet, and power station.
In this July 10, 2018, file photo, bottles of medicine ride on a belt at the Express Scripts mail-in pharmacy warehouse in Florence, N.J. Read more

President Donald Trump and his campaign donor-turned-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy got caught trying to rig the U.S. Postal Service for political purposes. Facing massive public outrage, and a date with angry members of Congress seeking answers, DeJoy now claims he will pause his so-called changes to the Postal Service until after the election.

Democracy and Americans right to vote arent the only things at risk.

When President Trump and DeJoy tampered with the mail, they also delayed prescription drugs for my patients and many others who count on their medications showing up in the mailbox on time, not two weeks late.

As a citizen, I was deeply concerned when I first heard President Trump admit he wanted to sabotage the Postal Service to undermine mail-in voting. As a physician, I am outraged that his ham-fisted plot to cheat in the upcoming election endangers my patients and many others who get their medications through the mail.

 READ MORE: Should the U.S. privatize the Postal Service? | Pro/Con

The Department of Veterans Affairs Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy system handles about 120 million prescriptions per year. More than 9.1 million prescriptions were delivered by mail to Pennsylvanians in 2019. With the COVID-19 pandemic causing more people to turn to remote services for their health care needs, these numbers are probably higher now.

The patients I care for include people with diabetes. Some of them get their insulin through the mail. If a diabetic doesnt take insulin when theyre supposed to, their blood sugar levels can increase rapidly. In severe cases, patients could experience diabetic ketoacidosis, which can be deadly. Diabetics arent the only ones affected when the mail is late. Patients who dont get their heart medications on time could potentially suffer a stroke. Cancer patients who miss out on oral chemotherapy could see their cancer return with a vengeance.

As a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, Im appalled that President Trumps shenanigans with our mail are slowing critical medications from getting to those who served our nation. The VA sends 80% of all prescriptions by mail, serving about 330,000 veterans, many of them with illnesses and injuries sustained on the front lines and in battle. Delaying critical therapies our veterans need so they can better manage PTSD, lost limbs, and a long list of other traumas sustained defending America is not how a grateful nation shows its thanks, and certainly not how their commander-in-chief should show his.

DeJoy may say hes pausing changes he has started to make at the Postal Service, including unplugging delivery bar code sorters in Erie and removing equipment in Lehigh Valley. His hatchet work is expected to have the most impact slowing mail in cities in battleground states, such as Philadelphia, which is estimated to handle 310,000 fewer pieces of mail per hour.

While the spotlight is rightly trained on the impact of White House-sanctioned mail tampering on the ballots voters will cast between now and Nov. 3, we cannot lose sight of the impact these delays will have on all our mail and our medications, now and after Election Day.

President Trump and DeJoy must do more than halt the damage they have already done. President Trump must do more than plug sorting machines back in and return mailboxes. He must rebuild trust in the men and women who proudly work at the post office. He must beef up postal staffing to clear his self-inflicted backlogs and delays. He must ensure the hundreds of millions of absentee ballots and millions of prescriptions get mailed on time.

And President Trump must apologize to every American for slowing down their mail, holding up their medications, and hijacking an institution as old as our republic that connects Americans to each other and to the things that help make our lives fuller.

 READ MORE: Destroy the Post Office and you destroy democracy. Maybe thats Trumps plan? | Will Bunch

President Trump undermined our nations pandemic response, and then washed his hands because the work was too hard. More than 170,000 Americans are now dead. With every challenge he has faced, President Trump has refused to take responsibility and fix the mess he leaves behind. His attack on the Postal Service fits this pattern.

The Post Service motto is: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Apparently the only thing darker than the gloominess of night is President Trump and DeJoys disdain for democracy and for Americans well-being.

Max Cooper is an emergency physician in Southeastern Pennsylvania, a U.S. Navy veteran, and the Committee to Protect Medicares Pennsylvania state lead.
U.S. court refused to release Bogdana Osipova from custody - Moskalkova

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

15:42 24/08/2020

MOSCOW, August 24 (RAPSI)  A court in the U.S. has refused to release Bogdana Osipova from jail after withdrawal of several charges in a kidnapping case, according to Russias High Commissioner for Human Rights Tatiana Moskalkova.

Last week, Moskalkova requested United States Attorney General William Barr to support a sentence mitigation motion filed by Osipova convicted of the so-called kidnapping of her own children. The ombudsman pointed that Osipovas grave health condition and several serious chronically illnesses endangered her life if she was infected with COVID-19. Therefore, Moskalkova asked Barr to back the Russian womans plea for changing her prison sentence to any other non-custodial punishment.

According to the Ombudsmans Office, on August 21, an appeals court withdrew charges of extortion and demands to indemnify her former husbands lawyer for the expenses incurred, and remanded the case to the new sentencing. However, the woman was denied release from custody.

Osipova left America with her children in 2014 explaining this action by violence from ex-husband Brian Mobley, a U.S. citizen. Then the court passed the custody of children to Mobley. She returned to the United States in 2017 to file a request for the custody of her daughters but was arrested and then detained on charges of abduction of her children.

In June 2019, the United States District Court for the District of Kansas sentenced her to 7 years behind bars, ordered that she be placed under the U.S. authorities supervision after release for 3 years and therefore prohibited her from leaving the country during this period. The court also obliged her to make efforts necessary to the childrens return to America.




The Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting amid Sonia Gandhis decision to step down as partys working president is reminiscent of a similar crisis the grand old party faced two decades ago.

Following the assassination of her husband and former Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi on Mar 21, 1991, Sonia Gandhi refused to join the party. In 1997, however, she became a primary member of the party.

Prior to that, former Prime Minister PV Narsimha Rao and former Union Minister Sitaram Kesari had led the party. Their tenures were, however, cut short in the wake of internal revolt.

Click to follow the latest developments from Congress Working Committee meeting here

Rao stepped down in 1996 and Kesari was removed ahead of 1998 midterm elections. The two leaders were the only two non-Gandhi family presidents in the recent history of the grand old party.

Finally, on March 14, 1998, Sonia Gandhi was elected as the Congress president with a hope of uniting the party. Her term didnt last long, however.

A year later, just ahead of Lok Sabha elections 1999, she stepped down from the post. Prominent Congress leaders, Sharad Pawar, PA Sangma and Tariq Anwar had protested her projection as Prime Ministerial candidate owing to her foreign origin.

What followed was a resignation spree of Congress leaders, including Digvijaya Singh in Madhya Pradesh, Sheila Dikshit in Delhi, Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan apart from a pan-India agitation against her decision to step down. On May 24, 1999, Sonia Gandhi withdrew her resignation. Pawar, Sangma and Anwar were expelled for six years.

Also Read: Congress crisis: Kamal Nath, Digvijaya Singh express faith in Sonia Gandhi's leadership

The ongoing meeting of CWC comes in the backdrop of a letter, addressed to Sonia Gandhi, by 23 top leaders of the Congress party complaining about a drift in the party and calling for a full time, visible leadership

Gandhi, 73, became the interim president of the party after Rahul Gandhi quit as the party chief in May 2019 soon after the party rout in the general elections in which BJP-led NDA came to power for the second time.

Her term as interim president ended on August 10 but senior party leaders insisted that she continue to lead until such time an election is held to elect a new president.
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Rezolut, a high-growth medical imaging business and portfolio company of Sunny River Management ("SRM"), has entered into a partnership with Shin Imaging, LLC, Shin MRI, Inc. (collectively "Shin Imaging"), and St. Jude Medical Center ("SJMC"), of Providence St. Joseph Health. Shin Imaging is a multi-modality medical imaging provider serving the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area.

Together, Rezolut, Shin Imaging, and SJMC will provide best-in-class imaging services to patients via three existing Shin Imaging fixed site locations and development of new centers.

Shin Imaging provides a full range of diagnostic imaging services to meet the needs of all patients and referring physicians and utilizes cutting-edge technology to provide the best imaging possible. In addition to providing the latest diagnostic imaging technology, Shin Imaging has always focused on the compassionate personal side of diagnostic care as much as the technical side. Shin Imaging has conducted over 100,000 MRI scans since inception.

"The partnership with Shin Imaging and SJMC expands Rezolut's existing presence in the Los Angeles area and strengthens our already deep bench of talent," states Dr. Jin Kim, CEO of Rezolut. "We are excited to work with the Shin Imaging team, and we look forward to providing greater value to existing patients while attracting new ones."

"We are excited to be partnering with a firm that prioritizes the quality of patient care in the same way we do at Shin Imaging," said Cindy Shin, CEO of Shin Imaging. "We believe this partnership will allow us to enhance our existing patient experience while allowing us to reach more patients across California."

This partnership continues Rezolut's strategy of building a nationwide medical imaging company that is committed to innovative and high-quality service to its patients.

About Rezolut Medical Imaging, LLC

Rezolut is a high-growth medical imaging business, committed to building an innovative, national multi-modal platform by delivering high-quality service to our patients. To learn more about Rezolut, visit www.rezolut.com.

About Sunny River Management, LLC

SRM is a private investment firm focused on building great mid-sized businesses in a few select, highly desirable industries. SRM builds its platform businesses through partnering with small businesses and investing in growth within those businesses as part of a larger platform. SRM's current platforms include: Industrial Inspection & Analysis, Fire Safety & Protection, and Rezolut Medical Imaging. To learn more about SRM, visit www.sunnyrivermanagement.com.

Media Contact:

Betty Jasper

Phone: 470-552-8303

SOURCE Rezolut

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U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun will travel to Moscow on Tuesday and hold talks with senior Russian officials about the crisis in Belarus, arms control and North Korea, U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said.

The envoy said on Monday Washington was deeply concerned by what he said was a seriously flawed Aug. 9 presidential election in Belarus, a close ally of Russia, and by the police crackdown and rights abuses that followed.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:45:49|Editor: huaxia

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Aerial photo taken on Aug. 27, 2020 shows a man washing clothes at an arid river in Cibarusah district, West Java, Indonesia. This year the drought season in Indonesia was estimated to be drier than those in the previous years, and would peak from August to September. (Photo by Arya Manggala/Xinhua)

JAKARTA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia has sent several thousands of soldiers and police personnel to prevent forest and bush fires during the peak of the drought season, an official said here on Monday.

Some of the vast-archipelagic nation's areas are vulnerable to forest and bush fires during the dry season. This year, the drought season was estimated to be drier than those in the previous years, and would peak from August to September.

The deployment of the soldiers and policemen was along with the dispatch of many forest fire fighters and volunteers, bringing the total number of personnel to 6,000, said Raditya Jati, spokesman for the National Disaster Management Agency which coordinates the measures.

Provincial administrations have been asked to increase their preparedness against threats of forest fires, among others by taking an early measure once a hotspot is recovered, he said.

The spokesman said that the personnel have been sent to six provinces in the main islands of Sumatra and Borneo (Kalimantan) which have been frequently hit by forest and bush fires, sending neighboring countries thick smog that triggered health problems and incurred huge economic losses.

Besides, a total of 26 helicopters for water bombings have also been on standby in the six provinces and planes for spreading salts during weather modifications have also been prepared, the spokesman said.

So far, a total of six provinces in the two main islands have declared a state of emergency for forest and bush fires within a period from February to November, he said in a text message.

Indonesia has previously carried out weather modifications to water down peatlands in Sumatra and Kalimantan islands to prevent the areas from being burned during the peak of the drought season.
Image: AP

India has recorded more than 31.06 lakh cases of the novel coronavirus and 57,542 deaths, according to the Union health ministry's latest update. Of these, more than 7.1 lakh are active cases and over 23.38 lakh have recovered.

Maharashtra reported the highest number of infections, followed by Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

The health ministry updates its numbers a day after states release their data.

Globally, more than 2.3 crore infections and over 8 lakh deaths have been reported due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Here are all the latest updates:

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

>> Metro train services may be allowed in the 'Unlock 4' phase beginning September 1, but schools and colleges are unlikely to reopen anytime soon, officials said on August 24.

>> The University Grants Commission (UGC) asked higher education, research institutes to deploy RT-PCR machines in district hospitals, laboratories.

>> Karnataka government issued revised guidelines for inter-state travellers, with a host of relaxations being introduced by the state government, including no mandatory 14-day quarantine and no hand stamping for incoming travellers.

>> BP drugs may improve COVID-19 survival rates, particularly in patients with hypertension, a study said.

>> Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said he has tested positive for COVID-19.

>> The Ahmedabad civic body said it has decided to denotify some designated COVID-19 hospitals in view of the falling number of coronavirus cases in the city. In the first phase, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) denotified nine private hospitals.

>> Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt tested positive for COVID-19.

>> Researchers at the University of Hong Kong claimed to have proved that a Hong Kong man was infected with COVID-19 for the second time in a first such documented case. The 33-year-old was discharged from a hospital in April after he recovered from an initial bout. He tested positive for the virus again after returning from Spain earlier this month.

>> US allows emergency use of blood plasma treatment for coronavirus patients.
The Civil Society Food Sovereignty Platform, a Civil Society in Ghana, has condemned governments upcoming plans to discuss the implementation of the Plant Breeders Bill (PBB)in the country.



To this end, the CSO which operates within the Savannah Ecological zone urged Parliament to refrain from adopting the Bill since it lacked credibility, legitimacy and was harmful to the countrys Agricultural development.



The platform noted that the country had a good potential to develop a unique system that would suit its needs and develop an effective system for plant variety protection.



It also proposed an agricultural system that promotes food sovereignty and protection of the environment as well as ensures that farmers rights and potentials are realized.



The platform made this known in a statement signed by Mr Bernard Guri, the Executive Director of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledge and Development (CIKOD) on behalf of the Platform, at a news conference organized in Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region, by some of its members.



Mr John Akaribo, the Regional Focal person of the Peasant Farmers Association (PFAG) who read the statement on behalf of members, underscored five reasons why the PBB should be rejected.



The bill is hostile to small holder farmers in particular and farmers in general because it does not allow farmers to sell and exchange seeds from so-called protected varieties as it is heavily tilted in favor of commercial breeders which undermine the rights of farmers.



Making reference to section 23 of the PBB, the statement indicated that it was directly from the colonizers strategy book and that a PBB right shall be independent of any measures taken by the Republic to regulate within Ghana the production, certification and marketing of material of a variety or importation and exportation of the material.



In this regard, Ghana government has no legal authority over any seed production and marketing firm that deals in improved seed varieties in the country.



The Bill undermines biodiversity and food sovereignty as it stifles the ability of farmers in high drought environments to develop drought tolerant seeds.



According to the statement The Bill is based on the International Union for the Protection of new varieties of plants, UPOV 91 and was designed to strengthen the power of the largest global seed companies and further weaken competition.



This puts Ghanaian seed companies at a disadvantage in relation to transnational seed companies, it added.



The Platform therefore proposed a Bill that will promote and protect the rights of farmers and indicated that the country needed a farmers bill that would include a disclosure of origin, as an important tool to safe guard against bio piracy.



It urged Parliament to prioritize the development of community managed seed exchanges and strengthen all existing community managed mechanisms for seed exchanges and sales.



Ms Anita Sutha of the Rural Women Farmers Association of Ghana (RUWFAG) stressed that the PBB disrupted the traditional way of life and work of farmers and above all impacted negatively on the elements of agro- ecology that promotes exchange of seeds and knowledge sharing.



Ms Sutha added that as rural women farmers with limited resources for farming, the focus of the PBB will affect women farmers negatively since indigenous seed varieties in communities were still vibrant for use and more suitable for the climate.

Source: GNA









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A former Pfizer employee who said she was fired for refusing a vaccine on religious grounds cant proceed with a discrimination lawsuit because she waived that right, New Jerseys Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a decision two justices called potentially troubling for employee rights.

Amy Skuses lawsuit alleges she was fired in 2017 for refusing to accept a yellow fever vaccine because it went against her religious beliefs. Skuse worked as a flight attendant at Pfizers airport facility in West Trenton.

The dispute centered on Pfizers online materials it emailed to employees that described the companys policy requiring them to submit to arbitration and waive their right to a jury trial.

Employees were asked to click a box to acknowledge receipt of the policy. The materials also stated that employees who didnt click the box but continued to work for the company for at least 60 more days would be considered bound by the policy.

A judge initially dismissed Skuses suit, rejecting her argument that she never explicitly agreed to waive her right to sue, but last year an appeals court reversed and let the suit go forward, leading to the state Supreme Court considering the case.

In Tuesdays 5-1 ruling where one justice did not participate, the Supreme Court held that Pfizer clearly informed Skuse that by continuing to work, there she would be waiving her rights to pursue employment claims in court.

Skuse had the option to leave her employment if it was unacceptable to her that most potential disputes between her and Pfizer would be arbitrated rather than resolved by a jury or judge, Justice Anne Patterson wrote.

Alan Schorr, an attorney representing Skuse, called the ruling a dark day for employees.

I just think the Supreme Court erred here, he said. Theyre holding that employees dont anymore have to agree to arbitrate, which has been the law in New Jersey for four decades.

In an emailed statement, Pfizer said the decision reflects that our arbitration program was appropriately implemented and communicated to our employees, consistent with applicable legal requirements.

Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, in a dissent, and Justice Barry Albin, in a separate opinion agreeing with the majority, also warned that the ruling could set a troubling precedent for employees.

If an entire industry or profession inserts in employment and consumer contracts arbitration provisions on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, the public has no real choice, Albin wrote. The option of rejecting an arbitration provision and foregoing either a job offer or access to medical services or the opportunity to purchase a car is not a choice.

Rabner expressed concern that the ruling ushers in a new day for arbitration agreements.

Going forward, what employer will ask an employee to agree to settle a dispute through arbitration and waive the right to proceed in court if it is enough simply to ask the employee to acknowledge she received a statement of company policy and deem consent from her continuing to show up for work? he wrote.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits New Jersey
Forty-year-old Antonio Valenzuelas death didnt spark widespread protests like George Floyds. In fact, the police killing of Valenzuela drew little attention outside Las Cruces.

The details about the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died in May at the hands of Minneapolis police resemble that of Valenzuela, a Mexican American man, who was killed in Las Cruces three months before global protests and outrage. Like Floyd, Valenzuela was killed by a choking maneuver during a struggle with an officer. In Valenzuelas case, the officer was also Hispanic.

As national Black Lives Matter demonstrations grow, Latino activists are joining the multiracial protests while trying to draw attention to their deadly police encounters, some of which go back decades. Latino advocates and families of those killed by police say they arent trying to pull the focus away from Black lives but want to illustrate their own suffering from policing and systemic racism.

Activists say cases from Phoenix to Springfield, Massachusetts, show a pattern of police violence against Latinos like that against Black people. As with the killing of Black men and women, officers rarely face punishment in the deaths of Latinos. However, Latino cases seldom garner national attention, even when caught on video.

The lack of attention around encounters that go wrong between Latinos and police highlights a lack of knowledge among the general population about Latino history in the U.S. and racism endured in the American Southwest. It also brings attention to the backlash some Mexican Americans say they endure when trying to join the national conversation about race.

Its like they dont care about Latinos and the racism we face, said Frank Alvarado Sr., 76, a retired U.S. Marine whose son was shot and killed by police in Salinas, California, in 2014 while holding a cellphone officers said they thought was a gun. Alvarado has since joined Black Lives Matter protests in nearby Sacramento.

According to The Washington Post, between 2015 and April 2020, Black Americans were killed by police at the highest rate in the U.S., at 31 per million residents. Latinos were killed by police at the second-highest rate, 23 per million residents, according to the newspapers analysis. Both are disproportionate rates when matched against percentages of the population.

In Las Cruces, a city of about 100,000 where nearly 60% of residents are Hispanic, the rate of police killings from 2015 to April 2020 was 26.2 for every million residents, or two to three people a year, according to the Post. But that rate was the highest for any city in the nation, the Post reported.

New Mexico, a state with the largest percentage of Latino residents in the nation, also had the second-highest rate of all states for police killings, behind Alaska.

In the Valenzuela case, police video posted by the Las Cruces Sun-News shows officers chasing him after he fled from a traffic stop in February when he was found to have a parole violation. He was hit with a Taser twice but continued to struggle with officers.

Eventually, officers catch Valenzuela and Las Cruces police officer Christopher Smelser is heard saying, Im going to (expletive) choke you out, bro. Valenzuela gasps for breath before going silent. The coroner determined that he died of asphyxial injuries and that he had methamphetamine in his system, which contributed to his death.

Smelser, who is also Hispanic, was fired and initially charged with involuntary manslaughter. Only after activists tied Valenzuelas death to Floyds killing and Black Lives Matter protests hit Las Cruces did New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas file a second-degree murder charge against Smelser, in July.

Smelsers attorney, Amy L. Orlando, called the new charge a political move meant to grab headlines.

Officer Smelser used a technique that was sanctioned by the department, she said.

The city of Las Cruces has agreed to pay Valenzuelas family more than $6 million.

A string of police killings of Latinos in Salinas, California, in 2014 received national attention after Floyds death. That year, police shot and killed four Latinos in the city of 160,000.

Ana Barrera, 48, an activist and middle school teacher, said the shootings stirred normally quiet Latino farmworkers, who marched and expressed anger that officers werent facing discipline. She said immigration status and fear over losing easily replaced farm jobs might have prevented some from speaking out.

Thats changed now, said Barrera, who has since arranged meetings with Black Lives Matter organizers from Ferguson, Missouri.

Monica Munoz Martinez, the author of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, said police killings of Latinos dont evoke the same emotion nationally as those of Blacks because most Americans dont know about this aspect of the violent history of the American West.

This country also cant discuss race outside of a Black-white binary, Martinez said. And that does not paint the true history of white supremacy.

Marisol Marquez, an organizer with Los Angeles-based Centro CSO Community Service Organization, said Mexican American activists know this history but felt immediately after Floyds killing the need to center Black Lives Matter when demonstrating against police violence.

On June 7, the group convened a Black Lives Matter protest outside of Mariachi Plaza in Los Angeles. Aztec dancers, lowriders and elder pachucos gathered to memorialize Floyd and rally in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Black and Native American speakers addressed the crowd. But the high number of Latino speakers also drew a backlash.

We got an angry message that said we really needed to have had way more speakers who were not Latino or Chicanos, Marquez said. I was so angry. Who they were referring to were people who had family members who had died at the hands of LAPD  Chicanos.
Good morning, Bay Area. Its Monday, Aug. 24, and California firefighters are facing a deadly combination of wildfires and the coronavirus. Heres what you need to know to start your day.

Nearly three years after a swarm of Wine Country wildfires devastated California, another explosion of flames is making clear that the states efforts to fight the crisis may be no match for the worsening conditions fueling it. And its only August  the most dangerous fire-prone months are still to come.

On Sunday, three huge wildfire clusters  the LNU, SCU and CZU complexes  continued to challenge Californias strapped fire crews. Cal Fire officials reported slight increases in containment on several fronts but warned it could take weeks to get control of the blazes.

The LNU and SCU fires have already raced into the top three of Cal Fires list of the largest wildfires ever to hit California.

Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Wildfire smoke continued to choke the Bay Area on Sunday, with two Alameda County air quality monitoring sites hitting the highest possible hazardous level. A Spare the Air Alert has been issued through Wednesday.

 Northern California is drastically short of firefighters while an onslaught of blazes rages.

 In Santa Cruz Mountains, the fight is on to save small towns.

 The latest: Live updates and our fire tracking map.

A very challenging set of circumstances

Thousands of firefighters living and working on the front lines of dozens of blazes across Northern California are facing the deadly combination of heat, smoke and flames  along with the invisible threat of COVID-19.

Public health and fire officials began preparing months ago for a catastrophic fire season on top of a devastating pandemic. But there are limits to how well they can protect the firefighters themselves when the best tools at hand  face coverings and social distancing  arent practical in wildfire conditions.

Reporter Erin Allday explains the concerns.

 Searching for solutions: T cells, the bodys antiviral snipers, look promising for a coronavirus vaccine.

 From John King: Bad things keep piling on  when is enough enough in the Bay Area?

 Coronavirus map: Tracking coronavirus cases across California.

Racism and its health toll

Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

The idea that racial profiling and other forms of discrimination can cause chronic stress  which in turn can provoke illness  is a growing area of research, especially as the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired new approaches to racial equality.

Not a lot is known about the health consequences of racism specifically. But it is well known that stress can set off a cascade of biological responses, potentially leading to hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and a weakened immune system. And numerous studies indicate that persistent racism is a leading cause of stress, particularly among Black people.

The implications for coronavirus vulnerablity can be deadly. Read more from reporter Tatiana Sanchez

 From Otis R. Taylor Jr.: Anxiety four years ago is nothing compared with now.

Around the Bay

Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

 Sporting Green: Giants cut popular Hunter Pence  outfielder, leader, World Series champion.

 Disgusting policy: Prisoners families must pay for remains after COVID-19 deaths.

 From Kathleen Pender: California approved for $300 a week in extra unemployment benefits.

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.

 Campaign 2020: Kamala Harris record as California attorney general could become an issue in presidential race.

 GOP convention: Trump will use California to drive home his message that Democrats will wreck America.

 From Heather Knight: S.F. woman who lost her father to COVID-19 blames Trump  and her story at the Democratic convention went viral.

 Golden State Killer: A laughable apology and closure for victims and families at sentencing.

 Questions remain: Two months after a UC Berkeley students killing, an arrest is made.

 From Phil Matier: Woman imprisoned for killing abusive husband gets freedom, new home.

Throughline: Thinking of theme parks

Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images

As the pandemic continues to slow down much of Californias economy, many theme parks, including Disneyland, remain shuttered. When they can safely reopen, things will probably look much different for visitors, including reduced capacity, sanitizing stations and socially distanced lines.

But what about longer-term solutions in the post-COVID future?

Theme park designers and tech experts believe smartphones, facial recognition and augmented reality might be part of the solution. Whether its a Pokemon Go-like exploration game or a holographic tour guide, Throughline editor Robert Morast writes about the theme park of tomorrow.

 Interactive graphic: The future of theme parks, including sanitizer gels and virtual guides.

 Take the Chronicles reader poll and share how far you would be willing to go to enjoy some time away.

Bay Briefing is edited by Taylor Kate Brown and sent to readers email inboxes on weekday mornings. Sign up for the newsletter here, and contact Brown at taylor.brown@sfchronicle.com.
MONTREAL, QC and VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / Nomad Royalty Company Ltd. ("Nomad" or the "Company") (NSR and NSRXF) and Coral Gold Resources Ltd. ("Coral") (TSXV:CLH)(OTCQX:CLHRF) are pleased to announce that they have entered into a definitive Arrangement Agreement (the "Arrangement Agreement"), under which Nomad intends to acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Coral pursuant to a statutory plan of arrangement pursuant to the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia) (the "Transaction") for total value of approximately $45.8 million. All amounts in this news release are expressed in United States dollars unless otherwise indicated.

Acquisition Highlights

Acquisition of a premier, uncapped sliding-scale 1.00% to 2.25% net smelter return ("NSR") royalty on Nevada Gold Mines' Robertson property located in Nevada, USA (the "Robertson Property"), which forms part of the greater Cortez & Pipeline mining complex. Based on the current gold spot price of over US$1,940 per ounce, the applicable NSR royalty rate is currently 2.00%;

Premier gold mining operator in the world on the tier 1 Cortez & Pipeline mine complex;

The Robertson development project contains an historical Inferred mineral resource estimate (MRE) in excess of 2.7 million ounces Au in total oxide and sulphide materials (191.7 Mt grading 0.0143 oz/t Au), using a 0.0147 oz Au/ton cut off, based on the NI 43-101 Preliminary Economic Assessment dated January 15, 2012 as prepared for Coral by Beacon Hill Consultants (1988) Ltd. in conjunction with Knight Piesold Ltd., SRK Consulting (U.S.), Inc. and Kaehne Consulting Ltd. (the "Technical Report"), a copy of which is available on Coral's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com;

Exploration upside from a key asset property with drilling currently underway, that is located within close proximity of the Cortez mill;

Strong balance sheet that currently has in excess of C$11.5 million in cash; and

Downside protection through minimum non-refundable advance royalty payments totalling $0.5 million per year for 10 years commencing in 2025.

Story continues

The above-mentioned resources estimate on the Robertson Property is historical in nature. Nomad and Coral are of the view that the resources disclosed in the Technical Report are relevant and reliable, but should not be relied on as a current resources estimate. No qualified person of Nomad or Coral has done sufficient work to classify the above-mentioned estimate as current mineral resources.

"When we created Nomad, we set the objective to become a catalyst for sector consolidation. Today's announcement marks the first step of our consolidation strategy and follows our desire to become the best global acquisition-driven precious metals royalty company in the sector. This acquisition will further diversify our global portfolio as we keep executing on our aggressive growth plan" said Vincent Metcalfe, Nomad's Chief Executive Officer.

"This acquisition is very strategic for Nomad as it allows us to access a royalty on a top tier mining complex, operated by one of the largest gold operator in the world and located in Nevada, a leading mining jurisdiction. We are also very pleased to welcome new shareholders of Nomad as we continue our growth trajectory" said Joseph de la Plante, Nomad's Chief Investment Officer.

Transaction Details

Pursuant to the Transaction, Coral shareholders will be entitled to receive, for each Coral share held, consideration consisting of C$0.05 in cash and 0.80 of a unit (a "Unit") of Nomad, as described below. The consideration payable to Coral shareholders by Nomad represents total value of approximately C$1.21 per Coral share (the "Aggregate Consideration per Coral Share"), based on the closing price of C$1.37 of Nomad common shares on the TSX on August 21, 2020 and including the C$0.06 estimated value per Coral share of the one-half common share purchase warrant included in each Unit. Based on Nomad's and Coral's August 21, 2020 closing prices on the TSX and TSX Venture Exchange respectively, the Transaction represents a premium of approximately 45% to Coral shareholders.

Each Unit will consist of one Nomad common share and one-half of a common share purchase warrant (a "Warrant"). Each full Warrant will entitle the holder thereof to purchase one additional Nomad common share at a price of C$1.71 for a period of two years following the effective date of the Transaction. If the daily volume-weighted average trading price of Nomad's shares on the TSX exceeds the Warrant exercise price by at least 25% for any period of 20 consecutive trading days after one year from the effective date of the Transaction, Nomad will have the right to give notice in writing to the holders of the Warrants that the Warrants will expire 30 days following such notice, unless exercised prior thereto.

Each stock option to acquire common shares of Coral will be subject to accelerated vesting in accordance with Coral's stock option plan, and the option holders are expected to enter into option exercise and termination agreement with Coral prior to closing of the Transaction, pursuant to which the optionholders will be required to exercise their stock options prior to closing of the Transaction or, if they fail to do so, any and all outstanding and unexercised stock options of Coral shall expire and be terminated as of the effective date of the Transaction.

Overview of Coral

Coral Gold Resources Ltd. is a precious metals royalty company with assets in Nevada, USA. Coral's primary asset is a 1.00% to 2.25% sliding scale NSR royalty on the Robertson Property. The sliding scale NSR royalty rate will be determined based on the observed gold price during each quarterly period based on the average LBMA Gold Price PM during the quarterly period, as follows:

Average Gold Price During the Quarter (US$/oz) Applicable NSR Royalty Rate Up to and including $1,200.00 1.00% $1,200.01 to $1,400.00 1.25% $1,400.01 to $1,600.00 1.50% $1,600.01 to $1,800.00 1.75% $1,800.01 to $2,000.00 2.00% Over $2,000.00 2.25%

In addition, in the event that the Robertson Property is not placed into production by December 31, 2024, then beginning on January 1, 2025, and continuing on an annual basis thereafter until the earlier of (i) the date commercial production commences and (ii) January 2, 2034, Barrick Cortez Inc. ("Barrick") will make annual advance royalty payments to the royalty holder of $0.5 million, which will be non-refundable and fully credited against any future obligations under the Robertson Royalty.

Coral also holds a portfolio of strategically-located exploration projects near Nevada Gold Mine's Pipeline/Cortez Mine Complex on Nevada's Battle Mountain/Cortez Trend. Coral is debt free with a strong balance sheet holding in excess of C$11.5 million in cash.

Coral's Initiatives to Enhance Shareholder Value

In 2016, Coral's management team, in consultation with Coral's Board of Directors and its financial and legal advisors, began considering and implementing various strategic and financial initiatives to create shareholder value. Coral's share price increased from a low of C$0.06 on January 5, 2016 to C$0.83 on August 21, 2020 representing an increase of 1,283%. The Aggregate Consideration per Coral Share of approximately C$1.21 represents an increase of approximately 1,900% compared to the aforementioned January 5, 2016 Coral share price of C$0.06.

On June 20, 2016, with very limited cash and financial resources on hand and Coral shareholders facing significant potential dilution in order for Coral to advance its projects, Coral changed its business model to become a royalty-focused company through a transaction with Barrick. Coral believed that, as the Robertson Property was advanced and benefited from Barrick's operating expertise and existing infrastructure, the NSR would become a valuable and sought-after royalty within the industry. Since the announcement of this transition to the royalty business model, Coral did not complete any dilutive equity financings and instead embarked on an aggressive campaign to reduce its outstanding common shares by acquiring Coral shares at what Coral believed were attractive prices. This included the return and cancellation of 4,150,000 Coral shares held by Barrick as part of the royalty model transition when the market price of Coral shares was C$0.08 per share, as well as the repurchase of 8,007,000 common shares through three normal course issuer bids since 2017 at an average purchase price of approximately C$0.39 per share. The value creation for Coral shareholders from these strategic and financial initiatives is evident culminating in the announcement of the Transaction with Nomad.

Coral's CEO David Wolfin commented, "I am delighted to announce this important Transaction with Nomad. Coral has patiently and confidently executed a clear, focused strategy over the past 5 years with the objective of maximizing shareholder value. This Transaction offers numerous benefits to Coral shareholders immediately as well as over the medium to long-term. I look forward to becoming both a Nomad shareholder and warrant holder, and benefitting from the Nomad management team's expertise, key industry partnerships and growth strategy. I also look forward to seeing the Robertson NSR become an important asset within Nomad's growing portfolio."

Benefits to Coral Shareholders

Significant premium to the current share price and continued upside through ownership of Nomad common shares and warrants;

Attractive mix of consideration including cash, Nomad common shares and Nomad warrants;

Immediate exposure to substantial free cash flow from Nomad's diversified portfolio of royalties, streams and gold loans;

Enhanced scale with better access to capital and greater balance sheet flexibility; and

Robust re-rate potential as Nomad pursues its growth trajectory towards intermediate royalty company status.

Approvals and Timing

The Transaction, which is expected to close on or about November 6, 2020, received the unanimous support of the Boards of Directors of Nomad and Coral. Certain Coral shareholders as well as Coral's directors and officers, holding or having control or direction over an aggregate of 39.46% of the issued and outstanding Coral shares, have entered into a support and voting agreement with Nomad to vote in favour of the Transaction.

The Transaction will be implemented by way of a court-approved plan of arrangement under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia). It will be subject to the approval of at least two-thirds of the votes cast by Coral shareholders, and a simple majority of votes cast by Coral "minority" shareholders in accordance with Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions, at a special meeting of Coral shareholders to be held on or about late October, 2020 to consider the Transaction (the "Special Meeting").

In addition to Coral shareholders' and court approval, the Transaction is subject to regulatory approval, including approval by the TSX for the listing of the shares to be issued by Nomad and the common shares issuable upon exercise of the Warrants, if any, and other closing conditions customary for transactions of this kind. The Arrangement Agreement includes customary deal protection provisions in favour of Nomad, including non-solicitation covenants and a right to match superior proposals, and a termination fee in favour of Nomad equal to 4.5% of the market capitalization of Coral on the date of any termination of the Arrangement Agreement by Coral.

Financial and Legal Advisors

Coral's financial advisor is Cantor Fitzgerald Canada Corporation and PI Financial Corp. provided an independent fairness opinion to Coral's Board of Directors. Harper Grey LLP is Coral's legal counsel. Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP is Nomad's legal counsel.

No Offer or Solicitation

This announcement is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to purchase or a solicitation of an offer to sell Coral shares or an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy Nomad shares.

None of the securities to be issued pursuant to the Arrangement Agreement have been or will be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities laws, and any securities issued in the Transaction are anticipated to be issued in reliance upon available exemptions from such registration requirements pursuant to Section 3(a)(10) of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable exemptions under state securities laws.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Lewis Teal, P. Geo., a qualified person under National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

CONTACT INFORMATION

For more information about Nomad Royalty Company, please visit our website at www.nomadroyalty.com or email us:

Vincent Metcalfe, CEO

vmetcalfe@nomadroyalty.com Joseph de la Plante, CIO

jdelaplante@nomadroyalty.com

ABOUT NOMAD

Nomad Royalty Company Ltd. is a gold & silver royalty company that purchases rights to a percentage of the gold or silver produced from a mine, for the life of the mine. Nomad owns a portfolio of 11 royalty, stream, and gold loan assets, of which 5 are on currently producing mines. Nomad plans to grow and diversify its low-cost production profile through the acquisition of additional producing and near-term producing gold & silver streams and royalties. For more information please visit: www.nomadroyalty.com.

Nomad Royalty Company Ltd.

500-1275 ave. des Canadiens-de-Montreal

Montreal, Quebec H3B 0G4

nomadroyalty.com

ABOUT CORAL

Coral is a precious metals exploration company, where it has explored one of the world's richest gold districts in Nevada for over 30 years. Coral's primary asset is a sliding scale net smelter returns production royalty on Barrick's Robertson Property in Nevada. Coral also holds a portfolio of strategically-located exploration projects near Barrick's Pipeline/Cortez Mine Complex on Nevada's Battle Mountain/Cortez Trend.

Coral Gold Resources Ltd.

Suite 900 570 Granville Street

Vancouver, British Columbia

Canada V6C 3P1

www.coralgold.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical fact, that address events or developments that Nomad and Coral expect to occur, are forward looking statements. Forward looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "scheduled" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur including, without limitation, the satisfaction of all conditions precedent for the closing of Transaction; the timing for the completion of the Transaction; the anticipated timing for holding the Special Meeting; the receipt of court, shareholder and regulatory approvals required for the Transaction; the potential impact of the Transaction on the combined entity's future operations; the exploration update and development of the Robertson Property; Nomad's ability to become a catalyst for sector consolidation and the best global acquisition-driven precious metals royalty company in the sector; Nomad's diversified global portfolio and potential growth and benefits to Coral shareholders. Although Nomad and Coral believe the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include, the impossibility to satisfy the conditions precedent for the closing of the Transaction, the impossibility to acquire royalties, streams and to fund precious metal streams, gold prices, Nomad's royalty and stream interests, mineral resource estimates, access to skilled consultants, results of mining operations, exploration and development activities for properties with respect to which Nomad holds a royalty or stream, uninsured risks, regulatory changes, defects in title, availability of personnel, materials and equipment, timeliness of government or court approvals, actual performance of facilities, equipment and processes relative to specifications and expectations, unanticipated environmental impacts on operations, market prices, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, but are not limited to, those described under "COVID-19" and "Risks and Uncertainties" in Nomad's Management Discussion and Analysis for the three and six month periods ended June 30, 2020, as well as those described under "Risk Factors" in Nomad's Filing Statement dated May 15, 2020, copies of which are available on Nomad's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Nomad and Coral caution that the foregoing list of important factors is not exhaustive. Investors and others who base themselves on the forward looking statements contained herein should carefully consider the above factors as well as the uncertainties they represent and the risk they entail. Nomad and Coral believe that the expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and such forward-looking statements included in this press release should not be unduly relied upon. These statements speak only as of the date of this press release. Nomad and Coral undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by applicable law.

SOURCE: Coral Gold Resources Ltd.





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/602957/Nomad-Royalty-Company-to-Acquire-Coral-Gold-Marking-the-Start-of-Its-Sector-Consolidation-Strategy




Lars Findsen has been suspended by Danish authorities after being accused of several serious crimes - Sean Pavone / Alamy /www.alamy.com

The head of the Danish agency responsible for gathering foreign and military intelligence has been suspended after a watchdog accused his service of violating Danish data privacy laws, withholding information, and failing to investigate espionage within Danish defence.

Lars Findsen, the head of the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) and two other senior employees have been "suspended from service until further notice," Denmark's Ministry of Defence announced in a brief press release issued on Monday morning.

The suspension came just an hour and a half before Denmark's intelligence watchdog dropped the bombshell conclusions of its ten-month investigation into material passed to it by one of more whistleblowers.

"The submitted material indicates that DDIS's management has failed to follow upon or further investigate indications of espionage around the Ministry of Defence," the Danish Intelligence Oversight Board announced in its press release.

"The submitted material," it added, "indicates that DDIS... has initiated operational activities in violation of Danish law, including obtaining and passing on a significant amount of information about Danish citizens."

The watchdog also accuses DDIS of failing to disclose to it "key and crucial information" and even of "unwarranted" collection of intelligence on an employee of the watchdog itself.

Denmark's Ministry of Defense announced shortly after the conclusions were made public that it planned to carry out an investigation into DDIS "in close dialogue" with the watchdog.

"I look at the matter with the utmost seriousness. It is absolutely vital that we can have confidence that our intelligence services are acting within their powers," said Defence Minister Trine Bramsen.

"Just as it should not be in question whether the intelligence service complies with its obligation to work closely with its watchdog and supervisory bodies."

Story continues

The watchdog's general secretary, who is anonymous for security reasons, told the Daily Telegraph that it was now up to the Danish Ministry of Defence to act on the report.

"We don't have any powers to actually do anything, we can only recommend, which we have done, and now we will continue our normal investigation activities and wait and see what happens," he said.

He said he was not in a position to give further details on the background to the report.

"I'm not allowed to elaborate further on the press release because it's related to very sensitive material and we can't really say any more than we do."
(Natural News) Asteroid 2020 QG broke the record for the closest flyby to Earth that did not result in an impact. But while it managed to avoid collision, the asteroid didnt fly past the planet unscathed.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said that the path of 2020 QG was forever changed by the gravitational force of Earth. The asteroid is now traveling in space in a new trajectory since its close run-in.

Its really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close because we can see the Earths gravity dramatically bend its trajectory, said Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Record-breaking asteroid now on a different path

Asteroid 2020 QG journeyed past Earth on Saturday night, August 15. It flew 1,830 miles above the Indian Ocean in its closest approach, which is about one-fourth of Earths diameter.

The asteroid is relatively small at 10 to 20 feet. If it were in an impact trajectory, it would have turned into a fireball  a meteor that has a visual magnitude greater than that of Venus, burning as it entered the atmosphere and breaking into fragments of rock.

Although asteroid 2020 QG did not land on Earth, Chodas said that its flyby around Earth forever altered its trajectory in space.

Our calculations show that this asteroid got turned by 45 degrees or so as it swung by our planet.

Astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California were the first to detect the asteroid. By the time they discovered it, however, it was already six hours past its nearest approach.

According to Chodas, detecting such space objects are challenging because they pass by very quickly. Asteroid 2020 QG traveled at a rate of 29,000 miles per hour  slower in comparison to other objects in space but fast enough to avoid immediate detection.

Its quite an accomplishment to find these tiny close-in asteroids in the first place because they pass by so fast, Chodas added.

There are only three asteroids that astronomers were able to detect before landing on Earth: one in Sudan in 2008, the Atlantic Ocean in 2014 and Botswana in 2018. Every day, however, Earth is pummeled by about 17 meteors that are large enough to reach the ground.

Monitoring near-Earth objects

Asteroid 2020 QG is one of the more than 20,000 near-Earth objects (NEO) in the solar system. These are asteroids or comets that orbit the Sun and whose orbits come close to that of Earth. They can be as small as a few feet or be tens of miles long.

NEOs are likely to hit the planet and cause great damage depending on their size. For this reason, several space agencies across the globe are working on tracking and forecasting the behavior of these objects.

NASAs CNEOS computes the orbits of NEOs and their odds of hitting Earth. It has found 95 percent of the mountain-sized asteroids in Earths neighborhood, none of which poses an impact risk in the foreseeable future.

NASA is currently working on a comprehensive compilation of near-Earth asteroids that are at least 460 feet wide. Larger asteroids are more easily detected farther away from Earth because they move slower across space than smaller asteroids. This upcoming compilation can help with risk assessment and inform hazard planning. (Related: NASA updates its plan to deflect potentially hazardous Earth-bound asteroids.)

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency (ESA)s Near-Earth Object Coordination Center is also conducting efforts to monitor NEOs. It plans to launch the Hera mission that will be the first-ever probe to a binary asteroid  a system of two asteroids that orbit each other.

Hera can help scientists and future mission planners better understand the structure and behavior of asteroids in response to a kinetic impact.

Space.news has more on asteroids and their impact probability.

Sources include:

LiveScience.com

JPL.NASA.gov

Space.com

CosmosMagazine.com

ESA.int 1

ESA.int 2
One Chinese AI company, Megvii, which has been blacklisted by the U.S. Commerce Department for alleged involvement in the Chinese governments repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang, is applying its technology to a program to recognize dogs by their nose prints. Other tech companies around the world have had a go

at identifying chimpanzees, dolphins, horses and lions, with varying degrees of success.
After the Post published the account of Barry's views of her brother, the president said in a statement late Saturday, "Every day it's something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I'll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!"

The Washington Post, which released some of the recordings in a story Saturday night, said it sought comment about the tapes from Barry and White House officials on Friday and Saturday. The paper reported that it did not receive a response.

"He has no principles. None. None," the now-83-year-old Barry said of her brother, the U.S. leader, during 15 hours of taped conversations that her niece secretly recorded.

"All he wants to do is appeal to his base," Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary Trump, who recently published a top-selling book condemning the presidents outlook on life as she watched it in family gatherings during his formative years.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was dismissive of the accusations on the "Fox News Sunday" show, saying, "Another day, another political attack."

The recording disclosed by the Post referred to a time earlier in the Trump presidency when he sought to halt thousands of undocumented immigrants from entering the United States from across the Mexican border and for a while separated children from their parents.

"I mean, my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this," Barry said. The retired judge said how appalled she was at how her brother acted as president. "His... tweet and lying, oh my God," she said. "Im talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy s**t."

She lamented "what they're doing with kids at the border" and surmised that her brother "hasn't read my immigration opinions" in court cases. In one instance, she berated an immigration judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant with respect. "What has he read?" Mary Trump asked her aunt about the president. "No. He doesn't read," Barry responded.

At another point in the recording reported by the newspaper, Barry said to her niece, "Its the phoniness of it all. It's the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel."

Mary Trump, 55, told the Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she plans to do "everything in my power" to elect Democrat Joe Biden. Mary Trump's father, Fred Trump Jr., died in 1981 of an alcohol-related illness when she was 16. In her book, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," she says Donald Trump and his father mistreated her father.

A spokesman for Mary Trump, Chris Bastardi, said that she began taping conversations with Barry in 2018 after concluding that her Trump relatives had lied about the value of the family estate two decades earlier when Fred Trump Sr., the president's father and family patriarch, died.

During a legal battle over her inheritance, she at first was set to receive far less than she expected, but the dispute was settled privately in 2001.
An influencer has posted an emotional video apologising to her followers for promoting cosmetic surgery after experiencing complications from a Brazilian butt lift.

Renee Donaldson, 24, from Stratford, East London, who has over 138,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, made a plea to young women not to alter their bodies in an emotive clip about her experience of travelling to Turkey for surgery.

She explained she had experienced complications after returning to Turkey on three different occasions to correct the results of her surgery, saying: 'My pain is horrible and I cant walk some days at all. The pain is a throbbing pain, and every time I said to them I was in pain they would tell me its normal.'

In the emotional video, Renee said she had had 'twenty girls' messaging her about 'botched' operations at the clinic, revealing: 'Please say no to surgery unless its life or death. You can achieve what you want by going to the gym... I'm sorry for any harm or any influence I've caused to you lot to go and do surgery.'

Scroll down for video

Renee Donaldson, 24, from Stratford, East London, who is best known across social media platforms as Miss R Fabulous, has spoken openly about undergoing botched surgery to enhance her bottom

She revealed how she was forced to travel to Turkey three times to have the surgery corrected and has now been left with a painful and swollen thigh after doctors injected fat into her leg

In a video shared earlier this week, Renee said she had cosmetic surgery after seeing girls with the 'perfect body' on social media.

She revealed she thought having a procedure to alter her figure would be easier to achieve her desired look than going to the gym.

She explained: 'I wasnt happy with my body. I was insecure about my stomach and back rolls and not having that perfect body.

'I would see girls on social media with the perfect body and I wanted that. I was too lazy to go to the gym, so it was the easy way.'

Renee, pictured before the surgery, said she wanted to have the operation because she felt insecure about not having the perfect body

Renee said she became involved with the clinic after they initially asked her to be an ambassador for them, revealing: 'Based on who I was, they wanted me to help boost their platform.'

She asked the company for a 360 liposuction procedure from her stomach to transfer the necessary fat into her bottom.

She went on to have a 'standard BBL and arms' during her first surgery in Istanbul, but said they botched the operation by removing fat from her lower abdomen instead of the upper part of her stomach.

She revealed: 'I then started to see complications and certain things wasn't right. I had caught an infection in my left bum cheek.'

The Brazilian butt lift: How common is it? With a Brazilian butt lift, fat is taken from various parts of the body and put with the buttocks. It has grown increasingly popular in the United States, becoming the fastest-growing type of plastic surgery, according to 2015 statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. The rate of buttock lift procedures rose 252 percent from 2000 to 2015. The total went from 1,356 to 4,767 procedures over the course of that time. Injecting fat into the butt can lead to problems if done improperly, including fat embolism - which is when fat enters the bloodstream and blocks a blood vessel. The estimated death rate for BBL is 1 in 3000, according to PlasticSurgery.org. Advertisement

Upon returning to the UK, Renee said she was 'rushed to A&E', and said she was put on antibiotics and left with a permanent scar on her body from the operation.

She said three months later, the doctors asked her to come back to Turkey so they could rectify the problem.

However she now believes she wasn't properly healed at the time and that the company should have warned her about it, saying: 'As a clinic, it is their responsibility to say, "You are not in a state to have surgery again. You've not healed yet".

'To my understanding, my bum was healed at that time.'

Renee (pictured) now experiences stabbing pain and is unable to walk at times because of the botched procedure

After her second BBL had healed, Renee felt she didn't have the 'look' which she had hoped she could achieve.

She felt forced to return to Turkey for the third time however, after the surgery, her thigh was left swollen and painful to touch, saying: 'I woke up and had bruises all over my leg.'

She now believes fat was injected into her thigh, and will have a fourth surgery in London in several months time in order to correct the issues.

Renee revealed: 'My pain is horrible and I cant walk some days at all. The pain is a throbbing pain, and every time I said to them I was in pain they would tell me its normal.'

Renee travelled to Turkey three times in order to have corrective surgery before being left with a painful throbbing pain in her thigh (pictured). She will now have corrective surgery in the UK

She accused the company of 'changing' their behaviour after she complained about her surgery online, and claimed they have now refused to hand over her health documents which she needs for her operation in the UK.

She explained: 'Its been four months and Im still waiting on my documents. They wont give me it because I made a YouTube video and Instagram post.'

Renee went on to share photographs and messages from other women who've contacted her with their own experiences in her YouTube video.

Meanwhile she added: 'All three surgeries have been a fail. They've all been disgusting. Ever since I had surgery, I've not been happy.'

Renee (pictured) said the clinic weren't clear with her about the dangers of having corrective surgery before her first operation had been completely healed

The influencer urged others not to have operations from the same company, saying: 'To anybody that I've influenced to get surgery, I want to say I am absolutely so sorry.

'At the end of the day I didn't know that this company was so bad and so toxic. I didn't know that this company only cares about themselves and the money.'

Renee admitted that if she was aware of how the company treats their patients, she wouldn't have undergone the procedure.

Renee (pictured) urged her followers not to have surgery and said the company she had used was 'toxic'

Renee (pictured) told her 138,000 YouTube subscribers that if she was aware of the company's culture, she wouldn't have had the surgery

She said: 'Please young women, and women, around the world, I have been fighting for my health.

She begged her followers to go to the gym to get the body they want, adding: 'It might take longer but its worth it.

'Not everything you see will work for you. Embrace what you have and love yourself.'
But while most of us, regardless of party or ideology, condemn such activists and seek to have nothing to do with them, the same cannot be said for those who continue to espouse Marxism despite its manifest flaws, deliberate falsehoods and horrendous real-world consequences.

Unless and until Marxists and their enablers achieve their ultimate end, we still live in a free society. Among other things, that means we are all free to associate with whomever we wish. We can listen to radical voices or tune them out. We can give our money and time to the causes and organizations that best reflect our values. Correspondingly, we can withhold money and time from those who reject our values and actively work to subvert them.

Public discussions about free speech and the cancel culture often elide important distinctions. Under no circumstances should any government try to police the expression of ideas, even abhorrent ones, unless the individuals in question are urging their audiences to engage in violence or other criminal behavior. At the same time, when private individuals go beyond expressing their own views and attempt to use force to silence others  by engaging in trespass, vandalism, physical obstruction or worse  they are no longer playing by the rules of a free society. They are seeking to overturn them.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 23

By Nargiz Sadikhova - Trend:

The value of trade turnover between Kazakhstan and Germany amounted to $663.3 million over first five months of 2020, compared to $635.8 million during the same period of 2019, Trend reports with reference to Kazakhstans Statistics Committee.

The share of Germany in the total value of Kazakhstans trade turnover was 1.9 percent during the reporting period of 2020 which is compared to 1.7 percent during the same period of 2019.

Kazakhstans export to Germany amounted to $120.2 million over the period from January through May 2020, compared to $125.2 million during the same period of 2019.

Germanys share in total volume of Kazakhstans export amounted to less than 0.5 percent during the reporting period of 2020 which is flat year-on-year.

In turn, Kazakhstans import from Germany amounted to $543.03 million over the reporting period compared to $510.6 million during the same period of 2019.

Germanys total share in Kazakhstans import was 4.3 percent during the reporting period of 2020 which is flat year-on-year compared to 3.7 percent during the same period of 2019.

The total volume of Kazakhstans trade turnover amounted to $34.9 billion over the period from Jan. through May 2020 which indicates a decrease from $37.5 billion during the same period of 2019.

Kazakhstans export amounted to $22.3 billion during the reporting period of 2020 ($23.6 billion in the same period of 2019), whereas import amounted to $12.6 billion ($13.9 billion).

---

Follow the author on twitter: @nargiz_sadikh
A St. Louis couple charged for waving guns during a Black Lives Matter protest outside their home say they have 'a god-given right' to defend themselves.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, lawyers in their 60s, warned violence will come 'to a neighborhood near you' ahead of their appearance at the Republican National Convention Monday evening.

Speaking to Fox News Mark McCloskey said they will emphasize that safety and security are basic tenets of freedom - a theme that fits with the law-and-order focus of Republican President Donald Trumps reelection campaign.

'Just that we have a God-given right to defend ourselves, and the right of self-defense is one of the most basic civil rights, one of the most basic human rights,' McCloskey said.

St. Louis, like many cities across the country, has seen demonstrations in the weeks since George Floyd's death in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

The McCloskey case drew Trump's attention, especially after Democratic St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filed felony unlawful use of a weapon charges in July.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, lawyers in their 60s, warned violence will come 'to a neighborhood near you' ahead of their appearance at the Republican National Convention Monday evening

Mark and Patricia McCloskey emerged from their St. Louis mansion with guns after protesters walked onto their private street in June of this year

Trump considered the charges an 'egregious abuse of power,' his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said.

Mark McCloskey added: 'You cannot have freedom and an opportunity to advance unless you have basic safety and security, and that it is not just limited to big cities. They are bringing it to a neighborhood near you.'

Patricia McCloskey added: 'You think you have a right to defend yourself and your family and it's shocking that we are still having the fallout. We have years of this following us.'

She described how protesters 'broke an iron fence down' before 'trying to set fire to the mayor's house'.

Patricia McCloskey described how protesters 'broke an iron fence down' before 'trying to set fire to the mayor's house'

Patricia McCloskey and her husband Mark McCloskey draw their firearms on protestors, including a man who holds a video camera and microphone, as they enter their neighborhood during a protest against St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson

Several hundred demonstrators on June 28 veered onto the private street where the McCloskey's Renaissance palazzo-style mansion sits.

The McCloskeys, who have a 25-year history of filing a slew of lawsuits, said the protesters knocked down an iron gate and ignored a 'No Trespassing' sign. Protest leaders said the gate was open and the demonstration was peaceful.

Mark McCloskey came out with a semi-automatic rifle and his wife emerged with a handgun. No shots were fired. Missouri law allows homeowners to use force, even lethal force, to defend their homes.

Gardner said the guns created the risk of bloodshed. A police probable cause statement said protesters feared 'being injured due to Patricia McCloskeys finger being on the trigger, coupled with her excited demeanor'.

The McCloskeys contend the protest was anything but peaceful.

'They broke the gate down,' Patricia McCloskey said on 'Fox & Friends. 'They broke it open, then they broke what was left of it down to the ground, an iron fence, and came in and started screaming threats from the beginning. They had weapons, they had fire material.'

The couple, who met when they were at Southern Methodist University law school, moved into the palazzo at One Portland Place having filed a lawsuit in 1988 to obtain the property.

Bruce McCloskey, who died in 2014, removed his son from the will

They sued a man who sold them a Maserati they claimed was supposed to come with a box of hard-to-find parts, the paper reported.

In November 1996, Mark McCloskey filed two lawsuits, one against a dog breeder whom he said sold him a German Shepherd without papers and the other against the Central West End Association for using a photo of their house in a brochure for a house tour after the McCloskeys had told them not to.

For years the couple have been at war over the rights to a small patch of land bordering their property.

The McCloskeys, according to the paper, have also constantly sought to force their neighborhood trustees to maintain the exclusivity of Portland Place.

They accused the trustees of selectively enforcing the written rules for living in the neighborhood, known as the trust agreement, and in particular failing to enforce a rule about unmarried couples living together.

Their insistence was seen as an attempt to force gay couples from the community.

The trustees voted to impeach Patricia McCloskey as a trustee in 1992 when she fought an effort to change the trust indenture, accusing her of being anti-gay.

In 2002, the Portland Place Association sued to foreclose on the McCloskeys house because they were refusing to pay dues.

On a second property, in Franklin County, the couple had disputes with their neighbors over a gravel path, and sued for squatters rights to a section of land.

The McCloskeys also evicted two tenants from a modular home on their property in a period of just over two years.

He sued his employers for wrongful dismissal, and then turned on his own family, in particular after his father largely wrote him out of the will in 2008, sparking a family feud that would last eight years.

Mark McCloskey filed a defamation case against his father and sister in 2011, dismissed it in 2012, and refiled it in 2013. By the time of the final filing, Bruce McCloskey was living in a memory care unit in Ballwin; he died in 2014.

In March 2013 McCloskey sued his father and his father's trust over a gift of five acres, promised in 1976, which never materialized.

A judge ruled against him in 2016.

The McCloskey case drew Trump's attention, especially after Democratic St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filed felony unlawful use of a weapon charges in July

Several hundred demonstrators on June 28 veered onto the private street where the McCloskey's Renaissance palazzo-style mansion sits

Mark McCloskey said that Democrat-controlled St. Louis 'is a very dangerous place,' and the statistics back him up. The city has long had one of the nation's highest homicide rates, and 2020 is shaping up to be the most violent year in decades.

'This is a prosecutor who has a remarkably low prosecution rate, a remarkably low conviction rate, and I think shes just trying to make an example out of anybody whos willing to stand up against the inherent lawlessness and violence in St. Louis,' he said.

Gardner said in a statement that she was disappointed that the case 'has been exploited for political purposes, which in turn has opened the floodgates for gleeful racist and misogynistic messages and death threats. The people of St. Louis expect me to pursue equal justice under the law without fear or favor, and that is what I intend to do.'

Gardner, St. Louis first Black circuit attorney, was elected in 2016 and appears headed to another term. She easily defeated a white former homicide prosecutor in the August Democratic primary and is heavily favored against her Republican opponent in November.

Mark McCloskey came out with a semi-automatic rifle and his wife emerged with a semi-automatic handgun. No shots were fired. Missouri law allows homeowners to use force, even lethal force, to defend their homes

She's been at odds with high-ranking Republicans before.

In 2018, Gardner charged then-Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, with felony invasion of privacy for allegedly taking a compromising photo of a woman during an extramarital affair.

The charge was eventually dropped but Greitens, who was also under investigation over ethics concerns, resigned in June 2018. He denied committing any crime.

Gardners decision to charge the McCloskeys drew an angry response from several Republicans in addition to Trump.

Gov. Mike Parson has said hell pardon the couple if they are convicted. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt asked a judge to toss out the charges.

During a special session earlier this month to address violence in Missouri cities, Parson asked state lawmakers to give Schmitt 'concurrent jurisdiction' in St. Louis homicide cases - perceived by many as an effort to take power away from Gardner.

Even in the Republican-led Missouri Legislature, the request prompted backlash and caused lawmakers to delay work on crime legislation Parson sought.
Eximbank CEO Bang Moon-kyu, right, gives a briefing during the Strategy & Finance Committee meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul, Monday. / Yonhap





Rep. Ki Dong-min of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea
The 27 former Republican members of the US Congress are encouraging support for Joe Biden in the presidential election.

More than two dozen former Republican United States legislators, including former Senator Jeff Flake, have endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president on the first day of the Republican National Convention, in the latest rebuke of President Donald Trump by members of his own party.

The 27 former members of Congress joined a Republicans for Biden initiative organised by the Biden campaign to encourage Republican support for the Democrat, the Biden campaign said.

They cited Trumps corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course as reasons for the move, according to a Biden campaign statement.

Flake, whose opposition to Trump led the Arizona Republican to retire from the Senate in 2018, was due to speak to reporters later on Monday about his decision to endorse Biden.

Seeing in print in the @WSJ this list of Republican national security officials endorsing Biden is really something. This is basically every GOP luminary of the last 30 years, saying enough to Trump. Stunning, really. pic.twitter.com/Zm6ZfFdyLP  Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) August 21, 2020

The former lawmakers represent only the latest Republican group to endorse the Democratic presidential nominee and oppose Trump in the November 3 election, illustrating how the Republican president has alienated members of his own party.

Last week, 73 former Republican national security officials, including former chiefs of the FBI and CIA, endorsed Biden while calling Trump corrupt and unfit to serve.

Charlie Dent: I'm voting for Joe Biden (Opinion)  CNN https://t.co/tEqO03AY2z  Charlie Dent (@RepCharlieDent) August 19, 2020

The opposition groups object to Trumps alienation of US allies abroad and his leadership at home, including his response to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 176,000 Americans, and triggered a severe economic downturn.

The Trump campaign has described the Republican groups advocating for Biden, such as Republican Voters Against Trump and 43 Alumni for Biden  hundreds of officials who worked for George W Bush  as the swamp and a group of disaffected former officials trying to take down the duly elected President of the United States.
Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL) is likely to soon acquire a 74 per cent stake in Mumbai International Airport (MIAL). With this acquisition, Adani Group flagship will become the largest private operator of airports in the country after GMR Group.

Adani Group is expected to announce acquisition of GVK Group's 50.5 per cent stake before next week, Business Standard reported. AEL would also acquire 23.5 per cent of minority partners, Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) and Bidvest Group. ACSA and Bidvest hold 10 and 13.5 per cent stake, respectively, in MIAL. According to the daily, Adani Group may pay nearly Rs 15,000 crore for the transaction.

The acquisition is also expected to provide the Group ownership of the upcoming Navi Mumbai airport, in which MIAL holds 74 per cent stake.

The union cabinet had recently approved the transfer of six airports on 50-year leases to AEL. The Gautam Adani-led firm will take control of the airports in Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Thiruvananthapuram, and Guwahati. The Adani Group has won rights to operate, maintain and develop these 6 airports in a public private partnership mode.

Meanwhile, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had recently written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting the Centre to rethink its decision to privatise the Thiruvananthapuram International Airport. Vijayan further stated in his letter that the government overlooked Kerala government's numerous pleas that the airport's operations and management be transferred to a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) in which the state dispensation is a major stakeholder.

Shares of AEL were trading at Rs 240.15, up 6.80 points, or 2.91 per cent as against Friday's close on NSE.

Also read: Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri explains why Adani Group got Kerala airport lease

Also read: Cabinet approves leasing out of Jaipur, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram airports to Adani Group
In response to an inquiry from Armenian News-NEWS.am, the National Security Service of Armenia reported that the study on the destruction of documents that was launched in 2018 is still in progress. In addition to other questions regarding the destruction of documents, Armenian News-NEWS.am also asked if, during the official examination, there were such circumstances that serve as a ground to institute a criminal case in regard to the case, and in response, the National Security Service said it could answer those questions only after the study was over.

During his regular press conference in May 2019, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan made a sensational statement, stating that documents of the National Security Service had been destructed before the former government resigned. Later, in the National Assembly, Pashinyan went into detail and said those destructed documents concerned a wide scope of people and events. In May of this year, Pashinyan declared that most of those documents have already been recovered. However, to this day, it is still not clear what those documents were about, what information they could have contained and what the reason for destructing them was.
Fig-1

The newly announced 26 sq. km. Toolleen-Fosterville Project shown in yellow is conveniently located only 42 miles from Bendigo, and 12 km from the 7.58 Moz Au Fosterville Gold Mine.

The newly announced 26 sq. km. Toolleen-Fosterville Project shown in yellow is conveniently located only 42 miles from Bendigo, and 12 km from the 7.58 Moz Au Fosterville Gold Mine.

Fig-2-3

Fig 2 (L)  Open cut mine on the northern extent of the property  Fig 3 (R)  Dr. Boucher (foreground) inspecting the surface scree while discussing paleochannel and reef evidence with Tom Burrowes of PGM.

Fig 2 (L)  Open cut mine on the northern extent of the property  Fig 3 (R)  Dr. Boucher (foreground) inspecting the surface scree while discussing paleochannel and reef evidence with Tom Burrowes of PGM.

Fig 4-5

Fig 4 (L)  Gold nuggets recovered from one of the farms on EL6001  Fig 5 (R)  Angular reef quartz and rounded glacial quartz scree of Permian glacial origin.

Fig 4 (L)  Gold nuggets recovered from one of the farms on EL6001  Fig 5 (R)  Angular reef quartz and rounded glacial quartz scree of Permian glacial origin.

Fig-6

Faults and block movements in the Toolleen and surrounding area.

Faults and block movements in the Toolleen and surrounding area.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A.I.S. Resources Ltd. ( TSX: AIS, OTCQB: AISSF ) (AIS or the Company) announces that on August 24th, 2020 the Company entered into a Binding Letter of Intent (LOI) with Providence Gold and Minerals Pty Ltd (PGM), to acquire the Toolleen-Fosterville Gold project (the Project) located 3 km from the township of Toolleen and 12 km from the Kirkland Lake Fosterville gold mine. The Project is situated on freehold land and has no native title claim.

Fig 1: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9b6f0ce0-ba9d-4485-b781-9d05f7c87cff

Close to the 7.58Moz. Gold Fosterville Mine

AIS President & CEO, Phillip Thomas commented, With the Toolleen-Fosterville Projects close proximity to the 7.58 Moz. gold Fosterville Mine ( Kirkland Lake GoldKL-NYSE ) we are in good company. To be able to acquire a property with an open cut mine, free gold on the surface, substantial geological work and evidence of quartz augurs well. Other explorers around our new project include: Fosterville South Exploration ( FSX-V ), Nubian Resources ( NBR-V ), Catalyst Metals ( CYL-AX ), and Petratherm Limited ( PTR-AX ). The Project area, which is adjacent to the recently lifted exploration moratorium area, is located within the Bendigo-Ballarat Zone of the Palaeozoic Lachlan Fold Belt of eastern Australia and the greenstone corridor running north south. The gravity survey shows highly prospective areas. The experience at Fosterville and Bendigo suggests that the shallow gold mineralisation may be indicative of high-grade shoots that can be mined by underground methods. This exploration project is a perfect addition to the AIS Resources more advanced exploration stage Yalgogrin Gold Project. The Company is finalizing definitive agreements for the Yalgogrin and Toolleen-Fosterville Gold Projects and is looking forward to executing its exploration plans in Australia.

Story continues

Toolleen-Fosterville Project Acquisition Terms

Under the terms of the LOI, AIS Resources will acquire 100% interest in the Project, by paying AU$375,000 (CAD$356,250) and issuing AIS shares equal to AU$375,000 (CA$356,250) to the Vendor, PGM. A 1% NSR is payable on all gold production. The Acquisition is expected to occur by September 14, 2020 and is subject to the receipt of all necessary approvals and all conditions having been satisfied or waived with respect to the terms of the LOI including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange.

The vendors geologist, Dr. Rodney Boucher, a pre-eminent Geologist with over 25 years experience in central Victoria geology will be assisting in the handover and future work on the Project. Several prospectors have been on the EL tenement ground and surrounding tenements and have recovered surface gold.

Fig 2 & Fig 3: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/994394bd-a654-4a02-913c-2e844f265981

Local Geology Prospective for Gold Deposits

The Toolleen Gold Zone was mined underground until 1957 with a reported 7,000 tonnes @ 10g/t Au being produced from the top 60 metres. Willman (2007) showed that the best mineralisation at both Bendigo and Castlemaine was found a few kilometres into the hanging walls of major faults thus, these areas of shallow cover are both prospective and easy to explore. PGM had previously discovered the Four Eagles project operated now by Catalyst Metals in the hanging wall in a similar position. The Mt William Fault transects the tenement in a north-west south-east direction.

Fig 4 & Fig 5: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/dc7994ca-539e-4d9a-a2c7-b02f9032b265

The Lachlan fold belt has been subdivided into eight zones based on age, rock types and structural history (Grey, 1988). The Permian glaciation is evidenced by small subsurface and locally outcropping occurrences of glacigene sediments that provide evidence of the glaciation. This occurred in eastern Australia during the lower Permian affecting the Toolleen area. Fluvio-glacial and glacial sediments crop out poorly and tend to be preserved in down faulted blocks or have been reworked into younger deposits. EL006001 is east of the Mt William fault.



Fluvial sediments have reworked Palaeozoic reef quartz and gold along with Permian glacial clasts into ancient rivers that criss-cross the tenement during the Cenozoic. Fosterville is unique in the region as it represents a large North striking West dipping fault reef up to 20 metres wide and eight kilometres long hosting rich gold reefs with finely disseminated gold. . Fosterville was attractive due to the arsenopyrite-hosted, fine disseminated folding (even though it wasnt unique with similar mineralisation at Nagambie & Bailieston and even in small parts of Bendigo and Daylesford), but has become famous for the abundant nuggetty gold.

At the deposit scale, high-angle secondary reverse faults and dilational cross structures served as conduits for the mineralising fluids. In addition to the fault-controlled mineralisation, where accommodation occurs at the apexes of tight fold hinges, mineralisation can occur as stacked saddle or trough reefs as commonly seen within the Bendigo area.

Fig 6: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a88ee8ec-9879-470d-840c-a2d903e2bd24

Technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Phillip Thomas, CEO of AIS, who is a Qualified Person under the definitions established by the National Instrument 43-101.

About AIS Resources Limited

AIS Resources Ltd. is a publicly traded investment issuer listed on the TSX Venture Exchange focussed on precious and base metals exploration. The Company is managed by a team of experienced mining and geological professionals. AIS has been involved in manganese trading from mines in Peru. In July 2020, AIS entered into an agreement to acquire and develop the Yalgogrin Gold Project in central New South Wales, Australia.

For further information, please contact:

Phillip Thomas, Chief Executive Officer, AIS Resources Ltd.

Tel: +1-747 2009412

Email: pthomas@aisresources.com

Or

Martyn Element, Executive Chairman

Email: melement@aisresources.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.




Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:54:01|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- China looks forward to jointly implementing the consensus reached by the leaders of China and the European Union (EU), and advancing key political, economic and trade agendas of both sides through Chinese foreign minister's visit, a spokesperson said Monday.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told a press briefing that State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will pay an official visit to Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, France and Germany from Aug. 25 to Sept. 1.

It will be Wang's first foreign tour as the COVID-19 epidemic eases, Zhao said.

He said this year marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of China-EU diplomatic relations, and both sides have actively worked together to promote bilateral and international cooperation in dealing with the COVID-19 epidemic, which has enriched the China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership.

Noting that the international situation is increasingly unstable and uncertain in the wake of the epidemic, Zhao said it is more important for China and the EU to cooperate in promoting the unity of the international community in the face of COVID-19, safeguarding multilateralism and restarting the global economy.

According to the spokesperson, China hopes to deepen cooperation with the EU in responding to COVID-19 and stabilizing global industrial and supply chain, and in fields such as the digital and green economies.

China also looks forward to a concerted voice in safeguarding multilateralism and improving global governance to make greater contributions to the world peace, stability and development, Zhao said. Enditem
Bengaluru, Aug 24 : With the Karnataka government convening an eight-day monsoon session of the state Legislature from September 21 for passing Bills and discussing major issues like the Covid pandemic and development works, there is a renewed clamour for cabinet posts as six vacancies remain to be filled.

"There is clamour in the ruling BJP for the six cabinet posts that are vacant even a year after the party came to power on July 26, 2019 and two cabinet expansions in August 2019 and February 2020," party's state unit spokesman G. Madhusudhana told IANS.

As the state Legislative Session has to be convened within six months of the previous session, which was in March, Assembly and Council will meet from September 21 to pass Bills and transact other government business, as it (session) got delayed due to Covid-induced lockdown and its extension.

"Cabinet formation, expansion and reshuffle of ministry are an ongoing process in any government or state. In the 34-member Ministry, though six posts have to be filled, over a dozen native and defected but re-elected legislators are vying to occupy them at the earliest," admitted Madhusudhana.

Of the many aspirants, Congress defectors M.T.B. Nagaraj and R. Shankar, who got elected to the Council on June 22 biennial polls, and Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) defector A. H.Vishwanath, who got nominated to the Council on July 22, are front runners for the cabinet posts along with eight-time BJP Legislator Umesh Katti and C.P. Yogeshwar, who was also nominated to the Council.

As 11 of the 12 defectors from the Congress and JD-S were made ministers in the February cabinet expansion after they got re-elected in the December 5 bye-elections in 15 Assembly segments, Nagaraj, Shankar and Vishwanath are waiting to join them, as they resigned from their Assembly seats in July 2019.

As Nagaraj and Vishwanath lost in the by-election from Hoskote in Bengaluru Rural district and Hunsur in Mysuru district, they were made members of the Council to reward them with a cabinet post as the other defectors have been by the ruling party and Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa.

Shankar, who too defected from the Congress and joined the BJP in November, was not given a ticket to contest in the by-election from Ranebennur in Haveri district but was assured by the ruling party of being made a Council member.

Nagaraj and Shankar were cabinet ministers in the 14-month JD-S-Congress coalition government from May 23, 2018 to July 23, 2019.

Though the Supreme Court in November upheld the disqualification of the 17 defectors by the Congress and JD-S by the former Assembly speaker (K. R.Ramesh Kumar) under the anti-defection law, it allowed them to re-contest in the Assembly by-elections.

"Resignation of the 17 defectors, including 14 from the Congress and three from the JD-S from their Assembly seats led to the fall of the coalition government after its Chief Minister H. D.Kumaraswamy lost the confidence vote in the Lower House for want of majority on July 23, 2019," the party official recalled.

With three defectors and two native Legislators lobbying hard for the six cabinet berths, only one of the party MLAs will be able to get the remaining one post.

"Though Yediyurappa appointed 20 party MLAs as chairman of the state-run boards and corporations, which are equivalent to a cabinet post, four of them rejected as they want cabinet posts," noted Madhusudhana.
Im no fan of Trump as are many others, but this is to everybody who keeps badmouthing, complaining and blaming Trump, Obama and everybody else for not doing their jobs  If you think you can do a better job, put your name on a ballot and run for office. In order to be president, you only have to be a natural born citizen and 35 years old. From then on, thats it. You can run for president. You can run for Congress. If you think you can do a better job, put your name on a ballot.
Residents and visitors in New Orleans on Sunday were preparing to leave town or hunker down as Marco approaches the Louisiana coast.

Ed Feys of Detroit, Michigan, who was in New Orleans visiting his son, loaded the back of his vehicle with jugs of bottled water and canned goods, saying he's not sure what to expect.

"Is it going to be a catastrophe or is it going to be just a lot of rain?" he said.

New Orleans resident Clay Smith said he's remaining optimistic, as he loaded his car with rations.

"It seems to be moving pretty quickly, and it's not that strong," Smith said. "So, I'm hoping it's a rain event and the power stays on. But, it could go off."

New Orleans resident Matthew Meloy said he filled the tank in his car and planned to check batteries and flashlights and clear the gutters ahead of Marco's arrival. He also planned to move his car to "the highest point possible" since the streets are prone to flooding.

Sandy Port walked the French Quarter, her visit to the city from Bullhead City, Arizona, cut short due to Marco. She was supposed to stay through the end of the month but changed her flight to leave Monday morning.

"I know all about when bad weather comes," she said. "You either want to get ahead of it and try not to ride it out because you just never know what's going to happen."

Marco became a hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico Sunday on a path toward the Louisiana coast. Tropical Storm Laura battered the Dominican Republic and Haiti and headed to the same part of the U.S. coast, also as a potential hurricane.

It would be the first time two hurricanes form in the Gulf of Mexico simultaneously, according to records dating to at least 1900, said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach.

The National Hurricane Center said Marco was about 300 miles (480 kilometers) south of the mouth of the Mississippi River and heading north-northwest at 14 miles per hour (22 kph), packing winds of 75 miles per hour (120 kph).

The centre warned of life-threatening storm surges and hurricane-force winds along the Gulf Coast.

(Image Credit Pixabay)
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An unarmed black man was shot in the back seven times by a white police officer in front of his children after Wisconsin police were called to a domestic dispute yesterday.

Rioting and looting erupted in the wake of the shooting as the County of Kenosha declared a state of emergency, and a curfew has been put into effect by authorities until 7am on Monday.

Jacob Blake, 29, was rushed to hospital following the shooting in Kenosha that prompted neighbors and crowds to gather and confront officers at the scene on Sunday night. Early Monday, family members posted that Blake was in a stable condition at the ICU in Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers issued a statement denouncing 'excessive use of force' by police. As video of the shooting quickly went viral, protesters took to the streets of Kenosha, where police are on high alert.

Video obtained from TMX.News shows a large crowd numbering hundreds of protesters gathered outside a Kenosha police station chanting 'Black Lives Matter' and other slogans denouncing law enforcement.

Demonstrators set fire to vehicles and smashed police cruiser windows as they faced off with police, who set off tear gas canisters to try to disperse the crowd.

Witnesses reported that at least three police officers had their guns drawn as Jacob Blake (seen above in the white t-shirt) was walking away from them in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday

Blake is seen above continuing toward his SUV, where his three children were inside the vehicle

The images above show the moments leading up to the shooting. Blake (seen in the white shirt) walks away from a police officer who has his gun drawn and is ordering him to stop

The shooting happened at around 5pm as officers were responding to a 'domestic incident,' the Kenosha Police Department said in a news release.

In the video, three officers could be seen shouting and pointing their weapons at Blake, who walked around the front of an SUV parked on the street.

As Blake opened the driver's side door and leaned inside, one officer grabbed his shirt from behind and then fired into the vehicle.

At least seven shots could be heard, though it was unclear if more than one officer fired.

Blake's three children were inside the SUV and watched as their father was gunned down, the family's attorney, Ben Crump, confirmed.

The image above shows the moment a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer fired at least seven shots into the back of Jacob Blake as he was getting into an SUV in a residential neighborhood

An unidentified woman (left) is heard in the video screaming as gunshots rang out

Several witnesses said that Blake tried to break up a fight between two women outside a nearby home, according to Kenosha News.

Before resorting to gunfire, the police attempted to subdue Blake with a Taser, to no avail, it was reported.

Benjamin Crump shared video of the incident on his Twitter feed, and confirmed today he is now representing Blake's family, and will 'demand answers' from police.

'We all watched the horrific video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back several times by Kenosha Police. Even worse, his three sons witnessed their father collapse after being riddled with bullets.

'Their irresponsible, reckless and inhumane actions nearly cost the life of a man who was simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident. It's a miracle he's alive.'

Crump is the attorney who represents the family of George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man who died in the custody of Minneapolis police in late May.

Floyd's death ignited massive nationwide protests and rioting as millions took to the streets over the course of several weeks to demand the police officers responsible be tried and convicted.

Following the shooting, neighbors could be seen gathering in the streets and hurling comments at police. Some could be heard chanting, 'No justice, no peace.'

Blake is seen far left with his three children. Witnesses said all three of his kids were in the back seat of the SUV when their father was shot

A dump truck that was parked in an intersection so as to prevent protesters from reaching a police station was set on fire on Sunday

Bystanders watch as a dump truck burns near the police station in Kenosha on Sunday night

Angry residents gathered near the scene of the shooting in Kenosha on Sunday night

Police officers were heckled by local residents in the aftermath of the shooting

Several officers stand guard at the crime scene in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday

Protesters gathered at the site of the shooting on Sunday night in Kenosha

Reports of rioting prompted authorities to declare a state of emergency in the County of Kenosha

Protesters posted images from the scene in Kenosha. Many were heard chanting: 'No justice, no peace'

Tensions ran high near the crime scene on Sunday as neighbors gathered to vent their anger at police over the shooting

Locals reported that some protesters vandalized police cars by smashing windows. Others set fire to dump trucks

Several protesters jumped on top of police squad cars and smashed windows.

One video circulating on social media shows a Kenosha police officer collapse to the pavement after witnesses said he was struck with a brick.

Another video shows a row of protesters walking toward a line of police officers clad in riot gear as simmering tensions threaten to escalate the situation.

A dump truck that was parked at an intersection to prevent traffic from moving toward the police department was set on fire.

Several curious onlookers got close to the burning truck and started taking pictures, but others warned them that the fire could lead to an explosion and warned them to back away.

At 11:05pm, police formed a cordon around the front doors of the police station and then fired tear gas canisters in an effort to disperse a large crowd that had gathered there.

'No justice, no peace!' the crowd was heard chanting.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers released a statement on Sunday denouncing 'excessive use of force' by police

A man could be seen breaking the window of a patrol car parked along the street.

Some police officers were positioned on the roof of the station as people continued toward the building.

Outside the station, protesters faced off with officers who were dressed in riot gear that included plastic facemasks and held plastic shields and batons that they occasionally used to push people back.

A truck that was parked outside the courthouse in Kenosha was also set on fire.

Kenosha Police referred all questions to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond to messages seeking to confirm details of the video.

The Kenosha Sheriffs Department and Wisconsin State Patrol were requested at the scene so another law enforcement agency could take over, police said in the news release.

The city of Kenosha is located on Lake Michigan, about 40 miles south of Milwaukee.

A Kenosha Police Department dispatcher referred calls by The Associated Press to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, the agency that will be investigating the shooting.

A message left with DOJ was not immediately returned.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers released a statement regarding the shooting late Sunday evening.

'Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin,' the statement read.

'Kathy and I join his family, friends, and neighbors in hoping earnestly that he will not succumb to his injuries.

A massive crowd is currently gathering in front of the Kenosha Police Station, hours after cops shot Jacob Blake https://t.co/7fdcnjNtD4  philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) August 24, 2020

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers released a statement saying he was 'hoping earnestly' that Blake 'would not succumb to his injuries'

He was airlifted to a hospital in Milwaukee, where he was listed in critical condition

Witnesses reported Blake was trying to break up an argument between two women moments before he was shot

'While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.'

The governor continued: 'We stand with all those who have and continue to demand justice, equity, and accountability for Black lives in our country - lives like those of George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor, Tony Robinson, Dontre Hamilton, Ernest Lacy, and Sylville Smith.

'And we stand against excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites.'
Five suspected cultists have been arrested with human skulls in Ogoja Local Government Area of Cross River State.

According to Danjuma Elisha the Cross River state commandant of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), the suspects were apprehended following a raid in a compound in Ogoja area.

He said;

This is a case of suspected cultism, ritualists in Ogoja Local Government Area. They were found with all the items they used in their activities. We raided the place because it is a compound. Eventually, four of them were found to be the people involved. So we are targeting them this time for the public to see.

Elisha added that the suspects will be handed over to the police for further investigation and prosecution.
Mainstreaming Ayurveda  Developing AYUMED for India and the World

As a part of the India Healthcare Week  Redefining healthcare ecosystem held last week, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) organized the Global Ayurveda Conference 2020, Resurgent Ayurveda: Leveraging Global Potential to develop cohesive strategies, cross sectoral policy dialogue and strategic exchanges to transform AYUSH into the mainstream system of medicine.

The Ministry of AYUSH has focused on the mitigation of COVID and have created specific strategies based on immunomodulation to help tackle the pandemic expressed Padmashri Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha, Secretary, Ministry of AYUSH, Government of India in his opening remarks for the inaugural session of the CII Global Ayurveda Conference 2020.

"We have undertaken a study, in collaboration with the Delhi Police, were we provide a Ayuraksha Kit  and observed the results. The incidence rate of COVID came down up to 4 times in the span of 2 months with a mortality rate of 0.47, showing the strength of AYUSH in mitigating the effects of COVID. We need to move towards institutionalizing AYUSH, and the GOI through the union cabinet have approved the proposal of one pharmacopeia commission which will be able to deliver quality medicines We are on our way to achieving a 10 billion dollar industry", he said.

The Government of Kerala has a wealth of tradition in Ayurveda, very good practices, and we have been promoting and propagating the principles of Ayurveda stated K. K. Shailaja Teacher, Minister for Health, Social Justice & Woman and Child Development Government of Kerala during her address at the CII Global Ayurveda Conference 2020.In our Health policy, we try to blend all the systems of medicine and we give a special place to Ayurveda and integrating these principles and practices in our public health systems. She lauded CIIs efforts in helping to improve the production and selling of ayurvedic medicines throughout the world an in India. We need to move towards more scientific rigorous studies and document the entire process to show the efficacy of Ayurveda in mitigating the challenges of COVID. It is imperative that the Government of India invest more money in Ayurveda and move towards a PPP Model to push the sector.

Satyendar Kumar Jain, Minister of Health, Industries, Power, Public Works Department, Home and Urban Development, Government of NCT of Delhi expressed the importance of Ayurveda medicines and services playing a pivotal role in controlling the panic among patients during the COVID epidemic. Ayurveda wings will be set up in Mohalla clinics and we will upgrade the existing Ayurveda institutions to meet international standards.

Ministry of AYUSH joined the battle of COVID before the actual threat was perceived with self-care guidelines issued in the first week of march stated Pramod Kumar Pathak, Additional Secretary, Ministry of AYUSH Government of India. We have created an AYUSH inter disciplinary research development task force which will undertake scientific studies and prepare the protocols. Under the guidance of this taskforce, multiple RCTs are being undertaken to test the efficacy of AYUSH to mitigate the challenges of COVID. With the cooperation from State Governments, we can control this pandemic, and post COVID, we can create decisive strategies for the future.

Ayush Personnel and manpower, that have been trained and deployed, have been growing steadily stated Dr Gouri Shankar Prasad Mishra, Ayurvedic Medical Officer, Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Odisha. Money has been devolved for the distribution of AYUSH medicines to front line workers and guidelines have been provided to provide medicines free of cost to the population.

As we go through the pandemic, there is a new resurgence seen in Ayurveda, which has translated to focus activities undertaken by different stakeholders. There is a sense of optimism that Ayurveda can translate this scenario into an opportunity stated Rajiv Vasudevan, Chairman, CII Group on Ayurveda and Managing Director and CEO AyurVAID Hospitals. We need to address the issue of capital availability for the industry, and it is imperative that we look at the funding requirements for the industry, the challenges in employment and skill development

The present and future generations will need Ayurveda and India to play a pivotal role expressed Dr Simone Hunziker, Director, Swiss Ayurvedic Medical Academy. COVID has shown that peopleare looking towards preventive care and are turning towards traditional and complementary medicines to find the required help. There is a need for inter-government dialogue and private sector to bring quality medicine in the market. For this, a fine coordinated strategy needs to be in place to approach the administration in Switzerland and Europe, guided by a senior country representatives to overcome these hurdles. Quality control of exports of ayurvedic products in collaborations with Government and private sector is critical to expand markets.

Dr Naresh Trehan, Chairman, CII National Committee on Healthcare and Chairman & Managing Director, Medanta  The Medicity expressed the need towards the convergence and ultimately the fusion of allopathic medicine and AYUSH. Out of India, will emerge the concept oy AYUMED which will bring to the table a strong science from both sides. It is imperative that we amalgamate the two sciences as it will be the biggest benefit to humanity.

The human population is passing through a grave situation of grave concern, we are sure as in similar past situation , the collective efforts of healthcare professionals will come out with tangible solutions with Ayurveda at the fore stated Dr P M Varier, CII Governing Council Member, Head of Kerala State, Ayurveda Panel and Chief Physician, Arya Vaidya Sala.
A crowd of protesters rallied Monday outside an Ocean County diner that has been cited numerous times for offering indoor dining in defiance of state rules aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus.

The protest, organized by Open New Jersey Now and New Jersey for Freedom, came after repeated citations of the Lakeside Diner in Lacey Township. Police changed the locks to the building early Friday, but the owners reopened that same day.

(The owners) are just trying to survive and trying to prevent himself and his wife from losing their business and everything they have built over the last 30 years, said protest organizer Ayla Wolf, the founder of both groups. She said she has held more than a dozen similar rallies around the state, including at Atalis Gym in Bellmawr, which made national headlines after it opened in defiance of Gov. Phil Murphys COVID-19 lockdown.

Brian and Debbie Brindisi, the diners owners, have been cited at least 10 times by authorities, Debbie Brindisi told NJ Advance Media on Friday.

The couple says it was forced to start serving customers indoors for financial reasons and contend the governors orders infringe on their rights.

As well as a need financially to pay our bills here, pay our bills at home, pay our employees, its also a constitutional right, Debbie Brindisi said.

Im here at Laceys Lakeside Diner where a couple dozen people are gathered to show their support for the diners continued defiance against the states ban on indoor dining. pic.twitter.com/KQgqCCPEyo  Keith Schubert (@keithsch94) August 24, 2020

Theres only two ways: Im leaving in handcuffs or a body bag.said owner of Lakeside Diner in #Lacey, whose doors remain open for indoor dining, defying @govmurphys executive order.#StoryComing @njnntv pic.twitter.com/2bL0jZ06Z1  Kimberly Kravitz (@KimberlyKravitz) August 24, 2020

Wolf said Lakeside Diner is a model for how indoor dining can restart safely in New Jersey. The restaurant is seating at only 25% capacity, customers sit more than six feet apart, their temperatures are taken and servers wear masks, she said.

Other nearby states have also begun allowing indoor dining, including some counties in Pennsylvania, Wolf said.

They are opened very safely. They are using the guidelines all the other states like Pennsylvania and New York are using for indoor dining, Wolf said. Were here defending the small businesses in New Jersey that are not being allowed to reopen.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Avalon Zoppo may be reached at azoppo2@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AvalonZoppo.
Austria has announced the expulsion of a Russian diplomat reported to be involved in economic espionage.

Russia hit back, announcing that a diplomat with the Austrian Embassy in Moscow had been declared persona non grata.

The Austrian Foreign Ministry said a diplomat at the Russian Embassy in Vienna was being ordered to leave because of behavior that was not compatible with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

The ministry did not provide further details, but the Austrian daily newspaper Kronen Zeitung reported the Russian diplomat had spied with the help of an Austrian citizen at a technology company for years.

The Russian Embassy to Vienna said on its website that it was "appalled by the unfounded decision of the Austrian authorities, which is damaging to constructive Russian-Austrian relations."

The Russian Foreign Ministry later announced the expulsion of an Austrian diplomat, saying the decision was "based on the principle of reciprocity."

In 2018, Austria declined to join the majority of EU countries that expelled Russian envoys over the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain.

Based on reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters
August is here, a month that seems to fly like an arrow, and as the dawn of a new school year approaches we are facing a very different September.

Normally Id be elated to head into my favourite month. Harvest is beginning at wineries throughout the northern hemisphere and I get to return to my students.

However, the past five months have changed so much. The daily news is inundated with details about the pandemic; we have entered an era that most living generations have never experienced. The fear of the unknown is eerily very present.

With all of the concerning headlines and statistics on illness and death, the subject of wine can seem rather frivolous. Or is it?

In times of crisis, keep calm and carry on is the famous motto that shaped Englands mindset during the Second World War. Theres something reassuringly direct about it, and given the fact that its branded on such things as coffee mugs and dog T-shirts, its certainly applicable today.

Indeed, a sense of normalcy might just be the ticket to help cope with the current state of affairs.

We each have our own normal, from hobbies to activities to routines. Personally my normal includes a glass of wine while I cook dinner. And judging by the line ups I see outside LCBO stores, I dont think Im alone.

Its actually the escapism of wine that allures me  not from the alcohol, mind you  but the notion of how and where it was made. Its this idea that for a moment, I can escape to the south of France with the smell of a beautifully blushing rose. I can close my eyes and picture that warm Mediterranean sun, the smell of lavender in the air, and the uneven ancient stone stairs that lead into town.

Each wine has its own story, and since we could use more happy stories, I think its a beautiful practice to find out more about your wine.

For instance, who actually made your wine? What team of winemakers and grape growers put so many hours of their life into this bottle and what is their story? It took an entire season of growing and additional time in the winery fermenting and aging under the careful watch of these folks. What is the background story of the winery where it was made?

Consider that each year the wine will be different. Pay attention to what vintage (year) your wine was made, and research what the summer was like in that spot in the world. Appreciate that next year the wine wont ever taste like this again.

Now imagine the location that your wine came from. Whether you have travelled there in person or not, in your glass is a virtual passport. Visualize the scenery, the sounds, the smells and the people. The aromas, tastes and flavours of your wine are unique to that part of the world. Remember that because it was bottled there, opening it means youre releasing that first breath of that location into your home.

All of these details change the way youll taste the wine. Think of it like going from a black and white movie scene into technicolour. It amplifies everything. You can apply this to other beverages of your choice, but in this case I had to stick with my normal.

Visiting wineries in person will further enhance your experience, and in Niagara we have the privilege of having nearly a hundred of them around us. If possible, walk around, meet the staff, take in all the beauty around you, and when you do purchase something and bring it home, opening it and enjoying it will be filled with all the memories you made there. Supporting our local wine talent is more important than ever, and it certainly helps that they make the shopping experience a pure delight.

And all of this is only for a moment, in what is a very uneasy time in our life, but it is an important thing to do. Remember what your normal is, and weave it in where you can. Then, carry on.
CENTRAL Visayas now has a 78.39 percent recovery rate in its Covid-19 cases, and it is one of the regions in the country that registered high numbers of patients who survived the respiratory disease.

As of Aug. 23, 2020, the regioncomposed of the provinces of Cebu, Bohol, Negros Oriental and Siquijorhad 14,383 recoveries out of the 18,348 total Covid-19 cases.

The region had 2,895 active cases and 1,070 deaths.

Central Visayas recoveries constituted 10.94 percent of the 131,637 total recoveries nationwide, as of Aug. 23.

The regions high recovery rate was reported by Dr. Mary Jean Loreche, Department of Health (DOH) 7 spokesperson for Covid-19, during an online press conference on Monday, Aug. 24, 2020.

Loreche said the high recovery rate in Central Visayas can be attributed to several factors, including the publics awareness on Covid-19.

They seek early medical consultation so there is early diagnosis and management, she said.

The other attributes, Loreche said, that resulted in more recoveries are the increase in testing capabilities; the hospitals capabilities in providing Covid-19 patients needs; and the availability of beds for the patients in hospitals, quarantine facilities and isolation centers.

Cebu City had the most number of recoveries with 7,632 as of Aug. 23. It also had 1,257 active Covid-19 cases and 623 total deaths as of Aug. 23.

Above 50 percent

Based on the Covid19stats.ph, the other regions with more than 50 percent recovery rate are National Capital Region (64.43 percent), Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (77.20 percent), Davao Region (72.11 percent) and Eastern Visayas (57.90 percent).

In Central Visayas, the critical care utilization rate, as of Aug. 22, had dropped to 22.8 percent.

Also, as of Aug. 22, the intensive care unit (ICU) utilization rate was at 32.7 percent while the utilization of the Covid-19 dedicated beds was at 21.5 percent, said Loreche.

Last July, the ICU bed occupancy was at 73.91 percent while the ward bed occupancy was at 62.39 percent.

Story continues

Appeal

Despite registering a high recovery rate, Loreche appealed to the private hospitals to retain their 30 percent dedicated beds for Covid-19 patients.

Loreche said the DOH 7 is aiming to downgrade Cebu Citys general community quarantine (GCQ) status to modified general community quarantine (MGCQ) status on Sept. 1. Under MGCQ, the quarantine protocol is less stringent than the GCQ, and the healthcare facilities must retain their facilities dedicated for Covid-19 treatment to accommodate patients in case there will be a surge of cases again.

There is also the fear that Covid-19 cases will increase in Central Visayas as more and more locally stranded individuals from other regions and overseas Filipino workers are returning to their home provinces, including Cebu.

Loreche said the nurses and doctors that the DOH 7 deployed to the private hospitals in June and July will remain as long as the hospitals retain their beds and wards for Covid-19 patients.

She said the nurses and doctors will possibly be pulled out after private hospitals will inform them that they will decrease their coronavirus-dedicated facilities.

Pooled testing

The DOH 7, said Loreche, is waiting to be tapped by the DOH central office, Go Negosyo and the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases to start the pooled reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing, which detects Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

RT-PCR is considered the gold standard in Covid-19 detection.

Pooled testing is led by the IATF and Go Negosyo, an advocacy of the Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship, a non-stock, non-profit organization.

Loreche said pooled testing, though, is advisable only in areas with low prevalence of Covid-19 cases.

In the pooled testing method, swab samples of several individuals are put into a single RT-PCR test. If the result is positive, individual assessment will be made to determine which specimen is infected with Sars-CoV-2. But if the RT-PCR test is negative, then individual testing will not be needed anymore.

Loreche said for areas with high prevalence, like Cebu City, which has a 2.2 percent prevalence rate, pooled testing is useful for surveillance purposes.

The pooled RT-PCR testing is expected to bring down the cost of swab tests, optimize the availability of test kits, and reduce the workload of laboratory staff.

National Covid-19 stats

After recording a new low in the daily tally of Covid-19 cases on Aug. 23, the DOH on Monday, Aug. 24, reported new infections that again went past the 4,000 mark and increased the cumulative cases in just 24 days of August to 100,898.

The DOH also reported an additional 13 mortalities from Covid-19, raising the death toll to more than 3,000.

In its 4 p.m. Monday bulletin, the DOH reported a total case count of 194,252, including 4,686 newly confirmed infections based on reports submitted by 95 laboratories.

In just 24 days of August, 100,898 were added to the tally, which stood at 93,354 from January to July.

Of the 194,252 total number of cases, 59,200 were active cases, or patients who were still in the hospitals or in quarantine.

Critical and severe patients comprised 1.4 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively of the active cases. Most of the patients, or 91.5 percent, had mild symptoms while 6.1 percent had no symptoms.

NCR cases

More than half of the new cases, or 2,519, were from the National Capital Region (NCR).

The provinces with the highest number of new cases were Laguna with 286, Cavite with 218, Bulacan with 189 and Rizal with 179.

The DOH also reported 13 additional mortalities, increasing the death toll to 3,010. With the total case count at 194,252, this translates to a case fatality rate of 1.55 percent.

Six of these mortalities occurred in August, six in July and one in June. Eight were from the NCR, two from Calabarzon, and one each from Bicol, Central Visayas and Davao.

The DOH also reported 729 new recoveries, bringing the total to 132,042 as of Monday.

The agency on Sunday reported only 2,378 new infections, the lowest in August so far. Cases have accelerated in August, averaging more than 4,000 a day. (JJL & MVI / SunStar Philippines)
Kwara State Government has announced the closure of all schools, both public and private operating in the state indefinitely as from next week Monday, March 23, 2020.

A statement by the Chief press secretary to the governor, Rafiu Ajakaye, on Wednesday, said the decision was taken in order to discourage the possible contamination of the dreaded Coronavirus among residents in the state.

The statement reads: Good evening gentlemen. I can confirm that Kwara State will be shutting down schools from Monday, March 23rd.

It is part of the efforts to contain the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We urge our people to maintain the highest level of hygiene and to remain calm and adhere to all safety measures earlier announced by the Kwara State Ministry of Health and other national bodies.

He said the government would release soon release to the public details on the closure of schools.

Meanwhile, Lagos State Government has announced the closure of all public and private schools in the state as part of the preventive measures against the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic.
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Storm Francis has struck Britain with full force as London drivers struggled through flash floods with 76mph winds and torrential rain to sweep in overnight.

More than a month's worth of rain is anticipated tomorrow as summer ends with a distinctly autumnal feel and forecasters warn of further travel chaos and power cuts as ferocious winds are set batter the country from the early hours of Tuesday.

Motorists in the capital city barely made it through waterlogged roads as drains struggled to clear the rain quickly enough. Drivers swerved into the paths of oncoming traffic in a desperate bid to avoid flooded roads as blustering winds blasted torrential rain across windscreens.

One user in a high-rise building filmed lashings of rain pelting below as she said: 'This is mother nature for us'.

The Met Office issued a wind warning for 24 hours from 9am tomorrow for most of England and Wales, with the strongest gusts on coasts and hills as unsettled weather continues to arrive from the Atlantic.

A 30-hour alert for rain will also begin at midnight tonight across Northern Ireland, central Scotland, North West England and North Wales - with up to 3.5in (90mm) expected to fall, above the August average of 2.8in (70mm).

Commuters get caught in torrential rain in Putney in South West London as forecasters warn that Storm Francis is set to batter the UK later to night with winds in excess of 50mph along with more heavy rain

South London was hit with a torrential downpour this evening at Storm Francis is set to batter the UK with rain and wind

A person in New Malden is given a piggyback ride to safety from their car to land

The car is nearly fully submerged in water amid the heavy rainfall that cause mass flooding

Videos being sent on social media on Monday evening show the torrential downpours which are expected to spread across the UK

Wild waves leash the seafront at Seaburn in Sunderland, as a further high winds whip up the water in the north of England

Storm Francis engulfing the UK and set to bring torrential downpours and strong winds, putting the country at risk of localised flooding

The Met Office has also put in multiple weather warnings for Tuesday (left) Wednesday (right) for wind and rain

The spell of strong winds will develop across the South West of England and Wales tomorrow morning, before spreading east across other parts of England and Wales overnight, clearing into the North Sea on Wednesday.

The rain warning included the threat of communities being cut off, spray leading to road closures, possible train or bus delays, flooding damaging buildings and fast flowing or deep floodwater 'causing a danger to life'.

Londoners took to Twitter and shared photographs of the devastation caused by the floods.

Nathan O'Connor, who lives on the 14th floor of an apartment block, said three inches of water flooded his balcony and burst through into the sitting room.

Another posted a picture that showed a park in south west London almost entirely flooded with gallons of water.

Others begged for a return of last week's heatwave. Olivia-Anne Cleary said: 'This monsoon-type downpour in South London is not working for me' while another user described the downpour as 'biblical'.

One Twitter user said the torrential rain caused a flood on his balcony that seeped into his sitting room

Downpours caused a 'biblical' amount of rain to flood roads across the capital city

Another posted a picture that showed a park in south west London almost entirely flooded with gallons of water.

The gloomy forecast is bad news for families enjoying a staycation in Britain in the last weeks of the summer holidays, following the cancellation of thousands of foreign trips due to coronavirus travel restrictions. It comes as temperatures fell below zero overnight, with -0.4C (31.3F) at Loch Glascarnoch in the Scottish Highlands.

It follows a similar period of unseasonable weather towards the end of last week, coinciding with the arrival of Storm Ellen, which saw 15-year-old Nicola Williams swept to her death in the Rhymney River in Llanrumney, Cardiff, and a 50-year-old holidaymaker die in the sea near Helston, west Cornwall, after getting into difficulties.

Also last week a child died in Bobbing, Kent, on Friday after being struck by a tree that was toppled by strong winds while another was airlifted to hospital with serious injuries as Storm Ellen battered the country. Elsewhere, a man died and a woman was injured after neighbour's chimney fell onto their house in Bradford yesterday.

Clouds form over the Solent in Portsmouth as Britain braces for another battering when Storm Francis sweeps in with 70mph gales and torrential rain from around midnight tonight

Huge waves strike into the Cornish port town of Porthleven this morning with more strong winds on the way tomorrow

Wild waves leash the seafront at Seaburn in Sunderland today as Britain's next named storm 'Francis' approaches just three days after Storm Ellen trampled the country, leaving four dead

Met Office chief meteorologist Andy Page said: 'The UK is in for another unseasonably wet and windy spell with Storm Francis arriving on Tuesday. There will be strong winds and heavy rain, especially in the west of the UK.

'A number of severe weather warnings have been issued and these warnings can be updated regularly so please keep up to date with the latest Met Office forecast.'

The Met Office issued a wind warning from 9am tomorrow and a rain warning from midnight tonight for parts of Britain

With today looking grey and overcast, Met Office forecaster Craig Snell said: 'This sort of weather pattern is more common in the autumn time, but as we saw from the storms last week we can get it at this time of year as well.

'On Tuesday and Wednesday we may see gusts reach up to 60mph along the coast. This is likely to be accompanied by heavy rain which may well cause some transport delays.

'It's likely to slowly dry up on Wednesday  but this will only be a brief respite before another area of low pressure comes in for Thursday and Friday. It won't be quite as windy but it will be wet.'

Next week's bank holiday is forecast to bring more settled weather, but  in a blow to any thoughts of a fiery end to the barbecue summer  Mr Snell said: 'There's unlikely to be any heat building.'

There were transport issues yesterday when a landslide closed the railway line between Glasgow and Edinburgh at Shotts in Lanarkshire. Passengers were encouraged to use alternative services to and from Glasgow Queen Street.

Meanwhile in Bradford, West Yorkshire, a 47-year-old man died yesterday when a chimney on his next door neighbour's house collapsed and fell through his bedroom roof.

A woman aged 28, who was asleep next to him, had a remarkable escape and was taken to hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries.

Motorists in Croydon risked driving through flooded roads earlier this evening

The road was entirely submerged under gallons of water earlier this evening as cars drove through floods

Onlookers watch this morning from behind a stone wall as huge waves crash into Porthleven harbour in Cornwall

Wild waves leash the seafront at Seaburn in Sunderland today as further high winds whip up the water in the North of England

A spell of strong winds will develop across the South West of England and Wales tomorrow morning (left), before spreading east across other parts of England and Wales overnight, clearing into the North Sea on Wednesday (right)

The chimney pot, bricks and slates from the roof of the two-storey cottage next door collapsed suddenly at 5am yesterday and smashed through the bungalow roof next door causing devastating damage.

Recent windy weather may have weakened the chimney structure and locals said it had been wet and windy again on Saturday night. The debris fell straight into the master bedroom.

The dead man is believed to have been killed instantly and pronounced dead at the scene Emergency services rushed to the scene to find a chaotic scene with piles of rubble and major damage to the two adjoining properties.

Nicola Maxey, meteorologist for the Met Office, added: 'Since 2015 when we started naming storms, we have never had to name a storm in August - and now we've had two in a few days.

'There are a lot of people on holiday in the UK at the moment, going camping and on walking breaks, many in coastal locations where the winds are likely to be stronger, so it is worth checking on the Met Office website ahead of time.'

Meanwhile holidaymakers and sunbathers flocked to the beach at the seaside resort of Lyme Regis in Dorset to soak up the 70F sun this afternoon.

A paddleboarder enjoys the sun on the River Wharfe near Otley in West Yorkshire today as the country braces itself for Storm Francis

Despite the looming Storm Francis, and high winds, hundreds enjoyed the sun on Lyme Regis beach in Dorset today

A woman wearing a face mask walking along the Millennium Bridge in London in the sunshine today

A man paddles boards with a dog on the Solent in Portsmouth. The UK has been braced to expect an 'unseasonably wet and windy spell', as Storm Francis reaches the west of England from the early hours of Tuesday

People out punting on the river Cam in Cambridge making the most of the good weather before it turns wet for the rest of the week

No new storm is currently forecast this month, meaning the next storm will begin with 'A' rather than 'G', as the storm-naming calendar resets on September 1.

Homes had been left without power and roads closed as Storm Ellen - the first named storm during the summer holidays - hit Britain last week.

Four people died, including a man and two children aged 14 and six when their car skidded off the road and plunged into a lake in torrential rain in County Donegal.

In Kent, police said they were called to Parsonage Lane, a narrow rural road that runs through wheat fields, to reports children had been injured shortly after midday on Friday.

A spokesman said one child was declared dead at the scene and the other was airlifted to a London hospital with serious injuries. Shocked locals suggested it was likely to be a 'freak accident'.

A man has died and a woman injured after neighbour's chimney fell onto their house in Bradford, West Yorkshire, yesterday
Washington, August 24, 2020--A new study finds evidence that contradicts claims in legal complaints to the U.S. Department of Justice arguing that Asian American students face negative consequences while in college as a result of not being admitted to and not attending their first-choice institution. These complaints led to the Trump administration launching formal investigations into the race-conscious admissions practices of Harvard and Yale universities. The findings were published today in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

The Justice Department issued its findings on the Yale investigation on August 13; its investigation of Harvard is still ongoing.

The nearly identical complaints filed by the Coalition of Asian American Associations (CAAA) and the Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) specifically cited several negative consequences for these students: reduced time spent on leadership, public service, and co-curricular activities; diminished satisfaction in their academic institutions; a negative attitude toward academics and lower academic achievement; a lack of self-confidence and assertiveness; and negative racial interactions.

To test the groups' claims, a team of seven researchers at the University of Denver and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), examined differences in Asian American student outcomes while in college, based on their college admission and enrollment decisions. For their study, the researchers analyzed longitudinal data from two national surveys administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA: the 2012 Freshman Survey and 2016 College Senior Survey. The study's sample included 1,023 students who self-identified as Asian American and completed both surveys.

The researchers assessed 27 student outcome measures spread across six general categories. The categories included academic performance and perception of academic abilities; satisfaction with college; self-confidence and self-esteem; level of student involvement; willingness and ability to contribute to society; and diversity of racial interactions.

"Overall, our findings countered the claims made by the two groups that served as the impetus of the Justice Department's investigation," said study coauthor Mike Hoa Nguyen, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Denver. "We found that only small differences, if any, exist between the self-reported outcomes of Asian American students who were admitted to and attending their first-choice university and those students who were not."

Nguyen's coauthors include Connie Y. Chang, Victoria Kim, Rose Ann E. Gutierrez, Annie Le, and Robert T. Teranishi at UCLA, and University of Denver scholar Denis Dumas.

On 23 of the 27 outcome measures, Nguyen and his colleagues found no difference between the two groups of students, after controlling for students' SAT score, high school grade point average, gender, and first-generation college status. On one other measure--"time spent participating in student clubs or groups"--students not accepted by their first-choice institution reported higher levels of involvement than their peers. The remaining three outcome measures showed marginally higher outcomes for students at their first-choice university, with a very small magnitude of difference between the two groups.

In the "academic performance and perception of academic abilities" category, only one of the 11 measures--"time spent studying and doing homework"--showed a difference between the two groups, with students at their first-choice institution indicating more time on schoolwork. At the same time, the two groups reported similar levels of academic performance and perception of their academic ability.

In the "diversity of racial interactions" category, four of the five measures--including "positive cross-racial interaction"--found no differences between the two groups of students. On the fifth measure--"negative cross-racial interaction"--students at their first-choice university reported fewer negative experiences.

In the "satisfaction with college" category, students at their first-choice university scored higher on one measure--overall satisfaction with the college experience--than their peers. On the other measure in the category--"satisfaction with coursework"--there was no difference between the two groups.

"It is important to note that college choice and admission outcomes are not the only factor contributing to students' college satisfaction," Nguyen said. "Prior research indicates that feeling welcome and valued, instructional effectiveness, racial identity, and faculty and student interactions all impact college satisfaction."

In the "willingness and ability to contribute to society" and the "self-confidence and self-esteem" categories, across seven indicators, both groups showed no differences.

"The bottom line is that our findings reject the claims that Asian American students face negative consequences if they are not accepted by and do not attend their first-choice college," said Nguyen. "Our study shows that the claims are inconsistent and inaccurate."

Furthermore, Nguyen added, the findings support prior research that emphasizes the benefits of attending college, in general, even if it is not at one's first-choice institution.

"Although college choice is of vast importance for many students, including Asian Americans, our study suggests that simply relying on rankings and perceived prestige at elite universities to determine one's first-choice schools might be a disservice to students," Nguyen said. "It is what students do in college, rather than the level of institutional prestige alone, that most determines educational outcomes."

While the CAAA and AACE indicate that they broadly represent the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, public opinion research, including the Spring 2016 Asian American Voter Survey, has found that a majority of Asian Americans support race-conscious university admissions.

###

About AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. Find AERA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Hundreds of tons of fresh and edible vegetables which are typically dumped because they do not meet the aesthetic requirements for export are ending up on the plates of hungry Kenyan students thanks to the UN's World Food Programme (WFP).

Each day, farms in Kenya reject up to 83 tons of perfectly nutritious vegetables simply because they are considered too ugly and off-putting for consumers, especially in the developed world, to buy.

WFP has piloted a project in three schools in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, which has provided 11,000 pounds or 5.5 tons of green beans, peas, and broccoli which has been tuned into lunch for 2,200 children over 75 school days.

Read more here about how ugly veggies are feeding Kenya's hungry kids.
Angels pitcher Patrick Sandoval throws against the San Francisco Giants on Aug. 19. (Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

The Angels send young left-hander Patrick Sandoval to the mound Monday for the start of four-game series against the Houston Astros at Minute Maid Park.

Sandoval, 23, is looking for a bounce-back performance. He has given up 10 runs, nine earned in his last 10 innings. In his most recent outing, he struggled to generate misses from the San Francisco Giants. They only whiffed on five of 33 swings taken in what ended up as Sandoval's third consecutive loss.

Sandoval, a native of Mission Viejo, is making his 13th MLB start since debuting last August. He hasn't earned a victory in any of his previous outings.

Earlier in the day, the league moved the finale of this series from Thursday to a doubleheader on Tuesday because of the potential impact of Tropical Storm Laura on the Houston area. Tuesday's doubleheader will begin at 1 p.m. PDT.

Angels starting lineup for Monday



1. David Fletcher  Second base



2. Shohei Ohtani  Designated hitter



3. Mike Trout  Center field



4. Anthony Rendon  Third base



5. Albert Pujols  First base



6. Jo Adell  Right field



7. Justin Upton  Left field



8. Andrelton Simmons  Shortstop



9. Anthony Bemboom  Catcher

Patrick Sandoval  Starting pitcher
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:07:38|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang attends the third Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Leaders' Meeting via video link at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 24, 2020. The meeting was co-chaired by Li Keqiang and Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith of Laos, and attended by Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, President U Win Myint of Myanmar, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha of Thailand, and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc of Vietnam. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin)

PHNOM PENH, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The third Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) leaders' meeting comprehensively maps out the blueprint for future cooperation among the LMC members, said senior officials of the LMC countries.

It will help them strengthen partnership, deepen practical cooperation in various fields, jointly fight the COVID-19 pandemic and boost socio-economic recovery, and jointly build a community of shared future, the officials said.

The meeting was held via video link on Monday, during which Chinese Premier Li Keqiang put forward a series of proposals to promote Lancang-Mekong cooperation in areas such as water resources, connectivity and global anti-pandemic efforts.

Cambodian Foreign Ministry's Secretary of State Luy David said the evolution of the LMC is quite fast, and its framework is one of the most important platforms for the six countries to work together to promote peace, stability and sustainable development.

China has proposed synergizing the LMC with the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, which will allow products from Lancang-Mekong countries to directly enter markets in the central and western regions of China, and then be transported to Central Asia and Europe, he said.

Sommad Pholsena, Lao minister of natural resources and environment, said "We depend more on our close neighbors than relatives faraway."

As a responsible partner, China shares the hydrological data on the Lancang River more timely and transparently with the downstream countries, and carries out emergency cooperation in response to floods and droughts, he said.

In 2016 and 2019, the Mekong countries suffered from severe drought. China strengthened the scientific operation of reservoirs on the Lancang River to effectively alleviate the drought, which was highly acknowledged by the governments of the Mekong countries including Laos, as well as by the international community, he said.

"I believe that other ministers of water resources in the other member countries of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, together with me, will actively implement the new consensus on water resources cooperation at this leaders' meeting," said the Lao minister.

Vikrom Kromadit, president of Thailand-China Business Council, said that the meeting will play an important role in regional cooperation and common development against the backdrop of the COVID-19 epidemic hitting the world economy.

Lancang-Mekong region has maintained a rapid growth rate in the past decade and has become one of the regions with the fastest economic growth in the world, he said.

The region has unique advantages of location, transportation, logistics and culture, he said, adding that under the LMC mechanism, the member states have provided a series of preferential measures in customs, capacity cooperation and cross-border trade.

U Khin Maung Lynn, joint secretary of Myanmar Institute of Strategies and International Studies, said against the backdrop of the epidemic, cooperative interaction should be further deepened among LMC member countries.

Development of the agricultural sector is important for all Lancang-Mekong member countries, he said, adding that cooperation is needed in quality control, improvement of research and agricultural technology, creating smooth transportation access, promoting eco-friendly production.

He said China can also help Lancang-Mekong member countries in poverty alleviation. LMC member countries should join hands in such issues as protecting women from poverty and natural disasters, promoting hygiene awareness in rural areas, and other corporate social responsibilities activities.

"It is the time to prove to the world that Mekong region can achieve prosperity and civilization with the unity and cooperation among LMC member countries," he said.

Hoang Quoc Dung, a member of the executive board of the Vietnam Association for Conservation of Nature and Environment lauded China's sharing the annual hydrological information of the Lancang River.

The official said that such information sharing will contribute to promoting a shift in farming towards minimization of water use in low river flow period, and will "certainly be a crucial input" for addressing the increasing impacts of intensive agricultural and aquatic farming practices.

Initiated by China in 2014, the LMC consists of six countries -- China, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The Lancang River originates on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in southwestern China. It is called the Mekong River as it flows through the other five countries before emptying into the sea. Enditem
Victor Shine of Crosshaven Coast Guard told RTE radios Morning that the teenagers, who were fishing in a light rib near Roches Point, were able to assist because their boat was small enough to reach the area, which would have been difficult for the Coast Guard.

I must commend them for their heroic efforts, he said.

It was a challenging area where the incident occurred, he added.

It is understood that the nine-year-old boy had been on an inflatable device when he was caught in a strong current and was swept out to sea. His father went into the water to help him and both were swept out further.

The teens  Jamie Venner, Richard McSweeney, Cillian Foster, Kate Horgan and Harry Pritchard  were fishing in a rib at White Bay, near Roches Point, when they rushed to the scene to save the father who was left clinging to a marker buoy.

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They retrieved the man onto their boat, and brought him ashore where he was reunited with his son who is understood to have made his way ashore himself.

Mr Shine said that both the father and son were suffering severe hypothermia and the emergency services brought them to a camp fire on the beach to warm them up while also wrapping them in foil blankets.

There were concerns about blood pressure so the Coast Guard helicopter landed on the beach to transport them to hospital in Cork.

Three of the teenagers involved in the rescue have direct family connections to the RNLI. And in a remarkable twist, the father of one of the teens was at the helm of the lifeboat which was tasked to the incident.

Jamies dad, Ian, is a member of Crosshaven RNLI. Cillian is a brother of another Crosshaven RNLI crew member, Caoimhe Foster, and Richards father, Kieran, is a former crew member of Baltimore RNLI.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 17:55:27|Editor: huaxia

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JAKARTA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The administration of the Indonesian province of Bali has postponed its plan to reopen the tropical holiday island to international tourists in September following a decision by the country's government to wait until the end of this year.

The postponement was announced by Bali governor Wayan Koster in a statement on Saturday.

"The government is still prohibiting citizens from traveling abroad at least until the end of 2020. In line with the policy, we also cannot open the gate to international travelers until the end of 2020 as the situation in Indonesia, including Bali, is not yet safe to welcome them," he said.

On July 5, Koster told local media that his administration planned to reopen Bali on Sept. 11 following the plan of the government to suspend entries of foreigners into the archipelagic nation for months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The resort island reopened its doors to domestic tourists on July 31.

As of Monday, Bali reported 4,576 COVID-19 cases and 52 deaths. Enditem
Americans are bracing for a new round of protests after white officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, unleashed a barrage of gunfire at an unarmed Black man who appeared to pose no threat to them. In a video of the shooting, the man had his back turned to the officers when at least one opened fire at point-blank range. Considering that seven rounds were fired into Jacob Blakes back, he was lucky to have survived.

Defenders of the police action can try all they want to portray Blake as the perpetrator of his own troubles. He failed to follow orders. He walked away when commanded to stop. He tried to get into his car where his three sons sat. Maybe, from the officers perspective, those constituted super-bad crimes. But under no law we know of can such infractions be construed as capital offenses worthy of attempting Blakes immediate execution on the street.

Did the Kenosha officers overlook the endless video broadcasts of George Floyds killing under the knee of Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin? Did they somehow miss the message from weeks of national upheaval protesting excessive police force against Black citizens?

The message bears repeating just in case some St. Louis-area officers also didnt get the memo: Its time to find another way to enforce the law without resorting to lethal force for nonviolent misdemeanors.

While we do not have all of the details yet, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin said in a statement, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

Police were responding to what they described as a domestic incident. Blakes attorney, Benjamin Crump, says the incident was a fight between two women. A witness told local television that Blake was trying to break up the fight when officers arrived. The video shows Blake walking away with two officers close behind, guns drawn and aimed toward Blake. Among nearby observers potentially in the line of fire was a toddler. No doubt etched forever in their memories, along with the three sons in the car, will be the sounds of those seven shots followed by Blakes collapse on the street.

By nightfall, as the video went viral, Kenosha streets erupted in violence as vehicles and buildings were set ablaze. Public anger is understandable, but violence can only play into President Donald Trumps hands as he searches for any way to distract the nation from the pandemic and turn attention to what he portrays as Democrat chaos and lawlessness. Police forces everywhere need to get the message, through loud and persistent but civil protest, that lethal force must be the last resort, not the first.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This editorial has been updated to correct the name of the city where officer Derek Chauvin served.
AOC Discusses Makeup, Skincare, And Beauty In Vogue Interview

AOC has officially cemented herself as the coolest Congressperson yet.

In an interview with Vogue, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed her skincare routine and her makeup habits, The reason why I think its so important to share these things is that, first of all, femininity has power, and in politics there is so much criticism and nitpicking about how women and femme people present ourselves, AOC told Vogue. Just being a woman is quite politicized here in Washington. Theres this really false idea that if you care about makeup or if your interests are in beauty and fashion, that thats somehow frivolous. But I actually think these are some of the most substantive decisions that we makeand we make them every morning.

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In fact, just last month, another congresswoman, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, came under fire for her choice in fashionable wigs.

Senator Sinema clarifies to @GarrettHaake her new wig color is Mint Green, not blue pic.twitter.com/GegeHvqlwt  Ali Zaslav (@alizaslav) July 21, 2020

Our culture is so predicated on diminishing women and preying on our self-esteem, AOC told Vogue. So its quite a radical actand its almost like a mini protestto love yourself in a society thats always telling you youre not the right weight, youre not the right color, youre not the right, you know, whatever it is.

Ocasio-Cortez emphasized that feeling beautiful and confident comes from the inside first, If Im going to spend an hour in the morning doing my glam, its not going to be because Im afraid of what some Republican photo is going to look like. Its because I feel like it, she said.

AOCs makeup routine consists of a few basic staples like Narss lightweight tinted moisturizer, concealer, Fenty Beautys contour stick, brow pencil, crayon liner and mascara, and (yes!) a little bit of eye glitter. As the youngest woman in Congressand as a woman of colorits so hard to be taken seriously. I would think, Man, [glitter] isnt going to help me out. People already try to diminish me and diminish my voice as young and frivolous and unintelligent. However, AOC has found that the extra step does the opposite. It helps me feel better, and I feel like it helps make my eyes pop, so you know what? I was totally wrong.

Then, the congresswoman finishes off the look with her signature bright red lipstick, her favorite being Stilas Stay All Day Liquid Lipstick in the shade Beso. One of the things that I had realized is that when youre always running around, sometimes the best way to really look put together is a bold lip, AOC says. I will wear a red lip when I want confidence, when I need a boost of confidence. The perk of using Stila is that the color, true to its name, stays all day.

AOC finished out the interview by emphasizing again that beauty comes from the inside first and no amount of money or makeup can really compensate for loving yourself.

If you need a little boost or if youre feeling particularly challenged that day, look in the mirror and say, Im the bomb, and I will make the world a better place in my own little pocket because thats what Im here to do, she said. Theres something that you bring, and you need to know that, and that is the best beauty secret of them all.

Header image screenshotted from Vogue's video.

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Evi Arthur is a graduate of Roosevelt University with a bachelors degree in journalism and media studies and a minor in womens and gender studies. The former editor-in-chief of her university paper, Evi has previously interned at Chicago Agent Magazine and St. Louis Magazine. A St. Louis native (and lover of St. Louis-style pizza), she plans to eventually return to school and earn a Master's degree in investigative reporting. You can follow her at @EviArthur on Instagram and Twitter.
New Delhi: The National Investigation Agency is expected to file a charge sheet against 11 accused in an NIA court in Jammu on Tuesday (August 25), in the Pulwama attack case that occurred on February 14, 2019, in which 40 CRPF jawans had martyred.

Pakistan-based terrorist organization Jaish-e-Muhamad had claimed the responsibility for the attack, therefore, the charge sheet may include the name of Jaish, which directly linked Pakistan's connection for the terror attack.

The suicide attack was carried out by Jaish terrorist Adil Ahmed Dar of Pulwama. The NIA had arrested all the accomplices of the suicide bomber in its investigation.

The charge sheet may include the names of all the accused, including a woman, who extended help to the suicide bomber to carry out the attack at the behest of Pakistan.

The charge sheet also includes the name of Pakistan-based terrorists of Jaish-e-Mohammed like Abdul Rashid Ghazi alias Kamran and local Hilal Ahmed, who used to recruit Kashmiri youth for Jaish-e-Muhammed. Hilal Ahmed was shot dead in an encounter in Pulwama on February 18, 2019

So far, three terrorists have been killed, while the names of 8 others are likely to be included in this charge sheet.

In June 2019, the government had clarified in Parliament that it was not an intelligence failure. Union MOS for Home G Kishan Reddy asserted that the government had acted firmly and swiftly on the Pulwama attack

He had said, The investigation by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) into the Pulwama terror attack so far has resulted in identifying the conspirators, suicide attackers and the vehicle provider, while citing the zero tolerance towards terrorism policy of the government.

Notably, India had avenged the Pulwama attack by conducting airstrikes at terror camps in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26, 2019, reportedly killing several terrorists.
Retired Army Staff Sgt. Raymond "Chip" Lynch of Nassau, a highly decorated 101st Airborne Division soldier in the Vietnam War, has been inducted into the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor.

John Mullen Jr. of Troy, co-chairman of the Rev. Francis A. Kelley Society of St. Joseph's Church, Troy, a military honor group, and Tom Mullins of Green Island, also a member of the society, presented a framed induction certificate to Lynch on the behalf of the Purple Heart Hall of Honor during a ceremony at the Schodack Diner.

Lynch also received a silver Vietnam War commemorative dollar.

The National Purple Heart Hall of Honor is located at 374 Temple Hill Road (Route 300), New Windsor, Orange County, next to the New Windsor Cantonment State Historic Site, the last encampment of the Continental Army. That's where Gen. George Washington created the Badge of Military Merit, the forerunner of the Purple Heart, in 1782.

Today, troops wounded in combat earn a Purple Heart Medal.

The museum includes a Purple Heart national registry of military personnel that have been injured or killed during combat. The registry also includes combat details of the recipients.

In 1782, at his headquarters, George Washington created the Badge of Military Merit to be given to enlisted men and noncommissioned officers for meritorious action.

On Mothers Day 1967, Lynch was shot in the left arm during a night ambush in the jungle while serving in Vietnam with the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry. A small-arms bullet entered and exited his elbow.

Four months later, he was shot in the head and an arm during a three-day battle.

On March 5, 1968, he was shot in both legs in the Song Be area of South Vietnam while on duty with the 160th Aviation Group of the 101st Airborne Division.

Lynch also earned two Bronze Star Medals with V device for valor, two Army Commendation Medals with V, numerous Air Medals, a Combat Infantry Badge, Silver Parachute Wings and Vietnamese Jump Wings.

Earlier this year, Lynch was selected to receive the Rev. Francis A. Kelley Hometown Hero Award. He will receive the award during a ceremony on Oct. 30 at Moscatiello's Family Italian Restaurant, 99 North Greenbush Road, Troy. For information, contact Mullen at jmullem3@nycap.rr.com or 518-272-2360.

After the war, Lynch founded R.A. Lynch Excavating and Trucking Co. He is an active member of J.J. Yager AMVETS Post in Nassau and the Chandler-Young Veterans Association, which includes Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8168 and the AMVETS Post 797.

New arsenal leader

Colonel Earl B. Schonberg Jr. became the 61st commander of the U.S. Army Watervliet Arsenal during a change-of-command ceremony.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Schonberg replaced Col. Milton G. Kelly, who has been reassigned as the supply and distribution chief for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.

Brigadier Gen. Darren L. Werner, Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command commanding general, officiated the ceremony over video teleconference. Werner praised the arsenal's performance under Kelly's command.

"Two years ago, Colonel Kelly took command of Watervliet Arsenal, and he's done an exceptional job managing this highly specialized workforce comprised of more than 760 Army civilians," Werner said.

Under Kelly's leadership, Watervliet implemented several improvements to processes and facilities, and in April of this year reached a record high on-time delivery rate in more than two years, he added.

Werner also praised incoming commander Schonberg,

"Colonel Earl Schonberg is one of the best, and his track record shows it," Werner said. "Schonberg's depth of experience gained while serving in numerous staff leadership positions, as well as his previous command experience, make him an ideal leader to guide Watervliet Arsenal."

Watervliet Arsenal is an Army-owned and -operated manufacturing facility and is the oldest continuously active arsenal in the United States, having begun operations during the War of 1812. Today's arsenal is relied upon by the United States and foreign militaries to produce the most advanced, high-tech, high-powered weaponry for cannons, howitzers and mortar systems, according to Matthew I. Day, arsenal spokesman.

News of your troops and units can be sent to Duty Calls, Terry Brown, Times Union, Box 15000, Albany, NY 12212 or brownt@timesunion.com.
Virgin Atlantic has announced that flights from Lagos to London will resume on September 10.

The announcement is coming on the heels of planned resumption of international commercial flights to Nigeria on August 29 as announced by the Federal Government.

A statement by Virgin said all passengers will be provided personal health packs which will contain three medical-grade face masks to be worn onboard, surface wipes, and hand gel.

The airline also said that it has taken other measures to ensure customers have a safe flying experience including the use of electrostatic spraying of high-grade disinfectants in all cabins and lavatories before every flight and enhanced thorough cleaning practices at check-in and boarding gates.

Economy and premium economy customers will now enjoy a fly safe, eat well meal box, which incorporates a choice of two hot meals, cheese and biscuits and a dessert pot washed down with a choice of wine, beer, soft drinks and bottled water.

Upper-class customers will receive a choice of three hot meals, desserts, including cheese & biscuits and a ciabatta roll, all delivered to their seat on a tray. All customers will receive a second meal service which, on day flights from the UK, includes the delicious Mile High Tea in collaboration with celebrity patissier Eric Lanlard, the airline said.

Virgin Atlantics Commercial Manager, Justin Bell, said, We are delighted to be able to relaunch flights between Lagos and London Heathrow, showcasing our brand new A350-1000 aircraft. We will always ensure that health and safety remain our number one priority, whilst keeping our signature Virgin spirit and our teams have been working tirelessly to implement new measures and evolve our customer experience. We are looking forward to welcoming customers back onboard, taking them to the skies safely and in true Virgin Atlantic style.

The health and wellbeing of our customers and crew is at the centre of all our operations and that includes social distancing at the airport and onboard wherever possible, meticulous cleaning of the aircraft and individual health packs for all customers, containing medical-grade face masks, hand sanitizer and surface wipes.

The airline also advised passengers to arrive at the airport three hours before their flights are due to leave.
(Reuters) - Moderna Inc <MRNA.O> said on Monday it has concluded advanced talks with the European Union to supply 80 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, which is currently in late-stage testing.

The potential agreement provides for an option for member states to buy an additional 80 million doses of mRNA-1273 for a total of up to 160 million doses, the company said, without disclosing the financial terms of the pact.

The drug developer is the fifth company with which the EU has concluded talks, after Sanofi-GSK <SASY.PA> <GSK.L>, Johnson & Johnson <JNJ.N>, CureVac <CVAC.O> and the signing of an advance purchase agreement with AstraZeneca <AZN.L>.

Moderna said it was working with manufacturing partners like Lonza Group AG <LONN.S> of Switzerland and Laboratorios Farmaceuticos Rovi SA<ROVI.MC> of Spain to produce the vaccine outside the United States.

Moderna, which is one of the handful of companies with vaccine candidates in late-stage testing, also said it was on track to complete enrollment of about 30,000 participants in the study in September.

Earlier this month, the company signed a pact with the United States to supply 100 million doses of the potential COVID-19 vaccine for around $1.5 billion.

Moderna on Monday reiterated it was scaling up global manufacturing to be able to deliver about 500 million doses per year and possibly up to 1 billion doses per year, beginning in 2021.

(Reporting by Ankur Banerjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
Special Deal

24 August 2020

Travelling abroad requires extra effort in this uncertain time - properties of Mandarin Oriental offer a series of attractive staycation packages, allowing guests to recreate a luxurious, cozy retreat closer to home.

After renovation, the brand new Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok is welcoming its guests with elevated services. Get Togethers by M.O. offers local touches through five senses. The activities start with Sunrise Yoga at the riverfront facing the Chao Phraya River to welcome the sun, followed by the act of giving of Thais - Alms Giving to Buddhist monks on the riverside lawn and a half-day walking tour to explore localization including some hidden historic sites. Families by M.O. offers a 50% off for the second room when occupied by a family member. Children under 12 years of age can enjoy complimentary meals from children's menus, three meals per day (excluding fine dining restaurants) with free access to children's amenities.
Hong Kong received its first COVID-19 reinfected case. Based on the results, researchers concluded that some of the recovered COVID-19 patients might have only short-lived immunity from the novel coronavirus, which caused the current global pandemic.

#COVID19 #copolitics #covid19australia pic.twitter.com/M22SQ5SBXh Hong Kong's hospitals could face collapse as the city grapples with a sharp rise in the number of coronavirus cases, leader Carrie Lam has warned. #COVID__19  South Gazette (@GazetteSouth) July 29, 2020

Also Read: Is It Safe To Go To The Dentist? NADG Disagrees With WHO Recommendation About Oral Care; Spreading Of COVID-19 Possible?

The University of Hong Kong's researchers confirmed that the man, who was previously infected, is the first patient to be infected with the coronavirus for the second time. The study's results will be useful to other scientists and medical experts who have been working on treatments using antibodies from the patients who recovered from the viral disease.

Also Read: Convalescent Plasma in COVID-19: Here's Why Experts Including Fauci Discourage the FDA Emergency Authorized Treatment

The research will also be helpful to those who are developing an effective and safe vaccine. In late Mar., the 33-year-old man in Hong Kong developed mild symptoms when he was first diagnosed with coronavirus.

He was hospitalized in Mar. 29 and then later discharged on Apr. 14 after his symptoms subsided. The researchers' study about the man's case was published by the medical journal Clinical Infectious Disease.

Researchers suggest that potential immunity to the viral disease will not last long

More than four months later, the man was infected for the second time after returning to Hong Kong from Spain. On Aug. 15, he tested positive and was hospitalized again. However, the study said that the patient remains asymptomatic.

#COVID19 #copolitics #covid19australia pic.twitter.com/M22SQ5SBXh Hong Kong's hospitals could face collapse as the city grapples with a sharp rise in the number of coronavirus cases, leader Carrie Lam has warned. #COVID__19  South Gazette (@GazetteSouth) July 29, 2020

Previous studies about corona virus antibodies found that their levels reduce after a few months, suggesting that any potential virus immunity may not last long. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the United States' top infectious disease expert, explained that immunity to other known corona viruses usually lasts only three to six months.



"It may be completely different with this coronavirus," he said.

"It may be that people induce a response that's quite durable. But if it acts like common corona viruses, it likely is not going to be a very long duration of immunity," he further explained.

For more news updates about coronavirus, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Also Read: Researchers Discover Microplastic Trapped in Human Organs: Liver, Lungs, and Spleen

This article is owned by TechTimes,

Written by: Giuliano de Leon.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Emmerdale's Mark Jordon and his fiancee Laura Norton have revealed they're expecting their first child together.

In a new interview, the soap star, 55, insisted he knew his partner, 37, was pregnant even before they took a test in June, but admitted they had planned to get a house and tie the knot before growing a family.

Their news certainly came as a nice 'surprise' for actor Mark, who was cleared of assaulting a pensioner in August 2019.

Happy news: Emmerdale's Mark Jordon and his fiancee Laura Norton have revealed they're expecting their first child together

'In my heart I knew before looking at the test. We both looked at the result and there was so much joy, but for a weird moment we were both deadly silent', TV star Mark said, while the actress added: 'I had tears in my eyes, we're over the moon!'

The former Daz Spencer character, who already shares Joseph, 22, and Poppy, 19, with his former wife Siobhan Finneran, admitted the couple tend to 'go with the flow of things', with Laura revealing they planned to get a puppy just two weeks before finding out she's pregnant.

Their baby is due on Mark's birthday on January 25 and the pair are in 'no rush' to find out their gender as they're focusing on welcoming a 'healthy' child.

On becoming a mother, the brunette told OK! magazine: 'It's something I've always hoped would happen. I hope my instincts kick in. I feel very calm and safe knowing that I've seen what an amazing father Mark and how brilliant his kids are.'

How sweet! In a new interview, the soap star, 55, insisted he knew his partner, 37, was pregnant even before they took a test in June

Priorities: Their baby is due on Mark's birthday on January 25 and the pair are in 'no rush' to find out their gender as they're focusing on welcoming a 'healthy' child

The Newcastle native revealed they were left 'in tears' when they decided to go to a private hospital for her first scan as partners are not permitted to attend the appointment at NHS facilities due to coronavirus restrictions.

As an excited Mark hailed fatherhood his 'best job', Laura credited him for helping out with their new pet pooch as she suffers from fatigue.

The To The Sea Again director's daughter has been also playing a role in supporting her stepmother through her pregnancy by making her nutritious smoothies.

On his children's reactions to having a younger sibling, Mark said: 'Poppy has been calling her "Baby Mama". Joseph has his own flat so we met him for a walk and he did this wry smile and said, "That's cool!"'

Moving on: Their news certainly came as a nice surprise for the actor, who was cleared of assaulting a pensioner in August 2019 (pictured after the trial)

'He's wonderful': As an excited Mark hailed fatherhood his 'best job', Laura credited him for helping out with their new pet pooch as she suffers from fatigue

Laura, who plays Kerry Wyatt on Emmerdale, was due to return to filming the ITV soap four days after they discovered they're expecting, so she was forced to inform producers of the happy news.

The media personality claimed her co-stars Charley Webb and Fiona Wade 'bizarrely predicted' she was pregnant earlier this year, and revealed fellow mother-to-be Michelle Harwick has been giving her advice in lockdown.

She also insisted she hasn't thought about the prospect of having more children in the future and is keen on purchasing a property with the Oldham native as she has a place in Yorkshire, while he lives in a house near Saddleworth.

The duo claimed they hadn't moved in together earlier and had originally split their time equally at each other's abodes as they 'didn't want to rush things' and had a 'good routine'.

Co-stars: The brunette has portrayed factory worker Kerry Wyatt in the soap since 2012, while her man made his first appearance as Daz Spencer in 2014 before he was written out last year

They also gushed about their 'perfect' engagement, which saw Mark get down on one knee during a Spanish holiday, after asking her father and his children's permission to take her hand in marriage.

Their wedding had been pushed back due to Mark's theatre tour which was scheduled to run up until December, as well as lockdown and their upcoming arrival.

Mark enthused they're looking forward to the baby now more than ever, shut down the prospect of tying the knot while pregnant, and have delegated the planning of the nuptials to Poppy.

Tender moments: They also gushed about their 'perfect' engagement, which saw Mark get down on one knee during a Spanish holiday

Psychic? The media personality claimed her co-stars Charley Webb (pictured together in 2019) and Fiona Wade 'bizarrely predicted' she was pregnant earlier this year

In July 2018, the father-of-two was accused of assaulting Andrew Potts by biting him on the face outside the Farrars Arms in Oldham.

A jury found him not guilty of affray, unlawful wounding and assault by beating, after Mark denied the charges and claimed he was acting in self-defence.

Having been at his side throughout the trial, Laura recently claimed the couple have been looking forward to planning their wedding.

The thespians, who have been in a relationship for five years, first met when Shoot to Kill actor Mark joined Emmerdale in 2014.

The ex files: The former Heartbeat actor shares son Joseph, 22, and daughter Poppy, 19, with his ex-wife Siobhan Finneran (pictured in 2016), who was married to from 1997 until 2014

Brunette beauty Laura has portrayed factory worker Kerry in the soap since 2012, while her man made his first appearance as Daz in 2014, a role he played until January 2019.

While Mark maintains a busy schedule with his acting stints, he previously described himself as 'the luckiest man alive'.

Gushing over his romance with Laura, he told Daily Record: 'My kids adore her. We are a good family unit.

'She adores my kids, Im loving work. I love this character and who Im working with and have got the most beautiful girlfriend. My life could not be any better.'
AMHERST  The school board and administrators spent late spring and all summer creating a hybrid reopening plan of mostly remote learning because of COVID-19  that they said would protect public health, but following union concerns, things have changed.

The plan, approved early August, had included only the kindergarten and grade 1 students returning to class Sept. 18 -- at the option of parents.

But the returning of students at that time went up in smoke last week after the teachers union lobbied strenuously against it. The union opposes in-class instruction until February at the earliest.

The district has promised parents and caregivers there will be an update to what the new plan might look like later this week.

As a result, when in-person learning for youngest children of Amherst-Pelham regional school district might begin is not known at this time; the school board says more information will be coming during or shortly after the next meeting scheduled on Aug. 25.

Superintendent Michael Morris has repeatedly said that remote learning is not a good substitute for in-person learning, and that the younger children are impacted most negatively.

No students will begin in-person learning prior to October 1, Morris wrote in an email to parents, caregivers and students Saturday morning.

I am reaching out today to let you know that we will be sharing more information next week about the change in plans for Phase 1 students and plans for remote learning. We appreciate your patience as we plan for a safe and successful opening of the 2020-2021 school year, he said on Saturday.

As things stand now, the district plans to begin the school year Sept. 16 with all-remote learning, he said.

The school board and the union representing teachers, paraprofessionals and clerical staff, the Amherst-Pelham Education Association, released a joint statement Friday night on the issue.

Together, we are devoted to developing robust, student-centered remote learning, the statement says.

The statement said delaying when in-person instruction might begin for kindergarten and grade 1 students would allow us to jointly consider the ever-evolving public health context related to COVID-19 pandemic.

Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee Chair, in an email, said the parties will be discussing this during the Aug. 25 meeting -- that is scheduled as an executive session, and thus will not be open to the public.

The boards backing away from the planned Sept. 18 beginning of in-person instruction for kindergarten and grade 1 occurred during a closed door meeting with the school board and union on Aug. 20.

The Republican has requested those executive session meeting minutes.

Two days prior, following a school board meeting on Aug. 18, the committee issued a statement, approved unanimously, reiterating that kindergarten and grade 1 would begin classes -- in school and not remotely, on Sept. 18, which had already been decided in early August.

The boards Aug. 18 statement was in response to union demands, published online Aug. 15.

The districts heretofore reopening plan, now undergoing change, included the Caminates dual language program at Fort River Elementary School -- that began last year in kindergarten and is expanding this year to include first grade.

Caminantes was to begin the school year with in-person instruction on Sept. 18. It is a fully integrated Spanish/English immersion learning model.

The boards Aug. 18 statement also had said the union proposals related to COVID-19 concerns is more extreme than the most conservative recommendations from any reputable public health or healthcare organization.

The unions plan says: Full In-Person occurs only once a safe and effective vaccine is administered to 100% of students and staff. It also states, Full Hybrid Phased-In by grade level groups cannot begin until February 1, 2021 at the earliest and can only occur if public health benchmarks and bargaining conditions are continuously met.

The school boards Aug. 18 statement, in response, said 90% of the parents of kindergarten and first grade students responded to a survey with more than two-thirds -- 323 of the 474 responses --saying they want their children in school, instead of using computers at home for remote instruction.

The survey data said 32% are planning for remote-only learning for kindergarten and first grade students.

The school board plan enables parents to choose remote learning for their students for any reason, the boards Aug. 18 statement said.

The board said: the union that represents our teachers, clerical employees, and paraprofessionals (the APEA) has submitted proposals that would all but require the Districts to force all students into all-remote learning for the foreseeable future.

Fridays joint school committee and union statement says the parties share the goal of meaningful, safe learning.

The Aug. 25 school board meeting is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. with executive session to include negotiations with the committee and union.

The meeting is scheduled to open to the public starting at 7 p.m. with public comment at 7:05 p.m.

Amherst Media will live stream and broadcast the meeting.

Related:
Passenger jets from the nation's low cost carriers are at Gimpo International Airport in Seoul, on July 28. Concerns are growing over mass layoffs of LCC employees amid longer-than-expected virus shocks. Yonhap



KDB unlikely to salvage sagging low cost carriers



By Lee Min-hyung



The nation's low cost carriers (LCC)  hit worst by the coronavirus spread  are teetering on the brink of collapse in the wake of the government's ill-prepared policies.



In 2019 alone, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport granted aviation licenses to three new LCCs. At that time, concerns surfaced over the "over-issuance" of the licenses as this increased the number of local LCCs to nine, which surpasses most other countries with bigger population and land area than Korea.



But with the COVID-19 panic sweeping across the nation and paralyzing their business operations due to the worldwide travel restrictions, most major LCCs  such as Jeju Air and Jin Air  have started to report operating losses of tens of billions of won in the first half of the year.



They are seeking additional financial support from state-run lenders  including the Korea Development Bank (KDB)  but the lender remains firm in its determination not to provide any immediate support for the sagging LCCs.



The lender even excluded LCCs from a list of companies receiving the 40 trillion won in coronavirus relief funds amid the judgment that other industries  such as automotive and shipbuilding  were in more dire need of the financial aid than LCCs.



But the lender is also expressing discomfort over why it has to support the LCCs after the land ministry granted "reckless" licenses to emerging players without considering their business capability and market restraints carefully.



"LCCs are in desperate need of financial support from relevant relief funds by state-run lenders to tackle the ongoing crisis," an official from the industry said. But the KDB is not considering doing so for now, as it deems the main reason for their collapse is due to the ministry's wrong decision to foster the industry with a view to generating outcomes in terms of job creation, according to the official.



A KDB spokesman also raised questions over the competitiveness of the existing LCCs here, saying the number needs to be downsized in consideration of the nation's market size. The number of LCCs here exceeds that of Japan which has a larger population and territory. The United States also has the same number of LCCs as Korea.



"We are leaving open the possibility of providing financial support to sagging LCCs, but no specific action plans have not been drawn up for now," an official from the lender said.



The KDB and Export-Import Bank of Korea (Eximbank), another state-run lender, were supposed to provide 170 billion won to Jeju Air which overturned its decision recently to take over Eastar Jet. But with Jeju Air dropping the plan, the lenders' move to provide financial aid ended up nowhere.



Despite the dismal financial situation of Eastar Jet, the KDB is not considering offering any immediate financial aid to the airline, as the company is in a state of "total capital impairment" and has low competitiveness for survival even after the coronavirus shock comes to an end.



This is in contrast to KDB's active support of the nation's two largest airlines  Korean Air and Asiana Airlines  whose businesses have also fallen victim to the pandemic. In July, the bank decided to provide one trillion won out of the 40-trillion won relief fund to Korean Air.



Major LCCs  such as Jeju Air, Jin Air, T'way Air and Air Busan  all reported losses in the second quarter on the fallout from the global pandemic shock. Jeju Air, the nation's largest LCC, reported an 85.4 billion won operating loss during the April-June period, the biggest quarterly loss in its history. Things were no different for the others. Jin Air reported a 59.6 billion won operating loss during the same period, and the other two airlines also saw their deficits widen.



"LCCs need to take self-rescue measures to attract more capital (from the state-run lender or the government)," KDB Vice President Choi Dae-hyun told reporters in a recent online press conference.



LCCs in deadlock



Cornered LCCs have in recent months been in emergency mode and taken all available measures to cut fixed costs.



Starting from early this year, most of them started accepting paid or unpaid leave requests from employees to minimize the virus shock. But with the pandemic expanding into a worldwide economic crisis, they are busy trying to persuade the government to offer aid packages.



Officials from the LCCs said the situation is far worse than has been reported, as their deficits continue to increase even as COVID-19 is showing signs of subsiding here.



"A pilot from one of the major LCCs here recently attempted suicide amid a dismal outlook for the industry's near-term rebound," an official from a local airline said.



"Being a pilot is widely perceived as a specialized job that requires a license and guarantees a high salary. But the latest incident shows how desperate the situation is in the LCC industry."



Major LCCs are requesting government support as the last resort for their survival, the official said.



"They continuously underline the need for their survival, as the market may be engulfed by overseas airlines if the status quo continues and more LCCs go bankrupt."



Eastar Jet is on the verge of collapse after Jeju Air decided to stop its takeover of the airline.



The union of Jin Air, the nation's second largest LCC, is also joining in to win more financial support from the government.



"We are trying to justify why we need support from the government, but the outlook for our short-term rebound appears very cloudy," an official from the airline said.



"The issue surrounding the excessive number of LCCs stems from the government's decision, not ours. It is unfair for the financial authorities to stop offering support for sagging airlines by taking issue with the matter."






Strategic Botswana Copper Acquisition

Sydney, Aug 24, 2020 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Cobre Limited ( ASX:CBE ) is pleased to announce the signing of a binding Heads of Agreement (HOA) for the proposed scrip-based acquisition of 51% of the equity of Kalahari Metals Limited (KML). KML is a private UK company which controls approximately 8,100 km2 of tenements within the Kalahari Copper Belt (KCB) in Botswana (with 6,650 km2 owned 100%, and 1,450 km2 in JVs). The KCB is regarded as one of the most prospective areas globally for copper exploration by the US Geological Survey (USGS), with a number of copper-silver deposits currently under development by both Sandfire Resources ( ASX:SFR ) and Cupric Canyon Capital (Cupric Canyon) (refer Figure 2*).KML is currently owned by seven shareholders, including Cobre's largest shareholder, Metal Tiger plc ( LON:MTR ) which currently holds ~62%. In the circa 2 years since MTR acquired its stake, it has invested approximately US$4.2m into KML, and has successfully identified copper mineralisation at multiple locations. Post completion, MTR will continue to hold a 49% stake in the KML JV, with all other KML shareholders fully converting their existing KML shares into CBE shares. Other than MTR, none of the other KML shareholders are related parties of Cobre. Upon completion MTR will hold circa 21% of CBE.Key terms of the HOA include:- The KML vendors will collectively be issued circa 21.4m CBE shares in consideration for the 51% interest in KML. Cobre will initially acquire a 49.9% interest in KML, and subject to obtaining change of control approval from the Ministry of Mines of Botswana, will increase its shareholding in KML to 51% immediately thereafter.- The new shares, to be escrowed until 31 January 2022, will be issued at an implied CBE share price of 20cps.- KML and each vendor have agreed to a 60-day exclusivity period in order for Cobre to conduct detailed due diligence on KML and its exploration licences.o Transaction completion is conditional upon:- Cobre conducting due diligence enquiries in relation to KML and its licences to Cobre's satisfaction;- Cobre and the vendors negotiating and executing an agreed share purchase agreement;- Cobre and MTR negotiating and executing a shareholders' JV agreement in relation to the future management of KML;- Cobre obtaining shareholder approval at its upcoming AGM in mid-October 2020; and- MTR obtaining FIRB approval, if required, for the receipt of additional Cobre shares.Assuming completion occurs on or before 30 November 2020, it is estimated that KML will hold a cash balance of approximately US$600,000. These funds will be used for ongoing exploration activities within the Kalahari tenements over the next 6 months. Once this cash balance is exhausted, Cobre and MTR have agreed to commit A$1.75 million each (A$3.5 million in total) to fund further exploration for the following two years. Cobre can fund this commitment from existing cash holdings.Background on Kalahari Metals Limited (KML)In geological terms, copper mineralisation in the KCB is typically hosted above the contact between the D'Kar Formation (reduced sediments) and the Ngwako Pan Formation (oxidised continental red beds). This is evidenced by nearby copper discoveries held by Cupric Canyon and Sandfire (through its acquisition of the formerly ASX-listed MOD Resources). In recent years, KML has undertaken a systematic exploration program across its Kalahari tenements. This included Airborne Electromagnetic (AEM) surveys to identify conductive carbonaceous marker units within the lower D'Kar Formation stratigraphy, which are critical in determining the underlying D'Kar/Ngwako Pan contact position, combined with magnetic survey interpretations of the geological structure, which together identify favourable locations for exploration drilling.KML's 8,100 km2 of licences are separated in to four project areas:- Okavango (2,720 km2)- Ngami (720 km2)- Kitlanya East (2,750 km2)- Kitlanya West (1,900 km2)Okavango includes tenements immediately along strike from Cupric Canyon's Zone 5 and Zone 5N copper deposits. KML has utilised high resolution magnetics and AEM surveys to map out target areas for exploration drilling. Of the six core holes drilled in 2019 as an initial test of these targets, KML has reported that five holes intersected the mineralised D'Kar/Ngwako Pan contact. The Okavango tenements are a mix of 100%-owned and JV holdings (refer Figure 2*).Similarly at Ngami, KML has reported that early stage exploration drilling based on magnetic and AEM survey interpretation has resulted in successful intercepts of the copper mineralised D'Kar/Ngwako Pan contact. The Ngami tenements are held as JVs (refer Figure 2*).Kitlanya East includes tenements in close proximity to Cupric Canyon's Banana Zone and Sandfire's T3 and A4 copper deposits. Recent magnetic and AEM data interpretation by KML has identified a number of prospective anticlinal fold hinge targets. Initial drill testing commenced in Q1 2020 confirmed the presence of lower D'Kar stratigraphy before drilling was suspended due to COVID-19.These tenements are 100% owned by KML.100%-owned Kitlanya West, located proximal to the Ngami tenements, includes three conductive dome targets considered analogous to Sandfire's T3 and A4 deposits as identified in recent AEM surveys. Soil sampling by KML has displayed positive base metal responses in this location.Botswana's recent COVID-19 lockdown has now eased allowing KML to restart their 2020 exploration program, which is scheduled to include drilling of the Kitlanya East and Kitlanya West prospects.Drilling has already commenced at Kitlanya East.*To view tables and figures, please visit:About Cobre Limited

Cobre Limited (ASX:CBE) is a copper and base-metals explorer with projects in Western Australia and Botswana. The Company recently discovered a new high-grade VMS deposit enriched in Copper, Gold, Zinc and Silver in Western Australia, and is currently exploring approximately 8,100 km2 of tenements within the Kalahari Copper Belt (KCB) in Botswana.
New Delhi, Aug 24 : Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari has called for adopting advanced public transport models, based on green energy such as biofuel, electricity and CNG.

Addressing a webinar on Monday he said that most of the State Road Transport Undertakings (SRTUs) are incurring huge expenditure on conventional fuels which are expensive and called for moving over to biofuels, CNG and electricity as transportation fuel.

Such a move, he said will not only save on fuel bills but also contribute to the economy and pollution reduction. The minister said that at present the country is spending huge amounts on import of crude oil/hydrocarbons, which according to him needs to be reduced.

Referring to workability of the use of biofuels and other greener fuels, he informed that Nagpur has started to convert 450 buses into biofuel-run vehicles. As many as 90 buses have already been converted so far, he said.

According to an official statement, Gadkari added that loss in bus service is about Rs 60 crore per year, which can be saved by converting buses into CNG-driven models.

He said that efforts are being made to produce CNG from sewage water. He called upon SRTUs to adopt this model for reducing losses which will help in providing better public transport.

The Minister called for adopting the 'London Bus model' harnessing utilisation of private capital for better public transport. Noting that encouraging Public Private Partnership (PPP) may be pursued, Gadkari said that bus ports are being planned with all modern amenities.

He suggested that adopting double-decker buses by the operators will also improve the efficiency of public transport.
Michigan U.S. Senate candidate John James is expected to speak at the Republican National Convention this week, according to his campaign.

James, a 39-year-old Farmington Hills businessman, is not listed on the schedule of speakers released by the Trump campaign. A campaign spokesperson said James is planned to deliver a short speech at some point during the four-day convention.

The RNC program is slim on speakers with ties to Michigan compared to last weeks Democratic National Convention, which featured Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, state Rep. Mari Manoogian, D-Birmingham, a Michigan WWII veteran and United Auto Workers union member. However, there are at least three Michigan natives scheduled to address the Republican convention.

Mondays lineup of speakers includes Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a Michigan native.

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who grew up in Detroit, will speak Thursday. Jenison native Richard Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence, will speak Wednesday.

James campaign did not release details about when he is expected to speak this week.

James is making a second run for the Senate after losing at 2018 challenge to U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing. This time hes challenging U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township.

James ran alone on the Republican Party ticket in Michigans August primary. Voters will decide between James and Peters on Nov. 3.

The Michigan Democratic Party said James appearance at the convention proves he stands with President Donald Trump 2,000%, referencing a statement James made during his 2018 campaign.

As James touts Washington Republicans record of leaving Michigan behind its clear hed be nothing more than a rubber stamp for Trump and McConnells toxic agenda which hurts working families, MDP spokesperson Elena Kuhn said in a statement.

READ MORE ON MLIVE:

How Michigans U.S. Senate candidates are fighting to earn the votes of their fellow military veterans

Vice President Mike Pence to visit Traverse City Friday after Republican National Convention

Postmaster general faces scrutiny over impact of mail delays on presidential election

Michigan is at the center of national politics, Democrats say during push for absentee voting
By Laman Ismayilova

For many centuries, Alinjagala fortress attracts many curious visitors from all over Azerbaijan. Mostly known as a symbol of strength, the fortress was one of the strongest defensive buildings of that times.

The ancient site is located on the top of the mountain of the same name.

Spanish merchant and traveler, Rui Qonsales de Klavikho once described Alinjagala as the fortress surrounded by walls and towers.

Some studies suggest that the name of the historical monument means "take off your hand", which is linked with its invincibility of the fortress. It is also believed that Alinjagala was built about 2,000 years ago.

The ruins and foundation stones of the dwelling houses and public buildings built in the upper part of the fortress used to serve as "Shah throne" for feudal.

Alinjagala played an irreplaceable role in the history of Middle Age states of Azerbaijan and was used as a fortification against enemies.

In the times of the Eldaniz dynasty, Alinjagala turned into shelter for the rulers families.

The residence of Zahida Khatun, the ruler of Nakhchivan and the treasure of the Eldanizlar were situated in the Alinjagala.

In the 80-90 years of XIV century, the fortress was the main foothold of the Azerbaijani people in the struggle against Timur and was bravely defended for 14 years.

After the death of Timur (1405) the Alinjagala again was under the power of Jalairlar and later the Garagoyunlular.

However, the legendary fortress was destroyed as a result of feudal intrigues and wars.

In 2014, Alinjagala was restored and granted a status of historical and cultural museum-reserve.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
On Thursday Cole got a call from a man who said he saw Solomon at a home construction site just an eighth of a mile from her house.

She and her husband rushed to bring Solomon home.

The tortoise was tired, hungry and caked in mud, but seems to be in good health after his odyssey. He's a vegetarian and was able to eat grass, dandelions and other flowers while he was away.

She said she is taking him to the vet on Monday to be sure he's OK and is watching him like a hawk until then.

Cole said she gave Solomon a big bowl of his favorite foods once he got home, including collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower and watermelon rinds along with some bananas and carrots.

Cole isn't sure how Solomon got loose, but they've reinforced his area to keep it from happening again. She's talked to the Nashville Zoo and a local rescue group about fitting Solomon with GPS in case he does take off again.

For now, it seems that Solomon's wandering days are behind him.

"People are surprised to know that he's very attached to his humans and he's very happy to be home," she said.

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Congress' Kapil Sibal, one of country's topmost lawyers and a former Union minister, has had a busy day (August 24). He has been representing Airtel in the AGR case in Supreme Court even as the turmoil within his party unfolded in a virtual Congress Working Committee (CWC) meet.

While the apex court has reserved its judgement for now in the case, the political crisis that has gripped Congress  one of the biggest in recent days  continues.

Sibal is among the 23 party leaders who have written to Sonia Gandhi seeking 'full-time' leadership that is active in the field and 'visible' in party offices, devolution of powers to state units, revamping of the CWC in line with the party constitution, among other changes.

Catch all the LIVE Updates here.

Earlier on August 24, Sibal had hit headlines when he slammed, on Twitter, senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi after the latter reportedly lashed out at letter writers and accused them of being in cahoots with the BJP.

In his tweet, Sibal also made a mention of the legal matters that he has handled for the party, particularly during the Rajasthan political crisis.

"Rahul says 'we are colluding with BJP'. Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party. Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP government. Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of the BJP on any issue. Yet 'we are colluding with the BJP'!" Sibal tweeted.

Also Read: Congress crisis: Kamal Nath, Digvijaya Singh express faith in Sonia Gandhi's leadership

The senior Congress leader however withdrew his statement latter after he was "informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him."

Sibal, who is also an author and has written several books, is considered one of the party's foremost legal minds. Apart from the ones he mentioned in the tweet, Sibal also appeared for the party during the Karnataka political crisis, particularly the MLA disqualification case.

Also read: Sonia Gandhi offers to resign: When Congress last faced a similar leadership crisis as now

Sibal has held top posts in the government during the tenure of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, including as the Law and Justice Minister and the Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

He is also a published poet and a volume of his poetry, I Witness: Partial Observations, was published in 2011.
Belarusian authorities on Monday detained two leading opposition activists who have helped spearhead a wave of protests demanding the resignation of the country's authoritarian ruler of 26 years.The oppositions Coordination Council said its members Sergei Dylevsky and Olga Kovalkova were detained by police in the capital, Minsk. City police confirmed their detention.

The move signals President Alexander Lukashenkos determination to stifle the massive demonstrations that have entered their third week. It comes a day after the 65-year-old Belarusian leader toted an assault rifle in a show of force as he arrived at his residence by helicopter as protesters rallied nearby.

Last week, Lukashenko's warned the council created to negotiate a transition of power that it could face criminal accusations for creating what he described as a parallel government. The Belarusian prosecutors then opened a criminal inquiry into the council members on charges of undermining national security, claims rejected by the council's members.

The detention of opposition activists follows Sunday's demonstration in Minsk that drew an estimated 200,000 people pushing for President Alexander Lukashenko to step down following the Aug. 9 election, which the opposition saw as rigged. The previous Sunday saw a similar number of demonstrators, the largest the ex-Soviet nation of 9.5 million people ever saw.

Video on Sunday showed Lukashenko getting off his helicopter with a Kalashnikov automatic rifle. No ammunition clip was visible in the weapon, suggesting that Lukashenko, who cultivates an aura of machismo, aimed only to make a show of aggression.He commented to his aides that the protesters ran away like threats and then thanked riot police who encircled the residence for safeguarding it.We will deal with them, he said about the demonstrators.

The protests were galvanized by a brutal post-election crackdown, which saw nearly 7,000 people detained and hundreds injured after police dispersed peaceful protesters with rubber bullets, stun grenades and clubs. As crowds of protesters swelled amid public outrage, the authorities backed off and let demonstrations go unhindered. However, the authorities again beefed up police cordons around the city since last week and threatened opposition activists with criminal charges.The demonstrators approached the edges of the presidential residence grounds, but stopped after encountering lines of police in full riot gear and dispersed shortly after as the evening came amid rain.

(Image Credit: AP)
KENOSHA, Wis.  At least three garbage trucks were burned out Monday and several businesses windows were shattered during unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the shooting of a Black man there Sunday.

The unrest stemmed from an incident in which police shot a man sometime after 5:11 p.m. local time Sunday. The encounter was partially captured in a video that showed an officer firing several shots at close range into the man's back.

Wisconsin officials identified the shooting victim as Jacob Blake, a Black man. He was in serious condition at Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee as of early Monday morning, law enforcement said.

As of 9 a.m. Monday, garbage trucks blocked the street outside the County Courthouse, and about 16 sheriffs deputies wearing helmets and holding shields were still standing outside the building.

Police shooting of Jacob Blake: Protests erupt, Wisconsin DOJ to investigate

Sheriff deputies in riot gear and protesters face off outside the Kenosha Police Department on Aug. 23, 2020, after an officer shot Jacob Blake.

'I cant believe this is in Kenosha. This is unreal.'

Onlookers came to witness the damage and take pictures. Others came with brooms and shovels to clean up the broken glass on the downtown streets.

Written with spray paint on the courthouse: They kill us because they fear us, honor the dead and be water, spread fire.

The smell of natural gas was in the air, and one truck of firefighters was on scene investigating.

Among the damaged buildings: the public library, the Dinosaur Discovery Museum, the Harborside Academy charter school, a law firm, the USPS building and the county register of deeds.

Many who walked up said they couldnt believe the situation plaguing so many other American cities happened in Kenosha.

A man records a city truck on fire outside the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020. Kenosha police shot a man Sunday evening, setting off unrest in the city.

Howard Plain walked up to the courthouse unsure if it was open  he had a hearing set for the morning.

Plain, a Kenosha resident of eight years, said he used to live in Chicago and didnt expect the violence to arrive in his city.

Plain said he watched the video of the shooting on Facebook last night and thought the officers could have deescalated the situation or used a stun gun instead of shooting Blake.

Story continues

The police could have handled it better, he said.

David Ferguson of Racine rode his bicycle to the scene of the damage.

I cant believe this is in Kenosha. This is unreal, he said.

Two burned-out garbage trucks and about 16 sheriffs deputies with shields and tactical gear outside the #Kenosha County Courthouse this morning following the unrest last night. pic.twitter.com/VlzOSoxGV4  Sophie Carson (@SCarson_News) August 24, 2020

He said police across the country are again and again treating white suspects with more respect than Black suspects.

People are upset. It just keeps happening, he said, surveying the damage.

He was horrified at the circumstances of the Kenosha shooting, with Blakes children in the car.

Theres got to be another way to resolve these issues. I mean, this is an epidemic, Ferguson said.

Crowds gathered Sunday night

In the aftermath of the shooting Sunday night, large crowds soon gathered at the scene of the shooting. A livestream from podcaster Koerri Elijah showed small fires in the street and a person, possibly an officer, lying prone on the ground, surrounded by officers.

The crowds began moving away from the scene, and the video showed people walking down the sidewalk and street, some on bicycles with some vehicles accompanying them, occasionally chanting. The video showed people kicking at police vehicles and later it appeared some fireworks were set off.

"Things have been very heated, tons of damage to cop cars, an officer was actually knocked out," the person taking video said.

A crowd of about 100 had reached the Kenosha County Public Safety Building by 10:15 p.m. and were chanting "no justice, no peace."

A line of police flanked the building and faced off with the crowd, moving them back away from the building.

Kenosha County said Monday morning that the courthouse and administration building would be closed for the day because of damage sustained during the unrest. No hearings will be held today but other services would be available by phone or online.

The County of Kenosha declared a state of Emergency Curfew for 10:15 p.m., saying "the public needs to be off the streets for their safety." It was enforced until 7 a.m.

At 11:05 p.m., police began backing up in a cordon around the front doors of the police station and then set off teargas canisters as people ran in fear, trying to wipe their eyes.

At 11:15 p.m., a city dump truck that had been positioned to prevent traffic from heading toward the police department was fully engulfed in fire. Some people were getting close to take pictures until someone shouted that the gas tank could blow.

A big boom sounded when one of the tires blew up around 11:45 p.m., scattering the crowd.

The crowd had lessened by midnight to a couple hundred people who stood in the square next to the courthouse watching city dump trucks become engulfed in flames.

At 12:21 a.m., a few hundred people could be seen milling around the courthouse, which was tagged with graffiti condemning the shooting and police.

Someone set a fire outside the courthouse. Officers arrived extinguished; soon after, officers also began firing what appeared to be tear gas canisters.

Protesters then began smashing windows at the administration building near the courthouse. Officers formed a line behind a police vehicle and continued to deploy what appeared to be tear gas or smoke bombs.

According to a Facebook livestream by Mercado Media, police shortly before 1 a.m. were asking for voluntary cooperation to disperse the area and leave the park.

"This is an unlawful assembly. Please leave the area," police could be heard telling the crowd as gas canisters were fired their way.

At 1:21 a.m., police formed a riot line and began moving into the park across the street from the courthouse. A few minutes later, a firework went off in the crowd.

People continued to move through the city. Before 2:30 a.m., the livestream showed a truck had been set on fire in the parking lot of a car dealership a few blocks from the courthouse.

Other cars were set on fire and occasional pops and explosions were heard as the fire burned through the lot, sending plumes of smoke into the sky. A fire truck arrived around 2:50 a.m. to begin extinguishing the blaze.

A little after 3 a.m., the fire had spread to the Bradford Community Church, the marquee of which had read Black Lives Matter before being incinerated. The men livestreaming attempted to alert anyone inside the building but received no response, then tried to smother some of the flames using shoves while flagging down a lone fire truck that had arrived near the car dealership.

Follow Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Sophie Carson (@SCarson_News) and Meg Jones (@MegJonesJS) on Twitter.

California wildfires become a target for looters: A firefighter is among the victims. His wallet was stolen, bank account 'drained.'

Trump speeches, attacks on Biden: What to expect this week at the Republican National Convention

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Kenosha protests escalate after police shoot Black man Jacob Blake
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Linkedin Enrico Dela Cruz (Reuters) Manila, Philippines  Mon, August 24, 2020 19:20 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c401afca 2 SE Asia Philippines,bombing,suicide-bombings Free

Twin blasts including a suicide bombing killed 15 people and wounded 75 others on a restive southern Philippine island on Monday, among them security forces and civilians, with Islamist militants suspected of being behind the attack.

The bombs went off within an hour of each other in the main town on Jolo island, a stronghold of Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic State-linked group that has intensified its campaign in recent years through the use of suicide bombers.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for what was the biggest attack of its kind in the southern Philippines since January 2019, when a double suicide bombing at a Jolo church killed more than 20 people and wounded over 100.

The military said the first blast happened around noon on Monday, when a homemade bomb in a motorcycle was triggered close to two parked army trucks, killing soldiers and civilians.

As police and army surveyed the scene, a suicide bomber tried to breach a cordon and detonated her device, killing herself and several others.

In total, eight members of the security forces, six civilians and the bomber were killed and 27 security personnel and 48 civilians were wounded in the attacks on Jolo, one of a chain of mainly Muslim islands in the southwest of the majority Roman Catholic country.

"We condemn in the strongest possible terms the explosion incidents in Jolo," presidential spokesman Harry Roque said.

"Authorities are now conducting an investigation, which includes identifying individuals or groups behind these dastardly attacks."

The troops were among hundreds from a special infantry division created by President Rodrigo Duterte to destroy Abu Sayyaf, a group notorious for banditry, piracy and kidnap-for-ransom and countless attacks on civilian and military targets.

Monday's incident was one of at least six suicide bombings in the past three years, a mode of attack previously rare in the Philippines, despite decades of separatist conflict that has given rise to Islamist sentiments.
You cant blame the operators of Gumbos in downtown Mount Clemens for being a little mixed up after a motorist crashed through the front window last week.

In a social media post, someone from the eatery indicated theyd be back open for business this Monday, offering home-cooked Cajun and Creole dishes.

Then they had second thoughts.

Unfortunately, we were optimistic in thinking we could open on Monday, venue operators said on Facebook on Saturday. However, after assessing the damage done to our main side we will be unable to open. We will be doing our utmost to open back up as fast as possible. All the love and support is very much appreciated and acknowledged and we thank all of you from the bottom of our heart.

Gumbos was forced to close after an elderly woman attempting to park her Lincoln SUV smashed through the entrance in the heart of the citys downtown section around 1 p.m. Friday.

Capt. Tom Moceri of the Mount Clemens Fire Department said the driver apparently thought she was pressing the brake pedal when she went to park but she actually had her foot on the accelerator.

Although shaken up, the woman was not seriously hurt. Several patrons seated at tables inside the restaurant also managed to escape the approaching vehicle.

Mount Clemens Mayor Laura Kropp was in the building when the incident took place. Afterward, she shared her feelings on the incident on social media.

That was a moment Ill never forget watching first the tree come through the window followed by the car. It was like slow motion. Feeling very thankful that everyone is safe, she wrote on Facebook.

Gumbos operators did not indicate when they anticipate being able to reopen, but added they will keep the public updated on their Facebook site.

 Macomb Daily staff
Zac Efron has been riding out the coronavirus pandemic in Byron Bay, a quiet town on Australia's east coast, since June.

And it seems the Hollywood actor is making plans to extend his stay Down Under.

The High School Musical star, 32, cancelled his scheduled flight to Los Angeles last week, Daily Mail Australia can reveal.

Here to stay! Hollywood star Zac Efron cancelled his flight home to Los Angeles last week and will stay in Byron Bay for the foreseeable future, Daily Mail Australia can reveal

'He was only planning to fly home if he had to,' a source revealed. 'He didn't really want to go back to America.'

Zac had purchased the plane ticket several months ago in case his application for a visa extension was denied by the Department of Home Affairs.

But it seems his request to have his tourist visa extended from three months to 12 months was granted, hence why he cancelled his trip home.

Change of plans! Zac had purchased the plane ticket several months ago in case his application for a visa extension was denied by the Department of Home Affairs. But it seems his request to have his visa extended from three months to 12 months was granted

Daily Mail Australia understands Zac received a last-minute refund for his ticket.

It comes just days after The Daily Telegraph reported that Zac had 'inspected and put in an offer' on a home in Byron Bay.

However, he was apparently outbid at the last minute by a rival buyer.

Putting down roots: It comes just days after The Daily Telegraph reported that Zac had 'inspected and put in an offer' on a home in Byron Bay

Zac was apparently disappointed because he had 'fallen in love' with Byron Bay.

While he is staying in Australia for the time being, the Baywatch star will have to return to America eventually due to his filming commitments.

He is scheduled to star in the Disney+ remake of Three Men and a Baby, based on the classic 1987 comedy starring Steve Guttenberg, Tom Selleck and Ted Danson.
Considerable progress has been made in the efforts to achieve peace in Donbas, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said, at the same time reiterating the need to solidify the local ceasefire.

"I need to stress that serious progress has been made recently. The ceasefire in the east of Ukraine has been holding for a longer period than previously, maybe even longer than at any point since 2014. It should be solidified and strengthened. And we are discussing how to find such a mechanism, how to track violations of the ceasefire," Maas said at a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv on Monday.

"Thanks to Ukraine's steps, we are now observing good progress as regards exchanges of captives, mine clearance, and the opening of additional crossing points," he said.

"Our impression is that, at last, initiatives are being implemented step by step. Of course, for Ukrainian citizens, this is an immensely important improvement in their day-to-day life. And our appeal is not to reduce these efforts, but to also tackle challenging political issues in Donbas, for instance the issue of holding elections in Donbas. We discussed this today, as well, and would like to make progress here," Maas said.
The telling thing about Joe Bidens acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination last week was what it wasnt. It wasnt a ringing call to fight systemic racism and advance the Oriflamme of wokism. It was, instead, mostly an anodyne rehearsal of standard American patriotism, and featured the usual Four Point Plan -- okay, Four Crises Joe is going to fight:

The worst pandemic in over 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The most compelling call for racial justice since the 60's. And the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change.

YouTube screen grab (cropped)

Actually, I predict, in two years comedians will be making jokes about all four crises. Worst pandemic? Yeah, since the infestation of Pet Rocks! Worst economic crisis? More like the biggest v-shaped economic bounce in history. Racial justice? Over a career criminal that overdosed himself and died while being restrained waiting for the ambulance? Climate change? Yeah, I get it. That See the USA in Your Chevrolet really was the worst thing ever. Imagine, bitter clingers and gun nuts driving needlessly all over the continent! The sooner we put a stop to that, the better.

Bidens speech shows that even in the depths of Woke Central at the DNC they know that you win elections by appealing to Commoners, and Commoners are interested in a great America where they can work and wive and thrive and build their lives using their God-given talents.

Did I mention Curtis Yarvins three-layer theory that modern society is composed of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients (of the Gentry)?

It is orthogonal to the current woke theory, publicized by Matt Taibbi, that society is composed of oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors. This theory is similar to a notion advanced by a German in the mid-19th century that society was composed of proletarians, their allies the Communists, and the bourgeoisie.

You can see what these last two theories have in common: they license lefty soyboys, ancient and modern, to sock it to the baddies and for their leaders (Fidel) to accumulate fabulous fortunes in the process.

Also, do you see that the oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors theory is a moral theory that has already figured how the world ought to be, whereas even Chuckie Marx had to explain to his readers in The Communist Manifesto how the proletarians were helpless innocents and the bourgeoisie were monsters, and then in Das Kapital how the science -- the science! -- agreed with him.

Pity that the day after Das Kapital was published the classical economic science Marx used got superseded by four economists all proposing a Marginal Revolution. How Dare They! Revolution is Our Lefty Thing!

But here is what I cant get out of my mind after watching Joe Bidens pretend patriotism. How come it took so long for a guy like Trump to come along and make his pitch squarely at ordinary American Commoners. Really, what took so long?

I think the answer is that, up until the day before yesterday, Commoners were split between the parties. The Democrats were the intellectuals and Southern racists and victims du jour plus some Commoners. The Republicans were the business and professional classes plus the rest of the Commoners.

Not anymore. Now Trump owns the nationalist patriotic America-is-the-best-country-in-the-world shtick, plus one thing more. He is going flat out to encourage blacks and Hispanics to come out of their ethnic enclaves and into the glorious day of self-conscious all-American nationalism.

See, I dont agree with the civic-nationalist/white-nationalist/whatever-nationalist analyses. I believe that all politics is fake tribalism, a political sales job to persuade people who are not blood relations that they are in fact related. The fake tribe of the modern Victim is the urban ethnic enclave. The fake tribe of the educated Gentry is the global elite. The fake tribe of the Commoner is the nation-state. And once blacks and Hispanics become Commoners, they will become American nationalists; you watch em.

In recent decades blacks have been coming over to the GOP in their onesies and twosies, courageous heroes like Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Herman Cain, and now Candace Owens. Imagine what happens when they start coming over in battalion strength. Now you know why the Democrats insist on a Trayvon Martin (2012) or Michael Brown (2014) or George Floyd (2020) event in even-numbered years. Just like our Cold War leaders kept us in line by teaching us to fear the Commies, Democrats keep blacks in line with fear of white police brutality.

Because once blacks start identifying as Commoners, its Katy bar the door on todays Democratic Party.

But thats okay. Theyll come up with a new shtick. You watch em.

Meanwhile President Trump is implementing a stunning reinvention of the Republican Party into the party of all-American Commoners. And if he succeeds? Oh. My. God.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
SEREMBAN, Malaysia: A Malaysian coroner began an inquest Monday into the death of a French-Irish teen, a year after her naked body was found near a nature resort where she mysteriously vanished while on holiday.

Nora Anne Quoirins disappearance from her familys cottage at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on Aug. 4 last year, a day after her family arrived for their holiday, sparked a massive search operation. Her naked body was discovered Aug. 13 beside a stream in a palm oil estate about 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) from the resort.

Coroner Maimoonah Aid said the inquest is aimed at determining when Nora died, the cause of her death, how she came to her death, and if anyone was criminally involved.

Police have said there was no sign the teen was abducted or raped, with an autopsy showing the 15-year-old succumbed to intestinal bleeding due to starvation and stress. But her Irish mother and French father, Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin, believed Nora was abducted as she has mental and physical disabilities and couldnt have wandered off on her own.

The coroner earlier this month visited the resort and the place where the body was found. The inquest, which is set to run until Sept. 4, will involve 64 witnesses.

The Quoirin family lawyer, S. Sakthyvell, said Noras parents couldnt attend the inquest due to the coronavirus pandemic but that they will testify via the videoconferencing app Zoom. A British doctor who conducted a second autopsy on Noras body will also testify remotely, he said.

The Quoirin family has sued the resort owner for alleged negligence. They said in their lawsuit that there was no security at the resort and that a cottage window was found ajar with a broken latch on the morning Nora disappeared.

Nora had poor motor skills and needed help to walk and her mental age was about 5 or 6 years old, her parents said in the claim.

Noras parents had welcomed Malaysias decision to hold the inquest after police classified the case as no further action. They have said the inquest will be crucial in determining the fullest possible picture of what happened to Nora and how her case was dealt with."

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Israel on Monday, on the first leg of his Mideast press the momentum of the Trump administrations Arab-Israeli peace push.

Pompeo met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office in Jerusalem and the two were expected to discuss the recently announced historic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, brokered by Washington, to establish diplomatic ties. The two were expected to also discuss Iran and China.

The agreement delivered a key foreign policy victory to President Donald Trump as he seeks re-election and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about archenemy Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.

Also read: Mike Pompeo heads to Middle East as part of Donald Trumps Arab-Israeli push

Earlier this month, the US, Israel and the UAE announced the deal to establish full diplomatic relations, which also requires Israel to freeze its plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank sought by the Palestinians as part of their future state.

Later in the trip, Pompeo was to meet with Netanyahus partner in the government and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, as well as Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi.

After his Israel stop Pompeo was also slated to visit Sudan, the UAE and Bahrain, with additional stops in the Gulf possible, the State Department had said. In Sudan, the secretary of state said he would push for deepening the Sudan-Israel relationship.

Ahead of Pompeos arrival, the Israeli military said it struck militant targets in the Gaza Strip early on Monday, in response to incendiary balloons launched into Israel the day before. It was the latest exchange as tensions between the two sides intensified in recent weeks.

The army said it bombed military posts and an underground infrastructure belonging to Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules Gaza. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Militants affiliated with Hamas have launched scores of incendiary balloons into southern Israel in recent weeks, causing extensive damage to farmland, in a bid to pressure Israel to ease the blockade imposed since Hamas took control of the territory in 2007. On Friday, Palestinian militants launched 12 rockets at Israel, nine of which were intercepted, in the largest outbreak of violence in recent months.

Israel has responded the balloons and sporadic rocket fire with airstrikes on militant positions.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars and numerous smaller skirmishes in the past 13 years. Last week Egyptian mediators tried to ease tensions and bolster the informal truce between Israel and Hamas that has largely held since the 2014 war in Gaza.
James Corden had Hollywood royalty for company as he hit the beach with wife Julia Carey and their three children on Sunday

The Late Late Show presenter was joined by actor Sean Penn as the family enjoyed some quality time together in Malibu.

Corden, 42, stood out in a pair of baby pink shorts while making the most of his picturesque coastal surroundings.

Friends: James Corden was joined by Sean Penn as he hit the beach in Malibu with wife Julia Carey and their two children on Sunday

The versatile star added to his beach ready look with a black Nike top as he made his way onto the sand with swimsuit clad wife Julia and their children - son Max, nine, Carey, five and Charlotte, two.

Joining Corden, actor Penn, 59, looked casual in a printed T-shirt and shorts as he relaxed after confirming his surprise wedding to 28-year old Leila George.

With temperatures still high across southern California, the pair were in high spirits during their latest appearance in the exclusive coastal enclave.

The family outing comes as James plans his return to the studio to film his talk show again.

He was set to return to sound stages in August, though the host will be filming without an audience present, according to Deadline.

ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish revealed the end of his and fellow talk show host Stephen Colbert's at-home filming earlier this month during the company's earnings call.

Make way: Corden stood out in a pair of baby pink shorts while making the most of his picturesque coastal surroundings

'Colbert and Corden will be returning to their buildings next week, albeit with no audience,' he said.

All of the late night hosts began filming from home in March as the coronavirus began to spread throughout the United States.

Colbert hosts CBS' flagship late night series The Late show, while Corden is on just after him with The Late, Late Show.
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Linkedin Esther Samboh (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is unlike any past crisis Indonesia has experienced. It has overburdened the healthcare system and crushed the economy, forcing the government to take unprecedented measures to attempt to revive business while keeping people safe and healthy.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati spoke recently with The Jakarta Posts deputy managing editor, Esther Samboh, during a Jakpost Up Close webinar about the future of Indonesias economy. She said she expected the gross domestic product (GDP) to stall at a near-zero rate this year because the pandemic had taken a greater toll on economic activity than previously expected.

She also explained the governments measures to soften the impact of the pandemic and discussed a plan for structural reform to transform the countrys economy and achieve Indonesias 2045 vision, which centers on human development. The following are excerpts from the interview.

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Googles parent company Alphabet reportedly considered buying a share of the viral video app TikTok.

Alphabet was going to purchase a minority, non-voting stake through via of its investment companies, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Alphabet was not the main player in these negotiations, but the talks fizzled in recent days, the report claimed.

When contacted by The Independent for confirmation of such talks, Alphabet declined to comment. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

As well as Alphabet, many other companies have come forward with the intention to purchase TikTok. Most likely is Microsoft, which is seemingly the longest-running contender and has publicly announced its interest in the viral video app, but Twitter and Oracle have also reportedly shown interest.

TikTok, which is currently owned by the Chinese company Bytedance, faces a ban in the United States if it is not sold to a US company.

This is at the behest of president Trump, who believes TikTok is spying on US users and is sending or could be forced to share data with Beijing.

TikTok has denied any allegations that it would do so, and has since said it is suing the Trump administration.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said that the Trump administration will not allow TikTok to continue its current form. Mr Trump has said that the US treasury should receive a substantial portion of money in an acquisition deal because the US is making it possible for this deal to happen.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the purchase of TikTok by a US company would set a really bad long-term precedent.

I am really worried ... it could very well have long-term consequences in other countries around the world, he also said. Facebook had recently rolled out reels, a feature of Instagram that TikTok has called a copycat product.

As well as TikTok, Mr Trump is also taking action via executive order against Chinese messaging platform WeChat, making similar allegations against it as against TikTok.

This could have greater ramifications than the TikTok ban due to the apps ubiquity in China, and both Apple and Disney have both warned against the block. WeChat has more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, many of them in China.

It has been forecasted that a WeChat ban could cause up to a 30 per cent decline in iPhone sales. Approximately 95 percent of 1.2 million people who answered a Weibo survey said they would switch to an Android smartphone over an iPhone rather than give up WeChat.
CCTV has captured the moment a Perth couple staged a clumsy hold-up at a petrol station south of Perth, which nearly unravelled when the woman forgot how to unlock the safe.

Bradley Borrett, 41, and Vicki Callaghan, 58, arranged to rob the Puma Service Station on Rockingham Road in Munster on September 4, 2018.

Bradley Borrett and Vicki Callaghan both pleaded guilty to staging the robbery.

Callaghan was the only employee manning the petrol station when her then-partner Borrett arrived by bus and entered the store at 9.10pm wearing a skull mask and hoodie to cover his face.

He approached the counter and told her to "open the safe".
DGAP-News: Corestate Capital Holding S.A. / Key word(s): Real Estate/Sustainability



The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

Corestate publishes ESG Report: Goals for the year achieved, measurable commitment to more sustainable property management disclosed Frankfurt, 24 August 2020. Corestate Capital Group S.A. (Corestate), a leading independent investment manager for real estate in Europe, has achieved and in some cases exceeded the targets it set itself for its ESG Strategy for the 2019 reporting period. The fully digital ESG Report published today provides an account of this and provides insights into the comprehensive integration of ESG into Corestate's business model. For example, in its energy and emissions balance, the company has reduced the CO2 emissions per square meter in its managed properties by more than 10%, eight percentage points more than the reduction target. Water consumption was even reduced by 12% instead of the 2% planned. Over the same period, energy consumption per square meter was reduced by 10%, twice as much as planned. "The value creation of real estate investments can only be secured in the future by focusing specifically on ESG criteria. Our ESG Report illustrates our measurable commitment to a more sustainable real estate industry in the interests of our customers, the environment and society. We have defined quantifiable ESG targets for ourselves and are now successively delivering measurable results. We clearly support the EU Green Deal that includes plans for climate neutrality by 2050 and are doing everything we can to make our concrete contribution as well and as early as possible. However, our ambitions go beyond the ecological sphere. The environment, social issues and clear Corporate Governance are equally important for us to make a long-term positive contribution to society and the environment and to create sustainable value for our customers." Digital recording of real estate consumption data In order to be able to precisely measure, continuously analyze and optimize the ecological footprint of the managed properties, Corestate initiated the digitalization of its entire property portfolio last year. A large part of the portfolio's consumption data is already being continuously collected and analyzed on a central data platform. In addition, starting in 2020, the general electricity meters in all properties managed by Corestate in Germany will be gradually replaced by so-called smart meters. These intelligent measuring systems will provide the company with cumulative consumption data for all building areas in real time. "Digital consumption recording is indispensable for increasing building efficiency. If we manage to identify the potential for improvement in our Real Estate AuM using robust and detailed data, we will be even more effective in cutting unnecessary costs at the consumption and, of course, emissions level. In the interests of our investors, we keep the entire life cycle of their properties in view - from purchase and development to management," explained Justus Wiedemann, Group Sustainability Officer for Corestate Capital Group. Diversity, public benefit and Corporate Governance In addition to its ecological goals, Corestate also focuses on the areas of social affairs and Corporate Governance. The company has improved the structures and processes that specifically promote the advancement of women to management positions. Since last summer, the percentage of women in management positions has already increased by just under 7%. At that time, the company had set itself the goal of increasing the ratio of female managers by 5% annually. However, diversity encompasses much more than gender. Corestate is therefore paying closer attention to all aspects of diversity. By establishing the Corestate Foundation at the end of 2019, the company is supporting local projects, associations and organizations that work for children and young people. Kinderschutzbund Frankfurt e.V. is just one of the projects the company supports. For Corestate, clear and transparent Corporate Governance is the basis of every business relationship. Annual compliance and governance training courses for employees and managers, an expanded Code of Conduct and a declaration on ethics are therefore central and recurring elements. In its 2020 ESG Report, Corestate invited many experts to examine the topic of ESG from their respective perspectives. Representatives from inside and outside the company were interviewed. The complete report is available online here.

Press Contact

Jorge Person

T: +49 69 3535630-136 / M: +49 162 2632369

jorge.person@corestate-capital.com IR Contact

Mario Gro

T: +49 69 3535630-106 / M: +49 162 1036025

ir@corestate-capital.com

About CORESTATE Capital Holding S.A. CORESTATE Capital Holding S.A. (CORESTATE) is an investment manager and co-investor with more than EUR 28 billion in assets under management. As a fully integrated real estate platform, CORESTATE offers its clients combined expertise in the areas of investment and fund management as well as real estate management services. The company operates as a respected business partner of institutional clients and wealthy private investors internationally. CORESTATE is headquartered in Luxembourg and has 42 offices, e.g. in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Madrid, Zurich and Amsterdam. The company employs around 800 people and is listed in the Prime Standard (SDAX) of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Further information may be found at www.corestate-capital.com. Forward-looking statements This press release may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by our management. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of our company and the estimates given here. These factors include those discussed in our public reports, which are available on our website at www.corestate-capital.com. The company assumes no liability whatsoever to update these forward-looking statements or to conform them to future events or developments. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.

24.08.2020 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



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'The genetic thing is not in your control. The virulence is not known.'

'The only thing is if you can avoid it.'

'Once you get COVID-19, none of it is in your control.'

IMAGE: A healthcare worker gets ready to check COVID-19 patients at the Commonwealth Village in New Delhi, August 19 2020. Photograph:ANI Photo

COVID-19 troubles Dr Anup Warrier.

Not for its virulence. Because he says COVID-19 is less lethal than past respiratory viruses of the same ilk, for instance, H1N1.

But for the attitudes surrounding it.

Like the mass hysteria that has greeted the aggressive bug.

Or how academicians have forgotten the absolute importance of scientific rigour in their speed to publish new data.

Dr Warrier speaks straight from the shoulder when he looks back at the realisations that have come to him since his medical journey with COVID-19 began six months ago.

He says primarily he was disturbed to discover that the academic and medical community abandoned best scientific practices in the speed to offer information that was often not up to the mark.

The clinical fraternity too, Dr Warrier feels, has been gripped by an unnecessary and unbecoming frenzy of misinformation and has begun to use "any number of drugs."

"They wouldn't pump a patient with five or six unproven drugs for any other disease on a routine basis," he adds.

The soft but blunt-spoken infectious disease specialist, who is a senior consultant, department of infectious diseases and hospital infection control, at the Aster Medcity Hospital in Kochi, has spent many years grappling with the larger consequences of various species of viruses, including the Nipah virus and HIV.

An interview with Vaihayasi Pande Daniel/Rediff.com:

IMAGE: A health worker collects swab samples for the COVID-19 Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test in Gurugram, August 18 2020. Photograph: Yogendra Kumar/ANI Photo

Lesson One: Too much poor science

Surprisingly, for the sake of speed, the rigour of scientific evaluation or scientific assessment of a treatment, has been sacrificed during this time. This is a little surprising. Top medical journals like NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) and JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) had to retract major scientific publications (papers). After publishing a lot of flak was received from the scientific community and it was accepted that it (what was published) was substandard. It was poor science which was published. Even the top journals -- NEJM is supposed to be one of the very well-respected medical journals in our community -- they had to retract because they published poor science. This is something which is surprising. That such journals would actually fall for the need to publish anything for speed and forgo putting things through the rigour of science, as they would have done for other standard publications (in normal times). It is not right. There are no circumstances which justify putting out information which is inherently false.

IMAGE: A COVID-19 patient at the Commonwealth Village in New Delhi, August 19 2020. Photograph: Prabhat Mehrotra/ANI Photo

Lesson Two: Mass hysteria by the medical community

From the clinical community, from the practicing doctors' side, what we saw was mass hysteria. They found themselves confident in using all sorts of unfounded and unproven medications based on anecdotal evidence. I have seen prescriptions for a COVID-19 patient, which contains five to six drugs, all of them unproven. At least the clinical doctors, academic centres and institutes, that take pride in their prescriptions adhering to the available knowledge and regular practice globally. But during this time, we saw that even in those high academic centres and very good institutes, for a lot of doctors -- obviously, primarily because, I believe, it was more out of more of a mass hysteria -- whatever was published in whatever medical literature, as a possible cure, found its way into actual patients' prescription, without looking at either the basic science rationale, nor evidence of clinical efficacy. There is a lot of hurry among the medical community to use whatever, though we have seen that, after rigorous clinical trials, all these new drugs have failed, like remdesivir and tocilizumab. Starting from vitamin C, vitamin D and zinc supplementation, which in another scenario most modern doctors would put down to quackery (were prescribed). They found a permanent place in medical guidelines -- the local guidelines, guidelines of societies of the local IMAs (Indian Medical Associations) and in many of the state COVID-19 management guidelines, like Karnataka state. People have put it down on paper about giving vitamin D supplementation etc. We call it nutraceuticals. It is more on the fringe of modern medicine, not mainstream modern medicine. Nutraceuticals are when you use nutrient supplements to improve, prevent or cure diseases. With this thing (the arrival of COVID-19) it has become mainstream with state government guidelines prescribing vitamin C and zinc, and what all, for treating COVID-19. There is a lot of paranoia, a lot of mass hysteria about whatever comes out (on COVID-19). Somebody just talks out of his head that this could be useful (and people listen) and you can write anything and it will be get published. If you look at the number of publications, which have happened in the last six months on COVID-19, it is humongous. Everybody who wanted to have some publication under their name, they could have added (written) anything about COVID-19 and all the so-called unusual manifestations which have been attributed to COVID-19 -- the blood clots, the ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome), the happy hypoxia*. When you look at it very rationally, without much of the hype (associated with) COVID-19, you will see that all the manifestations and major complications, which have been described -- other than maybe the loss of smell and taste (anosmia), which I have not really looked into in that much detail -- like pneumonia, the ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome), the blood clots, the happy hypoxia (the sensation of low oxygen levels being absent) all these have a perfectly rational explanations. And they have been found in all the previous viral pneumonias also including H1N1 (the pandemic that began in 2009). If you look at the publications, for H1N1 you find exactly the same kind of data on blood clots, hypoxia and all those things. But somehow these are all -- even in the medical fraternity - put up like something unique for COVID-19. Like people are seeing this for the first time. They are not. Even in 2009 H1N1 epidemic, all these were published. These are all things which are preexisting, which happened with other diseases and which people always were dealing with for many years in the past. The only difference between the previous pandemics is the scale. This was obviously on a much larger scale, which sort of pressurised the healthcare system in terms of capacity. So, the challenge here was capacity. It was not primarily a clinical challenge. If you look at the published mortality: The number of people who died after developing ARDS or severe pneumonia from H1N1 was actually higher than the number of people who developed ARDS or severe pneumonia from COVID-19 -- the actual deaths, because that is something which people cannot fool around with, because you know how many people died. That's the reason I am saying, overall, there is too much hype about the novelty of COVID-19's presentation or its severity. (What's different about COVID-19) is more to do with the scale of presentation and the challenges to the healthcare capacity, rather than an actual clinical challenge. It is also the absolute numbers. It's not that in Europe and US the healthcare systems were overburdened with H1N1 (like they were for COVID-19).

IMAGE: 103-year-old Purakatt Veettil Pareed leaving the government hospital after getting COVID free in Kochi, August 19 2020. Photograph: Kbjaya Chandran/ANI Photo

Dr Anup Warrier answers two more questions:

The situation in Kerala In August, we have treated about 25 to 30 odd cases. And out of that 25 to 30, just about maybe five or six could be on the more ill side, meaning requiring ICU care and all, and there was one death among that. We have stuck to the Government of India clinical management protocol. We have not used remdesivir. We have not used tocilizumab, at all. Our team here is quite comfortable sticking to what the Government of India guidelines and not going beyond or not using any experimental therapy. Previously, overall in the state, cases were less than 100 or sometimes rarely 100 per day. Over the last four days, it has been touching 1,000. Especially in the last one week to 10 days now (early August). Right now, almost, on a daily basis, we have between 800 to 1,200 new cases. We have two or three large clusters. Now these are not from expatriates or people who have come back. These are all local transmissions. Previously among 100 new cases, eight would be people who are coming from other states and other countries. Now among our 1,000 cases, 800 are local transmission. Not from outside. Definitely, there is a lot of local transmission in the state. The largest cluster is in Trivandrum, where they are reporting between 250 to 300 cases, on a daily basis. The second cluster is in Malappuram, where it si reporting around 100 odd cases. The third is in Ernakulam -- where we are reporting around 70 to 100 new cases. Now the time of contact tracing is probably past. There is significant local transmission. Previously, when you had somebody coming in from outside, then from him you trace the contacts and you could isolate. That was an efficient or effective method when it was limited to expatriates and local transmission was very less. Now 80 per cent is local transmission. Even out of that, every day, we are we have around 25 to 30 or more people, whose source of illness cannot be traced at all. So, contact tracing will not be an effective strategy now in this phase. Right now, what the government is doing is that it is going for cluster containment. Wherever a group of cases have been identified together, they're shutting down that area -- limiting traffic from that area to other areas and then doing mass screening and testing in that zone. Kerala is a little unique. We don't have that traditional Indian thing of rural-urban divide. Our access to healthcare is almost uniform. Barring a few hilly areas in Idukki and rural areas in Wayanad, 88 per cent of the population has extremely good access to health care. And we have large medical colleges. It is a small state also. There is a uniform testing across all districts.

IMAGE: A healthcare worker gives tea to a COVID-19 patient at the Commonwealth Village in New Delhi, August 19 2020. Photograph: ANI Photo

Why do some families suffer COVID-19 much worse than others?

One could see that the Bachchan family got a mild case, even if age was not on their side, while others much more sick?

Why is it different family to family? It's like that for any viral illness. One of the oldest viral illnesses in India, with which we are very, very familiar, is dengue. It has been around for more than a decade, 20 years at least in India. Many of us have got dengue or know people who got dengue. It is the same with dengue. Some people have just a mild body pain and fever and they get tested and they are found to have dengue. But that's it. They're at home. Nothing happens. There will be another group of people who are found to have dengue and they have a lot of rash all over their body. Their platelet count falls precipitously. They are admitted and they're given platelet transfusion. But then that is it. And they get back home. Then there is a group of people for whom the platelet count drops and they bleed extensively, their BP gives away and the healthcare services and the doctors are unable to save them and they die. Similarly, for flu. All of us get flu. Most of us just manage it and maybe sit at home for two or three days. And then we have people, including young people and pregnant women, who are very badly affected and who are prone to developing pneumonia require hospitalisation and then ventilation, etc etc. What I'm trying to say is that this is exactly how it is for any infectious disease. You have the clinical presentation -- of how a patient would behave, what would be the severity, what would be the outcome. It is a function of treating and it as a function of the virulence of that strain. In that locality, and in that time, it would be mostly standardised, right. You can't expect that in Bombay, Amitabh Bachchan would get a different strain than the others. It is mostly standardised in the same zone for the same time. Then you have the host's response ie the immune response of the host. That is genetically determined. Any depends also on the other diseases or comorbid conditions this person might have. So, that is a very, very individual and it would vary from person to person. And the third is the access to healthcare and what is the sort of management they get. The management they get could go either way -- it could alter the first response or it could alter the virulence also. Like you give somebody some medicine which is not good for his immune function or alters his immune function, that could be a reason and or it could be a medicine which actually enhances the potency of the virus. That is also possible. These are the three things which sort of determine how a disease could progress in a person. In spite of that, we know that between one family and the next family the viral effect is more or less the same. When I say virulence that is what I am saying, the ability of the bug to induce an adverse response and the amount of viral load he has managed to get. Globally they have found that the risk for healthcare workers is more because when during certain procedures in the hospital, intubation etc, they're exposed to higher viral load than normal people. But in routine activities -- like talking to somebody face to face or you come across somebody in the market -- there I would not expect a major difference in the viral load exposure. (On whether the viral load is higher if the person sick is your neighbor opposite) not really. The viral load depends on an aerosol generation. If you talk to somebody, face to face, or somebody is living next door, (you have to consider) the amount of air dilution. If he puts one lakh viruses into the environment, it goes into a million cubic feet of air, na? And then we know that in regular homes, with windows and all, our air exchange rate for about 30 to 35 per hour and it would fast get washed out.. It means the whole air in a room is replaced 30-35 times in an hour, if there are open windows and good ventilation.

IMAGE: A health worker in personal protective equipment collects a swab sample from a woman at a health centre in the Kashmere gate area in Delhi, August 19 2020. Photograph: ANI Photo

So, the factors that make the disease worse for one person and not so bad for another are not in your control? The genetic thing is not in your control. The virulence is not known. The only thing is if you can avoid it. Once you get COVID-19, none of it is in your control.

*A silent hypoxemia (dangerous decrease in oxygen in the blood) where people seem to be functioning without any issues and without, sometimes, shortness of breath.

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/ Rediff.com
KYODO NEWS - Aug 24, 2020 - 22:00 | World, All, Coronavirus

Hong Kong has restarted discussions with Japan and a handful of other countries over setting up travel bubbles, commerce chief Edward Yau said Monday, given a mutually recognized coronavirus testing mechanism is established.

Addressing a webinar held by the Hong Kong Productivity Council on small business promotion amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Yau told the news media that Hong Kong has engaged in travel bubble discussions with between eight and 10 countries and places.

Discussions with Japan and Thailand, which had been suspended as the pandemic worsened in July, are in more advanced stages compared with other countries, Yau said.

"Travelers would take coronavirus tests that are mutually recognized, and the test results would be sent to the destination country via the flight companies for confirmation, before they were being allowed to board," Yau said, referring to the possible arrangement under discussion. "Once landed, the local health department could demand further testing."

But the bubble may not be set up anytime soon as all sides need to review the pandemic's development and situation, he added.

Japan received 2.29 million visitors from Hong Kong last year, compared with 20 visitors last month, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.

Foreign visitors have been banned from entering Hong Kong since March as the government put in place measures to fight the pandemic, while Hong Kong residents returning from foreign countries are subject to 14-day compulsory quarantine.

Arrival visitors dropped 99 percent in June year-on-year and are down 90 percent in the first half of this year from the same period of last year, tourism figures showed.

A 12-day run of 100-plus daily new cases was reported in mid-July as the third wave of the pandemic hit the city. But cases have dropped subsequently as nine were reported Monday, with the total tally reaching 4,691 and 77 deaths.
Little said that she and her husband were among the 50 or so people who participated in the previous campaigns, and had solar panels installed on their 100-year-old home in downtown Fredericksburg in 2015. She said they saved enough on their electric bill that they were able to pay off the loan for the panels in five years.

It was actually no extra cost to us at all through the energy savings that we realized, she said.

Courtnage said he had the energy-efficiency test done on his house and followed the recommendations for such things as adding insulation in the attic. He and his family didnt add solar panels because their house is in the Historic District and it wouldnt have been allowed under the citys Architectural Review Board regulations.

I know the ARB has revised their handbook and theyre looking more progressive in this space with solar energy, he said. Thats one of the things we want to help improve, is being able to balance the historical character in the Historic District, but also allow people to invest in renewable energy.

The science is pretty scary, said Courtnage. We dont have that long, and were trying to do our part in a small city in addressing that issue with climate change.

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Two-wheeler major Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI) aims to expand its bike portfolio in the country as it looks to bring in new set of customers from both rural and urban areas to its fold, a top company official said.

In an interview with PTI, HMSI's newly appointed President, CEO and Managing Director Atsushi Ogata said the company aims to bring in entry-level affordable products for rural areas while strengthening its mid-segment range (above 150cc) as well as super bike portfolio to cater to different set of customers.

The Japanese company, which dominates scooter segment in the country with products like Activa and Dio, is now looking to expand its footprint in rural areas with a new motorcycle which would sit below its CD 110 range, the company's most affordable bike at the moment.

The company's focus on filling the gaps in its portfolio to acquire more customers stems from the underlying fact that with the implementation of BS-VI emission norms, profitability on each model has come down, leading to its review of each model line.

"This issue (dip in profitability) is not only for HMSI, (but) for the entire industry. So therefore, we plan to review model by model profitability and try to change model mix itself to have profitable model mix," Ogata said.

The review would not impact the current models, but will look at filling the gaps in the portfolio to acquire all kinds of new customers, he added.

He noted that the company currently lacks entry level motorcycle which could compete with the competitors.

"Unfortunately, we do not have a strong product for rural areas, therefore definitely we need a model to acquire such kind of customers because Honda philosophy is to supply affordable products to customers. It is our responsibility to provide a product that people in rural areas can buy," Ogata said.

Therefore, it is under study to develop such kind of model for entry, he added.

"We don't have actual product in this segment. Of course, we have CD 110 but it cannot penetrate such markets," Ogata noted.

When asked for timeline for launch of the entry-level bike, Ogata said it will take some time "but not five or ten years".

Noting that India has diverse regions with different requirements in terms of mobility, Ogata said the company would also strengthen its mid-range portfolio (above 150cc) going ahead.

In India, there are high income groups as well, and Honda has the technology to bring in new products in this category as well, he said.

"We already have Unicorn and others in the over 150cc segment, but that is not enough. Soon enough, we will release some attractive models to establish new customer groups in urban centres," Ogata noted.

On premium bike segment, he said the focus now would be on localisation and India centric products.

"Currently, we don't have localised premium motorcycles with HMSI. Parts are coming from other countries and the products itself are oriented towards advanced countries."

He further said, "Africa Twin, CBR...they are not India oriented models...so we should have localised, original products exclusively tested for the Indian market. Such models are under study, today I cannot tell more but soon details will follow."

Ogata said the company would not only launch new products but would also like to create culture for such products with curated drives and other activities.

Currently, motorcycle sales account for just around 35 percent of the company's total sales in a year. Scooter range, on the other hand, accounts for the rest 65 percent of the sales.

HMSI currently sells eight bike models, including two superbikes, in the country.

Ogata, who was appointed HMSI head in May, could join office only last month due to COVID-19 led travel restrictions.

Prior to joining here, he was based in Bangkok, serving as Executive Director of Honda's Regional Operations (Asia & Oceania region).

When asked to list his immediate priorities as HMSI chief, Ogata said he would like to begin with a review of company's operations in order to recover from losses due to the coronavirus pandemic led lockdown.

"So my first task is recovery of last two month's losses, I think it is good opportunity to review everything in the company, not only the factories but also sales and other departments," he noted.

Ogata, who has over 35 years of experience across various roles around the globe, said the business scenario is improving month on month now.

"Hopefully it will be back to normal in next one year, so before that it would be helpful to review everything to get back the advantage," he noted.

When asked if HMSI would also look at enhancing exports going ahead, Ogata said Honda Motor Co has lot of expectations from Indian motorcycle buisness.

"Within three years, HMSI will become biggest resource for exports among the Honda Group because now we have BS-VI products which could be exported to even advanced countries," he noted.

The company is currently in discussions with headquarters as how to utilise its manufacturing prowess for expanding overseas shipments of vehicles as well as CKD (Completely Knocked Down) exports to Honda companies across the globe, Ogata said.

Currently, China, Thailand and Japan are the top exporting countries among Honda Group, he added.

At present, HMSI exports only 3 percent of its total volume to a few countries such as Sri Lanka, Nepal and Latin America.

HMSI has four plants located at Manesar (Haryana), Tapukara (Rajasthan), Narsapura (Karnataka) and Vithalapur (Gujarat), with total installed production capacity of 64 lakh units per annum.
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Sugar dating, a mutually beneficial relationship where 'sugar daddies or sugar mommas provide financial support for their 'sugar babies in exchange for romantic affection and possibly sex, has recently become a trend in Vietnamese society.

Sugaring relationships and the people who seek them out usually try to stay covert because of the publics divisive response to the arrangement, with some even referring to it as mere pretense for prostitution.

Wife, mistress and sugar baby

A Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper undercover correspondent infiltrated a secret Facebook group, which boasts over 28,000 members, for people seeking a sugar dating arrangement.

The reporter then switched to a burner Facebook account, using sexually suggestive pictures from the Internet to pose as a junior-year college student in Ho Chi Minh City looking for a sugar daddy.

On paper, she offered the perfect package for a sugar baby: stunning looks, obedient, available to meet three times per week, and capable of keeping a secret.

Within less than an hour, the post yielded hundreds of reactions and a few dozen offers from aspiring sugar daddies in the group.

After a few flirty messages, Nguyen Duc Vinh  whose name has been changed for this article, a 44-year-old sugar daddy hopeful was down to meet in real life.

He claimed to be a husband, father as well as the director of a construction firm in Binh Tan District of Ho Chi Minh City.

During the first encounter at a coffee shop on Ung Van Khiem Street of Binh Thanh District, Vinh talked about his wife as a meek and caring person, but the flame between him and her seems to have died.

He was seeking companionship from a young woman to fill the gap that his mistress of ten years left behind.

The reason for their break-up was her forcing him to divorce his wife and marry her.

I wish to find a secret lover whom I can talk to, but please dont let yourself catch feelings, for I have yet to forget [the mistress], nor can I offer you a title [as a wife] in broad daylight, Vinh confessed right after he poured his heart out about his former mistress.

My wife is very docile. As long as you stay obedient and dont force me to divorce her, you will be all set.

Cutting a deal for affection

Vinh affirmed he is not the promiscuous kind of man, but he added that sex acts will be paid extra on top of the settled benefits.

During the first meeting, Vinh was extremely vigilant, scrutinizing the undercover reporter on whether she is a sex worker in disguise.

He insisted that his partner should be employed in a white-collar job or a student so he can help support and mentor her career-wise, or employ her if she is out of work, even suggesting the prospective sugar baby move near his company office to obtain care from him more easily.

Vinh offered a benefit package of VND15 million (US$645) per month starting after a probation period, where he would drive the partner-to-be to her school to confirm her identity. He also required his partner to take an HIV test at a facility of his choice.

Donning an exemplary corporate demeanor, Vinh handled all inquiries from the Tuoi Tre reporter with diplomatic finesse.

When asked about the possibility of him vanishing without any trace from the deal, he cited the credibility of his company and himself as a businessman.

Upon the staggering request of a high-end suite and a scooter after the first month together, he did not shy away, but instead floated them as feasible rewards for good times between the two.

The 44-year-old man shoved VND2 million ($86) of cash into the reporters hands as a guarantee of his credibility.

To seal the deal, Vinh said that he enjoyed his time with her and drew a comparison between her and his ex-mistress.

If we work out well, you will have whatever you want, as long as you satisfy me, he concluded.

A Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper reporter (left) disguised as a sugar baby hopeful is seen discussing relationship details with a sugar daddy candidate whom she got in contact from a Facebook group. Photo: Le Phan / Tuoi Tre

Sugar daddy as a mentor

The Tuoi Tre correspondent went on to meet another sugar daddy wannabe from the candidate list, which had expanded non-stop since the post in the Facebook group.

Tran Cong Hai  whose name has been changed, a 47-year-old from Binh Thanh District, said his casual outfit did not speak for the plush lifestyle that he can afford his partner.

Introducing himself as a cosmetics tradesman and homestay host in Ho Chi Minh City, Hai said he first joined the sugar dating Facebook group to promote his lodging facilities for sugar daddies to house their sugar babies, but later became part of the scene himself.

Prior to the undercover reporter, Hai had met up with two other sugar baby candidates but reached a deal with neither.

According to Hai, one was a hustler as she did not hesitate to suggest sex in their first encounter, while the other quoted VN20 million ($860) per month for her companionship, the amount being a dealbreaker for Hai.

Nevertheless, VND20 million per month is definitely within his pay range, he claimed.

As the conversation went, it was revealed that a case of erectile dysfunction greatly limited Hais sexual potency.

The tentative meetups would be in hotel rooms to shroud his affairs from his social network and would consist of casual dating for the most part.

Hai said he is only available to meet during the day, and his secret partner is not welcomed to actively ring him as his daughters might pick up the infidelity while using his phone.

He was caught cheating by his wife once, who threatened him until Hai promised to never be unfaithful again.

It turns out it was not an isolated case as he admitted to adopting a few sugar babies during his time in the group.

In these sugaring liaisons, Hai was willing to provide the babies with tuition money, career orientation, or even boyfriend advice. The sugar babies were allowed to have boyfriends outside of the sugaring affair with Hai.

Either party can call an end to the relationship the moment they want to, he proclaimed.

I dont give out many promises, but every single time you meet me, I wont leave you disappointed by any means, Hai assured.

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Turkish authorities have said that the Oruc Reis exploration vessel will carry out seismic surveys in a disputed part of the eastern Mediterranean until 27 August, in a move likely to increase already simmering tensions in the region.

Turkey and Greece, both Nato members, disagree sharply over rights to hydrocarbon resources in the eastern Mediterranean. Ankara and Athens can't see eye to eye over the extent of their continental shelves in waters dotted with islands, most of them Greek.

Earlier this month, Turkey said the Oruc Reis would conduct seismic exploration until 23 August in waters claimed by Greece, Cyprus and Turkey. Athens has called the survey illegal.

In reaction, French President Emmanuel Macron ordered the deployment of two Rafale fighter jets and two navy vessels to the eastern Mediterranean to provide support for Greek naval patrols.

The ships and jets arrived in Crete and carried out joint manoeuvres with Greek forces, acording to defence sources in Athens.

Navigational telex

On Sunday, the Turkish navy issued a navigational telex (navtex) saying that the work of the Oruc Reis and two other vessels, the offshore supply ship Ataman and the tug supply vessel Cengiz Han, would continue until 27 August.

Currently the three ships are operating about 200 km south of Turkey, in a stretch of Mediterranean between Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete.

Seismic surveys are part of preparatory work for potential hydrocarbon exploration. Turkey and Greece are also at odds over issues such as flight paths over the Aegean Sea and the ethnically divided island of Cyprus, where the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is controlled by Ankara, while the Republic of Cyprus is a full-fledged member of the European Union.

Black sea gas find

Last Friday, President Tayyip Erdogan announced the discovery of a 320 billion cubic meter gas field in the Black Sea, the largest such find in Turkish history.

Ankara hopes to start exploiting the gas by 2023, when Turkey will mark the centenary of the founding of the republic, Erdogan said.

Story continues

Turkey has realised the greatest natural gas discovery in its history, he said. We are determined to solve our energy issue. We will not stop until we become a net exporter of energy.

Berat Albayrak, the economy minister and Erdogans son-in-law, said the government hopes profits from the sale of gas will wipe out Turkey's current account deficit.

But while the find is significant, it is smaller than other discoveries in the nearby eastern Mediterranean. The Black Sea discovery is about a third of Egypts Zohr field, one of the largest ever found in the Mediterranean, which is estimated to hold 850 billion cubic meters, nearly three times the Turkish find.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The Pune-based Serum Institute, which has partnered with Oxford University to produce covid vaccine, on Sunday clarified that Indian government has granted it permission to only manufacture the vaccine and stockpile it for future use.

Named Covishield, the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine candidate which has been created using parts of adenovirus, will be commercialized once trials are proven successful and requisite regulatory approvals are in place, the company said.

The clarification comes after some reports suggested that the experiment vaccine, developed by Oxford University, could be launched in 73 days.

Phase-3 trials for Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine are underway and only once the vaccine is proven immunogenic and efficacious, SII will confirm its availability officially, the worlds largest vaccine manufacturer by volume said.

More trials likely to start in next few days.

Meanwhile, the apex health research body, ICMR, is in the process of developing an online vaccine portal which will provide information related to COVID-19 vaccine development in India and abroad, with the majority of the updates in several regional languages in addition to English.

The aim of creating the website is to provide all information and updates relating to the COVID-19 vaccine development on one platform as all the information in this regard is scattered as of now, Samiran Panda, Head of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases at ICMR, told PTI on Saturday.

The idea behind making the updates available in regional languages is to make sure that every citizen is able to access the information.

The portal is likely to be functional by next week, Panda said.

Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Sunday said that if everything goes well, India would get a vaccine by the end of this year.

Three COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including two indigenous ones, are in different phases of development in India.

The phase-one human clinical trials of the two indigenous COVID-19 vaccine candidates, one developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with ICMR and the other by Zydus Cadila Ltd, have been completed and the trials have moved to phase-two, ICMR Director General Dr Balram Bhargava had said recently.

In a tweet in Hindi, Vardhan said on Saturday, "I hope that if everything goes well, India will get a coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year."

(With PTI Inputs)
Medical interns and residents across the country began a walkout on Sunday against the government's plans to expand admissions quotas at medical schools. Full-time and private-practice doctors also plan to join the strike between Wednesday and Friday, raising serious concerns of a paralysis of the country's medical system. New coronavirus infections soared by 397 cases on Saturday. That means the risk of contracting the virus is everywhere. Lee Jong-koo at Seoul National University said, "There is a chance of the daily number of infections surpassing 1,000 cases," and Jeong Eun-kyeong, the chief of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, "We are facing a nationwide crisis."

There is no guarantee that the country will succeed in overcoming the epidemic even if all hands are on deck. The danger is that Korea might walk down the paths of Europe and the U.S. in the early phase of the pandemic, which resulted in a collapse of some medical systems due to a sudden overload in patients. If that happens, critical patients and those requiring emergency medical care will be ignored, and elderly patients could miss out on life-saving medication.

Minister of Health and Welfare Park Neung-hoo said Saturday that the government will postpone the medical reform plans until the coronavirus situation eases, but the Korean Medical Association said it no longer trusts the government and demanded that the entire agenda be scrapped. The Korean Intern Resident Association offered on Sunday to hold talks with the government, but it remains to be seen if the two sides can find common ground.

There are apparently only around 200 infectious disease experts in Korea who are capable of managing the epidemic, and only one pediatric surgeon each at all of the university-run and general hospitals in Anyang, Gwacheon, Gunpo and Uiwang south of Seoul. There is also sharp imbalance in doctors available in the Seoul metropolitan area and those practicing in other parts of the country because doctors, like most other people, want to work in the capital. But the government should not have raised this sensitive issue at the height of an epidemic. It must let doctors focus on combating coronavirus. The cooperation of the medical community is the most important thing at the moment. The ministry stirred up a hornet's nest even though it knew what would happen.

The ministry claims that it could not postpone the plan any longer because it will take up to 10 years to see the effects of the plan once it is implemented, meaning that many parts of the country have to continue to suffer the dearth of doctors. Then why did it wait until now to raise the issue? It seems clear that the government is once again trying to exploit the epidemic to stir public sentiment in its favor. That is highly irresponsible. It must listen to the opinions of doctors, and doctors must go back to work immediately.


White nationalist Richard Spencer speaks during an event in Gainesville, Fla., in 2017. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

White Nationalist Richard Spencer Endorses Joe Biden

White nationalist Richard Spencer, who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, says he now favors Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

I plan to vote for Biden and a straight democratic ticket, Spencer said on Sunday.

In a series of posts on Twitter, Spencer said he believes The MAGA/Alt-Right moment is over and that Nazis are the real liberals.

Im sure everyone who seeks to influence public opinion is an attention-seeker at some level. But voting for a neoliberal frontman whose administration will more competently manage a declining empire is not one of my more outlandish stunts, Spencer wrote in one missive.

Spencer told his supporters to be patient.

Well have another day in the sun. We need to recover and return in a new form, he said.

Spencer says he voted for Trump in 2016 but turned against him in 2018. Actions Trump carried out that Spencer opposed included Trump tweeting about Congresswomen that year, telling them to go back to their home countries and the killing earlier in 2020 of Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian general.

Spencer has expressed radical views in the past, including calling for the European Union to move forward as a racial empire. He was an organizer and speaker during the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that ended in violent clashes.

White nationalist Richard Spencer and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Emancipation Park after the Unite the Right rally was declared an unlawful gathering in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, 2017. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Biden campaign quickly moved to distance itself from the endorsement.

When Joe Biden says we are in a battle for the soul of our nation against vile forces of hate who have come crawling out from under rocks, you are the epitome of what he means. What you stand for is absolutely repugnant. Your support is 10,000% percent unwelcome here, campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told Spencer in a tweet.

Political observers have for years dissented on whether Spencer holds right-wing or left-wing views, an argument that reignited with his new endorsement.

In an interview with filmmaker Dinesh DSouza for Death of a Nation, Spencer said he opposed immigration unless the immigrants were white. Trump has welcomed legal immigrants and opposed people who come to the United States illegally.

Spencer has also said he supports single-payer healthcare, a system of healthcare the Democrat Party supports, and wide access to abortion, which many Democrats also advocate for. Asked for his favorite presidents, he named Presidents Andrew Jackson and James Polk, both Democrats.

Spencer says he voted for John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. He supported Ron Paul, a Republican candidate who leaned toward libertarianism, in 2008.
Nearly eight months after the Yemeni government and the Southern Transitional Council (STC) signed the first version of the Riyadh Agreement on Nov. 5, 2019, in the Saudi capital Riyadh, under the auspices of King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and with the participation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the two Yemeni parties began implementing the Riyadh Agreement with a new 30-day mechanism on July 29.

Under the agreement, the two parties committed to activating the role of all state authorities and institutions in southern Yemen, reorganizing the armed forces under the leadership of the Ministry of Defense, reorganizing the security forces under the leadership of the Ministry of Interior, as well as ending all offensive media campaigns, in order to normalize the relationship between the Saudi-backed Yemeni government and the STC, which is supported by the UAE.

The new mechanism provides for appointing a new governor for Aden governorate, according to which Ahmed Lamlas was appointed. It also includes the implementation of the Riyadh Agreements provisions that stipulated a cease-fire, the withdrawal of the STC forces from the city of Aden, the removal of the warring forces on the Abyan governorate front and the return of the military forces to their main sites.

In addition, the agreement called for forming a new government that will equally represent northern and southern Yemen, provided that the share of the UAE-backed STC would be four portfolios in a government of 24 ministers, in return for giving up the autonomous administration that it had announced on April 26. This would be the fourth government since the war in Yemen began in March 2015.

Once the government is formed, the economic issue would be tackled, according to which the Supreme Economic Council, the Supreme Authority for Combating Corruption and the Central Organization for Control and Auditing will be formed, and the Central Bank governor will be appointed.

However, a Yemeni government official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that the new mechanism does not address the political issues and finding a solution to the southern and Yemeni issue in general, given that resolving these issues is linked to regional and international understandings.

Meanwhile, several complications are impeding the implementation of the Riyadh Agreement, in addition to its rejection by some southern forces, most notably what was stated by the Southern Movement's Supreme Council, which rejected Aug. 2 the agreement altogether, hinting at protests to defend the demand for separation and restoring the southern Yemeni state.

This could further complicate the chances of implementing the Riyadh Agreement, especially since Hassan Baoum, head of the Supreme Council of the Southern Movement who resides in the Sultanate of Oman, announced that he will return to southern Yemen soon to confront anything that comes in the way of establishing an independent southern state.

The undersecretary of the Yemeni Ministry of Information, Fayyad al-Noman, told Al-Monitor, The STCs rebellion in the southern governorates was one of the reasons for diverting the course of the real battle [against the Houthis]. This is why  since it agreed to the Riyadh Agreement in November 2019  the Yemeni government has been seeking to unify the political, security and military decision in the governorates liberated from the Houthis, with the aim of devoting itself directly to the real battle against the Iran-backed Houthi group.

He believes that implementing the Riyadh Agreement has become an inevitable necessity for both parties, and the remaining period for its implementation according to the mechanism announced on July 29 will reveal the STCs seriousness in implementing the security and military part of the agreement.

Noman noted, The implementation of the Riyadh Agreement was stalled in the past due to the STCs failure to implement its obligations in the security and military file.

On Aug. 14, Saudi Ambassador to Yemen Mohammed al-Jaber announced the first steps to implement the military part of the mechanism to accelerate the implementation of the Riyadh Agreement between the legitimate government and the STC.

In a tweet, Jaber noted that the Saudi Coordination and Liaison Team, with the participation of the Saudi-led coalition forces in Aden, began supervising the removal of government and southern military forces from Aden governorate, and the withdrawal of forces in Abyan and their return to their previous locations, as part of the new mechanism.

The Riyadh Agreement gives the Saudi-led coalition ample space to intervene in Yemen through the clause that stipulates forming a committee under the supervision of the Coalition to Support Legitimacy in Yemen, led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, tasked with monitoring, executing and implementing the provisions of this agreement and its appendices. The committee is known as the Saudi Coordination and Liaison Team.

STC spokesman Nazar Haitham told Al-Monitor, The Riyadh Agreement is a true embodiment of a clear-cut partnership between the STC and the legitimate government supported by the Arab coalition.

Haitham noted, Emphasis will be placed on unifying efforts to confront the Houthi militias and terrorist organizations; provide security and safety for citizens; and work to improve the level of services in all southern governorates.

Yemeni author and political researcher Abdel Nasser al-Muwadea told Al-Monitor, This agreement has set Saudi Arabia as a guardian state over the southern regions, according to which it will supervise and manage the forces present there  be it the separatist forces or those of President [Abed Rabbo Mansour] Hadi. Saudi Arabia will also oversee the merger process and the formation of anti-terrorism forces, as well as it will determine the tasks of these forces and the areas of their deployment.

Muwadea added, The agreement reduces President Hadi's powers, as all appointment decisions he would issue would need Saudi Arabia's approval.

The successive crises in southern Yemen between the legitimate government and the STC have weakened the relationship within the Saudi-UAE alliance since the Saudi-backed Yemeni government accuses the UAE of supporting and financing the STC, especially after the latter declared autonomous administration in southern Yemen in April. This is why it has become crucial for both Saudi Arabia and the UAE to speed up the implementation of the Riyadh Agreement. However, many observers do not believe that this agreement will fundamentally end the conflict, but rather work to suspend it and control its rhythm.
T he Met Office has named another storm with Britain set to be rocked by fierce winds and heavy rain this week.

Forecasters said Storm Francis will bring gusts of 60mph, possibly reaching 70mph in exposed western parts of the UK, from Monday night.

Rain is expected to be heaviest in Northern Ireland and south-west Scotland where 60-90mm could fall as the storm moves from west to east, the Met Office added.

A yellow wind warning is in place for the whole of Wales and most of England until midday on Wednesday.

Chief Meteorologist Andy Page said: The UK is in for another unseasonably wet and windy spell with Storm Francis arriving on Tuesday. There will be strong winds and heavy rain, especially in the west of the UK.

A number of severe weather warnings have been issued and these warnings can be updated regularly so please keep up to date with the latest Met Office forecast.

Waves caused by Storm Ellen hit coastal defences in Cornwall / Getty Images

Storm Francis should clear up for most of the UK by Wednesday lunchtime, leaving the rest of the day brighter and sunnier, the Met Office said.

The Bank Holiday weekend should see sunshine and occasional showers for most of the UK, before the skies darken again for much of the country from Tuesday next week, forecasters added.

A lifeguard puts out a red warning flag at the beach during Storm Ellen / Getty Images

The Met Office names storms to help humanise them and make it easier for people to remember to take care in extreme weather.

A spokesperson for the organisation said earlier in 2020: "We have seen how naming storms elsewhere in the world raises awareness of severe weather before it strikes."

Storm Francis comes days after Wales and south-west England were battered by Storm Ellen.
The 500-bed makeshift Covid Care Hospital at Bihta in Patna, funded under the PM CARES (Prime Ministers Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency situations), was opened to public on Monday afternoon.

Union minister of state for home affairs, Nityanand Rai, inaugurated the hospital in presence of Bihar health minister Mangal Pandey.

PM-CARES Fund Trust has decided to allocate funds for fight against COVID-19 by way of establishment of 500-bed COVID-19 makeshift hospitals at Patna and Muzaffarpur, Bihar, by DRDO. This will go a long way in improving COVID care in Bihar, PMO India tweeted.

Earlier, in mid-July, a Central team had cautioned the state on hospital infrastructure and suggested setting up temporary field hospitals, taking into consideration the case growth trajectory for at least the next two months.

A similar hospital at Muzaffarpur is expected to be ready by August 30, said Bihars principal secretary, health, Pratyaya Amrit.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), which was entrusted with the project, has provided hospital infrastructure, which includes 125 ICU (intensive care unit) beds with ventilators, monitors; and 375 normal beds. Centralised piped oxygen supply will be available for each bed.

The director-general, Armed Forces Medical Services Doctors, will provide doctors and other support staff, stated a press release issued by DRDO. It will also handle medical documentation and medico-legal issues, the communique added.

The state government has provided nurses, free uninterrupted water and power supply, air conditioners in 25 rooms with soft furnishing, security arrangements and fire tenders with crew, said Amrit.

The hospital will be equipped with CCTV surveillance system. DRDO has also made pharmacy, medical pathology laboratory, catering, laundry and ambulance services available. All services will be free, the communique said.

The DRDO will also take care of the computerised hospital management system, providing personal protective equipment (PPE) kits and sanitiser, housekeeping services, consumable items, furniture and soft furnishing, such as bed sheets, pillows, pillow covers, blankets, towels, etc. It will also provide maintenance staff for specialised services like electrical works, air conditioning, operating diesel generator sets, etc., the communique added.

The PM had directed the Ministry of Home Affairs to establish 500-bed hospitals at Patna and Muzaffarpur, considering the gravity of the Covid-19 situation in Bihar. The MHA approached the DRDO to make one each in Patna and Muzaffarpur along the same lines as the 1,000-bed Sardar Vallabhai Patel makeshift Covid hospital in Delhi.

As on Monday, Bihar reported a total 1,23,383 Covid-19 cases with 627 deaths. Patna alone reported 19,112 cases and 124 deaths, the highest in Bihar. Muzaffarpur came next with 5,298 cases and 25 deaths.

The Central team had also advised the state to increase the number of all health personnel on the front-lines, ensure infection prevention practices and proper roster system for patient management, besides making available sufficient logistics and a regular supply of oxygen in all Covid-19 hospitals.

On July 23, Bihar health secretary Lokesh Kumar Singh had said that of the 40,000 beds designated for district Covid care centres (for mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic Covid-19 patients), 20,000 beds had been readied. The department was then in the process of arranging for 4,000 additional beds in dedicated Covid health centres in districts for patients with mild-to-moderate cases, besides increasing 3,500 beds (against an existing 2,500 approx. then) for the third level at medical college hospitals, which are for severe and critical cases.

The health department Monday did not share an update on the availability of beds for Covid patients and the occupancy .

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ruchir Kumar Ruchir writes on health, aviation, power and myriad other issues. An ex-TOI, he has worked both on Desk and in reporting. He over 25 years of broadcast and print journalism experience in Assam, Jharkhand & Bihar. ...view detail
Police Academy is one of the most celebrated comedy films of all time. The film revolves around a group of cops who are generous with great human values but come out to be incompetent in most situations. The film released in 1984 and most parts of it were filmed at various places in Toronto, Canada. The main academy shown in the film is now a part of the Lakeshore campus of Humber College in Canada.

Police Academy filming location

Police Academy is a critically acclaimed 1984 film that has stayed with the audience for a strong script and effective cast. Most parts of the film have been shot at different locations in Toronto, which is the largest city in Canada. The main academy showcased in Police Academy was previously the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in Etobicoke. It has now become a part of the Lakeshore campus of Humber College. The riot scenes of the film were shot at Kensington Market in Ontario while Barbaras Kodak booth was placed at Riverdale Shopping Centre Car Park in Carlaw Avenue.

The Blue Oyster Bar shown in the film is, in reality, the Silver Dollar Room which is another famous location in Ontario in Toronto. The climax scene, which has mostly been shot on a rooftop, is originally the Toy Factory Lofts at 43 Hanna Ave in Ontario. A few parts of the Police Academy shooting happened at the Lakeshore Film Studios where a wide range of Hollywood films have been shot and produced.

Image Courtesy: Still From YouTube (Movieclips Classic Trailers)

Police Academy was a comedy film that was quick to make its place in the minds of the audience. The plot of the film revolved around a group of generous and helpful policemen who are not very efficient at dealing with different crimes in the city. The movie was directed by Hugh Wilson who has also contributed to the story of the film. Police Academy cast includes talented actors like Steve Guttenberg, Kim Cattrall, GW Bailey, Bubba Smith, and Donovan Scott, amongst others.

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Things to do at Police Academy shooting location, Toronto

There are a number of tourist attractions in Toronto which are visited by a considerable number of people on a daily basis. The CN Tower is considered the landmark of Canada and has also been seen in various films and shows. It has the Edgewalk and the 360 restaurant which serves a few exotic dishes that must be tried. Harbourfront Centre is another place to visit in Toronto for its natural beauty and lighting. The visitors also have the option to take a boat ride across Lake Ontario, known for the stunning islands around it.

Image Courtesy: Still From YouTube (Movieclips Classic Trailers)

Image Courtesy: Still From YouTube (Movieclips Classic Trailers)

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Get the latest entertainment news from India & around the world. Now follow your favourite television celebs and telly updates. Republic World is your one-stop destination for trending Bollywood news. Tune in today to stay updated with all the latest news and headlines from the world of entertainment.
Earlier today we saw the debut of the latest budget offering in Motorolas G lineup with the Moto G9 in India. Hot on its heels comes the international variant which will be known as the Moto G9 Play and brings identical specs to the G9 though with an exclusive Spring Pink finish.

The G9 Play is slated to arrive in select European markets for 169 starting today. Its coming to other regions soon though they werent listed just yet. Youll also find the phone in the Sapphire Blue and Forrest Green paint jobs.

Like the Indian Moto G9, the G9 Play brings a 6.5-inch IPS LCD, the Snapdragon 662 chipset with 4GB RAM and a generous 5,000 mAh battery with 20W charging. Around the back, we have a 48MP primary shooter alongside a 2MP macro shooter and a 2MP depth helper. The phone boots Android 10 with Motorolas My UX on top.
LINCOLN  Today I am announcing my plan to retire from service as president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau effective at the end of my term which will occur at the Nebraska Farm Bureau annual meeting in December.

Words dont do justice in sharing my appreciation to all those whove supported my wife Elma and I over the last nine years in this role. I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to engage with so many great people in fulfilling a passion in working on behalf of our states farm and ranch families.

Its never easy to leave something you love, but its time for my wife Elma and I to start a new chapter in our life together that provides more time for family, friends, and new adventures.

There is still plenty of work to do. I will continue to put forth my energy and efforts in the remaining months to do whatever I can to advance the mission of Nebraska Farm Bureau during that time.

It has been an honor to serve Farm Bureau members in this capacity and Im forever grateful for the opportunity.

The Nebraska Farm Bureau is a grassroots, state-wide organization dedicated to supporting farm and ranch families and working for the benefit of all Nebraskans through a wide variety of educational, service, and advocacy efforts. More than 58,000 families across Nebraska are Farm Bureau members, working together to achieve rural and urban prosperity as agriculture is a key fuel to Nebraskas economy. For more information about Nebraska Farm Bureau and agriculture, visit www.nefb.org.
When the U.S. government extended pandemic hardship loans to thousands of religious institutions, Jim Bakker and Morningside USA, his ministry in Blue Eye, Missouri, were among the most high-profile recipients.

On April 28, the pastor received approval for an amount between $650,000 and $1.7 million in Paycheck Protection Program funds.

Weeks before, the New York and Missouri attorneys general, as well as the Federal Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission, filed complaints alleging Bakker engaged in deceptive practices by touting purported health benefits of a silver product on The Jim Bakker Show  including a suggestion it could be used to treat or prevent COVID-19 infection, something the FDA says is false. In June, the Arkansas attorney general's office followed with its own lawsuit.

Applicants seeking PPP loans were asked to certify they werent engaged in any activity that is illegal under federal, state or local law. The question is whether Bakkers involvement in ongoing litigation and fraud allegations will rise to the level of a Small Business Administration review.

Its likely, according to attorney Daniel Grooms, a former federal prosecutor who worked in the Justice Department for 15 years. There is every reason to think that an entity, led by a person with the profile he has, given his history, and given the ongoing fraud issues surrounding the product he was selling, that those ongoing investigations and the ongoing attention ... it would be realistic to think that would lead to further investigation of his PPP loans, Grooms said.

An SBA spokesperson refused to comment on any specific loan recipient. However, he provided an explanation about how the loan program was administered, saying the agency made no eligibility determinations during the approval process. After the fact, the SBA will review organizations and companies to identify those that may have submitted inaccurate self-certifications. The agency may seek repayment with the potential for civil or criminal penalties if a fraudulent application was submitted.

Bakkers attorneys argue no laws were violated and provided this statement: We strongly believe that Morningsides offering of a legal product, sold by stores across the country, did not violate any laws; a fact underscored by the FDA taking no action against Morningside and issuing its letter closing the warning letter process on July 14th. The allegations made by the Missouri and Arkansas attorneys general concern only this product, and Morningside had suspended its offering of that product prior to the date of its PPP loan application.

Bakker gained notoriety in the late 1980s and 1990s as a result of his trial and financial fraud conviction relating to Heritage USA, his TV studio, Christian-oriented theme park and water park attraction with shopping, hotels and condominiums in Fort Mill, South Carolina. After serving five years in federal prison, he shifted from preaching the prosperity gospel to an apocalyptic end-times message.

Weve gone through quite a year, a tearful Bakker told his TV congregants this month.

On Feb. 12, before any governor had ordered a coronavirus lockdown, Bakker touted the health benefits of Silver Solution on his show. Bakker was joined by guest Sherrill Sellman, who practices naturopathic medicine and is not a licensed physician.

This influenza that is now circling the globe, youre saying that Silver Solution would be effective, he said, holding a bottle throughout the TV segment.

Sellman explained that the silver product, previously promoted on the show and sold through its online store, had not been tested against COVID-19, but its been tested on other strains of the coronavirus and has been able to eliminate it in 12 hours  totally eliminate it. It kills it. Deactivates it, she said.

What followed was a succession of cease-and-desist orders, warning letters, multiple state complaints and a temporary restraining order to stop promoting or selling the product.

Bakkers co-counsel is Jay Nixon, a former four-term Missouri attorney general and two-term Democratic governor. Nixon has framed this as a First Amendment and religious freedom fight.

Nixon says the pastor and his family use silver products in gel, lozenge and liquid form. He said Bakker complied immediately with orders to stop offering Silver Solution on his show and website.

What were trying to do is to show that this is a targeting of a pastor for work said in his church as opposed to some sort of massive consumer issue that theyve been after for a long time, which they have not, Nixon said.

Bakkers legal team filed a suit against the Arkansas state attorneys office to prevent the pursuit of his congregations personal information as part of its investigation.

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge pushes back on framing the lawsuit as a religious freedom infringement. She wrote in a statement to the AP, I have a long track record of protecting the First Amendment and religious liberties for Arkansans and all Americans. What I will not tolerate are the illegal schemes used by Mr. Bakker that directly relate to harming Arkansas consumers financially or physically. By using his celebrity status to peddle fraudulent COVID-19 cures  stealing over $60,000  Bakker has historically cloaked his illegal action in the name of religion, yet he continues to deceive Arkansans for his own glory and wealth.

Bakker, wife Lori and daughter Maricela Bakker Woodall, who serves as president of Morningside Church Productions, appealed for donations during a show which aired April 20. They referenced financial difficulties, and Bakker singled out enemies who were behind their problems. The only way that we can stay on is if you help me. Its just sad to see whats happening to America. We are living in the final days, and if we go the wrong direction, America is through, he said. Dont let me have to file for bankruptcy.

A week later, Arvest Bank, as the lender, released three PPP loans to Bakkers church management, production and retreat entities.

Bakker declined to comment, but Woodall responded in an email via the attorneys: The PPP program, she said, has been another blessing for our ministry, and for so many other ministries and small businesses.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through the Religion News Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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Vietnam will cancel a US$390 million loan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to build the second metro line in Ho Chi Minh City, which was granted as per an agreement signed between the State Bank of Vietnam and the ADB in 2013.

The cancelation was proposed by the Ministry of Finance and approved by Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh.

The $390 million amount was part of a $540 million loan given by the ADB for the total investment for the second line of Ho Chi Minh Citys metro project  estimated to cost nearly $2.09 billion.

In March 2013, the ADB granted $40 million out of the $540 million amount for the preparatory works, including studies, surveys and designs, of the project.

Vietnam also signed two other agreements to take out a $313 million loan from KfW  a German government-owned development bank, and a $195 million borrowing from the European Investment Bank.

Deputy PM Minh asked the finance ministry to work with the ADB to reach a consensus on the early cancelation of the $390 million loan, while the Peoples Committee of Ho Chi Minh City was tasked with preparing a budget to pay the costs related to the early cancelation.

Ho Chi Minh City will also be responsible for offsetting the canceled amount by mobilizing capital from other sources while reviewing and evaluating the feasibility and progress of the project, ensuring that its implementation is up to speed, and avoiding paying commitment fees for capital loans only to cancel them, which can reduce the efficiency of such loans.

Ho Chi Minh Citys second metro line is designed to run about 12 kilometers from Ben Thanh Market in District 1, through District 3, District 10, Tan Binh District and Tan Phu District, to Tham Luong Bridge in District 12.

The project, approved in 2010, has been repeatedly delayed due to sluggish ground clearance and problems with capital disbursement.

Ho Chi Minh City is urgently wrapping up the projects site clearance so that its construction can commence in October.

Meanwhile, the citys first metro line, which connects Ben Thanh Terminal in District 1 with an extension to the New Mien Dong (Eastern) Bus Terminal, has neared completion as about 85 percent of the project is expected to be finished this year.

The metro line is slated to come on stream in late 2021.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
Former Local Official Flees to the US in Fear of Repercussion From Chinese Regime

The former deputy mayor of Jixi city in northeastern Heilongjiang Province reveals the tight control of speech and information in China, the regimes cover-up of COVID-19 cases, Communist Party officials secretly taking medicine to prevent virus infection, and the recent upsurge of petitioning across the country.

I quit the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] using my real name, Li Chuanliang, the former deputy mayor of Jixi, stated in an interview with the Chinese-language Epoch Times on Aug. 19.

Li had left his post of deputy mayor and quit public office in 2014. He has refused to pay the Party dues for many years and considered himself no longer a Party member.

Li Chuanliang, former mayor of Jixi City in northeastern Chinas Heilongjiang Province. (Xu Xiuhui/The Epoch Times)

On Feb. 14, Kong Lingbao, a former subordinate of Li in the Jixi municipal government, was dismissed from his official post and arrested for his remarks about the CCP and for covering up the severity of the COVID-19 epidemic. Kongs home and offices were also searched by the police.

Upon hearing the news, Li feared that he would be implicated for making similar remarks and for his political views. With the help of overseas democracy activists, he fled from China during the pandemic and eventually arrived in the U.S. city of Los Angeles recently.

Many may wonder why Li had to resign from public officeas a former deputy mayor, he is still a communist cadre and entitled to many special benefits and treatments in China. In response to this, Li said, No way, I really cant bear it anymore. As a certified accountant, auditor, tax agent, with an EMBA (Executive Master of Business Administration) degree from Tsinghua University, and having worked in finance for many years, Li always considered himself to be a skilled professional rather than a bureaucrat or communist official. I never fit into the political circle, he added.

At the end of 2011, Li was appointed as the deputy mayor of Jixi, while Chinese state-media reported his official appointment in May 2012. Li said that the time lag is due to the bureaucratic procedures, as CCP officials are appointed internally.

During the three years as deputy mayor, he had gradually entered the power center of the municipal government and witnessed corruption. They [officials] embezzled the public funds of construction and land use for personal expenses. This is common in all major cities, Li said.

However, as a low-ranking regional official, Li could only try to stop or not execute certain cases. I used to be very blunt and reported them. But in the end, their punishment was very light, and the officials were all protecting each other.

Li was both threatened and enticed by his superiors, implying that as long as he colluded with them, there would be a chance for promotion. He wanted to resign but got transferred to the position of deputy mayor of Hegang city in Heilongjiang Province in 2014.

In 2017, Li completely left the CCP governmental system, giving up all the benefits to become a free man, which is commonly known in China as a naked resignation. Since then, Li had worked as a corporate tax consultant. As he was no longer a government official, he was able to apply for a passport. He said, when I got my passport, I felt that I was truly free, and I happily called my friends to tell them about it. In recent years, Beijing has put out regulations to restrict officials new application for personal passports and to confiscate all officials current passports to prevent them from fleeing to other countries.

Since the CCP virus (novel coronavirus) outbreak, the regime has further tightened the control of information and speech. Li is very worried that China will return to the Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976), during which the communist regime initiated violent persecution campaigns against those deemed anti-revolutionary.

Before the pandemic, Li shared his views on current affairs, the CCPs system, and the ills of the Party with like-minded friends on social media group chats and at dinner parties. He said, I was not without worries before, but I did not expect it to be this bad.

Under the current situation in China, he believes that few people dare to say anything anymore, as the CCP encourages people to watch and snitch on each other, and further clampdowns on the freedom of speech, especially with its national network of artificial-intelligence-enhanced surveillance cameras, known as the Skynet Project.

One of the charges for Lis former subordinate Kong was publishing improper speech. But Li wonders what improper speech actually means. Kongs remarks during a private conversation with another CCP cadre was recorded and reported to Party authorities. He had said, I can no longer sell my life to the Communist Party. I cannot do its bidding anymore. Kong got into the authorities crosshairs as a result, Li said.

Another reason for Kongs arrest is that he refused to cover up the number of CCP virus infection cases in his district, Li said. In early February of this year, the epidemic in China was severe, but authorities did not allow local officials to report it. As the leader of Hengshan district of Jixi city, Kong saw with his own eyes that unemployed workers from the local coal mines were infected with the virus one after another. The spread of the virus was rampant and Kong decided to report it to his superiors. However, authorities listed this as his crime of failure to fulfill his duty in epidemic prevention and control. Li said, This is a typical scapegoating. Those who speak for the common people get convicted.

Li has heard of CCP officials taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent against COVID-19 infection, but the majority of Chinese people in the mainland dont know about it unless they are government officials or are able to read information on overseas websites through VPN to bypass the regimes firewall. When Li was still in China, he made inquiries about this medicine but could not get his hands on it.

Following the CCP virus outbreak, every Chinese citizen was given a health code installed in their cellphones. Li describes it as wearing a 24-hour, all-round monitor. However, he has noticed that many people dont mind the privacy invasion.

Li also refuses to believe the CCPs data on the pandemic, as it lacks transparency and the information is inaccurate.

The current social environment in China is that they are only concerned with looking good on the surface, while they care little about the reality. There are more false things than real ones, Li said. Amid the pandemic, he has noticed that many laid-off workers have no income, but the topic is rarely talked about among officials or reported by Chinese media, he added.

Li said he witnessed firsthand how authorities policies were harmful to citizens. How come a house can be demolished just a few years after being built? Because the developers interests are tied to it! He points out that this is the reason behind officials corruptionpolicies benefit interest groups.

Li said that most appeals and complaints filed by petitioners to higher authorities in China are not groundless.

Li also believes that if there are only a small number of people filing complaints, then they are just individual cases; but with so many people petitioning in China, it means that there must be something seriously wrong with government officials. The Chinese Communist system is actually the biggest problem in China, he said.

Li said that in China, whether someone is a high-ranking official, an entrepreneur or an intellectual, as long as they have a little conscience, they will have a lot of mental pressure. In addition to facing authorities various suppression policies, people also have to worry about their own safety. He said, Even being a CCP official is a high-risk and dangerous job nowadays.

After fleeing China, Li decided to speak up, because he believes that only by standing up can he encourage more people to distance themselves from the communist regime.
A kebab shop has been slapped with a $6,772 fine after an impromptu rave erupted at 3am with dozens of dancing revellers flouting social distancing rules.

Footage shared on Tik Tok showed more than 30 young patrons jammed in together at Shah Kebabs in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley on Sunday morning.

The 23-second clip showed customers and staff behind the counter singing and busting moves to Pump It Up by Endor.

A caption on the video read: 'Just your favourite kebab store,' with three flame emojis.

Footage shared on Tik Tok showed more than 30 young patrons jammed in together at Shah Kebabs in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley on Sunday morning

Queensland Police confirmed the store was fined for failing to follow coronavirus health and safety directives by enforcing a distance of 1.5m between patrons.

'Business operators and patrons are reminded to adhere to public health directions including social distancing measures at all times to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading in Queensland,' police said in a statement.

Despite the hefty penalty, a staff member told The Courier Mail: 'It wasn't a party,' adding that revellers flocked to the food joint after licensed venues closed.

'At three o'clock the nightclubs closed and everyone came here.'

Police Service Deputy Commissioner Steve Gollschewski described the scene as 'disappointing'.

The 23-second clip showed customers and staff behind the counter singing and busting moves to Pump It Up by Endor

A caption on the video read: Just your favourite kebab store,' with three flame emojis.

'The message to all of those persons - and a lot of them are young people ... is have a think before you go out and think about the impacts of your not abiding by social distancing in the community and what that means.'

The footage emerged as Queensland recorded one new coronavirus case in the last 24 hours bringing the state's total to 1,106 with six deaths.

Queensland's state government issued a health alert for 40 locations, centred mainly around Logan, south of Brisbane, after nine new COVID-19 cases in the region.

The new cases were linked to Brisbane's Youth Detention Centre in Wacol, 24km west of Logan, after a centre worker was diagnosed with the virus on August 19.
Nguyen Duc Quan, a 12th grader in Hai Phong City, is determined to make his dreams come true despite suffering from brittle bone disease (osteogenesis imperfecta).

Nguyen Duc Quan is an example of overcoming fate.  Photo courtesy of Nguyen Duc Quan

His peers at Thai Phien High School admire the example he sets by working hard to overcome the disease and excel academically.

Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) is a group of genetic disorders that mainly affect the bones. The term means imperfect bone formation and people with the condition can easily suffer broken bones.

Quan is very good at maths and dreams of becoming a technology engineer.

In December last year, he won first prize in Hai Phong Citys Science and Technology Contest for a project that used internet applications to build a maths self-learning model for high school students.

Quans mother, Tran Thi Thap, could not hide her pride for her son's achievement.

Quan is my first child. When he was born, he broke his left arm, Thap recalled.

I felt painful when Quan was diagnosed with brittle bone disease, the mother told giaoduc.net.vn.

At that time, Quans parents earned a modest income so they had to lend money from friends and relatives to bring him to many hospitals for treatment.

They also had to sell their small house for the cost of treatment in hopes of finding a miracle cure.

However, we just received anxious eyes and sympathy of doctors, Thap said.

When at kindergarten age, we applied to many kindergartens for him. But he was refused because of the illness, she recalled.

His mother had to quit her job and stay home to take care of the ill boy.

When he reached school age, although worrying for his health, his parents decided to send him to school.

The brittle bone disease made Quan weaker than his peers but he always tried not to miss any class.

His mother recalled that he was a very studious and hardworking boy.

"I knew that I just kept up with my friends when I made strong efforts," said Quan.

And he did not disappoint his parents.

During 12 years in school, Quan was recognised as an excellent student, but the disease led to incidents which hampered his efforts.

In the 9th grade, he attended a contest for excellent students. Unfortunately, he fell down in front of the examination room and broke his leg.

At the moment, he knew his leg had a problem but he still struggled to complete the test before being admitted to the hospital, his mother said.

In that contest, Quan got a perfect score.

The disease also makes Quan often suffer from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, especially in cold weather.

Despite his poor health, Quan has never complained or expressed pessimism and always tries to improve his knowledge.

He has entered contests for English, maths and chess and often wins prizes.

In his teachers and peers eyes, Quan was a special student.

Quan is a student with an optimistic spirit and strong energy to overcome fate, said Pham Thu Ha, Quans teacher.

Quan always wanted to be treated the same as others, the teacher said.

Sharing his learning experiences, Quan said he tried his best to study hard.

I am more passionate about maths and want to become an engineer of information technology, Quan said.

I just want to have better health so that I can live like my friends and my wish is to enrol in the Faculty of Information Technology of Hanoi University of Science and Technology. VNS

A special tutor for disadvantaged children Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tam may not have finished high school, but that doesn't stop her teaching children in Yen Quang Commune, Y Yen District, Nam Dinh Province.
Binance, the global blockchain company behind the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange on Monday, launched Build for Bharat program with a hackathon and acceleration opportunities for blockchain developers and startups in India.

The hackathon is sponsored by Google Cloud, along with leading technology companies Matic Network, Marlin Protocol, Band Protocol and Ankr cloud infrastructure. The acceleration comes under Polaris, an initiative by the Blockchain for India.

The program is set to Span over a couple of months -- from 24th August to 31st October 2020. The Build for Bharat hackathon will be open to creators, innovators, startups, and Builders from all over India working on unique and creative products utilizing digital assets and blockchain technology. The solutions will be centered around decentralized finance (DeFi) such as mini-Tokens, micro-financing products, blockchain datasets, blockchain-AI solutions amongst many others.

India has been one of the most interesting countries Binance has tapped into! said Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ). Weve seen entrepreneurs create robust blockchain-based solutions from scratch and scale it. With the second-largest blockchain developer base in the world - India has already kickstarted the revolution of decentralization and were here to fuel it!

Selected participants will undergo three stages of filtration with 100 teams shortlisted in the first cohort, 20 teams in the second, and five teams in the final cohort. The finalists will receive rewards from a pool of 30,00,000 INR. The winning teams stand a chance to secure additional investment and mentorship opportunities under the Polaris accelerator, an initiative by the Blockchain for India fund.

To apply for Build for Bharat program, head over to the event registration website. Registrations for the program are open from today till 11 September 2020.
LOS ANGELESIn a country where same-sex sexual relationships remain illegal, and can be punished by up to 14 years in prison, Nigerias $590 million film industry  known as Nollywood  has finally produced its first movie depicting a love story between two women. But to avoid censorship by Nigerias National Film and Video Censors Board, the producer of the upcoming film Ife says that she will make the release available online only, according to a report by the Reuters news service.

"We only see stories about LGBT people that condemn us, to say that we are people to be beaten, sometimes even killed, producer Pamela Adie, who is also an LGBTQ rights activist in the West African country, told Nigerias Premium Times newspaper. That is the kind of narrative that we get from Nollywood but that is not the reality. We are human beings too, just like everybody else.

In Nollywood films, LGBTQ characters are typically portrayed as mentally ill, or even under a witchs spell, according to a CNN report.

The films title, a word in the Nigerian Yoruba language which is spoken primarily in the countrys southwest region, translates simply as love. But Afie told Reuters that her intention with the film was simply to portray the reality of a lesbian relationship in her country.

The role of film is not to say this is right, or not. I think that the role of film, and a filmmaker, is to portray reality as it is, Adie told Reuters. But fearing censorship from the government over the movies gay content, she says that Ife will not even attempt a theatrical release, debuting solely via streaming platforms.

She did not announce a release date for the film. But a trailer has been made available online, and may be viewed below.

The producers worry about a government crackdown against the film appears well-founded, according to what a representative of the censorship board told CNN.

"We are monitoring the progress of the movie, and if it goes against the law by promoting homosexuality, we will be forced at some point to go after the producer and executive producer," Adedayo Thomas, executive director of the NFVCB told the network.

The filmmakers have not submitted Ife to the censors board for review, however, so far avoiding any censorship or possible banning of the movie.

Afie produced the film in collaboration with The Equality Hub, a non-governmental organization that advocates for the rights of LGBTQ people in Nigeria.

A recent survey found that public opinion remains heavily homophobic in Nigeria, with 75 percent supporting the enforcement of the countrys anti-gay Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act of 2014.

Photo by Ife The Movie YouTube Screen Capture
Operating since: 1969

Auctions, consignment, police sales and realty in Kearney, Nebraska.

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Whether it's one item or an entire estate, we can auction it on our Tuesday Consignment auction. Our consignment auction attracts a large crowd and items such as furniture, antiques, collectibles, automobiles, guns, and more are auctioned weekly. We are open to take consignments daily except Tuesday and Sunday from 10:00-12:00 and 1:30-5:00 pm. Our convenient pick up and delivery service, indoor auction facility, and public awareness make the Tuesday consignment auction time and cost efficient! Click here to view our upcoming auctions.

Paul Londer is an experienced and well-known real estate broker. For 30+ years Paul has been helping residents in Central Nebraska buy and sell real estate. Paul Londer can show any MLS listed home in Kearney. For Londers current real estate listings click here or contact Paul about his real estate services, call (308) 234-4200.

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About Paul Londer and His Family
By Roy Freiman

Grounding our healthcare decision-making on science and data during this pandemic has empowered us to have one of the most effective responses to COVID-19 in the country. While COVID-19 cases are rising in other states, New Jersey tackled the crisis with reliance upon logic and data-driven decision making. Therefore, I implore Commissioner Judith Persichilli to show us the data that explains and justifies why New Jersey has deviated from the science on hospital regulations for elective angioplasty.

Angioplasty is a life-saving medical procedure to clear a blockage in the arteries of the heart. It can be performed during a heart attack to return blood flow to the heart but can also be performed on an elective basis to prevent a heart attack for someone with a significant blockage.

In 2018, nearly 29,000 total angioplasty procedures were performed to help those suffering from heart disease. To put this number in perspective, this is equivalent to more than three procedures every hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Almost 88% of these were done on an elective basis, so it is difficult to imagine that there is a lack of demand or need for this service.

Nearly a decade ago, the John Hopkins CPORT-E study proved that doctors in community hospitals can safely and effectively perform elective angioplasty without a cardiac surgery team on site. Eleven of New Jerseys own community hospitals participated in this benchmark study. The Department of Healths (DOH) inaction for nearly a decade has essentially dismissed the findings of this study as 25 community hospitals and their patients continue to await permission to have elective angioplasty performed locally.

Currently, there are seven counties in New Jersey that do not have hospitals that can perform this procedure. For example, Hunterdon County has only one hospital, Hunterdon Medical Center, which is not licensed by the DOH to provide elective angioplasty. The Hunterdon Medical Center has the facilities, equipment, physicians and other staff that can perform this procedure. In fact, the state allows Hunterdon Medical Center to perform angioplasty on patients during a heart attack but does not allow them to perform this same procedure on someone who is about to have a heart attack to prevent death. Hunterdon County patients in need of elective angioplasty have to travel out of the county, in some cases to Pennsylvania, to get this care.

The data is there. The John Hopkins study, along with the actual experience from every other state in this country, demonstrates that New Jersey is not following the science to make its decision regarding elective angioplasty procedures. Why?

Community hospitals are practically begging for permission to perform elective angioplasty. With the technological capability, physician skill level and, more plainly, the fact that many are equipped and already do the procedure in emergency cases, hospitals are unnecessarily having to transfer patients who could just as easily receive quality care right there near home.

New York And Pennsylvania have both changed their states rules to allow elective angioplasty in community hospitals. New Jersey is now one of only a handful of places in the developed world that remains stuck in the stone age on this issue. Why? If, in New Jersey, we are doing it our way because it is safer, I ask Commissioner Persichilli to show us the data. Show us the data that should have everyone in the surrounding region flocking to New Jersey to have angioplasty performed, instead of choosing to go out of state for their procedure.

Licensing more hospitals to perform elective angioplasty is about advancing, expanding and addressing disparities in access to much-needed healthcare. The longer the DOH stalls, the longer patients are needlessly left waiting to be served by their local hospitals. These community hospitals stand ready with the expertise and know-how to provide the necessary treatment and yet their hands are tied.

Commissioner Persichilli, its time to follow the science and license community hospitals to perform elective angioplasty procedures. Lets not allow New Jersey to fall further behind every other state when theres an opportunity right now to make the right decision.

Assemblyman Roy Freiman represents the 16th Legislative District, which includes parts of Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex and Somerset counties.

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Kanye West took a break from working on his new album and crafting his Presidential campaign to take a trip back to Los Angeles.

The 43-year-old rapper flew back to Los Angeles from his ranch in Wyoming to reunite with his wife Kim Kardashian West and their four kids, according to People.

West returned to the Hidden Hills home he shared with West and daughters North, 7, Chicago, 2, and sons Saint, 4, and Psalm, 14 months, with a source adding they were, 'catching up as a family.'

Back to LA: Kanye West took a break from working on his new album and crafting his Presidential campaign to take a trip back to Los Angeles. He's seen in March in Paris above

'He is still busy working on his music and presidential campaign, but really missed the kids and flew to see them,' the source said.

While Kardashian West didn't post about her husband's return home, she did post photos from her trip to Colorado with West and her sister Kourtney.

Kardashian West returned to Los Angeles last week and West returned to his Wyoming ranch, where he brought back his Sunday Service.

Busy: 'He is still busy working on his music and presidential campaign, but really missed the kids and flew to see them,' the source said

'Kim still seems focused on making her marriage work,' a source close to the family revealed last week.

'She is pretty quiet about her exact plans for the future, but for now she seems okay with Kanye living in Wyoming,' the source added.

'He is moving ahead with the presidential campaign. This is a decision that no one can change his mind about,' the source continued.

Moving ahead: 'He is moving ahead with the presidential campaign. This is a decision that no one can change his mind about,' the source continued

The couple's six-year marriage seemed to be on the rocks just last month after West announced his unexpected run for President.

The rapper's Presidential bid reportedly has numerous ties to the Republican party and while he continues his struggles with bipolar disorder.

The couple also took their kids to the Dominican Republic earlier this month, with the reported 'focus' of that trip being to work on their marriage.

Rocks: The couple's six-year marriage seemed to be on the rocks just last month after West announced his unexpected run for President

'Kanye has made it clear that he will continue to run for president. Kim is not happy about it, but this isn't her focus,' a source added.

'She just wants to do what's best for the kids. And she thinks finding a way to save her marriage is what's best for them,' the source added.

The rapper has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for President under what's known as the Birthday party.
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Linkedin Ghina Ghaliya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 19:48 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c401d391 1 National wahyu-setiawan,KPU,harun-masiku,PDI-P,Hasto-Kristiyanto,KPK,KPU-bribery,Corruption-Eradication-Comission,Jakarta-Corruption-Court Free

The Jakarta Corruption Court has handed down a six-year prison sentence for former General Elections Commission (KPU) commissioner Wahyu Setiawan after finding him guilty of accepting bribes in connection with an election dispute.

"Wahyu Setiawan has been proven guilty of committing corruption as suspected, presiding judge Susanti Arsi Wibawani said while reading out the verdict on Monday.

The sentence was lighter than eight years of imprisonment demanded by Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) prosecutors. The judges also ordered Wahyu to pay a fine of Rp 150 million (US$10,240).

In its verdict, the court did not strip Wahyu of his political rights, but the bench denied his request to be a justice collaborator in the case.

Also on Monday, the court handed down a four-year prison sentence for former Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) member Agustiani Tio Fridelina and ordered him to pay the same fine as Wahyu.

The two convicts were charged under Article 12 of the 2001 Corruption Law, which prohibits state officials and civil servants from accepting gifts.

Both Wahyu and Agustiani were found guilty of accepting around $47,350 in bribes from Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) politician Saeful Bahri in exchange for helping PDI-P cadre Harun Masiku secure a seat to replace a deceased politician in the House of Representatives.

Apart from Haruns case, Wahyu was also indicted for allegedly accepting bribes from West Papua Governor Dominggus Mandacan in connection with the selection of provincial general elections commission members last year.

Saeful, a former staff member of PDI-P secretary-general Hasto Kristiyanto, was sentenced by the court in May to one year and eight months in prison and ordered to pay a Rp 150 million fine for his involvement in the case.

Meanwhile, Harun is believed to have fled the country shortly after he was named a suspect and currently remains at large. The KPK recently filed a request with the Law and Human Rights Ministry to extend an overseas travel ban on the suspect.
Black Lives Matter protests and some far-left and anti-Israel groups are calling for an end to police training exchanges between US and Israeli police, prompting participants in such programs to speak out.

Since George Floyd's death in Minneapolis in May, media outlets and pro-Palestine organizations have sought to connect controversial restraint, crowd control and other tactics utilized by US police to Israel. They allege that Israeli security forces taught US police how to put down protests and use chokeholds.

The idea that long-standing concerns about systemic racism and controversial US police practices could be linked to Israeli training programs is questionable. But the allegations gained some traction on the left and that has produced a strong counter-reaction from police.

Simon Perry, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a 30-year veteran of Israeli law enforcement who has been involved in US-Israel police exchanges, said he and other experts focused on counterterrorism. He blames the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which supports a variety of boycotts of Israel, for its policies spreading misinformation in Israel's security relationship with the United States.

You hear all this BDS nonsense  its really insulting, Perry told Al-Monitor. Dont overreact. Thats the one rule we preach here. We paid with a lot of blood in these lessons and its very frustrating that were being accused of something.

Participants in US-Israel police programs agree with Perry that the focus of exchange programs is on counterterrorism and exchanging ideas on best practices  not riot control and chokeholds.

Trainings and exchanges involving US and Israeli police accelerated after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when US police sought Israeli expertise in counterterrorism. Thousands of US police have participated in such programs in both countries and Israeli police have also come to the United States to learn. Police brutality was an issue in the United States long before the exchanges began, including during the civil rights marches of the 1960s when the authorities used powerful water hoses to disperse Black protesters.

The assertions that Israeli tactics might have influenced US police behavior arose after Floyd, a Black man, died following his arrest by Minneapolis police officers.

The London-based news outlet Middle East Eye ran several articles comparing US polices actions in Minneapolis to Israeli security forces against the Palestinians. One Palestinian in Minneapolis told the outlet that the tear gas used against the protesters in the city reminded him of Palestine. Another article included photos showing Israeli soldiers kneeling on the necks of Palestinian suspects in a way that mirrored former officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd.

Some American anti-police activists want to shut down US-Israel police exchanges. Demilitarize From Atlanta 2 Palestine works to end the Atlanta Police Departments relationship with the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE).

GILEE organizes meetings between US police departments and police around the world. During a Zoom event in late July, Demilitarize From Atlanta 2 Palestine claimed that GILEE, which includes Israeli police among its exchange partners, teaches some of the most violent policies, behaviors, and tactics of the state and mass surveillance, policing, incarceration.

Criticisms of US-Israel police relations are not new. In 2016, Amnesty International published an article noting that police in Baltimore  where a Black man named Freddie Gray died after being arrested in 2015  trained in Israel. The leading human rights organization did not include evidence of what Baltimore police learned there.

Recent critics have not cited ample evidence to show American police are adopting tactics from Israel that result in violence. The Americans and Israelis who participate in such exchanges say that the focus is not on riot control or controversial restraint techniques.

One thing we never dealt with is riot control, Perry said. I dont think we have anything we can teach American law enforcement in this field.

Perry has trained a variety of law enforcement officials in counterterrorism, including members of the FBI.

The first objective of terrorism is to attack societys resilience, he said. You want to collect a lot of intelligence, but you dont want to harm uninvolved people. [If you do] you actually create a larger problem.

On restraint tactics, he said he only taught how to detain suicide bombers and the faulty homemade explosives they use. If you shoot at it, it will explode, so thats exactly what you dont do, he noted. You have to surround them in an open area and keep a distance.

Brent Cummings is a retired US Army colonel who is the associate director of GILEE. He said GILEE does not teach violent policies as its critics say. The focus is on law enforcement executive leadership development promoting peer-to-peer experiential learning and exchange of best practices, Cummings told Al-Monitor. GILEE is not a police academy and does not train officers.

Cummings said that their exchanges allow officers to discuss a range of topics, including recruitment, promotion and community service. Their mission is not limited to Israel and they have programs with numerous other countries.

Cummings is not alone in his thinking. Former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton told Israels Ministry of Public Security that he discussed culturally sensitive policing, recruitment and the use of technology with Israeli law enforcement during a 2014 visit, according to an Israeli government archive.

GILEE does not facilitate trainings in chokeholds or crowd control, according to Cummings, who called this a propagandist charge that is unfounded.

Israelis have learned about policing in the United States as well during GILEEs exchanges.

Israelis  like all visitors who have centralized government  feel challenged to understand the idea and practice of home rule and the power of local government, Cummings noted.

Much has been made of what Israeli police teach their American counterparts, but Israel actually follows US and other Western models on some police matters.

David Weisburd teaches criminology at George Mason University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A recent article he co-wrote analyzed Israels EMUN program, which was based on the principle of problem-oriented policing. This is a crime reduction strategy that seeks to identify and solve problems in a community as a means of fighting crime.

EMUN was a nationwide program in Israel that followed earlier problem-oriented policing models in New York and Australia.

The Israel police is the civilian police force for all of Israel. The United States, with its thousands of separate police departments, is a world innovator in policing in a way that is hard to match in Israels centralized police, according to Weisburd.

The US has 15,000-20,000 separate police departments and they operate independently to a great degree, Weisburd told Al-Monitor. Theres tremendous innovation. Its hard in systems like Israel where you have a single system.

The fatal shooting of Iyad Hallak offers a clear parallel between policing issues in both countries. Hallak, an unarmed autistic Palestinian from Jerusalem, was shot and killed by Israeli border police in May. The police mistakenly thought he had a weapon. The incident led to outrage and inspired Palestinian Lives Matter protests in Israel.

Israels border police shot Hallak. This force operates in Jerusalem and the West Bank in addition to Israels borders. The unit is known for having many Druze officers and has participated in some US-Israel police exchanges.

Theres been more criticism of the border police, Weisburd added. He said there are notable differences to consider when comparing Israeli and American police; rate of gun violence is much higher in the United States than in Israel.

America is a society where theres tremendous violence, he said. Look at the number of Israelis who have been in the custody of the police and died. Its a very small number compared to the US.

Critical reports on US-Israel police exchanges also shed some light on the relationship. The pro-BDS group Jewish Voice for Peace published an in-depth report titled Deadly Exchange on US-Israel police ties in 2018, but some of their findings are disputed.

The report said that the Atlanta Police Department based its Video Integration Center on the elaborate system of cameras in the Old City of Jerusalem, citing a news article. An Atlanta Police Department spokesperson denied this.

Our Video Integration unit is not modeled after police station cameras in Jerusalem, officer Anthony Grant told Al-Monitor.

A 2015 report from the department touted its recent exchanges with Israeli police, but did not credit Israel for establishing the Video Integration Center in the section on the centers progress.

The report also said the New York Police Department (NYPD) established a surveillance program for Muslim New Yorkers based on Israeli intelligence gathering in the West Bank.

The Associated Press conducted extensive research on this in 2011. One of the articles cited a former police official saying the program was based in part on Israeli operations in the West Bank. The outlet also reported that the CIA was heavily involved in helping the NYPD with intelligence gathering following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jewish Voice for Peace also said that the NYPDs Ring of Steel surveillance network is related to Israels surveillance systems. A New York Daily News article cited by Jewish Voice for Peace said that in 2013, Israels then-Police Chief Yochanan Danino visited the NYPD to learn from New York police officers about community relations, discuss counterterrorism and tour the Ring of Steel. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union said that the Ring of Steel is based on a system in London.

On crowd control, Jewish Voice for Peace cited a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting that included a quote from a US police officer saying he learned crowd control techniques from Israeli forces on a 2013 trip.
Health Minister Kwaku Agyeman-Manu says the government has begun paying frontline health workers the allowances promised them by the government.

President Akufo-Addo in one of his national broadcasts announced that all frontline health workers in the country helping in the fight against COVID-19 would receive an additional allowance of 50 percent of their basic salary per month.

Months after this promise was made, some health workers have taken to social media to express their dissatisfaction about the non-payment of the promised allowance.

But in an interview with Citi News, the Health Minister, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu urged the disgruntled workers to exercise patience since payment had begun.

We had meetings with the Christian hospitals, the quasi institutions, and every terrain of the hospital sector. We met with their leaders and the associations as well, and they were demanding that we should pay them. We told them that we didn't even have the budget to go that far so we asked them to bring in a list of those that were at the forefront of fighting the disease because in some places we haven't encountered any COVID case in some facilities, meaning they are not frontline persons.

And that is what has delayed the payment, but we have started paying and we have even presented a document to Parliament to tell them how we are managing it. I know for sure that not all will be satisfied but we are still dialoguing and engaging them. From time to time we see new groups coming up, even those who buried the few that have died are also coming in with demands, he added.

Meanwhile, Parliament on Friday, August 14, 2020, approved tax waivers to the tune of 174 million for health care personnel who are at the forefront of the fight against the novel coronavirus.

The approval is in line with President Akufo-Addo's promise to give health workers additional allowances of 50% as tax-free on their basic salary per month.

The waiver will cover personal emoluments and additional allowances for July, August and September 2020.

Of the amount, GH168.98 million will cater for personal emoluments and GH5.7 million additional allowances.

The tax incentive is designed as a token compensation to encourage healthcare workers, especially frontline health personnel, to continue to make sacrifices in caring for those infected with the coronavirus disease, and in caring for the sick in general.

---citinewsroom
Can Regional Powers Help Combat Insurgency in Northern Mozambique?

By Sirwan Kajjo, Amancio Vilanculos August 23, 2020

Regional powers in southern Africa could play an important role in helping Mozambique combat a growing Islamist insurgency in the northern part of the country, experts say.

The violence in Mozambique was discussed last week when southern African regional leaders met for a virtual summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a 16-member bloc that aims to further political, economic and security cooperation among south African countries.

The meeting came days after Islamic State-affiliated militants took control of a strategic port in the restive province of Cabo Delgado.

In its most recent communique, SADC expressed its "solidarity and commitment to support Mozambique in addressing the terrorism and violent attacks and condemned all acts of terrorism and armed attacks."

During the summit, Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi assumed the chairmanship of the regional bloc, which experts say could be "an opportunity for a better coordinated regional response to the Cabo Delgado crisis."

Alex Vines, director of the Africa program at Chatham House, says there is growing regional concern about the Cabo Delgado crisis but little appetite from Mozambique or its neighbors for formal external intervention.

"The reality is that Cabo Delgado is much more an East African regional problem than a southern Africa one," he told VOA, adding that, "Tanzania especially can assist in lesson and intelligence sharing and disrupting supply lines to the insurgents from East Africa and beyond."

Tanzania, which borders Cabo Delgado to the north, has deployed troops to the border to prevent a spillover of the unfolding violence in the northern Mozambican province.

High expectations

In May, leaders of Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique met in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, under the banner of the SADC's security committee. The meeting largely focused on the security situation in northern Mozambique.

At the time, the leaders pledged to provide support to Mozambique to increase its counterinsurgency efforts in Cabo Delgado.

Experts say people in Mozambique have had high expectations of SADC, but the bloc has been slow to come up with a practical response for the insurgency in Cabo Delgado.

"From May until August, not much has happened," said Adriano Nuvunga, executive director at the Center for Democracy and Development in Mozambique. "Insurgents have gained confidence, capacity, more coordination, and they have been bolder in their actions."

He told VOA as the situation continues to deteriorate in northern Mozambique, "one expects quick actions" from regional powers, but since that hasn't been the case, "those high expectations seem to be waning."

But for Mozambique, "having taken over the chairmanship of SADC would show the extent to which the government will use that platform to mobilize support in its actions against the insurgency in Cabo Delgado," Nuvunga added.

Private military companies

Mozambican authorities have relied on private military companies from South Africa and Russia to assist in providing security in the Cabo Delgado region, where several foreign oil and gas firms, such as ExxonMobil and Total, have investment projects.

Experts say while some units of the Mozambican military are better motivated and disciplined than others, government forces in general are demoralized and fragmented with competition, particularly between the military and the police.

"There has been a number of niche offers made and an acceptance that Mozambique needed to contract the Private Military Company (PMC)  to assist its counterinsurgency efforts," Vines of Chatham House said.

"PMC engagement is not a long-term option; better training of government forces, consistent supply lines and much better command and control and intelligence gathering is required," Vines added.

Emilia Columbo, a senior researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says even private military companies have had difficulties in coordination with Mozambican security forces in the fight against the insurgents.

"To the extent PMC-supported operations have been successful in pushing back insurgents, we have seen them adapt, regroup, and strike again," she told VOA, adding that, "It is important to note that even as the PMCs operate in Cabo Delgado, the insurgency has grown in capability and sophistication."

Who are the militants?

Since the outbreak of the insurgency in northern Mozambique in 2017, militant attacks on civilians and government security forces have killed more than 1,000 people and displaced more than 210,000 others, according to the United Nations.

Locally known as al-Shabab, Ahlu Sunna wa Jama is the main militant group responsible for these attacks in northern Mozambique. It is considered to be the Mozambique affiliate of the Islamic State terror group.

In April 2019, IS declared its so-called Central African Province, known as ISCAP. Attacks attributed to its Central African Province affiliate have been limited to Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Mozambican officials and experts believe foreign fighters play a major role in the insurgency in northern Mozambique.

In a recent conversation with David Malpass, president of the World Bank, Mozambican President Nyusi said there is evidence that foreign militants have been training local insurgents in Cabo Delgado.

"In this terror threat, we have signs of involvement of foreigners who are recruiting and training local youth, and also be equipping them, because we don't know how they get their equipment," Nyusi said during a virtual meeting with Malpass.

Analyst Nuvunga said the knowledge the insurgents have shown about the geography of the area and the way they have engaged with the local population suggest that they are from the area.

"They are local young people who were mobilized and instrumentalized by certain interests to wreak all this havoc," he said.

Nuvunga said "the masterminds and leaders who I believe are behind all of this instrumentalization" haven't yet been identified.

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DUBLIN, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Bipolar Depression - Market Insights, Epidemiology, and Market Forecast-2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The report delivers an in-depth understanding of the Bipolar Depression, historical and forecasted epidemiology as well as the Bipolar Depression market trends in the United States, EU5 (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and Japan.



The report provides current treatment practices, emerging drugs, and market share of the individual therapies, current and forecasted 7MM Bipolar Depression market size from 2017 to 2030. The report also covers current Bipolar Depression treatment practice, market drivers, market barriers, SWOT analysis, reimbursement, and market access, and unmet medical needs to curate the best of the opportunities and assesses the underlying potential of the market.



Epidemiology



The disease epidemiology covered in the report provides historical as well as forecasted epidemiology segmented by Total Diagnosed Prevalent Cases of Bipolar Depression, Type-specific Diagnosed Prevalent Cases of Bipolar Depression and Severity-specific Diagnosed Prevalent Cases of Bipolar Depression scenario of Bipolar Depression in the 7MM covering the United States, EU5 countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and Japan from 2017 to 2030.



Key Findings

As per the analysts, the total diagnosed prevalent population of Bipolar Depression in the 7MM was 1,857,545 in 2017.

The estimates show the highest diagnosed prevalence of Bipolar Depression in the United States with 740,715 cases.

with 740,715 cases. Bipolar I and Bipolar II are the major subtypes of BD. In 2017, out of the total diagnosed prevalent population of 740,715 cases in the US for Bipolar Depression, 291,134 and 449,581 cases were contributed by Bipolar I disorder and Bipolar II disorder, respectively.

Based on the severity of the Bipolar Depression, total diagnosed prevalent cases are categorized into mild, moderate, and severe. In 2017, out of the total diagnosed prevalent population in the US for Bipolar Depression, 28,666 cases were mild, 158,735 cases were moderate, and 553,092 cases were severe.

Drug Chapters



The drug chapter segment of the Bipolar Depression report encloses the detailed analysis of Bipolar Depression marketed drugs, mid-phase, and late-stage pipeline drugs. It also helps to understand the Bipolar Depression clinical trial details, expressive pharmacological action, agreements and collaborations, approval, and patent details of each included drug and the latest news and press releases.



Marketed Drugs



Vraylar (Cariprazine): Allergan (AbbVie)/Gedeon Richter



Vraylar is an oral capsule containing cariprazine as an active ingredient. It is approved in the US for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and bipolar depression. In the EU it is approved as Reagila for the treatment of schizophrenia. Cariprazine also received regulatory approval in Singapore and Thailand for the treatment of schizophrenia. The mechanism of action of cariprazine in schizophrenia and bipolar I disorder is unknown. However, the efficacy of cariprazine could be mediated through a combination of partial agonist activity at central dopamine D2 and serotonin 5-HT1A receptors and antagonist activity at serotonin 5-HT2A receptors. Cariprazine forms two major metabolites, desmethyl cariprazine (DCAR) and didesmethyl cariprazine (DDCAR), that have in vitro receptor binding profiles similar to the parent drug.



Latuda (Lurasidone Hydrochloride): Sunovion Pharmaceuticals (Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma)



Latuda is an oral tablet containing lurasidone hydrochloride as an active ingredient. It is approved in the US for bipolar depression in pediatric patients (10-17 years of age) and schizophrenic patients (adolescent and adult); given as monotherapy and adjunctive therapy in adult patients with bipolar depression. In the EU, it is approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, whereas in Japan, it is approved for both, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.



The company is also conducting a phase IIII randomized, 6-week, multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled, flexible-dose, parallel-group study of lurasidone for the treatment of bipolar I depression in China. The mechanism of action of lurasidone in the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar depression is unclear. However, its efficacy in schizophrenia and bipolar depression could be mediated through a combination of central dopamine D2 and serotonin Type 2 (5HT2A) receptor antagonism.



Emerging Drugs



Abilify: Otsuka Pharmaceutical



Abilify (aripiprazole) is indicated to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia, bipolar I disorder (manic depression), and major depressive disorder. It is available as a tablet and suspension for injection. Oral solution and intramuscular injection of Abilify is discontinued in the US. The mechanism of action of aripiprazole in schizophrenia or bipolar mania is unclear. However, the efficacy of aripiprazole could be mediated through a combination of partial agonist activity at D2 and 5-HT1A receptors and antagonist activity at 5-HT2A receptors. Otsuka Holding is currently evaluating Abilify (tablet) in phase III clinical trial as an adjunctive treatment in the treatment of major depressive episodes associated with bipolar I or II disorder.



Falkieri: Celon Pharma



Falkieri (Esketamine DPI/Esketamine dry powder Inhaler) is an esketamine formulation and acts as an NMDA antagonist. The antidepressant activity of ketamine is established recently, even though it is majorly used in anesthesia. Esketamine as in form S-enantiomer is pharmacologically 3-4 times more potent to R-enantiomer. The goal of the project is to develop an innovative and convenient formulation for the patients to use Esketamine. The molecule has received approval by US FDA in March 2019, under the brand name Spravato, in conjunction with an oral antidepressant, for the treatment of depression in adults who have tried other antidepressant medicines but have not benefited from them.



The US FDA granted this approval of Spravato to Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Janssen had received fast track and Breakthrough Therapy Designation for intranasal ESK in 2013 for treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and in 2016 for the treatment of the major depressive disorder (MDD) with an imminent risk of suicide. Celon Pharma is currently conducting the phase II trial in subjects with treatment-resistant Bipolar Depression (TRBD). It is the first such formulation, which targets both the unipolar and bipolar treatment-resistant depression. It is co-financed from the National Funds Research and Development Center. As plans, Celon Pharma is expecting the Breakthrough designation for bipolar depression and fast track designation for both the indications (TRD and bipolar depression), by 2020.



Zuranolone: Sage Therapeutics



Zuranolone (SAGE-217) is a once-daily, two-week therapy in development for the treatment of the major depressive disorder (MDD) and postpartum depression (PPD). It is an investigational oral neuroactive steroid (NAS) GABAA receptor positive allosteric modulator (PAM). The GABA system is the major inhibitory signaling pathway of the brain and central nervous system and contributes significantly to regulating brain function.



The Landscape Program is evaluating the potential of zuranolone as a rapid-acting, short-course oral treatment for PPD and MDD. It includes three completed pivotal efficacy studies evaluating zuranolone 30 mg in PPD (ROBIN Study) and MDD (MDD-201, MOUNTAIN Study), the results of which have been previously reported. In March 2020, after a Breakthrough Therapy guidance meeting with the US FDA, Sage Therapeutics announced plans to launch three additional studies of its investigational drug zuranolone. Results are expected in 2021.



Market Outlook



The ultimate goal of treatment is to achieve as high as possible a level of psychosocial function and health-related quality of life. BD is a highly recurrent disorder and sometimes medication needs to continue even if the patient feels well. The treatment has two phases: the acute phase and the maintenance phase. Acute-phase treatment is focused on the management of acute mood episodes (manic, hypomanic, or depressive). Maintenance-phase treatment is focused on preventing recurrences of acute episodes. Each phase is associated with specific treatment needs, and available pharmacotherapies have shown differential efficacy according to the illness phase. Most commonly mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants, antianxiety medications, and psychotherapy is used.



In the United States, only four medications are approved for acute treatment of depressive episodes in the context of bipolar disorder: Symbyax (olanzapine-fluoxetine combination), Seroquel and Seroquel XR (quetiapine), Latuda (lurasidone), and Vraylar (cariprazine). Although older medications such as lithium also have modest effects in acute bipolar depression.



In October 2008, the US FDA approved once-daily Seroquel XR (quetiapine fumarate) Extended-Release Tablets for the acute treatment of the depressive episodes associated with bipolar disorder, the manic and mixed episodes associated with bipolar I disorder, and the maintenance treatment of bipolar I disorder as adjunctive therapy to lithium or divalproex. Seroquel XR and Seroquel are also approved in the EU for the prevention of recurrence of bipolar disorder in patients whose manic, mixed or depressive episode has responded to quetiapine treatment.



Symbyax was the first drug approved by the US FDA for the acute treatment of bipolar depression in adults in 2003. Zyprexa, in combination with fluoxetine, is now approved for the same indication. Oral Zyprexa and fluoxetine in combination is indicated for the treatment of depressive episodes associated with bipolar I disorder, based on clinical studies. Zyprexa monotherapy is not indicated for the treatment of depressive episodes associated with bipolar I disorder.



The US FDA approved lurasidone (Latuda, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc) for the treatment of major depressive episodes associated with bipolar I disorder (bipolar depression) in children and adolescents aged 10-17 years. In March 2020, Latuda was approved in Japan for the improvement of depressive symptoms in patients with bipolar disorder.



Recently, in May 2019, a new approval by FDA was made for bipolar depression. The US FDA approved a supplemental New Drug Application for Vraylar for the expanded treatment of depressive episodes associated with bipolar I disorder in adults. Vraylar (cariprazine), developed by Hungary-based Gedeon Richter Ltd. and licensed to Allergan, has also been approved in the US for treatment of manic or mixed episodes associated with bipolar I disorder in adults.



In short, efficacious pharmacologic options for managing the most prevalent and most disabling phases of bipolar disorder are extremely limited. Treatments that work in both phases of bipolar disorder are especially rare. New treatments are desperately needed.



Key Findings

The market size of Bipolar Depression in the 7MM was USD 762.83 million in 2017.

in 2017. According to the estimates, the highest market size of Bipolar Depression was found in the United States , followed by France .

, followed by . The market size of the United States in 2017 was found to be USD 431.04 million , and the market size of Japan was USD 60.75 million .

in 2017 was found to be , and the market size of was . In the EU5, the highest market share of Bipolar Depression was in France , followed by Germany and the United Kingdom , and the least of Spain , in 2017.

, followed by and the , and the least of , in 2017. The upcoming therapy, Abilify (Aripiprazole), is anticipated to enter the market by 2021 in the US, and 2022 in EU-5 and Japan . Other therapies that are expected to enter the market before 2024 are Lumateperone, NRX-100/NRX-101, and Zuranolone.

Drugs Uptake



This section focusses on the rate of uptake of the potential drugs recently launched in the Bipolar Depression market or expected to get launched in the market during the study period 2017-2030. The analysis covers the Bipolar Depression market uptake by drugs; patient uptake by therapies; and sales of each drug.



This helps in understanding the drugs with the most rapid uptake, reasons behind the maximal use of new drugs, and allows the comparison of the drugs based on market share and size which again will be useful in investigating factors important in market uptake and in making financial and regulatory decisions.



Pipeline and Development Activities



The report provides insights into different therapeutic candidates in phase II, and phase III stage. It also analyzes key players involved in developing targeted therapeutics. The report covers the detailed information of collaborations, acquisition, and merger, licensing, and patent details for Bipolar Depression emerging therapies.



Reimbursement Scenario



Approaching reimbursement proactively can have a positive impact both during the late stages of product development and well after product launch. In the report, we consider reimbursement to identify economically attractive indications and market opportunities. When working with finite resources, the ability to select the markets with the fewest reimbursement barriers can be a critical business and price strategy.



Competitive Intelligence Analysis



The publisher performs competitive and market Intelligence analysis of the Bipolar Depression market by using various competitive intelligence tools that include-SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis, Porter's five forces, BCG Matrix, Market entry strategies, etc. The inclusion of the analysis entirely depends upon the data availability.



Scope of the Report

The report covers the descriptive overview of Bipolar Depression, explaining its causes, symptoms, pathophysiology, genetic basis, and currently available therapies.

Comprehensive insight has been provided into the Bipolar Depression epidemiology and treatment.

Additionally, an all-inclusive account of both the current and emerging therapies for Bipolar Depression is provided, along with the assessment of new therapies, which will have an impact on the current treatment landscape.

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Companies Mentioned



Allergan (AbbVie)/ Gedeon Richter

Sunovion Pharmaceuticals (Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma)

Otsuka Pharmaceutical

Intra-cellular Therapies

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COMPASS Pathways

Sage Therapeutics

Iltoo Pharma

Celon Pharma

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/3gbvp3

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A 70-year-old man died in California on Sunday as huge wildfires continued to tear through the state.

Authorities said the victim was discovered near Last Chance Road, Santa Cruz County as the CZU Complex Fire caused widespread damage in the area.

The fatality was the first for the fire in CZU  the California fire department's designation for the area that spans San Mateo, Santa Cruz and San Francisco counties  and the seventh fire victim in the state in total.

The Santa Cruz fire is one of the complexes, or groups of fires, burning on all sides of the San Francisco Bay Area. They were started by lightning strikes that were among 12,000 registered in the state in the past week.

Hundreds of thousands of residents were told to evacuate the San Francisco Bay Area over the weekend as president Donald Trump declared a major disaster in the state.

Firefighters tackling blazes in the Santa Cruz mountains said their efforts had been hampered by people refusing to leave their homes, with more storms and new fires expected in the coming days.

The area was under an evacuation order.

Santa Cruz Sheriffs Department Chief Deputy Chris Clark said the death of the 70-year-old man was a stark reminder of the need for residents to leave the area as he called on people to evacuate.

This is one of the darkest periods weve been in with this fire, he said.

The National Weather Service has issued a red flag warning through Monday afternoon for the drought-stricken area, meaning extreme fire conditions including high temperatures, low humidity and wind gusts up to 65 mph (105 kph) that may result in dangerous and unpredictable fire behaviour.

In nearly a week, firefighters have got no more than the 17 per cent containment for the LNU Lightning Complex fire in wine country north of San Francisco.

Its been the most destructive blaze, accounting for five deaths and 845 destroyed homes and other buildings. It and a fire burning southeast of the Bay Area are among the five largest fires in state history, with both burning more than 500 square miles (1,295 square kilometres).

Story continues

In Southern California, an 11-day-old blaze held steady at just under 50 square miles (106 square kilometres) near Lake Hughes in northern Los Angeles County mountains. Rough terrain, hot weather and the potential for thunderstorms with lightning strikes challenged firefighters.

Holly Hansen was among evacuees from the community of Angwin being allowed to back their homes for one hour to retrieve belongings. She and her three dogs waited five hours in her SUV for their turn.

Its horrible, I lived in Sonoma during the (2017) Tubbs Fire, so this is time No 2 for me. Its horrible when you have to think about what to take, she said. I think its a very raw human base emotion to have fear of fire and losing everything. Its frightening.

Meantime, firefighters were frantically preparing for thunderstorms that will bring high winds and dry lightning, a term used when such storms have little or no rain. Brunton said while hes confident firefighters did the most with the time they had to prepare, hes not sure what to expect.

Theres a lot of potential for things to really go crazy out there, he said.

Flames spread up a hillside near firefighters at the Blue Cut Fire near Wrightwood, California (Getty Images)

Since 15 August more than 500 fires of varying sizes have burned throughout California, scorching 1.2 million acres, or 1,875 square miles (4,856 square km). Of those, about two dozen major fires were attracting much of the states resources.

The fires have burned 1,175 square miles (3.043 square km), destroyed almost 1,000 homes and other structures and now killed seven people, three of whom who were found in a home in an area under an evacuation order.

Other casualties included ancient redwood trees at Californias oldest state park, Big Basin Redwoods, plus the parks headquarters and campgrounds. Smoke from the fires made the regions air quality dangerous, forcing millions to stay inside.

Officials surveying maps at command centres are astonished by the sheer size of the fires, Cal Fire spokesman Brice Bennett said.

You could overlay half of one of these fires and it covers the entire city of San Francisco, Bennett said on Sunday.

Responding to the emergency, president Donald Trump on Saturday issued a major disaster declaration to provide federal assistance. California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement that the declaration will also help people in counties affected by the fires with crisis counselling, housing and other social services.

Fire officials, meanwhile, have struggled to get enough resources to fight the biggest fires because so many blazes are burning around the state.

The wine country fire has only 1,700 firefighters on scene. By comparison, the state had 5,000 firefighters assigned to the Mendocino Complex Fire in 2018, the largest fire in state history.

All of our resources remain stretched to capacity that we have not seen in recent history, said Shana Jones, the chief for Cal Fires Sonoma-Lake-Napa unit.

Additional reporting by agencies

Read more

Woman returns to family ranch to find 100 animals burned by California
Ukraine's position in Normandy Four talks sees support from Germany and France, the minister says.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has announced preparations for a meeting of Normandy Four (Ukraine, Germany, France, and Russia) top diplomats that could be held in September, noting that the key to peace in Donbas is held in Moscow.

"We have begun our negotiations on the issue of the Normandy format, on the settlement of the armed conflict in Donbas," the minister said at a joint press conference with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in Kyiv on August 24, according to an UNIAN correspondent.

Kuleba expressed gratitude to the foreign ministers of Germany and France for supporting his proposal to hold a second meeting of the Normandy Four foreign ministers after the first one was held this spring.

"Now we are preparing for the next meeting, today we discussed ways to prepare for it. As of now, we have every reason to say that it will take place in a full-fledged quadrilateral format, and that the Russian foreign minister will join us," Kuleba said.

"Our colleague, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is not putting forward any additional conditions to our September's ministerial... All four ministers are focused on one thing  to make sure that the meeting is meaningful," he said, adding that the parties should talk essence during negotiations rather than "drown the issue in diplomatic wording and conversations."

Progress in Donbas settlement is only possible, Kuleba says, if all elements of the negotiation process (the Trilateral Contact Group, foreign ministers, advisors to Normandy Four leaders, and N4 leaders themselves) engage.

The key to peace in Ukraine, the key to ending Russian aggression against Ukraine is in Moscow

"Over the past two months, you have seen tremendous progress at all these levels and efforts to take a step forward. The step was taken  this is a ceasefire regime, which, despite the fact that we record some fortification works from the other side, is maintained on principle, and zero casualties testifies to this," he said.

At the same time, Kuleba stressed that "the key to peace in Ukraine, the key to ending Russian aggression against Ukraine is in Moscow."

Kuleba said he was "encouraged" by the fact that, thanks to the involvement of Germany and France, the efforts of Ukraine, and "certain positive steps" on the part of Russia, the settlement process in Donbas has moved forward.

Read alsoDonbas special status may be put to referendum  lawmakerUkraine is determined to search for specific solutions to resolve the situation in Donbas, Kuleba said, adding that if Russia also has the same attitude, "the key (to will not just be found, it will turn, and the lock could open."

Normandy Four talks: background

On August 22, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that a meeting of advisors to the Normandy Four leaders would be held August 28, followed by a foreign ministers' meeting and a summit of N4 leaders.

The Kremlin announced the preparation of a meeting of aides to the Normandy format leaders.

Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba has said the country is interested in preserving the Normandy-Minsk infrastructure on Donbas settlement
Activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan refused to apologise to the Supreme Court on Monday. On August 20, the SC had granted Bhushan time till August 24 to apologise for his two tweets against the judiciary.

Bhushan said, in a statement submitted to the apex court, that his tweets represented his bona fide beliefs which he still continues to hold.

"An apology has to be sincerely made. If I retract a statement that I otherwise believe to be true or offer an insincere apology that in my eyes would amount to contempt of my conscience and of an institution (Supreme Court) that I hold in the highest esteem," the statement said. "An apology for expression of beliefs, conditional or unconditional, would be insincere," Bhushan added.

Bhushan said that as an officer of apex court it is his duty to speak up when he believes there is a deviation from the court's sterling record.

"Therefore I expressed myself in good faith, not to malign the Supreme Court or any particular Chief Justice, but to offer constructive criticism so that the court can arrest any drift away from its long-standing role as a guardian of the Constitution and custodian of peoples' rights," he said.

Bhushan added "My tweets represented this bona fide belief that I continue to hold. Public expression of these beliefs was I believe, in line with my higher obligations as a citizen and a loyal officer of this court."

In his first controversial tweet, Buchan had written, "When historians in the future look back at the last six years to see how democracy has been destroyed in India even without a formal Emergency, they will particularly mark the role of the SC in this destruction, and more particularly the role of the last four CJIs."

The second tweet was about CJI Bobde and said, "The CJI rides a Rs 50-lakh motorcycle belonging to a BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] leader at Raj Bhavan, Nagpur, without wearing a mask or helmet, at a time when he keeps the SC on lockdown mode denying citizens their fundamental right to access justice!"

The apex court, on August 14, had held Bhushan guilty of criminal contempt for his two derogatory tweets against the judiciary saying they cannot be said to be a fair criticism of the functioning of the judiciary made in the public interest.

Also Read: Prashant Bhushan contempt of court case: Supreme Court rejects plea to defer hearing

Also Read: JEE Mains 2020: Students go on hunger strike, demand postponement of JEE, NEET entrance exams
Photo: Brendan Kergin

Police are looking for information about a collision last week that left an 84-year-old man dead.

Williams Lake RCMP were called to the site of a crash between a Ford 350 and Honda CR-V on Thursday, Aug. 20, around 9:30 p.m. According to a police release the driver of the CR-V was travelling northbound when it crossed into oncoming traffic.

It then hit the Ford pickup, which was pulling a cargo trailer.

The driver of the CR-V, a man from Prince George, was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the release. There was one passenger with him, they were taken to hospital with minor injuries.

The driver of the truck also received minor injuries, and was subsequently taken to hospital.

Police are still investigating the cause of the crash, while the BC Coroners Service is investigating the cause of death. Alcohol is not believed to be involved.

Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call the Williams Lake detachment at 250-392-6211.
Firefighters Exposed to More Potentially Harmful Chemicals than Previously Thought

On-duty firefighters have an increased risk of experiencing exposure to PAHs, which are a family of chemicals known for their potential to cause cancer.

A study led by Oregon State University found that firefighters might be exposed to more harmful chemicals than previously thought while on-duty as compared to off-duty.

The on-duty firefighters of the Kansas City, Missouri area experienced higher exposures of polycuclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are a family of chemicals known to have the potential to cause cancer. The firefighters were also exposed to 18 PAHs that have not been previously reported as firefighting exposures in earlier research.

The results of the study are important, according to a news release, because previous studies have shown that firefighters have an increased risk of developing cancer and other damaging health effects, but did not specifically say what they could be exposed to that is causing the health problems.

We dont have enough data to profile the source of the PAHs, but we know PAHs appear from combustion, and obviously combustion is their work, study lead Kim Anderson, an environmental chemist and Extension specialist at OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences, said. They are also putting on a heavy load of protective gear that has PAHs, and they use cleaning products that have PAHs.

PAHs are a large group of chemical compounds that contain carbon and other elements. They form naturally after almost any type of combustion, both natural and human-created. In addition to burning wood, plants and tobacco, PAHs are also in fossil fuels.

The firefighters in the study wore personal passive samplers in the shape of a military-style dog tag made of silicone on an elastic necklace. The tags are made of the same material as OSUs patented silicone wristbands that Andersons lab has been using for several years to study chemical exposure in humans and cats.

This study demonstrates that the dog tags, which absorb chemicals from the air and skin, appear to be a reliable sampling technology necessary for assessing chemical exposures in firefighters, Anderson said.

Im quite confident those exposures existed but if you dont have something to help you find them you dont know for sure, Anderson said. Certainly, we found that its a lot more than what people had thought.

To learn more about this study and the health risks associated with firefighters, see the full study.
Pearson

The new boss of publisher Pearson is to continue living in Los Angeles - despite an eight-hour time difference with its London headquarters.

Former Disney executive Andy Bird has been told he can remain based in California after taking charge of the business behind GCSE and A-level exams in October, when he will replace longstanding boss John Fallon.

Mr Bird will also get a golden hello worth $9.3m (7.1m), and Pearson will contribute towards the rental costs of a New York apartment for business use so that Mr Bird can split his time as needed.

Shore Capital media analyst Roddy Davidson said that while in principle he would prefer the chief executive to be full time in the UK, the US is by far Pearson's largest market and there could be benefits in having its boss there. The firm's biggest office is in New Jersey.

He said: "[The US] is also the area in which it has had greatest difficulty for some time - so perhaps not a bad thing and may make it easier to attract US shareholders who tent to attribute a higher value than their UK counterparts to digital businesses."

Mr Bird - who was born in Warrington and began his working life answering phones for British radio DJ Timmy Mallet, before helping launch the career of Chris Evans - will get $9.3m of shares after buying $3.75m of stock with his own money. He will be paid a maximum of $7.7m a year.

A media veteran who ran the international arm of Walt Disney, overseeing its transformation into a "digital-first" brand, Mr Bird will seek to steer Pearson through the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic from his LA base almost 5,500 miles from London.

Mr Fallon, who has led the FTSE 100 firm since 2013, announced last December that he would leave this year. He will step down from the board but remain as an advisor until the end of 2020.

Story continues

Pearson has struggled in recent years as the publishing industry has been battered by the rise of online rivals, with the firm issuing a string of profit warnings.

However, it was one of the few big companies to retain its dividend this year as lockdown forced schools and universities to shift operations online.

Notably under Mr Fallon, it sold off Penguin Random House, the Financial Times and a stake in The Economist.

Sidney Taurel, Pearson chairman, said: "Andy brings a wealth of international consumer experience, as well as significant expertise in building brands, transformational change and driving digital innovation. He is an inspirational and dynamic leader with an excellent track record of growth."

Mr Bird will have to contend with activist investor Cevian, which has increased its stake in Pearson, strengthening its potential claim to a seat on the board as it campaigns for a shake-up.

Cevian Capital managing partner Christer Gardell told Bloomberg on Monday that he expects Bird to deliver profitable growth and value for shareholders.
For all of the challenges in controlling the spread of the coronavirus, Europes initial strategy was relatively straightforward: nearly universal, strictly enforced lockdowns.

It eventually worked. And in the two months since most countries have opened up, improved testing and tracing have largely kept new outbreaks in check, and with basic rules on wearing masks and social distancing, life has been able to resume with some semblance of normality.

But in recent days France, Germany and Italy have experienced their highest daily case counts since the spring, and Spain finds itself in the midst of a major outbreak. Government authorities and public health officials are warning that the Continent is entering a new phase in the pandemic.

There isnt the widespread chaos and general sense of crisis seen in March and April. And newly detected infections per 100,000 people across Europe are still only about one-fifth the number in the United States over the last week, according to a New York Times database.

But there are growing concerns that with the summer travel season drawing to a close, the virus could find a new foothold as people move their lives indoors and the fall flu season begins.

Follow live updates on the coronavirus here

With countries employing a variety of strategies  and with rules often changing suddenly and guidance varying from nation to nation  it remains to be seen which tactics will prove both enforceable and effective.

The virus is also spreading across a landscape vastly changed from the one it found in the spring, with many cities centers still largely empty of office workers and a public on guard.

The increase in cases in Europe, as in many other parts of the world, is being driven by young people: The proportion of people ages 15-24 who are infected in Europe has risen from around 4.5% to 15% in the last five months, according to the World Health Organization.

Dr. Hans Kluge, its director for Europe, said Thursday that he was very concerned that people under age 24 were regularly appearing among new cases.

Low risk does not mean no risk, he said. No one is invincible, and if you do not die from Covid, it may stick to your body like a tornado with a long tail.

This time, European leaders have largely avoided imposing widespread lockdowns, and are instead relying on measures like targeted restrictions on movement in hot spots, increased mask requirements and public health education campaigns.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has ruled out another countrywide lockdown, opting instead for very localized strategies.

We cannot bring the country to a halt, because the collateral damage of confinement is considerable, he told Paris Match magazine this week, adding that zero risk never exists in a society.

A growing number of French cities have made mask wearing mandatory in crowded streets and markets, and on Thursday the southern cities of Nice and Toulouse became the first to extend the rule to all outdoor areas.

But as the number of new infections rises daily  on Thursday, there were nearly 4,800 new infections, a figure not reached since April  some wonder whether the government is being too lax.

Olivier Veran, the health minister, acknowledged Friday that the viruss spread was accelerating, but he said the situation would remain under control as long as people observed social distancing and hygiene measures.

We are several days away from the return from vacations, Veran said, warning that people are going to get back to their lives in places like offices and schools.

The virus must not spread from younger people to older people, he added.

A surge in cases in Spain, however, illustrates the difficulties of an ad hoc approach to virus suppression.

Since the lifting of a state of emergency in June, 17 regional governments in the country have been directing their own efforts. That has left Spain splintered into a mosaic of different rules, many of which had to be changed almost immediately once hundreds of local outbreaks were identified.

Countries like Britain have now introduced self-quarantine rules on travelers coming from Spain, wrecking Spanish hopes of a strong summer tourism recovery. Nightclubs were closed again within weeks of reopening, and some Spanish regions have recently gone further, including banning smoking in public outdoor spaces.

The back-and-forth has also been coupled with uncertainty over whether regions are doing enough testing and tracing of infections. In the Madrid region, labor unions representing schoolteachers voted Wednesday to go on strike rather than reopen classrooms in September, in protest over what they consider inadequate safety guarantees from the regional government.

Nobody should be in any doubt, Dr. Fernando Simon, the director of Spains health emergency center, said Thursday. Things are not going well.

The approach in Britain, which has had the greatest rate of excess deaths in Europe during the pandemic, has a similarly disjointed feel, with sudden rule changes often confusing the public.

In Birmingham, residents are facing the return of the dark days of lockdown, a local official has said, after a surge of new cases was reported. In northern England, including around Manchester, people from different households have been barred from meeting.

But the countrys health secretary, Matt Hancock, told the BBC this week that workers should go back to their offices. And the government is funding an initiative to get people back out into restaurants, covering a portion of the cost of some meals.

The authorities are also requiring 14 days of self-quarantine for travelers coming from Austria, Croatia, France and the Netherlands, and have warned that more countries could be added.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to tackle the spread of the virus without closing national borders, despite a rise in daily infections not experienced since the end of April. She said Thursday that the European Union must be united and that it needed to act even more European to stop the virus.

I dont think were just going to close the borders again, she said. Politically, we really want to avoid that at all costs.
Premier calls for efforts to vitalize economic growth

From:ChinaDaily | 2020-08-24 06:50

Li notes positive outcomes in prioritized areas of protecting jobs, market players

Premier Li Keqiang has called for unrelenting efforts to protect market players and create jobs while coping with uncertain factors during the course of development, saying that China's economy can attain positive growth this year.

In remarks delivered during an inspection trip to Chongqing on Thursday and Friday, the premier recognized the positive outcomes in macroeconomic regulation in recent months, especially in the prioritized areas of protecting jobs and market players, ensuring people's livelihoods and the security of grain and energy supply, and guaranteeing the stability of industry and supply chains and the functioning of grassroots government bodies.

China has set the goal of creating more than 9 million urban jobs this year and ensuring the survival of over 100 million market players amid the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

A number of economic indicators in July, including exports, factory output and sales of commercial goods, have all pointed to a more sustainable economic recovery in China.

China's exports increased 7.2 percent in July from a year earlier, while the manufacturing purchasing managers index rose to a four-month high of 51.1, beating expectations and landing in expansion territory for a fifth consecutive month.

During the visit, Li spoke with over a dozen executives of smaller firms at the administrative hall in the Liangjiang New Area.

He highlighted the need for further widening market access and stimulating the vitality of market players.

Li lauded the online administrative services offered by local authorities, saying that the government, in its efforts to streamline administration and bolster compliance oversight and services, is aiming to provide the people with a pleasant experience and enough sense of gain as they access administrative services.

The premier also visited businesses, including the outsourcing service provider ZBJ.com, a subsidiary of BOE Technology Group, and Chongqing Changan Automobile.

He called upon western regions to further give play to their strengths and proactively undertake the transfer of industries from eastern areas so as to move further up industry chains.
KENOSHA, Wis.: Neighbors confronted law enforcement at the scene of a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday that drew a harsh rebuke from the governor and prompted crowds to march in the streets after a video posted on social media appeared to show officers shoot at a mans back seven times as he leaned into a vehicle.

Kenosha Police said a person was hospitalized in serious condition following a shooting by officers about 5 p.m. as police were responding to a domestic incident, the Kenosha Police Department said in a news release. Police did not provide details about what led to the shooting or the officers involved, but said the person was transported to a hospital in Milwaukee for treatment.

In the video posted on social media that appeared to show the shooting from across a street, three officers could be seen shouting and pointing their weapons at the man, who appeared to be Black, as he walked around the front of an SUV parked on the street. As the man opened the drivers side door and leaned inside, one officer grabbed his shirt from behind and then fired into the vehicle. Seven shots could be heard on the video, though it was unclear if more than one officer fired.

Following the shooting, social media posts showed neighbors gathering in the surrounding streets and hurling comments at police. Some could be heard chanting, No justice, no peace.

Later Sunday, in a scene that mirrored the months of protests over racial injustice around the world that have followed the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black people killed by police, marchers headed to the Kenosha County Public Safety Building, which authorities had mostly blocked off. Protesters marched along lines of cars honking on their way to the station and eventually made their way to the rear parking lot. A man could be seen breaking the window of a patrol car parked along the street. Some police officers were positioned on the roof of the station as people continued toward the building

Outside the station, protesters faced off with officers who were dressed in riot gear that included plastic facemasks and held plastic shields and batons that they occasionally used to push people back.

Gov. Tony Evers on Sunday night released a statement on Twitter condemning the shooting of a man who was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight and whom he identified as Jacob Blake.

While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country, Evers said. We stand with all those who have and continue to demand justice, equity, and accountability for Black lives in our country 

And we stand against excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites. I have said all along that although we must offer our empathy, equally important is our action. In the coming days, we will demand just that of elected officials in our state who have failed to recognize the racism in our state and our country for far too long.

Kenosha Police referred all questions to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond to messages seeking to confirm details of the shooting video.

The Kenosha Sheriffs Department and Wisconsin State Patrol were requested at the scene so another law enforcement agency could take over, police said in the news release.

Meanwhile, Kenosha County late Sunday night declared a state of emergency curfew, which the Kenosha Sheriffs Department would enforce until 7 a.m.

The city of Kenosha is located on Lake Michigan, about 40 miles (64.37 Kilometers) south of Milwaukee.

A Kenosha Police Department dispatcher referred calls by The Associated Press to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, the agency that will be investigating the shooting. A message left with DOJ was not immediately returned.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
(Natural News) On Wednesday, August 19, hours after Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Chief Chuck Lovell announced that he has figured out how the civil unrest in the city can end, an organized mob of Antifa and Black Lives Matter demonstrators marched on the citys Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building and started a riot.

The violent mob gathered at Elizabeth Caruthers Park, several blocks north of the ICE facility. Once the crowd numbered around 200 people, they marched out. Online posts made about the event said that they would be marching for the total abolition of law enforcement as well as the prison system. The groups that organized the event also shared photos showing several demonstrators holding anti-ICE signs such as Melt ICE and End ICE, which made it clear who their target was.

When they got outside the ICE facility a little after 9 p.m., they stopped marching and started chanting slogans like Stolen people, stolen land! and Abolish ICE. These chants were accompanied with people playing instruments like drums and guitars.

Officers from the Federal Protective Service (FPS) issued announcements warning the mob to not vandalize the building. These calls went unheeded and around a dozen or so people broke off from the main crowd to break several of the buildings windows and spray paint some parts of its walls.

Riot declared, BLM mob started a bonfire

By 10 p.m., the FPS officers in the facility had had enough and around three dozen of them went out of the building to push the crowd away from the federal property. Crowd control munitions, such as pepper balls, were used. At around the same time, squads from the PPB arrive to help the federal officers by declaring the gathering to be an unlawful assembly and warning that anybody who did not leave would be subjected to more crowd control munitions or even arrest. Many of the rioters responded by throwing rocks and bottles at both the PPB and the FPS.

Due to pressure from the police, the mob splintered and started making their way north, back to Elizabeth Caruthers Park. But by 10:30 p.m., they regrouped and returned to the ICE facility, where they continued to chant slogans and cause chaos. One protester even brought a loudspeaker to make a speech about Oregons long history of racism and enacting racist policies.

Before 11 p.m., several rioters broke three more windows in the ICE facility, which made the FPS officers come back outside and once again push the rioters out into the street, where the PPB, which brought more officers, can better handle them.

Around this time, the PPB declared a riot due to the immense volume of projectiles thrown at police officers. A report said that they were hit with rocks, full soda cans and even a hammer, leading to several officers getting injured.

After the mob was once again forced to retreat north, several rioters started a bonfire nearby using a mattress, the contents of several garbage cans and a picnic table taken from a nearby restaurant. This drew the condemnation of the areas residents, many of whom berated the mob from their windows.

By midnight, the rioters came back to the ICE facility, which prompted the police to disperse the crowd using tear gas. The crowd disappeared by 1:30 a.m. Two arrests were made; Joshua Buckley, 30 and Mark Putnam, 25, who were both arrested and charged with second-degree disorderly conduct and interfering with a peace officer. Unfortunately, thanks to a policy enacted by Multnomah Countys new district attorney, Mike Schmidt, these charges will be dropped.

Chief Lovells solution: Community must come together to denounce the violence

Hours before the riot, Police Chief Chuck Lovell made a statement saying that he knew how the violence can end. (Related: Kill a cop, save a life: Portland rioters chant and cheer for the MURDER of police officers.)

The solution is in a critical mass of community and partners coming together to denounce this criminal activity and call it out as it does not represent what we know our community at large wants or values. The solution includes broad support for the police to do their job in exhausting and challenging circumstances. The solution also includes elected officials and people in positions of power coming together in support of the real change, but against those who continue to feel empowered to act in a way that devalues our City with every brick thrown, every fire lit, and every crime committed.

Lovell praised the PPB officers who continue to respond to the rioting even though they know there is a high chance of them being injured by rocks and fireworks. While he thanked them for their grit and determination to continue serving Portland until the violence ends, he admitted that their morale was very low.

Lovell further stated that the stakes for Portland are very high because the world is watching. He would much rather have Portland known to be a place where leaders can come together and inspire great change, rather than a place where rioting, civil unrest and mass violence occur on a nightly basis.

Stay updated on the nightly rioting and civil unrest in Portland by reading the articles at Rioting.news.

Sources include:

TheEpochTimes.com

KOIN.com

OregonLive.com

KXL.com
analysis

Breaking the grip of southern Africa's predatory ruling parties, which exist only to serve their own selfish needs, will require a collective vision backed by popular solidarities.

The parties that now hold state power across southern Africa once carried the hopes of millions of people. When they were popular movements or military organisations, people of great principle and courage committed themselves to them and were willing to go to prison - and to war - in their name. They carried collective and redemptive visions.

In 1906, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a central figure in the founding of the ANC, gave a prize-winning oration at Columbia University in New York in which he anticipated shining cities, humming with science and commerce, and that Africa "walking with that morning gleam" will "shine as thy sister lands with equal beam".

By the late 1980s, millions of people were mobilised in the name of the ANC. But today, throughout southern Africa, most of the former liberation movements have become repressive and predatory excrescences on society. In Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the ruling parties are a direct hindrance to any prospect of the development of societies that are viable for the majority, let alone the prospect of an emancipatory politics.

Politicians and their families accumulate vast wealth while the majority faces deeping impoverishment and what Martin Luther King called "life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign". Elites inhabit a fully privatised life in terms of residence, security, education and health, while the institutions accessed by the majority are crumbling. Autonomous organisation is met with serious repression: arrest, torture, murder. There have been massacres in Angola, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Elites in South Africa, just like the racist Right in Europe and the United States, actively incite xenophobia to scapegoat African and Asian migrants for the steady decline of society under their management. There are regular pogroms.

The hucksters unmasked

None of this is new. In 1961, Frantz Fanon, dying and writing with the last of his energies in a flat in Tunis, warned against the collapse into xenophobia and excoriated the ruling parties and the national bourgeoisies in the newly independent states. The party, he wrote, ought to be a "living" movement enabling the "free exchange of ideas which have been elaborated according to the real needs of the mass of the people". Instead it had become the "modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous and cynical". Fanon spoke with withering contempt of a "little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster".

The novels that emerged out of the early experience of postcolonial disappointment are often just as uncompromising in their critique. Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, published in 1968, is saturated with a sense of rot and decay, of stench and filth, which is both material and moral. This is counterposed to frequent references to the gleam of wealth and the clean life it seems to enable. But the novel's chief protagonist, a railway clerk, observes: "Some of that cleanness has more rottenness in it than the slime at the bottom of a garbage dump."

In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which exploded on the global stage in 1981, there is a similar sense of rot and decay. It is not just Bombay that is in a state of decay - decay has set in to human flesh. In Chinua Achebe's 1987 novel, Anthills of the Savannah, set in a fictional country where old friends must be kept at a safe distance, "the rich man ... holds the yam and the knife" and the light of morning has been beaten back "into the seclusion of a widow's penance in soot and ashes".

Ngugi wa Thiong'o first attacked the Kenyan kleptocracy in his 1987 novel, Devil on the Cross, written in prison. Wizard of the Crow, published in 2006, has been described as "absurdist, scatological satire". It is a ruthless and very funny novel with a strong sense of the grotesque that is often rank with a sense of the putrid. Against this, Nyawira, an activist in the underground resistance, declares that the "life of even the least among us should be sacred" and the "wealth of science, technology and arts should enrich peoples' lives, not enable their slaughter".

Stark contrasts

In view of this accumulation of postcolonial melancholy, the situation in southern Africa, although it arrived later than parts of Asia, Latin America and elsewhere in Africa, should not be entirely surprising. Isabel dos Santos left Angola with personal wealth estimated at $2.2 billion (R38 billion), accumulated via the rot in the MPLA. Namibia is described as a rich country with poor people.

In Zimbabwe, the elite lunch on fresh fish flown in from Maputo that morning while people are beaten, mercilessly, in the crumbling streets. In Mozambique, young people denied a future by Frelimo rally to armed Islamism in a desperate attempt to move against the monopolisation of the wealth from which they are excluded. And in South Africa impoverishment deepens, looting flourishes and the state continues to govern its most vulnerable people with routine forms of violence, traumatising a new generation.

It is striking that since each of the countries in the region has attained independence or electoral democracy, there has been firm solidarity between elites. The ANC, and a number of other elite actors, have a shameful record of appeasing Zanu-PF. When the party stole the 2008 election amid sustained state and party violence against ordinary people, it was the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) that issued strong statements of solidarity with Zimbabwean workers, and the Zimbabwean people in general, in the face of the onslaught from a deeply corrupt and repressive ruling party.

As repression has escalated in Zimbabwe in recent weeks, it has again been the trade unions, including Cosatu and the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa), along with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the largest social movement in the country, that have taken firm positions against Zanu-PF in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe.

Viable popular alternatives

The solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe from organised workers and impoverished urban residents is certainly encouraging. But across the region the gleam of personal accumulation, often at the direct expense of society as a whole, continues to displace the gleam of a collective vision.

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Restoring the gleam of that collective vision, and, in Fanon's words, "a prospect is human because conscious and sovereign persons dwell within", is an urgent priority. But if an emancipatory vision is to become a material force in society, it needs political forces capable of realising it.

We have no chance of averting the precipitous decline of the countries across the region if we are not able to muster the strength to confront the bitter reality of just how deep the rot runs in the ANC, Zanu-PF, the MPLA and Frelimo. But while this is essential work, it is equally essential to see, with similar clarity, the dangers in the liberal alternatives backed by local capital, donors, many non-governmental organisations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The failure of the Movement for Democratic Change to chart an independent course, one rooted in the aspirations of its supporters for land, freedom, viable public services and decent work, is a key component of the seemingly endless crisis in Zimbabwe.

The former liberation movements are irredeemably rotten. The alternatives backed by imperialism are a road to a different kind of disaster. If there is a way forward, it lies in popular solidarities, popular organising and new thinking - undertaken from within popular organisations and struggle - about real alternatives.
Stephanie Adams, Houston Zoo / Stephanie Adams, Houston Zoo

Looks like the federal government just might be coming up with a plan to save the Houston toad after all.

The toad has been protected under the Endangered Species act for 50 years, Center for Biological Diversity biologist Jenny Loda told the Houston Chronicle, but it has continued to decline. And a federal judge ruled Thursday that the government can't dismiss a lawsuit asking for a new recovery plan.
(Photo : David McNew/Getty Images) SANTA BARBARA, CA - OCTOBER 07: The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base carrying the SAOCOM 1A and ITASAT 1 satellites, as seen during a long exposure on October 7, 2018 near Santa Barbara, California. After launching the satellites, the Falcon 9 rocket successfully returned to land on solid ground near the launch site rather than at sea. The satellites will become part of a six-satellite constellation that will work in tandem with an Italian constellation known as COSMO-SkyMed. (Photo : Andy Holmes/Unsplash) Elon Musk May Deliver Fast Broadband From SpaceX's Starlink Constellations (Photo : Joe Raedle/Getty Images) CAPE CANAVERAL, FL - FEBRUARY 05: The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket sits on launch pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center as it is prepared for tomorrow's lift-off on February 5, 2018 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket, which is the most powerful rocket in the world, is scheduled to make its maiden flight between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m. tomorrow.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been dreaming of creating a constellation of broadband satellites surrounding the Earth. He vowed to provide the fastest broadband internet service to anyone in the world, and he seems to be on his way to fulfilling his promise.

With the new data from Speedtest.net, Starlink users can expect download speeds from 11 megabits per second (Mbps) to 60 Mbps while upload speeds range between 5 Mbps and 18 Mbps. Starlink is currently at 80% to the required satellites to achieve "moderate" capability, but its recent performance is impressive.

Although the results show just 6% of the 1 Gbps that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires for the $16 billion funding competition under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), it is still much faster internet than many rural service providers.

Moreover, while the FCC initially doubted SpaceX's ability to provide sub-100 milliseconds speeds (ms) lag from space, Starlink is currently delivering ping rates between 31 ms and 94 ms, which is already below 100 ms.

"The tests you link to all appear to be legitimate," Ookla representative Adriane Blum told Business Insider adding their company had tough quality-assurance measures in place and vetted internet-service-provider names.

Read also: SpaceX Sends Another Batch of Starlink Satellites Using Record Breaking Falcon 9 First Stage Booster

Starlink can now offer moderate coverage

While Musk aims to install between 12,000 and 42,000 satellites in orbit, having 800 sats can already blanket the Earth. Meanwhile, reaching 80% of 800 sats is already enough to provide moderate coverage to most places on the Earth.

On August 18, Starlink launched its 11th installation with 58 internet broadband satellites in orbit. With about 650 or 660 functioning satellites in orbit, SpaceX is more than the 80% mark, ensuring moderate internet speed.

Also, the recent launch is a couple of satellites short that the maximum number each Starlink launch can carry as the company is reserving slots for customers who may want to rideshare.

The most recent launch marked SpaceX's 98th lift-off and 95th Falcon 9 launch. The booster also made its first stage landing on Earth and already six such round trips. SpaceX also successfully "netted" both payload fairing halves, so it can be reused on a future launch. The equipment cost $3 million each.

SpaceX's bid for $16 billion subsidy

While Musk may be a little close to achieving its Starlink constellations, SpaceX may still be behind its competitions for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) $16 billion funding to provide "gigabit-speed broadband networks" to rural areas in America still have no Internet access.

To get a chunk of this funding, SpaceX must compete with terrestrial cable services like Comcast and ensure Starlink satellite signals with less than 100 milliseconds of latency. However, the recent test figures provided by the company still is 940 Mbps short of the 1 Gbps requirement of the FCC.

"Looking at the numbers... the satellites don't win anything," former FCC chief of staff and telecommunications policy analyst Blair Levin told Business Insider.

While SpaceX has already succeeded in lobbying for its slot to compete for the RDOF, the company would still drop its lag rate down to 20 ms or below while enhancing its internet download speed to reach 1 Gbps using private financing.

With or without government funding, if SpaceX achieves much better performance, it can snatch up to 5 million broadband satellite internet customers in the U.S., giving it an annual revenue of about nearly $5 billion should the monthly cost will just be $80.

Read also: Redditors Leaked SpaceX Starlink Internet Speeds That Are Way Below Target

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Written by CJ Robles

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
As the search for missing Fort Hood soldier Sgt. Elder Fernandes continues, his unit at a Texas base says he seems to have left by choice.

"Information gathered from fellow soldiers indicate Sgt. Fernandes left on his own accord," the 1st Cavalry Division said in a statement over the weekend.

The unit also reaffirmed that the search for Fernandes, 23, will continue until he is found.

"Soldiers have visited local hotels and hospitals throughout central Texas and continue to expand their search efforts," the statement said. "The chain of command is working closely with local civilian and military agencies to coordinate search efforts."

MORE: Authorities searching for another missing Fort Hood soldier

INFORMATION SOUGHT ON #MISSING SOLDIER If you have seen ELDER FERNANDES or have info as to his whereabouts, call #FortHood MPs @ 254-288-1170 or US Army CID @ 254-287-2722. He is 5'4", 135lbs and last seen wearing black #Army PT shorts, T-shirt and red shoes.#Missing #BOLO pic.twitter.com/u7DdMru92n  Fort Hood (@forthood) August 21, 2020

Fernandes' mother and aunt told ABC News on Friday that he was admitted to an on-base hospital this month. They said they spoke to him several times while there, but that he was vague as to nature of his visit. They said they did not hear from him again after Sunday, Aug. 16, the day before Fernandes was discharged.

A 1st Cavalry Division official confirmed that Fernandes was hospitalized from Aug. 11 to Aug. 17.

Story continues

According to police, Fernandes was last seen by his staff sergeant on the afternoon of the 17th, who dropped him off at a residence in nearby Killeen, Texas, police said.

His aunt, Isabel Fernandes, said he used to live at the address, but his former roommate told the family he had not stayed there for some time and never entered after he was dropped off outside.

Division spokesman Lt. Col. Chris Brautigam also confirmed there is an ongoing investigation into claims Fernandes made of "abusive sexual contact" toward him. He added that updates will be given once the investigation is complete.

Fernandes' older brother, Elton Fernandes, told ABC News that he spoke with him about the alleged incident about a month ago, which he said involved another man grabbing Elder Fernandes' buttocks.

Elton Fernandes said his brother told him "not to worry about it, because he's taking care of it."

In its statement Sunday, the 1st Cavalry Division called for Fernandes to return to the base and resume care.

PHOTO: Sgt. Elder Fernandes, 23, is pictured in a photo released by the Killeen Police Department in Killeen, Texas, on Aug. 20, 2020. He was reported missing by his family, who have not heard from him since Aug. 17. (Killeen Police Department)

MORE: Authorities probe 3rd Fort Hood-linked death in a month

"Our priority remains to ensure Sgt. Fernandes safety and we ask him to reach out to his leadership, his family, the local police or a nearby hospital or clinic so we can ensure he receives the care he needs," the statement said.

While family members told ABC News they were dissatisfied with the communication they'd received from the Army, the 1st Cavalry Division said the command intends to share as much information with them as possible and has been talking with the family regularly since Fernandes was hospitalized.

"His immediate leadership initiated communication with the Family before his current disappearance and has met with them daily since their arrival. We met again with them in person [Sunday]," the statement said.

Another Fort Hood soldier goes missing, this time 'of his own accord' originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
A sixth service member and second National Guardsman has died from COVID-19, according to U.S. military and California National Guard officials.

The death was first reported Monday Monday in its routine statistics report.

A spokesman for the California National Guard confirmed the death, which occurred Aug. 20.

According to Lt. Col. Jonathan Shiroma, chief of public affairs for the California Military Department, the 36-year-old Guardsman, a staff sergeant, was assigned to the 40th Combat Aviation Brigade in Fresno.

The family has requested that the soldiers name and personal information be withheld.

Read Next: Space Wars: Why Top Military Leaders Say US Must Prep for Battles Beyond Earth

The death is the second reported in the U.S. military in a week: Master Sgt. Brian Tolliver, 46, a member of the Army Reserve Medical Command at Pinellas Park, Florida, died Aug. 17 following a five-week battle with the virus.

Since the first service member tested positive for COVID-19 Feb. 26, three Army Reserve soldiers, an Army National Guardsman and a U.S. sailor have died. More than 36,000 troops have contracted the illness since February, including 12,833 Army soldiers, 4,532 Marines, 8429 Navy sailors, 5,556 Air Force airmen and 4,566 Air or Army National Guard members.

Fifty civilian DoD employees have died, as well as seven dependents and 16 military contractors, according to the Pentagon.

Across the U.S., there have been more than 5.7 million cases and 176,927 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide, more than 23 million cases have been recorded, with 809,843 confirmed deaths.

This story was updated Aug. 25 to include details of the service members rank and unit.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime

Related: Troops in War Zones May Get Priority for COVID-19 Vaccine
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 13:35 514 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c40068aa 1 National COVID-19-in-Indonesia,epidemiologist,Gadjah-Mada-University,UGM,pandemic,covid-19-indonesia-handling,penanganan-covid-19-indonesia Free

Indonesia's response to the COVID-19 outbreak has not been successful, an epidemiologist from Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta, Bayu Satria Wiratama, has said.

"Indonesia has been unsuccessful [in handling the pandemic]," Bayu told kompas.com on Sunday.

He said there were two main factors that led to this conclusion: a lack of discipline in following health protocols among government officials and a failure to improve testing capacity.

"Despite the government continuously urging the public to wear masks, maintain physical distance and wash hands frequently, many government-organized events failed to implement such protocols," Bayu said.

This situation, he added, set a bad example for the public, causing many to ignore health protocols. He said it was important for the government to deliver a consistent message to the public by setting a good example.

"The President or any government officials should not be seen taking pictures or talking without masks," he said.

Read also: Testing disparity looms over Greater Jakartas efforts to break chain of transmission

Besides the lack of discipline, Bayu also believed the government had failed to improve testing capacity, patient quarantine measures and contact tracing.

"Previously, the government said that it would increase its testing capacity to 10,000 per day, but to this day it has not been able to meet that target," he said.

"Singapore for instance had successfully put COVID-19 under control by conducting massive and quick testing and tracing. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the government has done little contact tracing for each confirmed case," he added.

Considering the current situation, Bayu said, the pandemic might only be over after most residents contract the disease and develop immunity, unless the government finds a vaccine for the coronavirus.

"Seeing the government's current [COVID-19] response, our hopes now lay on vaccine development," he said. (nal)
Whats happening will force us to reconsider how we can do things better and to be more deliberate, said Karen Herold, principal of Studio K Creative design firm, whose projects have included Girl & The Goat, Maple & Ash and GT Fish & Oyster. Thats not minimizing how horrifying this is. But I believe if you look at it as opportunity, there are a lot of opportunities.
In response to (the Aug. 13) editorial Archbishops nuclear weapons view needs a homily on reality, I was one of the speakers at the 75th anniversary commemoration of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, organized by Fr. John Dear, at which Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester eloquently spoke. The editorial declared neither Wester nor Dear appear to accept the premise there is any deterrent benefit to the nuclear arsenal.

To the contrary, the Journal perpetuates the delusion that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is just for deterrence, a premise fed to American taxpayers since the beginning of the Cold War. Instead, the U.S. arsenal has always been about nuclear warfighting, starting with the simple fact that we were the first to use it. This continues to this day, as the Pentagon made clear in a 2013 nuclear policy declaration: The new guidance requires the United States to maintain significant counterforce capabilities against potential adversaries. The new guidance does not rely on a counter-value or minimum deterrence strategy.

Counterforce is Pentagon jargon for attacking the military assets and leadership of your adversary, in other words nuclear war. Ronald Reagan famously said, A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But the U.S. and Russia each have thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, to fight a nuclear war instead of just the few hundred needed for deterrence.

Nuclear warfighting capability is why the U.S. is now implementing a $2 trillion modernization program enriching the usual fat-cat contractors while robbing resources from the poor, which is one of the Vaticans main objections. Our own President Eisenhower said every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.

That $2 trillion nuclear weapons modernization will do nothing to protect us against the global pandemic impacting Americans now. Further, the Sandia and Los Alamos labs may actually degrade national security with planned new nuclear weapons designs that cant be tested because of the global testing moratorium. Or worse yet, this may prompt the U.S. back into testing, throwing more gas on the fire of the new nuclear arms race.

The Journals own homily ignores reality, the real harm done to New Mexicans by the nuclear weapons industry, disproportionally impacting people of color  the uncompensated Trinity Test downwinders, sick Dine uranium miners, contaminated nuclear weapons workers and deep groundwater contamination under Los Alamos Laboratory.

The Journal ignores the reality that sheer luck has kept us from nuclear catastrophe. In 1957 an H-bomb was accidentally dropped 4.5 miles south of the Albuquerque airport. If fully armed, it would have destroyed central New Mexico. We were lucky that one of three Soviet submarine officers vetoed using a nuclear torpedo against a U.S destroyer during the Cuban missile crisis. Robert McNamara said, At the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. In 1983, we were lucky to have a Russian officer follow his instincts that a radar blip was not incoming ballistic missiles, again preventing nuclear war. There are many other documented near-misses.

With escalating tensions, the possible end of arms control, new low-yield nukes, stealthy cruise missiles and bombers and future cyber and hypersonic weapons, we are now facing the greatest nuclear risks since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. How long can we count on luck? Being real demands multilaterally, verifiably getting rid of nuclear weapons before they get rid of us.

The U.S. should lead in honoring the mandate to do just that, agreed to long ago in the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty. Embarking upon a $2 trillion nuclear weapons-forever program is the wrong direction. The Albuquerque Journal should be exposing that instead of preaching the delusion of deterrence to the Santa Fe archbishop.
The Assad regime is engaging in a campaign to seize the property of families who have fled Eastern Ghouta to the relative safety of the north reports Zaman Al-Wasl.

The Syrian regime continues to violate the rights of civilians, looting and seizing the property of the residents of the eastern enclave of Damascus.

The elite Republican Guard forces early this week have delivered eviction orders to ten families living in homes owned by Syrian rebels who fled to northern Syria following surrender deals.

The order included houses, shops, land, cars and all property left behind during their displacement to the north, under the pretext that they betrayed their country and that the state has the right to take them.

The Republican Guard patrols removed a family from a house near the municipality of Ayn Tarma whose owner was displaced and is living in northern Syria.

Eight more houses had been seized and permanently closed, while many homes near the al-Hoda mosque were converted to military headquarters for its members.

According to Zaman al-Wasls reporter, in July and August, regime intelligence seized approximately 160 homes in Haza, Beit Sui, Misraba, Irbin and Harasta in Eastern Ghouta for the same previous reason.

The same scenario is reoccurring in all provinces where Assads forces have recently taken over, including Aleppo, the Qalamoun region and many other areas, not only seizing the property of the displaced, but also the property of everyone who left these areas for fear of oppression.

The fall of Eastern Ghouta last April was achieved in a brutal fashion and changed the course of the war.

More than 1,700 civilians were reportedly killed during the eight-week offensive.

Eastern Ghouta was the scene of the first major protests against the rule of Assad in the capital.

Since the Syrian revolution erupted in 2011, more than 560,000 people have been killed, and more than 6 million people have been displaced.

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.
I used to dismiss conspiracy theorists as contemptible idiots. Then one of my relatives became one. In the past few months I have watched someone I love  someone who used to believe in science, rational thought and the collective good  become an anti-vaxxer, anti-5Ger, anti-masker, a "plandemic" disciple and a "sovereign citizen" suspicious of any collective purpose.

Conspiracy theories are not simply a hobby. They have become an all-consuming identity akin to a cult.

Conspiracy theories are flooding social media and breaking up families.

Everything has an alternative explanation, from the Holocaust, the moon landing, September 11, the Earth being flat, to the British royal family all being dead and currently played by actors.

She has embraced so many conspiracy theories that they can't rationally coexist. One minute I'm told COVID-19 is a toxin released from chemtrails in aircraft, the next it doesn't exist. Then, it does exist after all, but it's no worse than the seasonal flu.
(Bloomberg) -- Several of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.s biggest investors have converted billions of dollars in U.S. shares for Hong Kong stock in part to avoid potential U.S. sanctions and de-listings of major Chinese technology companies.

Temasek Group Holdings Pte., Baillie Gifford & Co., and Matthews Asia are among the major shareholders that have swapped stakes in the Chinese e-commerce giant to take advantage of new rules easing the switch following Alibabas listing in Hong Kong last year. Geopolitics is contributing to the shift, according to people familiar with the moves.

Lots of long-term fund managers, especially the ones whose fund managers are based in Asia, are switching or considering switching from ADRs into Hong Kong-listed shares, said Nelson Yan, head of offshore capital markets investment at Creditease Wealth Management (Hong Kong) Ltd., referring to American Depositary Receipts. Demand for these ADRs in the U.S. is now clouded by the politics.

The Alibaba stock shifts are a sign that the Trump administrations fierce rhetoric against Chinese tech firms is prompting investors to take steps to avoid the potential fallout. At the same time, as Chinese companies seek more dual listings in Hong Kong, the moves threaten to drain liquidity of the New York shares.

Baillie Move

Baillie Gifford, whose partner and portfolio manager James Anderson told Bloomberg Television in March that Alibaba could become a $2 trillion company, swapped 10.4 million U.S.-listed shares worth about $2.67 billion in the second quarter. Thats about a fifth of its stake, and is the biggest change since it first bought shares in 2014.

The money manager, among Alibabas largest shareholders, converted the stock to the Hong Kong-listed shares, according to a person familiar with the move. A spokesperson for the Edinburgh-based firm declined to comment.

A spokesman for Singapores state-owned investor Temasek confirmed that it swapped half of its stake representing 12.1 million shares -- worth about $3 billion -- from the U.S. to Hong Kong, declining to comment further.

Story continues

The issue has been top of mind for many institutional investors since May when the Senate overwhelmingly approved S.945 -- a bill that could lead to Chinese companies being barred from listing on U.S. exchanges. Conditions include being able to certify that they arent under the control of foreign governments and allowing the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to audit the business.

Matthews Asia, which manages about $23.4 billion, divested almost three quarters of its U.S. Alibaba shares in the second quarter, worth about $700 million. Much of that is now held in H-shares in Hong Kong and in its Pacific Tiger Fund, whose lead manager is Sharat Shroff.

Venue doesnt really matter a whole lot  its about getting access to liquidity and its about getting access to the right pricing mechanism so we continue to have a position in Alibaba both through the Hong Kong listing as well as the listing in the U.S., Shroff told clients in a July webcast.

Keywise Capital Management, which oversees $1.5 billion for global investors including sovereign wealth funds and endowments, plans to invest in the Hong Kong shares of dual- listed Chinese companies, said founder and Chief Investment Officer Zheng Fang. The increased U.S. scrutiny of Chinese ADRs has led to investor concerns about the potential risks of holding these securities, he said.

Stock Connect

The Hong Kong shares may also get a boost from MSCIs plan to reduce the Chinese ADR weightings in its indexes, while raising Hong Kong stocks, he said. Once listed in Hong Kong, those companies may be included in the stock connect scheme with China, allowing them to attract support from mainland Chinese investors, he added.

Myriad Asset Management, the hedge fund firm led by Carl Huttenlocher, also swapped most of its Alibaba ADRs for Hong Kong shares, said a person with knowledge of the matter. With more of Alibabas peers listed in Hong Kong, itll become easier to compare valuations and do hedged trades, the person said.

The stock moves are already boosting Aliababas trading in Hong Kong. On a 50-day moving average basis, Hong Kongs daily turnover now accounts for about 17% of the companys total trading, up from a low of 13% in early June.

The float has also risen. Alibabas shares trading in Hong Kong have jumped 4.3 times to 2.5 billion, according to data disclosed with the Hong Kong exchange as of Friday. Hong Kong shares now account for about 12% of Alibabas total float, compared with 2% before.

Investors in the Hong Kong shares have been rewarded, with the stock gaining 45% since the November listing, compared with a 35% jump in the U.S. stock over the same period in local currency terms. The Hong Kong shares may attract even more institutional investors when Alibaba joins the Hang Seng Index on Sept. 7

Alibaba jumped 3.6% to $33.81 in Hong Kong Monday.

The majority of its shares are still in the U.S., but the relocation is already happening and thats driven by long-term holders, said Kenny Wen, Hong Kong-based strategist at Everbright Sun Hung Kai Co. In the very long run, we cant exclude the possibility for Hong Kong to become the primary listing place for Alibaba.

(Updates with stock move in 16th paragraph)

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RIO DE JANEIRO - When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, Eldiene Matias Maia believed he would destroy her world. Everyone she knew said he hated the poor, disliked women and despised the northeast, the poorest and Blackest region in Brazil. But now Matias Maia - poor, female, northeastern - has another way of describing Bolsonaro:

"Savior," she said.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit Brazil, and businesses closed and local officials urged people to stay home, the government began pumping $110 per month into the wallets of the poorest citizens. Matias Maia, who fed her two children with that money, knows whom to credit.

"I would now vote for Bolsonaro," she said. "He is helping us so much."

By most measures, this should be an abysmal political moment for Bolsonaro. A disease he called a "little cold" has swelled into the world's second-worst coronavirus outbreak, killing 114,000 Brazilians, infecting more than 3.6 million and devastating the country's health system. An economic collapse he failed to forestall has driven the unemployment rate to 14%. He has been abandoned by allies, pilloried by emboldened critics and ensnared by several corruption scandals.

And yet, the right-wing former army captain is more popular than at any time since the beginning of his presidency.

Even in the unpredictable world of Brazilian politics, where alliances are fleeting and politicians routinely go to prison, Bolsonaro's mounting popularity has been stunning. For the first time in more than a year, more Brazilians approve of his performance than disapprove. In the past two months, as the coronavirus gutted Brazil, his approval has risen from 32 to 37%, according to the polling service Datafolha. Disapproval has dropped from 44% to 34%.

Just weeks ago, people from across the political spectrum were clamoring for Bolsonaro's impeachment. Allies said he was leading the country on a suicide mission. His most popular deputy, Sergio Moro, resigned as justice minister and accused him of corruption. Bolsonaro was growing more erratic by the day - conducting lengthy and unfocused meditations on national television, undermining his own government's health admonishments, waving a box of hydroxychloroquine at an emu-like bird, and regularly fanning calls for him to lead a military takeover of the country.

Even the president himself didn't seem to quite believe his approval rating.

"True, half-true or fake news?" he said of the results on Facebook.

His growing popularity underscores how the coronavirus crisis can be harnessed to break into new constituencies and forge a political transformation. Bolsonaro, a former fringe politician who won the presidency in 2018 on the message of cracking down on crime and corruption, has often been called a populist. He speaks extemporaneously - sometimes offensively, frequently profanely - and was raised in a poor part of rural Sao Paulo state.

But he has never been a politician of the poor. His supporters have largely been members of the middle and upper classes - fiscal conservatives, Evangelicals and the military. During the pandemic, however, his base of support has also grown to include more poor people. The disease has been far more deadly among their ranks. But they're receiving emergency financial aid, and in return, they're giving him their support.

"The benefit reached many people long before the disease did," said Cesar Zucco, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university and research institution. "Many people have gone two or three months with never-seen income, and they have not yet seen the disease. And even if they have, it's income they're not used to making."

During the pandemic, Bolsonaro has prioritized the economy, to the near exclusion of all else. He urged businesses to remain open, saying life must continue, even at the risk of immense casualties. Among the media and political elite, he was vilified. But among the poor, Bolsonaro found an audience more inclined to agree. Many said they couldn't survive without working.

"They saw that it was important to struggle against the coronavirus, but Brazil doesn't have the luxury of social isolation," said Esther Solano, a political scientist at the Federal University of Sao Paulo. "It's a poor country, and the fact that he wanted to permit people to work was seen as something positive."

She said he has gained more by doing less. In recent weeks, Bolsonaro has been remarkably quiet. He stopped lashing out at other branches of government, shed controversial administration members, and worked to develop new congressional alliances. The moderated tone and aid package, Solano said, have erased the self-inflicted political harm.

"He is, in fact, stronger than he was before the pandemic," she said.

Nowhere else in the country has this been more apparent than in the northeast, an arid, impoverished region that voted overwhelmingly against Bolsonaro. The emergency aid was money few had before. In numerous states, around 60% of households were soon receiving it. A buying spree followed.

"It's a lot of money for them," said Yala Sena, the editor of the news site Cidade Verde in the largely undeveloped state of Piaui. "There was a lot of economic activity after the benefit. It has helped them to buy food, and businesses have grown a lot."

There was no town in the region more opposed to Bolsonaro than the remote city of Guaribas, one of the poorest places in Brazil. The only way in is a 25-mile dirt road. The earth is so sandy that agriculture is nearly impossible. Many of its 4,500 inhabitants are illiterate.

Because of its struggles, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva chose it as the first recipient of an ambitious social welfare program in 2003. In all the years since, people never forgot. They voted almost unanimously for anyone Lula's Workers' Party put on the presidential ticket. In 2018, 98% of people voted against Bolsonaro.

But now many are reconsidering that position.

"You can't close everything," said Ira Alves, 30, a municipal worker. "Life can't stop, even during a pandemic. We are changing how we feel about [Bolsonaro]. People would vote for him now."

Many residents said their changing opinions about Bolsonaro weren't rooted in ideology, but practical life concerns. Were things getting better? Did people have more money?

Matias Maia, who runs a seven-room hotel where rooms go for $10 per night, said the future was looking brighter. Workers were putting asphalt down on the dirt road to town, which could mean more business at her hotel. She didn't know if Bolsonaro was directly responsible for that. But it seemed foolish to oppose the president, she said, if conditions in long-impoverished Guaribas seemed to be improving.

"The road is a dream," she said. "If they can finish it, it would be so wonderful."

No one knows how long the support among the poor will last. Support based on material benefits like the emergency money is tenuous. Economists are saying the government simply cannot afford the aid, which costs nearly $10 billion per month. The finance minister, Paulo Guedes, has said it will bankrupt the government, if continued much longer. He said Bolsonaro could end up impeached for fiscal irresponsibility.

The other path, however, is equally treacherous. When the payments stop, the population will absorb the full impact of the financial crisis. The problems of the poor, temporarily stalled, will surge back - and then be magnified. Then the calls for impeachment could begin once more.

"The payments are a mirage," said Rogerio Barbosa, a sociologist at the University of Sao Paulo. "For now they are only being protected by this emergency measure. Poverty in Brazil hasn't dropped."

- - -

The Washington Post's Heloisa Traiano contributed to this report.
The UN-led talks aimed at drafting a new constitution for Syria are on hold after three out of 45 participants tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the office of UN special envoy for Syria Geir Pederson said Monday.

Immediate measures have been taken consistent with protocols to mitigate any risks, and tracing of anyone who may have been in close contact with affected persons is underway, a statement from Pedersons office said.

Following a constructive first meeting, the Third Session of the Constitutional Committee is currently on hold, the UN mediators office said, adding that another announcement would follow.

The statement did not identify which members had contracted the virus, but said delegates were tested before and after arriving in Geneva. During their first meeting at the Palais des Nations, which houses the United Nations in the Swiss city, mask-wearing and strict social distancing measures were in place, the special envoys office said.

Tasked with finding a political resolution to end the civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more, the so-called Constitutional Committee has yielded few meaningful results.

The Syrian-led, Moscow-backed body, which includes representatives from government, opposition and civil society groups, hasnt met in nine months. The last round of talks broke down over disagreements about the agenda.

Pederson has downplayed expectations for this weeks meeting, saying he hoped it would help build trust and serve as a door-opener to a broader political process.

President Bashar al-Assad has the upper hand in Syrias long-running conflict, having regained control of most of the country with Russian and Iranian support. A pocket in the northeast is still held by Kurdish forces, and the northwestern province of Idlib remains in rebel hands.

A fragile cease-fire brokered by Russia and Turkey in March is largely holding in the northwest, but US special envoy for Syria Jim Jeffrey told reporters in Geneva that he believes Assad still has his sights set on toppling the last bastion of resistance.

I have seen no indication that the Assad regime has given up its dream of a military victory beginning with Idlib, said Jeffrey.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-21 19:41:35|Editor: huaxia

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BAGHDAD, Aug. 21 (Xinhua) -- A roadside bomb struck a convoy of trucks carrying logistical equipment belonging to the U.S.-led coalition forces near the Iraqi capital Baghdad, the Iraqi military said Friday.

The blast took place in Aweirij, an area located on the southern edge of Baghdad, and resulted in the burning of one of the convoy trucks and the killing of its driver, the media office of the Iraqi Joint Operations Command said in a brief statement.

No group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack, but unidentified militant groups have frequently targeted civilian convoys contracted with the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq, which usually travel from neighboring Kuwait to the coalition bases in central and northern Iraq.

The attacks came as the Iraqi-U.S. relations have witnessed a tension since Jan. 3 when a U.S. drone struck a convoy at Baghdad airport, which killed Qassem Soleimani, former commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy chief of Iraq's paramilitary Hashd Shaabi forces.

More than 5,000 U.S. troops have been deployed in Iraq to support the Iraqi forces in the battles against the Islamic State militants, mainly providing training and advising to the Iraqi forces.

The troops were part of the U.S.-led coalition that has also been conducting air raids against IS targets in both Iraq and Syria. Enditem
The Sultan of Sokoto, Saad Abubakar, held a closed door meeting with the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, on Monday.

The sultans delegation arrived at the Kaduna State Government House around 12:20 p.m.

He was received by top government officials of the state before going into a closed-door meeting with the governor.

The meeting lasted about 50 minutes, and at the end of the meeting, the governor escorted Mr Abubakar to his vehicle and left..

The sultan entered his black Sport Utility Vehicle and left without addressing journalists around 1:30 p.m.

It was not clear if the Sultans visit is connected with the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of the invitation to Mr El-Rufal by the Nigerian Bar Association to attend their 2020 Annual General Conference.

But the governor told journalists shortly after the Sultan left that he (Sultan) was there only for a private visit.

He described the Sultan as his elder brother who came to show his support for the measures taken to promote peace in the state.

Sultan is my elder brother and also my senior in Barewa College and he came on a private visit to talk to me, to advise me, to guide me and also expressed his support for our efforts at bringing peace to Kaduna State.

He is happy that many people have come all talking about peace and felt he should not be left out particularly in light of our historical relationship not only as Barewa old boys but as my elder brother.

He (Sultan) was so happy to see that different groups, such as Muslim, Christians, as well as other ethnic groups are taking measures on how to promote peace in Kaduna.

He also prayed to God to bring peace in Kaduna and Nigeria in general, and for God to bring an end to insecurity bedeviling northern Nigeria; that was all that brought him here, he said.

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Asked if they discussed insecurity in Kaduna, the governor said:

We have discussed many things but what the Sultan and I discussed is private between us and not something that I will go into, except to say that Im grateful to him for the visit, for the support and for his affection all the time, he said.

The sultans visit came a day after the former Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi, visited the governor at the Government House.

Mr Sanusi is to spend a week in the state to be briefed on the activities of the State Investment Promotion Agency as part of his role as the vice chairman of the agency.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) Kolkata on Monday forecasted likelihood of heavy rain in southern West Bengal in the next three days due to formation of a low-pressure area in north Bay of Bengal. Issuing an orange warning, the MeT department said that the low-pressure system is likely to intensify in the next couple of days.

"A Low-Pressure Area has formed over North Bay of Bengal and neighbourhood on today, 24th August 2020. It is likely to become more marked during the next 48 hours. Under its influence, widespread rainfall is very likely to occur over the districts of South Bengal during 24-27th August 2020," read the official circular.

Due to this, the rise in water level in different rivers of South Bengal and waterlogging in city and suburban areas have been predicted. The districts of East and West Midnapore, South 24 Parganas, Jhargram, Howrah, Hooghly, Bankura and Birbhum are likely to receive heavy rainfall, while a thunderstorm is likely in other places of Gangetic West Bengal from Monday, the Met Office said.

The intensity of rain is likely to increase in the coastal districts from August 25 (Tuesday) with the low-pressure system becoming more marked, and it may continue till August 28 (Friday) morning.

Due to the formation of the low pressure in north Bay of Bengal, fishermen have been advised not to venture into the sea till August 27 (Thursday). "They are advised to not venture into deep sea as conditions will remain rough. Those fishermen who are already out for fishing," added the order. Water bound activity over the sea beach of West Bengal may be restricted on August 25-26, also added the order.

With several rivers in the region already in spate owing to heavy downpour over the last week, people living in the coastal districts are apprehensive of flooding of agricultural fields and low-lying areas. News agency PTI quoted the state Irrigation Department saying that it is keeping watch on the situation. Heavy rain occurred in Birbhum district, while other parts of Gangetic West Bengal also received rainfall since August 23 morning, the Met department said.

Some low-lying areas in the coastal districts of South 24 Parganas and East Midnapore have got inundated owing to overflowing of some rivers and heavy rain causing breaches in earthen embankments, added PTI.
Sofia Richie got a head start on her birthday festivities by boarding a private jet with her mom Diane, brother Miles, and a slew of her closest friends on Sunday.

The 'almost' 22-year-old model documented every moment of the extraordinary occasion on her Instagram Story, from boarding the luxe private jet to clinking glasses in flight.

'22 feels good,' captioned Richie, who, like the rest of her party, donned custom 'Sofia Turns 22' merch courtesy of Kylie Jenner's BFF Stassie Karanikolaou.

Richie will not officially turn 22 until August 24.

22 feels good: Sofia Richie got a head start on her birthday festivities by boarding a private jet with her mom Diane, brother Miles, and a slew of her closest friends on Sunday

Every moment: The 'almost' 22-year-old model documented every moment of the extraordinary occasion on her Instagram Story, from boarding the luxe private jet to clinking glasses in flight

She gave her 6.4million followers a clear look at Stassie's sweet birthday gift with the caption: 'Shout out to @stassiebaby for the merch.'

Based on Sofia's Instagram Story, Stassie surprised the entire gang with the custom shirts and shorts once they boarded the jet.

Prior to throwing on her birthday gear, Sofia had on a knotted white tee and a pair of grey bicycle shorts.

Her golden hair was, initially, parted down the middle and tied back into a low bun, until she let it loose to try on a party guest's bright pink cowboy hat.

Custom: '22 feels good,' captioned Richie, who, like the rest of her party, donned custom 'Sofia Turns 22' merch courtesy of Kylie Jenner's BFF Stassie Karanikolaou

Mommy's girl: Sofia and her mother Diane were photographed getting their cuddle on mid-flight

Let it down: Sofia's golden hair was, initially, parted down the middle and tied back into a low bun, until she let it loose to try on a party guest's bright pink cowboy hat

The mood inside the jet was a fun, but chaotic one, with drinks flowing and female party goers propping their legs up on the arms of their seats to show off their twerking skills for the cellphone cameras around them.

For one brief IG Story clip, Richie had an orange drink in her hand as she posed with her hand in the near next to a friend.

Sofia captured some hilarious footage of her mom Diane - who was married to Sofia and Miles' dad Lionel Richie from 1995 until 2004 - flaunting her impressively toned abs and twirling down the aisles of the jet.

She can also be heard in one of Sofia's Instagram Story clips urging all passengers on board to 'drink water' so they did not get too carried away with the open bar before they even landed.

Brother: Sofia's brother Miles took to his Instagram to pay tribute to his little sister on her 'almost birthday'

Chaos: The mood inside the jet was a fun, but chaotic one, with drinks flowing and female party goers propping their legs up on the arms of their seats to show off their twerking skills for the cellphone cameras around them

Diane's dear friend Shelleylyn Brandler uploaded a sweet snapshot of the mother-daughter duo enjoying an inflight cuddle session to her Instagram.

Later, Sofia taped Kylie Jenner's former assistant Victoria Villarroel, who donned a bright white athleisure set for the party, getting her bottom slapped by another party goer.

Stassie took a video of herself taking a sip from an orange juice drink with the caption: 'here we go.'

Casual cutie: Prior to throwing on her birthday gear, Sofia had on a knotted white tee and a pair of grey bicycle shorts

Core group: Sofia's core friend group proudly showed off their 'Sofia Turns 22' gear to the camera

Fun: For one brief IG Story clip, Richie had an orange drink in her hand as she posed with her hand in the near next to a friend

She was also spotted by Sofia's brother Miles giving 'twerking lessons' to her friends on board.

Once Sofia and her birthday crew landed in their undisclosed destination, they exited the jet and gathered around for a group photo.

Hours later, she returned to Instagram to unveil her awe inspiring birthday destination to her followers.

Sofia captured the video from a lavish cabana as her brother and friends swam in an infinity pool right next to the ocean.

Cool mom: Sofia captured some hilarious footage of her mom Diane, who was married to Sofia and Miles' dad Lionel Richie from 1995 until 2004, flaunting her impressively toned abs

Dance it out: Diane was also caught twirling down the aisles of the jet

Here we go: Stassie took a video of herself taking a sip from an orange juice drink with the caption: 'here we go'

Watch and learn: She was also spotted by Sofia's brother Miles giving 'twerking lessons' to her friends on board

Sofia's brother Miles took to his Instagram to pay tribute to his little sister on her 'almost birthday.'

'Happy almost birthday Shmurp! I LOVE YOU! So beyond proud of the woman you are. @stassiebaby with the merch,' captioned the 26-year-old model, who included a more intimate group shot with his sister and two female pals.

As if one pre-birthday celebration were not enough, Sofia indulged in a more intimate, family-oriented dinner party on Friday.

The ex of Justin Bieber boho trousers, which she teamed with a white tank top as she posed for photographs while caterers put the finishing touches on her birthday meal.

Closer look: Sofia gave her 6.4million followers a clear look at Stassie's sweet birthday gift with the caption: 'Shout out to @stassiebaby for the merch'

Hanging out: Sofia's brother Miles holding a female pal

Arrived: Hours later, she returned to Instagram to unveil her awe inspiring birthday destination to her followers

Leisure life: Sofia captured the video from a lavish cabana as her brother and friends swam in an infinity pool right next to the ocean

During the dinner, Sofia shared rare snaps with sister Nicole, 38, and dad Lionel, 71, as she reunited with family members in lavish style.

Sofia's socialite sister Nicole matched her ensemble to her younger sibling, wearing blue tie dye trousers and a black tank top.

Sofia shared a cute snap of dad Lionel, 71, seemingly singing at her birthday bash, and gave fans a video tour of the breathtaking set-up.

Relaxation station: As others took a dip in the pool, some partygoers lounged on chairs as the sunset

Family party: As if one pre-birthday celebration were not enough, Sofia indulged in a more intimate, family-oriented dinner party on Friday

A table of 14 was laid out on a huge white terrace overlooking a stunning backdrop of endless greenery.

Her family birthday dinner came after she recently split from Scott Disick, 37, 'for good,' after three years of dating, and reports emerged that they are 'no longer speaking.'

The TV star and Sofia are reported to have ended their turbulent romance, and they are now no longer on speaking terms after 'Scott officially called it off'.

Rare: During the dinner, Sofia shared rare snaps with sister Nicole, 38, and dad Lionel, 71, as she reunited with family members in lavish style

Superstar dad: Sofia shared a cute snap of dad Lionel, 71, seemingly singing at her birthday bash, and gave fans a video tour of the breathtaking set-up

Matching: Sofia's socialite sister Nicole matched her ensemble to her younger sibling, wearing blue tie dye trousers and a black tank top

'They have been off and on for two months,' said a source to E! News. 'Sofia really pushed to make things work between them after they initially broke up, but Scott officially called it off recently and they are no longer speaking.'

The insider also claimed that their age difference ultimately became an issue for the celebrity duo.

The source explained: 'Friends attributed their 15-year age difference becoming an issue. He's in a very much different place in his life, really focused on a more quiet lifestyle, his kids and his investment businesses.

Stunning: A table of 14 was laid out on a huge white terrace overlooking a stunning backdrop of endless greenery

And Sofia really still trying to figure what she wants to do which drove them apart over time.'

Scott and Sofia have previously split and then quickly reconciled their differences. But on this occasion, it appears their relationship is over for good.

The insider said: 'Scott was very clear with his decision to end things and doesn't see them getting back together again in the future.'
YPSILANTI, MI -- Ypsilanti officials narrowly voted down a measure to give City Council members a small raise.

Mayor Lois Richardson told fellow council members she put the resolution on the Tuesday, Aug. 18 agenda because City Council members had not received a pay raise since 2018. The resolution stated that non-union city employees are provided the same salary increases as union employees. The most recent increase for fiscal year 2020-21 is 2.5%.

The motion failed with three votes in favor, two votes against and two abstentions. Council members Jennifer Symanns, D-Ward 2, Anthony Morgan, D-Ward 3, and Richardson voted yes. Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Brown, D-Ward 1, and Councilwoman Annie Somerville, D-Ward 3, voted no. Steve Wilcoxen, D-Ward 2, and Brian Jones-Chance, Ward 1, abstained.

Business owner selected to fill Ypsilanti City Council vacancy

Some council members debated whether the increase was appropriate given the economic conditions many residents face during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

 ... I think this should happen in accordance to pay scale because its just horrible. People get compensated in the city, Morgan said during the virtual meeting. However, I dont feel comfortable taking it at this juncture, being everything so tight. I do believe the city -- employees should be compensated better, especially civil servants, but I dont feel comfortable at this very moment.

Council members earn about $5,360 annually. The mayor pro tem earns about $6,220 annually and the mayor earns about $9,325 each year. A 2.5% increase would earn each council member at least $130 per year. The increase would have added about $1,000 to the City Councils budget.

Others noted that the increase was small and in line with other city employees. Symanns, who has a professional background in human resources, said she thought the proposal could encourage more people to get involved in city politics if the small salary was discouraging.

I think ... if this work paid more, we probably would get more people interested in participating ... , she said. And again, if were not even talking about tons of money. I know every one of you and I dont think anyones doing this for the money. But I think its appropriate.

Brown suggested incorporating a potential raise into the next budgeting or goal-setting cycle.

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Tropical Storm Laura was strengthening in the Caribbean and poised to accelerate into a hurricane by Tuesday while Tropical Storm Marco weakened sooner than expected, sparing the U.S. Gulf Coast from two simultaneous hurricanes, as had been forecast. The changed forecast bought a little more time for residents along Louisiana`s coast to prepare for what could still prove dangerous winds and flooding when Laura is expected to make landfall on Wednesday.

"If that holds up, we`re going to catch a big break," Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told a news conference on Monday, referring to the less ominous forecasts that emerged overnight. "But it`s wrong to assume that Laura is going to do us a similar favor." Laura traced the southern coast of Cuba on Monday morning, but the brunt of the storm was offshore, helping the largest island nation in the Caribbean avoid serious damage after Laura killed at least 10 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The storm downed trees in Cuba, ripped away flimsy roofs and caused minor flooding on Sunday evening, according to residents and news reports. In Jamaica, there were reports of landslides and flooded roads. "I slept well last night, except when the wind howled," Nuris Lopez, a hairdresser, said by telephone from a town in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra mountains in Cuba`s eastern Granma province.

Laura was heading toward the Gulf of Mexico at 20 miles per hour (31 kilometers per hour), according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC). By Tuesday, it was expected to have reached hurricane strength. By Wednesday night, stronger still, it was expected to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, the NHC said.

By then, it could be a Category 2 or 3 hurricane on the 5-step Saffir-Simpson scale for measuring hurricane intensity, said Chris Kerr, a meteorologist at DTN, an energy, agriculture and weather data provider. Despite Marco`s weakening, with the NHC predicting it would slow to a tropical depression by Monday night, that storm still threatened to soak the Louisiana coast.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent teams to operations centers in Louisiana and Texas. This year`s hurricane season has been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, forcing many people to weigh the risks of leaving their homes and potentially exposing themselves to the virus. Testing for COVID-19 was suspended in Louisiana on Monday and Tuesday, Louisiana`s governor said.
Hong Kong reports its first confirmed reinfection

A 33-year-old man was infected a second time more than four months after he initially contracted the coronavirus, a team at the University of Hong Kong said on Monday. After getting sick in Hong Kong in March, he tested positive on Aug. 15 after a trip to Spain via the United Kingdom, picking up a strain that was circulating in Europe in July and August.

Doctors have reported several cases of presumed reinfection in the United States and elsewhere, but none of those cases were confirmed with rigorous testing. The Hong Kong researchers sequenced the virus from both infections.

It reaffirmed the need for a comprehensive vaccine: We cant just get to herd immunity the natural way because only vaccines may be able to produce the kind of immune response that can prevent reinfection, Apoorva Mandavilli, a Times science reporter, told us.

But some good news: The patient did have an immune response, and did not show symptoms the second time. His immune response prevented the disease from getting worse, an immunologist at Yale University said. Though concerning, one case like this out of tens of millions should not cause undue alarm as of yet, a Columbia University epidemiologist said.
Presidente @MartinVizcarraC: Espero encontrar en este foro alternativas viables, acordes con las capacidades presupuestales del Estado, que nos permitan atender las justas demandas de nuestros pensionistas, quienes merecen un trato mas justo y digno. pic.twitter.com/K3aALR4xhV
WASHINGTON, Aug. 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --

"The U.S. Postal Service greatly appreciates the efforts of the House of Representatives to assist us. We look forward to continuing to work with Congress on more meaningful reform that will ensure our long-term health, and we remain a vital part of our nation's critical infrastructure.

"We are concerned that some of the requirements of the Bill, while well meaning, will constrain the ability of the Postal Service to make operational changes that will improve efficiency, reduce costs, and ultimately improve service to the American people.

"We reiterate that the Postal Service is fully capable and committed to delivering the nation's election mail securely and on time, and will do everything necessary to meet this sacred duty."

Please Note: For U.S. Postal Service media resources, including broadcast-quality video and audio and photo stills, visit the USPS Newsroom . Follow us on Twitter , Instagram , Pinterest , and LinkedIn . Subscribe to the USPS YouTube channel , like us on Facebook and enjoy our Postal Posts blog . For more information about the Postal Service, visit usps.com and facts.usps.com

Contact: David Partenheimer

[email protected]

usps.com/news

SOURCE U.S. Postal Service

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Washington, Aug 24 : A group of Republicans opposing US President Donald Trump will hold an alternative event starting on Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina, the same day when the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) is also scheduled to begin.

Organized by former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, a conservative who ran for Governor in 2008 as a Republican, the four-day event is is called "Convention on Founding Principles", reports Xinhua news agency "I've got a far better and informative alternative to the RNC - watch the Convention on Founding Principles," Orr tweeted on Sunday.

Speakers include former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017; former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci; and former CIA director Michael Hayden.

This year's RNC is going to kick off on Monday in Charlotte, where over 300 delegates will meet in person to nominate Trump for a second term.

Trump, who plans to deliver an acceptance speech at the White House on Thursday night, will make a stop in the city later in the day, according to the White House.

Multiple protesters against the RNC were arrested on Friday and Saturday nights in Charlotte.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that police officers used their bikes to put crowds back and pepper spray on those who advanced on them.

The RNC comes three days after the conclusion of the virtually-held 2020 Democratic National Convention that officially nominated former Vice President Joe Biden for President.
From the protests in Belarus, to people in Beirut picking up the pieces after the deadly blast, to the Democratic National Convention held in the United States, here are the top images from the week gone by.

A devotee wearing a protective mask sanitizes a "pandal" next to an idol of Lord Ganesh ahead of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, amidst the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Kolkata. Photograph: Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

IMAGE: A participant embraces a member of Belarusian Interior Ministry troops, who stands guard during an opposition demonstration to protest against police violence and to reject the presidential election results near the Government House in Independence Square in Minsk, Belarus . Photograph: Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters

Artist and musician Raymond Essayan plays a piano he partly sculpted into the shape of a grand piano from the rubble in a destroyed building while shooting a music video for the piece he wrote to be released in dedication to Beirut after the past week's explosion in Beirut, Lebanon. Raymond suffered a concussion and his home was destroyed during the port explosion, although he started to write the musical piece in 2018 he decided to finish it and shoot a music video to release it now after the Beirut port explosion. The explosion at Beirut's port last week killed over 200 people, injured thousands, and upended countless lives. There has been little visible support from government agencies to help residents clear debris and help the displaced, although scores of volunteers from around Lebanon have descended on the city to help clean. Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Embers blow off a burned tree after the LNU Lightning Complex Fire burned through the area in Napa, California. The LNU Lightning Complex Fire continues to burn near Lake Berryessa near the town of Napa. The fire is zero percent contained. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Lightning strikes above the George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis, Minnesota as racial justice protests continue across the United States. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Reuters

A student burns an A-level result during a protest at Parliament Square, amid the outbreak of the coronavirus disease in London, Britain. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden and US Senator and Democratic candidate for Vice President Kamala Harris celebrate after Joe Biden accepted the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination during the fourth and final night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

A pro-democracy student wearing make-up and a tape covering her mouth does a three-fingered salute at a rally to demand the government to resign, to dissolve the parliament and to hold new elections under a revised constitution, at Mahidol University on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

Chrystia Freeland, Canadian deputy prime minister, elbow bumps Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after she is sworn in as finance minister at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Photograph: Patrick Doyle/Reuters
A delegation from the Afghan Taliban arrived in Pakistan to discuss the ongoing peace process with the Pakistani leadership ahead of expected intra-Afghan dialogue, local media reported on Monday. The delegation will meet with Pakistans civil and military leadership.

Pakistans foreign office spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhry confirmed the arrival of the Taliban delegation and said that it has been invited to Pakistan to discuss the way forward in the Afghan peace process.

The development comes days after the Afghan government released some 80 key Taliban figures to pave the way for direct peace talks.

Also read: Afghan govt starts releasing 400 Taliban prisoners

A high-level Islamic Emirate [Taliban] delegation led by deputy political chief, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, has left for Pakistan upon the invitation of the countrys Foreign Ministry to discuss the latest on the peace process, state of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, [cross-border] travel of people, and trade between the two neighbours, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said in a series of tweets on Sunday night.

He did not offer any further details such as which Pakistani leaders the Taliban delegation would meet and the duration of the visit.
The Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege, has called on the federal government to put off alleged plans to scrap the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) for ex-agitators in the Niger Delta region.

Such action, he said, would be premature and ill-timed and could jeopardise the fragile peace in the region.

Mr Omo-Agege spoke in Abuja on Sunday when he played host to a socio-political organisation, New Era Forum, according to a statement issued by his media aide, Yomi Odunuga.

The amnesty programme, introduced by a former president, Umaru YarAdua, has been enmeshed in allegations of corruption since inception. The allegations have led to the exit of the programmes past leaders  the most recent being Charles Dokubo who was suspended by President Muhammadu Buhari in February.

In this regard, there have been debates for the scrapping or retention of the programme.

Addressing the group, Mr Omo-Agege said the timing is not right for the Amnesty Programme to be scrapped.

We have challenges right now in the North East, the ravages of Boko Haram, banditry in North West and North Central. Those are enough challenges already in this country. I dont believe that this is the time to reawaken the agitations of militancy in the Niger Delta region.

It is my hope and expectation that the policymakers who are around Mr President will convey this to Mr President that to the extent that there is any such plan at this time, it is premature and ill-timed. That is not to say that this programme must stay in perpetuity. But we dont believe that the goals set have been completely achieved.

While he urged the group to hold leaders in the region to account, he said the leaders have failed, having been unable to judiciously utilise funds released for the development of the region.

You dont expect Mr President moving from community to community to ensure that the fundings made available to us have been judiciously utilised. It is up to us as the people of the region who cried out to insist that interventionist agencies like NDDC be created for us and properly funded and as a result of the youth agitation in the region that the Amnesty Programme be set up.

It is left for us to ask questions on how the fundings released to us have been utilised. It is left for us to ensure we identify the projects that we believe will best meet the needs of our people. So Mr President has done his part, we are the ones that have failed our people, he stated.

Earlier, the leader of the group, Sunday Onyewonsa, stressed the need to declare a state of emergency on Niger Delta roads. This is even as he called for a security summit that will proffer solutions to insecurity in the region.
New research by the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington finds that every six additional ICU beds or seven additional non-ICU beds filled by COVID-19 patients leads to one additional COVID-19 death over the following week.

"A spike in hospitalization naturally leads to more deaths, but these deaths may not only come from those who are hospitalized, but also from those who should have been hospitalized but were not," said co-author Anirban Basu, a UW professor of health economics.

Results of the study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, show the impact of ICU bed use remains fairly constant as ICU bed availability changes. These effects are also in line with recent literature estimates for the mortality among COVID-19 patients receiving critical care, that show mortality rates increase as ICUs fill up.

What was surprising, Basu explained, was the effect of non-ICU beds. For additional seven hospitalized patients not in intensive care, one would expect about 0.5 deaths over the next seven days based on general data put out by CDC. However, this new research finds that the total number of COVID-19 deaths actually occurring is much higher.

"This may indicate that constraints in available capacity of non-ICU beds may have a spillover effect to non-hospitalized patients. In fact, the study found that the effect of non-ICU beds rises steadily as more and more non-ICU beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients," said Basu, who is also director of the CHOICE Institute at the UW School of Pharmacy.

For example, when 20% of non-ICU hospital beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients, an additional seven COVID-19 admissions to non-ICU beds will produce two additional COVID-19 deaths over the next seven days.

"Even when, say, 80% of non-ICU beds are still available, a further increase in COVID-19 admissions leads to significantly more numbers of deaths than what we would expect from only the hospitalized patients. This may be because the health care delivery within a hospital is not only driven by hospital beds but also personnel and COVID-specific supplies, which may be stretched thin, and affecting COVID-19 admission policies of the hospitals."

Consequently, Basu said, efforts to "flatten the curve" -- that is, reduce or stop the increase of people infected with the novel coronavirus through public health measures such as mask-wearing and physical distancing -- are more important than simply keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. Failure to flatten the curve, even before hospitals reach capacity, is killing more people than just those who end up in hospital beds.

"These results have very important implications as large numbers of students head back to schools and colleges across the nation and resistance to public health measures continues to stymie efforts to reduce the number of infected," Basu said.

"Our study quantifies the relationship between COVID-19 deaths and COVID-19 hospitalizations using actual data," write the study authors. "These estimates provide a better understanding of the projections of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA especially when states are gearing up to restart economic activities and provide important practice insights for hospitals in terms of assessment of hospital bed and ICU bed capacity and preparedness."

###

The study's lead author is Pinar Karaca-Mandic, University of Minnesota professor and academic director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute in the university's Carlson School of Management. The researchers used the University of Minnesota's COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project to examine data from 23 states that reported daily percentages of ICU and non-ICU-bed use by COVID-19 patients. The research was partially funded by the University of Minnesota Office of Academic Clinical Affairs and the United Health Foundation.

Related research by Basu -- COVID-19: UW study reports 'staggering' death toll in US among those infected who show symptoms

For more information, contact Basu at basua@uw.edu.
China launches urgent use of COVID-19 vaccines for 1 month

Global Times

By Hu Yuwei and Shan Jie Source: Global Times Published: 2020/8/23 19:12:20

One month has passed since China officially launched the urgent use of COVID-19 vaccines on July 22, while the vaccines were going through clinical trials, said a National Health Commission official on Saturday. Recipients who got their first dose since then revealed they had few adverse reactions and none reported a fever.

According to China's Law on Vaccine Management, when a particularly severe public health emergency occurs, vaccines in clinical trials can be used in a limited scope to protect medical and epidemic prevention personnel, border officers and other people working in stable city operations, said Zheng Zhongwei, director of the Development Center for Medical Science and Technology of the National Health Commission, in an interview with China Central Television on Saturday night. Zheng now leads China's vaccine development work.

The Global Times has previously reported that employees of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) preparing to go abroad and frontline medics have been offered two choices of domestic inactivated vaccine candidates developed by Sinopharm for urgent use.

On Thursday and Friday, Sinopharm signed cooperation agreements on phase III clinical trials of inactivated vaccines with Peru, Morocco and Argentina.

Zheng noted that for the next step of preventing a possible outbreak this autumn and winter, vaccines' availability will be extended to people working in food markets, transport systems and services industries.

A document circulated online from a Chinese company in the tourism sector - TravelSky Technology - revealed that the company's key researchers, inspectors in airport terminals, and other employees with frequent business overseas can get priority for free vaccinations.

The number of people being vaccinated on an urgent basis may reach hundreds of thousands across China, considering that personnel in wider sectors are being offered free injections, said Tao Lina, a Shanghai-based immunology expert, on Sunday.

"But it's difficult to give an accurate figure since the Chinese military has begun mass vaccinations but has not released details," Tao said.

The inactivated vaccine is very likely to be approved for marketing by the end of the year though the timeline will be mainly dependent on the progress of late-stage clinical trials overseas, vaccine producer Sinopharm said on Sunday.

Wu, an employee of a state-owned company handling overseas construction projects along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Asian and African countries, told the Global Times on Sunday that all staff in her company have been offered inactivated vaccine injections on a voluntary basis for free.

Wu, who took the vaccine on August 7 along with many of her colleagues for free injections, said she had not had any obvious adverse reactions, similar to everyone else in her group.

"My colleagues and I felt only a little dizzy on the afternoon of the vaccination, but we got over it pretty quickly. There was no local redness, swelling or pain, and we did not hear of anyone reporting a fever," said Wu, who will take her second dose on day 28 after the first shot.

"People seem to be relaxed over the vaccination as most of us feel confident in domestically developed vaccines," she said..

At least 10 percent of the employees, mainly those in charge of projects overseas, have been vaccinated in groups since they were notified on July 30. The vaccination process is ongoing, Wu said.

Some employees who were overseas during the epidemic have also been vaccinated by Chinese medical teams that went abroad, Wu said.

Vaccinations are not given to those with severe allergies, those who tested positive for novel coronavirus nucleic acid or antibodies, or for pregnant women, according to the notification.

One of Sinopharm's inactivated COVID-19 vaccines on August 13 was revealed to have had a low rate of adverse reactions for patients in phase I and II clinical trials, while also demonstrating immunogenicity results.

The inactivated vaccine will be effective against all detected strains of the virus at least as of mid-July, with lower chances and degrees of adverse reactions than same-type vaccine candidates under research, Yang Xiaoming, head of Sinopharm, told the Global Times in a previous interview.

The rarity of adverse reactions and promising results of the inactivated vaccine stem from the rich experience and mature process of inactivated vaccine technology in China and vaccine manufacturers, a Beijing-based vaccine professional who prefers to be anonymous, told the Global Times on Sunday. "But how effective it is will require phase III clinical trials and longer tests."

Yang announced on Saturday night that more than 20,000 people in the United Arab Emirates had taken inactivated COVID-19 vaccines developed by Sinopharm in phase III clinical trials, which have shown a high level of safety. The efficacy of the vaccine is under observation.

"The phase III trial in the UAE has had no reported cases of side effects so far," Yang said. "Volunteers joined faster than expected and the vaccine was well worth the wait."

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Today Proficient Health announced that MUSC Childrens Health in Charleston, S.C., has selected PH Connect, a HIPAA-compliant software solution, for community-wide, provider-to-provider communications.

Part of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) health system, MUSC Childrens Health specialists often field consultation requests from physicians across the Southeast. Calls were being answered by a central call center and transferred to the appropriate point of contact.

PH Connect eliminates the inefficiencies inherent in using a call center between providers without sacrificing the gatekeeper function that is necessary in large institutions characterized by changing shifts and schedules. Call routing is fully automated for quick, secure communication from any mobile device or PC.

Rather than dialing into a call center, providers use their PH Connect app to reach the right physician, practice or service line, without having to figure out who is on call or available. Integrated call schedules and intelligent routing always directs calls and messages to the appropriate provider, complete with any supporting notes, images and test results.

Dr. Mark Scheurer, Chief of MUSC Childrens and Womens Health, is confident that PH Connect will make it much easier for clinicians statewide to reach his team, all while reducing call center volumes and operating costs.

A general practitioner concerned about whether a patient might need emergency care could use the app to connect with an on-call specialist for advice, even before the patient leaves the exam room, Scheurer says. Those types of timely discussions can lead to faster treatment decisions and to better patient outcomes.

For more information on PH Connect, visit https://proficienthealth.com/ph-connect. Or download our free white paper.

About MUSC Childrens Health

At MUSC Childrens Health, we are imagining whats possible for each and every child by providing the pediatric expertise your child deserves and needs. From promoting healthy lifestyles to offering life-saving treatments, we deliver comprehensive and compassionate care to children throughout South Carolina and beyond. Our integrated health care system consists of MUSC Shawn Jenkins Childrens Hospital a 250-bed pediatric hospital providing the most advanced care possible in more than 26 specialty areas. We also provide the same depth and breadth of expertise in multiple neighborhood locations throughout the Lowcountry, offering primary, urgent and specialty care. As a Level 1 Trauma center, our pediatric emergency department specializes in providing emergency care for any serious injury or illness your child may experience at home, at school or at play. Working collaboratively with pediatricians throughout the community, MUSC Childrens Health also provides after-hours care to children from birth to 17 years of age in three different locations on weeknights, weekends and holidays. In addition to the clinical care MUSC Childrens Health provides, we are a major pediatric clinical research center conducting significant and ongoing research efforts through the Charles P. Darby Research Institute. This involvement allows us to enhance our ability to provide the highest level of care to children by translating laboratory advances to bedside, developing new technologies and providing clinical trials. For more information visit https://musckids.org.

About Proficient Health

Proficient Health is a healthcare information technology company specializing in solutions for the secure exchange of referrals and clinical information. Our affordable, online services and mobility solutions connect physicians, hospitals and other healthcare providers  helping them easily share and manage information, improve service and care delivery, drive down costs, speed reimbursement and get more out of their electronic medical records platform.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:22:41|Editor: huaxia

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TOKYO, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Japan's "Go To Travel" subsidy campaign has been used by more than 2 million people since in was launched in July in a bid to kick-start the domestic tourism sector hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Japan's top government spokesperson Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, the campaign would continue to be supported by the government despite concerns over subsidizing travel would lead to the increased spread of the virus.

Suga said the industry needed help as it was essentially dying and the government would take advice from health experts on limiting the spread of the novel coronavirus.

"There are 9 million people working in the tourism industry and we can say that the industry is dying," he told a press briefing on the matter.

Suga said 10 cases of COVID-19 infections had been reported at hotels and other accommodations that had registered with campaign since it began on July 22.

The campaign has cost the government 1.35 trillion yen (12.7 billion U.S. dollars) and functions by eventually subsidizing up to half of a person's travel expenses.

The subsidies cover accommodation and transport fees and provides upfront discounts worth 35 percent of total costs.

After September, the outstanding 15 percent will be covered by coupons issued for food, shopping and other travel activities offered at destinations, under the campaign.

The "Go To Travel" campaign, however, has been met with resistance from numerous parties, including health experts.

Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike had spoken out about about the plan, suggesting the move could lead to the virus spreading across prefectural lines amid the metropolitan government's efforts to encourage people to refrain from making unnecessary trips across prefectural borders to curb the spread of the virus.

"It is like putting cooling and heating systems on at the same time. I'm not sure how we are supposed to deal with that," Koike said at the time amid a recent spike in COVID-19 cases in Tokyo and the prefectures surrounding the capital.

Her remarks came even though Tokyo residents were abruptly made ineligible for the subsidies. Travel to and from the capital was also not covered by the campaign.

Other local governments along with the opposition parties called on the government to reconsider the plan.

Main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan head Yukio Edano said it was "untimely" to be promoting tourism. "We need to stop and rethink it."

Toshio Nakagawa, president of the Japan Medical Association, said that "extreme caution" would be required by the government in launching the campaign.

"The program was originally planned to start after coronavirus infections are contained and it's not a good idea to bring it forward," Nakagawa said the government launching the campaign at an earlier time than initially planned so as to coincide with two national holidays which comprised a long weekend. Enditem
State officials and federal agencies warn theres a new phone scam circulating: Some callers posing as COVID-19 contact tracers try to pry credit card or bank account information from unsuspecting victims.

The grifters apparently are taking advantage of a genuine public health intervention thats crucial to stopping the spread of the novel coronavirus: contact tracing.

In one such scheme, detailed in a warning from the Montana attorney general, scammers tell their victims, Im calling from your local health department to let you know that you have been in contact with someone who has COVID-19. Then they move in for the kill, asking for payment information before we continue.

1. Legit tracers would never ask for payment info

Dont fall for that, say public health advocates and officials. Legitimate contact tracers dont ask for payment or seek other financial information.

That is absolutely not part of the process, said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. No one should give bank information or credit card information.

Real contact tracers generally work for health departments. They contact COVID-positive patients to track symptoms; they help the people they call figure out how to isolate themselves from others until they clear the virus, and determine which friends, neighbors, colleagues or acquaintances they might have been near in the days just before or after they tested positive for the coronavirus. Those contacts, in turn, are sought out by the tracers, who are in a race against the clock, hoping to get those folks to quarantine as well.

This tried-and-true public health tool (along with hand-washing, wearing a mask in public and maintaining 6 feet of physical distance from people outside your household) is one of the few strategies available to slow the spread of the virus while scientists work on treatments and vaccines.

What else should you watch for?

2. Real tracers dont click on links

Be concerned if you get an initial text asking you to click on a link, which might be spam and could download software onto your phone, the FTC warned in May.

Unlike a legitimate text message from a health department, which only wants to let you know theyll be calling, this message includes a link to click, the agency said.

3. Tracers wont ask for your Social Security number

Another clear red alert: being asked for your Social Security number. Contact tracers in most regions do not ask your immigration or financial status, either.

4. Legit tracers would never identify a patient by name

Also, watch out if any names of COVID patients are provided.

An authorized contact tracer will not disclose the identity of the person who tested positive and is the starting place for that tracing effort, the Wisconsin attorney generals office said in a release warning consumers about scams. Another piece of advice: Do a little research before you respond.

Anytime someone calls you for information, you should be concerned about who is calling, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. If they are legitimate, you can say Give me your name and phone number and you can always call them back after doing some checking.

Did the caller ID indicate the call was from a health department? Some states are including that information. For example, Virginias calls are from the VDH COVID Team. Call the health department if you have any questions.

Scammers prefer to prey on individuals who may be more trusting, are alone, or may respond out of confusion or fear, Pennsylvania Secretary of Aging Robert Torres said in an Aug. 12 press release. Its important that they stay alert about any contact from anyone identifying themselves as a contact tracer and do not provide personal information until they are sure the individual and information are legitimate.

And, finally, if you think youve been contacted  by phone, email or text  by a scammer, report it to agencies, such as your state attorney generals office.

If you see something, say something, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a recent consumer alert his office issued. We are working to track these impostors.

Legitimate contact tracing is being employed widely in some areas, such as the District of Columbia and Hawaii, and has been credited with helping countries such as New Zealand and Taiwan contain the virus.

But with this success also comes bad actors. The Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, and Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Better Business Bureau and state law enforcement and health officials from across the nation, have issued consumer alerts about unscrupulous people not affiliated with health departments using phone calls, texts or emails to get personal information from those they scam.

What differentiates a real call from a fake one? For one thing, legitimate tracing calls might be preceded by a text message, notifying patients of an upcoming call from the health department. Then, in that initial call, the legitimate tracer seeks to confirm an address and birthdate, especially if you are the COVID-positive patient, Watson said.

They ask about your identity to make sure you are the person they are trying to reach so they dont disclose potentially private information to the wrong person, Watson said.

The tracers can also help people who must isolate or quarantine by connecting them with resources, such as food or medicine delivery.

Some can even provide you with a separate place to quarantine safely if, for example, you live in a multigenerational house with no separate bathroom or bedroom in which to isolate, said Watson.

At the end of the call, the tracer may ask if they can call or text you in the coming days to check on how any symptoms may be progressing.

Julie Appleby: jappleby@kff.org, @Julie_Appleby
TEHRAN, Iran - Irans constitutional watchdog on Monday set June 18 as date for the countrys next presidential election, a vote that will choose the successor to President Hassan Rouhani who has served two four-year terms in office.

The watchdog, the Guardian Council, approved the date, Iranian election headquarters chief Jamal Orf told the official IRNA news agency. Candidates hoping to run in the balloting are to apply in early April for approval; the final list is to be announced in early June.

Under Iranian law, an incumbent president cannot run for a third term if he has already served for two consecutive terms in office. Rouhani was first elected in 2013 and reelected four years later.

Rouhani has been under increasing pressure from the U.S. sanctions since President Donald Trump two years ago pulled America out of the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. The deal curbed Irans nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Trump also imposed severe sanctions on Iran, sending its economy into a downward spiral. Iran is now grappling also with the Trump administrations push to impose so-called snapback sanctions over what Washington says is Irans violation of the nuclear deal.

In February, Iran held parliamentary elections that saw a turnout of 42.57%  the lowest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and a sign of widespread dissatisfaction and the state of the economy amid intense U.S. pressure. The newly elected house is dominated by conservative lawmakers.

Iran is also facing the Mideast regions largest and deadliest outbreak of the coronavirus, with more than 361,000 registered cases, including 20,776 deaths.

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As global economies contract because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the focus of most of the India Inc has now moved back to the home market where demand is expected to pick substantially from the coming festival season.

In the past 12 years, Indian companies - led by the Tatas, Birlas and Mukesh Ambanis Reliance Industries - poured billions of dollars in acquiring assets overseas.

The gold rush was followed by other groups like Bharti, JSW Group, and the Mahindra group.

But, as global economies contract because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the focus of most of the India Inc has now moved back to the home market where demand is expected to pick substantially from the coming festival season, bankers said.

The pandemic has given a lot of time to promoters to look at the performances of group companies overseas and now, they are taking tough calls, said a banker advising Indian companies.

The chief executive officers (CEOs) said sudden and mid-way changes in laws (as experienced by Anil Agarwal-owned Vedanta in Zambia), increased activism by environmentalists and fall in demand from local firms are the key reasons for companies failing in their overseas acquisitions.

Besides, unexpected political events such as the Brexit also impacted operations of Indian companies in Europe.

The Tata group is still trying to bring its steel business on track and has announced several steps in the past few years, including sale of few assets in the UK and a merger with ThyssenKrupp.

"However, nothing has worked in its favour. The company has now sought a bailout from the British government in lieu of a stake in its operations, said a Mumbai-based banker.

Tata Motors is also staring at huge losses because of Jaguar Land Rover, which is facing declining demand in China and Europe. The UKs exit from the European Union has also impacted the companys fortunes negatively.

A similar story was played with RILs shale gas assets in the US where it invested over $10 billion but there were no remarkable returns as oil prices fall made shale gas production unviable.

JSW Steel said it had decided to scale down its investments in the US to focus on India where demand for steel is going up.

The US operations remained a continued cause of worry for the organisation as it seldom made money.

The Mahindra group acquired South Koreas Ssangyong and failed to turn around the operations in 10 years.

The group has decided to sell stake in the unit this month after rejecting pumping any more money in the unit.

Bharti Airtel, which had acquired the African operations of Zain Telecom in 2010 for $10.7 billion, had a tough time turning around the business.

The telco listed its African subsidiary in the London stock market in July 2019 and reported 57 per cent fall in net profit in the June quarter because of the pandemic.

Silver lining

The only silver lining for Indian companies is the overseas businesses of the Aditya Birla group, which celebrated 50 years of its global presence in November last year.

According to analysts, the acquisition by Aditya Birla group of Novelis in the US in 2006 and later of Aleris by Novelis last year has yielded good results.

The groups journey started in Thailand and now, has presence across 36 countries in six continents, with over 120,000 employees from 42 nationalities.

Over 50 per cent of the groups global revenues now come from overseas operations.

In the June quarter, Novelis reported earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) of $253 million, which was down 32 per cent (YoY) mainly because of lower auto and aerospace shipments and sluggish demand.

Analysts said they were optimistic about Noveliss balance sheet strength as its net debt-to-Ebitda of 3.7 times even after the Aleris acquisition is comfortable and the company plans to reduce it below 3 times over the next two years.

Though the free cash flow of the firm in the current financial year will remain at the same level as FY20, it also plans to put its entire surplus cash flow to cut debt.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug.24

By Nargiz Sadikhova - Trend:

The value of trade turnover between Kazakhstan and Spain amounted to $619.6 million over 1H2020, compared to $1.1 billion during the same period of 2019, Trend reports with reference to Kazakhstans Statistics Committee.

The share of Spain in the total value of Kazakhstans trade turnover stood at 1.5 percent during the reporting period compared to 2.5 percent during the same period of 2019.

Kazakhstans export to Spain amounted to $546 million over the period from January through June 2020, compared to $1.06 billion during the same period of 2019.

Spains share in the total volume of Kazakhstans export also amounted to 2.1 percent during the reporting period of 2020 compared to 3.7 percent during the same period of 2019.

In turn, Kazakhstans imports from Spain stood at about $73.6 million over the reporting period, compared to $86.3 million during the same period of 2019.

Spains share in the total volume of Kazakhstans import amounted to 0.4 percent during the reporting period of 2020 compared to 0.5 percent during the same period of 2019.

The total volume of Kazakhstans trade turnover amounted to $42.5 billion over the period from Jan. through June 2020 which indicates a decrease from $46.1 billion during the same period of 2019.

Kazakhstans export amounted to $26 billion during the reporting period of 2020 ($28.6 billion in the same period of 2019), whereas import amounted to $16.5 billion ($17.5 billion in 2019).

---

Follow the author on twitter: @nargiz_sadikh
Firefighters from across the state, as well as the National Guard, have been stretched thin by the number of blazes, which have come well before the states traditional peak fire season in the fall. A climate of extremes here in recent years  wet winters and springs followed suddenly by hot, dry summers  has virtually erased the time frame for what had for decades constituted fire season.
MINSK -- Authorities in Belarus have stepped up detentions of prominent protest organizers and summoned others ahead of efforts to punish high-profile opposition leaders and dull weeks of unprecedented unrest.

The latest crackdown follows a weekend that saw signs that five-term President Alyaksandr Lukashenka was increasingly determined to stay in power despite public anger that drew at least 100,000 antigovernment demonstrators in Minsk on August 23.

Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich, 72, became the latest member of a council for an exiled presidential challenger who insists this month's election was rigged to be targeted in the crackdown.

The ailing Alexievich said after the August 9 vote that "the authorities have declared war on their people."

She has now been summoned to appear before Belarus's Investigative Committee on August 26 as a witness in a criminal case on the establishment of Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya's seven-member Coordination Council, a spokesman for the council said.

An aide for a disqualified presidential hopeful, Viktar Babaryka, who was jailed before the election, told RFE/RL that Alexievich's health had prevented her from taking part in the council's work.

However, she was said to be in contact with the group.

The authorities detained two members of Tsikhanouskaya's Coordination Council outside of a tractor factory in Minsk earlier on August 24.

The Coordination Council says Volha Kovalkova, a top aide of Tsikhanouskaya, and strike organizer Syarhey Dyleuski were detained early on August 24 and accused of attempting to organize an unauthorized protest rally at the Minsk Tractor Works (MTZ).

The 30-year-old Dyleuski is a worker at the tractor factory, whose outspoken criticism of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has attracted international media attention as well as pressure from Belarusian police.

Kovalkova's associate, Dzyanis Sadouski, told RFE/RL that police informed the Coordination Council that the two were detained as part of an "administrative" case against them, and that they would most likely be fined.

Another member of the opposition Coordination Council, attorney Lilia Vlasova, was summoned to Investigative Committee headquarters on August 24 for questioning.

Mass Protests

Their detentions come a day after more than 100,000 demonstrators packed the streets of the Belarusian capital on August 23 in a mass rally against Lukashenka -- the latest in more than two weeks of protests against an official presidential election tally that showed Lukashenka winning reelection by a landslide.

The protests have been growing in size amid a brutal postelection crackdown by Belarusian authorities and a heavy security presence in Minsk, with fresh warnings being issued to protesters during the weekend by the Belarusian army.

Dyleuski has said he started going through the giant MTZ factory's workshops to call for a strike after he witnessed injuries sustained by demonstrators who say they were tortured in police custody.

Hundreds of workers have joined Dyleuski to demand new elections and the release of political prisoners -- turning Dyleuski into the leader of a strike movement that has become a major challenge to Lukashenkas grip on power.

On August 21, Dyleuski and Tsikhanouskaya's lawyer Maksim Znak had been summoned to the headquarters of the Belarusian Investigative Committee as part of a criminal case in which the opposition Coordination Council is accused of attempting to illegally seize power.

That move came after Znak on August 21 filed a complaint with the Belarusian Supreme Court calling for the election results be ruled invalid amid widespread allegations that the vote count was fraudulent.

Lukashenka has ordered the military into full combat readiness, raising the prospect that the army may unleash a much-feared bloody crackdown to suppress the unprecedented wave of street protests across the country.

Crisis In Belarus Read our ongoing coverage as Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka continues his brutal crackdown on NGOs, activists, and independent media following the August 2020 presidential election, widely seen as fraudulent.

During the weekend, Lukashenka also said he would start closing factories on August 24 where there have been protests from workers who had previously formed his base of political support.

"If a factory is not working then let's put a lock on its gate from Monday, let's stop it," the Russian RIA Novosti news agency quoted Lukashenka as saying on August 22. "People will calm down and we will decide whom to invite [to work] next."

Lukashenka also expressed confidence that the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization would support him in any confrontation that he has with protest organizers in Belarus.

In neighboring Lithuania, where Tsikhanouskaya fled after the presidential election, the opposition leader met on August 24 with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun.

"She is a very impressive person and I can see why she is so popular in her country," Biegun said after the talks in Vilnius. "The purpose of the meeting was to listen, to hear what the thinking is of the Belarusian people, and to see what they are doing to obtain the right to self-determination," he added.

Biegun insisted that the United States "cannot and will not decide the course of events in Belarus," saying this was "the right of the Belarusian people."

The United States and the European Union have dismissed the Belarusian election as neither free nor fair and urged the authorities to engage in dialogue with the opposition.

Also on August 24, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Lukashenka "must, after this further weekend full of protests that we have seen, recognize the reality on the streets of his country but also the reality in the heads of the people in this country."

"So once again, our urgent call is not to use force and to uphold the rights of demonstrators," Maas said at a joint news conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv.

With reporting by Current Time, Reuters, AP, TASS, Interfax, The New York Times, and AFP
michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today: My colleague, Donald G. McNeil Jr. on four new developments in the treatment and understanding of the coronavirus. Its Tuesday, August 25. Donald, we wanted to check back in with you because the summer is drawing to a close and there have been a few major developments in the pandemic that we wanted to better understand by talking to you, our resident expert on the coronavirus. And the first development involves a new treatment in the U.S. So tell us about that.

archived recording (president donald trump) Thank you very much. Its good to see you all. Hope you have 

donald g. mcneil jr.

So just in time for the Republican convention, the Food and Drug Administration director, on the podium with his boss, the head of H.H.S., and his boss, the President of the United States 

archived recording (president donald trump) Today, Im pleased to make a truly historic announcement in our battle against the China virus that will save countless lives.

donald g. mcneil jr.

 gave emergency use authorization 

archived recording (president donald trump)  a powerful term, emergency use authorization for a treatment known as convalescent plasma.

donald g. mcneil jr.

 to a therapy called convalescent plasma.

archived recording (president donald trump) Because the F.D.A. has really stepped up and especially over the last few days in getting this done. The results have been incredible. And I think youll see the results even go up very substantially. So we appreciate it and 

michael barbaro

And Donald, what is convalescent plasma?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Convalescent plasma is the serum from blood thats taken from people who are convalescing, who are recovering from having had Covid. You draw out about a pint of their blood. You spin it down to take off the red blood cells and white blood cells, and then you keep the serum that contains a lot of things, including the antibodies. I probably shouldnt admit this, but I used to sell plasma when I was in college.

michael barbaro

Wait, Im sorry, whose plasma did you sell?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Mine.

michael barbaro

Huh.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yeah, $5 for the first donation a week, $15 for the second. I paid my rent for part of the time in college that way. And I assume, although I never asked back then, that they wanted it for the clotting factors they had for hemophiliacs.

michael barbaro

And just to be clear, who were you selling it to, presumably not like somebody off the street?

donald g. mcneil jr.

No, no, to a blood bank.

michael barbaro

And why would anyone pay for your plasma or anyone elses plasma for that matter? What is so special about blood plasma?

donald g. mcneil jr.

It contains your antibodies. And antibodies is what they need to kill the virus as its going through them.

michael barbaro

Got it. And so this is now being applied to Covid-19?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yes. People who have had Covid and are immune to it are in very high demand for their plasma, which has antibodies in it, which is what the president and the F.D.A. approved for emergency use authorization this weekend.

archived recording (president donald trump) And today, I once again urge all Americans who have recovered from the virus to go to coronavirus.gov and sign up and donate plasma today, please.

michael barbaro

And what was the evidence that the Trump administration cited in granting this emergency use authorization for blood plasma?

donald g. mcneil jr.

There is a program to distribute plasma and analyze the results run by the Mayo Clinic. And they are aiming to give the plasma out to 70,000 patients and see how they do. And the result was that people who got plasma did not do better across the board. But if you splice out a subgroup of people who were under 80 years old, hospitalized, but not on ventilators, were given a high dose of plasma, not a low or medium dose, and were given it within three days of diagnosis, those people did better. And better was defined as  they seemed to have a 35 percent lower chance of dying.

michael barbaro

So a narrow slice of that overall group of people who got this blood plasma did 35 percent better. And that was the basis for this emergency authorization?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yes, but some doctors, some experts are unhappy with the way this is done, because they would want to know a lot more things. Even in the context of this trial, they would like to know what other treatments those patients got just in case they got something like the steroids that we already know save people, or the remdesivir that we already know saves people. And really, what theyd like to see is a real randomized clinical trial done in which half the people got plasma and the other half of the people got placebo, and neither the doctors nor the patients knew who was getting which.

michael barbaro

Right.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Because thats really the only way in order to prove something really works.

michael barbaro

So why not undertake such a clinical trial now?

donald g. mcneil jr.

The Tony Faucis and Francis Collins would love to. The problem is that people are so excited about the idea of plasma, because its been talked up, that they refuse to go into a clinical trial. Because they would get a 50 percent chance of getting the placebo. And once youre sick, you dont want that. You want  hey, if you think it saves me, give it to me.

michael barbaro

Oh, thats interesting. So the governments decision  the Trump administrations decision to talk up blood plasma as a potential treatment, even though theres not a ton of evidence for it, might actually make it harder to do the kind of gold standard clinical trial test that lots of doctors, it sounds like  including Anthony Fauci  would want to know whether or not plasma really is a serious therapy for Covid-19.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yeah, and thats exactly what happened with hydroxychloroquine. It was talked up so much that people wanted it. And so it became hard to do the clinical trials, in which they got a 50 percent chance of getting a placebo, because they didnt want it. They heard the president say its a miracle drug, so they insisted on it.

michael barbaro

And of course, in the case of hydroxychloroquine, that too was granted an emergency authorization from the Trump administration as a treatment. But then subsequent testing showed it was not considered effective and it was not considered so safe. And that emergency authorization was eventually rescinded.

donald g. mcneil jr.

It was not considered effective at all, and it was definitely dangerous. And so emergency authorization was rescinded.

michael barbaro

So this potentially could be a similar situation?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yes, in fact a doctor said that to me yesterday exactly. This feels like hydroxychloroquine all over again. And the president is hoping to be able to announce a miracle. And thats the tone  the calls for the press conference on Sunday where you know, gigantic therapeutic breakthrough, going to come through this evening. And then everybody was saying, I think hes going to talk about convalescent plasma, which weve known about since the 1890s. And what this really is, is its a bureaucratic breakthrough, because hospitals are going to find it easier to use plasma than they did before, because they dont have to go to the Mayo Clinic for permission to enroll in the trial. But thats all. And what Tony Fauci and Francis Collins and Clifford Lane and the others at the N.I.H. said just in the last week or so, we dont think an emergency use authorization should be granted. And the president basically just reversed them.

michael barbaro

Or overruled them?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yeah.

michael barbaro

OK, so Donald, the second big recent development in the pandemic involves a case of reinfection out of Asia. Tell us about that.

archived recording Researchers in China say a 33-year-old man living in Hong Kong is the first person confirmed to have been reinfected with the coronavirus.

donald g. mcneil jr.

So the case is about a man who gets infected in Hong Kong early in the year, recovers. Four and a half months later goes to Spain, gets sick again, recovers. And so doctors know that he got infected twice.

michael barbaro

Which is kind of the nightmare situation?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yeah.

archived recording Right, well, this is a potentially serious setback tonight in our war against coronavirus. This new case you mentioned out of Hong Kong really does put into question that belief that so many of us have had  that if youve got coronavirus once, you couldnt get it again.

donald g. mcneil jr.

The reason that would worry people is because, well, that would imply that were never free of the disease and maybe a vaccine wouldnt work. Because if youve got a vaccine, youre protected, and then you know, a couple of months later, you got infected again. Then you know the vaccines a bust.

michael barbaro

Right, infection is supposed to equal immunity.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Infection is supposed to produce immunity, yes. Now in this case that was just reported out of Hong Kong, this doesnt shock immunologists.

michael barbaro

Why not?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Well, because its been known that even with some diseases where you think getting it provides lifetime immunity, some people get it again. And what happened in this guys case was his first bout of the disease was mild. And his second bout was so mild it was asymptomatic. He didnt realize he had it. And what may have happened in this case is that he had such a mild infection the first time that he got over it. But he really didnt produce enough long-lasting immunity in the form of antibodies to prevent him from getting a second infection. So the reaction of doctors is well, this is a curiosity, and its kind of the exception that proves the rule. But its not something to panic about. This is not common. This is not something were seeing all over the place. Theres millions and millions and millions of infections around the world, and weve only seen one proven case, so dont worry that this means the end of the vaccine or the vaccine wont work or anything like that.

michael barbaro

So this does not fundamentally change our understanding of immunity from a Covid-19 infection?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Were still in the gray area where we dont know how long immunity lasts. But we suspect it lasts for a year or more. Although thats impossible to prove, because this disease is only  it didnt come into existence before December.

michael barbaro

Got it.

donald g. mcneil jr.

But looking at other diseases like it, thats what the best immunologists expected to happen.

michael barbaro

Donald, immunity for a year or so would probably imply that whenever a vaccine is ready, it might last just a year. Or is that too big a logical leap?

donald g. mcneil jr.

So the answer is, nobody knows yet. Because we dont have the vaccine, and we dont have a years experience with the virus. But we know that some viruses mutate so fast that you need a vaccine every year, typically the flu virus. We know that this virus mutates at about one third the rate of flu. So maybe if it hangs around, well need a new shot every three years, rather than every year as you do with flu. But this is all a big gray area. Its really hard to say. No expert is going to say, we know whats going to happen.

michael barbaro

Well be right back.

[music]

archived recording 1 Chinese military is actually giving doses of the vaccine developed by a unit of the China National Pharmaceutical Group to soldiers and employees traveling overseas. That still though, is in the phase 3 testing. Its experimental. archived recording 2 Russia is claiming victory in the worldwide race for a coronavirus vaccine. The government is clearing a vaccine for use, despite not putting it through a third round of testing on humans. President Vladimir Putin insists the vaccine is safe, and says one of his daughters has been inoculated.

michael barbaro

Donald, our third development relates to the progress that we are making in the battle for a vaccine. And the biggest of these developments seem to be occurring overseas in Russia and in China. And I was hoping you could update us on those.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yeah, both the Russians and just recently, the Chinese, say they have started distributing their vaccines without having done the phase 3 safety and efficacy trials that we are doing here.

michael barbaro

And those are the ones that are double blind with the placebo, like we talked about before?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Right. And more importantly, they recruit tens of thousands of people. I think for these trials, were recruiting 30,000 people per vaccine. So immunologists and vaccine executives here say, this is crazy what the Russians and the Chinese are doing. You dont release a vaccine before youve done the big safety trial, because problems that you did not find earlier could crop up. And the big dangerous problem, the one that everybody is worried about, is that the vaccine makes you more likely to have a bad outcome if you do have the virus  as in more likely to get hospitalized and die. So doctors here think the Russians and the Chinese are very irresponsible to do this. It looks like they may be doing it for competitive reasons. The Russians wanted  they called their vaccine Sputnik. They want to brag that hey, we beat the United States. We beat the world at this, you know, as they did with Sputnik back in 1957 or whatever it was for a satellite in space. So what theyre really doing is using their own population as the guinea pigs for doing the safety and efficacy testing on the vaccine. And one hopes that, you know, they are following those first 30,000 guinea pigs really carefully to see if they pick up any dangerous signals that are there. You want to make sure that the vaccines go to people you think are likely to do well  you know, healthy young people  and then you move it out into the risk groups.

michael barbaro

But, Donald, and maybe Im being unnecessarily provocative here, but how different is what China and Russia are doing with these vaccines from what the United States and our F.D.A. is doing with hydroxychloroquine and blood plasma? Which is starting to authorize the delivery of it to people before its gone through those kind of gold standard, double-blind placebo tests.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Its similar, and yet its different. Its similar, because we are letting it be generally distributed before its been proven that it works and is totally safe. Its different, because hydroxychloroquine did have a long safety record. Convalescent plasma does have a long safety record. These vaccines that the Chinese and the Russians are using have no safety record other than the tests theyve done just in the last two or three months, presumably on you know, maybe 1,000 people. Another important difference between what the Russians and Chinese are doing with their vaccines and what were doing with treatments here is that treatments are given to people who are already sick and in trouble. Like, you can take wild chances with cancer treatments when you have patients who were on the brink of death and theres nothing else that will save them.

michael barbaro

Right.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Whereas vaccines are given to healthy people, even sometimes to babies and pregnant women. So you do not want something that is at all unsafe, because you turn someone from healthy into unhealthy. Youve done more damage than if you just left them alone.

michael barbaro

So our risky emergency authorizations are less risky than what China and Russia are doing with vaccines, because our emergency authorizations are going into sick people, theirs are going into healthy people?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Correct.

michael barbaro

OK, so Donald, finally, the fourth development here in the United States is a somewhat happy one for a change. And that centers around the current infection rate in the United States, which is flat.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yes, its flattening. But I dont see this as a happy story. What are we flattening at, about 40,000 cases a day? You know, even in our good period back in June when we thought we were doing well, we had 20,000 cases a day. I mean, none of this has been a good-news story. We have an out-of-control epidemic in this country. And the fact that weve brought it down by 10,0000 cases is good-ish news relative to how bad it was getting. But I dont think we should pat ourselves on our national back over getting down to 40,000 new cases a day.

michael barbaro

And what are the implications of us even staying at such an infection rate?

donald g. mcneil jr.

The implications are that a lot of people are going to continue to die. You know, this is like climbing a mountain. And you get up to 14,000 feet, and you stay at 14,000 feet because youre walking through a meadow. Its still hard to breathe up at that altitude. Its not a happy situation. Were not going back down to zero. Were going back down to a few hundred cases a day, which some other countries have gone to, that the implication is that were going to have more people hospitalized, more people die. Were going to see our death numbers go up beyond 200,000, definitely on the way to 300,000. Dont know exactly when its going to reach that, but were steadily plodding, day after day, up that peak of deaths.

michael barbaro

I dont want to let that slide by. Youre saying that it feels likely that the United States will hit 300,000 before the pandemics over.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Oh before its over? Yeah, the question is when before its over? I mean, its not just me. Its the models. Some models suggest that its is going to be, you know, well before Christmas.

michael barbaro

300,000 American dead before Christmas would be absolutely horrific.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Yeah, it would. And we can avoid that by being smart, using masks, socially distancing. All the usual things. But we have to do it.

michael barbaro

And of course, the fall in the U.S., beyond everything were talking about means something else, which is the flu. The flu is now about to kind of merge with the coronavirus. And I know that that has raised some fears. Is that something you worry about?

donald g. mcneil jr.

No.

michael barbaro

Why not?

donald g. mcneil jr.

And Im kind of an outlier on this. But there are doctors who agree with me. The flu doesnt sit around, hide in the country during the year. Flu travels. It migrates to the southern hemisphere and hits them in the middle of their winter. And then it comes back in the fall. But flu transmission went to zero in this country in the third week of April during lockdown. It just went boom, right down to zero. And then it did not really go south.

michael barbaro

Because people arent really flying south?

donald g. mcneil jr.

Right. It turns out that flu in Australia is down by 99 percent this year. And in the rest of the southern hemisphere, its way, way, way, way down too  you know, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand. If it isnt big there, and there are no flights from there to here, you cant reseed flu here. And also, practicing social distancing as we are now, cuts down flu transmission in any year. So I dont expect a big flu season. But I still think everybody should get their flu shot. And I got mine, in case Im wrong.

michael barbaro

So it sounds like another incentive to abide by all the rules around the coronavirus is that it has very nicely diminished the flu.

donald g. mcneil jr.

And other respiratory diseases  R.S.V., and the cold coronaviruses, and things. Any respiratory disease, they get knocked out. All those diseases have dropped in this country.

michael barbaro

But still, Im hearing you say in your role as our collective conscience that everyone should still get the flu vaccine just in case, in order to kind of take it off our plate. And here, I should say, Donald, and Ive always wanted to be youre A student in this respect. I got the flu vaccine just a few days ago.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Good, excellent. I got mine. I got the senior shot, the four times as powerful one that you cant get unless youre 65.

michael barbaro

I dont think I got that one.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Ive had people ask me, how do I get one of those? And Im like, nope, insurance will not pay for it until youre over 65. But then  and you know, I kind a slightly sorer arm than usual, I think. But you know, thats actually a good sign. It means the shot is working.

michael barbaro

Well, Donald, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

donald g. mcneil jr.

Youre welcome.

michael barbaro

On Monday night, The Times reported that many scientists have been startled by the way that the F.D.A. has interpreted and communicated data about the effectiveness of blood plasma in treating Covid-19. Several of them, including those who worked on the Mayo Clinic study cited by the Trump administration, said they cannot figure out the origins of the claim that it reduced deaths by 35 percent and are highly doubtful of that figure. Well be right back.

[music]

Heres what else you need to know today.

archived recording [GUN SHOTS] [ALARM SOUNDING] Unrest in the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin turned violent on Monday night as protests over the police shooting of a black man there, Jacob Blake, gave way to fires, destruction and looting. By early Tuesday morning, a strip of stores in Kenoshas downtown was consumed by flames. Blake was shot repeatedly by a white officer as he tried to get inside his car. The shooting appeared to be unprovoked and was immediately condemned by Wisconsins governor. The officers involved in the encounter have been placed on administrative leave as an investigation continues. And  archived recording 1 Madam Chairman, Louisiana proudly casts its 46 votes for President Donald J. Trump. archived recording 2 Michigan, the Great Lakes state, is going to cast all 73 votes for President Donald J. Trump. archived recording 3 In order to keep America first, the state of Arizona casts our 57 votes for President Donald J. Trump. [CHEERING]

michael barbaro

During the opening night of the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, President Trump was nominated for a second term after an in-person roll call by delegates.

archived recording (CHANTING) Four more years! Four more years! archived recording (president donald trump) Yeah, if you want to really drive them crazy, you say, 12 more years. archived recording (CHANTING) 12 more years! 12 more years!

michael barbaro

In a short speech accepting the nomination, Trump sought to cast doubt on this falls election by attacking mail-in voting and accusing Democrats, without evidence, of seeking to steal the election.

archived recording (nikki haley) Last time, Joes boss was Obama. This time it would be Pelosi, Sanders and the squad. Their vision for America is socialism. And we know that socialism has failed everywhere. They want to tell Americans how to live and what to think.

michael barbaro

Later in the night, a series of speakers, including Trumps first ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, claimed that Joe Biden, a moderate, would pursue a left-wing agenda that would undermine American values at home and overseas.

archived recording (nikki haley) This president has a record of strength and success. The former vice president has a record of weakness and failure. Joe Biden is good for Iran and ISIS, great for communist China, and hes a godsend to everyone who wants America to apologize, abstain and abandon our values. Donald Trump takes a different approach. Hes tough on China. And he took on ISIS and won. And he tells the world what it needs to hear.

michael barbaro
Families gathered around the stage at Concourse Park in Kansas City, Missouri Sunday afternoon for music, dancing and messages of unity. Handed the microphone, Juyle Standifer sang her plea for peace."Put the guns down. Put the guns down.
Jana Duggars love life has always been of interest to fans. The Counting On star chose not to marry young, taking a different path than her other siblings. Now, fans remain fascinated with Duggars love life  and cant help but find any clue that might hint at a courtship.

Jana Duggar | Jana Duggar via Instagram

Jana Duggars love life has always drawn curiosity

Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar raised their children unconventionally compared with most American families. The kids are not allowed to date; they can only court, which means entering a relationship with the intention of marrying.

Many of the children marry shortly after they reach courting age, and they usually start having kids by their early twenties. Joy Duggar even wed as a teenager and welcomed her first child when she was 20; Kendra Duggar became pregnant with baby no. 3 at 21. Jana Duggar, who is 30, has yet to enter a courtship, and while 30 is not too old to be married according to most Americans, its surprisingly late for the Duggars.

Fans have created their own theories about why Duggar hasnt wed. Some suggest its because Jim Bob and Michelle want her to stick around to help out with the younger children. Others think Duggar has romantic feelings for her best friend, Laura DeMasie, though the family has shut down those rumors.

RELATED: Counting On: Fans Hate That Jana Duggar Is Always Altering Her Sisters Maternity Clothes

Some fans seem to suggest Duggars recent photo could mean shes in a courtship

When Jana Duggar joined Instagram last year, fans were certain that a courtship was bound to be announced, as the Duggars typically launch Instagram accounts once they enter courtship. Still, more than a year later, Duggar has posted countless photos; none of which feature a potential partner.

Over the weekend, Duggar spent time on Beaver Lake in Arkansas, but her caption had some fans asking questions. We literally stayed out until the sun went down! Duggar wrote  and some fans thought the we was referring to a mystery man.

Whos we?? one fan wrote. We????? someone else commented. Others felt fans were reading too far into the post. All these people are like WE? like you arent from a family of dozens of people, someone added, reminding others not to read too far into anything. Still, people wanted to know who Duggar was referring to, since she was the only one on the boat in the photo.

RELATED:Counting On: Jana Duggar Admits the Real Reason She Isnt Courting Yet

Duggar has spoken out about her relationship status in the past

For years now, fans have wondered why Duggar hasnt yet wed, and at times, she has responded to fans curiosity. Duggar quoted Michael Buble when referring to her love life, saying she just hasnt met him yet. Duggars family spoke out about the rumors of her being romantically interested in her best friend, Laura DeMasie, confirming there is nothing happening between the two. And Duggar has said on Counting On that she was never in a rush to marry at a young age.
On June 5, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell released a video proclaiming that Black lives matter and that the NFL was wrong in shunning peaceful player protests of social injustice and police brutality.

It was a stunning reversal of policy and a bellwether of the larger culture shift on issues of race in the United States in the aftermath of George Floyds homicide at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Prior to Goodells about-face amid a larger race reckoning, the leagues defining statement on the issues was Colin Kaepernicks inability to find a job. While Goodell apologized that day for the leagues general response to peaceful player protests, he did not directly apologize to Kaepernick, whose leadership on the movement led to his blackballing from the league.

What would Goodell say to Kaepernick?

In an interview released on Sunday, Goodell addressed Kaepernick. He did so in an interview with former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho, who now hosts a digital show titled Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.

Acho asked Goodell directly what would he say if given the opportunity to apologize to Kaepernick directly.

Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man: The National Anthem Protest- PT. 1



NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, & I discuss Colin Kaepernick & the protests during the national anthem that polarized America. pic.twitter.com/PcL02732ys  Emmanuel Acho (@EmmanuelAcho) August 23, 2020

The first thing Id say is I wish we had listened earlier, Kaep, to what you were kneeling about and what you were trying to bring attention to, Goodell said. (5:07, above)

Goodell then shifted from the question to point out that Kaepernick never spoke with him or members of the NFL directly about his stance.

We invited him in several times to have the conversation, to have the dialogue, Goodell continued. I wish we had the benefit of that. We never did. We would have benefited from that. Absolutely.

Story continues

Goodells new understanding of player protests

Goodell went on to explain his understanding now of what the protests during the national anthem mean to players who conduct them.

This is not about the flag, Goodell said. These are not people who are unpatriotic. Theyre not disloyal. Theyre not against our military.

Roger Goodell addressed how he wished he had responded to Colin Kaepernick. (David Goldman/AP)

Why didnt Goodell understand before?

Its a message that protesting players repeatedly stated over the course of their protests that now resonates in places where it once didnt. Why didnt Goodell understand it before this summer? He says he wasnt aware of the extent of the social injustice that regularly occurs in Black communities.

Just what was going on in the communities, Goodell said when asked what he knows now that he didnt before. I didnt know what was going on in the communities. When I had the chance to sit with our players players  I never had the chance to sit with Kaep.

But I talked with Kenny Stills a lot. Eric Reid. Malcolm Jenkins, Anquan Boldin. So many other players. Some of them sacrificed a great deal.

Reports of police brutality and social injustice have been widespread and available for long before Kaepernicks protests began. Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray  to name a few  are not unfamiliar names to anyone who keeps up with news in the United States.

But to his credit, Goodell said he sought out experiences to better understand what he didnt before.

When I listened to them, Goodell told Acho of what prompted his change of heart. I heard it. And I believed it.

But when you go and sit in one of those bail hearings, or you go on a ride-along, you go talk to a parent whos lost their child because of police brutality. Its better than hearing. You feel it. You hear it. You know it, and you see it.

Acho promised more to come in Part II of the interview.

More from Yahoo Sports:
Organisers of the Africa Brand Summit are excited to announce that Dr Taleb Rifai, patron of the African Tourism Board, will deliver the opening address at the first ever hybrid 2020 Africa Brand Summit on the morning of Thursday, 7 October 2020.

Dr Taleb Rifai

His welcome address will be followed by a much-awaited keynote address by well-known and outspoken Pan-Africanist, Kenyan Professor Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba.Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1949, Dr Rifais illustrious career includes having been secretary-general of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), which he headed for two consecutive terms, from 2009 to 2018. His extensive professional background spans international and national public service, as well as the private sector and academia.Before his election as secretary-general of the UNWTO, Dr Rifai was assistant director-general of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), based in Beirut and Geneva.Prior to assuming his responsibilities as an international public servant (2004-2018) in Beirut, Geneva, (ILO) and Madrid (UNWTO), Dr Rifai held several ministerial portfolios in the government of The HK of Jordan (1999-2004). He was, at first, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation before, in 2000, he was appointed Minister of Information and spokesman for the government. He later became Minister of Tourism and Antiquities. As Minister of information, he led the major restructuring of Jordan Television (JTV).Prior to his ministerial responsibilities, Dr Rifai was CEO of Jordans Cement Company (1997-1999). It was in this position that he successfully led the first large-scale privatisation and restructuring scheme in Jordan during the 1990s. From 1995 to 1997, he was the first director-general of the newly established Investment Promotion Corporation of Jordan, after having served as the director of the newly established Economic Mission of Jordan to the USA in Washington DC, from 1993 to 1995.As an architect and urban planner from 1973 to 1993, Dr Rifais career was in academia, a period during which he also taught at universities in the USA and Jordan. He helped establish the first Department of Architecture in Jordan at the newly established School of Engineering, University of Jordan, which led to his appointment as director of The Center of Consultations and Studies at the same university.He holds a PhD in Urban Design and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA (1982), an MA in Engineering and Architecture from Illinois Institute of Technology, IIT in Chicago, USA (1979) and a BSc in Architectural Engineering from the University of Cairo, Egypt (1973).With his rich, professional trajectory that spans several decades and continents, Dr Rifai is set to bring a fresh, Mediterranean flavour of global reach to the 2020 Africa Brand Summit. This is particularly important at a time when many African countries are trying to find the best, safest, ways to emerge out of various levels of Covid-19 lockdowns in order to restart their economic engines and save businesses and livelihoods. The livelihoods of millions of people in Africa rely on the broader tourism and hospitality sector. This sector has also been one of the biggest casualties of the Coronavirus related lockdowns in Africa and across the world.I look forward to this opportunity to welcome and engage with delegates to the hybrid 2020 Africa Brand Summit. It is a good thing that while some delegates will be gathered at the Vineyard Hotel and Spa in Cape Town, South Africa, many others will be livestreaming from across the globe to be part of the same conversations in real time. Covid-19 has demonstrated, without any doubt, that we are all connected and that a viral attack in one part of the world can bring other economies across the globe down to their knees. In finding its way out of this, Africa cannot act alone. In fact, no part of the world can reasonably act alone. The 2020 Africa Brand Summit is the right platform to join others in leading conversations that should culminate in implementable resolutions about healing Africa in a sustainable way, said Dr Rifai.Having a global African of Dr Rifais calibre open the 2020 Africa Brand Summit takes this event to a whole new level indeed, said Solly Moeng, founder and convenor of the summit. He brings with him a well-developed understanding of Africa and the many things that have informed perceptions about Africa over time. Our 2020 delegates will learn a lot from the wealth of wisdom that he brings to the summit.
The California Supreme Court has ordered a re-examination of the conviction of Scott Peterson for the Christmas Eve 2002 murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn child, Conner.

The Chronicle has been covering the high-profile case for almost two decades. Here are key moments from that coverage:

Missing woman thought to be dead

March 6, 2003: Laci Peterson case now treated as a homicide.

Bodies of fetus, woman found by bay

April 15, 2003: Police investigating the Laci Peterson case summoned to site.

BEN MARGOT / AP

Laci Petersons husband held for murders

April 19, 2003: Scott Peterson is accused of killing his wife and their unborn son; the state attorney general says DNA analysis identifies two bodies.

A chronology of Laci Petersons disappearance

April 19, 2003: This timeline chronicles the four months from Laci Petersons disappearance on Dec. 24, 2002, until her husbands arrest on April 18, 2003.

A portrait of the accused

March 7, 2004: In a rare interview, the family of Scott Peterson sheds light on the life and times of the perfect son.

Husband sounds like love-struck teenager in tapes

Aug. 12, 2004: Jury hears some of hundreds of calls recorded by Scott Petersons ex-lover, Amber Frey.

Ex-lover shines on witness stand

Aug. 15, 2004: Amber Frey comes across as a bright, complex woman.

Michael Maloney / SFC

Key moments from Scott Petersons 2004 trial

Nov. 13, 2004: From jury selection to key testimony to the jurys verdict, here is a timeline of the trials major developments as they unfolded.

Jury finds Peterson guilty of murder

Nov. 13, 2004: Jurors find Scott Peterson guilty of first-degree murder for Laci Peterson's slaying and second-degree murder for the death of their unborn child. Jurors also find that Peterson committed the special circumstance of multiple murders, making him eligible for the death penalty.

Trial analysis after verdict

Nov. 13, 2004: Chronicle reporters break down the trial and how prosecutors told a coherent, powerful and satisfying story in their bid to secure a guilty verdict.

Jury recommends death for Scott Peterson

Dec. 13, 2004: Jurors take 11 hours to decide that Scott Peterson should die in San Quentins death chamber for murdering his wife and their unborn child.

How jurors decided Scott Peterson should die

Dec. 14, 2004: Members of the jury say no one issue or piece of evidence swung the panel toward conviction, but the cumulative weight of Scott Petersons deceptions and even his courtroom demeanor worked against him.

Families pour out anguish before Scott Peterson sentenced to death

March 17, 2005: Before the judge sentences him, Scott Peterson silently faces his former in-laws.

Scott Peterson files to overturn convictions

July 6, 2012: Scott Peterson asks the California Supreme Court to overturn his convictions and death sentence, saying his jury was soaked in hostile publicity, the case against him was flimsy and the judge allowed prosecutors to introduce unreliable dog-sniffing evidence.

Michael Macor / The Chronicle

Geraldo reports on Scott Petersons cushy life in prison

March 23, 2015: Geraldo Riveras weekend program delves into the post-conviction life of Peterson at San Quentin State Prison.

TV doc makes case for Scott Petersons innocence

Aug. 12, 2017: A controversial six-part docuseries called The Murder of Laci Peterson premieres on A&E.

California Supreme Court hears arguments for new trial

June 2, 2020: Scott Petersons lawyers tell the California Supreme Court that he could not have gotten a fair trial.

Death penalty overturned for Scott Peterson

Aug. 24, 2020: The state Supreme Court upholds Scott Petersons murder convictions but overturns his death sentence because the trial judge had dismissed jurors who opposed capital punishment without asking them whether they could put their views aside.
Massive Northern California Wildfires Rage on; 1 Man Dead

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.Three massive wildfires chewed through parched Northern California landscape Sunday as firefighters raced to dig breaks and make other preparations ahead of a frightening weather system packing high winds and more of the lightning that sparked the huge blazes and scores of other fires around the state, putting nearly a quarter-million people under evacuation orders and warnings.

At the CZU Lightning Complex fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, authorities announced the discovery of the body of a 70-year-old man in a remote area called Last Chance. The man had been reported missing and police had to use a helicopter to reach the area, which is a string of about 40 off-the-grid homes at the end of a windy, steep dirt road north of the city of Santa Cruz.

The area was under an evacuation order and Santa Cruz Sheriffs Department Chief Deputy Chris Clark said it was a stark reminder of the need for residents to leave the area.

This is one of the darkest periods weve been in with this fire, he said.

The fatality was the first for the CZU fire and seventh fire victim in the state in the last week that has seen 650 wildfires across California, many of them sparked by the more than 12,000 lightning strikes recorded since Aug., 15. There are 14,0000 firefighters. 2,400 engines and 95 aircraft battling the fires.

The Santa Cruz fire is one of three complexes, or groups of fires, burning on all sides of the San Francisco Bay Area. All were started by lightning.

Fire crew made progress during the weekend, which saw a welcome break in the unseasonably warm weather and little wind. that allowed firefighters to increase what had been precious little containment.

But the forecast late Sunday was ominous  the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning through Monday afternoon for the drought-stricken area, meaning extreme fire conditions including high temperatures, low humidity, lightning and wind gusts up to 65 mph (105 kph) that may result in dangerous and unpredictable fire behavior.

Mark Brunton, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), said while hes confident firefighters did the most with the time they had to prepare, hes not sure what to expect.

Theres a lot of potential for things to really go crazy out there, he said.

The LNU Lightning Complex fire in wine country north of San Francisco and SCU Lightning Complex southeast of the city have within a week grown to be two of the three largest fires in state history, with both burning more than 500 square miles (1,295 square kilometers). The LNU fire has been the most deadly and destructive blaze, accounting for five deaths and 845 destroyed homes and other buildings. Three of the victims were in a home that was under an evacuation order.

Officials surveying maps at command centers are astonished by the sheer size of the fires, Cal Fire spokesman Brice Bennett said.

You could overlay half of one of these fires and it covers the entire city of San Francisco, Bennett said Sunday.

In Southern California, an 11-day-old blaze held steady at just under 50 square miles (106 square kilometers) near Lake Hughes in northern Los Angeles County mountains. Rough terrain, hot weather and the potential for thunderstorms with lightning strikes challenged firefighters on Sunday.

Authorities said their firefighting effort in Santa Cruz was hindered by people who refused to evacuate and those who were using the chaos to steal. Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart said 100 officers were patrolling and anyone not authorized to be in an evacuation zone would be arrested.

What were hearing from the community is that theres a lot of looting going on, Hart said.

He and county District Attorney Jeff Rosell expressed anger at what Rosell called the absolutely soulless people who seek to victimize those already victimized by the fire. Among the victims was a fire commander who was robbed when he left his fire vehicle to help direct operations.

Someone entered the vehicle and stole personal items, including a wallet and drained his bank account, said Chief Mark Brunton, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

I cant imagine a bigger low-life, Hart said, promising to catch him and vowing the DA is going to hammer him.

Holly Hansen, who fled the LNU fire, was among evacuees from the community of Angwin allowed Sunday to go back to their homes for one hour to retrieve belongings. She and her three dogs waited five hours in her SUV for their turn. Among the items she took with her were photos of her pets.

Its horrible, I lived in Sonoma during the (2017) Tubbs Fire, so this is time No. 2 for me. Its horrible when you have to think about what to take, she said. I think its a very raw human base emotion to have fear of fire and losing everything. Its frightening.

By Martha Mendoza
Health bosses raised concerns about maternity care at a scandal-hit hospital seven years ago but failed to intervene to prevent further baby deaths, official records show.

East Kent Hospitals has been accused by families of covering up the deaths of newborns by only referring a handful of cases to coroners  even though many were sudden and unexplained.

The Mail revealed yesterday how just 24 out of 124 deaths since 2013 had been reported to coroners, who themselves expressed alarm at managers' suspicious practices.

Dawn and Kevin Powell (pictured) are pursuing a negligence claim over the death of their son Archie at four days old

The trust  one of the largest in the country  is currently at the centre of a major independent inquiry following concerns that at least 15 babies may have died needlessly since 2011.

Devastation for our family Dawn and Kevin Powell are pursuing a negligence claim over the death of their son Archie at four days old. Medics at the QEQM Hospital in Margate failed to spot symptoms of group B streptococcus, a common infection, shortly after his birth on February 10 last year. They initially treated it as a bowel problem  and one staff member even thought a grunting noise Archie was making was him singing. The delay in treating him caused severe brain damage. Dawn, 42, and Kevin, 52, of Margate, were faced with the heartbreaking decision of turning off his life support machine. Archie has a twin sister, Evalene, and was the couples first son after three girls. A probe found his death was potentially avoidable. Initially, there was not an inquest into his death, but the family have pushed and one is set to be heard in Kent. Dawn  who quit her teaching assistant job at a special needs school due to depression brought on by Archies death  said: The main issue was them failing to spot how ill he was getting and the lateness in him receiving antibiotics. Kevin added: All were interested in is making sure they change what they should have changed years ago. This has caused so much devastation to our family. We had three daughters who were looking forward to having a little brother. Advertisement

But board documents reveal that both the regional branch of NHS England and the local health authority, Canterbury and Coastal Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), were worried about the high number of serious mistakes in the maternity departments as early as 2013.

A 'quality report' written by the CCG that September points out that its own staff and a panel headed up by regional NHS England managers had 'both expressed concerns in relation to the number of serious incidents'.

Two years later, NHS England and another local health authority, Thanet CCG, were so concerned about East Kent's maternity services they asked the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to carry out a review.

That investigation highlighted how consultants were refusing to come in at nights and weekends, with other staff failing to follow guidance or flag up potentially dangerous mistakes.

But the document was filed away and never made public nor passed on to the Care Quality Commission.

The failings came to light in January this year during the inquest of baby Harry Richford, who died in November 2017 in what a coroner described as 'wholly avoidable' circumstances.

Derek Richford, Harry's grandfather, said: 'It seems astonishing Harry could have been born in a maternity unit where the locum was completely unassessed and frankly wholly inexperienced for the role.

'Why weren't people solving issues rather than writing reports?' Nick Fairweather, a medical negligence solicitor who is representing 12 families taking legal action against the trust, said: 'One of the most heartbreaking features to the cases is the number of opportunities that there were to put things right.'

The trust is one of a handful of hospitals to have been given a 'red' rating because the death rate is at least five per cent higher than average.

In February the NHS launched an inquiry into East Kent Hospital's maternity services.

It is overseen by Dr Bill Kirkup, who also chaired a damning report into the maternity scandal at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay in Cumbria in 2015, where up to 30 babies and mothers died.

The NHS is also investigating another major maternity scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital, where more than 1,800 families have raised concerns about poor care, including avoidable baby deaths.

A spokesman for East Kent Hospitals said: 'We wholeheartedly apologise to families for whom we could have done things differently. We have made significant changes to maternity care.

'We are doing everything we can to support the investigation.'

A spokesperson for East Kent Hospitals said: 'The findings and recommendations from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) report were incorporated into the Trusts improvement plan following receipt in February 2016.

'The Trust informed the Care Quality Commission (CQC) that a review of maternity services had been commissioned in 2015. Information about RCOGs findings and the Trusts progress were shared with commissioners, and with the CQC ahead of their 2016 inspection.'

Harrowing stories that will haunt me forever

Commentary by Jeremy Hunt

When you are a Secretary of State, your day is filled back to back with meetings - often on important but rather dry topics. But some meetings you never forget, and reading the harrowing accounts from parents who lost babies at East Kent NHS Trust in yesterdays Daily Mail reminded me of one I will remember till the day I die.

It cost our little miracle her life Shelley Russell became anxious in the 36th week of pregnancy as her baby  who she named Tallulah-Rai  was not moving as much as usual. The 39-year-old went to Buckland Hospital in Dover on January 23, 2019, but was told: Everything is OK. Midwives sent her home despite struggling to get a good heart-rate reading on the cardiotocography (CTG) machine, and they did not perform an ultrasound. Tallulah-Rai Edwards' parents Shelley Russell, 39, and Nicholas Edwards, 49 Miss Russell believes Tallulah-Rai died the following day. She was delivered stillborn on January 28 at William Harvey Hospital. The failings have left her and partner Nicholas Edwards, 49, devastated. They both have children from previous relationships, but the couple had previously been told they could not have children together. Miss Russell, from Dover, said: I was angry and upset sitting there because they had this huge poster saying if you arent feeling movement to contact them straight away which I did. But I just didnt see any urgency from the medical staff. This has cost our baby her life, because that midwife didnt do her job properly. Were never going to be able to conceive again and I dont think Im ever going to want to. Tallulah-Rai was a miracle and I think we were given our only chance. The minute they told me that she had died I knew instantly where it had all gone wrong. It feels like a constant punch in the stomach. They should be ashamed of themselves. According to the BBC, an internal investigation found: The CTG should have been continued for longer and an ultrasound arranged. Advertisement

I was due to report to Parliament on the baby deaths at Morecambe Bay NHS Trust and had invited some bereaved parents in to meet me. One of the parents, Carl Hendrickson, wanted to bringing his 11-year-old son to the meeting.

We tried to persuade him to allow his son to wait outside for what was going to be a difficult meeting  but he insisted. In the meeting I found out why  he had lost not just his baby son but also his wife in a terrible catalogue of errors.

This brave man wanted his son to see he had taken his complaints right to the very top.

I met many other extraordinary campaigners. James Titcombe lost his son Joshua at the same hospital. Simon Davey and Liza Brady lost their son Alex at Morecambe Bay NHS Trust.

All of them chose not to move on but to relive their tragedies over and over again to try to get changes made that stopped other families going through the private torture they had endured.

Now we hear the shocking news from East Kent. Thankfully this is being looked into independently by Dr Bill Kirkup. He pulled no punches in his report on Morecambe Bay and I am sure will not hold back this time. Partly as a result of his earlier recommendations, much has changed in the NHS: a national campaign to halve baby deaths by 2025, independent investigations into every major maternity incident by the newly set-up Healthcare Safety Investigation Board, and rigorous inspections of every hospital in the country by the CQC.

But there is much more to do. We have 3.9 neonatal deaths per 1,000 births. In Sweden it is half that. If we matched that here, 1,400 babies lives would be saved every year.

Why do the Swedes and other countries do so much better? A culture of blame in our hospitals often makes it practically impossible for dedicated doctors, nurses and midwives to be open and transparent when things go wrong. They worry they will be fired or lose their right to practise.

Lawyers circle immediately and it can take years for a complicated lawsuit to be settled. When they conclude, the sums are eye-watering: this July the NHS had to pay 37million to one family, the largest ever maternity claim in its history.

How many more obstetricians and midwives could that have funded if the mistakes in that case had not been made? That is why even in the midst of the pandemic, the Health and Social Care Select Committee, which I chair, has just opened an investigation into maternity safety.

The only solution is a total change of culture. After any unexpected death the top priority must be to find out the truth of what happened quickly, learning any lessons and making sure they are communicated to the rest of the NHS without delay.

Until that happens, my successors as health secretary will have to keep looking bereaved relatives in the eye and explain why it is so many tragedies are being allowed to repeat themselves.
NORTH CAROLINA  With a record number of Americans predicted to cast votes in the Nov. 3 election, mail-in ballots have become an increasingly popular option in the age of the coronavirus, particularly in North Carolina.

According to a recent survey of 133 Patch readers from around the state, most everyone intends to vote in the upcoming election, however the vast majority of respondents said they were nervous about their mail-in ballot being received in time to be properly counted.

Recent operational changes within the U.S. Postal Service have led to reports of widespread mail delays, elimination of overtime for postal workers, carriers being instructed to leave mail behind and the decommissioning of mail sorting machines. These changes have also increased anxiety for many, and our survey reflected that.

SEE ALSO: Work-A-Day Reporting Inspired Pressure To Save The Postal Service

While it is estimated that about 58 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election, among North Carolina Patch readers who responded to our poll, an overwhelming 97.7 percent plan to vote this time around.

Despite the continued community spread of coronavirus throughout North Carolina, a slight majority of readers  54.1 percent  said they do not plan to vote by mail. The deadline to request a vote-by-mail ballot in North Carolina is Oct. 27.

Of those who intend to vote early by mail, the majority said they were either very confident or somewhat confident that their vote would be tabulated by Election Night on Nov. 3. About 25 percent of respondents were not confident at all.

Despite expressing that confidence, anxiety remains. When asked, "Are you concerned your mail-in vote will not be received or properly counted?" more than 71 percent of the surveyed Patch readers in North Carolina answered yes.

Some of that anxiety seems to be coming from personal experience. With the reported operational changes at the U.S. Postal Service that began when Louis DeJoy took over as postmaster general in June, more than half of the readers who took our poll  54.9 percent  said their mail delivery has slowed down in recent months.

Story continues

Throughout his re-election campaign, President Donald Trump has stated he believes voting by mail will result in fraudulent activity. Overall, however, North Carolina readers disagree. More than half of readers  53.4 percent  said that voting by mail does not encourage fraudulent activity.

Finally, we asked, "What are your overall thoughts on voting by mail?" We received a wide variety of replies. Here are some of the responses from readers:

"If Trump does not support it he should not use it."

"If you can drive to the doctor, grocery store, bank, restaurant, bar, Wal-Mart....you can drive to vote!"

"Its necessary for many but I will go in person to my polling place b/c I dont trust the current administration."

"Seems like it would be fine as long as people registered for their ballots."

"It had been fine until trump called it fraudulent and put his large donor Dejoy in as postmaster General to slow the mail by taking mailboxes away and deconstructed mail sorter machines. I will vote by mail or stand in line if necessary to cast my vote!"

"I believe there will be widespread fraud with mail-in ballots, so me and my family will vote in-person!"

"I want a place to drop off my ballot instead of mailing it."

"Trump may be cutting off his nose to spite his face as Republicans will also vote by mail."

"I am a senior citizen, and feel this is the only safe way for me to vote during Covid19."

"Very bad idea. Vote in person to know that it is done right."

Eric DeGrechie, Patch Staff, contributed

This article originally appeared on the Charlotte Patch
After deliberations, which lasted for over seven hours, the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the grand old party's highest decision-making body, decided that interim chief Sonia Gandhi would continue to helm the party until the next AICC session.

The CWC also authorised her to effect necessary organisational changes to take on various challenges before the party.

What this essentially means is that until the next president of the party is elected, Gandhi would continue to lead the party and will step down once the next chief takes over.

Also Read | CWC asks leaders to raise inter-party issues 'only within party fora', wants Sonia Gandhi to continue as Congress chief

But electing a new Congress president is easier said than done. The party has its own constitution, which has laid down elaborate procedure to elect its President. Here's how it elects its highest leader:

>> Top leaders of the party are members of a top executive body called the Congress Working Committee (CWC).

>> Following a meeting of the CWC, the party's election committee sets an election schedule.

>> All members of the Pradesh Congress Committees are delegates to the party according to Article XII of the party's constitution.

>> It takes 10 delegates of the party to jointly propose any other delegate's name for the post of the party president. The term of the Congress president is five years.

>> After declaration of the election procedure, delegates can file their nominations according to the specified date. The nominations are then scrutinised and a final list of candidates is published. After which, candidates are given a seven-day window to withdraw their nomination if they wish to do so.

Follow our LIVE Updates here.

>> In a situation where only one candidate is contesting the election, he or she is declared the winner. The president officially takes charge starting from the All India Congress Committee (AICC) plenary session. Till the plenary session, the winner is called as the 'President-elect'.

>> In a situation where there are multiple candidates, the winner has to secure more than 50 percent of the total votes from AICC delegates.

>> Party rule states that, if in case, no candidate is able to secure more than 50 percent votes as the first preference, the second preferences would be counted.

>> If the election process is disrupted due to any unforeseen circumstance, the CWC has the power to appoint a provisional President till the time the process is completed.
Over two dozen former Republican members of Congress are backing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The Biden campaign on Monday announced that former Republican Senator Jeff Flake and more are joining a "Republicans for Biden" effort as they endorse the former vice president in the 2020 election, Fox News reports. Some of the Republicans on the list, including former Rep. Charlie Dent, had previously endorsed Biden.

NEWS: A lengthy list of Republicans including former U.S. Senator @JeffFlake are endorsing @JoeBiden on the first day of the @GOP convention Flake will also give remarks to the press later today on his endorsement pic.twitter.com/JiMGEGO0ch  Johnny Verhovek (@JTHVerhovek) August 24, 2020

"These former members of Congress are supporting Joe Biden because they know what's at stake in this election and that Trump's failures as president have superseded partisanship," the campaign told Fox News.

Flake in 2017 decided not to seek re-election, and he previously urged his fellow Republicans not to support Trump in 2020, telling them it's "time to risk your careers in favor of your principles."

A number of other Republicans have endorsed Biden for president, some of whom, including former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, recently spoke at the Democratic National Convention. The Trump campaign in a statement on Monday said, "Joe Biden has been a failure in the Washington Swamp for a half century, so no one should be surprised when Swamp creatures gather to protect one of their own."

Flake is reportedly set to deliver remarks on his endorsement of Biden later on Monday.

More stories from theweek.com

Melania Trump reportedly taped making 'disparaging' remarks about president and his children

The Late Show's Melania Trump previews her suspiciously familiar RNC speech

Donald Trump Jr. reportedly thinks his dad is going to lose in November


LONDON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading payments platform, Wirex, in partnership with The Fintech Times, have launched their inaugural 'Rising Women in Crypto Power List' 2020 to champion the female talent driving the future of digital currencies.

Building on the growing importance of cryptocurrency and the leading role it's expected to play in the future of the economy, the upcoming 2020 honour role will recognise 10 exceptional women who have used their skills, initiative and knowledge to make important contributions to the sector. Entries are open to anyone, whether you are a rising star or seasoned veteran in the field, to align with Wirex's vision of making cryptocurrency 'open to all'.

Since its inception in 2014, Wirex's vision has been focused on bringing cryptocurrency into the mainstream, and empowering everyone to take advantage of a world where all currencies, whether crypto or traditional, are equal. Offering a revolutionary platform that gives customers the ability to seamlessly buy, hold, exchange and spend multiple crypto and traditional currencies at over 54 million locations worldwide, Wirex are endeavouring to use this campaign to encourage women in particular to get involved in the cryptocurrency space.

Charlotte Wells, PR, Events and Communications Manager at Wirex, explained that with a considerable proportion of employees at Wirex being female, the campaign resonated with them on a personal level. "Myself and the women working at Wirex feel passionately about debunking the stereotype that only men can be involved in crypto, and we hope that offering this platform to celebrate women's achievements in the space will help to inspire others around the world. There are a lot of talented women that are rarely recognised, and so we hope that this initiative will bring the community together and showcase the power of women in the world of digital currencies."

The 'Rising Women in Crypto Power List' is part of a longer campaign that will run until November, culminating in a two-week long takeover of the Wirex's website and channels by the women of Wirex, during which the winners of the 'Power List' will be announced. The takeover will feature exclusive videos, content and articles from influential women working in fintech and cryptocurrency, as well as female Wirex employees, to share their insights, experiences and perspectives on women's involvement in cryptocurrency.

To create the list, Wirex is calling on the community to nominate both themselves and others that are playing a vital role in shaping the future of finance, software and blockchain. A team of carefully selected judges that are already playing pivotal roles in the sector will take a look at the nominees, to create a shortlist that will be announced on 2nd November with support from The Fintech Times.

Think you are or someone you know is a 'Rising Woman in Crypto'? To enter, simply fill out the short form here: https://wirexapp.com/blog/post/rising-women-in-crypto-power-list-2020-0211

About Wirex

Wirex is a worldwide digital payment platform and regulated institution that has forged new rules in the digital payments space. In 2015, the firm developed the world's first contactless payment card that gives users the ability to seamlessly spend crypto and traditional currencies in real life.

Wirex was created in 2014 by CEOs and co-founders Pavel Mateev and Dmitry Lazarichev, who identified the need to open up the esoteric world of cryptocurrencies and make digital money accessible for everyone. With the core aim of making it as easy as possible to use digital assets in everyday life, Wirex provides a trusted and cost-effective service for crypto and traditional currency transactions by incorporating the next generation of payments infrastructure integrated with cryptocurrency blockchains.

With over three million customers across 130 countries, the company offers secure accounts that allow customers to easily store, buy and exchange multiple currencies instantly at the best live rates on one centralised mobile app. Quick and simple money transfer options are available, as well as the freedom to spend 150+ traditional and cryptocurrencies in more than 54 million locations around the world using the Wirex card.

Wirex continues to develop the product in line with market developments, whilst adhering to regional regulations and securing appropriate licencing where it exists. A proven industry pioneer, Wirex introduced the world's first bitcoin reward programme, Cryptoback, which earns cardholders up to 1.5% back in Bitcoin for every in-store transaction they make. They also launched their own native utility token, WXT, which entitles holders to rewards and incentives such as heavily-discounted fees and higher Cryptoback rewards.

Wirex is based in London with offices in Singapore, Kyiv, Tokyo, Toronto, Dallas and Atlanta. With over $3bn worth of transactions processed already and rapid expansion into new territories, Wirex is uniquely placed to support and promote the mass adoption of a cashless society through creative solutions.

| wirexapp.com |

SOURCE Wirex

Related Links

wirexapp.com


The Berejiklian government will pursue its own push to allow uranium mining in NSW, after cabinet ministers backed away from supporting One Nation's nuclear power bill in the upper house.

The bill, introduced by Mark Latham, would lift the 33-year ban on uranium mining and nuclear power, but on Monday night cabinet agreed that it would consider its own bill.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Energy Minister Matt Kean. Credit:Nick Moir

In March, Deputy Premier John Barilaro stunned colleagues when he said his party would support Mr Latham's bill, despite not taking the issue to the Nationals' party room.

Mr Barilaro, a long-time supporter of nuclear power, said the government should "lift the ban on nuclear energy" and confirmed his party would support it.
Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat on Monday stated that India has "military options" to deal with the Chinese on the issue of transgressions if talks between both the countries at the military and diplomatic level don't yield any results.

"The military option to deal with transgressions by the Chinese Army in Ladakh are on but it will be exercised only if talks at the military and the diplomatic level fail," Rawat said here on the ongoing dispute between India and China in Eastern Ladakh.

India and China are engaged in a standoff since April-May over the transgressions by the Chinese Army in multiple areas including Finger area, Galwan valley, Hot springs and Kongrung nala.

The talks between the two sides have been going on for the last three months including five Lieutenant General-level talks but have failed to yield any results, so far.

The CDS, however, refused to discuss in detail the military options that India could exercise to push back the transgressions by the Chinese Army in Ladakh sector.

The Chinese Army has refused to withdraw or disengage completely from the Finger area and seems to be buying time to delay its disengagement from there.

While efforts are underway to resolve the ongoing border dispute, India has rejected the Chinese suggestion to disengage equidistantly from the Finger area in Eastern Ladakh.
DETROIT - A treasure hunting company is ready to send its first problem-solving, outdoor enthusiasts on a journey to win a cash prize - a explore Michigans parks along the way.

Detroit-based Michigan Treasure Hunts is offering a family friendly activity in that the hunts are not strenuous and wont require equipment like kayaks and shovels, said co-owner Rory Medina. Each hunt will consist of about two to four hours of walking and driving.

The first hunt is set for Sept. 12 in Oakland County. A second hunt will be held Sept. 19 in Washtenaw County. Tickets are $49 for each hunt.

Co-owners Medina and Doug Pough were inspired to start this venture in part by a Michigan jeweler who buried $1 million in gold, silver and jewelry throughout the state for Treasure Quest.

RELATED: Michigan jeweler buries $1M in gold, silver, diamonds from Detroit to U.P. in Treasure Quest

Were always looking for fun side things, Medina said. He and Pough work together at an IT banking company in Detroit.

MTH wont actually bury treasure because thats not always safe, and they want to make sure paying participants receive the prizes, Medina said.

Instead, the winning hunter or team will find a coin outfitted with GPS and instructions. The winner will then receive a cash prize; the amount will depend on how many people participate.

The first hunt consists of eight clues, all of which should be solvable by anyone, Medina said.

He compared the hunts to an escape room in that they will challenge participants knowledge, creativity and problem-solving skills. Unlike an escape room, the hunts are outdoors at public parks and theres a chance of winning a prize at the end.

Medina and Pough are both from Metro Detroit. Medina is a graduate of Michigan State University. Pough is an alumnus of the University of Michigan, and a veteran of the Michigan Army National Guard; he served from 2004-2010. Pough was deployed to Kosovo from 2005-2006.

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Workers have every right to view with suspicion the paltry $600 million Flint settlement for victims of the water poisoning.

In reality, even before legal fees are deducted, the deal is barely a slap on the wrist for the massive social crime that poisoned an entire working class city of 90,000 beginning six years ago. Motivated by the mad pursuit of profit by wealthy investors and their politically connected cronies from both capitalist parties, the devastating impact on men, women and children continues today.

The losses suffered by Flint residents are incalculabledozens, if not hundreds of preventable deaths, countless miscarriages, immense loss of income, plummeting home values and life-long illnesses for adults and particularly children whose rapid growth development can be more severely impacted by neurological and emotional damage produced by lead poisoning.

The Flint water crisis began in April 2014 when the state-appointed emergency manager severed the citys water system from Detroit, its water source for the previous 50 years. Flint began drawing water from the polluted Flint River through a privatization scheme called the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA).

In defiance of even minimal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards, no corrosion control measures were implemented in the switch, causing lead to leach from the aging pipes, along with harmful bacteria. Large financial interests were behind the KWA. In the same month the city changed to the Flint River, KWA sold $240 million in bonds to more than 30 investors, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and firms that played key roles in the 2013 bankruptcy of Detroit. Today, the bondholders are still being paid, while not a single Flint resident has been made whole.

Democratic Governor Whitmer and the corporate media have called the preliminary settlement, which is expected to receive court approval within 4560 days, historic and have declared that it is bringing closure to the residents of the city. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said it is a step forward in the healing process for Flint.

It is nothing of the sort. Flint is a microcosm of a society ruled by complete indifference and hostility to the well-being of the majority, the working class. The method applied to the Flint water is now being applied in the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration, Michigan Republicans and the Democratic Party are not concerned about saving lives or the well-being of the population, but in protecting corporate profit.

The US is an epicenter of the pandemic, with almost six million cases and more than 180,000 deaths. The policy of both parties has been to end the supplementary unemployment benefits and demand the deadly reopening of the schools to force parents back to work so profits can be churned out for Wall Street.

By late March, in what can be called the Great Wall Street Heist of 2020, the Congress of millionaires passed the CARES Act with a nearly unanimous vote. The bill gave hundreds of billions to corporations and sanctioned the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street by the Federal Reserve. The bailout was many thousands of times greater than the $600 million settlement in Flint.

Unlike Flint residents who will have to provide evidence-based proof of blood lead levels from six years ago, the corporations got their money with no strings attached and no need to prove their justification for compensation. And while the super-rich did not have to wait long for their money, the people of Flint will surely wait months, if not years, as demonstrated from lawsuits surrounding Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the BP oil spill, wildfires in California, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and on and on.

There will also be amnesty for all the criminals who are responsible for the water poisoning and its cover-up. Angry social media posts calling for jail sentences for former Governor Rick Snyder and others prompted Attorney General Nessel to tweet: To be clear, the Flint settlement absolves the State of MI and its public officials of civil responsibility. Solicitor General Hammoud and Pros. Worthy [Prosecutor Kim Worthy] continue their investigation into criminal actions by state actors and the quest for justice and accountability is not over. In June 2019, Nessel dismissed all pending criminal chargesincluding involuntary manslaughteragainst eight officials implicated in the water poisoning of the Flint population.

The insulting amount of $600 million begins and ends not with what the people of Flint need but with what the financial oligarchy says they can afford. As a matter of fact, it will be the Michigan taxpayers who will be funding the $600 million settlement, not the wealthy.

The Socialist Equality Party fights for what is needed by the working class, not what the capitalists can afford. We call for the following urgent measures:

 Life-time guaranteed medical care for all children and adults free of charge and on a completely equal basis.

 Life-time educational and social programs to provide for special needs children.

 Full replacementnot simply of the lead service lines, but of the entire water infrastructure system.

 Full compensation for declining home values, loss of income and as well as compensation for six years of paying high water bills for water that residents do not drink.

 All those responsible for the water poisoning and its cover-up must be criminally prosecuted.

The claim that there is no money is a lie. The three wealthiest individuals, in the United States, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, have a combined wealth that exceeds that of the bottom 50 percent of the American population, that is, 170 million people.

While 40 percent of the Flint population lives in poverty, more than one fifth of the American population is now unemployed, and millions are deprived of basic needs and confront an uncertain future of evictions, hunger and joblessness, the fortunes of the ultra-rich have not only recovered, they are improving substantially.

This struggle requires the independent political mobilization of the working class and a complete break with the Democrats and Republicans. To meet the needs of the working class for safe and free water, along with all other social rights, requires ending the economic dictatorship of the corporate-financial oligarchy. The vast fortunes of the ruling elite must be expropriated and used to meet the needs of the majority.

The coming weeks and months must be dedicated not to the election of Biden and Harris, but to the organization and unification of the struggles of teachers, autoworkers and others, into a mass social and political movement against the entire ruling class and the capitalist system. Only through the development of the class struggle can the working class make right in Flint.
First Horizon Bank announced that Chattanoogan Jeff Jackson has been named Chief Operating Officer of Regional Banking for First Horizon.

This is a newly created position for First Horizon Bank, which recently announced its merger of equals with IBERIABANK. In this role, Mr. Jackson will be responsible for operations and implementing strategies for the regional bank across the 12-state region where the company operates.

Mr. Jackson comes to his new position after serving as Regional President in Florida where he turned First Horizon into a top 15 bank. He was recognized for the banks active philanthropic dedication by receiving the key to the city of Miami-Dade County from Mayor Carlos Gimenez and was recently honored with Floridas Boy Scouts Distinguished Citizen Award.

Jeff brings a unique perspective to his new role, said Michael Brown, President of Regional Banking for First Horizon. He was a legacy market president in Chattanooga as well as led a new growth market president in Florida. In both of those positions, Jeff was able to leverage our success by paying close attention to business and client relationships that in some instances span over several generations.

I love challenges, said Mr. Jackson. I look forward to new opportunities presented by the recent merger with IBERIABANK. Both banks share similar philosophies of quality service and dedication to our clients and the leadership team mirrors those attributes. Im honored to be a part of the team.

Mr. Jackson has been with First Horizon Bank for 11 years. The Red Bank native holds a degree in finance from Auburn University and a certificate in corporate strategy, banking, corporate finance and securities law from Columbia University. He and his wife Ronna-Renee are parents to a son who is a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a daughter who will be attending Hutchison School in Memphis.
A explosion in the area led to a total power shutdown in Syria, state news agency SANA reported citing information from energy and electricity ministries.

The explosion on the Arab gas pipeline, which occurred between the Ad Dumayr and Adra areas near the Syrian capital, could be a terrorist act, the state news agency said on Twitter in the early hours of Monday.

The explosion on the pipeline, which supplies southern Syria, led to a total power shutdown in the country, SANA said.
Oil companies in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico need millions of gallons of water to retrieve petroleum.

At the same time, the city of Lubbock, Texas, spends $1 million each year to dispose its treated wastewater at two city farms.

Enter Palisade Pipeline, a Houston-based company with plans for a 100-mile pipeline to transport wastewater from Lubbock to the Permian Basin.

The company signed an agreement in June of 2019 to buy 6 million gallons of wastewater a day from the City of Lubbock.

This is a win-win for the community of Lubbock, and also to industry, to basically do a flip from a waste stream into a revenue resource, said Reagan Kneese, Palisades executive vice president of operations. Hobbs will act as our operations hub to distribute that water to various end users in Eddy and Lea counties.

Lubbock treats the wastewater, so Palisade doesnt need further treatment. Pumps along the route will transport water from a Lubbock city reservoir and reclamation plant to a reservoir in the Hobbs area.

The project comes as New Mexico encourages companies to recycle their produced water  the wastewater that surfaces along with petroleum  instead of pumping scarce fresh water.

When you think about how concentrated oil and gas is in one region of New Mexico, its a tremendous amount of water used in a very water-starved region, said Palisade president Phillip Laughlin.  Every barrel of water we bring offsets a barrel of potable groundwater that would have been taken out of the hydrologic cycle.

The state helped create a produced water research consortium at New Mexico State University. The team is exploring non-industry uses for produced water, like municipal supplies or irrigation.

Originally Palisade marketed their wastewater to industry. But the company soon realized its product could also be sold to power plants and municipalities.

Municipal reuse is checking those boxes now that produced water is trying to get to, Kneese said.

The City of Jal is interested in using the Lubbock wastewater to offset groundwater depletions from nearby fracking operations. Jal is currently protesting an application by Intrepid Potash and NGL Energy Partners to pump more groundwater.

Once that waters gone, its not coming back, Jal mayor Stephen Aldridge said earlier this month. That could devastate future water supplies for a small community like ours, where every drop counts.

Palisade will source pipeline materials this year. The build will take 6 months and cost tens of millions of dollars, Laughlin said. The company aims to have water flowing through the pipeline before the end of 2021.

Theresa Davis is a Report for America corps member covering water and the environment for the Albuquerque Journal.
Since mass demonstrations erupted in Belarus following the allegedly fraudulent reelection of President Alexander Lukashenko, who has held power for 26 years, opposition activists have rallied behind the historical Belarusian flag, a white-red-white tricolor. While the flags colors have a long lineage in Belarus, the oppositions white-red-white tricolor was first used as a national flag by the short-lived Belarusian Peoples Republic in 1918-1919.

When Belarus gained independence following the Soviet Unions collapse in 1991, it adopted a version of its historic flag, which it used until 1995, a year after Lukashenko was first elected. In 1995, it adopted a variation of the flag of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, without the Communist hammer-sickle-and-star symbol.

In an Aug. 23 video message, Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin attacked the opposition protesters, conflating their flag with those used by Nazi collaborators during the Second World War.

We cannot calmly watch how, under the flags under which the fascists organized the massacres of Belarusians, Russians, Jews, [and] representatives of other nationalities, actions are being organized today in these sacred places, he said.

This statement is misleading.

From the summer of 1941 to 1944, Belarus, then a Soviet republic, was completely occupied by Nazi Germany. A vast majority of Belarusians fought for the Red Army, and, as their territory was occupied, formed one of the wars largest Soviet partisan movements. The war devastated Belarus, which lost an estimated third of its population.

The Germans attempted to recruit local collaborators in Belarus, as they did in other territories they conquered, to carry out certain tasks, including atrocities connected with the Holocaust. However, the population was one of the least receptive to German appeals.

Like collaborators of other nationalities across Europe, Belarusian collaborators sometimes wore or used insignia based on national symbols. For Belarusians, this included the Belarusian white-red-white tricolor. Similarly, Russian collaborators with the Germans used the Russian white-blue-red tricolor, which is also the flag of todays Russian Federation. In fact, collaborationist forces in a number of countries  including Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands - used flags and symbols that their countries still use as military insignia. A failed attempt to form a Waffen SS unit from British Nazi sympathizers even led to the creation of SS insignia bearing the British Union Jack and three lions symbol.

The Belarusian Defense Minister made his comment the same day thousands of opposition protesters flooded into Minsk, Belarus capital. The protests have continued despite over 7,000 arrests, the beating and torture of protesters, and at least two fatalities.

Also on Aug. 23, President Lukashenko was seen in a video holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle after landing at his residence in a helicopter. It is clear from the video that there was no magazine in the weapon, suggesting it may have been unloaded.
The Supreme Court has been hearing pleas regarding cancellation of exams amid the coronavirus crisis. The top court will most likely announce its verdict on the UGC final year exams 2020 on Wednesday, August 26. In the last hearing held on August 18, the apex court had asked all the parties involved in the case to file written petitions, within 3 days.





Dear #UGC Final Year friends,



-Today Supreme Court has NOT pronounced Final Order in our Case



-As concerned Bench is not sitting tomorrow, now the Order is likely to come on Wednesday (26th)



-We are trying to send our request to Honble Court for early Order



Will update again  Alakh Alok Srivastava (@advocate_alakh) August 24, 2020

Advocate Alakh Alok Srivastava, who is representing the students in this case, argued that the UGC guidelines, dated July 6 are violative of Article 14 of the Indian constitution that deals with the right to equality before the law.

The new UGC guidelines, released on July 6, mandated universities across the country to conduct final year examinations by September end.

Also read: Cabinet approves new National Recruitment Agency; to allow common test for all govt jobs

The case which has been going on since July wherein multiple cases were combined under single hearing. A group of 31 students from states like UP, Bihar, Assam, etc had filed a petition in the top court seeking cancellation of exams. The primary bone of contention for the students is the rise in COVID-19 cases at an unprecedented rate. Replies of states like West Bengal, Maharashtra, Delhi, Odisha were also heard wherein the respective state governments decided to cancel the UGC 2020 exams.

Students brought to focus the health risks associated with conducting physical exams in the middle of pandemic through social media platforms and several petitions. Online exams are also not feasible for those students who reside in remote areas. Delhi and Maharashtra governments announced that conducting college exams would not be possible given the COVID-19 crisis and thus, the two states cancelled the final year exams. UGC intervened at this junction and said that its guidelines are all-binding and cannot be disregarded by one state.

Also read: 'Final exam can be postponed, not cancelled,' says UGC to Supreme Court

Also read: UGC Final Year Exam 2020: SC asks if Disaster Management Act can override UGC's notification
Australian Brenton Harrison Tarrant, 29, sits in the dock at the Christchurch High Court for sentencing after pleading guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism in Christchurch (John Kirk-Anderson/Pool Photo via AP)

The white supremacist who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques had intended to burn down the mosques afterwards, a prosecutor said in court on Monday.

New details about the March 2019 attacks were outlined during the first day of a four-day sentencing hearing at the Christchurch High Court.

The hearing gave some families and survivors their first chance to confront the gunman, 29-year-old Australian Brenton Harrison Tarrant.

You killed your own humanity, and I dont think the world will forgive you for your horrible crime, said a tearful Maysoon Salama, the mother of 33-year-old Atta Elayyan, who was killed in the attacks.

You thought you can break us. You failed miserably.

Expand Close Family and survivors from the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings arrive outside the Christchurch High Court (Mark Baker/AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Family and survivors from the March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings arrive outside the Christchurch High Court (Mark Baker/AP)

Tarrant pleaded guilty in March to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism  the first terrorism conviction in New Zealands history.

He could become the first person in New Zealand to be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Tarrant was brought into the courtroom shackled and wearing a grey prison outfit.

In the dock, unshackled and surrounded by five officers, he showed little emotion throughout the hearing. He occasionally looked around the room, tapped his fingers, and watched the survivors as they spoke.

The courtroom was only half full due to coronavirus distancing requirements, while many others watched from adjacent courtrooms where the hearing was streamed.

Survivors and family members occasionally wept and comforted each other.

Expand Close Police marksmen man the roof of Christchurch High Court as the sentencing hearing gets underway (Mark Baker/AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Police marksmen man the roof of Christchurch High Court as the sentencing hearing gets underway (Mark Baker/AP)

The hearing began with prosecutors outlining the attacks in a 26-page summary of facts, the first detailed account by authorities about what happened that day.

Crown prosecutor Barnaby Hawes said that two months before the attacks, Tarrant flew a drone directly over the Al Noor mosque, recording an aerial view of the grounds and buildings and taking note of the entry and exit doors.

Mr Hawes said the gunman planned his attacks for when the maximum number of worshippers were present, and that 190 people were in the Al Noor mosque for Friday prayers on the day of the attacks.

In his car, the gunman had six guns  two AR-15 rifles, two other rifles, and two shotguns, the court heard.

He also brought with him four modified gas containers which he planned to use to burn down the mosques after he finished shooting, Mr Hawes said. The gunman later told police he wished he had used them.

Mr Hawes also detailed the bravery of Naeem Rashid, who was killed at the Al Noor mosque.

He ran at the defendant from the southeastern corner of the room. When Mr Rashid was approximately one metre from the defendant, the defendant swung the AR-15 around and fired four shots at point-blank range, Mr Hawes said.

Expand Close Police stand outside the court as survivors and family members enter (Mark Baker/AP) / Facebook

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Mr Rashid crashed into the defendant and the defendant went down on one knee, Mr Hawes said, adding that Tarrant was able to get back up and shoot Mr Rashid again.

At the second mosque, Abdul Aziz chased Tarrant down the driveway screaming at him, prosecutors said, and threw a discarded rifle at his car, shattering a glass panel. Mr Aziz was not injured.

Tarrant has dismissed his lawyers and is representing himself during the sentencing, raising fears he could try to use the occasion as a platform to promote his racist views.

He can choose to speak once the survivors have spoken, although the judge will likely shut down any attempts he makes to grandstand.

New Zealand abolished the death penalty for murder in 1961, and the longest sentence imposed since then has been life imprisonment with a minimum 30-year non-parole period.

Justice Cameron Mander will decide on the gunmans sentence at the end of the hearing.

Your hatred is unnecessary. If you have done anything, you have brought the world community closer with your evil actions Survivor Gamal Founda

The attacks targeting people praying at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques shocked New Zealand and prompted new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons.

They also prompted global changes to social media protocols after the gunman livestreamed his attack on Facebook, where it was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

Prosecutors said that after Tarrant left the Linwood mosque he planned to drive to the town of Ashburton and attack a third mosque. But he was rammed by two police officers, dragged out of his car and arrested.

Gamal Founda, the imam of the Al Noor mosque who survived the shooting, told the court that the gunmans actions were misguided.

We are a peaceful and loving community who did not deserve your actions, Mr Fouda said.

Your hatred is unnecessary. If you have done anything, you have brought the world community closer with your evil actions.
The stopwatch started ticking for the AMP board last Thursday when the companys largest shareholder Allan Grays chief executive Simon Mawhinney presented chairman David Murray and CEO Francesco De Ferrari with an ultimatum.

Either Murray, along with fellow AMP board member and closest ally John Fraser, resign or Allan Gray would requisition an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders to have the two removed.

The board had seven days to make a decision.

David Murray, John Fraser and Boe Pahari - departed or stood down. Credit:

The retention of senior executive Boe Pahari after alleged sexual harassment claims in 2017 and his elevation to chief executive of AMP Capital in 2020 had infuriated shareholders who wanted heads to roll.
Years Later, ChipTic Founder Explains Company's Demise

August 24 2020

Last month, PokerNews published a two-part feature detailing the oral history of ChipTic. A program that promised to revolutionize the way poker was presented to fans, ChipTic got off to an auspicious start before ultimately meeting a massively disappointing end well short of the expectations of nearly everyone involved.

Despite the well-documented fate of ChipTic, lingering questions remained unanswered for years. Everyone saw the failure, but why had it failed? How had everything gone so wrong, sinking a project with such promise?

One man who can answer those questions reached out to PokerNews in the aftermath of the oral histories: company founder John Beveridge. For years, a non-disclosure agreement forced his lips fully zipped. Finally able to open up, he expounded on ChipTic's rise and fall over an hour-long call.

An Idea and a Fateful Choice

Beveridge was just a recreational poker player participating in the WSOP when he had an experience common to many little-known players there.

He played a hand against Allen Kessler, wherein he said he busted "Chainsaw" with a flush over a straight. As he stacked his chips, reporters rushed over and asked him what happened.

"I tell them and they publish that Kessler was busted by a player in Seat 5," Beveridge says. "No mention of me, and I thought there has to be a way to allow the average recreational players to be recognized and to allow people who follow them at home to see some of the action instead of it being all about the known players."

As owner of an electronic solutions company called PageMail, the Canadian was uniquely suited to turn this idea into reality. While he isn't a programmer, he had the tools to get the job done thanks to his industry work and connections. Plus, he had the dough.

"Back in the day we were making huge money," he says.

It took three years to develop the software, which Beveridge named ChipTic  a reference to the way a stack rises and falls similar to a stock on a ticker.

Software in hand, it was time to find a tablet to run the program.

"The BlackBerry tablet offered an easy cradle charger, durability and a nice, bright screen," Beveridge says. "You can drop this sucker flat on its face and it's not gonna make any difference. It's tough. The screen was very, very tough and the touch screen was one of the best in the day."

It also likely didn't hurt that BlackBerry shipped them 900 tablets for free, according to Dan Carpenter, whom Beveridge had hired to head the operation.

However, that fateful decision would have devastating consequences down the line, for reasons nobody could have foreseen at the time.

Follow all the latest from the WSOP - LIVE! The cards are in the air in the GGPoker portion of the event. The PokerNews live reporting team is on top of all things WSOP. Don't miss a beat! FOLLOW HERE

The Hidden Flaw

The trial in Iowa revealed no issues with the tablets, but another cog had to be added to the machine with the move to the Rio in order to cover the vastness of the rooms with an internet signal.

ChipTic partnered with Xirrus, which Beveridge says produced the fastest and most powerful WiFi access points at the time. Amazon, Brasilia and Pavilion rooms at Rio were each equipped with a single 10-radio access point high in the scaffolding.

The inside of a Xirrus WiFi array (c/o Wikimedia Commons)

The "very sophisticated and extremely powerful" units, which measure about two feet across, have their 10 radios arrayed in a circle, each pointing in a different direction of the room and broadcasting a signal. The BlackBerrys would pick up the signal aimed at their sections. At the surface level, everything looked good  the tablets showed five bars of signal.

Beneath the hood, though, corruption spread, unbeknownst to the ChipTic team.

When the connection issues surfaced, a closed-door meeting occurred with reps from ChipTic, Xirrus, BlackBerry and the Rio. Everyone pored over the logs until the Xirrus engineer raised a question that remains rooted in Beveridge's memory.

"In this multi-radio landscape, how does the tablet choose what radio to use?"

The BlackBerry rep responded that the tablet chose the strongest signal, ignored the ones it couldn't sense and blacklisted the weak signals. The Xirrus rep asked how long the blacklist lasted. "Permanently," came the response.

"Everybody fell out of their chair," Beveridge says. "As the tablets were recharged and moved about the room, individual radios on the access points were steadily being blacklisted until the majority of tablets saw no valid radio. This wonderful tablet we were using was killing us.

"I think back on that moment and my back pocket hurts so much. We had half a million dollars floating down the drain with three lines of code."

Life as a Poker "Pariah"

According to Beveridge, that programming was far outside industry standard at the time. A "simple" fix came down more than a year later, but it was far too late to save ChipTic. They were sunk by a freak programming misstep.

And thanks to a non-disclosure agreement, Beveridge couldn't even tell anyone what happened. Not his own staff nor their new partners at WSOP, who were less than pleased that the promised revolution had fallen apart more quickly than a typical new development on the North side of the strip.

"I listened to them roast my ass and I had to take it," Beveridge says.

Beveridge became, in his own words, "a pariah." He had once lived a high-rolling poker life, chumming it up with poker celebrities in home games and flying to Macau to play high-stakes poker. Those days were over.

Beveridge, competing in an APPT event in 2018.

"I did my best to pay everyones salaries out of my own pocket and retired to lick my wounds," he says.

He considered giving it another go a couple of years later, but he found himself short on both capital and respect in the community. Now 72, he calls Fallsview his home casino but mostly plays small-stakes cash online. He has also been spotted playing events in the Philippines, where he spends some of his time as well.

Would ChipTic still be around if, as Charlie Ciresi guessed, they had used new iPads instead of BlackBerrys? Nobody can say for sure, but ultimately, the years have made Beveridge comfortable shouldering the blame.

"I take full responsibility for the colossal failure," he says. "The buck stopped with me."
PORT HOPE, ON, Aug. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cameco and Bruce Power announced today a series of initiatives  highlighted by the creation of a centre for next generation nuclear technologies  to leverage their existing partnership to help restart the Canadian economy, protect the environment and fight diseases like COVID-19 around the world. In addition, further to the Bruce Power Life-Extension Program and the existing long-term supply agreement, Cameco and Bruce Power have announced the additional supply of 1,600 specialized fuel bundles for Unit 6 scheduled for restart in 2024.

The two companies are industry leaders in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Canada, directly and indirectly employing 27,000 workers and creating $9-12 billion of investment annually in the Canadian economy. Bruce Power, Cameco and the entire Canadian nuclear industry remain at the forefront of science and innovation in the production of GHG emissions-free power and cancer-fighting isotopes.

Throughout the pandemic, Bruce Power and Cameco have been able to ensure the safe and reliable supply of GHG emissions-free electricity to millions of people in Canada, and will now leverage one of Canadas largest infrastructure projects, the Bruce Power Life-Extension Program, to help rebuild the national economy through innovation, including exploring project acceleration and other opportunities.

To expand on their important inter-provincial partnership, as founding members of the Nuclear Innovation Institute (NII), Bruce Power and Cameco are proud to announce the launch of the NII Centre for Next Generation Nuclear Technologies to identify post-COVID economic, environmental and health-care opportunities.

The new centre will focus on next generation nuclear technologies by advancing the existing expertise of suppliers, regulators and operators to support future economic, environmental and export opportunities for Ontario, Saskatchewan and beyond. Innovations in nuclear energy will help support new technologies like small modular reactors (SMRs), cancer-fighting isotopes and hydrogen development by using infrastructure investments that will drive the economy now and power the world of the future. It will also look at how the current Bruce Power site output can be further enhanced with new technologies and as foundational enablers.

Todays announcement, along with the existing long-term arrangements between Bruce Power and Cameco, opens the door to assist the provincial governments in both Saskatchewan and Ontario with getting the economy back on its feet after six difficult months working to protect and keep people safe in both provinces, said Mike Rencheck, President and CEO of Bruce Power. Were extremely grateful to Premiers Ford and Moe, and the members of their respective governments, for realizing the positive impact that the nuclear industry has on the lives of Canadians.

Our focus, through the Centre, on next generation nuclear technology is anchored on the basis of building from our existing assets including life extension and efficiencies, partnerships and supply chain. This has the potential to fully leverage existing assets, reducing the need for more costly new generation in the future, creating a foundation for new medical isotopes and a hydrogen economy all while laying the foundation for new nuclear such as SMRs.

Cameco and Bruce Power will also be expanding their role in support of the production of life-saving medical isotopes. With its facility in Cobourg, ON, Cameco will contribute its expertise to the development of Bruce Powers new Isotope Production System being developed by its partner IsoGen that will help produce Lutetium-177, an isotope used to treat prostate cancer and neuroendocrine tumors. Bruce Power aims to begin harvesting Lutetium-177 in 2022. Cameco is a key supplier of materials in the production of Cobalt-60, which is produced in partnership with Ottawa-based Nordion, used to sterilize medical equipment and treat breast cancer and brain tumours.

Medical isotopes and leveraging our existing infrastructure in a post-COVID world are an important part of the future of nuclear, and Bruce Power is a leader and innovator in this sector, said Tim Gitzel, president and CEO of Cameco. I am proud that Cameco is able to contribute to this important work, especially now when the need for sterilized medical supplies is so high.

Were pleased to have our Ontario and Saskatchewan Premiers join us in celebrating our announcement today as the strength of the nuclear industry is grounded in meaningful relationships across the industry and across provinces..

Through their work on the Retooling and Economic Recovery Council, Bruce Power and Cameco focused on helping to ensure their communities had the tools they needed to endure the pandemic and now the focus has turned to powering the recovery.

The Life-Extension Program will continue to be a key economic driver and today will see a new arrangement for start-up fuel to be provided by Cameco when Bruce Powers nuclear reactors are ready to return to service following Major Component Replacement, beginning with the Unit 6 reactor. Cameco will supply 1,600 specialized fuel bundles for the safe restart of Unit 6, scheduled for 2024. This builds on the existing fuel arrangements between the two organizations announced in 2017 which was estimated to be worth $2 billion at the time and over the life of the contracts.

This new initiative will help drive Ontario-made and Canadian-made innovation for these emerging technologies and support our provinces economic recovery, said Ontario Premier Doug Ford. I want to thank Bruce Power and Cameco for this important investment, as well as for their generous community and PPE donations to support our front-line heroes and those in need over the past few months.

Working together, we will ensure our communities can recover and our economy can come roaring back.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe also offered his praise for the strong partnership.

The announcement today from Cameco and Bruce Power underscores the importance of Canadas nuclear industry, which is world class in every respect, from mining to research to power production, said Premier Moe. In Saskatchewan, were grateful for the contributions Cameco and Bruce Power are making every day to Canadas economic and social well-being.

About Cameco

Cameco is one of the largest global providers of the uranium fuel needed to energize a clean-air world. Our competitive position is based on our controlling ownership of the worlds largest high-grade reserves and low-cost operations. Utilities around the world rely on our nuclear fuel products to generate power in safe, reliable, carbon-free nuclear reactors. Our shares trade on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges. Our head office is in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

About Bruce Power

Formed in 2001, Bruce Power is an electricity company based in Bruce County, Ontario. We are powered by our people. Our 4,200 employees are the foundation of our accomplishments and are proud of the role they play in safely delivering clean, reliable, low-cost nuclear power to families and businesses across the province. Bruce Power has worked hard to build strong roots in Ontario and is committed to protecting the environment and supporting the communities in which we live. Learn more at www.brucepower.com and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

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Former Rep. Jim Walsh today endorsed Joe Biden for president, joining a group of more than two dozen retired Republican members of Congress who openly broke with their party and President Donald Trump.

Walsh represented the Syracuse area in Congress for 20 years, retiring after the 2008 election as a senior member of the influential House Appropriations Committee.

It was not a difficult decision, Walsh told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard when asked about his endorsement.

Vice President Biden has an excellent chance to beat this guy, and I think Biden has the qualities and values to clean up this mess that President Trump has gotten us into, Walsh said.

Walsh said he hopes other Republicans who share his concerns about Trump will also vote for Biden.

I think my endorsement of Joe Biden and rejection of President Trump speaks for itself, Walsh said. I knew this would draw attention, and I hope it will encourage other Republicans. I am a rock-ribbed Republican, but I dont like what President Trump has done to my party. Im hoping that my taking a public position will convince other Republicans to do the same.

Walsh and the other former GOP members of Congress cited Trumps corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course in their decision to endorse Biden.

The GOP group includes three former senators, including Jeff Flake of Arizona and John Warner of Virginia.

The Biden campaign said the group will encourage Republicans to organize their communities for Biden using the Vote Joe app and other organizing tools.

Walsh said he found it easy to support Biden because of his record during his 36 years as a senator and eight years as vice president.

There are a lot of people in that party that I could never support, Walsh said. Biden is a moderate Democrat. He is a thoughtful guy. I know his politics. They are not radical. I think he would be good for the country for a lot of reasons, including the fact that he is a good human being.

Walsh said he has confidence that Biden can lead the United States response to the coronavirus pandemic and help the economy recover from its pandemic-related losses.

We need someone who can get everyone pulling in the same direction, Walsh said, adding that Biden has a record of uniting people. Hes the antithesis of Trump.

Walsh refused to endorse Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign. He became a prominent supporter of former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and served on his national steering committee. Kasich visited Central New York twice during the campaign with Walsh by his side.

Walsh said he wrote in Kasichs name on the ballot in the November 2016 election between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Walsh said he talked recently with Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, to let him know that he planned to endorse Biden.

Katko refused to endorse Trump in 2016, questioned his fitness for office, and wrote in the name of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley on his presidential ballot. But Katko endorsed Trump in January, touting the presidents economic record.

Walsh said he still supports Katko.

Hes as good a representative as this area has ever had, Walsh said. Hes pretty well respected within the party and the other side of aisle.

Walsh is the father of Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh, an independent. Ben Walsh has not made an endorsement in the 2020 presidential race.

Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact Mark Weiner anytime by: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751
The white supremacist who murdered 51 Muslims in last year's New Zealand mosques shooting showed no emotion Monday as distraught survivors confronted him in court with harrowing accounts of the atrocity.

At the opening of the sentencing hearing in a Christchurch courtroom, prosecutors revealed chilling details of a meticulously planned attack in which Brenton Tarrant wanted "to have shot more people than he did".

With the Australian gunman face-to-face with the bereaved families and wounded for the first time, survivors told of hiding under bodies, of forgiving Tarrant, and of living with the sound of an automatic rifle ringing in their ears.

Held amid tight security with snipers positioned on downtown rooftops, the hearing was told how on March 15 last year the heavily-armed Tarrant opened fire on men, women and children, ignoring pleas for help and driving over one body as he moved from one mosque to the next.

When he saw three-year-old Mucad Ibrahim clinging to his father's leg, Tarrant killed him "with two precisely aimed shots," prosecutor Barnaby Hawes told the court.

Tarrant has pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder, 40 of attempted murder and one of terrorism after storming into two mosques in Christchurch, with the rampage ending when police stopped him as he travelled to a third.

Lawyers expect the 29-year-old to be the first person jailed for life without parole in New Zealand.

Wearing grey prison clothing and surrounded in the dock by three police officers, the 29-year-old remained silent, occasionally looking around the room, as Hawes delivered a chilling summary of facts.

"He admitted going into both mosques intending to kill as many people as he could," Hawes said.

"He stated that he wanted to have shot more people than he did and was on the way to another mosque in Ashburton to carry out another attack when he was stopped," he said.

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"In his interview, the defendant referred to his attacks as 'terror attacks'.

"He further stated the attacks were motivated by his ideological beliefs and he intended to instil fear into those he described as 'invaders', including the Muslim population or more generally non-European immigrants."

- 'Brainwashed terrorist' -

Abdiaziz Ali Jama, a 44-year-old Somali refugee, saw her brother-in-law Muse Awale shot dead, and said she continued to suffer trauma.

"I see the images and I hear the constant sound rata-rata-rata -- the sound of the gun shooting -- in my head," said Jama.

"I have flashbacks, seeing dead bodies all around me. Blood everywhere," added a son of Ashraf Ali, another victim.

Gamal Fouda, the Al Noor mosque Imam, said he was standing in the pulpit "and saw the hate in the eyes of a brainwashed terrorist" before telling Tarrant: "Your hatred is unnecessary."

The court was told Tarrant arrived in New Zealand in 2017 and based himself in Dunedin, 360 kilometres (220 miles) south of Christchurch, where he built up a collection of high-powered firearms and purchased more than 7,000 rounds of ammunition.

Two months before the attack, he drove to Christchurch and flew a drone over the Al Noor mosque, filming the grounds and buildings, including entrances and exits, with detailed notes about travelling between mosques.

On Friday, March 15, 2019 he left his Dunedin address and drove to Christchurch armed with a range of high-powered weapons on which he had written references to historic battles, figures of the Crusades and more recent terror attacks and symbols.

In the minutes leading up to the storming of the al Noor mosque, he sent his radical 74-page manifesto to an extremist website, alerted his family to what he was about to do and sent emails containing threats to attack the mosques to numerous media agencies.

Tarrant is representing himself at the hearing. Judge Cameron Mander has imposed reporting restrictions to prevent him using the court as a platform for extremist views.

Mander is expected to hand down a sentence on Thursday.

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A few of the 32 persons accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case are likely to file written replies through their counsels in the special CBI court on Monday.

On August 21, Surendra Kumar Yadav, judge, special CBI court, had ordered all the persons accused in the case to file their written replies on August 24.

The CBI court has ordered all accused in the Babri Masjid demolition case to file written replies on Monday (August 24). I will try to file the reply today, said lawyer KK Mishra.

Mishra is representing senior BJP leaders, including LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Kalyan Singh among others, in the Babri Masjid demolition case.

The CBI had filed its written argument in the case on Friday (August 21).

Also Read: Complete trial of BJP leaders in Babri Masjid demolition case by September end: SC

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court extended the deadline of the special CBI court hearing the Babri Masjid demolition case in Lucknow by a month till September 30. The apex courts deadline for the pronouncement of the judgment in the Ayodhya case was to expire on August 31.

Senior BJP leaders LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Kalyan Singh are among 32 accused persons in the Babri Masjid demolition case.

All 32 accused persons in the Babri Masjid demolition case, including senior BJP leaders LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharti and others, have recorded their statements before the CBI court.

The Supreme Court on July 19, 2019, had extended the time frame for completing the criminal trial in the case by six months, and also set a deadline of nine months for the final order. The deadline expired on April 19 this year and the special judge wrote to the apex court on May 6, seeking an extension.

On May 8, the Supreme Court issued a new deadline of August 31 with instructions to deliver the judgment by then.

On April 19, 2017, the Supreme Court had ordered the special judge to conduct a day-to-day trial, concluding it in two years.

According to legal experts, not all 32 accused persons will be able to file their reply on Monday and are likely to seek more time from the court.

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BAY VILLAGE, Ohio -- The Lake Erie Nature & Science Center is serious about getting families together again at their popular facility. Free general admission is resuming this week.

To continue serving children and families in our community, we are pleased to announce that free general admission is resuming on Tuesday, Aug. 25, but registration is required, said Executive Director Catherine Timko.

General admission at no charge allows you and your family to enjoy live animal exhibits indoors and outdoors, as well as displays about natural history and space science, she said.

Scheduling a visit helps to ensure capacity and distancing protocols and allows time for us to clean the facility, she said.

Timko said the employees are following protocols recommended by the Ohio Department of Health and Cuyahoga County Board of Health. Face coverings are now required for visitors ages 7 and older.

And you are strongly encouraged to visit only when you are feeling well, she said.

The center has been open to children and families for 75 years.

(The center) educates and inspires all of us to understand, appreciate and take responsibility for our natural world, Timko noted.

Members of the Lake Erie Nature & Science Center can have early access to registration for general admission visits by signing into their user accounts.

The mission of Lake Erie Nature & Science Center is to connect children and families with nature. As a nonprofit organization, it relies on donations, grants and program fees. Donations may be made online.

For more information, to register for a visit or to make a donation, go to www.lensc.org or call 440-871-2900.

Read more from the West Shore Sun.
President Donald Trump has approved Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for eastern Iowas Linn County, which was the county that was hardest hit by last weeks rare hurricane-strength windstorm.

Gov. Kim Reynolds office announced the approval. The FEMA individual assistance program helps homeowners, renters, and businesses affected by natural disasters. It includes assistance with housing, personal property replacement, medical expenses and legal services.

The approval was welcomed Friday in the countys largest city, Cedar Rapids, which suffered widespread damage from the Aug. 10 storm that saw winds of up to 140 mph.

This will provide much needed support to a number of critical needs in our community, city manager Jeff Pomeranz said at a news conference.

Nearly 8,000 homes and businesses in the Cedar Rapids area remained without power Friday afternoon, some 11 days after the storm, an Alliant Energy official said.

For those of you still without power, we are doing all we can do quickly and safely, Alliant Energy vice president Joel Schmidt said.

He said crews were bringing in smaller equipment as their work shifted to backyards and individual homes.

With high temperatures expected over the weekend, the city announced Friday that it would open the U.S. Cellular Center on Saturday and Sunday as a cooling station for those who may lack air conditioning.

Earlier this week during a brief stop in Cedar Rapids, Trump promised to approve Reynolds request for $180 million in FEMA aid for damaged homes and infrastructure for 27 counties in the state. He also promised additional funding for farmers who were affected by the storm.

The FEMA request includes $100 million in damage to private utilities and $82.7 million in damage to homes, according to early state estimates. In additional, farmers sustained an estimated $2.7 billion in damage to crops, grain storage and buildings, which is part of the declaration and would likely be covered under various U.S. Department of Agriculture programs.

The FEMA requests for the 26 other Iowa counties are still being assessed.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Windstorm Oklahoma Iowa
Israel has bombed Gaza, run by the Islamist group Hamas, almost daily since August 6, while balloons carrying fire bombs and, less frequently, rocket fire have hit Israel from Gaza

The Israeli army said Monday it had again hit Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight, in retaliation for incendiary balloon and rocket attacks launched from the Israeli-beseiged Palestinian enclave.

Israel has bombed Gaza, run by the Islamist group Hamas, almost daily since August 6, while balloons carrying fire bombs and, less frequently, rocket fire have hit Israel from Gaza.

An Egyptian delegation has been trying to broker a return to an informal truce.

"During the day, explosive and arson balloons were launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel," the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said in a statement.

"In response, a short while ago, IDF fighter jets, tanks and aircraft struck military posts and an underground infrastructure" belonging to Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip, it said.

On Thursday night, Gaza militants fired a dozen rockets at Israel, which responded with air strikes on a rocket-manufacturing plant and underground infrastructure.

Israeli fire-fighters meanwhile continued to put out blazes on farms and scrubland caused by the incendiary balloons launched from Gaza.

Egypt has acted to calm repeated flare-ups of violence in recent years to prevent any repetition of the three wars Israel and Hamas have fought since 2008.

The latest Israeli strikes came just before US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo touched down in Tel Aviv to kick off a five-day trip to the Middle East.

His visit will focus on Israel's normalising diplomatic ties with the UAE, seen as a betrayal by many Palestinians, and urging other Arab states to follow suit.

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China Launches Advanced Warship for Pakistan Navy

By Ayaz Gul August 23, 2020

China has launched the first of four "most advanced" warships it is building for Pakistan amid deepening defense and economic ties between the two allied nations.

The development comes as both the countries are locked in border tensions with their mutual neighbor India.

The Pakistan Navy said Sunday that Chinese state-owned Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai held the launching ceremony for the Type-054A/P frigate, with top officials from the service in attendance.

The Navy said in a statement the vessels are state of the art frigates equipped with modern surface, subsurface and anti-air weapons and sensors. "These ships will significantly contribute in maintaining peace and security in our area of responsibility," it added.

The statement did not mention the cost of military vessels, but reported estimates are more than $350 million each.

Once constructed, the ships will be one of the largest and technologically advanced surface platforms of the Pakistan Navy fleet, boosting its capability to respond to future challenges, the service said.

The Chinese builder is expected to deliver all four units to Pakistan by 2021, which Chinese media said could "double the combat power" of the Pakistan Navy fleet.

Pakistani officials said the Type-054A/P frigate is in service with China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and recognized as its backbone.

China and Pakistan are jointly producing various military-related hardware, including the JF-17 multirole combat aircraft, demonstrating the strong mutual defense ties.

Economic ties

The two allies in recent years have also cemented economic cooperation under Beijing's global infrastructure Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The BRI-related China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has brought nearly $30 billion in Chinese investment over the past six years, building Pakistani roads, ports and power plants.

Critics, however, see the investments as a burden on heavily indebted Pakistan.

U.S. officials have termed CPEC loans as a "debt trap" for Islamabad, though Pakistan and China dismiss the criticism, saying it has stemmed from "a lack of information and misunderstandings" about the collaboration.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is due to visit Islamabad later this year that Pakistani officials say will boost the BRI-linked economic cooperation. Xi was expected to visit Pakistan in May but the trip was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi last week hosted his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, for a bilateral "strategic dialogue," where the two sides agreed to push ahead with new mega projects under CPEC. They include a $6.8 billion railway program to improve Pakistan's main railway line, known as Main Line 1 (ML1), which runs for nearly 1,900 kilometers.

"Both China and Pakistan reaffirmed the vitality of the time-tested and all-weather strategic cooperative partnership between the two countries," a post-meeting joint statement said.

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By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Energy companies are weighing production cuts at U.S. Gulf Coast oil refineries after shutting half the area's offshore crude oil output ahead of back-to-back storms aiming for the coast this week.

Tropical Storms Marco and Laura, a rare double-team approach to the U.S. Gulf Coast, threaten days of heavy rains and strong winds this week. Firms had shut wells accounting for 1 million barrels per day of oil on Sunday, as one storm is forecast to become a damaging Category 2 hurricane.

Oil prices on Monday rose 1% to $44.83 a barrel on hopes for a COVID-19 vaccine and despite lackluster demand for fuels amid economic declines from the pandemic. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the largest Gulf Coast oil-export facility, halted operations at its marine terminal.

At least one top refiner is weighing a shutdown for the larger and potentially more damaging Storm Laura, which is forecast to strike the Texas/Louisiana coast by Thursday as a Category 2 hurricane with 105 mile per hour (169 km/h) winds and heavy rain. Some meteorologists say the storm could strengthen to a major hurricane before it makes landfall.

Operators including Exxon Mobil, Valero and Royal Dutch Shell are planning to maintain operations at Louisiana plants as the first cyclone arrives Monday, sources familiar with plans at those refineries said. Storm Marco is expected to drop up to 5 inches (12.7 cm) of rain along the Louisiana coast.

Refineries in east Texas including those operated by Exxon, Valero, Total and Motiva are weighing plans for Storm Laura when it hits the Texas-Louisiana border.

Motiva Enterprises may shut the largest crude oil refinery in the United States, people familiar with plant operations said. Its 607,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, could be drenched by both storms, the people said.

During 2017's Hurricane Harvey, which occurred three years ago this week, five feet (1.52 meters) of rain fell on east Texas, forcing Motiva to halt operations for nearly two weeks and others to take shorter shut-downs.

That storm led Motiva, which is owned by the world's top oil producer Saudi Aramco, to cancel plans to expand the refinery. (Reporting by Erwin Seba; Writing by Gary McWilliams; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
As of Sunday, the "Be Someone" graffiti has been painted over with #SAVEOURCHILDREN.

No single group has made a claim to the graffiti, according to the Houston Chronicle. Union Pacific spokeswoman Raquel Espinoza announced that the incident would also be investigated internally, and the railroad company might involve the Houston Police Department.

Related: Union Pacific plans to investigate QAnon-linked vandalism to Be Someone bridge

There's been much speculation about the new #SAVEOURCHILDREN graffiti, as the phrase is widely associated with an organization called Save the Children, a London based "humanitarian organization that aims to improve the lives of children around the world, including work against child trafficking," as reported by the Tampa Bay Times.

But the organization has lately distanced itself from the viral use of the #SAVEOURCHILDREN message, which has received numerous retweets and Facebook shares in recent weeks.

The Houston Chronicle reported that "the slogan has recently been associated with the convoluted, ultra right-wing conspiracy theory known as 'QAnon,' which alleges that a high-ranking government official known as 'QAnon' shares information about an anti-Trump 'deep state' often tied to satanism and child sex trafficking."

Followers of the QAnon movement acted in a counterproductive manner, by flooding the nonprofit National Human Trafficking Hotline with phone calls, which put a strain on the limited resources needed to track actual, real missing children.

While the new graffiti doesn't imply a specific message, I'm not sure if I'm more upset that our widely adored "Be Someone" sign is temporarily gone, or because people thought it was a good idea to spread a conspiracy theory. Either way, I'm hoping that Union Pacific finds whoever is responsible, Houston's balance is restored, and our "Be Someone" sign returns.
The farmer accused of killing Arkansas resident Sydney Sutherland was known to the victim and joined a Facebook group dedicated to finding her after she went missing.

Sutherland was last seen running on State Highway 18, near Newport, Arkansas, on Wednesday, and the 25-year-olds body was found on Friday following a two day search involving helicopters and K-9 units, according to the Daily Mail.

Quake Lewellyn was arrested later on Friday evening on suspicion of capital murder, but the authorities did not reveal what caused them to detain the 28-year-old, according to People.

The family of the victims boyfriend claimed that Mr Lewellyn confessed to the crime, but this was not confirmed by the authorities.

Over the weekend, Jackson County sheriff David Lucas told reporters that that Mr Lewellyn and Sutherland knew each other, but did not elaborate further on their alleged link.

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The 28-year-old is also listed as a member of a Facebook group that was set up to find Sutherland after she went missing on Wednesday, according to the The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Although more than 200 volunteers joined the search for Sutherland, there was no indication that Mr Lewellyn was part of the group that looked along the highway last week.

The suspect was filmed arriving at the Jackson County Courthouse on Monday wearing a bullet-proof vest, and was hurried into the building.

According to journalist Mitchell McCoy, who was at the courthouse on Monday, Jackson County prosecutor Henry Boyce confirmed that Mr Lewellyn may face the death penalty if he is found guilty.

Mr Boyce said: Capital murder only carries two punishments. Thats life without and death and at this point both are on the table.

After Sutherlands body was found on Friday, the sheriff said that the search for Sutherland was emotional for many of the local residents, and added: Its taken a toll, it really has.

Just because I know the people of this county. I know this family personally. I know this young lady personally. Ive known her and watched her grow up. It hits me personally.

Mr Lewellyn is being held without bond at the Jackson County Jail and has his arraignment scheduled for 1 October.
How about a singalong. Crew members should be taught the old song, Low Bridge, particularly the chorus, which goes: "Low bridge, everybody down, low bridge cos were coming to a town. Singing this at regular intervals will lift everyones spirits on their daily commute and will ensure they all have a safe journey as well as some incidental exercise. - Merona Martin, Meroo Meadow Fiasco indeed. I doubt that even the excellent scriptwriters of Yes, Minister and Utopia could come up with this. - Sally James, Russell Lea Could I suggest that the ferries be named Daffy and Donald? - Matt Petersen, Randwick Allowing small boats from Indonesia to enter Australian waters was always going to be a bad move. - Meredith Williams, Northmead One way or another, heads may roll. - Doug Walker, Baulkham Hills

Frigate. - Rick Johnston, Potts Point Duck, duck goose! - Lyn Savage, Coogee Build-to-rent must help those locked out of system Planning Minister Rob Stokes is correct in identifying the solution to Sydneys boom and bust property market by making long-term rental more available and affordable ("Sydney can get off the property roller-coaster", August 24). However, this must be extended to the many thousands who will need rent assistance because of the governments woeful lack of public housing, which has been decimated over the years. - Josephine Piper, Miranda Build-to-rent makes sense for both tenants and owners with the added benefit of reducing the drama plaguing many strata schemes when the interests of owner-occupiers and investors come into conflict. Plus, it is a great opportunity for super funds to invest in growing the housing stock while giving renters greater security and longer terms. Whats not to like? - Penny Hackett, Willoughby

All developers are not speculators and as a land and housing developer in Sydney for more than 60 years I can assure Stokes that we have never held stock back from the market. With interest accruing daily and with GST, land tax, levies and rates adding to the holding costs of development, we cant hold back stock. Also, if we dont sell, we cant release our equity to buy new properties to grow our business. Reducing the GST on housing, which adds 10 per cent to the price of all new housing, would go a long way to helping alleviate the affordability issues. - Peter Icklow, Pymble So with this new build-to-rent scheme, what prevents developers building and then "renting" to family members? Seems to be a chance to build for family and mates without paying land tax. Not being strata-owned, the developer owner could make internal modifications through a private certifier to form larger units. And who is going to monitor that there are in fact residential tenancies in the units, given such leases are not registered? - Polly Seidler, Darlinghurst A certifiable alternative This government has now provided another layer of cost with a watchdog, after giving developers everything they have wanted. This has resulted in noncompliance, and defective buildings ("New building watchdog warns rogue certifiers", August 24). The rectification cost of these developments is currently being paid by the purchasers, not the developers. The general public no longer has confidence in the system. Is it not time that all building certifiers were selected and paid by local government with developers paying the cost? This would improve confidence, save overall cost in the current system, eliminate the need for a watchdog and cease the current heartache, stress and rectification cost experienced by unfortunate purchasers. - Brian McDonald, Willoughby Stacking shows a broken system

Sadly, the prize of affluence and influence is simply far too glittering to stop branch stacking in the current system ("Stacking scandal embroils top Libs", August 24). With only limited proportionality, our two-party system is now deeply institutionalised and has all the problems associated with long-standing institutions, such as corruption, nepotism and loss of purpose. There are reforms that could stop career politicians. Introduce term limits: a maximum of four at federal and three in State and local government, and a four-year ban on staffers running for office after their final date of employment with an MP or their party. With that, and the multi-member proportional electoral system that New Zealand successfully adopted, we may just return our political future to the people. - Colin Hesse, Marrickville It is not just in the USA that "democracy" is at risk. Voters in Australia are reluctant to vote for people outside the two major parties Labor or Liberal/National, and yet their candidates are selected by relatively small numbers. Branch stacking distorts this even further and yet both parties have struggled to control rorts. One punishing electoral cycle is all it would really take to make politicians realise that they are the representatives of the population as a whole, and then perhaps we could get a Parliament we respect. - Brenton McGeachie, Queanbeyan West It looks like our neighbours on the other side of the fence have been stacking branches as well. However, their pile has developed an extreme lean to the right and is now a hazard. Best to put a match to it before the fire season. - Neil Reckord, Armidale End this national blight The article about Indigenous deaths in custody ("Were people, we need justice: inside the vicious prison cycle", August 24) brought tears of frustration and anger to my eyes. The incarceration of so many Indigenous people, some only children, is a national disgrace. It doesnt have to be this way. The use of alternatives, such the involvement of elders and even victims in sentencing and more help on release, can turn this around. Lets do it for Australias reputation as a just and humane nation. - Andrew Macintosh, Cromer

Aboriginal people are over-represented in prison but its a bit rich to blame the courts ("Systemic injustice must be addressed", August 24). A number of studies have failed to establish significant racial bias against Indigenous offenders in the legal system with regard to the likelihood of imprisonment once adjustments are made for factors courts are required to take into account. Sixty-three per cent of Aboriginal people in prison are there for violent offences. Their primary victims are Aboriginal women and children. The violence is a product of a chain of events that starts with colonisation and dispossession and stretches forward in time through trauma, loss of purpose, child neglect, substance abuse, depression, poor school performance and unemployment. As I argued in my book Arresting Incarceration: Pathways out of Indigenous Imprisonment, if you want to understand why Aboriginal people are over-represented in prison, you need to face the uncomfortable fact that rates of Aboriginal involvement in serious crime are higher than those of non-Aboriginal people. Dealing with the underlying causes of this should be a priority for every Australian government. - Don Weatherburn, UNSW National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre Dodgy edifice A worker's compensation insurer who can't even manage their own workplace relations ("'Betrayed, destroyed': icare whistleblower hounded out", August 24)? This house of cards is only built on the Premier's support of the Treasurer's support of icare. It's time the whole deal folded. - Marie Healy, Hurlstone Park Never so care-less Cettina Borg-Musin asks whether those super-rich owners of childcare centres with grossly underpaid staff have a conscience (Letters, August 24). A similar question could be asked of equally well-off owners of for-profit aged care nursing homes. Since in both cases their wealth is accumulated on the backs of employees who make a pittance, not only is the obvious answer an emphatic "no", but we also need to stop them using the word "care" to describe their core business. - Anne Ring, Coogee

Whitlam reached out Amanda Vanstone praises Richard Nixon but fails to mention Gough Whitlam who, as opposition leader, preceded Nixon's visit to China ("Coexistence the key with China", August 24). He was vilified by the Liberal, Country and National parties, and the mainstream press. As with so many things, Whitlam's foresight was way beyond that of the blinkered Coalition. - Tony Doyle, Fairy Meadow Wrist-slap technique Ive finally worked out what corporate bonuses are for. When your company really, really screws up by doing something really, really stupid, like blowing up Aboriginal caves of cultural significance, you can take away a portion of the offending executives bonus  not all of it, mind. Which means you dont have to sack anyone. - Susan Geason, Bondi Junction Damp argument

During the recent bushfire crisis, armchair experts repeatedly blamed the greenies for the lack of hazard-reduction burning. Has anyone noticed any hazard-reduction burning this winter in the Sydney region? Nil. Not because of rabid greenies but the reality that wet bush doesnt burn. So can we make sure that the debate is sensible when the next climate-induced extreme weather is upon us. - Frank Gasparre, Eastwood Nautical NIMBYs Its a simply case of blue versus red. (Kick your teeth out: Sydney Harbour suburb caught in ugly turf war, August 24). Berrys Bay, McMahons Point, has accommodated Sydneys necessary maritime services uninterrupted since the 1850s. In the blue corner, we have the newly arrived  a powerful lobby of self-entitled waterfront dwellers demanding that the bay is cleared of anything that smells like a paintbrush or looks like a caulking iron. In the red corner, a small business employing a rare band of skilled shipwrights and maritime tradesmen, who spend at least part of their time working on the yachts of the aforementioned. I fear the irony would be drowned by the applause of the McMahons Point elite if I suggested the whole pesky business should be moved somewhere West of the Divide. - John Westacott, Killcare A long trek, after all With federal Parliament now operating virtually, will we hear "beam me up, Scotty"? - Anne Szczurowski, Lambton

No escape Captiousness was a new one on me, John Carmody (Letters, August 24), but my etymological dictionary was very helpful. Using deceptive, fallacious arguments, it is derived from the Latin captus, meaning taken in or caught. I guess thats what enabled Scott Morrison to say gotcha! to Peter Dutton? - Jill Gordon, Roseville Tune deaf Singing may well ease anxiety (Letters, August 24) but mine seems to have the opposite effect. - Denis Suttling, Newport Beach Sour relations

It has been reported that many of the speakers at the Republican convention will be Trump family members. Assuming his sister and niece are now excluded, Trump may run short of friendly rellies. - Victoria Harrington, Thirroul Positive result 8.15am, Saturday: I visit Bankstown Hospital (no referral needed). Im a senior with sore throat and runny nose. Wait a few minutes, get the test. The staff, all of them, are the best. Free parking too. A very positive experience. Just got the result. Negative. Stay positive. - Derek Lewis, Condell Park Darn difficult I challenge Col Shephard's assertion (Letters, August 24) that socks can be put on upside down. Inside out, most definitely. To be able to put socks on upside down, they would need holes at both ends, and then they wouldn't be socks. - Nicolas Harrison, East Lismore
Manila, Aug 24 : At least 10 were killed, including a suicide bomber, and 40 others injured in twin blasts in the Philippines' Sulu province on Monday, the army said.

Western Mindanao Command chief Lieutenant General Corleto Vinluan said the victims also comprised five soldiers and four civilians, while 18 soldiers and 22 civilians were among the injured in the back-to-back blasts, reports Xinhua news agency.

Lieutenant Colonel Ronaldo Mateo, the spokesman for the army's 11th infantry division based in Sulu, said a bomb attached to a parked motorcycle exploded at 11.53 a.m. in front of a grocery store, while the second occurred at 1 p.m. near the cathedral in Jolo, the provincial capital.

He said troops were deployed in the area to secure the busy street, adding that soldiers and policemen were posted in the area daily to maintain peace and order.

He said the motorcycle was parked beside a military truck just outside the store before the bomb detonated.

"Two to three minutes after the motorcycle was parked, the improvised explosive device went off," he said.

"The second bomb is believed to have been carried out by a suicide bomber," Mateo added.

The military is verifying reports that the second explosion was carried out by a female bomber.

"Most probably these terrorist acts may have been perpetrated by the Abu Sayyaf group," Mateo said.

Jolo has long been a stronghold for the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.

Twin blasts hit the Jolo cathedral on January 27, 2019, that killed 23 and injured 95.
(Newser)  It's President Trump's turn. The Republican National Convention begins Monday night, and it will be unprecedented in a Trump-centric way: The president is expected to speak on each of the four nights in the 10pm hour, culminating with his Thursday night acceptance speech, reports the AP. Typically, the presidential candidate speaks only on the final night. "Think of each night like an episode," one insider tells Jonathan Swan of Axios. "And what would an episode be without an appearance from the star?" More:

When/where: The prime-time coverage is scheduled to run from 8:30pm to 11pm each night. While the Democratic convention was all-virtual, Republicans will have a mix of remote speeches and in-person events in Charlotte, NC, per Vox. In addition to network coverage, it will be streamed on YouTube and Amazon Prime.

story continues below

Speakers: Here is the full list and schedule, via Politico. CNN has the five most interesting to watch as, in order, Trump (meaning Thursday night's acceptance speech), former UN ambassador Nikki Haley (Monday), Mike Pence (Wednesday), Donald Trump Jr. (Monday), and Melania Trump (Tuesday). Whether Kellyanne Conway will still speak is up in the air in the wake of her announcement that she's leaving the White House.

Here is the full list and schedule, via Politico. CNN has the five most interesting to watch as, in order, Trump (meaning Thursday night's acceptance speech), former UN ambassador Nikki Haley (Monday), Mike Pence (Wednesday), Donald Trump Jr. (Monday), and Melania Trump (Tuesday). Whether Kellyanne Conway will still speak is up in the air in the wake of her announcement that she's leaving the White House. Missing: In another break with tradition, the only living former GOP presidentGeorge W. Bushwill not make an appearance, notes the Washington Post. Nor will the 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, who is on the outs with Trump since voting for his impeachment.

(Read more Republican National Convention stories.)
Nora Quoirin died while on holiday with her family in Malaysia (Family handout via Lucie Blackman Trust/PA)

A Malaysian coroner began an inquest on Monday into the death of a French-Irish teen, a year after her naked body was found near a nature resort where she mysteriously vanished while on holiday.

Nora Anne Quoirins disappearance from her familys cottage at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on August 4 last year, a day after her family arrived for their holiday, sparked a massive search operation.

Her naked body was discovered August 13 beside a stream in a palm oil estate about 2.5 kilometres (1.6 miles) from the resort.

Coroner Maimoonah Aid said the inquest is aimed at determining when Nora died, the cause of her death, how she came to her death, and if anyone was criminally involved.

Negeri Sembilan police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop, the first witness, said the investigation showed no criminal element. He said there was no indication Nora was abducted and no ransom demand.

Police believe Nora climbed out of a window on her own, and the post-mortem showed she succumbed to intestinal bleeding due to starvation and stress, he said.

Her Irish mother and French father, Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin, say Nora was kidnapped because she had mental and physical disabilities and could not have wandered off on her own.

Resort owner Haanim Bamadhaj, who gave evidence via video conference, said Noras parents had told her the teenager only had on her underwear when she went missing and that she would hide when she was frightened.

Recalling the night, Ms Haanim, whose house faces the Quorins cottage, said it was peaceful and that her dog, who would bark if there were outsiders, was also quiet.

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She acknowledged that a window of the cottage that was found ajar the morning Nora disappeared was faulty and could be opened from the outside. But she said there have never been any criminal break-ins in her property since it opened for business 11 years ago.

A recording of the girls mother calling Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here that was used during the search was played to the court.

The coroner earlier this month visited the resort and the place where the body was found. The inquest, which is set to run until September 4, is to involve 64 witnesses.

The Quoirin family lawyer, S Sakhty Vell, said Noras parents could not attend the inquest due to the coronavirus pandemic but will give evidence via video conference. A British doctor who conducted a second post-mortem on Noras body will also give evidence remotely, he said.

The Quoirin family has sued the resort owner for alleged negligence. They said in their lawsuit that there was no security at the resort and that a cottage window was found ajar with a broken latch on the morning Nora disappeared.

Nora had poor motor skills and needed help to walk and her mental age was about five or six years old, her parents said in the lawsuit.

Gurdial Singh Nijar, the lawyer representing the resort, told reporters after the first day of the inquest that the incident was unfortunate but there was no culpability on the part of the resort owner.

Noras parents have welcomed Malaysias decision to hold the inquest after police classified the case as no further action. They said the inquest will be crucial in determining the fullest possible picture of what happened to Nora and how her case was dealt with.
Time is nearly up for Australias ambassador to France, Brendan Berne.

Berne, an economist who rose from the graduate program of the Reserve Bank of Australia to the plum diplomatic post, will soon swap the modernist concrete Harry Seidler-designed embassy 400m from the Eiffel Tower, for, um, Canberra. Diplomatic tom-toms are beating with speculation about his successor.

Berne has handled the important post adroitly. And he hit the headlines in 2017 when Australia legalised same-sex marriage, parlaying his proposal to partner Thomas into a viral video on social media and subsequent Vogue Brides article.

Hotly tipped to replace Berne is Gillian Bird, the well-regarded career diplomat shoved aside as Australian representative to the UN when former communications minister Mitch Fifield was handed the New York gig after the last election.

Bird, a recipient of the Public Service Medal, needs no introduction to Paris. She once studied at the Ecole nationale dadministration and in the 1980s had a three-year stint in Paris representing the Australian government to the OECD.
Algeria will hold a promised referendum on a revised constitution on November 1, the office of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced on Monday evening. The new constitution is expected to boost democracy and give parliament a greater role, the presidency said on Monday, after months-long protests demanding reforms.

After "consultations with the parties concerned, it was decided to set the date of 1 November 2020 for the holding of the referendum on the draft revision of the Constitution", the presidency said. The date also marks the anniversary of the start of Algeria's 1954-1962 war for independence from France.

President Tebboune has repeatedly pledged to introduce political and economic reforms since coming to power in a presidential election last December after an unprecedented lengthy protest movement, which had forced long-time president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resign in April 2019. Even official figures put turnout in the poll at less than 40 percent.

More powers to PM and parliament

Tebboune, formerly a prime minister under Bouteflika, has since taking office sought a constitutional referendum, ostensibly as an answer to the popular protest movement. He has said a new constitution would reduce the authority of the president and "guarantee the separation and balance of powers".

The new constitution would give the prime minister and parliament more powers to govern the North African country of 45 million people, a draft released earlier this year showed. The government has said the draft, which kept presidential terms limited to two mandates, would be submitted to parliament for debate and approval before a referendum.

The referendum date was announced after Tebboune's meeting with the head of the election authority Mohamed Chorfi earlier on Monday, the presidency said in its statement.

Not enough, demonstrators say

Demonstrators however rejected his call for dialogue, insisting on demands for deeper reforms in the North African country.

Story continues

The country's constitution has been amended several times since independence from France, and during the two-decade Bouteflika era it had been tailored for the deposed leader's requirements.

Mass protests broke out in February last year to reject Bouteflika's plan to seek a fifth term after 20 years in power, and demand the departure of the old guard as well as the prosecution of people involved in corruption.

Several senior officials, including two former prime ministers, several ministers and prominent businessmen, have been jailed since then over corruption charges.

The demonstrations only petered as the government banned gatherings last March as part of measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)
America's economic recovery is in an uneasy pause, with key indicators of hiring, shopping and investment stalling or in retreat in the wake of a resurgence in coronavirus cases across broad sections of the country, and with Congress and President Donald Trump showing no signs of progress on another stimulus deal.

Real-time measures of consumer spending, business sentiment, small-business reopening plans and even available jobs began flatlining last month, suggesting that the wave of virus infections that swept across parts of the United States in June and July came with economic consequences. Small-business data from time management firm Homebase shows no improvement since the middle of the summer in employment or hours worked in crucial parts of the economy. Job postings from online recruiting site Indeed slipped backward this week for the first time since May.

Analysts are increasingly accounting for the possibility that lawmakers will fail to strike a deal for a new government package before the November election. Credit:Bloomberg

Now, key policy supports that included a $US600 ($838) per week unemployment insurance expansion have begun to lapse. Congress appears unlikely to pick up negotiations on a new relief package until September, and analysts are increasingly accounting for the possibility that lawmakers will fail to strike a deal before the November election. By that point, with the changing weather pushing many people back inside, public health officials fear a new wave of coronavirus infections.

Those twin risks  the path of the coronavirus and waning policy support  loom over the country's fledgling recovery when the economy has yet to recover about 60 per cent of the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic. More than half of those who are still out of work say they never expect to go back to their old jobs, according to polling from online research firm SurveyMonkey for The New York Times.
By PTI

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka's former Speaker Karu Jayasuriya on Monday offered to lead the Opposition United National Party (UNP) after it suffered a humiliating defeat in the recent parliamentary elections.

Jayasuriya, who will turn 80 next month, in a statement, said that he has informed the party leadership that he is capable of leading the UNP.

"In the backdrop of the current complicated situation, I have carefully considered numerous requests that came from many quarters. I have informed the party leadership and party seniors that I am capable of taking up the challenge to lead the party," Jayasuriya said.

The UNP, Sri Lanka's oldest political party formed in 1946, polled just 2 per cent of the national votes in the parliamentary elections held on August 5.

Former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who has been leading the party since 1994, failed to win a seat to Parliament for the first time in his 43-year-old career.

The UNP breakaway SJB of the former deputy leader Sajith Premadasa emerged the second largest and the main Opposition party by garnering 23 per cent of the vote in the elections.

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa-led Sri Lanka People's Party (SLPP) won a landslide victory in the elections.

The SLPP and its allies won a record 150 seats in the 225-member parliament.

Wickremesinghe since 2001 resisted calls to resign as the party leader even in the face of repeated electoral defeats.

He has indicated his willingness to step down only after the party could find a suitable younger candidate.

He continues to hold on to the party leadership claiming that he had been endorsed last year to hold the position until 2021.

There was no immediate reaction from the UNP leadership to Jayasuriya's intention to lead the party.

Jayasuriya was the Speaker between 2015 to 2019 and was at the forefront of a pro-democracy campaign alongside civil society to introduce reforms.

Jayasuriya, who did not contest the August 5 elections, has been identified as a staunch defender of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution which depoliticised key areas of governance, including elections.

The 19A, which was the main election plank of the previous government, depoliticised the government administration by ensuring the independence of key pillars such as the judiciary, public service and elections.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa last week vowed to abolish the 19th Amendment that curtailed the powers of the President and strengthened the role of Parliament.
CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket is in final preparations to launch the NROL-44 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to support national security. The launch is on track for Aug. 26 at Space Launch Complex-37 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Launch is planned for 2:16 a.m. EDT. The live launch broadcast begins at 1:55 a.m. EDT on Aug. 26 at www.ulalaunch.com.

"ULA is proud of the long-standing history of supporting critical national security missions and the continued partnership with our mission partners," said Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of Government and Commercial Programs. "Only the Delta IV Heavy possesses the capability to deliver this unique mission to orbit due to a combination of heavy lift and the largest flight-proven payload fairing."

The Delta IV Heavy is the nation's proven heavy lifter, delivering high-priority missions for the U.S. Space Force, NRO and NASA. The vehicle also launched NASA's Orion capsule on its first orbital test flight and sent the Parker Solar Probe on its journey to become the fastest robot in history while surfing through the sun's atmosphere.

This Delta IV Heavy is comprised of three common core boosters each powered by an Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-68A liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen engine producing a combined total of more than 2.1 million pounds of thrust. The second stage is powered by an AR RL10B-2 liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen engine.

This will be the 41st launch of the Delta IV rocket, and the 12th in the Heavy configuration. To date ULA has launched 140 times with 100 percent mission success.

With more than a century of combined heritage, ULA is the nation's most experienced and reliable launch service provider. ULA has successfully delivered 140 missions to orbit that aid meteorologists in tracking severe weather, unlock the mysteries of our solar system, provide critical capabilities for troops in the field, deliver cutting-edge commercial services and enable GPS navigation. For more information on ULA, visit the ULA website at www.ulalaunch.com, or call the ULA Launch Hotline at 1-877-ULA-4321 (852-4321).

Join the conversation at www.facebook.com/ulalaunch, twitter.com/ulalaunch and instagram.com/ulalaunch.

SOURCE United Launch Alliance

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A brutal police raid on a youth disco in Los Olivos, a populous working class and lower-middle-class district of Lima, Perus capital, has left at least 13 young people dead, with another 23 under arrest.

The police launched the Saturday night operation against the Thomas Restobar discotheque, where approximately 120 youth had gathered. They moved in barely half an hour before the start of a night-time curfew that has been in place since March 16 in response to the countrys devastating COVID-19 pandemic.

According to multiple witnesses, police fired both tear gas and live rounds into the crowded second-floor dance hall, prompting the panicked youth to flee down a narrow stairway at the bottom of which was a door that had been sealed, either by the clubs owners, or the cops themselves.

A young man interviewed on television, and supported by neighbors who had gathered at the scene, told a television interviewer, They didnt die from suffocation but from exposure to the tear gas fired by the police when they entered the place.

The young man added that the first thing the police did was talk to the owners, [but] since they didnt agree, they fired the tear gas. The clear implication was that the cops and the owners had failed to agree on a bribecommonly referred to in Peru as a coimato allow the club to remain in operation.

We are screwed by the coima, the young man continued. A friend of mine died ... theyve been killed like dogs.

A resident of the neighborhood confirmed the account given by the youth, telling RPP radio: It appears that police entered and threw tear gas canisters at them, and boxed them in.

Nieves Cantaro, who had come to the Clinica Jesus del Norte to identify the body of her 22-year-old daughter, also told RPP: I know that they fired teargas grenades. In what kind of a mind would it occur to the police to do this? My daughter had just gone into the discotheque ... She was 22 and a university student. They took my daughter from me.

Unsurprisingly, the police exonerated themselves of any responsibility for the mass killing, claiming that they had fired neither teargas nor bullets during the operation. The official version of tragedy was given by Gen. Orlando Velasco Mujica, the commander of the Peruvian National Police, who declared that those present tried to escape during the police operation, using a back door to the premises. However, the crowd prevented them from opening the exit door, causing the crowd to riot and suffocate.

The Peruvian media, echoed by their international counterparts, happily repeated this official story.

The cops and the media also claimed that this was the first time they had received a call about the existence of a clandestine discotheque, when in reality the neighbors had been complaining for weeks. People on the scene after the tragedy asked the television reporters to film a poster on the wall of the building that read, The best weekends, with pictures of young people dancing, making it clear that the parties were hardly hidden.

This operation, perhaps motivated in part by a failure of the cops to receive enough of a bribe, was also clearly organized to not only sow panic among those present, but to set an example for the wider population. The unit sent to the club was the so-called Green Squad, an elite paramilitary unit used in combating criminal gangs.

The contempt with which the government treated the lives of the young people was made grotesquely evident when the truck with the bodies of the dead arrived at the morgue on Sunday afternoon. This meant that the 13 bodies had been piled up inside for almost 18 hours.

With nearly 600,000 reported coronavirus cases and almost 30,000 deaths, Peru has the worst per capita fatality rate in the Americas and is second only to Belgium worldwide. Even the Peruvian Ministry of Health acknowledges that the real death toll is far higher, allowing that it is probably 40,000 or more.

The right-wing government of President Martin Vizcarra had initially been credited, both within the Peruvian establishment and internationally, for imposing strict quarantines, beginning in March, in a bid to stop the spread of the pandemic.

Now, however, it is more than evident that this strategy has failed. Meanwhile, Perus gross national product fell by 30 percent in the second quarter of this year, the worst decline in the countrys history, bringing with it a massive destruction of jobs and increase in poverty.

Since early July, Vizcarras crisis-ridden government has initiated a policy known as Reactiva Peru giving big business, and in particular the strategic transnational mining sector, a license to resume operations at the expense of the infection and deaths of large numbers of workers.

Meanwhile, the presidents approval rating has plummeted, falling from 83 percent in June to barely 50 percent today.

The governments response to the tragedy in Los Olivos has been to vilify the owners of the club and those who were present, including the 13 dead.

There were extensive press reports on the fact that coronavirus tests were administered to those who were arrested at the scene of the disco massacre, and that 15 of the 23 had tested positive. This is hardly shocking given the governments own estimate that roughly 20 percent of Limas population is infected. This is undoubtedly a vast underestimate, as Peru has conducted barely one-quarter of the tests carried out even in the United States.

The hypocrisy of this campaign was summed up in the statement of Rosario Sasieta, the minister for Women and Vulnerable Populations, who was dispatched to the scene of the tragedy to declare that she was outraged because some businessmen who, with a lust for profit, gathered 120 youth and, this lust, this avarice, has caused the deaths of these youth.

Who do they think theyre kidding? No one in the Peruvian government will accuse the transnational mining companies of a lust for profit as miners are herded back to work, with thousands contracting the virus and many dying.

The gathering of 120 youths, ignoring calls for social distancing and the wearing of masks, and the desire for a small business owner to stay afloat by allowing them to dance, are no doubt antithetical to the social practices needed to combat the virus.

But on the scale of the poverty, immense social inequality and the genuine lust for profit on the part of Southern Copper Corp., Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and other transnational mining companies that have resumed operations, the party in Los Olivios is less than a drop in the bucket in terms of factors contributing to the spread of the coronavirus.

The wildly disproportionate violence unleashed against the youth present at the discotheque is emblematic of the turn by the Peruvian state and ruling class to reliance upon the military and police to suppress growing opposition within the working class.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 06:26:32|Editor: huaxia

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by Zhang Qi

DUBLIN, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Irish government on Monday issued multi-lingual advice for parents of primary and secondary school students as part of its latest efforts in preparing a safe opening of schools in the country in the next week.

The two-page Back to School Advice for Parents, which was issued by the Irish Department of Education and Skills, comes in 21 foreign languages, including Chinese, French, German, Spanish and Arabic. The advice is even available in Pashto, Kurdish and Somali.

The phenomenal work involved in the translation of the advice in multi-languages demonstrates the determination of the Irish government that all the schools in the country, which have been shut down since mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will be opened safely and timely at the end of this month.

There are an estimated one million students studying at some 4,000 primary and secondary schools in Ireland, according to a Monday report by the Irish national radio and television broadcaster RTE.

According to the advice issued by the Department of Education and Skills, all the staff and students at secondary schools must wear face coverings where it is impossible to maintain the 2-meter social distancing and wearing a face covering when waiting for and aboard a school bus is mandatory for all secondary school students.

Parents of secondary school students are also advised to encourage their children to go to school on foot or bike.

Younger children at primary schools may not be required to practice physical distancing, but they may be organized into pods, said the advice.

To ensure social distancing on school buses, Irish Minister for Education Norma Foley said last week that her department has decided to cut the capacity on secondary school transport by 50 percent.

This requires an additional 1,600 school buses across the country by next week, she said, adding that her department is now in discussion with Bus Eireann (Ireland) to roll out the additional required capacity as quickly and speedily as possible.

The Irish Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science on Monday announced a 5-million-euro (about 5.9 million U.S. dollars) funding for the support of students' mental health and wellbeing at colleges and universities.

Part of the funding will be used to recruit additional student counselors and assistant psychologists, said the department in a statement.

Last month, the Irish government announced a 375-million-euro school reopening plan, of which 75 million euros will be used to alter buildings and classrooms to ensure one-meter physical distancing at secondary schools, according to Norma Foley.

On Monday night, the Department of Health reported another 147 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ireland, a daily figure only frequently seen during the peak time of the pandemic in the country in April and May.

To date, a total of 28,116 people have contracted COVID-19 in the country and 1,777 of them have died from the virus, according to the department. (1 euro = 1.18 U.S. dollars) Enditem
Investigation launched into Voronezh Region lawyer on fraud allegations

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

14:49 24/08/2020

MOSCOW, August 24 (RAPSI)  A probe has been launched in the Voronezh Region into a local attorney over alleged fraud, according to the press service of Russias Investigative Committee.

In July, the lawyer promised a female police officer to help in her reassignment to another position for 500,000 rubles (about $7,000). When receiving the first part of money worth 100,000 rubles the attorney was arrested.

Moreover, in September 2019, he received 500,000 rubles from relatives of his client. He promised them to assist in founding the defendant insane.




Israel's prime minister and Washington's top diplomat voiced hope Monday the Jewish state would soon build ties with more Arab countries, following its landmark move to normalise relations with the United Arab Emirates.

Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was starting a Mideast tour in Jerusalem, both praised the US-brokered deal as a major step toward stability to the turbulent region.

"I'm very hopeful that we will see other Arab nations join in this," said Pompeo, who was also set to visit Sudan, Bahrain and the UAE on his five-day trip.

Netanyahu hailed the Israel-UAE agreement as "a boon to peace and regional stability" which "heralds a new era where we could have other nations join".

"I hope we'll have good news in the future, maybe in the near future," he said.

Washington and its close ally Israel hope that more such ties with other regional countries traditionally hostile to the Jewish state will help forge a stronger regional alliance against their common foe, Iran.

Pompeo again stressed US President Donald Trump's goal that "Iran will never have a nuclear weapon" and urged world powers to maintain an arms embargo on the Islamic republic.

- 'Legacy of hostility' -

Israel has existing peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan which, unlike the UAE, share borders with the Jewish state and have fought wars with it.

Under the US-brokered agreement with the Emirates announced on August 13, Israel pledged to suspend its previous plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, without saying for how long.

The Palestinians slammed the UAE's move as a "stab in the back" while their own conflict with the Jewish state remains unresolved.

The Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, charged Monday that the Israel-UAE deal helps "maintain crimes and violations" against the Palestinians.

It urged regional and world leaders to "break their silence to bring an end" to the Gaza blockade.

Story continues

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab arrived Monday evening in Jerusalem, where he is scheduled to meet with Pompeo, according to diplomatic sources.

He is due to meet Netanyahu the following day, before going on to Ramallah to talk to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

"Israels suspension of annexation is an essential step towards a more peaceful Middle East," Raab said, according to a statement by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. "It is important to build on this new dynamic."

An Israeli foreign ministry official said Raab would be asked to coax the Palestinians back to peace talks with the Jewish state, which stalled in 2014.

"We will ask the British FM to be a bridge between us and the Palestinians, in order to bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table," the ministry's deputy chief for European Affairs Anna Azari told reporters.

- Who's next? -

The Israel-Emirati pact has sparked speculation on which country in the region might be next, with frequent mention of Bahrain and Sudan.

Israel is technically at war with Sudan, which for years had supported hardline Islamist forces but which is turning its back on the era of strongman Omar al-Bashir who was ousted last year.

The State Department said Pompeo would meet Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok during his tour, to "express support for deepening the Sudan-Israel relationship".

Pompeo will also meet Bahrain's Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa before talks with UAE foreign minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, it said.

Saudi Arabia, in keeping with decades of policy by most Arab states, says it will not follow the UAE's example until Israel has signed a peace deal with the Palestinians.

- 'Outlaw' -

Netanyahu has meanwhile denied reports that the UAE deal hinges on the sale of US F-35 stealth fighter-jets to the Emirates, saying he opposes a move that could reduce Israel's strategic edge in the region.

"This deal did not include Israel's acceptance of any arms deal," he said Monday.

Pompeo said the US was determined to help the Emirates defend itself against Iran "in a way that preserves our commitments to Israel".

"The United States has a legal requirement with respect to (Israel's) qualitative military edge. We will continue to honour that," he said.

But he also noted Washington's long-running security relationship with the UAE, saying the US would "continue to make sure that we're delivering them the equipment that they need to secure and defend their own people...from the Islamic republic of Iran."

And in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Pompeo said: "I hope one day that the Iranians will normalise with Israel as well."

But in a tweet, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif described Pompeo as an "outlaw".

"Standing next to World's #1 nuclear threat, he declares his desire to flood our region with even more US weapons," he wrote.

bur-scw/dwo/par
Maharashtra minister and Shiv Sena leader Aaditya Thackeray has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting him to postpone all academic activities. He further urged the PM to consider starting the new academic year from January 2021 instead of June-July 2021 so that students do not lose a year.

Thackeray said that various institutions and universities are scheduling examinations, which isnt a practical and feasible idea considering the rising cases of Covid-19 in the country.

In his letter, he said that he wished to draw the PMs attention to the plight of the students.

While most of our country is still working from home due to increasing Covid numbers, various institutions and universities for professional and non-professional courses have been trying to schedule examinations. This isnt a practical and feasible option sir, as most states are facing increasing numbers of Covid, along with red zones still in place and transport yet to resume, the chief of Shiv Senas youth wing said.

Last week, Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray asked the state education department to consider the idea of changing the academic year to January from June in the light of the delay in kicking off the academic year.

We may also think of starting our academic year from January 2021 instead of June/July 2020 so that no student loses the academic year. Sir Im sure that with this intervention, we would be able to prevent a larger spike in infection and contribute to our fight in keeping our citizens safe, said Aaditya Thackeray.

The Shiv Sena and the Sena-led Maharashtra government have opposed the Centres decision to hold final-year examination citing risk to students, teaching and non-teaching staff during the pandemic. He added that wherever schools and colleges were reopened, a large number of people were infected with Covid.

In our country, most students live with their parents and grandparents and the Infection, if at all, can be fatal. The system for even a single paper would include not just students, but teachers, non-teaching staff and much more of the state apparatus, most of whom are in the high-risk groups. Sir, I humbly request you to intervene and postpone all academic activity to do with physical or online examinations across the country, for all professional courses, including entrance exams.

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Abuja, Nigeria (PANA) - Amnesty International on Monday criticised the Nigerian authorities for leaving rural communities at the mercy of rampaging gunmen who have killed at least 1,126 people in the north of the country since January
Labor Day has been an annual federal holiday in the United States since 1894. It was created in honour of the American labor movement and the enormous contribution which millions of workers have made in helping the United States to develop and prosper. Labor Day is traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in September in the United States, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Canal Zone, and the Virgin Islands and is the culmination of Labor Day Weekend.

Being an official, national holiday in the U.S. and also Canada, for most Americans, Labor Day means having the day off from work and symbolically, it is considered the end of summer and start of fall when children return to school. There is always plenty to do on Labor Day and the weekend days preceding it; apart from spending quality time with family or friends, the day is usually celebrated with picnics, barbecues, street parades, fireworks displays, concerts and other events and activities. While workers are given time off on Labor Day, they are also paid as normal by their employers.

Curiously, the first 'Labor Day' actually took place on a Tuesday and was an unofficial event organised by New Yorks Central Labor Union (CLU). On 5 September 1882, around 10,000 workers took unpaid time off to march from City Hall to Union Square in New York City, in protest of inhumane working practices, conditions and abuse of workers rights. The CLU demanded a set of conditions, bound by law, including abolishing child labour, fair wages and an eight-hour workday.

Labor Day, an official holiday, passed by Congress in 1894

It became a state holiday around the country in the following years before finally being declared a federal holiday in 1894 when president Grover Cleveland signed it into law. This year, Labor Day will be celebrated on 7 September.

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As part of measures to reduce the risk of students' exposure to COVID-19 when schools are reopened, the government in collaboration with the number one Waste Management in Ghana and Africa, Zoomlion Ghana Limited has embarked on a 2nd phase disinfestation exercise in Tertiary institutions across the country.

It would be recalled that President Akufo Addo in his15th COVID-19 national address announced that, the government will put in place necessary preventive measures to allow students to return to school safely.

He assured that Government through the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service would ensure that all tertiary institutions are disinfected and equipped with necessary personal protective equipment before Students go back to school.

Cleaning, disinfecting, and promoting hand hygiene are important everyday actions schools can take to slow the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases and protect students and staff.

At Bagabaga College of Education in Tamale where one of the disinfestation exercises took place, the Vice Principal, Mr. Emmanuel Alhassan reiterated management's preparedness to receive the students now that the school has been disinfested ahead of the school reopened.

He stressed that the necessary preparations in terms of allocating places where students would be staying are available, adding that the school has 4 Halls, 3 for males, and 1 for the female.

Mr. Alhassan further disclosed that management of the school has put in place, a medical team who are waiting to receive the students and check their statistics in terms of temperature and other physical observation they might come across.

The Vice Principal however revealed that their only fears are lack of mass testing of students against the COVID-19 since students are coming from the various regions across the country.

He, therefore, said the school is of the firm belief that with arrangements made by the government and the Education Ministry as far as the COVID-19 protocols are concerned, they would not record any case.

He further assured that even if a case emerged, there are 3 Medical Doctors to assist because they have been providing routine consultancy services to the school.

Mr. Alhassan commended Zoomlion Ghana Limited for their extraordinary support towards the fight against COVID-19 since it came into the country.

The Northern Regional General Manager for Zoomlion Ghana Limited, Mr. Dawuni Peter on an interview pointed out that, the company is disinfesting 8 Tertiary Institutions comprises of Tamale University and 7 Colleges of Education in Northern, Savana and North East Region respectfully.

He averred that the second phase disinfestation exercise does not include the University of Development Studies.

Mr. Dawuni said, President Akufo Addo's appreciations to Dr. Siaw Agyepong and Jospong Group of Companies for excellent support towards the fight against the spread of COVID-19, re-emphasis the image of the company, and the capacity that they have in dealing with emergency issues in the country.

"So as a company, I feel so elated that the Number One Gentleman of the land single-handedly praises the company that I worked for. So, we are determined to do more beyond the expectations of every Ghanaian because, we are not just in to make a profit but, we are looking at the social aspect of our society".
In the age of the Internet, buyers can sit at home and use the phone or the computer, and votive products can easily be brought to their houses.

Votive products offered for sale online

With the thought "The life in the afterworld is similar to that of the real world" in mind, many Vietnamese still burn paper money and votive objects such as houses, cars, smart phones, gold and silver, and others for their deceased relatives, hoping that their ancestors have full utensils in the other world. Burning votive objects is more common during the seventh lunar month, called the month for wandering souls.

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the golden time of e-commerce, this year votive products are offered for sale on many online-shopping sites and even social networks like Facebook. Buyers can find products from banknotes and votive clothes, to offerings for wandering souls like popcorn, confectionery.

Ms. Thu Hai from Ha Dong district, Hanoi, told VietNamNet that after trying to search on a shopping app, she was quite surprised because products like votive objects were available.

Votive products are also available on Facebook.

In the past, consumers used to buy offerings at the grocery store or wet markets. Now, they can easily buy these products online, Hai said.

Although votive products are offered for sale online at low prices and the delivery service is very convenient, many people said they have changed their thoughts and would not buy these products.

Ms. Nguyen Thi Nga from Thanh Xuan district, Hanoi said that she would not purchase votive products and would instead save real money for charity. Using real money with economic value to buy paper money and votive objects to burn leads to waste and harmful effects to the environment, Nga said.

Bao Anh
Somali pirates release three Iranian hostages held for five years

August 24,2020 | Source: The National

Somali pirates released three Iranian hostages after five years, a security official said on Thursday, as conflicting reports emerged about whether another ship had been seized after a three-year pause in hijackings.



The three Iranians were the last of the crew of the fishing vessel FV Siraj, which was captured by pirates on March 22, 2015. Between 2010 and 2019, more than 2,300 crew were taken.



This marks the end of an era of Somali piracy and the pain and suffering of Somalias forgotten hostages, said John Steed, the co-ordinator of the Hostage Support Programme organisation in Nairobi, Kenya.



But six armed men hijacked the Panama-flagged Aegean II on Wednesday after engine problems were reported, a regional governor in Somalia said.



Musse Salah, the governor of Gardafu in the semi-autonomous northern region of Puntland, said the ship was travelling from the UAE to Mogadishu when pirates attacked it in the first successful hijacking since 2017.



There were 20 crew onboard, a resident in contact with the men who seized the ship said.



A regional security official said the men appeared to have links to a militia police unit in the Bari region of north-eastern Somalia.



Jay Bahadur, a Somali piracy analyst and former head of a UN group of experts enforcing an arms embargo on Somalia, said that being a pirate and a member of the police were not mutually exclusive.



Mr Bahadur said it appeared that a group of men wearing police uniforms boarded the ship, robbed the crew and took the weapons of a private security team.



The man reported to be the ringleader of the attack on the Aegean II had repeated phone contact with another pirate who was part of a group that carried out Somalias last hijacking in 2017, he said.



The contact happened in the months before the 2017 raid.



If it was indeed the police, it bears resemblance to one of the earliest Somali piracy incidents, when members of the Puntland coastguard hijacked the boat they were supposed to be guarding, Mr Bahadur said.



Satellite tracking data showed that the ship appeared to have rounded the Horn of Africa and had gone south past the Somali port of Hafun before turning sharply north and docking at Bereeda.



Pictures rom Bereeda showed the Aegean II, a small tanker that carries chemical or crude products.



The EU Naval Force was checking on the incident, a source in its Somalia Joint Operation Centre said.



At the height of their power in 2011, Somali pirates launched 237 attacks off the coast, the International Maritime Bureau said.



The number of attacks later tumbled as shipping conpanies strengthened security, including look-outs, sailed farther off Somalia and hired private security.



International warships operating as part of a coalition prevented several attacks.



Somalia has been riven by civil war since 1991 and is controlled by militias, pockets of federal forces, African Union peacekeepers and insurgents.

Theme(s): Others.
Business school students in Ontario are sounding the alarm about what they call outright racism from fellow students and a lack of equity and diversity training among faculty.

A number of social media accounts have popped up in recent months, anonymously recounting stories of racism happening in universities across the province.

Schools such as Queens University in Kingston and York University in Toronto are among those that have come under fire.

Kelly Weiling Zou, a 20-year-old Singaporean-Chinese student studying commerce at the Smith School of Business at Queens, said the racism she witnessed pushed her to create a platform for students to vent about their experiences.

Zou created the Instagram account Stolenbysmith, which has amassed more than 12,000 followers and shared more than 300 stories, ranging from tales about barriers to career opportunities, social ostracization based on students backgrounds and encounters with discrimination from faculty.

The Smith administration has historically failed to respond to students call to action in addressing issues of discrimination within the school, Zou said in an interview. We cant change systemic barriers, only they can as they have the power.

Meena Waseem, a second-year business student at Queens, said her first brush with racism at the school came on just her second day of orientation week last fall.

The 19-year-old said one student leader, also in the business program, used the N-word in a song to a room full of students.

Witnessing this was disappointing and it made me feel unsafe, Waseem said. This was the first of many experiences which made it clear that racism is normalized here.

For me personally, being a visibly Muslim brown woman at this school is exhausting, she said. Being a lower-income student doubles that exhaustion. I have to consistently advocate for my needs.

Brenda Brouwer, interim dean at the Smith School of Business, said the university is working on addressing concerns raised by its students. She called the incident detailed by Waseem completely unacceptable and deeply troubling and said it would be a clear violation of the schools code of conduct.

Improving diversity and increasing inclusion is an urgent priority, Brouwer said. While progress has been made, we know there is more work to be done, and we will continue to actively foster a culture of inclusion, dignity and respect.

Aba Mortley, co-chair of the council of anti-racism and equity at Queens, said she works as a bridge between faculty and students in order to bring about discussions on campus and in the wider Kingston community.

There is no denying that these issues regarding Black and Indigenous people are clear and present, Mortley said. No one can say that racism isnt happening when it is out in the open.

She said the school is in a better position to work on these issues now, thanks to the recent momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement.

With all these stories coming out, it is forcing the school to take action, Mortley said.

Sara Reza, a student at York Universitys Schulich School of Business, said discrimination and racism are also present on her campus.

Reza is the founder of a social media account called Silencedatschulich, which, like Zous account, highlights stories of racialized students experiences at Yorks business school.

Business programs rarely integrate diversity and inclusion, which fails to address the persistent inequality that exists in our communities and worldwide, she said.

Reza said business university programs foster a hostile environment in which topics of privilege, inequality and race are rarely brought up in the classroom.

Humera Dasu, a third-year student at York, said she was left feeling uneasy when a white professor and group of students allegedly made inappropriate comments when discussing Islam.

The professor implied to a class of 50 students that she thinks the religion is oppressive to women, Dasu, 20, said.

I was deeply offended and hurt.... Islamophobia has been normalized to the point that such a comment can be made in a classroom environment.

Detlev Zwick, interim dean at Schulich School of Business, said the school is aware of concerns brought forward recently by students and graduates.

The Schulich School of Business does not tolerate or excuse discrimination and racism of any kind. As one of the most diverse business schools in North America, Schulich has a long tradition of actively encouraging and supporting inclusivity and diversity, he said.

Obviously, more needs to be done and we have already begun taking action in various ways to ensure greater awareness surrounding issues of racism, especially anti-Black racism, as well as sexism and discrimination.

Zwick said the school is also currently in talks with other leading business schools in Ontario regarding several joint initiatives to tackle barriers for Black and Indigenous students, particularly from high schools in economically disadvantaged communities.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 24, 2020.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version had an incorrect spelling of Meena Waseems last name.
Sydney, Australia, Aug 24, 2020 - (ABN Newswire) - Cobre Limited (ASX:CBE) is pleased to announce the signing of a binding Heads of Agreement (HOA) for the proposed scrip-based acquisition of 51% of the equity of Kalahari Metals Limited (KML). KML is a private UK company which controls approximately 8,100 km2 of tenements within the Kalahari Copper Belt (KCB) in Botswana (with 6,650 km2 owned 100%, and 1,450 km2 in JVs). The KCB is regarded as one of the most prospective areas globally for copper exploration by the US Geological Survey (USGS), with a number of copper-silver deposits currently under development by both Sandfire Resources (ASX:SFR) and Cupric Canyon Capital (Cupric Canyon) (refer Figure 2*).



KML is currently owned by seven shareholders, including Cobre's largest shareholder, Metal Tiger plc (LSE:MTR) which currently holds ~62%. In the circa 2 years since MTR acquired its stake, it has invested approximately US$4.2m into KML, and has successfully identified copper mineralisation at multiple locations. Post completion, MTR will continue to hold a 49% stake in the KML JV, with all other KML shareholders fully converting their existing KML shares into CBE shares. Other than MTR, none of the other KML shareholders are related parties of Cobre. Upon completion MTR will hold circa 21% of CBE.



Key terms of the HOA include:



- The KML vendors will collectively be issued circa 21.4m CBE shares in consideration for the 51% interest in KML. Cobre will initially acquire a 49.9% interest in KML, and subject to obtaining change of control approval from the Ministry of Mines of Botswana, will increase its shareholding in KML to 51% immediately thereafter.



- The new shares, to be escrowed until 31 January 2022, will be issued at an implied CBE share price of 20cps.



- KML and each vendor have agreed to a 60-day exclusivity period in order for Cobre to conduct detailed due diligence on KML and its exploration licences.



o Transaction completion is conditional upon:



- Cobre conducting due diligence enquiries in relation to KML and its licences to Cobre's satisfaction;



- Cobre and the vendors negotiating and executing an agreed share purchase agreement;



- Cobre and MTR negotiating and executing a shareholders' JV agreement in relation to the future management of KML;



- Cobre obtaining shareholder approval at its upcoming AGM in mid-October 2020; and



- MTR obtaining FIRB approval, if required, for the receipt of additional Cobre shares.



Assuming completion occurs on or before 30 November 2020, it is estimated that KML will hold a cash balance of approximately US$600,000. These funds will be used for ongoing exploration activities within the Kalahari tenements over the next 6 months. Once this cash balance is exhausted, Cobre and MTR have agreed to commit A$1.75 million each (A$3.5 million in total) to fund further exploration for the following two years. Cobre can fund this commitment from existing cash holdings.



Background on Kalahari Metals Limited (KML)



In geological terms, copper mineralisation in the KCB is typically hosted above the contact between the D'Kar Formation (reduced sediments) and the Ngwako Pan Formation (oxidised continental red beds). This is evidenced by nearby copper discoveries held by Cupric Canyon and Sandfire (through its acquisition of the formerly ASX-listed MOD Resources). In recent years, KML has undertaken a systematic exploration program across its Kalahari tenements. This included Airborne Electromagnetic (AEM) surveys to identify conductive carbonaceous marker units within the lower D'Kar Formation stratigraphy, which are critical in determining the underlying D'Kar/Ngwako Pan contact position, combined with magnetic survey interpretations of the geological structure, which together identify favourable locations for exploration drilling.



KML's 8,100 km2 of licences are separated in to four project areas:



- Okavango (2,720 km2)



- Ngami (720 km2)



- Kitlanya East (2,750 km2)



- Kitlanya West (1,900 km2)



Okavango includes tenements immediately along strike from Cupric Canyon's Zone 5 and Zone 5N copper deposits. KML has utilised high resolution magnetics and AEM surveys to map out target areas for exploration drilling. Of the six core holes drilled in 2019 as an initial test of these targets, KML has reported that five holes intersected the mineralised D'Kar/Ngwako Pan contact. The Okavango tenements are a mix of 100%-owned and JV holdings (refer Figure 2*).



Similarly at Ngami, KML has reported that early stage exploration drilling based on magnetic and AEM survey interpretation has resulted in successful intercepts of the copper mineralised D'Kar/Ngwako Pan contact. The Ngami tenements are held as JVs (refer Figure 2*).



Kitlanya East includes tenements in close proximity to Cupric Canyon's Banana Zone and Sandfire's T3 and A4 copper deposits. Recent magnetic and AEM data interpretation by KML has identified a number of prospective anticlinal fold hinge targets. Initial drill testing commenced in Q1 2020 confirmed the presence of lower D'Kar stratigraphy before drilling was suspended due to COVID-19.



These tenements are 100% owned by KML.



100%-owned Kitlanya West, located proximal to the Ngami tenements, includes three conductive dome targets considered analogous to Sandfire's T3 and A4 deposits as identified in recent AEM surveys. Soil sampling by KML has displayed positive base metal responses in this location.



Botswana's recent COVID-19 lockdown has now eased allowing KML to restart their 2020 exploration program, which is scheduled to include drilling of the Kitlanya East and Kitlanya West prospects.



Drilling has already commenced at Kitlanya East.



*To view tables and figures, please visit:

https://abnnewswire.net/lnk/DV144F8H





About Cobre Limited:



Cobre Limited (ASX:CBE) is a Sydney based company focused on mineral exploration in Western Australia. The company recently discovered a new high grade VMS deposit enriched in Copper, Gold, Zinc and Silver in Western Australia from its maiden drill program in June 2019.



Contact:



Cobre Limited

Martin Holland

E: info@cobre.com.au

WWW: www.cobre.com.au





Source:



Cobre Limited



Copyright (C) 2020 ABN Newswire. All rights reserved.
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A police precinct was set on fire and protesters pelted cops with rocks and bottles during a protest in Portland last night prompting authorities to declare a riot and deploy tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.

Footage from the scene shows a fire burning an awning at the north precinct late Sunday night and protesters chanting 'burn baby burn' while police tried to put out the flames with a fire extinguisher.

Police ordered demonstrators to clear the area, saying that rocks and glass bottles had been thrown at officers, as well as lasers pointed their direction.

Further clips show police in riot gear marching towards the scene of the gathering.

A police precinct was set on fire (pictured) and protesters pelted cops with rocks and bottles during a protest in Portland last night prompting authorities to declare a riot and deploy tear gas to disperse the demonstrators

An officer extinguishes a fire on the Portland Police North Precinct building during a protest against police violence and racial injustice in Portland last night

Pictured: Rioters, some holding riot shields, hold the line during a riot in Portland last night

Pictured: A Trump 2020 hat can be seen burning during protests in Portland last night. Police declared the gathering a riot after rocks and bottles were thrown at officers and a police precinct was set alight

An unlawful assembly had been declared before the gathering was deemed a riot. Tear gas is said to have been launched after the fire was started, not before.

In a tweet, Portland Police wrote: 'Criminal Activity has continued. This event is now a RIOT.

'All persons must leave to the SOUTH. Failure to adhere to this direction may subject you to citation, arrest, and/or crowd control agents including, but not limited to, tear gas and impact weapons.'

The department later tweeted: 'Stop attacking officers.'

Protesters had marched to the precinct from a park, chanting several things including 'Jacob Blake,' who Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers identified as the man shot by a police officer in Kenosha on Sunday. Authorities in Wisconsin had not confirmed the person's name.

Police officers detain a demonstrator during a protest against police violence and racial injustice in Portland, Oregon

A police officer extinguishes a fire on the Portland Police North Precinct building during a protest against police violence and racial injustice in Portland, Oregon

Police ordered demonstrators to clear the area, saying that rocks and glass bottles had been thrown at officers, as well as lasers pointed their direction. Further clips show police in riot gear marching towards the scene of the gathering

Pictured: Rioters in Portland. Police ordered demonstrators to clear the area, saying that rocks and glass bottles had been thrown at officers, as well as lasers pointed their direction

Pictured: Protesters set off a firecracker during last night's riots in Portland, Oregon

Pictured: What appears to be an American flag is seen burning during riots in Portland, Oregon last night

Violent demonstrations have gripped Portland for months, following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

Early Sunday police forced protesters away from a law enforcement building, as efforts to stop the demonstrators from gathering at the building seemingly fell apart.

The protesters apparently had plans Saturday night to march from a park to the Penumbra Kelly public safety building, news outlets reported.

But, a standoff between marchers and officers took place on a bridge along the way - and the demonstrators retreated.

Protesters appear to have returned to the park, and then taken cars to the building.

Police initially declared an unlawful assembly, saying items had been thrown at officers, green lasers had been pointed at officers and a support airplane and paintball guns had been fired.

The gathering was later declared a riot. Officers had been hit with rocks, bottles and other objects, police said.

Numerous officers reported seeing people with some type of 'press' identification throwing rocks at them, authorities said.

The unrest followed rival protests Saturday afternoon. Federal authorities forced demonstrators away from a plaza near a federal building as dueling demonstrations by right-wing and left-wing protesters turned violent.
Mahesh M Goudar By

Express News Service

BAGALKOT: The Headmaster and staff at the Government High School in Herishivanagutti village had a pleasant surprise when they went back to school after the weekend recently. The school building which had not seen a coat of paint for decades looked bright and shining.

Mohammad Sabh Agra

The credit for this goes to Mohammad Sabh Agra (41), a resident of the village who is a Group-D employee (peon) at the school.

He chose a unique way to make his six-year-old sons birthday memorable. He got the school building painted with his own money.

His gesture has won appreciation from all -- Primary and Secondary Education Minister S Suresh Kumar to Zilla Panchayat CEO T Bhooblan to the people. Amidst financial difficulties, he has spent around Rs 30,000 to ensure that the school where he works gets a new look.

A couple of months ago, he had spent over Rs 3 lakh for the heart surgery of his only son Mohammad Mustaf (6).

I wanted to celebrate my sons birthday in a unique way. Initially, I had managed to mobilize only Rs 10,000. But as the estimated cost shot up to Rs 30,000, I took a loan and got the school painted, Mohammad Sabh told TNIE.

Sabh gets appreciation letter from minister'

The school was in a pathetic condition and had not been painted for decades. I also believe that my gesture will make the villagers and students bless my son so that he can recover fast, Mohammad Sabh added. As soon as this came to the notice of Minister Suresh Kumar, he spoke to Mohammad Sabh over phone, thanked him and also praised him.

Minister Suresh Kumar praised me, which is one of the memorable moments of my life. He also told me I was an inspiration to all and assured me of providing help for my sons treatment, the delighted father said.

Applauding Mohammad Sabhs work, ZP CEO Bhooblan said, Despite financial hardships, he has done an amazing job of improving his workplace. We will support him and the school in all possible ways. S Pochangundi, the headmaster, who did not know of Mohammad Sabhs plans, said, When we left the school after working hours on Saturday (August 7), the building did not look any different. But on Monday, we were amazed to see the school building sporting a new colour. We are proud to have such an employee working amidst us.

The ZP CEO recently gave Mohammad Sabh two certificates of appreciation, one from the ZP and the other on behalf of the minister, and felicitated the family on the school premises.
Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded full transparency from Vladimir Putin's government after a German medical team determined that Alexei Navalny, the Russian leader's most prominent critic, was likely poisoned last week.

"In view of Mr. Navalny's major role in Russia's political opposition, the country's authorities are urgently called upon to fully investigate this act as a matter of urgency -- and to do so in a completely transparent way," Merkel said in a joint statement with her foreign minister, Heiko Maas. "Those responsible must be identified and brought to justice."

The demand marks a sharp escalation in tensions between the West, led in this case by Merkel's government, and the Kremlin. A U.S. official warned earlier Monday that confirmation he was poisoned would turn the case into a major issue.

Two days after Navalny was transferred to the German capital for medical help, Berlin's Charite hospital said that the anti-corruption activist is in serious condition but there is no acute threat to his life. However, he may suffer long-term damage to his nervous system, according to the statement.

Navalny has been in a medically induced coma since Thursday after falling ill on a plane returning to Moscow from Tomsk, and was evacuated from Russia on Saturday.

His allies blamed Russia's security services for the poisoning. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the Charite statement.

In Berlin, doctors found evidence of poisoning through a substance related to cholinesterase inhibitors, Charite said. The specific substance wasn't immediately known and will require further testing to be identified, the clinic said, adding that the patient is being treated with the antidote atropine and his prognosis remains unclear.

The findings are another blow to Russia's relations with the West. Merkel has confronted Putin directly over the August 2019 murder of a political opponent in Berlin, a killing that German officials blame on the Russian government. Officials also accuse Russian authorities of being behind a 2015 cyberattack on the German Bundestag, the lower house of parliament.

"Putin's message to the Russian opposition is clear: those who oppose the system live dangerously," Norbert Roettgen, head of German parliaments's foreign affairs committee, said in a post on Twitter.

The 2018 poisoning in Salisbury, U.K., of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter allegedly by Kremlin agents led to sweeping expulsions of Russian diplomats by the U.K. and its western allies, accelerating the downward spiral in relations.

Ralf Stahlmann, a retired professor of pharmacology and toxicology in Berlin, said the strongest of the substances in the cholinesterase inhibitors group -- which can be used to treat dementia and Alzheimer's -- are "military-grade warfare agents." These poisons -- like the Novichok that British investigators blamed in the Salisbury case -- can be transmitted through food or drink, or simply by touch.

Navalny, 44, was in the Siberian city of Tomsk meeting local activists and opposition candidates ahead of regional elections set for September. His sudden illness raised suspicions after a string of Kremlin critics fell victim to poisoning in recent years.

Dissident security service officer Alexander Litvinenko died in London after consuming tea laced with polonium in 2006, while ex-spy Skripal survived the 2018 assassination attempt. U.K. officials linked both attacks to the Russian state, though the Kremlin denied any role.

Russian doctors at the Siberian hospital in Omsk that initially treated Navalny said he was not poisoned but suffered from a metabolic disorder. On Monday, they defended their handling of the case, saying their tests showed no traces of cholinesterase inhibitors, according to the state-run Tass news service.

Navalny became Russia's most prominent opposition figure during 2011-2012 protests against Putin's return to the Kremlin for a third term following four years as prime minister. He was under close surveillance by Russian security services during his visit to the Siberian city just before he fell ill, Russia's Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, citing security sources.

"Navalny was poisoned with a substance from the cholinesterase group," Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol wrote on Twitter Monday. "That's not something you can make easily. It clearly points to the security services."

John Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to Russia, said Monday that the case would likely come up in talks this week in Moscow between Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun and Russian officials.

"We're very concerned by the reports that Navalny may have been poisoned, and we're closely watching those developments," Sullivan told reporters on a conference call before the Charite statement was issued. "If Navalny has been poisoned, that would represent a very significant development for the United States."
DES PLAINES, Ill., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- According to data received by members of the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB), Chicago ranks as the second-worst city in the nation among major cities for towing abuses. Additionally, a survey of several insurance companies identified Chicago as one of the "most problematic cities" nationally for towing-related abuse.

In Chicago, a typical tow should cost a vehicle owner less than $400. However, towing bills in the city range from $3,000 to $5,000 due to extreme towing and storage fees. These combined fees could mean once a victim's car is towed away, they may not be able to afford to get it back.

Public safety is also at risk. Disingenuous towing companies respond to calls reported over police scanners and try to be the first operator on the scene. In June 2020, six people were injured in a bus accident as the bus driver swerved to avoid a collision with a tow truck seeking to be the first to an accident. And in extreme cases, gunfire has erupted between rival towing services attempting to provide the service.

"We believe strengthening licensing provisions and implementing stricter penalties is a step in the right direction to reduce the number of bad actors and improve the safety of innocent drivers," said Tim Lynch, senior director of government affairs with the National Insurance Crime Bureau.

The NICB is supporting an amendment to city ordinance which would require additional licensing to improve safety. The license will allow tow operators to tow, relocate and store damaged or disabled vehicles from public areas, such as accident scenes.

In part, when renewing or applying for licenses, tow companies must provide proof of a commercial vehicle relocator license, provide a statement certifying the applicant has never been convicted of a felony, and proof of insurance coverage. Once approved, a copy of the license must be placed in plain view within the tow truck and in each office in view of the public. If it is discovered a tow operator falsified or lied on the application the license will be revoked. Additionally, violating accident scene solicitation regulations will become a penalized offense.

"Such ordinances are not unique to Chicago," added Lynch. "We've seen other states and other cities take action to reduce predatory practices by towers and improve public safety."

California passed legislation prohibiting towing companies from stopping at an accident scene unless called by the vehicle owner or law enforcement, and requires towing companies provide written estimates of all charges to the vehicle operator before proceeding with a tow. Missouri has similar laws and Ohio allows civil action by insurers against a towing company operator to recover a vehicle.

The city of Philadelphia implemented a tow rotation system protecting consumers from towing abuse and combat insurance fraud. In Philadelphia, towers are prohibited from accident scene solicitation, and sets requirements for towers at an accident scene, and establishes a consumer bill of rights. Any tow service violating city regulations can be penalized.

New billboards from the NICB alert Chicago drivers to the problems faced by these dishonest towing services telling them to contact the Chicago City Council to end rogue towing practices.



REPORT FRAUD: Anyone with information concerning insurance fraud or vehicle theft can report it anonymously by calling toll-free 800.TEL.NICB (800.835.6422)or submitting a form on our website.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL INSURANCE CRIME BUREAU: Headquartered in Des Plaines, Ill., the NICB is the nation's leading not-for-profit organization exclusively dedicated to preventing, detecting and defeating insurance fraud and vehicle theft through data analytics, investigations, learning and development, government affairs and public affairs. The NICB is supported by more than 1,400 property and casualty insurance companies and self-insured organizations. NICB member companies wrote more than $526 billion in insurance premiums in 2019, or more than 82% of the nation's property-casualty insurance. That includes more than 95% ($241 billion) of the nation's personal auto insurance. To learn more visit www.nicb.org.

SOURCE National Insurance Crime Bureau

Related Links

www.nicb.org


The penultimate moment of any political leadership convention is the the inaugural speech of the new leader.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

The penultimate moment of any political leadership convention is the the inaugural speech of the new leader.

This is the moment when new leaders, employing nothing but the power of their convictions and the poetry of their ideology, create a narrative to heal any wounds or rifts inflicted during the leadership contest, and focus the rank and file on working together to defeat a political enemy.

Lamentably, this was the exact moment that the Conservative Party of Canada denied its supporters, and to the untold thousands of less-partisan Canadians who sincerely wanted to see an alternative to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his band of merry, unethical jesters.

At press time for this commentary, no new leader had been identified. Depending on the source, a malfunction with the machines that opened sealed envelopes with ballots inside, or with the machines that count and tabulate the ballots, led to hours of delay that pushed the final result well past prime-time television coverage in Eastern Canada and the deadline of just about every newspaper in the country east of Kelowna.

How badly did this Sunday night turn out for the Conservatives? After hours of swapping unfounded rumours on cable news programs and across several social media platforms, the same, obvious joke began to circulate among pundits and social media observers:

So, how many Tories does it take to open an envelope?

Its quite possible that several weeks from now, when the new leader is firmly installed in the consciousness of the Canadian electorate, the events of Aug. 23 will be but a distant, albeit painful footnote to this leadership race. But late on Sunday night, it was a horrible tragedy unfolding in real time.

Mechanical malfunctions aside, it was quite clear that the Conservative party never truly understood the concept of a "virtual" leadership convention. Particularly, the fact that in the age of COVID-19, a party leadership is no longer an event, but rather a process that was supposed to reveal in an elegant and timely fashion.

This time around, there was no mass gathering of delegates in a convention centre ballroom, no live speeches, no convention floor negotiations or hospitality room arm-twisting. This was a process to count more than 174,000 ballots cast and mailed in by party members over the past three months.

Given the prolonged voting period, it was somewhat curious the Tories didnt give themselves more time to process the ballots, input the results and tabulate the eventual winner. Still clinging to the idea that there was some sort of live event taking place in Ottawa, the actual vote counting did not start until very early Sunday morning.

By the time the official pre-result program started  90 minutes later than planned  the Tories were numb to their predicament and absent of any idea about what to do.

A party official tried to downplay the vote-counting problems by introducing a pre-recorded video congratulating party volunteers on the great job they did counting votes. Although the volunteers were not the problem here, it was still a horrendously awkward moment.

And lamentably, it was not the only awkward moment.

Dan Lett | Not for Attribution A weekly look at politics close to home and around the world that is sent every Tuesday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

The decision to feature a speech by outgoing leader Andrew Scheer before the new leader was crowned was quite squirm-worthy. Scheer is, after all, the man who is largely credited with snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in last falls election. Although Scheer likely deserved some sort of send off, his intolerably long rant about the Liberals, Eastern elites and traditional media bias served no discernible purpose.

Even as more rumours circulated that first-ballot results would be made public by 10:30 p.m. CT, party officials were still planning on some sort of cross-country video reveal of the regional breakdown of votes. That might have made for interesting, even anxious moments for party members and leadership contenders. As the clock crept closer to midnight in the eastern time zone, it seemed to be an unnecessary indulgence.

It is difficult to assess the potential damage that a screw-up of this magnitude can do to a political party brand. Obviously, a slick and well-executed leadership convention is considered to be a major win, an opportunity to create a lasting moment of political theatre that can help vault new leaders and their parties into the hearts and souls of voters, both committed and uncommitted.

In this instance, as well, there are internal battles awaiting the new Tory leader whenever he or she is finally crowned. The party core is rife with internal conflict between Western separatists, Red Tory centrists and coast-to-coast social conservatives. Depending on who ultimately, the deeply flawed vote-counting process could leave some hardcore Tories with long, bitter grudges.

The opportunity for slick and well-executed had come and gone by late Sunday night. Rather than getting a bounce in support, the new Tory leader is going to have to work extra hard to get past the stench of a leadership vote that has set a new standard for incompetence.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
THE UNSOLVED: This story is part of a periodic series examining unsolved homicides on Staten Island.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- It has been more than five years since James Hall was shot and killed on a quiet Sunnyside street in 2015. His killer has not been found.
Robert Pattinson is raring to get back to work on The Batman.

The 34-year-old actor made a cameo Saturday at the online DC Comics FanDome event, where he said he was ready to don the suit of the Caped Crusader for filmmaker Matt Reeves.

'As many of you probably already know, we were in the beginning stages of production when COVID hit,' the A-list actor said, 'so now Im very anxious to get back to work and continue to form this beloved character, Ive always been a massive fan.'

Ready to go: Robert Pattinson, 34, made a cameo Saturday at the online DC Comics FanDome event, where he said he was ready to don the suit of the Caped Crusader for filmmaker Matt Reeves

The English actor introduced the movie's director before a trailer was displayed for the film.

'Im not really allowed to share anything, so Im going to hand it over to the great Matt Reeves whos somewhere around here, and he can determine what can and cant be talked about,' he said.

'If you stick around to the end there's a cool surprise,' he said, in reference to the trailer.

The trailer, which ran about two minutes, was set to Nirvana's Something in the Way, featuring looks at Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman/Selina Kyle and Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner James Gordon.

Legacy: The London native follows in the footsteps of Michael Keaton, George Clooney, Christian Bale and Ben Affleck in stepping into the high-profile role

The English actor introduced the movie's director before a trailer was displayed for the film

The ensemble cast of the film also includes Colin Farrell as The Penguin, Paul Dano as The Riddler and John Turturro as Carmine Falcone.

The FanDome-released trailer had racked up more than 10 million views since it was unveiled online by Warner Bros. Saturday.

Due to a halting of production amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie has been rescheduled to be released October 1, 2021

The London native follows in the footsteps of Michael Keaton, George Clooney, Christian Bale and Ben Affleck in stepping into the high-profile role, which was first slated to arrive in theaters next June.

Due to a halting of production amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie has been rescheduled to be released October 1, 2021.
Even when a business is losing money, it's possible for shareholders to make money if they buy a good business at the right price. For example, although Amazon.com made losses for many years after listing, if you had bought and held the shares since 1999, you would have made a fortune. Nonetheless, only a fool would ignore the risk that a loss making company burns through its cash too quickly.

Given this risk, we thought we'd take a look at whether Bowen Coking Coal (ASX:BCB) shareholders should be worried about its cash burn. For the purposes of this article, cash burn is the annual rate at which an unprofitable company spends cash to fund its growth; its negative free cash flow. First, we'll determine its cash runway by comparing its cash burn with its cash reserves.

Check out our latest analysis for Bowen Coking Coal

How Long Is Bowen Coking Coal's Cash Runway?

You can calculate a company's cash runway by dividing the amount of cash it has by the rate at which it is spending that cash. When Bowen Coking Coal last reported its balance sheet in December 2019, it had zero debt and cash worth AU$2.7m. Importantly, its cash burn was AU$3.9m over the trailing twelve months. Therefore, from December 2019 it had roughly 8 months of cash runway. That's quite a short cash runway, indicating the company must either reduce its annual cash burn or replenish its cash. Depicted below, you can see how its cash holdings have changed over time.

How Is Bowen Coking Coal's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?

Whilst it's great to see that Bowen Coking Coal has already begun generating revenue from operations, last year it only produced AU$31k, so we don't think it is generating significant revenue, at this point. As a result, we think it's a bit early to focus on the revenue growth, so we'll limit ourselves to looking at how the cash burn is changing over time. With the cash burn rate up 34% in the last year, it seems that the company is ratcheting up investment in the business over time. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but investors should be mindful of the fact that will shorten the cash runway. Admittedly, we're a bit cautious of Bowen Coking Coal due to its lack of significant operating revenues. We prefer most of the stocks on this list of stocks that analysts expect to grow.

Story continues

How Easily Can Bowen Coking Coal Raise Cash?

Since its cash burn is moving in the wrong direction, Bowen Coking Coal shareholders may wish to think ahead to when the company may need to raise more cash. Issuing new shares, or taking on debt, are the most common ways for a listed company to raise more money for its business. Many companies end up issuing new shares to fund future growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.

Bowen Coking Coal's cash burn of AU$3.9m is about 9.0% of its AU$43m market capitalisation. Given that is a rather small percentage, it would probably be really easy for the company to fund another year's growth by issuing some new shares to investors, or even by taking out a loan.

So, Should We Worry About Bowen Coking Coal's Cash Burn?

Even though its cash runway makes us a little nervous, we are compelled to mention that we thought Bowen Coking Coal's cash burn relative to its market cap was relatively promising. Summing up, we think the Bowen Coking Coal's cash burn is a risk, based on the factors we mentioned in this article. Separately, we looked at different risks affecting the company and spotted 5 warning signs for Bowen Coking Coal (of which 3 are a bit concerning!) you should know about.

If you would prefer to check out another company with better fundamentals, then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt or this list of stocks which are all forecast to grow.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.



Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  August 24, 2020  Zacks.com releases the list of companies likely to issue earnings surprises. This weeks list includes Best Buy (BBY), Dollar General (DG) and Ulta Beauty (ULTA).

Improving Economic Momentum Driving Earnings Gains

The improving trend in the overall earnings picture that we have identified since mid-July remains in place, though the pace of favorable estimate revisions has eased a bit in recent days as the Q2 earnings season has moved towards the finish line.

Earnings in the June quarter were down roughly a third from the same period last year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. But thats actually modestly better than what was expected through early July. Importantly, estimates for the current period (2020 Q3) and beyond have been steadily going up, though they still represent big declines from the year-earlier periods.

All of this is consistent with what we are seeing in macroeconomic data that shows the U.S. economy steadily coming out of the pandemic-driven downturn. We saw this in Fridays August PMI surveys that not only show that the recovery is gaining momentum despite the summer surge in infections, but also that the U.S. recovery appears to be outpacing Europe and other regions of the world.

It is this fundamental momentum that is driving the major stock indexes into record territory. That said, the recovery needs continued fiscal support, which has started waning in recent weeks. The hope is that Congress passes the next round of relief measures after it comes back from the summer recess. Any slip up on that front likely remains a risk factor for the economy and the market.

Beyond the macro issues, we discuss the overall earnings story that emerged out of the Q2 earnings season, now winding down, through the following charts.

Please note that through Friday, August 21st, we have seen Q2 results from 476 S&P 500 members or 95.2% of the indexs total membership. We have another 15 index members on deck to report results this week, including Best Buy, Dollar General, Ulta Beauty and others.

Story continues

Analysts were totally in the dark as they set their Q2 EPS and revenue estimates. As we all know, most companies withdrew previously issued guidance given how difficult it was project business trends during the period because of the pandemic.

Total earnings (or aggregate net income) for the 476 S&P 500 members are down -33.4% on -9.7% lower revenues. To round out this scorecard, 80% of these 476 index members have beaten consensus EPS estimates and the corresponding revenue beats percentage is 63.4%, with a blended beats percentage of 56.5%.

Q3 earnings for the S&P 500 index are currently expected to decline -23.9% from the same period last year. But the growth picture has been steadily improving since the start of July. We see a similar trend in place for 2020 Q4 and full-year 2020 estimates as well.

This is a notable improvement in the overall earnings picture since the start of the pandemic and is in-line with high-frequency macroeconomic data that is showing a similar improvement in the economys growth drivers.

The question at this stage is the extent of damage to this improving trend as a result of Congress inability to extend the pandemic-related relief measures that played a critical role in stabilizing the economic picture.

2020 earnings and revenues are expected to be down -21.3% and -5%, respectively. As to be expected, 2020 estimates came down as the pandemic unfolded, with the current -21.1% decline down from +7.9% growth at the start of the year. But as mentioned earlier in the context of 2020 Q3 estimates, the revisions trend lately has been positive.

For an in-depth look at the overall earnings picture and expectations for the coming quarters, please check out our weekly Earnings Trends report >>>> Earnings Season Winding Down

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performancefor information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.



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Seoul, Aug 24 : A group of major South Korean online companies said Monday it has submitted a complaint to the country's telecommunications regulator against Google for potential changes to its app store policies that would force local developers to only use its platform's payment system.

The Korea Internet Corporations Association, which represents major local tech companies, such as top portal operator Naver Corp., said it requested the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) to launch a probe into the purported policy changes to Google's platform.

Google currently limits local game companies on its platform to use its in-app payment system, which takes a 30 percent cut from all purchases, according to the association.

A spokesperson of the association said that Google is planning to expand the system to all digital content purchases in local apps and restrict other options, potentially in violation of local laws.

A spokesperson for Google said the company has made no decision related to the alleged policy changes, reports Yonhap news agency.

Under the law, telecommunications service providers are restricted from obstructing users in selecting other services.

"If Google's policy changes are made, app operators that use other payment methods will be booted from the market and consumers will face more mobile content fees," the association said in a statement. "Google's actions may harm the broader local internet industry." A KCC official said the regulator has received the complaint and is internally reviewing whether to launch a probe.

External payment methods, in comparison to Google's system, take at most 10 percent in fees.

The latest move from the group follows similar complaints from startups.

Apple currently forces all local app developers to use its in-app payment system.

The group said local firms, especially smaller startups, are helpless in the face of the platform operators' demands, as they hold a tight grip over the local app market.
NORTON, Mass.  Theres not a lot of elevation at TPC Boston, but there are plentiful mounds that force you to move to a different vantage point to see more clearly. Scott McGuinness was in one of those quirky areas in Sundays final round of THE NORTHERN TRUST when he decided to jump for a better view at the par-4 ninth hole.

Unfortunately, he didnt have a better landing.

Going down with an ankle injury, McGuinness was attended to by medical officials even as Scottie Scheffler putted out at the par-4 ninth.

After a brief discussion with McGuinness, Scheffler supported the decision to provide more medical attention to his caddie. Thus, was the call made to the bullpen.

Eric Ledbetter, 26, got the call.

Ledbetter is in his seventh year as an assistant on head professional Mark Nowosielskis staff at TPC Boston. There was no hesitation when the staff suggested Ledbetter. He knows every inch of grass at this place, said Matt Byers, an operations manager with the PGA TOUR.

A few years ago, Jonas Blixt arrived for a practice round and used Ledbetter to guide him around TPC Boston.

Playing beautifully all week, Scheffler was introduced to Ledbetter and off they went to the 10th tee. The impressive PGA TOUR rookie was 15-under at the time, and nothing over the next few hours with Ledbetter put him out of sync.

In fact, they moved forward with a birdie at the par-4 13th, then a string of pars before the sky opened. A slow-moving storm packed a lot of rain and electricity and play was halted. Scheffler and Ledbetter were in the fairway at the par-5 18th, so the relief caddies stint lasted a little longer than expected. But it was worth it. Scheffler made birdie on the 18th when play resumed.
(Bloomberg) -- Tencent Holdings Ltd. is close to taking Leyou Technologies Holdings Ltd. private in a deal that would value the Chinese gaming firm at about $1.3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The companies are discussing an offer price range of HK$3.30 to HK$3.40 for each Leyou share, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. Leyous major shareholder Charles Yuk plans to sell his entire stake in the company, the people said. Yuk held about 69% of the Hong Kong-listed firm as of the end of December, its latest annual report shows.

Shares of Leyou erased earlier losses and jumped as much as 4.8% on the Bloomberg News report. The stock closed up 2.9% at HK$3.20, giving the gaming company a market value of about $1.27 billion.

Negotiations are in an advanced stage and an agreement could be announced as soon as this week, according to the people. Talks could still be delayed or fall apart and details including offer price and timeline have not been finalized, the people said. Representatives for Leyou and Tencent didnt immediately respond to requests for comment.

A deal would mark the end of almost a yearlong process that has been in motion since at least September. Bidders included Tencent-backed iDreamSky Technology Holdings Ltd., Zhejiang Century Huatong Group Co., a Shenzhen-listed gaming firm that also counts Tencent as a shareholder, Japanese tech giant Sony Corp., as well as private equity firms.

On July 10, Tencent Mobility Ltd., a wholly-owned unit of the Chinese tech giant, entered into an exclusive agreement with Leyou for a potential privatization. The companies didnt provide any financial details.

Leyou, which was listed in Hong Kong in 2011, makes games including free shooting games Warframe and Dirty Bomb. Its also working with Amazon.com Inc. to co-produce a video game based on the popular fantasy series The Lord of the Rings, according to its website.

Story continues

The company reported a $5.8 million loss in the first half of the year, compared to $9.3 million net income in the same period in 2019. Leyou attributed the loss in part to the coronavirus outbreaks impact on the ability to develop fresh content for Warframe, even though registered users rose 15.5% in the half-year period compared to the previous year.

(Updates share price in the third paragraph and earnings in the eighth paragraph.)

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

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2020 Bloomberg L.P.
Even in the unpredictable world of Brazilian politics, where alliances are fleeting and politicians routinely go to prison, Bolsonaros mounting popularity has been stunning. For the first time in more than a year, more Brazilians approve of his performance than disapprove. In the past two months, as the novel coronavirus gutted Brazil, his approval has risen from 32 to 37 percent, according to the polling service Datafolha. Disapproval has dropped from 44 percent to 34 percent.
President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits Anhui Innovation Center and learns about the technological innovation and emerging industries of Anhui, in Hefei, capital of East China's Anhui province, Aug 19, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]

President calls for awareness of area's status, function during inspection tour

China has vowed to step up the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta in order to make the region the pacesetter of the new development pattern with the domestic market as the mainstay and the domestic and foreign markets complementing each other.

During his inspection tour of Anhui province last week, President Xi Jinping called for a stronger awareness of the status and function of the delta-which involves Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces and Shanghai-in China's economic and social development in order to promote the region's integrated development amid grave and complex domestic and international circumstances.

Xi made the remark while presiding over a symposium on advancing the integrated development of the region in Hefei, capital of Anhui. The symposium was attended by Vice-Premier Han Zheng and other senior officials of the related departments from the central government as well as related provincial-level officials.

Noting that the region should rise to be the trailblazer of China's technological and industrial innovation, Xi said the entire delta region should not only provide quality products but also serve as a source of high-level technologies to support the country's high-quality development.

Xi underscored the need to make faster progress in developing the region to a new height of reform and opening-up. Efforts should be made to improve the business environment in line with world-class standards, and attract talent and enterprises from home and abroad with a development environment which has a high level of openness, services, innovation and efficiency, he said.

The president also called for efforts to promote trade and investment facilitation and strive to make the delta region an important bridge between the international and domestic markets.

Xi's remarks came as the country is striving to accelerate the establishment of a "dual circulation" development pattern, in which the domestic economic cycle plays a leading role while the international economic cycle is its extension and supplement. The development pattern aims to cope with an external environment characterized by rising protectionism, a global economic downturn and a shrinking international market.

China unveiled a plan for the integrated development of the delta in December as part of its national strategies for integrated regional development, which also involve integrated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

The delta region, considered to be China's most vibrant area in terms of technological innovation and economic development, has a built-in advantage in advancing the new development pattern as it boasts abundant talents, strong manufacturing, well-developed industrial and supply chains and vast market potential.

A draft of the spatial planning for the region's integration demonstration zone, an area of 2,400 square kilometers at the border of Shanghai and Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, was published on June 18 to seek opinions from the public.

It set out a blueprint for infrastructure construction, natural and cultural heritage conservation, and transportation routes, as well as industrial parks in the area by 2035. According to the plan, the area will have a population of 3.8 million and generate 1.5 billion yuan ($216.9 million) in GDP per square kilometer per year.

Zhejiang, which boasts the nation's most vibrant private economy, is planning to invest over 200 billion yuan in the construction of major projects concerning the integration of the region this year.

Zhejiang should fully utilize its booming private sector, which accounts for over 60 percent of its GDP, 70 percent of taxation and exports, and 80 percent of its gross employment, in regional integration, Weng Jianrong, deputy director of the Zhejiang Provincial Development and Reform Commission, said in an interview at the end of July.

Zhou Jun, Party secretary of the Hangzhou branch of internet giant NetEase Inc, said Zhejiang should take full advantage of its strength in the digital economy sector to construct a "Digital Yangtze River Delta".

He urged the provincial authorities to work out more favorable policies to attract high-end talents from abroad to make Zhejiang a major engine in boosting scientific and technological innovation in the delta region.
Egypt's House of Representatives approved on Monday a host of laws on economic and social topics. The session was the last before the MPs' summer recess.

With House elections slated for November, Parliament Speaker Ali Abdel-Aal gave MPs the choice to reconvene following the recess and before the five-year term ends.

The majority of MPs said they do not wish to come back for other meetings.

Abdel-Aal said the law allows we hold other meetings but it is better to adjourn today because if we decide to hold another meeting the government may be tempted to refer three or four new laws to us to discuss, said Abdel-Aal.

He also decided not to open a debate on a law regulating Egypts Dar Al-Iftaa, or the House of Fatwas (religious edicts).

The law, drafted by parliaments religious affairs committee, was harshly attacked by Ahmed El-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar. El-Tayeb said the law violates Article 7 of the constitution, which gives Al-Azhar absolute supervision of religious affairs, including the issuing of religious fatwas.

Abdel-Aal insisted that parliament will not adjourn before it discusses and approves a new government-drafted law on unified tax procedures.

This is a very important law that we all should discuss and pass before we adjourn after five years of meetings, said Abdel-Aal.

The 90-article law on was already approved by MPs a week earlier.

Finance minister Mohamed Maait said the law aims to facilitate the collection of taxes and boost the countrys financial revenues to push economic development forward.

All taxation procedures will be automated via electronic systems and this will save a lot of time, effort and cost, said Maait, adding that this is the first time in Egypts history that it has a unified tax procedures law.

Each tax payer will have a certain figure which will be used to tackle his tax dealings, said Maait, adding that the automation of tax procedures in Egypt will be completed in December.

Mohamed Abul-Enein, an independent MP and a businessman, said the law will also help settle tax disputes and enable the government to collect more than EGP 4 billion in tax arrears.

A report by parliaments budget committee said the new law facilitates the collection of taxes by forging four laws into one.

These are the income tax law (91/2005), the value added tax law (67/2016), the state's financial resources development tax law (147/1984) and the stamp tax law (111/1980), said the report.

Meanwhile, parliament finally approved 12 laws tackling a variety of economic and social topics. The list includes laws on regulating healthcare for patients suffering from psychological troubles; expropriating private property for public use; regulating the activities of microfinance projects; amending the construction law (119/2008); modifying the commercial register law (34/1970); and the law on regulating medical clinical research.

Other laws approved included regulating the Egyptian Waqf (religious endowments) Authority; establishing the Fund for Supporting Physically Challenged Persons; regulating waste management; amending the electricity law (87/2015), and the law on establishing the Catholic and Anglican Church Waqf Authority.

The list includes a law on licensing the two ministers of petroleum and housing to contract the Egyptian Mining Company for utilising salt lakes and quarries, in addition to the customs law..

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The search for survivors in the rubble of buildings destroyed during Saudi airstrikes near Sana Airport on March 26. (Mohammed Huwais / AFP/Getty Images)

In December 2016, President Obama restricted the sale of American arms to Saudi Arabia, citing concerns about the widespread killings of civilians in the brutal war in Yemen.

He should have done it much earlier, and the restrictions didn't go far enough, but it was a step forward. Or it seemed to be until Donald Trump took office just a month later and reversed course, starting the sales up again.

Since then, a wedding party and even a school bus have been bombed with U.S.-made weapons supplied to the Saudi coalition forces.

Disturbed by the continuing civilian deaths, Congress has tried to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen, where the Saudis and their allies are trying to drive Iranian-backed Houthi insurgents out of power. But Trump vetoed its bipartisan resolution. And when lawmakers put a hold on an $8.1-billion arms sale to the Saudi coalition last year, it was undone by Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeos declaration of an emergency that he attributed to Irans malign activities in the region.

So the sales have continued.

Now even the State Department has acknowledged that our arming of the Saudi coalition is problematic  or at least the agency's independent inspector general has. In a report out this month, the inspector general concluded that the U.S. government failed to fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties from American-made precision-guided bombs in Yemen.

The calamitous war in Yemen has created the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Millions of Yemenis are facing cholera, famine, displacement and economic collapse.

And our countrys fingerprints are all over the mess, raising serious questions about our advocacy of global human rights and our commitment to the rules of war.

Look, we should not be involved in war crimes or human rights abuses, period, Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) says. If we know theyre being committed with our weapons, and if the country were selling to is refusing our advice to change its behavior, from that point on we are complicit. And the Saudis have consistently refused our advice even as they have taken our weapons.

Story continues

How does it happen that U.S.-made weapons are routinely being used to kill civilians on the other side of the world? Simple. American arms manufacturers make and sell the military equipment  including planes, helicopters, bombs, missiles and spare parts of all sorts. The U.S. government approves the sales. The Saudis and their allies fly the planes, pull the triggers and detonate the bombs.

In April 2018, Saudi-led coalition forces dropped an American-made GBU-12 bomb on a wedding celebration in Al-Rafa village in Yemen, killing 21 people, including 11 children. In September 2016, 23 people were killed in the bombing of a residential neighborhood in western Yemen near the Red Sea, a remnant of a U.S.-made GBU-16 laser-guided bomb was found at the site. And in August 2018, a laser-guided MK 82 bomb manufactured in the United States destroyed a school bus in Northern Yemen, killing 40 children.

Those are just a few examples from a long list.

Today, the United States is the worlds biggest arms seller, and Saudi Arabia is its biggest client. American companies selling to Saudi Arabia include General Dynamics, Raytheon and Boeing.

It has long been the U.S. position that arms sales can work to our advantage. By arming our allies, we can help them meet their sovereign self-defense needs, as the State Department puts it. In theory, it protects them, keeps us from being drawn into their conflicts and creates jobs and profits here at home.

But how can we as a country possibly deny all moral responsibility when the deadly weapons we sell are misused  especially if that misuse is persistent and predictable? Surely its possible to bar weapons sales to repeat offenders. Surely when survivors are posting cellphone photos of bomb shards that say Made in the U.S.A., something needs to change.

A U.N. report last September went so far as to suggest that the role of the U.S. in arming and backing the Saudi coalition might make it legally complicit.

Human Rights Watch, which does not routinely call for bans on arms sales, has called for one in this case.

We see the attacks by the Saudi-led coalition as so egregious and so non-responsive to international or domestic pressure that we have come to believe the countries actively selling them weapons are participants, says Andrea Prasow, acting Washington director of Human Rights Watch.

Trump insists that he shares concerns about civilian casualties and says the U.S. is training coalition forces to improve their targeting.

And indeed, American advisors have worked with the Saudis at their operations headquarters in Riyadh  assessing collateral damage risks, making sure proposed targets arent on the no-strike list, and ensuring the underlying intelligence is accurate.

But the work has been ineffective, in part because casualties rarely occur in such pre-planned, deliberate strikes. They occur in dynamic strikes, where a coalition airplane flies over Yemen, gets in touch with an ally on the ground and asks for real-time targeting advice.

The truth is that the Saudis have shown little willingness to change their behavior  not because they dont know how or lack training or advice, but because they lack the political will to do so. The United States, for its part, lacks the will to disentangle itself from this humanitarian catastrophe.

@Nick_Goldberg




Silver Spring, MD, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For Immediate Release:

August 24, 2020

Media Contacts:

Tom Rumsey

240-281-3724;

Jennifer Villarreal

617-480-6833

Competitive Power Ventures, GE Energy Financial Services, Osaka Gas USA, Axium Infrastructure and Harrison Street Close Financing on CPV Three Rivers Energy Center

Construction to Commence Imminently; Facility Expected to Begin Operations in 2023

Competitive Power Ventures (CPV), in partnership with GE Energy Financial Services, Osaka Gas USA, Axium Infrastructure, and Harrison Street, today announced it has reached financial closing on CPV Three Rivers Energy Center (CPV Three Rivers) in Grundy County, Illinois. The project represents over $1.3 billion in private investment, including $875 million of senior credit facilities arranged on a true club basis with broad-based support from a diverse group of 14 international financial institutions and investment from the equity partners.

CPV Three Rivers is a state-of-the-art 1,250-megawatt natural-gas-fueled, combined-cycle electric generation facility that will use GE's latest highly-efficient HA turbine technology, which enables an unmatched efficiency of greater than 64%, with industry-leading flexibility. The facility will sell its power into the PJM market, enough to meet the demand of up to 1.25 million homes and businesses serving Northern Illinois, including Chicago. Construction, which is led by Kiewit Power Constructors Co., will commence shortly and commercial operation is expected to begin in 2023. CPV Three Rivers is CPVs largest project to date.

CPV is pleased to announce the financing of CPV Three Rivers, continuing our string of success in bringing another state-of-the-art electric generating project that will modernize the nations electric grid by generating safe, reliable, cost effective and environmentally responsible electric power. This project, located in Illinois, will serve the PJM market for years to come, said CPV CEO Gary Lambert. While the pandemic posed challenges throughout this process, we are thankful to our partners, lenders and host community for their perseverance and confidence in the success of this project.

Achieving financial close for CPV Three Rivers during a global pandemic and with commitments from 14 international lenders is a testament to CPVs successful track record developing, financing, constructing, and operating safe, reliable, cost-effective and environmentally responsible power generation facilities, said CPV CFO Paul Buckovich. Were grateful for the trust our lenders have placed in us to deliver.

The plant will feature two combustion turbines, two heat recovery systems and two steam turbines in order to maximize efficiency. The facility will have unmatched operational flexibility which allows it to quickly respond to demand changes introduced with the growing deployment of renewable generation. The unique ability for this state-of-the-art technology to provide highly efficient, low-emitting, reliable power and to support renewables with the unmatched operating flexibility offers an optimal solution for Illinois to meet its carbon reduction goals.

"GE is honored to continue its relationship with Competitive Power Ventures by supplying advanced gas technology for CPV's third HA-powered facility," said Scott Strazik, President and CEO of GE's Gas Power business. "Our relationship with CPV is built on proven results, and we are proud to be able to provide state-of-the-art technology, services and strategic financing to help develop complex projects like Three Rivers, which will provide reliable, affordable, and sustainable electricity to CPV's customers."

The project enjoys strong support from residents, business, labor and elected leaders in Grundy County and will yield substantial local and regional benefits, including hundreds of millions of dollars in private infrastructure investment and significant new revenues for local governments and businesses. At peak construction, more than 500 union workers will be onsite. Once operational, the energy center will require a staff of 25 full-time personnel and approximately 75 additional jobs will be created to provide ongoing services to the plant.

CPV Three Rivers will provide $1 billion in economic development and hundreds of good-paying, union construction jobs to Illinois over the next two years at a time when more than 1 million Illinoisans are unemployed, said Rep. Larry Walsh, Jr. (D-Joliet). Energy has always been the backbone of Grundy County, and I support the expansion of all resource types to ensure grid reliability, bring new tax revenue streams to the state of Illinois and spur job creation that puts Americans back to work.

After years of development, I am pleased to officially welcome CPV Three Rivers to Grundy County, said State Sen. Patrick Joyce (D-Essex). The project will provide long-term, high-paying jobs while increasing the resiliency, security, and affordability of our power supply. CPV is a true partner for our communities and our labor force.

CPV Three Rivers has executed a long-term redevelopment agreement that will help support Grundy Countys tax base, services, and economic development. These funds will be used to support local schools, offset reducing revenue streams, and improve infrastructure. Throughout the development process, CPV Three Rivers has been committed to keeping the community well informed through active community outreach, a dedicated project website and an informational open house held at Coal City High School. The company will continue to proactively invest in and support the community through open dialogue and active participation in local events and organizations.

As a staunch supporter of the CPV Three Rivers project during its development, I could not be happier to see CPV and their partners reach this critical milestone, said State Senator Sue Rezin (R-Peru). Not only are they enhancing the regions energy corridor by constructing a state-of-the-art generation facility in Grundy County, but also becoming an integral part of our community, committed to supporting our first responders and local schools.

About CPV

Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) is uniquely positioned to leverage global technology and financial partnerships to help modernize Americas power generation. Together with our investors, partners, host communities and other key stakeholders, we are driven to improve our energy infrastructure by developing and operating power generation facilities using cutting edge, domestically available natural gas and renewable power technologies. Headquartered in Silver Spring, MD, with an office in Braintree, MA, the company has ownership interest in 4.2 GW of clean generation across the United States. The companys Asset Management division currently manages more than 9,300 MW of fossil and renewable generating facilities in nine states for 12 different owner groups. Our focus on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and sustained track record of success have enabled us to grow into the number one thermal developer and one of North Americas premier energy companies. For more information: www.cpv.com and follow CPV on Twitter and LinkedIn.

ADDENDUM:

Achieving financial close on the 1,250-MW CPV Three Rivers Energy Center demonstrates GEs ability to partner with our customers on large, complex and capital-intensive infrastructure projects. CPV is an experienced and valued co-development partner to GE in the U.S. In the past decade, CPV and GE have closed six projects totaling over 4,000-MW utilizing GE technology and raised over $4 billion of capital," said Susan Flanagan, President & CEO, GE Energy Financial Services.

Once again, were proud to partner with CPV and GE Energy Financial Services on a cost-effective and environmentally-responsible power project. The CPV Three Rivers Energy Center will facilitate the electrification of energy end uses with a smaller carbon footprint while providing grid reliability, said Tetsushi Ikuta, President, Osaka Gas USA.

"Axium is thrilled to participate in the Three Rivers project and, when completed in 2023, to add this valuable asset in Illinois to its well diversified portfolio of infrastructure assets across North America," said Thierry Vandal, President of Axium Infrastructure US Inc.

Christopher Merrill, Harrison Streets Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, CPV Three Rivers Energy Center is a cutting-edge energy facility that will provide reliable, highly efficient power to our hometown of Chicago. This investment is reflective of Harrison Streets commitment to supporting mission-critical infrastructure assets and our ability to execute complex transactions amid uncertain environments. We are thrilled to be partnering with CPV, GE Energy Financial Services, Osaka Gas and Axium on this long-term project and bringing our infrastructure investing expertise to the Northern Illinois community.

"CPVs Three Rivers Energy Center is an important project that will use state-of-the-art technology to strengthen Illinois critical electric generation supply with reliable, cost-effective, and environmentally-responsible low emissions generation, said Illinois Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Todd Maisch. Strengthening our mix of generation is a huge boon to Illinois businesses who depend on affordable, reliable electricity to keep their doors open.

The construction of CPV Three Rivers is an enormous undertaking and we are proud to partner with industry leaders CPV and Kiewit to build this project for our community, said Tim Drea, President of the Illinois AFL-CIO. Working together, our focus will be on the health and safety of the more than 500 union workers who will bring their expertise to build one of the most advanced power generation projects in the country, right here at home.

The CPV Three Rivers Energy Center is a win-win for the entire community, said International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150 President-Business Manager, James M. Sweeney. In addition to using cutting-edge technology to generate power efficiently, this project will create hundreds of good-paying jobs for local workers. The economic benefit will be felt throughout the region, and we should be united in our support for the Three Rivers Energy Center.

Will & Grundy Building Trades Council is proud that the CPV Three Rivers Energy Center will be built by the hands of our talented union tradesmen who are supporting its nearly three-year construction, said Doc Gregory, President, Will & Grundy Counties Building Trades Council. After working with CPV over the past four-and-a-half years, its great to achieve this milestone and our members are ready, eager and able to take the CPV Three Rivers Energy Center from concept to reality.

The CPV Three Rivers Energy Center is a big win for our members and we are excited to put hundreds of skilled union workers to work here in Grundy County, said Tom White, Executive Director, Three Rivers Construction Alliance. Our workforce and their wages and benefits will extend beyond the construction site, too, supporting our local businesses and invigorating the local economy with their purchasing power.

Grundy County is fortunate to have attracted one of the most esteemed independent power producers in the country to develop, build and operate the CPV Three Rivers Energy Center, said Nancy E. Norton, CEO and President of the Grundy County Economic Development Council. The GEDC began working with CPV nearly five years ago and I have seen firsthand how they set themselves apart with their commitment to developing strong community ties and creating public awareness of the significant benefits their facility will bring to the region. Especially during this time of economic uncertainty and unemployment, we are thankful that the CPV Three Rivers Energy Center is one step closer to becoming a reality. I could not be more excited.

As the former Chairman of Grundy Countys Board, I met CPV early on in the development process and was impressed with their prowess. The location they uncovered for a new power generation facility is ideal and Im happy to have this major infrastructure project in the 75th District that I serve as State Representative. It is essential that we continue to add new, clean, reliable and cost-effective power to support our local and state economy and I fully support the CPV Three Rivers Energy Center, said Rep. David Welter (R-Morris).

"CPV Three Rivers brings a tremendous boost to the local economy," said Grundy County Board Chairman, Chris Balkema. "We are very thankful that CPV and their partners are investing in our community for the long-term. As CPV Three Rivers reaches their intended capacity, they will become one of our largest taxpayers and will energize our economy with funds for our schools, first responders and families for many years."

We are pleased to have a company like CPV join our community and that they are committed to being a good corporate citizen and supporting our local schools, said Dr. Kent Bugg, Superintendent, Coal City School District. I look forward to all we can do together to make a lasting impact on our students, especially in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).

CPV Three Rivers has generously shown its support for our community and heritage by sponsoring Cabin Festival for the last five years, remarked Char McDade, President, Goose Lake Prairie Partners. Were happy that they have achieved project financing and welcome them to Grundy County to be a part of our collective future.

Attachment
The White House has appealed to the Supreme Court to allow President Trump to block critics on his personal Twitter account. However, a decision by the Supreme Court whether to hear the case or not is unlikely before the November election.

This appeal is expected to be the last attempt by the Trump administration in a long-running saga. Columbia Universitys Knight First Amendment Institute originally filed the case in July 2017.

The Knight First Amendment Institute sued the President on behalf of seven persons, whom Trump had blocked on his Twitter account. Judge Naomi Buchwald, of New Yorks Southern District, ruled in favor of the Knight First Amendment Institute.

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The ruling stated that, given the nature of the continuous tweets, the resulting conversations are deemed as a public forum. As a result, Trumps blocking of certain individuals from participating in those conversations was legally curtailing their freedom of speech.

The federal appeals court in New York declines a case review

The federal appeals court in New York upheld the original judgment by Judge Naomi Buchwald, in 2019. Subsequently, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals also declined to review this case earlier this year. A majority of the judges felt that it was unnecessary to review this case, despite protest from the President.

In fact, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals had declined to review the case by a 7-2 vote. Judges Michael H Park and Richard Sullivan voted in favor of the appeal. Both of whom were appointed by President Trump.

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The Trump administration stated that Trumps Twitter account is his personal property. The White House argues that the President should be allowed to block critics on his personal account. They likened this to elected officials not allowing their opponents yard signs on their front lawns.

Acting Solicitor General, Jeffrey Wall, urged the Supreme Court justices to review the case. He cited that President Trump should be free to utilize all features of his personal Twitter account as it is independent of his presidential office.

President Trump blocks critics on his Twitter account.

President Trump uses his personal Twitter account  @realdonaldtrump  to broadcast his views to his 85 million followers. The New York federal appeals court had observed that President Trumps daily tweets and observations were overwhelmingly official.

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The resulting in conversations were termed as a public forum by the New York federal appeals court. Hence the court had held that by blocking a critic from his Twitter account, the President violated the First Amendment.

Given the past history of this case, it seems more than likely that the Supreme Court will decline a review. However, the Supreme Court will be out of sessions until October 5th, this year.
Indigenous protests have taken over Peru, threatening to undermine the Latin American nations burgeoning upstream industry. To many it would come as a surprise that Peru has any substantial amounts of oil production, especially on the back of sizeable crude and product imports to the country growing higher and higher. Yet below the surface, Perus problems mirror those of many other Latin American countries  combining sustainable development in fragile biodiverse zones with hydrocarbon reserves that are still available in places that are either nature reserves or of spiritual importance to indigenous populaces. Peru has become a battlefield between economic interests and social rights  a battle zone stained by blood as to date at least 3 indigenous protesters were killed in skirmishes with the enforcement authorities.

Latin Americas travails with the corona virus have triggered various responses from respective governments and Peru has been one of the most peculiar cases. Despite a swift lockdown announced on March 15, a week after Peru has reported its first case, Peru has been overwhelmed by the pandemic, having the second-highest COVID mortality rate globally after Belgium. As the Peruvian government introduced stringent health measures, production from faraway regions was shut down temporarily, in the hope that it can be restarted as soon as the COVID-19 gets more manageable. Technically Perus fields need not have shut down completely, however the national oil company PetroPeru has suspended all transportation on its 100kbpd Northern Crude pipeline that brings oil from the countrys northern states to the Pacific Ocean port of Bayovar.

Perus total crude production has averaged 60kbpd before the COVID-induced market slump, dropping to half of that by June 2020. The Chinese national oil company CNPC remains the largest producer in Peru yet its assets, being located next to the Ecuadorian frontier, rarely make it to the front pages as they lie within reasonably well-documented oil plays. Yet it is in Perus jungle-covered state of Loreto which moved into the forefront of the nations oil industry. Following the corona-induced demand slump Petrotal has temporarily laid off all but essential personnel at the 40 MMbbls Bretana field in early May, indicating that by August most curtailments would be eased, either fully or partially. When in the first days of August the Calgary-based company tried to restart the field, mayhem ensued.

Within 24 hours of Bretanas restart the indigenous protestors took over a pumping station, forcing the producer to halt production. The conflict quickly escalated into complete chaos, both sides accusing the other of opening fire, what is beyond controversy, however, is the completely unnecessary death toll  3 indigenous protesters from the Kukama community have been shot by security forces. Their allegations of the Peruvian government failing the COVID-19 pandemic and disregarding the environmental damage caused by oil production in the Amazon jungle have remained unanswered. Despite a lack of publicly articulated commitments, the government of Peru has managed to find common ground with the protesters and would restart the Northern Oil Pipeline by the end of August. Related: Saudi Energy Ministry To Help Build $500 Billion Smart City

Where does this leave Perus prospects for further drilling in the Amazon? In the specific case of Block 95 which hosts the Bretana field, it seems that the authorities have persuaded/coaxed the indigenous protesters into a period of lull. The Bretana cargoes are now finding their way to buyers (the 19 API and 0.5 sulphur grade is currently assessed at an approximately -1 per barrel discount to ICE Brent) and it seems that the indigenous peoples rights to live in an oil-free environment will be flung aside as all parties concerned want to maximize their revenues, now that the oil price is well above their production costs of ~25 per barrel. Moreover, if the case of neighboring Ecuador is to suggest anything, then Perus overall oil prospects would tilt heavily towards the economic side.

Ecuadors failed Yasuni-ITT initiative remains a poignant reminder that the dilemmas Latin American nations have been facing so far wielded very little progress on the environmentalists side. In 2007 then-President of Ecuador Rafael Correa has called on the international community to garner $3.6 billion in payments, in return of which Quito would perpetually suspend all oil development activities in the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) National Reserve in the Amazon, Ecuadors most oil-prolific new frontier which coincidentally turned out to be one of the most biodiverse corners of our planet. Were the initiative to work, it could ensure that indigenous peoples would not be confronted with the risk of oil spills and deforestation for industrial purposes  the plans only weakness lied in its reliance on international investors caring about the environment to such an extent as to financially back the ambitious initiative.

The Yasuni-ITT trust fund was open for almost 3 years and eventually collected less than 5% of the required sum. This in turn has prompted Ecuadorian authorities to start looking at their oil reserves in the Amazon and starting from 2016, the ITT national park has started witnessing drilling. Needless to say, cases of oil spills (such as the one this April when a landslide has damaged an oil-transporting pipeline and crude started to pour into the Coca river, a source of drinking water for indigenous communities. The Ecuadorian failure to keep the environment out of harms way and to safeguard the interests of its own people who happened to live in the wrong place will loom large in upcoming legal battles, of which Peru will not be the last. Hence, the resolution of the current political impasse in Peru is doubly important  it can either confirm a negative trend of disregard or mark a first-ever Latin American victory of social rights over economic development when it comes to oil.

By Viktor Katona for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
LUND, Sweden, Aug. 24, 2020and imILT treatment protocol in the rapidly growing Asia-Pacific market. The first step is to initiate the regulatory processes and market preparations needed in order to successfully launch CLS' products and therapy in the region.



"Clinical Asia Pacific is ready to start its operation in Singapore and service our business in this dynamic region. One of the key reasons for establishing a presence here is that Singapore is one of Asia's most important hubs for clinical research and development. I'm looking forward to working together with AMS and introducing the TRANBERG products for image-guided laser ablation treatment to healthcare providers and physicians - starting in Singapore, and expanding from there," says Lars-Erik Eriksson, CEO of CLS.



"We are enthusiastic about our relationship with CLS and look forward to working with CLS's products and therapy in the Asia-Pacific region. The AMS' product portfolio, "Advanced Diagnostics & Minimally Invasive Therapy Systems and Services," truly compliment and promote the TRANBERG-system for imILT protocol and for FLA/LITT procedures. AMS has built its 25+ years' reputation on innovative, minimally invasive therapies, and this is exactly where the fit between AMS & CLS is. The TRANBERG products offer some unique clinical value that can be professionally presented to customers in the APAC region," says Romesh Kaul, President & CEO of AMS.

AMS is an Asian Pacific enterprise, headquartered in Singapore, founded in 1988 with strategic engagements in the SEA and India. The Company is well positioned with healthcare practice intelligence and emerging market access. Since its inception, AMS is well known for having successfully introduced many ground breaking technologies, for use in cancer treatment as well as in neurosurgery, from leading suppliers in the world.

CLS markets and sells the TRANBERG | Thermal Therapy System for high-precision, image-guided laser ablation treatment in the EU targeting prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, brain tumors, and epilepsy, and in the USA for prostate treatment. The system is optimized for treatment with CLS' proprietary imILT protocol, with the potential to stimulate the immune system. Image guided means that the physician uses magnetic resonance images (MRI) or ultrasound (US) images, for example, to identify targets, guide placement of instruments, and monitor tissue during the ablation procedure.

The health care market in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to show continued growth during the years to come. According to Researchandmarkets.com , a 7.2 % growth during 2019 was predicted reaching a total value of $486.72 billion. The Singapore healthcare market alone is expected to grow to $29.8 billion in 2020, 9 per cent more than last year's $27.3 billion, according to a report published on March 13, 2020 by market insights firm Fitch Solutions . According to the report the market will more than double to $68.7 billion by 2029.

CLS Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. is a joint venture where CLS owns 50 % of the shares and AMS 50 % of the shares.

This press release has been translated from Swedish. The Swedish text shall govern for all purposes and prevail in case of any discrepancy with the English version.

Company contact:

Lars-Erik Eriksson, CEO Clinical Laserthermia Systems AB



About Clinical Laserthermia Systems

Clinical Laserthermia Systems AB (publ),develops and sells the TRANBERG |Thermal Therapy System including specially designed sterile disposable products for the minimally invasive treatment of cancerous tumors, in accordance with regulatory approvals in EU and USA. The products are marketed for image-guided laser ablation.
The Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Akin Abayomi, says he is responding positively to treatment after testing positive to COVID-19, and remains committed to discharging my duties.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalled that the state Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Gbenga Omotoso, had in a statement on Monday disclosed Mr Abayomis COVID-19 status.

Mr Abayomi, in a message posted on his Twitter account @ProfAkinAbayomi, said he remains committed to discharging his duties to the state.

With utmost sense of responsibility, I am obliged to make it known to the general public that I have tested positive to #COVID-19.

Consequently, I have proceeded on 14 days self-isolation and treatment at home.

Nevertheless, I remain committed to continuing to discharge my duties as the Commissioner for Health and Deputy Incident Commander for #COVID-19 responses in Lagos State.

I am extremely enthusiastic and hopeful of overcoming this phase of our collective fight against #COVID-19, he said.

READ ALSO:

Mr Abayomi said he has the full support of the governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the entire cabinet of the government of Lagos State, as well as his team at the state Ministry of Health, to put the incident behind as soon as possible.

I wish to, however, assure you all that my family members and I are fine and are responding positively to treatment, he said.

The commissioner urged Lagos citizens to continue to wear face masks, maintain physical distancing, as well as other established protocols for COVID-19 prevention.

Also, Chikwe Ihekweazu, Director-General, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), through his Twitter handle, wished Mr Abayomi speedy recovery.

I wish my dear brother and colleague @ProfAkinAbayomi, a speedy recovery.

Very grateful for your strong leadership of the #COVID-19 response in Lagos State.

We will #keeppushing, and urge Nigerians to adhere to all public health and safety measures, so we can control this outbreak, Mr Ihekweazu tweeted.

(NAN)
Technavio has been monitoring the RFID tags market for livestock management market and it is poised to grow by USD 1.18 bn during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of almost 13% during the forecast period. The report offers an up-to-date analysis regarding the current market scenario, latest trends and drivers, and the overall market environment.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200824005399/en/

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global RFID Tags for Livestock Management Market 2020-2024 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Although the COVID-19 pandemic continues to transform the growth of various industries, the immediate impact of the outbreak is varied. While a few industries will register a drop in demand, numerous others will continue to remain unscathed and show promising growth opportunities. Technavio's in-depth research has all your needs covered as our research reports include all foreseeable market scenarios, including pre- post-COVID-19 analysis. Download a Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impacts

Frequently Asked Questions:

What are the major trends in the market?

Increasing adoption of cloud technologies to improve dairy production in livestock units is a major trend driving the growth of the market.

Increasing adoption of cloud technologies to improve dairy production in livestock units is a major trend driving the growth of the market. At what rate is the market projected to grow?

The year-over-year growth for 2020 is estimated at 8.29% and the incremental growth of the market is anticipated to be 1.18 bn.

The year-over-year growth for 2020 is estimated at 8.29% and the incremental growth of the market is anticipated to be 1.18 bn. Who are the top players in the market?

Allflex Group, Dalton Tags, Datamars SA, Essen Computers Pvt. Ltd., HID Global Corp., Impinj Inc., Ketchum Manufacturing Inc., National Band Tag Co., Omnia Technologies Pvt. Ltd., and SafeTag., are some of the major market participants.

Allflex Group, Dalton Tags, Datamars SA, Essen Computers Pvt. Ltd., HID Global Corp., Impinj Inc., Ketchum Manufacturing Inc., National Band Tag Co., Omnia Technologies Pvt. Ltd., and SafeTag., are some of the major market participants. What is the key market driver?

The regulations regarding animal welfare is one of the major factors driving the market.

The regulations regarding animal welfare is one of the major factors driving the market. How big is the Europe market?

The Europe region will contribute 28% of the market share.

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Allflex Group, Dalton Tags, Datamars SA, Essen Computers Pvt. Ltd., HID Global Corp., Impinj Inc., Ketchum Manufacturing Inc., National Band Tag Co., Omnia Technologies Pvt. Ltd., and SafeTag. are some of the major market participants. The regulations regarding animal welfare will offer immense growth opportunities. To make most of the opportunities, market vendors should focus more on the growth prospects in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.

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

Technavio's custom research reports offer detailed insights on the impact of COVID-19 at an industry level, a regional level, and subsequent supply chain operations. This customized report will also help clients keep up with new product launches in direct indirect COVID-19 related markets, upcoming vaccines and pipeline analysis, and significant developments in vendor operations and government regulations.

RFID Tags Market for Livestock Management Market 2020-2024: Segmentation

RFID Tags Market for Livestock Management Market is segmented as below:

Type Cattle Goats And Sheep Others

Geography North America Europe APAC South America MEA



To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR43625

RFID Tags Market for Livestock Management Market 2020-2024: Scope

Technavio presents a detailed picture of the market by the way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources. The RFID tags market for livestock management market report covers the following areas:

RFID Tags Market for Livestock Management Market Size

RFID Tags Market for Livestock Management Market Trends

RFID Tags Market for Livestock Management Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies the increasing adoption of cloud technologies to improve dairy production in livestock units as one of the prime reasons driving the RFID Tags Market for livestock management market growth during the next few years.

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Technavio's in-depth research has direct and indirect COVID-19 impacted market research reports.

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RFID Tags Market for Livestock Management Market 2020-2024: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2020-2024

Detailed information on factors that will assist RFID tags market for livestock management market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the RFID tags market for livestock management market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the RFID tags market for livestock management market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of RFID tags market for livestock management market vendors

Table of Contents:

Executive Summary

Market Landscape

Market ecosystem

Value chain analysis

Market Sizing

Market definition

Market segment analysis

Market size 2019

Market outlook: Forecast for 2019 2024

Five Forces Analysis

Five forces summary

Bargaining power of buyers

Bargaining power of suppliers

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Threat of rivalry

Market condition

Market Segmentation by Type

Market segments

Comparison by Type

Cattle Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Goats and sheep Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Others Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Market opportunity by Type

Customer landscape

Geographic Landscape

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

North America Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Europe Market size and forecast 2019-2024

APAC Market size and forecast 2019-2024

South America Market size and forecast 2019-2024

MEA Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Key leading countries

Market opportunity by geography

Volume drivers Demand led growth

Market challenges

Market trends

Vendor Landscape

Overview

Vendor landscape

Landscape disruption

Vendor Analysis

Vendors covered

Market positioning of vendors

Allflex Group

Dalton Tags

Datamars SA

Essen Computers Pvt. Ltd.

HID Global Corp.

Impinj Inc.

Ketchum Manufacturing Inc.

National Band Tag Co.

Omnia Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

SafeTag

Appendix

Scope of the report

Currency conversion rates for US$

Research methodology

List of abbreviations

About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses 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/20200824005399/en/

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Nearly a year after five-year-old Dulce Alavez disappeared from a New Jersey playground as her mother sat in her car less than 100 feet away, the FBI says the child was abducted in a crime of opportunity and may still be alive.

'If you are looking for a child to take the child, you go where children are,' FBI special agent Daniel Garrabrant told NJ Advance Media. 'Thats one of the reasons that we believe that the target was a child, but it may not necessarily have been Dulce.'

Dulce was last seen in Bridgeton City Park with her three-year-old brother, Manuel, at around 4pm on September 16, 2019.

Scroll down for video

Dulce Alavez was five years old when she went missing from a Bridgeton, New Jersey, playground on September 16, 2019. Eleven months later, she has not been found

Dulce was on this playground with her younger brother when a man snatched her

The children's mother, 19-year-old Noema Alavaez Perez, stayed in her car parked 30 yards away from the playground to check a scratch-off lottery ticket and help her eight-year-old sister with her homework.

Garrabrant said the mother's being temporarily distracted and not being present next to Dulce led the abductor to believe it was an 'opportunity' for him to snatch the child in broad daylight.

Police have released a sketch of a man they consider a person of interest in connection to the disappearance

'The persons intent might not have been to take a kid,' according to Garrabrant. 'It could have been maybe to watch children because thats what they liked, and the opportunity presented itself and they did what they did.'

After a few minutes, the mother said she walked over to the play area to check on her children and found only her son crying.

An Amber Alert was issued that night, with police giving a description of a Hispanic man in his early 30s with facial acne they believe may have been involved in the abduction.

More than 11 months later, Dulce, who turned six years old in April, has not been found and no arrests have been made.

Having recovered no remains or evidence to suggest Dulce has died, investigation are working under the assumption that she is still alive.

FBI agents have spent thousands of hours chasing down leads and reviewing surveillance video from homes in the area surrounding the playground looking for the kidnapper's vehicle.

Agents have cleared every vehicle on video except for about a dozen because their license plates were not visible, or the footage was too blurry.

Surveillance video shows Dulce with family grabbing ice cream, just before the abduction in broad daylight

In the weeks and months after Dulce's disappearance, her mother's behavior came under scrutiny, with some accusing her of playing a role in the abduction, or even selling her daughter.

Alavez Perez spoke to Dr Phil last December and denied those rumors.

In a separate interview with NJ media, Alavez Perez said Dulce's father, who lives in Mexico, had previously expressed interest in seeking custody of her, but never took legal action to pursue it.

The FBI agent in charge of Dulce's case said the father has been interviewed and has been cooperative, and investigators have found no evidence of a custody dispute between Dulce's parents.

Garrabrant stressed that the rest of Dulce's family continue to be 'cooperative and engaged,' but he would not say that anyone has been ruled out as a suspect in the abduction.

He also addressed a series of letters referencing Dulce's kidnapping that were sent to various recipients in Ohio in March, saying that none of the information in them has been corroborated.

The FBI agent appealed to potential witnesses, or people who may know the identify of the suspect, to come forward.

He said the abductor may have missed work or family functions around the time of Dulce's kidnapping, exhibited unusual behavior, altered his appearance, or repainted his vehicle.

Garrabrant added that the suspect possibly frequents parks and behaves oddly around children.

Noame Alavez Perez spoke to Dr Phil last December and denied playing any part in her daughter's abduction

'I honestly think there are people out there that know who the offender is, interact with the offender and might even describe them as socially awkward or odd, but may be afraid to say anything because they think, "Oh, this person would never take a child,"' he told the outlet.

Potential witnesses may be reluctant to speak up because they do not think they have any valuate information to share, or out of fear. Police have sought to reassure undocumented immigrants in the community that detectives investigating Dulce's disappearance are not interested in their immigration status.

The Bridgeton community will host an event on September 13 to mark the one-year anniversary of Dulce's disappearance, reported The Press of Atlantic City. Family spokeswoman Jackie Rodriguez said the event will feature a vigil, a motivational speaker, a rock-painting activity and refreshments.

The investigation into Dulce Alavez's kidnapping remains active on the local, national and international levels, Garrabrant stressed.

Anyone with information is being asked to call New Jersey State Police at 609-882-2000, ext. 2554, or Bridgeton police at 856-451-0033. Tips may also be phoned in to 1-800-CALL-FBI and select option 4, then select option 8.
The Belarusian authorities have blocked access to several media websites and disrupted print media circulation, claiming that there are problems with the printing presses. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) joins its affiliate, the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), in condemning this blatant and anti-democratic attack on the free flow of information.

On Friday, August 21, the Ministry of Information restricted access to the websites of a large number of media, civil society organizations and unions.

Media , including Radio Svaboda, Belsat TV, Euroradio, Solidarity newspaper, Udf.by, The Village, by.tribuna.com, Vitebsk Courier, People's News of Vitebsk, Masheka.by, and the Human rights center Viasna suffered blocks of their websites.

Since August 9, Belarusian citizens have had no access to the BAJ's website. The union uses its Telegram channel to share the most important news about the situation during the protests that have spread across the country after the disputed presidential election.

Disrupting printed media circulation

In addition to the digital media blockade, the state-owned Belarusian Printing House disrupted the release of Narodnaya Volya and Komsomolskaya Pravda v Belarusi newspapers arguing a technical printing machine failure was at fault. For Komsomolskaya Pravda, this is the third time since the presidential election the paper has failed to be printed.

The BAJ claimed that both the digital and printed media blockades are government attempts to "censor and obstruct the media's legitimate activities in Belarus."

"This is a government attempt to block information about post-election protests in the country and severe violence against their participants," the BAJ said.

IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: "Blocking the access to media and disrupting printed media circulation is a blatant attack on media freedom, citizens' right to be informed and democracy. We stand in solidarity with the BAJ and all the affected media. The IFJ urges the Belarusian authorities to immediately lift the media blockade".
Lawyers for a nine-year-old Indigenous boy who is suing Daily Telegraph columnist Miranda Devine for defamation may be forced to serve legal documents on her in the United States, where she is on secondment, because her Australian employer will not accept them on her behalf.

Quaden Bayles, who has achondroplasia dwarfism, is suing Devine for defamation over a series of tweets from her Twitter account in February this year that raised questions about whether a viral video in which he cried after being bullied at school was "a scam" to make money.

Quaden Bayles is suing Miranda Devine over comments made on Twitter. Credit:SMH

The case was brought on his behalf by his mother Yarraka, who is also suing Devine in her own right for suggesting she "coached" Quaden. Devine has yet to file a defence or acknowledge the claim.

The lawsuit also names News Corp subsidiary Nationwide News, the publisher of The Daily Telegraph, as a defendant. The statement of claim alleges the company is responsible for the tweets as Devine's employer.
Bolstered by the growing demand in the EU, Vietnams coffee industry has a major opportunity to capture a bigger market share on the European continent.

Tran Van Thinh, owner of a coffee store in Berlin, expects that he could buy Vietnams speciality coffee products. The locals like Vietnamese coffee but we still buy products from German and Italian roasters as they are more affordable, Thinh said.

Thinh observed that Vietnamese brands have become more present in Europe in recent years. Vietnam is the second-largest coffee producer in the world after Brazil  however, most of what the nation exports to Europe is raw coffee, accounting for 95 per cent of all exports.

Despite the impact of the pandemic, the EU remains the largest export market for Vietnamese coffee, accounting for 60 per cent of total exports, of which 10-13 per cent are consumed in Germany alone, according to Nguyen Viet Vinh, general secretary of the Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association (Vicofa).

In the first half of 2020, Germany and Italy remained Vietnams largest consumer markets, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Developments Department for Agricultural Products Processing and Market Development (DAPP). Last year, other EU nations also increased purchases of Vietnamese coffee, including a 53.7 per cent rise on-year from Poland to $23.5 million, and an on-year increase of 20.1 per cent from Belgium to $74.8 million.

EU market within reach

With the official implementation of the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), Vietnamese coffee exports to the EU are entitled to zero tariffs.

Vietnam boasts 38 geographical indicators (GI) used to identify product origins through the EVFTA, which includes Buon Ma Thuot coffee. This gives Vietnams coffee sector a competitive edge among roasters and consumers in Europe. Equally important, Vietnamese coffee products with GIs will not be hindered by barriers or compromised by other brands in the EU market. However, fresh standards must be met.

The EU market does not have any technical barriers to Vietnams coffee imports, said Le Thanh Hoa, deputy director of the DAPP. But to increase coffee exports to the EU, we need to meet commodity import requirements, food safety standards, and comply with plant inspections and processing monitoring. If done right, businesses can increase their coffee exports to the EU.

Europe has one of the highest average per-capita coffee consumption in the world at just above 5kg per person a year. Some Northern European countries like Finland, Ireland, and Norway even reach more than 8kg per person per year.

In 2019, the EU imported over 50 million bags from the wider world, and the bloc is expected to import an additional two million bags this year. This two million bags equal around 120,000 tonnes, about one month of Vietnams exports. It shows that the EU market is developing stably with vast potential for Vietnamese coffee.

Meanwhile, the current pandemic has also been creating several challenges to Vietnamese exporters in recent months. Phan Minh Thong, CEO of Phuc Sinh Corporation  which has been working with European partners for 20 years  said that business has been slowing down when most transactions were conducted online and export procedures became longer.

It used to be two days but now we have to wait for one week. It is also difficult to send samples for testing and packaging for approval when import markets like Germany and Italy are closing borders. More customers are paying slower, and we often have to wait for 3-4 weeks for payment, Thong said.

Blue Son La brand serves as a prime example for a success story of Vietnams first speciality coffee products to the EU. Thong was the trader behind Blue Son La, which is made from Arabica coffee beans. To further boost export of this brand, Phuc Sinh hopes that it will be certified for sustainable farming, guaranteeing the origin of this coffee.

Thong said that the EU market is brimming with opportunities for Vietnamese coffee, but it is essential to have financial capability, perseverance, and motivation to build brands like internationally successful coffee brands from elsewhere.

Most Vietnamese companies just do some online marketing without developing their brands. However, if we dont focus on the root of the problems, we will not create core value, Thong added.

After its initial commercial success, Phuc Sinh developed a deep-processing factory with investment capital of VND100 billion ($4.38 million).

Adjusting to new habits

Though the ongoing pandemic has lowered the global coffee output, affecting the workforce of the industry, the crisis can be a catalyst for Vietnam to increase market share in the EU and reduce competitive pressure from Brazil  especially as the country is among the countries with the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world and focuses less on production and processing.

Economist Nguyen Quang Binh said that Vietnam has an affordable source of Robusta coffee, and noted that buyers will never give up a good coffee supplier, but they have changed buying and selling habits. Vietnam cannot continue to sell coffee in a street vendor fashion. It is critical to develop a real supply chain, thereby enhancing its added value in the region and using the benefits of the EVFTA in a sustainable way, Binh said. The Vicofa can learn from lessons from Brazil by helping coffee growers and commercial businesses, enabling them to take care of EU roasters and other markets in the world.

In Vietnam, the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak, producing 90 per cent of Vietnams coffee output, is expanding coffee plantation areas but its export value is shrinking. In the 2018-2019 crop year, Dak Lak had around 200,000 hectares of coffee plantations with an output of nearly 480,000 tonnes. The provinces export value reached $343.3 million, with $314.5 million accounting for coffee beans and $28.8 million for instant coffee.

These figures were much lower than in the 2005-2006 crop year when the export value reached $382 million with only around 170,000ha, and an output of 292,000 tonnes.

Vietnam has developed 97 processing facilities, 160 roasting establishments, eight instant coffee units, and 11 blended coffee facilities across the country. However, many companies remain hesitant to invest in deep-processed coffee, which has become a major problem slowing down the spread of Vietnamese products in Europe, thereby missing out an opportunity as more attention is paid to these products by bars, coffee chains, and small roasters in Europe.

Vinh from the Vicofa said that specialty coffee is a niche segment which requires high quality and value. Increasing the proportion of processed coffee will enhance the added value for Vietnamese coffee as well as make it less vulnerable to the price fluctuations in international futures markets, which are the main exchanges for coffee trade, Vinh said. VIR

Hai Van

More coffee chains open in Vietnam after Covid-19 Investors have rushed to open coffee shops as retail premises rent has become very reasonable and the market is returning to a "new normal" status.
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Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists.
President Akufo-Addo at the weekend went down heavily on his main political opponent, ex-President John Dramani Mahama, asserting that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) flagbearer cannot be trusted with the Free Senior High School (SHS) programme, as his credibility on the policy is zero.

According to him, Ghanaians have no reason to believe the NDC presidential candidate's newly proclaimed confession on Free SHS and Free Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET), indicating that Mr. Mahama has shown an inconsistent position on the policy.

For eight years, he and his party were loud in their assertions that they did not believe in Free SHS and Free TVET. They did not like the idea and rubbished it at every opportunity, and they proclaimed it would destroy Ghana's educational system, the President fired, adding I doubt ex-President Mahama can recognize a well-managed economy even if it slaps him in his face.

Speaking at the launch of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) manifesto in Cape Coast in the Central Region, President Akufo-Addo indicated that when Mr. Mahama and the NDC were in office they had a hard time trying to run even their water-down version of their so-called progressively Free SHS education.

Then the former President said he would review it and now we hear him say it has come to stay. Your Excellency, please try another one. Your credibility on this one is zero. Free SHS and Free TVET cannot be trusted in your hands, he jabbed and added that the NDC leader's review of Free SHS also meant cancellation.

It must be said in the same way that we would not risk putting agriculture under the NDC and its leader. They will once again leave the farmers on their own without the support that is happening to make farming a profitable and fulfilling business as it should be, he added.

Same Mahama

President Akufo-Addo questioned why anyone should imagine that the NDC administration under the former President would treat businesses any differently from what they did the last time round.

He said the NPP government had succeeded in equitable distribution which, he indicated, meant that all parts of the country had been touched by its policies that had been delivered with value for money.

I take pride in the fact that the Free SHS and Free TVET have been delivered and our young people, parents and guardians no longer are forced to stop school at JHS level because of financial difficulties.

It was not easily done and so we intend to protect it and prevent any so-called review  another word for cancellation, he stressed.

Covid-19 Experience

He pointed out that in spite of the unexpected and dramatic entry of Covid-19 into the lives of Ghanaians and the subsequent worldwide devastation, his government could demonstrate that it has set the economy on a strong foundation and that businesses will flourish.

The virus has slowed us down, but it has not diverted us from the path of growth we have put the country on, he indicated.

Not Taking Lead

President Akufo-Addo, who is also seeking a second term, asserted that it was interesting to note that the NDC in opposition is not able to take the lead to do some of the things that are most often done first by parties in opposition.

You might remember how it took the NDC presidential candidate to find a running mate and they have not yet got a manifesto.

I wonder what would happen the day they have a government to run as well. Or maybe, it is simply showing the country that they do not attach importance to a manifesto, or should we expect them whatever is written in it will reflect their belief, he stated.

We in the NPP know from where we came. We have never had any identity crisis and our manifesto always gives us an opportunity to reiterate our historic stance as the party of the rule of law. The party of good governance, the party of business, the party that builds and creates wealth, the party of social justice and the party that cares for every Ghanaian, he pointed out.

He explained, In other words, it helps to believe in something to spend time and energy to think through and to get passionate and competent people to lead in the implementation of the programme.

Choice Decision

According to the President, on the day of his acclamation as a presidential candidate of the NPP, he said the there was a clear choice before the nation, as he and the NDC flagbearer, who are the two main candidates in the 2020 polls, could be adjudged on a similar basis.

Short Memory

He said Ghanaians could decide who between the two had done a better job of governing the country as president, asserting that he knows the NDC flagbearer believes himself often that Ghanaians have short memories and holds strongly to such belief.

Otherwise, I doubt he would have summoned the courage to be seeking another term after the disaster that was his presidency. Ghanaians might have short memories but not short enough for us to have forgotten the broken down freezers, irons and other household equipment; thanks to the five years of dumsor.

Our memories are not short enough to forget that the economy under him was such a wreck and that there was a ban placed on all recruitment into our public service. Our memories are not short enough to forget that teachers toiled for three years and were only paid for three months. Our memories are certainly not short enough to forget that he brought our entire financial services system to a near collapse, the President fired.

Extraordinary Claim

He disclosed that he had heard Mr. Mahama make extraordinary claims that Ghana's economy was in tatters not because of the Covid-19 pandemic but because of mismanagement.

I doubt he can recognize a well-managed economy even if it slaps him in the face. Luckily for us, we do not have to rely on his judgement or assessment of the economy, but it is important to tell him, just in case there are others like him around, that Ghana is today in a position to be able to provide one hot meal for JHS Three students who are back in school in the midst of the pandemic, he said.

According to the President, the country is again in a position to pay for six months water bills for all Ghanaians and to subsidize electricity for all Ghanaians for three months.

Indeed, we thank the Almighty that the pandemic did not strike under his presidency when there was no money in the national kitty to pay teacher and nurses' allowances. We are very much aware of the realities of the time. We know how the Covid-19 has wrecked our economies and livelihoods, he noted.

He entreated members of the NPP to keep this sensibility in their minds in all they do when they are about campaigning for votes, adding that adherence to the Covid-19 protocols means they cannot resort to the traditional methods of campaigning and urged all of Ghanaians to continuously strictly obey the rules.

We cannot have the traditional crowds and rallies, and whenever there are gatherings we have to observe the social distancing rules, he added.

NPP Policies Lack Sense

President Akufo-Addo said it had been said by the NDC presidential candidate that NPP policies lack sense and stated that if running and advancing Ghana's economy into the hands of IMF because of the indiscipline in the management of the public finances is the sense Mr. Mahama talks about then he was happy the NPP had another concept of sense.

If having sense means cancelling teacher trainees and nurses' allowances, then I'm happy the NPP has another concept of sense. If having sense means recording the worse economic management statistics of modern times with the lowest rate of growth of the past 30 years, I am happy the NPP has another concept of sense, he pointed out.

Having sense in the NPP means we have been able to take the economy growing at 3.4 per cent to an economy that grew, on the average for three successive years, at least 7 per cent per year before the pandemic and was rightly acknowledged as one of the best performing economies not just in Africa, but also in the world.

He explained that having sense in the NPP meant executing the programme for Planting for Food and Jobs which has led to the revival of the Ghanaian agriculture from the doldrums of the NDC years, bringing in its wake the bumper harvest and affordable food prices in our markets and export of significant quantity stuff to our neighbours.

Having sense in the NPP means implementing policy, which, according to the latest Ghana's Living Standard Survey, has resulted in the declining unemployment rate from 11.9 per cent in 2015 to 7.3 per cent in 2019. I am happy with and prefer the NPP sense, he added.

---Daily Guide
In less than six months, Burkes team did it. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given emergency authorization to the U. of I. for its saliva-based test that produces rapid results and avoids the pitfalls of using nasal swabs, which are more cumbersome to process and uncomfortable for the patient. We spread COVID-19 through saliva droplets primarily so youre testing the exact medium in which that infectiousness is likely to occur, Burke told the Tribune. Its also much easier to collect, it requires less PPE, doesnt necessarily require direct engagement with the health care worker and, as weve shown, the process can be done very fast.
How It Started?

Fahadh Faasil and Nazriya Nazim first paired opposite each other for the first time in Anjali Menon's directorial venture, Bangalore Days (2014). The duo got to know each other more on the sets of the film. Interestingly, they were playing husband and wife in Bangalore Days and eventually, fell in love with each other.

Parents Involvement

After learning about Fahadh Faasil and Nazriya Nazim's closeness, the couple revealed that their parents played a vital role in arranging their wedding. Soon after parents' involvement, Fahadh and Nazriya got engaged in February 2014. However, they later got countered by the media's hard-hitting questions.

When Fahadh Got Annoyed With A Media Persons Question

At the engagement ceremony, Fahadh and Nazriya had held a press meet to greet media on the happiest day of their lives. However, during a media interaction, a journalist asked Fahadh, whether he will allow Nazriya to work in movies after marriage or not. This question left Fahadh angry and he expressed his disappointment over the same. The journalist again poked the actor after which Nazriya controlled the situation and said that she will decide after marriage. In August 2014, Fahadh Faasil and Nazriya Nazim got married in the presence of their close friends and family members.

Nazriyas Life After Marriage

After 4 years of marriage, Nazriya Nazim made her comeback in Malayalam films with Anjali Menon's directorial venture Koode (2018), starring Prithviraj Sukumaran and Parvathy Thiruvothu in key roles. Nazriya also featured in Fahadh Faasil-starrer Trance (2020).
In his new book  soon to make the Fox News/opinion circuit  former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page details his 2016 trip to Russia to deliver a commencement speech at the New Economic School (NES), which later became a subject of keen interest to the FBI.

Between the lines: On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the final volume of its Russia report, which revealed Page was likely a subject of interest to Russian officials during the 2016 election, given that he was the only member of the Trump Campaign's foreign policy advisory team publicly identified as a Russia expert.

The report stated that Page's invitation to speak at the Russian school "was extended because of the Russian sponsors' perception of his role in the Trump campaign.

Excerpt:

"Shlomo Weber, a professor of economics in Russia and at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, invited me to speak to the graduating class of 2016 at the New Economic School in Moscowan event independent of my work with the campaign." ...

"I ran the invitation by Corey Lewandowski to make sure that the campaign didnt see any issues with it and suggested that perhaps Donald Trump might want to speak in my place. It was a well organized venue in which the candidate could display his foreign policy credentials. Presidential candidates often use foreign trips to showcase what they would look like as Americas head of state abroad." ...Corey replied to my email: If you want to do this, it would be outside of your role with the DJT for President campaign. I am certain Mr. Trump will not be able to attend....

"For inviting me to give the speech, Shlomo Weber would later be interrogated by the FBI at Madelines Cafe [sic] in Dallas. The following July he joined a long list of other academics, many holding American passports, who would be interrogated about their interactions with the infamous Carter Page."

 Carter Page in his forthcoming book, " Abuse and Power: How an Innocent American Was Framed in an Attempted Coup Against the President"

Go deeper: Read the full excerpt
Hong Kongs third wave of coronavirus infections was not yet under control even as the city reported just nine new cases on Monday, health authorities warned, as officials mulled relaxing some social-distancing measures.

As the city registered the lowest number of daily infections since July 3, researchers from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) said they had confirmed the worlds first case of Covid-19 reinfection  a 33-year-old man who was struck again 4 months after he first caught the coronavirus.

On HKUs reinfection findings, the researchers, who included prominent expert Professor Yuen Kwok-yung, said the study had important implications.

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First, it is unlikely that herd immunity can eliminate [the pandemic], although it is possible that subsequent infections may be milder than the first infection, as for this patient. Covid-19 will likely continue to circulate in the human population as in the case of other human coronaviruses, the researchers said in a report.

The patient was infected in March and later discharged. In August, he went to Spain and on his return to Hong Kong via London was confirmed as infected.

Presumed reinfections had been reported overseas but the HKU study was the first in the world to confirm the reinfection with rigorous testing.

The report said that, in some instances, reinfection occurred despite a static level of specific antibodies. Vaccines might not be able to provide lifelong protection against Covid-19, and patients who had recovered from the coronavirus should also be included in vaccine studies, the report added.

Though antibodies developed rapidly after infection, the report, citing recent studies, said they started to decline as early as within one to two months.

Although our patient is asymptomatic during the second infection, it is possible that reinfection in other patients may result in more severe infection, the HKU report said.

Story continues

With the nine new infections, the citys tally of confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 4,691, with 77 related deaths. Two of the nine were imported: a student arriving from Switzerland and a domestic worker from the Philippines. Of the local cases, the authorities were not able to trace the roots of four. About 10 other people tested preliminarily positive.

The outbreak is not entirely under control yet, Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan of the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said when asked if it was time to relax social-distancing measures.

Although the overall trend is decreasing, there is some daily fluctuation of the number of cases. We have a single-digit number today but we have more than 10 preliminarily positive cases at hand.

Chuang said that from a public health point of view, any relaxation could result in an increase in the number of infections. But the government might also have other considerations in deciding whether to relax some measures, she added.

Among the preliminarily positive patients was an 84-year-old woman who remained in a critical condition at Tuen Mun Hospital. She was transferred from Tin Shui Wai Hospital after suffering from shortness of breath and low oxygen levels in her blood.

Four medical staff, who did not wear appropriate personal protection equipment while treating the patient, will be sent to a quarantine centre for two weeks. Another five staff members would undergo medical surveillance for 28 days.

Social-distancing measures, including the ban on restaurant dine-in services after 6pm and public gatherings of more than two people, end after Tuesday.

Late last week, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said her administration might relax some rules including the ban on restaurants serving anything other than takeaway between 6pm and 5am.

It was also considering allowing some types of establishments, including beauty parlours and cinemas, to reopen if the coronavirus situation improved.

Normally, the government would announce an extension on Monday. But no such word came during the day. According to a source, the administration did not follow the practice this time as Lam said last week officials would monitor the situation closely so a decision would only be made on Tuesday.

The government had to consider the possibility of infections rebounding if some measures were relaxed, the source added. And if, for example, the ban on dine-in services at night was to be lifted, bosses of other businesses that had to remain shut might be upset, the source said.

A Food and Health Bureau spokesman said that only when local infections remained at a consistently low level, and when outbreaks involving several recent clusters were contained, would there be room to relax social-distancing rules.

But the government has started to discuss with different industries how to gradually allow some businesses to resume operations.

Catering sector lawmaker Tommy Cheung Yu-yan and other members of the industry met the citys No 2 official, Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung Kin-chung, on Monday and urged him to allow restaurants to resume dine-in services at night. Tommy Cheung said he also hoped that four people would be allowed to sit at each table, up from the current two.

Cheung said restaurant bosses had agreed to install air purifiers and step up disinfection of tableware.

The chief executive, meanwhile, in a post on her Facebook page hit out at critics of the Beijing-backed universal Covid-19 testing scheme, urging residents to take part in the free programme so economic activities could resume as soon as possible.

Chuang of the CHP also appealed to the public to join the scheme, set to begin from September 1, to help cut off virus transmission chains. Secretary for Innovation and Technology Alfred Sit Wing-hang said the online system to sign up for the test was expected to start this week.

Professor David Hui Shu-cheong, a respiratory medicine expert at Chinese University, said community transmission would not be cut off if few people were tested.

University of Hong Kong microbiologist Dr Ho Pak-leung said he would not take part because he wore his mask all the time when going out so he did not believe he was an invisible carrier. He estimated that if 3 million people took part, only about 40 coronavirus carriers would be identified.

Earlier on Monday, Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Edward Yau Tang-wah said the city was in talks to form travel bubbles with eight to 10 destinations.

Talks with Thailand and Japan had reached a more advanced stage compared to other places, he said.

Its impossible to resume immigration in its totality, Yau said. We suggest, for example, that when countries resume tourism, we can agree on a mutually recognised test and share that information through airlines and other transport companies.

If a mutually recognised standard of testing could be ensured, he said, there was no longer a need to weigh the different reasons for travel, such as business or leisure.

The bubble cannot be built tomorrow. We also have to examine the local outbreaks in both places, he said.

More from South China Morning Post:

This article Worlds first coronavirus reinfection case confirmed in University of Hong Kong study first appeared on South China Morning Post

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If California had had a Republican governor  even a moderate such as Arnold Schwarzenegger  I wouldn't have wanted to see Kamala Harris named as Joe Biden's running mate. A Republican governor would have named a GOP successor to Harris, giving conservatives another vote in the upper chamber.

Harris' ascension to the presidential ticket is barrier-breaking and inspiring, a powerful reminder of the nation's progress toward its promise of full equality for all. When the California senator gave her speech accepting the nomination, I called my sixth-grade daughter to watch with me (even as the speech extended past her bedtime).

But having an experienced woman of color on the ticket wouldn't have been worth giving Republicans another vote in the Senate, an institution where aging, rural white voters are overrepresented. Mitch McConnell has used the power of the Republican majority to block not only sensible proposals, such as protections for voting rights and modest gun control, but also policies supported by most Americans, such as full citizenship for the young immigrants known as "Dreamers."

Democrats spent their convention rightly emphasizing the need for voters to turn out to oust President Donald Trump from the White House. That is clearly Job One. But if Democrats don't take the Senate, too, a President Joe Biden will find himself able to accomplish very little.

The 77-year-old Biden has spent nearly four decades in the Senate, having first been elected at the age of 29. He has fallen back on his experiences there during his campaign, recalling his friendships with Republicans such as John McCain, remembering legislation crafted through challenging yet fruitful compromise, channeling the chamber's reputation as an august body of statesmanship, patriotism and time-honored tradition.

But that Senate is no more. It had begun to change even before Biden left to become Obama's vice president, surrendering its traditions of compromise and comity to mimic Newt Gingrich's combative House. Its leaders adopted divisive rhetoric and a suspicion of bipartisan cooperation. They were bomb-throwers.

In 2010, Mitch McConnell, then Senate minority leader, declared that his priority was to prevent Obama's reelection. He didn't succeed at that, but the GOP, with frequent use of the filibuster, did restrict Obama's second-term agenda. Republicans even blocked Obama from naming a Supreme Court justice in the final year of his presidency.

There is no reason to believe McConnell's vision has changed. He has allowed Trump to trample democratic norms, aided the president in minimizing Russia's intrusion in the election and ignored Trump's rampant corruption. The only way to ensure that he can't frustrate a Biden presidency is for Democrats to win control of the Senate.

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They are within striking distance. In late July, the reliable, nonpartisan Cook Report rated Democrats as slightly favored to win the upper chamber as GOP incumbents, such as Maine's Susan Collins, struggle with the weight of Trump on their shoulders. But Biden and his allies will have to work hard  turning out voters in states where Republicans are using every imaginable trick to try to block ballot access.

Eventually, the nation will have to come to terms with the unfairness of the Senate (as it will have to do with the Electoral College). Because each state gets two senators, the most populous states, such as Texas and California, have no more representation than the least populous, such as Idaho and Wyoming. As cities and suburbs gain population and rural areas lose residents, that imbalance becomes more pronounced.

As The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib wrote in 2017: "David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, notes that by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them."

That's hardly the democracy that most Americans expect. Fixing that will require a constitutional convention. But first we have to ensure there is a democracy left to fix, by ousting Trump and his Republican enablers.
And when it came to the pandemic, she sounded the alarm early while also fighting to keep parks and beaches open.

Ive just been struck by how right she has been, said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.

I was curious to know how Dr. Tufekci had gotten so many things right in a confusing time, so we spoke last week over FaceTime. She told me she chalks up her habits of mind in part to a childhood she wouldnt wish on anyone.

A bunch of things came together, which Im happy I survived, she said, sitting outside a brick house she rents for $2,300 a month in Chapel Hill, N.C., where she is raising her 11-year-old son as a single parent. But the way they came together was not super happy, when it was happening.

These are, by her lights, the ingredients in seeing clearly:

An international point of view she picked up while bouncing as a child between Turkey and Belgium and then working in the United States.

Knowledge that spans subject areas and academic disciplines, which she happened onto as a computer programmer who got into sociology.

A habit of complex, systems-based thinking, which led her to a tough critique in The Atlantic of Americas news media in the run-up to the pandemic.

Add those things to a skill at moving journalism and policy through a kind of inside game, and Dr. Tufekci has had a remarkable impact. But it began, she says, with growing up in an unhappy home in Istanbul. She said her alcoholic mother was liable to toss her into the street in the early hours of the morning. She found some solace in science fiction  Ursula K. Le Guin was a favorite  and in the optimistic, early internet.

In the mid-1990s, still a teenager, she moved out. Soon she found a job nearby as a programmer for IBM. She was an office misfit, a casually dressed young woman among the suits, but she fell in love with the companys internal bulletin board. She liked it that a colleague in Japan wouldnt know her age or gender when she asked a technical question.

She stumbled onto the wellspring of her career when she discovered an email list, the Zapatista Solidarity Network, centered on Indigenous activists in southern Mexico who had taken up arms against neoliberalism in general and land privatization imposed by the North American Free Trade Agreement in particular. For Dr. Tufekci, the network provided a community of digital friends and intellectual sparring partners.
The Bombay high court on Monday questioned the Bank of Baroda (BoB) and the Bureau of Immigration (BI) to explain on what grounds they could restrain a woman from travelling to the USA after it was informed that the woman was stopped from flying at CSIA on the basis of a lookout circular (LOC) issued against her. When the court sought to know about the criminal case against the woman, the BI submitted that they had issued the LoC based on information by BoB that the woman was a defaulter, however, there was no complaint registered against her. The court sought to know whether anyone could be restrained from travelling abroad without any criminal case and directed both the BI and BoB to file their reply justifying their action.

A division bench of justice S J Kathawalla and justice Madhav Jamdar while hearing the petition of a woman of Indian origin who took up US citizenship in 2017 along with her family was informed by advocate Ashok Kumar Singh that the woman had been travelling to India regularly after shifting to the US to meet her aged mother. Earlier in 2020 when she was boarding a flight to the US, she was stopped by the BI officials and informed that there was an LoC against her name and hence she could not board the flight.

Singh submitted that his clients husband and father-in-law had taken a loan from BoB in 2012 for their factory in Gujarat. However as the business had run into losses they completed the securitization process with the bank by handing over the plant, machinery and plot of land before shifting to the US. He added that however there was some pending claim of the bank which was being heard by the Debt Recovery Tribunal at Ahmedabad. Singh added that his client was only the guarantor of the loan and hence the action of restraining her from travelling in the absence of any criminal proceedings against her was not valid.

The counsel for the BI submitted that as BoB had informed them that the woman was a defaulter and should not be allowed to leave the country hence they had issued an LoC and restrained her from flying.

After hearing the submissions the court wanted to know on what grounds the BI or the BoB restrain the woman from leaving the country without any criminal proceedings being initiated against her. As none appeared for BoB, the court directed it to explain the same and also directed BI to inform it of the procedure for issuing LoC and posted the matter for hearing on Tuesday.
Costumers shop by appointment only at the Joan Shepp boutique in Center City, Philadelphia, Pa. Wednesday, August 19, 2020. After closing due to the coronavirus and then rebuilding a store that was virtually destroyed after the George Floyd protests, Joan Shepp reopen the boutique this week. Read more

There wont be a fall fashion season this September.

Trends dont matter: Who needs a new power suit or the latest in back-to-school denim when most of us are working and learning from home? Special occasions are a no go, so glittery holiday frocks and ball gowns are a nonissue. Womens magazines annual September issues will be more about racial equality than retail therapy.

The see-and-be-seen aspect that fueled the fashion industrys frivolous reputation is pretty much a done deal in 2020.

Not only is the fall fashion season not happening, fashion entrepreneurs  especially local small-business owners  are facing the stark reality that shoppers dont have anywhere to go to show off their new duds. And, I dont know about you, but spending money on clothing  unless I absolutely need it  is not a priority right now. Im too worried about the fragile economy. Im not alone. According to the NPD Group, apparel sales were down 34 percent from March through July compared to sales during the same period in 2019.

But even while we save our coins and bake bread at home, its important that, when we do venture out to replace our moth-eaten sweaters, we shop at local boutiques. Because where we shop this season is just as important as what we buy. Like restaurants, apparel retailers are the backbone of our local economy. How fashion fares on the other side of the pandemic might be an indicator of our collective futures.

Philadelphia businesses are struggling

There is a lot going on in the fashion industry right now and none of it is sexy. The year started off challenging. Esteemed designers shuttered their studios and legacy brick-and-mortars, like Barneys New York, permanently closed their doors. The emergence of COVID-19 sent the industry into a tailspin, taking down Lord & Taylor, New York & Co., and Diane von Furstenberg.

Local businesses, too, were hit hard. Linda Golden is shuttering her eponymous Haverford boutique. How can I recover after being closed for three months? Golden asked me. Across town, Marissa Gelman is closing up Fashion Statements in-person shop. People were afraid to walk in the door, said the 29-year-old business owner who is now solely doing business online.

Those spared by COVID-19 are in a difficult position because theyve lost three months of sales. And what is traditionally the most important season of the year has fizzled before it started. What happens in specialty stores in September influences crucial, fourth-quarter sales. There is no excitement to shop for the upcoming winter events because holiday parties and balls cant happen.

To make matters worse, the New York and European fashion shows, where the worlds top designers introduce the following years trends, will be virtual, if they happen at all. And Hollywoods annual red carpet season? Forget about it. Our favorite actors and actresses will receive their Oscars and Golden Globes virtually. And if talk show host Tamron Hall is any indication  the Temple grad accepted her first Daytime Emmy last month in a plush bathrobe  they may be wearing jammies. Talk about another blow to the aspirational vibe, which fashion trades on so heavily to sell clothes.

Whats happening in 2020 is certainly a major paradigm shift in the world of fashion, said Elissa Bloom, executive director of the Philadelphia Fashion Incubator. What will happen in fall 2020 and spring 2021 in stores and with designers will have a long-term impact on how the customer purchases clothes.

The industry is adapting

But there is a chance we can both save local retailers and influence how fashion treats us in the future. Because for the first time since the days of Sex and the City, the industry isnt focused on celebrity. Its focus is us and what we need right now, not what we hope to be tomorrow. Because if this coronavirus experience has taught us anything, tomorrow is uncertain.

No wonder all local retailers are focused on comfort.

Even the proprietors of the citys poshest boutiques like Boyds Philadelphia and Sophy Curson are investing in less-structured  and less-expensive  apparel in ways theyve never done before. Sophy Cursons owner, David Schwartz, who once declared to me that leggings should be banished from polite society, is even giving in. Im adjusting as I go, said Schwartz, who is still on the hunt for casual pieces, including pants that arent yoga pants, but are comparable.

In a brilliant move, the owner of the uber high-end specialty store Kirna Zabete, Beth Buccini, designed a line of house dresses, T-shirts, and masks to sell alongside the elevated (translation: really expensive) sportswear shes known for, including Golden Goose sneakers and Suzie Kondi sweats.

But for Joan Shepp, revving up comfort to her customers is a way of comforting herself. Not only did Shepp, the owner of the citys most exclusive womens wear boutique, lose the bulk of her spring sales during the shutdown, but her store was also trashed by looters angry over the death of George Floyd a week before her store was set to reopen. All of her windows were smashed and tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise was stolen.

Shepp used the setback to rethink the mix of her store and also put a heavier focus on casual pieces from the likes of Rick Owen and Norma Kamali. And shes focusing on the health and safety of customers. Like many boutiques, shopping is by appointment only. She can only have a maximum of 10 people in the store at a time. And each piece must be steamed in between try-ons.

Still, Shepp added, After all weve been through, the last thing I want to do is get someone sick. There is no amount of fashion thats worth that.

Supporting local creatives

COVID-19 has brought with it lots of hardship, yet its also brought the potential of innovation. And, said Bloom, believe it not, local designers are finding a way. Thats why its more important than ever for us to support them.

Philadelphia Fashion Incubator alumni brands like PrintFresh, Milano di Rouge, Smart Adaptive Clothing and Lobo Mau consistently sell out collections thanks to the direct-to-consumer relationships and robust social media followings. Lobo Mau owner, Nicole Haddad, added bar codes to her stores windows so potential customers can shop virtually, and get clothes delivered by mail or through contactless pickup.

Kevin Parker, cofounder of Philly Fashion Week, pointed to Jeantrix as another example of new success despite the pandemic. The brands edgy sportswear was recently featured in Beyonces Black Is King video album.

So, Parker stresses, we need to remember its just as important for local boutique owners to support local designers as it is for Philadelphians to shop local. Its all connected. Its all necessary. Its all needed for our collective survival. COVID leveled the playing field, Parker said.  If we want Philadelphia to survive, if we want fashion to survive, all of us have to buy small and shop local.

This truth, if nothing else, this alone should take the frivolity out of fashion.
CCP Claims Million Tons in Agricultural Production Increase

Amid a severe food crisis, Xi Jinping called for strict legislation to stop food waste. The National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration also announced an annual decrease of 9.388 million tons in the wheat acquisition. However, on August 19, the National Bureau of Statistics of China published statistics claiming that this years rice production increased by 1.028 million tons in comparison to last year. This aroused public criticism.

On August 19, the National Bureau of Statistics of China released the early rice production data for 2020, claiming that the total production was 27.29 million tons this year, with an increase of 1.028 million tons. This represented a growth of 3.9 percent, reversing the situation of seven consecutive years of decline. Nevertheless, an agricultural researcher in Jiangxi, who did not wish to reveal his name, questioned the validity of the data. He asked how the production of crops increased when China has been suffering from the plague, heavy floods, and locust outbreaks continuously this year.
Parents play an important role in validating their childrens worries about privacy, and can help their kids practice speaking up about their concerns.

Amelia Vance, the director of youth and education privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that provides resources to help people better understand how new technologies affect privacy, said students should be instructed to tell their teachers or parents if they feel uncomfortable or unsafe in the online learning environment.

Take time to discuss any anxieties your children might have about online privacy: Are they worried that the teacher may record their class and, if so, are they concerned about how securely that recording will be stored and for how long? Are they anxious about being seen on camera or whether a video platform is safe? Are they scared that other students might take snapshots of the class or that their classmates will judge their home?

Students who appear on video may also fear that their teachers will judge their appearance. Thats why teachers should check in privately with their students to make sure that they are interpreting their students facial expressions and body language correctly, Cort advised. A student who giggles, for example, might be doing so out of discomfort and not because he finds something funny.

Discuss when and how often to use the camera

Talk with children about being on camera during class, and let them know that they have options.

Dr. Trust created an infographic challenging educators to consider different strategies for student engagement, like allowing students to respond via audio only or in the chat box.
Technology is being developed that can block sexual or violent content as it is being filmed, shared or livestreamed, which could help safeguard hundreds of thousands of children.

SafeToNet, a startup firm in Britain, is using live-threat detection software, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), to identify potentially harmful material as it is filmed or shared in real time.

It could be used on children's phones to prevent them creating, sending or receiving video or pictures involving nudity, sexual content and violence "before any damage is done".

This is believed to be key to ensuring safeguarding, given that 29pc of child sexual abuse content acted on last year by the UK charity Internet Watch Foundation was self-generated, and this proportion is rising steeply.

Social media companies could use the technology to help prevent graphic content being uploaded and to interrupt livestreams.

The company has already produced a device using similar AI which detects patterns on a phone's keyboard to prevent sexting, bullying and other abuse. The technology flagged up girls as young as nine who were being sent explicit texts.

Chief executive Richard Pursey said the technology could help prevent grooming, 'sextortion' and bullying.

He said: "A phone is the most dangerous weapon known to man as far as I'm concerned, because you can do anything you like - talk to anybody you like, look at anything you like, hear anything you like, share anything you like. And it's in an ungoverned, unregulated world."

In November, 2,000 families will start testing the software which is expected to be ready for release by mid-2021.
Inundated buildings and vehicles after heavy rain caused flooding in Shexian county, Huangshan city, in eastern China's Anhui province on July 7, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Bacteria Outbreak in China Raises Questions About Authorities Response

An outbreak of Shigellosis, a diarrheal disease, within a small Chinese town has left many citizens frustrated at local authorities failure to take prompt action.

On Aug. 23, the health commission at Shou County, located in eastern Chinas Anhui Province, issued an announcement that at least 493 residents in Baoyi Town had symptoms of fever, vomiting, stomach, and diarrhea since Thursday. Baoyi is one of several townships in Shou County, with close to 50,000 residents, according to official data.

According to the commission, its initial investigation revealed that the outbreak was caused by a bacteria known as Shigella. It also ordered a water treatment plant in Baoyi to shut down to prevent the spread of the bacteria, but did not explain further how the plant was involved in the outbreak. It did not reveal more information about the source of the infection.

Shigellosis is a diarrheal disease caused by Shigella, with diarrhea, fever, and stomach pain as common symptoms associated with the illness. The bacteria can be spread through contaminated food and water, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The disease can be cured without antibiotic treatment, but patients can be prescribed antibiotics if their conditions become severe, according to the CDC. Effective prevention methods include washing hands with soap and water, and avoiding drinking water from ponds or lakes.

The parent of a sick child and a local doctor told the Chinese-language Epoch Times what they had witnessed.

Mr. Liu (an alias), a Baoyi resident, said his 13-year-old granddaughter became sick on Aug. 18, when she began vomiting while having stomach pains, diarrhea, and fever. She had been treated at a local hospital for five days but she continued to have a fever.

Liu added that his other 10-year-old grandchild was also hospitalized due to the disease.

Liu said that the disease first appeared in children, but then later, elders in town also began exhibiting symptoms. People who ate at local restaurants were also sick.

Liu said that many locals suspected that the spread of the bacteria was caused by local tap water not being effectively filtered.

A doctor surnamed Yang (an alias) said a lot of people began to show up at his hospital in Shou County on Aug. 20, and many of these people came from Baoyi. A lot of the sick were children under 10 years old, according to Yang.

On the morning of Aug. 22, Yang said nearly 200 sick people turned up at his hospital. He wasnt sure exactly what caused them to be sick, but had prescribed antibiotics to his patients.

Videos circulating on Chinese social media showed videos of a hospital in Shou County packed with patients, and local tap water coming out of a faucet appeared to be black in color.

Many Chinese netizens took to Shou Countys official government account on Weibo, Chinas equivalent to Twitter, to express their frustrations.

At least two locals in Anhui questioned the county government for taking so long to issue the announcement. One wrote: The problem surfaced on the 20th [of August]. Why was it only exposed now? Who was trying to suppress the information?

One comment received many thumbs-up: It is caused by Shigella. Then, where is the source of the infection?

According to the Chinese news portal Sina, a Baoyi resident surnamed Lee said that the towns tap water originated from Wabu Lake. She questioned whether the lake water was polluted by the bacteria.

Wabu Lake, in the southeast of Shou County, is located on the south bank of the middle reaches of Huai River.

Anhui is one of Chinas provinces heavily hit by heavy rain since the summer. The rain resulted in a stretch of Huai River to swell and inundate surrounding areas. According to Chinese state-run Xinhua, 12 cities in Anhui declared flood emergencies on July 25. The disaster in Anhui prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping to visit the province in August.

One netizen said that after local flood discharges, the tap water coming out of his or her faucet was yellowish in color, leading him or her to wonder whether the floodwaters contaminated local water sources.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle

Ahead of storms Laura and Marco possibly striking Texas, several schools in Southeast Texas have closed for the week or delayed start dates.

Schools have already had to adapt to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Tropical storms have thrown yet another curve in the fall semester.
Hrithik Roshan bid farewell to Lord Ganesha on Sunday with the whole family. Pinkie Roshan, his mother, shared pictures on Instagram from their eco-friendly Ganesh visarjan.

#Tradition . Family . Love . And my sweetest lord Ganesha . Thank you for always protecting us from evil, she captioned her post. It showed Hrithik, his ex-wife Sussanne, their sons-- Hrehaan and Hridhaan, Pinkie, filmmaker Rakesh Roshan, Hrithiks sister Sunaina and another family member huddled around a plastic drum, ready for the visarjan.

Sharing another set of pictures, this time close-ups of the deity, Pinkie wrote: #ganpatibappamorya #immersion#see you in 2021. The bunch of pictures show the slow process of immersion, as the mud statue sinks deeper into water to dissolve in it.

Many other Bollywood families celebrated the annual festival in a subdued manner and with the required protection. Salman Khans family, who celebrates the festival with great fanfare, came out in full force for the visarjan at actor Sohail Khans home. Salmans family members had welcomed Lord Ganesha on Saturday as Ganesh Chaturthi began and took part in Ganpati visarjan on Sunday.

Seen at the function were Salmans rumoured girlfriend Iulia Vantur, sister Arpita Khan Sharma, her actor husband Aayush Sharma, Salmans other sister Alvira and her husband Atul Agnihotri, father Salim Khan, mother Salma Khan, Helen and brothers Sohail and Arbaaz Khan.

Actor Shilpa Shetty, who along with her family celebrates the annual festival, was also seen taking part in visarjan. She wrote: Saying goodbye is always the hardest, especially when Gannu Raja is on His way home. Although its a rather quiet & subdued farewell this year... were sending Him only with a promise that Hell be back next year with better times.

Also read: Instructor who trained first batch of IAF female pilots slams Gunjan Saxena biopic: No one had to run to their room to change

Actor Shah Rukh Khan too had shared a picture from their home celebration.

On Saturday, many Bollywood celebrities including Amitabh Bachchan, Kangana Ranaut, Priyanka Chopra, Riteish Deshmukh, Karan Johar among others had wished fans on the festive occasion.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Deborah Roses lottery dream really did come true.

The Thorold woman, who has been playing the same lottery numbers since they came to her in a dream, won a million dollars in the July 28 Lotto Max MaxMillions draw.

Her advice to other lottery players: Stay positive, she said, when she went to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming prize centre in Toronto to claim her winnings.

I wasnt having a very good day, she said, in an OLG release. But it surely made my day when I saw the Big Winner message appear (when I checked my ticket).

I remember saying, What? And then started crying.

Rose, 64, a grandmother and mother of four, said she will share some of her winnings with her children. The enormity of her win, she said, hasnt hit her yet but she expects it will when the money arrives in her bank account.

I really want to visit Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, she said.

Her winning ticket was purchased at the Avondale store on Main Street in Port Colborne.

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MINSK, Belarus  Security forces in Belarus on Monday arrested two of the last high-profile opposition figures not already in jail for protesting against the countrys authoritarian president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. The arrests came as a senior United States diplomat met with the embattled presidents most prominent opponent, who fled the country under duress earlier this month.

In the first publicly acknowledged high-level contact between the U.S. government and the Belarusian opposition, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen E. Biegun met in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Mr. Lukashenkos main rival in the disputed presidential election on Aug. 9 that triggered mass protests.

Ms. Tikhanovskaya claimed victory in the election. Mr. Lukashenko, pointing to official results that his opponents and European leaders called fraudulent, insists he won by a landslide. She fled to Lithuania a week ago after security agents in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, detained her and forced her to make a video urging people not to protest the election result.

The dangers that awaited her had she stayed in Belarus were evident on Monday, when riot police officers seized Olga Kovalkova, an ally of Ms. Tikhanovskaya, and Sergei Dylevsky, a strike leader at a tractor factory in Minsk.
Jaipur, Aug 24 : The Indian Institute of Management Udaipur inaugurated its two-year MBA programme followed by a three day-long orientation session for the incoming 2020-2022 batch with over 375 participants attending the ceremony.

The induction was held digitally in the presence of Chief Guest Sonjoy Chatterjee, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs India; Janat Shah, Director, IIM Udaipur; Rezina Sultana, Academic Dean, IIM Udaipur, and other faculties and incoming students.

Addressing the students, Chatterjee said, "Embrace the next two years of your life for they will be transformational as you set out to be citizens, corporate citizens, citizens of our country and citizens of this world. Hone your conduct. The ideas that you stand for, the principles that you stand for and the courage that you bring will define who you are and how people perceive you." "The wheel of progression will always move. Your conduct will really define what you hold. Discipline and teamwork are vital for your next two years and beyond. These principles should be the prime attributes outside this campus," he added while drawing on his learnings from Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the former President of India.

Janat Shah said, "The class of 2022 will be the pioneer class of IIM Udaipur. You have worked hard to be here. We will provide the platform and enable the ecosystem, but you will be writing your story. You will discover what you are good at, and how you can become financially stable, and at the same time, contribute to the society." Congratulating the incoming batch, Rezina Sultana said, "We welcome you to a transformational journey. Your effort is the key to the door of success. What matters is the consistency to strive throughout the two years."
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Children have fun in a Children's Home in Shunchang County, Nanping City, Southeast China's Fujian Province. [China Women's News]

The Women's Federation of Shunchang County, Nanping City, Southeast China's Fujian Province, built a Children's Home near its poverty-alleviation workshop to help female workers look after their children. The service gained support from a local industrial park and a household item manufacturer, and it is expected to ease the female workers' worries about their kids who are left at home when they work, according to Zheng Bijing, President of Women's Federation of Shunchang County.

"Every morning I take my son to the workshop after doing housework. He has fun in the Children's Home with many peers and is looked after by two village officials, so there's no need to worry about him. After work, I go back home with him. I feel very happy with this daily routine," said Lian Fang, a worker at the poverty-alleviation workshop.

The workshop mainly processes products such as pillows and file bags. It has attracted many women since its establishment for the flexible working hours.

"I had been unable to find a suitable job because of an early illness that crippled my leg. Although there are policies that have helped me get out of poverty, I also want to work hard to make my life better," said a low-income villager in Zhengfang Town, who suffers from a bone disease and had not worked for more than 10 years.

"The workshop offered me a job that allows me to make money while looking after my family," the villager added.

At present, more than 40 women villagers work in the workshop, earning a maximum monthly income of more than 3,000 yuan (US $433.6).

"This has made it possible for rural women to find jobs at their doorsteps, earn money in their hometown, support the elderly, take care of their children and steadily increase their income," said Zheng.

Workers sew in the poverty-alleviation workshop of Shunchang County, Nanping City, Southeast China's Fujian Province. [China Women's News]

(Source: China Women's News/Translated and edited by Women of China)
Thousands of people gather for a protest on Independence Square. The demonstrators are taking to the streets in the Belarusian capital and other cities and continue to press for the resignation of President Lukashenko.

Tens of thousands of protesters marched in Belarus' capital city of Minsk over the weekend, demanding the resignation of President Alexander Lukashenko following his contested re-election earlier this month.

Demonstrators marched toward Lukashenko's residence at the Independence Square on Sunday, brandishing red and white flags to symbolize their opposition to the president and chanting for the long-time ruler to step down and for new elections to be held.

One Reuters witness estimated that as many as 200,000 people could be seen rallying in central Minsk for the second consecutive week. State television suggested the demonstration consisted of 20,000 people.

Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, claimed a landslide victory in the August 9 presidential election after official results gave him his sixth term in office with 80% of the vote.

Opposition protesters have since taken to the streets to voice their anger over allegations of vote-rigging and reports of police violence.

Lukashenko has denied allegations of electoral fraud and maintained that he won the election fairly. The 65-year-old has also ruled out holding another vote and vowed to crush the unrest.

The president was shown in state media footage flying over the protests in a helicopter on Sunday, before landing at his residence and emerging wearing body armor and carrying an assault rifle in his hand.

Shortly thereafter, a separate video circulated by state media showed the president thanking riot police outside his residence, prompting an outburst of applause from security officials.
CHICAGO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Relativity, a global legal and compliance technology company, highlights its continued growth of SaaS platform RelativityOne among law firm users as well as customer use of Relativity Analytics at ILTA>ON, a virtual legal tech conference taking place August 24-28. Over the last year, RelativityOne data from law firms has grown by more than 80% as firms moved toward the platform to help them reduce costs within their e-discovery tech stacks and bolster their security profile.

To support more efficient business strategies, law firms are increasingly focusing on centralizing their e-discovery data platforms from processing all the way through to analysis and production. Cutting down on a tech stack not only reduces costs of various subscription fees, but with the increased efficiencies, teams can take on additional work, which in turn generates more revenue.

Additional business efficiencies for law firms will result from RelativityOne's upgrade to Aero UI, which couples the strong security of the cloud platform with a simply powerful UI. Aero UI delivers lightspeed performance, next-generation review, workflow-based navigation and automated workflows for RelativityOne. It maintains the power, flexibility and extensibility Relativity users have always appreciated, while making it faster and easier for novice users and case team members to get going in the software. Thus far, 50 customers have upgraded to Aero UI with a full rollout to all RelativityOne customers coming in September.

"We've seen strong growth among law firms moving into RelativityOne over the last year, which is very exciting. Not only does this demonstrate that cloud technology is a priority for the industry today, but it is a testament to how consolidating the e-discovery tech stack is one of the simplest ways law firms can drive real ROI for their entire organization," said Mike Gamson, Chief Executive Officer at Relativity. "Moving to the cloud and taking advantage of our leading AI capabilities with Relativity Analytics will help litigation and e-discovery teams improve their ability to draw insights from their case data and create opportunities for them to grow their businesses."

Last year, Foley & Lardner LLP (Foley) began work on a 110-million document case in RelativityOne. The international law firm used Active Learning and completed the review 10x faster than they would have without Active Learning, resulting in $10 million dollars of savings for their client.

"Everyone from Foley working on this case is happy with how Active Learning is going," said Nick Cole, Director of Litigation Support at Foley. "We are going to use this as an example to help evangelize using Relativity Analytics with other case teams."

Built with AI, Relativity Analytics continues to be an important aspect of Relativity usage among law firms like Foley as well as Relativity's customer base more broadly. Active Learning is one capability within Relativity's broad range of proven AI tools. Since its release in December 2017, Active Learning has made over 1 billion predictions, half of which occurred in 2019 alone. Utilizing this technology to make e-discovery more efficient is imperative as lawyers need to analyze millions of documents and discover key insights from mounds of data. Nearly 7,000 TB of data have been analyzed with Relativity Analytics since the Active Learning launch in 2017.

"At Korein Tillery we're lucky to have Relativity with unlimited analytics, so I always throw the proverbial 'kitchen sink' of analytics at every case we have," said Stephanie Clerkin, Director of Litigation Support at Korein Tillery and Relativity's ILTA Business Partner Liaison. "Whether it's 1,000 documents or 5 million, I can run as many structured analytics sets such as email threading or textual deduplication, clusters and Active Learning models as needed to discover the truth within all of the data we need to sort through."

Relativity will be participating in the following sessions during the virtual event:

Relativity's Company Update: All things Aero UI, security, and more in RelativityOne on Monday, August 24 at 10:00am CT : Join Relativity's Chief Product Officer Chris Brown and Group Product Manager Kyle Disterheft as they walk through the launch of RelativityOne this year and what's to come. They'll cover topics such as Aero UI, security in RelativityOne and the roadmap for what's to come in the next few years.

Join Relativity's Chief Product Officer and Group Product Manager as they walk through the launch of RelativityOne this year and what's to come. They'll cover topics such as Aero UI, security in RelativityOne and the roadmap for what's to come in the next few years. Litigation Support Roundtable: Today's Challenges on Wednesday, August 26 at 10:30am CT : David Horrigan , Relativity's Discovery Counsel & Legal Education Director, will be co-hosting a roundtable discussion with ACEDS President Michael Quartararo to give an overview of the legal and business issues facing law firms and corporate legal departments today.

, Relativity's Discovery Counsel & Legal Education Director, will be co-hosting a roundtable discussion with ACEDS President to give an overview of the legal and business issues facing law firms and corporate legal departments today. Doing More with Less: How Downsizing Your Tech Stack Can Transform Your Organization on Thursday, August 27 at 10:30am CT : Andrew Watts , Relativity's CIO, will share Relativity's journey along this path and what it's meant for the business. He'll give tips on how to simplify your software and share the impact this can have on your team's ability to be innovative, efficient, and see strong returns on investment for every piece of software you invest in.

About Relativity

At Relativity, we make software to help users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. Our platform is used by more than 13,000 organizations around the world to manage large volumes of data and quickly identify key issues during litigation, internal investigations, and compliance operations with SaaS platform RelativityOne and Relativity Trace. Relativity has over 329,000 enabled users in 48+ countries from organizations, including the U.S. Department of Justice, and 199 of the Am Law 200. Relativity has been named one of Chicago's Top Workplaces by the Chicago Tribune for nine consecutive years. Please contact Relativity at [email protected] or visit http://www.relativity.com for more information.

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Veronica Spak, Relativity Corporate Communications

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Relativity

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Here in the U.S., the pandemic has brought a lot of things to a halt, but one thing it hasnt stopped is the flow of people seeking asylum. People are still showing up at the border, hoping to escape brutal conditions in their home countries. And the U.S. government is supposed to hear these people out. But Adolfo Flores, who covers immigration policy for BuzzFeed News, says thats not happening right now. Back in March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said undocumented immigrants could no longer be safely detained at the border while they awaited processing because of the pandemic. They are quickly sent back to Mexico in less than two hours without any access to our immigration court system, Flores says.

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The government has also scrapped many of the protections in place for unaccompanied minorskids who have crossed the border and are trying to stay in the U.S. The Trump administration insists this is all necessary to minimize the spread of the coronavirus. But critics, like the American Civil Liberties Union, say the U.S. government is using the crisis to continue the presidents crackdown on immigrants. I spoke with Flores about how the Trump administration is denying immigrants and asylum-seekers access to the U.S. legal system, and what that means for the adultsand childrenfleeing violence in their home countries. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ray Suarez: Before COVID-19, was the United States able to handle the flow of asylum-seekers? Were those cases being adjudicated before and theyre not now?

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Adolfo Flores: They were, but there wasand there isa massive backlog in cases. So peoples cases were taking years to be adjudicated. But the administration had another policy before this, the so-called Remain in Mexico program. And that forced immigrants and asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases were adjudicated. But even then, people were waiting more than a year in some cases.

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So this is a policy thats been in flux already, regardless of COVID-19. People who once would show up at the border and have an asylum process scheduled and be kept in custody on the U.S. side of the border or released to relatives or allowed to remain at large were being pushed back into Mexico already. Now theyre being pushed back into Mexico and not even being given a hearing?

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Thats exactly whats happening.

Does the law give a lot of power to the executive branch in dealing with the day-to-day treatment of attempted border crossers and asylum requests? Is there normally a lot of latitude in the executive branch?

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The last three years have shown that there is more latitude than we previously thought. The changes in the policies under this administration, they dont always stick, but theres always a new one. Theres always something on the horizon to take over. Remain in Mexico is a good example. That was one thing. And now we have these expulsions. Of course, they say that this is because of the pandemic and we need to stop the spread of COVID- 19. But I think that the last few years have shown how much power and influence the executive branch does have in changing or adopting our immigration system.

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In your reporting, youre careful to make the distinction between deportation and expulsion. Walk us through the difference.

The reason I try to make that distinction is because if you say I was deported, that means you went through our immigration court system. You went through the process. Expulsions cut you off from that process completely. Lets say I show up at the border fleeing persecution or violence. And I tell a Border Patrol agent this. In the past, they would do a credible fear interview. And if I pass that, then I would be able to access the court system and try to get asylum or some other type of protection. Then I would go through that process. And if I didnt get it, I would be able to appeal it and go through that process. What youre seeing now is that that due process is taken away. I would go to the border today, tell the Border Patrol agent, Hey, Im fleeing persecution. They would quickly process me and then tell me, no, go back to Mexico

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Do we know what happens to people who are expelled? Do we know whether they try to cross again?

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People are immediately sent back. But theres nothing stopping them from trying again and again and again.

How has the pandemic become a factor in the way border enforcement is being handled writ large, not just with expulsions rather than hearingsis COVID-19 also changing the lives of people who are already in custody, adults and children?

In terms of people in ICE detention, the virus is spreading in all the facilities. So there has been an effort to reduce the population, and people have been getting released. But if you talk to some of the attorneys working with folks there, theyre not being released fast enough or releasing enough people, and people are getting sick and in some cases dying in ICE detention from COVID-19. And the immigration court system hasnt been working as it usually did. So some people are getting their cases postponed. Some are not. It just depends on what stage of the process youre at.

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Behind all this legal language, there are real people, people driven north by real distress. Tell us the story of a young Guatemalan sent home. You called her Claudia. Whats her story?

Claudia was a 17-year-old girl in Guatemala who was living there by herself after her parents and her younger brother immigrated to the U.S. And one day after school let out late, she was walking to a line of taxis, which she would usually take to get home, and she noticed somebody was following her. So she started walking fast. It was a five-minute walk. And in that time, a group of men grabbed her and they raped her. And she went home, and she didnt have anyone there, and she didnt tell her parents. She didnt want to worry them. But she had to eventually when she realized that she had become pregnant from the rape. And then after that, she started receiving calls from the men who had raped her, threatening her, telling her that they were watching her, that if she said anything, something would happen to her.

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After she gave birth to her daughter, she started to make her way from Guatemala to the border. She was abandoned in the Arizona desert by the smuggler because she stopped to change her daughters diaper. And by the time she looked up and tried to catch up, her and another woman realized the group was long gone and they were lost. And so they called 911, and they were able to get rescued by Border Patrol. But that was when she was told were going to be sending you back to Guatemala. And after about a day at a Border Patrol facility, she was taken to a hotel overseen by government contractors and then flown back to Guatemala.

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Unaccompanied children, and in some cases families, are being kept in these hotels. Sometimes theyre not given access to a phone. Their attorneys have a hard time reaching them. Some kids are able to call their parents, but then theyre not allowed to tell the parents where they are or what the conditions are like. One immigration attorney described them as black sites, because they sort of disappear into this hotel system. And then from there, theyre taken to an airport and sent back to their country.

The federal governments being sued by advocates trying to free migrant children from detention, the kind of detention you describe. What does the lawsuit argue?

The lawsuit argues that expelling unaccompanied children violates a 2008 anti-trafficking law and the law requires them to quickly transfer the kids to the refugee agency that usually took them, instead of quickly expelling them. And that law and other laws give these kids access to the asylum system and other protections. And so the lawsuit says that the Trump administration has violated that law specifically but also the other protections that unaccompanied children are entitled to.

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Whats the next shoe to drop? Or as long as the Trump administration is in power and the pandemic prevails, are we going to see pretty much what were seeing now?

Theres some stuff coming down potentially in the next few months. Last month, the Justice Department and DHS proposed a rule that would disqualify immigrants from asylum if officials determine they could spread an infectious disease. And then you also have some regulations that are being proposed that would make seeking asylum harder. If the administration stays in the White House, we can expect to see more policy build on this one and make it harder for people to access our immigration court system.

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The late Sushant Singh Rajput's father's lawyer, Vikas Singh addressed the question of Rhea Chakraborty being summoned by the CBI in its investigation of the actor's death. Vikas said that Rhea will be summoned by the CBI after it does its spadework, and added that if Rhea does not cooperate, then the possibility of her arrest will arise.

In a tweet, ANI quoted Vikas Singh as saying, "Rhea Chakraborty will be summoned by the CBI after it has done its spadework. They are examining everybody and once they are able to do their homework properly then only they will start grilling Rhea."

Singh added, "Once they (CBI) start grilling Rhea & if she does not cooperate with the investigation or gives evasive answers, then the possibility of her arrest will also rise. I'm quite hopeful that probe is going in the right direction."

Once they (CBI) start grilling Rhea & if she does not cooperate with the investigation or gives evasive answers, then the possibility of her arrest will also rise. I'm quite hopeful that probe is going in the right direction: Vikas Singh, lawyer of #SushantSinghRajput's father https://t.co/vSsUjgk6an  ANI (@ANI) August 24, 2020

Earlier in the day, Rhea's lawyer Satish Maneshinde had said that Rhea did not receive any summons from the CBI yet, and added that they will appear before the agency when they do.

ALSO READ: Sushant's Death Case: Rhea Chakraborty's Lawyer Says Actress Has Not Received CBI Summons

The CBI officially took over the case after the Supreme Court directed it to do so. It was earlier being investigated by both Mumbai Police and Bihar Police. A special investigation team of the CBI arrived in Mumbai to conduct its probe.

Sushant's father KK Singh had accused Rhea, her family members and a few others of abetment to suicide, theft, cheating and more, in an FIR registered with the Bihar Police.

Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate is investigating the money laundering angle of the case.

ALSO READ: Kangana Ranaut: Sushant's Family Lawyer Never Said Anything Against Me, Media Is Spreading Rumours

Worried about your mental well-being or of someone you know? Help is just a call away. Reach out to the nearest mental health specialist at COOJ Mental Health Foundation (COOJ)- 0832-2252525, Parivarthan- +91 7676 602 602, Connecting Trust- +91 992 200 1122/+91-992 200 4305 or Sahai- 080-25497777/ SAHAIHELPLINE@GMAIL.COM
Kamalvandi: IAEA chief's visit to Iran to focus on Safeguards issues

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, August 23, IRNA -- Spokesman for Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Behruz Kamalvandi said the visit of the Secretary-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Mariano Grossi is taking place within the framework of Safeguards Agreements.

He said that he will also discuss issues pertaining to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the related protocols.

He also noted that the volume of the heavy water produced in Iran amounts to over 3 tons parts of which is exported to a number of European countries.

The official also stressed that security investigations have proved that the recent incidents in Natanz were act of sabotage.

He said what is sure to say is that there has been an explosion in Natanz but how it happened, what ammunition was used and other details are the items which will be announced in proper time by security officials.

Referring to the Monday visit of the IAEA chief to Iran, he hoped that it would help remove the concerns both sides have.

Earlier, Iran's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Vienna Kazem Gharibabadi, on Saturday, wrote on his Twitter account that "in line with the ongoing interactions and cooperation between Iran & IAEA and based on Iran's invitation, Rafael Grossi will visit Iran next week."

"Iran is one of the main partners of the Agency and we hope this visit will lead to reinforced mutual cooperation", he further noted.

Meanwhile, Grossi, too, tweeted that "I will travel to Tehran on Monday for meetings with Iranian authorities to address outstanding questions related to safeguards in Iran. I hope to establish a fruitful and cooperative channel of direct dialogue. It is necessary".

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Sonia Gandhi to remain as interim Congress chief for few months: Reports

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Aug 24: After hours of deliberation during the CWC meeting, Sonia Gandhi will continue to remain the interim party chief. A panel has also been formed to help Sonia Gandhi in her day-to-day functioning. An All India Congress Committee (AICC) session will be called within six months.

At the CWC meet which began on Monday morning, Sonia Gandhi had expressed her wish to be relieved from the post of Congress' interim chief until the elections for the post are carried out. However, no major decision regarding a change in the leadership took place.

Congress workers demand party chief to be from Gandhi family, not outsiders

"Congress is one big family and I don't hold anything against anyone. But all, especially senior leaders should raise concerns at the party forum only," said Sonia Gandhi in her concluding remarks.

Though a large section of the leaders backed Sonia Gandhi at the nearly seven-hour virtual meeting of the Congress' highest decision making body to discuss the pivotal leadership issue, the faultlines were clear and appeared to deepen at some points as the day progressed.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh led the demand for Sonia Gandhi continuing as Congress president and leader after leader echoed him while attacking the letter writers, particularly Ghulam Nabi Azad, the senior-most signatory and a CWC member, sources said.

P Chidambaram suggested the holding of a virtual AICC session to start the process of holding elections for a new party chief. However, the stage seems set for the CWC endorsing Sonia Gandhi continuation as party chief, with the letter writers isolated and under attack from several leaders.

Sonia Gandhi asks Congress to find a new president, says won't remain the president | Oneindia News

The meeting was attended by 48 leaders. Former president Rahul Gandhi, it is learnt, launched a sharp attack against the signatories, questioning their timing as well as the fact they went public with their grievances. He also rued the fact that the letter - seeking sweeping changes to the party organisation and elections to the CWC -- was written when Sonia Gandhi was in hospital and the party was battling a political crisis in Rajasthan. He said Sonia Gandhi had accepted charge as party president only after the CWC last year urged her to take the responsibility.

"It is the CWC and not the media, where we voice our grievances and discuss issues," sources quoted Rahul Gandhi as telling the CWC members. They also said Rahul insinuated that the letter would help the BJP. Earlier in the day, Kapil Sibal, senior leader and one of the signatories of the letter, created a flutter when he hit out at Rahul Gandhi on Twitter for a purported remark on the BJP. Sibal, who is not a part of the CWC, withdrew his tweet a little later.

"Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him. I therefore withdraw my tweet," he said on Twitter. The Congress also denied that Rahul Gandhi had accused any party leader of "colluding with the BJP".

Congress workers demand party chief to be from Gandhi family, not outsiders

"Rahul Gandhi hasn't said a word of this nature nor alluded to it. Please don't be misled by false media discourse or misinformation being spread. "But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather then fighting & hurting each other and the Congress," the party's chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said on Twitter, tagging Sibal's earlier tweet.

Azad, too, attempted to set the record straight. The leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha said a section of media is "wrongly attributing that, in CWC I told Shri Rahul Gandhi to prove that the letter written by us is in collusion with BJP - 'let me make it very clear that Shri Rahul Gandhi has neither in CWC nor outside said that this letter was written at the behest of BJP."

Azad was at the proverbial centre of the storm in the CWC. Former defence minister A K Antony termed the letter "cruel", while his colleague Ambika Soni described the missive as unfortunate and said the party had given Azad a lot. Sources said Azad offered to resign at the meeting amid questions being raised on the letter, its timing and its leakage to the media. Sonia Gandhi also referred to Azad twice in her opening remarks, saying he had even sent a reminder to his letter, the sources said.

To this she had said she had given her reply to K C Venugopal expressing her desire to be relieved of the post and the party should initiate the process to find her replacement. While most leaders backed Sonia's continuation as party chief, there were some who proposed Rahul Gandhi's return as president, the sources said. Giving details of the proceedings, they said Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and his Chhattisgarh counterpart Bhupesh Baghel urged Rahul Gandhi to take charge in case Sonia Gandhi wishes to withdraw. Venugopal read out the letter written by Sonia Gandhi and criticised the party leaders who were behind the letter.

Besides Azad, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik and Jitin Prasada also part of the CWC and attended the meeting - divided between those demanding collective leadership and those reposing faith in the Gandhi family. Almost all Lok Sabha MPs of the party have written to Sonia Gandhi expressing solidarity and urging her to continue in her post or install Rahul Gandhi. Besides, several state units, including Delhi and Rajasthan, have passed resolutions favouring the leadership of the Gandhis.

The letter is the second challenge to Sonia Gandhi's leadership after 1999 when then leader of opposition in Lok Sabha Sharad Pawar raised the issue of her foreign origins in order to keep her from being named the party's prime ministerial face in the general elections that year. Sonia Gandhi then resigned in the CWC, which rejected her move unanimously bringing her back as party president. While Sonia Gandhi went on to become the longest serving Congress president, Pawar and rebels quit to form the NCP.
MACKINAC ISLAND, MI -- The relationship between fudge and Mackinac Island dates back to when Grand Hotel was built in 1887 and the arrival of the Murdick family, who helped build the hotel.

Thats not lost on Bob Benser, Jr., who runs the iconic Original Murdicks Fudge on the Island.

When you come to Mackinac Island, its all about the horses, the Grand Hotel, the natural beauty, the history, but you have to pick up a box of Murdicks Fudge before you go home, Benser said.

We are the Fudge Capital of the World, he added. We like to think we do it the best, but there are a lot of great fudge stores on the Island.

Its no coincidence Original Murdicks Fudge, as well as the other nearly dozen shops on the island, would team up with the Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau to celebrate the annual Mackinac Fudge Festival.

Although this years festival will look a little different with no big public events, most stores will continue their famous fudge demonstrations. Local pubs and restaurants will feature specialty fudge cocktails and desserts. Those on the Island can enjoy an outdoor movie - Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory at 9 p.m. Saturday at Fort Mackinac.

See the full schedule of events:

https://www.mackinacisland.org/mackinac-island-fudge-festival/

There is no denying that fudge has played a major role in the development of the Mackinac Island tourism, said Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau executive director Tim Hygh.

It is a staple here that people absolutely love. They love to watch it being made. They love to eat it on the island. And they love to take authentic Mackinac Island fudge back home as a gift.

Author and historian Phil Porter said:

Along with riding bikes, taking a carriage tour and visiting the fort, buying a box of fudge has been a must-do Mackinac Island activity since the Roaring Twenties.

The success of this sweet souvenir spawned a multi-million dollar industry housed in more than a dozen quaint fudge shops. The spectacle of watching it being made, the show in front of you, is a key part of what made Mackinac Island fudge famous, and why visitors still cant leave Mackinac Island without it.

Porter, who authored the book Fudge: Mackinacs Sweet Souvenir, speaks at 3 p.m. Friday about the Islands love affair with fudge. Check the schedule for the latest details.

In his book, Porter chronicles that love affair with fudge, when father-and-son sail makers, Henry and Jerome Rome Murdick, were commissioned to create canvas awnings for the new Grand Hotel.

Immigrants from Germany who settled in Detroit and then Petoskey, Henrys wife, Sara, was an expert fudge and candy maker, opening Murdicks Candy Kitchen while her husband and son hurried to get Grand Hotel opened for business.

Its a history that Original Murdicks Fudge owner Bob Benser, Jr., loves to tell.

They started down the street at our main store with just eight flavors, said Benser, whose father, Bob Benser Sr., operated a Tastee Freeze ice cream shop next to Murdicks Candy Kitchen and took over the business in 1969.

If it wasnt for the Grand Hotel opening, and Mr. Murdick and Mrs. Murdick coming to work on Grand Hotel, fudge may not be the phenomenon it is today on Mackinac.

With 13 fudge shops on Mackinac Island, more than 10 tons of sugar is used per week to make the sweet treat during a busy summer season.

READ: Your guide to Mackinac Island Fudge

Benser said Original Murdicks Fudge is made with only the freshest, all-natural ingredients, most from Michigan including the sugar, butter, cream, and maple sugar.

While the recipes have not changed, this summer has not been business as usual for Original Murdicks Fudge.

We had to be creative, said Benser, who had to ask family members to come up to the island this summer because the Covid-19 pandemic created a labor shortage there.

Along with his three sisters -- Leslie, Heidi and Amy -- he also recruited a brother-in-law, three nieces and four nephews.

He said the Benser family makes up about 25 percent of Original Murdicks Fudges workforce at two stores on the Island, as well as storefronts in Mackinaw City and St. Ignace.

Its been great to see them everyday, he said of his family. Were really doing whatever we have to do to still make Mackinac be Mackinac, and Murdicks Fudge to be Murdicks Fudge. Its been challenging, but its been great because I have family involved.

In a recent video interview about the upcoming Mackinac Island Fudge Festival, we had a chance to meet up with sisters Amy Benser Irish and Heidi Benser. Theyve enjoyed bugging their brother this summer, but working on the Island has brought back a lot of memories, too.

Its been great being back and doing what we used to do when we were in our teens and 20s, and now were in our 50s, Irish said. Now were working with teens, and were able to guide them along and teach them.

Its meant a lot to continue the tradition of Murdicks as a family, and work together, said Heidi Benser, referring to Murdicks history dating back to 1887.

Bob Benser, Sr. arrived in 1955, became friends and business partners with Jerome, and eventually took over the business from the Murdick family.

My dads been very proud of us for being up here and taking the reins and all pitching in at a time that its needed, Irish said. We all left the things we were doing and came up here to help out where its needed. Its been great.

Heidi Benser added: Murdicks is a true family business. Thats what this is all about. We rally when we need to come together.

Irish said the nieces and nephews range in age from 12-19. Many work six days a week. They like working hard. They like working for their uncle, she said.

We met up with Ava, Ellie and Gracie Irish, who all said they do, indeed, love working for Uncle Bobby. Its been a memorable summer, they said.

Its amazing how well were able to work together and produce such an amazing product, said Gracie Irish, who is studying business in college. I love my job. I get excited waking up in the morning, and I love working with (Ava and Ellie).

Do they eat the fudge?

Yes, they all said with big smiles.

My favorite flavor is Chocolate Caramel Sea Salt! Gracie said. Try that one.

Mine, too, Ava said.

Me, too, Ellie said.

Learn more about Murdicks Fudge at originalmurdicksfudge.com or on FACEBOOK.

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic that has caused a labor shortage on Mackinac Island, the Benser family is working together to keep making its iconic fudge at Original Murdick's Fudge.John Gonzalez

IF YOU GO

Mackinac Island Fudge Festival

Aug. 28-30, 2020

mackinacisland.org

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic that has caused a labor shortage on Mackinac Island, the Benser family is working together to keep making its iconic fudge at Original Murdick's Fudge.John Gonzalez

READ MORE

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 13, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zanzibar Gold Inc. (the Company) (ZBR  CSE; ZNZBF  OTC Pinks) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Juan J. Duarte Bravo as a director of the Company.



Mr. Duarte is a practising lawyer located in Hermosillo, Mexico, with more than twenty years experience as counselor and legal representative of international mining companies operating in Mexico. Throughout the years, he has participated in the creation, acquisition, sale, merging, spin-off, and joint-venturing of mining projects throughout Mexico. He has vast experience in the acquisition of mining concessions involving government, private and ejido-owned properties. He specializes in developing community and ejido relationships in Mexican mining regions along with managing compliance and environmental laws. He has obtained mine exploration and exploitation permits for natural areas protected by the Mexican State. Mr. Duartes practice has assisted mining companies in obtaining permits to use Mexican territorial water rights along with development of environmental permits. Mr. Duarte has also practiced archaeological law and on which he has published in specialized journals.

Mr. Farrage stated, On behalf of Zanzibars Board of Directors, I am very pleased to welcome Mr. Duarte to the Company. We are confident that Juans proficiencies, experience and perspective will be of great value to Zanzibar as the Company grows.

On behalf of the Board

Abby Farrage, President

1 (236) 818-2886

phoenicianabi@gmail.com
China has several novel coronavirus vaccine candidates in the late stage of development.

Below is a summary of its efforts to develop vaccines.

HOW MANY CHINESE VACCINES ARE IN PHASE 3?

Four of the worlds seven vaccines that are in the third phase of trials are from China. Two of the candidates are from China National Biotec Group (CNBG), a unit of state-owned pharmaceutical giant China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm).

Sinovac Biotech is developing the third candidate called CoronaVac, while CanSino Biologics is working with state military research unit Academy of Military Medical Sciences on Ad5-nCoV.

WHO IS PARTNERING WITH CHINA FOR TRIALS?

Argentina, Peru, Morocco, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have allowed CNBG to run Phase 3 trials. Its not immediately clear if the companys two vaccine candidates will be tested in those countries.

Indonesia and Brazil are helping with Phase 3 trials of Sinovacs CoronaVac, while Bangladesh aims to run a late stage clinical trial for the experimental vaccine.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Russia have agreed to conduct Phase 3 trials of CanSinos candidate, while Mexico has signed an early agreement with the Chinese firm for a late-stage trial.

HOW EXPERIMENTAL COVID-19 VACCINES ARE USED IN CHINA?

China has been administering experimental coronavirus vaccines to groups facing high infection risks such as medical workers since July under an emergency use" programme.

Authorities could consider modestly expanding the emergency use programme to try to prevent outbreaks during the autumn and winter.

China has not specified how many people have been vaccinated or which product has been given. Before the official launch of the programme in July, Chinas military approved the use of CanSinos vaccine, in June, while state media reported in June that employees at state-owned firms travelling overseas were allowed to take one of the two candidate vaccines being developed by CNBG.
Each spring, Lakeshore Technical College holds a graduation banquet in northeast Wisconsin for its dairy students. Unfortunately, this spring that could not happen. Students in the nine-month program did not have a chance to introduce themselves to the dairy industry and thank their families, host dairy farms, and mentors who helped them on their path to graduation. The list of activities and results of their competitions at state and national contests were limited this year or nonexistent.

Without a formal gathering, the professor still wanted the students to feel that there was a graduation or a conclusion to their studies. There was an offsite, casual social gathering of students, wearing masks and social distancing, to hear the positive remarks of their adviser. The three students from western Canada had already returned home, but they attended the gathering electronically.

This year 11 students graduated from Lakeshore Technical Colleges dairy management program. They received their plaques and posed for an individual photo. Those photos were joined in a digital collage.
Dang Hoai Bac, deputy head of PTIT and Park Dong Jin from Naver signed the MoU

The cooperation is part of Navers Global AI R&D Belt strategy. Under the MoU, the two sides will cooperate in organised training courses on embedded, IoT, AI, big data, blockchain, data for students; and exchanges of students and teachers to help Vietnamese join the exchange programmes of Naver.

The cooperation will also include technology transfer and exchange, technology application, products and services which Naver has strong expertise; develop new curricula and international training programme; scholarship programmes for PTITs excellent students in AI; and joint research projects between Naver and PTIT; among others.

Addressing the signing ceremony, Dang Hoai Bac, deputy head of PTIT, expressed that he was deeply impressed by the Global AI R&D Belt strategy of Naver.

"PTITs research teams are eager to cooperate with Navers because the fields that the South Korean technology giant is interested in are also PTITs focuses, especially multimedia labs and machine learning labs."

Park Dong Jin, director of Naver in charge of the Asia-Pacific region said that, "The cooperation with PTIT has been in Navers plan for a long time as the institute is the leading IT training centre in Vietnam  and the young Vietnamese generation is very good at IT."

Naver announced the Global AI R&D Belt in 2019, building a network of AI labs in South Korea, Japan, France, and Southeast Asia, with Vietnam being a focus. Through this belt, Naver aims to connect lecturers, universities, startups, and labs to exchange expertise and cooperate in AI development.

In July 2020, Naver signed a cooperation agreement with Hanoi Technology University, opening for future cooperation with Vietnam in the Global AI R&D Belt.

Naver now has more than 3,500 staff globally. Naver is also the leading online search engine in South Korea, handling nearly 75 per cent of all web searches with 42 million enrolled users.

Navers market capitalisation in South Koreas stock market is currently over $40 billion.
The Mata Shrine Board, on Monday said that all devotees coming from outside the Union Territory are required to bring 'valid negative test report', which should not be more than 48 hours old at the time of arrival.

Pilgrimage to Mata Temple resumed on August 16, nearly 5 months after it was suspended due to COVID-19.

Devotees will not be allowed to enter the temple without a COVID-19 negative test report.

"All devotees coming from outside for Yatra require valid COVID-19 negative test report not more than 48 hours older at the time of arrival. Without negative test report, they will not be allowed for the yatra," Ramesh Kumar, CEO, Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board, said.

Last week, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha had paid obeisance at Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine and inspected facilities for pilgrims here.He also directed to continue precautionary measures for the safety of pilgrims.

The shrine board is abiding with all central health norms to contain the spread of Only 2,000 people are allowed to visit the shrine per day.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Female suicide bomber blamed for second of twin attacks in mainly Muslim island, a stronghold of Abu Sayyaf Group.

At least 14 people have been killed and several others wounded after two explosions, including one reportedly carried out by a female suicide bomber, struck the southern Philippine town of Jolo, according to the authorities.

Philippine Red Cross Chief Richard Gordon said the first explosion hit at approximately noon (04:00 GMT) on Monday in the capital of Sulu, one of the countrys southernmost provinces.

Gordon, who is also a senator, said a motorcycle loaded with improvised explosive device went off near a military truck. The Red Cross office in Jolo is located near the site of the blast.

According to news reports, as authorities were cordoning off the area, a second explosion was reportedly carried out by a female suicide bomber.

A female suicide bomber detonated herself as a soldier stopped her from entering the cordoned area, Lieutenant Colonel Ronaldo Mateo, an army spokesman told Manila radio station DZMM.

In total, eight members of the security forces, six civilians and the bomber were killed in the two blasts, while 27 security personnel and 48 civilians were wounded.

Jolo is one of a chain of mainly Muslim islands in the southwest of the majority Roman Catholic country.

The blasts happened not far from the site of a major explosion that killed more than 20 people inside a Catholic church in early 2019, according to state-run PTV channel.

Images posted by PTV on social media on Monday showed debris and bodies lying on a street next to a military vehicle.

Mondays incident was one of at least six suicide bombings in the past three years, a mode of attack previously rare in the Philippines.

Island stronghold of Abu Sayyaf Group

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

In a statement, Philippine police chief General Archie Francisco Gamboa said he has ordered an investigation into the deadly incident.

Sulu is known as the stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf Group, an armed group that has allied itself with ISIL (ISIS).

Abu Sayyaf has long been battling for independence in the southern region of Mindanao, which they regard as their ancestral homeland dating back to the pre-Spanish colonial period.

The group is notorious for kidnappings, robberies and deadly bombings.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the explosion incidents in Jolo, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said.

Authorities are now conducting an investigation, which includes identifying individuals or groups behind these dastardly attacks.

In June, four soldiers were killed in Jolo following an alleged confrontation with police officers, igniting tensions between the two government forces.

The soldiers were reportedly pursuing suspected armed fighters, when they were stopped by police leading to the deadly incident.

Earlier on Monday, Major Gen Vinluan, a military commander in Mindanao, told senators in Manila that it is possible that the police officers involved in the shooting may be related by blood to the Abu Sayyaf suspects pursued by the military.

That is possible, because almost everyone are related to each other in Sulu. There are ASG [Abu Sayyaf Group] who have relatives in the police force  Sulu is small.
President Trump on Sunday announced that the Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for the use of convalescent plasma for COVID-19 patients.

The FDA said more than 70,000 patients have been treated with convalescent plasma, which is taken from people who have recovered from COVID-19, and the "known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product." Trump called the move "historic" and claimed the treatment will "save countless lives."

There is no conclusive evidence that using convalescent plasma works, and Denise Hinton, the FDA's chief scientist, said this "should not be considered a new standard of care for the treatment of patients with COVID-19. Additional data will be forthcoming from other analyses and ongoing, well-controlled clinical trials in the coming months."

Trump, who has touted the use of everything from disinfectants to antimalarial drugs to treat COVID-19, recently accused the FDA of "making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics." Benjamin Corb of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology told The Associated Press Trump's Sunday announcement has "conspicuous timing. President Trump is once against putting his political goals ahead of the health and well-being of the American public."

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GENEVA: U.N.-mediated talks involving Syrian government, opposition and civil society envoys were put on hold after three participants turned up positive for COVID-19, just hours after the meetings started in Geneva on Monday, the United Nations said.

The office of U.N. Syria envoy Geir Pedersen said the three delegations had gotten off to a constructive first meeting before the talks were suspended. They are discussing a possible new constitution for the war-battered country a step he has called a prospective door-opener to a final resolution of the countrys devastating nine-year civil war.

His office did not specify which delegation or delegations that the three participants were from.

The meeting, set to last through the week, is the first of its kind in nine months. The pandemic forced the postponement of an earlier meeting in March. Participants were tested for the coronavirus before and after arrival in Geneva, the U.N envoys office said.

Pedersen is hosting three 15-member teams from Syria, while major regional and world powers Iran, Russia, Turkey and the United States are expected to be present on the sidelines.

With a fragile cease-fire largely holding in the rebel-held region of Idlib, Pedersen said last week he is hoping to build trust and confidence in a U.N.-led process that has produced few concrete results so far. Hes also hoping for detainee releases and a nationwide cease-fire.

The Syrian war broke out in 2011, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the exile of millions from their homes. The opposition wants a new constitution, while the government says the current charter should be amended.

U.S. envoy for Syria James Jeffrey, who is in Geneva, noted this month a shift at least in tone from Syrian President Bashar Assad by acknowledging the U.N.-backed process in ways that he had not previously. Jeffrey said the United States will keep watch on whether the government has changed, at least tactically, in its approach to the talks.

A larger group of 150 delegates is also part of the process, but is not meeting this week.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
The National Guard will arrive in Kenosha County around 8 p.m. to aid local authorities after civil unrest broke out overnight following an officer-involved shooting of a black man.

Kenosha County Emergency Management Director Lt. Horace Staples said the declaration of a State of Emergency at 11 p.m. Sunday started the process of activating the deployment.

They have been deployed, Staples said.

However, some Kenosha County officials believe the process should not have taken as long as it did.

Kenosha County supervisors Terry Rose and Zach Rodriguez said Monday they feel someone dropped the ball.

Myself and other supervisors were knocking on the doors of other supervisors at 2 a.m. because the National Guard hadnt been sent to Kenosha, Rodriguez said.

Staples said he submitted the request to Wisconsin Emergency Management at 3 a.m. That office in turn submits the request to the governor o Wisconsin, who activates the National Guard.
A 27-year-old unemployed man who stole a parked three-seater KIA Besta commercial vehicle at Alhaji- Tabora Station in Accra, has appeared before an Accra Circuit court.



Evans Nuetey is alleged to have stolen the vehicle with one Spiderman and sold same at Agbogboloshie at a cost of GH 1,200.00



The vehicle has however been valued at GH15,000 cedis.



Nuetey charged with conspiracy to commit crime and stealing pleaded not guilty.



Nuetey who appeared without a legal representation, has been remanded into police custody.



The court presided over by Mrs Ellen Ofei Ayeh ruled that Nuetey has failed to satisfy the court that he has fixed place of abode and an employment.



The court was of the opinion that if Nuetey is granted bail his whereabouts cannot be traced.



It therefore adjourned the matter to September 4 for case management and ordered prosecution to file their disclosures within 12 days.



Prosecution led by General Sergeant Thomas Sarfo said the complainant is George Larbi, a commercial driver residing at Tabora, Accra.

Mr Osarfo said on September 3, last year, at about 2330 hours, Mr Larbi parked his vehicle with Registration number GR 7134 P at Alhaji Tabora Station and left it in the care of his mate.



Prosecution said at about 0230 hours the following day, the mate informed the complainant that he left to purchase food but, on his return, the vehicle could not be found.



Prosecution said the following day the complainant reported the matter to the Police.



The Prosecution said police intelligence and investigations led to the accused who was in Police custody for a different offence.



Prosecution said during interrogation, Nuetey admitted having stolen the vehicle with one Spiderman and that they sold it at Agbogboloshie to a man known as "Mainman" at a cost of GHC 1,200.00 and shared the booty.



Prosecution said Nuetey however failed to lead the Police to the said "Mainman" as well as his accomplice, Spiderman.



According to prosecution, the complainant claimed to know Spiderman at Tabora but did know his place of abode.



Prosecution said efforts were underway to arrest Spiderman.

Source: GNA









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Republicans will make their case this week that the United States' economic and political future depends on the re-election of Donald Trump at a party convention designed to highlight his pre-pandemic record as president and sow doubt about opponent Joe Biden.

Against the backdrop of a coronavirus pandemic that has killed over 175,000 Americans, and an ensuing recession that has seen the loss of millions of jobs and Trump's erosion in the polls, Republicans plan a partly virtual, partly in-person extravaganza studded with Trump family members that features the president speaking every night.

The four-day convention will focus on the highlights of Trump's first term and a promise to do more in a second, said White House and party officials, who did not provide details about his policy plans.

The event follows last week's Democratic National Convention that nominated Biden, a former vice president, and running mate Senator Kamala Harris. The Democrats, originally scheduled to gather in Milwaukee, held the first-ever virtual convention because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden, 77, is leading Trump, 74, in opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election. Biden and his fellow Democrats portrayed Trump as a force for darkness, chaos and incompetence, while stressing the Democrats' diversity and values like "empathy" and "unity."

Republicans said their convention would offer a more hopeful message, with an emphasis on "law and order," gun rights, tax cuts and the "forgotten" men and women of America.

"We definitely want to improve the mood, the dour, sour mood from this week at the DNC," White House counselor and former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told reporters on Friday. "We need to be lifted up. We need to hear more optimism and hopefulness."

But with the pandemic not yet under control, good news has been in short supply for Trump and his party. His performance as president was sharply criticized by Biden and former President Barack Obama at the Democratic convention, which the party considered a huge success.

Trump continues to receive low marks from the public on his handling of the virus. Biden's campaign said Trump and his allies would attempt to change the subject.

"What (voters) will hear from Donald Trump this week are the last things our country needs: more desperate, wild-eyed lies and toxic division in vain attempts to distract from his mismanagement," said Biden spokesman Andrew Bates.

"What they won't hear is what American families have urgently needed and been forced to go without for over seven consecutive months: any coherent strategy for defeating the pandemic," Bates said.

LIVE EVENTS, WHITE HOUSE STAGE

The president, a former reality television star, plans to hold several live events with in-person audiences during the Republican convention, in contrast to Democrats, who showed pre-taped segments or delivered speeches in mostly empty venues to avoid the spread of the coronavirus.

Trump will travel on Monday to North Carolina, the originally scheduled convention venue, where some activities are still slated to take place. His nightly speeches are a break from both parties' tradition, in which the nominee takes a low profile ahead of the acceptance speech on the last night of the convention.

The contrast between Trump and Biden is "overwhelming," Pennsylvania Republican Chairman Lawrence Tabas said on Sunday while attending the party's summer conference in Charlotte. Trump "is vigorous, optimistic and dynamic. In Bidens speech, he was dull and did not seem to have the energy, the spirit or the optimism."

On Tuesday, Trump's wife, Melania, will give a speech from the White House, while Vice President Mike Pence follows on Wednesday from Baltimore's Fort McHenry historic site.

Trump will accept his party's nomination on Thursday night from the White House South Lawn with a large crowd in attendance, a location that has been criticized by Democrats as a partisan use of public property.

Trump has four days to make two cases: One is 'we know what we are doing and have done a great job, obviously interrupted by the virus,'" said Constantin Querard, president of Grassroots Partners, an Arizona-based conservative political consultancy.

"And then you have to knock the Democratic ticket for being as far-left as they are," he said.

BASHING BIDEN

Trump, who uses nicknames and pejorative descriptions to demean his opponents, previewed his attacks on Biden, whom he frequently derides as "Sleepy Joe," in a rebuttal address after the Democratic convention finished last week.

"Joe Biden grimly declared a season of American darkness. And yet, look at what we've accomplished. Until the plague came in, look at what we've accomplished," Trump told supporters on Friday. "Where Joe Biden sees American darkness, I see American greatness."

Peter Trubowitz, a professor at the US center of the London School of Economics, said he expected Republicans to launch "a full-throated attack on Bidens fitness to be president" throughout the convention.

"It will be less about his age ... and more about questioning his 'independence' from Democratic constituencies that the Trump campaign is defining as 'radical,' 'socialist,' and a threat to law and order,' he wrote.
Tunisia:

Tunisia arrested the nephew of the suspected Berlin truck attacker and two other jihadist suspects who are connected to the Tunisian assailant Anis Amri, the interior ministry told on Saturday.

A statement said the three suspects, aged between 18 and 27, were arrested on Saturday and were members of a terrorist cell... connected to the terrorist Anis Amri.

It made no direct link between the suspects and Mondays deadly attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

The interior ministry said that Amri had sent money to his nephew and encouraged him to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State group.

One of the members of the cell is the son of the sister of the terrorist (Amri) and during the investigation he admitted that he was in contact with his uncle through (the messaging service) Telegram, it said.

Amri allegedly urged his nephew to adopt jihadist takfiri ideology and asked him to pledge allegiance to Daesh (IS), it said.

The nephew also told investigators that Amri sent him money through the post... so that he could join him in Germany, the statement added.

The unnamed nephew was reported in the statement to have said that his uncle was the prince or leader of a jihadist group based in Germany and know as the Abu al-Walaa brigade.

Amri, 24, is believed to have hijacked a truck and used it to mow down holiday revellers at a Berlin Christmas market on Monday, killing 12 people in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

He was shot dead after pulling out a pistol and firing at two Italian policemen who had stopped him for a routine identity check yesterday near Milans Sesto San Giovanni railway station.

He lightly wounded one of the policemen before being killed by the other.

The Tunisian interior ministry did not specify where the three suspects were arrested but said that the terrorist cell was active between Fouchana, south of Tunis, and Oueslatia, hometown of Amris family in central Tunisia.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
It was the latest in a series of episodes that have reverberated across the country as racial unrest continues to brew after the death of George Floyd in May.

Efforts to reach Mr. Oxford and Ms. Smith were not successful on Sunday evening.

The episode in Gwinnett began after the police said they received a property damage call. When Officer Oxford arrived, he said he was told that a bottle had been thrown at a car, according to a police report.

What happened was caught on surveillance video, and he was directed to a house where someone had been seen on the video picking up the bottle before the police arrived, the report said.

When Officer Oxford got to the house, he saw a woman who matched the description of the person in the surveillance footage who picked up the bottle before the police arrived, he wrote. He attempted to speak to her but could not because Ms. Smith and others were yelling at him, the report said.

Im not going anywhere, Ms. Smith tells the officer in one of several videos posted on TikTok.

Mr. Oxford told her she could go to jail for obstructing his investigation. In one of the videos, Ms. Smith responded: It doesnt matter. Youre on our property. We did not call you. Im not going anywhere.
Ronan Strouse, an 11-year-old with autism and other significant behavioral conditions, has regressed without in-person instruction. Here, Ronan flies across his room while being pushed by his personal care aid, Gabby Clauser, at home in East Greenville, Pa. Read more

The behaviors started a few days after COVID-19 closed schools indefinitely in March: Eleven-year-old Ronan Strouse would bite one arm, issue frequent short, high-pitched yells, bang his leg hard.

Ronan, who is intellectually disabled, has autism and other complicated conditions, cant carry on a conversation, but he had words enough to ask his mother: School sick? Yes, Celine Nace would tell her son. School is sick.

As a fifth grader in the Upper Perkiomen School District, Ronan was supposed to have virtual lessons with his teacher, and a host of services such as occupational and speech therapy on the computer, too. But that didnt work for more than perhaps 10 minutes a week; Ronan would refuse to sit, walk away, unable to grasp or tolerate what he was supposed to do. The problems continued this summer, when he had online-only services as mandated by his special-education plan.

He got nothing out of it, Nace said. Hes not being educated.

Come next week, school starts again, and Ronan will have three hours of in-person instruction at Upper Perkiomen Middle School four days a week. Hes supposed to spend every afternoon online. Thats untenable, his mother said  and shes worried hell never catch up.

For nearly seven million children nationwide with significant special needs, COVID-19 has been particularly disruptive; the patchwork of all-virtual or hybrid learning plans now offered by schools and districts is inadequate to meet their needs and could bring negative long-term consequences, parents and advocates say. Lawsuits  including a class-action claim that Ronans family has joined  allege schools that are not operating in person or offering compensatory services are illegally denying children the services spelled out in their federally mandated, individualized special-education plans.

 READ MORE: Kids with autism being denied an education during the pandemic, Pa. lawsuit says

Schools very much want to meet students needs, even ones that are complex and costly, said Francisco Negron, chief legal officer for the National School Boards Association. But the pandemic has presented quite a challenge for school districts, in particular because depending on the severity of a particular disability, there may be interventions that are difficult to address in a socially distant environment, he said.

If a student must work toward learning how to hold a pencil, for instance, theres no way to do that other than having a staffer put their hand on the childs hand.

Educators and therapists are finding alternative ways to help students, but there are challenges, said Negron. And, frankly, districts are quite concerned about a potential rise in demands from parents who dont understand the challenges.

At the federal level, the School Boards Association and others are asking Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Congress for some flexibility in special-education requirements during the pandemic, relief that so far has not come.

Special-education expenditures typically account for a large and growing share of school budgets, with districts required to invest heavily on personnel, equipment, training, and services.

Many districts say they hope to bring special-education students back to school or increase their hours in school as soon as health conditions and other considerations allow, but families like Ronans say needy students like him cannot wait.

Last Tuesday, the boy ping-ponged from activity to activity, zooming on a hoverboard across the light green carpet of his familys living room, jamming to a Justin Timberlake song blaring from his phone, rocking on a colorful swing set up outside his bedroom, briefly paying attention to an activity on his laptop with help from the care team who assist him.

Nace works full time and wont be able to manage his schoolwork and the constant redirection Ronan will need during the day. Her family is white-knuckling it now to get through the days; shes not sure how theyll manage when school begins.

 READ MORE: Pa. lawmakers concerned guidance for schools could open the door to COVID-19 lawsuits

I dont want my son to get sick or his teachers to get sick, but this is our societal agreement, said Nace. Im not asking for the sun, the moon, and the stars. Im just asking for what my kid needs.

Upper Perkiomen school officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Ronans is one of 500 families across the country who have signed onto a federal class-action lawsuit filed in New York in July; the number grows daily, said Patrick Donahue, the lawyer who filed the action, which seeks to either force schools to reopen or offer parents vouchers to obtain the services their children need, plus compensatory education and punitive damages for missed months of education.

Theres no pandemic pass, said Donahue, who also runs a private school for special-needs students. His school sent workers to offer in-person services in students homes when the coronavirus first shut schools; it fully reopened in May. These are the most vulnerable of our population, and most schools have abandoned these families.

In this unprecedented situation, the key is families and schools communicating clearly and well, and understanding the tough positions both are in, said Laura Schifter, a special-education expert and lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

If its not safe or healthy to have kids return to the building for learning, you have to do the best you can in other scenarios, said Schifter. Schools need to have a really clear plan of what they think they can deliver in terms of services, whats effective. And they need to check in with families: Whats working with you, to be constantly reflecting and working about how to make it better.

 READ MORE: Special-ed students at risk of falling behind amid school reopening plans | Opinion

Even some districts plan to bring students with disabilities back earlier than their typical peers is complicated, Schifter said.

I think a lot of that is coming from a place of really wanting to get kids services, but at the same time, making any decisions solely based on the identification of disability can by nature be discriminating. It can also make it feel like these kids are guinea pigs, said Schifter.

With two sons who have Fragile X syndrome  a rare, genetic condition that causes autism  Conshohocken mom Keri Akkawi has been hanging on by the skin of her teeth. Girius, 9, and Crosby, 8, attend the Timothy School, the Chester County private school the Colonial School District pays for because it cannot meet the boys needs. Classes will remain virtual when school reopens, meaning her children will receive no meaningful instruction or therapies, Akkawi said.

Her boys learning goals are things like tracing their initials, typing their names, managing behaviors and routines. At school, there are at least two adults to help them; at home, thats not possible, as only one adult can typically be with both kids, as Akkawi and her partner, John Barchard, trade off caring for the boys and working. The kids aggression and self-injurious behaviors have increased. Crosby now says fewer words; Girius bites, and neither boy is able to use the assisted communications device he used at school, without one-on-one help to manage them.

They cant get anything out of lessons on a computer; the second they see a teacher, they lose it, Akkawi said; the boys miss their teachers and dont understand why they cant interact with them and their therapists face to face. I just dont have the resources they have at school. If I sit Crosby down and say, Lets start here and write a letter C, its a mess.

As Girius played in the backyard last week, sinking his hands into a plastic bin of sand and smiling to himself, Akkawi considered the pandemics grim impact. She lost her job in March and Barchards hours were cut; shes been called back to work and hes driving for DoorDash, but they havent caught up financially and cant afford private services. They take the boys on walks in the neighborhood, but Girius and Crosby wont wear masks or face shields, so venturing out farther is impossible.

But the most striking loss has been school and the services that go along with it.

Every single thing we do is challenging, Akkawi said. My kids are being forgotten.




(Global Times) The first ever four-day online Democratic National Convention ended Thursday with Joe Biden formally accepting the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination and Kamala Harris the vice presidential nomination. Biden currently leads US President Donald Trump in both national and battleground states polls. And people are now wondering what Biden's China policy might be if he wins the election. Will there be dramatically change in the direction and tone of China-US relations? Or will the course be largely kept given the adverse nature and the underlying structure constrains of China-US relations?

First, the "tough on China" rhetoric has become the new "political correctness" in the US politics. No one wants to be seen as "weak on China" and risks losing public support. Throughout the campaign, Biden accused Trump of bluffing and of "weak on China." What sets this year's Democratic Party Platform apart as unique is its gloomy perception of and tough attitudes toward China. And as the platform declared, "Democrats will be clear, strong, and consistent in pushing back where we have profound economic, security, and human rights concerns about the actions of China's government."

Second, the economic rebalancing and partial technological decoupling will possibly continue. While Biden does not agree with the Trump administration's approach to China-US economic relations, especially with the latter's using of tariffs to cope with trade imbalances, he also emphasizes "fair trade." Biden also claims, "Economic security is national security." He has vowed to enforce economic foreign policy for the middle class to safeguard US manufactures and jobs. Moreover, he aims to protect US intellectual property, technology, and supply chain security.

Third, a Biden administration will be even tougher on "human rights" and will possibly form an international "united front" against China. Biden and the Democrats have emphasized the importance of uniting like-minded democracies in dealing with the "China challenge" instead of acting alone or deserting US leadership.

That being said, if Biden wins the election, his China' policy may be different from Trump's in both doctrine and style.

First, while Biden and Democrats have highlighted the "China challenge," they have yet to define this "challenge." On the whole, the Trump administration views China as a "revisionist power" that is the US' "strategic competitor." They think China-US relations are a zero-sum game. By stark contrast, the 2020 Democratic Party Platform believes "the China challenge is not primarily a military one." Instead, it warns against "falling into the trap of a new Cold War." The Democratic Party argues for "pursuing cooperation on issues of mutual interest like climate change and nonproliferation and ensuring that the US-China rivalry does not put global stability at risk."

Second, Biden's China policy will no doubt be "tough" on human rights and safeguard US economic interests. But his approach and style will be quite different. As was mentioned at the 2020 Democratic Party Platform, "Democrats will pursue this strategy without resorting to self-defeating, unilateral tariff wars."

Third, many Democrats are strongly against the Trump administration's approach to policies of bilateral cultural and people-to-people exchanges. These are especially relevant to Chinese students and visiting scholars' visas. They pertain to academic exchanges and cooperation programs. As the 2020 Democratic Party Platform says, "Democrats' approach to China will be guided by America's national interests and draw on the sources of American strength - the openness of our society." This hints at different approaches to bilateral cultural and people-to-people exchanges.

Fourth, China and the US will have an opportunity to cooperate on global issues such as climate change, non-proliferation, and global pandemics.

Biden and the Democrats view climate change as existential challenges. They call for global efforts to combat it. They also call for international cooperation in combating WMD proliferation and global pandemics, which China also has a huge stake in and is willing to cooperate with.

What will Biden's China's policy be like? It's still too early to tell. Only US voters have the last say on the Election Day whether or not Biden will be in power and if China policies change.
Warren Buffett famously said, 'Volatility is far from synonymous with risk.' When we think about how risky a company is, we always like to look at its use of debt, since debt overload can lead to ruin. We can see that Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC (LON:ERM) does use debt in its business. But the real question is whether this debt is making the company risky.

When Is Debt A Problem?

Debt and other liabilities become risky for a business when it cannot easily fulfill those obligations, either with free cash flow or by raising capital at an attractive price. Ultimately, if the company can't fulfill its legal obligations to repay debt, shareholders could walk away with nothing. However, a more usual (but still expensive) situation is where a company must dilute shareholders at a cheap share price simply to get debt under control. Of course, plenty of companies use debt to fund growth, without any negative consequences. The first thing to do when considering how much debt a business uses is to look at its cash and debt together.

View our latest analysis for Euromoney Institutional Investor

What Is Euromoney Institutional Investor's Debt?

The image below, which you can click on for greater detail, shows that at March 2020 Euromoney Institutional Investor had debt of UK68.6m, up from none in one year. But on the other hand it also has UK76.7m in cash, leading to a UK8.08m net cash position.

How Strong Is Euromoney Institutional Investor's Balance Sheet?

Zooming in on the latest balance sheet data, we can see that Euromoney Institutional Investor had liabilities of UK232.5m due within 12 months and liabilities of UK175.4m due beyond that. Offsetting these obligations, it had cash of UK76.7m as well as receivables valued at UK90.2m due within 12 months. So its liabilities outweigh the sum of its cash and (near-term) receivables by UK241.0m.

Euromoney Institutional Investor has a market capitalization of UK869.7m, so it could very likely raise cash to ameliorate its balance sheet, if the need arose. However, it is still worthwhile taking a close look at its ability to pay off debt. While it does have liabilities worth noting, Euromoney Institutional Investor also has more cash than debt, so we're pretty confident it can manage its debt safely.

Story continues

It is just as well that Euromoney Institutional Investor's load is not too heavy, because its EBIT was down 66% over the last year. Falling earnings (if the trend continues) could eventually make even modest debt quite risky. The balance sheet is clearly the area to focus on when you are analysing debt. But it is future earnings, more than anything, that will determine Euromoney Institutional Investor's ability to maintain a healthy balance sheet going forward. So if you want to see what the professionals think, you might find this free report on analyst profit forecasts to be interesting.

But our final consideration is also important, because a company cannot pay debt with paper profits; it needs cold hard cash. While Euromoney Institutional Investor has net cash on its balance sheet, it's still worth taking a look at its ability to convert earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) to free cash flow, to help us understand how quickly it is building (or eroding) that cash balance. During the last three years, Euromoney Institutional Investor produced sturdy free cash flow equating to 73% of its EBIT, about what we'd expect. This cold hard cash means it can reduce its debt when it wants to.

Summing up

Although Euromoney Institutional Investor's balance sheet isn't particularly strong, due to the total liabilities, it is clearly positive to see that it has net cash of UK8.08m. The cherry on top was that in converted 73% of that EBIT to free cash flow, bringing in UK33m. So we are not troubled with Euromoney Institutional Investor's debt use. The balance sheet is clearly the area to focus on when you are analysing debt. But ultimately, every company can contain risks that exist outside of the balance sheet. For example, we've discovered 1 warning sign for Euromoney Institutional Investor that you should be aware of before investing here.

Of course, if you're the type of investor who prefers buying stocks without the burden of debt, then don't hesitate to discover our exclusive list of net cash growth stocks, today.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.



Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
GODFREY  Some people do not think about coming back home. For Kim Tanner, of Chicago, it happened on accident, but she is so glad it did.

Tanner, born in Alton, plans to relaunch her business, Strangelovely, a seller of vintage furniture and home decor, in Godfrey. Shes not sure of the exact physical opening date, due to the spike of COVID-19 cases in Madison Count, but she loves the new location, she said.

Tanner has lived in Chicago for the past 20 years and in 2012 she started Strangelovely there. When the coronavirus pandemic started, her business had to close per the citys regulation.

It was really stressful to be in a higher populated area and real expensive, Tanner recalled.

As if by chance, Tanner came across a house that she remembered from growing up in the Alton-Godfrey area. The house is located near the Alton-Godfrey border and was designed by Calvin Riley. The house itself is approximately 3,000 square feet on two acres of land and its going to be the new home of Strangelovely. Riley also designed and built the Benjamin Godfrey Mansion, on Godfrey Road, named for the village of Godfreys namesake, Capt. Benjamin Godfrey, who lived there.

Tanner contacted a Realtor friend of hers but, at the time, she was adamant that she was not moving back.

I thought, Im just going to go see it, because it cant be as good as I think it is, Tanner said of the house.

Once she saw the house it turned out to be as good as she thought, so she made difficult decisions about her life trajectory.

This was it. The stars just aligned perfectly and Im so happy they did, Tanner said.

Until Strangelovely physically opens in Godfrey, she continues to sell online, which she has been doing since the pandemic began. She said she will keep an online business focus for the foreseeable future since there will be less foot traffic.

Tanner said that she has always had a passion for interior design, even obtaining in Bachelor of Fine Arts in interior design.

My family is largely antique dealers, appraisers and decorators, she said. Its in my blood, it has always been around me.

Tanner is ready for a post-COVID-19 world to continue her project in Godfrey.

Im looking forward to opening Strangelovely to the public soon, and offering a unique mix of vintage and antique furniture, home decor and womens wear in an eclectic boutique setting, she said.

I believe that luxury is a level of service, not a price point. Im all about the mix and integrating ageless style into contemporary homes and giving them a sense of history and a collected feeling, as opposed to cookie cutter interiors.

For more information, visit www.strangelovely.com.
Belarusian independence important to Kyiv, not names of leaders - Ukrainian FM

KYIV. Aug 24 (Interfax-Ukraine) - Ukraine does not accept the use of violence against protesters and cares about the existence of an independent and democratic Belarus, rather than the names of Belarusian leaders, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said.

"Ukraine categorically rejects the use of violence against protesters. Ukraine is a country which deems the right to protest to be practically sacred. An independent, democratic Belarus is of paramount importance to us, while the name of the person in charge of such a Belarus is secondary," Kuleba said at a joint press briefing with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas following talks in Kyiv on Monday.

Kuleba said he discussed the situation in Belarus with his German colleague and said that Kyiv and Berlin have a shared position: they strongly condemn the violence and believe that the situation can be resolved through national dialogue.
A fentanyl user holds a needle near Kensington and Cambria in Philadelphia: AP

Canadas chief health officer has said the decriminalisation of drugs should be up for discussion amid a surge in opioid deaths in the country.

Amid the crippling coronavirus pandemic, a number of provinces in Canada, including British Columbia and Ontario, have seen rises in opioid cases at overdose facilities.

Canadians should be seized with this particular crisis, which can actually happen to anyone and could also have increased risks right now for people who may be isolating at home, Dr Theresa Tam said during a news conference on Friday, Global News reported.

Increasing access to safer drugs and building additional supervised consumption centres were needed to address the escalating crisis, Dr Tam said, adding that a move toward a societal discussion on decriminalisation should also be considered.

Her comments echo those by the head of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, who called for the decriminalisation of simple possession of drugs.

Arresting individuals for simple possession of illicit drugs has proven to be ineffective, Adam Palmer said in July. It does not save lives.

In June, British Columbia saw a 130 per cent spike in the number of overdose deaths compared to June last year, while the provinces coroner service reported an increase in overdose victims with extreme fentanyl concentrations in their bodies.

Opioids, which include fentanyl, work by attaching to receptors across the body. They block pain messages sent from the source of the pain through the spinal cord to the brain whilst also creating feelings of euphoria. But they are highly addictive and frequently result in overdoses and even death.

Donald MacPherson, director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, said the cause of the surges in cases was likely twofold: the shutting of the border with the US meant more drugs were made or altered in Canada, increasing their dangerousness; while coronavirus restrictions meant access to safe injection sites and methadone clinics were more limited.

Story continues

Last week, prime minister Justin Trudeaus government proposed changes to Canadian drug policy, including a two-month consultation on how to improve supervised consumption centres.

Prosecutors are also being asked to take up only the most serious drug possession offences.

Read more

Melissa Etheridge opens up about losing son to opioid addiction

Twilight actor Gregory Boyce died of cocaine and fentanyl overdose

Florida man is arrested with enough fentanyl to kill 500,000 people
Rights group says government failings leave rural communities in northern Nigeria at the mercy of bandits.

More than 1,100 people have been killed in rural areas across several states of northern Nigeria amid an alarming escalation in attacks and abductions during the first half of the year, according to Amnesty International.

The Nigerian authorities have left rural communities at the mercy of rampaging gunmen who have killed at least 1,126 people in the north of the country since January, the London-rights group said in a new report on Monday, giving a figure until the end of June.

The killings, during attacks by bandits or armed cattle rustlers, and in clashes between herders and farming communities for access to land, have been recurrent for several years.

Amnesty said it had interviewed civilians in Kaduna, Katsina, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba and Zamfara states, who reported living in fear of attacks and kidnappings.

The rights watchdog said villages in the south of Kaduna state were affected the most, with at least 366 people killed in multiple attacks by armed men since January.

Terrifying attacks on rural communities in the north of Nigeria have been going on for years, said Osai Ojigho, director of Amnesty International Nigeria.

The ongoing failure of security forces to take sufficient steps to protect villagers from these predictable attacks is utterly shameful, he added.





Gross incompetence

Amnesty blamed state authorities and the federal government for failing to protect the population.

Armed groups loot and set fire to villages and frequently kidnap people for ransom, apparently with no ideological motive. Many experts have recently warned against associating the attackers with armed groups active in the region.

President Muhammadu Buhari was elected in 2015 on a campaign promise to eradicate the armed group Boko Haram, which has killed tens of thousands since it launched an armed in northeast Nigeria in 2009.

Amnesty said most villagers complained of receiving little or no help from security officials, despite informing them prior or calling for help during attacks.

During the attack, our leaders called and informed the soldiers that the attackers are in the village, so the soldiers did not waste time and they came but when they came and saw the type of ammunitions the attackers had they left, a witness to an attack in Unguwan Magaji in southern of Kaduna was quoted as saying by Amnesty.

The following morning so many soldiers came with their Hilux pick-up trucks to see the dead bodies.

Ojigho decried reported abuse of civilians who asked for more official help and protection.

In their response to these attacks, the Nigerian authorities have displayed gross incompetence and a total disregard for peoples lives, he said. Arresting people who dare to ask for help is a further blow.

The escalating violence has forced many farmers and their families from their homes while thousands could not cultivate their farms during the 2020 rainy season because of fear of attacks or abduction, according to Amnesty.

It said that in Katsina state, at least 33,130 people were living in displacement camps, while others have headed to urban areas to stay with relatives.
The Korean War was the first time the United States military engaged in a shooting conflict after the end of World War II; it was also the first of many sparks that really turned the Cold War hot.

From 1950 to 1953, the Korean War was at the forefront of American minds and politics. A public emerging from the World War II years and weary of fighting didn't fully understand the threat of Communism or the Truman administration's "containment" strategy -- which meant they didn't fully understand what happened in the first place.

Initially, the war was popular because the threat of Communism had loomed over the U.S. and her allies since the end of World War II. It was popular for the United States to take action against it. As the war ground on, however, all the American public knew was that it certainly didn't end the way they wanted it to.

What Happened in the Korean War?

A column of troops and armor of the 1st Marine Division move through communist Chinese lines during their successful breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea. The Marines were besieged when the Chinese entered the Korean War November 27, 1950, by sending 200,000 shock troops against Allied forces. (U.S. Marine Corps/Cpl. Peter McDonald)

On June 25, 1950 -- 70 years ago -- North Korean tanks rolled across the 38th parallel and over the South Korean defenders of that border. It was not the heavily defended, ironically named "demilitarized zone" as we know it today. The early days of the Korean War were easy for the Communist North Koreans.

With indirect support from Communist China and the Soviet Union, 75,000 Communist troops overran the pro-Western South. Republic of Korea (ROK) defenders had no tanks, artillery or heavy weapons to defend the position. Within five days, the South Koreans had lost 73,000 troops, and the capital of Seoul had fallen to the Communists.

As soon as the United States received confirmation that the Soviet Union would not directly intercede on North Korea's behalf, President Harry Truman ordered American land and naval forces to come to South Korea's aid. U.S. forces in Japan were quickly shuttled to the Korean Peninsula to prop up the resistance to the North Korean advance.

Even the American reinforcements were overrun by the Communists due to a general lack of weapons, equipment and supplies needed to fight a war -- especially in the blazing Korean summer. The Communist assault wasn't blunted until August, when the Americans established a line around a small section of the peninsula, centered on the city of Pusan (now Busan).

With Chinese supplies and Soviet support, North Korea looked ready to push the defenders into the sea. But time was not on the Communists' side. The United Nations passed U.N. Resolution 83, which called for military aid to South Korea to push North Korea back to the 38th parallel. Reinforcements from the mainland United States would arrive by September.

Meanwhile, air forces from the newborn U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy wreaked havoc on North Korean infrastructure and transportation capabilities. When the U.S. reinforcements did arrive, the Communists found themselves outnumbered.

In September 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur led an amphibious assault at Inchon with U.S. Marines and soldiers and ROK troops. The rope-a-dope was complete. American troops flooded into the peninsula behind the lines on Sept. 15, and the U.S. 8th Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter on the very next day.

A M-20 75mm recoilless rifle is fired during the Korean War. (U.S. Army)

Against all advice from China and the USSR, North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung (grandad to today's leader, Kim Jong-Un), did not redeploy to meet the Inchon Landing or to defend Seoul. Nine days later, Seoul was recaptured, and the road to North Korea's capital at Pyongyang was wide open. The North Korean People's Army (KPA) was rapidly disintegrating. On Oct. 1, 1950, U.N. forces invaded North Korea.

China had been ready to intervene in the war from the outset, if it deemed it necessary. Knowing the Americans would advance north of the 38th parallel, it massed troops along the border with North Korea. In October, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army (PVA) silently moved across the border. When the U.N. troops reached the Yalu River, China made its move.

The Chinese first encountered the Americans in November 1950. They routed the 8th Cavalry Division and forced its retreat, before disappearing into the mountains. The attack was so fast and their disappearance so sudden that the U.N. command didn't even believe the Chinese intervention actually happened. Two weeks later, the war began in earnest.

On Nov. 13, 1950, the PVA forced the 8th Army to begin a retreat out of North Korea. The U.S. X Corps was surprised and encircled at the Chosin Reservoir two weeks later. The U.N. forces, Korean refugees and all the supplies and materiel began to flood back down the peninsula, by land or by sea. Kim Il-Sung was relieved of any control of the war by the Chinese. Truman would fire MacArthur for expanding the war.

For the rest of the war, roughly two more years, the conflict turned into a bloody stalemate, with the front line hovering around the 38th parallel, where it is today.

Why There Was a Korean War?

A U.S. Marine with North Korean prisoners of war in Korea in 1953. (U.S. Marine Corps)

At the end of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was occupied in the North by the forces of the Soviet Union and in the South by the Americans, split at the 38th parallel. Ever since the two sides established their preferred government in these areas, the Korean Peninsula clamored for reunification -- under its own government, of course.

The North under Kim Il-Sung was ready to take the country by force from the outset, but was always restrained by Joseph Stalin in Moscow, who believed such a move could spark a third world war with the West -- something he feared.

After the KGB turned an American code clerk in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, they discovered that much of the American military power in the area had been moved to Japan. Believing the Americans would not move to defend Korea, the Soviets gave Kim Il-Sung the go-ahead.

(KCNA)

But Truman believed the invasion was a challenge to the free world and the United States in particular. He believed it was necessary for the free nations of the world to contain the spread of Communism -- that if the U.S. and the West allowed one country to fall to Communism, the rest of the nations in the region would fall one by one, or the "Domino Theory."

Who Won the Korean War?

By Christmas 1950, the Korean War ground to a stalemate at the 38th parallel, the place where it started and where the border is today. The war went on for two more years, but Truman opted not to run for another term as president of the United States and the Democratic Party lost ground in the 1952 elections. Dwight Eisenhower and the Republicans won the presidency, despite the war's initial popularity. Republicans also gained control of the House and Senate.

The United States dropped more ordnance on North Korea in three years of fighting than it did on the entire Pacific Theater of World War II. The United States lost upward of 37,000 troops and suffered 102,000 wounded, according to the Korean War Project. The locals fared far worse -- some 4 million Korean and Chinese (mostly civilians) were killed, wounded or missing.

The governments in North and South Korea never changed, even if Kim Il-Sung was forced to cede control of the Korean People's Army to China, and President (and de facto dictator) Syngman Rhee's South Korea wasn't really that "free" to begin with. After a while, the only sticking point between the two countries centered on returning captured Chinese and North Korean prisoners who didn't want to go home.

How Did the Korean War End?

B-26 Invaders bomb logistics depots in Wonsan, North Korea, 1951. (National Museum of the United States Air Force)

The fighting finally ended on July 27, 1953, after two years of negotiations. Seoul had switched hands four times. Newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower (formerly general and supreme allied commander during WWII) went to Korea to find out for himself how to end it. Indian General K.S. Thimayya laid out a solution to the problem of prisoners of war, one both sides accepted.

The shooting stopped that day, but the war never did.

The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed by the United Nations, Korean People's Army and Chinese People's Volunteer Army, but Syngman Rhee's government refused to sign. It is an armistice and not a peace treaty, which means the war is technically ongoing, though fighting has ceased.

Today, North Korea claims it won the Korean War, which it calls the "Fatherland Liberation War," and blames the United States for starting it in the first place. The armistice established the demilitarized zone (DMZ) as we know it today, where American and South Korean soldiers stare down North Korean soldiers every day.

The Korean War, sandwiched between the romanticism of World War II and America's traumatic experience in Vietnam, is often forgotten among the conflicts of the 20th century, so much so that it's often referred to as "The Forgotten War."

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, there are 1.16 million Korean War veterans still living today. So if you see one, tell them everything you learned about their war. They will appreciate your taking the time to remember.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.

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New Canaan Country School plans to open with students on campus Sept. 1, but amid new safety guidelines and facing the possibility of returning to remote learning.

School will, out of necessity, look different than it has in the past, according to the schools return to campus plan. We will have new procedures, including wearing face masks and practicing physical distancing, throughout the school day. Nevertheless, we are confident that students will continue to find their learning environment to be welcoming and inspiring.

Before school reopens, families must certify that they have not traveled within the previous 14 days to any state identified by Connecticut as being high-risk for COVID-19, are not experiencing any symptoms of illness, and have not knowingly come into contact with anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19.

We will also ask families to acknowledge the assumption of risk inherent in their childrens return to campus, according to the school website.

With some schools already shifting from in-person to remote learning as summer vacation wanes, New Canaan Country School designed its program to accommodate students learning from home. Entire groups can be shifted to remote learning in the event a cohort or class is exposed to COVID-19.

Our revised school calendar and schedules for the year allow for a transition to distance learning with minimal disruption, according to the return to campus plan. Standardized classroom communication systems make access to lessons and assignments easy and consistent whether on campus or at a distance.

On campus

While on campus, students and teachers will be asked to limit close face-to-face contact. Plexiglass barriers were installed on faculty workstations as well as in restrooms between the sinks.

Students and adults are required to wear face masks. Students should arrive each day with two clean masks, with a limited number available for those who forget them.

According to the school, Cloth masks that have elastic bands that slip over the ears are best. Gaiters, buffs, bandanas or other coverings that leave significant space between the nose/mouth and open air are not allowed.

Masks must fit the schools dress code, and regular mask breaks will be incorporated into the daily schedule.

Routine cleaning will occur daily, with cleaning and disinfecting of bathrooms and targeted high-touch areas twice a day.

Students will be trained to assist with cleaning desks.

Students and employees who become sick at school or who arrive at school sick will be immediately isolated, and sent home as quickly as possible. The Health Office has been redesigned and expanded to for treatment and isolation. It has indoor and outdoor entrances and exits. Isolation rooms are also available in each building.

New Canaan Country School will coordinate its response to any positive tests with the health departments in New Canaan and the hometown of the student. Health office staff are training contact tracers, and will notify all who came in contact with those affected.

We will notify the community of the presence of a positive case, consistent with guidance from the New Canaan Health Department, according to the school.

Those in contact with the affected individual will quarantine at home consistent with the criteria established by the Centers for Disease Control on home isolation, according to the return to campus plan. This is likely to include family members of the individual in addition to members of the same class or cohort.

Around school

Classroom furniture has been rearranged or removed to enhance traffic flow. Individual student desks will be used in kindergarten through sixth grade to support physical distancing.

The use of outdoor space for teaching is encouraged when possible, and tents will be provided in certain areas.

Face masks can be removed outdoors during faculty-supervised activities where physical distancing can be maintained.

Recess spaces and playgrounds will be designated for each grade level or classroom cohort according to a schedule.

Students must wear face masks on the playground, but they may be removed during faculty-supervised recess games and activities where physical distancing can be maintained.

Metal and plastic playground surfaces will be routinely cleaned.

In restrooms, capacity has been determined based on square footage, and capacities will be posted on doors.

Wherever possible, restrooms will only be used by classroom communities or cohorts.

Marks on corridor floors outside restrooms will encourage physical distancing while waiting.

Plexiglass shields have been added between urinals and sinks. Where barriers do not exist, a six-foot distance should be maintained.

Forced-air hand dryers will be disabled.

In the HVAC system, the operations team has reviewed the latest data and recommendations on indoor environments from the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

All windows will be fully functioning and have screens.

Each building has a different HVAC system. These systems have been examined by specialists and optimized with regard to COVID-19 recommendations.

Modifications to increase fresh air intake include: increased fan operation, additional system programming and undercutting of some classroom doors.

Lunch

Dining has been changed, with Upper School students eating daily in the Dining Hall, while Middle School students rotate by grade level, eating in the dining hall one week and eating a provided box lunch in classrooms the next week. Lower School students will eat a provided box lunch in classrooms for the 2020-21 school year.

Lunch periods will be 30 to 35 minutes, with little or no overlap between grades. Faculty will supervise lunch periods to ensure physical distancing.

Tables will be cleaned before and after each lunch sitting, and plexiglass partitions have been added to create individual space for four students per table.

Traffic patterns, including a tent outside on the south terrace, have been set up to allow physical distancing during lineup for lunch. A tent on the north side for additional dining space is also being considered.

All students will be asked to take a refillable water bottle to school each day. Water fountains have been disabled, but hands-free water bottle refill stations will be available.

Coming and going

Arrival and dismissal times are modified slightly and staggered to reduce traffic density on campus and entry and exit to buildings. Parents and guardians should remain in cars during drop-off and pickup, except to help a child out of the car, in which case they must wear a face covering and remain near their car. Anyone who opens doors or windows must wear a face covering.

Students in beginners through ninth grade will be dropped off at the car line for each building and will be picked up at designated locations. Students will be directed to designated grade-level entry and exit doors to decrease density and encourage physical distancing.

Country School administrators are working with DATTCO to design a bus system that incorporates COVID-19 guidelines and recommendations as well as assigned seating, potential bus monitors and the use of face masks.

After-school programs

Early Birds and Extended Day are available, with details on the Plus Program page on the parent Resource Board. At this time, Connections, Enrichment and Homework Central are postponed until further notice.

Visitors are not allowed unless approved in advance.

Adults are expected to wear masks and practice physical distancing when on campus.

Parent events and gatherings will not be permitted on campus during the week at this time.

Shutdown Plan

In the event of a shutdown on the local or state level, distance learning will be implemented.

Our ability to maintain a safe and healthy environment for our students, parents/guardians and employees depends on all of us, according to the return to campus plan.

While we will not expect a formal reporting of health on a daily basis, we expect every family to assess the health of their child(ren) every day, and for students who exhibit any symptoms of illness to remain home, administrators wrote.

If the school is concerned about the health of a student, possible exposure to COVID-19, or that the schools policies have not been followed, the school reserves the right to require the student to be tested for COVID-19 and provide proof of a negative result before returning to campus or to remain off campus for 14 days.

We continue to operate with a mindset of flexibility and are prepared for distance learning scenarios. We are planning for online access to our program whether one student is learning remotely or the entire school is, administrators wrote.
A cheating tradie who killed his cancer-stricken wife by careening their car into a river after proposing to his masseuse lover has lost his sentence appeal.

Edward Kenneth Lord was jailed for eight years in February for the manslaughter of Michelle Lord in October 2015 when he drove into the Tweed River in northern NSW during an argument.

During his appeal in April, the concreter argued the judge had overlooked the significance of him snatching his wife of 25 years from the sinking vehicle.

But on Monday a panel of three judges dismissed the appeal in the NSW Supreme Court, unanimously agreed that while the killing was 'spontaneous and momentary, it was an ... unlawful and dangerous act,' The Daily Telegraph reported.

Edward Kenneth Lord was jailed for eight years last February after he admitted to killing Michelle Lord in October 2015 when he drove into a river during an argument

Michele Lord, 57, (pictured) was killed by her husband after battling with breast cancer and hiring a private detective over her suspicion of her husband's affair

The court heard the 56-year-old persuaded his wife to let his lover, Malaysian masseuse Siew Ping 'Margaret' Fong, live in their Gold Coast home as a housekeeper.

He argued Ms Fong could help out with chores following Mrs Lord's battle with breast cancer.

The 57-year-old grew increasingly suspicious of his relationship with their 'housemaid' and hired a divorce lawyer.

She also approached police over fears he had put a sleeping tablet in her wine so he could have sex with Ms Fong, and told a friend she'd given Lord an ultimatum that they seek marriage counselling or she would leave him.

The scorned wife also spoke of his tendency to become angry and occasionally react spontaneously and aggressively by punching walls and yelling.

Edward Kenneth Lord (pictured left) was jailed for eight years after killing his wife in 2015 when he ploughed their car into a NSW river

In an attempt to salvage their marriage, the couple decided to drive to Byron Bay but quickly began fighting.

Lord flew into a rage following an argument on the way back to the Gold Coast and veered into the river.

The tradesman managed to escape the vehicle and went back underwater unsuccessfully to save his wife - a point lawyers on Monday claimed the sentencing judge Justice Ian Harrison had overlooked.

'He should get some benefit for the fact that he had done everything he could to retrieve, to save, his wife,' lawyers argued.

But Justice Peter Garling stood by the initial sentence and said there wasn't enough evidence to determine how the rescue attempt happened.

'Did he go back to rescue the deceased immediately he was freed from the vehicle? Did he do so in sufficient time before the vehicle was completely submerged and sank to the bottom of the river? Or, did he do so having waited for some short period of time? Did he do so at the earliest time he thought he possibly could? These are all questions to which answers were not supplied in the evidence,' Justice Garling said.

Mrs Lord's family members, including her brother Graham Flatman, were seen reacting outside the court

In February's sentencing, Justice Harrison agreed Lord did not intend to kill his wife.

'The driving into the river was an intentional but spontaneous act carried out purely to vent his rage,' he said, citing the agreed facts.

'It carried an appreciable risk of serious injury to Ms Lord but he had no intention to do her serious bodily harm or to cause her death.'

Lord originally told police Ms Fong was 'simply the housekeeper', his marriage had been happy and the car's wheel had slipped while 'we were driving along having a laugh'.

Ms Lord's brother Graham Flatman said her family had long desired the truth after enduring years of unanswered questions.

The family hoped the 'happy, trusting, loving' woman's death was not in vain and that others in similar situations would speak up

'We have learnt the truth and to learn her husband, a man we all knew and considered to be part of our family, was complicit in Michele's passing, has made this entire ordeal such an overwhelming and confronting experience,' Mr Flatman said outside court.

The family hoped the 'happy, trusting, loving' woman's death was not in vain.

'It is our hope that anyone who finds themselves in similar circumstances as Michele will find the strength to reach out and confide in all the amazing services out there,' Mr Flatman said.

Lord, who did not give evidence at his sentence hearing, told a psychologist of his remorse over what happened (pictured: a family member)

Lord told a psychologist of his remorse over what happened.

He described his wife as 'one in a million, can never be replaced ... she was my lover, soulmate, best friend ... she'll be in my heart forever'.

But the judge found Lord had failed to demonstrate remorse, noting words offered to a sympathetic clinician, far removed from public scrutiny, were a 'somewhat feeble substitute' to entering the witness box.

'In my experience, genuine remorse is difficult to suppress and easy to express,' Justice Harrison said.
David Rudolph has lost 12 people - family members, neighbors and friends - to COVID-19.

He remembers driving through the empty streets of Detroit during the early days of the pandemic, when so many were losing loved ones to the novel coronavirus and nearly every aspect of life was being disrupted. The community weathered the worst of the storm, but now families are faced with the daunting question of how and when to send their kids back to school.

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If you mention youre going to visit a 13th-century castle, complete with suits of armor, people would likely think youre going on a trip to Europe. But medieval castle-lovers can actually visit one in Hanceville, Ala.  or at least the replica of one.

The 13th-century-style Castle San Miguel is part of the complex of buildings at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, built in 1999 as the culmination of a dream of Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation (1923-2016). Mother Angelica was the much beloved, long-time host of shows on Eternal Word Television Network.

The shrine, which features a mostly gilt interior, is a destination in itself and draws as many as 80,000 tourists annually, according to an AL.com article by Greg Garrison. The complex includes the main church  also a 13th century design  a convent and monastery, a replica of the Lourdes Grotto, a life-size Nativity scene, a crypt where Mother Angelica is interred, the Pope John Paul II Eucharistic Center and Castle San Miguel.

The complex at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Ala., with Castle San Miguel on the right. (Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament )

It serves as a home for the cloistered orders of the Sisters of the Poor Clare Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration and the Brothers of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word, according to an article on Encyclopedia of Alabama.

But Mother Angelica wasnt finished building. In 2001, she ordered the construction of Castle San Miguel to serve as the nuns gift shop and as a conference center. Castle San Miguel features 40-foot-tall turrets and stone walls on the outside, Garrison wrote in his article. Inside, its already adorned with nine full-size suits of armor, most made in Spain, including a replica of the armor worn by Richard the Lion-Hearted, king of England from 1189-1199 A.D.

El Nino gift shop, run by nuns, at Castle San Miguel at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. (Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament)

Mother Angelica said in an interview at the time that she wanted to build a castle for its symbolism.

I wanted to encourage strength, courage, valor  something that weve lost since the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th centuries, when men fought for principles and the truth, she said. Now we just dont fight for anything. We just need to stand up for goodness and principle and God.

A few other important relics can be seen in the castle: an Italian woodcarving of Michael the Archangel, medieval manuscripts, marble floors, vaulted wooden ceilings and tables made from 600-year-old doors.

Another view of Castle San Miguel. (Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament)

Inside the El Nino Gift Shop, the nuns sell various religious items and gifts, from books to coffee mugs to rosaries. All proceeds benefit the sisters of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration.

Visitors are welcomed to tour the Shrine or attend mass, and to visit the gift shop inside the castle. Due to COVID-19, it is currently operating with limited capacity and limited hours so be sure to check the website before going or call 256-352-6267.

The shrine and castle are located at 3222 Cullman County Road 548 in Hanceville, Ala.
Tropical Storm Laura is expected to pummel the northwest Gulf coast late Wednesday as a Category 2 hurricane with 105-mph winds, but the storms exact trajectory remains unclear.

The most recent forecast showed the storm's center making landfall along the Texas-Louisiana border. Some 330,000 Southeast Texas residents will officially be under a mandatory evacuation order as of 6:30 a.m. Tuesday as part of the region's first mandatory pre-hurricane evacuations in more than a decade. All residents of Orange and Jefferson counties were ordered to leave.

Its possible, said National Weather Service forecasters, that Houston could take a direct hit.

It could take a last minute turn up into Louisiana, or it could wait and turn a little bit later and that would bring it right into Galveston Bay or parts of our coastline here, a Houston forecaster said during a Monday webinar.

The Houston area was under a tropical storm watch Monday until further notice.

Current models show the storm tracking toward the Texas and Louisiana border at 20 mph with sustained winds of 65 mph. The National Hurricane Center warned Monday of an increasing risk of dangerous storm surge, wind, and rainfall impacts from the upper Texas coast through the north- central Gulf Coast.

Residents from San Luis Pass to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, should follow any emergency advice from local officials. According to the hurricane center, hurricane conditions are possible by late Wednesday from Port Bolivar to west of Morgan City, Louisiana. A hurricane watch has been issued for that area, which includes Galveston Bay. A storm surge watch has been issued for areas north of San Luis Pass.

TEXAS FLOOD MAP: Your guide to long-term flood-risk data for Houston neighborhoods

Laura passed over the western coast of Cuba on Monday evening, causing heavy rain and flash flooding, weather officials said.

It is expected to is expected emerge into the Gulf of Mexico late Monday or early Tuesday. Warm waters there will help the storm intensify into a hurricane Tuesday as it barrels west and northwest, the hurricane center said.

Interests in these areas should monitor the progress of Laura and ensure they have their hurricane plan in place, as storm surge and hurricane watches will likely be issued later today, the centers latest update read.

The storm could dump 4 to 8 inches of rain where it strikes along the northwest Gulf coast, officials said. The rainfall could cause widespread flash and urban flooding, overflow in small streams and minor to moderate river flooding.

The storm is expected to make landfall with 105 mph winds  just shy of windspeeds that would be classified as Category 3, according to the National Weather Service. Tropical storm winds should arrive in the area Wednesday evening.

(We) certainly couldnt rule out a Category 3 major hurricane landfall with this, a NWS Houston forecaster said during a Monday webinar.

Still, plenty of uncertainty in the storms path remains, according to Eric Berger of Space City Weather.

The current forecast, which predicts landfall near southwestern Louisiana, would bring modest wind, rain and surge to the Houston area , Berger wrote Monday morning. But small changes could trigger more serious consequences for Houston  if the storm shifts 100 to 150 miles west, it would bring a potentially catastrophic hurricane into the region, he said.

This is entirely within the realm of possibility, and therefore the Houston-Galveston metro area needs to prepare now for a land-falling hurricanepossibly a major one, Bergers blog said.

By Monday afternoon, however, Berger said an updated model makes him believe its more likely the hurricane will make landfall near or east of the Texas and Louisiana border, keeping the worst of the storm away from the Houston area.

Do not let your guard down, he wrote. But maybe, breathe slightly easier if you live in Houston.

Forecasters expect Laura will move quickly over land without stalling, meaning it will likely not be a major rain event, Berger said during a Monday afternoon Facebook live. Instead, storm surge and winds are expected to be the biggest impacts.

This will not be a storm like Harvey, he said. Its not going to be the kind of thing where its days and days and days of rain...The thing that has been most concerning to me has been the potential for a major wind storm.

More certainty in the storms direction and path should be available when Laura enters the Gulf of Mexico, which should happen early Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.

Swelling surf, battering 60 mph winds and heavy rain were impacting Jamaica, Cuba and the Cayman Islands on Monday as the tropical storm passed through. National Weather Service officials warned of life-threatening flash floods and potential mudslides.

Tropical Storm Marco prompted storm surge and tropical storm warnings in Louisiana and Mississippi where coastal areas were warned of flooding caused by storm surge, dangerous waves and 3 to 6 inches of rain.

The storm is expected to degenerate and weaken Monday night and Tuesday, meaning Texas should feel little to no impact from Marco.

anna.bauman@chron.com
State officials announced Monday that a series of stricter regulations will be implemented this week in Will and Kankakee counties at restaurants, bars and casinos to slow the spread of COVID-19, after that region reached a threshold for positivity rate that triggers the move.

Come Wednesday, there will be no indoor service for bars or restaurants, outside bar and food service must close at 11 p.m., and gatherings are capped at 25 people or 25% of the overall room capacity. Casinos also must close at 11 p.m., and are limited to 25% capacity.

The stricter rules come after the region that includes Will and Kankakee counties in Gov. J.B. Pritzkers reopening plan posted an 8% test positivity rate for three consecutive days, becoming the second of the states 11 regions, as defined by the plan, to be sent backward from the Phase 4 plans that are widely in place throughout the state.

Earlier on Monday, health officials reported 1,612 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 and eight additional deaths. That brings the states total to 221,790 cases and 7,888 fatalities.

Heres whats happening Monday with COVID-19 in the Chicago area and Illinois:

7 p.m.: CPS will charge thousands in tuition for virtual prekindergarten this fall  day care not included

When it meant a 10-hour school day with social interaction and field trips for their children, the Theis-Brigells and many other families decided high-quality public prekindergarten was worth about $1,500 a month.

But now that Chicago Public Schools will continue remote learning until at least November, parents are having a harder time justifying the cost when it means theyll also have to monitor their 3- and 4-year-olds, or pay someone else to watch them.

Youre paying for the child care, really, when you do the tuition-based program, said Maddy Brigell, who is keeping her 4-year-old in the program at Disney II Magnet School so as not to lose the seat in case schools reopen next quarter. But if the COVID-19 pandemic causes classrooms to stay closed, the family isnt planning to continue.

Read more here. Hannah Leone

6:15 p.m.: One and done: IHSA announces fall sports will be limited to regional geographic competition instead of a state tournament

Athletes in fall sports will be one and done this season when it comes to postseason competition.

The Illinois High School Association board of directors met virtually Monday and approved a plan for a modified postseason state series that will feature a single round of regional geographic competition in boys and girls golf, boys and girls cross country, girls swimming and diving, and girls tennis.

The competition will be held the week of Oct. 19-25, with the majority of events expected to be held on Saturday, Oct. 24.

It wasnt unexpected.

Read more here. Rick Armstrong

6 p.m.: How did the NFL have 77 false positive COVID-19 tests from the same lab?

Several NFL teams had their weekends disrupted by false positive COVID-19 tests that the league traced to the same New Jersey BioReference laboratory.

The Bears had nine positive tests from players and coaches that turned out to be false positives. And according to reports around the league, the Jets, Vikings, Steelers, Bills, Browns, Packers, Eagles, Lions, Patriots and Giants also had spikes in positive tests, with many confirming Sunday afternoon they were false positives.

The NFL had the lab examine 77 positive tests from 11 teams, and all came back negative upon retesting.

Heres what we know  and what we dont. Colleen Kane and Dan Wiederer

5:15 p.m.: Volunteers get COVID-19 vaccine candidate at UIC

Doctors at the University of Illinois at Chicago on Monday began giving vaccination shots to volunteers as part of a clinical trial of one of the new COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

The university is taking part in a trial of a vaccine being developed by Massachusetts-based Moderna in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health. It uses genetic building blocks to get the body to create a non-harmful piece of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, in order to launch the bodys natural immune response to the disease.

The Moderna vaccine is just one of several vaccine candidates that have shown enough promise to enter Phase 3 trials, which are focused on evaluating how safe and protective they are.

People who still want to volunteer can sign up via UICs online registry or the national registry at coronaviruspreventionnetwork.org.

Read more here. Hal Dardick

4:55 p.m.: Illinois scales back reopening in Will, Kankakee counties after positivity rate threshold reached

State officials announced Monday that a series of stricter regulations will be implemented this week in Will and Kankakee counties at restaurants, bars and casinos to slow the spread of COVID-19, after that region reached a threshold for positivity rate that triggers the move.

Come Wednesday, there will be no indoor service for bars or restaurants, outside bar and food service must close at 11 p.m., and gatherings are capped at 25 people or 25% of the overall room capacity. Casinos also must close at 11 p.m., and are limited to 25% capacity.

The stricter rules come after the region that includes Will and Kankakee counties in Gov. J.B. Pritzkers reopening plan posted an 8% test positivity rate for three consecutive days, becoming the second of the states 11 regions, as defined by the plan, to be sent backward from the Phase 4 plans that are widely in place throughout the state.

Other rules for bars include requirements for outdoor bar patrons to be seated at tables outside that are at least six feet apart and no congregating at bars, and a reservation requirement for each party.

Once the new rules take effect Wednesday, they will be in place for 14 days. They do not apply to schools, however. After the 14-day period, if the regions coronavirus metrics dont improve, the state may crack down further.

If the positivity rate declines to 6.5% by the end of that two-week period, the region can return to the Phase 4 rules under Pritzkers reopening plan, which took effect statewide in late June.

The Metro East region became the first last week to have stricter regulations imposed by the state.

Read more here. Jamie Munks

4:50 p.m.: A week after opening for in-person classes, Loyola Academy closes due to COVID-19 cases

Just one week after Loyola Academy students returned to the Wilmette high schools campus, officials said Monday they are closing for two weeks after several students tested positive for COVID-19.

Officials say they believe the students likely contracted the virus at social gatherings off-campus.

As of the end of the school day on Friday, six students at the private Catholic high school had tested positive for COVID-19, and 63 students were in quarantine for issues related to exposure, travel or symptoms, officials said in a statement on the Loyola website.

While none of the cases have been linked to in-person instruction, we now believe off-campus social exposures are greater than first reported, Loyola Academy Principal Charlie Heintz said in a Sunday statement posted on the high schools website.

Read more here. Karen Ann Cullotta

4:23 p.m.: 2 Chicago restaurants cited for coronavirus guideline violations

In another weekend of enforcement, the City of Chicagos Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection shut down four more businesses, including two restaurants, after investigators found them in violation of COVID-19 safety guidelines.

All of the businesses were closed for one night and allowed to reopen the following day.

BACPs enforcement team investigated 83 places and issued 12 citations this weekend. Since June 3, it has investigated 1,366 establishments and issued citations to 92 businesses.

Read more here. Grace Wong

2:47 p.m.: 11 Chicago-area teachers share their setups for remote learning

For teachers, starting a new school year is never easy. But this year, teaching remotely is adding its own set of challenges.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many school districts across the country have shifted to virtual learning in the fall, including Chicago Public Schools and many Chicago-area suburban districts. So how are teachers getting ready for Zoom classes? What do their setups look like?

We asked teachers around Illinois to send us photos of their remote-learning work stations. See them here. Hannah Herrera Greenspan

(Updated 12:56 p.m.) 9:19 a.m.: Zoom says its fixed problem behind massive outages

The popular videoconferencing platform Zoom experienced widespread outages Monday, the first day of school for many students nationwide, with users unable to join calls.

The company said that it began receiving reports of disruptions around 9 a.m. Eastern time. It resolved the issue around 11:30 a.m., it reported on its status page.

12:53 p.m.: After COVID-19 had Kingston Mines singing the blues, the family takes steps to reopen

Lincoln Parks Kingston Mines, one of Chicagos oldest and most beloved blues nightclubs, originally shuttered because of the COVID-19 stay-at-home order. Its also a restaurant with Southern fare, but has yet to open its doors like others in the city.

After their fathers death just over two years ago, the family was left with little money to run the business. When COVID-19 first closed their doors, Donna said they had tried to do delivery for the first few weeks, but they didnt have enough orders to keep going.

Wed get maybe two orders one day and then no orders for three days  and we had all this food, Donna said. Id make a batch of gumbo and end up having to throw it out.

At present  due to lack of income and never-ending water and insurance bills  the pair said theyre in debt. Were living on borrowed money and GoFundMe, and thats it, Lisa said.

Read more here. Lauren Leazenby

12:11 p.m.: 1,612 new known COVID-19 cases, 8 additional deaths

On Monday, Illinois public health officials reported 1,612 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 and eight additional deaths. That brings the states total to 221,790 cases and 7,888 fatalities.

Chicago Tribune staff

11:12 a.m.: Children ages 6-11 should wear masks at times to slow coronavirus spread, WHO says

Just as millions of children are heading back to school, the World Health Organization says those aged 6 to 11 should wear masks in some cases to help fight the spread of coronavirus.

The recommendations presented Monday follow the widespread belief that children under 12 are not considered as likely to propagate the virus as much as adults. Children in general face less severe virus symptoms than do adults, with the elderly the most vulnerable to severe infection and death.

Now WHO says decisions about whether children aged 6 to 11 should wear masks should consider factors like whether COVID-19 transmission is widespread in the area where the child lives; the childs ability to safely use a mask; and adult supervision when taking the masks on or off.

Read more here. Associated Press

10:55 a.m.: Coronavirus has changed forever the way restaurants are designed  for better and for worse

For generations, dining out has rarely occupied a second thought. Restaurants have been there and we have flocked to them  all the way to a record $863 billion in 2019 sales, according to an estimate from the National Restaurant Association.

But due to the pandemic and shifting attitudes about health and safety, elements once taken for granted (squeezing into cozy spaces) or rarely given second thoughts (ventilation) will take on greater meaning for perhaps years to come. Restaurants in all directions are left to re-evaluate the mechanics of their operations during the health crisis and beyond.

Some have decided they cant make it in this new world. When one of Chicagos forerunners of modern fine dining, Blackbird, announced in June it would not reopen, chef Paul Kahan cited the challenges of operating an incredibly small, tight dining room.

Restaurants that survive are likely to change and new ones will almost certainly be designed with revised priorities. Some of the changes will be barely perceptible. Others will be glaring. Some changes will be shorter-lived. Others will remain long term.

Read more here. Josh Noel

9:46 a.m.: First case of coronavirus reinfection confirmed in Hong Kong

Researchers in Hong Kong are reporting the first confirmed case of reinfection with the coronavirus.

An apparently young and healthy patient had a second case of COVID-19 infection which was diagnosed 4.5 months after the first episode, University of Hong Kong researchers said Monday in a statement.

The report is of concern because it suggests that immunity to the coronavirus may last only a few months in some people. And it has implications for vaccines being developed for the virus.

The 33-year-old man had only mild symptoms the first time and no symptoms this time around. The reinfection was discovered when he returned from a trip to Spain, the researchers said, and the virus they sequenced closely matched the strain circulating in Europe in July and August.

Read more here. The New York Times

9:08 a.m.: Will COVID-19 cancel Halloween?

This years calendar was a Halloween-lovers dream: Oct. 31 falls on a Saturday, and Chicagos costume shops, haunted houses and candy companies were gearing up for a blowout season of spooky thrills.

So what happens when the scariest thing on Halloween isnt ghouls, witches or zombies, but the prospect of trick-or-treating in the middle of a pandemic?

Obviously its not going to be what it has been, said George Garcia, owner of Fantasy Costumes, who has been selling costumes in the Portage Park neighborhood for more than half a century. We waited six years to get Halloween on a Saturday, and now this.

Headed into a Halloween unlike any other, towns are weighing whether to announce trick-or-treating hours while haunted house operators determine if theres any way to make a room packed with screaming teens safe. Costume shops are trying to adapt, by offering inflatable costumes and trick-or-treating bags that promote social distancing.

With everything going on, people are going to be looking for a little bit of escape or relief, Garcia said.

Read more here. Lauren Zumbach and Doug George

7:57 a.m.: Back-to-school laptop shortage hits schools nationwide. You cant have a kid do distance learning without a computer.

Schools across the United States are facing shortages and long delays, of up to several months, in getting this years most crucial back-to-school supplies: the laptops and other equipment needed for online learning, an Associated Press investigation has found.

The worlds three biggest computer companies, Lenovo, HP and Dell, have told school districts they have a shortage of nearly 5 million laptops, in some cases exacerbated by Trump administration sanctions on Chinese suppliers, according to interviews with over two dozen U.S. schools, districts in 15 states, suppliers, computer companies and industry analysts.

As the school year begins virtually in many places because of the coronavirus, educators nationwide worry that computer shortfalls will compound the inequities  and the headaches for students, families and teachers.

Read more here. Associated Press

6:30 a.m.: Illinois Republicans sense momentum against Democrats but uncertain how to deliver their message

In the age of COVID-19 and a variety of fits and starts, the Republican National Convention that kicks off Monday will be held largely in a virtual digital setting just as the recently completed Democratic convention.

Unlike the Democratic convention, where states delegates were told to stay home as former Vice President Joe Biden was nominated for president, Republicans are allowing 336 delegates to actually go to the host city, representing the 50 states, plus territories.

Illinois GOP State Chairman Tim Schneider and Richard Porter, the states Republican National Committeeman, will attend. Demetra Demonte, the states Republican National Committeewoman, had planned to go but opted out for family health reasons.

That leaves the rest of the 67-member delegation, all pledged to President Donald Trumps renomination based on the states March 17 primary results, in a bit of quandary. Unlike the states Democrats, who met virtually for a rally session before each nights prime-time festivities, the state GOP delegations schedule has become a work in progress.

I have no idea what to expect, said Illinois Senate Republican leader Bill Brady of Bloomington, an at-large delegate. Ill be getting together with some colleagues to watch the convention and well talk and see. But I just have no idea what to expect out of this, given the framework.

Other delegates said they are attempting to organize convention watch parties and Porter, en route to Charlotte, said you can put together Zoom meetings in 15 minutes, so I do think at the end of the day there will be some of that.

Read more here. Rick Pearson

6:15 a.m.: Trump announces plasma treatment authorized for COVID-19, a treatment that has had inconclusive results

President Trump on Sunday announced emergency authorization to treat COVID-19 patients with convalescent plasma  a move he called a breakthrough, one of his top health officials called promising and other health experts said needs more study before its celebrated.

The announcement came after White House officials complained there were politically motivated delays by the Food and Drug Administration in approving a vaccine and therapeutics for the disease that has upended Trumps reelection chances.

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump put himself at the center of the FDA's announcement of the authorization at a news conference Sunday evening. The authorization makes it easier for some patients to obtain the treatment but is not the same as full FDA approval.

The blood plasma, taken from patients who have recovered from the coronavirus and rich in antibodies, may provide benefits to those battling the disease. But the evidence so far has not been conclusive about whether it works, when to administer it and what dose is needed.

In case you missed it
"The new risk parameters that Anne and the Crown Resorts board have put in place are very good and are being carried out very conscientiously," Mrs Danziger said with the fondness of a teacher singling out a favoured pupil for particular praise. Former Ascham headmistress Rowena Danziger. Credit:Illustration: John Shakespeare In this case, she was referring to Crown's audit manager Anne Siegers but we're sure former AFL supremo Andrew Demetriou was also earning his keep. Mrs Danziger was fronting a NSW inquiry on Monday which is examining if Crown should keep its licence for its soon-to-be-completed $2.4 billion casino at Barangaroo. For those who are not familiar with Mrs Danziger, she ran one of Sydney's most exclusive private schools, Ascham, for 30 years. Kerry Packer was so impressed he put her on the board of his flagship company Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd (PBL) in 1997 in gratitude for her role in keeping his daughter Gretel on the straight and narrow.

A decade-long tenure on the Crown Resorts board followed when it was split from PBL in 2007. She assured the inquiry that the Crown Resort's board had no knowledge of the escalating risks in China that preceded the 2017 arrest of Crown's employees in the country and the end of corporate-life-as-we-know-it for Crown and James Packer. They didn't even know Crown employees were questioned in 2016 by the police in China, but she agreed it all should have been brought to the board's attention and they would have acted. As she told the inquiry: "Things we didn't realise [at the time] have been addressed." The only real blemish admitted to during her time before the inquiry was some tardy homework from Mrs Danziger herself. The inquiry was only informed Sunday evening that she remains a member of the Crown Melbourne board which directly oversees the group's flagship casino. "I apologise for that, it was a complete oversight of mine," Mrs Danziger told the inquiry.

Homeward bound Not only has Fiona Sugden, senior media adviser to the Leader of the Opposition, left Anthony Albanese's office, she has also left the country. Sugden left the House of Albo on Friday, and was due to fly out of the country on Monday night bound for London. It was from Britain that Sugden was lured at the end of 2018 to work for then Labor leader Bill Shorten's doomed election campaign, which must have been a character building experience. Fiona Sugden with then opposition leader Bill Shorten during the 2019 election campaign. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Sugden, who began her Canberra career working with former ALP leader Kim Beazley, was previously prime minister Kevin Rudd's press secretary. In between the political advising, she has also held positions at Santos and Virgin Australia, as well as senior night editor at Mamamia.

The mother of five will rejoin her lawyer husband in London, where she once worked at the British Foreign Office, specialising in counter-terrorism. Sugden's replacement, who will start work in a couple of weeks, is Elizabeth Fitch from MP Chris Bowen's office. Full disclosure Atlassian might be under a cloud when it comes to its tax contributions in Australia, but the multibillion-dollar software group created by wunderkinds Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes is good for the rent apparently. So the City of Sydney councillors were always expected to approve the new Atlassian lease at the council-owned 344 George Street premises at Monday night's council meeting. But where would we be without a little controversy from the billionaire duo?

Mayor Clover Moore and her fellow councillors needed to grant approval for the new five-year lease, worth more than $500,000 per annum - while Atlassian builds its billion-dollar HQ above Central Station. Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. Credit:Louie Douvis Given the perceived political influence of the pair, it shouldn't be a surprise that one councillor had to excuse herself from the vote due to a conflict of interest. Former federal MP Kerryn Phelps told the meeting from "an abundance of caution" she will not vote as "one of the founders of Atlassian was a donor to my Wentworth campaign". She said it was a "less than disclosable donation". Last year, Cannon-Brookes donated $50,000 to a climate fund that handed half a million dollars to a dozen key independent and crossbench federal election campaigns, including Phelps' unsuccessful attempt to retain Malcolm Turnbull's old seat.
Some agreement, but issues remain as West African mediators meet Mali coup leaders Mali awaits outcome of West African bloc's talks to resolve coup

By Tiemoko Diallo

BAMAKO (Reuters) - Mediators from West Africa's regional bloc reached agreement on certain points in talks with Mali's military junta that are aimed at returning the country to civilian rule, the parties said on Sunday, adding that some outstanding issues remained.

The negotiations will continue on Monday, members of both delegations told journalists in Bamako.

Leaders of the military junta led by Colonel Assimi Goita and mediators from West Africa's regional bloc led by Nigeria's former president, Goodluck Jonathan, met behind closed doors all day on Sunday.

"We have been able to agree on a number of points but not yet on all the discussions," Jonathan told reporters on Sunday night after negotiations that lasted around nine hours.

A spokesman for the military junta, Colonel Ismael Wague, said: "We reached compromise on certain aspects and the negotiations will continue tomorrow."

Neither gave details on what issues they had reached agreement on, and what were the outstanding issues.

A senior officer close to the junta told Reuters earlier on Sunday that discussion during the morning session had focused on the bloc's sanctions on Mali following the military coup.

Other key issues would include the fate of deposed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, and details of Mali's transition to civilian rule.

French Radio RFI reported late on Sunday that the junta, known as the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP), proposed a three-year transition led by a soldier and made up of mostly soldiers.

The report added that the junta was also ready to allow Keita to return to his home or leave the country.

A spokesman for the CNSP could not be reached for comments.

The overthrow of Keita on Tuesday has been condemned abroad, but celebrated by many in a country battling an Islamist insurgency and months of political unrest following a disputed legislative election in March.

Story continues

While the delegation arrived in Bamako on Saturday with the aim of reversing the coup, a diplomat told Reuters that reinstating Keita - who is being held by the junta - was out of the question, adding that the only thing it could achieve was a transition.

The 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), weary of prolonged instability in Mali and the potential for similar power grabs in the region, have taken a hard line on the coup.

It suspended Mali from its decision-making institutions, shut borders and halted financial flows with the country.

(Additional reporting by Paul Lorgerie, Fadima Kontao and Idrissa Sangare in Bamako; Writing by Bate Felix; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Peter Cooney)
An in-depth Garvan study of how the immune system generates effective antibodies provides new insights for vaccine design.

An in-depth Garvan study of how the immune system generates effective antibodies provides new insights for vaccine design.

Researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research have uncovered a key strategy the immune system uses to generate effective antibodies, which could inform vaccine design for some of the most challenging viruses.

In experimental models, the researchers discovered that the immune system mutated its B cells to generate more finely-tuned antibodies when the targets for those antibodies, referred to as 'antigens', were structurally flexible, rather than rigid. The researchers publish their findings in the journal PNAS.

"Our findings address a central issue for developing vaccines - how the immune system generates antibodies that recognise 'foreign' from 'self'," says co-senior author Professor Daniel Christ, Head of Antibody Therapeutics and Director of the Centre of Targeted Therapy at Garvan.

"Taking a comprehensive analytical approach, we found that a flexible target allows the immune system to create antibodies more finely-tuned to foreign molecules, which we hope will play a role in informing the design of future vaccines."

Structure matters

Our immune system is constantly challenged by foreign microbes such as viruses. To clear a virus from our body, and to remember and eliminate it more quickly the next time we're exposed, our immune system evolves. This happens in structures called germinal centres within our lymph nodes, where B cells multiply and mutate to produce antibodies more finely-tuned to target the virus.

"Long-lasting immunity is an important challenge for the immune system - antibodies have to bind like glue to foreign threats, such as viruses but avoid any of the body's own molecules as this can lead to autoimmunity," says Dr Deborah Burnett, co-first author of the paper.

At a sub-microscopic level, some molecules bend and move more than others - some are more rigid, while others are flexible. The same is true for molecules on viruses, for example, the spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is highly flexible to adopt multiple different shapes.

"There is a longstanding debate about whether flexible or rigid antigens in vaccines are more likely to elicit a lasting immune response in humans. We wanted to help answer that question," says Dr Peter Schofield, co-first author of the study.

More paths to reach fine-tuned immunity

"Using an artificial pair of foreign and self-molecules that are very similar, we created different versions of the same antigen, altering one connection that made it either more rigid or more flexible," says Dr Schofield. The researchers then investigated how the immune system of mice generated antibodies to the different molecules.

The researchers discovered that when the foreign antigen was more flexible, the germinal centre could employ a greater number of evolution strategies to make antibodies that bound foreign but not self-molecules.

"Our results showed that the antibodies initially bonded to both the rigid self and flexible foreign antigens in the same way, unable to tell them apart. What surprised us was that, after only a few weeks, when the foreign antigen was flexible, the antibodies were able to specifically mutate to become 67 times more selective for foreign antigens, and 19 times less selective for self," says Dr Burnett. "The antibodies generated against rigid foreign antigens were more likely to have autoimmune properties."

Informing vaccine design

The ability to produce antibodies that bind foreign but not self-molecules is a major hurdle for vaccine development, say the researchers.

"It's the major roadblock in the generation of effective HIV vaccines, which have so far been blocked by checkpoints in the body that avoid an autoimmune response," says Professor Chris Goodnow, Garvan's Executive Director and co-senior author of the study. "What we have discovered is fundamental to establishing long-lived immunity, which will inform vaccine design going forward."

"There is circumstantial evidence that antibodies against the spike molecule on the SARS-CoV-2 virus may also recognise 'self'. This may be an explanation for why antibody levels against the novel coronavirus appear to decline in patients quickly after infection," he adds. "Understanding how to increase selection of antibodies that don't bind self may illuminate a pathway to long-lived immunity against COVID-19."

###

This research was supported by Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council (Program Grants 1016953 & 1113904, Project Grant 1108800, and Fellowships 585490, 1157744, 190774, 1176351 & 1081858), the Australian Research Council (Discovery Grants 160104915 & 140103465) and the Bill and Patricia Ritchie Family Foundation.

Media contacts:

Dr Viviane Richter

Garvan Institute of Medical Research

v.richter@garvan.org.au

+ 61 2 9295 8128

+ 61 404 999 682

Anna Sweeney

Garvan Institute of Medical Research

a.sweeney@garvan.org.au

+ 61 2 9295 8126

+ 61 437 282 467
Xtalks Life Science Webinars This webinar examines current ingredient trends for immune support, with an emphasis on antioxidants, which are found in one third of all immune supplements on the market.

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08/24/2020

Photo (c) Anatoliy Sizov - Getty Images The Trump administration has waged a vigorous campaign against the Chinese social media platform TikTok, issuing an executive order for the company to sell itself to a U.S. company or stop operating in the U.S.

While the administration has taken a hard line against China on a variety of fronts, The Wall Street Journal reports that the campaign against TikTok was stoked by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

At a time when Facebook was under increasing antitrust and privacy scrutiny in Washington, the newspaper reports that Zuckerberg was whispering in the ears of lawmakers and policymakers that the Chinese social media company was a bigger threat.

The report is said to be based on interviews with a number of people familiar with the matter. The campaign reportedly began last October when Zuckerberg delivered a speech to students at Georgetown University about the importance of freedom of expression.

Later that month, Zuckerberg dined at the White House with President Trump and reportedly made his case that Chinese internet companies threaten businesses -- especially technology companies -- in the U.S.

No memory of the discussion

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told The Journal that Zuckerberg doesnt remember talking about TikTok during the White House dinner. But he acknowledged a view at Facebook that sees Chinese tech companies as a growing and potential threat to American interests.

As Chinese companies and influence have been growing so has the risk of a global internet based on their values, as opposed to ours, Stone told The Journal.

The Journal also cited sources who said Zuckerberg met with a number of senators in Washington, warning of the threat posed by TikTok, a video app favored by young people and rivaling Facebook-owned Instagram.

Congressional action

Shortly after the late October meetings, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote a letter to U.S. intelligence officials asking for an inquiry into the Chinese company.

In March of this year, two Republican Senators -- Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rick Scott of Florida -- introduced legislation banning employees at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security from accessing the app on official government devices.

TikTok is owned by a Chinese company that includes Chinese Communist Party members on its board, and it is required by law to share user data with Beijing, Hawley said at the time. As many of our federal agencies have already recognized, TikTok is a major security risk to the United States, and it has no place on government devices.

Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order banning TikTok, along with Chinese social media company WeChat, from operating in the United States within 45 days if they were not sold by the Chinese companies that own them.

In signing the order, Trump expressed concern over how the social media platforms handle user data and whether it is shared with other entities.
KYODO NEWS - Aug 24, 2020 - 23:32 | All, World, Coronavirus

The Japanese and Myanmar foreign ministers agreed Monday to reopen borders for expatriates and other long-term residents as soon as early September, relaxing travel restrictions that were imposed to stem the spread of the new coronavirus pandemic.

Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi also confirmed at their meeting in Naypyidaw they will speed up talks to realize short-term business travel, while taking measures to combat coronavirus, according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

Motegi, in his final stop of the four-nation tour since Thursday, told reporters online that his country's pledges of economic and medical support to leaders in the respective countries demonstrate that "Japan leads international cooperation efforts" in fighting the pandemic.

The tour also included Papua New Guinea, Laos and Cambodia.

The visits to the countries came as Tokyo, which currently bans in principle entries by foreign nationals from 146 countries and regions, launched talks with 16 economies, including Myanmar, to resume travel in tandem with the restart of domestic socioeconomic activities.

Besides Myanmar, Japan agreed with Cambodia and Laos over the weekend and with Singapore and Malaysia earlier this month to allow reciprocal travel of long-term residents as early as September.

Under the arrangements, long-term residents are allowed to travel on condition they stay at home or at a designated place for 14 days after arriving and take steps to reduce the risk of infection.

At the talks with Suu Kyi, Motegi also pledged loans of 30 billion yen ($283 million) to the Myanmar government as emergency budget support and 15 billion yen to support small and medium-sized firms amid the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the ministry said.

The fresh provisions came on top of coronavirus-related aid worth over $30 million that Japan has administered to Myanmar, including the provision of medical supplies such as the antiviral drug Avigan, a potential coronavirus treatment drug manufactured by a unit of Fujifilm Holdings Corp., it said.

Motegi also said to reporters, "The leaders and I shared an understanding over the South China Sea issue," referring to the maritime areas, where tensions are high amid China's rising military assertiveness. He did not elaborate further.

The foreign minister added he "gained their understanding and support for a free and open Indo-Pacific (region) that Japan is actively promoting to realize."

In the meeting, Motegi also noted the importance of Myanmar "steadily implementing" the provisional order issued by the International Court of Justice in January requiring it to take "all measures" to end the persecution of the country's Rohingya ethnic minority by the Myanmar military, the ministry said.

Regarding the issue, Motegi told reporters he spoke to Suu Kyi about Japan's continuing support for Myanmar's efforts to improve the situation in the Rakhine State, from which Rohingya Muslims have fled to take refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. He said Suu Kyi responded by saying she will make efforts to do so as much as possible.

More than 740,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from the western Myanmar state to Bangladesh since 2017 in the wake of a brutal crackdown against insurgents by Myanmar's armed forces. Their return to their native state remains slow amid concerns of violence.

Motegi also stated Japan's "full-fledged support" for Myanmar's democratic nation building, and an election observer mission is set to be dispatched to the Nov. 8 general election in Myanmar, the ministry said.

Motegi also met with Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Myanmar military.
Indian Army Chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane on Monday conferred the COAS Unit Appreciation to 51 Special Action Group of the National Security Guards in recognition of the groups outstanding achievements in combating terrorism. On this occasion, the COAS complimented the force for its capabilities and professionalism.

The group draws 100 per cent of its manpower from the Indian Army and has established itself as an elite Counter-Terrorist Force earning many Gallantry Awards including three Ashok Chakras.

Among various operations of the group, most noteworthy was Operation Black Tornado during which it eliminated eight terrorists during the Mumbai terror attack in November 2008, freeing over 600 hostages, including numerous foreign nationals.

51 SAG of the NSG, a Counter Terrorist Unit was today conferred with the Chief of Army Staff Unit Appreciation by Gen M M Naravane, #COAS #IndianArmy, in recognition of its noteworthy achievements in combating terrorism since its raising in December 1984. pic.twitter.com/PDPybMeyXh  ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) August 24, 2020

Since its raising in December 1984, 51 Special Action Group has carved a niche for itself among the most renowned counter terrorist outfits of the world. One of the most renowned counter-terror outfit it has many feathers in its cap, including the elimination of eight terrorists responsible for the 26/11 attacks.
Departure of White House adviser, who managed Trumps successful 2016 campaign, comes just two months before elections.

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway has announced that she will be leaving the administration of US President Donald Trump at the end of August, citing the need to focus on her family.

I will be transitioning from the White House at the end of this month, she said in a statement.

Her departure, about two months before Trump seeks re-election, comes at a crucial time for the president, and leaves him without one of the more passionate spokespersons about his political and policy choices.

Conway was his third campaign manager in 2016 and has been one of Trumps most loyal and outspoken defenders in public and on news networks.

She was also the first woman to successfully manage a presidential campaign to victory and, more recently, was instrumental in getting Trump to restart regular, but shorter, White House briefings about the coronavirus outbreak.





Resumption of the briefings is seen as having helped arrest a drop in support for Trump largely because of his handling of the pandemic.

In a separate statement on social media, Kellyanne Conways husband George said he was stepping back from his role in the Lincoln Project, a project with a mission to defeat Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.

George Conway, a conservative lawyer who had co-founded the Lincoln Project, has been a vocal critic of the US president.

In a public feud with Kellyanne Conways spouse last year, Trump called him a whack job and a husband from hell, prompting George Conway to say Trump was mentally unfit for his office.

Less drama

On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway described her time in the administration and previously with the 2016 campaign as heady and humbling.

We wish only the best for you and your family in the days ahead and thank you for your invaluable contributions. https://t.co/7XxaUHXkCS  The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 24, 2020

I'm Leaving the White House. Gratefully & Humbly. Here is my statement:https://t.co/MpYxVfrY2N God Bless You All.  Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) August 24, 2020

She also added that while she and her husband disagree about plenty they are united about what matters the most to them, their children.

For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.

The couples teenage daughter has been feuding publicly with them, declaring on social media on Saturday night that is she was officially pushing for emancipation.

Kellyanne Conway had survived several rounds of staff turnovers in an often chaotic and drama-ridden Trump White House.

For years, she worked as a Republican pollster and operative and originally supported Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in the 2016 Republican primary.

She moved over to the Trump campaign and that August became campaign manager as Stephen Bannon became campaign chairman; Bannon was indicted two days ago for fraud.
Union Ministers including Home Minister on Monday paid tribute to former Cabinet Minister and BJP stalwart on his death anniversary.

Shah called him an "outstanding politician" and said he was someone who had "no parallels in Indian polity".

"Remembering ji, an outstanding politician, prolific orator and a great human being who had no parallels in Indian polity. He was multifaceted and a friend of friends, who will always be remembered for his towering legacy, transformative vision and devotion to nation," Shah tweeted.

In a tweet today, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), Dr Jitendra Singh said that Jaitley's demise "left a void which is difficult to fill".

"What #ArunJaitley meant to me, is an enigma even for me. For several years, he was virtually a part of my daily routine. It has never been the same after 24th August 2019. Friend, guide, mentor... all in one. He left a void, difficult to fill... atleast in our lifetime," he tweeted.

Union Minister for Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said that the former Union Minister played a pivotal role in the "inclusive development" of the country.

"My tributes to able administrator, effective organiser Late Ji on his death anniversary. Arun Ji played a pivotal role in "Inclusive Development" of the country. #ArunJaitley ji," Naqvi's tweet read.

The former finance minister died on August 24, 2019. He was 66.

Jaitley first became a Cabinet minister in the government of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2000. He then went on to serve as the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha from June 2009.

He was appointed the finance minister in the first term of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi government in 2014. He opted out of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections citing health reasons.
SAN FRANCISCO  Schools across the United States are facing shortages and long delays, of up to several months, in getting this years most crucial back-to-school supplies: the laptops and other equipment needed for online learning, an Associated Press investigation has found.

The worlds three biggest computer companies, Lenovo, HP and Dell, have told school districts they have a shortage of nearly 5 million laptops, in some cases exacerbated by Trump administration sanctions on Chinese suppliers, according to interviews with over two dozen U.S. schools, districts in 15 states, suppliers, computer companies and industry analysts.

As the school year begins virtually in many places because of the coronavirus, educators nationwide worry that computer shortfalls will compound the inequities  and the headaches for students, families and teachers.

This is going to be like asking an artist to paint a picture without paint. You cant have a kid do distance learning without a computer, said Tom Baumgarten, superintendent of the Morongo Unified School District in Californias Mojave Desert, where all 8,000 students qualify for free lunch and most need computers for distance learning.

Baumgarten was set to order 5,000 Lenovo Chromebooks in July when his vendor called him off, saying Lenovos were getting stopped by a government agency because of a component from China thats not allowed here, he said. He switched to HPs and was told they would arrive in time for the first day of school Aug. 26. The delivery date then changed to September, then October. The district has about 4,000 old laptops that can serve roughly half of students, but what about the rest, Baumgarten asks rhetorically. Im very concerned that Im not going to be able to get everyone a computer.

Chromebooks and other low-cost PCs are the computers of choice for most budget-strapped schools. The delays started in the spring and intensified because of high demand and disruptions of supply chains, the same reasons that toilet paper and other pandemic necessities flew off shelves a few months ago. Then came the Trump administrations July 20 announcement targeting Chinese companies it says were implicated in forced labor or other human rights abuses against a Muslim minority population, the Uighurs. The Commerce Department imposed sanctions on 11 Chinese companies, including the manufacturer of multiple models of Lenovo laptops, which the company says will add several weeks to existing delays, according to a letter Lenovo sent to customers.

School districts are pleading with the Trump administration to resolve the issue, saying that distance learning without laptops will amount to no learning for some of the countrys most vulnerable students.

Its a tough one because Im not condoning child slave labor for computers, but can we not hurt more children in the process? said Matt Bartenhagen, IT director for Williston Public Schools in North Dakota, a district of 4,600 waiting on an order for 2,000 Lenovo Chromebooks. They were supposed to be delivered in July. Then August. Then late August. The current shipping estimate is hopefully by the end of the year.

The Denver Public Schools district, the largest in Colorado, is waiting for 12,500 Lenovo Chromebooks ordered in April and May. The district has scrambled to find machines, settled for whatever is available and is handing out everything they get to students that need them. Still, when school starts Wednesday, they will be about 3,000 devices short, says Lara Hussain, an IT director for the district.

We were promised devices. Our students need devices. And as a result of not receiving devices we will have students starting the school year unable to participate. Its unconscionable, said Hussain.

Lenovo had informed Denver and other districts over the spring and summer of supply chain delays. In late July, Lenovo sent a letter to customers to say the trade controls announced by the Commerce Department would cause another slowdown of at least several weeks.

This delay is a new development and is unrelated to supply constraints previously communicated, Matthew Zielinski, president of Lenovo North America said in the letter, which referred to the sanctions on a Chinese supplier, Hefei Bitland Information Technology Co. Ltd. The letter listed 23 Lenovo models for education and corporate customers made by Bitland.

Effective immediately, we are no longer manufacturing these devices at Bitland, the letter said, adding that Lenovo is working on a transition plan to shift production to other sites.

A Lenovo official told Californias Department of Education the company has a backlog of more than 3 million Chromebooks, said Daniel Thigpen, the departments spokesman.

Lenovo declined to respond to repeated questions from AP seeking confirmation of the backlog and details on the numbers of devices delayed, replying only to deny a question on whether computers were seized by U.S. customs, as some schools were told by suppliers.

U.S. government agencies said they have no knowledge of the computers whereabouts and also deny any were seized.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection does not have any record of detained laptops matching this description, the agency said in a statement.

The Department of Commerce said it added Hefei Bitland to its so-called Entity List, which restricts the export and in-country transfer of items by sanctioned companies. It does not apply to the importation of Chromebooks from China, the department said in a statement, adding, however, we should all agree that American school children should not be using computers from China that were produced from forced labor.

There are no nationwide tallies on the numbers of laptops and other devices that schools are waiting for. The Associated Press found that some of Americas biggest school districts are among those with outstanding orders of Chromebooks, other laptops or hotspots for internet connections, including Los Angeles, Clark County, Nevada, Wake County, North Carolina, Houston, Palm Beach and Hawaii, the nations only statewide school district.

A recent poll of Californias 1,100 districts showed schools across the state are waiting on at least 300,000 backordered computers, said Mary Nicely, a senior policy advisor to the state superintendent. A survey in Alabama found that about 20 schools were waiting on 33,000 computers, said Ryan Hollingsworth, director of the School Superintendents of Alabama.

Smaller districts in Montana, New York, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio, New Hampshire and elsewhere are also waiting on laptop orders, with delivery dates that have become moving targets.

Some of the school districts, like Los Angeles, say the outstanding orders are for replacement devices and all students who need a computer will have one. Many districts are asking parents with the means to buy devices for their children but realize thats not an option for many families.

Its also not an easy task with supplies at commercial stores running out. Best Buys website shows 36 models of new and used Chromebooks priced under $500, the low-cost models that are popular for students. As of this week, 33 of those models were sold out.

The backlog and delays have become so widespread that some students will be forced to start the semester without an essential piece of technology for remote learning, said Michael Flood, senior vice president of Kajeet, which works with more than 2,000 school districts in the U.S. and Canada.

Some school administrators told Flood their laptop and Chromebook suppliers hope deliveries will only be delayed by a month or so. But others are being told their machines may not be available until early 2021.

The shortage stems from exceptionally high demand at a time when the personal computer industry is still recovering from pandemic-driven precautions that shut down the factories of major PC suppliers in China during February and March. Just as the supply chain started ramping back up, new orders poured in from huge companies and government agencies with large numbers of employees working from home  in addition to school districts scrambling to secure machines, said Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner Inc., which closely follows the PC industry.

The bottom line is everyone seems to want a laptop or Chromebook right now and there just isnt enough supply of it, Kitagawa said. Its a case of very bad timing.

To make matters worse, many school districts underestimated their needs during spring ordering, assuming that traditional in-person classes would resume in the fall.

In California, most schools were planning for some form of in-person classes in the fall but only learned in July that wouldnt be possible, when Gov. Gavin Newsom effectively ordered the majority of schools to start with remote learning. It created a mad dash for computers.

Tom Quiambao, director of technology for the Tracy Unified School District in Northern California, said he and his vendor contacted HP directly to ask why his July order for 10,000 HP laptops would take three months to be delivered. He was told, HP is short 1.7 million units of laptops because of production shortages in a variety of components made in China, including processors, touchscreens, motherboards and others, Quiambao said.

An HP spokeswoman declined to confirm or deny that number, saying only we are continuing to leverage our global supply chain to meet the changing needs of our customer.

Dell offered a similarly brief response to detailed questions about a backlog.

We cant comment on demand and supply specifically, Dell said in an emailed statement, adding the company was seeing increased orders due to virtual learning and trying to fulfill orders as efficiently as possible.

With so many customers ordering laptops at the same time, PC manufacturers may be put in the uncomfortable position of deciding who gets them first, said Linn Huang, an analyst for the research firm International Data Corp. Those kind of pecking orders threaten to push small school districts to the back of the laptop line.

Thats part of the problem for the central Texas district of Abilene, where they are waiting for 6,000 Dell Chromebooks, ordered in May and June but not expected until November.

In Texas, there are over 1,200 school districts and theyre all ordering, said district spokesman Lance Fleming. Schools are trying to get disinfecting supplies, too. Who would have ever thought that computers and Clorox Wipes would be on the same level of need in our country.

___

Associated Press Writers Kathleen Foody in Chicago, Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu, Tali Arbel in New York contributed to this report.

____

This story corrects the name of the Morongo Unified School District in California.
The National Communication Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Sammy Gyamfi has described Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumias presentation on infrastructure achievements by the Akufo-Addo-led government as a cocktail of blatant falsehoods, ghost projects, and stolen projects.

According to him, the shockingly mediocre accomplishments Dr Bawumia listed to have been achieved by the Akufo-Addo government will not even pass for the achievements of a rural Assemblyman, let alone a government that has had access to an unprecedented resource envelope of GH370 billion.



Mr Gyamfi who was addressing the media at the partys headquarters in Accra on Monday, August 24, 2020, as part of the partys weekly press briefings said the Vice President peddled a lot of downright untruths during his presentation which the party will expose through evidence-based exposition for all Ghanaians to see.



He said Dr Bawumias claim at page 56 of his speech that only 29 Community Day SHS (E-Blocks) had been completed by January 7, 2017 when the erstwhile Mahama government handed over power to the Akufo-Addo government is false.



Our handing over notes supported by final payment certificates raised by the contractors who executed and completed those projects show that 46 and not 29 E-Blocks had been completed by the Mahama government at the time of exiting office, he said.



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He added, This incontrovertible fact was corroborated by the NPPs own Minister of Education, Mathew Opoku Prempeh in an interview on Ekosisen on Asempa FM on 6th March, 2017. The claim by the NPP that some of the completed projects had not been furnished, hence were uncompleted is ridiculous as furnishing is not part of the construction process or scope of construction works of the E-Block school projects.



Mr. Gyamfi also said the claim by Dr. Bawumia on page 14 of his speech that the NDC did not complete any major road project in both the Upper East and Upper West regions is a barefaced lie.



Contrary to this false assertion, the facts show that within that period, the following major road projects, the Bolgatanga - Bongo road connecting Bolgatanga Municipality to Bongo District was completed; the Winkogo - Tongo road connecting Bolgatanga Municipality to Talensi District was completed; the Nadowli - Babile - Lawra road was initiated and completed by the NDC, and the Gwollu Town roads in Sissala West, were executed and completed in the Upper East and Upper West regions.



These are but a few of the several road projects which were executed by the Mills/Mahama administration in the two regions referenced by Dr. Bawumia between the period 2009 to 2016. His claim that the NDC failed to complete a single major road project in the two regions between 2009-2016 is therefore false, he stated.



CoronaLife Web Series

Mr Gyamfi said many of the projects Dr Bawumia touted as achievements by the Akufo-Addo government were ghost projects and that many of them did not exist.



According to him, many of the few ones that existed were also started by the past Mahama government or were projects undertaken by private persons or organisations such as NGOs or churches and foundations.



Ladies and Gentlemen, after a painstaking investigation into the claims made by Dr. Bawumia at the Town Hall Meeting and the delivery tracker which was launched at the program, we have identified hundreds ghost (nonexistent) projects and thousands of stolen Mahama and private-owned projects, he stated.



NDC's List of supposed ghost projects presented by Dr Bawumia



1. Bawumias claim at page 41 of his speech that this government is constructing 13 housing units at Sekondi (Ituma Estate) which is about 70% complete is a figment of his own imagination as same does not exist anywhere in the Sekondi metropolis.



2. Bawumias claim at page 41 of his speech that this government is constructing 500 housing units at Sefwi Wiawso which is 20% complete is palpable falsehood, as no such project exist.



3. The claim at page 40 of Bawumias speech that this government is constructing 120 affordable housing units in the Talensi District of the Upper East region which is 20% complete is yet another lie, as no such project exist.



4. Dromankese town roads in the Bono East region have not been tarred as claimed by governments delivery tracker. This is a big insult to the Chiefs and people of Dromankese in the Nkoranza area of the Bono East Region who are enduring untold hardship due to the poor nature of their roads.



5. The claim on governments delivery tracker that this government has rehabilitated the Anyinabrim Primary School in the Sefwi Wiawso Municipality is yet another lie. No such rehabilitation has been undertaken at the said school.



6. The claim on governments delivery tracker that the Akufo Addo-government has constructed an Astroturf in the Adenta constituency is another palpable falsehood, as no such project exists on the ground.



7. The claim on governments delivery tracker of complete electrification of Ananekrom and Pataban townships in the Asante Akyem North Constituency of the Ashanti region is a lie. No such project has been undertaken by this government, as the two towns dont have electricity as we speak.



8. The claim on governments delivery tracker of having constructed the Asuoso-Derma-Techimantia road in the Bono East Region as captured by governments delivery tracker is yet another palpable falsehood, as no such road exists anywhere in the referenced area.



9. The claim on governments delivery tracker about Re-roofing of cluster of schools at Akanteng in the Eastern region is a lie. No such project has been undertaken by this government.



10. The claim on governments delivery tracker about an ongoing 1D1F Palm Oil Processing factory in West Akim is a lie. No such project exist.



11. The claim on governments delivery tracker about an ongoing construction of solar powered water system at Dindani in the East Mamprusi Municipality (Nalerigu/Gambaga) is a lie. No such project can be found in and around Dindani.



12. The claim on the delivery tracker about ongoing construction of a water system at Zangu-Vuga in the East Mamprusi Municipality (Nalerigu/Gambaga) is a lie. As a matter of fact, Zangu-Vuga is in the West Mamprusi Municipality and not East Mamprusi Municipality as claimed. But yet again, there is no such project in Zangu-Vuga in the West Mamprusi Municipality (Walewale) as claimed. Ladies and gentlemen, it is instructive to note that, even in Walewale, the Vice Presidents hometown, Dr. Bawumia is conjuring nonexistent projects which is an insult to his own kinsmen and people.



13. The claim on governments delivery tracker that government has constructed and completed a 1V1D project at Zandua in the West Mamprusi Municipality is false, as no such community exists in the West Mamprusi Municipality.



14. The claim about an ongoing construction of a six (6) seater toilet block for St. Thomas Senior High/Tech at Asamankese in West Akim Municipality is another ghost project, as nothing like that exist on the ground.



15. The claim that there is an ongoing construction of a 12-unit classroom block for Pentecost SHS at Akropong in the Akuapem North Municipality is false, as no such project exist.



16. The claim of having completed a 10-seater toilet facility at Ahibenso in Bodi District is a lie, as no such project exist.



17. Also, the claim that this government has completed the Construction of 1 NO. 6 Units Classroom Block with Auxiliary Facilities at Debiso in the Bia West constituency is a lie, as no such project exist.



18. The claim of having completed the construction of a 16-seater water closet and 4 shower facility in selected communities in Bia West is also a lie, as no such project exist.



19. The claim about ongoing construction of a 2-storey dormitory block for Ghana Senior High School at Damango in the West Gonja Municipality is a fabricated lie, as no such school exists.



20. The claim about construction of a 6-unit classroom block at Jamara in the Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa Constituency is a lie, as no such project exist.



21. No Power Supply System at Afofosu in the Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa Constituency exist contrary to claims by governments delivery tracker.



22. The claim of a 10-seater WC toilet at Anwhiam in the Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa Constituency does not exist.



23. The claim of a 10-seater WC toilet at Asikuma is a palpable lie.



24. The claim of Abamkrom Clinic in the Agona West Constituency of the Central region as contained on governments delivery tracker is a ghost project.



25. The claim by the so-called delivery tracker that the Akufo-Addo government has completed the construction of the Anum Primary school at Anum Apapam in the Asuogyaman District in the Eastern region is a lie. There is no town in Asuogyaman called Anum Apapam, and there is no block constructed by the NPP in Anum Presbyterian Primary School at the Anum that we know in Asuogyaman.



26. The Claim of construction works at Dabala market is a lie. There is no such construction work ongoing in the Dabala market as claimed by the NPP on their website.





Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / Exploring The Block will be broadcasting on Fox Business Network 1030 pm PST tonight featuring fetch.ai with CEO Humayun Sheikh on their second interview in 6 Part series. We also have BlockQuake with CEO Antonio Brasse, giving us an update. Fetch.ai will be filming their next interview within the next few weeks, dates and times TBA.

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The company was formed in early 2018 to address the need for trust and transparency in the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities through the development of a centralized cryptocurrency trading exchange platform.

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Monique Mawulawe Agbedekpui, a graduate of Blue Crest College, has been crowned Miss Ghana 2020.

The 23-year-old graduate beat several other contestants to emerge winner at the Miss Ghana 2020 pageant organised by Exclusive Events Ghana on Friday at the National Theatre in Accra.

According to Ms Agbedekpui, she chose to be part of the Miss Ghana brand because it has shaped a lot of women to become women of substance.

She will volunteer at the Exclusive Events Ghana/Miss Ghana Foundation as well as enjoy a one-year platinum gym membership at Pippa's Health Centre and other souvenirs from sponsors.

Behind the one-time Exopa model is 18-year-old Issabella Eyram Agbo, who is a first year student of University of Ghana Business School, Legon, studying BSc in Administration with Marketing option. She was adjudged the first runner-up, while Annlisa Anangfio, a 22-year-old graduate in Human Nutrition, Food Science with Biochemistry from University of Ghana, Legon, was the second runner-up.

The judging panel, which included Okyeame Kwame and TV/radio hostess Akumaa Mama Zimbi, advised the newly crowned queens not to be swayed by social media, rather they should serve with passion and be patriotic.

Words cannot express our gratitude to our most cherished sponsors for demonstrating the true essence of strategic partnerships; standing by us in a globally challenging time as this. May God continue to keep your business soaring, now more than ever, the Miss Ghana Organisation also said in a statement.

Our amazing panel of judges helped us achieve our most important goal of finding young women who are really passionate about what the Miss Ghana brand symbolizes.

Friday's event was described as spectacular amid electrifying performances from Okyeame Kwame, The Tulips, Mijay, I-Kofi, Arabella and Shugalord.

Miss Ghana 2020 was supported by Tang Palace Hotel, Silver Queen Cosmetics, makers of Notescosmetics, Bel Aqua, Bel Beverages, Akosombo Textiles, Quality Medical Care Clinic, Pippa's Health Centre, Poised Etiquette Consultancy, Amazing U, Events by Thea, Stevefloral, De Essence, The Underbridge Event Centre, Buck Press, Eye360 Security, Mastermind with Grace Krobo- Edusei, Capitol Cafe & Restaurant, Snax, Cookers Delight, Gold Coast Restaurant & Cocktailbar , Rluri, Jramdo, Namax Kloding , Bellray, Bri Wiredua, Nicoline GH, Katie O, Aya Kloding, Hinlone Chinese Restaurant and Woveit.

---Daily Guide
Conservative Party of Canada Leader Erin O'Toole speaks after his win at the 2020 Leadership Election, in Ottawa on Aug. 23, 2020. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

Now the Real Work Begins: OTooles Plan for Pandemic Recovery

As Erin OToole thanked supporters for handing him a victory in the Conservative leadership race in the early hours of Aug. 24, he outlined his priorities for next steps as party leader: defeating Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and getting Canada back on track.

We must continue to point out Liberal failings and corruption. But we must also show Canadians our vision for a stronger, prosperous and more united Canada, he said in his acceptance speech.

Canada can and must do better, and Conservatives will work hard to earn the trust and confidence of Canadians in the next election. Friends, now the real work begins.

Since OToole first joined the leadership race in January, much has changed. The global pandemic has claimed over 9,000 Canadian lives and the Liberal government has been rocked by the WE Charity scandal. The government has prorogued Parliament, planning to start the new session with a vote of confidence.

We can rebuild our great country while protecting Canadians from the ongoing threat of COVID-19, OToole said in his acceptance speech.

We can get Canadians back to work, be proud of the things we grow, build and produce in Canada again. We must have a government that will keep us safe, and ensure that we are never ill-prepared again.

Steering Canada through post-pandemic recovery will be a complex taskboth in terms of rebuilding the economy, managing a record-high deficit, and preparing for a potential second wave of COVID-19.

Heres what OToole says he would do if he called the shots.

Managing the Deficit

OToole campaigned on a fiscal stability plan to tackle the $340 billion deficit and create a realistic timeline to balance the budget that takes into account emergency benefits such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. A conservative government under OToole would wind down CERB with a sliding scale in each province to take into account economic activity and unemployment levels by province.

OToole said he would also look into extending employment insurance for those not covered, such as the self-employed.

Rebuilding the Economy

OToole campaigned on a pipeline-friendly platform and has said he would introduce a National Strategic Pipelines Act within his first 100 days in office to speed up approval of pipelines that are in the national interest. His energy strategy would also include phasing out importation of oil from outside of North America, ending Bills C-69 and C-48 to encourage large project investment in Canada, and partnering with First Nations in large resource projects.

Cutting and simplifying taxes and reducing red tape was also part of OTooles campaign promises, as well as removing interprovincial trade barriers that he says would hold back economic recovery.

He has said that small- and medium-sized owner-operator businesses were hit hardest in the pandemic, suffering from a loss of business during lockdown while falling through the cracks of emergency aid. To address this he would expand the Canada Emergency Business Account program to extend loans and operating grants to small- and medium-sized businesses based on employment and economic activity, and make larger grant portions available for small businesses missed by the CEBA program.

He would also cut taxes for small businesses and provide new hiring incentives to promote job creation and introduce tools to help small businesses avoid insolvency.

His Back to Work agenda would encourage re-opening the economy while introducing pandemic safety measures such as increased testing, instituting masks and other PPE for crowded indoor spaces, and non-mandatory contact tracing programs.

Support for Families

OToole has promised increased childcare benefits to support families dealing with loss of employment and childcare.

He says he would convert the existing Child Care Expense deduction to a refundable tax credit for the duration of the recovery period. The refundable tax credit would cover up to 75 percent of childcare expenses and be rolled back as the economy recovers.

He would also double the existing limits under the Child Care Expense deduction, meaning families would get a refundable tax credit for up to $16,000 in childcare expenses for children aged 0-6 and $10,000 for children aged 7-17.

He would also repeat the one-time boost in the Canada Child Benefit into quarterly boosts until the end of 2021, providing $12 billion in transition assistance to Canadian families.

Pandemic Preparedness

One of OTooles campaign promises was to convene a Royal Commission on the pandemic within 100 days of taking office to ensure that all lessons learned from the crisis are publicly aired and learnings can immediately be adopted.

The commission would look at areas like long-term care homes and how Canada can be better prepared for future threats.

He has also called for Canada to build a domestic supply of essential PPE, key commodities, and pharmaceutical capacity to lessen reliance on foreign powers like Chinawhich was accused of hoarding essential PPE in the early days of the pandemic.

He would impose measures to improve food security such as greenhouse infrastructure programs to grow more food in Canada year-round, and strengthen ties with the United States and Mexico.

OTooles foreign policy objectives would also focus on domestic interests, such as strengthening foreign investment reviews so that all purchases of Canadian companies and resources by state-owned entities from non-free countries require approval.

He would work with allies to fix global trading systems and practices so that preferences are shown to countries that adhere to high standards of human rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental transparency.

As he closed his speech on Monday, OToole said he was up to the task.

Canada needs serious leadership for these challenging times to keep Canadians safe and prepare for the future, to rebuild our country, to navigate our way out of record Liberal deficits before they put our social programs at risk, to ensure that we rebuild stronger and more self-reliant, more resilient, so that we are better prepared for future waves of COVID-19 and all threats to restore Canadas place in a tough world.
Twins Mary Grace and Bennett Sease were seen as miracle babies after being born 13 weeks early.

Now 7 years old, the two spent all of last week with their grandparents in Mount Pleasant raising money for the hospital that helped save their lives.

"Its a miracle those kids are here today," said Chuck Bennett, the twins' grandfather.

What started as an attempt to occupy two small children's time has turned into a whole awareness project. During their final week of summer break, the Charleston Catholic School's Sease twins opened a lemonade stand with the goal of giving all of the proceeds to the Medical University of South Carolina's Shawn Jenkins Children's Hospital.

The two were born on Feb. 5, 2013, at MUSC. Their original due date was in May.

To see them today, you would never know that they had such a rough start," said Mary Elizabeth Sease, the twins' mother.

Sease was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia around the time she was 26 weeks pregnant with the twins. It's a condition that is characterized by high blood pressure and issues with kidney and liver functions.

According to the March of Dimes, a national organization dedicated to protecting the health of mothers and babies, 15 percent of premature births in the U.S. are caused by the condition.

Sease gave birth to the twins a couple of days after her diagnosis. The children were immediately placed in MUSC's neonatal intensive care unit.

Mary Grace was born 1 pound, 11 ounces, and Bennett was 2 pounds, 3 ounces. Both babies were about 12 inches long.

Their grandfather said witnessing how small they were was one of the scariest things he has ever seen.

You could put them in the palm of your hand they were so small," he said.

At the time, Mary Grace was able to breathe through the help of a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine. Bennett had to be placed on a ventilator. He also needed brain surgery at 8 weeks.

He ended up spending 107 days in the hospital vs. Mary Grace's 92. Sease said separating the two was probably the hardest part of the experience.

The family lived close to MUSC so they could visit the babies every day. And there was no cutoff time for a visit. During their three months in the NICU, Sease said she had enormous faith in MUSC's medical team.

Doctors and nurses would routinely provide the family updated information and explain anything that was confusing.

I just knew that they were going to come home," she said.

A preterm birth is a live birth that happens before 37 completed weeks gestation. Multiple births, or a birth involving more than one baby, were seven times more likely to result in a preterm in 2017 in South Carolina, according to the March of Dimes.

During the twins' NICU experience, the Sease family received a lot of support through local community organizations, churches and the March of Dimes. They were later selected as the March of Dimes Ambassador family in 2015.

Chuck Bennett said he sees what happened with his grandchildren as a miracle story. The lemonade stand was an opportunity to help emphasize to the twins and the community of just how lucky they are.

And to pay tribute to those doctors and nurses," Bennett said.

A couple of years ago, he built the stand for all of his five grandchildren to use. Last week wasn't the first time the twins had sold lemonade, but it was the first time they did so with a clear goal, Bennett said.

Fran Bennett, the twins' grandmother, said she agreed to let them do a lemonade stand only if they donated the money. The twins settled on MUSC after growing up hearing stories about their birth.

During the twins' lemonade-selling week, they even had community members who came up to give donations without purchasing any lemonade. Their goal was to raise $100 and by Wednesday they already had $96.

Im sure we will do it again ... as long as they show enthusiasm for wanting to do this," Fran Bennett said.

Those interested in donating to the MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children's Hospital Fund or even directly supporting the NICU can do so online at givenow.musckids.org.
MADRID: Spains cumulative tally of coronavirus cases hit 405,436 on Monday after a surge in infections last week, making it the worst week for infections since late March.

The countrys health ministry added nearly 20,000 infections for last week after revising upwards the number of cases for at least four of the days in that week.

Infections have risen sharply since Spain lifted a three-month lockdown in late June, but deaths have been much lower than during the epidemics late-March peak. Three people died in the past 24 hours, with the total death toll at 28,872.

In the past 24 hours, 2,060 cases have been diagnosed, the ministry said, a lower level than seen last week.

Right now there is a certain level of community transmission across Spain," health emergency chief Fernando Simon told a news conference.

Seeking to halt the resurgence, regional authorities are bringing back restrictions that were lifted after the national lockdown reduced the number of new cases.

In Catalonia, which has reported more than 1,000 daily cases over the past five days, social gatherings will be limited to 10 people, while southeastern Murcia banned meetings of more than six people and recommended people over 65 stay at home.

Catalan leader Quim Torra said the next three weeks - when thousands of workers will return from holidays and children are due to head back to school - will be crucial for reducing COVID-19 transmission.

No distractions, no deviations and maximum concentration  because one way or another this country has to get back to work and reopen schools," he told a news conference in Barcelona.

With the start of the school term just weeks away, teachers and parents associations are angry at the governments lack of a coherent back-to-school plan.

Madrid, which has logged more than 24,000 cases in the past two weeks, has urged people in the worst-hit areas to stay at home and has not ruled out targeted lockdowns if the situation deteriorates.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Former President John Dramani Mahama says President Akufo-Addo has tied up the hands of the Special Prosecutor, Mr. Martin Amidu from prosecuting corrupt government officials.



This, he said, is the reason why Mr. Amidu is unable to indict any government officials on corruption related issues.



The office of the Special Prosecutor is his (Akufo-Addo's) own baby and yet, he has tied the hands of the Special Prosecutor. We all know Mr. Amidu is a very vociferous lawyer and I am sure that if his hands were freed to really investigate these cases, he will have gotten some prosecutions by now, Mr Mahama said in an interview on XYZ TV, monitored by Graphic Online on Sunday, August 23, 2020.



According to Mr. Mahama, the Akufo-Addo led government has lost the fight against corruption hence their silence on the subject at their manifesto launch which was held at the University of Cape Coast in the Central Region on Saturday, August 22, 2020.



Im not surprised because they (NPP) have actually lost the fight against corruption. This president is not willing to fight corruption. And everybody knows that when you fight corruption, corruption fights back at you and depending on who you are in his (Akufo-Addo) administration, you can do whatever you want and get away with it.



Because he will (Akufo- Addo) personally clear you and say that nothing at all has happened. I mentioned the other day that there is a long list of cases of corruption and he has not made anybody to investigate it.



My point is that when you fight corruption you need to do it so that it becomes a deterrent, so that others will not engage in it and so obviously they have lost the fight, he stressed.



Mr. Mahama was of the view that the failure of the Akufo-Addo government to fight corruption as promised, has weakened the confidence of Ghanaians in politicians.



The former president further stated that it was unfortunate that the Auditor General, Mr. Daniel Domelevo, who he described as energetic was asked to proceed on leave. Look at what has happened to Domelevo. Domelevo is seen as an energetic Auditor General who has taken on quite some high profile issues, it is a constitutional body and it is supposed to be independent of government in order that the occupant can do his job properly.



"Unfortunately, this president who is a lawyer and must know the constitution than I has asked the auditor general to go on leave. It is the same as asking the EC Commissioner go on leave or the Chief Justice to go on leave, he said.



He said Akufo-Addo did so because the Auditor General was investigating someone who was close to the president.



When youre on leave and they change the lock to your office, it means there is no intention that you are coming back, so obviously this government has lost the fight against corruption, he said.



President Akufo-Addo in a statement dated Monday, June 29, and signed by the Director of Communications at the Presidency, Mr Eugene Arhin, directed the Auditor General to proceed on his accumulated leave and hand over all matters relating to his office to Mr Johnson Akuamoah Asiedu, the Deputy Auditor-General, to act as Auditor-General, until his return from his well-deserved leave.

Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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A 36-year-old Brigantine man is accused of murdering his wife, Atlantic County prosecutors announced Sunday.

Robert Declementi was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after his wife, Rachel, 30, was found dead in their home Saturday with numerous injuries, prosecutors said without disclosing details.

Brigantine police received a 911 call at 4:27 a.m. Saturday and responded to the couples home on Girard Place.

An autopsy is scheduled for Monday.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 23:57:44|Editor: huaxia

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LONDON, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- A special needs school in Dundee, a coastal city in eastern Scotland, has been closed after 17 teachers contracted COVID-19, British media reported Monday.

Kingspark School shut last Wednesday after 17 teachers, two pupils, and three contacts tested positive for coronavirus.

Teachers and pupils are now self-isolating for 14 days. Contact tracers had identified links to two other schools.

Local medical officials confirmed positive cases among three "community contacts" linked to the cluster at the school, which has about 185 pupils aged between 5 and 18, according to the reports.

Ellie Hothersall, a consultant in public health medicine with the National Health Service in the region, told The Guardian newspaper that a detailed contact tracing programme is tackling the spread of coronavirus.

The cases were reported as a total of 66 people in Scotland tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, according to the first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon.

Sturgeon told the Scottish government's regular coronavirus briefing that the total number of people who have tested positive is now 19,877. Enditem
NEWS FLASH

Poland is lifting a ban on flights to and from Serbia next week, however, restrictions will remain in place for a number of countries until September 8 at the earliest, including Macedonia and Montenegro. Overall, Poland is adding twenty countries to its flight ban list for a total of 63 among which are Spain, Belgium, Malta and Romania. Along with Serbia, the ban has been lifted for flights to China, Singapore, Russia, Gabon, as well as Sao Tome and Principe. The decision comes into effect on September 2. It will enable LOT Polish Airlines to restore its operations to Belgrade. Entry restrictions and regulations remain in place.
A local Black Lives Matter organizer says Kenosha, Wisconsin, will keep being destroyed until the city announces the firing of the police officer who shot Jacob Blake. Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via REUTERS

At least one police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake, 29, in the back at least seven times on Sunday.

Blake's shooting  in the middle of nationwide protests against police brutality  prompted protests and riots in the city on Sunday night.

A Kenosha Black Lives Matter organizer said she had been encouraging investigators to be transparent with the public about actions against the cops involved  and she fears that if they aren't, the city will continue to burn.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Whitney Cabal, a Black Lives Matter organizer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was three days into a march to Washington, DC, to protest police brutality when her phone blew up with calls about the police shooting of a 29-year-old Black man in her own city.

A graphic video posted on social media on Sunday appeared to show Jacob Blake walking away from two police officers and attempting to get in his car when one of the officers grabbed and pulled his T-shirt from behind. After that, the two officers point their guns at his back. Seven shots can be heard.

Blake was taken to a Milwaukee hospital for surgery, his brother told the WTMJ-TV reporter Lauren Linder. The civil-rights attorney Ben Crump said Blake's three sons were in the car when the shots were fired.

Blake's shooting prompted Kenosha, a city of just over 100,000 people, to erupt in rage and violence on Sunday night.

Crowds formed at the site where Blake was shot and set cop cars in the area on fire, Cabal told Insider. One officer was beaten in the head with a brick, she said.

The officers involved in Blake's shooting were placed on administrative leave while it's investigated, the Wisconsin Department of Justice said in a statement.

"People are mad," said Cabal, who goes by Billy Violet online. "Until this city hears that the officer has been fired or what the update is, the city is going to keep burning."

Story continues

Kenosha erupted in protest through Sunday night

When crowds surrounded a police station and banged on the doors, they were teargassed and struck with rubber bullets.

"I puked. I cried. I got separated from my friend," Kyle Flood, a local activist and former school board member, told Insider. "Someone was walking by and had a little bit of milk left and dumped it in my eyes."

Flood said people were agitated by the time the police started using tear gas, but that pushed the situation into chaos, with the crowds moving on to Civic Center Park.

"Two minutes later, the first dump truck went up in flames, and it spiraled out of control," Flood said.

Flood told Sheriff David Beth that the best thing officers could do at that point to calm the situation would be to leave, which they eventually did.

Older leaders from the local NAACP and other community groups arrived, trying to calm down the crowds. By that point, their story had gone national, Flood said.

At the park, rioters lit Department of Public Works trucks in the area on fire, causing explosions, Cabal said.

Isaac Wallner, a Kenosha activist, told Insider that he arrived about 30 minutes after Blake was shot and remained until 2 a.m.

"I got a little bit of the teargassing; my lungs were burning," Wallner said. "There is a lot of pent-up frustration because of things like George Floyd. A lot of people are angry, rightfully so."

A firefighter near a burned truck near the Kenosha County Courthouse on Monday. AP Photo/Morry Gash

Wallner said that he had dreamed of becoming a police officer to bring diversity to the department and that he planned to get weight-loss surgery in December to help with the process.

But the recent killings of Black people at the hands of the police have him questioning whether he should continue on his quest to reform policing from the inside or just walk away, he said.

"I always wanted to work in public service," he said. "I wanted to be out there not to hold a gun, not to have all the power, but to be part of a change in policing in America."

Chaos won't stop without a firing or arrest

Cabal said that when she heard what was happening in the city from people on the ground, she immediately called Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis and a public-information officer, with whom she had formed a relationship during an effort to rebuild trust between the city and the public.

When she called the department on Sunday, though, the dispatcher hung up on her, she said.

At 1 a.m. on Monday, she reached District Attorney Mike Graveley and told him that investigators from the Wisconsin Department of Justice's Division of Criminal Investigation  which is leading the investigation into the shooting  must be transparent with civilians or the destruction would continue, she said.

"The woman I'm traveling with, her daughters were stuck in a house right across the street from the incident," Cabal said. "There was rioting, busting up cop cars, and they had riot gear out. Her babies are of a darker complexion, so they were scared to leave and called for a police escort to get them out."

Smashed windows at the Kenosha County Administration Building. Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via REUTERS

Cabal said the district attorney told her that the Division of Criminal Investigation likely wouldn't announce any officer firings until it had time to investigate, following protocol.

Cabal said she worries that people can't wait that long.

"I said, 'With the way that things are going, it's eventually going to come to a time where officers are going to have to choose whether or not their job is important or whether or not justice is important,'" Cabal said. "Because they're going to have to watch their city burn until someone opens their mouth."

Wallner and Flood, too, said they think the chaos and destruction in response to Blake's shooting would continue at least until the officer is fired.

"If he's not fired, there's going to be more of the chaos side of things  along with the protests," Wallner said. "I feel like that may lessen the impact on the property of the community. That needs to happen for people to calm down a little bit until they can process their thoughts on how to move forward on how to fight for change."

"I do think that if they do not arrest this officer, there is a huge risk for another night like last night," Flood said.

"What we need is all eyes on Kenosha, and it's something we've needed for a long time," Flood said. "The political culture in Kenosha is bad. The racism in Kenosha, and the state, is bad."

Organized protests and unorganized violence will continue

Cabal said she never encourages violence unless it's in self-defense. She said Black Lives Matter organizers from surrounding states, including Indiana, had reached out to her to see whether they could help, knowing she's out of town.

Protesters from surrounding cities will be arriving in Kenosha on Monday, Cabal said.

The city has implemented an 8 p.m. curfew, but some protests aren't scheduled to begin until after that.

Wallner said organized protests would take place at Civic Center Park. He said he expected more unorganized demonstrations in the same area, as it's near the police station.

A protester shines a flashlight in the direction of Kenosha County sheriff's deputies outside the Kenosha Police Department on Sunday. Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via REUTERS

Cabal said that she didn't want to return home and that she planned to continue following the Milwaukee activist Frank Nitty on his 750-mile march to Washington. Cabal and others have been following Nitty in cars as he makes the journey on foot.

They plan to arrive on Friday, the 57th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and be joined by as many as 100,000 activists calling for an end to racism in America.

"I can't do anything about the looters. I'm not watching the city burn," she said. "I'm on a much bigger mission out here that will help my community."

This article has been updated.

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 18:09 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c4017c1d 1 National Evi-Novida-Ginting-Manik,KPU,Jokowi,DKPP Free

Evi Novida Ginting Manik officially returned to her position as General Elections Commission (KPU) commissioner on Monday after President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo revoked a presidential decree regarding her dismissal.

"We conducted a meeting and decided to allow Bu Evi to return as a KPU member for the 2017-2022 term starting from [Monday]," KPU chairman Arief Budiman said.

Arief said Jokowi had issued on Aug. 11 Presidential Decree No. 80/P/2020 to revoke his previous decree approving Evi's permanent dismissal from the commission.

Evi had sent the new decree to relevant parties such as the Election Organization Ethics Council (DKPP), the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) and the Home Ministry.

She will return to her original position in the KPU as the coordinator of the technical division, Arief said.

"There has not been any change in relation to her tasks. So, for now Bu Evi will return as the coordinator of the technical division," he said as quoted by kompas.com.

Jokowi issued Presidential Decree No. 34/2020 on Evi's dismissal in late March after the DKPP dismissed her for allegedly falsifying the 2019 regional election results in West Kalimantan.

Evi filed a lawsuit with the Jakarta State Administrative Court (PTUN) in March against Jokowis decree. The court ruled in her favor in July, ordering the President to revoke the decree, rehabilitate Evis name and restore her position at the KPU.

The PTUN judges cited serious juridical defects by the DKPP in the decision-making process in Evis dismissal, arguing that she had not been afforded her right of defense as the council had not questioned Evi prior to issuing the ruling.

On Aug. 7, presidential expert staff member Dini Shanti Purwono said Jokowi respected the ruling and would not file an appeal.

The President will issue another decree to revoke a decree stipulating Evi Novidas dismissal as a KPU commissioner, Dini said. (nal)
A Florida healthcare worker may lose her hands after a long and arduous five-month battle against the novel coronavirus.

Rose Felipe, 41, an EEG technician of more than 15 years at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, contacted the virus in early March.

Her condition quickly deteriorated and she was hospitalized, spending two months on a ventilator.

The ventilator saved her life but, during this period, Felipe suffered extensive tissue and muscle damage that had made her fingers go necrotic and turn black.

Doctors say she will likely have to lose most of her fingers or, in the worst case, both of her hands.

Rosa Felipe, 41 (left and right), a technician at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida, tested positive for coronavirus on March 9. Her condition deteriorated due to underlying health conditions and she needed to be hospitalized and placed on a ventilator

Doctors believe Felipe developed blood clots, which caused her fingers to become necrotic and turn black (pictured)

Felipe told the Miami Herald that she likely caught the virus due to poor safety measures that were put in place by hospital administrators.

'At the beginning of the crisis, the precautions and protections were activated too late,' she said.

'They told us to stretch our mask use to two weeks. There was a note on the board: "Wear your N-95 mask until it is soiled or wet and then you can exchange it."

'We made our own face shields with Krazy Glue. We bought the material on the internet with our own money.'

A spokesperson told the newspaper that about five percent of the 12,500 workers at Jackson health system have tested positive for COVID-19.

Felipe also had to travel throughout the hospital testing brain activity in many patients, which only increased her risk of exposure.

On March 9, Felipe learned she was infected with the virus and she had to be hospitalized at the very same hospital where she worked.

The mother-of-two, who is overweight, also has two underlying health conditions that likely worsened her condition, diabetes and asthma.

She was first placed on a ventilator before being placed on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, the Herald reported.

The machine, typically used for those with heart and lung issues, pumps and oxygenates a patient's blood outside the body, which allows the heart and lungs to rest.

According to the Herald, she needed to undergo dialysis after her kidneys began showing signs of failure.

Before being intubated, Felipe told CNN she asked a physician for a piece of paper so she could write a goodbye note to her children.

'I wrote on the paper to my children that I wanted them not to give up, and not to be upset with God,' she said.

'Because if something were to happen to me, this was his will and I didn't want them to be upset with God, I wanted them to be loving and happy that God allowed us to have the time that we did have.'

Both of her hands up to her wrists may have to be amputated but some of her fingers on her left hand may be saved. Pictured: Felipe's necrotic fingers

Felipe (pictured) says what keeps her going is the belief that she will soon see her two sons, age five and 12, again

Doctors believe Felipe developed blood clots and didn't have enough blood flow to her fingers, which turned them black.

A surgical team told her she will probably need to have both hands be amputated at the wrist, although they might be able to save some fingers on her left hand, the Herald reported.

Felipe said what keeps her going is the thought of being able to see her sons - 12-year-old Saiid and five-year-old Ishaan, soon.

'I know that in the end, I'm going to be with them...I know that,' she told CNN.

'So that's what keeps me focused, and it keeps me wanting to heal and wanting to get out of here fully restored.'

Felipe's niece has set up a GoFundMe page to help cover the cost of medical expense as well as ease the financial burden on Felipe's children.

As of Monday afternoon, more than $9,300 had raised out of a $50,000 goal.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:01:53|Editor: huaxia

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NAIROBI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Kenya's health ministry said Monday it will leverage on revamped laboratories, trained manpower and speedy acquisition of reagents to boost COVID-19 testing amid a backlog that has derailed flattening of the curve.

Rashid Aman, chief administrative secretary in the Ministry of Health, said that modernizing 24 laboratories spread across the country and providing them with adequate technicians will ensure that COVID-19 testing is fast, efficient and accurate.

"We are improving testing capacity for COVID-19 in different parts of the country and ensure the results are relayed electronically," Aman said at a daily briefing in Nairobi.

He acknowledged that state-funded testing facilities have in the recent past marred by a backlog occasioned by inadequate supplies like reagents and swabs.

Aman said the ministry of health is coordinating with devolved units to improve their testing capacity for COVID-19 amid intensified efforts to contain the pandemic.

"It is true we have experienced backlogs that have slowed down testing of COVID-19 but the matter is being addressed through joint effort between the ministry of health and county governments," said Aman.

Patrick Amoth, acting director-general in the Ministry of Health, said that Kenya is keen to achieve COVID-19 testing targets recommended by public health experts in order to contain its spread.

Amoth said the ministry was still working with the earlier projections that the pandemic could peak between August and September, stressing that the next three weeks will be critical to determine whether the country has flattened the curve.

"We now have more laboratories testing COVID-19 when compared to the early days of the pandemic in April," he added.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases reached 32,557 on Monday after 193 out of 3,381 samples tested positive for the disease, bringing cumulative tests since the first case was reported in the country in mid-March hit 425,364.

Among the positive cases was a two-month-old infant while the oldest was aged 87 years, as the national fatalities tally reached 554 after six patients succumbed to the disease.

Kenya has lately witnessed a drop in COVID-19 cases as positivity rate hit 5.7 percent on Monday and officials pledged robust interventions to ensure that a positivity rate of 5 percent and lower is achieved to help flatten the curve.

The ministry said 225 patients recovered between Sunday and Monday, out of which 188 are from home-based care program while 37 were discharged from various health facilities, bringing the total number of recoveries to 18,895. Enditem
South Africa: Condolences for Social Development DDG

Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu has expressed sadness at the sudden passing of Welfare Services Deputy Director-General Conny Nxumalo.

The DSD family learnt with great sadness the sudden passing of 'South Africas Chief Social Worker' who lived the life of service to the best of her abilities until her last breath. A mentor who was always ready to provide advice on the work of the department, and very knowledgeable on any issue related to welfare matters in particular, said Minister Zulu on Sunday.

The Deputy Director-General (DDG) passed away on Saturday morning.

She made particularly valuable contribution in championing innovative programmes to protect children and was one of the architects of the departments national action plan to combat violence against women and children as well as the anti-substance abuse interventions.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 in South Africa, Nxumalo was in the forefront of our national response, representing the department and the sector as a whole at the NATJOINT, said Minister Zulu.

Minister Zulu said Nxumalos passing has robbed South Africa of a leader who served with distinction.

I offer my deepest condolences to her family and friends as we mourn her untimely passing and celebrate a remarkable life dedicated to bettering the lives of the most vulnerable in our country, she said.

Nxumalo was admitted to hospital due to COVID-19 related complications.

We had hoped that she will recover and be with her family and with time return to work as she was in the frontline of our national efforts so that many in our country can benefit from her work. So much of our work in protecting children, older persons and persons with disabilities are the result of her extraordinary vision and leadership.

The DDG was a qualified social worker with a Masters degree in Public and Development Management with the University of the Witwatersrand.

She first worked in different settings as a social worker in the provincial spheres and later joined the National Department of Social Development in 2003, as a Director for Substance Abuse focusing on policy development, legislation, program monitoring and implementation in the area of substance abuse.

As we mourn and celebrate the life of this remarkable woman, we urge all members of the DSD family to remain vigilant in the face of the persistent threat that COVID-19 poses.

Even as the lockdown regulations have been eased, we also urge all South Africans to continue exercise caution by practicing social distancing, washing their hands, wearing a mask and avoiding crowded places, Minister Zulu said.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
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Linkedin Vishal Manve and Ammu Kannampilly (Agence France-Presse) Mumbai, India  Mon, August 24, 2020 08:01 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066fec386 2 Art & Culture coronavirus,COVID-19,elephant,India,festival,art-and-culture Free

Indian authorities have imposed tough anti-coronavirus restrictions on gatherings and the size of Ganesha elephant god idols for one of the biggest religious festivals of the year that started Saturday.

The 10 days of prayers and family gatherings for Ganesh Chaturthi started under a pandemic cloud with the country closing on three million infections and 56,000 deaths.

Most major cities have ordered that effigies of the popular elephant-headed god Ganesha, which can draw thousands of Hindu devotees onto the streets, be shrunk back.

Traditionally, the idols can tower 10 meters high or more and need dozens of people to carry them but this year authorities said they can be no more than 1.1 meters tall in a bid to cut crowds.

In New Delhi, no Ganesha idols will be shown in public while hard-hit Mumbai has cut back access to the seafront to immerse Ganesha figures, usually the highlight of the festival.

Tens of thousands traditionally flock to the beaches on the final day of the festival to immerse elaborately decorated figurines of the deity in the Arabian Sea.

This year, authorities in India's financial capital have constructed hundreds of artificial immersion ponds across the city to stop hordes crowding the waterfront.

Devotees will also be able to leave their elephant idols at collection centers and volunteers will immerse them in the sea.

Read also: Bling no longer king in India as gold loses its shine

Authorities want devotees to mark the festival at home, dampening enthusiasm among pandemic-weary locals. Even the idols worshipped at home must be no more than 33 centimeters.

"Every year I looked forward to Ganesha celebrations and visited a nearby lake to watch idol immersions. But this year, we are not even inviting friends home for traditional prayers," Mumbai-based analyst Ruta Amin told AFP.

"With lively music, colors, and rituals, the Ganesha festival always brought communities together. But 2020 is muted and sad," the 27-year-old said.

In a sign of the times one of the rare Ganesha elephants on display sprays sanitizer onto the hands of devotees who come to pray.

Worshippers are barred from making public offerings to the deity and organizers have been ordered to sanitize outdoor marquees several times a day.

Some cities which have seen a surge in coronavirus cases had proposed a complete ban on Ganesha gatherings in public.

But in Bangalore, authorities relented following protests by religious groups. Public displays of the elephant figures will still be restricted with socially distanced followers having to wear masks.
Mister Rebbily A looked every bit a professional racehorse when he cruised to a five and three-quarter-length victory in a $12,000 conditioned pace at Yonkers Raceway on August 10. He relaxed in fourth and watched a speed duel play out in front of him before launching a bid three-wide entering the backstretch the final time. He cleared to the lead around the final turn and imposed his will in the stretch under a Jordan Stratton hand drive to post a 1:52 victory.

Considering Mister Rebbily As professional appearance in his last outing, and his three-for-five record since being imported into the United States by trainer Tahnee Camilleri for owner David Kryway, one wouldnt know that only a few months prior, the horse was terrified of just about everything.

Camilleri found Mister Rebbily A while on a trip to Australia to visit her family in January. Mister Rebbily A was racing in overnights at Albion Park and although he was picking up cheques each start, he hadnt won since going back-to-back in April and May 2019. The October 2016 foal had less than $13,000 (AUD) earned and wasnt listed for sale. However, as a half-brother to Firebby A, who won her first three starts in the United States for Camilleri in 2018, the trainer was interested.

I saw him at the races and at his home farm. At the farm, he was very quiet and well-mannered, but at the races, he was quite hot and naughty. I knew I was going to have my work cut out for me, Camilleri said. Hes actually a half-brother to a mare called Firebby who was the mare I initially brought over and started my American dream. There was a little bit of a family connection there and I liked what I saw. He looked like a nice type to get around Yonkers. I purchased him as a Yonkers prospect.

He wasnt really for sale, but because I had trained and sold his sister over here, he was on my radar and I was luckily able to negotiate a sale while I was over there. He was extremely lightly raced, just at the start of his career. Most trainers dont want to lose horses that early on. I was very fortunate to be able to buy him.

Mister Rebbily A was cleared to the United States on January 20, but even a month after arriving stateside was no closer to starting in a race. Moving from a small farm in Australia to New Jerseys bustling Gaitway Farm made everything a challenge for Mister Rebbily A and his connections.

He was born and broken in on the farm that he was trained out of. It was like he came to the big city and it was very overwhelming for him, Camilleri said. Hed never experienced horses training coming at him while he was jogging, which he was petrified of. And dont get me started on the tractor. He would be jogging on the half-mile track and he would see the tractor on the mile track and he would run off the track. His eyes were bugging out of his head, there was just so much stimulation for him and hes already a hot little horse.

He wasnt used to crossties. He had to be broken to crossties and just a simple thing such as picking up his feet on the crossties would send him into a panic. It took a lot of work in the barn and a lot of work on the track, said Camilleri, who credits caretaker Yvan for working with Mister Rebbily A in the barn.

Recognizing she was effectively breaking a new horse from scratch, Camilleri enlisted the help of Ernie Hendry, an assistant trainer at Julie Millers stable who has significant experience breaking and training difficult young horses.

Ernie said hes never had a horse who was as fearful of the tractor or as hot as Mister Rebbily when he came, and thats saying something, Camilleri said.

Gradually, Mister Rebbily A started to improve. Mister Rebbily A and Hendry trained in a set with stablemate Billy Lincoln N, driven by Camilleri. With each training session, Camilleri could feel Mister Rebbily As talent revealing itself.

Billy Lincoln is a lovable fellow, unflappable, nothing phases him. Hes a big, tall, strong horse whereas Mister Rebbily is a small, flighty horse. Couldnt get two more opposite horses, but theyre stabled next to each other, they love each other, they go out in the field together, and they train down together. They do everything together, Camilleri said.

I would always cut the mile with Billy and Rebel would sit behind, just teaching him to relax and follow a helmet and see the tractor and the water truck and everything else that was happening. After about a month or two, he was really breathing hard on my helmet and Ernie started pulling him out and we worked them to the line together, and I was just so excited because he was really impressing me. It didnt take long to realize just how good they both were.

Mister Rebbily A was finally ready to qualify May 29 as the coronavirus racing shutdowns began to ease across the eastern United States. After finishing fifth in a trial at Gaitway, where he paced his mile in 1:53.1 with a :27.3 final quarter, Camilleri entered Mister Rebbily A in a $11,000 overnight at the Meadowlands Racetrack on June 6. He started from Post 10 and finished up the track.

He was very upset and very nervous. That was his first time racing under lights; he had only raced in the daytime in Australia. Meadowlands in and of itself can hot up even the quietest horse, so it was just a little too much stimulation, Camilleri said. I took him to the races expecting he would be a handful, and he was. He didnt do anything wrong in the race, thank goodness, but he was just washed out. He had run his race before he stepped foot on the track.

Mister Rebbily A qualified again at Gaitway June 29 with Dexter Dunn in the sulky and returned to the Meadowlands on July 4. Mister Rebbily A made short work of the competition in a $6,000 overnight, as he cruised to a three and three-quarter-length win in 1:52.

Mister Rebbily A moved to Yonkers and scored another open-length win in a $12,000 conditioned pace on July 13 before finishing second by a nose in the same class July 27. After his win on August 10, Mister Rebbily A improved his record to five-for-17 with another five placings and $27,169 earned.

Mister Rebbily A will make his next start Monday night (August 24) in the seventh race at Yonkers, a $14,500 pace for non-winners of eight pari-mutuel races or $100,000. He drew Post 2 and will have a new driver in George Brennan as Stratton opted for Pete Trittons Globaldomination N, who drew Post 6 and will be seeking his fifth win in 10 starts this season. The field also includes The Moonshadow N, who drew inside and who will look to make it four in a row for Mark Harder.

[Mister Rebbily As] heart rate was really good and he had plenty left (after his last start). Im sure if pressed, he could go 1:51. I think he could make a lot of money at Yonkers if he can do that, Camilleri said. Im so proud about what hes done. I cant help but sing the horses praises. Im very proud of the little bugger.

Yonkers Raceways revised schedule features live harness racing Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday nights through September 12. First-race post time will be at 7:12 p.m.

(SOA of NY)
Talks between West African mediators and Malis military coup leaders ended on Monday after three days of discussions without any decision on the make-up of a transitional government, a junta spokesman said.

West Africas regional bloc dispatched negotiators to Mali at the weekend in a bid to reverse President Ibrahim Keitas removal from power last week.

But talks had focused on who would lead Mali and for how long, rather than the possibility of reinstating the president, diplomats said.

SEE ALSO:

The coup has raised the prospects of further political turmoil in Mali which, like other countries in the region, is facing an expanding threat from militants.

Ismael Wague said mediators would report to regional heads of state ahead of a summit on Mali this week but, highlighting the backing the soldiers enjoy, the final decision on the interim administration would be decided locally.

Nothing has been decided. Everyone has given their point of view. The final decision of the structure of the transition will be made by us Malians here, Mr Wague said.

Former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who led the regional mediation team, said they requested and were granted access to Mr Keita.

President Keita told us that he has resigned. That he was not forced to do so.

That he does not want to return to politics and that he wants a quick transition to allow the country to return to civilian rule, Mr Jonathan told reporters.

Talks were taking place with the threat of regional sanctions hanging over the junta, known as the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP).

Mediators will discuss this with the heads of state so they can lift or at least ease the sanctions. Sanctions are not good for us or the population, Mr Wague said.

The regional branch of West Africas BCEAO central bank reopened on Monday.

(Reuters/NAN)
The United Arab Emirates is sending four F-16 fighter aircraft for joint training with the Greek military on Crete, an Athens-based daily newspaper reported Friday.

The aircraft will partake in training exercise with Greeces military over the Eastern Mediterranean amid heightened tensions with Turkey, which has deployed naval vessels to escort a hydrocarbon exploration ship to waters claimed by Greece.

The head of Greeces Hellenic National Defense staff spoke with his Emirati counterpart, Lt. Gen. Hamad Mohammed Thani Al Rumaithi, on Thursday, Kathimerini reported.

Athens Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias also spoke with UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. A spokesperson for the UAEs defense ministry was not immediately available for comment.

The deployment comes as Turkey also prepared to announce its largest-ever natural gas discovery in the Black Sea, and just a week after the UAE announced its formal recognition the state of Israel in a historic deal brokered by the US.

Abu Dhabis deployment to Athens Souda airbase is the latest sign of renewed regional opposition to Turkeys ambitions in the Mediterranean.

Israel last week joined Cyprus, Egypt, and France in voicing support for Greece in the dispute. Turkey originally appeared to back off its exploration mission earlier this year after objections from the European Union and US, but then dispatched the vessel, the Oruc Reis, on August 10.

France last week sent Rafale fighter jets to Souda and a naval frigate to the eastern Mediterranean for exercises alongside Greeces navy in an effort to deter Turkeys activities.

French President Emmanuel Macron called on Ankara last week to halt its research in the area. Macron called for sanctions against Turkey last month for what he said were violations of the sovereignty of Cyprus and Greece.

A US Navy expeditionary sea base arrived in Souda Bay on August 18 as part of a pre-scheduled deployment. The US Navy said the deployment was not in response to regional tensions.

Last week a Greek Navy frigate, the Limnos, collided with one of Turkish naval vessels guiding the Oruc Reis.

A source at the Greek defense ministry told Reuters the incident was an accident, but Ankara called it a provocation. Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not immediately confirm the incident but said a high price would be paid for any attack on Turkeys exploration vessel.

Greek Defense Minister Nikos Panagiotopoulos later congratulated the captain of the ship, saying he had done his duty, Ekathimerini reported.

The Oruc Reis is set to conclude its exploratory mission on Sunday, after laying some 1,700 meters of cable, Turkeys energy minister has said.
Cancer patient Denise Knight says she is terrified, stressed and angry.

She is scheduled for complicated surgery in Adelaide on September 17, with the operation to be led by a surgeon who once saved her life.

Cancer patient Denise Knight has been barred from heading to Adelaide for treatment.

But under harsh new border restrictions introduced last week, the South Australian health authorities have twice denied her application to cross the border from Victoria.

Mrs Knight's only alternative is to drive from her home near Mildura to Warrnambool, where she can be seen by another surgeon who she has never met.
Lawsuit seeks to delay enforcing Noem's new abortion pill ban

Planned Parenthood and ACLU of South Dakota are suing Noem and the Department of Health in enforcing a new abortion pill ban.
We are proud to be working with Quinsigamond Community College as they embark on transforming and automating the key foundational aspects of operating a successful, forward-looking institution, said Jim Milton, CEO of Anthology.

Anthology, a leading provider of proven higher education solutions that support the entire learner lifecycle, today announced that Quinsigamond Community College (QCC) has selected its CampusNexus suite of modern cloud-based solutions to drive its digital transformation. To improve the institutions entire operational landscape and elevate accessibility and overall student success, QCC will be implementing the following solutions in the CampusNexus Cloud:



CampusNexus Student

CampusNexus Engage

CampusNexus Finance, HR & Payroll

CampusNexus Occupation Insight

QCC serves over 13,000 students annually across 7 locations in Central Massachusetts. The institution offers over 120 degree and certificate career options spanning Business, Hospitality Management, Engineering Technology, Education, Healthcare, Human Services, Liberal Arts, Maintenance Technology, and General Studies.

We are proud to be working with the Quinsigamond Community College team as they embark on transforming and automating the key foundational aspects of operating a successful, forward-looking institution, said Jim Milton, CEO of Anthology. Our CampusNexus suites extensive data-driven capabilities are a perfect fit for their vision to continue evolving and unifying their multi-campus operations with innovation and student engagement at the forefront.

Built using Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Power BI, Anthologys CampusNexus solutions are designed to harness the collective power of best-in-breed technologies and decades of higher education expertise. CampusNexus Student offers a dynamic Student Information System (SIS) that evolves with the institution and CampusNexus Engage drives student success through a premier system of intelligence and engagement that supports recruiting, enrollment and retention. CampusNexus Finance, HR & Payroll delivers a feature-rich ERP and financial management system to drive higher education efficiencies and compliance. CampusNexus Occupation Insight helps align academic programs and student skills with the needs of the marketplace through advanced workforce analytics.

###

About Anthology

Campus Labs, Campus Management and iModules have joined together to form Anthology. We exist to help higher education advance and thrive. Through a connected data experience that offers a holistic view, creates efficiencies, and provides intelligence, Anthology inspires constituents to reach their full potential using technology insights in admission and enrollment management; student success and retention; institutional and learning effectiveness; alumni and advancement; and enterprise applications and infrastructure. Anthology partners with more than 2,100 colleges and institutions in over 30 countries to address the needs of all constituents in higher education. Visit us at http://www.anthologyinc.com.
California has faced hundreds of wildfires the past week, which have left seven people dead and caused tens of thousands to flee. As a result, hotels are stepping in to help communities affected by the blazes.

On all sides of the San Francisco Bay Area, three of the largest fires in California are burning: the LNU Lightning Complex to the north has burned 347,630 acres and was 21% contained; the SCU Lightning Complex to the southeast has burned 343,965 acres and was 10% contained, and the CZU Lightning Complex to the south has burned 74,000 and was 8% contained. A lightning complex is a group of fires started by lightning strikes.

Due to the CZU August Lightning Complex Fires in Santa Cruz County, free hotel vouchers may be available for those in certain areas. "Free hotel vouchers may be available to evacuees from official evacuation areas," reads a statement on the county's website. "To access this state/federal program, visit any of the overnight shelters below and ask for a hotel voucher form. The list of available hotels differ from those listed on this site, and may be located in nearby counties. Proof of residency required."

What we know: Massive wildfires scorch California as threat of lightning igniting more blazes looms

A list of hotels can be found at www.santacruzcounty.us, which lists the properties that allow pets and where discounts may be available. Some hotels report that they are already full, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

The southern California city of San Jose has provided a list of discounted hotels on its tourism website with this message: "Team San Jose would like to thank our generous hotel partners and Silicon Valley Strong for these special, reduced rates. Stay strong, stay safe, stay well."

Those hotels include the AC Hotel San Jose Downtown, Best Western Plus Airport Plaza, Country Inn & Suites by Radisson, San Jose International Airport, DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel San Jose, Fairmont San Jose and more (a full list is available here).

Story continues

The Red Cross has also offered assistance.

Three massive wildfires are scorching Northern California, and more than 650 wildfires, most sparked by lightning, have burned across the state in the last week.

At least seven people have died, including the first victim of the CZU Lightning Complex fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, who was found dead Sunday.

Nearly a quarter-million people were under evacuation orders and warnings as weather forecasts signaled the looming threat of more lightning with hot temperatures and unpredictable winds.

The toll on the community has been devastating for some residents. "Tuesday night, when I went to bed, I had a beautiful home on a beautiful ranch, said Hank Hanson, 81, of Vacaville. "By Wednesday night, I have nothing but a bunch of ashes."

Contributing: Susan Miller, Ryan Miller and Jordan Culver, USA TODAY; Joe Jacquez, Ventura County Star; The Associated Press

'Be vigilant': Hotel group condemns Trump administration's use of hotels to hold migrant kids

'Feels like I'm dorming anyway': Hotels housing college students in effort to social distance

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: California wildfire: Hotels offer vouchers, discounts
Ghana on Monday promoted war veteran and ex-serviceman, Private Joseph Ashitey Hammond, to the rank of Warrant Officer Class One (WO1), for his patriotic exploits and continuous service to the nation.

The honour was conferred on him by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, on July 20 this year, following his recent humanitarian efforts.

The war veteran, 95, in June this year, embarked on a two-kilometre walk a day for seven days to raise funds to support COVID-19 frontline workers and vulnerable veterans.

This earned him the Commonwealth Points of Light Award from the British Queen, an award he is yet to receive at an official ceremony at the British High Commission in Accra.

At a ceremony to officially confer the State Honour on Private (Pte) Ashitey Hammond, Mr Dominic Nitiwul, the Minister of Defence, described as exemplary the activities of the ex-serviceman over the years.

He said Pte Ashitey Hammond, even as a retiree, continued to contribute to the development of the country.

In contemporary times, this gallant veteran has been an Ambassador for Veterans Association of Ghana, touring some schools in the Accra Metropolis to educate students and pupils on not just Ghana's history, but the virtues of patriotism, Mr Nitiwul said.

It was in view of these exceptional contributions and sacrifices of the war veteran that the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, Nana Akufo-Addo, deemed it right and appropriate to confer on him the Honourary Rank of Warrant Officer Class One, he said.

It is my hope and belief that this will motivate and encourage others to strive and emulate his achievements.

Ex-Pte Ashitey, 95, was a Second World War veteran and was among a group of ex-servicemen who marched to the Osu Castle on February 28, 1948, to present a petition to the then Governor of the Gold Coast.

This led to the shooting and the death of three servicemen; Sergeant Adjetey, Corporal Attipoe and Private Odartey.

Mr Nitiwul said even though the welfare of veterans had improved over the past three years, government was committed to ensuring that their welfare, particularly ex-officers, improved further in the coming years.

He commended the Military High Command and the Veterans Association of Ghana (VAG) for their selfless service to the nation.

Lieutenant General Obed Boamah Akwa, the Chief of the Defence Staff, described the work of the ex-serviceman as exceptional and worth emulating.

He added that honours and awards were means of recognising service of outstanding officers beyond the normal demand of duty.

He said the honour would, therefore, boost the morale of serving officers, adding; It is hoped that the current generation of Ghanaians will continue to work hard to change the country for the better whether they are in or out of uniform.

Major General Clayton Yaache, the Board Chair of VAG, expressed profound gratitude to the President, the Minister of Defence, and the Chief of the Defence Staff for the unique honour not only to the recipient but to all veterans.

He appealed to them to continue to recognise and appreciate veterans for their past service and contribution to the state to encourage young officers to give off their best.

WO1 Ashitey Hammond, on his part, expressed appreciation to the President, the Military High Command, and VAG for making this a reality.

He assured the state of his continuous service in any capacity for the betterment of the country and the continent at large.

He further urged Ghanaians to adopt the spirit of patriotism and work to enhance the image of the country globally.

GNA
Group of Amba boys in Kumba Facebook

Separatists are bracing up for a major showdown against state forces in Kumba, Meme Division of the South West Region after they called for a 14-day lockdown to protest against the sealing of shops at the Kumba Main Market by municipal and administrative authorities.

US-based Cameroonian activist, Christopher Anu, who says he is Secretary for Communication & IT at the Ambazonia Interim Government, pushed out an audio record on Saturday inciting the population to embark on days of civil disobedience.

Last Wednesday, we gave the Mayors, DOs and SDO for Meme Division, and Kumba in particular until Friday, August 21 to unseal every single shop that they sealed in Kumba Market, said Anu, frontline activist of a group sponsoring armed rebels in Cameroons North West and South West Regions in a bid to create a state christened Ambazonia.

The resident of Houston, Texas, says the Interim Government and the Meme County administrators are declaring a two weeks complete shutdown of the city of Kumba in solidarity with every trader at the Kumba Main Market beginning Monday, August 24, 2020.

If the administrators will choose to unseal those shops with immediate effect, the lockdown will be canceled. Only the ghost town will remain on this Monday.

The Ambazonia Restoration Forces are completely in charge beginning Monday. If you love your life, and your business, stay home. The restoration forces will be all over the place.

Anus threats notwithstanding, administrators have always asked locals to trust the government for their protection.

Cameroon-Info.Net recalls that on Monday, August 3, 2020, Chamberlain Ntouou Ndong, Senior Divisional Officer, SDO, for Meme Division said the state is providing security to all citizens, including traders and buyers in Kumba.

The administrative officer was at the Kumba Main Market to supervise the City Councils sealing of shops that remained closed in respect of a routine Monday lockdown ordered by separatists.

Accompanied by security forces, Victor Nkele Ngoh, City Mayor of the Kumba City Council, KCC, supervised the sealing of all unopened shops at the Kumba Main Market and its environs.

Victor Nkele Ngoh said the decision to seal the shops is intended to punish traders who are respecting ghost towns imposed by separatist fighters and their promoters. He expects that the sealing of shops will serve as a deterrent to other business operators.

To the City Mayor, the socio-political situation in Cameroons North West and South West Regions has nothing to do with traders and thus nothing explains their decision to keep their shops closed on a normal working day.

Victor Nkele Ngoh says all those whose business premises and shops were sealed are expected to pay a fine of FCFA 25,000 before they can regain access into their shops.

On whether the security of the traders and their businesses can be guaranteed, the City Mayor said the state has taken measures to provide security. He regretted that the continuous respect of lockdown and ghost town calls has been a huge setback to the revenue-generating potential of the City Council.

The Fiango Market and other business hubs in the city have for the most part remained closed on Mondays, as business operators cite security concerns following threats from armed separatists.

Besides the fact that buyers hardly show up to buy on ghost town days, traders say they are regularly victimized by armed separatists for obeying state authority.

As you are saying that we should sell on ghost town days, know that those boys (armed separatists) attack us for doing so. The last time, they whipped me mercilessly and smashed the tomatoes I was selling, a seller told the SDO on August 3, as she struggled to display her goods with the hope of finding buyers.

Do not worry. The problem is going to be solved now, the SDO replied as state forces guarded him. You are here today. You are selling. We are going to sell the whole day together, not so? I am here.

Kumba is the economic capital of Cameroons South West Region and also the administrative capital of the regions Meme Division. State forces have been battling to dislodge armed separatists who pitched their tent in Meme Division since the current crisis transformed into an armed conflict in 2017.

Corporate demands by Common Law Lawyers and Anglophone Teachers led to protests in November 2016. The street demonstrations later morphed into ongoing running gun battles between state forces and armed separatist fighters in the predominantly English-speaking regions, leading to untold destruction of human lives, their habitats, and livelihoods.
We have repeatedly said in the online sessions that we all want our students back in school, Maine South Principal Ben Collins said in a Sunday statement on the District 207 high schools website. For that to happen, the rules outside of the school cannot differ from the rules inside school  and large parties are not going to help. What was also troubling was the lack of partnership that we witnessed through the weekend as we spoke to families who either refused to share information or gave us false impressions of what took place.
Mathura:

A labourer died after he allegedly suffered a cardiac arrest while standing in a bank queue to withdraw money "for the treatment of his son".

Uma Shankar, a resident of Durga colony in Goverdhan was queued outside the Govardhan branch of Central bank on Friday, to withdraw money for the treatment of his ailing son, when he suffered a cardiac arrest, police said.

"He died before any treatment could be provided," they said.

Shankar, father of five daughters and a son, was trying to withdraw money from the bank for the last four days, police said. Angry

villagers led by a local RLD leader Kunvar Narendra Singh, blocked roads for over three hours, demanding compensation for Shankar's family and police case against the bank employees.

The blockade was removed after police intervened. "We are not going to sit idle unless justice is given to the labourer," said Singh. "A probe will be initiated to ascertain the alleged accusation against the bank staff," SDM M P Singh said. "Efforts will be made to provide maximum help to Uma Shankar's family," he added.

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Swapnil Pawar

There is a class of issuers in Indian debt markets that is treated as being very safe in terms of credit risk  the quasi-sovereign companies. Generally, these include the so-called Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) and their subsidiaries. There is, in fact, a whole category of bond mutual funds called Banking and PSU Debt Funds that invests exclusively in debt issued by banks (public and private) and PSUs  under the broad assumption that banks and PSUs are safer that other issuers of debt.

This assumption is not entirely wrong. However, it is too general and can become dangerous in specific cases. This article explores why.

IL&FS was thought to be quasi-sovereign

After the event, many experts came forward to state that IL&FS was not a well-run institution and its default was only to be expected. Hindsight is 20-20 indeed; when the going was good, not many doubted IL&FS! Credit rating agencies gave it a full AAA status. The problems at IL&FS were largely ignored even by savvy institutional investors such as debt mutual funds. That was because a lot of investors considered IL&FS to be a quasi-sovereign company.

Listen: Will RBI's loan restructuring scheme work for you?

Was IL&FS indeed a quasi-sovereign company? It started operations in 1987 as a company owned by Central Bank of India, Unit Trust of India and HDFC. In that sense, it was never directly owned by the government of India. Also, it was never a wholly owned (or majority owned) subsidiary of a single government-owned company/bank. Over time, its ownership passed to LIC, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and ORIX Corporation. In this form, it hardly qualified to be called a quasi-sovereign company. Yet, most investors treated it as such.

Implicit guarantees mean nothing

When IL&FS defaulted on its obligations, it was widely believed that the government would intervene to bail it out and make good on its repayment obligations. The government did not. The important takeaway for investors was that unless the government explicitly guarantees some paper issued by a company, there is no real meaning to the term implicit guarantee of the government. By virtue of a direct or indirect ownership in an entity, the government does not automatically become liable to pay that entitys dues. Hence, although LIC owned part of IL&FS, it did not come forward to pay on its behalf.

The shades of ownership

As shown in the below graph, there are various possibilities when it comes to government ownership. Some companies are owned by the central government entirely  such as the National Highway Authorities of India. Some others are majority owned by the central government  PSU Banks, NTPC, Power Finance Corporation etc. There are wholly/majority owned subsidiaries of such wholly/majority owned companies  e.g., ONGC Mangalore Petrochemicals. Lastly, there are companies that were/are promoted by a government owned/controlled company but are no longer majority owned by them. LIC Housing Finance is an example of this  about 40 per cent of it is owned by LIC and the rest by the public.

Another possibility for government ownership is through state governments. State Electricity Boards are owned by respective state governments. Unlike the central government, the state government debt cannot be treated as sovereign debt since states do not issue currency.

In a nutshell, the government ownership of a company is a complex idea. Even if we assume that the government may intervene in the event of default by a supposedly quasi-sovereign issuer, it is likely to be quite dependent on the nature of government ownership. In cases of direct and majority/full ownership, an investor can be largely justified in her expectation that the government may not allow such a company to default. In the case of minority and/or indirect ownership (i.e., through another PSU), such an expectation is a stretch at best.

As the IL&FS default showed recently, it may be safer to assume that an entity with indirect government stake, especially if it not more than 50%, is as good as a non-government entity! LIC Housing Finance and PNB Housing Finance are not quite government-owned or government-backed in this sense.

What next? It is back to the basics!

Determining the creditworthiness of a supposed quasi-sovereign entity should still start with the assumption that it is a regular company with no government backing. This would give the investor a sense of inherent financial health of the company. For example, ONGC and NTPC are well-run companies with good financials. On the other hand, MTNL has a poor financial status. This tells us that the likelihood of a cash crunch and a need for government intervention is higher for MTNL than it is for NTPC.

After this, the ownership analysis described above enters the picture. In the specific case of MTNL, owing to the direct and majority ownership by the central government, one can have some degree of comfort. How much this improves the creditworthiness of MTNL is a matter of investors judgment. However, it would be counterintuitive to think that MTNL and ONGC both have the same credit risk because both are majority owned and controlled by the central government. Owing to the poor finances of MTNL, it is always going to be a poorer credit than NTPC or ONGC.

The following graph summarizes these axes of ownership and financial health.

Investing in PSU papers  directly or indirectly

Most investors have some exposure to quasi-sovereign issuers of debt  either through direct holdings or, more commonly, through debt mutual funds. It would be wise for investors in either case to evaluate the true relevance of government ownership. If the ownership is direct, by the central government and majority, it is good. Otherwise, one needs be on guard  best to treat minority and indirectly owned companies as effectively non-government-owned. Also, it pays to know the raw creditworthiness of a company  without ownership boost  and stick to well-run companies. For these the need for bail-out itself is low, thus hopefully not invoking their ownership status!

(The writer is Founder, ASQI Advisors)
Here are todays top news, analysis and opinion. Know all about the latest news and other news updates from Hindustan Times.

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Northern Ireland is ready to become a global leader in a future hydrogen economy but needs investment of at least 15m from government, politicians have said.

A group of 10 MLAs and MPs, from North Antrim DUP MP Ian Paisley to Sinn Fein MLA Philip McGuigan, have written to Secretary of State Brandon Lewis and Chancellor Rishi Sunak to call for support for the sector here.

Ballymena bus-builder Wrightbus has already developed a hydrogen electric double-decker bus.

But company owner Jo Bamford has said investment from government is required to help development of hydrogen buses.

Now politicians have joined the call for support. The group of eight, which also includes North Down Alliance MLA Andrew Muir and SDLP South Belfast MP Claire Hanna, have written: "We stand ready to become a global leader in a future hydrogen economy that is set to be worth $2.5trn and create 30 million jobs by 2050. We are home to innovative manufacturers as well as leading academic research and development of hydrogen technology at Queen's University Belfast, Belfast Met and Ulster University.

"We also have the ideal natural resources for the production of hydrogen, wind and water. We are therefore at a critical moment, and if we act quickly, we can secure the creation of thousands of good jobs, unlock hundreds of millions in private investment, support net zero ambitions, strengthen our energy independence and export our products and services across the world."

They are urging Mr Sunak and Mr Lewis to give support by investing 15m in a hydrogen hub which could support hydrogen companies, secure high-skilled manufacturing jobs and support a green recovery.

In February Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a 3bn fund for 4,000 zero emission buses - but now the group has called for that plan to be expedited.

"A quick introduction of zero emission hydrogen buses in this region will stimulate significant levels of private investment in hydrogen production facilities. The two steps in parallel will drive down the cost of hydrogen energy and technology, strengthen our export potential and create more jobs, quicker.

Alliance Party MP Dr Stephen Farry, along with Antrim MLAS Jim Allister, Stewart Dickson, Paul Frew, Mervyn Storey and Robin Swann have also signed the letter.

The politicians called on the Chancellor to hold a meeting with the Business Secretary to discuss how the proposals can be advanced to "start driving green growth and creating new jobs, as soon as possible". Earlier this month, Secretary of State Brandon Lewis visited Ballymena's Wrightbus factory.

The business is now owned by industrialist Mr Bamford, who bought it after it went into administration in August last year. It now employs around 575 people.

Speaking at the time, chief executive Buta Atwal said: "We appreciate the opportunity to share our vision and plans for Wrightbus to support the decarbonisation of public transport across the UK and island of Ireland as we journey towards net zero emissions by 2050.

"Working at scale, Wrightbus has a clear plan in place to reduce the costs of the buses to be comparable to diesel for the total cost of ownership. Wrightbus believes that hydrogen fuel cell electric buses, manufactured in Ballymena, can and should be used and powered across the UK and island of Ireland.

"Not only will it secure and grow jobs at Wrightbus's factory in Ballymena, it will support the many other innovative businesses, supporting the growth of a hydrogen sector that will enable us to become a world leader in this low-carbon technology.

"A great place to start is investment in a hydrogen hub that will be a centre for new and emerging hydrogen businesses to move to Northern Ireland. As an Incubator for hydrogen companies it will ensure that the benefits of growth and investment is spread across different sectors."


German officials say Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is being held under guard at a Berlin hospital while recovering from a suspected poisoning.

Navalny is an opposition leader, corruption investigator and strong critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He got sick last Thursday on a plane flying to Moscow from Siberia, where he had been campaigning. The plane made an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Omsk, where Navalny was hospitalized. He was flown to Germany for treatment on Saturday.

Supporters of the 44-year-old dissident believe he drank tea that contained poison. They blame the Russian government for his sickness, as well as a delay in transporting him to Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had personally offered the countrys assistance.

Berlins Charite hospital said in a statement Monday that Navalny is being treated in intensive care and remains in a medically induced coma. The hospital said his condition is serious but not life-threatening.

The team of doctors who have examined Navalny since his arrival on Saturday had found the presence of cholinesterase inhibitors in his system, the statement said. Cholinesterase inhibitors are substances found in several drugs, but also in some pesticides and nerve agents. The doctors said they had not yet identified the exact substance found in Navalnys system.

Merkel is calling on Russian officials to carry a full investigation of the poisoning of Navalny. She added, Those responsible must be identified and held accountable.

Berlin police officers and federal agents were sent to the hospital to provide protection while Navalny receives treatment.

Russians claim no poison found

Russias government had no immediate comment on the situation. Doctors at the Siberian hospital that first treated Navalny said Monday they had saved his life, but that two laboratory tests found no poisonous substances in his system.

If we had found some kind of poison that was somehow confirmed then it would have been a lot easier for us, senior doctor Anatoly Kalinichenko told reporters in Omsk.

The hospitals chief doctor, Alexander Murakhovsky, rejected allegations made by Navalnys team that doctors in Omsk had acted together with Russian security services.

Representatives for Navalny called last week for Russia to launch a criminal investigation. As of Monday, Russias Investigative Committee had not opened a case, a spokeswoman for Navalny said.

Ilya Yashin is an opposition politician in Moscow and a close ally of Navalny. In a video statement, he urged Russian law enforcement to investigate an attempt at a life of a public figure and look into the possible involvement of President Putin.

Like many other opposition politicians in Russia, Navalny has been detained by law enforcement and harassed by groups supporting Russias government. In 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw a chemical in his face that damaged an eye.

Last year, Navalny was rushed to a hospital from jail where he was serving a sentence on charges of violating protest rules. His team also suspected poisoning then. Doctors said he had a severe allergic reaction and sent him back to detention the next day.

Im Bryan Lynn.

The Associated Press and Reuters reported on this story. Bryan Lynn adapted the reports for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

stable  adj. not likely to change or end suddenly

induce  v. cause a particular condition

coma  n. the state of being unconscious for a long time

unfortunately  adv. used to say that you wish something was not true or that something had not happened

harass  v. to continue to annoy or upset someone over a period of time

allergic  adj. having an allergy - a medical condition in which your body reacts badly to something that you eat, breathe or touch
This story was originally published by ProPublica as part of Electionland, ProPublicas collaborative reporting project covering problems that prevent eligible voters from casting their ballots during the 2020 elections. Sign up to receive the biggest Electionland stories as soon as theyre published.

Jared Dearing, the director of Kentuckys board of elections, had little to do with Louisville, the states largest city, having only one polling place for the June 28 primary. It was a county decision, and it made sense. In-person turnout was expected to be low during the pandemic. The polling place, a convention center, offered multiple locations to cast ballots, and transportation by bus there was free.

Nevertheless, as luminaries from LeBron James to U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) tweeted in outrage about the supposed disenfranchisement of Louisville voters, threats poured into Dearings office. Youre too scared to answer your phone, one man said in a voicemail message from a blocked number. Go find a gun and kill yourself. Every person that didnt get to vote because of you should get to beat the s out of you. The man, who identified himself as a Washington resident, expressed hope that Dearing, a bigoted whore, would be mangled in a flaming car crash.

In another voicemail, the same caller predicted that every member of Dearings staff, whom he called evil fs, would be damned for eternity. Yall are going to hell. God sees you. He sees you committing voter suppression, and that is a mortal sin.

Such abuse isnt limited to Kentucky. Across the country, election administrators and their staffs are facing unprecedented attacks, much of it from outside their jurisdictions, from both left- and right-wing voters and activists. The polarization of American politics has reached such a fever pitch that the bureaucrats who operate the machinery of democracy  and largely lack the authority to change it  are harassed and threatened in language that would be out of place even if they were candidates espousing extremist views. This pressure, along with health concerns, is prompting an unusually large number of election officials to step down, thinning the ranks of experienced administrators at a turbulent time when they are dealing with record numbers of absentee ballot applications, which in most places must be processed by hand.

Dearing, a Democrat who supports voting by mail during the pandemic, stayed on the job, but he was rattled. It was disturbing, he said of the threats. Elections are always tense, but this year was something different. There is a new and increasing level of acrimony, specifically directed at administrators.

In Washoe County, Nev., a mail ballot for the states May primary had SEALED WITH COVID SPIT written on the outside of the envelope. We took that as a threat, said Deanna Spikula, the countys registrar of voters. The ballot was not counted, and the envelope was turned over to police. There was insufficient evidence to bring charges against the sender, said Michelle Bays, chief investigator for the Washoe County District Attorneys Office.

In Evansville, Ind., after an activist named Janet Reed sent out hundreds of absentee ballot applications in May that allegedly sought to deceive voters into registering as Democrats, recipients who assumed that she worked for the elections office began to flood its phone lines with furious accusations of malfeasance.

We have received many calls at the election office irate with our staff, and [they] think its our fault that this is happening, County Clerk Carla Hayden told the Election Board in a May meeting. Theyve been cursed at. Theyve been hung up on  all kinds of things, which is really unfortunate because theyre working very, very hard and helping extra hours. And some of it has to do with trying to fix this error that someone else made. Reed, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been charged with felony election fraud.

Oregons state election director, Steve Trout, said he has been harassed on the phone and social media by people wrongly accusing him of, among other things, changing voters party affiliations without consent. A conspiracy theory website, Gateway Pundit, spread the allegations, which originated with a group called My Party Was Changed Oregon. In fact, the voters had changed their registration years before or they were automatically registered through the states relatively new system, which doesnt require them to specify a party.

The threatening calls and emails are an annoyance that take time away from our important election duties and do not help improve elections in any way, Trout said in an email. They also reduce our ability to assist voters with real questions and issues.

Elections administrators say that morale is the lowest they have ever seen. In early July, Amy Cohen, the director of the National Association of State Election Directors, acknowledged the pressure in a tweet from NASEDs account, saying, We knew 2020 would be hard for election officials, but its been more challenging than ever imagined.

More than 20 local election administrators have resigned or retired since March 1, citing burnout, stress or health concerns, according to a ProPublica survey. In Alabama, which pays state employees an extra $165 or more a day to manage absentee ballot applications and mailings, Lee County Circuit Court Clerk Mary Roberson recently gave up this side job. Roberson cited the stress of a lawsuit filed against the state and county by the League of Women Voters to expand vote-by-mail options, according to Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill. A federal judge dismissed the case this month.

After the lawsuit ended, Roberson told Merrill, I think Ive had about as much fun as I can stand, he said. Roberson did not respond to a request for comment.

The elections director in Harris County, Texas  the states most populous county  resigned in May, less than halfway through her first term, as she tried to navigate a massive increase in voting by mail while beset with complaints from Republican activists. Her resignation letter cited personal health concerns. The longtime clerk of Payette County, Idaho, resigned effective June 1, the day before ballots for the states primary began to be counted, pointing to health concerns and frustration with new software the state had rolled out. Its just been a very trying primary, she told local media. Multiple election officials in Milwaukee quit after a chaotic Wisconsin primary in April.

The coronavirus has also taken a toll. The clerk of Jackson County, Kan., was infected with COVID-19 and was quarantined during the states August primary along with several other members of the staff. The county treasurer stepped in to run the office.

After serving for 39 years, the clerk of Marion County, W.Va., resigned on July 1. The COVID situation and her health and the disappointment in not being able to be more instrumental in probably the most difficult election in 100 years weighed on her, her deputy told local media. And in Montgomery County, Tenn., the clerk resigned in June, two years into her four-year term, after her mother died from complications of COVID-19. The time has come for me to concentrate on my health and family priorities, she wrote.

Neal Kelley, the election director of Orange County, Calif., was diagnosed with COVID-19 in mid-June and hospitalized. I had a very high fever and night sweats for three or four days, and then it became breathing issues, and then what caused me to seek out medical help was when I started getting these muscle aches and joint pains that almost paralyzed my body, he said. It took him three weeks to fight off the virus.

Still, he only took a few days off work. In my job, we have to work all the time. So once I got past the fevers, I was able to start working from home, he said. I was literally in bed with my laptop, plugging away. I was virtually in the office every day. As he was recovering, he oversaw the building of a full-scale model of a voting center, so that his staff could test social distancing scenarios and run drills for poll workers.

The near-daily false assertions by President Donald Trump and members of his administration about widespread vote-by-mail fraud have spurred much of the backlash against state and local election administrators. Its a total set up to cheat!! Democrats are a disgrace!! How is everyone receiving mail in ballots being allowed?? one voter said on Facebook in response to Connecticuts secretary of state encouraging voting by mail.

Dwight Shellman, who manages county services for the secretary of states office in Colorado, wrote on Twitter on July 30, It is tedious & exhausting to work your a off to ensure, in your own, small way, that US citizens can safely vote & exercise their franchise in whatever environment the future holds, only to be undermined daily by lies & disinformation from your own President. Argh.

A county election administrator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said, I go into work every single day wondering what Im going to see [Trump] tweet. The official added, I have a thousand things to do, and I know that Ill spend at least an hour of my day fielding calls from angry voters convinced hes right or questions from the media who think they need to report on what he said.

Especially frustrating to election administrations is that many of these angry calls come from outsiders who vote in other jurisdictions. On Georgias primary day, June 9, a state election call center received more than 1,000 calls by noon. About one-fourth were not from Georgia numbers, and these calls lasted several seconds longer on average than those from in-state numbers.

An analysis of calls to Kentuckys elections board ahead of the primary shows the same pattern. Nearly one-third came from out-of-state numbers, and those took an average of about three minutes, almost 20 seconds longer than in-state calls. Plus, residents of other states, including Oregon, Colorado and California, emailed dozens of complaints to the board about what they viewed as voter suppression tactics.

We will sue, a California resident emailed Dearing. My father is a Kentucky lawyer. And this is gross. You should know how you are being seen by the rest of Kentucky, the rest of the world, and probably, by God.

One caller also evoked the Lord. Whoever caused this should be hung from a tree. Thats right, lynched, the man told Dearing in a voicemail. Jesus thinks youre a piece of s. That voicemail came from a blocked number.

Other callers insulted Dearings staff members, subjecting them to long, curse-filled tirades, he said. Unaware that a receptionist was Black, one caller labeled her a racist.

As it turned out, the Louisville convention center largely handled the voting without problems, and there were no lines for most of primary day. Afterward, some of the critics offered belated praise. The state Democratic Party  which had stoked fear over Louisville on social media and elsewhere  put out a news release saying: Holding an election in the middle of a global pandemic is a complicated and difficult process. I think everyone involved should be proud of the results today.
ANN ARBOR, MI  In hopes of minimizing the spread of the novel coronavirus as University of Michigan students return, Ann Arbor officials are considering an emergency ordinance requiring face masks and limiting social gatherings.

Council Member Jane Lumm, I-2nd Ward, and Ali Ramlawi, D-5th Ward, are sponsoring the proposal for council to consider Monday night, Aug. 24.

It mirrors existing requirements under orders issued by the Washtenaw County Health Department and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Ramlawi said.

Outdoor gatherings in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti restricted to 25 people, health officials say

But the difference is that a violation of the city ordinance would be a civil infraction with a penalty fine, rather than a misdemeanor crime with possible jail time.

We dont need to over-criminalize society, said Mayor Christopher Taylor.

The proposed city ordinance serves a number of important purposes, one of which is to ratify the county public health officers recent actions, Taylor said.

It limits gatherings to no more than 10 people indoors and 25 people outdoors, with strict mask requirements.

Violators could face up to a $250 penalty fine plus costs and all other remedies available by statute.

Taylor said he doesnt expect the city to use it to issue a bunch of tickets. Rather, he expects the city and university to focus primarily on education to achieve compliance.

With few exceptions, it would require anyone who is less than six feet from another person who is not a family member or of the same household to wear a covering over their nose and mouth in any indoor public place or any outdoor place.

It also would require such face coverings while waiting for and riding on public transportation, while in a taxi or ride-sharing vehicle, or when using a private car service.

The stated purpose of the ordinance is to protect public health, safety and welfare amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Enactment of this ordinance is further intended to bring the city into alignment with policies expressed by the University of Michigan as students return to campus for the fall semester, the ordinance states.

A timeline of COVID-19 cases among Washtenaw County residents as of Aug. 21, 2020.Washtenaw County Health Department

Social gatherings and events among people not of the same household would be permitted under the ordinance only to the extent that theyre designed to ensure people not part of the same household stay six feet apart and adhere to the limit of 10 people indoors and 25 people outdoors.

No person who owns, leases or has control of a property could allow a gathering that violates the rules.

The only exceptions would be places of worship, people engaged in religious worship, outdoor weddings and funerals/memorial services scheduled prior to the ordinance taking effect, and polling places.

Violations would be deemed a public nuisance and, in lieu of prosecuting a violator, the city attorney could file a lawsuit or pursue other legal remedies to abate the nuisance.

The ordinance would be temporary, expiring when the governors state emergency declaration ends.

UM had a fall 2019 enrollment of over 48,000 students in Ann Arbor. While the number this fall remains to be seen, UM is at least expecting fewer students in university housing.

As of now, we anticipate approximately 8,300 students in university housing, said UM spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen, noting thats about 68% of normal capacity.

Under the proposed city ordinance, the requirement to wear face coverings would not apply to the following people:

Those younger than 5 years old.

Those who cant medically tolerate a face covering.

Those who are eating or drinking while seated at a food service establishment.

Those exercising, when wearing a face covering would interfere with the activity.

Those receiving a service for which temporary removal of the face covering is necessary.

Those entering a business or receiving a service who are asked to temporarily remove a face covering for identification purposes.

Those communicating with someone who is deaf, deafblind or hard of hearing where the ability to see the mouth is essential to communication.

Those actively engaged in a public safety role, including but not limited to law enforcement, firefighters or emergency medical personnel, where wearing a mask would seriously interfere in performing their public safety responsibilities.

Those at a polling place to vote in an election.

Those officiating a religious service.

Those giving a speech for broadcast or to an audience, provided the audience is at least six feet away from the speaker.

Those in a personal private vehicle or private home.

Those in a private business location or an individual private office at times when members of the public, clients, customers, guests or other invitees are not present, as long as there is a distance of at least six feet maintained.

Those participating in an indoor or outdoor recreational physical activity that involves 10 or fewer persons.

Those engaging in religious worship at a house of religious worship.

The ordinance further states that anyone waiting in line to enter a business must maintain a distance of at least six feet from other people not of the same household. Businesses would be prohibited from serving customers or allowing customers to enter if theyre not following the mask requirements, and employees also would have to wear masks.

According to a two-week snapshot provided by the health department, another 196 Washtenaw County residents were diagnosed with COVID-19 from Aug. 8-21, about 5% of whom were hospitalized. None were reported dead.

There have been 2,826 confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 among county residents since the outbreak started, including 442 hospitalizations, 117 deaths and 2,548 recoveries.

In about 4% of local cases, people with the illness were admitted to the intensive care unit at a hospital.

MORE FROM THE ANN ARBOR NEWS:

In May email, UM president told UNC officials he was struggling with how to bring back 30K undergrads

University of Michigans coronavirus dashboard goes live, shows 13 positive tests in last 2 weeks

University of Michigan professors have no confidence in administrations plan to contain coronavirus

Ann Arbor City Council members question University of Michigans effort to prevent spread of coronavirus

Eastern Michigan University delays move-in 3 weeks, citing other campus coronavirus outbreaks
Australian white supremacist who murdered 51 Muslims in last year's New Zealand mosques shooting attends his first day in court in Christchurch on August 24, 2020.(AFP)

Christchurch: The white supremacist who slaughtered 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques had intended to burn down the mosques afterwards, a prosecutor said in court Monday, while describing two of those praying as making heroic efforts to stop the mass shooting.

New details about the March 2019 attacks were outlined during the first day of a four-day sentencing hearing at the Christchurch High Court. The hearing gave some families and survivors their first chance to confront the gunman.

You killed your own humanity, and I dont think the world will forgive you for your horrible crime, said a tearful Maysoon Salama, the mother of 33-year-old Atta Elayyan, who was killed in the attacks. You thought you can break us. You failed miserably.

The gunman, 29-year-old Australian Brenton Harrison Tarrant, pleaded guilty in March to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one count of terrorism  the first terrorism conviction in New Zealands history.

He could become the first person in New Zealand to be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Tarrant was brought into the courtroom shackled and wearing a gray prison outfit. In the dock, unshackled and surrounded by five officers, he showed little emotion throughout the hearing. He occasionally looked around the room, tapped his fingers, and watched the survivors as they spoke.

The courtroom was only half full due to coronavirus distancing requirements, while many others watched from adjacent courtrooms where the hearing was streamed. Survivors and family members occasionally wept and comforted each other.

The hearing began with prosecutors outlining the attacks in a 26-page summary of facts, the first detailed account by authorities about what happened that day.

Crown prosecutor Barnaby Hawes said that two months before the attacks, Tarrant flew a drone directly over the Al Noor mosque, recording an aerial view of the grounds and buildings and taking note of the entry and exit doors.

Hawes said the gunman planned his attacks for when the maximum number of worshippers were present, and that 190 people were in the Al Noor mosque for Friday prayers on the day of the attacks.

In his car, the gunman had six guns  two AR-15 rifles, two other rifles, and two shotguns, the court heard. He also brought with him four modified gas containers which he planned to use to burn down the mosques after he finished shooting, Hawes said. The gunman later told police he wished he had used them.

Hawes also detailed the bravery of Naeem Rashid, who was killed at the Al Noor mosque.

He ran at the defendant from the southeastern corner of the room. When Mr. Rashid was approximately 1 meter from the defendant, the defendant swung the AR-15 around and fired four shots at point-blank range, Hawes said.

Mr. Rashid crashed into the defendant and the defendant went down on one knee, Hawes said, adding that Tarrant was able to get back up and shoot Rashid again.

At the second mosque, Abdul Aziz chased Tarrant down the driveway screaming at him, prosecutors said, and threw a discarded rifle at his car, shattering a glass panel. Aziz was not injured.

Tarrant has dismissed his lawyers and is representing himself during the sentencing, raising fears he could try to use the occasion as a platform to promote his racist views. He can choose to speak once the survivors have spoken, although the judge will likely shut down any attempts he makes to grandstand.

New Zealand abolished the death penalty for murder in 1961, and the longest sentence imposed since then has been life imprisonment with a minimum 30-year non-parole period. Justice Cameron Mander will decide on the gunmans sentence at the end of the hearing.

The attacks targeting people praying at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques shocked New Zealand and prompted new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons. They also prompted global changes to social media protocols after the gunman livestreamed his attack on Facebook, where it was viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

Prosecutors said that after Tarrant left the Linwood mosque he planned to drive to the town of Ashburton and attack a third mosque. But he was rammed by two police officers, dragged out of his car and arrested.

Gamal Fouda, the imam of the Al Noor mosque who survived the shooting, told the court that the gunmans actions were misguided.

We are a peaceful and loving community who did not deserve your actions, Fouda said. Your hatred is unnecessary. If you have done anything, you have brought the world community closer with your evil actions.
It shouldnt be surprising that the Democratic nominees message on the economy ignores the 100,000-plus Amazon-related jobs that his party chased from New York.

This is especially so as the Democrats featured Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, an anti-growth and anti-jobs advocate, as a featured speaker at their convention.

That she and Max Rose also support the pro-crime, anti-police, anti-education program of the Democratic Party in New York City should not be forgotten by all New Yorkers.

(John M. Gaw is a Midland Beach resident.)
However, the charges are so far toothless, as these have not yet helped the landlords evict Syed, CBC News reported.

The police are only following up with the fraud and the fraudulent documents, said Mandana Jafarian, one of the landlords targeted by Syeds scheme. They cannot evict [Syed] from the illegal houses that he is renting and making money.

Kambiz Farsian, another affected landlord and Jafarians husband, said that they were unable to check Syeds public record beforehand as he used the name Arif Saied when he introduced himself.

Syed was already charged with fraud as far back as 2010, and is also facing more than three dozen other charges of falsified vehicle mileage information.

He changed his name and thats why he tricked us, said Farsian. We couldnt find any history for him anywhere.  I dont know why there is no way to stop this type of business.
ROANOKE  In recent years, higher education leaders have known that achievement gaps between races persist, student debt keeps rising, more jobs will be automated and many students have adapted to online learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating these trends, the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors learned during Sundays retreat.

The board heard a data-packed presentation and brainstormed goals as masked members and administrators gathered underneath the pavilion at Smithfield Plantation on the eve of the boards two-day regular meeting.

Virginia Tech students were still arriving on campus Sunday, with classes starting Monday. Tech spread out move-ins over 10 days in order to avoid having too many people arrive at the same time during the pandemic. Tech will offer a mix of online and in-person classes.

Tech hopes that COVID-19 testing, hybrid learning and students forgoing large gatherings or parties will help it avoid problems experienced by the likes of Notre Dame or the University of North Carolina, both of which opened to students only to have coronavirus outbreaks sweep the schools. On Thursday, Tech suspended seven students who ignored coronavirus guidelines.

We will keep our fingers crossed about the students because we have seen what happened at other universities, Rector Horacio Valeiras told board members. But we thought it was appropriate to bring them back.

The potential future effects of the pandemic dominated an hour-long presentation by consultants from McKinsey & Co., who told the board that economic, technological and educational impacts from coronavirus could last for years.

McKinsey partner Bryan Hancock told the board that an economic survey conducted in partnership with Oxford Economics revealed that most global executives predict that the United States economy wont return to pre-crisis levels until the middle of 2023.

But we dont have a crystal ball, Hancock said.

McKinseys Ted Rounsaville showed the board how the coronavirus could amplify other recent economic patterns, such as increase demand for online classes, force more students to default on loans and widen the gap of educational disparities even as undergraduate classes become more diverse.

The coronavirus has accelerated trends that were in existence before, Rounsaville said.

Rounsaville also noted that a demographic cliff awaits the U.S. after 2026, when a peak in high school graduates will be followed by a major decline at the same time enrollment of international students is expected to drop.

The board laid out several goals during the retreat, and then broke into smaller groups to come up with ways to achieve those goals.

The boards priorities included curtailing costs both for students and the university, managing growth and fostering diversity and inclusiveness.

Later, members chose other priorities from among 12 options provided by the consultants, then agreed to find ways for implementation. Some of those priorities included keeping college affordable and increasing access; emphasizing research and engineering; achieving excellence in teaching, learning and student success; and providing a high return on the publics investment in the university.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  Amid criticisms the Philippine government prefers buying imported personal protective equipment (PPE), the passage of the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act will guarantee that local manufacturers will be the priority for procurement, a health official assured.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire on Monday said there is a provision under "Bayanihan 2" that specifically states that the government has to procure medical-grade coveralls and face masks from Filipino firms.

"Because of this 'Bayanihan 2' that was approved, it specifically states there that we are going to have preferential for these local manufacturers when we do our procurement for this different logistical supplies for our response to COVID-19," she told CNN Philippines.

Under the stimulus plan, 3 billion will be allocated for the procurement of PPE, face masks, and face shields.

The House of Representatives is set to ratify the 165.5-billion stimulus plan today to assist the government in its COVID-19 response. The reconciled 165.5-billion stimulus plan from last week's bicameral conference was approved in the House, four days after the Senate first ratified the measure. Once transmitted to President Rodrigo Duterte for his approval, lawmakers said "Bayanihan 2" will likely be enacted into law by September.

The current system of purchasing imported PPE is in accordance to Republic Act 9184, Vergeire said. She said DOH submits the required technical specifications of PPE sets to the Procurement Services-Department of Budget and Management, which is tasked to procure the items.

"They cannot procure anything beyond or below or less than the technical specifications that we indicate. So if ever these PPEs that we have right now, these are based on the specs, which are technical grade and which are of quality," she said.

The Confederation of Philippine Manufacturers of PPE on August 21 voiced "concerns" on the way the government secures and procures these protective gear against COVID-19. The group, composed of five local companies that heeded the call of the government to produce PPE for frontliners, said the government is still largely getting its supplies from foreign manufacturers instead of supporting its own.
Operating under the guise of a legitimate taxidermy business, he sold and transported black rhino horns and obtained tiger skulls, sperm whale teeth, a rhino skull and elephant tusks for sale - Cavendish Press

A taxidermist who posed for pictures with stuffed exotic animals has been jailed for using his business as a front for trading illicit items such as rhino horns to the Chinese mafia.

Aaron Halstead was imprisoned for 56 weeks on Monday after being caught flouting laws over trading in endangered species for a third time since 2011.

Operating under the guise of a legitimate taxidermy business, he sold and transported black rhino horns and obtained tiger skulls, sperm whale teeth, a rhino skull and elephant tusks for sale, Preston Crown Court heard.

The brazen 29-year-old, of Burnley, Lancs, would routinely post pictures of himself on social media alongside animals he had legally taxidermied - including him roaring alongside the head of a tiger, riding a giraffe and even driving a car with a zebra in the back.

He had first been investigated and cautioned in 2011 for breaching the regulations surrounding endangered species when he was a student who operated a taxidermy business to fund his education.

Following the caution, he had the benefit of guidance from a police officer with more than 20 years experience in wildlife crime who explained to him the legislation and what was permitted.

But Halstead went on to ignore the advice and was later jailed for 24 weeks in 2015 after he admitted purchasing sperm whale teeth, a cheetah skull and a dolphin skull, and offered to sell a snowy owl without a permit.

Andy McWilliam, investigations officer for the National Wildlife Crime Unit, with horns seized from Aaron Halstead - Lancashire Police/PA

On Monday, he received another term of imprisonment after pleading guilty to nine similar breaches of the control of trade in endangered species regulations between September 2017 and January 2018.

Halstead was said by the Crown to have used his legitimate business as "a vehicle for his illicit trading", arranging deals through his business website, as well as social media platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

Prosecutor Adrian Farrow told the court: "He was intimately familiar with the legislation and had been provided with specific guidance in relation to it.

Story continues

"Against that background, the circumstances of the offences for which he now falls to be sentenced can be characterised as deliberate and calculated actions driven by the considerable financial gains which can be made in such trade."

Outlining the case, Mr Farrow said the defendant reassured a supplier in a WhatsApp conversation he did not need to be "afraid of Customs" in shipping 10 tiger skulls worth 9,000 euros from the Netherlands.

Halstead boasted: "It will be fine ... I've never had anything stopped.

"Only from out of the EU."

In another WhatsApp chat Halstead arranged a trip to Calais, France, to sell black rhino horns for 70,000 euros to a "Chinese rich" client after he had removed the horns from a head he had lawfully bought at an auction.

The defendant wrote to an intermediary: "I must be mad. I'm in France meeting the Chinese mafia."

Mark Stuart, defending, said Halstead, a qualified swimming instructor of Glen View Road, had a "lifelong interest" in taxidermy, sparked by his grandfather's original interest.

But passing sentence, Judge Robert Altham said: "This was brazen, persistent, well-organised criminality.

"This is no hapless amateur who has offended by stumbling into an area of legislation he was not aware of.

"Here was a person who acted deliberately in a flagrant and knowing breach of the law, understanding the risks he took and the harm he could cause but was prepared to take those risks for considerable financial rewards."

He noted that a "most painstaking and careful investigation" was required after Halstead initially denied any wrongdoing following his arrest in January 2018.

Halstead's home and business premises had been raided after he offered rhino horns to a customer who contacted him via Instagram.

Andy McWilliam, investigations officer for the National Wildlife Crime Unit, said: "This is the third occasion that I have dealt with Halstead for similar offences in under 10 years. He is an extremely knowledgeable individual, but sadly his main concern is profit.

"He is well aware that some of the species he profits from are threatened with extinction. He is also aware that these species are protected by international law.

"He knows that is feeding a demand and that his illicit trading may have a direct impact on the survival of some of the world's most threatened species."
There was a controversy at the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting, which has been called to find a way to end the turmoil triggered by a letter from a group of Congress leaders. Reports quoted Rahul Gandhi as saying at the CWC that this was done in collusion with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

As soon as the reports surfaced, those who had raised the issues in the Congress - many of them senior party leaders - reacted in disbelief. One of them, Kapil Sibal, said he has never made a statement in favour of the BJP in the last 30 years. He also said that they have defended the party in many crises.

Another senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, also part of the group, offered to quit.

Congress soon got into damage control mode, with party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala clarifying that the reported remarks attributed to Rahul Gandhi are untrue.

After the clarification, Sibal said he is withdrawing his tweet.

The meeting of the CWC, Congress highest decision-making body, has been called after a group of 23 leaders wrote a letter to Sonia Gandhi earlier this month seeking an overhaul of the organisation.

Apart from Azad and Sibal, 21 other leaders were part of the group that wrote the letter on overhauling the Congress. AK Antony and other leaders who want Sonia Gandhi to continue called the letter unfortunate and cruel.

Sonia Gandhi, meanwhile, remained adamant on quitting as Congress president. In her opening remarks at the meeting, Gandhi made the offer to quit saying she had given a detailed reply on the issue to AICC general secretary K C Venugopal.

She also handed over a detailed reply to Venugopal, who read out its contents.

A year has lapsed now. In the interest of the party, I ask CWC to begin deliberations to put in a place of process of transition to relieve me from my duties, she said at the meeting.

The crucial meeting of the CWC started in New Delhi amid divisions in the party over the leadership issue.

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.
Simandou, a 110-kilometer range of hills deep in the hinterland of Guinea in Western Africa, boasts the worlds largest untapped iron ore reserves. They could reshape the global supply chain of the critical ingredient of steel, the worlds second-most traded commodity behind crude oil.

The rich assets have lured global investors, especially from ore-thirsty China, but pulling the mineral out of the ground has turned out to be a thorny challenge with entangled interests and risks stemming from technical, capital and political uncertainties.

It is considered the worlds largest, highest-quality iron ore deposit. Some industry experts project it could produce as much as 150 million tons of iron ore a year, equivalent to 7% of global production in 2019. Developing the deposits could save China, the worlds largest steelmaking country, billions of dollars a year.

But building the necessary infrastructure in Guinea, which ranks 160th by per capita GDP of 186 countries according to the International Monetary Fund, would also cost billions of dollars. To make the Simandou project operational would require railway and port construction amounting to the largest infrastructure project ever in Africa. Investors have been reluctant to sink that kind of money into Simandou because of the risk that prices will plunge.

The Simandou project has largely stalled over the past two decades, reflecting political complexity, mining rights disputes, concerns over costs and pressures from industry rivals. Discovered in the 1990s, the Simandou deposits hold more than 8.6 billion tons of iron ore with an average content of 65% iron, according to Guineas National Institute of Statistics.

The reserve of Simandou is so rich that one can get minerals with a simple shovel, a mining industry investor said.

The Simandou project could maintain a stable 7% share of global iron ore supply in the coming decade if it reached full capacity, giving it the power to influence global pricing, said Andrew Gadd, chief iron ore analyst at British commodity consultancy CRU. It could threaten some high-cost suppliers such as those in Canada, Brazil and South Africa, Gadd said.

In Australia, Simandou is known the Pilbara killer. Australia, the worlds largest iron ore exporter, produces more than 90% of its ore exports in the western region of Pilbara. Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto Group is a major stakeholder in the Simandou project since 1997 but has moved slowly to develop the project.

Chinese investors are among the main forces pushing the project forward as a new source of iron ore that could bring down prices for Chinas steel mills. In 2019, China imported more than 1 billion tons of iron ore, 70% of the global supply and 80% of the countrys total demand. About 80% of Chinas iron ore imports come from the four largest mining companies  Brazils Vale S.A. and Australia-based Rio Tinto, BHP Group Ltd. and Fortescue Metals Group.

In the first seven months this year, China imported 660 million tons of iron ore, up 11.8% from a year ago, official data showed. Demand has rebounded as the domestic outbreak of Covid-19 wanes and the governments pro-growth, infrastructure push drives up steel consumption.

Heavy reliance on foreign supply makes Chinese steelmakers especially vulnerable to iron ore prices. Every $10 increase of the price of a ton of iron ore will lead to an extra $10 billion of spending by China every year, analysts estimate.

In 2019, a $30 price rise for a ton of iron ore cost Chinese steel mills an additional $30 billion, more than the 189 billion yuan ($27.4 billion) of net profit posted by the countrys entire steel industry, said Chen Derong, chairman of China Baowu Steel Group Corp. Ltd., Chinas largest steel refiner.

Despite the pandemic, iron ore prices have continued rising this year, touching a six-year high on Aug. 19 of $128.80 a ton and hovering at $120 since then.

If Simandou starts operation, it could bring a drop of global iron ore prices by $40 to $50 a ton, a steel industry analyst in China said.

Since May, Baowu has been trying to lead a consortium of steelmakers to invest in Simandou and break the development logjam. Baowu plans to set up a $6 billion investment fund consisting of steelmakers and financial investors to develop Simandou, Caixin learned.

But the Baowu project is no sure thing. Chinese investors including state-owned aluminum giant Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd. (Chinalco) tapped into the project years ago with little progress to show for it.

Chinese companies have a poor track record of investing in foreign mining. The painful example is the Sino iron project in Australia. After Chinese state-owned conglomerate Citic Ltd. paid $450 million for 25 years of mining rights to the iron ore deposit at Cape Preston in 2006, it quickly turned into a money pit because of repeated production delays and skyrocketing investments.

Simandou needs a sophisticated dealmaker to coordinate various parties, to share interests and risks, a senior energy industry investor said. Without the capability to get all parties to act together and figure out a sustainable business model, the development of Simandou will remain out of reach, the investor said.





Long-stalled project

Mining rights to Simandou have been split into four blocks, none of which has yet been developed. The first two blocks in the north are owned by SMB-Winning, a consortium backed by Singaporean and Chinese companies, while the No. 3 and 4 blocks in the south are controlled by Rio Tinto and a group of Chinalco-led Chinese investors. The Guinean government holds 15% in each of the two parts.

Chinalco and Chinese partners entered Simandou in 2010 by acquiring a 39.5% stake in Simfer, a Rio Tinto unit operating blocks 3 and 4. Chinalco is the largest single shareholder of Rio Tinto with a 10.3% stake.

But development of the blocks stalled in following years, leaving huge costs for investors. A company document seen by Caixin showed that Simfer invested more than $3.7 billion in infrastructure and mining facilities in Simandou. In 2015 and 2016, Rio Tinto wrote off nearly $2.3 billion of losses from the project. Simfer staff working on the Simandou project has been slashed to dozens from around 1,000 before 2016.

Chinalco and partners paid $1.35 billion for the stake in Simfer. A company financial report showed that Chinalco spent $15.5 billion as of the end of 2019 on Simfer and affiliated companies.

Industry analysts said they think Rio Tintos slow progress on the Simandou project reflects a strategic decision to focus on cheaper development in Australia, and the company doesnt want new supply to press down market prices.

In reply to a Caixin inquiry, Rio Tinto said Simandou will provide a good supplement to ore supplies from Australia and Canada to meet strong demand for high-quality iron ore from China and other markets.

Rio Tinto was the first foreign investor licensed to explore Simandou in 1997. In 2006 the company won 25 years of mining rights for all four blocks with an option to extend. But no sustained work has been done on the sites. In 2008 the Guinean government forced Rio Tinto to relinquish its rights to the northern two blocks to an Israeli company, BSG Resources. But BSGs purchase of the mining rights was controversial and was voided in 2019 by Guineas new government, citing corruption. In November that year, the government relaunched bidding for the two blocks, and SMB-Winning became the winner.

SMB-Winning is a venture jointly set up by Singapore-based shipping company Winning International Group, Chinese private aluminum producer Shandong Weiqiao, Yantai Port Group and Guinean-French logistics company UMS. SMB-Winning didnt disclose how much it paid for the mining rights but pledged to invest $14 billion to develop the two northern blocks.

Sources close to the matter said the Guinea government hoped to pressure Rio Tinto into making progress in Simandou by inviting in the new investors. In June, SMB-Winning signed a framework accord with Guinean authorities and agreed on a timetable leading to commercial operations within 74 months after signing.

But several industry insiders said they are doubtful of SMB-Winnings ability to raise enough funds to support the development. Shandong Weiqiao, with the strongest balance sheet among the shareholders, has a debt-to-asset ratio of more than 60%, restricting its capacity to tap new credit, they said. SMB-Winning contacted some Chinese banks for potential loans, but most lenders showed little interest, sources said.

Game changer

The Simandou project is strategically valuable to China as it would diversify the countrys iron ore supply and give it greater bargaining power in price setting, said Lu Guangming, an analyst at CRU.

The four iron ore giants  Vale, Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue Metals  accounted for nearly half of 2019 global iron ore production of 2.1 billion tons. They have the major say in settling global prices.

Heavily reliant on imports, China has accepted almost every price increase by the four major suppliers since 2003 no matter how the pricing mechanism was changed, analysts said. The country has more than 300 steel mills, but their combined interests in foreign iron ore reserves amounts to only 65 million tons a year, or less than 10% of annual ore imports, according to the Metallurgical Industry Planning and Research Institute.

The Simandou project could become a game changer for Chinese steel mills. Caixin learned that Baowus proposed $6 billion investment would put $4.5 billion into the southern blocks and $1.5 billion into the northern blocks. Under the Baowu plan, 15% of the fund would come from Baowu, 35% from other steelmakers, 25% from the sovereign wealth fund, 10% from other institutional investors and 15% from infrastructure investors.

Baowu has held talks with major domestic steel companies since June, including Shougang Group Co. Ltd., China Minmetals Corp. and Jianlong Group. It also met with Simandous current investors Chinalco and SMB-Winning, Caixin learned.

Baowu Chairman Chen is very enthusiastic about the Simandou investment and wants to push it forward, said a person close to the company.

But the plan is still at an early stage, and many Chinese steelmakers are hesitant to take part because of different concerns over iron ore supply, a steel industry professional told Caixin. Meanwhile, financial investors shy away from the long investment period and related uncertainties, a fund manager said.

Even if Baowus plan wins supports from other investors, it will remain a major challenge to negotiate a way to work with the current project shareholders, analysts said. A person close to the matter said Baowu hopes to persuade Rio Tinto to sell part or all of its Simandou stake.





No easy money

Getting the minerals out of Guineas mountainous hinterland and transporting the ore to China will be a challenge requiring massive investment in infrastructure and logistics, the investor said.

The Guinean government is seeking to leverage the Simandou project to expand domestic infrastructure, demanding construction of a 650-kilometer Trans-Guinea Railway and a deep-water port as well as supportive facilities. This would mean a huge additional investment for Simandou developers. A study by Rio Tinto before 2016 showed that overall investment in block 3 and 4 could amount $18 billion. A preliminary study by Baowu projected $15 of billion investment for the two blocks, while SMB-Winning estimated $14 billion of spending for the other two blocks.

Such massive construction also means a longer investment period. Analysts said it could take as long as eight years for Simandou to complete construction and start delivery.

A greater challenge would come from market response after Simandou commences production.

Once Simandou starts production, international iron ore prices will be slashed, hurting investors interests, a financial institution source said.

Average production cost at Simandou might range between $35 and $40 a ton, compared with $15 to $20 a ton in Australia, making it more vulnerable to price wars, analysts said.

It is almost certain that the four mining giants will cut prices after Simandou starts operation to kill it, a fund manager said.

The financial institution source said considering the complexity of the Simandou project, it will need to be pushed forward by state-level coordination and planning. However, another source said authorities havent shown any interest in offering state backing to the Simandou project amid concerns over domestic steel industry overcapacity.

Contact reporter Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com) and editor Bob Simison (bobsimison@caixin.com).

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RARITAN, New Jersey, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- In its August 23Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for COVID-19 convalescent plasma for the treatment of hospitalized patients with COVID-19, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires all units of donor blood to be tested on Ortho Clinical Diagnostics' VITROS Anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG test for anti SARS-CoV-2 antibodies as a manufacturing step before release to hospitals and patients.*

The EUA was based in part on data from the FDA's Expanded Access Program (EAP), run by the Mayo Clinic.

"COVID-19 convalescent plasma is a promising therapy that the FDA has reason to believe demonstrates clinical benefit in hospitalized patients treated early and with higher antibody levels," said Mike Iskra, executive vice president, Commercial Excellence and Strategy, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics. "Ortho is pleased to offer a broadly available, high-throughput, low-cost test that can help health care teams identify convalescent plasma to aid the most critically ill patients. At Ortho, we believe that every test is a life, and continue to work to deliver large-scale solutions to help identify, control, and treat this devastating virus."

Ortho's COVID-19 IgG antibody test runs on Ortho's VITROS systems, already installed in more than 1,000 hospitals and reference labs throughout the United States. When running infectious disease tests such as our COVID-19 tests, Ortho's instruments can process up to 150 tests per hour.

The new COVID-19 convalescent plasma EUA is a groundbreaking announcement and Ortho is proud to have product offerings that are key in the major advancements being made by the scientific and medical communities to assure patients are able to access critical therapies in the continued fight against this unprecedented virus.

Ortho manufactures its COVID-19 IgG antibody test in Rochester, New York and Pencoed, UK and produces millions of tests per week.

Questions from laboratories, healthcare providers, or government officials regarding the COVID-19 antibody test can be directed to: OrthoCOVID19Test@orthoclinicaldiagnostics.com.

The VITROS Anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG test has not been FDA cleared or approved. It has been authorized by the FDA under an emergency use authorization and testing is limited to laboratories certified under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA), 42 U.S.C. 263a, to perform moderate and high complexity tests. The test has been authorized only for the detection of IgG antibodies from SARS-CoV-2, not for any other viruses or pathogens, and results should not be used as the sole basis for diagnosis. This test is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of in vitro diagnostic tests for detection and/or diagnosis of COVID-19 under Section 564(b)(1) of the Act, 21 U.S.C.  360bbb-3(b)(1), unless the authorization is terminated or revoked sooner.

*If a blood establishment is considering using an alternative test in manufacturing for convalescent plasma release, they should contact the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) to determine acceptability of the proposed test, which if accepted, would require an amendment to the newly issued EU.

About Ortho Clinical Diagnostics

Ortho Clinical Diagnostics is a global leader of in vitro diagnostics dedicated to improving and saving lives through innovative laboratory testing and blood-typing solutions.

Because Every Test is a Life we never stop innovating to offer streamlined, sustainable laboratory solutions that deliver fast, accurate, reliable test results that support exceptional patient care.

For more information about Ortho's solutions and services, visit Ortho's website or social media channels: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Sarah Jessica Parker recently shut down a troll who called her 'pretentious' in an Instagram comment.

And the four-time Golden Globe winner isn't bothering herself with haters, as she enjoys her summer with family.

The 55-year-old beauty showed off her stunning figure Sunday in black, as she hit the beach with husband Matthew Broderick in the Hamptons, getting away from their home in New York City.

Summer body: Sarah Jessica Parker showed off her stunning figure Sunday in black, as she hit the beach with husband Matthew Broderick in the Hamptons

SJP put her toned body on display in a timeless black one-piece swimsuit, while catching some sun.

She layered the swimwear look with a short green floral cover-up, which was trimmed in pink piping.

Parker accessorized with a pair of black chunky wraparound sunglasses and a silver pendant necklace.

Broderick, 58, showed off a muscled dad bod in a grey souvenir t-shirt from Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts.

Back in black: The 55-year-old put her toned body on display in a timeless black one-piece swimsuit, while catching some sun

Social distancing: They met up with some friends on the beach, while getting away from their home in New York City

Green with envy: She layered the swimwear look with a short green floral cover-up, which was trimmed in pink piping

Accessorizing: Parker accessorized with a pair of black chunky wraparound sunglasses and a silver pendant necklace

Hot dad: Broderick, 58, showed off a muscled dad bod in a grey souvenir t-shirt from Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts

Swim trunks: He complemented the shirt with some maroon swim trunks, trimmed in white, and a pair of round tortoiseshell sunglasses

Hands full: The famous couple had their hands full with towels, chairs and umbrellas, as they picked out a spot in the sand

Friendly outing: They met up with some friends for the beach outing, as they enjoyed a socially-distanced picnic

He complemented the shirt with some maroon swim trunks, trimmed in white, and a pair of round tortoiseshell sunglasses.

The famous couple had their hands full with towels, chairs and umbrellas, as they picked out a spot in the sand.

They met up with some friends for the beach outing, as they enjoyed a socially-distanced picnic.

Parker and Broderick were previously set to return to Broadway together for a revival of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite.

Although the play was originally supposed to premiere in March, it's been postponed to next spring, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Onstage romance: Parker and Broderick were previously set to return to Broadway together for a revival of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite

Postponed: Although the play was originally supposed to premiere in March, it's been postponed to next spring, amid the COVID-19 pandemic

Family time: The Sex and the City star has been isolating with Broderick, whom she married in 1997, and their son James, 17, and twin daughters Marion and Tabitha, both 11

Back to work: Parker is working on producing a dating show for Lifetime, which will potentially be titled Swipe Swap

The Sex and the City star has been isolating with Broderick, whom she married in 1997, and their son James, 17, and twin daughters Marion and Tabitha, both 11.

She's been keeping busy though, opening her SJP footwear boutique last month in midtown Manhattan.

Parker is also working on producing a dating show for Lifetime, which will potentially be titled Swipe Swap.

The reality show/social experiment will see two people switch locations and entire lifestyles, hoping to find the one.
Earl and Countess of Leicester are now building a huge 'eco-home' on the country estate

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Descendants of a nobleman who famously coined the phrase 'an Englishman's home is his castle' are set to build an eco-home on their sprawling country estate.

The Earl and Countess of Leicester want to create a modern environmentally sustainable residence in Creake House, while maintaining the imposing classical style of nearby Norfolk properties such as Sandringham.

The new home will sit on the 25,000-acre plot of Holkham Hall, built by their relative Sir Edward Coke in the 18th century.

Descendants of a nobleman who famously coined the phrase 'an Englishman's home is his castle' are set to build an eco-home on their sprawling country estate

Designed by Rodney Black, a Colchester architect, the plans have been praised as 'inventive' for its eco-credentials and use of local resources.

Planning permission for the house was recently approved in a tight vote by North Norfolk district council's planning committee.

The new home will sit on the 25,000-acre plot of Holkham Hall, built by their relative Sir Edward Coke in the 18th century

The family have also been hands-on in the project, including Thomas Coke, the 8th Earl, who with his late father Edward was credit with reviving the Holkham estate, and his a keen conservationist.

The Earl and Countess plan to continue living in the family wing of the huge Palladian mansion, while the new seven-bedroom home will become the primary residence of close relatives.

Details of the application for Creake House given to North Norfolk council show the property will be fronted with a range of material local to the region, including clunch, a white limestone; a buff limestone; red brick laid in Flemish bond, and knapped flint.

This goes against the style of other grand buildings that are covered in stucco render or faced entirely in materials such as limestone.

Energy saving has been made a priority, with the roof decked out with solar panels, and the a ground-source heat pump installed.

Landscaping plans pledge the planting of almost 6,000 trees to create a 13-acre native woodland around the site, and wildflower meadows and wetland habitats will be created to encourage biodiversity.

Together, the family hope the plans will make the house 'carbon negative' over 60 years.

Jeremy Musson, the architectural historian and former architecture editor of Country Life, who advised on the project, told The Times: 'The innovation is in the spirit of treating a classical house in this gentle, crafted way so we're looking at a building that is going to be very expressive of the materials of the area.'

The Earl and Countess of Leicester want to create a modern environmentally sustainable residence in Creake House

The Earl and Countess plan to continue living in the family wing of the huge Palladian mansion, while the new seven-bedroom home will become the primary residence of close relatives

He added that the interiors were very nicely planned around a central hall and staircase while the rooms were placed to get the best views and light at the times they were most used.

There are also plans to convert an old barn, which is currently occupied by two types of bat and barn owls for roosting. A new space will be created for the owls to roost.

The 18th-century Palladian-style Holkham Hall in Norfolk was built by a descendant of Sir Edward Coke, a Jacobean jurist who wrote in 1604 that an Englishman's house is his castle.
Essex may be known as a county of boy racers and fast car lovers, but it has also has a number of postcodes in which drivers are more likely to have their motors pinched than anywhere else in Britain.

The IG postcode of Ilford has been named the location where vehicles are most at risk, according to a new report.

Second on the list is Romford and its RM postcode and both have far higher than average vehicle thefts, according to data from Moneysupermarket.

The Only Way is Car Theft: Essex postcodes dominated the top 10 UK locations where car thefts are reported most commonly, according to new statistics

The analysis is based on more than 5.8million motor insurance enquiries between July 2019 and June 2020, with the crime reports covering a five-year period.

There were a staggering 20.3 car thefts reported per 1,000 people in Ilford, earning it the moniker of the UK's postcode where vehicles are most likely to be nicked.

Just six miles across the A12 in Romford, there were a recorded 19.1 car thefts per 1,000 people, which was the second highest rating of all UK areas.

Further down the A13, Southend-on-Sea was also among the top 10 most vulnerable spots with 11.99 reports of car crime per 1,000 people respectively - but this is almost half the figure of Ilford, showing just how bad the problem is in the IG postcode.

The SS postcode truly is in Essex, while the other two (IG and RM) in the list are technically in London - but it depends on who you ask.

Essex postcodes topped the standing for the most car crimes, according to the new report published this week

Ilford, Romford and Southend-on-Sea all made it into the list, while East London also had a high rate of car thefts

The analysis by the comparison site showed that cars kept in Birmingham are also under high threat.

The Midlands city was third in the rankings with 16.5 thefts per 1,000 inhabitants.

North London is also a risky location for vehicle owners, with 14.2 thefts per 1,000 people in the last five years, which is higher than the capital's average, recorded at 11.2 per 1,000 capita.

The research found that less inhabited parts of the country are were vehicles are most secure,

The Orkney Islands town of Kirkwall is the safest spot for drivers, said Moneysupermarket, with the lowest rate of reported car thefts at 0.5 per 1000 enquiries.

Other Scottish locations including Inverness (0.8), Perth (1.1) and Galashiels (1.2) follow as the next safest locations in the UK.

The coastal port town of Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands (pictured) is the postcode with the fewest reported car thefts since 2015, Moneysupermarket says

These are the postcodes where motor insurance enquiries suggest the fewest car thefts have taken place in the last 5 years

Dave Merrick, car insurance expert at MoneySuperMarket, said: 'When comparing car insurance quotes, providers will take your location into account which may impact the cost of your premiums.

'Fully comprehensive car insurance policies are a good option for drivers to protect themselves from theft, accidental damages and loss of personal items.

'Having the right car insurance in place for your needs will help minimise the financial impact of theft.

'If your policy is up for renewal, make sure you shop around for the best deal  doing so can save you up to 287.'

The spike in vehicle thefts in recent years is due to the increased use of keyless car crime, with thieves using 'relay attacks' to steal modern cars with keyless entry and engine start

Crime on the risk sparked by soaring cases of keyless car thefts

According to recent reports, at least 300 cars are stolen in Britain every day  but fewer than two result in convictions.

Police said 106,291 vehicles were taken last year, a rise of 50 per cent in six years, according to the Office of National Statistics.

But the Ministry of Justice said only 666 offenders were found guilty, of which 243 were jailed.

This means 99.4 per cent of car thieves escape justice  and of the small number sent to prison, most were out within nine months.

Insurers paid out a record 413million in claims for stolen cars last year  up from 376million in 2018.

MoneySuperMarket's data also gave some insight into which age groups are most and least susceptible to vehicle crime.

Drivers aged 40-49 face the highest risk of car theft (8.6), whilst those aged 17-to-19 years are least likely to report their vehicle stolen (1.5)  most likely due to older generations possessing more desirable cars.

The recent surge crime has been fuelled by a rise in keyless thefts in which crooks use hi-tech devices to unlock vehicles without breaking the locks or windows.

Many modern cars don't need to be physically unlocked when the owner wants to open the door  the proximity of the hi-tech key fob in the driver's pocket is enough to gain access.

To steal such a vehicle, one thief stands beside it with a transmitter while another moves a small amplifier around the perimeter of the owner's house until it detects a signal from the car key fob inside.

MoneySuperMarket's 5 top tips for keeping your car secure 1. Investing in windows made from security glass or Enhanced Protection Glazing, which are designed to prevent 'smash and grab' attacks, can protect you against damage to your vehicle. 2. Take care of your vehicle's documents and don't leave any records in the car. Should your car be stolen, this will make it easier for thieves to sell your vehicle or steal your identity. Instead, try keeping all important documents in a safe location at home. 3. Additional security devices such as tracking devices and steering wheel locks will not only act as good deterrents but also a method of tracing missing vehicles. These security devices will minimise damage and increase the chance of recovery. 4. It's important to keep your keys out of reach of thieves, so make sure they're not easily accessible or in view at home. It's possible for thieves to steal your keys from inside your home through the letterbox, so avoid leaving them near your front door. 5. Ensure that expensive technology isn't left in sight of any passers-by as you leave the vehicle. By removing valuables from your car such as your sat-nav or stereo, this will offset any opportunists who may be tempted.

The amplifier then relays the signal to the transmitter, which effectively becomes the key by passing it on to the car's security system, tricking it into thinking the real key is nearby.

This so-called relay theft can take just 60 seconds.

Luxury vehicles are usually stolen to order and shipped abroad or dismantled in illegal backstreet 'chop shops' before the parts are sold on.

While thieves may earn just 1,500 per vehicle, it remains a lucrative crime, and West Midlands Police shut down around 100 chop shops last year.

David Jamieson, West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner, said last month: 'It is a total disgrace that manufacturers allow their sophisticated, hi-tech vehicles to be stolen by 17-year-old kids within 40 seconds.

'Some manufacturers have started to take responsibility  but for years they have been doing virtually nothing on keyless theft.

'They always seem to be about three phases behind the criminals because the keyless access technology is developing so quickly.

'It has become a multi-billion-pound business. The problem is, we have lost a quarter of police officers in ten years and have started to prioritise other crimes. In some areas, roads policing is almost non-existent.'

Assistant Chief Constable Jenny Sims, head of vehicle crime on the National Police Chiefs Council, added: 'The increase in vehicle theft is clearly linked to organised crime and police are putting more resources into tackling it.

'This is not a low-level offence  it is a serious crime which causes distress to victims and we do take it seriously.

'The rapid development of technology has dramatically improved the experience of drivers, but it has also allowed criminals to exploit weaknesses in electronic security.'
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Forbes contributor, Bruce Lee emphasizes the difference between finding the viral RNA and a live replicating virus. Genetic material of the virus is not infectious as viruses need a live host for replication. Also, the viral load is another important factor for infectivity. Therefore, the chances of infection with coronavirus after eating food with just the viral genetic material is very low.Another study by Reuters has found the evidence of presence of the viral genetic material on the outer packaging of frozen seafood in Yantai in china. The threat from these food-borne sources are very low.For the new study, 500 tiny individual cubes of salmon, chicken and pork from supermarkets in Singapore were inoculated w with a hefty dose of SARS-CoV-2 viral particles.The meat was then stored at 3 different temperatures, 40C,-200C, and -800C. After thawing the meat at various time points (1, 2, 5, 7, 14 and 21 days after inoculation), there was no change in the amount of infectious virus that were capable of reproducing. The amount of infectious virus remained the same at 3 weeks in both refrigerated (40C) and frozen samples (-200C and -800C).Researchers say that workers handling contaminated meat in the processing plants could be possible vectors of the infection, which might also explain the recent outbreak of the virus in New Zealand, where no new cases hand been reported in 100 days.Though food may not be a primary source of transmission, people should realize that the risk of catching the virus from exposure to, or eating previously refrigerated or frozen meat and fish is still at large.The study has demonstrated that the virus canIn order to reduce the risk of Covid-19 outbreaks by contaminated food, efforts must begin at the source. This should include attention to hand hygiene, cleaning of utensils, material and food contact surfaces.According to the CDC,Source: Medindia
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:46:56|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- China's foreign ministry on Monday expressed support for companies including TikTok to take up legal weapons to defend their legitimate rights and interests.

The ministry's spokesperson Zhao Lijian made the remarks at a daily press briefing in response to a question concerning announcements by TikTok and some WeChat users in the United States to file lawsuits against U.S. government executive orders to defend their legal rights.

China will also continue to take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises, Zhao said.

He said some U.S. politicians are working to crush such Chinese companies as TikTok, WeChat and Huawei because they are down with an anti-China syndrome and will strike at anything Chinese.

"That explains their frantic attempts to hunt down TikTok and other Chinese companies by pinning the ideological label on them under the pretext of 'national security'. All the lies and smears are just disguise for their daylight bullying and robbery," he added.

The wanton actions some U.S. politicians have taken against specific companies, such as TikTok, are in essence organized and systematic economic bullying targeting outperforming non-U.S. multinational companies. U.S. politicians fear their strength and success and would even resort to state power to pummel them, said the spokesperson.

"This is a repudiation of the principle of market economy and fair competition that the United States has always boasted about. This is trampling on international rules and disrupting exchanges and cooperation in science, technology and innovation riding the trend of globalization. The world will only see more clearly the true face of these self-serving bandits-like politicians," the spokesperson added. Enditem
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  Scott Peterson's conviction for killing his pregnant wife will stand, but the California Supreme Court on Monday overturned his 2005 death sentence in a case that attracted worldwide attention. The justices cited significant errors" in jury selection in overturning the death penalty but welcomed prosecutors to again seek the sentence if they wish.

Laci Peterson, 27, was eight months pregnant with their unborn son, Connor, when she was killed. Investigators said that on Christmas Eve 2002, Peterson dumped their bodies from his fishing boat into San Francisco Bay, where they surfaced months later.

Peterson contends his trial was flawed for multiple reasons, beginning with the unusual amount of pretrial publicity that surrounded the case," the court said. We reject Petersons claim that he received an unfair trial as to guilt and thus affirm his convictions for murder.

But the justices said the trial judge made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection that, under long-standing United States Supreme Court precedent, undermined Petersons right to an impartial jury at the penalty phase.

It agreed with his argument that potential jurors were improperly dismissed from the jury pool after saying they personally disagreed with the death penalty but would be willing to follow the law and impose it.

While a court may dismiss a prospective juror as unqualified to sit on a capital case if the jurors views on capital punishment would substantially impair his or her ability to follow the law, a juror may not be dismissed merely because he or she has expressed opposition to the death penalty as a general matter, the justices said in a unanimous decision.

They rejected Peterson's argument that he couldnt get a fair trial because of widespread publicity after the proceedings were moved nearly 90 miles (145 kilometers) away from his Central Valley home of Modesto to San Mateo County, south of San Francisco.

Story continues

Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager did not immediately comment.

Its just too new, said spokesman John Goold. The familys digesting it, and were looking at the decision. Everybodys reading it and then were going to talk to them.

Fladager was one of three prosecutors in Peterson's trial, but the justices also chastised those prosecutors for not speaking up as the jury selection errors were occurring.

It is in no ones interest for a capital case to begin with the certainty that any ensuing death verdict will have to be reversed and the entire penalty case retried, the justices said.

Fladager was a chief deputy district attorney at the time, Goold said, but basically supervised and was there in the audience.

Peterson, who is now 47, was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his wife and the second-degree murder of their unborn son. He would serve a sentence of life without the possibility of parole if prosecutors don't again seek the death penalty.

We are grateful for the California Supreme Courts unanimous recognition that if the state wishes to put someone to death, it must proceed to trial only with a fairly selected jury, Cliff Gardner, Petersons appellate attorney, said in an email.

His trial attorney, Mark Geragos, said he objected at the time to what he said was clear error in jury selection.

Geragos said he does not expect prosecutors to retry the penalty phase. "Frankly, I think the only reason that they sought the death penalty was to get a guilt-prone jury panel, he said.

California has not executed anyone since 2006 because of legal challenges to the way it would carry out the death penalty, and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has a moratorium on executions for as long as he is governor.

That moratorium helped lead other California prosecutors to negotiate a plea deal in the more recent high-profile Golden State Killer case. Former police officer Joseph DeAngelo was sentenced to multiple life terms on Friday in exchange for his guilty pleas to 13 murders and 13 rape-related charges.

In the Peterson case, investigators chased nearly 10,000 tips and considered parolees and convicted sex offenders as possible suspects.

Scott Peterson was eventually arrested after Amber Frey, a massage therapist living in Fresno, told police that they had begun dating a month before his wifes death, but that he had told her his wife was dead.

Peterson is arguing in a separate proceeding that he was unfairly convicted, and if that fails he can try again in federal court.

While we are disappointed that such a biased jury selection process results in a reversal of only the death sentence, we look forward to the courts review of the new forensic and eyewitness evidence of innocence, Gardner wrote.

Geragos said he expects Peterson will eventually be exonerated. Were halfway there, he said.

But the justices found that even had the trial court rejected some of the evidence that Peterson challenged at trial and on appeal, there was considerable other circumstantial evidence incriminating Peterson.

Among them is that the bodies washed ashore 90 miles (145 kilometers) from their home but near where Peterson admitted he was fishing when they disappeared. He also researched ocean currents, bought a boat without telling anyone, and couldn't explain what type of fish he was trying to catch that day.

Moreover, in the weeks following her disappearance, but before the bodies washed ashore, he sold his wife's car, looked into selling their house, and turned the baby nursery into a storage room.

Those steps alone, the justices said, indicated he already knew Laci and Conner were never coming back.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Grand Rapids autonomous shuttle pilot is relaunching with a host of new cleaning tools that officials say will ensure passenger safety amid the coronavirus pandemic.

May Mobility and Grand Rapids officials announced Monday, Aug. 24, all eight autonomous shuttles will resume regular service Aug. 31.

Using routine ultraviolet light treatments, driver-passenger partitions, disinfectant solutions and foggers, officials expressed confidence that riders will be protected from COVID-19 transmission during their trips.

I am so proud of the May Mobility team for coming together with our partners to find the right combination of cleaning technologies to get the shuttles back in service in Grand Rapids -- this is a perfect example of how nimble and innovative we can be as a company, Edwin Olson, founder and CEO of May Mobility, said in a statement.

The Grand Rapids shuttle program also demonstrates our company mission of delivering safe, efficient transportation options that will ultimately improve cities.

Ann Arbor-based May Mobility, which is the citys primary partner on the autonomous shuttle pilot, suspended the service March 16 to prevent passengers from spreading or catching COVID-19 during rides.

While the service was launched as a one-year pilot starting on July 2019 and ending July 2020, the service suspension pushes the new end date to early January 2021 to compensate for the months of inactivity.

The pilot program has a price tag of $650,000 and aims to assess the barriers and benefits of implementing further self-driving shuttle services in the city. Grand Rapids funded $250,000 of the project, and private-sector partners picked up the remaining $400,000.

Regular service hours of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday will resume with the relaunch. The regular service route along the citys existing DASH West bus route will resume as well.

The DASH West route is 3.2 miles long and takes passengers around downtown. It has stops near more than 10 parking lots, as well as the David D. Hunting YMCA, Kendall College of Art & Design, Grand Rapids Children's Museum, Van Andel Arena and Bridge Street Market.

There is no fee to ride in the shuttles, which have a top speed of 25 mph.

We are pleased to return (the Grand Rapids Autonomous Vehicle Initiative) to the streets in a safe and responsive way, Josh Naramore, director of the Citys Mobile GR and Parking Services Department, said in a statement. The (Grand Rapids Autonomous Vehicle Initiative) pilot continues to be an innovative and popular option for travelers while advancing autonomous vehicle technology in Grand Rapids.

All eight autonomous shuttles will now feature a partition between passengers and the attendant, who at times will take over the vehicles manual controls to improve the ride.

Related: How driverless are Grand Rapids autonomous shuttles?

The partition reduces passenger seating from five to four. Passengers also can no longer ride with strangers and must either ride alone or with members of their household or party. The attendant and all passengers are required to wear masks.

In addition to social distancing measures, May Mobility is also deploying air conditioner filters and disinfection measures to kill any lingering COVID-19 pathogens between rides.

Between every ride, officials say they will deploy a treatment of ultraviolet C light. GHSP, the Holland-based company that makes the product, claims a five minute treatment with grenlite will disable up to 99.9 percent of germs and pathogens, including human coronavirus, according to May Mobility.

Staff will also wipe down the entire shuttle interior daily and use a disinfectant dry fogger to reach crevices and areas not where sprays, UV lights and wipes cant. The dry fogger system is a product of Halosil International.

Lastly, May Mobility has deployed MERV 13 air filters in both zones of the shuttles dual zone air conditioners. These filters can be easily replaced on a regular basis, officials say.

In Michigan, resiliency and innovation is in our DNA, and its never been more apparent than during this global pandemic, Trevor Pawl, chief mobility officer for the State of Michigan, said in a statement.

Ensuring transportation options are not only safe but also meet the biohealth concerns of Michigan residents is a massive undertaking. We are so grateful to May Mobility for their continued dedication to making sure that accessible and inclusive transportation options exist for everyone in our communities.

Read more:

UV light wands and 11 other tools businesses are using against coronavirus

Testing for mosquito-borne EEE in Kalamazoo County delayed by coronavirus pandemic

Michigan claims PFAS makers hid firefighting foam danger in new lawsuits
(Newser)  Video app TikTok says it will wage a legal fight against the Trump administration's efforts to ban the popular, Chinese-owned service over national-security concerns. TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, insisted Monday that it is not a national-security threat and that the government is acting without evidence or due process, the AP reports. The company said it will file suit against the government Monday in federal court in California. President Trump issued two executive orders in August, first a sweeping but unspecified ban on any "transaction" with ByteDance, to take effect within 45 days. He then ordered ByteDance to sell assets used to support TikTok in the US. Over the past year, TikTok has tried to put distance between its app, which it says has 100 million US users, and its Chinese owners

story continues below

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have shared concerns about TikTok that ranged from its vulnerability to censorship and misinformation campaigns to the safety of user data and childrens privacy. In excerpts from its forthcoming complaint, TikTok said that it has protected US user data by storing it in the US and Singapore, not China, and "by erecting software barriers that help ensure that TikTok stores its US user data separately from the user data of other ByteDance products." The company says Trump's Aug. 6 order banning TikTok "with no notice or opportunity to be heard" violated its Fifth Amendment due-process rights. It also says that the order is not acting based on a bona fide national emergency.

(Read more TikTok stories.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-22 03:52:51|Editor: huaxia

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QUITO, Aug. 21 (Xinhua) -- Ecuador's Ministry of Public Health on Friday reported a total of 106,481 cases of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infection and 6,248 deaths since the onset of the outbreak.

In the previous 24 hours, tests detected 973 new cases and 48 more patients died.

The province of Pichincha continues to be the epicenter of the pandemic in the South American country, with a total of 22,070 cases, followed by Guayas with 18,426 cases. The majority of the infections in Pichincha are concentrated in the capital city of Quito.

Vice Minister of Health Xavier Solorzano said on Friday that in Ecuador the pandemic is not yet under control and although at this moment "there are no significant outbreaks in the country, we do have cases every day. The cases continue to increase."

However, he added that in the case of Pichincha, "a flat curve has appeared as a plateau that has allowed better management of the response to the epidemic."

He assured that the situation in Quito "is not critical" and although the epidemic continues its course, "there is less pressure on the demand for beds" in public hospitals. Enditem
Shocking footage has emerged of a man poking a three-year-old Beluga whale at an aquarium.

In the video, filmed in Shenzhen, south China, on August 12, the man is seen poking and squeezing the whale's head to show nearby children how soft it is.

The man, possible an aquarium employee, said he spends time with the whale, named Dabai, every day and has built a relationship with the mammal.

Shocking footage has emerged out of China showing a young man poking a three-year-old Beluga whale's head (pictured) at an aquarium in Shenzhen while children are heard laughing

'Our relationship is very good. It is very good most of the time, but sometimes it is very naughty and will spray water at me,' he said.

'In this video, I'm touching its head and its head is super soft.

'Then it laughs super cute. I chat with it every day and it uses movements to respond to me.'

But not everyone saw the video as 'cute' with some taking issue with the man's actions.

'It's not safe to poke a Beluga's head,' one concerned viewer wrote.

'I don't think that's safe,' another added.

The bulbous part of a Beluga whale's head is the called the 'melon' and is an organ which directs and changes the frequency of the animal's sound waves.

The area is soft because it is filled with oil and wax, with the brain is well protected behind the melon and inside the skull.
Its a steamy August morning and teachers at Cumberland Regional High School are already back at work preparing for what will be an unprecedented school year.

They are attending a remote learning bootcamp, where they will discover best practices for educating students who are miles from the classroom.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 23:41:07|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

- - - -

DUBAI -- The United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Monday announced 275 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the total confirmed cases in the country to 67,282.

The Ministry of Health and Prevention said in a statement that the new cases of many nationalities are all in stable condition and receiving medical treatment.

- - - -

HANOI -- Vietnam reported six new cases of COVID-19 infection on Monday, bringing its total confirmed cases to 1,022 with 27 deaths from the disease so far, according to its Ministry of Health.

The six new cases, which were recorded in Vietnam's central Da Nang city and northern Hai Duong province, include those reportedly in contact with COVID-19 patients and two medical staff of Da Nang Hospital in Da Nang city, where a number of COVID-19 cases have been reported, according to the ministry.

- - - -

ULAN BATOR -- A total of 263 Mongolian nationals have returned home from abroad on a chartered flight from Japan on Monday night, the country's State Emergency Commission (SEC) said.

The flight landed at the Buyant-Ukhaa International Airport, the SEC said in a statement.

The returnees include children, pregnant women, seniors, sick people, and those with financial and other problems, and will be isolated at designated facilities for 21 days, the SEC said.

- - - -

KAMPALA -- A major private hospital in Uganda on Monday said it has suspended visitations to admitted patients as it attempts to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus, which is on the increase in the east African country.

Nakasero Hospital, in the capital Kampala, said in a tweet that currently only one caretaker per patient is allowed.

- - - -

URUMQI -- No new confirmed COVID-19 cases or asymptomatic cases were reported in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Sunday, the regional health commission said in its daily report.

A total of 15 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospital on Sunday after recovery, and 12 asymptomatic cases were released from medical observation, according to the commission.

- - - -

KAMPALA -- New infection figures show that the COVID-19 situation in Uganda is rapidly changing, forcing the government and scientists to reconsider their strategy, especially in the capital here, a local virus hotspot.

The East African country over the weekend recorded its highest daily cases after inmates at one of the prisons tested positive for the virus. The country recorded 318 cases, the highest daily number since the index case was registered on March 21. Enditem
Halstead, left, was jailed for flouting trading rules. (PA Images/Lancashire Police)

A brazen taxidermist has been sentenced to 56 weeks in prison for repeatedly flouting laws about trading in endangered species.

Aaron Halestead, 29, was accused of using his legitimate business as a vehicle for his illicit trading, prosecutors said.

He was first investigated and cautioned for breaching regulations when he was a student who ran a taxidermy business to fund his studies.

Handout photo issued by Lancashire Police of rhino horns as taxidermist Aaron Halstead was jailed for 56 weeks.

Despite receiving advice about what was allowed from an officer who had experience of wildlife crime, he was jailed for 24 weeks in 2015 after admitting purchasing sperm whale teeth, a cheetah skull and a dolphin skull, and offered to sell a snowy owl without a permit.

Halstead was jailed on Monday for nine similar breaches of control of trade in endangered species regulations between September 2017 and January 2018.

Tiger skulls were acquired for a commercial purpose, the court heard. (Getty)

A sawfish rostrum was among the items linked to Halstead. (PA/Lancashire Police)

He admitted a string of offences including selling and transporting black rhino horns, acquiring tiger skulls for a commercial purpose, offering a sperm whale tooth and black rhino skull for sale and keeping elephant tusks for sale.

Prosecutor Adrian Farrow told Preston Crown Court that Halsteads actions were driven by the considerable financial gains which can be made in such trade.

Farrow said Halstead told a supplier via WhatsApp that he did not need to be afraid of Customs in shipping 10 tiger skulls valued at 9,000 euros out of the Netherlands.

It will be fine  Ive never had anything stopped, Halstead said.

Only from out of the EU.

Aaron Halstead has been jailed for 56 weeks. (PA/Lancashire Police)

Undated handout photo issued by Lancashire Police of an elephant tusk. (via PA)

Another WhatsApp conversation showed Halstead had set up a trip to Calais in France to sell black rhino horns for 70,000 euros to a Chinese rich client. He had removed the horns from a head he legally bought in an auction, the court heard.

I will put some other taxidermy in the car and make a false invoice so it looks like I am delivering them to France, he had said.

Mark Stuart, defending, said Halstead, a qualified swimming instructor who helped disabled children, should have stopped trading but he did not, which was a ridiculous stupid decision to make which he now bitterly regrets.

Story continues

The court heard that Halsteads wife Heather was utterly astounded when she discovered he was trading illegally again and told him to shut the taxidermy business, which was dissolved in January 2019.

Andy McWilliam, investigations officer for the National Wildlife Crime Unit, with elephant horns. (PA/Lancashire Police)

A sperm whale tooth, catalogued by Lancashire Police. (via PA)

Sentencing, Judge Robert Altham said: This was brazen, persistent, well-organised criminality.

This is no hapless amateur who has offended by stumbling into an area of legislation he was not aware of.

Here was a person who acted deliberately in a flagrant and knowing breach of the law, understanding the risks he took and the harm he could cause but was prepared to take those risks for considerable financial rewards.
As the Nov. 3 election grows closer, my colleagues visited hotly contested areas across the region to check-in on races that could come down to the wire this fall. Even President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama are focused on Pennsylvanias impact on the election, offering contrasting views on what could happen depending on which party took the state.

And, if youre looking to take a break from politics, the Flyers start their series tonight against the Islanders. Meanwhile, the Sixers season ended yesterday with a sweep.

 Josh Rosenblat (@joshrosenblat, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

In getting past the Montreal Canadiens, the Flyers did just enough on defense to grab their first series win since 2012. But, theyre not going to beat the New York Islanders playing the same way, my colleague Sam Carchidi writes.

The Flyers will need to refocus ahead of tonights series opener, especially after losing all three regular-season meetings between the two teams. One key might be the Flyers young netminder Carter Hart keeping up his impressive play. But thats no guarantee, columnist Mike Sielski writes.

What do Trump and Obama agree on? For their parties, its either winning the state, or its the apocalypse, my colleague Jonathan Tamari writes. In their dueling visits to the Keystone State last week, the previous president and the current one presented contrasting but apocalyptic versions of what might happen when one or the other side loses.

In the Philly suburbs, Republicans are trying to survive what looks like an anti-Trump wave. In 2003, there were almost twice as many registered Republicans as Democrats in Chester and Delaware Counties. Today, Democrats have a narrow registration edge in Chester County and a wider one in Delaware County, my colleague Andrew Seidman reports.

New Jerseys 3rd District has long been a Republican stronghold in a Democratic state. Its made up of most of Burlington County and a large chunk of Ocean County. But Democrat Andy Kim flipped the district by fewer than 4,000 votes in 2018. If he wins again this November, hell be the first Democrat in decades to hold the seat for consecutive terms.

My colleague Allison Steele visited Kims district and reported on how the more progressive Burlington County towns that propelled him to victory two years ago contrast with deep-red Ocean County, a place where, historically, Democrats havent had a chance to win.

What you need to know today

Through your eyes | #OurPhilly

Not a bad spot for a paddle. Thanks for sharing, @baewindows.

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and well pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout-out.

Thats interesting

Opinions

Take Julie Davis. For years, the 48-year-old cook had watched helplessly as her daughter struggled with drug addiction. She braced herself for the day she got word that her drug-addicted daughter had succumbed to an overdose. Still, when that day finally arrived on July 16, Davis collapsed with grief.  writes columnist Jenice Armstrong about how the opioid crisis cant be ignored, even with a pandemic still raging.

Martha S. Jones, an author and history teacher at Johns Hopkins University, writes about how we can all live up to the ideals of the Black women who are the founders of American democracy.

The digital divide is holding back immigrant communities, writes Nasr Sadar, a Syrian refugee and job development coordinator at the Nationalities Services Center.

What were reading

Your Daily Dose of | Philly strangers

My colleague Stephanie Farr, who cares so deeply about highlighting the passion, love, and hilarity of Philadelphia, was starting to lose her faith. Theres been the pandemic, the citys tear-gassing of its own people, a rising homicide rate, and more.

So, she asked for your favorite interactions with Philly strangers to remind her of why she fell in love with the city. These are the stories you shared with her.
BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - U.K. stocks rallied on Monday as the U.S. authorized a new coronavirus treatment and investors cheered signs of a thaw in U.S.-China tensions. Risk sentiment received a boost after the U.S. FDA announced an emergency use authorization for the use of convalescent plasma in helping treat patients with Covid-19. President Donald Trump hailed the FDA's decision and claimed the treatment could reduce the mortality by 35 percent. Meanwhile, a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter said that Trump's team is privately seeking to reassure U.S. companies that they can still do business with the WeChat messaging app in China. The benchmark FTSE 100 climbed 113 points, or 1.9 percent, to 6,115 after declining 0.2 percent on Friday. AstraZeneca shares jumped 3.3 percent. The Financial Times said the Trump administration is considering fast-tracking an experimental Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca Plc and Oxford University to return the economy closer to normalcy. British Airways-owner IAG declined 0.6 percent after France said it plans to reciprocate Britain's decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on all arrivals from France. Shares of BT Group soared 5.6 percent. Sky News reported the telecoms giant has asked Goldman Sachs to update its defense strategy from possible suitors. Bunzl rose nearly 3 percent after the distribution and outsourcing firm resumed dividends and reported a 16.6 percent rise in first-half profit. BP Plc climbed 2.8 percent and Royal Dutch Shell added 3.3 percent as oil prices rose amid storms in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. 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.
Actor Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead in his Bandra apartment on June 14. The Mumbai Police had earlier called it a suicide but the Central Bureau of Investigation has now started a fresh investigation in the matter.

Sushants housekeeper Neeraj Singh had shared a detailed account of what transpired on the morning of Sushants death with Mumbai Police. His statement was accessed by India Today.

Neeraj told the police what Sushant ate in the morning and how he locked his room after a few hours. On June 14, I woke up at 6:30 am, as always, and went to walk the dog. I returned at around 8 am. Then I cleaned the rooms upstairs and was cleaning the staircase. Sushant sir came out of his room and asked for chilled water. When I served him water, he drank the water there. He asked me if the hall was clean and smiled and went back. After that, at around 9:30 am, when I was cleaning the hall, I saw Keshav (the cook) taking bananas, coconut water and juice to sirs room. When Keshav came back, he said sir only had coconut water and juice, he said.

At around 10:30 am, Keshav again went to sirs room to ask what he would like to have for lunch. He knocked on the door but the room was locked from inside and there was no response. He thought sir was sleeping so he came downstairs. He told this to Deepesh and Siddharth. They also went to the room and started knocking. They knocked for quite a long time but there was no response. As sir did not open the door, Deepesh came down and told me about it. I also went to sirs room but sir was not opening the door so Siddharth called on sirs phone but sirs room door did not open nor did he answer the call. We started looking for the room keys but we couldnt find them. Then, Meetu didi told us to open the room and that she was on the way and will reach soon. Siddharth called up a keymaker, he added.

The keymakers came in but were sent away soon afterwards as they were taking to much time. Sushants staff then broke down the door and entered the room.

When Deepesh came up, we opened the door and it was pitch dark in the room and air conditioning was on. Deepesh switched on the light. Siddharth went ahead from the door and quickly came out. Behind him, I and Deepesh also went inside, he added.

Sushants sister Meetu came in after that. It was the same time that sirs sister, Meetu, entered the room and started shouting Gulshan tune ye kya kiya. The police were also called.

Also see | Khaali Peeli teaser: Ishaan Khatter and Ananya Panday are on the run in this action-packed thriller, watch

The Supreme Court on August 19 had asked CBI to investigate the case related to the actors death, while holding that the FIR registered in Patna by Sushants father was legitimate. The single-judge bench of Justice Hrishikesh Roy had observed that the Bihar government was competent to recommend transferring the case to the CBI. It had also asked the Mumbai Police to hand over all the evidence collected so far in the case to the CBI.

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Amaravati, Aug 24 : The government of Andhra Pradesh will soon make a legislation for time-bound trials in cases of corruption. This was announced by Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy on Monday.

At a review meeting with the officials, he said that strict laws should be brought in to eradicate corruption and legislation on the lines of Disha Act would be brought soon to fix a timeline for completing the trial in corruption cases.

At the review meeting, the representatives of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad presented a report on good governance along with the cabinet sub-committee report. It reviewed the functioning of Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) call centre number 14440, judicial preview, reverse tendering and other issues on eradicating corruption.

During the meeting the delay in the trial of corruption cases was discussed and the chief minister said that legislation should be brought in to fix a timeline for the trial of those involved in corruption.

Even if an employee is caught red handed taking bribes, the cases get dragged for a long period and in some cases even for over 25 years. "To stop this we have to bring in legislation on the lines of Disha Bill fixing the timeline for trial," he said.

Jagan said his government would eradicate corruption at the top level and the message should percolate down the line.

He directed that all complaints on corruption directed to helpline no. 1092 should be diverted to ACB toll free number 14440. The ACB call centre was started a year back and till now 44,999 calls were received. Of these 1,747 calls pertain to corruption and all the cases were addressed.

The officials told the chief minister that for the year ending August 2020; so far 45 projects worth Rs 14,285 crore were sent for judicial preview.

The chief minister was briefed that the introduction of reverse tendering has resulted in the state exchequer saving a mammoth Rs 2,252.86 crore spanning over 788 contracts. Steps to widen the ambit of reverse tendering are being formulated, in order to increase it even further.

The cabinet sub-committee which was setup to probe various dubious deals struck by the previous government has met 6 times until now, yielding two reports after extensive discussions.

The chief minister said that complaints from village secretariat upwards should be received by ACB which should be linked to the Collector office. Town Planning, Sub Registrar, MRO, MDO and other such offices should be free of corruption, he said Professor Sundaravalli Narayana Swamy of IIM Ahmedabad submitted to the chief minister, the report on good governance, which identifies the grey areas of corruption in government departments and the means by which it can be eradicated.

Chief Secretary Nilam Sawhney, DGP Goutham Sawang, ACB DIG PSR Anjaneyulu, IIM representatives and other officials participated in the review meeting.
Lack of human capital holding back Latin America's growth: IMF report

Investment alone will not ensure growth in incomes as human capital is an important factor in realising the benefits of investments, and this could explain lack of GDP growth in much of Latin America, according to a new report prepared by IMF staff.

Lower levels of human capital and productivity are holding back Latin Americas growth, according to the report prepared by Bas B Bakker, Manuk Ghazanchyan, Alex Ho and Vibha Nanda of IMF Western Hemisphere Department.

In 1990, Latin Americas average GDP per capita was a little over a quarter of the United States income level, while emerging and developing Asian countries GDP per capita was only 5 per cent. In 2019, Asian countries had grown fourfold, but Latin America was still at the same level.

While Asia had twice the investment level of Latin America, the report says that does not fully explain the difference in GDP growth levels. They cite the GDP gains of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe that have even lower investment than Asia, but have achieved faster growth than Latin America.

The working paper compares the experiences of these three regions (before Covid-19) and concludes that Latin America is poorer because of lower levels of human capital and productivity, not investment.

They have cited the examples of Mexico and Poland. In the last 25 years, Mexico has had more investment (as a per cent of GDP), but its growth per capita has been much slower. What explains that?

Productivity, human capital and institutions

Investment does raise income. A higher capital stock per worker increases GDP per capita. But only up to a certain point, after which the return on investment starts decreasing. A pizza deliverer with a motorcycle will do more deliveries than one who has to walk. But giving the same deliverer two motorcycles, or a more expensive one, will not do much to increase his output, they point out.

In the long run, it is not more input (labor and capital) that generates growth, but productivity (how much more output can be produced with the same input) in the same amount of time.

Productivity growth depends only partially on technological progress. In Charles Dickens time, letters were written with goose-feather quills. A century ago it was typewriters and today it is computers. Current office workers are much more productive! But the same computer will make a college graduate much more productive than someone who has only finished elementary school, they point out.

The writers say they studied the different components of GDP growth for Poland and Mexico since 1995 and the picture is very clear: the combination of human capital and productivity is a major contributor for the European country, while often a negative factor for the North American nation.

Strong governance and good business climate matter for productivity growth. In countries where property rights are not secure and governance is poor, firms will remain small and productivity low. In well-run countries, successful firms can become large and more efficient, they point out.

Cross-country differences in income levels

The paper says that countries with higher human capital and better governance and business climate tend to be richer than those with low scores on these variables. High human capital alone is not sufficient: our analysis shows that countries become rich only when governance also improves.

Not surprisingly, Mexico has worse readings in both areas than Poland. In general, Latin America scores poorly on both dimensions, compared to advanced countries or emerging Europe, which helps explain why it is relatively poorer, they say.

Of course, there are exceptions: Chiles governance ranks well against some advanced economies and is better than most of emerging Asia, they add.

The paper argues that countries wont grow faster and close the income gap with richer parts of the world without improving human capital, governance, and business environment.

Eastern Europes success

In 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin wall, countries behind the Iron Curtain were much poorer than Western Europe. Now, some of them have income levels similar to Spain and Italy.

They converged rapidly because their human capital was already similar to Western Europes, while income was much lower in the early 1990s. Strengthening of institutions helped the process, and here the European Union (EU) played an important role. The prospect of EU membership led to more reforms and higher growth. Countries that joined, or worked toward that objective, saw significant improvements, the report points out.

Latin America fell behind as it lacked the right combination of high human capital and investment compared to the low-income former communist countries. In fact, in the mid-1990s, GDP per capita was somewhat above what could be expected for the level of human capital. Also, the strong institutional improvement seen in Europe also didnt happen in Latin America. Governance indicators actually deteriorated in many countries.

The same factors that hold back growth also make investment less attractive. According to the writers low investment in Latin America is not the cause, but the result of low growth. Governments solely focused on boosting investment might want to look at the problem from a different perspective, they add.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:25:55|Editor: huaxia

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JOHANNESBURG, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- As South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) President Cyril Ramaphosa conceded the ruling party was "deeply implicated in corruption" and promised to dismantle it, analysts said those accused of corruption must be jailed in order to restore citizen's confidence in the state.

"The reality is until we see some real big shots being arrested for corruption, I don't believe people believe in government anymore, people take actions seriously, not words," senior economist at Efficient group Dawie Roodt told Xinhua on Monday.

Roodt's remarks follow Ramaphosa's Sunday letter to ANC members where he reminded them of how angered South Africans were about allegations of the current widespread corruption.

"While the current allegations about corruption in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic have brought this issue sharply to the fore, the reality is that corruption in this country has far deeper roots," Ramaphosa wrote in the letter.

He agreed the problem was one of the biggest the country was faced with, saying "corruption stands as one of the greatest challenges facing our society."

In July, Ramaphosa authorised the Special Investigative Unit to probe allegations of corruption relating to the procurement of personal protective equipment by government departments. Some senior government officials have taken special leave while the investigations are underway.

Roodt said these allegations were embarrassing which is why the president had to take actions.

"This is a looting frenzy that we witnessed and there is nothing that we can do about it, it's been going on for a very long time."

With South Africa planning to rebuild its economy and attract foreign investment, Roodt said widespread corruption would hamper Ramaphosa's efforts of revitalizing the economy.

"It affects it massively, corruption is having a massive impact on this country," he added.

While investigations are ongoing, some said speaking out against corruption was what the president could do.

"It's the minimum the president could do to take action in the midst of COVID-19 corruption taking place. He must be seen to be acting more, with people implicated in corruption going to jail," Jannie Rossouw, head of School of Economic and Business Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand told Xinhua. Enditem
Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, has responded to growing calls for his resignation by releasing footage of himself wearing body armour and brandishing an assault rifle.

Protests have erupted in the country for 15 days, with around 200,000 people amassing in Minsks Independence Square in the latest demonstrations to call for him to go amid widespread accusations of election-rigging.

In an apparent display of strong-arm propaganda, state-funded news agency Belta released footage of the president in Minsk, talking to riot police while holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Dressed in the black uniform of the nations riot police  a force he is accused of using as a tool of political repression  he was accompanied by heavily armed bodyguards, reportedly including his 15-year-old son and preferred heir Kolya.

Belarusians first began to take to the streets on 9 August when the 65-year-old was handed his sixth term in office by officials who said he had won with 80 per cent of the nations votes  a figure observers and opponents say is not credible.

Despite the iron fist with which Mr Lukashenko has ruled the former Soviet republic, demonstrations of an unprecedented scale and duration have continued across the country.

Earlier this month, some 7,000 people were arrested at protests, with many badly beaten by police in a show of force that appeared to only intensify the scale of the rallies.

Additional reporting by agencies
Master Manufacturing Group (MMG) officials announced Monday that the company will relocate its headquarters and manufacturing operations from Rancho Cordova, Calif. to Dayton, Tn.

The project represents the creation of 72 new jobs over the next three years.

MMG will invest $3.9 million to renovate and upgrade an existing manufacturing facility located at 220 Masters Way in Dayton. The building will also undergo extensive retrofitting in order to install holding tanks, electrical and hydraulic infrastructure, and create adequate ventilation for welding and painting operations.

MMG utilizes multiple manufacturing processes including CNC machining, mandrel bending and forming. Processes such as robotic, semi-robotic, manual welding as well as high pressure and high purity welding will be performed in-house at the Dayton facility.

Founded in 1956, Master Manufacturing Group, formerly known as Woodmack Products, Inc., provides custom tube and pipe manufacturing services, specializing in the gas appliance industry. The company offers aluminum, stainless steel and steel tubing components in various shapes, sizes and forms.

Since 2015, TNECD has supported 90 economic development projects in Southeast Tennessee, resulting in more than 12,500 job commitments and approximately $3.8 billion in capital investment.

Governor Bill Lee said, What happens in rural Tennessee affects every Tennessean, and so we're excited by this investment from Master Manufacturing Group to bring more jobs and growth to Rhea County. I appreciate MMG for choosing to do business in our state, and I look forward to the many ways this new operation will spark economic activity in Southeast Tennessee.

Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Bob Rolfe said, We are pleased to welcome another West Coast, California-based company to the Volunteer State. Tennessee offers companies around the world a favorable business climate and attractive competitive advantages. We thank Master Manufacturing Group for its $4 million investment and commitment to create over 70 new, family-wage jobs in Dayton. This project will have a sizable impact on Rhea County, one of Tennessees at-risk counties, in the years ahead.

MMG president Eric Griesemer said, We are honored to be a valued community partner in Dayton and Rhea County. The state and local government and economic development leaders have an obvious passion for this community. The Rhea County High School technical program does great work in providing technical training to their students. Moreover, we have discovered they also prepare their students by challenging them to mature in life skills and work with a spirit of excellence. Although the current economic environment presents many unique and unforeseen challenges, we have high expectations for great results as we expand employment with the local workforce over the coming years.

Rhea County Executive George Thacker said, Im excited that Master Manufacturing Group chose Rhea County as their new home. Not only are they great people, but MMGs culture of excellence is one to inspire us all. To top it all off, they will be offering high-quality job opportunities to Rhea Countys workforce in the years ahead.

Dayton Mayor Gary Louallen said, Dayton is not just a great place to live, its a great place to do business. Master Manufacturing Group has impressed us with their professionalism in every facet, and with the companys strong culture and work ethic. They are an excellent fit for this community. We are blessed to have a new industry relocating here, especially during this pandemic. Its nice to have some good news to share.

John Bradley, TVA Senior Vice President of Economic Development, said, TVA and the city of Dayton Electric Department congratulate Master Manufacturing Group on its decision to locate and create new jobs in Dayton. Helping to support new job creation and investment is central to TVAs mission of service and we are proud to partner with the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development and Rhea County Economic and Tourism Council to further that mission.

Rep. Ron Travis (R-Dayton) said, Im proud to welcome Master Manufacturing Group to Dayton. Tennessee continues to be a top choice for companies looking to establish advanced manufacturing facilities. This proves our investment in education and infrastructure is resulting in good jobs in our communities. I congratulate our local leaders who worked to bring this investment to Rhea County.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has reacted to the shooting in Wisconsin of an unarmed black man by condemning the "systemic racism" seen across America in police departments.

In a statement released on Monday, Mr Biden implored for the Kenosha Police Department officers involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake to face accountability for their actions.

"And this morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another black American is a victim of excessive force," he said. "This calls for an immediate, full and transparent investigation and the officers must be held accountable."

He added: "These shots pierce the soul of our nation. Jill and I pray for Jacob's recover and his children."

Mr Biden then stated that America was at an "inflection point" with how it looks at racial justice in the country. "We must dismantle systemic racism," he said. "It is the urgent task before us."

The former vice president has joined a number of prominent politicians, celebrities, and athletes reacting to the shooting that happened early Sunday evening in Kenosha.

Video footage showing police officers trailing Mr Blake as he walked to the driver's side of his vehicle has sparked outrage on social media, as it showed the man with his back to the officers before getting shot.

Police were initially called to the area to respond to a domestic disturbance. Reports indicated that Mr Blake pulled over to assist a domestic dispute between two people while his three children were in the backseat of his vehicle. That was when police showed up and entered into an altercation with Mr Blake.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers confirmed later on Sunday night that Mr Blake was the one who was shot by police and taken to the hospital. He is currently in serious condition.

"Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kathy and I join his family, friends, and neighbours in hoping earnestly that he will not succumb to his injuries," Mr Evers said.

"While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country," the governor added.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who said he would be representing Mr Blake and his family, informed the public of more details relating to the altercation.

"Blake was helping deescalate a system a domestic incident when police drew their weapons and tasered him. As he was walking away to check on his children, police fired their weapons several times into his back at point blank range," Mr Crump said in a statement. "Blake's three sons were only a few feet away and witnessed police shoot their father."

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is now investigating the shooting and the officers involved have been placed on administrative leave.

President Donald Trump has not publicly reacted to the shooting that occurred on Sunday evening compared to that of his presidential challenger.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told reporters on Monday that he expected Attorney General William Barr to debrief Mr Trump about the shooting at some point.

"I am certain he will be briefed on the full matter as he is on each and every matter," Mr Meadows said, adding Mr Barr was already scheduled to come to the White House later on Monday.

"It's too early to tell in terms of what actually happened from what I was briefed on. Obviously the video tells a story that is troubling and yet, at the same time, we'll get a full briefing within the next couple of hours," he added.
Kuldeep Singh, a farmer in Uttar Pradeshs Tilhar area of Shahjahanpur, faced many troubles ranging from a shortage of labour to transportation of fertilizer during the Covid-19-induced lockdown. But the 52-year old now feels that the lockdown had been like a blessing in disguise for farmers with small land holdings in the tarai belt. Thats because lockdown restrictions reduced the cultivation of Saatha rice, mainly carried out by well-off farmers to increase their profits.

Though more than 70 percent of farmers grow this type of rice to make extra profit, locals said farmers with smaller land holdings suffered the consequences as the farming of this water-intensive crop would make groundwater levels dip sharply, making things difficult for small and marginal farmers.

Also read: UP Board moots drop boxes for to provide kids without e-wherewithal with study material

This year, however, Singh didnt face any problem in irrigating his crops during summers as the water levels hadnt depleted as much. Groundwater shortage is caused by many factors but Saatha rice cultivation contributes to it in a big way, said locals.

Saatha rice variety that is grown here is sown in April and harvested in June. Farmers depend only on groundwater for irrigation of this variety of crop which severely impacts the underground water level, explained Navjot Singh, a farmer from Tilhar who has been demanding a ban on Saatha rice farming.

Only farmers with big farms can afford to pump out underground water, those with smaller land holdings cant, Navjot added.

Covid-19 lockdown, however, changed things on the ground.

Lockdown meant restrictions and only 10 percent of farmers could cultivate Saatha rice. The rest planted vegetables or other crops that do not require much water. This has helped replenish the underground water level in the region, said Singh. Recent underground water level survey reports by the district administration confirm the same.

In the past few years, the water levels in 85 percent blocks where Saatha is grown used to drop below 150 ft during the cultivation period. This time, such a drop has been limited to only 28 percent of theses blocks, said Praveen Singh, the local irrigation officer.

This year, the markedly lower level of dip in underground water levels indicates that farmers are moving away from crops that need large amounts of water. The district administration will continue to support such moves. We plan to organise awareness campaign in the region to tell people about the harms of growing water-intensive crops and suggest alternatives too, said Jagannath Prasad Tripathi, district magistrate of Shahjahanpur.
If you had any doubts about Biden's commitment to the party line, he confirmed it by choosing Kamala Harris, who brings all the zeal of the abortion-on-demand movement.

I fear that a kind of indifference has set into Americans' hearts about abortion. We hear from abortion activists on both sides. But what about the rest of America? Some polls suggest the majority favors restrictions.

We can do better than the current status quo. And somewhere in his heart, Joe Biden knows this, even as he trips over himself to utter every Planned Parenthood talking point there is.

One recent Biden campaign video talks about his love for religious sisters. Here, too, he knows better than his actions. Catholic nuns have played a pivotal role in American history. And yet, these days, they are being persecuted. As you may have noticed, the Little Sisters of the Poor had to go to the U.S. Supreme Court not once, but twice because of the Obama-Biden administration. And back in the early days, behind the scenes, Biden was reportedly among those who advised against mandating that nuns cover contraception and abortion-inducing drugs in their employee insurance plans. But he gave in, and became a disingenuous mouthpiece -- pretending there was no conscience problem at all -- for the policy.
A defiant taxi rapist has denied returning to work as a cab driver following his release from prison and continues to insist he is innocent of his crime.

Muhammad Akbar Nabi was caged for nine years in 2014 for raping and sexually assaulting a vulnerable woman in the back of his car after pretending to be the taxi she had ordered.

The father-of-three from Glengormley on the outskirts of north Belfast was released in 2018 after serving just four years in jail, and concerned sources recently contacted Sunday Life over rumours he had returned to working as a taxi driver.

However, when approached by our reporter at his home Mr Nabi denied the claims and insisted he was innocent despite his conviction being upheld at the Court of Appeal in 2015.

The 54-year-old told our reporter: "I can tell you it's not true. I'm not a taxi driver and I haven't even applied for a licence or anything. I'm totally innocent of the crime. I'm still going through another appeal, which is ongoing with the European Court of Human Rights and I'm still fighting - you've got to fight it off.

"What more can you talk about? So many innocent people this happens to. It's no big story. It's an awful stressful thing to go through, especially when you haven't done the crime you're accused of.

"It's very stressful, definitely, but you just have to try and put your life together again and try to get on with things. You have to try and repair your life."

One concerned resident, who did not wish to be named, said the local community were worried about Nabi's rumoured return to work as well as his presence in the area.

They added: "If he is back driving a taxi, it's completely wrong after the crime he was convicted of.

"It's bad enough having someone like that living here, let alone driving people around. He should be ashamed.

"People in the community are rightly worried about someone like him being back on the streets."

Nabi was jailed in 2014 following a trial at Downpatrick Crown Court which heard how he had pretended to be driving the taxi his victim had ordered.

Once she was in the car he drugged her before forcing her to perform a sex act on him.

The court heard that on the day of the attack Nabi, then aged 44, was cruising around the village of Moneyreagh in Co Down. The woman said she had been at a barbecue party in the village when Nabi arrived and pretended to be the taxi she had called.

She said once inside the car he forced her to drink from a bottle of water that "had a syrupy texture".

The woman said this had the effect of paralysing her and rendered her only able to utter a whimper. Nabi then sexually assaulted her and forced her to perform a sex act on him.

The woman said that at one stage Nabi said to her, "Daddy knows what you want", and that he only stopped when she said he would be attacked by other people. Nabi then dumped her from his car, removed the taxi sign and fled the scene.

Following his trial, the jury convicted him of one count of oral rape and one count of sexual assault.

In 2015 Nabi launched an appeal bid to have his conviction overturned.

He claimed it was actually the victim who had performed a sex act on him and she continued to do so even after he asked her to stop.

But Lord Justice Girvan, sitting along with Lord Justices Coghlin and Gillen, rejected all grounds of the challenge.
ALTON  Two people were hurt Monday morning when an Alton Fire Department ambulance collided with a Ford Fiesta.

At 7:10 a.m. Monday, a Ford Fiesta was pulling out from North Rodgers Avenue in Alton when it was struck by a reserve Alton Fire Rescue Ambulance. The ambulance was empty at the time.

The ambulance struck the Fiesta on the drivers side door and the driver of the Fiesta was taken by ambulance to a local hospital. Information on the drivers name and condition was not available Monday morning.

An ambulance member also suffered what was described as a minor leg injury in the incident.

Alton Police were on the scene as the accident was cleared. The reserve ambulance was taken out of service and the Fiesta appeared totaled. Both vehicles were eventually towed from the scene.
Chicago police officers respond to shots fired near reports of rioting on West Madison Street near South Karlov Avenue on the West Side, of Chicago, Aug. 10, 2020. (Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Chicago Sun-Times via AP)

66 Shot, 5 Killed Over the Weekend in Chicago: Police

At least 66 people were shot and five of those victims died over the weekend in Chicago, officials said. Three teenage boys were also counted among those who were injured.

The surging violence has prompted activists and some city council members to call on Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, to call in the National Guard and declare a state of emergency.

The latest fatal weekend shooting occurred when a 27-year-old male was shot in Lawndale on the West Side. Officials told ABC7 that Martin Coleman was shot in the pelvis and chest during an argument at 6:20 a.m. on Sunday.

A shooting Saturday killed one man and injured another in the Little Village on Chicagos Southwest Side, officials told WBBM. They were shot at around 7:22 a.m. in the 2500 block of South Trumbull Avenue, adding that Esteban Campos Jr., 43, was shot several times before he was pronounced dead.

Some two hours earlier on Saturday, a man was shot and killed on Austin. He was identified as 31-year-old Devon Nelson, who was found unresponsive outside with a gunshot wound to the head at around 5 a.m., officials said.

A man was shot and killed and another person was critically injured around three hours before that in South Chicago. They were at a gathering at 2:04 a.m. on a porch in the 8500 block of South Burley Avenue when someone got out of a vehicle and opened fire at the group. Officials said that 33-year-old Antoine Rose was shot in the head and abdomen and died at the scene.

And about two hours before that, another person was killed and two others were hurt on the West Side, officials said, adding that the victim was identified as 26-year-old Ronald Boyd.
The incident occurred on Sunday evening around 7.20 pm.

A man who was under the influence of alcohol caught the attention of police officers in rue de Thionville in the capital when insulting customers of a petrol station. The man subsequently tried to flee the scene, but was found shortly after sleeping on a bench at a bus stop.

He was visibly intoxicated and unable to stand on his own two feet. The officers thus decided to bring the man to the station so he could sober up for everyone's safety.

On their way to the hospital, the man started to lose his temper all of a sudden, throwing a tantrum that still lasted inside the hospital. He then refused to put on a mask and even tried to spit on the police officers. After a medical check-up was completed, the man was arrested, which provoked him to assault another officer and attempt to escape. A futile effort, as he was subsequently fined for resisting the arrest.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 02:13:28|Editor: huaxia

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A medical worker is seen at a temporary field hospital in Casablanca, Morocco, on Aug. 24, 2020. Morocco registered 903 new COVID-19 cases and 32 deaths on Monday, increasing the tally of infections since March 2 to 53,252 and the death toll to 920. (Photo by Chadi/Xinhua)

RABAT, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Morocco registered 903 new COVID-19 cases and 32 deaths on Monday, increasing the tally of infections since March 2 to 53,252 and the death toll to 920.

The total number of recoveries from COVID-19 in Morocco increased to 37,478 after 1,135 new ones were added, said Mouad Mrabet, coordinator of the Moroccan Center for Public Health Operations at the Ministry of Health, in a press briefing.

The official added that the COVID-19 fatality rate in Morocco stands at 1.7 percent and the current recovery rate is 70.4 percent, while 170 patients are in intensive care units.

China has helped Morocco in its fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

A batch of medical supplies donated by the government of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region was transported on June 8 to Casablanca-Settat in Morocco.

On May 14, China Development Bank sent a batch of donation, including respirators and medical protective masks, to help Morocco fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

China's Guizhou Province also donated 15,000 surgical gloves, 20,000 medical masks and 2,000 protective suits to help protect Moroccan medical workers fighting the pandemic. Enditem
By Ayya Lmahamad

ADY Express LLC, a subsidiary company of Azerbaijan Railways, has transported 8,500 tons of bitumen produced at the Heydar Aliyev Oil Refinery of the State Oil Company to Ukraine, the company reported on August 24.

According to the report 8,500 tons of bitumen were loaded on 130 tank wagons, provided by ADY Express, and shipped to Ukraine.

Tanks wagons were delivered from Azerbaijan to Georgia and then by ferry from the Black Sea to Orlovshchina and Vasilkov stations in Ukraine.

The transportation process consisted of two stages. In the first stage, 4,500 tons of bitumen was shipped on 70 tank wagons while during the second stage 4,000 tons of cargo were loaded and transported on 60 tank wagons.

It should be noted that such cargoes are planned to be delivered from Azerbaijan to Ukraine on a regular basis.

This project is a joint project of ADY Express LLC, a subsidiary of Azerbaijan Railways, and SOCAR's Marketing and Economic Operations Department.

It should be noted that Azerbaijan accounted for 59.3 percent of neighboring Georgias exports of bitumen in the period between January-July 2020. The country exported 33,900 tons of bitumen to Georgia in the reporting period.

Considering the fact of increasing importance of Azerbaijan as a major transit country and due to high demand of railway freight services in conformity with world standards, Azerbaijan Railways CJSC has established a new company, ADY Express LLC. The company provides online services to forwarders and large cargo owners to attract and increase volume of transit cargo passing through the country.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Many large corporations have introduced their new CEOs, while others plan to name new CEOs in the months ahead.

At the 2020 shareholders meeting, Nguyen Thi Mai Thanh, CEO of the Refrigeration Engineering Enterprise (REE), spoke about finding a new CEO to replace her. She has been in the post for 30 years.

Huynh Van Thon of Loc Troi (middle)

According to Thanh, the person to be selected must meet many requirements and have experience in the fields in which REE operates, and have business skills.

Thanh admitted that she missed some good opportunities because she was sometimes indecisive. The new CEO must be young and decisive.

Since REE had failed to find such a person through head hunting companies, the management board decided to choose a person working for the enterprise for many years and sent him abroad for a 2-year training course.

After returning from the training course, he began taking over the management work at the company. Thanh said he will present himself at an official ceremony slated for July.

Stories about finding new generals for enterprises have been mentioned at many shareholders meetings this year.

Loc Troi Group some days ago said goodbye to Huynh Van Thon who held the post of president since 1995. The man selected for the post of general director is Nguyen Duy Thuan, who was finance and HR director.

Thuan is also the deputy head of the executive board of agricultural materials and food industry. The move of Loc Troi is considered a step for the business to restructure and expand its business fields.

The post of CEO of Masan Group held by Nguyen Dang Quang since its establishment, will be transferred to Danny Le, born in 1984.

Le joined Masan Group in 2010 and is now Masans strategy and development director, playing an important role in the groups development strategy and M&A activities.

In documents prepared for the upcoming shareholders meeting, the board of management of Masan showed its development strategy for the time to come, under which Masan would make some M&A deals. This is why the 8X CEO confidently stated he will turn Masan into an unicorn in the consumer goods manufacturing sector.

Some companies in the banking and finance sector, including VietBank, MSB and Techcombank, have also announced the appointment of young people to the posts of CEO and deputy CEO.

The news about the appointment of new CEOs has caught attention from the public, because the new CEOs will have to run businesses in the new development period, when businesses have just escaped difficulties amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Kim Chi
(From L) Jill Biden, husband former vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and senator from California and Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris greet supporters outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, held virtually amid the CCP virus pandemic, on Aug. 20, 2020. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

Mirror, Mirror

The Democrats live in an alternate universe

Commentary

I just listened to three days of the Democratic National Convention on Fox News. At least I think I did, because some Democrat friends posted on Facebook that Fox News wasnt covering it. But as I point out later, Democrats seem to be living in a parallel universe where, I guess, Fox News didnt actually cover it.

I was struck by how downbeat and accusatory it was. Some left-wing pundits praised it. Some progressive acquaintances called it refreshing. Maybe I was listening to some deep fake videos, because I found it just the opposite. Do progressives and conservatives live in parallel universes like those in the Mirror, Mirror episode of the original Star Trek series? These universes are populated by the same people in the same situations but in one universe those people are good, and in the other they are not. And they have goatees.

Lets examine the DNC speeches.

John Kerry

First was John Kerry, former Secretary of State under Barack Obama and failed presidential candidate. In criticizing President Donald Trumps foreign policy, Kerry actually said that Obama eliminated the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon. In the alternate universe, maybe, but in my universe, Obama gave Iran over $150 billion. Germany had already shown in 2016 that Iran was cheating on the deal. By 2017, Iran was refusing U.N. inspectors, and Israel confirmed Irans cheating in 2018.

In this alternate universe, President Trump inherited a more peaceful world and bankrupted it according to Kerry. In this alternate universe, Kerry and the Obama administration built a 68-nation coalition to destroy ISIS. In my universe they also built that coalition but never destroyed ISIS. In my universe, Obamas proclaimed JV team was growing its worldwide califate by the time Obama left office. Obama started excusing his incompetence by claiming that he always said that eliminating ISIS will not be quick. In just over a year after taking office in my universe, President Trump virtually eliminated ISIS.

In my universe, one day before Kerry called Trumps foreign policy a blooper reel, President Trump had concluded negotiating an historic peace treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. And three days after Kerrys speech, the United States demanded the restoration of all U.N. sanctions on Iran. When President Trump sets a red line, youd better not cross it. At least in my universe, not in the Democrats universe.

Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama, the woman who famously announced that she was never proud of her country until her husband was doing well in the Democratic presidential primary, started with Theres a lot of beauty in that story [of America]. Theres a lot of pain in it, too. A lot of struggle and injustice and work left to do.

She continued by saying, Four years ago, too many people chose to believe that their votes didnt matter. Maybe they were fed up. Maybe they thought the outcome wouldnt be close. Maybe the barriers felt too steep. Obviously after four years, she still doesnt understand why many in America had felt left out during her husbands administration.

She goes on to explain that a never-ending list of innocent people of color continue to be murdered; stating the simple fact that a black life matters is still met with derision from the nations highest office. She then gives a long list of the evils and injustices in modern America, especially those being perpetrated against minorities by police and American institutions. Somehow Joe Biden can do what her own husband, she admits, failed to do. This, again, is the alternate universe. My universe saw minority unemployment fall under President Trump to the lowest levels in history.

Michelle Obama envisions a world where people are no longer put in jail for minding their own business just because of the color of their skin. Where they will no longer watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages. Because in her universe, that started with President Trump, but in my universe, that practice was started by her own husband. She longs for a day when pepper spray and rubber bullets are [not] used on peaceful protesters for a photo op. In my universe, people who burn down churches are not considered peaceful protesters.

Bernie Sanders

According to Bernie Sanders, we are living in terrible times. I might agree, but hes not concerned about the rioting in major cities across the United States. According to Sanders, the crises are systemic racism, climate change, greed, oligarchy, and bigotry. He also mentions the health crisis, which hes been discussing since his last presidential run and, in fact, for his entire time in Congress. He also discusses the economic collapse. But in my universe, our robust economy is holding up against the worst pandemic in over 100 years.

In his universe, President Trump is a threat to our democracy. He claims that under this administration, authoritarianism has taken root. In my universe it was the Obama administration that used the IRS to obstruct conservative groups, scapegoated innocent people for their own failures in foreign affairs that resulted in the loss of American lives, supported foreign dictators against the interests and lives of their own people, released Islamic terrorists in exchange for American deserters, and wiretapped political opponents. In my universe, the Democratic Party manipulated the electoral process to deny Sanders the nomination four years ago.

Sanders then gives a list of socialist policies that Joe Biden will implement to move us forward. Do we believe that Biden is a moderate as his handlers and public relations people assure us? Or do we believe that Biden will implement these socialist policies that Sanders is promising his followers? Or perhaps in parallel universes, both can be true.

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton begins by saying, After the last election, I said, We owe Donald Trump an open mind and the chance to lead. I dont remember her saying that. I remember her saying that the election was stolen. I remember her saying that she actually won. I remember her saying that just a few days ago. But maybe in that alternate universe, Hillary Clinton took her defeat with dignity.

She adds later in her speech that for the past four years, people have told her, I didnt realize how dangerous he was, and I wish I could go back and do it over, and I should have voted. And then later again, she adds that we need to ensure that Trump cant [again] sneak or steal his way to victory. See, even in her universe, she believes that she was the true winner of the last election.

She ends, like the other Democrats, on a downbeat note: Theres a lot of heartbreak in America right nowand the truth is, many things were broken before the pandemic. They want to make sure we know just how bad things are, and they werent ever good, it seems.

Barack Obama

Barack Obama begins by referencing the Constitution, a document that he skirted so many times during his own presidency, at least in my universe. Barack Obama claims that President Trump has shown no interest in putting in the work. While you may disagree with President Trump, hes obviously putting in the work.

In this alternate universe, Barack Obama was rooting for President Trump and supporting him from Day One, contrary to what happened in my universe. Obama did say uniting words immediately after Trumps election in 2016, but after that, he rarely held back from repeatedly criticizing his predecessor and his successor. His criticism of George W. Bush began at his inauguration and continued throughout his presidency as an excuse for foreign wars he could not end, foreign relations that deteriorated on his watch, and an economy that he just couldnt get off the ground.

In the 2016 race, Obama declared Trump unfit for the presidency. After Trumps election, Obama broke with precedent and criticized President Trump numerous times. At least in my universe.

Kamala Harris, in her speech, made it clear that electing her and Joe Biden will be the first step toward American racial justice and equality by having a black, Asian woman married to a Jewish man in or near the Oval Office. In her universe, no person of color has ever been elected to high office in this country. In my universe, that already happened, and the racial divide got worse, not better.

Harris informed us that the CCP virus is racist. In her universe, the disease is brought about by injustice in reproductive and maternal healthcare and in the excessive use of force by police. And thats why President Trump doesnt care about it. Thats why he wants people to go back to work. Because hes a racist.

Joe Biden

Joe Biden gave a passing speech, which garnered him praise from all parts of the media (though it went unreported that he did actually screw up and say, This is the United States of America and there has never been anything weve been able to accomplish when weve done it together.).

Thats because everyone knows that Joe Biden lives in his own private universeone where he actually has the ability to lead the greatest nation in the history of the world. But thats definitely not my universe.

Bob Zeidman has a Bachelor of Art and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University. He is an inventor and the founder of successful high-tech Silicon Valley firms including Zeidman Consulting and Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering. He also writes novels; his latest is the political satire Good Intentions.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author. As a nonpartisan public charity, The Epoch Times does not endorse these statements and takes no position on political candidates.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
In Sebastian Vettel's place, F1 legend Gerhard Berger says he would say "bye-bye" to Formula 1.

In the past days, it has appeared more and more likely that Aston Martin - currently Racing Point - will stick with Sergio Perez and his powerful sponsors rather than sign the Ferrari refugee.

Berger admitted to Sky Deutschland that, in Vettel's place, he would only join a proven race winner.

"Unless some special situation occurs, Red Bull will not work. Mercedes will not work," he said.

"As a four-time world champion who has never been injured, who has a family, who has had a good income, I would rather make the decision and say: Ok, bye-bye," Berger, currently boss of the DTM series, added.

Berger, who was Vettel's team boss at Toro Rosso over a decade ago, also defended the 33-year-old from the harsh recent criticism of the Italian press.

"If one Ferrari driver is leaving at the end of the year and the other is the future of the team, you would usually dump your frustration on the weakest, or the one who is no longer relevant for the future," he said.

(GMM)
SAN FRANCISCO  TikTok sued the U.S. government on Monday, accusing the Trump administration of depriving it of due process when President Trump used his emergency economic powers to issue an executive order that will block the app from operating in the country.

The suit, which was filed in the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, is TikToks most direct challenge to the White House and escalates an increasingly bitter back-and-forth between the popular video app and American officials.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, poses a national security threat because of its Chinese ties. On Aug. 6, he issued twin executive orders banning transactions with TikTok and the Chinese social media app WeChat within 45 days. A week later, he issued a separate executive order giving ByteDance 90 days to divest from its American assets and any data that TikTok had gathered in the United States.

We do not take suing the government lightly; however, we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our community and employees, the company said in its suit. Our more than 1,500 employees across the U.S. pour their hearts into building this platform every day, the company said, noting that it planned to hire more than 10,000 more workers across eight states in the coming years.
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.

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Under near constant video surveillance, she'll only talk on her cell phone when she's sure no one can overhear. She eats her meals alone and spends most of her time in her room. She feels like she's in prison, not a nursing home.

"In the beginning, all of the measures were supposed to be to help seniors," said the woman, whom we'll call Lucy. "And yet, we were basically locked away and they threw away the key. It's like we don't even exist."

It has been more than five months since nursing homes locked down to try to protect their highly-vulnerable patients. But even with strict rules in place, more than 2,000 of L.A. County's nursing home residents have died from COVID-19 since March.

Most of the county's nursing homes have yet to reopen to visitors. Those new rules meant to keep out infection have also kept residents confined and isolated from their families and friends.

That's taken a toll on people like Lucy, who spoke to us on condition that we not use her real name because she fears retribution from administrators. She reached out to us after reading our coverage of nursing homes.

We spoke with other nursing home residents who described conditions similar to Lucy's, but they refused to speak publicly, terrified that they would be punished by staff or management.

The isolation has taken a mental and physical toll. Dozens of complaints are filed with county officials every week by nursing home residents desperate to leave their confined quarters but who fear even a walk outside could lead to eviction and homelessness.

DOOR CODES CHANGE TO KEEP RESIDENTS FROM RETURNING

Before the coronavirus, Lucy would sign out and leave the L.A. nursing home she's lived at for two years to get her hair cut or go to the grocery store. That changed in March when the pandemic hit.

"There was never like a general announcement, it was just suddenly, we're not allowed out," she said, adding the door codes were changed, making it impossible to let yourself back in.

Lucy hasn't left the facility since it was locked down in mid-March. The only outdoor access she has is a small employee parking lot encircled by a locked fence. She's been told if she so much as walks around the block for some fresh air she'll be evicted from the facility, the only home she has.

"We get complaints from the residents saying, 'They're holding us here against our will. They're threatening to evict us if we leave,'" said Molly Davies, the nursing home and long term care ombudsman for L.A. County. She estimates her office receives between 25 and 35 complaints like Lucy's every week. Residents report being barred from leaving even for doctor's appointments, Davies said.

Her office investigates complaints and monitors the safety and well-being of residents but can't enforce regulations -- in L.A. that's up to the County Department of Public Health.

A slew of employees come and go every day to work in nursing homes. In their free time, they go grocery shopping and run small errands. Davies said residents are entitled to the same freedoms, so long as they take appropriate precautions like wearing a mask and physically distancing.

"It's a violation of the residents' rights ... we're talking about nursing homes, we're not talking about prisons," she said.

The California Association of Health Facilities, a trade group that lobbies for 80% of the nursing homes in the state, doesn't see it that way.

Competent residents have the right to leave, said DeAnn Walters, the association's clinical affairs director. But she said the risk of asymptomatic spread could mean a resident is placed in a 14-day quarantine when they get back.

"There shouldn't necessarily be this, 'You're not allowed to go anywhere,' but there will be a lot of education around the risk of going out to themselves, to the others in the facilities," Walters said.

She maintained that employees differ from residents because they have training in infection control. And Walters argued that because facility administrators want to reduce the number of people infected in the community surrounding their nursing home, they need the flexibility to respond to local COVID-19 conditions.

IS THREATENING EVICTION LEGAL?

Nursing home critics challenge the basis for some of these rules.

"In the absence of consistent and widespread testing of health care workers at these facilities, it is the height of hypocrisy to say that residents must not be readmitted in order to prevent transmission of the virus," said Mike Dark, an attorney with the watchdog group California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

Instead of infection control, the motivation to keep residents from leaving boils down to money, he said.

"There have always been problems with nursing homes finding ways to kick residents -- especially Medi-Cal residents -- out so that they can make that bed available for a more lucrative Medicare patient," Dark said.

Threatening eviction is a tactic that started long before the pandemic, he argued. Most nursing homes are for-profit, so they want shorter-term residents on Medicare, which provides a higher reimbursement rate. Usually, there are legal safeguards to prevent financially-motivated evictions.

"In normal times if a resident walked out and then was not permitted back in, that would be a plain violation of the law," Dark said. "It would be called a wrongful refusal to readmit and a nursing home could face penalties [from the state health department] and even financial fines."

But is it against the law now? Dark said it largely depends on how the policy is communicated to the resident. The new coronavirus regulations make that murky.

"If they have a policy of not readmitting people after they go out but it's unwritten and people aren't told about it so they can't even know that that's the consequence of leaving the facility, that could certainly get them in trouble with [the California Department of Public Health] and should be the subject of a complaint," he said.

Calling it "a legal grey area," Dark said if a resident has been informed beforehand in writing that the facility won't allow re-entry due to fear of contagion, it may be much harder to get that resident reinstated.

"It puts them in a terribly dangerous situation, without a place to stay during a pandemic," he said. "Many of those people, especially ones without families, will become homeless."

HOW MUCH LONGER INSIDE?

Lucy isn't ready to gamble on becoming homeless just for the sake of taking a walk. But she said there needs to be a better balance between protecting vulnerable people from the coronavirus and the mental and physical toll of strictly limiting their movements.

After more than five months locked inside a nursing home where she both contracted and recovered from COVID-19, Lucy just wants to get out, even for a couple of hours.

"I lost a lot before I came here," she said. "I need to be somewhere I'm not being videotaped. Sometimes I just need to cry. I need to be away from here to do that. I just need to be free to think and feel."

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Russia reportedly has no plans to follow the US and the UK to ban Huawei 5G equipment in the country. As per a report from the Interfax news agency (via Reuters), the Chinese telecom giant could be part of Russias 5G networks.

The report cites Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying that Moscow officials are ready to cooperate with China and Huawei on 5G technology. Lavrov had previously said that the trade standoff between the US and China is not in the interests of Russia.

Speaking at an online session of the Primakov Readings in July, Lavrov said the exacerbation of US-China relations does not meet our interests or the interests of the European Union and other countries. He hopes the worlds two largest economies will be able to ease tensions using diplomatic methods.

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Huawei finds support from Russia

The latest statement from the Russian Foreign Minister comes at a time when several big economies around the world are shutting the doors on Huaweis 5G equipment. Following the US sanctions, countries like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the United Kingdom have all banned Huawei from developing 5G infrastructure in their respective countries.

The Trump administration insists that Huawei may have a backdoor for the Chinese government. Despite the company repeatedly claiming the otherwise, the American government believes that it poses a threat to national security.

Not only has the US government banned Huawei in the country, but its also forcing its allies to follow the same route. However, Russia seemingly has no such concerns and is willing to cooperate with Huawei on 5G technology. The country is interested in working together with the Chinese company to develop modern technologies including 5G. The worlds largest 5G equipment provider may have just found much-needed support from the worlds biggest country.

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The US isnt backing off

The American governments sanctions on Huawei dont just limit to 5G equipment. The worlds largest economy has cut off Huawei from doing business with any American company. In fact, the Chinese telecom giant cant do business with foreign companies that use American technology or software as well.

Recently, the United States Department of Commerce issued new regulations and updates to restrictions it had imposed on Huawei previously. The new amendments pretty much spell the end for the Chinese companys in-house Kirin chipsets for smartphones.

That said, Huaweis smartphone business hasnt suffered as much by the US bans as many would have hope for. However, it may have to become self-sufficient to survive in the long run. The company is already working on an alternate mobile OS as well as a replacement for Google Mobile Services (GMS). It remains to be seen if Huaweis Harmony OS and Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) manage to make people switch over from Android and GMS.
HARBOR SPRINGS, MICH. -- A rusted, damaged, historically significant boat is now undergoing restoration work with the goal of putting the vessel on display in Harbor Springs.

The nonprofit Harbor Springs Area Historical Society began the restorations after city officials requested the removal of the boat, which had been decaying near the citys Department of Public Works building, according to the Associated Press.

The boat, named the Aha, was built in 1891 by Ephram Shay, an inventor, engineer, and prominent Harbor Springs resident.

Built out of steel -- a rarity, considering most boats from that time were made of wood -- the Aha echoes another one of the inventors local legacies: A stamped-steel, hexagon-shaped house, now a historic site known as the Shay Hexagon House, where Shay lived out the last years of his life.

RELATED: The surprising secret behind the walls of this historic Harbor Springs house

During a recent Harbor Springs City Council meeting, Kristyn Balog, executive director of the Harbor Springs Area Historical Society, thanked the city council for the nudge to bring this artifact to life for the Harbor Springs community.

As a historical society, it is our responsibility that we hold these artifacts in trust for public use, and we would like to make this vessel useful to the public, Balog said.

In this image provided by the Harbor Springs Area Historical Society, students from the Industrial Arts Institute make welding repairs to the boat Aha in Onaway, Mich. The rusted and damaged boat, built in the late 1800s by a northern Michigan inventor, is undergoing an extensive restoration with the goal of putting the revamped vessel on display in the Lake Michigan resort community of Harbor Springs. (Kristyn Balog/Harbor Springs Area Historical Society via AP)AP

RELATED:

New Petoskey to Harbor Springs, Bay Harbor ferry service to launch June 25

How an 800-mile canoe trip starting at an Up North beach became a turning point in Michigan history
UPDATE: Motorcyclist dies after Phillipsburg crash, coroner says

A 62-year-old Pohatcong Township man was seriously injured when the motorcycle he was riding Sunday afternoon in Phillipsburg hit a storm drain, crossed into oncoming traffic and struck the drivers side of a car then a wall, town police report from witness accounts.

Stewart A. Lee, of the 100 block of Mt. Joy Road, was taken to a hospital for treatment after 1:59 p.m. wreck in the 800 block of South Main Street, police said. He is being treated at St. Lukes University Hospital in Fountain Hill, the Warren County Prosecutor Jim Pfeiffer said. Police werent able to interview him about the crash at the scene, paperwork says.

Dawn M. Rodriguez, 49, of the 100 block of Sitgreaves Street, was not hurt and the grey 2016 Chevrolet Malibu she was driving south on South Main sustained minor damage to the rear door, and a rear wheel and tire, police said. Rodriquez spoke to police and her version was consistent with witness accounts, paperwork indicates.

One witness said the northbound bike hit a storm drain before the car and the wall, police said. Two other witnesses confirmed Lee lost control of the bike before the crash, police said.

The black, 2004 motorcycle sustained major damage, police said.

Police have 30 days to file traffic citations against Lee, Pfeiffer said. Rodriguez will not be cited, he added.

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Tony Rhodin can be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com.
The kidnapped children of Bello Dankande, a former Zamfara Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, have regained freedom.

Mr Dankande, on Monday, told reporters the victims regained freedom after the payment of N5 million.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the abductors had last week attacked Dankandes house in Gamji village in Bakura Local Government Area of Zamfara and killed one of his neighbours in the process.

During the attack, the gunmen kidnapped four persons, including the two children of the former commissioner, one NSCDC official and another in the neighbourhood.

Mr Dankande said the victims were released on Sunday at about 9 p.m. after collecting the ransom.

He said his two children had been admitted in a hospital in Gusau to ascertain their health condition.

(NAN)
Attorney Michael T. van der Veen "In light of [the] expansion of mail-in voting, and the barriers to in-person voting posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of Pennsylvanians voting by mail will increase dramatically in the upcoming elections."

van der Veen O'Neill, Hartshorn and Levin, led by firm founder Michael T. van der Veen, has filed suit on behalf of Melvin Prince Johnakin in Pennsylvania federal court to reverse recent U.S. Postal Service operational changes implemented by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that have slowed mail delivery and raised concerns that mail-in ballots in the upcoming election could go uncounted.

The suit seeks an order that would force USPS to enact measures to make sure mail-in and absentee ballots in Pennsylvania are treated as Priority Mail, which offers delivery between one and three days. In addition, the suit asks for an order that would reverse operational changes including the removal of mailboxes and reduction in staffing hours to help ensure the timely delivery of ballots and other election mail.

Johnakin's viewpoint is clear, "In light of [the] expansion of mail-in voting, and the barriers to in-person voting posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of Pennsylvanians voting by mail will increase dramatically in the upcoming elections. However, their ballots will be subject to the vagaries of the U.S. Postal Service, thereby causing plaintiffs and many Pennsylvanians who vote by mail to face an impermissible risk of arbitrary disenfranchisement, in violation of their constitutional rights."

Voting is a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment protects the right of qualified citizens to vote in state elections involving federal candidates. Included within the right to vote is the right of qualified voters within a state to cast their ballots and have them counted if they are validly cast.

Johnakin's concerns are urgent. COVID-19 has caused most public gatherings to be curtailed and restricted. Pennsylvania's upcoming elections pose a public health threat. Johnakin maintains that, in order to exercise the fundamental right to vote, many voters have and will utilize all available means to vote by mail rather than in person at a polling place. Advanced planning and proactive measures will be necessary to ensure that voters have sufficient access to vote by mail to preserve and protect the essential right to vote and prevent large-scale disenfranchisement.

The case is Melvin Johnakin v. U.S. Postal Service et al., case number 2:20-cv-04055, before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Tennessees deer hunting Unit CWD has regulation changes this year starting with the August 28-30 hunt. The regulations in Unit CWD are directed at encouraging an increased harvest of deer in an effort to prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD).



For the August hunt in Unit CWD, guns and muzzleloaders as well as archery equipment may be used. Hunting is allowed on private lands and a select number of public lands.

For the rest of Tennessees deer hunting units, only archery equipment may be used, and hunting is allowed only on private lands. No antlerless deer may be harvested during the August hunt on any unit.



The Unit CWD hunting regulations apply to the units counties of Chester, Crockett, Fayette, Gibson, Hardeman, Haywood, Lauderdale, Madison, McNairy, Shelby, and Tipton. The Hatchie National Wildlife Refuge is not included. Deer hunters must follow the blaze orange requirements in Unit CWD and possess the appropriate licenses.



The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency is encouraging hunters to harvest more deer in Unit CWD after a decrease in the units harvest numbers last year. The fewer deer there are in the unit, the fewer CWD positive deer there are which will decrease disease spread. The TWRA has expanded harvest incentives and allowed the use of firearms more days.



If a hunter wants a harvested deer tested, there are drop off locations throughout Unit CWD. A list of the testing locations is located on the website, CWDinTennessee.com. If a hunter harvests an antlered deer where CWD is detected, then the hunter may take an additional deer within Unit CWD or in the county where the CWD-positive deer was harvested.



The annual bag limit for antlered deer is two, no more than one per day. Deer taken during this three-day hunt will count toward the bag limit. The Tennessee Fish and Wildlife Commission voted two years ago to establish the 3-day season to give hunters an opportunity to harvest a buck with velvet-covered antlers.

Public Lands Open to Deer Hunting During August 28-30 Velvet Hunt:

Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park and State Natural Area, Eagle Lake Refuge, Bomprezzi Unit of the Eagle Lake Refuge, Wolf River WMA Units 1 & 2, Piperton Wetland, Chickasaw State Forest WMA, Grays Creek WMA, Oak Dain Wetland, Big Hill Pond State Park, Tull Bottoms WMA, South Fork Refuge, Spring Creek WMA, Colonel Forest V. Durand WMA, Fort Ridge WMA, Lower Hatchie National Wildlife Refuge (the portion lying within Tipton County), John Tully WMA, Horns Bluff Refuge, Maness Swamp Refuge (the portion lying within Gibson County), Parker Branch WMA, and Perry Switch WMA.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 13:33:10|Editor: huaxia

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CHICAGO, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- A man was shot by police in Kenosha in the southeast corner of U.S. midwestern state of Wisconsin on Sunday evening and was taken to hospital in serious condition, according to local media.

Police were answering a call about a domestic incident when the shooting happened.

A video posted on social media shows a man in a white shirt and black shorts walking to a gray van, followed by two male police officers with weapons drawn. As the man opens the door to get in, an officer grabs his shirt to hold him still, then appears to shoot him in the back at close range.

Seven shots were heard, local media quoted local residents as saying.

Large crowds soon gathered at the scene of the shooting, then walked down the sidewalk and street, occasionally chanting. The video showed people kicking at police vehicles.

A crowd of about 100 people had reached the Kenosha County Public Safety Building by late Sunday night, chanting "no justice, no peace."

Wisconsin State Patrol and Kenosha County Sheriff's deputies came to the scene at the request of Kenosha police, as the shooting involved an officer.

The Division of Criminal Investigation under the Wisconsin Department of Justice is handling the investigation, local media reported. Enditem
OCP Africa, in a partnership agreement with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), has increased its efforts to support the agricultural value chain in Ghana. This agreement seeks to intensify OCP Africas flagship agribooster program that will bring a global offer to farmers with access to the quality of inputs, training and market.



The 2020 Agribooster Campaign which is aligned with Governments flagship Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) Programme, and jointly implemented between OCP Africa and MoFA, has provided improved fertilizers to support farmers across eight (8) regions of Ghana to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on small-holder farmers



Over 100,000 farmers who have benefitted from these improved fertilizers in the 2020 agribooster campaign will also receive training on Good Agricultural Practices (GAP).



Country Manager of OCP Africa in Ghana, Samuel Oduro-Asare, noted that it has become necessary now more than ever to support farmers because they are confronted with an adverse effect of COVID-19 on their farming season.



"COVID-19 has affected many areas of our lives and unfortunately, the agricultural sector has not been exempted. Committed as we are for transformation of food systems in Ghana, it is thus imperative that we support our farmers in these difficult times he said. This is why OCP Africa, in collaboration with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) have committed to supplying inputs to farmers through the Agribooster program".



Our 2020 Agribooster campaign has officially commenced with the distribution of (21,500 metric tons) of improved fertilizers (NPK 11.22.21 + TE) to farmers. Our importer partners namely; Africa Fertilizer Company Limited, Garnoma Agrichemicals, Ltd, Intercontinental Group Ltd and Glofert Ltd has distributed the fertilizers to farmer aggregators across eight regions of Ghana, he added.



According to Mr. Oduro, smallholder farmers will also be trained on the proper use of inputs, securing access to finance and market, which will positively impact their productivity and finance to help them over the negative effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.



OCP Africa is positive that the timely delivery of these products especially in the northern sectors will go a long way to assist farmers who are about to apply the fertilizers to their crops in this COVID-19 period.



The 2019 Agribooster Campaign trained 87 extension officers, 400 lead farmers and 42,605 smallholder farmers on Good Agricultural Practices. Additionally, 3,700 metric tonnes of NPK fertilizers were supplied to 14,800 smallholder farmers, cultivating a total of 37,000 acres. Their yields increased from 1.8 metric tonnes per hectare to 2.6 metric tonnes per hectare, representing an increase of 44%

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Two sisters who sparked a counter-terror probe after they fled from the UK to join ISIS have told how they were caught trying to escape a refugee camp in a failed bid to return to Europe.

Twin sisters Salma and Zahra Halane are now being detained in a high-security detention centre after trying to escape the Al Hol camp in Syria.

They now say they want to be repatriated to Denmark, the country of their birth.

The girls - dubbed the 'Terror Twins' - fled their home in Chorlton when they were 16 years old to travel to Syria in June 2014.

They were described as academically gifted but were said to have become radicalised and ran away overnight to join a so-called ISIS 'caliphate'.

Salma and Zahra (pictured speaking to ITV) are reportedly being detained in a high-security detention centre after trying to escape the Al Hol camp in Syria

Twin sisters Salma (pictured speaking to ITV) and Zahra Halane who sparked a counter-terror probe after they fled from the UK to Syria have been caught trying to escape a refugee camp in a failed bid to return to Europe

They say they have since turned their backs on IS, claiming they are 'not happy' with the terror group and have 'nothing to do' with it.

It is thought they went on to become 'jihadi brides' as they married fighters from so-called Islamic State (IS) and were later widowed.

The twins had fled from IS territory last year, they said, and spent the following 16 months at a refugee camp with Zahra's young son.

But they were recently arrested by Kurdish security services after trying to escape the camp.

Salma told ITV News: 'I had never thought of leaving. Things were good. We had WHO (the World Health Organisation) checking me and my sister but the situation became very bad.

'The water is yellow, I am suffering, I have injuries on me and my nephew and my sister, she has injuries on her head.

'We tried our best to go to hospital, we tried our best to do something for our health. So it was like survival of the fittest. We wanted to go to a better care.'

Salma (right) and Zahra (left) - dubbed the 'Terror Twins' - fled their home in Chorlton when they were 16 years old to travel to Syria in June 2014

She added: 'We have nothing to do with the Islamic State. I see myself as a victim. I am not happy about the Islamic State.'

The twins' mother, Khadra Jama, previously told The Daily Telegraph that her daughters had been banned from returning to the UK.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Zahra was caught trying to escape the Al Hol camp but Salma's whereabouts were not known at that time.

Ten thousand women and children live in Al Hol, in a crowded annex separate from more than 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi citizens in the camp.

Russia Today Arabic interviewed an unnamed woman - who was identified as Zahra - who was caught trying to escape from Al Hol camp last month.

Ten thousand women and children live in Al Hol (file image pictured), in a crowded annex separate from more than 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi citizens in the camp

Speaking Arabic, the woman said: 'I want to go back home.

'If you have money, there are different ways [of escaping] and it happens very fast. You can get to Turkey easily.'

In December 2013, Salma was caught viewing ISIS propaganda at their sixth form college, which included images of a suicide vest, a boy with a machine gun and a British jihadist in Syria.

The college did not alert the police at the time because she claimed that she was trying to find her older brother, who had previously travelled to Syria to fight.

The twins, who have an older sister and seven brothers, left their fled their family home having stolen 840 from their father and crossed into Syria in July 2014.

Both young women moved to Raqqa, the then-capital of ISIS's self-proclaimed caliphate.
Archbishop Nelson Perez called the assault of a lector at Sunday's 11 a.m. Mass "a senseless act of aggression." Read more

A lector was punched by someone in the congregation as she left the altar during Mass Sunday at Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia.

The sudden attack was captured on the Facebook livestream of Archbishop Nelson Perez, who called it a senseless act of aggression.

Such behavior is unacceptable at all times, especially within the confines of a church building and during the celebration of the Holy Mass, the archbishop posted on Facebook. I was saddened to learn of this incident and regret that it took place. The lector who was assaulted received immediate attention and assistance from Cathedral staff members off camera. She did not require medical attention and is doing well based on the reports I have received.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia is working with police, who are investigating the incident during the 11 a.m. Mass, he said.

Please be assured that there are safety and security plans in place for the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, Perez continued We welcome all visitors and work to provide for their safety. Violence has no place in our world and every life is a precious gift from God. Please join me in praying for everyone involved in todays incident and for respect for our fellow brothers and sisters.

The attack can be seen just after the 32-minute mark of the churchs Vimeo stream:
Tanya Monica Faraj holds a Masters degree in Nuclear & Radiation Engineering from Alexandria University in Egypt and was the first woman to have first-class honours in Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Jomo Kenyatta University.

She spoke to Life&Lifestyle about her undying love affair with science and more.

You are the first woman to have first-class honours in Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Jomo Kenyatta University since the inception of the department, how does this make you feel?

I thank the Lord for this blessing. I feel both humbled and accomplished. I put a lot of efforts in my academics, so I was actually hoping for the best. I remember receiving congratulatory remarks from my lecturers and classmates that morning of 2013(I cant remember the exact date).

Shortly after, I called my parents while sobbing, and they thought something bad had happened to me. Overjoyed, I couldnt communicate so I had to calm down, and rang them back to relay the good news.

You also have a Masters degree in Nuclear & Radiation Engineering from Alexandria University (Egypt). What does this entail?

This area deals with the application of nuclear and radiation processes. They include the release, control, and utilisation of nuclear energy and production and use of radiation and radioactive materials for applications in research, industry, medicine, as well as national security (as defined by Britannica). This may be the simplest way to define the course.

At Kebs, what does your work entail?

I am stationed at the standards development and trade section. My major responsibilities include, but not limited to, developing standards through stakeholder engagements in the field of metrology. Metrology is the science of measurements. It covers various disciplines of Physics and Engineering such as radiation, acoustics, thermodynamics, and mechanics among others. The significance of these standards is to ensure that there is a common understanding for different activities so as to promote optimum community benefits.

On a day-to-day basis, I carry out my desktop research, for instance, industrial application of radiation, identify the international standards or any other reference material available in the said field and whether they will be relevant to us as a community and a country.

This is then shared to experts, discussed and developed through a technical committee in accordance to the standardisation procedures and policies. I manage four technical committees covering different disciplines

Take us through your journey, how has it been? What are some of the challenges and achievements that you are most proud of?

The journey has been long and tiring at times, but the destination has been worth the numerous sleepless nights. It started when I fell in love with science from primary level all the way up. Its a love affair I have never abandoned. Challenges include being away from home, working extra hard and being out of a comfort zone. I am most proud of the fact that I not only set out to do what I loved most, and accomplished it at a young age.

I have always had support from my family, lecturers, classmates, colleagues and friends, so my achievement is not through my own effort and merit; they have all played a significant role in one way or another. And the most important achievement is good health, protection and the gift of life from The Almighty.

What makes you wake up in the morning to go to work? What keeps you going?

My little one. The most effective alarm clock is a toddler. In all honesty, for everything I do, my daughter is my driving force. I want to be a woman who is admired by many, and also to prove that science and girls arent mutually exclusive.

You are one of the women leaders who have cut their niche in the Science, Technical, Engineering and Mathematics Field, and also the vice-chairperson in the Physics Society of Kenya, what motivated you?

A sense of determination. My mother cultivated the belief that if I set my mind to something, then I am capable of completing it by all means. It also helped that I had so many people looking up to me. I felt obligated to prove them right.

What advice can you give to young girls who are passionate about joining you in your area?

Go for it. Sciences are as rewarding as they are demanding. Be prepared to work hard and expect difficulties, but it will be the best decision you make. We need more young female minds in the field  to breathe life into it and innovate it.

Some of the achievements/ changes you are proud of

Scaling in my academics, both undergraduate and postgraduate. The biggest change I am proud of is transitioning from a young woman to a mother and a wife. Balancing both my career and my family is an accomplishment. I thank my husband for supporting me  he pushes me to go after new heights in my career and helps me raise our little one.

What principles do you stand for?

I believe in hard work, and I am grateful for everything and everyone.

What do you enjoy doing at your free time?

I am a reader. Whenever I can pull myself away from the demands of work and family, I pore over articles and books. Its a calming and relaxing way to pass time, especially for a person who is ever busy.

What advice would you give to women?

For any woman out there reading this, do not be complacent with where you are. Always strive to improve, however small the improvement may be. This cuts across the board, in every aspect of your life. We are stronger, more resilient, more intelligent, so much more than what society deems us to be, and we should prove it

Your dream holiday destination?

Anywhere sunny, perhaps thats because I come from the Coast region.

Tell us a little bit about your family?

My family is just like any other. My daughter and husband keep me busy and make me laugh. My siblings are always a phone call away and my parents keep tabs on all of us. We are a close-knit family, loving and caring with all the highs and lows that come with being so close.

What do you dislike?

I dislike the sense of entitlement. Nothing in the world is guaranteed, we work for what we get and what we earn.

What are you currently reading and why?

I am re-reading Paulo Coelhos The Alchemist. I admire the lessons in the book, there is always a new takeaway anytime you reread the book.

Whats your favourite meal?

My palette is purely coastal. Chapati, biriyani. ..Ive lately been enjoying ugali

Parting shot?

Do not settle for what you can have, work for what you know you deserve, God will do the rest.
A civil society organisation, known as 2H City Connect, has distributed more than 4000 face masks to religious bodies in the Hohoe Municipality as part of its campaign dubbed: Wear A Mask, to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.



The religious bodies that received the masks include the Pentecost International Worship Centre, Reverend Seeger Memorial Congregation of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church, Revival Assemblies of God Church, and the Great Commission Church International.



Mr Honour Agbemor-Flint, President of 2H City Connect, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, said the organisation comprised volunteers who identified social gaps within communities and found ways of addressing them.



We are distributing to the churches, especially the elderly among them, who are more vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 and suffering its dreaded consequences, he said.



Mr Agbemor-Flint said the gesture was also to support governments effort to curb the spread of the disease by taking up the challenge to raise GH24,000.00 to supply 10,000 masks by engaging the services of young tailors and seamstresses in the Municipality to sew them under strict hygienic standards.



The Group contracted local dressmakers in a bid to empower them financially and to teach them how to produce locally made standardised masks.



He entreated the churches to continue to adhere to the safety protocols as a means of winning the fight against the novel coronavirus.



Reverend Father Isaac Benuyenah, the Parish Priest of St. Augustine Church, on behalf of the beneficiaries, expressed gratitude to the group for the support and called on other individuals to emulate the gesture.



He expressed worry over the disregard of some citizens to adhere to the precautionary measures to help fight the pandemic and said the disease was still present, hence people needed to be cautious.

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
By SA Commercial Prop News

Randburg Square Mall situated in Randburg CBD has undergone a complete overhaul and has received much needed facelift from the owners, Vukile Property Fund increasing footfall 20% in the last quarter of last year. Image gallery



The famous Randburg Square Mall situated in Randburg CBD has undergone a complete overhaul and received much needed facelift from the owners, Vukile Property Fund increasing footfall 20% in the last quarter of last year.

A total capital investment of approximately R207-million was poured into the upgrade project which was carried out in three phases, in which the centre management believes that the development will eventually translate into a future positive economic growth.

Other new features that make the new look of Randburg Square Mall appeal to shoppers and visitors alike, include bigger walkways, new flooring, enhanced lighting and reconfiguration of central areas and some of the stores.

Launched in the late-1970s as Sanlam Centre Randburg, the retail areas had long been in need of an extensive revamp to enable the centre to successfully compete with contending centres that have since been developed in the catchment area.

Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed property loan stock company, Vukile Property Fund, which owns the 35 818 square metre mall says that all the latest developments are just the good news that both investors and stakeholders have been waiting for.

"The design process has enabled us to attract 23 new retail stores that allow us to cater for our diverse shoppers who are in love and visit the mall. We expect a high surge in new entrants to the city of Randburg because of the fresh and new look appeal brought by the upgrade," says Vukile Chief Executive Laurence Rapp.

The scope of work carried out includes upgrading of the main entrance at the food court, and the escalators connecting the two shopping levels have been realigned to allow easier flow from the entrance into the centre. This has also created more space for the new banking mall on the lower level. First National Bank, an existing tenant, has relocated to this area while Nedbank, a new tenant, has also started trading here.

There has been a major improvement of all mechanical, electrical and fire safety systems, including the implementation of green energy saving measures wherever possible. The public toilets have also been upgraded aesthetically. Modern alterations were made to the main entrance from Pretoria Street as well as the secondary entrances located along the pedestrian promenade in Hill Street.

Jaco Nel, an executive at JHI Project Management and project manager in charge of refurbishment in the centre says the upgrade has allowed them an opportunity to have a mixture of tenants in the city centre to add value to the shopping experience of those used to the centre and to visitors.

The mall has a large sphere of influence due to the taxi rank close to the centre that mainly services Diepsloot, Randburg, Soweto, Cosmo City, Kya Sands, Alexandra, and Kagiso. There are also households within a two kilometre radius of the centre, in areas such as Blairgowrie, President Ridge, Fernridge, Kensington, Bordeaux and Hurlingham Manor. With an average foot count of over 800 000 customers per month, the mall plays host to commuters, professionals, families and friends.



The local authority, together with property owners, has in recent years upgraded the public facilities in the surrounding area and made improvements to the traffic flow. The new Gautrain bus route and the incorporation of the Randburg CBD into the Bus Rapid Transport system have further improved access to the area.

Vukiles diverse property portfolio is worth about R10bn. It is about 53% retail-focused while 10% is let to central government departments and 3% to a hospital. About 11% is industrial and the balance is office space.



Last year in terms of the empowerment deal Vukile restructured so as to have more than 20% empowerment ownership. This was done through Vukile completing a R1.04bn deal that saw it acquire four government-tenanted properties from the Encha investment group.



Vukile declared a 5% distribution for the six-month period to September 2013 in its most recent financial results. This was below the industry average of about 7% for that period.



However Mr Rapp has said the improved portfolio following the Encha deal means distributions will improve next year.
The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has asked Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia to apologise over what it says were lies he spewed about the cost of the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange.

The Vice President says the interchange cost $260 million but the NDC accused Dr. Bawumia of adding the cost of two separate and distinct projects; the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange and the Ring Road Flyover to arrive at the amount he quoted.

Dr. Bawumia suggested that the NDC inflated the contract sum for the construction of the Kwame Nkrumah Circle interchange.

But the Communication Officer of the NDC, Sammy Gyamfi, at a press conference on Monday, August 24, 202 said the current government created the impression as though the $260 million was the cost of just one project, the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange.

This mischief which was peddled by no less a person than the Vice President of the Republic of Ghana is shameful and reprehensible to say the least, Mr. Gyamfi said.

The scope of work of the two projects are totally different, and so it is disingenuous and shameful for Dr. Bawumia to lump the cost of the two projects together and create the impression that same is inflated.

The NDC maintains that the cost of the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange project as approved by Parliament and expended by the contractor was $90 million at the time.

This fact is contained in the Parliamentary Hansard of 16th August 2012, when the transaction was approved by the 5th Parliament of Ghana, with the full participation and approval of the then NPP Minority, Mr. Gyamfi said.

He also recalled that the Mahama government on October 1, 2014 laid before Parliament another export credit facility for the design and construction of another project, the Ring Road Flyover, at a cost $170 million.

Given the NDCs stance, Mr. Gyamfi said if Bawumia has any modicum of respect for Ghanaians, he will honourably do the needful by retracting and apologizing for this lie which has further lowered his fast-sinking reputation and sullied his integrity and that of the high office he occupies.

 citinewsroom
Oprah Winfrey has made Election Day an official holiday at her company, stating that the upcoming presidential vote in the US might be the most important election of our lives.

On 3 November 2020, members of the public in the US will vote for their next president, with Democratic candidate Joe Biden going up against the current US president Donald Trump.

The presidential vote is always held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, a tradition that has been upheld since 1845.

In order to allow her employees enough time to cast their votes, Winfrey has announced that all members of staff at her television network, the Oprah Winfrey Network, will be able to take the day as a company-wide holiday.

In a post shared on Instagram, the talk show host explained that the decision to make 3 November a holiday was made in honour of those who fought and continue to fight for our rights.

Winfrey stated that it was recently the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave some women the right to vote in the US.

In honour of those who fought and continue to fight for our rights, Im announcing that November 3rd, Election Day, will be a company holiday at @owntv, she said.

This will give my team the necessary time to put on their masks, get to the polls, cast their ballots, and volunteer.

Winfrey expressed her hope that other firms will follow in her footsteps by giving workers time off to vote in the election.

I challenge other companies to do the same because this might be the most important election of our lives, the 66-year-old said.

Together we can overcome all obstacles in order to exercise our right to vote.

Winfrey recently featured the late Breonna Taylor on the cover of her eponymous magazine, marking the first time in 20 years that the media mogul has not appeared on the front.

In March this year, Taylor was fatally shot after police officers entered her apartment in Kentucky, US using a no-knock warrant.

In an essay written for O, The Oprah Magazine about Taylor, Winfrey wrote that like everyone who dies unexpectedly, she had plans. Plans for a future filled with responsibility and work and friends and laughter.
Today

Sunny skies during the morning hours will become overcast in the afternoon. Much warmer. High near 40F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.

Tonight

Showers in the evening, then cloudy overnight. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Low 33F. Winds W at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%.

Tomorrow

Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. A few flurries or snow showers possible. High 38F. Winds NW at 15 to 25 mph.
(Natural News) A controversial bill was recently approved by a California Senate committee that will set up a fund for transgender medical interventions and operations that can cause sterility in children.

Although the Health Committee chair said late last month that the measure would not be considered this year, pressure from transgender activists led to the revival of the bill. AB 2218, or The Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund, ultimately passed in a 7 to 1 vote. The bill will allow the funds to be used to pay for puberty-blocking drugs, double mastectomies, castrations, and cross-sex hormones. All of these interventions have been identified in a statement by the American College of Pediatrics as causing sterilization in children.

The bill says the money is intended to provide grants to transgender-led hospitals, clinics and other medical providers who offer gender-affirming health care services.

The author of the bill, Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, said that nothing in the bill talks about sterilizing kids, and some lawmakers have complained that they have received a high volume of phone calls begging them not to support legislation that funds the sterilization of children. Although supporters of the bill have denied the connection to sterility, its mention of funding services such as gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy using puberty-blocking drugs indicates otherwise.

A taxpayer-funded study by the National Institutes of Health into the progression of hormonal drugs warns parents in its consent form that taking the medication will likely lead to infertility. According to the consent form, If your child starts puberty blockers in the earliest stages of puberty, and then goes on to gender affirming hormones, they will not develop sperm or eggs. This means they will not be able to have biological children.

Experts speak out against the bill

California endocrinologist Dr. Michael Laidlaw told Breitbart News that studies have shown most children who have been given puberty blockers have gone on to wrong-sex or cross-sex hormones and sex reassignment surgery. He said all those who started with the blockers and moved on to cross-sex hormones became infertile, while those who had their gonads removed were sterilized.

Christian leader and psychologist Dr. James Dobson expressed his concerns about the bill in a statement to Breitbart News: Ill say exactly what this bill supports: gender mutilation and sterilization. Proponents of this bill will deny the truth  in fact, they already have. They insist that since the bill doesnt use the word sterilization, there is no harm and no foul. Rubbish!

He called this experimentation on vulnerable people morally repugnant and said, These hurting individuals need our compassion and care  not a cocktail of drugs and disfiguring surgeries that could well cause irreversible harm to their bodies. Many of them, he pointed out, are still in grade school.

The bill has now made its way to the Senate Appropriations Committee and could end up on the Senate floor by the end of the month. If it is approved, it is believed that Governor Gavin Newsom will sign it into law.

Some experts have found evidence that there is a transgender peer contagion going on right now fueled by social media and that many of these young people later regret the irreversible steps they took to fit into the trend. Unfortunately, some doctors and therapists are encouraging young people who express attraction to people of the same sex to transition, telling them that they may have been born in the wrong body rather than entertaining the idea that they might merely be gay or bisexual.

How could anyone support a bill that allows children, adolescents and adults to be mutilated by their doctors through genital amputations and double mastectomies? The fact that this actually passed by a margin of 7 to 1 tells you everything you need to know about the state of California right now. Read more news about chemical violence against children at ChemicalViolence.com

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

CBN.com
A recent leak has pointed to an upcoming Samsung foldable that may be more affordable than its predecessors. This rumor now gains more weight due to the fact that the Wi-Fi Alliance has registered a device with its alleged model number. This new leak may also point to specs that may indeed render it the foldable for (more of) the masses.

Working For Notebookcheck Are you a techie who knows how to write? Then join our Team! English native speakers welcome! News Writer (AUS/NZL based) - Details here

Samsung's foldable devices - which are currently organized into the Galaxy Z Fxxx(n) series - are the cutting-edge of premiumleak smartphones. However, they also all have the price-tags to match: even the technically lowest-end Z Flip launched for about the same price as a Note 20 Ultra 5G. Then again, there are some hints that the OEM is working on making this category accessible to more consumers as soon as possible.

They arose with a rumor that the Korean electronics giant have a foldable (thought to be so as its model number allegedly has the prefix SM-F, same as the Galaxy Fold, Z Fold2 and both Z Flip variants) with internal storage SKUs of just 64 to 128GB in the works. Now, this same device has popped up on the Wi-Fi Alliance's website.

This type of leak is often a sure sign that a device is real and will see a debut in the near future. It may also confirm that it is of the mid-range variety, as the wireless connectivity evaluated for in this certification only goes up to 802.11 ac (or "Wi-Fi 5", as it is sometimes known). Combine this with its rumored storage spec (even the Z Flip gets 256GB), and it is looking sub-flagship indeed.

This SM-F415F/DS, as it is known in its new official documentation, is also now projected to get a Snapdragon 7-series processor, and, thus, to fall into the ~US$700 price-tier. Should this be the case, its launch might come as a nasty shock to the upcoming Motorola Razr 2020 5G - not to mention conventional phones such as the OnePlus Nord. Then again, Samsung has yet to acknowledge this rumored affordable foldable in any way.
Jerusalem: The United States Secretary Mike Pompeo on Monday (August 24, 2020) met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and discussed the ongoing efforts to counter Irans destabilizing influence in the region.

Pompeo and Netanyahu also talked about the success of the Abraham Accords agreement and establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Secretary Pompeo reiterated that Americas commitment to Israels security is unwavering.

Good to be in Israel again today with @IsraeliPM @Netanyahu. We discussed ways to address Iranian malign influence in the region, shared challenges the U.S. and Israel face, and the benefit of the Abraham Accords. As always, the U.S. commitment to Israels security is unwavering. pic.twitter.com/fnTRKIrH3u  Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) August 24, 2020

After the meeting, Israeli PM while referring to the US Secretary was quoted saying, "We have met here in Jerusalem and in Washington and in so many places in between, but every meeting was characterized by that same powerful alliance of values that has informed your activity and the activity of the Trump administration that cements even further the historic American-Israeli alliance."

He added, "I want to thank you, I want to thank the President, for all that youve done for Israels security and everything youre doing to solidify this friendship."

Today I had an important meeting with my friend @SecPompeo. I thanked him for Americas great support for Israel, the snapback sanctions on Iran and the peace agreement with the UAE. More good news soon!  Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) August 24, 2020

Netanyahu also commented on Iran and expressed, "The US has stood up to Irans aggression and triggered the snapback sanctions. I want to commend US for doing so. I think people should realize that the Iran deal failed just as we predicted. Not only did it not mollify Irans aggression, it fueled it, it increased it."

"Weve seen Iran, since the JCPOA was concluded, emerging from its cage and devouring one country after another, targeting countries with rockets, with terrorism, with pillage and plunder and murder  murder  all over the Middle East and even beyond the Middle East, including into US' hemisphere," stated Israeli PM.

While addressing the press, Pompeo said, "President Trumps made clear that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon and we are determined to use every tool that we have to ensure that they cant get access to high-end weapon systems, air defense systems."

"We think its in the best interest of the whole world  many of these leaders tell me so privately. Its time to stand up. Its time to publicly account for the fact that Iran is on the cusp on October 18th of having access to those weapons and the money that will come from their sale of those weapons that will be used to inflict real harm, not only in the Middle East but in Europe as well."

"Im confident that well achieve that and I welcome Israeli and Gulf state support for our effort. The people most impacted by Iran having weapon systems are all in favor of this arms embargo being extended. The rest of the world should join us," said the US Secretary.

Pompeo is on a visit to Israel, Sudan, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to discuss Irans 'malign influence' and will conclude his trip on August 28.
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / Exploring The Block will be broadcasting on Fox Business Network 1030 pm PST tonight featuring fetch.ai with CEO Humayun Sheikh on their second interview in 6 Part series. We also have BlockQuake with CEO Antonio Brasse, giving us an update. Fetch.ai will be filming their next interview within the next few weeks, dates and times TBA.

Premiering for their first featured interviews, we have Electroneum with CEO Richard Ells and WayckiChain with CEO Gordon Gao. Electroneum and WayckiChain will continue filming interviews and extend their series through Q4 2020.

We have a special interview with Chris Bolet Senior Developer and Herman Schoenfeld, CEO of Pascal, on their special tech.

New to the Street, "Exploring The Block " will be broadcasting on Bloomberg Saturday, August 29th at 6 pm EST. Check us out and the companies appearing in Bloombergs T.V. Guide.

We are doing monthly " New To The Street" segments and welcome companies with new products and services to inquire. The company has to be special and be T.V. ready regarding infrastructure and the ability to service massive orders and attention. Companies who are ready for this challenge, please contact our CEO Vince Caruso direct via email Vince.Caruso@NewtoTheStreet.com

ABOUT:

FMW Media

FMW Media Corp. operates one of the longest-running U.S and International sponsored programming T.V. brands "NewToTheStreet," and its blockchain show "Exploring The Block." Since 2009, these brands run shows across three major U.S. Television networks. These TV platforms reach over 540 million homes both in the US and international markets.

Twitter @NewtotheStreet @ExploringBlock

https://newtothestreet.com/

Fetch.ai (FET)

"Fetch.ai is at the forefront of accelerating research and deployment of emerging technologies, including blockchain and AI. Its solutions are designed for people, organizations, and IoT. The project has created an Open Economic Framework (OEF) that serves as a decentralized search and a value exchange platform for various autonomous economic agents. Supported by a scalable smart ledger, Fetch.ai has digital intelligence at its heart, enabling it to deliver actionable predictions and instant trust information to billions of smart devices."

https://fetch.ai/

Electroneum (ETN)

Using the power of blockchain to unlock the global digital economy for millions of people in the developing world.

http://support.electroneum.com

WaykiChain (WICC)

The WaykiChain is focused on developing its own technology, bottom public chain layer and as well corresponding to that an ecosystem that will foster technology research and development, as well as project operation.

The independent research and development of the third generation of blockchain business reached the leading level in the industry, with high-performance transaction processing capabilities (TPS 3300), efficient mechanism of consensus (DPoS + pBFT), robust and smart engine (Lua + WASM) contract, plus the blockchain decentralized control ability. WaykiChain will provide expertise in critical areas of vertical industry with infrastructure services and industry solutions.

At present, with the team's continuous investment in research and development and the active participation of the community of developers and users, the base of WaykiChain has been continuously upgraded and optimized. One of the critical financial roots of blockchain developed by WaykiChain, stable coin WUSD (built on the bottom layer of the public chain), is also enhancing the potential synergy of decentralized business.

https://www.waykichain.com/

Pascal (PASC) Pascal is a next-generation cryptocurrency that solves many of the limitations of existing cryptocurrencies. Its primary focus is on solving the "scalability issue." Stress-test results of the testnet 4.1 codebase show the mainnet capacity can achieve 1,600 transactions per second.

Secondly, Pascal solves the long-term blockchain "storage issue" by introducing deletable blockchain technology. This technology allows Pascal nodes to securely delete the blockchain beyond the last 100 blocks. By storing the flow of transactions rather than the infinite history, the Pascal network is the first (and only known) cryptocurrency that can theoretically run for infinite time at maximum throughput while requiring only constant storage. In this manner, Pascal achieves "infinite scalability".

Pascal is a fast, zero-fee, scalable, and totally decentralized cryptocurrency designed for payments and layer-2 applications. Enabled by the SafeBox technology to become the world's first deletable blockchain system, Pascal possesses unlimited potential.

https://www.pascalcoin.org/

BlockQuake

The company was formed in early 2018 to address the need for trust and transparency in the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities through the development of a centralized cryptocurrency trading exchange platform.

Through his experience in cryptocurrency trading, Antonio Brasse found there was a void within the existing landscape of cryptocurrency trading platforms. This void is relative to performance, security, transparency, and trust - as compared to operations within traditional financial markets. In talking with two of his friends and fellow crypto traders, Antonio discovered they had similar observations. Drawing upon their collective years of experience in financial services, the team believed they could change this landscape for the better through significant and rapid disruption, "creating seismic shifts." That was the genesis of BlockQuake.

The company was formed in early 2018 to address the need for trust and transparency in the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities through the development of a centralized cryptocurrency trading exchange platform.

https://www.blockquake.com/

CONTACT:

Bryan Johnson

1 (631) 766-7462

bryan@newtothestreet.com

SOURCE: FMW Media Works Corp

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/603145/ExploringTheBlock-Broadcasting-Tonight-Fetchai-FET-ElectroneumETN-BlockQuake-Pascal-PASC-and-WaykiChain-WICC
Mirzapur 2 release date, full cast: The OTT space in India has undergone a tremendous change in past 2 years. Some of the projects, which might have started on experimental basis, turned out to be one of the biggest success stories as audiences welcomed them with open arms. One such web show is Amazon Primes Mirzapur. Released in 2018, Mirzapur starring Pankaj Tripathi, Vikrant Massey and Ali Fazal among many others, gripped the audiences attention with its complex and multilayered story.

The aftermath of the web show was such that Mirzapur fans urged Amazon Prime, its makers and actors to reunite for a season 2. Every time Amazon Prime released a new film or a show, fans would ask When is Mirzapur Season 2 coming? and it seems like the wait is almost over.

On Monday, Amazon Prime released an announcement video to reveal that Mirzapur 2 will be streaming on Amazon Prime from October 23, 2020 (Monday) at 12 PM. Revenge is a dish best served when it is cold. Mirzapur is a dream and it shall come true, said the streaming giant while sharing the announcement video.

Speaking about Mirzapur season 2, Actor Ali Fazal, who plays Guddu, recently told a news agency that the new season would boast of a lot more. The stakes are much higher and his character is very different. Admitting that the playing the part this time was a bit frustrating, Fazal said that the audiences would get a glimpse of Old guddu only four to five times.
In Junewith Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, refusing, due to the pandemic, to accede to President Trumps demands for a business-as-usual Republican convention in CharlotteTrump pulled the plug, and said he would instead accept his partys nomination on the friendlier political turf of Jacksonville, Florida. Then, in Julyas cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, surged in FloridaTrump scrapped that plan, too. (Talk about cancel culture.) With a month to go until the convention, its organizers, Politicos Alex Isenstadt reports, were literally left staring at a blank slate. The Republicans plans remained murky right through this weekend. They still arent fully clear, though we do now know the conventions speaker roster (the St. Louis gun couple, Nicholas Sandmann, Rudy Giuliani), the credentials of its producers (The Apprentice), and the planned location of Trumps acceptance speech (the White House, despite laws that bar the use of federal property and employees for political ends). We also know that Trump wants more live action than the Democrats offered last week, and more of himselfhe plans to speak in prime time every night.

The convention, which kicks off today, will be longer than the Democrats offering, running for two and a half hours each night, starting at 8.30pm Eastern. In the absence of much advance notice, the networks may find themselves winging elements of the convention broadcast, though it seems that TV bosses are planning, as much as possible, to replicate their coverage of the Democratic convention. MSNBC and CNN are set to give the Republicans extensive airtime; the major broadcast networks, by contrast, will jump in at 10pm each night, as they did both last week and in convention cycles past. Typically, the networks have limited their convention programming to an hour for commercial(s) reasons, but, according to the Daily Beast, their decision to keep things short this year may have come with an added editorial concern. Network executives reportedly told Democratic officials that giving their event more airtime would mean having to do likewise for the Republicans eventa perilous pledge for the networks, given the chaos of the Republicans convention planning and Trumpism in general.

ICYMI: Journalisms Gates keepers

Some observers expressed skepticism at that pretext: the networks, the veteran anchor Dan Rather told the Beast, never wanted to give the conventions very much time, because they can cram in more commercials with even deadwood content. Still, the Trump factor has undoubtedly ignited a broader debate within the industry: do the Democratic and Republican conventions merit equal, unfiltered media treatment or not? (For previous iterations of this debate, see: Trumps rare Oval Office addresses; Trumps not-so-rare coronavirus briefings; the State of the Union.) Yesterday, Brian Stelter, CNNs chief media correspondent, noted on air that the Democratic and Republican conventions exist in a truth imbalancewhereas the former (while high on partisan puffery) was mostly rooted in some kind of shared factual reality, the latter will probably feature a cascade of dangerous lies. Amanda Carpenter, a CNN contributor and columnist for The Bulwark, told Stelter that the Republican convention is shaping up to be a major medical and political disinformation event, and that the networks should treat it as such.

Peter Hamby, of Snapchat and Vanity Fair, shared a different view with Stelter: if the networks handle the Republican convention differently to the Democratic one, he warned, pro-Trump partisans will cry foul. They surely will. But their protests arent a good reason to bestow equal treatment on conventions that manifestly are not equalfor the reasons Stelter outlined, and also because the Democrats do not currently command the apparatus of the federal executive, and the myriad responsibilities that go with it. If Trump does end up speaking at length every night, that, too, will mark a major difference with the Democrats conventionone which, some observers argued over the weekend, would be reason enough for the networks to cut away.

Treating things that are not the same as if they are the same in the name of partisan balance has been a recurring media error of the Trump era. The remedy is often clear cut: just report the truth, with as much context and as great a sense of proportion as you can muster. This imperative demands that when Trump lies on TV, networks correct him in real time, and/or yank him off air altogether.

Sign up for CJR 's daily email

The case of the conventions strikes me as a little more complicated than previous Trump-lies debates, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, conventions, as the political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote for CJR in 2012, have a democratic value that (at least in theory) transcends our normal judgments of news value and perfect informational purity: a party presenting its best case for election on a fixed, quadrennial timetable can be instructive, even though it always amounts, to some extent, to propaganda. Secondly, as I wrote last week, the pacy, virtual convention format necessitated by the pandemic does not lend itself kindly to live fact-checking or punditry. When the networks tried to cut into the Democratic convention, they ended up talking over the top of it, which made for choppy, often-confusing television.

Ultimately, though, dangerous misinformation doesnt care about such considerations: itll take root in any host body it can find. When Trump and his allies use this weeks Republican convention to lie about urgent matters of public health and election integrityand it is a case of whenthe networks first duty is to immediately correct the record. If they cant find an elegant way of breaking into the programming, they should cut away entirely, and not fear doing so just because they didnt treat the Democrats the same way. The theoretical purpose of partisan fairness norms is that they preserve the integrity of democratic choice; if we let bad actors use such norms to subvert democracy, then they literally become pointless. And thats before we even get started on the wisdom of drinking bleach.

Below, more on the Republican convention and the election:



Other notable stories:

ICYMI: Stop using officer-involved shooting

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.
Several multinational banks are expected to address their concerns and opposition to the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) revised current account norms, as per reports.

The foreign lenders will use diplomatic channels, corporate lobbies and write to the central bank to express their views, says a report by The Economic Times.

The banks have sought inputs from their regional headquarters and legal counsel to formalise their criticism about the new rules, the report said.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.

On August 6, the RBI had modified current account norms to improve credit discipline. According to the revised rules, a lender with an exposure of less than 10 percent exposure to a corporate borrower is allowed to open only a collection account.

"Where a bank's exposure to a borrower is less than 10 percent of the exposure of the banking system to that borrower, while credits are freely permitted, debits to the CC/OD account can only be for credit to the CC/OD account of that borrower with a bank that has 10 percent or more of the exposure of the banking system to that borrower," the banking regulator said.

Multinational banks think the new rules could increase fund cost and reduce ease of doing business for top-rated companies and some lenders, the report said. The foreign banks feel they will not receive the support of the industry body Indian Banks Association (IBA).

"Foreign banks clearly sense this. All the more after last week's meeting when the issue was brought up," a banker said as per the report.
A vigil will take place this evening for a teenager who died in a collision with a bus in Dublin.

Ballymun native Shane Murphy (17) was on a motorcycle when he died following a collision with Dublin Bus on Sunday

He was travelling along the R122 and the R108 at St Margarets, Finglas when he was fatally injured after hitting a Dublin Bus just before 8pm.

His body was removed from the scene and taken to the mortuary where a post-mortem will take place.

The bus driver, a man in his 50s, did not sustain any injuries but was treated for shock at the scene.

The road was closed for some time on Sunday while gardai investigated the scene.

Dublin Bus said in a statement that the bus was out of service at the time and that no customers were on board.

Hurling and camogie GAA club Cumann Baire Setanta, who Mr Murphy once was a member of, said: We are deeply saddened to learn of the sudden death of a former club member Shane Murphy this evening. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends at this difficult time.

A vigil will take place at 7pm this evening at the seven pitches at Ballymun Road to remember the young man.

Tributes poured in from loved ones as the community tried to come to grips with Mr Murphys passing.

Sorry to hear about Shane such a nice kid and a great laugh rest in peace little man, said one tribute.

Local Fianna Fail councillor Keith Connolly extended his condolences to Mr Murphys family, saying: From what I heard he was a very likeable character and was involved in the GAA and other clubs. Obviously, losing someone of that age is devastating for the community too.

Gardai are appealing to any road users who may have travelled the road to contact Finglas garda station.
Next week the Labor Party will find itself marking the 10th anniversary of the day Prime Minister Julia Gillard signed a deal with the Greens. There can be no celebration; at the national level, the ALP continues to be unable to get out from under that ill-starred moment. The agreement with the Greens ultimately sealed the fate of the government led by Gillard and later Kevin Rudd, crippling Labors ability to craft an effective and electorally saleable set of policies on climate change and energy.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese. Credit:Wolter Peeters

All these years later, the ALP seems as far away from a coherent approach to these policy areas as it was after it was smashed at the 2013 election at which Tony Abbotts coalition rode to victory vowing to axe the carbon tax that flowed from the deal with the Greens.

Right now, the ALP is in the throes of a very willing internal debate about the role of gas and renewable energy, with agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon warning that it could break the party in two. Fitzgibbon, who represents a coal seat in the Hunter Valley, has raised the prospect of Labor falling apart as it tries to satisfy the seemingly disparate constituencies of inner-city greenies and regional blue-collar workers. He wants the ALP to champion the use of fossil fuels for export and for industry.

Meanwhile, the energy spokesman, Mark Butler, appears to favour doubling down on renewables and is encouraging party activists to steer the party towards a purer stance.
A corner of Ho Chi Minh City (Photo: VNA)

HCM City  The Peoples Committee of Ho Chi Minh City has asked for the Governments support of its scheme to make the city a regional and international financial hub.

The city proposed that the Government consider adding the scheme to the national socio-economic development strategy in the 2021-2030 period with a vision to 2045, as well as to the draft documents of the upcoming 13th National Party Congress.

According to the municipal Party Committee, the scheme will help enhance the position of Vietnam in the global map of financial centres.

The building of an international financial centre in the city was initiated by HCM City and has been discussed for years. The city aims to provide financial services to neighbouring countries and those in the ASEAN and beyond, and join the network of regional financial centres.

In the long term, the city expects to lure leading regional and global financial institutions and organisations.

According to the municipal Peoples Committee, the city has the highest density of financial institutions in the country with 2,134 banking and credit entities, including 50 foreign-invested, 31 joint stock commercial and four State-owned banks.

In 2019, the mobilized capital in the city accounted for 24.09 percent of the countrys total, while the loan outstanding balance also made up 28.05 percent of the outstanding loans of the whole economy. Total market cap value in the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange accounted for 95 percent of the whole domestic markets total and 54.33 percent of the countrys GDP.

The city is serving as the major locomotive of the Vietnamese economy, which accounted for 22.3 percent of the national GDP and 26.6 percent of the State budget. It is home to 33.8 percent of the total FDI projects in Vietnam. The city is also the cradle of the Vietnamese stock market.

The successful formation of the HCM City financial centre is expected to create positive impacts on the countrys capital sources, while attracting investment flows which go along with supporting business and financial products and services.
The owner of a food bank in Queens, where the line for free food stretches a quarter of a mile long at weekends, has said he is struggling to keep up with the 'tsunami' of demand.

Almost 20 per cent of New Yorkers are currently without work, according to the latest labor statistics from the state, and almost 650,000 jobs have been lost.

The biggest losses have been in leisure and hospitality, with 249,700 jobs disappearing; professional and business services, with 110,300 people in the sector now unemployed, and in trade, transportation, and utilities, where 102,200 lost their jobs.

Striking footage has now emerged of a group of people lining up at La Jornada food pantry in Queens.

Pedro Rodriguez, a volunteer who serves as executive director of the service, said they used to hand out groceries to roughly 1,000 families a week. Now, the figure tops 10,000.

Nearly 400 volunteers across Queens are working to cope with the surge in demand for food

Huge numbers of people have been lining up outside a food pantry in Queens for help

The line stretches around the block in Queens, and starts before dawn as people gather

The director of La Jornada said the scenes reminded him of images of the Great Depression

Volunteers also serve lunch every day to 1,000 people - many of them children.

'We feel like we are underwater, drowning in a tsunami of people,' Rodriguez told The New York Post.

'This isn't like a little rain coming down. The numbers are unbelievable.'

He said the scene outside his establishment was like something out of the Great Depression.

'It reminds me of the picture from the Great Depression where a man in a suit and tie is giving another man in a suit and tie an apple. That's all he had,' he said.

'We give all we have, but that's not enough.'

Rodriguez and his army of other volunteers  nearly 400 spread across Queens  check off names from the appointment list.

The protocol used to be first-come, first-served  until the needy started showing up before dawn because they were afraid La Jornada would run out of food.

Once, in late March, the line covered 28 blocks, he said.

Unemployment in New York City is now almost 20%, leaving many struggling to feed families

Pedro Rodriquez, who runs La Jornada, said the lines of people picking up food was shocking

With their trolleys at hand, people lined up in Queens on Saturday for tinned and fresh foods

Walter Barrera told the paper he had arrived at 6am to pick up his family's groceries for the coming week  rice, potatoes, cans of soup, fruit and vegetables.

Barrera, 50, has stopped by the food pantry every Saturday since he lost his construction job four months ago.

He can't find work and neither can his two older sons, 19 and 17. His youngest son is 11.

Money is so tight, friends and relatives are helping him with the $2,300 a month he pays for his three-bedroom apartment in Flushing, where he lives with his wife and all of their sons.

'What do I tell my children when they look at me with hungry bellies, especially my 11-year-old son?' said Barrera, who came from South America 20 years ago.

'It breaks my heart. I'm their father. I'm supposed to feed them.'

Julio Moncayo, 40, told the paper he had to swallow his pride to come to the food pantry and seek help.

A construction worker, he works two or three days a week now, but said the pay is not enough to cover the $1,500 in rent for his family's two-bedroom apartment in Flushing or their grocery bill.

'I can't be proud, I have to come here. I have to feed my family,' Moncayo told The Post. 'It's tough. What am I going to do?'

Similar scenes are playing out across New York City, and indeed nationwide.

Cars line up to get food on August 11 in Dallas, at the North Texas Food Bank's free distribution

Volunteers at a food bank in Salt Lake City, Utah, hand out goods on August 12

Children were among those seeking free food from the Salt Lake City organization

'I've been in food banking for 24 years, and in my tenure I've never seen such a dramatic increase in need literally overnight,' said Lisa Scales of the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, referring to the initial spike in distribution in March, when the shutdowns started.

In California, the Sacramento Food Bank is serving 8,000 people a week.

'You have so many people that have been displaced from work, you have so many single moms with children at home, and you have so many isolated seniors, that the demand for services has just gone through the roof,' said Blake Young, the organization's president and CEO for 15 years.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, he told The Atlantic in June, the organization served approximately 150,000 people each month. In April and May, that number rose to more than 300,000 people.

Volumes at the Houston Food Bank, the largest in Feeding America's network, have more than doubled since the pandemic.

The group distributed on average 25 trailer loads of food a day in May and June compared with 10 during the same period last year.

'We've been spending a fortune on trucking,' Chief Executive Brian Greene said.

Boxes of food are stacked a walk-up food distribution bank in Los Angeles on August 10

People in Los Angeles were also lining up for assistance, pictured on August 10

In July, the Census Bureau reported that nearly 30 million Americans said they didnt have enough to eat in the prior week - a situation that is likely to worsen since the end of the $600 additional unemployment check last month.

Hunger-relief organization Feeding America, a nationwide network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs, estimates the pandemic could push an additional 17 million people into what it calls food insecurity this year.

More than 82 per cent of U.S. food banks are serving more people than they were last year, with an average increase of 50 per cent, according to a June survey by the group.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health reported 426 new coronavirus cases Monday, raising the statewide total to 129,474.

Across Pennsylvania, 7,579 deaths have been tied to COVID-19, including one newly reported fatality today. More than two-third of the states coronavirus deaths have occurred in long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes.

The health department regularly reports lower numbers of new cases on Mondays, as some laboratories process fewer tests over the weekend. But the state has reported an average of 661 new cases over the last seven days, the lowest 7-day average since the beginning of July.

Its been nearly a month since the state last reported 1,000 cases in a single day. The state last reported 1,000 new cases in one day on July 28 and the state crossed that mark several times last month. The state regularly reported well over 1,000 cases in a day at the peak of the virus in April.

Cases have declined in August after climbing steadily through late June and early July. Still, health officials have said theyre concerned about the number of younger adults contracting the virus, especially those between the ages of 19 and 24.

Gov. Tom Wolf and Health Secretary Rachel Levine continue to stress the importance of social distancing and wearing masks. Theyve said its especially critical to enable schools to offer in-person classes if they choose that route.

Some schools in central Pennsylvania are resuming classes this week, while others across the state will reopen in the next couple of weeks. Some schools are beginning the year with remote learning, while some schools are trying in-person education. Many schools are employing a hybrid approach, with in-person classes on some days and remote learning on others.

There were 14,973 test results reported to the health department through 10 p.m. Sunday. The state administered 157,052 tests between Aug. 17-23.

More than 1.4 million people have tested negative for the virus.

There are 518 coronavirus patients being treated in hospitals, according to the health departments online dashboard. Thats well below the peak of about 2,800 during the spring.

The health department reports 80 percent of those who have been infected are considered to be recovered. The department considers patients to have recovered when they are 30 days beyond the date of infection or the onset of symptoms.

Statewide, 5,127 coronavirus deaths have occurred in nursing and personal care homes.

The health department reports there are 20,730 residents of long-term care facilities who have contracted COVID-19, along with 4,394 employees. A total of 25,124 people have contracted the coronavirus in long-term care facilities.

Coronavirus cases have been found at 919 long-term care facilities in 61 counties.

Here is a look at new coronavirus cases over the past several weeks.

July 7-13: 5,438 new cases, an average of 776 per day

July 14-20: 5,996 new cases, an average of 856 per day

July 21-27: 6,526 new cases, an average of 932 per day

July 28-Aug. 3: 5,891 new cases, an average of 841 per day

Aug. 4-10: 5,298 new cases, an average of 756 per day

Aug. 11-17: 5,391 new cases, an average of 770 per day

Aug. 18-24: 4,630 new cases, an average of 661 per day

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COVID-19 has not only endangered lives and livelihoods around the world, it is exacerbating a crisis in labor law enforcement, making income inequality and racial inequality worse. New York state legislators could address this crisis and generate much-needed revenue for the state by passing the Empowering People in Rights Enforcement Worker Protection Act.

Even before the pandemic, New York faced a crisis in enforcement of its labor laws, with more than $3 billion in wages and benefits stolen from New Yorkers each year. Wage theft can occur in many forms, including sub-minimum wages, shaving workers' time, improper pay deductions and failing to pay overtime wages. Over the past decade, state Department of Labor investigators' average case load has doubled, and the agency now only investigates violations for half of the time period covered by the labor law.

Before the pandemic, it took the Labor Department more than two years on average to resolve wage theft claims. With the agency now putting wage theft investigations on hold to devote more resources to unemployment claims, workers will face even longer waits.

At the same time, forced arbitration effectively leaves workers with no avenue for private enforcement of their rights. Most employers force workers to sign arbitration requirements as a condition of employment, denying them the right to go before a judge or jury when their employer breaks the law. Instead, private arbitrators, whose fees are typically paid by the employer, decide workers' claims. Arbitration requirements typically prevent co-workers from banding together and require strict confidentiality.

These requirements are imposed on more than 64 percent of low-income workers, 59 percent of Black workers, 54 percent of Latinx workers, and nearly 58 percent of female workers, all groups who are disproportionately employed in the state's essential occupations.

Because forced arbitration heavily favors employers, most workers abandon their claims. Experts estimate that forced arbitration reduces the number of employment claims that would otherwise have been filed by 98 percent.

This is exactly what happened to a group of workers at a restaurant in Corona, Queens, a neighborhood ravaged by the coronavirus, who sought help from Make the Road New York because they were paid sub-minimum wages without overtime pay. Their employer, who had been sued for wage theft before, told the workers they could sign arbitration requirements or lose their jobs. Because the requirements prevented them from bringing wage claims together, and each worker's claim on its own would have been too costly to litigate, the workers were unable to recover their stolen wages.

Sign up for The Knick  Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter.

The new EMPIRE Act would allow whistleblowers to pursue monetary penalties for labor violations, including wage theft and safety violations, on behalf of the Labor Department without lengthy delays, and to distribute those penalties to the state and aggrieved workers. This public enforcement tool would not be restricted by forced arbitration requirements. A similar law in California raised approximately $88 million for the state in 2019 alone, and similar legislation has been proposed in Massachusetts, Maine, Oregon, Vermont, Connecticut and Washington.

The pandemic has shown us that worker health is public health and has led to important changes, like New York's new paid sick leave law. As we reopen and rebuild, we must make these changes meaningful by ensuring that people can enforce the rights they have.
Monday, August 24th, 2020 (11:47 am) - Score 986

Engineers working for Hull-based UK ISP KCOM have taken time out of their efforts to deploy a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in order to help dig the trench for a new water supply in the East Yorkshire town of Nafferton, which is being used to serve new allotments at the Nafferton Recreation Club.

At present the operator is busy with a major 100m expansion of their gigabit-capable full fibre network across more of East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. At the last update they were busy working in locations such as Driffield, Market Weighton, Nafferton, Withernsea, Hornsea, Pocklington, Howden and Goole (here).

However, in an unusual development, KCOMs engineers were volunteered to help resolve an awkward problem. Members of Nafferton Recreation Club asked the operator if they could help to connect a water supply to their new allotments, which were located in a field away from the clubs supply. Sadly, due to the lockdown, they had been was unable to find a contractor to dig the 300m trench needed to lay the pipes.

Luckily, four KCOM engineers who were laying fibre broadband cables nearby were happy to help out by volunteering their time and equipment to dig the trench. The work took 5 days to complete.

Tim Shaw, MD of KCOM Wholesale & Networks, said: Im glad we were able to step in and lend a hand to a project that will improve the lives of people in Nafferton. As a local company at the heart of the East Riding community this is the sort of project we love to get involved in. It shows we can react quickly to help our local communities  were not some faceless company based miles away, but we live, work and raise our families here too. Im looking forward to hearing about how the allotments are progressing.

End.
The new service will enable traders to submit an objection request to violations issued on commercial licences, enquire about fines and settle them, and obtain the list of inspection reports relating to their business, all online.



Customers can access the new services from anywhere through the consumer rights website without having to visit service centres. CCCP developed the services in line with the directives of the Government of Dubai to continuously develop and enhance e-services and smart platforms in the emirate, thus supporting the Dubai Paperless Strategy, which aims to build a paper-free future by 2021.



Abdullah Al Kaabi, Director of Development and Follow-up in CCCP, emphasised the role of the Sector, and Dubai Economy in general, in supporting traders and consumers, and its keenness to provide the best services, thereby reflecting the objectives and aspirations of Dubais government.



CCCP recently announced expanding its consumer rights services to free zones in the emirate of Dubai, enabling a wider segment of consumers to raise their queries and complaints to Dubai Economy and have the complaints resolved amicably.



CCCP has supported the business community and the public significantly to comply with the precautionary measures implemented following COVID-19. The Sector pressed its advanced electronic systems into service, contributing to the remarkable success of the remote work system in the emirate.



CCCP is also analysing the current situation to gather feedback from all concerned and monitoring the customer journey in Dubai identify and implement the best solutions that ensure service quality and efficiency, as well as the highest levels of satisfaction among customers and employees.



Dubai Economy invites consumers and traders to provide their feedback and raise complaints through the consumerrights.ae website, the Dubai consumer application available on the Apple, Android, and Huawei stores.  TradeArabia News Service
Weather Alert

...Spotty Black Ice Tonight... Slick spots on area roads may persist overnight as temperatures continue to fall. Snow will linger across west Kentucky through about midnight then diminish. Untreated roads and bridges are most likely to see black ice development. Motorists should use caution if driving overnight.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said on Sunday he believes everyone must pay "their fair share" of taxes, which is why if elected, he will "raise taxes for anybody making over $400,000."

During an interview with ABC News, Biden said there will be "no new taxes" for those earning under $400,000 or "90 percent of the businesses out there that are mom and pop businesses, that employ less than 50 people." Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the government must assist those small businesses with "the ability to reopen," he continued. "We have to provide more help for them, not less help."

When pressed by World News Tonight anchor David Muir about raising taxes on some people, Biden said it's smart to "tax businesses that are in fact making excessive amounts of money and paying no taxes." That's what the Obama administration did after the 2008 recession, Biden said, which led to an economic recovery with "the largest, the most consecutive number of months of growth in jobs of any time in history. We did it the right way."

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24) The sudden push and calls for a revolutionary government could only serve as a distraction for officials as the country continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of the Interior and Local Government said.

Speaking to CNN Philippines on Monday, Interior Undersecretary and Spokesperson Jonathan Malaya said authorities wont likely entertain the proposal for a change in government for now, given the country is in the middle of a great global health crisis.

At this time, sarado kami. Dahil we are focused on COVID, Malaya said in an interview with The Source. [Translation: At this time, our doors are closed, because we are focused on COVID.]

We do understand why they want to amend the Constitution," he said. "But given that we are battling a great crisis right now, this could be a distraction from what were doing.

Malaya also stressed that the agency is preoccupied with various pandemic response efforts which include the contact tracing program and establishment of more isolation facilities.

Last week, the Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte-National Executive Coordinating Committee launched an event to express their support for a Duterte-led revolutionary government which the group said will help fast-track the establishment of federalism before Dutertes term ends in 2022.

Malaya said the DILG which chairs the Inter-Agency Task Force on Constitutional Reform was not consulted nor had any talks with the group regarding the controversial proposal.

He also noted that the call to amend the government structure is not supported by the 1987 Constitution itself.

Our problem with this proposal is that its not in the Constitution," Malaya stressed. "If you look at the constitution, the constitution only speaks of a constitutional convention, constituent assembly, or a peoples initiative as a means of amending it So thats where the grey area comes in.

He added that any amendment should be processed within the parameters of the Constitution.

Some officials and lawmakers have earlier raised suspicions over the brewing talks of the proposed revolutionary government, with Vice President Leni Robredo advising the administration to prioritize more pressing issues particularly the pandemic.

READ: Calls for charter change, revolutionary govt. amid crisis ill-timed, lawyers say

Amid criticisms, Malacanang maintained that the administrations focus remains on the health crisis, which it said is the most urgent concern of the country at this time. Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said the proposal came from a private group and that the concerned individuals are free to "publicly express" their opinions.

Proposal 'illegal,' should not be allowed to progress

A group of lawyers echoed Malayas statement, saying that the revolutionary government proposal is deemed illegal for it cannot be done within the parameters of the Constitution.

Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) president Domingo Cayosa said the proposal should be prohibited to progress further.

There is no legal basis for any revolutionary government," Cayosa told CNN Philippines in a separate interview. "Because the essence of a revolutionary government is that it is established outside the law extraconstitutionally, extralegally.

It should not be allowed to progress beyond mere expression of ideas or aspirations," he also said. "Changing the constitution is perfectly legal, but you do it through legal means. You cannot work outside the processes prescribed by the Constitution.

There are still no moves to tackle constitutional amendments in the Senate and House of Representatives so far, after lawmakers noted that they need to focus on the government's battle against COVID-19.

Duterte, who had listed shift to federalism as one of his main campaign promises in the 2016 elections, admitted last year that passing the measure would be a long shot, with many Filipinos still not supporting the proposed change in the form of government.

Michael Yusingco, a lawyer and research fellow of the Ateneo School of Government, agreed with the Presidents statement that a proposal to shift to a revolutionary government is unpopular among Filipinos.

Yusingco further explained that the nature of establishing a revolutionary government is to overthrow the existing government structures.

We have a phobia with any movement that will lead to authoritarianism and dictatorship. Our experience under the Marcos dictatorship really has given us an aversion to any proposal that will lead to a dictatorship, Yusingco told CNN Philippines Rico Hizon on Monday night.

CNN Philippines Glee Jalea contributed to this report.
Weeks before her death, an El Paso mother received millions of views on her public message saying COVID-19 isn't a joke and pleading with people to never take the little things for granted.

Forty-three-year Sara Montoya, connected to a ventilator and struggling to breathe, went live on Facebook from her hospital bed on July 5 and urged people to take the virus seriously. She passed away about six weeks later on Aug. 13.

'SHAME ON ALL OF YOU': Texas wife blames Trump and Gov. Abbott for husband's COVID-19 death

Never in my life did I ever think that I would be fighting for my breath, something that we take for granted every day when we wake up. Please do not put your families at risk. I did the best that I thought I could. It is not worth it. Put your masks on. Dont go out if you dont have to, she said in the video.

I have fought too hard to have the life that I have now and I refuse to give up. I miss my kids. I miss my husband [who was at the same hospital fighting COVID].  With the grace of God I will be walking out of this hospital. I dont know when, but I will."

Jasmin Chavez told TODAY she was initially embarrassed about her mother's video and asked her to remove it, but "I'm glad she didnt listen to me. Her video has been viewed over 5 million times and Im glad people realize this virus is real."

Her mother at first thought she had a simple sinus infection, Chavez said, but by July 1 she had been admitted to the hospital because of COVID-19. A week later, she found out she had staph infection in her lungs.

The 24-year-old is now reaffirming her mother's final message to the public, and encouraging everyone to do all they can to slow the virus's spread.

I want people to continue to wear their masks, wash their hands, and only leave their house when necessary, Chavez said. There is not a cure."
Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday (August 24) directed the state officials to take precautionary measures regarding flooding due to heavy rains in Howrah, Hooghly and South 24 Parganas, asking them that "Howrah needs a proper planning before heavy rains start over the next few days."

The Chief Minister said, "Amidst the pandemic, we must take precautionary measures regarding flooding due to heavy rains in Howrah, Hooghly and South 24 Parganas. If Jharkhand releases water, there will not be waterlogging as before as we have put in place a mechanism to prevent waterlogging. Rivers in Jharkhand have not undergone dredging. If they release waters in huge amounts, it will flood several districts of Bengal. Police will do miking in places of alert."

Mamata Banerjee further said, "Howrah needs a proper planning before heavy rains start over the next few days. The road in Howrah belonging to HRBC, the pitch road has completely come off. Now, they are telling the state government to repair the roads."

"We have helped you set up a toll. The toll is collected to help you in repairs. Recently, I saw the road condition very bad, it was repaired by Municipality after I pointed out. Keep your eyes open. If it doesnt belong to us atleast pass on the message. Bad road conditions will not be tolerated. Must be pursued by police, district authorities."

Notably, the West Bengal Assembly will begin next month with all COVID-19 safety norms in place. The state government has sent a proposal for resuming the Assembly either from the first or the second week of September, said a government official, adding that safety measures will be ensured.

Assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee reportedly confirmed it and said plans are being chalked out for the commencement of the session. He told PTI, "The session will start either in the first or the second week of the next month. We are working on how to have the sessions by maintaining COVID-19 protocols. We are yet to receive a proposal from the state government."

Earlier in the day, the West Bengal CM appealed to the Centre to postpone the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) due to the prevailing COVID-19 situation.

In a series of tweets on Monday morning, Banerjee said, "In our last video conference with the Hon'ble PM Shri @narendramodiJi, I had been vocal against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020, which had a huge potential to put student lives at risk."

"Now with the directive of @EduMinOfIndiato conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sep, I would again appeal to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone these examinations until the situation is conducive again. It is our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students," she said in another Twitter post.

The Supreme Court had dismissed a plea seeking the postponement of JEE (Main) April 2020 and NEET (Undergraduate) examinations, which are scheduled to be held in September, amid a spurt in COVID-19 cases, saying the precious year of students "cannot be wasted" and "life has to go on".

The JEE (Main) is scheduled to be held between September 1 and 6, while the JEE (Advanced) on September 27. The NEET will be held on September 13.
The goal of the ITA's Spirits Promotion Project is to "showcase the variety of Italian Spirits to the consumers and instill in them a newfound appreciation for the unique characteristics, notes, and ingredients of each product" says Trade Commissioner Antonino Laspina.

The Italian Spirits webinar series, guided by industry expert Livio Lauro, will kick off at the end of August and run through the beginning of September, featuring three events dedicated to the trade and one exclusively for members of the press.

August 24, 2020 @ 4:00 PM EST / Amaro: the Bitter, the Better? featuring Ramazzotti, The Spiritual Machine, Meletti & Montenegro.

Italian Amari serve as more than just drinks, and there's never been a more perfect time to better understand this bitter Italian liqueur.

REGISTER HERE!

August 27, 2020 @ 4:00 PM EST / International Food Pairing with Italian Spirits featuring Italicus, Pallini, Polini & Toschi.

Learn how to combine the flavor of global dishes with its perfect Italian drink for the best sensory experience.

REGISTER HERE!

August 31, 2020 @ 4:00 PM EST / A Blast from the Past: Vintage Italian Cocktails featuring Casoni, Cocchi, Gin Engine, Luxardo & Poli.

Modernize your cocktail list and impress your patrons by adding some old-school Italian favorites.

REGISTER HERE!

September 9, 2020 @ 4:00 PM EST / Around the Boot with Italian Spirits

By invite only.

About the Italian Trade Agency

Since 1926, the Italian Trade Commission, with 78 oces in 66 countries worldwide, has been the Italian government agency entrusted with the mission of promoting trade between Italian companies and foreign markets. The Food and Wine department, based in New York City, works on increasing the awareness of the Italian products in the U.S. For all the activities regarding alcoholic beverages, see http://italianspirits.us/ .

About Bar Convent Brooklyn

At Bar Convent Brooklyn, bar and beverage professionals are invited to network with peers and learn about new trends, techniques, and products in the domestic and international markets. Attendees can also attend demonstrations, keynote addresses, and panel discussions with leading industry experts. Exhibitors at Bar Convent Brooklyn are carefully curated to feature primarily premium, craft spirit brands, and mixers. For more, visit www.barconventbrooklyn.com .

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 17:47:47|Editor: huaxia

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MANILA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- At least 10 were killed, including a suicide bomber, and 40 others wounded in twin blasts in Sulu province in the southern Philippines on Monday, the army has said.

Western Mindanao Command chief Lieutenant General Corleto Vinluan said at least five soldiers and four civilians were killed in the back-to-back blasts, while 18 soldiers and 22 civilians were wounded.

He said that one suicide bomber was also killed in one of the blasts.

Lieutenant Colonel Ronaldo Mateo, the spokesman for the army's 11th infantry division based in Sulu, said a bomb attached to a parked motorcycle exploded at 11:53 a.m. local time in front of a grocery store, while the second blast occurred at 1:00 p.m. local time near the cathedral in Jolo, the capital of Sulu province.

"The blasts occurred in a village called Walled City. It's in the center of Jolo," Mateo said.

He said troops were deployed in the area to secure the grocery stores along the busy street, adding that soldiers and policemen were posted in the area daily to maintain peace and order.

He said the motorcycle was parked beside the military truck just outside the store before the bomb detonated. "Two to three minutes after the motorcycle was parked, the improvised explosive device went off," he said.

"The second bomb is believed to have been carried out by a suicide bomber," Mateo added. The military is verifying reports that the second explosion was carried out by a female bomber.

"Most probably these terrorist acts may have been perpetrated by the Abu Sayyaf group," Mateo said.

Jolo has long been a base for the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.

Twin blasts also hit the Jolo Cathedral on Jan. 27, 2019, that killed 23 and injured 95.

The Abu Sayyaf group is a loose band of violent extremist groups in the southern Philippines. The group, which has an estimated 400 fighters, is active in the impoverished island provinces of Sulu and Basilan.

The group is responsible for the series of kidnappings, deadly bombings, ambushes of security personnel, public beheadings, assassinations, and extortion in the Mindanao region.

The group has been terrorizing the Philippine southern region since the 1990s, preying on foreign tourists, businessmen, and fishermen not only from the Philippines but also from Indonesia and Malaysia and hide them in Philippine jungles or remote islands. Enditem
As Victorians reel from Premier Daniel Andrews' announcement that strict second lockdown will continue beyond September, the question of whether you should report someone for breaking coronavirus restrictions is growing louder.

The debate has been raging in a Facebook parenting group since a woman living under Stage Three lockdown in rural Victoria asked members if she should report her neighbours for having dinner parties in defiance of COVID-19 emergency laws.

After spotting 'several different cars' outside their house, the woman  who is separated from her family living overseas  said she almost notified Victoria Police but relented after arguing with her partner who believes she is overreacting.

'I just feel like we are all sacrificing so much at the moment but there are so many people who keep ignoring the rules and thinking they don't apply to them. Should I just stay in my own lane or should I report them?' she asked.

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Exhausted Victorians are locked in debate over reporting coronavirus breaches to the state police, seen here performing random roadside checks in Geelong on August 14, 2020

Stage Three 'stay at home' orders took effect across country Victoria at midnight on Wednesday, August 5, including a blanket ban on having social visitors to your home.

Poll Would you report someone for breaking COVID-19 restrictions? Yes, it's against the law No, it's none of my business Would you report someone for breaking COVID-19 restrictions? Yes, it's against the law 134 votes

No, it's none of my business 74 votes Now share your opinion





While many urged her to contact authorities about the breach, other responses reveal a country divided between wanting to trust each other and mounting resentment of life under such extraordinary limitations.

'Report them, 100 percent. Sorry, but your partner needs to pull his head in. I reported so many of my neighbours during stage three (I'm in stage four now), no regrets!' one woman from Melbourne said.

'Report them please! Our health services are under immense strain and we can't fight this thing alone,' said another.

'I also live in regional Vic (sic) and reporting is common in my town. It's anonymous, just do it.'

That's the official advice from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), which advises anyone who suspects a breach to contact the coronavirus hotline on 1800 675 398 and select Option Four  a direct line to Victoria Police.

The state police have fined 199 people for breaching coronavirus restrictions, including a man who told officers he 'got bored at home' and wanted to visit a friend.

But others railed against the government instruction.

An elderly man looks out the window of his Melbourne home where he is isolating to avoid contracting COVID-19

Police and Australian Defence Force soldiers patrol a running track in Melbourne on August 4, the day before Stage Three 'stay at home' orders came into effect across regional Victoria

'Do not report them! Live and let live. I would think less of you for reporting them, than I do them breaking the rules. I would never consider this unless someone was in immediate danger,' a Sydney mother replied.

Some stood on middle ground, with one woman noting how difficult it has been to adjust to life in the shadow of a global pandemic.

'You're definitely not overreacting, but I also understand where your husband is coming from. It's hard for us to realise in these times that things have changed,' she said.

A police offer walks across a deserted Collins Street in Melbourne CBD on August 9, 2020, a thoroughfare typically thronged with tourists, shoppers and students visiting from overseas

Another suggested sending the flouters a typed letter to 'give them an anonymous warning that they will be reported' if they continue to have guests over.

The dispute highlights the mood of Victorians jaded and infuriated by the virus-stricken state's second wave.

Lockdown fatigue is accelerating by the minute, but Premier Daniel Andrews on Monday announced the the State of Emergency will be in place for 18 months and lockdown restrictions will be extended beyond September 13.

This is despite the state recording its lowest rise in COVID-19 infections in seven weeks with 116 new cases and 15 additional fatalities on Monday.

199 VICTORIANS FINED FOR VIRUS BREACHES Victoria Police have fined 199 people for breaching coronavirus restrictions, including a man who told officers he 'got bored at home'. The man from Altona Meadows was pulled over 19km away in Brimbank - in breach of the 5km travel radius rule - and told police he was aware of the restrictions but wanted to visit a friend. Of the people fined in the 24 hours to Sunday, 73 were in breach of the 8pm to 5am curfew in metropolitan Melbourne, 20 were pinged for failing to wear a mask when leaving home and 14 were picked up at vehicle checkpoints. Five men found inside a vehicle in Airport West told police they were 'just out chilling'. Police were called to an address on the Mornington Peninsula to reports of loud music and found two women and three men drinking together. When asked why they were breaching restrictions on gatherings they said, 'We are idiots', according to police. A man was also seen leaving a petrol station in Glen Eira after curfew. He told police he had been buying chocolate for a friend with diabetes who had low blood sugar. 'When asked to produce chocolate he admitted to lying and produced cigarettes he had just purchased,' police said in a statement on Sunday. Police conducted 3,869 spot checks on people at homes, businesses and public places across the state. Some 316,136 spot checks have been conducted since March 21. Advertisement

Victoria's 'stay at home' order includes a blanket ban on social visitors to the home (stock image)

'It is not an unlimited extension, it is nothing more than a recognition that this virus won't be over on September 30,' Mr Andrews said.

'I would love nothing more for there to be no need for any rules on September 14, but I don't think that is the reality.'

While the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 only allows a State of Emergency to operate for six months, the premier said amendments are being made to change it.

For the city of five million, it means an indefinite continuation of mandatory masks, 8pm to 5am curfew, a five kilometre travel radius and a ban on leaving the home save for one-hour of exercise, permitted work and care-giving to the elderly or vulnerable.
On August 8, the Courage Foundation sponsored an online panel discussion entitled, What would Julian Assange face in the US? The participants reviewed in detail the drive to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher from the UK, explored the legal issues involved in the first-ever prosecution of a journalist under the Espionage Act of 1917 and described the conditions that Assange would face within the criminal justice system if he is dispatched to the US.

The three-person panel consisted of Barry Pollack, Assanges US attorney, Jeffrey Sterling, a CIA whistleblower who was convicted of violating the Espionage Act in 2015, and Lauri Love, a UK political activist who successfully defeated a US extradition request in 2016.

The online event was moderated by US independent journalist Kevin Gosztola, editor of Shadowproof.com. The Courage Foundation is an international organization that raises funds for the defense of persecuted whistleblowers and journalists. The organizations website says that it supports those who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record.

Promotional material for the event

The 90-minute discussion, which can be watched in its entirety on YouTube here, was significant because it brought together three panelists who are very familiar with the abuses of the American government in extradition proceedings, the multiple legal conundrums in cases that involve national security and intelligence matters, the aggressive and inhumane tactics of the US Eastern District Court of Virginia and the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the personal toll that fighting the US government has on individuals facing political persecution.

Following introductions by Kevin Gosztola, Barry Pollack said: What is unprecedented is using the Espionage Act to prosecute a publisher or a journalist. That has never happened previously and so there are a lot of legal issues that could come up in this case, if Mr. Assange is ever extradited, that have never been subject to court rulings in the past and we dont know how they are going to come out.

Pollack explained that US laws governing the handling of classified material in state prosecutions often means that relevant information is not available to be shared with the defendant. One of the great challenges in defending this sort of case is there may be large volumes of evidence that I, as the lawyer, cannot even discuss with my own client. That makes it extraordinarily difficult, Pollack said.

Pollack said that any attempt by the defense to use classified information in its case would require a page by page, line by line review and a dispute with the government over whether the defence needed to preview its case with the state, a practice that does not happen in any other federal trial.

Pollack added that the pretrial conditions for Assange would involve the most draconian conditions: In all likelihood, he would be in administrative detention and would have very little access, if any, to visitors, to email or even to snail mail because of the governments concerns that he has been privy to classified information.

Jeffrey Sterling is one of seven people charged with violating the Espionage Act during the Obama administration, which includes Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. All of them were accused of disclosing classified information to publishers. Sterling, who is African American, was targeted by the US government in retaliation for a discrimination lawsuit he filed in 2000 against the CIA. The suit was ultimately thrown out because the government successfully argued that his case, if it were to go forward, would reveal state secrets.

Arrested a decade after he had left US intelligence and charged with revealing classified information to New York Times journalist James Risen, Sterling was convicted on January 26, 2015. He served three-and-a-half years at the Federal Correctional Institution of Englewood, Colorado.

Sterling spoke extensively about his treatment by the courts and prison authorities as well as the way those accused of violating national security interests are abused by the entire US government. When Sterling was arrested, he explained, They were treating me like a terrorist. They were believing, if I were free to go, I would go out and start assassinating CIA employees. The judge was believing that. The Fourth Circuit was believing everything the government said.

Sterling said the presumption of innocence was non-existent in his situation. Their view is that: if youre a defendant, youre guilty. We are going to do everything to isolate you and punish you, he stated.

Lauri Love appeared before Westminster Magistrates Court in Londonthe same court where Assange has been brought prior to the start of his extradition hearingon June 2829, 2016 in connection with claims by the US that he had hacked a server of the federal judicial system and posted a video protesting the treatment of internet activist Aaron Swartz who had committed suicide days earlier.

The US brought two separate indictments against Love for allegedly breaching thousands of computer systems in the United States and elsewhereincluding the computer networks of federal agenciesto steal massive quantities of confidential data, and demanded his extradition to New York. In February 2018, the UK High Court ruled in favor of Love and blocked his extradition while also ruling that it would not be oppressive [to] prosecute Mr. Love in England for the offences.

Speaking about the extradition process, Love said: It is very difficult to defend against extradition because you are never able to speak to the charges or the legitimacy of the charges or the factuality of the charges because they are all treated hypothetically. The only thing that we could speak to is my health, physically and mentally, and the conditions that I would be facing in detention in the United States.

We had several expert witnesses speak to just how horrificI think most people imagine jail and prison to be un-nice places, but they are not really capable of imagining just how bad it can bein terms of someone who might be suffering from depression and potentially suicidal ideation. The solution to this in US detention is to be put in effectively a form of solitary confinement. Its called suicide watch.

You are removed from society, you have another person watching you in the cell, theyre usually not a trained medical professional or even a member of staff, theyre often another prisoner who is doing it for extra merits. And you can be put into horrific clothing called a suicide-smock which is kind of like a straight-jacket. Its special clothing to make it more difficult to affect a suicide. Its been ruled by expert people including from the United Nations that extended solitary confinement, even solitary confinement for brief periods, is tantamount to torture.

Moderator Gosztola then asked Pollack about the jurisdiction that the US has claimed over Julian Assange. This aspect of Assanges persecution was unprecedented and really frightening, Pollock said. Youre talking about someone who is not a US citizen, who has no ties to the US governmenthas never entered any kind of employment agreement or nondisclosure agreement with the US governmentwho is not in the US, he is in the UK, an Australian citizen in the UK, and yet, the United States claims jurisdiction over him.

Pollack explained the global implications of Assanges case: That means, literally, the United States can and would claim jurisdiction over any journalist, anywhere in the world. And the basis for that is that if you are publishing US classified information, in the USs mind, you have committed offenses in the United States and the United States has jurisdiction over you. You have published their documents. And so, under that theory, every journalist in the world is at risk if they publish something that the US considers national defense information, meaning contrary to the interests of the United States.

Responding to the question of jurisdiction, Jeffrey Sterling said: I think it speaks to the overbroad nature of how the Espionage Act is being used. My case for instance, with regard to jurisdiction, the government did not, throughout the entire trial, establish when, where or how I supposedlyI was innocent of the chargesleaked this classified information. Part of their effort to claim jurisdiction was the book, the infamous book that was at the basis of the trial against me.

It is ridiculous, its overbroad. As I have said on Twitter many times, their use of the Espionage Act is perverse... If the US is successful in extraditing Julian Assange, any journalist is going to be subject to that sort of retaliation by the US government.

If Assange were extradited and put on trial for violating the Espionage Act, there would no public interest defense available to him. As Pollack explained, you either published national defense information or you didnt and why you did it doesnt matter. And so, I have no doubt that the US government will take the position that  Julian shouldnt even be allowed to describe why he published what he published, and we shouldnt even be able to show that what he published was newsworthy.

Pollack then addressed how the US will seek to deny Assange his fundamental rights, We would certainly argue that the statute, if it does not have a public interest defense, has to be a violation of the First Amendment as applied to a publisher.

The US will take the position that Julian Assange doesnt have any First Amendment rights. Their view will be because he is not a US citizen, he doesnt have any rights. Just think about the irony there. They can prosecute an Australian citizen publishing in the UK, haul him back to the United States and then say because youre not a US citizen you dont have the First Amendment rights that a US citizen would have.

In further discussion, Lauri Love said: An occupying force in a voluntary war of aggression had military personnel who committed war crimes, murdered journalists in cold blood, and then publishers revealed those war crimes to the world. And now, the UK judiciary is being asked whether the publisher should be served up to the very regime which was ultimately responsible for the commission of those war crimes. To establish a precedent that this is a bad thing to do.

I dont think I can imagine a more serious threat to the transparency which underpins freedom and democracy in the world.

The Courage Foundation online meeting raised many of the fundamental and serious problems confronting Assange, his legal team and his friends and family in the coming weeks and months as the US presses forward with its vendetta against the WikiLeaks journalist. The discussion deserves a wide audience.

As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly emphasized, the demand for the freedom of Julian Assange and the defense of the fundamental democratic rights that are under attack by US imperialism must be taken up by the working class and made a central part of the struggle for socialism on a world scale.
Maharashtra inched closer to the 700,000 mark for Covid-19 cases with 11,015 new infections on Monday, taking its count to 693,398.

Active cases also rose to 168,126, which is 24.24% of the total cases reported so far.

Death toll of the state reached 22,465 with 212 more fatalities reported on Monday, of which 164 were reported in the past 48 hours, 19 were from the past week, while the remaining 29 deaths were from the period before that, health officials said.

The single-day toll was the lowest since July 20, when 176 deaths were reported. On July 27, the state reported 227 casualties.

Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, meanwhile, cautioned people about the possibility of a second wave of the pandemic.

The state also crossed the 500,000 mark for Covid recoveries after 14,219 patients recovered in the past 24 hours, taking the count to 502,490.

This has led to improvement of recovery rate of the state to 72.47%, against the national average of 75.27%.

Maharashtra continues to face a surge in Covid-19 cases as the number of fresh cases is yet to flatten. It has recorded over 14,000 cases for three consecutive days past week on August 20, 21 and 22. In the past 24 days of August, it recorded 271,719 cases, highest in any month, so far. It also accounted for 11,321 per day, on an average. With seven more days to go, it is likely to rise even further. The state has reported 247,392 cases in July, 102,172 cases in June, 57,157 cases in May, 10,196 cases in April and 302 cases in March.

Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray on Monday said that the state is going through its most crucial phase. We are facing very challenging situation as festivals and monsoon, which lead to spread in other diseases, have come at the same time and thus local authorities will have to be more vigilant even if cases are reducing at some places, Thackeray said, while holding a review meeting of the Covid-19 situation of Thane, Navi Mumbai and Kalyan-Dombivli municipal corporations where the Covid-19 cases had shot up since early June. He was in Thane on Monday.

Chief secretary Sanjay Kumar said that the peak is coming in different cities at different time and they are hoping flattening of the curve soon. Going by the experience of other countries, number of cases flatten after reaching peak and then start declining after sometime. In our state, peak is coming in different cities at different time. For instance, cases have flattened in Mumbai, but Pune, Solapur and Sangli are currently experiencing a peak, he told HT.

Even in Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) cases have started coming down. Hopefully, cases will be flattened in the coming days, he added.

State health minister Rajesh Tope has recently said they expect the downward trend of the Covid-19 infection after mid-September.

Chief minister is concerned of second wave and has asked local authorities to remain vigilant. The recurrence of the second wave is observed in some of the countries in the world whenever authorities go negligent. We have granted relaxations for some activities and the efforts are being made to make day-to-day activities smooth, but we have to remain alert, the CM cautioned.

Meanwhile, the state is contemplating on opening up intrastate and interstate movement, following directives from the central government.

Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on August 22 has written to chief secretaries of all states saying that there should be no restrictions on inter-state and intra-state movement of people and goods. The letter also mentions that any such restriction would amount to a violation of guidelines issued earlier by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) during the unlock phases.

The chief secretary has said that they will be allowing free intrastate movement after Ganesh Chaturthi. We have already allowed intrastate movement. The condition for obtaining e-pass for travelling will also be scrapped. A decision on this is likely to be taken after Ganesh festival, the chief secretary told HT on Sunday.

Officials are wary that the move could further lead to spread in cases due to free movement of people Opening of intrastate and interstate movement is nothing, but removing all travel restrictions. It will allow people to move freely and ultimately increase their movement. It is not advisable when the cases are already at a peak, said an official from state health department.

State transport minister Anil Pawar, too, said that it will put further strain on the existing health infrastructure. The state is yet to take decision on this but allowing intrastate and interstate travel will put more strain on the health infrastructure, he opined.

However, chief minister said that they wont be taking any decision, which will lead to withdrawal of existing relaxations. Since June we have started Mission Begin Again and have given many relaxations in rural and urban areas, but whatever is not possible is not possible. We wont be taking any decision hastily. We will not take a decision until and unless we are sure that it wont being negative impact. No decision will be taken, which will lead to withdrawal of existing relaxations, Thackeray told reporters.

On Monday, Mumbai recorded 743 cases, taking its tally to 137,096. Of them, active cases are 18,267.

This is for the fourth time the daily caseload in the city dipped to 700-mark in the past month. On July 28 and August 4 and August 17, it recorded 700, 709 and 753 cases respectively.

On June 27, Mumbai has reported highest single-day spike with 2,077 cases. It has been maintaining a sort of stability in the fresh cases in the past one month.

City toll stood at 7,442 after 20 deaths were reported on Monday.

Pune city continue to contribute maximum infections in the daily caseload as it recorded 1,107 cases on Monday. Its tally stands at 90,257 cases. Pimpri-Chinchwad, satellite city in Pune Metropolitan Region (MMR), recorded 815 cases, third highest-contributor in the state. Its tally went up to 41,157.

Apart from Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, peak in cases can be seen at Nashik city with 699 cases, Jalgaon (539 cases), Nagpur city (478 cases), Satara (446 cases) and Kolhapur (426 cases), according to the data shared by the state health department.

High number of casualties continued to be another concern the state is struggling with.

In the last 24 days, the state has reported 7,471 deaths, which has broken the record of highest number of casualties in a month. In July, a total of 6,988 deaths were reported, while in June, May, April and March, total number of deaths recorded were 5,638, 2,286, 449 and 10 deaths respectively. Maharashtra still has highest number of deaths across states in the country.

The case fatality rate (CFR) of the state was recorded at 3.24% on Monday, slightly less than Gujarat, which is having highest CFR in the country as present. On Sunday, Gujarats CFR was 3.34% with 2,805 deaths (86,624 cases), according to the statistics shared by the state medical education department.

On Thursday, it has conducted 46,784 tests and total number of tests conducted so far are 3,663,488. While reviewing Covid situation in municipal areas, Thackeray directed officials to follow-up on recovered patients for a month after their discharge.

Thane district, according to the health department data, has a recovery rate of 81.5 per cent as 100,570 people have been discharges so far. Thackeray during the review meeting held in Thane stressed that the administration should keep a close watch on asymptomatic patients as well. There should be contact with the Covid-19 recovered patients for one month. The symptoms of corona are changing day by day. The attention must be paid to asymptomatic patients, the CM said in the review.

Thackeray also stressed on dealing with monsoon-related ailments, condition of roads, garbage disposal and other issues within the municipal corporations. The CM also called for increased coordination between elected representatives and authorities along with greater involvement of locals for public awareness campaigns. Now it is necessary to focus on monsoon-related diseases, potholes, roads and garbage along with other issues. If the municipal corporations, the health department, police and revenue authorities and the elected representatives work together, then we can defeat corona, a note from the Chief Ministers Office quoted the CM.

Currently, 34,820 people have been kept at institutional quarantine facilities and 1,230,982 people are home quarantined across the state.
(Photo : (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)) WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 10: Sen.Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks about a graphic related to free speech at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on April 10, 2019 in Washington, DC. The Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee is questioning whether large tech companies are biased towards conservatives. (Photo : Unsplash)

A federal civil servant who also contributes to a blog site is stripped away from his job and career in the national public service because of a piece he wrote about the relationship of technology companies and the Novel coronavirus. Josh Krook admits that his blogpost was non-controversial.

Josh Krook was recently stripped of his title and post in the federal public service in Australia's industry department because of a blog post. According to The Guardian, the particular post mainly tackled the Novel coronavirus changing the landscape of the world and led to a reliance on technology.

The newly established blog site, Oxford Political Review, contained Krook's piece, which he submitted and published last April. Krook claims that the blogpost was uncontroversial and impartial of all technology companies.

He presented a view on how social isolation and disconnection from the outside world benefitted technological companies that mainly focuses on giving online services to connect people seamlessly. Krook did not imagine that writing about the situation the world currently faces, and its correlation to technology could cost him his job.

Krook also mentioned that his post tackled generalities and presented a view of the increasing dependence on the digital world. The post did not mention any companies, individuals, or even the Australian government or its existing rules, prohibitions, or policies.

Josh Krook also defended that his post did not conflict with his then-current status as a civil servant. Three months after his April blogpost, Krook was invited to a meeting that included his superiors.

Censorship in the Australian Government?

Krook's superiors mentioned that his blog post could potentially damage the government's relationship and image with the present frontrunners in the technological industry. The blogpost he publicized would be easily found by the technology companies and will refuse to work with their country.

He was then told that his article would be fine if he did not become impartial and wrote "good things" about the companies he generalized. Later, Krook was asked to take down the article, which he did initially by contacting the blog editor.

Krook realized that what he was asked to is to go against his ethics and principles as a writer. Despite his neutral side and take on the article, he was still criticized and asked to remove the post. With this happening, Josh Krook decided to quit his job and campaigned about the form of censorship that he experienced.

Censorship and its threat to the 'Free Press'

The word censorship is mainly associated with the 'free press' or freedom of the press movements that aim to remove the liberty of a journalist or a news agency in delivering the news.

Censorship is done in lots of elements found on the mass media, and some are not threats to freedom. Censorship can be used to blur suggestive and 'R'-rated images or clips and inappropriate curse words that are uttered. These censorship types help protect the young and innocent audience from the vulgar objects in the media.

However, censorship to the "free press," which are protected by some state policies and the constitution is a direct suppression and attack against the liberty of delivering various types of information to the public. Censorship in the press has caused several news agencies and journalists harm in doing their jobs.

The suppression is a form of controlling the press and shaping the audience's opinions and views using powerful mediums.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) veteran leader and former finance minister of India Late Arun Jaitley died on August 24 in 2019. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister of India Amit Shah paid tribute to the leader on his first death anniversary.

Remembering his friends, PM Modi shared a video of his speech on Arun Jaitley's prayer meet and wrote, ''On this day, last year, we lost Shri Arun Jaitley Ji. I miss my friend a lot. Arun Ji diligently served India. His wit, intellect, legal acumen and warm personality were legendary. Here is what I had said during a prayer meeting in his memory.''

On this day, last year, we lost Shri Arun Jaitley Ji. I miss my friend a lot. Arun Ji diligently served India. His wit, intellect, legal acumen and warm personality were legendary. Here is what I had said during a prayer meeting in his memory. https://t.co/oTcSeyssRk  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) August 24, 2020

Shah said that 'he will always be remembered for his towering legacy. Taking to microblogging site Twitter, Shah wrote, ''Remembering Arun Jaitley ji, an outstanding politician, prolific orator and a great human being who had no parallels in Indian polity. He was multifaceted and a friend of friends, who will always be remembered for his towering legacy, transformative vision and devotion to nation.''

Several other politicians like Minister of State for Road Transport & Highways V K Singh, Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb, MP B Y Raghavendra paid respect to the leader.

V K Singh said, ''Remembering one of most versatile politicians, Arun Jaitley ji. An exceptional orator, lawyer, who delivered on all responsibilities assigned to him. His contribution will always be remembered.''

Arun Jaitley served as the Minister for Information & Broadcasting in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government in 1999. He was also the Union Law Minister between 2000-04, Jaitley served.

In 2009, the BJP appointed him as Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. He, along with Sushma Swaraj, were two of the most articulative voices of the party in the Parliament.

Jaitley was a top leader of the Narendra Modi-led government which was formed in 2014. He was entrusted with the crucial Finance portfolio, but also briefly headed the I&B, Corporate Affairs and Defence Ministries.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been lobbying president Donald Trump and other politicians, reportedly stoking their fears about Chinese viral video app TikToks existence in the US, according to a new report.

Zuckerberg made the case to President Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook in October last year, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal,

The breakup of Facebook has been a concern of US politicians in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as arguments that Facebook owning Instagram and WhatsApp creates an anti-competitive ecosystem.

Zuckerberg also discussed TikTok specifically with a number of other US senators, the report claimed, and it was reportedly after that discussion that senators began raising concerns about its safety.

This year, both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee issued warnings to their staff about using TikTok.

A Facebook spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that Zuckerberg could not recall discussing TikTok with Mr Trump.

Mr Trump has since issued an executive order against the viral video app, giving it until the 21st September 2020 to either be purchased by a US company  most likely Microsoft  or be banned in the US.

This is because Mr Trump believes TikTok could be used to gather data about US users and send that with the Chinese government.

TikTok has denied any allegations that it would do so, and is now suing the Trump administration over the issue.

Zuckerberg has previously spoken out against Mr Trumps executive order, saying it would set a bad long-term precedent, but any harm against TikTok is likely to benefit his own properties.

Instagram recently rolled out reels, a feature similar to TikTok which that the video app has called a copycat product.

As well as an executive order against TikTok, Mr Trump has also signed a similar executive order against WeChat which experts have hypothesised could have severe consequences for Apple.

This is due to the number of users who would swap from Apples iOS platform to Googles Android if the app was removed from their phones.
Tokyo: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has become Japan's longest-serving leader in terms of consecutive days in office, but there was little fanfare, as he visited a hospital for another check-up amid concerns about his health.

Abe marked 2799 consecutive days in office since bouncing back to leadership in late 2012 for a second term, surpassing the previous record set by Eisaku Sato, his great-uncle, who served 2798 days from 1964 to 1972.

Abe, who turns 66 next month, became Japan's longest-serving prime minister last November, combining his earlier one-year term.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, centre right, arrives at Keio University Hospital in Tokyo on Monday. Credit:Kyodo/AP

He visited a Tokyo hospital for a second time within days, stoking concern about his ability to stay on as leader due to health issues and fatigue from tackling the coronavirus pandemic.
TikTok UK chief has said user data entrusted to the app is not destined for China amid serious allegations about collusion with the Chinese government coming straight from US President Donald Trump. The United States administration has even gone as far as issuing an executive order that would restrict the app from functioning in the country citing a 'national security risk'.

Read: TikTok May Challenge US Order Banning Transactions With App: Reports

TikTok rapidly growing

While speaking to the Observer, TikTok UK head Richard Waterworth said that the Chinese social media app was rapidly growing in the UK and the US despite being caught in the middle of a geopolitical power struggle.

As per reports, TikTok is widely popular among the younger generation and has been downloaded more than 2 billion times with as many as 800 million regular users. The app allows its users to create short 12-60 second videos.

Earlier, Trump claimed the Chinese social media app was a national security concern for its alleged siphoning of user data and tracking of device location. His sentiments have been echoed by many conservative politicians in the United Kingdom as well as with the government mulling over restrictions.

However, Tiktok is not the only Chinese app that has been targeted by Donald Trump. The US President has gone after several other Chinese tech companies, including the popular messaging app WeChat.

Read: Estonia's Information System Authority Bans Employees From Downloading TikTok

Trump in a bid to take concrete action against Chinese tech companies signed two executive orders that would ban apps like TikTok and WeChat in the United States. The executive orders will take effect from next month, 45 days after its signing. Trump has given that time for the apps to be bought out by US companies like Microsoft. Despite the executive orders, TikTok has vowed to continue its operations in the US and challenge the legality of the order.

Next month, Tiktok is planning a large scale advertisement campaign in the United Kingdom with the aim of expanding the apps reach. A number of famous artists that have benefitted from their popularity on the social media app, like Cat Burns and rapper S1mba will be part of the advertising campaign.

Read: TikTok Launches New Information Hub To Target Misinformation Regarding Data Theft

Read: TikTok To Continue Operations In United States Despite Trump's Executive Orders For Ban
BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 24

By Tamilla Mammadova  Trend

Azerbaijan was the second largest export partner of Georgia after China from January through July 2020, Trend reports citing the National Statistics Office of Georgia (Geostat).

As reported, during the reporting period, exports from Georgia to Azerbaijan amounted to $230.7 million.

The largest exported goods from Georgia to Azerbaijan were cars worth $120 million. The second place in terms of exports ($15.4 million) is taken by medicine, and the third is the export of livestock which was equal to a total of $14.5 million.

The list of other export goods are as follows: ferroalloys - $6.7 million, spare parts for electrical goods - $6.2 million, fibrous and cellulose products - $4.4 million, plastic and rubber products - $3 million, clothing - $2.4 million, copper concentrates - $2.3 million, agricultural goods - $2.2 million, shoes, umbrellas - $2.1 million, fats and oils - $1.4 million, optical instruments and their parts - $540,000, construction materials - $230,000, jewellery - $40,000, wood - $30,000.

The external merchandise trade (excluding non-declared trade) of Georgia amounted to $6.03 billion from January through July 2020, 17.6 percent lower compared to the same period of 2019. The exports equaled $1.75 billion (dipped by 16.8 percent ), while the imports stood at $4.27 billion (decreased by 17.9 percent).

Follow the author on Twitter: @Mila61979356
Kabul, Aug 24 (UNI) At least three Afghan security personnel were killed and six others wounded during a Taliban attack in Ghazni province, an official said on Monday.

The attack took place on Sunday night at the Deh Yak district when the Taliban detonated a car bomb near the district governor's compound and attacked security forces.

As per Tolonews the Taliban also suffered casualties during the attack.

The Taliban has not commented on the attack.

UNI XC RKM PS 1431
A jet ski rider died after he was thrown from the watercraft in Ocean County Sunday afternoon, authorities said.

Divers recovered the rider, identified as Salvatore Cusimano, 49, of West Creek, from the water at Sahara Sands Quarry in Eagleswood Township, according to Trooper Charles Marchan, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Police.

Troopers based at the Point Pleasant Marine station were called to the quarry for a report of a missing jet ski rider around 2:30 p.m., the spokesman said. A preliminary investigation found Cusimano was operating the watercraft when he was thrown and did not resurface.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com.
You are here: China

A spell of heavy rainfall has triggered floods in three rivers in northwest China's Gansu province, local authorities said Sunday.

The province's water resources department said water has surpassed alert levels in Taohe River and Daxia River, two tributaries of the Yellow River, as well as in Bailong River, which flows into the Yangtze River, amid intense rain between Saturday and Sunday.

Gansu on Saturday initiated a Level II emergency response to floods, the second-highest in the country's four-tier emergency response system.

Rainstorms and floods have wreaked havoc in Gansu since Aug. 10, damaging 721 km of levees, of which 2.5 km gave way to floodwater. Over 1.2 million people have been affected.

Zhouqu County, among the hardest hit by rain-triggered floods, on Wednesday activated a top-level emergency response for flood control and natural disaster relief. In its Qugaona Township, roads were damaged, electricity and communication were cut off and more than 2,500 people were urgently evacuated.

Zhouqu was the site of a devastating mudslide that left more than 1,700 people dead or missing in August 2010.
Best Men's Linen Shirts (and How to Wear Them)

11 Linen Shirts for Every Occasion

The AskMen editorial team thoroughly researches & reviews the best gear, services and staples for life. AskMen may get paid if you click a link in this article and buy a product or service.

Product photos from retailer site.

Linen fabric has long been a durable, dependable summer-friendly fabric made from the flax plant. According to Encyclopedia Britannica: Flax is one of the oldest textile fibers used by humans; evidence of its use has been found in Switzerlands prehistoric lake dwellings. Fine linen fabrics have been discovered in ancient Egyptian tombs.

RELATED: Best Short Shorts for Men

Thanks to its ability to conduct heat well by absorbing and releasing moisture quickly, garments and fabrics made from linen feel cooler in warmer months, making them the ideal option for men looking to elevate their style above the ofttimes chosen cotton t-shirt. This is why come summertime, you'll see linen pants, a blazer, a jacket, and even a full on linen suit - the breathability of pure linen natural fiber makes linen shirts a classic menswear staple for the warm weather wardrobe. Whether it be for a special occasion, that extra hot summer day, or even everyday wear, there seems to only be one real drawback of natural fabric texture Wrinkles.

It's time you forget what youve been told about the fiber from flax you know as linen. Times have changed, and it's time to appreciate the very look and nature of the loosely woven classic fabric. The wrinkles of linen are actually what make it great. When someone wears the flowy fabric, its showing an ease  a comfort in wearing a fabric that couldnt be too formal if it tried. Sure, suits and dress shirts can be found frequently made from linen, but its inherent qualities keep it apart from a tightly woven super 150s wool-silk or a 100% Egyptian cotton broadcloth.

Simply put: embrace the wrinkle.

Best Linen Shirts for Men

How to Wear Linen Men's Shirts

Introducing a linen shirt into your wardrobe  warm weather wardrobe, everyday wear, or somewhere in between  might seem intimidating. If you are used to swapping out your button front shirts for a simple polo style, then you can easily grab one of these and wear it just about the same way.

Do: Wear it untucked, with casual jeans, chinos, or shorts whenever you feel the need to be cool - both literally and figuratively.

Wear it untucked, with casual jeans, chinos, or shorts whenever you feel the need to be cool - both literally and figuratively. Dont: Take it too seriously. Relax. There is a common misconception that linen is an unforgiving luxury fabric that needs to be reserved for a special occasion. That is simply not true. Linen can be washed and dried just like all of your other clothes (although always read washing instructions) so it should be worn like all your other clothes.

Take it too seriously. Relax. There is a common misconception that linen is an unforgiving luxury fabric that needs to be reserved for a special occasion. That is simply not true. Linen can be washed and dried just like all of your other clothes (although always read washing instructions) so it should be worn like all your other clothes. Do: Consider wearing it into the fall. Much like linen sheets (we are a big fan), linen clothing is actually great to incorporate into your cold weather wardrobe as well. Its a sturdy fabric that can actually help regulate temperature all year long, not just during the hot summer days.

Consider wearing it into the fall. Much like linen sheets (we are a big fan), linen clothing is actually great to incorporate into your cold weather wardrobe as well. Its a sturdy fabric that can actually help regulate temperature all year long, not just during the hot summer days. Dont: Overthink it. Pick a style that you think you would wear and then go for it. The nature of this style is to be lightweight and airy, so dont go for anything too slim fit. Fabric does stretch out a bit over time, but you should still aim to buy the size that fits you naturally.

If you want to feel safe, grab a solid option and ease into the stye. If youre looking to dive into the deep end of this trend, go for a bold floral print that will surely get you noticed. If you are feeling somewhere in between, dont worry, there are plenty of options for you guys too.

Weve picked out 11 men's linen shirts that we think that you should take a serious look at for the warm temperatures that remain.

Best Overall Linen Shirt

UNTUCKit Wrinkle-Resistant Linen Shirt

This is the linen shirt for the modern man. Featuring UNTUCKit's signature untucked design and wrinkle-resistant linen fabric, this is how linen is done these days. This shirt works with just about anything, for less than $100, hence why its our pick for one of the best linen shirts for men.

From $50 at UNTUCKit.com

Best Relaxed Linen Shirt

Tommy Bahama Sea Glass Breezer Linen Shirt

Youd swear this Tommy Bahama shirt was a washed Oxford with a cutaway collar at first glance, but look again. It's linen all the way. Keep this tucked or leave it untucked with dark jeans, light chinos - even throw it on with a pair of white linen pants and get into full on vacay mode.

$99.50 at TommyBahama.com

Best Short Sleeve Linen Shirt

Amazon Essentials Short Sleeve Linen Shirt

Swap this short sleeve linen shirt from Amazon for your go-to polo or T-shirt when you want to up the sophistication factor while remaining cool and comfortable. This style works well with light denim, chinos of just about any color and of course, your best summer shorts.

$22 at Amazon.com

Best Linen Shirt on a Budget

28 Palms Relaxed-Fit Long-Sleeve Linen Shirt

Starting at under $10, available in over 10 colors, and ranging in sizes from XS to XXL, this shirt from 28 Palms should satisfy just about anyone looking for a linen button down shirt on a budget. We suggest wearing it open on the beach, but you can wear it closed with jeans or board shorts away from the water as well.

From $8 at Amazon.com

Best Loose-Fitting Linen Shirt

Everlane Linen Standard Fit Shirt

The woven stripe may be subtle on this Everlane shirt, but less can certainly be more when it comes to linen. We suggest you wear this untucked with just about anything. Not sure if you like this incredibly neutral and natural color well enough to drop the way below retail price? Youre in luck, over half the colors available are on sale, for even less.

$50 at Everlane.com

Best Linen Dress Shirt

Polo Ralph Lauren Custom Fit Linen Shirt

If you absolutely have to dress up the perennially casual fabric, why not do so with a brand that knows how to dress up better than just about anyone? This bold button-down shirt from Polo Ralph Lauren looks great under a suit jacket, with a pair of seersucker trousers, tucked into crisp chino shorts  basically anything you will end up wearing to a semi-formal event in the warm weather, this shirt is a must.

$110 at RalphLauren.com

Best Patterned Linen Shirt

J.Crew Short-Sleeve Linen Shirt

Just relax with a bold tie dye design from J.Crew. It may stand out from those other button down numbers you have hanging in your closet, but don't let that intimidate you. Throw this on over a t-shirt and wear it with shorts or casual pants for an easy, lightweight summer layer.

$59.99 at JCrew.com

Best Casual Linen Shirt

Abercrombie Camp Collar Button-Up Shirt

Camp collars have become a wardrobe must (trust us on this one) so why not add one like this from Abercrombie to your rotation? It's designed to be the most casual iteration of the summer style staple. The flat hem along the bottom of this blue-hued linen-blend makes it an untucked-only and the camp collar means you cant get too stuffy and buttoned up. Even better, the linen-cotton blend helps take this into fall, winter, spring, and summer all over again  meaning youll be able to wear this all the time.

$24.99 at Abercombie.com

Best Linen Camp Collar Shirt

Dandy Del Mar The Tonga Linen Shirt

If you really want to nail the camp collar trend, go with one with a seriously summer print. Not your everyday white linen shirt, this is the summer shirt you'll want to make your signature casual look for every spontaneous backyard BBQ, while at the same time, thrown in your bag for all day trips to the beach. If youre looking to add extra flare, grab a straw boater hat and your best huarache sandals and go enjoy the hot, humid summer nights.

$119 at DandyDelMar.com

Best Linen T-Shirt

Inis Meain Melange Linen T-Shirt

Pair this slubby, slouchy, seriously chic shirt with your cuffed selvedge denim for a perfect summer variation on your jeans and T-shirt outfit.

$110 at MrPorter.com

Best Linen Henley

Bonobos Short Sleeve Linen Henley

Not your basic boring white tee  which has its time and place  and not that stuffy long sleeve business you might not be too keen on wearing with any regularity, this henley from Bonobos is both stylish and sophisticated. Wear it with the usual jeans or shorts, or go bold with white denim, contrasting trousers or even a seven inch corduroy short to really amp up the retro feel. This is so stylish, it even works under a jacket.

$88 at Bonobos.com

Linen seems to be everywhere lately, so these mens linen shirts are just the tip of the iceberg on the subject. If these dont strike your flax-fiber fancy, use them as a jumping off point to let you know whats trending and stylish and make a note as to where to start when adding one to your warm weather wardrobe or add them to your everyday wear rotation. Youll be ready for the yacht in no time.

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MEXICO CITY: The U.N. human rights agency has called on Mexican authorities to thoroughly investigate the death of an independent journalist in police custody in a Mexican border city.

The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said Sunday that Juan Nelcio Espinoza was arrested Friday while covering a confrontation in the city of Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas.

Espinoza reported for his web page El Valedor TV. Espinoza was later taken to a hospital by police where he was pronounced dead. One of his last entries on his news site showed him cautiously painting the word Presson his car.

Authorities in the northern border state of Coahuila told local media Espinoza and another man were arrested after engaging in a confrontation with police, and that Espinoza choked to death.

The U.N. agency wrote that in Mr. Espinoza Meneras case, the circumstances that should be taken into account are the claims by the victims family of possible previous harassment or threats by police officers, and their possible relation to his work as a journalist.

At least five journalists not counting Espinoza have been killed in Mexico this year. More than 140 journalists have been killed over the past 20 years.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Scientists and public health officials said Monday they are skeptical convalescent plasma is an effective treatment for patients hospitalized with Covid-19, even after the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the treatment and President Donald Trump touted it as a "breakthrough."

There are no formally approved drugs or vaccines for the coronavirus. Convalescent plasma is one of several therapies being tested as a potential treatment.

The plasma, taken from patients who have recovered from Covid-19 and developed antibodies against the virus, is infused in sick patients. Scientists hope it helps kick-start the immune system to fight the virus. A study of 35,000 patients posted earlier this month by the Mayo Clinic and sponsored by the National Institutes of Health suggested the plasma may reduce mortality in some hospitalized patients. Though the study had no placebo group to compare the results, making it hard to determine whether the treatment actually worked.

The FDA said Sunday it was granting the emergency use, allowing health-care providers in the U.S. to treat suspected or laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 in hospitalized patients with the disease. The agency said it was reasonable to believe the treatment may be effective in treating Covid-19 patients, and the known and potential benefits outweigh the known and potential risks.

Adequate and well-controlled randomized trials "remain necessary" for a definitive demonstration of effectiveness and "to determine the optimal product attributes and appropriate patient populations for its use," the FDA said in granting emergency use.

"This is a powerful therapy that transfuses very, very strong antibodies from the blood of recovered patients to help patients battling an infection. It's had an incredible rate of success," Trump said Sunday evening at a White House briefing, calling the treatment a "breakthrough." "Today's action will dramatically expand access to this treatment."

Scientists and public health officials have doubts, saying more data from randomized controlled trials, which are considered the "gold standard" in science, is still needed to know whether it is safe and effective. Results from trials have not been conclusive, were relatively small and have provided "very low-quality evidence," according to the World Health Organization.

"We've been tracking this," Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO's chief scientist, said Monday in Geneva. "We do ongoing meta-analyses and systematic reviews to see where the evidence is shifting or pointing, and at the moment it's still very low-quality evidence. So we recommend that convalescent plasma is still an experimental therapy. It should be evaluated in well-designed, randomized, clinical trials."

She said countries can use it on an emergency basis "if they feel the benefits outweigh the risks, but that's usually done while awaiting the more definitive evidence, which is yet to come."

The FDA has issued emergency use authorization for several coronavirus tests and some drugs. In May, the agency granted antiviral remdesivir the authorization, allowing hospitals and doctors to use the drug on hospitalized Covid-19 patients. Hydroxychloroquine was also granted emergency authorization, but the FDA later removed the designation once the agency found the malaria drug was unlikely to be effective.

Results of the study by the Mayo Clinic that the FDA cited in its authorization of the plasma treatment indicates that patients below age 80 who were not on a respirator and received plasma with a high level of antibodies within three days of diagnosis were about 35% more likely to survive another 30 days compared with patients who received plasma with a low level of antibodies.

The study acknowledged, however, that its findings are limited, particularly because it did not have a placebo comparison.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner, said the treatment might help patients but it "doesn't look like a home run." He did agree that convalescent plasma "certainly" met the standard for an emergency use approval "in the setting of a public health emergency."

"I think that this could be beneficial. It might be weakly beneficial," Gottlieb said on "Squawk Box." "It doesn't look like a home run, but right now we're looking for singles and doubles. There aren't really going to be any home runs on the horizon until we can get the other therapeutic antibodies on the market and hopefully eventually vaccines and better therapeutics."

Lawrence Gostin, a professor and faculty director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, is skeptical about the treatment's effectiveness. He also said he was concerned the FDA had been politically pressured to authorize the treatment before data showed whether it was safe and effective. Trump's announcement on Sunday night came on the eve of the start of the Republican National Convention and 10 weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

On Saturday, Trump accused FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn of delaying enrollment in clinical trials for Covid-19 vaccines or therapeutics because of political motivations.

"The EUA was granted without a published peer review study and rolled out with political fanfare," said Gostin, also the director of the WHO's Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. "I'm worried the scientific integrity of FDA may be significantly compromised."

Dr. Jeremy Faust of Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School blasted the FDA, tweeting that "science lost today" and "politics won."

"Breakthroughs come from randomized controlled trials," he said. "Not cherry picking subsets of existing datasets and finding one promising finding amongst a sea of disappointment."

CNBC's Will Feuer, Kevin Stankiewicz and Emma Newburger contributed to this article.
By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 08/24/2020



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Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.

: The Other Way star Jihoon Lee has confirmed his split from wife Deavan Clegg shortly after Deavan teased that "disgusting things" happened off camera and she's been living in the United States apart from her husband.Jihoon conducted an Instagram Live session on Saturday and spilled the beans his relationship with Deavan is over and they will continue to live in different countries, In Touch Weekly reported "So I can't tell everything because the show [is] not finished. They will be happy and I need to be happy. Just, I will live my own life," Jihoon, 29, reportedly told his followers, referring to Deavan and her two kids.Deavan is mom to five-year-old daughter Drascilla from a previous relationship as well as son Taeyang, whom she welcomed with Jihoon in April 2019."If you lost [a] lover, boy [or] girl. So sad, but you can start again," Jihoon said, according to In Touch.Jihoon also described himself as "free" in the since-deleted Instagram Live video."We are living our own life, that's our future," Jihoon shared."So just keep watching. Just keep [supporting] [me] getting [a] better life and please pray for Deavan and Taeyang, [for] their family life."Late last week, Deavan reportedly wrote on Twitter she has "moved back" to the United States permanently for a "horrible reason.""[The] truth will come out eventually," Deavan wrote in a since-deleted tweet, according to the magazine."You all really believe everything you see on TV," she added. "You guys don't know the truth or half of it."When fans asked for Jihoon and Deavan's plans in terms of custody of Taeyang, Jihoon reportedly explained in his Instagram Live that he'll be able to see his son once a year."[Deavan] said every summertime, she [will] go back to Korea with Taeyang. She promised, So we can see Taeyang," Jihoon said.At the beginning of : The Other Way's second season, Deavan was shown waiting out the coronavirus pandemic while living in South Korea.The footage filmed earlier this year, around February or March, and was seemingly intended for TLC's : Self-Quarantined spinoff.But speculation began to swirl that Deavan and Jihoon's relationship was over when she reportedly returned to the United States with her children in May.Deavan's mother Elicia, however, led fans to believe there wasn't trouble in paradise.Elicia revealed on social media in late July that Deavan was just visiting America with her two kids and got "stuck" in Utah due to COVID-19 while Jihoon remains in South Korea."She is visiting here, but the travel restrictions have forced her to be here longer," Elicia reportedly wrote, adding, "[Deavan and Drascilla] are stuck here until travel restrictions are lessened because of the virus."But it now appears Elicia was just trying to create a cover story to avoid : The Other Way spoilers on the current status of Deavan and Jihoon's relationship.Deavan took to her Instagram Stories last week to vent about how : The Other Way viewers know very little about her struggles in 2020, suggesting her relationship with Jihoon has been on the rocks for months."If you guys only knew the disgusting things that happened this year off camera," Deavan wrote.While Deavan didn't cite her problems to Jihoon or even say he was involved with the "disgusting things," it's probably safe to assume their marriage has been on the rocks for a while."If you knew everything going on in this very moment," Deavan continued in her post. "Knew what I'm doing and going through, the scars that happen this year. Enjoy the show. #90dayfiance."Deavan also explained in her Instagram Stories how : The Other Way viewers didn't see what really happened in the latest Season 2 episode when Drascilla took off running towards a street and she fought with her husband over his lack of attentiveness and care for her children.Deavan recalled of the Drascilla incident, "She ran off and a car almost hit her and instead of grabbing her, he turned around and started screaming at me in front of my mother for a while -- [none] of that part was caught on film... You guys didn't see what really happened and I'm very upset about that."Deavan continued, "I'm not gonna say exactly what he said, because I can't remember... It was over a year ago. But he was cursing at me.": The Other Way's second season has shown Deavan repeatedly forgiving Jihoon for his mistakes and trying to make a life work with him in South Korea.Not only did Jihoon lie about having a lot of money saved for his family, but he also lied to Deavan about working a full-time, high-paying job. Jihoon's lack of parenting skills with Drascilla and their infant son Taeyang only added to the couple's issues.Deavan decided to give Jihoon a second chance under the expectation he would find a permanent apartment for them to live, make and save money, and better support and provide for his family."All of the actions you have done show me that you don't want a family life," Deavan told her husband in last week's broadcast. "If you want to have your freedom, you can have your freedom.""You guys are more important to me," Jihoon replied, referring to Drascilla and Taeyang. "I'll become a better dad because I really love you guys."Many fans have taken a side in Deavan and Jihoon's breakup, with Deavan revealing she and her mother have received hateful messages on social media in regards to Drascilla and how she's been raised.Deavan has lashed out at people claiming it wasn't Jihoon's fault that Drascilla took off and she should blame her own parenting skills, or alleged lack thereof."Not everyone is perfect. Me and Deavan, even Elicia, I'm so sorry. But please stop all criticism," Jihoon reportedly wrote Friday on Instagram."Especially Elicia. They're probably having a harder time than I am. I heard that Elicia and Drascilla [are] under threat of murder. It is 100% wrong. I am begging you guys, I just want peace... I apologize to you guys but thank you so much."Want more spoilers or couples updates? Click here to visit our homepage!
Lucknow:

Dense fog occurred at many places in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday resulting in killing of seven people and injuring 14 others in separate road mishaps.

Five people were killed and seven others injured in separate incidents in Bhadohi on Sunday.

While four persons were killed and five others injured when a truck hit their van near Lalaganj locality in Gopiganj area in Bhadohi, police said.

In a separate incident in the same district, two persons were seriously injured when their SUV rammed into a stationary truck in Amva village in Gopiganj area.

In Mau district, two elderly persons were killed and seven others injured when a roadways bus hit a jeep in Haldharpur area due to fog in the district, they said.

Teju Yadav (60) and Jagdish Yadav (70) were killed on the spot in the mishap, they said.

The injured were rushed to a hospital, where their condition is stated to be serious.

According to the MeT department, night temperature rose markedly in Agra division, rose appreciably in Moradabad and Meerut divisions, rose in Allahabad divisions and changed a little in the remaining divisions of the state.

The lowest minimum temperature over the state was 7.1 degrees Celsius and the weather was dry over the state.

The MeT department has forecast dry weather over the state with a possibility of shallow to moderate fog at many places.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
A colorful sign calling for the defunding of Portlands police force has been erected in front of Portland City Hall, attracting onlookers but yielding no response from city officials so far.

The sign, which simply reads DEFUND, in large, individual block letters, went up sometime around Sunday morning, when photos began appearing on social media describing it as a guerrilla art installation.

Who put up the sign is unclear, though messages, slogans and symbols scrawled on the back indicate that it is associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against police violence that have been occurring nightly in Portland since May.

As of Monday morning, the installation remained in front of City Hall. Two men in uniform entered the building and walked by the sign without a second glance. Pedestrians stopped to take photos of the display.

Large wooden letters spell out "DEFUND" in front of Portland City Hall. The backs of the letters contain popular protest slogans, including say their names and no justice, no peace, as well as Black trans lives matter.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Large wooden letters spell out "DEFUND" in front of Portland City Hall, scrawled with messages critical of Portland police. It's not clear who set up the installation.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

Large wooden letters spell out "DEFUND" in front of Portland City Hall, scrawled with messages critical of Portland police. Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

While the front side of the sign is decorated with flowers made of cardboard, paper and tulle, the back side is covered in writing. The back of one wooden block letter reads Black folx killed by PPB with a list of 27 names including Andre Gladen, Patrick Kimmons and Quanice Hayes.

Nearby, a message reads, Another world is possible. Writing on the back of the next letter over says, Invest in community.

The sign contains popular protest slogans, including Say their names and No justice, no peace, as well as Black trans lives matter. In contrast to some of the graffiti that has covered buildings nearby, profane criticisms of police are absent.

Defund the police is not just a rallying cry but a political aim for activists in Portland and throughout the country, who call for cities to redirect funding away from traditional police departments to new law enforcement organizations that would rely less on arrests and physical force, and that would not disproportionally affect people of color.

The defund message is now an integral part of the protest movement that began in May after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. In June, the Minneapolis City Council pledged to disband the department.

The Portland City Council has since taken measures to scale back the police presence in schools and on public transit, and pledged to cut $12 million from the Portland Police Bureaus budget. But so far, local officials have shown no appetite for defunding and replacing the local police force.

--Jamie Hale; jhale@oregonian.com; 503-294-4077; @HaleJamesB

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Acorn Pulp Group has agreed to purchase a new state of the art molded fiber manufacturing machine from Southern Moulded Pulp and Moulded Fibre Technologies.

Acorn Pulp Group is a joint venture between Acorn West Paper Products Co, a division of Oak Paper Products Co a 4th generation packaging company located on the West Coast, and other strategic investors. The purchase of the SPM machine is a testament to the ultimate goal and mission of the Acorn Pulp Group; provide its customers with superior quality products and service at competitive prices.

Acorn West Paper Products is a leading packaging supplier to the California and North American wine markets and holds several patents in the molded pulp space. Acorn will continue to lead innovation into the sustainable and "green" packaging movement while continuing to focus on the wine, food, ag, medical, and tech sectors.

"We are truly excited about this opportunity to further enhance our existing relationships with both our customers and vendors in the region," said David Weissberg CEO of Acorn.

Acorn Pulp Group plans to locate the new factory and equipment in the Greater Sacramento/Napa region or Northern Nevada. The machinery will be the most technologically advanced piece of equipment in the region. The estimated startup will be in the late second quarter of 2021.

"Acorn Pulp Group will be an employer of choice offering opportunity for full time high-quality manufacturing jobs with training and skill development. We understand that equipment alone will not make us successful; it's going to be the hard-working employees that prove to be our key to execution," says Weissberg.

Media Contact:

David Weissberg

[email protected]

3686 East Olympic Blvd

Los Angeles, CA 90023

800-LA-ACORN

SOURCE Acorn Pulp Group
Amitabh Bachchan who recently recovered from COVID-19 has resumed shooting for the upcoming season of Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC). The actor shared a sneak peek from the sets of the show, where the entire crew can be seen wearing blue PPE suits.

Sharing the photo on his Instagram page, he also mentioned that he has been working on the show for 20 years and a lot has changed in that time. In the caption, he wrote: ".. it's back to work .. in a sea of blue PPE .. KBC 12 .. started 2000 .. today year 2020 .. 20 years ! Amaze .. that's a lifetime !!"

According to reports, the first season of the Indian adaptation of the British show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, aired from 2000-2001. Amitabh Bachchan had also opened up about returning to work on his blog. He said, "Lots of prep and presentation for the starting of KBC promo shoots and the KBC itself .. detailed protocol of how its all going to be done with maximum safety precautions."

Back in July, Amitabh Bachchan and his family had tested positive for the Coronavirus. After spending more than 20 days in Mumbai's Nanavati Hospital, he had tested negative and returned home in early August. The veteran actor was last seen in Shoojit Sircar's Gulabo Sitabo, and has several projects waiting for release. He will be seen in Ayan Mukherji's Brahmastra with Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt, Nagraj Manjule's Jhund and Chehre with Emraan Hashmi.

Amitabh Bachchan Gets A Job Offer From Fan After Actor Expresses Concern About Finding Work

Amitabh Bachchan All Set To Start Kaun Banega Crorepati 12 Shoot
A couple in the US had splendid plans for their impending marriage ceremony until the coronavirus pandemic marred all the original arrangements.

However, they exchanged wedding vows in a low-key ceremony attended by immediate guests and decided to engage in a gesture of community service on their big day. The pairs matrimony was witnessed by a few family and friends in the courtyard of Melanies grandparents.

Ohio-based Tyler and Melanie Tapajna donated all the reception food, prepared for guests, to families in food crisis at a local charity. The newlyweds, shortly after the ceremony, headed over to a Cleveland women and childrens facility where they offered lunch.

The couple, dressed in bridal attires, spent the entire afternoon serving meals with the staff and volunteers at the local shelter.

RELATED NEWS Twitter Sends Love to Couple Who Donated 50 Beds to Covid-19 Patients on Wedding Day

"We pray this amazing couple is blessed immensely in their marriage, and thank them for inviting our guests to their wedding feast," the City Mission captioned the heart-touching photos on their official Facebook page.

When Melanie and Tyler's formal wedding reception was canceled due to COVID-19, they decided they not only wanted to donate their reception food to our guests at Laura's Home, but also to serve the meal in their gown and suit! pic.twitter.com/kKFVx0RO6O The City Mission (@TheCityMission) August 16, 2020

Sharing her experience, Melanie told Yahoo Lifestyle, "Covid may have cancelled our original plans, but God gave us so much more today. I have never been told that I was beautiful as much as I had that day."

Thanking for all the love and support, the groom said, "The kids were cheesing hard. They were adorable. Everyone was appreciative. I loved it."

The gesture of spreading joy in the uncertain times has won the couple many well-wishers, earning blessings and winning hearts around the world.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., arrives for a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., Oct. 23, 2019.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned President Donald Trump at a White House dinner last October that Chinese tech firms posed a direct threat to the U.S. business, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter.

Zuckerberg is said to have argued that clamping down on these firms should be more of a priority than reining in Facebook.

Around the time of the dinner, Zuckerberg warned U.S. officials and lawmakers that Chinese tech firms pose a risk to American values and the nation's technological dominance. The tech mogul is also said to have pointed out that TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, doesn't share Facebook's commitment to freedom of expression.

Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer  who met Zuckerberg in September  called for an inquiry into TikTok in October. A national security review was launched soon after, and Trump signed an executive order to ban the app this month citing national security concerns. TikTok confirmed over the weekend that it has launched a legal appeal against the ban.

TikTok presents major competition to Facebook's business. The social video-sharing app, which has boomed in popularity in recent months, competes directly with Instagram. Given the size of TikTok's audience, it's possible companies would rather pay for advertising space on TikTok than on Instagram or Facebook.

White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday that Zuckerberg has "zero influence" when it comes to TikTok and that the report has "zero credibility."
PITTSBURGH, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- "My daughter was not able to breastfeed my grandchild," said one of two inventors from Chicago, Ill. "I thought there should be a way for non-breastfeeding parents to experience the special bonding that occurs while breastfeeding, so we invented the LI NIP."

The patent-pending invention provides an effective way to simulate breastfeeding for an infant. In doing so, it enables the baby to hear and feel the parent's heartbeat while feeding. As a result, it increases comfort and it could enhance the bonding experience between a parent and child. The invention features a unique design that is convenient and easy to use so it is ideal for mothers, fathers and other caregivers of infants and toddlers. Additionally, it is producible in design variations.

The inventors described the invention design. "Our design eliminates the need to resort to traditional bottle feeding."

The original design was submitted to the Chicago sales office of InventHelp. It is currently available for licensing or sale to manufacturers or marketers. For more information, write Dept. 19-CKL-1364, InventHelp, 217 Ninth Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15222, or call (412) 288-1300 ext. 1368. Learn more about InventHelp's Invention Submission Services at http://www.InventHelp.com.

SOURCE InventHelp

Related Links

http://www.inventhelp.com


Like many who served in Congress alongside the late John Lewis, then-Rep. Mike Pence made a pilgrimage to Selma, Ala., in 2010 to commemorate the 45th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday." He marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge just a few feet from Lewis as they retraced the historic route, and posed for a photo at the foot of the span - the Indiana Republican in crisp gray and the Georgia Democrat in somber black, their shoulders touching.

But when Lewis died last month of pancreatic cancer at 80, Pence, now vice president, held off on issuing a public comment on the civil rights hero's passing. President Donald Trump was no fan of the late congressman and openly complained about Lewis's refusal to attend his inauguration. Only after the White House distributed a perfunctory proclamation on the death in Trump's name did Pence feel comfortable releasing a statement of his own, memorializing Lewis as not just an "icon" but also "a colleague and a friend."

That hesitation - deferring to Trump for cues, and then following his lead - was classic Pence. It exemplified the well-honed subservience of a man who once governed his home state of Indiana but who as vice president has transformed himself into a loyal student and servant of Trump - binding his political ambitions to a mercurial and capricious boss now at risk of losing in November.

On Wednesday night, Pence will formally accept his party's nomination for a second term as vice president in an address to the Republican National Convention from Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where he will praise Trump's leadership. The keynote serves as a bookend of sorts for one of the few high-ranking officials to survive Trump's first term. He is being repaid for his loyalty with a reward - remaining in the No. 2 slot - that in most other administrations would never have been in doubt.

To his allies, such staying power demonstrates the extent of Pence's influence with Trump - no small accomplishment in such a tumultuous White House.

"Pence has built the rarest of commodities in this administration, and that is a durable, close relationship with the president," said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity and a longtime Pence ally. "And the operative word is 'durable.' "

This portrait of Pence's time as Trump's vice president is the product of interviews with 25 current and former senior administration officials, Republican operatives, and confidants of the two men, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid insights. Pence's office declined to make him available for an interview.

Earlier this year, Pence was thrust into his most high-profile role yet when Trump abruptly appointed him to chair the administration's coronavirus task force. While Pence brought some discipline and organization to the group, the administration's effort was on the whole disastrous - marred by bureaucratic dysfunction and infighting; skepticism of science and experts; and a bungled strategy that has left the United States leading the world with 5.6 million Americans confirmed to be infected with the novel coronavirus and more than 172,000 dead of covid-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Administration and task force officials privately complain that Pence has been overly tentative and reluctant to make decisions without Trump's buy-in. And they say the vice president and his staff have been overly preoccupied with the public relations aspect of the virus - catering to a president obsessed with how he and the administration are covered by the media.

That Trump turned to Pence to manage the pandemic was no surprise. Over nearly four years, Pence has firmly established himself as a trusty sidekick. The president has dubbed him "On Message Mike" for his ability to deliver Trump's views without complaint; critics mock Pence as a "bobblehead" for his obsequious deference to his boss.

But people who know him say Pence's subservience masks a thrumming ambition. Losing two congressional campaigns propelled him finally into the House, then to the Indiana governor's mansion, and on to his current home at the U.S. Naval Observatory. In his four years at Trump's side, Pence has never given the president cause to seriously doubt his devotion.

"I admire his stick-to-it-iveness," Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said with a laugh.

- - -

On his weekly video conference meetings with the nation's governors, Pence is a man in control. He leads the calls - which typically stretch for more than an hour and include updates from himself as well as other task force members - from the White House Situation Room, and offers updates on issues including the latest virus data, federal guidelines and supply-chain issues.

Though Pence peppers his public remarks with praise for Trump and goes out of his way to personally credit the president with actions the government has taken, the vice president's private comments to the governors contain little if any direct mention of Trump, according to a review of audio recordings of several recent video conferences.

On the calls, Pence has demonstrated command of his brief, delving into the details of how the virus is spreading regionally as well as detailed instructions for governors about how they can request federal resources and assistance.

Pence has gone out of his way to compliment the governors, and they have responded in kind, among them some who have publicly been critical of Trump and his management of the pandemic.

During a meeting last Tuesday, according to one recording, New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy recounted how his phone calls are always returned and said: "In our deepest, darkest hour of need, everybody in that room, and the president as well, was with us when we needed them."

But administration officials say Pence's stewardship of the coronavirus task force has been mixed. Trump originally considered former New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb for the role. Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, was also initially reluctant for Pence to take on the responsibility, though Pence quickly accepted.

The task force meetings were plagued by indecision, and Pence himself had little expertise in the nuances of the novel virus. Pence was initially dubious of masks and reluctant to implement what he saw as overly long lockdowns that could harm the economy. Short, his chief of staff who controlled the task force, was viewed by some of the medical experts as ideological. He was determined to travel, even though other White House aides warned against it. His travel included a controversial trip to Seattle in the early days of the pandemic.

Some staffers felt that too much time was spent bogged down on the same topics - mask guidance, which was constantly shifting; the distribution of personal protective equipment; and preparing the vice president and president to brief the media - and not enough time on formulating a still-nonexistent national testing strategy or weighing broader containment strategies. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, didn't always attend task force meetings but often made key decisions.

Some aides say Pence painted what one administration official called a "relentlessly positive" picture of the virus to Trump, papering over the severity of the spread and telling the president the situation was under control. Pence told others he was regularly looking for positive developments to show the president. Even as the number of infections and deaths spiked, Pence kept a cheery demeanor, praising members of the task force relentlessly in meetings.

In response to questions sent by email, infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci praised Pence as "a truly decent person, and very smart, who is trying to do his best in a very difficult and fluid situation." He said that while Pence is "an optimist" and "glass half full type of person" who always presents the "optimistic" view to Trump, the vice president has never prevented him from sharing his "darker side" with the president.

"I am sometimes referred to as 'the skunk at the picnic' but Pence never directly asks me, the skunk, to be quiet or leave," Fauci wrote, adding: "Some may say that Pence and his team are 'too ideological' but they are after all political people. This is not unexpected."

In mid-June, Pence penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "There Isn't A Coronavirus 'Second Wave.' " Contradicting many of his task force's own experts, he argued that any panic over the pandemic worsening this fall or winter was "overblown." Along with Trump, he has repeatedly pushed to reopen schools even though some officials are skeptical it can be done safely. Like Trump, he was initially reluctant to wear a mask and was rebuked by the Mayo Clinic for not wearing one during a visit there.

Within weeks, another coronavirus surge was washing over the South and Southwest.

Members of Pence's team stressed that Trump has repeatedly praised Pence's handling of the virus and provided a list of some of the president's public comments, including boasts that Pence has been "working day and night" and has made a "fantastic" effort. But other aides say Trump has griped about Pence privately, blaming him for the negative coverage of the coronavirus response.

One tense moment came in late April when the task force brought in William Bryan, the science administrator at the Department of Homeland Security, to privately brief Trump before his coronavirus news conference on new research that found that sunlight and disinfectants could quickly kill the virus on surfaces. Some argued that the research was "half-baked."

The result: Incendiary remarks by Trump, in which he suggested injecting disinfectant to fight the virus.

Soon after, the daily briefings were canceled, even though Pence told other aides he didn't understand why they ended. They have been revived in recent weeks.

Now, however, Trump usually appears alone, rather than flanked by Pence and the rest of the task force, and reads morosely from a script.

- - -

"Trump-Haley 2020," read the Wall Street Journal opinion piece, which reverberated around Washington's political set last June. In just over 300 words, Andrew Stein - a former president of the New York City Council, who in 2016 founded a Democrats for Trump effort - argued that while he meant "no disrespect" to Pence, the vice president already had "given Mr. Trump all the help he can."

"To have the best chance of reelection, he should replace Vice President Mike Pence on the ticket with Nikki Haley," Stein wrote, referring to the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former South Carolina governor.

The essay was just another splash in the stream of chatter urging Trump to replace his No. 2 - often with Haley, though, more recently, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem have also merited mention.

At the time of the Journal column, Trump sought to reassure Pence. "Mike is my guy," the president concluded, according to people familiar with the conversation.

Those close to Pence insist there never was any real worry his job was at risk. The vice president carefully tracks Trump, watching his rallies and reading the transcripts of all his interviews and public comments, and is determined never to outshine the president. Aides say he seeks to avoid interviews or stories that focus on him, fearful the attention could rile Trump. He clears remarks with Trump and deliberately avoids making news; he was unhappy when a visit he made to a border facility with caged men in July 2019 dominated the headlines.

Trump also relies on Pence, calling the vice president as many as a half-dozen times a day for brief check-ins. Because Trump is often swayed by whoever he talked to last, Pence makes an effort to be physically present when Trump is; former aides recall his visiting the Oval Office multiple times a day and stopping by the desk of Trump's executive assistant to touch base.

Pence has been careful never to disagree with Trump in meetings with other advisers present, preferring to offer his counsel one-on-one with the president. At times, former Trump aides grew frustrated with Pence when he was unwilling to help dissuade the president from what they viewed as rash or ill-considered decisions.

"To say that he was a sycophant so understates it," said one former senior administration official. A Pence aide said he offers his counsel to Trump in private.

- - -

During the initial mass protests that followed the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed in Minneapolis police custody, Pence floated the idea of using the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the U.S. military to quell the violence in the streets. But after Trump sided with military advisers who objected to the idea, Pence then voiced agreement with the president's decision. Pence usually holds a more hawkish foreign policy view than Trump and is more socially and fiscally conservative, aides say, but he is deferential at almost all times.

Jim DeMint, a former head of the conservative Heritage Foundation, recalled a meeting with Trump at the White House. Trump joked about Pence, who wasn't there: "You know, Mike wants to pray about everything, and he's always coming in here and praying. I bet I'm the only New York developer who has prayed about anything!"

DeMint said Trump meant the comment as a "positive" observation on Pence's evangelical Christian faith. Former aides say that in the early tumultuous months of the administration, then-chief of staff Reince Priebus and Pence regularly joined for prayer on Priebus's patio.

A former White House aide said Trump also would allude to Pence's statement as a congressman that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife, and won't attend events with alcohol without her at his side. The president would sometimes joke, this aide said, that they needed to send a male staffer to pass along a message to Pence, because he doesn't like to be alone with women.

Since Pence officially began campaigning for Trump's reelection last October, the vice president has made 73 trips to 27 states, according to aides - including 10 visits to Florida, seven to Wisconsin and six to Pennsylvania, all 2020 battlegrounds.

He has cruised along on 11 bus tours, rallied the crowd at 10 "Make America Great Again" rallies, and chatted through more than 150 regional media interviews in nearly 30 states.

Pence has done it all in service to Trump - Trump's ambitions, Trump's ego, Trump's second term. He begins many speeches by saying he's just spoken with the president, who sends his greetings.

Pence's efforts on behalf of Trump serve a dual purpose: Proving his loyalty while nurturing his own political relationships. He has taken trips abroad that Trump prefers to delegate, wooed donors at his residence through the political action committee he created in 2017 and regularly connected with conservative leaders. When he visits key states, he often meets with top political and business officials privately.

"People often mistake humility for weakness or lack of ambition, and they do so at their own peril when it comes to Mike Pence," Phillips said. "Pence is neither weak nor lacking in ambition. He is strong and, in a good sense of the word, ambitious."

Pence regularly holds calls with conservative groups such as Concerned Women for America, FreedomWorks and the Heritage Foundation. He also provides his West Wing office space for a loose network of conservative activists to gather monthly, and Pence occasionally stops by.

He focuses on personal touches, sending notes and cards and thanks yous, and hosts meals with operatives and donors. His office is fastidious about fulfilling small favors - organizing White House tours and answering calls from lobbyists, executives and others. Much of the political effort is orchestrated by Short, Pence's chief of staff, who has deep ties in the conservative community and has worked for the Koch brothers and Oliver North.

"As we say in the Jewish community, everybody thinks the vice president is a mensch," said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Pence wrote the foreword to Marjorie Dannenfelser's new book, "Life is Winning." Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion group, said Pence has never hinted at a possible 2024 presidential run of his own.

"There's no wink, there's no nod, there's no indication that 'Hey, later we'll talk about that when it's just you and me,' " she said. But if Pence sought the presidency, she added, "he's the best positioned person that I know."

Pence's wife, Karen, also plays an outsize role, both in the vice president's office and in protecting her husband, according to people familiar with their relationship. She has told his staff that she doesn't want him doing early morning television or radio interviews or late-night travel.

She bears similarities to Nancy Reagan - a fierce defender and protector, as invested in her husband's political future as Pence himself. She sat in with Pence on interviews for potential hires and met with the lawyer who represented Pence in Robert Mueller's Russia investigation before the attorney was hired.

Many of his allies concede that if Trump loses in November, Pence is likely headed to the "markdown bin," in the words of one. And if the Trump-Pence ticket does win four more years, a successful 2024 bid for Pence is still uncertain. As one Republican operative put it: "Who do you talk to who's fired up for Mike Pence?"

Others are more optimistic. Michael Steel, a longtime adviser to former House speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Pence is "fundamentally rational and intelligent and conservative."

"I don't know how many of us there are," Steel said, "but I am a Republican who would be much more comfortable pulling the lever for Mike Pence than for Donald Trump."

- - -

The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
Spokesman for Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Behruz Kamalvandi said the visit of the Secretary-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Mariano Grossi is taking place within the framework of Safeguards Agreements, Trend reports citing IRNA.

He said that he will also discuss issues pertaining to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the related protocols.

He also noted that the volume of the heavy water produced in Iran amounts to over 3 tons parts of which is exported to a number of European countries.

The official also stressed that security investigations have proved that the recent incidents in Natanz were act of sabotage.

He said what is sure to say is that there has been an explosion in Natanz but how it happened, what ammunition was used and other details are the items which will be announced in proper time by security officials.

Referring to the Monday visit of the IAEA chief to Iran, he hoped that it would help remove the concerns both sides have.

Earlier, Iran's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Vienna Kazem Gharibabadi, on Saturday, wrote on his Twitter account that in line with the ongoing interactions and cooperation between Iran & IAEA and based on Irans invitation, Rafael Grossi will visit Iran next week.

Iran is one of the main partners of the Agency and we hope this visit will lead to reinforced mutual cooperation, he further noted.
West African envoys resumed talks with Mali's new military rulers on Monday as the junta denied it had decided on a three-year blueprint for restoring civilian rule.

Colonel Ismael Wague, spokesman for the rebel officers who seized power last Tuesday, insisted that the transition remained undecided as the third day of talks with the regional bloc ECOWAS got underway.

"I want to make clear at this stage of discussions with the ECOWAS mediation team that nothing has been decided," he said at the defence ministry in Bamako.

"At no point have we talked about military-majority government," he said.

"Any decision relating to the scale of the transition, the transition president, the formation of the government will be done among Malians" and be followed by "mass consultation," he said.

Keita appeared on national TV in the early hours of Wednesday, saying he had no choice other than to quit. By - (ORTM/AFP)

ECOWAS flew a high-level mission to Bamako on Saturday led by former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan, four days after mutinying troops seized power and detained 75-year-old President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

The coup sent shockwaves among Mali's neighbours, which fear that the country -- already beset by a jihadist insurgency and moribund economy -- could spiral into chaos.

A source in the visiting delegation on Sunday said the junta "has affirmed that it wants a three-year transition to review the foundations of the Malian state. This transition will be directed by a body led by a soldier, who will also be head of state.

"The government will also be predominantly composed of soldiers" under the proposal, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Additionally, a junta official confirmed to AFP that "the three-year transition would have a military president and a government mostly composed of soldiers."

ECOWAS reaction

This timeframe contrasts with the junta's vow, within hours of taking over on August 18, that elections would be held within a "reasonable" timeframe.

Many Malians took to social media on Monday to attack the transition scheme.

The ECOWAS delegation is being led by former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan, second from left. By ANNIE RISEMBERG (AFP)

It also compares starkly with demands by the 15-nation ECOWAS -- the Economic Community of West African States -- for the "immediate return of constitutional order."

The bloc's leaders are to confer in a virtual summit on Wednesday as to how to proceed, mindful of Mali's last coup in 2012, which led to a regional revolt that metastasised into a jihadist insurgency.

They have already decided to close Mali's borders and issued threats to impose sanctions against the coup leaders.

The bloc has already intervened in several crises in West Africa, including The Gambia, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Keita was elected in 2013 after running a campaign in which he pitched himself as a unifying force in a fractured country.

He was re-elected for a second term in 2018 but failed to make headway against the jihadists, and the ethnic unrest they ignited in the centre of the country further damaged an already sickly economy.

Mali's political crisis. By Gal ROMA (AFP)

An outcry over the results of long-delayed legislative elections in April cemented his unpopular reputation, and in June a protest movement was born aimed at forcing him to resign.

ECOWAS has stood by Keita and called for him to be restored to office, although this demand has been eclipsed since the start of the talks by the issue of his detention.

Jonathan met Keita on Saturday and said he seemed "very fine".

The ECOWAS and junta sources said on Monday that Mali's new rulers had agreed to free the ousted president and that he would be able to return to his home in Bamako.

The coup leaders say they are holding 17 leaders at a barracks about 15 kilometres (nine miles) from the city after releasing two others last week.
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said the agency does not plan to put up concertina wire imminently on Laredos riverfront; but at least one council member remains outraged about the proposal.

On Monday, City Council voted down a lease agreement with CBP that would allow them to put up concertina wire through several of Laredos parks, ports of entry and the entire span of the downtown area. Although Mayor Pete Saenz noted that CBP has told him they have the power to put it up regardless of councils vote.

Councilman Merc Martinez told LMT he has not heard any explanation as to why CBP would need to put up this military-grade razor wire on city land.

And if they do put this up I want to have our police department ready to take it down. Its our property, he said.

It may be an international boundary, but until the government actually takes the property, it still belongs to the city, Martinez argued.

This agreement would allow Border Patrol to deploy concertina wire as an enforcement mechanism when needed, the CBP spokesperson said. USBP does not have any current plans to deploy the concertina wire which could be used on an as-needed basis.

And this is in fact a renewal of a license agreement between CBP and the City of Laredo that council approved last year, allowing CBP to install concertina wire from the rail bridge to Zacate Creek. The agreement was first read by council on May 20, 2019 and approved two weeks later in a large motion along with several other ordinances.

Martinez was not present for that vote in 2019 and was angered that the lease agreement was likewise placed on the consent agenda this time around.

He was reading through the agenda in the days before the meeting and was taken aback by the proposed agreement.

And after Martinez brought it up at the meeting, he said he immediately started to receive text messages from constituents and even people in Nuevo Laredo.

I was getting all these +52 numbers with the country code coming in, texting me in Spanish and thanking me for bringing that item out. So theyre watching on the Nuevo Laredo side. Theyre our neighbors, Martinez said.

The councilman believes it was wrong for this item to be placed on the consent agenda, and the next day he told City Manager Robert Eads as such. The consent agenda is typically for items that council assumes have been vetted by staff and are accounted for in a departments budget.

I just felt they were trying to sneak one by us, Martinez said. I was not happy about it.

Eads said he was not happy about this proposal from CBP either and said there was no nefarious reason for putting it on the consent agenda.

Julia Wallace may be reached at 956-728-2543 or jwallace@lmtonline.com
Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been a sitcom hit since it first premiered in 2005. In fact, the show is probably one of FXs biggest hits. Perhaps thats because Rob McElhenny, Katilin Olson, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton are not afraid to go over the top and push the limits when it comes to the scenes they write for the show. However, one of those scenes almost wound up killing Danny DeVito while filming.

How did Rob McElhenny get Danny DeVito?

Charlie Day, Kaitlin Olson. and Rob McElhenney of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia | Amy Sussman/Getty Images

RELATED: Charlie Day From Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia Says Louis C.K. Had to Have a Social Reckoning

According to Rob McElhenny, Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia was a project born out of misery and failure.

The original pilot came out of desperation, I mean I was working at a restaurant and living in the back of a garage somewhere in West Hollywood, and accruing incredible amounts of debt. I was sort of at the end of my rope, McElhenny explained to FX.

When his pitch for the show was approved, McElhenny was thrilled. However, when the president of FX suggested they take on Danny DeVito, McElhenny wasnt thrilled.

He said, Yeah, well heres the thing. We dont have a marketing budget, were also a fledgling network  we love the show. We want it to succeed. So we want to add maybe an actor that has a little cache. Somebody that can bring some exposure to the show, McElhenny told Stephen Colbert during an interview.

When the president suggest Danny DeVito, McElhenny turned him down at first. However, he soon realized it was either DeVito joins, or the show dies.

And we said no. We dont want Danny DeVito. Its nothing personal against Danny DeVito, I grew up watching Danny, hes a legend and hes incredibly funny and we love him but, we thought we had something really special, and we really thought that bringing a movie star in might ruin the chemistry, he explained.

How Danny DeVito almost died while filming

Danny DeVito of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia | Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic

While filming Season 11 of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the gang almost killed Danny DeVito. And not just in-script, in real life.

Charlie Day appeared on Conan to discuss the moment with the shows host. Apparently, the actor came very close to drowning.

This time, we almost killed him this year. We almost drowned him. We did an underwater sequence, and uh, Dannys incredibly buoyant. Like a buoy! Its hard to get him down, so we really had to weigh him down to get the shot where were all holding hands, explained Day.

And when the shot was over and we were all trying to get back to the surface for air, we all quickly got through the water. But because we weighed him down he sort of got halfway and was going nowhere, laughed Day.

And that look of panic in his eyes, like this is the end, these guys killed me. But we had some safety divers and they got him out.  He went straight home, said Day.

The stars favorite scene of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia

No matter how close Danny DeVito came to death while filming for Its Always Sunny, the star still enjoys doing the show.

He loves doing the show, and he loves being a part of it, and he really has done crazy things. Hes jumped out of a couch naked before, explained Charlie Day to Conan OBrien.

However, it seems the episode in which he almost drowned isnt his go-to. Rather, DeVito prefers the episode, Frank Falls Out the Window.

When Charlie was making the sandwich, you know, and I was sitting on the window sill and I fell out. I love that, because I like falling! I mean I did though. Backwards. Out the window. Which is fun to do, DeVito told FX.

He added, I like things that are surprising so also I [can] be surprised.
at 1:07:30 "You came back for Miller, not me. Right?" Black soldier asked.

"Yes. We need to blow a bridge, so we came back for Miller who knows how to explosion, not you."

"That's the first straight answer you've ever given me!"

-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oruKFJt4ZIQ
Format for print or mobile

USA/Global: Divest from Violent Policing and Endless Wars, Part Two

AfricaFocus Bulletin

August 24, 2020 (2020-08-24)

(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor's Note The notion of policing as a war, in which more lethal force will lead to more security, is not a recent development, but is deeply rooted in U.S. history. The police and the military share the countrys legacy of white supremacy and violence against racial others, which has also given rise to mob and individual violence by white civilians. Both domestic law enforcement and the conduct of foreign wars continue to reflect the history of conquest, slavery, and U.S. empire of earlier centuries. In previous essays in this series, we have argued that significant shifts in views on the home front are opening opportunities for similar changes in policy paradigms at the global level. Such is the case for action on the climate crisis, structural racism and class inequality, and economic rights such as the right to health and the right to a living wage. These trends were already underway early in the year, when we began this series by comparing the foreign policy platforms of the Democratic presidential candidates at the time. Since then, first the Covid-19 pandemic and then the nation-wide uprising against police violence and racism following the murder of George Floyd have accelerated the drive to change the narratives about the need for fundamental change. In the two AfricaFocus Bulletins sent out today, we explore the potential and the limitations on making similar links between the domestic movement against violent policing and the need to make fundamental changes in the global role of the U.S. military in escalating violence rather than providing security. In the first Bulletin, available at http://www.africafocus.org/docs20/viol2008-1.php, we focused on the profound impact of the Black Lives Matter movement from its origin as a hashtag in 2013. In this Bulletin, also sent out today and available at http://www.africafocus.org/docs20/viol2008-2.php, we turn our attention to the deadly feedback loop between policing and empire in U.S. history and to the current status quo of the global U.S. military apparatus. For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins in this series, visit http://www.africafocus.org/usa-2020.php. ++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++

Divest from Violent Policing and Endless Wars: Invest Instead in a New Social Contract, Part Two

by William Minter and Imani Countess*

* William Minter is the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin. Imani Countess is an Open Society Fellow focusing on economic inequality. This essay is part of a series entitled Beyond Eurocentrism and U.S. Exceptionalism: Starting Points for a Paradigm Shift from Foreign Policy to Global Policy, which began in January 2020. Thanks to Catherine Sunshine for editing the essays in this series.

For the first part of this essay, go to http://www.africafocus.org/docs20/viol2008-1.php

Policing and Empire: A Deadly Feedback Loop

The interactions between policing, racism, and the U.S. military vary enormously across time and place. In some instances the relationship is positive. In particular, the two world wars of the 20th century led to advances in international human rights law, such as the Geneva Conventions and the global human rights system constructed after World War II. Both within the United States and around the world, veterans of color returned home to demand that they and their communities should enjoy the same rights that they had been fighting for. Their actions contributed decisively both to the U.S. civil rights movement and to anti-colonial movements around the world.

Nevertheless, violence against racial others has been pervasive, with the history of conquest and slavery feeding into contemporary policing and U.S. wars. This is amply confirmed by recent scholarship and commentaries on the history of U.S. policing, usefully summarized in a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore.

A few examples, ranging over the course of U.S. history up to the present, well illustrate the point.

Let us briefly consider the iconic Second Amendment, the violent displacement of Native Americans over centuries, the territorial expansion of U.S. empire in the late 19th century, and the growth of domestic policing and its international expansion in the 20th century.

The Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, after almost two centuries of colonial settlement in what was to become the United States. It reads in full: a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz explains, this historical context is still relevant despite the passage of more than two centuries and the expansion of U.S. power across the continent and around the world:

The elephant in the room in these debates has long been what the armed militias of the Second Amendment were to be used for. The kind of militias and gun rights of the Second Amendment had long existed in the colonies and were expected to continue fulfilling two primary roles in the United States: destroying Native communities in the armed march to possess the continent, and brutally subjugating the enslaved African population.1

The violent displacement of Native Americans within the territory that is now the United States began with Spanish settlers in Florida and New Mexico in the late 16th century, even before English settlers first arrived in Virginia in 1607. The violence continued with conquest of the East Coast and New Mexico in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then came the forced expulsion of Native Americans from the South in the infamous Trail of Tears, under the Jackson administration in the 1830s, to make way for white settlers to occupy the land and grow cotton on plantations using slave labor.

The conquest of the American West, then home to many of the continents indigenous peoples, followed in the second half of the 19th century. The assault on Native lands continued in the second half of the 20th century with displacement for construction of dams and, in recent years, pipelinesintrusions that are still being contested.2

From the Spanish-American War of 1898 onward, U.S. wars included not only the iconic World Wars I and II, but also the construction and defense of a formal and informal empire that spanned the globe.

August Vollmer is not a household name, but his career trajectory reflects the historical links between policing and the military. He served as the police chief of Berkeley, California, from 1909 to 1923. Vollmer was influential in shaping law enforcement around the country, becoming known as the father of modern American policing and a pioneer in the academic field of criminal justice. His drive to professionalize the police was built on his experience in counterinsurgency in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.

Vollmer was not an exception. According to historian Stuart Shrader,3 writing in 2014 in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri:

A close look at the history of US policing reveals that the line between foreign and domestic has long been blurry. Shipping home tactics and technologies from overseas theaters of imperial engagement has been a typical mode of police reform in the United States.  From the Philippines to Guatemala to Afghanistan, the history of US empire is the history of policing experts teaching indigenous cops how to patrol and investigate like Americans.  But the flow is not one-way: these institutions also return home transformed.

This mutual influence has manifested itself in open wars in Southeast Asia in the 20th century and in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century. But it has also spawned pervasive global structures to manage not only these wars, but also the war on drugs, the policing of immigration, and the post-9/11 war on terror.

A Global Military

The Breathe Act, proposed by the Movement for Black Lives, includes a demand to dramatically reduce the budget of the U.S. Department of Defense. This is echoed in more detailed proposals put forth by antiwar activists and defense analysts. The global reach of the Black Lives Matter movement implies that a similar reckoning must come for the global security system. Progressives must scrutinize, expose, and challenge the endless wars pursued by the United States military along with the parallel failures of global counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategies.

United States military spending far exceeds that of any other country, adding up to more than the total of the next nine countries. Despite rising criticism of wasted money and endless wars, however, in late July 2020 significant majorities, including Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress, defeated an amendment to cut 10% from the total Pentagon budget of $740.5 billion. The vote was 324 to 93 in the House of Representatives and 77 to 23 in the Senate.

In contrast to the Vietnam War era, there is currently no strong antiwar movement in the United States with links to progressive movements focused on domestic policy. The default assumption in public debate is that U.S. wars are waged in order to protect the security of the United States. And with no military draft to spread the pain widely throughout societyas during the Vietnam Warthe loss of U.S. lives in wars abroad remains largely invisible to the media and the public. Nonetheless, there are abundant critiques, across a wide political spectrum, of the U.S. military posture, and a widely shared uneasiness about endless wars. 4

The toll of U.S. wars, of course, is by no means limited to the U.S. personnel who lose their lives. The wars involve a scale of violence against civilians that systematically violates international human rights law, primarily targeting those seen as racially other. In the Indochina wars of the 1960s and 1970s, in covert interventions throughout the post-World War II period, and in the Middle East wars and the global war on terrorism of the years since 9/11, there has been little accountability to international standards.5 Moreover, U.S. policy systematically rejects any international obligation to allow independent review of the U.S. military presence around the world.

Violent Repression but No Security

Impunity for abusive state violence and failure to provide security are more common around the world than respect for the rule of law. The United States is no exception. It is important to explore the unique U.S. history and legacy of white supremacy that underpins the resistance to change. But it is also important to recognize that the United States, however powerful, is far from alone in its failures. No nation can claim to have found the solutions or to be above the need for accountability.

Because of the global scope of its military force, the United States is indeed the largest force for state violence outside its own borders in the current era. But in many active conflicts this country is neither the exclusive nor even the primary factor driving these wars, which are also shaped by internal forces and by other outside actors. As Elizabeth Schmidt has extensively detailed in her two-volume study, the scope, nature, and impact of foreign intervention in Africa varies enormously across cases.6 However iconic, U.S.-dominated interventions such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq are the exception rather than the rule worldwide.

Much more common, throughout the years of the Cold War as well as the post-9/11 era, is U.S. complicity with authoritarian regimes to wage aggression without the presence of large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground. U.S. involvement in such cases can unfold largely without attracting the attention of the U.S. media. The slaughter of as many as one million Indonesians in 19651966 has no resonance in U.S. public memory, unlike the Vietnam War. But U.S. officials both encouraged and collaborated with the slaughter of as many as half a million people, directed by the military forces that brought General Suharto to power and kept him in office for 31 years. Jakarta became a code word in Latin America for anti-communist mass killings, which the United States supported over decades.7

Whether the United States is actively involved or plays a secondary role to other actors, however, the post-9/11 counterterrorism and counterinsurgency wars tend to operate with the same logic. With a relatively low toll in American lives, they have little visibility to most of the U.S. public. But these forever wars have produced mounting costs in U.S. resources as well as violence and insecurity in the nations where the wars are staged. At best there have been occasional military victories and temporary restoration of a semblance of normality. More often, escalation has increased insecurity and civilian suffering, whether or not U.S. involvement is front and center.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the region with which the two of us are most familiar, that pattern is most visible in three long-running conflicts: the Nigerian army against Boko Haram in Nigeria, the African Union military mission in Somalia, and French and regional military forces fighting in Mali and other countries in the West African Sahel. In all these cases, unlike in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the United States has a minimal presence of combat troops on the ground. But U.S. involvement is significant nonetheless: the United States is training African military forces, flying armed as well as reconnaissance drones, and mounting occasional actions by special forces, most notably in Somalia. Neither the U.S. government nor the affected African governments are willing to prioritize diplomacy and development over military aid and arms sales. 8

During the Cold War, extreme repression sometimes bought years or decades of stability for authoritarian governments at the expense of their citizens. In the period following the Cold War and particularly in the post-9/11 period, even nominal stability is elusive, as state violence often provokes increased insurgent violence and/or the growth of organized criminal violence, such as drug trafficking.

This then provides the incentive and the excuse for security forces to double down on violence. Despite revelations by investigative journalists, monitoring by human rights organizations, and calls for reform,the mission and the organizational culture of both the police and the military ensure that reform efforts are strong on rhetoric and weak on implementation.

Structural Obstacles Thwart Internal Reforms

To some extent, racism, violence, and impunity can be tempered by reforms within police and military institutions, such as policies to encourage diversity in the ranks and to prohibit or change certain practices. The U.S. military is subject to codes of conduct such as the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Convention against Torture, and the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice. Some local jurisdictions have attempted to reform their policing through measures such as barring chokeholds, requiring use of body cameras, and establishing civilian review boards to investigate misconduct.

These reforms can have some limited effects, but they are by no means universally applied. There are significant differences among agencies, within both law enforcement and the military, with respect to the rule of law. Many officers in the U.S. military hold strong personal commitments to professional codes of conduct; this is reflected in the rising tensions between some levels of the military and the lawless Trump administration.9 Among federal and domestic law enforcement agencies, norms, policies, and practices are highly variable. In times of crises, these differences between agencies will continue to be central in the choices either to escalate violence or to deescalate violence while considering alternatives.

However, the organizational culture of security agencies is most often highly resistant to significant reforms or checks, and credible penalties for violations are rarely enforced. Moreover, the criteria for success in achieving their missionsnumbers of enemy forces killed in war, arrests made in policingare not measures of success in achieving actual security. Continued threats are turned into justification for increased budgets and for doubling down on failed strategies.

Without external accountability for violations of human rights and for ineffective policies, internal reforms can only have marginal impacts. And vested interests in violent organizational cultures, growing in proportion to exorbitant budgets, create strong incentives for politicians to avoid enforcing outside accountability.

Shifting Resources through Divestment and Investment

The domestic debate on police violence has significant momentum, with continuing local protests and high national visibility. A central question is whether, how, and to what extent localities should divest from violent policing and reinvest some funds in alternative means to ensure community security.

With U.S. military engagement abroad largely invisible to the wider U.S. public, there is no parallel, high-profile debate on the role of the U.S. military in fomenting global violence, nor much public discussion of redirecting the Pentagons budget or priorities. The U.S. military itself is unlikely to question the fundamental premises of its global engagement, which centers on the competition with major powers such as Russia and China. The traditional conception of securityas protection against violent threats from enemieslargely persists. And the vested interests and policy assumptions that protect funding for the military-industrial complex are even more strongly entrenched than those that defend local police budgets.

But there is also a strand of strategic thinking and internal criticism within the defense community that is open to considering other threats to security, most notably global disease pandemics and climate change. A notable example is the internal military investigations of the impact of climate change. In his new book All Hell Breaking Loose, Michael Klare analyzes internal Pentagon documents, finding evidence that of all major institutions in U.S. society, none is taking climate change as seriously as the U.S. military.10

Military planners realize that they must prepare for complex clusters of climate disasters, such as the sequence of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017. Such events have already stretched the militarys capacity for humanitarian response and pose a growing threat to military bases, both within the United States and around the world. The military has focused its planning more on adaptation to climate change than on mitigation by reducing carbon emissions. But it has also taken steps to diminish its reliance on fossil fuels through proactive research and investment in renewable energy. And it is acutely aware of the likely increase in instability due to the effect of climate crises in areas already plagued by other causes of conflict.

These Pentagon reports and their implications have not been widely publicized, given the imperative not to openly contradict the climate-denying commander-in-chief. But under different national political leadership, some military voices could potentially be advocates for addressing the causes, rather than only the consequences, of rising conflicts. This would also require rethinking the mission of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

No single conflict, in Africa or elsewhere, currently has the potential to shift thinking about fundamentals of the U.S. global military posture. Even Saudi Arabias war in Yemen, which earned bipartisan condemnation, is discussed only as an exceptional case. Nor is the movement to curb violence within the United States likely to fully extend its scope to the global arena. What can have significant effects, however, are the fiscal pressures from new initiatives on other issues, such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. And changes in the Pentagons priorities may also come, in indirect ways, from its own research and planning to deal with the climate crisis, the threat of pandemics, and other humanitarian crises. Those factors, together with the emerging consensus against endless ground wars, have potential to eventually change the minds of Republican as well as Democratic voters.



Credit: Costs of War Project

The costs of the post-9/11 wars have been well documented by the Brown University Costs of War Project, with a budgetary cost of $6.4 trillion through fiscal year 2020. Peace activists and analysts have advanced credible alternatives to save on military spending.11 Polls from foreign policy establishment organizations may highlight support for ongoing military alliances as essential to U.S. global engagement. But when other pollsters asked more detailed questions, 58 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats supported ending U.S. ground wars.

When asked to identify the top threats to our security, a plurality of voters (46 percent), and 73 percent of Democrats, said that the US primarily faces nonmilitary threats. In light of the covid-19 pandemic, along with disastrous hurricanes, fires, and floods, public pressure for spending on such other threats is likely to grow. And critics will find many in the military who agree with them.

Trump has vowed to end wars, but this is a false promise, notes Peter Certo in Foreign Policy in Focus. Democratic candidates, for their part, have not yet taken full advantage of public disenchantment with shooting wars to advance a robust agenda of funding for alternative security initiatives.

A New Social Contract?

In the previous essays in this series, we argued that significant shifts in views on the home front open an opportunity for similar changes in policy paradigms at the global level. Such is the case for action on the climate crisis, gross economic inequality, and economic rights, such as the right to health and the right to a living wage. The major obstacle is political will rather than lack of compelling alternative visions, which are now highly visible in public debate. The same applies to state violence, although the potential for domestic change on this front is still much more visible than the alternatives to global U.S. military overreach.

The current convergence of global crises, none of which shows any signs of ending, threatens mass devastation on the scale of the Great Depression and World War II, in the United States and around the world. In rapid succession in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic, its economic repercussions, and resistance to state violence have had unprecedented cumulative effects. While further turmoil is inevitable, this might also offer the opportunity for fundamental changesif urgent demands for immediate action are grounded in an understanding of the deep roots of injustice and the global scope of the challenge.

One of the most striking signs of hope is the fact that progressive activists as well as many mainstream analysts are seeing the issues not as isolated and competitive but as linked and complementary. The Black Lives Matter movement has continuously stressed the intersectionality of identities and issues. More and more activists are following their lead, which implies focusing on providing mutual aid and solidarity across boundaries of all kinds, including national borders.

Policy changes to implement such a vision will not be easy. One measure of success, whether at the local, national, or global level, will be to what extent government budgets begin to shift from investing in state violence to social investment in fulfilling a new social contract.

Notes

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter. For an archive of previous Bulletins, see http://www.africafocus.org,

Current links to books on AfricaFocus go to the non-profit bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshores and also provides commissions to affiliates such as AfricaFocus.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please write to this address to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about reposted material, please contact directly the original source mentioned. To subscribe to receive future bulletins by email, click here.
Harry and Meghan wrote to Jeremy Corbyn and his wife Laura Alvarez, a book has revealed. (Getty Images)

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle wrote to former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his wife before stepping back from senior royal duties, a new book has revealed.

According to Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn, an excerpt of which appeared in The Sunday Times, Corbyns wife Laura Alvarez snuck Meghan a book of poetry by a 17th-century Mexican nun during the Commonwealth service in March.

As Corbyn and Alvarez were leaving behind the Labour leadership, the Sussexes were closing their own chapter in life, and Left Out reports Alvarez slipped a book by Juana Ines de la Cruz to Harry and Meghan during the 9 March service, hoping it would find a kindred spirit.

De la Cruz, who died in 1695, had a broad range of work, according to Britannica, ranging from satire and comedy to scholarly works, as well as cloak-and-dagger plays.

While she gained esteem for her work, she also received disapproval from church officials, one of whom publicly maligned her, forcing her to break with him.

She also wrote in defence of womens right to knowledge, though in the year before her death she succumbed in some ways to the pressures and cut back on her writings.

Read more: Meghan Markle tells women: 'If you aren't voting, you're complicit'

Now she is celebrated as a feminist icon, though there has been some debate on how persecuted she was.

Amy Fuller, a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, wrote of her works: In reality, each of her volumes was praised by the Inquisition and prefaced with dedicatory letters and poetry from Spanish nobility and clergy celebrating her as an icon of the Spanish Empire. In return, she commended the crown for having saved the indigenous Mexicans from the ignorance of paganism.

Meghan, 39 and Harry, 35, followed up on the gift with a personally signed thank-you message written to Jeremy and Laura.

Corbyn and Alvarez are said to have previously offered private sympathies to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in the light of some of the press reports about them.

Story continues

Read more: Who are Brene Brown and Tristan Harris? The influencers Harry and Meghan 'absolutely adore'

Harry and Meghan carried out their final working royal duties in March. (WireImage)

Earlier this year a spokesperson for Corbyn said he shared concerns about racial undertones in reporting about the Duchess of Sussex.

In January, his spokesperson said: Jeremy has commented in the past in relation to Prince Harry and Meghan, about press intrusion and its impact on people and their families and, to use Prince Harry's words as well, the 'racial undertones' in relation to how the media has approached Meghan.

She added Corbyn understands how press intrusion can have a negative impact on people and their private lives.

Harry and Meghan are now living in California, where they are working with charities and organisations which are likely to form part of their new non-profit Archewell.

Meghan has attracted some criticism after she urged women to vote in the forthcoming US election, saying we know whats at stake.

A row erupted after Piers Morgan suggested the comment should lead the Queen to strip them of their royal titles. Bette Midler was one of those to defend the duchess.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK News
Large wildfires ravage parts of California, threatening the homes and lives of many residents in the northern half of the state.

The surge in fires has been especially brutal, even for California  a state historically known as a hotbed. Two fire complexes emerged as the second- and third-largest in state history, while the total number of wildfires stands at more than 650 over the past week.

At least seven people have died and nearly a quarter of a million people were under evacuation orders or warnings by Monday morning.

Lightning strikes sparked all three of the major fire complexes surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area.

California fires: This is how a lightning storm can start a wildfire

Officials surveying maps at command centers are astonished by the sheer size of the LNU Lightning Complex Fire in wine country north of San Francisco and the SCU Lightning Complex southeast of the city, Cal Fire spokesman Brice Bennett said.

You could overlay half of one of these fires, and it covers the entire city of San Francisco, Bennett said Sunday.

What we know Monday: Massive wildfires scorch California as threat of lightning igniting more blazes looms

Here's a look at how the fires have scorched parts of California.

Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex Fire burn in unincorporated Napa County, Calif., on Aug. 18. The blaze destroyed multiple homes near Lake Berryessa.

Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex Fire consume a home in unincorporated Napa County, Calif., on Aug. 19.

Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex Fire jump Interstate 80 in Vacaville, Calif., Aug. 19.

A firefighter watches the LNU Lightning Complex Fire spread through the Berryessa Estates neighborhood of unincorporated Napa County, Calif., on Aug. 21. The blaze forced thousands to flee and destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures.

Docked boats burn on Lake Berryessa during the LNU Lightning Complex Fire in Napa, Calif., on Aug. 19.

Bill Nichols, 84, works to save his home as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire tears through Vacaville, Calif., on Aug. 19. Nichols has lived in the home for 77 years.

A massive column of smoke rises above Highway 1 just north of the Santa Cruz County line as a section of the CZU August Lightning Complex burns above Waddell Beach on Aug. 19, northwest of Santa Cruz, Calif.

Embers burn along a hillside as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire tears through unincorporated Napa County, Calif., on Aug. 18.

A C-130 aircraft equipped with Modular Airborne Fire Fighting Systems (MAFFS) drops retardant ahead of the LNU Lightning Complex Fire on Aug. 20 in Healdsburg, Calif.

Inmate firefighters rest during a break from battling the River Fire in Salinas, Calif., on Aug. 17.

Alyssa Medina looks over the charred remains of her family home during the LNU Lightning Complex Fire in Vacaville, Calif., on Aug. 23.

Austin Giannuzzi cries while embracing family members at the burned remains of their home during the LNU Lightning Complex Fire in Vacaville, Calif., on Aug. 23.

Peter Koleckar is overwhelmed by the sight of multiple homes burned in his neighborhood after the CZU August Lightning Complex Fire passed through Aug. 20 in Bonny Doon, Calif.

Katie Giannuzzi is elated to find her cat Gus in a drain amid the burned remains of her home during the LNU Lightning Complex Fire in Vacaville, Calif., on Aug. 23.

Vehicles and homes have been burned in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire in Boulder Creek, Calif.

Residents sit next to a vineyard as they watch the LNU Lightning Complex Fire burn in nearby hills on Aug. 20 in Healdsburg, Calif.

Contributing: Martha Mendoza and Frank Baker, The Associated Press

Police shooting of Jacob Blake: Protests erupt, Wisconsin DOJ to investigate

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: California wildfire damage: Photos show homes, vineyard, boats on fire
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:28:38|Editor: huaxia

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CAPE TOWN, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The South African government on Monday lamented alcohol abuse which it said dampens efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19.

"Tragically, the positive progress that the country has been making towards containing the spread of COVID-19 is being dampened by report of alcohol abuse, recklessness and terrible vehicle crashes and fatalities on our roads," government spokesperson Phumla Williams said.

South Africa lifted the ban on alcohol sale on August 18 with the easing of restrictions following the tapering off of COVID-19 infections. However, the move has led to alcohol abuse which is blamed for the recent spate of fatal accidents.

Three police officers in Pretoria are among the people who died in alcohol-related traffic accidents that occurred this past weekend, according to Williams.

As verified by the police, 740 suspects, including two police officers, have been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Health workers in hospitals have to deal with high numbers of cases at the trauma units as a result of alcohol abuse, Williams said.

While many South Africans are responsible in their use of alcohol, the government and society cannot sit idle when lives are being destroyed as a result of alcohol abuse and binge drinking, Williams said.

Some South Africans do not abide by the current alert level two regulations which place restrictions on gathering, Williams said.

She urged law enforcement authorities to play their role in bringing the culprits to book.

"Although the government is committed to address societal issues such as alcohol abuse and the carnage on our roads, ultimately, these issues are everybody's responsibility," the spokesperson said.

The liquor industry should also strengthen current efforts with the government that aim to curb the scourge of alcohol abuse, she said.

Williams welcomed the recent call by Police Minister Bheki Cele for police to be tough on alcohol consumption and driving under the influence of alcohol.

In South Africa, alcohol abuse is seen as a major contributor to contact crimes such as murder, attempted murder, sexual offences, assault resulting in grievous bodily harm, common assault, and robbery.

It is estimated that around 70 percent of domestic violence is associated with alcohol abuse in the country. Enditem
We will continue to deal with Chinese PLA in firm, resolute manner: Army chief

Military option to deal with Chinese transgressions on if talks fail: Bipin Rawat

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Aug 24: India's Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat has said that India is open to opt for a military option to tackle the transgressions by the Chinese People's Liberation Army in Ladakh but will be exercised only if talks between the two armies fail.

India-China border stadoff: General Rawat says military option is on table | Oneindia News

"The military option to deal with transgressions by the Chinese Army in Ladakh is on but it will be exercised only if talks at the military and the diplomatic level fail," Rawat told reporters.

Defence minister Rajnath Singh, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval are reviewing all options to restore status quo ante in Ladakh, he said.

Follow up to WMCC, India-China military commanders set to meet

The statement comes in the wake of the assessment by the Army that the Chinese military was not serious about the resolution of the border conflict in eastern Ladakh.

There has been a stalemate in the military talks as the Indian Army was strongly insisting that the Chinese side must restore the status quo ante of April this year to resolve the over three-month-old row.

The Indian Army has clearly stated to the Chinese People's Liberation Army that "shifting" of the Line of Actual Control was not acceptable to it, the sources said, adding that the Chinese military was now desperately attempting to give "ex post facto strategic meaning" to its actions in eastern Ladakh.
God calls us to take increasingly knowledgeable glimpses into [the] many wonders [of] what he designed. Those words, which appear in the opening of Jimmy Carters note on Genesis 1:1, exemplify the spirit with which the former U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize winner guides readers through Scripture in the NRSV Simple Faith Bible, Zondervans new Bible in the New Revised Standard Version featuring more than 600 annotations by Carter. In his commentary, Carter advocates for an open heart and mind, a questing and questioning engagement with the world and with faith, and an embracing vision of life lived according to the Bible.

In this divided and divisive time, the Simple Faith Bible encourages readers to follow Jesus into a life of peace, compassion, and wholeness. Carters reflections, prayers, and introductions spring not only from his political and humanitarian work but also from his decades of teaching the Bible through his Sunday school ministry. The result is a unique study Bible that will appeal strongly to many mainline Christians.

Carter is a difficult figure to categorize. A Democratic president, he was a lifelong member of the conservative and heavily Republican Southern Baptist Convention until 2000, when theological differences led him to break with the Southern Baptist Convention. He maintains his commitment to his Baptist faith through membership in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Carters faith and politics are inseparable. People may agree or disagree with Jimmy Carters politics, says Melinda Bouma, vice president and publisher for Zondervan Bibles. But what they cannot disagree with is that Jimmy Carter has a contagious desire for peace, compassion, and wholeness. Those values are at the heart of the Simple Faith Bible.

The Simple Faith Bibles annotations take several forms. Carter introduces each book with a short paragraph summarizing its central themes and his questions about them. Set at the bottom of some pages of Scripture are Bible in Life notes, which identify parallels between biblical episodes and everyday life. Within a family, Carter writes in his commentary on the story of Cain and Abel, the sibling relationship is vital and sometimes volatile.

Also included are mini-essays titled Bible in Focus that delve deeper into important themes and highlight connections between different parts of the Bible. They conclude with a set of questions to prompt readers personal reflection. How have you grown impatient waiting for Gods promised blessings? Carter asks at the end of his essay on the renaming of Jacob. In what ways do you wrongly struggle to work things out for yourself? Also punctuating the pages of Scripture are Ponder and Pray notes, which offer a short prayer related to meditation-worthy quotes

from the verses, for example, O Father, these Biblical characters were courageous in defending your people. Help us to learn this lesson for ourselves, to be courageous in standing firm in our faith.

Carter is a kind and patient teacher, firm in his conviction that God sets challenges for us that we are capable of overcoming and compassionate in his prescriptions for how those challenges might be met. We live in the midst of the kingdom of heaven now, just as John did in the time of Christ, Carter writes in an essay midway through the Book of Matthew. The kingdom of heaven is a continuing history of human beings and our relationship and reconciliation with God through faith in Jesus Christ. Carters welcoming voice in these reflections, as well as his well-earned reputation as someone who has lived by the principles of his faith, make the NRSV Simple Faith Bible the ideal study Bible for many Christians.
The Patna high court Monday directed health workers, paramedics and doctors to call off their strike immediately and resume their duties.

Around 20,000 paramedical employees under the National Health Mission (NHM) in the state had struck work since Sunday while junior doctors, including those at the AIIMS-Patna and state-run medical colleges, had threatened to boycott work indefinitely from August 27 over their respective demands.

Restraining the paramedical workers and doctors from going on a strike, a division bench of the Patna high court said the violation of the order would be tantamount to contempt of court. It listed the case for further hearing on August 26.

The division bench of chief justice Sanjay Karol and justice S Kumar also issued notice to the Bihar State Contractual Health Employees Federation (BSCHEF) and the Junior Doctors Association (JDA), Bihar.

The bench, which drew upon orders by the Supreme Court, said the medical officers and the paramedical staff employed in government hospitals were duty bound to extend medical assistance for preserving human life. Failure on their part to provide timely medical treatment in the need of hour resulted in violation of right to life.

During the time of current situation and circumstances prevalent as a result of pandemic Covid-19, none of the functionaries empowered and authorised under the provisions of the Disaster Management Act, 2005, and the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, can refrain from discharging their duties and functions, more so by resorting to the mechanism of strike which perhaps may be illegal. The doctors and the para medical staff(s) are constitutionally duty bound, even so on humanitarian grounds, to protect and preserve human life, the bench said.

Perhaps, they may have some genuine grievance, but then for redressal thereof, proper mechanism has to be resorted to, but state cannot be put to ransom by resorting to an illegal method of protest, i.e. going on indefinite strike, the bench added.

Responding to the court order, secretary of the Bihar State Contractual Health Employees Federation, Lallan Kumar Singh, said, We will share our viewpoint in court.

The government has not revised our salary since 2011. Besides, we do not even have life insurance cover. We have also been kept out of the state government incentive to give one-month basic salary to healthcare workers on Covid-19 duty. Demand for Employees Provident Fund is also among our 17-point charter of demands, he added.

The NHM workers were on strike between July 20 and 23 as well.

President of the Resident Doctors Association of AIIMS-Patna Dr Vinay Kumar said, The government and authorities concerned must hear and solve all the genuine concerns of doctors and residents of the state. All the health professionals are working tirelessly day and night in times of Covid-19. We never want to withdraw our services as we are responsible for the lives of patients. But where do we go if no one will hear our genuine concerns?

The junior doctors are demanding a hike in stipend and relaxation in clauses of the government bond for post-graduate medicos, among others.

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Washington, Aug 24 : US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun will travel to Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine and Austria over the coming week, the State Department said.

During the trip starting from Monday to Thursday, Biegun will meet senior government leaders to discuss a range of regional and international issues during his visit to Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine, Xinhua news agency quoted the Department as saying on Sunday.

The No. 2 U.S. diplomat will also travel to Vienna, Austria on Thursday to meet his counterparts at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to discuss issues related to regional security and human rights.

Biegun's trip to Russia and Lithuania will reportedly would focus on the ongoing crisis in Belarus, the Department added.

Belarus has witnessed mass protests after incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko won a sixth term during the August 9 elections, with the opposition refusing to recognize the results.
LIMA, Peru - Thirteen people died in a stampede at a disco in Peru after a police raid to enforce the countrys lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, officials said Sunday.

The stampede happened at the Thomas disco in Lima, where about 120 people had gathered for a party on Saturday night, the Interior Ministry said.

People tried to escape through the only door of the second-floor disco, trampling one another and becoming trapped in the confined space, according to authorities.

After the stampede, police had to force open the door.

I feel sorry for the relatives... but also anger and indignation with the business people who organized the event, Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra said at a public event in the south of the country. He urged judicial authorities to punish those who had broken the law.

Some 23 people were arrested, and 15 of those tested positive for the coronavirus and will be quarantined, Claudio Ramirez, a Health Ministry official, told reporters.

The party was a breeding ground for the transmission of this disease, there was a viral load because it was a closed environment, Ramirez said.

Franco Asensios, one of those who attended the party, told local radio RPP that the police raid started at 9 p.m. and that authorities told the party-goers to let the women exit first.

People got excited and started to go down, and then they said that the people in front were suffocating, said Asensios, who added that a friend who took him to the party had found out about it through social media.

Some people at the scene alleged that police fired shots and tear gas during the raid, but police chief Gen. Orlando Velasco denied it.

Alejandro Ruiz, a watchman on the street where the disco is, told RPP that parties had been held there previously.

The noise could be heard two blocks away, said Ruiz. When police cars passed by, people in the disco turned off the lights and lowered the volume of the music, he said.

The building in which the night club is located is dilapidated on the outside and is located in an industrial area in the Los Olivos district of Lima.

Felipe Castillo, mayor of the district, told local television N that the club was in his jurisdiction but that surveillance and supervision in the streets is precarious due to the effects of the pandemic, which include a reduction in the collection of taxes.

Night clubs have been prohibited from operating since March because of the pandemic. Peru started lifting quarantine restrictions on June 30 in an effort to get the economy moving again, and the daily reported number of virus infections has doubled to more than 9,000 in recent weeks.

Peru has reported about 27,500 deaths from the coronavirus.
There was a significant increase in visitors to Coillte-operated forest parks in Limerick following the lifting of travel restrictions, it has been revealed.

New figures show nearly 30,000 people visited Curragh Chase forest park and Ballyhoura forest park during June, July and early August. This was a significant increase on the number of visitors recorded in April and May and followed the easing of public health restrictions in early June.

During March and April, when strict Covid restrictions were in place, there was a large drop in visitor numbers as all non-essential travel was restricted.

However, since travel restrictions were lifted on June 19, visitors have begun returning to Coilltes forests across Ireland.

Since restrictions were eased and people could move more than five kilometres from their homes, we, unsurprisingly, saw an immediate large increase in visitor numbers. In fact, there was a significant increase in visitor numbers in two of Coilltes Limerick forest parks since lockdown restrictions were eased in June, Curragh Chase and Ballyhoura. This continued, steady increase is heartening for all of those who cherish our amenities, said Imelda Hurley, Chief Executive of Coillte.

Access to nature is very important for the body, mind and spirit and that is why we work hard to maintain our tracks, parks and outdoor recreational facilities across Limerick. As we approach the end of August, and people take time to enjoy our forests, we ask that visitors continue to adhere to the social distancing rule of two metres when meeting others outside of their household, as well as the other guidelines on outdoor gatherings announced by the Government, she added.

Ms Hurley has also thanked visitors to both forest park for adhering to the public health guidelines during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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New Delhi, Aug 24 : Hours after Sonia Gandhi offered to step down as interim party President, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) on Monday unanimously requested her to continue to lead the party till such time as circumstances permit an AICC session to be convened.

Addressing the media after a stormy CWC meeting here, Congress General Secretary (Organisations) KC Venugopal said that the CWC passed a resolution that intra-party issues "cannot be deliberated" through the media or in public fora.

"The CWC urges and advises all concerned to raise such issues only in party fora in the interest of propriety and discipline," Venugopal said while reading out the resolution.

He also said that the CWC authorised the Congress President to effect "necessary organisational changes" that she may deem appropriate to take on the challenges listed above.

"In the light of the above deliberations and conclusions, the CWC unanimously requests Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the Congress until such time as circumstances will permit an AICC session to be convened," he said.

Earlier in the day, Sonia Gandhi had offered to quit the top post.

However, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged her to continue as the party chief.

The party resolution also said that it had taken note of the letter of Congress chief as also a letter written earlier by certain Congress leaders to Sonia Gandhi.

The CWC also thanked Sonia Gandhi and former party chief Rahul Gandhi for questioning the Narendra Modi government over the handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic and the issue of migrant workers,job losses, and spiralling economy.

The CWC also discussed the "brazen aggression" into and occupation of Indian territory by the Chinese.

"The CWC makes it clear that no one will be or can be permitted to undermine or weaken the party and its leadership at this juncture. The responsibility of every Congress worker and leader today is to fight the pernicious assault on India's democracy, pluralism and diversity by the Modi government," the resolution read.
New Delhi, Aug 24 : A survey has found that 62 per cent of parents will not be sending their children to school even if they are reopened on government's orders on September 1.

According to the LocalCircles survey, only 6 per cent citizens are willing to visit multiplexes and theatres to watch movies in the next 60 days, even if they open on September 1.

Only 36 per cent citizens say they will take metro or local trains in the next 60 days if they are restarted on September 1.

All this is when India's daily caseload for COVID-19 has now reached 70,000 cases and is now the highest in the world by a margin of over 40 per cent.

With close to 400 districts with 1,000 total cases, Covid-19 is fast spreading into tier 3, 4 towns and rural India. In the LocalCircles survey in late July, 31 per cent citizens said that they had one or more Covid-19 positive cases in their social network.

As the Government decides on whether schools should be reopened for senior classes, LocalCircles asked parents that if the Government does go ahead and announces opening of schools from September 1 for senior classes and others thereafter, will they be sending their children/grandchildren to school. To this, 62 per cent outright siad 'no', while only 23 per cent answered 'yes'. Around 15 per cent parents were undecided.

Given the fact that the Covid situation is not improving and numbers are only rising, the number of "aye" sayers has now reduced from 33 per cent to 23 per cent within 2 weeks. This indicates that even if schools were opened in regular manner, a large majority of parents will refrain from sending children to school and continue with online education instead.

Case studies from many countries, including the US where 97,000 children came down with Covid-19 within 2 weeks of school reopening; and also in Berlin, Germany, where 41 schools reported children or teachers getting infected last week. All of these are causing concerns amongst Indian parents.

Most parents are of the view that India shouldn't even consider reopening schools in regular mode till December 31 and instead the focus of Central and State Governments should be on equipping schools for online education, television or radio-based classes directly or in alliance with industry through the CSR programs.

LocalCircles conducted a survey to understand what citizens feel about opening of multiplex and movie theaters, metro or local trains and most importantly, schools. The survey received over 25,000 responses from citizens residing in 261 districts of India.

Citizens were asked if the government decides to restart metro/local trains from September 1, will they be taking them in the next 60 days. A total of 36 per cent answered 'yes' while 51 per cent answered 'no'; 13 per cent were unsure about it.

After opening restaurants, gyms and malls, the Government is considering reopening multiplexes and movie theaters in the next phase of 'unlock' guidelines, slated to be issued by August-end.

Citizens have continuously been opposing the reopening of movie halls as they could lead to an increase in spread of Covid-19.

The survey asked if the Government opens multiplexes and movie theatres from September 1, will they go to watch movies in the next 60 days. Three per cent said they will go many times while 3 per cent said they will go once or twice. It was a whopping 77 per cent who said will not go to movie halls at all to keep themselves safe, while 14 per cent said they don't go to movie theatres anyways to watch movies.

The comparison with last month's survey shows that citizens favouring opening of multiplexes and movie theatres is not increasing like in the case of metro and local trains. An increased number of people are not in favour of reopening theatres and multiplexes. It is a 77 per cent of citizens in August compared to 72 per cent in July, who have said they will not visit multiplexes or movie theatres in the next 60 days.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Stella Maxwell has spent the better part of the last five months in quarantine in Los Angeles since COVID-19 was deemed a pandemic in mid-March.

But on Sunday the Belgian-born Northern Irish-New Zealander model decided to step out and go on a pizza run with a friend in LA's hip Los Feliz neighborhood.

And despite the rising summer temperatures, she opted to wear a leather jacket, all while giving more than a hint of her toned midriff.

Quarantine breakout: Stella Maxwell, 30, showed off her toned midriff in a crop top and matching sweatpants during a pizza run in the Los Feliz neighborhood of LA on Sunday

The mercury soared above 90 degree Fahrenheit when the Victoria's Secret Angel, 30, headed out to pick up a full pizza to-go in the afternoon.

She wore the orange-brown cropped jacket with over a crop top that showcased several inches of her tummy.

In keeping with her casual-cool look, Maxwell wore matching sweatpants that also had a baby blue design from the knees down.

The outfit was rounded out black sneakers, stylish sunglasses and her long blonde tresses pulled back into a ponytail.

Fashion statement: The Belgian-born Northern Irish-New Zealand model wore a leather jacket despite temperatures soaring above 90 degrees Fahrenheit

Tasty: Maxwell and her friend both wore protective masks while out picking up a pizza to-go

In keeping with health and safety protocols amid the still raging coronavirus, Maxwell wore a black protective mask the entire time she was out in public.

Her male friend, who looked summer ready in shorts and a t-shirt, also had a safety-first approach and donned a similar mask.

Once the pair picked up the pizza they walked across a busy street, hopped in their car, and drove away.

Model behavior: Just last month, during her Daily Summer cover interview, Maxwell revealed that she has been wearing masks for many years before the pandemic, as a precaution to help stave off germs and viruses. The beauty is seen in February above

Just last month, during her Daily Summer cover interview, Maxwell revealed that she has been wearing masks for many years before the pandemic, as a precaution to help stave off germs and viruses.

Along with her work as a Victoria's Secret Angel, the model is also known as a brand ambassador for the cosmetics brand Max Factor, which began with her first campaign in 2017.

She has also made headlines when she briefly dated Miley Cyrus in 2015, and for her on-and-off relationship with actress Kristen Stewart from December 2016 to July 2019.
Then corporate lawyer Alexei Navalny poses in his office in Moscow, on March 17, 2010. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo)

German Hospital: Poisoning Signs Found in Russian Dissident

BERLINTests conducted on Russian dissident Alexei Navalny at a German hospital indicate that he was poisoned, but doctors said on Monday he was being treated with an antidote and his life was not in immediate danger.

The Charite hospital said in a statement that the team of doctors who have been examining Navalny since he was flown from Siberia and admitted Saturday have found indications of cholinesterase inhibitors in his system.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had personally offered Germanys assistance in treating Navalny before he was brought to Berlin, said in view of the findings and his prominent role in the political opposition in Russia, authorities there are now called upon urgently to investigate this crime in detail and in full transparency.

Those responsible must be identified and held accountable, Merkel said.

Cholinesterase inhibitors are a broad range of substances that are found in several drugs, but also pesticides and nerve agents. Charite said the specific substance to which Navalny was exposed is not yet known.

German police officers stand in front of the emergency entrance of the Charite hospital, in Berlin, on Aug. 22, 2020. (Markus Schreiber/AP Photo)

The patient is being treated in intensive care and remains in medically induced coma. While his condition is serious, it is not currently life-threatening, the hospital said in a statement.

Cholinesterase inhibitors act by blocking the breakdown of a key chemical in the body, acetycholine, that transmits signals between nerve cells.

This results in overstimulation of the junction between nerves and muscles. Each year hundreds of thousands of people suffer from cholinesterase inhibitors poisoning, mostly due to exposure to pesticides.

Navalny is being treated with the antidote atropine, the hospital said.

Alexei Navalnys prognosis remains unclear; the possibility of long-term effects, particularly those affecting the nervous system, cannot be excluded, it said.

The hospital added that it has been in close contact with Navalnys wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who visited her husband in the Berlin hospital on Sunday and Monday.

Alexei Navalnys wife Yulia (L), arrives at the Charite hospital in Berlin, on Aug. 24, 2020. (Kay Nietfeld/dpa via AP Photo)

Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putins fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Thursday and was taken to a hospital in the city of Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing.

His supporters believe that tea the 44-year-old drank was laced with poisonand that the Kremlin is behind both his illness and a delay in transferring him to Germany.

German authorities posted a special detail of federal agents and city police at the hospital once Navalny arrived on Saturday out of suspicion he had been the victim of an attack.

It was obvious that after his arrival, protective precautions had to be taken, Merkels spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters Monday.

Navalnys team last week submitted a request in Russia to launch a criminal probe, but as of Monday, Russias Investigative Committee still has not opened a case, Navalnys spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said.

Yarmysh pointed out that Navalnys team insisted the politician had been poisoned from the very beginning, despite statements of the Omsk doctors and state propagandists.

Now our words have been confirmed by tests in independent laboratories. Navalnys poisoning is no longer a hypothesis, its a fact, Yarmysh said in a tweet.

Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician in Moscow and a close ally of Navalny, in a video statement Monday urged Russias law enforcement to investigate an attempt at the life of a public figure and to look into the possible involvement of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It is Putin who benefits from these endless assaults, Yashin said.

The Kremlin has not commented on the allegation.

U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said the Navalny case would be on the agenda for Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Bieguns visit to Russia that begins Tuesday.

With Alexei Navalny in a hospital in Berlin, our dialogue with Russia must include reemphasizing the importance of free speech and civil society, he told reporters.

Navalny was flown to Germany on Saturday from Siberia after much wrangling over whether he was stable enough to be transported.

Before the Charite announcement, Russian doctors said on Monday that two laboratories there had found no poisonous substances in Navalnys system.

If we had found poisoning confirmed by something, it would have been much easier for us, said Anatoly Kalinichecnko, deputy chief doctor of the Omsk Ambulance Hospital No. 1, where Navalny was treated.

But we received a final conclusion from two laboratories that no toxic chemicals that can be considered poisons or by-products of poisons, were found.

The hospitals chief doctor, Alexander Murakhovsky, rejected allegations made by Navalnys team that doctors in Omsk had been acting in coordination with Russias security services.

We were treating the patient, and we saved him, Murakhovsky said. There wasnt and couldnt be any influence on the patients treatment.

He wasnt able to identify men in plainclothes spotted in the hospital last week who the politicians allies said were law enforcement and security service agents.

I cant say who they were, Murakhovsky said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week he didnt know anything about security service operatives being present at the hospital.

A protester stands holds a poster reads poison is the weapon of a woman, a coward and a eunuch! during a picket in support of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the center of St. Petersburg, Russia, on Aug. 20, 2020. (Elena Ignatyeva/AP Photo)

Like many other opposition politicians in Russia, Navalny has been frequently detained by law enforcement and harassed by pro-Kremlin groups. In 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw antiseptic in his face, damaging an eye.

Last year, Navalny was rushed to a hospital from jail where he was serving a sentence on charges of violating protest regulations. His team also suspected poisoning then. Doctors said he had a severe allergic reaction and sent him back to detention the following day.

By David Rising And Daria Litvinova
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:45:08|Editor: huaxia

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KAMPALA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- New infection figures show that the COVID-19 situation in Uganda is rapidly changing, forcing the government and scientists to reconsider their strategy, especially in the capital here, a local virus hotspot.

The East African country over the weekend recorded its highest daily cases after inmates at one of the prisons tested positive for the virus. The country recorded 318 cases, the highest daily number since the index case was registered on March 21.

As of Aug. 23, the country has a total of 2,263 confirmed cases, 1,226 recoveries and 20 deaths, according to Ministry of Health figures.

The Kampala Metropolitan Area has the highest numbers of community transmission; with a total of 401 COVID-19 cases and six deaths registered within the last week.

Cumulatively, according to the Health Ministry, a total of 599 COVID-19 cases, including 16 deaths have been reported in Kampala since March 23.

Uganda had been praised for taking some of the strictest measures in stopping the spread of COVID-19. In March, the country instituted a lockdown, which included closing the border entry and exit points to international travelers except for cargo, closing schools, and banning public and private transport except for essential workers, among others. The country also has a night curfew.

Economic experts, including the World Bank, warned that Uganda's tough stance would adversely affect the country's economy.

The country's President Yoweri Museveni insisted that human life is more important than the economy.

Over time, the country started easing its lockdown measures. Figures, including those released by the country's Ministry of Finance showed that the economy had started exhibiting signs of recovery.

Private and public transport reopened, shopping malls resumed operations, and wearing a facemask while in public was made mandatory.

As the easing occurred, international financiers like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) extended support to Uganda to help with the economic recovery.

On June 29, the World Bank approved a 300 million-U.S.-dollar budget support for Uganda to help the country mitigate the impact of the pandemic.

The IMF on May 6 approved a 491.5 million-dollar disbursement to Uganda to address what it called urgent balance-of-payments and fiscal needs occasioned by the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the government emphasized the necessity of social distancing, hand sanitizing and wearing face masks.

As the recovery journey started, the virus also spread rapidly despite calls to the public to adhere to the ministry of health standard operating procedures.

The ministry is now warning that the country has reached a critical stage in the fight against the pandemic.

Minister of Health Ruth Aceng recently said that if the COVID-19 cases continue to increase, the health sector would be overwhelmed, and the situation could worsen.

"The COVID-19 situation is rapidly changing in Uganda. COVID-19 is real, it's highly infectious and it kills. It's our responsibility to stop this catastrophe," said Aceng.

Minister of Works and Transport Katumba Wamala last week warned that the government would re-impose a ban on public transport over violation of COVID-19 prevention procedures.

Wamala said public commuter taxi operators and other motorists are flouting the standard operating procedures.

"With the increasing cases of community transmission, we may be forced to halt public transport," he said.

Museveni last week said that he would this week issue new regulations to curb the rapid spread of the virus.

It is widely believed that the government is likely to re-impose a lockdown in order to get a firm grip on the fight against the pandemic. Enditem
Popular highlife musician, Alex Lucky Mensah, aka Lucky Mensah, who actively campaigned for the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) to come to power in 2016,says he has never regretted his decision to campaign for the party because it has delivered on its promises to Ghanaians.

According to him, he will still campaign for the party to win the 2020 election so that it can continue its good works.

For him, the NPP has proven to be a serious party determined to better the lives of Ghanaians and he cannot help but support the progress.

The Nkrato hitmaker, who has since 2008 been very involved in composing political songs for the two major parties, said the Akufo-Addo-led NPP government had fulfilled the promises it made to Ghanaians and must be given another four years.

Speaking in an interview with Prince Benjamin on Class 91.3FM's Class Drive, Lucky Mensah said he was proud of the achievements of President Akufo-Addo.

Credited with hit songs such as Wooti Akoma, I Miss You, Old School, Aduu Sumo Akwadu and Nkrato the musician mentioned that President Akufo-Addo needed to be praised for his achievement so far.

Lucky Mensah, who was a well known sympathizer of the NDC, disowned the NDC leading up to the 2016 general elections, asserting that the then President Mahama failed woefully to lead the nation's development agenda, subjecting many into economic hardship and sufferings.

He later paid a visit to the residence of Akufo-Addo to present him with a copy of his latest track then, Yeresesamu, in September 2016 to support the NPP's 2016 election campaign.

He has composed a campaign song for the NPP titled Nana Toaso.

Lucky Mensah has been in the industry for over two decades with 11 albums to his credit.

The albums include Nsawa Bo, Glory to the Lord, Wope a Hwe, Agooji Baby, Brofre Nie, Aduu Sumo Akwadu, Old School, Bottom of My Heart and I Miss You among others.

---Daily Guide
Rail passengers will be able to travel directly from Amsterdam to London in just over four hours from October, Eurostar announces.

The cross channel train service is offering tickets for 40 between the British and Dutch capital, and will launch on October 26.

Passengers will also be able to go from Rotterdam, located south of Amsterdam, back to St Pancras International in London in three hours 29 minutes.

Eurostar launched its direct service to the Netherlands from St Pancras International in 2018.

Until now passengers coming back to the UK have had to stop at Brussels for passport checks.

However UK Border Force officials will be stationed at Rotterdam and Amsterdam, allowing for one direct route from either city.

Eurostar services will soon run from St Pancras International, above, to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, at a cost of 40 each way

Tickets will cost at least 40 each way to either city.

The announcement comes as the UK Government removed the Netherlands from its list of countries people can travel to without having to quarantine on their return.

Since August 15, any traveller returning to the UK from the Netherlands has had to self-isolate for 14 days under coronavirus safety measures.

The Netherlands was added to Britain's quarantine list after after Dutch cases reached 23.1 per 100,000 earlier this month.

Anyone travelling there from the UK does not need to self-isolate, unless they are arriving from Leicester, who are strongly advised to quarantine for 10 days.

Tickets for the new rail service go on sale from September 1 and can be booked up to six months in advance.

Eurostar said all bookings made from July 1 to December 31 are exchangeable for any dates of travel available at the time of purchase, with no exchange fee up to 14 days before departure.

The company said its trains are deep cleaned before every journey and that a new seat map system will ensure passengers are kept at a safe distance apart.

Earlier this month Eurostar announced it was cutting the number of daily services from to Paris from eight journeys to six.

A spokesman said: 'We have been tweaking timetable since March. If demand changes we will tweak the timetable on that.'
San Diego, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 08/24/2020 -- An investigation was announced concerning possible violations of securities laws by Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A. in connection with certain financial statements.



Investors who purchased shares of Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A. (NYSE: GOL), have certain options and should contact the Shareholders Foundation at mail@shareholdersfoundation.com or call +1(858) 779 - 1554.



The investigation by a law firm focuses on whether a series of statements by Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A. regarding its business, its prospects and its operations were materially false and misleading at the time they were made.



Brazil based GOL Linhas AAreas Inteligentes S.A. provides air passenger transportation services in Brazil, rest of South America, the Caribbean, and the United States.



In the fiscal 2019 annual report, Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A.'s auditor, KPMG raised significant concerns about the Company's accounting, including that Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A. lacked "(i) effective policies and procedures related to the identification and disclosure of material uncertainties in the going concern analysis and (ii) effective review of financial statement information, and related presentation and disclosure requirements."



Then, on July 23, 2020, Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A. announced the termination of KPMG as its external auditor.



Those who purchased shares of Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes S.A. (NYSE: GOL) have certain options and should contact the Shareholders Foundation.



Contact:

Shareholders Foundation, Inc.

Michael Daniels

3111 Camino Del Rio North - Suite 423

92108 San Diego

Phone: +1-(858)-779-1554

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NAIROBI, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Stronger China-Africa ties are key to the post-COVID-19 economic recovery of the African continent, a Kenyan scholar said on Sunday.

Peter Kagwanja CEO, Africa Policy Institute, a regional think tank, said in a commentary published in the Sunday Nation that as the global COVID-19 crisis continues, promoting manufacturing and technological innovation is emerging as key to Africa's COVID-19 response and recovery.

"With the resurgence of isolationism, protectionism and shrinking resources for investment from Africa's traditional partners in the West, cooperation with China offers a common response and recovery strategy for African countries to combat COVID-19 while promoting manufacturing to roll back poverty, provide jobs and livelihoods," Kagwanja wrote.

He noted that rising economic nationalism, isolationism and protectionism in the West has made Africa's cooperation with China even more urgent and pivotal.

"But with the resurgence of the cold war-era geopolitics, signified by trade and technology wars between America and China, Africa has to make bold and enlightened choices in favor of its post-COVID-19 recovery and greater development," he observed.

Kagwanja said that since February, Beijing has collaborated with the 54 African countries to fight COVID-19, noting that since COVID-19 struck, Africa has waged two wars.

"The first is the war to contain the spread of the virus, which affected more than one million people. The other is the war against poverty that would come from succumbing to the disease either as a health threat or as an economic threat," he added.

The scholar observed that the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on African economies is yet to be assessed but what is certain is that it has exacted a heavy toll on jobs and employment, disrupted manufacturing supply chains, leading to a shortage of raw materials, reduced orders and led to the closure of manufacturing plants around the world.

According to the scholar, South-South cooperation offers new avenues of recovery from COVID-19 and sources of investment to spur industrialization.

He revealed that over the past two decades, China has expanded its footprint in Africa's manufacturing and industrialization.

Kagwanja said the launch of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000 moved this cooperation to a whole new level in the 21st century, providing a new strategic framework for collaboration in Africa's industrialization and infrastructure.

"African countries are increasingly participating in China's multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative," he noted.

Kagwanja said that China has been the continent's leading trading partner since 2009 and there are nearly 100 China-Africa joint industrial parks under construction across the continent.

He noted that Beijing's investment stock in Africa now exceeds 10.8 trillion shillings (100 billion U.S. dollars), the largest investment by a single country on the continent and there are more than 10,000 Chinese firms on the continent, about one-third of them in manufacturing.

According to the scholar, China's development assistance has immensely contributed to a hopeful Africa, rising up and out of poverty.

He said the Asian nation has also calibrated its foreign policy and investments to support Africa's Agenda 2063, the continent's development blueprint.
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Linkedin Han Phoumin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 13:48 514 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c400ca1f 3 Opinion ASEAN,energy-industry Free

Rapid economic development over the past two decades has transformed the Southeast Asia region to the point where it is able to participate in international production networks which allows more exports of manufactured products, textiles and other primary high-quality valued-added products.

This transformation is due in part to foreign investors who have been attracted to the region because of favorable labor conditions, growth of connectivity and innovation, and regional political stability as driven by the ASEAN vision. These changes have provided many additional growth opportunities for the region, which have in turn improved the well-being of ASEAN peoples through income generation and employment.

As the region has embarked on continued progress on the development of quality infrastructure, connectivity and innovation are keys for the region to ensure prosperity and sustainable development.

However, we can anticipate that post-COVID-19 economic recovery will drive increased economic activities and energy demand in all sectors which indicates the need to sufficient investment, especially in secured energy infrastructure and other hard and soft infrastructures, to fill the infrastructure gaps.

To satisfy this growing demand, huge energy- related infrastructure investment is necessary between now and 2040. The East Asia Summit (EAS) Energy Outlook 2019 projects US$430-440 billion will be necessary in the power generation sector, including $149-226 billion for refineries and $16-28 billion for LNG terminals (Kimura & Han ed.2019).

More broadly, the International Energy Agency (IEA) Outlook 2017 projects $2.1 trillion will be required for oil, gas, coal, and power supply. More than 60 percent of investment goes to the power sector with transmission and distribution (T&D) accounting for more than half of the total necessary investment.

The region is very fortunate to have different stakeholders supporting infrastructure improvement in a manner that bridges the missing links in ASEAN region. In this sense, ASEAN should focus on key development partners that promote long term development sustainability especially the focus on quality infrastructures, building human resources and bringing in knowledge and innovation to the region.

For example, Japan has been pioneering and promoting quality infrastructure for many years in order to empower Asia to be a growth center to drive the global economy. Most importantly, at the Group of 20 in Osaka in June 2019, Japan successfully launched the initiative G-20 Principles for High-quality Infrastructure Investment which is key to promote investment for sustainable development. The principles take into account many aspects of sustainability to ensure that quality infrastructure is in harmony with local environment, communities, and peoples livelihoods through generating local employment and facilitating technology transfer.

So far, Japan has committed $110 billion for quality infrastructure in Asia from 2015-2020 which will accelerate financial resource mobilization from private companies around the globe into the region. This is in line with Japans global commitment to promote high-quality infrastructure investment to address sustainable economic growth, reducing poverty and disparity.

Other initiative such as Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) of the United States, Japan, Australia, and other regional partners has also well received by ASEAN as an alternative or to some extent as complementary to other initiatives for infrastructure investment.

Further, to promote the principles of high quality infrastructure, the US, Japan and Australia announced the Blue Dot Network in November 2019 as a multistakeholder initiative for governments, the private sector, and civil society to join hands in order to promote high quality infrastructure investment.

More specifically, Japans promotion of quality infrastructure in Southeast Asia region can be seen in their efforts to enhance ASEANs connectivity through core land and maritime corridors and soft infrastructure development. The land corridors are the high-quality hard infrastructure development connecting the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, developing the Southern Economic Corridor (SEC), connecting Ho Chi Minh, Phnom Penh, Bangkok and Dawei as well as East-West Economic Corridor (EWEC) that expands from Da Nang to Mawlamyaing in Myanmar as a trading centre and seaport to connect Southeast Asia to India and other regions.

Another hard infrastructure development is the Maritime Economic Corridor which consolidates connectivity through the development of port, port-associated industries as well as energy and information and communication technology networks in major cities. This allows the Mekong sub-region to connect to Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines, thus enhancing connectivity in all of ASEAN.

In recent years, China also invested hugely in Asia infrastructure through Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). However, there are growing concerns from recent experiences of BRI megaprojects that have received criticism on sustainability issues such as creating severe debt for partner countries and other environmental and societal sustainability.

The BRI vision atatement does not offer explicit guidelines on how Chinese investors ought to regard environmental protection or civil society. However, it does call for strengthening people-to-people bonds and creating win-win cooperation between Chinese and host country stakeholders. However, if BRI is to be successful, the principles of high quality infrastructure initiative will need to be considered in all infrastructure investments, and local communities developing BRI projects will have to play an active role and the host-country stakeholders will need to improve the quality of their governance systems.

To facilitate the quality infrastructure investment, ASEAN will need to work more toward institutional connectivity to facilitate international commercial trade and policies, removing behind-the-border issues as fast as possible. Innovation through research and development can increase capabilities and human resource development to attract more industrialized investment and high industrial technology.

People-to-people connectivity in ASEAN has also improved and the region will be deeply integrated not only in economic aspects, but also social and environmental aspects such as health insurance and environmental regulation and standards.

The region is moving toward innovative development (Industry 4.0) in which policies will be needed to facilitate the back bone of economies such as small and medium enterprise (SME) development, highly efficient economies, smart cities, smart agriculture  basically innovations in all sectors. Strengthening institutional frameworks, establishing procedures, providing access to support services, credit markets and finance, technology upgrading, market expansion, entrepreneurship, can promote inclusive growth and development in the region.

ASEAN should be bold in facilitating all the investment opportunities guided by clear principles for quality infrastructure to promote sustainable development. ASEAN should also be responsive to the risks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The countries and ASEAN as a group may need to work on a green deal recovery to bring back normal economic activities as soon as possible through various measures including financing green projects and promote quality infrastructure into the economic recovery package.

***

The writer is senior energy economist at the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA). The views expressed here are personal.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
Indian banks for the longest time have treated corporate customers like gifts from god. This is because corporate customers are of high value they borrow and deposit hundreds even thousands of crores of rupees.

Every banker loves them because they can be of help in inflating business figures to meet yearly targets. Banks often turn a blind eye to minor rule violations to keep these customers happy. Repayments are made at the last minute and in small instalments to keep loans standard, which is called evergreening in banking parlance.

Even if the company is in stress and the banker knows that the money is not coming back anytime soon, fresh funding (or non-fund support) is given if the borrower is powerful enough to get a few phone calls made by the right people.

Listen: Work near home the new WFH says WeWork India CEO Karan Virwani

There is a tacit understanding between the banker and the corporate customer to keep the show going. Things, however, get out of hand when evergreening is no longer possible or when there is a major liquidity shock in the system or when the regulator wakes up from the deep slumber.

Thats when the banker-corporate nexus become public and investigative agencies come into the picture.

Remember Kingfisher Airlines?

Banks merrily overlooked the rapidly worsening financials of the Vijay Mallya-owned airline, which didnt make a profit even once.

Banks agreed to give money on securities such as the Kingfisher brand, company goodwill and the promoters personal guarantee. One banker, who was part of the whole process, told me banks couldnt say no when they got a call from Vijay Mallya seeking another loan. Such was the grip of the flamboyant industrialist and a one-time poster boy of Indian civil aviation on the Indian bankers.

Losing a big corporate account to a competitor is damaging. When the company collapsed like a pack of cards on October 20, 2012, banks had too much at stake. They were left with Rs 9,000-crore exposure, a heavy stake in airline shares that were reduced to a penny and a handful of real estate assets that no one would buy despite repeated auctions.

Banks woke up too late in moving the Supreme Court against Mallya. By then, the baron had flown to the UK with seven bags and an unidentified woman to be with his family.

Four years have gone and banks are still waiting for Mallya, who is fighting extradition to India, to come back and pay them their money (he has offered to pay several times since).

The key takeaway from the episode is that the personal guarantee of the hot-shot promoter proved useless for the banks.

Four years later, yet another case has come up where banks are caught in a legal battle on personal guarantees. Banks have taken Anil Ambani-led ADAG group to court after the promoter failed to honour payments deadlines even after banks invoked the personal guarantee.

There are two separate loans, together amounting to Rs 1,200 crore, to two ADAG companies for which Ambani furnished his personal guarantee along with other collaterals.

The businessman failed to pay up despite repeated deadlines and demand notices. Banks finally moved the National Company Law Tribunal, which has now ordered the appointment of a resolution professional to make an evaluation of the assets. This isnt the start of bankruptcy proceedings yet but there is a likelihood of the case progressing to that stage.

The Ambani group has contested banks move and a long legal battle awaits the lenders.

These two cases, though different in many ways, raise the key question of the validity and usefulness of the personal guarantee for big bank loans when it comes to actual recovery.

The fundamental idea of a personal guarantee is that banks have an assurance that the promoter will pay from their pocket if the company fails to do so. But in both cases this instrument has failed to help banks.

It is high time that banks take the cue and make sure there is enough tangible, recoverable collateral while giving big corporate loans. Personal guarantees and company brand names offer no real relief.

It is surprising that the same banks are aggressive if a retail customer defaults on a home or a car loan. In no time, bankers or their recovery agents rush to the doorstep of the person and push for repayment even in front of family members. Naming and shaming happen in many cases.

Small customers do not have the means to drag the bank to court unlike wealthy promoters or flee the country to safe havens.

Banks should show the same alertness in chasing corporate loan defaulters as they do with retailers. The ADAG case in NCLT points to a changed approach.
AP

Googles parent company Alphabet reportedly considered buying a share of the viral video app TikTok.

Alphabet was going to purchase a minority, non-voting stake through via of its investment companies, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Alphabet was not the main player in these negotiations, but the talks fizzled in recent days, the report claimed.

When contacted by The Independent for confirmation of such talks, Alphabet declined to comment. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

As well as Alphabet, many other companies have come forward with the intention to purchase TikTok. Most likely is Microsoft, which is seemingly the longest-running contender and has publicly announced its interest in the viral video app, but Twitter and Oracle have also reportedly shown interest.

TikTok, which is currently owned by the Chinese company Bytedance, faces a ban in the United States if it is not sold to a US company.

This is at the behest of president Trump, who believes TikTok is spying on US users and is sending or could be forced to share data with Beijing.

TikTok has denied any allegations that it would do so, and has since said it is suing the Trump administration.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said that the Trump administration will not allow TikTok to continue its current form. Mr Trump has said that the US treasury should receive a substantial portion of money in an acquisition deal because the US is making it possible for this deal to happen.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the purchase of TikTok by a US company would set a really bad long-term precedent.

I am really worried ... it could very well have long-term consequences in other countries around the world, he also said. Facebook had recently rolled out reels, a feature of Instagram that TikTok has called a copycat product.

As well as TikTok, Mr Trump is also taking action via executive order against Chinese messaging platform WeChat, making similar allegations against it as against TikTok.

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This could have greater ramifications than the TikTok ban due to the apps ubiquity in China, and both Apple and Disney have both warned against the block. WeChat has more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, many of them in China.

It has been forecasted that a WeChat ban could cause up to a 30 per cent decline in iPhone sales. Approximately 95 percent of 1.2 million people who answered a Weibo survey said they would switch to an Android smartphone over an iPhone rather than give up WeChat.

Read more

Why does Trump want to ban TikTok and is it going to happen?
What lies beyond the pandemic? MassForward is MassLives series examining the journey of Massachusetts businesses through and beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

________________

MGM Springfield will be celebrating its second anniversary but unlike last year, there will be none of the food, music and Patriots cheerleaders in downtown Springfield due to the pandemic.

The 2019, ONEderful Anniversary Celebration held at the casino included the New England Patriots Cheerleaders, live music, balloons, food trucks and a five-tier birthday cake. This year, the celebration will be markedly quiet.

As we mark MGM Springfields second anniversary, I want to recognize our team members and extend my sincere gratitude and appreciation for their dedication and perseverance during these challenging times, said Chris Kelley, president of the northeast group for MGM Resorts in a statement to MassLive. This was not the second year we were anticipating, but we remain optimistic for the future, and will continue to serve our guests and this great community to the best of our ability.

In July, a $250,000 grant was awarded by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission will help with Springfields efforts to develop the surrounding area of MGM Springfield, something city officials and casino boosters had hoped would happen on its own.

During the reopening in July, Seth Stratton, MGMs vice president and general counsel said that reopening amid coronavirus is the biggest challenge our industry has ever faced.

However, MGM Resorts Internationals stock soared on the morning of Aug. 10 after a media and technology company made a significant investment in the company, officials said.

IAC InterActive Corp., which owns well-known brands like The Daily Beast and Vimeo, said it has built a 12% stake in MGM that is worth about $1 billion.

The Massachusetts Gaming Commission closed the states three casinos on March 14, initially for two weeks before extending the closures. MGM Springfield, Encore Boston Harbor and Plainridge Park all shut down.

The limited capacity reopening of MGM Springfield took place on July 13 with strict rules on masks or face coverings required of all guests.

MassForward is MassLive's series examining the journey of Massachusetts' small businesses through and beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

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Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fire consumes a home in unincorporated Napa County, Calif., on Wednesday. (Noah Berger / Associated Press )

As the saying goes, pandemics spread like wildfire. But it is equally true that wildfires spread like pandemics. COVID-19 and landscape fire are both biologically based, both break out when people and nature get out of whack, and both propagate according to the same exponential dynamics of transmission. The coronavirus pandemic is viral contagion; wildfire is a contagion of combustion.

Similar strategies for containment apply. Wear masks to prevent dispersion by aerosols? That looks like hardening houses against embers, the primary means of igniting structures. Practice social distancing? Thats like defensible space, keeping receptive fuels away from ignition sources. Rely on herd immunity? That could be a matter of setting enough good fires to contain the bad ones. Mandate compliance? Fire, too, is a social threat to public health and safety that cant depend on individual whim. I may comply but Im still at risk if you dont.

The big payoff against contagion comes from systemic preparations. Emergency medicine can cope with a coronavirus surge only if other work flattens the curve of infection. Emergency firefighting can cope with outbreaks on the scale of Californias only if we address that fraction of climate, fuels and ignitions that remain within our reach.

We can eliminate obvious points of contact, such as powerline failures during Santa Ana and Diablo winds. We must tend to landscapes with pre-existing conditions  drained by drought, covered in feral fuels, buffeted by high winds  that can push mundane outbreaks toward lethal outcomes. We must promote community fire-wellness programs and practice routine watchfulness to reduce vulnerability.

Fire experts have offered this kind of advice over (and over and over) again. But many problems (and distractions) clamor for attention. The flames seem to afflict someone else, in another state, another county or a distant continent. Too often various kinds of experts use fire to advance their own agendas, proposing solutions  such as more commercial logging on public lands or simply buying more air tankers and engines  that have little to offer in terms of living with fire and bending the curve of its worst effects. Fire isnt listening any more than COVID-19 cares about Twitter tantrums.

Story continues

When I first worked on a fire crew (in 1967), fire was remote from media attention and of scant scientific interest. Large fires were those that reached 5,000 acres and they happened "out West," a spasm of random danger like a grizzly bear attack. As a science, fire was studied patchily, in forestry programs, and only in order to control it. Wildfire did not rampage into communities, it didnt consume a million acres at a time, and it didnt smother San Francisco with smoke.

Our greed (our rambunctious burning of fossil fuels) and our clumsiness (our neglect of genuinely managing fire on the landscape) now mean that every place is out West. Ask Bastrop County, Texas, or Gatlinburg, Tenn., if burned communities are just a California quirk. Places that suffer big burns will experience more and bigger ones, and the narrative is no longer that people are inviting threats by building where the fires are because the fires are going where the people are.

Fire is global. The smoke from Australias 2019-20 Red Summer circled the Earth. In one year, Indonesias burning peatlands are estimated to release more greenhouse gases than Germanys average annual emissions. The devastation of Californias 2017 and 2018 fires drove the largest utility in the worlds fifth-largest economy to bankruptcy. Big fires are metastasizing into megafires; fire "busts," into fire sieges. Add up our fire practices and we are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age: Even climate history has become a sub-narrative of fire history. The maturing Pyrocene is not a pretty sight.

We are the keystone species for fire. Until we began binge-burning fossil fuels, we had managed to live with fire. We need to relearn how to coexist with it because it isnt going away  it cant. Unlike for COVID-19, no fire vaccine is possible. At this point in our fire-powered warming world, even as we ratchet down fossil fuel burning, landscape fires will likely ratchet up.

They can be fires of choice or chance. We can have good fires or bad fires. We can ready ourselves to truly manage fire or scramble in blustering incredulity. But the fires are coming.

Stephen J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University specializing in environmental history and the author of 35 books including Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America.





This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
On the Aug. 16 episode of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, while examining racial disparities in jury selection, Oliver went off on a tangent, in which he had some choice words for the city of Danbury, Conn. Oliver was speaking about how a computer error resulted in no jurors being summoned from Hartford and New Britain when he set his sights on Danbury.

If youre gonna forget a town in Connecticut, why not forget Danbury? Oliver asked. Because, and this is true, f**k Danbury. From its charming Railway Museum to its historic Hearthstone Castle, Danbury, Conn., can eat my whole a**. I know exactly three things about Danbury: USA Today ranked it the second best city to live in in 2015, it was once the center of the American hat industry and if youre from there, you got a standing invite to come get a thrashing from John Oliver, children included. F**k you.

Oliver has yet to say whether he holds actual animosity toward the city or if it was just chosen at random for the bit. Either way, Danbury wasnt having it.

John Oliver, don't mess with Danbury.



Last Week Tonight with John Oliver https://t.co/ieHJiG0vQa  Mayor Mark Boughton (@MayorMark) August 22, 2020

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton responded on Saturday with a tweet, and posted a video to Facebook, in which he announced the Danbury sewer plant was going to be renamed in Olivers honor.

Behind me youll see the city of Danbury sewer plant, Boughton said in the video. And we are going to rename it the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant. Why? Because its full of crap, just like you, John.

On Sunday, Oliver doubled down on his disdain for Danbury, wedging in another dig while talking about neighboring Rhode Islands appearance at last weeks Democratic National Convention.

I had no idea that calamari was Rhode Islands official state appetizer, Oliver said. It might be the first thing Ive learned about that state that Ive actually liked, aside, of course, from the fact that it doesnt include the city of Danbury, Conn. Because, Ive said it before and Ill say it again, f**k Danbury. Babies. Elderly. Pets. Buildings. All of you can go f**k yourselves.

Story continues

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver airs Sundays at 11 p.m. on HBO.

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WARE  A 30-year old Springfield man is to be arraigned today on a home invasion allegation and the alleged rape of a Ware woman who is in her 50s, and other related charges.

According to police, Wilson L. Clay III of 46 Leslie St., Springfield committed the alleged crimes on Aug. 19 in the town of Ware.

He turned himself in at Massachusetts state police barracks in Springfield early on Monday, escorted by his mother, and is expected to be arraigned later on Monday, police said.

This is an isolated incident and I would like to re-assure the public, that they are safe, Ware police chief Shawn Crevier said in a written statement.

Clay is being charged with home invasion, breaking and entering in the night time for a felony rape, and indecent assault and battery of a person over 14 years old.

According to the police statement: Clays mother walked Clay into the MA State Police Barrack in Springfield where Clay was arrested on the Ware Police Department Arrest Warrant.

Clay is being held on $20,000 cash bail pending his arraignment.

This is a developing story. More information will be provided as it is available.
Premier Doug Ford is urging Conservatives to rally around new federal Conservative Leader Erin OToole but says he wont campaign for him in the next federal election.

Im so swamped right here, Ford told a news conference Monday at Queens Park, where he has been working long hours tackling the COVID-19 pandemic and controversy around back-to-school plans for children across the province.

I cant take my eye off the ball for an election or anything else, he added. I wont be campaigning for anyone, like I didnt last time, either.

Ford was treated as a liability and shunned by former Conservative Party of Canada leader Andrew Scheer during last falls federal campaign. He has made a point of working with Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus Liberal government throughout the coronavirus crisis and regularly touts his co-operative dealings with Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, the new finance minister.

We have a phenomenal relationship. I think the world of the deputy prime minister, we are able to get a lot accomplished just by communicating and collaborating  and along with the prime minister as well, the premier added during his daily teleconference with journalists.

Ill work with anyone at the end of the day. And like I say, I don't care what political stripe youre from, if you get elected Ill work with you, continued Ford, who has repeatedly thanked the federal government for financial assistance during the pandemic and help from Canadian Armed Forces medical teams in nursing homes hard-hit by the killer virus.

I wish everyone all the best and let the best person win.

Trudeau has a minority government and there is talk the possibility of a federal election this fall if his government is toppled on a vote of confidence following the upcoming Throne Speech.

As the Star has reported, the premier privately expressed frustration last fall after being frozen out by Scheer  who rarely mentioned his name on the campaign trail  and being a frequent target of Trudeau on the hustings after a rocky first year in power that left Ford and his Progressive Conservatives lagging in public opinion polls.

But now Ford has improved his standing in the polls and pledges to stick to his knitting with the next provincial election less than two years away, in June 2022.

Pressed on why he wont help push a Conservative agenda by campaigning for OToole, whose father is former Progressive Conservative MPP John OToole, Ford said, Im gonna take the high road here.

Im gonna just work hard with Ontario ... getting our economy back up and running, make sure everyones safe here.

Deputy Premier and Health Minister Christine Elliott, who shares Durham Region roots with OToole, tweeted her support for him on Monday.

You will be a great leader and have made #Durham proud, she wrote.

Read more about:
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Marco became a hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico for most of Sunday but weakened back to a tropical storm as it closed in on the Louisiana coast during the night, while Tropical Storm Laura killed at least 11 people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Laura began moving over Cuba late Sunday afternoon, following a path forecast to take it to the same part of the U.S. coast by midweek as a hurricane.

The National Hurricane Center said Marcos sustained winds had decreased to 70 miles per hour (110 kph), though it still warned of life-threatening storm surges and dangerous along the Gulf Coast. Marco was centred about 185 miles (295 kilometres) south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River land heading north-northwest at 13 mph (20 kph).

Marco was expected to be approaching the Louisiana shore Monday afternoon before turning westward toward Texas.

Haitian civil protection officials said they had received reports that a 10-year-old girl was killed when a tree fell on a home in the southern coastal town of Anse-a-Pitres, on the border with the Dominican Republic. Haitis prime minister said at least eight other people died as Laura passed by and two were missing. In the Dominican Republic, relatives told reporters a mother and her young son died after a wall collapsed on them.

Hundreds of thousands were without power in the Dominican Republic as both countries on the island of Hispaniola suffered heavy flooding.

A hurricane watch was issued for the New Orleans metro area, which Hurricane Katrina pummeled in August 2005.

Laura was centred about 125 miles (200 kilometres) southeast of Camaguey, Cuba, late Sunday, and its maximum sustained winds were at 65 mph (100 kph). It was moving west-northwest at 21 mph (33 kph).

It was forecast to move along Cubas southern coast during Monday.

New warnings were added Sunday morning for Marco, including a storm surge warning from Morgan City, Louisiana, to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and a hurricane warning from Morgan City to the mouth of the Pearl River. A tropical storm warning included Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, and metropolitan New Orleans.

A storm surge of up to 6 feet (2 metres) was forecast for parts of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, who declared a state of emergency Friday, asked President Donald Trump for a federal emergency declaration.

People in Louisiana headed to stores to stock up on food, water and other supplies.

The hurricane centre said the storms were not expected to interact as the region faces an unusually active hurricane season.



Associated Press writers Freida Frisaro in Miami and Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans contributed to this report.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 17:29:21|Editor: huaxia

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YANGON, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar authorities seized 478,800 stimulants in Sagaing region, according to a release from the Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control (CCDAC) on Monday.

Acting on a tip-off, the joint police force made a seizure in Indaw township on Sunday.

Stimulants worth over 2.39 billion kyats (over 1.7 million U.S. dollars) were confiscated from a truck along with two suspects.

The township police filed a case against the suspects and further investigation is underway under the country's Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law, the release said.

On the same day, a total of 1,003,200 stimulants worth over 1 billion kyats (743,111 U.S. dollars) and 3.3 kilograms of heroin worth 165 milliom kyats (122,222 U.S. dollars) were seized in Khampat township of the same region.

According to a latest release issued by the President's Office on Monday, a total of 1,298 drug-related cases were registered across Myanmar while 1,991 people were charged in connection with the cases as of August 22 this year. Enditem
It's no secret that Locky Gilbert is quite the ladies' man, with several women coming forward claiming they dated the thrill-seeker in the months before his debut on The Bachelor.

And on Monday, a Perth-based mother of two told Woman's Day that she had dated Locky, 30, before he signed on to the Channel 10 reality show.

Charlie Octavia, 28, said she'd been close to falling in love with the former Australian Survivor star before they called things off and he resurfaced on The Bachelor.

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Another one! It's no secret that Locky Gilbert (left) is quite the ladies' man, and on Monday, Charlie Octavia (right) told Woman's Day she had dated him before his debut on The Bachelor

While they had romantic chemistry, Charlie said she was 'glad' she didn't fall for Locky.

But their break-up wasn't too bad, as Locky reportedly kept in touch with Charlie when he was filming The Bachelor.

At one stage during production earlier this year, he even sent his ex a friendly selfie from the Bachelor mansion.

Wasn't meant to be! Charlie (pictured), a Perth-based mother of two, said she'd been close to falling in love with Locky before they called things off and he resurfaced on The Bachelor

The photo showed him sitting in front of a fireplace that coincidentally was used as the backdrop to one of his dates with Irena Srbinovska, who is rumoured to win the show.

'To be as intimate as we were, then see Locky on TV tying to win the hearts of so many other women was surreal,' Charlie said.

It comes after Charlie told Daily Mail Australia in March: 'I do know Locky, but he was never my boyfriend.'

Hmm! At one stage during production earlier this year, Locky even sent his ex a friendly selfie from the Bachelor mansion. The photo showed him sitting in front of a fireplace that coincidentally was used as the backdrop to one of his dates with Irena Srbinovska (pictured)

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Channel 10 and Locky Gilbert for comment.

Earlier this month, Locky unleashed on his exes for coming out of the woodwork after he was announced as the Bachelor in March.

'All these girls are coming out, I am not too sure why they are coming out, they just want their time in the sun,' he told the Herald Sun.

'I have clearly moved on': Earlier this month, Locky unleashed on his exes for coming out of the woodwork after he was announced as the Bachelor. Pictured with host Osher Gunsberg (left)

He added: 'I have got a past, I can't hide that, but they feel like they want to come out and give their story; all power to them.

'I am sorry it didn't work out with me and them, but I have clearly moved on and maybe they haven't.'

Just days before Locky was announced as the Bachelor, Brooke Jowett, whom he had grown close to on Australia Survivor, told TV Week their relationship had potential.

Blindsided: Just days before Locky was announced as the Bachelor, Brooke Jowett (pictured), whom he'd grown close to on Australia Survivor, told TV Week their relationship had potential

'We haven't completely written it off, it's just very complicated with the distance,' she said, referencing the fact they live in different states.

But when news broke that Locky would be handing out roses on national TV, Brooke expressed her disappointment on Instagram.

'I'm hurt and a little blindsided, but I wish the best for Locky, I always will,' she wrote.

In the past: Locky's other former flings include Farmer Wants a Wife star Tahlia Rubio (left), ex-Bachelor contestant Deanna Salvemini (right) and Perth model Holly Newman

Locky's other former flings include Farmer Wants a Wife star Tahlia Rubio, ex-Bachelor contestant Deanna Salvemini and Perth model Holly Newman.

He previously dated Love Island Australia star Jordan Cayless until mid-2019.

Despite Locky insisting he's found 'the one' on The Bachelor, Jordan said she was skeptical about her ex-boyfriend's claims in a recent interview with New Idea.

Case of the ex: He previously dated Love Island Australia star Jordan Cayless until mid-2019
Over half (54%) of SMEs believe social distancing has reduced their ability to take on new business. This is according to new research from Bibby Financial Services Ireland, a provider of financial support and funding solutions to Irish SMEs.

Meanwhile, despite the measures introduced under the recent July Stimulus package, 20% of Irish SMEs believe it will more than a year before they return to the productivity levels they enjoyed prior to lockdown.

The research reveals that while 72% of SMEs are supportive of the Governments efforts during the crisis, and 65% are optimistic about the future of the economy, 42% of businesses have had to turn down new orders because they are unable to fill them. Additional obstacles for SMEs attempting to secure new business include being unable to hire or bring back staff (31%), and not having the working capital to buy raw materials (21%).

The chief concerns of business owners across the country include cashflow difficulties (34%), followed by a loss of customers (31%) and staff losses (14%). Bankruptcy remains a pressing concern for 14% of businesses.

In response to the pandemic and the restrictions introduced, 35% of SMEs say they had to lay off staff, while 38% closed parts of their business, either temporarily or permanently. Almost a third (30%) say they withheld payment to some suppliers, demonstrating the impact the crisis has had in constricting the supply chain.

The research also surveyed SMEs attitudes towards the ongoing trade deal negotiations between the EU and the UK. Some 61% of SMEs are optimistic a trade deal can be done, however the cost of failure would be significant, with 63% believing there would be a negative impact on their business if a deal cannot be agreed, compounding the effects of Covid-19.

Over four in five (83%) SMEs were not using external finance prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, however, 66% of those now say they would be more likely to do so in future. Bibby Financial Services Ireland has therefore highlighted how businesses should not overlook the benefits of invoice finance, which can be quickly provided and used on a short-term basis to support cashflow and working capital requirements.



Commenting on the research, Managing Director of Bibby Financial Services Ireland, Mark ORourke said, "Our research reveals the stark reality currently facing Irelands SME sector. While most commend the Governments handling of the Covid-19 crisis, the measures needed to deal with it are having a lasting and profound impact on SMEs. Many are dealing with severe cashflow difficulties as a result of supply chain disruption, while the need to ensure social distancing is also causing logistical challenges and making margins tighter."

He added, "Despite this we are glad to see that SMEs are casting the net wider in terms of the financial supports available to them. Many will be reluctant to take on additional debt when already faced with mounting overheads and an uncertain economic landscape, so its encouraging to see the growing proportion of businesses contemplating services like invoice finance."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Q You have said the quarantine deadline that weve seen from France, Holland and now Croatia is the time you need to be back in the UK from those countries. But on BBC News a lady was interviewed who was coming back from Croatia by ship to Italy, then waiting there for two days, then flying home to the UK, to avoid quarantine. Is she right or are you?

You have also said that if you change planes in a country that isnt exempt you will need to quarantine. But shouldnt passengers be warned about that? Ive made a couple of searches for flights to Portugal, both on Skyscanner and British Airways, and they have included options via Paris and Madrid respectively. Some people might think that the fact that theyre being advertised makes them safe. What are the rules on warning prospective buyers?

John M
New Delhi, Aug 24 : With the Special Investigation Team of the CBI going out all guns blazing against all possible angles in the Sushant Singh Rajput case, senior advocate Vikas Singh representing the late actor's family, slammed Rhea Chakraborty and claimed she "has never cooperated with Sushant's family and is playing double game".

"Rhea has not cooperated with the family, she didn't even offer condolences to the family when the mishap took place. Moreover, when the request for CBI probe was made, they opposed it tooth and nail. She may have put out a video in support of the CBI probe but her legal team opposed the same strongly," the senior advocate said.

He further said that if she really wanted to cooperate with the family, she could have withdrawn her petition from the Supreme Court. "Rhea is playing a double game in this matter, if she wanted to support the family, then why did she file this petition in the Supreme Court," Singh said.

Reacting to Sandip Ssingh, who claimed to be a friend of Sushant and said that he is one of the first person to reach the late actor's residence after hearing the news of his death, the senior advocate said that no one from Sushant's family knew about him. Ssingh is the producer of a biopic on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"How can Sandip come out suddenly just like that. No one from the family knew Sandip. When he was not in touch with him for a long time, how did he reach there suddenly?" questioned Vikas Singh.

Singh further said: "Two lockers from Sushant's home were broken, now we don't know who broke it, was it Rhea, was it the staff at his home or someone else, this is a matter of investigation and it would unfold when the CBI would proceed further in the matter." The CBI team probing the Sushant case, once again on Monday questioned the actor's flatmate Siddharth Pithani and his staff Neeraj Singh and once more visited the Waterstone resort, where the Bollywood star stayed for two months.

According to CBI sources, Pithani and Singh joined the questioning earlier in the day at the DRDO guest house in Mumbai's Santacruz area.

The CBI source added that on Sunday the agency had also questioned the actor's personal staff Dipesh Sawant apart from Pithani and Singh about the behaviour of Sushant after his break-up with Rhea Chakraborty and whether she took financial and professional decisions for Sushant, besides whether she really was keeping the late actor away from his family.

The source said that the CBI will summon more people for questioning in the case including Rhea, her father Indrajit, brother Showik and mother Sandhya. The CBI could ask Rhea why she left Sushant's flat on June 8 and what was the reason for her breakup with the 34-year-old actor.

However, Rhea's legal team has clarified that the actress and her family have not received summons from the CBI.

"Dear Friends, Rhea Chakraborty & Fly (Family) have not received any summons from CBI so far to attend. No sooner she receives it, she & fly will attend as they did before Mumbai Police and ED as law abiding citizens. No speculations are necessary," said her lawyer Satish Maneshinde in the statement.

Sushant was found dead in his Bandra flat in Mumbai on June 14. Now, the CBI has taken over the case.

Latest updates on Sushant Singh Rajput Death Mystery

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
"So why wouldn't we just change the [party] constitution, which is our plan, and open up preselections for 2020 when we've got the numbers all eligible," he asked of his allies in a call recorded in 2018, "[when] we're locked in, we're institutionalised, we've got our members in the upper house, we've got a state director around our finger."

Mr Sukkar denies any involvement in branch stacking and Mr Bastiaan insists he never breached the Liberal Party constitution. But in private, Mr Bastiaan was candid about his ambitions.

The most serious allegations facing Mr Sukkar, the federal Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Housing, and Mr Andrews involves their dealings with Liberal backroom powerbroker Marcus Bastiaan . Taped phone calls capture Mr Sukkar plotting to remove four sitting Victorian Liberal state MPs while Mr Bastiaan is recorded targeting up to six federal Liberal MPs by 2020.

This time, though, the branch-stacking operation was on the Liberal side of the aisle. And the plan, revealed in secret recordings, colourful social media communications as well as a tranche of leaked files and planning documents, implicates one of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's own frontbenchers, Michael Sukkar, along with Kevin Andrews, a former cabinet minister and the longest-serving member in the House of Representatives.

But in 2018, it was part of a scheme similar to the Adem Somyurek school of factional hardball . It involved installing enough members into party branches to control the preselection of favoured political candidates and win key internal party positions. And as with Mr Somyurek, the disgraced state Labor MP forced out of cabinet in June, the scheme used fake members and taxpayer-funded staffers to amass significant political power.

Mr Bastiaan's political operation recruited dozens of Liberal members and added them to seats that were often nowhere near their real addresses. In one case, a new member lived 50km from the electorate. Others have said their party memberships were paid by ethnic recruiters in breach of party rules.

"Who gives a shit," he responded to one electorate officer in a call to discuss allegations taxpayer funds were being misused. "We are trying to win a f---ing seat mate."

Records show Mr Sukkar's younger brother, Paul, was employed as an electorate officer in 2017. It is a breach of federal and state laws for an electorate officer to work for the benefit of other MPs or engage in party political activity. But in secretly taped conversations, Mr Bastiaan was scathing of that restraint.

Among the leaked material provided to The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes by half-a-dozen Liberal insiders is a memo created by Mr Bastiaan and seemingly endorsed by Mr Sukkar, who responded, "good summary". It sets out a scheme to build the Bastiaan-Sukkar faction's power by giving taxpayer-funded jobs in Kevin Andrews' office to Mr Bastiaan's operatives. Employed as electorate officers, who usually carry out mundane constituent work for their MP, these staffers were instead directed to recruit members for the faction.

In April 2018, Mr Bastiaan's years of amassing numbers across the state culminated in an extraordinary scene: members loyal to him bearing proxy voting forms arrived en masse on chartered buses to the party's state council and delivered a thumping win to the party's right-wing hardliners. They re-elected Mr Kroger as state president, voted Mr Bastiaan to be one of the party's vice-presidents and gained control of the powerful administrative committee. Party elders had seen nothing like it. At the heart of Mr Bastiaan's success was his ability to target certain conservative religions and ethnic groups. At least 10 of the 78 people elected to the Liberals' administrative bodies at the state council were Mormons.

The 28-year-old quickly made his presence felt on Spring Street and in Canberra, partly via an alliance with Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger. Mr Kroger was never totally comfortable with Mr Bastiaan, sources said, but he ultimately embraced the young firebrand, given his control of the votes of dozens if not hundreds of new party members.

Before he set his sights on the broader state party, Mr Bastiaan cut his teeth building a formidable power base in the well-heeled Melbourne bayside area. The Brighton Grammar alumni recruited voraciously  among friends, family and Rotary club members  and was the president of the local branch in his early 20s. But it was in 2016 that Mr Bastiaan burst to prominence, fashioning himself as the Liberals' new great hope. With a state election looming and then opposition leader Matthew Guy struggling against Premier Daniel Andrews, Mr Bastiaan claimed he was capable of re-energising disenchanted members by thrusting the party to the right.

When leaked recordings revealed Mr Somyurek had stacked branches and misused taxpayer-funded staff to win power, Prime Minister Morrison did not hesitate in demanding Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese take action over the "very concerning" reports.

After the election loss, recriminations were swift. Former premier Jeff Kennett called for Mr Kroger to resign live on television on election night, which he did within a week along with Mr Guy. The same month, The Age reported leaked text exchanges involving Mr Bastiaan in which he referred to "fag Catholics" who were "so far in the closet, if they end up coming out they will blow up big time with lots of secrets" while an associate referred to Indian members as "curries".

Marcus Bastiaan and wife Stephanie at their wedding. James Newbury, state MP for Brighton, is second to the left of Mr Bastiaan.

Despite concerns from party moderates, Mr Guy ran a hardline campaign focused largely on crime rates among South Sudanese youth. The party suffered a 7 per cent statewide swing, defeated in safe Liberal seats such as Hawthorn and coming within hundreds of votes of losing Brighton where the divisive Liberal candidate, James Newbury, was almost defeated by a teenage Labor candidate. Mr Newbury had been a groomsman at Mr Bastiaan's wedding.

The influx of social conservatives had an immediate impact on Liberal Party policy. The Bastiaan-Sukkar faction opposed policies such as Safe Schools and euthanasia, leading some senior figures such as former state director John Ridley to complain they were no longer "listening to, or interested in, the community mainstream".

The recordings reveal a close factional bond with Mr Sukkar, one of the most powerful conservative Liberals in federal politics. So close that in 2018, Mr Sukkar described Mr Bastiaan in one taped conversation as "a very important piece of the team".

That Mr Bastiaan wielded real political power within the party was an open secret among MPs. Even today, Liberal sources say he and his allies are not afraid to use it.

In another private message, Mr Bastiaan derided senior Victorian Liberal official Sean Armistead, who is Indigenous, as a "fake Aboriginal". When another Liberal operative joked that Mr Armistead was involved in "pagan abo rubbish" such as "praying to the rainbow serpent", Mr Bastiaan responded: "Ha ha."

It can be hard to separate hubris from reality with Mr Bastiaan, but new leaked communications obtained by The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes do reveal ugly and immature posturing. In private conversations in 2017 between Mr Bastiaan and the vice-president of the Young Liberals, Alex Lisov, Mr Bastiaan describes Senator James Paterson's wife  who was at the time childless  as having a "barren womb". Mr Lisov responded by mocking the Patersons for having "no family values".

Mr Bastiaan denied sending the messages, with his lawyers suggesting they could be faked. Regardless, he had resigned from his leadership role weeks before the election, citing family reasons, though he remained a party member.

Michael Sukkar:

Evidence from memos, documents and recordings suggests that while Mr Sukkar was not actively involved in stacking Liberal branches, he benefited from it. In one private conversation, Mr Sukkar described the pair's tense but mutually beneficial relationship.

"Marcus has got to realise he is not the dictator," Mr Sukkar says. "None of us have individual numbers, we carry little groups of support and I think he has finally realised that he is not indispensable and I think that's a very, very healthy thing for him to now understand."

But one taped conversation exposes Mr Sukkar's own political plotting. He talks about their faction using its numbers to remove or shift a group of state upper house members in Victoria after they angered conservatives by voting in support of a euthanasia bill.

"My view is there is four people in the upper house on our side who have broken faith: Simon Ramsay, Bruce Atkinson, Mary Wooldridge, Ed O'Donohue. I think we can get rid of Simon Ramsay. We can potentially get rid of Bruce Atkinson, that's harder, but we can, it is still in the mix. So that is two out of the four gone."

Mr Sukkar's plan for Mr O'Donohue, an opposition frontbencher, was to shift him into the less-influential Mornington Peninsula lower house seat of Nepean. The plan never eventuated.

"In isolation, someone would look, for example, at the decision we've taken to support Ed O'Donohue," Mr Sukkar said. "That decision is not really consistent with our values. Because, in isolation, you look at that and you say: 'Well hold on, why are we facilitating a creep like O'Donohue into the lower house?' And then you go, 'let's look at the bigger picture here'."

Marcus Bastiaan: Eyes on a Senate seat. Credit:The Age

Mr Bastiaan also set his sights on sitting federal MPs. In one recording, he discussed his desire to remove the federal member for Goldstein, Tim Wilson, and former minister Kelly O'Dwyer, who has since resigned.

"We're going to have to fight very hard to beat Wilson and we can't get rid of O'Dwyer because if we do we'll be blamed for losing the election," Mr Bastiaan said in 2018. The idea was to wait for 2020, when he controlled more numbers and then "get rid of six of these guys rather than get rid of two and wake all of them up".

In their places, the faction hoped to install its own loyalists  including Mr Bastiaan himself  in Parliament. His preference was for the Senate "where I don't have to deal with constituent problems but I could continue to run the faction, so I could then fill Parliament both state and federal with good people."

Marcus Bastiaan:

Former Victorian Liberal premier Ted Ballieu has once again called for his party to take decisive action.

"We are talking about a few people seeking to rig elections, internal elections, in the Liberal Party, and I think that it's just staggering," said Mr Baillieu who would not speak about Mr Bastiaan directly. "And I can only presume that there are people who think that's more important than the great challenges Victorians are facing, and that's to their shame."

Under pressure: Tim Wilson and Kelly O'Dwyer. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Last week, Liberal state director Sam McQuestin launched an inquiry into branch stacking. A review of party membership for the 2019-2020 financial year had "found a small number of possible breaches of the party's rules around payment of other members' fees", he said in a statement. It's unclear what exactly his investigation is targeting. In the days leading up to the publication of this investigation, News Corporation mastheads have run stories attacking factional opponents of Mr Bastiaan and Mr Sukkar.

'FINE-TUNING THE MACHINE'

It is a critical 2018 memo written by Mr Bastiaan that best describes his faction's modus operandi. Recruiting members is a labour-intensive operation. The manpower required to fuel what Mr Bastiaan describes as an organisational "machine" is obtained by fake political jobs paid for by taxpayers.

The operation was conducted from Kevin Andrews' office. Credit:The Age

The document was viewed and endorsed by Mr Sukkar. It appears to outline breaches of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act by showing staffers in Kevin Andrews' office were directed to conduct party political work while paid by the taxpayer. There is no suggestion Mr Andrews knew of the memo, but other correspondence suggests that Mr Andrews was directed to hire the factional staff and had at least a general awareness they may be engaged in factional work.

One factional operative, Thilaga Jayakumaran, who came from the Mormon church, was listed as working five days a week as an electorate officer for Mr Andrews in early 2018. It is a job that the Department of Finance paid her $1000 a week to perform.

But Ms Jayakumaran's actual tasks, according to the memo, were to "take a leading role in turning out numbers and facilitating proxies for state council" as well as "databasing of new members, facilitating factional operations". Ms Jayakumaran was directed by Mr Bastiaan. "Marcus told her to provide Ivan more support," the memo says, a reference to former state administrative committee member and Mormon elder Ivan Stratov.

While the law requires electorate officers to "work under the sole direction of the employing senator or member", the memo suggests Mr Andrews' electorate officers reported at least partly to Mr Bastiaan. "I feel I have the capacity to manage them," Mr Bastiaan wrote.

Despite her job, according to the memo, Ms Jayakumaran lacked the skills to perform electorate officer work. "Marcus told her to learn office skills at Kevin's so she can take up and [sic] EO role if required," the memo said. When called for a response, Ms Jayakumaran hung up the phone.

Another identified in the memo as being a factional operative, Cameron Manassa, is listed as working three days as an electorate officer each week for Mr Andrews, of which "three hours per day" was to be spent on "membership resources on eligible pre-selectors". Another operative working one day a week as an electorate officer was, according to the Bastiaan memo, "recruiting, however focus needs to be on numbers".

Labor's Adem Somyurek was accused of using taxpayer-funded staff for his factional work while the "red shirts" affair exposed the Victorian Labor government over a similar misuse of money. But Mr Sukkar's response to Mr Bastiaan's memo is to describe it as a "good summary". And in a secret recording, when questioned on using electorate officers in the manner exposed during the "red shirts" affair, Mr Bastiaan was scathing of the rules.

"Who gives a shit  we are trying to win a f---ing seat mate ... The reality is, this is the hardest f---ing business now to get a job while you're a candidate. It's impossible because you can't work and also campaign so the party has to provide some sort of cover ... That's a political, that's a reality. You can't change it. That's politics."

Corruption expert Geoffrey Watson, SC, who analysed the secret recordings of Mr Somyurek, described the Bastiaan memo endorsed by Mr Sukkar as "prima facie evidence of the misuse of taxpayers' money".

"I very much doubt that Sukkar can or should remain a minister of the Crown. A minister is a position of real power and thus real trust and you cannot have it in the hands of people who abuse it," Mr Watson said.

Asked last week if he had ever stacked branches or paid for others' membership, Mr Bastiaan said he had not "willingly or knowingly breached the [Liberal Party] constitution". Quizzed about whether he had ever installed electorate office staff to do factional work, he said: "That's not the role of the electorate officer. What they choose to [do] outside of office hours is their business."

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Mr Bastiaan said his role in the Liberal Party in the past 2 years had been "zero". "I work Saturday and Sunday trying to keep a business going," he said.

Mr Sukkar denied he had been involved in branch stacking either on his own account or in support of Mr Bastiaan and was "positive" he had never endorsed the scheme allegedly run through Kevin Andrews' office.

He said "it can be hard" to control the work that party people do in your electorate office but added: "If recruitment was going on, you're going to have to show that that recruitment was going on during those hours, and if it was, that's wrong. Absolutely wrong."

Kevin Andrews said in a statement: "Electorate staff employed in my office are expected to abide by relevant workplace laws and standards."

Michael Sukkar:

FRIENDS AND FAMILY

Mr Sukkar's younger brother, Paul, was one of the factional operatives employed five days a week for stints in 2017 and 2018 in Kevin Andrews' office. His duties, according to the memo, included "recruitment for Menzies" (Mr Andrews' east-suburban seat) and "recruitment outside Menzies".

While Paul Sukkar might have been qualified for the job, the Department of Finance prohibits MPs from hiring their relatives as electorate officers to prevent the perception of nepotism. Mr Sukkar did not employ Paul but Mr Andrews did.

An August 2017 message to Paul Sukkar from Mr Bastiaan directs him to "Please help  on your relevant Liberal days to  initiate and follow through transfers of existing members into their home electorate. Update the entire Party database. This is expected to take at least six weeks."

Employment records show that by 2018, Paul Sukkar was shifted by the Bastiaan faction from his job in Mr Andrews' office to a role paid for out of the Liberal Party's budget, funded via political donations. Michael Sukkar said in a statement he was aware that his brother, Paul, had "worked with the Member of Menzies" Kevin Andrews in 2017 and 2018 but "my understanding was that Paul was employed by the Liberal Party".

"He was there to support Kevin. He was there to help Kevin," Michael Sukkar said.

It seems the faction liked to keep things in the family. Mr Bastiaan's wife, Stephanie, also did a stint as an electorate officer in Mr Sukkar's office. In various messages, the Bastiaans query if an Andrews' electorate officer, Nick Lamanna, was doing enough factional work. Mr Bastiaan complained Mr Lamanna was only engaged in "general office activity", was "underworked" and doing "nothing of note".

Stephanie Bastiaan. Credit:The Age

Stephanie Bastiaan was scathing. "Lamanna is a waste at Kevin's office  he [is] only doing EO [Electorate Officer] stuff," she complained. "We've got enough freeloaders in our faction  don't need non-factional people too! Kev needs to wake up. Lol!"

DOSA HUT AND DUTTON

Mr Bastiaan's biggest recruiting grounds have been Mormon churches, through Mr Stratov, and the Indian community where he has had the help of Rampal Muthyala, the owner of Indian restaurant chain Dosa Hut. Mr Bastiaan has always claimed these members are legitimate, have paid for their own memberships and are committed to the party. But evidence collected by The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes suggests otherwise.

Confidential communications between Mr Bastiaan and Mr Lisov show the pair discussing giving cash to a Liberal operative in 2017 so he can pay for six new members.

"He had $150," Mr Lisov complained. "He has not produced me six names." Mr Bastiaan told Mr Lisov to find out what happened but to "be careful leaving anything written to him" because "he's possible to blow up". Mr Lisov responded that he was "very careful" and did not "discuss anything with money in writing".

"I'm amazed he's taken your money and is relaxed about it. C---," Mr Bastiaan texted. Mr Lisov responded wryly that the money was "technically yours".

A key indicator of whether members of political parties are genuine is that they pay their own membership fees and fill out their own forms. In a leaked 2016 email, Mr Bastiaan instructed Mr Muthyala to fill in forms in bulk.

Stephanie and Marcus Bastiaan with Dosa Hut owner and factional operative Rampal Muthyala.

"Tick the box saying they are happy to help at elections," Mr Bastiaan instructed him, and "tick the box saying automatic renewal, this saves time next year".

The Age, the Herald and 60 Minutes have spoken to about 30 people who said they were recruited to the Liberal Party by Mr Muthyala, including four young Liberals who joined in 2018. Of the 30, four admitted on the record that Mr Muthyala had paid for their memberships. Two outlined a scam by which they paid for their membership with their own credit cards but were then reimbursed by Mr Muthyala, an apparent attempt to avoid raising alarm bells at Liberal headquarters.

Liberal member Sisindra Gandavarapu said he had temporarily paid $50 to Mr Muthyala to fund a membership application and that about 15 family and friends had done the same. Then they got their money back.

"We just pay him $50 then he does the membership  and he pays you back the money to your account," Mr Gandavarapu said.

Kishore Yannam said Mr Muthyala had recruited him and asked him to vote in internal party elections. "One year he paid for me. The closing date was approaching, so he paid," Mr Yannam said.

Marcus Bastiaan:

Mr Bastiaan and Mr Muthyala are close. Mr Bastiaan invited the restaurant chain owner to his wedding and helped bring former prime minister Tony Abbott to the opening of one of Mr Muthyala's suburban Dosa Huts. Mr Bastiaan also supported Mr Muthyala's ultimately unsuccessful push to win Liberal preselection for an upper house seat in 2018, according to confidential party files.

Michael Sukkar and Rampal Muthyala.

The year before, in 2017, Mr Bastiaan asked a federal minister if he could do a "favour" for Mr Muthyala by getting Immigration Minister Peter Dutton to assist with a visa request. An email from Mr Bastiaan asked the minister to see "if there is anything he can do with this re PD's office".

"If to [sic] hard don't worry  would be a favour to Rampal."

There is no evidence the request was either made to Mr Dutton or agreed to. Mr Muthyala denied all wrongdoing.

MARCUS AND THE MORMONS

Steve Holland, who chairs the local Liberal branch in the seat of Dunkley on the Mornington Peninsula, has had enough.

Earlier this year, he rejected two "fake" members recruited by Mr Stratov, saying they "openly state that not only are they unwilling to help the Liberal Party in winning elections through volunteering, but some of them have told me that they may not even vote Liberal at the ballot box".

Mr Holland said the focus on whether non-genuine members were from conservative church groups had obscured a bigger issue: that stacking was sometimes occurring with impunity and driving away real party members.

"I have no doubt that branch stacking occurs," Mr Holland said. "I think it's more discreet in the Liberal Party but the damage that it can do is the same regardless  I would describe it as a wet blanket on genuine membership engagement."

Mr Stratov recently quit the Liberal Party's administrative committee, saying he had moved to Ukraine.

Marcus Bastiaan:

A major stacking operation appears to have been organised by the Bastiaan faction in 2017. It involved putting dozens of members into the party's Ringwood branch even though most of the new members did not live in the electorate.

But some Liberal members signed up to the Ringwood state electoral conference by the Bastiaan faction in 2017 said they did not know why they were signed up there because they had never lived in the locality. Maddie, who did not want to use her full name, said she paid for her membership initially but did not pay in subsequent years. The membership was continually renewed anyway.

"I ended up texting someone saying, 'What's going on? Do I have to do anything? Am I a member?' Then I get another membership card in the mail and I was like, 'Oh, OK'. [The recruiter] said you don't need to worry about doing forms or anything," she said. "I had to vote [in internal Liberal Party elections] twice. I had no idea  I just did it."

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Another member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was recruited by Mr Bastiaan at a religious gathering in a private home where they spoke about the same-sex marriage plebiscite.

The member paid for his own membership but said he did not know why he was placed in the Ringwood branch when he lived more than 50km away. "I never went there and had no idea why I was put in Ringwood," he said.

The Ringwood campaign appears to be the equivalent to the Labor practice of "warehousing", used by Adem Somyurek, in which people were recruited to branches using false addresses to achieve an internal party outcome. Two other members, both of whom did not want to be identified, said they joined the party because a friend asked them to. Both lived in Mount Waverley and did not know why they were placed in the Ringwood branch 15km away.

It was 2016 when whispers first began that the Bastiaan-Sukkar faction was involved in branch stacking. A covert recording of a factional meeting attended by Michael Sukkar and Mr Bastiaan in November that year captured Mr Sukkar deriding those who complained.

"The same people that talk about branch stacking bitch and moan to me that they couldn't get people onto their booths during the campaign," Mr Sukkar said.

"They're a disgrace," Mr Bastiaan said as an aside.

Michael Sukkar:
By Associated Press

JERUSALEM: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Israel on Monday, on the first leg of his Mideast press the momentum of the Trump administration's Arab-Israeli peace push.

Pompeo was scheduled to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and discuss the recently announced historic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, brokered by Washington, to establish diplomatic ties.

The two were expected to also discuss Iran and China.

ALSO READ | Sudan fires foreign ministry spokesman Haidar Badawi after comments on peace agreement with Israel

The agreement delivered a key foreign policy victory to President Donald Trump as he seeks reelection and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about archenemy Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.

Earlier this month, the U.S., Israel and the UAE announced the deal to establish full diplomatic relations, which also requires Israel to freeze its plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank sought by the Palestinians as part of their future state.

ALSO READ | 'Normalisation is betrayal to Jerusalem': Palestinians in Gaza rally against Israel-UAE deal

Later in the trip, Pompeo was to meet with Netanyahu's partner in the government and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, as well as Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi.

After his Israel stop Pompeo was also slated to visit Sudan, the UAE and Bahrain, with additional stops in the Gulf possible, the State Department had said.

In Sudan, the secretary of state said he would push for "deepening the Sudan-Israel relationship."
Australia Rio Tinto Protesters rally outside the Rio Tinto office in Perth, Australia, June 9, 2020. Rio Tinto chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques will lose around $3.5 million in bonuses due to the destruction in May of Australian indigenous sacred sites, the mining company said on Monday, Aug. 24, 2020. (Richard Wainwright/AAP Image via AP)

CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  Rio Tinto chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques will lose around $3.5 million in bonuses due to the destruction of Australian Indigenous sacred sites to access iron ore, the mining company said on Monday.

The Anglo-Australia mining giant announced that three executives would lose bonuses following the destruction in May of two 46,000-year-old rock shelters in Juukan George in Western Australia state.

Chris Salisbury and Simone Niven will each lose around $700,000 in bonuses. The full details of their financial penalties will be revealed in the companys remuneration report next year.

The company has apologized to the rock shelters traditional owners, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.

The destruction of the rock shelters should not have happened and we are absolutely committed to listening, learning and changing, Rio Tinto said in a statement.

Rio Tinto concluded in an internal review that there was no single root cause or error that directly resulted in the destruction of the rock shelters.

The board review concluded that while Rio Tinto had obtained legal authority to impact the Juukan rock shelters, it fell short of the standards and internal guidance that Rio Tinto sets for itself over and above its legal obligations, a company statement said.

Australian Center for Corporate Responsibility strategy leader James Fitzgerald described the internal report as an insult to traditional owners. Fitzgerald argues that Jacques should be fired.

Theres no findings in relation to them and yet theyre being fined millions of dollars, Fitzgerald said of the three punished executives.

It says to me that this is just a bit of an empty gesture in order to deflect the anger of shareholders and others, Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald hoped a parliamentary committee thats examining the demolition of the shelters would provide meaningful answers.

The committees chairman Warren Entsch said earlier this month that Rio Tintos actions in destroying the cultural site beggar belief.

Story continues

It seems to me that in spite of everything that happened, this was totally avoidable, Entsch said during a hearing.

There were a number of warning bells and Im very interested to find out why those warning bells werent investigated further. It just beggars belief, he added.

The Western Australian government has promised to update Indigenous heritage laws that allowed Rio Tinto to legally destroy the sacred sites.

I think theres a lot of soul searching going on among some of the mining companies and the Juukan Gorge issue has obviously caused a lot of consideration of their internal practices, and thats a good thing, Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan said. They should always be doing that. But well make sure we bring forward new Aboriginal heritage legislation.
Zaina's mother, Cremesta, has moved into her daughter's home in Montepuez in Cabo Delgado after fleeing from conflict.

By the UN Resident Coordinator Myrta Kaulard, Laura Tomm-Bonde, IOM Chief of Mission and Samuel Chakwera, UNHCR Resident Representative, all based in Mozambique.

In the town of Montepuez, Cabo Delgado, in northern Mozambique, Zaina, a mother of four, is hosting her elderly mother, sister, and ten nieces and nephews, all of whom fled their villages due to the escalation of violence in the province. Now the relatives live together in Zaina's two-bedroom home and Zaina has welcomed them to stay while they are unable to return.

Normally, Zaina makes and sells popcorn and cakes to support her children. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, street sales are no longer allowed and she is currently seeking alternatives to provide for her household which has grown from five to 17 people.

The UN Secretary-General, in the Policy Brief: COVID-19 and People on the Move, points out that COVID-19 hits the most vulnerable people the hardest, including refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons (IDPs). They are at increased risk, many having fled conflict and natural disasters, living in potentially crowded conditions in host communities or camps with limited resources to protect themselves, and often with a precarious livelihood.

COVID-19 compounding existing problems

These risks are also present in Mozambique. Just last year, Mozambique experienced two severe cyclones, Idai and Kenneth. As a result of the cyclones, over 100,000 people live now in resettlement sites, and hundreds of thousands more are still recovering. At the same time, drought has affected southern parts of the country while insecurity in the north has displaced over 250,000 people. The health and socio-economic impacts of COVID-19 are worsening these already complex dynamics.

Kiza Onesphor, a 49-year-old refugee and physician from Democratic Republic of the Congo, lives in Maratane Refugee Camp in the Province of Nampula. He was recruited as a Community Health Volunteer, along with other members from the refugee and local communities, to disseminate COVID-19 prevention measures.

Kiza describes COVID-19 as a bomb for which no one was prepared. He believes the dangers of COVID-19 are not fully understood and aims to expand the understanding and self-protection capacities of around 9,500 refugees and asylum seekers living in Maratane.

For Zaina, Kiza and their families, COVID-19 is a crisis on the top of other crises. Yet, they share the little they have, demonstrating the power of solidarity and how it is key to defeating COVID-19. Recognizing their contributions, the contributions of people on the move, is very important for COVID-19 response plans to include refugees, asylum seekers, IDPs and host communities.

Together with the Government and partners, the UN is working in full coordination with local and national authorities on harmonizing providing life-saving and life-sustaining assistance for all people living in Mozambique.

Preventing the virus spreading in displacement camps

When providing humanitarian assistance, the priority is to save lives, ensuring that those who are most vulnerable are protected. To this end, the UN is supporting the national authorities-led health response to COVID-19 in scaling up Mozambique's preparedness and response operations, especially by helping to prevent the spread of the virus in resettlement, transit and refugee camps; it is also supporting food assistance interventions.

The UN, humanitarian community, Mozambican institutions and partners are coming together and - along with host communities and local leaders - fostering a dialogue on how to strengthen communities' support networks and resilience.

Peacebuilding and health education programmes in northern Mozambique are working in communities with large numbers of displaced families, to educate on COVID-19 prevention and promote community dialogue to strengthen social cohesion and mitigate social tensions induced by displacement. The UN is also providing shelter support for displaced families in northern Mozambique, to reduce crowding in host communities, and enable improved adherence to physical distancing precautions.

We need to prioritize the creation of income-generating opportunities with focus on a recovery process that builds back better. From supporting tailors and community members in resettlement sites and refugee camps to produce hand-made face masks and providing families in resettlement sites with training and equipment to rear chickens and boost their livelihoods, UN Mozambique recognizes and is responding to the need for people on the move and host communities to support themselves and their families during and after the pandemic.

We need to truly engage communities and harness their power, particularly the power of youth, to successfully trace the path towards a resilient society that can overcome COVID-19, security challenges and support people on the move with lasting peace. It is only through trust building and cohesion that we will be able to continue protecting and empowering people on the move and host communities.

National institutions' response to contain and prevent the COVID-19 outbreak was swift, focused, and effective in reducing the spread of the disease. Three months after identifying the first case, there are currently over 2,000 cases in Mozambique. This demonstrates the urgency of continued preventive measures against the coronavirus.

UN $103 million appeals

The UN and humanitarian community recently launched two appeals, the COVID-19 Flash Appeal and the Rapid Response Plan for Cabo Delgado, totaling approximately $103 million, to address the most critical needs of millions of people facing severe humanitarian conditions, who would be unable to withstand the health and socio-economic impact of the pandemic, including those who have been displaced by the increasing insecurity in northern Mozambique.

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Through these plans, the United Nations and the humanitarian community will continue to support Mozambique with progress toward sustainable development through the COVID-19 response. The UN has joined efforts with the international community to support cohesion in policies and engagement and to complement resource mobilization to provide Mozambique with the vital support needed during the COVID-19 period.

We have done all we could with the resources we had. A lot has been done, but additional efforts and resources are urgently needed. This is a time for true solidarity; a time for partners worldwide to stand together with Mozambique and to help protect the lives of the most vulnerable, to protect the lives of the many Zainas, Kizas and their families across the country.

The United Nations is committed to continue working together hand in hand with Mozambican institutions and civil society to act and advance the lives of people on the move and the most vulnerable in Mozambique during this crisis and beyond.

The UN Resident Coordinator, sometimes called the RC, is the highest-ranking representative of the UN development system at the country level. In this occasional series, UN News is inviting RCs to blog on issues important to the United Nations and the country where they serve.
NSW Police has fined a security guard who tested positive to coronavirus and failed to self-isolate after getting tested, as the state passed the 2 million COVID-19 test milestone.

It comes as the state government launched a testing blitz in Sydney's south-west, west and east in an effort to track down any undetected chains of community transmission.

Drive-through COVID-19 testing was at full capacity at Bondi Beach on Monday morning. Credit:Edwina Pickles

"We know there is community transmission lurking in and around south-western and western Sydney," NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said on Monday morning.

NSW recorded three new cases of coronavirus in the 24 hours to 8pm on Sunday, and four were recorded in the previous reporting period.
THE landlords of a Henley pub have celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.

Graham Steward, 73, and his wife Celia, 71, owners of the Bird in Hand in Greys Road, were married in Little Marlow on August 8, 1970.

They celebrated their anniversary with a weekend away in North Yorkshire.

Mrs Steward said: We stayed at a really nice hotel called Swinton Park. We went on lots of walks and had some nice meals.

The couple dated for about four years before they were married.

Mr Steward said: Celia used to work with a friend I played rugby with and he thought wed be a good match so set up a blind date.

The couple have three children, Gary, Natalie and Carly and two grandchildren, Louisa and Antony.

Mrs Steward said: I have so many highlights from over the last 50 years. Some of the memorable ones are having the children and them getting christened and married.

We have had some wonderful holidays with the children as well. My favourite holiday was to Sri Lanka for our fifth wedding anniversary.

Mr and Mrs Steward have run the Bird in Hand, where they also live, for 26 years.

It has been named the best pub by the South Oxfordshire branch of the Campaign for Real Ale a record six times.

Mr Steward said: Since weve been in Henley weve met all sorts of lovely people and thats what keeps us going.
Discussions due to resume on Monday with negotiators saying compromises have been reached.

The military government that seized power in Mali wants a military-led transitional body to rule the country for three years and has agreed to release deposed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a source in a visiting West African delegation said on Sunday.

The junta has affirmed that it wants a three-year transition to review the foundations of the Malian state. This transition will be directed by a body led by a soldier, who will also be head of state, a source in the ECOWAS delegation in capital Bamako told the AFP news agency.

The government will also be predominantly composed of soldiers under the military governments proposal, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Leaders of the military government led by Colonel Assimi Goita and mediators from ECOWAS, West Africas regional bloc, led by Nigerias former president, Goodluck Jonathan, met behind closed doors all day on Sunday and are due to resume discussions on Monday.

We have been able to agree on a number of points but not yet on all the discussions, Jonathan told reporters on Sunday night after some nine hours of negotiations.

A spokesman for the military government, Colonel Ismael Wague, said: We reached compromise on certain aspects and the negotiations will continue tomorrow.

Neither gave details on what issues they had reached agreement on, and what were the outstanding issues.

The AFP source said the military government has agreed to free president Keita, who has been detained along with other political leaders since the coup on Tuesday, and he will be able to return to his home in Bamako.

And if he wants to travel abroad for treatment, that is not a problem, the ECOWAS source said.





Prime minister Boubou Cisse, who has been detained with 75-year-old Keita at a military base outside the capital where the coup began, would be moved to a secure residence in the city, the source said.

A military government official confirmed to AFP the decisions on the fate of Keita and Cisse, as well as that the three-year transition would have a military president and a government mostly composed of soldiers.

Popular discontent

The coup followed months of protests calling for Keita to resign as public discontent with the government grew about the countrys brutal rebellion and collapsing economy.

While it met international condemnation, thousands of opposition supporters celebrated the presidents removal in the streets of Bamako.

The military government has said it completed the work of the protesters and has promised to stage elections within a reasonable time.

However, the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), weary of prolonged instability in Mali and the potential for similar power grabs in the region, has taken a hard line on the coup.

It suspended Mali from its decision-making institutions, shut borders and halted financial flows with the country.

Tuesdays coup was Malis second in eight years, and has heightened concern about regional stability amid months of political unrest following a disputed election in March.
If youre an AT&T customer whos craving 5G wireless data service that rivals the fastest home internet speeds, Ive got some good news for you: Its here in Houston.

And by here I mean in a few spots downtown. Youll have to look to find them, and youre best off if your search is on foot, because the signal cant penetrate the metal and glass of most vehicles.

Instead, what youll mostly encounter is a tamer form of 5G thats a solid improvement over LTE, but not the jaw-dropping speed that 5G hype has led many to expect.

Last month, AT&T launched a 5G mobile network that combines both the more common, so-called sub-6 spectrum and the astonishingly fast millimeter wave variety. Sub-6 is also used by T-Mobile.

REVIEW: T-Mobile's 5G feels a lot like 4G

AT&T was last to the 5G party here, beaten to the punch in Houston by Verizon and T-Mobile. Sprint was actually the first to stand up a local 5G network, which worked on middle frequencies between sub-6 and millimeter waves. Sprint has since merged with T-Mobile, which is working to integrate the two systems.

I tested AT&Ts network last week with a loaned Samsung Galaxy S20 5G phone running the popular Speedtest app from Ookla. I drove routes from the center of town out to the west and near northern suburbs. At best, Id describe the results as inconsistent, but when AT&Ts network was working well, it was impressive. Sometimes, I even said wow!

First, some technical background.

The hype around 5G centers on promised faster connections than the older, 4G LTE wireless standard. Those speeds, combined with a shorter delay between asking a network for information and getting a response - known as latency - are touted as enabling all kinds of new applications, ranging from advanced telemedicine to self-driving vehicles to wireless competition for home broadband providers.

So far, its mostly just that: hype. Both AT&T and T-Mobile concede their sub-6 5G is an incremental improvement over 4G for now. And AT&T says its faster, millimeter wave service is primarily for use where people gather, such as in parks, on college campuses and in large sporting or concert venues. (Verizon, which for now only has a millimeter wave network, echoes AT&Ts use cases.) Thats because millimeter wave cant pass through buildings or even foliage, and requires a dense collection of antennas known as small cells.

5G FUTURE: Houston's 5G landscape is complete. Now what?

In testing AT&Ts sub-6 5G network, which is available across most of Houston, I saw download speeds as low as 14 Mbps and as high as 222 Mbps, with an average of 70 Mbps. For comparison, PC Mag, which conducts annual tests of mobile networks around the country, clocked AT&Ts average LTE downloads in Houston in 2019 at 42 Mbps, with a maximum of 173 Mbps.

When I say inconsistent, heres what I mean: In one spot on the north side, I got a 51 Mbps download result and a minute later, 8 Mbps. That was not uncommon, but its also not uncommon with LTE.

Sub-6 upload speeds werent great, ranging from 1.1 Mbps to 39 Mbps, with an average of 14 Mbps. Most early 5G networks use 4G for uploads, and thats the case with AT&T, though 5G is also utilized.

AT&Ts millimeter wave network, which it markets as 5G+, was much more impressive. The slowest download speed I got was 90 Mbps and the maximum was 857 Mbps. This was in one spot in downtown Houston  standing on the plaza outside Toyota Center, where the average download speed was 373 Mbps.

Release Notes: Get Dwight Silvermans weekly tech newsletter in your inbox

Upload speeds ranged from 51 Mbps to 60 Mbps, with an average of 55 Mbps.

But finding this location required help from an AT&T spokesperson. On the evening I did the other driving tests, I cruised around the Discovery Green area, where Id initially been told 5G+ was available, and only got standard 5G. I had even driven past the Toyota Center and didnt pick up the faster network.

Its important to keep in mind that these are early days for 5G. If you buy a 5G phone now on AT&Ts network  or its competitors, for that matter  youre likely to see improvements and greater consistency over time. But for now, those who snatch up a 5G phone are early adopters. Dont expect to be blown away just yet.

dwight.silverman@chron.com

twitter.com/dsilverman

houstonchronicle.com/techburger
In 1982, amid the tensions of the Cold War, a 10-year-old American named Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yury Andropov, asking: "Why do you want to conquer the world or at least our country?" To everyone's great surprise, she received a detailed reply from Andropov that read: "I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country." Her trip in July 1983 as a "goodwill ambassador" to the U.S.S.R. was a media sensation, although some dismissed her visit as a Soviet PR stunt. She spent three days at the most popular Young Pioneers' camp called Artek, which was located on the Black Sea coast of the Crimean Peninsula.



After her trip, Samantha Smith became a fixture in the media, working as an actress and correspondent. In 1985, she published a book called A Journey To The Soviet Union, which was dedicated to children around the world. On August 25 of that year, 35 years ago, Samantha died at the age of 13 along with her father and six others in a plane crash in Auburn, Maine. The crash was ruled an accident, mainly due to bad weather and an inexperienced crew.
JERUSALEM: Israels cellphone surveillance for coronavirus contact-tracing may have overcome challenges by privacy watchdogs, but the state tracking policy is hard put to deal with low-tech evasion methods seemingly lifted from TV cop shows.

Some Israelis, fearing a quarantine order after unwittingly being near a coronavirus carrier, are rendering themselves untraceable while in public by switching their cellphones to airplane mode" or using prepaid burner" SIM cards instead.

Such actions are not illegal and, although there is only anecdotal evidence for their prevalence, they drew remonstration from Communication Minister Yoaz Hendel on Sunday.

This is a problem," he told Ynet TV. Ultimately, we are not a police state. We will not manage to compel the citizens of the State of Israel to keep to the health regulations."

The surveillance, initially instituted without parliamentary oversight by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been anchored in legislation at the behest of Israels Supreme Court after it heard challenges by civil liberties groups who worry the mass-surveillance is ripe for abuse.

Modeled on a counter-terrorism technology and in force since March, the system back-tracks movements of people who have tested positive for the virus to determine who came within 2 metres (yards) of them for more than 15 minutes while they were infectious.

Having been identified by their own cellphone locations, these potential new carriers are then ordered over SMS to self-isolate for a period of 14 days from the moment of exposure.

Around 80,000 people per week have received such notifications since July 1, according to officials - an economic drag for a country of 9 million.

Officials say the surveillance has detected some 30% of coronavirus cases in Israel. They also acknowledge a false-positive rate of around 16%, sometimes due to a vertical blind-spot in the technology which risks flagging people above or below a coronavirus carrier in a multi-storey building.

Such instances may be overturned on appeal - a process that can take several days, during which the quarantine is in force.

Israel offers a voluntary coronavirus app, HaMagen, whose latest upgrade includes Bluetooth contact-tracing for greater precision. But with users complaining about battery drainage, its market penetration has been far below the 60% required for the state surveillance technology to be dropped, officials say.

Israel has recorded 102,380 coronavirus cases and 834 deaths.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
By Ayya Lmahamad

The volume of trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Belarus amounted to $131 million during the period of January-July 2020, according to the State Statistics Committee of Belarus.

Azerbaijans export to Belarus amounted to $64.2 million during the reporting period, while the value of import from Belarus amounted to $66.8 million.

It should be noted that, the volume of import and export operation between Azerbaijan and Belarus exceeded $227 million in 2019, which were by $23 million more than in 2018.

Azerbaijans trade operations amounted to $15.3 billion in the period between January and July.

It should be noted that Belarus ranked third in terms of volume of export among the CIS countries. Russia accounted for the largest volume of export worth $430.7 million, and Ukraine ranked second with export worth $272.9 million.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:44:14|Editor: huaxia

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KABUL, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani on Monday talked via telephone with his Tajik counterpart Emomali Rahmon discussing key bilateral issues, the Afghan Presidential Palace said.

The two sides talked about bilateral trade, transit and boosting regional cooperation and increasing cooperation on along the two banks of the Amu Darya River, the palace said in a statement.

Ghani believes border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan was turning into point of "friendship and development" and would remain a sample of "friendship and good relationship" between the two countries, according to the statement.

On his turn, president Rahmon expressed his strong support to an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process and vowed to stay alongside Afghanistan at the regional and international meetings and support the stance of the Afghan government during the upcoming peace talks, the statement noted.

The two leaders also exchanged views on bilateral issues including economic and security cooperation, particularly fighting terrorism and narcotic drugs, the statement said. Enditem
CHICAGO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Hospital Operating Margins have plunged 96% since the start of 2020 in comparison with the first seven months of 2019, according to a new Kaufman Hall report, as uncertainty and volatility continue in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those results do not include federal funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Even with that aid, however, Operating Margins are down 28% year-to-date compared to January-July 2019.

Operating Margins fell 2% year-over-year in July without the CARES Act relief, according to the latest edition of Kaufman Hall's National Hospital Flash Report. Hospitals also saw flat year-over-year gross revenue performance in July, continued high per-patient expenses, and a fifth consecutive month of volumes falling below 2019 performance and below budget.

From June to July, however, hospital Operating Margins were up 24%, likely due to a backlog in demand resulting from the shutdown of many non-urgent services in the early months of the pandemic.

"COVID-19 has created a highly volatile operating environment for our nation's hospitals and health systems," said Jim Blake, managing director, Kaufman Hall. "Hospitals have shown some incremental signs of potential financial recovery in recent months. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee these trends will continue, and hospitals still have a long way to go to recover from devastating losses in the early months of the pandemic."

July volumes continued to fall year-over-year, but showed some signs of potential recovery month-over-month. Adjusted Discharges were down 7% compared to July 2019, but up 6% compared to June 2020. Adjusted Patient Days were down 4% year-over-year, but up 7% month-over-month. Adjusted Discharges are down 13% and Adjusted Patient Days are down 11% since the start of 2020, compared to the first seven months of 2019.

Hospital Emergency Department (ED) volumes have been hardest hit, falling 17% year-to-date compared to the same period in 2019, down 17% year-over-year, and 13% below budget in July. Surgery volumes saw some gains with the continued resumption of non-urgent procedures pushing Operating Room Minutes up 3% month-over-month and 4% above budget in July, but they remain down 15% year-to-date.

Not including CARES Act relief, Gross Operating Revenues were essentially flat year-over-year and 2% below budget for the month, but have fallen 8% year-to-date compared to the same period in 2019. Inpatient Revenue is down 5% year-to-date and fell 3% below budget in July, but increased 1% year-over-year. Outpatient Revenue is down 11% year-to-date, 1% year-over-year, and 2% below budget.

Hospitals nationwide also continued to see higher per-patient expenses despite having fewer patients. Total Expense per Adjusted Discharge has jumped 16% year-to-date compared to the same seven-month period in 2019, and rose 9% year-over-year and 5% above budget in July. Labor Expense per Adjusted Discharge is up 18% year-to-date and rose 9% year-over-year and 5% above budget in July. Non-Labor Expense per Adjusted Discharge has increased 15% during the first seven months of 2020 and jumped 11% year-over-year and was 5% above budget for the month.

The National Hospital Flash Report draws on data from more than 800 hospitals.

Kaufman Hall experts are available for comment; please contact Philip Anast at [email protected].

About Kaufman Hall

Kaufman Hall provides management consulting solutions to help society's foundational institutions realize sustained success amid changing market conditions. Since 1985, Kaufman Hall has been a trusted advisor to boards and executive management teams, helping them incorporate proven methods, rigorous analytics and industry-leading solutions into their strategic planning and financial management processes, with a focus on achieving their most challenging goals.

Kaufman Hall services use a rigorous, disciplined, and structured approach that is based on the principles of corporate finance. The breadth and integration of Kaufman Hall advisory services are unparalleled, encompassing strategy; financial and capital planning; cost transformation; treasury and capital markets management; and mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and joint ventures.

Press Contact:

Philip Anast

Amendola Communications (for Kaufman Hall)

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 312-576-6990

SOURCE Kaufman Hall
FILE PHOTO: Takeda Pharmaceutical's logo is seen at its headquarters in Tokyo

By Junko Fujita

TOKYO (Reuters) - Takeda Pharmaceutical Co <4502.T> said on Monday it would sell its Japanese consumer healthcare business to U.S. buyout fund Blackstone Group <BX.N>, as it aims to focus on developing drugs for unmet medical needs and rare diseases.

Japan's largest pharmaceuticals company has been selling

its over-the-counter (OTC) assets worldwide as it seeks to refocus its business and reduce debt following a $59 billion acquisition of Shire Plc last year.

Takeda CEO Christophe Weber said via an online briefing the company had decided to sell the Japanese OTC unit because it would be difficult for Takeda to keep investing in OTC businesses while trying to develop new drugs for more serious diseases.

"My responsibility is to make sure that we don't destroy value (for OTC businesses) but create value, and to create value we need to grow businesses and it's not good to keep business and not invest sufficiently into that," said Weber.

Takeda Consumer Healthcare Company, known for its Alinamin line of energy drinks, is valued at 242 billion yen ($2.29 billion) and the sale price will be determined after calculating its debt and other factors, Takeda said.

Blackstone was among the final bidders for the OTC unit, Reuters reported in June, along with Bain Capital, CVC Capital Partners and Taisho Pharmaceutical Holdings Co Ltd <4581.T>.

Takeda said proceeds from the sale would boost its net profit by 105 billion yen. The transaction is expected close by March 31, subject to regulatory closing conditions, it said.

Blackstone said in a statement the acquisition of Takeda's OTC unit would be its second in Japan, following the acquisition of Ayumi Pharmaceutical Corp, a maker of anti-rheumatism drugs, in March 2019 in an deal worth $1 billion.

(Reporting by Junko Fujita and Chris Gallagher; editing by David Goodman and David Evans)
Following a series of damaging thunderstorms that swept through Massachusetts over the weekend, more strong to severe storms are in the forecast both Monday and Tuesday.

The weather is expected to be very warm and humid, with high temperatures in the upper 80s and lower 90s across the state Monday, according to the National Weather Service.

Potentially damaging thunderstorms, similar in intensity to Sundays, will develop after 2 or 3 p.m. and last until roughly 8 p.m. Heavy wind gusts, isolated large hail, torrential rainfall and brief street flooding is possible.

Dangerous cloud-to-ground lightning will be possible with any of the thunderstorms this afternoon and early this evening, the National Weather Service said. Those with outdoor plans should keep an eye to the sky and prepare to seek an indoor shelter if threatening weather approaches.

While there is a potential for intense thunderstorms across most of southern New England on Monday, the greatest threat of serious storms is near and south of the Massachusetts Turnpike, according to forecasters.

A hazardous weather outlook has been issued for Berkshire County, where there is a marginal risk of intense thunderstorms, though the National Weather Service is warning of severe weather throughout the commonwealth.

In fact, most of the available guidance seems to point to an area from Amherst to Worcester to Norwood southward to Hartford-Providence/Warwick vicinity to Plymouth as having the best shot at storms today, with lesser chances elsewhere (excluding dry Cape Cod), the National Weather Service said.

Any leftover storms should weaken or move offshore by Monday night.

On Tuesday, there may be even more widespread thunderstorms. There is a slight risk that a cold front will bring a severe storm system to the state with gusty winds and hail possible.

While there are some uncertainties and limiting factors, Tuesday still continues to look quite active, the National Weather Service said. The very warm and humid conditions presently across Southern New England will continue to exist ahead of a powerful cold front.

Communities across Massachusetts on Sunday were battered by thunderstorms that downed trees and power lines, caused widespread power outages, sparked a lightning fire at a Springfield home and flooded roadways in Worcester.

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I snuck through the parking lot to get to the back of the crowd of paid extras, Sheryl wrote. I managed to worm my way through to the front of the crowd to be in the film. They did several takes and I only stayed for two of them but if I play the credits in slow motion I can briefly see me cheering in the one cut that they used.
Meeting marks 75th anniversary of August Revolution

Chairwoman of the National Assembly Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan attended a ceremony held at the NA House on August 19 to mark the 75th anniversaries of the Tan Trao National Congress (August 16), the August Revolution (August 19), and National Day (September 2).

Tan Trao, known as the cradle of Vietnams revolution, was once the home of President Ho Chi Minh and Party agencies in the period before the success of the August Revolution in the resistance war against French colonialists.

On September 2, 1945, at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, President Ho Chi Minh delivered the Declaration of Independence giving birth to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

As part of the meeting, the delegates watched a documentary that reconstructs the atmosphere of September 2, 1945 and underlines the significance of the Independence Day.

A number of cultural events were also held across the country to mark the 75th anniversary of the August Revolution and National Day.

NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan attend fifth World Conference of Speakers of Parliament





NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan attend fifth World Conference of Speakers of Parliament (Photo credit: Hoang Quynh)

National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan on August 19 attended the virtual fifth World Conference of Speakers of Parliament, which was held from August 19-20 under the theme of the leadership of parliaments in realising multilateralism more effectively.

The conference, held by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the United Nations, and the Austrian Parliament, adopted the Declaration on Parliamentary leadership for more effective multilateralism that delivers peace and sustainable development for the people and planet.

On the first working day of the conference, Vietnamese National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan delivered a speech on Stepping up parliamentary action: climate change urgency. She agreed that climate change has become ever more urgent, particularly as the world is being severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vietnam among top 16 most successful emerging economies in the world

A new study shows that Vietnam is in the top 16 most successful emerging economies in the world, with many prospects to narrow the gap with developed countries amidst the COVID-19 epidemic, according to The Economist.

In a recent article, The Economist said this awful year could, paradoxically, be a good one for what economists call convergence. This normally takes place when poor economies grow faster than rich ones, narrowing the income gap between them. Few emerging markets will grow at all  perhaps China, Egypt and Vietnam. But because advanced economies will probably retreat even faster, the gap between them will narrow.

Based on the productivity performance of 97 economies since 2000, the World Bank has identified five clubs. The three gloomiest groups comprise fairly poor countries. A fourth contains some big ones with unfulfilled potential, such as Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa.

The most successful club spans all of todays advanced economies as well as 16 emerging markets, including China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Poorer members tend to grow faster than the rich ones, at a pace that would halve the productivity gap between them every 48 years.

Vietnamese team bag six medals at 13th Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad

The Vietnamese team participating in the 13th Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad.

All six members of the Vietnamese team competing at the 13th Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad (APIO) 2020 on line have won medals, the Ministry of Education and Training said on August 22, citing sources from the events host Indonesia.

The team brought home one gold, four silver and a bronze medals, ranking sixth in the event, after China, Russia, Iran, the Republic of Korea and Japan.

Vietnam is among 10 teams winning gold at the competition.

In the previous event, Vietnam won seven silver medals.

568 COVID-19 patients in Vietnam fully recovered as of August 24 morning

As many as 568 of the total number of COVID-19 patients in Vietnam have fully recovered as of August 24 morning, according to the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control.

The countrys total COVID-19 cases were reported at 1,016, including 674 community infections. There are 534 cases linked to outbreaks in Da Nang since July 25.

Among the active patients, 39 have tested for SARS-CoV-2 once, 49 twice and 28 three times. There have been 27 fatalities so far.

A total of 70,620 people who had close contact with COVID-19 patients and came from pandemic-hit areas are under quarantine nationwide.

Vietnam wins golden trophy in volleyball at Army Games 2020

Vietnam's military engineering unit at the Army Games 2020.

The Vietnam Peoples Army (VPA) delegation won their first golden trophy at the Army Games 2020 in Russia after overcoming the Uzbekistani team 2-0 in the final match of the amateur volleyball tournament on August 14 (local time).

The event, open to engineering units, was the first sideline activity of the Safe Route competition within the framework of the Army Games in Kstovo.

Four participating teams were divided into two groups for the preliminary round, with Vietnam beating hosts Russia 2-0 to set up a title match with Uzbekistan, who defeated Belarus. In the final, agility, good jumping power and especially teamwork helped the Vietnamese military engineers finish off the opponents to lift the golden trophy.

The golden volleyball trophy will be presented during the closing ceremony of the Army Games 2020 on September 5, together with other important awards.

Make in Vietnam digital technology product awards 2020 launched

The Make in Vietnam digital technology products 2020 award, the first of its kind in Vietnam, was launched by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) in Hanoi on August 19.

The awards will cover five categories including excellent digital foundation, excellent digital products, outstanding digital solutions, the narrowing of the digital gap, and potential digital products.

All enterprises operating in Vietnam can apply for the awards from August 20 to October 20, 2020, through the online address makeinvietnam.mic.gov.vn.

The award is expected to encourage digital technology enterprises to research and create digital technology products and honour outstanding products with contributions to the development of the e-government, digital economy and digital society in addition to promoting Make in Vietnam digital products to businesses and the people of Vietnam.

Vietnamese film wins prize at Locarno International Film Festival





Poster for A Trip to Heaven by director Duong Dieu Linh

Thien Duong Goi Ten (A Trip to Heaven), a film by young Vietnamese director Duong Dieu Linh, has won a prize at the 2020 Locarno International Film Festival which was held in Switzerland from August 5 to 15.

The 15-minute Vietnamese film was presented with the Medien Patent Verwaltung AG Prize of the festivals Pardi di doman category, which honours best international short films.

The category saw the competition of 43 entries, including two other Vietnamese films, namely An Act of Affection by Viet Vu, and The Unseen River by Pham Ngoc Lan.

A Trip to Heaven tells the story of 50-year-old woman named Tam, who bumps into her high school sweetheart on a tour bus to the Mekong Delta. Tam was hopeful for a chance of reconciliation, but maybe he was not.

Vietnamese painter wins awards for promoting intangible cultural heritage

Vietnamese painter Vu Duc Hieu, director of the Muong Cultural Space Museum, has won the 2020 Jeonju International Award for Promoting Intangible Cultural Heritage (JIAPICH).

Hieu and the two other finalists, namely Impacto, a non-governmental organisation founded in Mexico; and Asama, a non-profit organisation in Burkina Faso, stood apart from thirty-nine applicants from 27 countries on six continents.

According to the organising board, the activities of Vu Duc Hieus Museum of Muong Cultural Space could be considered as model activities for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage of minority people, resulting in assisting minority groups to affirm their cultural identity and promoting the establishment of the harmonious cultural diversity of the nation.
YEREVAN.  Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan arrived a while ago at the headquarters of the ruling Civil Contract Party, but this time as well he did not wish to answer the journalists' questions. He just said that he had interacted with the journalists during his last press conference.

Before that, Lilit Makunts, the head of the majority My Step faction in parliament, told reporters that this was the PMs regular meeting with the faction. "Of course, agenda topics will be discussed, I believe. The agenda [of this meeting] will be formed on the spot. No agenda was formed in advance," she said.

As reported earlier, the My Step faction is currently holding a meeting at the headquarters of the Civil Contract Party, and PM Nikol Pashinyan is also in attendance.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 15:29:03|Editor: huaxia

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DHAKA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh's foreign exchange reserves hit an all-time high of 38.33 billion U.S. dollars, central bank's latest data showed.

According to the provisional Bangladesh Bank (BB) data, the country's foreign exchange reserves stood at 38,334.84 million U.S. dollars as of Aug. 19 after reaching 37,288.20 million U.S. dollars last month.

An official of the BB's Forex Reserve and the Treasury Management Department said this is the highest level of forex reserves Bangladesh has ever held.

He said Bangladesh's foreign exchange reserves crossed the 37-billion-U.S. dollar mark last month amid a boom in inflow of remittances ahead of Muslim Eid al-Adha festival.

According to the official, slump in import bills due to COVID-19 that made businesses in the country sluggish in the recent months has also immensely contributed to the robust rise in reserves.

The BB data showed that millions of Bangladeshis living and working abroad sent home 2.6 billion U.S. dollars in remittances in July, a new monthly record.

Experts said the current reserve level is good enough to support Bangladesh's resilience to external odds, as well as to maintain macroeconomic stability in light of the unabated COVID-19 outbreak.

According to the figures reported by the Directorate General of Health Services under the country's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Sunday, the number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in Bangladesh totaled nearly 300,000, while fatalities stood at 3,941. Enditem
(Newser)  Confirmed COVID-19 cases are slowly emerging from a massive motorbike rally in South Dakota, CNN reports. Nebraska has tied seven cases to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, while Minnesota has 15, including one hospitalization. And the Washington Post reports that South Dakota health officialswho have traced a case to a Sturgis barannounced that an employee at the tattoo shop in the same bar has also tested positive. Yet South Dakota has linked fewer than 25 infections to the rally so far. Benjamin Aaker, head of the South Dakota State Medical Association, says little is known because most people who get infected won't be tested or properly contact-traced back to the event.

story continues below

"I don't know that they'll be able to contact-trace very well," he says. "And that's one of the big problems that we will be experiencing the next 10 to 14 days." South Dakota's coronavirus dashboard shows a sharp uptick in cases in Meade County, where Sturgis resides, but daily numbers remain low. The Rapid City Journal reports that Meade saw a dozen new cases Sunday amid a 25.5% positive rate; that's double the state's "relatively high" positive rate of 12.4%, per CovidActNow. Health officials expressed alarm that the rallywhere 462,000 vehicles were logged entering Sturgis from Aug. 7-16could become a "super spreader" event, in part because many attendees ignored social distancing and didn't wear masks. (Read about a Smash Mouth concert at the rally.)
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) yesterday announced a total crude oil and gas export receipt of $378.42 million in June 2020 as against $133.16 million it posted in May this year.

The corporation said that this signalled a marked improvement in revenue earnings, apparently following the easing of the COVID-19 pandemic global lockdown and the subsequent increased demand and firmer prices for crude oil in the international market.

In a release by its group general manager, Group Public Affairs Division, Dr Kennie Obateru, the NNPC stated that petroleum receipts for the month reflected crude oil earnings of $230.65 million, with gas and miscellaneous proceeds standing at $75.97 million and $71.80 million respectively.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has disclosed that

the nation's total crude oil and gas export receipts for the one year

period June 2019 to June 2020 was $4.60 billion.

Similarly, the Corporation revealed that earnings from both products

for the month of June 2020 stood at $378.42 million as against $133.16

million it posted in May 2020.

A breakdown of the receipt for the month show crude oil earnings of

$230.65 million, with gas and miscellaneous proceeds standing at

$75.97 million and $71.80 million, respectively.

The release further explained that details of the earnings were contained in the June 2020 Monthly Financial and Operations Report (MFOR) of NNPC, the NNPC monthly report which is the 59th edition in the series.

The report put the total crude oil and gas export receipts for the period June 2019 to June 2020 at $4.60 billion.

The report also revealed that the in order to ensure continuous supply and effective distribution of petroleum products across the country in June, 2020, 1.34 billion litres of white products were distributed and sold by NNPC's Downstream subsidiary, the Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC). It explained that the figure was significantly higher than the 950.67 million litres of white products sold and distributed in May 2020, again an apparent reflection of the gradual ease of the lockdown in the Country and the picking up of business activities.

According to the report, the June 2020 figures indicated that over 1.3 billion litres of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), 5.10 million litres of Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) and 1.65 million litres of Dual Purpose Kerosene (DPK) were sold and distributed during the period.

White products sale for the period June 2019 to June 2020, the report

disclosed, stood at over 19.104 billion litres, with PMS accounting

for over 18.9 billion litres or 99.36 per cent.

In monetary value terms, the above volumes translated to a total sale

of 134.22 billion of white products by PPMC in June 2020, compared to

92.58 billion sales in May, 2020.

Total revenues recorded from the sales of white products for the

period June 2019 to June 2020 stood at over 2.267 trillion, where PMS

contributed about 99.12 per cent of the total sales with a value of

over 2.247 trillion.

During the month under review, 33 pipeline points were vandalized

representing about 11 per cent decrease from the 37 points recorded in

May 2020.

Mosimi-Ibadan accounted for 33 per cent, while Atlas Cove-Mosimi and

Warri-River Niger recorded 27 per cent of the breaks each; other

locations made up for the remaining 13 per cent.

The NNPC monthly Financial and Operations Report for June, 2020

explained that in collaboration with the local communities and other

stakeholders, the corporation would continuously strive to rein in on

the incidences of pipeline breaches across the Country.

Close Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox Top Headlines Nigeria Petroleum By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy. Success! Almost finished... We need to confirm your email address. To complete the process, please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you. Error! Error! There was a problem processing your submission. Please try again later.

In the Gas sector, out of the 232.03billion Cubic Feet of gas (BCF)

supplied in June 2020, 148.66BCF of gas was commercialized; consisting

of 34.64BCF and 114.01BCF for the domestic and export market,

respectively.

This, the report explains, translates to a total supply of 1,154.78million Standard Cubic Feet of gas per day (mmscfd) to the

domestic market and 3,800.45mmscfd of gas supplied to the export market for the month, implying 64.07 per cent of the average daily gas

produced was commercialized, while the balance of 35.93 per cent was

re-injected, used as Upstream fuel gas or flared.

The NNPC report stated that gas flare rate for June 2020 stood at 6.11

per cent, that is: 472.94mmscfd, compared with average Gas flare rate

of 7.84 per cent, equivalent of 611.73mmscfd for the period June 2019

to June 2020.
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Linkedin Ardila Syakriah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 18:49 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c40196b5 1 National AGO-building-fire,AGO,Attorney-General,Attorney-General-Office,fire,Jakarta-police,mahfud-md,Jakarta-administration,kebakaran,kejaksaan-agung Free

Authorities have launched an investigation into the cause of a fire that ravaged the main building of the Attorney Generals Office (AGO) in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta, and are set to question at least 15 witnesses, according to the Jakarta Police.

The witnesses include building security officers, construction workers and AGO staff.

We will use their information later as investigation material and also for the examination by the forensics team, Jakarta Police general crimes unit director Sr. Comr. Tubagus Ade Hidayat said on Sunday, as quoted by kompas.com.

He added that a joint team from the National Polices forensic laboratory and those handling the Indonesia Automatic Fingerprint Identification System had been deployed to the location.

The fire broke out on the sixth floor of the building before quickly engulfing the entire structure, including the intelligence office and the office of Pinangki Sirna Malasari, a prosecutor who was recently in the spotlight following meetings with graft convict Djoko Soegiarto Tjandra.

This has led some to suspect the fire may be linked to ongoing AGO investigations.

Read also: Graft suspect's office destroyed in AGO blaze

Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Mahfud MD, however, asked the public to refrain from speculation about the cause of the fire.

Just keep an eye [on the case] together, theres no need to speculate this was done to protect this or that [person], he said at a press conference on Sunday night.

Mahfud said all case files were safe and vowed the government would be transparent with regard to this incident.

Meanwhile, AGO spokesman Hari Setiyono said that the AGO would coordinate with Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan regarding the renovation of the destroyed building.

The renovation, of course, must be in accordance with regional regulations, as stipulated by the Jakarta governor regarding cultural heritage sites, he said.

Separately, the Jakarta Culture and Tourism Agencys cultural protection division head, Norviadi Setio Husodo, explained that, while the AGO building had not been officially classified as a cultural heritage site, it was located in a designated cultural restoration area and was in the process of becoming an official heritage site.

Therefore, it is treated as a cultural heritage site, he said. (syk)
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State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) on Monday said its board will meet on September 1 to consider raising funds of up to Rs 45,000 crore.

The board will also consider and approve the company's financial results for the June quarter on the said date, ONGC said in a BSE filing.

It will consider raising of funds "by way of availing Bank loan(s) and/ or issue of debt instruments (including bonds, NCDs and notes) in domestic and/or overseas market including drawdown(s) under Euro Medium Term Note (EMTN) programs not exceeding Rs 35,000 crore," it said.

It will take a call on "establishing and/or extending EMTN (European Medium Term Note programme) program of the company not exceeding $2 billion, out of the limit of Rs 35,000 crore (mentioned above)...subject to applicable laws, the filing added.

The board will also decide on availing loan not exceeding Rs 10,000 crore against bank term deposit.
The Monday sought response of the on a plea by a Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) university student, who was arrested in a case related to communal violence in northeast Delhi during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in February, seeking inquiry against officials for leaking information to the media.

Justice Vibhu Bakhru also asked two media houses and two social media platforms to respond to the plea which also sought direction to take down the sensitive/confidential information leaked to them by the officials of

The high court, which listed the matter for further hearing on September 11, however, refused to pass an ex-parte order directing the media houses, Zee News and OpIndia and social networking platforms Facebook and YouTube to remove the content.

The high court said it will pass necessary orders after hearing all the parties.

I agree it is not an acceptable behaviour of some officer has done this and advocate Rajat Nair (representing Delhi Police) will agree with it, the judge remarked.

The high court was hearing the plea by JMI student Asif Iqbal Tanha alleging misconduct by police officials in leaking his disclosure statement, recorded by the probe agency during the investigation, to the media.

Advocate Siddharth Aggarwal, appearing for Tanha, argued that his bail plea was being considered by the trial court and the timing of publication of articles in the media was such that it was not only prejudicing the public mind but also the trained mind which was hearing the bail application.

Special Public Prosecutor Rajat Nair, representing the Delhi government and Delhi Police, sought time to seek instructions on the issue.

The petition said Tanha was aggrieved by various publications reporting that he has confessed to orchestrating the Delhi riots and alleged that he was coerced to sign certain papers in the effective custody of police.

It said this information does not have any evidentiary value and alleged that the officials, with malafide intention, leaked the statements to the media to prejudice his case.

The high court was informed that the charge sheet has not yet been filed in the case.

Tanha, who was arrested in May, is currently lodged in judicial custody in the Delhi riots case.

Tanha, a third-year student of BA in Persian language, was earlier arrested in connection with the violence in the Jamia area during a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December last year.

The police had said that Tanha, a resident of Abul Fazal Enclave in Shaheen Bagh, was a member of the Students Islamic Organization and was part of the Jamia Coordination Committee which spearheaded protests against the new citizenship law.

"Tanha is a key member of the Jamia Coordination Committee and played an active role in organising protests and riots in Jamia in December 2019. He is a close associate of Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar who had been key organisers of anti-CAA protests and subsequent riots," the police had said.

On December 15 last year, protesters had turned violent, torching four public buses and two police vehicles and pelting stones at the police and civilians, near JMI. At least 40 people including students, policemen and fire fighters were injured in the incident.

Communal clashes had broken out in northeast Delhi on February 24 after violence between citizenship law supporters and protesters spiralled out of control leaving at least 53 people dead and around 200 injured.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 24

By Elnur Baghishov  Trend:

About 6.7 trillion rials (about $159 million) has been paid to wheat farmers in Irans Markazi Province from May 30 to August 24, 2020, said Gholamreza Maleki, director for Government Trading Corporation (GTC) of Irans branch in Markazi Province, Trend reports citing the corporations website.

Maleki noted that so far, more than 320,000 tons of wheat worth 8.2 trillion rials (about $195 million) has been purchased from farmers in the Markazi Province.

He added that the purchase of wheat in the province will continue until the end of 5th month of current Iranian year (September 21).

The director general emphasized that a total of 400,000 tons of wheat was expected to be purchased.

Maleki said that the capacity of the province's grain warehouses was 200,000 tons seven years ago (the current government of Iran has been in power since 2013). However, at present, the capacity of grain warehouses in the province amounts 800,000 tons.

The price of ordinary wheat to be purchased from farmers in the current planting year is set at 25,000 rials (about 59 cents), and of durum wheat - at 26,000 rials (about 61 cents) per kilogram in the current Iranian year (began March 20, 2020). The price of rapeseed is set at 46,600 rials (about $1.1) per kilogram.

A number of products, including wheat, tea, rice and other products are purchased from farmers by a state company under a guarantee in Iran.
Upper Darby Council approved an ordinance decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.

The ordinance, passed at the council meeting last Wednesday, changes penalties for possessing 30 grams or less of marijuana and 8 grams or less of hashish or marijuana paraphernalia to a summary citation, rather than incarceration. Hashish is an extract resin of the cannabis plant that is smoked.

Its a long time coming. It has been a big issue, especially for people of color, said Michelle Billups, one of the council members who pushed for the change. I believe our police can use their resources on more serious matters.

The amount of marijuana is small, 30 grams or less, and that is very small, said Billups. It doesnt take away from anything that is on the books in Pennsylvania. Of course if someone is driving under the influence, our ordinance does not take precedence. I think that was one of the things people didnt understand. 

It was a historic event last night. Im proud of it, Billups said, a Democrat who was elected as council-at-large in 2019.

It led to a lot of black and brown people being incarcerated, said Seventh District Councilman Hafiz Tunis Jr., who was appointed to council unanimously in February. It will give people a chance in Upper Darby and not just limit them. Im actually grateful the administration was very responsive.

A number of other local governments, including Norristown, Lancaster, York, Bethlehem, and Harrisburg, have enact similar reforms on handling non-violent drug offenses.

Hafiz credited Police Superintendent Tim Bernhardt for backing the ordinance.

Its going to help law enforcement with the community, especially the youth, said Bernhardt. The problems that it (arrests) cause for youth moving forward  they are endless.

Bernhardt said marijuana arrests of young people puts them into the criminal system, leading to bail, having a criminal record, losing their drivers licenses and following them through their lives.

This is another tool we can use and someone is still held responsible if they do have marijuana on them, Bernhardt said.

In the past, for simple possession (anything under 30 grams of marijuana) you were arrested, and a criminal complaint was filed. You would go before a judge and bail may be set. You could spend up to 90 days in jail and have $500-$1000 in fines, lose your drivers license and it follows you. You have a criminal record.

Now none of that is applicable. It doesnt supersede. We can still charge the way we did in the past. It is another tool we have. Its a summary offense like a traffic or disorderly conduct. The judge still has the right to make the scale on the fine. He could make it $50 or offer you community service, Bernhardt said. Its a win-win for everybody and will help law enforcement dealing with the community instead of bringing them back and putting them into the system.

Bernhardt said the ordinance was not for someone carrying amounts with intent to deal. He said it was for someone in possession of a small amount such as a blunt, or a joint or marijuana laced brownie or gummy bears. That is what the ordinance would be used for and officers have discretion to charge.

Bernhardt said he has spoken police commanders in Philadelphia who are in favor of the concept.

It frees up the officers and allows them more time on the street, Bernhardt said. You take an officer who makes an arrest in the past for simple possession  they have to bring them back, do the paperwork, they could be two to three hours start to finish, doing the paperwork, processing the individual, then putting the prisoner in the holding cell waiting for a judge. This way, it can be issued right on the scene or they can do it at the end of their shift and send it via mail.

I thank all township council members for taking this first step on marijuana laws in our township. Decriminalization of marijuana not only makes us safer by freeing up local police and court system resources, but more importantly, it helps to halt the continuous cycle of mass incarceration that disproportionately affects black and brown residents, said Mayor Barbarann Keffer.

Keffer said her administration remains fully committed to identifying and reforming policies that perpetuate economic hardship and promote institutional racism, unnecessary mass incarceration being one of them.

No person, of any age or race, should have their life ruined and or be trapped in the criminal justice system because of these types of incidents, Keffer said.

Tunis said they highlighted how it affected the entire township and the vote in favor was bipartisan.

It will help the community, not hurt, Tunis said.
Playa del Carmen police detain 8 found with drugs, weapons, gear

Playa del Carmen, Q.R.  A group of eight youths were arrested after being found with hundreds of packages of drugs as well as firearms, communication radios and bulletproof vests.

Playa del Carmen police made the arrests in the irregular settlement of InHouse in the citys far west after seeing one of the now detained aboard a vehicle with a firearm. On Saturday, surveying police saw three people aboard a white Dodge, one of whom appeared to have a gun.

Upon being stopped, the trio fled on foot, making their way toward a home in the InHouse settlement where they were intercepted by police. Municipal Police say upon inspection, the suspected firearm was a BB gun, however, their search of the vehicle revealed 177 street doses of crack and 50 bags of marijuana along with four communication radios and two bulletproof vests.

Five males and 3 females were arrested on drug and firearm charges in Playa del Carmen

Police also noted that inside the house where the subjects were about to enter, there were three bags on a table that, once reviewed, contained 52, 92 and 60 bags of marijuana respectively. For this reason, the five subjects in the home were also insured.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Famed chef and restaurateur David Burke delivered an impassioned speech at a rally on Saturday afternoon in front of City Hall. The tenor of his words: Open dining rooms or New York City will lose its once vibrant restaurant industry.

Addressing the crowd in a chef coat, Burke said, When I decided to be a chef in the 70s, the place to be was New York. The place to learn was New York...New York had the best of everything...and you came here to earn your stripes, said Burke. Now, the city and restaurant business is dying, he said.
Democrats concede nothing to President Trump and his reversal of Obama foreign policy in critical matters involving Russia, China, and Iran. They seek a return, for example, to the putative alliance of the United States with the enemies of the United States in the Iranian mullahcracy. Obama Secretary of State John Kerry helped deliver the disgraceful nuclear agreement that resulted in our funding the Iranian regime and placing it on the path to full membership in the nuclear club. How stupid can you get? Even Neville Chamberlain didnt think to load Adolf Hitler up with cash under the Munich Agreement. Yet Kerry now awaits the restoration.

Triggered by Kerrys speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, David Harsanyi reviews the excruciating history in History Keeps Proving John Kerry Wrong. Analyze this:

It took approximately 20 seconds for former Secretary of State John Kerry to drop the first flagrant lie in his Democratic National Convention speech on Tuesday, when he claimed that the Obama administrations so-called Iran deal had eliminated the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon. It didnt get any better from there. Kerry knows well that sunset provisions in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action provided Irans government with a pathway to building nuclear weapons in a few years. He knows well that Israel uncovered a giant cache of documents with instructions on how to jumpstart a program to build a nuclear arsenal, which undermined both the spirit and the rationale of the nonproliferation agreement Iran signed. He knows that Iran was developing ballistic-missile programs meant to deliver nuclear weapons. Kerrys big accomplishment was to destroy a sanctions program that was working, thereby saving the Islamic Republic from economic ruin. This allowed the Islamist government to strengthen its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen and Iraq. Now, Kerry says Trump doesnt know how to defend the troops? Well, Im not sure that the man who oversaw the billions in direct cash payments to a government that had a hand in murdering and maiming hundreds of American troops has the moral authority to level that criticism. Kerry himself acknowledged that sanctions relief would likely end up in the coffers of Irans Revolutionary Guard  now a designated terror group. Surely, then, he knew that the pallets of euros and Swiss francs he was shipping to Tehran in an unmarked cargo plane would also find their way to the groups triggering conflicts across the Middle East  not to mention subjugating people at home.

Harsanyi has more and the whole thing is here.
MBABANE  ACAESWA donated a pair of school shoes to the Ministry of Education and Training through the Minister of Sports, Culture and Youth Affairs on Friday.

ACAESWA stands for Association of Christian Artists in Eswatini. Sharing the donation on behalf of the association was Minister Harries Madze Bulunga, who handed it over to the Minister of Education and Training, Lady Mabuza, at a press briefing held at Lilunga House. At the press briefing, ACAESWA President Phetsile Masilela said the donation, which was a collective effort from local gospel artists, sought to assist the government during the COVID-19 pandemic. She revealed that the 100 shoes donated were received from Toughees and Bata Group in South Africa, who are distributors of school shoes in Africa. We have targeted the donation of 500 pairs before the end of October and we would also like to appeal to other organisations, which may be able to assist to make donations of any form, she said.

Artists

Stanley Dlamini, who is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for the Eswatini National Council of Arts and Culture (ENCAC),took the opportunity to thank the local gospel artists for their kind heartedness. ENCAC is the governing body for associations for the arts in the country. The CEO highlighted that although the arts sector had been affected greatly by the pandemic, they did not neglect helping the less privileged. Minister Bulunga applauded the selflessness shown by the gospel artists.

We are here to pass on the gift from ACAESWA to our sister ministry and it is a commendable spirit that they started this campaign at a time like this, he said. He mentioned that the arts and education sectors joined hands for this good cause through the ACAESWA Keep a Child Warm campaign. The minister further quoted a bible verse from the book of Proverbs 19:17, which highlights that giving to the poor is lending to the Lord and they would receive a great reward.

Donation

Education and Training Minister Mabuza thankfully received the donation and acknowledged the gesture shown by the local gospel artists in ensuring the wellbeing of the less privileged children. We will make sure that the donation gets to its destination through career guidance and counselling departments placed in the schools, she said. She highlighted that it was touching that an equally struggling sector would see the opportunity to lend a helping hand.
There are nine new cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand today.

Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield has provided an update this afternoon.

The new cases are made up of eight confirmed cases, and one probable case.

One of the cases was picked up in a managed isolation facility at routine testing on day 12.

The imported case is a woman in her 30s.

Information about where she travelled from has not yet been made available.

The other eight cases of Covid-19 are in the community, and have been epidemiologically linked to the Auckland cluster.

Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield says one case has been linked to bus travel, one at a church and two in a workplace.

There are currently 132 active cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand, with 19 of these being imported cases.

The total number of confirmed cases in New Zealand is 1332.

Ashley says there are 10 people in hospital with Covid-19 and two people in intensive care.

There have been 151 people who are linked to the Auckland cluster moved to quarantine facilities.

There were 4589 tests completed yesterday, and almost 100,000 tests have been processed in the past seven days.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is expected to announce the alert level decision at 3pm this afternoon.

Earlier: Yesterday there were three new cases of Covid-19 reported in New Zealand with just one linked to the Auckland community cluster.

The Ministry of Health says the case is epidemiologically linked to the cluster and is a household contact of a previously reported case.

The two other cases are in managed isolation.

They consist of a woman in her 20s who arrived in New Zealand on August 16 from Croatia via Switzerland and Hong Kong.

She was in managed isolation at the Sudima in Rotorua and has now been transferred to the Jet Park Hotel in Auckland after her positive test.

The second case is a person in their 30s who was staying at the Grand Millennium in Auckland and tested positive around day 12 of their stay.

The total number of active cases in New Zealand is now 114, with 18 of these imported cases from managed isolation facilities.

The contact tracing team has now identified 2308 close contacts of the current cluster, with 2219 having been contacted and instructed to self-isolate, says the ministry.

There are 151 people linked to the cluster that have been moved to the Auckland quarantine facility, including 89 people who tested positive for the virus.

The total number of Covid-19 cases in New Zealand is now 1324.

Nine people with the virus are currently in hospital, two people are in Auckland City Hospital, four in Middlemore and another two in North Shore Hospital.

One person is in Waikato Hospital. Six people are stable while three are in ICU at Middlemore.

"All of the cases who are in hospital are isolated and carefully managed separately from other patients," the ministry says.

On Saturday, labs processed just over 7000 Covid tests, bringing the total number of tests completed to 692,481.

Today Cabinet will decide the fate of Auckland's alert level 3 lockdown and whether level 2 restrictions across the rest of the country can be eased.

The restrictions are due to lift at midnight Wednesday and ministers are meeting this afternoon to review whether community transmission has been contained.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister of Health Chris Hipkins will announce Cabinet's decision at 3pm today.
Suspected hare coursers gained access to a field in Dorset and ran over six sheep with a vehicle, police have said.

Officers from Dorset Police Rural Crime Team have asked the public for information following the 'horrendous' crime.

Speaking on social media, the team accused hare coursers of 'purposely driving on fields and mowing ewes and lambs down'.

The incident occurred in the Sixpenny Handley area between 8pm on Friday 21 August and 8am the following day.

North Dorset MP Simon Hoare reacted to the news, calling the perpetrators 'scum'.

"Terrible. What scum would even think to do something like this and in my constituency too," he said on Twitter.

"This wanton violence makes my blood boil."

*** WHO DID THIS?? ***

21/8 Friday overnight #SixpennyHandley #HareCoursers purposefully drove in to sheep fields & mowed ewes & lambs down, killing six, leaving tyre marks across their bodies. Any info in confidence.

Someone knows who did this.Patrols & investigation continues pic.twitter.com/8Ov6M6K94k  Dorset Police Rural & Wildlife (@RuralCrimeTeam) August 23, 2020

A spokesman for Dorset Police Rural Crime Team added: "We are asking anyone who was driving in the area at that time to review any dash cam footage and get in contact if they have any information which may assist us.

"Likewise if anyone witnessed any vehicles or persons acting suspiciously in the area please get in contact.

"If you have information please email 101@dorset.pnn.police.uk quoting reference number 55200125905."

Hare coursing has increased in recent times, leading some police forces to launch campaigns which deal solely with the crime.

New figures by NFU Mutual show the cost of rural crime in the UK reached an eight year high last year.
JAKARTA, Aug 24 (Reuters) - More than a thousand mine workers in Indonesia blocked access to the Grasberg gold and copper mine operated by the local unit of Freeport-McMoRan Inc on Monday to protest a coronavirus lockdown policy that halted bus services to meet with families.

Grasberg, the world's largest gold mine and second largest copper mine, is currently transitioning from its open pit operation to all-underground mining. The mine is expected to produce 110,000 tonnes of copper ore per day in 2020.

Riza Pratama, a spokesman for PT Freeport Indonesia, said the company was assessing conditions at the site, including the impact on mining operations.

Freeport employees began their protest in the early hours of Monday morning, and the protest was still continuing well into the afternoon, said Yonpis Tabuni, a worker representative.

"The main request from the employees is to resume the operation of staff buses so they can meet their families immediately," Pratama said, adding that Freeport restricted travel to and from the mine due to coronavirus outbreak.

Tabuni said talks had taken place, while Pratama added that the company was considering the mine workers requests.

Freeport said in May is had reduced the number of workers in operation to a "skeletal team" after a rise in coronavirus infections in the area.

"We are preparing a new working schedule that refers to the new normal," Pratama said. (Reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa, Fransiska Nangoy; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
New Delhi:

The three-MP delegation of BJP on visit to West Bengal for investigate recent communal riots was on Saturday stopped by Howrah Police in Dhulagarh.



The delegation, consisting Satyapal Singh, a Lok Sabha member and former Mumbai Police Commissioner; Jagdambika Pal, also a Lok Sabha member; and Roopa Ganguly, a Rajya Sabha member from West Bengal, reached the state earlier in the morning to look into incidents of alleged targeting of BJPs supporters and members of a particular community in the region.



BJP alleged that the minority wing of the ruling Trinamool Congress has targeted Hindus in the area in Howrah district for their support to the saffron party.



West Bengal Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi has recently enquired from the state Director General of Police Surajit Purakayastha about the law and order situation there.



Also read: 25 people injured in communal clashes in Dhulagarh, Kolkata



According to information received from the Governor's residence, Purakayastha briefed Tripathi on the matter. "The governor asked the DGP to ensure peace and law and order in the area and to take strict action against the culprits," a release issued by the Raj Bhavan said on Thursday.

Tension erupted in Dhulagarh when two groups reportedly clashed as a procession was brought out in the area last week. As per a senior officer at the Howrah Commissionerate, police had to use tear gas to bring the situation under control when the groups hurled bombs at each other.

Also read: Three member BJP parliamentary delegation to visit violence-hit Dhulagarh today

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The Delhi High Court on Monday allowed a city court to hear arguments on the framing of charges through a regular public prosecutor (PP) in a case related to the alleged assault on former chief secretary Anshu Prakash in which Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, and 11 other MLAs of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) have been named as accused.

Justice Vibhu Bakhru modified its earlier order of March 14, 2019, where it had directed the trial court to not conduct any proceedings in the matter till the lawyers issue was settled by the high court.

The court, while removing the stalemate on the proceedings from the last one-and-a-half years, directed the trial court to hear the matter, following which it was listed for 4 pm on Monday.

As far as the March 14, 2019 order is concerned, the same is modified to the extent that the trial court can proceed and hear the matter at the stage of arguments on charge, Justice Vibhu Bakhru said.

The Delhi government declined to comment on the development.

Prakash had moved the high court seeking early hearing in a case where he had alleged that he was assaulted during a meeting at the chief ministers residence on February 19, 2018.

The CM, the deputy CM, and other AAP MLAs had earlier denied any wrongdoing. The partys chief spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj has accused Prakash of making false allegations at the behest of the Union government.

In his plea, filed through advocate Stuti Gujral, Prakash had asked that the matter, which has been pending in the trial court in the arguments stage for framing of charges, be heard on the grounds that no substantive proceedings had happened in the last 18 months.

In 2018, Kejriwal and Sisodia moved the high court, challenging a trial court order allowing Prakash to have the lawyers of his choice rather than a special public prosecutor.

On Monday, senior advocate N Hari Haran and Dayan Krishnan, appearing for the CM and the Deputy CM, said they do not have any objection over the hearing to be conducted through the regular PP. He, however, sought some time from the trial court for them to prepare the case.

Justice Bakhru agreed and directed the trial court to hear the matter at 4 pm. At the trial court, N Hari Haran sought time from the judge Vishal Pahuja, who listed the matter for further hearing on September 21.

During the hearing, senior advocate Siddharth Luthra, representing Prakash, told the court that an early hearing be given in the matter at the high court. However, the court said it would not be feasible and posted the matter for further hearing on November 2.

The Delhi police had on February 20, 2018, filed a first information report (FIR) based on Prakashs complaint, in which he had alleged that he was called by the Kejriwals advisor, VK Jain, for a midnight meeting to discuss the release of the partys advertisements related to the government completing three years in Delhi.

Prakash said he was manhandled and assaulted in the course of the meeting. Police filed the case after the chief secretary was examined by a team of doctors at Ram Manohar Lohia hospital.

Police later filed a 1300-page charge sheet against 13 AAP leaders for offences, including criminal conspiracy, assaulting a public servant, threatening to cause death or grievous injury, and wrongful confinement, among other sections.

The maximum punishment in the case is seven years. On October 25, 2018, Kejriwal, Sisodia and nine other AAP MLAs were granted bail by the trial court in the assault scase.

The other two MLAs, Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, who are also accused, were earlier arrested in the case and granted bail by the high court.
In recent months, the movement has gained momentum since the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

Johnson said he is not an advocate of literally defunding police, but he would like changes in the way public safety is addressed.

What people are really saying is that if we invested more in communities, maybe we wouldnt have to fund the police the way we do now. ... Maybe we can make the polices job easier, Johnson said.

Everybody knows there are times when you need police, he said.

Black lives matter is not anti-police, said Hill. Its not even anti-policing per se. Its anti-police brutality.

Johnson said Black Lives Matter was not involved in the Greenwood Avenue street mural but wants it to remain.

Hill said the mural etches into the landscape the Black Lives Matter concept, something that is difficult for some to accept.
BAMAKO, Mali - The military junta now in charge of Mali insisted Monday that former President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita had resigned of his own free will and was not overthrown, as the officers now running the country try to prolong their rule until 2023.

While the international community has been pressing for an immediate return to civilian rule, the junta says it wants to oversee the transition for the next three years, according to those participating in the negotiations between the military leaders and neighbouring countries.

The juntas spokesman, Ismael Wague, later said that no timeline had been established for elections to return to the country to civilian rule. He maintained that Keita  who still had three years left in his final term  had not resigned because he was under pressure from mutinous soldiers.

The visiting delegation from the regional bloc, ECOWAS, had met with the 75-year-old former president, who was being held at the military barracks in Kati near the capital.

President Keita told us that he has resigned, that he was not forced to do so and that he does not want to return, said former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan on Monday. He says he wants a quick transition to allow the country return as soon as possible to a civilian regime.

To the outside world, however, last weeks political upheaval bore all the hallmarks of a coup detat. Soldiers at the Kati barracks launched a mutiny in the morning, and then began rounding up officials in Bamako. They later encircled the private residence where Keita was staying with his prime minister and fired shots into the air. The junta has maintained they took him into custody for his own protection.

Just before midnight he appeared on state broadcaster ORTM and announced his immediate resignation, and the dissolution of his government and the National Assembly. Before dawn, five military officers crowded around a table and announced their committee was now in control.

Keita, who had won the 2013 democratic election in a landslide, was re-elected five years later. His popularity plummeted though as his government failed to rein in Islamic extremist in the north and the military faced punishing losses from the jihadists. Others pointed to his use of a private jet and his sons influential position in the National Assembly as signs he was out of touch with a suffering nation.

An official who spoke on condition of anonymity Monday told The Associated Press that coup leaders said during the negotiations that they first want to draft a new constitution before holding elections. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to journalists.

That proposal will likely be rejected by West African regional mediators and former colonizer France: Its more than double the time it took to hold a vote after a similar coup in 2012, and would allow the soldiers who overthrew a democratically elected president to remain in power for years.

The ECOWAS mediators initially had called for Keita to be reinstalled as president, but that prospect has become unlikely amid an outpouring of public support in Mali for the coup detat. Thousands took to the streets on Friday in a show of support for the juntas leadership.

African countries and the wider international community have expressed fears the upheaval could allow Islamic extremist to extend their reach. Mali has been fighting against Islamic extremists with heavy international support for more than seven years, and jihadists have previously used power vacuums in the country to expand their territory.

Demonstrators had begun taking to the streets to call for Keitas resignation back in June. He offered concessions and regional mediators intervened, but his opponents made it clear they would accept nothing short of his departure.

Malis opposition coalition, the M5-RFP, has welcomed the ouster of Keita but they insisted they remained deeply attached to democracy.

___

Associated Press writer Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal contributed.

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Jerry Seinfeld responds to claims New York is dead

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld admits that the coronavirus has made life in New York City tough, but hes strongly objecting to a LinkedIn article claiming NY is dead forever and everyones leaving. Wipe your tears, wipe your butt and pull it together, the Seinfeld star responded in a new op-ed for The New York Times. He says he knows people who have left New York for Maine, Vermont, Tennessee, Indiana. I have been to all of these places many, many, many times over many decades. And with all due respect and affection, Are .. You .. Kidding .. Me?! ... I will never abandon New York City. Ever. The Empire States population has declined over the past decade, losing a net 1.4 million residents to other states since 2010, according to U.S. census data and migration patterns in IRS records, but Seinfeld blasted the author for moving to Florida. This stupid virus will give up eventually. The same way you have, Seinfeld wrote. Were going to keep going with New York City if thats all right with you. And it will sure as hell be back. Because of all the real, tough New Yorkers who, unlike you, loved it and understood it, stayed and rebuilt it.

.@JerrySeinfeld: "You think Rome is going away too? London? Tokyo? The East Village? Theyre not. They change. They mutate. They re-form. Because greatness is rare. And the true greatness that is New York City is beyond rare." https://t.co/QebVYxCXi6  New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) August 24, 2020

The Batman, more DC trailers

This weekends DC FanDome event reignited excitement in DC Comics superheroes with the first trailer for The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne, Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman; Paul Dano as The Riddler; Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner and Colin Farrell as the Penguin. Matt Reeves take on the Dark Knight will hit theaters Oct. 1, 2021. Other highlights included a new look at Wonder Woman 1984 with Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig as Cheetah -- currently scheduled to hit theaters Oct. 2, 2020 -- and new footage of Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, Cyborg and Ben Afflecks Batman in Zack Snyders Justice League, a four-hour directors cut coming to HBO Max next year.

MORE BUZZ:

iHeartRadio Music Awards canceled, but winners will still be announced ( BB

Beyonce debuts Brown Skin Girl video with all-star cast ( RS

The Suicide Squad cast revealed, including Idris Elba, Pete Davidson ( SF

Early RHCP member Jack Sherman dies at 64 ( ET

Lea Michele welcomes first child with husband ( BB

The Comey Rule trailer: Jeff Daniels as Comey, Gleeson as Trump ( RS

Dwayne Johnson previews Black Adam movie, with Superman ( SF

Dwayne Johnson predicts Justin Bieber will be a dad next year ( ET

John Oliver revisits Trumps border wall promises on Last Week Tonight ( RS

Rose McGowan, Alyssa Milano trade claims over Charmed set ( E!

Brandy, Monica to face off in Verzuz battle ( BB

The Black Keys, Gorillaz, among Record Store Day exclusives ( RS

Shazam 2 will be titled Shazam: Fury of the Gods ( SF

Goo Goo Dolls to release first Christmas album ( RS

Buzz is a daily roundup of entertainment news from movies, TV, music and celebrity gossip.
Courtesy of Aimee Allen

One of the simplest ways to blend an office into a bedroom or other multiuse space is to clearly define each section of a room with furniture and storage and put an emphasis on keeping everything tidy. A bench at the foot of a bed can be swapped for a compact desk. An empty wall can be transformed with shelving and containers or baskets, to minimize clutter. If a room is large enough, curtains, dividers or area rugs can divide the space into sections. Clearing out closet space will allow paperwork and office supplies to be neatly boxed up, out of view.

If your office is in your bedroom, Lau suggests making the bed before transitioning to work and investing in pieces that set the tone of the space you want to create. Splurging on a leather trash bin or beautiful wicker organizer baskets can foster a sense of pride and offer visual cues to switch gears. It's a lot about shifting your mindset, Lau notes.

Avoid aches and pains

Don't forget about ergonomics when rethinking your office space. An external mouse, a keyboard and an adjustable laptop stand (or stack of books) are easy and affordable upgrades. An external monitor can reduce eyestrain.

An office chair, instead of a folding chair, can help those sitting in front of a screen avoid aches and pains. Such improvements don't have to break the bank, observes Nikki Weiner, an occupational therapist and cofounder of the Rising Workplace. Consider low- to mid-range chair brands with lumbar support or even a rolled towel or pillow placed behind your lower back.

When real estate appraiser, Jonathan Miller, 59, realized he would no longer be commuting from his Darien, Connecticut home to his Manhattan office, he quickly made his existing office more comfortable. Miller already had a nice Herman Miller chair that allows his feet to lay flat on the floor and a desktop monitor aligned with his eyes, but he needed a better setup for many hours of Zoom calls and TV interviews. He purchased an adjustable boom microphone, external lights and camera on a tripod that he could line up to his forehead, angled down slightly toward his face.

I knew Id be talking on the phone a lot during the lockdown, he says. I wanted to make sure the last thing I had to worry about was being comfortable while presenting.
Subbarao said, short-term as well as medium-term prospects or Indian economy continue to be grim.

Fiscal deficit is going to be much higher, the debt burden much larger and the financial sector will be in a worse shape.

IMAGE: Duvvuri Subbarao, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Photograph: Henry Romero/Reuters

Calling 'green shoots' of economic revival as a mechanical rebound, former Reserve Bank Governor D Subbarao says India's short and medium term growth prospects continue to remain grim and the government should not read too much into the economic activity coming back from the depressed base of lockdown.

Indian economy was in a troubled state when the pandemic hit the world.

Before the COVID-19 crisis hit India, the real GDP growth had moderated from 7 per cent in 2017-18 to 6.1 per cent in 2018-19 and to 4.2 per cent in 2019-20.

"I don't believe we should read too much into the green shoots that you refer to.

What we've been seeing is just a mechanical rebound from the depressed base of the lockdown; it will be misleading to see it as a signal of a durable recovery," Subbarao told PTI in an interview.

He said the "short-term as well as medium-term prospects (for Indian economy) continue to be grim".

"The pandemic is still spiralling, the number of daily cases is rising and it is spreading to newer regions," he added.

On India's medium-term growth prospect, the former RBI governor said that the economy was in a troubled state when the COVID-19 crisis hit India.

"When the crisis is behind us - and I hope that is soon enough - these problems are going to be much bigger.

Fiscal deficit is going to be much higher, the debt burden much larger and the financial sector in a worse shape," he said.

The World Bank recently projected India's fiscal deficit to rise to 6.6 per cent of GDP in 2020-21 (April 2020 to March 2021) and remain elevated at 5.5 per cent in the following year. This compares to the 3.5 per cent target set by the government.

"Our medium-term prospects will depend on how effectively we resolve these challenges," Subbarao said.

With India's economic growth in pre-COVID 2019-20 fiscal slipping to the lowest in a decade, global and domestic agencies have indicated a sharp contraction in the GDP in the current fiscal.

The estimated contraction ranges from 3.2 per cent to 9.5 per cent.

This will be the first contraction in four decades.

Asked whether he sees any positive at all in this grim scenario, he noted that the rural economy has recovered better than the urban economy helped by several factors and the expanded MNREGA provided a lifeline when most needed.

Subbarao said that another big although less acknowledged positive is that the economy today has some basic safety-nets in place.

Citing an example, Subbarao said that 40 million urban labour went back to their villages post COVID-19 induced lockdown and despite that there have been no reported cases of mass starvation or hunger.

"Throw your mind back 20 years or even 15 years, and it's easy to imagine how easily this could have turned into a story of hunger, destitution and death.

That story did not play out is a testimonial not just to this government but to successive governments over the last several decades," he emphasised.

On criticism that the government is not spending enough to help the nation tide over the economic crisis, the former RBI governor said he does believe that it is critical for the government to borrow and spend more.

"Indeed, government spending is the only growth driver we have in the short term; all other growth drivers - private consumption, investment and net exports - are all depressed.

"Besides, if the government does not spend more now to arrest the decline, many problems such as bad loans will only get even more intractable and take a much heavier toll on the economy," he argued.

Subbarao, however, added that government borrowing cannot be open ended, it should set itself a limit.

"That will force the government to be efficient, transparent and accountable," he noted.

Asked where he thinks additional spending should go, Subbarao opined that given the very limited fiscal space, more than ever, the government should aim to get the maximum bang for the buck.

"Spending can go either to spur consumption or production," he said, adding that he believes production should take precedence over consumption.

Noting that the RBI has already given guidelines for loan restructuring by banks, Subbarao said, "The government can chip in by taking some of the loan burden of MSMEs and of MUDRA loans."

The government also needs to spend a significant amount to recapitalize banks, and through that, provide support for recapitalization of NBFCs, he added.

When asked about the criticism that the RBI has not been bold enough on unconventional monetary policies, he said the LTROs that the RBI has instituted to support specific sectors like NBFCs, MSMEs, HFCs etc. are certainly unconventional policies.

"True, the RBI has not gone into as much uncharted territory as advanced economy central banks but there was no need to.

A central bank cannot be expected to do something just because it is fashionable; it should make its policy as demanded by the macroeconomic circumstances," he said.

Besides, Subbarao noted that in comparison with advanced economies, we must remember that the markets are less forgiving of unconventional policies by emerging market central banks as compared to rich country central banks.

Asked whether having a universal basic income (UBI) would have made the problem simpler during COVID-19 pandemic, he said UBI is a neat idea, yet it is not clear that UBI is an unambiguously good idea.

"What is the guarantee that politicians will not convert UBI to a UBI plus? Giving subsidies is after all so politically intoxicating.

"So, we might end up in a worse situation than we are in now," Subbarao said.

Nevertheless, the balance of advantage may lie in adopting UBI provided, the government can institute some checks and balances for minimising the downsides, he added.
Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray indicated on Sunday that further relaxation of lockdown restrictions would be taken cautiously to prevent a second wave of Covid-19 transmission across Mumbai and the state.

Speaking via video conferencing during the commissioning of an 800-bed dedicated Covid hospital in Pune on Sunday, Thackeray said the state government is preparing health infrastructure to fight in case there is a second wave of outbreak of the disease in the state.

When we say we want to resume our lives normally, then crowding is inevitable. We are opening things gradually, but while doing so we are also ensuring that a second wave does not start, he said.

There have been demands from various quarters, including from leaders within the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi, to allow gymnasiums and religious places to open up. But so far the state has not taken a call.

The Union home ministry has asked state governments to allow unrestricted movement of people and goods between states. The state, however, is yet to take a call in it.

Thackeray said that the next 10 days are crucial for the states battle against coronavirus. The state is anticipating a rise in Covid-19 cases with the increased movement of people during festivals, including Ganeshotsav and Muharram.

The next phase is quite important for the state. The next eight-10 days are going to be crucial as Ganpati festival is on, Paryushan of the Jain community is going on, Muharram is also in a few days. Along with these festivals, there is monsoon, which brings diseases, he said.

Maharashtra health department officials said that with opening up of restrictions in the state, they have seen an increase in fresh cases of Covid-19 and the trend is expected to continue.

The CM said though the situation in Mumbai is getting under control he cautioned the authorities against negligence to prevent a second wave of attack. Mumbai recorded 991 new infections on Sunday, taking the citys tally to 136,353. It also recorded 34 fatalities, taking its toll to 7,422.

A dedicated Covid facility is being commissioned in Pune, and two more will be added this week. People ask me do we require so many facilities? We cannot remain careless. Absolutely not. Today, the situation in Mumbai is in control, but I am not letting things rest. We are continuing with the tracing, tracking, testing, etc. Globally it is seen that after a wave, a second wave (of Covid-19) comes. We are striving so that no second wave comes, but if it comes, then what will we do? Earlier, we had a shortage of PPE kits, N95 masks, and ventilators, the CM said in the speech at the event.

On Sunday, Maharashtra recorded 10,441 new Covid-19 cases, taking its tally to 682,383. The death toll crossed 22,000 with 258 fatalities on Sunday pushing the toll to 22,253.

The case fatality rate (CFR) in the state stood at 3.26%. With 8,157 people discharged on Sunday, the number of recoveries rose to 488,271. The state now has 171,542 active cases.
The Supreme Court (SC) is yet to announce a date to pronounce its final judgment in the students' plea against the University Grants Commission or UGC Guidelines for final year exam 2020. However, Advocate Alakh Alok Srivastava, who represents the petitioners, said the judgement is likely to come on Wednesday, August 26.

Advocate Srivastava tweeted that since the concerned Bench of the Supreme Court is not sitting tomorrow, i.e. on August 25, the decision is likely to come on August 26.

On July 7, UGC said the final year examination for students would have to be mandatorily held by the end of September 2020 in offline (pen & paper), online or blended mode.

Track this LIVE blog for all the latest updates on coronavirus pandemic

On July 30, UGC had informed the SC that if students are unable to appear for the examinations by September 30, he/she will be given an opportunity to appear at a specially conducted exam at a later date.

Also read: Plea against UGC at the Supreme Court: What is the matter all about?

However, the 31 lead petitioners in the SC case refused to accept this reply and said the UGC's response does not take into consideration the hassles faced by students if exams keep getting postponed. The petitioners had also said job prospects and future admission opportunities for students will be hampered.

Ever since the UGC guidelines 2020 were announced, students have been opposing the decision to conduct final year exams citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The students have argued that since the number of COVID-19 cases in India is rising every day, appearing for examinations will be unsafe for students.

The students have demanded that the final year exams should be cancelled and students should be promoted on the basis of internal assessment.

Also read: SC dismisses plea seeking postponement, says refer to JEE Main 2020, NEET 2020 order

A single-day spike of 61,408 new cases took India's virus caseload past the 31-lakh mark on August 24, a day after it crossed 30 lakh, while recoveries surged to 23,38,035, pushing the recovery rate to over 75 percent, according to the Union health ministry data.

India's COVID-19 death toll climbed to 57,542 with 836 more fatalities being reported in a span of 24 hours, the data updated at 8 am showed.
Palaeontologists from the Natural History Museums in Luxembourg and Maastricht have discovered a previously unknown species of brittle star that lived in the shallow, warm sea which covered parts of the present-day Netherlands at the end of the Dinosaur Era. The starfish-like creature was unearthed more than 20 years ago but has only now been identified as new to science. The name of the new fossil pays tribute to Dutch metal vocalist Floor Jansen, in recognition of the mutual inspiration between science and music.

Like so many exciting discoveries, the new fossil species had long passed unnoticed. It was a stroke of luck when a fossil collector noted the fossil of a tiny, starfish-like creature during one of his excursions to the world-famous ENCI HeidelbergCement company quarry near the Dutch city of Maastricht. The specimen was much smaller than other brittle-star fossils occasionally found at the same locality and thus much less likely to be collected. Dr John Jagt, palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in Maastricht, soon identified the specimen as a long-spined brittle-star. "I reckoned the specimen belonged to a group of brittle-stars that is particularly rare in the fossil record but its true identity remained puzzling with the information at hand", Jagt explains. "When examining microfossils extracted from the same rocks that yielded the brittle-star fossil, I noticed microscopic skeletal fragments that seemed to belong to the same species", he continues. 20 years later, Jagt was proved right when Dr Ben Thuy and Dr Lea Numberger, palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg, examined the brittle-star fossils from Maastricht from a different angle, taking into account the latest progress of knowledge in the field. "We were incredibly lucky to have both microscopic skeletal remains and a complete fossil skeleton of the same brittle-star species," Thuy highlights. "This provided an exceptionally complete picture of the species" Numberger continues. That the species turned out to be new to science was exciting in itself but there was more: "The new brittle star must have lived in a shallow, warm sea while its living relatives are found in the deep sea. This shows that there was a major shift in distribution over the past million years," Thuy explains. The experts were even able to gain insights into the mode of life of the new species. "Because the fossil individual was found wrapped around the stalk of a sea lily, we assume that the species lived with and probably even clung to these flower-like echinoderms," Jagt remarks. Interactions or associations between species are only rarely preserved in the fossil record. When scientists discover a new species, they have the privilege to name it. Often, species names refer to a locality or a specific character. Some also honour other experts in the field. In the case of the Maastricht brittle star, Jagt, Thuy and Numberger decided to combine their passions for fossils and heavy metal music and paid tribute to Dutch metal vocalist Floor Jansen and her band Nightwish. "Rock music and fossils are a perfect match. They have been inspiring each other for a long time" Numberger explains. The new fossil, Ophiomitrella floorae, is in excellent company, as can be experienced in the travelling exhibition "Rock Fossils on Tour", celebrating fossils named after rock bands and musicians like Kalloprion kilmisteri, an ancient worm honouring Motorhead's Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, and currently on display (until January 3, 2021) at the Natural History Museum in Maastricht.

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continues to face flak for failing to prevent hate speech from spreading on its platform as four rights groups have claimed that the social networking giant played a role in the 2017 violence in Myanmar that forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas to seek refuge in Bangladesh.

The rights groups in a joint statement on Sunday demanded that help the Rohingya refugees to get justice.

Representatives of the Voice of Rohingya, Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, Rohingya Youth for Legal Action, and Rohingya Women for Justice and Peace said they had a phone call with Director for Human Rights Miranda Sissons, and her colleague Alex Waraofka.

"We told her that we were forced to flee from Myanmar to Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh after the violence in Myanmar, which Facebook played a role in," said the joint statement.

"Now, it is Facebook's duty to help us to get justice and, and to improve our lives in the camp," it added.

During the phone call, the representatives of the rights groups asked Sissons to share the information Facebook has with justice mechanisms, "because we had read that they had not done so."

"Sissons informed us that Facebook is working with the independent investigative mechanism for Myanmar to identify the information that can be used in legal cases," it added.

The rights groups requested that Facebook provide financial support for services and activities in the refugee camps such as arranging education and training for young people and the elders.

"Sissons told us that Facebook is doing a lot of work to counter violent hate speech. This work is important in Myanmar, especially in the lead up to elections (scheduled for November 8)," the statement said.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said last week that the community must adapt its assistance to the critical needs of those displaced and the host communities supporting them.

UNHRC spokesperson Andrej Mahecic said the UN refugee agency and the Bangladesh government have individually registered over 860,000 Rohingya refugees in the Cox's Bazar settlements.

The country now hosts nine out of 10 Rohingya refugees registered in the Asia-Pacific region.

--IANS

gb/na

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
France's Total has signed a pact with the government of Mozambique to bolster security for a US$20-billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) development the energy group leads in the African country, which has seen renewed militant attacks in recent weeks.

A terrorist organization affiliated with Islamic State has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks in Mozambique over the past months, including in the Cabo Delgado province, which is home to the LNG project Total is developing.

The Mozambique LNG Project, for which the US$20-billion Final Investment Decision (FDI) was taken in 2019, is on track to deliver LNG in 2024, Total says.

In June, gunmen killed eight workers from a firm subcontracted by Total to work on its LNG project in Mozambique, yet Total is not giving up on the project, nor are other companies.

The security pact between Total and the Mozambique government "bolsters security measures and endeavours to create a safe operating environment for partners like Total which enables their ongoing investment in Mozambican industry," Ernesto Elias Tonela, Mozambique's minister of mineral resources and energy, said in the statement as carried by Reuters.

Last month, Total secured as much as US$16 billion in funding for its LNG project in Mozambique despite the supply glut and demand decline in the LNG market.

The considerable financing agreement "shows continued progress on project implementation despite security challenges and lower medium-term hydrocarbon prices, raising the prospect of significant positive effects on Mozambique's growth and public finances in the longer run," Fitch Rating said after Total secured the funding.

While Total secured financing for its project, U.S. supermajor ExxonMobil delayed the FID on its US$30-billion LNG project Rovuma to next year, due to low commodity prices and Exxon's need to cut investments globally. This will delay the start of production by one or two years, to around 2025-2026, Fitch says.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
At least 10 people were killed and dozens wounded  including soldiers and police  in a twin bombing Monday involving a suicide attacker on a southern Philippine island that is a stronghold of Islamist militants, officials said.

The attack happened in Jolo in Muslim-majority Sulu, where government-backed security forces have long been fighting the Abu Sayyaf group.

Five soldiers and four civilians were killed in the first blast, when an improvised explosive device attached to a motorcycle parked outside a supermarket blew up, Lieutenant General Corleto Vinluan told reporters.

Sixteen soldiers were wounded in the explosion, which happened at around midday.

Around 20 civilians were also hurt, Lieutenant Colonel Ronaldo Mateo said, citing the local mayor.

A soldier saw a person leave the motorbike outside the grocery store "where there were a lot of people" including members of the military. It immediately detonated, Mateo said.

"Our soldiers are conducting security operations. That was the time that the improvised explosive device detonated," he said.

There was a second blast a short time later in the same street when a female suicide attacker blew herself up as police cordoned off the area, killing one person and wounding around six officers, Vinluan said.

A soldier had been trying to apprehend the bomber when she detonated her explosives, he added.

Abu Sayyaf was "most probably" behind the double bombing, Mateo said.

Blasts follow arrest

Listed by the United States as a terrorist organisation, Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of Islamic militants blamed for the Philippines' worst terror attacks as well as kidnappings of foreign tourists and Christian missionaries.

They also have ties to Islamic State militants seeking to set up a caliphate in Southeast Asia.

Monday's explosions come after the arrest earlier this month of an Abu Sayyaf leader on the southern island of Mindanao.

Security forces had been on alert for possible reprisal attacks after detaining Abduljihad Susukan, who is accused of kidnapping and beheading several foreigners.

Story continues

He has been charged with 23 murders, five kidnappings and six attempted murders, police have said.

President Rodrigo Duterte's spokesman Harry Roque condemned the "dastardly attacks" and issued condolences to the families and loved ones of those killed.

"We call on the residents of Jolo to stay vigilant and report suspicious personalities and unattended items in their areas," Roque said.

The Philippine Coast Guard issued a "red alert" for Sulu and several other areas in the restive south as it assists the military and police in responding to the incident.

The explosions happened near a Catholic cathedral in Jolo where two suicide bombers blew themselves up in January 2019 killing 21 people. It was blamed on a group linked to Abu Sayyaf.

(AFP)
Three years ago, I borrowed 180,000 yuan from my relatives to transform my house into a B&B. I never expected that I would be able to pay off my debt in three years, said Nong Haizhong, a resident in Nonggang village in south Chinas Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

A corner of Nonggang village (Photo/People's Daily Online)

The five-member family in Zhubo township, Longzhou county of Congzuo city, used to cultivate 0.4 hectares of sugarcane and was registered as a poor household in 2015, with a per capita income of 2,400 yuan.

The village is blessed with a sound ecological environment and a diverse variety of birds is located in the periphery of the Nonggang National Natural Reserve. From 2016, Nong Haizhong began working as a bird-watching guide for research teams and tourists who came to the village to observe and photograph birds, and his income has since continued to increase.

In September 2017, he built a B&B with five rooms, which increased his income to over 10,000 yuan. By the end of that year, his family had shaken off poverty.

My familys income has increased year by year in recent years, he said, expressing satisfaction with his current living conditions.

Nong Weihong is another guide, who also runs the first B&B in the village. He has been working as a forest ranger at the nature reserve for 20 years.

The village has a population of nearly 3,000 people, who previously all made a living by planting sugarcane.

In 2008, ornithologists discovered the presence of Nonggang babblers, a recently described species of bird in the family Timaliidae, in the natural reserve, which attracted a great deal of attention. Nong Weihong worked as the guide for these ornithologists. In the years that followed, research teams would ask him to guide them to watch the babblers. I can earn hundreds of yuan a day, he said, adding that the part-time job has changed his life.

Now, more and more tourists are flocking to the village thanks to its growing popularity resulting from bird watching.

To better organize the bird-watching activities, Liuzhou Bird Watching Society in the autonomous region granted an interest-free loan of 100,000 yuan to Nong Weihong so that he could expand his B&B and improve its conditions in 2014.

He said the income from the four rooms on the second floor of his B&B and from his job as a bird-watching guide came to over 50,000 yuan that year.

Being a bird-watching guide as a new way to increase our income has inspired us, said Hou Yong, Party secretary of the township, explaining that the county and township have pushed Nonggang to develop ecotourism and find a balance between ecological protection and economic development.

The village has now built a bird-watching base, and with over 7 million yuan in financial support from the county, Nonggang has built infrastructure such as roads, parking lots, water and power supply, and communication facilities, and ensured a neat and tidy living environment.

According to Hou, the poverty headcount ratio in Nonggang stood at 26 percent at the end of 2015. Last year, the figure dropped to 0.4 percent.

So far, the village has opened 15 B&Bs, and there are now nearly 30 bird-watching guides. Last year, the bird-watching base received more than 16,000 visitors. On average, the income of 166 households in the village increased by about 15,000 yuan by providing shuttle services, catering and accommodation.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: A day after Bloomsbury India announced that it will withdraw from publishing a book on the Delhi violence following outrage on social media about the guests invited for the launch, as many as three authors on Saturday announced that they were withdrawing their books which were to be published by the company.

Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story, written by Monica Arora, Sonali Chitalkar and Prerna Malhotra, was set to be published by Bloomsbury India.

ALSO READ | After Bloomsbury's withdrawal book on Delhi riots gets new publisher

Three authors who severed ties with the publication include retired IAS officer Sanjay Dixit, Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Anand Ranganathan and Sandeep Deo.

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu, whos written multiple bestsellers for the publishing house, said it is the responsibility of publishers to ethically endorse and publish what they can stand by and for, no matter what the circumstance.

ALSO READ | Won't publish book on Delhi riots: Bloomsbury after outrage on social media

The integrity of any publisher is much more critical than catering to the majoritarian view and in this case, a blatantly right-wing agenda that has triggered communal violence and dented the secular fabric of our nation, she said.

The author added that she believes that the controversy indicates a rising and dangerous trend. Following the massive backlash faced online, the publishing house had on Saturday announced their decision to not publish the book under its auspices.
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to pass a direction to Centre to hold National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) Undergraduate (UG) 2020 at examination centres in Gulf countries, but asked Centre to consider allowing students to come via Vande Bharat Mission flights to appear for the exam scheduled on September 13.

As regards the mandatory 14-day quarantine, the Court said there can be no relaxation as it involves public safety, but gave the petitioner liberty to approach the concerned state authorities to seek relaxation.

A three-judge bench headed by Justice L Nageswara Rao said this while hearing a petition filed by one Abdul Azeez, a social worker situated in Middle East who was pursuing the interest of NEET students. The petitioner claimed that close 4000 students in the Gulf region are taking NEET but were unable to travel to India due to ban on international flights.

Azeez wanted the undergraduate MBBS entrance examination to be either made online or in the alternate, demanded examination centre in Qatar and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

Both the National Testing Authority (NTA) and Medical Council of India (MCI) had opposed the request by the petitioner. Earlier on Saturday, the MCI filed an affidavit in Supreme Court informing that there cannot be examination centres outside India as this will compromise the uniformity of NEET, and will affect secrecy of question papers besides posing risk of leakage of questions.

The Court agreed that time was too short to extend any benefit for the students stuck in Gulf. However, for the coming years the bench, also comprising Justices Hemant Gupta and S Ravindra Bhatt asked MCI counsel Gaurav Sharma to consider conducting the test online.

There are a number of students appearing in NEET from the Gulf, Singapore and Malaysia. Why cant you (MCI) think of having NEET online? This will avoid trouble for so many people studying abroad, especially when the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering courses is being conducted online, the bench said. The Court refused to issue an order to this effect.

The MCI in its affidavit had said that holding an online examination is out of question as NEET follows a paper-book format and it will compromise the uniformity of examination. It also objected to the demand for NEET examination centres in Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries for NEET candidates stuck there. The affidavit said, .in order to fairly conduct an examination like NEET, which has to be a uniform examination, it is imperative that the examination is conducted at the same time everywhere, which shall not be possible, if examination is conducted in outside countries due to various reasons including different time zones, logistical issues, secrecy of test papers, etc being a booklet-based examination.
BAMAKO, Mali - West African leaders visiting Mali pressed Sunday for the release of ousted President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita amid mounting speculation that he could be flown out of the country after thousands showed support for the military coup that toppled him.

The 75-year-old Keita has been in the custody of the ruling military junta for five days at the barracks where the government overthrow originated. The 15-nation regional bloc known as ECOWAS has demanded Keitas reinstatement, though with a wave of public support for his ouster it appeared increasingly unlikely Sunday he would return to power.

ECOWAS had earlier demanded that Keita be reinstated and said it would mobilize a regional standby military force. But a demonstration by thousands of Malians showing their support for the coup in the streets of Bamako on Friday made it more difficult for the regional leaders to sideline the junta.

Among the destinations where Keita could go is neighbouring Senegal, which hosted Amadou Toumani Toure, the last democratically elected Malian president overthrown in a similar 2012 coup.

African countries and the wider international community have expressed alarm over the coup detat, which deposed Keita three years before his final term was due to end. Mali has been fighting against Islamic extremists with heavy international support for more than seven years, and jihadists have previously used power vacuums in Mali to expand their territory.

The high-level delegation, led by Nigerias former president, Goodluck Jonathan, held talks with the junta, including Col. Assimi Goita, who has declared himself the groups leader. The regional delegation also met with Keita and the other detained officials.

After the brief meetings, few details were given, but Jonathan did say that Keita was doing well.

We have seen the president IBK and he is very well, Jonathan said, referring to Keita as many do by using his initials.

Hours after Keita was detained Tuesday after his home, the democratically elected president announced his resignation on state broadcaster ORTM saying he did not want any blood to be shed for him to stay in power. By early Wednesday, soldiers took to the airwaves calling themselves the National Committee for the Salvation of the People.

While the new military leaders have insisted they intend to hand over power to a civilian transitional government, West Africa has seen a large number of putschists prolong the transitional period so that the military stays in power. In the case of Mali, it took nearly 18 months after the 2012 coup for democratic elections to resume.

It was Keita himself who won that 2013 vote in a landslide, only to see his popularity plummet after his 2018 reelection as the Malian army faced punishing losses from jihadist attacks. Then after dozens of legislative elections were disputed this spring, demonstrators began taking to the streets calling for his resignation. He offered concessions and regional mediators intervened, but his opponents made it clear they would accept nothing short of his departure.

On Friday, Malis opposition coalition, the M5-RFP, welcomed the ouster of Keita insisted they remained deeply attached to democracy.

Read more about:
The 33-year-old male was cleared of the virus and discharged from a hospital in April, but tested positive again after returning from Spain via Britain on August 15. - ANDY RAIN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock/Shutterstock

11:05 PM

What happened today

Follow the latest news in Tuesday's live blog

09:56 PM

Poppy Appeal hit by coronavirus as street collections will be cut back

This year's Poppy Appeal will be unlike the British public has ever known it as the Royal British Legion (RBL) revealed it will scale back street collectors and focus on contactless donations due to coronavirus.

While street collectors selling poppies in the run up to November 11 will be a familiar sight for many, it is understood that for this year's appeal the charity is in discussions as to how it can raise money in a Covid-friendly way.

The charity, which raises more than 50million each year for both veterans and serving military personnel, hopes to introduce "point of sale donations" where shoppers pay at supermarket tills or online and will be asked if they would like to round up their total to the nearest pound.

The Telegraph understands that as many poppy sellers are elderly the charity is keen to find a way to best protect them, which avoids exchanging cash between hands. A source said that "technology" such as "cashless donations" will be the focus of raising money this year.

Story continues

Read the full story here.

09:39 PM

Head teachers signal they will not fine parents whose children don't return to school

Head teachers have signalled they will defy orders to fine parents who fail to send their children back to school next month, claiming such punishments would be counterproductive.

Downing Street insisted on Monday that education is compulsory and that parents should be aware they will be fined as a last resort if they keep their children at home without permission.

Boris Johnson acknowledged that parents are genuinely still a bit worried about their children contracting coronavirus, but stressed that the danger was tiny. - Lucy Young/Pool Evening Standard

Boris Johnson acknowledged that parents are genuinely still a bit worried about their children contracting coronavirus, but stressed that the danger was tiny. He said:

"All I can say is the risks are very, very, very small that they'll even get it, but then the risk that they'll suffer from it badly are very, very, very, very small indeed. "I think it's vital that parents understand that schools are safe and that teachers have gone to great lengths to get schools ready."

Click here to read the full story.

09:19 PM

Evening summary

Here is a quick summary of this evenings top stories:

Researchers in Hong Kong have today reported what appears to be the first confirmed case of Covid-19 reinfection.

A globally coordinated rollout of a coronavirus vaccine will be in the "interests of all countries", the World Health Organisation's (WHO) director general has said. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned against "vaccine nationalism" a nd said global competition to create one could lead to prices spiking "exponentially", which would only prolong the virus.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has said a "very clear system of controls" has been set out so that schools are able to return safely.

A chief constable for Greater Manchester Police has admitted that the force has spent an additional 100,000 per week enforcing lockdown restrictions.

Seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school in Scotland as hundreds of people are told to self-isolate.

In Greece , teachers and students will be required to wear masks in class and indoor spaces when schools reopen in September, Reuters reports.

Sweden is likely to see local outbreaks but no big second wave of Covid-19 cases in the autumn, the country's top epidemiologist and architect if its unorthodox pandemic strategy said today.

An Italian hospital has said it has inoculated a first volunteer with a vaccine as part of human trials expected to last six months

Japan is facing a shortage of 16-digit credit card numbers after the pandemic sparked an online shopping boom.

09:04 PM

Spain: Covid caseload rises to 405,436

In the past 24 hours, 2,060 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Spain, the countys Health Ministry said.

The total number of confirmed cases within Spain now stands at 405,436, while the death toll has increased to 28,872.

08:26 PM

More research needed to determine genetic impact of Covid in BAME patients, experts say

There is not enough historic research to know what role genes linked to race have on diseases, experts have said, but "everyday discrimination" could explain why people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups are more likely to die from Covid-19.

Dr Winston Morgan, reader in toxicology and clinical biochemistry at the University of East London, said more BAME people needed to be involved in scientific research to avoid implicit bias within the medical profession.

Speaking on a Royal Society of Medicine webinar, he said: "We don't like to accept that there's implicit bias in our practice but there are all these studies that show there is a lot of implicit bias."

"By having more BAME people involved in research, not only can you see things that others can't see but you can also change the direction of the research and that's really important."

08:09 PM

Comment: 'Back to school? Government's 'awful and inconsistent' message leaves parents fearful'

More than half of parents are 'worried' about children going back to school, despite science supporting a return, writes Camilla Tominey.

The Prime Ministers clarion call for children to return to school next week may have been loud and clear, but parents remain confused about the safety of the classroom in the post-Covid-19 era. Boris Johnson reiterated that Britain has a moral duty to reopen schools in September, insisting the science now shows it is safe to do so. But the mixed messaging around the risk of the R rate (the number of people that a single infected person will go on to infect) spiking as the new term begins  potentially sparking a second lockdown  appears to have left families in a quandary. The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) data reveals that while approximately nine in 10 (90 per cent) of adults say it is very likely or fairly likely that the children or young people in their household will return to school or college, more than half of parents (58 per cent) are very worried or somewhat worried about it. That figure is barely down on the 62 per cent who reported similar concerns at the end of term in mid-July, before many of the lockdown measures were eased. Read more here.

07:48 PM

Trials for Oxford vaccine moving in a positive direction, says leading professor

Asked when a Covid-19 vaccine might be available, Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, told Channel 4 News: "I'm hopeful we are going to start to get a read-out early in the autumn as to whether this thing works or not."

A woman holds a small bottle labeled with a "Vaccine COVID-19" sticker and a medical syringe in this illustration - Dado Ruvic/REUTERS

"A lot of this depends on the intensity of infection. So, in order to get a read-out, you have to have a certain number of incident cases in the control vaccine population - and that then tells you you can look at the real vaccinated population and see whether they have been protected."

"So, I'm hoping that's going to happen pretty smartly this autumn."

"There will be a delay between the outcome of the trial and a decision whether it can be approved as a vaccine."

07:31 PM

WHO: 172 countries engaging with Covid vaccine plan

Around 172 countries are currently engaging with the World Health Organisation led COVAX plan designed to ensure equal access to coronavirus vaccines, Reuters have reported.

However, WHO has cautioned against complacency and warned that more funding is urgently needed.

WHOs director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a media briefing: Initially, when there will be limited supply (of Covid-19 vaccines), its important to provide the vaccine to those at highest risk around the globe.

07:14 PM

Companies accused of furlough fraud after data found two thirds of workers carried on working

Companies have been accused of encouraging furlough fraud after data found two thirds of workers carried on with their jobs during the pandemic.

According to a new report six million workers continued to work during April and May while their employers were claiming furlough money from the Government.

The furlough scheme was announced by the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, on March 20 in a 30billion scheme which saw the Government pay 80 percent of salaries for furloughed staff up to a maximum of 2,500 a month.

The study, by Oxford, Cambridge and Zurich universities, conducted surveys of 9,000 people and found that the ban on working while furloughed was routinely ignored, with 63 percent of furloughed employees having broken the rules.

It also found that furloughed staff worked an average of 15 hours a week and that a fifth of furloughed employees were instructed to carry on working by their employer.

Our Political Correspondent, Danielle Sheridan has more here.

06:54 PM

Watch: Gavin Williamson says it is the 'right time' for schools to return as 'clear' system of safety controls in place

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has said a "very clear system of controls" has been set out so that schools are able to return safely.

He told Sky News: "What we've done is we've set out a very clear system of controls for every school to be following, whether that's primary school or whether that's secondary school.

"Whether it's making sure it's maintaining good hygiene and good distancing, good flows of pupils moving through the schools, staggered starts, all of these measures are about ensuring children remain safe and those who work in schools remain safe.

"By doing that, we can see all children returning back to their classes and we've already seen over 1.6 million children going back to school safely, not just safely for them but also safely for those who work in schools."

06:35 PM

Ireland: Health chiefs closely monitoring rise in Covid cases

Irish health chiefs are closely monitoring the rise of coronavirus cases in Dublin, Reuters has reported.

Chief Medical Officer Ronan Glynn said that while there was no suggestion that further targeted measures would be needed in the capital, officials were observing trends within the region.

Its not that there is a major problem, Im not sounding an alarm but we have seen an increase in cases particularly in Dublin over the last number of days. Its just something were watching closely, Mr Glynn told a news conference.

06:16 PM

Test and Trace system criticised as some users sent 350 miles away for Covid testing

The NHS Test and Trace system has faced fresh criticism for a flaw in its online booking system, after users complained of being directed more than 100 miles away for testing.

Some people with coronavirus symptoms have been directed to testing centres hours away from their homes.

For example, a person from Ilfracombe in Devon who has symptoms of Covid-19 - including a persistent cough, fever or loss of sense of taste or smell - is directed to a test centre in Swansea when they try to book a test online.

This would see them drive past centres in Taunton, Bristol and Cardiff on their six-and-a-half hour round trip, driving 175 miles in each direction.

The NHS Test and Trace system has faced fresh criticism for a flaw in its online booking system, after users complained of being directed more than 100 miles away for testing. - Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Europe

Problems with the booking system were highlighted early on in the crisis but it appears that glitches in the system - which seem to disproportionately affect those on the coast - are yet to be rectified.

Labour said it was "hugely disappointing" that the issues were still occurring and has called on the Government to address the issues as a "matter of urgency".

Shadow health minister Justin Madders said:

"From the first days when testing centres were being rolled out, we have heard stories of people being sent unfeasibly long distances just to get a test, but for this to be still happening at this stage is hugely disappointing. "They must solve these problems as a matter of urgency."

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: "NHS Test and Trace is working, it's completely free and is stopping the spread of coronavirus."

"Regional testing slots are allocated based on the nearest testing site with availability and we are working to ensure this takes into account journey times. Anyone with symptoms across the UK should get a test as soon as possible."

05:55 PM

US: Covid death toll rises to 176,223

The number of recorded coronavirus deaths within the US has increased by 572, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The overall Covid death toll now stands at 176,223, while 5,682,491 cases have been reported across the country.

05:41 PM

Scotland: Government consulting on recommending face masks in secondary schools

The Scottish Government is consulting on recommending secondary school pupils and staff wear face coverings when moving around schools, Scotland's First Minister has announced.

Nicola Sturgeon said Scotland's Education Secretary John Swinney is in the final stages of consulting with teachers and councils on the issue.

She told the Scottish Government's regular coronavirus briefing the recommendation would not include pupils wearing masks while in the classroom.

"We're consulting on this specific measure because, firstly, mixing between different groups is more likely in corridors and communal areas - increasing the potential for transmission. "Secondly, crowding and close contact in these areas is more likely and voices could be raised, resulting in greater potential for creating aerosol transmission. "Finally, there's also less scope for ventilation in these areas."

She said decisions are yet to be made on whether the guidance would apply to school transport and that decision will be made in the coming days.

05:26 PM

Bali bans foreign tourists for rest of 2020

Foreign tourists won't be allowed to visit Bali for the rest of 2020 due to coronavirus concerns, its governor said, scrapping a plan to open up the Indonesian island from next month.

The holiday hotspot re-opened beaches, temples and other tourism spots for domestic visitors at the end of July and had said it would let foreign tourists return on September 11.

But the plan has now been cancelled over concerns about Indonesia's mounting virus cases, with many foreign nationals subject to travel bans in their home countries.

Foreign tourists won't be allowed to visit Bali for the rest of 2020 due to coronavirus concerns, its governor said on Monday - Barcroft Media/Wawan Kurniawan / Opn Images/ Barcroft Studios / Future Publishing

Jakarta is also yet to lift its ban on foreign tourists entering Indonesia.

"The situation in Indonesia is not conducive to allow international tourists to visit Indonesia, including...Bali," the island's governor I Wayan Koster said in an official letter.

"The central government supports (Bali's) plans to recover tourism by opening the doors for international tourists. However, this requires care, prudence, not to be rushed, and requires careful preparation," it added.

He did not give a new date for allowing foreign tourists to visit.

05:09 PM

Blood pressure drugs may protect against Covid-19 effects

Medication for high blood pressure lowers the risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from Covid-19 by one third, a study suggests.

Researchers from the University of East Anglia studied 28,000 patients taking antihypertensives, a class of drugs used to treat high blood pressure.

They found that the risk of severe Covid-19 illness and death fell by one third for people taking Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme inhibitors (ACEi) or Angiotensin Receptor Blockers (ARB) .

Lead researcher Dr Vassilios Vassiliou, from the University of East Anglia's Norwich Medical School, said: We found that there was a significantly lower risk of death and critical outcomes, so they might in fact have a protective role, particularly in patients with hypertension.

Covid-19 patients with high blood pressure who were taking ACEi/ARB medications were 0.67 times less likely to have a critical or fatal outcome than those not taking these medications. Our research provides substantial evidence to recommend continued use of these medications if the patients were taking them already.

Read the full story by our Science Editor, Sarah Knapton here.

04:53 PM

Syria: Constitutional Committee paused after three members test positive for Covid

The Syrian Constitutional Committee has been put on hold after three members tested positive for coronavirus, the United Nations has said.

The Committee were attempting to make progress in drafting a new Syrian charter to lay the foundations for U.N.-sponsored elections, as part of ongoing efforts to find a political resolution to the Syrian Civil War.

A statement released by the Committee said: Following a constructive first meeting, the Third Session of the Constitutional Committee is currently on hold. The Office of the Special Envoy will make a further announcement in due course.

Committee members were tested before they travelled to Geneva, and they were tested again on arrival, and the wearing of masks and strict social distancing measures were in place when they met at the Palais des Nations.

04:29 PM

Government not considering introducing face masks in schools, says Education Secretary

Secondary school pupils in England will not be required to wear masks when they return to class despite their Scottish counterparts potentially being ordered to wear face coverings.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said measures being adopted by schools to limit the spread of coronavirus meant that masks would not be necessary.

Pupils arrive by school bus at Kelso High School on the Scottish Borders - Owen Humphreys/PA

This contrasts to Scotland, where the Government is consulting on measures which could see masks worn by secondary school pupils and teachers in corridors and other communal areas - although not in classrooms.

The World Health Organisation and UN children's agency Unicef advise that adults and children aged 12 and over should wear a mask, particularly when they cannot guarantee at least a one-metre distance from others and there is widespread transmission in the area.

However Mr Williamson insisted there was no need to do so, arguing that the Government was confident in the "system of controls" in place in schools for children to be able to return safely "and for staff to be able to operate safely".

04:21 PM

Watch: WHO urges caution over Covid plasma treatment approved by Trump

The World Health Organization has said that coronavirus plasma treatment is still experimental and more research was needed to determine its effectiveness.

The treatment involves using antibody-rich plasma from recovered Covid patients and transferring it to individuals who are suffering from coronavirus.

While the treatment has been endorsed by US President Donald Trump, WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan, said that evidence in support of the treatment has not been convincing enough for the organisation to endorse it fully.

At the moment, its still very low-quality evidence, she told a news conference, adding: so we recommend that convalescent plasma is still an experimental therapy, it should continue to be evaluated in well-designed randomised clinical trials.

04:09 PM

Scotland: Coronavirus outbreak at Dundee school leaves 17 staff and two pupils infected

Seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school in Scotland as hundreds of people are told to self-isolate.

Kingspark School in Dundee was closed last Wednesday when people on site were stuck down by the virus, and cases have now been linked to two other schools nearby.

NHS Tayside said in an update on Sunday that 17 staff, two pupils and three community contacts had tested positive.

The school, which looks after pupils with additional support needs, has 185 students aged between five and 18.

All of them have been told to self isolate for two weeks, while their parents, carers, siblings or anyone else who lives with them have also been told to self isolate if they are unable to maintain physical distancing within the household.

03:56 PM

At least 150 test positive for coronavirus at French naturist resort

At least 150 holidaymakers at one of Frances best-known naturist resorts have tested positive for Covid-19, making it one of the countrys most worrying coronavirus clusters, according to health authorities.

At least 150 holidaymakers at one of Frances best-known naturist resorts have tested positive for Covid-19 - Bruno DE HOGUES/Gamma-Rapho

Holidaymakers say the Cap dAgde resort on the Mediterranean coast is frequented by many libertines and swingers who have ignored social distancing rules.

One visitor told the Telegraph by telephone: In the evening, were all huddled together, which means preventive measures or physical distancing are impossible. Frankly, this is a place where you come to meet people. No one comes here to play cards.

The local newspaper, LIndependant, described the resort as a temple of libertinism. However, a spokesman for its management said:

"Our customers are disciplined and they have respected health rules and barrier gestures. I dont think you can say that people have been more careless here than anywhere else."

David Chazan has the full story here.

03:46 PM

Greater Manchester Police spending an extra 100,000 per week on enforcing Covid restrictions

A chief constable for Greater Manchester Police has admitted that the force has spent an additional 100,000 per week enforcing lockdown restrictions.

Ian Hopkins also defended the force against accusations that it was heavy handed in its decision to break up a children's birthday party over the weekend.

The force was criticised after issuing a fixed penalty notice when officers attended a home in Swinton where three families were celebrating a child's birthday in a private garden.

Speaking to Radio 5 Live on Monday, Chief Constable Ian Hopkins said: "It feels a bit at the moment like we can't win."

He added: "It wasn't sort of jelly and ice cream with a bunch of three and four-year-olds sat around in the middle of the afternoon.

"Officers decided, based on what they had seen, to issue a fixed penalty notice."

He said officers were also called to a party being held for a terminally-ill child and decided not to issue a fine after attending.

"We are trying to absolutely balance what we're doing, but it's a really difficult position for us at the moment," he said.

03:33 PM

Birmingham 'not a Covid hotspot', former council leader argues

Birmingham is not a "Covid-19 hotspot" and warnings the city should be preparing for local lockdown have been branded "ridiculous" by the local authority's former leader.

John Clancy, who led the city council from November 2015 until September 2017, said "the citizens of Birmingham should be congratulated, not warned" for their response to coronavirus.

He claimed imposing local lockdowns based on "dodgy data" was unacceptable, pointing out "91 per cent of England - that's 51 million people - live in neighbourhoods where there hasn't been a recorded Covid-19 case in the last four weeks".

A woman is seen wearing a protective face mask in an area outside the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham - Carl Recine/REUTERS

"Birmingham cannot, as a city, be in any way regarded as a Covid-19 hotspot", he added.

No new Covid deaths have been reported in Midlands hospitals, including those in Birmingham, in the latest figures released by NHS England on Monday.

Data from the seven days to Friday - the latest available - showed Birmingham had 20.4 cases per 100,000 people, or a total of 233 cases in the period, according to the NHS Digital Progression dashboard.

03:21 PM

Education Secretary: 'Clear system of controls' to ensure schools reopen safely

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has said a "very clear system of controls" has been set out so that schools are able to return safely.

He told Sky News: "What we've done is we've set out a very clear system of controls for every school to be following, whether that's primary school or whether that's secondary school.

"Whether it's making sure it's maintaining good hygiene and good distancing, good flows of pupils moving through the schools, staggered starts, all of these measures are about ensuring children remain safe and those who work in schools remain safe. "By doing that, we can see all children returning back to their classes and we've already seen over 1.6 million children going back to school safely, not just safely for them but also safely for those who work in schools."

03:12 PM

UK: A further four people have died from coronavirus

A further four people have died from Covid-19 in the UK, according to the latest data from the Department of Health and Social Care.

In total, 41,433 Covid deaths have been recorded by the department.

Separate figures published by the UK's statistics agencies show there have now been 57,000 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.

853 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the past 24 hours, bringing the UKs total caseload to 326,614.

03:01 PM

Experts react to Hong Kong re-infection case

There has been a mixed reaction from experts on the news that a patient has become re-infected with Covid-19, with some urging caution against reading too much into the case.

Professor Brendan Wren, professor of microbial pathogenesis at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: "With over 3 million cases of Covid-19 worldwide, the first reported case of a potential re-infection with SARS-CoV-2 needs to be taken into context.

"It appears that the young and healthy adult has been re-infected with a slight SARS-CoV-2 variant from the initial infection three months previously. It is to be expected that the virus will naturally mutate over time. This is a very rare example of re-infection and it should not negate the global drive to develop Covid-19 vaccines.

However David Strain, clinical senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and chair of the British Medical Associations Medical Academic Staff Committee, said:

This is a worrying finding for several reasons. The first, as is laid out in this manuscript, is that it suggests that previous infection is not protective. The second is that it raises the possibility that vaccinations may not provide the hope that we have been waiting for. "Vaccinations work by simulating infection to the body, thereby allowing the body to develop antibodies. If antibodies don't provide lasting protection, we will need to revert to a strategy of viral near-elimination in order to return to a more normal life.

02:49 PM

Usain Bolt tests positive for coronavirus

Usain Bolt has allegedly tested positive for Covid-19 shortly after attending a star-studded surprise party to celebrate his birthday, a Jamaican news site has reported.

The retired sprinter took a Covid-19 test a few days ago and tested positive yesterday, Nationwide News Network said.

Bolt celebrated his 34th birthday on Friday with a surprise party attended by celebrities including footballers Raheem Sterling (Manchester City) and Leon Bailey (Bayern Bayern Leverkusen). All will now have to take tests, according to the news site.

02:40 PM

Virgin Atlantic launches free Covid-19 insurance cover for customers

Free Covid-19 insurance is to be provided to customers of Virgin Atlantic, offering financial cover should they or a companion fall ill with coronavirus while travelling.

The airline's new policy includes meeting emergency medical costs as well as associated transport, accommodation and repatriation expenses up to a value of 500,000 per customer.

It will also cover up to 3,000 of expenses if a customer is denied boarding a plane or held in quarantine due to a suspected or positive case of coronavirus during a trip.

Virgin Atlantic's announcement follows the Emirates airline launching its own Covid-19 insurance for customers earlier this month, covering medical expenses of up to 150,000 euros (135,000) if they are diagnosed while away.

All existing and new bookings for travel from August 24 until March 31 next year will have the "Virgin Atlantic Covid-19 Cover" automatically applied.

The airline claimed the policy, being fulfilled by Allianz Assistance, had "the highest value offered by any airline to date", with no excess payment required.

02:18 PM

First Covid-19 reinfection documented in Hong Kong, researchers say

Researchers in Hong Kong have today reported what appears to be the first confirmed case of Covid-19 reinfection.

A 33-year-old man who was first infected by SARS-CoV-2 in late March has, four and a half months later, seemingly contracted the virus again while traveling Europe.

The case raises concerning questions about the durability of immune protection from the coronavirus, but it has also been met with caution by other scientists, who questioned the extent to which the case pointed to broader concerns about reinfection.

While there have been scattered reports of reinfection, these have been largely based on anecdotal evidence and flaws in testing.

In this case, however, researchers at the University of Hong Kong sequenced the virus from the patients two infections and found that they did not match, indicating the second infection was not tied to the first.

This is the worlds first documentation of a patient who recovered from Covid-19 but got another episode of Covid-19 afterwards, the researchers said in a statement.

02:13 PM

Masks for teachers and students become mandatory in Greece

In Greece, teachers and students will be required to wear masks in class and indoor spaces when schools reopen in September, Reuters reports.

The rise in coronavirus cases in recent weeks has forced Greek authorities to gradually reimpose restrictions to curb the spread of the virus.

Education Minister Niki Kerameus said schools are expected to reopen on September 7 but an extension may be deemed necessary.

Mask wearing will be mandatory in all indoor spaces of schools across the country, she said, adding that authorities will offer fabric masks for free to students and teachers.

The number of pupils in each class will be limited to 17.

On Sunday, Greece reported 284 new cases, a new daily record since its first case surfaced in February. In total, the country has registered 8,664 infections and 242 deaths.

02:05 PM

One further death and 19 cases in Wales

Public Health Wales said a further one person has died having tested positive for coronavirus, bringing its total number of deaths since the beginning of the pandemic to 1,593.

The number of cases of Covid-19 in Wales increased by 19, bringing the revised total of confirmed cases to 17,746.

01:58 PM

WHO: Worldwide Covid-19 vaccination rollout 'in the interest of all countries'

A globally coordinated rollout of a coronavirus vaccine will be in the "interests of all countries", the World Health Organisation's (WHO) director general has said.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned against "vaccine nationalism" and said global competition to create one could lead to prices spiking "exponentially", which would only prolong the virus.

Instead, he urged countries to support the Covax vaccines facility, which has the "largest and most diverse" Covid-19 vaccine portfolio in the world.

He told a WHO press briefing today that 172 countries were "engaging" with the mechanism, which aims to deliver at least two billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021.

Dr Tedros said: "We're working with vaccine manufacturers to provide all countries that join the effort timely and equitable access to all vaccines, licensed and approved. This doesn't just pool risk, it also means that prices will be kept as low as possible.

"New research outlines that global competition for vaccine doses could lead to prices spiking exponentially in comparison to collaborative efforts, such as the Covax facility.

"It would also lead to a prolonged pandemic as only a small number of countries would get most of the supply. Vaccine nationalism only helps the virus."

01:53 PM

Coronavirus around the world, in pictures

Security guards ensure that passengers respect the obligation to wear a face mask in western Germany - AFP

Children, who miss their online classes due to lack of internet, walk in a line as they leave after attending their open-air classes after schools were closed in central Kashmir's Budgam district - Reuters

Here's a look at the open air school setup in Kashmir - Reuters

Education Minister Peter Weir talking with pupils at St Joesph's Primary School Carryduff, as primary 7 year pupils are allowed to return to school in Northern Ireland - PA

01:35 PM

Italian vaccine candidate inoculates first volunteer

An Italian hospital has said it has inoculated a first volunteer with a vaccine as part of human trials expected to last six months, AFP reports.

The woman, in her 50s, received the first dose developed by Rome-based biotech company ReiThera at the capitals Spallanzani Institute for infectious diseases.

The trials, developed between ReiThera and Spallanzani researchers, will be carried out on 90 volunteers divided into groups by age to test the efficacy of different dosages of the vaccine, developed since March.

If the first results of Phase 1 of the human trials prove positive, researchers say they will be able to proceed to phases 2 and 3 by the end of the year, on a larger number of volunteers even outside of Italy.

The vaccine has already passed pre-clinical tests on animal models.

Giuseppe Ippolito, the institutes scientific director, said: Having an Italian vaccine means not being slaves and servants of other countries that will say Me first, adding that he hoped the vaccine would be ready for use by spring 2021.

01:27 PM

KFC to pause 'Finger Lickin' Good' slogan amid pandemic

KFC is to pause the use of its classic Finger Lickin' Good slogan after 64 years as it admitted that the message "doesn't quite fit" following the coronavirus outbreak.

The company has released new images of advertising posters and packaging with the well-known slogan blurred and pixelated.

It said the slogan will return "when the time is right" but it will shift its messaging in the meantime.

The restaurant chain closed its sites temporarily in March as a result of the pandemic but has now reopened the majority of its restaurants with more stringent health and safety policies in place.

"We find ourselves in a unique situation - having an iconic slogan that doesn't quite fit in the current environment," said Catherine Tan-Gillespie, global chief marketing officer at KFC.

"While we are pausing the use of It's Finger Lickin' Good, rest assured the food craved by so many people around the world isn't changing one bit."

01:16 PM

Online booking system under fire as some face 350-mile round trip for Covid test

The NHS Test and Trace system has faced fresh criticism for a flaw in its online booking system which tries to direct people to test centres more than 100 miles away.

Some people with coronavirus symptoms who try to book a test online are directed to centres which would take them more than three hours to reach by car.

A person from Ilfracombe in Devon who has symptoms of Covid-19 - including a persistent cough, fever or loss of sense of taste or smell - is directed to a test centre in Swansea when they try to book a test online.

This would see them drive past centres in Taunton, Bristol and Cardiff on their six-and-a-half hour round trip, driving 175 miles in each direction.

People in Felixstowe, Suffolk, have been directed to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, with the Government coronavirus test booking website saying it is just 13.8 miles away.

However, the journey is 40 miles by car, taking almost an hour to get from one place to another.

And people in the region with symptoms of Covid-19 would be forced to drive past their closest test centre in Ipswich on their way to Clacton.

Labour said problems with the booking system should be resolved as a "matter of urgency".

01:11 PM

Scottish secondary pupils to wear face coverings in school corridors but not classrooms

Secondary pupils in Scotland are to be ordered to wear face masks in school corridors and other communal areas but not classrooms, under plans outlined by Nicola Sturgeon.

The First Minister said different groups of pupils are more likely to mix and transmit the virus in these areas, with crowding and a lack of ventilation also more commonplace.

Speaking at her daily briefing, she said her government was in the final stages of consulting on the change and an announcement will be made within the next few days.

Although SNP ministers are not consulting on introducing masks into the classroom, she said they could be an option where there are outbreaks. Ministers are also considering whether masks must be worn on school buses.

Simon Johnson has more here.

01:06 PM

Pilot schemes taking place for mass testing

Downing Street said mass testing was "incredibly important" and pilot schemes were taking place.

Responding to reports that Health Secretary Matt Hancock wants up to four million coronavirus tests a day by early next year, a Number 10 spokesman said pilot schemes were currently being assessed.

"We have, throughout the pandemic, increased our capacity to test for coronavirus and we have always been clear that we'll continue to increase capacity," the spokesman said.

"DHSC (the Department of Health and Social Care) has three pilots currently under way and we are continuing to assess their feasibility."

Mass testing on that scale "would allow for us to test wider sections of society that may be asymptomatic".

01:01 PM

Catalonia caps all social gatherings at 10 people

Catalonias Government has moved to ban all meetings of more than 10 people in a bid to stem a rise in infections that is threatening the scheduled return of children to classrooms in September, reports James Badcock in Madrid.

After today saw the number of new Covid-19 positives from the previous 24 hours reach more than 1,700, Quim Torra, Catalonias president, said urgent measures were require to stop this persistent rise.

The R rate in Catalonia stands at 1.12.

We have to ask people for a fresh effort so that we all get to work and ensure that schools can reopen, said Mr Torra.

Numbers of people meeting in public have been limited to 10 in the Barcelona area since July, but the restriction will now be imposed across Catalonia and also apply to private gatherings.

The fewer people we have contact with, the better, said Alba Verges, Catalonias health minister.

12:51 PM

India's outbreak shows no sign of slowing as cases surpass three million

India's total number of Covid-19 cases surpassed the unwelcome milestone of three million yesterday, only the third country to reach this figure, Joe Wallen reports.

Concerningly, India's outbreak shows no sign of slowing with the number of new daily cases consistently exceeding 60,000 throughout August. If it continues to add new Covid-19 infections at this rate it is predicted to overtake Brazil to have the world's second-highest tally of cases by the end of September.

Public health experts have warned that despite this already alarming number that only a small percentage of India's cases are being officially registered, due to a lack of testing.

A sero survey carried out in New Delhi last week found over one-quarter of the 15,000 respondents had already developed Covid-19 antibodies. Officially, fewer than one per cent of Delhiites have contracted the virus.

Similar results have also been recorded in serosurveys in other major Indian cities like Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad, indicating the epidemic is far more widespread than officially thought.

12:38 PM

Labour calls for halt to restarting bailiff visits for duration of pandemic crisis

Bailiff visits should be halted for the duration of the Covid-19 public health crisis, Labour has said.

In April, the Government banned bailiff visits but the temporary measures ended on Sunday, with debt collections allowed to restart today.

On a visit to Citizens Advice in Beverley, East Yorkshire, Labour's shadow justice minister Karl Turner warned that millions of people could now face an anxious wait for a knock at the door.

Speaking to the PA news agency, he said: "It is incredibly worrying the Government promised not to reintroduce bailiff visits during a public health pandemic, they've gone back on what they promised there.

"We've now got a situation where three million people are likely to be affected and 800,000 of those people who might be expecting a knock on a door today are people who have been affected directly as a result of Covid-19 and the public health crisis.

"So what we're saying is the Government should think again, they should stop bailiff visits right now, get this public health crisis out of the way and then go back to reintroducing.

"But we need better oversight and we need better regulation - there is not enough, that's just the truth of it."

12:33 PM

Top Gear 'very much up and running' but The Apprentice on hold

Kate Phillips, entertainment controller at the BBC, offered an update on their flagship entertainment shows, saying: "Top Gear is very much up and running. The big difference is we won't be able to do all the foreign trips although a couple were done before lockdown.

"The inventiveness they have brought to the table, they are very, very funny, proper belly laughs."

She added: "The Apprentice was a really hard call because we all really love The Apprentice. We had long discussions with the production team.

"We felt in the end the compromise that would have to be made, a lot of things that people love, the running around the streets, the living in the house together, we just couldn't do it, and with the increasing costs, we thought we would rather bring it back when we can do it properly so that is paused until next year."

12:28 PM

BBC drama boss says shows using 'ingenious' ways to navigate Covid filming restrictions

BBC drama boss Piers Wenger has said productions ranging from EastEnders to The Pursuit Of Love are using "ingenious" ways to navigate Covid-19 filming restrictions, including have actors kissing through a sheet of perspex, which is then taken out in post-production, or putting cast and crew in "bubbles".

12:24 PM

Millionaire search after two winning Lotto tickets bought in lockdown-Oldham

Two potential millionaires from Oldham are being urged to come forward as winning Lotto tickets bought in the town have yet to be claimed.

The 1 million prizes were both won in the Lotto draw on Saturday August 8, but have not been claimed by the lucky ticket-holders.

The tickets were both bought in the metropolitan borough of Oldham, which has been subject to local lockdown restrictions in recent weeks.

National Lottery bosses are urging people to double-check their tickets for the winning numbers: 2, 40, 49, 53, 56 and 58 with a bonus ball of 41.

Camelot's Andy Carter, senior winners' adviser at the National Lottery, said: "We're desperate to find this mystery ticket-holder or ticket-holders and unite them with their winnings, these amazing prizes could really make a huge difference to somebody's life.

"Given the current situation in Oldham, and the wider national situation, we're encouraging everyone who may have bought a ticket in the area to check their tickets online via the National Lottery website or via the National Lottery App."

12:10 PM

The ever-changing travel naughty list has turned some of us into middle-class criminals

To go or not to go? Our columnist ponders the pros and cons of breaking the rules in order to visit France.

I should be in France right now, eating a croissant for breakfast, slathering the thing in apricot jam from the garden and washing it down with a delicious mug of rose. Sadly, Im not. Im sitting in Crystal Palace, where theres a lamentable lack of apricot trees and Ive never seen a single man wearing a string of garlic like a handbag. I couldnt go to France because I didnt have time to quarantine on the other side and I spent the week leading up to the governments decision dithering over whether I should book a pedicure or not. Oh just go, said one anonymous friend, when I moaned about the situation. Whos going to check if you quarantine properly when you get back? This friend, I need to tell you, is the sort person who would never put the wrong sort of plastic in the recycling bin and yet here she was, advocating that I return from holiday and skip around the countrys care homes to have a jolly good breathe over everyone. Close enough, anyway.

Read the full piece, from Sophia Money-Coutts, here.

11:53 AM

Sweden not expecting big second wave, says country's chief epidemiologist

Sweden is likely to see local outbreaks but no big second wave of Covid-19 cases in the autumn, the country's top epidemiologist and architect if its unorthodox pandemic strategy said today.

Sweden has been an outlier in Europe's fight against the coronavirus, keeping businesses, restaurants and most schools open throughout the pandemic, while not recommending the use of face masks, which remain a rare sight on city streets.

Per capita, Sweden has suffered many times more virus deaths than its Nordic neighbours, though not quite as many as Europe's worst-hit countries such as Belgium, Spain and Britain.

New cases, hospitalisations and mortality have fallen sharply over the past couple of months. With most Swedes having returned from summer vacations and schools reopening last week for the new term, there are concerns the country could see a second wave of infections.

"We don't believe we'll have a classic second wave, such as those seen in influenza pandemics where you get widespread contagion in the community again," Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said in an interview with broadcaster TV4.

"This disease appears to work in a different way. The spread is more patchy, so the likelihood is greater that we will see - as one is currently seeing around Europe - outbreaks in certain places, at workplaces and similar environments, during the autumn."

11:40 AM

Record rise in cases puts Greek holidays at risk of quarantine

Fears are growing that Greece could be dropped from the UK's quarantine-exempt list, as it announced a record 284 new cases on Sunday, and two more deaths.

Greeces Civil Protection Authority has thus implemented new measures on the island of Lesvos; ordering bars, restaurants and entertainment venues to close between midnight and 7am as of today. Similar rules are already in place in Santorini, Kos, Crete and Thessaloniki.

While Greece's number of cases per 100,000 residents over a one-week period is currently at 14.1, well under the UK's threshold of 20, it has been rising sharply. Two weeks ago, that number was only 6.1.

It comes as a raft of other countries around Europe face being removed from the FCO's fast-dwindling 'green' list. The Czech Republic reported 506 positive tests on Friday, its highest daily rise since the start of the pandemic, while Switzerland saw new cases climb above 300 a day twice last week, a four-month record.

Read all the latest on our travel live blog here.

11:34 AM

Wetherspoons warns of annual loss in wake of pandemic

Wetherspoon expects to sink to an annual loss and warned that sales will suffer when the Eat Out To Help Out scheme ends next week.

The pub group, which has reopened 844 of its 873 sites, said bar and food sales fell by 16.9pc for the 44 days to 16 August.

Wetherspoon said sales had seen a rapid acceleration following the launch of Rishi Sunaks discount dining scheme that halves the cost of food and soft drinks up to a maximum of 10 per person from Monday to Wednesday in August.

Sales have also improved as a result of additional seating outside its pubs, the company added.

However, it warned that sales are expected to be more subdued once the Chancellors scheme ends. Chairman Tim Martin said it expects to fall to a loss this year due to one-off costs related to the pandemic.

Hannah Uttley has more here.

11:27 AM

Face masks at Edinburgh school 'request, not obligation', council says

Pupils who have been asked to wear face coverings at school are doing so as a "request by the school, not an obligation", according to a local authority.

The move comes as a school in Scotland remains closed after a cluster emerged last week.

James Gillespie's High School in Edinburgh welcomed youngsters back to classes today with the decision for masks reportedly to be used when moving along indoor corridors between classrooms.

Face masks are also being introduced at schools in the Highland Council area - including Millburn Academy in Inverness and Grantown Grammar School, in Grantown.

But a City of Edinburgh Council spokeswoman told the PA news agency: "As per the current Scottish Government and city guidance, there is no requirement for pupils to wear face coverings while in our schools.

"However, schools may choose to construct advice based on consultation with their pupils, on what they find suitable for their individual school community.

"At this time the wearing of face coverings at James Gillespie's is a request by the school, not an obligation."

11:18 AM

Watch: Minister insists return to school is 'safe'

11:05 AM

Dutch royals sorry for Greek holiday virus breach

The Dutch King and Queen have apologised after they were pictured breaking coronavirus social distancing rules while on holiday in Greece.

A photograph on the internet showed King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima up close to a man said to be a restaurant owner on the island of Mykonos.

"A photo appeared in the media in which we kept too little distance. In the spontaneity of the moment, we did not pay attention," the King and Queen said on Twitter.

"Of course, we should have done. Because on holiday too, respecting rules for coronavirus is essential for beating the virus."

The photo showed the King, 53, in a patterned shirt with a mask in one hand and his arm around the Queen, 49, while the man also had his arm around the queen.

The person who took the photo, quoted anonymously by Dutch broadcaster RTL Nieuws, said it was taken in a private capacity and that the failure to respect social distancing was a "mistake".

10:57 AM

It may not start and it may not finish - prepare for a Tour de France like no other

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic means this year's biggest road race is up in the air, but its unpredictability could make it thrilling, writes Tom Cary.

It promises to be a Tour de France like no other. When the 107th edition of cyclings biggest race kicks off in Nice next Saturday, it will do so with bubbles and buffer zones, mobile testing labs and minimal media interaction. Pre-race press conferences will be conducted via Zoom. Journalist access to buses and team hotels forbidden. In a blow for fans of plastic keychains and Haribo sweets, there will be no Tour caravan throwing trinkets to crowds this year. What there will be is regular Covid-19 testing for the travelling circus. Tour organisers ASO have confirmed a two-strikes-and-youre-out policy, raising the possibility of a maillot jaune contender having to abandon the race within sight of the finishing line in Paris despite not actually testing positive for coronavirus himself. Imagine if that contender was Groupama-FDJs Thibaut Pinot, about to become the first French winner since Bernard Hinault in 1985. It might trigger another French revolution.

Read the full piece here.

10:44 AM

EU Trade Commissioner urged to resign after controversial golf event

Ireland's housing minister said that the EU's Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan should resign after he attended a controversial golf event in the west of the country which many claim broke Covid-19 rules.

Mr Hogan is a senior Irish politician with significant standing in Brussels who would be deeply involved in any deal with Britain after Brexit.

The country's Minister for Housing Darragh O'Brien said this morning that Mr Hogan should take responsibility for his actions.

The commissioner has also been urged to consider his position by the leaders of Ireland's coalition Government, Micheal Martin and Leo Varadkar, after attending a dinner at a hotel in the west of Ireland with more than 80 people present.

Police are investigating whether coronavirus regulations were broken in holding the Irish parliament's golf society event two days after the Government announced it intended to curb the numbers permitted to gather together.

Mr O'Brien also criticised the "drip feed" of information about Mr Hogan's movements in Ireland.

"That's unhelpful to say the least. The commissioner needs to realise how rightly people are so angry about this event and his participation in it," he added.

10:33 AM

Japan running out of credit card numbers after online shopping surge

Japan is facing a shortage of 16-digit credit card numbers after the pandemic sparked an online shopping boom.

Card providers are reportedly mulling an increase in the number of digits after shoppers turned to e-commerce as Covid-19 kept them at home.

The pandemic has helped with Tokyos push to boost cashless transactions with notes and coins still used for the vast majority of small purchases. Japan has lagged behind in the cashless shift but Shinzo Abes government plans to double usage to 40pc by 2025.

However, the industry fears the flurry of card issuance since the pandemic struck will cause a shortage of digit combinations, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported.

Tom Rees has more here.

10:24 AM

Tesco to create 16,000 permanent jobs for online business

Tesco has said it is creating 16,000 new permanent jobs as it sees "exceptional growth" in its online business.

Most of the roles are expected to be filled by workers who joined on a temporary basis at the start of the pandemic but who now want to remain with the business for the longer term, the retail giant said.

They include 10,000 pickers to put together customer orders and 3,000 drivers to deliver them, plus a number of other roles in stores and distribution, said Tesco - which is Britain's biggest supermarket chain.

It said the new permanent roles were in addition to 4,000 already created since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.

10:15 AM

Russia reports over 4,700 new cases

Russia has reported 4,744 new coronavirus cases today, pushing its confirmed infection tally to 961,493, the fourth largest in the world.

Authorities said 65 people had died over the past 24 hours, pushing the official death toll to 16,448.

10:00 AM

First pupils return to schools in Northern Ireland

Many pupils in years seven, 12 and 14 in Northern Ireland are back at school today for the first time since March.

However, three schools did not reopen following the detection of Covid-19 cases: Ballyclare Secondary School is set to reopen on Tuesday following a deep clean and 72-hour incubation period, while St Kevin's Primary School and St Louise's College have also delayed their reopening following positive cases among the school community.

Some parents have taken to social media to express concern at their children returning to school.

Trevor Dempster, a father of five from Bangor, Co Down, said he is worried as his wife had been shielding during the pandemic.

"As a family, for us coronavirus is a life or death situation. My wife who is 32, has been taking immunosuppressants to treat a long-term illness.

"Jayne has no immune system to fight coronavirus and falls into the highest at risk category, labelled as vulnerable," he tweeted. "This week will see our five young children return to school, at a time when new daily cases are rising sharply.

"The spread across all council areas in Northern Ireland suggests community transfer, which vastly increases the risk to those most vulnerable within our society.

"I agree the risk to children themselves is low but that is being used as spin from politicians & school leaders to hide behind the fact that children are 'spreaders'. The issue is not that of children dying but of whom they will pass the virus too and the long-term consequences."

Ashleigh Clarke teacher at St Clare's Primary School in Belfast wearing a protective visor and gloves stands to greet pupils back to school - PA

Teacher Catherine McClean has her temperature checked by assistant teacher Hilary Brennan at St Clare's Primary School in Belfast - PA

09:51 AM

England's deputy chief medical officer calls for 'fair distribution' of any vaccine

England's deputy chief medical officer has advocated for "fair distribution" of any Covid-19 vaccine after it was reported that Donald Trump is considering fast-tracking a UK Covid-19 vaccine candidate before the US election.

According to reports, the White House is considering granting emergency authorisation for a vaccine being developed by Oxford University and pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.

Commenting on the prospect of the vaccine being fast-tracked, England's deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries said that everyone around the globe should have "fair and safe access to vaccine development".

Dr Harries told Sky News: "We have a global crisis... It is really important that everyone around the world has fair and safe access to vaccine development.

"Obviously those countries which are more developed have the facilities to develop the vaccine and get it safely out to their populations. But I think all public health colleagues would be wanting fair distribution."

09:46 AM

22 cases linked to school in Dundee

A total of 22 coronavirus cases, most of them adult staff, have now been linked to a school in Dundee.

Kingspark School was closed last Wednesday as pupils and staff were asked to self-isolate for 14 days, with NHS Tayside confirming in an update on Sunday that 17 staff, two pupils and three community contacts had tested positive.

Two other school sites in Dundee have also been identified as result of contact tracing connected to the Kingspark outbreak.

A primary two class at St Peter and Paul's School has been asked to self-isolate until September 2 after an individual tested positive.

Children who attended the Happy Times out-of-school club at Downfield Primary School are also being asked to self-isolate until the same date following a positive test result.

09:40 AM

Latest Covid rates in key UK risk areas

Below is a summary of the latest rates of new Covid-19 cases in key areas of England from PA news agency:

Oldham

There were 149 new cases of Covid-19 recorded in Oldham in the seven days to August 20. This is the equivalent of 62.8 cases per 100,000 people - down from 102.5 per 100,000 in the previous week. Oldham continues to record the highest rate of new cases in England, but the rolling rate has fallen steadily since a peak of 112.2 in the seven days to August 11.

Further restrictions were introduced in Oldham from midnight on Saturday August 22, with people told not to socialise with anyone outside their household and to use public transport only if it is essential.

Pendle

Pendle is currently recording the second highest rate in England, but here too the numbers are falling. Some 55 new cases were recorded in the seven days to August 20 - the equivalent of 59.7 cases per 100,000 people. This is down from 90.1 cases per 100,000 in the seven days to August 13.

Blackburn with Darwen

A total of 76 new cases were recorded in Blackburn with Darwen in the seven days to August 20, or 50.8 per 100,000 people. This is down from 94.9 in the previous seven days. Both Blackburn with Darwen and Pendle have had the same additional restrictions imposed as in Oldham.

Leicester

Cases continue to fall in Leicester. The latest figures show 167 new cases were recorded in the seven days to August 20, or 47.1 per 100,000 people. This is down from 60.7 in the previous seven days. At the peak of the recent outbreak in the city, the rolling rate was as high as 159.5 cases per 100,000 for the seven days to June 24.

Birmingham

The city of Birmingham was placed on the Government's national watchlist on August 21 as an "area of enhanced support", meaning it will be provided with extra resources and support to help increase testing and manage outbreaks if necessary.

No new restrictions have been placed on residents, however, and the number of new cases is falling.

Birmingham currently has the 17th highest rate in England, with 23.6 cases per 100,000 people recorded in the seven days to August 20 - down from 30.4 in the previous seven days.

09:30 AM

Residents in locked down China region complain about harsh restrictions

Residents in Chinas north-western Xinjiang region have complained on social media about the harsh coronavirus lockdown measures in the region after a local outbreak.

Officials said earlier this month that they had effectively contained the spread of the Urumqi cluster, and there have been no new cases reported in the last eight days.

But hundreds of local residents flooded local social media forums in recent days to complain about harsh conditions, including many being forced to stay home.

After some of these comments were removed  Chinas internet is heavily censored  users tried to flood local forums on the Twitter-like Weibo platform in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Social media users shared photos of front doors sealed with steel crowbars, and locks installed by community workers.

Why cant prefectures with no cases remove the lockdown? Why do you need to lock down the whole of Xinjiang? read one comment on Weibo, which received thousands of likes.

09:23 AM

Johnson: Transport should be 'no obstacle' to pupils returning

Boris Johnson said that transport should be "no obstacle" to pupils returning to school in September.

He said: "We've also got to face the fact that lockdown, kids being out of school as so many of them have, has been I think a risk for them physically because they haven't been able to exercise, perhaps in the way that they should.

"But also there's been pressure on their mental health as well and that's why we're putting another 8 million now into helping teachers to cope with some of the mental health problems that kids and young people may experience.

"But the best way to tackle any mental health problems is to get our kids into school in September."

Mr Johnson added: "Whether your child, whether your pupil is going by bus or by cycle, or by train, or by car, or walking, whatever mode of transport your kid needs to get to school, we'll do everything we can to help.

"We're putting another 40 million in to support councils and we want to make sure that transport is no obstacle and it won't be. Transport should be no obstacle to kids, to pupils, getting back into school in September."

09:10 AM

Boris Johnson: Risk of children getting Covid is very small

Boris Johnson has sought to assure parents that the risk of children getting Covid-19 as they return to school is "very, very, very small".

In a video posted on Twitter, the Prime Minister said: "It's absolutely vital that pupils get back into school in September.

"It's vital for their education, it's vital for their welfare, it's vital for their physical, and indeed, their mental wellbeing. So let's make sure that all kids, all pupils, get back to school at the beginning of September."

Mr Johnson continued: "I think parents are genuinely still a bit worried about their children contracting coronavirus. All I can say is the risks are very, very, very small that they'll even get it, but then the risk that they'll suffer from it badly are very, very, very, very small indeed.

"I think it's vital that parents understand that schools are safe and that teachers have gone to great lengths to get schools ready. They've been doing it all throughout the pandemic, by the way.

"Lots of schools have been open and looking after kids very, very successfully and will take steps to ensure that groups aren't mixed up, that we have washing of hands and all the other disciplines you need to prevent spread of the virus."

Now is the time to get kids back to school. pic.twitter.com/yMxw595KUr  Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) August 24, 2020

09:08 AM

Five-mile limit lifted as Aberdeen lockdown begins to ease

A number of lockdown measures have now been lifted in Aberdeen, including the five-mile travel limit and restrictions on indoor meetings.

People can now travel further than five miles for non-essential or leisure purposes, while restrictions on gatherings and hospital and care home visits have been eased.

However, people will have to wait until Wednesday before they can visit pubs or restaurants, which will reopen once they have undergone an environmental health check.

Aberdeen was put back on lockdown following a spike in Covid cases almost three weeks ago, with the hospitality sector ordered to close after an outbreak linked to pubs and restaurants.

08:41 AM

Closing schools 'last resort' in terms of tackling local increase in infections

Minister for school standards Nick Gibb said the Prime Minister "has made very clear that closing schools will be the last resort in terms of tackling a local increase in the infection rate".

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "So I think we are confident that it is safe for children to attend schools and we're confident that we can identify at a local level where there is an increase in the infection rate.

"The Prime Minister has made very clear that closing schools will be the last resort in terms of tackling a local increase in the infection rate, but we will take swift action, advised by the local health protection teams when we identify a rise in the infection rate in local areas around the country. That's the only way we can sort of suffocate this virus, to deal with it, to stop it spreading more widely in the community."

Asked about having a helpline for headteachers to call, he said: "There are all kinds of methods by which we contact schools, we will look at all these issues... My understanding is that there's always been a helpline available, but better than that is that our regional teams are in continual contact with schools around the country, and where there are concerns then help and support will be given to those schools."

08:33 AM

France to reciprocate Britain's quarantine rule in coming days

French authorities will in coming days reciprocate Britain's decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on all arrivals from France, the junior minister for European affairs said today.

Britain said on Friday that travellers from the United Kingdom to France are required to self-certify that they are not suffering coronavirus symptoms or have been in contact with a confirmed case within 14 days preceding travel.

Since August 15 British authorities have also required travellers returning from France to self-isolate upon their return due to high Covid-19 infection rates in France.

"We will have a measure called reciprocity so that our British friends do not close the border in one single way," French Junior European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune told French TV France 2.

"For travellers returning from the United Kingdom, there will probably be restrictive measures decided in the next few days by the Prime Minister and by the Defence Council."

08:26 AM

Schools minister 'confident' all schools will open at start of September

Nick Gibb also said he was "confident" that all schools will be open at the beginning of September.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Fines are something that headteachers are very reluctant to use, they use them only as a last resort. It's about reassuring parents that may have a particular concern about the measures that the school has taken to make sure that their young people are safe, and they are going to extraordinary lengths to make sure that children are safe.

"Ninety per cent of parents have said that it's likely or very likely that their children will attend school. I'm confident that all schools will be open at the beginning of September."

Asked about masks, he said: "What the current advice is, is that if a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July, all the hygiene measures that I've been talking about, then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils ...

"Well, we always listen to whatever the current advice is from PHE, the chief medical officers, we always adhere to that advice, and it's that advice that drives the content of the guidance that we give to schools."

08:18 AM

Measures schools taking to minimise virus risk 'very effective', says schools minister

Minister for school standards Nick Gibb has insisted the measures schools were taking to minimise the risk of transmission of the virus are "very effective".

Asked about fines for parents, he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Well, look, fines for non-attendance have always been a last resort for headteachers and schools. What matters is that young people are attending school.

"We live in a country where education is compulsory and I think parents can be reassured that the measures that schools are taking to make sure that we minimise the risk of the transmission of the virus are very effective."

He added: "If they've (parents) got extra concerns, that is a matter between the headteacher and the family to make sure that their concerns are taken into account, but it is important - it's a moral imperative - that young people are back in school, because what the chief medical officers are saying now is that the risk of not being in school outweigh the very small risk of children being in school, particularly given all the control measures, the hygiene, the cleaning that's taking place in our schools ... there's an absolute determination to make sure that schools are safe for the children and children want to be back."

08:13 AM

Face masks compulsory in Seoul as South Korea battles surge in cases

South Korea's capital has ordered the wearing of masks in both indoor and outdoor public places for the first time, as it battles a surge in coronavirus cases centred in the densely populated metropolitan area.

"If we fail to flatten the curve this week we believe we will be faced with a very important crisis, that the virus will spread to the entire nation," health ministry official Yoon Tae-ho told a briefing.

The Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) reported 266 new cases as of midnight on Sunday, down from 397 a day earlier but another in more than a week of triple-digit daily increases. Overall, South Korea has reported 17,665 coronavirus cases and 309 deaths.

South Korea has been widely praised for its success in tackling the virus, with extensive testing and aggressive contact-tracing, but Yoon said health investigators had been unable to determine the transmission routes of about 20 per cent of the recent cases, raising concerns over so-called silent spreaders.

He called on people to avoid leaving home and to cancel any unnecessary trips out.

The Government has also extended second-tier social-distancing rules, which had been in place in Seoul, to other areas of the country, banning in-person church meetings and closing nightclubs, buffets and cyber cafes.

Health authorities say they are considering imposing the toughest stage 3 social-distancing rules, under which schools and business are urged to close, if the spread of new cases can not be slowed.

08:07 AM

Trump considers fast-tracking UK vaccine before US election

The Trump administration is considering bypassing normal US regulatory standards to fast-track an experimental coronavirus vaccine from the UK for use in America ahead of the presidential election, according to people briefed on the plan.

The Financial Times is reporting that one option being explored to speed up the availability of a vaccine would involve the US Food and Drug Administration awarding "emergency use authorisation" (EUA) in October to a vaccine being developed in partnership with AstraZeneca and Oxford University, based on results from a small UK study if it is successful.

The White House declined to comment on the report.

A spokeswoman for AstraZeneca denied the company had discussed an emergency use authorization for its potential vaccine with the US Government and said it would be premature to speculate on that possibility.

The company said the late-stage Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials for its vaccine candidate are still ongoing in Britain and other markets globally and that it did not anticipate efficacy results until later this year.

There are no approved vaccines for Covid-19, but AstraZeneca's shot, called AZD1222, is widely seen as one of the leading candidates.

07:13 AM

Children more at risk from road accident on way to school than coronavirus

Children are more likely to be involved in a car accident or catch flu than coronavirus, the deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries has said.

"Every time a parent sends their children to school, pre-Covid, they may have been involved in a road traffic accident  there are all sorts of things.

"That risk, or the risk of seasonal flu, we think is probably higher than the current risk of coronavirus, she told Sky News.

"The risk to the child themselves is very, very small."



Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Jenny Harries says schools are currently a safe environment for children, describing a child's risk from seasonal flu as higher than that posed by COVID-19. SI#KayBurley pic.twitter.com/lP65sgfVQy  Kay Burley (@KayBurley) August 24, 2020

06:42 AM

Back-to-school campaign must engage with parents

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders' union NAHT, said the Government needs to engage with families to help parents send pupils back to school.

Noting the anxiety many parents have about the return to school, he told BBC Breakfast: "The Government's back-to-school campaign has really got to engage with parents, let parents know what to do, and to make sure that parents know what to do around the school as well to make sure all of the measures being taken in school are as secure as they can be."

Mr Whiteman said there were worries about the impact on the R-rate and transmission of coronavirus in schools.

Boris Johnson in a classroom - Lucy Young/Pool via AP, File

He added: "We want to engage with Government, we want some more advice from Government about what to do if the pressure on R comes and what to do if we do need a plan B.

"It seems to be an act of heresy at the moment if you talk about wanting a plan B. It's not defeatist to prepare for the worst whilst hoping for the best.

"If we do have to experience some form of shutdown going forward, we want to learn from what happened before when we had no time to prepare, and be prepared if it comes again."

06:25 AM

Prime Minister must galvanise his inner Churchill, says Sir Iain Duncan Smith

Writing in today's Telegraph, former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith says: " We have to make it clear to the Unions and others that there are no ifs or buts, schools must re-open and children must go back in September.

"Ministers even now should be explaining, forcefully, to parents that their childrens future will be blighted if this does not happen. They also need to explain again and again to parents that there is no risk. Also if children dont go back to school, large swathes of the economy will lose the input of parents and be further damaged.

"This battle over schools returning must see the Prime Minister in the lead, galvanising his inner Churchill for this issue has the capacity either to scar the government or alternatively to re-invigorate the government.

"It is a fight that, if the government wins, will see the start of an uplift in its fortunes and win it must."

Read it in full here

05:30 AM

The oil and gas sector allowed to bypass environmental rules

Thousands of oil and gas operations, government facilities and other sites have won permission to stop monitoring for hazardous emissions or otherwise bypass rules intended to protect health and the environment because of the coronavirus outbreak, The Associated Press has found.

The result: approval for less environmental monitoring at some Texas refineries and at an army depot dismantling warheads armed with nerve gas in Kentucky, manure piling up and the mass disposal of livestock carcasses at farms in Iowa and Minnesota, and other increased risks to communities as governments eased enforcement over smokestacks, medical waste shipments, sewage plants, oilfields and chemical plants.

The Trump administration paved the way for the reduced monitoring on March 26 after being pressured by the oil and gas industry, which said lockdowns and social distancing during the pandemic made it difficult to comply with pollution rules. States are responsible for much of the oversight of federal environmental laws, and many followed with their own policies.

05:06 AM

India's coronavirus cases surge to 3.1 million

Indian devotees wearing a protective face mask, carry Hindu god Lord Ganesha for immersion as part of a ritual in India. - Shutterstock

India reported 61,408 coronavirus infections in the last 24 hours, taking its total caseload past 3.1 million, data from the federal health ministry showed.

India crossed the 3 million cases milestone on Sunday, 17 days after it crossed the 2 million mark. It is the worst-affected country in Asia, and third behind Brazil and the United States globally.

The number of deaths in the last 24 hours was 836, taking the total to 57,542.

04:56 AM

New Zealand extends Auckland lockdown

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand. - Getty Images AsiaPac

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern today extended a coronavirus lockdown in the country's largest city until the end of the week and introduced mandatory mask wearing on public transport across the nation.

Ardern said the four-day extension in the city of Auckland was critical to enable the country to step down its scale of emergency restrictions - and remain at less restrictive levels.

"We want both confidence, and certainty for everyone," Ardern said during a televised media conference.

The Auckland lockdown, imposed on August 11 after officials detected the country's first locally acquired cases of Covid-19 in more than three months, had been scheduled to end on Wednesday.

It will now end on Sunday night. The city's step down from Level 3 to Level 2 restrictions will be made gradually from today.

02:19 AM

Mexico posts lowest weekly death toll in 2 months

Mexico reported 226 more deaths from coronavirus on Sunday, finishing the week with 3,723 fatalities, the lowest total in over two months and lending weight to government assertions it is beating back the pandemic.

On Tuesday, the government's coronavirus czar, Deputy Health Minster Hugo Lopez-Gatell, declared the virus was in "sustained decline" in Mexico, barely two weeks after the country posted its highest daily new infections.

Low testing rates have fed concerns that the published data may understate the true extent of the pandemic, and ministry officials also caution that cases could surge again.

Mexico has the third highest death toll globally standing at 60,480, after the United States and Brazil.

12:44 AM

Australia's Victoria state reports lowest rise in cases in seven weeks

The Australian state of Victoria reported its lowest daily rise in new infections in seven weeks on Monday, fuelling optimism that a deadly second wave there is subsiding.

Victoria today reported 116 cases and 15 deaths from the virus in the past 24 hours, down from a peak of more than 700 cases early this month.

Australia saw a surge in infections in the past month in Melbourne, Victoria's capital and the country's second-largest city, but cases have been trending downward in recent days helped by a total lockdown.

While the Melbourne lockdown has curtailed the spread of infections, it has wreaked havoc on the economy with Australia's effective unemployment rate expected to climb above 13pc by the end of September, according to government estimates.

Nearly half a million people could lose their jobs due to the full lockdown in Melbourne, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said on Sunday.

11:32 PM

Japan's Prime Minister Abe to visit hospital again

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is rumoured to have health issues - Reuters

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is planning to visit a Tokyo hospital today, Yomiuri daily said, amid mounting concerns about his ability to continue as premier due to health issues and fatigue from handling the coronavirus crisis.

Citing several government and coalition sources, Yomiuri said Abe would receive the results of a medical check-up from a week ago, when he underwent an examination that lasted seven-and-a-half hours, adding to worries about his health.

Abe, already the country's longest-serving prime minister, was set to surpass a half-century-old record set by his great-uncle Eisaku Sato for the longest consecutive tenure as premier on Monday.

Abe, in office since 2012 in his second stint as prime minister, resigned from his first term in 2007 because of struggles with ulcerative colitis, which he now keeps under control with medication that was not previously available.

Akira Amari, an Abe confidante and chairman of the LDP's tax panel, said that Abe, 65, could be suffering from fatigue because of his continuous work over the response to the virus.

10:41 PM

US announces approval of plasma treatment against virus

American authorities announced an emergency approval of blood plasma from recovered coronavirus patients as a treatment against the disease that has killed over 176,000 in the US.

The Food and Drug Administration's authorisation comes as President Donald Trump faces intense pressure to curb the contagion that has crippled the world's largest economy and clouded his once-promising prospects for re-election in November.

The plasma is believed to contain powerful antibodies that can help fight off the disease faster and help protect people from being seriously hurt by it.

"This product may be effective in treating Covid-19 and... the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product," FDA said in a statement.

While the treatment has already been used on patients in the United States and other nations, the extent of its effectiveness is still debated by experts and some have warned that it could carry side effects.

For more read Donald Trump gives emergency authorisation for use of plasma to treat coronavirus by US correspondent David Millward.

10:31 PM

Boris Johnson urges parents to send their kids back to school

Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits St Joseph's Catholic Primary School in London encouraging children to return to the classroom - Lucy Young/Pool Evening Standard

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called on parents to send their children back to school next month after the summer holidays, which he views as a key step to helping the country and its economy recover from the lockdown.

Mr Johnson followed up on a warning over the weekend from medical advisers who said that students faced bigger risks from missing out on their education than from catching the virus.

"The risk of contracting Covid-19 in school is very small and it is far more damaging for a child's development and their health and well-being to be away from school any longer," Johnson said in a statement. "This is why it's vitally important that we get our children back into the classroom to learn and to be with their friends. Nothing will have a greater effect on the life chances of our children than returning to school."

Schools shut their doors in March, except for the children of key workers, and reopened in June for only a small number of pupils.

For more read Julia Hartley-Brewer 's article entitled Schools crisis is Boris Johnson's do-or-die moment.
New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) announced Monday that her office had filed a lawsuit to compel the Trump Organization to comply with subpoenas related to an investigation into whether President Trump and his company improperly inflated the value of its assets on financial statements.

The state of play: The investigation was launched after the president's former personal attorney Michael Cohen testified to Congress that Trump inflated and deflated his net worth at various times in order to obtain tax benefits and more favorable terms for loans.

The big picture: The attorney general's investigation is one of several probes that Trump and his company are facing as he seeks re-election in November. Earlier on Monday, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said he would hold off on a subpoena for Trump's financial records until an appeals court weighed in on the case.

What they're saying: "I took action to force the Trump Organization, and specifically EVP Eric Trump, to comply with my offices ongoing investigation into its financial dealings. For months, the Trump Organization has failed to fully comply with our subpoenas in this investigation," James said in a statement.

"We are seeking thousands of documents and testimony from multiple witnesses regarding several Trump Organization properties and transactions, including from Eric Trump, who was intimately involved in one or more transactions under review."

"The Trump Organization has stalled, withheld documents, and instructed witnesses, including Eric Trump, to refuse to answer questions under oath. That's why we filed a motion to compel the Trump Organization to comply with our lawful subpoenas for documents and testimony."

Read the AG's filing.
Ahead of the Working



Committee (CWC) meeting on Monday, senior party leaders from on Sunday hailed leadership of during the COVID-19 crisis and demanded she and former party president be supported for their work.

Pradesh Committee (GPCC) president Girish Chodankar and Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat have issued separate statements in support of the Gandhis.

Chodankar said the demand for restructuring the party is "absurd" at a time when Gandhis are fighting to help the people facing the wrath of coronavirus on one side and "trying to save democracy of our great nation".

"@INCIndia is the First Family of India and the movement that provides strength and sanity to the Nation. After @RahulGandhi resignation it was SmtSoniaGandhi who took charge despite all odds.

"Making internal communication public of our family is unethical, unfair and destructive. Especially when @INCIndia is the only party keeping a selfish Govt in check," Chodankar tweeted.

"It's only @RahulGandhi who is fighting against @narendramodi and his reign of greed, terror and injustice. We should stand unitedly with our President and support #RahulGandhi who is exposing misdeeds," he added.

Kamat said has led the party by keeping everyone united during the (COVID-19) crisis.

"Let us discuss how to strengthen her and Rahul Gandhi's hands to defeat the divisive BJP," he said.

"The efforts of of exposing the shortcomings of the BJP government needs to be strengthened in the interest of the country," Kamat stated.

The senior Congress leader said had always extended him support when he was chief minister of

"I appealeach and every Congress worker in Goa to solidly stand by the leadership of Gandhis," he stated.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SPRINGFIELD  The citys superintendent of schools said Monday that Springfield will stick with plans for teachers to stay out of their classrooms this fall despite a state recommendation for educators to provide remote instruction from their schools.

Superintendent Daniel Warwick said the remote learning system for students and teachers was approved by the School Committee and is the more prudent measure to protect students and staff during the coronavirus pandemic.

The School Committee recently approved the remote plan for the first quarter of the school year for students and staff while the school buildings are professionally evaluated for ventilation and safety.

The safety of our students and staff is number one, Warwick said during the weekly coronavirus update at City Hall.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said Friday evening that it expects teachers and critical support staff working in districts with a remote learning model to instruct from school buildings each day.

The department said the approach would be beneficial to the students, ensure teachers have reliable internet access and make it easier for teachers to collaborate.

The schools are scheduled to open for the year on Sept. 15. Professional development for teachers and staff began this week.

Warwick said having potentially large numbers of teachers and staff in the buildings is not the right decision. Some buildings could have more than 200 people inside under such a plan, he said.

The system must make sure students and staff are safe, Warwick said, adding that the School Department has been developing a strong remote plan for the first quarter.

Springfield will stay with the current plan for remote learning and teaching, and re-evaluate it for the second quarter of the school year and beyond, he said.

Warwick said the the citys Health Department, Facilities Department, School Committee, various school officials and the office of Mayor Domenic J. Sarno participated in the planning and will remain involved in future decisions.

Health Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris said she supports the full remote plan for the first quarter.

The city has hired Bob Kirchherr, an industrial hygienist with OReilly, Talbot & Okun Engineering Associates, to test the ventilation and filtration systems for all 57 city school buildings. The district serves about 26,000 students and has more than 3,000 employees.

Some school staff, including principals and assistant principals and custodians, are in the schools now, Warwick said.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association slammed the state guidance, saying it showed a fundamental lack of trust in educators.

Association President Merrie Najimy wrote in a statement issued Saturday that the guidance was paternalistic and punitive and has no bearing on the quality of education.

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The Supreme Court (SC) on August 24 heard the adjusted gross revenue (AGR) case. Telecom companies, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and others had appealed to the Supreme Court to allow them to make staggered payments of their adjusted gross revenue dues.

The SC reserved its judgment on the issue of recovery of AGR dues from insolvent telecom companies. The judgment will clarify if there is any additional liability for Jio and Airtel on account of past dues of Reliance Communications (RCom) and Videocon.

Since Justice Arun Mishra is due to retire on September 2, a judgment is likely within the next seven working days.

On August 21, the court had reiterated its request for details spectrum shared by insolvent companies.

The SC had in October 2019 upheld the expanded definition of AGR as given by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

Vodafone Idea owes balance dues of around Rs 50,399 crore, while Bharti Airtel's outstanding amount is Rs 25,976 crore, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said on July 20.

SC observations:

> We are verifying if Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) proceedings are subterfuge to escape paying AGR dues. Can an asset (spectrum) that does not belong to telecom companies be sold under IBC?

> Government should move to cancel license, spectrum if dues are being wiped out. If telcos are unwilling to pay, we will direct cancel of spectrum allocation. How else is DoT supposed to deal with such an issue?

> How can you sell somebody else's property? This will allow for dues to be wiped out, new party will take over free of all encumbrances, liabilities. Wiping out of Govt dues in this fashion is not permissible.

> What is being proposed is like you renting out your house to a tenant, and the tenant selling your house under IBC.

> New person will take over the asset, free of encumbrances and liabilities.

Spectrum if cancelled will have to be surrendered to DoT, may be auctioned for higher realization.

> Why was no demand raised against Airtel for past dues of Videocon spectrum that was acquired by Airtel? Airtel has consistently argued that no demand has been served on them by DoT.

> Trading guidelines say that seller of spectrum shall satisfy all pending dues, before sale of spectrum. Our understanding is that upon non-payment of dues by seller, the trading guidelines transfer the burden on the buyer.

> It's been almost a year since our AGR judgment, why is DoT dithering?

DoT

> Under trading guidelines all past dues should be cleared prior to spectrum trading. Under trading guidelines, DoT can seek to recover dues from seller and buyers, jointly or severally.

> Assessment is under process, DOT can move to recover. AGR Dues were crystallised and known only after SC judgment. Once the SC crystallises a view on spectrum sharing and spectrum trading, consequences will follow.

> No demand has been raised against Jio, Airtel for part dues of RCom, Videocon. Assessment of Jio, Airtel liability for past dues of RCom, Videocon spectrum is under process.

Senior advocate Harish Salve for RCom CoC /Jio to SC:

> Resolution plan is proposing for sale of right to use under trading guidelines. License agreement recognises spectrum as a security, can be monetized under IBC.

> Government liability is not being wiped out because sale of spectrum, it is as per the IBC and status of DoT as operational creditor.

> Government liability is not being wiped out because sale of spectrum, it is as per the IBC and status of DoT as operational creditor.

> Notion of security under IBC allows for sale of right to use spectrum. It is not for this court to decide, DoT can decide on sale of spectrum at the appropriate stage

> At the stage of resolution applicant seeking DoT nod to sell, the applicant may provide for part payment and DoT may see commercial wisdom. There will be room for negotiation while seeking DoT nod.

> DoT has clarified that before 2016 there was no case of spectrum sharing. Spectrum trading between Jio-RCom is a small part of the total spectrum that was owned by RCom. No additional demand has been raised by the DoT against Jio, RCom. No AGR dues are attributable to the small fraction of total RCom spectrum sold.

> (For Jio) Only those dues that were unknown can be recovered from buyer of spectrum, under trading guidelines. AGR demands had been raised by DoT and were known to the telcos.

Senior advocate Ranjit Kumar for Aircel CoC to SC:

> Commercial decision of DOT to decide on allowing permission for spectrum sale. SC cant make that commercial decision for DoT. There will be no auction, banks won't lend to telcos if spectrum not recognised as security.

> License agreement, certified by President, recognises spectrum as a security. If spectrum not recognised as a security that can be monetised, why would banks lend a single rupee to telecom companies.

> Telecom companies do not have the cash reserves to purchase spectrum, operate without banks. Economy will face negative consequences if spectrum sale under IBC not allowed.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal for Airtel to SC:

> Aircel - Airtel spectrum traded in June 2016. Airtel paid the entire price upfront, purchased it in auction. No claim against Airtel, no demand raised by DoT.

> Videocon entered IBC on June 2018, AGR judgment came from SC in Oct 2019. In May 2016, traded 1800MHz Videocon spectrum in 6 circles, no demands were raised by DoT for shared spectrum.

> Have been paying all dues pending against Airtel since acquiring Videocon spectrum in May 2016. No demand raised for prior dues pertaining to the spectrum traded in May 2016.

> Even if demand raised, Airtel reserves right to appeal demand in TDSAT, not for court to decide at this stage.

> If the liability of past dues of Videocon were to be cast on Airtel, why wait for so long. DOT should have clarified long back on Airtel being made liable for Videocon's dues. AGR dues were known to telecom companies, DOT had raised demands.

Here's a quick recap of the previous hearings:

> On August 20 said it is worried that almost all of the AGR dues will be wiped out in the IBC process.

> On August 19, Senior advocate Harish Salve said RCom it will have to go into liquidation if spectrum sale is not permitted.

> On August 10, the court had asked the government to prepare a plan for recovery of dues from telecom companies under insolvency.

> When asked about payment due on spectrum bought from Reliance Communications (RCom), Jio said it has already paid the relevant Spectrum Usage Charges (SUC).

> Both Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel, which owe the maximum amounts, had on July 20 revised their demand from 20 years to 15 years for the staggered payments after SC's stringent stance on payment period.

> The SC has made it clear that it will not permit any self-assessment by the companies or re-calculation, and the DoT's assessment will be final.

Disclaimer: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban group's top political leader, second left, with other members of the Taliban delegation. (AP File)

Islamabad: Pakistan has invited key members of the Taliban's negotiating team to Islamabad, where senior officials will this week press them on the importance of starting peace talks, the country's foreign minister said Monday.

The meetings come at a crucial time in Afghanistan's conflict, with talks once again stalled amid a controversial prisoner swap.

"The delegation is in Islamabad and we will have a round of talks with them tomorrow as part of efforts aimed at (building) mutual confidence," foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told a press conference.

The Taliban and the Afghan government had signalled they were prepared to start talks immediately after Eid, which ended earlier this month, but the process remains bogged down over a prisoner exchange.

Kabul has released about 4,680 insurgent prisoners while the Taliban say they have freed 1,000 members of Afghan security forces, broadly fulfilling an agreement outlined in a deal reached between the US and the Taliban.

But the swap has stumbled over the final few hundred prisoners, with Kabul reluctant to release what it says are dangerous Taliban fighters tied to deadly attacks.

Qureshi said Islamabad had invited the Taliban to Pakistan to stress the importance of talks, saying negotiations were the "the only way forward" in Afghanistan.

"This is for Afghans to reconcile, and our task is that of facilitator," he added.

"The main objective is to secure peace and the next phase should be the start of intra-Afghan dialogue."

In October 2019, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar -- the Taliban's co-founder who spent eight years in Pakistani custody -- led a delegation to Islamabad ahead of a deal the insurgents signed in February with Washington.

Islamabad has said its influence over the Taliban encouraged the militants to join talks with the US.

Tensions remain high between Islamabad and Kabul, with the administration of President Ashraf Ghani frequently lashing out at Islamabad for allegedly sheltering, funding and supplying the Taliban.

Pakistan, which was one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban regime in the 1990s, denies the claims.

On Sunday, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen tweeted that Baradar and other negotiators would discuss "recent developments in Afghanistan's peace process, relaxation and facilitation of peoples' movement and trade between the two neighbouring countries."
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan -- Residents and officials in Afghanistans northeastern province of Badakhshan say the Taliban is raking in considerable revenues by taxing illegal gold mining in the remote region bordering China, Pakistan, and Tajikistan.

They say revenues from gold mining are helping the hard-line movement to expand its control in the strategic province, which largely remained outside its control during the Talibans stint in power in the 1990s when it controlled most of countrys more than 650,000-square-kilometer territory.

The Taliban controls the district of Raghistan and control the gold mining there, too, Haseebullah, a resident of the remote district, told Radio Free Afghanistan in Badakhshans capital, Faizabad. Everyone who looks for gold in the region is forced to share one-fifth of their find with the Taliban.

Haseebullah says the Taliban is also equipping some of the rudimentary mining operations with modern machinery to increase their output. Revenues from illegal gold mining are now seen as supplementing the Talibans income from lapis lazuli mines, which the group has exploited for years.

While the Taliban denies taxing gold mining in Badakhshan, its actions are in line with insurgent tactics during the more than four decades of war in Afghanistan. Many groups, mostly Islamist factions, have exploited Afghanistans natural and mineral resources, trade routes, and illicit narcotics to fund their violent campaigns in the country where most governments have struggled to control the countryside because of attacks by rural rebels.

Badakhshans governor, Mohammad Zakaria Sawda, estimates the Taliban raises tens of thousands of dollars every month from Badakhshans gold mines, which are mostly concentrated in the Raghistan and Yaftali Shufla districts of Badakhshan. He says the group uses this money to bankroll its violent campaign in eight of Badakhshans 29 districts.

There is no doubt that control over resources plays a major role in the violence in the region, Sawda told Radio Free Afghanistan. They [the Taliban] engage in extraction themselves and also tax the locals, who mostly pan for gold in rivers and streams.

Abdul Baseer Haqjoo, a local mining expert, says that in addition to funding streams from abroad the Talibans taxation of gold and lapis lazuli extraction contributes to its war chest. The areas the Taliban controls in Badakhshan have gold and lapis lazuli mines, which are central to buying its weapons and strengthening its forces [through recruitment], he said.

But Zabihullah Mujahed, a purported Taliban spokesman, denied taxing illegal gold mines in Badakhshan. In a message to Radio Free Afghanistan, he said only locals were involved in mining in the region.

Lapis lazuli is believed to have been mined in Badakhshans rugged mountains for thousands of years. The region is said to have major deposits of gemstones such as azure, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. Estimates suggest that one ton of substance has 80 grams of gold while some of the regions rivers have considerably more gold reserves. Locals often find gold by panning the river sediment or sand.

In a 2016 report, Global Witness, a resource and conflict watchdog, estimated that revenues going to the Taliban from lapis lazuli mines in one small area of Badakhshan rivaled the Afghan governments revenue from the entire natural resource sector.

Badakhshan illustrates the wider dangers around Afghanistans natural resources, the report said. Mining is implicated in violence from Balkh to Helmand.

Abubakar Siddique wrote this story based on Radio Free Afghanistan correspondent Nimatullah Ahmadis reporting from Badakhshan, Afghanistan.
The scene of a murder at Kincora Court in Clontarf, Dublin. Pic:Mark Condren 24.8.2020

An elderly woman has been killed in a vicious assault in her home in north Dublin.

The body of the pensioner was found at her house in Kincora Court in Clontarf yesterday evening.

The woman, who is understood to have been aged in her 80s, suffered serious injuries during the brutal attack and was pronounced dead at the house.

A man well known to her and aged in his 60s was arrested at the scene.

Paramedics

He was brought to Clontarf garda station, where he was last night being held under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act, 1984.

Sources say no weapon was used in the assault and it was being described as a tragic domestic incident.

Dublin Fire Brigade paramedics attended the scene about 8pm, but the woman could not be saved.

Her body remained at the house last night as forensic investigators carried out an examination.

The area was cordoned off and the State pathologist was notified.

Speaking to the Irish Independent last night, local Fine Gael Dublin City councillor Naoise O Muiri said the area where the woman's body was found was a quiet, residential area.

"Kincora Court is a small (housing) development. It's established and settled," he said.

"It's a long established area and people would be quite taken aback," he said.

"There would be a bit of concern about it locally," he added.

Gardai said their investigations into the elderly woman's death were ongoing. "Gardai are currently at the scene of a fatal assault which occurred at a house in Kincora Court, Clontarf, Dublin 3," they said in a statement last night.

"A female received fatal injuries as a result of the incident.

"Her body remains at the scene. The scene is currently preserved and the State pathologist has been notified."
House Homeland Security chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday demanding that the agency turn over documents related to its interactions with the "We Build the Wall" campaign, whose founding members were indicted for fraud last week.

Why it matters: Thompson notes that Brian Kolfage, the group's president, tweeted on several occasions that the project to privately fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border had been "approved" and "endorsed" by DHS and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Kris Kobach, a member of the organization's board, "claimed at least three times during 2019 that President Trump approved of the group's border wall projects," Thompson adds.

Since the arrest of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, Trump has attempted to distance himself from the project, claiming he did not know much about it.

What they're saying: "On November 20, 2019, you and U.S. Border Patrol El Paso Sector Chief Gloria Chavez praised We Build the Walls New Mexico project at a press event," Thompson writes in the letter addressed to acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf.

"Chief Chavez touted the privately built, half-mile barrier as a game changer and 'very effective.' Chief Chavez also described specific technical capabilities included as part of the project," Thompson continues.

Read the letter.
Figure 1

Thorn and Metla Mineral Claim Map

Thorn and Metla Mineral Claim Map

Figure 2

Metla Magnetics and Gold-Copper Rock Geochemcal Results

Metla Magnetics and Gold-Copper Rock Geochemcal Results

Figure 3

Stuhini Rock Float Sample ALW19-004 of Foliated Diorite Porphyry with Bornite-Chalcocite returning 4.7% Cu, 1.8 g/t Au, 31 g/t Ag, 0.3 g/t Pd (after HF Acid Staining, Potassic Allteration in Yellow).

Stuhini Rock Float Sample ALW19-004 of Foliated Diorite Porphyry with Bornite-Chalcocite returning 4.7% Cu, 1.8 g/t Au, 31 g/t Ag, 0.3 g/t Pd (after HF Acid Staining, Potassic Allteration in Yellow).

Figure 4

Stuhini Rock Float Sample ALW19-004, Quartz-bornite-chalcocite in Potassic Altered Foliated Diorite Porphyry which returned 4.7% Cu, 1.8 g/t Au, 31 g/t Ag, 0.3 g/t Pd.

Stuhini Rock Float Sample ALW19-004, Quartz-bornite-chalcocite in Potassic Altered Foliated Diorite Porphyry which returned 4.7% Cu, 1.8 g/t Au, 31 g/t Ag, 0.3 g/t Pd.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Brixton Metals Corporation (the "Company") (TSXV: BBB) (OTCQB: BBBXF) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a purchase agreement to acquire a 100% interest in the Metla mineral claim group of 6,413 hectares from Stuhini Exploration Ltd., TSXV:STU (Stuhini) for consideration of 1,200,000 common shares of Brixton and CAD $42,000 in cash (subject to the acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange). The Metla claims will be subject to a 1.0% net smelter royalty interest in favour of Stuhini.



Chairman and CEO of Brixton Metals, Gary R. Thompson stated, We are happy to have reached an agreement with Stuhini on this high mineral potential tenure as we continue to consolidate the Thorn project and transform it into a major 70 km mineralized trend. These Metla claims add an additional 7 km to this major mineralized trend. As a result of retreating glaciers, Stuhini geologists discovered new well mineralized porphyry float rocks. These samples shown below, represent the center of a porphyry system by the potassic alteration and bornite mineralization. We believe that the source of these rock samples is nearby. The hunt is now on to locate the in situ material, through soil-rock geochemistry, radiometrics and mobile MT geophysical surveys. The Metla ground provides an exciting new target area within the Thorn Project.

Click here for Figure 1. Thorn and Metla Mineral Claim Map:



http://brixtonmetals.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Figure-1-Aug24_2020.jpg



Story continues

About the Metla Project

Gold mineralization was first discovered on the Metla property in 1957. Follow up work in 1988 identified a 1200 metre long by 800 metre wide mineralized boulder train with disseminated to massive sulphide that assayed up to 67 grams per tonne gold. In 1989, trenching by Cominco Ltd. (Cominco) returned 4.6 g/t Au across 9 meters. Retreating glaciers have exposed land up-ice from early discoveries by Cominco prospectors. In 2019, Stuhini geologists discovered porphyry style boulders with bornite and chalcocite mineralization with potassic alteration returning grades up to 4.7% Copper and 1.8 g/t Au, 31g/t Ag, 0.3 g/t Pd from sample# ALW19-004, see Figures below.



Click here for Figure 2. Metla Magnetics and Gold-Copper Rock Geochemcal Results:

http://brixtonmetals.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Figure-2-Aug24_2020.jpg

Click here for Figure 3. Stuhini Rock Float Sample ALW19-004 of Foliated Diorite Porphyry with Bornite-Chalcocite returning 4.7% Cu, 1.8 g/t Au, 31 g/t Ag, 0.3 g/t Pd (after HF Acid Staining, Potassic Allteration in Yellow):

http://brixtonmetals.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Figure-3-Aug24_2020.jpg

Figure 4. Stuhini Rock Float Sample ALW19-004, Quartz-bornite-chalcocite in Potassic Altered Foliated Diorite Porphyry which returned 4.7% Cu, 1.8 g/t Au, 31 g/t Ag, 0.3 g/t Pd:

http://brixtonmetals.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Figure-4-Aug24_2020.jpg

Metla Project History

In 1957, Cominco conducted the first recorded work at Metla Creek, when exploration crews discovered an occurrence of pyrite, sphalerite and galena which assayed 11.0 g/t gold, 45.2 g/t silver, 0.1 % copper, 1.0% zinc, and 0.2 % lead, near the toe of an icefield.

In the 1980's, Chevron Canada Limited conducted a precious metal reconnaissance exploration program that included contour soil sampling and heavy mineral stream sediment sampling throughout the region. This work ultimately lead to the discovery of the Golden Bear gold mine 25km to the south of the Metla property. Chevron prospected and ran contour soil lines on the Rod prospect, now just within tenure 510284 at the southeast comer of the Metla property. The work by Chevron identified numerous coincident gold-arsenic-antimony-silver soil anomalies with values up to 8,400 and greater than 10,000 ppb gold. One sample assayed 10.3 g/t gold (sample KN2-8).

In 1988, Cominco staked the Metla area when it was noted that the ice field had retreated over 900 meters during the preceding 31 years, subsequently revealing widespread polymetallic sulfide mineralization. During the next three field seasons, Cominco established a 20 line-km grid, drilled, blasted and sampled 18 bedrock trenches, conducted detailed bedrock and boulder train mapping and sampling, a mineralogical study, ground geophysical surveys (16.3 line-km. of HLEM and 14.1 line km. of ground magnetics) and some heavy mineral sampling (Mawer, 1988, 1989 & 1990).

In 1990 Cominco produced a highly detailed 1:500 scale geology and sample compilation map of the Metla Creek area and collected over 400 rock samples. Gold-silver-zinc-lead-copper mineralization was identified within carbonate hydrothermal breccia and argillite-hosted bedding parallel silicified breccias and pyritic stringers in six different areas along a corridor 600 meters wide and 1,200 meters long. Results from a total of 339 glacial float boulder samples ranging from <10 ppb gold to 68,000 ppb gold, had an average of 4.47 g/t gold. Five bedrock areas hosting significant gold and base metal mineralization were identified, including Area D where a 9.0 meter chip sample produced a weighted average of 4.70 g/t gold.

In 1991, Galico Resources Ltd., optioned the Metla property and from a base camp at Trapper Lake, combined magnetic, EM and VLF (Aerodat Ltd.) and detailed petrographic study and 10 diamond drill holes totaling 1,075.0 meters on the property (Payne, 1991). Unfortunately, little of the Galico work is available; archived data was discarded and no assessment reports other than the airborne survey (Dvorak, 1991) were filed either with the BC government or Cominco.

In 2000, interest in the region was renewed when Rimfire Minerals Corporation optioned the Thorn property located 19km to the northwest of Metla and began exploration on a high sulphidation model for the mineralization.

The original Cominco Metla claim lapsed in 2001 and was restaked by Aspinall and Dawson in the spring of 2002. A brief prospecting program was completed by Aspinall in the 2002 field season.

In 2004, Solomon Resources Limited optioned the Metla property and compiled the Chevron and Cominco data, assayed and produced polished samples from a suite of hand specimens collected by Mr. Tom Schroeter of the B. C. Geological Survey.

In 2005, Barrick Gold Ltd. formed the Kismit Joint Venture with Rimfire Minerals Corporation (owner of the Thorn Property during that time) and staked a large land package measuring roughly 70 km. (NW-SE) by an average of 18 km wide which encompassed the Thorn, Metla and other prospects in the newly recognized Late Cretaceous metallogenic belt.

In 2006, Indico Technologies Ltd collected 129 rock samples and 10 samples for petrographic analysis. Satellite images at 1:2000 and 1:5000 scale were commissioned for the purposes of geological mapping.

In 2008, the Aspinall-Dawson partnership collected a total of 90 soils, 10 silts, 11 float and 8 grab samples.

In 2011, Ocean Park Ventures (now Kodiak Copper Corp.) collected 76 rock samples as 25 float and 51 grab samples. Samples were collected within a 4 square kilometre area in the glacial valley of the retreating Metla glacier.

In 2017, Stuhini Exploration acquired the Metla Project and conducted a small magnetic geophysical survey and collected 143 rock samples. Highlights returned 21.3 g/t Au, 39 g/t Ag, 2.18% Cu from sample 1892554.

In 2018, Stuhini obtained drill permits, conducted 419 line kilometers of airbourne VTEM geophysical survey, built a new camp and collected 34 rocks samples. Highlights include 9 samples returning gold values greater than 0.25 g/t with a maximum of 9.96 g/t; 9 samples returning silver values greater than 8 g/t with a maximum of 45.5 g/t; 11 samples returning copper values greater than 300 ppm with a maximum of 3284 ppm. Assays of up to 3441 ppm lead and 6.33% zinc have also been reported.

Source: Technical Report on the Metal Property, by Litos Geological Inc.,(Wilkins), October 2018; BCMEM Assessment Reports 19226, 27,145, 34,596, 21,718, 27771A, 4823928, 4983562, 5487177, 5662600, 5567670, 5568009; http://www.em.gov.bc.ca/cf/minfile/ ; https://www.stuhini.com/



Mr. Gary R. Thompson, P.Geo., who is a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, reviewed and approved the information in this press release. However ,the QP has not done sufficient work to verify the results presented.

About Brixton Metals Corporation

Brixton is a Canadian exploration and development company focused on the advancement of its gold copper and silver projects toward feasibility. Brixton wholly owns four exploration projects, the Thorn copper-gold-silver and the Atlin Goldfields projects located in NWBC, the Langis-HudBay silver-cobalt project in Ontario and the Hog Heaven silver-gold-copper project in NW Montana, USA. Brixton Metals Corporation shares trade on the TSX-V under the ticker symbol BBB. For more information about Brixton please visit our website at www.brixtonmetals.com .

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

Mr. Gary R. Thompson, Chairman and CEO

Tel: 604-630-9707 or email: info@brixtonmetals.com

For VP Investor Relations please contact Mitchell Smith

Tel: 604-630-9707 or email: mitchell.smith@brixtonmetals.com

Cautionary Note

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.

Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are statements that relate to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as anticipate, believe, plan, estimate, expect, and intend, statements that an action or event may, might, could, should, or will be taken or occur, including statements that address potential quantity and/or grade of minerals, potential size and expansion of a mineralized zone, proposed timing of exploration and development plans, or other similar expressions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact included herein including, without limitation, statements in respect of TSX Venture Exchange are forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the following risks: the need for additional financing; operational risks associated with mineral exploration; fluctuations in commodity prices; title matters; and the additional risks identified in the annual information form of the Company or other reports and filings with the TSXV and applicable Canadian securities regulators. Forward-looking statements are made based on managements beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made and the Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statement.

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at:

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8fb2afa1-b9c8-4902-8c7f-c7581d193572

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/73e65831-931f-4d30-adf5-3591d3b2ced0

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/99073e6d-f3a0-44e1-b8bc-63e561683a1e

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/af51010a-f22e-4561-93b4-97e7a478dcf0




Australian music industry pioneer Ron Tudor, who was also an early talent show judge, has died, aged 96.

He died on Friday in a Maldon nursing home -it was not COVID related.

Tudor was an Australian music producer, engineer, label owner and record industry executive who started his career with W&G Records in 1956 as a sales representative, later becoming their in-house producer and A&R agent.

Over his career signed Ernie Sigley, Bert Newton, Jimmy Hannan, Ivan Hutchison, The Thunderbirds, Merv Benton, Colin Cook, Diana Trask, The Hawking Brothers and discovered The Seekers -he released the band when they went to London in case they found a better deal.

In 1969 he set up Fable Records with a worldwide distribution deal with PolyGram (now Universal) with acts including Johnny Chester, John Williamson, Liv Maessen, The Mixtures, Jigsaw, Hans Poulsen, Matt Flinders, Karen Knowles and later Bootleg Records in partnership with Brian Cadd.

Amongst his other successes was Mike Bradys AFL 1979 anthem Up There Cazaly which sold 250,000 copies on release.

But Fable did not join a recording industry demand for radio pay to play their records, leading to a black ban by EMI, which pressed PolyGrams records.

On TV Tudor was a judge on both New Faces, where he signed both John Williamson & Liv Maessen, and Young Talent Time, alongside the great Evie Hayes.

Tudor is often referred to as the grandfather of independent Australian music. In 1979 he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, For service to the recording industry and has received the Ted Albert Award for Outstanding Services to Australian Music from APRA and a Special Achievement Award from the ARIA Awards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlUoUwbyqTw&feature=emb_logo

Source: The Music Network
Following the publicised disagreement between Rami Makhlouf and Bashar al-Assad, Makhloufs brother has been awarded the contracts for duty free businesses at ports and airports reports Syria Call.

Press sources confirmed that the Syrian regime has decided to award the duty free contracts to Ehab Muhammad Makhlouf, the cousin of Bashar al-Assad, months after the contracts with Ehabs brother, Rami Makhlouf, were terminated.

Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported that the regime awarded duty free contracts to Ehab Makhlouf and a Kuwaiti businessman residing outside his country, known as Abdul Hamid Dashti.

Citing economic sources, Asharq Al-Awsat added that the regimes Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been told to bypass more than 10 offers to operate duty free markets, and to award the contract to Ehab Makhlouf and his Kuwaiti partner, who had shown support for the Assad regime in recent years.

At the end of last June, the regime issued a decision to terminate contracts with Rami Makhlouf regarding duty free market investment in Jadidat Yabous, Nassib Crossing, Bab al-Hawa, the ports of Tartous and Lattakia, and the airports of Damascus, Aleppo, and Lattakia.

At the time, the regime demanded the investing parties (all of those belonging to Makhlouf) hand over all buildings and warehouses used in the duty free markets and to pay the financial receivables within a period of 15 days, threatening to seize the goods under the pretext of safeguarding the rights of public authorities.

It should be noted that Rami Makhlouf has been, for months, in a major tug of war with the Assad regime, which decided to seize its fixed and movable assets and imposed a judicial guard over his companies and seized the al-Bustan Association, which provides support to the National Defense militias and their families.

After the escalation of disputes, Ehab Makhlouf announced his resignation from the board of directors of Syriatel and sided with his cousin Bashar al-Assad against his brother, Rami.

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.
Rotunda Rumblings

Speak now: The Republican National Convention will feature two Ohio natives for the all-digital nominating event, Seth Richardson reports. Rep. Jim Jordan of Urbana, one of President Donald Trumps fiercest defenders in Congress, will appear Monday while JaRon Smith, one of Trumps highest-ranking Black advisers, will speak on Thursday, the same night Trump gives his nominating speech.

Its been a Goodyear: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Bidens campaign launched an attack ad against Trump over Goodyear, part of a broader shift as they plan to go on the offensive over the economy in the coming weeks, Richardson reports. Goodyear is already a ready-made political issue for the Biden campaign, which has been laying the groundwork to focus on the economy in Ohio for weeks.

Twice as nice: And if you had any reservations about Goodyear as an issue Trumps opponents will hammer on until Nov. 3, look no further than The Lincoln Project releasing a Goodyear ad this weekend as well, per Richardson.

Mic drop: Kanye West, the hip hop artist who is running for president as an independent, failed to meet the requirements to get on the Nov. 3 general election ballot, Laura Hancock reports. In addition to Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin election officials also decided last week he cant be on ballots in those Midwestern states.

More testing: As of Monday, saliva baseline testing must begin at Ohio assisted living facilities, per a public health order signed Friday. Hancock posted the order here.

Let the show go on: Ohio will soon issue a reopening order for performing arts theaters, capping indoor venue capacity at 15% or 300 people, and outdoor capacity at 15% or 1,500 people, Emily Bamforth reports. Details of the order are still being worked out.

Weekend numbers: On Friday, 1,043 more Ohio cases and 25 new deaths of people with coronavirus were reported by the Ohio Department of Health. Saturday saw 1,119 new coronavirus cases and 20 more deaths. The numbers dropped Sunday to 637 new cases and three deaths.

Post time: Ohios Rob Portman was among the GOP senators who attempted to address what he called disinformation about changes U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy made to the postal service at a Friday committee hearing, writes Sabrina Eaton. DeJoy told Portman he plans to vote by mail himself, and the American public should be able to vote by mail and the Postal Service will support it, although he advised mail-in voters to cast their ballots early.

Free stamp: Democratic U.S Sen. Sherrod Brown along with Northeast Ohio House of Representatives members Marcy Kaptur, Marcia Fudge and Tim Ryan on Friday urged the Ohio Controlling Board to approve a proposal to prepay postage for absentee ballots for the upcoming 2020 General Election. A letter they wrote asks the board to take the matter up at its Aug. 24 meeting. In order to preserve access to our democratic process, we must do all that we can to ensure that health concerns do not prevent any Ohioan from casting a vote, the lawmakers wrote.

Good and bad unemployment news: Ohios unemployment rate fell to 8.9% in July from a revised 11% for June. But the July number is more than double the 4.2% for July 2019. On the jobs side, Ohio added 62,700 full- or part-time jobs in July from June, reaching 5.1 million. But in comparison to July 2019, Ohio is still down 495,100 jobs, Rich Exner reports.

AEP investor sues: A new would-be class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of American Electric Power investors, whom the suit claims have been hurt financially by the utilitys covert support of ex-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householders political operation and pro-House Bill 6 campaign. As Jeremy Pelzer reports, the lawsuit notes that after a media report about how an AEP-backed nonprofit gave $350,000 to two pro-Householder dark-money groups, AEPs stock fell 5% the next trading day.

Lobbying Lineup

Five groups that have lobbied on House Bill 146, which would ban animal abuse offenders from having companion animals. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Tom Brinkman, has only had one hearing since it was introduced March 19. State lobbying forms dont indicate whether a person is for or against the legislation.

1. Buckeye State Sheriffs Association

2. National Association of Veterinary Technicians of America

3. Ohio Veterinary Medical Association

4. Cleveland Animal Protective League

5. Ohio Domestic Violence Network

On the Move

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has been appointed co-chair of the National Association of Secretaries of States Elections Committee, along with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Birthdays

Kyle Miller, legislative aide to state Rep. Adam Holmes

Adam Schwiebert, policy analyst for the County Commissioners Association of Ohio

Tom Stickrath, Ohio Department of Public Safety director

State Rep. Nino Vitale

Straight from the Source

When Mr. Kasich was Governor, he did two things to hold the opioid manufacturers & distributors accountable: jack & squat

Now he wants to seize benefits from actions he never had the courage to take. Have the grace to stand down, sir. You had your shot

-Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, reacting on Twitter to an opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune in which former Ohio Gov. John Kasich argues that governments cant be trusted with opioid settlement money.

Capitol Letter is a daily briefing providing succinct, timely information for those who care deeply about the decisions made by state government. If you do not already subscribe, you can sign up here to get Capitol Letter in your email box each weekday for free.
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After notices were sent to telecom companies (telcos) on the service tax they have to pay on their adjusted gross revenues (AGR), the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) wrote to the government, asking for a law to do away with taxes on the AGR dues, Business Standard reported.

According to the COAI, if this is not done, then the telecom industry will suffer incalculable losses.

"It's a double whammy, first, the Supreme Court asked the telcos to pay

additional, and now the service tax department wants to levy tax on it, an industry source told the paper.

Tax demands are as high as Rs 20,000 crore, with the industry source putting it up to 15 percent of the AGR dues, the report said.

Listen: Work near home the new WFH says WeWork India CEO Karan Virwani

The COAI has thus written to the government, asking it not to levy service tax on AGR dues. And if it is levied, to have the money immediately refunded. The telcos have sought exemption under the Central

Excise Act.

The department started issuing notices after the Supreme Court in October last year ordered all telcos, including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea , and

Tata Teleservices, to pay their past dues to the government.

Speaking to Business Standard, industry experts said more litigation would be on the cards, The liability to pay service tax on licence fee and spectrum usage charges, if any, was with the telecom operators paying the licence fee to the government. Given that the SC has now confirmed the additional liability on licence fee and spectrum usage charges, the service tax paid is no longer a pass-through as credit of service tax paid can no longer be availed of in the goods and services tax (GST) regime, said Bipin Sapra, tax partner, EYIndia.

The COAI has also asked Parliament to approve, if needed, the exemption, said a source.The issue is that the service tax paid would have beenavailable as credit to telcos to be used against output service tax orGST. However, its not clear as to how this credit would now beavailable, given that GST was introduced more than three years

ago, said Pratik Jain, partner and leader, indirect tax, PwCIndia to the paper.
South Africa's students in all grades resume classes on Monday after weeks of closure because of the coronavirus pandemic.



Final-year students had resumed classes earlier to prepare for examinations.



President Cyril Ramaphosa closed the schools in July after they were briefly reopened following a public outcry on rising virus cases.



Monday's resumption of classes comes as the country registers a decline in new infections.



The health minister said the country was "over the surge", adding that the "plateau has started".



Last week, UN agencies asked African governments to reopen schools with measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus.



The authorities in South Africa say they have prepared for safe resumption of learning starting this week

Source: BBC









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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President Donald Trump wants millions of Americans to receive a higher amount of stimulus checks and unemployment benefits.

The White House and top Republican leaders, including the lawmakers, are still working on an agreement on the next round of coronavirus relief aid.

Trump has long advocated for another round of relief aid.The idea of having another $1,200 stimulus check has bipartisan support. But Trump wants millions of Americans to receive a higher amount.

During his visit to West Texas last month, he said: "I'd like to see it be very high because I love the people. I want the people to get it, you know, the economy is going to come back."

Trump has also told Congress to act immediately on the second round of relief bill, which includes other stimulus checks and other benefits. But for whatever reason, Congress failed to act on it.

It has led to Trump's signing an executive order that expanded the unemployment benefits by using the unspent budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows recently challenged the Democratic lawmakers to go back to Capitol Hill and pass the bill for another round of stimulus checks. He even said that Trump already gave a signal to sign the bill once it is on his table.

Meadows told reporters on Saturday that the ball in passing the legislation on the second round of stimulus check is now on the hands of Democratic leaders.

"I even think that we can come up with an agreement on stimulus checks to Americans and enhanced unemployment. Those issues are not as divisive as we might think," Meadows said.

The talks on the second round of stimulus checks were stalled after Democratic and Republican leaders failed to agree on the package's overall amount.

The Democratic leaders are proposing $3 trillion to help more people, but the Republicans offer $1 trillion and will give bonuses to those who will go back to work.

Despite a division on the package's overall amount, Meadows insisted on passing what both parties can agree for the meantime and prioritize the stimulus checks.

As lawmakers appeared at the Capitol Saturday, Republican lawmakers and the White House were expecting a second stimulus check to be included. But as expected, it did not happen.

Each side pointed at their political adversaries as the cause of the issue. Even the Democrats are also divided. Some support the second round of stimulus checks while others do not.

Democratic Representative Lou Correa from Anaheim, California said she would fight to make sure the second round of stimulus package happens.

Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina also expressed his frustration to watch the negotiation unfold. He said: "I would encourage everyone to remain at the negotiating table, (and) hammer out a deal recognizing that not everyone is going to get everything they want. Do not let perfect be the enemy of good."

Meanwhile, Meadows said he tried to reach out to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hoping to have a meeting and discuss the additional aid. However, he was told that the Democratic leader was in a meeting.

Meadows assured that he would try to go back to Pelosi's office to discuss the second round of relief aid.

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The department said Martinez also cause several crashes in the Phoenix metro area and is expected to face more charges in Maricopa County.

Martinez was released from the Eloy Immigration Detention Center about a month ago after spending almost a year detained.

He was detained in August 2019 after briefly crossing the border into Nogales.

Martinez was one of the first dreamers to join the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012.

Attorney Claudia Arevalo, who represented Martinez in his immigration case, said shes unsure of what will happen to Martinez immigration status. Martinez was granted permanent residency when he won his immigration case.

Arevalo said shes waiting to see what happens with his new criminal charges and isnt sure whether he will have an Immigration and Customs Enforcement hold tied to Thursdays case. She is not representing Martinez in his recent case, she said.

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LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Boris Johnson will visit Northern Ireland on Thursday to talk up the strength of union between Britain's constituent nations and promise a strong rebound from the coronavirus crisis.

Johnson will also meet Ireland's new prime minister Micheal Martin for the first time since the formation of a new Irish coalition government in June.

On his first visit to Northern Ireland since the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson wants to firm up ties badly strained by several years of acrimonious Brexit negotiations.

"As the country begins to get back on its feet in the wake of coronavirus, we cannot simply strive to rebuild, but we must commit to building back stronger than ever," he said in a statement.

His message echoes that made on a similar trip to Scotland, where polls show support for independence now outstrips that for remaining part of the union.

Northern Ireland's views on leaving the United Kingdom are still largely split along sectarian lines with many Catholics favouring the creation of a united Ireland while pro-British Protestants favour the status quo.

The dispute fuelled three decades of bloodshed that largely ended with a 1998 peace deal.

Northern Ireland voted 56 to 44% to remain in the European Union in a 2016 Brexit referendum, when the United Kingdom as a whole voted 52 to 48 to leave.

That angered Irish nationalists, who feared they would be cut off from friends and relatives in the Republic of Ireland, one of the EUs most enthusiastic members - prompting some to call for a referendum on leaving the United Kingdom.

The subsequent Brexit negotiations in turn angered pro-British unionists who were outraged at Johnsons decision to agree a Brexit deal that will see EU customs rates and regulations remain in place Northern Ireland while the rest of Britain goes its own way.

(Reporting by William James in London and Conor Humphries in Dublin; editing by Stephen Addison)
PARIS (Reuters) - French government officials on Saturday said they would work to track down those responsible for defacing a memorial to the victims of a Nazi massacre during World War Two, which was painted over with graffiti calling the killings a lie.

The site, at the village of Oradour-sur-Glane near the western city of Limoges, commemorates the hundreds of men, women and children who were killed in June 1944 by an SS division.

The word "martyr" on the memorial was crossed out, with "menteur" or "liar" daubed next to it.

"Nothing can erase the memory of our 642 martyrs of

Oradour-sur-Glane," French President Emmanuel Macron said on Twitter.

Prime Minister Jean Castex said in a statement that everything would be done to bring those behind the "disgraceful acts" to justice.

(Reporting by Sarah White and Elizabeth Pineau; Editing by David Holmes)
Russian authorities may this week announce the resumption of international flights to France, Hungary, Malta, Cyprus, Jordan and Chinas Shanghai, the Izvestia newspaper cited unnamed airport and airline sources as saying on Monday.

Russia grounded international commercial flights during the coronavirus lockdown earlier this year and has so far only resumed flights to London, Turkey, Tanzania and Switzerland.

Russia has confirmed the worlds fourth largest tally of coronavirus cases. It has recorded close to 5,000 new cases of the virus on a daily basis for the last several weeks.

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)

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A private medical testing company will host COVID-19 antibody testing for two weeks at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, with appointments beginning Aug. 31 and continuing through Sept. 11, except on weekends.

According to a release, a private firm called Genalyte will conduct the antibody testing Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. There are no weekend hours and pre-registration is mandatory. The test is free for those patients with verified health insurance coverage.

Genalytes SARS-CoV-2 Multi-Antigen Serology Panel, which tests for antibodies the body can produce in response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is being offered with appointments available Monday through Friday from, company officials stated in the release.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Baylor College of Medicine to use antibody testing to determine COVID-19s prevalence in Houston

Genalyte CEO Cary Gunn stated the need to do antibody testing is important due to continued increases in cases in the Houston region.

With COVID-19 cases continuing to rise in the Houston area, its imperative to help meet the demand and crucial need for high-quality, extensive antibody testing in the community, Gunn stated in the release. Antibody testing is beneficial to help determine whether individuals have developed antibodies to SARS-CoV-2; it also helps the community understand overall prevalence of the antibodies, and thus, the virus in the population. Antibody testing is integral in research regarding immunity and the development of antibody-based treatments like convalescent plasma and even vaccine development.

According to the release, Genalytes SARS-CoV-2 Multi-Antigen Serology Panel can, detect the type of antibodies present in a persons blood. Based on the type of antibodies present, the test may indicate the presence of an active or past infection.

Any person who would like to get the test must make a reservation and will first go to The Pavilion Lounge, located inside the facilitys Event Center. Parking is available for free in the Gold Lot near the Pavilion as well as in the parking garage along Six Pines Drive.

One important note about the testing was stressed by officials from Genalyte: the antibody testing service is designed for patients who are, no longer experiencing any symptoms and have been symptom-free for at least 14 days.

After a blood sample is taken, officials send it to an Austin-area laboratory for processing. Results are generally available to patients within 24-48 hours and have a 98 percent accuracy rate, the release stated. People with active symptoms are advised to contact their doctor to discuss other diagnostic testing options.

Those interested in being tested for antibodies to the virus can register today and book appointments at www.genalytecovid19.com/houston.

jeff.forward@chron.com
A throwback picture of Disha Vakani aka Dayaben from the Ganesha Utsav celebration on the set of Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah has grabbed everyones attention. The snap was shared by Disha on Instagram. The image features Disha along with Ambika Ranjankar and Amit Bhatt.

In the picture, the three can be seen dressed in beautiful traditional attires as they celebrate Lord Ganesha's arrival in the Gokuldham society. The photo was taken when the setup and decorations were underway.

This BTS picture has taken fans down in the good old days.

Meanwhile, Mandar Chandwadkar, who plays the role of Bhide, shared a beautiful throwback picture of 2018 Ganpati celebrations at his home. Mandar had recreated a mini Gokuldham in the backdrop of the Ganesha idol.

Sharing the picture, he wrote,  Just a glimpse of Bappa at my place. This is 2018 when Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah completed 10 years, so brought Gokuldham society at my place.

The show has recently completed 12 years and is counted amongst the longest-running shows of Television.
In Louisiana and Wisconsin, police shot two black men. The man in Louisiana died; the one in Wisconsin is still alive. Naturally, the Black Lives Matter crowd is on the march again. However, when one looks at the videos, both shootings are more nuanced than the instant, knee-jerk protests would suggest.

On Friday, police in Lafayette, Louisiana shot and killed Trayford Pellerin. Pellerin was black, so community activists are already on the move, marching through Lafeyette and bringing with them the threat of imminent violence. The ACLU has described the shooting as a "horrific and deadly incident of police violence against a Black person," and it's joined with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Marxist shakedown organization, to demand an investigation.

Ben Crump, who's always described as a "civil rights lawyer" but who, instead, behaves remarkably like an opportunistic race-hustler, has already signed on to represent the family. Pellerin is being described as the usual loving, family-oriented choir boy. That's an accurate description only if the family means he had constant, serious run-ins with the law:

Pellerin was arrested multiple times, and some of those cases were dismissed, court records show. But he also served time in a state prison for felony drug and firearm possession. Pellerin was sentenced in 2014 to five years at Richwood Correctional Center for possessing a firearm as a felon and violating his probation on a cocaine possession charge that he pleaded no contest to in 2012, court records show. A state judge recommended drug treatment for him in 2014, although it's not clear if he received it, court records show.

Stripping away the rhetoric, the video of the shooting shows that police almost certainly had probable cause to shoot Pellerin when they did. The narrative is that Pellerin was walking away from the police when he was shot.

The reality is that Pellerin was carrying a knife, refused to respond to officer orders that he put the knife down and lie down on the ground, didn't stop even when police tasered him, and then tried to enter a gas station, putting everyone in there at risk. Even the women videotaping the scene taking place before them noticed that Pellerin was carrying a knife, ignoring police orders, and not responding to tasering (content warning):

The same dynamic played out in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The police shot, although they did not kill, Jacob Blake, a black man, and the inevitable protests are already beginning  so much so that Kenosha has already had to declare a state of emergency. The video shows that a man involved in a domestic dispute was refusing to follow police orders and did not respond to being tasered. When he reached into the car, where he could easily have had a gun, the police had to make a split-second decision about whether to take the risk that the man would pull a gun out of the car and go on a shooting spree:

As a reminder, the videos below show how quickly a murderously inclined person who appears unarmed can arm himself and shoot people, including police:

The best way for people to avoid being the victim of a deadly shooting is for them to listen when police tell them to drop their weapons and lie down. Those who don't are committing suicide by cop  and those who take to the streets are creating civil unrest in service to a lie.

Images: Active Shooter Training, Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, by U.S. Marines, public domain.
PHILIPSBURG:--- With continued dedication to the community of St. Maarten, Motorworld Group of Companies has partnered with the Rotary Club of St. Martin Sunrise to donate tablets to schools. In response to the wide-ranging impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, local schools have implemented virtual classrooms which provide digital, internet-based education, from a safe social distance. However, many students are unable to follow online classes, as they do not have the necessary resources, such as digital devices or internet, at home.

Therefore, the Rotary Club of St. Martin Sunrise has launched an island-wide initiative to Help St. Maarten Children Receive Online Education. The purpose of this major effort is to assist many students with digital devices, who otherwise, could go without education.

Motorworld Group of Companies donated 19 new tablets to assist with providing schools and students with the essential tools required for internet-based learning, the new norm. In spite of the economic downturns that are affecting our business operations, we felt compelled to support this essential initiative by the Rotary Clubs, as we recognize the dire need for students to maintain their education online, shares Tariq Amjad, Managing Director, Motorworld Group of Companies.

On behalf of Rotary Club of St. Martin Sunrise, we would like to thank Motorworld for choosing to collaborate with our club to execute this much-needed community initiative that ensures children are educated online during this COVID-19 pandemic, Dolly Sadarangani-Ahuja, President of the Rotary Club of St. Martin Sunrise.

Through the Rotary Clubs ongoing initiative, a needs assessment has been conducted among the schools and students at several schools have been identified on the priority list for donations. Among them, several schools have already received donations of digital devices. This includes the following: The Ruby Labega School, St. Joseph School, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Primary School and Marie Genevieve de Weever School

Rotary Clubs fundraising drive for digital devices is an ongoing, community-wide effort. Motorworld Group of Companies is a long-standing partner of the Rotary Club of St. Martin, and will continue to strive to support the cause over time. Please contact President Dolly Sadarangani-Ahuja at 5223292 or Fundraising Director Prakash Dialani at 5229170 to contribute, or for further information.
Reports and images from around the country of torn postboxes, dismantled mail processing machines, live animals delivered dead and the delayed shipments of medicine to elderly and veterans have ignited widespread public outrage. It is now very clear that the drive to wreck an institution older than the United States itself, to justify its privatization and sale to profit-driven corporations, is proceeding at a rapid pace.

The USPS expects to run out of cash by 2021, but it is the delivery crisis, particularly its potential impact on the US elections, which has created a deadlock in Congress, with the Democratic-controlled House passing a bill to provide an additional $25 billion in funding and the Senate Republicans expected to reject it.

President Donald Trump recently denounced this appropriation effort, initiated partly to offset the losses caused by the coronavirus crisis and partly to insure proper functioning during an election in which mail ballots will be critical. Trump claimed, This is all another HOAX by the Democrats to give $25 billion unneeded dollars for political purposes without talking about the Universal Mail-in Ballot scam  that they are trying to pull off in violation of everything that our Country stands for.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before an emergency session called by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Friday. Two competing and false narratives were on display, with the Democrats blaming Trump and the Republicans as sole authors of the postal crisis, while the Republicans essentially denounced the USPS as a sort of perhaps unfixable problem, in the words of Senator Rand Paul, which required complete dismantling and privatization.

Republican committee chair Ron Johnson of Wisconsin started the meeting off by pointing out that DeJoy was not a Trump appointee, but rather had been chosen by the bipartisan Postal Board of Governors. All of these governors, however, whether Democratic or Republican, were appointed by Trump.

Ranking Democrat Gary Peters scolded DeJoy over the impact of the policies he has implemented since taking the reins in the spring. He revealed that his office had received over 7500 reports of delays from Michigan and around the country in less than two weeks. They have written to me about skipping doses of their medication and their small businesses losing customers or having to lay off employees, all because of changes that you directed.

Among the changes instituted by DeJoy were an effective ban on overtime, leading to the piling-up of mail in facilities and lengthy delays.

As the WSWS had reported earlier on the hiding of COVID-19 deaths and infections at USPS by management, it was further revealed over the course of the meeting that the USPS leadership is hiding important data which reveal the internal operations of the Post Office.

DeJoy contradicted himself throughout the meeting. He claimed at one point, We serve 161 million people. We still deliver at 99.5 percent of the time. We have significant efforts to continue to improve on that process, and then later, I wont go as far as to not say that we had maybe a four or five percent hit on our service level for delayed, all sorts of mail, marketing mail, everything, because it got stuck on a dock and were drastically bringing that down.

He even stated at one point, Theoretically everyone should have gotten their mail faster.

The Republican Senators received DeJoy with great fanfare and admiration, with former Florida governor and now Senator Rick Scott introducing DeJoy with, can you just talk about why youre uniquely qualified to lead the USPS and, How does it make you feel when you have people make these unsubstantiated claims that you personally have a goal to slow down the mail?

DeJoy is a major GOP donor, according to FEC Data since 2016 he has given roughly $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Committee and the Republican National Committee each alongside smaller contributions to Republican House and Senate Candidates. Simultaneously, according to a report by USA Today, he and his wife may claim up to a total $75,815,000 in assets from US Postal Service competitors.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky inadvertently suggested the reality of the situation by asking DeJoy, If you came in as a venture capitalist and a venture capitalist group took over the post office and named you CEO what would you do that you are unable to do because its a government agency?

DeJoy thanked Paul for the question and answered, Number one, the legislative reform that I would ask is what I said in my written testimony and opening remarks on integration of Medicaid and pension reform. I would like to be kind of liberated on pricing, its a very, very competitive market out there now. I would like more pricing freedom.

The Postal Service Reform Act of 2018 was a bipartisan bill which had aimed to achieve part of what is outlined, the bill would have led to a retiree paying an additional $1,600 or more per year in Medicare premiums, according to National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association President Richard G. Thissen.

Senator Paul called for further assaults on postal services to his own rural constituents, declaring, We also need to look atthe easiest way to continue personalized service to each person individually at their house would be to do it less frequently, and frankly, people who live 20 miles down a shell road, if you told them they were going to get twice a week versus six times a week, I think wed actually live with this.

In the almost two-hour meeting, a critical element missing was any discussion on DeJoys move to centralize his leadership and create a new department responsible for sorting mail during an election cycle, which will be largely decided through mail-in ballots.

Senator Kamala Harris, who is a part of the Senate committee, decided to spend her time on the campaign trail rather than question an individual who may have conspired against her campaign. This only demonstrates the unseriousness of the Democrats posturing as defenders of democracy against Trump.

In stark contrast to the duplicitous role of the Democrats, who are equally as responsible for the manufactured crisis at USPS, postal workers in Wenatchee and Seattle-Tacoma in Washington have restored into service dismantled mail-sorting units. Workers in Dallas, Texas, have ignored the USPS directives.

The Senate hearing was largely political theater. Much noise was made about the $25 billion which USPS needs in order to maintain its function of providing essential items such as life saving medicine to all Americans, but no such noise was made in regards to the $738 billion budget to the US military approved last year, with even the so-called socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voting in favor.
 Imagine That! A Local Artists Co-op, which celebrated its 15th anniversary.

 Justin Frost, who cleans headstones as part of his new business, Past Preservation.

 Midland County for being recognized with an Achievement Award from the National Association of Counties.

 Bill Schuette, who was named the 2020 champion for Shelterhouse's "100 Men or More" campaign.

 Dr. John and Martha Pafford, who celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

 Doris and Terry Michaud, who celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary.
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The Jammu and Kashmir administration has told the High Court that role of various government officers is being investigated by its Anti-Corruption Bureau after projects worth hundreds of crores were executed without sanction.

According to a report by The Economic Times, The Union Territorys administration said government officials were being probed for fraud in connivance with the contractors in hundreds of tenders. These works are said to be executed between 2010 and 2018.

The J&K governments fact-finding committee had informed this to the court in May. However, this was only reproduced into the courts order last week on a petition by a contractor seeking the release of pending dues.

The report suggests that 12 treasury officers in the finance department have been transferred for clearing bills for various works without technical sanction or administrative approval.

A brief check of the information provided by the field/executing agencies regarding macadamization works executed from 2010-18 in Jammu as well as Kashmir reveal that proposal for accord of administrative approval is shown as submitted to the competent authorities but a copy of the same is not available in the records. This clearly shows works in all probability have been executed without the accord of administrative approval, the report suggests.
A new, smaller bass is invading our most coveted fishing holes.

Bass fishing aficionados for generations have treasured the waters of this region for both smallmouth and largemouth bass.

But now there's a new fish in town, and its name is the Alabama bass.

And two of the four waters in Virginia where it has been found are within the confines of Henry County.

The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources identifies the Alabama bass as one of 12 species of black bass. Native to Georgia and Alabama, when introduced into waters with largemouth bass, it aggressively takes over the habitat.

Where smallmouth and spotted bass are to be found, the Alabama bass will readily crossbreed with both.

State officials have confirmed the presence of Alabama bass at the Beaver Creek Reservoir in Martinsville and Philpott Lake in Henry County as well as Lake Gaston along the Virginia-North Carolina border and Claytor Lake in Pulaski County, prompting the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries to conduct genetic testing to determine the extent of the problem.

The VDWR says largemouth and smallmouth bass are the most popular targets for anglers, representing more than 60% of the intended catch during a fishing season.

The economic value of these two species is valued in the millions of dollars, and a decline in either population will result in a loss of sportfishing opportunities across the state and the money that sport generates.

Alabama bass and spotted bass are so closely alike only an experienced angler is able to tell the difference. Such as:

The spotted bass and the Alabama bass are nearly identical in appearance. The jaw of the Alabama bass lines up with the middle rear of the eye, while the jaw of largemouth bass extends past the eye.

Alabama bass have a dark, blotchy lateral band from head to tail and a few spots below the band, and largemouth bass have a lateral band that is more continuous.

A report from the VDWR uses Lake Norman in North Carolina as an example of the tremendous threat the Alabama bass poses.

Lake Norman was well known for its abundance of largemouth bass, but once the Alabama bass was introduced, the population declined to less than 8%.

Those declines have been noted to be greater in waters that are relatively clear and have limited vegetation, putting the Smith Mountain Lake, Lake Anna, South Holston Reservoir and Lake Moomaw at great risk.

Smith Mountain Lake has received national attention as host to numerous bass fishing tournaments, including the prestigious Big Bass Tour that offers more than $1.6 million in prizes and lures anglers from all over the country.

The Beaver Creek Reservoir is a 175-acre impoundment owned and controlled by the city of Martinsville for its water supply, but the fishery is managed by the VDGIF.

Officials say the most popular sportfish species at the reservoir is by far the largemouth bass, then crappie, sunfish, catfish and yellow perch.

Recent fish surveys show the fishing to be in good condition and that the largemouth bass population has been improving over the years.

By comparison, Philpott Lake is a 2,880-acre impoundment owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and is managed for flood control and hydroelectric power generation.

Largemouth and smallmouth bass are the most-sought-after species by anglers at the lake, and the water is considered to be one of Virginia's premier walleye destinations. Crappie and catfish are also present at Philpott.

A report from the VDWR says once the Alabama bass is established in a body of water, "populations often increase to the point where stunting [of other fish] occurs, resulting in greater abundance of smaller bass and a shift from being dominated by 2-3-pound largemouth or smallmouth bass to being dominated by the 1-pound Alabama bass.

Anglers are considered the primary reason for the spread of Alabama bass in Virginia and the VDWR is reminding everyone that it is illegal to stock fish into a public body of water without authorization from them.

Anyone with knowledge of intentional stockings of Alabama or spotted bass should contact DGIF law enforcement at 800-237-5712 or WildCrime@dgif.virginia.gov.

Also, anglers who think they have caught an Alabama bass should take a picture of the fish, clip off a bit of one of the pelvic fins and contact the DGIF at fisheries@dgif.virginia.gov or 804-367-1293.

Bill Wyatt is a reporter for the Martinsville Bulletin. He can be reached at 276-638-8801, Ext. 236. Follow him @billdwyatt

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'Assessments show that the explosion ... was the result of a terrorist attack,' state news agency SANA quoted Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem as saying

An explosion on the Arab Gas Pipeline that caused a power blackout in Syria on Monday was the result of a "terrorist" attack, state media cited the energy minister as saying.

Ikhbariya TV channel showed footage of a large fire after the explosion, which officials said occurred between the towns of Ad Dumayr and Adra, northwest of the capital of Damascus. The channel later said the fire had been extinguished.

"Assessments show that the explosion ... was the result of a terrorist attack," state news agency SANA quoted Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem as saying. He did not provide further detail.

The electricity minister earlier said that power was gradually being restored to the country's provinces. A resident in Damascus said power had returned in the capital.

In 2013, much of Syria was hit by a power cut after rebel shelling hit a gas pipeline during the country's civil war.

The Arab Gas Pipeline system extends from Egypt into Jordan and Syria.

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New Delhi, Aug 24 : The Supreme Court on Monday declined to entertain a plea seeking directions to the Centre and Telangana government to pass an executive order or resolution in the state Assembly or in Parliament by giving a commitment for rebuilding religious structures - two mosques and a temple - within the Telangana Secretariat complex building in Hyderabad.

A bench comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan and R. Subhash Reddy queried the petitioner if he had moved the High Court before coming to the apex court. The petitioner said he did not move the High Court yet as his petition did not pertain to the demolition of the Secretariat, instead it was for rebuilding of religious structures around it, which were demolished. The bench noted that the matter is not fit to be entertained under Article 32. The top court allowed the petitioner to withdraw the plea.

The plea filed by advocate Khaja Aijazuddin contended that the Secretariat complex is spread across 25 acres and housed the Office of the Chief Minister of Telangana, Council of Ministers and bureaucrats. "It is respectfully submitted that within the Secretariat complex existed a temple namely Nalla Pochamma temple which is situated in one of the blocks i.e. A Block, and two mosques or masjids namely Masjid Dafaatir-e-Muatamadi located adjacent to the 'C' Block and Masjid-e-Hashmi Located near the 'D' Block", said the plea.

The petitioner argued that the temple and the two mosques were within the Secretariat building complex, Hyderabad and the same is under no dispute so far as the existence of the religious places.

The petitioner said the Telangana government has decided to demolish the Secretariat building complex, entire structures existing therein, which resulted in the filing of PILs in the Telangana High Court. On June 29, the High Court dismissed all the PILs paving the way for the demolition of the Secretariat complex building.

"The Chief Minister of Telangana has just merely apologised for the demolition of the religious structures but never assured the citizens by committing to rebuild the religious places which were demolished. It is a settled Principle of Law once the religious structure exists it remains forever as the same is enshrined under Article 26 of the Constitution of India", said the plea.

The petitioner contended that authorities concerned who are statutorily bound to supervise the functioning and protection of the temples have failed to act upon and remained silent so far.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:11:24|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang attends the third Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Leaders' Meeting via video link at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 24, 2020. The meeting was co-chaired by Li Keqiang and Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith of Laos, and attended by Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia, President U Win Myint of Myanmar, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha of Thailand, and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc of Vietnam. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin)

BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Leaders of the Mekong countries on Monday vowed to work together with China to step up the Lancang-Mekong cooperation.

The leaders' remarks were made at the third Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) leaders' meeting, which was held via video link on Monday.

Initiated by China, the LMC consists of six countries, namely China, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said thanks to the sincere and close partnership among the six countries, the LMC has achieved tangible results over the past four years and more.

Thanking the Chinese government for attaching great importance to this cooperation mechanism, which has played a positive role in promoting Lancang-Mekong cooperation, the prime minister said Laos agrees to China's proposal for the Lancang-Mekong sub-regional mechanism to strengthen cooperation with other sub-regional mechanisms.

Samdech Techo Hun Sen, Cambodian prime minister, said as major grain producers, the five Mekong countries urgently need to strengthen cooperation with China in food security and food trade.

Cambodia will continue to firmly push forward Lancang-Mekong cooperation with other parties, and looks forward to working with other members of the LMC to build a community with a shared future for Lancang-Mekong region, Hun Sen added.

Noting the six LMC member states are linked by mountains and rivers, share similar cultures and enjoy profound friendship, Myanmar President U Win Myint said Myanmar appreciates China's rapid and comprehensive control of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The president said he hopes that the Mekong countries will work together to bring the pandemic under control at an early date and promote rapid economic and social recovery through solidarity and cooperation.

Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said although the meeting was held via video, it demonstrated the steadfast determination from all sides to expand cooperation.

Thailand also supports better cooperation among the countries of upstream, midstream and downstream Mekong River, so as to benefit the nations and peoples along the river, said the prime minister.

He added Thailand is willing to enhance cooperation with China in vaccine research and development, medical workers capability buildup as well as other fields.

Noting that he is glad to see China has reiterated its resolution and commitment toward the LMC mechanism, the prime minister said Thailand is willing to work with other parties to face challenges and turn challenges into opportunities to safeguard the sustainable development and prosperity of all countries.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the Lancang-Mekong countries have provided each other with assistance, solidarity and coordination in jointly responding to the pandemic.

The prime minister said Vietnam especially thanks the Chinese government for its important contribution to the Lancang-Mekong cooperation and its strong support to relevant countries.

He also expressed his belief that the Lancang-Mekong cooperation can make a significant contribution to people's well-being and the regional peace and prosperity. Enditem
WASHINGTON  Jerry Falwell Jr., the embattled president of Liberty University and an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump, agreed to resign as president on Monday, then changed his mind after seeing media reports, the university said.

Falwell appeared to change his mind again later Monday night, telling the Wall Street Journal that he had sent a letter of resignation to the board of directors.

The board put me on leave, took away my duties as prez, and thats not permitted by my contract, Falwell told the newspaper. And they put me on leave because of pressure from self-righteous people.

Falwell had previously agreed to resign as president and from the board on Monday, then asked his attorneys not to tender the letter for immediate resignation, according to a statement by the university's general counsel David M. Corry.

The executive committee met Monday morning and will gather Tuesday for a conference call, the school said.

"I call upon the University community and supporters to be in prayer for the University and for all its leadership, past, present and future, as we walk with the Lord through this stormy time of transition," acting President Jerry Prevo said in a statement.

During a late-night call with the WSJ, Falwell said he had decided to resign because he wants "whats best for the university, and I dont want to harm the future of the university.

Earlier on Monday, multiple media outlets reported that Falwell had agreed to relinquish his post at the university after allegations emerged of a years-long sexual relationship that he and his wife had with a business partner.

Monday's public tussle between Falwell and Liberty University unfolded just hours after Reuters published an interview with a man who said he had a years-long relationship with the evangelical leader's wife, Becki Falwell, with her husband's consent and encouragement.

Giancarlo Granda told Reuters that he met Jerry and Becki Falwell while working as a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in March 2012. Starting that month and continuing into 2018, Granda told Reuters that the relationship involved him having sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell looked on.

Story continues

In this Nov. 16, 2016 file photo, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., poses during an interview in his offices at the school in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell Jr. apologized Monday, June 8, 2020 for a tweet that included a racist photo that appeared on Gov. Ralph Northam's medical school yearbook page decades ago, saying his effort to make a political point had been offensive.

Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room, Granda told Reuters. He said his relationship with the Falwells began when he was 20 and their sexual encounters occurred multiple times per year at hotels and at the Falwells home in Virginia.

Granda went into business with Jerry Fallwell in 2013, according to Buzzfeed News, when they bought a Miami beach youth hostel together.

A lawyer for Jerry Falwell, Michael Bowe, told Reuters that the evangelical leader categorically denies Grandas account.

Liberty University, founded in 1971 in Lynchburg, Virginia, by Falwell's pastor father, has a student body of more than 15,000 on campus and more than 100,000 when counting its online courses. Known for its conservative politics, Liberty's honor code states, "Sexual relations outside of a biblically-ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman are not permissible at Liberty University."

Before Reuters published its story, Falwell released a statement to the Washington Examiner, a conservative newspaper, acknowledging his wife's extramarital affair.

"During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school," Falwell said in the statement.

Falwell did not name the man in his statement, but his description of their relationship seems to track with Granda's. Falwell mentioned they had inked a real estate deal with him and "became close with him," though he denied consenting to or participating in a relationship with him.

"Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved," Falwell's statement continues. He said he was extremely distressed by the affair, but he and Becki forgave each other.

"I was and have always remained fully devoted to Becki and we have shared many private conversations to better understand and support each other and to strengthen our marriage," he wrote.

The Religion News Service and Washington Post, which cited an unnamed school official, first reported Falwell's departure from Liberty University, which ends a run as president that began in 2007 when his father, The Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., died.

Falwell Jr., an early and ardent Trump supporter , had been on a leave of absence after posting a controversial photo of himself with his arm around a pregnant woman, both of their stomachs exposed, with their pants unzipped.

Falwell was among the earliest Christian conservatives to endorse Trumps 2016 presidential campaign and has routinely been in the spotlight since then for a series of controversies in both his role at Liberty and his personal life.

Becki Falwell, known as the "first lady of Liberty University," served as an advisory board member for the Trump campaign's Women for Trump group. She appeared on an online campaign video last year hosted by the president's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to discuss "teaching traditional American values."

President Donald Trump and Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. during commencement proceedings on May 13, 2017.

More: Liberty Universitys Jerry Falwell Jr. taking leave of absence after photo with pants unzipped

In his statement to The Washington Examiner on Sunday, Falwell said the man involved had been threatening to reveal the relationship to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies.

Over the course of the last few months this persons behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public, said the statement.

Contributing: Elinor Aspegren and Jessica Flores, USA TODAY; The Associated Press.

Reach Joey Garrison on Twitter @joeygarrison.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jerry Falwell Jr. agreed to resign at Liberty University, school says
Barcelona  Green Climate Fund backs host of new projects including strengthening buildings to withstand hurricanes in Caribbean

The Green Climate Fund has promised developing nations it will ramp up efforts to help them tackle climate challenges as they strive to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, approving $879 million in backing for 15 new projects around the world.

At a four-day virtual board meeting ending late Friday, the fund added Afghanistan and Sudan to a list of more than 100 countries receiving a total of $6.2 billion to reduce planet-heating emissions and enhance climate resilience.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was set up under U.N. climate talks in 2010 to help developing nations tackle global warming, and started allocating money in 2015.

Executive Director Yannick Glemarec said the fund had "a key role to play to maintain climate ambition in the era of COVID-19" and would aim to improve the speed and efficiency of its response to developing country needs.

Board co-chair Nauman Bashir Bhatti, from Pakistan, said climate finance would be crucial for recovery from the pandemic and the fund needed to increase support "even during these difficult times".

Those promises came as small island states criticised the pace and size of GCF assistance, saying they were now struggling with the economic blow from the pandemic on top of climate change impacts such as rising seas and stronger storms.

Fiji's U.N. Ambassador Satyendra Prasad said COVID-19 risked worsening the already high debt burden of small island nations, as tourism dived.

"The importance of the (GCF) ... in accelerating transformative climate action in this present decade cannot be understated," he added.

He told the Thomson Reuters Foundation island nations were struggling to access other sources of finance and urged the GCF to boost aid to help them prepare project proposals and to release funding for approved projects faster.

The Alliance of Small Island States said its members represented less than 10% of total funding requests.

JOB CREATION

The GCF this week approved three new projects for island nations, including strengthening buildings to withstand hurricanes in Antigua and Barbuda, and installing solar power systems on farmland on Fiji's Ovalau island.

It also gave the green light to payments rewarding reductions in deforestation in Colombia and Indonesia between 2014 and 2016.

But more than 80 green groups issued an open letter ahead of the meeting opposing such funding.

They said deforestation had since spiked and countries should not be rewarded for "paper reductions" in carbon emissions calculated from favourable baselines.

Liane Schalatek, who leads climate finance work for the Heinrich Boll Foundation North America, said the fund should take a hard look at whether the forest emission reductions it is paying for would be permanent.

It should also ensure the funding protects and benefits forest communities and indigenous people, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Other new projects included one for zero-deforestation cocoa production in Ivory Coast, providing rural villages in Senegal and Afghanistan with solar mini-grids, and conserving biodiversity on Indian Ocean islands.

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The fund said initiatives like these would create jobs and support a green recovery from the coronavirus crisis.

The board also accepted Senegal's La Banque Agricole and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization as partners that can implement projects with fund money.

But Japan's Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) put its accreditation application on hold after campaigners argued the GCF should not work with a company that lends to developers of coal-power plants, though it has ruled out backing new ones.

(Reporting by Megan Rowling @meganrowling; editing by Emma Batha. The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, and covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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In his most important speech about the place of culture in the national experience, delivered at Amherst College mere weeks before his death, President John F. Kennedy said:

In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society  in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.

Is that necessarily how artists best serve the nation? Truly, it is different elsewhere. Outside the US, artists may successfully aspire to become  in Stalins phrase  influential engineers of the soul. In our hemisphere, the first names to come to mind may be Mexican: Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, powerful and impactful muralists on the left, defining and espousing Mexican identity, agitating with their art for social and economic reform.

Its a pity that Silvestre Revueltas is not at least as well known as Rivera. I would unhesitatingly call him the supreme political composer of concert and film music produced in the Americas. His music combines ideology with personal understanding. This is what Octavio Paz meant when he wrote extolling Revueltas:

All his music seems preceded by something that is not simply joy and exhilaration, or satire and irony. That element is his profound empathy with his surroundings. He occupies a place in our hearts above that of the grandiose Mexican murals, that seem to know all except pity.

Revueltass peak achievements include his singularly arresting score for the film Redes (1936), in which impoverished Mexican fisherman unite to storm the bastions of power. That this film isnt as celebrated as it deserves to be is partly because until recently it seemed impossible to obtain a decent print. PostClassical Ensembles Naxos DVD Redes not only features a pristine print, courtesy of Martin Scorseses World Cinema Project; it also features a newly recorded soundtrack by PCE (and its inimitable principal trumpet, Chris Gekker) led by Angel Gil-Ordonez. The impact of Revueltass score, in combination with Paul Strands lyrical cinematography, is fully realized for the first time.

PostClassical Ensembles latest More than Music film (you can screen it above), remarkably embellished by Peter Bogdanoffs visual presentation, explores the significance of Redes and Revueltas today; we call it Redes Lives!

The distinguished Mexican composer Ana Lara beautifully sums it all up by saying (at 1:01:38): Its unique in film music, that you can have his very revolutionary music  wonderfully written, wonderfully orchestrated  and at the same time it throws you into the deepest feeling of the human being.

To which Angel Gil-Ordonez adds (at 1:00:40) that, because Revueltas combines political militancy with empathy (always on the side of those who are suffering), he bears comparison with Shostakovich.

Why did Aaron Copland say: When I was in Mexico I was a little envious of the opportunity composers have to serve their country?

Why did the Mexican government decide to back a film espousing revolutionary change? (The historian John Tutino has the answer at 51:09.)

What impelled the Mexican music historian Roberto Kolb to deny that Mexican composers were running around in loin cloths? (46:42)

Is Redes today a call for action? Yes, affirms Lorenzo Candelaria, a leading Hispanic educator and dean of Vanderbilts Blair School of Music (58:35).

Midway through Redes, Strand admires the pride and resilience of challenged fishermen, hauling their nets in unison, bringing in the catch. His camera feasts on the elemental grandeur of Mexican sky and water  and discovers, in the veins of the fishermens muscled arms, a visual metaphor for their rope nets, themselves a metaphor for entrapment. Revueltas does not accompany this sequence; he comments upon it with a chorale. I cannot think of a film clip that more memorably marries music with the moving image

Reviewing our Naxos DVD, Spains pre-eminent contemporary novelist, Antonio Munoz Molina, wrote in El Pais: The beauty of image and of sound register as never before. . . . It is like experiencing a masterpiece of painting cleaned of centuries of grime. The exhausted and disillusioned Silvestre Revueltas of his final years would never have imagined such a posthumous tribute.

A follow-up zoom chat  The Artist and the State: Political Art in Mexico and the US  will include a terrific presentation by Gregorio Luke on the Mexican muralists. Also Ana Lara, Roberto Kolb, John Tutino, Lorenzo Candelaria, and Ix-Nic Iruegas Peon of the Mexican Cultural Institute. To register, click here.

For more on More than Music, click here.

Coming in September: a More than Music film on Dvoraks New World Symphony as a lens on the American experience of race.
Election 2020 Myanmars Military Chief Urges Personnel to Vote for Correct Candidates

Military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing attends a ceremony honoring military doctors in Naypyitaw on August 23. / Htet Naing Zaw / The Irrawaddy

YANGON  Myanmars military chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has cautioned his personnel against voting for the wrong candidates in the November general election, saying it will harm the country.

Candidates that you support should be the ones who will benefit the country. If you make the wrong choice, it will be harm the country, Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing told a ceremony honoring military doctors who have worked for two years at hospitals in the remote Naga self-administered zone and Chin State.

He told the attendees in Naypyitaw to assess the records of governments led by the National League for Democracy (NLD) and Union Solidarity and Development (USDP) and vote for those capable of serving the country.

You guys have higher IQ and EQ [emotional intelligence] than others. So explain to other voters how to understand this, he said.

When choosing the correct candidate, the military chief referred to the six points he mentioned to political parties on August 14.

During the meeting with 34 parties  most of them pro-military parties and USDP allies  Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing called good candidates those who would work for their constituents and the country, maintain the national interest and understand the military role in national politics and respect race and religion while being free from foreign influence.

It is hard to find candidates who meet all six points, the army chief told military personnel yet they should look for those who fulfill as many characteristics as possible.

When Myanmar goes to the polls on Nov. 8, military personnel and their relatives for the first time will vote at polling stations outside their compounds as Parliament abolished military polling stations to increase transparency.

During the 2010 and 2015 general elections and 2012, 2017 and 2018 by-elections, votes were cast at polling stations inside military property under the watchful eyes of superior officers.

But where bases are far from civilian areas, polling stations will operate on military land, Union Election Commissions (UEC) spokesman U Myint Naing told The Irrawaddy recently.

The abolition of military polling this year raised hopes that personnel will be free to pick candidates of their choice. But observers have raised concerns that military voters will be intimidated into voting for a specific party and the location of the polling stations is irrelevant.

The military has an estimated 500,000 personnel. When relatives are added, there are over 1 million military-affiliated voters. The UEC recently declined to provide The Irrawaddy the number of registered military voters ahead of the Nov. general election.

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This struggle is for our children, and nothing can stop us. This is what head of KAMQ (Will) Social Initiative for Protection of National Values Vahagn Chakhalyan declared during a protest held in front of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport today, adding that he and the Initiatives members demand Minister Arayik Harutyunyans resignation.

Were not going to let the ministry desecrate our schools and our children. Were not going to let them remove Armenian Church History from the curriculum and make children wear face masks. The regime is panicking, he said, adding that this is a crucial struggle and that the members of the initiative are not politically affiliated to any political party.

At a certain point, police officers started apprehending the participants of the demonstration, but Chakhalyan told reporters that he and the members wont back down.

Police officers drew up a record and stressed that assemblies are prohibited during the state of emergency and that citizens need to maintain social distancing.

The police are here today to repress the peoples will. Dear citizens, dont be afraid. Im going to fight for every citizen. We cant let the Lanzarote Convention be introduced in Armenias educational system. Well come to the ministry again and show Minister Harutyunyan the trashcan in which he will be thrown, if he doesnt submit to the peoples demands, Chakhalyan said.
Huge fire breaks out in 139-year-old Grey Street Mosque in the southeastern port city of Durban.

A massive blaze has engulfed a 139-year-old mosque in the South African city of Durban.

The cause of the fire on Monday at the Grey Street Mosque, one of the largest in the southern hemisphere, was not immediately known.

But Faisal Suliman, chairman of the South African Muslim Network, said it was believed to have started in one of seven staff flats located above the mosque and may have been caused by an electrical fault.

Its presumed to have been accidental, and not to have been any foul play, Suliman told AFP news agency.

There were no reports of casualties.

Durban  FIRE at a Mosque on Grey Street in the CBD area pic.twitter.com/iilkePxgex  Rob Beezy (@TrafficSA) August 24, 2020

Videos posted on Twitter showed crowds gathered as curtains of flames raged through the top floor of the two-storey building in the central business district of the southeastern port city.

Several people took to social media to express sadness about the fire at the historic structure, which can accommodate up to 7,000 worshippers.

Firefighters managed to bring the fire under control in about two hours.

Emergency services spokesman Robert Mckenzie told AFP the blaze also damaged three adjacent buildings.

The mosque is a landmark of central Durban and a well-attended house of worship.

As well as hosting Friday prayers, it has been visited by prominent figures including anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, British singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, and boxing superstar Muhammad Ali.
Many small businesses remain shuttered. Restaurants, bars, banquet halls and hotels are trying to adapt to a new reality, visualizing a future when customers can dine-in and guests can feel safe again. In response to the March 16 th New Jersey mandated non-essential business shut down, Bielat Santore & Company became 'a voice for the hospitality industry.' The firm immediately began to distribute timely and useful information by way of their daily 'Restaurant Industry Alert' email bulletins and weekly 'Thursday Restaurant Rap' video interviews.

Bielat Santore & Company has now published an E-Book called "100 Days of Darkness." The E-Book is a synopsis of events that occurred over the first 100 days of the pandemic and how the firm rallied from within to help hospitality owners and operators. "100 Days of Darkness" will be released this week.

Prior to the release of this new E-Book, Bielat Santore & Company had released a "Restaurant Reopening Playbook." The company's mission was to provide a collaboration of knowledge, expertise and innovative thinking from some of the industry's most reputable restaurant operators, yielding a strategy for all independent restaurateurs to follow in the transition back to "business as normal."

Both the "100 Days of Darkness" E-Book and the "Restaurant Reopening Playbook" can be downloaded on the company's website at https://www.123bsc.com/resource-library/?utm_source=press-release&utm_medium=news&utm_campaign=100-days. To request a copy of these books, email Courtney at [email protected] or call 732.531.4200. For other Bielat Santore & Company updates, visit www.123bsc.com/news/.

About Bielat Santore & Company

Bielat Santore & Company is an established commercial real estate firm. The company's expertise lies chiefly within the restaurant and hospitality industry, specializing in the sale of restaurants and other food and beverage real estate businesses. Since 1978, the principals of Bielat Santore & Company, Barry Bielat and Richard Santore, have sold more restaurants and similar type properties in New Jersey than any other real estate company. Furthermore, the firm has secured in excess of $500,000,000 in financing to facilitate these transactions. Visit the company's website, www.123bsc.com for the latest in new listings, property searches, available land, market data, financing trends, RSS feeds, press releases and more.

SOURCE Bielat Santore & Company


Sonia Gandhi The Congress likely to appoint a panel of senior leaders to assist interim chief Sonia Gandhi till she is at the helm of affairs, say sources for though the party maintains all is well but the discontent, evinced by a letter seeking a leadership change, may not have been fully doused. Sources say that the party may appoint a panel of four persons to take important decisions. The Congress working Committee, the party's highest decision making committee, which met on Monday, in wake of the letter seeking change, has authorised the Congress President to affect "necessary organisational changes" that she may deem appropriate to take on the challenges. "In the light of the above deliberations and conclusions, the CWC unanimously requests Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the Congress until such time as circumstances will permit an AICC session to be convened," party General Secretary, Organisation, K.C. Venugopal said, after the key meeting. Hinting at the committee, several leaders said that Sonia Gandhi will be assisted by four persons so that consultation process is more wide than what she had done in past while going for treatment abroad. However, chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said: "The organisational reconstitution is at her (Sonia Gandhi's) discretion. How she will exercise her discretion, is neither for General Secretary, Organisation nor for me to say at this juncture." As Congress has decided to go for AICC session, this means that Rahul Gandhi may contest organisational elections. "Millions and millions of ordinary Congress workers have, on innumerable occasions, raised their voice to say that they want Rahul Gandhi to come back and take over the Presidentship of the INC.... that is a sentiment that was also again expressed today by all members of the Congress Working Committee," Surjewala said. "But, as we are all aware that we are a democratic party and the election will be held for the next President in an AICC session: dates for which at an appropriate time will be fixed by General Secretary Organisation. And it is the wish of everyone, including myself that Rahul Gandhi should take over. But, I cannot predict what will happen in an AICC session because that is the unanimous opinion of all Congress workers and leaders," he added.




Abubakar Malami, the Attorney-General of the Federation, AGF, and Minister of Justice, has described as false reports that he conspired wi...

Abubakar Malami, the Attorney-General of the Federation, AGF, and Minister of Justice, has described as false reports that he conspired with a lawyer to testify against Ibrahim Magu, the suspended Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

Malami made the denial in a statement signed by his spokesman, Umar Gwandu and made available to reporters on Monday.

The statement said that report about the Malamis involvement with one Donald Wokoma was false.

The statement reads: The attention of the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice has been drawn to a flimsy allegation made by one, Victor Giwa, Esq accusing the Honourable Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN of conniving with one Donald Wokoma to witch-hunt him over what he termed as his refusal to testify against Ibrahim Magu at the ongoing Retired Justice Ayo Salami-led Presidential Panel probing the suspended Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu.

It added that the AGF never met Giwa nor had any discussions with Wokoma nor asked anybody, personally or by proxy, to engage the so-called Victor to testify against the suspended EFCC boss.

The statement said the Minister did not set up the investigation panel to probe Magu and not saddled with any responsibility to procure witness(es) for the panel.

According to the statement, Malami is never a member of the panel constituted by President Muhammadu Buhari nor does it fall within his realm of authority to invite witness (es) for a presidential probe panel.
/NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES/

Western Pacific to acquire two high-grade gold exploration assets, Coriorcco and Las Antas, in southern Peru for cash consideration of USD $1,500,000 and 7,050,000 shares of Western Pacific

The 56-hectare Coriorcco Dome structure is a high priority exploration target with 17 mineralized epithermal veins. Veining may represent the upper-reaches of a low sulphidation epithermal system with precious metal grades improving with depth

Historic targeted underground mining at Coriorcco from 2 of 17 known outcropping veins produced over 5,720 tonnes of material, averaging 7.45 g/t Au

Highlights of limited surface rock sampling by the previous operators include:

22.90 g/t Au; 19.25 g/t Au; 14.20 g/t Au; 13.05 g/t Au



Average grade from surface sampling 1.91 g/t Au over 181 sample



Further encouraging sampling for underground workings to be verified

Appoints mining entrepreneur Paul Matysek as Lead Advisor. Mr. Matysek is a consistent creator of shareholder value and has sold five publicly listed exploration and development companies, in aggregate worth over $2 billion

Western Pacific arranges private placement of 15,243,902 common shares at $0.41 per Share for gross proceeds of $6,250,000

Changes name to Oro X Mining Corp.

VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 24, 2020 /CNW/ - WESTERN PACIFIC RESOURCES CORP. (TSXV: WRP) (the "Company" or "Western Pacific") is pleased to announce it has entered into an Option Acquisition Agreement (the "Option Acquisition Agreement") with Titan Minerals Ltd. ("Titan") (among others) in which Western Pacific will purchase Titan's right to acquire the Coriorcco and Las Antas gold projects located in Ayacucho, Peru. Upon closing of the transaction and Exchange acceptance, the Company will appoint Mr. Paul Matysek as lead advisor and change its name to "Oro X Mining Corp".

The flagship Coriorcco project is comprised of two concessions totalling 2,000 Ha and fully encloses the high priority Coriorcco Dome Structure. The Dome hosts 17 epithermal quartz, quartz-carbonate, and quartz-carbonate-adularia veins with Veins 3 and 6 being the most significant. These veins may represent the upper reaches of a low-sulphidation epithermal system.

The outcropping quartz vein system is host to drill-ready targets located within an extensive belt of volcanic hydrothermal systems. With favourable topography, access, and proximity to electrical power, the project is well suited for low capex development of high-grade, low-tonnage mining of veins.

"The acquisition of the Coriorcco and Las Antas options along with our proposed re-brand as Oro X Mining speaks to the strength of our new team and the transformative nature of this transaction" said Luis Zapata, Chief Executive Officer of Western Pacific. He continued "The Coriorcco and Las Antas projects are ideally located in an established mining district and have shown impressive gold grades in very limited past production. The market is rewarding to projects with the potential to be high-grade low-cost mines, and we will move expeditiously to advance the projects in that direction".

Coriorcco Property

The Coriorcco property is located in the San Juan de Lucanas Mining District and consists of two contiguous mineral concessions in an established metallogenic belt recognised for its epithermal Au-Ag mineralisation potential. The belt hosts multiple producing mines including Hochschild's Inmaculada and Pallancata gold-silver operations 100 km down strike. Both operations exploit high to low sulphidation epithermal systems and have collectively produced 100 Moz Ag & 1.1 Moz Au with 33.5 Moz Ag & 633 Koz in proven and probable reserves. Numerous publicly-listed exploration companies are also active in the area and 9 toll-milling plants service local artisanal miners.

Mineralisation at the property is related to epithermal veins with a close spatial relationship to a volcanic dome (Coriorcco Dome Structure) with significant silicification and argillization. Seventeen (17) veins have been mapped at the property, the most common vein orientations are northwest and east-northeast. Vein 3 and Vein 6, the two most significant veins, strike approximately east-northeast, antithetic to the Andean Trend, a regionally significant orientation that exercises structural control on mineralisation throughout the Peruvian Andes. Veins pinch and swell along-strike and down-dip. Vein 3 and Vein 6 have been mapped on surface and extend 280m and 405m respectively. Crustiform quartz-carbonate veins and surrounding wall rock contain minor sulphides.

Previous exploration activity included surface channel sampling and follow-up trial mining from 2010 to 2011. Three portals were developed and over 400m of sub-horizontal mining was completed on three veins up to 60 m below surface, within the silica cap of the Coriorcco Dome. The three portals were sunk into the side of the Dome, to the east and west of the major vein swarm, and followed mineralized Vein 3, 6 and an unnamed vein. There are 15 additional veins visible on surface within the broader vein swarm that require systemic mapping and sampling.

Historical mining of veins 3 and 6 exploited over 5,720 tonnes of material and was shipped to a third-party mill for processing. The underground minable width of the vein system ranged from 0.8 m to 2.5 m and the material produced had an average head grade of 7.5 g/t Au.

Limited surface rock sampling by the previous operators include:

22.90 g/t Au; 19.25 g/t Au; 14.20 g/t Au; 13.05 g/t Au



Average grade from surface sampling 1.91 g/t Au over 181 samples



Further encouraging sampling for underground workings to be verified

Historic sample results have not been verified by the Company, and readers are cautioned not to place undue weight on such results. The historical grades are considered relevant; however, the reliability, assumptions, parameters and methods used in preparing the reports are unknown. Chip samples are selected from a larger population of samples and are not indicative of the average grade of mineralization hosted on the Coriorcco Property.

Las Antas Property

The Las Antas property consists of two contiguous mineral concessions immediately to the south of the Coriorcco Concessions. It lies in the same established metallogenic belt recognised for its prospectivity for epithermal Au-Ag mineralisation, and polymetallic veins. The property hosts a large zone of extensive hydrothermal alteration developed in volcanics at the junctions of regionally significant northwest and northeast trending faults.

Two named prospects have been established at the property based on observed hydrothermal alterations:

Yuracmarca is an approximately 1.9 x 1.4 km area in the northwestern part of the Property, with pervasive hydrothermal alteration including, propylitization and argilization.

Cerro Amarillo is an approximately 3.0 x 1.5 km area in the central and southwestern part of the Property with intense silicification.

Artisanal and small-scale miners have been intermittently active in the areas around the Property and wider San Juan de Lucanas Mining District since pre-colonial times.

New Board and Advisors

Upon closing the Transaction, the Company will add Mr. Paul Matysek as Lead Advisor and Mr. Nick Rowley, nominee of Titan, as a director to its board.

Mr. Matysek is a geologist/geochemist by training, a successful alpha entrepreneur and consistent creator of shareholder value, with over 40 years of experience in the mining industry. Since 2004 Mr. Matysek has sold five publicly listed exploration and development companies, in aggregate worth over $2 billion. Currently, Mr. Matysek is the CEO of Gold X Mining Corp., which is advancing the Toroparu Project in Guyana.

Mr. Rowley is an experienced corporate executive with a strong financial background with over 15 years' experience specialising in corporate advisory, M&A transactions and equities markets. He has advised on the equity financings of numerous ASX and TSX listed companies predominantly in the mining and resources sector. Mr. Rowley currently serves as Non-Executive Director of Titan Minerals (ASX:TTM) and holds an executive role at Galaxy Resources Ltd (ASX:GXY). He was also founder and Non-Executive Director of Cobalt One Ltd (ASX:CO1) which was acquired by Canadian listed First Cobalt Corporation (TSX:FCC) in 2017.

Transaction Summary

Pursuant to the terms of the Option Acquisition Agreement, Western Pacific will acquire Titan's legal and beneficial right, title and interest in options to acquire: (a) 100% of the legal and beneficial interest in and to a 2,000 hectare concession known as the Coriorcco property pursuant to a cession and option agreement (the "Coriorcco Option Agreement"); and (b) up to 85% of the legal and beneficial interest in and to 1,400 hectare concession known as the Las Antas Property (together, the "Properties") pursuant to an earn-in agreement (the "Las Antas Earn-in Agreement").

As consideration for the acquisition of the option rights over the Properties, Western Pacific will: (a) pay cash consideration of USD $1,500,000 of which USD $100,000 has already been paid to Titan as a deposit; and (b) issue to Titan and its nominees 7,050,000 Western Pacific common shares (the "Shares"); and (c) reimburse Titan up to USD $150,000 in relation to certain expenses incurred in connection with the Properties.

If the Company exercises its option to acquire the Coriorcco property, Western Pacific will grant to Titan a 1% net smelter royalty (the "NSR") over the Coriorcco property.

Additionally, the Company has agreed to make a conditional payment to Titan (in cash or Shares at Western Pacific's option) based on the size of the mineral resource (in the measured and indicated category) that is established on the Coriorcco property in a technical report prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101.

Titan will receive:

(i) USD $1,000,000 if a measured and indicated resource of 500,000 to 999,999 ounces of gold is established

(ii) USD $1,500,000 if a measured and indicated resource of 1,000,000 to 1,499,000 ounces of gold is established

(iii) USD $2,000,000 if a measured and indicated resource in excess of 1,500,000 ounces of gold is established

At closing, the Company will enter into an Investor Rights Agreement with Titan in which Titan will be granted certain ancillary rights. The Investor Rights Agreement will grant Titan an anti-dilution right, a board nomination right and certain information rights. The Investor Rights Agreement will terminate in the event that Titan's Share ownership falls below 5%. The Company also anticipates paying a finder's fee consisting of 764,695 Shares in connection with the Transaction to an arm's length third party, subject to TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange") acceptance.

This Transaction is subject to: (i) the completion of a private placement for minimum gross proceeds of C$4,000,000; (ii) the receipt of all necessary consents, approvals, authorizations (including Exchange approval) for the Transaction; and (iii) other customary conditions for a transaction of this type.

The Transaction, if completed, is a Fundamental Acquisition, as defined under the policies of the Exchange. The arm's length Transaction will not require Western Pacific shareholder approval and trading of the Company's common shares will be halted, Pursuant to Exchange policy.

Change of Name

On the closing of the Transaction, subject to Exchange acceptance, the Company will change its name to "Oro X Mining Corp."

Private Placement

Pursuant to the terms of the Option Purchase Agreement and concurrent with the closing of the Transaction, Western Pacific will offer a private placement (the "Private Placement") of 15,243,902 common shares of Western Pacific at a price of $0.41 per Share for gross proceeds of $6,250,000. The Company may pay finder's fees on the Private Placement in cash or share purchase warrants or a combination of thereof within the maximum amount permitted by the policies of the Exchange.

Western Pacific intends to use the net proceeds of the Private Placement to fund the costs of the Transaction, for exploration of the Properties, for expenses associated with expanding the Company's operations to Peru and for general working capital purposes.

Coriorcco and Las Antas Option Agreements

Under the Coriorcco Option Agreement, Western Pacific will have the right to acquire a 100% interest in the Coriorcco property by making a payment of USD $3,000,000 plus general sales tax and granting a production royalty to the underlying concession holder (the "Coriorcco Royalty").

If Western Pacific exercises the option to acquire the Coriorcco property, the royalty payments are calculated as follows:



Price per dry metric tonne of gold bearing ore Before 4 years After 4 years Vein Ore $ 3.50 $ 7.00 Disseminated Ore $ 0.50 $ 1.00

The Coriorcco Royalty can be repurchased for USD $1,000,000 (the "Buy-Back Right") prior to the fifth anniversary of the Coriorcco Option Agreement. Every year following the fifth anniversary of the Coriorcco Option Agreement, the cost of the Buy-Back Right increases by 10%.

Pursuant to the Las Antas Earn-in Agreement, Western Pacific will have the right to acquire up to an 85% interest in the Las Antas property.

Western Pacific can earn-in a 60% interest by:

Spending USD $2,000,000 within the earn-in period (which runs for two years from the date on which all applicable permits have been obtained).

within the earn-in period (which runs for two years from the date on which all applicable permits have been obtained). Making a payment to the underlying concession holder of USD $450,000 .

Once Western Pacific has obtained a 60% interest in the Las Antas property it will form a joint venture with the underlying concession holder (the "Las Antas Joint Venture").

Following the creation of the Las Antas Joint Venture, Western Pacific can obtain a further 25% interest in the Las Antas property, as follows:

(i) 5% interest from the underlying concession holder prior to the completion of a pre-feasibility study for USD $500,000

(ii) 10% interest from the underlying concession holder by completing a pre-feasibility study

(iii) 5% interest from the underlying concession holder following the completion of a pre-feasibility study for USD $1,000,000

(iv) 5% at any time within 60 days following the commencement of commercial production from the Las Antas property for USD $1,000,000

Information Related to the Properties

The Properties are contiguous and located in the Ayacucho Region of Peru, approximately 80km's northeast of the city of Nazca, in south-western Peru. Further information concerning the Properties will be included in NI 43-101 technical reports to be filed for each of the Properties which will be available under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.

Qualified Person

Mr. John E. Bolanos, who is a qualified person under NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release and will continue consulting the Company for future press releases. Mr. Bolanos is a M.Sc. Mining Geologist from Camborne School of Mines (U.K.) and a Professional Geologist Eng. from The Central University of Ecuador (honours degree). He is a registered member (ID 4172671) of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration (SME) of the United States; Director of the Ecuadorian College of Engineers in Geology, Mines, Oil and Environment; and a member of the Mining Chamber of Ecuador. He has 27 years of experience in the exploration and mining industry throughout the Americas.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Luis Zapata

CEO & Director

ABOUT WESTERN PACIFIC

Western Pacific Resources is a gold exploration company based in Canada with a focus on Latin America. The company recently announced a transformative transaction to acquire previously producing high grade gold exploration assets in Peru and subject to the closing of the transaction will be renamed Oro X Mining.

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.

Completion of the Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, Exchange approval and the receipt of all regulatory consents required for the completion of the Transaction. There can be no assurance that the transaction will be completed as proposed or at all.

The TSX Venture Exchange Inc. has in no way passed upon the merits of the proposed transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.

This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described in this news release in the United States. Such 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, accordingly, may not be offered or sold within the United States, or to or for the account or benefit of persons in the United States or "U.S. Persons", as such term is defined in Regulation S promulgated under the U.S. Securities Act, unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or pursuant to an exemption from such registration requirements.

Cautionary Statement Regarding "Forward-Looking" Information

Some of the statements contained in this news release are forward-looking statements and information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information can be identified by the use of words such as "expects", "intends", "is expected", "potential", "suggests" or variations of such words or phrases, or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "should", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements and information are not historical facts and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties beyond Western Pacific's control. Actual results and developments are likely to differ, and may differ materially, from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained in this news release. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Western Pacific undertakes no obligation to update publicly or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements, except as may be required by law.

SOURCE Western Pacific Resources Corp.

For further information: Western Pacific Resources Corp., Luis Zapata, CEO, +1 236 858 9593, [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.westernpacificresources.com


McNeal told KPIX-TV that he lost contact with his mother Tuesday night as the fires picked up speed. He said his mother had tried to go into town earlier that day but turned back at a roadblock where authorities said if she went through she wouldnt be allowed back. She returned home to get her boyfriend, who was in a wheelchair.
She may be the queen of Instagram, but Tammy Hembrow is a nobody on TikTok.

The 26-year-old has more than 11.5 million followers on Instagram, the Facebook-owned image-sharing app popular among millennials (those aged between 22 and 38).

But she has nowhere near this level of popularity on TikTok, which has a much younger and comparatively 'hip' user base.

Oh, no! Instagram superstar Tammy Hembrow (pictured) is facing a popularity crisis as she fails to build an audience among Generation Z users on TikTok

Tammy has only 221,000 followers on TikTok, which goes to show that her viral fame among twenty- and thirty-somethings hasn't translated to Generation Z (those aged between 15 and 21).

To put her TikTok audience into perspective, D-list reality stars tend to have about 200,000 followers.

While her paltry following on the Chinese-owned social media app will no doubt be a crushing blow to her ego, Tammy can rest assured she is still one of the most-followed Australians on Instagram.

Numbers game: The 26-year-old has more than 11.5 million followers on Instagram, the Facebook-owned image-sharing app popular among millennials. But she has nowhere near this level of popularity on TikTok, which has a much younger and comparatively 'hip' user base

Tammy is the eleventh most popular Aussie on the platform, alongside the likes of Hollywood stars Ruby Rose and Liam Hemsworth.

And while data shows that Instagram users are getting older, about two fifths of users are between 16 and 24 years old.

This is considered a crucial demographic for advertisers, who pay influencers like Tammy thousands of dollars for a single sponsored post.

That's quite a difference! She has only 221,000 followers on TikTok (right), which goes to show that Tammy's viral fame among twentysomethings hasn't translated to Generation Z teenagers

Tammy has gained a huge following on Instagram by documenting her pregnancies and sharing raunchy bikini photos.

She parlayed that popularity into her businesses, activewear label Saski Collection and workout app Tammy Fit, making millions of dollars in the process.

She recently purchased a mansion on the Gold Coast worth $2.88million.

Money talks: Tammy (centre) has gained a huge following on Instagram by documenting her pregnancies and sharing raunchy bikini photos. She parlayed that popularity into her lucrative businesses, activewear label Saski Collection and workout app Tammy Fit
21:55

Observing that the COVID-19 situation in Gujarat is 'quite frightening', the state high court in Ahmedabad has directed the chief secretary to constitute a committee of five senior IAS officers to prepare a report on the condition prevailing at all civil and government hospitals where coronavirus patients are being treated.





A division bench of Chief Justice Vikram Nath and Justice J B Pardiwala said, in an order made available on Monday, that the panel shall prepare a comprehensive report regarding the condition prevailing in all government/civil hospitals after minutely looking at the deficiencies, if any, so that they (shortcomings) can be 'cured and taken care of'.





'The picture that emerges as regards the conditions prevailing as on date in the state of Gujarat is quite frightening.





'Although all the necessary steps are being taken to combat the situation of COVID-19 pandemic, yet the machinery needs to be gear up and the state should be prepared to meet with the worst of the situation,' said the court in its order dated August 17 which was made available on Monday.





The HC order came on a PIL seeking details of the Gujarat government's preparations to deal with the coronavirus pandemic in the state.





The court said it would like to be informed aboutconditions prevailing in all civil hospitals across Gujarat, particularly Vadodara, Rajkot, Bhavnagar and Gandhinagar.





The bench directed the chief secretary to constitute a team of five high-ranking IAS officers, not below the rank of joint/additional secretary, to take a tour across Gujarat and visit all the civil/government hospitals to take stock of the prevailing situation.





'There is a lot of hue and cry at various civil hospitals regarding the treatment, services etc. We direct the committee members to prepare a comprehensive report as regards to the conditions prevailing in all civil hospitals/government hospitals in the state of Gujarat where COVID-19 patients are being treated.





'The committee members shall, very minutely, look into the deficiencies, if any, at such civil hospitals so that such deficiencies can be cured and taken care of,' the HC said.





The court said the exercise shall be taken with the aim to ease the difficulties being faced by common citizens, particularly the poor, so that the government could provide them better medical services during the pandemic.





'The circumstances, as on date, are such that it is difficult for a common man to come forward and point out his problems.





'We expect the committee members to effectively interact with the resident doctors, interns, superintendence,nursing staff, and above all, the patients and their family members attending the patients in the hospital,' it said.





Such interactions will go a long way in achieving the objective for which the exercise is to be undertaken, the bench said and asked the committee to submit its report by September 4, the next date of hearing.





Appreciating the fact that the Gujarat chief minister and health minister have been regularly visiting Surat, the court said they need to put in similar efforts for all major cities where COVID-19 cases are on the rise.





It sought to know if any safety-cum-checking mechanism is in place to ensure that patients in private hospitals are actually being administered the drugs being provided by the state government free of cost.





The bench also sought to know if there are SOPs for operation of industries other than diamond and textile units in Surat, a COVID-19 hotspot. -- PTI


(Natural News) Forests and farms around the globe are fighting another crisis: insect infestations. The recent outbreaks of beetles, spotted lanternflies and longhorned ticks across the U.S. and in other countries are killing trees and threatening to decimate crops and infect cattle.

Local authorities are hard-pressed to contain the outbreaks and protect resources from further destruction. In Canadas British Columbia (BC), mountain pine beetles have infested enough trees to build nine million homes but demonstrate no signs of stopping in the near future.

Spruce beetles are coming out of hiding as well, threatening to infest spruce trees in BC and in the U.S. Similar infestations could be seen in parts of Europe due to a historic succession of droughts that have left forests ripe for pests. In fact, about a dozen European countries are struggling to contain their spruce beetle outbreaks.

State authorities across the U.S. are also sounding the alarm about sightings of spotted lanternflies. The pests, endemic to China and South Korea, feed on more than 70 plant species, including some that are critical to the agricultural landscape in the eastern U.S.

Earlier this month, Ohio officials also reported troubling sightings of the longhorned tick, another bug found in China, Korea and Japan. Officials are concerned that the ticks could transmit fatal diseases to cattle and deal major economic losses.

Experts are unsure if these sightings are due to a greater proliferation of bugs or if locals are just spending more time outdoors due to quarantine protocols for COVID-19. Nonetheless, local authorities are encouraging residents to kill bugs that turn up in their areas and to report sightings.

Beetles are decimating lumber supplies

Mountain pine beetles had been killing trees in BC for more than a decade. From 2000-2015, BC authorities estimate that the pests ruined a total of 730 million cubic meters of pine trees, a huge and unprecedented loss to Canadas largest exporter of timber to the U.S. housing market.

Recent projections also indicate that the beetles could kill more than half of BCs marketable pine trees in 2020. BC officials have expressed grave concern that the ongoing beetle infestation could exacerbate the soaring prices of lumber in the global market due to the ongoing pandemic.

In the U.S., people are scrambling to repair their homes during the quarantine, thus tightening remaining lumber supplies. In fact, the demand for lumber has surged beginning late March, but producers expect this strong demand to continue into the fall.

Experts point to human interference and rising temperatures as the major culprits behind the unprecedented proliferation of mountain pine beetles in BC. In order to protect their forests, authorities from neighboring regions took to cutting and burning infested pine and spruce trees.

Besides this technique of cut and burn, Canadian lumber producers are also looking to expand their operations in the southern U.S. as the beetle infestations continue to decimate acres of forests. Nonetheless, experts maintain that the U.S. is far from running out of timber.

Spotted lanternflies are forcing counties under additional quarantine

In addition to COVID-19-related restrictions, some states are also placing counties under quarantine to curb the spread of spotted lanternflies, an invasive pest that can cause significant damage to plants, crops and trees.

In total, the six-legged threat has infestations in four states and has been found in eight.

Pennsylvania has placed 26 counties under quarantine earlier this month due to these infestations. New Jersey followed suit on Sunday, August 16 and quarantined eight.

The insects had been sighted in Pennsylvania for the first time in 2014. Experts suspect that the pests had traveled from China to the U.S. by hitching a ride on a shipment.

State entomologists believe that the recent infestations are the result of a lack of control. The flies are invasive insects that have no natural predator, leaving it up to residents to control their populations.

In fact, state officials are encouraging residents of quarantined counties to do their part in curbing the infestations by killing adult spotted lanternflies and scraping their egg masses off trees and surfaces.

Both states have also launched efforts to scour their most affected areas for the tree-of-heaven, an invasive tree species that scientists believe the spotted lanternflies need in order to reproduce.

Asian longhorned ticks continue to creep across the U.S.

In the midwest, officials with the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) have confirmed sightings of the notorious Asian longhorned tick in Gallia County.

The tick was first detected on a stray dog in the county, which was later transported to a shelter in Canal Winchester. The tick was then sent to a federal lab for confirmation of the species.

Since 2017, the longhorned tick has had confirmed sightings in 13 states, according to recent reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In other countries, the Asian longhorned tick is known to transmit serious illnesses to people, such as Lyme disease and Japanese spotted fever.

The tick can also be a carrier of other pathogens and, if left to proliferate, could cause massive infestations on both animals and people.

Moreover, female longhorned ticks can reproduce without a male. Therefore, it takes just one tick to create an established population in a new location, said ODA State Veterinarian Tony Forshey.

Tick populations also tend to be greater in or near counties with large horse, cattle and sheep populations. To protect against possible outbreaks, farmers are encouraged to check their animals for ticks on a regular basis.

ODA officials also recommend practicing preventative measures like trimming grass, pulling out weeds and clearing brushes on pastures to control tick populations. (Related: Small and incredibly dangerous: Follow these tick safety tips to prevent infections.)

Read more articles about ticks, beetles and other pests at Environ.news.

Sources include:

StrangeSounds.org

Bloomberg.com 1

Bloomberg.com 2

SmithsonianMag.com

OCJ.com

ScienceDaily.com
The fast-growing, high-margin branded spices business is turning out to be an interesting growth opportunity, which to an extent was reflected in the Sunrise-ITC deal, with multiple parties from PE to strategic players joining the fray.

It is uncharacteristic of ITC - known to favour building brands from scratch - to make a big-ticket acquisition.

But last month, the diversified conglomerate sealed its biggest acquisition deal to date, paying Rs 2,150 crore for Kolkata-based Sharma family-owned, Sunrise Foods; additionally, the sellers are entitled to a contingent consideration of an amount not exceeding Rs 150 crore, payable upon Sunrise achieving mutually agreed operational and financial milestones over a period of two years.

Roughly, the deal size is close to four times the turnover of Sunrise which stood at Rs 591.50 crore in 2019-20.

Why did it make sense?

The fast-growing, high-margin branded spices business is turning out to be an interesting growth opportunity, which to an extent was reflected in the Sunrise deal, with multiple parties from private equity (PE) to strategic players joining the fray.

PE players have been taking interest in the branded spices space for a while now.

According to data from Venture Intelligence, since 2015, 17 PE/VC (venture capital) deals involving companies engaged in spices have taken place.

The largest at $185 million was General Atlantics investment in Capital Foods, which owns the Chings Secret brand, in 2018.



In terms of product portfolio, however, Chings Secret is quite different from Sunrise, which is focused mainly on spices.

But Sunrise may not be the last regional brand on offer, pointed out analysts.

There are other family-owned spice companies that are engaged in talks with companies for sale.

One of the reasons Sunrise exited was that it was unable to commit to a growth strategy and there was huge scope for expansion beyond what it had already achieved.

Sunrise, incidentally, has been growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24-25 per cent for the past nine years.

The Rs 63,000-crore spices business is largely unbranded with the share of branded packaged at about 30 per cent.

The branded segment has been growing at 15-20 per cent at the cost of unbranded, which probably explains why national players are suddenly woke to the segment and its growth prospects.

Additionally, with the overhang of Covid-19, the pace of the shift could just get accelerated.

As Hemant Malik, divisional chief executive ITC Foods, explained, The spices segment has been growing steadily because there is a conversion from unbranded to branded.

"Now, Covid-19 will just fast-forward the shift as consumers are increasingly looking for trust and quality.

During the initial stages of nationwide lockdown to contain the pandemic, spices witnessed the same kind of panic buying as staples, both being an important part of in-the-kitchen segment.

While out-of-home consumption fell, in-house consumption of spices surged 25-30 per cent.

Margins on spices are also handsome, ranging between 30 and 45 with blended spices accounting for a higher share.

The Indian market is fragmented and is led by several regional brands - MTR (South), Ashok & Goldiee Masale (North), Everest (pan India, mainly in North), MDH (pan-India, mainly in North), Ashi (Tamil Nadu), Shakti (Tamil Nadu) and Badshah (West).

Now, big consumer companies are trying to give it a national flavour.

ITC was already present in the spices segment through Aashirvaad, a market leader in Telengana and Andhra Pradesh.

With the acquisition of Sunrise, it will now be a two-brand play.

Our aspiration is to significantly scale up the spices portfolio and expand the spices footprint across the country.

"Sunrise is a clear market leader in eastern India with a robust portfolio of both basic and blended spices.

"This acquisition will enable us to strengthen our presence in the focus markets leveraging the brand connect of Sunrise together with the sourcing and supply chain capabilities of ITCs agri business, Malik said.

Last year, Emami Agrotech, the edible oil & bio-diesel arm of the Rs 20,000 crore Emami Group, announced its foray into the spices category with the launch of Emami Healthy & Tasty Mantra.

The target is to make Mantra a Rs 500 crore brand in the next three to five years.

We are currently present in Bengal, but we will be launching in all states where our edible oil is present in the next i6 to 12 months, said Aditya Agarwal, director, Emami Group.

Agarwal explained, Since we are in Bengal, our spices are specially designed for the Bengali palate.

"As we go into different states, we will adapt to the local tastes and preferences.

One of the reasons spices has been a localised play is because brands have been able to carve out their strongholds by coming up with innovative blended spices specific to markets.

What works in the east, may not in the north, west or south.

Agarwal said regional brands will continue to have their strongholds.

Analysts, too, said that the unbranded was such a large segment that there was room for regional and national players to grow the branded segment.

The other spices brand which is expected to gain traction going forward is Sampann from the Tata Consumer Products stable.

In the annual report, Sunil D Souza, managing director and chief executive officer, Tata Consumer Products, said Tata Sampann was a mega brand in the making.

He believes that carving a strong brand through sharp consumer insights, products that offer value and brand communication was key to achieving it.

Apart from spices, the Tata Sampann brand, also extends to pulses and ready-to-cook mixes.

According to a Credit Suisse report, Tata Consumer has a small turnover in spices at Rs 60 crore, but is expected to see a strong CAGR of 40 per cent over FY20-23.

The report also said that while there were front-end similarities with tea which could be used to scale up, the inorganic route may be a quicker path to growth.

Last month, at the companys annual general meeting, DSouza while making a presentation had described the Sampann brand as a diamond in the rough to shareholders.

How much of its shine would be powered by spices remains to be seen.

Photograph: PTI Photo
Gerald D. Hines, an engineer from Indiana who became a towering figure in real estate development by collaborating with world-renowned architects on projects from Barcelona to Beijing and in his adopted hometown of Houston, died peacefully at a family home in Connecticut on Sunday. He was 95.

Hines, who launched his property company as a one-man shop in Houston in 1957, developed billions of dollars worth of real estate across the globe, influencing generations of builders and leaving a lasting mark on the worlds top cities.

The founder and chairman of the Hines firm was one of the first developers to hire sought-after architects, proving that tenants would flock to top-quality buildings, even in a down market. He raised the bar for commercial real estate by showing that quality and financial success could be mutually attainable.

Downtown despair: How the pandemic turned downtown into a ghost town

Gerald Hines was one of the great patrons of American architecture of the 20th century, said architectural historian Stephen Fox, putting him in a category with John and Dominique de Menil, Ima Hogg and her brother William, and Edgar Odell Lovett, the first president of Rice University.

He put Houston on the map in terms of architecture by his imaginativeness and his business discipline in understanding how he could work with the best architects of the world within the economic constraints of real estate development and construction, said Fox, a lecturer at the architecture schools at Rice and University of Houston.

A pivotal point in his career that allowed him access to new markets and deep-pocketed investors came in the mid-1960s when his firm simultaneously developed Houstons 50-story One Shell Plaza and the Galleria mall.

His son, Jeffrey Hines, who took the helm of the business in 1990, said his father was a brilliant salesman who operated with an understated approach. He used his vast knowledge of real estate and stressed the importance of quality to win over customers.

When Shell was considering becoming a tenant in Hines first major downtown building, the developer met with the company and brought with him actual pieces of hardware to demonstrate the level of finishes the building would have, his son recalled.

It was incredibly effective. It was all about information and imparting confidence to who he was dealing with, said Hines, who has been running the firm as president, and now assumes the role of chairman and CEO.

Hines went on to shape downtowns skyline with a series of notable towers: Pennzoil Place, the former Bank of America building and 600 Travis (also known as JPMorgan Chase Tower), Houstons tallest building at 75 stories.

When his firm completed Williams Tower (formerly Transco Tower) in 1983, the 64-story building was the tallest structure outside of a central business district in the United States. The Galleria-adjacent property features a three-acre park with a 64-foot water wall, a helipad and a revolving beacon of light atop its peaked roof.

Hines didnt cut corners and focused on developing imaginative buildings that benefited its occupants as well as its greater surroundings, said architect and longtime Hines collaborator Jon Pickard of Pickard Chilton in New Haven, Conn.

He does that over and over. He sets the tone, Pickard said. Hes guided his team to know how to achieve the right result and he does it in a very collegial way. Hes not dogmatic.

Downtowns Pennzoil Place represented a breakthrough for Hines from a design and development standpoint. The twin 36-story trapezoidal towers of darkly tinted glass was named Building of the Decade when it was completed in 1975 by the late New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable.

Hines collaborated on the project with architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee who turned away from the boxy modern design of the era exemplified in One Shell Plaza just up the street.

In so doing they demonstrated that if you make a building that is distinctive there are tenants that will pay extra to have their offices there, Fox said. That was kind of the Hines breakthrough  to understand and respect the power of architecture to create structures potential clients would want to identify with.

Prime Property: Get Houston real estate news sent directly to your inbox

Hines worked with Johnson and Burgee on multiple projects, including the so-called Lipstick Building at 53rd at Third in midtown Manhattan, a 34-story elliptical-shaped office tower completed in 1986; and San Franciscos 101 California, completed in 1982, a cylindrical 48-story tower of glass and granite and glass, featuring a seven-story, glass-enclosed lobby.

Hines developed friendships with many of the architects who designed his buildings. For his 90th birthday, he was joined by seven of them to discuss design and development in a public architecture forum at Houstons Hobby Center. Hines sat alongside Burgee, A. Eugene Kohn, Henry Cobb, Cesar Pelli, Robert A.M. Stern, Jon Pickard and Art Gensler who talked of Hines outsize influence on commercial real estate. The event drew an audience of more than 2,000.

Our best work was for Gerry Hines, Burgee, who, along with the late Philip Johnson designed several buildings for Hines, said at the forum.

Paul Goldberger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a former columnist for The New York Times and The New Yorker, told the Houston Chronicle in 2015 that he considered Hines to be the opposite of real estate developer and now-President Donald Trump.

If Donald Trump is one extreme, Gerry Hines is all the way at the other end, Goldberger said. Hes quite reasonable, thoughtful, understated and unpretentious. Hes sort of the un-Trump.

Looped In podcast: Has COVID-19 made the corporate campus obsolete?

Hines also had extraordinary will and self-discipline, his son said.

When told he would need heart bypass surgery in his 50s, Hines adopted a strict diet and exercise program and was able to reverse his coronary heart disease without surgery.

I know of no one else who could stick to that sort of regimen, said Jeffrey Hines, who recalled his father joining breakfast meetings with a full plate of steamed broccoli.

Hines was long a proponent of building more housing in downtown Houston. The company is constructing its second apartment tower there, a 46-story tower called the Preston underway at 414 Milam at Preston. The Hines firm is also building Texas Tower, a 47-story office building in the 800 block of Texas Avenue, where the company plans to relocate its global headquarters.

Born on Aug. 15, 1925 in Gary, Ind., Hines graduated from Purdue University with a degree in mechanical engineering. He took a job with American Blower Corp. and was later transferred to Houston. A couple of years later, he joined Texas Engineering.

Hines bought his first Houston building on Anita Street in Midtown, long ago replaced by townhomes. In the 1960s, he developed about a dozen buildings on Richmond Avenue.

He was known for an obsession with small details and big challenges. He sought out difficult developments, knowing that others would avoid them.

One Shell Plaza was the worlds tallest reinforced concrete structure when it was completed. The Galleria, built on what was then a prairie, was modeled after Milans Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. The ice-skating rink was added to increase lease rentals on the basement floor by drawing traffic to it.

Under Jeffrey Hines the firm expanded globally, venturing into Europe after the Berlin wall fell, developing projects in Germany, Spain, Italy, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

The Hines firm has built a portfolio of $144 billion of assets under management in 25 countries, including $75.5 billion for which Hines serves as an investment manager. The company has more than 4,800 employees.

Hines philanthropic contributions included a $7 million donation in 1997 to the University of Houstons architecture school that now bears his name.

When he spoke to students, Dean Patricia Belton Oliver said, there was an immediate connection and mutual respect.

I never saw him light up quite the way he did when he was surrounded by students, she said. For someone who made his career in such a tough business, it was so gratifying to see the joy he experienced when he had the opportunity to share his legacy.

In his second marriage, Hines wed Barbara Fritzsche in 1981. The couple has two children, Serena and Trevor. Hines and his first wife, Dorothy Schwartz, had two children, Jeffrey and Jennifer, before divorcing.

Hines is survived by his wife, Barbara, his four children, 15 grandchildren and one great-grandson. He will be laid to rest in a private family ceremony in Aspen, Colo. A celebration of his life will be held at a future date when it is safe to congregate.

The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture was planning to honor Hines at its 75th anniversary this year when the event had to be postponed until next year due to the pandemic.

Sadly he wont be here to see it, Oliver said, but we plan to do it anyway in his honor.

nancy.sarnoff@chron.com

twitter.com/nsarnoff
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 21:58:15|Editor: huaxia

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JOHANNESBURG, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The financial services company Old Mutual said on Monday that their sales volumes took a nosedive because of the difficult macroeconomic environment and COVID-19 in the first six months.

"Although lockdown restrictions have been eased and economic activity has somewhat resumed, sales levels remain lower than last year's levels. Although there has been some recovery since the start of the second quarter of the year, average equity market levels were 12.1 percent lower than last year during the first half year," said Old Mutual CEO Iain Williamson.

He stated that there was significant market volatility as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown on its first six months results while new business sales volumes were negatively impacted as many of its advisers were unable to sell during the lockdown.

"While we expect the ongoing fallout of the pandemic to continue to put pressure on our customers and affect our performance for the remainder of 2020, we remain cautiously optimistic that the easing of lockdowns everywhere will be positive for us," he said.

Williamson said with a strong balance sheet and capital position, they hope to invest in growth opportunities. Enditem
The West Australian government will spend $280 million a month on transport projects by 2021-22, indicating that the state's COVID-19 economic recovery will be guided by traffic cones.

But the states construction union has warned that money must find its way into workers pockets.

The CFMEU has called on the state government to ensure workers receive a fair wage from its unprecedented infrastructure program. Credit:LOUIE DOUVIS

More than $6.5 billion in road and rail projects have been committed to over the next two years and 11 major road projects have been brought forward by between two and 18 months to keep the construction sector ticking (see table below).

The expedited road projects across the state are worth an estimated $2.37 billion and are tipped to create about 13,000 jobs.
New Delhi, Aug 24 : The merger between Indiabulls Real Estate and Embassy is a strategic decision for both companies, said Jitendra 'Jitu' Virwani, Chairman and Founder of the Embassy Group.

In an interview with IANS, billionaire Virwani said that Embassy is predominantly Bengaluru-based while Indiabulls has a 95 per cent residential asset base.

"I feel the merger benefits both companies - by allowing Indiabulls to participate in the fast-growing commercial market of Bengaluru and for Embassy, as it allows us to build a pan-India presence," he said.

Virwani said the combined entity will have access to the major Tier-I markets of NCR, MMR and Bengaluru as well as strategically important Tier-II cities and will have a very balanced mix of both commercial and residential assets.

"The combination also provides us scale and creates one of the leading real estate platforms in the country with Rs 10,700 crore of surplus from launched projects, 80.8 million sq ft of saleable/leasable area and an additional monetisable land bank of 3,300 acres in NCR, MMR, Nashik and Chennai," he said.

Virwani said that on receipt of all approvals and once the merger is complete, certain Embassy Group entities shall become the new promoter entities and the existing Indiabulls promoters will seek to declassify themselves as promoters.

On the consolidation trends in the real estate industry, Virwani said: "We believe that there will be increasing consolidation amongst players in the real estate industry. The consolidation was limited to acquisition of distressed projects/assets by a larger well- capitalised developer. However, we believe that in the future, consolidation will get broad-based and may happen at entity levels and even between Tier-I developers as well." "We believe the current market dislocation will make the residential sector more organised and eliminate unwanted excessive competition. We foresee a change in the way real estate companies upgrade and conduct themselves," he added.

On the priorities as the new promoter group, Virwani said that their "immediate focus would be to generate liquidity of Rs 10,700 crore by selling near completion/ under construction inventory, which requires very little additional capital of Rs 200 crore".

"The liquidity generated will be redeployed for planned projects and other new market opportunities." On the revival in the sector, he said investor and home buyer confidence needs to come back. "It is very difficult to exactly say how much time that will take but I am pretty sure that it will happen sooner than later," Virwani said.

Excerpts of the interview: Q: Indiabulls Real Estate Ltd and Embassy Group have entered into a merger. What is the rationale and trigger for this move? A: The merger is a strategic decision for both companies. Embassy is predominantly Bengaluu-based whilst Indiabulls has a 95 per cent residential asset base. I feel the merger benefits both companies - by allowing Indiabulls to participate in the fast-growing commercial market of Bengaluru and for Embassy, as it allows us to build a pan India presence.

The combined entity will have access to the major Tier-I markets of NCR, MMR and Bengaluru as well as strategically important Tier-II cities and will have a very balanced mix of both commercial and residential assets.

The combination also provides us scale and creates one of the leading real estate platforms in the country with Rs 10,700 crore of surplus from launched projects, 80.8 million sq.ft. of saleable/leasable area and an additional monetisable land bank of 3,300 acres in NCR, MMR, Nasik and Chennai.

Whilst we have a listed REIT platform for yield investors, we believe there is an interesting play in residential and commercial development. We believe a listed platform allows us to access to more avenues for capital to grow the business. There will be a lot of opportunities due to recent market dislocations and having a listed platform of scale, backed by institutional investors, provides us with a strong base to make good use of these opportunities and accelerate growth.

Q: What will be the change in the structure of promoters? A: On receipt of all approvals and once the merger is complete, certain Embassy Group entities shall become the new promoter entities and the existing IBREL promoters will seek to declassify themselves as promoters. The resultant combined entity post merger shall be owned 44.9 per cent by Embassy promoter entities, 26.2 per cent by the existing public shareholders (excluding old and new promoter groups), 9.8 per cent by IBREL promoter entities and 19.1 per cent by existing Embassy private equity and institutional investors, including Blackstone Real Estate Partners.

Q: The combined IBREL entity will become one of India's leading real estate development companies. What will be the reach and expansion of the new entity? A: The merger will create a market leader in terms of net surplus from launched projects (Rs 10,700 crore) and land bank ownership (3,353 acres). The combined entity will become 2nd largest real estate company in terms of inventory for sale + planned residential projects area (around 38 million sq ft).

The combined entity shall have 30 projects spread across Mumbai, Bengaluru and NCR/ strategically important Tier-II cities with a development potential of 80.8 million sq ft. The merged entity will be one of the leading market players among listed companies in the real estate sector.

Q: What are the opportunities created due to market consolidation and dislocation? Is this the beginning of consolidation in real estate sector and how do you see panning out? A: We believe that there will be increasing consolidation amongst players in the real estate industry. The consolidation was limited to acquisition of distressed projects/ assets by a larger well-capitalised developer. However, we believe that in the future, consolidation will get broad-based and may happen at entity levels and even between Tier-I developers as well.

We believe the current market dislocation will make the residential sector more organised and eliminate unwanted excessive competition. We foresee a change in the way real estate companies upgrade and conduct themselves.

Q: What are the opportunities in commercial and residential real estate for the new entity? A: As I have stated before, the merged entity shall benefit from a complementary pan-India presence across key Tier-I and Tier-II markets. Merger shall provide us diversification and a balance mix of asset classes, 53 per cent commercial and 47 per cent residential. The planned commercial assets have a development potential of 43.2 million sq ft and the ongoing plus planned residential projects have a development potential of 37.6 million sq ft.

Additionally, there exists a land bank of 3,353 acres in NCR, MMR, Nasik and Chennai, which will provide us with further developmental opportunities over the long term.

Q: As the new promoters, what would be the future strategy? A: Our immediate focus would be to generate liquidity of Rs 10,700 crore by selling near completion/under construction inventory, which requires very little additional capital of Rs 200 crore. The liquidity generated will be redeployed for planned projects and other new market opportunities.

There are multiple institutional investors who would like to generate development returns and are willing to invest their capital in a professionally-run, well-governed, well-capitalised platform, which we aim to provide. This will allow us to capitalise on the multitude of other opportunities available in the real estate segment due to market dislocations.

Q: When is the real estate sector expected to revive? Is there confidence to buy big ticket items like homes? A: As I have stated, I believe that the recent market dislocations will bring about increased consolidation in the sector which will make it more organised. Investor and home buyer confidence needs to come back. It is very difficult to exactly say how much time that will take but I am pretty sure that it will happen sooner than later. We, however, expect large Tier-1 developers who are well capitalised to benefit disproportionately from this revival. We have seen in the last 30-40 days that gradually that confidence is coming back, reflected in our sales numbers.

Q: What are the plans for the SEZ and manufacturing capacities? A: As of now, we do not have any specific plans for the SEZ land and will evaluate the appropriate strategy for these land banks in due course.

(Sanjeev Sharma can be contacted at sanjeev.s@ians.in)
Riham Yacoub was a nutritionist who ran a womens gym in the south of Basra. She was also a staunch activist against corruption in the government, leading womens marches in her city as early as 2018, a year before mass demonstrations would erupt across the country.

On Wednesday, Yacoub was assassinated when gunmen on the back of a motorcycle opened fire on her car. Three of her companions were also injured and one later died.

Yacoubs death follows a string of recent attacks in a country that has been drained by corruption, war and foreign influence.

Less than a week earlier, Tahseen Osama, a father of four who was known for his frequent participation in anti-government protests, was killed when gunmen stormed his business. His brother was also injured in the attack. Three days later, two prominent activists, Lodia Raymond and Abbas Sobhi, survived an assassination attempt. They are both in stable condition.

The attacks have ignited a new wave of demonstrations as anti-government protesters pin the deaths on Iran-backed militias. The same militias had assisted security forces in clamping down on mass demonstrations that broke out in Baghdad and Basra last October. Nearly 500 Iraqis were killed during the protests and many more are unaccounted for, according to a UN human rights report.

On Saturday, Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, fresh off his visit to Washington, vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice.

I swear by the blood of the martyr that the criminals will not escape punishment no matter how long it takes, and that the blood of the martyr Hisham Al-Hashimi and the martyr Tahseen Osama will not be wasted, he allegedly told Yacoub's family on Saturday, according to a tweet from his office.

Why it matters: Violence is nothing new for prominent activists and researchers in the country. As early as 2018, Yacoub told the Middle East Eye that she had been receiving death threats after being accused of working for the United States to sabotage peaceful protests.

And in July, gunmen ambushed Iraqi analyst and political adviser Hisham al-Hashimi at his home. Hashimi had been a researcher into the Islamic State and Iran-backed militias. An international outcry followed his death, with the US Embassy in Baghdad calling for swift justice and the Iranian Embassy condemning the act as criminal. Iraqs Kadhimi said he would not sleep until his killers were in custody.

Now, Yacoubs death has ignited a new wave of protests. Crowds gathered in Basra Friday in front of a local parliament office to demand resignations. They eventually set the building on fire as security forces fired live rounds in the air to disperse the crowds, according to Reuters.

Whats next: The recent assassination attempts led Kadhimi to dismiss Basras police chief and national security chiefs. He also ordered an investigation into the violence.

We will do all that is necessary and let the security forces do their duties, Kadhimi tweeted after Wednesday's attack. Colluding with the killers or submitting to their threats is unacceptable.

Immediately after his visit to the White House, Kadhimi met with security chiefs in Basra on Saturday and urged them to find the criminals as quickly as possible.

Iraqi Interior Minister Othman Al-Ghanemi announced on Sunday that special forces were sent to the city to hunt the militants responsible for killing the anti-corruption activists, according to The National.

Know more: Al-Monitor correspondent Ali Mamouri analyzes the balancing act the Iraqi government is struggling to play between regional and international forces.
With pragmatism, common sense and a kind heart, actor Sonu Sood has redefined philanthropy. His ability to take matters in hand and deliver has inspired two villages in Andhra Pradesh to turn self reliant. On being informed about it, the actor, on his part, has promised to visit the place.

A Twitter user, wrote, Inspired by @SonuSood (not kidding!), 2 villages in #Vizianagaram dt of #AndhraPradesh decided to stand on their own feet. After begging the local govt since 1947 to build a road to access the village on a hill top, each family pooled in 2,000 to build a road themselves! (1/4). He also added video showing road building as proof.

I will soon come and visit you guys you will inspire the nation.  https://t.co/BTARu7G07e  sonu sood (@SonuSood) August 24, 2020

Till today, the only mode of transport for around 250 families in Chintamala & Kodama villages of Salur mandal was the doli. Pregnant women had to depend only on this for emergencies. This pic is from 2 yrs ago where the lady was carried in a harness for 12 km to the hosp (2/4), he had continued. Overall 20 lakh was collected (Two loans + 2,000 from each family). The villagers hired JCBs from neighbouring #Odisha to build the 4-km ghat road. The villagers were inspired by @SonuSoods deeds and felt that theres no point waiting for others to fulfill their needs. (3/4). He also added a testimonial by a local who has been coordinating with the villagers to build the road.

Retweeting the video, Sonu promised he would pay them a visit. I will soon come and visit you guys. You will inspire the nation.

Chalo Ghar Chalein.The feeling of coming back to ur own home, your country, your loved ones is beyond words.We are ready to fly u back to that love.

SG 9286, Manila to Delhi Departure - 10:25pm.

Looking forward to have the third set of our people come back to home.@flyspicejet  sonu sood (@SonuSood) August 24, 2020

In the meanwhile, Sonu has also arranged for students, stuck in the Philippines capital, Manila to return home. Tweeting about it, he wrote: Chalo Ghar Chalein.The feeling of coming back to ur own home, your country, your loved ones is beyond words.We are ready to fly u back to that love. SG 9286, Manila to Delhi Departure - 10:25pm. Looking forward to have the third set of our people come back to home. @flyspicejet.

Also read: Instructor who trained first batch of IAF female pilots slams Gunjan Saxena biopic: No one had to run to their room to change

Not just that, the actor has now provided accommodation to 20,000 migrated workers who have also been provided jobs in garment units in Noida. Tweeting about it, he wrote: I am delighted to now offer accommodation for 20,000 migrated workers who have also been provided jobs in garment units in #Noida through @PravasiRojgar. With the support of #NAEC President Shri Lalit Thukral, we will work round the clock for this noble cause Smiling face with halo @lalit_thukral.

I am delighted to now offer accommodation for 20,000 migrated workers who have also been provided jobs in garment units in #Noida through @PravasiRojgar. With the support of #NAEC President Shri Lalit Thukral, we will work round the clock for this noble cause  @lalit_thukral pic.twitter.com/XejomrrPaL  sonu sood (@SonuSood) August 24, 2020

Since the start of the pandemic-related lockdowns, Sonu has sent home hundreds of stranded migrant workers and students overseas to their home, arranging buses, train tickets and, in some cases, flights.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

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Seoul, Aug 24 : Six more American soldiers stationed in South Korea have tested positive for Covid-19 amid the recent surge in locally transmitted cases in the country, the US Forces Korea (USFK) said on Monday.

It said in a statement that the six USFK service members were infected after arriving in South Korea between August 10-21, reports Xinhua news agency.

Four service members arrived at the Osan Air Base aboard US government-chartered flights from on August 10 and 19.

Osan Air Base is located in Pyeongtaek, 70 km south of Seoul.

Two service members arrived at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, on commercial flights on August 12 and 21.

The confirmed patients have been transferred to designated isolation facilities at Camp Humphreys and the Osan Air Base, both in Pyeongtaek.

The total number of infections among the USFK-affiliated personnel rose to 166.

"Despite the recent confirmed cases, USFK remains at a high level of readiness with less than 1 per cent of its active duty service members currently confirmed positive with Covid-19," the USFK said.

On Monday, South Korea reported 266 new cases, raising the total number to 17,665.

The daily caseload fell below 300 for four days, but it grew in triple digits for 11 straight days owing to infections in Seoul and its surrounding Gyeonggi province linked to church services and a massive rally in mid-August.
DETROIT  Police in Detroit arrested 42 people early Sunday in their first clash with protesters since the July 10 shooting of a man on the city's west side.

"Detroit Will Breathe" organizer Tristan Taylor said police in riot gear attacked protesters between 12:15 and 12:30 a.m. local time Sunday after marchers blocked a road in the heart of downtown to vehicular traffic.

Taylor said the gathering was peaceful  even festive  at the end of a night of speakers and marching through downtown. Sometime after midnight, police in riot gear moved in, firing tear gas and making mass arrests.

Protesters have been assembling and marching through Detroit since shortly after George Floyd died on May 25 after a Minneapolis police officer kept his knee on Floyd's neck. "Detroit Will Breathe" has lead marches for more than 80 days.

Taylor said Saturday night's program began with some speeches and presentations outside the McNamara federal building. He said about 400 protesters marched throughout downtown before the remaining 100 or so decided to "occupy" Woodward Avenue. Taylor said the gathering was peaceful, with music played by a deejay.

He said police in riot gear appeared south of the gathering and marched north up Woodward.

"As they got close to us they started throwing tear gas at us," Taylor said. "Then there was a flash bomb  Then they went in with riot shields and batons."

A photographer posted a photo on Instagram of three police subduing a protester on the ground while a fourth officer sprayed something at the protester's head. Videos taken by protesters and others, including a Detroit Free Press photographer, show tear gas deployed during the event.

An officer is seen spraying a substance toward a person being detained by police officers during a protest in downtown Detroit on August, 23, 2020.

Police said Sunday that they arrested 42 people for misdemeanor and felony offenses. Of those arrested, 18 are residents of the city and the remaining 24 came from outside of Detroit, including one from California, police said.

Story continues

Detroit Police Sgt. Nicole Kirkwood said protesters were given many warnings for over an hour to disperse as they had shut down lanes of traffic and were not marching. Kirkwood said they shut down the street and were in violation of city ordinances in doing so but the protesters refused to disassemble.

"Detroit Will Breathe" recently began calling for the removal of federal agents who were sent to Detroit to help combat the rash of gun violence that has plagued the city this summer.

Taylor, who said he was among those arrested, said he did not believe federal agents were among those who advanced on protesters assembled on Woodward Avenue.

Kirkwood said a member of the media sent a video from the night showing an alleged excessive use of force, which has been handed over to the DPD's Internal Professional Standards Department.

It is unclear how many officers are being investigated or which video it is.

Follow reporters M.L. Elrick (@elrick) and Meredith Spelbring (@mere0415) on Twitter.

Returning from overseas or out of state? The CDC removes its 14-day quarantine recommendation

Who will speak at the RNC?: What we know about the newly released lineup

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit protest: Police arrest 42 after protesters, authorities clash
(Photographer: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg)

The Qantas Airways boss is warning of another economic crisis if state borders don't open again soon.

Last week it was revealed the coronavirus is crippling the airline, ripping $2 billion dollars off its bottom line, and that's only a few months of dealing with the impact of COVID-19.

The pain is being felt by everyone.

Roughly 4,000 Qantas workers will be shown the door by the end of next month, while thousands of travellers who desperately want to see friends and relatives living abroad have a long wait to reach them.

For the lucky few who do, itll cost and arm and a leg  both in terms of hip-pocket expenses, and lost time in travel.

Lets take a closer look at the cost of travel and lost travel in 2020 and beyond.

National economic pain

Coronavirus took out Qantas' international business and cut local travel by 80 per cent.

To put it bluntly, Qantas Airways is haemorrhaging cash, and there really is only one way to stop the bleeding.

CEO Alan Joyce says interstate borders need to re-open, especially between New South Wales and Queensland.

He argues the decision to keep the borders closed isnt based on medical or scientific evidence but is motivated by other factors.

In any case, given how vital Queensland tourism is for Qantas Airways, Mr Joyce warns many more jobs will be lost (both at Qantas and elsewhere in the economy) the longer borders stay closed.

My Joyce is actually warning of another economic cliff. Whether thats well founded or not, who knows, but it speaks to the broader issue of how long the economy can survive standing on one leg  as it were.

He wants what he calls a "national framework" in place to get Australia's domestic tourism moving again.

International travel pain

If youre one of the thousands of Australians itching to travel overseas, Qantas says youll need to wait for a vaccine.

Story continues

Itll be a staggered start, Mr Joyce says, but Qantas will consider bubbles, as he calls it, with countries like New Zealand, and eventually the United States.

However, even with a vaccine, Mr Joyce says travellers will need to wait many months before travelling to the United States.

Of course jet-setters can still attempt overseas trips using other airlines.

Air New Zealand, Emirates, Malaysia Airlines, United and Singapore Airlines all have flights out of major Australian ports.

But not, at this stage, Virgin Australia.

Bond holders are still wrangling with private equity firm Bain Capital as to what to do with the airline.

RMIT management expert Warren Staples believes the carrier will only have very limited capacity once international border re-open.

The bottom line: coronavirus has crippled many companies and airlines have been among the hardest hit. The result post-COVID-19 will, I fear, be limited travel options, higher ticket prices and great inconvenience.

That too will have spill-over affects into the broader economy.

Hip pocket pain

While coronavirus remains and on-going threat, there are additional costs the traveller must wear.

The most obvious expense is hotel quarantine. If an exemption to travel is issued to an individual by Australian Border Force, the returning traveller needs to quarantine.

The New South Wales Government, for example, states that travellers will be charged $3,000 for one adult. Children under 3: no additional cost.

Theres also the cost of being stuck overseas. Despite 4,000 travellers returning to Australians shores per week, thats right, per week, tens of thousands of Australians cant find a flight home.

Without employment, this is a great way to burn through cash. I know, I spent several weeks in London before commencing as a producer with Channel 4 news. It came at a huge financial cost.

The cost of COVID

The true cost of coronavirus is only just starting to emerge.

Yes, theres a big hit to GDP, but its often hard to conceptualise what this means or looks like.

Through the travel and tourism industry we can see quite clearly it means job losses, broken dreams, extraordinary inconvenience and disruption, and endless extra expenses.

Alan Joyce has the Qantas Airways company to protect, but his fears for the economy raise an interesting question: what are the longer-term effects of restricting movement when theres no clear forward guidance for businesses from policy makers.

Businesses, and financial markets for that matter, hate uncertainty. So long as they can plan for whats ahead, I suspect many of their anxieties may go away.

There are costs to COVID-19, but with good policy, they dont always need to be overwhelming. The fear though is that they will be.

@DaveTaylorNews

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DUBLIN, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Operating Room Integration Market By Component, By Application, By End Use, By Devices, By Region, Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2020 - 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Global Operating Room Integration Market size is expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2026, rising at a market growth of 10.6% CAGR during the forecast period.



The market is dominated by a wide number of companies operating in this sector. Key players are focused on introducing new strategies, such as regional expansion, mergers, and acquisitions, expanding their product portfolio by technology developments, alliances and distribution deals to increase their sales share and to mark their position in the operating room integration industry.



The major strategies followed by the market participants are Partnerships and Product Launches. Based on the Analysis presented in the Cardinal matrix, Canon, Inc., Stryker Corporation, and Steris PLC are the forerunners in the Operating Room Integration Market. Companies such as Olympus Corporation, Barco NV, Getinge AB, Dragerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, Skytron, LLC, Brainlab AG, Karl Storz SE & Co. KG are some of the key innovators in the market.



The market research report covers the analysis of key stake holders of the market. Key companies profiled in the report include Stryker Corporation, Dragerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, Steris PLC, Olympus Corporation, Canon, Inc., Barco NV, Getinge AB, Brainlab AG, Skytron, LLC, and Karl Storz SE & Co. KG.



Recent Strategies Deployed



Partnerships, Collaborations, and Agreements



Apr-2019: Barco collaborated with Caresyntax, the leader in vendor-neutral software solutions for surgical automation, analytics, and AI. The collaboration strengthened the value proposition of both parties and accelerated the next level developments for the Nexxis digital platform.



Apr-2019: Steris signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense. Under this agreement, Steris aimed to supply the agency with integrated operating room components, accessories, and services.



Apr-2019: Karl Storz came into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense. Following this agreement, the former company has been supplying the agency with integrated operating room components, accessories, and services.



Acquisitions and Mergers



Sep-2019: Stryker signed an agreement to acquire point-of-care imaging company Mobius Imaging and sister firm GYS Tech, doing business as Cardan Robotics. The acquisition is expected to add expertise in advanced imaging and robotics, as well as a robust product pipeline and is expected to allow the spine division to provide more complete procedural solutions, including sales, service, and support.



Product Launches and Product Expansions



Feb-2020: Barco introduced Barco Insights, a new cloud-based internet of things solution for enhanced projector management. The connectivity platform enabled and streamlined remote monitoring and serviceability. Barco Insights includes live dashboards where operators can monitor real-time information on the projector's operating and environmental conditions, enabling them to discover and troubleshoot issues more easily.



Jan-2020: Barco India released its next-generation wireless conferencing solution, the ClickShare Conference. This solution is based on the concept of BYOM (Bring Your Own Meeting). Whether used in huddles spaces, meeting rooms or boardrooms, ClickShare Conference works seamlessly with the videoconferencing software, the camera brand, the laptop, and makes remote meetings.



Apr-2019: Getinge unveiled the new mobile operating room (OR) table, the Maquet Lyra. The table offers the stability and functionality needed for almost all surgical disciplines. This table has improved functionality and increased cost-effectiveness in the OR.



Mar-2019: Stryker launched four visualization tools for surgical arthroscopy to improve efficiency and patient outcomes. These tools are HipCheck, HipMap, the 1688 Advanced Imaging Modalities (AIM) 4K Visualization Platform, and the Connected OR Hub.



Jan-2019: Olympus introduced nCare, an easy-to-use, reliable, and secure networked medical recorder; and VaultStream, a cutting-edge medical content management solution within the hospital network. The nCare medical recorder and the VaultStream medical content management system support efficient clinical workflows and safeguard recorded images and videos while providing flexibility in various healthcare environments.



Key Topics Covered



Chapter 1. Market Scope & Methodology

1.1 Market Definition

1.2 Objectives

1.3 Market Scope

1.4 Segmentation

1.4.1 Global Operating Room Integration Market, by Component

1.4.2 Global Operating Room Integration Market, by Application

1.4.1 Global Operating Room Integration Market, by End Use

1.4.2 Global Operating Room Integration Market, by Devices

1.4.3 Global Operating Room Integration Market, by Geography

1.5 Methodology for the Research



Chapter 2. Market Overview

2.1 Introduction

2.1.1 Overview

2.1.2 Market Composition and Scenario

2.2 Key Factors Impacting the Market

2.2.1 Market Drivers

2.2.2 Market Restraints



Chapter 3. Competition Analysis - Global

3.1 Cardinal Matrix

3.2 Recent Industry Wide Strategic Developments

3.2.1 Partnerships, Collaborations and Agreements

3.2.2 Product Launches and Product Expansions

3.2.3 Geographical Expansions

3.2.4 Business Unit Expansions

3.2.5 Mergers & Acquisitions

3.3 Top Winning Strategies

3.3.1 Key Leading Strategies: Percentage Distribution (2016-2020)

3.3.2 Key Strategic Move: (Partnerships, Collaborations, and Agreements: 2016, Dec - 2019, Apr) Leading Players



Chapter 4. Global Operating Room Integration Market by Component

4.1 Global Software Market by Region

4.2 Global Services Market by Region



Chapter 5. Global Operating Room Integration Market by Application

5.1 Global General Surgery Market by Region

5.2 Global Orthopedic Surgery Market by Region

5.3 Global Neurosurgery Market by Region

5.4 Global Other Application Market by Region



Chapter 6. Global Operating Room Integration Market by End Use

6.1 Global Ambulatory Surgical Centers (ASCs) Operating Room Integration Market by Region

6.2 Global Hospitals Operating Room Integration Market by Region



Chapter 7. Global Operating Room Integration Market by Devices

7.1 Global Display Systems Operating Room Integration Market by Region

7.2 Global Documentation Management Systems Market by Region

7.3 Global Other Devices Market by Region



Chapter 8. Global Operating Room Integration Market by Region

8.1 North America Operating Room Integration Market

8.2 Europe Operating Room Integration Market

8.3 Asia-Pacific Operating Room Integration Market

8.4 LAMEA Operating Room Integration Market



Chapter 9. Company Profiles

9.1 Stryker Corporation

9.2 Draegerwerk AG & Co. KGaA

9.3 Steris PLC

9.4 Olympus Corporation

9.5 Canon, Inc.

9.6 Barco N.V.

9.7 Getinge AB

9.8 Brainlab AG

9.9 Skytron, LLC

9.10 Karl Storz SE & Co. KG



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/jakunt

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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But mining giant stops short of removing executives after destruction of caves considered sacred by Indigenous people.

Rio Tinto says it will cut the short-term bonuses of some senior executives but stopped short of a leadership overhaul following review of the companys destruction of two ancient caves in Australia.

Chief Executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques and two other leaders will take financial penalties after the worlds biggest iron ore miner legally destroyed two historically significant sacred caves in the state of Western Australia  against the wishes of their Aboriginal traditional owners  as part of a mine expansion.

Rio said it would reduce the short-term bonuses of Jacques, Chief Executive of Iron Ore Chris Salisbury, and Group Executive, Corporate Relations Simone Niven in 2020 by about $3.7m in total.

Jacquess long-term incentive plan award would also be reduced by about 1 million pounds ($1.3m). He was paid 5.8 million pounds ($7.6m) last year.

The Rio Tinto board has come to an informed judgment that the sanctions that have been applied to senior executives are appropriate, Michael LEstrange, who led the review, told the Reuters news agency.

Rio Tinto blew up the caves in Juukan Gorge, about 1,075km (667 miles) north of Perth, in May as part of an expansion programme in the Pilbara iron ore region, provoking an outcry and calls for reform of heritage protection laws.

Explosives destroyed two ancient rock shelters, where artefacts discovered included 4,000-year-old plaited human hair with genetic links to the present-day traditional owners, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.

Irreplaceable cultural heritage

The destruction sparked public outrage and an Australian government inquiry that senior Rio leadership faced early this month. The penalties were far short of the management changes pushed for by some investor groups who have criticised Rios leadership for a lack of accountability.

Irreplaceable cultural heritage has been lost and the only consequence for any of the senior leadership at Rio is the loss of a bonus  not even their job, said shareholder advocacy group the Australasian Corporate Centre for Responsibility.

Rios board could have acted decisively. This soft touch, public relations-oriented review calls into question the suitability of every board member, especially the Chair Simon Thompson and the head of the review Michael LEstrange.

LEstrange said he was confident Rios board had made the correct decision that was in line with community expectations, even as investor pressure on boards for greater accountability grows. In a separate corporate scandal, Australian wealth manager AMP Ltd saw a leadership shake-up on Monday after investors were unhappy with board decisions around accountability over allegations of inappropriate conduct.

The board has thought very, very deeply on this Now we will consult with investors and others, LEstrange said.

Rio said: The review found no single root cause or error that directly resulted in the destruction of the rock shelters. It was the result of a series of decisions, actions and omissions over an extended period of time.

The Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura did not comment. They have previously said they were too distressed to comment.

Rio Tinto is reviewing the organisational structure of its communities function that will report to Mark Davies, who joined the executive committee in charge of safety and technical projects in July. It had previously reported to corporate affairs.

The miner also said it was reviewing the terms of its existing 2011 agreement with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura, in relation to consent to reflect evolving practice.

Rio did not tell the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura about three alternative mining plans, Jacques told the government inquiry, despite saying it had won fully informed consent for blasting.
Jerry Falwell Jr. said Monday evening that he had not resigned as the president of Liberty University, rebuffing news reports in which school officials said he stepped down amid a brewing sex scandal.

I have not resigned, Falwell told POLITICO. I will be on indefinite leave.

The comments by Falwell, a close friend and early supporter of President Donald Trump, came hours after he was accused of routinely watching his wife have sex with a pool boy with whom the Falwells later partnered for business.

School officials later told multiple news outlets that they would be negotiating with Falwell through Monday evening.

At the center of the controversy is a Reuters story in which a former business associate, Giancarlo Granda, said hed had a years-long affair with Falwells wife Becky.

On Sunday, ahead of the Reuters story, Falwell released a separate statement to the Washington Examiner in which he said the affair occurred, but Granda used it to attempt to extort the Falwell family.

Granda, who said he was 20 when he first met the Falwells, first emerged in the national spotlight two years ago, when Buzzfeed News reported his involvement in a south Florida hostel in which the Falwells had also invested.

In the Reuters story published on Monday, he alleged that he had sex with Falwells wife numerous times while Jerry Falwell watched from the corner of the room. Falwell denied that allegation when asked about it by Reuters.

Falwell, son of the famed evangelist of the same name, had been at the helm of Liberty University since his fathers death in 2007. Liberty in Lynchburg, Va., is the nations largest Christian school.

Since taking over, Falwell, a former real estate developer with no ministerial training, helped transform the college and its once-beleaguered finances.

He also was a point of controversy for, among other things, his endorsement of then-candidate Trump, comments about Muslims, and for increasingly lashing out at critics online.

Then, earlier this month, Falwell posted, then deleted, a photo in which he and a young, pregnant woman posed with their pants undone and stomachs showing while on a yacht. That and other images that Falwell posted on his public Instagram were eventually shared by a Houston Chronicle reporter on Twitter. Falwell later apologized to the woman without addressing the myriad other issues critics took with the photo.

Days later, he took an indefinite leave of absence from his position at Liberty.

The reports of his resignation were wapplauded by many who said hed become a distraction at the strict, conservative college. Others questioned why Falwell was able to keep his job despite the many scandals that preceded the Reuters report.

Good, Christian author Jemar Tisby wrote on Twitter in response to the news. From all appearances this is a long overdue separation.

Tisby and others also urged people to support Liberty, its faculty and students, some of whom had just begun classes on Monday.

Malachi OBrien, a Liberty graduate who works at the school-affiliated Falkirk Center, said Falwells reported resignation caused him deep, deep sorrow.

Not that he resigned, but for the pain, shame, hurt, sorrow his family and friends are facing, he told the Chronicle. They need our love and prayers. In moments like these we must audit our hearts.

robert.downen@chron.com
If Becca Graves could press through the less pleasant parts of her junior year schedule at her small-town Massachusetts high school  the peers whose personalities perturbed her, the classes she didnt care for  she could make it to Ms. Es art class.

There she could relax, be herself, express her emotions without fear of judgment. Her anxieties eased as she focused on drawing assignments or molded clay figures with her fingers.

I want to say its almost like a new coping skill, said Graves, 17. The art room at our school is a safe space.

She ate lunch there daily rather than in the crowded cafeteria, as did a dozen or so other Murdock High School students. Despite their diverse lifestyles and political views, Graves said, one thing united them: their love for Nicole Elias: Ms. E.

When Graves starts her senior year in September, escaping to art class may no longer be an option.

Elias, along with all eight other teachers of specials, or elective classes  art, music and physical education  at Winchendon Public Schools, received notice that her contract would not be renewed because of budget constraints.

The teacher layoffs come as cash-strapped school districts nationwide must implement costly safety measures to prevent COVID-19s spread and to equip students with the devices remote learning requires in the meantime.

Winchendon wasn't the only Massachusetts school district faced with making controversial budget cuts. In June, dozens of people gathered on the common and around Leominster city hall to rally in support of that school system and the more than 100 staff members who had received unemployment notices.

Any school administrators pinning their hopes to another congressional relief bill have been disappointed so far. While House Democrats signed off in May on a $3 trillion bill that included more than $100 billion for schools, the Senate has resisted calls for additional aid to state and local governments.

Winchendon already was tasked with trimming $600,000 from its 2021 fiscal year budget before COVID-19 closed schools in March, according to district superintendent Joan Landers. Adding to the cost were expenditures in anticipation of students return: replacing carpeted floors with tile, testing air conditioning systems, storing excess furniture to allow for social distancing and supplying bus drivers with personal protective equipment.

Story continues

In a town of 10,000 with five public schools, teacher salaries make up much of the budget. Each cut is close to the bone.

'Going to see massive cuts': Without more coronavirus relief, schools slash budgets, prep layoffs

Everything in our budget is essential, Landers said. Thats the hardest part.

As pressure builds on school districts for more cuts, experts fear the move to single out specials programs portends a nationwide trend that may disrupt the whole child approach to education, hinder academic growth and disproportionately hurt low-income families.

School districts struggling to navigate shrinking budgets may ask core subject teachers to incorporate art, music and physical education into their lesson plans to save on salaries, said Kristi Wilson, president of the American Association of School Administrators  an idea she opposes.

We have a real opportunity to return back to what is good about education and the whole child, Wilson said. But were not going to do that if we push to cut the arts, and I fear that's coming.

Kristi Wilson is the American Association of School Administrators president and superintendent of Arizonas Buckeye Elementary School District.

Arts and the achievement gap

Specials teachers across the country fear it, too.

In an open letter to school administrators, National Art Education Association president Thom Knab requested that they keep art programs a priority even amid difficult budget decisions.

Widespread concern among art teachers that their jobs are in jeopardy prompted the plea, according to Mario Rossero, the associations executive director.

Yet those same teachers, who often provide instruction to a schools entire student body, have unique insight into students, their families and the community, he said. As out-of-the-box thinkers by nature, they should be sought out and provided a seat at the decision-making table.

This is the time to reinvest and double down on the arts, said Rossero, who spent nearly 10 years teaching visual art in Pittsburgh and Chicago before moving on to administrative roles. We are creative problem-solvers. We have limited resources, limited time and we try to pull off miracles. Were pretty good at figuring out ways around challenges and roadblocks.

Dozens of people gathered on the common and around city hall in June for a rally in support of the Leominster, Massachusetts, school system and the more than 100 staff members who had received unemployment notices.

Though art and music are designated specials rather than essentials, they are particularly vital to the overall success of students whose only access to the subjects is through public schools, said Andrew Spar, Florida Education Association vice president and a former elementary school music teacher.

When lawmakers say they have to address the achievement gap, the way to address it is to make sure those students have access to arts, P.E. and elective programs that engage them and pull them in in ways they otherwise wouldn't get, Spar said.

During his nine years teaching in one of the poorest communities in Daytona Beach, Florida, he saw students who participated in the schools performing orchestra achieve greater test score growth than those who didnt.

Students who excel in music also tend to do a lot better in problem-solving, visioning and understanding the big picture and how things fit together, Spar said. For kids that come from poverty to be able to say I have an advantage that someone else doesn't have  that's pretty rare.

The arts, and the inclusivity they encourage, play an important role in the whole child approach to education, which is centered on ensuring that each student  regardless of race, socioeconomic standing or learning style  is healthy, safe, engaged, supported and challenged.

Mario Rossero is the executive director of the National Art Education Association.

Think about every student  maybe the kids who are quiet and creative and need to express themselves, Rossero said. What are they going to do without an art space? It might be the reason theyre really engaging each day.

The way that Graves described Elias art room as a safe space is not uncommon, he said. Its often a lifeline for students.

Its their only way out

Elias describes Winchendon as a tiny town with inner-city problems. Many of her Murdock High students are impoverished. Some spend their spare time hunting and fishing  theres not much else to do  and they bring Elias gifts of venison and turkey.

Their parents cant afford music lessons or museum trips. Few have traveled even as far as Worcester, the nearest sizable city, just an hour south. Some of her students have lost parents to suicide, drug overdose or disease. Some live with relatives or in foster homes.

Arts teacher Nicole Elias, known to her students at Murdock High School in Massachusetts as Ms. E., fears for teens' well-being if arts programs are cut back.

It seems there are a lot of tragic cases, Elias said, a sense thats amplified in a close-knit community.

She has worked to cultivate her classrooms soothing atmosphere. She understands the turmoil her students feel and the power of art to alleviate it.

If the district doesnt renew her contract, she worries more for the students than herself.

It's a detriment to them to have not just visual arts cut but music, theater, P.E. For some of these kids, it's their only way out, she said. It really helps to save lives.

Landers, the district superintendent, said she is a very strong advocate for the arts and is hopeful that at least some specials teachers contracts can be renewed in the coming weeks. The district originally cut 38 teaching positions, but many of the teachers in other subject areas have been invited back.

I have to believe that something positive is going to happen to enable us to give our students the best education they deserve, Landers said.

The art room at our school is a safe space, says Becca Graves, 17, a student at Murdock High School.

For Graves, losing her safe haven is one more stressor in a senior year that already will be filled with so many uncertainties. When she heard Elias had lost her job, Graves said she emailed district officials to ask how she could help. I want to know what I can do to make sure Ms. E stays with us, she recalled writing.

Graves was motivated to take action, she said, because Ms. Es art class helped her lay down a burden shed carried since childhood when her parents separated. Her father left home, and Graves shouldered the blame.

I tried to do something about it to make myself better so maybe he would come back, Graves said. Ms. E helped change her mindset.

Theres nothing I could have done, and it took a lot to realize that, Graves said. Art is a reminder to me that you don't have to be perfect.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID back to school: Will virtual learning mean no art, music class?
Press Release

August 24, 2020 Gatchalian highlights provisions on education sector in 'Bayanihan 2' Senator Win Gatchalian lauded the provisions in the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act (Bayanihan 2) that will help schools foster continuity of learning through loans and other subsidies while ensuring job security of teachers and other school personnel amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the ratified bicameral conference committee report on the Bayanihan 2, academic institutions will have increased access to funds for the purchase of distance learning tools. For private institutions, however, availing these loans or grants have these conditions: retention of personnel and no retrenchment of employees for at least nine months upon receipt of aid. Gatchalian cited Section 4 (iii) of Bayanihan 2 which calls for the provision of loan assistance, subsidies, discounts or grants to schools, universities and colleges, and technical vocational institutions for the purchase of information and communications technology (ICT) devices and equipment to be used under alternative delivery modes of teaching and learning, including computers, laptops, and tablets. Aside from schools, teachers and students can also apply for these loans and other forms of financial assistance. These loans and aid will be made available through the Department of Education (DepEd), the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) in partnership with government financial institutions (GFIs). The loans, however, should have terms that are more reasonable than those prevailing in the market. Gatchalian recalled that a survey on micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) presented in May by the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) and the Department of Finance (DOF) showed that the education sector had the second highest number of job losses at 130,514 when the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) was implemented in areas including the National Capital Region (NCR). The lawmaker also added that for many schools, especially the smaller ones with limited resources and technical expertise, the cost of transitioning to distance learning is a financial burden. At a Senate panel hearing held earlier this month, Gatchalian emphasized the need to help more than 1,000 small private universities with limited financial capacities. He pointed out that if these small private universities are not able to install remote learning systems, learning for the 525,000 students enrolled in these institutions will be hampered. Sa ilalim ng Bayanihan 2, hindi lamang natin matutulungan ang ating mga paaralang maipagpatuloy ang edukasyon sa pamamagitan ng distance learning. Mabibigyan din natin ng proteksyon ang mga trabaho ng ating mga guro at kawani sa panahon na ang ating ekonomiya ay humaharap sa isang matinding krisis na dulot ng COVID-19," said Gatchalian, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Basic Education, Arts and Culture. Gatchalian concluded that in the long run, helping schools invest in their ICT infrastructure would accelerate modernization in the education sector, which in turn would equip learners with competencies required of the 21st century and Industry 4.0.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The wake for Cleveland fire Lt. Rich Petras will take place from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 p.m. Aug. 24 at Chambers Funeral Home, 4420 Rocky River Drive in Clevelands West Park neighborhood.

A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Aug. 25 at Our Lady of Angels Church, 3644 Rocky River Drive, West Park.

Petras, 51 and a longtime West Park resident, died Aug. 15 from complications of COVID-19.

Survivors include his wife, Jill; twin daughters Amber and Ashley; mother, Arline; and brothers Ron and Michael. He was predeceased by his father, Stephen.

Petras, an honored firefighter, was promoted to lieutenant in July. He served 26 years as a Cleveland firefighter, many of them in the citys Glenville neighborhood. Most recently, he was assigned to the Fire Training Academy.

Volunteers spent the afternoon on Aug. 23 sprucing up the grounds around the West Park Police and Firefighters Memorial on Rocky River Drive. They also planned to decorate the route for the funeral procession along Rocky River Drive by wrapping utility poles in red and attaching American flags in Petras honor.

The funeral procession will pass by the memorial at Rocky River Drive and McKinley Avenue before proceeding to the church. After Mass, the procession will travel south on Rocky River Drive to Brookpark Road. Burial will be at Holy Cross Cemetery in Brook Park.

Those planning to pay their respects are reminded that face masks are required when social distancing cannot be observed and when inside the funeral home and church. Capacity will be limited at the funeral home, so it is likely that people will need to wait outside. There also is limited capacity in the church because of restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Memorial contributions are suggested to the Cleveland Animal Protective League, 1729 Wiley Ave., Cleveland, 44113.

Volunteers spruced up the memorial and surrounding grounds on Aug. 23 in preparation for the funeral of Cleveland Fire Lt. Rich Petras. (Carol Kovach, special to cleveland.com)

Helping hand: North Olmsteds Oxcart Pantry normally accepts food to help feed the needy in the community. However, during the pandemic, it is unable to accept food items.

Instead, residents are invited to donate household, cleaning and personal products. No-contact donations are available. Items can be left in bins or on tables outside the pantry from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. The pantry is at 26272 Butternut Ridge Road, North Olmsted.

Among the items needed are liquid laundry soap, hand soap (pump or bar), hand sanitizer, disinfecting spray or wipes, tissues, toothpaste, deodorant, household multipurpose cleaner, shower soap (bar or liquid), paper towels (only single or double roll packages) and shampoo.

Businesses or organizations interested in arranging for a collection date and delivery can call 440-716-4165 to coordinate the details.

New addition: Congratulations to Matt and Alyse Bixenstine of Lakewood, who welcomed their second child, daughter Lucie Anita, on Aug. 18. She joins older brother Charlie. Matt Bixenstine is known around town as the marketing and development director for LakewoodAlive.

Community meals: A free community meal-to-go will be available from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Aug. 30 at West Park United Church of Christ, 3909 Rocky River Drive, West Park. Those interested in picking up a meal should meet church volunteers -- who will be waring face masks -- at the double doors in back of the church.

Also, Clague Road United Church of Christ and Westlake Church of the Redeemer will offer a free grab-n-go meal from 4:30 p.m. until supplies run out Aug. 29 at Clague Road UCC, 3650 Clague Road, Westlake. Those arriving for a meal should drive to the rear of the church. Volunteers wearing face masks and gloves will bring meals to your car.

At the library: The North Olmsted Branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library is continuing its policy of not offering in-person programming if proper social distancing cannot be assured. Many programs were transitioned to online events. More details are available at cuyahogalibrary.org.

All Cuyahoga County Public Library branches -- including Fairview Park and North Olmsted -- are now open to the public from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Drive-thru and curbside service is also available.

The North Olmsted Library is among the county library branches collaborating with WKYC and PCs for People through Aug. 31 to accept donations of used desktop and laptop computers during regular hours. Curbside donations will be accepted from 4 to 7 p.m. Aug. 31.

PCs for People will erase all data, refurbish the computers and distribute them to students in need throughout the county.

Senior meals: The Fairview Park Senior Life Office is delivering frozen meals, fruit, bread and milk every Wednesday to Fairview Park seniors in need ages 60 and older.

Seniors interested in receiving a meal should call the Fairview Park Senior Center at 440-356-4437 to register or for more information.

The program is made possible by the Older Americans Act through a grant from the Ohio Department on Aging. It is administered by the Western Reserve Area Agency on Aging and furnished by the Cleveland Food Bank.

Free COVID-19 tests: Drive-thru and walk-up COVID-19 testing will be offered at the Westshore Campus of Cuyahoga Community College during fall semester through a partnership with Care Alliance Health Center.

Testing will take place on three Thursdays -- Sept. 17, Oct. 15 and Nov. 12 -- for Tri-C students, faculty and staff, as well as community residents. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. The program offers testing to individuals regardless of their symptom status, insurance status or ability to pay. There is no charge for the test.

No appointment is necessary, but those planning to be tested are asked to call 216-317-1250 to get pre-screened in order to expedite the process. Testing will be done on a first-come, first-served basis.

Westshore Campus is located at 31001 Clemens Road, Westlake.

Information, please: Readers are invited to share information about themselves, their families and friends, organizations, church events, etc. in Fairview Park, Lakewood, North Olmsted and West Park for the A Place in the Sun column, which I write on a freelance basis. Awards, honors, milestone birthdays or anniversaries and other items are welcome. Submit information at least 10 days before the requested publication date to carolkovach@hotmail.com.

Read more from the Sun Post Herald.
Algeria has set November 1 as the date for a referendum on a new constitution aimed at boosting democracy and giving parliament a greater role after months-long protests demanding reforms.

After consultations with the parties concerned, it was decided to set the date of 1 November 2020 for the holding of the referendum on the draft revision of the Constitution, the office of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said on Monday.

The date also marks the anniversary of the start of Algerias 1954-62 war for independence from France.

The new constitution would give the prime minister and parliament more powers to govern the North African country of 45 million people, a draft released earlier this year showed.

The government has said the draft, which kept presidential terms limited to two mandates, would be submitted to parliament for debate and approval before a referendum.

Balance of powers

Elected last December, President Tebboune has repeatedly pledged to introduce political and economic reforms and to meet demands raised in demonstrations that toppled veteran president Abdelaziz Bouteflika in April last year.

Tebboune, formerly a prime minister under Bouteflika, has since taking office sought a constitutional referendum, ostensibly as an answer to the popular protest movement.





He has said a new constitution would reduce the authority of the president and guarantee the separation and balance of powers.

The referendum date was announced after Tebbounes meeting with the head of the election authority Mohamed Chorfi earlier on Monday, the presidency said in a statement.

The countrys constitution has been amended several times since independence from France. During the 20-year Bouteflika era, it had been tailored for the deposed leaders requirements.

Mass protests broke out in February last year to reject Bouteflikas plan to seek a fifth term after 20 years in power, and demand the departure of the old guard as well as the prosecution of people accused of corruption.

Since then, several senior officials  including two former prime ministers, several ministers and prominent businessmen  have been jailed over corruption charges.

The government banned mass demonstrations in March this year as part of measures to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Saltwater practically runs in the blood of fishermen in California. Commercial fishermen have been an important food producer in the state for centuries, supplying the freshest seafood to restaurants and consumers.

Its hard to disentangle seafood from the California restaurant culture  one comes to expect the freshest rockfish fillet alongside an outstanding glass of Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc.

Indeed, each year, fishermen offload millions of pounds of seafood at fishing ports along the California coast and transport to local, independent restaurants, like Robin.

The sushi restaurant, tucked into the heart of Hayes Valley in San Francisco, prides itself on serving fresh, local seafood to locals and tourists alike. In light of COVID-19, Robin is currently open for takeout only, limiting its ability to serve a full house of hungry diners.

Before restaurants shuttered due to COVID-19, nearly 70% of all seafood caught was consumed in restaurants and other food service establishments. But since March, weve seen many restaurants cash drawers sit at $0 and seafood sales decline by 80%. As restaurants across the Bay Area and the state struggle to reopen, we see these problems persist: With fewer customers, theres less demand for seafood, and restaurants and fishermen alike struggle.

This new reality for Californias commercial fishermen and independent restaurants was unthinkable back in February. But since COVID-19 began its rampant spread in the U.S., independent restaurants have lost more jobs than any other industry. In addition to the 11 million workers they directly employ, more than 5 million more workers are employed by associated industries up and down the supply chain including fishermen.

In light of these significant impacts to our operations, independent restaurants and fishermen have teamed up to ask Congress for direct aid. Congress is currently considering additional relief measures and we call on them to include critical funding for restaurants and fishermen.

Taking on additional debt, the solution currently proposed in the Senates HEALS Act, would not be helpful for Robin. Our business model is not structured for a rainy-day fund. Nearly all revenue that comes in goes back out the door to staff, seafood suppliers, rent, taxes and personal protective equipment.

The reality is restaurants dont need more short-term loans: They need grants that would help us stay afloat for the entirety of this crisis.

The bipartisan Restaurants Act, introduced in June by Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., would provide $120 billion in grants to independent restaurantsincluding the restaurants serving fresh tuna, crab, groundfish and salmon in San Francisco and throughout California. The legislation now has over 160 co-sponsors in the House and 25 co-sponsors in the Senate. A recent economic report by the consulting firm Compass Lexecon projected that such a fund would pay for itself more than twice over, pouring up to $271 billion back into the national economy and reducing unemployment by 2.4%.

Commercial fishermen and the seafood industry have asked for an additional $1.5 billion in direct fisheries assistance and $2 billion for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to purchase seafoodsimilar to how they provide relief to other food product industries. While Congress has provided some financial relief to fishermen, its become clear that additional assistance, through both direct fisheries assistance and USDA seafood purchases, is needed to ensure fishermen can weather this pandemic. Direct assistance through the fisheries assistance program will allow fishermen to pay their bills and boat mortgages, provide for their families, and support our coastal communities despite the significant drop in demand for seafood products. USDA seafood purchases will help get fishermen back to work and provide Americans with safe, sustainable and nutritious forms of protein through the USDA food assistance programs.

Fresh seafood draws tourists and Californians alike to restaurants throughout the state. As restaurants up and down the coast struggle to survive in the midst of the pandemic, iconic restaurants and local watering holes risk shuttering for good. Summer travel along the California coast will lose one of its key draws: fresh, sustainable seafood caught just offshore.

The connection couldnt be clearer: Without restaurants, many fishermen have nowhere to sell their catch. Without fishermen, many restaurants lose their main appeal. Were proud to harvest and serve the best-managed, most sustainable seafood in the world. By passing the Restaurants Act and providing additional financial assistance to the commercial fishing industry, Congress would make sure fresh salmon and groundfish, sushi, and Dungeness crab continue to be served to restaurant-goers, returning hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of jobs in the process.

Leigh Habegger is executive director of Seafood Harvesters of America; Adam Tortosa is owner of Robin in San Francisco.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

Rent and mortgage payments are still due, even with a record number of New Mexicans out of work, and as many as 110,000 New Mexico renters could be at risk of eviction.

With that in mind, the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions hosted an online webinar last week aimed at helping renters understand their rights.

Lt. Gov. Howie Morales, Mesilla Valley Community of Hope Executive Director Nicole Martinez and University of New Mexico School of Law professor Serge Martinez each spoke and answered questions from the online audience.

What we do see across the country is that were in a crisis, Morales said.

During the webinar, state Workforce Solutions Secretary Bill McCamley cited data from The Aspen Institute, an international think tank based in Washington, D.C., to show the scope of the problem. The data showed that, without a cushioning supplemental unemployment benefit that ended in July, 110,941 renters in New Mexico may be at risk of eviction before the year ends.

The now-lapsed benefit was part of a federal program that provided a $600 weekly supplement to state unemployment benefits.

McCamley also referred to a survey of unemployed New Mexicans commissioned by the department showing that 88% of respondents were concerned about meeting rent or mortgage requirements.

As soon as you know youre going to miss a (rent) check, the time to start having a conversation about rental assistance  is right away, McCamley said.

Although the New Mexico Supreme Court issued a pair of temporary rulings in March prohibiting renters from being evicted if they cant pay, Serge Martinez said renters arent automatically out of the woods. He said the order applies only to renters being evicted for not paying rent who can show the courts that they are unable to pay.

While additional federal assistance may be on its way, many New Mexicans may need to have tough conversations with their landlords in the meantime.

Serge Martinez encouraged renters facing eviction to talk to their landlords about their situation, and to consider proposing a payment plan if they dont feel they can meet the terms of the lease.

As soon as theres a situation where its clear that youll have trouble, the first thing you do  is just be open and transparent, he said.

He said landlords may issue a notice to tenants who havent paid, informing them they have three days to pay rent before an eviction process begins in earnest. If tenants can pay within that period, he said, landlords must legally accept that payment.

Serge Martinez emphasized that the only legal way for tenants to be evicted is by a court order, and he encouraged tenants to attend the hearings to defend their rights.

Dont just ignore it and hope it will go away, he said. It will not.

Meanwhile, Nicole Martinez highlighted regional, state and federal programs aimed at providing housing assistance. Long-running federal programs such as Community Development Block Grants and the Emergency Food and Shelter Program help address housing assistance in communities.

State funding through services such as the Rental Assistance Program is awarded to local organizations across New Mexico, which help with housing in their communities. The Governors Office said Thursday that it is dedicating $13.3 million in federal grant funding to emergency housing assistance for low- and moderate-income families. And the Albuquerque City Council set aside $300,000 of the citys federal relief money for eviction prevention assistance last week.

Nicole Martinez said different programs and agencies will have different eligibility requirements but encouraged tenants to have documents like their lease agreement, eviction notice and proof of income handy.

The full hourlong webinar is available online on NMDWS YouTube channel, at www.youtube.com/user/NMDWS/videos.
A pet dog may have saved his owner's life after attacking a home intruder as he allegedly tried to strangle her.

Susan Bandera, 60, was woken when her ex-housemate Peni Naiserelagi, 32, allegedly broke into her unit in North Parramatta in Sydney's west at about 4am on Sunday and attacked her in her bedroom.

Naiserelagi allegedly attempted to strangle Ms Bandera, before the woman's pit bull named Caesar ran into the room and mauled him.

Ms Bandera hid in the bathroom while Naiserelagi ran from her home after being attacked by the dog.

His trail of blood ran metres up the street.

Naiserelagi allegedly attempted to strangle Ms Bandera, before the woman's pet pit bull named Caesar (pictured) ran into the room and bit him several times

Susan Bandera (in wheelchair), 60, was woken up when her ex-housemate Peni Naiserelagi, 32, allegedly broke into her unit in North Parramatta, in Sydney's west, about 4am on Sunday

Ms Bandera's daughter praised Caesar's quick thinking.

'I'm really proud of him. He's such a good boy and I couldn't be more happy with how he reacted - and just being there for her,' she told 9News.

Officers arrested Naiserelagi at a home on nearby Victoria Road at Parramatta at about 10pm on Sunday.

He was taken to Parramatta Police Station and charged with break and enter and assault with intent to murder.

Naiserelagi's charges were mentioned briefly before Parramatta Local Court on Monday morning, but he did not appear in person or via video link.

He will next return to Parramatta Local Court on October 15.

Officers arrested Naiserelagi at a home on nearby Victoria Road at Parramatta at about 10pm on Sunday

in December 2008, Ms Bandera was shot twice by police responding to a dispute at a unit block in North Parramatta.

She is now confined to a mobility chair.

Ms Bandera was alleged to have ran at the cops while making threats, before they were forced to use capsicum spray.

She then allegedly lunged at officers with a fork, which police initially thought was a knife.

The grandmother, who was 48 at the time, suffered a shattered spine from the bullets fired by a junior female officer.

'It's changed my life. I want [the officer] to be charged just like everybody else and I don't think she should work for the police force any more. My kids nearly ended up with no mother,' Bandera told the SMH while recovering in 2009.

Then NSW Police Deputy Commissioner for Operations Denis Clifford said at the time he was satisfied the female officer who opened fire had 'acted appropriately'.
When Lauren Langbein became a doctoral student in cell biology at Thomas Jefferson University in 2014, she was used to being a stellar student  she had always excelled in classrooms and labs.

But by the end of 2016, her research project was falling apart, and Langbein, a native of Monmouth County, N.J., and a perfectionist, began comparing her failures with her peers successes. She struggled to sleep. Lost weight. Experienced near-constant anxiety, which soon became full-blown panic attacks.

The pressure started adding up and my mental health snowballed, said Langbein, 28. Before this, I took a mental health day here and there but didnt really get time off. I didnt want to disclose the issues I was dealing with because I didnt want people to think I didnt have drive.

Soon after, she began seeing a therapist, who diagnosed her with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) and panic disorder. She also began writing about her experience as someone who struggles with mental health in a blog she named Anxious in Academia.

I wanted to talk about the fact that this is really hard, Langbein said. Academia itself is not conducive to mental health. Lets not pretend its easy.

I did it, so you can do it

Although COVID-19 has caused mental health to deteriorate across all age groups in the United States, young people have felt the symptoms most keenly. Graduate students, who already experience rates of anxiety and depression six times greater than the general population, are coping with a shrinking job market and huge changes to their workplaces as a result of the pandemic, leading some to call for a systemic change in how mental health is addressed in academia.

 READ MORE: 75% of young adults report anxiety or depression, and suicide thoughts rise as coronavirus pandemic wears on, CDC reports

Even before the pandemic began, there was mounting evidence that mental health among graduate students was a problem, due to how hard it can be to maintain a work-life balance, imposter syndrome, harassment, and discrimination. The University of Pennsylvania has seen 14 student suicides over the last six years  five of them have been graduate students.

Last November, Nature surveyed more than 6,300 early-career researchers from around the world and found that 36% of participants had sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their Ph.D. studies. In 2018, a Harvard University study found that one in 10 doctoral students in economics programs thought about suicide over a two-week period. A Duke University study, also published in 2018, reported that half of biomedical doctoral students met the threshold for at least one clinical diagnosis of a mental health condition in the last year, but less than half of those students sought out professional help.

Eliminating the stigma surrounding mental health issues in academia was one of the reasons why Susanna Harris created PhD Balance, an online space where graduate students can share candidly about their struggles. Harris struggled with depression and anxiety while she was a doctoral student in microbiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and knew how isolating the experience could be.

Theres a big difference between the amount of community were given, compared to undergrads, said Harris, who graduated in May. Undergrads go through really intense periods of stress, but graduate students have that feeling all year round. And theres survivor bias from the people managing us  this idea of I did it, so you can do it. If we step back from that, its no surprise that people are falling apart.

Graduate students of color are at particular risk, said Tania Czarnecki, the executive director of counseling at Drexel Universitys Office of Counseling and Health Services. While they can be most affected by issues like imposter syndrome, where students fear theyll be outed as frauds, they are the least likely to ask for help.

Grad students are pulled in a lot of different directions, Czarnecki said. Sometimes other things going on in their lives are not taken into consideration, so they just have to perform at a really high level. When we think about our grad students of color, sometimes they feel responsible to represent a collective group and do even more, in the midst of feeling loneliness or isolation from not seeing other students or faculty that look like them.

Czarnecki said that after the counseling center transitioned to telehealth services in March, theres been a more concerted effort to make sure graduate students know what resources are available.

Im wondering if this opens up a whole new range of possibilities, she said. Before, it was a challenge for many of them to make the time to go to the counseling center amidst having to be in lab or class.

There wasnt a lot of honesty or openness

When Karuna Meda lost her mother to cancer during her fourth year in a doctoral program in neuroscience at the University of California-San Francisco, she began blogging about her grief and depression. After she became more open about her own struggles, she said, other students began confiding in her.

It exposed me to how rampant poor mental health is in grad school, said Meda, now a science writer at Jefferson. Everyone was having a hard time, but we used euphemisms like third-year slump or Im feeling unmotivated. There wasnt a lot of honesty or openness. People were really afraid to say they were depressed.

Meda, who finished her Ph.D. in 2017, said that many graduate schools had a culture that struggling is a rite of passage. But thats changing, she said, thanks to grassroots movements taking place on Twitter and Instagram.

 READ MORE: How coronavirus affects young adults with chronic illnesses and rare diseases

Ive talked to an adviser at Jefferson whose approach was so different from what I had seen when I was in grad school, Meda said. For example, he said he tries not to jump straight to results when approaching his students and trainees  instead he asks about how theyre doing.

Finding an empathetic principal investigator (PI) was a priority when Hannah Loo, a 25-year-old Penn doctoral student studying neuroscience, applied to programs. She raised the issue of mental health at every interview she went to. After Loo arrived at Penn in fall 2019, she also began seeing a psychiatrist.

I heard so much about how grad school makes you sad and depressed and breaks your spirit, said Loo, who has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I was aware that my family history and experience made it more likely for me to experience these issues, and I wanted to give myself the best chance at success by going somewhere where I could feel supported.

Harris, the recent Chapel Hill Ph.D., pointed out that most professors mentoring graduate students have not been trained to be managers. If professors dont establish a work environment where students feel comfortable speaking up about mental health concerns, it can become toxic, she said.

Professors will say, I dont know what to do when my student is struggling, said Harris, who works in science communications. We should be teaching professors how to have these conversations so they know what to do in those situations.

Brandon Orzolek, a 23-year-old doctoral student in organic chemistry at Penn, agreed, saying that many students feel as if they cant be open with their advisers about their struggles. Orzolek, who just began his second year, said that although many faculty members say they care about mental health issues, acting upon what graduate students share about their struggles is what ultimately helps them feel supported.

A lot of younger PIs are more understanding about mental health and work-life balance, said Orzolek, who has struggled with depression and anxiety since high school. That gives me a lot of hope for what the future will look like for grad students. Academia changes at a snails pace, but the momentum is in the right direction.

Loo said that even though universities are beginning to take the mental health of graduate students more seriously by starting conversations about it, more must be done.

I would love to see more questions being raised about how we can change the current structure, how we can make people less sad on the whole instead of shipping them off to therapy, Loo said. For all the workshops we get, knowing that other people experience these [mental health issues] doesnt make it go away for me.

Meda, who lost a friend who worked in her lab to suicide right before she graduated from UCSF, said that because more students are speaking up about their experiences, institutions can no longer ignore the issue.

My institution didnt necessarily follow up in the best way, Meda said. But now so many students are talking openly and pushing back on stereotypes that have been perpetuated in academia for so long. There are always people struggling in the same way, and I hope they continue to start the conversation at whatever institution theyre at.
Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan on Monday refused to apologise to SC or retract his statements. In his response to SC, Prashant said that if he offers an insincere apology, he would amount to the contempt of his conscience.

Senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, who has been held guilty of contempt of court and is also facing another contempt matter before the Supreme Court, on Monday refused to retract his statements or tender an apology in the matter. Bhushan, in a supplementary reply in the suo motu contempt proceedings, submitted that if he retracts his statement before the court that he otherwise believes to be true would amount to the contempt of his conscience in his eyes.

The Supreme Court had, on August 20, reserved its order on the suo motu criminal contempt of court proceedings against Bhushan but had asked him to reconsider the statement and submit his unconditional apology by August 24.

If I retract a statement before this court that I otherwise believe to be true or offer an insincere apology, that in my eyes would amount to the contempt of my conscience and of an institution that I hold in highest esteem, Bhushan said in his reply.

He said that he has nothing but the highest regard for the institution of the Supreme Court. I believe that the Supreme Court is the last bastion of hope for the protection of fundamental rights, the watchdog institutions and indeed for constitutional democracy itself. It has rightly been called the most powerful court in the democratic world, and often an exemplar for courts across the globe, Bhushan said.

Today in these troubling times, the hopes of the people of India vest in this Court to ensure the rule of law and the Constitution and not an untrammeled rule of the executive, he added.

Bhushan said that this casts a duty, especially for an officer of this court like himself, to speak up, when he believes there is a deviation from its sterling record. Therefore I expressed myself in good faith, not to malign the Supreme Court or any particular Chief Justice, but to offer constructive criticism so that the court can arrest any drift away from its long-standing role as a guardian of the Constitution and custodian of peoples rights, he said.

The senior lawyer said that his tweets represented this bonafide belief that he continues to hold and added that the public expression of these beliefs was in line with his higher obligations as a citizen and a loyal officer of the court. Therefore, an apology for expression of these beliefs, conditional or unconditional, would be insincere. An apology cannot be a mere incantation and any apology has to, as the court has itself put it, be sincerely made, Bhushan said.

This is especially so when I have made the statements bonafide and pleaded truths with full details, which have not been dealt with by the Court, he added. Bhushan was held guilty of contempt of court for two of his tweets, the first one posted on June 29, related to his comment/post on a picture of CJI Bobde on a high-end bike.

In his second tweet, Bhushan expressed his opinion on the role of last four CJIs amid the state of affairs in the country.
A real estate agent who split with her long-term partner went on a 12-day drug bender that saw her arrested three times and fired from her dream job.

Siahn Curran, 28, was first spotted by police in Brisbane's CBD on June 13 at 9pm when officers found her asleep at the wheel of a parked car.

Prosecutor Val Crossley told Sandgate Magistrates Court on Monday officers were suspicious she may be carrying drugs and searched her.

Siahn Curran, 28, (pictured) pleaded guilty to five charges on Monday after she was caught driving while high on drugs during a 12-day bender

Sgt Crossley said the officers arrested Curran and drove her to Princess Alexandra Hospital, the Courier Mail reported.

On June 19, police saw Curran driving erratically and pulled her over, finding 0.81 grams of meth and a syringe stashed in her centre console.

Curran was taken to Royal Women's Brisbane Hospital and recorded positive reading to a drug test.

Her licence was immediately suspended.

But police caught her driving again on June 25 during a routine patrol and she was arrested for a third time.

The real estate agent has now been fired from her job and has been ordered to serve 14 months of probation

Curran pleaded guilty to five charges on Monday with her lawyer, David Abrey, noting she had recently broken up with her long-term partner.

'It seems to have exacerbated her situation and led her to go on a bit of a bender,' he said.

'She has no other explanation or excuses other than she made some very poor decisions. She has lost her employment as a result of this.'

Magistrate Jennifer Batts said Curran was lucky she did not seriously injure anyone.

She sentenced Curran to 14 months of probation with a recorded conviction and banned her from driving for three and a half years.
Announcement of Periodic Review: Moody's announces completion of a periodic review of ratings of Hecla Mining Company

Global Credit Research - 24 Aug 2020

New York, August 24, 2020 -- Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") has completed a periodic review of the ratings of Hecla Mining Company and other ratings that are associated with the same analytical unit. The review was conducted through a portfolio review in which Moody's reassessed the appropriateness of the ratings in the context of the relevant principal methodology(ies), recent developments, and a comparison of the financial and operating profile to similarly rated peers. The review did not involve a rating committee. Since 1 January 2019, Moody's practice has been to issue a press release following each periodic review to announce its completion.

This publication does not announce a credit rating action and is not an indication of whether or not a credit rating action is likely in the near future. Credit ratings and outlook/review status cannot be changed in a portfolio review and hence are not impacted by this announcement. For any credit ratings referenced in this publication, please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page on www.moodys.com for the most updated credit rating action information and rating history.

Key rating considerations are summarized below.

Hecla Mining Company's B3 corporate family rating reflects its largely favorable geopolitical risk profile with key long-life mines located in US and Canada, significant mineral reserves, geologically attractive exploration portfolio and adequate liquidity profile. The rating is limited by its modest scale, moderate operational diversity, exposure to volatile gold, silver, zinc and lead prices, relatively high cost position with the exception of the Greens Creek mine and asset concentration risk given that Greens Creek generates the majority of the company's operating earnings. The rating benefits from the recent conclusion of the strike at Lucky Friday that lasted nearly 3 years with the planned ramp-up of the mine to full capacity by the end of 2020 expected to improve the operational diversity and cash flow generation.

Story continues

This document summarizes Moody's view as of the publication date and will not be updated until the next periodic review announcement, which will incorporate material changes in credit circumstances (if any) during the intervening period.

The principal methodology used for this review was Mining published in September 2018. Please see the Rating Methodologies page on www.moodys.com for a copy of this methodology.

This announcement applies only to EU rated and EU endorsed ratings. Non EU rated and non EU endorsed ratings may be referenced above to the extent necessary, if they are part of the same analytical unit.

This publication does not announce a credit rating action. For any credit ratings referenced in this publication, please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page on www.moodys.com for the most updated credit rating action information and rating history.

Botir Sharipov Vice President - Senior Analyst Corporate Finance Group Moody's Investors Service, Inc. 250 Greenwich Street New York, NY 10007 U.S.A. JOURNALISTS: 1 212 553 0376 Client Service: 1 212 553 1653 Glenn B. Eckert Associate Managing Director Corporate Finance Group JOURNALISTS: 1 212 553 0376 Client Service: 1 212 553 1653 Releasing Office: Moody's Investors Service, Inc. 250 Greenwich Street New York, NY 10007 U.S.A. JOURNALISTS: 1 212 553 0376 Client Service: 1 212 553 1653

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CHICAGO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The global law firm of Winston & Strawn LLP today announced the formation of a new, fully integrated Global Privacy & Data Security practice. Sheryl Falk, Steve Grimes, and Alessandra Swanson will lead a cross-disciplinary and international team with a deep bench of experience in privacy and data security issues that span employment, health care, trade secrets, breach counseling, litigation, consumer, emerging technologies, private equity and mergers and acquisitions.

"In today's increasingly complex regulatory environment, nearly every business entity we serve has serious concerns about compliance in how they protect their valuable data," said Falk. "The almost-universal remote work environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has added to the challenge of providing access to information while ensuring systems are not vulnerable, and abiding by privacy and data security laws."

The new practice is the culmination of Winston's Global Privacy & Data Security Task Force, formed in 2017, which effectively established a suite of capabilities to serve clients across a wide range of regions and industries. Now, the team of more than 75 attorneys in 13 offices across the world can work together seamlessly to address the full spectrum of clients' privacy and data security challenges, including:

Privacy counseling and compliance program building

Regulated Personal Information

Privacy and data security litigation

Internal forensic investigations and cybersecurity incident response

Theft of confidential information and trade secrets

Breach notification, response and regulatory defense

Technology outsourcing

Private equity and mergers and acquisitions

Health care privacy and security

Financial privacy

Employee privacy

Emerging technology

E-commerce and consumer interaction

Marketing and online advertising

International trade, export controls, and sanctions

"What sets this practice apart is not only the scope and breadth of experienceour team members regularly advise the world's largest companies on their most complex and highly sensitive data issuesbut also the strategic manner in which we provide counsel," said Swanson. "By combining a pragmatic business approach with technical forensic expertise, we can translate the legal and regulatory expectations into specific business decisions and actions."

"As companies evolve and grow, they need to consider the cross-border implications of how they collect, use and protect their data, given rapidly evolving U.S. and international privacy laws," added Grimes. "Our international team is poised to advise clients around the world on trade secret protection and investigations, cyber-investigations and data security class action litigation, and international data protection."

Sheryl Falk draws on her deep expertise in privacy, data security, and forensic technology, as well as her strong litigation background as a former federal prosecutor, to handle complicated privacy and data protection issues. Sheryl concentrates her practice on privacy and data security counseling and diligence, providing strategic advice to mitigate privacy and data security risk in emerging technology, investigating trade secret theft, leading data security incident response, and handling privacy and trade secret litigation.

Steve Grimes is a former federal prosecutor, an experienced trial lawyer, and a former chief compliance officer and senior litigation counsel for a global, publicly traded Fortune 500 company whose practice focuses on compliance counseling, sensitive internal investigations, and complex litigation. Steve works with companies across many industries to investigate highly sensitive and urgent issues related to trade secret theft, technology and security breaches, employee misconduct, conflicts of interest, financial fraud, and potential violations of anti-bribery and other laws.

Alessandra Swanson is a former federal privacy regulator and leverages her unique experience to help clients understand their regulatory and compliance obligations regarding the use, disclosure, and protection of personal information. She focuses her practice in the areas of Regulated Personal Information, privacy and data security counseling, security breach response and regulatory defense, marketing and data ownership issues, corporate advisory services and outsourcing, and large-scale commercial contracting.

Winston & Strawn LLP is an international law firm with 15 offices located throughout North America, Asia, and Europe. More information about the firm is available at www.winston.com.

CONTACT: Matthew Kraft, (646) 502-3546, [email protected]

SOURCE Winston & Strawn LLP
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JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  A key federal permitting decision on a proposed copper and gold mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay region could still be weeks away as work continues on a wetlands mitigation plan, a spokesperson for the company behind the Pebble Mine said Thursday.

Mike Heatwole, with the Pebble Limited Partnership, said the company is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to finalize a wetlands mitigation plan. Given there is still some work to conclude, he said by email, a final decision isn't likely to come for another month or so.





. . .
Victoria, B.C., police say that for the second night in a row, theyve broken up a party at the same downtown apartment and fined one of the participants.

Police say they were called to a one-bedroom suite in a multi-unit residential building just after midnight on Sunday for reports of a party.

They had visited the same suite the night before, breaking up a party of approximately 30 people and fining the host $2,300 for failing to follow the COVID-19 provincial health guidelines.

Police say this time they encountered a group of 15 people and ordered the party to disband.

One guest refused to co-operate, was subsequently arrested and given a $230 fine for abusive or belligerent behaviour under the COVID-19 Related Measures Act.

Police say the guest was later released at the scene and no additional tickets were handed out.

Read more about:
Gavin Williamson is in the running to be named MP of the Year despite widespread demands for him to quit over this year's exams fiasco.

The Education Secretary has been nominated in the People's Choice category of the awards run by non-partisan organisation the Patchwork Foundation.

He has been nomination by the public in a competition for MPs 'who have gone above and beyond in their role over the past year', sparking ridicule.

Mr Williamson has so far seen off attempts to force him from office after English exam results affected by coronavirus were first marked down and then marked up following an outcry.

While the award nominations closed in July, before the shambles that came to a head last week, by that point he had already presided over a failure to get all schoolchildren back into classrooms for at least a few weeks before the summer break.

He now faces a battle to get them all back into lessons in September, despite a massive push from politicians and medical experts.

Social media users brutally mocked Mr Williamson after the announcement, with one saying: 'In other news, King Herod has been nominated for the post of Children's Commissioner, (Donald) Trump as the next Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University and Vlad the Impaler as National Medical Director of NHS England.'

Another senior education minister, Gillian Keegan, has also been nominated.

The Education Secretary has been nominated in the People's Choice category of the awards run by non-partisan organisation the Patchwork Foundation

Social media users brutally mocked Mr Williamson after the announcement

Corbyn nominated for top MP gong after Labour's election humiliation Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is also among those nominated for MP of the Year. He was voted on to the list despite overseeing his party's utter humiliation at December's general election. The party suffered its worst reverse since the 1930s, handing Boris Johnson an 80-seat majority and prompting Mr Corbyn to stand down. Mr Corbyn is nominated in the same People's Choice category as Mr Williamson. Former prime minister Theresa May is also nominated. Advertisement

The Apprenticeships and Skills Minister was under fire at the weekend for enjoying a holiday in the French Alps while teenagers in Britain went through hell over their exam grades.

As students worried over their futures, Gillian Keegan enjoyed hiking trips, mountain biking and dips in a mountain lake  and boasted about them on Instagram.

In her post she is jointly responsible for post-16 education strategy.

The Patchwork Foundation works to get young people from 'disadvantaged and minority communities' more involved in politics and civil society.

Regarding the voting it said: 'The public nominates any MPs they think have gone above and beyond in their role over the past year, especially in championing underrepresented voices. This year nominations opened April 22nd and closed July 19th.

'Winners are then chosen in two ways. The first are the Judges' Awards, chosen by an independent panel of judges who blind judge the nominees by considering their work and accolades.

'The second are the People's Choice Awards, which is where YOU come in! The public votes for their #MPoftheYear. Voting will close at midnight on the 31st of August, so don't miss your chance.'

It came as Boris Johnson was forced to take charge of the Government's push to get children back to school in September.

Mr Johnson, who has returned to London following his Scottish holiday, pleaded with parents to send their children back to the classroom.

He today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September.

The Prime Minister said in a video posted on his Twitter account that he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health.

He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed'.

Boris Johnson today admitted that some parents are 'still a bit worried' about the return of schools

The Government remains under pressure over its handling of the return of schools with Tory MPs today complaining ministers have left it 'very late' to persuade parents it is safe.

Many pupils in England have not been to class since March, when schools were closed except to look after vulnerable children and those of key workers.

Schools in Scotland reopened earlier this month, while those in Northern Ireland will welcome pupils again on Monday. English and Welsh schools will follow suit in September.

The Government's handling of the schools return, and last week's debacle over A-level and GCSE results, has sparked Tory MP fury.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, told The Telegraph schools and parents needed a 'clear message' that it is 'completely safe to return'.

'They have left it very late and the debacle of exam results means parents don't trust the Government any more,' he said.

Sir Iain urged Mr Johnson to 'lead, galvanising his inner Churchill' in order to reverse the Government's fortunes.
Home Search ICH US is willing to dismantle the UN Security Council to put pressure on Iran By Scott Ritter August 23, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - In a world where American exceptionalism and unilateralism has become common currency, the brazenness of Secretary of State Pompeos bid to impose snap back inspections of Iran takes the cake. Moreover, its doomed to fail. When it comes to Iran and the Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), President Trump has been singularly focused on one outcometo bring the Islamic Republic back to the negotiation table for the purpose of producing a better deal than the one done by his predecessor, Barack Obama, in July 2015. For the former New York realtor and reality television star-turned Chief Executive, it does not get any simpler than thathe is, after all, the consummate (if self-proclaimed) deal maker. How the deal is made, and even what constitutes the deal, is less important than the deal itself. This goal dominated his thinking about Iran as a candidate and continues to do so as President. The precipitous decision to withdraw from the JCPOA in May 2018 was driven more by the perceived need to begin shaping the diplomatic battlefield in support of a new negotiation than any legitimate national security concerns. Trumps goal all along has been to compel Iran, through the implementation of economic sanctions combined with political isolation, to scrap the Obama-era JCPOA and sit down with the new American deal maker to craft a big deal that would make everyone happy. No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media Get Our Free Newsletter America versus the world The problem from the start, however, was that the United States was alone with its displeasure over how the deal was being implemented. Among the other parties to the JCPOA (France, Great Britain, Germany, the EU, Russia, China and Iran), the agreement was proving its viability by preventing Iran from engaging in any breakout actions that could result in Iran obtaining enough fissile material from its centrifuge-based uranium enrichment program to build a nuclear device. Trump, however, had latched on to the so-called sunset clauses of the JCPOA, which lifted restrictions on Irans use of centrifuges after a period of several years, allowing Iran to blow-past the hypothetical calculations regarding nuclear breakout, and thereby mooting the fundamental purpose of the JCPOA to begin with. The US decision to unilaterally withdraw from the JCPOA has proven to be an unmitigated policy disaster, one that has empowered Iran, Russia and China as the aggrieved parties, and driven a wedge between the US and its European allies. Rather than admit defeat and help restore the status quo by re-entering the JCPOA, the Trump administration has instead opted to double down, threatening to reimpose UN sanctions which had been suspended upon Irans entry into the JCPOA via procedural mechanisms contained in the body of that agreement calling for the snap back of sanctions if any party is dissatisfied with the compliance of another. The real purpose of the US gambit to reimpose snap back inspections wasnt any malfeasance on the part of Irans nuclear program, but rather a desire to prevent the automatic lifting of an arms embargo that had been spelled out in the body of the JCPOA. This embargo was scheduled to automatically terminate come October 2020. The US sought to pressure the Security Council into passing a resolution which would permanently extend this embargo. Both Russia and China had promised to veto, so the resolutions defeat was inevitable. The goal in pushing for it, however, was to persuade at least nine other members of the 15-member body to vote in favor, thereby providing the US with the moral high ground when approaching the Security Council about re-imposing snap back sanctions. Most of the other members of the Security Council, recognizing that if they intervened to reverse a clause mandated by the JCPOA, they would put Irans continued participation in the agreement at risk, instead abstained from voting on the resolution. Only the Dominican Republic sided with the US; Russia and China, as expected, cast their vetoes. Trumps deal or no deal Having failed to secure the moral high ground, the US could have admitted defeat and regrouped, trying to find another, less controversial way forward. But the US policy of maximum pressure brooks no such weakness, especially when Donald Trump has bragged that he will secure a new deal with Iran within four weeks of his being re-elected. To even have a shot at this, the US would need to not only maintain the existing unilateral sanctions regime it is enforcing on Iran, but also increase the pressure, something that could only be done by re-imposing UN sanctions via the snap back mechanism of the JCPOA. If the US were to succeed in snapping back UN sanctions, the JCPOA would be dead in the water, as there would be no way Iran would continue to comply with an agreement which no longer delivers on its promises. The other parties to the JCPOA understand this and indicated their unwillingness to go along with the US scheme. Moreover, these nations believe that by having withdrawn from the JCPOA, the US was no longer a participant to that agreement, and as such, had no jurisdictional or legal authority to initiate the snap back provisions. On August 20, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ignoring the warnings from the other JCPOA parties, met with the President of the Security Council for the purpose of delivering a letter announcing that the US was activating the snap back procedures, and that in 30 days it would be calling for a vote on the matter by the Security Council. Almost immediately the US actions were condemned by the other parties of the JCPOA, with France, Great Britain and Germany calling the US move incompatible with our current efforts to support the JCPOA, and both Russia and China terming the effort illegal. Tearing down UNSC is an acceptable outcome for the US The Trump administration, faced with this united opposition, has shown no indication it is willing to back down. The UN Security Council is navigating uncharted waters, having never been confronted with a challenge of this nature in its entire 75-year history. There is every reason to believe that the US will submit a resolution for consideration following the expiration of the 30-day notification period, and then veto it itself, thereby triggering the automatic snap back of UN sanctions. There is also every reason to believe that the Security Council will seek to block the US through various procedural formalities designed not to formally recognize the US demands, and thereby preventing the submission of any resolution. A likely outcome will be that the Security Council fails to recognize the US submission of a resolution, followed by the US refusing to recognize the Security Councils ability to prevent such a resolution from being submitted. The US will seek to submit the resolution, then immediately veto it, and claim that the snap back has been accomplished. The rest of the Security Council will reject this action, and deem the JCPOA to be in play, free of UN sanctions. The US will then sanction any party which fails to comply with the UN sanctions. If this were in fact to occur, it would mean the functional death of the UN Security Council, an outcome many in the Trump administration appear willing to live with. Faced with the inevitability of this outcome, some membersespecially the French, Germans and Britsmay be compelled to reexamine their position on the lifting of the arms embargo, seeking a compromise solution that salvages the JCPOA while denying Iran access to Russian and Chinese armaments. This may be the goal of the US all along. If so, it is an extremely dangerous one that is based on a false predicate, namely that there is a combination of economic and diplomatic pressure that can be placed on Iran to compel it to renegotiate the JCPOA. Simply put, there is not, and for the Trump administration to proceed as if there is only endangers regional and international peace and security. Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopfs staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter - " Source " - The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Post your comment below See also The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Search Information Clearing House === The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. Click Here To Support Information Clearing House Your support has kept ICH free on the Web since 2002. 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India's COVID-19 recoveries have crossed 23 lakh and are more than three times the number of active cases of the infection in the country, while the case fatality rate, maintaining a steady downward trajectory, has further dropped to 1.85 per cent, the Union health ministry said on Monday.

IMAGE: Health workers congratulate 1000th COVID-19 recovered patient and discharged from Kaushalya Hospital in Maharashtra's Thane. Photograph: ANI Photo

With 57,469 patients having recuperated in a day, total recoveries have surged to 23,38,035, pushing the recovery rate to 75.27 per cent as on date.

They exceeded the active cases by 16,27,264.

This has been made possible because of effective implementation of the policy of testing aggressively, tracking comprehensively through surveillance and contact-tracing and treating efficiently, the ministry underlined.

Focus on standard of care protocol, including use of non-invasive oxygen, better skilled doctors in the ICUs and hospitals, and improved ambulance services have led to improved recovery rate among the severe and critical COVID patients.

"Those in home isolation, being medically supervised and monitored, are also recovering at a fast pace," the ministry said.

The record high recoveries have ensured that 7,10,771 active cases, which is the "actual caseload" currently, comprise only 22.88 per cent of the total cases.

"Effective clinical management of the patients in the ICUs has been instrumental in keeping the case fatality rate low and on a steady downward trajectory. It has further dipped to 1.85 per cent today," the ministry said.

A major role in India's substantial rate of recovery and a declining case fatality rate has been played by the 'National e-ICU on COVID-19 Management' exercise being conducted by AIIMS, New Delhi, in active collaboration with the Ministry of Health, it mentioned.

The National e-ICU is held twice a week -- on Tuesdays and Fridays -- and covers ICU doctors of COVID hospitals in states, and answers their queries related to COVID-19 treatment. So far, 14 such National e-ICUs have been held, covering 117 hospitals from 22 states across the country, it added.

With a single-day spike of 61,408 infections, India's COVID-19 tally mounted to 31,06,348, while the death toll climbed to 57,542 with 836 fatalities being reported in a span of 24 hours,the data updated at 8 am showed.
Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has stated that the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) takes governance seriously and it is the reason why it has made feasible promises in its 2020 manifesto to continue to address the needs of Ghanaians.

Speaking on Ekosii sen on Accra based Asempa FM on Monday 24th August 2020 , the Minister noted that the NPP's 2020 manifesto was drafted in a way that considers the needs and aspirations of Ghanaians.

The NPP as a political party believes that governance is not just about power so we make blanket statement to deceive Ghanaians or statement that we do not believe is achievable just for political expediency. We believe that when given the mandate, we will use it to put the country in a better economic position so that majority of Ghanaians can benefits from it.

Therefore, one of the important things we consider in drafting our manifesto promises is a broad based approach to improving the lives of Ghanaians while narrowing down to how specific manifesto promises can elevate the average Ghanaian from poverty, he added.

According to Mr. Nkrumah, the NPP's 2020 manifesto is a historic manifesto that is different from the party's previous manifestos. He said the 2020 manifesto accounts for their 2016 manifesto promises and goes on to outline how the next administration seeks to further improve the economic situation of the average Ghanaian.

One of the major difference of our 2020 manifesto from our previous manifestos particularly our 2016, 2008 and 2004 manifestos is that this very one is a record for history. This is because since we assumed office some four years ago, we have been able to account for all our manifesto promises as an administration. Point by point, all the promises we made back in 2016 and what we have done about these promises are accounted for in our 2020 manifesto. So for example in our 2016 manifesto, we promised to restore macro stability. In our 2020 manifesto, we have detailed how the administration has in the past years achieved this, he added.

Daily Guide
President Donald Trump blasted cable TV networks for failing to cover the roll call of states as the Republican National Convention kicked off Monday, while griping at Fox News anchors who talked over the action.

Trump tweeted about the roll call as the RNC made its effort to run through the official state delegate tallies  an event that typically takes place in pact arenas with screaming partisans and colorfully dressed delegates.

Instead, Republican delegates spoke in front of a convention background poster, while making brief speeches about their states which were piped into the convention hall in Charlotte where more than 300 delegates gathered.

President Donald Trump complained that cable networks were not covering the traditional roll call of votes by state delegations at the kickoff of the Republican National Convention

'Incredible that @CNN & MSDNC arent covering the Roll Call of States. Fake News! This is what the Republican Party is up against. Also, Id like to hear the remarks of the Delegates from individual States, rather than @FoxNews anchors. Ridiculous!' Trump wrote.

Trump then took his complaints to the delegates themselves in a surprise speech at the Charlotte gathering.

He called it 'our big deal, the roll call.'

Whats more important than the roll call, youre the ones calling it,' he told them during an improvised speech that ran longer than 20 minutes.

He complained that CNN was showing House hearings with the Postmaster General.

'Theyre trying to show the post office so when their mail-in thing fizzles, theyll blame the post office,' Trump said, referencing mail-in voting.

He said the hearing was 'Very boring, actually.'

Democrats opted to have their delegations speak remotely from far-flung locales  including one from American Samoa which featured lush scenery and a pair of uniformed military members.

The networks were stiffing a roll call that is often a fan favorite of convention viewers  but that is usually held during prime time.

Trump tweeted about how cable was covering or failing to cover morning convention action

MyPillow founder Mike Lindell spoke for Minnesota

Former Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin bashed Joe Biden when announcing his state's votes for president

Delegates cast their votes during the opening of the first day of the Republican National Convention, meeting in the Richardson Ballroom, Charlotte Convention Center on August 24, 2020, in Charlotte, North Carolina, during the roll call to renominate Donald Trump to be President of the United States and Mike Pence to be Vice President

The roll call typically features speeches in a packed convention hall

Delegates applaud in the Charlotte Convention Center's Richardson Ballroom, where they have gathered for the roll call vote to renominate Donald J. Trump to be President of the United States and Mike Pence to be Vice President, in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S., August 24, 2020

Republican delegates to the convention gathered in person in Charlotte Monday, but other action was shifted to the D.C. area

Instead, the RNC opted to show it beginning in the late morning Monday. CNN kept its coverage to testimony by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, an event Trump complained earlier interfered with the convention.

Speaking for the Minnesota delegation was MyPillow company founder Mike Lindell, a friend of Trump's who has appeared at the White House.

'Minnesota has been blue since 1972,' he said, calling out 'destruction of so much of my great state and country.'

'With Democratic leadership being exposed for what it is and President Trump's great pragmatic leadership, we will win Minnesota,' he predicted.

Lindell called Trump 'the greatest president ever.'

The Maryland delegation was chaired by David Bossie of Citizens United, who a key Trump campaign advisor in 2016. But Bossie flubbed while making an effort pointing to positive elements of Maryland's complex racial past.

'Maryland is home to the Underground Railroad, and two of our greatest segrega  abolitionists, Frederic Douglass and Harriet Tubman,' Bossie said, correcting himself in mid-sentence during an election cycle featuring steep racial divisions.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski spoke as chair of the New Hampshire delegation, where he recalled patriotic history and then put in a plug for his book.

'New Hampshire is known for our maple syrup, comedian Adam Sandler, poet Robert Frost and New York Times bestselling author Corey Lewandowski' said.

Don Kaltschmidt sported a Montana, saying his state was now affectionately being called 'Trump-tana.'

'We fish we hunt, we boat and we have at least five guns in every home,' he quipped, days after Democrats at their convention featured a long video about victims of gun violence and protests that grew out of school shootings.

Wisconsin's former Gov. Scott Walker gave a speech endorsing Mike Pence as Trump's vice presidential running mate again  and delivered the conventions first attack on Joe Biden.

'Mike Pence believes in the sanctity of life, he always has and he always will,' he said.

He said both Pence and Trump 'have a deep and abiding love for America and for the American people.'

'Thats why both of them were in Wisconsin last week during the Democrats' convention while Joe Biden was hanging out in his basement in Delaware. Delaware the place that he hasn't left not just to go criss-cross the country, but he hasnt even been to Wisconsin one time since the start of his run for president,' he said.

Trump and Pence visited Wisconsin last week. Biden begged off, citing the coronavirus.

He has travelled to Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D.C. since the pandemic.
Chandigarh, Aug 24 : Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Monday welcomed the unanimous resolution passed by the Congress Working Committee (CWC), asking Sonia Gandhi to continue as interim party President till the next AICC session and authorising her to take whatever decisions needed.

He, however, agreed with former party chief Rahul Gandhi that her continuation at the helm of the Congress could not be open-ended.

Speaking during the CWC meet, via video conference, he also endorsed Rahul Gandhi's suggestion that some sort of structure needs to be put in place to assist the Congress President in handling the party's affairs and functioning.

The Chief Minister also said he was in agreement with senior party leader P. Chidambaram that the next AICC session should be convened at the earliest, possibly within the next six months, to elect the new President.

Since a regular session was precluded by the Covid-19 pandemic, it could be held virtually, he said, backing Chidambaram's suggestion on the issue.

Amarinder Singh also said he was in full agreement with the CWC resolution stressing the need for discussing and addressing intra-party differences within the party and not in the media or in public.

"There are ways to deal with issues," he had said earlier, at the start of the meeting, in reference to the content and the leakage of the letter by a group of Congress leaders.

"This is not done. The BJP is after us and then, in the middle of it, we find our own people striking a dissenting note," he observed, speaking immediately after Rahul Gandhi's intervention questioning the timing of the letter.

The Chief Minister had earlier also urged Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the party and hand over the baton to Rahul Gandhi once she decides to finally step down.

Terming as "shameful and unacceptable" the public dissent by a group of Congress leaders in the midst of the continuing BJP onslaught against the party, he said that Sonia Gandhi had always been accessible, and there was no need to pen down such a letter and then putting it in public domain.

While he said that all the leaders who had signed the letter were friends of the rest in the party and he hoped they would continue to do so, Amarinder Singh made it clear that what their act was not acceptable.
(ANSAmed) - NAPLES, AUGUST 24 - Greek researchers will begin a research project in September examining alien species of fish currently present in the country's seas. The project aims to understand what curative properties might be extracted from these fish species, as well as to control the population. The species in question are the silver-cheeked toadfish, the bluespotted cornetfish, and the red lionfish. The research project, "Explias", is being funded as part of strategic Greek national studies in collaboration with the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), the University of the Aegean, and the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. According to NTUA chemical engineering professor Magda Krokida, past research has shown that these marine species contain substances that are useful in various medical areas, from cancer treatment to the creation of alternative substances for synthetic botox, reported Greek daily Kathimerini.(ANSAmed). (ANSA).


Langworthy will not make any convention boasts about carrying New York for Trump, Cox noted, but he can set goals like picking off New York congressional seats lost in the Democratic sweep of 2018.

"I think we can win them back," Cox said. "We have a good shot with the president at the top of the ticket to win back three, four or maybe even five. And that is still an important function of the party."

The former chairman also said Langworthy must return from Charlotte with an "alternative message" he can present to New York voters this fall. The property tax cap embraced by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo early in his administration originated with Assembly Republicans, he noted.

"We can do that again," he said.

Even if the Democratic registration advantage of more than 3 million voters almost guarantees a New York victory for Joe Biden on Nov. 3, Langworthy will be best served by another Trump term. He has invested much in the president since he joined other upstate Republicans in urging the then-real estate tycoon to run for governor in 2014. That didn't happen, but Langworthy has since faithfully ridden the party's Trump wave (he only sheepishly acknowledges his original presidential enthusiasm for former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker).
Bonds turned more decisively positive (if anything can be decisive in such a narrow overall range) after the 9:30am NYSE Open. The timing and the correlation with slumping stocks made a clear case for a quick little rotation out of stocks and into bonds. Both are bouncing back in the other direction now, but 10yr yields are still nearly a bp lower on the day and UMBS 2.0s are up nearly an eighth.
Several workers of the Congress on Monday demanded that the partys president should be from the Gandhi family as top leaders held a virtual meeting of its highest decision making body amid a controversy over a letter by top leaders over changes in the organisation.

The meeting of the Congress Working Committee is being held after a controversy erupted over the letter by more than 20 senior leaders calling for full time active leadership, sweeping reforms and raising questions about the partys condition and direction, as well as demanding the election of the CWC.

The workers, who had gathered in front of the party office in Delhi, shouted slogans as well.

We want party president from the Gandhi family only. Party will be destroyed and break away if any outsider is made president, Jagdish Sharma, who had gathered outside the Congress office with others, was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi offered to quit during the CWC meeting, asking the body to initiate the process for selecting a new party chief. However, former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who spoke after Gandhi, and AK Antony urged her to continue.

Rahul Gandhi questioned the timing of the letter, which he said was sent to Sonia Gandhi when she was in a hospital.

Around 23 party leaders, including Ghulam Nabi Azad and Kipal Sibal, had written to Sonia Gandhi demanding a full-time, visible president and overhauling of the organisational structure including elections to the CWC.
Samantha and Mark Womack in 2014. (John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

Samantha Womack has revealed that she and husband Mark split in 2018 but have remained living together since ending their marriage.

The former EastEnders actor says the arrangement to reside side-by-side in the family home works for them and there is "no rush" to change.

Our family home is big enough and were co-existing happily, she told OK! Magazine.

Theres no rush to change things.

Read more: EastEnders return date confirmed

But now feels like the right time to be honest and admit were no longer together.

Samantha said they had decided to publicly reveal the status of their relationship due to media interest after Mark's recent stint as corrupt police officer DI Mark Malone in Emmerdale.

Samantha Janus and Mark Womack in 2009. (Dave M Benett/Getty Images)

Their romance began when they both starred in ITV drama Liverpool 1, and they tied the knot 10 years into their relationship in 2009.

The couple share two children, son Benjamin, 19, and daughter Lili-Rose, 15. Meanwhile, Mark has a son, Michael, 25, from a previous relationship.

Samantha said they decided to end their marriage two years ago after realising they "wanted different things" from the next chapter of their lives.

They've explained the situation to their children and remain on good terms, she said.

The Ronnie Mitchell star added: "It's bizarre but these have probably been the best years we've had as a family. It sounds cheesy but Mark's still my soulmate, it's just our marriage is over. Our relationship has just taken a different route."

Actress Samantha Janus with boyfriend Mark Womack in 2000. (Sean Dempsey  PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

The pair have been dating other people but Samantha said they would not be discussing new romances publicly unless it "feels serious".

It comes after several of Samantha's former EastEnders co-stars recently split from their spouses.

Read more: Samantha Womack settles phone hacking claim

The soap's longest-serving actor Adam Woodyatt separated from his wife Beverley Sharp last year, it was confirmed last week.

Meanwhile, Rita Simons, who played Samantha's onscreen sister Roxy Mitchell, has ended her relationship with husband Theo Silveston.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK Lifestyle
A Taliban political team arrived in Pakistan on August 24 amid ongoing efforts to start negotiations between the Afghan government and the militants.

The talks, envisaged under a landmark peace agreement signed in February between Washington and the Taliban, had been expected to start earlier this month but were stymied by a series of delays.

The militants' delegation, headed by Taliban political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, will discuss with Pakistans leaders the recent developments in Afghanistans peace process, according to a tweet by Suhail Shaheen, the spokesman for the Taliban political office.

Shaheen added that the relaxation and facilitation of peoples movement and trade between the two neighboring countries will also be on the agenda.

The visit comes a day after the Taliban chief announced a beefed up negotiating team that includes nearly half of the Taliban leadership council and has the power to set agendas, decide strategy, and even sign agreements with the Kabul government.

That Taliban team is headed by the militants' chief negotiator, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai.

Pakistan earlier gave the go-ahead to implement UN sanctions against a number of outlawed groups, including the Taliban.

The sanctions restrict travel, freeze assets, limit fundraising, and outlaw weapons sales. The UN has allowed travel for the purpose of peace negotiations but for a limited number of Taliban figures.

Baradar, who is on the sanctions list, spent eight years in jail in Pakistan until his release in 2018.

Baradar and U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who negotiated the U.S.-Taliban deal, signed the agreement on February 29.

The Afghan government and the Taliban are deadlocked over outstanding prisoner releases. Kabul wants the Taliban to free 22 Afghan commandos they hold captive while the Taliban demand the release of a final 320 Taliban prisoners held in Afghan jails.

The release of the remaining prisoners was approved by a traditional Afghan council or Loya Jirga called by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani earlier this month but the government later said the Taliban were still holding Afghan soldiers and halted freeing the Taliban.

With reporting by AP and AFP
The Republican National Convention is set to kick off on Monday night, only days after Joe Biden accepted the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

President Donald Trumps campaign on Sunday announced its list of more than 70 speakers for the four-day event, including Washington politicians, White House and campaign staff and the presidents family members.

While a small number of Republican delegates will be present at the convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday, the majority of the RNC will be virtual with speakers appearing from various locations, NPR reported. North Carolina would not permit a large-scale event; thus, Republicans decided not to hold the rest of their convention there, according to CNN.

WHITE HOUSE CHANGES: Top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway to leave White House

President Trump

The White House announced on Saturday that the President will be going to Charlotte on Monday as part of a day-long series of events in North and South Carolina.



He is also expected in attendance at Mondays convention for the formal presidential nomination, The New York Times first reported. Although Trump is expected to take part in the other three nights, The New York Times noted that Monday will be the only in-person portion of the convention.

The RNC will culminate with Trump's formal acceptance speech from The White House on Thursday.

Monday



Speakers on Monday include Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is the chair of the Trump Victory Committees finance committee.

Also scheduled to speak are Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla.; and Patricia and Mark McCloskeythe couple from St. Louis who pointed guns at protesters this summer from outside their home.

CORONAVIRUS AID: Trump tells Treasury to prepare direct payments to Americans

Tuesday

First lady Melania Trump will speak on Tuesday, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, and the presidents children Eric and Tiffany Trump.

Mary Ann Mendoza and Nicholas Sandmann will also take the stage.



Mendozas son, Sgt. Brandon Mendoza, was killed by an immigrant in a drunken-driving collision in 2014.

Sandmann, a former Covington Catholic High School student, became a viral sensation among conservatives after his 2019 encounter with a Native American activist was caught on video. Sandmann went on to sue several media outlets for defamation.

Wednesday

Among those scheduled to speak on Weds. are Pence and second lady Karen Pence, Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, and Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump, who is married to the presidents son Eric Trump.

Also on the schedule is Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina candidate who won a Republican primary runoff for a congressional seat vacated by Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Thursday

Speakers on the final night of the convention include Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, Rudy Giuliani and Ivanka Trump.

UFC President Dana White, evangelist Franklin Graham and the president, who will deliver his acceptance speech from the White House, will also speak.

The RNC

Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller on Sunday told NBC's "Meet the Press" the RNC will present an "optimistic and upbeat convention this week" versus what he characterized as a "massive grievance fest" voiced by the Democratic National Convention, CNN reported.

The RNC announced it will not have a platform, claiming it will continue to support whatever Trump decides.

How to Watch

The Republican Convention will air Monday through Thursday from 7:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Central Standard Time.

The major broadcast networks and cable TV outlets, C-SPAN and PBS will cover the RNC.

It will also be live-streamed on the conventions Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Twitch pages as well as via Amazon Prime Video.
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazilian Congresswoman Flordelis de Souza was charged with ordering the execution of her husband, pastor Anderson do Carmo, who was shot more than 30 times at their home in June 2019, according to a police statement on Monday.

The Rio de Janeiro state police said a total of 11 people have been charged in connection with the crime.

Souza did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by email. The telephone numbers for her office and her lawyer were not answered.

Her Social Democratic Party (PSD) said in a statement her membership will be immediately suspended and, as proceedings progress, she will be expelled from the party.

As part of the probe, on Monday the police served nine arrest warrants and 14 search warrants in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Niteroi, Sao Goncalo and Brasilia, where the congresswoman has an apartment.

Police said Souza's motive was "a struggle for power and her financial emancipation."

There is currently no arrest warrant for Souza, who is an elected federal deputy and as such enjoys parliamentary immunity. Police said a copy of the investigation, with evidence of the charges, had been sent to the lower house of Congress. The statement said she could be stripped of her parliamentary position, allowing for criminal proceedings to be pursued further.

Police say Carmo was killed at the couple's home. At the time of his death, Souza testified to police that her husband had been killed during a robbery.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Viga; Writing by Ana Mano; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
HONOLULU: A Pearl Harbor ceremony in Hawaii marking the 75th anniversary of World War II will only feature veterans living in Hawaii after organizers limited those who can attend over coronavirus concerns.

The plan before Friday had been to allow about 200 people, mostly WWII veterans, their families and government officials, to gather on the battleship USS Missouri, which hosted the Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945 in Tokyo Bay.

But an announcement was made Friday night that said those planning to fly into the state are no longer invited in an effort to protect the aging veterans mostly in their 90s from COVID-19.

Tony Vericella, the executive director of 75th WWII Commemoration Committee, said in a phone interview Monday that the decision to limit attendance was a difficult one, but organizers are working on new ways to honor those left out in a virtual setting.

Vericella said they were confident in safety measures put in place for the mainland veterans once they arrived for a special flight from Oakland to Honolulu and thereafter, but the risks for those traveling from their hometowns to California was too great.

In a story published early Friday, WWII veteran Jerry Pedersen, who was aboard the USS Missouri and watched the Japanese surrender, told The Associated Press he had been looking forward to attending the event for years, and he understood the risks.

Ive been told what I need to do in order to be responsible for myself but also toward others, said WWII veteran Jerry Pedersen, who was aboard the USS Missouri and watched the Japanese surrender.

I want to go back because that day, as much as I remember it, what happened, why we were there, the fact that it was the end of the realities of war and killing and all, it was the first day that I had to start answering, What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Pedersen said.

Organizers now say fewer than 50 people will attend, mostly veterans and their families, at the Sept. 2 ceremony aboard the USS Missouri. The same health screenings and safety measures previously planned will be in place.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
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Zen Technologies share price rose 6 percent intraday on August 24 after the company was granted a patent by the UK Patent office.

The company has been granted a patent by UK Patent office for Containerised Tubular Shooting Range (CTSR), as per company release.

CTSR is a Range-In-a-Container Solution where security forces can train their personnel rapidly and efficiently with much more effectiveness than conventional ranges, it added.

The system eliminates the need for huge swathes of land and the threat of environment pollution. The solution also frees up very valuable land for the purpose of alternative use.

This product is expected to have a significant demand overseas where the sensitivity pertaining to ranges is very high.

In India, it is being used in Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi and many other locations. The system has also been exported, company said in the release.

At 10:08 hrs Zen Technologies was quoting at Rs 92.20, up Rs 2.65, or 2.96 percent on the BSE.

The share touched its 52-week high Rs 97 and 52-week low Rs 22.40 on 19 August 2020 and 31 March 2020, respectively.

Currently, it is trading 4.95 percent below its 52-week high and 311.61 percent above its 52-week low.
President Donald Trump said he was open to the possibility of 'decoupling' with China in his second term if 'they don't treat us right' as he doubled down on his attacks that if rival Joe Biden wins the election then Beijing would 'own our country.'

'We were doing better than we've ever done with China, and I was all set to rock and roll and then we got hit with this damn situation,' the president said in an interview with Fox News Channel's 'The Next Revolution' that aired Sunday night.

He said he was open to the possibility of 'decoupling' from China in his second term.

'Well it's something that if they don't treat us right I would certainly, I would certainly do that,' he said.

President Donald Trump said he was open to the possibility of 'decoupling' with China in his second term

President Trump also charged if Democratic rival Joe Biden is elected, China will 'own our country'

Trump's relationship with China and its President Xi Jinping has had its ups and downs as the two nations struggle to complete a trade deal.

After two years of arguing and a tit-for-tat in raising hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on each other's goods, the two nations are still stuck in phase one of negotiations.

The coronavirus pandemic has soured relations even further.

'I don't want to set the world on fire right now,' Trump said in the interview as he continued to bash Beijing.

President Trump also complained about U.S. intelligence reports that indicated China is working to influence the November election in Biden's favor. The agencies also said Russia was working in Trump's favor.

'I'm the only one who ever took on China. And you saw the intelligence reports where they say China is working hard to get Joe Biden elected. If he gets elected, China will own our country,' the president charged.

Trump also repeated his charge that Hunter Biden made billions off work he did with China when his father was vice president.

'China owns Joe Biden. His son got a billion and a half dollars. His son with no experience, no brainpower, no anything, never did it, not only Ukraine, he got hundreds of thousands of dollars of money from Ukraine and the upfront payment and then with China he walks up with a billion and half dollars in fees. It's ridiculous,' Trump said.

Hunter Biden sat on the board of BHR, a Chinese equity firm, that was trying to raise a $1.5 billion financial stake - a number the president has latched on to to accuse Hunter Biden of personal financial gain.

Hunter Biden told ABC News in an interview last year that he didn't make any money from that work.

'No. Definitely not 1.5 billion,' he said.

But he would not say how much money he has made.

'Look, I'm a private citizen,' he said. 'One thing that I don't have to do is sit here and open my kimono as it relates to how much money I make or make or did or didn't. But it's all been reported.'

President Donald Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting of the G-20 in June 2019 - relations between the two nations have deteriorated amid a trade war and the coronavirus

Trump, meanwhile, continued his tirade against China.

'They own Joe Biden. They own him and they want me to it lose so badly,' he said.

The president's interview aired the day before the Republican National Convention - where he will be formally nominated as the GOP presidential nominee - begins.

Polls show Biden leading in their contest, by 7.6 per cent in the RealClearPolitics average.
Migrants stand near the border fence on the Turkey-Greece border buffer zone near Pazarkule crossing gate in Edirne, Turkey, on March 7, 2020. (Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images)

Greece to Extend Fence on Land Border With Turkey to Deter Migrants

ATHENSGreece will proceed with plans to extend a cement and barbed-wire fence that it set up in 2012 along its northern border with Turkey to prevent migrants from entering the country, the government said on Monday.

The conservative government made the decision this year, spokesman Stelios Petsas said, after tens of thousands of asylum seekers tried to enter EU member Greece in late February when Ankara said it would no longer prevent them from doing so.

Greece, which is at odds with neighbouring Turkey over a range of issues, has been a gateway to Europe for people fleeing conflicts and poverty in the Middle East and beyond, with more than a million passing through the country in 2015-2016.

The project led by four Greek construction companies will be completed within eight months at an estimated cost of 63 million euros, Petsas told a news briefing.

The 7.7 mile-long fence was built eight years ago to stop migrants from crossing into Greece. It will be extended in areas indicated by Greek police and the army, Petsas said without elaborating. In March, he said it would be extended to 25 miles.

Tensions between NATO allies Greece and Turkey, who disagree over where their continental shelves begin and end, have recently escalated further over hydrocarbon resources in the eastern Mediterranean region.

By Renee Maltezou
Tom Thrasher Toms reputation, industry knowledge, and proficiency are tremendous assets for our teams and clients. I know Tom will make a positive impact on workforce development and other key economic drivers within the Florida marketplace. - Heidi DeBenedetti, senior vice president

Gilbane Building Company is pleased to welcome Tom Thrasher as the senior vice president of the Florida business unit. As a veteran industry professional, he brings over 27 years of experience to Gilbane including extensive and recent work in Florida over the past seven years. Toms knowledge includes a wide variety of market sectors with expertise in design, construction, project management, and executive leadership. Mr. Thrasher will be responsible for Floridas business strategy, operations and sales growth to continue positioning Gilbane as a top provider of construction facility-related services while building long-term relationships with clients in the public and private sectors. Known for his charismatic personality, caring and encouraging nature, he brings creative solutions infused with positive energy and success-oriented thinking to his teams.

When asked what brought him to Gilbane, Tom replied For me, its about cultivating the best people who will deliver consistent market-leading results that build necessary long-term client relationships which I see at Gilbane. As a 150-year-old company, I am excited to have the opportunity to strategically grow the Florida business unit and align our Vision 2025 plan to ensure Gilbanes legacy.

Tom began his career with a degree from Purdue University in Construction Engineering and Management. He has been a committee member, at a national level, developing project management manuals and procedures, quality control programs, and innovative safety, LEAN, and KLI (Key Leading Indicator) practices. His commitment to working smarter, not harder can be seen in his daily pursuit of increasing efficiencies for higher team satisfaction and performance.

The scope of expertise that Tom brings is ideal for our growing Florida market, says Heidi DeBenedetti, senior vice president of the southeast division. Toms reputation, industry knowledge, and proficiency are tremendous assets for our teams and clients. I know Tom will make a positive impact on workforce development and other key economic drivers within the Florida marketplace.

About Gilbane Building Company

Gilbane provides a full slate of construction and facilities-related services  from pre-construction planning and integrated consulting capabilities to comprehensive construction management, general contracting, design-build and facility management services  for clients across various markets. Founded in 1870 and still a privately held, family-owned company, Gilbane has 50 office locations worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.gilbaneco.com.
Union defence minister Rajnath Singh Monday reviewed the progress of Uttar Pradesh Defence Corridor and directed completion of all works within the stipulated time, a statement issued here said. The Defence Minister told the video conference review meeting that a cabinet note on a new policy for the defence production is ready and will be released in September.

Reviewing the progress of implementation of the MoUs signed for the Defence Corridor, he asked the state government to remain in continued contact with investors and take prompt action on their suggestions and resolving their problems, if any.

The defence minister also asked for speeding up the work on land acquisition in Lucknow and Agra.

Apprising about the progress of the Defence Industrial Corridor, states Chief Secretary R K Tiwari said that six nodes have been developed in Aligarh, Agra, Jhansi, Chitrakoot, Kanpur and Lucknow. Tiwari said the state government has assigned 1,461 hectare land for the purpose, of which 1,310 hectare has been acquired, which is over 90 per cent of the assigned land, according to the release. Investments of Rs 3,732 crore have been announced till now and works started on some of them which will be further speeded up, he said. He also said that under the Aligarh node, the entire planning of Detailed Project Report, town planning and power station has been completed.

Additional chief secretary, UP Expressways Industrial Development Authority Avanish Awasthi informed that work has been started ever since the announcement the Defence Industrial Corridor in February 2018.
Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg during a press conference in the Mural Hall at Parliament House on June 11, 2020 in Canberra, Australia (Sam Mooy/Getty Images)

JobKeeper Extension Top of Parliaments Agenda

The extension of JobKeeper beyond its initial six month period to a full year will top Parliaments agenda when it resumes this week; operating via remote video links to accommodate MPs and senators unable to travel to Canberra.

Australia has fought a two-fronted battle against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus: one to protect the peoples health and the other to preserve the nations economy as best as possible.

At $101 billion  this is the single largest economic support package that any Australian government has ever undertaken, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told 2GB radio on Aug. 24.

JobKeeper was introduced to cushion the financial impact of the virus on the hip pockets of businesses.

Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Phillip Lowe told Parliaments economics committee on Aug. 14 the program has done remarkably well to keep Australians in jobs amid the crisis.

Without it and the other economic support measures the Morrison government introduced, Treasury estimates that 700,000 jobs would have been lost.

Opposition Labor leader Anthony Albanese told ABC Radio on Aug. 24 that Labor will not block the governments proposed legislation to extend JobKeeper.

Were not about blocking and having no [JobKeeper] support. Weve been like that the whole way through, Albanese said. What Labor will do is point out some of the weaknesses in the system, he added, such as changes to superannuation.

Finance Minister Sen. Mathias Cormann is focused on passing the legislation. Thats obviously important to give businesses and working Australians who rely on these payments certainty that the arrangements remain in place, he told reporters.

The legislation would scale back the fortnightly JobKeeper payments from $1500 to $1200 at the end of September, and then down to $1000 from December to March.

At some point, we need to get back into a situation where viable, profitable businesses pay for the wages of their employees out of their income rather than on the basis of taxpayers support, Cormann said.

JobSeeker has temporarily been doubled to a maximum $1100 per fortnight through to September.

The government wants to reduce it to $800 until the end of the year before developing a longer-term plan.
An education app developed by Vietnamese programmers, AskNow seeks to help students to interact with a host of qualified online tutors.

The app is a startup project initiated by the Unify Smart Tech Joint Stock Company that aims to help students nationwide access the best tutors from all over Vietnam, especially those in remote areas who cannot afford private tutoring.

AskNow removes all limitations of online learning.

In two months since its release, thousands of students have downloaded the app and registered for the service, benefiting from the knowledge and wisdom of hundreds of qualified tutors and a library of more than 3,000 questions in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and English from grade 1 to grade 12.

"It can be said that AskNow is the new normal for Vietnamese education," Unify Smart Tech said in a release.

The education sector currently has to surmount formidable challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic to ensure that teaching and learning continues unimpeded by such emergencies.

In this context, the application of information technology comes to the fore, opening up new and positive teaching and learning methods like AskNow as students are required to learn from home instead of school for extended periods of time.

Excellent AskNow tutors are highlighted and honored regularly.

The tutor grab

One of the unique features of this app is the one-on-one interaction with online tutors that it arranges, helping students understand a problem clearly and thoroughly in an easy manner.

Whenever parents and students need to solve a homework quiz, just open the app at any time and AskNow will "grab" a tutor within 20 seconds and open an online chat room for them, providing much more flexibility and saving a lot of time compared to conventional teaching methods.

Studies have shown that many students are shy and lack the confidence to raise their hands in the class and ask questions. They are afraid to be at the receiving end of jibes and jeers from their peers and wary of "bothering" the teacher.

"With AskNow, students can feel free to ask whatever they want and be answered by friendly tutors who understand the feelings of the student," Unify Smart Tech said.

"With a team of masterminds, qualified and experienced tutors carefully tested and chosen, users can rest assured that the knowledge delivered is the right and best fit."

Learning amid the Covid-19 pandemic has become safer and more effective, thanks to apps like AskNow.

Parents and students can also choose their favorite tutor after their sessions on AskNow. This is another advantageous feature over other learning forms where students do not have the right to choose the teacher, which can result in difficulties and ineffective teaching methods.

AskNow is not just an education software that meet pandemic conditions, it also creates the habit of active self study among students.

"Every question and answer session is a chance to memorize the lesson being taught. The knowledge thus gained and exchanged stimulates creative thinking," the firm added.
As the United States exceeds 5 million reported coronavirus cases  the worlds first country to do so  epidemiologists have pinpointed what helped to set the country on this path.

Research from the University of Notre Dame estimates that more than 100,000 people were already infected with COVID-19 by early March  when only 1,514 cases and 39 deaths had been officially reported and before a national emergency was declared. The study provides insight into how limited testing and gaps in surveillance during the initial phase of the epidemic resulted in so many cases going undetected.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We werent testing enough, said Alex Perkins, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, an expert in infectious disease epidemiology and population biology and the lead of the study. The number of unobserved infections appears to be due to very low rates of case detection during a critical time, when the epidemic was really starting to take hold in this country. Part of it was the availability of testing, but another huge part was case definitions and the fact that they were overly restrictive early on.

From the study: In early 2020, delays in availability of diagnostic testing for COVID-19 prompted questions about the extent of unobserved community transmission in the United States. Although precision of our estimates is limited, we conclude that many more thousands of people were infected than were reported as cases by the time a national emergency was declared and that fewer than 10% of locally acquired, symptomatic infections in the United States may have been detected over a period of a month. This gap in surveillance during a critical phase of the epidemic resulted in a large, unobserved reservoir of infection in the United States by early March.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States was reported in January. Early guidance on identifying possible infection included respiratory symptoms, and travel to Wuhan, China  where an outbreak occurred in December 2019.

While we were focusing on people coming back from China, we were ignoring people coming from Europe, and actually quite a bit of the initial seeding of the virus into various parts of the United States came from Italy, Perkins said.

First State

While awareness and concern over COVID-19 grew from January to March, it wasnt until Feb. 29 that Washington became the first state to declare a state of emergency  closing schools and restaurants and imposing restrictions on large gatherings. By mid-March several states followed, but a lack of a coordinated national response created a number of variables as each state decided for itself how to react to a rising number of cases.

By focusing their analysis on the January to March timeframe, when little to no action had been taken on a wide scale, Perkins and his team were able to incorporate a constant into their models. While other studies provide a sense of how school closures and lockdowns slowed the spread of the virus, looking at transmission for the first three months of the year gave the epidemiologists a clearer picture of how the virus emerged and spread throughout the country so quickly.

It was such a crucial period in terms of how this situation started, said Perkins. We look at the United States now and compare it to other countries like South Korea or Germany, New Zealand or Vietnam, any number of countries who have done a much, much better job controlling transmission. The key differences really come down to the time period we examine in this study. Those countries had adequate surveillance up and running at that time, whereas we show that throughout most of February the United States missed the vast majority of infections that were already out there. This particular timeframe that we focus on is really important for figuring out how we got here in the first place.

Detection Over Time

The study used a simulation model beginning on Jan. 1, using data reported by Johns Hopkins University on confirmed cases and deaths, accounting for asymptomatic infections, case fatality rates and local transmission. Perkins and his team first generated an estimate of total infections in the U.S. through March 12. The team then factored in how detection of symptomatic infections changed over time and estimated the number of unobserved infections during this time.

A significant aspect of the analysis is the models incorporation of many uncertainties that played out in the early days of the epidemic in the U.S., which Perkins said speaks to the inherent nature of a novel and emerging infectious disease. The number of unobserved and unreported infections also speaks to how critical containment strategies are when battling infectious diseases.

I think the fact that there were so many infections by the second half of February speaks to the importance of and what we could have done in terms of containment, said Perkins. If you think about Ebola or SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) or other emerging infectious diseases, there have been cases that show up in the U.S. or other countries where officials move quickly to get ahead of them. They isolate those people, they do contact tracing  and transmission is extinguished. I think a lot of us were hoping that would be the situation with this disease. By the time we got to February, the problem had grown so big, containing the virus wasnt possible.

The potential for misdiagnosis and the limitations of surveillance are huge issues across infectious diseases, especially emerging infectious diseases, he added. As illustrated in the COVID-19 study, while public health officials must work quickly to understand how a new virus functions, without appropriate testing or coordinated response strategies the risk grows for infections to go unreported, he said.

Perkins is an affiliated member of Notre Dames Eck Institute for Global Health and Environmental Change Initiative. Co-leads of the study include Sean M. Cavany and Sean M. Moore, and co-authors include Anita Lerch, Rachel J. Oidtman and Marya Poterek, all at Notre Dame.

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation through a Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant.

Study: Estimating unobserved SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States

Topics COVID-19 USA
The Clane Local History Group journal, Coiseanna, will now be given out free at its usual outlets, the group has decided.

The journal, which sold for 5 over recent years, was due to be launched in April but the launch was suspended and a September date was proposed.

The group has, however, opted to abandon its person-to-person launch, and give the journal away free during National Heritage Week.

It will be available at the Roman Catholic Parish Office on Main Street, Hughes Pharmacy, Marrons Pharmacy, Bob and Kates, Londis supermarket in Main Street and Givens Opticians.

The group has been grant aided by Kildare County Council and the grant has provided half the cost of the production.

The ninth edition contains a host of interesting articles from a variety of sources, pulled together by the editorial committee of Brendan Cullen, Larry Breen and Jim Heffernan.

Designed and laid out by Jim Heffernan, the front cover features a cover of the motte near Alexandra Bridge, information on which is provided in Tony McEvoys article, The Name of Clane and Related Matters.

He discusses various sources for the name of the town and how he was alerted by a phone call from the late historian, Con Costello, in the 1980s, to potential damage to the motte.

Con, who was at the time in Waterford, had received calls from people fearful that the ancient motte was being damaged by a JCB.

An article by the late Pat Given, A Short History of Clane, also looks at the towns origin and how it was likely to have been a river point between two of Irelands ancient centres of power, Tara and Naas.

Brendan Cullen writes a piece about The Hill of Tara, an area related to this route.

Also related is an detailed article by Lorcan Harney, called Ancient Times, Long Forgotten: Unearthing the Prehistoric Archaeology of Clane, in which he tells, among other things, of the discovery of remains from the Great Irish Elk (a form of deer) in a field below Rathcoffey Castle.

The article, once again, highlights what can be found when areas are disturbed for building purposes and how Tony McEvoy found, or rather rescued a Neolithic (4,000 to 2,500 BC) pottery bowl and a lignite bracelet during the development of the Loughbollard estate in 1971.

It contains a very useful appendix or list of the prehistoric monuments and artefacts in Clane.

John ODea, a former manager of the farm, writes on The History of Clongowes Wood College Farm, which bought the Castle and 219 acres for 16,000 (1.3 million in current money) from Michael Wogan Browne.

He outlines details of its produce, including prize cattle, and details of the many local people who worked on the farm.

In the 1930s, a Fr Finucane was in charge of the farm and he established a top class pedigree Shorthorn herd.

John wrote about how the Raheen Wood, which had native trees of beech, oak and larch, was cut down for firewood during World War 11 when supplies of coal stopped coming from the UK.

He told how the college owned 200 acres near Rathcoffey Castle, which for some years from 1976, was rented to people in Farringtons. It was then rented to Ray Coyle (Mr Tayto) for growing potatoes and grain before being sold.

Jim Heffernan takes us to a different world with an article, From Riches to Rags: the life and times of Horace de Vere Cole, a man born to wealth and privilege, whose life mirrored the decline of the ascendancy class in the years around World War 1.

Horaces grandfather had become wealthy by cornering (virtually dominating) the market in quinine.

His mother inherited wealth from Galway.

Horaces sister married the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.

Described as a spectacular and often cruel prankster, one hoax he was involved in was selling the throne of Croatia, posing as a Croatian minister.

He managed to lose a lot of his investment and hit upon relatively hard times.

When he died in France in February 1936, his daughter, Valerie, was brought to live with her aunt at 11 Downing Street.

Kevin Kenny writes about the explorer, Kildare-born Ernest Shackleton and Jim Heffernan writes about The Theft of the Irish Crown Jewels, allegedly by Ernests brother, Frank, and another man.

It involved a none too happy King Edward VII and Lord Walter Fitzgerald of the Kildare Archaeological Society, among many others.

Andrew Tierney has a piece about The Georgian Castle at Clongowes while Ciaran Reilly writes about Richard Thomas Wolfe (1794-1855) of Baronrath, Clan in A Clane connection with Robben Island, South Africa.

He tells how Wolfe was appointed British Commandant of Robben Island in 1834.

The island, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, is where one of the worlds most famous prisoners, No 46664  Nelson Mandela  was held.

Liam Kenny writes about Kildare County Council and the War of Independence in which he discusses, not so much the military element of that work, but the conflict between the newly elected nationalist councils and the authorities at the time.

The RIC, the forerunners to An Garda Siochana, had raided the courthouse and the Councils minute book.

He outlined how the British administration and the new council fought essentially over who controlled the money and how a special committee of the Council made arrangements for keeping the Council money out of British funds. They were so secret that they could not be detailed in the minutes of the council.

But it was not all hidden minute books. Some new council members were on the run having changed their council seats for guns.

Horses are not left out of this journal edition.

Kim Mullahey and Eogan Corry provide a History of Polo in County Kildare, telling how the sport had reached its peak before World War 1, but declined a lot following the war. They refer to the split in the sport in recent years and to the uncertainty over its future.

Stan OReilly writes about Folklore and Holy Wells in Kildare.

He refers to the great belief in the Banshee or female spirit notifying us of forthcoming death or how she is said to follow certain families with an O or a Mac in their name. In Kildare she is mainly known as Badbh.

He also writes about the culture and belief surrounding Kildares Holy Wells, about which there about a dozen.

Leinster Leader journalist, Henry Bauress, writes about the conditions in the Kildare turf work camps in the 1940s and uses Cabinet papers and documents from the National Archives to outline how the Government found it difficult to recruit much-needed labour to drain box and harvest turf for a Dublin and Irish market which was relatively quickly deprived of coal supplies from the UK during the World War 11 years.

The article, Weak Tea, Bread, Bad Spuds and Bog Workers, shows how, almost a hundred years after the potato blight related 1845 famine, weak tea and bad potatoes blighted the comfort of turf workers as the Government threatened to cut off the dole to those who refused to work on the bogs.

The writer also examines what was done to resolve the situation.
Land border pact shows China, Vietnam can 'solve maritime issues without external intervention'

Global Times

By Yang Sheng and Chen Qingqing Source: Global Times Published: 2020/8/23 22:16:52

China and Vietnam celebrated the 20th anniversary of delimitation their territorial boundaries, a historic border land treaty between the two countries which sends a clear message that neighboring countries can solve disputes without being influenced by external forces, as the US has recently increased the provocation in the South China Sea, Chinese experts said.

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh attended an event in Dongxing, South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region that commemorated the 20th anniversary of the demarcation of the China-Vietnam land boundary and 10th anniversary of setting up pillars to demarcate the border on Sunday.

The two foreign ministers inspected the boundary pillars and traced in red ink over characters printed on each county's first boundary stone, and agreed to promote the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership between China and Vietnam to a new level.

We must learn from the successful practice of dealing with land borders to resolve maritime issues at an early date, Wang said at the ceremony on Sunday.

China and Vietnam have accumulated valuable experience in delimiting the land boundary and completing the demarcation of the Beibu Gulf, he said, noting that the two countries are fully capable and have the wisdom to continue negotiations and consultations to further resolve maritime issues, the Chinese Foreign Minister said.

The two sides must focus on the overall situation of bilateral relations and the needs of long-term cooperation, actively carry out dialogue and consultation, find a basic and long-term solution acceptable to both sides, and jointly maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea, Wang noted.

The ceremony was the second meeting between Wang and Pham inside a month after the 12th Meeting of the China-Vietnam Steering Committee for Bilateral Cooperation which was held on July 21 via videoconference. The conference is widely believed to have sent a clear signal to Vietnam that it should avoid miscalculations with China on the South China Sea issue.

The anniversary celebration between China and Vietnam comes amid rising tension in the South China Sea, especially after the US made a rare move of sending two aircraft carriers to the region recently.

The controversial maneuver made waves and forced Southeast Asian countries to make a choice between China and the US, according to some experts. However, the past history of resolving border matters shows that countries in the region can solve their own disputes by not being interfered with by external forces, Chinese experts noted.

Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Sunday that "the experience and wisdom that China and Vietnam have to solve the dispute on land can also inspire and guide not only the two sides but also other countries in the region to solve their disputes in the South China Sea."

Xu Liping, director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Sunday that the celebration delivers a clear signal to the world that China and Vietnam are able to solve border disputes through the bilateral model and that the sovereignty dispute in the South China Sea will not affect overall relations and cooperation between the two countries.

"When China and Vietnam negotiated to solve the territorial dispute on land, there was no interference from any other country and the two sides solved the problem based on their own interests after the border military conflicts in the late 1970s and the 1980s, so this is proof that without external and non-regional intervention, China can solve disputes with its neighbors successfully," Li said.

China and Vietnam signed the landmark Land Boundary Treaty in December 1999 and the two sides exchanged instruments of ratification on the treaty which took effect on July 6 in 2000, the Xinhua News Agency reported. With the signing of the treaty, all outstanding issues relating to the land border were resolved, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

"The solution of the land dispute between China and Vietnam 20 years ago has proved that China and its neighbors can solve the problem without any external intervention. The external forces outside the region, especially the US and its allies, that are trying to interfere in the regional issue will only make the situation get more complicated and too difficult to solve," Xu noted.

Chinese experts have warned Vietnam not to fall into a US trap as Washington only wants to use the disputes between China and Vietnam to incite conflicts and create chaos and instability. It wants to use regional countries to contain China without any cost to itself.

"Anyone who can understand the basic facts of international relations can discern that the US is just using those countries to serve its Indo-Pacific strategy to contain China, and it wants to see conflict more than cooperation in the region," Li said.

During the 12th Meeting of the China-Vietnam Steering Committee for Bilateral Cooperation in July, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, for the first time since 2006, harshly criticized extremist forces in the US that have provoked ideological disputes and coerced countries to pick sides in an attempt to bring back the notorious McCarthy era.

Wang said that as both China and Vietnam are socialist countries led by communist parties, upholding the socialist system conforms with the common interests of the two countries.

The situation of the South China Sea has been improving in the past years. China and other littoral countries have maintained dialogue and communication through consultation mechanisms on maritime affairs. The COC consultations are proceeding smoothly and speedily, with the second reading of the text already under way, and China and ASEAN members have agreed to conclude the COC at an early date, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on the sidelines of the 13th National People's Congress on May 25.

But the US government has not given up stirring up the tension by carefully deploying and orienting its steps in the region. In mid-July US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that most of China's maritime claims in the South China Sea are "completely unlawful," and he accused China of "bullying" Southeast Asian countries. Analysts warned that the US will stir up more troubles, incite more confrontations in the region and engage in more radical and dangerous moves in stirring up military conflicts with China.

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Deborah Doyle is a survivor of sexual abuse. For years she struggled with fears of her body and pain around sexual intimacy. Now, she recalls her history of bodily trauma and explains how pornography has helped her to heal.

"I couldn't look at my own vagina without fainting," says the 38-year-old mother-of-one. "When my friends would talk about theirs, I would feel queasy; I would Google pictures and it would make me feel sick. But in the porn environment, with sexual feelings built up, it became less about biology. It started to be about romance, or pleasure."

Deborah was 12 years old when issues around her body began to emerge. "We were doing sex education in primary school, and I remember squirming in my chair, crossing my legs - I was really nervous and jittery looking at diagrams of the female anatomy. I was thinking, 'What is wrong with me?' With boys then, I would never let them touch me. I was always covered up, and I wouldn't even let friends hug me."

At 16, Deborah attempted to have intercourse with a boyfriend and recalls it as "excruciating".

"Any time a guy would put his hand down there, it would feel like sharp knives," she says.

"I went to the doctor and she knew my background. She said there was nothing physically wrong me: it was mental. She told me I had vaginism and that it could be related to the abuse."

"Vaginism" or "vaginismus" is when the muscles around the vagina tighten involuntarily whenever there is an attempt to penetrate it.

Symptoms vary from woman to woman and it can make sexual intercourse painful or impossible.

"From 16 onwards, I had opportunities to be with lovely guys," says Deborah, "and it just wouldn't happen. Friends were having relationships; some of them were having children. I remember sitting in a room with four girls, all in their 20s, thinking, 'They're so normal, I can't even get anything inside me.'"

Getting Help

Deborah struggled to get help for her condition, finding the process both costly and daunting. "I went to a clinic in Dublin," she says. "I had to pay for the transport to Dublin and was only 20 years old and had no income. I was too young to handle it; I wasn't ready for it.

"I remember I was given a book with different pictures of vaginas and I started to feel dizzy, and fainted. It was so alien to me. This part of my body was this thing that gave me pain. I knew it was supposed to bring me joy, but all I was getting was discomfort and pain."

In later years, Deborah managed to have intercourse and even became pregnant, but still could not go near her own body, or form any kind of positive association with her own anatomy.

She visited a counsellor again in Wexford, but found it difficult to pay for continuous private therapy. "I went to see a counsellor for depression and then, when I told her my backstory, she said she was actually qualified as a sex therapist. I was meant to go back to her but she was 60 per consultation."

Then last year, a friend of Deborah's suggested she take her recovery into her own hands and look to pornography. "At first I thought, 'Oh God, no! How could that help me?' But it planted a seed in my head. I was so angry - just because of something that happened when I was younger, I had been set up for life. I thought, 'I've had enough. OK, I'm going to begin looking.'"

Deborah began with female-only pornography at first, before considering anything involving penetration. "The very first porn clip I looked at was just two women, wearing jeans; they were kissing and touching. That was enough to begin with. The next step was to try a small vibrator. The counsellor in Wexford had explained that a person can make new neural pathways in the brain. I thought, 'This might normalise my vagina for me.' So I said I'd try a little bit every day."

Eventually, Deborah worked her way up to engaging with the female anatomy fully. "It took me a very long time to look at vaginas. That was a massive deal. I would get to a point and think, 'Ugh, switch it off - I'm not ready yet!' But the more I was looking at the videos, and trying the vibrator, the braver I felt.

"Then I found these beautiful sex videos of a man and his wife. He would whisper in her ear. There would be storylines and scenarios. I worked on it; I set aside time every night. I was like, 'Deborah, put in this work for you.' Every single day I was working on myself and the more I watched, the more I started to enjoy it."

The Expert View

Sex and relationships therapist Natalya Price says that Deborah's experience is not unusual. "It is common for a person to experience vaginismus after sexual abuse," she says. "Following abuse, therapists will begin to work with a person on understanding the trauma, but the sexual piece is often the last part to be addressed: getting the person to enjoy sex and enjoy their own body."

Natalya says she understands how pornography helped in Deborah's case. "I can see why sexual imagery helped this woman. She was very careful choosing what was safe for her, and she began with gentle interactions, without a male present.

"She eased herself into observing other people's bodies, and she did a big job of normalising her own body, how genitals look and the fact that these can be sources of pleasure. Porn can be educational in this way. It can be normalising."

However, Natalya would not necessarily recommend this route of therapy to other people. "This is a specific case," she says. "I wouldn't be recommending to people to explore porn. Porn is very visual; it's also about fantasy. A lot of things you see or stumble on, you might not be ready for, or you might think this is what real sex looks like. We need to be ready to look at porn."

Natalya believes erotica may be a more appropriate avenue for a person to explore their own body. "Erotica allows space to visualise things for yourself," she says. "You're not given an exact image, you're given a description, so in some ways it might be safer."

Overall, Natalya feels every individual case needs guidance, and sex therapy is the best course of action. "I would definitely say to a person to have at least one consultation with a sex therapist. If you can't afford therapy for a long time, sometimes just a conversation can be really useful. With some clients, I can give them resources that I know are going to be safe for them to explore. Feeling safe in your body is so important and that's where therapy comes in. Everybody's situation is so unique and different. Yes, for this woman, I can see how it worked, but I wouldn't be recommending it for everyone."

A year on from her foray into porn, Deborah is now proud of how she has normalised her own body. "Now I can sit there, I can open myself a little and have a look without fainting. This time last year, I would never have dreamed of doing that. That normalisation - that's the point I never thought I would get to. It has normalised my vagina as a body part, as an arm or as a leg, just as a vagina should be normalised."

Deborah would like to see these issues discussed more, so no one has to feel the shame she felt about her own body. "I have felt enough shame about my vagina and about my body. I am no longer feeling shame about what I am.

"I would love to see more people talking about this. Why do you have to figure things out for yourself?

!Why are there not talks about this? Why is there shame? I'm not sweeping anything under the carpet anymore - I'm sick of it. It's time to start talking about sexual abuse."

For more information on vaginismus, visit hse.ie/eng/health/az/v/vaginismus/treating-vaginismus.html

HELP LINES

To avail of psychological support for sexual abuse, you can contact the HSE National Counselling Service (NCS), a confidential counselling and psychotherapy service available free of charge in all regions of the country.

You may refer yourself or be referred by a health professional. Visit hse.ie/eng/services/list/4/mental-health-services/national-counselling-service. The 24 Hour Rape Crisis Helpline is 1800 77 88 88.
Actor Janhvi Kapoor has faced incessant trolling ever since she made her debut but she says she cant let it make her bitter. Janhvi says that the constant criticism keeps her on her toes to perform better each time.

Speaking to Bollywood Hungama, Janhvi said she is being trolled ever since she made her debut with Dhadak in 2018. I dont allow myself to get bitter about it. When my first film came I even got comments like...good that your mother is not around to see thisI cant allow myself to get bitter or hurt. Id rather see the criticism as an opportunity to better myself. I would rather live in a bubble where everything is okay and then try to improve myself, she said.

Janhvis mother, legendary actor Sridevi died in February, 2018, just a few months before Dhadaks release. While she could not watch the entire film, filmmaker Karan Johar had shown her snippets of Janhvis work.

Also see | Khaali Peeli teaser: Ishaan Khatter and Ananya Panday are on the run in this action-packed thriller, watch

Janhvi latest release was Netflixs Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl. Though the film has been embroiled in controversy, critics appreciated Jahnvis performance in the film. Reading some reviews I had tears in my eyes. I didnt realize how much this acceptance would mean to me. We all say it is enough to work hard and that is enough of a reward. But we all need the audiences acceptance, she said. Janhvi added that if Sridevi were alive, she would have sent the positive reviews to all her relatives. However, her father Boney Kapoor has taken up that job now.

Gunjan Saxena is based on the life of retired flight lieutenant Gunjan Saxena, who was the first woman to fly during combat during the 1999 Kargil War. However, Gunjan Saxenas colleagues have challenged that fact, saying that Gunjan wasnt the first or the only woman to fly to Kargil at the time.

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Tests on Alexei Navalny indicate that the Russian anti-corruption campaigner was poisoned and he may suffer long-term damage to his nervous system, according to the German hospital that's treating him.

Navalny is in serious, but stable condition, according to a statement Monday from Berlin's Charite hospital. He was evacuated from Russia on Saturday and has been in a medically-induced coma since Thursday after falling ill on a plane returning to Moscow from Tomsk.

Doctors in Berlin found evidence of poisoning through a substance related to cholinesterase inhibitors, Charite said. The specific substance wasn't immediately known and will require further testing to be identified, the clinic said, adding that the patient is being treated with the antidote atropine and his prognosis remains unclear.

Ralf Stahlmann, a retired professor of pharmacology and toxicology in Berlin, said the strongest of the substances in the cholinesterase inhibitors group -- which can be used to treat dementia and Alzheimer's -- are "military-grade warfare agents" and that the poison can be transmitted through food or drink, or simply by touch.

Navalny, 44, was in Tomsk meeting local activists and opposition candidates ahead of regional elections set for September. His sudden illness raised suspicions after a string of Kremlin critics fell victim to poisoning in recent years.

Dissident security service officer Alexander Litvinenko died in London after consuming tea laced with polonium in 2006 and ex-spy Sergei Skripal survived an assassination attempt with a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok, in England's Salisbury in 2018. U.K. officials linked both attacks to the Russian state.

Navalny ally Leonid Volkov wrote on Twitter that "the best known cholinesterase inhibitor in the world is called 'Novichok,'" referring to the agent used in the Skripal attack.

Russian doctors said Navalny was not poisoned but suffered from a metabolic disorder. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the Charite statement Monday.

Navalny became Russia's most prominent opposition figure during 2011-2012 protests against Putin's return to the Kremlin for a third term following four years as prime minister. He was under close surveillance by Russian security services during his visit to the Siberian city just before he fell ill, Russia's Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, citing security sources.

"Navalny was poisoned with a substance from the cholinesterase group," Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol wrote on Twitter Monday. "That's not something you can make easily. It clearly points to the security services."

Germany earlier reiterated its demand that Russian authorities provide a full explanation for what happened to Navalny. Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said that this must be "down to the very last detail with full transparency."

"The suspicion is that somebody severely poisoned Mr. Navalny, of which unfortunately there are one or two other examples in recent Russian history," Seibert said at a regular news conference in Berlin. "That's why the world is taking this suspicion very seriously."

Additionally, Merkel has confronted Putin over the August 2019 murder of a political opponent in Berlin, a killing that German officials blame on the Russian government.

A German government spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Charite statement.

John Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to Russia, said Monday that the case would likely come up in talks this week in Moscow between Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun and Russian officials.

"We're very concerned by the reports that Navalny may have been poisoned, and we're closely watching those developments," Sullivan told reporters on a conference call. "If Navalny has been poisoned, that would represent a very significant development for the United States."
Leading New York City Police Department (NYPD) officials, including Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, have extensive misconduct allegations against them, according to years of records made public by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). Shea has overseen the NYPD since being appointed by Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio in November 2019.

NYCLU, the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was able to publish data from the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) after a federal judge ruled, per a recent change in state law, such data could be made public.

The CCRB data published by NYCLU includes 323,911 complaints against 81,550 NYPD officers stretching back to 1985. It does not include complaints which are currently being investigated. According to the CCRB, most years only 30-40 percent of complaints are fully investigated, with most stymied due to witness noncooperation or inability to identify the officer.

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea (center) speaks at City Hall event announcing his appointment with then-Commissioner James ONeill (right) and Mayor Bill de Blasio (left), Nov. 4, 2019. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

If investigated, the allegations are either substantiated (the incident happened and constituted misconduct) or unsubstantiated (the CCRB could not prove that the incident happened, or that it constituted misconduct), or the officer is exonerated (the CCRB found that the incident happened but did not constitute misconduct).

While representing only the tip of the iceberg in terms of police misconduct, several current and former NYPD top officials appear in the NYCLU database.

According to the nonprofit New York City news site The City, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea got cited for what appears to be a wrongful vehicle search in 2003, during the era of stop and frisk, when he was a captain in The Bronx.

The incident is a microcosm of the indignities and abuse working-class New Yorkers suffer at the hands of the police. The CCRB substantiated that the 2003 incident involved misconduct. Shea was found to have wrongfully pulled over the vehicle before illegally searching it and unlawfully frisking at least one passenger. The disciplinary result of Sheas illegal actions was that he was given instructions.

Three other complaints against Shea resulted in him being exonerated, meaning that the CCRBan independent body whose board members are appointed by the New York City Council, the mayor and the police commissionerfound that the incident occurred but that the officer conduct did not violate procedure or the law.

Sheas predecessor, James ONeill, who was police commissioner from September 2016 until November 2019, also appears in NYCLUs database. The CCRB substantiated charges that then-Lieutenant ONeill unlawfully searched and detained someone, along with unspecified abuse charges, during a 1997 incident. The CCRB could not substantiate allegations of ONeill threatening to use and actually using force improperly, as well as using nasty words.

The City reports, Theres no record indicating ONeill received any form of discipline stemming from the substantiated charges. ONeill was exonerated of three other allegations in 1997, 1999 and 2002, including regarding illegal search of premises and damage of complainant property.

Other top NYPD officials appear in the NYCLU database. The highest-ranking uniformed cop, Chief of Department Terence Monahan, was named in six abuse of authority complaints, at least five of them during the 2004 Republican National Convention [RNC], which saw clashes between protesters and police, according to the New York Post. While none of the allegations against Monahan were substantiated, protesters at the RNC were awarded a $200,000 settlement for the abuse they received at the hands of the NYPD.

Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison has 21 complaints against him, of which an abuse of authority complaint was substantiated. Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael LiPetri has 25 complaints against him, of which three have been substantiated.

That abusive cops rise to the top in the NYPD comes as no surprise to most New Yorkers. However, summary data put forward by the CCRB, as well as analyses of the NYCLU database, hint at the much broader culture of brutalization within the NYPD.

The CCRB received 7,663 complaints (each complaint can contain multiple allegations) in 2006, with a general decline over the following decade, in part due to the official discontinuation of stop-and-frisk, which a judge found to constitute unconstitutional searches and be racially discriminatory in application. However, from 2016 through 2019 complaints increased annually, reaching 4,962 in 2019.

A plurality of complaints originated in incidents which did not result in arrests or even a summons, and a plurality occur when a police officer suspects a crimethat is, is not called to the scene of a reported crimeexpressing the arbitrary character of police violence and other heavy-handedness meted out to the citys working class residents.

ProPublica, which separately published a subset of the CCRB data, found that of the 36,000 current NYPD officers, 3,900, or 11 percent, have had at least one substantiated allegation.

A small fraction of complaints, less than 3 percent, led to the officer receiving punishment, with only 12 officers dismissed, according to the NYCLU. For those cases investigated and substantiated, the NYPD decides internally how to act on the CCRBs findings, with Police Commissioner Sheahimself, as revealed by the data, an abusive copmaking the final decision.

Several categories of allegations within the NYCLU database are revealing:

Beating: 4,215 allegations, of which 314 were substantiated. Except for two entries of No Disciplinary Action, no NYPD findings or punishments are listed in the database.

4,215 allegations, of which 314 were substantiated. Except for two entries of No Disciplinary Action, no NYPD findings or punishments are listed in the database. Chokehold: 1,746 allegations, of which 84 were substantiated. The NYPD found the officer not guilty in about half of the substantiated cases.

1,746 allegations, of which 84 were substantiated. The NYPD found the officer not guilty in about half of the substantiated cases. Gun firing: 423 allegations, of which 16 were substantiated. About half of the NYPD findings and punishments are not listed.

423 allegations, of which 16 were substantiated. About half of the NYPD findings and punishments are not listed. Refusal to obtain medical treatment: 1,885 allegations, of which 132 were substantiated, mostly resulting in training and command discipline. Officer Damian Marcaida was fired in 1999 for this infraction.

1,885 allegations, of which 132 were substantiated, mostly resulting in training and command discipline. Officer Damian Marcaida was fired in 1999 for this infraction. Vehicle search: 5,575 allegations, of which 753 were substantiated, mostly resulting in command discipline, training or instructions.

5,575 allegations, of which 753 were substantiated, mostly resulting in command discipline, training or instructions. Offensive racial language, e.g., slurs: 2,781 allegations, of which 75 were substantiated by the CCRB. About half of these, despite being substantiated by the CCRB, had their charges dismissed by the NYPD, or were found not guilty. Many of those found guilty received instructions or written warnings, with very few substantiated claims resulting in penalties such as the loss of vacation days.

2,781 allegations, of which 75 were substantiated by the CCRB. About half of these, despite being substantiated by the CCRB, had their charges dismissed by the NYPD, or were found not guilty. Many of those found guilty received instructions or written warnings, with very few substantiated claims resulting in penalties such as the loss of vacation days. Offensive language against black people (separate from the above category): 2,970 allegations, of which 200 were substantiated, with no NYPD findings or punishments listed beyond a single finding of not guilty.

There were also three allegations of a sexually motivated strip search, one of a sexually motivated frisk and 32 of a sexual/romantic proposition. Offenses include multiple categories for police officers using items like flashlights and radios as clubs, as well as for offensive language targeting complainants race, ethnicity, gender, disability or religion. There are also eight threats related to immigration status. Such bigoted and backward elements find a ready home in police departments across the United States.

That so few police officers are held accountable for their actions is by design. The CCRB functions as a fig leaf for the NYPD. Its board is appointed by the political representatives of the same ruling class which the NYPD defends, along with appointees from the NYPD commissioner himself. It has limited powers and can only make recommendations to the NYPD, which often lets officers off the hook entirely in its own process or gives them merely a slap on the wrist for serious violations of democratic rights.

Even the limited oversight the board provides is anathema to the police and their fascistic unions, which sued to keep the NYCLU database under wraps after the organization obtained it through a Freedom of Information request.

Hundreds of cases being investigated by the CCRB have been delayed since March because officers refused to attend remote hearings necessitated by the pandemic, reportedly over concerns that such testimony would be leaked. It was only in early August that the department ordered officers to attend hearings.
A Delhi court on Monday framed charges against 36 foreigners, who had attended the Tablighi Jamaat congregation at Nizamuddin Markaz in south Delhi in March, for negligence and not maintaining social distancing norms.

It, however, dropped the charges of visa violations while observing that there is not an iota of evidence to suggest that they had in any manner professed or propagated the principles

and doctrines of the Tablighi Jamaat.

In separate orders, the court also discharged eight foreigners, who were charge-sheeted for visa violations and other offences for attending the Tablighi Jamaat congregation, while stating that the entire charge sheet and documents neither shows their presence or participation in the markaz during the relevant period.

This is the first group of people who will walk free to their countries without any charges. Earlier, 911 foreigners were allowed by the trial court to be deported to their native countries under the provisions of plea bargaining, while another 44 foreigners had chosen to stand trial. One Malaysian was found to be juvenile and his case was transferred to Juvenile Justice Board .

Two each from Indonesia and Thailand and one person each from Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Kazakhstan and Jordan were set free without standing trial.

The city police had filed 53 charge sheets against 956 other foreign nationals belonging to 35 countries for visa violation, not maintaining social distancing norms and other sections of the Epidemic Act and Disaster Management Act.

Chief metropolitan magistrate Gurmohina Kaur, while framing the charges, discharged the accused from the visa violation charges falling under the Foreigners Act. The judge said the statement of the police officers in which they had alleged that the Tablighi Jamaat people had professed and propagated the doctrines of Jamaat, are general ones and do not specifically allege the role of the accused.

They ( police statements) are not putting forth the case of the prosecution as it has not been asserted that the foreigners who had participated in the markaz from March 8 to March 10 had done so for the purpose of professing and propagating the principles and doctrines of the Jamaat.

In fact, there is not an iota of evidence to suggest that the accused had in any manner professed or propagating the doctrines of Jamaat or had indulged in Tablighi work as alleged, the court said.

Kaur also said the charge sheet is silent on this fact and the register taken from markaz merely marks the presence of the Jamaatis.

The court, however, framed charges against them for negligence (269 IPC), disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant (188 IPC) and relevant sections of Epidemic Act and Disaster Management Act.
Following the Google Pixel 5, the Google Pixel 4a 5G renders have just leaked as well. These are CAD-based renders, and have been leaked by @OnLeaks and 91Mobiles.

There are a ton of renders for you to check out in the gallery below the article. The phones design is also shown in a 360-degree video, which is also embedded below.

The Google Pixel 4a 5G renders show a device similar to the Pixel 4a

Now, youll immediately notice that there are minimal changes here compared to the Pixel 4a, as expected. The phone looks almost identical to the Pixel 4a, though there is one notable difference.

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The Google Pixel 4a 5G will include two cameras on the back, while the Pixel 4a includes a single one. Were still not sure if the second camera will be a portrait one, or an ultrawide one.

An LED flash will be a part of that very same camera module, which will be placed in the top-left corner of the phones back. The difference in the camera module is the most notable change here.

The Pixel 4a 5G will also be larger than the Pixel 4a. It will feature a 6.1 or a 6.2-inch display, claims the source. As a reminder, the Pixel 4a comes with a 5.81-inch panel.

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A fingerprint scanner will be placed on the back of this phone as well, same as on the Pixel 4a. The same goes for Googles branding on the back. Its barely visible, but its there.

The phone will be made out of polycarbonate, and it will include a flat display

The phone will be made out of polycarbonate (plastic), the same as its sibling. The bezels will be minimal, and its display will be flat. A display camera hole is included in the top-left corner of the display.

The power / lock button is included on the right-hand side of the device. Above it, youll notice the volume up and down buttons, by the way.

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A Type-C USB port can be found at the bottom of this phone, along with the phones main speaker. The secondary speaker will be placed above the display, the same as on the Pixel 4a.

A 3.5mm headphone jack will be included here as well. It will be placed at the top side of the phone, as expected. The Pixel 4a will support 5G connectivity, as its name suggests.

The source notes that the phone will measure 153.9 x 74 x 8.6mm. That thickness will increase to 9.5mm on the part where the rear camera module is located, by the way. The pre-orders for this phone are expected to kick off in early October, so it will launch either at the end of September, or in early October.
Russia claims success with a second Covid-19 vaccine, EpiVacCorona

After the launch of the worlds first coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V, Russia has announced success with initial human trials of a second vaccine candidate, EpiVacCorona, says an IANS report.

The new Covid-19 vaccine developed by Russia's Vector State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology has been found to be safe in the early trials conducted in humans.

The EpiVacCorona vaccine is different from the first one and trials of the vaccine are expected to be completed in September, this year. The new vaccine produced no side effects in the volunteers who received the jab of the vaccine, Russia's Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Human Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing said.

The agency has said that the vaccine produces an immune response after double administration with the interval of 14-21 days. However, only one volunteer has so far been inoculated twice.

"All inoculated volunteers are feeling well. To date, the first vaccination was administered to 57 volunteers, while 43 received placebo," the agency said.

Announcing the completion of trials of the first vaccine-- Sputnik V, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the vaccine would offer sustainable immunity against the deadly coronavirus or Covid-19.

Russia also recently approved the first Sputnik V vaccine for public use, Large scale trials, and plans for mass vaccination in Russia are also currently underway.

Reports say, Russia is planning a large-scale trial of its Sputnik V vaccine involving 40,000 people.

However, concerns over its efficacy and safety have been raised by experts from all over the world.
Tertiary institutions in the Upper East Region have indicated their readiness to receive continuing students back to school to enable them to complete the academic calendar.

According to some senior administrative staff, they have put in place adequate COVID-19 preventive mechanisms to protect both the students, teaching and non-teaching staff members from contracting the virus.

They gave the assurance when the Ministry of Education (MoE), the Ghana Education Service (GES) partnered Zoomlion Ghana Limited (ZGL) to embark on the second phase of disinfection in tertiary institutions across the country.

The exercise in the Upper East begun on Friday, and it was in line with President Akufo-Addos directive for all tertiary institutions in the country to be disinfected against the virus before reopening on August 24th, 2020.

The first school that saw its open spaces, lecture halls, administration, and other facilities disinfected was Millar Institute for Transdisciplinary and Development Studies, Bolgatanga

Addressing the media on the sidelines of the exercise, Vice President, Academic Affairs, Millar Institute for Transdisciplinary and Development Studies, Paschal B. Atengden, while affirming that his school was ready, noted that the second disinfection exercise would help protect the schools space against the virus.

I am very happy with the government and Zoomlion Ghana Limited partnership to undertake this national exercise. It is a good thing and it will help halt the spread of the virus, he said.

He was also full of praise for the president, especially for including private institutions in the national exercise.

To this end, Mr. Atengden appealed to the central government and GES to include the private schools and institutions in any national exercise that would benefit educational institutions in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic in the country.

Other institutions that also benefited were the Bolgatanga Technical University, St. John Busco's College of Education in Navrongo

At the St John Busco's College of Education, the Estate Manager, John Amoah, was very elated about the exercise.

He also added that the college had put in place all the necessary measures to welcome back the continuing students.

The Deputy Manage, Zoomlion Ghana Limited, Upper East Region, Issaka Abubarka described day one of the exercises as successful.

According to him, his company had already disinfected 5 tertiary institutions in the region.
Video-conferencing company Zoom Video Communications Inc said on Monday it had restored service to its U.S. users after a partial outage left many unable to log in to work meetings or attend school classes remotely.

The San Jose, California-based company has experienced a surge in usage during the coronavirus pandemic, as millions of people turn to it for work meetings, school, social events including weddings and to otherwise stay connected while isolating themselves. Many schools that turned to remote instruction have used Zoom for classes.

Outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed nearly 17,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Zoom earlier in the day.

We have resolved the issue causing users to be unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars. Users are now also able to sign up for paid accounts, upgrade, and manage their service on the Zoom website. We are currently monitoring to ensure that these services are operational," Zoom said on its website.

The company did not provide details on the cause of outage.

Zooms stock has risen more than eight-fold since its initial public offering last year and four-fold so far in 2020, but it was down 2.9% after falling as much as 5.4% in earlier Monday.

Zoom competes with Cisco Systems Incs Webex, Microsoft Corps Teams and Alphabet Incs Google Meet platform for paying customers, particularly enterprises, while offering a free version to customers.

Zoom had 300 million daily meeting participants in April, the latest figures disclosed.

Even as its usage has soared, Zoom has come under fire over privacy and security issues, including incidents of Zoom bombing" in which uninvited users entered and disrupted meetings. It has since rolled out major upgrades, including end-to-end encryption for video calls.

Although a California company, Zoom has big research and development centers in China with hundreds of employees, according to a filing it made to the U.S. government.

For sustained growth to continue, it (Zoom) will have to show investors that it can be relied on to ensure its core customers dont drift towards the likes of Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Ciscos Webex," said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets commentator at Hargreaves Lansdown.

As Zoom fatigue sets in and the pandemic eases, its even more important that the company demonstrates its systems are secure, if its to be seen as a long-term player in this competitive market," Streeter added.

Users took to Twitter to complain about the outage.

Zoom having a world wide outage for the first day of school, so 2020!" Twitter user Anthony Slaughter wrote.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
John Sabraw painting in his studio, in Athens, Ohio in 2018. Credit - Ben SiegelOhio University

Sunday Creek begins around Corning, a small town in southeastern Ohio, before snaking down 27 miles to connect with the Hocking River. Like much of Appalachia, the creeks watershed was historically home to communities of coal miners, but the mines have since closed, leaving only their runoff: nearly 1,000 gal. a minute of water so badly contaminated that Sunday Creek is now home to the worst acid mine drainage (AMD) site in the state. John Sabraw, an Ohio University professor of art who is also interested in sustainability, first noticed the effects of AMD when exploring the area with an environmentalist group in 2003.

John Sabraw deep in acid mine drainage in Bat Gate cave, Sulfur Springs Hollow, Ohio. Ben SiegelOhio University

Discharge and tanks in Corning, Ohio, December 2017. Michelle Shively

As we toured southeastern Ohio, I was struck by local streams that are not only devoid of aquatic life, but are orange, red and brown, as if from a mudslide upstream, recalls Sabraw. From the environmentalists, he came to understand the source of the waters discoloration. The colors were mainly from iron oxidethe same raw material used to make many paint colorsI thought it would be fantastic to use this toxic flow to make paintings.

Sabraws idea inspired not only a line of his paintings but also a collaborative effort between artists, researchers and community organizers to turn Sunday Creeks AMD into paint pigments via an artistically inclined water-treatment facility breaking ground next year. Should the project prove to be a success, its backers at Rural Action, a regional nonprofit, are hoping to replicate it throughout Appalachia, turning the runoff from abandoned mines into art, jobs and clean water.

There are more than 23,000 abandoned mines across the U.S., according to records maintained by the Department of the Interior. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identifies these mines as the main regional source of AMD, a pollutant that contaminates drinking water, disrupts the growth of plants and animals, and corrodes infrastructure like bridges. While the federal government has been attempting to mitigate acid mine drainage since 1977 (by removing the sources of contamination, diverting polluted channels or allowing them to rewild, with funding from the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act), it remains a health and environmental hazard, especially in Appalachia.

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The three states with the highest number of abandoned mine lands and acid mine drainage sites on their state inventories are Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, says Michelle Shively of Rural Action. The next three are Ohio, Virginia and Alabama. (The Appalachian Regional Commission defines Appalachia as extending from southwestern New York to northeastern Mississippi along the Appalachian Mountains.)

Since 1999, Rural Action has been analyzing Sunday Creeks water quality, installing remediation projects and leading educational tours of the area. The creeks greatest AMD hazard is an abandoned underground coal mine in Millfield, Ohio, known as the Truetown Discharge. (The site was named after its former township, Truetown, which has since been incorporated into Millfield.) Mining at this and other such sites unearthed naturally occurring pyrite, which reacts with air and water to produce sulfuric acid and iron oxide. According to Shively, the Truetown Discharge now sends more than 1,000 tons of granular iron oxide into Sunday Creek each year.

Commercial ventures have harvested iron oxide from acid mine discharge before. When heated, iron oxide changes color, from yellow to red to purple, depending on the temperature. Nearly 240,000 tons of it is used in the U.S. each year, much of it imported from China, to produce oil and acrylic paints and to tint everything from cosmetics to concrete. Companies have traditionally pulled the iron oxide from bodies like Sunday Creek by diverting the flow into settling ponds, then evaporating the water. But that does nothing to detoxify the source stream.

Aerial view of the acid mine drainage near Oreton, Ohio in 2018. Ben SiegelOhio University

Rural Action hopes to take a different approach with True Pigments, its water-treatment facility in Millfield, a town of fewer than 400 people through which Sunday Creek runs. Based on the research of another Ohio University professorGuy Riefler, chair of the universitys civil-engineering department and a specialist on AMD treatmentRural Action piloted a smaller facility farther up Sunday Creek at Corning, with a patent-pending process that takes in contaminated water, reduces its acidity, removes iron oxide and returns clean water to the source. The scaled-up facility at Millfield would produce 1,200 tons of iron oxide each year while simultaneously remediating seven miles of waterway.

True Pigments would address only a fraction of the U.S.s iron oxide needs as well as its AMD-polluted streams, but Rural Action doesnt plan on stopping there. It intends to channel profits from the operations iron oxide pigment salesnearly $2 million a year, according to the groups projectionsinto building other water-treatment facilities in the region. That reinvestment, says Brent Means, a hydrologist with the U.S. Department of the Interior, is unique and really forward-thinking. Rural Actions plan would also reduce U.S. imports of iron oxide, thereby cutting carbon emissions as well as reducing demand for operations that mine or artificially synthesize paint pigment. The local benefits would extend beyond ecology to the economy, in an area with only eight other registered businesses.

This project alone will double the annual payroll of the Millfield ZIP code, says Shively.

Construction of True Pigments is set to begin in the spring of 2021, with its planned completion in 2022. Rural Action has already secured $3.5 million from the Ohio department of natural resources and is currently fundraising for the remaining $4.5 million in anticipated construction costs. With the funds from an anonymous gift, the organization has purchased all 48 acres necessary for the facility and its grounds. It is also finalizing a deal with Ohio University to license the AMD treatment process developed by Riefler.

Gamblin Reclaimed Earth Violet and AMD pigment set. John Sabraw

Sabraw, who serves as a research consultant to True Pigments, was the inspiration for using the iron oxide produced by Rieflers process to create paint pigment. The paintings he made with pigment harvested from Sunday Creek are circular compositions that simultaneously evoke alien planets and microscopic cells. Chroma S4 Chimaera, for example, could be a tie-dye Jupiter, while Chroma S4 Blue River resembles an azure fungal growth on rust. Taken together, the paintings suggest a relationship between the universal and the infinitesimal, an interconnectedness Sabraw says captures the significance of AMD.

Everything is intertwined, he says. The streams these pigments come from connect to other streams, rivers and eventually the ocean. This might seem like a local issue, but its notits a global issue.
On Saturday, Rozsa and Aaron Harris will be among some 600 audience members at the Forum for Healthy Minds at Cal State San Marcos.

It will be the third year in a row that the San Marcos couple will attend the free, all-day conference in memory of their son, also named Aaron, who died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 21.

The forum was launched 12 years ago by the Community Alliance for Healthy Minds to provide the community with support, education, resources and stigma-reducing strategies about treating mental illness and suicide prevention.

The Harrises say theyre impressed and grateful for the forums wealth of information for families and individuals in crisis, as well as for educators and health professionals. They just wish theyd discovered these tools before they lost their son.

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It wasnt until after he died that we became educated, said Rozsa, 54. Sometimes I wish I could travel back in time so that maybe the outcome could be different.

Photographs of Aaron, the eldest of the Harrises three children, fill the living room wall of their home. The couple  shes an optician, he runs a mobile personal training business  love talking about him, even when it brings up a few tears.

Aaron was a straight-A student, a gifted musician, a computer wizard and a loving person with many friends. But he was also extremely quiet and rarely shared his pain. After he graduated from San Marcos High School in 2011 and prepared to attend Palomar College, he silently began to struggle with depression.

His parents were stunned when he attempted suicide the first time at age 19. They did everything they knew to help him. He went to counseling and was prescribed antidepressants but eventually stopped taking the drugs because they hurt his stomach.

Fortunately, things went well for Aaron for a couple of years. He thrived at Palomar, performed in the colleges guitar ensemble, made many new friends, got a job at a movie theater and had a steady girlfriend. But when that relationship ended in early 2015, he spiraled downward. On his own, he went back to counseling and back on medication. But it would not be enough.

In the early morning hours of April 17 as his family slept, he drove his car to the center span of the Coronado Bridge, parked and jumped over the side to his death. He didnt leave a note for his family but he texted a goodbye to his ex-girlfriend.

The next morning, his parents went to the Sheriffs Department to report him missing. As soon as they identified themselves to the clerk, a trauma counselor walked in and asked them to sit down. Police had run the cars license plates overnight and IDd the owners.

The Harrises said they were crushed by their loss but they found support in family, friends at the Palomar faculty, who offered the campus theater for Aarons memorial.

But they also had some friends who suddenly disappeared from their lives. Some people felt the Harrises should stop talking about their son after the memorial. Others were uncomfortable with the manner of his death.

I think in order to empathize with someone you have to be able to relate to the experience theyre going through, said Aaron Harris, 52. They dont want to hear about suicide because its too upsetting for them to think about it happening in their lives.

It wasnt until three months after their sons death that the Harrises found kindred spirits at a meeting of Survivors of Suicide Loss. The San Diego organization, known as SOSL, hosts 13 support group meetings a month in communities from Chula Vista to Sun City.

Thats where they met Rex and Connie Kennemer of Rancho Bernardo. They created the Community Alliance for Healthy Minds, and the forum it presents each year, after they lost their 25-year-old son, Todd, to suicide in 2005.

Like the Harrises, the Kennemers struggled to find resources and information on mental illness after their son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder just 11 months before he hanged himself in his Seattle apartment.

Connie Kennemer said the stigma of mental illness keeps many sufferers from coming forward for treatment. Also, the shame of a suicide in the family sometimes causes survivors to avoid sharing their story or seeking help with their grief.

The Harrises were devastated by the loss of their son Aaron, but eager to share within a group of survivors, Kennemer said. They wept openly and often, but quickly shifted into a desire to advocate, speak out, contribute to the cause of breaking the silence surrounding suicide.

Rozsa said the forum and SOSL meetings give them strength because they provide her and her husband with the freedom to process their emotions in a safe environment. Now Rozsa and Connie co-facilitate their SOSL group in Rancho Bernardo and Rozsa is training to become a series speaker.

Rozsas best gift to me is her humor, Connie said. She has a natural ability to draw humor out and into every meeting. She lightens the room with her laughter. Survivors need that.

Aaron said events like the forum and the SOSL group not only help him deal with his grief, they also allow him the chance to give other parents some hope for the future.

The worst meetings are the ones where there are new members and their grief is raw and brand new, he said. I want to tell them, youre not going to be crying every day for the rest of your life. And when you think of them, it wont just be the incident (of their death) but it will be happy memories. And I want to tell them theyre not alone.

This years forum, co-hosted by the California State University Institute for Palliative Care, will offer panel discussions and breakout sessions on mental wellness, recovery and palliative care in a shame-free atmosphere.

San Diego County Chief Medical Officer Nicholas Dr. Nick Yphantides will open the program followed by a screening of the documentary Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope. The film examines how many college-age adults who experienced trauma in childhood carry those memories and the anxiety it creates into their adult years.

For the fifth year in a row, the conference keynote speaker is Baltimore psychiatrist Dr. Mark Komrad, author of the bestselling book You Need Help!: A Step-by-Step Plan to Convince a Loved One to Get Counseling.

One of the breakout sessions will focus on the connection between mental illness and substance abuse disorder. Another, led by CSUSM Palliative Care Department director Dr. Sharon Hamill, will focus on building resiliency for a higher quality life. The program will close with a performance by stand-up comic Andrew Norelli, who has been open about his own mental health issues.

The event will also include a resource fair with more than 40 booths hosted by local community organizations and programs.

Forum for Healthy Minds

When: 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: Cal State San Marcos, 333 S. Twin Oaks Valley Road, San Marcos

Admission: Free (includes lunch with online registration)

Registration: cahmsd.org

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com
BJP leader Jyotiraditya Scindia



on Sunday said that although the Congress's top leadership had offered to make him the deputy chief minister of after the 2018 state polls, when he was still in that party, he had turned down the offer as he decided to work for the people.

He alleged that the had betrayed the people of the state with false promises to come to power.

"The Congress's top leadership had offered me deputy chief minister's post. Instead, I decided to work for the people," the BJP Rajya Sabha member said while addressing his party's three-day long membership drive, which will end here on Monday.

This is for the first time that Scindia has publicly admitted that he was offered this post by the

In March this year, veteran leader Digvijaya Singh had said that Scindia was offered the post of MP deputy chief minister, but Kamal Nath had refused to accept a "chela".

Scindia said, "I understood that Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh will ruin the Congress government in 15 months. The Congress betrayed the people with false promises like waiver of farm loan in 10 days in order to come to power in the state."



"Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi had promised that farm loans of up to to Rs 2 lakh will be waived within 10 days or else the chief minister will be sent back on the eleventh day," he said.

"Congress made false promises to come to the power in the state," he alleged.

Scindia had quit the Congress in March this year and later joined the BJP.

On the Congress's agitation against the BJP's membership drive in Gwalior, Scindia said, "At least they (Congress leaders) came out of their houses to protest against BJP's drive five months after losing the government in MP."



With an eye on the by-elections to 27 assembly constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, especially in Gwalior- Chambal region of the state that accounts for 16 of these seats, the ruling BJP has launched the membership drive here on Saturday.

Twenty-two rebel Congress MLAs in Madhya Pradesh, mostly from the Scindia camp, resigned in March, reducing the 15-month-old dispensation led by Kamal Nath to a minority and paving the way for the BJP to form the government in the state.

These former MLAs had later joined the BJP.

The BJP then sent Scindia to Rajya Sabha, while many of his loyalists got important portfolios in Shivraj Singh Chouhan's cabinet.

Last month, three more Congress MLAs in the state resigned and joined the saffron party, taking their number to 25, while two assembly seats had fallen vacant due to the demise of legislators.

The Congress now has 89 MLAs in the House, while the ruling BJP has 107. The effective strength of the 230-member House has come down to 203 due to the resignations and deaths of legislators.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Joe Biden's campaign said Sunday that the former vice president had not been tested for COVID-19  even as his team carries out 'strict protocols' to mitigate risk.

Biden's deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield, revealed the information nearly a month after the candidate, 77, said he had not been tested.

'He has not had the virus,' she told ABC's 'This week'  initially avoiding a direct question about whether Biden had been tested.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden has not been tested for coronavirus, according to a top aide

She continued: 'We have put in place really strict protocols, as I think all of your journalists who attended our convention in Delaware this week saw. We put in place incredibly strict protocols to ensure that everybody involved who is around Vice President Biden, whose around Senator Harris, is undergoing the appropriate testing.'

Interviewer George Stephanopoulos followed up, again asking if Biden had been tested.

'He has not -- he has not been tested,' she said. 'However, we have put the strictest protocols in place and  and moving forward should he need to be tested, he certainly would be. But he has not been tested yet.'

Deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield at first dodged when asked if Biden had been tested when asked on ABC's 'This Week'

Former Vice President Joe Biden, Democratic presidential nominee, left, and wife Jill Biden wear protective masks while exiting Chase Center during the Democratic National Convention in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., on Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020

Former vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden (L) and Senator from California and Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris greet supporters outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, held virtually amid the novel coronavirus pandemic

Members of the media wear protective masks during the Democratic National Convention at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020

She made her comment after Biden wrapped up his mostly digital convention, where the party nominee interviewed party faithful remotely in a talk show-style format.

When he delivered his convention speech in Wilmington, near Biden's home, there was only a smattering of media in the room. Biden, his wife Jill, and running mate Kamala Harris and her husband then joined outside to watch a fireworks show.

Biden put on a mask for part of the display. Democrats had essentially abandoned the initial plan of holding a full convention in Milwaukee.

President Trump abandoned his plan to have a full convention first in Charlotte, then in Jacksonville. On Monday, GOP delegates meet in person to nominate Trump, in a dramatically scaled-back affair.

Although Bedingfield asserted that Biden has not had the virus, one challenge of COVID-19 is that many people who have the virus are asymptomatic and do not realize they have it.

President Trump is tested frequently (his press secretary said last month he was tested multiple times per day) but Trump soon contradicted her. 'I do probably on average a test every two days, three days, and I don't know of any time I've taken two in one day, but I could see that happening,' Trump said.

Reporters and White House visitors who come in contact with Trump are tested for the coronavirus.
YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. Clashes occurred between the residents of Toria village of Ninotsminda region of Georgia and newcomer Azerbaijanis from Tusheti, ARMENPRESS reports Jnews informs.

The newcomers brought their sheep to pasture in the lands belonging to the local villagers and the locals had to drive the animals out of their lands, after which clashes began. The Ministry of Interior of Georgia has launched an investigation. There are wounded and arrested.

According to a resident of Toria village, they sent a 16-year-old to the newcomer Azerbaijanis to convey the message of the locals to drive out their sheep of their lands, but they beat the youngster, after which clashes began.

The Ministry of Interior of Georgia informs that there are 11 arrested from both sides.

Editing and translating by Tigran Sirekanyan
By Mitchell Schnurman, The Dallas Morning News

Health insurance companies are racking up big profits during the pandemic, sometimes two to three times higher than a year ago. Thats largely because so many customers are putting off their usual care.

Elective surgeries, office visits and even trips to the emergency room have dropped sharply, which means fewer claims on insurance plans.

Four insurers  UnitedHealthcare, Anthem, CVS Health and Humana  together reported almost $10 billion in profit growth for the second quarter. Collectively, their operating income rose 152%.

Who shares in the windfall? That wont be clear for a while because the costs of COVID-19 could still soar and much of the deferred treatment of recent months may happen later.

COVID-19 vaccine tests are under way. (Carline Jean/Sun Sentinel/TNS)TNS

Heres one thing to count on: The cost of health insurance is expected to rise next year  over 5%, according to a survey of large employers, and 3% to almost 10% for individual plans, based on Texas rates posted on HealthCare.gov.

We shouldnt be confident it will all work out in the end for consumers, said Doug Heller, an insurance expert for the Consumer Federation of America. These companies cherish their profits much more than they cherish their customers.

Some lawmakers in Washington are skeptical, too. This month, Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and the House committee he chairs launched an investigation into health insurers. They asked for details of coronavirus policies and spending, and cited concerns about increased barriers to free COVID-19 testing.

These developments raise important questions about the extent to which the insurance industry may be profiting off the pandemic, said the letter to insurance company CEOs.

Insurers have done many things in response to the coronavirus, including waiving deductibles and copays for COVID-19 tests and care. They greatly expanded coverage of telehealth and reached out to vulnerable populations.

Some companies, not all, have pledged premium holidays, discounts and other assistance, such as helping providers suffering from a decline in business.

Anthem is providing pandemic relief that includes a one-month premium credit to members in select plans.AP

Anthem, which operates Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in 14 states, said its providing $2.5 billion in pandemic assistance. That includes a one-month premium credit to members in select plans.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota said it would give $70 million in premium relief and rebates. UnitedHealth pledged $1.5 billion in additional support, including credits toward a portion of premiums and the waiving of cost-sharing for doctors visits in Medicare Advantage.

Were making significant investments and making sure theres no reason for anyone to avoid care because of the costs, said Jamie Dudensing, CEO of the Texas Association of Health Plans.

The main reason to hold back rebates, she said, is to make sure the coverage can handle whatever the pandemic brings.

Theres still a lot of uncertainty, Dudensing said. We have to make sure  for all those employers and consumers  that the premiums are still there to pay for care and hospitalizations.

Consumers have an added layer of protection. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers must spend at least 80% of premiums on clinical services (a threshold that rises to 85% for large group plans). Excess profits have to be rebated to policyholders.

For 2018, over $1.3 billion in rebates were shared with 8.9 million people in the U.S., according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That included almost 681,000 Texans, who got $91.9 million or an average of $135 a person.

For 2019, rebates are projected to double, totaling $2.7 billion across all markets, Kaiser estimates.

Insurers are the only entities in health care that have profits capped, Dudensing said. Not drug companies, not hospitals, not doctors. That means consumers and employers are always protected.

Ironically, Texas is leading the legal fight to overturn the health care law, which includes the provision on rebates.

In a survey of 122 large employers with over 9 million covered lives, respondents projected that health spending would rise 5.3% in 2021. That tracks recent increases and comes despite the trends during the pandemic.

Companies are worried about three major threats, said Ellen Kelsay, CEO of the Business Group on Health, an advocate for employers. Theres the potential for a new surge of COVID-19 cases in the fall, perhaps with the flu. The costs of caring for chronic diseases related to COVID-19 could be significant. And expenses for other chronic conditions, such as diabetes, could rise for patients who didnt maintain care.

Theres a concern that all this could come together, Kelsay said, adding that companies are investing in other COVID-19 initiatives, too.

A woman is taken on a stretcher by healthcare professionals into the United Memorial Medical Center after going through testing for COVID-19 Thursday, March 19, 2020, in Houston. People were lined up in their cars in a line that stretched over two miles to be tested in the drive-thru testing for coronavirus. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip) APAP

Unlike individual health plans, most private coverage in Texas is through employers who are self-insured; they use insurance companies for administrative work but carry the risk.

If health costs soar one year, the companies absorb the expense (or increase employees contributions the next year). If costs decline sharply, they accrue a windfall and can use it however they want.

They could lower employees share in the future or use the savings to bolster other parts of the business.

Ill lay money that employees in D-FW wont be paying any less next year, said Marianne Fazen of the Dallas-Fort Worth Business Group on Health. Many of our big companies are very cash-strapped.

Its a striking contrast: Many employers and workers are struggling while the largest health insurers are doubling their profit margins.

Nobody wants to see COVID-19 profiteering, and the health plans dont want it, either, said Dan Mendelson, founder of Avalere Health, a Washington consulting firm. This discussion is not going away.

Insurers are partners with the government, teaming up on Medicare and Medicaid. He said the industry was talking with governors about how to return excess profits to states. He also mentioned an insurer making advance payments to an in-network hospital so it could meet certain financial metrics.

Insurers face a real threat of a spike in COVID-19 cases, but they must be forthcoming about costs and expenses.

We should demand a high level of transparency, Mendelson said.

Adjust your expectations here. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, the states largest insurer, reported a 3% rate increase on HealthCare.gov. In a memo, under Reason for rate increases, the company listed seven bullet points.

Each of them was blacked out.
Observers and analysts have said the United States embassy was looking to reset its relationship with Cambodia on the back of the prolonged celebrations to mark 70 years since the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

In the first seven months of 2020, the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh has organized many events and activities, including conducting forums at the Royal Academy of Cambodia and media interviews on television and radio to promote the celebrations.

Ambassador W. Patrick Murphy has also hosted and moderated virtual discussions with some of his predecessors and leaders from the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, home to the second biggest Cambodian-American community in the U.S.

I noticed [Patrick Murphy] has done a lot of activities both online and in person, which shows the U.S. interest in helping, and continuing to help, Cambodian people in almost all sectors as much as the U.S. can in accordance with bilateral agreements or ties between the U.S. and Cambodia, said Pa Chanroeun, executive director of the Cambodian Institute for Democracy.

Since January 2020 when the embassy officially launched the celebrations, it has attempted to promote sectors and projects the U.S. has funded or assisted, such as in agriculture, women and equality, and the environment.

Our mission here in the last couple of years, especially with Ambassador Murphy, has been to help achieve healthy, prosperous, democratic and independent Cambodia, Arend Zwartjes, the U.S. embassy spokesperson, said in an interview in late July. The U.S. began its diplomatic relationship with Cambodia on July 12, 1950, when Donald Heath, the first ambassador to Cambodia, presented his credentials to late King Norodom Sihanouk.

The bilateral ties have been mostly bumpy and increasingly tense in the last few years. In the run-up to the 2017 elections, senior Cambodian officials accused the U.S. of attempting to topple Prime Minister Hun Sens government in a so-called color revolution. It resulted in the ousting of the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute in 2017. Weeks later, opposition leader Kem Sokha was arrested and charged with colluding with the U.S., and his party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, was dissolved and its senior members banned from politics.

But, political observers say the relations may have become better in recent months because of the soft yet firm attitude of the new U.S. ambassador.

The methods Mr. Ambassador has used so far seem to be more diplomatic, flexible and friendly, which reflects that the U.S. still sticks to its principles that it does a lot in the interest of Cambodian people and Cambodia as a whole, said Pa Chanroeun.

We want to be a good friend and a good partner, Murphy said in the VOA Khmer interview, adding that the U.S. also hoped for concerted efforts to restore good practices when it comes to democracy and full respect for human rights.

Ro Vannak, a co-founder of Cambodian Institute for Democracy, said the softening of the U.S. tone was more likely to prevent Cambodias further sway towards China, which is also currently engaged in diplomatic and trade skirmishes with the U.S. If the U.S. had pressured the Cambodian government hard, the latter would be turning even more closer to China, a move Washington does not want to happen, he added. Sok Touch, president of Royal Academy of Cambodia, said bilateral relationships had improved with the new ambassador, but candidly admitted that a hardline position from the U.S. would push Cambodia toward China.



If the U.S. still pushes Cambodia further away, it will then go [to China], he said.



Murphy conducted a forum with Sok Touch on July 11, which marked the day diplomatic relations were established.



Sok Touch, who is also a personal adviser to Hun Sen, conducted numerous forums in 2016 and 2017 at the Royal Academy of Cambodia alleging the U.S. was conducting a color revolution in Cambodia and assisting the CNRP to topple the Hun Sen government.

Ear Sophal, associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College in California, said there were some doubts if the current better relations will last long. He noted that core differences remain between Phnom Penh and Washington, including views about the role and value of civil society organizations and freedom of expression.
Though its been close to a half a century, Barbara Irwin vividly recalls the day her husband was murdered.

I can close my eyes and picture my husband lying there at St. Mikes (Hospital), knowing he wasnt going to survive, she said. I dont think those memories ever go away.

Barbaras husband, Det. Michael Irwin, and his partner, Det. Douglas Sinclair, were shot while responding to a domestic dispute call at a North York apartment building in the early morning hours of Feb. 27, 1972. Michael died 12 hours later; his partner died on scene.

The tragedy sparked her seven-year battle for better compensation for widows of police officers killed in the line of duty, and a lifelong dedication to offer support to families of other fallen officers.

Barbara and Michael grew up in the same area of downtown Toronto and had known each other since they were 13.

I basically had told my mother at 16 that I was going to marry Mike Irwin, and she laughed at me, Barbara said. Barbara and Michael were married in September 1954; both were 21.

Hed always wanted to be a policeman, and his mother kind of discouraged him, Barbara, now 87, recalled in a recent interview.

Michael got his dream job in February 1960 when he joined the then Metropolitan Toronto Police.

He was so proud of that uniform, it was unbelievable, and I was just as proud of it, Barbara said.

Though he loved the job, his family came first, Barbara stressed. He was just 100 per cent a good father, a wonderful husband, she said. If any of the kids were sick, he was as sick as they were because he worried so much about them. Like, thats the type of man he was.

Barbara and Michael had four children, who were 11, 12, 14 and 16 when he was killed. Three of the children would become police officers.

Michael was also affectionately known as the father of the street. Neighbourhood kids would turn to him for help with things like fixing a broken bike.

Mike was the one that came and got everybody out of a situation, Barbara said.

Michael taught at the police college, was a member of the emergency task force and worked in the detective office of North Yorks 33 Division before being promoted to the rank of detective and transferring to neighbouring 32 Division in January 1972.

Barbara said she didnt worry when her husband went on the job; Toronto at the time was not known for gun violence.

Nevertheless, Barbara would always tell Michael to be careful. And thats what she did on the night of Feb. 26, 1972, as well.

Be careful, hon. Ill see you in the morning, Barbara told Michael as he left for his midnight shift. He replied, Dont worry, when your number is up, its up, and when my number is called, Ill be taken, Barbara recalled.

Shortly after 1 a.m., Michael and Sinclair were on the Don Valley Parkway, heading down to police headquarters, when the fateful call came over: an apparent domestic involving a citizen discharging a pellet gun at 267 Roywood Dr., near the DVP and York Mills Road.

Michael was familiar with the address; he lived just around the corner.

On arrival, the two detectives were joined by a young constable, Sam Fox.

While the trio was on the fourth floor of the building, Louis Fines burst through the door and into the hallway with an automatic rifle. When Michael ordered him to drop the gun, he opened fire. Michael, 38, was struck in the head while his partner, Sinclair, 44, was struck twice in the chest.

According to an Ontario Police Memorial Foundation webpage, Fines took off through a door at the end of the hall with Fox racing after him but lost Fines in the underground garage. Fox returned to the fallen detectives, administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Sinclair. Fox then heard Fines coming up the stairs and ordered him to drop the rifle. Fines raised his rifle and was shot dead.

As it turned out, there was never a pellet gun nor a domestic.

Fines, who had a long criminal history and was facing eviction that day, had been shooting at cars on the DVP from a balcony.

Barbara remembers the knock on her door from her brother-in-law, who was a staff sergeant at 32 Division.

He said to me, Barb, youd better come with me. Theres been an accident,  Barbara said. And as we drove by the apartment building, I said to him, Its worse than youre telling me. . . . And he said, Mikes been shot, and hes in very serious condition, and Doug Sinclair is dead. 

Michael died 12 hours later, never regaining consciousness.

All I kept thinking about were my children at home, Barbara said. Apparently, they sat there and prayed, knowing it had to be pretty bad, and then they did hear it on the news that it was their father that had been shot.

Barbara later broke the news that their dad wont be coming home.

In those early years, Barbara began a fight for better compensation for widows of police officers killed in the line of duty.

The total annual payment she could receive, she explained, could not top that of her murdered husbands salary of $12,828  less compensation, she added, than Fines widow was receiving.

Her pleas for cost-of-living increases were initially turned down by Metro Council and the police commission.

I then decided I was going to fight harder because now I felt that it was an unjust situation. My husband had given his life for the City of Toronto, and it has to be worth something more than the $12,828, she said. My children couldnt take school trips. I still had a mortgage on the house.

The fight had its ups and downs. About a year after the murder, Barbara took a trip to England that was paid for by a relative.

That hit the news that heres this widow looking for more money and yet she can take trips to England and travel the world, Barbara said.

But after a seven-year battle, she won. Barbara said the bylaw was changed, allowing spouses of officers killed in the line of duty to receive cost-of-living increases.

(I) came out with the satisfaction that there wouldnt be any more widows left with trying to struggle to raise their children, she said. It made quite a difference, to be honest. It certainly upped my income.

Ever since Michaels death, Barbara has also been reaching out to the families of other fallen officers to offer support.

I just tell them Im available, they can call me any time, morning, noon or nighttime because I understand, Barbara said. I really walked the shoes that they had all walked (or) are walking, and I wanted them to know that I was there if they needed me.

Barbara never remarried and still lives in the home she shared with her husband.

She said its rewarding to know spouses are now better taken care of.

She had to pay for her husbands funeral and wasnt allowed to accept donations. The school where my children went had collected $3,600, and it couldnt go to my children, so the school asked me where I suggest it go to. Barbara told them to donate it the Hospital for Sick Children.

Barbara said her husbands slaying is a tragedy shell never get over. But she said she tries to focus on the good things that have happened.

I was blessed with the legacy he left behind in my four children, she said. It has made up for a lot of the loss because they all turned out good citizens and thats what he and I both had hoped for.

Barbara now also has 10 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

Granddaughter Michelle Flannery, a Toronto police constable, said that despite the trauma and adversities, her grandmother never became bitter and always kept a positive attitude and instilled pride in subsequent generations.

Andrew Palamarchuk is a reporter with toronto.com. Reach him via email: apalamarchuk@toronto.com
The Michigan Board of Canvassers demanded the Secretary of State require election workers in Detroit to thoroughly follow guidelines for processing absentee ballots after its precincts were left unbalanced in the primary election.

The board discussed the Wayne County Board of Canvassers recent request for state oversight of how election workers in Detroit are trained at an Aug. 24 meeting where it certified the results of Michigans primary election. The board was alarmed to find out 72% of the absentee voting precincts in Detroit werent balanced and 46% of all Detroits precincts, both absentee and in-person, werent balanced.

Secretary of State Joceyln Benson does have supervisory control over elections. The board voted 4-0 to require Benson to provide a list of actions shes taking to prevent Detroits precincts from being unbalanced in the Nov. 3 general election.

I can speak for all of us when I say we were really appalled by what happened in Detroit, said Democrat Julie Matuzak, a board of canvassers member. We want to know whats going to be done to help the folks running the elections in Detroit.

Johnathan Brater, the secretary for Board of State Canvassers, said the SOS can invoke supervisory control when the bureau is directing election workers who arent fulfilling their roles, for whatever reason.

(We) are emphasizing training ahead of the election in November, Brater said.

Brater said election workers in Detroit didnt record absentee ballots as soon as they came in, hand-marked ballots in the incorrect poll books and werent putting absentee ballots in the appropriate boxes.

The Board of Canvassers requested a thorough report of what happened in Detroit, the actions the SOS plans on taking to prevent unbalanced precincts in November and an additional meeting to discuss how election workers are being trained in Detroit.

Jonathan Kinloch, the vice-chair of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, said unseasoned election workers in many of Detroits precincts didnt properly record why certain changes were made to a ballot. For instance, a ballot may have been canceled and that change wasnt properly noted by an election worker.

The coronavirus pandemic kept many of the countys seasoned election workers at home making clerk offices to make new hires without adequate training, according to Kinloch.

The blame falls on untrained election workers and those who hired them, Kinloch said. Its fine to have new folks but you need the appropriate level of training and oversight.

Kinloch said an investigation by Wayne Countys board of canvassers found some election workers left before finishing the job, leaving precincts unbalanced. Michigan elections are conducted under a rigorous check-and-balance system where polling places and absent voter counting boards are operated by bipartisan teams of election inspectors, according to state procedure.

That is unacceptable, Kinloch said. Whether its training or whether these people should never work on an election, the bottom line is that we cannot have these types of deficiencies.

Balancing a precinct is important because state law doesnt allow precincts votes to be recounted if the results arent balanced, Kinloch said.

It warranted us to ask the Secretary of State to come in and lend some additional guidance as well as appoint a monitor because we definitely dont want to see these types of issues in November, Kinloch said.

Kinloch describes the perfect storm of challenges Detroit precincts face: untrained election workers processed record-high numbers of absentee ballots during a pandemic without the necessary resources or staffing.

Detroit had imbalanced precinct issues in past elections, Kinloch said. However, we have seen improvements in the few elections since 2016. Especially, after they integrated electronic poll books at their election day precincts.

Kinloch said changes the SOS is suggesting may may address a few of their operational challenges during this pandemic.

A large part of what is required under Michigan Election Law for a recount is accuracy. Instituting verification teams throughout the process from the moment an application is processed, a ballot is issued, returned; makes its way through the AV Counting Board to the tabulator, could make a world of a difference, Kinloch said.

There wasnt a specific timeline given to when the SOS would be required to provide the board with this information.

Read more on MLive:

Michigan ballot drive to ban abortion procedure gets another chance

Petition language to recall Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer approved by state board

Backers of Michigan LGBT rights initiative granted extra time for ballot petition signatures
Salvaged items stand next to a damaged house near a river after the passing of tropical storm Laura in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (AP/Dieu Nalio Chery)

Tropical Storm Laura strengthened in the Caribbean on Monday and was poised to accelerate into a hurricane, while Tropical Storm Marco weakened sooner than expected, sparing the US Gulf Coast from two simultaneous hurricanes that had been forecast.

The dual storms have taken offline nearly 10% of the United States' crude oil production, as energy companies shuttered operations to ride out the weather.

The changed forecast from the National Hurricane Center bought a little more time for residents along Louisiana's coast to prepare for the one-two punch. Marco could still bring dangerous winds and rain on Monday evening, with Laura forecast to make landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on Wednesday night.

"Having two storms in the Gulf at one particular time made the last few days pretty stressful," said Archie Chaisson, the president of Lafourche Parish on the Louisiana coast.

The coronavirus pandemic had complicated preparations, Chaisson said, with officials modifying their shelter plans to ensure social distancing and the wearing of face coverings.

Howling winds

Laura traced the southern coast of Cuba on Monday morning, but the brunt of the storm was offshore, helping the largest island nation in the Caribbean avoid serious damage after Laura killed at least 10 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The storm downed trees in Cuba, ripped away flimsy roofs and caused minor flooding on Sunday evening, according to residents and news reports. In Jamaica, there were reports of landslides and flooded roads.

Expand Close Tropical Storm Laura battered the Dominican Republic and Haiti and is heading for a possible hit on the Louisiana coast as a hurricane, along with Tropical Storm Marco (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Tropical Storm Laura battered the Dominican Republic and Haiti and is heading for a possible hit on the Louisiana coast as a hurricane, along with Tropical Storm Marco (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

"I slept well last night, except when the wind howled," Nuris Lopez, a hairdresser, said by telephone from a town in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra mountains in Cuba's eastern Granma province.

Laura was heading toward the Gulf of Mexico at 31km/h, according to the NHC. By Tuesday, it was expected to have reached hurricane strength. By Wednesday night, stronger still, it was expected to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, the NHC said.

By then, it could be a Category 2 or 3 hurricane on the 5-step Saffir-Simpson scale for measuring hurricane intensity, said Chris Kerr, a meteorologist at DTN, an energy, agriculture and weather data provider.

Oil takes a hit

Despite Marco's weakening, with the NHC predicting it would slow to a tropical depression by Monday night, that storm still threatened to soak the Louisiana coast.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent teams to operations centers in Louisiana and Texas.

This year's hurricane season has been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, forcing many people to weigh the risks of leaving their homes and potentially exposing themselves to the virus.

Officials in Louisiana said that testing for COVID-19 was suspended in the state on Monday and Tuesday.

Expand Close A woman and man cross a flooded street during the passing of Tropical Storm Laura in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (Dieu Nalio Chery/AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp A woman and man cross a flooded street during the passing of Tropical Storm Laura in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (Dieu Nalio Chery/AP)

Energy companies moved to cut production at U.S. Gulf Coast oil refineries after shutting half the area's offshore crude oil output as back-to-back storms took aim at the coast.

Producers have shut more than one million barrels per day of Gulf Coast offshore oil production, 9% of the nation's total output, facing a storm that is forecast to become a damaging Category 2 hurricane.
Cholinesterase inhibitors are found in drugs used to treat some diseases, including Alzheimers, but certain classes can be used in pesticides and as nerve agents for biowarfare, according to the National Institutes of Health. The chemical can be delivered orally; Navalnys spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said she suspected the tea he purchased at an airport cafe Thursday morning was laced with a toxin because it was the only thing she saw him ingest that day.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:34:40|Editor: huaxia

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ULAN BATOR, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- A total of 263 Mongolian nationals have returned home from abroad on a chartered flight from Japan on Monday night, the country's State Emergency Commission (SEC) said.

The flight landed at the Buyant-Ukhaa International Airport, the SEC said in a statement.

The returnees include children, pregnant women, seniors, sick people, and those with financial and other problems, and will be isolated at designated facilities for 21 days, the SEC said.

Since its COVID-19 outbreak, Mongolia has evacuated more than 18,600 nationals on chartered flights, buses or trains from different parts of the world, according to the commission.

The Asian country has confirmed 298 COVID-19 cases so far, with no local transmissions or deaths. Enditem
Jim Felker stepped out of the funeral home Monday morning to take a phone call. JoAnn, his wife of 68 years, died Thursday evening. Felker just concluded a morning viewing, and he had a few things he wanted to say.

COVID-19 robbed the Felkers - and tens of thousands of others just like them - of precious time together, part of the effort to stop the spread of the disease, which has hit nursing homes particularly hard.

He was allowed to sit with her in her last hours. Thank God. But it was not nearly enough, and could in no way make up for the time lost to enforced separation.

I talked to her and rubbed her hands, Felker said. Just like that she was gone. She didnt have to suffer, and Im so appreciative of that.

Jo Ann, who had Alzheimer's disease, had spent her last months in a skilled nursing center in Bermuda Run. She had great medical care and kindly attendants, but she was deprived of the loving companionship that only family can provide.
Members of the National Assembly Special Committee on Budget and Accounts attend a meeting at the Assembly in Seoul, Monday. The lawmakers are seated apart from each other while the committee minimized the number of attendees at the meeting in keeping with the government's quarantine guidelines to prevent any further spread of COVID-19. Yonhap



By Jung Da-min



The National Assembly is seeking to adopt contact-free meetings amid the COVID-19 pandemic situation, to prevent possible disruptions to its legislative activities due to infections.



According to the government's new quarantine guidelines announced last week, Assembly meetings for legislative activities are technically exempt from a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people in indoor places and 100 in outdoor places. But the Assembly, which had undergone a temporary shutdown in February, is taking stricter quarantine measures than the guidelines, minimizing the number of people attending meetings.



The Assembly's Special Committee on Budget and Accounts, in particular, has been put to the test as the committee has the largest number of members, a total of 50 including the committee chief. Considering the number of required participants from relevant government departments, keeping to the government's Level 2 social distancing guidelines, currently in effect, did not seem adequate.



The budget committee therefore decided to split the 50 members into two groups, with each group spending four days each to screen policies in different scheduled times each day  while the committee review used to take two days.



While a minimum number of government officials and lawmakers attending the meetings, the committee also reduced the number of public servants including stenographers and Assembly security staff.



"By dividing the lawmakers and the Cabinet members into two groups while the number of administrative staff was also cut to half, the committee would be able to keep the meeting participation below 50 people," said Rep. Park Hong-keun, the committee's administrative secretary for the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) side.



As the regular sessions of the Assembly are scheduled to commence in September, the Assembly secretariat is further reviewing to find grounds to support holding video meetings and voting for the September session. As introducing such a contact-free online system requires an amendment to the National Assembly Act, some lawmakers of the DPK, including Rep. Jo Seoung-lae, proposed a bill to allow lawmakers to make decisions and votes through online channels instead of being present in the Assembly's plenary chamber.



"In the event of an urgent situation like the spread of an infectious disease or natural disaster, in which it is difficult for lawmakers to come to the National Assembly to attend meetings, we need to make it possible for lawmakers to remotely attend Assembly meetings with the permission of the National Assembly speaker," Jo said. "We need to prepare ground rules so that lawmakers can participate in Assembly votes online when they cannot be in the meeting room."



The Assembly has already secured a budget of 4.5 trillion won ($3.78 billion) for building a contactless meeting system for its standing committees in early July as part of this year's third extra budget.



Some lawmakers have introduced telecommuting systems for their offices in which their legislative staff work from home. Seminars and conferences held by lawmakers at the Assembly almost every day have been replaced with video meetings.



DPK Rep. Song Young-gil, chairman of the Assembly's Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee, said Monday that his office adopted a remote working system as a preemptive measure against the virus.



"The COVID-19 situation is serious. What is even more worrisome is the virus is spreading like a ghost without us even realizing it," Song said.



Rep. Ryu Ho-jeong of the minor opposition Justice Party, who previously worked at an IT company before joining the party, urged the Assembly to adopt online governance systems for the "contact-free" era. Her office introduced a remote working system last Thursday.


Statement on Belarus by the Minister for European Affairs, Thomas Byrne T.D.

Statement

Events in Belarus since the illegitimate Presidential election remain of deep and immediate concern. During the large-scale protests on Sunday, the Belarusian people once again voiced in a peaceful and powerful manner their clear and simple wish for free and fair elections.

This afternoon the Taoiseach, Micheal Martin T.D., spoke by phone with Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. He expressed Irelands solidarity with her and with the people of Belarus in their pursuit of democracy and human rights.

To that end, Ireland is working closely with our international partners to ensure that the democratic will of the people and their human rights are fully respected.

As Minister for European Affairs, I will be supporting the quickest implementation of the actions announced by the European Union at the weekend. In particular, the re-programming of 53m in Eastern Partnership funds. This will redirect EU assistance directly to civil society and vulnerable groups, including to those who have suffered most at the hands of this repression.

Ireland will continue to act in support for the Belarusian people and we will impose sanctions on those responsible for the falsification of election results and the unacceptable use of violence and intimidation.

ENDS

PRESS OFFICE

24 AUGUST 2020

 Previous Item |
North Korean leader Kim Jong Uns disappearance from public life in recent months led to speculation about his health. And the fear for the worst gained credence after reports surfaced that he has handed over some power to his sister Kim Yo Jong.

Kim underwent a surgery earlier this year after which his health has been declining. And unlike other democratic countries, the Hermit Kingdom doesnt have a succession plan in place. It is being ruled by Kims family since 1948; the 36-year-old became the supreme leader in 2011.

So what happens if Kim dies?

Kims grandfather Kim Il Sung started the Mount Paektu bloodline in the country in 1948. After his ascension to power, a cult of personality developed around him which was later passed on to his successors: Son Kim Jong Il and grandson Kim Jong Un in 2011.

In a democratic country (example India), there are set protocols and designations which have been empowered by the Constitution of the country to run the affairs in case an elected leader is left incapacitated or cant perform his/her duties due to some other reason. But in North Korea, the leader has to be from Kims bloodline.

What about his sons?

Reports in variuous outlet say that Kim has three sons - and the eldest one was born in 2010. Hence, the reponsibilities to run the affairs of the country rests on the shoulders of his sister Kim Yo Jong. She is the only person that the North Korean leader trusts.

Kim has made his sister the de facto second-in-command, according to neighbouring South Koreas intelligence agency. The sleuths of the agency said that Kim has delegated responsibility for relations with Seoul and Washington to his sister.

Kim Yo Jong won fame ahead of her brothers 2019 summit with US President Donald Trump in Vietnam, when her efforts to ensure everything went well included holding an ashtray for the North Korean leader at a train station on his journey.

The Kim dynasty

Kims grandfather is a revered figure in the country. Many North Korean consider Kim Il Sung as the father of the country. He established the bloodline after end of the Japanese rule in North Korea in 1945.

One of the first things that travellers to North Korea notice is a huge portrait of Kim Il Sung, pictured in front of an airplane and workers alongside the road as they drive out of Pyongyang International Airport. Its an image that soon becomes very familiar.

Millions of portraits, mosaics and paintings of Kim Il Sung, founder of North Korea, and his son Kim Jong Il, the father of current leader Kim Jong Un, offer daily reminders to the public of the central role of the Kim dynasty in their nations story.
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En espanol | If you have a substance use disorder, staying sober can be a one-day-at-a-time challenge. For some, the coronavirus outbreak has made that even tougher, with routines disrupted, in-person therapy on hold, and, in many cases, less face-to-face time with supportive friends and family.

And this is a time when an alcohol and drug dependency can increase the risk of respiratory complications from COVID-19  already higher than average for older people - because substance misuse can impair immune function. (Heavy drinking can also exacerbate other health conditions common among older adults, such as high blood pressure and heart disease.)

That's why it's so important to seek help - even if it can't be face-to-face because of the outbreak  if you or a loved one is struggling right now, says Rebecca G. Baker, director of the National Institutes of Health Helping to End Addiction Long-term (NIH HEAL) Initiative to stem the national opioid public health crisis: Stressful times like these require even more support."

National crisis

A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study finds that excessive alcohol use is responsible for more than 255 deaths each day in the U.S., or over 93,000 deaths per year. And despite a 30-year decline in drug overdose deaths since 1990 in the U.S., the pandemic may have ushered in recent spikes in these fatalities in several states, ranging from an estimated 20 percent in Jacksonville, Fla., to 100 percent in the Chicago area. The national public health group Well Being Trust predicts the pandemic may contribute to as many as 75,000 deaths related to drug or alcohol misuse and suicide in the U.S.

The pandemic has been especially dangerous for those with an opioid use disorder (OUD), particularly for those who have a chronic pain condition. Baker says that in recent weeks there's been an increase in fatal overdoses during weekends, when these individuals are alone, and there is nobody around to call 911 or administer a medication to reverse the overdose. She stresses the need for loved ones to know about naloxone (also known as Narcan), the overdose reversal medication, and learn how to administer it. It's possible to get low- or no-cost naloxone to keep in the home; it may help you save the life of someone you love.

Recognizing alcohol abuse problems

Some people have responded to the stress and social isolation brought on by the outbreak by drinking more - enough that a longtime alcohol dependency now begins to intensify. Using alcohol as a coping mechanism leads down a slippery slope to contracting an alcohol use disorder, says George F. Koob, director of the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). We have individuals who are maybe already vulnerable to engaging in alcohol use disorder and the social isolation is exacerbating that, he notes.



Symptoms of an alcohol misuse disorder may include an obsession with drinking, needing to drink more alcohol to get a buzz, withdrawal symptoms when you don't drink (like shaking hands, for example) and problems with relationships, finances, your job and your health.

Finding online support

Many people who normally have sought help from in-person support groups are finding that online groups are just as helpful - or even more so. Robin Blanche, 51, who lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has been in recovery for two decades from unhealthy alcohol use, has found that Zoom allowed her to attend more support group meetings. I'm actually able to go to meetings once a day, says Blanche. I feel like it's rejuvenated my recovery.

The groups moving online has also allowed her to virtually visit Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with old friends from Los Angeles, where she once lived. I feel really lucky that I get to reconnect with people who played such an important part in my early recovery, she says. (Visit the NIAAA Alcohol Treatment Navigator for information on where to find help.)
NASHVILLE  The scent of sun-dried sheets fresh off the clothesline can completely change my state of mind. Like the sense of well-being that comes over me when a song from my youth is playing on the radio, the smell of line-dried sheets takes me home to Alabama, back to a time when all my beloved elders were still alive, still humming as they shook out a wad of damp bedsheets and pinned them to the line.

This summer I have repeatedly washed not just our sheets but also our 20-year-old matelasse coverlet, whose scalloped edges are now beginning to fray. I have washed the dust ruffle for possibly the first time in its entire existence. Once the linens are reassembled, I crawl between the sheets, breathe in, and feel the muscles across the top of my back begin to loosen. As my friend Serenitys mother is fond of saying, There are very few problems in this world that putting clean sheets on the bed wont improve, even if just a little bit.

These days its truly just a little bit, even when the clean sheets have been dried on a clothesline in the bright summer sun. Everyone I know is either suffering terribly or terribly worried about someone who is suffering. When will they ever find work? What if they get sick at work and cant afford to take time off? What if they bring the virus home to the people they love? How will they work and also home-school their children? Will their parents die of the coronavirus? Will their parents die of loneliness before they can die of the coronavirus?

For months now, all my phone calls and texts and emails have begun, How are you, really? or How is? Sometimes Im the one whos asking and sometimes Im the one whos being asked, but every exchange begins the same way.
WILTON  While most parents have said they intend to drive their children to school, police say they dont expect too many traffic jams when classes resume on Aug. 31.

For one, parents are being asked to drive their children to school in waves. Secondly, with a hybrid opening, only half the student body will be in school at any one time. Half the students will attend Monday and Tuesday and the second half will attend Thursday and Friday. Wednesday will be devoted to remote learning for everyone.

With the hybrid plan, were hoping that alleviates excess volume issues, Capt. Rob Cipolla said last week. Nevertheless, police officers will be out the first week monitoring the situation.

We will have one officer at each location, he said. The main objective is to see where the buildups are, if anything is readily identifiable. Hopefully, it all runs smoothly. That first week we will get an idea.

If there is a problem and police are there, they will try to assist, he said.

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Classes at Cider Mill School on School Road begin at 7:40 a.m. Parents will drop their children off in six-minute intervals beginning at 7:20. Buses will also begin arriving at 7:20, as is usual.

Miller-Driscoll, with driveways on Wolfpit and Belden Hill roads, begins class at 9:05. According to the schools website, morning drop-off by car will begin around 8:30. Buses will arrive when most of the car drop-off is complete.

Middlebrook did not respond to a request for its parent drop-off plan.

Overall volume down

According to Cipolla, overall traffic volume in Wilton has been considerably lower than usual since the coronavirus pandemic hit hard in March.

Belden Hill Road is a popular bypass for Route 7, and traffic can back up quite a bit at the four-way stop with Route 106 (Wolfpit/New Canaan roads).

We havent observed it to be the kind of issue were used to, Cipolla said. In terms of congestion, we will see once school is back in session.

Another choke point is the left-hand turn from Route 7 north onto School Road, which provides access to both Cider Mill and Middlebrook schools.

In past years, Cipolla said, that has always been a topic of discussion. We are hopeful that on a day-to-day basis we will see half the school population on any given day.

Ironically, Cipolla said one means of reducing traffic volume around schools is to have more children ride the bus.

Were in a different world right now, he said. Were encouraging people to drive themselves or be driven to create more room on the buses.
At least 15 people were killed when gunmen attacked an area in southern Burundi, three local witnesses told Reuters on Monday.

It was unclear whether the dead were members of the security forces, civilians or the attackers. The witnesses asked not to be named for fear of repercussions.

The fighting in Bugarama district in Rumonge province began on Sunday and continued into Monday and people were hiding in the bush, a resident who escaped the attack told Reuters.

The gunmen kidnapped everyone they met and killed them before engaging in fighting with the army on Sunday morning, the man said. He asked for anonymity to avoid reprisals.

A senior government official said the attack, which occurred as the country was holding local elections, was not unexpected and potentially linked to the imminent repatriation of refugees from Rwanda.

The government anticipated that armed groups opposed to the government will attempt to carry out attacks ahead of the first repatriation of refugees from Rwanda, the official said.

Rwanda hosts thousands of refugees from neighbouring Burundi who fled violence in 2015.

A message posted on Twitter claiming to be from Red Tabara, a Burundian rebel group that says it is based in Congos South Kivu region, claimed responsibility for the attack and said it had neutralized nine policemen and about 20 militants. The veracity of the account or the message could not be verified.

The statement on Twitter said presidential elections in May, won by the ruling partys candidate Evariste Ndayishimiye, were a farce and called for a new vote.

The statement also called for the disarmament of several militia groups such as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a group founded by Hutu officials who fled Rwanda after orchestrating the 1994 genocide, which it claims has infiltrated security forces in Burundi.

The army did not respond to requests for comment on the fighting.

Burundi has an ethnic Hutu majority and Tutsi minority, the same split as in Rwanda.

It has been plagued by decades of ethnic and political violence, including a bloody civil war which lasted 12 years in which 300,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed. (Reporting by Nairobi Newsroom, Editing by William Maclean)
Strength: Thousands of people attend a massive opposition protest against presidential election results at the Independence Square in Minsk. Photo: Reuters

Minsk erupted with roars and chants of "Go away!" yesterday as at least 100,000 opposition protesters filled the main streets of the Belarusian capital, demanding the resignation of the country's embattled leader.

The massive rally came two weeks after Alexander Lukashenko, who has led Belarus for 26 years, was awarded a disputed landslide victory in the presidential election.

At the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for a "dialogue with the population" and stressed it was up to "the Belarusian people to decide how it can solve this situation".

At least 7,000 people were swept up in the crackdown on the protests that followed the election and many testified about beatings and torture.

But yesterday crowds of protesters, carrying white flowers and the historic white-and-red Belarusian flags that have come to symbolise the movement, were undaunted as they thronged Minsk's streets.

Yulia Kushnir and Katya Yermolenko, two friends in their 20s, were carrying a poster saying "Coward, go away! Never forgive, never forget!"

Expand Close Peaceful: A woman holds flowers during the protest in Independence Square in Minsk. Photo: Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters / Facebook

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Whatsapp Peaceful: A woman holds flowers during the protest in Independence Square in Minsk. Photo: Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters

"Our former president is a coward who just can't leave gracefully and with dignity," Ms Kushnir said.

"When you look at what police do to men and women, it was scary coming here. But this is exactly what they want: they want us to be scared."

Speaking at a rally in western Belarus after inspecting troops and riot police, Mr Lukashenko had an ominous message for protesters.

"You have Saturday and Sunday to think things through," he said. "When Monday comes... don't take it personally... A government should govern."

The country's defence minister took it a step further yesterday when he threatened to use troops against protesters if they didn't stop.

"I would like to warn you that in case of disturbances you will have to deal with the army, not the police," he said.

Crowds of protesters chanting "Go away" walked all the way up to the presidential palace yesterday evening where they were met by several lines of riot police in full gear and armoured vehicles. Troops with machine guns were seen around the palace on the other side of the police line.

Mr Lukashenko's helicopter landed at the compound just as protesters had turned to head back to the city centre. The Belarusian leader was filmed dressed in riot gear and carrying a machine gun as he arrived at the presidential palace in the evening.

"There's no one left there, right?" he said, motioning to the street that was filled with protesters just half an hour before. ( Daily Telegraph, London)

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Melbourne, Australia  Mon, August 24, 2020 22:07 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c401f4c1 2 News backpackers,Australia,travel Free

A major destination for backpackers from around the world, Australia has closed its international borders to non-residents until 2021. Some of those who are now in the country are managing to cope with this unprecedented situation, while others are stranded in uncertain and often precarious circumstances.

Foreign backpackers play an important role in the Australian economy, in particular in the tourism and agriculture sectors, which depend on them as a labor source. However, the COVID-19 crisis has put many of them in a difficult situation in which they are unable to find work or prolong their visas.

Unable to stay on in Australia

Alena from Slovakia moved to New Zealand in 2018 after finishing her PhD in linguistics and arrived in Australia in February 2020.

The 29-year-old, who had applied for a renewable work-holiday visa, found a teaching job in Melbourne. However, after a month her employment was suspended by stage three of the COVID-19 lockdown.

Stuck in Melbourne, alone and isolated in her apartment, she managed to find another job, but quickly lost it because of the pandemic. Since then she has spent six months going from one disappointment to another. She has no possibility of doing the 88 days of work in a government-specified industry that she will need to complete if she is to prolong her visa, because restrictions are preventing her from moving to another state to find a job on a farm.

She has no idea what to do next.

Waiting out the crisis

Stella, a 26-year-old from Germany who studied to be a special needs educator, has been in Australia since February 2020.

Her plan was to make the country the starting point for a round-the-world trip lasting several years. The idea was to stay there to save some money by working on farms.

When the health crisis began, she was working in a walnut grove where she stayed for two months before she found work at a station in the Australian outback in June. She will be able to stay there until September, or even longer now that she has obtained her third work-holiday visa.

Read also: 'Proud to be Indonesian': Student stranded for months in South Africa shares her story

Adapting to local restrictions

Toni, a 27-year-old who studied communications and then worked in finance in Argentina, came to Australia with his girlfriend to look for adventure in June 2019.

The couple initially worked in Tasmania before finding jobs on a farm in Queensland. Having been laid off during the health crisis, they are now searching for work in a rural area of the territory that is far from the big cities.

Vicky, a 32-year-old German woman, arrived in Australia in September 2019. In what turned out to be a stroke of luck, she quickly moved to the west of the country, before Australias lockdown measures came into force.

Although her plans to travel have been disrupted by the closure of interstate borders, she has been able to stay busy working as an au pair with one of the many families struggling to find someone to look after their children during the pandemic.

Parents are not the only people who are struggling to find help. Fruit farmers are also faced with a labor shortage at a time when many backpackers have left the country. And it is not certain that they will ever come back.

Unions worried about increased unemployment in the Australian population have suggested suspending the countrys work-holiday visa system, which allows backpackers to stay for up to three years in the country, to make it easier for nationals to find jobs.

In the wake of the closure of Australias borders, which has led to the loss of 80 percent of workers in some regions, they believe that now is also the time to address the issue of farmers underpaying seasonal workers and what the Pacific union has described as an unacceptable level of abuse in the current system.

However, the government, which insists that the native labor force is not adequate to the needs of farmers who depend on foreign visitors to harvest their produce, is still refusing to put an end to the current visa system.

Topics : backpackers Australia travel
ROME, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- ReiThera Srl, a biotech company dedicated to the technology development, GMP manufacturing and clinical translation of genetic vaccines and medicinal products for advanced therapies, today announces that the first healthy volunteer has been dosed in a Phase 1 study of the Company's vaccine candidate (GRAd-COV2) against the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). The Phase 1 study is being conducted in Italy at the Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases (INMI) in Rome and at the GB Rossi University Hospital in Verona.

ReiThera's vaccine candidate GRAd-COV2 encodes the full-length spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The vaccine technology is based on a novel, proprietary replication-defective gorilla adenoviral (GRAd) vector, which both induced a strong humoral and cellular immune response in preclinical studies and demonstrated a good safety profile. GRAd-COV2 is expected to induce strong immune responses based on low pre-existing immunity to the vector in humans.

Vaccines based on similar simian adenoviral vectors, such as Chimpanzee adenoviral vectors (ChAd), have been evaluated in Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials in other infectious diseases and proved to be safe and immunogenic with a single-dose vaccine.

The Phase 1 clinical trial is evaluating the safety and immunogenicity of GRAd-COV2 in 90 healthy volunteers divided equally into two age cohorts: 18-55 years and 65-85 years. Each cohort will be divided into three study arms of 15 volunteers which will be administered one of three escalating doses of GRAd-COV2. Participants will be monitored over a 24-week period.

The primary objective of the study is to evaluate the safety and tolerability of GRAd-COV2, and to select a vaccine dose for further investigation in a Phase 2/3 trial. The secondary objective is to evaluate the vaccine's ability to induce immune responses (antibodies and T cells) against the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in volunteers. Interim safety and immunogenicity analysis are expected by mid Q4 2020 which will guide dose selection for Phase 2/3 studies.

A larger international Phase 2/3 trial in countries where SARS-CoV-2 is still very active is planned to commence by the end of 2020, pending positive interim safety and immunogenicity results of the Phase 1 trial.

The Phase 1 trial of GRAd-COV2 is being funded by the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research and the Lazio Region. The study is being run jointly by ReiThera and Lazzaro Spallanzani INMI using initial vaccine material manufactured at ReiThera's cGMP facility in Rome.

In parallel, ReiThera is working with LEUKOCARE in Germany to develop a thermostable GRAd-COV2 vaccine formulation and with Univercells in Belgium to develop a bespoke manufacturing process to enable rapid, large-scale production of the vaccine.

"This study is the first important step in the clinical development of our novel GRAd-COV2 vaccine against COVID-19," said ReiThera's Chief Technology Officer, Stefano Colloca. "We are proud to undertake this trial in Italy where the impact of COVID-19 has been felt particularly hard. The cutting-edge science behind our approach is backed by many years of pioneering research on adenoviral vector technologies with pre-clinical and clinical data generated with a single-dose vaccine in other serious infectious diseases demonstrating potent humoral and cellular immune responses. This feature makes our technology platform suitable for an outbreak situation such as COVID-19 and has clear advantages in terms of manufacturing and compliance."

"The launch of this Phase 1 trial demonstrates ReiThera's expertise and what can be done when stakeholders come together towards a common goal," said ReiThera's Chief Executive Officer, Antonella Folgori. "We are grateful to Lazzaro Spallanzani INMI for their ongoing collaboration and to the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research and the Lazio Region for funding the trial and initial manufacturing of the GRAd-COV2 vaccine candidate. We look forward to providing important updates about the safety and immunogenicity of our vaccine candidate over the coming months, and potentially advancing into international Phase 2/3 trial later in the year."

About GRAd-COV2

GRAd-COV2, the candidate vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 recently developed by ReiThera, is based on a novel and proprietary replication-defective simian (gorilla) adenoviral vector (called GRAd) encoding the full-length coronavirus spike protein (GRAd-COV2). The spike protein enables the coronavirus to enter human cells.

Simian adenoviral (SAd) vectors have been extensively used as delivery agents for genetic vaccine candidates against multiple infectious diseases, including Ebola and RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus), in different populations, with more than 5,000 individuals including elderly and infants enrolled in early and late stage clinical trials to date. Preclinical and clinical evidence have demonstrated that ReiThera's vaccine technology is safe and induces robust cellular and humoral immune responses.

ReiThera's novel GRAd vector belongs to species C adenovirus that are considered the most potent vaccine carriers and has low seroprevalence in humans. This means that GRAd vaccine immunogenicity is not hampered by pre-existing anti-human adenovirus antibodies.

About ReiThera Srl

ReiThera Srl is a biotech company dedicated to the technology development, GMP manufacturing and clinical translation of genetic vaccines and medicinal products for advanced therapies. The company's management and scientific teams have developed a highly innovative technological platform based on simian adeno-vectored vaccines against several infectious diseases, such as RSV and Ebola.

ReiThera is led by an experienced management team that has worked together for many years in previous successful enterprises, including Okairos (acquired by GSK), and has a long-standing expertise in scalable processes for viral vector manufacturing, supported by a cGMP facility inclusive of filling suite and quality control laboratories. ReiThera is also part of a pan-European consortium focused on the development and large-scale manufacture of an adeno-viral vector vaccine against COVID-19.

ReiThera has its headquarters, R&D laboratories and GMP facilities in Rome, Italy.

For further information see: www.reithera.com

Media Contacts:

ReiThera Srl

Antonella Folgori, Chief Executive Officer

[email protected]

Citigate Dewe Rogerson  International Press

Sylvie Berrebi, Mark Swallow PhD

+44 (0) 7714306525 / +44 (0) 7903737703

[email protected]

GPG Associati  Italian Press

Maria Alessio Ruffo

[email protected]

Cell +39 3357450537

SOURCE ReiThera Srl

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On August 23, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo said that he is very hopeful that several other Arab countries will join the initiative to normalize the bilateral relations with Israel, following the UAE-Israel Abraham Accords agreement. Speaking at a press conference in Jerusalem, in presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Pompeo said that the commitment to peace, security, and stability between the two nations under President Trumps leadership was exemplary for more Gulf nations to initiate the talks, pushing Trumps peace rhetoric. US Secretary Pompeo is on a Mideast tour to press peace momentum. He will travel to Israel, Sudan, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates between August 23 to August 28, as per the US State governments press release.

Good to be in Israel again today with @IsraeliPM @Netanyahu. We discussed ways to address Iranian malign influence in the region, shared challenges the U.S. and Israel face, and the benefit of the Abraham Accords. As always, the U.S. commitment to Israels security is unwavering. pic.twitter.com/fnTRKIrH3u  Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) August 24, 2020

Pompeo met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office as the two leaders discussed the Israel-UAE peace deal brokered by the US and regional security issues related to Irans malicious influence. Additionally, the US secretary held talks about establishing and deepening Israels relationships in the region, as well as cooperation in protecting the US and Israeli economies from  malign investors, according to the press document.

At the presser, Pompeo stressed that the US will ensure that Israel had the military edge in the Middle East under the US arms deals with the UAE to be negotiated in the future. Netanyahu had earlier said in the state-run press address that Israel and the US would hold talks about expanding peace in the middle eastern region, and with more Gulf nations. He said, assuring the Israeli people that there will be more countries  and in the not-so-distant future who would look to build a strong strategic relationship with Israel.

Delighted to be in Israel following the announcement of the Abraham Accords. This historic diplomatic breakthrough will advance peace in the Middle East and is a testament to the vision of @IsraeliPM @netanyahu, Crown Prince @MohamedBinZayed, and President @realDonaldTrump. pic.twitter.com/1LF4sZUGzt  Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) August 24, 2020

Read: Trump Mulls Fast-tracking AstraZeneca Vaccine Development Before US Elections

Read: Republican Convention To Kick Off In North Carolina To Nominate Trump

Tour will conclude at UAE visit

Pompeo will also hold meetings with Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok in Sudan and the Sovereign Council Chair General Abdel Fattah el-Burhan to discuss continued US support for the civilian-led transitional government and express support for deepening the Sudan-Israel relationship, as per the state press release. US Secretary will then travel to Manama to meet with Crown Prince of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. His tour will conclude with a visit to the United Arab Emirates, as he will hold a meeting with Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi to discuss Abraham Accords agreement and other key Middle Eastern regional issues.

Read: Trump's Adviser Kellyanne Conway To Leave White House By End Of The Month

Read: Donald Trump Raises Possibility Of US-China 'decoupling'
KENOSHA, Wis. - Anger over the shooting of a Black man by police spilled into the streets of Kenosha for a second night Monday, with police again firing tear gas at hundreds of protesters who defied a curfew, threw bottles and shot fireworks at law enforcement guarding the courthouse.

The southeastern Wisconsin city became the nations latest flashpoint in a summer of racial unrest after cellphone footage of police shooting Jacob Blake  apparently in the back, as he leaned into his SUV while his three children sat in the vehicle  circulated widely on social media Sunday. The 29-year-old was hospitalized in serious condition.

The shooting drew condemnation from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who also called out 125 members of the National Guard on Monday after protesters set cars on fire, smashed windows and clashed with officers in riot gear the previous night.

Police first fired tear gas Monday about 30 minutes after the 8 p.m. curfew took effect to disperse protesters who chanted, No justice, no peace as they confronted a line of officers who wore protective gear and stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the courthouse entrance. But hundreds of people stuck around, screaming at police and lighting fires, including to a garbage truck near the courthouse.

Tensions had flared anew earlier Monday after a news conference with Kenosha Mayor John Antarmian, originally to be held in a park, was moved inside the citys public safety building. Hundreds of protesters rushed to the building and a door was snapped off its hinges before police in riot gear pepper-sprayed the crowd, which included a photographer from The Associated Press.

Police in the former auto manufacturing centre of 100,000 people midway between Milwaukee and Chicago said they were responding to a call about a domestic dispute when they encountered Blake on Sunday. They did not say whether Blake was armed or why police opened fire, they released no details on the dispute, and they did not immediately disclose the race of the three officers at the scene.

The man who said he made the cellphone video, 22-year-old Raysean White, said he saw Blake scuffling with three officers and heard them yell, Drop the knife! Drop the knife! before the gunfire erupted. He said he didnt see a knife in Blakes hands.

The governor said he has seen no information to suggest Blake had a knife or other weapon, but that the case is still being investigated by the state Justice Department.

The officers were placed on administrative leave, standard practice in a shooting by police. Authorities released no details about the officers and did not immediately respond to requests for their service records.

Evers was quick to condemn the bloodshed, saying that while not all details were known, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said the officers must be held accountable.

This morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force, he said, just over two months before Election Day in a country already roiled by the recent deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Those shots pierce the soul of our nation.

Republicans and the police union accused the politicians of rushing to judgment, reflecting the deep partisan divide in Wisconsin, a key presidential battleground state. Wisconsin GOP members also decried the violent protests, echoing the law-and-order theme that President Donald Trump has been using in his reelection campaign.

As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident, Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha police union, said in a statement. He called the governors statement wholly irresponsible.

The shooting happened around 5 p.m. Sunday and was captured from across the street on the video posted online. Kenosha police do not have body cameras but do have body microphones.

In the footage, Blake walks from the sidewalk around the front of his SUV to his driver-side door as officers follow him with their guns pointed and shout at him. As Blake opens the door and leans into the SUV, an officer grabs his shirt from behind and opens fire while Blake has his back turned. Seven shots can be heard, though it isnt clear how many struck Blake or how many officers fired.

White, who said he made the video, said that before the gunfire, he looked out his window and saw six or seven women shouting at each other on the sidewalk. A few moments later, Blake drove up in his SUV and told his son, who was standing nearby, to get in the vehicle, according to White. White said Blake did not say anything to the women.

White said he left the window for a few minutes, and when he came back, saw three officers wrestling with Blake. One punched Blake in the ribs, and another used a stun gun on him, White said. He said Blake got free and started walking away as officers yelled about a knife.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, representing Blakes family, said Blake was simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident.

Police did not immediately confirm either mans account.

Blakes partner, Laquisha Booker, told NBCs Milwaukee affiliate, WTMJ-TV, that the couples three children were in the back seat of the SUV when police shot him.

That man just literally grabbed him by his shirt and looked the other way and was just shooting him. With the kids in the back screaming. Screaming, Booker said.

Blakes grandfather, Jacob Blake Sr., was a prominent minister and civil rights leader in the Chicago area who helped organize a march and spoke in support of a comprehensive housing law in Evanston, Illinois, days after the 1968 slaying of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Rachel Noerdlinger, publicist for the National Action Network, told The Associated Press that the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke Monday to Blakes father, who called the civil rights leader for his support. Blakes father will speak at Sharptons March on Washington commemoration on Friday, Noerdlinger said.

Karissa Lewis, national field director of Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 150 Black-led organizations that make up the broader Black Lives Matter movement, said the shooting was yet another example of why activists have called for defunding police departments.

Theres no amount of training or reform that can teach a police officer that its wrong to shoot a Black man in the back seven times while his children watch, Lewis said in a statement first shared with the AP.

Online court records indicate Kenosha County prosecutors charged Blake on July 6 with sexual assault, trespassing and disorderly conduct in connection with domestic abuse. An arrest warrant was issued the following day. The records contain no further details and do not list an attorney for Blake.

It was unclear whether that case had anything to do with the shooting.

Crump, who has also represented the Floyd and Taylor families, said Blakes family has asked that demonstrations in response to his shooting remain peaceful.

They dont believe violence to be the solution, he said.

For more than 100 years, Kenosha was an auto manufacturing centre, but it has now largely been transformed into a bedroom community for Milwaukee and Chicago. The city is about 67% white, 11.5% Black and 17.6% Hispanic, according to 2019 Census data. Both the mayor and police chief are white. About 17% of the population lives in poverty.

___

Webber reported from Fenton, Michigan. Associated Press reporters Scott Bauer and Todd Richmond in Madison, Wisconsin, Jeff Baenen in Minneapolis, Aaron Morrison in New York City and Mike Householder in Kenosha contributed.
NEW HAVEN  A coalition of six unions representing school workers has released a list of 13 principles they described as non-negotiable as school districts prepare to reopen buildings in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On some level we understand their need to get students back into the classroom as soon as possible, said American Federation of Teachers Connecticut President Jan Hochadel at a virtual press conference Monday, referring Gov. Ned Lamont and state Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona.

Like the hierarchy of needs, we feel those things cannot happen unless our students and our staff are safe, Hochadel said.

Some leaders said that there are apparent different standards for students  who are allowed to opt out of in-person learning if they so choose  and school staff.

Teachers who have compromised immune systems are being told pretty much that you have to come into school, wear a mask and keep your fingers crossed, said Don Williams, executive director of the Connecticut Education Association.

The coalition said it represents more than 60,000 staff employed by school boards in Connecticut.

Hochadel said all 13 principles are important, but the first  that schools may not reopen unless representatives from every labor organization be included in the planning process  does the best to sum up the coalitions desires.

Cynthia Harris Jackson, a school nurse at Conte West Hills Magnet School, said that schools in cities such as New Haven are often akin to an acute care center because of lack of regular access to medical care.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created additional challenges that place more burdens on the existing health gaps we see every day, said Harris Jackson, who is president of the New Haven union for school nurses. The entire school staff and student body must work together. In many cases it takes a village to slow the spread of the virus.

Harris Jackson announced two of the 13 principles: that all staff, including temporary and substitute workers, must be trained on COVID-19 safety protocols and that only trained professionals be allowed to administer healthcare related to COVID-19 or to medically assess students.

Other principles address constant mask-wearing among students and adherence to social distancing, a non-retaliation principle about staff raising concerns about workplace safety, the installation of partitions, ensuring that food service adhere to restaurant COVID-19 protocols and notification to all unions of positive tests within the school district.

Katy Gale, a fifth grade teacher in Darien and a CEA board member, said she believes social distancing cannot be done in her small school district, so its hard to believe a city such as New Haven could accomplish it in school.

My own nightmare is one in which Im looking down at one of my 11-year-old students who is becoming unraveled because of my death, she said. We must get this right. We must reopen safely.

Ivy Delgado, a bus driver in New Haven and president of their union, read principle 13: that all buses have a trained monitor and students must adhere to seating protocols  no students may share a row unless they live in the same household and they will be seated in a diagonal formation by alternating sides of the bus in each row.

As a parent, a driver and the president of the school bus drivers council, I would like to see a safe reopening for the students, drivers, monitors and school staff, she said.

brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:18:17|Editor: huaxia

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JUBA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan's military said on Monday it will retaliate against the attacks by the militia group, the National Salvation Front (NAS) led by renegade general Thomas Cirilo which previously opted out of the 2018 revitalized peace deal.

Lul Ruai Koang, military spokesperson warned that they are ready to retaliate against NAS in case of continued attacks on their positions and on civilians.

"South Sudan People's Defense Force (SSPDF) reaffirms commitment to the Rome declaration, but reserves the right to respond with deadly force in self-defense and that of civilians and their properties," Koang said in a statement issued in Juba.

NAS refused to sign the revitalized peace deal to end the more than five years of conflict, since the outbreak in December 2013, as it called for renegotiation of the peace pact to include a federal system of governance.

This came following last week's deadly ambush by the rebel group on the convoy of James Wani Igga, second vice president, which left six of his bodyguards killed.

NAS, a rebel group fighting against the government in Central and Western Equatoria State recently claimed responsibility for the attack that took place at Lobonok, which is the home area of the second VP located on the outskirts of the capital.

Koang also blamed NAS for the Aug. 7 attack on a local gold mine, which left nine civilians killed.

He called on the ceasefire monitors to investigate violations.

The government on Jan. 13 inked a peace deal dubbed the "Rome Declaration" in Rome, with the South Sudan Opposition Movement Alliance (SSOMA), a coalition of opposition groups that did not sign the 2018 peace agreement.

NAS is part of SSOMA but its persistent attacks on government troops have meant violation of the Cessation of Hostilities under the Rome Declaration.

The revitalized peace deal was inked in Ethiopia in September 2018 between the government and the main opposition, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM)-In-Opposition led by now First Vice President Riek Machar.

Under the ten-point statement dubbed the Rome declaration, the parties reaffirmed their commitment to cease hostilities and continue to dialogue. Enditem
Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Monday that the blood plasma treatment for coronavirus patients tat was just granted emergency approval by the Trump administration may be somewhat effective.

"I think that this could be beneficial. It might be weakly beneficial," Gottlieb said on "Squawk Box." "It doesn't look like a home run, but right now we're looking for singles and doubles. There aren't really going to be any home runs on the horizon until we can get the other therapeutic antibodies on the market and hopefully eventually vaccines and better therapeutics."

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Sunday the emergency use authorization for using convalescent plasma to treat coronavirus patients. The Trump administration announcement came a day before the start of the Republican National Convention. President Donald Trump touted it as a "a breakthrough," just a few days after suggesting, without providing evidence, that opponents in the FDA may have been holding up emergency approval until after the Nov. 3 election.

Blood plasma treatment has cut Covid-19 mortality by 35%, Trump claimed on Sunday. However, results of the study by the Mayo Clinic that the FDA cited in its authorization of the treatment indicates that patients below age 80 who were not on a respirator and received plasma with a high level of antibodies within three days of diagnosis were about 35% more likely to survive another 30 days compared with patients who received plasma with a low level of antibodies. The study acknowledged, however, that its findings are limited, particularly because it did not have a placebo comparison.

Convalescent plasma is a century-old treatment that also was used on patients during the 1918 flu pandemic. It involves taking the blood from recovered Covid-19 patients who have developed antibodies against the disease, according to the Mayo Clinic, which is conducting studies on the treatment. The convalescent plasma is then given to people with the coronavirus, in hopes of preventing severe illness.

"We have a lot of experience using convalescent plasma in the setting of viral infections. We've seen situations where it does provide a benefit. We've seen some situations where it doesn't," said Gottlieb, who led the FDA in the Trump administration from May 2017 to April 2019.

In late March, in the early stages of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, the FDA began allowing doctors to use convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19 patients on a case-by-case basis. In its release Sunday, the FDA stressed that clinical trials to determine its effectiveness "remain ongoing."

Gottlieb said he believed that convalescent plasma "certainly" met the standard for an emergency use approval "in the setting of a public health emergency."

"So the standard isn't the typical standard of safe and effective as it is for a new drug approval," he added. "I think on the basis of the data set that's available, it's reasonable to conclude that this may provide a benefit to patients who are suffering from Covid."

There are about 5.7 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. At least 176,809 people have died. After a new surge of infections this summer, daily new cases of Covid-19 have started to decline.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy listens to a question during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Aug. 24, 2020. (Tom Williams/AFP via Getty Images)

Postmaster DeJoy Urges Voters to Request Ballots Well Ahead of Election

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, in Mondays testimony on Capitol Hill, urged voters wishing to cast their votes by mail to request and submit ballots early ahead of the Nov. 3 election as a commonsense best practice that will ensure they reach officials on time and are counted.

DeJoy, who testified before the House Oversight Committee on U.S. Postal Service (USPS) operations and the upcoming elections, said that voters should request their ballots at least 15 days ahead of Election Day. He said his advice is meant to ensure that voters have enough time to receive their ballot, complete it, and mail it back to election officials on time.

I encourage all Americans who choose to vote by mail to request their ballots early and to vote early as a commonsense best practice, he told the panel. He also said that due to an expected surge in mail-in ballots because of the CCP virus pandemic, voters should mail back their completed ballots at least seven days ahead of the election.

He stressed, however, that his urging voters not to wait until the last minute should in no way be misconstrued to imply that we lack confidence in our ability to deliver those ballots.

We can, and will, handle the volume of Election Mail we receive, he told the panel.

The Postal Service is fully capable and committed to delivering the nations ballots securely and on time, DeJoy said, adding, this sacred duty is my number one priority between now and Election Day.

United States Postal Service mail carrier Frank Colon, 59, delivers mail amid the CCP virus pandemic in El Paso, Texas, on April 30, 2020. (Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images)

DeJoys comments came as the oversight panel opened a hearing on operational changes at the Postal Service that have drawn complaints of mail delays nationwide.

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) told DeJoy at the hearing that changes imposed by DeJoy this summer have threatened the reliability of mail service in his state and across the country.

What the heck are you doing? Lynch asked DeJoy at the sometimes contentious hearing. Either through gross incompetence or on purpose, DeJoy is deliberately dismantling this once-proud institution, Lynch claimed.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testifies during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on slowdowns at the Postal Service ahead of the November elections on Capitol Hill in Washington on Aug. 24, 2020. (Tom Williams/AFP)

DeJoy denied any wrongdoing and accused Lynch and other Democrats of spreading misinformation. He also said that he wished to clarify certain inaccuracies about my actions that he said were perpetuated by some media and elected officials as part of a false narrative to the American people.

First, I did not direct the removal of blue collection boxes or the removal of mail processing equipment. Second, I did not direct a cutback on hours at any of our post offices. And finally, I did not direct the elimination or any cutback in overtime, DeJoy said, adding that he did suspend these practices to remove any perceptions about our commitment to delivering the nations election mail.

He said that the actions that he did direct at the USPS were aimed at removing operational inefficiencies, among other aims, so as to deliver an improved level of service.

Mailboxes sit outside of a Morris Plains, N.J., post office, on Aug. 17, 2020. (Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

I directed the Postal Service operations team to develop and execute on a plan to improve our adherence to the transportation schedule of our over 40,000 trips a day. We have accomplished this goal, he said, adding that the number of on-time departures at USPS is approaching 90 percent, while wasteful, extra trips are down by over 70 percent.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), the chair of the oversight committee and author of a House bill, adopted on Aug. 22, that allocates $25 billion in funding for the USPS and freezes recent changes made at the agency, accused DeJoy of using the Postal Services longstanding fiscal problems as an excuse to justify sweeping and damaging changes to Postal Service operations. And we have all seen the results: national headlines about delays of days and weeks, veterans desperately waiting for their medications, sorting machines being ripped out and thrown in dumpsters.

Acknowledging that there were some service declines, which he said were temporary and should not have happened, DeJoy insisted they were being remedied as he remains laser focused on improving service for the American people.

I am not engaged in sabotaging the election, DeJoy said, adding that he, personally, plans to vote by mail.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
"Several evidentiary studies, including a 16-year landmark study, have shown that 98.3% of the surveyed U.S. head lice have become genetically resistant to the over-the-counter (OTC) products containing either pyrethrin or permethrin as active ingredients," said Dr. John Clark, professor of environmental toxicology and chemistry, and director of the Massachusetts Pesticide Analysis Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "While these products have dominated the market, insecticide resistance has occurred worldwide and is contributing to both the increased incidence of pediculosis and to unprecedented levels of treatment failure."

Contrary to the abundance of clinical evidence demonstrating the lack of effectiveness of several leading OTC head lice shampoos and creme rinses, medical associations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, and government agencies including the Centers for Disease Control have been slow to update their treatment guidelines and continue to recommend the use of pyrethrin- and permethrin-based OTC products as first-line agents. In addition, major U.S. pharmacy retailers continue to sell these OTC products further compounding the situation and resulting in the purchase of 3.45 million units annually even though their efficacy has been substantially reduced to no clinical effect due to resistance.1

Bill Culpepper, President of ParaPRO added, "In this unsettling time of COVID-19, families shouldn't have to cope with any unnecessary health worries concerning their children, such as treatment failure for head lice or the potential side effects of multiple failed treatments. We urge parents and caregivers to follow the overwhelming genetic and clinical evidence, and to seek the advice of a licensed health professional when faced with any potential infestation with these all too common parasites."

The Importance of Telemedicine

Parents concerned about accessing a health care professional regarding a head lice infestation have sensible options. Virtual visits to health care providers, including pediatricians, family practitioners and pediatric dermatologists, offer a great alternative to face-to-face office visits, especially during today's nation-wide pandemic. Telemedicine enables parents and families to access expert advice from the comfort and safety of home, with the added benefits of reduced wait times and potential cost savings for payers and for the patients' family.2

About "Super" Lice

Head lice are continuously evolving to adapt to their environment and have widely and uniformly developed knockdown resistance by acquiring kdr-type genetic mutations that render them resistant to the two most common OTC treatment formulations.3 Researchers hypothesize that patient self-diagnosis and patient misuse of these products have contributed to this increase in resistance, with one clinical analysis of patient use charts showing that the OTC head lice medications were applied five times on average, well beyond the recommended use.4 Continued exposure to insecticides such as permethrin and other pyrethroids can result in side effects ranging from headaches, dizziness, nausea, and seizures, to muscle tremors, abdominal pain, and other symptoms of neurotoxicity.5

About ParaPRO

ParaPRO LLC., a life-sciences organization dedicated to eradicating ectoparasites (bugs that live on the body surface), has developed a variety of diagnostic and educational tools to assist HCPs and parents in successfully identifying, managing and treating head lice infestations in children. For more information, visit ParaPRO.com/head-lice/.

References

IRI  52-week period ended April 21, 2020 , Total US Drug and Total US Food. K Seiger, EB Hawryluk, D Kroshinsky, JC Kvedar, S Das. Pediatric Dermatology eConsults: Reduced Wait Times and Dermatology Office Visits. Pediatr Dermatol 2020 Jun 16;[EPub Ahead of Print] Gellatly KJ, Krim S, Palenchar DJ, et al. Expansion of the Knockdown Resistance Frequency Map for Human Head Lice (Phthiraptera: Pediculidae) in the United States Using Quantitative Sequencing. J Med Entomol. 2016;53(3):653659. https://academic.oup.com/jme/article/53/3/653/2222496 West DP. Head lice treatment costs and the impact on managed care. Am J Manag Care. 2004;10(9 Suppl):S27782. https://www.ajmc.com/view/sep04-1894ps277-s282 FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) Quarterly Data Extract Files https://fis.fda.gov/extensions/FPD-QDE-FAERS/FPD-QDE-FAERS.html

SOURCE ParaPRO LLC.

Related Links

https://www.parapro.com/


Big mammals such as elephants, rhinos and primates are at highest risk of extinction in the national parks and nature reserves of the world's poorest countries, a new global review has found

Big mammals such as elephants, rhinos and primates are at highest risk of extinction in the national parks and nature reserves of the world's poorest countries, a new global review has found.

The review, which looked at 81 studies carried out between 1980 and 2020, found that illegal hunting was causing worrying declines in the big mammal populations of protected areas across the globe, and particularly in poorer countries.

In the four continents included in the study, 294 different mammal species were discovered to have been illegally hunted in the national parks created to protect them.

The threat species face in poorer countries may be down to a boom in bushmeat trade and a lack of resources for conservation.

In order to protect species, governments and policy makers need to focus on tackling human poverty, the researchers urge.

Lead author of the study, Dr Alfan Rija, of Tanzania's Sokoine University of Agriculture who conducted the review while a PhD student at the University of York, said: "We have known for several years that illegal hunting reduces mammal populations, but our review reveals that this is happening even inside protected areas and particularly affects larger mammals (those with a body mass of over 100kg) in the poorest countries. In poorer countries such as my home of Tanzania, bushmeat is a valuable source of income and protein in some areas and there is also less resources available to invest in the security and policing of national parks.

"The threat from illegal hunting is particularly dangerous to large mammals because they have slow growth rates and so over-hunting is likely to cause population decline.

"Aside from concerns about the future of many of these species being in peril, the loss of mammals due to illegal hunting pressure has been related to substantial loss of important functional characteristics in an ecosystem. They support many ecological interactions - such as seed dispersal and regeneration - and their decline threatens wider biodiversity."

The study found that in general across the globe, stricter protected areas showed lower rates of large mammal population decline. However, this was not the case in Asia, where stricter national parks had higher rates of illegal hunting and species decline.

Senior author of the study, Dr Colin Beale from the Department of Biology at the University of York, said: "Our research adds to a growing number of studies that suggest Asia is currently a particular focus for the illegal trade of wildlife body parts. Despite strict laws, illegal hunters may be forced to enter protected areas where most sought-after species such as snow leopard, tiger, pangolin, orangutans and sun bears still remain.

"Improving the effectiveness of Asian protected areas will be important to strengthen biodiversity conservation across continental Asia, and is likely to need a range of measures including ensuing effective law enforcement as well as work with communities in and around valuable wildlife areas."

###

Global extent and drivers of mammal population declines in protected areas under illegal hunting pressure is published in PLos One.

The study was carried out in collaboration with the Department of Wildlife Management, Sokoine University of Agriculture, in Tanzania.
Professor Louise Dubras moved to Derry in June 2018 after being appointed Foundation Dean of the Magee Graduate Entry Medical School (GEMS). The collapse of Stormont coupled with the Department of Healths view that the school did not demonstrate need and value for money led to delays.

Finally, in May of this year Deputy First Minister Michelle ONeill announced that it had been approved and would open in September 2021.

In an in-depth interview with Derry News reporter, Garrett Hargan, Professor Dubras speaks of her elation after discovering the long wait was over, about the hundreds of people who have expressed an interest to date and the wide-ranging benefits that training doctors locally will bring.

She also refutes any suggestion that the school will ever be relocated, talks about the prospect of health science courses moving to Magee to complement the medical school and new build projects in the pipeline which will enhance the learning experience for medical students in the city.

For readers who may not know, can you provide a brief background of your career path before taking on the role as Foundation Dean at the Magee Medical School?

Ive been a GP for a long time. My clinical background is that I worked in Southampton looking after homeless people for a long, long time. I was lead GP for a homeless service.

From a university perspective, I worked at the University of Southampton for quite a long time and had increasing roles in leadership and ended up running the medical degree programme.

I went from there to Kings College in London where I was the Deputy Dean of Medical Education. We were doing a huge curriculum change in this very big medical school, one of the biggest schools in the country with about 410 students each year. So it was very sizeable and quite a challenge.

Then I became the Interim Dean of Medical Education for nine months and then was ready for a new challenge and thats when this job came up.

I arrived in Derry in June 2018.

I was really excited about coming here because it was an opportunity to establish something new, obviously with a focus on General Practice. An opportunity to bring my own values to the school and my personal values which have kind of always been about social justice, access and community-based healthcare.

It really aligned with the universitys plans. And thats me in a nutshell.

What are your thoughts on the city having lived here for two years now?

Its wonderful, I have felt so welcomed here. I was born and grew up in the Channel Islands, Jersey, and its a small community, coastal and Im kind of used to being in a place where people know other people and Im used to being somewhere that I can get to the sea. From that perspective Ive loved it.

But Ive done things like joining Altnagelvin Hospitals choir, Im probably the worst member of the choir, but its just been lovely and a brilliant way to get to know people.

Ive started running, I joined Star Running Club. Everywhere Ive gone Ive been impressed by just how much of a welcoming place the city is.

Why did approval for the medical school take so long?

It took a little bit longer than I was expecting. But although the journey was a little bit longer and a bit lumpier than I had anticipated, its worth it. I think the outcome is a really great one.

At this month's Western Trust meeting a member of the board said the Department of Health put obstacles in the way. Is that true?

No, I dont think so. Its been a very thorough process of working with the university to develop our outline business case. And I think the civil service have a responsibility to make sure that these things are robust. At the point where we submitted our final business case to them in October of last year I was confident it was well put together and robust.

There was time required for them to consider that. And the Assembly was not in place which was an added dimension to the decision-making process because the civil service arent in a position to make that level of decision.

So it took longer than any of us expected but with the benefit of hindsight, that was not wasted time.

And the GMC process was ongoing in parallel anyway. They visited us in July last year and we did have to pause the process until such time as we had confirmation of student places.

But once we resumed the process we were able to pick that up fairly quickly.

A little bit longer but I wouldnt say there was deliberate obstruction at all.

How did you feel when it finally got over the line?

Oh goodness, delighted. The announcement by the Deputy First Minister in May of our places was just so welcome and then the confirmation that we had by the end of June was equally, each step has been fantastic.

But the one that made me feel most excited was the point where the GMC gave agreement that we could recruit staff and students. That was the most significant for me when our external regulator said it was happy for us to progress.

There is some fear in the city, which has been highlighted by local councillors, that the school could be moved given the history of courses being transferred to other campuses. Are there any guarantees that the medical school will not be moved to another campus?

I dont think theres any question about that, Garrett.

How many applications have you received so far for the course?

They all go through UCAS and we dont know how that is going until various UCAS deadlines are passed.

This morning we had the first of a series of webinars with people who are interested in studying with us. We had 100 people on this morning wanting to know about the programme.

Were running a test centre for The Graduate Medical School Admissions Test (GAMSAT) and we filled up our places within a week. There is a real interest in coming to study with us.

Has a date been set for the GAMSAT?

There are two opportunities, one is usually September and the other March. We became registered as a GAMSAT centre as soon as we got the go-ahead to recruit students.

Because its an Australian company that runs GAMSAT, its the kind of gold standard for anyone going in to graduate entry medical school courses.

Our September/October sittings are full and they will release the dates for March and as soon as those are released people will be able to register.

But in order to apply, people dont have to have taken GAMSAT in those dates.

Theres a two-year grace so if someone did it in 2019 they would still be eligible for our first round of applications.

Youve pointed out that it is not a post-graduate course or limited to people with medical qualifications, but open to anyone with a 2:1 degree. What fields have applicants come from so far?

The beauty of our programme is that we dont limit it to people with bioscience backgrounds. My experience working with students on other GEMS courses and also the experience of our partner medical school, St Georges in London, is that theres a real mix of prior backgrounds.

You might have people coming in whove got Masters of even PhDs in biomedical related subjects but equally Ive worked with people whove come in with degrees in music, whove been geography teachers, lawyers, and the interesting thing about graduate entry medicine is that we teach it; students work in mixed groups so youll find you might have somebody with an English degree working with someone who has a Masters in mechanical engineering or a BSc in biomedical sciences and actually they all learn from each other and are all engaged in that journey.

And the people who are non-bioscience in background learn fast and by the end of the first year they are all at the same level and all really benefited from that diversity in backgrounds.

At this stage would you know anything about the geographical spread of applicants?

We have a database of about 350 people who have been interested in following the programme and have probably been in contact with us for about three years.

Theyre fairly widely dispersed, quite a lot of them are from NI and spread out here. Some expressing interest from GB and other international students but theres a limit to the number of international students any medical school can take.

Thats set by the UK government because of the way clinical placements are funded and also going into the foundation programme to become fully registered with the GMC.

Theres a cap on medical courses partly because of what it costs to train doctors but in addition to that its about the capacity of hospitals and general practices to take those students.

Weve got lots of interest but limited to what we can do internationally.

What specific facilities do you need in order to provide the type of first-class course you envisage?

We have a building identified for refurbishment. We will have students on campus for their first year and part of their second year. After that theyre largely out on clinical placements and coming back to campus for certain weeks, tutorials and so on.

The estate plan is comprehensive to accommodate those students and well be providing them with a range of resources; rooms for learning anatomy, for learning clinical skills, communication skills as well as standard tutorial rooms.

Do you have those in the current buildings at Magee?

Absolutely.

Is the aim to still have a new building along the riverfront (artists's impression below)?

Absolutely yeah, we still intend to have our new building but we have the wherewithal and are ready for first intake on the campus.

Would the theory element of the course be taught there once its ready?

That would be the expectation, yes.

Is there any timeline that youre aware of for that?

As you know, the funding for that is within the City Deal process so there will be the standard contractual stuff that will go on. But we have space on the campus to not be pressured for time and ultimately our new build has to be right. Its not like were going to have to move out within a particular timescale.

Seventy students have been agreed to begin with a view to increasing that to 100. Are you confident it will be increased to 100 and in what timescale are you looking for that to happen?

There are ongoing discussions with the Department for the Economy. In our business case we had a sense of how we want to grow year on year but were certainly happy to be delivering 70 doctors a year because that is a substantial addition to the Northern Ireland medical workforce.

Does Ulster University have enough experience and expertise to supervise the medical school at council level?

One hundred per cent, absolutely. Youve heard us talk about the rigorous GMC quality assurance process and a lot of that process is about testing out with us, in a very robust way, a whole range of things that include senior level governance, support, commitment, resources; so the GMC wouldnt be permitting us to progress if they werent confident in the universitys ability to deliver this.

Can you say anything about the plans for on-site teaching facilities at Altnagelvin that were mentioned at the recent Western Trust board meeting?

Were at an early stage of those conversations and obviously were working in a partnership with the Trust and well be having conversations with them and with our colleagues at Queens University Belfast. So its early days yet with that.

Were these plans included in a business case that has already been submitted?

Oh yes, its costed. Absolutely.

Was it with the department of health because a number of departments have said they have no knowledge of it?

I cant remember the details about which department, it was included in the capital requirements within the City Deal.

Should health science courses (Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy etc) move to Magee to complement the medical school and build upon that positive progress, and would you like to see them come?

As you know theres been a consultation on the future location of those courses which has been paused because were running a full equality impact assessment. So were aiming to resume that shortly. I think from an educational perspective, the more health professionals you are able to educate in the same place the better.

Do you think the medical school approval will aid that case?

I think its a significant element.

Are you confident it will happen and are you personally pushing for that move?

Its subject to consultation, Garrett, so I cant pre-judge the outcome of a consultation. But youve read the consultation document so you know that thats the universitys preferred outcome (relocating courses to Magee).

What do you think about a cross-border university named in honour of John Hume that would link UU Magee, the Institute of Technology in Letterkenny & Sligo and North West Regional College (NWRC)? It has been proposed by the Irish governments Higher Education minister, is that something youd be supportive of?

I think we have to recognise the impact of John Hume as a politician, peace maker and honorary graduate of the university. So John Hume had immense impact and I think we are very keen to work with the Hume Foundation to recognise his contribution in whatever way is most appropriate. And of course, as you know, his daughter is a GP locally so I think commitment to health and social justice are all things which align very much with my own personal values.

We have a very strong working relationship with our colleagues at the Letterkenny Institute of Technology, with North West Regional College, so I think from my perspective, the university is going to continue to deepen those working relationships.

Student numbers have dropped at Magee every year since 2015. Does the university have to show that it is committed to the campus by delivering on long-promised expansion to 10,000 students?

I think the mere fact that the university is committed to the school of medicine and training of doctors in the city is evidence of its commitment.

Are you aware of a wider strategy to deliver on that promise?

I dont think theres any doubt about the universitys commitment to the city, as I said, certainly in terms of training doctors, weve already talked about the universitys preferred outcome for the health sciences consultation so I think theres absolutely no doubt about the universitys commitment.

I'd imagine you have a busy year ahead, what has to be done to ready the school for students in the coming months?

As you can see from the universitys marketing material and my tweets and so on youll see that were actively marketing to recruit students. And well continue that with webinars, well be running the GAMSAT test in October, we aim to run our interviews in January//February of next year whether they are in person or virtual because of COVID. That will be us progressing student recruitment.

Then there is staff recruitment which is due to go out in the next week or so. We have a recruitment strategy to get all of those people in post in time for the first students.

Theres the building refurbishment, theres procurement of our virtual learning environment and various other bits and pieces.

So, youre right, there is plenty to keep us out of mischief.

Looking to the future, what will the course bring to the city, and ultimately when these students are able to graduate, how much will that mean to local health care?

My goodness, there are so many benefits. One is that we know from really good research over time that if you train doctors locally they stay local. And will often choose general practice as a career.

What it can do for the city first and foremost is, it will grow our health profession workforce. Second is, there is also a huge opportunity to improve morale amongst the workforce who are currently here because they can see real benefit in brining on the future.

Theres nothing more exciting than actually working with medical students because theyre amazing people and you know that theyre going to make brilliant doctors.

The third thing is that theres a real opportunity to improve recruitment anyway, because people like to come to places that are involved in medical education.

And another benefit is the fact that medical students dont just stay in their university, they like to get involved with the local community through classes and societies, so they will often run resuscitation training courses for kids in schools, they might work with a range of community groups doing volunteering. So I think everywhere you turn you would see real benefits to the school the medicine and these students in the city.
In the mid-1850s, Australian officials created a way to protect voters from that sort of manipulation. The states of Massachusetts and New York brought the system to the U.S. in 1888. The key element is preserving official control of ballots throughout the electoral process. All votes must be cast in a public space, in the security of a private booth. All voters must use a uniform ballot form listing all candidates, which is available only from election officials at the polling site. The ballot, which is not labeled with any information identifying the voter, is returned to election officials in a confidential manner, and then counted.
WASHINGTON  While he's backing away from a formal endorsement, former U.S. Rep. John Faso, a Republican, said he will probably vote for President Donald Trump in 2020 - although some former GOP members of Congress are now publicly backing Democrat Joe Biden.

I definitely would not vote for Vice President Joe Biden and I most likely will vote for President Donald Trump," Faso said Monday, declining to explain his reasons why.

Faso did not support Trump in 2016; in the presidential election, he voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, he said.

A long time member of the New York state Assembly, Faso represented New York's 19th District from 2017 to 2019, but lost re-election to U.S. Rep. Antonio Delgado, D-Rhinebeck. Faso was endorsed by Trump in 2018.

On Monday, three other former GOP members of Congress from New York announced their endorsements for Biden, the former Vice President. Former U.S. Reps. Jim Walsh of Syracuse, Jack Quinn of Hamburg and Susan Molinari of Staten Island, gave the Democrat their backing. They were among 27 Republican former members of Congress who announced they were team Biden Monday.

Molinari spoke about her support for Biden at the Democratic National Convention last week, along with Republicans former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Hewlitt-Packard CEO and GOP presidential candidate Meg Whitman.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

In their remarks, the Republican politicians presented Biden as a unifier across party lines and presented Trump as a threat to the country. At the Republican National Convention Monday, speakers - including Trump himself - fought back, calling Biden "radical." House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., noted that a Democratic Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey switched parties in 2019 and pledged his support for Trump.

Despite the endorsements of other former members, Faso said he did not see the value of making an endorsement now that he's out of office.

"I dont think my endorsement or lack there of means anything," he said. "Im not interested in making one.
The move comes as a response to the recent attack on a woman on the Mariupol-Kyiv train.

Armed security teams will board passenger trains on ten routes across Ukraine to ensure passenger safety.

The pilot project will be launched before the end of August, Suspilne reports.

The security will respond jointly with the train crew to violation of rules on board the trains.

"We asked the police to accompany trains. We have received no response for a long time. Therefore, it will be the state company's militarized security, of course, at the cost of Ukrzaliznytsia," the company official told the public broadcaster.

Read alsoPassengers to be allowed to get off trains at "red zone" stations  infrastructure ministerSuch security teams already work on freight trains.

"Now they will also accompany passenger trains. At this stage, we chose the routes that, in our opinion, are in the greatest demand, or those where there are frequent cases of attacks," said the Ukrzaliznytsia official.

Violence on trains: background
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Linkedin Apriadi Gunawan (The Jakarta Post) Medan  Mon, August 24, 2020 12:29 514 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c400352b 1 National North-Sumatra,Medan,Sibolga,ship,collided,collision,vessel,vessel-accident,port Free

One fisherman was killed and six others injured aboard the KM Sinar Mas Jaya when the fishing vessel collided with the KMP Wira Glory ferry on Sunday evening in Sibolga Bay, North Sumatra.

The Sinar Mas Jaya was badly damaged in the mid-sea collision.

All seven victims of the 24-strong fishing crew have been transported to Sibolga hospital. The fatal victim has been identified as Miswar Andri Matondang, 52.

Puyuh 5014 Police Boat commander Adj. Comr. FAP Silalahi of the National Police's Security Maintenance Agency said the incident occurred at around 8 p.m. on Sunday in the port water area of Sibolga Bay.

At the time, the KM Sinar Mas Jaya was heading out to sea, while the KMP Wira Glory was entering Sibolga Port. The collision was inevitable, Silalahi said on Sunday.

Sudirman, one of the injured fishermen, said that the Sinar Mas Jaya was just about to leave the Beringin fishery to catch fish in the sea when it collided with the ferry coming from the opposite direction.

Our ship tried to avoid [the crash], but it was too late, he said.

Sibolga Port Authority (KSOP) daily operative Purwadi Herianto said the captain of the KMP Wira Glory had flashed warning lights and sounded the siren as the fishing boat approached, but then the boat veered to the wrong side of the ferry.

We are still investigating [the incident], he added. (syk)
A logo is pictured on the headquarters of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, Switzerland, June 2, 2020. (Reuters/Denis Balibouse)

Canada Largely Wins WTO Case in Lumber Dispute With US

BRUSSELSCanada largely won a case before the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Monday in a long-running dispute with the United States over U.S. duties imposed on Canadian softwood lumber exports.

A three-person panel determined that the duties, designed to counter Canadian subsidies, breached global trading rules because Washington had not shown that many prices paid by Canadian firms for timber on government-owned lands were artificially low.

The U.S. industry has complained for decades that Canadian rivals benefit from provincial government subsidies, allowing them to sell their wood for less.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer criticised the ruling in a statement, saying it prevented the United States from taking legitimate action against Canadian subsidies.

This flawed report confirms what the United States has been saying for years: the WTO dispute settlement system is being used to shield non-market practices and harm U.S. interests.

U.S. President Donald Trump has branded the WTO a broken and horrible institution and his administration has crippled the appeals process by blocking appointments to the WTOs appellate body.

The lumber dispute dates back to the 1980s and has included a previous round of WTO cases lasting from 2001 to 2006. That concluded with a settlement under which Washington suspended duties as long as lumber prices were sufficiently high.

The agreement expired in 2015, prompting the subsequent Trump administration to slap tariffs of up to 17.99 percent against what it saw as unfair subsidies for Canadian exporters of softwood lumber, which is used in home construction.

Mondays case, the ninth before the WTO in the lumber dispute, concerned subsidies. A different WTO panel last year largely upheld U.S. anti-dumping duties on Canadian lumber, prompting a Canadian appeal.

In Mondays ruling, some Canadian claims were dismissed and the panel considered that it did not have to rule on others to resolve that dispute.
(Newser)  A 33-year-old IT worker in Hong Kong came down with COVID-19 in March but recovered after experiencing mild symptoms. More than four months later, he returned from a trip to Europe and was diagnosed again, this time with a different strain of the virus. Researchers say his case is the first confirmed reinfection of COVID-19, reports the New York Times. While other reports of reinfections have surfaced anecdotally, this is the first to be verified by rigorous testing. Scientists at the University of Hong Kong sequenced the virus in both infections and discovered they didn't match, explains STAT News. Specifically, "there was a difference of 24 nucleotidesthe 'letters' that make up the virus' RNAbetween the two infections," the site explains.

story continues below

The unidentified patient is experiencing no symptoms at all this time, which might suggest that the virus is milder the second time around. But it's important to "not jump to any conclusions" about what the case may or may not mean, says Maria Van Kerkhove of the World Health Organization, per Bloomberg. One reading of it might mean that the immunity people acquire from infection doesn't last as long as hoped, unlike the period of a few years for SARS and MERS. It's also possible that the man's case is an outlier and that reinfection is rare for COVID-19. Only time and more study will tell. But for now, "this is the world's first documentation of a patient who recovered from COVID-19, but got another episode of COVID-19 afterwards," the researchers say. (Read more coronavirus stories.)
A 66-year-old man who was hired to tend to a marijuana crop due to his proficiency in growing tomatoes has been sentenced to 30 days in jail for his role in a medical marijuana facility that police say grew thousands of plants illegally.

In the early morning hours of Sept. 19, 2016, Niagara Regional Police responded to a robbery which had occurred at a rural home on Pinecrest Road in Port Colborne.

The residents, Peter Muileboom and his wife, told police they had been confronted at gunpoint by a group of masked men who demanded drugs, cash and guns.

Police then discovered the property was home to a licensed medical marijuana facility.

The 2,700-square-metre greenhouse operation, formerly Muileboom Organics, and once backed by former prime minister John Turner, had three medical marijuana licences limiting production to about 400 plants.

Police, however, seized 3,390 marijuana plants in various stages of growth.

The additional illegal plants, police said, could have yielded a profit of more than $1.5 million.

The defendant was cautioned by police, but not charged with a crime.

Police returned to the property six months later and discovered almost 3,000 pot plants.

Muileboom was subsequently arrested and charged with production of a controlled substance.

In Ontario Court of Justice in St. Catharines Monday, Judge Peter Wilkie imposed a sentence of 30 days, to be served on weekends.

The judge said a custodial sentence was required as the defendant had resumed growing unlawful amounts of marijuana, despite the earlier warning by police.

I have here a 66-year-old man who has led a very good life up until this point  a very pro-social life, Wilkie said.

But for the fact he committed this offence after having been put on notice by the police that what he was doing was unlawful and after being given a break,  if that had not happened I would have not imposed any custody at all.

He said the mans prior interaction with police was a meaningful aggravating factor that deserves some denunciation.

He was investigated by the police, he was warned that what he was doing was wrong, he persisted and went ahead in any event. That is the reason why I feel some period of custody is mandated for this case.

Muileboom, who did not have a prior criminal record, had grown tomatoes on the property for many years before selling the land, which had been in his family since 1962.

The federal prosecutor said the new owner hired the defendant to oversee the pot production because he was a very efficient tomato grower.

The offender received a salary and lived on the property rent free in exchange for supervising the greenhouse operation.

Defence lawyer Mark Evans had argued his client was merely following his employers instructions and did not profit from the operation.
Spanish-born beauty Elsa Pataky looked glamorous as she posed for a lavish photo shoot in Byron Bay last Wednesday.

The 44-year-old actress flaunted her sensational physique in a series of outfits as she posed up a storm on the shore.

During the shoot, Elsa, who is married to hunky Australian star Chris Hemsworth, was also spotted spending time with the family's dog Sunny, who soaked up the sun on the sand.

Glamorous: Elsa Pataky (pictured) looked glamorous as she posed for a lavish photo shoot on the beach in Byron Bay, last Wednesday

Soaking up the sun: During the shoot, Elsa was also spotted spending time with the family's dog Sunny

The model showed off her figure in a a stunning high slit black dress and matching coloured blazer along with a buckle belt.

Elsa had all eyes on her as she posed for a series of photographs on the sand while Sunny sat nearby.

Her blonde hair was styled straight and she appeared to be wearing a neutral palette of makeup for the shoot.

Back to her modelling roots! Elsa showed off her figure in a a stunning high slit black dress and matching coloured blazer along with a buckle belt

Strike a pose: Elsa had all eyes on her as she posed for a series of photographs on the sand

Beauty: Her blonde hair was styled straight and she appeared to be wearing a neutral palette of makeup for the shoot

After posing for several photos, Elsa changed into a stunning yellow dress with sheer long sleeves.

She then enjoyed a quick break from filming and relaxed as she sat in a chair under a beach umbrella.

Elsa moved to Byron Bay with her husband Chris and their three children in 2014, where they built a $20 million mega-mansion.

Staying close: Sunny sat nearby as Elsa continued to pose for the photographs

Final touches: A hairdresser was also spotted fixing Elsa's hair during the photo shoot

Sunshine! After posing for several photos, Elsa changed into a stunning yellow dress with sheer long sleeves

On Saturday, she revealed the secret behind her successful marriage to her husband.

'It's funny that people think of us as a perfect couple. No way,' she told Australian newspaper The Sunday Telegraph's body+soul lift-out.

'It's been ups and downs, and we still keep working at the relationship,' she added.

Taking a break: She then enjoyed a quick break from filming and relaxed as she sat in a chair under a beach umbrella

Winter sun: After changing her outfit, Elsa enjoyed a quick break and held a cold water bottle on her neck

Home town: Elsa moved to Byron Bay with her husband Chris Hemsworth and their children in 2014 and built a $20 million mega-mansion

Elsa admitted that after nearly a decade of marriage with the Avengers star it's not always 'easy', but the secret to their long-lasting love is 'work'.

'I think a relationship is constant work. It's not easy,' she said.

Chris, 37, and Elsa married in 2010 after a whirlwind three-month romance.

The genetically-blessed pair share three children: daughter India Rose, eight, and twin sons Sasha and Tristan, six.

Marriage: On Saturday, Elsa admitted that after nearly a decade of marriage with the Avengers star it's not always 'easy', but the secret to their long-lasting love is 'work'
Soon after the Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959, he made several efforts to locate his teacher Khunu Lama, who was rumoured to be in the country at that time, and finally managed to find him living incognito in a Shiva temple in Varanasi, says a new book. "Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life", released on Monday, is an account by Tenzin Priyadarshi, president and CEO of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, of his lifelong journey as a seeker.

Co-written with Iranian American author and literary translator Zara Houshmand, Priyadarshi talks about the teachers who have influenced his life, among them the Dalai Lama, former Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa.

The Dalai Lama found it difficult to locate Khunu Lama as the latter kept a low profile and shunned attention and had a habit of disappearing whenever his reputation caught up with him.

"When people came to pay their respects, he would have an assistant place a huge padlock on the outside of his door as a deterrent, and slide the key under the door to him. Hours later he would slide the key back out again and knock quietly to be let out," the book, published by Penguin Random House, said.

The Dalai Lama sent emissaries to all the Buddhist pilgrimage sites, to all the places where Khunu Lama was known to have taught, and found no trace of him.

Finally, he was accidentally discovered, living incognito in a Shiva temple in the middle of Varanasi.

"When the emissary knocked on the door of his small closet of a room and asked if he would meet with the Dalai Lama, he said no, he wasn't feeling well.

"His Holiness was actually waiting downstairs and would not be put off, so then Khunu Lama demurred again because he didn't have a chair to offer his guest - an old blanket was his only furnishing," the book says.

But the Dalai Lama insisted and they met standing up in the tiny room. The Dalai Lama asked Khunu Lama to teach the younger 'tulkus' (reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist masters) who had accompanied him into exile, and to teach him personally as well.

Khunu Lama was not recognised as a tulku himself. Nor was he ever initiated into a monastic community, in spite of the fact that he spent many years studying and teaching at several different monasteries.

He was born in the late 1800s. He came from Kinnaur, in the foot-hills of the Himalayas, from a prosperous farming and trading family who were devout Buddhists but opposed his desire to travel for study. He left home around the age of 18 so suddenly that he didn't stop to put on his shoes, and he never really stopped travelling from that point on.

He made a point of learning the languages deeply - both Tibetan and Sanskrit - as a prerequisite to the study of the religious texts, and gained a reputation for extraordinary scholarship. His expertise in Tibetan grammar and poetics was famous, to the point of inciting dangerous jealousies among native Tibetans.

When the Dalai Lama asked Khunu Lama to teach him personally, one theme among others that he specially requested was Khunu Lama's dearest, most constant preoccupation.

'Bodhicitta' was the subject he taught most eagerly and on which he wrote a poem of praise every day. He embodied bodhicitta with all his being. It didn't matter how great a scholar he was, how his knowledge of Sanskrit could unlock nuances of Shantideva's and Nagarjuna's writing that few others could fathom, the teaching was never just theoretical, the book says.

"When the Dalai Lama once asked Khunu Lama to pray for the people of Tibet, Khunu Lama was reluctant. He couldn't possibly do that, he said, as it was His Holiness who was their leader and should pray for them. He could, however, pray for Mao Zedong to experience 'bodhicitta' and be moved to change his policies toward Tibet," it says.

In "Running Toward Mystery, Priyadarshi shares his thoughts on science and technology, meditation and spiritual disillusionment, and the relationship between Buddhism and the modern world.

He also describes his work at MIT, including how the 2008 financial crisis gave critical momentum to the formation of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values.
Ellen DeGeneres has been making headlines in recent weeks for all the wrong reasons. A number of former staffers have come forward with horror stories from their time working on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Some have accused producers  who have since been fired  of sexual misconduct. Others have shared stories of racism and made accusations that the show is a toxic work environment. One common story is that DeGeneres doesnt allow anyone to look her in the eyes. But she isnt the only celebrity to be accused of such behavior.

Ellen DeGeneres | Christopher Polk/KCA2016/Getty Images for Nickelodeon

Ellen DeGeneres says she doesnt know how the rumor started

According to Page Six, DeGeneres has no clue where the no-eye-contact rumor came from on the set of her talk show. During a recent Zoom call with her staff, she addressed the rumored rule and called it insane.

I dont know where it started, said the 62-year-old. Please talk to me. Look me in the eye. Its crazy, just not true, I dont know how it started. [Its] not who I am.

However, Neil Breen  a former producer at Australias Today show  says that DeGeneres staff made some bizarre demands when she appeared on the show in 2013. Breen says that DeGeneres staff told him that the comedian would come in, shell sit down, shell talk to Richard, and then Ellen will leave.

And I sort of said, I cant look at her? I found the whole thing bizarre, recalled Breen.

Insiders say that DeGeneres plans to make changes in the upcoming season and plans to interact with her staff more.

Hollywood agents claim the celebrity no-eye-contact rule is a myth

Rumors have swirled for years about certain A-listers forbidding others on set to look them in the eye. As E! Online points out, both Tom Cruise and Sylvester Stallone names have repeatedly come up.

However, getting the celebrity or anyone on their team to admit to something like a no-eye-contact rule isnt easy. Most Hollywood agents and managers will say that the rule is a myth.

I have never personally encountered any celebrity who requires that employees, stagehands, extras, etc., do not look them in the eye or address them directly, said Hollywood manager Thomas Ingrassia.

RELATED: Cher Got Fed Up with Ellen DeGeneres Teasing Her During a Show Appearance, Called Ellen a B*tch on Air

He added that there are certainly some celebrities who are paranoid that way. But, he insisted that for the most part the rumor simply wasnt true.

The accusations against DeGeneres have been a hot topic over the summer. But, those stories have been making their rounds for years. And, they come from a number of different sources. Managers and agents may call it a myth. But, in some cases the stories appear to have merit.

The rumor is one of the most persistent in Hollywood

According to The New York Post, the no-eye-contact rumor is one of the most persistent in show business. There have been claims that both Barbra Streisand and Michael Jordan force hotel workers to face the wall when they are in a room.

One rumor claimed that Nicole Kidman wouldnt allow her makeup artist to make eye contact. Her ex-husband Tom Cruise reportedly didnt want any extras on the set of Magnolia to look him in the eye.

In 2011, The Smoking Gun released Katy Perrys tour rider. It featured a section that stipulated her chauffeur was not to start a conversation with the client or stare at her in the rearview mirror.

Jessica Alba once shared a story from when she had a small role on Beverly Hills 90210 in 1998. She said she was contractually forbidden from making eye contact with Tori Spelling and Luke Perry.

You wouldnt be allowed to talk to them unless they spoke to you first, Alba said. It was bizarre. But I guess thats what happens when you become a big star.
Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and leader has appealed party president to 'give strength to the Party' by continuing as President and lead the party.

in a series of tweets, Madhya Pradesh Committee (MPCC) president Nath made an appeal to Gandhi on Sunday, a day before the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting is scheduled to be held on Monday (today).

"Any suggestion or insinuation that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi's leadership is in question is absurd. I appeal to Mrs. to give strength to the Congress Party by continuing as President and lead the Congress," Nath said.

Congress general secretary Nath further said that he had worked with Gandhi family members and led the Congress Party to victory in 2004 general elections.

"I have had the privilege of working with Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and I have also had the privilege of serving the Congress Party as a Member of Parliament for almost 40 years and as the longest-serving Member of Parliament," Office Of tweeted.

"I have been the General Secretary of the Congress Party for many years. We must not forget that in spite of the canard against Smt. Sonia Gandhi, she led the Congress Party to victory in 2004 and made Atal Bihari Vajpayee sit at home," he added.

Various leaders including Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, Leader of the Congress party in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Karnataka unit chief DK Shivakumar have requested Sonia Gandhi to continue as party president.

An internal dispute had emerged regarding "leadership" issues in the party after several senior Congress leaders reportedly have written to party interim president Sonia Gandhi raising a 5-Point Agenda to revive the party, emphasising the need for active leadership in the party and raising questions about the party's condition and direction, as well as demanding the election of the Congress Working Committee.

There has been a debate in the Congress on the issue of leadership with a section of the party pitching for return of as party president.

Sonia Gandhi completed one year as the party's interim chief earlier this month. She took over the reins of the party for a second time after stepped down as party chief following Congress suffering its second successive defeat in Lok Sabha polls in 2019.

Sections of the party feel that the uncertainty over the leadership issue should end soon as it will help the party take on the BJP-led government more forcefully.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a paper published in NANO, a team of researchers from Xinjiang University, China have prepared Au@CDs photocatalyst with core-shell structure by combining coal-based carbon dots (CDs) with gold sol. With its high photocatalytic activity in the synthesis and visible-light photocatalytic N 2 /H 2 O to ammonia, this has far-reaching significance for the further development of coal resources to prepare high-performance materials.

Synthesis and visible-light photocatalytic N 2 /H 2 O to ammonia at atmospheric pressure and room temperature is considered to be the most ideal ammonia synthesis technology. However, fixing N 2 to NH 3 under mild conditions remains a major challenge.

In this study, coal-based carbon dots (CDs) were prepared by H 2 O 2 oxidation method using cheap and ubiquitous coal as the carbon source. Then the gold sol was connected to CDs to obtain a core-shell structure photocatalyst Au@CDs by sodium borohydride (NaBH 4 ) reduction method. While characterizing the material structure, the photocatalytic N 2 /H 2 O to ammonia performance of Au@CDs was investigated.

The results show that the prepared Au@CDs has higher photocatalytic activity for photocatalytic N 2 /H 2 O to ammonia, the yield of Au@CDs photocatalytic N 2 /H 2 O to ammonia about 3.5-fold higher than that of bare CDs. Using N 2 -TPD, UV-Visible, EPR, and electrochemical tests to study the photoelectric properties of the prepared photocatalysts. The photocatalyst Au@CDs prepared by CDs coated with precious metal Au not only improves the carrier performance of the catalyst under visible light but also inhibits the recombination of photocatalyst hole pair, promote the charge transfer ability, and make the photocatalyst and hold move smoothly to the photocatalyst surface. At the same time, it also improves the adsorption and dissociation ability of N 2 on the catalyst surface, thus promoting the photocatalytic N 2 /H 2 P ammonia synthesis reaction.

This work will contribute to the better design of carbon nanoparticle-coated metal-type photocatalytic materials, which will be of far-reaching significance for the further development of coal resources to prepare high-performance materials. The Xinjiang University team is currently exploring the preparation of more suitable photocatalysts to improve photocatalytic nitrogen fixation for ammonia synthesis.

This work was grateful for the financial support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21862020)

###

Corresponding author for this study is Halidan Maimaiti (m15899160730@163.com). Additional co-authors of the paper are Ying-dan Cui,Halidan Maimaiti, Shi-Xin Wang,Bo Xu,Hai-zhen Zhang and Pei-shuai Zhai.

For more insight into the research described, readers are invited to access the paper on NANO.

IMAGE

Caption: Synthesis and visible-light photocatalytic N 2 /H 2 O to ammonia of Au@CDs core-shell nanocatalyst.

NANO is an international peer-reviewed monthly journal for nanoscience and nanotechnology that presents forefront fundamental research and new emerging topics. It features timely scientific reports of new results and technical breakthroughs and publishes interesting review articles about recent hot issues.

About World Scientific Publishing Co.

World Scientific Publishing is a leading independent publisher of books and journals for the scholarly, research, professional and educational communities. The company publishes about 600 books annually and about 140 journals in various fields. World Scientific collaborates with prestigious organizations like the Nobel Foundation and US National Academies Press to bring high quality academic and professional content to researchers and academics worldwide. To find out more about World Scientific, please visit http://www.worldscientific.com.

For more information, contact Tay Yu Shan at ystay@wspc.com.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 05:24:12|Editor: huaxia

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People wearing masks dance at a wedding in Ankara Turkey on Aug. 23, 2020. (Xinhua/Mustafa Kaya)

--Turkey's COVID-19 cases near 260,000;

--Infections in Kuwait exceed 80,000;

--Iran reports 2,113 new cases, tally hits 358,905;

--Iraq sees another daily increase over 3,000.

CAIRO, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- The number of COVID-19 in Turkey is nudging 260,000 as Kuwait saw its confirmed cases over 80,000 on Sunday.

Turkey's COVID-19 cases increased by 1,217 to 258,249. Meanwhile, 19 people died in the past 24 hours, taking the death toll to 6,121.

A total of 795 patients recovered in the last 24 hours, raising the total recoveries to 237,165 in Turkey.

Kuwait reported 571 new COVID-19 cases and two more deaths, raising the tally of infections to 80,528 and the death toll to 515, the Health Ministry said in a statement.

Currently, 7,706 patients are receiving treatment, including 97 in ICU, according to the statement.

The ministry also announced the recovery of 537 more patients, raising the total recoveries in the country to 72,307.

People sit at a cafe in the Avenues, the largest shopping mall in Kuwait, in Farwaniya Governorate, Kuwait, Aug. 19, 2020. (Xinhua/Asad)

The Kuwaiti government decided on Thursday evening to lift a countrywide partial curfew as of Aug. 30.

Iran, the hardest-hit country in the Middle East region, reported 2,113 new cases, taking the total number of infections to 358,905.

The pandemic has so far claimed the lives of 20,643 in Iran, up by 141 in the past 24 hours. A total of 309,464 coronavirus patients have recovered, with 3,841 still in critical condition.

The Iraqi Health Ministry on Sunday reported 3,291 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the total nationwide infections to 204,341.

In a statement, it also reported 75 fatalities during the day, raising the death toll to 6,428, while 3,016 more patients recovered in the day, bringing the total number of recoveries to 146,409.

The cumulative number of Israeli coronavirus cases reached 102,663 after 730 new ones were added, the Ministry of Health said.

The death toll rose to 834 with 15 new fatalities, while the number of recoveries grew to 79,514 with 863 new recoveries, while the number of active cases dropped to 22,315.

A medical worker holds a sample for COVID-19 test in central Israelcity of Tel Aviv, on Aug. 21, 2020. (Gideon Markowicz/JINI via Xinhua)

The Qatari health ministry announced 243 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total number of confirmed cases in the Gulf state to 117,008.

Meanwhile, 277 more recovered from the virus, bringing the total recoveries to 113,808, while no new death was reported as the fatalities remained 193.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Sunday announced 390 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the total confirmed cases in the country to 67,007.

The UAE's Ministry of Health and Prevention said 80 more patients have recovered from the virus, taking the tally of recoveries in the UAE to 58,488.

It also confirmed three more deaths, pushing the country's death toll to 375.

Jordan reported a new death case from novel coronavirus, increasing the overall number of deaths in the country to 12.

It said 33 new COVID-19 cases, including 29 local infections, were registered in the country, increasing the tally to 1,609.

Fifty-two recoveries were registered during the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of coronavirus tests in Jordan to 745,100.

Local resident looks at destroyed buildings in Beirut, Lebanon on Aug. 17, 2020. (Xinhua/Bilal Jawich)

Palestine recorded 326 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total number of infections in its territories to 25,035.

Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila said in a press statement that four fatalities were reported in the West Bank, bringing the death toll to 144.

The Syrian health ministry said 74 new cases were recorded on Sunday, bringing the overall confirmed infections in government-controlled areas to 2,217, including 505 recoveries and 89 deaths.

The Syrian interior ministry has urged Syrians abroad who want to return home to contact the Syrian embassies and register their names. 
ALTON  Alton firefighters and paramedics were called to a serious motorcycle crash shortly before 4 p.m. Sunday in the 700 block of West Broadway near Piasa Park off of the Great River Road.

A motorcyclist was down with serious, possibly life-threatening injuries, according to reports. The Alton Fire Department command ordered an ARCH Air Medical Service Inc. helicopter ambulance to land at the scene, on the Great River Road.
Bernard Bernie McMahon was treated to a display of love and celebration when his West Shore community came out to celebrate him turning 100 years old this week.

Although McMahons birthday is on Wednesday, the East Pennsboro resident and his wife Charlene Tallman sat outside their home Sunday to take in the parade of vehicles that included around 100 vehicles.

McMahon, who has been a longtime member of the Knights of Columbus and a founding member of the American Legion Post 1001, had friends come out that he hasnt seen in 10 to 20 years.

McMahon, who was born in Harrisburg, is a World War II veteran and member of the U.S. Marines. These days he enjoys a quieter life.

In the hours before the parade, McMahons youngest son called from Florida to wish him a happy birthday.

Michael McMahon said his wife works at a hospital that is currently treating COVID-19 cases, so they felt it was best to stay home.

Its all about Pop. We dont want to get him sick, Michael said.

When Michael spoke to his father and asked him how he was doing, McMahon said Im breathing! with a laugh.

Said Michael, I tell you what, it certainly is great for us to know that the community is there.

He joked with his dad about having a Canadian Club and water on his birthday, which McMahon said has been his drink for the last couple of years.

Amid all the preparation for the celebration, Tallman acknowledged that 2020 has been difficult for them. McMahon had a stroke several years ago, but up until the pandemic he was going to a day center.

With the pandemic, its kind of taken its toll on him, Tallman said. Hes become quiet. Hes just slowed down. He doesnt walk as well. So Im sure he senses it. Hes dealing with it the best he can.

Knowing Bern, he would be happy if this was just another day. But I knew we had to have something for our church family, our community family, Tallman said. Its just so reassuring that we have such a loving community that when we are, when and if were in trouble, or theyre always there.

As McMahon listened to the variety of people who were planning on driving by on Sunday, he said, Thats really something.

Around 100 vehicles drove by, including representatives from East Pennsboro Township police and fire. A group of men from the American Legion came by on motorcycles, stopped and saluted him before leaving. The parade started a little before 5 p.m. and went almost an hour, Tallman said.

McMahons other children also came by with their families and were able to stay and socially distance from him, just to talk.

After the event, Tallman said McMahon was exhausted, so he was going to eat some ice cream and go to bed.

McMahon might be 100, but he still had a sense of humor. When asked if he ever thought hed make it to 2020, he said, No, I never thought Id get to 1515!

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Linkedin Norman Harsono (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 19:38 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c401caaf 1 Business pertamina,oil-and-gas,first-semester,H1,financial-performance,financial-report,loss Free

Indonesias largest oil and gas company, state-owned Pertamina, booked a US$767.92 million net loss in the first half of this year amid weak energy demand and prices.

The company's latest financial report shows that the performance in the January-June period of this year makes a reversal from $659.96 million in profit booked in the same period last year.

Pertamina was hit by a triple shock, company spokeswoman Fajriyah Usman told The Jakarta Post on Monday. She was referring to low global crude oil prices, weak domestic demand and a weak rupiah-to-dollar exchange rate amid the ongoing health crises.

Pertamina joins other oil and gas companies worldwide, including giants, such as Britains BP, Saudi Arabias Aramco and the United States Chevron, that logged major losses in this years first half due to the pandemic.

Aramco, often dubbed the worlds most profitable company, saw its net profit fall by 50 percent to $23.7 billion in the first semester, according to the companys latest financial report.

Pertaminas revenue plunged by 19.8 percent year-on-year (yoy) to $20.48 billion, largely driven by lower domestic fuel and crude oil sales, as major Indonesian cities underwent large-scale social restrictions (PSBB), curbing demand for transportation.

To minimize losses, Pertamina reduced total expenses by 14.1 percent yoy to $18.87 billion, largely by cutting sales expenses, yet upstream-related expenses actually rose as the state-owned company strives to meet government oil and gas production targets.

The financial report also shows that the company booked a $211.83 million loss in the first half due to the weak rupiah exchange rate, which increases Pertaminas oil import costs.

Read also: Pertamina, PGN cut revenue targets as weak rupiah, lockdown severely hurt businesses

Pertaminas financial woes will strain the companys ability to retain employees, partners, contractors, foreign assets, tax payouts and dividend payouts, said Gadjah Mada University (UGM) economist Fahmy Radhi, summarizing the recent developments potential impact.

Read also: Pertamina to pay $601m in dividends to government

In the end, it will be unavoidable for Pertamina and its partners to fire employees, he told the Post. Under such conditions, Pertamina cannot contribute to economic growth.

Pertamina expects to see profits by year-end as global crude oil prices and domestic fuel demand recover over the following months, added Fajriyah.

Global crude oil benchmark price Brent dropped as low as $19.33 per barrel on April 21 but has since rebounded to $44.47 per barrel on Monday, Bloomberg data show.

Despite some recovery, the USs Energy Information Administration (EIA) and credit rating agency Fitch Ratings expect Brent prices to remain lower than last year at less than $50 per barrel.

Pertamina is optimistic that, by year end, there will be a positive trend, said the spokeswoman.

Read also: Energy ministry expects oil and gas lifting to reach 1.91 million boepd in 2021

However, the risk of a second COVID-19 wave, which would likely trigger new lockdowns, loomed large over the global oil and gas industry, said analyst Dulles Wang of energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie America in a statement on Aug 18.

A second large-scale lockdown would deepen the recession and possibly delay any rebound in GDP until 2022. This would have a significant impact on the oil and gas sectors, he said.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug.24

By Nargiz Sadikhova - Trend:

The value of trade turnover between Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan amounted to $65.1 million over 1H2020, compared to $67.9 million during the same period of 2019, Trend reports with reference to Kazakhstans Statistics Committee.

The share of Turkmenistan in the total value of Kazakhstans trade turnover stood at 0.2 percent during the reporting period compared to 0.1 percent during the same period of 2019.

Kazakhstans export to Turkmenistan amounted to $48.2 million over the period from January through June 2020, compared to $55.1 million during the same period of 2019.

Turkmenistans share in the total volume of Kazakhstans export also amounted to 0.2 percent during the reporting period of 2020 compared to 0.2 percent during the same period of 2019 indicating it was flat year-on-year.

In turn, Kazakhstans imports from Turkmenistan stood at about $16.8 million over the reporting period, compared to $12.8 million during the same period of 2019.

Turkmenistans share in the total volume of Kazakhstans import amounted to 0.1 percent during the reporting period of 2020 compared to 0.1 percent during the same period of 2019.

The total volume of Kazakhstans trade turnover amounted to $42.5 billion over the period from Jan. through June 2020 which indicates a decrease from $46.1 billion during the same period of 2019.

Kazakhstans export amounted to $26 billion during the reporting period of 2020 ($28.6 billion in the same period of 2019), whereas import amounted to $16.5 billion ($17.5 billion in 2019).

---

Follow the author on twitter: @nargiz_sadikh
The government is focused on local government areas including Fairfield, Liverpool, Canterbury-Bankstown and the eastern suburbs in Sydney City Council for increased testing. Loading NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said some of those areas or suburbs were either where there was "ongoing transmission" or had been visited by infectious patients. "We want the community to be particularly vigilant for signs and symptoms and help us identify any further chains of transmission," she said. In Queensland, the Brisbane Youth Detention Centre cluster grew to 10 after one new case was confirmed on Monday morning.

Queensland testing numbers remain lower than 10,000 per day, and the state's health minister Steven Miles said more testing was needed to help manage the spread of COVID-19. "We need to test more people, 6834 tests in the last testing period is not enough for us to be assured that we are finding all of the cases that are out there," he said. Queues at the drive-through testing clinic at Bondi Beach on Monday. Credit:Edwina Pickles Despite the ongoing local transmission around south-east Queensland, Ms Berejiklian said she did not feel it was necessary to close to border. "At this stage the rates of community transmission are very low up there, and where we can we should absolutely keep borders open," she said.

"If you have confidence in your health system, if you have confidence that your community members will come forward and get tested, we should really be careful before we take those big decisions because it does adversely impact communities." Ms Berejiklian maintained the closure of the Queensland border was a matter for its Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, but added the decision to close the NSW/Victorian border had been a joint decision between herself, the Prime Minister and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Ms Berejiklian said NSW remains open to every state except Victoria. Credit:Kate Geraghty "We stand by that decision, but I want to make very clear that NSW is open to every other state. If other states choose not to be open to us, that's a matter for them." The Marriott Hotel security guard identified by NSW Health on Saturday as having the virus was issued with two $1000 fines on Sunday night for failing to self-isolate while waiting for his test results.

The 22-year-old man from Campsie had a test on Thursday afternoon and "was informed to go directly home and commence a 14-day self-isolation in accordance with current Ministerial Directions", NSW Police said on Monday morning. Loading Instead, he allegedly travelled to Westfield Burwood on Thursday afternoon and a Services NSW branch in Burwood on Friday. On Saturday, he had a secondary test at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and was informed he returned a positive test result. "He was transferred to a NSW Health COVID-19 quarantine facility where he will stay for the remainder of his quarantine period," NSW Police said. NSW Health on Sunday said anyone who had been at the Marriott Hotel, Burwood's Westfield and Services NSW branch at the same time as the guard was considered a casual contact and should monitor for symptoms.

On Monday, Dr Chant said further testing revealed the man had a "very, very low" level of infection while he was visiting the two sites in Burwood. It comes as Victoria recorded its lowest number of cases in a-month-and-a-half, with 116 new cases confirmed on Monday. It's the state's lowest daily total since July 5 when there were 74 new cases. On Monday, Victoria recorded 15 deaths taking the national death toll to 517. With Craig Butt
Nebraska state troopers, with assistance from Lincoln County Sheriffs deputies and McCook police officers, have taken four juveniles into custody after a pursuit Monday morning.

About 8:10 a.m. Monday, troopers were informed that the McCook Police Department was chasing a vehicle that had fled a traffic stop in McCook. The vehicle, a PT Cruiser, was identified as having been stolen in Geneva. As the pursuit traveled north on U.S. Highway 83, troopers successfully deployed stop sticks to slow the vehicle.

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Troopers took over the pursuit as it continued northbound on Highway 83. The vehicle continued driving on its rims as it entered North Platte. The driver eventually lost control and became stuck in a ditch on East Philip Avenue. All four occupants were then taken into custody without further incident.

The four juveniles were all identified as missing from central Nebraska, according to a press release from the State Patrol.

The driver, a 16-year-old male, spat on a trooper after being taken into custody. He was cited on suspicion of assault on a peace officer with bodily fluid, as well as flight to avoid arrest, willful reckless driving and possession of a stolen vehicle. The driver will be lodged at the Northeast Nebraska Juvenile Detention Center. The three passengers, all juvenile males, were remanded to probation officers.
North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un is reportedly in a coma, according to a South Korean official. The claims come amid reports of him handing over control of the kingdom to his sister, Kim Yo Jong.

Chang Song-min, a former aide to late-South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, has said that Kim Jong Un has been taken ill all of a sudden and that his sister has taken over on his behalf.

"A complete succession structure has not been formed, so Kim Yo-jong is being brought to the fore as the vacuum cannot be maintained for a prolonged period," Chang Song-min was quoted by The Korean Herald.

Rumours of the Supreme Leader's demise or illness have been surfacing from time-to-time off late, and every time, the spotlight is on his sister.

In the recent past, Jong Un has been seen taking a leading role in a new, more hard-line pressure campaign against South Korea, highlighting what analysts say is a substantive policy role that goes beyond being her brother's assistant.

Believed to be in her early 30s, Kim Yo Jong is the only close relative of the North Korean leader to play a public role in politics. In recent months, Yo Jong seems to have taken on a more hands-on role in North Korean politics, especially since the nation's anti-South Korean agenda came to the fore.

READ: Who is Kim Yo Jong? North Korea Leader's Sister May Just Be More Dangerous Than Him

Since this is not the first time we've come across reports of Kim Jong Un being sick and his sister holding the reins, this is how Twitter reacted to the news:

So I Photoshopped Princess Azula and Kim Jong Un's sister together, and now I present to you, Princess Kim Yo-Jong of the Fire Nation! pic.twitter.com/ddZnFMaBZf  Jacob Haap (@JacobHaap) August 24, 2020

Rule 34 artists when Kim Jong Uns sister takes over: pic.twitter.com/QCao3doySE   (FIRE REIRDEN) (@DcSportsFan4Lyf) August 23, 2020

Wait... Kim Jong Un is in a coma and his sister took over? Is 2020 repeating storylines now?  Santiago Mayer (@santiagomayer_) August 24, 2020

Kim Jong Un's sister after he goes into a coma pic.twitter.com/n4cm9TbjbI  Kuma (@Asstronau_t) August 24, 2020

Me seeing kim Jong uns sister take control over their country. pic.twitter.com/YbecoWUJaX  cookies (@GOODXVXBESS) August 24, 2020

kim jong uns sister every time he fakes his death pic.twitter.com/6nTvtmuCKS  ~    (@flatbootyhoe5) August 24, 2020

"Kim Jong Un's sister will reportedly take control of North Korea" Kim Jong Un's sister: pic.twitter.com/ecpe5WVeOZ  TRAFON (@RiseFallNick) August 24, 2020

kim jong uns sister every few weeks when western media decides he died pic.twitter.com/OWVNQ0BFHW  eoin  (@cemetrygaytes) August 23, 2020

Yo Jong has worked behind the scenes in North Korea's propaganda agencies, a role that led the United States to add her to a list of sanctioned senior officials in 2017 because of human rights abuses and censorship. In 2018, she became the first of the Kims to visit South Korea since the Korean War and has since been actively involved in the nuclear-armed nation's international relations and diplomacy policies.

In March, state media carried the first-ever statement by Kim, in which she criticized South Korean authorities. That was followed by several more, including a response to comments by Trump.

Rising from the ranks of Jong Un's younger sister to his personal assistant to now his "enforcer", experts have even surmised that Yo Jung would be an even tougher, more brutal ruler than her dictator brother. While her direct bloodline ensures her hold over the politburo, her trigger-happy debut has definitely drawn eyes.

Will Kim Yo Jong become the first woman to rule the male-dominated political sphere of North Korea and emerge its leader? Or is the report of her brother being in a coma a rumour again?
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Linkedin Ni Komang Erviani (The Jakarta Post) Bali  Mon, August 24, 2020 11:14 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066fff012 1 News travel,Bali-tourism,tourism,destination Free

Plans to reopen Bali to international tourists on Sept. 11 have been reconsidered following the government's decision to wait until the end of this year before welcoming foreign visitors.

"The government is still prohibiting its citizens from traveling abroad at least until the end of 2020. In line with the policy, we also cannot open the gate to international travelers until the end of 2020 as the situation in Indonesia, including Bali, is not yet safe to welcome them," said Bali Governor Wayan Koster in a statement Saturday.

According to Koster, there is no country in the world that has allowed its citizens to travel abroad. "Many countries in the world are still implementing tight restrictions on their citizens due to the still-spreading COVID-19 pandemic, which is threatening their citizens' health and safety."

"For example, Australia has not allowed its citizens to travel abroad until 2021. This is also the case for China, Korea, Japan and many European countries," Koster said.

Koster added that the government fully supported the province's plans to reopen to international travelers as part of tourism recovery efforts. "However, we should be careful, [we] cannot hurry [such a plan as we] need to be well prepared. In attempting to recover tourism, Bali should not fail, because it will badly impact the image of Indonesia in the eyes of the world."

Following the decision, Bali is said to be focusing on efforts to attract domestic tourists in a bid to smooth its way to tourism and economic recovery.

The pandemic has badly hit the province's local economy, 80 percent of which relies on tourism. Bali's economy contracted 10.98 percent in the second quarter of 2020. At least 2,667 people who work in the tourism sector have lost their job, and 73,631 people have been forced to take unpaid leave.

Previously, Bali was planning to reopen its tourism in three phases, starting on July 9 with the reopening of tourist sites to local residents, followed with reopening access to domestic travelers from regions across Indonesia. The third phase would have been to welcome international travelers on Sept. 11.

Since opening its doors to domestic travelers, Bali has seen an increase in tourist arrivals of more than 100 percent. As of Aug. 14, the number of domestic tourists arriving daily at Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar reached between 2,300 and 2,500. (kes)
NEW DELHI: Sonia Gandhi will continue as the interim president of Congress until a fresh All India Congress Committee (AICC) election is held and a new party chief gets selected, sources said on Monday (August 24). Congress leader PL Punia told ANI that the next meeting would be called soon, probably within six months to elect a new president. He added that party members expressed faith in Sonia as well as Rahul Gandhi and urged her to continue leading the party, which she agreed with.

Expressing her displeasure over the letter sent to her by a few party members that raised doubts on the leadership, Sonia is learned to have said, "I am hurt but they are my colleagues so lets forget and work together." She added that an AICC session will be held within the next six months to elect the next party chief.

The seven-hour-long Congress Working Committee meeting, which was called on Monday amid divisions in the party over the leadership issue, meanwhile has come to an end, sources said.

"Sonia Gandhi has to continue and the election will take place as soon as possible which is the unanimous decision of the working committee. There is no different opinion on leadership and even Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mukul Wasnik and Anand Sharma have given in writing that there is no dispute on leadership," Congress leader and CWC member, KH Muniyappa told ANI.

Sources said that a time of one year was being set for the election of the new president in the CWC, but Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi opposed the suggestion of taking that long and advised that the process should start within six months.

Sources said that during the CWC meet, Congress leader Rajeev Shankarrao Satav attacked Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma, former ministers during UPA government, for drafting a letter that demanded an 'active, full-time and visible' party president.

Earlier in the day, at the CWC meet, Sonia had offered to quit as the Congress interm president, asking to initiate the process for selecting a new party chief, sources said. In her opening remarks at the meeting, called in the wake of a section of leaders seeking a 'full time and visible' Congress president, Sonia made the offer to quit saying she had given a detailed reply on the issue to AICC general secretary K C Venugopal.

Sources said Sonia Gandhi referred to Azad and others twice during her brief address and the issues raised by them. She also handed over a detailed reply to Venugopal, who read out its contents at the CWC meeting in which Gandhi sought to be relieved from the post.

Former PM Manmohan Singh, who spoke after Sonia Gandhi, urged her to continue, so did former Defence Minister AK Antony, with both the veterans criticising the letter by some party leaders, including Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik, who are a part of the CWC, the party's highest decision-making body.

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

A group of 23 party leaders wrote a letter to Sonia earlier this month seeking an overhaul of the organisation. The letter, however, was criticised by Rahul and few other party leaders. Sources added that Rahul in his speech questioned the timing of the letter, signed by 23 Congress leaders, and sent to Sonia while she was at Delhi's Gangaram hospital and under medication. "It is the CWC and not the media where we put out our thoughts and discuss," he is learnt to have said at the meeting, the sources said.

On the other hand, Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot and Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Bhupel demanded the CWC to annoint Rahul as the full-time party president.
Public health officials announced 114 new COVID-19 cases over the weekend  42 on Saturday and 72 on Sunday  bringing the total number of lab-confirmed cases in Manitoba up to 944.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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Public health officials announced 114 new COVID-19 cases over the weekend  42 on Saturday and 72 on Sunday  bringing the total number of lab-confirmed cases in Manitoba up to 944.

Both weekend updates mark a new single-day record for COVID numbers for Manitoba, since the previous provincial high was 40 on Aug. 14.

The lions share of new cases from this past weekend could be traced back to Prairie Mountain Health region, with 24 and 45 cases coming to light on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

In fact, chief provincial health officer Dr. Brent Roussin told reporters during a rare weekend news conference that a large chunk of the new cases announced on Sunday are linked to proactive testing that is being conducted throughout "communal living communities" in PMH.

While Roussin wouldnt spell out what he meant by "communal living communities" specifically, Health Minister Cameron Friesen would go on to praise regional Hutterite colonies for being so co-operative during these ongoing testing campaigns.

"I think that its important to look past the large number today to understand that a significant part of todays reported numbers is because there is testing going on on colonies, and thats good thing," Friesen said on Sunday. "So I think were building relationships, were building trust because we need it and Manitobans have to all understand that these are our neighbours, that these are our friends and that they are committed Manitobans."

Sunday also marked a dismal milestone for the Northern Health Region, since that part of the province reported its first coronavirus case since April.

Roussin mentioned that this new northern case is connected to previously announced cases in PMH.

When asked if this revelation will prompt the province to bring back travel restrictions to northern Manitoba, Roussin responded by saying that those kinds of measures are not "off the table."

Meanwhile, back in Brandon, McDonalds Canada reported on Friday that an employee at the 2626 Victoria Ave. location revealed that they are presumed positive for COVID-19.

Out of an abundance of caution, the company decided to immediately shut down the restaurant for a thorough cleaning and sanitization by a certified third party.

All crew members who may have been in close contact with the employee have been asked to self-quarantine until further information is available. The employee in question worked their last shift on Friday from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The current five-day COVID-19 test positivity rate in Manitoba is now 2.7 per cent, having jumped from 1.8 per cent on Saturday. The data also shows that:

 Seven people are currently hospitalized due to the virus, with one individual in intensive care;

 356 active cases and 576 individuals have recovered from COVID-19; and

 The number of deaths because of COVID-19 is 12.

Because of this recent spike in activity, PMH is now under level-orange restrictions for at least the next 14 days, as designated by the provinces new Pandemic Response System.

This means that Manitobans living in PMH are required to wear a mask at all public indoor places and at all indoor and outdoor public gatherings. Public gatherings are also being limited to 10 people regardless if they are taking place indoors or outdoors.

In order to elevate the threat level to "red," Roussin said on Sunday that the province would need to observe way more evidence of community-based transmission in PMH as opposed to the known clusters that are dominating most daily updates.

"And then, in addition, we need to see a significant strain on the health-care system, and so were not seeing that in our province at this point," he said.

An additional 1,839 laboratory tests were completed on Saturday, bringing the total number of COVID-19 tests completed since early February to 125,300.

 kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @KyleDarbyson
Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar used his taxpayer-funded electorate office budget to pay one of his best friends, who was also tasked with designing Mr Sukkar's political smear files and materials to solicit party donations, in potential breach of parliamentary rules.

Graphic designer Matt Pham, who chose Mr Sukkar as one of the groomsmen at his 2014 wedding and has been a close personal friend of the minister for more than a decade, was paid from Mr Sukkar's electorate office budget between 2016 and 2018. Mr Pham's LinkedIn account shows he worked in full-time roles for a real estate advertising company during the same period that Mr Sukkar has said Mr Pham worked "as a casual Electorate Officer in the Deakin Electorate Office".

Michael Sukkar, left, with his good friend and sometime employee, Matt Pham. Credit:Facebook

Mr Sukkar defended giving his close friend work due to his "skill set and performance" as a designer. The member for the east Melbourne seat of Deakin is facing calls from Labor to resign from federal cabinet, scrutiny from an internal Liberal Party probe as well as a departmental audit. The revelations come as the fallout from the Liberal Party branch stacking scandal revealed on Sunday night by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes led to Monday's resignation from the party of powerbroker Marcus Bastiaan.

Mr Sukkar has retained the support of the Morrison government, despite evidence showing he backed a scheme to give taxpayer-funded jobs to factional operatives in the office of Liberal MP and party elder Kevin Andrews in 2017 and 2018. Mr Sukkar also employed factional operatives, including Mr Bastiaan's wife Stephanie, in his own office as electorate officers. He insists he has no knowledge or involvement in any wrongdoing or abuse of public funds.
Rome doctors hope to produce 'Made in Italy' coronavirus vaccine by next spring.

Human trials of an Italian-developed covid-19 vaccine have begun on volunteers at Rome's Spallanzani hospital on 24 August, reports Italian news agency ANSA.

The first person to volunteer for the vaccine, a 50-year-old woman, was inoculated at 08.30 this morning at the Spallanzani, a specialist centre for infectious diseases which has played a central role in battling Italy's coronavirus crisis.

The woman said she was "excited and proud" to be the first volunteer to take the vaccine and hopes that it will help to "save lives," ANSA reports.

After being observed by doctors for four hours, the woman will return home and be monitored for the next 12 weeks, said hospital director Francesco Vaia, who stated that if the trials go well a vaccine could be ready on a commerical basis by next spring.

Earlier this month, when the Spallanzani put out the call for 90 volunteers to come forward to take the vaccine, more than 3,000 people volunteered, in what Vaia said demonstrated the "great heart of the Italian people."

The vaccine has been produced by Italian biotechnology firm ReiThera of Castel Romano, near Rome, with funding from the Lazio Region whose president Nicola Zingaretti said: "Today, an historic phase in research begins."

The news comes the day after Italy registered 1,210 new coronavirus cases, up from 1,071 the day before.

Oggi allo Spallanzani inizia la sperimentazione del vaccino anti #Covid sugli esseri umani, finanziata da @RegioneLazio e Ministero della Ricerca. Un bellissimo traguardo per la scienza e la medicina italiana.



Per noi il vaccino deve essere un bene comune pic.twitter.com/OKrnKjFpvu Nicola Zingaretti (@nzingaretti) August 24, 2020
Three archbishops have written to Prime Minister Scott Morrison criticising the AstraZeneca vaccine candidate because it uses research cells from a foetus aborted more than 40 years ago.

Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher, Anglican archbishop Glenn Davies and Greek Orthodox Archbishop Makarios Griniezakis wrote a joint letter to Mr Morrison opposing the Oxford University vaccine on 'ethical grounds'.

Australia's most powerful Catholic archbishop said he is 'deeply troubled' as the vaccine candidate has been developed from a kidney cell line called HEK-293.

Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher (pictured left) and Greek Orthodox Archbishop Makarios Griniezakis (pictured right) have written to the Prime Minister urging him to look at vaccine alternatives as they are 'deeply troubled' about research from foetal cell lines

The HEK-293 cell was first taken from an aborted foetus in Holland in 1973.

It has been the second most widely used line in cell biology for more than 45 years, contributing to a wide variety of life-saving medical advances including cancer research.

Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences professor Colin Pouton said the HEK-293 cell was regularly used in virus research.

'They're using the cell line as a packaging system to make the virus,' he told the ABC.

'It's not like people are using a new cell line - it's already there, so in many respects the ethical issue is in history.'

Prime Minister Scott Morrison tours the AstraZeneca laboratory in Sydney on Wednesday. The Australian government has signed an agreement to secure their potential vaccine if it passes phase three trials at Oxford University

Anglican Archbishop Glenn Davies (left) signed the letter opposing the vaccine. Secular Party President John Perkins (right) said prayer would not create a vaccine, medical research would

A medical researcher at work at AstraZeneca's offices in Sydney on Wednesday. The HEK-293 cell line is the second most widely used in medical research and has been in use since 1973

The religious leaders' letter says the churches want the Federal Government to pursue alternative vaccines that are have not used foetal cells in their development.

'It is important that the government does not create an ethical dilemma for people,' Archbishop Fisher wrote on Facebook.

Religious people may not want to benefit from a vaccine where the cells were cultivated from 'the death of the baby girl', he wrote in Catholic Weekly on Monday.

'Some will feel deeply conflicted whichever way they go. And it will be socially divisive,' he wrote.

CORONAVIRUS CASES IN AUSTRALIA: 27,244 Victoria: 20,269 New South Wales: 4,273 Queensland: 1,161 Western Australia: 692 South Australia: 473 Tasmania: 230 Australian Capital Territory: 113 Northern Territory: 33 TOTAL CASES: 27,244 ESTIMATED ACTIVE CASES: 269 DEATHS: 897 Updated: 5.31 PM, 11 October, 2020 Source: Australian Government Department of Health Advertisement

Archbishop Fisher denied he had called for an outright boycott of the vaccine, saying he just wanted the government to make arrangements for alternatives.

'Most religious believers are not anti-vaxers. In fact most of us are praying for a vaccine against COVID-19,' he wrote on Monday.

Atheist John Perkins, President of the Secular Party, said praying for a vaccine won't work, only medical research would.

'The production of an effective vaccine requires diligent research. Prayer has no role to play. Gods do not intervene in the real world,' he said on Monday.

'It is not in the public interest for the church to be disparaging vaccines.'

Mr Morrison has locked in a deal with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to secure a potential coronavirus vaccine, if its Oxford University phase three trials prove successful.

There are more than 100 vaccines in development around the world as scientists, governments and other organisations race to find a safe, effective innoculation.

In June The Lancet reported that 10 candidates had already advanced to clinical trials, as companies including Moderna, Pfizer, Inovio and Sinopharm all race to be the first with a working vaccine.

The AstraZeneca candidate is considered the frontrunner as it is already in Phase Three trials at Oxford University.

Deputy Chief Health Officer Dr Nick Coatsworth spoke out to reassure the public on ethical grounds on Monday.

'I think we can have every faith that the way they have manufactured the vaccine has been against the highest of ethical standards internationally,' he said.

Nobel laureate and immunology Professor Peter Doherty said he believed the process was ethical.

'It's an established cell line being used in lots of applications,' he said.

The rubella, hepatitis A and rabies vaccine, in use for decades, all use cell lines originally derived from human foetal tissue, ABC news reported.


A USC student locks up his bike on campus under a sign that states three steps to keep the coronavirus at bay on Aug. 17, the first day of academic instruction for the fall 2020 semester. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Just one week into fall semester, USC is reporting "an alarming increase" in the number of COVID-19 cases in students among the campus community, according to a Student Health notice sent out Monday.

In the past seven days 43 cases have been identified and more than 100 students placed in a 14-day quarantine due to exposures, the memorandum from Dr. Sarah Van Orman, chief health officer for USC Student Health, said.

The university is testing students who are symptomatic and those who have had contact with positive individuals, as well as some asymptomatic students. All of the positive cases were related to students living off campus, the statement said.

"This increase comes despite the continued state and county health guidance that significantly restricts in-person instruction and on-campus activities for universities located in counties that are on the states COVID-19 monitoring list, including Los Angeles County," Van Orman wrote.

USC resumed instruction almost entirely online Aug. 17 and is limiting access to campus. But many students remain in private apartments and houses off campus, where they have reported some parties and gatherings of people from different households, a situation one public heath expert called a "recipe for disaster."

USC officials have sternly warned students that parties and gatherings are barred, and hosting or attending one could lead to disciplinary action, including probation, suspension or expulsion. And the university has taken substantial precautions in response to the pandemic, including asking students to take a daily symptom check through an app and to make reservations before setting foot on campus. Students must also submit to randomly selected temperature screenings once they arrive on campus.

Across the country, universities have scrambled to deal with coronavirus outbreaks as students returned for the fall term.

Last week, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced it would pivot to online learning after discovering clusters of cases linked to dorms, a fraternity house and other student housing. Notre Dame also ceased in-person instruction for two weeks after 147 students tested positive within a 14-day period. Syracuse University suspended 23 students last week after a large gathering of students on the campus quad "may have done damage enough to shut down campus, a vice chancellor said in a statement .

Story continues

This week, many California State University campuses will resume instruction, primarily online, but several universities outside the Los Angeles area expect thousands of students to return to on-campus housing or to private off-campus housing nearby.

Van Orman's note exhorted USC students on and near campus to follow the six-foot physical distancing guidelines, avoid gathering with people outside their homes, wear face coverings, clean common surfaces frequently, and practice good hand hygiene.

She focused especially on playing games and eating and drinking in close proximity  hallmarks of college gatherings, especially at fraternity houses, which have seen outbreaks.

"Every surface, every interaction where you share close contact or remove your face covering, can pose a risk to yourself and your friends. Even simple board games involving touching shared objects can become a super-spreader event," she emphasized.

Further down in the note, she added: "Alcohol will impair judgment of distance and contact, so it will be harder to remember who youve been in close contact with, if anyone in the gathering later tests positive."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 12:00:39|Editor: huaxia

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by Yosley Carrero

HAVANA, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Cubans are trying to abide by the COVID-19 health protocols while sheltering from tropical storm Laura which is hitting the entire country as it heads to the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S. coast.

"Now, we wear face masks and use hand sanitizers. That makes the difference during the evacuation process," Yenisel Perez, 36, a resident in the easternmost Cuban province of Guantanamo, told Xinhua.

Laura has ravaged the entire island nation with heavy rains and gusty winds.

In the eastern Cuban town of Baracoa, the storm has flooded streets, causing damage to houses and buildings near the city's seafront. And as the storm's powerful winds washed out roads and crippled communication in mountainous regions, streets in northern and southern coastal towns have been filled with debris and mud.

Also, local governments in the country's central and western provinces have also taken precautionary measures in light of the imminent impact of the storm.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has posed new challenges to the management of natural disasters in Cuba since the health crisis has complicated the rescue and evacuation requirements.

Jose Antonio Torres Iribar, head of the provincial defense council in the capital Havana, said that measures must be adopted to minimize the risk of COVID-19 contagion in government shelters.

"We must foresee everything at evacuation centers," he said. "If under normal circumstances, these shelters could house 500 people, now this number must be necessarily reduced for the evacuation process not to become a problem in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic."

As lockdown restrictions have been reimposed in the capital, the rest of the country's provinces and the Isle of Youth special municipality are gradually returning to the "new normal."

Miguel Angel Hernandez, a weather forecaster at the Cuban state TV, said that the coronavirus pandemic, along with climate change, is a major threat to the Caribbean countries.

"We must stay alert and efficiently activate early warning systems in the region because more storms are to come and the novel coronavirus will be around for a while," he said.

Forecasters have termed the current hurricane season in the Caribbean "extremely active," predicting 19 to 25 named storms, including seven to 11 hurricanes.

The hurricane season in the Caribbean runs through Nov. 30. Enditem
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: Few voices in Indian cinema command the widespread attention Naseeruddin Shah gets. His no-holds-barred approach and the ability to speak his mind make him a rare original voice in cinema.

"Too many people are miserable with the work they do. On that front, I consider myself lucky, and a lot of actors should feel that way too," said the actor in a chat sponsored by Airtel, and arranged as part of e-Expressions, a series of webinars organised by The New Indian Express group, and hosted by senior journalist Kaveree Bamzai.

Naseeruddin Shah took the digital plunge with Amazon Prime Video's Bandish Bandits.

"This series is like an antidote for the content we see on the web these days. There is no violence, gratuitous sex scenes, cuss words... Being on the small screen isn't new to me. As an actor, my job remains the same irrespective of the medium," said the 70-year-old actor, who was also seen in the direct-to-OTT film, Mee Raqsam (Zee5), in which he played an Islamic hardliner.

"All characters are make-believe. You assume their skin and make it your own. I play each of my roles with the same conviction; the success or the lack of it lies in the writing," said the actor.

After citing lack of originality and relentless promotion of mediocre talent as big problems in Hindi cinema, Naseer addressed the elephant in the room.

Naseeruddin Shah: All Indian war films are sheer jingosim | EE56 https://t.co/9DbycvqVLF  The New Indian Express (@NewIndianXpress) August 24, 2020

"After the death of the young actor (Sushant Singh Rajput), it is like everyone has descended to the lowest possible level, in terms of backbiting and running down the other," said the Ishqiya actor, who found it worrisome that this was happening despite so many educated people joining the industry. "Many actors who are complaining about being cheated of a film here and there, are quite successful now and lead comfortable lives. What are they complaining about? Yes, just like in any other industry, there are camps here too, but to blame all the ills on nepotism is absurd."

This debate, it seems, is here to stay, and the resentment against film families and star kids appears to be growing.

"These incidents should teach every actor that the idea of 'audience love' is a myth. They don't love us. They are there for the thrill. They don't care whether you live or die," said Naseeruddin, and went on to talk about how Aamir Khan's trip to Turkey for scouting shooting locations invited backlash in India. "Someone with 25 followers on Twitter decides to teach Aamir Khan a lesson now. For all we know, he might have been an Aamir fan all his life. Look at the kind of abuse the Bachchans received for just falling ill. The trolling happened to the epitome of a gentleman, who has been worshipped by four generations."

As a veteran of this industry who has seen ups and downs, and one whose every word gets scrutinised, you can see why Naseeruddin feels this way. "Actors, no matter how much affection we receive, should not believe that the love we get is universal."


The Minister for the Interior Ambrose Derry has questioned the appropriateness of former President John Dramani Mahama's promise to legalize the operations of commercial motorcycles popularly referred to as Okada.

Although not opposed to the idea, Mr Dery believes any action to legalize the commercial use of motorbikes must take compliance with traffic rules seriously.

He said the government may consider regularizing if all necessary legal frameworks are done and it is found that the operations of the riders contribute to the public good.

Speaking to Citi News on the sidelines of the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) manifesto launch over the weekend, Mr Dery said the manner in which okada riders currently operate in the country is not the best.

John Mahama was president before and okada was with us. He didn't do anything about it. Okada riders are not above the law. We have traffic lights but when others stop, they pass. So we need to allow them to operate, but if we do, they have to operate within the law. Currently, we are not legalizing it. Okada should be harmonized and as far as possible, if the law permits them to operate effectively and contribute to the general good, we will consider it, he said.

His comments come on the back of a promise by former President John Mahama that he will regularize Okada operations should he be reelected to the high office of president.

Mr Mahama in an address to chiefs and people of Kpando in the Volta Region as part of his tour of the region said he recognizes the benefits of the 'okada' business to the many families that depend on it, hence his promise.

This is a service that has come to stay. Whether you legalize it or not you cannot stop it and so why behave like the ostrich and bury your head in the sand. These okadas have created more jobs in this economy than any government job-related policy. It has created more jobs than NABCo, it has created more jobs than YEA and all those artificial job creation programs, John Mahama said.

Currently, the use of motorbikes and tricycles for commercial purposes in any form is against Ghana's Road Traffic Regulations 2012 (L.I 2180).

----citinewsroom
The Republican Party has formally nominated United States President Donald Trump for a second term in the White House  one of the first acts of the first day of the Republican National Convention (RNC) that saw both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence speak in person in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Just 336 delegates gathered in a convention centre in the city for a roll call Monday morning to nominate Trump as the partys candidate to take on Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Earlier in the day, the delegates  who numbered over 2,400 during the 2016 convention  nominated Vice President Mike Pence.





We fish, we hunt, and we have at least five guns in every home, said Montana Republican Party Chairman Don Kaltschmidt, who cast 27 votes for Trump as he declared the state temporarily Trumptana.

We love the second amendment and we love Donald Trump, he said.

Minutes after the votes passed the threshold that officially cemented Trump as the candidate, the president made a surprise appearance, walking on stage to chants of four more years, four more years.

If you want to really drive them crazy, say 12 more years, Trump said, before launching into a speech that continually came back to accusations that Democrats are trying to steal the election through increased mail-in voting and other means  accusations that are being called baseless by Trumps opponents.

The president hailed Novembers vote as the most important election in our history, while touting the countrys economic strength before the coronavirus pandemic, which he referred to as the plague that came from China. He also derided Biden and prominent Democrats for not visiting Milwaukee, Wisconsin during their convention there last week.

During his wide-ranging speech, Trump added he felt a responsibility to visit North Carolina, accusing the states Democratic governor of politically imposing coronavirus restrictions on the convention, which saw the bulk of event plans briefly moved to Jacksonville, Florida  then saw the nomination moved to Charlotte, North Carolina and subsequent events moved to Washington, DC.

I guarantee on November 4 itll all open up, he said, referring to the day after the election. You know these Democrat governors  they love to shut down until after the election is over because they want to make our numbers look as bad as possible for the economy. But our numbers are looking so good.

Make America great again, again

The presidents early appearance set the tone for a convention that will seek to rebut the Democratic National Convention, held almost completely digitally last week in light of the coronavirus pandemic, while energising the partys base amid a slump in polls.

The roll call contained some of the usual trappings of a convention, including signs designating each state and gift bags stuffed with Republican swag.

But chairs on the ballroom floor were arranged with lots of space between them and convention organisers told participants to wear masks, although adherence to that rule was uneven.

We are obviously disappointed we could not hold this event in the same way we had originally planned, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said as she began the proceedings while thanking Charlotte for allowing the convention to move forward in its truncated form.





The party also unanimously voted to forgo forging a new 2020 Republican platform during the gathering. A party resolution instead proclaimed: Resolved: That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the Presidents America-first agenda.

The roll call and speeches served as a precursor to Mondays main programming from 8:30pm (00:30 GMT) to 11pm (03:00 GMT), centred around the theme land of promise, which is set to feature several prominent Republican legislators, including the partys only Black senator.

Also set to speak are Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St Louis, Missouri couple who were photographed brandishing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters during a march that passed by their home.

Other highlighted citizens on the first night are Tanya Weinreis, a Montana coffee shop owner whose business and employees livelihoods were saved by the federal coronavirus relief Paycheck Protection Program, and Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the 2018 Parkland Florida, school shooting.





Beginning what will be four days of prominent appearances by Trump family members, Trumps son, Donald Trump Jr, and his sons girlfriend and Trump fundraiser, Kimberly Guilfoyle, are also set to speak on Monday.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is scheduled to address the convention with a video message taped in Jerusalem, defying decades of precedent that the nations chief diplomat stays out of domestic politics in an election year.

The week will culminate in the presidents acceptance of the partys nomination on Thursday on the South Lawn of the White House.

Pence, who spoke shortly before Trump during the roll call, summed up what are expected to be the overarching themes of the next four days.

I heard the other day that democracy is on the ballot, Pence said, referring to Democratic messaging that Trumps presidency presents an existential threat to the country.

I think we all know the economy is on the ballot, he added. Law and order is on the ballot. Our most cherished ideals of freedom and free markets are on the ballot.

Were gonna make America great again, again, Pence said.
File image

BJP leader Jyotiraditya Scindia said that although the Congress's top leadership had offered to make him the deputy chief minister of Madhya Pradesh after the 2018 state polls, when he was still in that party, he had turned down the offer as he decided to work for the people.

He alleged that the Congress had betrayed the people of the state with false promises to come to power.

"The Congress's top leadership had offered me deputy chief minister's post. Instead, I decided to work for the people," the BJP Rajya Sabha member said while addressing his party's three-day long membership drive, which will end here on Monday.

This is for the first time that Scindia has publicly admitted that he was offered this post by the Congress.

In March this year, veteran Congress leader Digvijaya Singh had said that Scindia was offered the post of MP deputy chief minister, but Kamal Nath had refused to accept a "chela".

Scindia said, "I understood that Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh will ruin the Congress government in 15 months. The Congress betrayed the people with false promises like waiver of farm loan in 10 days in order to come to power in the state."

"Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi had promised that farm loans of up to to Rs 2 lakh will be waived within 10 days or else the chief minister will be sent back on the eleventh day," he said.

"Congress made false promises to come to the power in the state," he alleged.

Scindia had quit the Congress in March this year and later joined the BJP.

On the Congress's agitation against the BJP's membership drive in Gwalior, Scindia said, "At least they (Congress leaders) came out of their houses to protest against BJP's drive five months after losing the government in MP."

With an eye on the by-elections to 27 assembly constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, especially in Gwalior- Chambal region of the state that accounts for 16 of these seats, the ruling BJP has launched the membership drive here on Saturday.

Twenty-two rebel Congress MLAs in Madhya Pradesh, mostly from the Scindia camp, resigned in March, reducing the 15-month-old dispensation led by Kamal Nath to a minority and paving the way for the BJP to form the government in the state.

These former MLAs had later joined the BJP.

The BJP then sent Scindia to Rajya Sabha, while many of his loyalists got important portfolios in Shivraj Singh Chouhan's cabinet.

Last month, three more Congress MLAs in the state resigned and joined the saffron party, taking their number to 25, while two assembly seats had fallen vacant due to the demise of legislators.

The Congress now has 89 MLAs in the House, while the ruling BJP has 107. The effective strength of the 230-member House has come down to 203 due to the resignations and deaths of legislators.
" " People enjoy dining by the Spree River (with a view of the Berlin Cathedral) in Berlin, Germany, a great place to experience sommerloch. ElOjoTorpe/Getty Images

The German language has a poetic way of describing unique emotions and phenomena that often lack a direct English translation. Schadenfreude is the best-known example, a word that means "deriving pleasure from another person's pain or failure," but there are plenty of other German gems, including fernweh, (literally "distance pain"), a feeling of wanting to get away from where you are and kummerspeck, ("grief bacon"), the weight put on by emotional overeating.

Here's another fun and timely German word that captures the languid laziness of late summer: sommerloch (pronounced "summer-lock"). Directly translated as "summer hole," sommerloch is used in Germany to describe the slow season of late July through August when everyone in Germany goes on vacation to escape the heat, many shops are closed, and the news media has nothing to report on except fluff stories. (Sommerloch is also the name of a German village. In this case, loch doesn't mean "hole" as much as "gap," referring to the town's scenic location in the Nahe River Valley.)

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"A great example of sommerloch this year would be the media frenzy in Germany around wild animals," emails Taylor Hermerding, a Berlin-based editor in didactics at Babbel, the language learning app. "Recent sommerloch stories include a bold fox in Berlin who has turned into a bit of a shoe thief, or a wild boar at the famous Teufelssee nudist park which stole an unsuspecting man's laptop."

AKA 'Sour Cucumber Time'

Germans actually have more than one word for the roughly six weeks of late summer when the whole country seems to take a collective nap. Predating sommerloch is the mouthful sauregurkenzeit, which literally means "sour cucumber time." According to one explanation, the phrase comes from 18th-century Yiddish proverbs referring to times when food is scarce and the only thing left in the pantry is pickles.

"Interestingly, many other countries refer to cucumbers when talking about the slow season of summer," says Hermerding. "Dutch, Norwegian, Icelandic, Czech, Polish and Hungarian people all reference 'cucumber time' or 'cucumber season' when discussing the sluggish news agenda of the summer months."

Hermerding says that the cucumber connection may also have 18th-century roots, when late summer was the time when Berlin shops stocked up on gurken (German for cucumber) harvested from the local Spree Forest.

Now That's Cool In the United Kingdom, the slow news days of summer are called the "silly season," because the entire British government is on vacation and news outlets are left scrambling for content. The term was coined back in 1861 by the Saturday Review.
Syracuse, N.Y.  Syracuse police are investigating a fight involving a knife Sunday afternoon at Destiny USA.

Someone called the Onondaga County 911 Center at 3:33 p.m. to report a group of people fighting with a knife at Foot Locker inside the mall. The caller told 911 dispatchers they thought someone might have been stabbed, but police say they did not find any victims.

Several males were fighting at the mall and a knife was displayed, Syracuse police spokesman Sgt. Matthew Malinowski said.

Police searched the mall after the fight. One officer was spotted with a canine inside the mall. American Medical Response (AMR) ambulance also responded.

But police think the group of males who had been fighting left Destiny USA before they arrived, Malinowski said. No arrests have been made yet and police are continuing to investigate, he said.

Syracuse police ask anyone with information to call them at (315) 442-5222.

Have a tip or a story idea? Contact Catie OToole: cotoole@syracuse.com | text/call 315-470-2134 | Twitter | Facebook
Jeremy Corbyn gave an interview with the Tribune podcast, A World to Win, last week, describing events at some point in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic before his removal as Labour leader on April 4.

He explained, We were involved in meetings with the government throughout the spring of this year and Jon Ashworth and I remember distinctly going to a meeting at the Cabinet Office, where we got a lecture about herd immunity.

The last time I discussed herd immunity was when I worked on a pig farm 40 years ago. It was absurd that actually [you] would build up herd immunity by allowing people to die. And so, while the government was going into eugenic formulas and discussing all this stuff, they were not making adequate preparations.

Boris Johnson, right, and Jeremy Corbyn walk through the Commons Members Lobby in Parliament, London [Source: AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, pool]

Corbyn and his Shadow Secretary for Health were involved in discussions with the Tories who told him explicitly that theirs was a murderous policy of allowing the coronavirus to develop unchecked in the population with the supposed aim of eventually arriving at herd immunity. He describes this as eugenic; that is, a fascistic policy for the deliberate elimination of a supposedly undesirable section of the population for the supposed betterment of the species, in this case a vast swathe of the working class, especially the elderly, infirm, and otherwise vulnerable.

When this herd immunity policy was made public it provoked widespread outrage that threatened the stability and possibly even the survival of Boris Johnsons Conservative government.

On March 5, Johnson appeared on ITVs This Morning to explain that one of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.

This theory provided the rationale for the governments refusal to take any measures to contain the virus. On March 11, Dr. David Halpern, a member of Whitehalls Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), told the BBC that at some undefined point the government would want to isolate at-risk groups so that they basically dont catch the disease and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunitys been achieved in the rest of the population.

On March 12, at a Downing Street press conference, Johnson declared, I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time. Sir Patrick Vallance, the governments chief scientific adviser, declared, Its not possible to stop everyone getting it and its also not desirable because you want some immunity in the population to protect ourselves in the future.

A Sky News journalist noted that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had suggested a possible infection rate of 70 percent and asked Sir Chris Whitty, the governments chief medical advisor, what percentage of the UK population the government estimated will be infected and how many you think will actually die. Whitty replied, Actually, our top number for our reasonable worst-case scenario is higher than the chancellors. In fact, our top planning assumption would be up to 80 percent of the population being infected the overall mortality rate in our view is 1 percent or less overall, although higher in older and vulnerable groups and lower in other groups.

As the WSWS reported at the time, Based on 60 percent of the UKs 66.5 million population, acquiring herd immunity would mean around 40 million people catching COVID-19, with around 8 million becoming severe or critical cases and needing treatment in hospital. If Whittys reasonable worst-case scenario of 80 percent infection comes true, and with just a 1 percent death rate, 500,000 people would die.

The outrage among scientists and, more significant still, in the working class, was so explosive that within three days Health Secretary Matt Hancock was lying through his teeth promising that herd immunity was not the governments goal: Our goal is to protect life.

Just one day later, a leaked document from Public Health England (PHE) meant for senior National Health Service doctors and officials again exposed this lie. It revealed that PHE expected the UKs coronavirus epidemic to last one year and require the hospitalisation of up to 7.9 million people.

It took another week of mounting public anger to force the government to belatedly impose a national lockdown March 23, a delay that cost tens of thousands of lives. Those deaths are the criminal responsibility of the Johnson government. What is now clear is that Corbyn, due to his silence, was their partner in crime.

Corbyn doesnt even bother to say when the government lectured him on herd immunity, or to explain why we only hear of this months after the event. He is not asked to do so by his interlocutor, Tribune s Grace Blakeley, a title bought in 2018 by the Democratic Socialist of America publication, Jacobin.

Blakeley was intent on making a desperate effort to fashion Corbyn as a modern-day King across the water a noble fighter for socialism deposed by enemies too foul, numerous, and powerful to overcome. And Corbyn played to this narrative. Speaking of his first appearance in parliament as party leader in 2015, he told Blakeley, I looked around and there werent too many people that Id call close political friends. In fact, there were about 15 of them out of the 650 MPs there There are people in the Labour Party that dont want change, that didnt want that change. I was faced by a great deal of hostility from the very beginning.

This should not have been a surprise to him. Corbyn did not proceed on the basis that Labour MPs would ruthlessly oppose any move away from a pro-business agenda of austerity, militarism, and war because he had no genuine intention of fighting for such a shift. If he did, then he would have based himself on the hundreds of thousands of workers and youth that flooded into the party, and on broader forces in the working class, in a fight against his MPs. Instead he protected the Blairites at every turn, insisting that his overarching goal was to preserve party unity. The result was Corbyns resounding defeat in the December 2019 general election and handing over leadership of the party to Sir Keir Starmer.

The specific intention of Blakeley was to plead with those who are deserting Labour in disgust not to give up on the party, after the disastrous failure of Corbyns efforts to push it to the left. She closes an accompanying piece, What I learned from Jeremy Corbyn: In 2017, the socialist movement in Britain came so close to powerperhaps closer than at any other point in history. We may be disappointed, discouraged and disillusioned after the election defeat and Starmers ascent. But figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn spent their entire lives fighting for socialisminside and outside the Labour Party. Now is not the time to give up.

Corbyn shares this aim of maintaining Labours control of the working class: When asked about the one request he would like to make of [new Labour leader Sir] Keir Starmer, Jeremy responded to always be proud of the fact that Labour is a socialist party.

Blakeley knows how stupid such an appeal to Starmer sounds, so provides an instant apologia: On the face of it, this assertion is open to challenge. The Parliamentary Labour Party contains just as many ardent anti-socialists as socialists. But it is more of a call to action than a statement of fact.

It most certainly is not a call to action. Corbyns entire record in office was dedicated to opposing any action by the working class, not just against the Blairites, but also against the Tories. To this end Corbyn agreed to weeks of Brexit talks with then Prime Minister Theresa May in April 2019 to achieve national unity to deliver the national interest. His latest admission on his secret talks on herd immunity prove that he extended the same political service to Johnson during a yet more dangerous crisis.

In his last parliamentary appearance as party leader, March 25, Corbyn said of Labours approach to the pandemic, Our immediate task as the Opposition is to help arrest the spread of the coronavirus, support the governments public health efforts while being constructively critical where we feel it is necessary to improve the official response.

Support for the Johnson government combined with only the most constructive criticism has become Starmers mantraone drawn up for him by Mr Corbyn.

The Corbynites have no intention of changing their spots. Speaking to Rupert Murdochs Times Radio, Corbyns main ally, former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, was asked by John Pienaar about Starmers leadership style during the pandemic.

I think Keirs got this exactly right, McDonnell replied. Hes approached the government in a constructive wayand weve got to get through this crisis together By occasionally pointing to the governments failures, Keirs offering that alternative Hes taking this government on.

Even this ringing endorsement was not enough for McDonnell. Asked whether Starmer is a proud socialist, he replied, Keir has made it clear hes a socialist The issue is, what does socialism mean in the 21st century? And the ten-point plan he put forward to be elected as leader was 21st-century socialism. Were on the same page.

Anyone who still maintains a lingering belief that Corbyn, McDonnell, and the rest ever offered an alternative to the Blairites and the Tories, should survey the political wreckage of the Labour left. It is time for the working class to strike out on a new road of genuinely socialist struggle, and to recognise that the few remaining Corbynites are just as much their opponents as Starmer, Johnson, and their ilk.
How votes for the Conservative leadership race are being counted  and when to expect results

The race to crown Andrew Scheer's successor as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada will come to an end tonight following an unprecedented contest that saw a record number of votes cast despite a nationwide public health crisis.

The campaign took a worrisome turn in March after the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizers to suspend the race, which was originally intended to wrap up in June.

But by the end of April, the party was armed with a new plan: a vote that would take place entirely by mail-in ballot and would do away with a lively night of election results announced inside a convention hall packed with supporters.

So far, candidates Peter MacKay, Erin O'Toole, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan have contended with socially distanced debates and steered clear of the door-knocking and hand-shaking that usually accompany a campaign.

The four contenders will be watching tonight's results with family and friends from separate suites in a downtown Ottawa hotel instead of congregating on the convention floor.

WATCH | Conservative party members cast final ballots in leadership race:

Despite the setbacks, nearly 175,000 votes were cast in this year's race out of almost 270,000 eligible members  the highest number of votes in the party's history.

"I've struggled to find anyone that predicted back in March, when the pandemic hit, that the Conservative Party wouldn't just see a record amount of memberships but a record amount of ballots cast in a record turnout," said the party's director of communications, Cory Hann.

"We're pleased with it, and I don't know if anyone predicted it. If they did, I encourage them to buy a lottery ticket."

Hann said the figure is a testament to candidates keeping in touch with supporters, party members being more familiar with the voting process and renewed excitement to unseat the Liberal government.

"They're looking at these candidates as the prime minister-in-waiting," Hann said.

Story continues

How to follow along

The Conservative Party was expecting to kick off the evening's proceedings from Ottawa's Shaw Centre at 6 p.m. ET, with a tribute and a speech from outgoing leader Andrew Scheer. The party expected to see a winner crowned between 7:30 and 9 p.m. ET. Glitches with a machine that opens the ballot envelopes delayed results by several hours.

Here's how you can tune in throughout the day:

Hear National Affairs Editor Chris Hall and the CBC's Martina Fitzgerald host special coverage on CBC Radio One and the CBC Listen App starting at 7:30 p.m. ET (revised time).

Counting votes and assigning points

Vote counting is expected to start at 4 a.m. ET, a daunting process that includes opening 174,849 envelopes and flattening the ballots inside before they can be fed through a tabulating machine.

Tabulating could take until 6 p.m., at which point scrutineers will sign off on the final tally.

The new leader will be chosen by a ranked ballot system that awards points to each candidate rather than counting up votes. Each of Canada's 338 federal ridings is assigned 100 points, meaning a total of 33,800 points are up for grabs.

Candidates are assigned points depending on what percentage of the vote they get in each riding. If 60 per cent of voters in one riding choose a certain candidate as their first choice, for example, that person is given 60 points. A candidate must get 16,901 points to secure the party's top job.

Photos Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press

Ranked ballots, rounds of results

In a ranked ballot system, voters can rank candidates in order of preference if they choose to do so. With four names on the ballot this year, the task was likely easier than it was during the 2017 leadership race, which saw 13 candidates go head-to-head.

The ballots will be counted in rounds depending on how many points each candidate gets.

In Round 1, regional results from provincial and territorial counts will be shared first, followed by national results delivered by Leadership Election Organizing Committee chairs Lisa Raitt and Dan Nowlan.

If none of the contenders hit the magic number of points in the first round, the person with the lowest number of points is taken off the ballot and a second round begins.

Everyone who ranked that candidate as their first choice then has their ballots counted again, with their second-place rankings tallied instead.

WATCH | How the vote could break down:

If a winner still has not emerged, the next candidate with the lowest number of points is removed and a third and final round begins.

Because it's not known how many rounds will take place, Hann said a winner could be announced at about 7:30 p.m. at the earliest and about 9 p.m. at the latest, though glitches have delayed that result.

When that happens, the newly unveiled leader will travel from Ottawa's Westin Hotel to the Shaw Centre next door to deliver their victory speech.
By Express News Service

VIJAYAWADA: With over 18,000 cases reported during the weekend, the Covid-19 tally in the state rose to 3,53,111. East Godavari continued to be the most-affected district by registering over 2,500 infections in the last two days even as the overall cases there were approaching the 50,000-mark.

According to a media bulletin released by the State Command Control, 46,712 samples were tested in the 24 hours ending Sunday 9 am, out of which 7,895 returned positive.After East Godavari (1,256 new cases), most of the fresh infections were recorded in Nellore (985), Chittoor (934) and Prakasam (923).

Guntur and Kadapa districts have now reported over 30,000 and 20,000 total number of cases. Meanwhile, the total number of recoveries rose by 7,449 to 2,60,083, leaving 89,742 active cases.

While Krishna has the least active cases (2,083), East Godavari, which has been recording over 1,000 cases for the past few days, has the highest (17,228).Kurnool district has the highest number of recoveries: 31,711 patients have recovered as against 38,835 total cases.

The Covid toll rose by 93 to 3,282. Among the casualties reported in the 24 hours ending Sunday 9 am, 16 were from Nellore, 13 from West Godavari, 11 from Chittoor, 10 from Kurnool, nine from Prakasam, eight from Kadapa, six from Srikakulam, five from Visakhapatnam, four from East Godavari, three each from Anantapur, Guntur and Krishna and two from Vizianagaram.On Saturday, 10,276 persons tested positive for Covid and 97 others lost their lives to the disease.

Lockdown in Skulam

A total lockdown was enforced in Srikakulam town on Sunday following the directive of district collector J Nivas. All the shops and business establishments in the municipal corporation limits remained closed. The police set up check posts on the town outskirts to prevent entry of people from neighbouring places

Cop dies of Covid-19

A police head constable attached to the Vizianagaram District Crime Records Bureau died of Covid-19 on Friday night while undergoing treatment at Maharaja Hospital. He tested positive for coronavirus 10 days ago. Initially, he was sent to home isolation, and admitted to the hospital on August 19
By Carl Hiaasen

Knopf. 352 pp. $28.95

- - -

Nearly all of the dozens of Carl Hiaasen's hugely popular satirical novels, young people's stories, nonfiction books and column collections - mainly about political corruption and environmental despoliation in the state of Florida - have been all too believably, even depressingly, topical. But by the evidence of the scabrous and unrelentingly hilarious "Squeeze Me," the Trump era is truly Carl Hiaasen's moment. It's as if Mastodon, as he is known here only by his Secret Service code name, had actually been hatched in Hiaasen's febrile brain as one of his most farcically outlandish characters, and then in some "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"-like transmogrification, President Donald Trump actually turned up in real life - and now he is back in Hiaasen's novel. (The POTUS here loves the Mastodon moniker and asks an agent to be taken to the zoo so he can see a real one.)

One unnerving aspect of "Squeeze Me" is that it's set in post-pandemic Palm Beach and Trump is still president. It will be useful for any pro-Biden readers to view this not as pessimism on Hiaasen's part but simply as some additional deeply mordant humor. Just dive in and have a wonderful time.

Lampooning the rich is a longtime American literary pastime, and no writer has ever been blessed with more fertile territory in that regard than Palm Beach. On the very first page we meet Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, of the "aerosol Pews" and one of the Trump-loving "Potussies," a bevy of hard-drinking, bejeweled heiresses, who at a ball in POTUS's honor serenade him with a song they made up, "Big Unimpeachable You."

Poor Kiki misses that splendid event, however, because by then she has tipsily fallen into a pond during the Irritable Bowel Syndrome gala at Limpid House and been devoured by a 20-foot Burmese python. (Tens of thousands of these Asian creatures are actually on the loose in the Everglades, a result of the exotic-pet craze in the 1980s and '90s. They normally eat only smaller mammals, but apparently Kiki was too tempting to pass up.)

There's a coverup, of course - bad for Palm Beach's image - that eliminates the snake from the public scenario and has Kiki instead done in by a "terrorist," an unlucky wrong-place/wrong-time Honduran asylum-seeker named Diego Beltran. Egged on by Mastodon, mobs outside his jail cell scream, "No more Diegos! No more Diegos!" Diego has become Mastodon's "brown-skinned Fiend-of-the-Month." It's the one aspect of the novel that's not all that funny.

Hiaasen can always be relied on to give readers a likable, decent-hearted, beset young female protagonist to fight for justice, and Angie Armstrong is great fun to follow around. A former park ranger who did jail time for assaulting a poacher, Angie runs a business called Discreet Captures, ridding homes and businesses of overdeveloped Florida's many animal intruders.

Angie is called in to deal with the original python as well as others that start turning up. Having figured out what's really going on, Angie must obtain - and eventually coerce - the assistance of, among others, an honest local cop, the Secret Service and the first lady of the United States. Code-named Mockingbird, Mastodon's spouse is sympathetically portrayed here. She finds pleasant distraction from her tedious duties and her ghastly husband in a raucous affair with a Secret Service agent named Keith Josephson. His real name is Ahmet Youssef; in passing, the clueless POTUS compliments his wife's lover on the agent's "nice tan."

Hiaasen's narrative wanders around a bit randomly, but with all the lovingly biting detail there isn't a page here that flags. Even the Palm Beach hi-so names are choice, like the section in Gatsby where the long list of his party guests is so funny and revealing. Kiki's best friend is Fay Alex Riptoad of the "compost and iron ore Riptoads." Then there are the McMarmots, Tripp Teabull, Yirma Skyy Frick of the personal-lubricant Fricks, and Kiki's stepsons, Chase and Chance Cornbright. Mastodon's mansion/private club is Casa Bellicosa. Among the upcoming charity events threatened by the python scourge are the Psoriatic Gingivitis Gala and the Peyronie's Syndrome Ball. Everybody's artificially bronzed and cantilevered, and a crucial you-see-it-coming-and-can't-wait plot point involves POTUS's malfunctioning tanning bed.

Hiaasen's old reliable deus ex machina character, much beloved by his fans - former Florida Gov. Clinton "Skink" Tyree - even shows up to help Angie provide Mastodon with a dose of his own bad medicine. The crazy-sane environmentalist emerges from the swamps where he resides among the snakes and shows Angie the baby iguana recently hatched from an egg he incubated in his empty eye socket. That's a joke, but is it any grosser or daffier than what the nation now witnesses daily on cable news?

- - -

Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson.
The TMC supremo said she was vocal about the issue during the last video conference of chief ministers with Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday appealed to the Centre to postpone the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) due to the prevailing COVID-19 situation.

Aspirants sit for JEE for admission to premier engineering colleges and NEET for undergraduate medical courses.

Banerjee, in a series of tweets on Monday morning, said she was vocal about the issue during the last video conference of chief ministers with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In our last video conference with the Honble PM Shri @narendramodi Ji, I had been vocal against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020, which had a huge potential to put student lives at risk. (1/2)  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) August 24, 2020

Banerjee appealed to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone the examinations until the situation is conducive again.

Now with the directive of @EduMinOfIndia to conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sep, I would again appeal to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone these examinations until the situation is conducive again. It is our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students. (2/2)  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) August 24, 2020

The Supreme Court had dismissed a plea seeking the postponement of JEE (Main) April, 2020 and NEET (Undergraduate) examinations, which are scheduled to be held in September, amid a spurt in COVID-19 cases, saying the precious year of students "cannot be wasted" and "life has to go on".

The JEE (Main) is scheduled to be held between1 and 6 September, while the JEE (Advanced) on 27 September. The NEET will be held on 13 September.

On Friday, Education Ministry officials had said the JEE (Main) and the NEET-UG will be conducted in September as scheduled.
Benchmarks Sensex and Nifty advanced over one and half per cent each last week, largely backed by positive global cues. Meanwhile, the broader market outperformed with the Nifty Midcap index rising over 3 per cent while the SmallCap shot up 5 per cent. As such, investors will keep a keen eye on the broader market this week too.

The overall direction for the Indian equity market will be largely driven by developments around Covid-19 and overall global sentiment with key focus on the US-China relations. The scheduled F&O expiry of August month contracts are expected to keep the volatility high as traders roll over their positions to the next series.

On the Covid-19 front, India's tally zoomed past the 31-lakh mark, while the death toll climbed to 57,692, according to Worldometer. The government yesterday announced the release of standard operating procedures for resuming shooting of films and TV programmes. In the US, the American health regulator yesterday announced an emergency approval of blood plasma from recovered coronavirus patients as a treatment against the disease.

Besides, an ongoing Supreme Court hearing on telecom AGR dues remains on market participants radar with the next hearing scheduled for today. Foreign fund flow will be another key trigger for the as overseas investors have put in Rs 41,330 crore in Indian on net basis in August so far, contributing heavily to the bulls.

Moreover, the last leg of June quarter earnings will trigger stock-specific movements. Over 300 companies are scheduled to announce their June quarter earnings this week, with LIC Housing Finance, NMDC, and Avanti Feeds being among the major ones.

Among other key events for the week is the meeting of the GST Council to be held on August 27. Meanwhile, the Rs 250-crore rights issue of Minda Industries will open on August 25 and the Rs 120 crore rights issue of Satin Creditcare Network will close on August 26.

Let's now focus on today's trade setup.

The SGX Nifty is indicating a positive startup for the Indian today. At 7:30 AM, the SGX Nifty was up 33 points at around 11,410 levels, tracking a similar trend in Asian indices. Australian shares were up 0.17 per cent while Japans Nikkei reversed early losses to be last up 0.34 per cent. South Koreas KOSPI gained 0.9 per cent in early deals.

On the stock-specific front, Gautam Adani-led Adani Group is set to acquire a 74 per cent stake in Mumbai International Airport with the current operator settling its disputes with its minority partner and exiting the venture. Sources have told Business Standard that the transaction under which Adani Group will acquire 50.5 per cent of GVK Group could be announced before next week.

Private-sector general insurers ICICI Lombard and Bharti AXA general insurance have signed definitive agreements to combine their business. Bharti AXA's business will be demerged into ICICI Lombard's through a scheme of arrangement under which the shareholders of Bharti AXA would receive two shares of Lombard for every 115 shares held by them. The financial details of the deal have not been revealed so far.
BHU was earlier scheduled to hold the examinations between 16 and 31 August. Now the university will be holding the entrance tests in two phases.

BHU admit card 2020 | The Banaras Hindu University (BHU) has released the admit card, or hall ticket, for the undergraduate entrance test (UET) 2020 on its official website - bhuonline.in.

The University will be holding the entrance tests in two phases. In the first phase, from 24 to 31 August, the varsity will conduct the exam for all postgraduate programmes, LLB (3 years), B.Ed Special Education, B.P.Ed, BFA and BPA.

During the second phase, from 9 to 14 September, the entrance test for remaining undergraduate programmes including B.A. (Hons), Arts, B.A. (Hons) Social Sciences, B.Com (Hons)/B.Com-FMM, B.Sc. (Hons) Ag., B.A. LLB  5 years (Hons), B.Sc. (Hons) Maths, B.Sc. (Hons) Bio, Shashtri (Hons) and different programmes of B.Voc will be conducted.

BHU was earlier scheduled to hold the examinations between 16 and 31 August.

Candidates appearing for the BHU UET and PET 2020 should carry the admit card to their respective examination centres, else they will not be allowed to take the exam.

A report by The Indian Express said that candidates who cleared the UET get admission based on their eligibility and marks obtained in the test. The undergraduate entrance test will be conducted in the computer-based test mode or online mode.

Steps to download BHU UET and PET 2020 admit card:

Step 1: Go to the official website of BHU - bhuonline.in.

Step 2: Scroll down and click on the tab that reads 'Admit Card UET-2020' or directly click here

Step 3: You will be directed to a new page where you will have to enter your registered email ID or registration ID and click on the search button.

Step 4: The admit card will appear on your screen. Download and take a print out.

According to a report by NDTV, BHU has taken a series of precautionary measures to conduct the entrance tests amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Standard Operating Procedures for holding the exams issued by the Ministry of Education will be strictly followed at all examination centres.

Candidates will have to follow social distancing guidelines and sitting arrangement with at least two meters distance between two candidates at the exam centres will be made.

Exam centres will be sprayed with disinfectants and hand sanitisers will be provided. Examination halls will be cleaned after every shift.
Administrators overstepping their authority, unlawful payments, illegal closed meetings, denials and shifting answers  there's a lesson here for some Saratoga County leaders: You can't sweep a mess this big under the rug.

A pandemic pay plan that would have given well-paid officials  including the ones who came up with the plan  time and a half to do their jobs ignited public anger and splintered the Board of Supervisors into factions: those who tried to defend this laughably bad and expensive plan, and those who stood up for good governance. The former group advanced a milquetoast internal report and resisted the release of a damning independent review, which concluded that officials who lacked authority to make wage decisions had made them anyway, had tried to boost the wages of ineligible officials, had violated the Open Meetings Law, and had left the county vulnerable to lawsuits.

A committee will weigh disciplinary action against those involved in the pay debacle. That is absolutely warranted. Especially at a time when local governments are desperate to save every dollar they can, a thorough review is in the public interest. And how can Saratoga County residents have any confidence in their government if leaders are not held accountable for the mess they've made?

Don't kill the contract

For the Center for Disability Services in Albany, losing a planned printing contract with the state means laying off 20 current employees and leaving 30 new jobs unfilled. It also means they're stuck with $4 million in expenses they undertook to upgrade printers, software and other technology ahead of the job.

For the workers whose jobs are affected, it could mean losses that can't be tallied on a balance sheet: the loss of independence and the satisfaction of contributing to the community.

The Division of the Budget nixed the contract proposal as it looks to slash costs  understandable, given the economic crisis. But it would be better to start with a review of the $76 million in printing and fulfillment contracts that go to private, out-of-state companies.

Disabled adults are more than twice as likely to be unemployed and to live below the poverty line, according to a 2019 Rockefeller Institute study. The state shouldn't seek savings at the expense of its most vulnerable citizens.

Sign up for The Knick  Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter.

Telling New York's story

What's Gov. Andrew Cuomo's publisher paying him for his new book?

More Information To comment: tuletters@timesunion.com See More Collapse

New Yorkers are right to ask, because the book, coming out in October, isn't his personal story. In "American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic," according to the blurbs, Mr. Cuomo will share leadership advice as he walks readers through his administration's management of the ongoing public health crisis. It's an account of a job he did while working for the people of New York. In a sense, we are investors in this enterprise. We deserve to know what he makes from it.

Aside from the fact that the book feels premature  we're not out of the woods yet  it will be difficult for the governor to explain making any money off of the story of New York's suffering and struggle. The governor says he'll be making a donation to a "COVID-related entity." A pledge to donate all profits to charity would better befit the subject matter, and the circumstances.
Switzerland, Bern, August 23, 2020  For Immediate Release PESTICIDE RELEASES A NEW SINGLE FROM THE WAST EMPTY NEVER ENDING "NIGHT" WAITING FOR THE NEW DAWN, WHILE HOWLING AT THE MOON, TRASHING GUITARS AND EATING ALL THE BANANAS, GET YOUR MONKEY MASKS READY... Following up on their EP Monkey Speedway, the Swiss hard rock group Pesticide releases a new single All Night Long on 1th of October 2020. Distributed world 
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

Marie Mora says its important to her to mentor students of color, and her calling to help underrepresented students get their Ph.D.s has garnered her some national recognition.

Mora is one of 12 recipients of the 2020 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. The award recognizes those who have made significant contributions to mentoring and thereby support the future productivity of the U.S. science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce, according to the awards website.

She is one of two people with New Mexico ties to win the award this year. University of New Mexico professor Angela Wandinger-Ness is the other.

Mora, an Albuquerque native, is now provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and an economics professor. She said she has taken it upon herself to mentor Ph.D. students who are women or minorities because a lot of times an African American or Hispanic student might be the only one in their program.

I am in a position where I can make a difference, and thats part of what has motivated me, Mora said in a recent phone interview.

She its important to increase diversity in STEM fields.

Diversity leads to policy, Mora said. Were getting an incomplete perspective or view, and it affects minority communities.

After graduating from Manzano High School, Mora got her bachelors and masters degrees from the University of New Mexico in five years. She then received a Ph.D. in economics at Texas A&M University and started her first faculty job at New Mexico State University.

Moras father, Gerald Mora, said his daughter has always encouraged her students to stick with it, and he believes thats why she got this award.

We both encouraged her, but shes always been a go-getter, he told the Journal. As a couple of old people, we really appreciate this. We are so proud of her.

Mora said the 12 recipients were honored in a virtual ceremony earlier this month.

Its certainly a huge honor, she said.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  Financial firms are advised to review its security protocols and ramp up anti-fraud measures, as more scammers dupe depositors into giving personal data through fake text messages.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Deputy Governor Chuchi Fonacier issued a memorandum to all banks and other financial institutions to flag rising cyber threats called SMiShing  short for SMS phishing  where fraudsters send alarming text messages to depositors to gain access to their accounts.

The scheme involves fake texts patterned after the official advisories of banks and e-wallet services telling a client to provide their online banking credentials or login details, either through text or by clicking a link to a fake website pretending to be the official portal of a bank.

"The effectiveness of this attack relies on the attacker's ability to convince the customers that immediate action is required and to deceive that the message originated from a legitimate or trusted sender," the BSP said, noting that official announcements are "spoofed" and the sender ID is altered to make it appear like it really came from a person's banking services provider.

A common tactic is to use fake texts claiming that a person's bank account has been hacked or compromised, causing panic so that the client will provide their existing login details to supposedly stop the scammer. The fraudster will then ask for personal data and the one-time PIN provided by the bank, which will be used to access the bank account.

RELATED: More room to boost e-payments as some Filipinos still fear getting scammed

Sometimes, bank employees fall prey to the cyber attacks by unwittingly revealing sensitive information, the BSP said.

The central bank told all financial firms to intensify education campaigns among staff, clients, and the public against SMiShing.

"Given the fast-evolving nature of these attacks, BSFIs (BSP-supervised financial institutions) should adopt multi-layer controls," the BSP added, saying lenders should review its fraud management system rules and actively hunt down threats and detect unusual activities.

Banks should also take proactive steps to shut down phishing or dubious websites.

"As part of the BSFIs' consumer protection program, customers' verification requests and complaints in relation to SMiShing and SMS spoofing incidents must be acted upon immediately to minimize financial losses," the August 19 order added.

The BSP has been pushing for increased digital or cashless payments especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic to limit interactions and possible infections.
Pompeo stressed he will be speaking in a personal capacity and the State Department says no tax dollars will be used.

Mike Pompeos planned speech to the US Republican National Convention this week has sparked a fury of criticism for breaking decades of precedent for sitting secretaries of state avoiding overt partisan political activity.

Despite State Department assurances that Pompeo will be speaking in his personal capacity and will not violate prohibitions on federal employees participating in public political events on duty, Democrats and others have cried foul. They accuse the countrys top diplomat of inappropriate behaviour that has been anathema to his predecessors.

Four teams of lawyers, including the State Department legal counsel, have reviewed the speech that will be recorded in Jerusalem and broadcast in prime time at the Republican convention on Tuesday to ensure that it does not cross ethical lines, a person close to Pompeo who was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press news agency.

That person and the State Department said no taxpayer money will be used in the production of the video, which will be filmed on the first stop of Pompeos current multination trip to the Middle East that is otherwise clearly dominated by official government business.

Looking forward to sharing with you how my family is more SAFE and more SECURE because of President Trump, Pompeo tweeted after the RNC announced his appearance. The State Department followed quickly with comments distancing the agency from the planned remarks.





Secretary Pompeo will address the convention in his personal capacity, the department said. No State Department resources will be used. Staff are not involved in preparing the remarks or in the arrangements for Secretary Pompeos appearance. The State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance.

The person close to Pompeo said the short address would focus on Trumps accomplishments in making Americans and the world safer and promoting his America First foreign policy. The speech will not delve into Pompeos own activities as secretary of state, according to the person who was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Pompeo is likely to tout Trumps Middle East policies and the recent agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates to normalise relations.

Critics, though, say that does not matter and that Pompeo is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, known as the Hatch Act, by using government resources to travel to the venue and jeopardising long-standing tradition that domestic politics ends at the waters edge when it comes to diplomacy.





At the same time, they complain that in using Jerusalem as the venue, Pompeo is further politicising the US-Israel relationship with a pitch for President Donald Trumps re-election.

It is unprecedented and highly unethical for a sitting secretary of state to address a political convention while on official foreign travel, Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told the AP. In addition to violating the Hatch Act, Secretary Pompeos plans to speak at the Republican National Convention from Jerusalem underscore the presidents ongoing effort to politicise the US-Israel relationship.

Trump has proudly claimed the mantle of being the USs most pro-Israel president ever and pointed to his decisions to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and sideline the Palestinians as proof.

Such actions have won him high praise from conservative Israelis and American Jews but also appealed strongly to evangelical Christians in the US whose support Trump is counting on.

Trump on moving Israel's capital: "The evangelicals are more excited about that than Jewish people"  Kathryn Watson (@kathrynw5) August 17, 2020

While previous secretaries of state have naturally supported the policies of the presidents they served, they have steered clear of public political endorsements, sometimes going to great lengths to avoid their parties conventions. So Pompeos decision to take time out of his official schedule in Israel to record the speech has raised eyebrows.

Previous secretaries of state have shunned overtly partisan rhetoric, and some have made a deliberate point of being out of the country and unavailable during their political parties presidential nominating events.

Like two of his predecessors, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, both of whom were unsuccessful Democratic Party nominees for president, Pompeo was a member of Congress before joining the executive branch. But both Clinton and Kerry eschewed the Democratic National Convention while they served as top US diplomat.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing face masks bump elbows after a joint news conference in Jerusalem, August 24, 2020 [Debbie Hill/Pool via Reuters]

When President Barack Obama was officially nominated for a second term during the party convention in 2012, Clinton was half a world away, travelling to the Cook Islands, Indonesia, China, East Timor, Brunei and far eastern Russia. When Clinton was nominated in 2016, Kerry was travelling in Europe and Southeast Asia.

It is not just Democrats. When Republicans nominated John McCain in 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on a trip to Portugal, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
Democrat Kamala Harris Is First Woman of Color Nominated for VP by Major US Party
After Ike, he said he wouldn't rebuild in Galveston. But 12 years later, he still lives there. He's resigned to another hurricane. If he has to, he'll rebuild again. Humans are like that. "We have to be resilient," he said, "we have to have short memories."

But humans are also more reactive than proactive, Temple said. Maybe Phoenix 2.0 can convince Tampa Bay residents to better prepare for their worst-case scenario:

"By putting this (model) out there, people might take it more seriously."

Not much has changed since the original Phoenix study. The new simulation predicts 10 percent higher storm surge due to Kelvin waves, large-scale waves that can change ocean height. Sea level rise in the past decade has had a negligible impact.

What has changed is the Tampa Bay area itself.

The estimated 3.1 million residents makes Tampa Bay the 17th largest economy in the U.S. If the bay area were its own country, it would have the 55th largest economy in the world.
Air Chief Marshal R K S Bhadauria on Monday launched a mobile application, "MY IAF", that will provide career-related information to those who want to join the Indian Air Force, an official statement said.

The app was launched by the chief of the Air Staff at Vayu Bhawan as part of the 'Digital India' initiative, it said.

"The user-friendly format of the app serves as a single digital platform interfacing the users with the details of selection procedure, training curriculum, pay and perks etc for both officers and airmen in the IAF," the statement said.

"The application, developed in association with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), provides career-related information and details for those desirous of joining the IAF," it said.

It is available on Google Play store for android phones and is linked to the IAF's social media platforms. It also provides glimpses into the history and stories of valour in the IAF, it said.

Also Read: AGR case: Cancel license, spectrum if telcos' dues are being wiped out, SC to govt

Also Read: NEET 2020: Allow students to come via Vande Bharat flights to sit for exam, SC to govt
SACRAMENTO, Calif., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- California Lawyers Association (CLA) and Legal Access Alameda (Legal Access) are proud to announce a new partnership hosting a free online question and answer portal through the American Bar Association's Free Legal Answers (FLA) platform. The platform will offer pro bono legal services to Northern Californians affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent wildfires, especially low-income residents who face limited access to legal services.

The project is focused on providing legal support to those especially affected by COVID-19, particularly in the areas of labor and employment, housing, and family law. With a four-month pilot program in Northern California starting September 1st, the program will help residents navigate the legal landscape with support from volunteer lawyers and experts in California law. Volunteer attorneys will take required online classes in the relevant law, and expert attorneys will review answers before they go out, in order to ensure that we are providing high-quality legal services.

In a statement, CLA President Emilio Varanini highlighted the importance of getting help where it is needed most. "When disaster strikes, the most vulnerable among us often find it hard to get the legal help they need. This partnership with Legal Access, hosting the Free Legal Answers platform, offers our volunteer attorneys a new opportunity to help our communities directly, providing access to critical resources as they navigate this pandemic."

Legal Access President Janice Cho also addressed the desire the attorneys have to help. "Giving back is paramount in our profession. Bay Area lawyers and lawyers from around the state are eager to share their expertise with those in need, and the Free Legal Answers platform provides an easy and flexible opportunity to give much needed legal advice."

This project is the latest in a series of resources CLA and Legal Access have each developed to support their communities facing difficult decisions and legal obstacles, including the Navigating COVID-19 video series and the statewide website hosted by the Disaster Legal Services Collaborative. If you need help and to access the platform, go to https://ca.freelegalanswers.org/

This partnership is made possible with support from the California Lawyers Foundation, the Bigglesworth Family Foundation, the van Loben Sels/RembeRock Foundation, and the Walter and Elise Haas Foundation, and with the partnership of the American Bar Association.

ABOUT CALIFORNIA LAWYERS ASSOCIATION

Established in 2018, the California Lawyers Association is the bar association for all California attorneys. CLA's mission is to promote excellence, diversity and inclusion in the legal profession and fairness in the administration of justice and the rule of law.

ABOUT LEGAL ACCESS ALAMEDA

Legal Access Alameda is the pro bono arm of the Alameda County Bar Association. Legal Access provides free legal services to Alameda County's low-income population by mobilizing volunteer attorneys to provide pro bono service.

SOURCE California Lawyers Association

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Nana Kwasi Owusu-Yeboa, the Oti Regional Minister, has inaugurated a 14-member spatial planning committee in the Oti Region.



The establishment of the Committee is in line with the provisions in the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act, 2016(Act,925).



Inaugurating the committee on behalf of Hajia Alima Mahama, the Minister for Local Government and Rural Development, Nana Owusu-Yeboa said the ACT requires each Regional Coordinating Council (RCC) to establish a Regional Spatial Planning Committee (RSPC).



This is to provide technical advice on land use planning and development control to the RCC.



The Minister said the land use and spatial ACT stipulates the implementation of a three-tier planning system, which includes the Regions and Districts compliance with the preparation of spatial development frameworks (SDFs), preparation of structure plans (SPs) and preparation of local plans (LPS).



The Regional Minister told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that Madam Alima Mahama had already inaugurated the regional spatial planning committee in the new regions and it was the turn of Oti.



He said there was the need to prepare timely spatial plans for major towns to avert the problems associated with land use planning, overcrowding, generation of slums, lack of development control, unplanned and haphazard development.



Mr Owusu-Yeboa said that the new regions must take advantage to re-plan their areas into city extension programmes which would serve as a new norm for fast-developing towns, promote joint planning between two more districts and ensure that all streets properties are addressed properly for easy digitisation and promotion of spatial location.



Mr Owusu-Yeboa, who chaired the Committee, assured of diligent work to stem land litigation and haphazard development of human settlement in Oti region.



The fourteen-member spatial planning committee includes Nana Kwasi Owusu-Yeboa (Chairman), Regional Head of Land Use of spatial planning ( Secretary), Regional Coordinating Director ( Member), Regional Head of Ghana National Fire Service (Member), Regional Head of Environmental Protection Agency ( Member), Regional Head of Ghana Highway Authority (Member), Representative of Regional House of Chiefs (Member).



The rest are, Regional Head of National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) Member, Regional Head of Forestry Commission (Member), Regional Head of Water Resources Commission (Member), Representative of Utility Service Providers (Member), Regional Head of Land Commission (member), Regional Economic Planning Officer(Member) and Regional Director of Water Resources Commission( member).

Source: GNA









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Our Sun isnt quite as old as other stars out there. However, scientists are already trying to pinpoint exactly when the Sun will die. Of course, it isnt as simple as throwing out a date. After all, were working with a massive ball of energy that weve still barely managed to scratch the surface of  The post Scientists think they figured out when the Sun will explode and kill us all appeared first on BGR.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:07:39|Editor: huaxia

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Containers of China COSCO Shipping Corporation Limited are seen at the Port of Long Beach in Los Angeles County, the United States, Feb. 27, 2019. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- China reminded some U.S. politicians that blindly engaging in anti-Communist and anti-China political manipulation is unpopular and doomed to fail.

The more times they lie and cheat, the more people with a sense of justice will see their true colors clearly, a spokesperson with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday.

Spokesperson Zhao Lijian made the remarks at a daily press briefing when asked to comment on recent remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who once again attempted to smear the Communist Party of China (CPC).

"First of all, I would like to correct the premise of Pompeo's statement," Zhao said, adding that China-U.S. relations are facing serious difficulties at present, and the United States is responsible for all this.

Some U.S. politicians are trying to suppress China because they are afraid of China's development. The more severe the U.S. suppression, the more it proves China's success.

Zhao stressed that China will never seek hegemony, but it never fears power politics.

"We are committed to working with other countries to build a community with a shared future for mankind. In contrast, some U.S. politicians are engaging in political bullying, economic bullying, military bullying, and discourse bullying everywhere. They are increasingly spurned by the international community and by Americans who see through their tricks."

"Is the United States still behaving like a big country?" he said.

Photo taken on April 27, 2020 shows boxes containing face masks donated by China's Fujian Province in Oregon, the United States. (Xinhua)

Regarding what the U.S. President Donald Trump has said about the possibility of U.S. decoupling from China, Zhao said the development of China and the United States is not an either-or relationship. There is no need to exclude each other.

They may well lend hands to each other and support each other in their undertakings, he said.

"China and the United States should develop their relations by cooperation rather than decoupling, and assume their due responsibilities towards the world," he said.

China's policy stance on the development of China-U.S. relations has been consistent, maintaining a high degree of stability and continuity.

"At the same time, we are also ready for relations to go through ups and downs. We urge some U.S. politicians to correct their mistakes, return to rationality, correctly view and handle China-U.S. relations, stop harming China's interests and smearing and attacking China, and push the relations back on the right track as soon as possible," he said. 
Six black-naped terns -- a coastal seabird found in the Pacific and Indian Oceans -- have given researchers a glimpse into how they navigate tropical typhoons.

The research team based in Japan published their analysis on May 30 in Marine Biology, a Springer journal.

"Our goal was to examine the migration characteristics of the black-naped terns from the Okinawa Islands," said paper author Jean-Baptiste Thiebot, project researcher at the National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR) in Japan. "The bird is listed as vulnerable by Japan's Ministry of Environment."

Thiebot and the team were specifically interested in finding where the birds spend their winters and how they manage to cross the Philippine Sea. The body of water lays just south of Japan, covering an area of two million square miles that suffers from frequent and strong typhoons.

"The birds have to cross the Philippine Sea during the peak of typhoon season," Thiebot said.

The birds nest near Okinawa in mid-May, lay their eggs in June, and the hatchlings are ready to leave the nest near the end of August. The adults then spend September traveling to their wintering sites south of the Philippine Sea -- but, it appears the time and path of travel depends on typhoon season.

The researchers outfitted a total of 20 terns with geographic logging trackers in 2012 and 2017. Of those 20, the researchers were able to collect movement data from two terns from 2012 to 2014 and from four birds from 2017 to 2018.

"The two birds tracked in years of medium-high typhoon activity from 2012 to 2014 seemed to target a stopover area in the northern Philippines several days after a typhoon hit," Thiebot said. "By contrast, in 2017, no strong typhoon hit in August, and the four study birds departed 23.8 days later, but moved significantly quicker with little or no stopover."

Despite when they left the breeding grounds, the birds always arrived in the Indonesian islands south of the Philippine Sea within four days of October 1.

"The terns seemed to adjust the timing and path of their migration according to the level of typhoon activity," Thiebot said. "It is likely that terns respond to the typhoon activity because the storms modify the birds' feeding conditions at the water surface."

The terns may use environmental cues, such as the low infrasound storms emit, to time their migration, according to Thiebot. The researchers plan to record the infrasound levels at the breeding area to test this hypothesis, and they hope to further study the terns' migration across years of typhoon activity to refine their understanding.

###

This work was supported by the 'Monitoring Sites 1000 Project' of the Ministry of the Environment, and it was funded by the Suntory Fund for Bird Conservation (2017-19) and Bird Migration Research Center, Yamashina Institute for Ornithology in 2012.

Other contributors include Noboru Nakamura, Naoki Tomita and project leader Kiyoaki Ozaki, all of whom are affiliated with the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology; and Yutaka Toguchi of Koboh Ryukyurobin.

About National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR)

The NIPR engages in comprehensive research via observation stations in Arctic and Antarctica. As a member of the Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS), the NIPR provides researchers throughout Japan with infrastructure support for Arctic and Antarctic observations, plans and implements Japan's Antarctic observation projects, and conducts Arctic researches of various scientific fields such as the atmosphere, ice sheets, the ecosystem, the upper atmosphere, the aurora and the Earth's magnetic field. In addition to the research projects, the NIPR also organizes the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition and manages samples and data obtained during such expeditions and projects. As a core institution in researches of the polar regions, the NIPR also offers graduate students with a global perspective on originality through its doctoral program. For more information about the NIPR, please visit: https://www.nipr.ac.jp/english/

About the Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS)

The Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS) is a parent organization of four national institutes (National Institute of Polar Research, National Institute of Informatics, the Institute of Statistical Mathematics and National Institute of Genetics) and the Joint Support-Center for Data Science Research. It is ROIS's mission to promote integrated, cutting-edge research that goes beyond the barriers of these institutions, in addition to facilitating their research activities, as members of inter-university research institutes.
Church leaders across the island of Ireland have come together to issue a joint statement with guidance on the wearing of masks at religious services.

The statement has been issued by the Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland Primates of All Ireland, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and the President of the Methodist Church in Ireland.

It states that while wearing of face coverings has not been made mandatory in the Republic or Northern Ireland, church leaders are formally recommending and encouraging the use of face coverings at all services of worship, along with the ongoing maintenance of 2 metre physical distancing from August 30, and earlier if practicable.

The full statement issued by The Most Revd Eamon Martin (Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland), The Most Revd John McDowell (Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland), The Rt Revd Dr David Bruce (Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland) and The Revd Dr Tom McKnight (President of the Methodist Church in Ireland) reads:

At this time, both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland, the governments have not formally made mandatory the wearing of face coverings at services of worship. This is, in part, due to the fact that as churches we are committed to maintaining 2 metre physical distancing between household groups and strict adherence to all government guidance on hand hygiene, cleaning, ventilation etc.

It, however, remains our responsibility to ensure that our services of worship are safe places for all who join with us. It has become increasingly clear that the wearing of face coverings, in conjunction with hand washing etc., is likely to reduce the spread of coronavirus, thus helping to protect others. Their use is therefore one way in which we can evidence protection for the most vulnerable, support for our health workers, and practical love for our neighbours.

Following further recent consultations with public health authorities, we join with Christian church leaders all over this island in formally recommending and encouraging the use of face coverings at all services of worship, along with the ongoing maintenance of the two metre physical distancing, from Sunday 30 August 2020, and earlier if practicable.

We understand that some people are exempted from the wearing of face coverings, as outlined in the two jurisdictions.

We also recognise that whilst it may not be appropriate for those who are leading from the front during worship, including preaching, to wear face coverings, they should at all times continue to maintain at least two metre physical distancing from one another, and four metre physical distancing from the front row of the congregation.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti stands next to demonstrators during a protest in Los Angeles, Calif., on June 2, 2020. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

LA Mayor Defends Shutting Off Power, Water to House

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Sunday defended his recent order to shut off power and water to a house where parties had been held.

Garcetti, who is co-chairing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Bidens campaign, was asked about the decision after promoting the campaign on CBSs Face the Nation.

People are listening, theyre far and few between, our numbers are coming down, but where people dont listen, were going to shut them down. Thats critically important, Garcetti said.

This is not a time to be spreading this disease, especially younger people, he continued, adding later: Were just not playing here. We are not going to let people take our lives into their hands, so theyre shut down.

The mayor said many youth stopped holding or attending parties because they saw others acting irresponsibly. He claimed that so-called super spreader events, or gatherings where large numbers of people come into close contact with each other, are responsible for a number of cases of COVID-19.

COVID-19 is a disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Officials in Los Angeles have taken some of the harshest actions in the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The home in question sits in Hollywood Hills and was the site of multiple parties, officials said, before shutting off water and power to the property last week.

Garcetti at the time said the home has turned into a nightclub in the hills, hosting large gatherings in flagrant violation of our public health orders.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which supplies water and power to over 4 million people, has not responded to inquiries.

A spokesman told the Los Angeles Times last week regarding the house, We will restore utilities when the order is made to do so.

Garcettis actions have drawn some pushback.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, a police union, issued a statement saying the mayor should send civilian staff, not police officers, to enforce public health orders.

Let officers deal with the rise in shootings and killings in LA, the union said. We need a leader and not a political contortionist.
PITTSBURGH, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Caregivers of disabled individuals, whether at home or in a medical facility, face the challenge of keeping their charges comfortable when lifting them. Thanks to the innovative thinking of an inventor from Brooklyn, N.Y., their job has become easier.

He developed TOTAL COMFORT to provide extra cushioning in seat and back areas. At the same time it improves air flow for enhanced comfort, facilitates blood circulation and helps relax tight muscles. As such, this patent-pending lightweight, portable and user friendly patient accessory contributes to overall better health and wellbeing. It is also convenient, effective and affordably priced.

The inventor's personal experience inspired the idea. "I have been wheel chair-bound for over thirty years," he said, "and wanted a more comfortable lifting pad."

The original design was submitted to the Manhattan sales office of InventHelp. It is currently available for licensing or sale to manufacturers or marketers. For more information, write Dept. 19-MTN-3484, InventHelp, 217 Ninth Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15222, or call (412) 288-1300 ext. 1368. Learn more about InventHelp's Invention Submission Services at http://www.InventHelp.com.

SOURCE InventHelp

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Most white Christians say killings of black men by police are isolated incidents: poll

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Most white U.S. Christians across denominational lines believe that police killings of African-American men are isolated incidents, according to the findings of a recently released survey.

The Public Religion Research Institute released a report last Friday which found that majorities of white evangelicals (72%), white Catholics (56%), and white mainline Protestants (53%) viewed police killings of black men to be isolated incidents.

The percentage of white evangelical respondents expressing this opinion was basically unchanged when compared to polls taken in October 2018 (71%) and October 2015 (72%).

By contrast, both white Catholics and white mainline Protestants saw a considerable decline in the percentage of respondents who believed that the killings are isolated incidents. In October 2015, 71% of white Catholics and 73% of white mainline Protestants felt that the killings were isolated incidents.

White respondents who identified as religiously unaffiliated were far less likely to agree, with 30% surveyed in June saying they were isolated incidents.

Overall, 42% of Americans said they were isolated incidents, down from 53% in 2015.

For the June 2020 data, PRRI drew from an online survey conducted June 26-29 of 1,016 U.S. adults from all 50 states, with a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percentage points.

Down from 58% in 2015, 49% of Americans today disagree that generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for black Americans to work their way out of the lower class. White evangelicals (72%) are more likely to disagree compared to other religious groups.

Other findings included 59% of respondents saying that Confederate monuments are symbols of Southern pride rather than racism, 64% of Republican respondents saying they believe that discrimination against whites had become just as big a problem as discrimination against minorities, and 19% of Democrats saying they believe that police killings of black men are isolated incidents.

Over the past several months, the nation has erupted with protests and debates over race relations in America following the killing of African-American George Floyd by a white Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer.

Many have argued that American institutions, especially the criminal justice system, are influenced by systemic racism that results in disparate treatment for blacks and whites.

On Sunday, an African-American man named Jacob Blake was seriously injured after being shot reportedly seven times by police responding to a domestic incident in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Graphic video of the incident went viral on social media, sparking local protests that included a fire being started and another officer being attacked, according to CBS News. The short video clip shows the man going around the front of his car as officers follow him, with at least one officer holding a gun. After the man opens the car door and reaches in, he is shot.

According to the family's attorney, Ben Crump, Blake was shot in front of his children, who were in the car.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice announced that they will investigate the shooting, with the police officers who were present being put on administrative leave.

While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country, said Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, in a statement reported by CBS News.
Two-thirds of pub owners who cannot open their premises because of Covid-19 restrictions believe they will be out of business by the start of next year.

And the Government is losing the support of the pub sector, according to the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI).

The representative body for pubs outside Dublin was reacting to a new survey of 1,539 VFI members whose pubs are still closed, which showed 82pc no longer support the Government.

It found that two-thirds of pub owners (65pc) who are not allowed to open their doors believe they will go out of business by January 2021, based on current conditions, and some 92pc believe pubs have been scapegoated during this crisis.

The survey found that almost half (48pc) of the pubs still closed have accrued debts of 16,000 or more since the lockdown began, while one in five (19pc) of those pubs have accumulated debts of at least 30,000 since having to close their doors in March.

The survey was organised ahead of the Government decision on whether the 3,500 pubs still closed across the country can reopen on Monday, August 31, with the Cabinet due to discuss this issue in the coming days.

"This survey highlights how much the pubs that are still closed feel abandoned by the Government," said VFI chief executive Padraig Cribben.

"They feel like they have been cast adrift with no support and only shallow declarations of sympathy.

"There is little expectation that the Government will allow these pubs to reopen next week. So the question is what are they going to do for these pubs who are being deprived from opening their doors by Government order?

"If they are being asked, as the Government has put it, to 'make national sacrifice' then the Government must have a plan that recognises that sacrifice and allows these businesses to survive. They need to announce support, not sympathy, this week."

The VFI said that in light of the public health conditions, most in the industry believe the reopening will be delayed for a third time and the focus is on what plan the Government will bring forward for those pubs that will be closed.

It said a further three-week delay in reopening will mean these pubs will be closed for six months, with around 25,000 people employed by these businesses having been unable to work throughout that period.

The survey showed 95pc of the pubs still closed believe they will need grant aid for each week of closure for their pub to survive, while only three out of 10 would be in favour of low-interest loans.

It also revealed that 63pc of the publicans whose pubs are still closed are suffering from extreme stress.

Four out of 10 are worried about being able to put food on the table, and six out of 10 are considering closing their business for good.
Donna Pellegrino has had a day. She talks about scrubbing grease off the fryer, then off her skin. And its difficult to clean a kitchen that has been closed for months without hot water, but the water heater just went out, not long after the compressor in the air conditioner also had to be replaced. The bright orange awning that characterizes the facade of Kingston Mines is also missing. Yet without the funds to hire help, Donna and her sister, Lisa Pellegrino  daughters of the clubs founder  have been tackling this largely on their own.
When Paula Artley bought her recycled fashion shop in January this year, the already committed up-cycler of designer labels had a plan.

She was going to bring The Secret Closet  Perth's oldest recycled designer clothing store  into the 21st century and launch an online and social media onslaught to capture new clientele.

Perth shops selling recycled designer fashions have seen a rise in business during the pandemic, as people watch their spending. Credit:Tamara Voninski

"When I took over I was already really passionate about recycling," Ms Artley said. "This was my local shop and I used to take my stock here.

"I had a business plan, but COVID whacked us on the backside and the business plan went out the window.
Recently, the Supreme Court ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in actor Sushant Singh Rajput's death case. Meanwhile, Rhea Chakraborty's lawyer Satish Maneshinde has said that the actress and her family have not received any summons from the CBI yet. He said that they will appear before the agency if they receive from the agency.

Satish Maneshinde said in his statement, "Rhea Chakraborty and her family have not received any summons from the Central Bureau of Investigation, so far. If they receive a summon, they will appear before the agency."

Earlier, an official revealed that the CBI team questioned Sushant's friend Siddharth Pithani, cook Neeraj Singh and domestic help Deepesh Sawant at the DRDO guest house in Mumbai. They even visited Sushant's Bandra flat as part of the ongoing investigations.

On Saturday, another CBI team visited the state-run Cooper Hospital in the city, where the autopsy had been performed on Sushant's body. A third CBI team visited the Bandra police station to meet Mumbai Police officials who were investigating Sushant's death case.

Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead in his Bandra residence in Mumbai on June 14, 2020. After almost a month of his death, the late actor's father KK Singh filed an FIR against Rhea Chakraborty and her family under multiple sections of Indian Penal Code including 'abetment to suicide' and siphoning off funds from Sushant's bank accounts.

Based on the FIR, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) also filed a case against Rhea Chakraborty and her family members.

Last week, the apex court had directed the CBI to take over all the investigations in Sushant Singh Rajput's death case, asserting that "an impartial probe is the need of the hour".

ALSO READ: Sushant Singh Rajput Was Upset About Not Getting Credit For Chhichhore, Claims Chetan Bhagat

ALSO READ: Kangana Ranaut: Sushant's Family Lawyer Never Said Anything Against Me, Media Is Spreading Rumours
Weintraubs advice for mortgage newbies was simple: Work your asses off.

When I look at this panel, this panel of top producers, theyre literally all working eight, ten, twelve hours a day, five, six, seven days a week, he said. How are you ever going to deliver a ton of business when youre half an hour here, half an hour there?

Its really easy to fill your day with a list full of bullshit, Woodhouse added. What are you really doing with your time?

Joanna Lang of Outline Financial also had some words of advice for young brokers who may spend their days procrastinating. She encouraged them to first think about how much money they want to earn and then calculate how that amount translates to an hourly wage.

Youre going to feel so much worse if you spent an hour browsing Facebook if you just burned through a hundred bucks, Lang said. Time is money here. If youre not using your time productively, youre wasting your time and youre wasting money.
India's premier defence research institute has identified 108 military systems and subsystems like navigation radars, tank transporters and missile canisters for the to design, develop and manufacture.

The list of the items was handed over to Defence Minister Rajnath Singh by a high-level delegation from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the defence ministry said.

It said the will also provide support to industries for design, development and testing of these systems on a requirement basis, adding the initiative is in sync with the government's focus on achieving self-reliance in the defence sector.

The has set a target of next year for developing the systems and subsystems



"All the requirements of these systems by R and D establishments, armed forces, and other security agencies can be met through development contracts or production orders on suitable Indian industry. This will allow DRDO to focus on the design and development of critical and advanced technologies and systems," the ministry said in a statement.

Two weeks back, the defence minister announced a ban on import of 101 military systems and weapons like transport aircraft, light combat helicopters, conventional submarines and cruise missiles in a staggered manner by 2024 to promote India's domestic defence industry.

Following the announcement, the defence ministry has initiated a series of measures to promote the domestic defence industry.

The ministry has set a goal of a turnover of USD 25 billion (Rs 1.75 lakh crore) in defence manufacturing in the next five years that included an export target of USD 5 billion (Rs 35,000 crore) worth of military hardware.

"Responding to the clarion call given by the Prime Minister for Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India), the DRDO has taken several initiatives to strengthen the indigenous defence ecosystem," the ministry said.

It said the present industry base for DRDO consists of 1800 MSMEs along with defence public sector undertakings, Ordnance Factories and large scale industries.

"DRDO has already taken major initiatives through various policies to involve Indian industry as development cum production partners (DcPP), offering its technology to industry at nominal cost and providing free access to its patents," the ministry said.

"This initiative will support the fast-growing Indian defence industrial ecosystem and will help the industry to contribute towards 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' in a big way," it added.

The list of items identified by the DRDO for domestic production included mini and micro UAVs, mountain footbridge, modular bridge, mines laying and marking equipment, armoured engineering reconnaissance vehicle and anti-terrorist vehicle (ATV).

It also comprised tank transporter, missile canisters, missile storage container, marine rocket launcher, satellite navigation receivers, navigation radars, high nitrogen steel among others.

The timeline for developing some of the systems and subsystems has been mentioned as 2020.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
PHOENIX  Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and his staff had no shortage of advice when he was considering reopening the state following a six-week coronavirus shutdown that ended in mid-May.

The business community, including the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry as well as a national small business lobbying group, the National Federation of Independent Business, were among those sending letters to the Republican governor offering their take on what they needed.

The Chamber specifically asked Ducey for liability protections for businesses should their staff or customers contract the disease. It also asked for flexibility in rules the governor would lay out for reopening and for more financial support for small businesses.

The Chamber had pulled together a task force to present recommendations to the governor, according to letters sent by top chamber executives.

A spokesman for the Chamber said he didnt know the extent to which Duceys administration relied on its recommendations, but he praised the states approach as responsible.

We understand theres been  just like in every state  plenty of speed bumps along the way, said Garrick Taylor, the chambers executive vice president. But there has been a desire from the administration to ensure there were as few interruptions in the economy as possible, with a focus on ensuring public health all along.

The letters were contained in nearly 175 pages of communications with the governors office provided to The Associated Press in response to a public records request. In May, the AP filed records in every state seeking copies of communications between governors offices and health, business and local government organizations during a critical period when they were considering reopening plans after coronavirus shutdowns.

Thousands of pages of emails show that governors were inundated with reopening advice from a wide range of industries, and sometimes allowed businesses to help write the rules for their own operations.

In Arizona, other key groups seeking the governors ear were associations representing hospitals, nursing homes and physicians.

The Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, in particular, was pushing hard for Ducey to allow its members to restart elective surgeries that were blocked in mid-March to save scarce personal protective equipment. He allowed them to restart on April 22 after hospitals which had laid off staff and suffered big financial losses  lobbied hard for exemptions to the executive order.

Patrick Ptak, the governors spokesman, acknowledged regular communications with interest groups, but said public health interests were always at the forefront of decisions.

Whether its business owners, or religious community leaders, leaders of our banks, you name it, weve sought to listen and gather feedback, Ptak said Friday. But our decisions have been driven by public health and whats best for public health and how we can best keep Arizonans safe and healthy.

The governor was criticized after nightclubs and bars became packed with patrons soon after he ended his stay-home order on May 15. Many health experts said those types of gatherings led to a surge of cases that forced new lockdowns in late June.

The Arizona Medical Association sent a letter to Ducey on May 22 saying people in bars were not social distancing and urging him to continue to stress that people should keep their distance from one another and wear masks.

Now, there is proof of overcrowded bars, people elbow to elbow, increasing significant risk of potential spread and a resurgence of the virus, the associations president, Dr. Ross Goldberg, wrote to the governor. While we recognize that enforcement of these guidelines is not the easiest task to accomplish, we reiterate that they are of vital importance.

Ducey didnt act, bars remained open, and a surge of cases followed that turned Arizona into a national virus hotspot.

The medical associations CEO, Libby McDannell, followed up with a June 15 email to a Ducey adviser and state Health Services Department Director Dr. Cara Christ asking for a meeting to discuss the concerns of their member physicians.

There is a lot of frustration that the public is not adhering to the recommended guidance  and it is resulting in the surging numbers we are seeing, McDannell wrote.

Two days later, Ducey allowed cities and counties to order people to wear face masks in public. On June 29, he ordered bars, nightclubs and gyms to again close. Cases then began dropping significantly.

___

Associated Press writer David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri, contributed to this report.
The Australian share market finished session higher on Monday, 24 August 2020, as investor sentiment improved after a strong lead from Wall Street late last week following upbeat U. S. business activity data for August and on signs that the Trump administration may fast-track vaccines and treatments for coronavirus. Meanwhile, boosting sentiments were a significant slowdown in fresh daily coronavirus cases which fuelled hopes that a deadly second wave may be on the wane.

However, investor optimism was dulled to a degree by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's forecast that effective unemployment in Australia would breach 13% by the end of September amid lockdowns.

At closing bell, the benchmark S&P/ASX200 index added 18.39 points, or 0.3%, to 6,129.57. The broader All Ordinaries rose 29.61 points, or 0.47%, to 6,300.33.

Market sentiment was supported by news over the weekend that the U.

S. Food and Drug Administration is working to expand access to a virus treatment involving blood plasma from recovered patients. Also, as per reports, the Trump administration is considering whether to bypass regulatory standards to accelerate an experimental vaccine.

The country's second-most populous state of Victoria reported its smallest daily rise in fresh COVID-19 cases in seven weeks following strict lockdown curbs.

Afterpay shares advanced 4.8% after the buy-now-pay later firm said it would acquire Spain-based Pagantis and expand into Europe. Payment provider Zip Co was also solid, up 13.1% after flagging a number of positive developments at its US-based soon-to-be partner Quadpay.

Global miners BHP and Rio Tinto recovered from a soft start to add 0.6% and 0.2% respectively.

The big banks were soft, with ex-dividend ANZ down 0.9% and Commonwealth Bank shedding 1%.

Health insurer nib closed 5.8% lower after full-year net profit plunged 40% thanks to a A$98.8 million provision for deferred claims.

CURRENCY NEWS: The Australian dollar changed hands at $0.7176 following a decline last week from above $0.724.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Joan Collins has revealed she was 'yelled at' by police at an Ikea in France after swapping her face mask for an illegal plastic visor.

The film legend, 87, who has been holidaying in St. Tropez with loved ones and pals including Piers Morgan, said she was 'pounced upon' when an official spotted her wearing a clear, plastic visor which she found easier to breathe in than a mask.

Face masks have been mandatory in indoor public spaces in France since July 21, Joan owns a home in St. Tropez.

Oh dear: Joan Collins has revealed she was 'yelled at' by police in an Ikea in France after swapping her face mask for an illegal plastic visor during a shopping trip

In her column for the Spectator, Joan, who is worth 24million said the incident had occurred as she checked out the store's basic food menu, writing 'An officious gendarme became deeply offended by it, and while I was mulling over the benefits of Ikeas gravadlax vs its smoked salmon, he pounced.

'Gesticulating in Gallic fashion, he yelled at me to put on a proper mask, because visors arent legal. Chastised, I slunk away, muttering an Anglo-Saxon expletive under my breath, which, as he glared at me, I feared he might have understood.

'I then tried wearing a clear plastic face mask, of the sort which all the staff at the Byblos were wearing, but although it was easier to speak and to be understood, it forced my face into a hideous rictus.'

The star, who is a regular at celebrity hotspots in the town such as Les Graniers restaurant and Club 55, seemed to be admiring the low-budget dining option at Ikea.

Against the rules: The film legend, 87, who has been holidaying in St. Tropez, said she was 'pounced upon' when an official spotted her wearing a clear, plastic visor which she found easier to breathe in than a mask

Starters range in price from a simple green salad at 1 (90p) to a cheese plate for 1.95 (1.76)with the most expensive starter the large Caesar salad at 5.95 (5.37).

The store's iconic Swedish meatballs main is 5.95 (5.37) with marinated beef skewers the most pricey main at a respectable 9.95 (8.98).

Desserts including Ikea's chocolate cake with Daim bar are all under 3 (2.71).

Joan has been spending time in the South of France with her husband Percy Gibson, 55, and daughter Katyana, 48.

In May, Dame Joan criticised the UK government for being 'ageist' to those over the age of 70 amid the ongoing crisis.

Pals: The star has been holidaying in St Tropez with pals including Piers Morgan (pictured at the glitzy Less Graniers Restaurant)

Did Joan dine on a budget in IKEA? The star, who is a regular at celebrity hotspots in the town such as Les Graniers restaurant and Club 55, could have opted for a more low-budget dining option at Ikea. Starters range in price from a simple green salad at 1 (90p) to a cheese plate for 1.95 (1.76)with the most expensive starter the large Caesar salad at 5.95 (5.37). The store's iconic Swedish meatballs main is 5.95 (5.37) with marinated beef skewers the most pricey main at a respectable 9.95 (8.98). Desserts including Ikea's chocolate cake with Daim bar are all under 3 (2.71). Advertisement

In her column for The Spectator, the actress claimed government advice saying elderly people needed to stay indoors during the global pandemic was 'utter discrimination'.

Holding nothing back, she said: 'I've always thought Western society was terribly ageist, and I don't just mean showbiz folk but across the board.

'Then the UK government insisted the over-70s, horrible expression, were part of the vulnerables, an even more horrible expression, and should remain in lockdown, the most horrible expression of all, until a vaccine is found.

'That was utter discrimination against the hardy individuals who have no health issues. But more harmful was bolstering the existing belief among the general public that the old should keep out of everyone's way.'

The Dynasty star added that she declared 'stunningly healthy' by her GP on her most recent visit, and has never limited herself by her age, which was true of others too.

Picking out fellow elderly actors, Joan said it was a shame 88-year-old Coronation Street star William Roache, who plays Ken Barlow, was not allowed to return to work because of the government's advice.

She also detailed her shock when pal Christopher Biggins, 71, was stopped by members of the public during a run, because they believed he should remain inside.

Joan previously declared she'd 'settle' at living til she's 100 - and brushed off the age difference between her and Percy.

Joan married Percy in 2002, and said in a new interview that 'people make too much fuss about age, which is just a number.'

Speaking to The Mirror, Joan said: 'I think theres a big difference between biological age and the age youre supposed to be.

'As you know, [Percy] is somewhat younger than me. At first people would always say, "What are you going to do about the age difference?" Id say, "Well, if he dies he dies!"' She mused: 'Will I outlive you all? No, I dont want that.'
He was a wonderful immigrant, embraced his new country and knew more Australian history than many locals and his repertoire of Australian poems was extensive, many of which he could recite from memory.

Jock was born in Kilmarnock near Glasgow, Scotland in 1940 and moved to Australia with his parents and sister in 1956. He retained his highly honed, dry, witty, Scottish sense of humour until the end.

John "Jock" Cunningham Anderson was one of early adopters in NSW of ultrasound for pregnant women and was involved with the first amniocentesis procedure in Sydney. He also had a keen interest in aviation and built his own aircraft.

Anderson served in the Australian Army Reserve holding a commission as a Captain Medical Officer from 1971 to 1978 during which time he made two tours to Papua New Guinea involved in malaria research.

After completing school at Homebush Boys High, Jock was admitted to medical school at the University of Sydney. After graduating, he chose obstetrics and gynaecology as his specialty, training in the now defunct Womens Hospital, Crown Street.

He returned to his native Glasgow in 1973 to pursue training in obstetrical and gynaecological ultrasound from its founding father, Professor Ian Donald, and was one of the very first to be qualified in this field. On returning to Australia, Anderson was among the first to introduce ultrasound to NSW, a medical discipline that was virtually unheard of at the time. He established an ultrasound department at the Womens Hospital. He nurtured an interest in the developing field of prenatal diagnosis and was involved in the first amniocentesis performed in Sydney and later pioneered fetoscopic blood sampling for the diagnosis of thalassaemia, a blood disorder related to a deficiency of red blood cells.

When the government closed the Womens Hospital in 1983, Anderson was appointed as a visiting medical officer at King George V Hospital for mothers and babies/Royal Prince Alfred Hospital where he helped set up the fetal medicine department in 1987 and developed chorionic villus sampling for first trimester diagnosis as well as the development of a multidisciplinary team for the monitoring and management of high-risk pregnancies.

As well as continuing to practise as an obstetrician, Anderson established a specialised obstetrical and gynaecological private ultrasound practice outside the hospital arena, which was to become Sydney Ultrasound for Women, with sites throughout the metropolitan area.
The British Army's entire force of hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles could be scrapped under sweeping modernisation plans.

The UK's Challenger II main battle tanks and Warrior infantry fighting vehicles are said to be at risk because of swingeing budget cuts expected to follow the coronvirus crisis.

The cost of upgrading the heavy armour and a desire to switch military focus to modern threats like cyberwarfare could see the battlefield heavies put out to pasture, little more than 100 years after they were invented.

The Challenger II has been the UK's main tank since the late 1990s, with cavalry regiments using it in Iraq. There are around 227 in service.

The Warrior, of which there are almost 400, has been in service since the 1980s.

Britain already sounding out Nato partners about giving up its heavy armour and focusing instead on aviation and cyber warfare, the Times reported.

A government source told the newspaper: 'We know that a number of bold decisions need to be taken in order to properly protect British security and rebalance defence interests to meet the new threats we face.'

It comes after senior MPs demanded Boris Johnson's chief aide Dominic Cummings submit to questioning about his involvement in a major review of the UK's defence and security capabilities.

Labour's shadow defence secretary John Healey said: 'This Government has shown time and time again that it lacks the strategy and competence needed to maintain our national defences, with little to show from a decade in power other than a shortage of troops and an equipment funding black hole.

The Challenger 2 main battle tank, taking part in exercise Saif Sareea 3 in Oman

The evolution of Britain's tanks in the bottom row. And in the top row, the armoured vehicles still used by the armed forces in the UK

'The Integrated Review comes at a time of national crisis and further cuts to the defence budget are likely. Having botched the last two Strategic Defence and Security Reviews and with the ship building strategy seemingly in tatters, this government's track record fails to reassure that the national interest will be served in this review.

'The Secretary of State must make a credible assessment of Britain's defence requirements based on a full consultation with military chiefs and stakeholders. Britain simply cannot afford for ministers to pursue pet projects or repeat the past mistakes of knee-jerk cuts to defence assets.'

Tobias Ellwood, the Tory chairman of the Defence Select Committee, said Mr Cummings must not be allowed to drive a 'coach and horses through our defence architecture'.

It emerged in July that Mr Cummings, Boris Johnson's most senior aide, had been given the green light to tour classified sites including MI5, MI6 and the SAS headquarters ahead of the review.

Mr Cummings' involvement in the review has prompted controversy in Whitehall with MPs having warned armed forces chiefs that they need to improve or face the prospect of the aide 'sorting you out his own way'.

Last year then defence secretary Penny Mordaunt warned that the age of the Army's armoured vehicles meant that the UK was falling behind other nations without an expensive investment programme.

In her first speech in her short stint int he role before being replaced by Ben Wallace, Ms Mordaunt said: 'Challenger 2 has been in service without a major upgrade since 1998. During this time the US, Germany and Denmark have completed two major upgrades, whilst Russia has fielded five new variants with a sixth pending,' she said.

'Warrior is even more obsolete, and is 20 years older than those operated by our key allies. Since Warrior's introduction in 1988 the United States and Germany have conducted four major upgrades and Russia has invested in three new variants,' said Mordaunt.

The ongoing talks about the tanks are part of the government's defence review which is set to conclude around November.

Steward McDonald, the SNP's defence spokesman, tweeted: 'The black hole in the equipment plan ain't gonna close itself - you'd have to be pretty naive to believe this is purely a capability choice and not a financial one.'

British soldier (Sgt George Long) escapes his Warrior armoured vehicle after it was petrol-bombed in Basra

One senior British defence source said: 'We simply will not be viewed as a credible leading Nato nation if we cannot field close-combat capabilities. It places us behind countries such as France, Germany, Poland and Hungary.'

When Challenger 2s beat Saddam's tanks 14-0 Tank-on-tank exchanges are rare in modern warfare, and the only time a Challenger 2 has been defeated by another tank on the battlefield was in a friendly fire incident in Iraq at the hands of another Challenger 2. But it was in that conflict in 2003 that the Challenger 2 had its proudest moment. A squadron of 14 tanks from the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards confronted a similar number of ageing Soviet-era T55 tanks. Every Iraqi tank was destroyed and every British tank untouched in a battle that one cavalry officer said 'was like the bicycle against the motor car' Advertisement

Currently the UK's arsenal of 227 tanks leaves us behind Argentina, who have 231, Germany, with 236, and Uganda with 239.

At the top of the table is Russia, who have 12,950, followed by the United States on 6,333, China on 5,800 and India with 4,665.

But General Sir Richard Barrons, former commander joint forces command, supports the modernisation of the forces and said the future is is 'about manned/unmanned autonomous things.'

Under the potential plans the Challenger 2 tanks would be placed in preservation, just in case they were needed in an emergency.

The country's premier battle tank has been in service since 1998 - the successor to the Challenger 1 which was used during the first Gulf War - and was used during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The tank was deployed in Bosnia and Kosovo during the NATO-led mission in former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s.

The tank has a crew of four, carries a 120mm main gun and two 7.62mm machine guns, with a top speed of around 37mph.

It is currently in service with the Queen's Royal Hussars, the King's Royal Hussars and the Royal Tank Regiment.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: 'Our commitment to Nato is unwavering, and the UK recognises that as a global military power our greatest strength remains our alliances.

'We are engaging our international allies and industry partners as we develop and shape defence's contribution to the integrated review.'
B Anbuselvan By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: The remarks of Vaidya Rajesh Kotechas, Secretary of the Ministry of AYUSH, during the online conference violated the Official Languages Act, say language activists.

While speaking at the virtual training programme for the master trainers, Kotecha told participants from Tamil Nadu they could leave if they did not understand Hindi.

He said this after requests from participants to converse in English instead of Hindi. About 37 naturopathy doctors from the State had participated in the conference.

The secretarys remarks were dubbed as neo-colonial hegemony on non-Hindi speaking States by a section of activists. They say he not only discriminated against people, but also violated the Official Languages Act.

The Official Languages Act 1967 and Official Languages Act Rules 1976 stipulate communications from the Central Government to a State categorised in Region C shall only be in English. Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and few other Southern States have been grouped under the Region C.

ALSO READ: Tamil Nadu Ayush doctors told to exit webinar as union govt official firm on speaking only in Hindi

Section 3 of Official Language Act Rules 1976 allows the Centre to use Hindi in communication with the States in Region A and B, but communication with States categorised in Region C shall be in English. Kotecha, an Ayurvedic doctor, was a former Vice-Chancellor of Gujarat Ayurveda University, Jamnagar. He was appointed as the secretary of AYUSH Ministry in 2017 for three years and got an extension.

Retired IAS officer MG Devasagayam said appointment of non-IAS officers as secretaries has subverted the pan-India character of civil service posts.

Kotechas behaviour is unacceptable and unbecoming of an official. The lateral entrants show scant respect to the Constitution and become subservient to their political masters. Language activists Aazhi Senthil Nathan said Kotechas remarks were remnants of neo-colonial hegemony and discrimination against Tamils. "Any attempt to portray a part of the country as a colony of another part on the basis of language should be viewed as an anti-national activity."

Narayanan Thirupathy, a spokesperson for the State BJP admitted that the secretarys remarks were unacceptable.

But Kotecha said 430 persons participated in the conference as against the invited delegates of 350. The official said an inquiry will be conducted.
The Samsung Galaxy Note20 users have yet another offer to look forward to. Samsung has announced the extension of its partnership with Microsoft and the availability of the discounted price of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite for all Galaxy Note20 and Galaxy Note20 Ultra buyers in India. This is added to the list of discounts, cashbacks, exchange offers and voucher bundles that are already Live for the Samsung Galaxy Note20 preorders. You will need to purchase the Microsost 365 suite at a discounted price from the Samsung Store app on your eligible Galaxy Note20 phone. Microsoft 365 is otherwise priced at Rs 5,299 for an years worth of subscription and the Galaxy Note20 and Galaxy Note20 Ultra buyers can get a discount of 22.6 percent on this.

The Microsoft 365 subscription will allow users to better sync data between the phone and the Windows 10 PC. The Microsoft 365 subscription includes the Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook apps, as well as OneDrive Cloud storage. You can share this subscription with up to 6 users, and each get 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage as part of the bundle. In fact, Samsung Galaxy phones have been the first to get the goodness of the new and more capable Microsoft Your Phone app for Windows 10 PCs, that let you access every app on your phone, on the PC.

The flagship Galaxy Note20 series is about maximizing productivity. The new wireless Samsung DeX and our close collaboration with Microsoft, lets you stay connected across work devices. Consumers will get access to premium Microsoft features and applications to integrate work between their smartphone and personal computer, giving them the power to work and play, says Aditya Babbar, Director, Mobile Business, Samsung India. Combining the array of apps and services across Microsoft 365 and Windows 10 with Samsungs new devices provides users seamless and productive experiences across their work and personal lives, said Farhana Haque, Group Director, Devices, Microsoft India.

To subscribe to Microsoft 365 at the discounted price, you need to open the Samsung Shop app on the phone. You may be asked to share the IMEI number of the phone to check for eligibility. Once that is confirmed, you can make the purchase from the Samsung Shop itself for your Microsoft account. You can use the same credentials to access all the apps and services that are a part of the Microsoft 365 subscription on Windows 10 PCs and other devices as well.
Kapil Sibal on Monday deleted his tweet in which he hit back at Rahul Gandhi for his reported accusation that senior Congress leaders who called for a change in party leadership were dissenters and colluding with the BJP after being told that Gandhi never said what was attributed to him.

Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him. I therefore withdraw my tweet, Sibal tweeted, soon after Congress spokesperson also issued a denial stating that Gandhi had not stated or even alluded to such a charge during the Congress Working Committee meeting.

Rajya Sabha member Ghulam Nabi Azad, a Gandhi loyalist, had said he would quit from the Congress party if the charges could be proven. Howver, he later clarified that he was referring to statements by some other Congress leaders, and not Rahul Gandhi.

Sibal and Azad were among the 23 top leaders to demand a "full-time, visible leadership" in a letter to Sonia Gandhi sent on Saturday.

In his tweet, Sibal had listed his contributions to the party and his track record to hit back at Rahul Gandhi in his tweet. Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP Govt. Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue. Yet we are colluding with the BJP! Sibal had said in the now-deleted tweet posted in the middle of the CWC meeting.

He posted the tweet after reports from the meeting said Rahul Gandhi accused the signatories of the letter of working in cahoots with the ruling BJP. Gandhi reportedly asked why the letter attacked the Congress when it was at its weakest, when it was battling crises in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and when the Congress president (Sonia Gandhi) was unwell.

"For whom was this done," he had questioned, adding that the letter had "hurt" his mother.

Azad later tweeted that it was wrongly reported that he told Rahul Gandhi to prove that the letter written was in collusion with BJP. Let me make it very clear that Shri Rahul Gandhi has neither in CWC nor outside said that this letter was written at the behest of BJP," he wrote on Twitter.

"What I said was, yesterday some Congress person had said that we did it at behest of BJP and in that context I said, 'It is most unfortunate that some colleagues (outside CWC) have accused us of collusion with BJP, and if those people can prove this allegation, I will resign'," he added.

Sonia Gandhi at the start of the CWC meeting offered to step down as interim president and asked the top decision making body to elect a new president. Her decision to quit follows the unprecedented letter written by 26 top Congress leaders, including MPs and former Union Ministers, complaining about a drift in the party.

The explosive letter spoke about "uncertainty" over the leadership and stressed that the Gandhis will always be an integral part of a "collective leadership".

Apart from Sibal, other senior leaders who were signatories to the letter were Ghulam Nabi Azad, Shashi Tharoor, Anand Sharma, Prithviraj Chavan and Vivek Tankha.

Her call to select a new party president led to pleas for her to continue in the post from former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as attacks on those who wrote the letter from other. Fromer defence minister AK Antony said, "More than letter, contents of the letter were cruel." He also spoke about "the sacrifices of Sonia Gandhi," according to sources, and urged Rahul Gandhi to take over as Congress president.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:36:25|Editor: huaxia

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Handout photo taken on Aug. 24, 2020 shows the site of a blast in Sulu Province, the Philippines. At least 15 people, including seven soldiers and a suicide bomber, were killed and 75 others wounded in twin explosions that rocked the southern Philippine Sulu province on Monday, the military and police said. (Philippine Army/Handout via Xinhua)

MANILA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- At least 15 people, including seven soldiers and a suicide bomber, were killed and 75 others wounded in twin explosions that rocked the southern Philippine Sulu province on Monday, the military and police said.

Major General Corleto Vinluan, the commanding general of the military's Western Mindanao Command based in Zamboanga City, said that the first explosion occurred around 11:55 a.m. local time when a motorcycle bomb went off in front of a grocery store along a busy street in Jolo, the capital of Sulu province.

While troops were cordoning off the first bomb site, "a suicide bomber attempted to penetrate the area and blasted himself" at around 1:00 p.m. local time, the military said.

The two explosions killed seven soldiers, a policeman, six civilians and a suicide bomber, and wounded 21 soldiers, six policemen and 48 civilians.

"Metro Jolo was locked down to prevent further casualties and preempt any other untoward incident," the military said, adding that "combat clearing operations and investigations are currently being conducted to identify the perpetrators."

Lieutenant Colonel Ronaldo Mateo, the spokesman for the army's 11th infantry division based in Sulu, said the explosions happened in the center of Jolo, damaging the stores and the military trucks parked there.

He said the motorcycle bomb was parked beside the military truck just outside the store before it detonated.

"Most probably these terrorist acts may have been perpetrated by the Abu Sayyaf group," Mateo said.

Jolo has long been a base for the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.

Twin blasts also hit the Jolo Cathedral on Jan. 27, 2019, which killed 23 and injured 95.

The Abu Sayyaf group is a loose band of violent extremist groups in the southern Philippines. The group, which has an estimated 400 fighters, is active in the impoverished island provinces of Sulu and Basilan.

The group is responsible for the series of kidnappings, deadly bombings, ambushes of security personnel, public beheadings, assassinations, and extortion in the Mindanao region.

The group has been terrorizing the Philippine southern region since the 1990s, preying on foreign tourists, businessmen, and fishermen not only from the Philippines but also from Indonesia and Malaysia and hide them in Philippine jungles or remote islands. Enditem
As the coronavirus surged across the Sunbelt, President Donald Trump told a crowd gathered at the White House on July 4 that 99% of virus cases are totally harmless.

The next morning on CNN, the host Dana Bash asked Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and one of the nations most powerful health officials: Is the president wrong?

Hahn, an oncologist and former hospital executive, certainly understood the deadly toll of the virus, and the danger posed by the presidents false statements. But he ducked the journalists question.

Im not going to get into whos right and whos wrong, he said.

The exchange illustrates the predicament that Hahn and other doctors face working for a president who often disregards scientific evidence. But as head of the agency that will decide what treatments are approved for COVID-19 and whether a new vaccine is safe enough to be given to millions of Americans, Hahn may be pressured like no one else.

Unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci or Dr. Francis Collins, leaders at the National Institutes of Health who have decades of experience operating under Republican and Democratic administrations, Hahn was a Washington outsider.

Now seven months into his tenure, with the virus surging in parts of the country and schools debating whether to reopen, the push for a vaccine is intensifying. The government has committed more than $9 billion to vaccine makers to speed development, and last week Trump speculated that one could be ready by Election Day  a timeline that is unrealistic, according to scientists, and shows the strain Hahn may be under.

Many medical experts  including members of his own staff  worry about whether Hahn, despite his good intentions, has the fortitude and political savvy to protect the scientific integrity of the FDA from the president. Critics point to a series of worrisome responses to the coronavirus epidemic under Hahns leadership, most notably the emergency authorization the agency gave to the presidents favorite drug, hydroxychloroquine, a decision it reversed three months later because the treatment did not work and harmed some people.

When youve got a White House that is not interested in science, its important to have a strong counterweight, said Dr. Peter Lurie, a former associate commissioner at the FDA. who now runs the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Hahn, he said, is not a powerful presence.

In an interview, Hahn, 60, defended his record as FDA chief. All of his decisions have been guided by the data, he said, and sometimes, rapidly evolving science has led to policy changes.

I do not feel squeezed, Hahn said. I have been consistent in my message internally about using data and science to make decisions.

On the line as he spoke was Michael Caputo, a deputy to Hahns boss, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Since working for the consulting firm of the longtime Trump adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. in the 1980s, Caputo has been a cheerleader and even, once, a driver for the president.

Hahn is not allowed to speak to the press without Caputo or another official on the phone  a marked contrast to the practice under the last FDA commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a powerful force in Washington who came to the job with years of experience at the FDA and political think tanks. He called reporters whenever he felt like it, which was often.

Hahn said he didnt mind the restriction on his press calls.

Im going to tell you how I feel and the truth as I know it, regardless of who is listening on the line, Hahn said.

But people close to the commissioner point out that if he is too honest, he could be out of a job.

The president has shown if you disagree with him too much, he fires you, said Hahns longtime friend and former colleague Kevin B. Mahoney, chief executive of the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

In late July, Mahoney noted, the president retweeted a viral video of fringe doctors praising hydroxychloroquine that social media platforms later removed for its misleading claims. One of those doctors had given sermons warning that women having sex with demonic spirits in their dreams can cause certain gynecological ailments.

To say that any public health official can control what is going on right now is expecting too much for that person, Mahoney said.

A Catastrophic Delay in Testing

The job of FDA commissioner is a lightning rod in the best of circumstances. Every White House and every Congress has its agendas, from Ronald Reagans broad mission to deregulate, to the Obama administrations specific order not to ban flavored e-cigarettes.

But the FDA has never been pushed as hard as it is being pushed now, when it must vet every new treatment and vaccine for a disease that has already killed more than 160,000 Americans, under a president who downplays the severity of the pandemic and recommends unproven treatments.

Given when he started, this level of intrusion is all that Steve Hahn has really known, but it is not normal, said Dr. Margaret Hamburg, who was FDA commissioner for six years under President Barack Obama. Theres no doubt that the president believes he can massage FDA decisions.

Before joining the Trump administration, Hahn had climbed the ranks of academic medicine, spending 18 years at the University of Pennsylvania followed by five years at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where his last role was chief medical executive. A wine aficionado who studies Italian (his rescue dog is named Baci), Hahn is known for being affable, perhaps to a fault.

It did not take long for Hahn to discover the intense scrutiny that came along with his new job.

In late January, when only a handful of coronavirus cases had been recorded in the United States, Hahn planned to reach out to the chief executives of private companies about developing diagnostic tests, according to four current and former senior administration officials who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Gottlieb had made the suggestion to Hahn.

According to two of the officials, Hahn told them that he had been informed that HHS did not want him reaching out to the companies. Hahn declined to comment on any communication regarding the companies, but one of the officials said Hahn expressed disappointment over the situation.

In a statement, Azar denied giving any such order. There is not a shred of truth to this. In fact, I encouraged FDA to reach out to industry from the earliest days of the response, he said. Asked whether someone else in the agency might have conveyed the message, Caitlin Oakley, a spokeswoman for Health and Human Services, said: HHS has 80,000 employees and I cant speak for all of them.

The FDA soon discovered serious problems with the countrys first coronavirus tests issued by its sister agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The FDA discovered that there was contamination in two CDC labs, leading to significant delays.

But it took about three more weeks after the FDA confirmed these problems before it allowed state and commercial labs to more easily use their own validated tests. State labs had been stuck with the CDCs flawed version  losing critical time when hospitals across the country were desperate to isolate infected people.

This was a catastrophic delay that was a major part of why we had to shut down, said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

In an effort to respond to public demand for more coronavirus tests, the agency then changed course, permitting scores of companies to sell tests that detect coronavirus antibodies, which show whether someone has been exposed to the virus in the past.

Many of the tests failed and few companies bothered to alert the FDA, as required. The agency has taken some off the market, but many shoddy tests are still being sold.

Unproven Treatments

While his administrations testing missteps were fueling the early pandemic, Trump began a crusade for what were then chiefly known as malaria and lupus drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine.

At a March 19 news conference, Trump said that the drugs would be approved for COVID-19 as well, thanks to the quick work of the FDA and Hahn, in particular. Id shake his hand, but Im not supposed to do that, Trump said. But hes been fantastic.

It was startling news, given that scant data had shown that the drugs could treat the disease. Speaking immediately after the president, Hahn tried to hedge, saying that clinical trials were needed. But he also acknowledged Trumps personal role in the matter, noting, thats a drug that the president has directed us to take a closer look at.

Nine days later, the FDA issued an emergency authorization for the drugs in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.

The science they had wasnt sufficient to make that decision, said Dr. Luciana Borio, who worked as a top FDA scientist during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks and was also director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council under the Trump administration. I dont know how they say its not politics.

In June, the agency revoked its emergency authorization after it found that more than 100 COVID-19 patients taking the drugs developed serious heart disorders, including 25 who had died.

Hydroxychloroquine wasnt the agencys only authorization lacking solid evidence, some scientists say. In April, the FDA partnered with the Mayo Clinic to give COVID-19 patients across the country access to convalescent plasma, even though the jury is still out on whether it works. The agency also gave emergency authorization to several blood purification systems that critics say dont help patients get better.

FDA is giving approvals right, left and center, said Dr. Swapnil Hiremath, a nephrologist at the University of Ottawa and a critic of the blood filtration devices. You need data.

After a month of playing defense with an exasperated scientific community, Hahn found himself on CNN, again struggling to cover for Trump. This time, he was asked about the presidents disturbing suggestion that injecting disinfectant might be a good way to treat COVID-19.

I think this is something a patient would want to talk to their physician about, Hahn replied. Then he seemed to remember his medical training. And no, I certainly wouldnt recommend the internal ingestion of a disinfectant.

Many of Hahns colleagues, as well as longtime observers of the FDA, say that Hahn is doing his best to uphold the mission of his agency under exceedingly difficult circumstances.

I think some mistakes have been made. I think probably Dr. Hahn has learned from those mistakes, said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., who heads the oversight panel of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over the FDA. My perception is hes trying to accommodate real efforts to treat the virus.

The Vaccine Stakes

More than 30 experimental coronavirus vaccines are now in clinical trials, with several companies racing to have the first product in the U.S. ready by the end of the year. With the public highly skeptical of these new vaccines, the FDAs vetting process will be Hahns biggest test yet.

In June, the FDA issued guidelines saying that, in order to be approved, a coronavirus vaccine must be at least 50% more effective than a placebo, on par with most flu vaccines.

Worried that an ineffective or unsafe vaccine would fan fears about immunizations, a bipartisan trio of senators introduced legislation last week to improve oversight of the vaccine approval process, and nearly 400 health experts sent a letter urging Hahn to use the agencys vaccine advisory group. On Friday, the commissioner and two of his deputies wrote in JAMA that transparent discussion by the advisory panel would be needed before any vaccine authorization or approval.

The president, for now, appears to be pleased with the commissioner.

Hahn was really speeding up the process of therapeutics and vaccines, Trump said at a recent news conference on drug pricing. Its very important, Stephen. Can you move it faster, please, OK? Thank you, great job.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
New Delhi:

The central government gave a major boost to operational capabilities of border guarding force SSB by sanctioning more than 9,000 assault rifles, 34 armoured vehicles and more than 760 patrolling bikes to it. The SSB is given the task of securing the countrys borders with Nepal and Bhutan.

Officials said the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) had some time back written to the Union Home Ministry for not only upgrading its arms, ammunition and vehicles, but also wanted an upgrade in this regard.

Among the sanctions received include procurement of 12 bullet proof vehicles, 15 light armoured troop carriers, seven mine protected vehicles, 42 four-wheel patrolling vehicles, 763 bikes for troops patrol in Left Wing Extremism affected areas and 9,917 new assault rifles, they said, adding, procurements will be made soon.

Officials said the new vehicles and weapons, once procured, will be sent across to various border guarding formations and those deployed in the LWE hit areas and Jammu and Kashmir.

The SSB has also sought raising a full-fledged combat intelligence wing comprising around 1,000 personnel in order to better secure the sensitive and porous borders of Nepal and Bhutan.The force has 67 battalions on ground at present (about 67,000 personnel) and in the next two years it will raise more such contingents to rise its number upto 73 battalions.

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Kathleen Ziegler Joins CopperPoint as Senior Vice President, Operations

CopperPoint Insurance Companies, a western-based super regional commercial insurance company, announced Kathleen Ziegler has joined the company in a newly created role as Senior Vice President, Operations.

CopperPoint Insurance Companies, a western-based super regional commercial insurance company, announced Kathleen Ziegler has joined the company in a newly created role as Senior Vice President, Operations.

PHOENIX, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CopperPoint Insurance Companies, a western-based super regional commercial insurance company, announced Kathleen Ziegler has joined the company in a newly created role as Senior Vice President, Operations.



Kathleen will be responsible for overseeing business operations, procedures and efficiency to support CopperPoint and its agency/broker partners. She will also be instrumental in integrating operations for the CopperPoint Family of Insurance Companies: CopperPoint, Alaska National and PacificComp, leveraging opportunities to improve the operating platform and shared services approach.

Kathleen brings an extensive background in business start-ups, driving innovation and leading and transforming businesses within the insurance industry, said Scott Shader, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at CopperPoint Insurance Companies. As a seasoned insurance executive, we look forward to her operational expertise, strategic planning experience, leadership presence and the impact she will make as we continue the integration efforts for our growing family of companies.

Most recently, Kathleen served as the Head of Distribution at Blackboard, an AIG-owned technology-focused subsidiary where she was responsible for developing and managing broker relationships and contributing to the overall build of this middle-market commercial insurance start-up. She began her career at Accenture and progressed to roles of increasing responsibility at Zurich, Marsh and AIG most notably Head of Operations and Technology for the US at Marsh and Northeast Regional Vice President of Zurichs commercial market business.

Story continues

Kathleen is a strong proponent of advancing women in business and served as an executive sponsor for AIGs Women & Allies Employee Resource Group. She was also on the steering committee of Marshs internal womens group and founded the global womens network at Zurich in 2007, which is still in place today.

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and French from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics from the University of Kansas.

About CopperPoint Insurance Companies

Founded in 1925, CopperPoint Insurance Companies, www.copperpoint.com , is a western-based super regional commercial insurance company and a leading provider of workers compensation and commercial insurance solutions. With an expanded line of insurance products and a growing 10 state footprint in the western United States, CopperPoint is in a strong position to meet the evolving needs of our brokers, agents and customers. It has $4.8 billion in total assets and an enterprise surplus of over $1.4 billion.

CopperPoint Mutual Insurance Holding Company is the corporate parent of CopperPoint Insurance Companies, Pacific Compensation Insurance Company and Alaska National Insurance Company. All companies are rated A (Excellent) by AM Best.

Contact:

Michael Goldman

mgoldman@copperpoint.com

602.686.7726

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/92944ec3-5c38-464b-9c33-13ce6eb584a6




She has been documenting the ups and downs of her first pregnancy on Instagram.

And Ashley James shared the realities of bump-shaming as she posted a radiant photo of her cradling her growing tummy while posing in her underwear.

The 33-year-old star - who is half way through her pregnancy - is having a baby boy with her boyfriend of nine-months Tom Andrews and admitted that she's been left worried about 'people commenting on the size of her bump'.

Radiant: Ashley James shared the realities of bump-shaming as she posted a radiant photo of her cradling her growing tummy in her underwear on Instagram on Monday

The Made in Chelsea star reflected: 'I've been pretty chilled throughout my pregnancy, but one thing that has bothered me and caused me to worry is people commenting on the size of my bump.

'My bump looks completely different depending on the time of day, or the position my body is in, and people have commented on how small my bump is pretty much from the moment I announced I was pregnant.

'I started comparing my bump to others and worrying my baby wasn't growing properly, so much so I asked my midwife to check everything was ok.'

Ashley went on to explain that she has found support during the shaming by using social network Peanut to connect with other women across fertility and motherhood.

Baby on board: The 33-year-old star is having a baby boy with her boyfriend of nine-months Tom Andrews

Worry: the TV star admitted that she's been left worried about 'people commenting on the size of her bump'

Her candid post comes as she shared an adorable selfie with her other half Tom as they enjoyed a Sunday at Down Hall Hotel & Spa on the Hertfordshire and Essex border.

Elsewhere, Ashley gave her fans an update on her pregnancy journey on Sunday, when she opened up about the realities of stretch marks and how women should not be ashamed of their changing bodies.

Taking to Instagram, the TV star shared a snap of herself lying in underwear as she caressed her bump.

Cradling her baby bump as she said: 'What if we stopped seeing stretch marks as bad, and started seeing them as a gift from mother nature, like a tattoo or intricate stitching to document the tapestry of our lives?

Glowing: She donned a blue midi dress for her outing on Sunday

Candid: Ashley recently discussed stretch marks and how women should not be ashamed of their changing bodies

'I've had stretch marks around my boob since I was 15, and around my bum from, well I don't quite know what age. Now as my baby develops, I'm noticing them appear more across my bum and thighs.

'It's interesting that there's so many pregnancy products aimed at helping you get rid of your stretch marks. Pregnancy books telling you how to do everything to avoid them, inferring that we should dislike these appearing stretches in our skin.'

She continued: 'I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you should LOVE your stretch marks, but you could learn not to hate them either.

'We might all have stretch marks in varying amounts, but we nearly all have them, no matter what our body type. But each one tells a story: We might have grown quickly as teens, survived lumps, or be growing new life inside us... They all sound like wonderful stories to me.

'It's our marks and scars that tell a story, that add character to our bodies, and that make us perfectly unique.'
New Solar Covered Parking Array Opens at WSU

August 24, 2020

OGDEN, Utah  Weber State University took another step in its goal of becoming a sustainable, carbon-neutral campus by installing a solar covered array over the W10 parking lot, on the northwest side of the Ogden campus. The parking array opened to the campus community just in time for the start of the new semester.

We are very excited about the first solar covered parking structure at Weber State, said Mark Halverson, Facilities & Campus Planning associate vice president. The location in the W10 lot makes a clear and visible statement about the sustainable values the campus holds. The new solar array is a significant step forward toward our carbon neutral goal, and we hope it is the first of many similar installations.

Weber State broke ground in June on the solar array, which is the first of its kind on any of the universitys campuses. As an added benefit, the array has turned W10 into a covered-parking lot, protecting vehicles from the elements. The lot has approximately 100 parking spaces available for students, faculty and staff.

The array houses 550 kilowatts of solar panels that feed directly into Lindquist Hall and the campus electrical grid. The power produced by the array is expected to offset 80% of Lindquist Halls energy consumption.

According to Justin Owen, WSU energy manager, the university hopes to build additional solar-covered parking arrays every two to three years, with plans to eventually have 10 arrays total across the Ogden campus.

Solar is a major piece of the university's plan to reach carbon neutrality, and this array will help us with that goal, Owen said. It will not only save money on WSU's utility bills; it will also reduce WSUs environmental impact. Since we completely covered the lot, it has the added benefit of providing better quality parking and allowing the university to save money on pavement maintenance and snow removal.

Weber State currently has approximately 6,500 solar panels in use across all of its campuses, and the new array adds almost 1,400 panels to that number.

In 2007, Weber State set the goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The university is set to reach carbon neutrality 10 years ahead of the original goal. Since 2007, WSU has reduced its consumption of electricity by 32%, natural gas consumption by 30% and total greenhouse gas emissions by 22%. WSU has reduced energy costs by 47% in the process, saving more than $13.6 million in the last 10 years.

For photos, visit the following link.

smugmug.com/app/photos?searchText=solar%20parking

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.
The World Bank sees the pact bolstering Africas income by $450 billion and lifting 30 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035, if it is accompanied by significant policy reform and measures to facilitate trade. In the near term, lower trade costs could help the continent mitigate output losses of between $37 billion and $79 billion due to the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, according to the Washington-based lender. It expects Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe, where trade costs are among the regions highest, to benefit the most from the agreement, with income set to rise by 14%. Countries such as South Africa and Kenya -- with larger manufacturing bases and better road networks, railways and ports -- are most likely to gain from further regional integration, says Moodys Investors Service. The benefits may be restricted in other countries because of poor infrastructure and non-tariff barriers such as cumbersome government regulation.
I am sure you may have seen the Year 2020 Survey (swachhsurvekshan2020.org) that came out recently. Such are the dubious accolades that Bihar collects most of the time. Such accolades undoubtedly help dish out the denigrated look and treatment in states where Biharis work hard in low paying jobs.

We all have faced this filth when we go and travel to many parts of Bihar and India. Seeing the filth, to encounter and dealing with the rotten smell and ugly stomach wrenching sights are difficult to put in words; it can only be experienced. Visiting from the States and other Western Cities, where cleanliness is a natural is very difficult to explain to our kids travelling and visiting with us.

To experience the filth in Patna, Gaya, Buxar, Biharshariff, Bhagalpur, Parsa bazar is tough to stomach after 73 years of Independence.

Complaining to those who work at Nagarpalikas or to those holding high positions in administration becomes meaningless. Either they haven't seen anything better, cannot comprehend that it can be better than this or have learned to live with it in the same vein as "sab chalta hai saheb and I have bigger personal or official problems than this to deal with".

One can live cleanly despite being poor, living in overcrowded quarters or other innumerable problems. I guess inside their homes (as Holy Books teach us) or inside business stores they practice cleanliness but when it comes to where to dump the garbage, it is always the neighbor's yard, public roads, or where no one can see, complain or object.

I think it can be incentivised. To parrot being a poor country, state, city or municipality is the old hackneyed story, not fit or relevant in today's India. As a matter of fact, being poor, at least for an individual, can be made into an opportunity.

The municipalities of these dirtiest cities can make garbage collection a monetary incentive for an individual. For example, the municipalities can put a monetary value to each bag of collected and deposited garbage/trash.

A token worth RS 10, 20 or 50 can be given to the person depositing the trash (not only the recyclable plastic but any form of trash particularly the smelly food and waste trash). This way the garbage goes to the nearest properly maintained collection centers, the collection becomes an incentive and becomes operational. The administration with the help of NGOs (and I'm sure there are several NGOs in every city for this too) can do it. Sure there are pitfalls in it as when it comes to money, corruption is bound to creep in. But it can still be a valid, workable method to keep cities clean.

I am sure such monetary incentive can clean the cities in no time and it will keep them clean too!

"Saaf Raho Aur Paise Lao" should be the slogan for every municipality.

One can also use a combination of this incentive and another where the citizens are informed that a Garbage Truck will come once, twice or three times a week in your neighborhood where you can bring your trash.

In narrow streets the municipality employee (with a whistle to alert everyone) will bring the trash can on a wheeled cart where the residents and business or stores can deposit their trash.

Rabindra K. Sinha, Leander, Texas, USA
New Haven, Conn. -- Less is sometimes more when treating heart patients who go into shock after a heart attack.

A new study found that more than 30 percent of hospital patients who have a heart attack complicated by low blood pressure undergo an aggressive treatment in which coronary stents are placed in cardiac blood vessels showing any restriction of blood flow to the heart. This is happening despite the existence of a less aggressive approach, called a "culprit-only" strategy, that places stents only in the blocked blood vessels that caused the heart attack.

The study, led by Yale and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, looked at patients undergoing either of the two procedures at hospitals in the United States from 2009 to 2018. The study's aim was to evaluate patterns in the use of the aggressive, multivessel procedure.

In 2017, an unrelated study found that the more aggressive procedure may lead to a higher death rate than the more conservative treatment. But until now, no research has examined patterns in the use of the two treatments such as relative frequency and its variation among hospitals.

"Our work emphasizes the need for optimization of care practices for a group of patients who experience really bad outcomes," said Dr. Rohan Khera, an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine at Yale and first author of the study. "In this case, less is more."

The senior author of the study is Dr. Robert Yeh of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Overall, more than one-third of all heart attack patients who go into shock die during their initial hospital presentation. About half of them die within one year. By contrast, the mortality rate for heart attack patients who do not go into shock is less than 5%.

Despite concerns about the aggressive stenting of multiple blood vessels raised in the 2017 research, Khera said, his team found no early signals that its revelations have affected the proportion of patients undergoing aggressive versus more conservative stenting approaches.

But, he said, the team found wide variation among hospitals as to the approach they use -- and that "those hospitals using multi-vessel treatments more frequently had worse patient outcomes."

###

The new study appears in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Co-authors from Yale were Yongfei Wang, Nihar Desai, Harlan Krumholz, and Jeptha Curtis.

The American College of Cardiology funded the research.
The chorus for postponing various examinations, including NEET 2020 and JEE Main, grew louder on Sunday with over 4,000 students observing a day-long hunger strike to press for the demand in view of rising COVID-19 cases. The protest came on a day Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the government must listen to the 'mann ki baat' of students and arrive at "an acceptable solution" and his party demanded that the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, NEET 2020 and the Joint Entrance Examination, JEE Main Exam be deferred.

According to the leftist All India Students Association (AISA), over 4,200 students observed the day-long hunger strike at their respective home demanding that CBSE compartment exams of Classes 10 and 12 be cancelled and entrance exams such as the UGC-NET, CLAT, NEET and JEE be postponed.

Using the hashtag, SATYAGRAHagainstExamInCovid, many students also took to Twitter to appeal to the government to heed to their demands. Manoj S, a JEE aspirant from Karnataka, said, "We have to report to the JEE Main Exam centre at 7 am. My centre is almost 150 kilometres away and there are no train or bus services available currently.

Also read: JEE, NEET 2020 exam dates announced; Centre releases schedule after admit cards

"Many of my friends have said that their centres are 200 to 250 kilometres away. How are we supposed to travel? How will we write exams wearing masks for seven to eight hours?" He urged the government to postpone the exams till normalcy is restored. Anisha, hailing from Odisha, said with all the hotels and guest houses closed, where would they stay in case they have to travel for exams. "I am from Balasore and my NEET 2020 Exam centre is in Bhubaneswar. I will have to travel for five hours to take my exam.

There are no hotels or guesthouses that are open. Where will we stay?" she said. Siddh Dutt, who will be appearing for CBSE compartment exam, said, "I am an asthma patient. I am scared of what may happen to me if I catch COVID-19." Madhurima, who said she has to take four different entrance exams, wants authorities to listen to her appeal -- "Please produce a vaccine so that we can take exams. "I am a JEE Main, IISER, DUET aspirant and also have to take another entrance exam," she said.

Md Danish Khan from Bhagalpur in Bihar said he has been "allotted an exam centre in Patna, which is a COVID-19 hotspot". "I do not want to risk the lives of my relatives by staying at their place when I go to take the exam. I also stay in a joint family and if I contract the virus, it will create a chain of infection," he said. A Common Law Admission Test, CLAT 2020 aspirant from Kolkata, who requested anonymity, said she fears for her parents' safety during this time.

Also read: NEET 2020 cannot be further postponed: MCI to SC

"My father is a diabetic and my mother just had an operation for a tumour. Even if they go to drop me to the exam centre using public transport, I will be putting them at risk. The government is not ready to listen to us. "We will have to sit and write the exams wearing masks, gloves and headgear under hot weather conditions," she said. Other students also shared similar woes and urged the government to postpone entrance exams and declare the academic year as a "zero year".

The AISA lent solidarity to the demands of the students. A day ago, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia had appealed to the central government to cancel medical and engineering entrance exams JEE and NEET in view of the COVID-19 situation. He also said an alternative admission methodology should be used this year and the exams should not be conducted. On Friday, Education Ministry officials had said the Joint Entrance Examination Main 2020 and the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET 2020) will be conducted in September as scheduled.

Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union president Aishe Ghosh said student representatives of some universities, including Hyderabad Central University, Aligarh Muslim University and JNU, have written to the National Testing Agency over issues pertaining to the recently declared exam date of UGC NET. "We request the authorities to address the logistical issues, before going ahead with the exam," she tweeted.

Also read: After IITs, NITs to select students based on JEE Mains 2020: HRD minister

JNU Students' Union president Aishe Ghosh tweeted Universities and schools across the country have been closed since March 16 when the Centre announced a countrywide classroom shutdown as part of measures to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. A nationwide lockdown was announced on March 24, which came into effect the next day and threw economic activities out of gear.

India's COVID-19 tally sprinted past the 30-lakh mark on Sunday, just 16 days after it crossed 20 lakh, while 22,80,566 people have recuperated in the country so far pushing the recovery rate to 74.90 per cent, according to the Union Health Ministry data.

Also read: UGC Final Year exams case: Supreme Court to give its verdict soon
DUBAI (Reuters) - Iraq said on Friday it would cut its oil production by another 400,000 barrels per day in both August and September to compensate for its overproduction in the past three months.

Iraq oil minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar said in a joint statement with his Saudi counterpart Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman that Iraq's output cut was in addition to the 850,000 bpd it had committed to cut in August and September under an OPEC+ supply pact.

The total reduction to Iraq's production in August and September will amount to 1.25 million bpd for each month.

"The reduction could be adjusted when the six secondary sources publish their production figures," the joint statement said, referring to oil industry data providers such as the International Energy Agency.

The two ministers stressed their full commitment to an OPEC+ deal curbing oil production.

Abdul Jabbar confirmed Iraq's firm commitment to the OPEC+ agreement, adding that Iraq would reach 100% conformity by the beginning of August.

The two ministers discussed in a phone call the latest developments in the oil markets, continued recovery in global demand and progress made towards implementing the OPEC+ agreement.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies, known as OPEC+, began a record supply cut in May to bolster oil prices hammered by the coronavirus crisis.

OPEC and allies led by Russia, known as OPEC+, agreed to cut output by 9.7 million bpd, or around 10% of global output, from May 1, and to taper off the cuts to 7.7 million bpd from August.

In July, OPEC delivered 5.743 million bpd of its share of the cuts, equal to 94% compliance, a Reuters survey found.

Iraq agreed to cut output by 1.06 million bpd under the deal.

The Saudi and Iraqi energy ministers said efforts made by OPEC+ member states would enhance the stability of global oil markets, accelerate its balancing and send positive signals to the markets, the statement said.

OPEC oil output rose by more than 1 million bpd in July as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf members ended their voluntary extra curbs on top of the OPEC-led deal, and other members made limited progress on compliance.

(Reporting by Samar Hassan; Writing by Rania El Gamal Editing by Tom Hogue/ Michael Perry/Jane Merriman)
Iranian sky safe for foreign flights, aviation official says

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, August 23, IRNA -- Head of Civil Aviation Organization of Iran Touraj Dehqani Zangeneh said that the foreign airlines should be assured that flying from the Iranian sky is safe.

Dehqani Zangeneh made the remarks at a press conference in Tehran where he described the results of decoding the black boxes of the Ukrainian passenger plane crashed in the Iranian capital seven months ago.

He said that the Civil Aviation Organization ensures all airlines that Iran's sky is safe for the flights that used the sky of Iran in the past and now they do not use anymore.

He went on to say that "according to International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) guidelines and the country's existing national laws, which are also approved by the government delegation, we must report the final result within a year; but I ordered my colleagues at the airline to inform the public of the final crash investigation report as soon as possible."

A Boeing 737 belonging to the Ukrainian airline had just left Tehran's International Imam Khomeini Airport on January 8 when it was mistakenly shut down by Iranian civil air defense. All those onboard the plane died.

3266**2050

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If God wants everyone saved, why isnt everyone saved?

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It is natural and normal for people to reject the Christian faith. Moreover, the Bible isnt shy about telling us that.

Regarding the gospel message, Paul says: Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness (1 Cor. 1:22-23).

To the Jews back then, a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms and still is today. To everyone else, the gospel literally sounds moronic; the Greek term Paul uses (moria) for foolishness is where we get our word for moron.

But the Bible also tells us the same God who uses such a foolish message to proclaim salvation wants everyone saved. Paul says, This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (1 Tim. 2:34), while Peter declares: The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9).

If God is all-powerful and sovereign over everything and wants everyone saved, why did He craft such a foolish salvation message that most find absurd and end up rejecting? Put another way, does God get what He wants or not? [1]

There are only two possible answers to the question:

1. There is a power in the universe greater than Gods that is frustrating Him by overruling what He wills.

2. God does get what He wants, but He wills something more than the salvation of all humanity, with this something resulting in not everyone being saved but Gods overall purpose still being accomplished.

Some say option 1 is the right answer; those who feel, for example, that this world has gotten beyond God to keep things such as evil in check. However, the majority of Christians who affirm Gods sovereignty rule out option 1, leaving option 2 as the only other possibility.

If thats true, then the question becomes: what is this thing that God desires more than the salvation of everyone?

The answer most give is that God values human free will and a potential love relationship more than saving all people via His efficacious grace. Laced throughout such replies is talk of self-determination, how God doesnt create or want robots, and assertions that God would never force Himself on us.

However, theres a critical problem with those answers  you will not find explicit Biblical support for them anywhere in Scripture.

The two verses highlighted most often as proof that God wants all saved provide no backing whatsoever for that line of reasoning, nor does the context that surrounds them. Instead, they only implicitly present us with the question as to why everyone isnt saved and do not give us the answer to it or what God desires more than the salvation of all.

But what if? What if there was another place in the Bible that brought to our attention the exact same dilemma (God wanting to save people, but they arent obtaining salvation), but did answer the question quite clearly as to why everyone is not being saved and stated what God wills more than the salvation of everyone?

Fortunately, we have just that in one of Pauls letters.

All Israel isnt being saved

In Romans, Paul tells his readers what pains him the most  the fact that his fellow Jews arent experiencing Gods salvation: I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen (Rom. 9:1-5).

The Apostles agony is compounded by the fact that, if such a thing is true, it means God has failed to keep His promises to Israel and that He has, in effect, failed and not achieved what He wants. This is the exact same quandary that implicitly arises from 1 Tim. 2:3-4 and 2 Pet. 3:9 but is not answered in those Pauline letters.

John Murrays commentary on Romans articulates Pauls text this way: The question posed for the apostle is: how can the covenant promise of God be regarded as inviolate when the mass of those who belong to Israel . . . have remained in unbelief and come short of the covenant promises?[2]

How Israel and we are being saved

Pauls answer to the question is this: But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel (Rom. 9:16).

Paul says its not that God doesnt get what He wants  He does and is never thwarted. Its that not all those who were born Jews will be saved.

But why arent all Jews being saved? Surely Paul will tell us its because they are using their free will to deny Gods gift of salvation and thats why they arent experiencing saving faith through Christ, right?

Wrong.

In vv. 7-13, Paul instead uses the example of Isaac, Esau and Jacob to make his point. God chose Abraham, then Isaac not Ishmael, then Jacob and not Esau. Why? So that Gods purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls (Rom. 9:11).

Instead of propounding a free will argument, Paul says that not everyone who comes from Abraham gets the same treatment from God. Before they were ever born, God made His choice of individuals. The idea that some have put forward that God is talking of nations in this passage and not individual people cannot hold up under serious exegetical scrutiny.[3]

As if anticipating the exact same response that people who reject election today give to the idea of God choosing some and not others for salvation, Paul proactively responds: What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! (Rom. 9:14).

Pauls question makes absolutely no sense if he believed in the free will argument of salvation. What is unjust about providing a way of salvation for all and letting everyone choose whether they will accept it or not? Answer: nothing.

Instead Pauls conclusion regarding how a person is saved is summed up this way: So then it does not depend on the man who wills [not your free will] or the man who runs [not what you do], but on God who has mercy (Rom. 9:16). In other words, its not about human autonomy or works, but Gods grace directed towards those who he chooses (vs. 15) because He is the potter and His creation the clay (vv. 20-21).

So, by completing our verse in 1 Cor. that we started with earlier, we see those accepting Gods foolish message of salvation being only those He calls: Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks [notice its the same two groups as before], Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:22-24, my emphasis).

On to the next key question

Now  what about the other key question we posed earlier: since everyone wont be saved, what is it that God desires more than everyones salvation?

Paul provides the answer in the following way: Who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, Why did you make me like this, will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles (Rom. 9:2024).

The answer Paul supplies is the same one given in Jonathan Edwards book, The End for Which God Created the World. Gods passion for His glory takes priority over the salvation of everyone.

Paul presents two truths in Romans that cause many Christians to bristle. First, God gets 100% of the credit for your salvation, even down to you not choosing it yourself (see vs. 16 again). Youre not a Christian today because youre smarter than unbelievers and figured things out, or because youre humbler and recognize your sin where others dont.

No, youre a Christian today because God had mercy on you, opened your eyes and heart just like He did Lydia (Acts 16:14), which caused you to receive His gift of salvation. He gets all the glory; you get none (Eph. 2:8-9).

The second hard truth is that God gets glory when He showcases His justice and wrath in the same way He does when He distributes His mercy. Many think God is only glorified through the kindness He shows undeserving people, but Paul says in Romans that God also desires to put His justice on display with those He allows to continue in their chosen sin. He receives glory in this as well.

Daniel Fuller describes it like this: To show the full range of his glory God prepares beforehand not only vessels of mercy but also vessels of wrath, in order that the riches of his glory in connection with the vessels of mercy might thereby become more clearly manifest.[4]

All of us are born sinners and deserve Gods justice. By grace, God calls some not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles (Rom. 9:24) for salvation and receives glory for His mercy. Others He leaves in their chosen rebellion, and with these, He receives glory for His justice.

This is the answer, then, as to why everyone is not saved and what God desires more than everyones salvation. Nowhere in Romans or the rest of the Bible will you find explicit support for God valuing human free will over the salvation of people. But in Romans, you do find explicit text detailing what God desires most  His glory that comes from displaying both His mercy and justice on those He chooses.

[1] Much of this articles content is influenced by John Pipers essay, Are there two wills in God? For Pipers analysis of the topic, see: http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/articles/are-there-two-wills-in-god.

[2] John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), pg. 18.

[3] John Piper says of the nations interpretation: The interpretation which tries to restrict this predestination or unconditional election to nations rather than individuals or to historical tasks rather than eternal destinies must ignore or distort the problem posed in Rom. 9:1-5, the individualism of 9:6b, the vocabulary and logical structure of 9:6b-8, the closely analogous texts elsewhere in Paul, and the implications of 9:14-23. The position is exegetically untenable. John Piper, The Justification of God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), pg. 73.

[4] Daniel Fuller, Unity of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), pg. 446.
Ukraine will be grateful to Germany if it considers Kyiv's proposal and its format of participation in the international platform for the return of Russian-occupied Crimea after its final approval, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said.

"Separately, we paid attention to the issue of Crimea. This issue is always on the agenda. We hold it very high. I informed Heiko [German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas] that the Foreign Ministry had developed a concept for an international platform on Crimea. And after its final finalization and approval, we will be grateful to Germany if it considers our proposal and its format of participation in this platform," Kuleba said at a joint press conference with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in Kyiv on Monday.
The San Francisco Chronicle has hired an award-winning journalist to lead investigative reporting and narrative projects.

Lisa Gartner will join The Chronicle next month from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she has worked as an investigative reporter since 2018. While at the Inquirer, Gartner wrote Beaten, Then Silenced, revealing a pattern of abuse at the Glen Mills reform school in Pennsylvania. The school housed youths from across the country, including from San Francisco.

Shortly after the stories published, the state shut down the school after 193 years. The project won a George Polk Award for justice reporting.

Prior to the Inquirer, Gartner worked as an education and enterprise reporter at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. With two colleagues there, Gartner was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and a Livingston Award for Failure Factories, a series of stories documenting how a school board abandoned integration and turned five schools in the countys black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

Failure Factories led to a dramatic overhaul of the Pinellas County school district.

Other notable stories by Gartner include an account of a teachers return to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., after the tragic 2018 shooting; and Wrong Way, a tale of young car thieves in Florida and what theyre really running from. Both were published in The Best American Newspaper Narratives.

Lisa has a track record of producing work that is not only compelling but improves peoples lives by forcing change, said Demian Bulwa, The Chronicles managing editor overseeing news. This is one of the most vital roles of a newspaper, and Lisa will help us broaden our focus on the most ambitious and impactful stories.
Bolt Bikes, the electric bike platform marketed to gig economy delivery workers, has a new name and a fresh injection of $11 million in capital from a Series A funding round led by Australian Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

The round also included equity from Hana Ventures and existing investors Maniv Mobility and Contrarian Ventures, together with venture debt from OneVentures and Viola Credit.

The Sydney, Australia-based startup that launched in 2017 is now called Zoomo, a change that aims to better reflect a customer base that has expanded beyond gig economy workers to include corporate clients and everyday consumers. Mina Nada, co-founder and CEO of the newly named Zoomo, also told TechCrunch that he wanted to ensure the company wouldn't be confused by other similarly named businesses.

"When we set up Bolt back in 2017, the name was fine in Australia, but as we've gone international we've come up against at least three other companies called Bolt, two of them in the mobility space," Nada explained. On-demand transportation company Taxify rebranded as Bolt in March 2019. Another company known as Bolt Mobility provides shared-scooter services.

Zoomo, which has operations in Australia, the U.K., New York and soon in Los Angeles, sells its electric bikes or offers them as a subscription. Its primary business has been subscriptions for commercial use, which includes the electric bike, fleet management software, financing and servicing. Subscribers get 24-hour access to the bike. A battery charger, phone holder, phone USB port, secure U-Lock and safety induction is included.

Zoomo has sales and service centers in the markets where it offers subscriptions, which includes Sydney, New York and the U.K. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its subscription footprint  which means adding physical sales and service centers  to Los Angeles and Brisbane as well as within New York.

The company's strategy is to slowly expand where its subscription service is offered, while ramping up direct sales. The need for physical locations limits how quickly Zoomo can expand its subscription product. Selling the bikes to corporations and other users allows the company to generate more revenue, grow its geographic reach and build brand recognition as it slowly expands its more capitally intensive subscription service.

Zoomo also plans to use the funding to add new corporate categories such as parcel, mail and grocery deliveries that its bikes can be used for as well as other models better suited for individual consumers.
RTHK: Outrage over US police shooting black man in back

A video showing Wisconsin police shooting a black man in the back in front of his children sparked outrage across the United States on Monday, with officials calling in the national guard as they girded for a second night of violent protests.

Wisconsin's Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes said the shooting of Jacob Blake in the city of Kenosha reflected a pattern of police violence nationwide against African Americans.

Kenosha County, on the shores of Lake Michigan, declared a "state of emergency curfew" from 8.00 pm until 7.00 am on Tuesday, as angry citizens planned demonstrations.

"The public needs to be off the streets for their safety," the county sheriff said in a statement.

Video footage showed Blake, 29, being shot in the back seven times at extremely close range by two officers on Sunday as he tried to get into his car following what some observers said was his attempt to break up a fight.

The footage and the lack of any immediate explanation provoked painful memories of the police killing of African American George Floyd three months ago in Minneapolis, which sparked massive nationwide protests.

Blake was airlifted to hospital in Milwaukee in a serious condition, but local media reported on Monday afternoon that his family said he was out of surgery and improving.

"Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin," Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers said on Sunday.

"While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country."

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden called for a transparent probe into the shooting.

"Yesterday, Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by police. His kids watched from the car. Today, we woke to grieve yet again. We need a full and transparent investigation," he said.

Barnes, the lieutenant governor, said Blake "was actually trying to deescalate a situation in his community but the responding officer didn't feel the need to do the same.

"This was not an accident. This wasn't bad police work... This is familiar violence to too many of us. This didn't start with George Floyd."

Kenosha police though pushed back at criticism, and urged the public to wait for the results of an investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

"As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident," said Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha Professional Police Association.

The officers involved in the incident were placed on administrative leave, according to the justice department.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents the families of Floyd and other black victims of police violence, said Blake had been trying to break up a fight between two women, and that his three sons were in the car at the time.

"We will seek justice for Jacob Blake and for his family as we demand answers from the Kenosha Police Department," Crump said in a statement.

Protesters set alight several city vehicles and damaged the county courthouse late on Sunday.

Evers said he was sending 125 members of the national guard to the city to maintain order on Monday night.

He urged protesters to be peaceful, adding: "We must see the trauma, fear and exhaustion of being black in our state and our country."

He also called a special session on the state legislature to pass bills on police reforms he said were submitted two months ago but stifled by Republicans.

"We cannot wait for Republican leadership to show up for work, because clearly they intend to keep us waiting," he said. (AFP)

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Joel Markovich testified he stopped to make sure everyone was OK and began following the man in his vehicle, finding him hiding under an old U-Haul truck. The man jumped a fence, and Markovich saw a black ski-mask-type hat fall from him.

Shelton's attorney, Russell Brown, told jurors police and prosecutors "sat on their hands and did nothing" after Judge Jamise Perkins issued a subpoena earlier in the week requiring witness Brett Battle to testify.

Battle, who never appeared in court, was interviewed by police as a possible suspect, because he  like Shelton  walks with a limp, attorneys said.

Battle's mother lives in the area where witnesses testified they last saw the suspicious man, Brown said.

"Where'd the guy go? Where'd he go?" Brown said in closing arguments. "It's not very hard to disappear at your mom's house. No police perimeter was made. No canvass was made."

Brown also tried to cast doubt on a program Indiana State Police use to analyze DNA evidence. Shelton was among several possible sources of DNA  some of which were unknown  found on items linked to the crime scene, he said.
Nancy Mace, the Republican congressional candidate running for Charleston's 1st District seat, released her initial TV ad Monday, highlighting her role as the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, her upbringing in Goose Creek and her experience in the S.C. Legislature.

It follows weeks of television ads that her opponent, incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham, has run in the Lowcountry.

Mace's ad, titled "Lowcountry Values," features her parents, Anne and James Mace.

James Mace is the recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross for his service in Vietnam. He is The Citadel's most decorated living graduate.

The 30-second ad is running across multiple cable networks and satellite TV, a statement from her campaign said.

"The ad highlights Mace's Lowcountry upbringing featuring her parents of Goose Creek, S.C., and highlights her record of standing up for South Carolina taxpayers and advocating for veterans," the statement added.

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The ad features scenes of the aircraft carrier Yorktown, shots inside her home and an archived picture of Mace during her time as a cadet at The Citadel.

The Republican candidate graduated from The Citadel in 1999. In 2018, she was sworn in as a state representative for District 99 covering Hanahan, northeast Mount Pleasant and Daniel Island.

"Im Nancy Mace and I approve this message because talk is cheap, but Lowcountry values run deep," she says in the ad.

It makes no specific mention of Cunningham, or of President Donald Trump, her political affiliation or her specific policy stances. Mace served as the coalitions director and field director for Donald J. Trump for President Inc. during his 2016 campaign.

Cunningham has amassed an enormous $2.3 million cash advantage over Mace, expanding his war chest to $3 million in one of the top-watched congressional races of the 2020 cycle, according to the latest quarterly Federal Election Commission filings.

Mara Mellstrom, a spokeswoman for Mace, didn't disclose the exact amount the ad cost but said it was "six-figures across broadcast, cable, satellite and digital."
VICE-President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has flayed a promise by the flagbearer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), ex-President John Dramani Mahama, to offer free primary healthcare when given the mandate, saying the move is meaningless.

According to him, 95 per cent of the disease burden from primary to tertiary healthcare is already covered under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) which offers non-payment of premium by children, the elderly and vulnerable groups in the country.

One Time Premium

Mr. Mahama, whilst introducing his running mate recently, stated that a new NDC administration led by him would unveil a free primary healthcare plan before the end of 2021, claiming it would make the provision of primary healthcare to all Ghanaians.

It would be recalled that in 2008 when the NDC was in opposition, it promised One Time Premium payment for the NHIS but when many based on that promise and voted for the party to win power, it turned around to say it was impossible to implement such a policy and quickly ran away from it.

During the manifesto launch of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Cape Coast, the Vice-President pilloried the NDC leader's proposal, saying, If you say you are going to offer free primary healthcare it is almost meaningless. If you have primary healthcare and you don't have an NHIS card and go for a checkup and they say go for secondary treatment what are you going to do? he asked rhetorically.

Dr. Bawumia said the NPP government intended to focus on health promotion and prevention as part of primary healthcare through the NHIS to achieve universal healthcare.

We will work with the Ghana Medical and Dental Council to streamline the admission processes for foreign trained doctors, he noted and added that a lot of foreign trained doctors express frustration in joining the normal medical core in the country.

He stated that the government, in its next term, would build additional facilities and augment the human resource base at medical schools to increase access to enrolment.

Sanitary Pads & Telemedicine

Dr. Bawumia said the government would get rid of import duties on sanitary pads to improve health conditions, particularly for girls, and in the ultimate would make sure that sanitary pads are produced in Ghana.

He revealed that the government, in its next term, would again focus on telemedicine in this era of digitalization to reduce cost as doctors can diagnose and prescribe at a distance without necessarily be at a particular location.

Student Loan

According to him, the NPP government under President Akufo-Addo has a policy initiative that will make all tertiary students, except teacher and nursing trainees, who will be on allowances, to get the option to obtain a student loan without the requirement of a guarantor.

The current scheme asks for guarantors and a lot of people are not willing to put their pensions on the line, and so many students are unable to have access.

We want to make it guarantor-free and all a student will need is his or her national ID card to be able to access a loan, and once you complete your tertiary education repayment will be deferred for one year after your national service, he pointed out.

GALOP programme

The Vice-President said the government would again implement the $219 million Ghana Accountability Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP) which has already identified 10,000 low-performing schools in Ghana.

This GALOP programme, he stated, would target these schools for academic improvement by giving them additional funding plus their capitation grant, adding that the funding for the project has already been secured by the government.

It will also support teachers in these schools to raise the level of performance so that the students will not be left behind, he added.

Education in Zongos

In addition, we want to focus on education in the Zongo communities. We are building in each of the 16 regions model SHSs in Zongo communities, he said.

According to him, one of the areas that have not received enough attention is special needs education and that the government intends to focus on it by increasing the resources allocation and infrastructure for special need's education across the country.

A lot of our children suffer from autism, cerebral palsy and others need support. We are going to increase the resources and infrastructure for special need's education across the country, he disclosed.

Legal Education

He continued that the government would also expand infrastructure to increase access for professional legal education in the country as the infrastructure limits intake, thereby getting many prospective lawyers frustrated.

We will complete the provision of free wifi at all senior secondary schools and public tertiary institutions. The process has started and a contract has already been awarded and ECG is levelling its fibre network across the country and before the end of this year we will be starting from the ECG perspective on the tertiary institutions.

By next year, we expect our senior high schools and tertiary institutions to have free wifi for their studies, he said.

---Daily Guide
Australia investigates Tiktok and WeChat amid US bullying towards Chinese tech companies

In Trumps latest attack on China, the US government has issued a ban on Chinese-owned apps such as Tiktok and WeChat, sparking an Australian parliamentary committee to investigate the apps potential to interfere in Australian politics. In a seemingly unbiased move, US-owned companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are also being investigated under this committee. This decision poses many more questions about Australias ever increasingly difficult relationship with both the US and China.

Exposed by American NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, Google and Facebook were found to be involved in spy operations, information censorship to benefit US interests, and later found to be interfering in foreign elections.

While Snowden is still unable to return to the US for releasing this information, Google and Facebook, and to an extent, Twitter, remain heavily relied upon by most Australians for work and leisure. It seems if a genuine investigation were to be taken, they would likely face the same penalties as Tiktok and WeChat, such as banning them.

The argument against the Chinese-owned apps prominence in Australia is linked to concerns over Chinese political influence in Australia. As a result, it may just seem prudent to conduct an investigation, in light of the actions of the US-owned apps, and in light of allegations against China and the Chinese government in the Australian media, however the reasons for the investigation are likely to be part of a more serious US agenda.

First of all, the allegation of Chinese influence in Australian politics is seemingly assumed in mainstream media, rather than explained in detail as to what that actually means. On ABCs Four Corners, evidence for Chinese influence in Australia included story about a Chinese consulate who lobbied a local council to drop the Vision China Times (VCT), a Chinese-language outlet that is often critical of the Chinese government (which was unsuccessful anyway), and another story of censorship of anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rhetoric on a Mandarin-language radio in Australia, which turned out only to be being censored by an Australian media mogul who supported the CCP and did not want to lose listeners  but with no evidence of connection to the CCP. This is hardly compelling evidence for hard hitting Chinese influence.

On the other hand, evidence of US interference in Australian politics has a long and dark history, and continues today through organisations such as the Australia-United States Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN), and Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Evidence has been found linking the CIA to the coup on Former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, way back in 1975, when he announced the aim to shut down US military base Pine Gap, in Australias centre. This was a major insult to the Australian working class, with Malcolm Fraser, leader of the Liberal opposition being undemocratically appointed by the governor general at this time. Before and since then, everyday Australians have been fighting against the continued removal of workers rights, in part due to this interference, as well as US military presence, funding and engagement in Australia.

So while it seems the move to investigate Tiktok and WeChat is unbiased and perhaps a responsible call to action, the historical and political ties Australia has with these nations suggests otherwise. The overwhelming evidence of spying and interference from the US suggests that the aim is not to protect citizens private information from the CCP or Chinese organisations, but to have access to information themselves, and the ability to censor content as they wish. For instance, in the so-called international community (aka, in the West), those who have a genuine interest in learning about countries outside of the imperialist core will undoubtedly almost always led to overtly critical and biased information when searching with Google or YouTube. Additionally, social commentators on the anti-imperialist left are constantly shut down for minor criticisms of the United States on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The US is unable to shut down dissent from Chinese-owned apps.

Tiktok users mainly comprise young people, and it is the first Chinese-owned app to become popular amongst non-Chinese Australians. While there have been arguments against the apps ability to raise public awareness of social and political issues, there is growing content of this description. Tiktok also has the ability to reach a massive audience quickly, owing to its function and algorithms.

However, there is a more unsettling reason Trump aspires to ban TikTok in the US than the inability to track and censor users. As the US-China trade war has intensified, the US has demanded China no longer engage in the world market for technology. This is not simply to stop the Chinese government from spying or interfering, but to allow the US to maintain hegemony over tech industries, not only in communications, but aerospace, semiconductors and biotech. If China is to accept dependence from the US and other foreign suppliers for high-tech products and services, it is at the whim of US sanctions and influence, and at risk of much slower and limited development, and forced to produce only cheap low-tech products as it has done over previous decades. It is clear that the option for China to forever remain a sweatshop of cheap European and American products is unreasonable.

But the growing material reality is that China is not at the whim of US-lead demands anymore. China is striving forward with the implementation of the phase one bilateral trade deal with the US, and is still providing greater convenience for American companies, especially financial companies, to enter the Chinese market. In July, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng cited a survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China which showed that 84 percent of US enterprises are unwilling to withdraw from China, and 38 percent of them will maintain or increase their investment in China. Chinese officials have proposed that the relations between the two countries should not be dominated by hawks, that any issue can be taken to the negotiating table, and China and the US can work together to draw up three lists respectively on cooperation, dialogue and issues that need proper management.

The rise of China is especially relevant for Australians, as the business-as-usual do-what-the-Americans-say strategy becomes increasingly at odds with the interests of Australians  of all classes. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is now in a position where the implications for following the Americans in line to ban TikTok and WeChat are worse for the Australian politicians. As China continues to make strides, it is likely that Australian politicians will continue to be obliged to make more decisions which go against the wishes of the US empire, and to prioritise the local economy, through positive relations with China.

The leadership in Australia will need to step up and to think more independently about the most optimal way forward for our country. Not as a lapdog for any other country, but as a strong, independent sovereign nation, who makes decisions about its own future, and its relationships with its neighbours. Left and progressive forces must continue to demand action by politicians along these lines.
Choice of words not correct, but strictness was needed: Haryana CM on Karnal lathicharge

Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar tests positive for coronavirus

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Chandigarh, August 24: Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has been tested positive for coronavirus on Monday.

Taking to Twitter, Khattar wrote,''I was tested for Novel Corona Virus today. My test report has returned positive," he said in a tweet. "I appeal to all colleagues and associates who came in my contact over the last week to get themselves tested. I request my close contacts to move into strict quarantine immediately.''

Coronavirus: Karnataka Congress president DK Shivakumar tests positive for COVID-19

On August 21, Khattar was tested for Covid, but his test report came negative. He was tested again, Monday, and found positive.

Earlier, Haryana Speaker Gian Chand Gupta tested positive.

Haryana Assembly is scheduled to convene for Monsoon Session on August 26.
What Does the Bible Say about Accountability?

When discussing the nature of accountability, the Bible doesnt hold back in telling us that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is watched and noticed by the Lord. But before this causes you to become increasingly anxious, it is meant that nothing can be hidden from God, including what is in our hearts, our feelings, and our dreams.

When we accept Jesuss sacrifice, we do so with the knowledge that our actions and words before we were saved are forgiven by God through Jesus. The belief is that after this recognition of salvation, we will go forward in our lives with a changed heart and the sense that what we do is for the glory of the Lord more than the glory for ourselves.

This is not to say that you wont utter a curse word, do something out of pride, or judge someone unjustly. But it is to say that while before it didnt bother you to do or say something like this, you will be bothered now by these words and actions.

Romans 14:12 explains what we are to expect when we pass away from earth and appear before the throne of God, which is illustrated more through other verses of the Bible as well.

James 4:17 affirms that if you know what is right to do, especially in Gods eyes, and dont do it, it is sin. This means that if God were to tell you to forgive someone and you say no, you are not only rejecting the privilege of being seen as an authentic Christian to a hurting, misguided person, but you have also rejected God and what He represents in your life.

Jesus talked about accountability in Matthew 12:36 when He stated that every idle or careless word we speak will be discussed by God to each of us on the Day of Judgment. Jesus stated this to convey that it is important to be accountable with our tongues and words, which can make or break others and ourselves, because on the Day of Judgment, God will remind us of these words and show His happiness or displeasure.

In 1 Samuel 16:7, the Lord spoke to the prophet Samuel to tell him that while man looks at what a person is on the outside, the Lord concentrates most on the heart. This explains that the heart reveals the true intentions of people and whether they understand the gravity of being accountable to what is asked of them, or if they are immature and not responsible enough to be accountable yet (if ever).

These verses demonstrate that when it comes to accountability, Gods Word holds it in the highest esteem. You are to be an example to others of this accountability as a Christ believer.

Photo credit: Sparrowstock
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina  along with Sens. Mike Rounds of South Carolina and Shelley Moor Capito of West Virginia  has introduced a bill called the U.S. Made Act of 2020, which has the objective of reshoring Personal Protection Equipment from China to the U.S.

PPE that is deemed to be a national priority under Grahams bill includes sanitizing/disinfecting wipes, surgical/respirator masks, face shields, surgical gowns, and items used in hospitals such as bandages and bedding.

The bill would mandate that all PPE be American-made within five years. Graham is pushing to have the bill incorporated into the Phase IV coronavirus relief package, if the White House and Congress, and Republicans and Democrats, can come to an agreement.

Not surprisingly, the bill is endorsed by large associations such as the National Council of Textile Organizations, the Alliance for American Manufacturing, and the AFL-CIO. During the announcement for the bill, Graham stated, Ninety percent of our personal protective equipment that our doctors and nurses and healthcare workers use to keep us safe is made in China. At the heart of the bill, the main hook, if you will, to reshore PPE manufacturers are tax credits for equipment used to make PPE.

Being beholden to other countries for supplies that are deemed a national priority is a position the U.S. should never have put itself in. Ensuring that plenty of PPE supplies are available is a government responsibility to its citizens. Its surprising that it was not a war, but a global pandemic that is making this crystal clear.

There is a precedent for the federal government to mandate that certain products be American-made. The Berry Amendment, which was originally passed in 1941 and made a permanent part of subsequent apprpriations in 1994, restricts the Department of Defense from using any funding for procurement of clothing, food, textiles, hand tools, and measuring tools that are not American-made. This ensures that in times of crisis, the U.S. military will have critical supplies such as uniforms being made at home.

It is unclear if all PPE can be American-made within five years. This would require a quantum leap compared to where the PPE situation currently stands. However, with a mandate and good leadership, the U.S. can move mountains if it needs to. We also might consider negotiating PPE import targets with trusted trading partners such as Canada and Mexico.

This could help us with the shift from China to North America within five years. After the implementation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on July 1, trade friction between the three neighbors seems to be settling down. We do not want to stoke these frictions, especially with these two valued allies that have worked with us during the pandemic. Inputs/components from Mexico and Canada can help with the production of U.S.-made products.

Incentives are a good start in terms of luring PPE companies to the U.S. Another would be for other federal agencies, states, counties, municipalities, and public agencies to commit to purchasing American-made PPE. This will ensure PPE companies a local market by which they can succeed and grow.

And why not use the local supplier base or develop one that can supply this movement of PPE back to the U.S.? A preferential program also can be developed for these companies to use U.S. suppliers of cloth, paper, metals, plastics and other materials in order to make their products. Perhaps, incentives could be offered to tier one, tier two, and tier three supplies that would ramp up their production to allow PPE to quickly come to the U.S. Incentives could take the form of federal tax credits, job training grants, and expansion incentives for U.S. suppliers of PPE production inputs that expand their workforce in a national program of reshoring PPE.

Amid the partisan squabbling in Washington, D.C., the Graham bill will need to have buy-in from both parties. Parts of it will probably change, as provisions are added and eliminated. Incentives may have to be strengthened or a combination of incentives may need to be developed.

Regardless, now is the time to stop talking about putting a plan together to ensure that the U.S. doesnt get caught flat-footed during the next pandemic, and actually put a viable plan together. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, it is an American issue for the health (literally) of our country.

Jerry Pacheco is the executive director of the International Business Accelerator, a nonprofit trade counseling program of the New Mexico Small Business Development Centers Network. He can be reached at 575-589-2200 or at jerry@nmiba.com.
Google is to offer small businesses new tools to help improve their online presence and reach more customers, as part of its effort to boost the UK economy post-lockdown.

The tech giant announced a support scheme in June to help small businesses become more visible online.

Now, it is launching an additional free tool that will provide bespoke recommendations to firms on the best products and resources that will help them get online for the first time or improve their existing presence.

It is part of the firms Open for Business initiative, which has committed to helping one million small British businesses stay open by making them easier to be found online.

It comes as the firm has published research which suggests 85% of people believe businesses having up-to-date details, for example new opening hours and what Covid-19 prevention measures were in place, was important.

It also found that nearly nine out of 10 people (88%) in the UK believe having the confidence to venture out into their local area and visiting local businesses is important to the UKs economic recovery.

The study showed that 38% of people had shopped at local businesses more regularly during lockdown, and that 88% of those said they would be more likely to choose to do so in the future.

Google UK managing director Ronan Harris said: Local businesses are the lifeblood of our communities.

Like millions up and down the country, we want to help local businesses both survive and thrive.

The results of this research show were more likely to visit a business if were confident in knowing what well find when we get there.

From something as simple as updating opening hours, posting a review or a photo of anti-Covid measures taken by a business, we can all help make a positive impact by sharing online information for our favourite local businesses.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- White Castle, a family-owned business for 99 years, has honored our nation's healthcare professionals, first responders, grocery store and food retail employees, and other frontline workers during the pandemic with special offers and discounts. Today, America's first fast-food hamburger chain continues the celebration of essential workers including our communities' teachers, principals, administrators and other school and daycare employees with offers in restaurants and frozen food aisles nationwide.

White Castle, a family-owned business for 99 years, has honored our nations healthcare professionals, first responders, grocery store and food retail employees, and other frontline workers during the pandemic with special offers and discounts. Today, Americas first fast-food hamburger chain continues the celebration of essential workers including our communities teachers, principals, administrators and other school and daycare employees with offers in restaurants and frozen food aisles. White Castle, a family-owned business for 99 years, has honored our nations healthcare professionals, first responders, grocery store and food retail employees, and other frontline workers during the pandemic with special offers and discounts. Today, Americas first fast-food hamburger chain continues the celebration of essential workers including our communities teachers, principals, administrators and other school and daycare employees with offers in restaurants and frozen food aisles.

Any school or daycare employee can show their employee ID or other credentials while visiting any White Castle restaurant from Aug. 24 through Sept. 24 and get a 20% discount on their order. For those residing outside of the restaurant footprint, or simply looking to stock up for at-home cravings, a coupon is available at whitecastle.com for 75 off any four- or six-count Slider package in the frozen food aisle of grocery, convenience and club stores where White Castle Sliders are sold.

"We have celebrated so many of our country's essential workers since the start of the pandemic, and with back to school upon us, it's time to celebrate and acknowledge our heroes in education," said Jamie Richardson, vice president at White Castle. "We hope that this expression of thanks can put a smile on their faces and make it a little easier to savor a nourishing meal morning, noon or night."

The special discount comes on the heels of other offers and activities to support people who have been working on the frontline of the COVID-19 health crisis. Between mid-March and mid-July, White Castle gave away more than $1 million worth of free meals and delivered more than 12,700 complimentary Sliders to healthcare workers and first responders in the 14 markets where it has restaurants. In addition, it provided significant discounts to all frontline workers and gave over 3,300 Sliders to grocery store and other retail food workers.

"These heroes are working so hard and making real sacrifices in our communities every day," Richardson said. "From the White Castle family, it brings us immense pride to shine a light on the great work that educators and supporting teams do for our children and their futures."

About White Castle

White Castle, America's first fast-food hamburger chain, has been making hot and tasty Sliders as a family-owned business for more than 99 years. Based in Columbus, Ohio, White Castle started serving The Original Slider, made from 100% USDA inspected beef, in 1921. Today, White Castle owns and operates more than 365 restaurants dedicated to satisfying customers' cravings, morning, noon and night and sells its famous fare in retail stores nationwide, in a growing number of international locations, and at military exchanges around the world. The Original Slider, named in 2014 as Time Magazine's most influential burger of all time, is served alongside a menu of creatively crafted Sliders and other mouthwatering food options, including White Castle's Impossible Slider, named by Thrillist in 2019 as the "Best Plant-Based Fast Food Burger."

White Castle's commitment to maintaining the highest quality products extends to the company owning and operating its own meat processing plants, bakeries and frozen-food processing plants. White Castle is known for the legendary loyalty of its team members, more than 1 in 4 of whom have worked for White Castle for at least 10 years, and of its faithful fans, affectionately referred to as Cravers, many of whom compete each year for entry into the Cravers Hall of Fame. The official White Castle app, available at iTunes App Store or Google Play , makes it easy for Cravers to access sweet deals and place pickup orders any time. They can also have their orders delivered using one of White Castle's delivery partners. For more information on White Castle, visit whitecastle.com.

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In the high-pressure push to combat COVID-19, two things have become abundantly clear: we need effective treatment and we need further data to inform our findings.

Sunday evening, the FDA issued what was a long-expected emergency authorization for one of the treatments most eyed with high hopes -- convalescent blood plasma. President Trump, has even recently been touting the treatment as a powerful therapy with an incredible rate of success.

While some doctors welcomed the authorization, others tasked with spearheading the ongoing clinical study of convalescent plasmas efficacy tell ABC News that this latest green light may make their work more difficult.

This authorization doesnt make a lot of sense to me -- it basically says were approving it on no data, Dr. Hollis O'Neal told ABC News, whose team at LSU Health Sciences Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has joined the newly-announced clinical trial through Vanderbilt University. It complicates the issue and makes it more difficult to recruit on both ends. You have to keep the data clean here or theres just no way to interpret it. It puts everyone in a difficult position as far as being able to do this study that we all believe is necessary to do.

The concern is that the widespread use of plasma treatment will introduce confounding variables to randomized, controlled clinical trials -- what's understood as the scientific "gold standard."

MORE: New clinical trial means real data in COVID-19 fight, maybe answers

FILE PHOTO: Phlebotomist Jenee Wilson takes apart an aphaeresis kit after processing a convalescent plasma donation from a recovered coronavirus patient at the Central Seattle Donor Center of Bloodworks Northwest in Seattle, Washington, on April 17, 2020. (Lindsey Wasson/Reuters)

The FDA said more than 70,000 patients have been treated with convalescent plasma so far and preliminary results have been somewhat promising with mortality rates slightly reducing in hospitalized patients treated with it earlier on.

Harvested antibodies from those who have recovered from COVID-19 are now authorized for use on the sick but that permission could prevent scientists from knowing how well, or even if, it actually works.

It could really violate the integrity of the trial, ONeal said. We could still do the study, but it would create selection bias, or we would need another mechanism to control for potential use of plasma as standard care.

Story continues

"The @US_FDA's emergency use authorization just makes it harder to conduct placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials to figure out if it works," Dr. Celine Gounder, infectious diseases specialist at NYU Langone Health, tweeted in response to Sunday's announcement.

Clinical trials for convalescent plasma have already faced many obstacles and recruiting volunteers is not an easy task, especially amid a global health crisis, when control trials require a placebo group while there is desperate demand for actual treatment and finding anyone willing to risk taking a placebo poses a high hurdle.

However, not everyone agrees the authorization steepens the scientific climb.

Clinical trials in hospitals were already very difficult to do, Dr. Arturo Casadevall, Johns Hopkins Chair of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology, told ABC News. Doing clean, randomized control trials is very, very hard in the middle of a pandemic. You almost have to have put all the pieces in place in advance. But there is a lot of evidence now that this is reducing mortality. It may not be as definitive as you would want -- but at least we have treatment. And that, we need now.

Thus, the debate fundamentally becomes one over how much time we have -- and how to use it -- in pursuit of a cure.

"It's a nuanced argument and the FDA has been struggling with this for months," Casadevall continued. "I think this makes it a lot easier for our patients in hospitals in in places that don't have a lot of resources. It's been shown to work and something that here could probably help people. So I would ask you -- what would you do?"

Unquestionably, medical experts say we need good treatment and we need it fast. But its a matter of what gets introduced and when that makes a difference in the hunt for the definitive data that top federal officials have consistently called for.

Now with this plasma treatment even more widely available, those already not inclined to participate in placebo studies may find it even less appealing.

(MORE: Trump, FDA tout COVID-19 convalescent plasma treatment, but some express concerns)

FILE PHOTO: Phlebotomist Jenee Wilson talks with Melissa Cruz, an ER technician for Valley Medical Center who has recovered from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) she contracted from a patient in Seattle, Washington, U.S. April 17, 2020. (Lindsey Wasson/Reuters)

But when asked about his concern over issuing an emergency authorization now that may inhibit researchers' ability to conduct clear, clean clinical trials, and if it will be harder to avoid introducing confounding factors to getting further data, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn expressed hope, telling ABC that, ideally, this would in fact encourage more people to participate.

"We all can use this as an opportunity to encourage people to participate in clinical trials for all therapeutic and vaccine agents in this time of crisis -- because it's so important, and it does a service to everyone," Hahn said.

In an op-ed Sunday night, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb wrote that the plasma authorization now comes despite recent concerns from public health leaders about the lack of evidence.

"The decision would have a stronger foundation if patients had participated in a randomized study that looked at whether patients who received plasma fared better than those who didnt," Gottlieb wrote. "The pressure to find effective treatments for COVID-19 is enormous. All the more reason to rely on FDA expertise to steer the focus toward the most promising options and get patients the clear evidence, and effective treatments, they deserve."

This makes our work a little harder. But it doesnt make it impossible, Dr. Todd Rice, one of the Vanderbilt clinical study's leaders told ABC. I'm so excited about doing a study because I think the science behind this -- and the early data -- are encouraging. So -- as they said announcing the authorization -- its suggestive of benefits. And its encouraging. We want to see treatment. I agree with a lot of that. I don't think they're strong enough data yet - to definitely give it to everybody - which is why its important to study it: is this something where we should be putting a ton of eggs in the basket?

The elephant in the room, Rice says, is the very language in the emergency authorization itself:

Given that the clinical evidence supporting this EUA was not obtained from prospective, well-controlled randomized clinical trials, a fact sheet for healthcare providers on the authorization says, more randomized clinical trials are needed, adding, convalescent plasma should not be considered a new standard of care for the treatment of patients with COVID-19.

To me -- and to the group thats doing these trials -- that means its urgent that we get to an answer on this, Rice said. Theres more pressure now. But to be honest -- we were going to do this anyway -- it just means we need to comb over our data all the more, every step of the way.

ABC News' Eric Strauss, Sony Salzman and Elizabeth Thomas contributed to this report.

Emergency plasma authorization sparks concern for those leading charge on treatment originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:20:32|Editor: huaxia

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DOHA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Qatari health ministry on Monday announced 258 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total number of confirmed cases in the Gulf state to 117,266, the official Qatar News Agency (QNA) reported.

Meanwhile, 291 more recovered from the virus, bringing the total recoveries to 114,099, while one more fatality was reported, bringing the death toll to 194, according to a ministry statement quoted by QNA.

The ministry attributed the increase in coronavirus infections to gatherings and visits as well as ignoring the preventive measures such as staying at home and social distancing.

A total of 594,215 lab tests for COVID-19 in Qatar have been taken so far.

China and Qatar have offered mutual help during the fight against COVID-19 pandemic.

On Feb. 21, five Qatar Airways cargo freighters flew to China carrying approximately 300 tons of medical supplies donated by the airline.

On July 8, Chinese health officials and medical experts held a video conference with Qatari counterparts to share experience and expertise in fighting COVID-19.

The two sides also held in-depth exchange of views on the issues that Qatar is most concerned about, including coronavirus prevention and control, testing analysis, clinic care, vaccine development and social management. Enditem
PITTSBURGH, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- While packing and bringing lunches from home is often the most economical lunch option for workers and students, there is no way to prevent unauthorized access to the contents. Thanks to the creative thinking of an inventor from Waukegan, Ill., however, users can now be sure their food will be undisturbed.

She developed WANA LOCKABLE LUNCH BOX to prevent such losses or thefts. As such, it keeps contents securely enclosed, saving food replacement expenses and affording peace of mind. It is also lightweight, compact, portable and easy to operate and store. In addition, its simple design minimizes production costs.

The inventor's personal experience inspired the idea. "After I had someone go into my lunch bag while it was unattended and take out food items," she said, "I decided I needed a lunch carrier with a lock."

The original design was submitted to the Chicago sales office of InventHelp. It is currently available for licensing or sale to manufacturers or marketers. For more information, write Dept. 19-CKL-1351, InventHelp, 217 Ninth Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15222, or call (412) 288-1300 ext. 1368. Learn more about InventHelp's Invention Submission Services at http://www.InventHelp.com

SOURCE InventHelp

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Trump at RNC: To Drive Them Crazy, 'You Say 12 More Years'

President says 'I felt an obligation to come to North Carolina'
On This Day The Day Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Made Her First Public Appearance in Myanmar

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi makes her first-ever public speech in Myanmar at the Yangon General Hospital on Aug. 24, 1988.
A white supremacist who killed 51 people in terror attacks on two New Zealand mosques had planned to target a third place of worship when he was captured by police, his sentencing hearing was told today.

Brenton Tarrant, 29, wanted to inflict as many fatalities as possible during the gun rampage last year, which he partially streamed live on the internet.

In meticulous planning over years, Tarrant determined when the Christchurch mosques would be full and flew a drone over his primary target, the Al Noor mosque, to capture its layout and exits.

During the attack in March last year, the killer shot worshippers inside the Al Noor mosque and murdered more on the street as they attempted to flee. He then drove to his second target, the Linwood Islamic Centre, to continue the gun rampage.

The Al Noor Masjid in Christchurch where Tarrant killed 51 worshippers / EPA

Christchurch High Court was told he had been planning to strike at a third venue, the Ashburton Mosque, but was stopped by police who rammed his car.

Tarrant, an Australian, has admitted 51 charges of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder, and one charge of terrorism. He could face life in prison without parole when sentenced later this week.

The live-stream video of the attack sent shockwaves around the world, prompting a change in New Zealand gun laws including a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons.

Prosecutor Barnaby Hawes told the court today Tarrant had also planned to burn down the mosques after shooting worshippers on March 15 2019, aiming to "inflict as many fatalities as possible".

He had studied floor plans and locations of a series of mosques in Christchurch, and struck when the Al Noor mosque was attended by 190 people.

Tarrant had six guns in his car, including two semi-automatic AR-15 rifles, as well as four modified gas containers which he planned to use to burn down the mosques after he finished shooting, the prosecutor said.

The court was told how one of the victims, Naeem Rashid, made a heroic attempt to stop the gunman.

"He ran at the defendant from the southeastern corner of the room. When Mr Rashid was approximately one metre from the defendant, the defendant swung the AR-15 around and fired four shots at point-blank range", Mr Hawes said.

Floral tributes are laid in Christchurch, New Zealand, following the deadly attacks / Getty Images

"Mr Rashid crashed into the defendant and the defendant went down on one knee", he added, saying Tarrant was able to get back up and shoot Mr Rashid again.

At the sentencing hearing, relatives of those who died will be able to confront Tarrant for the first time about the atrocity.

Maysoon Salama, the mother of 33-year-old Atta Elayyan who died in the attack, tearfully told the terrorist: "You killed your own humanity, and I don't think the world will forgive you for your horrible crime.

New Zealand abolished the death penalty for murder in 1961 / AP

"You thought you can break us. You failed miserably."

Gamal Founda, the imam of the Al Noor mosque, told Tarrant: We are a peaceful and loving community who did not deserve your actions.

"Your hatred is unnecessary. If you have done anything, you have brought the world community closer with your evil actions."

Eight courtrooms are being used to accommodate all the survivors and relatives of the murdered victims, with more than 60 impact statements expected to be heard over the next three days.

High Court Justice Cameron Mander, overseeing the case, has said Tarrant  who has sacked his legal team - will be given the opportunity to speak before he is sentenced, but will not be allowed to grandstand about his actions and ideology.

The judge has the power to impose a full life sentence, which would be the first in New Zealand criminal history.
Centre asks states not to restrict movement of people, goods and services

The central government has asked all states to ensure there are no restrictions on inter-state and intra-state movement of persons and goods as such restrictions create problems in supply of goods and services and impact supply chains, resulting in disruption in economic activity and employment.

In a communication to chief secretaries of all states and union territories, union home secretary Ajay Bhalla said there were reports that local level restrictions on movement were being imposed by various districts and states.

Drawing attention to the Unlock 3 guidelines, Bhalla said such restrictions are creating problems in inter-state movement of goods and services and are impacting supply chains, resulting in disruption in economic activity and employment. The unlock guidelines clearly state there shall be no restrictions on inter-state and intra-state movement of persons and goods, he said in the letter.

The guidelines also said no separate permission, approval or e-permit will be required for movement of persons and goods for cross land border trade under treaties with neighbouring countries. Bhalla said such restrictions amount to violation of guidelines issued by ministry of home affairs under provisions of Disaster Management Act, 2005.

The letter asked states to impose no restrictions and to ensure that the unlock guidelines are followed.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had first announced a nationwide lockdown with effect from 25 March to combat the coronavirus pandemic; the lockdown was subsequently extended till 31 May.

Since 1 June, a phased unlock process began with the opening up industrial activities and offices across the country.

India, which saw a spike in the number of coronavirus cases, also scaled up Covid-19 tests that have scaled a new peak of 10, 23,000 on a single day even as it recorded highest ever single day recoveries of 63,631 in the 24 hours ended 3:30 pm on Saturday..

With a steady increase in the number of Covid-19 patients recovering and being discharged from the hospitals and home isolation (in case of mild and moderate cases), the recovery rate has reached 74.69 per cent. This has also led to declining case fatality rate, which stands at a new low of 1.87 per cent.

Indias total recoveries now exceed the total active cases (6,97,330) by more than 15 lakh. The record high recoveries have ensured that the actual caseload of the country, viz, active cases, currently stands at 23.43 per cent of the total positive cases.
WASHINGTON  The Trump administrations latest effort to use COVID-19 rapid tests  touted by one senior official as a turning point in arresting the coronaviruss spread within nursing homes  is running into roadblocks likely to limit how widely theyll be used.

Federal officials are distributing point-of-care antigen tests  which are cheaper and faster than tests that must be run by a lab  to 14,000 nursing homes to increase routine screening of residents and staff. The initial distribution targets nursing homes in hot spots and those with at least three COVID-19 cases, senior Trump administration officials said in July, hailing it as a tool that could root out asymptomatic carriers who might still infect others.

But theres a hitch: Two manufacturers that have received Food and Drug Administration authorization and whose instruments are being delivered  Becton, Dickinson and Co., known as BD, and Quidel  say their antigen tests are intended for patients with symptoms, calling into question how valuable the tests would be for broad screening purposes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 40% of infected people may be asymptomatic.

Its important always to use a diagnostic in the way that it has been designed to be used, said Elizabeth Talbot, New Hampshires deputy state epidemiologist. We simply dont know how [the tests] will perform in persons who are asymptomatic.

Perhaps the highest-profile example of the problem occurred in Ohio this month, when Gov. Mike DeWine had no symptoms and tested positive for COVID-19 with Quidels antigen test. Within hours, the Republican governors diagnosis was reversed after he got a PCR test.

People should not take away from my experience that testing is not reliable or doesnt work, DeWine said on CNN after his false-positive diagnosis. The antigen tests are fairly new, he said. Were going to be very careful in how we use it.

The bigger problem is false-negative results, which show someone isnt infected when they actually are. BDs false-negative rate  how often a test incorrectly says someone isnt infected  is about 15%; Quidels is 3%.

Quidel and BD say their tests are intended to be used for people within the first five days of showing symptoms. A spokesperson for BD said its test should not be used on asymptomatic individuals. Quidel through a spokesperson deferred to FDA guidelines, which allow asymptomatic testing in certain scenarios.

For routine surveillance, this is a great tool and these are our best tools that we have available, said Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, on a July call with nursing home officials, according to a recording obtained by Kaiser Health News. Seema Verma, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, on the call referred to the effort as a turning point in the fight against the virus.

A month after the initial announcement, the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act to bump its contracts with the two companies to the front of the line and expedite shipments. BD will send roughly 11,000 devices and 3.75 million tests to nursing homes; Quidel and HHS declined to answer questions about its volume.

As states and the federal government move to mandate COVID testing inside nursing homes, whose patients are deemed highly vulnerable to infection and severe complications, several industry officials have said they hoped to use the tests on asymptomatic people. But many states restrict the use of antigen tests or still require lab-based testing because of accuracy concerns.

If a person with a negative test result has to default to getting a more accurate PCR test, then we simply have just added time and cost, Talbot said. Thats a problem.

Officials said the antigen test announcement caught them by surprise, underscoring the administrations chaotic testing strategy. Separate from the federal effort, 10 states have banded together through the Rockefeller Foundation to secure 5 million tests from the two companies in hopes of curbing the viruss spread this fall.

After nursing homes receive an initial batch of tests  each facility gets between 150 and 900  they would have to buy future supplies. Medicare will cover the costs of diagnostic tests but not expenses for routine surveillance.

I just have a lot of skepticism, said Brendan Williams, president of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes and assisted living facilities in the state. Basically youre giving some lousy tests for nursing homes and youre making them pay for them. I dont see that as a win; I see that as a risk.

Public health experts have become increasingly vocal that frequent rapid testing is the best tool for stopping the virus  which has killed more than 174,000 Americans including tens of thousands in nursing care  rather than relying on more accurate lab-based tests that have been plagued by delays and shortages. In a call this month with the industry, Verma estimated that half of the countrys nursing homes have experienced cases.

I dont see an avenue where these will not help to stop transmission chains, and I dont see another option on the table for us, said Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a proponent of rapid tests. It is what we need to be doing right now.

This is better for the folks in our buildings, without a doubt, added Jason Belden, director of emergency preparedness and physical plant services for the California Association of Health Facilities.

In theory, antigen tests can serve dual purposes  diagnosing a person with a suspected infection or screening a group of people to more quickly identify sick individuals. The tests by Quidel and BD, under their FDA authorizations, can be used on certain asymptomatic individuals, including those suspected of having COVID-19 after exposure to an infected person. The companies would need additional FDA authorization to screen any asymptomatic person regardless of whether theyre suspected of being sick, according to agency guidelines.

The CDC has suggested antigen tests could be useful in high-risk settings if performed repeatedly. It said there was limited data to guide using them to screen asymptomatic people.

Nonetheless, HHS recommends universal screening of nursing home residents at least once and regular screening of staff regardless of symptoms, said agency spokesperson Mia Heck, citing the fact that COVID-19 viral loads are similar between patients with and without symptoms. Only one test in the U.S. is authorized for asymptomatic individuals, she said, referring to a PCR test from LabCorp, yet the overwhelming majority of testing is being done on asymptomatic individuals.

If the world were ideal wed say, Oh, we want the more accurate test. But the more accurate test takes forever to get the results back, said Peter Van Runkle, executive director of the Ohio Health Care Association, which represents the states nursing homes.

All targeted nursing homes will receive tests by the end of September, according to federal officials, who recently announced that facilities in states with a positivity rate of at least 5% must test staff each week.

I dont see this as a federal strategy so much as a stopgap method to bring a little relief to nursing homes, said Katie Smith Sloan, president of LeadingAge, which represents nonprofit nursing homes. Its really tragic that we are where we are right now.

Boosted by $71 million in federal funds for Quidel and $24.3 million for BD, Quidel plans to produce 1.8 million tests weekly by September; BD will produce similar volumes by October.

The situation is much too urgent to wait a few months so we can put bows and lipstick on the program. So were going to build this plane a little bit while were flying it, Giroir told nursing homes in July. Just work with us. We want to get you what you need. And then in September, October you can get what you want.

States take different approaches in deploying antigen tests in nursing homes; in at least seven  including California, Illinois and Maryland  officials say PCR tests should still be used to confirm results or to screen patients without symptoms. In Massachusetts, nursing homes must use PCR tests to meet surveillance requirements.

In Maryland, our goal is to screen out staff who are positive as quickly as possible, particularly asymptomatic folks, said Dennis Schrader, chief operating officer of the health department.

Maryland nursing homes can use antigen tests for weekly staff testing if there isnt an outbreak. But if at least one person tests positive for the coronavirus, all staff and residents must be tested with PCR tests.
In this illustration the photo of the medical syringe is seen with the Italy flag in the background in Rome, Italy, on August 23, 2020.

Italy kicked off human trials of a potential COVID-19 vaccine on Monday, joining a global effort to develop a response to the virus which has shown signs of resurging in Europe.

Rome's Lazzaro Spallanzani institute, a hospital specializing in infectious diseases will conduct trials on 90 volunteers over the coming weeks, with the hope a vaccine may be available by spring of next year.

Francesco Vaia, health director of the Spallanzani hospital, told Reuters the first patient will be monitored for four hours before being allowed to go home where he will be kept under observation for 12 weeks.

"We will see if it produces any side effects and if it produces neutralizing antibodies," Vaia said, adding the second phase of testing will take place in countries with higher infection rates, like Mexico and Brazil.

"If we are able to be fast, we will have the first shots on the market next spring," Vaia added.

The potential vaccine, called GRAd-COV2, was developed by ReiThera, a company based in Rome. The Lazio region, around the Italian capital, said in a statement early trials, including on animals, had delivered positive results.

Potential vaccines are undergoing trials in a number of different countries including India, Britain, Russia and China, as scientists have raced to unpick the secrets of a virus that emerged less than a year ago.

"Our country's minds and research are at the service of the global challenge to defeat COVID," Health Minister Roberto Speranza wrote on Facebook announcing the start of the trial.

Italy, one of Europe's worst-hit countries with more than 35,000 deaths, saw the epidemic peak between March and April before the outbreak appeared to be on the retreat. But it has since seen a surge in new cases with more than 1,000 recorded on both Saturday and Sunday.

Other countries in Europe have seen even bigger jumps as tight restrictions and social distancing measures imposed earlier in the year have been eased.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney blasted Postmaster General Louis DeJoy at a hearing Monday where she confronted him with documents provided by a whistleblower that confirmed nationwide-slowdowns in mail delivery.

Maloney, early in the second appearance in Congress for DeJoy in recent days, blasted him for an 'astonishing' 8.1 percent drop in delivery times for first-class mail.

The New York Democrat said documents provided by a whistle-blower  and not by the Postal Service in response to a request  showed a slow-down in marketing mail delivery times by 8.42 per cent.

'So Mr. DeJoy, you and your aides have repeated downplayed these delays. But this is just a disaster for the people who need their mail. Dont you agree?' she asked him.

She also hammered him for not turning over the document.

He said staff had responded to document requests, and said delivery times had improved. 'In fact were seeing a big recovery this week,' he said.

DeJoy is warning that voters should request mail-in ballots at least 15 days before the Nov. 3 election to ensure they have enough time to receive their ballot, complete it and mail it back to elections officials on time.

Acknowledging an expected surge in mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic, DeJoy says voters should mail back their ballots at least seven days prior to the election. In prepared testimony Monday before the House Oversight Committee, DeJoy said the advice on mail-in ballots is similar to previous years, but is even more important this year to ensure that ballots will be delivered on time and counted -- even as volumes of mail-in ballots are expected to spike to record levels across the country.

His advice 'should in no way be misconstrued to imply that we lack confidence in our ability to deliver those ballots, DeJoy told the House panel in prepared remarks obtained by The Associated Press. 'We can, and will, handle the volume of Election Mail we receive.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy elbow bumps with Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the chair of the Oversight Committee, before a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the Postal Service on Capitol Hill, Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Washington

The pre-election warning 'has nothing to do with recent operational initiatives or concerns about delayed mail, DeJoy said, and is merely intended to help ensure that ballots will be delivered on time and counted.

'While we will do whatever we can to deliver ballots even when they are mailed at the last second, it should also be obvious to fair-minded election officials that urging voters to mail back their ballot at least a week before the deadline is a simple and straightforward step to ensure that ballots are delivered on time and, most importantly, counted under state law, he said.

During curtailed remarks at the start of the hearing, he said: 'I encourage all Americans who choose to vote by mail to request their ballots early and to vote early as a common-sense best practice.'

DeJoys comments came as the oversight panel opened a hearing on operational changes at the Postal Service that have resulted in mail delays across the country.

At the start of Monday's hearing, Maloney brought up reports of rotting mail and rodent infestation at postal facilities reported by the Los Angeles times  as well as DeJoy's prior status as a top campaign contributor to President Trump.

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is seated to testify as a nameplates for Dejoy and that of fellow witness USPS Board of Governors President Robert Duncan are placed atop the witness table during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on slowdowns at the Postal Service ahead of the November elections on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., August 24, 2020

She blasted Trump for having installed 'someone as postmaster general after he donates millions of dollars to your campaign' who then pushed through changes to the postal service without 'adequate analysis. '

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) referenced 'rotten patronage systems' in the past that characterized the Postal Service.

'What leader would take steps to freeze overtime for a workforce literally risking its life every day to deliver mail to the people of this nation,' Connolly said.

'Has recklessly cut hours and delayed delivery times in the pursuit of unsupported operational efficiencies,' Connolly added.

He told the witness sarcastically: 'In a very brief time, congratulations Mr. DeJoy. An esteemed institution that now is in doubt in the American public's mind.'

But Republican Jody Hice of Georgia blasted the Democratic majority for holding its hearing two days after the House voted on a $25 billion postal service bill.

'I think this is absolutely disgusting,' he said.

'I don't ever recall having a vote to so-called fix something and then have the hearing afterwards. This is unprecedented,' he said, calling it 'political malpractice.'

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy arrives to testify before a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the Postal Service on Capitol Hill, Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Washington. (Tom Brenner/Pool via AP)

The House approved legislation Saturday to reverse the changes and send $25 billion to shore up the agency ahead of the November election, when a surge in mail-in ballots is expected.

DeJoy testified Friday in the Senate that his 'No. 1 priority' is to ensure election mail arrives on time.

Still, the postmaster general, a political ally of President Donald Trump, said he would not restore the cuts to mailboxes and sorting equipment that have already been made. He could not provide senators with a plan for handling the ballot crush for the election.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the chair of the Oversight Committee and author of the House bill, said DeJoy was using the Postal Service's longstanding fiscal problems as an excuse 'to justify sweeping and damaging changes to Postal Service operations. And we have all seen the results: national headlines about delays of days and weeks, veterans desperately waiting for their medications, sorting machines being ripped out and thrown in dumpsters.'

Maloneys committee on Saturday released internal Postal Service documents warning about steep declines and delays in a range of mail services since early July, shortly after DeJoy took the helm. Delays have occurred in first-class and marketing mail, periodicals and Priority Mail, the agency says in an Aug. 12 briefing prepared by Postal Service staff for DeJoy.

'These new documents show that the delays we have all heard about are actually far worse than previously reported,'' Maloney said.

DeJoy acknowledged at the Senate hearing there has been a 'dip' in service, but disputed reports of widespread problems.

In a statement Sunday, the Postal Service said it greatly appreciates House efforts to assist the agency, but remains concerned that some of the bill's requirements, 'while well meaning, will constrain the ability of the Postal Service to make operational changes that will improve efficiency, reduce costs and ultimately improve service to the American people.''

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled lawmakers to Washington for a rare Saturday session over objections from Republicans, who dismissed it as a stunt. Trump urged a no vote, railing on Twitter against mail-in ballots expected to surge in the COVID-19 crisis. He has said he wants to block extra funds to the Postal Service.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows dismissed the bill as 'going nowhere,' while Pelosi urged the GOP-controlled Senate to act quickly. 'The public is demanding action on this now,' Pelosi said Sunday. 'I cant see how the Senate can avoid it unless they do so to their peril.'

Meadows called the House bill a 'political statement,' stressing that Trump would consider additional money only as part of a broader coronavirus relief package.

'That bill was not a serious bill,' Meadows said. 'And my conversations with a lot of the Democrats on Capitol Hill ... is, if you want to be serious about it, this president is willing to put forth money and reforms.'

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has been eyeing a $10 billion postal rescue as part of the next COVID-19 relief package, but said Trump 'has already made it clear he will not sign the speakers partisan stunt into law.''

'The Senate will absolutely not pass stand-alone legislation for the Postal Service while American families continue to go without more relief'' from the coronavirus crisis, McConnell said.

Pelosi called White House proposals to deal with the pandemic 'bare leaves,' saying they dont address children facing food insecurity, people grappling with evictions, coronavirus testing and treatment or money for state and local governments.

Still, there were signs of bipartisan support for the Postal Service, one of the most popular government agencies with an approval rating above 90%.

Twenty-six House Republicans broke with Trump and GOP leaders to back the House bill, which passed 257-150.

A bill co-sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would provide the Postal Service with up to $25 billion to cover revenue losses or operational expenses resulting from COVID-19. The bill has at least 22 co-sponsors, including at least nine Republicans. Three co-sponsors - Collins, Montana's Steve Daines and Colorado's Cory Gardner - are among the GOP's most vulnerable incumbents in the fall election.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Sunday he had secured agreement with a new election committee created by the Postal Services Board of Governors to issue a report in two weeks on the services plans to address an expected surge of mail-in ballots. Under the agreement with the committees Democratic chairman, Lee Moak, the committee would also provide weekly briefings for top Senate Democrats.

Robin Schriefer and Sue King rally in support of the U.S. Postal Service outside the post office in New Braunfels, Texas on Saturday, Aug. 22, 2020. The event was one of many Save the Post Office Saturday protests held across the country. (Mikala Compton /Herald-Zeitung via AP)

A man mails a letter on Saturday, August 22, 2020 in Whitehall, Ohio. Postal workers and supporters across central Ohio gathered at Post Offices across the region to protest actions by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy including the removal of sorting machines which has led to mail delivery delays in some states. Critics of these policies fear they will create delays with absentee and mail-in ballots during the upcoming general election. (Joshua A. Bickel/The Columbus Dispatch via AP)

People gather during the 'Save the Post Office' rally Saturday, Aug. 22, 2020, in Salt Lake City. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is declaring it's his 'sacred duty' to ensure election mail delivery this fall. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
GENEVA: The Syrian Constitutional Committee, which began its first session in nine months in Geneva on Monday as part of efforts to find a political solution to end Syrias war, was swiftly put on hold" after three members tested positive for COVID-19, the United Nations said.

Hours earlier, U.S. Syria envoy James Jeffrey told reporters that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had agreed under some Russian pressure" to take part in the week-long talks.

The session, organised by U.N. Special Envoy Geir Pedersen, is aimed at making make progress in drafting a new Syrian charter to pave the way for U.N.-sponsored elections, in line with a stalled 2015 U.N. Security Council resolution.

The office of U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen did not identify which three of the 45 members of the so-called small body of the Constitutional Committee were infected. One third is nominated by the Syrian government, one third by the opposition, and one third by civil society.

Committee members were tested before they travelled to Geneva, and they were tested again on arrival, and the wearing of masks and strict social distancing measures were in place when they met at the Palais des Nations," the statement said.

Following a constructive first meeting, the Third Session of the Constitutional Committee is currently on hold. The Office of the Special Envoy will make a further announcement in due course," it said, adding that Swiss authorities had been informed and contact-tracing was under way.

Jeffrey said that the latest U.S. sanctions, under the Caesar Act passed by Congress, were having a serious political and psychological impact" on Assad and his inner circle.

So we are going after them in any way we can and after their international holdings, any way that they or their banks touch dollars, they are in trouble," he said.

But Jeffrey also said, referring to a province in rebel-held northwestern Syria: I have seen no indication that the Assad regime has given up its dream of a military victory beginning with Idlib."

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
(Newser)  A hospital in Germany has contradicted Russian doctors who claimed there was no sign opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned. Berlin's Charite hospital, which began treating the 44-year-old on Saturday, says there are signs he was poisoned, the BBC reports. In a statement, the hospital said that while the exact substance involved has not been determined, "clinical evidence suggests an intoxication through a substance belonging to the group of cholinesterase inhibitors." NPR describes those inhibitors as ones that interfere with the body's ability to break down a key neurotransmitter. Navalny, who is still in a medically induced coma, is being treated with an antidote for cholinesterase inhibitors.

story continues below

After Navalny became seriously ill on a flight Thursday, aides said they believed his tea had been poisoned; doctors who treated Navalny before he was flown to Germany claimed he suffered a "metabolic collapse," possibly from low blood sugar. Biological counter-terrorism expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon tells the Guardian that the tests suggest Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent and calls his cholinesterase levels an important "jigsaw piece in the puzzle." Navalny "was attacked with some sort of chemical, in the same way as Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, and a host of others," he says. Doctors in Germany say Navalny is expected to survive, CNN reports. "His state of health is serious, but there is currently no acute danger to his life," their statement said. (Germany says Navalny is being protected by police.)
Panaji:

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar has partially credited lotus from Goas famous Carambolim lake for his first-ever victory from Panaji in the 1994 Assembly polls.

There is importance to Carambolim lake. When I was contesting for the first time from Panaji...on the day of election, at around 4.30 in the morning, a group of workers came to Carambolim lake (which is generally filled with lotus which is also BJPs poll symbol).

They jumped in the lake and returned with sacks full of lotus. Then when the polling was on, they gave lotus to voters before they went to exercise their franchise. I feel I got at least 500 additional votes because of this, he added.

Parrikar was on Friday addressing Vijay Sankalp rally at Cumbharjua constituency, which also houses the famous Carambolim lake.

The IIT graduate-turned-politician was elected MLA from Panaji in 1994 and since then he has won from the seat multiple times. In late 2014, the 61-year-old BJP leader was inducted into the Union Cabinet and given defence portfolio. He is currently a Rajya Sabha member from Uttar Pradesh.

Parrikar, a former Chief Minister, expressed confidence that BJP will win more than 26 seats (out of 40) when Goa Assembly polls are held nearly next year.

Admitting that the BJP-led State Government failed to keep its promise of providing sizeable employment, Parrikar blamed it on financial crisis arising out of the closure of mining industry.

We fulfilled all promises (made in BJP manifesto) but could not do the same on employment generation front. But things are now picking up on this front too.

The Goa Government has generated 24,000 jobs in different industries. The Centre, on the other hand, has given orders to Goa Shipyard Ltd which will create 10,000 jobs. In the next two to three years, a total of 50,000 jobs would be created, he added.

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Prof. Hamadi Iddi Boga, the Principal Secretary of the State Department for Agricultural Research in the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries, contracted coronavirus last month and shared his experience on Facebook on August, 13.

THE MUSINGS OF A COVID TESTED SCIENTIST (long post)

Prof. Hamadi Boga, Principal Secretary, State Department of Crops Development and Agricultural Research also a Senior Microbiologist/Microbial Ecologist.

Dear Family, Friends, Neighbors, fellow Kenyans.

Here I am. Still alive. I am doing okay, largely. I have finished self-isolating at home after 32 days since I first experienced COVID 19 symptoms. I did the retest for COVID-19 and thank God came out negative. The test procedure looks scarier than it really feels? Most people would cringe at the thought of taking that test. For me the nose swab was easier than the throat swab. The technician who took my swab said that the throat swab is the riskier one even for the one swabbing. One could easily puke. Here are my lessons and observations out of this COVID-19 experience.

Pre Test

1. It began with serious chills that go all the way to the bone marrow. I know it was July but that is not what I am talking about. These chills were abnormal, way way deeper than the usual July experience.

2. Then I had the achesall over.especially muscles (calves, thigh and arms).

3. Then the cough that was not productive and that persists.and a tightness or numbness around the chest at the back and at the front. I had no flu. Just this cough that irritated and persisted.

4. Nausea and intense urge to puke every time I coughed. This was scary.

5. The headaches and fever I was primed to expect were no show. Actually in all temperature checks at entrances to key buildings, I was recorded to have a temperature of 35 to 36.5oC. Only once did I have a low-grade fever (37.5 oC) when tested at the hospital.

6. I could not smell anything. Nothing. Not food. Not perfume. Nothing.

7. The taste buds went out of the window. I was basically eating grass.

8. The area around the kidneys or abdomen pained. It went on and off.

9. I was not dizzy but I would sayI was not sure I was really seeing properly. So I would take off my glasses just to be sure that the mist was not interfering with my vision.

10. I was also very tired and would sleep and sleepof course interrupted by this irritating cough and the fear of the unknown that lay ahead.

11. My voice was hoarse. Most of my friends who called were concerned my voice was strange.

12. I got breathless just from talking in a zoom meeting.

The Test

On day four I started thinking, should I be tested just to rule COVID-19 out or in. I called my physician and picked a referral letter to go to the tents at Nairobi hospital, where sampling took 5 minutes but administrative processes to pay the KES.10,000.00 fee took 2 hours. Something between my Insurance Company and the billing at the Nairobi hospital just does not work.

As a scientist, my mind wanders and I am asking myselfand why should the simple PCR test cost KES10,000.00? You see, the Polymerase Chain Reaction Test (PCR) is an old technology that has been here since 1982 when Harry Mullis won the Nobel prize for chemistry for inventing PCR. I think the laboratories have found a cash cow cashing in on our ignorance, fear and desperation. Because of these high costs, testing will be the limiting factor in our fight against COVID-19.

When I told my wife that I had gone for the test, she was terrified that the men and women in PPEs would come and cart the family away. How could I do that? I replied that it would be good as we would know the reality and get early treatment if we had all been exposed. I sense there is a lot of fear out there for testing and my wife was no exception. If we do not address the fear component most people will keep hiding and infecting others. Most people who have the symptoms just avoid hospital, hoping to wait things out. Others go into hiding. This disease can make you die in hiding if it causes an acute infection and you are not one of those lucky asymptomatic victims.

After the Test

I waited for the results for 48hand they came by a phone call. You are COVID 19 positive. Self-isolate for 14 days. Separate yourself from your family. Let the family come for testing tomorrow. They thought I was being weird. If there are any issues please call us. Any questions? Confusion.

I was sure the lady across the phone was doing her best, but she really was not sure what to tell me or what to do beyond announcing the positive results. I called my physician for further details. We remained in regular touch throughout the isolation to clarify situation and review scenarios.

Luckily my family members were all negative. Immediately I had started feeling sick, I had instructed them to avoid getting too close to me and I started wearing a mask in the house. They thought I was being weird until the verdict came. They were there to take care of me as I self-isolated. Thank God almighty for that.

Decision to Check into an Isolation Centre

So I began the self-isolation; day 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. I am largely struggling with a cough and a desire to vomit. I also feel giddy especially when prostrating in prayers. I asked my physician to check me in. I was worried about oxygen levels.

It was also not clear to me if, in the event that things really got serious how I would get myself anywhere at night with the curfew. I was sure if an ambulance showed up at my apartment, chaos would break loose. My neighbors would probably shout Boga must go. We feared. I decided to use private means to get me to the isolation centre. I am not sure how the average families get themselves into these isolations centres when the going gets tough. I checked into an isolation centre.

My blood pressure was high (maybe due to anxiety), the blood oxygen levels were manageable (94%) and the cough was pressing on. I had a low-grade fever. I learnt with trepidation that my insurance or any insurance for that matter does not cover COVID 19 isolation so I had to pay a deposit of KES.100,000.00 for admission which I did hurriedly via Mpesa. When push comes to shove, you do not think twice about such earthly things. Survival becomes the primary goal.

After 48 hours of monitoring and.

1. Regular sips of Dawa (ginger, lemon, honey)

2. Paracetamol every 8 h

3. Cough syrup (Bro Zedex) every 8 h

4. Glemont L (antihistamine) daily tablet

5. vitamin C tablet 100 mg per day

This is all I was given at the Isolation Centre. It was not for treatment of COVID 19, more for management of symptoms. I get amazed at this: the actual management is cheap when the symptoms are mild. I guess that is why, for most cases, management can be done at home. Most of the items can be obtained over the counter at minimal costs.

I realize that the testing and the ceremonies around isolation, PPES and quarantine is what will hamper our ability to manage this beast. I was checked out after 2 days to continue with home quarantine. I carried my medicines with me. It was looking good. My voice had improved. I was looking more energetic. I greeted people with vigor. There is light after darkness.

Lessons learnt and the opportunities to win the war

I have learnt some lessons along the way and done some reflections.

1. This beast is now in our communities. The social/physical distancing is the only tool available for the mass market. We can all afford this. The poor people cannot afford the testing or the quarantine and the ceremonies that go with that. Let us make social distancing a religion. It should come from bottom up. It should be everyones responsibility to understand and manage the disease for ourselves and our communities, whatever we do and wherever we live. We have to change and tame our instincts to socialize casually. We need to activate our caring genes so that we project care by preventing the spread of COVID 19 and we show our humanity that way. Should this be the single most important thing that we should anchor any behavior change communication? Food for thought

2. I believe testing should be for people really in distress and after key symptoms are confirmed positive. Those who have come into contact with positive persons and are not showing any infection should self-isolate and self-monitor with proper guidance and regular reports submitted to a health worker or central database so that their situation can be tracked centrally and data analyzed by epidemiologists and infectious disease experts. Not collecting information limits us from mining data from positive cases that would be helpful in managing the pandemic as it evolves. Testing everyone is expensive and the staff and facilities are overstretched and the more information we mine from 1 positive case the better for designing our management system. The PCR kits are expensive here in Kenya. We will go broke testing 47 million Kenyans.

3. Efforts should go into educating families on how to self-isolate and how to support those in self-isolation. This requires education and discipline. Inahitaji ujirani mwema and reawakening the spirit of being each others keeper. This thing will be defeated bottom up. Formal systems will be overrun and everyone has to view themselves as part of the war against COVID 19. In the end change in community behavior is what will help us manage this Public Health challenge. Our communication at all levels should aim to make that mother, father, youth and that community/religious leader take ownership of the COVID-19 challenge. We cannot afford to have misleading messages laced with conspiracy theories.

I have read many snide remarks from talented critics with a gift for writing who can better use their talents to understand and build community resilience, instead they are spreading lies, misinformation, distortion and cynicism. To what end? There are many conspiracy theories being peddled out there. All of them do not matter at this moment. Let us use our hands, words, deeds and imagination to stop the spread of COVID 19 and create safe communities. The spread is within the communities. The interventions must be at the community level. The youth in the maskanis, blogs and WhatsApp groups are consumed by skepticism and conspiracy theories. We should scale and frame our communication at this phase of the pandemic and trickle it down to the community influencers so that we can address the negative narrative.

Now thinking as a scientist, there is to accelerate investment in scientific capabilities at three levels

a) People who understand viruses in KEMRI and in the Universities (scientists and technicians). Each region should have a serious Laboratory of CDC level. No need for new buildings. Just upgrading those which are there, and ensuring that they have the right people, equipment and reagents;

b) Let us incentivize synthetic biology startups to set up small biotech companies to manufacture the primers and reagents required for diagnostics and research. The COVID-19 Africa challenge is just about to unravel. The logistics of shipping reagents from abroad will just work against us. We should use the crisis to also emerge as a Biotech manufacturing hub.

Most University laboratories are now closed. MSc and PhD students have suspended their work.WHY? This is the time to unleash all the science we have in this great nation to this war. This is the time to get scientists back into the laboratories to help in surveillance, diagnosis, modeling and scenario building that will get the country ahead of this beast. How else do we grow if not through our pain? As we test, trace, isolate and report, let there also emerge some serious scientific work and discourse in the background to contribute to the body of knowledge required to manage this beast. No one will do our science for us but ourselves.

Today is day 32. Yesterday I had some courage to venture back into the office. Some symptoms still linger, but they are manageable. Sometimes my throat dries up and the voice gets hoarse again, I break into a sweat thinking maybe the beast is still around. Or is it my imagination playing tricks on me. Wahenga walisema, ukiumwa na nyoka, utakimbia hata kambaa. I tested negative on 26th of July. As I venture out, I know I have to continue beingmore cautious to avoid re-infection, have less physical meetings, hand sanitize properly, avoid touching may face and eyes less (very hard) and making sure that I wear my mask properly and people around me wear masks. Please do the same so that you can protect yourself, your family and your communities. The cheese has moved. Let us adapt. Let us all pray for God to protect all of us.
For Democrats, the 2020 election represents a first  and possibly a last.

The Democratic Party's presidential and vice presidential candidates have been either a woman or a person of color for the last 4 election cycles, which suggests the top of the ticket will never again be occupied exclusively by white men, an expert told Yahoo Finance recently.

Last week, California Senator Kamala Harris made history when she officially became the partys vice presidential nominee, and the first Black or Asian American woman on a major presidential ticket. In her speech, Harris acknowledged the significance of the nomination, and paid tribute to the women and people of color who helped carve the path for her.

Her candidacy  which follows 8 years of Barack Obama and the 2016 nomination of Hillary Clinton  is likely to become the new normal, an academic explained. Moving forward, presidential tickets will look very similar to this one.

We know that the norms are actually changing and theyre changing very quickly, Sparsha Saha, Harvard University Department of Government Lecturer told Yahoo Finances On the Move last Friday.

I don't know if we're ever going to see a Democratic ticket that's two white men ever again, she added.

From martyr to go-getter

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrives to speak during her California primary night rally held in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., June 7, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Saha recently conducted research examining voter bias when it comes to ambitious women, and found most people actually do not mind seeing female candidates in office. The research found voters did not treat ambitious women differently than they did ambitious men.

In the last 10 years, bias against a potential female president has halved amongst everyone in the U.S., Saha said. Whats left to change are the party gatekeepers the old men who kind of like to hold the door.

Saha and her colleague Anna Catalona ,a professor at the University of Bath, were inspired to take on this research after studying Clintons failed 2016 presidential bid.

She was kind of a martyr, Saha told Yahoo Finance. We all were kind of able to see the battles and the obstacles that women in politics face.

But Saha is optimistic that voters are changing, and believes they will want to see more ambitious women in politics. The first step is the newly nominated Harris.

Story continues

Voters do want to see Kamala the go-getter, she said. They want to see Kamala being the one whos going to give it to the other side.

Valentina Caval is a producer at Yahoo Finance.



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MOSCOW/FRANKFURT: Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who fell gravely ill on Thursday after what his allies believe was a poisoning, will survive, the founder of the activist group that sent the air ambulance to fly him to Germany, told a newspaper.

Navalny will survive poison attack, but be incapacitated for months as a politician," Jaka Bizilj, founder of the Cinema for Peace Foundation, told mass tabloid Bild.

Navalny, a long-time opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin and campaigner against corruption, was flown on Saturday for treatment in Germany.

Navalny, 44, was in an induced coma when he was evacuated from the Siberian city of Omsk, but there has been no word yet from the Charite hospital in Berlin on his condition.

If he gets through this unharmed, which we all hope, then hell certainly be out of the political arena for at least one, two months," Bizilj was quoted as saying.

He said that Navalny had coped well with the flight, but added this did not change his worrying overall situation".

Navalnys team had been due to host a briefing via YouTube on Sunday evening to discuss everything we know so far about Alexeis poisoning," but subsequently cancelled it saying they were not ready, press secretary Kira Yarmysh and campaign HQ head Leonid Volkov wrote on Twitter.

Navalny was under intense police surveillance in preceding days, a Russian tabloid newspaper cited law enforcement sources as saying.

Before he collapsed on a flight during a trip to Siberia Navalny was followed by plainclothes FSB officers and his movements were closely monitored via CCTV, the report in the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said.

Citing security service sources, the paper described the timeline of his trip before he fell ill down to the number of rooms his team booked in a local hotel and the fact that Navalny chose not to sleep in the room booked under his name.

SURVEILLANCE

An apartment rented for him by one of his supporters was discovered by police surveillance, the paper reported, when a sushi takeaway was ordered to the address by one of Navalnys supporters.

The scale of the surveillance does not surprise me at all, we were perfectly aware of it before," Yarmysh wrote on Twitter.

What is surprising, however, is that (security service sources) did not shy away from describing it."

In its report, the Moskovsky Komsomolets paper cited security sources as saying that their surveillance of Navalnys movements did not reveal any suspicious contacts that could be related to his illness.

Security services believe that if Navalny was poisoned, the incident took place either in the airport or on the plane, the newspaper wrote.

However the paper said they are still awaiting results of laboratory tests of samples taken by police from all the places Navalny and his team visited on their trip, including samples of the air.

Initial results are expected on Monday, with results from tests for radioactive material due later in the week, the paper said. It did not say whether or not these would be made public.

Doctors at the hospital in Omsk where Navalny was treated before his evacuation to Germany have said they do not believe he was poisoned. They diagnosed him with a metabolic disease that may have been caused by low blood sugar.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that it was still unclear what caused Navalny to fall ill. He had previously said that any poisoning would need to be confirmed by laboratory tests and that doctors were doing everything they could to help Navalny.

(Writing by Polina Ivanova and Christoph Steitz; Editing by Frances Kerry and Daniel Wallis)

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
At the invitation of the Minister of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, General of the Army Sergei Shoigu will pay a working visit to Baku, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijani Defense Ministry.

The visit will take place on August 25.
A police chief has insisted there was 'no indication' London teenager Nora Quoirin was abducted on the first day of an inquest into her death after she vanished from a resort in Malaysia.

The 15-year-old's disappearance sparked a ten-day search through dense rainforest involving helicopters, sniffer dogs and hundreds of volunteers.

But when her naked body was found by hikers beside a small stream about 1.6 miles from the resort police said foul play was not involved and closed the case.

They pointed to an autopsy claiming she had succumbed to intestinal bleeding from starvation and stress after spending a week in the rainforest.

Her heartbroken parents argued their daughter, who had learning difficulties, would never have wondered away alone and demanded an inquest.

The inquest into the death of London teenager Nora Quoirin opened today a year after her naked body was found in a jungle in Malaysia. She is pictured above in a family photo

Parents Meabh and Sebastien demanded an inquest after arguing their daughter would not have wandered off. They are pictured calling for their daughter with a megaphone last year

Local police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop was the first witness called to the inquest in Seremban today, held a year after she disappeared.

'There was no indication the victim was kidnapped,' he said.

'We did not receive any telephone calls - usually in this kind of case we will get a call to say the victim has been kidnapped and is in the hands of certain people, and they would demand a ransom.

'I believe the missing person actually climbed out of the window.'

When he first met the family, Mr Yusop said they were 'distraught' and that he 'assured the father we will use all our resources to find the missing girl'.

He told the court that he immediately ordered a search after being told she was missing on August 4 last year.

The voice of the girl's mother calling 'Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here' was played in court - a recording that was used in the search for the girl.

Police officers pictured leaving the court today. The local police chief was the first of 64 witnesses called to the inquest to give evidence

The 15-year-old's disappearance sparked a ten-day hunt through the rainforest involving helicopters, sniffer dogs and hundreds of volunteers

A second witness, resort owner Ahmed Bamadhaj, told the inquest that the latch of one of the windows in the bungalow where they were staying was broken.

Pictures of the two windows in the hotel room were shown to the court, including the one with a broken latch. There is no CCTV of the site.

The Dusun resort, based deep in the rainforest of Negeri Sembilan, consists of seven self-catered bungalows with a maximum capacity of 20 adults.

As many as 64 witnesses are expected to be called to the court including the hikers that found her body, a British forensic expert, Nora's parents and police officers.

Opening proceedings today, Coroner Maimoonah Aid said: 'We are here to answer a few questions - who is the dead person, when and how she died and whether anyone was responsible.'

Maimoonah visited the Dusun and the place where the body was found earlier this month in a trip the Quoirin family's lawyer described as 'quite thorough'.

The inquest will be calling 64 witnesses to the courthouse, pictured, in Seremban

A map shows the Dusun Resort near Seremban in Malaysia where Nora disappeared last year

Ahead of the inquest, the teenager's parents Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin described it as 'a crucial element in the fight for truth and justice for Nora'.

'We hope that all avenues surrounding Nora's disappearance will be fully explored and not just the theory which the police has always favoured,' they said.

They were not present at the inquest because of the coronavirus pandemic but will be interviewed by the coroner via video-link.

Nora disappeared from the resort on August 4 last year.

Her parents have previously said their daughter could not have wandered off on her own as she had poor motor skills and needed help to walk. They also said that her mental age was about five or six years old.

A police officer searches for Nora in August last year following her disappearance

In a statement issued by the Lucie Blackman Trust, a charity which helps British families in crisis overseas, they said in January: 'It is crucial to understand how Nora came to be found where she was.

'As a vulnerable child, with significant physical and mental challenges, we strongly refute any conclusion that Nora was alone for the entire duration of her disappearance.

'We have repeatedly asked the police to clarify answers to our questions in this regard - and we have been repeatedly ignored.'
Zakir Naik wants Indian Muslims to migrate to Kerala, a state he mastered in radicalising

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: Controversial Islamic preacher, Dr. Zakir Naik is back in the news and this time it is for the advise he has been offering Indian Muslims.

He says that Indian Muslims cannot practice their faith, they should do Hijira. If you have the means to go to a Muslim majority country that would be the best he said while adding that he did expect that all Indian Muslims would leave the country.

He further said that those Muslims who could not move out of India should go to states which are lenient towards Muslims. The best state I can think of for Muslims is Kerala adding that all the three major religions-Hindus, Muslims and Christians each accounted for about one-third of the population of Kerala.

Zakir Naik tried to cross over to Maldives but was not allowed

The people of Kerala are not communal in nature. The BJP government does not have much hold on Kerala. So the best option if you want to do Hijira to another state, I would say go to Kerala, he also said.

Naik mentioning Kerala is interesting, considering the big role he has played in the state when it comes to radicalisation. The fugitive preacher who is in Malaysia has found a mention several times in the files of the National Investigation Agency.

Nashidul Hamzafar, the 26 year old management student from Kerala's Wayanad was in September 2018 arrested by the NIA after he became one of the first ISIS recruits to be deported from Afghanistan.

During his interrogation, he detailed the role played by Islamic preachers such as Naik and what sort of an influence they had on him, which ultimately prompted him to join the ISIS.

Hamzafar said that he was not attracted to the ISIS ideology for long. I found them to be too brutal and the outfit only scared me, he says. My ambition was to pursue my education and find a good job in Dubai.

A lot changed when one of his friends, Shihas sent him an audio clip regarding the Islamic State. My perception towards the outfit changed. Then I began listening to audios of Zakir Naik, Noman Alikhan among others. Their speeches inspired me and my approach towards life changed.

Going by his statements, it becomes clear that the likes of Zakir Naik through his Islamic Research Foundation and the Kerala based Peace Educational Foundation have played a huge role in the radicalisation of youth in Kerala.

Naik has not only been quoted by several terrorists as an inspiration, but his NGO has sown the seeds of poison in several states. One key state to be hit is Kerala, which already faces a mammoth problem of Islamic radicalisation. In addition to this, the state has also produced the most number of Islamic State terrorists.

In 2019, the raids by the NIA in various places in Kerala led to the seizure of Naik related literature. In the Kerala Islamic State case, his name has cropped in the past as well. The raids that were conducted in 2019 were related to the same case and the NIA had learnt that the members of this module were on the same social media group that the terrorists who undertook the Sri Lanka blasts were.

The NIA probes say that a majority of the 127 ISIS suspects who have been arrested have said that they were inspired by the speeches and ideology of Zakir Naik.

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Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 16:28 [IST]
Turkeys involvement in Libya has come a long way  from commercial diplomacy to proxy war and now institution-building. The new promise to build the Libyan army from scratch is what might set the Turks apart from many of the other foreign powers involved in the North African nations civil war. Future success in Libya, however, depends on Turkeys ability to find more powerful partners  especially Germany and the United States.

The state-owned Anadolu Agency reported on Aug. 17 that the defense ministers of Turkey and Qatar agreed to sign a deal with Libyas UN-backed, Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) to establish facilities  for military training and consultancy and send consultants and military personnel to Libya. Essentially, Turkey will build and run a military academy to train officers for the GNA, turning its militias into a standing army. Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) has provided training to GNA forces in the Turkish town of Isparta.

The new agreement represents a new chapter for Ankara. After Gaddafi, Turkeys involvement in the North African country focused on commercial diplomacy at first  securing lucrative contracts for Turkish firms and boosting bilateral trade. But when Libyas civil war entered a new phase in 2014, the North African country turned into a battleground for local factions that sometimes acted as proxies for foreign actors  not unlike Syria. The GNA found itself on the defensive against the Tobruk-based House of Representatives, whose Libyan National Army (LNA) is led by the controversial strongman Khalifa Hifter. A host of regional and international powers  Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Greece and Russia  back the LNA, while Qatar and Turkey support the GNA.

Ankaras big move in Libya came after it signed military cooperation and maritime boundary agreements with the GNA in December 2019. At the time, Hifters forces had reached the outskirts of Tripoli, but the TSK helped the GNA turn the tide. Now, GNA forces fight the LNA on a more equal footing  especially in the coastal town of Sirte  while Turkeys clout in Libya and the eastern Mediterranean grows.

In recent months, the Turkish air force has built something of an air bridge between Turkey and GNA-controlled areas  especially Al-Watiya air base in western Libya, which the GNA had recaptured from the LNA with TSK help in May. Yoruk Isik, an Istanbul-based geopolitical analyst who shares open-source information to track plane and ship movements in and around Turkey, told Al-Monitor via direct messages on WhatsApp and Twitter that the Turkish air force may have carried out 50 air bridge sorties to Libya in recent months.

Now, Turkey is going for institution-building in Libya. Various pro-government media outlets in Turkey claimed that the tripartite deal with Qatar and the GNA is similar to the TSKs support in forming and training Azerbaijans national army following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. From the early 1990s onward, the TSK built military training facilities and conducted joint exercises and training with the armed forces of Azerbaijan per NATO standards. Turkey also provided similar institutional and training support to Somalias internationally recognized federal government in Mogadishu as well as the Afghan national army. Following the Islamic State onslaught in 2014, limited, ad hoc training by the TSK helped to raise new units for the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq.

According to Isik, What makes Turkeys engagement [in Libya] superior to other countries is the institutional engagement. When we think about the soldiers trained in Isparta, we can say that there is a desire to build a deeper institutional relationship. What makes Libya different from Somalia, Isik added, is that Libya is actually a very rich country. Given Turkeys current situation, it is in no position to finance a national army [for Libya]. For that reason, it is very important for Libya to earn oil revenues again. This endeavor could work if Qatar finances the enterprise.

Of course, Turkeys Libyan venture faces several risks. The Turkish governments financial and economic woes are the most critical.

Though less tangible, time is another major constraint. While the Azerbaijani military has expanded in size and capabilities since independence, save for a few skirmishes against Armenian forces in recent years, it has not been battle-tested like the TSK. Somalia and Afghanistan, meanwhile, remain too divided for their national armies to prove their mettle. At any rate, when one considers how Turkeys own military transformation took decades of training with the worlds best militaries and capacity-building through its NATO membership, it will be a while  a decade or two  before the Turkish-Qatari initiative in Libya bears fruit. If, however, Turkey and Qatar could sustain that process, the pendulum could swing in the GNAs favor in the long term.

In the final analysis, the success of Turkey and Qatars recent move in Libya will depend on the political and diplomatic game  namely, their ability to bring new (and more powerful) partners into the fold. Two candidates stand out: the United States and Germany. Both powers seem concerned about Russias growing interest in Libya, and unlike Syria, neither Washington nor Berlin has taken an overt stand against Ankaras actions in Libya  despite the occasional jabs from Ankara.

It is worth remembering that Turkey became more directly involved in Libya to give the GNA breathing space. Turkish and Qatari leaders continue to emphasize that they support a political solution to the civil war in Libya. In a smart move on Aug. 20, the GNA called for a cease-fire in Sirte, a move that the Tobruk parliament reciprocated. Additional diplomatic overtures by Turkey and Qatar to the United States and Germany could force the LNA and its backers to come to the negotiating table and  who knows  maybe even bring the Libyan civil war to a speedier end.
Washington, Aug 24 : US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo kicked off his four-country trip starting on Sunday, the US State Department said in a statement.

Pompeo will travel to Israel, Sudan, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from August 23 to 28, State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said in a statement, Xinhua news agency reported.

Pompeo's first stop is Israel, where he will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on regional security issues and "establishing and deepening Israel's relationships in the region," according to the statement.

During his stay in Sudan, Pompeo will meet with Sudanese leaders to "discuss continued US support for the civilian-led transitional government and express support for deepening the Sudan-Israel relationship." The top US diplomat will then travel to Bahrain and the UAE.

Pompeo's visit comes after Israel and the UAE agreed to the full normalization of relations earlier this month, which was brokered by the United States.

According to the deal, Israel agrees to suspend its plan to annex parts of the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank.

US President Donald Trump, who first touted the deal on Twitter, said earlier that the two sides would have an "official" signing ceremony at the White House in the next few weeks.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said last week that the peace deal between the UAE and Israel "is a stab in the Palestinians' back." Abbas called on all Arab countries to abide by the Arab Peace Initiative, launched in 2002, which stipulates that the Arabs can only normalize relations with Israel after the Palestinian issue is resolved.
With a bumper crop and good export prices, Vietnams rice export volume and turnover have exceeded Thailands, making the former the second largest exporter amid the Covid-19 crisis.

While the exports of many farm produce items have fallen dramatically because of the epidemic, exports of rice have been high.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) reported that in the first seven months of the year, Vietnam exported 3.9 million tons, earning $1.9 billion. Though the export volume decreased by 1.4 percent, export turnover increased by 10.9 percent compared with the same period last year.

In the first half of 2020, China imported 458,000 tons of rice, an increase of 88.9 percent.

The second biggest importer has been the Philippines which consumed 1.4 million tons worth $634.3 million in H1, up by 13.3 percent in volume and 30.5 percent in value.

The Vietnam Food Association (VFA) updated export price list on August 14 showed that Vietnams 5 percent broken rice was traded at $493-497 per ton, Thailands at $473-477 per ton. Pakistans rice at $423-427 and Indias $378-382 per ton.

According to VFA, of the three biggest rice exporters in the world (Vietnam, Thailand and India), Vietnams 5 percent broken rice price is the highest, higher by $20 per ton than Thailands.

According to VFA, of the three biggest rice exporters in the world (Vietnam, Thailand and India), Vietnams 5 percent broken rice price is the highest, higher by $20 per ton than Thailands.

An expert on farm produce market said Vietnams rice export price peaked thanks to the demand increase in the context of limited supply from India and Thailand.

Besides, the improvement of Vietnams rice quality, especially scented rice, also helped raise the export price.

The expert believes that Vietnams rice price may continue increasing because some countries have lowered exports, while the demand is high.

Besides traditional markets, Vietnam now can export rice to the EU, about 80,000 tons a year under the EVFTA (EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement).

The USDA (US Department of Agriculture) has predicted that the global total rice output would be 495.2 million, a decrease of 0.3 percent, while the consumption level would be 490.4 million tons, an increase of 1.3 percent over 2019.

The high exports have pushed domestic rice prices up. Mekong Delta rice was traded at VND5,000-6,700 per kilogram, up by VND200-500 per kilogram.

Nguyen Van Tam in Can Tho City, who cultivates rice on 6 hectares, said though rice is still unripe, merchants have committed to buy fresh rice at the fields at VND5,700 per kilogram, or VND500-700 per kilogram higher than the previous year.

The farmers in Phu Dien commune of Dong Thap province also said merchants have committed to collect rice at high prices.

Tam An

Improved quality and higher demand boost Vietnam rice export outlook In the first half of this year, rice export value jumped 18.6% year-on-year to US$1.71 billion.
Toronto police say two out of the three suspects wanted in the stabbing of a homeless shelter resident on Saturday have been arrested.

The stabbing took place on Saturday at 10 p.m. outside the Roehampton hotel near Mount Pleasant Road and Eglinton Avenue East, which has been used by the city as a temporary homeless shelter during the pandemic. A 44-year-old man living at the shelter was stabbed multiple times after a dispute erupted between him and the three suspects, police say.

Police say the victim is recovering at a hospital.

Police said in a news release that 20-year-old Koran Sokwaypnace and 27-year-old Colin Defreitas of Toronto were arrested on Sunday and Monday, respectively.

Both men were charged with aggravated assault, while Sokwaypnace was also charged with assault with a weapon, possession of a dangerous weapon and failure to comply with a release order.

The Roehampton Hotel is one of two temporary shelters in the area that have sparked divisions within the Yonge and Eglinton community. Some local residents and business operators say the shelters have brought in an increase in crime to the area.

The city of Toronto says none of the suspects were residents of the shelter.

Reese Moore, a third suspect, is still outstanding. He was seen wearing black track pants with a white vertical stripe, a white Adidas T-shirt and white running shoes. He also has black hair in medium length twists and is approximately 20 to 30 years of age.

Moore was previously incorrectly identified by police as Reese Morris.

Police say Moore is armed and dangerous and are asking the public to not approach him and call 911 if located.

TY Tom Yun is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star's radio room in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @thetomyun
The Texas Workforce Commissions application for more unemployment benefit funding has been approved. The funding is provided through President Donald Trumps Lost Wage Assistance Executive Order, according to a news release from Governor Greg Abbotts Office. The additional funding could provide $300 more per week to Texans who receive unemployment benefits.

In all, nearly $1.4 billion in initial funds will be made available.
Debris at the scene where a Ukrainian plane crashed in Shahedshahr southwest of the capital Tehran, Iran. Iran has retrieved some data, including a portion of cockpit conversations, from the Ukrainian jetliner accidentally downed by the Revolutionary Guard forces in January, killing all 176 people on board, an Iranian official said on Aug. 23, 2020. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)

Iran Retrieves Data, Cockpit Talk From Downed Ukraine Plane

TEHRAN, IranIran has retrieved some data, including a portion of the cockpit conversations, from the Ukrainian jetliner that was accidentally downed by the Revolutionary Guard forces in January, killing all 176 people on board, an Iranian official said on Aug. 23.

Thats according to a report on the website of Irans Civil Aviation Organization, which described the officials remarks as part of the final report that Tehran plans to issue on the shootdown of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.

The development comes months after the Jan. 8 crash near Tehran. Iranian authorities had initially denied responsibility, only changing course days later, after Western nations presented extensive evidence that Iran had shot down the plane.

The shootdown happened the same night Iran launched a ballistic missile attack targeting U.S. soldiers in Iraq, its response to the American drone strike that killed Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3.

At the time, Iranian troops were bracing for a U.S. counterstrike and appeared to have mistaken the plane for a missile. Iran, however, has not acknowledged that, only saying that after the missile attack, its air defense was sufficiently alert and had allowed previously scheduled air traffic to resumea reference to the Ukrainian plane being allowed to take off from Tehran amid such an unprecedented crisis.

The Ukrainian passenger plane was apparently targeted by two missiles. The plane had just taken off from Tehrans Imam Khomeini International Airport when the first missile exploded, possibly damaging its radio equipment. The second missile likely directly struck the aircraft, as videos from that night show the plane exploding into a ball of fire before crashing into a playground and farmland on the outskirts of the Iranian capital.

For days after the crash, Iranian investigators combed the site, sifting through the debris of the plane.

The head of Irans Civil Aviation Organization, Capt. Touraj Dehghani Zangeneh, said on Aug. 23 that the planes black boxes have only 19 seconds of conversation following the first explosion, though the second missile reached the plane 25 seconds later. The report quoting him didnt elaborate.

He said the first missile explosion sent shrapnel into the plane, likely disrupting the planes recorders. He didnt reveal any details of the cockpit conversation that was retrieved.

Representatives from the United States, Ukraine, France, Canada, Britain, and Swedencountries whose citizens were killed in the crashwere present during the process to gather data from the recorders, Zangeneh said.

In the months since the downing of the plane, Iran has struggled with vast domestic economic problems and a major health crisis. It has the Middle Easts largest and deadliest outbreak of the coronavirus, with more than 358,000 confirmed cases, including 20,643 deaths. The Iranian government is also grappling with both crushing U.S. sanctions, as well as the Trump administrations push to impose so-called snapback sanctions on Iran over what Washington says is Irans violation of the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

In July, an initial report from the Iranian investigation said that a misaligned missile battery, miscommunication between troops and their commanders, and a decision to fire without authorization all led to the fatal downing of the jetliner.

The report said the surface-to-air missile battery that targeted the Boeing 737-800 had been relocated and was not properly reoriented. Those manning the missile battery could not communicate with their command center, they misidentified the civilian flight as a threat, and opened fire twice without getting approval from ranking officials, it said.

Western intelligence officials and analysts believe Iran shot down the aircraft with a Russian-made Tor system, known to NATO as the SA-15. In 2007, Iran took the delivery of 29 Tor M1 units from Russia under a contract worth an estimated $700 million. The system is mounted on a tracked vehicle and carries radar and a pack of eight missiles.

The initial report didnt say why the Guard moved the air defense system, though that area near the airport is believed to be home to both regular military and bases of the paramilitary force.

It also noted that the Ukrainian flight had done nothing out of the ordinary up until the missile launch, with its transponder and other data being broadcast. The aircrafts black boxes were brought to Paris in July, to Frances BEA accident investigation agency, where they are being examined.

Data recovery activity was all done with the aim of safety and preventing similar incidents, Zangeneh said, adding an appeal against any political use of the process.

Later in the day, Iranian state TV quoted Zangeneh as saying the data showed the Ukrainian plane was on the right flight path. After 19 seconds of the first explosion, the communication system of the black boxes was cut, he said.

Planes carry two different flight recorder devices, called black boxesthe flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

All three crew in the cockpit were controlling the flight until the very last, Zangeneh said.

He added that Irans airspace is now safe and ready for international flights.

By Nasser Karimi
(Natural News) Residents of Chicago are preparing themselves for more nights of engineered rioting organized by the citys Antifa chapter and their allies in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

The renewed wave of civil unrest in the city was provoked on Sunday by rioters responding to the death of a man who shot at police officers. The event occurred around 2:30 p.m. on the same day, and the 20-year-old suspect reportedly shot at Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers while running away from them. The CPD units present during the altercation defended themselves, firing at and injuring the suspect, who was then transported to a hospital and was expected to survive.

CPD officials stated that the suspect had four previous arrests and that a gun was recovered at the scene of the incident.

Police Supt. David Brown said on Monday that a crowd of agitated demonstrators gathered at the site of the criminals shooting. Anger quickly rose as misinformation was deliberately spread through the crowd and throughout the city via social media.

This was not an unarmed juvenile, unfortunately, as being propagated on social media, said Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat.

Theres a caravan of dozens of cars filled with #Looters hitting Chicagos luxury store fronts. pic.twitter.com/uIqucbEIU9  Askdoctorindia (@askdoctorindia) August 10, 2020

In response to the renewed rioting, the CPD deployed over 400 officers, and the police also instructed that the drawbridges downtown be raised in an effort to prevent the rioters from making their way into other parts of the city.

Unfortunately, this did not help the businesses that were already in the way of the violent mob. Many department stores and small businesses were ransacked by the looters throughout the night. Many officers who arrived to respond to the situation were physically attacked by the rioters.

More than 100 arrests were made by the early morning hours of Monday. One group of officers that were arresting a suspect carrying a looted cash register were even fired upon by a gang of armed individuals in a car. Thirteen police officers were injured that night.

Listen to this episode of the Health Ranger Report, a podcast by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, as he teaches his listeners about how the BLM domestic terrorist movement has once again updated their rules of engagement in order to allow their members to fire their weapons into civilian vehicles  and why Americans need to start exercising their Second Amendment rights and keep themselves armed at all times.

Recent violence in Chicago making residents frustrated and angry

The wave of looting and violence began in the South Side area of Chicago, several miles from the site of the police-involved shooting. The area is predominantly populated by people that identify as African Americans. Many have noted the similarities between the citys second wave of rioting and destruction to the first days of civil unrest in Minneapolis.

Its starting to look like it did a couple of months ago, said Tracey Flaherty from Lincoln Park on Monday. She noted that many of the neighborhoods businesses have once again begun boarding up their stores after a Best Buy and a liquor store were looted overnight.

Stores looted, damaged in Chicago's Goose Island neighborhood: https://t.co/XJbOYwSqlA pic.twitter.com/3v61QjL9h5  WGN TV News (@WGNNews) August 10, 2020

Alen Music, owner of KEA Construction, remarked on Monday afternoon that he had boarded up no fewer than half a dozen businesses in another area of Lincoln Park. He also said that the looting and violence has only left people frustrated and pissed off more than scared.

Lightfoot and the CPD are preparing for even more rioting. Supt. Brown has ordered that access to the citys downtown area be limited between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Officers were placed on 12-hour shifts and all time-off requests have been cancelled.

Chicagos residential areas must prepare for rioters escalation

Chicagos Magnificent Mile, a wealthy section of the city lined with luxurious businesses, was also looted by the large mob of rioters. As this area becomes less profitable for the rioters, Chicagos residents must prepare for the violent mobs to move further out and into residential areas, especially if the CPD will keep the drawbridges raised during riots, which will block the access of the mob to the wealthier districts in downtown Chicago.

Up until very recently, the Antifa and BLM rioters have been containing themselves to rioting in commercial and political areas of cities, thanks in part to the tireless work of law enforcement across the country. If they did move into residential areas, it was to look for political targets such as police chiefs, city mayors and prominent conservative figures. (Related: Seattle police chiefs home targeted by Black Lives Matter because of her opposition to defunding the police.)

After #antifa were dispersed by police following the attack on the East Precinct, they tried to blind a woman at her home with lasers and attacked her. Antifa have gone into residential parts of the city after moving on from attacking federal courthouse. pic.twitter.com/mKcrgHixmC  Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) August 6, 2020

However, as of late, it seems that Antifa and BLM have started updating their tactics, as their recent attacks in residential areas have been against innocent people, as well as people who profess opposing beliefs.

In Portland on Saturday night, one group of Antifa and BLM rioters threatened the residents of one building, shouting statements such as We know where you live and Were gonna burn your building down.

Several Antifa-affiliated groups have even openly called for the rioters to begin attacking suburbs and residential areas, especially in Portland, where the group that calls itself the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front has begun calling on their supports to move away from the citys downtown area and into the more residential Southwest Portland district.

Similar attacks on residential areas have been witnessed in other parts of the country, such as in Fort Collins, Colorado, where Antifa disrupted a Back the Blue rally, and in Washington, D.C., where agitators marched through a neighborhood in the middle of the night just to wake up the areas White, rich residents.

The rioters are escalating their tactics, and its time people learned more about what they have been doing. Stay informed by subscribing to Rioting.news.

Sources include:

WSJ.com

ZeroHedge.com

ChicagoTribune.com

Breitbart.com
Conflict over management and confusion over policy increased the dangers for aged care residents and staff at one of Australia's earliest coronavirus outbreaks, according to a new report into the deaths at Newmarch House in western Sydney.

The aged care home lost 87 per cent of its usual staff at the height of the crisis, far beyond federal advice to prepare for up to 30 per cent, and discovered crucial skills gaps among the "surge" workforce sent to offer help.

Anglicare's Newmarch House in Sydney lost 87 per cent of its usual staff at the height of the crisis. Credit:Edwina Pickles

The Anglicare home suffered a serious and sudden loss of staff in April even after the emergency medical workers were sent in, revealing a problem that was repeated on a far greater scale in Victoria two months later.

The lessons from Newmarch, where there were 71 cases leading to 17 deaths over two months, have been outlined in a final report handed to Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck ten days ago but only released on Monday morning.
Our current president of the United States is not a big delayed gratification guy. So the Republican National Convention did not wait until the middle of the week, or even until prime time, to officially renominate Donald Trump and Mike Pence as their candidates for the presidency and vice presidency. The GOPs roll call of the states, in which state delegations award their bound delegates alphabetically, was one of the very first orders of business on the opening day of the streamlined convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday, offering an immediate lightning round of hyperbolic compliments for the president.

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Trump was mad that the full cable news universe wasnt capturing the scene of people from all 50 states, plus territories, speaking to his greatness. Its a risk you run when you try to counterprogram a House committees grilling of the postmaster general. Fox News was showing it, but the commentators kept babbling over the good stuff.

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Incredible that @CNN & MSDNC arent covering the Roll Call of States. Fake News! This is what the Republican Party is up against. Also, Id like to hear the remarks of the Delegates from individual States, rather than @FoxNews anchors. Ridiculous!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2020

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Trump and Republicans believed that having some in-person element of the conventionabout 360 delegates would attend Charlotte, plus RNC staffwould make for a more vibrant feel than the Democrats all-virtual convention. But Republicans roll call featured leaders of state delegations against the same bland convention-center backdrop, missing the pastoral, coastal, or calamari-infused settings of the DNCs virtual roll call. The state delegation leaders tried their best to make up for the weak visuals with thrilling rhetoric. Connecticut, the Nutmeg State, cast all of its spicy votes for the president. Louisiana accused Joe Biden of hiding in the dark, waiting to take the lives of unborn babies. David Bossie, a Trump campaign aide, described Maryland as home to two of our greatest segregaabolitionists. Corey Lewandowski, another Trump campaign hand, said in presenting New Hampshire that it was known for our maple syrup, comedian Adam Sandler, poet Robert Frost, and New York Times bestselling author Corey Lewandowski.

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That Trump tweet complaining about coverage had been sent from aboard Air Force One en route to Charlotte. Though Pence and Trump are scheduled to speak Wednesday night and Thursday night, respectively, to accept their partys nominations, they both showed up Monday in the middle of the roll call, delaying its conclusion twice.

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Pence adequately delivered the speech looking back at past accomplishments (judges, boosting the defense budget, building the roaring economy of February) and ahead to new ideas (whatever they jotted down on scrap paper last night) that staff uploaded into his data stream this morning.

Trump offered a pre-address address clocking in at 50 minutes, twice as long as Joe Bidens address accepting the Democratic nomination. A breezy 50 minutes, really, with more talking about how Democrats were trying to steal the election through mail voting, and a reiteration of his firm belief that Fox News was doing too much talking over the roll call of states. Once he was done talking, he exited to the Village Peoples Y.M.C.A., and the roll call of states resumed with Tennessee.

The prime-time segment of Mondays opening day will begin around 8:30 with speeches from, among others, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, Reps. Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, and gun-pointing barefoot lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey.

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??Hoy es el Dia Mundial de los Parques Nacionales, una fecha para recordar la importancia de estos espacios que albergan una biodiversidad unica.

Sabias que los Parques Nacionales conservan mas de 10 millones de hectareas del territorio peruano?

Existen 15 ANP con esta categoria pic.twitter.com/WzopOVjq03
MADISON, Wis. - The shooting by police in Wisconsin of a Black man sparked strong words of condemnation and a demand for Republicans to take action from the states Democratic governor, who said he stood by those who demand justice. Republicans and the police union countered Monday that the governor went too far, urging caution in making any judgments about what sparked the shooting.

The divergent reactions to the shooting Sunday by Kenosha police is just the latest example of the deep divide in Wisconsin, a key presidential battleground state that has been at the forefront of partisan battles for the past decade ranging from redistricting to union rights. More recently, Republicans ignored Gov. Tony Evers call to do away with in-person voting for the states April presidential primary in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Cellphone footage posted on social media Sunday appeared to show police shooting Blake multiple times in the back as he opened a door and leaned into an SUV. The state Department of Justice said officers were responding to a domestic incident, but it has not released more details. Blake was in serious condition Monday at a Milwaukee hospital.

Protests erupted in Kenosha in the hours after the shooting, sparking concerns of more unrest across the country similar to what was seen after the May death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police. Chris Ott, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, said the shooting looks like attempted murder.

Exhale, said Republican state Sen. Van Wanggaard, a retired police officer from Racine, which is next to Kenosha. Everyone should take a deep breath. ... We must let law and reason, not emotion, guide the next steps.

But Evers was passionate in his response, saying he stands with everyone who has demanded justice, equity and accountability and against excessive use of force when engaged with Black people.

While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country, Evers said.

Wanggaard was among Republicans who condemned Evers for his comments, which were issued just as protesters took to the streets in Kenosha and clashed with police.

The best leaders attempt to diffuse situations, not escalate them, Wanggaard said. Evers statement was irresponsible and inflammatory. He jumped to conclusions without first having all the facts. At a time when stereotyping situations is especially risky, Evers stereotyped every police interaction with people of colour  harming both.

Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha police union, called Evers statement wholly irresponsible.

As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident, Deates said in a statement. We ask that you withhold from passing judgment until all the facts are known and released.

Evers called a special session of the GOP-controlled Legislature starting Aug. 31 to pass a package of police reform bills he put forward in June, following Floyds death. The Legislature has not taken any action on the measures and cant be forced to vote on them in in the special session, either. The bills would ban the use of chokeholds by Wisconsin police officers, as well as limit other uses of force.

Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Monday said he was creating a task force to examine police policies and standards, racial disparities, educational opportunities and public safety. Vos said by calling for a special session, the governor is choosing to turn to politics again by dictating liberal policies that will only deepen the divisions in our state.

Evers said he didnt expect Vos to take action on the bills.

In general, he seemed to be unmoved by my request, Evers said.

Wisconsin Republicans echoed a law-and-order theme that President Donald Trump has been using in his reelection campaign, including during stops to Minnesota and Wisconsin last week. While calling for peaceful protests, Wisconsin Republicans also urged patience given the ongoing investigation.

Jim Steineke, Republican majority leader of the Wisconsin Assembly, didnt call out Evers by name but urged elected officials to resist the temptation to rush to judgment.

The frustration and anger that many in our communities are feeling must be met with empathy, but cannot be further fueled by politicians statements or actions that can stoke flames of violence, Steineke said.

Evers, in the second year of his first term, has been stymied by Republicans who control the Legislature and have it as their goal in November to build majorities strong enough to override any gubernatorial veto. The state also is at the forefront of the presidential race, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week emphasizing the recurring message that its all riding on Wisconsin. Trump won Wisconsin by less than a percentage point in 2016.

___

Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sbauerAP
Prime minister Boris Johnson says there is a 'moral duty' for children to return to school. (PA)

Boris Johnson says parents have a moral duty to send their children back to school next week.

Schools in England and Wales are due to reopen in September after closures forced by coronavirus.

The prime minister has urged parents to bring their children back to school.

On Monday, his spokesman was asked if headteachers should fine parents who dont send their children back.

He replied: The PMs words are clear. We believe theres a moral duty.

The prime ministers clear, he believes that every child should be back in school next week.

Weve also been clear that the risk posed to students from COVID is less than the risk of them not attending school.

The spokesman said fining parents was the last resort.

Earlier, the prime minister said in a series of tweets: I have previously spoken about the moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely.

We have always been guided by our scientific and medical experts, and we now know far more about coronavirus than we did earlier this year.

Johnson said the risk of children contracting COVID-19 is very small, echoing the view of Englands deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries.

She said on Monday that children are more likely to get the flu or be involved in a road accident than they are to catch coronavirus at school.

Watch the video below

A Public Health England analysis, published on Sunday, found there were 67 single confirmed cases, four co-primary cases (two or more linked cases diagnosed at the same time) and 30 outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools during June.

It said the majority of cases linked to outbreaks were in staff.

Schools in Scotland reopened earlier this month, while those in Northern Ireland welcomed pupils again on Monday. English and Welsh schools will follow suit in September.

Read more: 11% of Britons would keep pubs open over schools during lockdown

On Monday, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders union NAHT, said fining parents for not sending children back to school would not be helpful and would risk the relationships teachers have with families.

He told BBC Breakfast: We can engage with those that still have a lack of confidence hopefully without fines.

Coronavirus: what happened today

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The Taliban chief has finalised a negotiating team that is to have decision-making powers in upcoming intra-Afghan negotiations, a top Taliban negotiator told The Associated Press.

Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada hand-picked the 20-member team, 13 of whom comprise about half of the Talibans leadership council, lead Taliban negotiator Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai told AP.

The negotiating team will have the authority to set agendas, decide strategy and even sign agreements with the political leadership of the Afghan government in Kabul, Stanikzai said.

This is a powerful team  All decision-making powers are with the negotiation team, Stanikzai said.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who signed the peace deal with Washington on February 29 paving the way for the intra-Afghan negotiations and a withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, will keep the post as head of the Talibans political office in Qatar.

The critical intra-Afghan talks, which were laid out in the peace deal signed in the Qatari capital Doha, were expected to begin August 20 but have been plagued by relentless delays.

A road map for post-war Afghanistan

The talks are intended to set a road map for post-war Afghanistan. They will include a permanent ceasefire, the rights of minorities and women, constitutional changes and the fate of tens of thousands of armed Taliban and militias loyal to Kabul-allied leaders.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar will stay on as head of the Talibans political office in Qatar [File: Hussein Sayed/AP Photo]

According to the deal Washington signed with the Taliban, the Afghan government was to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners and the Taliban were to free 1,000 government and military men it held.

The first round of talks seemed imminent earlier this month when a traditional grand council or Loya Jirga approved the immediate release of a final group of 400 Taliban prisoners in government custody.

But since the decision of the Loya Jirga on August 10, only 80 prisoners have been released so far. Australia and France had officially asked Kabul not to let out Taliban prisoners convicted of killing their citizens.

The Afghan goverment also recently demanded the Taliban free 22 commandos in their custody before freeing the remaining Taliban.

We will be ready for negotiations in the near future, Stanikzai, the lead Taliban negotiator, said. Now we urge the US to convince the other side to end their excuses, release prisoners as soon as possible and come to the negotiation table.

Suhail Shaheen, spokesman for the Talibans political office, said last week that the Taliban had freed the 1,000 prisoners they had promised, and that he was not aware of the commandos.

The withdrawal of American troops

Under the US-Taliban agreement, the withdrawal of US troops does not hinge on the success of intra-Afghan talks, but instead on commitments made by the Taliban to combat terrorist groups and ensure Afghanistan is not used as a staging ground for attacks on the US and its allies.

Since signing the agreement, the Taliban have held to a promise not to attack US and NATO troops, but have carried out regular attacks on Afghan security forces.

By November, it is planned that fewer than 5,000 US soldiers will be in Afghanistan, down from about 13,000 prior to the February agreement.

On Sunday, Baradar was travelling to Pakistan from Doha, just days after Islamabad issued orders implementing the 2015 UN sanctions against the Taliban as well as a number of other outlawed groups.

It was not immediately clear who Baradar would be meeting or the purpose of his visit, but Pakistan has been pressing for an early start to intra-Afghan negotiations.
Chinese carmaker SAIC MAXUS Automotive Co., Ltd. has managed to buck the trend of a global automobile industry recession amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with vehicle sales rising by 26.4 percent year on year in July.



"Our team has gone through all of our 1,288 suppliers to sort out possible problems early during the epidemic, which is full of twists," said Wang Ying, general manager of SAIC MAXUS's Nanjing Plant in east China's Jiangsu Province.

"We even requested the local authorities to help transfer parts and even equipment from Wuhan, a strategically important city of China's automobile industry that was hard hit during the epidemic," said Wang.

Thanks to the resilient supply chain in the world's largest auto market, SAIC MAXUS resumed full operations of its four manufacturing bases on Feb. 24.

China's broader auto industry has seen a recovery. Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) showed that the country's automobile production and sales increased by 21.9 percent and 16.4 percent, respectively, year on year in July.

Back on track



Governments at different levels in China have made concerted efforts to help enterprises resume production, in a move that also helps stabilize the global supply chain.

According to Wang, the company's auto parts imports were affected as the epidemic quickly swept the world. "Thankfully, the local government quickly helped us find substitute domestic suppliers, which were key to the recovery of the automobile industrial chain."

"Authorities also sent medical supplies, such as masks and disinfectants, to help us resume production at the very beginning of the epidemic," Wang added.

The quick industrial production resumption across China has helped the company ensure the smooth operation of its global supply chain by exporting product parts to Europe and the United States via intercontinental trains and ships, said Steve Jin, plant manager of ASSA ABLOY Entrance System Suzhou Co., Ltd. in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou. The ASSA ABLOY Group is a global leader in access solutions with factories in more than 70 countries.

"Orders for our swing doors have increased by 20 percent and 19 percent year on year in the American and European markets so far this year," said Jin. "Manipulators and other components of these swing doors are made or purchased by the Suzhou plant."

Xin Guobin, vice minister of MIIT, said China's industrial performance has improved month by month with effective epidemic control and policy support.

Statistics showed that China's industrial output went up by 4.8 percent year on year in June, picking up from the 4.4 percent and 3.9 percent expansion in May and April, respectively.

Supply chain stability



During the COVID-19 epidemic, China's manufacturing sector has withstood the "stress test" from the virus, and helped ensure a steady global supply of medical goods, as well as stable industrial and supply chains, said Xin.

According to Jin, the pedestrian access door business of the ASSA ABLOY Group has established four plants in America, the Czech Republic, Canada, and China. As a global purchasing center, the Suzhou plant also supplies some of the core components for the other three factories.

The Suzhou plant also produces many half-finished goods of the pillar products to reduce the costs of raw materials and labor in the entire supply chain.

"The fact that the Suzhou team has been able to maintain product supply during these challenging times is vital to our ability to continue operations across the world, including installing and servicing key infrastructure like healthcare," said David Johansson, PDS Supply Chain Director of ASSA ABLOY.

As the pandemic swept other parts of the world, fast-recovering Chinese companies are playing a role in stabilizing the global industrial supply chain.

The Nanjing High Accurate Drive Equipment Manufacturing Group Co., Ltd. (NGC), one of the world's leading wind-turbine gearbox suppliers, saw sales increase over 30 percent year on year during the Jan.-July period.

The company is expected to accomplish a sales record in 2020, as it has attracted new customers in the global market, and is seeing strong sales growth in the European and Asian markets.

As an important link in the industrial supply chain, the company focuses on product development and technological innovation, with all its products owning their intellectual property rights, according to Hu Yueming, NGC's chairman and general manager.

During the epidemic, China's business environment and stable industrial supply chain have won widespread recognition from foreign investors. Statistics from the Ministry of Commerce showed that China saw an 8.4 percent year-on-year increase in the actual use of foreign investment in the second quarter of this year.

MIIT Vice Minister Xin said China will focus on increasing the stability and competitiveness of its industrial and supply chains, and improve the industrial foundations and level of modernization for the industrial chains.
TORONTO - Flight Centre Travel Group Inc. has reached a $7-million settlement in a proposed class action lawsuit against it by its Canadian travel agents.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A plane is silhouetted as it takes off from Vancouver International Airport in Richmond, B.C., Monday, May 13, 2019. Flight Centre Travel Group Inc. has reached a $7-million settlement in a proposed class action lawsuit against it by its Canadian travel agents. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

TORONTO - Flight Centre Travel Group Inc. has reached a $7-million settlement in a proposed class action lawsuit against it by its Canadian travel agents.

The case began in February 2019, when a plaintiff claimed the Australian company's Canadian wing failed to properly compensate its agents for overtime, breaching provincial employment standards.

Flight Centre Canada has denied these claims and no ruling was made on them.

Under the settlement, the $7-million payout will include legal fees, administrative expenses and an honorarium for each class member based on their province and length of employment.

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Flight Centre will also implement a new timekeeping system for logging and tracking overtime hours.

The deal, reached after mediation, is subject to court approval.

"As anyone who has worked in the travel industry knows, the work of travel consultants is hard, and often involves putting in long hours to meet the needs of their clients," plaintiff Stephen Aps said in a statement. "I am proud of this settlement and what it achieves for Flight Centre's travel consultants."

"We are pleased to be able to put this litigation behind us as we respond to the challenges facing the travel industry caused by COVID-19 and prepare to welcome our clients back to travel," said Flight Centre Canada president John Beauvais.

Travel agents who were members of the class action number "in the thousands," said Joshua Mandryk, the plaintiff's lawyer.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 24, 2020
Senator Jeff Flake appears on "The View," Oct. 23, 2018. - ABC NewsBy MOLLY NAGLE and JOHN VERHOVEK, ABC News



(WASHINGTON) -- On the first day of the GOP convention Monday, Democratic nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris picked up support from 27 former GOP members of Congress, including former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump before and after retiring in 2018 -- in the latest act of defiance from Republicans against the sitting president who represents their party.



"In a strong rebuke to the current administration, these former members of Congress cited Trump's corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course as a reason why they support Biden. These former Members of Congress are supporting Joe Biden because they know what's at stake in this election and that Trump's failures as President have superseded partisanship," the Biden campaign wrote announcing the endorsements.



Later in the day, Flake personally addressed his decision to vote for the first time in his life for the Democratic candidate in a firm address aimed at his fellow conservatives.



"After the turmoil of the past four years, we need a president who unifies rather than divides. We need a president who prefers teamwork to tribalism. We need a president who summons our better angels, not a president who appeals to our baser instincts. That's why we need Joe Biden," Flake said in live-streamed remarks straight to the camera.



In a blistering speech that focused heavily Trump's reputation and a Republican Party that Flake says has abandoned its conservative ideals, the former Arizona senator said he is endorsing Biden both because of his concern over Trump's conduct and his belief in the separation of powers in the Constitution.



"And so it is because of my conservatism, and because of my belief in the Constitution, and in the separation of power. And because I am gravely concerned about the conduct and behavior of our current president, that I stand here today, proudly and wholeheartedly, to endorse Joe Biden as the next President of the United States of America. America's best days are ahead. Go Joe," he added.



Attempting to lay out the case against Trump, Flake also sought to appeal to fellow conservatives by warning against simply supporting the party they have traditionally belong to under the control of Trump.



"Some of my conservative friends will say yes, we don't like his behavior, but he governs as a conservative. Here today I will say to my fellow conservatives whatever else you might call the behavior I have just described, It is most assuredly not conservative," Flake said "Indifference to the truth, or to the careful stewardship of the institutions of American liberty is not conservative. Disregard for the separation of powers -- the centerpiece of our constitutional system -- is not conservative. Governing by tweet is not conservative -- it's not even governing."



"If we are honest there's less of a conservative case to be made for reelecting the president, than there is just a blatant appeal for more rank tribalism and further division, and more willful amnesia in the face of more outlandish presidential behavior. I cannot and will not be a part of that," he continued.



Flake blasted the president on a number of fronts, both personally and on policy, denouncing Trump's claim that this year's election will be "rigged" before presenting the choice, as he sees it, to American voters.



"Now, as president of the United States, he has said, and I quote, 'The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.' What kind of president talks like that? What kind of American leader undermines confidence in the elections in his own country?" Flake asked.



"My fellow conservatives and Republicans who, like me, believe in the power of conservative ideas. Ask yourself: Will we be in a better position to make the conservative case for governing after four more years of this administration?" he said.



The former GOP senator and congressman also compared his endorsement of Biden to former conservative icon and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater's endorsement of Democrat Karan English for Congress in 1992.



"Can any of us stand here today and claim that our party has remained faithful to the conservative principles during the President's time in office? No, we cannot," Flake declared.



Flake's remarks come just hours after the Biden campaign announced the endorsements from Flake and 26 former GOP members of Congress including prominent "Never Trump' Republicans" such as former New Hampshire Sen. Gordon Humphries.



Some of the names on the list had previously announced their support for Biden, including former Pennsylvania Rep. Charlie Dent, who wrote an op-ed about his decision to endorse Biden last week, and former New York Rep. Susan Molinari, who spoke at the DNC with other Republicans.



Along with the endorsements, the Biden campaign is launching "Republicans for Biden," which they say will be a "national effort to engage Republicans who are supporting Biden this fall," and will "encourage Republicans to organize their communities for Biden using the Vote Joe app and other relational organizing tools."



It comes a few days after more than 70 former Republican national security officials, including some former members of the Trump administration, came out in support of Biden's bid for president last week, releasing an open letter that offered a scathing rebuke of Trump's first term.



"Through his actions and his rhetoric, Trump has demonstrated that he lacks the character and competence to lead this nation and has engaged in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as President," the letter released Thursday read.



Monday's endorsement also comes comes after several Republicans, including former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, spoke at the Democratic National Convention last week.



Republicans endorsing Biden include:



Senator Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

Senator Gordon Humphrey, R-N.H.

Senator John Warner, R-Va.

Congressman Steve Bartlett, R-Texas

Congressman Bill Clinger, R-Pa.

Congressman Tom Coleman, R-Mo.

Congressman Charlie Dent, R-Pa.

Congressman Charles Djou, R-Hawaii

Congressman Mickey Edwards, R-Okla.

Congressman Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md.

Congressman Jim Greenwood, R-Penn.

Congressman Bob Inglis, R-S.C.

Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz.

Congressman Steve Kuykendall, R-Calif.

Congressman Ray LaHood, R-Illinois

Congressman Jim Leach, R-Iowa

Congresswoman Susan Molinari, R-N.Y.

Congresswoman Connie Morella, R-Md.

Congressman Mike Parker, R-Miss.

Congressman Jack Quinn, R-N.Y.

Congresswoman Claudine Schneider, R-R.I.

Congressman Christopher Shays, R-Conn.

Congressman Peter Smith, R-Vt.

Congressman Alan Steelman, R-Texas

Congressman Jim Walsh, R-N.Y.

Congressman Bill Whitehurst, R-Va.

Congressman Dick Zimmer, R-N.J.

Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
Kabul police chief fired amid surge in Afghan attacks

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 5:37 PM

Kabul's police chief has been fired following a rise in violence and bombings in the Afghan capital in recent weeks, the Interior Ministry says.

Interior Ministry spokesman Tareq Arian said on Sunday that authorities dismissed Ammanullah Wahidi and at least two other security officials over "the recent rise in insecurity" the national capital.

Another top security official confirmed the removal of Wahidi, who oversaw security in Kabul and surrounding districts.

"The people are worried and the president is upset over these attacks," the official said. "There will be more changes in the security leadership of Kabul soon."

The dismissal came following mortar attacks that hit the presidential palace last week.

At least three people were killed and about 20 others injured in a string of rocket attacks that hit Kabul on Tuesday.

Fourteen rockets were fired into Kabul's heavily-fortified green zone on Tuesday as the country marked its 101st independence anniversary. Witnesses said that on same day some of the rockets struck near the presidential palace  where Afghan President Ashraf Ghani a short while earlier took part in an independence day event  and the Defense Ministry.

The area is home to a number of foreign embassies along with high-profile government installations.

The attacks came as Kabul has been rocked by a series of assaults using sticky bombs, homemade devices attached to vehicles with magnets.

On Saturday, officials said at least four magnetic bombs had exploded in the Afghan capital killing at least one security official and wounding six others, including civilians.

At least seven civilians were killed in eastern Ghazni province after an improvised explosive device (IED) struck their vehicle on Sunday, According to the governor's spokesman Wahedullah Jumazada.

More than 100 IEDs had been detonated across Afghanistan in the past two weeks.

No group has claimed responsibility for the increasing number of blasts caused by the devices, but the Afghan authorities have continued to pin the blame on the Taliban militant group.

Official data shows that bombings and other assaults by the Taliban have surged 70 percent since the militant group signed the deal with the United States in February.

The deal envisages a complete withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, and the Taliban pledged not to attack American and other foreign forces. They made no such pledge in relation to the Afghan government and people.

The Afghan government was a party neither to the negotiations nor to the deal, but it has been acting in accordance with its terms, including by agreeing to free Taliban prisoners. The militants have not stopped attacking government targets and civilians.

Washington invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban-run government in 2001 on the pretext of fighting terrorism following the September 11 attacks.

The Taliban, however, never stopped their attacks, citing foreign military presence as one of the main reasons behind its continued militancy.

The Daesh terrorist group has also emerged in the Asian country more recently.

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A man suspected of shooting two other men in Southeast Portland last month, killing one of them, was arrested in Bend late Saturday.

According to Portland and Bend police, 32-year-old Thomas E. Cooper Jr. was arrested at a Bend home a little before midnight in connection with the July 25 death of 27-year-old Tyrell Penney of Sacramento, California and the shooting of a second man who hasnt been identified publicly by authorities. Portland police said the second man is still recovering from his injuries.

Cooper is accused of shooting both men near Southeast Division Street and 158th Avenue late last month. Police havent released any information about the circumstances of the shooting.

Penney was in Portland visiting relatives when he was shot.

-- Everton Bailey Jr; ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 | @EvertonBailey

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Marriage fever seems to have spread throughout the Telugu film industry. In the last few months, Nithiin, Sujeeth, Nikhil Siddhartha, Rana Daggubati and many other renowned celebs from Tollywood tied the knot with the love of their lives. And now, one more actor is likely to join the list.

As per a report published in a leading portal, Sharwanand is all set to get married to his childhood friend. He has reportedly been seeing his childhood friend for quite a long time now. She is said to be an entrepreneur. Sharwanand's lady love's name has not yet been revealed, but he seems to have finally found his 'Jaanu' (Sweetheart).

A source informed the portal that Sharwanand's family has already given their approval to their relationship. However, fans are waiting for the official announcement from the Prasthanam actor.

On a professional note, Sharwanand's last film Jaanu was the Telugu remake of Tamil film, '96 starring Vijay Sethupathi and Trisha. Directed by C Prem Kumar and produced by Dil Raju, the film also stars Samantha Akkineni as the female lead. Jaanu was a commercial failure but was acclaimed by the critics, especially for Sharwanand and Samantha Akkineni's performance.

Also Read : Mahesh Babu To Cast Sharwanand In His Next?

Sharwanand will next be seen in Keeravani and Sreekaram. He is also a part of an untitled bilingual film which, will be shot in Tamil and Telugu. All the projects have been kept on hold due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

Also Read : Is Sharwanand's Film Sreekaram Similar To Mahesh Babu's Maharshi?
Galveston County apparently wont be following the lead of cities and counties that have removed Confederate statues from public places  at least for now.

At a meeting Monday, County Commissioner Stephen Holmes made a motion to remove the statue from in front of the courthouse, but it died when no other commissioner seconded his motion.

The one thing I think we should agree upon is that the courthouse square is a place that is reserved for civic honor, and to have that statue in the middle of our courthouse square is not indicative of civic honor, said Holmes, a Democrat and the courts only African American member. Because if we have something on the courthouse square that causes dissension and divides people, it clearly states that its not appropriate to be in the place where it is.

The Dignified Resignation monument, which includes a statue of a returning Confederate soldier, has stood in front of the Galveston County Courthouse since 1911. A plaque from the Galveston Veuve Jefferson Davis chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy praises the purity of motives, intensity of courage and heroism of Confederate soldiers and sailors.

In recent months, Galveston native Isaac Fanuiel IV and others with The Galveston Monument Project have pushed to have the statue removed from the courthouse grounds. Protesters covered it with a white sheet during a recent celebration of Juneteenth, the state holiday marking the day in June 1865 when a Union general read an order in Galveston stating that slaves were free.

Before another county commissioner had the opportunity to second Holmes motion to remove the statue Monday, Galveston County Judge Mark Henry asked Holmes where it should be moved to.

Judge, I think we have to cross the first step, before we get to the second step, said Holmes. If you dont agree that its wrong to have it in that place, then theres nothing I can say to change your mind. If we cant get past the fact that it should be removed, we cant decide where to move it to.

No other commissioner spoke after Holmes made his plea for the statue to be removed.

The motion will die for lack of a second, said Henry, a Republican.

Henry did not respond to a request for additional comment Monday.

During public comment, some residents spoke in favor of removing the statue. Others called for it to stay in place.

Joshua Foxworth, said he wants the statue to stay put so he can honor his ancestors.

The people who want this statue removed, want it removed because it represents a people, said Foxworth. The statues presence is a reminder of who settled this land, who built this city, this county and this nation. Those people are my ancestors, and I love them.

Fanuiel, a Galveston native and descendant of slaves, said seeing the statue reminds him of the racial injustices, economic injustices and other disparities happening within the country.

Walking through those doors, in a lot ways, it tells me that theres a chance that the government has this lopsided view of a person like me and my history, said Fanuiel. Im asking you to really open your minds and your hearts, and dig deep to hear the cries of the people.

Interest in removing or taking down statues that celebrate the Confederacy has grown since George Floyd, a Black man and former longtime Houston resident, was killed while in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25.

Since Floyds death, Confederate monuments have been taken down in states such as Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Virginia and South Carolina. Mississippi lawmakers agreed to remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag, and in Houston, two Confederate statues and one of Christopher Columbus were removed over the summer.

brooke.lewis@chron.com
The state of Michigan reported nearly 800 additional COVID-19 cases on Sunday, Aug. 23.

New figures from the state Department of Health and Human Services showed 768 new daily confirmed cases, increasing the states total to 96,792 since March.

An additional four deaths linked to COVID-19 boosted the states overall count to 6,393 deaths.

Nearly 800 new coronavirus cases in Michigan, four additional deaths

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The state also reported 1,016 probable cases and 266 probable deaths related to the virus. The seven-day average for new cases is 581, down from 759 the prior week.

On top of the additional facts and figures, the state has seen reopening issues between school parents in Flint and Ypsilanti to gym owners in Wyoming.

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Back to school is total chaos for Michigan parents

The Ms. Donald K through 12 Academy of Flint will begin promptly at 8 a.m. Aug. 31 for its four students.

Were going to have a hot breakfast and were wearing new outfits and were going to have our hair done, just like the first day of school, said Tasha Donald, mother and now de-facto teacher, principal, lunch chef, janitor and behavioral specialist.

Shes doing everything she can to create a school atmosphere in the midst of a pandemic that has many kids learning via computers instead of next to classmates.

With most students in Michigan returning to school in just a few weeks, and some already back to school, many parents are preparing to once again be expected to play multiple new roles in their childrens education. Some are embracing the change, while others are frustrated with the limited options and concerned about taking on the myriad of other new roles in their kids lives.

Lawmakers recently passed legislation aimed at guiding schools through the back to school process. The bills do not require in-person instruction, but there are provisions that once school districts determine its safe for kids to go back, that districts prioritize getting elementary students in the classrooms first.

School boards would be required to revisit their learning plans publicly once a month and provide a chance for public comment. There would also be changes to the per-pupil funding formula. Districts would have to prove that they are providing at least two two-way interactions a week between at least 75% of enrolled students and their teachers.

Parents in our state deserve peace of mind knowing that their children are going to receive the quality education that prepares them for future success, said Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield (R-Levering) during a floor speech ahead of a final House vote.

But right now parents are feeling anything but peace of mind.

School districts have been allowed to come up with their own plans for starting the school year, and parents say the plans are complicated.

Its total chaos, said Colleen Brewer of Ypsilanti. Her older son Zachary, 16, is a senior at Huron High School and younger son Maxwell, 13, is a freshman.

Michigan gyms in crisis as some flout the law and others bleed out

Kathy Birge has owned Anytime Fitness in the Grand Rapids suburb of Wyoming for more than five years. She has devoted her time and money to making it a successful business. She calls its members her second family.

But after five months of forced closure by the state due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Kent County gym is losing money at what might prove an unsustainable rate. Her attempts to acquire small business assistance have been unsuccessful.

We are bleeding and theres not much help to stop it, Birge said. Its killing us. Im not sure if we can recover.

While some Michigan gyms, like Birges, are following the rules laid out in Executive Order 2020-160, others have reopened and are attempting to fly under the radar. Health department officials across the state say theyve received dozens of complaints and have sent letters notifying owners that theyre in violation of the executive order.

Some have cooperated with the warnings. Others have put up a fight.

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In Ottawa County, the owner of a Powerhouse Fitness Center in Grand Haven has been charged with a misdemeanor by the Ottawa County Prosecutors Office after an initial refusal to close its doors. He was in court Thursday, Aug. 20, for a pre-trial hearing, but declined to provide an update on his case.

On Friday, a group of gym owners with the Michigan Fitness Club Association called on Whitmer and state health officials to allow fitness centers to reopen, saying they have safety protocols in place.

Two things have become clear during the past five months, Burn Fitness co-owner Alyssa Tushman said in a release from the group. One is that gyms are not a COVID threat. The other is that obesity and high blood pressure are. Were a state of 10 million people and 32 percent of adults are obese  which is one of the leading causes for COVID hospitalizations.

COVID-19 PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus.

Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible.

Use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home (door handles, faucets, countertops) and carry hand sanitizer with you when you go into places like stores.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has also issued executive orders requiring people to wear face coverings over their mouth and nose while in public indoor and crowded outdoor spaces. See an explanation of what that means here.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

For more data on COVID-19 in Michigan, visit https://www.mlive.com/coronavirus/data/.
One person is dead, and another injured after a suspected shootout in east Birmingham Monday afternoon.

The gunfire erupted shortly before 1:30 p.m. in the 4100 block of Airport Highway in the Tom Brown Village public housing community. Police said it appeared the two men were shooting at each other, but that is still under investigation.

One person was taken to UAB Hospital where he was pronounced dead. The second  described by police as a person of interest  was taken to St. Vincents East.

One person was killed and another injured in a shootout Monday, Aug. 24, 2020 in Birmingham Tom Brown Village public housing community.

Police have roped off a parking lot near one of the apartment buildings. At least 10 markers have been put down to record shell casings.

The deadly shooting is Birminghams 78th homicide so far in 2020. Of those, 10 have been ruled justifiable and one accidental and therefore are not deemed criminal. In all of Jefferson County, there have been 112 slayings, including the 78 in Birmingham.

Anyone with additional information is asked to call Birmingham police homicide detectives at 205-254-1764 or Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777.
Algiers, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Aug, 2020 ) :Algeria will hold a promised referendum on a revised constitution on November 1, the office of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced on Monday evening.

After "consultations with the parties concerned, it was decided to set the date of 1 November 2020 for the holding of the referendum on the draft revision of the Constitution", the presidency said.

That date also marks the anniversary of the start of Algeria's 1954-1962 war for independence from France.
A glamorous socialite who ran up $26,000 in unpaid charges at top Australian hotels has been charged with lying about receiving psychiatric treatment for lying.

Annabel Walker, 32, was arrested on Friday and charged with three more offences on top of a raft of 'shocking' crimes she admitted to in the NSW Local Court in July.

Walker was charged with two counts of using a false document to influence exercise of public duty and one count of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage.

The false document charges relate to the use of a fake letter claiming she'd attended mental health sessions, which police say she hadn't.

The allegations were first raised at Walker's last court appearance in July, with police applying then to have her put behind bars immediately.

'My instructions are they (police) have confirmed with the hospital that she hasnt been admitted to the hospital since 2018,' prosecutor Craig Smith told the Downing Centre Local Court

'The police have been attempting to locate Ms Walker with a view to an arrest and detention application.'

Despite this, Walker was granted bail then and again by Wollongong Local Court on Saturday.

Annabel Walker (pictured), 32, has been hit with more fraud charges relating to her allegedly faking a letter from a hospital where she was meant to be receiving mental health treatment as ordered by a court

Walker had been ordered by a court to attend hospital for mental health treatment, with Magistrate Susan McIntyre last month describing her as having a 'disturbing history of dishonesty'.

Her solicitor Michael Moussa told Daily Mail Australia he would not comment as the matters remain before the courts.

Last month Mr Moussa said his client insisted she had attended the hospital but that they had been unable to gain access to her records to prove it.

'My instructions are she has been going and she has in my presence tried to contact the hospital,' he told Downing Centre Local Court.

'She has been unable to get these records from the hospital, I'm not sure how police have been able to get them so quickly.'

While prosecutors pushed for her to be taken into custody, Mr Moussa successfully won her freedom until her next court date.

Walker fought back tears in July as Magistrate McIntyre told her she would be jailed for her crimes.

Magistrate McIntyre did not miss in a scathing assessment of Walker, telling her the only thing left to decide was if she would receive a full time or suspended sentence.

'Given her shocking record, two breaches of a CCO (community corrections order) and how many drive while disqualified's (she's had) in the last ten years... imprisonment or an alternative is a real prospect,' Magistrate McIntyre said.

'Actually, that is what's going to happen, it is just how that imprisonment is served.'

The court heard that Walker obtained a total of $17, 981 from her former employer in Australian Leisure Group.

The socialite from Bowral, in the NSW southern highlands, has already been told she will be off to jail by a magistrate after pleading guilty to a string of fraud related crimes in the NSW Local Court

Walker faced Wollongong Local Court on Saturday where she was granted bail on the three new charges

She admitted to taking $26,000 in hotel stays (pictured is the lavish Rae's on Wategos resort at Byron Bay where she stayed), products or services without every paying for them

There was also $2,030 for a printing job, $3,361.60 for lighting and $2,816 for a sign to be painted.

Walker had also stayed at the lavish Rae's on Wategos resort in Byron Bay and bought products from a Harvey Norman store, none of which she paid for.

Walker will be sentenced on September 9 after issues with court documents led to a further delay in the matter.

She now just wants to get on with her life... - solicitor Michael Moussa on Walker

Walker sat quietly in court clutching a tissue tightly in her hand throughout the day.

When she was finally called to give evidence in relation to her bail conditions Walker fought back years as she told how she'd lost her job and moved away from Sydney's eastern suburbs after being charged.

'When I was charged I lived in Darlinghurst, but after I moved down to the Southern Highlands to be close to my family,' Walker said.

'I recently lost my lease and property after an article in the local paper about me.'

Outside court Mr Moussa told Daily Mail Australia that Walker was now ready to 'get on with her life'.

Before the new charges were laid, Walker's solicitor Michael Moussa indicated she was ready to 'get on with her life'

Walker will have the new charges mentioned alongside the old matters when she is sentenced in the Downing Centre Local Court (pictured) on September 9

'She's had a very hard time and shes learned from her experience and she now just wants to get on with her life,' he said.

'The last year has been very difficult and she has sought the appropriate assistance that she needs and now she's good as gold.'

Walker's defence team indicated they intend to organise a psychiatric assessment of her.

In addition to the fraud charges, Walker will also be re-sentenced over a number of driving offences.

The court heard she had previously pleaded guilty to low-range drink driving and a count of driving while disqualified.

She was on a good behaviour bond in relation to both matters at the time she again offended, and as such will need to be re-sentenced.
Whats new: Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced Monday that the country will prioritize countries around the Mekong river for aid once Covid-19 vaccines are available. Li made the remarks during a video conference with leaders of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC), a regional dialogue mechanism that consists of six member countries along the Mekong river basin, China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

The premier did not elaborate on details of the vaccine aid program, but said China will set up special funds to promote public health under the framework of the LMC Special Fund, and continue to provide anti-epidemic materials and technical support to the Mekong region.

The background: In May, Chinas President Xi Jinping pledged that the countrys development and deployment of Covid-19 vaccines will be treated as a global public good to ensure vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.

China has been authorizing the emergency use of some domestically developed Covid-19 vaccines since late last month, a senior Chinese health official confirmed in a TV interview (link in Chinese) on Saturday. These vaccines were used by some high-risk groups, such as frontline medical workers and civil servants, according to the official.

Quick Takes are condensed versions of China-related stories for fast news you can use.

Contact reporter Lu Zhenhua (zhenhualu@caixin.com) and editor Heather Mowbray (heathermowbray@caixin.com)

Support quality journalism in China. Subscribe to Caixin Global starting at $0.99.
(Bloomberg) -- Tencent Holdings Ltd. jumped the most in a month after White House officials are said to have reassured American businesses that a ban on its WeChat app wont be as broad as feared.

The WeChat owner rallied 5.8% at the close in Hong Kong Monday, making it the best performer on the benchmark Hang Seng Index, after people familiar with matter said the Trump administration is privately seeking to reassure U.S. companies including Apple Inc. that they can still do business with Tencents WeChat messaging app in China. In recent days, senior administration officials have been reaching out to some companies, realizing that the impact of an all-out ban on the popular app could be devastating for U.S. technology, retail, gaming, telecommunications and other industries, according to the people.

Read more: Trump Team Reassures Apple, Others on Using WeChat in China

Company management earlier this month sought to reassure investors that the executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Aug. 6 may apply only to WeChats overseas operations. The ban, which came amid efforts by the White House to curtail the rise of Chinese-owned technology giants like Huawei Technologies Co. and TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd., had erased roughly $66 billion from Tencents value, though todays rebound means the stock has recouped all but $9 billion of those losses.

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says

Intense lobbying by representatives of U.S. businesses such as Walmart, General Motors, Best Buy and Target reinforces the indispensability of WeChat for reaching consumers in China. The sales impact on Tencent from President Donald Trumps WeChat ban may be minimal as the administration appears to be narrowing the scope of the order to protect U.S. businesses in China.

- Vey-Sern Ling and Tiffany Tam, analysts

Click here for the research.

Spreads on Tencents dollar bond due 2030 tightened 2 basis points, according to credit traders in Hong Kong Monday morning, the most since August 11. Shares of Prosus NV, the Naspers Ltd. unit that holds 31% in Tencent, gained as much as 3.6%, while Naspers climbed 2.9%.

Story continues

Trump ignited a furor after signing the order to ban U.S. entities from dealing with WeChat. Confusion reigned as investors grappled with the sweeping language of Trumps order -- which bars transactions with the Chinese company -- that leaves the door open for the administration to extend it well beyond the service in America. Apples shares fell on fears the action could hurt sales of iPhones in its largest market after the U.S.

Still, risks remain until details of the executive order are finalized. Senior administration officials are deliberating over the scope of the ban ordered by Trump, one of the people said, and the president could ultimately overrule anything they decide.

Even if corporations are permitted to do business with WeChat, individuals may still face restrictions on using the app in the U.S. A group of U.S. WeChat users filed a complaint at the federal court in San Francisco Friday in an attempt to block the Trump administration from imposing a ban on the app, saying it would violate their rights.

(Updates with Tencents closing share price from first paragraph.)

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 Akbar Mammadov

Azerbaijani tank crew has shown the successful performance during the first day of Tank Biathlon competition being held in Russia, the Defense Ministry said on August 24.

The Azerbaijani tank crew highly accurately hit the targets during the first day of Tank Biathlon contest held as part of the International Army Games-2020.

The ministry noted that Chinese, Belarusian and Serbian teams tested their strength in the same division with Azerbaijani.

It should be noted that according to the terms of the contest, aftering hitting three conditional targets, the Azerbaijani crew has covered the specified distance on the dedicated route in a short time.

The Azerbaijani tank crew is competing in the first division of the Tank Biathlon contest, which also includes Belarus, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Serbia and Uzbekistan.

According to the draw of the competition held on August 17 in Moscow, Azerbaijan and Russia will compete on red tanks in the first division, while Belarus and Uzbekistan on blue tanks, Serbia and Kazakhstan on yellow tanks, China and Kyrgyzstan on green tanks.

The Tank Biathlon contest will take place in the Russian Alabyno military training area near Moscow from August 23 to September 5.

At the competition, the crews will demonstrate their driving, shooting and obstacle crossing skills. The military ground is composed of various sites with ramparts, ditches, firing emplacements and lines.

It should be noted that Azerbaijani servicemen first participated in the Tank Biathlon competition in 2016.

Azerbaijani tank crews competed with the teams of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in the final relay race in the first division in the Tank Biathlon 2019 competition and took the 4th place in the competition.

---

Akbar Mammadov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AkbarMammadov97

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Mumbai police, between Saturday and Sunday, reported over six cases of chain snatching from Oshiwara, Borivli, Vikhroli, Parel, Mulund and Tilak Nagar.

According to police data, over 70 cases of chain snatching have been reported across the city, till August, this year. Despite lockdown being imposed in the months of April, May and June, the city has witnessed a rise in street crimes.

Vinoy Kumar Choubey, the joint commissioner of police, law and order, said, We have asked senior police inspectors of all police stations to identify vulnerable spots where such offences are on rise and to increase patrolling in those areas. We have also asked them to start Nakabandis in sensitive areas.

In the six instances, victims collectively lost gold ornaments worth 3.72 lakh. Detection teams of six police stations are looking out for the accused.

The first instance of chain snatching was reported at Oshiwara police station where two unknown persons snatched the chain worth 65,500 of a 61-year-old woman identified as Jayshree Jain. The incident took place at around 5pm when she went to buy vegetables near Maheshwari Bhavan at Lokhandwala in Andheri (West). A man snatched her gold chain and then fled in an autorickshaw, said Oshiwara police officer who registered an FIR in the case.

In the second case, two motorcycle born men targeted 64-year-old Surekha Mehta while she was heading to Sion from Thane in a taxi at around 6pm. Mehta in her complaint said that she was sitting in the backseat and had reached near Godrej gate when two men came close to her cab and snatched her gold chain worth 85,000. An FIR has been registered at Vikhroli police station.

The third case was registered at Borivali. A gold chain of 28-year-old Vasundhara Gandhile was snatched by two motorcycle-borne men while she was walking near Joggers park at Chikuwadi in Borivali at around 8.30 pm on Saturday.

The fourth case was registered at NM Joshi Marg by 28-year-old Darshan Kokle. Kokle in his complaint said that he was on a bike with his brother at Senapati Bapat Marg in Lower Parel when two bike-borne men snatched his gold chain worth 39,000.

Sunday morning saw robbers strike in Mulund (East) when 24-year-old Akshad Rahate had gone to the first market at 7 am. Rahate in his complaint at Mulund police station said that he was standing near Fish World Shop on Jata Shankar Road when two men on a motorcycle snatched his chain worth 80,000.

Later in the day at 11 am, two robbers on a bike snatched the gold chain of 65-year-old Subbammal Arumugam worth 67,500 while she was walking with her husband near Tilak Nagar in Chembur. An FIR has been registered at Tilak Nagar police station.

According to the police all the incident cases were registered under sections 392 (Punishment for robbery) and 34 (common intention) of Indian Penal Code and a police team is been looking for the accused.
First lady Melania Trump at a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Despite overwhelming data supporting the use of face masks and social distancing to contain the spread of COVID-19, the White House is continuing to spurn both practices at highly publicized events.

First lady Melania Trump and many other attendees went maskless at a Monday White House event geared toward children that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Trump spoke and shook hands with many of the maskless children and hugged some of them, according to CNN reporter Kate Bennett.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Despite overwhelming data supporting the use of face masks and social distancing to contain the spread of COVID-19, the White House is continuing to spurn both practices at highly publicized events.

First lady Melania Trump and many other attendees went maskless at a Monday White House event geared toward children that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which afforded white American women the right to vote.

Trump spoke and shook hands with many of the maskless children and hugged some of them, according to CNN reporter Kate Bennett. In the crowd at the event, high-profile White House and administration officials, including second lady Karen Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, mingled without wearing masks.

The event was held outdoors, and the White House told Business Insider that all attendees were tested for the coronavirus when they arrived. But the rapid tests the administration uses aren't 100% reliable, and images of the event sent a message to Americans that masks and social distancing aren't necessary.

While the first lady urged Americans to wear face masks and socially distance in a video and tweet in early April, she's rarely worn a mask in public. Recent polling showed a majority of Republicans support wearing masks and government mask-wearing mandates, but there's still widespread noncompliance with mitigation policies across the country.

Story continues

President Donald Trump and his administration have held dozens of events at the White House that similarly failed to set an example for the nation in regard to COVID-19.

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, second lady Karen Pence, and secretary of education Betsy DeVos also attended the event without wearing masks. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Read the original article on Business Insider
The U.N. health agency for months trailed many governments in backing the widespread use of masks, a point not lost on critics, who said WHO was too slow to get on board with the benefits of general mask use. WHO had expressed concern that people who put on masks might unwittingly spread the virus from an unclean hand to their face, and insisted that health-care providers needed masks first amid some shortages.
DUBAI, Aug 16 (Reuters) - Kuwait's position towards Israel is unchanged after its accord with the United Arab Emirates and it will be the last country to normalise relations, newspaper al-Qabas reported on Sunday citing Kuwaiti government sources.

Israel and the UAE announced an agreement on Thursday that will lead to a full normalisation of diplomatic relations between the two states, making the UAE the only third Arab state to do so.

A Kuwait foreign ministry official was not immediately available to comment.

"The Kuwaiti position is consistent with its decades-old foreign policy approach in support of the Palestinian cause, as it is the premier Arab issue, and only accepting a solution if it is what the Palestinians accept," al-Qabas said.

Palestinians denounced the Israel-UAE deal, while Saudi Arabia and Qatar have remained silent.

Fellow Gulf nations Oman and Bahrain praised the deal. (Reporting by Dahlia Nehme, additional reporting by Ahmed Hagagy, writing by Nafisa Eltahir; Editing by Toby Chopra)






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Final Year JHS pupils and staff have been served with their free hot meal as promised by government _ #UTVGhana #UTVNews #DespiteMedia
It is premature to make the assumption that Joe Biden's policy toward China will not be a break with Trump, observes Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.

IMAGE: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, flanked by his wife Dr Jill Biden, left, and Democratic vice presidential candidate US Senator Kamala Harris on stage after Joe Biden accepted the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on the final night of the 2020 Democratic national convention, August 20, 2020. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Joe Biden's acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention on August 20 has been widely acclaimed in America (external link) and it enhances the growing perception that he is likely to prevail in November's general election as President Trump's support continues to wane due to his perceived failings in addressing the pandemic and the country's economic problems.

Democratic elections are hard to predict and Trump has a reputation to dig himself out of deep holes that would end the careers of most other politicians.

Nonetheless, sans something entirely untoward happening before November, Joe Biden may well be the 46th president of the United States.

This poses some important policy questions to consider, Biden's China policy in particular.

What stands out from Biden's speech is that he cleverly mentioned China only once.

Possibly, he refused to take Trump's bait to sound 'tougher' on China.

More likely, though, he sequestered his China policy from attack by Trump.

Biden would know that China is not really to be held responsible for America's domestic problems today and shifting blame to China won't get him votes.

Whereas, Trump's failure to tackle domestic problems will.

Biden spoke on a day when the US reported 5.57 million coronavirus cases, with a death toll of 174,283 -- the world's most.

And the US department of labour just reported that there were 1.1 million initial jobless claims on a seasonally adjusted basis for the week ending August 15, which is actually higher than forecast of 925,000.

So, on how he would deal with the coronavirus if elected president, Biden framed his stance this way: 'We'll make the medical supplies and protective equipment our country needs. And we'll make them here in America. So we will never again be at the mercy of China and other foreign countries, in order to protect our own people.' Period.

Biden said nothing more on China in his entire speech.

Biden didn't hand over an excuse to Trump to attack him by saying something rather than nothing on China, fathoming the convoluted politics behind the latter's contrived ramping up of efforts to attack and provoke China -- from blaming China for the coronavirus, to sanctioning Chinese high-tech companies like Huawei, and from accusing China of messing up the US election to sending aircraft to the Taiwan Straits.

Indeed, Trump's accusations and attacks against China, as well as sowing an ideological bias, would do no good either to improving the US' current situation or protecting US companies.

IMAGE: Joe Biden accepts the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination during a speech delivered at the 2020 Democratic national convention from the Chase Center in his home state, Delaware, August 20, 2020. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

However, the expert opinion in the US (and to some extent in China) is that Biden would pay heed to the 'bipartisan consensus' in America for tougher policies against China.

Indeed, the 2020 Democratic party patform takes a tough stance on China -- on technologies, intellectual property, security and human rights, and also plans to draw more allies to its side.

Beijing has taken note that one major difference from the 2016 Democratic party platform is that this time around, the Democrats 'failed to endorse the one-China principle but reaffirmed its commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act.'

The relevant portion reads as follows: 'Democrats are committed to the Taiwan Relations Act and will continue to support a peaceful resolution of cross-strait issues consistent with the wishes and best interests of the people of Taiwan (Taiwan region).'

Chinese State media commented (external link), 'The change of tone will likely further strain China-US relations.'

By the way, the Taiwan Relations Act provides for the sale of American weaponry to Taiwan and Beijing regards it as a violation of China's national interests and as constituting support to separatists in Taiwan.

However, these are early days and Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian held a conciliatory line at his press briefing on Friday: 'We hope that the two parties in the US can view China and China-US relations in an objective way, and work with China to advance bilateral ties based on coordination, cooperation and stability.'

The platform's failure to mention 'one-China' cannot be an accident, but the intention remains unclear.

Arguably, it needn't be seen as a repudiation of the principle as such.

Of course, if Biden reverses the one-China policy after taking office, China-US ties will enter a turbulent zone.

On the other hand, the Democratic party's strategy at this point could as well be to avoid being attacked by Trump for showing 'weakness' on China.

Basically, party platforms need not necessarily translate as policies.

It is premature to make the assumption that Biden's policy toward China will not be a break with Trump.

Biden knows China and he is an immensely experienced statesman.

Biden's internationalist orientation can actually work as a double-edged sword.

His choice is to build a united front of allies and partners to confront China, or to join a platform with Europeans to compete while also cooperating with Beijing on issues where interests converge, such as climate change, nonproliferation, and global health security.

Biden, the consummate coalition builder, will certainly dump his predecessor's 'America alone' approach.

Clearly, an improvement in tone in the US's relations with China is to be expected.

And the importance of this shouldn't be underestimated.

An improvement in tone alone should bring down the recent overheated rhetoric and, most important, provide a possible opening for China to move on to explore opportunities to mend the fractured relationship.

In fact, a commentary in the Chinese Communist party newspaper Global Times is titled Biden 'smoother' to deal with (external link).

It quotes Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations at the China foreign affairs university in Beijing: 'Biden is definitely smoother to deal with, which is the consensus around the world.'

'For China, because Biden was vice president during Obama's term, and had a lot of prior experience dealing with Chinese leaders, we would expect to facilitate more effective communication with Biden if he wins.'

Biden, who has described himself more than once as a 'transitional president', would know that his election victory will be largely attributed to the state of the US economy and the pandemic -- and not the China Question.

Biden listed climate in his acceptance speech among the four 'historic crises' facing the US, alongside the pandemic, the economic crash and the need for racial justice.

The spirit of the times was captured brilliantly on the convention floor on Thursday, August 20, night by California Governor Gavin Newsom who spoke before Biden: 'The hots are getting hotter, the drys are getting drier. Climate change is real. If you are in denial about climate change, come to California.'

Biden simply tethered climate to his economic message and called it an 'enormous opportunity... for America to lead the word in clean energy and create millions of new good-paying jobs in the process.'

Biden's plan calls for $2 trillion in new investments over four years.

That's something to watch, because there can't be a better partner than China in the whole planet to realise his plans before retiring from public life in 2024.

Climate is a dramatic example.

The US cannot solve the problem by itself. It has to be done collectively among the big guys, of which China and the US are the two indispensable leaders -- or, it fails.

Cooperation is necessary for the US's selfish objectives. Climate is a dramatic case, but make no mistake, avoiding a nuclear war is no less consequential for humankind, as you live only once.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar served the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years. He has been a Rediff.com columnist for over a decade.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
Britains largest supermarket Tesco on Monday said it will create an additional 16,000 permanent jobs to support the exceptional growth in its online business and may even increase the number of roles as the lockdown boosted its sales.

The supermarket expects the majority of these roles to be filled by colleagues who joined on a temporary basis at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but who now want to stay with the business permanently," the company said.

Tesco said the roles will include 10,000 pickers to assemble customer orders and 3,000 drivers to deliver them, along with a variety of other roles in stores and distribution centres.

At a time when companies including high-street retailers, hotels and airlines have laid off tens of thousands of workers to cut costs, UK supermarkets have had to take on additional staff to deal with more demand for deliveries and groceries at home.

Discount supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl said last month they will create an additional 1,200 and 1,000 jobs respectively this year in the UK, as the two companies continue to open more stores and drive market share gains.

Ahold Delhaize NV, a major operator of supermarket chains in the United States and Europe, said earlier this month that its brands hired more than 45,000 employees globally in the second quarter.

British grocery sales had surged during the pandemic, but slowed down in the 12 weeks ended Aug. 9 as shopping habits eased back towards normality after months of lockdown, according to market researcher Kantar.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
yazidi-refugees-program-germany-01

Hanan on the sofa in her living room in Germany. Credit - Tori FerencINSTITUTE for TIME

When Hanan escaped from Islamic State captivity, there wasnt much to come back to.

She and her five children had survived a year in a living nightmare. After her husband finally managed to arrange their rescue in the summer of 2015, they joined him in a dusty camp in Iraq where he lived in a tent. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) still controlled the territory they called home, and they were unsure if they could ever go back. And Hanan was unsure if she could ever escape the darkness she felt inside.

So when, in the fall of 2015, Germany offered her the promise of safety and a chance to heal from her trauma, it wasnt a difficult decision. Accepting a place in a groundbreaking program for women and children survivors of ISIS captivity did mean leaving her husband behind in the camp, but she was told he could join her after two years. So she and her children boarded the first flight of their lives, out of Iraq and away from their tight-knit community, in search of safety and treatment for what still haunted them.

Hanan, now 34, was one of 1,100 women and children brought to Germany in an unprecedented effort to aid those most affected by ISISs systematic campaign to kill and enslave the ancient Yazidi religious minority. (TIME is identifying Hanan by her first name only for her safety.) Launched by the German state of Baden Wurttemberg in October 2014, the program aimed to help survivors of captivity receive much-needed mental-health treatment and support. In Iraq, there had been a rash of suicides among the heavily-traumatized survivors, who had minimal access to mental-health care and faced an uncertain future. In Germany, far from the site of their suffering, state officials hoped the women and children could find healing and a fresh start.

But for Hanan, those promises remain unfulfilled. German officials never granted visas to any of the womens husbands, leaving families, including Hanans, indefinitely torn apart. Like most of the women, shes not undergoing promised trauma therapy. She often thinks about killing herself. The only thing stopping her, she says, is her children.

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Not all the women are desperate. Some are thriving in Germany, and others have become global advocates for their community, like 2018 Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad. She is the most prominent face of a program that was so ambitious and well-intentioned it inspired other countries, like Canada and France, to follow suit. But Hanans experience illustrates how parts of the program failed to live up to their full potential, and shows how difficult it is for refugees to gain access to mental health services, even in a program designed for just that. Michael Blume, the state official who led the program, sees it as a great success overall. But he is troubled by the states failure to bring the womens husbands to Germany. A great humanitarian program should not be sabotaged by bureaucracy, he says. But thats what is taking place.

Before she left Iraq, Hanan said she was given a piece of paper with information about what awaited her in Germany. I wish I could find that paper now, she says, because the promises they gave us, they didnt keep all of them.

By the time ISIS swept across Sinjar, the area in northwest Iraq that is home to most of the worlds Yazidis, Hanan had already endured more than her share of hardship. Her parents were murdered in front of her when she was six. She and her two siblings went to live with their grandfather and his wife, where they were beaten, starved, and forced to work instead of going to school. Her baby sister died soon after.

In her early twenties, she escaped the torturous conditions at home by marrying Hadi. It was the first good fortune of her life, she says; they loved each other. Over the course of about seven years, they had four daughters and then a son, who was just a few months old in August 2014, when ISIS captured Sinjar and unleashed its systematic campaign to wipe out the Yazidis.

In conquered Yazidi towns, fighters executed the men and elderly women. Boys were sent off for indoctrination and forced military training. Women and girls were sold into slavery, traded among fighters like property and repeatedly raped. Hanan and her children were among more than 6,000 people kidnapped. Hadi, who was working as a laborer in a city beyond the reach of ISIS when their village was captured, was frantic when he learned his family was gone.

Within days, President Barack Obama launched U.S. airstrikes on ISIS militants, and U.S. forces delivered food and water to besieged Yazidis trapped on Sinjar mountain. In the following months, as Yazidi women and children started emerging from captivitysome escaped, while others were rescued by a secret network of activistswith tales of horror, Yazidis pleaded for more international action. Former captives were severely traumatized. Mental-health care in Iraq was limited. And because the Yazidi faith doesnt accept converts or marriage outside the religion, the women raped and forcibly converted to Islam by ISIS members feared they were no longer welcome in the community.

In Germany, home to the largest Yazidi population outside of Iraq, officials in Baden Wurttemberg decided to act. In October 2014, state premier Winfried Kretschmann decided to issue 1,000 humanitarian visas and earmark 95 million ($107 million) for what became known as the Special Quota Project for Especially Vulnerable Women and Children from Northern Iraq. The state recruited 21 cities and towns across the southwestern state to host the refugees, agreeing to pay municipalities 42,000 ($50,000) per person for housing and other costs, while the state would cover the cost of their healthcare. Two other states agreed to take an additional 100 people.

Saber, six, and Sheelan, eight, playing on the bed. Tori FerencINSTITUTE for TIME

Program officials interviewed survivors of ISIS captivity in Iraq, selecting those with medical or psychological disorders as a result of their captivity who could benefit from treatment in Germany. The project was not restricted to Yazidis, and a small number of Christians and Muslims also were chosen. That was when the officials told each woman that after two years, immediate family members like husbands could apply for a visa under German rules for family unification.

Read More: He Helped Iraqs Most Famous Refugee Escape ISIS. Now Hes the One Who Needs Help

The program was groundbreaking. No German state had ever administered its own humanitarian admission program. And instead of waiting for asylum-seekers to make dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean, officials were seeking out the most vulnerable and bringing them to safety. The first plane arrived in March 2015. The last of the flightsincluding the one carrying Hananlanded in January 2016.

Hanan, along with 111 others, was sent to a pleasant hilltop town of about 25,000 people at the edge of the Black Forest. (Officials asked that the town not be named to protect the survivors, whom they fear could be targeted by ISIS members.) For the first three years, she lived with about half of the group in an old hospital in the town center that had been converted into a communal residence.

Hanan and her five children occupied two rooms off a central corridorone they used for sleeping, and the other, with a sink along one wall and a worn leather sofa along another, as a living room. They shared a bathroom and a kitchen with a large family next door.

The neighbors are worse than Daesh, she joked with a grimace, using a pejorative name for ISIS. It was May 2017, more than a year after her arrival. She sat on the floor to breastfeed her youngest child, Saber. At three, he was small for his age, but Hanan was small too. Her long dark hair was pulled back, and she wore a long blue skirt and a dark hoodie. Her next youngest, Sheelan, climbed into a wardrobe in the corner, peeking out from underneath thick black bangs. Haneya, her oldest at 10, and Hanadi and Berivan, eight and seven, were fighting with the neighbors children, their shrieks competing with the Kurdish music videos blaring from the television. Hanan yelled at them to stop.

Caring for her five children alone was wearing Hanan out. She was often sick, but found it difficult to go to the doctor because she didnt have help with childcare. She complained about painful and unresolved gynecological issues from being repeatedly raped. She wanted to go back to the doctor, but she relied on social workers to make appointments for her and said they were blowing off her requests. And most days, she suffered debilitating headaches.

Berivan, Hanan's 10-year-old daughter, at home. Tori FerencINSTITUTE for TIME

A trauma therapist came once a week to the shelter for a group session with the women, but Hanan usually wasnt able to attend because of the children. And she didnt want to talk about her experiences in front of the other women. When she slept, nightmares came. One night she dreamed she was back in captivity and an ISIS fighter was trying to take her oldest daughter, Haneya. Hanan woke herself and the children up with her screams. The older girls talked about their time in captivity often and sometimes had nightmares too. Theyre not like normal kids, Hanan said. When its nighttime, they ask me, Mama, do you think Daesh is going to come to get us?

A year earlier, around six months after her arrival, that nightmare had become reality. She was out shopping for food when she spotted him. He had trimmed his hair and beard, and exchanged his tunic for a blue T-shirt. But it was himthe ISIS member who had been her captor for a month.

She stared, frozen in place. He saw her, too: His eyes widened in recognition and surprise. Panic shot through her and then her feet were moving, carrying her out of the store and around the corner. By the time she went to the police, he was gone. She said they treated her as if she had mistaken a random refugee for her former tormenter. But she knew what she saw. How could I forget the face of the man who raped me?

Germany was supposed to be a sanctuary. Now, inside the old hospital walls was the only place Hanan felt safe. She rarely ventured out, remembering threats from her captors that they would find her if she ran away.

She worried the man shed spotted might come back to harm them. The only identifying information she could give police was his nom de guerre. And though police were stationed outside the shelter for some time after she made the report, Markus Burger, head of the department for refugees and resettlement in the towns social office, said his office eventually received a report stating there was no direct threat. The police referred questions about the incident to the federal public prosecutor, and a spokesman for the prosecutor said the office was aware of the incident but could not comment further. At least one other woman in the program saw her own captor in Germany, and she later returned to Iraq because she no longer felt safe.

Hanan couldnt understand why the police couldnt find the man. She began to see threats anywhere she went. Muslim people speaking Arabic terrified her. Once at a park with her children, a bearded man on a bench called out to her. Though she had never seen him before, she was afraid. She gathered the children and rushed back to the shelter.

Oranges in Hanan's kitchen. Tori FerencINSTITUTE for TIME

Yazidis are no strangers to trauma. The religious minority has endured centuries of persecution and attacks, from the Ottoman empire to Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. Jan Kizilhan, an expert in psychotraumatology and transcultural psychotherapy who was the programs chief psychologist, was born to a Yazidi family in Turkey and immigrated to Germany as a child. Survivors of ISIS captivity are dealing not only with their own individual trauma from the violence and family separation they endured, he said, but also the historical trauma borne by their people, and the collective trauma from ISISs attempted genocide.

But after the women arrived in Germany as part of the program, trauma therapy wasnt a top priority. At first, most of the refugees were focused on adjusting to life in Germany, said Kizilhan. They were also following the situation back home, where a multinational coalition was wrestling territory away from ISIS. With every victory, Yazidi families waited for news of their missing relatives, hoping they would not be among the bodies discovered in mass graves. Most had family members in camps, and others still in captivity. They werent ready to work through past trauma in therapy, because it was still part of their present.

There was another, more basic, obstacle to treatment: Most of the women were unfamiliar with the concept of psychotherapy. To even help them understand why they would need this or how it would help, it takes time, said Kizilhan. In many Middle Eastern cultures, including the Yazidi community, psychological trauma is often expressed somatically, he explained  many women complained of a burning liver, headaches, or stomachaches when the root was a psychological, rather than physiological, problem.

In 2017 and 2018, Tubingen University Hospital and the University of Freiburg, which were also involved in psychotherapeutic care for program participants, carried out surveys of 116 of the women in the program. Ninety-three percent of those surveyed fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder during the first survey, and the number remained the same a year later. That makes the fact that just 40% of the women have received trauma therapy, years after their arrival, striking.

But Kizilhan insists the figure does not represent a failure. Some women simply dont want therapy, he says, and it cant be forced. He expects that an additional third of the women will be ready for therapy in the coming years. And then we will be there to help them, he says. Each person is individual, different, and needs different timing. The state decided to cover the cost of the womens healthcare indefinitelyinitial plans were to foot the bill for three yearsafter it spent only 60 million ($71 million) of the allocated 95 million ($113 million) on the program.

Kizilhan acknowledges the challenges, including finding enough therapists and translators to work with the women. Kizilhan and Blume, who led the Special Quota project, say the program was an emergency intervention, and that a more long-term solution is building capacity for mental health care in Iraq. The state of Baden Wurttemberg has put resources toward that, toodonating 1.3 million ($1.5 million) to help establish the first masters program for psychotherapy in Iraq, started by Kizilhan at the University of Duhok in 2017.

Kizilhan and Blume say the program in Germany has been successful despite the challenges. In the Tubingen University study, 91% of the women surveyed said they were satisfied to be in Germany, and 85% said they were satisfied with the program. When asked if they were satisfied with the psychosocial care, the number who said yes dropped to 72%. Hanan was among those who found it lacking.

Her struggle to access medical care and therapy were two of the ways she felt let down by the program. For her first three years in Germany, Hanan received minimal therapy, even though she wanted it. She rarely attended the group sessions, both because she found them unhelpful and because of the ongoing childcare issues. She said she was not offered individual sessions. Burger said when social workers saw some women were unhappy with group sessions, they arranged for individual therapy, and Hanan began talking with a therapist every few weeks. She said it helped a little, but she felt the same after each session.

***

On a Wednesday in July 2018, Hanan left German class early to shop for food. Before leaving home, she pulled on a fitted black blazer over her beige shirt and leggings. The clothes were new; she had recently cast aside the long, dark skirts and sweaters that she had worn ever since her escape for a more modern wardrobe. Friends had urged her to make the switch, teasing her that she dressed like she was still living under ISIS. Hanan walked to the store, passing traditional timber-frame buildings and window boxes overflowing with geraniums and petunias. She spotted a friend outside the supermarket and stopped to chat before buying chicken legs and vegetables. Managing the familys budget alonesomething she had never done in Iraqwas challenging. Sometimes she didnt have enough money at the end of the month.

Two years on from encountering her former captor, the town was beginning to feel less threatening, though Hanan still didnt like going out at night. She attended German language class four mornings a week. Shed never learned how to read or write as a child, so learning German was doubly hard, but she was making slow progress. She was also making a few German friends, and shed found a way to decipher their text messages even though she couldnt read. When she received a message, shed paste it into the Google Translate app and press the audio button. A robotic voice would read it aloud and shed reply via voice note.

Back at home, she put a pot of rice on the stove and began browning the chicken, preoccupied by the logistics of her upcoming trip to Iraq to visit her husband, Hadi. Shed learned through her social worker that her stipend would be paused while she was away, and Hanan wasnt sure how she would make it through the month without the money.

It would be the second time she had to travel to see Hadi. (The women were admitted as humanitarian refugees, rather than asylum seekers, which spared them the process of applying for asylum and meant they were allowed to return to visit family in Iraq, unlike asylum holders.) Saber, now four, had spent most of his life separated from his father, and didnt recognize him. The girls no longer even missed him. He was becoming a faraway memory.

Two and a half years had now gone by since she left Iraq, well past the two years after which Hadi had been promised he could apply for a visa. Hanans social worker helped her file papers related to his visa application. But whenever Hanan asked what was happening, she was given the same answer: Not yet.

What she didnt know was that Germanys position toward refugees had shifted. The welcoming stance the country adopted when more than a million people poured into the country seeking asylum in 2015 had hardened amid a backlash fueled by far-right anti-immigration parties. When he interviewed the women in 2015, and told them their husbands could apply for a visa after two years, Kizilhan was in line with the rules at the time. But now laws governing refugees and family unification visas were tightened. German courts even began ruling against Yazidis who requested asylum, saying it was safe for them to go back to Iraq.

To date, no husbands of women in the Special Quota Project have received visas. Its hard to know how many are waiting: Kizilhan says he has identified 18. According to the study, 28 percent of the women surveyed had husbands in Iraq.

Read More: Syrian Women Are Embracing Their New Lives in Germany. But At What Cost?

A spokesman for the Baden Wurttemberg Ministry of Interior, Digitalization and Migration said that special rules apply to family reunifications for those granted humanitarian admission, and may only be allowed for reasons of human rights, on humanitarian grounds or to protect political interests. The special rules must be considered on a case by case basis, he said, and added the federal authorities are responsible for issuing visas, not the state.

Kizilhan said the ministry could intervene to make sure the family members are issued visas. But the political will behind the creation of the Special Quota Project has evaporated. In January, Kizilhan said he had recently met with state interior ministry officials to ask that they find a way to bring the husbands to Germany, but that they told him the change in federal law made it difficult to do so. This is ridiculous, Kizilhan says. If you can take 1,100 with the special quota, you can take 18 people in one day.

On trips back to Iraq, Kizilhan said hes been confronted by husbands demanding answers, and is distressed that the state has not followed through. He notes that bringing the womens immediate family to Germany would improve their psychological healththe goal of the programby helping to reduce post-traumatic stress symptoms and easing their integration into society. Hanan often spoke of waiting for Hadis arrival to move into an apartment on her own. She was fearful of handling all the responsibilities of living in a new country without him. And she desperately needed help caring for the children, help she thought would be provided in the program. Theyd spent a year separated from Hadi in captivity. Now, they were once again separated, once again waiting for their family to be reunited.

Hanan braiding her 11-year-old daughter Hanadi's hair while Berivan, 10 (L) and Haneya, 13 (R) watch. Tori FerencINSTITUTE for TIME

After Hanans visit to Iraq, months went by with no news about Hadis visa. They both began to despair that it would ever materialize, their frustration compounded by a dearth of information about the delay.

In the spring of 2019, after waiting three years, Hadi decided he could wait no longer. He borrowed money and set out for Germany along irregular migration routes. It took him eight monthshe was detained in Greece on the waybut eventually he made it to Hanan. Their reunion, though, was far from perfect. After his arrival in Germany, the once-happy couple separated. Hanan would not discuss the details of their estrangement except to say that it took root because of their physical separation and left her distraught. He is now in a relationship with another woman and Hanan said he is not in touch with his children. His future in Germany is uncertain, tooit is unclear whether he will be permitted to stay.

Last summer Hanan moved into a light-filled two-bedroom furnished flat rented for her by the municipality in a quiet residential neighborhood. Its decorated brightly in orangea peach wall, tangerine dining chairs, an ochre shag carpet, and a sofa the color of carrots. While theres a bunk bed in the kids room, they usually end up sleeping in Hanans king-size bed every night, a tangle of arms and legs. She was finally able to see a doctor to resolve her lingering gynecological health problem, although the daily headaches are still there. Shes no longer afraid of going out at night.

On a Sunday morning in January, she awoke late, groggy from hosting friends the night before. Saber, now six, and Sheelan, seven, plopped on the sofa to watch Tom and Jerry on the television as Hanan made bread in the kitchen. Squeezing small lumps off the dough, she quickly slapped each one from hand to hand, stretching it into a thin disc. In Iraq, she would have baked the loaves in an outdoor clay oven. Here, she used a small metal box oven, heated with an electric coil, placed on the countertop. She placed each loaf on top to let it brown, then baked it inside the oven before stacking the finished loaves on the windowsill.

When she was done, the children gathered at the table, scooping up fried eggs, yogurt, tahini, and cheese with the fresh bread. They chattered together in German; they rarely spoke Kurdish with one another anymore. Saber, impish and sensitive, speaks German with a near flawless accent. After breakfast, the three older girls clear the table, wash the dishes, and sweep the floor unbidden. Hanadi, now 11, and Berivan, now 10, both with round cheeks like their mother, are learning how to swim at school. Haneya, now 13, reads and translates the mail and types messages in German for her mother.

Sometimes I look at my kids and think OK, Im all right. But I just feel bad, Hanan said, lowering herself onto the sofa. Its a bad feeling inside of me, I dont know how to explain it. Sometimes I want to hit myself, because of this bad feeling inside, and I dont know how to deal with it. Many times I thought about killing myself, but then I remember my kids, that they need me.

The situation with Hadi has her so upset she doesnt think about ISIS anymore, Hanan said, adding that she doesnt know what to do or where to turn. Shes spent hours crying with a Yazidi friend, another survivor, who lives nearby. Thats the closest she gets to therapy now.

After Hanan moved into the apartment, her therapy sessions ended. A few months later, social workers took her to an appointment at a new therapists office, but she hadnt gone back. She said the appointment time of 7 p.m. was impossible as there was no one to watch the children at home. But she knows she needs help. Its too much for me, she said. I cant hold all these problems alone.

Read More: Is Germany Failing Female Refugees?

Burger, of the towns department for refugees and resettlement, said that as more of the women moved into private apartments last yearall but 10 now live on their ownit became harder to arrange therapy sessions. Some therapists have waiting lists, and there is always the problem of timing, he said. Its difficult finding a time when the trauma therapist and the translator both are available, and also when someone can take care for the children, and when the German classes arent at the same time. But we are working on it. He could not give a number for how many of the women in the town were undergoing therapy, saying it was constantly changing, but said therapy was available to all who wanted it. We can only offer it, he said. In the end it is the decision of the women if they want to take part in the programs, and we dont want to and cant force anyone to take part.

Hanan knows it was right to come to Germany. Shes better off than she would be in Iraq, where despite the territorial defeat of ISIS, most Yazidis are still displaced, and their future is uncertain. She feels safe now in Germany, and she can see bright futures for her children here.

But she cant muster any of that hope for herself, not after losing Hadi. The darkness she had hoped to escape never went away. Maybe Im going to go crazy, or Im going to kill myself. Maybe I wont find a solution for myself except to die, she said. Now Im 34, and I didnt see any hope in my entire life. And for the future also, I dont have any hope. Only God knows.

With reporting by Navin Haji Semo and Madeline Roache

Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the International Womens Media Foundation Reporting Grants for Womens Stories.
Nurse Tova Yellock says that even though she has COVID-19, she still doesnt regret her role on the front line of health care.

Im a health care worker, so I sign up for this, she said. I signed up to be on the front lines, and I just ended up getting it [COVID-19].

COVID-19 is not a joke. Its not a game, especially if you have underlying issues. Wash your hands frequently, and wear a mask.

Yellock, 35, has been a nurse for six years. She has worked in various places, often unhappy with conditions she has seen, but in the past half a year has worked at a skilled nursing facility she loves.

On Friday, Aug. 7, I knew I was sick. I just hadnt got all the way sick yet, she said. She stopped working immediately.

She only felt like she was coming down with a cold or something, but there was cause for concern: not just from the coronavirus pandemic, but also from the fact that she has lupus.

Lupus is an autoimmune disorder that affects your joints, she said. She also has fibromyalgia, which causes pain.

Over the weekend, I had the general malaise just because of my underlying illnesses, she said.

On Aug. 11, she went to the hospital, where she was tested for the flu, strep and the coronavirus.

The coronavirus test came back positive on Aug. 13.

I have breathing problems. Thats the main thing about it with me. Because of my health issues, the breathing is horrible, she said.

She is on oxygen therapy, with oxygen at home to help her breath more deeply when she needs it. There was a point she was using it quite a bit, and she has been cutting back lately.

She hasnt had much coughing, but she has chills. I break out in sweats.

The body aches are unbelievable, like being stabbed with ice picks, she said.

One day I wake up and Ill feel normal, then 2, 3 hours later  boom, Im sick again, she said. Its weird like that. Its the weirdest virus Ive ever had in my life. Its the craziest thing.

She cant taste or smell anything, but she feels the textures of food while she eats, she said.

Ive been scared this whole time, she said. Especially earlier in the week I was scared. I couldnt breathe good, couldnt smell, was dizzy, had no coordination, was falling.

Someone sick with COVID-19 needs regular help with the most basic of functions, she said. You cannot do this alone. She is being well taken care of by her husband, Johnny Yellock, she said.

As well as tending to her needs, he is doing all the parenting for their two daughters, 2-year-old Kailyn Yellock and 4-year-old Milan Waller.

By maintaining a strict quarantine in her bedroom, she has kept the virus from the rest of the family, she said.

She mostly stays in the couples bedroom, while her husband sleeps on the other end of the house. She constantly wears a mask, and she wipes down anything she touches with bleach wipes.

Thats how I am keeping my family safe  along with my amazing husband, she said.

One of her friends, Michelle George, created a Facebook fundraiser for her.

People wanted to help me in some way, Yellock said.

The fundraiser is titled Tova Yellock COVID 19 Fundraiser.

My sweet Friend Tova Yellock has COVID 19, the fundraiser description reads.

She is a hard working nurse. She loves her job and her residents so much. She has a wonderful family as well.

If you can imagine having COVID is scary. She is very sick at home on oxygen therapy. She is in need of donations.

If you do not feel comfortable donating money then please consider buy gift cards to grocery stores. Even Walmart gift cards. 

Listen, she has been front lines since Day One of this. Never taking off. Please consider helping her. At least share this fundraiser. Thank you so much! The fundraising goal was a modest $300.

Im not trying to be that person thats just wanting more and more and more, whether I need it or not. Im not that person, Yellock said.

That $300 would have been around the amount to cover about a week without a paycheck. However, Yellock since has learned that shell miss more work than that.

Shes receiving some financial assistance while shes not working, she said, but it wont cover the all the time with no paycheck  even though bills and expenses still keep coming in.

Yellock said she is sharing her story because she warns people to take this disease seriously.

The COVID can affect your whole family, she said. Wear your mask. Be careful.

However, as medical experts say, wearing a mask is more for the protection of other people around than it is for the mask-wearer: I wore my mask every day  and still ended up contracting the virus, she said.

With that being said, its important for everyone including yourself to wear a mask, to keep one another safe as well. A person who is not wearing a mask can give it to someone who is wearing a mask.

Holly Kozelsky is a writer for the Martinsville Bulletin; contact her at 276-638-8801 ext. 243.

Holly Kozelsky is a writer for the Martinsville Bulletin; contact her at 276-638-8801 ext. 243.

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A new study from the University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University reports that people spend a little less time looking at 'fake news' headlines than to factual ones -- knowledge that could make it easier to sort through fake news

The term 'fake news' has been a part of our vocabulary since the 2016 US presidential election. As the amount of fake news in circulation grows larger and larger, particularly in the United States, it often spreads like wildfire. Subsequently, there is an ever-increasing need for fact-checking and other solutions to help people navigate the oceans of factual and fake news that surround us.

Help may be on the way, via an interdisciplinary field where eye-tracking technology and computer science meet. A study by University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University researchers shows that people's eyes react differently to factual and false news headlines.

Eyes spend a bit less time on fake headlines

Researchers placed 55 different test subjects in front of a screen to read 108 news headlines. A third of the headlines were fake. The test subjects were assigned a so-called 'pseudo-task' of assessing which of the news items was the most recent. What they didn't know, was that some of the headlines were fake. Using eye-tracking technology, the researchers analyzed how much time each person spent reading the headlines and how many fixations the person per headline.

"We thought that it would be interesting to see if there's a difference in the way people read news headlines, depending on whether the headlines are factual or false. This has never been studied. And, it turns out that there is indeed a statistically significant difference," says PhD fellow and lead author Christian Hansen, of the University of Copenhagen's Department of Computer Science.

His colleague and co-author from the same department, PhD fellow Casper Hansen, adds:

"The study demonstrated that our test subjects' eyes spent less time on false headlines and fixated on them a bit less compared with the headlines that were true. All in all, people gave fake news headlines a little less visual attention, despite their being unaware that the headlines were fake."

The computer scientists can't explain for the difference, nor do they dare make any guesses. Nevertheless, they were surprised by the result.

The researchers used the results to create an algorithm that can predict whether a news headline is fake based on eye movements.

Could support fact-checking

As a next step, the researchers would like to examine whether it is possible to measure the same differences in eye movements on a larger scale, beyond the lab - preferably using ordinary webcams or mobile phone cameras. It will, of course, require that people allow for access to their cameras.

The two computer scientists imagine that eye-tracking technology could eventually help with the fact-checking of news stories, all depending upon their ability to collect data from people's reading patterns. The data could come from news aggregator website users or from the users of other sources, e.g., Feedly and Google News, as well as from social media, like Facebook and Twitter, where the amount of fake news is large as well.

"Professional fact-checkers in the media and organizations need to read through lots of material just to find out what needs to be fact-checked. A tool to help them prioritize material could be of great help," concludes Christian Hansen.

###

FACTS

Researchers selected 108 headlines from thelocal.dk, a news website that publishes Danish news in English. The headings were selected on the basis of the following criteria:

(a) headline content should be widely known to the public, (b) the headlines should be formulated in roughly the same tone (e.g., no clickbait), (c) headlines were most likely not to provoke strong emotional responses.

The researchers altered some of the headlines to make them fake by changing individual words, such as by substituting in the word "worst" in the headline: "Copenhagen still worst bicycle city in the world". They ensured that the headlines remained plausible and sounded natural.

All 108 headings in the experiment had a fairly uniform composition, text level and length.

The 55 test subjects were 19-33 years old, with a fair distribution of women and men. All participants agreed to participate in the trial and allowed for their eye movements to be tracked.

The study was conducted by Christian Hansen, Casper Hansen, Jakob Grue Simonsen, Stephen Alstrup and Christina Lioma, all affiliated with the Information Retrieval Lab at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Computer Science as well as Birger Larsen from the Science, Policy and Information Studies research group at Aalborg University's Department of Communication.

The results were published by: Christian Hansen, Casper Hansen, Jakob Grue Simonsen, Birger Larsen, Stephen Alstrup and Christina Lioma (2020). Factuality Checking in News Headlines with Eye Tracking. In Proceedings of the 43nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3397271.3401221

The study is partly funded by Innovation Fund Denmark, through DABAI.
WINNIPEGManitoba shattered its single-day record for new COVID-19 cases on Sunday, most of which health officials said were from communal-living settings.

But authorites stress that people shouldnt be too focused on the numbers.

Seventy-two new COVID-19 cases were recorded in the province on Sunday  compared to the previous record of 42, which was set the previous day.

The provinces chief public health officer, Dr. Brent Roussin, told a news conference that 47 of Sundays new cases are in communal-living settings.

The province says that preliminary investigation shows that most of the new cases are a result of extra testing thats being done due to known clusters in those settings in the Prairie Mountain health region in western Manitoba.

Health Minister Cameron Friesen told the news conference that Hutterite communities are being co-operative with testing and are working with public health officials to try to limit the spread of the virus.

Hospitalization rates in Manitoba remain low, with the province reporting seven people with COVID-19 in hospital on Sunday, one of whom is in intensive care.

I think its important to look past the large number today to understand that a significant part of todays reported numbers is because there is testing going on on colonies and thats a good thing, Friesen said, urging people not to stigmatize anyone.

Lets remember that Hutterite colonies were among the first Manitoba groups to step up and sew masks, to bring food to food banks, to supply hospitals with masks and other things. And theyve been there in the past, as well, in the same way.

Manitoba announced last week it was tightening COVID-19 restrictions the region, which includes Brandon, Dauphin and other communities because of rising case numbers, and because of some people ignoring health guidelines.

Starting Monday, indoor and outdoor public gatherings in Prairie Mountain will be limited to 10 people, with some exceptions that include religious gatherings. The rest of the province will continue to be allowed gatherings of up to 50 people indoors and 100 outdoors.

Masks will also be mandatory in the region starting Monday for indoor public places and any public gatherings. In the rest of the province, masks remain a government recommendation when physical distancing is not possible, although some businesses require customers to wear them.

Roussin said multiple Hutterite colonies have had positive cases, but he wouldnt specify how many.

He said the increased testing shows the communities are taking the disease seriously and are working with public health.

I think that in any setting where theres close, prolonged contact then theres increased risk of transmission of this virus but a lot of these communities are working hard to reduce that risk, he said.

Roussin said there was nothing to indicate any of the new cases Sunday were associated with an earlier outbreak in Brandon that affected dozens of people associated with a meat packing facility, 37 of which he said are still active.

The province also said Sunday that there are seven cases related to an outbreak at Bethesda Place personal care home in Steinbach thats affecting a combination of staff and residents.

Manitoba had recorded a total of 944 COVID-19 cases as of Sunday. Of those, 356 remained active, while 576 people had recovered. Twelve people have died of the virus in the province.

Read more about:
In a matter of days, nearly all U.S. colleges and universities will be back in session  whether its online, in person, or some combination. Davidson College and The Chronicle of Higher Education are tracking the reopening plans of nearly 3,000 institutions:

6 percent will be online-only

27 percent will be primarily online

15 percent will be a hybrid of online and in-person

20 percent will be primarily in-person

2.5 percent will be solely in-person

6 percent are doing something else entirely

24 percent of schools have still not yet finalized their plans

Struggling to salvage some normalcy  and revenue  during the pandemic, many colleges and universities are inviting students into dorms and classrooms. But that comes with strict rules: No parties. Regular coronavirus tests. Wellness pledges to self-report symptoms. And some mandatory quarantines  with some suspect meals  before students can enter the dorms.

Colleges are very risk averse, but at the same time, theyre consumer-oriented, said our colleague Anemona Hartocollis, who covers higher education. Theyre torn between the desire to make the students happy and the desire to preserve their own reputations.

Theres one problem with that plan: It requires students to self-police their own social distancing.

The blame game

At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Notre Dame, dozens of coronavirus cases popped up almost immediately, many of which were linked to large parties. Those schools shut down in-person education and switched to online-only classes.

If you look at the pictures, kids seem oblivious, Anemona said. But when youre that age, its easy to just get lost in the excitement and forget.
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Administrators at California State University, Northridge are seeing a new enrollment trend: an increasing number of students who are waiting until the last minute to sign up for classes.

In the weeks leading up to the first day of class today, administrators have received emails from about 120 first-year students who had been accepted to the university, but didn't commit to enrolling. Many now say they want to register after all.

"The mother in me is, like, 'Why didn't you take care of this before?'" said Geraldine Sare, director of CSUN's Matador Advising Hub, which provides a variety of support services to students.

Sare and other officials had expected about 4,000 to 5,000 first-year students to enroll in time for today's start of classes. That number is down about 1,000, she said. But CSUN, like other colleges, waits a few weeks into the semester to conduct a final census.

Sare said she believes some of these prospective students resigned themselves to at least temporarily forgoing college after a disrupted and chaotic senior year of high school.

Students walk across the California State University, Northridge campus prior to the pandemic. (Andrew Cullen for LAist)

"They just didn't think a lot of things would go through, so they figured they won't start this fall, or they might go to a community college," she said.

CSUN has received emails in the past few weeks from about 70 students who had committed to enrolling in May but have since decided to withdraw.

"The general reason is they're saying personal reasons or financial reasons," said Sare, "and, you know, we don't want to go further with that conversation."

The unstable nature of CSUN's first-year student enrollment sheds light on how COVID-19 is shaping students' college plans, and leading some campuses to change enrollment deadlines and adjust projections of how many students will enroll.

FALL ENROLLMENT IMPLOSION PREDICTED

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the economy and was expected to upend fall college enrollment. While the dire predictions haven't come to pass at some Southern California colleges and universities, COVID-19 has disrupted the usual enrollment management process.

A report last April by the consultant company McKinsey said surveys indicated that 20% of freshman students would forgo the first year of college altogether. As the months passed and COVID-19 remained a serious threat to public health, higher education officials decided to keep classes online for the fall. The conventional wisdom was that first year students would attend community colleges to save money, or defer their enrollment for one year.

Besides examining public agency health directives to help them decide whether they were going to open in-person classes, college officials spent a lot of time studying how their enrollments would be affected.

While the bigger, richer research universities appear to be weathering the enrollment storm, smaller schools are struggling to fill available slots.

"Students are willing to go online for a while in order to get that degree," said Jerry Lucido, an education researcher at USC and director of the university's Center for Enrollment Research Policy and Practice. "Less selective private colleges and regional publics are struggling more to meet their numbers ... they can't dip easily into their applicant pool to take more students and they have to be much more creative."

McKinsey said universities had moved deadlines and created payment plans for families to make enrollment more attractive.

Occidental College first-year students and their families on move-in day in Aug. 2018. (Marc Campos/courtesy Occidental College)

At Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Northeast Los Angeles, administrators predicted they'd have 535 first-year students for the fall semester. That's down about 20%. Occidental granted 90 incoming freshmen deferred enrollment until the fall of next year. The college begins its semester online today.

"If you're a first-year student and this is going to be your introduction to the college life and the college experience, and your first semester is not going be on campus, I certainly can understand why some families opted to take a gap year," said Vince Cuseo, Occidental's dean of admission.

A spokesman for Cal State Long Beach said total enrollment for the fall is predicted to be 1,000 students higher than last year. However, enrollment of international students is down 15% due to travel restrictions.

But first-year enrollment appears to be down on that campus. Cal State Long Beach maintains a public data website where the university posts enrollment figures daily. As of Aug. 21, 361 first-year students had enrolled for the fall 2020 semester, according to the data. That's 103 fewer than the same day last year.

UC Irvine said it's received significantly fewer deferral requests for the coming quarter than last year. But the university has not loosened its deferral policies as Occidental College and CSUN have.

"I think that the strength of our plans for remote instruction, our messaging, and the Chancellor's leadership on the issues helped many applicants understand that they had a viable and safe option for enrollment this year," Dale Leaman, executive director of UCI's Office of Undergraduate Admissions, said in an email.

It's taken a lot of work for colleges and universities to get close to their enrollment figures. Now their challenge is to create an engaging and enriching online college experience, so students don't get disillusioned and drop out.
A Malaysian coroner began an inquest on Monday into the death of a French-Irish teen, a year after her naked body was found near a nature resort where she mysteriously vanished while on holiday.

Nora Anne Quoirins disappearance from her familys cottage at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on August 4 last year, a day after her family arrived for their holiday, sparked a massive search operation.

Her naked body was discovered August 13 beside a stream in a palm oil estate about 2.5 kilometres (1.6 miles) from the resort.

Coroner Maimoonah Aid said the inquest is aimed at determining when Nora died, the cause of her death, how she came to her death, and if anyone was criminally involved.

Negeri Sembilan police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop, the first witness, said the investigation showed no criminal element. He said there was no indication Nora was abducted and no ransom demand.

Police believe Nora climbed out of a window on her own, and the post-mortem showed she succumbed to intestinal bleeding due to starvation and stress, he said.

Her Irish mother and French father, Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin, say Nora was kidnapped because she had mental and physical disabilities and could not have wandered off on her own.

Resort owner Haanim Bamadhaj, who gave evidence via video conference, said Noras parents had told her the teenager only had on her underwear when she went missing and that she would hide when she was frightened.

Recalling the night, Ms Haanim, whose house faces the Quorins cottage, said it was peaceful and that her dog, who would bark if there were outsiders, was also quiet.

Expand Close Location of where Nora Quoirins body was found in Malaysia (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook

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She acknowledged that a window of the cottage that was found ajar the morning Nora disappeared was faulty and could be opened from the outside. But she said there have never been any criminal break-ins in her property since it opened for business 11 years ago.

A recording of the girls mother calling Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here that was used during the search was played to the court.

The coroner earlier this month visited the resort and the place where the body was found. The inquest, which is set to run until September 4, is to involve 64 witnesses.

The Quoirin family lawyer, S Sakhty Vell, said Noras parents could not attend the inquest due to the coronavirus pandemic but will give evidence via video conference. A British doctor who conducted a second post-mortem on Noras body will also give evidence remotely, he said.

The Quoirin family has sued the resort owner for alleged negligence. They said in their lawsuit that there was no security at the resort and that a cottage window was found ajar with a broken latch on the morning Nora disappeared.

Nora had poor motor skills and needed help to walk and her mental age was about five or six years old, her parents said in the lawsuit.

Gurdial Singh Nijar, the lawyer representing the resort, told reporters after the first day of the inquest that the incident was unfortunate but there was no culpability on the part of the resort owner.

Noras parents have welcomed Malaysias decision to hold the inquest after police classified the case as no further action. They said the inquest will be crucial in determining the fullest possible picture of what happened to Nora and how her case was dealt with.
President Trump, who has struggled to answer basic questions about what he would do with a second term, on Sunday night released a list of vague statements about his agenda for four more years.

The list was featured under the headline President Trump: Fighting for You! and included broad, detail-free pledges. Some were standard fare, like promises of millions of new jobs, and there were also some of Mr. Trumps broad pledges, like hold China fully accountable for allowing the virus to spread around the world.

Return to normal in 2021 was another pledge, a reference to the social distancing measures that have caused widespread disruptions in states as officials have tried to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

Then there were the more esoteric pledges, like, Drain the Globalist Swamp by Taking on International Organizations That Hurt American Citizens.
The New Orleans Saints cut former Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Nigel Bradham on Monday, less than three weeks after the team signed the veteran linebacker, according to ESPN.

Bradham, 30, signed with the Saints on Aug. 7 after the Eagles declined an option on his contract in February to send him into free agency after four seasons in Philadelphia.

A surprise Monday morning release: the Saints cut veteran LB Nigel Bradham, per source.  Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) August 24, 2020

Bradham wont make it to the regular season with New Orleans.

In his short Saints tenure, Bradham courted a little bit of controversy.

Read more: Nigel Bradham clarifies comments on Philadelphia Eagles team culture

During an introductory news conference in New Orleans, Bradham said he was excited to join a winning organization, and he implied that his two previous teams  the Eagles and the Buffalo Bills  did not fit that characterization.

Its definitely a different type of environment, a different culture, because the last two organizations I went to wasnt really a winning organization, Bradham said a week ago. So when you come to a place where its known for winning and known for being in the postseason, you see the different type of culture they have and the different type of expectations that they have naturally.

Both Bradham and the Saints later clarified that his comments were meant to describe the organizations when he arrived.

Bradham signed with the Eagles before the 2016 season. At the time, the Eagles had just one playoff appearance in the previous five seasons.

Read more: Eagles training camp rundown: Is the offensive line behind?

During Bradhams four seasons in Philadelphia, he started at linebacker in the teams Super Bowl LII win after the 2017 season, and he played key roles on defenses that helped the Eagles to a wild-card berth in 2018 and an NFC East title in 2019.

The Eagles signed Bradham to a five-year contract extension worth $40 million in 2018, but the contract had an out after two seasons, and the Eagles declined an option to make him a free agent. In four seasons in Philadelphia, Bradham started 58 games and recorded 348 tackles, 21 tackles for loss, five sacks, three forced fumbles and two interceptions.

Now, it appears Bradham will be on the job hunt once again.

Daniel Gallen covers the Philadelphia Eagles for PennLive. He can be reached at dgallen@pennlive.com. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Follow PennLives Philadelphia Eagles coverage on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

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Leonelis Arango Salas in "Epicentro" Kino Lorber/Kino Marquee

"Epicentro," director Hubert Sauper's ("We Come as Friends") fascinating, observational documentary about Cuba, opens with a man smoking a cigar the country is famous for. Yet the filmmaker, who was Oscar-nominated for "Darwin's Nightmare," is more interested in diving deeper into how people on this island country live. Sauper's film, which won a World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and is available through Kino Marquee starting August 28, guides viewers to see the "real" Cuba.

He follows Leonelis Arango Salas, a young girl he deems a "young prophet," who wants to be an actress. He encounters Cuban musicians singing "Guantanamera" on the streets of Havana. He observes people drinking rum in bars (and gets drunk himself). He greets a woman named Clarita in her home and observes dance classes. "Epicentro" even visits an abandoned sugar factory that used to supply Coca-Cola.

In addition, Sauper's film offers thoughts about tourism, (including sex tourism), but it also travels back in time, to the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, to explore American hegemony and imperialism, as well as ideas of utopia, freedom, and slavery. Of course, there is a discussion of Castro.

In "Epicentro" Sauper uses the "hypnotic prism" that is cinema to comment on all these socio-political themes. He films Cuban kids laughing at "The Great Dictator" among other Chaplin films, and has Oona Castilla Chaplin, Charlie's granddaughter, performing songs and enacting a dramatic scene with Leonelis.

What emerges is a vibrant portrait of a people and a nation that is trying to maintain its own identity without foreign interference. Sauper chatted with Salon about Cuba, the U.S. and his new film, "Epicentro."

Story continues

What prompted your fascination with Cuba and the creation of this documentary?

Cuba is fascinating to most people on the planet. For centuries it has been the friction line between the new world and the old world, and the epicenter of the Spanish imperial entity. Havana was the first cosmopolitan, globalized city because people from all continents met there. It was the epicenter of slave trade, the Cold War, and Communist and Capitalist thinking structures.

Had you been to Cuba before? Did you know what to expect to encounter?

I was there 20-25 years ago. Cuba is a part of America and Europe, and culturally, there are things I knew from Africa that I found again in Cuba. I felt at home quickly there. Havana is, in a way, America at its best  it's the fantasy of Americans. That's why it's so interesting  the cars, and this look into the past. For Europeans, too. Something I didn't treat in the film was that Cuba, to me, is a window into the future because it's a possible scenario of what happens when global structures and industries break down, like sugar. Life continues in a very different form in a post-industrial society.

How did you determine that you would follow subjects such as Leonelis or Clarita? Why did they make the best participants?

It's hard to say. Why did I choose Mozart to open the film? The decisions are not conceptual. The ideas are, but the actual choice of characters is by encounter. How do I interact with people and what do I see in them in terms of archetypes and figures for a movie? Clarita is one of the millions of women in Cuba who are struggling. She has a kid and don't know how to make a living. Some of these [women] are pushed into real poverty and prostitution. Clarita is one of the versions that the kids could become. The tension, I hope you have as a viewer, is that you live with the kids and try to figure out what is going to happen to them. Will they live in the street and give a massage to a German tourist, or study or live abroad? That tension is interesting to me.

"Epicentro" examines the power of cinema to make impressions on people  the manipulation of cinema. Can you talk about the way your documentary both creates reality but also influences it?

Yes, "Epicentro" is a movie. I, Hubert, am a part of the reality I'm describing. I'm obviously manipulating reality and try to enact something. But I'm also overwhelmed by what's happening around me. I'm constantly playing with the question: What is reality, or fake, or true? I reflect on it in a playful and real-time way.

If I'm applying the same methods to the things I'm criticizing, I am playing with an open hand of cards. In the film, there is a scene of the kids in school watching a man talk over a silent movie being shown. That was a real school and real children reacting to what they saw. But they are bluffed by the real look of fake images. Any visually literate person understands that, and I'm playing with it. I'm not pretending to say that I walked into school and someone was talking about cinema from the 1890s. It's staged, but it doesn't take away from the reality of what is happening or being shown. What I'm documenting is what I see  the Cuba I see. But I am there with my own questions and my own confusion and the paradox of me being in that situation and understanding that history.

You feature Oona Chaplin and show several Chaplin films to the Cuban children. Why did you include her in your documentary?

It was a strange situation. I shot the scene where the kids are trying to get my phone and make a film on the rooftop of a house. They knew how to work fast forward and slow motion  which I didn't know myself, by the way  on my phone. They made these films in front of me. And suddenly Chaplin appeared. It was ghost-like in a way. I called Oona, she's a friend, and told her to come, and she fell in love with the kids. We created a scene  Leonelis wants to be an actress, so "Here's an actress. Do a scene." Oona has a Cuban background; part of her life was spent in Cuba.

Cuba is defined by symbols such as cigars, sugar, rum, but you focus more on Fidel and what he means to Cubans. Can you discuss that?

Places like Cuba are so overloaded from things that have been overstressed  images and cliches. It's impossible to make a bad photo in Havana because everything looks amazing! But it is also full of cliches. Fidel died when I started to shoot the film, that's why it's in the film. I wasn't going to treat the Castro aspect. It's an important part of the Cuban history, but it's been talked about too much. The man standing on the globe [it's a floor design] says, "Cuba is a utopia, but I don't know what utopia means."

It's not something I intellectualized. When you open a movie, you strike a contract with the audience. You are now in a cinema and follow a story you may not be used to following. Talking about something abstract gives you a film. You can sink into it, or you can refuse it. Both reactions are [legitimate]. The man with a cigar who opens the film is not a conceptual idea. It's an idea to create a mood. He had a cigar because many people have cigars. The association you have is the right one. I don't want to lead you to something specific. I want you to feel the rhythm and the story starting.

There's a terrific scene of Leonelis and her friends admiring an expensive pen that costs more than $2,300 U.S. dollars. They talk about their families earning 4 pesos a day and work out how long it would take to buy that pen. What observations do you have about the inequality in a country that is modeled on a utopian premise where everyone is supposed to have what they need?

I think that's what I wanted to produce. Utopia as a concept is unique, but we have to be aware of it. Utopian often turns into dystopian. What is strange is that when I studied Thomas Moore's book "Utopia," and I looked at the charter from the Cuban revolution, it basically quotes Moore's book. The headlines of the revolution were pulled from "Utopia," which was written 500 years earlier!

I loved the thoughts in the film about tourism, and how it is "superficial." There are scenes of a couple participating in sex tourism, and even a photographer trading a pen for a photograph of a young boy, perhaps exploiting his subject. Can you discuss these themes?

Tourism is a form of invasion, and all of us are tourists. We are the wave. I thought that the imagery of a soldier armed with guns plowing into a town is similar to tourists armed with cameras  a similar kind of invasion. The sheer image of the guy from New York giving away pen. He's armed literally like a guy in Baghdad. Mass tourism was invented by a God-fearing half-crazy Thomas Cook, which is the name of a travel agency now in the UK. He Invented mass tourism and got rich people from Britain to discover the Nile in big boats.

There is considerable anti-Trump sentiment from the Cuban people. What do you want viewers to understand about American hegemony after seeing "Epicentro"?

I'm not American, but I grew up with Americans, and I know it is not much different than Europe; Europeans went to America to kill Apaches. It's complex. There's a dialectic in my films of haves and have-nots, North and South. In America and Europe, we have microphones and cameras, and we talk, so when you go to Sudan or Cuba, we can learn more about ourselves if we are listening carefully. It's not about the others, it's about what we are doing there. The hegemony is a fact, and the intervention is painful  Baghdad, Vietnam  the prototype was the Spanish-American war. That was the Beta version of a whole century of interventionism. It created a narrative of liberating Cuba.

"Epicentro" is available in virtual cinemas beginning Friday, Aug. 28.

https://youtu.be/F2ycVtJ8leM

Related Articles
The year is unknown. Roving bands of highway gangs patrol Californias vast interstate system, searching for ever-dwindling sources of power. Road Warriors compete for what energy can be scavenged across a crumbling infrastructure.

While Californias version of Mad Max is unlikely to happen any time soon, the state is experiencing the worst blackouts since the energy crisis of the early 2000s  and there is little reprieve on the horizon.

In 2020, millions of people in the countrys most technologically-advanced state could be without power. Its not because of corporate greed or malfeasance this time, but rather because of a self-inflicted policy wound.

For years, the state prioritized specific forms of green energy, like wind and solar, at all cost  and to the exclusion of other carbon-free energy sources like nuclear and hydroelectric.

Solving Californias heat-induced rolling blackouts with clean energy innovation The solution to rolling blackouts is to shift industrial demand to when our grid can handle it and rapidly expand our clean energy resources, two advocates say.

The problem is that science has shown that wind doesnt always blow for 24 hours a day, and the sun never shines for 24 hours a day in California. So, as we have increased our reliance on these clean, but intermittent, forms of energy production, we have left our state more and more vulnerable to rolling blackouts.

Our reliance on intermittent energy production also increases costs for families. When demand for electricity exceeds California-based supply after the sun goes down, the state buys power from out-of-state energy producers. These out-of-state energy barons charge exorbitant rates, which eventually get passed onto businesses and families.

This crisis, however, should not be a referendum on our nation-leading transition to emission-free sources of energy. It is proper that we continue to decarbonize. Instead, the solution must be clean energy diversification. We must maintain and develop clean base-load energy production like nuclear and hydro, paired with an aggressive build-out of storage infrastructure.

California could lose community newspapers without legislative action To help save community newspapers, the Legislature must extend an exemption over contract workers in AB 5, or risk losing a vital voice for their constituents, says David Chavern is president and CEO of News Media Alliance.

The good news: We already have a network of emission-free sources of base-load energy.

The largest single source of emission-free power in the state is the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County. This single plant produces nearly 10% of the states electricity  24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Also critical is our states extensive network of hydroelectric dams. Hydroelectric power also works at night and when there is no wind.

The bad news: State law refuses to recognize the clean, emission-free power from these sources as part of its Renewable Portfolio Standard, which dictates what sources of power will be counted toward the states renewable energy mandate. The short-sighted decision to exclude both nuclear and hydroelectric power devalues the energy produced by these sources.

Californias looming wildfire threat requires a cleaner, more resilient electrical grid Californias electrical grid is getting cleaner, but it is still not well positioned to deal with a changing climate with its web of decades-old poles and wires, two researchers say.

This misguided policy choice enabled the State Lands Commission to force the closure of Diablo Canyon. When the plant closes for good in 2025, we will lose 10% of our states electricity overnight. There can be no doubt that this will compound our energy problems like high costs, blackouts and an over-reliance on dirty power from out of state.

If policymakers are serious about both avoiding rolling blackouts and continuing our progress toward an emission-free grid, we have to diversify and prioritize clean base-load power. We must utilize an all-of-the-above approach that includes and expands on existing nuclear and hydroelectric power. And we must make major investments into creative energy storage solutions so that power generated via solar and wind sources can be used even when the sun is down and the wind stops blowing.

The time is now to make intelligent choices with our clean energy programs. If we dont start diversifying our energy sources and building out storage, a Mad Max-like scramble for energy becomes an unpleasant potential reality.

Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham, a Republican from San Luis Obispo, represents the 35th Assembly District. He wrote this for CalMatters, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how Californias Capitol works and why it matters.
Was there a particular moment when everything went wrong for Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, prompting them to make the decision to leave their royal life behind? Royal expert Omid Scobie, author of Finding Freedom, believes that there was definitely a timeframe where things got more complicated for the couple and they felt unsupported by the royal family.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle | Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle exited the royal family

In January, Prince Harry and Meghan stunned the world with an announcement that they hoped to step back from their senior royal duties and split their time between the UK and North America. They didnt get the exact arrangement they wanted, but they did cut ties with the royal family and made their way to a life out of the spotlight, giving up their HRH titles and public funding in the process.

At the time, Queen Elizabeth issued a statement of support, noting, in part, Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved members of my family. I recognise the challenges they have experienced as a result of intense scrutiny over the last two years and support their wish for a more independent life.

RELATED: How Queen Elizabeth Took Back Control of the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Exit Situation, Expert Explains

Was there a moment when everything changed for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle?

During the 2019 documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey, the couple touched on some of the pressures of the public and media scrutiny. Looking back on that moment after they announced their wishes to step back, it seems clear that they were unhappy with royal life and the negativity that surrounded them.

During the August 21 episode of the HeirPod podcast, Scobie was asked if there was a moment where things changed for the Sussexes where it all went so wrong to make them reach their breaking point.

Scobie believed that there wasnt a specific moment, but rather a build-up of frustration after several different moments.

I think where it really started to crack was during the Duchess of Sussexs pregnancy because I think that was a time in which the press commentary, particularly in certain sections of the tabloids, became extremely negative at such a vulnerable moment in any womans life, Scobie explained.

He added, I think that was really one time where the couple, and particularly Meghan, felt extremely unprotected by the institution of the monarchy.

'As brothers you have good days, you have bad days'



Prince Harry says the 'majority of stuff' written about his relationship with his brother William is 'created out of nothing' and adds: 'I love him dearly' #HarryAndMeghan https://t.co/GWs5KfuovM pic.twitter.com/bW7GVALZR6  ITV News (@itvnews) October 20, 2019

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle reportedly couldnt defend themselves

Prince Harry and Meghans frustrations grew, Scobie said, because they werent able to really speak out in response to the medias misreporting. It was the time when they really desperately wanted to speak out and defend themselves from some of the mistruths that were being reported, Scobie explained.

Of course, alongside that, the very ugly undertones that existed in a lot of the commentary, for the couple, they really felt that this went beyond the need to follow this no comment policy that the royal family have, he added. Actually there were much bigger reasons to speak up because a lot of what was being written crossed certain lines.

Scobie touched on how racial insensitivity cultural insensitivity and of course, straight-up sexism were in the mix from the media. I think these made it an increasingly difficult period for Meghan and one in which it really became clear to them that they were never going to get the support that they needed.
Federal authorities have lodged multiple charges against a Texas A&M University professor who is accused of lying about his connections to China while conducting research for NASA.

Investigators say Zhengdong Cheng, 53, led a research team where he willfully took steps to obscure his affiliations and collaboration with a Chinese University and at least one Chinese-owned company, according to the Department of Justice.

Cheng and Texas A&M University received funds for a grant  which prohibited any participation with China, Chinese owned companies or Chinese universities  based on the false information provided to the university and to NASA, the charges allege. He then had increased access to NASA resources such as the International Space Station, also furthering his standing in China at Guangdong University of Technology, authorities said.

Unknown to Texas A&M and NASA, Cheng held senior research positions at Guangdong and served in the Peoples Republic of China Talents Program, according to the charges.

The Talents Program centers around recruiting and fostering scientific talent for scientific development, economic gains and national security in China.

U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick and other federal leaders on Monday said that the Talents Program has, not for the first time, taken advantage of United States resources.

China is building an economy and academic institutions with bricks stolen from others all around the world, Patrick said in a news release. While 1.4 million foreign researchers and academics are here in the U.S. for the right reasons, the Chinese Talents Program exploits our open and free universities. These conflicts must be disclosed, and we will hold those accountable when such conflict violates the law.

Texas A&M University Chancellor John Sharp said the institution cooperated with federal authorities in the investigation.

We worked closely with the FBI on this case, and we gladly will work with them again as needed, Sharp said. No one in higher education takes security as seriously as we do at The Texas A&M University System. In fact, we have received several awards from the Department of Defenses Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, including one just last month.

Cheng faces charges of conspiracy, making false statements and wire fraud. He was taken into custody Sunday and is expected to make an initial appearance at 2 p.m. Monday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sam Sheldon.

Those charges are just the latest allegations of Chinese exploitation of U.S.-funded research in the Houston area. In April 2019, MD Anderson Cancer Center announced it was firing three scientists over concerns China was trying to steal scientific research.

MD Anderson ousted the scientists after receiving emails from the National Institutes of Health, the nations largest public funder of biomedical research, which described conflicts of interest or unreported foreign income by five faculty members.

samantha.ketterer@chron.com
A student was left 'disgusted' after her university halls threw away 'everything she owns' when she wasn't allowed to return to her accomodation because of Covid-19.

Hannah Mullins, from London, who studies graphic design at the University of Brighton, had made an appointment to collect her belongings after she was forced to leave the accommodation at the start of the pandemic in March.

However she returned to find her room had been completely cleared out, with 'irreplaceable' childhood items, cameras, clothes, medication, prescriptions and personal documents all thrown away.

Posting on Facebook, Hannah's sister Holly revealed that two other students had also had their rooms cleared out and thousands of pounds worth of items including TVs and laptops chucked.

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Hannah Mullins, pictured, from London, who studies graphic design at the University of Brighton, was left 'disgusted' after a university halls threw away 'everything she owns'

Posting on Facebook , Hannah's sister Holly revealed that two other students had had their rooms cleared out and thousands of pounds worth of items including TV's and laptops

'My sister had to come home from her BRIGHTON UNIVERSITY halls 'KAPLAN LIVING' in March and was not allowed to return due to coronavirus', wrote Holly. 'We were told her belongings would be safe in her room until we came to collect them.'

She went on to emphasise that Hannah received no information from the accommodation about clearing her room, and says her 'privacy had been completely invaded'.

'We booked a slot for today 20.08.20. Her key wasn't working firstly. When we finally got access to the room it was completely empty of EVERYTHING she owns,' Holly went on.

'Cameras, clothes, trainers, personal sentimental items, photos, hundreds of pounds of skincare and make-up.

Hannah made an appointment to collect her belongings after she was forced to leave the accommodation at the start of the pandemic, however she returned to find her room had been completely cleared out

Hannah was devastated to discover irreplaceable childhood items, medication, prescriptions, personal details, bank statements all thrown away - and was told to 'look in the bins' where she discovered mountains of bin bags containing other students' belongings

'All her uni work thrown away. She had childhood items in that room which now cannot be replaced. Most importantly her privacy completely invaded as someone has gone through her things without consent.

'Her medication, prescriptions, personal details, bank statements have also been thrown god knows where! Which is a breach of GDPR.'

Hannah's twin sister Holly went on to claim that there were 'hundreds' of rubbish bags full of personal belongings by the bins, including clothes, shoes, passports and medication.

She added: 'We then went to reception to ask if it had been stored elsewhere and they couldn't tell us. They then said "you can look in the bins if you want". So we did. We saw hundreds of black bags full of peoples personal belongings. Clothes, shoes, passports, medication.

'We have NO answers and sadly we don't have her things. Brighton University & Kaplan Living Brighton CANNOT get away with this. Other girls also had their stuff taken including TVs, laptops.

Hannah's twin sister Holly went on to claim that there were 'hundreds' of rubbish bags full of personal belongings, including clothes, shoes, passports and medication

'The kitchens were also completely clear of all belongings. So sad and so disgusted at the lack of care considering.'

A spokesperson from Kaplan Living Brighton told Femail: 'Since mid-June when lockdown was eased, Kaplan Living Brighton have been working closely with the many students who returned home early before the end of term due to the Covid-19 pandemic in order to arrange for them to come back and collect their belongings.

'We also provided assistance for students to have their belongings collected and put into storage. However, some students who were not planning to return to Brighton, have instead asked for us to dispose of their belongings for them.

'Last week we became aware that a number of rooms had been cleared in error. We initially believed it to be 3 rooms and immediately began an investigation of the status of all 450 rooms in the building. We now know that 9 rooms in total have been cleared in error.

'We are continuing our investigation into how this could have happened. This should not have occurred and we offer our sincere apologies to the students affected.

'The onsite team have spoken to most of the students affected to apologise. We are still trying to reach several who we have not yet been able to establish contact with. We will of course compensate the students for the loss of items that have been cleared.

'As part of the preparations for students arriving for the new term, rooms are cleared and deep cleaned. We do not dispose of students belongings without their permission, so clearly there has been an error and again, we offer our sincere apologies to the students affected.'
BEIJING, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB) is proud to announce that 21 alumni and 1 professor made the Forbes China '2020 China Philanthropy List'. The list honors business leaders committed to solving some of the world's most pressing issues. Of the RMB 17.91 billion (USD 2.58 billion) donations made, approximately RMB 3.1 billion (USD 446 million) were made by CKGSB alumni and professor.

Social responsibility has been in CKGSB's DNA since its foundation. Going beyond the boundaries of traditional business schools, CKGSB has pioneered a series of experiments to nurture business leaders who compete and collaborate for the economic, social and global good.

In 2005, CKGSB pioneered the incorporation of humanities into core business curricula to give students a more holistic view of business. CKGSB also set up EMBA philanthropy scholarships, now awarded across all degree programs, to outstanding leaders. Since 2009, all degree students are required to complete volunteering hours in order to graduate, resulting in over 150,000+ hours served. In 2018, social innovation became a compulsory module for all degree programs.

CKGSB now partners with different sectors to develop a global ecosystem for a new generation of disruptors who are economically, socially and environmentally responsible, while embracing technologic innovation.

The full list of CKGSB alumni and professor from the 2020 Forbes China Philanthropy List:

SOURCE Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB)
Over past year, TikTok has tried to put distance between its app, which it says has 100 million U.S. users, and its Chinese owners. It installed a former top Disney executive as its American CEO and named two other Americans chief security officer and general counsel. TikTok has also said it is willing to sell its U.S. operations and has held talks with Microsoft with to buy parts of its English-language app. Other companies and investors have reportedly expressed interest as well.
In a normal election year, the parties political conventions represent the highest point of the year except for election night itself. This year, well, things arent looking so exciting.

So far, of course, we only have the Democratic National Convention to judge by, since the Republicans convention didn't start until Monday. But the Democratic convention wasnt exactly a barn burner. According to New York City's Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, he didnt know the convention was last week: I really didnt even know the convention was coming up this week, is the truth.

He probably wasnt alone in that. There wasnt much buildup  the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, has barely been seen in public for months  and the news cycle has been occupied by everything from COVID-19, to Black Lives Matter riots, to murder hornets and asteroids and twin hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

Most Americans were not interested in the DNC

Most Americans dont seem to have been much more interested than de Blasio, with the Democrats convention drawing a shockingly low TV audience  Americas Got Talent drew more viewers than the second night of the Democratic Convention.

Then again, Americas Got Talent has talent. The Democratic convention was notably lacking in that department. Oh, there were moments. On the important subject of criminal justice reform, the Democrats gave us Donna Hylton, who was convicted for her role in the kidnapping, rape, torture and murder of a 62 year old man. It takes a certain talent to come back from that and serve as a DNC speaker. Likewise, we saw Linda Sarsour, a leader of the Womens March who was ousted for anti-Semitism, though the Biden campaign quickly disavowed her  after she spoke.

Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 20, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware.

At the top of the ticket, of course, we had Joe Biden, who presented what was by all accounts a creditable speech, one that seemed more so by the lowered expectations brought about by Bidens isolation, and a series of odd and largely unintelligible remarks he had offered on various subjects in recent months. (James Lileks says Biden benefits from the soft bigotry of Joe expectations.) His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, was a primary candidate mostly noted for her harsh attacks on ... Joe Biden, and for her failure to win any actual delegates. (The one nonwhite Democratic primary candidate to actually win any delegates, meanwhile, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, wasnt even invited to the convention.)

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GOP chair: Democrats' doom-and-gloom convention no match for President Trump's forward-looking vision

A convention is supposed to boost its party in the polls. So far in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll, its Trump who surged during the Democratic convention. Maybe thatll change with later polls, but its not a good sign. Measures of social media engagement found that the vast bulk of attention went to Michelle and Barack Obama. Biden came in a distant third, and  despite her historic selection  Harris barely registered.

Its the Republicans' turn next

Now the Republicans have their turn. Unlike the Democrats, who mentioned China  source of the coronavirus that has infected so many Americans and turned the global economy upside down  only once, and who said next to nothing about the urban rioting hollowing out so many big blue cities, you can expect the GOP to talk a lot about both.

As Byron York comments, urban violence is the Democrats elephant in the room: Of course, all the cities involved  Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, and others  are controlled by progressive Democrats. Indeed, the breakdown of order in those cities can be seen as a glaring failure of progressive governance on the issue of public safety. And the most energetic voices in the Democratic Party are not calling for the restoration of order  they're calling to defund the police. So its no wonder Democrats didn't talk about it in public. Doing so would highlight one of the party's failures and also showcase a division among Democrats about whether to create conditions, by defunding the police, that would invite even more disorder.

Democrats also talked about a group of former Republican national security policymakers who are endorsing Biden. The Republicans will probably contrast those policymakers (and Bidens) records  the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the debacles in Syria and Libya, the coddling of the Peoples Republic of China  with Trumps record of making peace in the Middle East, managing to neither start nor expand a war in his first term, and pushing back against China while rallying allies in the region to resist Chinese expansionism.

Convention season: On Democrats face reality as Trump Republicans fantasize

The good news for the Democrats is that not many people watched their convention. Republicans will have to wonder whether any more will watch theirs. And thats not all because of party politics.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has been handled to no great effect by many governments all over the world, suggests that weve been putting too much faith in government as a tool to solve our problems. That could be part of the reason why so many people have tuned out on this election. Another might be that weve heard most of this before: Joe Biden, after all, has been in politics for half a century.

The challenge for the Republicans will be to offer something interesting enough to hold Americans attention  if they bother to tune in.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself," is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Democratic National Convention: How it failed to draw viewers
Andrew Harnik, STF / Associated Press

Theres still much confusion about how President Donald Trumps executive orders giving an extra $400 per week to unemployment recipients will play out  if at all.

The orders pull money from the Federal Emergency Management Agencys hurricane response fund and allocate it to the increased unemployment payments after Congress failed to compromise on how benefits would be expanded under the next COVID-19 economic relief bill, according to the Texas Tribune. Up until the end of July, recipients were receiving an extra $600 per week for unemployment, but Senate Republicans balked at the idea of expanding those benefits and conceding other aspects of the bill pushed by House Democrats.
Since the start of August, Benton County has been progressing on a continued restoration effort of the Jackson-Frazier Wetland in Corvallis.

Now, with that portion of the restoration reaching completion, boardwalks surrounding the 147-acre prairie habitat are reopened to the public after a brief closure. Those overseeing the project say the long-term effort will ultimately provide an enhanced experience for park users.

Its going to be completely transformed out there in the wetland prairie restoration area, Adam Stebbins, natural resources coordinator for the Benton County Natural Areas and Parks Department, said. Its going to look a whole heck of a lot different and enhanced for birdwatchers and outdoor enthusiasts. The nature out there is really going to take off.

Efforts to restore the area have been ongoing since 2017, when county officials proposed a plan to provide significant upgrades to the wetlands.

For the past several weeks, the county has been working through Phase 2 of that plan  using large soil-moving trucks called scrapers to re-contour a 50-acre area of the wetlands in order to remove the berm that was created decades ago by the prior property owner.

The scrapers, which Benton County is able to utilize thanks to a partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are handy for moving massive amounts of soil, and were used to relocate the excess soil from the project to a nearby city of Corvallis property.

In turn, the city is able to immediately use the high-quality soil.

Its been a long term restoration that was a long time coming, Stebbins said. This most recent Earth work that we did smoothed out those ditches and ruts and removed the berm and then created more of the historic, natural pools that would have existed there.

The Jackson-Frazier Wetlands have been in possession of the county since it foreclosed on the property in 1992 after the previous owner made major alterations to the natural hydrology of the wetland without first acquiring necessary permits.

That same year, the county declared the wetlands a natural protected area. Today Benton County, in partnership with the city of Corvallis Parks & Recreation Department, Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife, and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service partners, with major funding provided by an Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board wetland restoration grant, is making major progress toward its original restoration goals.

Its been a great project with great partners, Stebbins said. We couldnt have done it without them. Its a community effort. Its really a sustainable, multi-partner project that we can get done with these rare natural areas that are left.

Stebbins said even though the scraping potion of the project is finished, Phase 2 is not officially in the books. In October, the county will do significant native seed planting of wetland vegetation throughout the restoration area.

Thats gonna be huge, Stebbins said. And then come spring it will be looking really green out there again.

Once the restoration project is completed, Benton County will assume responsibility for maintaining the wetlands  primarily mowing of invasive regionary grass. Then, the county will set its sights on giving a long-anticipated upgrade to the 3,400-foot boardwalk that sprawls throughout the wetlands.

The boardwalk is hitting 25 years old and weve already had to replace significant sections of  if not the majority of  the original boardwalk, Stebbins said. It was completed by volunteers. Theres going to be a significant update on the quality, and possibly even the final location.

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The flagbearer of the Convention People's Party (CPP), Ivor Kobina Greenstreet has promised to work to make Ghana a better place should he be given the nod to become president.

The Convention Peoples Party on Saturday elected Mr. Ivor Greenstreet as its presidential candidate for the 2020 general elections.

He defeated two other contestants; Mr Bright Oblitey Akwetey and Mr Divine Ayivor, for the flagbearer slot.

In delivering his acceptance speech, Greenstreet indicated that the CPP is the change that Ghanaians have been hoping for.

Ghana needs the CPP desperately. Our country needs a progressive government that will deliver for all the people of Ghana. Everywhere that I have gone on the campaign trail, all that I get told is where is the CPP that will deliver for the people of Ghana? Today I give you my pledge that the CPP will deliver for the people of Ghana.

He further promised that the party will deliver self-reliance, social justice and good health among others.

We will deliver the social justice that will make this country a better and more equal place with opportunity for all. We shall implement the self-reliance that this country has been crying out for. We will continue to work towards the African unity that our founding fathers saw as the only way that independent African countries could develop. Our people need good health  the CPP will deliver. Our young people need good education  the CPP will deliver. Our people need good housing  the CPP will deliver. Our people need a living wage that leaves some money in the pockets at the end of the long month  the CPP will deliver, he said.

Ivor Kobina Greenstreet's victory means this is the second time back to back that he has gotten the nod to lead the CPP into a general election.

As a first-time contender in 2016, Greenstreet won 25,552 votes in the presidential election, representing 0.24% of the total valid votes cast.

On Saturday, the CPP also elected new national executives who will take up the mantle of the party's leadership.

Nana Akosua Frimpomaa-Sarpong, who was the 2012 running-mate of the then CPP flagbearer Dr Abu Sakara Foster, was elected National Chairperson.

Nana Yaa Akyimpim Jantuah, former Public Affairs Director of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), was elected General Secretary with 187 votes against acting General Secretary James Kwabena Bomfeh popularly known as Kabila who polled 67 votes.

Emmanuel Ogbojor won 125 votes to become Vice Chairman of the party against Onsy Kwame Nkrumah, self-acclaimed son of CPP's founder Kwame Nkrumah who polled 84 votes.

---citinewsroom
National Review readers may have been surprised earlier this month to learn that the entire ideological edifice of classical liberalism has been constructed exclusively with borrowed capital from the Christian Church  still more, that Americas Founders tried to carve out a vision of human rights that circumvented the need for metaphysical or theological commitments, no less, but they were destined to fail. Yet such were the claims put forward by Cameron Hilditch, National Review Institute William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism, in an essay entitled The American Misunderstanding of Natural Rights. One imagines Bill himself would have been surprised.

Just to be clear, Hilditch, who hails from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and graduated recently from Magdalen College, Oxford, is not opposed to our separation of church and state. In fact, he calls the disestablishment of religion in the United States a glorious victory for the claims of conscience. But his brief for Christianity as the exclusive foundation of the entire classical-liberal order  the Founders borrowed capital, he writes, came from the Catholic canon lawyers of the Middle Ages  is seriously overstated and, in the end, misstated.

What prompts Hilditch to undertake this excursion into the origins of our political order is the release last month of the State Departments much-anticipated Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, ordered a year earlier by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to provide him with fresh thinking about human rights and propose reforms of human rights discourse where it has departed from our nations founding principles of natural law and natural rights. Since its release, numerous leftleaning human-rights organizations have attacked the report, fearing it threatens not only womens and LGBTQ rights but the very firmament of international human rights. Yet the report advocates no such thing. What it does do, however, as we outlined in a short op-ed just after the reports release, is put modern social and economic rights on a par with our innate unalienable rights to freedom, thus enabling brutal authoritarian regimes to boast of their support for such rights even as they repress the freedom of their citizens  and worse, to wrap themselves in the mantle of human rights from their seats on the U.N. councils that were created to expose such tyrants.

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Unfortunately, in his long essay, Hilditch says relatively little about the Commissions attempt to find a workable synthesis between those two very different kinds of rights. Instead, he treats the report as a springboard for his larger agenda. Thus, he finds it full of mistakes regarding the nature and foundation of natural rights,

the same mistakes that were made by the Founding Fathers of this country and that persist in the minds of many Americans to this day. The American natural-rights tradition has rarely ever been articulated in a historically or intellectually defensible way, which is a great shame, because all of its major intuitions about the sacred and inviolable liberties of man are entirely correct. The truth is that Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were far more capable of building the great and glorious constitutional edifice of the American Republic than they were of accounting for it historically or philosophically, or explaining it adequately from first principles. The State Departments report falls predictably at all of the same hurdles the Founders did. But it does provide a long-overdue opportunity for Americans to understand where their rights really come from.

Seizing that opportunity, Hilditch proceeds to instruct us, first by deconstructing the classical-liberal project, then by re-grounding its conclusions on Christian foundations. But notice a problem already in that final sentence: the ambiguity in the locution where our rights come from. Is Hilditch posing a historical or a theoretical (i.e., justificatory or normative) question? In truth, he goes back and forth between the two grounds for the Founders claims, but in the end his argument is essentially that of the historicist. Thus, he does not leap immediately to the answer that our unalienable rights come from God, as Secretary Pompeo did, understandably, when he released the report last month at Philadelphias National Constitution Center. That answer echoes Jeffersons invocation of our Creator in the Declaration of Independence, of course, a vague notion that believers of many kinds might accept uncritically. Clearly, however, the justificatory problem with that answer is epistemological, for the self-evident truths concerning our rights are thus left to rest on religious belief, which counts for little among nonbelievers. Yet to the extent that Hilditch is making a moral case for our rights, which again is unclear, that may be his ultimate justificatory argument.

He begins his deconstructive case by quoting the Commissions report: Classical liberalism put at the front and center of politics the moral premise that human beings are by nature free and equal, which strengthened the political conviction that legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed. That indeed is how the Founders went about the matter, in the state-of-nature justificatory tradition. As the Declaration makes clear, the moral order, defined by our natural rights, comes first. The political and legal order, aimed at securing those rights, comes second, as derived consistently from the logically prior moral order.

But the problem there and in the Founders political thought, Hilditch says, is with the word nature. How do we know which rights are natural to human beings? Moreover, how can our rights be said to be self-evident when there is so much disagreement about their nature and scope? Jefferson was wrong, Hilditch charges. The idea that the human beings right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is self-evident to the unaided rational intellect, he concludes, is thoroughgoing and unadulterated nonsense, echoing thus the (in)famous Jeremy Bentham: Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense  nonsense upon stilts. Alas, it seems not to have occurred to Hilditch that while rights are indeed discovered through human reasoning, not all humans reason well, if at all, which is one reason we find disagreements, a matter James Madison addressed in Federalist No. 51.

Yet the nonsense continues today, Hilditch laments, as in George Wills recent tome, The Conservative Sensibility, where Will writes that rights are natural in the sense that they are discovered by something that is natural: reason, aided by empirical observation. Hilditch elaborates: In other words, the light of human reason should be able to observe what is consistently true about human beings across space and time and then to infer from these data what rights are natural or appropriate for such a creature, all of which he calls very silly.

With that sketch before him of how retrograde the Founders naivete on this issue is  to say nothing of the Commissions and Wills  Hilditch unleashes his criticism:

The stubborn fact is that rights commonly referred to as natural rights or human rights by people in Western liberal democracies have not been thought of as such by most human beings at most times and in most places in world history. This means that they cannot be thought of as naturally discoverable in our nature in the same way language or the appetite for food is, because only certain communities, nations, and civilizations exhibit any kinds of adherence to them. Human rights are, consequently, radically contingent in historical terms.

Because human beings contain such a bewildering variety of contradictory desires, impulses, intuitions, and habits, Hilditch continues, its possible to infer just about anything one might care to from our nature. Humans exhibit a great range of behaviors, he notes, from the noble to the appalling, all of it natural. Our nature supplies us with a kaleidoscopic array of facts about ourselves and the world around us; all accessible to reason and none obviously more prescriptive of our political institutions than any other.

If Hilditchs critique of the classical-liberal project and the American vision in particular is not stewed in moral relativism, it is at least grounded in naive empiricism. Take his claim, for example, that because most human beings at most times and in most places in world history have not thought of natural rights as we do, this means that [rights] cannot be thought of as naturally discoverable in our nature in the same way language or the appetite for food is. No serious philosopher would go about discovering the nature, foundation, and scope of our rights in that way. One would ask instead what rights are, how they differ analytically, linguistically, and operationally from other moral notions, whether there are rights, what it means to say that there are, what the truth-conditions of such claims are, how one demonstrates them, and, from answers to such questions, what rights we do and do not have. In short, one would reason.

But even the implications Hilditch draws from his armchair empiricism are faulty. To be sure, its easy to claim a right and thus to find disagreement about what rights we have; and rights can easily be created, withdrawn, or ignored through political, legal, or brute force, as the world makes clear. But that empirical evidence is irrelevant to the question of whether we have natural or moral rights: Again, one does not go about addressing that question by comparing conditions around the world. Yet even if we did, we would, through extrapolation (reasoning), reach two distinct conclusions. First, despite Hilditchs kaleidoscopic array of facts, however various the cultural and political arrangements of a society may be, certain fundamental rights would be evident, even if not called rights and even if severely limited, absent which the society would simply not function: some form of property, contract, familial arrangement, redress for wrongs, and due process. The variety of such arrangements in evidence notwithstanding, those basics are found everywhere, and they are the building blocks of a general theory of rights.

Second, even in highly repressive societies  even in North Korea, as closed and repressive a society as can be imagined  people try to flee, because they know that things are not right there: They know they have rights, natural rights. Those who doubt the universality of basic human rights need only ask victims deprived of them. Ask a Chinese citizen about to be arbitrarily shot after an unfair trial; ask the torture victim if this is not a fate universally undeserved. But even in free societies, the simplest of examples informs us that rights are inherent, for when someone interferes with us, the natural response is to object, even if tacitly, to demand a justification, to assert no right to interfere, and thus, by implication, to claim a right to be free from the interference. Yes, in the world, as Hilditch says, human rights may be radically contingent in historical terms. In human nature theyre not contingent. Theyre in our DNA.

Hilditchs historicism, aimed at unseating the traditional, reason-based case for human nature and natural rights and at showing instead that the entire ideological edifice of classical liberalism rests exclusively on Christian foundations, has led him, ironically, to focus on non-Western societies rather than on the individuals in those societies. Thus, by failing to take notice of the often tacit, inchoate right-claims of those individuals, repressed as they may be by their social or political regimes, he slights the very thing that explains, he will argue, our Western respect for rights: the individual. We turn briefly, then, to his affirmative argument.

Hilditch draws largely on Larry Siedentops Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014), which treats Christianity as the cradle of the rights tradition in the West. As he notes, Siedentop disputes the claim that the Founders idea of human nature is something obvious or inevitable, something guaranteed by things outside ourselves rather than by historical convictions and struggles. Precisely what Siedentop means there is less than clear. He seems to be pitting the Anglo-American justification of liberalism, based on things outside ourselves (universal reason, apparently), against the Continental explanation of liberalisms origins in a history of convictions and struggles, origins that better guarantee that outcome, he avers, than pure reason. If that is what he means, that final point is hardly self-evident; for reason, constant and universal, when properly institutionalized, is surely a better guarantee of liberty than history, which taken alone not only does not justify but often evolves in directions that cannot be justified. Here again, we see explanation treated as justification.

Nevertheless, history is Hilditchs main focus. Thus, he goes on to trace how history evolved in the direction of individual equality by contrasting the ancient Greek conception of natural inequality, a hierarchical world of everything in its place, with the modern political emphasis on the many ways in which individuals are equal to one another. Reviving his earlier critique of natural, he asks why the former should be considered any less natural than the latter. When it comes to politics, he argues that the real civilizational shift began not, according to Siedentop, with the isolated machinations of unaided reason, but with the advent of Pauline Christianity.

Without question, the rise of Christianity was a factor in the evolution of European thought about what weve come to call the human condition, broadly understood. But it was hardly the only factor, much less the exclusive foundation for liberalisms entire ideological edifice, as Hilditch claims. In fact, well before the birth of Christ, after the demise of the Greek city-states in which ethics was a function of politics, we find the Stoics invoking our capacity for reason as undergirding human equality and moral universality, ideas that found their way through Roman Stoics such as Seneca the Younger into the jus gentium, described later by the Roman jurist Gaius in the Institutes as that law which natural reason established among all mankind. And the Old Testament too has a clear conception of the individual, of our duty to others, and hence of the rights of others.

But it was the much later, 500-year evolution of the English common law, especially after John Locke recast it in 1690 as a theory of natural rights, that more directly influenced the Founders than the Continental developments that concluded, on Siedentop and Hilditchs telling, with the Catholic canon lawyers of the Middle Ages. Christianity was certainly in the background as the common law developed. But the laws origins trace to the third quarter of the twelfth century when Henry II established a system of circuit courts and a central appellate court to hear complaints brought by one subject against another and, later on, against the Crown, all in the name of the subjects rights, reflected in property and contract. Consulting reason, custom, and often what they knew of Roman law, judges discovered rights as they decided cases brought before them, crafting over time a body of positive law  common-law rights and obligations. Its important to see, however, that it was their character as reasoned decisions that marked these rulings not simply as positive but as higher or natural law, with a universal character about it. As the eminent legal historian Edward S. Corwin put it in his classic Harvard Law Review essays on The Higher Law Background of American Constitutional Law, the notion that the common law embodied right reason furnished from the 14th century its chief claim to be regarded as higher law.

There is nary a mention of this law in Hilditchs account. Instead, our attention is directed away from unaided reason and to medieval canon law as the exclusive source of our liberties. That is a large overstatement. And a misstatement too, for it was through reasoning, in fits and starts for sure, that the canon lawyers reduced Christian dogma to political principle  principle that others too discovered quite apart from Christian dogma. Yet for Hilditch, the moral intuitions undergirding our unalienable rights are not natural, apprehended by naked reason, but cultural artifacts bequeathed to us by 2,000 years of Christian history.

Toward the end of his essay, Hilditch returns to the report of the State Departments Commission on Unalienable Rights, which laments, he notes, the fact that the core principles on which nearly all nations once agreed are now threatened by a competing vision in which the rights of the individual are being radically subordinated in the name of development or other social and economic objectives. Hilditch then contends that these complaints make sense when one understands that the Western understanding of human rights is predicated on one particular and historically contingent idea of what it is to be human: that of the Christian religion. There is furthermore no evidence that this particular notion of rights will outlive the faith that birthed it.

We see there, finally, what animates Hilditch  and prompts his essay. Thus, understandably, he concludes that what he views as our borrowed capital from the Middle Ages

is dwindling and is now almost spent. Our inheritance of human rights was built to reflect the fact that we are all living images of a particular crucified criminal from Galilee, who proclaimed that we are each and all more than what Caesar would make of us. If we care to enjoy the rights bequeathed to us by this tradition throughout the coming years, decades, and centuries, then we can no longer avoid publicly discussing the inextricable nature of religious and political ideas. A civilization can only avoid this discussion for so long before it begins to wither on the vine. For the United States, the day is already far spent in this regard.

Hilditchs concern is not unfounded, for in the West, for some time now, it is not only religion but reason too that has been dwindling. But if our unalienable natural rights are mere cultural artifacts, we are in trouble indeed. Our chances are far better, we submit, if we defend them with appeals to reason, common to all, as Americas Founders did.

Roger Pilon holds the Cato Institutes B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies. He was the director of policy for the State Departments Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs (198687) during the Reagan administration. Aaron Rhodes, president of the Forum for Religious FreedomEurope, was the executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights from 1993 to 2007 and is the author of The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom (Encounter Books, 2018).

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U.S. government debt prices held steady on Monday as investors focused on the latest coronavirus and political developments.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note gained just one basis point to 0.6428%, while the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond was little changed at 1.3470%. Yields move inversely to prices.

Monday's calendar does not include any major economic data releases. Nonetheless, the U.S. Treasury is due to auction $105 billion in 13 and 26-week bills.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Jyotiraditya Scindia on Sunday said that although the Congress's top leadership had offered to make him the deputy chief minister of Madhya Pradesh after the 2018 state polls, when he was still in that party, he had turned down the offer as he decided to work for the people.

He alleged that the Congress had betrayed the people of the state with false promises to come to power.

"The Congress's top leadership had offered me deputy chief minister's post. Instead, I decided to work for the people," the BJP Rajya Sabha member said while addressing his party's three-day long membership drive, in Gwalior.

This is for the first time that Scindia has publicly admitted that he was offered this post by the Congress.

In March this year, veteran Congress leader Digvijaya Singh had said that Scindia was offered the post of MP deputy chief minister, but Kamal Nath had refused to accept a "chela".

Scindia said, "I understood that Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh will ruin the Congress government in 15 months. The Congress betrayed the people with false promises like waiver of farm loan in 10 days in order to come to power in the state."

"Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi had promised that farm loans of up to to Rs 2 lakh will be waived within 10 days or else the chief minister will be sent back on the eleventh day," he said.

"The Congress made false promises to come to the power in the state," he alleged.

Scindia had quit the Congress in March this year and later joined the BJP.

On the Congress's agitation against the BJP's membership drive in Gwalior, Scindia said, "At least they (Congress leaders) came out of their houses to protest against BJP's drive five months after losing the government in MP."

With an eye on the by-elections to 27 assembly constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, especially in Gwalior- Chambal region of the state that accounts for 16 of these seats, the ruling BJP has launched the membership drive here on Saturday.

Twenty-two rebel Congress MLAs in Madhya Pradesh, mostly from the Scindia camp, resigned in March, reducing the 15-month-old dispensation led by Kamal Nath to a minority and paving the way for the BJP to form the government in the state.

These former MLAs had later joined the BJP.

The BJP then sent Scindia to Rajya Sabha, while many of his loyalists got important portfolios in Shivraj Singh Chouhan's cabinet.

Last month, three more Congress MLAs in the state resigned and joined the saffron party, taking their number to 25, while two assembly seats had fallen vacant due to the demise of legislators.

The Congress now has 89 MLAs in the House, while the ruling BJP has 107.

The effective strength of the 230-member House has come down to 203 due to the resignations and deaths of legislators.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Antiquated computer systems that prevent Ohios Department of Health from effectively analyzing contact tracing for the coronavirus also are posing problems for other states - and developing better systems could take a year or longer, big-data experts say.

Tom Frieden, a former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control who now heads an effort by Resolve to Save Lives to improve disease reporting, said inadequate technology is a problem across the country and could take many months to replace.
Footage of a university student in China savagely hitting a pet dog while staying at his friend's home has sparked widespread outrage on social media.

The heart-wrenching video shows the Chinese man repeatedly kicking and beating the tiny Pomeranian with a metal rod as the terrified pooch screamed in pain.

The unnamed attacker is said to have lost his temper after becoming frustrated by the animal's barking, according to the dog owner.

Footage of a university student (pictured left) in China savagely hitting a pet dog (pictured right) while staying at his friend's home has sparked widespread outrage on social media

Hundreds of thousands of angered web users pledged to expose this devil after the original post quickly became a trending topic on Chinese Twitter-like Weibo over the weekend.

The white Pomeranian, nicknamed Bobo, has been in stable condition after suffering a bone fracture, according to its owner, known by her surname Xie.

The incident was brought to light when Ms Xie from south-eastern Chinese city Fujian uploaded the footage on Friday.

The university student was a family friend who was staying at the womans home for the summer while working at a company nearby, Ms Xie wrote in a social media post.

'He is the son of my mother-in-law's friend. His parent is also my husband's teacher,' she added.

The pet owner claimed to have first noticed Bobo with bruises, appearing to have been beaten by someone, after she returned from a work trip in July.

Hundreds of thousands of angered web users pledged to expose this devil after the original post quickly became a trending topic on Chinese Twitter-like Weibo over the weekend

When confronted by Ms Xie, the house guest claimed to have kicked the dog once because it was biting my shoes.

The woman wrote: But ever since that incident, the dog would always bark at him when I was home. So I became suspicious and installed a surveillance camera.

On Thursday, Ms Xie was horrified to discover her beloved pet nearly dying when she returned home from work.

After checking the CCTV camera, the woman spotted her house guest hitting the tiny dog after the family had left the flat.

The man is seen in the footage obtained by Pear Video initially using the long stick to beat the pooch hiding in a cage on the balcony.

As Bobo scrambled to get away, the university student took off one of his slippers and use it to slap the dog as the pooch screamed in pain.

The white Pomeranian, nicknamed Bobo, is said to have suffered multiple injuries including a bone fracture. The left picture shows the dog before the incident and it is pictured on the right being treated at a veterinary in China's south-eastern city Xiaman following the incident

He can be heard saying: 'Why don't you try bark again?'

The dog is said to have suffered multiple injuries including a bone fracture after the family rushed their pet to a veterinary.

Ms Xie wrote on her account: How come someone is so cruel?

The incident has drawn huge attention on Chinese social media over the weekend as outraged animal lovers vowed to expose this devil.

One commenter said: What a trashy person! We need to expose this cold-blooded devil!

Another one replied: Bobo looks exactly like my dog. This is so heart-breaking. Im struggling to fall asleep after reading this, outrageous!

On Sunday, the pet owner said that Bobo was in stable condition and slowing recovering.

The man has later told Ms Xie that he hit the dog after getting annoyed by its barking.

'He said that he had a bad temper,' the woman told reporters.

She also decided to not press charges against the man. He is returning to university in October. I didnt want to ruin his future, Ms Xie added.

MailOnline has contacted Ms Xie for further comments.
Press Release

24 August 2020

Land Union Group acquires the TUI BLUE Sylt in Northern Germany

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Berlin-based Land Union Group has acquired the 159-room TUI BLUE Sylt from German hotel developer GBI. The hotel, which is currently undergoing a renovation, has been operated by TUI, subject to a lease agreement, since its opening in 2007. Located on Germany's northernmost island, the 60,000 sqm resort will continue to be operated by TUI, and is expected to reopen under TUI's flagship TUI BLUE brand in April 2021.

SevenCapital buys Royal Angus Hotel in Birmingham, UK

UK real estate developer SevenCapital has acquired the 186-room Royal Angus Hotel in it's home city of Birmingham. The property, which previously traded as a Thistle hotel, is currently closed and is set to undergo an 18-month renovation. Expected to reopen ahead of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, the hotel will be repositioned to a 4-star standard under an aparthotel concept. The property will be SevenCapital's second hotel project in Birmingham, following the Park Regis Hotel and residential project that opened in 2016.

Cypriot investor acquires the Sofia Hotel Balkan in Bulgaria

The former Sheraton hotel in Sofia, Bulgaria, currently trading as the Sofia Hotel Balkan under Marriott's Luxury Collection brand, has been acquired by Cypriot real estate investor Potamiro Limited. The 185-room hotel has been sold by a joint venture led by Greek HNWI Ioannis Papalekas, that has owned the hotel since 2011.
Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands have responded to a backlash after being pictured ingnoring social distancing guidelines during their holiday in Greece.

The Dutch couple who visited the Greek island of Milos with their daughters Princess Amalia, 16, Princess Alexia, 15, and Princess Ariane, 13, were criticised for not practising guidelines to prevent the spread of coronavirus during their holiday.

A photo uploaded on social media shows Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander posing alongside an unidentified restaurant employee, less than one metre apart.

They took to Twitter to apologise for not practicing the 1.5 metres apart guideline imposed by The Netherlands, in addition to not wearing face masks.

Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands have responded to comments they received for failing to social distance during their holiday in Greece. Pictured: The Dutch royals with a restaurant employee

The Dutch royals took to Twitter to apologies for the snap, explaining that the photo was taken spontaneously and they believe it's essential to follow guidelines in place to prevent the spread of covid-19

The Dutch royals penned a personal message to explain their lapse in judgement at the time the photograph was taken.

'A photo appeared in the media in which we kept too little distance. In the spontaneity of the moment, we did not pay attention to that.

'Of course we should have, because compliance with corona rules is also essential when on holiday to get the virus under control,' they wrote.

The message was signed 'WA & Maxima', implying that King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima had personally written it.

According to The National, an employee of the restaurant confirmed to Dutch television service RTL Nieuws that the picture was 'a mistake' and had been taken for a private album.

Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander were holiday in Greece with their daughters Princess Amalia, 16, Princess Alexia, 15, and Princess Ariane, 13 (pictured)

Queen Maxima and King Willem-Alexander have been on holiday with their daughters for a few weeks.

They received over 500 comments in response to their apology with many praising them for acknowledging their mistake.

The action follows Crown Princess Mary of Denmark taking to Instagram at the weekend to apologise for shaking hands during an engagement.

Speaking remorsefully, she urged others to wear a face mask and embrace the advice in place to reduce the spread of coronavirus.

Crown Princess Mary of Denmark urged people to wear face coverings and follow official advice from the country's health ministry in a frank Instagram post

Alongside a selfie of herself wearing a surgical mask on a plane, the royal wrote: 'On land, at sea and in the air - we have to get used to wearing face masks.'

'Yesterday, I was in Grenaa for my first official visit after the summer holidays. At sea and in the air it went fine, but on land it slipped for me and I unfortunately came to shake hands.

'It reminded me how important it is that we help each other live up to the recommendations.'

She was dubbed a great role model by many of those who commented on the post, racking up over 43,000 likes.
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Linkedin Inforial (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Tue, August 25, 2020 00:01 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c4020491 4 Inforial Free

We should be familiar with human capital and Indonesias vision for 2045.

President Joko Jokowi Widodo has a big vision for Indonesias 100th year of independence in 2045. The goal is to be a developed country with an annual income of Rp 320 million per capita or a monthly income of Rp 27 million per capita.

Human capital development is central to that effort. There have been many challenges that have disrupted the development of Indonesias human capital, primarily a yawning skills gap between graduates of Indonesian universities and schools and the private sectors employment needs. The unemployment rate for graduates of vocational high schools, which are meant to train students for specific jobs, is most alarming, followed by high school graduates at 6.78 percent.

Indonesias 75th anniversary is a good moment to remind people of the countrys plans for its centennial in 2045. The plans include human development, knowledge and technology acquisition, a sustainable economy, equitable development, national resilience and good governance.

JakPost Up Close webinar on human capital and Indonesias vision for 2045

The Jakarta Post is hosting a webinar series that will discuss human capital-related issues to coincide with the celebration of Indonesias 75th year of independence. It will involve many elements of society, including representatives of the public sector, private sector and civil society organizations. Called Human capital and Indonesias 2045 vision, the virtual seminar will feature authoritative speakers from relevant stakeholders. They will bring a diverse array of views to facilitate constructive discourse.

The series will explore issues that include

The governments human capital road map to achieve Indonesias 2045 vision

Lessons learned from other countries human capital development

What the private sector and communities are doing to reach Indonesias human capital goals

The skills gap: Why education alone is not enough to land a job in Indonesia

Opportunities and challenges in the development of Indonesias human capital

The Zoom webinar will be held in English from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020, and will feature:

Presidential Chief of Staff Moeldoko Denni Puspa Purbasari, Executive Director, Pre-Employment Card Management Prof. Dr. Tadjuddin Noer Effendi, Scholar, Gadjah Mada University Anton J. Supit, Vice Chairman, Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) Connie Ang, CEO, Danone Specialized Nutrition Indonesia

The webinar seeks to be useful for the general public, stakeholders in the education sector, researchers, schools and universities, university students, private sector employees and executives, public sector staff members and high-ranking officials, entrepreneurs, the international community as well as others eager for information on the latest developments of Indonesias human capital and on how to collaborate to achieve Indonesias vision for 2045.
City and law enforcement leaders in Kenosha unanimously endorsed the use of body cameras in 2017. But since then, they have balked at the price tag, raised policy concerns and put off implementation.
HOBOKEN, NJ  The city of Hoboken adjusted its total coronavirus fatality number to 31 on Thursday (it was previously reported as 29), and announced that testing will be offered at two sites rather than just one this coming week.

Mayor Ravi Bhalla explained, "Sadly, we were informed of two previous fatalities related to COVID-19 that were only recently reported to the Health Department, a female in her late 60s who passed away in April, and another female in her mid 60s who passed away in May. I send my deepest condolences to their families and loved ones. Hobokens fatalities now total 31."

Hoboken Health Department reported Thursday that 693 Hoboken residents had tested positive for the virus since the start of the pandemic. A week earlier, the number was 687.



The breakdown of new, reported cases is:

Aug. 14: 2 new cases

Aug. 15: 0 new cases

Last Sunday: 1 new case

Monday: 1

Tuesday: 1

Wednesday: 1

Testing update

The city said that this week, it will offer testing both through a partnership with Riverside Medical under the 14th Street Viaduct on weekdays, and with Prompt MD at a pop-up site at 605 Jackson St. this Monday and Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. For the former, call 201-420-5621 between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Monday through Friday for an appointment. For the latter, go to http://www.hobokennj.gov/promptmd.

Results may take three days, the city said, as there is a national shortage of rapid tests.

The city said that 650 people were tested at both sites on Monday and Tuesday of this past week.

The city noted in a followup email over the weekend, "Residents are asked to keep in mind that a COVID-19 test is recommended at least 5-7 days after a potential exposure, and that many who have contracted the virus do not have symptoms. Receiving a COVID-19 test prior to the 5-7 days after a potential exposure may yield inaccurate results. Residents are asked to quarantine until after receiving the test result."



Social distancing task force

Story continues

The mayor said that weeks ago, the city formed a social distancing task force made up of various departments in City Hall including Class II police officers, Office of Emergency Management, Zoning Office, Fire Department, and more.

"The task force continues to work with businesses to facilitate compliance with social distancing, and hand out face masks in public places, including our waterfront," a release said. "Although the City Council did not adopt an ordinance authorizing a potential fine for those who are not wearing face masks (when social distancing is not possible, and as a last resort), the task force will continue to provide education and distribute face masks on our waterfront and other locations.

READ MORE: Hoboken Council Votes Down $250 Facemask Fine

Hoboken, a city of 53,000 people in one square mile, was one of the first towns to close facilities in March amid the pandemic.



Hoboken and national coronavirus statistics and trends



The city had gone a week in June with only one new case, then experienced an uptick in new cases in July  as did many New Jersey cities  after facilities started reopening and people traveled to states with higher numbers. The governor has also blamed large parties for high transmission rates.



On Saturday, Gov. Phil Murphy said the number of coronavirus cases statewide had risen to 189,236, with 14,114 confirmed deaths, including 3 new deaths and 427 new cases confirmed since the day before.



The daily death rate in New Jersey has been declining since back on April 30, when it reached a peak of 460 residents in 24 hours.

Many other states reached record daily death rates in July (see the daily totals in each state here). They have pulled back on their reopenings, including Texas, which closed bars after seeing record numbers of hospitalizations and deaths.



Last weekend, 35 states remained above the positive testing rate recommended by the World Health Organization to safely reopen. WHO recommends states remain at 5 percent or lower for at least 14 days. Read more.



New Jersey updated its list on Tuesday to 35 states that residents must quarantine upon returning from. Read more.



As of a week ago Thursday, 165,000 Americans had died of coronavirus, and more than 5 million have tested positive.



See below for other recent Hoboken coronavirus and reopening updates:



SCHOOLS

The Hoboken public schools are slated to reopen Monday, Sept. 14 remotely, and then Sept. 21 on-site for those who requested it.

The district has offered a reopening plan giving parents a choice of either full-time on-site learning (until 3 p.m.) or full-time distance learning. In the buildings, there will be restrictions, such as kids wearing masks and maintaining a 6-foot distance.

The governor's school reopening guidance was published on June 26.

The state has said that all districts must offer a remote learning option.

BUSINESS

Here is the August schedule of Hoboken "summer streets" that are restricted to vehicles, to encourage walking, bicycling, and outdoor dining.

Hoboken recently received almost $1.9 million in funding for small businesses, to be distributed in $20,000 grants. Read more here.

Hoboken businesses received government PPP loans to help with payroll, rent, and more during the pandemic. Read the list here.

More than 50 of the city's restaurants opened the week of June 15 for outdoor dining. READ MORE.

Some of those have added "streateries" for outdoor dining. READ MORE.

Two of the city's weekly farmers' markets reopened in June. READ MORE.

The city and Patch both have directories of businesses that are open and closed. Check them out and add your listing. READ MORE.

The city will be closing off certain blocks for businesses to expand and draw foot traffic. READ MORE.

Here's what you need to know about applying for unemployment and other benefits during coronavirus. MORE.

Read more about unemployment, small business, and other coronavirus regulations and benefits in New Jersey here.

LIBRARY

Residents can return library books and other materials by placing them in the library book/media dropbox in front of the library (500 Park Ave.) from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. The library has begun no-contact "curbside pickup" service. Library patrons will be able to reserve the materials online, place their orders via email to hobkcirc@bccls.org, or call (201) 4202346, ext. 5102. For additional details, visit hobokenlibrary.org.

PARKS

Most Hoboken parks reopened earlier this summer.

Playgrounds reopened last month. Kids over 2 must wear a mask in playgrounds in Hoboken.

GYMS

Bhalla said recently, "According to Governor Murphy, the following activities are permitted at indoor gyms starting July 2, as provided by his office: 'individualized indoor instruction by appointment only where an instructor is offering training to an individual, and the individual's immediate family members, household members, caretakers, or romantic partners. If a gym or fitness center is offering multiple simultaneous instructions at the same facility, these instructions must take place in separate rooms or, if they take place in the same room, must be separated by a floor-to-ceiling barrier that complies with all fire code requirements.' "

NURSING HOMES

New Jersey residents have become alarmed at the high number of residents who have passed away in nursing homes, rehabs, and similar facilities, and have charged that the facilities are undercounting the numbers and not adequately protecting residents and staff. The state has faced questions for weeks from the press about how they will address the problems. They announced plans last month to increase testing at some long term care facilities and to bring in the National Guard to help make changes.

The state has begun releasing death toll statistics for long-term care facilities like rehabs and nursing homes. See the list here.

You can report problems with long term care facilities here, or if you suspect coronavirus related misconduct, here.

Some New Jersey long-term care facilities reopened for limited visits, with precautions, in July.

Other states have also been dealing with nursing home deaths more recently, including a recent outbreak in a Texas nursing home.

Here are statewide coronavirus resources:

NJ COVID-19 Information Hub: https://covid19.nj.gov/

General COVID-19 questions: 2-1-1

NJ COVID-19 hotline: (800) 222-1222

Got news? Email caren.lissner@patch.com. To be the first to get news alerts with breaking stories in Hoboken, or to get a free local newsletter each morning, sign up for Patch breaking news alerts or daily newsletters.

This article originally appeared on the Hoboken Patch
How to turn on Bluetooth on Windows 10 is among the many questions users ask once they've switched over to Microsoft's latest OS version.

Windows 7, next to XP, has been touted as the most popular version of Windows. However, Windows 7 is already on "end of life" (EOL). This means, like its predecessors, it's no longer officially supported by Microsoft. Your computer will no longer be able to receive official updates and fixes. This lack of update makes your system more susceptible to crashes and other errors. Worse, you're opening yourself to virus and malware.

The most logical action then is to upgrade to the most recent version  Windows 10. There's a learning curve, but it's not really that steep. Topics such as how to use more than one display on your PC and how to speed it up are other common questions people ask around.

Bluetooth: Going wireless for the first time

For those of us who've been used to wired connections, having a Bluetooth-equipped computer is a blessing. Instead of having messy wires prone to tangling and breakage, this wireless protocol allows connecting your headphones, speakers, smartphones, and more without the need for compatible cables.

You've just upgraded to a gaming PC, running the highest amount of RAM and Nvidia's latest RTX cards. With all the cable management you've already done at the back of your computer desk, you feel you deserve a reward: a wireless keyboard, mouse, and headphones. Worry not, you can easily get what you wish for since today's computers often have a built-in Bluetooth receiver. If yours doesn't have one, you can always get a USB Bluetooth receiver.

How to Turn on Bluetooth on Windows 10: Ease and compatibility

For desktops that come with a Bluetooth receiver, turning it on or off is a breeze. Let's also include laptops as almost all come with a Bluetooth function. There are two common ways to configure Bluetooth on windows 10.

Accessing it via Windows Settings

Accessing it from Action Center

To access it from Windows Settings, just click on the Start button. On the left-most side, click the Settings icon (the one that looks like a cogwheel). Once inside, head over to the Devices section and select Bluetooth & other devices.

The easier and quicker way is by going to your Action Center. The Action Center provides quick access to regularly used features. Just click on the Bluetooth icon to turn it on. If it's grayed out, it means it's currently off.

Make sure the device you want to connect to is on pairing mode. Once Bluetooth is on, your computer will see a list of Bluetooth-enabled devices that you can connect with. Depending on the device, sometimes it will also ask for a numerical pass phrase. You can always refer to your device's manufacturer for the pairing code.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, even if Bluetooth is on, your PC still can't see the device you're trying to pair with. Restarting both the computer and the device often fixes the issue. Make sure too that the device is set to discoverable mode so that your PC can "see" it. There are also times that Bluetooth may be malfunctioning. Always check via Windows Update if your system has the updated Bluetooth driver. For Bluetooth receivers, they often come with a driver installation CD.
August 24, 2020 - Three popular complementary and integrative health (CIH) therapies - yoga, tai chi, and meditation - lead to significant improvements in key outcomes perceived by Veterans receiving care in the Veterans Health Administration (VA) system, suggests a study in a special September supplement to Medical Care. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

"[O]ur study showed that meditation, tai chi, and yoga appear to improve overall physical and mental health and reduced perceived stress," according to the new research, led by Dr. A. Rani Elwy of the VA Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research at the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Mass, and an Associate Professor in the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Published today, the special issue of Medical Care documents progress toward implementing CIH therapies throughout the VA system - part of efforts to promote a "Whole Health" approach in VA care. As required by the 2016 Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA), the VA has expanded research and education on CIH programs, focusing on the impact on pain, mental health, and chronic illness.

Improvements in Patient-Reported Outcomes with CIH Therapies Dr. Elwy and colleagues performed a 12-month survey study to examine the impact on CIH therapies on 119 veteran's self-reported health and well-being. These Veterans completed 401 surveys over five different time point during the study. The surveys focused on patient-reported outcomes (PROs) - an important target for efforts to improve healthcare, focusing on the most important problems and outcomes identified by patients themselves.

Overall, Veterans in the study reported using 14 different CIH therapies. Yoga was the most popular, with nearly half of Veterans participating. This was followed by meditation, acupuncture, and tai chi. Three CIH therapies were associated with significant improvements in PROs:

Yoga was related to decreases in perceived stress.

Tai chi was linked to improvements in overall physical and mental health functioning, anxiety levels, and ability to participate in social role activities.

Meditation was also associated with improvements in physical functioning.

None of the CIH therapies resulted in improvement in Veterans' pain intensity or level of engagement in their health care. Larger studies with longer follow-up times may be needed to show significant effects on these outcomes, according to Dr. Elwy and coauthors. They conclude: "It is time to focus on health and well-being, as defined by Veterans, and reaching these goals must include participation in CIH treatment approaches."

More Progress in CIH Implementation and Research at the VA Titled The Implementation of Complementary and Integrative Health Therapies in the Veterans Health Administration, the new supplement presents 11 original research papers and commentaries on the VA's progress in implementing and evaluating the impact of CIH therapies on Veterans' health outcomes. Dr. Elwy and Dr. Stephanie L. Taylor of the HSR&D Center for the Study of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation, and Policy, Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center are the supplement Guest Editors.

The special issue papers address strategies to build support for and implement CIH programs, to evaluate their effectiveness, and to promote their long-term sustainability. "We already know that CIH therapies are effective for the treatment of Veterans' chronic pain, posttraumatic stress, depression, and other chronic conditions," Drs. Elwy and Taylor write. "Now we need to develop, test, and use effective strategies to increase CIH use and sustainment."

In a commentary, Alison Whitehead and Dr. Benjamin Kligler of the VA Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation state: "As the VA continues to develop new and better ways of making CIH approaches available to all Veterans, and to collect data on the outcomes of this expanded access for Veterans and employees, we hope to demonstrate to the rest of the U.S. healthcare system how an emphasis on whole person care and self-management skills should become the new standard across the industry."

###

Click here to read "Participating in Complementary and Integrative Health Approaches Is Associated With Veterans' Patient-reported Outcomes Over Time."

DOI: 10.1097/MLR.0000000000001357

Click here to read "Progress of Veterans Health Administration Complementary and Integrative Health Research Along the Quality Enhancement Research Initiative Implementation Roadmap."

DOI: 10.1097/MLR.0000000000001382

About Medical Care

Rated as one of the top ten journals in health care administration, Medical Care is devoted to all aspects of the administration and delivery of health care. This scholarly journal publishes original, peer-reviewed papers documenting the most current developments in the rapidly changing field of health care. Medical Care provides timely reports on the findings of original investigations into issues related to the research, planning, organization, financing, provision, and evaluation of health services. In addition, numerous special supplementary issues that focus on specialized topics are produced with each volume. Medical Care is the official journal of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association.

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When Justin Trudeau proclaimed gleefully last week that he wouldnt be raising taxes as part of his recovery strategy, he was likely aiming to take a bit of the wind out of the sails of the next Conservative leader.

But as Erin OToole moves to turn his leadership-race platform into something his party could run on in the next election, theres still a lot of space for him to carve out as a conservative alternative.

He needs to fill in the blanks quickly though.

The Liberals have already started to define their approach to recovery. The build back better refrain keeps coming up, and the throne speech and fiscal update next month will seek to turn that progressive rallying cry into an actual vision that combines environmentalism, job creation, help to deal with the pandemic and support for the most vulnerable.

Theres no Liberal talk of balanced budgets or fiscal discipline, though. Even when Trudeau unveiled Chrystia Freeland as his new finance minister last week, the pro forma promises to keep a lid on spending or keep the debt burden on a downward track were absent.

Thats not the case for OToole.

During the Conservative leadership race, he campaigned, albeit vaguely, on fiscal prudence  getting the budget gradually back to balance, smaller and more efficient government, cutting costs and boosting small business and natural resource extraction.

Its a traditional, small-c conservative approach despite the unprecedented fiscal and economic upheaval. It hints at a stark contrast to the Liberal direction, which implies lots more spending beyond the $343-billion deficit already projected even before recovery efforts have begun.

But before voters can decide whether they prefer a right-leaning or left-leaning approach to recovery from the pandemic, OToole has some work to do in fleshing out what his campaign promises will look like in real life.

Most of his detailed campaign promises around recovery are somewhat dated. He wants government to invest in safe workplaces through ensuring proper supplies of masks, personal protective equipment and testing, which is already an ongoing effort by the federal government. He wants to end the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and reform Employment Insurance to provide proper support for self-employed, which the federal Liberals announced last week.

Longer term, he wants to unleash the private sector and spur higher rates of economic growth, not just by cutting taxes but by simplifying and flattening the tax system. It means the rich would not face disproportionately higher tax burdens than the rest of us, and its something conservatives flirt with now and again.

But details are scarce, and the ideas themselves are highly controversial. Lower taxes dont always lead to more private-sector investment or jobs. A flatter tax system may not be popular in the age of populism and anti-elite sentiment.

And how much cutting of government programs would be necessary if OToole really wanted to balance the budget at the same time? The deficit at this point is so enormous that we shouldnt expect a hard date on its elimination, even from Conservatives. Instead, a schedule or some kind of guiding principle could go a long way toward persuading those blue Liberals who are queasy about unconstrained deficits that they should give OToole a second look.

The Conservatives need to win that group over  something Andrew Scheer was not able to do  if they are to have a hope of winning the next election.

OToole has got an opportunity here, says Garry Keller, vice-president of StrategyCorp and chief of staff to Rona Ambrose when she was interim leader of the party. If hes bold, he can try to force the debate onto his terms.

Build back better may sound enticing to professionals, but it wont mean much to millions of blue-collar workers who are facing unemployment and looking for a way back to work right now, Keller said. And it will make those fiscal hawks within the Liberal Party cringe at the prospect of ballooning deficits.

Since the ousting of Bill Morneau last week, a narrative within both Conservative and Liberal circles has taken hold: the former finance ministers departure was Trudeau getting rid of an obstacle to spending more. Whether or not thats true doesnt matter much. The Trudeau-Freeland team seem perfectly content with that narrative; they have set themselves up to be doves, not hawks, on fiscal policy.

Wherever one stands on the economics, such positioning comes with political risk.

Thats why Trudeau tried to protect his right flank by promising not to raise taxes. But OToole still has ample room to manoeuvre and strike.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 02:25:42|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- UN Undersecretary-General for UN Counter-Terrorism Office Vladimir Voronkov on Monday called for attention to new challenges brought by COVID-19 to counter-terrorism efforts.

"This pandemic environment raises several strategic and practical challenges for counter-terrorism," Voronkov told the Security Council.

The Islamic State (IS) and other terrorist groups seek to exploit the far-reaching disruption and negative socio-economic and political impacts of the pandemic. Strengthening collective action and international counter-terrorism cooperation must remain a priority during and after the pandemic, he said.

Since the start of the year, there have seen contrasting regional disparities in the threat trajectory. In conflict zones, the threat has increased, as evidenced by the IS regrouping and increasing activity in Iraq and Syria. In non-conflict zones, the threat appears to have decreased in the short term. Measures to minimize the spread of COVID-19, such as lockdowns and restrictions on movement, seem to have reduced the risk of terrorist attacks in many countries, said Voronkov.

Yet, there is a continued trend of attacks by individuals inspired online and acting alone or in small groups, which could be fueled by the IS opportunistic propaganda efforts during the COVID-19 crisis, he warned.

The pandemic's impact on recruitment and fundraising activities remains unclear, as its socio-economic fallout could exacerbate conditions conducive to terrorism and increase the medium- to long-term threat, both within and outside conflict zones, he said.

Meanwhile, there is no clear indication of a change in the IS strategic direction under its new leader. Command and control arrangements between the IS core and its remote "provinces" have continued to loosen, thereby strengthening regional affiliates, he said.

Voronkov also briefed the council on some developments in different regions concerning the IS.

In the Middle East, he said, the IS core has continued to consolidate its position in some areas previously under its control, operating increasingly confidently and openly.

More than 10,000 IS fighters are estimated to remain active in Iraq and Syria, moving freely in small cells between the two countries. There has been a significant increase in IS attacks in both countries in 2020 compared to 2019, he said.

The COVID-19 crisis has further complicated the already dire and unsustainable situation of thousands of individuals with suspected links to the IS who are stranded in the conflict zone, especially women and children. Repatriation, prosecution, rehabilitation, and reintegration and the protection of the vulnerable have become ever more urgent, he said.

While some states have repatriated and continue to repatriate children, there has been only limited progress in overcoming legal, political, and practical hurdles to repatriation. The global threat from the IS is likely to increase if the international community fails to meet this challenge. Decisive action is required from member states on humanitarian, human rights, and security grounds, he said.

In Africa, the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) remains a major focus of IS global propaganda, and its total membership of approximately 3,500 makes it one of the largest of the remote "provinces," said Voronkov.

ISWAP continued to reinforce links with the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, which remains the most dangerous group in the tri-border area of Burkina Faso, Mali, and the Niger, he said.

Although the IS has only a few hundred fighters in Libya, it has been exploiting local tensions between ethnic groups. It represents a potent threat capable of broader regional impact. The risk of escalation of the conflict in Libya could allow the IS to expand its activity, he warned.

In Asia, the IS affiliate in Afghanistan remains capable of high-profile attacks in various parts of the country despite continued territorial losses and the arrest of its leaders. The group seeks to use Afghan territory to spread its influence across the region, similar to the approach of the IS core. It also aims to attract fighters who oppose, among others, the peace agreement reached between the Taliban and the United States, he said.

In Europe, the threat continues to come mainly from Internet-driven, homegrown terrorist radicalization. Acute concerns persist about radicalization and failed rehabilitation in prisons, and the imminent release of dangerous inmates with a terrorism background or connections, said Voronkov.

Several European countries report a growing terrorist threat from "right-wing violent extremism," which requires intelligence services to shift their operational and analytical priorities away from a focus on the IS, he said. Enditem
Pune, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global preeclampsia diagnostics market is anticipated to gain momentum from the increasing number of pregnancies owing to the complete lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This information is given by Fortune Business Insights in a new report, titled, Preeclampsia Diagnostics Market Size, Share & COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Test Type (Blood Tests and Urine Analysis), By Product (Instruments and Consumables) End-user (Hospitals, Specialty Clinics, Diagnostic Centers, and Others) and Regional Forecast, 2019-2027. The report further states that this market size was USD 1.06 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 2.52 billion by 2027, thereby exhibiting a CAGR of 11.0% during the forecast period.





Request a Sample Copy of the Research Report: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/request-sample-pdf/preeclampsia-diagnostics-market-101519







This Report Answers the Following Questions:

What are the challenges and opportunities in the market?

What are the market dynamics, hindrances, and growth drivers?

What are the estimated, present, and historical sizes of the global market?

What steps are being taken by companies to surge sales of preeclampsia diagnosis kits?

Drivers & Restraints-

Increasing Prevalence of Preeclampsia in Developing Nations to Boost Growth

The increasing perinatal and maternal morbidity & mortality rate is set to surge the need for the early diagnosis of preeclampsia worldwide among pregnant women. The British Charity Action on Pre-eclampsia (APEC) declared that in the U.K. every year, around 7 mothers die on account of complications related to preeclampsia and approximately 1000 babies die owing to the same cause. The condition is majorly affecting the health of both neonates and mother, especially in the emerging countries. As per the BMC Journal, in Africa, preeclampsia affects around 10% of pregnant women annually. These factors are set to propel the preeclampsia testing market growth in the coming years.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented demand in the healthcare industry. Presently, because of the unavailability of efficient healthcare facilities and midwives, the cases of cancelled or delayed abortions have surged rapidly. Besides, the number of coronavirus positive cases amongst pregnant women is increasing, which, in turn, is resulting in the high demand for preeclampsia diagnostics. We are providing elaborate research reports to help you better understand the effects of this pandemic on every pandemic.





To get to know more about the short-term and long-term impact of COVID-19 on this market, please visit: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/preeclampsia-diagnostics-market-101519







Segment-

Instruments Segment to Grow Rapidly Owing to Their Highly Sensitive Nature

Based on product type, the market is bifurcated into consumables and instruments. Out of these, the instruments segment is expected to grow significantly throughout the forthcoming period because of their highly sensitive nature. They are extensively used for fast and accurate testing for preeclampsia.

Regional Analysis-

High Pregnancy Rate to Drive Growth in Asia Pacific

In 2019, North America generated USD 401.9 million in terms of preeclampsia screening market revenue. This growth is attributable to the significant healthcare expenditure and the rising usage of technologically advanced preeclampsia diagnostics kits in this region. Coupled with this, the increasing awareness programs amongst the patients and doctors regarding the severity of the disease would propel growth in this region. Asia Pacific, on the other hand, is expected to remain in the second position after North America backed by the increasing adoption of fertility treatments, high rate of pregnancy, and the rising population.





Quick Buy - Preeclampsia Diagnostics Market Research Report: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/checkout-page/101519







Competitive Landscape-

Key Players Aim to Introduce Wide Product Offerings to Intensify Competition

The market for preeclampsia diagnostics consists of several prominent companies that are persistently trying to gain a competitive edge by introducing a wide range of product offerings. Some of them are also trying to broaden their geographical footprint by expanding their brand presence. Below are two of the latest industry developments:

February 2019 : Diabetomics introduced a rapid point-of-care test called Lumella in Hyderabad. It is a novel preeclampsia diagnosis test.





: Diabetomics introduced a rapid point-of-care test called Lumella in Hyderabad. It is a novel preeclampsia diagnosis test. March 2019: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center introduced its latest urine test for preeclampsia diagnosis at an early stage.



Fortune Business Insights lists out the names of all the renowned preeclampsia diagnostics providers operating in the global market. They are as follows:

F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd (Basel, Switzerland)

PerkinElmer Inc. (Massachusetts, United States)

DRG INSTRUMENTS GMBH (HE, Germany)

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (Massachusetts, United States)

Diabetomics, Inc. (Massachusetts, United States)

Metabolomic Diagnostics Ltd. (Munster, Ireland)

Sera Prognostics (UT, United States)

Siemens Healthineers AG (Erlangen, Germany)

Bayer AG (Leverkusen, Germany)

Others





Have Any Query? Ask Our Experts: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/speak-to-analyst/preeclampsia-diagnostics-market-101519







Detailed Table of Content:

Introduction Research Scope Market Segmentation Research Methodology Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Dynamics Market Drivers Market Restraints Market Opportunities

Key Insights Prevalence of Preeclampsia by Key Regions Pricing Analysis by Key Players in Major Regions Technological Advancements in Preeclampsia Diagnostics New Test Type Launch by Key Players Key Industry Developments  Partnerships, Mergers, and Acquisitions

Global Preeclampsia Diagnostics Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2016-2027 Key Findings / Summary Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Test Type Blood Tests Urine Analysis Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Product Instruments Consumables Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By End User Hospitals Specialty Clinics Diagnostic Centers Others Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast  By Region North America Europe Asia Pacific Latin America Middle East & Africa



TOC Continued...!!!







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Have a Look at Related Reports:

Preeclampsia Therapeutics Market Share & Industry Analysis, By Preeclampsia Type (Mild Preeclampsia, Severe Preeclampsia), By Drug Class (Antihypertensive Agents, Anticonvulsants, Antioxidants, Others) and Regional Forecast, 2019-2026

Immunodiagnostics Market Share and Global Trend By Product Instruments, Reagents & Consumables), By Application (Oncology & Endocrinology, Hepatitis & Retrovirus, Cardiac Markers, Infectious Diseases), By End user (Clinical Laboratories, Hospitals, Physicians Offices), By End-user(Hospitals, Dental Clinics, Academic & Research Institutes) and Geography Forecast till 2026

Point of Care (POC) Diagnostics Market Share and Global Trend By Product (Blood Glucose Monitoring, Infectious Diseases, Cardiometabolic Diseases, Pregnancy and Fertility Testing Products, Hematology Testing Products, Others), By End User (Hospitals Bedside, Physicians Office Lab, Urgent Care & Retail Clinics, Home and Self Testing) and Geography Forecast till 2026

Molecular Diagnostics Market Share and Global Trend By Product Type (Instruments Reagents & Consumables), Application (Infectious Disease, Blood Screening, Histology & Oncology), Technique (Hospitals Amplification, Hybridization & Sequencing Techniques), End User (Hospitals, Clinical & Pathology Labs) and Geography Forecast till 2025

In-vitro Diagnostics (IVD) Market Share & Industry Analysis, By Product Type (Instruments, Reagents & Consumables), By Technique (Immunodiagnostics, Clinical Chemistry, Molecular Diagnostics, Point of Care, Hematology and Others), By Application (Infectious Diseases, Cardiology, Oncology, Gastroenterology, Others), By End User (Clinical Laboratories, Hospitals, Physicians Offices, Others) and Regional Forecast, 2019  2026



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The new mask ordinance will allow Athens-Clarke County to enforce the use of masks in public and in private businesses with the owner's consent.
Japanese company Aska Pharmaceutical has signed an agreement to acquire a 24.9 percent stake in Vietnamese pharmaceutical company Hataphar.

The Tokyo-based company said in a recent statement that Hataphar, formally Ha Tay Pharmaceutical Jsc, was the second largest drug company in Vietnam last year and the deal would help it get a foothold in Southeast Asia as part of its international expansion.

Le Xuan Thang, CEO of Hataphar, told VnExpress that the company would issue an additional 5.28 million shares equivalent to a 20 percent stake at a price of VND370 billion ($16 million).

The Japanese company would buy the remaining 4.9 percent from existing shareholders, he added.

Hataphar plans to use the proceeds to build a VND1.35 trillion ($58.2 million) plant in Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park in Hanoi. Construction is set to begin in the last quarter of next year.

It reported revenues of VND915 billion in the first half, up 1 percent year-on-year, while post-tax profits grew by 6 percent to VND52.5 billion.
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Sta. Magdalena (73 km N of epicenter) [ Map ] / Moderate shaking (MMI V) : It was really frightening!I really thought our house will collapsed! People are going outside their houses as we all felt dizzy. We watched the tree got swayed by the shaking, and our slowly cracking! | 8 users found this interesting. / Moderate shaking (MMI V)

Ormoc (122.8 km SSE of epicenter) [ Map ] / Weak shaking (MMI III) : I had a feeling it was far away as usually I hear the 'p-wave' during a quake. I did not hear this one and in fact there was no sound or rumble. No vibration although I could feel the movement and see a dormant ceiling fan wave a bit. It is a light III. | 4 users found this interesting.

Legazpi City (130.1 km NNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Moderate shaking (MMI V) : I was working on my computer when our house suddenly jolted. at first it was kinda weak but then the shaking became stronger so I ran downstairs because I was afraid that if it continues it might damage our house. fortunately it stopped after a few second | 2 users found this interesting.

Lapu-Lapu City , Punta Engano (184.8 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / Very strong shaking (MMI VII) : Arterra Hotel and Resort. Very strong shaking then a brief pause then strong shaking a second time. Total 10-15 seconds of shaking | One user found this interesting.

San Antonio Village, Cataingan, Masbate (5.9 km WNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Very strong shaking (MMI VII) : I was on my way from home to work, driving a motorbike, when I experienced that my motorbike is swaying, I thought the tires are flat, but when I am about to slow down, I saw people coming out from their homes, electric posts are swaying and that even whe

San Antonio Village, Cataingan, Masbate (5.9 km WNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Very strong shaking (MMI VII) : On Aug. 18, around 8:00 in the morning, I was on my way from home to work, at least 6 kms from the District Hospital driving a motorbike, when I experienced that my motorbike is swaying, at first I thought the tires are flat, but when I am about to slow d

talisay city, cebu (194.7 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / Moderate shaking (MMI V) : I was eating, then the table as well as some of the furniture at home shook. I was sitting down so I felt the earthquake, but some of the people in the household like my mom, who at the moment was standing, didn't even feel the earthquake.

Bacolod (184 km SW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Light shaking (MMI IV) : I was waiting for my online class when suddenly I saw my aquarium water shaking violently and I felt my chair shaking

near Biking, Bohol, Central Visayas (281.5 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / Light shaking (MMI IV) : Light shaking. Felt our hanging decorative light moving, and it was kinda long, then stopped,then continued...

San Francisco, Cebu, Central Visayas (150 km SSE of epicenter) [ Map ] / Light shaking (MMI IV) : I had just woken up and the lights and hanged clothes were swaying. Dad checked up on us if we felt that and if it was an earthquake. Yep, that was an earthquake.

Nabua (175.8 km NNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Very weak shaking (MMI II) : Felt tremors for 45 seconds, then nothing for 20 seconds then tremors for 10 seconds. Hanging balls on Chandelier rocked back and forth for at least 15 minutes.

Mabolog, Naga City (203.8 km NNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Light shaking (MMI IV) : I was working at home and currently attending an online meeting. Felt it and told my e-meeting colleagues there's an earthquake.. saw the hanging lights swaying.. afraid it will fall off the ceiling.took my 2 kids and laptop with me out of the house :( ho same but i didnt do anything at all / Light shaking (MMI IV)

Kabankalan City (267.6 km SSW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Weak shaking (MMI III) : Wasn't sure if it was an earthquake or not. But my in-laws noticed, so I googled it. Was fairly weak, but lasted a good 15-25 seconds. We were decently far from the epicenter in Kabankalan.

bogo city siocon / Moderate shaking (MMI V) : bed rocking back and fourth also chandaleers lights hanging from ceiling swaying back and fourth i would estimate 3.5 magnatude to 4 house shaking north to south | 3 users found this interesting. neibors felt it too / Moderate shaking (MMI V)

Talisay City, Cebu (193.1 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / Very weak shaking (MMI II) Was already awake doing my morning meditation when I felt the floor move. It was a few seconds long. | 2 users found this interesting. (reported through (reported through our app / Very weak shaking (MMI II)

Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu. Babag2 (190.6 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / Weak shaking (MMI III) : Just laying in bed and felt minor vibration. | One user found this interesting.

Sto.Domingo,Albay (141.8 km NNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Strong shaking (MMI VI) : I was sipping my morning coffe,all of a sudden it spills all over my table. | One user found this interesting.

consolacion, cebu (180.2 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / Moderate shaking (MMI V) : its like swinging . it wakes me up | One user found this interesting.

Iloilo City (219.8 km SW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Moderate shaking (MMI V) : Slow rythmic pulsing shaking the entire building. Akin to being on a ship in medium waves. | One user found this interesting.

Pavia, Iloilo, Western Visayas (213.2 km SW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Weak shaking (MMI III) : Took a while before it stopped | One user found this interesting.

sorsogon city (90.5 km NNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Light shaking (MMI IV)

Pototan, Province of Iloilo, Western Visayas (192.3 km SW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Very weak shaking (MMI II) : I was lying on the bed and suddenly i got dizzy for around 5-10 seconds.

Iriga City, Camarines Sur, Bicol (172.9 km NNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Moderate shaking (MMI V)

Guadalupe Cebu City (186 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / not felt

Masbate, Bicol (61.8 km NW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Light shaking (MMI IV)

Daet, Camarines Norte, Bicol (262.7 km NNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Very weak shaking (MMI II) : Very weak shaking, felt as i was laying on the floor. Though it lasted only for few seconds.

I fart because of the strong shake (697.7 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / Very weak shaking (MMI II) (reported through our app / Very weak shaking (MMI II)

Compostela, Cebu, Central Visayas (170.4 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / not felt

Mandaue City , Cebu (182.4 km S of epicenter) [ Map ] / Light shaking (MMI IV)

Calbayog City, Samar, Eastern Visayas (60.4 km E of epicenter) [ Map ] / Strong shaking (MMI VI) It's very shaking many glass has been destroyed (reported through (reported through our app / Strong shaking (MMI VI)

brgy del rosario, naga city, camarines sur, bicol (201.1 km NNW of epicenter) [ Map ] / Light shaking (MMI IV) : lying in bed on 2nd story of my camella home.. felt like waves in a water bed..
Richa Sharma By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Rahul Gandhis move to sideline party veterans is one of the reasons behind the dissent letter written by some senior leaders seeking a collective leadership, say sources.

The party sources cited several instances  Rajya Sabha elections, appointments in state units and Rajasthan crisis  in the last one year showing how he continues to call shots in the party and seniors are being sidelined.

Senior party leaders say that among the signatories, Rajya Sabha MPs Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma and Kapil Sibal, seemingly drafted the letter.

Azad, who is opposition leader in Rajya Sabha and his term ends early 2021 and Sharma, his deputy in Rajya Sabha, are seemingly upset with the former Lok Sabha opposition leader Mallikarjun Kharge being brought to the Rajya Sabha.

Azad may also not get another term in the upper house while Kharge will be elevated in his place.

ALSO READ | Cracks wide open in Congress on CWC meet eve; Gandhis vs collective leadership

Also, both Gandhi siblings have attacked senior party leaders during the Congress Working Committee meetings for not being on the same page when it comes to Rahuls attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Some Congress leaders had expressed that attacking the PM will not serve a purpose and the party should target the policies of BJP government.

Senior leaders feel that they are not consulted on any key party decisions. They want the party to make collective decisions. They felt humiliated during the meeting of Rajya Sabha MPs with Sonia Gandhi when a young MP attacked the UPA regime, said a senior party leader.

ALSO READ | Leadership row: Several Congress leaders throw weight behind Gandhi family on CWC eve

A divide among young and senior party leaders came to the fore during the meeting in July as some young MPs, including Rajiv Satav, in-charge for Gujarat, called for introspection within the party and that if the party is paying for the work during the UPA regime.

Satav, who is considered close to Rahul, has been sent to Rajya Sabha along with KC Venugopal, partys organisation secretary.

Rahul Gandhi had resigned from the partys top post in July, 2019.In the letter shared on his Twitter account, Rahul had taken responsibility for the partys massive defeat in the general elections but had added a word of caution for other party leaders.
The executive body, on behalf of the NPP Japan branch, wishes to extend its congratulation to the elephant fraternity for the successful 2020 manifesto launch on Saturday, 22nd August, 2020 at Cape Coast.

Japan NPP branch is happy to have had its chairman, Dr Benard Oppong-Kusi, represent it at the launch grounds.

In the NPP 2016 manifesto, the party made a number of promises, including the radical transformation of agriculture as well as other policies including, one district, one factory (1D1F); one village, one dam (1V1D); one constituency, $1million; free senior high school (FSHS) education; restoration of nursing and teacher trainees allowances, among others. We are happy to note that all of these promises have either been fulfilled or are in the final phases of being fulfilled.

The NPP government, under the able and dynamic leadership of President Akufo-Addo, through the implementation of prudent micro and macro policies was able to exit the IMF programme in a record time of just a year of taking office, chalking an average economic growth rate of 7 percent over the last three years.

There is no better time to launch the 2020 manifesto than now, when the governments solid economic policies have started bearing bountiful fruits.

And again, there is no better time than now when we have over 1.2 million students enjoying free Senior High School, one of the most flagship programmes of the NPP, and a totem of its commitment to building the human resource base of our nation.

Thanks to the Nana Addo-Bawumia government, the planting for food and jobs programme has increased cereal production by over 100 % even in these difficult times. The nation can now pride itself as being fully self-sufficient in cereal production, and even exports maize to other ECOWAS countries.

There is certainly no better time to launch the 2020 manifesto when the NPP government through its Ghana beyond aid agenda is bridging the development gap through an industrialization drive aimed at lifting citizens from misery and poverty.

The 2020 NPP manifesto launch has been done *at a critical* moment as we prepare for election 2020. The NPP Japan branch wishes to salute all the gallant members for the great work done so far. We are on the right path and our campaign momentum is absolutely on fire.

On this note, the NPP Japan branch wishes to humbly appeal to the good people of Ghana to vote massively to retain the best president in Africa in the forthcoming election on December 7th.

We want to remind all Ghanaians that 4 more for Nana is a clarion national call and not a political talk 4 more to do more for you.

God bless our homeland Ghana.

Issued on behalf of the NPP Japan branch by

Kwaku Adu

(Acting Communications Director)
-- Video platform TikTok's parent company ByteDance said it will file a lawsuit against the U.S. government to safeguard its rights and interests, while prepare a shutdown plan for its business in the United States.

-- Besides ByteDance's lawsuit, its U.S. employees are also planning to take the Trump administration to court over the executive order signed by the U.S. president.

-- The litigation itself is of great significance as it will not only bring legal and public pressure to the U.S. government, but may also become a landmark event for Chinese enterprises to protect their rights.

The logo of TikTok is displayed on the screen of a smartphone on a computer screen background in Arlington, Virginia, the United States, Aug. 3, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

BEIJING, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- ByteDance, owner of the popular video platform TikTok, announced Sunday that it will file a lawsuit against the U.S. government Tuesday, Beijing time, to protect its rights and interests while beginning to prepare a shutdown plan for its business in the United States.

"Over the past year, we have earnestly sought to communicate with the U.S. government, and provided solutions regarding its concerns. But the U.S. administration disregarded facts, disobeyed necessary legal procedures, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses," ByteDance said in a statement. "To ensure that the rule of law is not discarded, and that our company and users are treated fairly, we announce that we will officially file a lawsuit to safeguard our interests."

Besides the lawsuit, the company is also preparing for the worst -- a shutdown plan to keep its employees in the United States on the payroll, even if the app is shut down in the country.

File photo shows the Tiktok app icon (upper right corner) on a smartphone screen. (Xinhua/Shi Zhongyu)

U.S. authorities have repeatedly accused TikTok of being a potential threat to U.S. national security since last year.

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 6, blocking all transactions with ByteDance, to address "the national emergency."

The New York Times, however, reported on Aug. 7 that even the Central Intelligence Agency assessed that there is no evidence showing China had intercepted TikTok's data, or used the app to intrude on users' mobile phones.

The order was to take effect within 45 days. On Aug. 14, the president signed another executive order, this time giving ByteDance 90 days to sell or spin off TikTok in the United States.

There has been no evidence to show that TikTok poses a threat to U.S. national security, according to TikTok's U.S. General Manager Vanessa Pappas.

Photo taken on Aug. 21, 2020 shows the video-sharing social networking company TikTok's Los Angeles Office in Culver City, Los Angeles County, the United States. (Xinhua)

TikTok has more than 100 million users, over 1,500 employees and thousands of business partners in the United States, according to ByteDance.

A shutdown, if it occurs, would cause ByteDance a loss of at least 200 billion yuan (28.94 billion U.S. dollars) at a rumored sale of 20 billion U.S. dollars to 50 billion U.S. dollars, the company said.

ByteDance worries that, due to the extremely wide scope and highly uncertain content of the U.S. executive order against ByteDance, the company is unable to ensure that a solution acceptable to all parties can be reached within the time limit set by the U.S. government.

In just a few years, TikTok has become one of the most beloved apps among the global youth population, providing a platform for people to display their talent through short videos.

Since September 2018, TikTok usage among adults in the United States has increased exponentially, doubling and reaching 14.3 million in just six months, recording the third-highest number of downloads in the world.

Data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower showed that it was the most downloaded non-gaming app globally in June 2020, and its installs were much higher than those of Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube during the first two quarters in the United States.

Besides the company's lawsuit, its U.S. employees are also planning to take the Trump administration to court over the executive order.

Under the pretext of national security, the U.S. government is obviously abusing state power to suppress Chinese high-tech enterprises, said Huo Zhengxin, a professor in international law at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing.

From a legal perspective, such actions from the U.S. have no basis, Huo said, noting that the hastily-issued executive order did not give TikTok any opportunity to defend itself. The U.S. oppression on TikTok is probably unprecedented, he noted.

"The litigation itself is of great significance. First, this is an important measure for the Chinese enterprise to protect its rights, which will bring legal and public pressure to the U.S. government," the professor said. "Second, it shows the confidence of Chinese companies and may become a landmark event for Chinese companies to protect their rights."
Whenever there is a need for an impartial probe, be it criminal or corruption, there are demands to hand it over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). This is because not just people and the government, even the judiciary fear that state investigative agencies may work in the interest of politicians or could botch-up cases due to sheer incompetence.

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Deputy Prime Minister Truong Hoa Binh has told HCM City authorities to consult foreign experts on its plan to build an innovative city within a city in the eastern part of the sprawling metropolis.

A view of the proposed innovative hub tentatively called Thu Duc City. The government has approved a proposal by HCM City to merge three eastern districts into one administrative unit, creating a city within a city. Photo vnexpress.net

The government has approved a HCM City proposal to merge the eastern districts of 2, 9, and Thu Duc into one administrative unit, tentatively called Thu Duc City.

To build the new city, Binh said HCM City authorities must seek advice from foreign experts and investors, including technology, finance and real estate companies.

Such consultations will allow the city to better understand investment needs and infrastructure requirements for Thu Duc City.

The consultations can be done online, he said.

To attract investment, HCM City must make clear how the new area would be distinguished from other urban areas in the country and other financial and technological centres in Asia, he added.

The plan should also be in accordance with the general planning for HCM City and the southeastern region to avoid overlaps that could lead to unnecessary competition within HCM City and the region, according to Binh.

To seek ideas for the new hub, the city last year launched a contest on planning concepts. The winner, the US architecture and design solution firm Sasaki Associates Inc, proposed different zones, facilities and development plans, with all the elements needed for a smart city and innovation, as well as other features to support the growth of technologies and key industries.

Dr Tran Du Lich, member of the Governments Economic Advisory Group, said the new city should be considered as an economic driver for the city and region, connecting research, entrepreneurship, academia, and industry to create an innovation eco-system.

Dr Huynh The Du, lecturer at Fulbright University Vietnam, said Thu Duc City should study the experiences of major cities in other countries, including the Pudong area in Shanghai and Gangnam in Seoul, and propose policies for a creative ecosystem and improved competitiveness.

Challenges

According to the Ministry of Construction, the plan to build a new city within a city is unprecedented in the country and will require extensive study.

The ministry said the establishment of the new city directly under HCM City management would also require amendments in urban planning and construction laws.

Pham Thai Son of the Vietnam-Germany University pointed out that the citys current resources were still insufficient to build the innovation district in the citys eastern part.

Dr Nguyen Cao Tri of Van Lang University also noted that it would be difficult to change management methods immediately, so the city must devise creative methods based on current policies.

Pham Chanh Truc, former deputy secretary of the municipal Party Committee, said: A smaller area should be designated first as the innovation district and then expanded because the project will involve huge expenditures.

To make the plan feasible, the city has to start with the basics such as traffic infrastructure, he added.

Master plan

The city government has established a steering committee, led by Nguyen Thanh Phong, chairman of the city Peoples Committee, which will develop a master plan for the development of the new city.

The master plan includes strategies for a knowledge-based economy that promotes investment in urban development and a highly skilled workforce.

The committee plans to develop a centralised urban database with data about land use, transportation, canals and other works in the three districts.

In addition, the committee will consult both the public and agencies, and promote international cooperation in investment.

Experts recommend that Thu Duc City should be designed to attract more investment and new opportunities while promoting globalisation and maintaining local culture, appealing to a talented workforce from around the world, and adapting to climate change.

Thu Duc City would be spread over 211 square kilometres and house more than a million people.

Currently, the 48sq.km Thu Duc District has a high concentration of educational institutions and research centres and four large universities with more than 10,000 lecturers and professors and 100,000 students.

The 50sq.km District 2, which includes the Thu Thiem new urban area, will provide international exhibition and financial centres for the new urban area and the city as a whole.

The 114sq.km District 9, which includes the Saigon Hi-Tech Park, would be a hub for research and an incubator for innovative technologies.

The new city is expected to contribute 30 per cent of the citys economic growth, and 4-5 per cent of the countrys.

HCM City contributes 23 per cent of national GDP, 30 per cent of Government revenues, 16 per cent of industrial output, and 15 per cent of exports. VNS

HCM City to merge three districts to create innovative hub The HCM City Department of Home Affairs has submitted a plan to the People's Committee on the merger of three districts and 19 wards in the eastern side of the city.
Hisbah, the Sharia law enforcement agency in Jigawa, said it has destroyed no fewer than 588 confiscated bottles of beer in Ringim Local Government Area of the state.

Ibrahim Dahiru, the State Commandant of Hisbah, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Dutse on Sunday that the bottles of beer were destroyed on August 20.

Mr Dahiru said that the beer was confiscated in Tudun Babaye village, Ringim LGA, during a raid in Gujungu, Kijawal and Wadugur villages in Ringim and Taura Local Government Areas.

He emphasized that consumption of beer was prohibited in all parts of the state, including villages.

The commandant assured that the Hisbah would not relent in its fight against immoral acts, including consumption of alcohol in the state.

Mr Dahiru further advised residents to desist from engaging in vices capable of destroying the society.

(NAN)
Three weeks after the US Congress went on vacation and allowed federal supplemental unemployment benefits to expire for 20 million workers, cutting their benefits by $600 a week, the House of Representatives stabbed the unemployed in the back a second time.

The Democratic Party-controlled House reconvened in the midst of its August recess, passed emergency legislation on the US Postal Service, and then adjourned without taking any action on the plight of those thrown out of work by the coronavirus crisis.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined to act on the appeal by nearly 100 members of her own caucus, who sent a letter asking that the reconvened House take up legislation to restore federal extended benefits for tens of millions of workers.

The refusal of Pelosi and other leading Democrats to take action on the unemployment crisis shows that the Democratic Partys claim to uphold the interests of working people is a political fraud. The Democrats jump to attention when Wall Street demands a bailout, but they have no time for workers facing poverty, hunger, eviction and homelessness.

People wait in line for food donations in the Corona neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Saturdays House session followed the Democratic National Convention, where there was virtually no reference to the cutoff of federal extended benefits during four days of rhetorical bilge about the decency and empathy of Joe Biden. The alleged tender feelings of the Democratic presidential nominee evidently do not extend to those who lost their federal extended benefits on July 31. He made no mention of them in his acceptance speech, nor did he urge the House to take action on their behalf.

The silence of the Democratic National Convention will be matched this week when the Republican National Convention meets to renominate the president. Trump will stage his own coronation with nonstop declarations about the great economy and his prowess in making America great again. But the only thing great about the present state of affairs is the great scale of the social need and mass suffering to which both corporate-controlled parties are entirely indifferent.

Two weeks ago, Trump signed an executive order purporting to revive the extended federal benefits at a much lower level$300 a week, a cut of 50 percentto be financed through the disaster relief fund of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The White House capped the resources to be made available at a total of $44 billion, compared to the $70 billion a month that the supplemental benefits were paying out. In a best-case scenario, this would limit the duration of the $300-a-week benefits to about five weeks. But even this derisory assistance will be further reduced if natural disasters, such as the twin hurricanes expected to strike the Louisiana Gulf Coast this week, or the California wildfires, place sizeable demands on FEMA.

Only one state, Arizona, has begun paying out benefits using the FEMA funding. Fourteen other states have been approved to do so but have not yet been able to carry through the necessary preparatory and administrative work to put the payments into operation.

Most of these states have declined to contribute $100 a week from their own funds to bring the supplemental benefits up to $400 a week, taking advantage of the loophole provided by Trump. The president is allowing states to count existing unemployment compensation payments towards the $100 a week, rather than providing new money.

Michigans Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer was one of those who announced they would go forward with the $300 a week benefit without adding any new state money. Whitmer addressed the Democratic National Convention from a United Auto Workers union hall, and professed her sympathy for autoworkers but said nothing about her decision to limit the size of extended jobless benefits.

Two of the three largest states, Texas and Florida, have declined so far to join the $300-a-week program, declaring that they need further clarification on the terms. The largest state, California, is one of the 14 that have enrolled, but Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said the state could not afford to add $100 a week to the payout. New York state, the fourth largest, will follow a similar path.

The blatant refusal of the Democratic-controlled House to take action Saturday allowed White House spokesmen to raise the issue themselves on the Sunday television talk shows, pretending sympathy for the unemployed. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows regularly objected to every penny of social spending while he was a House member himself and a leader of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus. But appearing on ABC News, he criticized Pelosi, asking, Why did they come back on a Saturday and only deal with postal? Why did they not deal with enhanced unemployment? Why did they not extend the PPP program that actually helps small businesses?

Kate Bedingfield, Bidens deputy campaign manager, appearing on the same program, managed to avoid speaking either of the unemployed or the $600-a-week supplemental benefit, saying only that Biden also believes that we need to get money to people who are hurting now, without saying anything more concrete.

Pelosi herself appeared on the CNN program State of the Union, and dismissed the White House suggestion that the House pass a stripped-down bill extending supplemental unemployment benefits, without additional money for state and local governments, coronavirus testing and tracing, food stamp benefits, or the Postal Service. Trump was only offering crumbs, she said. All the president wants is this one thing. He wants his name on a letter to go out with a check in it.

This is of course true, just as it is true that the Democrats calculate that the cutoff of unemployment benefits will hurt Trump more than themselves in the November elections.

But behind the mutual vituperation and jockeying for electoral advantage, both capitalist parties are committed to meeting the demands of corporate America, which regards compelling workers to go back to their jobs, regardless of the danger to their health and lives, as the number one priority. Every other action of the Democrats and Republicans, from cutting off supplemental benefits to reopening the schools no matter how many coronavirus outbreaks erupt, flows from this central class imperative.

The truth is that corporate America, like its counterparts around the world, has seized on the COVID-19 pandemic to carry out a long-planned restructuring of class relations, driving down wages, destroying jobs, and undermining long-established social benefits, from Social Security and Medicare to public education.

The cutoff of supplemental benefits, now entering its fourth week, comes amid mounting signs of a further sharp slowdown in the US economy and a skyrocketing of social need.

The New York Times wrote of the first circumstance on Saturday, under the headline, Economic Data Points to Pause in Recovery as Aid Programs Expire. The newspaper noted: Real-time measures of consumer spending, business sentiment, small-business reopening plans and even available jobs began flatlining last month, suggesting that the wave of virus infections that swept across parts of the United States in June and July came with economic consequences.

The Washington Post detailed the social consequences in a harrowing report posted on its website Sunday night, under the headline, Debt, eviction and hunger: Millions fall back into crisis as stimulus and safety nets vanish. The article began, Without federal aid to stave off the impact of the pandemic and economic recession, households that were already on the margins are now being pushed to the brink of financial ruin, and it cited the estimate by a Columbia University researcher that the $600-a-week supplemental benefit and other federal payments had kept 17 million people from falling below the poverty line as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

As these articles demonstrate, the US political establishment, both the capitalist parties and their media apologists are all well aware of the scale of the social and economic disaster facing tens of millions of working people. Their main concern is to suppress the mass struggles of the working class that will erupt and to block the development of a political movement of the working class against the profit system as a whole.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug.22

By Nargiz Ismayilova - Trend:

Kyrgyzstans share in the total import to Azerbaijan over the first seven months of 2020 grew from 0.01 to 0.03 percent, Trend reports on August 22 referring to the statistical bulletin of the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan.

According to the bulletin, in the reporting period, foreign trade operations between Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan amounted to $2.6 million, which is 9.7 percent less compared to the same period of last year.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan exported to Kyrgyzstan products worth $872,000, which is 1.9 times less than from January through July 2019 ($1.7 million). Kyrgyzstans share in Azerbaijans total export remained without changes.

At the same time, export of products from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan grew by almost 56.1 percent year-on-year, having amounted to $1.8 million.

Thus, the foreign trade balance of the two countries for the reporting period shifted to negative and made up $932,000.

In general, Azerbaijan's foreign trade turnover from January through July 2020 amounted to $15 billion.
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A sycamore laced with shoes, an oak bound in chains and a yew said to be more than 1,000 years old are among the contenders vying to be named England's Tree of the Year 2020.

Ten trees have been shortlisted and members of the public are invited to vote for their favourite.

The Woodland Trust's annual competition, now in its seventh year, shines a light on the nation's best trees to help drive up interest in their value and protection.

The Shoe Tree, Heaton Park, Newcastle, which has been shortlisted as one of the contenders vying to be named England's Tree of the Year 2020

The Happy Man Tree, Hackney, London, which has been shortlisted as one of the contenders vying to be named England's Tree of the Year 2020

The Remedy Oak, Dorset, which has been shortlisted as one of the contenders vying to be named England's Tree of the Year 202

The Shoe Tree in Heaton Park, Newcastle, is a sycamore adorned with shoes thrown by students on completion of exams.

The Chained Oak in Alton, Staffordshire, was the inspiration for the Hex ride at Alton Towers, with legend stating that the Earl of Shrewsbury had the tree bound in chains after a curse warned that for every branch that fell, a member of the earl's family would die.

A 150-year-old plane tree in Hackney, east London, called the Happy Man Tree, currently earmarked for felling to make way for housing, is also among the contenders.

It was nominated by parents and children who pass it on the school run, and believe it is vital that a tree which plays a part in making the air cleaner for the community is saved.

The Wilmington Yew, Wilmington, Sussex which, growing among the graves, is more than 1,000 years old

The Wilmington Yew pictured above. The Woodland Trust's annual competition, now in its seventh year, shines a light on the nation's best trees to help drive up interest in their value and protection

The Marylebone Elm, in Westminster, London, pictured above, was also shortlisted for England's Tree of the Year 2020

The Marylebone Elm, Westminster, London, left and the Shoe Tree, Heaton Park, Newcastle, pictured right

Another tree in the running is The Wilmington Yew in Wilmington, Sussex, which, growing among the graves, is more than 1,000 years old.

Completing the shortlist are The Marylebone Elm in Westminster, The Beltingham Yew in Northumberland, The Beech Tree in the Altar at Bayham Abbey, Kent, The Crouch Oak in Surrey, The Grantham Oak in Grantham, Lincolnshire, and The Remedy Oak in Dorset.

Darren Moorcroft, chief executive of the Woodland Trust, said: 'Easily overlooked and routinely undervalued, trees deserve their moment in the sun.

A 150-year-old plane tree in Hackney, east London, called the Happy Man Tree (pictured left), currently earmarked for felling to make way for housing, is among the contenders. The Chained Oak in Alton, Staffordshire, (pictured right) was the inspiration for the Hex ride at Alton Towers

The Grantham Oak, in Grantham, Lincolnshire, pictured above. 'This competition is a very simple way to demonstrate our appreciation of trees,' Darren Moorcroft, chief executive of the Woodland Trust, said

The Beech Tree in the Altar at Bayham Abbey, Kent, which has been shortlisted as one of the contenders vying to be named England's Tree of the Year 2020

'This competition is a very simple way to demonstrate our appreciation of trees.

'We had more than double the number of trees nominated by members of the public this spring compared to past years.

'This is perhaps no surprise given that lockdown had so many of us slowing down and taking more note of nature on our doorsteps, a boost for our mental health and wellbeing.

The Beltingham Yew in Northumberland pictured above. 'We had more than double the number of trees nominated by members of the public this spring compared to past years,' Mr Moorcroft said

The Chained Oak, in Alton, Staffordshire, pictured above. 'This is perhaps no surprise given that lockdown had so many of us slowing down and taking more note of nature on our doorsteps, a boost for our mental health and wellbeing,' he said

The Beech Tree in the Altar at Bayham Abbey, Kent, which has been shortlisted as one of the contenders vying to be named England's Tree of the Year 2020

The Beltingham Yew in Northumberland, pictured left, and the Crouch Oak in Surrey, pictured right

'At a time when we're fighting both a climate and nature crisis, it is undeniable that trees are needed now more than ever.'

The Woodland Trust's Tree of the Year competition runs in England, Scotland and Wales, and each country will have its own winner.

Just one of the three national winners will be selected to represent the UK in the 2021 European Tree of the Year contest.

The public can look at the shortlist and cast a vote on the Woodland Trust website, with voting closing on September 24.

The Remedy Oak, Dorset, pictured left, and the Grantham Oak in Lincolnshire, pictured right. The Woodland Trust's Tree of the Year competition runs in England, Scotland and Wales, and each country will have its own winner
At first, the sight of a government Mi-8 helicopter flying over massive protests in Minsk led to speculation that President Alyaksandr Lukashenka was fleeing the capital amid days of opposition pressure for him to step to step down.



In fact, the authoritarian ruler appeared to have been on a reconnaissance mission, taking airborne advantage of his red-and-green aircraft to observe the red-and-white demonstrators challenging him



Then, after touching down, Lukashenka was filmed striding on the grounds of the presidential palace wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an AK-47 rifle, flanked by an armed entourage that included his 15-year-old son wearing body armor.



But while the scene appeared to be a show of force aimed at demonstrators disputing the August 9 election that he was declared winner of, the message was received with a mix of skepticism, disbelief, and even outright mockery.



The tough-guy appearance was part of a broader demonstration, by him and his government, that has included threats of military intervention, efforts to rally the troops, and sniping comments toward demonstrators.



The imagery added further to the mixed picture of Lukashenka's response, and to concerns that he was contemplating a full-blown aggressive crackdown on opponents.

Such a response likely couldn't happen without Russia's knowledge. But Moscow, which has long had a strained friendship with Lukashenka and has admitted there were shortcomings in the vote, has wavered on its offer of military intervention under the terms of the military alliance known as the Collective Security Treaty Organization.



Asked on August 23 about Lukashenka carrying the weapon, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to answer the question.



But Viktor Vodolatsky, a lawmaker for the ruling United Russia party who serves on the parliamentary committee overseeing affairs with ex-Soviet republics, offered his interpretation to the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.



Lukashenka "wanted to demonstrate his readiness to fight for Belarus, for his country, against the organizers of all sorts of orange revolutions," Vodolatsky was quoted as saying. That's a reference to pro-democracy upheaval in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere in the former Soviet space that the Kremlin frequently claims were fomented by the West.



Crisis In Belarus Read our ongoing coverage as Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka continues his brutal crackdown on NGOs, activists, and independent media following the August 2020 presidential election, widely seen as fraudulent.

Some observers suggested that Lukashenka's warning shot was a damp squib, noting that there was no ammunition clip on his Kalashnikov. "The footage almost seemed comical in nature, but it is anything but to those in Minsk that are demanding his ouster," the War Zone military blog said.



Aleksei Pushkov, a Kremlin ally in Russia's upper house of parliament, openly questioned the logic of Lukashenka's gun-toting display. "Looks strong, but the scene is dark. Was it necessary to bring things to this?" he said in a post to his Telegram channel. "There were no reasons for such a force majeure. Gross political mistakes were made."



And Vladimir Solovyov, a pro-Kremlin talk-show host on state TV, posted a throwback picture of an armed Lukashenka on his Telegram channel. "Lukashenka with an automatic weapon when it wasn't mainstream," he wrote.



The imagery also drew derision from Carl Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden and ex-European Union envoy, who said that entire day, including him brandishing the weapon, was "deeply humiliating" for Lukashenka, and suggested he was scared and lacked confidence.



One Twitter user called on readers to offer suitable musical accompaniments for Lukashenka's video, which included an Elton John song ("I'm Still Standing") and the Imperial March from the Star Wars films.

Still, the tough talk hasn't been limited to Lukashenka. Earlier on August 23, ahead of the arrival of some 150,000 demonstrators in Minsk's Independence Square, Defense Minister Viktor Krenin threatened military intervention if any war monuments were harmed.



"We are strictly warning in case of disruption of the order and tranquility in these places, you will be dealing not with the police, but with the army," Krenin said in a video statement posted on the ministry's official Telegram channel.



In videos from Lukashenka's helicopter posted on the state news agency BelTA, the embattled president could be seen sending orders to security forces below. At one point, he can be heard remarking that the protesters had "fled like rats" as riot police began to move in to disperse the demonstrations.



The Telegram channel for the official Belarusian press pool was the first to show Lukashenka addressing his guards as he inspected the security cordon outside his residence after the demonstrators -- some of which reportedly had approached the presidential palace -- had cleared.



"Guys, thank you, you are beautiful!" he is heard telling the guards, adding in reference to the protesters that "we will deal with them."



"We are with you till the end!" the guards responded.



At the end of the day, Lukashenka's press spokeswoman claimed he had been in control from the beginning.



"As the president promised, he did not run anywhere," Natalya Eismont said. "No matter how some bloggers and Telegram channels tried to present it."
A dairy trader (45) was murdered and dumped in a 50-foot deep well in West Delhis Najafgarh, Delhi Police said on Monday.

The police have arrested the assistant of the slain dairy trader Om Prakash. The police said that the dairy trader was murdered, as the assistant was allegedly disgruntled with him for not raising his monthly salary.

Prakashs decomposed body was found in the well in an agricultural field on Saturday morning, about 10 days after he was killed and dumped.

On Sunday, the suspect, Mohammad Tasleem, was nabbed by the Dwarka district police authorities from Jharoda Kalan in West Delhi, soon after he returned from Panipat in Haryana, where he was hiding at a relatives house, said Anto Alphonse, deputy commissioner of police (DCP), Dwarka, Delhi Police.

He has revealed that he killed his employer following a heated argument over not raising his monthly salary, said the DCP, adding that a stick and a knife was allegedly used in the murder.

The murder weapons and Prakashs motorcycle that Tasleem had used to decamp a day after allegedly committing the murder have been seized by the police, the DCP said.

Prakash, a bachelor, lived in Najafgarhs Dhichaon Kalan, which is notorious for its criminal antecedents. He ran a dairy business along with his nephew, Purushottam.

My uncle had decided to hire a help because we were overburdened with work. On June 23, we hired Tasleem, who had earlier worked at a restaurant, said Purushottam.

Tasleem was hired for a monthly salary of 12,000, even though he had demanded 15,000, he said.

But the DCP quoted Tasleem as saying that he was hired for 15,000, but was being paid 12,000 by Prakash who cited losses due to the pandemic for not keeping his word.

The monthly salary amount became a constant source of friction between the deceased and the arrested accused, he added.

Another argument occurred between the duo on the night of August 11, said Purushottam, who had to intervene to end the quarrel.

The following morning Prakash was found missing, said a police officer probing the case. Tasleem misled the family by saying that Prakash had left town. But by evening, when he realised that the probe would lead the police to him, he rode away on Prakashs motorcycle, said the DCP.

We registered a kidnapping case and started looking for Tasleem and searching for Prakash, he added.

On Saturday morning, Prakashs decomposed body was found in the 50-foot deep well in the agricultural field near the place, where ran his dairy business. The owner of the field had visited the farmland following a stench emanating from the well. Later, Delhi Fire department authorities sent personnel to fish out the decomposed body that was half stuffed in a sack and tied with a rope, the official said.

Soon, the police tracked down Tasleem in Panipat. Tasleem has confessed to his crime. He recounted that Prakash had slapped him during the quarrel. An enraged Tasleem, in turn, thrashed him with a stick and then slit his throat with a knife while he was sleeping, he added.
Keralas Legislative Assembly has passed a resolution moved by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan against the Centres decision to hand over operations of the Thiruvananthapuram airport to Adani Enterprises. The assembly, passing the resolution unanimously, also asked the Centre to reconsider the decision.

Last week, the central government cleared operation, management and development of airports in Keralas Thiruvananthapuram, Rajasthans Jaipur and Assams Guwahati by Adani Enterprises through the public-private partnership (PPP) model.

The takeover of these three airports was cleared as part of the original six that were auctioned in 2019, wherein Adani Enterprises emerged as the highest bidder.

Following this development, Vijayan had shot off a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying the move was "against the wishes of people."

WATCH: Big Story | Government leases out 3 airports to Adani Enterprises

Disapproving of the move, Vijayan in his letter said that the Centre ignored repeated requests from Kerala for entrusting the airport to a special purpose vehicle, with the state as a major stakeholder. Pointing out that litigation on the matter is pending before the Kerala High Court, the chief minister said "it will be difficult for Kerala to offer cooperation for implementation of decision."

Later on August 20, the states Finance Minister Thomas Issac tweeted: Thiruvananthapuram airport privatised to Adani rejecting the claim of Kerala government, even after offer to match Adanis rate. PMOs promise to accept Kerala proposal broken. People of Kerala will not accept this act of brazen cronyism.

The Kerala government had moved the Supreme Court, which earlier this year sent petitions back to the High Court. Apart from the state, the airport employees union had also filed a petition against the PPP move. The case continues to drag along in the High Court, which has been unable to take it up because of the COVID-19 disruption.
Hamiltons schools reopen on Sept. 8, and school boards are scrambling to finalize plans that will allow for students to learn in a virus-free environment.

Needless to say, it hasnt been easy.

In the time since the Ontario government announced its guidelines for reopening in late July, both the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) and the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board (HWCDSB) have released plans for reopening their schools that allow for elementary students to return to classes full time, and secondary students to return to class part time while learning the remainder of the curriculum remotely.

Here are five things to know about reopenings thus far.

This guide will be updated as we receive more information from school boards and the ministry.

1. Staggered reopening dates

The Catholic board has announced it will delay the reopenings of elementary schools by up to two weeks to allow more time for certain schools to prepare safety protocol and limit the number of students and staff who initially enter the buildings. The staggered reopening scenarios can vary depending on the needs of each individual school. The public board says its considering staggering reopening dates but has not made a final decision.

2. Mandatory masks on buses

Both the HWCDSB and the HWDSB are requiring all students, from junior kindergarten to Grade 12, who ride school buses, to wear masks while commuting to and from school. The decision to make masks mandatory came after the Ministry of Education announced that, contrary to previous plans that would allow students to maintain social distancing on buses, students may have to share seats if the board cannot attain enough buses and staff to reduce riders. The ministry has not provided boards with additional funding for bus drivers.

3. Masks for all ages

At its most recent board meeting, the Catholic board unanimously approved a motion that will require all students, from junior kindergarten to Grade 12, to wear masks in school. The move expands a previous rule that would have required only students in Grade 4 to 12 to wear masks. Currently, the public board requires students in Grade 4 to 12 to wear masks in school. The board has not indicated if it will require all students to wear masks.

4. Most students are attending in-person classes

According to preliminary numbers from the HWCDSB, 77 per cent of all students in the Catholic board will attend in-person classes. Pat Daly, the boards chair, has said he expects that number to grow when the 10 per cent of undecided parents register their children. Roughly 13 per cent of students in the Catholic board are expected to learn remotely. The public board has yet to release its enrolment numbers. Shawn McKillop, spokesperson for the board, has said the numbers will be released following the boards student registration deadline, on Aug. 25 at noon. A recent national poll found that roughly 70 per cent of parents will send their children to in-person classes.

5. Virtual elementary schools

The public board is creating at least one virtual elementary school for students who have chosen to learn remotely when classes reopen. This means that students who choose to learn online may not be attached to their local school. The board will use current teachers and staff to teach those kids, though it has also applied for funding from the ministry of education to employ a new principal and secretary for the virtual school. The Catholic board has not made concrete plans to establish a virtual school, though it discussed the possibility at its most recent board meeting.
Talks aimed at changing Australia's industrial relations landscape to cope with the coronavirus pandemic are bogging down as traditional enemies fight over old ground.

The industrial relations working groups, overseen by Attorney-General Christian Porter, have been asked to reach a compromise on five areas of reforms to Australia's workplace laws in a process key to the government's hopes of creating more jobs post-pandemic.

Attorney-General Christian Porter established the working groups in concert with unions and business bodies. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

But multiple sources close to the negotiations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential, said both sides were bringing their traditional positions to the process, dimming hopes of major compromises.

One source close to the negotiations said other parties had been approaching it like an enterprise agreement negotiation, the often-lengthy process workers and bosses use to work out wages and conditions in a business.
Video shows a man walking towards a car followed by two officers, one officer shoots him as he opens the vehicles door.

Protests erupted in Kenosha in the US state of Wisconsin after police shot an apparently unarmed Black man multiple times in the back, prompting authorities to impose a curfew.

The shooting occurred at about 5pm (22:00 GMT) as officers were responding to what they called a domestic incident. The victim was immediately taken to a hospital by the police, according to a Kenosha police department statement.

No further explanation was given by the police as to what led to the shooting, in which one officer fired seven rounds into the mans back. The Wisconsin Department of Justice said early on Monday that the officers involved had been placed on administrative leave.

The incident on Sunday was likely to add to continuing outrage and protests in the US and abroad against police brutality and racism since the death on May 25 of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.





The victim in Kenosha, identified by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers as Jacob Blake, was hospitalised in serious condition.

A video circulating on social media and cited by the US media showed a man walking towards a car followed by two officers and one of them shooting him as he opens the car door.

Soon afterwards, multiple fires were set at the scene by a crowd that gathered to protest the incident.

Evers, in a tweet, said Blake had been shot in the back multiple times in broad daylight.

We stand against excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites, said Evers.

Mercilessly killed

Social media posts showed crowds marching down the streets of Kenosha, a city of about 100,000 people on Lake Michigan, 100km (65 miles) north of Chicago, and throwing Molotov cocktails and bricks at police officers.

Police responded by imposing a city-wide curfew until 7am local time (12:00 GMT).

The states Division of Criminal Investigation said it would aim to issue a report to prosecutors within 30 days, US media reported.

Evers said while full details of the incident had yet to emerge, Blake was among Black people to have been injured or mercilessly killed by police in the United States.

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We stand with all those who have and continue to demand justice, equity and accountability for Black lives in our country, Evers said, mentioning Floyd and other victims of brutal law enforcement.

Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump said Blakes three sons were in the car at the time and he had been trying to break up a fight between two women.

They saw a cop shoot their father. They will be traumatised forever, Crump said on Twitter.

Clyde McLemore, who local Kenosha TV identified as part of a nearby chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement, said at the scene were tired of it.

The frustration is boiling to the top and were sick and tired.
A man holds a poster with a portrait of Alexei Navalny reading "Navalny was poisoned, we know who is to blame, Alexei you must live" during an unsanctioned protest in support of Sergei Furgal, the governor of the Khabarovsk region, in Khabarovsk, 6,100 kilometers (3,800 miles) east of Moscow, Russia. (AP)

Berlin: Alexei Navalnys wife and a top aide visited him Sunday in a Berlin hospital where the comatose Russian dissident is being treated by German doctors after a suspected poisoning.

Navalny was flown to Germany on Saturday from Siberia after doctors determined he was stable enough to be brought to the capitals Charite hospital for treatment.

After his arrival, hospital spokeswoman Manuela Zingl said the 44-year-old would be undergoing extensive diagnostic tests and that doctors wouldnt comment on his illness or treatment until they were able to evaluate the results.

On Sunday, Navalnys wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and aide Leonid Volkov visited the Russian opposition leader in the hospital but did not speak to reporters.

Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putins fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Thursday and was taken to the hospital in the city of Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing. His supporters believe that tea he drank was laced with poison  and that the Kremlin is behind both his illness and a delay in transferring him to Germany.

While his supporters and family members insist that Navalny was poisoned, doctors in Omsk denied that, saying a metabolic disorder was the most likely diagnosis and that a drop in blood sugar may have caused Navalny to lose consciousness.

Russian health authorities on Saturday said tests so far havent shown any poisons in his system.

When German specialists arrived Friday morning aboard a plane equipped with advanced medical equipment at his familys behest, Navalnys physicians in Omsk initially said he was too unstable to move. The dissidents supporters suggested that was just a ploy to delay his departure until any poison was out of his system.

The Kremlin denied that resistance to the transfer was political, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that it was purely a medical decision. However, the reversal to allow him to leave came as international pressure on Russias leadership mounted.

Navalnys own doctor, Yaroslav Ashikhmin, said the politician has always been in good health, regularly went for medical checkups and didnt have any underlying illnesses that could have triggered his condition.

Like many other opposition politicians in Russia, Navalny has been frequently detained by law enforcement and harassed by pro-Kremlin groups. In 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw antiseptic in his face, damaging an eye.

Last year, Navalny was rushed to a hospital from jail where he was serving a sentence on charges of violating protest regulations. His team also suspected poisoning then. Doctors said he had a severe allergic reaction and sent him back to detention the following day.

If he was poisoned, it would not be the first time a prominent, outspoken Russian was targeted in such a way  or the first time the Kremlin was accused of being behind it.
The food and beverage sector faces unique supply chain complexities that are specific to product integrity and regulations, making on-time performance and consistent service vital to the success of our customers.

NFI, a leading supply chain solutions provider, was recently named a Top 3PL and Cold Storage Provider for 2020 by Food Logistics for the ninth consecutive year. Published in the August issue, the list was determined by Food Logistics editorial staff and advisory board. The list serves as a resource directory of the leading third-party logistics and cold storage providers in the food and beverage industry.

Founded in 1932, NFI is one of the oldest and largest privately-held 3PLs in North America. Serving some of the largest customers in the food and beverage industry, NFIs temperature-controlled and food-grade capabilities span its entire suite of supply chain solutions. The companys food and beverage customer base includes grocery retailers, food manufacturers and processors, and beverage producers.

Of the companys 50 million square feet distribution space, more than six million is dedicated to the food and beverage industry in both dry and food-grade capacities. In addition to warehousing, NFIs refrigerated transportation solutions ensure product integrity. The companys dedicated fleet of more than 12,500 trailers is made up of over 750 temperature-controlled trailers, while its brokerage team offers specialized refrigerated capabilities. Further, NFIs intermodal equipment includes SlimLine refrigerated containers and non-operating refrigerated containers, capable of maintaining temperatures as low as -20F.

The food and beverage sector faces unique supply chain complexities that are specific to product integrity and regulations, making on-time performance and consistent service vital to the success of our customers, said Sid Brown, CEO of NFI. In addition to these intricacies, the industry has experienced unprecedented challenges in the past months related to COVID-19. NFI was able to provide the flexibility and agility necessary to address surges and work quickly with its customers to ensure food supply chains remained uninterrupted while maintaining food safety standards.

In addition to food and beverage, NFI serves customers across a diverse range of industries, including retail, ecommerce, manufacturing, and CPG. NFIs end-to-end suite of supply chain solutions spans dedicated transportation, distribution, brokerage, transportation management, port drayage, intermodal, global logistics, and real estate.

View the full list from Food Logistics here.

About NFI -- NFI is a fully integrated North American supply chain solutions provider headquartered in Camden, N.J. Privately held by the Brown family since its inception in 1932, NFI generates more than $2 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 13,100 associates. NFI owns facilities globally and operates approximately 50 million square feet of warehouse and distribution space. Its dedicated fleet consists of over 3,000 tractors and 12,500 trailers operated by 3,000 company drivers and leveraging partnerships with 400 owner operators. NFI has a significant drayage presence at nearly every major U.S. port, leveraging the services of an additional 1,500 owner operators. The companys business lines include dedicated transportation, distribution, brokerage, transportation management, port drayage, intermodal, global logistics, and real estate. For more information about NFI, visit http://www.nfiindustries.com or call 1-877-NFI-3777.
Mumbai, Aug 24 : In an interesting development, it is being reported that the mobile phone of Disha Salian was used till nine days after her death. Disha, former manager of late actor Sushant Singh Rajput, passed away in Mumbai on June 8 by allegedly jumping off a highrise apartment.

Not only was Disha's phone switched on after her death, but internet calls were placed from the phone between June 9 and June 17, according to a report in zeenews.india.com. The report further states that as per an eyewitness, even though Mumbai Police had quickly reached the spot where Disha was lying, they did not confiscate her phone.

As per a report in timesofindia.com, Mumbai Police had switched on Disha's phone after her death as part of their investigation protocol. The report further states that call data records of Sushant's ex-manager's phone have revealed that internet was used till nine days after her demise.

Meanwhile, netizens are alleging that there is a foul play in Disha's death and that it was not suicide. They are also speculating that the death of Sushant Singh Rajput on June 14 must have some connection with that of his former manager Disha, who died six days before.

Latest updates on Sushant Singh Rajput Death Mystery
Representative image

In most stories of coronavirus recoveries, we have heard that the patients symptoms start disappearing after receiving about two to three weeks of treatment. Their COVID-19 test results also come negative.

However, the officials of Mumbais civic body -- Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) -- have informed that hundreds of COVID-19 patients in the city had to remain hospitalised for months as they kept testing positive for the virus.

For live updates on coronavirus, click here

As per a Hindustan Times report, civic officials said that though more than one lakh coronavirus patients have recovered in Mumbai and been discharged from hospitals, there were hundreds who needed hospitalisation for up to four months.



As per the BMC, these COVID-19 patients kept testing positive despite recovering completely from the disease. These were reportedly mostly patients who had other health issues.



The Mumbai civic body officials believe the viral load of the infection, which stays in the body despite a clinical recovery, to be the reason behind this prolonged positivity. Though cured of COVID-19, such patients are not sent home until they test COVID-19 negative, since they have other ailments that may worsen without medical supervision.

The Seven Hills Hospital in Andheri East has admitted as many as 8,000 serious and complicated COVID-19 cases since the pandemic outbreak, of which, 15 percent had to remain hospitalised for more than a month.

Dr Balkrishna Adsul, Dean, Seven Hills Hospital, said: We have been treating (COVID-19) patients, who have comorbidities like kidney ailment or any other chronic disease. They are kept in the hospital for a long period because they tested positive despite recovering and showing no symptoms. These are not youngsters but those who are above 60 years of age. One of the many reasons they are not discharged is that there is also fear in the minds of patients and their families to not take them home when they test positive.

There are around 19,000 active cases in Mumbai at present and the COVID-19 fatality rate in the city is 5.44 percent.

Follow our coverage of the coronavirus crisis here
If you have been injured in an accident due to the fault of a third party, you may be entitled to claim for damages on the basis that the third party has been negligent. The most common type of accidents are car, workplace, or accidents in public places. The third party or potential wrongdoer owes you a duty of care to you and, if in their actions or omissions which caused the accident they have failed to meet that duty of care, they are likely to be deemed negligent. The law of negligence is complex and there are many other factors which can be considered when assessing whether a third party has been negligent.

You will also have to prove that the accident or the negligent act or omission caused the injuries you have suffered. The best way to prove causation is to use contemporaneous medical records, and you should obtain medical treatment immediately or within a couple of days of an accident occurring. If the injury does not result in a hospital admission, you should attend your GP.

If you have been involved in an accident which you believe was due to the fault of a third party, you should consult a solicitor as soon as possible, who will advise you on what steps you can potentially take.

The steps for potentially bringing a personal injury case are as follows:

1. Prepare and send a letter of claim to the appropriate defendants and to their insurer if you are aware of who the insurer is. The letter of claim sets out some details of the accident and holds the defendant responsible for the accident. The defendant or their insurer will then normally carry out investigations in respect of the accident, and may write to your solicitor looking for further information. You may need to instruct a consulting engineer at this stage to inspect the locus or where the accident occurred. Under legislation, it is possible to obtain a court order that the scene of the accident is preserved as much as possible, in order that accidents can be fully investigated.

2.Your solicitor will then instruct your treating medical expert to complete a report which will set out the injuries suffered as a result of the accident, which should give a prognosis as to when you are likely to recover from your injuries. Your solicitor will either instruct your GP or a specialist such as an orthopaedic surgeon, depending on the nature of your injuries

3. The next step is your solicitor would have to submit a claim to the Personal Injuries Assessment Board. The Injuries Board have an option to assess a claim, which can take a number of months, and they make a decision as to whether they will offer an award or alternatively they will give authorisation to issue court proceedings. The Injuries Board do not accept certain claims such as psychological cases. You have the option to accept or reject the award offered

4. If you are given an authorisation, your solicitor will then issue court proceedings. The courts for bringing personal injury claims are the District, Circuit and High Court, depending on the level of damages. Damages normally consist of an award for pain, suffering and loss known as general damages, and you can also claim for quantified damages arising out of an accident which is known as special damages. Examples of this would be loss of earnings or medical expenses.

Under Irish Law, there is a limitation period, and you have two years to bring a case for personal injury to the courts. Once a claim is submitted to the Injuries Board, the limitation period stops, and it begins to run again once it leaves the Injuries Board. Accordingly, it is advisable you attend a solicitor within this period, or you will be statute barred from bringing a case.
The Conservatives picked Durham MP Erin OToole to lead them into the next federal election, an upset in a campaign that was initially assumed to be a coronation for Peter MacKay.

A transcript of his victory speech:

What an honour. Thank you so much.

Thank you to my friends  Leslyn Lewis, Derek Sloan, and of course to the Honourable Peter MacKay.

Thank you for stepping up for our country. Congratulations for the campaigns you have run, for the ideas you have put forward, and for the Canadians you have recruited to our cause.

Thank you for putting your name on the ballot. For leaving your families for weeks to travel all over this great country  whether on the ground or in a room of your house on hours of Zoom calls.

Thank you for talking to Canadians about our country, our party and ideas for a stronger future.

Thank you for valuing the grassroots members of our movement.

I want to thank my incredible campaign team from coast to coast to coast! We have built an incredible team of passionate and patriotic Canadians. Your hard work led to this victory.

O'Toole spoke to supporters early Monday morning after winning the Conservative leadership over Peter MacKay.

Mes amis, cette course montre que le Parti Conservateur est un parti didees et de principes. Les debats positifs avec Leslyn, Derek, et Peter prouvent que notre mouvement est en sante. Merci a vous trois. On va continuer le travail ensemble.

Durant cette course, jai ete fier de voyager a travers la Belle Province. Jai rencontre des centaines de Quebecois a Montreal, Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, et dans le Saguenay. Merci de mavoir recu chez vous pour parler deconomie, de sante, et dagriculture. Quand les journalistes vont parler de cette course, ils vont parler de notre grand succes au Quebec. On a batit une equipe incroyable qui fait honneur au deal des deux peuples fondateurs.

I also want to thank the volunteers for Peter, Leslyn and Derek. You worked incredibly hard and I look forward to all of us working together to build a stronger country with more opportunity for our children and grandchildren.

I would also like to thank Andrew and Jill Scheer and your family for your service and dedication to our party and our country. We will continue to work together for Canadians.

And of course I want to thank my wife, Rebecca, our children Mollie and Jack and all of my family and friends here tonight or watching at home for your love, advice and patience these nine months.

Cette victoire revient evidemment a mon epouse Rebecca, nos enfants Mollie et Jack, ainsi que toute ma famille et nos amis. Merci pour votre amour, votre patience, et vos conseils.

Most of all, thank you to the tens of thousands of Canadians from coast to coast to coast who voted for me.

You put your faith in me to lead this historic party and I am honoured and humbled. I promise you, I will not let you down.

Today, you have given me a clear mission:

To unite our party.

To champion our conservative principles.

To show Canadians what we know so well  that Justin Trudeau and his team are failing our great country.

We must continue to point out Liberal failings and corruption BUT we also must show Canadians our vision for a stronger, prosperous and more united Canada.

Canada can  and must  do better and Conservatives will work hard to earn the trust and confidence of Canadians in the next election.

Aujourdhui, vous me donnez une mission claire:

- Unire notre parti

- Me tenir debout pour nos valeurs

- Et demontrer, encore une fois, que Justin Trudeau affaiblit le Canada.

Mais je ne vais pas juste critiquer les Liberaux. Nous allons proposer une vision dun Canada plus fort, plus uni, et plus prospere. Une vision positive Conservatrice.

Friends, now the real work begins. We could be into an election campaign as soon as this fall. But as more than 260,000 passionate Conservatives have already shown in this record breaking leadership amidst a pandemic  the Conservative Party will be ready for the next election. And we will win the next election.

To the millions of Canadians that I am meeting tonight for the first time

Hello, Im Erin OToole.

You are going to be seeing and hearing a lot from me in the coming weeks. I want you to know that I am here to fight for you and your families.

Il y a des millions de citoyens qui me voient ce soir pour la premiere fois.

Mais on a beaucoup en commun. Je suis ne a Montreal et jai grandi en Ontario. Jai appris mon francais dans les Forces Armees Canadiennes. Et oui, je parle comme un anglo mais un anglo qui respecte les francophones et qui est fier du francais dans notre pays. Je suis en politique pour me battre pour tous les Canadiens et nos deux langues nationales.

Like millions of Canadians, Rebecca and I have been juggling a lot of jobs lately. With our kids at home, COVID has made us appreciate teachers more than ever before.

My mother, who passed away when I was 9, was a teacher. And, throughout my life, I have wished she was here to give me advice. Right now, I wish she were here to see her child succeed. But, I know she is here tonight because I can see her in my daughter who shares her name.

Thankfully, I have had my stepmother  also a teacher  to guide me to this very day. I am thankful she and my Dad are here with me tonight. My father John, inspired me into public service.

But like many teenagers, especially those who have lost a parent, I gave my dad a hard time growing up.

He worked at General Motors for over 30 years, which brought us from Ste. Therese QC to Bowmanville, Ontario  to my home in the Toronto area.

After high school I joined the military to gain discipline and to serve the country. It deepened my love for Canada and defines who I am today.

I served as a navigator on Sea King helicopters and sailed with our Navy out of Halifax. It was in Halifax where I met Rebecca, the love of my life.

Today, Rebecca and I are both navigating raising our amazing children Mollie and Jack  and 5 days ago we celebrated 20 years of marriage

I have spent my entire adult life trying to serve Canada and its people. Soon, I will be asking Canadians for the chance to serve as Prime Minister so we can get our country back on track. I love this country and I am very worried about the course we are on.

When I launched my campaign in Calgary in January, I said that the stakes were high.

They are even higher today.

Our country is currently facing its most serious economic challenges since the Great Depression. Capital and jobs have been leaving Canada and large deficits were being run BEFORE the COVID crisis led to record debt and deficits.

Des centaines dentreprises familiales sont pres de la faillite. Nous voyons les tariffs sur laluminium augmenter et aucun accord pour le bois doeuvre Canadien. Warren Buffet a annule son investissement de plusieurs milliards dans le Saguenay a cause des blocus illegaux. Avec les Liberaux, le Canada est devenu un pays risque pour investir.

Il faut redonner confiance aux employeurs, aux PME, et aux innovateurs. Il faut leur rappeller cest possible pour le Canada detre un des meilleurs endroits au monde pour faire des affaires.

Mais surtout, je vais me battre pour tous les oublies, ces gens qui se levent tot pour nourir leur famille. Les hommes et les femmes qui travaillent fort et qui sont fier de travailler. Ils peuvent compter sur moi.

Our country is more divided than it has ever been in my lifetime. People are losing faith in Canada because of the ideological and out of touch policies from the Liberals.

We just emerged from the largest health crisis in our history.

Premiers across our country have shown real leadership amid the COVID-19 crisis. They were looking out for you. Justin Trudeau, Bill Morneau and the Liberals showed  once again  that even amid a national crisis  they were more interested in looking after their friends.

We can rebuild our great country  while protecting Canadians from the ongoing threat of COVID-19.

We can get Canadians back to work, be proud of the things we grow, build and produce in Canada again. We must have a government that will keep us safe, and ensure that we are never ill-prepared again.

To do that, we need a leader with real-world experience and someone who is not afraid to make the tough decisions.

A leader who cares more about keeping Canadians safe and united than about his personal image and the interests of his friends.

We need a leader who puts Canadians first and will stand up for Canada and our interests in a challenging world where we have lost the respect of our friends and allies

The world still needs more Canada, it just needs less Justin Trudeau.

Why should I be that leader?

Because I believe that:

Whether you are black, white, brown or from any race or creed.

Whether you are LGBT or straight.

Whether you are an Indigenous Canadian or have joined the Canadian family 5 weeks ago or 5 generations ago.

Whether you are doing well, or barely getting by.

Whether you worship on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, or not at all.

You are an important part of Canada and you have a home in the Conservative Party of Canada!

Maybe you have voted for a different party your whole life, or have never voted at all.

Maybe you feel that as a union member you should not vote for our party.

Maybe you feel let down by politicians.

Maybe your family came here for better but you are still waiting for fair treatment.

Maybe you run a small business and work all day only to be called a tax cheat by your government.

It is time for many Liberal and NDP voters to socially distance themselves from these out of touch parties.

Its time for more Canadians to look at the Conservative Party again.

If you want the opportunity to work hard to provide for your family  you should be voting Conservative.

If you want to stop insiders getting ahead while you are falling back  you should be voting Conservative.

If you are proud of what we produce in this country  whether it is the resources in the ground or the ideas in our heads  you should be voting Conservative.

And if you believe deeply  like I do  that the Canadian Ethics Commissioner needs to stop working overtime  you should be voting Conservative!

Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh claim to stand up for working families, but they fail them time and time again.

Et Le Bloc Quebecois? On va se dire la verite, le Bloc est passe date. Il renait quand Justin Trudeau meprise les Quebecois. Ca va etre tres different avec moi.

Cest le temps pour le Quebec davoir une chaise a la table des decisions. Et je le dis a vous tous: les Quebecois nationalistes ont une place importante dans le Parti Conservateur.

Canada needs serious leadership for these challenging times.

To keep Canadians safe and prepared for the future.

To rebuild our economy.

To navigate our way out of record Liberal deficits before they put our social programs at risk.

To ensure that we rebuild stronger, more self-reliant, and more resilient, so we are better prepared for future waves of COVID-19 and other threats.

To restore Canadas place in a tough world, earning back the respect that Trudeau has lost on the world stage.

That is what Conservatives stand for.

Doing what is right even when it is not what is easy.

That is what Canadians stand for.

Its the same sense of duty that kept our healthcare workers and PSWs helping our sick in the early weeks of the pandemic when they were worried about risks to themselves and their families.

On a tous ete fier de nos soldats qui sont venus aider dans les CHSLD. La situation etait difficile, mais les Canadiens ont travaille ensemble. Dans nos familles, on a cuisine des tartes portugaises, on a pris soin de nos parents. Il y a eu des bons et des mauvais coups, mais on a continue.

That same feeling when a family helps newcomers to Canada by opening up their own home and letting them get their start with help from family or friends in their community even when it makes things challenging.

That same feeling our soldiers must have felt at the bottom of Vimy Ridge more than a century ago.

Its a belief in what Canada can be.

Its a belief in the hope and opportunity that Canada represents.

My fellow Canadians.

My name is Erin OToole.

I believe in this country and I am running to serve you as Prime Minister.

Thank you, good night!

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MONROE, MI  A Michigan man accused of beating his grandmother to death inside her home, cutting her head off and putting it in the back yard is heading to trial.

Kenny Wayne McBride, 45, of Temperance, was bound over for trial, Aug. 12, on one felony count each of open murder and mutilation of a dead body associated with the slaying of his grandmother, 79-year-old Cecelia Gibson.

Following the conclusion of his preliminary examination Aug. 12, Monroe County District Court Judge Michael Brown found there was sufficient evidence for the case to proceed to trial in Monroe County Circuit Court, records show.

McBride was arrested and charged, Feb. 19, after investigators were called for a medical emergency at his Bedford Township home, Feb. 17, according to the Monroe County Sheriffs office.

Gibsons headless body was found in the living room of the home she shared with McBride and his father. Her head was found in the backyard, police said.

An autopsy showed Gibson died of blunt force trauma to her head, officials said.

McBride was ordered, Feb. 26, to be sent to the states Center for Forensic Psychiatry for a mental competency evaluation which later determined he was fit to stand trial.

It is unclear what led up to the beating and subsequent decapitation.

McBride is scheduled to appear for circuit court arraignment Aug. 26 before Judge Michael Weipert. He is being held in the Monroe County Jail without bond.

Open murder allows a jury to decide the degree of murder a person is guilty of if convicted.

Gibson was a grandmother of 15 grandchildren and 20 great grandchildren, according to her obituary. She loved completing needle point, cross-stitch, sewing, beading, and leather work with many of her creations being sold at craft shows.

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Four participants in San Antonio-based construction and engineering firm Zachry Groups 401(k) retirement plan have filed a federal lawsuit alleging excessive costs and lower returns have caused the plan to sustain millions of dollars in losses.

The plaintiffs seek a court order compelling Zachry and the compensation and benefits committee overseeing the plan to restore all losses from allegedly imprudent investments and breaches of fiduciary duties. The plaintiffs also have asked for unspecified financial damages.

Zachry joins an expanding list of employers that been sued over the administration of their 401(k) plans in recent years.

Last year, a lawsuit against the San Antonio grocery store chain H-E-B alleged it failed to monitor and control plan expenses, making it one of the most expensive plans in the country with over $1 billion in assets. H-E-B has disputed the allegations in the case, which is pending in San Antonio federal court.

On ExpressNews.com: H-E-B sued over 401(k) fees, accused of having one of the most expensive retirement plans

The plaintiffs in the Zachry lawsuit want it certified as a class-action. The suit doesnt estimate the size of the class, but says the 401(k) plan had about 18,000 participants with account balances at the end of 2018. The class period runs from Aug. 21, 2014, through the date of the judgment.

A report on the plan, known as the ZHI 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan, showed it had almost $754 million in assets at the end of 2018.

Zachry Group is one of the successors to H.B. Zachry Co., a global construction company that that had been led by Bartell Zachry, who died at 86 in June.

Zachry Co. reorganized into two entities, Zachry Group and Zachry Corp, in 2008.

Zachry Group took over industrial projects in the power and petrochemical sectors, industrial engineering and maintenance. It has more than 20,000 employees in about 400 locations nationwide, according to its website. The company is led by John Zachry, Bartell Zachrys son.

On ExpressNews.com: Bartell Zachry, force in construction industry, dies at 86

The plaintiffs in the suit against Zachry Group are Justin Rozelle of La Porte, Jared Munson of Livingston, Eric A. Myers of Gautier, Miss., and James R. Blackmon of Lexington, N.C. Munsons LinkedIn page shows he no longer works at Zachry. It couldnt immediately be determined if any of the other three remain employed with the company.

The suit, like others before it, was brought under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, which provides protections for individuals in retirement plans. The complaint was filed Friday in San Antonio federal court.

The relief the plaintiffs seek is for the benefit of the plan and its participants.

The lawsuit names Zachry Holdings Inc. as the lead defendant, identified as the 401(k) plan sponsor and a fiduciary. (The Zachry name is misspelled throughout the complaint, including in the caption naming the parties.)

Zachry and its compensation and benefits committee breached their fiduciary duties by including mutual funds in the plan that were more expensive than necessary, the suit alleges.

The plan has retained several actively-managed funds as (its) investment options despite the fact that these funds charged grossly excessive fees compared with comparable or superior alternatives, the complaint continues. Actively-managed funds rarely outperform passively-managed index funds, it adds.

The suit cites some of the mutual funds in the plan with expense ratios higher than the median ratios for funds in the same investment category. In some examples given, the expense ratios were more than double the median.

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Thats important, the suit says, because the expenses reduce the participants return and the compounding effect of the return.

There is no good-faith explanation for utilizing higher-cost funds when lower-cost funds are available for the exact same investment, the suit says. Defendants failed in their fiduciary duties either because they did not negotiate aggressively enough with their service providers to obtain better pricing or they were asleep at the wheel and were not paying attention. Either reason is inexcusable.

In October, the suit says, the plan switched from some Fidelity funds to others with higher expense ratios.

There is no valid explanation for why the Plan would have switched to funds with higher expense ratios other than to increase the revenue sharing amount which would end up in the coffers of Fidelity, the suit says.

The suit also criticizes the defendants for the fees paid to Fidelity, the plan trustee, and a Fidelity affiliate that performs record-keeping services.

The structure of the plan is rife with potential conflicts of interest, the suit says. There appears to be no reasonable justification for the millions of dollars collected from Plan participants that ended up in Fidelitys coffers.

An attorney for the plaintiffs and a Zachry spokesman didnt respond to requests for comment.

Patrick Danner Patrick Danner covers banking, insurance, business litigation and bankruptcies. To read more from Patrick, become a subscriber. pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD
The reason behind the clash between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Javakhk yesterday was the fact that the Azerbaijanis had brought their sheep into the Armenian territory. This is what co-chair of the unregistered Virk political party Davit Rstakyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am, adding that this has been a problem for Azerbaijanis and Armenians for many years.

Azerbaijanis would bring their sheep from Azerbaijani-populated territories to our territories starting from the Soviet era, and this led to a dispute. As a rule, they cross the Armenians borders. The disputants are at the police station now and are giving clarifications. There used to be tension sometimes, but this is the first time the Armenians and Azerbaijanis got into a dispute, he said.

Armenians gathered near the police station and demanded the release of three detainees.
YEREVAN, 24 AUGUST, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 24 August, USD exchange rate up by 0.20 drams to 485.25 drams. EUR exchange rate up by 1.26 drams to 574.20 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.01 drams to 6.54 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 1.68 drams to 636.94 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price down by 31.29 drams to 30022.07 drams. Silver price down by 0.84 drams to 418.89 drams. Platinum price down by 243.73 drams to 14041.03 drams.
NEW HAVEN  Police towed cars, issued tickets and made arrests in a weekend crackdown on drag racing, according to Capt. Anthony Duff.

The New Haven Police Department conducted the enhanced enforcement targeting drag racing beginning at sunset Saturday into the overnight, Duff said in an emailed statement. The enforcement was aimed at those motor vehicle operators and participants who engage in street racing, reckless driving, and illegal obstruction of city streets.

Duff said uniformed and plainclothes officers and detectives monitored areas where drag racing has been reported or known to occur. Law enforcement personnel shut down motor vehicle traffic and took enforcement action whenever racing started, he said.

Our efforts are in response to citizen complaints and public safety concerns for other motorists, pedestrian spectators, and the drag racers themselves, Assistant Chief of Operations Renee Dominguez said in the email. This weekends enforcement resulted in no reported injuries to the motoring public, racers, or our officers.

Police said a city resident from the Foxon Boulevard (Route 80) and Quinnipiac Avenue area recently wrote the department, But when you cant have a conversation on the side porch in the afternoon because of the frequent roar of loud cycles and cars, and then the weekend late night noise that disrupts the peace and quiet of the area, we believe it is our obligation not to surrender our streets.

Duff said that officers monitored Foxon Boulevard and other locations this weekend, but most of enforcement was conducted when racers gathered near a Sargent Drive gas station; on a portion of Ella Grasso Boulevard in the Hill section of New Haven; and near Fort Hale Park.

Drag racing is dangerous and takes away police resources from responding to other important calls. Many people have been coming to New Haven from outside the City to participate in illegal racing. The City will be working to make sure we put a stop to this activity, said Mayor Justin Elicker, in a separate email.

The city began installing three raised crosswalks on Long Wharf Drive Thursday in an effort to deter street racing, according to City Engineer Giovanni Zinn.

Zinn said the city built the food truck area in 2016. Traffic speeds in the area have since decreased, but there have been issues with illegal racing, he said.

This is sort of the next step in keeping the speeds down while theres a lot of people down here, but also (deterring) things like speed racing, Zinn said last week.

Duff noted that when possible, the officers issued misdemeanor summonses instead of making custodial arrests.

The weekend enforcement brought:

 16 misdemeanor summonses.

 18 infraction tickets.

 Nine vehicles towed.

 Two custodial arrests.

 One arrest warrant served.

 Five drug arrests.

We are committed to addressing this quality of life issue in a safe manner that fits within our department policies and holds violators accountable, Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said, also in the email. We will increase our enforcement efforts to include use of noise meters, window tint meters, and additional speed enforcement devices.
Mr. Trumps message is far less clear. The president and his allies say the uplifting convention message will inspire hope  a morning in America during mourning in America.

I think were going to see something that is going to be very uplifting and positive, Mr. Trump said Saturday on the Fox News program The Next Revolution. Thats what Id like it to be.

Yet Mr. Trumps own words  the dark, divisive imagery of his recent campaign events  and some of the choices of convention speakers hint at a stormy and discordant week to come.

Along with top Republicans and administration officials, the list of speakers includes a number of figures at the center of culture war dust-ups, like the former Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann; Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who brandished firearms at Black protesters; and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA.

That kind of mixed messaging isnt going to accomplish what Mr. Trump must do to win a second term, which is expand his base.

At a time of crisis, voters want to know what the president will do to fix the nations problems. Late Sunday, Mr. Trump sent out a one-page news release detailing his second-term agenda. The bullet-point list largely consisted of vague goals like stop endless wars and return to normal by 2021. Worth noting: In the Trump administrations first term, it still has no cohesive national strategy for combating the coronavirus.

This weekend, the Republican National Committee announced that it would pass no platform for 2020, and would rather continue to enthusiastically support the presidents America-first agenda.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 24

By Elnur Baghishov  Trend:

As many as 5,823 people have died of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in Iran's Tehran Province so far, Governor of Tehran Province Anoushirvan Mohseni Bandpey told journalists, Trend reports citing IRNA.

The governor emphasized that a total of over 96,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus in Tehran Province, so far.

In addition, more than 78,800 people have recovered from the coronavirus in the province, he added.

According to Mohseni Bandpey, Tehran Province is considered red zone due to the spread of the coronavirus.

"The continuation of this situation may have a negative impact on the start of the new school year. Thus, despite the start of the new school year, students may not come to school," he said.

It has been decided to start the new school year in Iran 15-16 days earlier on September 5.

Iran continues to monitor the coronavirus situation in the country. According to recent reports from the Iranian officials, over 361,100 people have been infected, and 20,776 people have already died. Meanwhile, over 311,300 have reportedly recovered from the disease.

The country continues to apply strict measures to contain the further spread. Reportedly, the disease was brought to Iran by a businessman from Iran's Qom city, who went on a business trip to China, despite official warnings. The man died later from the disease.

The Islamic Republic only announced its first infections and deaths from the coronavirus on Feb. 19.

The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019.
2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #34

Posted on 23 August 2020 by John Hartz

Story of the Week: Fire... Story of the Week: Ice... Toon of the Week... Climate Feedback Article Review... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review...

Story of the Week: Fire...

California and Colorado Fires May Be Part of a Climate-Driven Transformation of Wildfires Around the Globe

Wildfires from Australia to Siberia are not just larger, hotter and faster, but burning in areas and seasons where they were previously rare.

A spot fire from the CZU August Lightning Complex fire burns along Alba Road on the outskirts of Ben Lomond, California, on Aug. 20, 2020. Credit: Dai Sugano/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images

The wildfires that exploded over the past few days in California and Colorado show clear influences of global warming, climate scientists say, and evidence of how a warming and drying climate is increasing the size and severity of fires from the California coast to the high Rocky Mountains.

They may also be the latest examples of climate-driven wildfires around the world burning not only much bigger, hotter and faster, but exploding into landscapes and seasons in which they were previously rare.

For tens of thousands of Californians enduring evacuations, and millions more suffering through smoke that has brought some parts of the state the worst air quality in the world, the recent fire weather has seemed almost biblical.

The entire state and much of the rest of the West has been, for the last week, in the grip of a "heat dome" that has brought temperatures of 129.9 degrees Fahrenheit to Death Valley, perhaps the hottest temperatures ever recorded on the planet. On Saturday, Aug. 15, the National Weather Service issued its first ever warning for a tornado born of a wildfire, when radar detected at least five spinning vortices in a pyrocumulonimbus cloud rising from the Loyalton fire near the Nevada state line. Witnesses saw a "firenado" dropping from the smoky storm cloud to the ground.

Click here to access the entire artile originally posted on the InsdieClimate News website.

California and Colorado Fires May Be Part of a Climate-Driven Transformation of Wildfires Around the Globe by Michael Kodas, InsideClimate News, Aug 22, 2020

Story of the Week: Ice...

Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice in less than 30 years

Stunned scientists say there is little doubt global heating is to blame for the loss

Husky dogs wade over sea ice during an expedition in north-western Greenland, where ice loss has been triggered by rising sea levels and atmospheric temperatures. Photograph: Steffen Olsen/Centre for Ocean and Ice at the/AFP/Getty Images

A total of 28 trillion tonnes of ice have disappeared from the surface of the Earth since 1994. That is stunning conclusion of UK scientists who have analysed satellite surveys of the planets poles, mountains and glaciers to measure how much ice coverage lost because of global heating triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientists  based at Leeds and Edinburgh universities and University College London  describe the level of ice loss as staggering and warn that their analysis indicates that sea level rises, triggered by melting glaciers and ice sheets, could reach a metre by the end of the century.

To put that in context, every centimetre of sea level rise means about a million people will be displaced from their low-lying homelands, said Professor Andy Shepherd, director of Leeds Universitys Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling.

The scientists also warn that the melting of ice in these quantities is now seriously reducing the planets ability to reflect solar radiation back into space. White ice is disappearing and the dark sea or soil exposed beneath it is absorbing more and more heat, further increasing the warming of the planet.

In addition, cold fresh water pouring from melting glaciers and ice sheets is causing major disruptions to the biological health of Arctic and Antarctic waters, while loss of glaciers in mountain ranges threatens to wipe out sources of fresh water on which local communities depend.

In the past researchers have studied individual areas  such as the Antarctic or Greenland  where ice is melting. But this is the first time anyone has looked at all the ice that is disappearing from the entire planet, said Shepherd. What we have found has stunned us.

The level of ice loss revealed by the group matches the worst-case-scenario predictions outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he added.

Click here to access the entire article origninally posted on the Observer/Guardian website.

Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice in less than 30 years by Robin McKie, Environment, Observer/Guardian, Aug 23, 2020

Toon of the Week...

Hat tip to the Stop Climate Science Denial Facebook page.

Climate Feedback Article Review...

[To be added.]

Coming Soon on SkS...

Scientists seek to collect ice core samples before glaciers and ice sheets melt (Kristen Pope)

(Kristen Pope) Climate TRACE to track real-time global carbon emissions (Bruce Lieberman)

(Bruce Lieberman) SkS New Research for Week #34 (Doug Bostrom)

(Doug Bostrom) change (Daisy Dunne)

Will Fusion Power solve Climate Change? (Climate Adam)

(Climate Adam) 2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #35 (John Hartz)

(John Hartz) 2020 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #35 (John Hartz)

Poster of the Week...

SkS Week in Review...
Patrice Evra has revealed how he and Cristiano Ronaldo played a crucial role in Manchester United's signing of Bruno Fernandes.

The Portugal international joined the club in January after completing a 68million transfer from Sporting Lisbon and quickly became an important player.

United sat outside the top four when Fernandes arrived at Old Trafford but the midfielder scored eight goals and provided seven assists to help the club qualify for the Champions League.

Manchester United signed Bruno Fernandes in January and he had an instant impact

Patrice Evra and Cristiano Ronaldo played a crucial role in United signing the midfielder

Evra and Ronaldo briefly played with United boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and the Frenchman revealed how the manager sought their advice when he was weighing up a move for Fernandes.

'When they wanted to sign Bruno Fernandes, Ole texted me. I asked for advice from Cristiano Ronaldo,' Evra told The Guardian.

'Cristiano says, "Bruno's a good guy and very professional".

Solskjaer was convinced after Ronaldo gave his Portugal team-mate a glowing review

'I say, "Ole, I've spoken with Cristiano. Let's go for it".

'And Fernandes had a massive impact. Without him I don't think we would have qualified for the Champions League.'

After his Portugal team-mate Ronaldo gave him a glowing report, Fernandes revealed he made it his childhood dream to follow in the footsteps of the five-time Ballon d'Or winner.

Speaking after joining United, Fernandes said: 'When Cristiano burst on to the scene here in Manchester, he spent a good chunk of his early career here and enjoyed so much success.

'That's why it was a dream of mine to play for Manchester United and I'm very pleased to be here because it's a childhood dream come true.'
The grand imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed El-Tayyeb, lauded the House of Representatives after it had postponed voting on a controversial draft law regulating the country's Dar Al-Iftaa, or the House of Fatwas (religious edicts).

The bill has stirred considerable controversy recently, as the Sunni institution believes it endangers its independence.

The law was scheduled to be voted on by parliament on Monday, but Parliamentary Speaker Ali Abdel-Aal told the MPs he decided against debating the law.

In an official statement on Monday, El-Tayeb said "this step assures with no doubt that Egypt will always remain a country that respects the constitution and appreciates its national institutions, including Al-Azhar."

"Egypt, under the leadership of President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, is always keen to preserve the Al-Azhar institution and to support and assist it to fulfil its mission of spreading moderation and tolerance," the grand imam was quoted as saying.

The bill, drafted by parliaments religious committee, proposes Dar Al-Iftaa be supervised by the justice ministry instead of the Sunni institution.

The law also aims to restructure the authority of the grand mufti, the head of Dar Al-Iftaa, as well as the appointment procedures, tenure, and procedures to renew the term of the mufti.

Al-Azhar believes the new law will establish an independent authority under the justice ministry that will not be supervised by Al-Azhar.

The Sunni body warned that assigning an authority that belongs to the justice ministry and is not affiliated with Al-Azhar to carry out these tasks violates the constitution and the independence of Al-Azhar.

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West African envoys resumed talks with Mali's new military rulers on Monday as the junta denied it had decided on a three-year blueprint for restoring civilian rule.

Colonel Ismael Wague, spokesman for the rebel officers who seized power last Tuesday, insisted that the transition remained undecided as the third day of talks with the regional bloc ECOWAS got underway.

"I want to make clear at this stage of discussions with the ECOWAS mediation team that nothing has been decided," he said at the defence ministry in Bamako.

"At no point have we talked about military-majority government," he said.

"Any decision relating to the scale of the transition, the transition president, the formation of the government will be done among Malians" and be followed by "mass consultation," he said.

ECOWAS flew a high-level mission to Bamako on Saturday led by former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan, four days after mutinying troops seized power and detained 75-year-old President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

The coup sent shockwaves among Mali's neighbours, which fear that the country - already beset by a jihadist insurgency and moribund economy - could spiral into chaos.

A source in the visiting delegation on Sunday said the junta "has affirmed that it wants a three-year transition to review the foundations of the Malian state. This transition will be directed by a body led by a soldier, who will also be head of state.

"The government will also be predominantly composed of soldiers" under the proposal, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Additionally, a junta official confirmed to AFP that "the three-year transition would have a military president and a government mostly composed of soldiers."

ECOWAS reaction

This timeframe contrasts with the junta's vow, within hours of taking over on August 18, that elections would be held within a "reasonable" timeframe.

Story continues

Many Malians took to social media on Monday to attack the transition scheme.

It also compares starkly with demands by the 15-nation ECOWAS - the Economic Community of West African States - for the "immediate return of constitutional order."

The bloc's leaders are to confer in a virtual summit on Wednesday as to how to proceed, mindful of Mali's last coup in 2012, which led to a regional revolt that metastasised into a jihadist insurgency.

They have already decided to close Mali's borders and issued threats to impose sanctions against the coup leaders.

The bloc has already intervened in several crises in West Africa, including The Gambia, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Keita was elected in 2013 after running a campaign in which he pitched himself as a unifying force in a fractured country.

He was re-elected for a second term in 2018 but failed to make headway against the jihadists, and the ethnic unrest they ignited in the centre of the country further damaged an already sickly economy.

An outcry over the results of long-delayed legislative elections in April cemented his unpopular reputation, and in June a protest movement was born aimed at forcing him to resign.

ECOWAS has stood by Keita and called for him to be restored to office, although this demand has been eclipsed since the start of the talks by the issue of his detention.

Jonathan met Keita on Saturday and said he seemed "very fine".

The ECOWAS and junta sources said on Monday that Mali's new rulers had agreed to free the ousted president and that he would be able to return to his home in Bamako.

The coup leaders say they are holding 17 leaders at a barracks about 15 kilometres (nine miles) from the city after releasing two others last week.

(AFP)
Microsoft has joined the brewing legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, giving the "Fortnite" creator an unexpected ally.

Microsoft submitted a letter to the court in support of Epic Games on Sunday. The firm isn't writing because they're upset that Fortnite was pulled from Apple's App Store. Rather, it is fighting the ripple effects of Apple's block on Epic Games.

When Fortnite was yanked off the App Store, the company also cancelled Epic Games' Developer Program contracts effective August 28, reported Business Insider.

Kevin Gammill, Microsoft's general manager for Gaming Developer Experiences filed the declaration on Sunday, saying that allowing Apple to block Epic Games' developer account would deal a significant blow to game makers like them, said a CNBC report.

Gammill said Apple's move to cut development ties with Epic games may harm not just game makers, but also creators.

For one, Microsoft won't be allowed to use Epic Games' Unreal Engine if the Apple block pushes through.

What is Unreal Engine?

Unreal Engine is a type of gaming engine. It is a widely used set of technologies that lets creators build three dimensional graphics.

Epic Games hold the power to license companies that use this technology for a fee.

According to Game Spot, it is an extremely popular game engine used by Microsoft's own smartphone racer game "Forza Street".

Gammill added that Unreal Engine was a "critical technology for numerous game creators including Microsoft." He said the move to revoke Epic's access could put harm among the iOS and macOS games that they already launched.

If Apple cannot provide Epic Games to its developer kit, Unreal Engine would likely stop supporting Apple products. This could lead to many companies and creators getting left out.

If matter comes to worst, fans of certain creators will be seeing apps start from scratch as they restart completely or switch to another gaming engine.

This is the exact thing that Microsoft is worried about.

Microsoft said that if the Unreal Engine cannot support games for Apple and Mac computers, they will be required to abandon their Apple market and potential customers. They might also use a different game engine to prepare in developing new games, said Gammill.

While the statement was not officially issued by the company, its gaming brand Xbox stands by Gammill's sentiments. Xbox Leader Phil Spencer characterized Gamill's statement as on behalf of the company.

Epic Files Restraining Order Against Apple

Epic Games filed a request for a restraining order against Apple. With it, they aim to force the company to at least keep Fortnite on the App Store in the meantime.

The request also seeks for the direct payment system to let players avoid Apple's own payment system and the 30% cut that Apple gets from transactions.

As far as the case if progressing, it seems like the battle is just beginning.

Epic Games launched a Free Fortnite campaign and tournament, that like likely aimed to get the public on their side.

Google Play has also removed Fortnite from its own play store, but it is not the only application that provides apps for Android users.

Check these out!

Source Code for Disney, Microsoft, Nintendo Leaks Online

TikTok to Sue US Government Over Trump's Ban on App

Oracle Enters Race to Buy TikTok US Operations, Reports Say
New Delhi:

Realty major Tata Housing has partnered with with private equity firm Macquarie Group to form a Rs 2,000 crore fund to be used for the companys luxury housing projects.

Australia-based Macquarie Group will put in Rs 1,400 crore while the Tata group firm will contribute Rs 600 crore.

Tata Housing and Macquarie have joined hands to invest Rs 2,000 crore in the Indian real estate market, a source said. Macquarie will have 70 per cent stake in the fund. A Tata Housing spokesperson declined to comment.

According to sources, the investments will be in the form of equity infusion into the fund to expand Tata Housings presence across premium and luxury projects in the top 8 cities in the country over the next 3-5 years.

The projects would be targeted at marquee locations in Mumbai, National Capital Region, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata and Pune. This is the second such fund for Tata Housing. Its subsidiary Tata Value Homes has formed a fund of about USD 90 million as it targets to develop about 16,800 homes over the next 10 years.
Monday, August 24, 2020 at 9:49AM

Old versions of the WordPress app on iOS had Plans tab, but in-app purchases aren't available on the app

While Apple's legal battle with Epic Games rages on, it is resolving its issue with WordPress. The tech giant even issues a rare on-the-record apology to the blogging platform after it forced WordPress to monetize its free app. If WordPress offers in-app purchases, it would be giving Apple 30% of what it earns from these.

Apple's full statement reads: "We believe the issue with the WordPress app has been resolved. Since the developer removed the display of their service payment options from the app, it is now a free stand-alone app and does not have to offer in-app purchases. We have informed the developer and apologize for any confusion that we have caused."

As The Verge points out, Apple is wording this as the developer having worked the issue out by removing the "display of their service payment options from the app." While that might be true, that removal happened weeks or months ago. The WordPress app on iOS doesn't sell anything or make any mention of paid "WordPress.com" plans. Older versions of the app once had a dedicated "Plans" tab, which showed the different options available for premium customers. But you can't purchase any plans on the app.

The news and succeeding outrage broke when WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg shared that Apple successfully forced him to add Apple's in-app purchases. He was going to be locked out of updating the app unless he added the feature within 30 days.

Mullenweg said he even offered previously to take out other mentions of paid plans from the app, only to have Apple reject the suggestion.

So, while Apple is framing this as WordPress caving, it would seem like Apple has just decided it's not worth getting additional flak by forcing WordPress to include in-app purchases.
After Pakistan declared sanctions on the 88 terrorists including Dawood Ibrahim, a human rights activist from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), has urged India to start extradition process to bring back some of these dreaded terrorists for their involvement in terror attacks on Indian soil. The order revealed Dawood's three Karachi-based addresses including his residence named 'White House', which Pakistan then officially and belatedly attempted to debunk.

The list sanctioned by the Pakistan government also includes mastermind of Mumbai terror attacks Hafiz Saeed who heads terror organisation Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), and Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar who was the mastermind of 2001 Parliamentary attack.

Dr Amjad Ayub Mirza, a human rights activist and a journalist hailing from PoK said, "The most important name is that of Dawood Ibrahim, who is known as the mastermind of serial blasts in Mumbai in 1993. More than 250 people were killed and over 700 people got injured. These terrorists are in Pakistan and we are also aware of this."

"India must start the process of extradition of Dawood Ibrahim after Pakistan has accepted about his presence in the country. He should be brought to India along with others and action must be taken against them legally. Masood Azhar, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Hafiz Saeed should also be handed over to India because they are involved in terror incidents in India", said Dr Mirza.

He said, "They have committed heinous crimes against the people of India. If Pakistan wants to prove that it is fighting against terrorism then these dreaded terrorists should be handed over to India and be punished as per the law".

"If Pakistan fails to hand over these terrorists to India and not handover compensation to terror victims in India, then it is clear that this list of terrorists by Pakistan is just to impress the FATF", said Dr Mirza.

Mirza added that presence of Dawood Ibrahim in Pakistan's Karachi city was revealed by media several times but it has now been officially declared by Islamabad in the list of sanctions. In his YouTube video, he also called for handing over Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azar to India as they have perpetrated and caused damage to India in its territory.

"It's time when Pakistan admitted that these terrorists are being sheltered in Pakistan, then they should be handed over to India," he concluded.

READ | Pakistan Reveals Dawood Ibrahim's Karachi Home 'White House'; 88 Terrorists Sanctioned

READ | How Pakistan Has Ruptured Ties With Saudi Arabia Over Its Attempts To Peddle Kashmir

Pakistan issues list of terrorists

Pakistan seemingly under the pressure of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) issued a list to the UNSC, dated August 18, of dreaded terrorists operating from Pakistani soil, including gangster Dawood Ibrahim. It also had Dawood's three addresses from Karachi. However, Pakistan thereafter retracted from its stance stating that the media reports are 'baseless and misleading.

Contradicting its own admission, Pakistan's foreign ministry said that the information in the notifications of August 18 is "reproduced as per the details in the list entry of the individuals/entities designated under the two sanctions regime, which is publically available and contains names of individuals, who despite their confirmed deceased status still continue to be on the sanctions list."

READ | 'Don't Interfere': India Rejects Cornered Pakistan-China's Attempt To Discuss Kashmir

READ | Pakistan Releases Statement About Dawood Ibrahim; Lies After Admitting To His 3 Safehouses
FILE PHOTO: TikTok logos are seen on smartphones in front of displayed ByteDance logo in this illustration

By Echo Wang and Joshua Franklin

(Reuters) - ByteDance investors are in talks to use their stakes in the Chinese technology firm to help finance their bid for its popular short-video app TikTok, according to people familiar with the matter.

ByteDance has been in talks to divest TikTok's North America, Australia and New Zealand operations to potential acquirers, including Microsoft Corp <MSFT.O> and Oracle Corp <ORCL.N>. President Donald Trump has ordered the Chinese company to sever ties with the social media app in the United States, citing concerns over the safety of the personal data it handles.

Some ByteDance investors, including investment firm General Atlantic, are vying to own large stakes in the TikTok assets for sale, the sources said. Under their restructuring plan, Microsoft or Oracle could receive a minority stake in the assets, the sources added.

The TikTok assets for sale could be worth between $25 billion and $30 billion, the sources said. To help fund their bid, the ByteDance investors are discussing exchanging some or all of their stakes in the Chinese company with equity in the TikTok assets, according to the sources.

The ByteDance investors' plan faces long odds and significant hurdles, the sources said. Trump administration officials have said they expect a major U.S. company to lead the TikTok deal and ringfence the app technologically from ByteDance. A U.S. government panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), has to sign off on any deal that ByteDance reaches.

Nevertheless, the push by some ByteDance investors for a bigger role in the TikTok deal underscores their efforts to give the Chinese company more options and avert a fire sale. Some of them had to convince ByteDance's founder and CEO Yiming Zhang to let go of TikTok, the sources said.

Microsoft remains the lead bidder for the TikTok assets because of its deep pockets and technical capacity to design new algorithms for TikTok that will be separate from ByteDance and its Chinese short video app Douyin, according to the sources.

Story continues

Microsoft is working on a blueprint on how TikTok would be separated operationally from ByteDance after a deal is reached, which the Redmond, Washington-based company has said it hopes to ink by Sept. 15, the sources added. CFIUS would then monitor the implementation of the deal under a lengthy transition period, according to the sources.

The sources requested anonymity because the matter is confidential. TikTok and General Atlantic declined to comment, while ByteDance, Microsoft and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

As relations between the United States and China deteriorate over trade, Hong Kong's autonomy, cybersecurity and the spread of the novel coronavirus, TikTok has emerged as a flashpoint in the dispute between the world's two largest economies.

While TikTok is best known for its anodyne videos of people dancing and going viral among teenagers, U.S. officials have expressed concerns that information on users could be passed on to China's communist government.

Trump has said he would support an effort by Microsoft to buy TikTok's American operations if the U.S. government got a "substantial portion" of the proceeds, but has also said there are other credible buyers such as Oracle.

CRACKDOWN ON CHINESE-OWNED APPS

The White House has stepped up its efforts to purge what it deems "untrusted" Chinese apps from U.S. digital networks. Beyond TikTok, Trump has also issued an order that would prohibit transactions with Tencent Holding Ltd's <0700.HK> messenger app WeChat.

Earlier this year, Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd <300418.SZ> sold Grindr LLC, a popular gay dating app it bought in 2016, for $620 million after being ordered by CFIUS to divest. ByteDance acquired Shanghai-based video app Musical.ly in a $1 billion deal in 2017 and relaunched it as TikTok the following year. ByteDance did not seek approval for the acquisition from CFIUS, which reviews deals for potential national security risks. Reuters reported last year that CFIUS had opened an investigation into TikTok.

TikTok said last week it planned to file a lawsuit against an Aug. 6 executive order by Trump prohibiting transactions with the app and ByteDance.

ByteDance was valued at as much as $140 billion earlier this year when one of its shareholders, Cheetah Mobile <CMCM.N>, sold a small stake in a private deal, Reuters has reported. The start-up's investors include Japan's SoftBank Group Corp <9984.T>.

(Reporting by Echo Wang and Josh Franklin in New York; Additional reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
In early September, a new artistic attraction will open on Decatur Street, unlike any other in the French Quarter.

The object of the ARTmazing Gallery is to provide amusing sets where smartphone-toting guests can snap photos of one another cavorting in a giant bird cage, on a golden throne, with stacks of inflated pink pool toys, at an executives desk piled high with fake cash and among cottony clouds in a heavenly skyscape.

Founder Giselle Monteiro is an artist who produces spare, geometric abstractions. She said she got the idea for the interactive gallery in November when she visited a place called WonderWorld in Brooklyn, New York, where artists create walk-in installations that double as selfie ops.

Monteiro figured the same sort of experience would be ideal in New Orleans. It would draw curious tourists and locals looking for an alternative to the bar and nightclub scene.

When I first moved here, I had a hard time finding things to do with kids that didnt involve drinking, she said.

In addition to her art career, Monteiro worked as a granite exporter in her native Brazil. When she moved to New Orleans five years back, she branched out into the kitchen cabinet business. Her goal is to be New Orleans queen of cabinets, she said, laughing. Thats why the throne room, where she can pose as royalty, is her favorite ARTmazing feature.

But the cabinet business is somewhat seasonal, so Monteiro decided to diversify into a business completely different. It was a leap, she said, but the art experience concept was simple. WonderWorld was just a warehouse with scenarios, she said.

Monteiro already had an available warehouse space in Kenner, but she decided to seek a location at the center of the citys tourist industry instead. A friend steered her toward a picturesque 6,000-square-foot, second-story former restaurant at 309 Decatur St. Monteiro began creating the arty environment.

As it turned out, it wasnt the optimal time to open a tourist destination. Shed planned to unveil the attraction in March, at more or less the exact time the coronavirus crisis struck the Crescent City.

In the French Quarter, most businesses were required to shut down, and tourist traffic evaporated immediately. But we were too deep in to quit, Monteiro said, so she and her crew kept at it.

Changes had to be made. The pillow fight room, the bubble bath-themed ball pit and the fan-blown flurry of money all had to be modified because they caused too much contact for the COVID-19 era. All 13 of the existing scenes can be disinfected daily.

At this moment, Monteiro said she's unsure exactly when the doors will finally swing open. She's aiming for an early September debut, but she fears that impending hurricanes could cause more delays.

When the time comes, timed tickets will be sold online only, masks will be required, and hand sanitizer will be provided. Admission will be $25.

In the future, other artists will be invited to help update the ARTmazing Gallery regularly, Monteiro said. The big backroom will be available for private functions and activities, such as recreational painting parties.

Sure, she said, the timing of the project seemed terrible, but who knows? Maybe nows a moment when people are looking for something to do.
The head of the UN's atomic watchdog arrived in Iran on Monday, state media reported, for a visit aimed at improving cooperation on the Islamic republic's nuclear activities.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, on his first trip to Iran since taking the helm of the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, is to meet with senior officials on Tuesday.

He is expected to press for IAEA access to two nuclear sites in the talks with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the head of the country's atomic agency, Ali Akbar Salehi.

"My objective is that my meetings in Tehran will lead to concrete progress in addressing the outstanding questions that the agency has related to safeguards in Iran and, in particular, to resolve the issue of access," Grossi said in a statement on Saturday.

The visit comes amid tensions between the US and its European allies over Washington's bid to maintain an arms embargo on Iran and reimpose UN sanctions dating back to 2006.

His visit also takes place shortly before a September 1 meeting of the joint commission on the 2015 deal between Iran and global powers, which aims to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb.

Tehran has always denied its nuclear programme has any military dimension.

The US and European nations are at loggerheads after Washington began the process Thursday of activating a controversial mechanism aimed at restoring UN sanctions against Iran.

Britain, France and Germany rejected the move, saying it frustrated their efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear accord that US President Donald Trump pulled out of two years ago.

Washington controversially maintains it has the right to force the reimposition of sanctions through the agreement's "snapback" mechanism, despite its withdrawal.

Iran-US tensions have escalated since the US in May 2018 withdrew from the deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

In retaliation, Iran has progressively abandoned commitments under the accord that was meant to give it relief from sanctions in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme.

Grossi is also expected to meet Iran's President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday before flying back to Vienna, where the UN agency is based.

Iran had expressed hopes that the Argentine would act "neutrally" after his appointment in July last year following the death of his predecessor, Japan's Yukiya Amano.

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The on Monday appeared set to close ranks behind Sonia Gandhi, urging her to stay on as party chief after she offered to step down as interim president following a letter by more than 20 leaders demanding an "active, full-time and visible" president.

Though a large section of the leaders backed at the nearly seven-hour virtual meeting of the Congress' highest decision making body to discuss the pivotal leadership issue, the faultlines were clear and appeared to deepen at some points as the day progressed.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh led the demand for continuing as Congress president and leader after leader echoed him while attacking the letter writers, particularly Ghulam Nabi Azad, the senior-most signatory and a CWC member, sources said.

P Chidambaram suggested the holding of a virtual AICC session to start the process of holding elections for a new party chief.

However, the stage seems set for the CWC endorsing continuation as party chief, with the letter writers isolated and under attack from several leaders. The meeting was attended by 48 leaders.

Former president Rahul Gandhi, it is learnt, launched a sharp attack against the signatories, questioning their timing as well as the fact they went public with their grievances. He also rued the fact that the letter seeking sweeping changes to the party organisation and elections to the CWC -- was written when Sonia Gandhi was in hospital and the party was battling a political crisis in Rajasthan.

He said Sonia Gandhi had accepted charge as party president only after the CWC last year urged her to take the responsibility.

"It is the CWC and not the media, where we voice our grievances and discuss issues," sources quoted as telling the CWC members.

They also said Rahul insinuated that the letter would help the BJP.

Earlier in the day, Kapil Sibal, senior leader and one of the signatories of the letter, created a flutter when he hit out at on Twitter for a purported remark on the BJP.

Sibal, who is not a part of the CWC, withdrew his tweet a little later.

"Was informed by personally that he never said what was attributed to him. I therefore withdraw my tweet," he said on Twitter.

The Congress also denied that Rahul Gandhi had accused any party leader of "colluding with the BJP".

"Rahul Gandhi hasn't said a word of this nature nor alluded to it. Please don't be misled by false media discourse or misinformation being spread.

"But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather then fighting & hurting each other and the Congress," the party's chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said on Twitter, tagging Sibal's earlier tweet.

Azad, too, attempted to set the record straight.

The leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha said a section of media is "wrongly attributing that, in CWC I told Shri Rahul Gandhi to prove that the letter written by us is in collusion with BJP let me make it very clear that Shri Rahul Gandhi has neither in CWC nor outside said that this letter was written at the behest of BJP.

Azad was at the proverbial centre of the storm in the CWC.

Former defence minister A K Antony termed the letter "cruel", while his colleague Ambika Soni described the missive as unfortunate and said the party had given Azad a lot.

Sources said Azad offered to resign at the meeting amid questions being raised on the letter, its timing and its leakage to the media.

Sonia Gandhi also referred to Azad twice in her opening remarks, saying he had even sent a reminder to his letter, the sources said. To this she had said she had given her reply to K C Venugopal expressing her desire to be relieved of the post and the party should initiate the process to find her replacement.

While most leaders backed Sonia's continuation as party chief, there were some who proposed Rahul Gandhi's return as president, the sources said.

Giving details of the proceedings, they said Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and his Chhattisgarh counterpart Bhupesh Baghel urged Rahul Gandhi to take charge in case Sonia Gandhi wishes to withdraw.

Venugopal read out the letter written by Sonia Gandhi and criticised the party leaders who were behind the letter.

Besides Azad, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik and Jitin Prasada also part of the CWC and attended the meeting divided between those demanding collective leadership and those reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

Almost all Lok Sabha MPs of the party have written to Sonia Gandhi expressing solidarity and urging her to continue in her post or install Rahul Gandhi.

Besides, several state units, including Delhi and Rajasthan, have passed resolutions favouring the leadership of the Gandhis.

The letter is the second challenge to Sonia Gandhi's leadership after 1999 when then leader of opposition in Lok Sabha Sharad Pawar raised the issue of her foreign origins in order to keep her from being named the party's prime ministerial face in the general elections that year.

Sonia Gandhi then resigned in the CWC, which rejected her move unanimously bringing her back as party president. While Sonia Gandhi went on to become the longest serving Congress president, Pawar and rebels quit to form the NCP.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hyderabad, Aug 24 : Telangana reported 1,842 new Covid cases on Monday, pushing the state's tally to 1,06,091, officials said.

Six more people died of the virus during the last 24 hours ending Sunday 8 p.m., taking the death toll to 761.

Health officials said the case fatality rate in the state stood at 0.71 per cent as compared to the national average of 1.86 per cent. Of the fatalities, 53.87 per cent had comorbidities.

According to a media report from the office of the Director of Public Health and Family Welfare, the number of cases declined in Greater Hyderabad and surrounding districts but the spike continued in some districts.

Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) reported 373 new cases as compared to 472 on Sunday. Medchal Malkajgiri and Rangareddy districts abutting GHMC reported 32 and 109 cases, respectively. Sangareddy, another district bordering the state capital, saw 50 new cases.

Outside GHMC and surrounding districts, Nizamabad was the worst-affected district with 158 new cases followed by Karimnagar with 123 cases, Suryapet with 113 cases and Siddipet with 86 cases. Khammam reported 77 new infections, Warangal Urban 74, Jagtiyal 70, Mahabubabad 64 and Mancherial 59. Four of the 33 districts reported new cases in single digits.

During the last 24 hours, authorities conducted 36,282 tests. With this the number of tests conducted in the state has risen to 9,68,121. The samples tested per million population mounted to 26,076 against a daily testing target of 5,600 as per the World Health Organisation (WHO) benchmark of 140 per million per day. The results of 895 samples were awaited.

As many as 16 government and 23 private laboratories were conducting the RT PCR/CBNAAT/TRUENAT types of tests and there were 1,076 rapid-antigen test centres. However, the authorities did not provide a breakup of the tests.

During the last 24 hours, 1,825 people recovered from Covid, taking the number of recoveries to 82,411. The state's recovery rate improved to 77.67 per cent against the national average of 74.9 per cent.

The number of active cases in the state stands at 22,919, including 16,482 in home/institutional isolation.

Age-wise Covid positive details show that 65.3 per cent of those who tested positive were in the age group of 21-50 years. Terming this as a susceptible age group, authorities have urged them not to go out unless absolutely necessary. They were advised to strictly exercise precautions like wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing.

Among Covid positive cases, 24.71 per cent were above 51 years. Nearly 10 per cent were below 20 years.

Officials said 64.41 per cent of those who tested positive were male while the remaining 35.59 per cent were female.

According to the media release, of 20,396 beds in the government-run hospitals, 18,020 beds were vacant.

As many as 170 private hospitals were treating Covid-19 cases in the state. These hospitals have 9,058 beds of which 4,997 were vacant.

The state has 958 containment zones with the highest 141 in Ranga Reddy district, followed by 94 in Mahabunagar, 93 in Jagtiyal, 91 in Rajanna Sircilla and 81 in Gadwal. Greater Hyderabad has 65 containment zones.

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New Delhi, Aug 24 : The Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on Monday saw intense action and reactions between the members amid open rebellion after former Congress President Rahul Gandhi targeted party leaders for their timing in asking for a leadership change, while Ghulam Nabi Azad promised to quit if proven to have colluded with the BJP, Kapil Sibal reminded of his unwavering fight to keep the party together.

While Haryana Congress leader accused the dissenters of colluding with the BJP calling them "agent" of the saffron party, Randeep Singh Surjewala tried to calm nerves and made it clear that no such remark was made by Rahul Gandhi and neither did he endorse the pitch.

The Congress asked the party leaders to not focus on the "media reports" and said that the former party chief "did not say a word of this nature".

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala tweeted: "Rahul Gandhi hasn't said a word of this nature nor alluded to it. Please don't be misled by false media discourse or misinformation being spread. But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian (Narendra) Modi rule rather than fighting and hurting each other and the Congress."

Surjewala was responding to a tweet by senior party leader Kapil Sibal, in which he said: "Rahul Gandhi says 'we are colluding with BJP'. "Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party. Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP government. Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue. Yet 'we are colluding with the BJP'!"

His remarks came soon after Ghulam Nabi Azad said that he will quit the party if proven that he was colluding with the ruling BJP.

Party sources said that the senior Congress leader and Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha said this while countering Selja's charges.

Azad said: "If you can prove that I am colluding with BJP, I will quit right now." Azad also praised Sonia Gandhi for leading the party amid the difficult times.

Selja targeted the dissenters at the highest decision-making body of the party, for writing the letter seeking leadership change and called the leaders who wrote it as "agents" of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The remarks from the senior Congress leaders came soon after Rahul Gandhi on Monday targeted the party dissenters and questioned the timing of a letter which was sent to interim chief Sonia Gandhi seeking leadership change.

Congress sources said that Rahul Gandhi at the CWC said, "What was the reason to write a letter when Sonia Gandhi was admitted in hospital and when the party was fighting the political crisis in Rajasthan." Sonia Gandhi was admitted in Sir Ganga Ram Hospital on July 30 for routine check-up and was discharged on August 2. While the Rajasthan political crisis began on July 11 when former Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot rebelled against the party leadership. The Rajasthan crisis was taken care of by the top leadership on August 11.

Earlier as the CWC meeting began, Sonia Gandhi offered to step down from the party's top post. The move was rejected by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as he asked her to continue. As the meeting progressed, senior Congress leader A.K. Antony also questioned the letter written by several party leaders urging for sweeping reforms, and "a full-time, visible leadership".

The CWC meeting comes weeks after the Congress saw a stormy meeting of its Rajya Sabha MPs wherein certain leaders sought introspection on the 2019 poll debacle.

It was thereafter, a bunch of leaders wrote the letter to Congress interim chief Sonia Gandhi on the issue of leadership change and elections in the CWC.

-- Syndicated from IANS
GUELPH  Two judges have rejected a mans claim that child pornography on his computer was for research purposes.

In 2017 police found more than 3,500 child pornography images and 70 videos on Gabriel Mellors laptop computer and a storage device. He was charged with possessing and distributing child pornography.

At his trial the Guelph man claimed he was doing research to create a training program for volunteers with Guelph organizations, but he acknowledged he told no one about his research.

He testified that he was involved with several youth-serving organizations, including the Red Cross, Scouts Canada and Family and Childrens Services, Superior Court Justice Nancy Dennison said in a recent ruling.

Mellor, 47, said his so-called research would allow him to help volunteers recognize signs of sexual abuse, stop perpetrators from joining those organizations and identify perpetrators already in the organizations.

(He) testified that an important part of his research was to be able to detect and interpret emotions on faces, Dennison said. He believed that if he reviewed child pornography, he would have a better understanding about those who perpetrated sexual offences and its effect on children.

Mellor said he previously took a 10-week counter-intelligence course that included training about deception, detection and the study of body language and facial expressions.

He testified he told no one about his research of child pornography because of the stigma attached and because he would be expelled from the Scouts and would no longer be able to do the research, Dennison said.

The trial judge, Justice Gary Hearn, found Mellor guilty of both charges. Mellor launched an appeal but Dennison dismissed it earlier this month. It is unclear whether Mellor has been sentenced.

Hearn said he could not see how viewing child pornography would assist in Mellors research.

(Mellor) provided nothing aside from hope that educational material might be extracted from watching child pornography, Dennison said.

Mellor said he was a safeguard trainer with Family and Childrens Services and a first-aid trainer with the Red Cross. His role with Scouts Canada was unclear.

The laptop and storage device were found in Mellors bedroom. He lived in Guelph with his mother.

Two foster children apparently also lived in the house. Mellor said they were not allowed in his room.

His trial heard that a police officer downloaded 34 child pornography images from Mellors computer over a peer-to-peer file-sharing network.

The officer said nothing indicated the pornography was for educational purposes.

Some of the names of the files were known to the officer from past investigations and were known child pornography files, Dennison said. The officer also testified that there were adult pornography files intermingled with the child pornography.

As part of his alleged research, Mellor also accessed pedophile material on the dark net.

He said he also collected information from the University of Waterloo and University of Guelph libraries.

He testified that the literature identified gaps in the research because sexual predators are typically interviewed after having been convicted, at a time when their responses may be unreliable, Dennison said.

The judge said the Criminal Code of Canada provides a defence for possessing or accessing child pornography when the act has a legitimate purpose related to the administration of justice or to science, medicine, education or art and where it does not pose an undue risk of harm to persons under the age of 18.

She ruled that the trial judge did not err in finding that Mellor had no legitimate reason for having child pornography.

In finding Mellor guilty, Hearn said the man never explained why adult pornography was intermingled with the child pornography on his devices.

The trial judge held that this would be consistent with a person viewing pornography for a noneducational purpose, Dennison said.
"This is a test for Scott Morrison. This is the test he himself set when there were allegations into Victoria[n] [Labor] ... [when] a minister [Adem Somyurek] was gone by the morning, a minister was expelled from the Labor party. "Now, once again, a bit like aged care, he's saying it's not his responsibility, it's a matter for the organisational wing. Well someone needs to tell Scott Morrison that he's actually in charge of the Liberal Party, that this is a scandal [and] his assistant treasurer is in it up to his neck and his position is untenable." In a statement issued on Sunday, the party's Victorian state director, Sam McQuestin, said he would request "full and detailed" responses from the Liberal figures. "The Liberal Party takes the integrity of its membership very seriously," he said.

"The party will decide urgently on immediate actions to be taken and will determine further measures having regard to the responses received and the findings of any further investigations." Late on Sunday night, the two politicians rejected the allegations and said they would ask the department responsible for politicians' staff to review whether funds were misused. Loading Mr Sukkar rejected the allegations and said he had never directed his staff to undertake party political activities. "Every member of my team has been directed to, and expected to, obey all applicable parliamentary policies and guidelines and workplace laws," he said in a statement. "I cannot speak to the operations of other electorate offices."

Mr Andrews said "the suggestion that I would be coerced into making decisions on staffing arrangements in my electorate office by others is untrue." "Tonight's 60 Minutes program made a number of allegations which are false," Mr Andrews said in a tweet. "As 'Father of the House' my integrity and my reputation mean everything." Treasurer backs Sukkar Mr Frydenberg said he had "real concern" about the allegations against his Victorian colleagues. He said he supported Mr Sukkar to remain in his position as the department conducted its investigation. "He certainly has my support  He's rejected those allegations," Mr Frydenberg said. "As my assistant treasurer, he's done a very good job."

"I've subsequently spoken to the president of the Victorian division [Robert Clarke], the state director as well as the leader of the opposition [Michael O'Brien], and the Liberal Party will now deal with the matters internally." Finance Minister Matthias Cormann said the Victorian Liberal Party was in the best position to assess the potential wrongdoing and "deal with it". "When allegations are made ... then in the first instance the department investigates independent of government. That's what I would expect to happen," he told ABC's Radio National. "If there are allegations of inappropriate use of taxpayer resources then that ought to be investigated." Former MP says Bastiaan threatened him over euthanasia vote

Former Victorian MP Simon Ramsey said Mr Bastiaan threatened to end his political career if he did not vote against the Victorian government's assisted dying laws in 2017. In a leaked recording published by this masthead, Mr Sukkar outlined a plan to remove or shift four Victorian MPs, including Mr Ramsey, who voted for assisted dying laws. Speaking on ABC radio on Monday, Mr Ramsey said Mr Bastiaan pressured him to vote down the Andrews government bill which passed the upper house by 22 votes to 18. "During the debate, the vote was getting very close. I received a call from Marcus Bastiaan saying he would prefer my vote to vote against the bill and that if I didn't, there would be repercussions for my endorsement," he said. "I told him in no uncertain terms that I will not be threatened or cajoled by someone of his ilk.
Princess Olympia has been living it up in Greece for the past month, and today hung seaside with her family in a black bikini.

The 24-year-old  who grew up in London and completed her education in New York  flew to the Greek isles in late July for some mid-pandemic relaxation.

The heiress has been living it up on her extended European holiday and enjoying some quality time with her parents and brothers.

Must be nice: Princess Olympia has been living it up in Greece for the past month, and today hung seaside with her family in a black bikini

Sweet deal: The 24-year-old  who grew up in London and completed her education in New York  flew to the Greek isles in late July for some mid-pandemic relaxation

Love is in the air: She appears to be there with her boyfriend, Peregrine Pearson, the 25-year-old son and heir of the 4th Viscount Cowdray

'Things are getting very serious,' a friend told The Daily Mail's Richard Eden. 'He's already met the family and they love him'

She appears to have arrived in Greece in late July. After several members of the family shared snapshots of themselves at the airport, Olympia's father  Pavlos, Crown Prince of Greece  shared a photo of Olympia and her mom, Marie-Chantal, walking around a marina.

This month, she's shared several photos of the beautiful scenery, as well as moped rides and dinners out.

In addition to her parents, she appears to be spending time with her four younger brothers: Prince Constantine Alexios, 21, Prince Achileas-Andreas, 20, Prince Odysseas-Kimon, 15, and Prince Aristidis-Stavros, 12.

Today, she and Achileas-Andreas  who goes by Achi  were pictured together longing on rocks by the sea, he in swim trunks and she in a black two-piece.

Luxe life: The heiress has been living it up on her extended European holiday and enjoying some quality time with her parents and brothers

Beautiful: This month, she's shared several photos of the beautiful scenery, as well as moped rides and dinners out.

Whole fam: In addition to her parents, she appears to be spending time with her four younger brothers: Constantine Alexios, Achileas-Andreas, Odysseas-Kimon, and Aristidis-Stavros

Outdoor dining: The group has gone out to eat together

Achi just celebrated his 20th birthday in the Greek isles.

Also along for the trip is Peregrine Pearson, the 25-year-old son and heir of the 4th Viscount Cowdray, whose family has a reputed 224 million ($292.55 million) fortune  who, it was reported earlier this month, is dating Princess Olympia.

'Things are getting very serious,' a friend told The Daily Mail's Richard Eden. 'He's already met the family and they love him.'

Perry's father owns a significant chunk of the Pearson media empire as well as the 16,500-acre West Sussex estate which is home to Cowdray Park polo club, where Princes William and Harry have played.

Proud: Pavlos, Crown Prince of Greece, shared a photo of Olympia and her mom, Marie-Chantal, walking around a marina

Jet set: Olympia didn't grow up in Greece, nor does she speak the language

Meanwhile, Olympia's cousin Talita von Furstenberg, 21, has also been living it up abroad.

Earlier in the summer, the American heiress was vacationing on the Amalfi Coast with her boyfriend, Rocco Brignone, 19.

The lovebirds sunbathed in the Mediterranean, with Rocco sharing a photo of them laying out on a rented boat on the water  to which Talita commented with a heart.

In another photo, Talita poses in the countryside in a white tank top and flouncy yellow skirt, while yet another shows her waving out a window  presumably of a house the couple rented there.

In 'picture perfect Portofino,' she posed in a white bikini top and colorful cropped pants, which she accessorized with a matching hat.

At the end of July, she appeared to join her grandmother, fashion icon DVF, and her husband Barry Diller on a trip to Spain's party island of Ibiza.

Monied youth: Olympia's cousin Talita von Furstenberg, 21, had been vacationing in Europe her boyfriend, Rocco Brignone, 19

Trust fund time: The socialite showed off her fashion credentials as she and her boyfriend explored the pier in Portofino

Pretty! Calling the town 'picture perfect,' Talita shared a host of snaps from her latest summer getaway after spending lockdown in the US

Lucky lady: Other snaps from the holiday show the socialite exploring the Italian countryside on her summer getaway

How the other half lives: They then met up with her grandmother Diane von Furstenberg in Ibiza

Talita posted a couple photos of the gorgeous views in her Instagram Stories, but its her step-grandad and mega-mogul Barry who really documented their meet-up.

On Instagram, he posted several snaps of Talita, Rocco, and DVF hiking in the July heat, captioning one: 'Early evening hiking. 96.'

While the designer was dressed causally in loose clothing and a visor cap, Talita wore just a bikini and sneakers for the scenic walk.

Though Barry didn't tag the location, on Wednesday the owner of an antique shop Ibiza called Vicente Ganesha shared a quick video of DVF's visit.

Meeting each other in the Mediterranean was likely quite easy for the family, thanks to Diller's $150 million 305-foot yacht Eos.
The first lady, Aisha Buhari, has narrated how she escaped aircrash while returning from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Mrs Buhari said she travelled to the middle east country for medical treatment, and returned aboard a Nigerian Airforce plane.

"On our way back, the Nigerian Airforce Flight encountered a violent clear air turbulence which was navigated safely and professionally by the Captain and crew of the Flight," she tweeted Friday evening.

It is not clear what Mrs Buhari was treated for, but she said in her posts on Twitter that she "was well now and fully recovered" and had since returned to the country.

She praised the courage and professionalism of the captain and his crew, and spoke of the quality of maintenance of the Airforce's fleet.

"I want to commend and appreciate the courage and professionalism of the Captain and his crew, the wonderful gallant service men and women of the entire Nigerian Airforce for their dedication to duty and the quality of maintainance of its Fleet," she wrote.

Members of the first family, including President Muhammadu Buhari, and their close relatives regularly travel outside the country for medical reasons.

In his first term in office, Mr Buhari spent several months in London where he received medical treatment.

The trips, often paid for by the government, are usually met with criticisms, with many Nigerians urging the country's political leaders to fix the nation's broken health system and save cost by patronising them.

In her tweets, Mrs Buhari urged healthcare providers in the country to apply for the federal government's credit support.

"I recall hosting the private healthcare Providers earlier in the year and we had a very productive engagement where the issue of building the capacity of Nigeria health sector was the major focus, and funding was discovered to be the major challenge," she wrote.

"I therefore call on the healthcare providers to take the advantage of the Federal Government's initiative through the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) guidelines for the operation of NGN100 Billion Credit Support for the Healthcare Sector as was released recently contained in a circular dated March 25, 2020 to the Commercial Banks.

"This will no doubt help in building and expanding the capacity of the Nigerian health sector and ultimately reduce medical trips and tourism outside the Country."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 12:14:56|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Monday proposed synergizing the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation with the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor.

The proposal came as Li attended the third Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) leaders' meeting via video link in Beijing.

Li said greater synergy between the LMC and the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, which traverses western China and connects Southeast Asia with the Eurasian continent, would lead to a number of positive outcomes.

It will make trade routes more convenient and enable the leveraging of more resources from western and southwestern China and other ASEAN countries, and thus channel more inputs to the Mekong countries. This will help optimize the allocation of resources, keep industrial and supply chains stable and spur coordinated development, the premier said.

"China is ready to work with the five Mekong countries to implement the joint statement issued at this meeting and inject new impetus into regional development," he added. Enditem
Police shot a Black man in the back multiple times in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as his three sons watched on Sunday, his familys lawyer said, sparking a night of sometimes-violent unrest and prompting the governor to deploy the National Guard.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers also called a special legislative session to take up a package of bills aimed at addressing problems with law enforcement following the shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake late on Sunday afternoon.

After being rushed to a hospital, Blake was out of surgery and in stable condition, his father told news media on Monday.

In a video taken by a bystander across the street from the shooting, Blake can be seen walking toward the drivers side of a gray SUV followed by two officers with their guns drawn at his back. Seven gunshot sounds can be heard as Blake, who appears to be unarmed, opens the car door, and a woman nearby jumps up and down in disbelief.

It was unknown whether the officers saw something inside the vehicle to justify deadly force. It was also not clear whether one or both officers fired their weapons.

Crowds gathered at the scene, then set fires and threw bricks and Molotov cocktails at police, prompting authorities to close public buildings. Activists said they were organizing another night of demonstrations for Tuesday night.

Evers, a Democrat, condemned what he called the excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites" and announced the special session next Monday for legislators to consider bills introduced months ago to improve police accountability and eliminate dangerous practices.

We must rise to this movement and this moment and meet it with our empathy, our humanity and a fierce commitment to disrupt the cycle of systemic racism and bias that devastates Black families and communities," Evers said in a public address.

Pete Deates, president of the citys police union, the Kenosha Professional Police Association, said Evers was wholly irresponsible" for rushing to judgment and asked the public to wait until all facts are known.

The shooting occurred three months after the death of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis police custody sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and structural racism in the United States.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrat seeking to defeat Republican President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 election, on Monday called for the officers to be held accountable.

And this morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force," Biden said in a statement. These shots pierce the soul of our nation."

CROWDS MARCH

About 125 members of the Wisconsin National Guard were expected to be deployed on Monday to Kenosha, a city of around 100,000 people on Lake Michigan about 65 miles (100 km) north of Chicago, after local officials asked Evers for their help.

Clyde McLemore, a member of a nearby chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement, said he was organizing a 2-1/2-mile (4-km) march on Monday from Blakes house to the courthouse in Kenosha, which authorities closed due to the unrest.

This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they (protesters) know that this officer has been fired," said Whitney Cabal, one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Kenosha. There was no reason for seven shots to be fired into this mans back while he had three kids in the car."

The shooting occurred around 5 p.m. on Sunday as officers were responding to what they termed a domestic incident." Police immediately took the victim to a hospital, according to a Kenosha Police Department statement. Authorities gave no further explanation as to what led to the shooting.

Ben Crump, who said the Blake family had retained him and who has represented George Floyds family, said in a statement that Blake had been trying to de-escalate a domestic incident when the officers first shot him with a taser gun.

As he was walking away to check on his children, police fired their weapons several times into his back at point blank range. Blakes three sons were only a few feet away and witnessed police shoot their father," Crump said.

The officers involved in the shooting have been placed on administrative leave while the investigation is underway, the Wisconsin Department of Justice said early on Monday, which is standard procedure in an officer-involved shooting.

(additional reporting by Ann Maria Shibu in Bengaluru and Trevor Hunnicutt in New York; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Jonathan Oatis)

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
You can't miss Kristina Williamson and her goldendoodle in the 2020 Jeep Wrangler.

"Maverick is my copilot," said Williamson, co-host of "Broadway & Krissy in the Morning" on New Country 93.1 FM in Detroit that airs weekdays from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m.

"I have the doors and top off the Jeep 24/7. He just sits in my passenger seat and watches people go by," she said. "Everyone smiles at him at stoplights. It's awesome during a pandemic because we could all use an easy laugh right now, and he brightens up every face that catches him when were on our way to adventure.

Getting her first dog in April was "kind of perfect," she said.

Kristina Williamson hugs her dog Maverick, who was adopted in April 2020 during the coronavirus quarantine. They ride together in her 2020 Jeep Wrangler, named one of the top vehicles for dog owners by Autotrader.com.

Maverick is a quarantine puppy. He arrived just a few weeks after the Jeep.

"The couch is ripped up. The rug is all ripped up that you can barely afford anyway because you're on your own. I love the dog but everything is destroyed. I was going to put him in training but then COVID happened. I'm trying to figure this out," said Williamson, 28, a New Jersey native who moved to Michigan for her dream job a year ago.

"Girl, this is probably the biggest challenge I've ever had  but it's the best challenge I've ever taken on, raising my best friend," she said. "The Wrangler has brought us together. It has bonded us, for sure."

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And the other 9 best ...

The 2020 Jeep Wrangler like the one Williamson now owns made the Top 10 list of vehicles recommended for dog lovers by Autotrader.com, a respected online marketplace for car buyers and sellers.

Our dogs are our family and we want to make them part of the action, Jim Morrison, head of the Jeep brand, FCA-North America, told the Free Press. There is nothing like rolling through the backcountry in the Jeep Wrangler with our four-legged friends."

Story continues

Jim Morrison, head of the Jeep brand for FCA - North America, said, "Our dogs are our family and we want to make them part of the action." His brown dog, Daisy, is a rescue from Kentucky. His black and white dog, Turbo, is a rescue from Ontario. This image was provided on Sunday, August 23, 2020.

Morrison provided an image of his rescue dogs Daisy and Turbo happily hanging out on the seats of his Jeep in the afternoon sunshine.

The just-released new annual list for dog lovers, which offers a range of vehicle sizes, prices, pet-friendly design features and pet-friendly accessories, recommends, in no particular order:

2020 Audi Q5

2020 Chrysler Pacifica

2020 Honda Fit

2020 Hyundai Kona

2020 Jeep Wrangler

2020 Kia Soul

2020 Subaru Outback

2020 Tesla Model Y

2021 Toyota Sienna

2020 Volvo V60

These vehicles include large rear doors, low cargo floors, dog safety harnesses and even special technology to accommodate dogs, as is the case with Tesla.

"This is a feature-driven list," said Brian Moody, executive editor at Autotrader. "The Ford F-150 is a great truck. But we didn't come upon anything compelling that said, 'Hey, dog owners, this feature is for you' the same way we did with other types of vehicles. In addition, many pet safety experts say pickups aren't the best way to transport your family pet.'"

In addition to the Wrangler, Fiat Chrysler builds a popular van that made the list, too.

'Dog mode' technology

Meanwhile, Moody said Volvo and Subaru go "above and beyond" with efforts to impress dog owners. He pointed to the built-in look and feel of features such as partitions, separations and cages, available with Volvo vehicles. Volvo sets a gold standard.

"When you crate your dog, it's actually for safety reasons. And many times they like to be crated," Moody said. "Subaru has a robust pet adoption program, they give to those causes regularly. That's more than horsepower and harnesses. We're talking about life."

Dog owners have a "deep vibe" and they're serious about vehicle selection, said Moody, who personally curates the list. "I don't picture people taking their Jeep off road and taking their cat along for the ride. It's a dog thing. And Chrysler and Jeep do a great job of producing accessories that match the vehicle with look and feel."

Meanwhile, Tesla has a "dog mode" that allows owners to lock their pets in the car, leave the vehicle switched on to run heat or air-conditioning, and a message on the big screen inside the vehicle says, " 'Don't worry. My owner knows I'm here and the cabin temperature is set to 68 degrees,' " Moody said. "That's pretty spectacular."

Dogs find new homes

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to inspire cautionary behavior, more and more people are spending time in cars rather than in planes or trains.

Another trend is the increased adoption of dogs, especially big dogs.

"We're seeing a lot of younger people in their 20s and 30s adopting dogs to go camping and hiking," said Debbie Thurman, manager of the Michigan Anti-Cruelty Society in Detroit. "Bigger dogs that didn't used to be adopted out or adopted as quickly, and dogs that had behavior issues. They're the dogs that were hyper. Now people want dogs that are active and out running around."

Brinkley arrived at the Michigan Anti-Cruelty Society in Detroit four years ago. He would flop to the ground at the sight of a raised hand and never jump. "As happens so many times, we become what we call 'Foster Failures' because we fall so deeply in love we can't part with them, one of the greatest experiences one can hope to have," said Debbie Thurman, shelter manager. This photo was taken on Feb. 20, 2020 while he slept on his teddy bear en route to work.

The shelter now has visitors scour choices online and meetings with potential adoptive families are held outdoors, Thurman explained there is no obligation to take an animal and if things don't work out, animals may be returned.

"We want things to work out," she said. "We have a behaviorologist to match dogs with families. We're seeing a lot of people off work because of COVID. People are taking more time; they're home with the family and kids. I think shelters all over the United States are emptier than they ever were."

'You need a dog in your life'

Michigan car dealer Thad Szott sees personally the surge in dog ownership, he said.

He sells Ford, Dodge and Ram plus Jeep, Chrysler and Toyota. And he hears customers talk about space demands, pet needs and long car trips.

"It may be surprising that there are a lot of dog people that own Toyotas even though they're not as well known as, say, Jeep. But the Sienna minivan, they have so much crazy space," Szott said. "You put it next to a full-size SUV and the way minivans are designed now, they can fit way more stuff. You look and think, there's no way. It doesn't make sense. But the minivan has storage in the floor and you can just load like crazy. People have stuff, dude. Everybody has so much stuff."

Thad Szott takes a break from selling cars to fish on Otsego Lake in Gaylord, Michigan with his dog Nicki on Saturday, August 22, 2020. He sees more and more customers shopping for vehicles to carry dogs.

Heading into six months of COVID-19 restrictions inspired people to spend more time away from others, social distancing in faraway places.

"I constantly hear, 'We need more room because our dogs go with us' or 'We need more room because we're taking our dogs up north,' " he said. "We sell more Jeep Wrangler four-doors to people that have dogs because there's so much space. Dog people seem to be a little happier. You need a dog in your life, dude."

Tesla has dog-safety features including a screen that leaves a message when dogs are left in the heated or air-conditioned vehicle. The 2020 Tesla Model Y is among the Top 10 best vehicles for dog lovers, according to Autotrader.

Editor's note: A cat person wrote this story. Contact Phoebe Wall Howard at 313-222-6512 or phoward@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @phoebesaid. Sign up for our autos newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: International Dog Day: Top cars for pet owners include surprises
A talented 14-year-old boy was killed when he was hit by a speedboat while snorkelling during a family holiday around the world.

Young musician Eddie Jarman had been checking the anchor of his family's yacht off the coast of Tahiti in Mo'orea with his family when he was hit by the boat on August 9.

His family desperately tried to save him but his injuries were fatal.

His mother, Barbara, father, Harry, and sister, Amelie, 13, have now returned to the UK following the 'incredibly traumatic' incident earlier this month.

Eddie Jarman, 14, (pictured) was killed when he was hit by a speedboat while snorkelling on a family holiday around the world

Hauru Point, Mo'orea, Society Islands, in the French Polynesia, where ian Eddie Jarman had been checking the anchor of his family's yacht when he was hit by the boat

Sussex teenager Eddie Jarman pictured with his father Harry Jarman, sister Amelie and mother Barbara Genda

The family set off on their two-year trip in 2018 after selling their Sussex home and buying a yacht to sail the world.

They have now launched a campaign to raise 100,000 to set up the Eddie Jarman Young Musicians Charity to help other young music lovers.

Eddie, who was due to start a scholarship in January 2021 at Hurstpierpoint College in Sussex, played piano, violin and double bass to a high standard.

The campaign has already generated more than 33,000.

In a statement, the family said: 'Our sailing boat has been our ''live aboard home'' for the past 18 months, nine of which we have spent in French Polynesia, mainly due to Covid travel restrictions.

'The sailing community has been amazing in supporting us throughout this incredibly traumatic time.

Talented musician Eddie Jarman, pictured, died after he was struck by a speedboat while snorkeling near his family's yacht

'Cremation is not possible locally and we cannot leave our boy behind in a foreign country, hence we must repatriate his body for a burial back in England.

'Unfortunately we were not covered for the imminent and substantial costs of international repatriation of Eddie's body, but amazingly generous people from around the world, sailors, dreamers, good souls, family and friends have supported us and enabled us to bring Eddie home for burial, though Covid makes the funeral arrangements very challenging.

'Eddie had an amazing zest for life, a lovely boy and so bright with talent and kindness, who loved adventure and the sea.

'We were blessed with his musical talent, he played expertly the piano, violin and a double bass, never happier than listening to his favourite jazz and Bossa Nova tracks.

'Mature well over his 14 years, he has made an indelible mark on everyone he has met.

'In memory of his life and his love for music we are setting up a trust fund which will fund music and school tuition for talented youngsters. Eddie's former headmaster has kindly agreed to be a trustee.

'We are immensely grateful for any and all donations made to help us bring Eddie home for burial to his village where he grew up.

He had been checking the anchor of his family's yacht off the coast of Tahiti in Mo'orea with his family when he was hit by the boat on August 9

'We have raised more than we needed to cover the costs so all monies over and above what's strictly required to repatriate him home for burial will be donated to Eddie Jarman Young Musicians Trust Fund.

'The trust will also receive the accident monetary compensation that we may eventually receive.

'To aid the fund further we will organise various auctions including offering some of his possessions and instruments, as well as making a recording of his favourite piano and violin pieces, which he played.

The family set off on their two-year trip in 2018 after selling their Sussex home and buying a yacht to sail the world. Pictured is Mo'orea

The music trust fund will support the specialist music tuition and instrument hire and/or purchase for young and musically talented and dedicated children of modest and disadvantaged means. The funding will support children living in the UK and French Polynesia to spread the love of music in Eddie's name.'

Urging people to support the campaign, Eddie's mother, Barbara Genda, said: 'Eddie loved music more than anything.

'He often said that he could not imagine living without music, either playing it or listening to it.

'In his memory let other children enjoy music as much as he has in his short but wonderful life.'

The family plan to lay his body to rest in the Sussex village of West Hoathly where he grew up.

They set sail from Lanzarote to the Caribbean early last year, then cruised the Atlantic through Aruba, Columbia and Panama. They explored Ecuador, the Galapagos Islands and French Polynesia.
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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 23:32:34|Editor: huaxia

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MAPUTO, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Airports in Mozambique recorded a revenue loss of 22 million U.S. dollars due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected all its sources of income, said the country's Minister of Transport and Communications Janfar Abdulai on Monday.

The sources include overflight and landing fees and other non-aeronautical charges, the minister announced in Maputo during the opening of a meeting with the airports' management company to evaluate its performance.

Airports across the country have their international flights cancelled, domestic flights reduced to more than half, with catering services closed and convenient shops running at low capacity, said the minister.

"The government wants to ensure that all is being done for the restoration of aviation activity in our country, and there are perspectives for concrete measures for the feasibility of the sector which is fundamental to restore tourism in the country," said Abdulai.

The minister also praised the company for the creativity in its management to guarantee that the airports remain functional to respond to the gradual resumption of the economy despite the challenges imposed by COVID-19.

In 2019, Mozambican airports handled 17,000 tons of cargo and provided services to 2.2 million passengers. Enditem
With Chinese Navy positioning itself for dominance in the Indian Ocean through strings of ports in Myanmar, Pakistan and Iran, India is planning rapid infrastructure upgrade in its Island territories to ensure that there is no restriction on navigation or a replay of the South China Sea in Indian backyard.

According to top military officials, India will upgrade the airstrip at INS Kohassa, Shibpur in north Andamans and at the Campbell strip at Nicobar into full-fledged fighter bases. The airstrip at Agatti, in Lakshadweep will also be upgraded for military operations to secure both the Bay of Bengal upto Malacca Straits and Arabian Sea up to Gulf of Aden.

The two Island territories will be like the new aircraft carriers for India, extending the navys reach in the region far from the mainland. Both the Islands sit on the busiest sea lanes of the world with more than half the world trade going through this route, said a tri-service commander.

Lakshadweep sits on the Nine Degree Channel, so named because it lies on the 9-degree line of Latitude, north of the equator. The Andamans and Nicobar Islands will allow the navy to dominate the Six Degree and Ten Degree Channels towards Southeast Asia and North Asia.

Officials said the infrastructure upgrade had also acquired urgency due to efforts by China, much of it backroom, to get Thailand to start work on the Thai Canal aka Kra Canal that has been on the drawing board for the last 70 years. The canal has been proposed to slice through the Malay peninsula some 800 km south of Bangkok and connect the Gulf of Thailand with the Andaman Sea.

It would let ships bypass the choked Malacca Strait, the main shipping channel between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean that has become the worlds busiest trade route. For ships passing between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, it would shorten the distance by at least 1,200 km.

There is no unanimity in Indias strategic community on the approach to the Kra canal. One view is that the canal, promoted by China under its Belt and Road Initiative, would pose a risk to Indias long-term maritime security but there is an influential section that sees the construction of the Thai Canal as inevitable given the money China is believed to be throwing at powerful elements in Bangkok.

Like when Thailand was to decide on setting up an ad-hoc committee to carry out a study earlier this year, there were raised eyebrows at how Thailands fragmented political class demonstrated unprecedented unity in supporting the move. Even parties that are known to be anti-China had ended up supporting the canal. The Thai King, however, is still opposed to the Kra Canal.

National security planners believe that India should capitalise on the opportunity - bundled with its own set of challenges - that the Kra Canal offers and offer transhipment ports to vessels bound for either Malacca or Kra Canal. As of now, ships wait for their turn at Sri Lankan ports, earning Colombo precious foreign exchange as well as leverage.

Building pressure on China USS Ronald Regan - The US Navys aircraft carrier Ronald Regan and its strike group recently returned to the South China Sea to carry out air operations to demonstrate, what the navy called, the US enduring commitment to allies and partners. B-2 Bombers - The US Air Force has deployed three B-2 Spirit Stealth Bombers to its naval facility in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The heavy strategic bomber has the ability to deliver lethal, ready, long-range strike options. 66 F-16 jets for Taiwan - Taiwan has signed a pact to buy 66 latest F-16s from the United States, the first sale of advanced fighter jets to the island since then US President George Bush cleared 150 F-16s in 1992.

It is argued that the infrastructure upgrade in the island territories would serve twin objectives: one, enable India to maximise the economic gains as well as raise its military presence in the Indian Ocean Region.

The continuing focus on the infrastructure upgrade also comes against the backdrop of Chinas aggressive moves in Ladakh and its reluctance to restore status quo ante. The Chinese aggression has not only prompted New Delhi to reinforce force deployment along hotspots along the LAC but also in the high seas.

The Indian Navy is on high alert from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Strait in the context of the standoff with China. The instructions to the navy are clear: That they should be prepared for military action if China mounts an attack along the Line of Actual Control, people familiar with the matter said.

Indian military officials stressed that the upgradation of air bases in the Island territories would ensure that Chinas Peoples Liberation Army Navy under its President and commander in chief Xi Jinping, does not dominate the area to extract leverage from all countries in the region.

Also Read: Military option on table if talks fail: CDS General Rawat on China

For now, the United States earlier this month flew in its three B-2 stealth bombers to the naval support facility in Diego Garcia in the south Indian Ocean to support the Pacific Air Forces Bomber Task Force to deter China from flexing its muscles in the region. Around the same time, the US decided to sell 66 new American-made F-16 fighter jets in the biggest arms sale to the island, a democracy of 24 million people that Beijing claims to be an inseparable part of its territory.

A few days later, the United States also moved aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan and its strike group for maritime air defence operations to the restive South China Sea. The US Navy said the training said the Carrier Strike Group participated in cooperative sea drills with the Air Forces B-1B Lancer to improve joint readiness response capabilities. The US Navy said the units conducted air-to-air operations, combat search and rescue drills and air defence exercises, according to the Navy.

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Several protesters and a person who illegally entered a secure area were arrested in the hours before North Carolinas scaled-back share of the Republican National Convention on Monday, local police said, noting that the event itself was conducted without disruption.

Hours later, after a group of demonstrators gathered in a park, police said they used pepper spray and arrested a protester who was accused of assaulting a woman and an officer. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department also said on Twitter that protesters blocked traffic after Charlotte convention activities wrapped up. News footage showed dozens marching after dark.

Earlier in the day, the streets outside of the Charlotte Convention Center were marked by heavy security and little foot traffic as about 300 delegates met inside for several hours to formally renominate President Donald Trump. The event had once been expected to attract thousands to the city before the COVID-19 pandemic altered plans. Now, most of the conventions prime-time speakers are expected to deliver their remarks from Washington and elsewhere to a largely virtual audience.

By Monday afternoon, work crews were dismantling the barriers and other security equipment to return the area to normal foot and vehicle traffic. After the citys portion of the convention ended, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police department said in a news release that Mondays delegate meeting had been free of disruption.

Among the small group of protesters outside the convention hall during the day was Mosie Boyd, who stood in Charlottes main business district with a sign that said, Team Joes Got True Grit, in a nod to Trumps Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.

Im here to support democracy and our liberties and our freedom. I believe the United States of America and the democracy weve known are under attack, said Boyd, who described herself as an enthusiastic Biden supporter.

When Kris Newton heard Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence would be in Charlotte, he decided to show up and protest.

The things that have been put in place over the last four years have taken this country in an awful place, he said.

A small number of Trump supporters also gathered outside the security perimeter while the delegates were meeting during the day.

I thought he would do the things that hes said hes done, and it seems like I was right so Im here because this is an important election, Ken Lane said.

Dana Knox proudly waved her Trump 2020 flag as a steady stream of traffic passed by in Uptown Charlotte.

Shes ready for Election Day but doesnt want to get overconfident.

No, you never say Trumps got it in the bag, ever. Thats why were out here, were out here to show support, Knox said.

Before the renomination rollcall vote began, RNC security officials said a man was arrested Monday morning after entering the security perimeter outside the convention centre but that he didnt disrupt any events or encounter any delegates. Police later said the suspect had jumped a short fence along the citys light rail line but that they dont believe his motive was to interfere with the RNC. He was charged with trespassing and resisting or obstructing an officer.

On Sunday night, five protesters were arrested during demonstrations that drew at least 75 protesters to the business district and the area outside the hotel where delegates were staying, police said. Just before midnight, police said demonstrators began to move barricades, construction cones and trash cans to block roads. While protesters were marching away from the area, they surrounded a pickup truck that was trying to pass through the crowd, authorities said. Police had also made several arrests each on Friday and Saturday night. No serious injuries were reported.
Main opposition party rejects her request to be allowed to step down, after a rare challenge to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Indian politician Sonia Gandhi will continue to lead the main opposition Congress as its interim president, the party said following a stormy seven-hour meeting of its top leaders in the capital, New Delhi.

The CWC [Congress Working Committee] unanimously requests Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the Indian National Congress until such time as circumstances will permit an AICC [All India Congress Committee] session to be convened, the party tweeted on Monday.

In dramatic developments during the Congress meeting, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi had asked the party to relieve her from the duty of party president and look for a replacement, local media reports said.

Her offer to quit came after almost two dozen Congress leaders called for better decision-making in the party.

Two party sources said the signatories to the letter expected the Gandhi family to either play a proactive role or step down, adding that more than 300 regional Congress politicians also supported the letter.

In the light of the above deliberations and conclusions, the CWC unanimously requests Smt. Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the Indian National Congress until such time as circumstances will permit an AICC session to be convened: Shri @kcvenugopalmp  Congress (@INCIndia) August 24, 2020

It was a rare challenge to the Nehru-Gandhi family, which produced three Indian prime ministers and has dominated the party for much of the countrys independent history.

Sonia Gandhi, 73, is the widow of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Their parliamentarian son Rahul Gandhi had also served as the Congress president.

However, towards the end of Mondays meeting, Sonia Gandhis offer to resign was rejected by the CWC, which wanted Gandhi and her son, Rahul, to remain in control.

The CWC, reflecting the overwhelming view and desire of the rank and file of the Congress, unanimously resolved to strengthen the hands of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi in every possible way, KC Venugopal, a Congress legislator, told a news conference.

It was not clear whether an election would take place but Congress politicians hope to persuade Rahul Gandhi to take up the post, even though the 50-year-leader has appeared reluctant on returning as party chief.

In her closing remarks, Sonia Gandhi is reported to have asked the party to move on and that she held no ill will towards the leaders who had signed the letter of dissent.

We are a large family, we have differences on many occasions but in the end, we come together as one. The need of the hour is to fight for the cause of the people and forces that are failing this country, she told her party, according to a news briefing addressed by a Congress spokesman.

In recent years, Prime Minister Narendra Modis Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has dealt the Congress party consecutive defeats in the national polls in 2014 and 2019.

While the Congress managed to win a mere 44-seats in the 543-member parliament in 2014, last year polls did not see any revival in its fortunes and the party secured just 52 seats.

The party now controls just a handful of Indias 28 states.
Syracuse, N.Y. -- The Syracuse City School District has decided to delay in-person instruction until later this fall, following concerns from both teachers and parents.

All 20,000 students in the city school district will learn online until Oct. 2, board members decided Monday following a recommendation from Superintendent Jaime Alicea.

In-person learning would tentatively start Oct. 5 for families that chose a hybrid schedule.

The decision comes following surveys of both parents and teachers: Half of parents said they planned to keep their children home to learn online instead of sending them to school for two days of in-person hybrid learning. And 75% of teachers and staff told the district they did not want to return to in-person instruction because of concerns about safety.

Alicea told school board members that the Oct. 5 date for a return to in-person school was not set in stone. The district would take a look at county and statewide data about Covid-19 infections in late September and make a decision then.

While the hybrid model we had initially planned would have allowed for a safe and healthy opening, it is imperative that everyone feels comfortable within the learning and work environment, which is why we have decided to begin the school year virtually, Alicea said in a statement following the vote. We will continue to work with all of our stakeholders to address concerns and questions as they come up.

That date is when the district would return to its plan for hybrid instruction for those children whose parents selected it. Students in grades preK-8 would go to school two days a week and learn online at home for three days a week. High school students had been told that they would be remote until January, but the district has since said they may have an option to go one day a week when the hybrid schedule begins.

The Syracuse Teachers Association voted earlier this month to ask the district to delay in-person instruction until the end of the first marking period in November.

Tonight, union president Bill Scott said the Oct. 5 start date was a good middle ground.

The union has given the district a stack of questions that still need to be answered before teachers feel comfortable returning to school. Those range from how to handle sick kids to which buildings could accommodate the Merv-13 filters recommended by the state.

The delay gives the district time to find those answers and teachers more time to prepare for an in-person start, Scott said.

Tonight is a good example of what happens when both sides listen, Scott said.

Teachers in city school districts across the state have asked their districts to delay in-person education. Several have delayed including Auburn, Rochester, Binghamton, Ithaca and Rome.

At tonights meeting, Alicea said he would give the board more information about the district plan for virtual education at a Wednesday meeting.

Are you a teacher or parent who wants to talk about your back-to-school plans? Contact reporter Marnie Eisenstadt anytime: email | Twitter| Facebook |cell 315-470-2246
GETTYSBURG, Pa., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- OPEN MINDS announces that Sigmund Software LLC has signed on as a Bronze Partner for The 2020 OPEN MINDS Executive Institute Series.

Sigmund Software LLC will be exhibiting at OPEN MINDS' upcoming events, including The 2020 OPEN MINDS Management Best Practices Institute in August and The 2021 OPEN MINDS Technology & Analytics Institute in March. They also will be hosting a Product Theatre Session at The 2021 OPEN MINDS Technology and Analytics Institute on March 8 through March 11, 2021.

"Since 2004, Sigmund Software's primary focus has been providing our clients with improved workflow procedures and positive patient outcomes," says Philip Turner, Sigmund Software's President and Chief Executive Officer. "We have leveraged our extensive behavioral health background and software development expertise to create an innovative platform that is tailor-made for behavioral health. Our values and mission align closely with OPEN MINDS in that we continuously strive to enhance and expand digital access, clinical tools and support resources through practice virtualization and connected care." Mr. Turner continues, "We use our technology to improve availability of services and lower the cost curve. We are looking forward to connecting and engaging with the diverse audience at OPEN MINDS."

"OPEN MINDS is excited to partner with Sigmund Software LLC for this year's executive education events," said Monica E. Oss, chief executive officer of OPEN MINDS. "Our attendees look forward to learning how highly-ranked EHR solutions can offer excellent levels of safety and efficiency, which can ultimately improve patient outcomes."

As part of their bronze-level partnership, Sigmund Software LLC also will be an underwriting sponsor of all five of OPEN MINDS upcoming executive institutes, including:

The 2020 OPEN MINDS Management Best Practices Institute, August 25-27, 2020 , Now Virtual: http://management.openminds.com/

The 2020 OPEN MINDS Executive Leadership Retreat, October 27-29, 2020 , Gettysburg , Pennsylvania: http://leadership.openminds.com/

The 2021 OPEN MINDS Performance Management Institute, February 13-14, 2021 , Clearwater Beach , Florida: https://performance.openminds.com/

The 2021 OPEN MINDS Technology & Analytics Institute, March 8-11, 2021 , Las Vegas , Nevada: https://technology.openminds.com/

The 2020 OPEN MINDS Strategy & Innovation Institute, June 15-16, 2021 , New Orleans , Louisiana: https://strategy.openminds.com/

About Sigmund Software LLC

Sigmund Software develops, distributes, and supports Electronic Health Record (EHR) software for the Behavioral Health and Addiction Treatment community. We leverage our extensive Behavioral Health background and software development expertise to enable our customers to provide a safer and more efficient environment for improved patient outcomes.

Our vision is to improve and streamline treatment practices and industry cost structures through continued development of innovative, consumer-centric products with unparalleled customer service and support. Better outcomes start with Sigmund.

For over a decade, Sigmund software has been used by some of the most technologically advanced organizations in the country, spanning both the public and private sectors.

In addition to fully supporting all electronic health record feature requirements, Sigmund's enterprise platform (AURA) offers a comprehensive suite of specialized features that span Business Development & CRM, Intake, Compliance, Workflow, Outcomes, Practice Management, Revenue Cycle Management, Analytics, and Facility & Staff Management.

Learn more about how Sigmund Software LLC is leading the way in the EHR industry. Visit sigmundsoftware.com, call 1-800-448-6975, follow us on our Sigmund Software Blog, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter, like us on Facebook or visit us on YouTube.

Media Contact

For more information or media inquiries, contact Meredith Karcher, Sigmund Software LLC, at 1-800-448-6975 ext. 5609, or [email protected].

About OPEN MINDS

OPEN MINDS is an award-winning information source, executive education provider, and business solutions firm specializing in the domains of health and human services serving consumers with chronic conditions and complex support needs. For thirty years, we've been pioneers for change  helping organizations implement the transformational business practices they need to succeed in an evolving market with new reimbursement, competition, policies and regulations.

OPEN MINDS is powered by a national team of experienced executives and subject matter experts with specific expertise and experience in nine key market areas  mental health, addictions, chronic conditions, autism and intellectual/developmental disabilities, long-term care, children's services, social services, juvenile justice, and corrections health care. Our mission is to improve the quality of care for consumers with complex support needs by improving the effectiveness of those serving them  provider organizations, payer and insurance organizations, government agencies, pharmaceutical organizations, and technology firms. Learn more at www.openminds.com.

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The outcry over Turkeys continued disruption of potable water supplies to the Hasakeh region of northeast Syria is growing louder. Humanitarian aid agencies and officials in the autonomous administration in northeast Syria say that Turkey is putting hundreds of thousands of lives at risk through its actions in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and soaring summer temperatures.

Some 89 civil society organizations noted in a statement published today that Turkey and its Sunni rebel proxies had once again cut off the supply of water from the Alok pumping station near Ras al-Ain on Aug. 13. The station provides drinking water for around 800,000 residents and is also the main source of water for tankers supplying potable water to tens of thousands of internally displaced Syrians and Islamic State prisoners and their families. It was the eighth such stoppage since Turkey invaded Ras al-Ain in the wake of its military assault against US-backed Kurdish forces controlling the area in October 2019. Alok was rendered inoperable during the Turkish invasion and service has been only partially restored.

Sporadic water forced the population of Syrias northeast to rely on unsafe alternatives, endangering their lives on top of their fight against COVID-19, the statement read. Suspending the Alok water station puts the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at risk, since washing hands with water and [soap] is essential to protect themselves against the pandemic, the statement read.

At least 20 people have died as a result of the novel coronavirus in the Kurdish-administered area. There are 294 active cases, according to the Rojava Information Center, a research organization that publishes regular reports on northeast Syria. There is mounting worry about the pandemic spiraling out of control. The London School of Economics predicted in a recent study that the number of cases nationwide could reach two million by the end of August.

Nushin Ibrahim, a 22-year-old woman in Hasakeh city contacted by Al-Monitor through the Rojava Information Center, said, We havent had water for the past 25 days. In this situation, with the virus spreading and the water cut off, we are unable to take any precautions against the coronavirus. The media tells us that we have to wash our hands every half an hour, but when water is unavailable this makes it very hard.

Ahmed al-Khelil, another resident of Hasakeh city, said, We dont have drinking water or even any water. The lack of water creates both health and psychological problems. Water is a basic human right. But we are struggling to find water because its very expensive to purchase, and thats if you actually find someone who is willing to sell it.

The autonomous administration accuses Turkey of weaponizing water as a means of forcing it to supply electricity to the territory covering 1,100 square kilometers (680 square miles) in northeast Syria currently under Turkish control. If Turkey were to have its way, people living under Kurdish rule would receive comparatively less power as a means to help Turkey placate Syrians living under its own occupation. The stoppages are seen as part of a broader Turkish effort to suffocate the Kurdish-dominated autonomous administration through a mix of political, economic and military pressure. Even as it starves the area of water, Turkey has kept up its attacks against Syrian Kurdish forces with artillery strikes and armed drones.

Sinam Mohammed, the Washington representative of the autonomous administrations political arm, the Syrian Democratic Council, told Al-Monitor that that the administration had held an urgent meeting with American diplomats in the region about the water cuts and had called upon the United States to impress upon Turkey that its actions are wrong and must be stopped without delay for the sake of more than three quarters of a million innocent Syrian citizens. Mohammed said the meeting took place on Aug. 22. She said US officials had pledged to discuss the matter with Turkey "and try to solve the problem. Turkey denies the accusations. The State Department did not respond to Al-Monitors request for comment.

Jim Jeffrey, the United States envoy for Syria engagement, is known to have raised the issue in private meetings with his Turkish counterparts numerous times. But Washington has yet to formally condemn Turkey for the stoppage. Jeffrey is expected to travel to Ankara Thursday after taking part in UN-sponsored talks between members of the Syrian opposition and representatives of the Syrian government that kicked off in Geneva today. The Democratic Union Party, which is part of the autonomous administration, remains unrepresented at the talks because Turkey opposes its presence.

Russia, which has been mediating between Turkey and the autonomous administration, is either unable or unwilling to get Ankara to change its stance on the water issue.

The central government in Damascus has offered the Kurds some rare support. The permanent representative of Syria to the United Nations, Bashar al-Jaafari, said in a telephone call with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, The Turkish aggressive behavior to cut off drinking water to Hasakeh is a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Joseph Lahdo, the co-chair of the local administration and municipalities authority in northeast Syria, said emergency measures were underway to address the water shortage. They include digging 100 wells connected to a redistribution center in Khirbat Hammah northwest of Hasakeh. But Lahdo said this would solve only 50% of the problem.

The flow from Alok reportedly resumed yesterday after the autonomous administration cut off electricity to the Turkish-held zone as a last resort. But the water has yet to reach residential areas in Hasakeh city, said Thomas McClure, a researcher at the Rojava Information Center.

Even before [Aug.] 13 many neighborhoods were without water for one or two months because the water supply is so low, McClure told Al-Monitor.

In an Aug. 21 letter addressed to Guterres, the Damascus-based head of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church called Turkeys actions a crime against humanity.

Ignatius Aphrem II said, Using water as a weapon  which is not the first time  is a barbaric act and a flagrant violation of fundamental human rights. Yet, there has been no response form the international community to this atrocity despite the constant appeal of the people of the region.
The Vietnamese property market is expected to slow down, with prices starting to drop by the end of this year and hitting the bottom by mid-2021, creating opportunities for home buyers sitting on cash, experts have forecast.

The countrys property market is expected to slow down with prices starting to drop by the end of this year and hitting the bottom by mid-2021.

Housing prices will begin to plummet by the end of this year and bottom out by mid-2021 when the [COVID-19] pandemic has impacted almost every sector, especially the housing market, Tran Khanh Quang, general director of Viet An Hoa Company, said.

Since the second wave of the pandemic began late last month, investors confidence has once again weakened as property sales dived and incomes were hit hard.

"Investors have to wait and observe the market," he said.

The financial market has faced fluctuations since the beginning of the year when the outbreak started.

A large amount of long-term cash flow is still waiting for good prices to buy.

From the end of the year to the first half of 2021 will be an opportunity for home buyers. The most affected segment is the higher end.

Experts said the most valuable assets in or near the central area are expected to be hit hardest.

Tourism real estate, restaurants and hotels and resorts at tourist hotspots, especially along the coast such as Phu Quoc, Nha Trang and Da Nang, are expected to be the worst affected.

Buyers are waiting for prices to drop further, hopefully by 15-20 per cent, to buy, experts said.

Phan Cong Chanh, general director of Phu Vinh Group, said investors who had bought property at peak prices (before the pandemic) are now struggling to repay bank loans while they find it extremely hard to sell their property now.

With the real estate market remaining uncertain in the first half and probably continuing to be so for the rest of the year the commercial housing segment in HCM City faces a slump, according to Savills Vietnam.

The outbreak has forced people to tighten their purse strings due to loss of income, which would also affect housing demand.

Housing development has also been facing a prolonged legal and licensing barrier, hitting buyers confidence.

The resurgence of COVID-19 caused the online real estate market to slow down by 7 per cent in July as measured by users likes and number of searches, according to a report from popular property website Batdongsan.

The amount of news posted and the level of interest in the market has seen a decrease since late-July due to the return of the deadly virus, it reports.

Interest levels in online real estate floors in provinces recorded an average drop of 10 per cent.

The websites internet consumer research data also show that in Da Nang, the new disease epicentre, it dropped by 20 per cent, the highest rate in the country.

Opportunities for buyers

Once borrowers cannot afford to repay loans, the likelihood is that banks will begin to sell their collateral, which is expected to happen in the next six to 12 months.

Nguyen Khanh Duy, director of housing business at Savills, said, This is a golden opportunity for both home buyers and investors to buy.

According to his company, in the first half of the year the supply of condos in the primary market decreased by more than 9,100 units, or 52 per cent year-on-year, to the lowest level in the last five years.

The supply of land lots plummeted by 53 per cent and that of villas and townhouses, by 23 per cent. Sales of land declined by 67 per cent.

The number of condo transactions in the first half dropped by 55 per cent to just 6,800 units, again the lowest in the last five years. The number of transactions for villas and townhouses decreased by 34 per cent.

When the market gets gloomy, most developers tend to be cautious due to uncertainty, according to Duy.

Buyers are now hesitant to buy while sellers are being urged to sell out due to losses.

"This is also a good time for acquisition of real estate projects across the country, especially in major cities like HCM City," he added.

Affordable segment preferred

Le Hoang Chau, chairman of the HCM City Real Estate Association (HoREA), said the market would continue to have high demand for affordable apartments while the supply in this segment is limited.

There is need for more investment in the affordable housing segment. This segment has high demand and also high liquidity".

Demand from foreigners was also increasing, said Nguyen Duc Them, project sales manager at Savills.

According to HoREA's report foreigners now own around 16,000 apartments, or 2 per cent of the total supply, and this has not affected locals opportunity to buy housing.

Since 2015 big-name developers have sold 12,335 units to foreigners, 81 per cent of them in HCM City.

Most people coming from Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan prefer to rent when they come to work in Viet Nam, while those from mainland China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore prefer buying, it added.  VNS

Property market to develop strongly in next two years: Insider Though the COVID-19 pandemic may linger into the end of 2020, the property market will bounce back soon and develop strongly in 2021 and 2022 thanks to the Governments resolve and timely action.
As Tropical Storm Laura powers up the Gulf of Mexico, bringing the risk of life-threatening storm surge to the Texas Gulf Coast including Galveston, an ambitious and costly proposal for protecting the area from a massive storm continues to slowly grind its way through the federal approval process.

Nearly 12 years after Hurricane Ike devastated much of the Upper Texas Coast, federal officials are still studying the effects of a proposed coastal barrier and looking for ways to pay for a project now estimated to cost as much as $32 billion.

The next draft of a plan is due out in October, but the project always takes on greater urgency during hurricane season when the region is threatened by violent tropical storms. This week coastal residents faced the prospect of two tropical storms coming their way in the midst of an historic pandemic.

While Tropical Storm Marco weakened as it approached Louisiana on Monday evening, Laura was expected to make landfall as a Category 2 hurricane near the Texas-Louisiana border, according to forecasters.

To see these storms coming, thats one of the reasons that Congress funded us, authorized us to do this study and gave us funding to do it for the whole Texas coast, said Kelly Burks-Copes, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project manager for the coastal barrier proposal.

While supporters tout the projects virtues  protecting Houstons vast petrochemical complex and coastal communities while preserving crucial wildlife and wetlands  coastal residents and environmentalists worry the project will become an expensive boondoggle that will harm marine and beach ecosystems and tank property values.

Plan stirs controversy

The last hurricane to make landfall in the Houston area was Ike in 2008. A Category 2 storm with 110 mph winds, Ike caused roughly 15 to 20 feet of storm surge on Bolivar Peninsula and in parts of Chambers County. It led to loss of life and $20 billion in damages.

Years of discussions led to the Corps proposing a 71-mile-long barrier system to protect the southeast Texas coast in October 2018. That proposal has gone through significant changes in response to public feedback.

The proposal  a system of levees and gates stretching from High Island to San Luis Pass  was a close approximation of the Ike Dike concept first touted more than a decade ago by William Merrell, a professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M University at Galveston.

That original plan called for constructing levees that would run parallel to FM 3005 on Galveston Island and to Texas 87 on Bolivar Peninsula but behind the dune line. The barrier would have left thousands of homes adjacent to the beach exposed to flooding and likely required extensive eminent domain buyouts.

But the backlash to that alignment from coastal residents sent the Corps back to the drawing board. By late 2019, the Corps had settled on a double dune system  a field of 12- and 14-foot-high dunes, approximately 185 feet wide, with a runway of 250 feet of renourished beach leading to the Gulf of Mexico. The plan also includes a sea gate at the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel, a ring barrier around the northern coast of Galveston, gates and pumping stations at Dickinson Bayou and Clear Lake, and 6,600 acres of ecosystem restoration.

The Corps estimates 40 to 50 million cubic yards of sand over 50 years would be needed to maintain the dune system along Bolivar and Galveston. The Corps is targeting two sand banks in the Gulf to supply the necessary material: Sabine Bank, 17 miles south of the mouth of Sabine Pass; and Heald Bank, 27 miles offshore from Galveston.

However, the projects supporters now fear that even this massive amount of sand might not be sufficient to protect the coastline from a storm surge. Some, including Merrell and Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, have backed proposals for a hybrid dune system  essentially a sand dune with a fortified core made of a clay composite. A hard structure underpinning the dunes could reduce the cost of replenishing sand on the beaches, but environmentalists say that type of dune could contribute to habitat loss for endangered species, such as the Kemps Ridley sea turtle.

A lot of us are concerned that the dunes are not gonna be sufficient enough, thats why were talking about the fortified (dunes), but Im not gonna let people get hung up on that to slow this thing down, Mitchell said. When they really do the final engineering, that will tell us what theyre gonna use.

High pricetag

The Corps has declined to release the new cost estimate before it releases its draft feasibility report and environmental impact statement for the barrier on Oct. 9. The entire project, which extends southwest to South Padre Island, was originally estimated to cost between $23 billion and $32 billion, with the dunes and sea gate at the ship channel alone making up $14 billion to $18 billion of that total. Burks-Copes maintains the cost of the project will still fall within the original estimated range.

In February, the Corps held three public meetings  in High Island, Galveston and Seabrook  on the new barrier proposal with the dune fields, hoping to provide some clarity on the projects status. It still left many coastal residents with major questions about the environmental impacts of the sea gate and cost of maintaining the dunes. A group of Port Bolivar residents requested a follow-up meeting to address a wall from the sea gate that connects to the dunes on the peninsula, but were left unsatisfied with the result.

There werent any substantive changes but it was again very general, they actually did a really poor job of even talking about the Port Bolivar Community. They kept wanting to talk about the (project) in general, said Azure Bevington, a coastal ecologist and High Island resident who attended the meeting.

Burks-Copes emphasized that the agency would continue to work with the community to get its input. She noted that the Corps will not only convene its federally mandated 45-day comment period after the feasibility report is released in October, but will host six public meetings with local residents where the agency will unveil an interactive map of the proposed barrier system. These meetings, which will be held on Oct. 19, Nov. 2, and Nov. 16, will be virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Its a really interactivedata-driven mapping system that allows people to literally dive into the study and learn about it on their own computers, phones, on their Kindles and get a feel for what each feature is and how it basically reflects into their communities, Burks-Copes said.

Building support

Community buy-in for the coastal barrier may, in fact, be one of the easier lifts compared to the political morass the project will have to survive in order to win final approval.

A local sponsor needs to be identified to maintain the barrier system annually once the Corps work is done. Burks-Copes said the Texas General Land Office is working with local political officials to draft legislation that would identify that partner, and expects it to be voted on during the coming legislative session in 2021.

Winning congressional approval is another hurdle, made more complicated by the uncertain political landscape. One of the projects chief backers, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, is facing a campaign challenge this year, and its unclear if a shift in power in the Senate from Republicans to Democrats might jeopardize its support. The Corps expects to submit the final proposal to Congress in May 2021.

Merrell has expressed concern about the length of time it has taken to get this far.

New Orleans completed its barrier protection in time for the 2011 hurricane season  six years after Katrina hit in 2005, Merrell wrote in a 2018 commentary for the Houston Chronicle. More than a decade after Ike, Galveston Bay remains undefended. If we had moved at the same speed as New Orleans, we would have achieved comprehensive protection before the 2014 hurricane season.

Even if the most recent version of the project is approved  backers dont call it the Ike Dike because the current proposal is far more vast in scope  construction would not be complete for 10 to 15 years by the most optimistic estimates. By that point, the Houston-Galveston region may have faced a small handful of serious storms similar or even more intense than the ones currently posing a threat to the Gulf Coast.

Thats why this study is important: the whole goal is coastal resilience, Burks-Copes said.

nick.powell@chron.com
Marist College in Poughkeepsie has suspended 15 students who attended an off-campus party last week and ignored coronavirus pandemic precautions, just days before classes were set to begin.

The Associated Press reported that the suspended students attended a house party on Wednesday night, did not wear masks and did not social distance, according to Deb DiCaprio, vice president of student affairs and dean of students. All 15 students face the possibility of being sent home for the semester, pending investigation.

Marist College President Dennis J. Murray told Hudson Valley Post that the students were suspended for not following the colleges COVID-19 guidelines.

If this trend continues, well have no choice but to completely close the campus and require students to finish the semester online. None of us wants this outcome to occur, so please help us to ensure it doesnt happen, Murray said in a letter to the student body.

A message from President Murray on enforcing health and safety protocols: https://www.marist.edu/-/president-murray-safety-policies-08-21-2020 Posted by Marist College on Friday, August 21, 2020

The letter from Murray to Marist students continued to say, Ultimately, I hope that what motivates you to comply with our health and safety rules isnt the threat of punishment, but rather your respect for others and concern for the common good. Please dont be a knucklehead who disregards the safety of others and puts our ability to remain on campus at risk.

In-person classes are scheduled to resume today and are set to end before Thanksgiving with the remainder of the semester being held online.

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There will be bungalows built in the romantic and peaceful tourist site, which will arouse tourists sense of being tipsy. The site is full of vitality and inspires people to mingle with the nature, which explains why tourists are keen on bungalows. Especially, Vietnams most beautiful wooden bridge, which will be introduced to visitors from August 20, will contribute to embellishing Tra Su cajuput forest. It has attracted the attention of tourists, especially foreigners, due to its original charm and specialty. A radiant bridge in Tra Su cajuput forest. The special Tra Su tourist site Tra Su tourist site has earned a new record as Vietnams most beautiful wooden bridge, which crosses a beautiful long canal. When tourists set foot on the radiant bridge, the Tra Su paradise will meet their eyes, showing a stunning picture of a carpet of enormous emerald-green duckweed adorned with white cajuput flowers, blooming pink lotus, butterflies hovering on yellow common sesban branches and Vietnams longest bamboo bridge. Tra Su will have bungalows which will be developed based on designs chosen from a recent contest. The contest has attracted many contestants whose designs feature new and breakthrough ideas and ensure the harmony with the nature. The most impressive design is Bungalow Thuy Moc, which features Vietnams longest bamboo bridge in Tra Su cajuput forest and ancient cajuput trees. Other designs, such as Net san Kho-me (Khmer stilt house) and Ben que, are no less special. Bungalows, which will be mainly made of bamboo and wood, rustic but made specially eye-catching, will help the young to satisfy their passion and make their youth more meaningful. Visiting bungalows in Tra Su, tourists will surely feel tranquility and peace of mind when they open windows to enjoy the fresh air and the glow of dawn. Time seems to pass slowly so that tourists can enjoy the beauty of the nature there, so that they can swallow the sweet aftertaste of the nowness like a symphony from the Creator. Bungalows will be built in a modern and classical manner with simple architecture and high-end amenities inside. The highlight of bungalows will be wooden rooms with glossy brown beds and white silk curtains like romantic ancient houses in Italys Venice City, helping tourists to have pleasant and memorable trips. Bungalows will make Tra Su more interesting and attractive. Fish in forest It is not exaggerated to compare Tra Su tourist site with an oil painting catching the eye of art lovers. The tourist site has become an ideal destination for those wanting to explore and indulge themselves in the richness of nature. Sitting in the balcony and getting sunlight, tourists can contemplate the beauty of fish swimming in canals and birds flying freely in the blue sky. Based on the biological interaction in the Tra Su ecosystem, the investors of the tourist site have released tons of fish to the forest to enhance biodiversity there. The forest is covered with white flowers and is lively with the sounds of animals, which is often seen in the flooding season. Coming to Tra Su tourist site, tourists can drink tea while watching schools of fish swimming in rivers and canals, listening to birds songs and enjoying the spectacular landscape, so that they can feel relaxed and nurture their emotions and compassion. Different landscapes will take visitors on a journey from one special feeling to another, sometimes ebullient and sometimes thoughtful. So, lets get prepared to enjoy interesting things in Tra Su tourist site, a safe destination meeting standards of new normal tourist sites gaining tourists confidence. SGT Dieu Anh
Volunteers across the country have come up with ways to help frontline medical workers in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic relieve ear pain caused by prolonged use of face masks.

Volunteers in Hanoi make silicone ear guards to donate to doctors and nurses at the front-line hospitals.  Photo tienphong.vn

Ear guards, made of silicone or wool, are gadgets that go behind the head and have hooks to attach the straps of the medical mask to protect the ears of the wearers.

Thuy Trang, the co-founder of the Anti-COVID-19 Group, said she spoke with a doctor at the National Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion, who said doctors there suffered serious ear pain as they had to wear face masks the entire day.

The story motivated me to do something for them. When I read an article about a Canadian boy making a plastic product to help reduce the pressure of the mask straps in the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to make the same product, she told Tien Phong (Vanguard) newspaper.

Based on the initial model, she redesigned it to suit Vietnamese peoples head size and used a member's garment factory to make the products.

"Instead of plastic and leather, I decided to choose a silicone material that is easy to disinfect and reuse," she added.

A doctor wears an ear guard to ease the pain caused by extensive face mask-wearing.

The ear guards are made from small pieces of silicone. After the moulding process is finished, they can be disinfected with alcohol and then kneaded with talc powder to create a smooth surface for the product.

Each product has small hooks to attach the mask straps depending on the size of the wearers head.

Initially, the group made 400 products and sent them to the National Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion and Bach Mai Hospital.

We have received positive feedback from doctors and nurses. They were happy to say that they no longer had ear pain when wearing face masks, Trang said.

So far, the group has produced nearly 10,000 ear guards to present to frontline doctors at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and provincial hospitals across the country.

Cotton and textile yarn ear guards

A group of the volunteers in central Da Nang City  a hotspot of the COVID-19 pandemic  came up with the idea of making ear guards with another material.

Ear guards are made of wool by a group of volunteers in central Da Nang City.  Photo plo.vn

They chose local cotton and textile yarn to make the ear guards and one roll of wool can make between 30 and 40 ear guards.

The products are donated to doctors and nurses and quarantined patients at frontline hospitals.

The project has drawn attention and received support from people across the country.

Huong Giang, a volunteer from Hanois Dong Da District, said she asked her friends and colleagues to join the project. After three days, more than 1,000 products were made and sent to Da Nang.

Nguyen Thi My Le, head of Ha Tinh Knitting Team said her team made nearly 5,000 products in a week.

These products were sent to 199 Hospital in Son Tra District.

Le said she and the volunteers would continue making more products to help frontline doctors and nurses in the fight against the pandemic. VNS
BBC presenter John Beattie has revealed he was stopped by police for suspected drink driving after being spotted having an alcohol-free beer.

The Radio Scotland host was breathalysed at the side of the road after being reported by a member of the public.

He was travelling home from a holiday on Islay when he stopped off in Inveraray, Argyll, for fish and chips.

BBC presenter John Beattie has revealed he was stopped by police for suspected drink driving after being spotted having an alcohol-free beer

The former Scotland rugby international washed down his meal with a bottle of alcohol-free beer at the town's harbour before jumping back in his car and driving off.

The police received a call from someone who thought Beattie had got behind the wheel while over the limit on Sunday night and he was pulled over on his way home to Glasgow.

Beattie, 62, said his reading was 'zero' and posted a photograph of himself taking the breathalyser and the two officers who stopped him on Twitter.

Beattie, 62, said his reading was 'zero' and posted a photograph of himself taking the breathalyser and the two officers who stopped him on Twitter

'After an amazing holiday on Islay someone in Inveraray told the police I'd been drinking beer at the harbour last night before jumping back in my car again,' he wrote on social media.

'They pulled me over blue lights etc on Loch Lomondside..... The reading was zero. I was using up an alcohol free bottle with excellent fish and chips.

'The lads were ok with me taking the picture. So, back to work today.'

Police Scotland;s head of road policing Chief Superintendent Louise Blakelock said: 'Drink and drug driving is a key factor in serious injury and fatal collisions and Police Scotland will continue to take appropriate action in response to reports from the public about suspected drunk drivers'.
Hong Kong: Policy Address consultation launched

Chief Executive Carrie Lam today attended the first consultation session, held via video conferencing, to listen to the views of stakeholders of the aviation, maritime and logistics sectors on the upcoming Policy Address.

More than 20 stakeholders participated online, including lawmakers and representatives of trade organisations, local aviation and maritime companies, and enterprises of the relevant industries.

Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung and Secretary for Transport & Housing Frank Chan also attended the consultation session.

It lasted for about two hours.

Mrs Lam said she held very meaningful exchanges of views with the stakeholders.

Pointing out that despite the fact that the COVID-19 epidemic has dealt a heavy blow to the cross-boundary passenger service sector, Mrs Lam emphasised that the Government is committed to maintaining Hong Kong's status as an international aviation hub, an international maritime centre and a regional logistics hub.

She also indicated that she would consider in full numerous valuable views raised by the stakeholders on related issues while she formulates the Policy Address.

Mrs Lam will hold the rest of the 11 theme-based consultation sessions via video conferencing in the month ahead.

Areas to be covered range from people's livelihoods, finance, economy, innovation and technology, education, land and housing to medical and health services, sports, arts and culture and sustainable development.

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Rep. Jim Jordan speaks as (L-R) Reps. Matt Gaetz and Jody Hice listen during a news conference in front of the Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 6, 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

GOP Lawmakers Allege That Amazon Excludes Conservative Organizations From Charity Program

Republican Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Matt Gaetz (Fla.) sent a letter (pdf) to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos requesting a briefing on his companys AmazonSmile charity support program which the lawmakers say excludes some conservative non-profit organizations from participating.

The briefing would require Bezos to clarify to Congress how AmazonSmile uses information from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to make eligibility determinations for its program.

The SPLC is a legal nonprofit that says it monitors extremist groups and fights hate. But conservatives say the organization holds a strong bias against conservative organizations and promotes a radical agenda.

The GOP letter states In particular, the SPLC has baselessly labeled some conservative charitable organizations hate groups, alongside actual extremist organizations such as neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

The letter was sent from the House Judiciary Committee, of which Jordan is the ranking Republican, and was also signed by 13 other House Republicans who are not on that committee.

The conservative lawmakers cite a recent hearing of the House Judiciary committees Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, which featured Bezos testifying for the first time before Congress.

A few of the GOP members of the subcommittee took the opportunity to question the CEOs of Big Tech about alleged bias against conservative individuals and groups on their respective platforms.

Congressman Gaetz asked Bezos why they use the SPLC data to determine which group can participate in their charity program since it has labeled conservatives like Ben Carson and organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom or Family Research Council as extreme.

In his answer to the question from Gaetz, Bezos said, Sir, its a good question. We have, for those of you who dont know what Amazon smile is, its a program that allows customers to designate a certain fraction of their purchases to go charity that we then pay for, and they can select from any one of millions of charities, and we use the Southern Poverty Law Center data to say which charities are extremist organizations. Adding, Sir, Im going to acknowledge this is an imperfect system.

The letter goes on to say that the exclusion of these conservative groups from Amazons heavily-trafficked digital platform leads to less exposure for these groups and fewer opportunities for donations, adding, In this way, Amazons reliance on the SPLC as a barometer to determine the eligibility of charitable organizations on AmazonSmile serves to discriminate against conservative views.

Amazon did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times request for comment.

They continue: Amazons ongoing reliance on the SPLC, with its documented anti-conservative track record, reinforces allegations that Big Tech is biased against conservatives and censors conservative views.

At the July hearing, Gaetz suggested to Bezos that they divorce from the SPLC.
Nasal Powder Spray May Provide Barrier for Cell Transmission of Respiratory Infections

WEST CHESTER, PA / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / Virpax Pharmaceuticals Inc. ("Virpax"), today announced the signing of a technology license agreement with Nanomerics Ltd. ("Nanomerics") for the exclusive North America rights to use Nanomerics' High-Density Molecular Masking Spray (MMS019) for the prevention of seasonal influenza and viral infections in humans. The formulation will be delivered using a preassembled device and cartridge to propel the High-Density Molecular Spray formulation into the nose. MMS019 will be used as a nasal powder spray to prevent viral binding to epithelial cells in the nasal cavity and the upper respiratory tract, which could significantly reduce respiratory related infections.

Among other uses, MMS019 is being developed to prevent SARS-COV-2 binding and entry to respiratory epithelial cells, by binding to epithelial cells in the nasal cavity and the upper respiratory tract. Virpax believes MMS019 may offer another layer of protection, in the form of a Molecular Mask, to be added to standard personal protective equipment to protect healthcare workers, and those at-risk of contracting serious diseases, from infection. MMS019 has completed IND-enabling toxicology studies and Virpax intends to develop this product for potential FDA accelerated review in healthy human volunteers as soon as possible.

"We believe MMS019 can work together with current personal protective equipment to enhance our ability to help prevent the spread of respiratory viral infections and seasonal influenza," said Anthony Mack, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Virpax.

"We are pleased that Virpax has licensed MMS019 for the prevention of viral respiratory infections and that they will undertake the clinical development of MMS019 to potentially bring a new respiratory infection prophylactic product to the market," said Ijeoma Uchegbu, Chief Scientific Officer of Nanomerics Ltd.

Story continues

About Virpax Pharmaceuticals

Virpax Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is focused on developing branded prescription products and providing more efficient drug treatments using its proprietary cutting-edge delivery technologies designed to satisfy unmet global market needs. Virpax's pipeline consists of non-addictive products being studied to manage musculoskeletal pain, post-operative pain and moderate to severe chronic pain. While Virpax is a market leader in the development of non-addictive pain management products, Virpax is also using its patented delivery technologies to develop therapies to manage PTSD, as well as to help prevent viral spread, including influenza and SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19). For more information, please visit www.virpaxpharma.com .

About Nanomerics Ltd.

Nanomerics is a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the development of pharmaceutical products using its polymeric technologies. Nanomerics' proprietary technologies are based on world leading know-how and scientific leadership in polymeric nanotechnology. The founding scientists Professor Ijeoma F. Uchegbu and Professor Andreas G. Schatzlein developed these technologies at the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow and, later at the UCL School of Pharmacy.

Forward-Looking Statement

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are identified by terminology such as "may," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "could," "intends," "target," "projects," "contemplates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential" or "continue" or the negative of these terms or other similar words. These statements are only predictions. Virpax cautions readers that forward-looking statements are based on management's expectations and assumptions as of the date of this news release and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including, but not limited to, those associated with the timing of MMS019 regulatory filings and clinical milestones and other risks and uncertainties. Accordingly, you should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Forward-looking statements reflect the Company's analysis only on their stated date, and Virpax takes no obligation to update or revise these statements except as may be required by law.

CONTACT:

Shana Panzarella, Chief of Staff

Virpax Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

484-880-4588

info@virpaxpharma.com

SOURCE: Virpax Pharmaceuticals, Inc.





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/602814/VirpaxR-Enters-into-License-Agreement-to-Develop-High-Density-Molecular-Masking-Spray-Formulation-MMS019-for-the-Prevention-of-Respiratory-Viruses




(Natural News) Two American citizens living in Colombia have been arrested after they were found to be offering Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS) to sick people living in that country, as well as in the United States and all throughout Africa.

Mark and Joseph Grenon were apprehended in the northern beach town of Santa Marta on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, as well for violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act.

Mark Grenon, who describes himself as the archbishop of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing in Bradenton, Florida  we have reported on this church in the past, and the persecution it has endured at the hands of the state  reportedly ignored a Miami court order from back in April that ordered him to stop selling MMS, which is legal in Bolivia.

Claiming that MMS has divine healing powers, the Grenons have continued to produce and sell it in violation of the states orders, for which they now face up to 17 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says that people who consume MMS end up ingesting bleach, as the concoction supposedly transforms into bleach upon consumption, claims the same FDA that says patients being injected with chemotherapy toxins is safe. But the Grenons and others who use MMS say this is not the case, and that the solution is helpful for curing all sorts of diseases, including the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).

Miracle Mineral Solution has not been approved by the FDA for any use, but these products continue to be promoted on social media as a remedy for treating autism, cancer, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and flu, among other conditions, the FDA wrote in a warning letter from last August.

However, the solution, when mixed, develops into a dangerous bleach which has caused serious and potentially life-threatening side effects, says the FDA without evidence.

Sign the petition calling for a National Day of Prayer on Sept. 11

It is important to note that after District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled against the Grenons, Mark reportedly agreed to stop selling MMS, only to change his mind not long after that.

We will NOT be participating in any of your UNCONSTITUTIONAL Orders, Summons, etc., Mark wrote in an angry follow-up email to Judge Williams. Again and again I have written you all that  you have NO authority over our Church.

Whether you agree with this approach or not, a possible 17-year prison sentence for selling a product that people want to buy, and that many people say is helping them overcome serious disease, really is a form of tyranny that needs to be opposed.

A petition calling on President Donald Trump to declare another National Day of Prayer on September 11 is available for signing, and it relates to this situation with the Grenons in that it calls on people everywhere to repent of their sins, and plead with God to overcome this and many other types of evil that have overtaken our land.

Mr. President, We ask that you issue a proclamation declaring Sept 11th, a national day of Fasting, Prayer, repentance asking all people to cry out to our Creator, To profess our sorrow for the millions of unborn children we have murdered and the manifold sexual sins we have allowed, the petition reads.

Mr. President, we ask you to call our nation to beseech God as in 2 Chronicles 7:14, If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.'

More related news about government tyranny against natural healers is available at Tyranny.news.

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

NaturalNews.com

Petitions.WhiteHouse.gov
Sundays mass at Cristo Rey Catholic Church marked an important milestone for newly-appointed and ordained Bishop David Toups as he led Beaumonts Catholic Hispanic community for the first time.

Tucked away on Avenue A resides Cristo Rey Catholic Church -- the only Spanish-speaking Catholic Church in Beaumont. Outside of the small parish, cars filled every parking space, and those that could not find a space made their own along the perimeter with hopes of being a part of history.

Parishioners, along with their newly-installed bishop, could be heard shouting Viva Cristo Rey!  which translates to long live King Christ  as mass concluded Sunday evening.

Its very exciting to have him (Toups) here, Martha Kapparis said. Theres a lot of joy in our hearts to have a bishop who speaks Spanish.

Latinos make up about 40% of the Beaumont Catholic Archdioceses parishioners, according to director of Hispanic Ministry, Jesus Abrego; and Toups ability to switch between both English and Spanish was on display during his sermon.

Were growing every year, said Abrego, who has worked with the diocese since 1999.

It is something that many parishioners are excited about after being a part of Toups first Spanish language mass.

Kapparis said that while former Bishop Curtis Guillory took the first noticeable step in order to reach out to the Latino community during his 20-year tenure from the diocese, Toups ability to speak Spanish will bridge the language barrier.

Its huge, Kapparis said of the importance of Toups ability to speak Spanish. To have that relationship with our bishop is important. You can feel it. You can sit here in the mass and feel the emotion. I am very joyful right now.

To tell the Hispanic community that we are the treasure of his heart, and that he loves us, makes us feel a part of the community, she added. Thats a message weve been longing to hear.

Toups first mass in Spanish was streamed online for those who still wanted to experience the historic moment from home. Those who were in attendance were spread out among three separate rooms.

A third of the parishioners were in the main chapel spaced out every other row; the second group was in a separate room still in the same main chapel; and the final 20 remaining parishioners were in an auditorium toward the back of the premises watching the mass via the live stream.

The theme of Toups first sermon could be broken down to three simple words: relation, identity and mission.

Remember these three letters. R-I-M, Toups said. It is important to have a relationship with Christ.

Toups referred back to his ordination as a renewal of his relationship with his faith and called on the parishioners in attendance to do the same. He reminded those in attendance to remember their identity as children of God and implored the younger generation of Catholics to continue the mission in all aspects of their lives.

Following the final blessing, Toups thanked 99-year-old Fr. Luis Urriza, who helped found Cristo Rey Church in 1951, and set the foundation for the Latino community within the Beaumont Diocese.

While Toups first full week as head of the archdiocese begins with potentially dealing with two tropical storms and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, he asked for those in attendance to pray for him.

Pray for me. Pray for your young Obsipito (Little Bishop), Toups said in Spanish. I will pray for you and serve you.

jorge.ramos@beaumontenterprise.com

twitter.com/byjorgeramos
118,000 has been allocated by Government to DKIT to support students mental health and wellbeing, a Fine Gael Senator has said.

Senator McGahon was speaking after Minister for Further & Higher Education, Research, Innovation & Science, Simon Harris,announced a national package of 5 million to support students wellbeing and mental health.

Senator McGahon said: This significant funding for DKIT confirmed to me today by Minister Harris, comes at a time of great urgency around student support and re-opening planning for the next academic year.

The funding will be used to

 Recruit additional Student Counsellors;

 Recruit additional Assistant Psychologists;

 Implementation of the Framework for Consent in HEIs; Safe, Respectful, Supportive and Positive: Ending Sexual Harassment in Irish Higher Education Institutions;

 Implementation of the soon to be published National Student Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Framework.



Senator McGahon continued: Mental health is probably the number one health issue for young people in Ireland today. The concerns and worries of young people around their mental health have been compounded by the isolation and uncertainly brought forward by the COVID-19 Pandemic.

For students, the college experience has been different this year from ever before. Students have had to adjust to remote learning and carried out without face to face support from their college or their peers.

For these reasons, Minister Harris has prioritised funding to support student counselling services, key mental health interventions and the provision of a safe, respectful, supportive and positive environment in our higher education institutions.

This important funding for DKIT will really help support students as they return to college in this Covidworld.

Commenting on the announcement, Minister Harris said: This additional support is a welcome boost to a higher education sector that enrols in the region of 55,000 new students each year. These young and not-so-young students engage in higher education at a sometimes-challenging time of change and progression in their lives. This is a sizeable proportion of our population, and while our health and community services work to support everyone, there can be environmentally specific or transitional issues that arise for both current and new students in higher education.
Photo credit: Getty Images

From Country Living

Apple Music is rebranding its flagship radio station, Beats 1, to Apple Music 1.

Additionally, the streaming service is launching its first-ever country music station, Apple Music Country, with brand new radio shows from some of countrys biggest artists.

On August 18, Apple announced that, in addition to rebranding its global radio station, Beats 1 to Apple Music 1 , theyd be launching two new radio stations, one of which is totally and completely devoted to country music.

Radio is part of the fabric of country music culture, and Apple Music Country amplifies that experience for the modern fan, the company stated in a press release. As country music evolves and expands around the world, Apple Music Country aims to be the definitive place for every lane of an increasingly diverse genre. The station offers a mix of the best music of today while introducing fans to the stars of tomorrow and reminding them of the legendary artists and tracks that have shaped and defined country music along the way.

Oh, and it only gets better. Along with keeping fans up to speed with all the greatest country hits, Apple Music Country will also provide listeners with brand new radio shows hosted by some of Nashvilles greatest stars. Think: Carrie Underwood, Kelsea Ballerini, Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line, and many more. Here are a few of the shows we're particularly excited about:

Carrie Underwood's 'XO' Radio

The day is finally hereIm thrilled to be hosting my very own radio show on Apple Music! Carrie exclaimed on Instagram. Check out my new show #XORadio on Apple Music Country!

Kelsea Ballerini's 'kelsea' Radio

Story continues

The magical thing about music is [that] everyone hears it differently, Kelsea Ballerini shared in her debut post about her new radio show. Certain songs are unexplainably connected to memories, people, hometowns. Certain songs tell your story so perfectly you swear theyre written just for you. Beyond the banjos and the beat drops, there are stories that make me cry, make me dance, and mainly just make me feel like Im not alone. So, for the music lover that grew up on Garth AND Britneythat can recite Cowboy Take Me Away AND No Diggity word for wordthat really just wants to continue to find and play their lifes soundtrack.Welcome to kelsea radiothe way I hear music. On Apple Music.

Luke Bryan's 'Party Barn' Radio

Look out world they are letting me host my own radio station, Luke wrote on Instagram to share the big news. Check out #PartyBarnRadio only on Apple Music. Its gonna be fun!

Florida Georgia Line's 'FGL House Party' Radio

Big day yall! Florida Georgia Line captioned their celebratory post. So excited to announce your boys are bringing #FGLHousePartyRadio to Apple Music Country! Kick off the weekend with good tunes and good vibes every other Friday, starting this week at 4pm PT/6pm CT/7pm ET. Only on Apple Music!!

Find Apple Music Country's entire roster of artists and industry figures below:

"Apple Music Countrys talent roster boasts a wide range of countrys most exciting voices, including daily on-air hosts Kelleigh Bannen, Ty Bentli, Bree, Alecia Davis, Ward Guenther, Nada, and Tiera, plus weekly shows from Ashley Eicher and Kelly McCartney. Fans can also enjoy new exclusive shows from artists like Jimmie Allen, Kelsea Ballerini, Dierks Bentley, BRELAND, Luke Bryan, Luke Combs, Morgan Evans, Florida Georgia Line, Pat Green, Willie Jones, Chrissy Metz, Midland, Rissi Palmer, The Shires, Carrie Underwood, and Morgan Wallen, alongside exclusive shows from legendary producers and songwriters like Dave Cobb, Jesse Frasure, and Luke Laird, and journalist Hunter Kelly."

Needless to say, we know what well be streaming from here on out!

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YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. This summer, Ucom partnered with Teach For Armenia to implement a three-week long Virtual Student Leadership Camp that promoted local ingenuity, civic responsibility, and global connectivity among students. Ucom provided 370 campers from 24 communities across Armenia with data cards to participate, Ucom told Armenpress.

During the camp, students tuned into virtual career development workshops led by Ucom executives and worked in groups to design Community Impact Projects that meet needs in their communities. Ucom has selected to fund a Community Impact Microgrant for students from Bagaran village in Armavir Province to make their project a reality. Students from Bagaran Secondary School have proposed establishing a museum and accompanying student-developed website that celebrates their local cultural heritage.

In recent months, Ucom has had a hard time choosing all the new projects and programs to participate in. This is due to a number of objective and subjective reasons, including COVID-19, but we could not help but support the implementation of this program by Teach For Armenia. One just had to see the enthusiasm of our managerial staff that conducted training to share their experience and knowledge with students. I thank both the Teach For Armenia team for this opportunity and my colleagues for interactive training, said Ara Sergei Khachatryan, Director General at Ucom.

Since March, the educational landscape in Armenia has experienced seismic shifts, with many of our students left out of learning. Were grateful to Ucom for providing our students with the internet connectivity to bridge the gap created by COVID-19 and the digital divide, said Ruiz Clarke, Interim CEO of Teach For Armenia.

Ucoms support of the 2020 Virtual Student Leadership Camp is part of an ongoing partnership with Teach For Armenia (TFA), a nonprofit organization that aims to expand educational opportunity to all children in Armenia and Artsakh. TFA recruits and trains talented individuals to teach for two years in rural communities, for whom Ucom provides internet connectivity and smartphones.
I laid under bodies in the mosque, thinking I was going to die, he said. I tried to lie as still as possible when the gunman came back a second time. I could feel the blood and brains of the person above me running down my face and neck. I couldnt move or make a sound, as the gunman would have executed me.
New Delhi: "No, I'm not 'Bigg Boss' type," said TV actress Saumya Tandon when asked if she would participate in Salman Khan-hosted 'Bigg Boss 14'. Saumya, who has quit 'Bhabiji Ghar Par Hain', recently hosted a Q&A session on Instagram, during which she was asked the 'Bigg Boss 14' question.

Speculations were rife that the actress would participate in the controversial reality show as she has quit 'Bhabiji Ghar Par Hain'. However, in an interview to Zee News last week, she had already said she would not be seen there. And, during the Instagram session, she categorically mentioned, "'Bigg Boss' - no chance, no. I'm not the 'Bigg Boss' type and I'm not the 'Bigg Boss' material. What will I do in 'Bigg Boss'. I'm a very calm and private person. So, I'm not the right person for 'Bigg Boss'. You are not going to see me in 'Bigg Boss', surely not."

Saumya starred as Anita Bhabhi in 'Bhabiji Ghar Par Hain' for five long years. Of her decision to quit the show, she told Zee News, "I want to do something new in my career, and that is why I have made this decision to quit the show. I have a beautiful journey on the sitcom for five years. 'Bhabiji Ghar Par Hain!' has given me a lot but now I want to explore something else. Now, it is not important for me to come on TV every day."

'Bigg Boss 14' is expected to air in September. It is hosted by Salman Khan. Saumya's former 'Bhabiji Ghar Par Hain' co-star Shilpa Shinde had won 'Bigg Boss 12'.
tech2 News Staff

Oppo will launch the Oppo A53 in India today. The launch event will kick off at 12:30 pm IST.

Oppo A53 will feature a triple rear camera setup that is placed in a rectangular camera module. It will come with a 90Hz refresh rate punch-hole display. It will come in a blue colour option as well. The company has also confirmed that Oppo A53 will house a 5,000 mAh battery that supports 18W fast charging.

(Also read: Oppo A53 to launch in India today at 12.30 pm: How to watch the live stream)

The new #OPPOA53 is ready for anything, anytime! Packed with a high-capacity 5000mAh battery and a 18W fast charge its always ready when you are! Launching on 25th August 2020 at 12:30 PM, stay tuned! Know more: https://t.co/P4KDg4v1a8 pic.twitter.com/rtJJtEfyn2  OPPO India (@oppomobileindia) August 24, 2020

Oppo A53 expected specifications

Since the smartphone is now available for pre-order in Indonesia, the India variant is expected to come with similar specifications. As per the Indonesia variant, Oppo A53 will offer 4 GB RAM and 64 GB of internal storage. The smartphone is likely to be powered by Snapdragon 640 chipset.

In terms of camera, Oppo A53 will come with a triple rear camera setup that includes 13 MP + 2 MP + 2 MP sensors. The smartphone is likely to feature a 16 MP punch hole selfie camera.
Iraq Interested in Russian Infantry Vehicles, Su-57s, Army Inspector Says

Sputnik News

10:39 GMT 23.08.2020(updated 10:55 GMT 23.08.2020)

MOSCOW, August 23 (Sputnik) - Iraq is interested in purchasing infantry vehicles from Russia and in boosting Baghdad-Moscow military ties, Imad Al-Zuhairi, the military inspector for the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, said on Sunday.

"Iraqi Ministry of Defense [wishes] to be hand by hand with the Russian government and with the Ministry of Defense of Russia in air defense and infantry forces," he said on the sidelines of the Army-2020 defense industry forum near Moscow.

"Yes, that is right," the official said when asked if Iraq wants to purchase infantry vehicles from Russia.

He also said that Iraq wants to boost military cooperation with Russia and conduct drills to share experiences in combating terrorism.

"Exhibition is very nice, and is very good quality. It is clear message from Iraq to Russia. Russia has a good relationship and she offered military help to support ... [due to the] situation in our country, we need help from Russia, and we are every year coming to the exhibition," he added.

"To buy armor, to buy aircraft, to buy tanks, to buy everything ... Land forces, some for ground forces, we are focused on troops. But I am a pilot, I need airplane, I need fighter, Su-57. Helicopters. We have many helicopters from Russia, Mi-35, Mi-28, Mi-17  It is main [air] power in Iraq," the official concluded.

A Sputnik

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With the 2020 presidential election just over two months away, former Vice President Joe Biden sat down with "World News Tonight" anchor David Muir and "Good Morning America" co-anchor Robin Roberts for their first joint interview since officially becoming their partys presidential and vice presidential nominees.

The wide-ranging interview touched on a number of pressing issues -- from their previous confrontation on the debate stage to what the candidates are doing to prepare for their upcoming debates with President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

Here are five takeaways from The Ticket: The First Interview," which aired Sunday during a special edition of "20/20" on ABC.

Biden on his vice presidential pick: It was easy for me

After a months-long search, Biden told Roberts it was easy for him to choose Harris.

I mean she had the best recommendation she can get: my son Beau, not a joke, Biden said of Harris, who, as attorney general of California, worked closely with Bidens son, who died of an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2015.

The choice of Harris was historic: the California senator is the first Black woman and Asian American to join a presidential ticket. Protests over racial inequities in the country also led to calls for Biden to choose a woman of color.

While Biden said he didnt feel pressure to choose a woman of color, he acknowledged that Harris will bring a different perspective to the table.

PHOTO: 'Good Morning America' co-anchor Robin Roberts conducts a joint interview with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris, Aug. 21, 2020. (ABC News)

I cannot understand and fully appreciate what it means to walk in her shoes, to be an African American woman, with Indian-American background, a child of immigrants. She cant assume exactly what it's like to walk in my shoes. What we do know is we have the same value set, Biden told Roberts.

Harris also praised his audacious decision to add a woman of color to the ticket.

Those are the kinds of things he does and he doesn't seek permission to do it. He doesn't look to whether or not its popular. He said, I'm going to select a woman, and then he selected a woman of color. Right? It says a lot, Harris said of Biden.

Story continues

MORE: TRANSCRIPT: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris' first joint interview with ABC's David Muir

Biden, Harris confront their controversies amid national reckoning on race

The former vice president has continued to face questions about his agenda for the African-American community and his at-times controversial rhetoric on the topic of race.

I shouldn't have said it, Biden told Roberts, referring to comments he made during a May interview on The Breakfast Club radio show, where he quipped that you aint Black, a reference to Black Americans who are still deciding on their presidential pick. But, the truth is, there's a fundamental difference between Donald Trump and me on the issue of race across the board.

Harris, who largely stayed quiet after Bidens comments on race drew backlash, backed her running mate, touting his policy plan for Black America and attempting to paint him as a candidate who understands the issues facing the Black community.

He has been outspoken on those issues and continues to talk about disparities and I know where his heart is. I know where his heart is, Harris said.

The senator confronted her own controversial past as a prosecutor and credited the Black Lives Matter movement for the shift in national attitudes on policing and race.

PHOTO: Former Vice President Joe Biden participates in his first his first joint interview with his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, in Wilmington, Del., on Aug 21, 2020. (ABC News)

I give full credit to the brilliance of that movement in terms of what it has done to advance a conversation that needed to happen, a long time ago, but did not capture the ears or the hearts of the American people. What Black Lives Matter has done as a movement has been to be a counter force against a very entrenched status quo around the criminal justice system in America, Harris said.

Biden says he could 'absolutely' consider serving serve 8 years if elected president

Biden also reacted to repeated attacks from President Trump questioning his mental fitness to serve as president.

His campaign has called you diminished. And, I'm curious how youd respond to that, Muir said, pressing Biden Trumps repeated attacks.

Watch me. Mr. President, watch me. Look at us both. Look at us both, what we say, what we do, what we control, what we know, what kind of shape we're in, Biden said.

I think it's a legitimate question to ask anybody over 70 years old whether or not they're fit and whether they're ready. But I just, only thing I can say to the American people, it's a legitimate question to ask anybody. Watch me, Biden told Muir.

Biden would be 78 on Inauguration Day -- the oldest president ever elected if successful in November. Biden has called himself a transition candidate, but when Muir pressed him on what that meant, Biden said it did not mean a one-term president.

We havent spent nearly enough time building the bench in the Democratic Party, Biden said.

[What] I want to do is make sure when this is over, we have a new Senate, we won back statehouses, were in a position where we transition to a period of bringing people up to the visibility that they need to get to be able to lead nationally. And that's about raising people up. And that's what I'm about.

So you're leaving open the possibility you'll serve eight years if elected? Muir pressed.

Absolutely, Biden replied.

MORE: TRANSCRIPT: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris' first joint interview with ABC's David Muir

Biden, Harris looking forward to debates, say preps are underway

The first presidential debate is now nearly one month away, and both Biden and Harris made it clear they are eager to confront their Republican counterparts.

The president said he's already prepping for the debates. Are you? Muir asked Biden.

So am I. I can hardly wait, Biden responded with a wide grin.

PHOTO: Sen. Kamala Harris participates in her first joint interview with her running mate, former Vice President Joe Biden, in Wilmington, Del., on Aug 21, 2020.PHOTO: (ABC News)

Harris, too, laughed off comments from Vice President Mike Pence last week that he is looking forward to the one vice presidential debate more than anyone could imagine.

Oh, Im looking forward to seeing him. Yes, absolutely, Harris chuckled.

While the impact of presidential debates on the outcome of the race is uncertain, the debates give voters a chance to compare the tickets side-by-side.

MORE: TRANSCRIPT: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris' first joint interview with ABC's Robin Roberts

Biden says his campaign will win campaign from home: 'Were gonna follow the science'

As COVID-19 continues to impact the country, its impacts continue to be felt on the campaign trail as well, with Biden conducting a campaign--for the most part--virtually, despite the president hitting the trail.

We saw the president just this week, during the convention, he traveled to Pennsylvania. He traveled to Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, all of that while you were making your case to the American people. I understand the restrictions of COVID and campaigning in this time. But can you win a presidential election from home? Muir asked Biden.

We will, Biden said. We're gonna follow the science, what the scientists tell us. We've been able to travel places when we've been able to do it in a way that we don't cause the congregation of large numbers of people.

With just over 70 days until Election Day, Biden was critical of Trumps campaigning, arguing the presidents events, and the crowds they draw, put peoples lives in danger.

Look what happens when -- with what's happened with his, his events -- people die. People get together. They don't wear masks. They end up getting COVID. They end up dying, Biden said.

5 takeaways from Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris' 1st joint interviews originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Hundreds of university staff have voted to take unprotected industrial action in protest against widespread job cuts and a lack of federal government funding support at a time when the sector grapples with the loss of international student revenue because of COVID-19.

A group called the National Higher Education Action Network, which includes disaffected members of the National Tertiary Education Union from universities around the country, held a Zoom meeting on Monday afternoon that endorsed the motion to strike.

Staff at the University of Sydney fear the threat of future job cuts. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

Sydney academic and NHEAN spokesman Nick Riemer said more than 330 staff had voted in support of the motion, which opposes the governments proposed higher education reforms.

"Our motion commits us to the goal of making democratically planned unprotected industrial action possible," he said.
Roughly one billion cars and trucks zoom about the world's roadways. Only a few run on hydrogen. This could change after a breakthrough achieved by researchers at the University of Copenhagen. The breakthrough? A new catalyst that can be used to produce cheaper and far more sustainable hydrogen powered vehicles.

Hydrogen vehicles are a rare sight. This is partly because they rely on a large amount of platinum to serve as a catalyst in their fuel cells -- about 50 grams. Typically, vehicles only need about five grams of this rare and precious material. Indeed, only 100 tonnes of platinum are mined in annually, in South Africa.

Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Chemistry have developed a catalyst that doesn't require such a large quantity of platinum.

"We have developed a catalyst which, in the laboratory, only needs a fraction of the amount of platinum that current hydrogen fuel cells for cars do. We are approaching the same amount of platinum as needed for a conventional vehicle. At the same time, the new catalyst is much more stable than the catalysts deployed in today's hydrogen powered vehicles," explains Professor Matthias Arenz from the Department of Chemistry.

A paradigm shift for hydrogen vehicles

Sustainable technologies are often challenged by the limited availability of the rare materials that make them possible, which in turn, limits scalability. Due to this current limitation, it is impossible to simply replace the world's vehicles with hydrogen models overnight. As such, the new technology a game-changer.

"The new catalyst can make it possible to roll out hydrogen vehicles on a vastly greater scale than could have ever been achieved in the past," states Professor Jan Rossmeisl, center leader of the Center for High Entropy Alloy Catalysis at UCPH's Department of Chemistry.

The new catalyst improves fuel cells significantly, by making it possible to produce more horsepower per gram of platinum. This in turn, makes the production of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles more sustainable.

More durable, less platinum

Because only the surface of a catalyst is active, as many platinum atoms as possible are needed to coat it. A catalyst must also be durable. Herein lies the conflict. To gain as much surface area as possible, today's catalysts are based on platinum-nano-particles which are coated over carbon. Unfortunately, carbon makes catalysts unstable. The new catalyst is distinguished by being carbon-free. Instead of nano-particles, the researchers have developed a network of nanowires characterized an abundance of surface area and high durability.

"With this breakthrough, the notion of hydrogen vehicles becoming commonplace has become more realistic. It allows them to become cheaper, more sustainable and more durable," says Jan Rossmeisl.

Dialogue with the automotive industry

The next step for the researchers is to scale up their results so that the technology can be implemented in hydrogen vehicles.

"We are in talks with the automotive industry about how this breakthrough can be rolled out in practice. So, things look quite promising," says Professor Matthias Arenz.

The research results have just been published in Nature Materials, one of the leading scientific journals for materials research. It is the first article in which every researcher at the basic research center, "Center for High Entropy Alloy Catalysis (CHEAC)", has collaborated. The center is a so-called Center of Excellence, supported by the Danish National Research Foundation.

"At the center, we develop new catalyst materials to create sustainable chemicals and fuels that help society make the chemical industry greener. That it is now possible to scale up the production of hydrogen vehicles, and in a sustainable way, is a major step forward," says center leader Jan Rossmeisl.

###

For more information:

Professor and Center Leader Jan Rossmeisl

Department of Chemistry

Mobile: +45 5071 9584

Email: jan.rossmeisl@chem.ku.dk

Professor Matthias Arenz

Department of Chemistry

Mobile: +45 3035 5574

E-mail: m.arenz@chem.ku.dk
- Neymar admitted losing was part of the sport as he thanked fans who commisserated with him in the wake of the defeat

- Kingsley Coman's solitary goal proved vital as Bayern strolled to a slim win to claim the prestigious trophy

- The title is Bayern's sixth Champions League title, equaling Liverpool's record of the same number

Neymar has congratulated Bayern Munich following the German side's triumph in the Champions League.

Bayern, who have enjoyed a scintillating campaign, stunned Neymar's Paris Saint-Germain 1-0 in Lisbon on Sunday night, August 23, to win the European title.

READ ALSO: PSG vs Bayern Munich: Rooney tips French giants to win Champions League title

Neymar admitted losing was part of the sport as he thanked fans who commisserated with him in the wake of the defeat. Photo: Twitter/@ChampionsLeague.

Source: Twitter

READ ALSO: Harry Maguire: Man United star staring at three years in jail after Greece arrest

Kingsley Coman's 59th header proved the difference in the highly-contested match as the Bavarians strolled to victory.

Neymar, having inspired PSG to a historic berth to the finals, was hoping to lead the French side's to glory.

However, the Parisians failed to capitalise on earlier chances only to be punished by Bayern who were clinical in all departments.

Neymar cut a dejected face after Bayern Munich beat PSG to win the Champions League. Photo: Getty Images.

Source: Getty Images

READ ALSO: Freddie Ljungberg announces Arsenal departure

The defeat meant Neymar is yet to add to the European title he won with Barcelona five years ago and the loss clearly hit the Brazilian ace.

Members of PSG's management had to console an emotional Neymar who broke down after the final whistle.

But the forward appeared to have overcome his emotions later after the devastating defeat and took to Twitter to applaud Bayern.

PAY ATTENTION: Install Pitch Football app for FREE to easily access stats, news and live updates

READ ALSO: Marc Jurado: Barca youngster hints he has joined Man United

The ex-Barca ace further thanked fans who commiserated with him, admitting "losing is part of the sport."

"Losing is part of the sport, we try everything, we fight until the end," the Brazil international posted.

"Thank you for the support and affection I have received, each and every one of you. And congratulations to Bayern [sic]," he added.

Do you have an inspirational story you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Tuko news.

I am willing to go back to prison if it's for God's glory - Jowie Irungu | Tuko TV

Source: TUKO.co.ke
After his retirement, Harre served in a variety of positions relating to his faith. He served as the interim pastor of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Staplehurst, Nebraska, from 20102011 and as the vacancy pastor of St. John Lutheran Church in Waco, Nebraska, from 20122013. He also served as a volunteer adviser, primarily in the area of fundraising, to a number of institutions and agencies affiliated with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod
LONDON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Consistent with CRU's commitment to accuracy and continuous improvement, another independent audit of CRU's HRC data providers has been completed. This latest audit was carried out by independent professional services company PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC). It has demonstrated CRU's, and our data providers', commitment to reinforcing the integrity and quality of the industry's HRC price index.

CRU's leading HRC index successfully completes an independent audit of its data providers (PRNewsfoto/CRU)

Results indicate that the integrity of the index is strong, with overall compliance with required methodology and definitions. Data providers had a strong understanding of the importance of following clear specifications, and reporting in a consistent manner. Nevertheless, there are areas CRU wants to take forward with data providers and the market at large and we reaffirm our commitment to providing the very best service to this important industry.

"We are committed to underpinning, supporting and maintaining the integrity and quality of the industry's leading HRC price index. Completing this latest independent audit does just that and has reconfirmed the integrity of the price." CRU CEO David Trafford said.

"While CRU has processes that follow IOSCO Principles, we go further than that when it comes to our US Midwest HRC price - CRU is the only PRA to audit its data providers using a third-party audit firm. As you might expect, a rigorous approach was developed, including questionnaire, site visits and inspection of evidence." CRU's Compliance Lead Claire Ballak added.

For more details on the audit findings, please contact [email protected].

To learn more about CRU's US Midwest and other North American prices, or to become a CRU data provider, please contact [email protected].

For more information on CRU's price, analysis and forecasting services and how they can help your business, please visit contact [email protected].

Read the full story:

https://www.crugroup.com/about-cru/news/2020/crus-leading-hrc-index-successfully-completes-an-independent-audit-of-its-data-providers/

Read more about CRU: http://bit.ly/About_CRU

About CRU

CRU offers unrivalled business intelligence on the global metals, mining and fertilizer industries through market analysis, price assessments, consultancy and events.

Since our foundation by Robert Perlman in 1969, we have consistently invested in primary research and robust methodologies, and developed expert teams in key locations worldwide, including in hard-to-reach markets such as China.

CRU employs over 280 experts and has more than 11 offices around the world, in Europe, the Americas, China, Asia and Australia  our office in Beijing opened in 2004 and Singapore in 2018.

When facing critical business decisions, you can rely on our first-hand knowledge to give you a complete view of a commodity market. And you can engage with our experts directly, for the full picture and a personalised response.

CRU  big enough to deliver a high-quality service, small enough to care about all of our customers.

CRU US Midwest HRC/flat-rolled methodology key features

Exclusively transaction-based data - the market preference

Weekly (not daily) pricing - the industry preference, again confirmed by independent market research

Balanced across buyers and sellers, with dozens of data providers

Third-party auditors assess CRU processes and audit data providers

Expert industry analysts based in Pittsburgh apply expert judgment informed by a depth of steel industry experience and understanding

apply expert judgment informed by a depth of steel industry experience and understanding IOSCO adherence and broader price governance and compliance are overseen by CRU's dedicated Compliance Lead

For additional details, please click here.

SOURCE CRU
The Congress Working Committee (CWC) held a seven-hour-long virtual meeting on Monday amid a controversy over a letter written by 23 party leaders calling for sweeping reforms in the organisation. It was decided in the meeting that Sonia Gandhi will continue to lead the party.

The members of the CWC, the partys highest decision-making body, also decided to form a committee to help Gandhi in day-to-day functioning of the organisation.

The meeting was held in the context of two emerging views in the party, one of the 23 Congress leaders seeking dissolution of powers to state units and revamping the CWC, and another of the group that has come out in support of party president Sonia Gandhi.

Read full statement here:

The Congress Working Committee [CWC] takes note of the letter of Congress President, Smt. Sonia Gandhi addressed to General Secretary (Organisation) as also a letter written earlier by certain Congress leaders to the Congress President.

The CWC has extensively deliberated on the letters and, after detailed discussion, places on record the following:

First, the last six months have seen the nation in the throes of multiple crises. We have been beset by (i) the Corona pandemic that continues to claim thousands of lives, (ii) downward-spiraling economy, (iii) massive job losses and growing poverty, and (iv) brazen aggression into and occupation of Indian territory by the Chinese.

CWC Meeting: Track Live Updates

Second, the two voices that have been at the forefront of exposing the Governments inadequate responses, divisive politics and audacious propaganda are of Smt. Sonia Gandhi and Shri. Rahul Gandhi. Smt. Sonia Gandhis hard questions on the handling of the migrants crisis put this Government to shame. She ensured that Congress-ruled states tackled the pandemic effectively and provided access to healthcare and treatment to all sections of the people. Her leadership has rankled and embarrassed those occupying the highest offices in this Government. Shri. Rahul Gandhi has resolutely led the fight against the government from the front. The CWC, reflecting the overwhelming view and desire of the rank and file of the Congress, unanimously resolved to strengthen the hands of Smt. Sonia Gandhi and Shri. Rahul Gandhi in every possible way. The CWC makes it clear that no one will be or can be permitted to undermine or weaken the party and its leadership at this juncture. The responsibility of every Congress worker and leader today is to fight the pernicious assault on Indias democracy, pluralism and diversity by the Modi Government.

Third, and most importantly, the voices of our two leaders have inspired a generation of Indians, both within and outside of the Indian National Congress, to rise and demand answers from this Government which seeks to desperately distract the people through shallow and manufactured issues. It is under their leadership that crores of Congress workers and supporters have reached out to fill the large, callous gaps in governance left by this Government as a result of which millions belonging to the poor and middle classes have been unjustly deprived of their rights and their livelihoods.

Fourthly, the CWC notes that inner-party issues can not be deliberated through the media or in public fora. The CWC urges and advises all concerned to raise such issues only in party fora in the interest of propriety and discipline.

Fifthly, the CWC authorises the Congress President to affect necessary organisational changes that she may deem appropriate to take on the challenges listed above.

In the light of the above deliberations and conclusions, the CWC unanimously requests Smt. Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the Indian National Congress until such time as circumstances will permit an AICC session to be convened.
RTHK: Belarus cracks down on opposition with detentions

Police in Belarus arrested protest and strike organisers on Monday as authorities cracked down on opposition leaders after the latest unprecedented demonstration against President Alexander Lukashenko's disputed re-election.

The detentions came as a top US diplomat met with opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania and after tens of thousands took part in some of the largest protests in the country's recent history for a second Sunday in a row.

Tikhanovskaya fled to neighbouring Lithuania after August 9 polls that she claims to have won against Lukashenko. His insistence on his own landslide victory and police violence against demonstrators have sparked huge protests against his rule.

The opposition said two members of its Coordination Council were detained on Monday: Sergei Dylevsky, a tractor plant worker who has come to prominence as a strike leader and Olga Kovalkova, a member of Tikhanovskaya's staff.

Allies of Tikhanovskaya formed the Coordination Council this month to oversee efforts for a peaceful transition of power.

Its members include Nobel Prize-winning author and outspoken Lukashenko critic Svetlana Alexievich and former arts minister Pavel Latushko.

"We are under pressure. This morning two members of the presidium of the Coordination Council were detained," another presidium member, Liliya Vlasova, said at a press conference.

Vlasova, a lawyer and mediator, said Dylevsky and Kovalkova were accused of illegally organising a strike, an administrative violation.

A mobile phone video by a witness posted by news site Tut.by apparently showed Dylevsky and Kovalkova being led to a police van, watched by uniformed workers from the Belarus tractor plant.

"We consider these actions of the authorities are absolutely unlawful," Vlasova said, adding: "We are negotiators."

Vlasova said that investigators had also summoned her for questioning later on Monday.

In the industrial city of Soligorsk, police detained a strike leader at the Belaruskaly potash plant, Anatoly Bokun, and another, Alexander Lavrinovich, at the MZKT plant, which makes heavy-duty trucks, factory workers told reporters.

The strike leaders were taken to police stations.

US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun met Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania, calling her a "very impressive person".

He condemned "the violation of human rights and brutality that we've seen play out in Belarus," saying Belarusians must "determine their own future".

Tikhanovskaya said Lukashenko "does not have the support either of the Belarusian people or the international community."

Visiting Ukraine, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas also called for Lukashenko "not to resort to violence, to respect the rights of the protesters."

The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had spoken by phone with Lukashenko on Monday, the latest in a series of calls between the two leaders, whose countries are closely linked.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised protesters for lack of "provocations" and said law enforcement behaved "very appropriately" during Sunday's demonstration.

While police did not crack down at the time, the opposition warned on Monday that anyone who took part could potentially be detained.

Monday's detentions came after huge crowds of protesters held an unsanctioned march through the capital Minsk on Sunday, while Lukashenko mounted a bizarre display of force.

Footage released by his press service showed him landing at his residence in Minsk with his 15-year-old son Nikolai, both in bullet-proof vests and carrying semi-automatic rifles. He then praised riot police manning a heavily fortified barricade as "beautiful guys".

On Monday the presidency and state news agency Belta used the footage in a montage set to stirring music, titled "Belarus will not waver". It featured scenes of heavily armed riot police and warnings that Lukashenko will impose "order".

Tikhanovskaya's campaign ally and Coordination Council member Maria Kolesnikova on Monday called for an official investigation into how Nikolai, a minor, was allowed to carry a combat weapon, and ridiculed Lukashenko.

"We think it's very strange when someone who heads a country allows himself to run about in very strange clothing, with a very strange weapon in the centre of Minsk," she said.

"If he thinks 80 percent of Belarusians voted for him, why does he fearfully hide behind barbed wire and those chains of 'beautiful guys?'" (AFP)

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
ATLANTA - Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he would follow public health advisers advice if they called for a national shutdown should he take office and the coronavirus had not abated.

I would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives. We cannot get the country moving until we control the virus, Biden said in an interview broadcast Sunday night on ABC News.

Asked specifically whether hed push to shutter economic activity if scientists said it was necessary, Biden replied: I would shut it down.

The former vice-presidents remarks came as part of his first joint interview with vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The pair accepted their partys nominations during a virtual convention last week. On Monday, Republicans begin their convention to nominate Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence for a second term.

Biden and Harris, once primary rivals who sparred on the debate stage, sought during their sit-down with ABC to project a united front on policy issues from race to health care.

Harris, the first Black woman to join a major-party presidential ticket, vouched for Biden, a 77-year-old white man, when asked whether shes privately addressed some of his missteps when discussing race. He declared in May that any Black American having trouble deciding who to support aint Black, a comment he walked back the same day and said again Sunday he regretted.

Harris described Biden as possessing a deep sense of awareness and knowledge about racial disparities, inequities and systematic racism. She added that Biden actually knows how to say the words Black Lives Matter, contrary to Trump, who will never speak those words.

The running mates downplayed their bitter debate encounter last summer, when Harris levelled deeply personal criticism against Biden over his opposition in the 1970s to federally mandated busing to desegregate public schools and for remarks hed made about having worked amicably alongside racist senators when he first came to Washington.

Harris noted enduring racial wealth gaps in the U.S. and the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on Black and Hispanic communities. Biden, she said, is addressing these truths, he speaks these truths.

Biden said, looking back, he understands how Harris, who was among the minority students bused in the 1970s, would criticize him so harshly. But he said she and others may not have known his full record on civil rights.

He said he, as a white man, cannot understand her lived experiences and that she, a 55-year-old daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, cant understand his. But, he said they have the same value set and are on same exact page about what the possibilities are right now.

They put similar framing on their primary-campaign differences on health care. Biden has consistently backed adding a public option to existing private insurance markets. Harris signed on to Sen. Bernie Sanders bill that would create a single-payer government insurance system to replace private insurance.

I signed on to bills that were about great ideas to fix the problem, Harris told ABC, arguing she and Biden are completely aligned on  making sure everyone has health care.

Biden called any differences tactical but said, We both believe that health care is a right, not a privilege.

Pressed about her record as a prosecutor, Harris tacitly acknowledged that some critics see her as part of the same criminal justice system she and Biden want to overhaul amid ongoing protests over the killings of Black Americans by police. Biden repeated that, contrary to Trumps assertion, they do not support defunding police departments around the country.

The interview was Bidens first extended sit-down with national journalists since Trump, who is just three years younger than Biden, mocked his Democratic rival as unable to handle such a venue. Trump has repeatedly suggested Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency. Biden smiled when asked about Trumps characterization and said he remains eager to debate the president. Biden said he has no problem with voters questioning his fitness. Its a legitimate question to ask about his and Trumps ages, Biden said. Watch me.

Biden also laughed when asked about Trumps recent statement that the only way hed lose was if the election were rigged, and the Democratic challenger dismissed any notions that Trump wouldnt leave the White House voluntarily if he loses.

The American people will not let that happen, he said. No ones going to allow that to happen.
Israel has launched an attack against a site that was used by both the regime and Hezbollah, in the western countryside of Daraa writes Baladi News.

The Israeli army targeted a joint military site of the regime forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah militia today in the western countryside of Daraa.

Local sources said that an Israeli missile targeted the headquarters of the 61st Brigade in Tel al-Jabiya in the western countryside of Daraa.

They explained that the headquarters of the 61st Brigade constitutes a joint location for the regimes forces, Hezbollah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The resulting losses are still unknown.

On Aug. 4, 2020, the Israeli army targeted a joint site for regime forces and Iranian militias in Quneitra Governorate in southern Syria, which resulted in casualties.

Tensions have increased in recent weeks along the Israeli-Syrian border, after a member of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah was killed in an Israeli strike on the outskirts of Damascus.

As a result, Israel reinforced its forces along the northern borders between Lebanon and Syria.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the Israel Defense Forces international spokesperson, said at the time that this confrontation took place in the same place where two years ago Israel was operating a field hospital to treat Syrians wounded in the Syrian civil war.

Conricus added that the army detected unusual activity in that area about a week ago, which led a team of commandos to set up an ambush there.

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.
French health authorities have warned of a 'very worrying' outbreak of coronavirus at a famous nudist resort in the south of the country.

At least 95 people at the resort of Cap d'Agde, 30 miles south of Montpellier, have tested positive for the virus so far - with more results due this week.

That is in addition to an estimated 50 people who reported falling ill after returning home from the holiday village.

Health officials have warned visitors to the resort - which is also popular with swingers - that they must comply with all social distancing measures, including wearing face masks.

At least 95 visitors to the French nudist resort of Cap d'Agde, in the south of France (file image), have tested positive for coronavirus - with more results due this week

Health officials have warned visitors to the resort, which was built in the 1960s, that they must comply with all social distancing measures including wearing masks (pictured in the 1980s)

France made masks compulsory in all indoor spaces on July 20, with only very limited exceptions.

The nudist resort contains multiple indoor areas, including shops, banks, restaurants, bars and clubs.

Medics carried out 194 tests on visitors who volunteered at the resort on Monday last week, with 38 coming back positive, the regional health service said.

Another 244 tests were then carried out on Wednesday, with 57 positive.

Health officers carried out 310 additional tests on Friday, with results expected early this week.

A spokesman for the health authority said the rate of infection at the nudist resort is four times higher than the nearby village.

The outbreak comes as France on Sunday reported almost 4,900 new coronavirus cases over the last 24 hours, its highest figure since May.

Health Minister Olivier Veran warned earlier that the situation was risky, and said infections were essentially happening among 20 to 40 year-olds at parties.

Cases among older people were starting to rise too, Veran said, but he ruled out another total lockdown in France.

While there was a small nudist village on the site of Cap d'Agde in the 1950s, it was not until the area was developed in the 1960s that the idea really took off.

Originally, the resort was simply intended to be a tourist village, before the concept of nudity was later incorporated into the plans.

The outbreak was reported as France's daily coronavirus case total increased to 4,897 on Sunday - the largest single-day increase since May

Despite the rise in cases the number of coronavirus deaths in the country has remained low, with 10 reported at the weekend

It is now thought to be the largest community of nudists anywhere in the world, with up to 40,000 people staying there at the height of a typical summer season.

As well as France, there have been worrying spikes in coronavirus cases in Spain, Germany and Switzerland - much of it blamed on holidaying Europeans and youngsters enjoying parties in the summer heatwave.

Austria and Croatia have also seen a spike in cases, leading the UK government to warn Britons returning from holidays in both countries that they must quarantine for 14 days upon arrival.

Spain and France are already included on the list.

Weekly coronavirus cases in Croatia have increased by more than 179 percent from 7.8 per 100,000 to 21.5 per 100,000.

In Austria, it's a 79.5 percent increase on the previous week from 8 per 100,000 to 14.4 per 100,000.

And in Switzerland - another nexus of European tourism - weekly cases have increased by 54.6 percent in the last week, from 11.1 per 100,000 to 17.2 per 100,000.

Germany is also experiencing an increase of 26.1% on last week, with particular concern in Berlin where the contagion is soaring wildly after overcrowding in its parks during the heat.

The latest figures, from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases, bring to 228,621 the number of infections in the country since the start of the pandemic.

Italy registered 845 new cases on Thursday, its highest daily tally since May, while France's 4,771 fresh infections was a colossal increase on Wednesday's 3,776 (pictured: a graph of the rolling 7-day average)

Masks have been mandatory in all indoor spaces across France since July 20, with some cities - such as Nice, pictured - ordering masks to be worn in all public spaces

It takes the daily toll back to a level not seen since late April, when the pandemic was considered to be at its peak.

The daily record of new cases in Germany is just over 6,000, registered in early April.

Ten new deaths were reported in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 9,253.

Faced with a surge in cases, Germany earlier this month introduced free, mandatory tests for anyone returning from areas deemed a high risk for COVID-19 infections.

But despite the second wave gathering momentum, the head of the WHO's European branch said that reimposing a full-scale lockdown measures would not be necessary.

Hans Kluge said: 'With the basic nationwide and additional targeted measures, we are in a much better position to stamp out these localized virus flare-ups.

'We can manage the virus and keep the economy running and an education system in operation.'

Countries are currently racing to develop vaccines for the virus, with several candidates in late-stage development - including in China, the US and UK.

Russia claims to have already approved a vaccine for widespread use in humans, the the Philippines signing up to receive millions of doses, though the medication has not yet undergone mass-testing.

The Kremlin said last week that it is also testing the vaccine on 40,000 people in its own country.

The EU said on Thursday it had concluded talks with a German pharmaceutical firm to secure 225 million doses of a potential vaccine - the fourth such agreement the bloc has reached.

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed European cooperation on the issue and said he was hopeful that a vaccine would come online with the next few months.

'This will not solve the problems of the next few weeks, but of the next few months,' he said.

However, while a vaccine remains elusive, governments are left trying to control the spread through social-distancing measures, quarantines, travel bans and restrictions on businesses.
Today we'll do a simple run through of a valuation method used to estimate the attractiveness of Ariadne Australia Limited (ASX:ARA) as an investment opportunity by projecting its future cash flows and then discounting them to today's value. Our analysis will employ the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model. Before you think you won't be able to understand it, just read on! It's actually much less complex than you'd imagine.

We generally believe that a company's value is the present value of all of the cash it will generate in the future. However, a DCF is just one valuation metric among many, and it is not without flaws. If you want to learn more about discounted cash flow, the rationale behind this calculation can be read in detail in the Simply Wall St analysis model.

Check out our latest analysis for Ariadne Australia

The calculation

We use what is known as a 2-stage model, which simply means we have two different periods of growth rates for the company's cash flows. Generally the first stage is higher growth, and the second stage is a lower growth phase. In the first stage we need to estimate the cash flows to the business over the next ten years. Seeing as no analyst estimates of free cash flow are available to us, we have extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the company's last reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years.

A DCF is all about the idea that a dollar in the future is less valuable than a dollar today, and so the sum of these future cash flows is then discounted to today's value:

10-year free cash flow (FCF) estimate

2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030 Levered FCF (A$, Millions) AU$7.81m AU$6.52m AU$5.81m AU$5.41m AU$5.18m AU$5.06m AU$5.02m AU$5.02m AU$5.05m AU$5.11m Growth Rate Estimate Source Est @ -24.61% Est @ -16.55% Est @ -10.91% Est @ -6.96% Est @ -4.19% Est @ -2.26% Est @ -0.9% Est @ 0.05% Est @ 0.71% Est @ 1.18% Present Value (A$, Millions) Discounted @ 7.8% AU$7.2 AU$5.6 AU$4.6 AU$4.0 AU$3.5 AU$3.2 AU$3.0 AU$2.7 AU$2.6 AU$2.4

("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)

Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = AU$38m

Story continues

After calculating the present value of future cash flows in the initial 10-year period, we need to calculate the Terminal Value, which accounts for all future cash flows beyond the first stage. The Gordon Growth formula is used to calculate Terminal Value at a future annual growth rate equal to the 5-year average of the 10-year government bond yield of 2.3%. We discount the terminal cash flows to today's value at a cost of equity of 7.8%.

Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2030  (1 + g)  (r  g) = AU$5.1m (1 + 2.3%)  (7.8% 2.3%) = AU$94m

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= AU$94m ( 1 + 7.8%)10= AU$44m

The total value is the sum of cash flows for the next ten years plus the discounted terminal value, which results in the Total Equity Value, which in this case is AU$82m. In the final step we divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. Compared to the current share price of AU$0.4, the company appears around fair value at the time of writing. Remember though, that this is just an approximate valuation, and like any complex formula - garbage in, garbage out.

dcf

The assumptions

Now the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate, and of course, the actual cash flows. If you don't agree with these result, have a go at the calculation yourself and play with the assumptions. The DCF also does not consider the possible cyclicality of an industry, or a company's future capital requirements, so it does not give a full picture of a company's potential performance. Given that we are looking at Ariadne Australia as potential shareholders, the cost of equity is used as the discount rate, rather than the cost of capital (or weighted average cost of capital, WACC) which accounts for debt. In this calculation we've used 7.8%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.930. Beta is a measure of a stock's volatility, compared to the market as a whole. We get our beta from the industry average beta of globally comparable companies, with an imposed limit between 0.8 and 2.0, which is a reasonable range for a stable business.

Moving On:

Valuation is only one side of the coin in terms of building your investment thesis, and it is only one of many factors that you need to assess for a company. DCF models are not the be-all and end-all of investment valuation. Instead the best use for a DCF model is to test certain assumptions and theories to see if they would lead to the company being undervalued or overvalued. For instance, if the terminal value growth rate is adjusted slightly, it can dramatically alter the overall result. For Ariadne Australia, there are three important factors you should further examine:

Risks: For example, we've discovered 2 warning signs for Ariadne Australia that you should be aware of before investing here. Other Solid Businesses: Low debt, high returns on equity and good past performance are fundamental to a strong business. Why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals to see if there are other companies you may not have considered! Other Environmentally-Friendly Companies: Concerned about the environment and think consumers will buy eco-friendly products more and more? Browse through our interactive list of companies that are thinking about a greener future to discover some stocks you may not have thought of!

PS. The Simply Wall St app conducts a discounted cash flow valuation for every stock on the ASX every day. If you want to find the calculation for other stocks just search here.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.



Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
Schools around the United States are modifying their curriculum in response to the Black Lives Matter movement as students return following a summer of protest.

The weeks of unrest sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor has jumpstarted the response from educators.

It has also led to increased demands for teaching materials and practices that help black students better understand their history and place in the country.

A June survey by the EdWeek Research Center, which is affiliated with the prominent trade publication Education Week, found that 81 percent of US teachers support Black Lives Matter.

After a summer of teacher workshops focused on updating curricula, millions of students will return to school in coming weeks - virtually or in person - that focus more on black history and experiences, according to interviews with teachers, officials, publishers and others. Pictured, the first day of school in Los Angeles earlier in August

'We can't control what happens with the police, but we can control what happens in our school systems,' said Michael McFarland, head of the National Alliance of Black School Educators and a superintendent of the Crowley Independent School District in Texas.

After a summer of teacher workshops focused on updating curricula, millions of students will return to U.S. classrooms in coming weeks - virtually or in person - that focus more on black history and experiences, according to interviews with teachers, officials, publishers and others.

John Marshall keeps a picture of Breonna Taylor in his office at the headquarters of Kentucky's largest school district, a visual reminder, he says, of the need for curriculum changes that better honor and focus on black stories.

Taylor, a black emergency medical technician, spent her senior year of high school at Kentucky's Jefferson County Public Schools, where Marshall, the district's chief diversity officer, has been leading a system-wide revamp of teaching materials and practices.

Taylor was shot dead by police officers in March. Her death and that of George Floyd, killed by Minneapolis police in May, and others have set off a national reckoning over race and race relations.

No criminal charges have been filed against the officers involved in Taylor's death, infuriating many in the school district, where a majority of the nearly 100,000 students are students of color.

'We're not just talking about a couple of lesson changes,' said Marshall.

'We're getting to the quintessential work of trying to put race, equity and inclusion inside of our curriculum.'

The deaths of George Floyd (pictured left) and Breonna Taylor (pictured right) sparked a summer of unrest and weeks of Black Lives Matter protests. Teachers across the US are now looking to revamp their curricula in response as millions of students return to school

Some of the changes don't necessarily involve new material, but rather teaching the same material from a new perspective.

In the Jefferson County schools, for instance, teachers discussing the Space Race of the 1960s plan now to focus on the black women mathematicians whose computations underpin modern rocket science.

In Houston, teachers at YES Prep public charter schools will dissect James Baldwin's iconic book of essays 'The Fire Next Time' less as a history of racial struggle and more as a guide for black students to overcome injustice.

These and other recommendations came after school districts spent summer months updating educational materials because most public school textbooks are only updated by publishers on a fixed schedule.

How and what U.S. students learn about American history depends on the school.

The country's public K-12 education system is run by more than 98,000 local and state school board members, who nearly always have the final say on which textbooks are bought for classrooms.

Schools around the United States are modifying their curriculum in response to the Black Lives Matter movement as students return following a summer of protest. Pictured, a mother walks her child to school on the first day of in-person classes in Orange County, Florida, Friday

In 2014, the Texas State Board of Education came under fire when it considered approving a Mexican-American studies textbook that critics decried as riddled with mistakes and demeaning stereotypes.

Other school boards either bought different textbooks or didn't offer the same course.

The National School Boards Association, which advises school districts on curriculum changes, said requests for advice on crafting racially diverse educational material doubled this summer from the same period last year.

'They're making sure teachers are teaching the right history in their classrooms,' said Anna Maria Chavez, the association's executive director.

Scholastic Corp, which publishes educational material to supplement textbooks, said it has seen a surge in demand for books that focus on diversity and equity.

'Schools are wanting to have these more difficult conversations about race and social justice,' said Michael Haggen, Scholastic's chief academic officer.

Staff at Houston's YES Prep said their returning 15,000 students can expect to spend more time reflecting on how the deaths of Taylor, Floyd and others connect to a timeline of injustice.

The goal for YES Prep students, nearly all of whom are black or Latino, is to consider how they can not only oppose racism, but be part of broader cultural change, said Kiara Hughes, YES Prep's director of organizational strategy and initiatives.

'This isn't a singular moment in time,' said Hughes. 'This is a fight that people have been fighting for a hundred of years.'
The federal government has said it plans to build a third refinery in Rivers State bringing the total in the state to three.

This is as the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, insisted that the Niger Delta region is safe for companies to conduct their businesses and demanded that international oil companies (IOCs) relocate their headquarters to the state.

The duo spoke Sunday when the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipri Sylva, and the management of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) paid a courtesy visit to Wike at the Government House, Port Harcourt.

Sylva also said plans had reached an advanced stage to rehabilitate the existing refineries in the country.

He said the federal government decided to start the rehabilitation programme from the two refineries in Port Harcourt because Rivers State is the headquarters of the hydrocarbon industry.

The minister of state for petroleum resources also commended Wike for being persistent in his quest to get the Refinery Road dualized and promised that the ministry would support the move.

In his response, Wike urged multinational companies to stop using insecurity to justify their refusal to relocate their operational headquarters to the Niger Delta region.

The governor wondered why insecurity does not prevent the drilling of oil but could be used to deprive the state what is due to it.

"They use insecurity issues to place us in a disadvantaged position and deny us our right.

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"There is insecurity in Lagos, Kaduna and Katsina States. Yet, companies do not run away from those states. The railway projects are not stalled too.

"The multinationals are sometimes to blame because they instigate insecurity by paying militants and turn around to blame it on the people.

"There is no excuse to operate outside our state. The federal government should compel them to relocate their headquarters to the state as the hub of the hydrocarbon industry," he said.

He noted that the NNPC has not done anything substantial for the state after many years of operation, adding that the Port Harcourt Refinery has continued to operate below installed capacity, even as the access road has been in a poor state for years.

"I urge you as minister and members of the board of directors to dualize the three kilometres road and change the narrative," he stated.

Wike noted the patriotism Slyva had demonstrated by attracting federal projects to his state and urged other ministers to emulate him.

He said even if the minister is of the opposition party in Bayelsa State, his sense of patriotism has made him to place the interest of the state above partisan interests.
There are calls to reform, defund and even abolish the police. And central to the push for law enforcement reform is how police officers receive training.

Training has a huge influence on how police officers react during routine traffic stops and life-or-death encounters. There are no federally mandated training minimums for police officers in the United States, and reform advocates say other countries have much stricter and longer requirements for training police officers.

Both the International Association of Chiefs of Police and Fraternal Order of Police did not respond to CNBC's request for comment for this story.

Watch the video above to learn about how much federal taxpayer money gets spent on police training, and about the cottage industry behind some of the controversy.




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Linkedin Djemi Amnifu and Moch. Fiqih Prawira Adjie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta/Kupang  Mon, August 24 2020

Friday marks the 11th anniversary of the Montara oil spill, in which hundreds and thousands of barrels of oil spilled into the Timor Sea following an explosion at an offshore rig.

Despite more than a decade of suffering the impacts, the affected residents of Timor Island in East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) are still fighting for justice and demanding compensation from rig operator PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP) Australasia and the Australian government.

NTT residents, especially the ones living in West Timor, are demanding that the Australian government immediately compensate more than 200,000 residents that have suffered [from the oil spill]. Some have even passed away, Montara victim advocacy team head, Ferdi Tanoni, said on Friday in Kupang.

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This article has been updated to reflect that activists repainted the slogans late Sunday night/early Monday morning.

OTTAWA COUNTY, MI  Activists showed up in Allendale Township Sunday to draw Black Lives Matter slogans, only to meet counter-protesters at the ready with water buckets to wash them away.

The gathering was a protest pushing for the removal of a Civil War statue, depicting Confederate and Union soldiers both standing over a Black slave child, from a community park near the Allendale Township hall.

Organizers from Justice for Black Lives, TakeItDown! Allendale and the Michigan Association of Civil Rights Activists met at 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 23, in the township hall parking lot at 6678 Lake Michigan Drive. The group has continued to rally the last few months after the township board unanimously voted on June 30 to keep the statue in its place.

Read more: Controversial Allendale statue a symbol of larger issues of racism, its opponents say

Were not going to give up the pressure. Were going to keep the pressure on (the township board), said MACRA spokesperson Mitch Kahle, who joined others in painting messages on the pavement Sunday. Were going to make sure that the township of Allendale understands that black lives matter, freedom of speech matters and that theres no place in this country where this type of hate speech honoring Confederate soldiers, demeaning black children can be tolerated.

In addition to Black Lives Matter, Kahle and others scribbled several messages with chalk on the concrete, including Take it Down and Good Trouble, a reference to a favorite saying of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis.

An opposing group rallied at the site as well, painting messages of All Lives Matter and Trump 2020. Some also brought buckets of water and brooms to wash away the messages entirely.

The Black Lives Matter activists did not get approval from the township board to write their messages in the parking lot, Kahle told MLive.

The lack of prior approval angered counter-protesters, such as Allendale resident Mike Stewart.

These people are defacing our property, Stewart told MLive. They dont live in our town. They have no business even being here. This whole thing has been blown out of proportion for the last three or four months.

Local residents have spoken out against the statue, as have Grand Valley State University students. In June, GVSU President Philomena V. Mantella suggested the statue be moved from the veterans display to a different location.

Stewart and others stood on top of unfinished messages to prevent activists from finishing them, though many proceeded to draw around their feet. The Ottawa County Sheriffs Office did not intervene, other than advising people not to touch one another. No physical altercations occurred and no arrests were made.

Abby VanMalsen, who is seeking her masters degree at GVSU, was among those painting messages with the MACRA goup Sunday.

I want to be supportive of the Black voices in Allendale, in our community, Van Malsen said. I think there are a lot of ideas circulating that we dont live here. And we do live here. We go to school here, we give to businesses here, I go to church here in West Michigan.

I want all Black people in Allendale to feel loved, I want them to feel safe, I want them to feel supported, I want them to feel cared for.

After some arguments between those gathered, the protest and counter-protest eventually dispersed. As evening turned to night, the counter-protesters returned with more buckets of water to wash away all the messages written on the pavement earlier.

Activists repainted Black Lives Matter late Sunday heading into early Monday morning, Kahle confirmed with photos sent to MLive.

The township boards action in late June to keep the statue as is came after a lengthy meeting with public comment. The board voted to form a diversity advisory committee to further discuss matters of race in the township.

Obviously, a lot has happened in the last 20 years, Allendale Township Supervisor Adam Elenbaas said at the time. It may be time to make updates to our veterans memorial. When you try to make fast dramatic changes, you often times have people that want to dig their heels in and say, I dont want to change.

Elenbaas could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday.

Related on MLive:

Hundreds gather in Ottawa County to protest Confederate statue in park, demand removal

GVSU president urges Allendale Township to relocate Confederate soldier statue
All the four Vietnamese students competing at the International Biology Olympiad 2020 won prizes, including one gold medal, reported the Ministry of Education and Training today.

The four prize winners.

The ministry received official results from host Japan on August 24.

The students, comprising three 12th graders and one 11th grader, snatched one gold, one silver and one bronze medal, and one consolation prize.

Specifically, Ho Viet Duc, 12th grader from the National High School for the Gifted, Thua Thien-Hue Province, won the gold medal.

Dong Ngoc Ha, 12th grader from the High School for the Gifted of the Hanoi University for Natural Sciences, won a silver medal.

Ha Vu Huyen Linh, 12th grader from the High School for the Gifted of the Hanoi University for Natural Sciences, won a bronze medal.

Nguyen Thi Thu Nga, 11th grader from the Hung Vuong High School for the Gifted, Phu Tho Province, won a consolation prize.

The Vietnamese team.

The International Biology Olympiad 2020 was held online, instead of taking place in Japans Nagasaki city in mid-July as initially scheduled, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although the event was held online, the number of exercises did not change. Candidates took two theory exercises (each for three hours) and two practice exercises. The virtual experiments on animal physiology took place within three hours, and the bioinformatics exercise took 1.5 hours.

Earlier, all the six members of the Vietnamese team at the online 13th Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad 2020, hosted by Indonesia, also won medals, including one gold, four silver and one bronze medal.

Four others brought home gold medals at the virtual International Chemistry Olympiad 2020 hosted by Turkey.

Thanh Hung
Vinay Sahasrabuddhe By

Even when Covid-19 has compelled all of us into a collective languor, there are people across India and abroad who have continued to trod their path cautiously with preventive measures, epitomising the charaiveti, charaiveti (keep moving, keep moving) mantra. Many industries are opening because of such souls; factories are being unlocked and the discussion has veered now on to when and how schools will reopen.

Just recently, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warned that the world is facing a generational catastrophe due to the ongoing closure of schools. More than 1,500 members of Londons Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, in a statement last month (actually, it was an open letter to the British premier), termed the lockdown as a case of cure worse than the disease. Countries like Denmark, South Africa, Finland, etc., have made more or less successful attempts to restart their schools, where students are divided into smaller batches and given entry into the school with masks and social distancing made mandatory.

According to Arnaud Fontanet, Head of the Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases Unit at the Institut Pasteur, children below 11-12 years are less likely to spread the transmission. He says middle school students are more likely to catch the infection in school while those at the primary school level are more prone to getting infected at home. Possibly because of this, Netherlands has cut down on the number of students in each class by half but has refrained from imposing social distancing for children below 12 years. Denmark too has put restrictions on the number of students per class.

The emphasis is on conducting classes out in the open, so much so that some classes are held even in cemeteries. Germany and Brazil too are experimenting with smaller class strengths. India has not reopened schools as yet, but several states have come up with innovative solutions combining online and offline measures. Andhra Pradesh started a helpline to address study-related problems faced by students. Over 200-odd teachers man this helpline and provide guidance to callers.

Arunachal Pradesh has roped in radio to reach out to students in the far-flung areas. Assam and Bihar have used a mobile app to take the school to each household. Sikkim has started a Facebook channel for its students. Pankhe village in Pune district has launched a novel campaign with the slogan Schools closed, Education continues while using WhatsApp tutorials. On the one hand, schools and managements are trying especially hard to ensure that students do not miss out on anything.

And on the other, there are states that are opposing conducting the final year examination for degree students. Considering that a return to normalcy is generally high on the agenda of state governments, a reluctance to conduct examinations is eyebrow-raising. Those opposing final year examinations fail to gauge the damage that such a move would do to the careers of lakhs of students. A few decades ago, a massive fire in the godown where the answer sheets of students of Class 10 of the Maharashtra SSC board examinations were stored burnt everything down to ashes.

The state was constrained to declare all those who had appeared for the exam as passed. However, even decades thereafter, all of them are pooh-poohed and referred to as the batch of burnt SSC! Those opposing final year exams must understand that they are forcing a complete batch of these students to carry this stamp of passed-without-exam on their forehead for their entire lifetime, without any fault of theirs. No examination may appear as an easy, and therefore alluring, way to create an impression that the problem is solved.

However, advocates of this policy forget that this may create a permanent inferiority complex in the minds of the batch of 2020! Those who see no wrong in appointing fellow party workers as Gram Panchayat administrators or those who occupy the top position in a political party simply because of their belonging to a particular dynasty may not find promotion sans examination odd. However, for a crass populist move like this, students and their families will be paying a heavy price in the future.

This, of course, is not to suggest that the threat of the pandemic is not serious enough. But the challenge thrown by the pandemic has to be met with a catch-the-bull-by-its-horns approach! If a village teacher in Nandurbar district of Maharashtra can use a microphone for a public lecture on a lesson in geography which the students are made to listen to sitting at their homes, if a variety of social media platforms could be put to use for disseminating education elsewhere, avoiding examinations of final year students is like surrendering before the challenge. To start with, at least this mindset of helplessness needs to be done away with.

Once we overcome this, efforts for finding solutions could be taken to a different level. Lets take the example of university examinations. Had universities experimented with what is called the question bank system, we could have found ourselves in a position to have hassle-free examinations. Under this, typically, a bank of 100 questions is announced right at the start of the academic year. At the time of final year examinations, students are expected to attempt any, say, 15 questions that are decided by a lottery draw.

This way, examinees in every classroom face a different set of questions, thereby absolutely negating the threat of a question-paper leak. Moreover, in a Covid-19-like situation, one can have multiple batches of students for the same exam to comply with the limit on the number of examinees at a time.

Extraordinary situations demand extraordinary solutions. It is convenient to go for a compromise, easy to give up on set standards and norms, and perhaps alluring to take a populist position. But to be steadfast on certain issues needs courage of conviction. Lets hope that the same will not be in short supply in the larger interest of all. After all, The show must go on will have to be the spirit!

Vinay Sahasrabuddhe

National Vice President of the BJP, President, ICCR, and Rajya Sabha MP

(vinays57@gmail.com)
The COVID-19 count in the country stood at 30,44,941 including 7,07,668 active cases, 22,80,567 cured or discharged or migrated patients, and 56,706 deaths the health ministry said. 912 deaths have also been reported due to the infection.

With a single-day spike of 69,239 cases, Indias COVID-19 cases count crossed 30-lakh mark, Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said on Sunday. The COVID-19 count in the country stood at 30,44,941 including 7,07,668 active cases, 22,80,567 cured or discharged or migrated patients, and 56,706 deaths the health ministry said. 912 deaths have also been reported due to the infection.

The count had breached the 20-lakh mark in the country 16 days ago on August 7, with the then highest spike of 62,538 cases. The Union Health Ministry said that maintaining daily COVID-19 testing spree of more than 8 lakhs, India has tested more than 3.5 crore samples to date. In the last 24 hours, the test per million (TPM) reached 25,574 as on Sunday.

The country has performed 8,01,147 COVID-19 tests, taking the total figures to 3,52,92,220, stated the Union Health Ministry. Meanwhile, Maharashtra with 1,71,542 active cases and 4,88,271 cured and discharged patients continues to be the worst affected.

Also read: Sonia Gandhi to step down as Congress chief, asks for selection of a new chief: Reports

Also read: Centre releases SOP for resumption of film and television production

A total of 10,441 new COVID-19 cases and 258 deaths were reported in Maharashtra today. The total number of positive cases now stands at 6,82,383.

Tamil Nadu has reported 5,975 new COVID-19 cases, 6,047 recoveries and 97 deaths on Sunday, taking total cases to 3,79,385 including 3,19,327 discharges and 6,517 deaths. The number of active cases stands at 53,541, according to the state health department.

Andhra Pradesh reported 7,895 new COVID-19 cases, 7,449 recoveries, and 93 deaths, taking total cases to 3,53,111 including 2,60,087 recoveries and 3,282 deaths.

As many as 1,450 new COVID-19 cases 16 deaths were reported in Delhi on Sunday, taking the total number of cases to 1,61,466 in the national capital, the health department said. According to the official data, a total of 1,250 discharges or recoveries or migrations were also reported in the capital today. The total number of cases includes 1,45,388 recovered cases, 11,778 active cases and 4,300 deaths so far.

Divulging further, the health department informed that 6,261 RT-PCR or CBNAAT or TrueNat tests and 12,470 Rapid antigen tests conducted today. A total of 14,31,094 tests have been conducted so far and Tests Per Million (TPM) stands at 75,320 so far.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal expressed happiness over the controlled situation in the capital. As many as 13 new COVID-19 cases were reported in Himachal Pradesh, taking total positive cases to 4,936 out of which 1,493 cases are active.

A total of 1,908 new cases and 1,110 recoveries were reported in Kerala today, taking active cases to 20,330 and recoveries to 37,649, Kerala Health Minister KK Shailaja said.

Manipur reported 114 new cases of COVID-19, taking total cases to 5,246 including 3,616 recoveries and 22 deaths. The number of active cases stands at 1,608.

Similarly, Jammu and Kashmir reported 666 new COVID-19 cases, 434 recoveries and nine deaths today which took the total number of cases to 32,647, including 24,832 recoveries and 617 deaths. The number of active cases stands at 7,198.

According to the Punjab Health Department, 1,136 new COVID-19 cases were reported in the state today. The total number of cases roses to 41,779 including 14,165 active cases, 26,528 recovered cases and 1,086 deaths so far.

Meanwhile, Karnataka reported 5,938 cases (2,126 in Bengaluru), 4,996 discharges and 68 deaths, taking total cases to 2,77,814 including 1,89,564 discharges and 4,683 deaths.

A total of 1,101 new COVID-19 cases and 14 deaths were reported in Gujarat on Sunday, taking the total tally to 86,779 including 69,229 discharges and 2,897 deaths. The number of active cases stands at 14,653 in Gujarat.

A total of 5,423 new COVID-19 cases were reported in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday, taking the total number of active cases to 49,242 in the state. According to state principal secretary health Amit Mohan Prasad, there are 1,35,613 recoveries while 2,926 people have died in the state so far. The recovery rate has increased to 72.21 per cent.

Also read: India slams China, Pakistan over interference in Kashmir matter
Assisted by the role of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) in continuing to push through historic cuts in jobs, wages and conditions, Australian university managements are unveiling plans to intensify their offensive, eliminating thousands more jobs.

In line with the demands of the federal government and the corporate elite, the employers are exploiting the fallout from the global COVID-19 pandemic to demand further pro-business restructuring.

There was outrage by staff at the University of Sydney last week, after it was revealed that all departments have been asked to plan scenarios to cut full-time jobs by up to 30 percent next year to deal with the pandemics impact, which the management now admits will worsen next year.

With a workforce of about 9,000 full-time equivalent jobs, a 30 percent cut would slash 2,700. But many more people would be affected because the university employs a high proportion of part-time and casual workers, hundreds of whom have been cut already.

The University of Sydney

In an email last Wednesday, the head of the universitys School of Education and Social Work, Deb Hayes, said Arts and Social Sciences dean Annamarie Jagose had asked her to propose how we might restructure to reduce by up to 30 percent FTE (full-time equivalent jobs). Hayes suggested that one scenario would be for academics to take one days leave without pay each week.

In a bid to quell staff anger the management denied any final decisions had been made, but similar scenarios are being drafted across the university. The NTEU also sought to head off unrest by claiming that its enterprise agreement with the university would protect jobs, even though that agreement permits restructuring and retrenchments provided there is consultation with union representatives.

A hastily-called meeting, joined by more than 200 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences workers last Thursday, committed to fight the cuts, possibly including by industrial action. But the motion put to the meeting offered no alternative perspective except to call on the management to borrow money on the basis of the universitys significant assets.

That call leaves unchallenged the underlying agenda of accelerating the decades-long transformation of universities into corporatised and casualised facilities serving the vocational requirements of the corporate elite. It echoes similar NTEU pleas at other universities for managements to sell off assets and axe jobs only as a last resort.

During the meeting, one professional staff member pointed to the wider cuts and restructuring throughout the universities in Australia and globally. He explained the culpability of governments and big business for their profit-driven response to the pandemic, and their bailouts of the corporate elite. He raised the necessity therefore to fight for the reorganisation of society on a socialist basis to meet social needs, not boost private profits.

The next day, the need for that perspective was highlighted when Melbournes RMIT University announced that it had eliminated 355 jobs via so-called voluntary redundancies, on top of the destruction of hundreds of casual jobs in April. A spokesperson said the measures would save $48 million and foreshadowed further cuts, saying the universitys revenue would fall by $175 million in 2020 alone.

Earlier in the week, Sydneys Macquarie University told its staff that forced redundancies would follow if proposed voluntary redundancies failed to meet an expected a $175 million revenue shortfall this year, and an even bigger loss next year. This would mean eliminating between 600 and 1,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

The email from Macquaries vice chancellor also announced a strategic alignment of its academic workforce, including increased use of the job families scheme. This scheme, which forces targeted academics to devote 80 percent of their workloads to teaching, with no time for research, was imposed by the NTEU in its 2018 enterprise agreement despite significant opposition from academic staff.

Two weeks ago, Victorias La Trobe University launched a second round of voluntary redundancies following the axing of 239 jobs in an earlier round. It told staff it plans to cut costs by 20 percent and reduce the range of academic disciplines it teaches.

Remaining staff will be expected to lift their productivity by 20 percent as the ratio of full-time students to full-time staff member is lifted from 8.7 to 10.5. This was after a majority of staff voted, at the NTEUs urging, to take salary reductions, supposedly to limit job losses.

In a draft 10-year strategy for 2020 to 2030, the La Trobe management said it may lose up to 25 percent of revenue by the end of next year and would resort to more online teaching. We will be a smaller institution measured by revenue, staff and students for the foreseeable future, the draft strategy stated.

In the same week, Melbournes Victoria University revealed a plan to cut up to 190 jobs. Vice-chancellor Professor Peter Dawkins said the number of positions lost would depend on staffs willingness to accept a pay-cutting variation to their enterprise agreement.

These losses came in the wake of those at other Melbourne universities, with the University of Melbourne to lose 450 full-time positions and Monash University to shed 277 jobs despite Monash workers accepting an NTEU proposal to cut wages.

Universities Australia, the employers body, previously projected that the higher education sector would lose up to 21,000 jobs this year alone. That is now an under-estimate because of the pandemics resurgence since July, particularly in the state of Victoria.

In response, the NTEU has stepped up its collaboration with university managements, policing cuts to wages, jobs and basic conditions. It has defied the opposition of union members in May that triggered the collapse of the unions national framework, which volunteered wage cuts of up to 15 percent and still accepted the loss of 18,000 jobs.

The NTEU and its allies are also trying to divert the outrage of university workers and students into a parliamentary petition campaign. They are appealing to right-wing senators to block the Liberal-National governments latest student fee hikes and funding cuts on the basis of arguing that universities make a valuable contribution to Australian capitalism. This campaign buries the record of successive governments in cutting billions of dollars from the public universities, starting with the last Greens-backed Labor Party government of 2010-2013.

These bitter experiences demonstrate that university academics, staff and students can defend jobs and fight for free, high-quality education, only through a rebellion against the NTEU and all the other pro-capitalist unions and the entire political establishment.

The Committee for Public Education (CFPE) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) have jointly called for the formation of independent rank-and-file committees to prosecute a genuine industrial and political struggle against all the union-enforced attacks.

That requires challenging the capitalist profit system and turning to a socialist perspective based on the total reorganisation of society in the interests of all, instead of the financial oligarchy. We urge all university workers and students who want to take forward this fight to contact us.

Email: cfpe.aus@gmail.com

CFPE Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/commforpubliceducation/

Twitter account: @CFPE_Australia
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is scheduled to visit Sudan on Tuesday to hold talks with the head of the Transitional Sovereign Council Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan and Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, Sudan's SUNA news agency reported.

The talks will focus on US support of the democratic transition in Sudan, Israel-Sudan relations, and lifting Sudans name off the list of countries harbouring terrorism in the nearest time possible.

The visit is the first by a US secretary of state to Sudan since 2004.

The visit comes at a time relations between Khartoum and Washington are witnessing remarkable developments following the formation of the civilian-led government in Sudan.

Pompeo arrived in Israel on Monday, kicking off a five-day visit to the Middle East focused on Israel's normalising of ties with the UAE and pushing other Arab states to follow suit.

In addition to Israel and Sudan, the US State Department said Pompeo will travel to Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Officials said stops in Oman and Qatar are also possible.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is also scheduled to arrive in Khartoum on Tuesday for a one-day visit, SUNA reported.

Ethiopia's ambassador in Khartoum Yibeltal Aemero said on Monday Ahmed will discuss bilateral relations with Sudanese officials and means to boost cooperation between the two sides.

Aemero said he discussed boosting economic, political and social ties during a meeting with the head of the Transitional Sovereign Council, Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan, while presenting his credentials letter.

Al-Burhan welcomed Abiy's visit which will push forward relations between the two countries.

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The exams are going to be held from 22 September and these will follow the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) set by the University Grants Commission (UGC).

Assam's Gauhati University (GU) on Monday released the details for the conduction of the final semester exam on its official site  guportal.in.

The exams are going to be held from 22 September and these will follow the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) set by the University Grants Commission (UGC).

Students in the intermediate years or semesters will be promoted on the basis of internal assessment marks and theory marks received in the earlier semesters. But the final semester students of undergraduate and postgraduate courses will have to qualify the university exams.

According to an NDTV report, candidates will be evaluated on a 50-50 basis, where the marks scored in the offline exams will carry 50 percent weightage and the other half will be awarded on the basis of internal assessment.

Final semester examinations will be conducted in blended mode maintaining COVID-19 protocol and the relevant SOP published by the UGC for the purpose, read the official statement.

The GU final semester examinations will be held in both the online and offline mode in view of the pandemic situation.

The students who opt to give the exams offline will have to go to the college or university for the test. The Gauhati University will be providing accommodation for free to such students, reported Times Now.

As per a report by Sentinel Assam that cited the official notification issued by the GU controller of examinations, the question paper(s) for offline examinations will cover the whole syllabus but the students need to attempt questions for 50 percent marks only.

The UGC had issued the guidelines a while back, instructing universities to hold final year exams by the end of September. The new guidelines had also stated that the final university exams can be held online and offline. In case a student failed to appear for the exams in September, provisions will be made so that they can take the exams later.
Despite COVID-19 restrictions, the Army's new AH-64E Apache V6 program is finding ways to get things done.

The Program Executive Office (PEO) Aviation's Apache Attack Helicopter Project Management Office (PM Apache) plans to deliver the first production aircraft to the Tigersharks of the 1-229th Attack Reconnaissance Battalion at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, in October, according to an Aug. 18 release.

The PM Apache New Equipment Training Team (NETT) graduated the battalion's first 10 aviators to be qualified on the aircraft July 24..

Read Next: Travis Air Force Base Evacuating as Wildfire Rages

"Technically, we haven't started fielding aircraft to 1-229th," Steve Tibaldo, product support manager of Apache Production & Fielding, said in the release. "In order to facilitate the NETT, we sent four of our former test aircraft AH-64E V6 to JBLM. These aircraft were upgraded to V6 from a V4 configuration in order to perform all required testing and Follow-On Test and Evaluation II."

The move gave the battalion a head start, he said, adding that they "can now fly to the Boeing Plant in Mesa [Arizona]) and pick up the aircraft themselves."

The battalion is scheduled to receive a total of 24 of the new helos by March 2021.

The newest AH-64E aircraft is designed and equipped with an open systems architecture to incorporate the latest communications, navigation, sensor and weapon systems, and has been upgraded with the improved Modernized Target Acquisition Designation Sight/Pilot Night Vision System (MTADS/PNVS). The E-model supports Brigade Combat Teams across the full spectrum of warfare by destroying armor, personnel and materiel targets, according to the service.

"The new version of the Apache helicopter will provide the Bayonet Division and I Corps with a more lethal, intelligent and survivable platform to help the team destroy the enemy," Lt. Col. Kevin Easter, I-229th commander, said in the release. "The sensor suite upgrades provide increased range and lethality. The improvements to the battalion's tactical navigation, combined with the Cognitive Decision Aiding System, will better assist them in maneuvering to the target and destroying it."

The 3rd Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment, out of Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia, and the 4th Aerial Reconnaissance Battalion (Attack), the 2nd Aviation Regiment, at Camp Humphreys, South Korea, are scheduled to receive the new helicopter next, the release states.

-- Bing Xiao can be reached at bingxiao2020@u.northwestern.edu.

Related: Down to 2: Aircraft Will Compete to Replace the Army's Apache, Kiowa
New Delhi: The Supreme Court Monday disposed of as "infructuous" a BJP MLA's plea seeking stay on Rajasthan Speaker's decision, which allowed six BSP MLAs to merge with the Congress, in view of the High Court order.

A bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Vineet Saran and M R Shah was informed by senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Speaker, that earlier in the day that the Rajasthan High Court has passed an order on the plea filed by BJP MLA Madan Dilawar.

He said the high court has asked the Speaker to decide on merit, the plea against the merger of six BSP MLAs with the ruling Congress.

Sibal said the high court had also asked the speaker to decide on the matter within three months.

The bench said the plea before it was against an interim order of the high court, and has now become infructuous.

On August 17, the top court had deferred the hearing on Dilawar's plea after it was informed that the Chief Justice of the High Court has reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 and the functioning was postponed till August 19.

Earlier, the top court had refused to pass any interim order on the plea after it was informed that the high court has been dealing with the case.

The BJP lawmaker said the six Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLAs have been wrongly allowed by the Speaker to merge with the ruling Congress party.

Dilawar challenged the high court order which had refused to stay the functioning of these six MLAs as Congress legislators.

Earlier, the apex court had allowed the withdrawal of a petition filed by six Rajasthan MLAs of BSP seeking transfer of the plea pending against them in the high court to the apex court.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Dilawar, had said that the matter can go on before the high court but the issue is what is to be done in the meantime.

Salve, while referring to the September last year order of merger passed by the Speaker, had said there is a 'curious situation' as the BSP is saying that they have not merged.

He had said that the apex court should stay the Speaker's order of September last year.

Senior advocate S C Mishra, appearing for the BSP, had said the six MLAs had gone to the Speaker saying they want to merge and the order for the merger was passed "straight away".

He had said in the Rajasthan Assembly also, these MLAs are not following the whip of the BSP; moreover, it is a national party and split, if any, has to be at the national level.

Dilawar has challenged in the apex court the August 6 order of a division bench of high court which disposed of his plea against the order of a single judge, who had refused to stay the functioning of these six MLAs as Congress legislators.

The single judge of the high court had earlier not granted any interim relief and refused to put a stay on the participation of six MLAs in the proceedings of the House as Congress legislators.

On July 30, the high court had sought response of the Assembly Speaker and its secretary on the pleas challenging the induction of the six MLAs into the Congress.

Two petitions have been filed in the high court, one by Dilawar and the other by BSP National Secretary S C Mishra.

Sandeep Yadav, Wajib Ali, Deepchand Kheria, Lakhan Meena, Jogendra Awana and Rajendra Gudha contested and won the 2018 assembly election on a BSP ticket but they defected to Congress in September 2019.

They had submitted an application for the merger on September 16 last year and the Speaker allowed their induction into the Congress two days later.

The merger was a boost to the Ashok Gehlot-led government as the tally of the Congress increased to 107 in the house of 200.

Dilawar has challenged the merger of the BSP MLAs into Congress, questioning Assembly Speaker CP Joshi's order dismissing his complaint without allowing him to have his say.

Mishra has challenged in the high court the defection of the MLAs, but these legislators had not sought transfer of his plea to the Supreme Court.
The Democratic Convention was a joke. All the lies being told at the DNC were pathetic. Those Democrats are so hungry for power they will stoop as low as they can to attain it. They are tearing down this country with their support for the rioters, and they are lying day and night about COVID-19. When do their constituents stand up and say that they have had enough. President Trump is a patriot and they hate that. President Trump has brought our economy back twice, and they hate that. And he is a law and order president, and they hate that. All the cities blowing up are run by Democrats. Let that set in, and then wonder why anyone can be a Democrat at this time. There is a silent majority out there that are not being taken into consideration when these bogus polls are taken, and you die-hard Democrats that align with the lying left are going to be shocked in November.
Godeau told Aoun that 120,000 Syrians were sent to foreign countries and there exist 3,000 applications by Syrian refugees asking to be naturalized in foreign countries

Lebanese President Michel Aoun urged on Monday Carmela Godeau, regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), to assist Lebanon in the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland.

"We urge IOM to assist in the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland as the explosions of Beirut's port left 300,000 citizens homeless and Lebanon already suffers from several issues and problems," Aoun was quoted as saying by a statement issued by the presidency.

Aoun's remarks came during his meeting with Godeau at Baabda Palace.

Meanwhile, Godeau told Aoun that 120,000 Syrians were sent to foreign countries and there exist 3,000 applications by Syrian refugees asking to be naturalized in foreign countries.

"We will continue our efforts to look into applications of Syrian refugees who asked to be transferred to other countries," she said.

Godeau added that she has launched an appeal to help 50,000 people impacted by the explosions that rocked Beirut's port on Aug. 4.

The flow of Syrian refugees to Lebanon has weighed heavily on the country's economy and infrastructure, prompting Lebanese officials to urge the international community for support in guaranteeing the return of refugees.

More than 1 million Syrian refugees are registered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Lebanon, while the Lebanese government estimated the true number of Syrians in the country at 1.5 million.

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Syracuse, N.Y. -- Syracuse University believes all the students who attended last weeks high-profile gathering on the school quad had tested negative for coronavirus when they arrived on campus, easing worries that the event could cause substantial coronavirus spread.

Shortly after the event, Syracuse Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation Mike Haynie said the gathering of hundreds of freshmen could have done enough damage to shut down campus.

Based on the test results the school has received that is no longer a major concern.

We have those results back now and I have a much higher level of confidence that what happened on the quad will not create a situation in this instance, Haynie said, during a conference call with reporters. All those saliva samples have come back clean.

Haynie said that the school has received results from the saliva pool samples that it took between between Monday and Wednesday of last week and all have come back negative. Every freshman who moved into campus housing between Monday and Wednesday would have taken one, and the Wednesday night gathering is believed to have been made up of first-year students.

Every saliva pool sample that the school has taken dating back to Aug. 2 has come back negative, a result so good that it has even surprised SU officials.

While there is still the possibility that a test result came back incorrectly or that a student contracted the coronavirus between taking the test and the gathering on the quad, the probability is low, especially given the low prevalence of corornavirus in Central New York.

Haynie said that the school currently has just three active cases of coronavirus. Two cases involve students and one involves an employee. That number is down 10 from the schools previous update. The school also has 12 students in quarantine, a drop of six.

Theres reason for cautious optimism at Syracuse University, Haynie said. Im not celebrating these numbers because I am fully aware they can change, even dramatically change on a dime, however, to start our semester this is a contrast to many other institutions.

Haynie continued to express frustration with the group of freshmen that gathered on the quad in violation of the schools rules but stressed it was only a small group of the thousands of freshmen on campus and thousands of overall students.

He largely defended the response of the schools Department of Public Safety, whose office is located near the quad, indicated they dispersed students within 20 minutes of being informed of the gathering. He said he didnt believe they should be scapegoated for an event that students knew was inappropriate.

He acknowledged that the school should have done a better job giving students something to do.

Many freshmen to campus earlier than usual this year, either because they had to perform a two-week quarantine mandated by the state or because of a move-in process that had to be staggered in order to maintain physical distancing. Those early move-ins left some students on campus for multiple days without much to entertain them.

Theres plenty of responsibility and accountability to go around, Haynie said. This is new to all of us. Weve never brought students back this early. What we should have done, in retrospect, we should have had more engagement experiences and opportunities for students as they were waiting. I dont think we necessarily thought through how we put together a robust program of engagement for those students so theyre not just sitting in their dorm rooms looking at each other. Lesson learned.

Public health experts told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard that making sure students have safe ways to socialize is critical to limiting the number of parties that occur on campus throughout the semester. Haynie said coming up with ideas has been a significant part of on-campus discussions in recent days and the school hopes to plan outdoor movies, among other events.

In a meeting with reporters, Haynie stressed that the reopening plan at Syracuse differs greatly from several schools that have been forced to shut down or move classes online because of substantial spread.

Unlike Syracuse, the high-profile schools that have had early issues (which include North Carolina, North Carolina State and Notre Dame) did not test all of their students on arrival like Syracuse did. Syracuse also draws most of its students from the northeast, where there is substantially less of the virus among the population. Haynie called the comparisons apples and oranges.

I think if you look at some of the other institutions, not to call any out, but if you do a little digging youll realize many that are in the national news did no pre-arrival testing, they did no arrival screening, Haynie said. As a consequence, the first quad-like incident was essentially ground zero of an outbreak on those campuses. We set the conditions to mitigate a situation like that.

Contact Chris Carlson anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1639

MORE CORONAVIRUS AND COLLEGE

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It didnt seem that urgent: Hundreds of students gathered right under Syracuse Universitys nose

Syracuse University puts 23 students on interim suspension following quad gathering

Syracuse University reopening: What happens when a party school meets a pandemic?

Videos show large gathering of Syracuse University students on quad
Manohar Lal Khattar, the Chief minister of Haryana, has tested positive for coronavirus. In a tweet, the minister has urged all his close contacts and colleagues to get themselves tested and move into strict quarantine.

Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar tested positive for novel coronavirus Covid-19 on Monday. The minister wrote on Twitter that his Covid-19 test reports have come out positive and urged all his colleagues, associates and close contacts, who came in contact with him over the last week, to get themselves tested and move into strict quarantine.

Earlier in the day, state assembly speaker and 2 BJP MLAs had tested positive for Covid-19. State home minister Anil Vij told media that the assembly speaker Gian Chand Gupta and 2 MLAs (Aseem Goel and Ram Kumar) have tested positive for coronavirus.

The latest developments come 2 days ahead of the monsoon session. Considering the spread of Covid-19 in the state, the state speaker had earlier made it mandatory for all ministers, including chief minister; to produce a Covid-19 negative report.

I was tested for Novel Corona Virus today. My test report has returned positive. I appeal to all colleagues and associates who came in my contact over the last week to get themselves tested. I request my close contacts to move into strict quarantine immediately.  Manohar Lal (@mlkhattar) August 24, 2020

Manohar Lal Khattar had decided to self-isolate himself after meeting Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, who tested Covid-19 positive last week.

As the total Covid-19 count in India surpasses 31 lakh mark, the total number of coronavirus cases in Haryana have reached 54,386, including 44,822 recovered cases and 603 deaths.
The pandemic is not stopping some independent brands from taking the plunge into retail. While a lot of the larger chains are closing stores, smaller companies view this time as a potential opportunity.

Thats the case with Arias, the buzzy luxury contemporary womens brand founded by Nina Sarin Arias and favored by Gigi Hadid, Chrissy Teigen, Priyanka Chopra and Gabrielle Union, among others.

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On Monday, Sarin Arias will open her first store, a 1,500-square-foot boutique at 466 Broome Street in Manhattan. This marks a milestone for the brand, which was founded in 2017 as a direct-to-consumer label. In addition to its own web site, Arias is sold on Net-a-porter, Moda Operandi and at other high-end retailers as well as through a series of trunk shows.

Its always been a dream to open a store and it means even more to me to do so in this unprecedented time, Sarin Arias said. I chose to open our doors and show support for the city as our collections are made in New York. Its an important moment in my brands development and I couldnt think of a better location than in SoHo, which is an intersection of fashion and art. The Arias woman has always shopped our brand online and attended our trunk shows. I am now able to share the world of Arias with my clients  an experience she has been waiting for.

The stores interior is designed to reflect the brands minimal, yet feminine approach to design. Black galvanized steel rods are suspended above marble slabs throughout the perimeter of the space. Corinthian columns and a tinted mirror wall at the rear of the store lend visual interest and there is a central seating area.

The store will also appeal to art lovers by collaborating with New York galleries to present exclusive exhibitions. For the opening, Arias is partnering with the Andrew Kreps Gallery to host an installation of six works by German contemporary artist and photographer Annette Kelm that will be available for purchase in the store through October.

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Arias isnt the only brand opening a store in downtown Manhattan this summer. The New York-based denim and lifestyle label 3Sixteen has opened its first unit at 190 Elizabeth Street in NoLIta that will serve as both a retail store and a showroom. The store portion measures 625 square feet and the showroom, which the company is referring to as The Den, is 500 square feet.

The store is intended to pay homage to the brands New York roots with its old-growth and reclaimed wood, textured hand-troweled walls and century-old brick that are intended to complement the handmade garments. The location was designed by Studio Meadow, which also designed the brands other store in the Arts District of Los Angeles that opened in 2016.

At this point, the store is open by appointment only because of safety concerns during the pandemic, but it is expected to become more accessible to the public in the future for walk-ins.

Andrew Chen, founder, said: We signed the lease in December not knowing that a pandemic was on the horizon. Once reality set in this spring, we were determined to move forward to complete the space despite the challenges facing the retail market. Our reasons were manifold: as small businesses near and dear to us were forced to close due to COVID-19, we felt it was important to be able to play a part in rebuilding the landscape of downtown New York City, to provide a destination that was worth visiting.

Chen added that, Despite new challenges, in-person retail is so important to our brand because the nuances of our clothing can often be lost in online stores to those who might be new to what we do. The hand of a fabric, the stitch count of a seam  these details can only be appreciated when seeing and trying the garment on. 2020 has become a year of survival for so many brands; our hope is that we will become a space of rest and respite in a changed retail landscape downtown.

Joining these two, Japanese brand Nanamica has opened its first store in the U.S. at 125 Wooster Street. Initially scheduled for an April debut, the store opening was pushed back due to the pandemic. The store, which was designed by Japanese architect Taichi Kuma to resemble a beach house, measures 1,200 square feet and is only the second in the world. It first opened in the brands hometown of Tokyo last October. In addition to the high-tech outerwear the brand it is known for, Nanamicas New York store carries its collaboration product with The North Face Purple Label.

Nanamica means One Ocean, All Lands and was founded by Eiichiro Homma, who worked for Goldwin in Japan for 18 years designing marine and outdoor apparel before creating the brand in 2003 with Takashi Imaki. Nanamica uses high-tech fabrics and modern silhouettes to create a collection of pieces that blend fashion and function.
SINGAPORE - Media OutReach - 24 August 2020 - Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada Singapore Branch ("Sun Life Singapore") today announced a donation of S$25,500 to The N.1 Institute for Health ("N.1") which will go towards helping the community through the IDentif.AI project. The donation is part of a global C$1 million pledge, announced by Sun Life in March 2020, to provide support for communities battling COVID-19 around the world.









Belinda Au, Chief Executive Officer of Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada Singapore Branch (right) presented the donation cheque to Professor Dean Ho of The N.1 Institute for Health (left).

In 2020, N.1 pioneered IDentif.AI, an AI-driven platform that can rapidly pinpoint the best combination therapy regimens against infectious diseases. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, N.1 has started to explore therapies for COVID-19 patients using the IDentif.AI platform. N.1 is part of the National University of Singapore.





Belinda Au, Chief Executive Officer of Sun Life Singapore said, "Founded more than 150 years ago, Sun Life today helps millions around the world achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. We are pleased to be part of the Singapore community after the opening of our office here in May and are committed to playing our part in the fight against COVID-19. Established in 2018, N.1 has been at the forefront of health innovation. We hope our donation can help supercharge the COVID-19 study initiated by N.1 which aims to develop the optimal dosage of drugs that can be used in combination for treatment of COVID19 patients."





Professor Dean Ho, Director of N.1 said, "We are grateful for the generosity of Sun Life Singapore. IDentif.AI uniquely uses a strategically designed and small set of experiments to simultaneously pinpoint the best drugs and doses from an extraordinarily large number of possible drug combinations. The platform has successfully addressed over 40 diseases and multiple human clinical studies that have led to life-saving outcomes."

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Sun Life Singapore is licence by the Monetary Authority of Singapore since May 2020. Sun Life Singapore will offer life insurance solutions to help High Net Worth Clients grow, protect and transfer their wealth to the next generation.





About Sun Life

Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing insurance, wealth and asset management solutions to individual and corporate Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Bermuda. As of June 30, 2020, Sun Life had total assets under management of C$1,122 billion. For more information, please visit www.sunlife.com.





Sun Life Financial Inc. trades on the Toronto (TSX), New York (NYSE) and Philippine (PSE) stock exchanges under the ticker symbol SLF.





Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada is an insurance company federally incorporated in Canada, with OSFI Institution Code F380 and its registered office at 1 York Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5J 0B6. It is regulated by Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, Canada. Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada Singapore Branch (UEN T19FC0132B) is registered with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of Singapore as a foreign company, with its registered office at One Raffles Quay, #10-03 North Tower, Singapore 04583. It is licensed and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Where Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada Singapore Branch is referred to as "Sun Life Singapore", this is strictly for marketing and branding purposes only, and no legal significance is expressed or implied. Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada is a member of the Sun Life group of companies. The Sun Life group of companies operates under the "Sun Life" name. Sun Life Financial Inc., the publicly traded holding company for the Sun Life group of companies, is not a product offering company and is not the guarantor of the obligations of its subsidiaries.  2020 Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada. All rights reserved. The name Sun Life and the globe symbol are registered trademarks of Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada.




A nationwide manhunt for a man and a woman suspected in a string of shootings in Ohio, West Virginia and Indiana that left two people dead and three wounded ended with their arrests Monday morning in South Dakota, authorities said.

Timothy Sargent, 42, of Akron, Ohio, was taken into custody by state troopers in Sioux Falls, according to the Northern Ohio Fugitive Task Force. Also arrested was Savannah Emich, 20, who had allegedly been on the run with Sargent and is a suspect in one of the shootings that left two people wounded near a state park in Indiana, officials said.

The task force here in Ohio worked around the clock with its local partners and law enforcement across the county to locate and apprehend this pair of violent individuals," U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott said in a statement.

The three-state shooting rampage began on Aug. 17, when Sargent allegedly shot and wounded a 29-year-old man on a section of the Towpath Trail in Akron, police said. The victim, who was living at a homeless campsite on the trail and was acquainted with Sargent, was shot multiple times and helped police identify Sargent as the suspected shooter, according to Akron police.

PHOTO: Timothy Sargent, who was arrested for involvement with shootings in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, is pictured in an undated photo released by authorities. (Indiana State Police)

The following day, Sargent is suspected of fatally shooting his girlfriend, Rebecca Tomlinson, 22, whose body was discovered near a set of railroad tracks in Akron, according to police.

MORE: UConn murder suspect arrested in Maryland after 4-state manhunt

Sargent also is suspected in the slaying of a 62-year-old man who was shot on the morning of Aug. 19 while driving a car on a highway in Milton, West Virginia, according to authorities.

PHOTO: Savannah Emich, who was arrested for involvement with shootings in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, is pictured in an undated photo released by authorities. (Indiana State Police)

Hours after the West Virginia shooting, police believe Sargent and Emich, also of Ohio, drove to Indiana. On the night of Aug. 19, police believe Sargent and Emich opened fire on an SUV occupied by a family of three near the entrance to OBannon Woods State Park in Corydon, Indiana.

MORE: Suspect in Michigan quadruple homicide surrenders to police

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The driver of the SUV and his wife were wounded and the vehicle crashed into a tree, according to Indiana State Police. A 16-year-old girl, sitting in the backseat was not harmed, police said.

A motive for the shooting rampage is under investigation.

MORE: Escaped inmate accused of killing sheriff's deputy in Mississippi captured

Sargent and Emich were being held in South Dakota pending extradition back to Ohio, authorities said.

Suspects in deadly 3-state shooting rampage arrested in South Dakota originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week said movie theaters might be among the next businesses allowed to reopen in New York. They, like so many other businesses, were shut down in March in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Last week, Cuomo announced that gyms could start to reopen today if they follow strict guidelines. He later told WAMC that movie theaters could be next. AMC Theatres, the worlds largest movie theater chain, opened more than 100 theaters last week in states where its allowed.

They are a situation that we have to attend to, he said.

But even if theaters do open soon, will you go? Or are you fine staying home and watching Netflix and Amazon Prime? Take the poll:

Previous polls: Throughout the pandemic, weve asked readers if theyll resume some of their activities once the government allows them to reopen. We asked you if you had returned to eating out. 43.2% said you were going to restaurants while 56.8% said you were eating at home. As for shopping at Destiny USA, 76% said you were avoiding the mall while 24% resumed shopping there. Its a different story when it comes to drinking at bars. 53.5% said they were comfortable bellying up to the bar while 46.5% are drinking at home.

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Charlie Miller is a journalist at syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Contact him at 315-382-1984, or by email at cmiller@syracuse.com.
New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at the foundation laying ceremony of Pune Metro project (Phase 1) on Saturday.

PM Modi shared the dais with NCP chief Sharad Pawar at foundation stone laying ceremony of Pune Metro project.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on a day's visit to Maharashtra on Saturday, laid foundation stone for the grand memorial of Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in Mumbai.

Here are the updates from the PMs speech at Pune:

# In this nation, the voice of 125 crore Indians will be heard. This voice cannot be subverted by a select few

# After 8th November, the power of the 'big' people has reduced and the power of the poor and those perceived as 'small' has increased

# Pune is a city of learning. Cant this city take the lead in embracing online banking & exploring the facilities available

# If the evils of corruption and black money were removed earlier, I would not have had to take the decisions I took

# In this nation everybody is equal before the law and everyone has to follow the law

# After 8th November, urban local bodies have seen a rise in their income. This makes it possible to spend more resources of development

# We are working on gas grids, water grids, digital network, leveraging space technology, using technology to help farmers

# Earlier infrastructure was only about roads, rail and airports. Now times have changed. We need to cater to people's expectations

# It is our endeavour that whatever projects are taken up are completed within the decided time frame. Delayed projects do not help

# Yes, the gains of the present are vital but we need systems that cater to the needs and aspirations of the future too

# The character & spirit of the village has to be preserved. And at the same time we need to invigorate our villages with good facilities

# There is still time to work as per the law, return the poorer sections their due. Now, there's no chance of escaping

# People who didn't take decisions have harmed the country, I have saved the country

# If timely interventions had been done in the country, I would not have been forced to undertake such hard steps

# How have govt functioned in our country? I don't want to criticise any one but its very painful

# People who have contacts are habituated to breaking the law. However, I made them stand in lines

# People want both highways and i-ways. However, we will have to build optical fibre network for i-ways

# Government of India actively working on the Rurban Mission. This caters to those places that are growing & urbanising quickly

# On the other hand, we need to think long term so that we can mitigate the challenges our urban areas are facing

# India is urbanising at a very quick pace & thus, its essential to work in 2 directions. First is to improve quality of life in villages

Modi landed in the metropolis at 11.30 AM and left for MIDC Patalganga in neighbouring Raigad district where he inaugurated the newly-built campus of the National Institute of Securities Management.

The PM then reached Raj Bhavan and later moved towards Girgaum Chowpatty for the Shivaji Memorial event.

He proceeded to the site in the Arabian Sea off Mumbai coast, where the state government was planning to build a mega memorial for Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Maia Ervins mission is to create safe spaces for young Black artists to meet, brainstorm and celebrate their art and voices, in hopes she can inspire others her age to fight for their beliefs.

Words to me are super important, she told In The Know. When people think of activists, people think of protests and they think of signing petitions and all those things are great  but for me, my voice has been the biggest thing that has helped me make change.

Credit: Cyle Suesz for In The Know

The 24-year-old, Queens-born activist serves as Chief of Staff for a youth brand marketing consulting agency called JUV Consulting, which was founded in 2016 to bring awareness to brands about how theyre portraying certain communities.

A lot of the people that work at JUV are activists themselves, she said. Being around those people that share the same motivation and share the same drive to make change in the world is super empowering.

Ervin explained that after moving to a predominantly white Pennsylvania suburb from New York following the loss of her stepdad to gun violence, she began experiencing a lot of microaggressions at the hands of her peers.

Backhanded compliments, like, Youre pretty for a Black girl,' she described. I knew it felt wrong, like, this is a compliment, but it feels kind of off. But I didnt really have the language or the knowledge to be like, Hey, this is wrong.'

Credit: Cyle Suesz for In The Know

Amid her struggles with social injustice, Ervin enrolled at Washington & Jefferson College, about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, where a racially motivated incident  in which her senior government president posted a culturally inappropriate Snapchat  prompted her to speak out.

Ervin was spurred to write about the Snapchat incident in a 2017 Public Source article after she found herself questioning how the school could push for students to feel at home on a campus where a good portion of students feel uncomfortable and unwelcome and othered.

The activist wrote at the time that these types of situations were so frequent on her predominantly white campus that she initially felt nothing upon receiving the Snapchat.

Story continues

Her article ended up going viral and being read across campus  and her words apparently resonated with others.

I had a lot of Black alumni from my school reach out and was like, Keep fighting,' Ervin recalled. I had trans people connect with me, which was wild to me because I never thought I could reach a different community in that way. Once I saw the amount of people that actually read it, that actually talked about it, I realized that my voice can bring awareness to issues that I care about.

Credit: Cyle Suesz for In The Know

Ervin was involved with Cafe Open Mic at the time as a social media manager. The welcoming and open-arms group for creatives helped push her out of her comfort zone to write her successful article.

I wouldnt have been able to go semi-viral if I didnt have people in my corner pushing me to write that article, she recalled.

Ervin ultimately says through her words, her writings and her podcast  where she shares personal experiences and discusses issues like body shaming, LGBTQ+ rights and gun violence  she hopes to pay it forward and inspire other young creatives to challenge the status quo.

It doesnt have to be speaking out all the time, she said. It can be simple actions. I want to see people empowered to fight for issues that they believe in.

Every generations youth fought to make change. I dont want to take that away from other generations, she continued. The difference with Gen Z is that its not about bringing a seat up to the table  its about flipping the damn table. If structures arent working for us, were not going to do it. Were going to find something else, where everybody can properly have a seat.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this teachers viral list of childrens books that deal with racism.

More from In The Know:

This all-female Mariachi band is challenging gender norms

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Shop Black and excellently with these 10 Black-owned brands

Subscribe to our daily newsletter to stay In The Know
Along with the clear plastic dividers, hand sanitizing stations, and six-feet-apart floor markings in schools this fall, some teachers will have to make room for another new piece of classroom equipment: a camera.

Many districts are planning for hybrid approaches to school scheduling , and in some cases that means teachers will be simultaneously instructing students who are in the brick-and-mortar classroom and students who are home, via live stream.

The design, in theory, is simple: Students at home log into a videoconferencing platform at the start of class. Everyone, whether in class or remote, can listen to the same lesson, ask questions, and receive feedback on independent work. Kids who are doing distance learning can see their classmates and feel like theyre part of the same community.

But some teachers whose schools are planning for this model in the fall worry about the privacy implications of broadcasting a classroom. Every heated class debate, teacher mistake, and student outburst is on display and might be recorded.

Schools need to consider if and how theyll store videos that capture kids voices and faces, said Linnette Attai, a student data privacy compliance consultant.

The critical piece for schools and districts is to really refresh the fundamentals of privacy, she said. Dont just try something new because its new. Think really carefully.

And there are still basic practical questions that teachers say remain unanswered: How will they split their attention between two groups of kids? When youre giving directions, do you look at the computer camera or the students in class?

Maybe half my students wont be with me, and I have to somehow bring them in, said Laura, a teacher at a private school in Arizona, who asked that her name be changed for this article.

Not only am I creating my class via the learning management system, so that everyone has access to all the materials, but I have to engage [students at home] in learning at the same time as Im managing my classroom. I think thats going to be a huge learning curve for teachers, she said.

Protecting Privacy

A few of the privacy concerns that come with this model are the same challenges that districts faced in all-remote synchronous classes this past spring, experts say. Schools cant forget lessons learned from that experience, said Attai.

They should take steps to secure access to the virtual classroom, so that only students can get inside, and set community norms and rules around not taking screenshots or recording the session on a separate device, she said.

Emory Roane, the policy counsel at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, said schools might also want to think twice before requiring remote students to join with video. If students are required to have their camera on, thats going to force some students to reveal personal information that they might not feel comfortable sharing, he said. Other students can see details about a kids family life, what their house looks like, or how many other people are living there.

But there are also new concerns, specific to streaming an in-person class. For instance: Do parents need to give explicit consent for students who are in the school building to appear on camera? Attai suggests that families be given an opt-out option.

Laura, the Arizona teacher, said her students parents have signed off on them appearing on a stream. Even so, she worries that the feed could catch kids in moments they might not want broadcast. A student who is falling asleep at their desk wont want [that] on public video, she said.

Some teachers are also wary about having their movements constantly recorded.

In California, several teachers unions are pushing back on district livestreaming policies , citing a section of the states education code that requires a teachers consent to capture video or audio in the classroom. But nationally, there are few protections for teachers when it comes to surveillance, said Roane.

Unfortunately, teachers are kind of left out in the cold like most employees in the country, he said.

Cheryl Manning, a science teacher at Evergreen High School in Colorado, said she worries that this model could lead to schools micromanaging teachers instruction.

Teaching itself is a feminized career. Its a career thats been done historically by women  and most administrators are men, said Manning, whose school is planning to have teachers livestream lessons. Because of that, there is a complete and utter lack of trust in our professionalism.

I think that were putting Big Brother in the classroom, Manning continued. And Big Brothers never going to leave.

Its possible that districts may want to keep using the monitoring and streaming tools that they introduced during these months, even after the pandemic ends, Roane said. We just want to be careful that as we are barreling into this online-only or hybrid classroom that were carefully considering the technologies were bringing with us, he said.

FERPA Considerations

If public schools record these livestreams and keep the video files, they will also have to consider the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law that protects student privacy. Under the law, any recordsincluding video recordingsthat are directly related to an individual student generally cant be shared without parental permission.

What counts as directly related to the student? The term doesnt come with a specific definition, said Roane. The U.S. Department of Education says that it could include , but isnt limited to, grades, transcripts, class lists, student course schedules, health records, and student discipline files.

Its possible that certain circumstances that could arise in a recorded class would qualify: for instance, if a student is filmed misbehaving and the video becomes part of a suspension record.

In a March webinar , the departments Student Privacy Policy Office said that schools should consider how they plan to secure video files from virtual learning that count as student records.

Still, a students face merely appearing in a video doesnt necessarily mean that video would be considered part of his education recordwhat counts as directly related is decided on a case by case basis, said Roane.

Schools that want to livestream classrooms will need to provide professional learning around FERPA that goes beyond explaining what the law requires to demonstrate its practical application in this model, said Attai. It has to be, Heres how you have to be thinking about protecting privacy in your classroom given what youre planning to be doing this year, she said.

Still Huge Question Marks

Outside of privacy concerns, how feasible teachers find this model depends, in large part, on theirand their studentsaccess to technology and training.

Middle school teacher Jodi West said her private school, Akiva Academy in Youngstown, Ohio, will be providing Chromebooks and hotspots for students and earpieces and lapel mics for teachers. All students will do their work on the computer, regardless of environment, to keep instruction coherent. For the remote students, its like theyre still in the classroom, she said. You dont want to isolate them so that they feel worse about not being there.

West still has a few unanswered questionslike how to angle her camera in class so that remote students get a good viewbut overall, she has a good sense of what her teaching will look like in a remote synchronous environment. Shes confident she can do it well.

Beth Jensen, a 7th and 8th grade ELA teacher at Everest Middle School in northeast Kansas, is less sure that a synchronous, hybrid model could work for her students.

Students will be expected to follow the days synchronous schedule on their own, making sure that theyre tuning into classes at the right time throughout the day. She anticipates technical difficulties. I already know that one of [my remote students] lives way out in the country, without reliable internet connection, so Im not sure how thats going to work out, she said.

Jack Viere, a resource teacher at Immaculata Catholic High School in Durham, N.C., said theres still a huge question mark about how he and his colleagues will deliver push-in special education services for students who are videoconferencing into live classes from home. How will they interact with individual students on screen, without impeding their or their classmates access to the in-person lesson?

Research on hybrid, synchronous learning is still limited. But the studies that do exist suggest that this model requires a specific set of conditions to work well.

A 2019 review paper from researchers in Belgium looked at 47 studies of classes where some students participated in person, and others joined via livestream. They found that teaching in this way was a lot more complicated than turning on the camera and conducting a lesson as usualit required radical shifts in pedagogy and technical support. Teacher training is important, they wrote.

And while having remote students join live can help build social connections and keep instruction coherent across environments, the review found that there are drawbacks to the model to consider, too: Technology glitches can easily frustrate students and derail lessons, and having to constantly monitor two groups at once is stressful for teachers.

Almost all of the studies in the review were of college-age students or other adult learners. How K-12 students might fare in a hybrid synchronous model is less clear, said Betty Chandy, the director for online learning at Catalyst @ Penn GSE, a center for educational innovation at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

If a teachers attention is divided, students livestreaming from home may have to be more self-directeda skill that would be reasonable to expect from college students but maybe not from middle or high schoolers, Chandy said.

Theres this assumption that younger generations are going to be more tech savvy intrinsically, somehow, said Viere. School leaders might think that students can manage a hybrid set-up on their own because theyre comfortable using apps and smartphonesbut thats a huge assumption there, he said.
Kim Kardashian helped encourage her longtime pal Paris Hilton to plan for motherhood.

Paris, 39, opened up about her choice to freeze her eggs during a wide ranging interview with the Sunday Times and credited Kardashian with inspiring the decision.

The celebrity DJ added that, in the future, she'd love to have a set of twins and is already looking forward to 'dressing them up.'

The future: Paris Hilton, 39, opened up about her choice to freeze her eggs during a wide ranging interview with the Sunday Times and credited Kim Kardashian with inspiring the decision (Pictured in December)

During her interview, the heiress was candid about her desire to become a mother in the future and revealed that she is already taking steps toward that goal.

'I had a really amazing conversation with Kim [Kardashian] about it,' Paris said. 'She introduced me to her doctor, and I was so inspired by her to actually do it.'

The blonde starlet said she wants a 'mini-me' - well, actually two, to be more precise.

'I'm obsessed with dressing them up. I want  twins, because then you get [a girl and a boy] at once,' she gushed.

'I had a really amazing conversation with Kim [Kardashian] about it,' Paris said. 'She introduced me to her doctor, and I was so inspired by her to actually do it.'

Paris continued to say that she would encourage any woman who is interested in freezing her eggs to do it.

'Because you can really control it and not have that "Oh my God, I need to get married" [mindset],' she explained.

Hilton was previously engaged to actor Chris Zylka in 2018 but they called things off that same year. She is currently smitten with her new love, businessman Carter Reum.

Kim Kardashian, who shares four children with her husband Kanye West, used frozen embryos with her three youngest - Saint, four, Chicago, two, and Psalm, one. The latter two were born via surrogate.

'I'm obsessed with dressing them up. I want  twins, because then you get [a girl and a boy] at once,' the international DJ gushed (Pictured in 2018)

Her own story: Kim Kardashian, who shares four children with her husband Kanye West, used frozen embryos with her three youngest - Saint, four, Chicago, two, and Psalm, one. The latter two were born via surrogate

Hilton is getting in plenty of parenting practice as the aunt to her sister Nicky's two little girls, Lily, four and Teddy, two.

When Nicky and Paris sat down exclusively with DailyMailTV in the winter, Nicky gushed that her girls remind her so much of she and Paris when they were litte.

During her interview with the Sunday Times, Paris also opened up about another one of her famous friends, Britney Spears.

Hilton said it 'breaks [her] heart' that the popstar has been under a conservatorship for 12 years, doesn't think it's right that Britney is still being 'treated like a child.'

Practice! Hilton is getting in plenty of parenting tips as the aunt to her sister Nicky's two little girls, Lily, four and Teddy, two (Paris pictured with Nicky and the girls in July)

'It's not fair to be an adult and be treated like a child. I can't imagine having to live my life like that.'

Britney was subjected to the conservatorship in beginning in 2008, following her high-profile breakdown.

The move gave her father Jamie Spears control of her finances and estate and allowed him to make decisions based on her welfare. Spears is currently contesting the conservatorship in court.

Paris, meanwhile, has been opening up more than every about her personal life.

In her words: During her interview with the Sunday Times, Paris also said her piece on pal Britney Spears' conservatorship saying she is sad that the popstar is still 'treated like a child'

In addition to her candid interview about freezing her eggs, the Simple Life star details abuse she faced at Provo Canyon School in her upcoming documentary This Is Paris.

The style icon claims that former classmates recalled being restrained, force-fed medication and put in solitary confinement. 'And they were physically abusive, hitting and strangling us.'

Hilton's parents sent her to the Utah boarding school to focus on her behavioral and mental development. She attended the programs for 11 months from 1998 to 1999, before leaving when she turned 18.

This is Paris premieres September 14 on YouTube.
Mumbai and Pune police departments have been on top of their social media game. Whether it be sensitising people about cyber security or making them aware about precautionary measures against the novel coronavirus, both the teams have been a pro at it.

Recently, the Pune police took to Twitter to share a clip from the popular show The Office. The main aim behind sharing this clip was to make people aware about frauds and cyber crime. Captioning the video, the police wrote, Never give out personal or banking information over calls- they can be used to access your accounts. It won't take long for the 'turntables' if you do.

Never give out personal or banking information over calls- they can be used to access your accounts. It won't take long for the 'turntables' if you do.#IdentityTheftIsNotAJoke#AlwaysBeVigilant#CyberSafety pic.twitter.com/aHggO3N1m5 PUNE POLICE (@PuneCityPolice) August 23, 2020

The clip opens to Rain Wilson, who plays the role of Dwight Schrute in the show, saying, Identity theft is not a joke, Jim. Millions of families suffer every year.

Take a look at the reactions to the post:

Since being posted, the video has been viewed over 38 hundred times.

For the unversed, The Office is an American sitcom based on the daily lives of people working at the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. The series has a total of nine seasons and was aired on TV from 2005 to 2013. Lead characters of the show include John Krasinski, Steve Carell, Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, Ed Helms, BJ Novak among others.

Meanwhile, on the auspicious occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi, the Pune police shared a graphic that has an image of Modak. The text of the image read, Distancing Mode(ak) ON!.

Let us welcome Bappa into a safe and healthy home this Ganeshotsav. Do not gather in huge crowds and avoid unnecessary visits. #HappyGaneshChaturthi pic.twitter.com/iJsSF2y25d PUNE POLICE (@PuneCityPolice) August 22, 2020

Captioning the post, the department wrote, Let us welcome Bappa into a safe and healthy home this Ganeshotsav. Do not gather in huge crowds and avoid unnecessary visits.
Each of the BTS members have their own special moment in the K-pop groups latest music video. For Jungkook, the youngest member of the boy band, that means a scene alone in a room with a glass of milk.

This wasnt surprising for most BTS fans  Jungkook loves his banana milk and isnt afraid to share his reviews with the world.

Jungkook of BTS performs during 102.7 KIIS FMs Jingle Ball | Rich Fury/Getty Images for iHeartMedia

Jungkook is an unapologetic fan of banana milk

Even when BTS was just starting out, Jungkook could often be seen with a banana milk in his hand. His passion since inspired a number of fan drawings and even memes from the BTS ARMY of the Golden Maknae. Just because its a childhood drink doesnt mean its only for children.

As Jungkook got older, his love for banana milk stayed the same. During July 2020, BTS had a guest appearance on Waktu Indonesia Belanja, thanks to their partnership with the company Tokopedia. There, Jungkook enjoyed a container of banana milk, even giving his honest review to the other BTS members.

Its delicious, its delicious, he concluded, after some of the other members held up their microphones for some ASMR slurping content, according to one translation. Ill drink it while doing the interview.

Jungkook drank a glass of milk during the Dynamite music video

The K-pop idol even showcases his love for milk in BTS latest, colorful, playful music video, titled Dynamite. As a groundbreaking and chart-topping song for BTS, it was performed entirely in English, including the vocals of the youngest member.

One of the first scenes in the Dynamite music video featured Jungkook alone in a bedroom. He reached for his milk and took a sip, getting a mini-milk mustache along the way. This part matched the lyrics perfectly, where Jungkook sings, Shoes on, get up in the morn / Cup of milk, lets rock and roll.

There are a few other food items scattered throughout the BTS music video

After downing some milk in his room, Jungkook headed to a donut shop for the Dynamite music video. Right before he was about to take a bite, he ran into the other BTS members, tipping his donut towards them.

This wouldnt be the first time food appeared in a BTS production. In the Lights music videos, a few of the BTS members hung around a theater concession stand. Suga even threw a piece of popcorn directly into J-Hopes mouth. For J-Hopes solo song, Ego, there was one scene where he held a birthday cake.

The Dynamite music video is now available on YouTube. Music by BTS, including the single Stay Gold and Map of the Soul: 7, is available for streaming on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

RELATED: Is Jungkook the Last BTS Member to Create a Solo Song? Heres What We Know About Still With You and the Mixtapes of These K-Pop Idols

RELATED: Did J-Hope Tease Outro: Ego During The Late Late Show With James Corden? The Comeback Trailer Gives New Meaning to the Music Artists Comment
The coronavirus pandemic caught Spain unawares back in March, with insufficient personal protective equipment in hospitals and a lack of resources in senior residences. But now, five months later, the country is the European Union state with the worst figures in what already can be classed as a second wave. According to the European Center for Disease Protection and Control, the cumulative incidence of the virus over the last 14 days is now at 152 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, ahead of Malta (119), Romania (88) and France (54).

A month ago, the positive cases being detected in Spain were mostly among young people, and they were asymptomatic. But the spread of the virus has seen a recent rise in hospitalizations and deaths. The concern among health chiefs has risen greatly. Fernando Simon [the director of the Health Ministrys Coordination Center for Health Alerts] made it clear, explained an attendee at a meeting of regional health chiefs last week. The ministry did not think that we would see these rates of infection until the fall.

EL PAIS has spoken to several experts from a number of different areas to explore the reasons for this new spike and the possible ways out of this predicament. The answers range from poor management of the deescalation process and the lack of contact tracers, to the lack of compliance with prevention measures on the part of citizens.

If a new lockdown is to be avoided, they add, the management of the data needs to be improved, and there needs to be quicker intervention in any outbreaks, faster diagnostic tests and more contact tracing. This formula has been cited over and over again in recent months, but the countrys administrations have not been able to implement it.

These are the three questions that EL PAIS put to the experts:

What situation do you consider Spain to be in right now with relation to the coronavirus? Why is Spain the European country with the highest incidence rate? What needs to be done now before the reopening of schools and the start of the fall?

There is a lack of strategic capacity to manage the pandemic

Miguel Hernan, an epidemiology professor at Harvard University

1. The situation is deplorable, but the lack of strategic capacity to manage the pandemic is even more worrying. The swift deescalation in May and June was only justifiable if it was accompanied by those strategies. Its not surprising that there are more cases with the rise in mobility and tourism, but it is surprising that many areas still lack adequate isolation systems for cases and contact tracing, and that it is unknown whether the diagnostic capability will be adequate for the fall and winter. A fundamental problem is that the new outbreak will threaten the health system once more and could cause a slowdown of economic activity. There are no shortcuts that will work: the economy and public health go hand in hand. There will be no economic growth without effective management of the epidemic.

2. The current situation is partly explained by the improvised management and partly by cultural reasons. Epidemics are like fires: they can break out again due to a spark, but not all sparks cause a fire. The number of sparks in Spain is probably higher due to the spontaneity and the closeness of our personal relationships. But anyone who chooses to return to pre-pandemic behavior should commit to not living with older people.

3. We have time to avoid a new lockdown and the closure of schools if we undertake coordinated management of the epidemic, to harmonize decisions. This will not be possible while most of the technical supervision falls to a small group in the Health Ministry that is considered to be consistently overwhelmed.

We wanted to get back to normality too quickly

Magda Campins, the head of preventive medicine at the Vall dHebron hospital in Barcelona

1. The situation is worrying due to the marked rise in the incidence in recent weeks. The spread is faster and faster and the capacity to contain it is insufficient.

2. The deescalation was probably done too quickly, moving from one phase to another without leaving sufficient time. A second reason was that with the first outbreaks, the capacity to contact trace was not sufficient. Thirdly, in some cases the population has not respected the prevention measures. We wanted to return to normality too quickly. And finally, we havent done mass testing until now.

3. We need to increase the tracing capacity. We also have to do mass testing where the incidence has shot up. And finally, and no less important, we have to influence young people, so that they respect prevention measures in order to avoid the transmission of the virus to the older, more vulnerable population.

Some of the cases are due to the relaxation of individual protection measures

Antoni Trilla, head of preventive medicine at the Clinic Hospital in Barcelona

1. We find ourselves in an uncertain situation. More outbreaks are being detected and cases and hospitalizations are rising. The epidemic is traveling at different speeds and with different impacts throughout the country, but the situation in Madrid, Aragon and the Basque Country is the most worrying today. There is no sustained nor generalized community transmission, which is why we have to insist on strengthening the strategy of containment and attack: the detection of cases, rapid study of contacts, isolation and effective quarantine, as well as strictly complying with protection measures.

2. There are a number of EU countries (Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany) where cases are rising, most of them mild or asymptomatic. The capacity of carrying out PCR tests has also increased, although we have to improve this aspect. At the end of July, Spain carried out 582 PCR tests per 100,000 inhabitants. France and Germany 680 and the United Kingdom 1,378. Its likely that a large part of this rise in cases is due to a relaxation of personal protection measures. A number of outbreaks registered point to activities outside (parties, outdoor drinking sessions) and inside (nightclubs and bars) where distancing is not being observed, people are talking loudly and alcohol is consumed, all of which are risk factors for infection. Twenty percent of cases are under the age of 20.

3. We need to make an effort to begin the school year in the best epidemiological conditions possible. That means few cases and that they are under control. If this is not the case, the situation will be more complicated. The risk of contagion will never be zero, not for children, families, teachers But we have to accept this and minimize it. Individual protection measures, the reduction of the number of students per class, the ventilation of the classrooms and other measures can be implemented with good will, patience, understanding and solidarity. The administration should make a great effort to guarantee the best safety conditions.

We could enter generalized community transmission

Rafael Canton, chief of the microbiology service at the Ramon y Cajal hospital in Madrid

1. The cases and sources of infection indicate that, if the numbers dont come down, we could enter generalized community transmission. The high number of PCR tests, compared to the start of the pandemic, makes a better snapshot of the situation possible. The detection of cases and asymptomatic contacts contributes to reducing transmission if the actions are efficient and the population being studied collaborates.

2. The explanation can only be down to a number of factors and includes aspects such as the accelerated deescalation, greater socialization than in other countries, family members living together, nightlife and in some cases, a failure to declare symptoms among vulnerable sectors of society due to a fear of losing employment. Part of the population has relaxed distancing measures, losing their respect for the virus and its consequences for health.

3. Establishing obligatory protocols that reinforce prevention measures, as well as procedures when faced with possible cases. These protocols should also extend to the social and family environments. Its important that young people, who are contributing in a large way to the rise in transmission, be aware of their importance.

We are lagging way behind with the adaptation of schools

Jesus Rodriguez Bano, head of infectious diseases at the Virgen de la Macarena Hospital, Seville

1. The situation is worrying, very worrying in some areas. Hospital admissions are rising and mild cases with no epidemiological relationship with other positives are growing, which indicates that a large part of the transmission in the community is uncontrolled. We can expect that this will soon translate into transmission to more vulnerable people.

2. The virus is the same in all countries, so the hypothesis to consider would be whether the measures taken have been adequate (which measures, when to take them, how to apply them), if we have lacked resources and whether they have been adequately complied with. These options are not exclusive. It will be important to do a comparative analysis, because currently we are more in an environment of opinion rather than data. The initiative of some colleagues to carry out an independent analysis is absolutely essential.

3. We need to make face-to-face teaching compatible so as not to increase the risks. There is some published data that suggests that the reopening of schools, in some conditions, will not be a problem. But for this data to be applied to our country there are two problems: its unclear that these conditions can be observed in all our education centers, and we have higher community transmission than is desirable. And I believe that there have been major errors made both in the technical area (which measures to take) as well as in terms of management (how they are applied and with what funding). There should have been a plan with three levels (complete face-to-face teaching, partial face-to-face and remote) with concrete measures that were clearly specified, so that they could be applied according to the epidemiological situation, and there should have been work carried out over the summer to see the possibilities of adapting the schools and solving the logistical problems. We are lagging behind.

The start of activity in schools is essential

Juan Armengol, president of the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (Semes)

1. Spain is in a phase of the pandemic where it has areas with outbreaks and areas with community transmission. The latter leads to cases arriving at the emergency room, calls to the 112 emergency line, hospitalizations and intensive care admissions. There is community transmission, although the average rate of [coronavirus] admissions is around 4% of the total. The rise in the absolute number of cases will increase the cases in the emergency room, admissions and deaths. It will be important to reduce the rate of positive PCR tests until it is below 5%.

2. The analysis of the outbreaks is categorical. Most are associated with what is closest to us: family, friends, leisure Also to the workplace and special situations such as seasonal workers. And there is a low percentage, albeit constant, of outbreaks in residences. All of us could be carrying the virus and situations such as carers, parties, hugs, expressions of friendship, outdoor drinking can all become excellent mechanisms for transmission.

3. The start of the school year is essential, especially for the most vulnerable sectors. Online learning is very restricted for many layers of society, which will end up doubly disadvantaged. We need to reduce the infection rate as much as possible and increase the groups of the population that will receive flu shots.

Another lockdown is economically unsustainable

Ricard Ferrer, president of the Spanish Society of Intensive and Critical Medicine, and Coronary Units (Semicyuc)

1. The situation is very worrying. There are hundreds of patients in intensive care units [ICUs], and in some areas the health system is already under strain. The ICUs are making a huge effort to be able to attend to all patients, whether they have Covid-19 or other pathologies.

2. The Spanish population has been responsible, as was seen during the weeks of lockdown. However, a number of problems have come up that explain the current situation. In some areas, at the time of the deescalation there was still sufficient virus circulating to cause new outbreaks. This is exacerbated by the fact that Spain is a country of services and there is significant movement, especially during the summer. Some outbreaks are related to social problems that need to be solved. Finally, we are culturally very close as a people and this has caused problems among adolescents who have spent months locked down.

3. We cannot allow the current epidemiological situation to continue. Its not possible to go back to dedicating the hospitals just to the coronavirus and delaying other procedures. In economic terms, another lockdown  which is the only intervention that has really worked  is unsustainable. There is no other option than to clearly identify specific chains of infection and to cut them out at the root. We need to monitor areas with the highest transmission rates with mass PCR testing and confine them if necessary.

The lack of transparent, quality data is a serious problem

Pedro Alonso, public health professor at Barcelona University and the director of the malaria program at the World Health Organization

1. We have a serious problem with the quality of the data, but all of it points to the fact that transmission has been growing for weeks now, and with it, hospitalizations and deaths. As is common with infectious diseases, not all regions and communities are being affected equally. Finally, it is notable that European countries with structures and behaviors similar to those in Spain are managing to effectively control transmission. This and the large excess of cases and deaths in the first wave require a deep and multidisciplinary analysis to learn from the mistakes that were made.

2. As 20 Spanish scientists pointed out in a letter to the medical journal The Lancet, in which they called for an urgent and independent evaluation of the response to the epidemic, there are a number of factors that could have contributed to Spain being among the most-affected countries. The list is not exhaustive, but it does include elements related to the public health structures, including the management of emergencies, legal frameworks and coordination mechanisms with the regions, capacities and scientific consultancy, mobility, inequalities, communication and lack of preparedness. Perhaps one of the most serious factors is the lack of transparent, quality data.

3. The country is facing an enormous challenge. No one is sure about what the optimum strategy or approach is. We are arriving in the month of September in worse circumstances than in June. We need to call together the best specialists in transparent technical committees and public consultants. We need to generate consensus in terms of the approaches that should be followed. Consensus and solidarity is needed.

We need to think about more solid policies for work-life balance

Joaquin Estevez, president of the Spanish Society for Health Directors

1. Community transmission is currently intense, which has prompted hospitals in some regions to suspend their usual surgeries. For now, it appears that patients have less serious symptoms, but it is fundamental that the system be prepared for a new wave.

2. Its very worrying and we cannot determine the causes without rigorous analysis of the problems over time. But the causes are rooted in the fact that a sector of society has ignored the fact that no longer being locked down does not mean that the problem has gone away. Political parties should take the situation seriously and work in the same direction, with efficient coordination between the Health Ministry and the regions.

3. The reopening of schools means, at least, two essential issues. On the one hand, safety, and on the other, its impact on the work-life balance of families, with the social and economic implications that has. Protocols set out by the central government that guarantee the safety needed for there not to be infections in schools are fundamental, and the regions need to turn these protocols into plans and specific measures adapted to their concrete situations. More solid work-life balance measures need to be thought out, which will allow families to carry out their jobs and, at the same time, attend to their children, taking into account that in many cases face-to-face classes will be combined with virtual classes.

English version by Simon Hunter.
The Republican National Convention kicks off Monday, giving party leaders a chance to showcase what they see as the biggest victories of President Donald Trump's first term.

CNBC sat down with several economists to get their take on the effectiveness of the Trump administration's fiscal policies and what impact they've had so far.

Though several economists CNBC interviewed for our "What's Next For The U.S. Economy" series declined to comment on the current administration, a handful were willing to offer their insights.

Overall those willing to speak on the record took a dim view of the administration's policies, though the president's ability to break Washington's "obsession" with budget deficits was cited as a positive accomplishment.

Both Moody's Chief Economist Mark Zandi and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz expressed concerns over Trump's moves toward deglobalization.

Zandi said the U.S. economy will be "diminished" after the coronavirus pandemic and expects policymakers to have trouble trying to "reengage with the rest of the world."

Stiglitz condemned Trump's protectionism as "ugliness," citing the ban on exports of medical supplies and hoped that other countries will not reciprocate.

Jim O'Neill, former chief economist at Goldman Sachs, said, "There's a difference between the rhetoric that comes out of the U.S. president's mouth and what will happen" when it comes to reducing the trade deficit with China and bringing jobs back to the U.S.

He warned that without a "defined policy" in the U.S. to deliberately rein in deficit spending, the U.S. will not be able to erase its trade deficit with China, which as of July 2020 was more than $130 billion.

He added that though Trump's promise to bring jobs back to the U.S. in 2016 was powerful, he does not see how it could work without specific policy intervention

Stiglitz noted that factory work that can be brought back to the U.S. will likely be done by robots so it would not create as many jobs for American workers as Trump hopes.

He thinks Trump's "protectionism" is a way to make U.S. manufacturing more resilient but that it could "backfire."

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, offered the bleakest view of Trump's tenure, telling CNBC, "I think it is, aside from perhaps James Buchanan's lead into the Civil War, the worst presidency in American history."

He went on to warn that the president's rhetoric regarding China is dangerous and said the U.S. should be preparing for a "multipolar world."

Sachs also praised Scandinavian countries for their social safety nets and suggested the U.S. move toward a similar approach.

Paying for those kinds of social safety nets in the U.S. may be possible now, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman told CNBC. The New York Times columnist, who has been known to criticize Trump, credited him with breaking Washington's "obsession" with budget deficits and predicted that a Joe Biden presidency would not face the same calls for fiscal austerity that would have befallen Hillary Clinton had she won in 2016.

When asked for comment, White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere told CNBC, "President Trump's policies of lower taxes, deregulation, fair and reciprocal trade, and energy independence created the strongest most inclusive economy with rising wages in our history and under his leadership, we will do so again."

Trump will formally accept his party's nomination for a second term on Thursday. He currently trails his rival, Democratic nominee Biden, in most national and battleground polls.
The California Supreme Court has ordered a re-examination of the conviction of Scott Peterson for the Christmas Eve 2002 murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn child, Conner.

The Chronicle has been covering the high-profile case for almost two decades. Here are key moments from that coverage:

Missing woman thought to be dead

March 6, 2003: Laci Peterson case now treated as a homicide.

Bodies of fetus, woman found by bay

April 15, 2003: Police investigating the Laci Peterson case summoned to site.

BEN MARGOT / AP

Laci Petersons husband held for murders

April 19, 2003: Scott Peterson is accused of killing his wife and their unborn son; the state attorney general says DNA analysis identifies two bodies.

A chronology of Laci Petersons disappearance

April 19, 2003: This timeline chronicles the four months from Laci Petersons disappearance on Dec. 24, 2002, until her husbands arrest on April 18, 2003.

A portrait of the accused

March 7, 2004: In a rare interview, the family of Scott Peterson sheds light on the life and times of the perfect son.

Husband sounds like love-struck teenager in tapes

Aug. 12, 2004: Jury hears some of hundreds of calls recorded by Scott Petersons ex-lover, Amber Frey.

Ex-lover shines on witness stand

Aug. 15, 2004: Amber Frey comes across as a bright, complex woman.

Michael Maloney / SFC

Key moments from Scott Petersons 2004 trial

Nov. 13, 2004: From jury selection to key testimony to the jurys verdict, here is a timeline of the trials major developments as they unfolded.

Jury finds Peterson guilty of murder

Nov. 13, 2004: Jurors find Scott Peterson guilty of first-degree murder for Laci Peterson's slaying and second-degree murder for the death of their unborn child. Jurors also find that Peterson committed the special circumstance of multiple murders, making him eligible for the death penalty.

Trial analysis after verdict

Nov. 13, 2004: Chronicle reporters break down the trial and how prosecutors told a coherent, powerful and satisfying story in their bid to secure a guilty verdict.

Jury recommends death for Scott Peterson

Dec. 13, 2004: Jurors take 11 hours to decide that Scott Peterson should die in San Quentins death chamber for murdering his wife and their unborn child.

How jurors decided Scott Peterson should die

Dec. 14, 2004: Members of the jury say no one issue or piece of evidence swung the panel toward conviction, but the cumulative weight of Scott Petersons deceptions and even his courtroom demeanor worked against him.

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.

Families pour out anguish before Scott Peterson sentenced to death

March 17, 2005: Before the judge sentences him, Scott Peterson silently faces his former in-laws.

Scott Peterson files to overturn convictions

July 6, 2012: Scott Peterson asks the California Supreme Court to overturn his convictions and death sentence, saying his jury was soaked in hostile publicity, the case against him was flimsy and the judge allowed prosecutors to introduce unreliable dog-sniffing evidence.

Michael Macor / The Chronicle

Geraldo reports on Scott Petersons cushy life in prison

March 23, 2015: Geraldo Riveras weekend program delves into the post-conviction life of Peterson at San Quentin State Prison.

TV doc makes case for Scott Petersons innocence

Aug. 12, 2017: A controversial six-part docuseries called The Murder of Laci Peterson premieres on A&E.

California Supreme Court hears arguments for new trial

June 2, 2020: Scott Petersons lawyers tell the California Supreme Court that he could not have gotten a fair trial.

Death penalty overturned for Scott Peterson

Aug. 24, 2020: The state Supreme Court upholds Scott Petersons murder convictions but overturns his death sentence because the trial judge had dismissed jurors who opposed capital punishment without asking them whether they could put their views aside.
On the Idea of Social Justice and the Christian

My Response to Tim Keller

By David Fitch

Pastor Tim Keller recently posted A Biblical Critique of Social Justice and Critical Theory. Its a good read worthy of some serious reflection. I encourage everyone to read it here. Here are some of my reactions.

No One Justice

Tim Keller starts by asserting there is no one view of justice in the West. He outlines a history of justice following philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre to prove his point. And I couldnt be more on board. When Christians say the word justice, it is by no means clear what we mean. I think the US church needs to hear and understand this.

There was a time when the US church assumed that the word justice meant the same thing to everybody who speaks English. And it meant what the church meant. Protestant Christians at large, especially the white mainline protestant churches after World War 2, saw the work of justice, and the Christianizing of the social order (Rauschenbusch) as a Christian task of the church in the American society. It was subtly assumed that justice was a Christian universal value all Americans could agree on.

Martin Luther King Jr followed in this tradition when he used Biblical imagery to call America at large to racial justice basically assuming a cultural authority for Christianity. And so even to this day, Christians, and this includes evangelicals, seek justice at large in society on terms we deem to be Christian.

Conservative evangelicals explicitly appeal to Christian principles or the Bible for their pursuit of pro-life legislation and other socially conservative justice agendas. They assume this should apply to everybody in the U.S. even though the majority do not believe the Bible as an authority for their lives.

Likewise, progressive evangelicals, in reaction to a white fundamentalism, generally assume a Christianized motivation for why they pursue racial and economic justice, along with equal rights in society at large.

But in a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic country, we can no longer assume Christian parochial understandings of justice to be universal for all. As Keller argues, justice requires a narrative, a history from which to make sense. I press even further and say justice requires a community in which theres a language and a practice of justice that fleshes out the meaning of the word justice when used in everyday life. Otherwise the word justice becomes an ideological banner that can be applied for certain power tactics.

As Keller argues, justice requires a narrative, a history from which to make sense. I press even further and say justice requires a community in which theres a language and a practice of justice that fleshes out the meaning of the word justice when used in everyday life. Otherwise the word justice becomes an ideological banner that can be applied for certain power tactics.

The US church has fallen into the bad speech habits when it comes to justice. Even after the demise of the post WW2 white protestant hegemony in North America, U.S. Christians continue to assume that when we use words like justice, self-actualization, pro-life, marriage and even love that we as Christians are all talking about the same thing as those outside the church. But this is absurd.

The very fact that progressive evangelicals cannot agree with conservative evangelicals on what justice means is testimony to this fact. Keller appeals to MacIntyre to make this point and he couldnt have chosen a better thinker to explain the problems of justice in our time.

And so, can we hear Tim Kellers challenge to us Christians to be more careful with our language of justice? When our language/practice of justice becomes blurred with other versions of justice and detached from the person and work of Jesus Christ as Lord, we get one step closer to supporting justice as an ideology.

Well end up doing stupid things which we then have no pathway out of, like supporting (or starting) wars in the name of God (because he is the God of freedom), or supporting one issue in an election (pro-life or national healthcare), or stamping a candidate with Gods imprimatur based upon our one view of justice. Justice will get separated from any real work on the ground. We will lose our Christian witness and lose the wherewithal for the justice of God to take shape in our neighborhoods and towns.

Keller and Foundations

Anabaptist leaning thinkers argue that Christians cannot expect Christian moral behavior of non-Christians. We assume that Kingdom social behaviors - like forgiveness, reconciliation, love and care for those who have been broken, healing, the wherewithal to subordinate our security and dependence upon money to the Lordship of Christ so as to give sacrificially, etc.  are really only possible in a relationship of trust and dependence upon Jesus and the Holy Spirits working. Christian justice is not possible apart from Jesus. In fact it cannot even make sense to many non-Christians. And so we should not assume that what Christians believe about justice in and through Jesus Christ can be imposed on a world who does not know him as Lord. Imposing a Biblical justice therefore, as a universal foundation, on society at large is a complicated issue.

We assume that Kingdom social behaviors - like forgiveness, reconciliation, love and care for those who have been broken, healing, the wherewithal to subordinate our security and dependence upon money to the Lordship of Christ so as to give sacrificially, etc.  are really only possible in a relationship of trust and dependence upon Jesus and the Holy Spirits working. Christian justice is not possible apart from Jesus.

In his article, under a heading entitled The Problem of Foundations, Keller cites a large section of a Christian Smith interview with an atheist. At the end of this citation we are left with the strong impression that justice is in need of a universal foundation to be legitimate. Keller then proceeds to provide an exposition of what he names as Biblical Justice with 5 points. The impression here is that this outline can provide a foundation for justice for all Christians and beyond. But just how is his version of justice Biblical and in what manner is it foundational?

This is where stuff gets tricky. Is Keller saying his take on Biblical justice is THE (emphasis on the) Biblical version of justice or one of many Biblical versions of justice? I agree with many of his emphases in his version of Biblical justice but I notice he has not made reference to Jesus or the New Testament (except for one reference). This is a problem for those of us inclined to center the revelation of God in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the fulfilment of Israel (and the OT) and is the one who most fully reveals who God is. All understanding of Gods justice therefore must go through Jesus. For us, it is even through Jesus that we understand ultimately the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. What is clear from all this therefore is that Kellers Biblical justice is one interpretation/one version of such justice. It is arguably not a foundation to which even all Christians can assent.

But is Keller advocating for a Biblical justice that all people should accept as foundational? He provides a spectrum of 4 theories of justice playing off Michael Sandels book on Justice. He follows Sandels history of justice except that he replaces Sandels virtue ethics with a treatment of critical theory. (Please note that this is a bit odd because MacIntyre, upon which he begins his analysis, is really the one responsible for the rebirth of virtue ethics). At the end of each account of the four theories, he provides a rationale for how (his version of) Biblical justice incorporates the best of each theory while also compensating for the lack in each theory. The argument moves, in a very Niebuhrian way, to a summary that compares (his own version of) Biblical justice to the alternatives and you dont have to guess how that ends. His own version wins. There is nothing in the world like biblical justice! Christians must not sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. But they must take up their birthright and do justice, love mercy , and walk with their God (Micah 6:8). Again, Keller seems to advocate for the superiority of Biblical justice over all other versions of justice in a way that provides a foundation for Christians and the world for engaging secular justice.

Kellers compare-contrast competition between versions of justice is both MacIntyrian and non-MacIntyrian. MacIntyre of course argues that justice is worked out in a tradition. And there are necessarily competing traditions at work alongside one another in history (his argument in Whose Justice?). It is the interchange between traditions that advances one over the other. It is all within a process of Gods sovereignty. This is narrative theology (not to be confused with process theology) at its best. There is no one tradition that, extracted from history, can somehow be argued as a meta-foundation over all other traditions from a transcendental viewpoint. This is to worked out within history. I cant quite figure out if Keller is putting forth Biblical justice as a meta-foundation ahistorically? or whether he is himself showing how his version of Biblical justice is manifesting its superiority in the history of the West?

And so the question is, how is Keller viewing his Biblical justice as a foundation in relation to the other versions of justice?

Is it (A) foundational, objective truth to be argued for over against the other versions as the one true justice ahistorically? Or is it (B) a tradition of justice to be worked out in our lives as the church in the world, alongside other justices (including the secular one)?

Are we to argue about it as in (A) and convince others to live up to its standards? or live into it as in (B) and allow this justice to be the work of God in us to be put on display for the world to see and be invited to join in with? Sometimes I see Keller doing a (A) whereas I want (B) I am sure Keller would say both, but for me (B) must come before (A).

I am not sure how Keller would answer this question, but I worry about Keller confusing option (A) with option (B). I worry about the church today confusing (A) with (B). I think there is the ever present temptation in United States Christianity (liberal or conservative) to argue from the universal to the particular and enforce/argue for what we believe in on the world. I fear with option (A), we enter the world with a presumption weve got the foundations locked up. We know what justice is and we have God on our side. We have it figured out what and now we must go tell other people what to do. These are habits leftover from Christendom when we Christians assumed we were in charge. They tempt us to coerce and worldly power. They tempt us to align ourselves with worldly power. These habits are in large part why the church has fallen into its current corrupt relationship with American nationalism and the U.S. government.

On Why We Need The Church to Make Sense of Gods Justice

As I said on my facebook page recently, Christians have been used to being in (hegemonic) power in our culture (think 1950s). We are therefore used to exercising moral judgement by proceeding from the general to the particular. We argue from what is/what is supposed to be to then imposing it on that which does not meet that standard. This posture is inherited from Christendom and it may have even worked (in scare quotes) in Christendom. People might have done what we wanted them to do at our direction back in 1954 when Eisenhower listened to Reinhold Niebuhr. But this posture is a problem now (and I argue always has been a problem).

When we live as a minority people, without worldly power (as opposed to the power at work in Jesuss Lordship), we see that our moral judgements in Christ consider things like forgiveness, regeneration of the Spirit, the hope of what is possible in Christs transformative work among us. We realize we cannot impose such standards of justice on those who do not yet have faith and dependence upon the person and work of Christ. We therefore must engage one situation at a time. Seek middle axioms where our sense of justice overlap, discerning carefully what God is doing here to make Himself known. The power of our witness comes from the way we live our lives, not the way we argue foundations. This is a totally different posture of entering the world for Gods justice. It is no less Biblical and just as invasive but in a noncoercive way that depends on God working and Gods justice. It is the basis for option (B) described above. It is the way I believe God works to transform the world.

In the words of Stanley Hauerwas, an disciple of MacIntyre in his earlier days, the first task of the church is not to make the world more just, but to make the world the world. We the church have to live out what justice means in this place and this time under the Lordship of Christ so that the world can see something different, a new possibility. But this justice is not a concept or a theory extracted from God or Scripture. It is a way of life made possible in Jesus Christ extended by God through a people into the world (and yes it depends upon Scripture).

I think Kellers article leaves us asking how shall we live and work for this justice in the world? I fear he leaves us opting for option (A). I hope and pray hes leading us (with more work to do) towards option (B). I believe now, more than ever, we need a church that lives justice in the world as opposed to enforcing a justice upon the world through coercive means (like both conservative and liberal protestants are doing now in their use of government). I think the strength of Kellers article is that he poses the question. The weakness is that he lets it hang. The danger of the article is that many Christians might interpret him as pushing us (Biblically) towards option (A) instead of leading us towards option (B).

In a second post, I want to address Kellers take on critical theory and how I see critical theory as relieving us of any illusions we Christians have of option (A) and leading us to option (B).
UPDATE: The robbers covered their victims heads with pillowcases. Click here for the story.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Police are investigating a home-invasion robbery in Woodrow where a senior woman was restrained with zip ties late on Sunday night.

The incident was reported at about 11:30 p.m. in the vicinity of Woodrow Road and Vernon Avenue, according to a spokesman for the NYPDs Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

The 65-year-old victim told police that two males wearing masks rang the doorbell and then pushed their way inside the home.

The robbers, who brandished two black firearms, bound the woman with zip ties as they demanded money and jewelry, the police spokesman said.

The suspects fled with about $1,500 in cash and two iPhones, but no jewelry, the police spokesman said.

Police described the suspects as white males, both around six-feet tall, wearing masks and all-black clothing.

No arrests have been made and the investigation continues, according to the police spokesman.
Hanoi police officers said on Sunday they had arrested a 30-year-old man suspected of breaking into a jewelry shop in the capital city last week and getting away with more than 13 kilograms of gold.

The Criminal Police Division under Hanois Department of Police confirmed that the suspect, Nguyen Tien Han from Dan Phuong District, was being investigated on charges of theft.

The investigation revealed that Han had made plans for the burglary well in advance by acquiring a number of tools such as a backpack, pliers, a crowbar, a screwdriver, and gloves.

He also went online to buy a motorbike without a license plate for the crime.

At around 3:00 am on August 18, Han rode the motorbike to Quang Trung Ward, Son Tay Town, Hanoi.

Upon careful inspection, he found out that the Tuan Dat gold and jewelry shop on Phung Khac Khoan Street was a vulnerable target.

Han parked his vehicle about 100 meters away and walked toward the shop.

The man climbed into a balcony on the stores third floor after scaling the next-door house and used the prepared pliers and crowbar to unlock three layers of locked doors.

He went down to the first floor, disabled the security system, then grabbed 13 kilograms of gold inside the display cabinets.

Han got back out through the third floor and escaped on his motorbike.

The gold shop owner reported that more than 13 kilograms of gold and gold jewelry as well as VND140 million (US$6,000) in cash, worth a total of VND13 billion ($556,800), were stolen in the burglary.

About 8.4 kilograms of gold was retrieved by police officers from under a bed at the house of Hans grandmother in Dan Phuong District at the time of his arrest.

Police officers also alleged that Han had pulled off another burglary at a motorbike store in Thach That District, Hanoi on August 16, stealing VND58 million ($2,510) in cash and a scooter.

The cases are being further investigated.

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BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug.24

By Nargiz Sadikhova - Trend:

Kazakhstans oil and gas companies have allocated over $22 million to support COVID-19 battle in the country since the pandemic began, Head of Kazakhstans Oil and Gas Strategic Partnership Development Council Assylbek Jakiyev told Trend.

Talking COVID-19 pandemic affecting Kazakhstans oil and gas sector Jakiyev noted that as it turned out, from the point of view of compliance with epidemiological safety, the oil and gas industry in Kazakhstan was better prepared for the pandemic than the state healthcare system.

Although, it must be understood that no one was ready for a pandemic of this magnitude, but oil and gas companies quickly and harmoniously worked to prevent the spread of coronavirus at the production facilities, he said.

Jakiyev reminded that the very first cases of COVID-19 among oil and gas industry workers in Kazakhstan were identified during an examination at the medical center of the Vaternas shift camp at the Tengiz field, after which they were promptly isolated.

On the same day, the operator of the field - Tengizchevroil (TCO), the management of Vaternas and the sanitary services of the Atyrau region, where the field is located, developed an algorithm of actions and further worked to prevent the spread of the virus, Jakiyev said.

In his words taking into the consideration the fact that at that moment over 45,000 people worked at the field, an enormous work has been carried out.

Moreover, it was oil and gas companies such as Chevron, Eni, Karachaganak Petroleum Operating, Shell, KazMunayGas and others that helped local executive authorities of the country. These compnies promptly brought the necessary equipment, medicines, personal protective equipment, ambulances and much more. In total, oil and gas companies have allocated more than 10 billion tenge (more than $ 22 million) to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, he concluded.

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Follow the author on twitter: @nargiz_sadikh
As Shoppers Stay Away, Small Stores Seek Refuge Online

NEW YORKFor small retailers across the country, the coronavirus outbreak has turned an already challenging business environment into neverending uncertainty.

Amy Witt might have 20 customers on a good day in her Dallas womens clothing store, and then none the next.

Its a rollercoaster we ride every day, says Witt, whose store, Velvet Window, reopened May 1 after being closed since March. Were doing everything we can to cover expenses and keep the store stocked with inventory.

Many of Witts older customers are still shy about going into stores, especially since the virus has resurged in Texas. As she reopened the store in May, Witt told The Associated Press she planned to use services such as private shopping hours to encourage reluctant customers to come in. The strategy has helped, but sales remain well below Witts expectations. She hopes to boost sales by selling at an outdoor market where shoppers can feel more comfortable.

Still, Witt is grateful to be openthere are empty stores in the shopping center where Velvet Window is located.

Small retailers, especially those selling non-necessities such as apparel, are still struggling months after state and local governments lifted shutdown orders aimed at containing the virus. With the virus far from under control in many areas, however, consumers worried about getting sick are staying home and doing their purchasing online or, if they venture out, going to big stores like Walmart and Target where they can do one-stop shopping.

The weak sales and erratic customer traffic have forced store owners to be creative in hopes of persuading customers to stop in rather than order from a big online retailer. But for some owners, disappointing sales and an uncertain outlook have forced them to close their stores for good and stake the future of their businesses on the internet.

Washington was one of the first epicenters of the virus, and one of the first states to shut down its economy. Ambika Singh felt the impact immediately: Her company, Armoire, rents clothing to professional women. Her customers, suddenly stuck at home, no longer needed outfits for the office, dinners, and business trips.

Singh has permanently closed her two stores in Seattle, knowing they couldnt be sustained. Shes adapted her online business to meet customers rapidly changing needsthey wanted different clothes, like luxury loungewear or more dress shirts to look business-like on videoconferences even as they wore sweatpants.

Having lost customers due to the weakened economy, Armoires revenue is down about 35 percent from February, which was its best month ever. One of Singhs biggest challenges now is marketing to new customers as she tries to replace the shoppers who left.

As weve lost the physical connection with customers, can we rebuild? she says.

The internet has been a refuge for many retailers during the pandemic, says Carlos Castelan, managing director of The Navio Group, a retail consultancy based in Minneapolis. He noted that Shopify, a company that hosts e-commerce websites, had a 71 percent increase in new stores in the second quarter compared to a year earlier.

Theyre urgently setting up these e-commerce models to serve their customers, he says.

The most recent government tallies of retail sales show that sales at clothing sellers, which tend to have physical locations, fell nearly 36 percent from May through July. But online and other non-traditional retailers saw their sales soar 26 percent.

Small retailers have also learned to be more customer-friendly. Theyre using, for example, texts to communicate with shoppers and making pickups easier by setting aside dedicated parking spaces so people can grab and go, Castelan says. And stores are letting shoppers know theyre trying to keep everyone safe.

The primary driver has been as much about convenience and safety. Thats more the story rather than merchandising, he says.

The internet has been a lifeline for Antonellis Cheese Shop. The Austin, Texas, store remained open during the government-ordered shutdown, but many consumers stayed home, sharply reducing store traffic. The shop also sells to restaurants, which stopped ordering as they were forced to close. The shops business is still down 20 percent.

Owners John and Kendall Antonelli say theyve managed to survive by taking the events they normally run on their premises, like cheese tastings, and putting them online. Theyve had as many as 150 people take part in a tasting, with many people ordering cheese in advance and picking it up curbside. More recently, with fewer people sheltering at home, theyve been more likely to get 50 people, but that is still about double the number of attendees they had pre-pandemic.

The Antonellis revamped their website so local customers can order a la carte instead of pre-selected packagesthats more expensive for the store, but it keeps people happy and shopping.

The Antonellis have learned that several cheese shops in other cities have gone out of business, so they know they too could be at risk.

We are potentially considered one of the success storiesand what I mean by that is were still operating, Kendall Antonelli says.

Business has been slow since Mallory Shelters Washington, D.C., jewelry store reopened in June. Shelter, whose store bears her name, responded to the pandemic and shutdown by pouring her marketing efforts into her website. It now accounts for 75 percent of her revenue, up from 8 percent before the virus struck, but her overall revenue is down by half. She also has changed her product mix, focusing more on custom items that can have a more personal meaning for buyers.

A big question is whether her in-store business will recover in time for the holiday season, which starts three months from now.

This is the month when Im preparing for the holidays. But that looks really hard when you dont know if youre going to be open, if theres going to be another wave of the virus, or what peoples spending will be like, Shelter says.

By Joyce M. Rosenberg
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 18:11:00|Editor: huaxia

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JAKARTA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Monday asked the authorities to anticipate the increasing number of COVID-19 cases in the European Union (EU) and Asia and ordered all the stakeholders to step up fighting against the virus.

The move came following the significant hike in the confirmed cases in several members of the European Union (EU) and Asian countries.

"I want to stress that the home affairs minister reminds the COVID-19 task forces in the provinces, governors and mayors to fully and seriously work for the battle against the pandemic," the president told a limited cabinet meeting.

The tight health protocols, especially the face mask wearing and the efforts to rein the virus transmission have to be fully implemented, the president said.

A campaign for the face mask wearing must also be intensified, the president said.

Indonesia has brought down the number of cities and districts classified as high-risk areas for the COVID-19 transmission a month ago. But at the same time the situation in some other areas has worsened, the COVID-19 Task Force said. Enditem
UGC Exam Guidelines 2020: All eyes on Supreme Court

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: All eyes would be on the Supreme Court which is set to deliver its verdict on the UGC Exam Guidelines 2020.

The court had on August 18 reserved its verdict and had also given all the parties three days time to present their final arguments. The SC would decide on whether the final year degree examinations should be held before September 30.

Students have been protesting against the UGC for allowing universities and colleges to hold the final year exams amidst the ongoing pandemic.

JEE Main, NEET 2020: Mamata Banerjee urges Centre to postpone exams

On August 10, the UGC told the Supreme Court that it is the sole authority to take a decision on whether the exams should be conducted or not.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the court on behalf of the UGC that the decision can be taken by the body only as it only it can grant degrees. He further questioned the decision taken by the governments of Maharashtra and Delhi under the Disaster Management Act to cancel the final examinations.

Earlier, the Supreme Court had asked the Maharashtra and Delhi government to place on record the decision to cancel the exams. The Ministry of Home Affairs too was asked about its stand on the matter.

The court is hearing a batch of petitions that sought cancellation of the final term exams due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The UGC said that the universities were approached to inform the status of the conduct of the exams and responses were received from received from 818 universities (121 deemed universities, 291 private universities, 51 central universities, and 355 state universities).

Out of the 818 universities, 603 have either conducted the examination or are planning to conduct. 209 others have already conducted examination (on-line/off-line), 394 are planning to conduct examination (on-line/off-line/blended mode) in August or September.

Many students had urged that the exams be cancelled and the results of the students be calculated on the basis of their internal assessment or past performance.
CBI officials probing Sushant Singh Rajputs death case on Monday visited a Mumbai-based resort where the actor is said to have spent a couple of months, and also continued the questioning of the actors friend and cook at the DRDO guest house here.

Rajputs accountant Rajat Mewati was also called on Monday for questioning at the DRDO guest house at Kalina in Santacruz, where the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sleuths probing the case are staying, an official said.

A CBI team on Monday reached the Waterstone Resort in suburban Andheri, where Rajput is apparently spent about two months, for questioning its staff in connection with the probe into his death, according to the official.

The probing team went to the resort on Sunday also, but left as its staff members were not there.

Meanwhile, Rajputs accountant Mewati, flat-mate Siddharth Pithani and cook Neeraj Singh reached the DRDO guest house for questioning by the CBI, the official said.

The CBI questioned Pithani, Neeraj and Rajputs domestic help Deepesh Sawant on Saturday and Sunday also.

These three were present in Rajputs house at Mont Blanc Apartments in suburban Bandra when the 34-year-old actor was found hanging in his room on June 14.

On Sunday, the CBI team questioned Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant at the DRDO guest house and later took them to the late actors residence.

After spending three hours there, the central agency team left the place along with Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant, who were then again taken to the DRDO guest house in the evening for questioning, the official said.

Forensic science experts were also part of the CBI team which visited Rajputs residence, the official said.

On Saturday also, the CBI team accompanied by Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant visited the late actors house to reconstruct the sequence of events before he was found dead.

On Friday, the CBI officials had recorded the statements of Pithani and Neeraj.

The Supreme Court last week upheld the transfer of an FIR, lodged by Rajputs father in Patna against actor Rhea Chakraborty and others for allegedly abetting his suicide, to the CBI.

After Rajput was found hanging in his apartment in June, the Mumbai Police registered a case of accidental death.

Later, Rajputs father filed a police complaint in Patna, accusing Chakraborty and her family of abetting the actors suicide and misappropriating his money.
Yalochat, a five-year-old, Mexico City-based conversational commerce platform that enables customers like Coca-Cola and Walmart to upsell, collect payments and provide better service to their own customers over WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat in China, has closed on $15 million in Series B funding led by B Capital Group.

Sierra Ventures, which led a $10 million Series A financing for the company in early 2019, also participated.

The round isn't so surprising if Yalochat's numbers are to be believed. It says that since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, its platform has seen a tenfold increase in volume, and a 650% increase of message volume as more large enterprises -- especially outside of the U.S. -- use messaging apps to manage some of their sales operations and much of their customer service.

Yalochat is chasing a fast-growing market, too. According to the 10-year-old, India-based market research company MarketsandMarkets, the conversational AI software market should see $4.8 billion in revenue this year and more than triple that amount by 2025.

Certainly, having conglomerates on board is speeding along the company's growth.

"With Coca-Cola, we started in Brazil and we helped them run their commerce when it comes to talking with small mom-and-pop shops," says Yalochat founder and CEO Javier Mata, a Columbia University grad who studied engineering and founded three other companies beginning in 2013 before launching Yalochat.

"They had such success running their ordering process that they then took us to Mexico and Colombia, and were talking with [them about entering into the] Philippines and India." Says Mata, "You try to get fast success in one market, then the conglomerate takes you into other areas of business so they can optimize their workflows around sales and customer service in other countries."

Mata makes the process sound awfully easy, particularly considering that dozens of startups are also focused on conversational commerce and also raising funding right now.

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Still, he argues that if you build your product the right way, it becomes a no-brainer for customers.

In pitching companies like Walmart, for example, he says Yalochat would "start with something super simple but high value that they could launch in a week. We'd say, 'That process for sales that it has taken you years [to organize], we can get it out for you by Friday.' Then we'd just do it.

"It was low stakes for them to try us out, and as soon as they saw our conversion rates, we were introduced to other [units] with the corporation." Says Mata, "I think why a lot of other companies havent been successful is that [their tech] is not simple or doesn't really work. We made ours scalable, easy to launch and capable of running smoothly without passing that complexity to end users."

B Capital is plainly buying what Yalochat is selling. Firm co-founder Eduardo Saverin -- who famously co-founded Facebook -- calls Mata and his team "phenomenally strong" and suggests there's little to stop their trajectory right now. "Yalo is an example of a Latin American business that is already today in Asia. And if you're building a conversational commerce enablement for large enterprises that redefines the way they touch customers -- [meaning] messaging applications, the most engaging medium in the world today -- should that really be confined to Latin America or Asia? Absolutely not."

Saverin compares the startup to B Capital itself, which has offices in LA, San Francisco, New York and Singapore.

The firm has already made bets in the U.S., Europe and Asia, since getting off the ground in 2015. Now, with Yalo, it has its first investment that's principally headquartered in Latin America, as well. "For us," says Saverin, who grew up in Brazil, "we didn't start investing everywhere on day one. But that's the mission."
By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Opposition UDF moved a no-confidence motion in the Kerala Assembly against the Pinarayi Vijayan government and raised several allegations on bribery as the one-day session of the legislature began on Monday in strict compliance with Covid-19 protocol.

The debate on the no-confidence motion began in the House at 10 am as Speaker allotted five hours to debate on the issue.

Congress MLA V D Satheesan presented the no-confidence motion against the LDF government on the floor of the Legislative Assembly.

He quoted Mark Antony's speech in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and said that in the current scenario, captain of the ship is the Chief Minister and the problem lies within the cabin of the captain.

Satheesan in his inimitable style maintained that Vijayan could not walk away from the responsibility when his office has been involved in the gold smuggling case.

He also mentioned that there is a concerted effort to ensure that all the blame is bestowed on Pinarayis former principal secretary M Sivasankar. It is unfortunate that Pinarayi keeps claiming that he doesnt know anything, he said.

Bribery allegations raised against left government

The alleged bribery involved in the Life Mission as well as on the back door appointments made by the CMO, was also touched upon by the MLA.

Much to the embarrassment of the ruling front, Satheesan informed the Assembly that Rs 9.25 crore was the commission amount in the Life Mission scheme -- an all-time record amount of bribery in the country.

Till now, only Rs 4.50 crore was reported to be the commission amount in the Life Mission scheme.

Interestingly, the Opposition also came out with a new allegation involving the Bev Q app where a CPM leader has walked away with "Rs 5 crore bribe."

Earlier, at the beginning of the session, Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala demanded the Speaker to leave the seat of the speaker in light of the notice given by M Ummer of the IUML seeking removal of Speaker Sreeramakrishnan.

M Ummer had cited that the Speaker had tarnished the image of the House by attending a function sponsored by Swapna Suresh, the accused in the gold-smuggling case.

The Speaker himself rejected the notice given by the Opposition to move a resolution against him, saying that the notice did not meet the 14-day advance notice period criteria mentioned in the Constitution and rejected the notice.

Law Minister A K Balan who addressed the House also said that the notice given by the Opposition has no legal sanctity.

Covid-19 test being done on Congress MLA K C Joseph at the Legislative Assembly in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday. (Photo | Vincent Pulickal, EPS)

While the floor of the Assembly witnessed heated debates happening against the LDF Government, BJP State leadership held its protest outside the entrance to the Assembly on the privatization of the Thiruvananthapuram Airport issue.

ALSO READ: Kerala Assembly unanimously passes resolution against airport privatization

BJP State president K Surendran and the lone BJP MLA O Rajagopal held protests outside the Assembly along with the other party workers.

Earlier Rajagopal was denied permission to speak on the Thiruvananthapuram International Airport privatization issue even though he had raised his hand seeking permission to speak.

BJP Thiruvananthapuram district president V V Rajesh and former district president S Suresh also attended the protest. They protested by demanding the resignation of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. The BJP leaders were later arrested and taken to the Museum Police Station.

The presentation of the finance bill will also be held and it would be followed by the discussion on the no-confidence motion.

Kerala Administrative Reforms Commission chairperson V S Achuthanandan and C F Thomas MLA have not attended the morning session of the assembly citing health reasons.

The Jose faction of the Kerala Congress (M) is also abstaining from the assembly proceedings. The lone BJP legislator O Rajagopal is expected to support the no-confidence motion.
O ne of President Trumps top aides today announced she is quitting to focus on her family.

In a statement Kellyanne Conway said she was stepping down as his senior adviser at the end of the month to concentrate on her children  promising them less drama, more mama.

Her work as a passionate public defender of Donald Trump has set the mother-of-four against members of her family, including her lawyer husband and eldest daughter.

Only hours before the shock announcement 15-year-old Claudia took to social media to declare that she was officially pushing for emancipation from her parents.

Buckle up because this is probably going to be public one way or another, unfortunately. Welcome to my life, she wrote on Twitter. In another post she claimed that her mothers job had ruined my life.

Ms Conways departure comes amid the presidential election campaign. Claudia has previously described herself as a radical agnostic liberal/leftist and is a keen supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Last month she announced her parents were making me delete all social media, but soon returned to Twitter where she attacked Mr Trump as racist and homophobic.

In the statement, Mrs Conway, 53, touched on troubles at home as she revealed she was leaving her high-profile role. This is completely my choice and my voice, she said.

Mrs Conway also spoke about her relationship with her husband George, a conservative lawyer and well-known critic of the President.

We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids.

Claudia Conway with her mother Kellyanne Conway

She added: Our four children are teens and tweens starting a new academic year, in middle school and high school, remotely from home for at least a few months. As millions of parents nationwide know, kids doing school from home requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times.

Mr Conway is a Washington lawyer who is key figure in the Lincoln Project, a pressure group which aims to defeat Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.

In a public feud last year, Mr Trump called him a wack job and a husband from hell, prompting Mr Conway to say Trump was mentally unfit for his office. Mr Conway last night said he was stepping back from his role in the Lincoln Project in a separate statement on Twitter. Mrs Conways departure will leave Mr Trump without one of his more passionate spokesmen.

She was his third campaign manager in 2016 and has been one of Trumps most loyal and outspoken defenders in public and on cable news. She was the first woman to successfully manage a presidential campaign to victory.

US President Donald Trump sits alongside Kellyanne Conway / AFP via Getty Images

Mrs Conway has also been involved in a number of controversies. In a 2017 interview, she cited a non-existent massacre to defend the administrations immigration restrictions. In the same year a US government ethics advisory board said she should be investigated after urging people to buy clothes developed by the Presidents daughter Ivanka.

The announcement comes as a blow to Mr Trump as he seeks to boost his faltering re-election campaign at this weeks Republican National Convention amid the pandemic, economic woes and polls showing him lagging behind his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

In an interview with Fox News, Mr Trump said the four-day event, which is largely being staged online after the physical convention was cancelled due to the pandemic, would be very uplifting and positive.

Mr Trump also sought to strike a positive note in the battle against the virus by announcing that emergency authorisation has been given to treat patients with plasma.

The technique uses antibody-rich blood plasma from people who have recovered from the disease. It has already been used on more than 70,000 people in the US.

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Mr Trump called the move a breakthrough and claimed it could cut deaths by 35 per cent. However some experts claim that more research is required to determine it effectiveness.
As two of the three largest fires in California history burned near the eastern edge of San Jose and in wine country north of San Francisco Bay, firefighters saw a welcome respite in dangerous fire weather with the cancellation of a red-flag warning for the Bay Area.

Forecasters, however, continued to warn about dry lightning in the Sacramento Valleys foothills and mountains through Monday evening. Red-flag warnings  which indicate that dangerous fire weather conditions are expected  were also in effect for parts of the North Coast, northeast California and the Tahoe Basin through Monday evening.

The National Weather Service initially issued warnings covering large swaths of Northern and Central California through Monday afternoon. With firefighters already responding to more than two dozen major fires, it was feared the storms could ignite even more blazes and cause existing ones to spread more rapidly, pushing crews into a triage situation.

The red-flag warning covering the Bay Area and northern Central Coast was canceled shortly after 9:30 a.m. Monday. The local National Weather Service office said that "weak cells are still over the North Bay; however, most moisture has moved north of our area and instability has decreased, giving us confidence to let the warning expire early."

Firefighters were able to use a brief respite in the wind over the weekend to build containment lines. Crews battling the CZU Lightning Complex fire in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties got some additional help from Mother Nature in the form of rain showers Sunday evening.

"The weather hasnt been as significant as we were expecting, which is good," Mark Brunton, operations chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said at a briefing Monday morning. "And that has given us an opportunity for our crews to make a lot of great progress throughout this fire."

The sheer magnitude of what has already burned is sobering: about 1.4 million acres this month alone, with four more months of potential fire season to go. Only 2018 saw more land scorched in California  over an entire year.

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Im essentially at a loss for words to describe the scope of the lightning-sparked fire outbreak that has rapidly evolved in Northern California  even in the context of the extraordinary fires of recent years, wrote Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, in a blog post. Its truly astonishing.

Jake Hess, a Cal Fire unit chief, said at a news conference for the SCU Lightning Complex fire  now California's second-largest blaze in history at more than 360,000 acres  that the state has entered a period of mega fires.

We are essentially living in a mega fire era, he said. We have folks who have been working for Cal Fire for the last five years, and that is all they understand, mega fires, since they started.

On Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the White House had approved Californias request for a presidential major disaster declaration to bolster the states emergency response to the wildfires.

Across California, over 14,000 firefighters are on the front lines of more than two dozen major fires and lightning complexes, or groups of fires, Jeremy Rahn, Cal Fire public information officer, said at a Sunday media briefing.

There have been more than 13,000 lightning strikes statewide since Aug. 15, he added on Monday, and "an astonishing 2,700 more wildfires have occurred this year than last."

During a media briefing Monday afternoon, Newsom said that there had been at least 289 lightning strikes statewide over the last 24 hours, and that 10 new fires had broken out.

"The good news is the lightning did spare the coast, where a lot of the fires are going right now," Michelle Mead, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said Monday in a Cal Fire video update. "The bad news is we did have more lightning strikes in the inland region along the Sierra Crest."

Crews are currently battling 625 fires throughout the state, according to Newsom. So far this year, firefighters have responded to 7,002 fires that have scorched a combined 1.4 million acres, the governor said.

By this same time last year, there had been 4,292 fires that had consumed about 56,000 acres.

Seven people have died so far in this year's fires, including five  three in Napa County and two in Solano County  as a result of the LNU Lightning Complex fire, and one in the CZU Lightning Complex fire. The death toll also includes a pilot who died in a helicopter crash in Fresno County while on a water-dropping mission for the Hills fire.

Newsom called this week critical "as it relates to addressing and suppressing these wildfires" and said the state is "deploying every resource at our disposal." In some areas, volunteer fire-fighting units have stepped in as well.

The state's commitment includes more than 2,400 fire engines, he said. More have been pledged from other agencies both in and out of California  including 91 from Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico, Texas, Oregon, Utah and Washington.

The LNU Lightning Complex fire, at more than 351,000 acres, is the second-largest fire in California history. With slightly less acreage burned  over 347,000 acres  the SCU Lightning Complex fire is the next largest. Combined, they dwarf the Thomas fire, which at 281,893 acres shattered the records just three years ago.

To have both of those going on at the same time ... gives us the magnitude of what has happened here in this state, Sean Kavanaugh, incident commander on the LNU fire, said Sunday.

As of Monday evening, the LNU fire complex, which was burning in Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Solano, Yolo and Colusa counties, had destroyed 908 homes and other buildings and was 25% contained.

"The size and complexity of this fire is not one that weve seen in times past," Cal Fire Unit Chief Shana Jones said during a briefing Monday, adding that "everyone on the line is extremely tired but working so incredibly hard."

The SCU Lightning Complex fire, which spans seven counties, began as a collection of about 20 blazes in areas of Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties and by Sunday had merged into two conflagrations.

The fires, which were 15% contained as of Monday night, were burning primarily through grass and brush in steep, remote areas that hadnt burned in years.

Theres a lot of dead fuel up there, said Barbara Rebiskie, public information officer on the SCU fire. And the erratic winds, the 7% humidities and the lightning  its not a good combination.

As of Monday afternoon, more than 20,000 homes and commercial buildings were threatened and 5 structures were confirmed destroyed. Investigators are looking into 7 other structures that may have also been demolished by the blaze.

A new evacuation order was issued at 3 a.m. Sunday for parts of Alameda County. In the hours that followed, a public information center was flooded with so many phone calls that it crashed. On Monday, officials reduced an evacuation order to a warning in parts of Stanislaus county.

Although firefighting resources have been pouring into the region in recent days, officials say its simply not enough.

In some places, officials said that they were being turned down for state help and left to beg for equipment and manpower from volunteers and local agencies.

On Sunday afternoon, forecasters were concerned with an area of moisture with the potential to generate thunderstorms that was just off Central California and moving toward the Monterey area. Bay Area forecasters said Monday, however, that most of the moisture had moved to the north, spurring the cancellation of a red-flag warning there as well as along the northern Central Coast.

Since late July, more than 1,200 homes, commercial buildings and other structures have been destroyed by fires in California, with nearly all of that destruction occurring after Aug. 15, which marked the start of what officials are calling a lightning siege.

The CZU Lightning Complex fire was threatening multiple communities and had forced 77,000 people from their homes. The blaze began as a collection of about 22 fires that largely merged into one, challenging firefighters as they tried to keep the flames away from the towns dotting the rural, mountainous area.

The fire had consumed more than 78,000 acres and was 13% contained as of Monday evening. It threatened about 25,000 structures and had destroyed 276.

Ian Larkin, a unit chief for Cal Fires San Mateo Santa Cruz Unit, said that the aircraft attack was better Monday.

"Were making progress thanks to the increase in personnel, and better weather, but well be here awhile," he said.

Newsom called the CZU Lightning Complex a "proof point that we are in a different climate" as it's burning in areas "that have simply never seen forest fires because of weather conditions and the like."

"We are dealing with different climate conditions that are precipitating in fires the likes of which we haven't seen in modern recorded history  in dense forests that are well-covered and have been historically immune from significant fires along our coast," he said.

The body of a 70-year-old man was recovered in the fire area over the weekend, according to Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Chief Deputy Chris Clark.

Clark said the man's body was found "some distance away" from what appeared to be his vehicle at the end of Last Chance Road  deep in the mountains northwest of the community of Davenport in Santa Cruz County.

Last Chance Road was so damaged that it was impassable, and rescuers needed a helicopter to recover the man's body.

Clark said it looked as though he was "likely leaving the fire."

This is the darkest day of this fire so far, he told reporters Sunday.

Authorities were also searching Monday for four people who had been reported missing.

Firefighters over the weekend were taking advantage of fairly calm winds to attack the fire on the ground as much as possible as they scrambled to make progress ahead of the expected storm, said Daniel Potter, a Cal Fire public information officer.

Were going to get as much accomplished as we can before the front hits us, he said. And then adapt and overcome any new fires that may start in the area due to the lightning coming through.

Crews worked over the weekend to establish containment lines and fire breaks around the city of Santa Cruz and the campus of UC Santa Cruz in a bid to keep the blaze from damaging the community if it made a run in that direction. As of Monday morning, Clark said there was "no imminent fire danger" to Santa Cruz.

Officials were asking people to stay out of evacuation zones to avoid hazards, including fire and downed trees and wires, and to keep roads open for emergency vehicles.

"It is highly dangerous in there still. There are trees coming down. We have redwood trees, old-growth timber that is coming across the roadway and we have infrastructure that needs repair," Jonathan Cox, a deputy chief with Cal Fire, said Monday. "We have bridges that have failed.... It is not safe."

They also warned about criminals taking advantage of the crisis. Authorities on Saturday morning arrested five people on suspicion of grand theft, burglary and conspiracy after they were stopped driving away from the Fall Creek Drive area, the Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Office said.

Someone also broke into the department vehicle of a firefighting commander while he was out battling the blaze, stole his wallet and drained his bank account, Brunton said at a briefing Sunday.

Its saddening, its sickening," Brunton said. We are doing everything we can to try to help the community, and unfortunately these [things] happen.

Meanwhile, officials continued to beg tourists to stay away.

The Santa Cruz County Emergency Operations Center said it was requesting that visitors refrain from traveling to the area through Sept. 1 to keep overnight accommodations available for evacuees.

More than 45,000 Santa Cruz County residents have been displaced by the fires, and though the county is operating 12 shelters, capacity is limited because of COVID-19, officials said. Many hotels, motels and vacation rentals are also booked.

DO NOT visit us now, the county said in a tweet. Air quality is poor, ash is everywhere, and were dealing with an unparalleled catastrophe. This is no time for a day at the beach.

Given that closely clustered crowds heighten the risk of spreading the coronavirus, Newsom said many evacuees were not being directed to typical congregate settings. Out of 2,211 sheltered evacuees, 1,480 are staying in hotels, he said.

The state also has implemented additional safety protocols for shelters, including conducting health screenings and assessments prior to entry, requiring masks, installing air purifiers and practicing social distancing.

"We continue to battle historic wildfires, but we're also battling this historic pandemic, COVID-19, that has not gone away," he said. "That makes some of our wildfire efforts a little bit more challenging, but we are up to the task."

While the intense firefight continued in and around the Bay Area, crews made significant progress on several other substantial wildfires throughout the state.

The Lake fire, which ignited near Lake Hughes in Los Angeles County on Aug. 12, was 65% contained, officials said Monday. That blaze had charred more than 31,000 acres and destroyed 33 structures and outbuildings.

Officials also lifted some evacuations in the burn area Monday morning, allowing residents of Kings Canyon Road east to Shafer Road to return to their homes as of 10 a.m. Evacuations remained in place for areas east of Old Ridge Route, west of Kings Canyon Road, north of Pine Canyon Road and Three Points Road south of Highway 138. Officials announced Monday evening that all evacuation orders would be lifted by 10 a.m. Tuesday.

Elsewhere in L.A. County, the Ranch 2 fire was 81% contained, officials said Monday. That wildfire had burned 4,237 acres near Azusa.

The River fire, burning south of Salinas in Monterey County, was 23% contained. That 48,424-acre wildfire had destroyed 21 structures since it started Aug. 16.

"Fire activity was minimal overnight, allowing firefighter[s] to make great progress by reinforcing containment lines," officials wrote in an incident update Monday morning.

Crews also reported 15% containment of the Carmel fire, which was burning nearby to the southwest. That fire had consumed roughly 6,700 acres and destroyed 51 structures.

Some evacuation orders were lifted in the vicinity of the two fires Monday. Up-to-date information on the status of evacuations is available through a county website.

Times staff writer Leila Miller contributed to this report.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

Christopher McCasland wasnt just burglarizing popular Angel Fire businesses  including the villages ski resort  while he was a police officer, court documents say. He was also allegedly getting his ex-wife and a child involved.

The former Angel Fire police officer and Roosevelt County deputy even took a police report for one of the burglaries hes accused of committing, according to a criminal complaint.

McCasland is charged with crimes in two counties, including receiving stolen property, commercial burglary and unlawful taking of a motor vehicle.

New Mexico State Police caught on to the burglaries in June during an investigation into McCaslands missing department firearm from the Roosevelt County Sheriffs Office. McCaslands ex-wife told investigators she was with him as he burglarized two businesses in Angel Fire while McCasland was an officer in the Angel Fire Police Department.

There was also a child present during one of the alleged burglaries, according to court documents.

McCasland, who most recently worked at the Roosevelt County Sheriffs Office, resigned July 14 and was booked into the Quay County jail the next day, according to a July news release from the Roosevelt County Sheriffs Office. A small amount of marijuana was found in McCaslands patrol unit.

Snowmobile

His law enforcement status is temporarily suspended, state Law Enforcement Academy Director Kelly Alzaharna recently told the Journal.

McCasland denied the allegations when State Police agents confronted him with them. His lawyer declined to comment on the case when reached by the Journal.

McCaslands ex-wife, Kendra Gossett, told State Police that while they were living in Angel Fire from 2013 to 2016, McCasland stole several saws and other landscaping equipment from a lumber store, new TVs from a local brewery, and a snowmobile from the Angel Fire Resort.

Police tracked down a man in Eagle Nest who bought an allegedly stolen snowmobile from McCasland. Gossett said McCasland sold other stolen items as well.

Court documents say police found items in McCaslands Portales home that matched descriptions of items that were reported stolen.

According to an arrest warrant affidavit written by State Police Sgt. Gerardo Hernandez:

Gossett was interviewed by State Police in Clovis in June during an investigation into a firearm missing from the Roosevelt County Sheriffs Office. She told Hernandez that McCasland committed burglaries while he was an Angel Fire officer and that she helped him in the burglaries.

Chain saws and more

Gossett said McCasland stole five chain saws and a pole pruner from Alpine Lumber in Angel Fire.

According to the Angel Fire police report on the Alpine Lumber burglary, 11 items were stolen for a total value of $5,739.

Gossett then told police McCasland stole TVs from Enchanted Circle Brewing in Angel Fire. She said he went inside the brewery one day while it was being remodeled and propped open the back door after using the restroom.

Gossett said McCasland later woke her up around 1 or 2 a.m. and told her there were some TVs at the brewery. Ms. Gossett then went with Deputy McCasland while leaving her child sleeping at home and helped him steal two televisions inside the Enchanted Brewery, the affidavit says.

Gossett also told officers about the theft of a snowmobile from the Angel Fire Resort.

She said McCasland would go up to the resort during work hours and drive around the storage unit with the snowmobiles. She said he told her about a blue snowmobile in a storage unit that still had the keys in the ignition.

A few days later, she said she was awakened in the middle of the night.

She said she put her child in the vehicle and followed Deputy McCasland to the snowmobile storage unit at the top of the mountain in the Angel Fire Resort.  They got to the storage unit and stole the snowmobile, Hernandez wrote.

$8,000 in cash

In January 2019, about $8,000 disappeared from the Roosevelt County Sheriffs Office evidence vault. McCasland denied having any involvement in the burglaries or the missing $8,000 from the evidence vault. But he did tell Hernandez and agent Kenneth Villarreal that he bought a boat for $8,000 last year and sold it.

Police searched his Portales home and seized a 50-inch TV and two Stihl landscaping tools. Hernandez wrote that the items were confirmed to be the ones stolen by checking the serial numbers in the Alpine Lumber burglary report and by using the brewerys receipt for the TV.

McCasland was put on administrative leave after the State Police investigation into the missing gun found links to other crimes, the Roosevelt County Sheriffs Office news release says. McCasland was indicted on one count of receiving stolen property in 9th Judicial District Court in Portales and is scheduled to be arraigned later this month.

He is also charged with nonresidential burglary and unlawful taking of a motor vehicle in Colfax County Magistrate Court, and theres no indication if those charges will be taken to a higher court soon.

Officer Dusty J. Francisco, a State Police spokesman, said McCasland will not be charged in connection with the missing firearm or the money missing from the evidence vault.

Gossett has not been charged with any crimes.
The Victorian Liberal Party has launched an internal investigation after a joint report by The Age and 60 Minutes exposed extensive branch stacking, implicating one of the Prime Ministers frontbenchers.

The scheme was revealed in an array of secret recordings, colourful social media communications and detailed documents that involve the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Housing, Michael Sukkar, as well as Kevin Andrews, the longest-serving member in the House of Representatives.

In this episode, national editor Tory Maguire is joined by investigative journalist Nick McKenzie to discuss what the branch-stacking revelations mean for the Prime Minister, the party and taxpayers.

Our supporters power our newsrooms and are critical for the sustainability of news coverage.
Namibia Critical Metals has entered into an agreement for a draw-down equity financing facility with Alumina Partners (Ontario) Ltd. to provide the Company with up to CD$5,000,000 over a 24-month periodDraw-downs are at the Company's discretion ... Namibia Critical Metals Inc.

Namibia Critical Metals has entered into an agreement for a draw-down equity financing facility with Alumina Partners (Ontario) Ltd. to provide the Company with up to CD$5,000,000 over a 24-month period

Draw-downs are at the Company's discretion in increments of up to CD$250,000

The Company has completed a first draw-down of $100,000 which will be directed towards acceleration of the Company's gold exploration programs and provides for the immediate analysis of 5,000 soil samples that have already been collected

HALIFAX, NS / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / Namibia Critical Metals Inc. ("Namibia Critical Metals" or the "Company") (TSXV:NMI) today announced that it has entered into a draw-down equity financing facility ("Investment Agreement or Alumina facility") with Alumina Partners (Ontario) Ltd. ("Alumina"), an affiliate of New York-based private equity firm Alumina Partners, LLC., that is structured to provide Namibia Critical Metals with timely access to private placement financing as and when required. Under the terms of the Investment Agreement, the Company has the right to draw down on the CD$5,000,000 facility, at its sole discretion, through equity private placement tranches of up to CD$250,000 each. Each tranche will be a placement of units (each a "Unit"), with each Unit comprising one common share (a "Share") and one-half of one common share purchase warrant (each whole common share purchase warrant referred to as a "Warrant"). The Units will be priced at a discount of 15% to 25% from the then most recent closing price of the Shares on the TSX Venture Exchange at the time of the applicable Company draw-down notice to Alumina. The Warrants will be issued at a 40% premium over the market price of the Shares and will have a term of 24 months. There are no standby charges or other upfront fees associated with the Investment Agreement or any penalties for not drawing the full facility. Each tranche of Units issued under the Investment Agreement will be subject to the acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange, and the securities issued will be subject to the customary 4-month hold period.

Story continues

A first tranche draw-down of $100,000 was completed concurrent with the execution of the Investment Agreement. The Company issued 555,555 units ("Units") at a price of $0.18 per unit for gross proceeds of $100,000. Each Warrant in this tranche is exercisable into one additional common share at a price of $0.336.

The proceeds from the first draw-down will be used to accelerate gold exploration over the 1,638 square kilometer Grootfontein project area. A total of 5,000 samples over many of the principal target areas have already been collected and will now be submitted for gold analyses.

Don Burton, President of Namibia Critical Metals stated "The Alumina facility will provide the Company with the flexibility to accelerate high priority exploration programs outside of the Lofdal Heavy Rare Earth joint venture which is already fully funded by our joint venture partner, Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC). Exploration of our 2,000 square kilometer land package in the emerging Navachab-Otjikoto gold belt of central Namibia can now be accelerated with the objective of identifying gold targets using systematic soil geochemical surveys, in a manner similar to what has been utilized by Osino Resources. This approach led to the discovery of Twin Hills and other important gold anomalies. Management is no stranger to large scale gold exploration, having previously conducted similar programs with Etruscan Resources throughout West Africa from 1996-2010 which led to the development of the Samira Hill, Tabakaroni, Youga and Agbaou gold mines."

"Alumina is thrilled to support Namibia Critical Metals as they prepare to dramatically ramp up exploration," said Adi Nahmani, Managing Member of Alumina Partners. "The two areas of resource focus that present the greatest value proposition right now are rare earth elements and counter-inflationary precious metals... And investing in Namibia now will allow us to get exposure to both. We look forward very much to seeing this veteran management team execute against plan and hit key milestones even sooner than previously expected."

The Company's Gold Portfolio

The immediate priority for the Company outside of the Lofdal Heavy Rare Earth joint venture with JOGMEC, is to accelerate exploration programs over its gold project portfolio in central Namibia. The portfolio comprises three project areas covering a total of 2,002 km2 (Figure 1). All project areas have the potential for the discovery of orogenic gold deposits similar to known occurrences within the Navachab-Otjikoto gold belt which is being explored by Osino Resources Corp ("Osino"), B2 Gold, Antler Gold and others. The Erongo project (295 km2) is located 20 kilometers north of the Navachab Gold Mine operated by QKR and 10 kilometers northwest of the Twin Hills discovery of Osino. The Otjiwarongo project (69 km2) is located 70 kilometers southwest of B2 Gold's Otjikoto Gold Mine and Grootfontein (1,638 km2) is situated 85 kilometers to the northeast of Otjikoto and is contiguous with ground held by B2 Gold.

The Company has already initiated regional geochemical soil surveys on all three areas and collected over 10,000 samples. An initial batch of 2,500 samples collected over Erongo has been re-submitted for check analyses. An evaluation of available airborne magnetic and radiometric geophysical survey data from the Geological Survey of Namibia was undertaken by Earthmaps Consulting to provide structural and lithological interpretations of the Erongo and Grootfontein areas. The study has identified a number of gold targets and has confirmed the position and extent of favourable structures that vary in strike length from 14 to 53 km across the project areas. Similar structural context is linked to the Navachab, Otjikoto and Osino gold occurrences. The study has also confirmed targets for base metals of the Berg Aukas type and within the Grootfontein mafic complex for magmatic copper, nickel, cobalt and PGM targets.

The Company will utilize this tranche of $100,000 to analyse the first 5,000 samples over favourable target areas at Grootfontein covering over 30 kilometers of strike length proximal to first order structures. Samples will be submitted for ultra low detection limits on gold. The initial objective is to identify large-scale gold anomalies that can indicate proximity to mineralized systems based on a sampling density of 400 meters x 100 meters. Once these areas are identified, more closely spaced soil sampling can confirm the extent of the anomaly and priorities can be made for drill targets.

Figure 1 - Location of Namibia Critical Metals' projects highlighting position of gold projects (Erongo, Otjiwarongo and Grootfontein) in relation to important gold projects within the Navachab-Otjikoto gold belt

Donald M. Burton, P.Geo. and President of Namibia Critical Metals Inc., is the Company's Qualified Person and has reviewed and approved this press release.

About Namibia Critical Metals Inc.

Namibia Critical Metals Inc. holds a diversified portfolio of exploration and advanced stage projects in the country of Namibia focused on the development of sustainable and ethical sources of metals for the battery, electric vehicle and associated industries. The Company also has significant land positions in areas favourable for gold mineralization.

The Lofdal Heavy Rare Earth Project is the Company's most advanced project having completed a Preliminary Economic Assessment in 2014 and full Environmental Impact Assessment in 2017. An application has been made for a mining licence at Lofdal. The project is now in joint venture with Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation ("JOGMEC") who are funding the current $3,000,000 drilling and metallurgical program with the objective of doubling the resource size and optimization of the process flow sheet.

At the Erongo Gold Project, stratigraphic equivalents to the sediments hosting the recent Osino gold discovery at Twin Hills have been identified but not yet sampled. Detailed soil surveys are planned over this highly prospective area.

The Grootfontein Project has potential for magmatic Cu-Ni mineralization, Mississippi Valley-type Zn-Pb-V mineralization and Otjikoto-style gold mineralization. Detailed soil surveys are planned over this highly prospective area.

The Epembe Tantalum-Niobium Project is also at an advanced stage with a well-defined, 10 km long carbonatite dyke that has been delineated by detailed mapping with over 11,000 meters of drilling. Preliminary mineralogical and metallurgical studies including sorting tests (XRT), indicate the potential for significant physical upgrading. Further work will be undertaken to advance the project to a preliminary economic assessment stage.

The Kunene Cobalt-Copper Project comprises a very large area of favorable stratigraphy ("the DOF") along strike to the west of the Opuwo Co-Cu-Zn deposit. Secondary copper mineralization over a wide area points to preliminary evidence of a regional-scale hydrothermal system. Exploration targets on EPLs held in the Kunene project comprise direct extensions of the DOF style mineralization to the west, sediment-hosted cobalt and copper and stratabound Mn and Zn-Pb mineralization.

The common shares of Namibia Critical Metals Inc. trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "NMI".

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

For more information please contact -

Namibia Critical Metals Inc.

Don Burton, President

Tel: +01 (902) 835-8760

Fax: +01 (902) 835-8761

Email: Info@NamibiaREE.com

Web site: www.NamibiaCriticalMetals.com

The foregoing information may contain forward-looking information relating to the future performance of Namibia Rare Earths Inc. Forward-looking information, specifically, that concerning future performance, is subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the appropriate securities commissions.

SOURCE: Namibia Critical Metals Inc.





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/603002/Namibia-Critical-Metals-Secures-5-Million-Discretionary-Financing-and-Accelerates-Gold-Exploration-in-Central-Namibia




Talks between a delegation of West African envoys and the military officers who overthrew Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita have ended without a deal on how the country should return to civilian rule following last weeks coup.

The mediation team from the regional bloc Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) would report to heads of state on progress made before a summit on Mali later this week, Colonel Ismael Wague said on Monday, but the military spokesman added that the final decision on the makeup of an interim transitional administration would be decided by Malians.

He added that no timeline had been established for elections to return the country to civilian rule. The coup leaders previously said they would stage elections within a reasonable time.

The two sides said that ousted President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita  whose return to office had been initially demanded by the Economic Community of West African States  no longer wished to resume duties [Ali Ousmane Toure/Anadolu]

Separately, the two sides meeting in the capital, Bamako, said Keita  whose return to office had been initially demanded by ECOWAS  no longer wished to resume duties.

Wague maintained that Keita, whose term was set to expire in 2023, had resigned of his own free will and not because he was under pressure from mutinous soldiers.

The ECOWAS delegation met the 75-year-old former president, who was being held at the military barracks in Kati, near the capital, Bamako.

President Keita told us that he has resigned, that he was not forced to do so and that he does not want to return, former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who led the delegation, said on Monday. He says he wants a quick transition to allow the country [to] return as soon as possible to a civilian regime.

Do I really have a choice?

On the morning of August 18, soldiers at the barracks in Kati launched a mutiny and then began detaining officials in the capital. They later encircled the private residence where Keita was staying with his prime minister and fired shots into the air. The coup leaders maintained they took the president into custody for his own protection.

At around midnight, Keita appeared on state television and announced his immediate resignation, as well as the dissolution of his government and the National Assembly. Today, certain parts of the military have decided that intervention was necessary. Do I really have a choice? Because I do not wish blood to be shed, Keita added in his brief statement.

Before dawn, five military officers also made a televised statement announcing that their committee was now in control.





The coup against Keita triggered shock waves among Malis neighbours, who feared that a country hit by escalating violence would spiral into chaos.

ECOWAS  comprised of 15 member nations  sent a high-level delegation to Bamako on Saturday to press its demands for the immediate return to constitutional order.

The bloc has suspended Mali from its decision-making institutions, shut borders and halted financial flows with the country.

There were discussions on both sides, given that at this stage nothing has been set down, nothing has been decided, and that as far as we are concerned, the final architecture of the transition will be discussed and defined by us, said Wague.

Jonathan said: We have agreed on a number of issues, but there are some issues that we have not agreed. So on those issues we told the military officers the thinking of ECOWAS and we asked them to go and review.

Security crisis

While last weeks coup met with international condemnation, thousands of opposition supporters celebrated the presidents removal in the streets of Bamako, and the coup leaders said they completed the work of the protesters.

The coup followed months of protests calling for Keita to step down as public discontent with the government grew over alleged corruption, persistent economic woes and worsening security in large parts of the country where affiliates of al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) are active.

Mali has struggled to regain stability since 2012, when ethnic Tuareg rebels and loosely aligned armed groups seized the northern two-thirds of the country, leading former colonial power France to intervene to temporarily beat them back.

As the government and international actors have sought to restore peace in the north, violence has steadily increased in the countrys central region, where the state is largely absent, and spilled into neighbouring countries.

Those attacks grew fivefold between 2016 and 2020, with 4,000 people killed in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, up from about 770 in 2016, according to the UN. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee from their homes and thousands of schools have closed.

At the same time, authorities support of some local militias against others and accusation of abuses and extrajudicial killings by Malian troops have perpetuated deep-seated mistrust and enmity in regions with little official presence otherwise.
This weekend Warner Bros. launched the first teaser trailer for the in-production The Batman, a forthcoming reboot of the classic DC superhero.

The gritty promo video for the film, first revealed during the DC FanDome virtual event, was met with widespread acclaim from fans, who hailed the first look as a triumph.

Pitched somewhere between Christopher Nolans grounded Dark Knight trilogy and Tim Burtons stylish Michael Keaton films, the film  from War For The Planet Of The Apes director Matt Reeves looks like a new take on the 80+ year series, introducing new versions of beloved characters including Bruce Wayne, Catwoman, Riddler and Alfred.

But its a new incarnation of Batmans long-time nemesis the Penguin that has got people talking online. Irish actor Colin Farrell is playing Oswald Cobblepot in the film, and hes early in his criminal career, as Reeves explained during FanDome.

Colin Farrell as Penguin in The Batman (Warner Bros,)

Os isnt the kingpin hes going to become, hes not the Penguin, in fact he doesnt like being called the Penguin, the director explained.

Its not the Penguin we know, and  judging by the trailer  its not the Colin Farrell we know either. The 44-year-old heartthrob is unrecognisable under layers of incredibly realistic SFX makeup, giving him pock-marked skin, a double chin, hooked nose, and cleft chin.

Colin Farrell as Penguin in The Batman (Warner Bros,)

In one scene he looks like character actor Richard Kind, while in another he looks more akin to Robert De Niro. Fans were taken aback.

Wait is Twitter messing with me or is this really Colin Farrell as Penguin in the Batman trailer? If so this is one of the best transformation makeups I've ever seen? pic.twitter.com/egV9AMgosy  John Squires (@FreddyInSpace) August 23, 2020

I cant believe this is Colin Farrell as Penguin. Hes unrecognizable lol pic.twitter.com/sbedKZxJna  Social Damising (@jdamis) August 23, 2020

Bruh I had no idea that was Colin Farrell as the Penguin! pic.twitter.com/n2iTiRttkK  Christian Mason (@CReelProduction) August 23, 2020

Reeves revealed that the film shows Batman early in his career as the Caped Crusader.

Story continues

Because its still early, and because he is a vigilante, which means he takes the law into his own hands, Reeves said.

If you were in a city and there was a guy who dressed up as a bat, and showed up out of the shadows, and sometimes confronted those people and beat them up because he felt what they were doing was wrong, so he could put the fear of god into them about the crimes that they were committing, I think we would think, That guy sounds a little dangerous.

Hes not the version of the character he becomes, where hes this symbol of hope for the city. Hes early in the trajectory, so theyre afraid of him, frankly.

The Batman is currently in production and will come to cinemas in 2021.
Pilots talk after exiting a Delta Airlines flight at the Ronald Reagan National Airport on July 22, 2020 in Arlington, Virginia.

Delta Air Lines will furlough 1,941 of its pilots in October unless it can reach a cost-cutting agreement with the employees' labor union, the airline said Monday.

U.S. airlines that accepted $25 billion in federal aid are prohibited from cutting jobs through Sept. 30.

"We are six months into this pandemic and only 25% of our revenues have been recovered," said John Laughter, Delta's senior vice president of flight operations in a memo to pilots, which was seen by CNBC. Laughter said the airline doesn't expect a quick turnaround in demand.

This summer, Delta warned 2,558 of its pilots about potential furloughs. The number was lowered by more than 1,800 pilots who took early retirement packages, but Laughter warned it is not enough to avoid the furloughs altogether.

"With approximately 11,200 active pilots still on the roster following the September 1 [voluntary early retirement] departures, we are simply overstaffed, and we are faced with an incredibly difficult decision," he wrote. Laughter said letters would be going out this week to pilots hired on or after July 17, 2017.

Delta last month said remaining pilots could avoid furloughs altogether with a 15% cut to minimum pay.

The Air Line Pilots Association, which represents Delta's pilots, urged the company to come up with a solution. It previously proposed offering pilots voluntary time off with partial pay, but Delta and the union have so far failed to reach an agreement.

"While we should be talking about real solutions to save jobs, Delta's most junior pilots are facing unnecessary career uncertainty when ALPA has offered countless voluntary options to management to prevent furloughs from occurring," said union spokesman and Delta first officer Chris Riggins, in a statement. "It's not too late for management to complete discussions at the bargaining table and help mitigate the need to furlough.

Laughter said the company will need about 9,450 pilots for summer 2021, "which we expect will be the peak flying for the next 12-18 months."

Separately, Delta said its COO Gil West plans to retire at the end of September after 12 years at the Atlanta-based airline. West started shortly before Delta's 2008 merger with Northwest and was named Delta's COO in 2014.

West also led several ancillary businesses at Delta, including its aircraft maintenance unit, which the airline has expanded in recent years, Delta said in a news release on Monday.
Thane:

A 27-year-old small-time goldsmith was allegedly duped of Rs 13 lakh in old demonetised notes by two persons in Thane, police said on Sunday.

Anoop Parmar did petty jewellery work for some gold traders in Kalyan and mostly collected his payment in cash, a personnel in Mahatma Phule police station said.

Problems started for Parmar after demonetisation of higher currency notes in November as he had a hefty sum of Rs 13 lakh in demonetised notes and was finding it difficult to exchange them with new ones.

He then met an acquaintance Balveersingh Bhavarsingh, who was also into the same business, the personnel said, adding that Bhavarsingh then offered help to Parmar by assuring that he would exchange the old currencies for him or pay gold worth Rs 13 lakhs with help of his friend, Sagar Bhadoria.

Accordingly, on November 11, the victim handed over the cash to Bhavarsingh. And since then the duo has been untraceable.

Later, when Parmar visited Bhavarsinghs shop in Mumbai, he came to know that the accused handed over his business to someone else and left the city.

The victim then lodged a case in this regard with Kalyan police under sections 420 (cheating) and 406 (criminal breach of trust) rw 34 (common intention) of the IPC, police added.

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Liz Nugent

Our Little Cruelties author Liz Nugent broke into a sweat when she saw Graham Norton pull up her book on Rick OSheas Facebook Book Club.

I nearly died! I didnt hear anything he said. I had to have a cigarette and compose myself and then listen back  it was amazing. Norton said Liz has the very rare gift of "being able to hook a reader and keep them hooked", take them "by the scruff of the neck and drag them through a plot".

On the creative process behind that  including how lockdown affected this  Nugent says: I was in hospital for three months after an accident last November. I got out in February. Lockdown happened, the clinics shut, and I couldnt get physio. I had to up my medication, which made it really difficult to write because meds affect your mind. I found a Zoom pilates class, was able to come off medication, and got back into my writing stride.

Ive been reading a lot during lockdown, especially books by women of colour  Bernardine Evaristo, Candice Carty-Williams, Kit de Waal. Reading absolutely helps  you cant be a writer unless youre a reader.

After a leisurely morning, I write from 12-3pm. Listening to music without lyrics helps, like movie soundtracks  theyre designed to provoke emotion and thats what you need when youre writing. I have to have my cup of tea before I do anything  and it must be in the pottery mug my husband gave me.

 Our Little Cruelties is about three brothers. As one of nine, Im used to family dynamics. The brothers arent at all based on my family, but Im interested in family dynamics and favouritism within families.

My mother always said you love the child most who needs you most at the time. In Our Little Cruelties, thats reversed  the mothers quite a monster. In normal families, little rivalries get resolved. I wanted to ask, what if they dont? What if somebody holds a grudge for that thing that happened when they were seven  and the betrayal grows till ones murdered by another?

Our Little Cruelties is published by Penguin Ireland (18)

Rachael English

Rachael English: "It wasnt the best time for a new book to come out, but would any time this year be good?

RTE Morning Ireland broadcaster and author Rachael English had been everywhere launching her latest book, The Paper Bracelet, just before lockdown. Everything came to an abrupt halt. It wasnt the best time for a new book to come out, but would any time this year be good?

When lockdown started, Rachael felt easily distracted and jittery. It was hard to take myself away from the phone and radio. But as time went on it was really helpful to have the writing to escape into  its something small you have control over, almost the only aspect of life thats completely separate from Covid-19.

I try to write every day but with work too, its not always possible. I write a lot over winter  there are fewer distractions. Once I get stuck into a chapter or scene and the ideas keep coming, its hard to walk away.

I find walking very useful. I wouldnt even think Id need inspiration and then, on the walk, problems start getting solved and I think thats where the story should go next, thats what this character would have said.

For years I wrote at the kitchen table. Recently I fancied a change. I moved upstairs to the spare bedroom; its working well. I try not to finish for the day at the end of a scene or chapter. I write the first paragraph  or even line  of the next one, just to get me started next day.

When I hit a difficult place, knowing Ive done it before  that I can write a book  helps. With The Paper Bracelet, I was confident in the spark of my idea  about Katie, who worked years before in a mother and baby home and who tries to reunite people with their birth mothers. I could just picture Katie right from the start  relatively small with a quiet determination that showed in her face.

I cant say there are never elements of people I know in a character. Im interested in certain traits, but the finished character would bear no resemblance to the person I borrowed the trait from.

A books just hundreds and hundreds of words. You have to keep writing them down. This methodical way of seeing it demystifies it.

The Paper Bracelet is published by Hachette Ireland (14.99)

Hilary Fannin

Hilary Fannin: "Im quite good at grabbing whatever moments available."

Playwright and newspaper columnist Hilary Fannins debut novel, The Weight of Love, was published just before lockdown and she has started a new book.

Lockdown has impinged. Life was busier, the house fuller. There was a lot of strategising about keeping things ticking over. Im quite good at grabbing whatever moments available. That could be night-time  Im pretty flexible.

Creativity-wise, sometimes you find stuff going on in the back of your head. Doing anything mundane, repetitive, tootling around  just chopping onions  is really helpful [for drawing it out].

I started a creative writing master's in 2017. During that time I knitted a lot of ideas Id been carrying around in my head. Im always interested in what people do. I like detail. I gather detail from other peoples lives. I dont think characters arrive fully born. Its a very gradual piecing together, an amalgamation of an idea. You have a sense of what it is youre going to be writing about.

For me, it was that sliding door moment  God Almighty, how did I get here? What are the choices I didnt make, the people I left, the relationships that didnt work out? I was thinking about all that and I needed [characters] to represent points of view.

Robin in The Weight of Love was a secondary character who I knew I needed. But when Id go to write he was always there. He moved from being a two-bit player to being in pole position in the book. He took over from the rest and became my go-to person.

The Weight of Love is published by Doubleday ( 15.99)

Tips for getting creativity flowing

Emer McLysaght, who, along with Sarah Breen, co-authors the Aisling books. The latest is Once, Twice, Three Times an Aisling (Gill Books, 9.99): "Write something down. Anything  dont just keep saying Id love to write a book. If you think youll enjoy it, give it a go.

"My brains constantly on the lookout for snippets of ideas for characters and stories. In a hospital waiting room  a universal experience  youll see stuff thats funny and poignant at the same time. Something like his could be a great jumping-off point for a story.

"When you see an idea, put it in the notes app on your phone, text it to a friend  what do you think of this?  or leave yourself a voice message.

- Roisin Meaney, whose latest book, The Restaurant, was published earlier this summer (Hatchette Ireland, 14.99): offers these tips: "Read newspapers, listen to podcasts  theyre full of human stories. You never know what youll find thatll spark an idea. Be alert every time you go out. When I get the bus to Dublin, Id be hoping someone would be having a good conversation nearby.

"To get started, think of a plot idea: This is the story of and come up with the end of that sentence. Then take the sentence and grow it into a page. When I did this, my sentence was: This is the story of a woman who realises shes dying and gives herself a year to find a cure. Very quickly, I realised she was dying of boredom. Why? She was stuck in a rut. I kept asking myself questions and writing down the answers. Make yourself sit down. By the end of half an hour youre going to have developed something  dont leave the chair til you have."
(Newser)  A 150-pound tortoise that escaped from a Tennessee home has been returned after 74 days, managing to make it about a mile during his slow and steady journey, per the AP. The African sulcata tortoise named Solomon crawled away from his Ashland City enclosure more than two months ago, his owner, Lynn Cole, told WKRN-TV on Friday. Cole says a man and his son spotted Solomon grazing in a valley at a construction site and returned him within minutes.

story continues below

He didn't seem to make it far, but Cole said the true extent of the 15-year-old tortoise's trek remains a mystery. "I guess that we will never know the full details of Solomon's great adventure and how he managed to elude us all for so long," Cole tells the news outlet. "No matter his traveled course or intent, thanks to the gentleman and his son who happened to be driving by at that moment, Solomon is now safely at home and, as such, so much joy has been returned to our family." The tortoise has been with the family since birth.

(Read more tortoise stories.)
MIAMI - Attorneys for the Justice Department signalled the U.S. would deport a former Colombian paramilitary warlord to Italy within the next two weeks despite a last-minute challenge by the South American nation to seek his extradition.

The announcement came in a hearing Monday in Washington, DC federal court in which Salvatore Mancuso was seeking a judges order to force Attorney General William Barr to immediately remove him to Italy, where he also has citizenship, after completing a 12-year narcotics sentence in March.

Mancuso, the former top commander of the United Defence Forces of Colombia, known as the AUC, argued that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have illegally detained Mancuso beyond the maximum 90 days allowed for the removal of aliens, according to a pre-hearing memorandum filed by his attorneys. Included in the emergency petition is a copy of a final administrative removal order dated April 15 that compels ICE to remove Mancuso to Italy.

In Mondays appearance before Judge Richard Leon, Assistant U.S. Attorney April Seabrook said she had agreed with Mancusos attorneys on a draft order that would stay the proceedings pending Mancusos removal by Sept. 4. She didnt say where the former warlord would be sent but Mancusos attorneys said they expected to dismiss all claims once the removal had taken placean indication that their clients wish to restart his life in Italy had been granted.

Mancusos attorneys attributed the delay of Mancusos removal to strong pressure from Colombias conservative government, which last week submitted to the U.S. what it said was its fourth extradition request.

One of the earlier requests was unilaterally withdrawn in July after Mancusos legal team, led by Miami defence attorney Joaquin Perez, pointed out in U.S. federal court that it was based on an arrest order already cancelled by a Colombian judge.

Its not clear what happened to the other two requests provided to the U.S. but neither has been recognized by a U.S. court. While Colombian courts have judged Mancuso responsible for more than 1,500 acts of murder or forced disappearance, many of the crimes are not recognized as offences under U.S. law because they stem from his position atop AUCs chain of command  not specific orders he gave. In 2001, the U.S. designated the AUC a foreign terror organization.

Colombia has had 12 years to formalize a proper extradition request. Mr. Mancusos liberty should not bear the weight of government bureaucracy, or international failings; nor should this Court be the arena where such failings are raised for legitimizing an illegal detention, Perez and two other attorneys, Hector Mora and Manuel Retureta, wrote in their pre-hearing memorandum.

If returned home, Mancusos lawyers argue he is likely to be jailed, or even killed, despite having fulfilled his obligations under a 2003 peace deal he negotiated, which caps prison terms at eight years for militia leaders who confess their crimes.

Mancuso, 55, was the most remorseful of the former right-wing militia leaders after demobilizing and his eagerness to discuss the paramilitaries war crimes has already shaken Colombias politics.

His boast in 2005 that a third of Colombias congress was elected with paramilitary support triggered a wave of judicial investigations that ended with dozens of elected officials behind bars. His lawyers contend that others still in power have not hidden their desire to find a Colombian court to order Mancusos arrest in an effort to silence him.

Colombian President Ivan Duque this month called for Mancusos return, saying his future should be in a Colombian jail cell so he answers for crimes against humanity. Mancusos lawyers argued

In 2008, then-President Alvaro Uribe stealthily extradited Mancuso and 13 other warlords to face drug charges in the U.S. His critics say the shock move, an apparent peace accord violation, was an attempt to quiet the men just as they began to reveal secrets about their crimes and politician collaborators  including Uribe, who as a governor in the 1990s backed the creation of legal, armed groups to protect ranchers land from leftist guerrilla fighters.

The fight over Mancusos future has garnered the attention of Mancusos many victims as well as Human Rights Watch, which accused Colombian officials of being notably negligent in their pursuit of Mancusos extradition.

According to correspondence submitted with the petition, Mancuso applied for asylum in the U.S.  where his ex-wife and youngest child were granted protection  as well as indicated that he would not oppose removal to Italy but would fight any orders sending him to Colombia.



Follow Goodman on Twitter; @APJoshGoodman
Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott to speak on the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention.

The 2020 Republican National Convention kicks off Monday as President Donald Trump makes his case for reelection during overlapping national crises.

Many of the speakers, including the president, will deliver remarks from around the country during the four-day event because of the coronavirus pandemic. Parts of the convention will take place in the original site of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Trump will outline his alternatives to the vision Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden detailed in Delaware last week. The president has trailed his challenger in most swing-state polls as he struggles to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

The night's main speakers will start at about 8:30 p.m. ET. CNBC.com will livestream the convention.

C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC and PBS will show the full 2 hours of the convention each night. Fox News, CBS, ABC and NBC will show the 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. hour.

A mix of current and former elected officials and figures in conservative media circles will appear at the convention Monday night. The headliners include Sen. Tim Scott, the lone Black GOP senator who has taken a lead role in the party on racism in policing, and congressional Trump defenders Reps. Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador mentioned as a potential 2024 presidential hopeful, will also speak.

Here's the list of speakers released by the Trump campaign:

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.

House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio

Former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel

Vernon Jones, a Democratic state representative from Georgia

Nurse Amy Johnson Ford

Trump campaign fundraiser Kimberly Guilfoyle

Trump campaign advisor Natalie Harp

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, an organization for young conservatives

Kim Klacik, a GOP candidate running in a deep blue Maryland congressional district who recently released a viral campaign ad

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who pointed guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters who walked past their home

Sean Parnell, a Republican congressional candidate in Pennsylvania

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, high school shooting massacre

Donald Trump Jr., the president's son

Tanya Weinreis, a Montana coffee shop owner who got a Paycheck Protection Program small business loan during the pandemic

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.
By AFP

LAGOS (Nigeria): More than 1,100 villagers have been killed this year by armed gangs in several states across central and northwest Nigeria, where raids have escalated, Amnesty International said in a report Monday.

"The Nigerian authorities have left rural communities at the mercy of rampaging gunmen who have killed at least 1,126 people in the north of the country since January," the rights watchdog said, giving a tally until the end of June.

The killings, during attacks by "bandits" or armed cattle rustlers, and in clashes between herders and farming communities for access to land, have been recurrent for several years.

Amnesty said it had interviewed civilians in Kaduna, Katsina, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba and Zamfara states, who reported living in fear of attacks and abductions.

"Terrifying attacks on rural communities in the north of Nigeria have been going on for years," said Osai Ojigho, director of Amnesty International Nigeria.

"The ongoing failure of security forces to take sufficient steps to protect villagers from these predictable attacks is utterly shameful," he added.

Amnesty blamed both state authorities and the federal government for failing to protect the population.

Armed groups loot and set fire to villages and frequently kidnap people for ransom, apparently with no ideological motive. Many experts have recently warned against associating the attackers with jihadist groups active in the region.

President Muhammadu Buhari was elected in 2015 on a campaign promise to eradicate the jihadist group Boko Haram, which has killed tens of thousands since it launched an insurgency in northeast Nigeria in 2009.

Ojigho decried reported abuse of civilians who asked for more official help and protection.

"In their response to these attacks, the Nigerian authorities have displayed gross incompetence and a total disregard for peoples lives," he said.

"Arresting people who dare to ask for help is a further blow."




One of the most revolting things about Joe Biden's candidacy is his dishonest insistence that Donald Trump called white supremacists "fine people." Democrats have successfully used this hoax to brainwash large parts of the American public into believing that Trump and his supporters are racists and anti-Semites. One wonders, therefore, how much consternation there is in Biden campaign headquarters now that Richard Spencer, one of America's best known neo-Nazis, is all in for Biden.

To fully appreciate what should be one of the biggest stories in the presidential campaign, there are two things you need to know: (1) who Richard Spencer is and (2) what the "fine people hoax" is.

Richard Spencer

Richard Spencer is an unapologetic neo-Nazi. He's frequently seen giving Nazi salutes, quoting Nazi propaganda, and making openly anti-Semitic statements. He thinks Haitians should be re-enslaved and that racial minorities should be removed from America. Not surprisingly, his wife has accused him of verbal and physical abuse. He is a terrible human being.

Spencer organized and was a featured speaker in at an August 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That fact brings us to the...

Fine People Hoax

Spencer was in Charlottesville in August 2017 for a Unite the Right rally that saw neo-Nazis parading through the streets shouting anti-black and anti-Semitic slogans. The reason that the neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville was that the town was contemplating pulling down a famous statue of Robert E. Lee.

The debate over the statue meant that Charlottesville saw a convergence of Black Lives Mattersupporters, white supremacists, people who opposed the Confederacy but who also objected to willy-nilly tearing down signs of America's history, and people who were curious about the whole event. While the protest was at its height, James Alex Fields, one of the white supremacists, drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer.

Because the media had already tarred Trump as a racist based upon his promise to enforce existing laws regarding America's southern border, they naturally asked him about the events in Charlottesville. Trump expressed his concern about deconstructing America's past  comments that proved to be remarkably prescient when one looks at the Black Lives Matter and Antifa madness in June and July.

In that context, Trumped mentioned that there were people at the rally who were "fine people" because they shared this concern about mindlessly attacking American history. Without any prompting, Trump then immediately clarified that, when he spoke of "fine people," he wasn't referring to the Spencer crowd of neo-Nazis and other white supremacists:

Despite Trump's crystalline clarity, the media instantly created their hoax, falsely proclaiming that Trump had called white supremacists "fine people." Joe Biden has been running with this hoax ever since. Indeed, it's the accusation at the core of Biden's campaign, for he mentioned it when he announced his candidacy; when he accepted the nomination; and when he had a brief, tightly controlled interview with ABC. If you want to hear how foul Biden is in this regard, listen to Scott Adams (language warning):

To sum it up, Richard Spencer is a vile racist and anti-Semite. President Trump strongly denounced Richard Spencer and all other white supremacists. Nevertheless, Joe Biden continuously lies about Trump's denunciation, pretending Trump is allied with white supremacists, as are Trump's supporters.

With that in mind, please enjoy  and share  Richard Spencer's endorsement in the 2020 presidential election:

I plan to vote for Biden and a straight democratic ticket. Its not based on accelerationism or anything like that; the liberals are clearly more competent people.  Richard  Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) August 23, 2020

You read that correctly: one of the leaders of America's few, but vile and toxic, white supremacists just endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There's a kind of beautiful symmetry to this, not just because Biden's been lying for over a year about Trump, but also because the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists originated in the Democrat party. With his Biden endorsement, Spencer is bringing the haters back home.

Image: Collage: Richard Spencer by Vas Panagiotopoulos (CC BY 2.0) and Biden Logo (public domain).
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th August, 2020) Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin on Monday discussed military and technological cooperation with Algeria's land forces commander, Ammar Atamnia, during a working meeting, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

"The sides have discussed particular projects of military and technological cooperation related to land forces as well as noted ways of their implementation," the ministry said in a statement.

The meeting took place on the sidelines of the international defense industry forum ARMY 2020 held in Russia this week.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  The coronavirus disease has infected 194,252 people in the Philippines and resulted in the death of over 3,000, according to the Department of Health (DOH).

Another 4,686 new cases were reported by the DOH on Monday, with 86 percent or 4,045 infections detected in the last two weeks.

Metro Manila saw 2,519 more residents contracting the virus, while 286 new patients are from Laguna, 218 from Cavite, 189 from Bulacan, and 179 from Rizal.

The disease has also claimed the lives of 13 more patients, pushing the countrys COVID-19 deaths to 3,010. Of the newly reported fatalities, six occurred in August, six in July, and one in June, the DOH said.

Meanwhile, recoveries rose to 132,042, with 729 more cleared of the disease.

The latest figures brought the active cases or currently ill patients in the country to 59,200, which is 30 percent of the national case count.

According to researchers from the University of the Philippines, the country has seen a downward trend in the coronavirus reproductive rate following the two-week implementation of stricter quarantine measures in Metro Manila and nearby regions.

However, they said the Philippines still needs to sustain the momentum to win the battle against COVID-19. They also warned that the trends are subject to change, adding that the development should not let the country slacken its efforts to combat the health crisis.

READ: COVID-19 reproduction rate drops after MECQ, but PH needs to sustain momentum in pandemic fight  research group

President Rodrigo Duterte will again address the nation on Monday night from Davao City to discuss how COVID-19 funds have been spent, according to his spokesperson.
Updated story 12 p.m. July 30:

A TEA spokesman said Thursday the no-funding rule applies only to unlawful closures. In his guidance letter, Paxton indicates local health orders to close schools are unlawful, but as the Houston Chronicle reports, that guidance is not legally binding. In a statement released Wednesday, the TEA said it will still fund schools that are closed under lawful health orders.

School systems planning on starting the year with 100 percent remote instruction will still be fully funded in accordance with TEAs previously announced 8-week back to school transition funding waiver," Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said in the statement. "Lawful building closure orders will continue to enable a school system to be funded when providing remote-only instruction. Also, its important to note that the school start date remains at the discretion of local school boards."

Original story July 29:

Shortly after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent out a guidance letter stating local health authorities cannot issue orders that close schools as a preventive measure to slow the spread of COVID-19, the Texas Education Agency issued guidance that said it will not fund schools that are closed under unlawful local health orders.

The announcement potentially conflicts with the agency's previous guidance stated earlier this month that it would fund school districts if local health officials lawfully closed campuses due to COVID-19, the Texas Tribune reported. Harris County public and non-religious private schools were ordered by local officials and health authorities last week to delay in-person classes until at least Sept. 7 Many of Houston's largest school districts have already announced plans to do so, including Houston ISD, Katy ISD and Fort Bend ISD.

Paxton's letter states school officials should be the ones to decide when and how to open their campuses, not local officials.

TEXAS TEACHERS SPEAK OUT: CDC updates school safety guidelines, strongly advocates for reopening campuses in the fall

"Nothing in the law gives health authorities the power to indiscriminately close schoolspublic or privateas these local orders claim to do," Paxton said in the statement. "The decision to close schools on such a preventative basis whether public or privateremains with school system leaders who should consult with relevant public health authorities, including the department and local health authorities"

Later that same day, the TEA updated its guidance on state funding for closed schools on its website.

"Consequently, a blanket order closing schools does not constitute a legally issued closure order for purposes of funding solely remote instruction as described in this document," the website read.

School districts that have already planned to start the year virtually will not be impacted due to the TEA's decision to extend the transition period for districts to operate virtually for up to eight weeks.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Other countries opened schools, so why shouldnt Texas? Outbreak severity, health experts say

Virtually all of the public health authority orders covered a time period that was also covered by the start-of-school transition period, TEA Commissioner Mike Morath told Texas superintendents on a conference call Tuesday.

When it was first announced, local officials said Harris County's school closure order could be extended pending COVID-19 case trends. If an extension were to happen, the TEA guidance could have further implications on Harris County schools.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo responded to Paxton's letter on Tuesday evening, citing recent COVID-19 data as the reason why local schools should remain closed.

"We're in an immensely worse position than we were when things opened too early, leading to where we are now," Hidalgo said on Twitter. "We stand behind our decision to close schools."

According to the Houston Chronicle, local health orders to keep schools closed are still legally binding, despite Paxton's letter. Despite numerous requests from media outlets, including the Houston Chronicle, Gov. Greg Abbott has not commented on whether orders from local health officials should stand or not.

Read more on the TEA's guidance and how it affects Houston and Texas school districts on HoustonChronicle.com.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated with a new statement from the TEA.

rebecca.hennes@chron.com
A lawyer, Victor Giwa, says the Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami (SAN), ordered his arrest because he refused to implic...

A lawyer, Victor Giwa, says the Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami (SAN), ordered his arrest because he refused to implicate the suspended acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ibrahim Magu.

Giwa said this in a statement on Sunday after he was released from the EFCC custody.

The lawyer was arrested alongside one Fatima Hassan last week shortly after they testified before the Justice Ayo Salami-led panel which is investigating Magu.

Giwas former client, Donald Wokoma, who was a Director at Damijay Integrated Services, had told the panel through a sworn affidavit that his bank account was frozen by Magu unjustly and he subsequently hired Giwa to sue the EFCC.

Wokoma, who is a former special assistant to Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, had said after the court ordered that the account be unfrozen that Magu through his boys demanded N75m from him as a condition for obeying the order.

Wokoma, who submitted text messages and audio clips of his conversation with Giwa, said the latter told him that Magu had demanded the money and advised him as his lawyer to pay the bribe.

However, when Giwa appeared before the panel, he denied the bribery allegation, insisting that Magu was a man of integrity. He was later arrested.

Giwa, however, accused the AGF of instigating his arrest.

He said this in a statement titled, Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami (SAN) Is Using Donald Wokoma, My Erstwhile Client Against Me For My Refusal To Testify And Indict Ibrahim Magu, Acting Chairman of EFCC, At The Justice Ayo Salami Panel Investigating The EFCC Boss.

The statement read in part, On August 18 and 19, 2020, I was invited by the Justice Ayo Salami Panel, sitting in Aso Villa to testify against Ibrahim Magu through a conspiracy between the AGF, Malami (SAN) and Donald Wokoma, the sacked Special Adviser to Vice President Prof YemiOsibanjo, whom I have represented and secured a judgement in his favour.

Donald Wokoma was investigated for fleecing the sum of N250m from amnesty programme, through his company Damijay Integrated Services, by receiving contracts he never executed. His account was restricted by the EFCC.

On July 11, 2020, Donald Wokoma was scheduled to be arraigned before Justice Akanbi at FCT High Court, Lugbe. Donald Wokoma was absent and I represented him and the case was adjourned till October 10, 2020, for arraignment.

Donald (Wokoma) in a desperate move to subvert the administration of justice, to quash or suspend his trial conspired with persons in the AGF office who had promised to frustrate the trial and release (sic) the restricted account.

To achieve this aim, the AGF requested that Donald (Wokoma) have me to do a petition against Ibrahim Magu to the Justice Ayo Salami Panel, accusing Ibrahim Magu of graft and having me to testify against the (suspended) EFCC boss, an offer I declined.

Donald (Wokoma) in cahoots with the AGF procured a lawyer who did the petition, which was forwarded by the AGF to the panel.

The lawyer said surprisingly, Wokoma in a sudden twist, accused him of being a Magu boy.

It was my refusal and my stand to defend the truth and not to consent to the subversion of Justice that the AGF ordered my arrest and that of Fatima Hassan, a lawyer, whose testimony absolves me and Ibrahim Magu from any wrongdoing, Giwa added.

Attempts to get a reaction from the AGF proved abortive as he neither responded to calls nor a text message on Monday.

His Spokesman, Umar Gwandu, could not also be reached for comment.
BJP president JP Nadda on Monday hit out at DMK and said that the partys footprint was increasing in Tamil Nadu and it will have a substantial share in municipal and assembly elections.

Addressing a meeting of state BJP executive meeting through video conferencing, he appealed the party workers to work hard as the party needs to increase its vote share in the state.

In the near future, the party will have a good share in local body elections as well as in assembly elections. We have to increase our vote share, he said.

Targeting DMK, he alleged that it has been inciting feelings against the national spirit.

They have been on a lookout to see to it that the assimilation into national mainstream is always disrupted. They have been anti-development, he said.

We can say that in Tamil Nadu, DMK has become a sheltering ground for people who are not working in interests of the nation. We have to be alert, active and see to it that we are able to give a befitting reply to such people, he added.

Lauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi he said the Prime Minister led from the front in the fight against Covid-19.

He took a very bold decision to prepare the county to fight the pandemic and make the health system robust. There was no dedicated Covid-19 facility when the lockdown began but now there are more than 1500 dedicated Covid-19 hospitals in the country, he said.

Nadda said the last National Education Policy came in 1986.

It was just a change in figures and no change in policies and spirit. Under PM Modi, we have got an independent education policy, which is Bharat education policy. Under the New Education Policy, rich and poor are both going to get a qualitative and affordable education. Acceptability has also been improved as local languages are set to be used as a mode of education till class VIII, he said.

Nadda also lauded BJP workers their effort in the partys `Feed the Needy programme.

He said that teams of state unit should be strong and use should be made of social media to strengthen the party.
Chinese state-media stooge Hu Xijin on Sunday attempted to discredit viral advertisements asking 100 Uyghur women to "urgently" sign up for intermarriage with Chinese men as "fake". Taking to Twitter, the Editor of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) mouthpiece Global Times blathered that there has "never been a public call" for Uyghur and Han intermarriage in Xinjiang.

'This is a propaganda'

"It's impossible for anyone daring to publish such an advertisement to organize Uyghur women to marry Han men. This is propaganda that incites Westerners to hate China," he claimed desperately along with the video clip of the advertisement.

This advertisement must be fake. There has never been a public call for Uygur & Han intermarriages in Xinjiang. It's impossible for anyone daring to publish such an advertisement to organize Uygur women to marry Han men. This is a propaganda that incites Westerners to hate China. pic.twitter.com/EZ0RuOMHaw  Hu Xijin  (@HuXijin_GT) August 22, 2020

A video clip asking 100 Uyghur women to urgently sign up for intermarriage with Chinese men has been circulating on social media platforms in recent weeks. Many observers and Uyghur human rights activists have called it another attempt by the Communist Party of China (CCP) to Sinicize the Turkic-speaking ethnic groups in Xinjiang region.

'We thank the government & the party'

According to media reports, the 30-second video clip first appeared on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, but was later deleted following a social media campaign by Uyghur human rights activists in foreign countries. We thank the government and the party for creating this beautiful life, the video begins in Uyghur, saying its urgent call to organize 100 Uyghur brides is giving voice to the governments promotion of Uyghur and Chinese intermarriage.

READ | China pledges continued support for Hong Kong as global financial centre

The Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking minority from Central Asia, are a distinct ethnic group from Han Chinese, with Urumqi being closer to Kabul than Beijing. In 2009, the most infamous riots broke out in the streets of Urumqi, Xinjiang which pitted Uyghur Muslims against Han Chinese.

READ | Indian-Americans protest China's aggression against India; human right violations of Uyghurs

The CCP government has turned the entire region into a highly controlled, open-air prison after the Urumqi riots in 2009. The CCP has turned the region into a "brutal totalitarian police state" and everything unique about Uyghurs is "systematically targeted". There have been growing calls for action against the Chinese officials involved in human rights violations in Xinjiang. The US had recently imposed sanctions and visa restrictions against senior officials over human rights violations in Xinjiang.

READ | Uyghurs not seen as 'normal' by Beijing, forced to forego their culture: US-based activist

READ | LAC talks: India rejects China's 'equidistant disengagement' idea in Ladakh's Finger area
By Express News Service

DEHRADUN: Uttarakhand BJP on Monday revoked the suspension of controversial MLA Kunwar Pranav Singh 'Champion' who had called countrys first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was characterless.

Last year, in his three-page letter to Uttarakhand chief minister dated April 15, 2019, the MLA has written that the countrys first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was characterless.

The MLA after his suspension was formally revoked said he feels like Lord Rama coming back from exile. "I am thankful to the party leaders, all seniors, and everyone who supported me. I regretted my actions and will not repeat such acts in the future. It feels like Lord Rama coming back from exile," said the BJP MLA from Khanpur state assembly constituency.

In the aforementioned letter, he also wrote about Mahatma Gandhi stating that he used to harbour jealousy for Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. He also alleged Gandhi of conspiracy against democracy and snatching away power from the worthy and giving it to the unworthy (from Patel to Nehru).

He claimed that Nehru used to ridicule Hindu religion and further added that Gandhi did not deserve to be called 'Father of the Nation'.

He concluded by requesting the CM and PM that Ambedkar should be designated as Father of the Nation who contributed to nation-building.

In a small ceremony in the presence of state BJP president Bansidhar Bhagat, unaware Pranav Singh was 'welcomed' into the party. "The MLA has realized his mistake and after consulting the core committee of the party we have decided to take him back in the party, " said Bhagat.

In July, last year, Champion was suspended from the BJP after many of his transgressions including alleged threatening to a journalist in Delhi, surfacing of his video dancing on a raunchy Bollywood number brandishing guns, abusing people of Uttarakhand and the state, a woman dancing in his office on yet another song while he and his associates watched.

However, all in the party are not in a mood to welcome the move. Many think that taking back the controversial MLA amidst ongoing controversy regarding allegations of rape on another BJP MLA will dent the party's image.

A party insider said, "Anil Baluni and others are not happy with this decision as they think that timing bis really bad. Allegations of rape have surfaced on another party MLA while Champion has always been reckless. Many feel that he got away too easily."
Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that ballot harvesting would cause the 2020 presidential elections to be the greatest scam in the history of politics as the president continued his false attacks against mail-in voting.

Speaking at the kickoff of the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, the president attacked efforts to expand mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic, alleging it was a Democrat-led attempt to disrupt a fair and free election.

This is going to be one of the greatest scams, Mr Trump said. Theyre going to mail out 80 million ballots. Its impossible, they have no idea. Whos mailing them? Mostly Democrat states and Democrat governors.

The president then launched into a host of conspiracies, suggesting  again, without any evidence  that states ran by Democrats wont mail [ballots] to Republican neighbourhoods.

The vast majority of evidence supports the fact that mail-in voting is a safe and secure way for voters across the country to cast their ballots  but Mr Trump has harped on claims that expanded access to absentee voting could cost him and other Republicans the election come November.

This is the greatest scam in the history of politics, I think, he continued. And Im talking about beyond our nation.

Mr Trump told delegates at the RNC that the only way Democrats can win is if this is a rigged election.

Until he won, the president also warned that the 2016 election was going to be rigged.

On Monday, he said Americans know how to keep themselves safe from the coronavirus and can go to the polls, eliminating the need to mail in their ballots. He said, without providing evidence, that that creates fraud.

Voter fraud has proved exceedingly rare. The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004 to 0.0009 percent, based on studies of past elections.

Mr Trump said other votes will be harvested by people going door-to-door to collect ballots that voters have not submitted. In addition, he says some states are not verifying signatures on ballots. He did not provide evidence for those claims.

He then claimed the upcoming presidential election was the most important in the history of the United States, adding: Our country can go in a horrible direction or in an even greater direction.

He then said the US economy was humming along at high levels before the coronavirus pandemic. Mr Trump condemned governors who were continuing to keep their states shut down to stem the spread of the virus.

The speech was largely seen as a jab at his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who has said that further shutdowns are needed to battle the virus.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany has issued a travel warning for Paris and the French Cote d'Azur region due to rising coronavirus infections there, the foreign ministry in Berlin said late on Monday.

The foreign ministry said it was warning against unnecessary tourist trips to the Ile-de-France region, which includes the French capital, and the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Cote-d'Azur, which includes Marseille and Nice, due to the high number of infections.

(Reporting by Michael Nienaber; Editing by Sandra Maler)
TikTok logos are seen on smartphones in front of a displayed ByteDance logo in this illustration taken on Nov. 27, 2019. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

TikTok Sues Trump in Challenge to Executive Order Ban

This article has been updated with the latest information.

TikTok filed a lawsuit at a California court on Aug. 24 against President Donald Trumps executive order prohibiting transactions with the popular short video app and its Chinese parent ByteDance, confirming an earlier Reuters report.

The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court names Trump, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as defendants.

Reuters exclusively reported on Friday that TikTok would challenge Trumps executive order as early as Monday.

TikTok called Trumps Aug. 6 executive order for a TikTok ban a means to further his alleged broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, where Trump is seeking a second term.

The app said it had tried to engage with the U.S administration for nearly a year, but faced a lack of due process.

To ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and users are treated fairly, we have no choice but to challenge the executive order through the judicial system, the company said in a statement.

Trump also issued an executive order on Aug. 14 that gave ByteDance 90 days to divest from the U.S. operations of TikTok. ByteDance has been making progress in talks with potential acquirers, including Microsoft Corp. and Oracle. Some of ByteDances U.S. investors could also join the winning bid.

While TikTok is best known for its anodyne videos of people dancing and going viral among teenagers, U.S. officials have expressed concerns that information on users could be passed on to the Chinese regime.

TikTok, which was acquired by Beijing-based ByteDance Technology Co. in 2017, is estimated to have tens of millions of active users in the United States.

TikToks legal challenge would not shield ByteDance from having to divest the app. This is because it does not pertain to the Aug. 14 order on the sale of TikTok, which is not subject to judicial review.

However, the move shows that ByteDance is seeking to deploy all the legal ammunition at its disposal as it tries to prevent the TikTok deal negotiations from turning into a fire sale.

The Trump administration has also issued an order that would prohibit transactions with Tencent Holdings WeChat.

The State Department, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and Transportation Security Administration have already barred TikTok on government devices, and in December 2019, the U.S. Army blocked its soldiers from using the app. Lt. Col. Robin Ochoa, an Army spokeswoman, told Millitary.com that it is considered a cyber threat.

Trump has said he would support an effort by Microsoft to buy TikToks American operations if the U.S. government got a substantial portion of the proceeds, but has also said there are other interested potential buyers such as Oracle.

The White House referred a request for comment to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to comment.

By Radhika Anilkumar, Ken Li Yingzhi Yang, and Brenda Goh.

The Epoch Times contributed to this report.
NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. -- The Air Force doesn't have enough aircraft or range space for pilots to train for combat against a sophisticated enemy, so it's looking to link real and simulated environments at a new training center.

Pilots taking part in Red Flag air-to-air combat training exercises could soon face new virtual threats on top of those they're seeing in real life. That's one of the possibilities leaders see out of a new $38 million Virtual Test and Training Center here.

Maj. Gen. Chuck Corcoran, commander of the Air Force Warfare Center, said the center will prep pilots who could be called into a great power competition. Officials gave Military.com a tour of the new 60,000-square-foot center, which had its ribbon-cutting ceremony last week.

"There's no live training venue for the joint force -- and certainly for the Air Force -- that's big enough or that has the threat density that can replicate what China or Russia can do," Corcoran said. "So the live training venues ... and testing venues we have, we have to do what we can on those, collect data, and then feed that into the virtual world and scale it to the size and scope we need."

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The Air Force plans to install F-15E Strike Eagle simulators in the new building. The Virtual Test and Training Center's campus will also include F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, F-22 Raptor and F-16 Fighting Falcon simulator buildings located here at Nellis.

"Any conflict in the world could be simulated here," said Lt. Col. Chris "Slam" Duncan, an F-35 operational test pilot and commander of Detachment 1, 29th Training Systems Squadron.

That could include virtually adding other services' or allies' aircraft into a Red Flag mission, so they're all flying in the same airspace simultaneously. Eventually, Duncan said, participants from around the world could join in the training.

The Air Force wants the new virtual center linked with the Joint Simulation Environment, a government-owned modeling environment where fifth generation-plus aircraft and systems can be tested.

"This is a generational leap in the way we train," Duncan said. "This allows us to validate tactics, techniques and procedures we otherwise could not do [on this scale]."

It's going to cost the Air Force to get the networking and processing tools and simulators that allow it to carry out the type of ambitious testing it wants to do here. But Duncan said there's no other way for the services to train for this level of fighting, and the initial investment is far less than what it would cost to even try doing so in real life.

"The bang for the buck far surpasses what we can do in live flying," he said. "Just like anything, it's a large initial investment to get to where we want, but ... however many thousands of dollars those airplanes cost to fly per hour, you wouldn't have that here."

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Related: US Pilots' Close Calls with Russian Aircraft Are Likely to Continue, Experts Say
MILWAUKEEThe largest street demonstration of last weeks Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee was shouted down, for a while, by a handful of pro-Trump men shouting insults through a bigger loudspeaker and carrying an assault rifle  a microcosm of how politics across the U.S. often seems to play out these days.

This was in Red Arrow Park last Thursday  the demonstrators prefer to call it Dontre Hamilton Park, in honour of a young, mentally ill Black man who was shot dead by a police officer there in 2014. An organizer with the Coalition to March on the DNC told me that the groups message originally focused on defeating Donald Trump while holding the Democratic Partys feet to the fire on a list of key issues  climate change, immigration and economic inequality, among others  but had decided after George Floyds death to focus on racial justice in policing.

As the marchers gathered in the park, they carried banners bearing the names and faces of Wisconsin residents who had been killed by police: Alvin Cole, Jonathan Tubby, Joel Acevedo, Isaiah Tucker. The families of these men gathered in front the press and about a hundred early-arriving demonstrators to tell the stories of their lost sons.

Just as the first of them began to speak  no amplification had been set up, they were just using their voices  a loud shouting came from a booming megaphone across the park.

What are you going to do when President Trump wins again? If you hate America, you should leave it! The voice was coming from the opposite edge of a park, across a closed-for-the-season skating rink, where six men carrying anti-abortion and homophobic signs stood. Youre a bunch of atheists, homos, lesbians! the man shouted.

He was loud enough that you could not hear the voices of the family members speaking just a dozen feet away. Jose Acevedo appeared to be near tears talking about the pain of his sons death this spring. The loud pro-Trump voice was shouting about Black on Black crime and how abortion kills more Black Americans than police do. He was extolling the virtue of Trump and police. He was shouting about Fidel Castro.

This went on as various grieving family members came up to speak. Cassandra Tucker, whose son Isaiah was shot and killed by police in nearby Oshkosh, WI in 2017, raised her voice to be heard. I loved my son, so yes Im asking for justice. And if you watched footage of your child dying, you would ask for justice too.

Eventually a handful of the demonstrators went over to confront the pro-Trump group. A Black woman in a long, patterned blue, yellow, and red dress took a megaphone to shout back at them.

Youre a Jezebel! A Jezebel! Get away from me, Jezebel! Read the bible and repent! the pro-Trump guy shouted again and again, as she shouted at him from inches away to leave. An older man in combat clothes carrying an assault rifle repeatedly attempted to block the woman from following the man with the megaphone. A few of those from the demonstration attempted to use their own bodies to block the gun-toting guys path. He pushed them away as they shouted in his face.

When police arrived, they ordered the DNC March protesters to go back to the other side of the park. Its big enough for both protests. The officer said openly carrying a gun is legal in Wisconsin.

Shortly afterwards, more police came, including some on horseback. There was a short, ultimately uneventful confrontation between mounted officers and demonstrators. As the afternoon became evening, the demonstrators  now several hundred people  marched peacefully through the streets and past the mostly-empty convention centre that served as convention headquarters.

But the scene in the park seemed to sum up something about American politics right now. An angry minority was able to effectively shout down a grieving majority by being louder and armed. The demonstrators had arrived to air particular policy concerns stemming from their own lives, while the pro-Trump conter-demonstration appeared only intent on disrupting them, and insulting them, and demonizing them.

And when the authorities arrived to adjudicate, they essentially called it even and wound up in a confrontation with the larger group of policy demonstrators.

A similar dynamic played out, more violently, when pro-Trump demonstrators showed up in Portland over the weekend and physically attacked and pepper-sprayed Black Lives Matter protesters  before dispersing and leaving police to clash with the racial justice protesters.

But it plays out on the national stage in the U.S. too, more broadly. Americans often appear not to be having the same argument. One side is merely trying to shout the other down, and the rules often help them. This plays out in how Trump floods the zone with dishonest, demonizing claims about his electoral opponents. In how the electoral college system has allowed the Republicans to win three of the past five presidential elections, though Democrats got the most votes in four of those. In how keeping people from voting, especially some of those in cities, has become virtually an open strategy for one party.

How do you have a political debate in an environment like that? In Milwaukee, the larger, quieter group of demonstrators just waited it out and marched on, well into the night, chanting at a mostly empty convention hall, and their neighbours, vocally critical of Democrats but afraid of Trump.
SAN FRANCISCO - California fire officials are cautiously optimistic after dodging a major lightning storm, but they are pleading with residents to stay out of evacuation zones and prepare for days away from home as three massive San Francisco Bay Area wildfires rage on, suffocating the region with smoky air.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week will be critical as more than 14,000 firefighters battle 17 major fire complexes, largely in Northern California where wildfires have surrounded the city of San Francisco on three sides, singeing coastal redwoods that have never been burned. The wildfires, all caused by lightning, have been burning for a week.

We are dealing with different climate conditions that are precipitating in fires the likes we havent seen in modern recorded history, he said Monday.

A warning about dry lightning and winds that could have sparked more fires was lifted for the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday morning, a huge relief to fire commanders who said the weather was aiding their efforts as firefighters pour in from out of state. Temperatures are expected to be hot again this week.

At an evening news conference, officials said progress has been made against a huge fire in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties with the help of rain Sunday evening and calmer weather Monday.

With the clear air, we were able to fly a lot more aircraft, said Mark Brunton, operations chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, of Cal Fire.

Helicopters dropped 200000 gallons (over 757,082 litres) of water on the blaze, he said, calling it the best day yet.

Fire lines on the fires southern border appeared to be holding, he said.

But officials warned the danger was far from over and called the fires complex and large. They admonished residents to stay out of evacuated areas and warned looters theyll be arrested.

It is highly dangerous in there still, Jonathan Cox, a Cal Fire deputy fire chief, said of the blaze north of Santa Cruz. We have bridges that have failed, old wooden bridges that have failed that may not appear failed to drivers.

Not knowing whether her home is still standing is the hardest part, says Barbara Brandt, a Boulder Creek resident who fled the Santa Cruz area fire Tuesday night.

The last few days have been a roller coaster, she said. You get conflicting reports. You dont know what your life is going to be like. We dont know when we can go back, but we know its not going to be for a long time.

When Brandt evacuated with her 94-year-old father, they figured the order was just a precaution. It was smoky, but not the massive complex of fires it is now. Her cats werent inside so she left without them, thinking theyd be back soon.

She went back Wednesday to put her cats in the house and feed her chickens. On Thursday, she returned yet again  this time to grab the cats.

North of San Francisco in wine country, Tim Ireland, 48, and Sherri Johnston, 47, were heading back to their destroyed Healdsburg home in Sonoma County to look for one of their dogs. The dog refused to get into the car when they fled.

We only got out with a car full of clothes, firearms, safe, all our electronic devices, one dog, and two cats, he said.

California has had more than 13,000 lightning strikes since Aug. 15, sparking more than 600 wildfires statewide that have burned over 1,875 square miles (4,856 square kilometres), said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director with Cal Fire.

The burn area is bigger than Rhode Island and not quite the size of Delaware.

More than 1,200 buildings have been destroyed. The number is bound to increase as residents are allowed back into neighbourhoods and inspectors get a better look.

Another body was found Sunday from that wildfire, bringing the death count from the blazes to seven. Santa Cruz authorities said Tad Jones, 73, was found in Last Chance, a remote area. He was found on a trail near his van. Police had to use a helicopter to reach the area of roughly 40 homes at the end of a windy, steep dirt road north of Santa Cruz.

Among the victims was 70-year-old Mary Hintemeyer, of the city of Winters, her boyfriend Leo McDermott, and his son, Tom, said Hintemeyers son, Robert McNeal.

McNeal told KPIX-TV that he lost contact with his mother Tuesday night as the fires sped up. He said his mother had tried to go into town earlier that day but turned back at a roadblock where authorities said if she went through she wouldnt be allowed back. She returned home to get her boyfriend, who was in a wheelchair.

Authorities found their remains among the ruins on the Napa County property Wednesday, he said.

Just get out, dont wait, McNeal told the TV station, urging people to follow evacuation orders. If you think its going to be too much to get your sprinklers on before you get out of there, forget those too. Forget it. Get out. Just get out. It aint worth it.

A utility worker found unresponsive in his vehicle in Solano County while assisting fire crews also died last week, but authorities have not yet released a cause of death.

Berlant, with Cal Fire, said about 170,000 people remain evacuated after about 50,000 were allowed back into their homes starting Sunday.

Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Office Chief Deputy Chris Clark said several people were arrested, including a man who had $5,000 and some items in his car, and a woman, not a local, seen walking around with a backpack in a closed area.

The governor on Monday called reports of looting repugnant and applauded prosecutors tough stance.

The wine country fire north of San Francisco and another southeast of the city burning in seven counties grew within a week to be two of the three largest fires in state history, each scorching about 550 square miles (1,425 square kilometres).

The wine country fire has been the most deadly and destructive blaze, accounting for five deaths and destroying more than 900 buildings. It is 25% contained.

___

Associated Press writers John Antczak and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles, Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco and Aron Ranen in Healdsburg contributed to this report.
At the Congress Working Committee meeting to discuss the issue of the party leadership, leaders decided that Sonia Gandhi would continue to remain the interim chief and the new chief would be elected within six months. The CWC meeting was held after a letter written by senior Congress leaders and signed by the likes of Kapil Sibal and Shashi Tharoor among several others, sought reforms in the party.
Longer buffet layouts with increased gap between dishes, skip-a-seat rule during parties to ensure social distancing, mandatory masks and staggered entry of guests are some of the suggestions offered by owners of banquet halls during a meeting with chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday to discuss standard operating procedures (SOP) to be followed by all such facilities in the national Capital.

With the wedding season a little more than month away, the Delhi government on Monday started drafting SOPs to be followed by all banquet halls.

Click here for full Covid-19 coverage

The suggestions of banquet hall owners would be incorporated in the SOPs,which are likely to be issued by this week, senior government officials later said.

Representatives of the banquet halls demanded a relaxation on gatherings, which is presently restricted to 50 persons for weddings and 20 for funerals.

We requested the CM to relax the number of guests at a function to 50% of the size of the banquet hall. So, if a banquet hall has a capacity of 500 people, then 250 should be allowed. The CM did not deny the request and said it will be considered, said Ramesh Dang, president of Delhi banquet federation, who attended the meeting.

A senior government official, however, said any relaxation on the number of people will depend on the Centres Unlock 4 guidelines.

Dang said the SOP for banquet halls would include mandatory masks for all guests and staff and frequent sanitisation of all common areas, including the kitchen.

To manage the crowd better, parking at banquet halls will have to be streamlined. It may now take longer for a guest to park their vehicles since the entry of guests at a function may also be staggered, especially at the time when the groom arrives at the wedding, he said.

During the meeting, Kejriwal is learnt to have told all banquet hall owners that in case Covid-19 cases spike again, these facilities may be requisitioned so they can be converted into makeshift hospitals.

The chief minister also suggested that the representatives should create a common online platform where people can get the entire list of banquet halls in Delhi and book according to their choices.

People should be able to access the whole list of banquet halls in Delhi. So, if they are put on a single website or a medium, people from other states will also be able to book banquet halls in Delhi and you all will get more business. The website will be promoted by the Delhi government. The market, industries and service sectors will be displayed on the website and the traders, industrialists and service sector professionals can easily take their businesses to the global level, Kejriwal told the banquet hall associations.

Delhi has around 300 banquet facilities and most of them with multiple halls within their premises, taking the total number of halls to over 1,000.

I agree that an SOP must be made and it will be done soon. I will hold another meeting with representatives of banquet halls in few days to discuss environmental and parking issues as well, Kejriwal said during the meeting.

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Official poster for the

Any casual lover of architecture knows the names Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi, but far fewer have heard of Phyllis Lambert, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, or Denise Scott Brown. But thats not because their work was any less important to the field.

City Dreamers, a documentary directed by Joseph Hillel, sheds light on the work of these four influential women in architecture and design. All now between the ages of 87 and 97, the women broke into the traditionally masculine industry just after the Second World War, when the work to rebuild was plentiful but prominent woman architects were not.

The films subjects were chosen because their careers intersect, resemble, and complement each other, says Hillel. For starters, their highly original work addressed major societal issues rising at the time, like traffic, population density, green spaces, ghettoization, urban sprawl, and heritage preservation. Sound familiar? Were still dealing with all these issues today. By examining creative solutions from the past, maybe well be inspired to improve upon them for the cities of the 21st century.

Shot on location in Philadelphia, Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, City Dreamers features interviews with Lambert, van Ginkel, Oberlander, and Brown, shows off some of the greatest examples of their respective bodies of work, and includes archival materials illustrating how cities have changed since the mid-20th century.

Architects Phyllis Lambert and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe work together on a project.

You may not be familiar with these women, but youve almost certainly seen their buildings before. And if it werent for the patriarchal glass ceiling they continually had to fight back against throughout their careers, theyd probably be celebrated alongside their most famous mentors and colleagues.

The docs official website explains: Phyllis Lambert, for example, was responsible for the construction of the Seagram Building in New York, in addition to being the founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Heritage Montreal. Blanche Lemco van Ginkel is credited, along with her husband, with saving Old Montreal from being destroyed to make way for an expressway and with helping develop the master plan for Expo 67. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, for her part, reinvented how we develop urban green spaces and introduced the concept of green roofs in several major cities. And Denise Scott Brown revolutionized the way we think about contemporary architectural and urban heritage, along with her husband Robert Venturi.

Story continues

These women, who are for the most part still active, hold the titles of architect, urban planner, landscape architect, curator, educator and/or activist, and have amassed a long list of illustrious accomplishments, publications, honorary degrees, and other distinctions over their respective careers. But while the credentials and achievements of these great women deserve to be more widely known and celebrated, they are not the only focus of this feature documentary. City Dreamers is above all inspired by what has united these four women throughout their careers: the dream of a fundamentally human and inclusive city.

A short description and image of each of the four powerhouse women featured in the

Nominated for a Canadian Screen Award in the Best Cinematograpy in a Documentary category, the film was released widely in 2019. In Canada, you can watch it on the Documentary Channel. In the U.S., its available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Five months have passed since coronavirus precautions persuaded one of New Jerseys most senior supermarket employees to step aside.

On Sunday, on Bartholomeo Bennie Ficetos 99th birthday, his many admirers  friends, family, colleagues and customers  joined together to honor him in a very public way.

Dozens of vehicles, including at least one fire truck, paraded past Ficetos home in Perth Amboy for what was described as a surprise birthday party for the World War II veteran who never wanted to retire and, in his late 80s, launched an improbable new career bagging groceries at Stop & Shop.

Ficeto stood on his front deck, waving, above a banner reading, Honk, its my birthday  not that anyone needed any encouragement.

Long before arriving at the Stop & Shop in Bloomfield in 2009, Ficeto operated a power press machine for the Lionel Train Company and supervised for LOreal, the cosmetic company

He transferred to the supermarkets store in Edison in 2017, in order to live with his family.

Bartholomeo "Bennie" Ficeto, 97, never never takes a break during his four hour shift bagging groceries at Stop&Shop.

Working two days per week, four hours per day, Ficeto became known as Bennie the Bagger, lauded for his unwillingness to take even a 15-minute break and ambition of working until his 100th birthday.

What am I going to take a break for? Thats a waste of time, Ficeto told NJ Advance Media in 2019.

The coronavirus pandemic forced a change of plans. Due to safety concerns, Ficeto was persuaded by his family to take a break.

Will he return to the job someday? No one is ruling it out.

Sunday, though, was all about getting the chance to say thank you, and show appreciation, for a job well done.

Bartholomeo 'Bennie' Ficeto, aka Benny the Bagger, as seen at a surprise 99th birthday party outside his home in Perth Amboy, Aug. 23, 2020Photo courtesy of Stop & Shop

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Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com
The prognosis remains unclear, doctors say.

Clinical findings by a Berlin-based Charite medical facility say Vladimir Putn's critic Alexei Navalny has been poisoned.

The preliminary conclusion indicates "poisoning with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors," that's per a statement by Charite press service.

The result was confirmed by multiple tests run by independent laboratories.

At the same time, the specific poison remains unknown, which requires "a further series of comprehensive testing" that has been initiated.

Navalny is being treated in intensive care with the antidote atropine and remains in medically induced coma. His condition is deemed "serious" but "not currently life-threatening."

"Alexei Navalnys prognosis remains unclear; the possibility of long-term effects, particularly those affecting the nervous system, cannot be excluded," the clinic stressed in the statement.

The treating physicians remain in constant contact with Navalnys wife, and the decision to make details of the patients condition public "would be in accordance with his wishes."

Read alsoRally held outside FSB building in Moscow in support of Navalny, detentions reportedEarlier today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said it is "fairly likely" that the Russian opposition politician was poisoned, adding that "because there is a certain probability of a poison attack," personal protection of Navalny is "necessary," according to Voice of America.

Navalny poisoning: background

Navalny felt sick on board the plane he was flying from the city of Tomsk to Moscow.

His rapidly deteriorating condition forced the captain to perform an emergency landing in Omsk.

Navalny's press secretary assumed the politician had been poisoned and that the poison had been laced into his tea.

Navalny was evacuated from Omsk and brought to Germany on an ambulance aircraft for further medical treatment on Saturday, August 22.
VACAVILLE, Calif.  When he closes his eyes at night, Hank Hanson hears sirens in his dreams  a byproduct of living nearly 30 years in the wildfire-prone wilderness of Northern California between San Francisco and Sacramento.

But at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, Hanson knew he wasnt dreaming when he looked to the hills above his home.

The ridge line, where he and his wife in daylight tracked the suns shifting seasonal paths, was lit up as if someone had strung lights across it and plugged it in.

It started pouring toward us like a waterfall, Hanson said.

The fire was one of the more than 500 wildfires ignited across California this week from what state firefighting officials are calling a lightning siege  summer thunderstorms that produce little or no rain but have prompted nearly 12,000 lightening strikes across sun-scorched terrain.

More than 13,700 firefighters are battling the blazes, the most severe of which are focused in Northern California west of the state capital in Sacramento and east of the San Francisco Bay.

The extraordinary reach of the flames has pushed firefighting resources to the point we have not seen in recent history, said Shana Jones, chief of the Sonoma-Lake-Napa unit of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

With firefighting crews stretched thin, there was no evacuation warning for Hanson and his neighbors.

Luckily, Hanson was awake because his electricity was out and the stifling 95-degree (35C) temperature prevented him from sleeping.

He quickly woke up his wife and the two raced in their diesel truck down the road. The air rang with car horns as people desperately tried to wake up their neighbors.

Hanson and his wife made it to a hotel room in the nearby community of Fairfield, grateful they were alive. They found out later that their house was destroyed by the fire.

The house was really two houses. The first was a small redwood home originally built in Vacaville in the 1930s but later moved to the property. Hanson, who owned a business that made patio enclosures, bought the property in 1974. He spent weekends there for the next 17 years, planting walnut, peach, fig and eucalyptus trees.

In 1991, he completed a 3,000 square-foot (279-square-meter) addition to that house. It had a wine cellar, indoor and outdoor pools plus three fireplaces.

The fires this week have grown quickly and, collectively, have destroyed nearly 700 homes and other structures across the state.

Most of the homes that were leveled were burned by the fire that took Hansons home, the so-called LNU Lightning Complex fire. Its the second-largest wildfire in state history and has burned more than 490 square miles (1,270 square kilometers).

At 81 years old, Hanson said he is treating the fire as an adventure and talks excitedly when describing his harrowing escape . But his voice catches when he talks about the house, especially when he says he wont rebuild.

I worked on it for 30 years. It was pretty nice, he said. I wouldnt want to do it on a lesser scale and I dont got time to top the old one.

Hanson said he plans to turn the lot into a park and a campground for himself and his friends for the next few years.

But first, he had some shopping to do. His tomatoes, surprisingly, did not burn. He bought some hoses and plans to return to the ranch in an attempt to water them, assuming the deer havent eaten them first.

They escaped the whole deal, he said. About the only thing I have left in the world is tomatoes.

About the photo: Hank Hanson, 81, gestures to the kitchen of his home, destroyed by the LNU Lightning Complex fires, in Vacaville, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 21, 2020. Hanson, who built the house thirty years ago, does not think he will rebuild. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
When it comes to conducting classes this fall, most colleges seem to be stuck between holding in-person or remote classes, or some combination of the two. As a researcher who focuses on the design of educational spaces, I believe theres a fourth option thats not being given its due: outdoor spaces, such as open-air tents.

Rice University in Houston, Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., and Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., are among those who have committed to using outdoor classroom spaces to mitigate the risk of viral spread.

These institutions are not looking to merely hold classes outside on nice days, but to find solutions to support regular class meetings outside even in cooler weather. These innovative outdoor learning options might have a future on the other side of the current pandemic.

A closer look

Rice University has constructed five open-air tents that will each accommodate classes of 25 to 30 students. Each tent is large enough to allow students and instructors to stay six feet away from each other during class.

In addition to the five tents, Rice is building four temporary buildings that will each support classes of up to 50 students at a time, allowing more people to learn on campus than existing buildings can support. The temporary buildings will have sturdy floors and walls and may be used to hold classes beyond this coming school year. While these are not permanent, brick-and-mortar buildings, their physical structures offer a more long-term option for holding classes compared to tents. These structures will be connected to electricity to enable cooling, heating and lighting  like the tents  allowing students and faculty to plug in any educational technology they may need or want.

Kevin Kirby, vice president for administration at Rice, detailed how these structures will lessen the risk of the spread COVID-19 this fall. The open-air design aligns with research that suggests the virus spreads less efficiently outdoors than indoors. Kirby says the open-air tents also help reduce the number of people inside campus buildings.

Theyre designed to withstand hurricane force winds, Kirby wrote. They can be used not only for instruction, but also for academic lectures in the late afternoon and student meeting and study spaces in the evenings.

Enduring the elements

Amherst College in Massachusetts is making similar investments in the infrastructure required to support outdoor learning that officials there hope will allow for a near normal fall semester for its students. The liberal arts college with fewer than 2,000 undergraduates purchased 20 tents to hold classes outside. Most classes held in the tents will be small, seminar-style meetings that remain at the heart of the Amherst undergraduate experience. The tents will be equipped with electricity to support learning technology and heating mechanisms when the need arises.

Amherst, like many schools across the country, will pivot entirely to remote instruction after the Thanksgiving break. Schools are avoiding bringing students back to campus after the November holiday to reduce the chance of coronavirus case spikes in concert with large influxes of students who will undoubtedly have spent time in close contact with friends and family over the break.

Eckerd College made headlines in July for its creative plan to encourage outdoor instruction. The school will encourage any instructor who wants to teach classes outside to do so. A professor of environmental studies and experienced outdoor instructor, Elisabeth A. Forys, proposed the idea of using geographic information systems (GIS) technology to map and visualize all viable outdoor spaces on the 188-acre campus where classes could be held.

Campus after COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic has inspired the world of higher education to reconsider the ways physical campus spaces are used to support student learning. Several studies support the idea that being outside helps students learn. Studies also suggest that there are positive associations between memory function and the types of emotions students experience while outside. In other words, there is evidence that students remember more information when they learn in an outdoor setting. Students mental health also may benefit from spending time outdoors, a finding that is especially relevant for students who attend college amid the stress of COVID-19. As colleges continue to wrestle with whether to have students on campus in regular buildings or learning remotely at home, we believe outdoor learning spaces could prove to be a better option than both.

Birdwell is the program director of the Mosaic Initiative at Indiana University. Harris is a PhD student and research assistant at Indiana University. This piece was edited and previously published in The Conversation.
Early indicators suggest attendance could be well below average among some of the states community colleges, but others are hoping declines will be smaller.

A survey shared by John Wood Community College President Michael Elbe during a meeting of the colleges board of trustees showed some of the states 48 community colleges reported fall enrollment has fallen by more than 20% compared to last fall  with some declining as much as 40%.

The survey on enrollment was conducted by the Illinois Community College Board.

In reviewing the survey responses, we are not surprised by the challenges higher education is experiencing due to the pandemic, Elbe said.

John Wood Community College  which has centers in Pittsfield, Baylis and Mount Sterling  had a relatively minor drop off in projected fall enrollment compared to other colleges. The college expects enrollment to be down 4.4% compared to last fall.

JWCC is positioned very strong comparatively, Elbe said. Summer enrollment was up 15.3 percent from last year and we continue to close the gap for fall enrollment.

Lincoln Land Community College, which has branches in Jacksonville and Beardstown, is still accepting students for the fall session and does not report enrollment data until the official 10th day of classes, according to Lynn Whalen, chief communications officer.

A 4% drop in enrollment being seen as relatively strong underscores the issues community colleges are facing going into fall. Reports of community college enrollment throughout the country are anticipating a large drop in enrollment. Declines are expected in colleges that are hosting in-person classes and colleges that will start the fall session exclusively through e-learning.

Community colleges had hopes that enrollment would be strong in the fall after seeing a boost in the summer. Some speculated that more students would want to stay closer to home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, that boost has not carried into the fall.

Illinois is not alone. Other community colleges across the nation that were expecting to see an uptick in enrollment are experiencing the opposite.

Many community colleges are boasting  yes, boasting  about enrollment losses of 5% as a good sign, Inside Higher Ed reporter Scott Jaschik writes. Enrollments are down both at institutions that are opening up their campuses and those that are keeping most students off campus. Community colleges have large enrollments of minority and low-income students, and they appear to be particularly vulnerable. Of course, the full picture isnt clear yet  [b]ut the overall picture is glum.
In good news for investors of Franklin Templeton, two more frozen debt schemes have turned cash positive. As of now, four of six frozen schemes are cash positive.

A 1,050 crore repayment on debt issued by Vedanta Ltd along with interest has turned two more debt schemes -- Franklin Credit Risk Fund and Franklin Low Duration Fund -- cash positive, LiveMint reported, citing a note from Franklin Templeton.

Franklin Dynamic Accrual and Franklin Ultra Short Bond Fund were already cash positive. The fund house wound up six of its debt schemes on April 23 due to liquidity issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The combined size of these six schemes was Rs 25,856 crore as on April 22.

These cash flows, however, is yet to translate into payments for the investors in these schemes. "Distribution of proceeds will only be possible after successful e-voting," Sanjay Sapre, president, Franklin Templeton Asset Managers India Pvt Ltd, said in a 5 August letter, as per the report.

On June 3, the Gujarat High Court issued a stay order on the upcoming voting process that Franklin Templeton Asset Management had initiated for choosing either its own trustees or Deloitte for the winding-up process of the six debt schemes. However, as per a Karnataka High Court order, the e-voting and unitholders meet will remain suspended until further directions.

The Supreme Court had in June asked all petitions related to the case to be transferred from various high courts to the Karnataka HC.

Also read: Franklin Templeton gets over Rs 700 crore more in six suspended debt funds

The schemes had borrowed money to meet redemptions in April. Interest and principal repayments on the debt paper held by the schemes have allowed some to completely repay their borrowings and turn cash positive.

However, steep borrowing levels remain in the final two schemes, Franklin Short Term Income Plan and Franklin Income Opportunities Fund, with net borrowing at 23.17 percent and 37.22 percent, respectively.

The schemes will have to pay off the borrowing and interest due before distributing any money to investors.

A day after receiving the Vedanta payment, Franklin Templeton put investment curbs on three of its asset allocation fund-of-funds (FoF) schemes, which had invested in two debt allocation plans of the six schemes it wound down in April.

From August 18, investors can put a maximum of Rs 1 lakh per day in Franklin India Multi Asset Solution (FIMAS); Rs 2 lakh in Franklin India Dynamic Asset Allocation FoF (FIDAAF); Rs 25,000 in 30s Plan and 50s Plus Plan of Franklin India Life Stage FoF; and Rs 50,000 in the 20s Plan and 40s Plan of Franklin India Life stage FoF.
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The materials are specifically designed for comfort and breathability, providing a close fit and ease-of-wear, while simultaneously delivering a controlled dose of medicine to the problem area. Developed in tandem with Department of Defense and MIT grant funding, this patented technology allows ingredients like capsaicin, copper, and shea butter to be delivered directly through fabric. TheraMasks and Solscia were founded as a division of Nufabrx. For more information visit http://www.Nufabrx.com.
Russian security agents were tracking Alexei Navalny's every move before he suddenly fell ill, and saw no attempt to poison him, they have claimed.

President Vladimir Putin's most outspoken critic was transferred to a German hospital on Saturday and remains unconscious after what supporters say was an attempt on his life in Siberia.

Doctors who treated him in Siberia before he was allowed to travel to Germany rejected claims of poisoning, saying he was suffering from a "metabolic disorder".

Security sources told the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets that plain-clothes officers followed Mr Navalny and his team in Siberia, where he met supporters before regional elections.

Agents said they had traced transactions made by his team to work out what food and drink they might have bought.

The sources added they had seen no suspicious activity and suggested that if Mr Navalny was poisoned, it must have been on the plane to Moscow, or at the airport shortly before the flight.

Mr Navalny has long said his moves were being tracked by the security service.

"I am not at all surprised by the level of surveillance. But it is astounding [the security service] has no reservations about discussing it so openly," said Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman.

Mr Navalny (44) began crying out in pain on Thursday on a Moscow-bound flight, and the plane was forced to make an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Omsk.

Russian doctors at first denied his family's requests that he travel to Germany for treatment, before relenting. He is having tests at a medical centre in Berlin. Germany is providing 24-hour security. ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
Republicans and the police union accused the politicians of rushing to judgment, reflecting the deep partisan divide in Wisconsin, a key presidential battleground state. Wisconsin GOP members also decried the violent protests, echoing the law-and-order theme that President Donald Trump has been using in his reelection campaign.

As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident, Pete Deates president of the Kenosha police union, said in a statement. He called the governors statement wholly irresponsible.

The shooting happened around 5 p.m. Sunday and was captured from across the street on video that was posted online. Kenosha police do not have body cameras but do have body microphones.

In the footage, Blake walks from the sidewalk around the front of his SUV to his driver-side door as officers follow him with their guns pointed and shout at him. As Blake opens the door and leans into the SUV, an officer grabs his shirt from behind and opens fire while Blake has his back turned.

Seven shots can be heard, though it isnt clear how many struck Blake or how many officers fired. During the shooting, a Black woman can be seen screaming in the street and jumping up and down.
'It's a double whammy': Telcos want govt to waive service tax on AGR With notices being sent to telecom companies (telcos) on the service tax they have to pay on their adjusted gross revenues (AGR), the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has written to the government, asking for a law doing away with the tax on the dues the firms have to stump up in compliance with a Supreme Court (SC) order.

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Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh attend an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the demarcation of the land boundary and the 10th anniversary of the erection of boundary markers in Dongxing, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Aug. 23, 2020. (Xinhua/Huang Xiaobang)

NANNING, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- China and Vietnam on Sunday vowed to make their border areas peaceful and friendly for cooperation and common development.

The pledge came as Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, together with Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, attended events commemorating the 20th anniversary of the demarcation of the land boundary and the 10th anniversary of the erection of boundary markers.

Wang said since the normalization of bilateral ties, China and Vietnam have been committed to settling land boundary issues via dialogue and consultation, hailing the border areas as an important bond and bridge of cooperation for promoting the two countries' common development.

Wang called on the two sides to make the China-Vietnam boundary better serve the two countries' development and people's well-being, shore up border governance system and capacity, promote regional cooperation via the border areas, and draw on the successful practice in solving land boundary issues to seek an early settlement of maritime disputes.

"China is ready to work closely with Vietnam to make the land boundary a peaceful and friendly one for cooperation, common development and prosperity," Wang added.

During their talks, Wang said China and Vietnam were first among world countries to have successfully contained COVID-19 and restored economic and social development, demonstrating their institutional advantages and cooperation achievements.

China-Vietnam relations will become more robust after weathering the test of the pandemic, he said.

For his part, Pham Binh Minh said the Vietnamese side is committed to upholding the Vietnam-China comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership, and expressed the willingness to further advance bilateral ties.

The two foreign ministers examined the boundary stones between China and Vietnam and traced in red ink over characters printed on their respective first boundary stones.
The order-of-service card at the funeral of Nora Quoirin in Belfast last year. The 15-year-old went missing on 3 August while on holiday with her family at the Dunsun resort in Malaysia. (Getty Images)

Malaysian police have claimed London schoolgirl Nora Quoirin wasn't kidnapped when she vanished from a resort while on holiday with her family and instead wandered off alone.

The 15-year-olds naked body was found in the Malaysian jungle about 2km from the Dusun resort where she was staying, 10 days after she went missing in August last year.

On Monday, a Malaysian court opened an inquest into the death and heard from Sembilan state police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop, who has always insisted that Nora, who had special needs, climbed out of a window.

Haanim Ahmed Bamadhaj, the resort's owner, said the latch of the window the teenager is believed to have climbed out of was broken, and that there was no CCTV at the site.

The inquest, at Seremban Coroner's Court, was shown two windows from the bungalow, one of which had a broken latch.

At the inquest, Mat Yusop said he inspected the family's bungalow and saw nothing suspicious, according to the Mirror.

A poster during the search operation for Nora Quoirin in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. (AP)

There were no signs a crime had occurred, he said, adding: "There was no indication the victim was kidnapped.

"We did not receive any telephone calls  usually in this kind of case we will get a call to say the victim has been kidnapped and is in the hands of certain people, and they would demand a ransom.

"I believe the missing person actually climbed out of the window."

A preliminary postmortem result found that Nora had died of intestinal bleeding, possibly caused by hunger or stress, two or three days before her body was discovered.

Read more: Parents of Nora Quoirin say there was a criminal element in daughters death

Malaysian authorities said there was no sign of foul play, although parents Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin suspect there was a criminal element to her death and said her condition meant she was not independent and had difficulty walking.

The Quoirins, who have lived in London for 20 years and are due to give evidence via video-link, have previously said their daughter would not have wandered off alone and was abducted.

Story continues

Meabh Quoirin, mother of missing schoolgirl Nora Anne Quoirin, reads a statement at a news conference in Seremban, Malaysia, in August 2019. (AP)

The Quoirins called for an inquest in order to have "the fullest possible picture of what happened to Nora.

"As a vulnerable child, with significant physical and mental challenges, we strongly refute any conclusion that Nora was alone for the entire duration of her disappearance, they said last year.

However, police in Malaysia said they found no evidence of abduction or kidnapping.

Mat Yusop also said the postmortem found no evidence Nora had been abducted or raped.

He said at the time: For the time being, there is no element of abduction or kidnapping.

The cause of death was upper gastrointestinal bleeding due to duodenal ulcer, complicated with perforation... it could be due to a lack of food for a long period of time and due to prolonged stress, he added.

Ms Quoirin said in an interview with Irelands state broadcaster RTE last year that it would have been impossible physically mentally to imagine that she could have got any distance at all.

Rescue team members gather in a cordoned-off area in Pantai, Malaysia, shortly after Nora's body was found. (AP)

For us something very complex happened, she said.

We have insisted from the beginning that we believe there was a criminal element to what happened.

And crucially were struggling because it was difficult to get resources in place fast enough to investigate a criminal angle.

Read more: Nora Quoirin starved after spending week alone in jungle, Malaysian police say

While a postmortem when it comes through may give us answers, and has already given us some basic answers around what caused Noras death, it doesnt explain any of how she could possibly have got to where she was found.

Mat Yusop said he had immediately ordered a search after being told that the girl was missing.

A member of the rescue team uses a sniffer dog in the massive search operation. (AP)

He said he visited the resort, about 40 miles south of the capital Kuala Lumpur, the next day and spoke to Nora's parents.

He added: "The family was distraught when I met them. I assured the father we will use all our resources to find the missing girl."

The court also heard a recording of Meabh Quoirin calling "Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here".

The Quoirins say crucial time and evidence were lost because the Malaysian police insisted on treating the girls disappearance as a case of a missing person, not a crime.
On August 21, US President Donald Trump said in a televised interview that China will own the United States if his 2020 Presidential democratic rival Joe Biden is elected in November. Trumps comments were made as democrats concluded the four-day virtual convention DNC concluded with Biden officially accepting nomination as the presidential candidate from the Democratic party. Trump, in a presser, said that no party that spends time tearing America could lead America, adding, Biden didnt talk about China, law enforcement, and other key issues in his DNC speech.

Speaking in a live-streamed conference, Trump said that as a President he has procured billions of dollars from China as taxes that benefitted the US farmers. Further, he added, Republicans way of handling China has been like no other. Trump accused China of ripping the US for decades and when asked about future relations with China, Trump said that the US has helped China rebuild, and if he won the elections, he would decouple with the Peoples Republic. Further, he added, that the US would do no business deals with China as China has stacked profits out of the US, having nothing to offer in return. Launching an attack on the democrats approach, Trump said in the live-streamed interview that China owns Biden. He accused Bidens son Hunter of making millions of dollars in fees from China and Ukraine, saying, its ridiculous. Trump said that China, who owns Biden wants him to lose so badly.

Chris Wallace forgot to ask a very weak and pathetic Schumer puppet, Senator Chrisie Coons, why Biden fought me when I put an extremely early BAN on people coming into our Country from heavily infected China. Biden later admitted I was right! But why no question?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2020

Read: Pompeo Arrives In Israel To Press Trump's Mideast Peace Push

Read: Twitter Attaches Disclaimer On Trump's Tweet, Says It Violates civic, Election Integrity'

China knows "consequences"

When asked about Chinas intentions of invading Taiwan, and its belligerent practices in the Taiwan Strait, Trump said on the US national television, I think China knows what Im gonna do, adding, while the subject of retaliation was vast, China had an understanding of his response incase Peoples Republic invaded and attempted to occupy Taiwan. Trump warned China of grave consequences, adding, that the television wasn't an apt space to elaborate on his response to China's occupation of Taiwan. Earlier, in a press conference last month, US President Trump had launched a similar scathing attack against his Democratic presidential contender, saying, China would "love" to have him lose the election to "sleepy Joe Biden". Speaking at a press conference, Trump said If Joe Biden was president China would own our country. Further, he added, that China would dream to rule the United Staes of America.

LIVE: President @realDonaldTrump holds a news conference https://t.co/IkaqkcJtpR  The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 7, 2020

Read: Delegates Ready To Renominate Trump At Charlotte Convention

Read: Will Accept Trump Win, But Will Also Shout Against His Initiatives: US Speaker Pelosi

(Image Credit: AP)
TAIPEI: Taiwan gave e-commerce site Taobao Taiwan six months to re-register as Chinese-backed rather than foreign or leave the island, in the governments latest shot against Chinese firms.

Taiwan has stepped up oversight of Chinese investments and the operations of Chinese tech firms on the island and last week said it planned to stop local sales of Chinese internet television streaming services, though it didnt plan to block them.

Taiwan treats investment from foreign countries differently to that from China, with far more stringent rules for Chinese firms.

The investment commission of Taiwans Economics Ministry said on Monday Taobao Taiwan was operated by a British-registered company called Claddagh Venture Investment, which it said was in effect controlled by Chinas Alibaba Group Holding Ltd .

Alibaba owns the wildly popular main Taobao platform in China.

The commission was also concerned about information security as user data was sent back to China, it said, adding that Taobao Taiwan had been fined T$410,000 ($13,961) and had six months to either withdraw its investment or re-register.

We do not consider the company as a foreign investment," commission spokesman Su Chi-Yun told Reuters. They will have to decide whether to disinvest or rectify their investment."

The company should have registered as a Chinese investment but came in as foreign since its more convenient", he added.

Claddaghs Taiwan office expressed regret at the move and said it had received no formal notification from the government, but said it respected the decision and would carry out rectification as soon as possible". It did not give details.

It said Taobao Taiwan, launched last year, is an entirely different company from Taobao China and does not come under the Alibaba group.

Alibaba said it was not in a position to comment".

Claddagh is registered in the British town of Altrincham.

Su said even if Taobao chose to register as a Chinese investment in Taiwan, it could still fall foul of rules barring Chinese companies from sectors vital to its business model, such as third-party payments processing or advertising.

($1=29.3680 Taiwan dollars)

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Medical workers administer nucleic acid swab tests in Urumqi - China News Service /China News Service

Chinas social media platforms have been flooded with thousands of posts protesting draconian coronavirus lockdown measures in the countrys far west Xinjiang region, including accounts of residents being chained up or barricaded in their homes.

Xinjiang, where around half of the population belong to ethnic Muslim minorities, has been battling a resurgence of the coronavirus in Urumqi, its regional capital, since mid-July. Authorities declared a wartime state and began implementing containment measures to curb virus spread.

Accounts indicate that authorities are employing exceptionally harsh measures to lock down the vast region, where Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims are already subject to a brutal campaign of suppression that some experts have likened to genocide.

As many as three million people have been thrown in a network of internment camps, US officials have estimated, with detainees suffering horrific physical torture and political indoctrination.

Xinjiang residents have long feared the coronavirus pandemic would give authorities an excuse to further clamp down in the region under the guise of public health.

Xinjiang has come to global attention as details have emerged of the plight of Uighur Muslims who have been placed in 're-education' camps - Thomas Peter /Reuters

The measures appear particularly disproportionate given the relatively low number of infections. At its peak, Xinjiang -- with a population of 20 million -- reported 112 cases in one day. There have been zero cases in the region since August 17, say health officials.

Videos have circulated showing people chained to pillars, or physically barricaded in their homes with steel bars across their doors to enforce quarantines.

One user wrote: If there were accidents like earthquakes or fire, where can we escape to? From the window? Now that even our basic personal safety cannot be guaranteed, why do we care about fighting the virus?

One video from Saturday showed dozens of high-rise residents in Urumqi yelling from their windows in despair.

Story continues

One resident of Ili, a city with zero cases more than 400 miles west of Urumqi, posted online that it too had been under lockdown for over a month. The user said that cities at a similar distance from outbreaks in other parts of China had not been subject to lockdown measures at all.

The whole of Xinjiang is under lockdown without exception, they wrote.

Others complained of being forced to drink traditional herbal medicine that the government has promoted as a remedy for coronavirus.

A medical worker swabs the throat of a resident of Urumqi - China News Service /China News Service

Some compounds even mandate residents to consume them in front of the officials or record a video of them taking the meds, wrote one person online. Is it reasonable that the residents dont have any right to choose?

One user posted that their mother was forced to drink leftover medicine and became ill as a result.

They just added more water and distributed the medicine. It was not the individually-packaged kind; they just had it in a bucket, and villagers waited at their doors with a mug.

After drinking the fluids from the communal vats, the resident wrote, my mother had a fever, vomited and had diarrhea, and had to receive IV fluids from the hospital for four days. When she was back, she was ordered to drink the medicine again. Im so angry".

Most of the posts have since been deleted by government censors.
Dave Sigley, son of TV legend Ernie Sigley, has given an update on his fathers health.

The family previously announced in October 2016 that Ernie was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease, and later made the tough decision to put him in full-time care.

Dave Sigley, who is a minister for the Uniting Church told ABC, Its a strange period to be in because he hasnt passed away, but in another way you feel like he has.

He doesnt know my name but the love that me and him have will never go. Its an important thing to remember and hold onto.

One thing that gives me joy is that he gave so many people joy.

Ernie, now 81, enjoyed over 55 years in show business, notably on Adelaide Tonight, The Ernie Sigley Show, Wheel of Fortune, In Melbourne Today & Radio 3AW.

He retired in 2008.

You can read more here.
The Congress crisis: Need for a full time and not part time leader

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 23: Having a "full time" leadership that is active in the field and "visible" in party offices, dissolution of powers to state units and revamping the CWC in line with the party constitution are some of the far-reaching suggestions made by 23 senior Congress leaders in a letter to party chief Sonia Gandhi to revive the organisation, sources said on Sunday.

The leaders said that over-centralisation of the organisation and micro-management has always proven to be counter-productive, and that uncertainty over the leadership has "demoralised the Congress workers and further weakened the party"

'Reports of Sonia Gandhi resigning as Congress president false: Randeep Surjewala

They were also critical of the way the Congress Working Committee, the party's apex decision-making body, was being constituted and was functioning.

Highlighting the gravity of the challenges facing the party, they said that it was "imperative" to urgently establish an institutional leadership mechanism to collectively guide the party's revival

The letter talked about forming the CWC in accordance with the Congress' constitution as well as reconstitution of the central parliamentary board and the central election committee.

According to the party constitution, the CWC shall consist of the president of the party, its leader in Parliament, and 23 other members, of whom 12 will be elected by the All India Congress Committee and the rest shall be appointed by the party president

Elections to CWC have not taken since the 1990s and the Congress has been taking the ?consensus route' while choosing the CWC team.

The details of the letter written around early August by the leaders, who include former Union ministers, ex-chief ministers, former and current parliamentarians and senior functionaries, have emerged just ahead of the CWC meeting during which the issues flagged are expected to be discussed and debated.

The leaders are also learnt to have said that the CWC is not "effectively guiding" the party anymore in mobilising public opinion against the BJP government. They said that its meetings were "episodic" and convened in reaction to political developments, according to the sources.

They said that the party has witnessed a steady decline reflected in successive electoral verdicts in 2014 and 2019, noting that the reasons were manifold.

The letter stated that even after 14 months of the 2019 verdict, the Congress party has not undertaken "honest introspection" to analyse the reasons for its continued decline

It also said that in recent years the institutional process of "merit-based and consensus-backed selection has been disrupted"

The letter, according to the sources, also disapproved of the introduction of elections in the cadre feeding organisations, NSUI and IYC, saying the move had created "conflict and division".

Stormy CWC expected: Sonia Gandhi likely to step down

The letter did not refer to Rahul Gandhi, but elections to the feeder organisations were his reform initiatives

In the letter, the leaders are learnt to have also said that uncertainty over the leadership and the drift, has "demoralised the Congress workers and further weakened the party"

Giving a host of suggestions to revitalise the party and give party workers a "sense of purpose", they said there is a need for a "full time and effective leadership active in the field and visible and available at the AICC and PCC headquarters".

The leaders said in the letter that over-centralisation of the organisation and micro-management has always proven to be counter-productive.

They suggested that appointments of District Congress Committee presidents from the AICC should be stopped henceforth, and DCC presidents should be appointed from the state capital by in-charge general secretary in coordination with Pradesh Congress Committee presidents, as per sources.

The top leaders are also learnt to have called for urgent constitution of the central parliamentary board for collective thinking and decision making on organisational matters, policies and programmes

The leaders demanded that the central election committee be reconstituted comprising leaders with organisational background and active field of knowledge and experience

The letter also stressed that the Nehru-Gandhi family will "always remain an integral part of the collective leadership" of the Congress party

The leaders acknowledged the visionary leadership of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and asserted that his enduring legacy will always remain a source of guidance and inspiration for the Congress

It said that an "environment of fear and insecurity has engulfed the country" and the Congress has a duty to rise to the challenge

The group of Congress leaders said the party must take the initiative for creating a national coalition of democratic and secular forces and make an effort to bring on one platform leaders of political parties, who were once part of the Congress

The signatories to the letter include Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad; former Union ministers Kapil Sibal, Shashi Tharoor, Anand Sharma, Manish Tewari, P J Kurian, Renuka Chaudhary and Milind Deora, and Ajay Singh

Ready to step down as Congress president: Sonia Gandhi tells aides after letter row

Also among them are MP Vivek Tankha; CWC members Mukul Wasnik and Jitin Prasada; former chief ministers Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Rajender Kaur Bhattal, M Veerappa Moily and Prithviraj Chavan

Former PCC chiefs Raj Babbar (UP), Arvinder Singh Lovely (Delhi) and Kaul Singh Thakur (Himachal); current Bihar campaign chief Akhilesh Singh, former Haryana Speaker Kuldeep Sharma; former Delhi Speaker Yoganand Shastri and former MP Sandeep Dixit are also among the signatories to the letter.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 8:47 [IST]
A Florida police officer's body cam footage revealed the dramatic moments when he rescued five people after their boat capsized in the Gulf of Mexico.

The video, released on Facebook by the Pasco County Sheriffs Office, shows its marine unit deputy Cpl. Mitch Bollenbacher carrying out the rescue on Saturday, about 15 miles northwest of Anclote Key in Pasco County, Florida.

Bollenbacher's camera shows him motoring up to the site where the mostly submerged, 20-foot vessel was located.

At the time, four of the passengers were sitting on the upturned boat, while the fifth floated in the water nearby.

The Pasco County Sheriff's Office released body cam footage of a boat rescue from Saturday. Five passengers (pictured) were stranded in the Gulf of Mexico when their boat flipped over

'God d**n it's good to see you,' one of the passenger says, while another says, 'We've got life jackets and we're all set.'

When one of the passengers asks Bollenbacher how he's doing, the deputy replies 'I'm good,' adding 'Better than you!' as he maneuvers closer.

He then tells the passengers about the rescue plan and tosses them a rope that each of the passengers hold on to while swimming the short distance to Bollenbacher's boat.

At one point, Bollenbacher has to tell a passenger not to pull his boat towards theirs while they wait for their turn to get on the rescue boat. In that moment, his keel floats on top of the submerged portion of the capsized boat.

The deputy's bodycam footage shows him rushing back and forth on his deck and helping the passengers climb aboard during the four-minute rescue.

'I better not be on YouTube!' one of the rescued passengers calls out.

Cpl. Mitch Bollenbacher responded to their distress call and pulled the stranded passengers aboard his boat during the four-minute-long rescue

The passengers used a rope Bollenbacher tossed them as a guide to help swim towards his boat. The deputy then pulled them on board

Bollenbacher (left) was in the Coast Guard Reserve and is a certified EMT and scuba diver

The US Coast Guard released an image (shown) of the capsized boat. The Coast Guard picked up the passengers' mayday call and also responded to the call, waiting nearby as backup

Also floating nearby is a US Coast Guard Station Sand Key 45-foot Response Boat-Medium, which, along with Bollenbacher, also responded to the passengers' distress call.

Watchstanders at Coast Guard Sector St. Petersburg had received the passengers' mayday report on channel 16, prior to the boat capsizing, according to a Coast Guard media alert.

Marine VHF Channel 16 is the international distress frequency used by boaters.

'Its so important to ensure safety equipment is working prior to leaving the dock, Capt. Mathew Thompson, commanding officer at Sector St. Petersburg said in the alert.

'In cases like this the use of a life jackets and using channel 16 through a VHF-FM radio made a critical difference for the rescue units being able to provide support when the boaters were in distress.'

The Pasco County Sheriff's Office said in its Facebook post: 'This incident also serves as a reminder of the importance of having proper life jackets for all occupants, as well as other safety equipment that is in good working condition.'

The five rescued people were taken to shore with no reported injuries.

Authorities have not released information about what caused the passengers' boat to capsize.

Bollenbacher was a Coast Guard reservist, is a certified EMT and scuba certified and grew up as an Eagle Scout and lifeguard.

In a 2018 YouTube interview he said he tried out for the Sheriff's Office's Marine Unit because it was a childhood dream of his: 'I want to be Baywatch on a boat,' he said.
In times like these, investors can get by with a little help from the Wall Street legends. Deemed as the man who solved the market, Jim Simons relied on his experience as a mathematician and code-breaker to pioneer a ground-breaking investing approach, one that involved crunching data and developing predictive algorithms.

Founding one of the most formidable hedge funds on the Street, Renaissance Technologies, in 1978, Simons, who is worth approximately $23 billion, has more than earned his reputation as the best of the best. Between 1988 and 2018, Renaissance generated trading profits of over $100 billion, and its flagship fund, Medallion, boasted annual returns that bested the likes of Warren Buffett, George Soros and Ray Dalio.

Taking this into consideration, we wanted to get all the details on two stocks the billionaires fund snapped up recently. Running the tickers through TipRanks database, we found out that the analysts are also fans, with each name scoring a Strong Buy consensus rating. Not to mention both sport some massive upside potential.

Orchard Therapeutics (ORTX)

Utilizing a development approach that involves ex vivo autologous gene therapy, Orchard Therapeutics wants to improve the lives of patients battling rare diseases. With an EMA approval potentially coming this year, its no wonder this stock is attracting attention from Wall Street.

Simons stands squarely with the bulls. In Q2, Renaissance bumped up its holding by 146% when it bought up 373,200 shares. Now, the funds total ORTX position comes in at 630,400 shares worth $1,746,576.

Writing for Oppenheimer, 5-star analyst Kevin DeGeeter also likes what hes seeing. ORTX is gearing up to commercialize its lead lentiviral gene therapy, Libmeldy, in metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) in Europe, with an EMA decision expected this year. This means that the therapys EU launch could come in 1H21, with an IND filing anticipated in 2H20.

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ORTX identifies the marketing strategy as to increase disease awareness and initiate diagnostic and birth screening, including no charge testing. We anticipate this commercial strategy could be applicable to its other programs in coming years, DeGeeter commented. As part of this approach, ORTX is planning to open six sites in Germany, France, Italy, the UK and the Netherlands for commercialization. DeGeeter added, ORTX extended a gene therapy manufacturing relationship with MolMed through June 2025. The agreement covers multiple programs, including potential commercial launch of Libmeldy.

Looking at the market opportunity, MLD is estimated to be about a fifth of the size of the spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) market. Both diseases are severe and progressive neuromuscular conditions, and the global SMA market is expected to surpass $5 billion by 2023.

To this end, DeGeeter rates ORTX an Outperform (i.e. Buy) along with a $26 price target. This figure puts the upside potential at a whopping 462%. (To watch DeGeeters track record, click here)

Other analysts dont beg to differ. 3 Buy ratings and no Holds or Sells have been assigned in the last three months, making the consensus rating a Strong Buy. The $16 average price target implies shares could climb 243% higher in the coming year. (See ORTX stock analysis on TipRanks)

Kadmon Holdings (KDMN)

The second stock on our list, Kadmon, specializes in the development of small molecules and biologics for autoimmune, inflammatory and fibrotic diseases as well as immuno-oncology. As a major upcoming regulatory filing is right on track, several Street pros are pounding the table on this name.

Simons falls into this category. Reflecting a new position for the fund, Renaissance pulled the trigger on 1,199,100 shares in Q2.

5-star analyst Mark Breidenbach of Oppenheimer, tells clients that KDMNs management team still expects to present 12-month follow-up from ROCKstar and complete its NDA submission for belumosudil in Q4.

It should be noted that the FDA has accepted belumosudil under the Real-Time Oncology Review (RTOR) program, which streamlines the communication between developers and the FDA, allowing feedback on individual application modules to be received before the final submission. Based on its clinical profile and Breakthrough Therapy Designation, we believe belumosudil has an excellent chance (85% probability of success) of securing U.S. approval, Breidenbach explained.

Looking more closely at the available clinical data, Breidenbach points out belumosudil has already demonstrated impressive efficacy in the six-month primary analysis of the ROCKstar study, with it generating objective rates of 73% and 74% in the 200mg QD and 200mg BID dosing arms, respectively. These responses were witnessed in a heavily pre-treated patient population with a median of 34 priors, which is representative of a real-world steroid-resistant cGVHD population, in the analysts opinion.

That being said, European approval could be harder to come by. ...we do not believe ROCKstar will be adequate to secure conventional regulatory approval. However, Kadmon plans to lobby the EMA with 12-month results and matched historical control datawhich could potentially open a pathway to conditional approval, supported by a randomized controlled trial. We believe a controlled study could also help spur belumosudils uptake in the U.S., Breidenbach stated.

Even though the pandemic has led to substantial enrollment delays for belumosudils ongoing placebo-controlled Phase 2 clinical trial in diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis (KD025-209), KDMN will kick off a smaller (12-15 patient) open-label trial at alternate sites in Q1 2021 to quickly show evidence of activity in this indication.

Based on all of the above, Breidenbach reiterates his bullish call and $8 price target. Should his thesis play out, a potential twelve-month gain of 84% could be in the cards. (To watch Breidenbachs track record, click here)

Are other analysts in agreement? They are. Only Buy ratings, 3, in fact, have been issued in the last three months. Therefore, the consensus rating is a Strong Buy. Given the $16.50 average price target, which is more aggressive than Breidenbachs, shares could skyrocket 280% in the next year. (See Kadmon stock analysis on TipRanks)

To find good ideas for healthcare stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.
President Donald Trump made some of his flashiest 2016 campaign pledges in foreign policy areas, such as vowing to reevaluate the US relationship with NATO, abandon a landmark nuclear deal with Iran and bring US troops back from forever wars.

The Republican president, a former businessman from New York who boasts about his deal-making skills, has delivered on some of his pledges, while partially meeting a few others. Some he has so far completely failed to achieve.

If Trump is defeated in the November 3 election by Democratic rival Joe Biden, the new administrations hardest challenge will be to restore the global standing and trustworthiness of the United States, analysts and former US and European officials say.

Biden, vice president under President Barack Obama, will be taking over a scarred transatlantic relationship, deep antagonism with China and sanctions-dominated pressure campaigns against Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

Here is a look at some of the key policy priorities of the Trump administration and potential challenges for Biden:

CHINA

A central theme in Trumps 2016 campaign was to accuse China of ripping off the United States while vowing to seal a fair trade deal with Beijing that would help American businesses and create US jobs.

After almost two years of tit-for-tat trade war with the worlds second largest economy, Trump has so far managed a stalled first phase of such an agreement.

Meanwhile, Washington and Beijing have slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of each others goods and the global spread of the coronavirus from China has soured bilateral ties to their worst level in decades, raising fears of a new Cold War.

Washington has acted against Beijing on multiple fronts: It ended the special status of Hong Kong, sanctioned top officials over human rights abuses and sought to ban Chinese technology companies from operating in the United States.

A Biden administration would have little option but to maintain the hard stance, analysts say, but would likely seek to dial down some rhetoric to create room for engagement.

IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL

In 2018, the Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, saying he could strike a better one. He also launched a maximum pressure campaign to choke off Tehrans sources of income.

Despite almost two years of sanctions on everything from oil revenue to minerals and Irans central bank, Washington has yet to force a change of behavior by Tehran and bring it back to the negotiating table. Instead, escalating tensions have carried the two nations to the brink of war.

Biden has said he would deal with Iran through diplomacy and re-enter the agreement, but only if Iran first returned to compliance with the deals restrictions on its nuclear program.

NATO & TRANSATLANTIC TIES

Trump has repeatedly complained about the failure of many NATO partners to meet defense spending targets. He has also questioned the continued relevance of the organization created in 1949 at the start of the Cold War with Russia.

His attacks soured ties with several European allies, but more members of the alliance have now increased spending to meet its target of two percent of GDP.

This year, Trump vowed to cut the number of US troops in Germany, accusing Berlin of taking advantage of the United States while not meeting its NATO obligations.

Analysts say repairing the transatlantic alliance will take time, but should be one of the easier tasks awaiting a potential Biden administration.

BRINGING TROOPS HOME

Trump promised in his 2016 campaign to stay out of foreign wars and bring home US troops deployed in Afghanistan, Americas longest war, which is now in its nineteenth year.

Washington has begun cutting troop numbers in Afghanistan after striking a deal with the Taliban in February that envisaged the withdrawal of all US troops. This depends, however, on talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which have stalled.

Trump also ordered a pullout of US troops from Syria. The decision was repeatedly watered down by aides and the military, but numbers have still been reduced by more than half.

PARIS CLIMATE DEAL

One of Trumps most controversial decisions was his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, something he had repeatedly vowed to do during the 2016 campaign.

Trump said the agreement imposed draconian financial and economic burdens on the United States and vowed to negotiate a better one.

A new agreement has not materialized. The Biden campaign said he would recommit to the original Paris deal and lead an effort to get major countries to toughen their domestic targets.

MIDDLE EAST

Trump delivered on his 2016 campaign promise to relocate the US Embassy in Israel to divided Jerusalem. The move was slammed by most of the Arab world but won praise from the Israeli government and its supporters, as well as evangelical Christians.

His wider Middle East Peace plan was rejected by Palestinians as it allowed Israel to maintain control of long-contested West Bank settlements, but received some encouraging reviews from several Arab states.

One, the United Arab Emirates, this month normalized ties with Israel in a historic deal brokered by the United States, a move that many analysts saw as a foreign policy win for Trump at a time when he has been trailing Biden in polls.

NORTH KOREA

Trump surprised the world by entering unprecedented talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He made no progress in persuading Kim to give up his nuclear weapons, but some believe his ice-breaking diplomacy could be a building block for a future administration.
His cherished goal of revising the constitution is still unmet, although he has stepped up his efforts to do so before his term ends. Abe and his right-wing supporters have long seen the U.S.-drafted war-renouncing constitution as a legacy of Japans World War II defeat and humiliation during U.S. occupation.
The Government has advised parents that it is okay to send their children to school if they are sneezing or have a runny nose.

As one million students prepare to go to school, new health advice has been issued to parents ahead of the reopening of classrooms across the country.

Parents have been told that it is usually okay to send kids to school or childcare if they do not have a temperature of 38 degrees celsius or more, do not have a cough and have not been in close contact with anyone who has coronavirus.

If a child only has nasal symptoms such as a runny nose or sneeze, parents should not keep children home from school.

Read More

However, if a child has a temperature above 38 degrees celsius, has a cough, had a loss or changed sense of taste or smell and shortness of breath, they should remain at home and see a GP as soon as possible.

Most of the time, you do not need to phone your GP if a runny nose or sneezing are your childs only symptoms. Talk to your pharmacist instead, the advice states.

If a child has the coronavirus symptoms outlined above, parents will need to isolate their child and anyone who lives in the household will have to restrict their movements until a diagnosis has been made.

Parents are being urged to make sure your child knows how to use a tissue to cover coughs or sneezes or to cough or sneeze into their elbow.

The new advice will be sent out to homes from schools and will be published on the Department of Educations website.

Previous advice stated that parents should not send a child to school or childcare if they displayed any flu-like symptoms at all.

Meanwhile, the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland has written to Health Minister Stephen Donnelly asking him to secure a meeting between the union and the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) regarding the well-being of staff in the high-risk category.

The HPSC today refused the unions request for a meeting.

ASTI said it is receiving a significant number of calls from teachers whose illnesses include chronic kidney disease, cancer and serious heart disease who are required to return to school.
A police officer walks by patrol cars at the Oakland Police headquarters in Oakland, Calif. in a file photo. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Police: 3 Officers Shot in Maryland Were Ambushed

Three Maryland police officers who were wounded by gunfire while responding to a 911 call on Aug. 23 were ambushed, officials said.

Prince Georges County police were responding to a report of a home invasion in Hyattsville at 6:30 p.m., said interim Police Chief Hector Velez.

Within minutes, they arrived at the scene, and within seconds, they came under gunfire, Velez told reporters. They were ambushed.

Two men were taken into custody after officers returned fire, Velez said. The three injured officers are expected to recover.

At 6:35 pm Sunday, we responded to a call in the 1300 block of Capital View Terrace. 3 of our officers who arrived in the area were shot. They were rushed for treatment. We returned fire. 2 males are in custody. They were not struck. We will update soon.  PGPDNEWS (@PGPDNews) August 23, 2020

These officers are coming to work to protect, defend the residents of Prince Georges County, Velez said. And this evening, these heroes did just that.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote on Twitter: We are all extending our prayers to the three officers shot tonight in Prince Georges County. [Maryland State Police] has offered its full support for the investigation.

Prince Georges County Executive Angela Alsobrooks said she met with the three officers, WUSA9 reported.

Authorities told The Associated Press that two of the three officers shot were saved by their bulletproof vests. One was struck in the chest and the other was hit in the back, while another was wounded in the foot.

My heart sank. Im thinking about their families, their fellow officers, and their community, Velez said.
By Fabian Cambero and Aislinn Laing

SANTIAGO, Aug 24 (Reuters) - The Chilean Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request by the United States to extradite businessman Carlos Cardoen, whom it accuses of having illegally exported a mineral used to make cluster bombs to Iraq.

The court said too much time had lapsed since Cardoen, 78, was indicted by a U.S. court in 1993 for exporting zirconium from the United States and selling cluster bombs to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein between 1982 and 1989.

Interpol issued a international arrest warrant the same year but Washington asked the Chilean Foreign Ministry only in March last year to arrest Cardoen so he could be tried on U.S. soil.

The ruling brings an end to an almost 30-year legal saga that has prevented business tycoon Cardoen, once labeled a "Merchant of Death" by U.S. Customs officials, from leaving Chile.

He has turned instead to running a hotel and museum and making wine in the town of Santa Cruz, 100 miles south of the capital, Santiago.

The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Cardoen in 1993 for conspiring with a U.S. company, Teledyne Industries, to violate export controls on zirconium, which it used to manufacture cluster bombs used by the Iraqi Air Force in its war with Iran.

Teledyne Industries pled guilty to the charges and paid a $4 million fine in 1995, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Cardoen has alleged that U.S. authorities turned a blind eye to his business activities while Saddam was attacking Iran, a U.S. opponent. He told the Wall Street Journal in 2011 that he had been "scapegoated" after Iraq invaded Kuwait, a U.S. ally. (Reporting by Fabian Cambero and Aislinn Laing; Editing by Dan Grebler)
MARYVILLE  As the areas primary care center, Anderson Hospital quickly became an accessible location during the pandemic.

Keith Page, the hospitals president and CEO, and Lisa Klaustermeier-Spencer, Andersons chief nursing officer, spoke to an Intelligencer reporter Thursday along with marketing/public relations director Natalie Head.

Since March, we put many procedures in place to deal with the coronavirus, Klaustermeier-Spencer said. But were always prepared for a pandemic. She said they have followed guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) since the spread of the novel coronavirus became a reality in southern Illinois in February.

Page said the hospitals patient volume increased after March then temporarily bottomed out this summer.

We had one day in June with zero new patients, Page said. However, by the end of July or the first of August, patient volume was on the upswing again.

However, Page warned against people drawing false conclusions after seeing television images of overloaded, overflowing New York City hospitals.

We have never had anything like that here, he said, adding they have had up to 15 patients in their own area, separate from the rest of the hospitals patients.

More Information Anyone who is suspected to have or who tested positive for the coronavirus will not be admitted. Visitor guidelines are: Emergency Department - one visitor who must remain in the patient's room for the duration of the hospital stay Inpatient Adults - One visitor between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. and must be same visitor for duration of hospital stay The Rehab Center - One visitor between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.; same person for duration of hospital stay Chest pain/Cardiac Lab - One visitor for duration of hospital stay OB Pavilion for Women - One support person for duration of hospital stay Surgery/GI Lab - Patient's family/support person must wait in their vehicle unless pre-authorized to accompany patient. Visitor will be allowed following inpatient guidelines if patient is admitted postoperatively Outpatient services - These patients are encouraged to come alone whenever possible or have visitors wait outside until services are complete Patients with intellectual and/or developmental disability or cognitive impairments - one support person may accompany patient See More Collapse

Klaustermeier-Spencer said a lot of what she and the staff went through amounted to refresher lessons. For example, with personal protective equipment (PPE); lessons included when to apply, how and when to remove it, plus COVID screening at hospital entrances and COVID testing and an off-site location.

She said they are prepared for any Second Wave of coronavirus infections and that now, it is the reverse of how it was in March. Now, they are coming off of COVID and preparing for the new influenza season.

Flu never goes away, she said. We are prepared for flu season. Per the CDC, the exact timing and duration of flu seasons can vary, but influenza activity often begins to increase in October. Most of the time, flu activity peaks between December and February, although activity can last as late as May.

Page expressly wanted to thank the employees and staff  1,110 at the hospital and another 150 at Anderson Medical Group and more at other off-site facilities.

We appreciate them, their commitment has been outstanding to patients and customer service, he said. He said they had to give up traditional roles common before the pandemic and do a lot more interaction with families over the past six months.

Concerns and fears surrounding COVID-19 have caused many patients to delay or avoid getting the care they need. Anderson staff are concerned this may cause confusion as coronavirus and seasonal influenza overlap. Anderson Hospital strives to provide the safest environment for patients and staff throughout its COVID response. This effort includes continued use of screening entrances, visitor restrictions and face coverings throughout the facility.

Its 154-bed inpatient and outpatient acute care facility offers patients medical diagnostics that are not often found in a local community setting.

Everyone who enters the facility must wear masks and they must undergo body temperature scans. Every hospital entrance is open except for #2. Effective June 29, no visitors under the age of 18 are allowed, unless they are patients.

With regard to Andersons Goshen Campus Expansion in Edwardsville, Head said the first building, a surgery center, is complete while construction is underway on the second building, an inpatient rehabilitation center, which should be finished in June 2021. She added that there was no ribbon-cutting ceremony due to the coronavirus but there may be a topping-out ceremony this fall.

Reach reporter Charles Bolinger at 618-659-5735
In the small kitchen of their tidy, sunlit apartment, Joshua Zacharias and Samantha Moran work shoulder-to-shoulder putting the finishing touches on a modern dish of quail and potato puree. They silently trade places while drizzling sauces and applying garnishes  an indication that cooking together has become second nature.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the small kitchen of their tidy, sunlit apartment, Joshua Zacharias and Samantha Moran work shoulder-to-shoulder putting the finishing touches on a modern dish of quail and potato puree. They silently trade places while drizzling sauces and applying garnishes  an indication that cooking together has become second nature.

They met in the kitchen at Winnipegs Capital Grill nearly five years ago and made the leap from co-workers to couple while prepping for a private dinner event at Zachariass home.

The chefs bring their different backgrounds and training into their cuisine. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press)

"She had no idea what she was getting into," he says, laughing.

Zacharias wanted to start hosting semi-regular dinner parties where he could cook high-end meals for small groups of people. He dubbed the idea Stefan Supper Club (pronounced "Ste-fawn"  its the name his mom almost gave him) and invited Moran to help out with the first event in 2018.

The pair spent many late nights getting to know each other while planning and prepping for an ambitious 10-course meal.

"After the dinner was done, that was supposed to be it," Moran says. "I had no reason to come over, but it was like, Hey, do you want to still hang out?"

The last two years have been filled with exploring their shared love of food and brainstorming ways to improve the supper club concept. A relaunch was in the works for this spring, but the coronavirus pandemic put things on hold.

Samantha Moran, left, and Joshua Zacharias operate Stefan out of their apartment. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press)

"Because of quarantine, the fortunate thing was that we were able to just really practise dishes, play around, read books," Moran says. "That was the only blessing for us during that time."

By summer, they felt comfortable enough inviting strangers into their downtown apartment and hosted a six-course dinner, paired with screening questions and hand sanitizer, for six people in early August. The event seems to have meshed with their goal of bringing strangers together over food.

"They (were) total strangers laughing, having fun talking... I felt like I was interrupting them when I was giving them food," Zacharias says. "A lot of people arent really eating around the table anymore, theyre just taking their food either to go or theyre watching TV and we really wanted to bring conversation back."

The supper club atmosphere is modern fine dining and the food is a blend of classic French cuisine and personal influences.

Moran is a graduate of Red River Colleges culinary arts program. Her love of cooking comes from watching her mom in the kitchen and learning how to make dinner for her siblings when she was younger.

"I just liked doing it. They were very simple meals, like stuff you would heat up in a pot of water, but I wanted to do more and know more," she says. "I would get in trouble, too, playing around with food, because she paid for everything."

Moran is a first-generation Canadian and often finds inspiration in the Salvadoran dishes her mom taught her how to make, such as frijoles (refried beans) and pupusas (stuffed corn-flour cakes).

Zachariass cooking career has also been influenced by family, as well as his Vietnamese heritage. He doesnt have formal culinary training, but grew up helping his mom in the kitchen and watching cooking shows with his grandmother.

"I always just gravitated towards food and cooking and I would always try and make new things at home," he says.

"I cant say they were ever successful, but my grandma was willing to be the test subject."

Moran and Zacharias still work together full-time at Capital on top of starting their supper club business.

"This is definitely our creative outlet," Zacharias says. "It forces us to learn new techniques and try things differently."

Despite working side-by-side for so long, the chefs have starkly different cooking styles.

Try our Dish The latest on food and drink in Winnipeg and beyond from arts writers Ben Sigurdson and Eva Wasney. Dish arrives in your inbox every other Friday. See sample. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

Moran describes herself as a rustic cook who likes dishes that look a little rough and messy, while Zacharias is all about precise placement and delicate flavours.

"Were different in that way, but it also kind of brings us together," she says.

"Yeah, definitely," he adds. "Even though we might have our differences, (it) opens our eyes to new ideas as well."

They are spacing out their events and keeping a close eye on COVID-19 developments, to ensure safety for themselves and their guests. The next dinner is tentatively planned for the end of October and set to feature an upscale Asian- and Latin-inspired menu. Details and tickets will be available at stefandining.com.

eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @evawasney
The newly elected General Secretary of the Convention People's Party (CPP), Nana Yaa Akyimpim Jantuah says the party will go back to its original blueprint of grassroots organisation to build a more formidable party.



She has therefore called on all persons who believe in the founder of the partys ideologies, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah to come home to help in the rebuilding of the party.



According to her, "It is time for everybody to come onboard to build CPP and change our fortunes in this country."



Nana Yaa Jantuah, who is a former Public Affairs Director of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), was speaking on Accra-based Citi FM on Monday morning, August 24, 2020.



She said the party from its formative period, was founded on the principle of grassroots organisation which enabled the party to win elections in the country within a period of three months.



She said the party still has the skill, strength and the capacity to use grassroots organisation to turn things around even in the upcoming elections.



"We need to do a lot of organisation", Nana Yaa Jantuah said, pointing out that fragmentation has caused the party a lot.



She said the CPP offers the best hope for Ghanaians, explaining that both the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that have alternated governance of the country between them have failed to better the fortunes of the country.



According to her, the period that the CPP served in government brought so much development to the country and that Ghanaians can attest to that.









Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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KBR, Inc.s KBR government services unit, KBRwyle has received a $8.74-million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Per the contract, KBR will provide technical assistance, program management, and engineering, financial and logistics support to the integrated product teams that acquire and sustain F-18 series aircraft for Foreign Military Sales customers, as well as the governments of Finland and Kuwait.



Notably, major part of the work will be performed in Lexington Park, MD and the rest in Philadelphia, PA; Kuwait City, Kuwait; North Island, CA; along with Patuxent River. The project work is expected to be completed in August 2025.

KBRs Government Solutions Unit: A Bright Spot

KBR has a diversified business portfolio, which helps it combat cyclicality associated with any single market. Presently, the company has been banking on strength of the Government Solutions (GS) and Technology Solutions (TS) segments to optimize growth potential.



The companys GS segment  accounting for approximately 70% of total revenues  has been performing pretty well on the back of robust operational performance and progress on international programs.



As of Jun 30, 2020, its total backlog came in at $12.59 billion, of which Government Solutions booked $10.52 billion and Technology Solutions accounted for $561 million. Government and Technology units had a book-to-bill ratio of 1 and 1.5, respectively, excluding the impact of long-term PFIs.

Our Take

We believe that the recent contract will further boost KBRs Government Services business. Moreover, its recent agreement with Arlington Capital Partners to acquire Centauri, LLC  a leading independent provider of high-end space, directed energy and other advanced technology solutions  will boost revenues, given attractive and growing federal sectors aligned with DoD and intelligence priorities that benefit from bipartisan support.





Story continues





Shares of KBR have outperformed the industry in the past three months. Its shares have performed pretty well owing to the ongoing contract wins, acquisitions and robust organic growth.

Zacks Rank

KBR  which shares space with Fluor Corporation FLR, Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. J and AECOM ACM in the same industry  currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Just Released: Zacks 7 Best Stocks for Today

Experts extracted 7 stocks from the list of 220 Zacks Rank #1 Strong Buys that has beaten the market more than 2X over with a stunning average gain of +24.3% per year.



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TikTok said on Monday that we simply have no choice but to sue the Trump administration over U.S. President Donald Trumps executive order banning transactions in the United States with the popular short-form video-sharing app.

In a blog post, TikTok said it strongly disagreed with the White Houses position that the company was a national security threat, saying it had taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikToks U.S. user data.

It also said the administration has ignored its extensive efforts to address its concerns, and accused Trump of politicizing the dispute by calling for a ban on TikTok in an Aug. 6 executive order.

We do not take suing the government lightly, TikTok said. But with the Executive Order threatening to bring a ban on our U.S. operations  we simply have no choice.

TikToks complaint is expected to be filed later on Monday.

Amid growing distrust between Washington and Beijing, Trump has for weeks complained that TikTok, owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance Ltd, was a national security threat and might share information about users with the Chinese government.

His Aug. 6 executive order called for banning transactions with the app after 45 days.

Trump issued a separate executive order on Aug. 14 giving ByteDance 90 days to divest TikToks U.S. operations and any data.

Reuters reported last week that TikTok was preparing to mount a legal challenge as early as Monday to Trumps Aug. 6 order.

ByteDance had acquired Shanghai-based video app Musical.ly in a $1 billion transaction in 2017, and relaunched it as TikTok the following year.

In its blog post, TikTok said the Trump administration violated its constitutional right to due process by banning the company without notice.

It accused Trump of misusing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets the president regulate international commerce during a national emergency.

Trump had in May 2019 invoked that law to stop alleged efforts by foreign telecommunications companies to conduct economic and industrial espionage against the United States.

But TikTok said the Aug. 6 executive order was not supported by the emergency Trump declared a year earlier, and that the company did not provide the types of technology and services contemplated at that time.

It also said the executive order was not rooted in genuine national security concerns, adding: We believe the Administrations decisions were heavily politicized, and industry experts have said the same.

ByteDance has been in talks to sell TikToks North American, Australian and New Zealand operations to companies including Microsoft Corp and Oracle Corp .

Those assets could be worth $25 billion to $30 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.

Before buying TikTok, ByteDance had not sought advance approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which reviews acquisitions for potential national security risks.

CFIUS later opened an investigation, and according to TikTok repeatedly refused to engage with ByteDance before saying it had found national security risks associated with the purchase.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
The spat between the founder of Amigo Loans and its current board escalated over the weekend after a blog was posted by James Benamor on 21 August slating the company's practices and branding former CEO Hamish Paton's tenure a 'calamitous time'.

Benamor listed a number of proposals which included him being instated as CEO of the company's parent group - Amigo Holdings PLC.

But today the board of struggling subprime lender Amigo Loans rejected the proposals outlined by Benamor and warned that his return to the business would be 'materially detrimental'.

On Friday, Benamore penned a blog welcoming the return of the CEO Glen Crawford but pointed out that he his work cut out for him - which included, he believed, the ousting of the remaining board members who he claims mismanaged Amigo.

The Amigo Loans board is currently locked in a bitter dispute with its founder James Benamor who is accusing the guarantor lender of irresponsible lending. Benamor wants to return as the parent company's CEO

He also recommended the cutting back on 'unnecessary suits' accused Amigo Loans of irresponsible lending - adding that it had 'financially excluded millions of ordinary people'.

Amigo hit back with an RNS announcement today pointing out that Benamore's blog was not issued through a regulated information service, highlighting that Crawford has made it clear that he is not prepared to continue to work at Amigo 'in any circumstances where Mr Benamor returns'.

What are founder James Benamor's proposals? James Benamor, founder of Amigo Loans, pulled no punches in his scathing online attack on the companies current board. On Friday Benamor wrote a blog with the following recommendations: Replacement of Nayan Kisnadwala with a 'capable CFO' within the next 30 days. Immediate removal of Roger Lovering and replacing him with one of the remaining iNEDs as non exec chair

Retention of Glen as CEO of Amigo Loans Ltd, the subsidiary of Amigo Holdings PLC

He also recommended the formation of a 'functional board' of Amigo Loans Ltd which would comprise of Glen as CEO; INEDs Richard, Gary and Jonathan; and the new CFO. This UK board will discharge corporate governance functions expected by the FCA of an FCA Authorised UK lender

The appointment of himself as CEO of Amigo Holdings PLC - the parent company

Formation of PLC board comprising of himself as CEO, along with the new CFO, and iNeds Richard, Gary and Jonathan

The board additionally called on its founder not to push ahead with a series of proposals he made on Friday.

It said that James Benamor should not 'waste further time and expense' in calling a shareholder vote which could seriously shake up the way the company is run.

The Amigo board warned that Crawford, who joined the guarantor lender as chief executive this year in March, can leave the business if Benamor calls and wins the shareholder vote.

Benamor suggested in his blog that the board should appoint him chief executive of Amigo Holdings, while putting Crawford back in charge of its subsidiary, Amigo Loans.

Lack of support for Benamor?

In June, the founder said that he would sell his 61 per cent stake in the lender after losing a fight to remove several of its directors.

Only around one vote out of 10 among independent shareholders was cast in favour of Benamor and his company Richmond Group.

The board highlighted in its statement: 'Mr Crawford's decision to return as CEO was predicated on the clear statement from Mr Benamor that he was selling down Richmond Group Limited's controlling shareholding in Amigo to a position of zero.'

The boards statement ended with it relaying its 'unanimous rejection' of the views and proposals put forward by Benamor.

Extension from Amigo lenders

The online slinging match follows the announcement last week that Amigo Loans got another extension from its lenders until December on a 250million finance deal.

It's not the first time that Amigo had been given an extension. The lifeline extends the deadline, which was meant to run out last Friday after originally being extended for a few weeks.

The Financial Ombudsman Service has recorded a steady increase in complaints about Amigo  94 per cent of which were upheld in the second half of 2019.

The company said it would provide an update on its handling of complaints when it announces its results at the end of August.

Last year, 317 new complaints were recorded between July and December 2019 - a 349 per cent increase from the 69 complaints recorded in the second half of 2016.
By the order of Minister of Emergency Situations of Armenia Felix Tsolakyan, Tigran Petrosyan has been appointed Deputy Director of the Rescue Service, as reported the Ministry of Emergency Situations.

At the outset of todays consultation, the minister congratulated Petrosyan and wished him success. The heads of structural and territorial subdivisions of the Rescue Service reported on the activities carried out over the past week.

Minister Tsolakyan stated that there are fewer cases this year compared with the previous year, but instructed regional rescue departments to continue to be alert, taking into consideration the fact that the picture might be different in September and October.

Director of the Rescue Service Vrezh Gabrielyan gave the heads of territorial subdivisions several assignments and particularly stated that the heads of the regional departments and Yerevan Rescue Department will have to provide information on explosive and flammable facilities after each semester.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 14:07:37|Editor: huaxia

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MANILA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- At least nine people were killed and 17 others wounded in twin blasts in Sulu province in the southern Philippines around noon time Monday, the military and police said.

In an initial report, the military said the first explosion occurred around 12:00 noon in front of a grocery store along a busy street in Jolo, the capital of Sulu province.

About one hour after the first blast, a second explosion rocked a church at 1:00 p.m., about 70 meters away from the first blast scence. Enditem
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn couldn't empathise with today's 'prosperous' Jewish community and stopped talking to shadow Chancellor John McDonnell for months, a new book claims.

Stunning new details from the party's largest general election defeat since 1935 have come to light in Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn, written by two journalists with front row seats to Labour's calamitous attempt to gain power.

Former aides have revealed non-stop infighting between top strategists, Jeremy Corbyn's anger at losing control of his diary, and his own wife's on screen snipes.

According to the Times, former senior advisor Andrew Murray spoke to the authors about Mr Corbyn's failure to deal with antisemitism in the party.

Labour campaign chiefs feared that Jeremy Corbyn himself was sabotaging the party's 2019 general election campaign, a new book has claimed

Andrew Murray, left, has said Corbyn (right) struggled to empathise with today's Jewish community because they were relatively prosperous unlike back in the 1930s (file photo)

Mr Murray, a Unite trade unionist, told them: 'He is very empathetic Jeremy, but he's empathetic with the poor, the disadvantaged, the migrant, the marginalised, the people at the bottom of the heap.

'Happily, that is not the Jewish community in Britain today. He would have had massive empathy with the Jewish community in Britain in the 1930s[...]

'But, of course, the Jewish community today is relatively prosperous.'

Serialised in The Sunday Times and the Times, the book details how Jeremy Corbyn ignored his chief of staff Karie Murphy who had suggested a visit to Auschwitz as a gesture after he faced criticism for failing to address antisemitism in the Labour Party.

It also reveals Mr Corbyn fell out with John McDonnell to the extent that the pair didn't speak to each other 'for months'.

The book claims Mr McDonnell was unhappy with the disciplinary matters against Jewish MP Dame Margaret Hodge who had questioned Mr Corbyn about antisemitism in the Commons and Mr McDonnell was furious that Jeremy didn't intervene.

Left Out, by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire. claims top advisors knew the party was heading towards electoral disaster months before voters went to the polls in 2019, but were unable to stop it.

But in a damning revelation, the advisor find those present, including party chairman Ian Lavery and John Donnell's wife Cynthia, rejected the warning that the party was losing votes to the Conservatives.

'People in the north just won't vote Tory,' said Lavery, MP for Wansbeck. 'It just won't happen!'

But with just two weeks to go and YouGov putting Conservatives ahead by 359 seats to Labour's 211, any changes including a suggestion to adopt a new campaign slogan of 'We're on your side' would be futile.

The Conservatives won with 365 seats to Labour's 202.

Book details how Mr Corbyn fell out with John McDonnell (pictured) to the extent that the pair didn't speak to each other 'for months' over a disciplinary matter involving MP Margaret Hodge

Former aides have revealed non-stop infighting between top strategists, Jeremy Corbyn's anger at losing control of his diary, and his own wife's on screen snipes. Pictured: Corbyn with his office director Karie Murphy

Waters' polling suggested that voters did not trust Labour on Brexit, at the time a position of having a Second Referendum on a Labour deal which some MPs could campaign against.

This convinced McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, that Labour had to win back pro-EU voters.

The party would therefore refrain from discussing the detail of Brexit and 'extol the virtues of giving voters the final say via a second referendum'.

But several figures including Corbyn's chief strategist Seumas Milne had argued against this strategy, saying that it would alienate the working class in favour of Boris Johnson's 'Get Brexit Done'.

The book suggests that those who shared Milne's viewpoint were outmuscled over Brexit, which would become a key point of the campaign.

The book reveals that top figures including John McDonnell knew to party was heading towards electoral disaster months before voters went to the polls in 2019, but were unable to stop it

As planning for the campaign got underway, McDonnell would lead discussions, with Karie Murphy, the Executive Director of Corbyn's office sometimes stepping in.

But wary of being blamed for decisions she was unable to take, Murphy would constantly remind people in the room she was not in charge.

Seamus Milne, Corbyn's Chief Advisor, who was a key figures in decision for the 2017 campaign, had also lowered himself from a role of decision maker.

The lack of leadership was combined with infighting between advisors.

Policy adviser Andrew Fisher would refuse to share the draft manifesto with Milne  or anyone he regarded as being in the Milne/Murphy Brexit axis to stop their influence.

In turn Murphy closely guarded Corbyn's diary 'grid', and Niall Sookoo, Labour's director of elections, refused to share his list of key seats with Milne or Murphy.

Seamus Milne, Corbyn's Chief Advisor, who was a key figures in decision for the 2017 campaign, had also lowered himself from a role of decision maker

After four-years as Labour leader, defeat in the Brexit referendum and a draining antisemitism row, Corbyn's energy was sapped heading into the election.

Polling in 2019 also put him as the most unpopular Labour leader of the past 45 years.

Paul Hilder, a data consultant to the campaign, warned  just as Labour MPs did after their weekly surgeries  that the leader had become a liability.

He recommended that the party deploy a broader team of spokespeople to neutralise the damage a campaign that relied on Corbyn alone would do.

But with a reduced diary and control taken away, Corbyn proved irritable.

In another example in the book, Corbyn threw what one aide described as a 'tantrum' when he learnt that his campaign bus was powered by a diesel engine - the sort that his own manifesto promised to outlaw by 2030

In one case, McDonnell proposed that Corbyn would upstage Boris Johnson by making a visit to parts of Yorkshire and the midlands affected by the floods to highlight cuts to flood defences overseen by the coalition.

But Corbyn refused to go, citing the fact he had not been kept in the loop after his office director Murphy took control of his diary and only fed him parts at a time.

The Labour leader became increasingly more frustrated as decisions were taken out of his hands.

In another example in the book, Corbyn threw what one aide described as a 'tantrum' when he learnt that his campaign bus was powered by a diesel engine - the sort that his own manifesto promised to outlaw by 2030.

In protest, he refused to use the battle bus, opting for trains and public transport. This drew ire from his team, as they struggled to reach him with constant poor phone reception while travelling the country.
Robert Pattinsons Batman suit enables him to easily go to the bathroom, thanks to an intervention from Christian Bale.

Pattinson portrays the Caped Crusader in next years The Batman, Matt Reevess reboot of the DC comic, which is about to restart production following a coronavirus shutdown in March.

While appearing at the virtual DC FanDome convention on Saturday (22 August), Reeves revealed that Pattinson and Bale spoke to one another prior to filming, with Bale leaving Pattinson with one piece of Batman-related advice.

Reeves said: One of the big things that Rob actually talked to Christian Bale [about] was, Just make sure youre going to be able to relieve yourself, so that was actually part of what was important to build into [the suit].

Like okay, he needs to be able to put it on. He also needs to be able to live as a human being.

Bale has form with offering bathroom-related guidance to his Batman successors, having previously told Ben Affleck to make sure his Batman suit enabled him to urinate.

The only thing I said to him is to make sure he can take a p*** without anyone having to help him, Bale revealed in 2014, shortly after Affleck was cast in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Its a little bit humiliating, at least what I went through, when you have to have someone help you out of the costume in order to do that. That was my main piece of advice for him.

Robert Pattinson in The Batman, and Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Rises (Warner Bros)

The Batman sees Bruce Wayne face off against a number of villains, including The Riddler (Paul Dano), Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz) and The Penguin (Colin Farrell).

Farrells appearance in the role has been highly praised based on a short teaser of the film released during the DC FanDome, with one fan calling it one of the best transformation makeups Ive ever seen.

The Batman is currently scheduled for release on 1 October, 2021.
The finding could help us understand the 'Geodynamo' which keeps compasses pointing north. (NASA)

Scientists have recreated the hellish conditions in the heart of our planet in a laboratory  and now believe Earths solid core is around a billion years old, far younger than thought.

Researchers measured the conductivity of iron  the material that forms Earths core  in core-like conditions, with a pressure greater than one million atmospheres and temperatures as high as the surface of the sun.

They achieved these conditions by squeezing laser-heated samples of iron between two diamond anvils.

The University of Texas at Austin researchers now believe that the planets solid inner core formed between one billion and 1.3 billion years ago.

Read more: Earths magnetic field can flip 10 times faster than we thought

The finding could help scientists understand the origin of our planets geodynamo  the mechanism that sustains the Earths magnetic field, which keeps compasses pointing north and helps protect life from harmful cosmic rays.

Professor Jung-Fu Lin said: People are really curious and excited about knowing about the origin of the geodynamo, the strength of the magnetic field, because they all contribute to a planets habitability.

The research was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Our planets core is made of iron, with a solid inner core and a liquid outer core. But researchers have struggled to find a theory on when the solid core formed, without requiring unrealistically high temperatures to maintain Earths geodynamo.

The new research solves that paradox by finding a solution that keeps the temperature of the core within realistic parameters.

Read more: Antarctic records hottest temperature ever

We encountered many problems and failed several times, which made us frustrated, and we almost gave up, said article co-author Youjun Zhang, an associate professor at Sichuan University in China. We finally worked it out after several test runs.

Lin said that with this improved information on conductivity and heat transfer over time, the researchers could make a more precise estimate of the age of the inner core.

Story continues

Once you actually know how much of that heat flux from the outer core to the lower mantle, you can actually think about when did the Earth cool sufficiently to the point that the inner core starts to crystallise, he said.

This revised age of the inner core could correlate with a spike in the strength of the Earths magnetic field as recorded by the arrangement of magnetic materials in rocks that were formed around this time.

The evidence suggests that the formation of the inner core was an essential part of creating todays robust magnetic fields.

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As someone who researches and presents to school leaders and teachers across the country about how racism functions in schools, I have been asked the same question repeatedly in recent weeks: What is your opinion on white fragility? Ten times out of 10, a Black educator is asking me this question. My response is always noncontroversial because I respect the work of Robin DiAngelo, whose 2018 book White Fragility has caught fire with white people seeking to better comprehend the concept of racism. But I do raise the point that her work is only a starting point for understanding anti-racism.

After reflecting on this question from Black educators, I worried whether my response has been critical enough of white fragilitythe idea that when white people are confronted with even minimal amounts of racial stress, for example, a conversation about race and racism in America, their initial reactions are to become angry, fearful, guilty, or tearful.

So, I called my mentor, Cynthia Dillard, a professor of teacher education and a colleague at the University of Georgia, to discuss her perspective on the idea of white fragility. She pointedly asked me: Tina, whats fragile about racism? She was right. I have never known racism to be fragile.

Anti-racism often looks like school districts managing inequality and racism instead of eliminating them."

Racism is violent. It systemically kills, destroys, and diminishes the dreams and real lives of Black, brown, and Indigenous people every day in the United States and has for centuries. Racism killed Breonna Taylor, racism killed George Floyd, and racism is a major factor in determining who will live and die from COVID-19. The idea that whiteness is fragile or weak does not reflect the racial terror people of color have experienced in this country.

By design, racism is powerful and sustained by anti-Blackness, violence, and capitalism. Even DiAngelo herself, a white woman, classifies white fragility as a form of bullying. She writes: Let me be clear: while the capacity for white people to sustain challenges to our racial positions is limitedand, in this way, fragilethe effects of our responses are not fragile at all; they are quite powerful because they take advantage of historical and institutional power and control.

It is by design that white people do not have the language to address or understand how racism and white privilege work in their own lives. For example, our current education system does not provide white students with anti-racist curriculum, language to call out racism, or teachers of color to learn from. After 13 years of schooling, many white students end their K-12 experience without ever having a teacher of color or being challenged to disrupt their learned racism.

More From This Author:

If we are going to begin the hard, anti-racist work of systemically eradicating racism from institutions and the everyday practices of white people, then we need white people to know just how powerful they are, how destructive racism is, and how managing inequality is not racial progress. White fragility legitimizes white peoples belief that they are powerless as they continue to benefit from and consume unearned privileges, positions, and power. This belief is not paving a path to anti-racism. Although I support DiAngelos work as a starting place for white folx seeking understanding of racism, the idea of white fragility without further context is harmful to the work of anti-racism.

In the field of education, anti-racism often looks like school districts managing inequality and racism instead of eliminating them. School districts all over the country have Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion departments, where they hire BIPOCBlack people, Indigenous people, and people of colorto manage and measure oppression. There is still little to no talk of removing institutional barriers. Instead, the focus continues to be on tracking how students of color perform against the barriers of racism, poverty, and language.

In the state of Georgia, the Governors Office of Student Achievement presents an actual award to schools called Beating the Odds. The award is calculated by variables that are outside of a schools control such as school size and students race, ethnicity, disabilities, English fluency, transience, and economic insecurity. The state acknowledges that these are barriers to student achievement. But instead of eliminating English-only testing or funding education fully, it bestows a hollow honor on schools for managing inequities and racism the best.

Effectively, school districts declare that there are barriers that hinder students educational growth and then seem to be fine managing those inequalities with awards, reports, committees, and task forces. I would be remiss if I did not pause here to say that race is not a barrierracism is the barrier. These types of awards and measures perpetuate grit models of academic achievement where students of color are asked to persevere through injustices and jump over institutional barriers, while schools measure their success.

As we work to make this country anti-racist, this goal is only achievable if white people acknowledge their power and cede it for the humanity and rights of everyone, including themselves, by methodically tearing down racist policies and replacing those policies with ones that value the lives of BIPOC. Thus, the work of anti-racism is anything but fragile. DiAngelos White Fragility represents the training wheels of anti-racism work, but if white people expect to accomplish real social change, they need to acknowledge their strength.

If they are strong enough to oppress people of color for over 400 years and create a country that can systemically kill Black people in broad daylight with impunity, they are strong enough to destroy the system that they built. They are strong enough to walk in the footsteps of co-conspirators such as Jane Elliott (the international lecturer on racism and creator of the Blue Eyes & Brown Eyes Exercise), Mandy Manning (the 2018 National Teacher of the Year who handed President Donald Trump letters from refugee students at her award ceremony), James Tyson (who assisted Bree Newsome in taking down the confederate flag in South Carolina and put his hand on the flagpole so the cops would not tase the pole and kill Newsome), Heather Heyer (the civil rights activist who was killed in 2017 at a protest in Charlottesville, Va.), and Brandelyn Tosolt (the anti- racist educator and co-founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network). These white folx saw themselves as anything but fragile. They saw the need to attack the system of racism from all angles.

If anti-racism is going to be more than a slogan, then white people must follow the lead of these activists and educators and stop believing they are too fragile to work toward ending racism.

Related Video

In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this essay, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Heres what she had to say:
Ronn Torossian

Tesla Motors has been the undisputed frontrunner in the electric automobile market for some time. While other car companies have worked hard to keep pace, theyve largely been unable to fund and produce the quality and variety offered by the groundbreaking fully-electric auto brand. That may soon change, as Volkswagen has made a big announcement about its plans to expand the brands fully-electric product line.

Volkswagen announced that production of the ID.4, a fully-electric compact SUV, has begun at a recently-converted auto plant expected to manufacture about 300,000 electric vehicles per year. Automotive market watchers expect the ID.4 to go head-to-head against the Tesla Model Y, that companys fully-electric SUV.

VWs ID.4 will become a companion vehicle to its Audi luxury brand electric SUV, the E-Tron. However, the ID.4 is expected to bridge the gap to a more mid-range consumer market, pitting it directly against the Model Y.

VW brand head Ralf Brandstatter said the company was excited to begin making the ID.4, which would give Volkswagen a place in the worlds largest growth segment in the automotive industry. According to Brandstatter, the ID.4 will first be built and sold in Europe and China before opening up to U.S. production in Tennessee in 2022. As a whole, Volkswagen says, with the expansion of its electric lineup, the company is on track to produce about 1.5 million electric cars in 2025.

The announcement is positive news for the international auto industry, which has faced seriously dire straits since the coronavirus pandemic exploded across the globe. Factories slowed production or shut down completely and consumer car-buying ground to a veritable halt in many places, creating a serious issue for the industry.

Retailers have tried many different methods to bring consumers back to dealerships, but manufacturers have been slower to announce new plans, given the uncertainty the industry is facing in the coming months. But, if any company has the international clout to get the shoe on the other foot, its VW.

If the brand emerges from the pandemic slowdown as a trend leader, it could have much larger implications and ramifications for the global automotive industry as a whole. Many companies thatve been slowly working toward electric vehicles might ramp up their efforts in order to keep up with Tesla and VW in the marketplace. And, if more consumers see that a fully-electric vehicle is actually a reality for them, the trend line in the industry may begin to shift faster.

All this, of course, is subject to change as the pandemic continues to ebb and flow. However, the industry is welcoming good news and looking forward to more.

***

Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR, a leading PR agency.
Kamala Harris has shrugged off her previous criticism of Joe Biden as 'a distraction', using their first interview together to try and publicly bury the hatchet and move on from the contentious Democratic candidate debates.

Harris memorably attacked Biden for being against the busing in of students to white-majority schools, telling him: 'That little girl was me'.

She clashed with him on his healthcare plan, and pressed him on why he took so long to end his support for the Hyde Amendment - which bars federal funding for abortion.

Yet on Sunday night she said a focus on their previous disagreements was irrelevant.

Kamala Harris, California senator, shrugged off her previous criticism of Joe Biden

Biden, 77, said he felt the focus on their rivalry was part of the sexism pervasive in politics

'I believe in Joe Biden, I believe in his perspective, and frankly I think that's that conversation is a distraction from what we need to accomplish right now and what we need to do,' she told ABC's David Muir and Robin Roberts.

'We're looking at a situation where the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died in the last few months, where millions, tens of millions of people have become unemployed, and Joe Biden has not only a plan but a deep, deeply rooted commitment to take care of folks.

'And there are so many of the priorities that he has that are shared priorities between us based on our collective life's work.

'And we certainly have one thing in common in this election, in addition to all the policies, which is: Donald Trump should not be president of the United States. And so that's where I'm focused.'

Biden, asked about those previous disagreements, replied: 'I don't hold grudges.'

He said that the focus on his and Harris' policy clashes was sexism.

'I think there is an inherently greater burden on women seeking the presidency than on men,' he said.

'I think there's an inherent sexism that just pervades our politics.'

Discussing economic policy, Biden said he will raise taxes for those earning more than $400,000, but 'no new taxes' beyond that.

The Delaware-based political veteran said the Republican narrative about him planning to impose sweeping new taxes was incorrect.

He said 90 per cent of businesses were 'Mom and Pop businesses' employing less than 50 people, and vowed to help them.

Asked about the repeated attacks by Donald Trump on his mental health, Biden, 77, laughed.

'Watch me. Mr President, watch me,' he said.

'Look at us both - what we do, what we say. Come on.

'I think it's a legitimate question to ask anybody over 70. But what I say is: watch me.'

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sat down with ABC News for a joint interview that aired on Sunday

He also said he had no intention of being a one-term president, even though there are claims he intends to run as a 'transition candidate.'

When asked by host David Muir if he only plans to serve one term, Biden replied: 'No.'

'You're leaving open the possibility that you'll serve eight years if elected?' Muir asked Biden, who was officially nominated as part of the events last week to appear on the Democratic ticket.

'Absolutely,' the former vice president said.

And he said he was deeply concerned about Trump's non-committal answers when it comes to respecting the election result.

Asked what he would do if Trump refuses to leave the White House, Biden said he did not think it would come to that.

'The American people will not let that happen,' he said. 'No one is going to let that happen.'

He said: 'I'm going to represent everyone whether they voted for me or not. That's what presidents are supposed to do. I'm going to reach out to people.'

He said he wanted to 'heal' and 'unite the country'.

He promised to bring his political opponents into the debate, to search for solutions to America's problems.

On COVID-19, Biden was fiercely critical of Trump for not 'listening to the science' to save lives amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden said Trump was guilty of 'walking away and not dealing with the solutions' to COVID-19.

He said he did not blame Trump for the pandemic, but did blame him for responding by suggesting drinking bleach and resisting face mask orders.

'This isn't about freedom. It's a patriotic responsibility to protect your neighbors,' he said.

'We cannot get this country moving until we beat the virus.'

Biden, 77, grew animated when asked about Donald Trump's failures as president

Harris, 55, dodged questions about her previous attacks on Biden during the primary debates

Asked if he would shut the country down again, if scientists recommended it, he replied: 'I would shut it down. I would listen to the science.'

Biden said he had been 'pleading' with the president for 'a plan'.

He said: 'Somebody should be in charge of distributing the vaccine. It's about a plan. How?'

Biden said he was convinced he could win the election without campaigning as Trump has, with mass rallies.

Biden pointed out that people - such as former presidential candidate Herman Cain - have died after attending Trump's rallies.

'It's about being responsible,' he said.

In an ABC News/Ipsos poll taken August 11-12, Biden had 40 per cent favorability and in the same poll taken August 21-22  after the first-ever fully virtual Democratic National Convention  his approval jumped to 45 per cent.

Also before the convention, Biden had a net negative favorability rating, meaning more people disapproved of him than approved, a stat that has now flipped.

By comparison in the 2016 ABC News/Washington Post poll, then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's rating jumped 6 percentage points from before the convention to after.

Clintons favorability rating landed at 48 per cent, but her unfavorability rating still stood at 50 per cent.

One of Biden's most passionate moments was when asked about Trump's description of the neo-Nazi Charleston protesters as being 'very good people' on both sides.

'No president has ever said that,' he said, with a flash of anger.

Harris, 55, was asked about her attack on Biden during the debates, in a fiery row over racism.

Biden and Harris clashed repeatedly during the primary debates in the summer of 2019

'What is hurtful to me is that black families own one tenth of the wealth of white families,' she said.

She said it was 'hurtful' that systemic inequalities existed.

She said Biden had been a great vice president, and was her role model for how to do the job.

She dismissed the question of their previous debate stage rivalry as irrelevant, saying she was focused now on winning the election.

'In terms of the bond that Joe and I have around the issues that are at play in this election, based on our personal experiences, and that being one of probably the most profound and important, which is the dignity of human beings and their right to have health care, and not have it be a function of how much money they have,' she said.

'Joe Biden and I are completely aligned on the goal. Making sure everyone has healthcare. We have both gone through that, on a personal level.

Harris said she was not proposing eliminating private healthcare insurance.

Biden added: 'I don't think we have any disagreement on the basic question of what we have to do as a nation.'

Harris was asked about Biden's much-criticized May comment that African American Trump voters 'ain't black'.

Biden admitted on Sunday night: 'I shouldn't have said that.'

Harris said: 'Joe and I talk about, and frankly have talked about, over the years, but in connection with this race about the state of black America, he has a deep sense of awareness and knowledge about racial disparities, inequities and systematic racism.

'And Joe speaks the words and actually knows how to say the words "Black Lives Matter." Contrary to what the president of the United States, the current president of the United States, does which is to sow hate and division full time, has never spoken those words and will never speak the words "Black Lives Matter."

'So in this election, there is no question to me, that electing Joe Biden as president of the United States, means for the first time in the last four years having a president who takes on the issue of systemic racism and does something about it.'
As many as 40 stolen border collie and beagle puppies worth thousands of pounds have been rescued after police foiled a dog-napping raid.

Police were called after a tip-off told them a man was seen putting the dogs into the back of a van in Charlton Kings, near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, on Saturday afternoon.

Officers then arrested a man, 24, after tracking and stopping his vehicle on the motorway.

The puppies, miniature breeds worth thousands of pounds, were then taken to the RSPCA to be checked over.

As many as 40 stolen border collie and beagle puppies worth thousands of pounds have been rescued after police foiled a dog-napping raid

A Gloucestershire Police spokesman said: 'A man is in custody on suspicion of the theft of puppies thanks to a call from a member of the public who reported suspicious activity.

'Police were called to Beeches Road in Charlton Kings on Saturday following reports that a man was seen to have been loading a number of puppies into a van.

'Officers conducted enquiries into the vehicle before liaising with colleagues at West Mercia Police who located and stopped the van on the M6 before detaining the man.

Officers then arrested a man, 24, after tracking and stopping his vehicle on the motorway

The puppies, miniature breeds worth thousands of pounds, were then taken to the RSPCA to be checked over

'A 24-year-old man from Durham was arrested on suspicion of the theft of puppies and has been transported to custody in Gloucestershire where he remains at this time.

'Between 30 and 40 puppies were recovered from the van and have been taken to an RSPCA vet surgery for assessment.'

Detective Constable Dave Wise, of Mercia Police, tweeted: 'These are the stolen pups Gloucestershire Police, West Mercia Police and the RSPCA helped to rescue yesterday.'
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 18:34:23|Editor: huaxia

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NAIROBI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- A Kenyan investment expert said on Monday that closer Kenya-China financial technology (fintech) collaboration will boost bilateral commercial ties.

Daniel Mainye, senior manager for fintech, brand and innovation at Nairobi-based Cytonn Investments told Xinhua by phone that China is a critical partner of Kenya given that China is now one of Kenya's biggest trading partners.

"Fintech integration will smoothen trade by enabling merchants to pay seamlessly for goods from both countries and will result in a win-win relationship," Mainye said.

M-Pesa, a mobile phone money transfer platform in Kenya has already integrated with Alipay, a Chinese fintech company.

Mainye observed that the collaboration will also facilitate the Chinese business community to transfer funds to Kenya for investment purposes.

He added that the growth of Kenya's fintech sector will be accelerated through international partnerships.

"Kenya's huge diaspora which is scattered across the globe requires convenient payment methods to send money back home," he added.

According to the analyst, a number of Kenyan banks have already seen an opportunity of partnering with Chinese fintechs in order to serve the local Chinese community.

Mainye noted that fintech allows those outside formal financial institutions to make and receive payments even across borders.

He added that the fintech industry is playing a bigger role in the economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic as the public moves to adopt practices such as social distancing and other measures to contain the spread of the virus.

He observed that the digitalization of financial services also has other benefits for governments and the private sector as it enhances the efficiency of operations.

Mainye noted the government is also promoting the use of contactless financial services by directing fintech firms to remove charges for smaller mobile money transactions. Enditem
London: Researchers claim to have confirmed the world's first case of a coronavirus reinfection, in a discovery with far-reaching consequences for the fight against the pandemic.

The 33-year-old IT worker was struck down by the disease in Hong Kong during the first wave of the pandemic, but recovered and was discharged in mid-April. However, he tested positive again in mid-August  some 142 days later  after travelling through Spain and the United Kingdom.

Researchers analysed the genome sequence to confirm that the man had been infected by two different strains, effectively ruling out the possibility that his illness in August was related to the earlier bout.

The discovery is important because it adds to growing concerns that antibodies in some patients may only last as little as four months.
Guru Gram:

Tight security arrangement has been made and more than 1500 hundred police personnel deployed at all churches and malls in the city to ensure incident-free Christmas and New Year celebrations.

We have deployed more than 75 per cent police personnel in crowded areas, markets, malls and churches. We have also asked restaurant and bars owners to exercise zero tolerance against women crimes, Assistant Commissioner of Police Manish Sehgal.

We have also set up rapid action and quick response teams headed by DCP and ACP rank officials and launched a drive against drunk driving, Sehgal said.

Commissioner of Police Sandeep Khairwal will monitor the security situation.

To check crime against woman, we will start Operation Romeo drive on the eve of New Year, he said.

The Excise department has also constituted four teams headed by Assistant Excise and Taxation Officer (AETO) to keep tab on violations in night clubs across the city.

Rave party organizers will be under police radar, Sehgal said.
GENEVA - U.N.-mediated talks involving Syrian government, opposition and civil society envoys were put on hold after three participants turned up positive for COVID-19, just hours after the meetings started in Geneva on Monday, the United Nations said.

The office of U.N. Syria envoy Geir Pedersen said the three delegations had gotten off to a constructive first meeting before the talks were suspended. They are discussing a possible new constitution for the war-battered country  a step he has called a prospective door-opener to a final resolution of the countrys devastating nine-year civil war.

His office did not specify which delegation or delegations that the three participants were from.

The meeting, set to last through the week, is the first of its kind in nine months. The pandemic forced the postponement of an earlier meeting in March. Participants were tested for the coronavirus before and after arrival in Geneva, the U.N envoys office said.

Pedersen is hosting three 15-member teams from Syria, while major regional and world powers  Iran, Russia, Turkey and the United States  are expected to be present on the sidelines.

With a fragile cease-fire largely holding in the rebel-held region of Idlib, Pedersen said last week he is hoping to build trust and confidence in a U.N.-led process that has produced few concrete results so far. Hes also hoping for detainee releases and a nationwide cease-fire.

The Syrian war broke out in 2011, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the exile of millions from their homes. The opposition wants a new constitution, while the government says the current charter should be amended.

U.S. envoy for Syria James Jeffrey, who is in Geneva, noted this month a shift at least in tone from Syrian President Bashar Assad by acknowledging the U.N.-backed process in ways that he had not previously. Jeffrey said the United States will keep watch on whether the government has changed, at least tactically, in its approach to the talks.

A larger group of 150 delegates is also part of the process, but is not meeting this week.
A fire at Irans Natanz nuclear facility last month was the result of sabotage, the spokesman for Irans Atomic Energy Organisation Behrouz Kamalvandi told state TV channel al-Alam on Sunday.



The explosion at Natanz nuclear facility was a result of sabotage operations, security authorities will reveal in due time the reason behind the blast," Reuters cited him as saying.

"Iran has not opposed access to its nuclear facilities, but the IAEAs questions and allegations should be based on serious evidence and documents," Kamalvandi added.



Irans top security body in July said that the cause of the fire had been determined but would be announced later. Iranian officials said that the fire had caused significant damage that could slow the development of advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges.



The Natanz uranium-enrichment site, much of which is underground, is one of several Iranian facilities monitored by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog.



Some Iranian officials have said the fire may have been the result of cyber sabotage, and have warned that Tehran would retaliate against any country carrying out such attacks.



An article by Irans state news agency IRNA in July addressed what it called the possibility of sabotage by enemies such as Israel and the United States, although it stopped short of accusing either directly.



The IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said on Saturday he will make his first trip to Tehran in that role on Monday to pressure Iran to grant inspectors access to two suspected former atomic sites.



The IAEA suspects activities possibly related to developing nuclear weapons were carried out in the early 2000s at these sites. Iran insists its nuclear programme has no military dimensions.



Iranian officials said on Sunday that Grossis visit was not related to the U.S. push at the U.N. Security Council to reimpose international sanctions on Tehran, Irans state TV reported.
DUBLIN, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Coiled Tubing Market by Fleet (Operator, Region), Service (Well Intervention Service (Well Completions & Mechanical Operations, Well Cleaning & Pumping Operations) Drilling Service, Others), Application (Onshore, Offshore), Region - Global Forecast to 2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global coiled tubing market size is projected to reach USD 4.0 billion by 2025, from an estimated USD 3.0 billion in 2020, growing at a post COVID-19 CAGR of 5.8% during the forecast period.



The global coiled tubing industry is driven mainly by the growing demand for well intervention operations, redevelopment of mature fields, and advancements in shale developments. The increasing demand for larger diameter coiled tubing and the evolution of intelligent coiled tubing units are likely to offer lucrative opportunities for the market players over the next five years.



The onshore segment, by application, is expected to be the fastest-growing market from 2020 to 2025



The coiled tubing market is witnessing high demand from onshore applications as new well drilling activities are rising in onshore locations at a faster pace than in the offshore fields. Also, most of the onshore fields in the Middle East and North America are in their declining phase, where pumping operations and mechanical operations performed through coiled tubing can improve the production from reservoirs.



Additionally, the development of domestic shale gas and tight oil reserves drive the major surge in crude oil and natural gas production in North America. This has resulted in the improved efficiency of the operations for increasing production from oil & gas wells. This increase in well intervention activities leads to a rise in coiled tubing operations in onshore wells.



North America: The largest and the fastest-growing region in the global coiled tubing market.



North America is expected to dominate the global coiled tubing market between 2020 and 2025. The North American oil production is rising drastically, with a growth rate of 7.7% from 2017 to 2018. Moreover, the continuous shale activities in the region are driving the demand for well intervention operations. The upstream operators, such as Total, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Apache, also have a significant presence in North America. This creates more opportunities for oilfield service providers to capture long-term contracts.



Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction



2 Research Methodology

3 Executive Summary

3.1 Pre- and Post-Covid-19 Scenario Analysis

4 Premium Insights

4.1 Attractive Opportunities in the Coiled Tubing Market

4.2 Coiled Tubing Market, by Service

4.3 Coiled Tubing Market, by Application

4.4 Coiled Tubing Market, by Region

4.5 North American Coiled Tubing Market, by Application & Country



5 Market Overview

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Covid-19 Health Assessment

5.3 Road to Recovery

5.4 Covid-19 Economic Assessment

5.5 Market Dynamics

5.5.1 Drivers

5.5.1.1 Growing Demand for Well Intervention Operations is Driving the Coiled Tubing Market

5.5.1.2 Redevelopment of Mature Oilfields Demands Coiled Tubing Units for Production Enhancement

5.5.1.3 Advancements in Shale Oil Extraction Require More Coiled Tubing Operations

5.5.1.4 Rising Primary Energy Consumption from Asia-Pacific Will Boost the Coiled Tubing Market in the Region

5.5.2 Restraints

5.5.2.1 Risks Associated With Coiled Tubing Operations and Regulations Associated With Operational Safety Are Restraining the Market Growth

5.5.2.2 Wireline Operations, Which Are a Cheaper Substitute of Coiled Tubing Operations, Hinder the Growth of the Coiled Tubing Market

5.5.3 Opportunities

5.5.3.1 Increasing Exploration & Production Activities from New Discoveries Offer Lucrative Opportunities for the Coiled Tubing Market

5.5.3.2 Evolution of Intelligent Coiled Tubing Technologies

5.5.4 Challenges

5.5.4.1 Challenging Coiled Tubing Operations in Offshore Well Interventions & Drilling Pose Challenges for the Coiled Tubing Market

5.5.4.2 Impact of Covid-19 on Oil and Gas Production Activities

5.6 Adjacent and Interconnected Markets



6 Coiled Tubing Market, by Service

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Well Intervention

6.2.1 Well Completions & Mechanical Operations

6.2.1.1 Increasing Concerns for Improving Well Accessibility and Enhancing Production Are Expected to Drive the Well Completions & Mechanical Operations Market

6.2.2 Well Cleaning & Pumping Operations

6.2.2.1 Optimization of Mature Oil & Gas Reservoirs Drives the Demand for Well Cleaning & Pumping Operations

6.3 Drilling

6.3.1 Multilateral Well Drilling is Driving the Coiled Tubing Drilling Market

6.4 Others



7 Coiled Tubing Market, by Application

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Onshore

7.2.1 Onshore Shale Development in North America and Higher Number of Mature Onshore Oilfields in the Middle East Are Likely to Provide Opportunities for Coiled Tubing Service Providers

7.3 Offshore

7.3.1 Greater Logistical and Operational Challenges Are Affecting the Growth of Coiled Tubing Operations in Offshore Regions



8 Coiled Tubing Market, by Fleet

8.1 Introduction

8.2 by Region

8.2.1 North America

8.2.1.1 Demand for Coiled Tubing Operations from Shale Development in North America is the Major Reason for the Higher Number of Active Fleets in the Region

8.2.2 Europe

8.2.2.1 Europe Witnessed the Highest Utilization Rate for Coiled Tubing Fleets as Offshore Operations Are High in the Region

8.2.3 Asia-Pacific

8.2.3.1 Asia-Pacific is Expected to Increase the Highest Number of Fleet in the Next 5 Years as Production Activities in the Region Are Rising

8.2.4 South & Central America

8.2.4.1 High Demand for Well Intervention Services from Brazil and Mexico Were the Major Demand Generators for Coiled Tubing Units in South & Central America

8.2.5 Middle East

8.2.5.1 Redevelopment of the Mature Fields in the Middle East Creates An Enormous Demand for Coiled Tubing Services in the Region

8.2.6 Africa

8.2.6.1 Africa is Still in the Nascent Phase for the Coiled Tubing Market; Thus, the Fleet Count is Lower in the Region

8.3 by Operator

8.3.1 Introduction

8.3.2 Nextier Oilfield Solutions

8.3.3 Step Energy Services

8.3.4 Key Energy Services

8.3.5 Pioneer Energy Services

8.3.6 Basic Energy Services

8.3.7 Calfrac Well Services



9 Coiled Tubing Market, by Region

9.1 Introduction

9.2 North America

9.3 Europe

9.4 South & Central America

9.5 Asia-Pacific

9.6 Middle East

9.7 Africa



10 Competitive Landscape

10.1 Overview

10.2 Ranking of Players and Industry Concentration, 2019

10.3 Competitive Scenario

10.3.1 Mergers & Acquisitions

10.3.2 Contracts & Agreements

10.3.3 New Product Launch

10.3.4 Alliances/Collaborations/Joint Ventures/Partnerships

10.4 Competitive Leadership Mapping

10.4.1 Visionary Leaders

10.4.2 Innovators

10.4.3 Dynamic

10.4.4 Emerging



11 Company Profile

11.1 Halliburton

11.2 Schlumberger

11.3 Baker Hughes Company

11.4 Weatherford

11.5 Nextier Oilfield Solutions

11.6 RPC, Inc.

11.7 Step Energy Services

11.8 Superior Energy Services

11.9 Trican

11.10 Altus Intervention

11.11 National Energy Services Reunited (NESR)

11.12 Oilserv

11.13 Basic Energy Services

11.14 Oceaneering International

11.15 Calfrac Well Services

11.16 Key Energy Services

11.17 Nine Energy Services

11.18 Pioneer Energy Services

11.19 Legend Energy Services



12 Adjacent & Related Markets



13 Appendix



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/r0utc2

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

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Are we turning the corner? Is there light ahead? Can we discern traces of economic recovery?

Or is this a comparative calm before a storm that will be far more tumultuous than anything we have experienced in the past six months and test this error-prone Government to breaking point?

Lets look on the brighter side for a moment. Its likely that schools will finally reopen in England at the beginning of September. That will be a huge step towards normality.

The Prime Minister will have to show great statesmanship, as will European leaders. His room for compromise is limited since he cant give EU countries rights over our territorial waters, or accept the jurisdiction of the European Court

Granted, with Education Secretary Gavin Williamsons limp hand on the tiller and the teaching unions whingeing as per usual, anything could still go wrong.

Nonetheless, there are reasons for thinking that the Government will make it happen.

The Prime Minister is reported to have told allies that failure to reopen schools is not an option. Hes right.

Panic

And he was right last night to appeal to parents to send their children back to the classroom next week, saying that there is a moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely.

Incidentally, one wonders why the lugubrious chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, and colleagues could not have said a month or two ago what they have just declared  namely, that parents can send children back to school in the knowledge that they face an exceptionally small risk from Covid-19.

Lets not get too bogged down in the past, though. Enumerating the Governments mistakes during the pandemic can be a depressing business. The good news is that schools are probably going back.

While there are bound to be setbacks  inevitable outbreaks of the disease in a few schools, and doubtless much resulting panic  Professor Whittys belated optimism will very likely turn out to be justified.

But what if things go badly wrong on another front? That is a question considered in a Cabinet Office document leaked to The Sun On Sunday, which has been aptly dubbed the Doomsday Dossier. It sends shivers down my spine.

The Prime Minister is reported to have told allies that failure to reopen schools is not an option. Hes right. The PM is pictured in a classroom earlier this month

Emergency plans are being drawn up to protect the United Kingdom from the perfect storm of a second wave of Covid-19 during the winter months coinciding with a No-Deal Brexit at the end of December.

The dossier suggests that the double impact of a revival of the virus and a failure to get a free trade agreement with the EU could lead to public disorder, shortages and price increases.

An already weakened economy would tank. Troops might be put on the streets to deal with civil unrest.

Planners surmise that, in the absence of a deal, France will impose mandatory controls on UK goods from day one  i.e. January 1, 2021  and that between 40 and 70 per cent of hauliers travelling across the Channel are unprepared. Kent could become a lorry park.

The document reckons that the flow of goods between Dover and Calais might decline by 45 per cent for three months, leading to some medicines and food being in short supply. Three quarters of our medicine imports come through Dover.

Other unfortunate possible outcomes floated by the apocalyptic dossier include some cash-strapped town halls going bust, and airdrops of food and medicine being made to the Channel Islands.

Lorries are seen pictured lining up outside of Dover in March 2019 before Operation Slack to prepare for Dover border queues

What should we make of all this? My first thought was that the hair-raising passages about the dire consequences of a No-Deal Brexit may have been written by highly strung Remainer civil servants who have watched too many American disaster movies.

Of course, none of this might happen. Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, whose baby the dossier seems to be, says it is not a forecast or prediction of what will happen but rather a stretching scenario. It reflects a responsible government ensuring we are ready for all eventualities.

That sounds sensible, and it comes as a relief that, in a rather disorganised administration, there is some proper thinking. Notwithstanding my suspicions about overwrought Remainer officials, one would have to be bone-headed not to take these warnings seriously.

Its certainly feasible that Covid-19 might make a comeback. Indeed, it seems already to be doing so in some European countries, such as Spain, though the death rate appears to be significantly lower relative to the number of infections than when the virus first struck in March.

And there could be bottlenecks in Dover and other ports as a result of the French authorities applying tariffs and, dare one say it, acting in a characteristically petty and obstructive way.

So disaster may lie ahead. This Government could be on the verge of being tested even more than it has been during the Covid crisis, when it made a succession of unforced errors, most egregiously over testing and the rapid spread of the virus in care homes.

Fiasco

If one quarter of the Doomsday Dossier ever comes about, No 10 will have to demonstrate a strength of purpose and clarity of thought that have often been lacking in recent months. This is not the time for bluster or boosterism.

Yesterdays newspapers brought the latest crop of embarrassments for the Government. It transpires Gavin Williamson took a weeks holiday by the sea in the run-up to the examinations fiasco.

While he was away (aides insist he kept in touch via Zoom), the Scottish government ditched an algorithm-based system for predicting grades. Mr Williamson returned to work days before a similar scheme was introduced in England, precipitating an outcry followed by a U-turn.

Was this sensible behaviour? No, it was not. An equally frivolous attitude was evident in Education Minister Gillian Keegan taking a fortnights holiday in France from August 6. Throughout her stay she posted smug photographs on Instagram, some of which were liked by her boss, Gavin Williamson.

Somehow these two episodes symbolise the lack of serious intent sometimes visible at the heart of this Government  just as did Boris Johnsons failure to attend five consecutive meetings of Cobra in January and early February, when plans for combatting the impending pandemic were discussed.

Lethal

Thats in the past, and we mustnt hark on it. But is there any reason to suppose that the Government will be more focused if, as the Doomsday Dossier foresees, problems of almost unprecedented severity come flying towards it?

There will have to be compromise on both sides if there is to be a deal with the EU.

Brussels thinks it can treat us as though we are still a member, for example by maintaining unfettered access to our fishing waters.

Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, whose baby the dossier seems to be, says it is not a forecast or prediction of what will happen but rather a stretching scenario. It reflects a responsible government ensuring we are ready for all eventualities

Meanwhile, the Government wants the free-trade privileges of membership without any of the responsibilities.

The Prime Minister will have to show great statesmanship, as will European leaders.

His room for compromise is limited since he cant give EU countries rights over our territorial waters, or accept the jurisdiction of the European Court.

But theres little doubt a No-Deal Brexit would inflict a lethal economic blow.

As for Covid-19, if there is a second wave we will be better prepared, though there are still doubts about the effectiveness of testing. Whatever advice the likes of Professor Whitty may give, Mr Johnson surely recognises that another national lockdown would be suicidal.

Its hard to think of another peacetime leader who has faced such enormous challenges. Can Boris rise to the occasion? I dont know.

What I do know is that, as he gets his feet back under the Downing Street desk, it is the next six months which will define his prime ministership. They may also make or break this country.
The woman at the centre of AMP's sexual harassment scandal says she welcomes the resignation of chairman David Murray and the demotion of AMP Capital boss Boe Pahari but has renewed her calls for the wealth giant to release details of her complaint.

"It gives me some comfort to see that AMP has today acknowledged the seriousness of my complaint and is moving to try and address the culture of the company," said former AMP executive Julia Szlakowski, who accused Mr Pahari of harassment in 2017.

AMP chairman David Murray has resigned. Credit:Louie Douvis

"That work, however, still has a long way to go, and thats why I am continuing to call for AMP to release my complaint, the findings document and all other documents relating to the reports commission."

The sudden departure of Mr Murray and AMP director John Fraser, a former Treasury secretary, came after AMP's major shareholders banded together last week, threatening to call a special company meeting to oust Mr Murray from the board. The shareholder threat came after weeks of mounting political and investor pressure over AMP's handling of the issue.
Belarusians Pack Minsk Streets Calling For Lukashenka's Ouster

By RFE/RL's Belarus Service August 23, 2020

MINSK -- Tens of thousands of people have packed the streets of the Belarusian capital, Minsk, for a rally against the disputed reelection of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and a postelection crackdown amid a heavy military presence in the city and a fresh warning from the army.

The crowd, estimated at more than 100,000 people, filled the streets of the city center on August 23 for what is being billed as the March of New Belarus as protests entered a 15th day in the Eastern European country of 9.5 million.

Thousands were gathered on Independence Square, waving white and red Belarusian flags and unfurling long banners with white and red stripes.

Protesters chanted "Leave!" and "Get out!" as they called for Lukashenka to step down after 26 years of authoritarian rule.

There were no reports of violence.

As people began dispersing, Lukashenka was shown in a video posted on Telegram arriving at Independence Palace by helicopter. He stepped off the aircraft wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a rifle.

Ahead of the rally, the Defense Ministry announced that the army would take responsibility for protecting national memorials from protesters.

Describing the protesters as "fascists," the Defense Ministry said in a statement that the memorials, specifically those dedicated to victims of World War II, must not be desecrated. The ministry warned against any violation of peace and order in such places, writing in all capital letters, "You will have the army to deal with now, not the police."

The statement came as army personnel were spotted being transported into Minsk in military transporters.

Users of a number of large network operators had problems connecting to the Internet.

Mobile operator A1 said in a message to subscribers posted on Facebook that at the request of state authorities its network had been "significantly reduced in some areas of the city."

It apologized and said it hoped for a speedy resumption of service.

Protests have been taking place on the streets of Belarus since Lukashenka, in power since 1994, was declared the winner of the August 9 poll. More than 7,000 have been detained and hundreds beaten by police. The EU and the United States have criticized the vote and condemned the postelection crackdown.

Protests also took place on August 23 in the Belarusian city of Mogilev as well as outside Belarus in Lithuania and Kyiv, where human chains were formed.

Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the opposition candidate who left for Lithuania after the election and claimed to have won from 60 to 70 percent of the vote, said on August 22 that Belarusians must "struggle for their rights" and not be distracted by Lukashenka's claims that the country was under military threat.

"We are people of Belarus and we are a majority and we will not step away. We are not afraid of them any more," she told the AFP news agency.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on August 23 accused Belarusian opposition members who left Belarus of seeking "bloodshed," according to the RIA-Novosti news agency.

He added that Moscow was calling for the launch of a genuinely broad national dialogue in Belarus and said Russia would accept any decision of the Belarusian authorities with regard to dialogue with the opposition.

But he said the Belarusian people "will decide for themselves how to get out of this situation."

He also said there are "clear signs of a normalization" in Belarus, and a proposal on constitutional reform was "a quite promising path."

On August 22, Tsikhanouskaya's team said that the No. 2 U.S. diplomat would meet Tsikhanouskaya in Lithuania, where she has remained since the disputed election.

No election in Belarus under Lukashenka has ever been deemed free or fair by the West.

Meanwhile, the Nasha Niva media site said the body of Mikita Kryutsov was found in a forest near Minsk with signs of multiple beatings. He was reported missing after taking part in protests in Minsk on August 12.

So far, two people have been confirmed killed in the postelection protests in Belarus.

With reporting by Current Time, Belsat, AP, Reuters, and AFP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/belarusians-gather- for-anti-lukashenka-rally-as-army- issues-warning/30798061.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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New Delhi, Aug 24 : Even as India finds itself in a confrontation with China and Pakistan on its borders, its armed forces will carry out drills with these countries' militaries next month in Russia.

An Indian military contingent will take part in "Kavkaz 2020" ("Caucasus 2020"), strategic command-post exercise next month where various countries, including China and Pakistan, would take part.

The exercise will witness the participation of over 12,500 troops, including from Russia.

The Indian contingent would include around 180 troops and officers from across infantry, artillery, mechanised, and armoured forces along with Special Forces, air defence and signals. The contingent would also include personnel from the Indian Navy and the Indian Air Force.

China is sending an army contingent, and also a naval deployment of three ships to the exercise.

The drill will be held in Astrakhan region of south Russia between September 15 and 26.

"The aim and scope of the exercise is improving cooperation. The idea is for militaries to prepare for joint action with units of armies of foreign states," said a senior Defence Ministry officer.

Apart from Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) members India, China, Pakistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the exercise will also have participation of troops from Mongolia, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Belarus, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Contingents from Abkhazia, and South Osetia, which are partially recognised by states by Russia and a few other nations, will also be present.

The participating nations will strictly follow Covid-19 protocols. The participants will spend 14 days in quarantine preceding their departure and will be tested for Covid again on arrival in Russia.

The exercise comes amid an over three month long standoff between India and China at the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh. Despite several levels of dialogue, there has not been any breakthrough and the deadlock continues.

There have been several clashes between troops of both sides and the most brutal took place on June 15 in Galwan Valley where India lost 20 of its men while there was undisclosed number of casualties on the Chinese side.
When Eduardo Guzman-Diazs temp agency job at a major Toronto bank fell victim to budget cuts, the recent graduate initially took it in stride. He had been a temp for one year and 11 months, and he was ready for something better.

Then, he said, came the bill.

The temp agency that hired him now said he owed them $30,000 in damages for leaving his two-year assignment early. For Guzman-Diaz, then 26, the invoice was almost as much as hed earned his entire first year on the job.

Ive never seen that much money at once, he said. It felt really gut-wrenching. Like, What now?

Guzman-Diazs temp agency, FDM Group, is now the subject of a complaint to the Ontario Labour Relations Board claiming the $30,000 fee violates provincial employment laws  and represents an unconscionable threat to young individuals who were hoping to embark on a career.

In response to detailed questions from the Star, a spokesperson for FDM Group said the company could not comment on an an ongoing legal process.

Suffice to say that FDM Group operates to the highest ethical standards and is widely recognized as a leading employer, the emailed statement said.

Temp agencies in Ontario are not allowed to charge fees for finding employees work, according to the Ministry of Labours website. Agencies also cant charge fees for providing resume help or interview preparation.

According to submissions made by Parkdale Community Legal Services on behalf of Guzman-Diaz and three other former employees, FDMs employment contract committed them to two-year placements as business and IT consultants at financial institutions like the Royal Bank of Canada and Fidelity Investments. If they left early, their contract said they could be liable for breach of contract and associated damages to the agency, the submission says.

Guzman-Diaz describes that as a scare tactic. Not long after receiving the temp agencys invoice, he contacted the Parkdale clinic for legal assistance. Lawyer John No said once he got involved, the temp agency didnt pursue the fee.

But No, who has handled several other complaints about FDM, remained concerned about the practices impact on workers who were often young people and newcomers.

They are desperate to accept whatever job that they can get, he said.

Employees received training from FDM Group and were paid minimum wage during that period, the submissions to the board say. Computer science graduate Guzman-Diaz said the training  which included tutorials on how to use spreadsheets  wasnt really beneficial.

The stuff they taught there was really preliminary, he said. It was just, I have to be here.

Guzman-Diaz said he began training at the end of August 2017, and said he was required to attend the academy until he received a job placement. He received a temporary offer from RBC in January 2018.

He said he signed FDMs employment contract despite the damages clause because he felt he had no other choice. He had moved from St. Catharines to Toronto and invested months in the training program FDM required of him, all in the hopes of landing a job.

I was hoping to get something out of it, he said.

Numerous workers over the past two years have filed complaints to the Ministry of Labour about the issue, documents obtained by the Star show.

In 2018, a worker who left her placement at RBC early was told she owed FDM $30,000 to recoup training costs. After she filed a complaint, the Ministry of Labour ruled the fee was prohibited under the Employment Standards Act.

After it lost the 2018 complaint, FDM sought an official review of the ministrys decision. Following discussions with the provinces Director of Employment Standards, the temp agency agreed to change its employment contract to make it clearer that employees were accepting potential damages for breach of their two-year contract, according to ministry documents seen by the Star.

At least four more workers have since filed claims about FDMs fees  but the ministry has rejected them, according to the complaints obtained by the Star.

In one case, FDMs lawyer successfully argued the $30,000 invoice was sent out in error and told the ministry the agency was not seeking repayment. In another case, FDM again successfully argued to the ministry that the charges were not a prohibited fee but were instead to recoup damages to reputation and revenue.

No said even the threat of repayment creates two kinds of victims: employees who leave their job and risk being hit with a massive invoice, and workers who are too afraid to leave.

Whether they call it a fee or damages, it is what it is. Its to scare people, he said.

RBC said in a statement that it could not comment on ongoing legal proceedings. Fidelity Investments did not respond to the Stars request for comment.

No said he is disappointed in the governments response to the issue so far, which is why he has filed an application for review at the provincial labour board.

The Ministry of Labour (initially) agreed with us that this was illegal, he said. FDM changed their wording slightly  and suddenly its allegedly legal now, even though its exactly the same $30,000 fee.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Labour said it would be inappropriate to comment as this matter is before the Ontario Labour Relations Board.

FDM Group has outlets across North America and Europe. In the U.K., two of the companys competitors are currently facing legal action for charging exit fees, said barrister Jolyon Maugham, who launched the case. In 2018, the Guardian newspaper reported that an FDM worker faced a demand for 18,000 pounds ($30,000) after trying to leave a few months after completing his training.

FDMs 2019 annual report describes the company as a leading graduate employer and says its model of providing workers with comprehensive and role-specific training before placing them with clients generated more than $462 million in revenue that year. The company placed 1,277 temporary business and IT consultants at North American clients in 2019, according to its annual report.

According to the submissions to the Ontario labour board, Guzman-Diaz and the other workers hired by FDM were paid a base salary of $30,000 in their first year, plus a $40 bonus for each day worked. Guzman-Diaz said a colleague at RBC once showed him the rate FDM charged the bank: $70 an hour per temporary worker, or roughly $130,000 annually.

Clearly, they made a lot of money, he said of the temp agency.

No said he hopes the Ministry of Labour will intervene on behalf of workers at the labour board proceedings scheduled for September.

What is disconcerting about it is, how many people has this affected? he said.

FDM is not just making money off these people through their labour. Theyre making money off them leaving.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is concerned about universities in Michigan reopening this fall, she told reporters in Detroit Monday.

Im concerned. Theres no question that anytime were congregating, it is inherently riskier behavior. We also know that that age range is where were seeing a lot of our growth, Whitmer said.

Many colleges and universities in Michigan plan to reopen for in-person instruction or a mix of in-person and virtual instruction this fall. Some, like Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University, have postponed in-person instruction in favor of remote options.

Related: Eastern Michigan University delays move-in 3 weeks, citing other campus coronavirus outbreaks

Whitmer praised those decisions and said she was talking regularly with the leaders of the universities.

I was glad to see Michigan State take the action they did, Eastern as well. This is, I think, one of those moments where were going to see if these protocols work and Im hoping people stay safe and were successful, Whitmer said.

As the parent of a university freshman, Whitmer said, this is personal on top of all the other concerns I have as the governor.

Other universities plan to move forward with in-person instruction. At the University of Michigan, professors recently protested that decision, leading chants and marching on campus.

Related: University of Michigan professors have no confidence in administrations plan to contain coronavirus

According to state data, 22,644 of the states 106,808 total cases have been in people age 10 to 29. In Washtenaw County, where the University of Michigan is located, 45% of growth in late July and early August came from cases in people under the age of 30.

Related: Young people account for 45% of new coronavirus cases in Washtenaw County

COVID-19 PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus.

Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible.

Use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home (door handles, faucets, countertops) and carry hand sanitizer with you when you go into places like stores.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has also issued executive orders requiring people to wear face coverings over their mouth and nose while in public indoor and crowded outdoor spaces. See an explanation of what that means here.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

For more data on COVID-19 in Michigan, visit https://www.mlive.com/coronavirus/data/.

Related stories:

The key to safety on college campuses this fall? Student willpower to avoid parties

Mid-Michigan universities stick to opening plans after MSU nixes in-person classes over coronavirus

Young people account for 45% of new coronavirus cases in Washtenaw County

Eastern Michigan University delays move-in 3 weeks, citing other campus coronavirus outbreaks
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:27:47|Editor: huaxia

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YANGON, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The total number of COVID-19 cases in Myanmar has risen to 474, with 10 more locally transmitted cases and one imported case reported on Monday night, according to a release from the Ministry of Health and Sports.

Of the newly confirmed patients, five of them had travelling history to Sittwe township of Rakhine state in the past 14 days, four of them had close contact with recently confirmed patients and one of them did not have either recent travel history or close contact with the confirmed patients while the other one was a returnee from Singapore, the release said.

So far, a total of 81 local transmission cases were reported in Rakhine state since Aug. 16, the ministry's figures said.

Myanmar government sent to Sittwe township 24 volunteer health workers to help fight against the COVID-19.

A total of 146,037 samples were tested for COVID-19 so far and 7,280 patients are under investigation at present, the ministry's figures said.

According to the ministry's figures, 341 patients have recovered from the disease so far.

Myanmar reported its first two positive cases of COVID-19 on March 23 and six deaths have been reported so far. Enditem
Last week, some 45 refugees and migrants died in the worst shipwreck this year off Libyas coast.

The Libyan Red Crescent has retrieved the bodies of 22 refugees and migrants off the coastal town of Zwara on Sunday, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said, likely to be from a shipwreck that took place last week.

On Wednesday, the IOM and the UN refugee agency said at least 45 refugees and migrants, including five children, died in the worst shipwreck reported so far this year off Libyas coast.

Safa Msehli, spokesperson for the IOM in Geneva, told AFP news agency on Sunday it was possible the 22 bodies were from that same sinking, given the reported location of the shipwreck.

The bodies retrieved today were all African males. We still dont have information on the nationalities, she added.

On Sunday, AlarmPhone, an activist network alerting authorities of boats in distress in the Mediterranean, reported that three more shipwrecks took place in the central Mediterranean between August 17 and August 20.

After days spent collecting testimonies from survivors, speaking to relatives of the missing people and cross-checking, we can now confirm at least four shipwrecks took place in the central Mediterranean between 17 and 20 August, it said.

Several bodies have washed ashore the Mediterranean coast since.

At least 497 refugees and migrants are known to have perished on the route so far this year, according to the IOMs Missing Migrants project. Authorities stress that the actual figure was likely much higher.

Libya acts as a major gateway for Africans hoping to reach Europe.

There are more than 636,000 refugees and migrants currently in Libya, according to IOM. Fighting in the country endangers them as they wait to cross the sea in hope of reaching Europe, across one of the deadliest migration routes in the world.

The first shipwreck (16-17.08), was not just a shipwreck. People were shot at by a group of 5 men, and their boat caught fire. 45 people were killed. Those who did survive are alive only because a local fisherman rescued them. We collected some of of the survivors' voices: pic.twitter.com/Ne0MeFJETZ  Alarm Phone (@alarm_phone) August 24, 2020

Since 2014, more than 20,000 refugees and migrants have died at sea while trying to reach Europe from Africa.

In addition to the casualty figures are the ones forcibly returned from Europe, especially to Libya, described as hell by those who survived the ordeal on their transit.

Since February 2017, at least 36,000 people have been intercepted by the Libyan coastguard and returned to the North African country, UN figures show.

An Associated Press investigation revealed the European Union sent more than 327.9 million euros ($373.8m) to Libya, largely channelled through UN agencies.

The EU has also reportedly spent more than 90 million euros ($100m) in funding and training the Libyan coastguard to stop the crossings.

The Europeans let people drown and take them to Libya, because it is easy for them, Alarmphone quoted one of the survivors as saying.

I cant believe what happened to us. We drowned and there was fire everywhere. Nobody came. Some ship couldve saved us. But no one came. Were still alive thanks to the fishermen who saved us.

Additional reporting by Faras Ghani
Stephani Conley left her job at DoorDash in March when her six-year-old son, who is autistic, had to stop attending his therapy sessions due to the coronavirus pandemic. Soon after, her husband, who works for a pharmacy, saw his hours cut in half.

Conley, 37, who also has two teenage children, filed an unemployment claim on March 21, hoping to access some much-needed relief for her family. For months, she heard nothing from the Oregon Employment Department.

With the departments phone lines hopelessly overloaded, Conley searched for help on Facebook. There, she found a group of other Oregon independent contractors and self-employed individuals navigating the unemployment process. They became her support system.

By June, Conley and her family were struggling to keep up with their bills. A week before her husband was scheduled to receive his paycheck, Conley realized she didnt have enough money for groceries. She got up the courage to write about her situation in the Facebook groups weekly Pay it Forward post, where individuals can ask for help or support others in need.

Within hours, Conley had received $175 from other group members, none of whom she had ever met in person.

Its really amazing to see people reach out to their community and help out like that, Conley said. It really has given me hope in people. There are really amazing people out there.

PAYING IT FORWARD

Portland resident Sean ORiordan founded the Facebook group in March after he lost his job as a technical artistic director due to the pandemic. He hoped to create a space for independent contractors and self-employed individuals, who became newly eligible for unemployment benefits when Congress passed the CARES Act in March, to come together and help each other through the unemployment process. Over 3,000 people joined the group.

By May, Oregons backlog of unemployment claims in the new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which Congress set up for individuals who wouldnt qualify for regular unemployment, was well on its way to ballooning to 70,000. Many of the people in the Facebook group were starting to worry about how they would pay their bills without knowing when, or if, their unemployment checks would come through.

Thats when ORiordan had an idea. He wrote a post offering to donate a couple hundred dollars to those that needed the money most. It wouldnt cover rent or any big expenses, but he hoped he could help a few people pay for groceries, medications or diapers.

Soon, others were offering to contribute as well. It quickly developed into a weekly program where group members could either ask for help or donate money to support others within the community. ORiordan just asked that the recipients of the small gifts pay it forward when they could.

Thats exactly what Conley did. When three months of backlogged checks arrived in the mail in early July, she went in search of ORiordans pay it forward post, so she could do her part to support the group that lifted her up.

Some people have contributed to the program, even as theyve been waiting for their own unemployment checks to come through.

Portland resident Chaela Manning, 56, applied for unemployment insurance on March 13 after her contract job as a program director at a state prison was not renewed due to the pandemic. She didnt receive any payments until mid-August.

But Manning had put away some money to pay her taxes. She dipped into that savings to send money to a member of the group who needed to buy baby formula.

When people posted that they really needed help, I was sometimes able to help them, Manning said. It felt like I had more control over my situation by being able to help someone else.  On a personal level, it was understanding that other people are experiencing the same stress and fear that I am, but they dont have any backup money.

ORiordan doesnt know exactly how much money has been donated through the program since he started it on May 26, but he estimates that its in the thousands of dollars.

Its been pretty much every week, ORiordan said. Thats been heartening to see. Everybody else is still having problems too, but they maybe had $25 that day to be able to help someone out. Thats one of the best outcomes of the group. We all were able to get in touch with our humanity.

DELAYS AT THE EMPLOYMENT DEPARTMENT

Yet, ORiordan expressed frustration that the program was needed in the first place.

Close to 200,000 jobless claims remained unpaid for weeks during the heart of the pandemic as Oregon dealt with backlogs in both their regular unemployment and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) programs. After clearing a backlog of 100,000 regular unemployment claims, the state announced in early August that it had cleared its massive backlog of unprocessed PUA claims as well.

But processing claims isnt the same as paying them. Tens of thousands of unemployed workers are still waiting to have their claims adjudicated. And while the employment department released a new weekly Google form in July that has helped to speed up the payments of PUA claims, issues continue to hamper the program. Just last week, David Gerstenfeld, interim director of Oregons employment department, said the department was working to address an issue around PUA claimants having problems with login credentials.

While ORiordan said he understands that the state faced real challenges in responding to an unprecedented flood of new claims at the start of the pandemic, he said that doesnt change the fact that people have faced significant hardships because of the delays. Last week, the Oregon Legislature released $35 million in funds to pay $500 to individuals still waiting on unemployment benefits. The funds were exhausted in less than three days.

I understand (the employment departments) issues and problems, ORiordan said. I get it. However, people still need insulin, people still need food. So, thats tempered with the reality of how the broken system really hurt people. If it wasnt so destructive, I could be a little more constructive with it, but it was really harmful to a lot of people.

Manning said she was especially bothered to learn that state leaders and the employment department failed to upgrade their antiquated computer system for years, despite receiving federal funding and repeated warnings that they needed to act.

Im bitter and Im angry, Manning said. All of sudden their system is crashing. If they could have brought it up to date, it may not have ended up this way.

Still, the communities that have come together in online forums and groups have been a bright spot for many as theyve navigated the dysfunctional unemployment system.

Milwaukie resident Kate Reyes, a self-employed web developer and graphic designer who lost work during the pandemic, said she was able to find multiple online groups that had programs where members could send small donations to others in need, including the pay it forward program that ORiordan set up.

Reyes, 42, said she contributed to the weekly program after she started receiving her unemployment payments. But weeks later, after her payments unexpectedly stopped, she found herself in need of cash to help pay for groceries. She posted in the group. It didnt take long for someone to send her $20.

I feel like its so much more than money, Reyes said. Its acknowledgement and appreciation, and that means so much more.

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
VALDOSTA, Ga., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- To mark its opening in Valdosta, Brazils Waxing Center, a full-body professional waxing salon for women and men, will host its biggest-ever giveaway. Guests who book an appointment before September 24th will be entered to win one of ten free Brazilians or one year of free waxing.

Brazils Waxing Center Promo Image

Brazils Waxing Center is a full-service waxing company offering friendly, clean, and affordable waxing with an all-inclusive body-positive message. Brazils specifically supports those that other waxing centers forget with no maximum weight requirements and affordable pricing to take waxing from a luxury item to part of your monthly maintenance regime. Other than the giveaways, Brazils offers discounts to new clients and a budget-friendly membership program for existing clients.

"We are thrilled to introduce Brazils Waxing Center to Valdosta and we're passionate supporters of their local community and military  Brazils has always prided itself in being accessible to all body types, genders, and income brackets," said Edward Blocker, CEO. "We've already received a warm welcome from the Valdosta community, and we can't wait to open our doors and start waxing!"

With the recent announcement of its expansion across Florida and Georgia, Brazils Waxing Center seeks to become a landmark in Valdosta, with guests soon able to have all their waxing needs met in one place at prices they can afford. The location sits conveniently at 2418 Bemiss Rd, Valdosta, GA 31602, and is open every weekday from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekends.

When asked about the giveaway, Mr. Blocker commented, "We are so passionate about supporting the local community and proud of the service that we provide, that I felt it was important to reward those who give us a shot. We know we provide best-in-class service and we wanted to celebrate our new store in a big way."

Other recent community service initiatives have included providing free waxing to select military members after the COVID-19 crisis and offering a 20% discount to military families and veterans.

Brazils Waxing Center  Valdosta is currently open. Anyone who books an appointment before September 24, 2020, will be entered to win a free Brazilian or one year of free waxing. Brazils also offers $35 new client Brazilians and Unlimited Brazilians with 15% off all products and additional services for $39 a month for women and $49 a month for men.

About Brazils Waxing Center

Brazils Waxing Center is a professional, clean, and affordable waxing salon providing full-body waxing to women and men. Their unique six-step process provides maximum effectiveness of hair removal and minimum discomfort. Their technicians are certified and approachable. The salon is a body-positive zone.

Visit Brazilswaxingcenter.com or call (229) 262-3720. You can also find Brazils Waxing Center on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Media Contact: Alicia Lyons

Brazils Waxing Center

646-248-3926

[email protected]

SOURCE Brazils Waxing Center
Ms Bolaji Ayinde-Sekoni, a Regent University College of Science and Technology alumna has been selected for the Sunlight-Unilever Women Empowerment initiative.



The Sunlight-Unilever Women Empowerment Initiative is aimed at recognizing and celebrating leading women who play instrumental roles in empowering women in their different careers.



Ms Ayinde-Sekoni, the Founder and Creative Director of Nouva Couture, graduated from Regent in 2012 with a BSc. in Management with Computing.



A statement issued in Accra by Mr Benjamin Larbi, the Acting Head, Communications Unit, Regent University and copied to the Ghana News Agency said Ms Ayinde-Sekoni began her journey while studying as an undergraduate.



It said in 2019, Ms Bolaji was among five female entrepreneurs in Nigeria who were enlisted in a nation-wide multimedia campaign by Unilever Nigeria Sunlight.



The five female entrepreneurs selected as part of the Sunlight brands campaign were drawn from various industries, it said.



They included Ms Olubunmi Aboderin-Talabi, the Founding Publisher, Clever Clogs Books; Bolaji Ayinde-Sekoni, Creative Director, Nouva Couture; Ms Ifeoma Okoye, Founder PaintedNail.



Ms Bella Rose Okojie, a morning show host at City 105.1 FM, as well as Nelly Agbogu, founder, Naija Brand Chick and Nellies Nigeria. They each shared their stories of how they had made it their mission to empower women.



It said asides their recognition and their stories shared, the collaboration led to the creation of a special collection dubbed: The Sunlight Collection, which was launched at the 2019 Lagos Fashion Week event.



Nouva Couture, established in 2010, had over the years, grown to become an esteemed fashion house in Nigeria, with a number of celebrity clients, including Nollywood star Omotola Keinde.



At Nouva Couture, 60 percent per cent of our staff are women, we provide them with the tools and environment that allows them to grow into confident and empowered professionals, she revealed.



I make an effort to support one young woman every year, provide her financial support and also mentoring where needed.



"I strongly believe that female empowerment should be centered around financial independence, and at Nouva Couture, we walk this talk, Bolaji emphasized."



Coming from a family of strong entrepreneurs, empowerment has always been important to me, Ms Ayinde-Sekoni stated.



My mum taught my sisters and I all we know, and I plan to pass this same empowerment spirit to my daughter, she added.



Female empowerment is at the heart of everything I do and partnering with sunlight, a brand that encourages and empowers women to empower other women makes this campaign worth the while, she said.



Bolaji describes herself as a mother, wife, and fashion entrepreneur.



Through initiatives such as this, as well as programmes like Shakti, which has provided economic empowerment for over 3000 women in the rural areas of Nigeria, the Unilever Sunlight brand continues to work towards building more inclusive African societies.

Source: GNA









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Back in June, the GOP released a working draft of their 2020 election platform that was literally the same as their 2016 agenda. This included passages like (emphasis added):

The survival of the internet as we know it is at risk. Its gravest peril originates in the White House, the current occupant of which has launched a campaign, both at home and internationally, to subjugate it to agents of government. The Middle East is more dangerous now than at any time since the Second World War. Whatever their disagreements, presidents of both parties had always prioritized America's national interests, the trust of friendly governments, and the security of Israel. That sound consensus was replaced with impotent grandstanding on the part of the current President and his Secretaries of State. The results have been ruinous for all parties except Islamic terrorists and their Iranian and other sponsors.

It similarly blamed the "current President" for things like "a social and cultural revolution" and a "huge increase in the national debt." Oops.

Fortunately  or not, I don't know  the GOP made some updates before releasing the official platform in time for the start of the Republican National Convention. And that brand new 1-page official agenda is:

We hate Obama/Biden, we support Trump, and we will continue to support Trump's agenda.

No, seriously, that's it.

WHEREAS, The Republican National Committee (RNC) has significantly scaled back the size and scope of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte due to strict restrictions on gatherings and meetings, and out of concern for the safety of convention attendees and our hosts;



WHEREAS, The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement;



WHEREAS, All platforms are snapshots of the historical contexts in which they are born, and parties abide by their policy priorities, rather than their political rhetoric;



WHEREAS, The RNC, had the Platform Committee been able to convene in 2020, would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party's strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration;



WHEREAS, The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed policies of the Obama-Biden Administration, rather than providing the public with unbiased reporting of facts; and



WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it



RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda;



RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;



RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration; and



RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.

This sadly speaks volumes about the emptiness of the GOP Death Cult, who are nothing without pandering to Trump's base. Frustratingly, this is also why they will all defend him to the death  because they actually lose everything without him.
Losing sleep over your finances and getting angry or emotional wont make the situation better. Instead, these common-sense techniques will help reduce money stress starting today, and empower you to take control. They also work really well even when were not feeling threatened by a global pandemic. As always, involve your spouse in this process; you need to be aligned with your finances or your stress will grow, not shrink.

Look at your accounts. Dont hide from them

Awareness is the first step to reducing money stress. Log in and review your banking and credit accounts, alongside your CRA My Account, which contains information about taxes and your government benefits (which may be in flux as CERB gets replaced this fall). Note the balances and important updates or notifications. If your blood pressure starts to creep up, try to let the stress roll over you. You need to look, before you can make a plan to tweak and improve the situation.

Streamline

If during the above process you uncover that you have a lot of accounts scattered everywhere, which can be tough to manage, acknowledge the challenge, and over the next few weeks, start to streamline and reduce the accounts to only whats necessary. Fewer accounts saves money on fees and allows you to keep better tabs on your finances.

Assess your money situation now, and then do it regularly

What do you think needs to change, now that youve faced the reality of your accounts? If youre staring at overdraft balances, trimming your expenses is necessary, so make a list and start to tackle them. Note that non-essential spending tends to be easiest to cut  subscriptions, takeout, etc. If increasing your income through a side hustle seems to be the best approach, draft up a business road map and actions to test it out. Note that a side hustle doesnt always need to be a new business idea. It could simply be a part-time gig driving a Lyft on weekends, or tutoring in the evenings. Just remember to set aside money for income taxes if your side hustle pays you in pre-tax dollars.

Use technology to your advantage

Set up your bills to be paid automatically on the day they are due (not before). Use a downloadable template or budgeting app to track your spending. Create a calendar entry in your phone to review your upcoming monthly expenses, and the previous months digital statements. Sign up for a free credit report and fraud alerts. If this seems like a lot of work, trust me  its going to get easier after these systems are in place.

Save for an emergency

The pandemic has shown a heightened need for reserve funds in the event that we lose work or have unexpected expenses. If youve never set aside money for an emergency, now is the time to do so, and create some peace of mind. This is best achieved through an automatic transfer from your chequing to your emergency savings account either daily, weekly or on payday. It takes time to build this fund, so just stick with it!

Invest in your future

When I was 17, I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show talking about how important it is for young people to learn healthy saving habits. My fellow guest was a woman named Marcia and her claim to fame was amassing $650,000 in retirement savings as a single mom, making less than $40,000 per year. One of her strategies was setting aside approximately $10 per day for her investments, from the moment she got her first job, until retirement at age 65.

The purpose of sharing this story with you is investing for retirement can be done with small amounts of money; the equivalent of a latte or sandwich purchase. So, if youre thinking about getting started, see what you can do to free up a small daily amount of money to put toward your future.

Stop comparing yourself to others

The consumption culture we live in is hard on our mental health as well as our finances. Do whats right for your finances, not because someone else is driving that decision, but because you genuinely care about the thing youre spending on or saving for. Another thing to remember is that statistically, the luxurious lives that people post about on social media are backed by a lot of consumer debt, and debt is extremely bad for stress.

Learn more about it, and maybe get some help

No one is born with financial knowledge. Its learned. The more you know, the greater your financial empowerment. You dont need to be a pro at this stuff, but you should try to learn enough so you feel confident that you understand the decisions you are making with your day-to-day spending. Its empowering to be able to assess important factors when it comes to debt (interest, payment terms, etc.), picking investments (risk tolerance, fees and historical rate of return) and whos qualified to give you advice.

Read about money weekly. Talk to advisers. Sign up for money courses. Read the educational materials your bank sends you.

These techniques will not completely eliminate your financial worry, and thats probably a good thing. You need to have a healthy tension between you and your money so that youre curious and continuously trying to improve your situation.
White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway and her husband George Conway arrive for a candlelight dinner at Union Station on the eve of the 58th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, U.S., January 19, 2017.

Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor to President Donald Trump, will leave the White House at the end of the month, saying she wants to spend more time with her children.

An administration official told NBC News that Conway told Trump about her decision Sunday evening in the Oval Office. The official said the president expressed support for her decision.

"This is completely my choice and my voice," Conway said in a statement. "In time, I will announce future plans. For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama."

Conway, who has four children, is one of Trump's longest-serving senior advisors, serving as his campaign manager in 2016.

Her husband, George Conway, is also leaving his role at The Lincoln Project, a group run by Republican operatives who oppose Trump. He also emphasized his desire to "devote more time to family matters," while reiterating his support for the organization.

George Conway, a frequent vocal critic of the president, also said he would be taking a Twitter hiatus.

The Washington Post first reported the news.

The announcements come on the eve of the Republican National Convention and a little more than two months before the presidential election.

The administration official and another source familiar with the matter told NBC News that Kellyanne Conway is still expected to speak at the RNC on Wednesday as scheduled.

While George has persistently condemned Trump on Twitter, Kellyanne has been one of the president's most ardent defenders. The couple's contrasting views have often become the subject of media attention.

"We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids ... As millions of parents nationwide know, kids 'doing school from home' requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times," Kellyanne Conway said in her statement.

Earlier Sunday, the couple's 15-year-old daughter, Claudia, said she was "devastated" that her mother will be speaking at the RNC. In a flurry of tweets criticizing her parents, she also said she and her father "agree on absolutely nothing" politically, before announcing she would be taking a mental health break from social media.
Restricting numbers on the dancefloor and making clubbers wear face-coverings are among the suggested safety measures which should lead to clubs being allowed to reopen, it was claimed today.

The Night Time Industries Association said a risk-assessed return for clubs and venues is possible as the sector reaches a 'critical point' with thousands of jobs at risk.

The association said the night-time economy was one of the few remaining sectors without any clear path to reopening and has urged the Government to 'save the sector from collapse'.

Last week the association said three out of five businesses could go bust by September and a new report, supported by the Institute of Occupational Medicine, looks at how clubs and other venues could reopen safely.

The report said there is a 'strong argument' to permit clubs to reopen under strict controls 'bearing in mind the behaviour we are witnessing in unregulated environments such as beaches, parks and raves'.

A member of bar staff wears a face mask while serving drinks at an East London pub in July

It added: 'Whilst there are some areas of increased risks over other sectors there are many real benefits that such businesses have over other sectors, particularly as all our venues have security to give 100 per cent cover of matters such as temperature checks, track and trace, and keeping customer behaviour in check.'

There are also 'sector specific measures' which venues can put in place which would put them 'at least on a par' with other businesses which are allowed to open.

These include adding temperature checks for guests when they enter, and restricting capacity to ensure distancing is possible throughout the venue.

'Use of face-coverings on the dancefloor can be implemented and enforced through existing security staff and protocols,' it added.

Michael Kill, chief executive of the association, said: 'We have now reached a critical point. In the absence of a clear reopening strategy from government, or the promise of financial support, huge numbers of businesses within our industry are facing financial collapse and thousands of job losses.

'The report we have launched today clearly shows that there is a case for the safe reopening of night-time leisure venues, including nightclubs, late night bars, live music venues and event spaces.

Revellers queue outside Rosies nightclub in Birmingham on March 14, shortly before lockdown

'Whilst many of these are large capacity venues, it is important to note that they already have many of the safety protocols in place to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.

'We implore the government to give us the opportunity to reopen in a safe, risk-assessed way.'

Meanwhile a survey by the Night Time Industries Association Scotland (NTIAS) of its membership to assess the impact of Covid-19 after the lockdown on March 23 revealed that 83 per cent of businesses are set to make staff redundant.

Up to 76 per cent are ready to make more than half of their workforce redundant within a matter of weeks, while 58 per cent of businesses fear they will not survive longer than two months without further Government support.

As little as 19 per cent of respondents said they have been able to repurpose their businesses.

Mike Grieve, owner of SubClub in Glasgow and director of NTIAS, concert promoter Donald Macleod, owner of The Garage and Cathouse Rock Club in Glasgow, and Geoff Ellis, of DF Concerts, called on the Scottish Government to provide emergency funding.

The NTIAS s now calling for an extension of the UK Government's coronavirus job retention scheme.

Michael Kill, NTIAS chief executive, has called for an indication of when late night premises can reopen and believes no further financial assistance after October could be 'potentially fatal for the future of the night-time economy'.

Mr Kill said: 'Without immediate additional help and clear indication of when we can reopen we are facing financial Armageddon. I implore the Government to act on this data.

'Give us a clear roadmap on when businesses can re-open and reassurance that the financial support will be there to keep businesses financially afloat in the coming months.'
National Communications Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has described the recently introduced Delivery Tracker portal as a scam.



This follows the launch of the website by the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) last week to enable Ghanaians track infrastructural projects undertaken by the Akufo-Addo government.



Addressing Journalists at a press briefing in Accra on Monday, August 24, Sammy Gyamfi said independent checks conducted by his party show some projects listed on the portal were either 'non-existent or stolen'.



As we [NDC] indicated from the outset that there are thousands of stolen projects that were undertaken by the erstwhile Mahama administration and other private entities such as NGOs which have been appropriated and presented by the Akufo-Addo government through their so-called Delivery Tracker, Sammy Gyamfi said.



He continued; We wish to urge the media to conduct your own independent district by district fact checks of the projects listed by governments Delivery Tracker and Dr Bawumia during his Town Hall Meeting to ascertain the truth for yourselves. We have no doubt that your independent checks will confirm that the so-called Delivery Tracker is a scam that cannot be relied upon by the media or general public for credible information.



The website portal; www.deliverytracker.gov.gh is aimed at helping Ghanaians track promises fulfilled by the governing NPP administration since it came into office.



According to Vice President Dr. Bawumia, the portal will also enhance transparency, accountability in governance as well as enable government to ensure that uncompleted projects are prioritised.

Source: Graphic.com.gh









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She was supposed to walk down the aisle in July.

Yet after the coronavirus pandemic forced her to cancel the big day, Tabitha Willett has revealed her new wedding plans with nightclub mogul fiance, Fraser Carruthers.

The couple - who welcomed their first child, Ottilie, last year - now plan to tie the knot at an intimate ceremony as soon as September.

Wedding bells: Tabitha Willett is ready to tie the knot with her partner Fraser Carruthers in an intimate ceremony after the COVID-19pandemic caused havoc for their original wedding plans

Speaking to HELLO! magazine, the former Made In Chelsea star, 28, revealed the setback means their toddler daughter will be able to walk with her down the aisle.

Tabitha was originally set to exchange vows with Fraser at Fulham's Hurlingham Club in July in front of a host of celebrity guests.

However, the pandemic scuppered their plans, and they have now decided to get married at a register office and hold a reception in a Chelsea restaurant.

She told the magazine: 'We have a couple of options that we could pull off, even within two weeks notice - well, 29 days, because that's how long you need to legally leave it after you give your notice - but we're waiting for the current laws to change.'

Change of plans: The MIC star, 28, planned to exchange vows at the Fulham's Hurlingham Club in July with her beau but they will now get married at a register office for a smaller affair

Mother daughter time: Despite the annoyance of her delayed wedding planning, the former reality star is over the moon that her 14-month-old daughter can join her at the ceremony

According to the MIC star, she is waiting for the Prime Minister to relax the policy on the number of guests that can attend her wedding before they move ahead with their plans

She added: 'So as soon as Boris says you can have 50 people attend instead of 30, we'll be all systems go.

'I'll look like a Disney princess. I want a big, white dress, and I want to wear a veil because there's only one time in your life that you can.'

Fraser proposed during a trip to Miami in November 2019, with a three-carat diamond engagement ring designed by Eden Rocks, the company run by MIC pal Spencer who is also expected to attend the wedding.

Out now: Read the full interview in Hello! magazine, out now

Tabitha said: 'The ring box had a light inside so the ring sparkled so much.

'It was everything I'd dreamed of, and I cried.'

Made In Chelsea co-stars and new parents, Hugo Taylor and Millie Mackintosh are also expected to attend the intimate wedding ceremony.

Their delayed wedding date also means their 14-month-old daughter Ottilie will be able to walk down the aisle with them.

Willett told the magazine: 'She wasn't walking on our original date, 24th July.

'So now it will be even more special.

'When it finally happens, it will all have been worth the wait.'

Read the full interview in Hello! magazine, out now.
The lawyer of Sushant Singh Rajputs family, Vikas Singh has confirmed that Rhea Chakraborty will be summoned by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) only after the questioning of other people related to the case. He also said the Jalebi actor may be arrested if she does not cooperate with the investigation or gives evasive answers.

Vikas Singh, lawyer of Sushant Singh Rajputs father KK Singh have said, Rhea Chakraborty will be summoned by the CBI after it has done its spadework. They are examining everybody and once they are able to do their homework properly then only they will start grilling Rhea.

Once they (CBI) start grilling Rhea & if she does not cooperate with the investigation or gives evasive answers, then the possibility of her arrest will also rise. I'm quite hopeful that probe is going in the right direction: Vikas Singh, lawyer of #SushantSinghRajput's father https://t.co/vSsUjgk6an  ANI (@ANI) August 24, 2020

He added, Once they (CBI) start grilling Rhea & if she does not cooperate with the investigation or gives evasive answers, then the possibility of her arrest will also rise. Im quite hopeful that probe is going in the right direction.

Amid speculations of Rhea being summoned by the CBI on Monday, her lawyer Satish Maneshinde said, Rhea Chakraborty and her family have not received any summons from the Central Bureau of Investigation, so far. If they receive a summon, they will appear before the agency.

The Enforcement Directorate had already questioned Chakraborty twice -- on Augut 9 and 10 -- and 56 persons statements and other relevant evidence have been collected.

The agency had on July 31 registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) in the case based on the FIR by actors father. In his complaint, KK Singh had alleged that around Rs 15 crore was withdrawn from Rajputs bank account in the last one year and transferred to accounts that had no link with him.

Also read: Sushant Singh Rajputs brother-in-law Vishal shares unseen videos of actor at sister Shweta Singh Kirtis wedding. Watch

On Saturday too, the teams of the CBI and the Mumbai Police visited the residence of Rajput as a part of the investigation in the case related to his death. Both Neeraj (Sushants cook) and Siddharth Pithani were grilled by the agency in connection with the case.

On August 19, the Supreme Court had asked the agency to investigate the case related to the actors death, while holding that the FIR registered in Patna was legitimate.

(With ANI inputs)

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The atmosphere of mistrust between India and Nepal over border issues has not impacted cooperation between the two countries as both have decided to explore the possibility of another petroleum to feed the growing fuel demand in the Himalayan nation.

The existing Motihari-Amlekhgunj petroleum products has become the lifeline for Nepal for meeting its energy needs. The two sides are now exploring whether state-owned Indian Oil Corporation could look at another product running into the northern and eastern parts of the country.

The discussion on extending the network of petroleum pipeline and setting up new pipelines was discussed during the meeting of a joint working group early this month. The meeting organised through video conferencing was attended by top government officials from the Indian side including representatives from IndianOil, GAIL, and HPCL.

The Nepalese side was represented by the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs of Nepal and Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC).

"A team of officials would soon visit Nepal to explore the possible routes for a new product pipeline. This would be followed by establishing feasibility studies before investment decisions are worked out. There is potential for expanding the pipeline network that would bring a lot of savings for the Himalayan country," said an official of a public sector oil company asking not to be named.

The existing pipeline between the two countries was inaugurated in September last year by the Prime Ministers of India and Nepal. The 69-km pipeline, which starts from Motihari in India and ends at Amlekhgunj in Nepal, is the first of its kind in south Asia.

Indian Oil Corporation Ltd, India's largest refiner, built the pipeline, with an investment of over Rs 324 crore, in collaboration with Nepal Oil Corporation Ltd, fulfilling the commitment made under an MoU signed in August 2014.

Before the opening of the pipeline, petroleum products were being transported from India to Nepal by tankers/trucks at 13 pick-up points (7 for products and 6 for LPG). The Raxaul-Birgunj was the most important trade point between the two countries but the pipeline has reduced the movement of tanker trucks from these points to consumption centres in Nepal.

The JWG also discussed a larger role for India in building oil production storage capacities in Nepal. It is envisaged that Indian and Nepalese companies may cooperate towards this end as well.

--IANS

sn/kr

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
CHICAGO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Industrial Films Market by Film Type (LLDPE, LDPE, HDPE, PET/BOPET, PP/BOPP, CPP, PVC, Polyamide/BOPA), By End-use Industry (Transportation, Construction, Industrial Packaging, Agriculture, Medical), and Region - Global Forecast to 2025", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global Industrial Films Market size is expected to grow from USD 39.4 billion in 2020 to USD 49.0 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 4.5% during the forecast period. Industrial films are used across industries, such as agriculture, transportation, electrical & electronics, photovoltaics, construction, industrial packaging, medical, and aerospace. In the industrial films market, agriculture is the key end-use industry owing to the wide applications of these films as greenhouse films, mulch films, silage films, and others in this sector.

Download PDF Brochure:

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Browse in-depth TOC on "Industrial Films Market"

100  Market Data Tables

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185  Pages

View Detailed Table of Content Here:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/industrial-film-market-227835863.html

The LLDPE segment is the largest type of industrial films.

The industrial films market has been segmented based on film type into LLDPE, LDPE, HDPE, PET/BOPET, PP/BOPP, CPP, PVC, Polyamide/BOPA and others. Among these types, the LLDPE segment accounted for the largest share of the market in 2019 and is likely to witness a significant growth during the forecast period. The market growth in this segment is attributed to their wide applications and superior properties such as impact & tensile strength and heat sealability LLDPE is replacing LDPE in many areas such as industrial packaging and agriculture, but there are some differences in their properties that make both these films suitable for diversified applications.

The agriculture end-use industry is expected to register the highest CAGR in the global industrial films market during the forecast period.

The agriculture end-use industry segment is growing rapidly. The decreasing arable land, coupled with rising demand for food, which is driving the need for modern farming techniques, which, in turn, is fueling the demand for plastic films in the agriculture industry. The segment is expected to dominate the industrial films market owing to the rising need for food, driven by the growth of the global population. This has led to the development of advanced cultivation methods that can increase crop productivity and resist climatic changes

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APAC is expected to hold the largest market share in the global industrial films market during the forecast period.

APAC is estimated to be the leading industrial films market during the forecast period. The growth in this region can be attributed to the rapidly increasing demand for industrial films from the end-use industries, especially agriculture, construction, transportation and medical. The market is witnessing moderate growth, owing to increasing application, technological advancements, and growing demand for these resins in the APAC and Europe.

Saint-Gobain (France), Berry Global group (US), SKC Co. Ltd. (South Korea), Toray (Japan), and Eastman (US), DSM-RKW SE (Germany) and 3M (US) are the leading industrial films manufacturers, globally.

Browse Adjacent Market: Coatings Adhesives Sealants and Elastomers Market Research Report & consulting

Related Reports:

Bonding Films Market by Type (Epoxy, Acrylic, Polyurethane), Technology (Thermally Cured, Pressure Cured), End-Use Industry (Electrical & Electronics, Transportation, Packaging), Region

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/bonding-film-market-207621328.html

Automotive Films Market by Film Type (Window Films, Wrap Films, Paint Protection Films), Vehicle Type (Passenger Cars, Commercial Vehicles), and Region

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/automotive-films-market-144449362.html

Polyfilm Market by Resin Type (LLDPE, LDPE, HDPE, BoPP, CPP, PVC, BoPET, BoPA), End-use Industry (Agriculture, Packaging, Building & Construction, Consumer Goods, Medical) and Region

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/polyfilm-market-4979094.html

Agricultural Films Market by Type (LLDPE, LDPE, Reclaim, EVA, HDPE), Application (Greenhouse Film, Mulch Film, and Silage Film), and Region

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/agricultural-mulch-films-market-741.html

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Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model  GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve.

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Melissa Doyle co-hosted Seven's breakfast program Sunrise alongside David 'Kochie' Koch from 2002 to 2013.

And after the news broke that she has left the network, David praised his former colleague for her talent in a heartfelt tribute aired on the 7pm News on Friday.

'Sunrise wouldn't be what it is today without Mel Doyle. She was part of the founding group that sort of reimagined breakfast television,' the 64-year-old said.

'She reimagined breakfast TV': David Koch, 64, praised his former Sunrise co-host Melissa Doyle in a heartfelt tribute on Seven News on Friday (pictured), after her shock departure

David went on to commend Melissa, 50, for her endearing personality off-camera.

'She's incredibly warm and she's compassionate. She's family oriented. [Got] a great sense of humour, great values. And we almost became part of each other's family.'

During the heartfelt tribute, Seven compiled numerous segments from Sunrise and other programs over the years, showing just how far she's come.

The Morning Show's Kylie Gillies also weighed in on Melissa's reputation across the industry and with viewers.

Talent: 'Sunrise wouldn't be what it is today without Mel Doyle. She was part of the founding group that sort of reimagined breakfast television,' he said in the tribute that also aired footage of the pair throughout the years

Endearing personality: David added of Melissa (pictured early on in her career): 'She's incredibly warm and she's compassionate. She's family oriented. [Got] a great sense of humour, great values. And we almost became part of each other's family'

'Mel's seen it all, she's done it all, and she's done it so well in that typical Mel way,' the 53-year-old said.

She went on to say: 'We're going to miss Mel terribly, but you know what? It's going to be the viewers who miss her the most. They love her as much as we do.'

On Friday, Seven announced that Melissa had left the network after an incredible 25 years of service.

Heartfelt: The Morning Show's Kylie Gillies, 53, (pictured in an Instagram post) also said in the tribute: 'We're going to miss Mel terribly, but you know what? It's going to be the viewers who miss her the most. They love her as much as we do'

Veteran presenter: On Friday, Seven announced that Melissa had left the network after an incredible 25 years of service

During her career, she hosted several of Seven's flagship programs, including Sunrise, Today Tonight, 7News, Sunday Night and The Latest.

Her departure is believed to be the result of the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit Seven particularly hard.

According to industry website Radio Today, Melissa will continue hosting her weekend show on Nova-owned station Smooth FM.

Impressive: During her career, she hosted several of Seven's flagship programs, including Sunrise, Today Tonight, 7News, Sunday Night and The Latest

As news broke of her departure from Seven, Melissa said in a statement: 'For 25 years, I have called Channel Seven home. I've had the privilege to share stories that mattered, meet incredible people and be there for significant moments in history.

'I am incredibly proud of the work I have done and appreciative of the trust and warmth our viewers have shown me.

'I want to thank the consummate professionals I have worked with along the way, in particular our Chairman Kerry Stokes for his constant support.

'I leave Seven with a great deal of pride, satisfaction and gratitude.'

Class act: As news broke of her departure from Seven, Melissa said in a statement: 'For 25 years, I have called Channel Seven home. I've had the privilege to share stories that mattered, meet incredible people and be there for significant moments in history'

Melissa first joined Seven's Canberra bureau as a political reporter back in 1995. She then moved to Sydney, working as a newsreader on the 11AM program.

After 11 years working alongside David Koch on Sunrise, the mother-of-two announced she was leaving Sunrise, departing in August 2013.

Melissa remained with the network, however, presenting Seven Afternoon News and Seven News at 7.

In 2015, she was announced as host and senior correspondent for Sunday Night, but the current affairs show was cancelled in October 2019, as a cost-cutting measure.
Kuwait will rebuild Lebanons largest silo plant destroyed in Beirut port explosion that has caused the death of at least 180 people, reports say.

We decided that the best and most appropriate way to start with the material aid is to rebuild the silos, Kuwait ambassador to Lebanon Abdel-Aal al-Qenae was quoted on Sunday.

The Lebanese capital was rocked by a powerful explosion early this year after a stock of high explosive chemical substance warehoused at Tripoli port went off.

The explosion which killed at least 180 people and left over 6,000 people injured destroyed the countrys only largest silo processing structure which has an output of 120,000 tons.

Kuwaits pledge is part of the countrys contribution to global donors marshalled by France to assist the Middle East country to overcome consequences of the blast amid financial meltdown.

These silos were originally built in the year 1969 with a loan from the Kuwait Fund for Development, and that is why we decided to announce their rebuilding, al-Qenae said.
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Michael Baraldi Named Vice President of Finance & Facility Services Baraldi says he looks forward to serving his local community.

Michael Baraldi became the Vice President of Finance & Facility Services for Johnston Community College on August 1, 2020. Baraldi previously served as Director of Budget and Accounting for the Facilities Division of North Carolina State University for more than a decade. He brings a total of 31 years of experience in finance and accounting to JCC.

Baraldis career at NC State began as a senior budget analyst in February 2008 and he was promoted to Budget Director in July 2012. He was named the Director of Budget and Accounting in August 2016. During his tenure at NC State, Baraldi directed a $110 million annual operating budget and oversaw more than $1.2 billion in transactions.

I am delighted to welcome Michael Baraldi to our JCC team as VP for Finance and Facility Services. Mike brings a wealth of experience from NC State to assist him in learning the community college way, said President David Johnson. He has hit the ground running while facing uncertain times during COVID. His background in both finance and facilities will be put to good use as we move forward with construction projects and an uncertain budget year. This is a critical position for JCC and I am so pleased Mike said yes to it!

Baraldi earned a BA in Economics with a minor in Philosophy from Rutgers College, a part of Rutgers University. He earned an MBA from Saint Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill New York, where he was member of the International Honor Society, Delta Mu Delta, and became the first MBA student to graduate with a 4.0 GPA.

A resident of Johnston County for 17 years, Baraldi looks forward to serving his community. I am proud to join Johnston Community College in the role of Vice President of Finance and Facility Services, he said. I am eager to support Johnston Community College in providing accessible, high-quality educational and community enrichment opportunities for the successful development of learners.
The Finnish Minister for Transport and Communications, Timo Harakka, has said he is hopeful that services between Skopje and Turku will be temporarily suspended by the end of the month after a number of imported coronavirus cases have been traced to the Wizz Air flights. The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom) is currently considering the option of temporarily discontinuing the service. Flights between Skopje and Turku have been linked to sixty coronavirus infections detected in the Finnish city. A total of 26 infections were registered in passengers arriving on August 8, five in passengers arriving on August 11 and twelve in travellers arriving on August 15. Data for August 22 is still being analysed. The Mayor of Turku, Minna Arve, has come to an agreement with airport operator Finavia and Wizz Air on reducing frequencies on the route and requiring all passengers to test negative for the virus before boarding the aircraft bound for Turku. The airline now maintains one instead of two weekly flights. Thanks to Wizz Air for making the responsible decision, she said.
The newborn son of a young tradesman who died in a workplace accident will be able to attend his father's funeral after Premier Daniel Andrews granted the grieving family an exemption to the COVID-19 restrictions on funeral services.

The Premier and the Health Department have flagged moves to amend limits on the number of people who can attend a funeral to include children under the age of 12 months.

Jarrod Fox pictured with his two young sons, Archer, 2, and Jasper, five weeks.

The family of electrician Jarrod Fox, 37, pleaded for compassion on Monday morning after being told his five-week-old son may miss his father's funeral because authorities refused to allow an extra person to attend.

On Monday afternoon the Department of Health and Human Services said it would amend restrictions to allow infants under the age of one to accompany a parent or caregiver to funerals, excluding them from the current 10-person cap.
Tropical Storm Laura pounded Cuba with heavy rains Monday as it barrelled toward the US, where forecasters predicted it would strengthen to a hurricane after leaving 24 people dead and a swath of destruction in the Caribbean.

"Strengthening is expected when the storm moves over the Gulf of Mexico, and Laura is forecast to become a hurricane by late Tuesday," the US National Hurricane Center said, predicting it would make landfall in the US state of Louisiana later in the week.

Meanwhile Tropical Storm Marco -- which also churned through the Gulf of Mexico -- was downgraded from a hurricane overnight and was forecast to hit Louisiana later Monday, weakening to a tropical depression on Tuesday.

Marco's weakening winds have at least spared the Gulf what would have been twin hurricanes, unprecedented since records began 150 years ago.

Laura was moving fast across Cuba at 20 miles (32 kilometers) per hour on Monday, unleashing heavy rain and coastal flooding.

Winds gusting up to 65 miles per hour were reported in Havana, and waves of more than three meters (10 feet) battered the Maisi area of Guantanamo province.

The high winds tore tin roofs off homes and downed trees, but local authorities reported no human casualties.

Cuban authorities had evacuated at least 160,000 people in the provinces of Guantanamo, Santiago de Cuba, Granma and Camaguey.

"The center of Laura will move away from Cuba and over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico overnight (Monday)," the NHC said.

"Laura is then forecast to move over the central and northwestern Gulf of Mexico Tuesday night and Wednesday."

- Deaths in the Caribbean -

The Atlantic storm season, which runs through November, could be one of the busiest ever this year, with the Hurricane Center predicting as many as 25 named storms. Laura is the 12th so far.

Energy companies suspended some oil and natural gas production in the Gulf as the weather deteriorated.

Story continues

Heavy rainfall and flash flooding also hit Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.

However, Storm Laura has done its worst damage so far in Haiti, killing at least 20 people, including a baby and an 8-year-old child.

The storm also killed four in the Dominican Republic's capital Santo Domingo, said the country's Center of Emergency Operations.

A woman and a child died at home, while a young man died when a tree fell on his home.

The storm flooded houses, cut off remote villages and left more than one million Dominicans in the dark.

Storms pose a serious risk to Haiti every year from June to November. Even a heavy rainfall can threaten the country's poorest residents, many of them living in at-risk zones, near canals or ravines that can be obstructed by debris and quickly overflow.

In Petionville, near the capital Port-au-Prince, the damage caused by torrents of brown water rushing down from mountains was considerable.

"I didn't know there was bad weather forecast. We don't often have electricity in my neighborhood so I couldn't follow the news on the radio," said Sony Joseph, shivering from the cold.

burs-jm/st
Four people who took part in demonstrations in Portland and were exposed to chemical agents or sustained injuries from impact munitions filed a lawsuit Monday against Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and 200 federal law enforcement officers.

Angelica Clark, Ellen Urbani Gass, Nathaniel West and Rowan Maher are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which alleges that the federal government used excessive force against peaceful protesters. The lawsuit identifies the class as people who protested downtown in July and were exposed to teargas, impact munitions and those who were beaten by federal officers.

The suit claims the Trump administration deployed federal agents unlawfully and that the officers acted outside of their authority by using force against people protesting as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. The lawsuit alleges that federal agents failed to employ de-escalation strategies or tactics to mitigate violence and protect the rights of peaceable assembly and protest.

Instead, the lawsuit says, law enforcement escalated nightly violence and used a variety of crowd-control tactics against peaceful protesters. Those tactics included the use of tear gas and flash-bang grenades that clouded the streets and made it difficult for people to safely disperse, the lawsuit says.

These federal agents used chemical and impact munitions designed for war zones against American civilians, lawyers for the group said in announcing the lawsuit. Their actions resulted in hundreds of injuries to peacefully protesting women and men of all races, ages and walks of life.

Ellen Urbani Gass is one of four Oregonians suing the federal government for excessive force. Gass said her foot was broken by an impact munition. At the time, she was recovering from a broken ankle unrelated to the demonstrations. "The violence we were met with that day mirrors the historic violence against Black people that we were there protesting against, she said in a statement through her lawyer.

The lawsuit also names Kenneth Cuccinelli, a senior Homeland Security official, as a defendant. Two hundred unnamed agents with the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Protective Service, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection were also listed as defendants.

The lawsuit was filed by David Sugerman, the lead attorney in the class action case. Another six attorneys are also on the case.

Clark, 28, of Milwaukie, Gass, 51, of West Linn, West , 43, of Portland and Rowan, 25, of Portland, were each injured, according to the suit.

Clark said she took part in more than a dozen demonstrations and said she was shot in the hand with an impact munition, was beaten with a baton and maced by federal agents.

Rowan Maher shows her damaged bike helmet. Maher is one of four Oregonians suing the federal government for using excessive force against protesters. She said she was also exposed to tear gas and was struck with a baton while attending demonstrations.

Gass said she was standing arm-in-arm with other moms when federal officers used tear gas and shot pepper bullets into the group. She said she was struck by an impact munition in the foot that broke a bone.

West said he and his 16-year-old daughter Beck were protesting near the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse when he said tear gas and explosive crowd control munitions were used against the crowd. He said his daughter experienced significant hearing loss as a result.

Maher said she was tear-gassed, beaten with a baton and shot in the head with an impact munition, which blew a hole in her bicycle helmet.

Donavan La Bella, who suffered a serious injury when a deputy U.S. marshal fired an impact munition at his head, continues to recover. La Bella has retained Salem attorney, Chris Best. Best last month said he is looking at filing a civil rights and tort claim against the federal government and the federal official who fired on La Bella.

-- Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Chennai's coronavirus test positivity rate has surpassed the 10% mark yet again, increasing from 7-8% amid an inflow of people in view of the easing of travel restrictions.

According to a report in The Times of India, official figures reveal that Chennais TPR, which stood at 7% for August 8-12 period, surged to 10.7% on August 22. TPR is the percentage of samples collected that tested positive. Notably, the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), advise that testing be ramped up if the TRP exceeds 10%.

The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) tested over 14,000 samples on August 8 but now the number stands at around 12,000. On August 21, 12,982 samples were collected. This shows that there has been a decline in the number of tests amid rising TPR. Given this development, there are fears that the Covid-19 disease is advancing faster across Chennai.

However, many officials, who spoke to the publication quelled such concerns.

Greater Chennai Corporation commissioner G Prakash told ToI that the surge in the TPR coincides with easing in issuing e-pass. The increase in TPR (test positivity rate) is because we have widened the testing. We had anticipated this, he added while expressing confidence that the situation is under control.

Another official, an epidemiologist with the civic agency told the publication that testing undertaken by the civic body was sufficient. However, there cases in the Central region (Zones 6-10) which may be because the city is now open, he was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu on Sunday saw 5,975 new Covid-19 cases, taking the overall tally to 3,79,385, while 97 fatalities took the death toll to 6,517, the Health department said.

Of the state's tally of 3,79,385 cases, Chennai's share crossed the 1.25 lakh-mark to reach 1,25,389, it said. According to the bulletin, 70,127 samples were tested

today, pushing the tally to 42,06,617.

Of the new infections, Chennai recorded 1,298 cases while neighbouring Kancheepuram, Tiruvallur and Chengalpet districts collectively contributed 928.
There was no previously planned agenda. We touched upon Armenias foreign policy agenda and the agenda for reforms in the country and held a rather value-based discussion. This is what head of the My Step faction of the National Assembly of Armenia Lilit Makunts told reporters following the factions meeting with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan today.

Makunts emphasized that the faction and the Prime Minister particularly discussed issues related to judicial-legal reforms, reforms in the education sector and the work of the Professional Commission for Constitutional Reforms.

Asked if the fact that an Armenian serviceman is on the Azerbaijani side was discussed and Baku accusing the Armenian side of sabotage attempt were discussed, Makunts said the following: The session with the Prime Minister was a closed session, and therefore, I cant touch upon the details.

The head of the parliamentary faction also informed that the resignation of Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sport Arayik Harutyunyan also wasnt discussed. Asked if she is content with the ministers work, Makunts said the following: We didnt discuss individuals or candidates. We discussed general approaches, how we picture or plan the development of a certain sector in a certain direction as state officials.

After the session, Prime Minister Pashinyan refused to answer journalists questions and only said he would be glad to answer their questions, but was in a hurry.
The comatose Russian dissident was flown to Germany after doctors determined he was stable enough to be transported for treatment

Berlin: Alexei Navalnys wife and a top aide visited him Sunday in a Berlin hospital where the comatose Russian dissident is being treated by German doctors after a suspected poisoning.

Navalny was flown to Germany on Saturday from Siberia after doctors determined he was stable enough to be brought to the capitals Charite hospital for treatment.

After his arrival, hospital spokeswoman Manuela Zingl said the 44-year-old would be undergoing extensive diagnostic tests and that doctors wouldnt comment on his illness or treatment until they were able to evaluate the results.

On Sunday, Navalnys wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and aide Leonid Volkov visited the Russian opposition leader in the hospital but did not speak to reporters.

Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putins fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Thursday and was taken to the hospital in the city of Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing. His supporters believe that tea he drank was laced with poison  and that the Kremlin is behind both his illness and a delay in transferring him to Germany.

While his supporters and family members insist that Navalny was poisoned, doctors in Omsk denied that, saying a metabolic disorder was the most likely diagnosis and that a drop in blood sugar may have caused Navalny to lose consciousness.

Russian health authorities on Saturday said tests so far havent shown any poisons in his system.

When German specialists arrived Friday morning aboard a plane equipped with advanced medical equipment at his familys behest, Navalnys physicians in Omsk initially said he was too unstable to move. The dissidents supporters suggested that was just a ploy to delay his departure until any poison was out of his system.

The Kremlin denied that resistance to the transfer was political, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that it was purely a medical decision. However, the reversal to allow him to leave came as international pressure on Russias leadership mounted.

Navalnys own doctor, Yaroslav Ashikhmin, said the politician has always been in good health, regularly went for medical checkups and didnt have any underlying illnesses that could have triggered his condition.

Like many other opposition politicians in Russia, Navalny has been frequently detained by law enforcement and harassed by pro-Kremlin groups. In 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw antiseptic in his face, damaging an eye.

Last year, Navalny was rushed to a hospital from jail where he was serving a sentence on charges of violating protest regulations. His team also suspected poisoning then. Doctors said he had a severe allergic reaction and sent him back to detention the following day.

If he was poisoned, it would not be the first time a prominent, outspoken Russian was targeted in such a way  or the first time the Kremlin was accused of being behind it.
Minister of Inner-city and Zongo Development, Dr Mustapha Abdul-Hamid has applauded the Akufo-Addo administration over its pledge to construct a new harbour and airport at Cape Coast, Central Region.



The NPP, on Saturday, August 23, 2020 launched its 2020 manifesto in Central Region and made a solemn promise to the residents in the Region.



They have outlined in their manifesto to establish harbour and airport in the next four years of President Nana Akufo-Addo.



However, some people believe the campaign promise is only a ploy for votes since it's an electioneering year but won't be fulfilled.



Speaking on Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'', the Minister justified the importance of the two facilities in the Region, particularly an airport.



According to him, the Region has evolved to become a hub where many people commute to and fro for various reasons including tourism.



To him, constructing an airport in the Region ''is a very wise decision and I think that it will open Central Region''.



''As one of the poorest Regions in Ghana, there is no doubt in my mind that a port and an airport will open up the economic potential of the Region'', he added.



He assured the people of Cape Coast that President Nana Akufo-Addo will deliver on his promise and asked them to have confidence in the government.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Say this about San Antonio businessman and activist investor Sardar Biglari: Hes tenacious.

Biglari, chairman and CEO of Biglari Holdings Inc.  best known as the parent company of the struggling restaurant chain Steak n Shake  is taking another shot at controlling a seat on Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc.s board. Hes been a frequent critic of the Tennessee-based companys management over the years.

Biglari last week notified Cracker Barrel of his intention to nominate Raymond Rick P. Barbrick as a director. Barbrick is co-CEO of New Jersey-based Briad Group, which owns 111 Wendys restaurants and some Marriott- and Hilton-branded hotels in the Northeast. Barbrick has given Biglari power of attorney in the matter.

On ExpressNews.com: Has San Antonios Sardar Biglari lost his touch?

In a statement, Cracker Barrel said board members will evaluate Mr. Barbricks candidacy and make a recommendation to shareholders in due course.

It marks the fourth time Biglari has sought representation on Cracker Barrels board, but the first since 2013.

Biglari personally pursued a seat on the board in 2011, 2012 and 2013. The latter two years he was joined by Phil Cooley, Biglari Holdings vice chairman and a former Trinity University business professor who taught Biglari.

SA Inc.: Get the best of business news sent directly to your inbox

Each of the three proxy fights ended in defeat for Biglari, which may explain why he isnt taking another run himself this time. Cracker Barrel shareholders in 2014 also defeated a Biglari proposal that would have allowed him to engage in a potential acquisition of the company.

A Biglari hedge fund owns more than 2 million Cracker Barrel shares, or about 8.7 percent of the stock. Those shares were worth about $248 million based on Mondays closing price.

Biglari has bashed Cracker Barrel while profiting handsomely from the stocks performance.

The Biglari funds original $241 million investment in Cracker Barrel, made in 2011 and 2012, turned into nearly $1 billion in value at the end of last year, Biglari wrote in a February letter to shareholders.

Since June 13, 2011, when Biglari first disclosed the investment in Cracker Barrel, the stock has produced a total return of almost 290 percent. Biglari Holdings total return over the same period is down more than 50 percent.

At one time, Biglari was Cracker Barrels largest shareholder with just under 20 percent of the stock. That led the chain to adopt a poison pill in 2012 to ward off Biglari, or anyone else, from acquiring control of the chain without offering a premium to all shareholders.

Biglari has criticized Cracker Barrel management for store expansions and side ventures. The companys restaurant and retail store combinations are ubiquitous along interstate highways.

Cracker Barrel CEO Sandra Cochran described Biglari Holdings in 2015 as a threat to her company.

On ExpressNews.com: Biglari blast Cracker Barrel management over coronavirus decision

Last year, Biglari pressed Cracker Barrel to sell its fledgling Holler & Dash Biscuit House, a fast-casual restaurant chain that serves Southern food. He called it an ill-conceived project destined to fail.

Biglari stepped up his criticisms in April after Cracker Barrel wrote off its $133 million investment in Punch Bowl Social, a restaurant chain combining food and drinks with arcade games. The write-off came amid the pandemic and just nine months after Cracker Barrel made the investment. The Denver-based chain had 19 locations locations, including two in Austin.

Punch Bowl Social was hit especially hard by the pandemic, which resulted in all of their locations closing, Cochran said during a June 2 earnings call. Cracker Barrels strategy is to focus its resources on its core brands, she added.

Biglari told his companys shareholders at its annual meeting in June that Cochran was sold a lemon.

It took probably 200 days to lose all of the investment, Biglari added. I am getting concerned that someone is trying to be more creative than her competency allows.

Biglari lifted a term coined by famed mutual fund manager Peter Lynch to describe Cracker Barrels strategy of expanding beyond its core business: diworsification.

Two Biglari Holdings shareholders who spoke to the Express-News after the meeting on the condition their names not be used wondered why Biglari doesnt hold his own company to the same standard he holds Cracker Barrel.

In answer to a stockholders question of whether Biglari Holdings stock performance over the past five years was acceptable, Biglari replied, You will be disappointed if you have a different set of expectations than we do in terms of the time thats required for value to be reflected in the stock price.

Biglari had demanded that Cracker Barrel release records related to Punch Bowl Social and other investments. A similar request in October was rebuffed. Cracker Barrels failure to provide the information led Biglari to warn that he might be left with no choice but to pursue a seat on its board.

Neither Biglari nor Barbrick responded to a request for comment. Barbrick owns no shares of Cracker Barrel.

Barbricks Briad Group has has its own troubles with the pandemic. In June, it announced it was shuttering 15 of 18 Northeast locations of a burger chain known as Zinburger Wine & Burger Bar.

Patrick Danner Patrick Danner covers banking, insurance, business litigation and bankruptcies. To read more from Patrick, become a subscriber. pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD
Several thousand Ethiopians are now living in refugee camps in the capital Addis Ababa, waiting to emigrate to Israel. Some of them have been there for many years, from the beginning of the last decade, and all are waiting for the government of Israel to implement its decisions to let anyone who can prove to have relatives in Israel immigrate to the country.

Still, even among Ethiopian Israelis there is disagreement on bringing in the remaining Ethiopians, since most are not Jewish (according to Jewish religious law), but rather relatives or offspring of people who converted from Judaism in the past.

In recent decades, about 40,000 Ethiopians immigrated to Israel. Most of them had maintained their Judaism and are called Beta Israel, and the others  the Falash Mura  are those who converted to Christianity or married Christians, mostly due to persecution and pressure. In other words, some were apparently converted under duress.

In some cases, only partial families immigrated to Israel, and over the years those who came to Israel demanded to be reunited with their family members. In the past decades, several government decisions were made to bring first-degree relations over, but the decisions were only partially implemented, among other reasons because every time it seemed most of the relatives had immigrated, more Ethiopian relatives arrived in the refugee camps.

Today, according to estimates, 8,000 people are in the camps. On Aug. 19, Minister of Immigration and Absorption Pnina Tamano-Shata, herself an immigrant from Ethiopia, presented a draft plan to allow all those waiting there to immigrate to Israel within three years. In a discussion at the Knesset Absorption Committee she said that all responsible parties have reached the conclusion and understanding that this painful quandary should end. She suggested that the 8,000 people waiting should emigrate from Ethiopia by the end of 2022; 4,500 of them should be brought to Israel by the end of 2020. She also suggested that in three years the camps should close.

According to the minister, absorption would take place both at absorption centers and directly with the local authorities. In addition, an exceptions committee would be created, headed by a retired judge, with the participation of two kessim (Ethiopian Jewish religious leaders) to examine the eligibility of those waiting, up to second-degree relation. In the framework of understandings with the government of Ethiopia a certain amount of aid would be allocated to those not eligible to emigrate.

David Bitan (Likud), chairman of the Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, opposed the proposed plan and argued that it would enshrine the camps and fill them anew every time. As he sees it, they should be closed, and all those approved to emigrate should be brought to Israel immediately, i.e., those who came to the camps up to the end of 2015. Bitan emphasized that the Jewish Agency stopped working with the communities at Gondar and Addis Ababa seven years ago, and that since then conditions have become very difficult in terms of education, lack of food and welfare and medical services.

But this proposed immigration has opponents among Ethiopian Israelis. The council of kessim addressed a letter to the prime minister, the minister of immigration and absorption, and other ministers, asking that it be charged with deciding whom should be allowed to immigrate, by looking into the Judaism or affinity to Judaism of those waiting in Ethiopia. The letter demands that the 2018 government decision  which stipulated the creation of the council of kessim and giving them authority regarding Ethiopians in Israel  should be enacted. In the letter they asked to institutionalize a conversion process for anyone who wants to come to Israel, for them to oversee the process, and to put an end to this saga called Falash Mura.

One of the prominent Ethiopian activists opposed to bringing the Falash Mura and the non-Jewish Ethiopians to Israel is Ayanao Pareda Sanbeto, who wrote on Facebook following the kessims letter, The government of Israel is allowed to bring Muslims and Christians here, but to wrap people up in fringes and prayer shawls and all of the symbols sacred to the Jewish people and to define them as Jews is a disgrace to our Judaism. The Minister of Absorption and Immigration wants and is acting to bring Christian missionaries from Ethiopia. She does not want the kessim, the rabbis and elders of communities to check who is from the seed of Israel, because if the kessim and elders check those missionaries she wants to bring over they wont come. She is thus betraying the heritage of her forefathers.

Sanbeto told Al-Monitor that the acts of the minister of immigration and absorption constitute a divorce certificate from the heritage of her forefathers and a humiliation of its spiritual leaders in the public eye. He argues that she succumbed to the pressure of missionary organizations.

Shalom Sharon, a community rabbi and senior lecturer at the Kiryat Ono Academic College, also an immigrant from Ethiopia, partly supports this position. According to him, the government of Israel over the years has given in to pressure and protests to bring those waiting in Ethiopia, but hasnt implemented these decisions. He rejects the claim that those waiting should be brought here for humanitarian reasons and calls for the Law of Return (enabling a person born to a Jewish father or mother to immigrate to Israel and become citizen) to be put in force, i.e., allow only eligible Jews to immigrate.

As immigrants from Russia are not allowed to bring with them all their gentile relatives, the same should apply here, and anyone whos not Jewish should be informed that he cant immigrate and should return to where he came from," Sharon told Al-Monitor. He supports the demand of the kessim to be involved in the process. They treat the community and its elders with paternalism here, he added.

Minister Tamano-Shata rejects the criticism and said that Sanbeto represents a very small part of the community and that the large majority supports her. She explains that in light of the kessims letter, she directed the creation of an appeals committee to check anyone whose case is doubtful, on which two kessim would serve. According to her, the most important thing is to make sure to quickly bring all those eligible and provide a final answer to anyone who is in doubt.

According to testimony she received, there are about 500 children in the camps, and they live in a state of undernourishment, since aid from Israel and the Jewish Agency has been delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and all emissaries who were there returned to Israel. She noted that after they sent the letter the kessim already announced that they agree to her plan.

But despite the presentation of the plan, the great financial cost of absorbing all 8,000 people waiting is about half a billion Israeli shekels ($147 million), which is the main obstacle. In Israels current political and economic crisis, obtaining such a sum is especially problematic, and the expectation is that the slow pace of their immigration will continue  only a few hundred a year.
NEW YORK: The opening of the Republican National Convention on Monday offered quick proof that how it is covered by the news media will be an ongoing sore spot.

Day One featured a complaint about his coverage by President Donald Trump, some aggressive fact-checking by television reporters and an odd social media backlash against Fox News Channel, the favorite network of the presidents fans.

Mostly viewers were repeatedly reminded of who the four-day program, reimagined because of the coronavirus pandemic, was all about. Trump gave an unexpected 54-minute address to delegates during the day, appeared in two segments from the White House in prime time and had his son give one of the featured speeches.

This really is the Trump convention, said NBC News Andrea Mitchell.

MSNBC and CNN, the ratings leaders during last weeks Democratic convention, were again the two commercial networks that showed the most of the partys program during the evening.

But unlike last week, they interrupted the Republicans for fact-checks and analysis. MSNBC interrupted a speech from a nurse who had praised Trumps response to COVID-19 for saving lives. Its all propaganda, said contributor Dr. Vin Gupta. Theres no truth to it.

Similarly, the network broke into a speech by the Missouri couple who stood outside of their house with guns when a Black Lives Matter protest march went by, after noting on an onscreen chyron that they had been charged with unlawful use of a weapon.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said, We do feel a responsibility to make sure that we are not unquestionably presenting things that are false, that are deliberately false and are potentially dangerously false.

The decision drew the ire of Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham.

MSNBC is fact-checking the GOP speakers in real time, Ingraham wrote on Twitter. Why didnt they do the same last week for the DNC?

Fox had its own issues during the first 90 minutes of evening programming, when viewers noticed they could see more of the actual proceedings on CNN and MSNBC.

The mob, the media, they wont be showing large parts of the RNC that well be showing, Hannity said at the opening of his show.

Yet it wasnt true. Hannity talked over a speech by a Georgia state legislator, a Democrat who supports Trump, while CNN and MSNBC aired it. Fox aired a conversation in which analyst Brit Hume told Tucker Carlson that the convention was trying to feature more women while at the same time the other two networks were listening to Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel speak.

It led Trump campaign aide Brad Parscale to complain on Twitter: Cant believe I have to watch the convention on CNN. Unbelievable.

Trump appeared in two White House segments, one with essential workers during the coronavirus epidemic telling their stories, and the other with former hostages in foreign countries who had been freed during the Trump administration. All praised the president.

None of the essential workers wore masks, CNNs Dana Bash pointed out during a break.

During the day, Trump complained about spotty coverage of the roll call vote that renominated him as the Republican candidate for president. Some networks abandoned the presidents informal acceptance speech in a Charlotte, North Carolina, arena for fact-checking.

Democrats last week turned the traditional roll call vote into a well received television production, with delegates stationed in their home state or territory to proclaim allegiance to Joe Biden. Republicans had 336 delegates a fraction of the normal amount support Trump at the Charlotte Convention Center.

It was a split-screen moment for news networks, which dipped in and out of the roll call as they also covered the testimony of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy before the House Oversight Committee.

Trump said his moment was overshadowed by the scam and boring hearing into whether the postal service was prepared for voting by mail this fall.

His appearance was covered live on ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News but only MSNBC and Fox stayed with him to the end.

Listening to the president underscores the challenge for us in the news business, said CNNs John King.

This is a sad thing to say, but a lot of what you have heard from the president of the United States is wrong, misleading or outright lies, King said.

He corrected Trumps statements calling voting by mail into question, as did CBS News Major Garrett when that network stopped showing the president. Potential problems outlined by Trump are highly, highly unlikely to happen, Garrett said.

MSNBCs Chuck Todd lit into Trump and the Republicans.

We were told this convention would be upbeat, optimistic, Todd said. Well, what we have just heard from the president was a grievance-filled informal acceptance speech that was filled with so many made-up problems about mail-in voting that if we were to air just the truthful parts, we probably could only air maybe a sentence.

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Home Secretary lawmaker Priti Patel, leaves 10 Downing Street in London. Relations between British government and ice cream maker Ben & Jerryas chilled Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020 in a spat about the treatment of migrants. The Vermont-based dessert brand directed a tweet Monday at Britainas interior minister, Home Secretary Priti Patel, who has vowed to stop asylum seekers crossing the English Channel from France to England in small boats. Hundreds have made the dangerous crossing in the past weeks of calm summer weather. - Matt Dunham/AP Photo

Police are to get new tasers that are more accurate and fire darts with twice the force and speed of previous models to ensure they stick into their targets.

Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, has approved the use of the Taser 7, an upgraded model of the weapon that will enable police to use it more effectively on suspects at close range as well as at distances of up to 22 ft.

Axon, the US company behind it, said the Taser 7 is faster, more accurate, and with stronger connections when the electrically-charged darts hit a suspect. They are also better at penetrating clothing with less chance of ricochets.

The approval follows Home Office safety tests on Taser 7s and a 10 million Government cash injection to fund a trebling in the number of frontline police officers trained in their use, from the current 20 per cent level.

However, it comes amid growing controversy over tasers after the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) called in May for greater scrutiny of their use following a series of incidents where critics claimed their deployment was unnecessary.

Ms Patel said: It is sickening that our brave police officers face assaults and attacks as they work tirelessly to keep us all safe. They are our protectors and I will do everything in my power to give them what they need to keep themselves and the public safe.

This new taser model will provide a safe and effective tool for apprehending criminals.

"The taser is an important tactical option for police in potentially dangerous situations.

Tasers fire two wires with probes on the end at 180 feet per second which embed in persons body. Each trigger pull results in a five second burst of electricity that incapacitates the suspect.

The Taser 7 provides a wider spread of two darts on impact at close range, which means the charge is more widely spread and so safer, according to Axon.

The close range dart cartridge operates at between 4ft and 11ft, unlike previous models where the officer had to fire further away.

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A second long-range cartridge can be used between 11ft and 22ft with the company saying it is fired double the kinetic energy of previous versions. It also has a green laser which works in daylight better than the previous red spot.

It automatically activates an officers body worn video camera on deployment and also reduces costs for forces by replacing disposable batteries with rechargeable ones.

It will be up to local police forces to decide if they want to deploy the Taser 7.

Police deployed tasers a record 23,000 times last year in face of increasingly violent suspects, double the number just two years ago, Home Office figures show.

Rosalind Comyn, of campaign group Liberty, said: Tasers can kill and they are disproportionately used against people of colour.

"Rather than continuing to promote more aggressive and dangerous police tactics, the Government should focus on tackling police racism and finding solutions that actually keep our communities safe.
"The manufacturing and retail segments have always faced unique challenges, and these have only been compounded by the unprecedented environment resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic." -- Jamie Bsales, Director of Smart Workplace & Security Analysis at Keypoint Intelligence

Lexmark, a global imaging solutions leader, today announced it has been honored in two categories with prestigious BLI PaceSetter awards 2020-2021 from Keypoint Intelligence - Buyers Lab (BLI). Lexmark was recognized for excellence in the Retail and Manufacturing categories.

PaceSetter awards recognize companies that offer the most impressive portfolios of hardware devices, software solutions, and technical and professional services for customers in the categories studied, based on in-depth research conducted by Keypoint Intelligence among participating document imaging OEMs and the firms expert analysis of each vendors offerings for the target market.

"The manufacturing and retail segments have always faced unique challenges, and these have only been compounded by the unprecedented environment resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic," said Jamie Bsales, Director of Smart Workplace & Security Analysis at Keypoint Intelligence. "Partners who serve customers in these markets need to enable those customers to be agile, efficient and innovative, while also helping them drive out cost and increase productivity wherever possible.

Retail PaceSetter

Lexmark landed in the top tier based on its strong portfolio and proven track record in creating labels and patient information packs for pharmacies, shelf tags and signage for stores, multi-part inserts for ship-to-store applications, output from customer-facing kiosks, and more. Lexmark also scored well based on its Print and Digital Signage solution, which allows retailers to publish shelf-edge signs, digital signs, electronic shelf labels and more, all from a single platform tied to the retailer's back-end systems.

Manufacturing PaceSetter

Lexmark earned top marks in manufacturing thanks to its rugged designs built to withstand the rigors of factory life. Print capabilities designed expressly for manufacturers include the ability to handle specialty media, print GHS (Globally Harmonized System) labels for flagging chemical shipments, and create RFID tags on demand so boxes can be tracked more easily. On the software front, Lexmarks Supply Chain Document Optimization offering automates and streamlines the manual and paper-based processes in supply-chain environments.

Lexmark devices are intentionally engineered to withstand harsh manufacturing and retail environments, said Brock Saladin, Lexmark senior vice president and chief revenue officer. We are proud to help our customers and partners transform their business processes for better insight and control of their retail and manufacturing paper-based processes so they can make decisions that make an impact.

Supporting Resources



Read the BLI PaceSetter award 2020-2021 article for Retail.

Read the BLI PaceSetter award 2020-2021 article for Manufacturing

Go here to find out how Lexmark enhances customer services with tailored retail solutions.

Learn more about how Lexmark helps manufacturers transform processes to make improvements that have impact.

Subscribe to the Lexmark News Blog.

Follow Lexmark on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Keypoint Intelligence - Buyers Lab

Keypoint Intelligence is a one-stop shop for the digital imaging industry. With our unparalleled tools and unmatched depth of knowledge, we cut through the noise of data to offer clients the unbiased insights and responsive tools they need in those mission-critical moments that define their products and empower their sales.

For over 50 years, Buyers Lab has been the global document imaging industrys resource for unbiased and reliable information, test data, and competitive selling tools. What started out as a consumer-based publication about office equipment has become an all-encompassing industry resource. In a landscape thats ever evolving, we change with it.

About Buyers Lab PaceSetter Awards

Based on exhaustive questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and a proprietary rating scale, Buyers Lab PaceSetter awards recognize document imaging OEMs that have shown market leadership in a variety of categories, including with technologies, services, and key vertical markets.

About Lexmark

Lexmark creates innovative imaging solutions and technologies that help customers worldwide print, secure and manage information with ease, efficiency and unmatched value.

Lexmark and the Lexmark logo are trademarks of Lexmark International, Inc., registered in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Former AP Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Sunday slammed the Jagan Mohan Reddy government for proposing its 3 Capitals plan. He asserted that going forward with the capital shifting is despotic and destructive.

As Amaravati agitation reached 250 days, Telugu Desam Party National President and former Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Sunday slammed the Jaganmohan Reddy Government for pushing ahead with its 3 Capitals plan even though it has no approval of the people of Andhra Pradesh.

Mr. Naidu asserted that the fact that the YSRCP was afraid of seeking a fresh mandate was a clear indication of how the peoples mood was strongly against the Capital shifting being pursued by the Jagan Reddy regime.

In a statement here on the occasion of Amaravati stir crossing another milestone, the TDP chief recalled that the ruling party has not come forward to accept the TDPs challenge to dissolve the Assembly and seek re-election on the promise of 3 capitals. Going ahead with the 3 Capitals blindly despite lack of public mandate would amount to a despotic and destructive action on the part of the Chief Minister.

Also Read: With single-day spike of 61k+ cases, Indias Covid-19 tally crosses 31 lakh mark

Also Read: Amid Congress letter bomb row, Maha PCC bats for Rahul as President

Stating that nobody would support demolition of Amaravati, Mr. Naidu pointed out that the people from all the 13,000 villages and 3,000 municipal wards brought sacred water and holy soil from their respective places for the foundation of Amaravati Capital. All these people brought the sacred things in a procession marking their complete approval for Amaravati as the one and only Capital. They had given their approval at the time of foundation laying for Amaravati itself. The Jagan Reddy regim would not be able to go against these wishes of the people now.

Mr. Naidu stressed the need for the people in all the 13 districts in the State to show their total solidarity to the continuing Ranabheri agitation in Amaravati. It is one of the longest agitations in the countrys recent history. The agitators would continue this till the Government withdrew its evil plan to destroy their dream Capital. It was appalling to see that the present day rulers were not coming forward to solve their problems even though the protests were continuing for such a long time.

Mr. Naidu expressed concern that the Government was remaining unmoved without any feelings even as over 85 farmers, rythu coolies and women have become martyrs while taking part in the Amaravati agitation. The agitators were continuing their protests despite harassment in the name of false cases. Many protesters were sent to jail and the police even resorted to lathi charge but the agitation was relentless.

In another statement, TDP National General Secretary and MLC Nara Lokesh said that if the rulers begin changing Capital city everytime there is a change in the Government, then the State would meet with destruction with no hope of development ever. The YSRCP should realise how the Amaravati agitation was going forward for such a long time. It is time for the ruling party leaders to change their adamant attitude and fall in line with the peoples aspirations.

The agitation for keeping Amaravati as the one and only Capital of Andhra Pradesh began on December 18, 2019. This has proved to be one of the longest agitations across the country during the Coronavirus epidemic. The agitation was begun in protest against the 3 Capitals announcement made by Chief Minister YS Jaganmohan Reddy in the AP Assembly on December 17. Later on Jan 21, 2020, the Jagan Reddy Cabinet approved the Capital shifting in the name of 3 Capitals. This had further intensified the protests in all the 29 villages of Amaravati Capital area.

Over 29,000 farmers in all these 29 villages sacrificed their 34,000 acres of ancestral property to the cause of developing Amaravati Capital for the entire State. The pre-existing agitation for Amaravati continued through the Coronavirus lockdown and unlock periods. The farmers, women, youth, coolies and others have been taking part in the agitation by duly following the Covid restrictions and the preventive guidelines recommended by the Central Government. Consequently, the AP Government and the AP Police could not create any obstacles for their agitation.

Also Read: Dont want to continue, says Sonia Gandhi, offers to step down as CWC begins
With these first three RFPs, we are trying to set the stage for what equitable development and inclusive growth will look like in the Invest South/West initiative, Cox said. This is how were trying to do it, to lift up those neighborhood assets that are vacant but can have a catalytic, stage-setting impact on what is to come in those corridors.
Following hundreds of social media posts, petitions and appeals to Instagram, Black plus size influencer Nyome Nicholas-Williams has succeeded in getting the platform to review its semi-nudity policy after a campaign called #iwanttoseenyome made waves.

Nicholas-Williams, who goes by @CurvyNyome on Instagram, shared a picture of herself topless to Instagram in early August, covering her breasts with an arm. The pose is one youll find on the feeds of many influencers, celebrities and social media users on Instagram to little objection from the platform.

However, Nicholas-Williams picture was deleted by Instagram and she received a warning that her account could be taken down.

Alexandra Cameron

Speaking to The Guardian, Nicholas-Williams said: Millions of pictures of very naked, skinny white women can be found on Instagram every day. But a fat black woman celebrating her body is banned? It was shocking to me. I feel like Im being silenced.

Following the spread of the #iwanttoseenyome hashtag and a Change.org petition with over 18,000 signatures calling to Stop instagram from censoring fat Black women, Nicholas-Williams and her supporters have succeeded in getting Instagram to review its policy on nudity.

Nicholas-Williams shared the news on Instagram, along with an accompanying email screenshot with details of the policy review. Previously, she revealed Instagram had apologised to her over the deletion of her image and restored it.

The social media platform explained in the email that its guidelines dont allow breast squeezing as it is often associated with pornographic content, but said it had made mistakes in how this has been enforced.

Alexandra Cameron

Images are flagged on Instagram through a combination of AI technology and staff members who manually review posts.

The email continued: Weve shared new guidance with our review teams to help them better distinguish between squeezing breasts and simply holding or covering them, and were looking closely at our existing policy to understand where we can improve this experience for our plus-size community.

Fellow influencer Stephanie Yeboah also spoke with the social media platform about the constant censorship of fat bodies and black bodies on the platform, while allowing smaller bodies to show partial nudity.

She shared a breakdown of her Zoom conversation with Instagram about their Community Guidelines policies and about Nicholas-Williams impact, explaining that Instagram acknowledged they were very aware of Nicholas-Williams situation.

Adding that fat bodies are subject to extreme hypersexualisation, she said, [Instagram] agreed with me on this, and because of the huge visibility that stemmed from @curvynyome and the overwhelming support she received, they have changed their policy on how they review semi-nudity THIS WEEK.

She continued: [It happened] all because of (and Im quoting @instagram directly here) @curvynyomes voice and the overwhelming support she received online.

Nicholas-Williams original images depicted her semi-nude sitting on a chair, wearing cycle shorts and covering her breasts. They were taken by photographer Alexandra Cameron, who shared a side by side comparison of one of Nicholas-Williams deleted images from her photoshoot as well as a semi-nude portrait of herself which she said had been up since November 2018.

Alexandra Cameron

Cameron wrote in early August: I cannot imagine Instagram deciding that the way I look is against community [guidelines]. I cant imagine how it feels to be repeatedly censored and targeted just for being her.

Nicholas-Williams has since celebrated the win on Instagram with a portrait, captioning the post: This is the first step but look what I did yall. Black plus sized bodies arent going anywhere!!
Banners against renters eviction reading no job, no rent is displayed on a controlled rent building in Washington, DC on August 9, 2020.

More renters are unable to make their monthly payments, and that is having an outsized impact on the nation's "mom and pop" landlords.

Nearly a third of renters who live in single-family or small multifamily properties owned by individual landlords were unable to pay their August rent, according to a survey by Avail, a technology and marketing platform for small landlords. That is up from just under 25% in July. Avail received responses from 2,225 landlords and almost 3,000 renters.

The main reason for their inability to pay was loss of employment or reduced income. Additional unemployment benefits put in place when the coronavirus pandemic hit were helping tenants to keep up with their rent, but those recently expired, and a growing number of renters are now missing their payments during a standoff between D.C. Republicans and Democrats over a relief package.

On the other end of the equation, about a third of small landlords rely on that rent for the bulk of their income.

Individual landlords make up the majority of single-family rental owners. Nearly 23 million units in 17 million properties are owned by individual investors, according to the most recent count by the U.S. Census Bureau. Just under a third of these investors are retirees.

Nearly 54% of the income from a typical rental unit normally goes toward fixed costs associated with property ownership, according to an analysis by Zillow. These expenses include mortgage payments, property taxes, maintenance, insurance and capital improvements. Without the rent, landlords still have to cover shortfall.

"Our data show that 42% of renters and 35% of landlords are digging into their emergency funds and savings to cover everyday expenses," said Ryan Coon, CEO of Avail. He noted that close to half of small landlords said they have offered to defer or forgive rent entirely.
The two outfits were instrumental in mobilising protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in Assam last December

Amid talks of a possible regional political alternative, the influential All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuva Chatra Parishad (AJYCP) have formed a 16-member advisory committee to, what they call, suggest steps to secure educational, social, economic and political future of the state.

The two outfits were instrumental in mobilising protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in Assam last December, and since then there has been a demand from the civil society that they take the lead in launching an alternative to the Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state ahead of the 2021 assembly polls.

The AASU and the AJYCP were among the many indigenous groups in the Northeast that were up in arms against the CAA, fearing it would encourage more migration which could eventually alter the demographic balance of the region.

The CAA grants Indian citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan who entered the country on or before December 31, 2014.

This would be the second instance of the AASUs brush with politics. In 1985, when the six-year anti-foreigner movement came to an end, a section of student activists led by then AASU president Prafulla Kumar Mahanta formed the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and went on to rule the state for two terms.

The latest move, though long expected, comes at a time when the opposition Congress is batting for a grand alliance to defeat the BJP in the upcoming assembly elections. Prior to this, a political forum of indigenous groups called the Anchalik Gana Morcha was launched in June under the leadership of veteran journalist-turned-Rajya Sabha member Ajit Kumar Bhuyan.

An impressive panel

For the advisory panel, the two student outfits have picked noted litterateur Dr Nagen Saikia, former Meghalaya governor RS Mooshahary, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Jahnu Barua, educationists Basanta Deka, Ali Haider Laskar, Rana Changmai, Abu Shahid Rafikuddin Ahmed, former bureaucrat Dhiren Saikia, writer Sanjay Kumar Tanti, actor Prithviraj Rabha, journalist Surya Thausen, advocate Pranabjyoti Saikia, and eminent citizen Pradip Koch, among others.

The uniqueness of the panel comes from the fact that the members were drawn not only from various fields but also from the different communities of this multiethnic state. The idea seems to be to protect the interests of the indigenous people at a time when the national political parties are turning a blind eye to the problems faced by the state, including the vexed issue of illegal migrants.

Why it is so significant

The advisory committee was formed a week after the AASU released a confidential report on implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord that seeks to protect cultural, social and linguistic identity of the Assamese people. The student body was part of the high-powered committed constituted by the Centre which submitted its recommendations to the Assam government five months ago. For its part, the AASU accused both the Centre and the state government of keeping the people of Assam in dark about the reports contents and its implementation.

The AASU was one of the signatories of the historic accord that was signed at the end of Assam Agitation in 1985. However, it is yet to be fully and effectively implemented even after 35 years of its signing, the committee noted in its report.

The updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, as required under the accord, did not yield desired results. The state government is now exploring legal options for re-verification of names in the final list released in August last year following fears that a large number of suspected people made it to the list.

It is expected that the 16-member advisory committee would create a detailed roadmap for the proposed political party, with an emphasis on the full implementation of the Assam Accord in a time-bound manner.

Likely candidates

For its part, the AASU maintains that it would retain its apolitical character as a student body. However, both the AASU and the AJYCP are well aware of the fact that from the beginning of the anti-CAA movement in the state, the people of Assam have openly expressed their support towards formation of a strong regional alternative, AASU chief advisor Samujjal Bhattachrya told reporters in Guwahati on August 19.

There are reports that the proposed political party would contest as many as 70 out of 126 seats in the upcoming assembly elections. There is also speculation that student leaders such AASU president Dipanka Kumar Nath, general secretary Lurinjyoti Gogoi and AJYCP leader Palash Changmai would be probable candidates, in which could well turn out to be a high-pitched battle.

An ambitious plan as it is, the AASU would do well to avoid past mistakes of its former leaders who had joined politics but failed to live up to the voters expectations. Needless to say that the people would not tolerate a second AGP, a biproduct of Assam Agitation, and in which they had put utmost trust, only to be felt betrayed when it voted in favour of the citizenship bill last year.

(Jayanta Kalita is a senior journalist and author based in Delhi. He writes on issues related to Indias Northeast. The views are personal.)
Authors Note: This is the first of a three-part series.

To answer the question posed in last Tuesdays column, Yes, Kevin Clinesmith did plead guilty Wednesday. Sort of.

Well, maybe it was a smidge better than sort of. After all, it did happen in a federal-district-court proceeding (via videoconference) on Wednesday. And Judge James Boasberg did accept the plea after eliciting it in accordance with settled criminal-law rules. Sentencing is scheduled for December 10. So its official.

But Im sticking with sort of. If Clinesmiths guilty plea is legally adequate, it is barely so. And neither a judge nor a prosecutor is required to accept an allocution sliced so fine. In admitting guilt, Clinesmith ended up taking the position that I hoped the judge, and especially the Justice Department, would not abide, in essence: Okay, maybe I committed the crime of making a false statement, but to be clear, I thought the statement was true when I made it, and I certainly never intended to deceive anyone.

Huh?

I dont mean to make you dizzy, but in my view, Clinesmith is lying about lying. His strategy is worth close study because it encapsulates the mendaciousness and malevolence of both Crossfire Hurricane (the FBIs Trump-Russia investigation) and the collusion never-enders who continue to defend it. A defendants lying about lying does not necessarily make a false-statement guilty plea infirm as a matter of law. The bar is not high. Still, his story is ridiculous, in a way that is easy to grasp once its placed in context.

So lets place it in context.

Page Is a Russian Spy  the FBI Plants Its Feet on a Fantasy

Our point of reference is spring 2017.

While indignantly denying news stories portraying him as a clandestine agent of Russian, Carter Page asserts that, actually, hes been an informant for a U.S. intelligence agency. FBI officials should know that Page is telling the truth. They have already heard the same thing from the CIA and from Page himself.

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The CIA told the bureau ten months earlier, in a memo dated August 17, 2016 (i.e., two months before the FBI sought the first FISA warrant against Page). Page had been a CIA source who provided information about Russians. Page told the bureau about at least some of this work during voluntary interviews in 2009 and 2013, during the period when the CIA had authorized Page for operational contact with Russians. The FBI, meanwhile, actually used information from Page in a prosecution of Russian spies. (See my 2018 column, discussing of United States v. Buryakov.)

And its not as if the CIAs acknowledgment of Pages informant status was the only exculpatory fact the FBI knew. Not by a long shot. Page was pleading with the FBI director to sit down with the bureau and explain himself, as he had done on other occasions over the years. More to the point, in August 2016 (again, two months before the first FISA warrant to permit spying on Page), Page had credibly insisted to a covert FBI informant, Stefan Halper, that key allegations about Page (derived from the bogus Steele dosser) were false: Page did not even know Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, let alone act as Manaforts intermediary in a TrumpRussia espionage conspiracy; and Page had not recently met in Moscow with Putin-regime heavyweights Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin.

Thus, (a) Page had not done the very things that led the FBI to accuse him of being an active anti-American spy, and (b) Pages prior contacts with Russians, on which the bureau further rationalized its overwrought suspicions, overlapped with Pages years as a CIA operative. Weeks before the FBI and the Obama Justice Department first applied for a FISA warrant on the theory that Page was a spy for the Kremlin, the FBI team conducting the investigation had information showing the theory was untenable.

Yet the bureau chose to plant its feet on the daft theory anyway. Apologists for the bureau and the Obama administration would now have you believe that this is because a single one of the FBIs crack counterintelligence agents, Stephen Somma, dropped the ball  that he alone knew Page was a CIA informant, but held out on his chain-of-command. Really? If they dropped as many balls in Times Square as Somma did  purportedly without anyone noticing, in one the most significant investigations in the FBIs history  wed have New Years once a week.

The fact is, top officials were drinking the Donald Trump must be colluding with Russia Kool-Aid, so the story was too good to check. And once the farcical Steele dossier grabbed the investigators attention in late summer 2016, the bureau was off to the races, framing Page as a key cog in the Trump campaigns conspiracy of cooperation with the Kremlin.

But that was autumn 2016. Now, remember, were in late spring of 2017. At this point, the FBI has been monitoring Page for over eight months. The Page-is-a-Russian-spy theory is in tatters. The surveillance turns up nothing. Halper has nothing. Steeles dossier, a shoddy product on its face, is now a hot, steaming mess. Not only is it uncorroborated and unverifiable; Steele himself is dismissing it as raw information that needed to be investigated, and his primary subsource, Igor Danchenko, has discredited it as fiction and rumormongering.

But alas, the FBI is dug in. This was not just office banter. The bureau had taken the claim that Page was a spy to court. It was the linchpin of the hypothesis that the Trump campaign was a Kremlin influence operation. This theory, bereft of supporting evidence and resistant to exculpatory evidence, had the imprimatur of FBI headquarters. By June 2017, in conjunction with the Justice Department, the FBI had made this claim under oath to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), three times: a first application in October 2016, and renewal applications in January and April 2017. Each time, based on the FBIs representations, the FISC issued a 90-day surveillance warrant against Page.

Disclosure Would Mean Epic Humiliation

The warrant issued by the FISC on April 7 was due to expire in early July. By mid June, then, the bureau was well into its preparations to submit yet another renewal application.

This is the salient time frame for Clinesmiths case. His defense counsel and apologists would have you look at it as a snapshot. But it wasnt just a moment in time. It was a moment shaped by the preceding ten months, since the Crossfire Hurricane investigation (i.e., the Trump-Russia probe) was formally opened on July 31, 2016.

By June 2017, it would have occasioned epic humiliation for the FBI to admit that it had on three occasions made false assertions under oath in order to persuade federal judges to issue classified surveillance warrants against an American citizen. Not just humiliation. FBI leadership had publicized the existence of the TrumpRussia probe, consciously promoting the media-Democratic political narrative that the president was beholden to the Kremlin. An admission that court warrants had been sought on false premises would have led to certain administrative discipline and potential criminal inquiries.

This was not at the back of the bureaus mind. It was front and center. Just read the FISA warrants. Read the in-the-interest-of-full-disclosure footnotes massaged into gibberish as the case was collapsing. And bear in mind: These laborious rationalizations did not come close to revealing the mounds of exculpatory information that the FBI was withholding.

To hear FBI and Justice Department officials tell it, the FISA process is so well designed and diligently executed that, at all times, they are profoundly aware of their heightened duty of candor, of their obligations to submit only verified warrant applications. Of their duty to alert the FISC promptly if they discover that something theyve represented to the court is inaccurate. They know, they tell us, about the imperative to be transparent regarding exculpatory information. And even if officials were ever to lose sight of these weighty responsibilities, even for a moment, were to take comfort that their recollection would quickly be refreshed by the multiple, high-level FBI and DOJ approvals the FISA statute mandates. These have spawned an infrastructure of lawyers, analysts, and verification procedures to ensure that the bosses dont embarrass themselves by signing off on FISA warrant applications that are fraudulent, or at least recklessly irresponsible.

Thats how its supposed to work . . . on the drawing board.

Down here on Planet Earth, though, in all of governments sprawl, there is no institution more self-conscious about its image, more energetic in promoting its pristine reputation, than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And thus there is none more resistant to damaging disclosures.

At the bureau, officials are keenly aware that, when a misrepresentation is discovered, it is often just the visible part of what, on inspection, turns out to be a train of errors, oversights, poor judgments, and, occasionally, misconduct. The disclosure of a single glaring inaccuracy elucidates that investigators, analysts, or lawyers  or all of them  were aware of information that should have set off alarm bells, yet they all turned a deaf ear. Alarm bells, after all, signal underlying misfeasance . . . and sometimes malfeasance. If a judge gets spun up by one embarrassing disclosure, it can soon become two . . . then four . . . And then, next thing you know, a case is unraveling as a scandal unfolds.

Clinesmiths Motives Mirror His Superiors MotivesIn June 2017, on the thin line between business as usual and epic embarrassment, stood Kevin Clinesmith.

He was then a 30-something assistant general counsel in the bureaus National Security and Cyber Law Branch. It is part of the FBIs Office of General Counsel (OGC), then led by James Baker.

Among the branchs responsibilities, it reviews FISA warrant applications. The Carter Page applications, however, were handled in an unusual way. Details of the applications were scrutinized at the highest levels of the FBI and the Justice Department, to the point that the National Security branchs once-over became superfluous.

For example, Trisha Anderson, the OGCs former deputy general counsel, told the House Intelligence Committee in 2018 testimony that, though she normally reviewed FISA warrant applications before they went to the upper ranks for statutorily required sign-offs, she did not do that with the October 2016 Page application. By the time it landed on her desk, it had already been reviewed line by line by such superiors as the FBIs thendeputy director Andrew McCabe, as well as by thendeputy attorney general Sally Yates at Main Justice. It had even been perused by Andersons OGC superior, General Counsel Baker. Baker conceded to the committee that it was unusual for him to review a FISA warrant application, particularly at an early stage, as he did with the Page application.

In the chain of command, Clinesmith ranked a few notches lower than Anderson: He reported to the National Security branch chief, who reported to Anderson, after which the chain ascended to Baker, McCabe, and ultimately Director James Comey. That is, Clinesmith was a junior officer  support personnel. The decision to represent to the FISC that Page was a Russian spy had been made way above his pay grade. The bosses were so invested in it, they were relying on it to investigate the sitting president of the United States. And just a few weeks earlier, when the president fired Comey in May 2017, a special counsel had been appointed to take over the investigation. The Mueller teams mandate from the deputy attorney general was to get to the bottom of links between the Russian regime and former Trump-campaign advisers, such as Page.

This was not a train Clinesmith could have started or stopped on his own. Nevertheless, he was all in.

We learn from the Inspector Generals report on the FBIs FISA abuse that, from the very beginning, Clinesmith was in on OGC deliberations about seeking FISA surveillance of Page. Even before September 2016, when he first learned about Steeles reporting, he told the IG he believed that there was a 50/50 chance of establishing probable cause that Page was a clandestine agent for Russia. For that assessment, he relied on Pages historical contacts with Russian intelligence officers. At that point, he says he did not know that the CIA had told the FBI that Page was a CIA informant when these contacts took place. So, when the first FISA warrant was sought in October 2016 (and the second in January, and the third in April), he agreed that the probable-cause standard was easily satisfied by these contacts, weighed in combination with Steeles (uncorroborated) claims about Page, as well as Pages statements to Halper (as bowdlerized by the bureau).

Echoing his bosses, then, Clinesmith adopted the Page is a Russian spy fantasy from the get-go. If subsequent developments ever called for scrutinizing the kamikaze portrayal of Page as a spy, Clinesmith was sure to be on the hook. And while the higher-ups would take most of the heat if the bureau proved to be embarrassingly wrong, it is always the underlings like Clinesmith who get hung out to dry for misinforming their superiors. That is how Washington works. Clinesmith, a Washington creature, realized this only too well.

The Predication of Our Entire Investigation Is at RiskOf course, Clinesmith was not putting himself personally on the line with the FISC. That was to be the responsibility of the affiant, the FBI agent assigned to swear to the truth of the warrant application. This difference in the duties of that agent and Clinesmith, along with an obvious integrity disparity, explains the very different way they approached the matter.

This affiant-agent is identified only as SSA in the criminal information filed against Clinesmith. (This affiant-agent is SSA 2 in the IG report, one of several unidentified supervisory special agents who appear therein). Though nominally a supervising agent, the SSA operated at some remove from the rubber-meets-the-road investigating. In the bureau, the agent who signs a FISA warrant is not the supervisor of agents investigating the case; he is a headquarters program manager. Furthermore, the SSA was not assigned to Crossfire Hurricane until late December 2016. That is, he was not involved in the initial deliberations over whether Page was a Russian spy and whether to seek FISA surveillance on that theory.

Having inherited sign-off responsibility in an ongoing surveillance that his superiors had already green-lighted, the SSA went with the flow, at least at the beginning. The IG report indicates that, in signing the first and second renewal applications (in January and April 2017), the SSA performed only a cursory review of the file. He assumed that other agents had done their work properly.

It was only in June 2017, as the third renewal application was being prepared, that he became concerned. It was around that time that the SSA heard about Pages vehement public denials that he was a Russian spy and claims that he had engaged Russians on behalf of an American intelligence service. It dawned on the SSA that he would be expected to swear, under penalty of perjury, that he believed there was probable cause to conclude that Page was a clandestine agent of Russia, working against the United States. Pages public protestations gave him pause. They also created a potentially catastrophic problem for the bureau, which the SSA later summarized for the IG (Id italicize  but Id have to italicize every word):

[If Page] was being tasked by another agency, especially if he was being tasked to engage Russians, then it would absolutely be relevant for the Court to know . . . [and] could also seriously impact the predication of our entire investigation, which focused on [Pages] close and continuous contact with Russian/Russia-linked individuals.

If Page had been a CIA operative during meetings with Russians  meetings that the FBI had sworn to the court showed Page was a traitorous spy  then the FBI would have some serious explaining to do. And if it turned out that, before applying under oath for the warrants, the FBI had been informed by the CIA that Page was a CIA operative, then the FBI would be humiliated.

Bear in mind: The incumbent Democratic administration had opened an election-year investigation of its Republican opposition, and the FBI had heavily relied on bogus evidence generated by the Democratic campaign to claim that Page was a spy for Russia. With that as background, there would be only two possible explanations for the FBIs failure to inform the court that Page was working for the CIA when the bureau had claimed he was working for the Kremlin: willful abuse of power or monstrous incompetence.

End of Part 1.

More from National Review
In the early morning hours of Oct. 5, 2005, 27-year-old Christie Wilson left Thunder Valley Casino after a night of gambling. She wasn't alone.

When a missing persons report was filed, Placer County investigators immediately pulled surveillance footage from the casino northeast of Sacramento. They watched Wilson, under no apparent duress, enjoying herself like any other patron. Then, they spotted a man who kept striking up conversations with her, hour after hour. Around 1 a.m., the man and Wilson left together. The last bit of surveillance footage showed them walking out into the parking lot.

Using Thunder Valley's player membership system, that man was identified as Mario Flavio Garcia, a 53-year-old IT specialist who was then working as a project manager for Sutter Health. Garcia, who was reportedly sporting a black eye, told detectives he did meet Wilson that night, but that she had later gone back into the casino to retrieve her cell phone. This was not corroborated by the casino's surveillance footage.

When Placer County sheriff's detectives served a warrant on Garcia's car, they found Wilson's hair and spots of her blood in the vehicle. No other traces of Wilson were discovered.

In 2007, Garcia was convicted of first-degree murder, the first case in Placer County history where prosecutors were able to secure a conviction with no body. And so while a man was behind bars for her murder, Wilson remained missing.

On Monday, 15 years after her disappearance, the Placer County Sheriff's Office announced they have finally found Christie Wilson's body.

Last week, investigators went to Garcia's former home in Auburn and began searching anew, scanning the four-and-a-half acre property with ground-penetrating radar. A few areas "of interest" were located.

"Detectives and investigators searching one of those areas located and recovered skeletal remains which were brought to the Placer County Morgue for examination," said a statement from the sheriff's office. "Dental records have confirmed the remains found on the property, formerly owned by Garcia, are those of Christie Wilson."

At a press conference Monday, Wilson's mother Debbie Boyd expressed her gratitude to the investigators and said finding Christie's body will enable the family the "close this horrible chapter" in their lives.

Garcia, who is now 67, is serving his sentence of 59 years to life at the R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego.

Katie Dowd is the SFGATE managing editor. Contact: katie.dowd@sfgate.com | Twitter: @katiedowd
After two men were shot in the head in a slowly moving car last week in north Reading, a Berks County Prison inmate had a conversation with a caller who seemed to admit he was the shooter, according to investigators.

The inmate is heard asking a man later identified as Joewel Keita, 22, of Mohnton if he remembered who cheated his relative, according to the criminal complaint.

Keita replied, You already know, according to the criminal complaint.

The inmate asked Keita if he sent him to Mars, which a Reading police criminal investigator interpreted as a slang term for killing someone.

The inmate, in an apparent attempt to clarify if the victim was dead, asked Keita if he sent him to Mars or to the moon. Keita is alleged to have replied that he didnt know because no one said anything, according to the documents.

Both victims were alive when the conversation took place.

One of the victims, who from the criminal complaint appears to be the subject of the Aug. 19 conversation, suffered wounds to the scalp and left shoulder.

The other victim, Albert M. Pena-Pena, 26, of Reading, was pronounced dead Thursday night in Reading Hospital.

An autopsy was scheduled for late Monday afternoon in Reading Hospital by Dr. Supriya Kuruvilla, a forensic pathologist.

Investigators said they did a reverse search of the callers phone number and it came back to an address on Pear Street in Mohnton.

They said they learned from state parole officials that the phone number of the prison caller is assigned to Keita who resides at that address. Keita was convicted of robbery in 2014 and 2015

City police arrested Keita on Friday night. He was sent to Berks County Prison without bail to await a hearing following arraignment before District Judge Tonya Butler in Reading Central Court

Keita is charged with first- and third-degree murder, attempted murder and related counts.

According to the probable cause affidavit:

Police were dispatched for the shooting in the 1200 block of Church Street on Aug. 18 just before 11 p.m. As they were responding, officers learned that two men were shot in the head in a vehicle that ended up about six blocks away at McKnight and Greenwich streets.

Officers found the two victims with gunshots wounds to their heads and bodies. The victims were taken by ambulance to the Reading Hospital trauma center.

Pena-Pena was the more seriously injured victim and was unable to speak to investigators.

The other victim was able to talk to investigators. He said he was hanging out with some people, including Pena-Pena, in front of a residence on Church Street.

He and Pena-Pena decided to leave and loaded a large speaker into the car. Pena-Pena got into the passenger seat, and the other man got into the drivers seat.

While loading the speaker, he said he noticed he noticed a short-, stocky black man with glasses walking past on the sidewalk with a mask pulled partially down and a hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

As he drove away shots were fired into the car.

Security camera footage shows a male with his hood pulled up walking on the sidewalk past the victims. As the victims got into the vehicle, he pulls out a gun and fires at the vehicle. Four muzzle flashes are seen, and the shooter turns and runs.

Criminal Investigator Joseph Snell asked the victim why he had Social Security card that did not belong to him. Police said it was for a person who was known to them as a member of the Northside gang. The victim said he would file for unemployment benefits for others.

A forensic review of the surviving victims phone revealed a Facebook conversation between him and the relative of the inmate who made underlying threats to the victim about withholding money from him.

The victim had told him he was unable to secure unemployment benefits for him.
As COVID-19 cases rise at the University of Alabama, the City of Tuscaloosa is taking new measures to slow the spread.

Bars will be closed for two weeks and bar service at restaurants will be suspended, mayor Walt Maddox announced Monday morning. The new orders begin at 5 p.m. Monday and run through Sept. 8.

The mayor said he will be making a request to the Alabama Beverage Control Board to suspend walk-up alcohol sales. Only customers seated at tables can be sold alcohol, under these new orders.

Maddox said he will be working with the city council to make investments in our bars and restaurants to help them in this difficult time. The full executive order from the city is posted on its website. In it, the mayor requests $400,000 in small business grants for businesses impacted by the order. Failing to comply with the new executive order comes with a $500 fine and up to 180 days in jail

University of Alabama president Stuart Bell said these measures were needed to slow the increasing spread of COVID-19 on campus. He declined to give specific numbers of positive cases on campus but said the UA System office will be announcing numbers later Monday. There is a particular concern about outbreaks in Greek houses, which were the subject of restrictions announced Friday.

The plan is to test up to 1,000 students per day, said Dr. Ricky Friend, dean of the UA College of Community Health Sciences, where large number of positives have been documented.

Without this intervention and the supportive measures of our partners in Student Life and the city, our epidemiology and medical teams feel we will be at risk for even further consequences in the coming weeks, Friend said.

Maddox said the executive order announced Monday was the result of discussions he had with UA officials over the preceding 48 hours.

The ever-increasing number cases of coronavirus on campus will create two major disruptions for the city of Tuscaloosa if left unabated, Maddox said. The first is to our healthcare system. From the start, the city has taken decisive action to protect DCH. This has been our North star. The second disruption has been to our economy. UA has a $2 billion economic impact on our metro and thousands of our citizens depend on the jobs that UA provides. I know this is not easy. I know the coronavirus has taken so much but we must finish the job.

RELATED: Alabama president tells students COVID case rise unacceptable

Alabama governor Kay Ivey showed support for Tuscaloosas move in a statement released Monday morning.

They have made tough decisions, and I appreciate Mayor Walt Maddox and The University of Alabama leadership for tackling a serious problem as quickly as possible, Ivey said. If we do not act expeditiously, it leaves the potential for a situation to get out of hand, which would require even tougher, longer-lasting decisions to be enacted.

Alabama SGA president Demarcus Joiner attended Mondays announcement of increased regulations. He hopes this can make a dent in the numbers.

I think its going to hit them hard but hopefully students understand that this about more than them, Joiner said. This is for the community to make sure the community is safe. I also hope students will use this opportunity to focus on academics over these first two weeks of class. And once these restrictions are lessened, maybe theyll have an opportunity to be more social.

**This post was updated at 2:34 p.m. to include more on student testing and comments from Maddox.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.
A rise in German cases linked to weddings and private parties was hardly a shock because the rules around friends and families meeting vary so widely. Federal states are allowed to set their own guidelines and some are too permissive: In Berlin as many as 500 people can meet inside. In contrast, England restricts private gatherings to a maximum of 30 people and the government has threatened 10,000 pound ($13,000) fines for breaches. Ireland has tightened restrictions so that only six people may meet indoors.(1)
An employee of a marriage hall was injured after being allegedly shot by some unidentified assailants in broad daylight in Lucknows Daliganj area on Monday morning, police said.

The injured man identified as Dhirendra Das, 50, was rushed to the trauma centre at King George Medical University (KGMU) where his condition was stated to be stable, they said.

Dhirendra Das who managed booking for marriages and other events was shot at around 9:30 am. According to the people present there at the time of the incident, the attackers approached Das on the pretext of seeking booking for a function and then shot at him. The accused fled the spot and our teams are trying to identify and arrest them, said additional deputy commissioner of police Rajesh Srivastav.

We have deployed four teams which are checking CCTV footage and mobile surveillance besides seeking help of local intelligence unit to identify the attackers, said the officer.

We are also speaking to people who were present at the marriage hall when the incident took place to ascertain if Das had any personal rivalry with anyone, he added.

In 2015, Das was shot at under similar circumstances and the involvement of other employees of the marriage hall had come to fore then.
YEREVAN -- An Armenian soldier has been taken into the custody of Azerbaijani forces under disputed circumstances in an area where both the rival Transcaucasus states maintain heavy troop presences.

The Armenian Defense Ministry said the junior officer, Gurgen Alaverdian, had lost his way due to "extremely unfavorable weather conditions" as he was preparing to inspect an Armenian front-line position late on August 22.

The ministry did not say whether Alaverdian was near the Armenian-Azerbaijani border or the "line of contact" around Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan's breakaway region populated mostly by ethnic Armenians.

The Azerbaijani military disputed the Armenian account, saying its troops deployed in the Goranboy district north of Nagorno-Karabakh captured Alaverdian while fighting back an Armenian commando attack early on August 23.

Armenia and Azerbaijan conduct occasional exchanges of individuals in their respective custodies but long-running diplomatic talks have been largely stalled for over a year.

Days of deadly fighting that included artillery fire along a remote northern section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in mid-July alarmed the international community and stoked deep national resentments in both countries.

It was the most serious bloodshed in at least four years in a history of incidents since a 1994 cease-fire ended major fighting that killed around 30,000 people but failed to resolve the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh's fate.
This image made from video shows Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko armed with a Kalashnikov-type rifle near the Palace of Independence in Minsk on Aug. 23, 2020. (State TV and Radio Company of Belarus via AP Photo)

Police in Belarus Detain Opposition Activists After Rally

MINSK, BelarusPolice in Belarus on Monday detained several leading opposition activists who have helped spearhead a wave of protests challenging the reelection of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko in balloting that his critics say was rigged.

The Coordination Council, which was established by the opposition to negotiate a transfer of power, said its members Sergei Dylevsky and Olga Kovalkova were detained in the capital of Minsk. Later in the day, the opposition also reported the detention of Alexander Lavrinovich, the leader of striking workers at a major industrial plant.

Demonstrators fill the streets of Minsk on Aug. 23, 2020. (Sergei Grits/AP Photo)

The police actions signal Lukashenkos determination to stifle massive post-election demonstrations that have entered their third week. The 65-year-old Belarusian leader, who has been in power since 1994, toted an assault rifle in a show of force as he arrived at his residence by helicopter on Sunday while protesters rallied nearby.

Last week, Lukashenko warned that the opposition councils members could face criminal accusations for creating what he described as a parallel government. Prosecutors then opened a criminal inquiry on charges of undermining national security, an allegation rejected by the council.

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko armed with a Kalashnikov-type rifle as he greets riot police officers near the Palace of Independence in Minsk on Aug. 23, 2020. (State TV and Radio Company of Belarus via AP Photo)

Several other council members, including Belarus most famous writer, Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, have been summoned for questioning over the protests in an apparent attempt by authorities to intimidate them.

Dylevsky played a leading role in organizing a strike at the Minsk Tractor Plant, one of the multiple labor actions at top factories last week in support of the protests that posed a major challenge to Lukashenko. Lavrinovich led the strike organizing committee at another major factory, the Minsk Wheeled Tow Truck Plant.

A girl covers with an old Belarusian National flag as people stand near the place where Alexander Taraikovsky died amid the clashes protesting the election results, in Minsk, on Aug. 24, 2020. (Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

Kovalkova is a top associate of the main opposition challenger in the disputed Aug. 9 election, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who entered the race after her husband was jailed and prevented from running. She fled to Lithuania after the vote under official pressure.

Tsikhanouskaya met Monday with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun in Lithuanias capital, Vilnius. In a statement issued by her campaign headquarters, she reaffirmed her readiness for talks on a transition of power to settle the crisis in Belarus. Tsikhanouskaya also thanked the United States for supporting the Belarusian people.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun listens during the meeting with Lithuanias Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Aug. 24, 2020. (Mindaugas Kulbis/AP Photo)

She is a very impressive person and I can see why she is so popular in her country, Biegun said after meeting her. The United States cannot and will not decide the course of events in Belarus, this is the right of Belarusian people.

The U.S. and the European Union have dismissed the election as neither free nor fair and urged authorities to start a dialogue with the opposition.

Sundays anti-Lukashenko demonstration in Minsk drew an estimated 200,000 people pushing for him to step down. A protest a week earlier attracted a similar number in the largest rallies ever held in the former Soviet nation of 9.5 million people.

Protesters wave flags as serviceman stand behind a barbed wire fence during a protest in Minsk on Aug. 23, 2020. (Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

The demonstrations are challenging the official results of the election, which gave Lukashenko a sixth term with an unlikely 80 percent of the vote.

The president, who cultivates an air of machismo, has dismissed the opposition as puppets of the West and accused the U.S. of fomenting the unrest.

Video on Sunday showed him getting off his helicopter with a Kalashnikov automatic rifle. He was accompanied by his 15-year-old younger son, who also carried a rifle.

The Belarusian leader commented to his aides that the protesters ran away like rats and then thanked riot police who encircled the presidential residence.

We will deal with them, he said of the demonstrators.

A young boy catches a balloon during a protest in Minsk, Belarus, on Aug. 23, 2020. (Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

Shortly before he spoke, the demonstrators approached the edges of the grounds, but were stopped by lines of police officers in full riot gear and soon dispersed amid the rain.

The authorities are afraid of the majority and clearly nervous, said Maria Kolesnikova, a leading member of the opposition council, in describing Lukashenkos actions in the face of the protests.

She described the detentions of her colleagues as crude pressure and an attempt to scare us.

They ignore our proposals for a dialogue and respond with repressions, she told The Associated Press.

Women hold flowers while lining up during a demonstration against violence in Minsk on Aug. 20, 2020. (Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

The protests were galvanized by a brutal crackdown in the initial days after the election, when police detained nearly 7,000 people. Hundreds were injured when officers dispersed peaceful protesters with rubber bullets, stun grenades and clubs. At least three people died.

Lukashenko on Monday dismissed Belarus ambassador to Slovakia, Igor Leshchenya, who denounced the crackdown and handed in his resignation.

As crowds swelled amid public outrage, the authorities backed off and let demonstrations go unhindered. However, they again bolstered police cordons around the city since last week and threatened opposition activists with criminal charges.

People carry a portrait of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, former candidate for the presidential elections during opposition rally in front of the government building in Minsk on Aug. 17, 2020. (Sergei Grits/AP Photo)

German Chancellor Angela Merkels spokesman Steffen Seibert criticized the threats against the striking factory workers and deplored the very martial, threatening backdrop which Mr. Lukashenko created on the weekend. He praised the protesters courage and emphasized that a dialogue between the leadership and the Belarus society is urgently needed.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said while visiting Ukraine on Monday that Germany, which currently holds the EU presidency, urged Russia to use what influence it has with Lukashenko to make clear to him that he can no longer get past this dialogue.

A young girl plays with a balloon during a protest in Minsk on Aug. 23, 2020. Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said that Biegun, the No. 2 U.S. diplomat who is set to visit Moscow on Tuesday and Wednesday, will be urging the Russian government to join us in respecting the democratic rights and aspirations of the Belarusian people, not intervening in that process.

The message is letting the Belarusian people decide their fate without outside interference, he said at a briefing.

Russia and Belarus have a union treaty envisaging close political, economic and military ties, and Lukashenko said he secured a promise from Russian President Vladimir Putin to provide security assistance, if needed.

The Belarusian leader has sought to rally Moscows support by trying to cast his foes as anti-Russia, although the protesters in Belarus have not displayed anti-Russia slogans.

Putins spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow has shunned contacts with the Belarusian opposition, arguing that such a move would amount to meddling in a neighbors internal affairs.

We consider it wrong and have no intention to do so, at least not during the current hot stage, Peskov said.

Seeking Putins support amid the protests, Lukashenko also has accused NATO of harboring aggressive plans and bolstering its forces in neighboring Poland and Lithuania, and he ordered a massive military exercise near those borders. The alliance has rejected Lukashenkos claims.

Lukashenkos office said he and Putin had another call Monday to discuss the domestic situation in Belarus and the developments on its western frontier. The Kremlin said in its readout of the call that Lukashenko told Putin about his efforts to normalize the situation in the country.

By Yuras Karmanau
A video has emerged showing a Wisconsin police officer being apparently knocked out with a brick during overnight riots that were sparked by the shooting of an unarmed black father at the hands of a white cop.

Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times at close range in front of his children after police arrived responded to a call about a domestic dispute in Kenosha at around 5pm on Sunday.

Unrest and looting erupted in the wake of the shooting, which culminated with a police officer purportedly being attacked with a brick.

Viral video that has been circulating on social media shows the unnamed cop in a tactical vest collapse to the ground face down while walking away from a Molotov cocktail explosion.

An officer in a tactical vest is seen walking through a chaotic scene in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday, just moments before he is attacked with a brick

The officer collapses face first to the ground and his colleagues rush to his aid

At least three officers are seen in viral video dragging the officer away from the scene to safety amid a violent demonstration against a police shooting

A Molotov cocktail was thrown just moments before the brick attack on the cop

The scene in the video appears chaotic, with fires burning around a patrol car and a crowd of people clashing with police, shouting obscenities and recording the unrest on their cellphones.

It is unclear from the blurry recording who struck the officer. A figure could be seen standing next to the patrol vehicle when the cop is knocked down, but it is impossible to make out the person's facial features.

At least three of the injured officer's colleagues rushed to his side and dragged him to safety.

'He just got bricked!' someone in the crowd exclaimed, followed by cheers and jubilant screams of 'f*** the police!'

Kenosha News reported that shouts of 'officer down!' were heard on the police scanner.

It is unknown at this time how seriously the officer was hurt in the attack. The Kenosha Police Department has not named him and has not commented on his condition.

Blake, 29, was rushed to a hospital in serious condition. Early Monday, family members posted that Blake was stable at the ICU in Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers issued a statement denouncing 'excessive use of force' by police.

Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha police union, called Evers statement 'wholly irresponsible.'

'As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident,' Deates said in a statement. 'We ask that you withhold from passing judgment until all the facts are known and released.'

As video of the shooting quickly went viral, protesters took to the streets of Kenosha, where police are on high alert.

Video obtained from TMX.News shows a large crowd numbering hundreds of protesters gathered outside a Kenosha police station chanting 'Black Lives Matter' and other slogans denouncing law enforcement.

Demonstrators set fire to vehicles and smashed police cruiser windows as they faced off with police, who set off tear gas canisters to try to disperse the crowd.

A curfew was issued for Monday evening in Kenosha County. It goes into effect at 8pm and expires at 7am on Tuesday.

Witnesses reported that at least three police officers had their guns drawn as Jacob Blake (seen above in the white t-shirt) was walking away from them in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday

Blake is seen above continuing toward his SUV, where his three children were inside the vehicle

The images above show the moments leading up to the shooting. Blake (seen in the white shirt) walks away from a police officer who has his gun drawn and is ordering him to stop

The shooting happened at around 5pm as officers were responding to a 'domestic incident,' the Kenosha Police Department said in a news release.

In the video, three officers could be seen shouting and pointing their weapons at Blake, who walked around the front of an SUV parked on the street.

As Blake opened the driver's side door and leaned inside, one officer grabbed his shirt from behind and then fired into the vehicle.

At least seven shots could be heard, though it was unclear if more than one officer fired.

Blake's three children were inside the SUV and watched as their father was gunned down, the family's attorney, prominent civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, confirmed.

The image above shows the moment a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer fired at least seven shots into the back of Jacob Blake as he was getting into an SUV in a residential neighborhood

An unidentified woman (left) is heard in the video screaming as gunshots rang out

Several witnesses said that Blake tried to break up a fight between two women outside a nearby home, according to Kenosha News.

Before resorting to gunfire, the police attempted to subdue Blake with a Taser, to no avail, it was reported.

Laquisha Booker, who is Blakes partner, told NBCs Milwaukee affiliate, WTMJ-TV, that her and Blakes three children were in the back seat of the SUV when police shot him.

'That man just literally grabbed him by his shirt and looked the other way and was just shooting him. With the kids in the back screaming. Screaming,'

Crump said Blake was 'simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident.' Police did not immediately return messages seeking details on the dispute.

Benjamin Crump shared video of the incident on his Twitter feed, and confirmed today he is now representing Blake's family, and will 'demand answers' from police.

'We all watched the horrific video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back several times by Kenosha Police. Even worse, his three sons witnessed their father collapse after being riddled with bullets.

'Their irresponsible, reckless and inhumane actions nearly cost the life of a man who was simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident. It's a miracle he's alive.'

Crump is the attorney who represents the family of George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man who died in the custody of Minneapolis police in late May.

Floyd's death ignited massive nationwide protests and rioting as millions took to the streets over the course of several weeks to demand the police officers responsible be tried and convicted.

Online court records indicate Kenosha County prosecutors charged Blake on July 6 with third-degree sexual assault, trespassing and disorderly conduct in connection with domestic abuse. An arrest warrant was issued for Blake the following day. The records contain no further details.

Following the shooting, neighbors could be seen gathering in the streets and hurling comments at police. Some could be heard chanting, 'No justice, no peace.'

Blake is seen far left with his three children. Witnesses said all three of his kids were in the back seat of the SUV when their father was shot

A dump truck that was parked in an intersection so as to prevent protesters from reaching a police station was set on fire on Sunday

Bystanders watch as a dump truck burns near the police station in Kenosha on Sunday night

Angry residents gathered near the scene of the shooting in Kenosha on Sunday night

Police officers were heckled by local residents in the aftermath of the shooting

Several officers stand guard at the crime scene in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday

Protesters gathered at the site of the shooting on Sunday night in Kenosha

Reports of rioting prompted authorities to declare a state of emergency in the County of Kenosha

Protesters posted images from the scene in Kenosha. Many were heard chanting: 'No justice, no peace'

Tensions ran high near the crime scene on Sunday as neighbors gathered to vent their anger at police over the shooting

Locals reported that some protesters vandalized police cars by smashing windows. Others set fire to dump trucks

Several protesters jumped on top of police squad cars and smashed windows.

One video circulating on social media shows a row of protesters walking toward a line of police officers clad in riot gear as simmering tensions threaten to escalate the situation.

A dump truck that was parked at an intersection to prevent traffic from moving toward the police department was set on fire.

Several curious onlookers got close to the burning truck and started taking pictures, but others warned them that the fire could lead to an explosion and warned them to back away.

At 11:05pm, police formed a cordon around the front doors of the police station and then fired tear gas canisters in an effort to disperse a large crowd that had gathered there.

'No justice, no peace!' the crowd was heard chanting.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers released a statement on Sunday denouncing 'excessive use of force' by police

A man could be seen breaking the window of a patrol car parked along the street.

Some police officers were positioned on the roof of the station as people continued toward the building.

Outside the station, protesters faced off with officers who were dressed in riot gear that included plastic face masks and held plastic shields and batons that they occasionally used to push people back.

A truck that was parked outside the courthouse in Kenosha was also set on fire.

Kenosha Police referred all questions to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond to messages seeking to confirm details of the video.

The Kenosha Sheriffs Department and Wisconsin State Patrol were requested at the scene so another law enforcement agency could take over, police said in the news release.

The city of Kenosha is located on Lake Michigan, about 40 miles south of Milwaukee.

A Kenosha Police Department dispatcher referred calls by The Associated Press to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, the agency that will be investigating the shooting.

A message left with DOJ was not immediately returned.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers released a statement regarding the shooting late Sunday evening.

'Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin,' the statement read.

'Kathy and I join his family, friends, and neighbors in hoping earnestly that he will not succumb to his injuries.

A massive crowd is currently gathering in front of the Kenosha Police Station, hours after cops shot Jacob Blake https://t.co/7fdcnjNtD4  philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) August 24, 2020

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers released a statement saying he was 'hoping earnestly' that Blake 'would not succumb to his injuries'

He was airlifted to a hospital in Milwaukee, where he was listed in critical condition

Witnesses reported Blake was trying to break up an argument between two women moments before he was shot

'While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.'

The governor continued: 'We stand with all those who have and continue to demand justice, equity, and accountability for Black lives in our country - lives like those of George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor, Tony Robinson, Dontre Hamilton, Ernest Lacy, and Sylville Smith.

'And we stand against excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites.'
24.08.2020 LISTEN

The Police in the Ahafo Region have maintained a tight-lip on the murders of two men, one of them believed to be a financier of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), at Mim in the Asunafo North Municipality of the region.

Akwasi Banahene, the financier, the source said, was killed at home by an unknown assailant(s) immediately he returned from work last Friday night.

A reprisal attack carried out by people believed to be connected to him also led to the death of one Nana Yaw Osei Frimpong said to be a timber merchant.

Frimpong was alleged to have masterminded the killing of Banahene due to a land dispute between them, DAILY GUIDE has gathered.

Banahene was killed at about 9:30 p.m. on Friday while Frimpong was also attacked and murdered at about 12:45 a.m. the next day.

DAILY GUIDE learnt some police officers rushed to the house of Frimpong to rescue him from his attackers but met him seriously battered in a pool of blood.

He was rushed to Goaso Government Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Frimpong's attackers also set his car ablaze.

Both bodies had been deposited at the same hospital morgue pending investigation and autopsy.

Though police confirmed the murders on phone to local media, they would not comment further.

---Daily Guide
African powerhouse Nigeria has always shown support for the ICC even when some other African countries were calling for a mass withdrawal from the court. On June 17, after the attacks by US President Donald Trump, Abuja condemned in a press release any action or threat of action, that undermines or seeks to undermine the ability of the court to freely exercise its mandate and carry out its core functions. But Nigeria is itself accused of not respecting its obligations under the Rome Statute and not providing sufficient judicial redress for crimes committed in its northeast.

The Nigerian message of support is welcome in a context where the ICC is the target of unacceptable attacks by the United States, says Amnesty International West and Central Africa director Samira Daoud, but that support should be more than words. The first responsibility of ICC State parties like Nigeria is to try crimes falling within the mandate of the Court. But, says the human rights activist, Nigeria is not living up to its obligations. The ICC opened a preliminary examination into the situation in Nigeria nearly ten years ago concerning crimes committed by both the Boko Haram armed group and the Nigerian army during the conflict in the northeast. Amnesty International has documented many of these crimes over the years and has published several reports on abuses and violations suffered notably by children. But no fair and credible judicial investigations or prosecutions have been launched by the authorities, she told Justice Info.

The right to justice ignored and denied by the Nigerian authorities

And Daoud denounces a lack of cooperation. The Courts requests for cooperation and information are piling up, but promises by the Nigerian authorities to implement them are often not followed up by action. Nigeria is not acting in accordance with its obligations under the Rome Statute or its public statements, she says. the need for justice and the hope that those responsible for atrocities will be prosecuted and brought to justice are extremely strong demands in conflict-affected communities. So far, the right of these people to obtain justice has been ignored and denied by the Nigerian authorities. Nigeria has clearly demonstrated its unwillingness to fight impunity. This is why we call on the ICC to formally open an investigation, Daoud says.

In her 5 December 2019 Report on Preliminary Examination Activities, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda expresses strong suspicions that grave crimes have been committed by both the Nigerian army and Boko Haram. She cites attacks on displaced peoples camps targeting aid organizations and executions of humanitarian workers by the armed group. She recalls her previous conclusions: The Office previously found a reasonable basis to believe that Boko Harams specific targeting of both females and males constitute acts of persecution on gender grounds. Men and boys were often forced to join the armed group and to participate in hostilities, with those who refused being killed; while women and girls were often abducted and became victims of forced marriage, rape, sexual slavery and other forms of sexual violence.

With regard to the Nigerian security forces (NSF), Bensouda writes: The information assessed during the reporting period provides a reasonable basis to believe that members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) committed the war crime of conscripting and enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into armed groups and using them to participate actively in hostilities. The Office considers the CJTF to be a part of the NSF for at least part of the period under examination.

Nigerias judicial activities limited in scope and depth

The Prosecutor has identified seven potential cases against Boko Haram and three against the security forces. But the investigative/prosecutorial activities undertaken to date in relation to both members of Boko Haram and of the NSF appear to have been limited both in their scope and depth. According to the information available, it does not appear that the authorities are investigating and/or prosecuting cases concerning substantially the same conduct or cases that are otherwise similar to those identified by the Office [of the Prosecutor], Bensouda complains. To date, the repeated commitment of the Nigerian authorities to provide the Office with relevant information in this respect has not materialised. During 2020, the Office will continue to urge the Nigerian authorities to tangibly demonstrate that they are indeed fulfilling their primary responsibility to investigate and prosecute ICC crimes, in the absence of which the Office will need to come to its own determination with respect to the admissibility of the potential cases it has identified.

Mark Kersten, a consultant for the German NGO Wayamo Foundation promoting international criminal justice, believes that on the contrary Nigeria has spoken in support of the Court and its work and has also taken strides to investigate and prosecute (some) perpetrators of atrocities in the Boko Haram conflict. These efforts are not perfect and real challenges remain. My impression is that Nigeria takes this more seriously than many other states under ICC investigation.

1,600 Boko Haram members tried in secret

Nigerian civil society, however, notes serious irregularities in the conduct of national trials. For example, in a press release published on October 17, 2017, the Nigerian Coalition for the ICC denounced the secret trial of 1,600 alleged members or collaborators of Boko Haram who were detained at the time in Niger State. Accelerated/secret hearing in criminal matters of this nature is not advisable as it may present a glitch in the administration of justice, it says. Suspects must be afforded the opportunity to be represented by a legal practitioner of their choice and lawyers must be given reasonable time to prepare their defence.

Three years after this appeal, the flaws denounced still persist, according to sociology teacher Oludayo Tade from the University of Ibadan (southwest). According to this Nigerian researcher, defendants are tried twice for the same facts, sometimes appearing without adequate representation. Trials are mostly shrouded in secrecy without the victims having an opportunity to testify or observe proceedings, he told Justice Info. This further breeds distrust between the victims of terrorism and the State. Construction of peace and justice cannot arise solely from the perspective of the State but also from the eyes of the sufferers of terrorist acts.

A struggling judicial response

This sense of mistrust is clearly expressed by Hamsatu Allamin, founder of the Allamin Foundation for Peace and Development based in Maiduguri, Borno State, in the heart of the troubled area. We, people in the North-East, want to know from the military how many people they have arrested since the beginning of the insurgency, since the state of emergency was declared. We have the right to know. We want to know how many have died in military detention. And those who are still alive, where are they?

Vincent Foucher is closely following the Boko Haram case at the French National Centre for scientific research (CNRS). The states reaction has been first and foremost extra-judicial, he says. Lets remember that Mohamed Yusuf, the leader of Boko Haram, captured by the army in 2009 and delivered alive to the police, was found a few hours later with his body riddled with bullets in the street. More broadly, faced with Boko Haram, it is the army that is in charge, and justice for a long time has had only a limited place.

But in recent years, partly because of increased criticism and pressure and the overcrowding of detention centres, Nigeria has tried to establish a judicial process, adds Foucher. This includes dealing with pending cases, all those people who have been in pre-trial detention for years. So there have been organized trials. Hundreds of people have been released, sometimes because there were no files, and probably often because they were actually innocent and were picked up a bit randomly.

Non-judicial measures are vital

But legal proceedings, even if conducted fairly, will never be enough to heal the wounds. In Maiduguri, the ordeal of the victims, both from the army and from Boko Haram, is immense, Allamin points out. Her foundation assists men, women and children who have escaped the clutches of Boko Haram or been freed from the armys secret prisons. They are all traumatized, they are suffering from psychological stress, she says. After an introduction to the creation and management of income-generating projects, she organizes these victims into groups and gives them a nest egg to help them resume an activity.

Non-judicial measures to ensure that conflict-affected populations can obtain truth, justice and reparations, including for the purpose of enabling them to rebuild their lives, are absolutely vital, says Daoud. And Professor Tade agrees. Victim compensation and rehabilitation and reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure are critical, he says.

Theres no magic solution, says Foucher. The problem is old, its huge and linked to structural problems, to the long history of the country. Even more than the poverty that afflicts much of the country, the people of Boko Haram denounce the illegitimacy and immorality of the ruling elites. The State must therefore regain credibility. This requires, among other things, an improvement in public services, but above all justice and a more serious fight against abuses by state agents, both military and civilian, he adds.
Even as peers are struggling for growth, Balkrishna Industries is expected to benefit from strong demand for agriculture tyres. This coupled with backward integration is expected to help Balkrishna Industries post strong revenue growth as well as improve profitability.

The stock which has gained over 40 per cent over the last three months is expected to get support from the demand trends. Led by Europe, agriculture tyre exports from India have been strong and are up over 40 per cent y-o-y in July. Balkrishna Industries is expected to be a major beneficiary of this trend as it gets 60 ...
Charlottesville will argue its appeal in a Confederate statues case to the Supreme Court of Virginia in November, potentially ending a years-long legal saga.

As localities across the state, including Albemarle County, prepare to remove their Confederate statues, removal of Charlottesvilles statues has remained tied up by the state Supreme Court appeal.

In a Thursday news release, the state Supreme Court agreed to hear Charlottesvilles appeal of a 2019 trial decision, writing that it was of imminent public importance. Oral arguments are set for Nov. 2-6.

Earlier this month, Albemarles Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to remove a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier situated in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse. The removal could occur as early as Sept. 6, though a Friday news release from the county said more information about the date would be released in September.

The decision is the first local use of a law that went into effect July 1 that allows localities to go through a process to remove war monuments.

However, prior to the laws passage, the Charlottesville City Council attracted the ire of some residents when it voted to remove a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee and later a statue of Gen. Thomas Stonewall Jackson.

Several area residents and The Monument Fund group sued the city and the City Council, alleging violation of a state code section that forbade localities from encroaching on war monuments and memorials.

The lawsuit went to trial last September, with Judge Richard E. Moore largely siding with the plaintiffs by ruling that the council votes violated state code. Moore issued a permanent injunction barring the city from removing the statues.

Now, nearly a year later, the process of appealing that lawsuit to the Supreme Court of Virginia has consequently made the city unable to begin the newly legal removal process.

Filed in June, the citys 37-page petition for appeal largely takes issue with decisions Moore made prior to the trial.

Among the arguments is the claim that the city did not authorize and permit the statues to be erected as war memorials as described in the state code. The code section also does not apply retroactively, the petition for appeal argues, pointing to diction used in the state code that would appear to only refer to monuments that have not yet been erected.

Additionally, the appeal argues that awarding of attorneys fees is not permitted under that state code section because Moore ruled that no damages would be awarded to the plaintiffs because the statues were not physically harmed. Earlier this year, Moore awarded plaintiffs counsel approximately $364,000 in attorneys fees.

The city persistently noted that [the plaintiffs] various complaints alleged no physical harm to the statues causing any damages recoverable under the statute, and therefore there could be no basis for award of attorneys fees, or any other relief, under [state code], the appeal reads. Predictably, [the plaintiffs] did not, at trial, prove any damages recoverable under [state code], because no damages were necessary for the expressed statutory purposes.

In a response filed in July, counsel for the plaintiffs argues in part that there are no reversible errors present in the citys petition for appeal and that the plaintiffs had standing to seek injunctive relief and damages.

The Citys Assignments of Error pertain entirely to the Circuit Courts interpretation and application of the old law, the response reads. This appeal is therefore not about whether Charlottesvilles Confederate statues stay or go under the new law. This appeal, instead, is about whether the City can escape accountability for its past actions under the old law.

Counsel for the plaintiffs balk at the citys argument that a 1997 ruling extending the monument protection code section to cities was not intended to be retroactive.

Noting the specific inclusion of memorials and monuments to wars back into the eighteenth century, Judge Moore noted the peculiarity of accepting  as the Citys interpretation required  that the General Assembly intended and expected such memorials and monuments to the named conflicts to be erected after [1997], and that all of the then-existing monuments to all of those past wars and those soldiers in every city throughout the Commonwealth were not protected, the response reads. In a variety of ways, the Circuit Court expressed its conviction that a purported legislative intent to deprive already-erected memorials and monuments of statutory protection beggared belief.

Later in the response, counsel for the plaintiffs argue that physical harm is not needed for damages to be awarded and points to the usage of litigation costs among the damages available under the statutory right to action.

In June, the Monument Fund filed a motion to partially dissolve the permanent injunction and is seeking to alter the language in the permanent injunction to match the new law allowing localities to remove monuments to war and veterans.

That motion remains pending, presumably because of the citys petition for appeal before the state Supreme Court.
Her name cant appear on the ballot if Janicek stays in the race. And Shelton is barred from running as a write-in candidate because she lost in the primary.

State Sen. Megan Hunt of Omaha said Democrats should support Shelton, even if those votes wont officially count, because Shelton is an important voice who represents the future of the Democratic Party in Nebraska.

Ashford said Monday that he remains supportive of Sheltons campaign and that he hopes that Janicek will do the right thing and get out of the race so Shelton can run.

But if Janicek doesnt remove himself, Ashford plans to hold a press conference on Aug. 31 to announce his write-in run.

At this stage of my career, I cant leave the system of governance in such a mess for my children and grandchildren, he said. If we dont learn to govern, our democracy is at stake.

Shelton, in a tweet Monday evening, said Janicek still has time to do the right thing and step aside, but if he doesnt, she will work to elect Democrats up and down the ticket who represent the partys values.
On Sunday, a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, repeatedly shot an unarmed Black man in the back as he calmly walked away. The officer fired from extremely close range, in front of dozens of witnesses, hitting the man repeatedly in the back.

Heres what we know about the incident.

The Bystander Video

In a deeply upsetting video that circulated on social media, several officers can be seen gathered around a sidewalk on a suburban street. When the video begins, Jacob Blake is standing among them, but he soon begins to walk, at an unrushed pace, toward the drivers side of a parked SUV. As bystanders scream, one of the officers follows closely behind with a gun pointed to Blakes back. Another officer trails behind them, as police shout at Blake to get on the ground.

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As Blake opens the door to step in the SUV, the officer closest to him grabs his shirt and pulls on it. Blake appears to strain against the officers force in an effort to get into the car, and a second later, the officer fires seven times into Blakes back. At least two officers are pointing guns at this point. Blake is just inches away from the police officer firing at him.

Blakes Condition

It appears that Blake is still alive but in critical condition. He was taken to a hospital near Milwaukee.

This is 29-year-old Jacob Blake who was shot by Kenosha police. His fiance shared this picture with us. pic.twitter.com/6Si9lkCPFu  Sarah Thamer (@SarahThamerWISN) August 24, 2020

Witness Accounts of the Incident

According to the department, the officers were responding to a call about a domestic incident. A number of witnessesthere were about 60 people at the scenetold the Kenosha News that Blake had been trying to break up a verbal altercation between two women in the minutes before the video started. They also said that the police had tried to hit him with a taser. Blake, they said, had no weapon.

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A civil rights attorney representing Blakes family put out a statement on Monday claiming that Blake had been returning to his vehicle to check on his young children, who were in the car: Blakes three sons were only a few feet away and witnessed police shoot their father.

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The family of Jacob Blake has retained @BenCrumpLaw. We will seek #JusticeForJacobBlake and his family. We demand answers from @KenoshaPolice. pic.twitter.com/hpOr2tmdif  Ben Crump (@AttorneyCrump) August 24, 2020

The Officers Status

The officers, who have not been identified, have been placed on administrative leave. The Wisconsin Department of Justice will investigate the shooting, officials said.

The Protests and Civil Unrest

Protests broke out in the city, starting Sunday night and lasting into Monday. A crowd formed at the intersection where Blake was shot, and police officers met them in riot gear. Protesters damaged police cars, and one officer was struck with a brick. Hundreds of protesters gathered peacefully to march through the city and chant outside the Kenosha County Public Safety Building.

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The city declared a state of emergency and a curfew, citing armed robberies and shots fired calls. With the breaking of curfew as justification, police, armed with rubber bullets, fired tear gas into the crowd. The protesters dispersed but gathered again, while others broke windows and sprayed graffiti on several buildings downtown. Someone set a fire outside the courthouse and inside a few cars. Police continued to confront the protesters with tear gas and riot tactics in clashes through the night. The National Guard was called in, to be deployed Monday.

The Response From Politicians

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, released a statement calling for greater police accountability. While we do not have all the details yet, what we know for certain is he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or in our country, he said. I have said all along that although we must offer our empathy, equally important is our action. In the coming days, we will demand just that of elected officials in our state who have failed to recognize the racism in our state and our country for far too long.

For more of Slates news coverage, subscribe to What Next on Apple Podcasts or listen below.
Theres been a lot of talk, very overdue talk, about who Canadas essential workers are in the COVID-19 pandemic.

But it turns out some of these essential workers arent even in the country yet.

Theyre stuck in their homelands, among the tens of thousands of people whose hopes of settling in Canada have run smack into the coronavirus roadblock. As a new Royal Bank of Canada report shows, this isnt just bad for them. Its bad for all of us here in Canada, too.

The reason is that high levels of immigration have long been a major source of labour and economic growth in Canada. The sharp reduction in those levels since mid-March could already be a drag on the countrys efforts to break out of its worst economic recession in generations.

The numbers tell much of the story. From the start of April to the end of June, Canada added just 34,000 permanent residents, down 67 per cent from the same period a year ago, the RBC report said.

Meanwhile, new permanent residency applications to Canada had dropped 80 per cent. Roughly 10,000 new permits were processed in the second quarter, a huge drop from the 107,000 in 2019.

The bottom line for 2020, at least, is that by years end Canada will welcome only 70 per cent of the originally targeted 341,000 new permanent residents. That will mean a decline of about 100,000 people from the previous year. And the pandemic is almost entirely to blame.

Were sure some readers are saying that given the current health and economic crises, that may not be such a bad thing, especially if its only temporary.

But the immigration shortfall is hampering Canadas efforts to find the employees it needs in sectors such as health care and elder care. The countrys long-term-care facilities were grappling with labour shortages before COVID-19. The pandemic made things worse because it infected so many nursing home employees, many of whom are immigrants.

And heres the rub. Despite the highest unemployment levels in decades in Canada, most Canadians refuse to do a lot of the physically demanding and poorly paid jobs out there, such as the ones done by personal support workers or farm labourers. We look offshore for these people, even as we realize more than ever how much we depend on them.

Dont forget theyre consumers, too. The hundreds of thousands of newcomers who arrive each year buy food, clothing and other products, providing hundreds of thousands of little jolts that keep our economy energized.

If all this is disconcerting in 2020, what happens next year and the year after that? If the pandemic lingers, fewer people might want to leave their homeland. Maybe the new risks to air travel and tighter border regulations will permanently reduce global migration.

So heres something else for the Justin Trudeau Liberals to put on their to-do list for rebuilding post-pandemic Canada. The RBC report urges the government to find ways to encourage more immigrants to come to Canada.

In our view, that might mean part of the new investments everyone agrees should go into our long-term-care system should be used to lift the wages for the front-line staff caring for the elderly. It should also mean investing in the processing system to speed up applications and get more people approved. Step up marketing in appropriate regions where the potential exists to recruit willing immigrants, too.

And while the governments at it, why not review the process of becoming a Canadian citizen to ensure its as speedy and smooth as possible? After all, immigrants are essential.
Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, President of the Republic of Mali, addresses the general debate of the 74th session General Assembly (file photo).

Mali's junta and mediators from West Africa's regional bloc have reached agreement on some points. Reports said the junta pledged to free deposed President Keita and proposed a three-year transition led by the military.

Mali's military junta has put forward a plan for a soldier-led transitional body to rule for three years and agreed to release the ousted president, French Radio RFI and the AFP news agency reported.

The proposal was reportedly presented during negotiations between the rebel soldiers and West Africa's regional bloc late Sunday.

Malian soldiers seized power in a coup last Tuesday following months of protests against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

'Discussing the way forward'

Members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) headed by former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan are holding closed-door talks with the new junta, led by Colonel Assimi Goita (pictured above), in a bid to return the country to civilian rule.

"We have reached a number of agreements but we have not reached agreement on all the issues," Jonathan told reporters.

Both the regional delegation and the military officers "want the country to move on" after the coup, he said. "We are just discussing the way forward."

The talks lasted around nine hours on Sunday and were set to continue on Monday.

"We reached compromise on certain aspects and the negotiations will continue tomorrow," spokesperson for the junta, Colonel Ismael Wague, said.

Neither delegation specified which points they had agreed on or what the outstanding issues were. However, sources quoted by media suggested the fate of detained President Keita and the details of a transition to civilian rule were a key focus of discussions.

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Junta wants three-year transition

AFP quoted a source in the ECOWAS delegation as saying the junta wanted a "three-year transition" to review the foundations of the Malian state.

"This transition will be directed by a body led by a soldier, who will also be head of state," the source said on condition of anonymity.

A junta official confirmed the proposal to AFP, saying the transition would have "a military president and a government mostly composed of soldiers."

French Radio RFI reported late Sunday that the junta was ready to allow Keita to return to his home in Bamako or leave the country.

"And if he wants to travel abroad for treatment, that is not a problem," AFP quoted the ECOWAS source as saying. Prime Minister Boubou Cisse would be moved to a secure residence in the capital, the source added.

Tuesday's coup, the country's second in eight years, has received condemnation from the international community but it is being celebrated by many in Mali -- a nation grappling with an Islamist insurgency and months of political turmoil following a contested legislative election in March.

(AP, Reuters)
By Trend





Planes from Belarus with Turkmen citizens, who were unable to return due to the termination of air traffic caused by the coronavirus pandemic, have arrived at Turkmenabat International Airport (Turkmenistan), Trend reports with reference to Turkmenportal information portal.

In accordance with recommendations of World Health Organization (WHO), all citizens who arrived on a charter flight from Belarus will undergo a mandatory two-week quarantine.

A plane with Turkmen citizens from India also arrived in Turkmenistan, said Arzuw NEWS information portal.

Those who returned from India also couldnt arrive in Turkmenistan earlier, due to the termination of air traffic caused by the coronavirus pandemic and have to spend two weeks in quarantine.

There are no registered cases of coronavirus infection in Turkmenistan, but Turkmenistan is taking all necessary sanitary measures to prevent the virus from entering the country.

Earlier, the country adopted the mandatory wearing of masks in public places, as well as the need to provide a COVID-19 absence certificate s when using flights.
Thousands of trials to find new treatments for diseases including cancer and heart disease have been halted because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Seven in 10 NHS research projects have been affected by the coronavirus outbreak, an analysis by Southampton University found. One in 10  a total of 1,500 including clinical trials of new medicines as well as lab research  have been stopped entirely because of the virus.

Dr Michael Head, study author, said all areas of health had been impacted and many had taken a backseat while research into Covid-19 steamed ahead.

Charities working on cures and therapies for cancer and heart disease are likely to have been hard-hit by a fall in funding for research. But Dr Head warned that the smaller charities fuelling research for rare diseases that already have few treatments will find it hard to carry on at all.

It comes as a cancer charity today revealed that the anxiety surrounding cancer has been 'higher than ever' because of Covid-19, with patients worrying about spiralling waiting times and delayed trials.

Thousands of clinical trials to discover treatment for diseases, including cancer and heart disease, have been halted in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (stock image)

The figures shine a light on the catastrophic effect that Covid-19 has had on UK medical research.

And they come amid concerns about delays in care for other diseases, caused by coronavirus, which has led medics to warn survival rates could fall.

In March, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) said new clinical trials were to be suspended to prioritise Covid-19 studies, such as for treatment and vaccines.

Trials in the recruitment stage were also halted, with NHS trusts and health boards making decisions on a case by case basis.

Hospital trusts had to consider if trial participants could be protected from Covid-19 because many experimental drugs can compromise the immune system, making volunteers even more susceptible to the infection.

WHAT TRIALS HAVE BEEN SUSPENDED? 1. A drug for motor neurone disease A Europe-wide study to determine if the drug Tudca could halt the progression of motor neurone disease had to be suspended in March. Patients in Italy, Germany, UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Ireland were set to take part. Those given the drug during the 18-month study period would have been asked to visit the clinic every three months for routine checks of your symptoms - but this would have been risky during the Covid-19 crisis. Efforts are still being made to restart it at five British centres involved in the study. 2. A drug for stroke patients A study at Edinburgh University to determine if specific drugs could prevent stroke patients from going on to develop memory problems was paused in March. R4VaD, funded by various charities, had recruited 1,271 patients at 53 sites by mid-March 2020 when the sponsor suspended recruitment due to Covid-19. Researchers obtained approval to continue recruiting during the Covid-19 pandemic and have since found stroke patients had been affected by social distancing measures up to 12 months after stroke. They had high levels of anxiety and major difficulties with social support as a result of interruptions to care. This may affect long term recovery after a stroke. 3. A trial for surgery in elderly heart attack patients Newcastle University experts were to find out if older, frailer patients could benefit from a procedure to restore blood supply to the heart muscle following a heart attack. Some 1,668 patients were to be recruited across the UK, and patients were going to be randomised to receive the invasive surgery. The study, called the SENIOR-RITA trial, started in 2016 and was to last five to seven years. 4. A trial of two tests to guide treatment for breast cancer University College London Hospital NHS Foundation Trust halted the ROSCO breast cancer trial examining two tests to guide treatment for the disease. The trial, supported by Cancer Research UK, was looking at two tests called CEP17 and TOP2A to help doctors decide the best type of chemotherapy to give before surgery for invasive breast cancer. The aims of the trial are to find out how well the tests work and more about quality of life. 5. A trial for drugs to treat lung cancer The British Lung Foundation said in May it had had to pause a phase two clinical trial for new drugs to treat malignant pleural mesothelioma. The condition, diagnosed 2,600 times every year, has no cure. Just five per cent of men and 10 per cent of women survive for more than five years. Dr Samantha Walker, the director of research and innovation at Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation, told The Telegraph: 'This is not good news for a cancer where survival rates are dismal and there is no cure.' 6. A drug for Parkinson's In March, Geneva-based drug company Addex Therapeutics announced that it would delay the start of a clinical trial to treat involuntary movements in people with Parkinson's disease. The trial, known as study 301, was of the compound dipraglurant to treat levodopa-induced dyskinesia associated with Parkinsons disease (PD-LID). The company said the trial has 'been postponed' with no timelines in place for its restart because of the continued spread of Covid-19 in the US. 'Sites are temporarily suspending on-site visits for monitors, vendors, and all other non-patient visitors and several sites have cancelled all non-essential patient visits,' Dr Roger Mills, chief medical officer of Addex said. Advertisement

The aim of pausing research also helped with the redeployment of clinical staff to frontline care to help treat the swathes of Covid-19 patients.

Clinical trials include caregivers and nurses who care for the patients involved, as well as the research scientists.

Laboratories have largely been requisitioned for mass coronavirus testing, and it's not clear for how long they will be needed.

Around 200 new trials are typically added to NIHR's Clinical Research Network (CRN) portfolio each month  2,400 a year.

In 2018-19, the CRN supported over 6,100 studies and recruited over 870,000 participants.

University of Southampton looked at the Edge database, which is used by NHS trusts to give information on research being conducted on NHS sites.

Early findings revealed that 70 per cent of research was impacted in some way as a result of Covid-19.

It includes clinical trials as well as epidemiology and laboratory studies, such as those looking at risk factors for diseases.

Some 60 per cent of projects - a total of 9,000 - were paused. They may have stopped recruiting patients because the risk of Covid-19 infection in hospitals was too high.

Some 10 per cent - 1,500 - were shut down all together.

It is unclear currently the exact reasons why each was stopped, but possible reasons include the research being time sensitive or they did not have enough money to wait until after the outbreak, for example.

Dr Head told MailOnline: 'I guess looking back and reflecting, the numbers are not surprising. The pandemic has taken the world by surprise.

'We've shown globally and in the UK we are not prepared, and that will impact on research.

'Research is directed towards Covid-19, which is necessary. But obviously that will impact on other areas of health. In terms of preparedness for the future, we need to make sure non-Covid types of research are in planning.'

The research is ongoing and so it is unclear exactly what areas have been impacted the most. This will become clearer over the next few months.

Dr Head said: 'It might be that cancer research was not affected but stroke and mental health was. It won't just be large diseases, but areas of health with few cases.

'There will be research impacted that what will be rare or orphan diseases, where there isn't much treatment available.

'Aspects of that might include motor neurone disease or haemophilia. If they are impacted it might hard for those charities to carry on.'

He added that it will be important to discover what knowledge would have been found had Covid-19 not halted medical research.

These 'knowledge gaps' will be important for moving forward in the treatment of patients, he said.

Dr Head told The Observer: 'This pandemic has knocked everything off track. Research gives us the knowledge we need to tackle illnesses in new ways, and if that doesn't happen all areas of health will suffer.'

A stark example of the harm caused to medical research by the pandemic is to cancer research, as large charities have revealed the devastation in stark numbers.

'We had planned to spend 400m on research this year. That figure will have to be cut to 250m,' Aoife Regan of Cancer Research UK told the Observer.

'That is 150m of research on treatments with the potential to save or lengthen lives that will not now take place.'

If cuts continue to persist for four or five more years, it would mean hundreds of millions of pounds will be stripped from cancer research in the UK in coming years which will 'send ripples beyond that'.

The impact of Covid-19 on cancer patients has been at the forefront of discussions during the pandemic.

Dame Laura Lee, the chief executive of cancer charity Maggie's, today said the past few months have been a difficult time for cancer patients.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, she said: 'It's been hugely difficult. Cancer is not just a physical illness but it's the psychological effects that has not just on the person but also the family.

'With auto treatments and on many occasions treatment being ceased, people with cancer dying during this period, or finding that their disease has progressed, it's been a heightened time of distress and anxiety.

'Cancer always brings anxiety, a sense of aloneness, but during this Covid time, it's been higher than ever.

'People are coming into our centres with that knowledge and information of what they've heard and worrying, "what does that mean for me?"

'Our centre staff have never said they've ever dealt with such level of distress, feelings of anger, about the situation they find themselves in and actually, to a certain extent, feelings of abandonment with the NHS as well.'

Shannon Amoils, of the British Heart Foundation, said its research had 'ground to a halt' during the pandemic.

A study at Edinburgh University was set to determine if specific drugs could prevent stroke patients from going on to develop vascular dementia.

Another study at Newcastle University aimed to find out if non-invasive treatments could be used instead of surgical interventions for elderly men and women who had suffered heart attacks.

Brian Dickie, of the Motor Neurone Disease Association, warned time was critical for the research of motor neuron diseases - which affect about 5,000 people in the UK.

He said: 'Around 50 per cent of people with motor neurone disease will die within 18 months of their first diagnosis.'

Work to determine whether a drug called Tudca could stop the disease progressing is among the suspended trials.

Dr Dickie said: 'These individuals are rapidly running out of time, so suspending projects like these is utterly heartbreaking.'

The British Lung Foundation said in May it had had to pause a phase two clinical trial for new drugs to treat malignant pleural mesothelioma.

The condition has no cure and just five per cent of men and 10 per cent of women survive for more than five years.

Dr Samantha Walker, the director of research and innovation at Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation, told The Telegraph: 'This is not good news for a cancer where survival rates are dismal and there is no cure.

'We completely understand the need to focus on Covid-19 right now, but the impact will be colossal, with huge repercussions on the research community and patients who, heartbreakingly, don't have time to spare. This will mean delays in the trial going ahead and any potential new treatments reaching those who need them.'

Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the US National Institutes of Health, said the effect of Covid-19 on medical research goes beyond just trials.

In a article for The Lancet last week, he said: 'There have also been tremendous disruptive effects on all biomedical research that is not directly related to Covid.

'Laboratories are closed. Communications have been shut down, conferences have been cancelled, supply chains for equipment have been lost, resources have been lost. There have been widespread financial losses within academic medical centres that have had spillover effects on their research operations.'
Ive always been active in veterans things, said Jim Duncan of Jacksonville. Veterans are near and dear to my heart.

Nearly every area veteran support or fundraising effort during the past several decades has seen the 71-year-old Duncans involvement. He is the current commander of AmVets Post 100 in Jacksonville, is a life member of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1379, belongs to American Legion Post 279, and is a life member of the Disabled American Veterans.

A Vietnam combat veteran himself, Duncan knows what his fellow veterans are going through, and thats why 10 years ago he helped to establish a local branch of the Vet to Vet national peer counseling group. At the time, it was just the second such group in Illinois.

Our having gone through these experiences makes other veterans more likely to open up to us, Duncan said. Vet to Vet is not nearly as structured as the Veterans Administration and we dont have the 8-to-5 office hours, we are willing to work more quickly.

With the recent wars we see that young men or women come home and they may think there is no support, even though there is, and they dont know where to turn to find it, Duncan said. The VA can sometimes be hard to deal with, you call an 800 number and you push this button and that button, and especially if you are suffering from PTSD or anxiety, youre not going to push very many buttons.

Vet to Vet meetings are usually scheduled at the AmVets Post 100 at 210 E. Court St. on Saturdays or in the evening to better accommodate working people, although the COVID-19 pandemic has temporarily reduced the frequency of those meetings. Duncan said the only meeting rules are that participants must be respectful, and what is said in the meeting stays there.

Duncan has noticed that it usually takes about five years after someone gets out of the armed forces to reach out for help to either the Veterans Administration or a group like Vet to Vet. The reasons for the delay may vary, but sometimes its due to stresses that accumulate over time.

A young warrior comes home and theyre really gung-ho and they get up every morning and get dressed up and put their job applications in, Duncan said. If they dont have success quickly, instead of getting up at 6, they get up at 8. Then, they get up at 10, and then they get up at noon. Very possibly drugs or alcohol come into play. It just kind of spirals down, and if they happen to have a family its very tough on them too.

Once veterans finally seek help from a group like Vet to Vet, the results can be dramatic.

Its like the sun coming up, Duncan said. Its amazing when it works.

Duncan speaks from experience. The Routt High School graduate joined the Army and spent much of his three years in the service as an infantry adviser to the South Vietnamese Army. Duncan was often in the middle of combat zones, and when he returned from Vietnam he came back with issues he wasnt aware were seriously afflicting him.

I did what a lot of people in my generation did, I self-medicated with alcohol. I was working full-time, going to school full-time, and drinking full-time, Duncan said. People that know me very well can remember the horrible temper I used to have. It didnt even matter what it was, Id get mad if somebody had the wrong color of shirt on.

Duncan slept underneath his bed for protection during the first six months back in the United States. He kept a large knife scabbard in his boot so he could feel like he was carrying protection. Duncan often awoke screaming with nightmares caused by his Vietnam service.

Duncan carried the issues for years but by all outward appearances had successfully readjusted to society. He worked in management for the Illinois Department of Transportation, owned and operated Easy Street Lounge in Jacksonville, and served in a number of civic roles, including Jacksonville alderman and long-time chair of the Jacksonville Plan Commission.

Ironically, it was when Duncan and several fellow veterans were forming Vet to Vet that he realized the help he needed.

I was meeting with a psychologist in Springfield about Vet to Vet and he asked if I was seeing anybody yet for help, Duncan said. I told him no, and he said, youd better go.

Duncan took the doctors advice, and hes glad that he did. Now he can speak from experience when talking to others at Vet to Vet sessions.

I didnt have an epiphany all of a sudden that it was helping me, but I did feel better. Having the anger go away was really good, Duncan said. And I noticed I wasnt drinking as much. So now I dont have to drink to go to sleep.

Duncan said 13% to 14% of the Morgan County population is made up of veterans, nearly double the state rate of 7%, and in his opinion Illinois has some good programs that area veterans can take advantage of. The main problem is making people aware of what the federal and state governments and private groups such as Vet to Vet have to offer. Thats important, he said, because the nation is losing more than 20 veterans per day due to suicide, more than twice the rate for the general population.

Suicide is usually a permanent solution to a temporary problem, Duncan said. So if we can help anybody do something else, we do it.

Meanwhile, Duncan continues to help veterans causes in additional ways. Hes involved in many veteran parade entries, helps to coordinate mailings to overseas troops, and has been among those raising money for local veteran memorials. He also finds time to visit with his three younger sisters, one of whom still lives in Jacksonville.

With all of that community and veteran assistance involvement, how would Duncan most like to be remembered?

That I tried, Duncan said. My motto that a friend picked for me was anything for liberty and loyalty.

.

If you have a suggestion about someone who should be profiled, send their name and any contact information available to communitynews@myjournalcourier.com.
US President Donald Trump was formally re-nominated as the Republican Party's presidential candidate for the November 3 elections.

Trump secured sufficient votes to be re-nominated as the presidential candidate during the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Trump, 74, who faces formidable challenge from former Democratic vice president Joe Biden, 77, is scheduled to deliver his acceptance speech from the South Lawns of the White House on August 27.

According to reports, incumbents usually keep away from party conventions until their acceptance speech, but Trump, who is facing flak over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, showed up at the event.

While the once in four-year GOP (Grand Old Party) convention is being held in virtual mode due to the coronavirus pandemic, a small part of the official business of the convention is being held at Charlotte.

Trump was re-nominated following a roll call of votes from elected GOP delegates from all the 50 states. Vice President Mike Pence was re-nominated as the running mate of Trump. Pence made a surprise appearance at the Charlotte where the roll call vote was done.

The US President is also facing internal turmoil, with Steven Bannon, his former chief strategist being arrested on charges of fraud and Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump's longest-serving and most influential advisors stepping down from her position.
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Montreal, Canada  Mon, August 24, 2020 15:03 514 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c4010436 2 Art & Culture Cirque-du-Soleil,bankruptcy Free

A group of Cirque du Soleil creditors has announced it will take control of the heavily indebted Canadian circus troupe.

Suitors had until Tuesday afternoon to better the proposal of the dozen lenders, led by the Canadian fund Catalyst Capital Group.

The world's most famous circus troupe, placed under the protection of the courts, later said that the proposal -- estimated at more than $1.2 billion -- had not been topped, according to Canadian media.

The creditors' offer will still have to be validated by the Quebec courts in the coming weeks.

According to the Globe and Mail, the creditors will inject $300 million to $375 million into the circus and also agree to reduce the circus's guaranteed debt from $1.1 billion to $300 million.

Gabriel de Alba, managing director of Catalyst, welcomed the "great result for Cirque", its employees, artists and partners, in an email sent to AFP.

"Now with the company's recent missteps put behind, we are eager to close the transaction quickly and support the company as it rekindles the magic and artistry that have made Cirque du Soleil an iconic global brand and creative force," he said.

Founded in Quebec in 1984, the troupe of acrobats had to cancel 44 productions around the world in March, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

It has laid off 4,679 acrobats and technicians, 95 percent of its employees.

The agreement with the group of creditors, announced in mid-July, replaces the takeover offer that it concluded at the end of June with its current shareholders, the American TPG and Chinese Fosun, as well as the Caisse de deposit and placement of Quebec (CDPQ).
A restaurant in Quang Ninh Province has attracted lots of customers with their charcoal black bread.

Shop owner Tran Khac Tuan said he is happy that the bread was so warmly embraced and their orders quickly increased. Tuans shop sells 300 to 500 loaves daily.

It took us about a year to research the right recipe and four testings for the bread, Tuan said. Hanoi, Danang and HCM City have their own distinctive foods so we also want to make something for Quang Ninh.

The bread is made with bamboo charcoal powder and squid ink. Squid represents the coastal areas while charcoal is a symbol for the numerous coal mines in Quang Ninh. Tuan said they only use seafood for the toppings, including shrimp, squid and crab, as they hope to give everyone an affordable meal with seafood.

Each sandwich is sold for VND25,000 to VND45,000.

Thuy Trang, a customer in Hanoi, said that after hearing about the bread from her niece she had travelled to the shop to try the bread. Trang said both the look and the taste were very nice.

I was curious about how the bread looks and tastes in real life. I also bought five to six more loaves for my nieces and nephews, she said.

Source: Dtinews
The Joint Entrance Examination and National Eligibility cum Entrance Test should be postponed until the spread of COVID-19 was brought under control, DMK President M K Stalin on Monday urged Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal.

Besides COVID-19, which has wreaked havoc on the nation, many parts of the country were yet to recover from the recent floods that have ravaged peoples livelihoods, he said in a letter to Pokhriyal.

Students and parents are under enormous mental stress, he said, adding that considering the current restrictions on public transportation, the allotted exam centres are not uniformly accessible to all aspirants.

It will not be possible for students belonging to rural areas and less-privileged sections to reach the exam centres.

They will be put under a great disadvantage against their affluent counterparts. While around 25 lakh students are expected to sit for this years NEET and JEE, the National Testing Agency has made it mandatory for the students to give an undertaking that they are neither COVID-19 positive nor have any symptoms for the same. However, in light of the fact that most of the infected population in India remains asymptomatic, demanding self declaration from thestudents does not seem to be effective in any possible way, the Dravidian party chief argued.

If those appearing for the exams contracted the virus, there are highpossibilities of another wave of infections across the country.

No decision shall be made in haste putting the lives of students at stake.

The government shall act, keeping the well-being and future of students in mind.

In the light of the severe difficulties, I sincerely request you to postpone the JEE, NEET exams until COVID-19 is brought under control, he urged.
Union Pacific officials plan to lodge an investigation following the latest round of vandalism on their rail overpass, where Interstate 45 motorists typically see the iconic Be Someone phrase.

At some point before 1 a.m. Sunday, the phrase Save Our Children was painted on the side of the bridge.

The slogan has recently been associated with the convoluted, ultra right-wing conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which alleges that a high-ranking government official known as QAnon shares information about an anti-Trump deep state often tied to satanism and child sex trafficking.

Last week, Vice President Mike Pence dismissed QAnon as a conspiracy theory, while President Donald Trump expressed support to those who give the theory credence. The call-to-action is alternatively known as Save the Children, which shares no relation to a nonprofit of the same name.

NBC News reported Friday that more than 200 Save the Children events were recently scheduled on Facebook.

Union Pacific spokeswoman Raquel Espinoza on Sunday the incident would also be investigated internally and that they may notify the Houston Police Department of the vandalism.

Several people  at least eight  holding what appeared to be painting supplies were spotted on the train tracks around 1 a.m. The group appeared to be posing and then walked off the tracks.

No group has publicly claimed responsibility for the bridge vandalism. Prior to the latest message, the bridge was painted with a tribute to longtime Houstonian George Floyd.

Another QAnon-linked slogan, We are the storm, was recently adopted by Texas Republicans, whose party leaders have since denied any connection to the conspiracy theory. Earlier this year, the FBI warned in a bulletin  which mentions QAnon  that conspiracy theory-driven extremists have become a domestic terrorism threat.

nicole.hensley@chron.com
The Coast Guard has issued a reminder to members of the public to exercise caution on exposed areas including along the coast over the next 36 hours.

As consequence of Storm Francis moving into the South West, Met Eireann are forecasting that weather will turn very wet and windy early this evening (Monday, August 24) with some torrential downpours and possible flooding. This weather is forecasted to continue into Tuesday as Storm Francis crosses the country with further heavy falls of rain and the continued risk of flooding.

See also: Live - track the path of #StormFrancis

Very windy or stormy conditions are expected on Tuesday as Storm Francis crosses Ireland. Southwest winds veering westerly, reaching mean speeds of 55 to 65km/h, will bring widespread severe gusts of 90 to 110km/h. Some disruption is likely with possible structural damage. Gale force winds from South East to East winds eventually veering to the South West and West are forecasted for all Irish coastal waters.

A status orange rainfall warning for Connacht, Cavan, Monaghan, Donegal, Wexford, Cork, Kerry and Waterford has been issued and other areas are impacted by Status Yellow warning.

See also: Status Orange warning in place

If you see somebody in trouble on the water or along the coast use VHF CH 16 or dial 112 and ask for the Coast Guard
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, on Saturday, declared that in Nigeria today, over 14 million children that should be in school were not in school, and thereby deprived of education.

He also Nigerian youth need to take up leadership positions for the countrys educational system to be transformed.

Mr Obasanjo said this in Lagos at the virtual 2020 Fellowship Graduation Ceremony of the second cohort of Teach for Nigeria Fellows.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Teach For Nigeria, an NGO, graduated 161 fellows who have impacted approximately 9,660 students in 80 schools across Lagos, Ogun, and Kaduna States.

NAN reports that Teach For Nigeria focuses on developing a movement of leaders across Nigeria who are committed to putting an end to educational inequity.

Mr Obasanjo said: They are deprived of opportunities that will allow them to develop their abilities and become useful to themselves and their communities.

It is evident that at this point, to transform our education system in a sustainable way, Nigerian youths must take up leadership positions.

According to him, the youth must champion different innovative solutions at every level of the society and across different sectors.

It is inspiring to see the work that Teach For Nigeria is doing to equip promising future leaders with the skills and experience to drive the change that we need, the former president said.

He added that the leaders had dedicated their time, energy and resources to inspire love for learning, improved educational outcomes, and enhanced life opportunities for children in the classrooms.

As a result of your commitment, your pupils have succeeded at various academic and non-academic competitions.

I recently learnt about pupils of Teach For Nigeria Fellows who came second in the National Lafarge Competition and other scholarship opportunities.

They also initiated actions by working with stakeholders such as parents, community members, heads of schools and other teachers, Mr Obasanjo said.

He, however, advised the fellows to continue to leverage their acquired skills and experiences to advocate for educational excellence in the country.

The former president urged them to be ambassadors for change, driving the movement for freedom and justice in Nigeria.

I strongly advise that you remain resilient in your fight for educational equity, not relenting on the strides of deploying solutions to tackle the myriads of problems confronting our education system.

Please do not let anybody tell you that you are leaders of tomorrow, you are leaders today, Mr Obasanjo said.

He noted that the outbreak of the raging coronavirus pandemic had put the world on its knees as the whole world strives to develop a vaccine and successful treatments to fight the disease.

So far, the damage in Africa has been moderate; but if we relax, the African continent can become the worst affected from the economic fallout of the crisis, Mr Obasanjo said.

He said that our education system was already in crisis before the pandemic hit us.

The outbreak has exacerbated the ever-widening gulf between the learning opportunities of our most privileged children and our less privileged children.

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To close the dangerous gap as a nation, we require prompt action from well-meaning Nigerians imbued with courage, patriotism, commitment, foresight and love, Mr Obasanjo said.

Also, Folawe Omikunle, the Chief Executive Officer, Teach For Nigeria, said that graduating fellows had spent the past two years improving the academic outcomes of their pupils.

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Ms Omikunle said that they ignited the love for learning in these pupils, instilling self-belief, successfully galvanising parental and community support to aid pupils learning process.

The graduating 161 fellows are joining our maiden set of 44 Alumni members, thereby bringing the number of our Alumni network to 205 members.

Teach For Nigeria is a life-long commitment in the fight against educational inequity.

We are positive that our Alumni will continue to work toward ensuring that one day we have a Nigeria where every child can attain an excellent education, she said.

(NAN)
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Linkedin Issam Ahmed (Agence France-Presse) Washington, United States  Mon, August 24, 2020 09:06 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066ff6dc7 2 Parents Khan-Academy,pandemic,coronavirus,children,Education,technology,united-states Free

Sal Khan's first inkling that COVID-19 was going to disrupt education around the world came in February, when the popular online learning platform he created saw a surge in traffic from South Korea.

"We got a letter from a teacher who was saying how they were using Khan Academy to keep the kids learning during school closure," he told AFP from San Francisco, saying he soon realized the vital role his organization could play in the pandemic.

The idea for Khan Academy began in 2004 when Khan, then a hedge fund manager, started giving math lessons to his 12-year-old cousin who lived on the other side of the United States, using Yahoo Doodle.

Since that time, it has become one of the world's leading internet education sites, available in 46 languages with a user base of 100 million, for whom it is completely free, thanks to the support of the Gates Foundation, Google and more.

But Khan soon recognized that the platform's videos, articles and online tests designed to supplement students' learning in normal times weren't enough for quarantined schooling.

They began creating detailed daily schedules to provide children with the structure they were missing out on in schools, and hosting webinars to help parents and teachers.

"We also began stress testing the servers," added the 43-year-old, as the number of learners shot up from about 20 to 30 million per month, and each user spent two-thirds more time learning than previously.

Read also: Tips from parents on helping children study at home during COVID-19 outbreak

'Pull kids out of the screen'

As many students return to school only via virtual or hybrid learning this fall, Khan said that the world had to find ways to mitigate the impact.

His tips include giving children a dedicated workspace that helps them mentally differentiate where they're studying and where they can goof off.

Another suggestion to reduce feelings of isolation: physically-distanced park meet-ups between families with children of a similar age.

In order to prevent mental atrophy and prepare their kids to return, parents can leverage online learning for the core subjects like math.

"Try to get at least 20 to 30 minutes of practice in a day," he said.

For reading and writing, parents can look for book lists and organize Zoom meetings for their children to talk about what they read. They can also write about the books and have their peers give feedback.

"You've got to make it interactive, you've got to pull kids out of the screen, a lecture over Zoom is not a good idea," he said.

One drawback of distance learning is that it widens the attainment gaps between children from better and worse-off families.

Khan admitted the situation was far from ideal, but said in the long run there may be certain "silver linings" -- such as renewed effort to close the digital divide.

A project he's currently working on called "schoolhouse.world" would connect children to tutors online for free.

Read also: Challenges of home learning during a pandemic through the eyes of a student

Leveling the playing field

Unlike other major online education players like Coursera and EdX that are fee-charging, nonprofit Khan Academy teaches subjects from preschool up to college level at zero cost.

Khan, who studied computer science at MIT and has a Harvard business school MBA, devised many of the site's courses himself, particularly in math and science (it also hosts subjects like history, economics and law).

He is widely praised for instilling a sense of wonder about a subject, while also explaining the nitty-gritty in ways that are clear and help build confidence.

Multiple studies have found use of the platform is linked to higher test scores, particularly in math, and Khan Academy has established partnerships with school districts across the US.

Most recently, a small randomized controlled trial by UMass-Amherst this May found the free literacy app Khan Academy Kids boosted early literacy skills among high-poverty families.

How did he become such a proficient teacher?

"I was the kid who wanted to learn for learning's sake," he jokes, rather than studying for the test.

When word of his early success tutoring his cousin Nadia got out among his large family, more cousins came to him for help, and "I was just trying to explain to my cousins, and I guess everyone's cousins, the way that I learned myself," added Khan, who is of Indian and Bangladeshi descent.

In 2015, Khan Academy became an official partner of the SAT -- the standardized test used for US college admissions.

Here too, the platform's impact on outcomes has been backed by research, unlike for-profit companies that charge up to thousands of dollars for the same services but don't publish their efficacy data.

This, Khan said, went to the core of his philosophy: that education isn't well suited to the marketplace and it's his job to "level the playing field."

"If there's a young child who needs to learn, we shouldn't be saying, 'How much do their parents make?' Or 'Can they get the credit card out?' We should say, 'Let's teach them.'"
The presidency said yesterday that it has no partisan interest in the forthcoming governorship election Edo State billed for September 19.

According to it, the repeated sentiments displayed by the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) over a recent video clip is a complete waste of time.

The PDP, in the last few days, had been holding several press briefings over a video clip showing the chief of staff to the President, Ibrahim Gambari, chatting with former national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole, along a walkway in the presidential villa.

In one of its press conferences, PDP's national chairman, Prince Uche Secondus called on the United Nation (UN), the European Union (EU) and other international bodies to place visa restriction on Gambari, Oshiomhole, and other individuals as punishment for allegedly plotting to truncate democracy and good governance in Nigeria.

But a top presidency source told State House correspondents that the opposition party made a mistake by trying to malign the person of the president's chief of staff, stressing that all the efforts directed at discrediting Gambari have failed in the face of his solid credibility.

The source who did not want his name in print said the chief of staff was only doing his job of leading the former APC national chairman to meet with the president.

The villa source further added that Oshiomhole had repeated what he said in the video at a press briefing after meeting with the president.

It would be recalled that Oshiomhole, while briefing State House correspondents after meeting with President Buhari, explained that he came to plead with the President to ensure security for the upcoming Edo State governorship election, citing threats of violence by PDP.

The presidency source, however, wondered why the PDP decided to mudsling with "an incomplete information", saying no one knew how the conversation started or how it ended.

The source added: "What PDP is doing is called 'playing the devil's card', which is all about suggesting ideas into people's heads, the truth does not matter in such an atmosphere. What I am convinced of is that even the leaders of the PDP know that what they are doing is wicked and unethical, but since it is politics, they believe anything goes.

"How do you know the 'arrest' in the conversation is for PDP elements? The target in this mudslinging is the chief of staff to the President, but their mistake is that this is not a man for this sort of politics. He is way above petty politicking. He is a career diplomat and hardly interested in this kind of politics, those who know him, know this much about him".

APC Begins Reconciliation In Niger, Imo, Ogun

Meanwhile, as part of measures to fortify its structure ahead of 2023 general elections, the ruling APC has commenced moves to reconcile aggrieved members in Niger, Imo and Ogun States.

Caretaker committee chairman of the APC and Yobe State governor, Mai Mala-Buni, started the process by inaugurating a reconciliation committee made up of governors at the party's national secretariat in Abuja over the weekend.

The reconciliation committee chaired by Jigawa State governor, Alhaji Abubakar Badaru, also has Governors Abdullahi Sule of Nasarawa, Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti, Simon Lalong of Plateau and Inuwa Yahaya of Gombe as members.

Chairman of the APC caretaker committee expressed confidence in the committee's capacity to execute the assignment with a sense of fairness, justice and responsibility, noting that they will place party interest above personal interest.

He said, "The ongoing reconciliatory initiatives of the All Progressives Congress will soon shake Nigeria's political space with massive return of former members who felt aggrieved and unwillingly went to other political parties.

"Therefore, it is in the spirit of the ongoing reconciliation that the chairmen and members of the Imo and Ogun reconciliation committees were carefully selected to reconcile aggrieved members and groups within the party.

"You are enjoined to be guided by the terms of reference as contained in your letters of appointment," he said.

Responding on behalf of the committee, Governor Badaru, while thanking the party leadership for giving members of his team an opportunity to serve the party, assured that the committee would make aggrieved members see the need for the reconciliation.

He said, "Strengthening and making the party strong is more important than individual interest and I'm sure they will see that, and they will agree to come to table and resolve all differences.

"And then we will have one single party that is committed and dedicated to fight for the people and continue to help people of Imo and Ogun States".

In a related development, APC stakeholders in Niger State, comprising founding members, met in the state capital to interface on how to save the party from implosion.

The party leaders who met over the weekend in Minna, the state capital, blamed the crisis rocking the party on the antics of those they described as being desperate to achieve political ambitions in 2023.

Speaking at the meeting, Niger State APC chairman, Engineer Mohammad Jibrin Imam, said the allegations made against the party executive members are unfounded.

"The plan by some people is to ensure they do away with me to actualise their dreams of 2023 ambition," Imam noted.

He noted that the state executive under his leadership remained the recognised body by the APC national secretariat in light of article 20 of the party's constitution on the election of officials through congress or convention.

The Founding Fathers Forum chairman, Alhaji Abubakar Katcha, however declared the support of stakeholders for the party state executive led by Engineer Imam.

Secretary of the forum, Barrister Yusuf Lakpeni read a nine-point resolution of the meeting including "that Niger State APC as the ruling party in the state should work assiduously to retain power in 2023 and that party supremacy should be respected."

We'll Partner Azura Plant On Power Saupply - Ize-Iyamu

Meanwhile, the APC candidate in the Edo State governorship election, Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu, has promised to partner with Azura Edo Plant and others in the energy sector to improve power supply in the state as part of his strategic plan to embark on jobs/wealth creation for citizens of the state.

Ize-Iyamu said the state requires regular power supply in order to achieve his agenda for industrialisation.

He said, "A strong and prosperous Edo State will depend on a vibrant and growing manufacturing sector that can create competitive advantages in the midst of rapid technological change and globalisation of markets, production and innovation. Manufacturing is an antidote for unemployment, a creator of wealth and a harbinger of sustainable development.

"The primary objective of the industrialisation programme of government will be to accelerate the pace of industrial development in the state by leveraging private financing through Public-Private-Partnership. In doing this, we need regular power supply in the state".

Azura Edo Plant, which is located in Benin City, is the country's largest Independent Power Plant (IPP) and the first fully financed private power plant in Nigeria.

The plant currently produces 450 megawatts of electricity but in the long run, the plant is expected to produce 1,500 megawatts.

In a press statement by his campaign organization, the governorship hopeful explained that his desire to partner with

Azura and other interested investors in the energy sector, is predicated on the fact that energy plays a huge role in the economic development, poverty reduction and security of any state or nation.

Ize-Iyamu added: "Uninterrupted power supply is vital for economic growth and any nation that is desires to create jobs and wealth will crucially depend on the long-term availability of power from sources that are reasonably priced and available.

"Energy is a critical factor in all the sectors of any country's economy. Energy supports the delivery of basic needs such as cooked food, relaxed living temperature, lighting, piped born water, essential health care, educational aids and other social amenities.

"Regular power supply also fuels productive activities including agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, industry, and mining. And lack of power supply contributes to poverty and can contribute to the economic decline".

The APC governorship candidate said that the Edo State government under his leadership will embark on wealth creation for citizens of the state through the uncommon embrace of the public private partnership paradigm to bring about economic prosperity in various sectors of the state's economy.

He added that a robust and wealthy Edo State will largely depend on a vibrant and growing manufacturing sector that can create competitive advantages in the midst of rapid technological change and globalisation of markets, production and innovation, saying manufacturing is a remedial for unemployment, a creator of wealth and a harbinger of sustainable development.

Ize-Iyamu further explained that the primary objective of the industrialisation program of his government will be to speed up the pace of industrial development in the state by leveraging private financing through Public-Private-Partnership.

He continued: "In doing this, the focus will be to re-examine the state existing public and private industries with a view to resuscitating their activities, ensuring profitable operations and increasing employment opportunities. Establish one functional industrial park in each Senatorial District; establish an Export Processing Zone as an industrial and commercial hub.

"Mentor the local government to establish an industrial cluster in their jurisdiction; to stimulate the growth and development of a culture of industrial production and entrepreneurship in the state.

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"We intend through PPP to establish a refinery in Ikpoba-Okha because of the oil fields in that locality and its proximity to Koko Port. We also intend through the same PPP to establish a gas plant at Oben in Orhiomwon because of the abundant gas in that area".

He promised to work with the Edo State Chambers of Commerce and Industry to provide support, information, business start-ups and growth capacity enhancement programmes across the three senatorial districts.

"Our government will partner with stakeholders, banks and financial institutions to resuscitate and revamp the state owned industries including, the Fertilizer plant, Auchi; Cassavita Industry, Uromi; Ava Cement Factory, Akoko-Edo; Fruit Juice Factory, Ehor; Bendel Brewery, Benin and Ewu Flour Mill to mention but a few", Ize-Iyamu stated.

The aspirant estimated that the policy would create additional 3000 direct jobs and sustain over 5,000 related jobs in the state's economy.

APC Wins Ondo Council Polls

The Ondo State Independent Electoral Commission (ODIEC) yesterday declared results of local government elections held across the state on Saturday.

Out of 18 local governments, APC won the chairmanship seats of 14 local government areas as announced by the chairman of the commission, Prof Yomi Dinakin as at press time.

Declaring the election results yesterday, Prof Dinakin said there was no contest in five local governments.

Dinakin who declared APC candidates winner of the elections in the five local government areas maintained that it was in line with provisions of the Electoral Act.

The chairman noted that he acted within the law which states that where there is no contestation, any candidate validly nominated should be declared the winner.

The five local government areas are Akoko North-East, Ose, Ifedore, Odigbo, and Irele.

Other local governments where the APC won are Ese-Odo, Akoko South East, Akure South, Ilaje, ile-Oluji/Okeigbo, Okitipupa, Ondo West, Owo and Akure North.

Local governments where results were being expected at press time are Akoko North West, Idanre Akoko South West, and Ondo East.

The ODIEC chairman however said the results of the remaining four local governments would be announced later after which certificates of return would be presented to the winners.
Jiang Li (R) consults with other doctors and experts in Wuhan, Hubei Province. [For China Daily]

Jiang Li, director of the department of critical care medicine at Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, starts her work day by going around ICU wards to check the patients as early as possible before the formal ward inspection during shift change.

In between, she usually makes coffee for herself and her team, sometimes even producing some latte art for them.

Since COVID-19 pandemic hit China in December, Jiang, 51, has only spent a few days in her wards-as the expert from the National Health Commission, she spent three months in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province treating seriously ill patients on the frontline until the last COVID-19 patient in Wuhan was discharged on April 26.

Two months later, when a second wave of the virus hit Beijing, Jiang went to the frontline alone again-she joined the team at Beijing Ditan Hospital, Capital Medical University to treat the patients.

"Drawing on experience gained from Wuhan, this time the treatment was not as hurried," Jiang says.

By Aug 6, all 335 COVID-19 patients related to Beijing's Xinfadi wholesale market had been discharged after the unflinching 56-day effort of Jiang and the medical team.

Jiang heads to Wuhan on the second day of the Spring Festival to tackle COVID-19. [For China Daily]

Team Building

A day after the Chinese New Year, Jiang took the train to Wuhan, the Chinese city hit hardest by COVID-19.

The next day, she started work in Jinyintan Hospital, one of the designated hospitals for COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, where regular wards had been repurposed into the 30-bed ICU she took over.

The work waiting for her was tough. She not only had to establish a workflow in the special wards, but also coordinate a team made up of medical staff from different hospitals with different professional backgrounds, working practices and habits.

"The communication between the ward and the outside working zones only took place via two way radios then, and the doctors who were in the wards were not able to see the patients' information, such as laboratory test reports," Jiang recalls. "With the limited protection equipment available at the time, we couldn't just walk onto the ward to treat the patients whenever we needed to like we can in a normal ICU, but we had to maximize the work when we were inside."

Jiang figured out a clumsy way-a doctor always brought a piece of paper onto the ward, upon which he or she would have written down key facts and figures of the patients and their planned treatment.

"After seeing the patients, the doctor would write down what treatment needed to be changed or adjusted on the paper and paste it to the window so that another team member outside could take a photo and pass the message on to the wider team," Jiang says.

"Not a single needle could be brought out of the wards because of the highly infectious nature of the disease, so we could only use this system," she says.

To ensure the cooperation between team members ran smoothly was another challenge-the slang used to describe certain medicine or procedures, to the sequential order of an operation all need to be unified.

"For example, the nurses had to fully understand the doctor's prescription including drug dosage and the infusion speed," Jiang explains, adding that some of the nurses were not trained to work in the ICU, meaning that they needed to get up to speed very quickly.

The team workflow was gradually established by Jiang and other members continually changing and perfecting the rules until it was on the right track.

Jiang on the front line in the ICU, where she remained until all hospitalized patients were discharged in April. [For China Daily]

Learning to Adapt

A new patient was admitted to Jiang's wards on Jan 29. He was a physician of neurology and became infected after performing a procedure on his patient.

"Looking at his blue lips and the increased ventilator pressure, I prayed silently that his condition would get better. The novel coronavirus pneumonia causes many patients' condition to deteriorate sharply and they won't recover easily," Jiang writes in a Chinese journal.

On the fifth day, when entering the ICU, Jiang noticed that some new medical staff had written their names on their protection garment-they were ICU nurses from all over the country sent to help Wuhan.

The workflow gradually got smoother, several seriously ill patients were stabilized and, after several cloudy days, the sun finally came out.

Jiang says that when the medical team started drawing small cartoons on their protective clothing, it meant the situation in Wuhan was improving and the pressure on doctors and nurses was easing.

"In the first few days we were under such great pressure that we didn't even think of writing down names, there wasn't even a marker pen there. Sadly, I can only remember some pretty eyes with no name that worked with me then," Jiang says.

Besides taking care of her patients, Jiang also joined an expert team to patrol designated hospitals in the city for COVID-19 patients to find the potentially seriously ill patients and arrange special monitoring or transfer to the ICU wards.

"It's crucial for a potentially seriously ill patient to be identified early," Jiang says.

During each patrol, Jiang would check on each patient's vital signs, their degree of difficulty in breathing and their oxygen saturation, as well as taking a little time to observe suspected cases.

"If a patient's lips turns a little blue, it means their blood oxygen saturation has dropped and if a patient is using the accessory respiratory muscle that should not normally be used when breathing, they also need more oxygen," she says.

From early March, Jiang's daily routine included one more item on the agenda-if there was a COVID-19 death the day before, all doctors in charge of each ward zone in designated hospitals would gather together for a review and a group discussion.

The meetings, which could last anywhere up to 4 hours, would be attended by more than 40 doctors and experts.

"The doctor who took charge of the patient would make a report giving an overview of the whole treatment process, and then all of the doctors would discuss what could have been done better," Jiang recalls.

She thinks it was an effective way for doctors to learn about the new disease and about the effects of different treatments.

"Even though we could not bring the lives of those patients back, the discussion was helpful for the patients still fighting," Jiang says.

Jiang believes that conducting autopsies is a necessary and meaningful procedure as the pathological conclusion provides the final answer of what happened to the patient.

On April 26, all COVID-19 patients in Wuhan were discharged. Jiang took the train back to Beijing a day later.

Lou Ran, an ICU doctor in Jiang's team in Beijing, recalls that when Jiang returned from Wuhan, she looked bad. "She didn't lose any weight, but she didn't say a word about getting tired," Lou says.

When Jiang was in Wuhan, she still cared about her patients in the ICU wards in Beijing. Each day Lou and other doctors on watch sent her updates about the patients. "She replied every day, sometimes at 12 am, sometimes at 5 am," Lou says.

ICU doctors need a long period of training and a wide range of knowledge. Jiang has been an ICU doctor since 1992.

Lou says when she reads about a rare disease, she will often ask Jiang about it. "I have never caught her out, she always knows," Lou says. "When she is not that familiar with the disease, she will search for some literature about it and share it with us that same day."

ICU doctors and nurses have played an important role in fighting COVID-19, Jiang thinks the building of a solid ICU team is the key to successfully facing a future epidemic.

"Seventeen years ago, we joined the fight against SARS, and hopefully, in the future, the young doctors will carry on our duty," she says.

(Source: China Daily)
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug.24

By Nargiz Ismayilova - Trend:

Azerbaijan exported 273,643 tons of oil and petroleum products to Belarus in the first half of this year, the State Statistics Committee told Trend.

According to the committee, over the reporting period the export of oil and petroleum products made up 55.6 million manat [$32.7 million], while no exports of the products to Belarus were carried out in the same period of last year.

Oil was supplied from Azerbaijan to Belarus via Odessa-Brody pipeline as early as in 2011. The contract envisaged the supplies in the volume of four million tons, but the actual volume of shipments reached about 900,000 tons.

Oil supplies to Belarus in the southern direction, through Ukraine, were resumed due to a lack of import from big Russian companies caused by disagreements over the price.

Following the lack of oil supply from Russia, Belarus launched its alternative import - through the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda via railway to the Naftan refinery and through the Ukrainian port of Odessa to the Mozyr refinery through the Odessa-Brody and Brody-Mozyr oil pipelines.

Alternative oil supplies were also launched from Norway and Azerbaijan. In May 2020, Belarus Belneftekhim began to import oil from Saudi Arabia and the US.

(1 USD = 1.7 manat on Aug.24)

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @IsmailovaNargis
Brett Nickman power-washes benches at Cal State Fullerton in preparation for the school's reopening for the fall semester. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

As 480,000 California State University students prepare to log on for the start of a new academic year, the coronavirus crisis has produced uneven effects throughout the system on enrollment, budgets and even the number of students permitted to take in-person classes.

Some campuses, particularly in the north, are struggling with enrollment, while in the south campuses see little to no change. Budget cuts have some universities considering layoffs and course reductions, while others are holding steady. And with 23 campuses in 18 counties, some colleges will offer more in-person classes and services than others.

At Cal Poly Pomona, for instance, just 2.5% of course sections will offer in-person components, including courses held off campus. Fewer than 500 students will live on campus. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, in contrast, will offer 13% of sections in person, and as many as 5,980 students  70% of capacity  will live on campus.

Los Angeles County, which has a relatively high prevalence of COVID-19, has issued strict reopening guidelines for higher education institutions, whereas San Luis Obispo, which has half the case rate per 100,000 people, has said it would follow the somewhat more relaxed state guidelines.

Richelle Meneses helps her 18-year-old daughter, Sidney Meneses, move into the dorms at Cal State Fullerton. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

CSU Chancellor Timothy White signed off on all 23 campuses' plans.

"They vary based on the geography of the campus, they vary based on the facility footprint," White said at a recent online forum hosted by the nonprofit news organization CalMatters. "Small cramped classrooms are different than great, big open spaces.... Something that cannot happen on one campus might be happening on another campus."

The Cal State system was one of the first to announce, in May, that it would begin the fall semester almost entirely online. Days later, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed a 10% state budget reduction to all three systems of public higher education in California, prompting campuses to grapple with how to make cuts.

Story continues

All of the L.A.-area CSU campuses  Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Northridge and Pomona  say they are projecting steady enrollment compared with a year ago. With about half their revenue coming from tuition and fees, that ensures some stability, though campuses are still limiting travel, freezing hiring and laying off some employees.

"I am confident that we will deliver the same level of service to our students in the classroom and outside the classroom as we have delivered in the past," said President Framroze Virjee of Fullerton, the system's largest college and one of its most competitive. "I dont know that we will be able to do that in future years, but for this year I am sure of it."

Virjee added that his college, which expects to exceed last fall's enrollment of 39,868, has no plans to cut classes.

Itzel Delgadillo, who is studying business administration and public relations at Fullerton, moved back in with her parents in Lamont, Calif., after the pandemic hit. The first member of her family to attend college, she was used to focusing only on school and her part-time job managing a Little Caesars restaurant.

But at home, she's expected to help with cooking and cleaning. She shares a room with her sister and doesn't have a desk, working from the dining table or a bed instead.

"Thats the roughest, just not having a desk," she said. "As a student at Cal State, Im used to having a library or a Starbucks and my own space, my own room. Now I dont have that controlled environment."

Despite the difficulties, she said she wouldn't return to campus even if it were an option. Delgadillo and her sister recently spent two weeks quarantined in their room, recovering from COVID-19.

"I know how it is and I know who it can affect, and I wouldnt risk my family and I wouldnt risk other peoples health," she said.

In L.A. County, only classes that train students in essential work, such as healthcare, education, and food and agriculture, may meet in person, and only students with no feasible alternative may be housed on campus.

At Cal State L.A., where enrollment is on target around the 26,000 students who attended last fall, fewer than 100 students will live on campus and only six clinical nursing courses will be offered in person.

At Cal Poly Pomona, enrollment numbers are also steady, at about 27,000. Almost all classes, with the exception of graduate research or thesis projects that cannot be conducted virtually, will be remote, leading to one of the lowest rates of students on campus of any Cal State school.

"We had a really high bar  higher than even those among the other CSU campuses," said Sepehr Eskandari, associate provost for academic planning and faculty excellence. With its focus on "inclusivity" and equity, that meant rethinking how the university offered remote instruction.

"We had not paid enough attention to the digital divide" before the pandemic, said S. Terri Gomez, associate provost for student success, equity and innovation.

To correct that, Pomona created a lease-to-own laptop program, trained faculty in distance education over the summer, and embedded more tutors and teaching assistants in classes.

At some Northern California campuses, the picture looks somewhat different.

Long reliant on students from outside their regions to bolster enrollment, these campuses were experiencing enrollment declines before the pandemic.

"The growth in demand for the CSU has been largely in Southern California," said President Lynn Mahoney of San Francisco State, where enrollments have been dropping for years, in part because of the high cost of housing. "The Northern California campuses have had to work harder."

Amid the uncertainty of COVID-19, many students are electing to stay closer to home or enroll in community colleges. San Francisco State is expecting a 10% drop in overall enrollment, including a 33% drop in its freshman class  the latter of which Mahoney attributed entirely to the pandemic.

"The number ... sounds huge," she said, "but it's not an existential crisis."

It does mean, though, that revenue will drop. The university will reduce some lecturers' loads and cut back on courses, giving priority to general education and major requirements, advising and counseling, Mahoney said. It will also lay off employees according to its collective bargaining agreement, but not full-time faculty.

With just over 1% of classes being offered in person and almost all other services moved online, Mahoney estimates there will be few students on campus, which blends into the city of San Francisco.

Farther north, at Chico State and Humboldt State, which are projecting enrollment declines of about 7.5% and 12%, respectively, officials plan to open up more of their campuses to students.

Located in more rural Butte and Humboldt counties, these campuses offer hands-on training in agriculture, forestry and oceanography that can be hard to translate online. Many students live on or near campus, where they contribute significantly to local economies.

Chico State will offer in-person learning for about 10% of all course sections; at Humboldt State, the figure is closer to 13%.

Chico State officials said that once Butte County comes off the state's coronavirus watchlist, the campus will open some student activities, with modifications. In Bell Memorial Union, conference rooms will house student services such as the Dream Center and Gender and Sexuality Equity Coalition, and the bookstore and cafe will be open. Some study spaces will be available by appointment, but students must socially distance. The school's 800-acre farm will be open.

So will off-campus sorority and fraternity houses, where university employees have volunteered to hang leaflets reminding residents about safety during the pandemic.

"We knew our students were going to come back anyway," said Sandy Parsons, Chico State's interim vice president for student affairs. "Either we figure out a way to engage them appropriately and safely, or it wont go well."

Breanna Holbert, an agriculture major and the Associated Students president at Chico, has remained throughout the pandemic at the off-campus house she rents with three other students.

"From a student standpoint, of course I want these things to be open because Im paying for them," she said of student services.

But as a Black Latinx individual whose parents have preexisting conditions, she doesn't think she'll use them much.

"I have family members who could be impacted and infected and potentially die because I went into this building," she said. "I dont feel comfortable doing those things."
08/24/2020

Photo (c) zoff-photo - Getty Images Without fanfare or explanation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has lifted its mandatory 14-day quarantine for travelers.

However, according to its website, the agency will now defer to state, local, and territorial governments that still have travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders, or other quarantine requirements in place.

As an example, the CDC tells travelers that they will need to follow restrictions set by the U.S. State Department. That agency warns that any U.S. citizen returning to the United States who has been in China in the previous 14 days may be subject to up to 14 days of quarantine.

Quarantining for 14 days is still a smart move

The CDCs move is not an all-access pass to go wherever you like. The CDC reminds travelers that they can still be exposed to COVID-19 anywhere.

You may feel well and not have any symptoms, but you can be contagious without symptoms and spread the virus to others. You and your travel companions (including children) pose a risk to your family, friends, and community for 14 days after you were exposed to the virus, the agency stated.

The agency is asking travelers to use their common sense and follow safeguards like hand-washing, social distancing, using a face covering, and keeping track of any coronavirus-like symptoms. It also notes that consumers should allow for some flexibility in travel arrangements in the short-term.

Prepare to be flexible during your trip as restrictions and policies may change during your travel, the CDC wrote. If traveling internationally or across international borders, check with the destinations Office of Foreign Affairs or Ministry of Health or the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Avoid surprises by being prepared

In addition, travelers should make themselves aware that not every country has relaxed its admission policy and may prohibit entrance by a U.S. tourist or a non-essential traveler. Its also important to keep in mind that because of how other countries are handling the pandemic, the U.S.s advice might be to stay at home.

To prevent being surprised, the State Department recommends that travelers visit not only its own database of current advisories, but also the websites of those countries' embassies in the United States for additional information, including entry/exit restrictions and permissible categories of travel.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA has awarded 14 planning grants to Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) through its Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP), part of the agency's Office of STEM Engagement. The grants, totaling more than $587,000, are part of a phased partnership effort with the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The grants will encourage the development of coalitions aimed at broadening participation in engineering, in alignment with the goals of the NSF Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) initiative.

"Efforts with Minority Serving Institutions to broaden student participation exemplify the work of the federal coordination in STEM community and highlight the direct benefit to students when agencies work together," said Mike Kincaid, NASA associate administrator for STEM Engagement. "We look forward to see the results of this partnership."

"NSF is thrilled to welcome MUREP's planning grant awardees to the NSF INCLUDES National Network of partners," said Karen Marrongelle, assistant director of NSF's Directorate for Education and Human Resources. "We value NASA's support for the vision of the NSF INCLUDES initiative, as we work collaboratively for inclusive change to the STEM workforce, and we look forward to the outcomes of the catalytic work that will be conducted through these planning grants."

Continuing to invest in MSIs is an ongoing priority for MUREP. Through these planning grant awards, the lead MSIs have developed coalitions with a variety of partners, including other MSIs, non-MSIs, industry, non-profit organizations and other non-governmental organizations.

The recipient institutions, and their proposed projects, are:

California State University, Northridge

Growing Engineering Engagement in Underserved and Underrepresented Populations

This project will form a network to promote the interagency collaboration that delivers the STEM knowledge to the next generation of underserved/underrepresented children.

California State University, San Bernardino

Partnerships for Recruitment, Retention, Research and Mentoring for Engineering

This project, consisting of a unique collaboration of MSIs and the Community College Association of Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement Directors (CCAMD), will broaden participation in engineering.

Florida A&M University

NASA MUREP-NSF INCLUDES Fueling Opportunities for Successful Engineering Retention of Non-Traditional STEM (FOSTER-NTS) Majors into PhD Programs at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering

The goal of this planning grant is to generate an Opportunity Response Team, comprised of Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University-Florida State University College of Engineering faculty and graduate students, along with faculty from three Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to develop a FOSTER-NTS program for non-engineering STEM underrepresented minority students who want to obtain PhDs in engineering.

Navajo Technical College

NASA - Navajo Nation Ne-tdale Ak'is: Expanding Partnerships

The outcome of this planning grant will be a concept paper detailing strategies and best practices to enable the first TCU-led submission of a multi-institutional NSF INCLUDES proposal to implement findings from this award.

Navajo Technical College

Integration of Earth and Space Science initiatives in Engineering Curriculum and community engagement at Navajo Technical University

During the coming four months, the partnership will work to assess the possibility of introducing astronomy, physics, and environmental engineering courses in the Engineering programs, as well as assessing the possibility to reuse the observatory at the NTU campus, which is not functioning at this time, to make it available for NTU students, K-12 students and the local community.

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces

Coalition for Growing a Diverse Workforce to Develop and Commercialize the Next Generation of Space-Based Technologies

The proposed program has two top-level objectives  to increase the participation and role of MSIs in space-related research, and to increase the number and diversity of STEM graduates that are well prepared to contribute to the space industry. The coalition will achieve these objectives by implementing a set of scalable strategies.

North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro

iCASE: Inclusive Consortium of Autonomous Systems Engineers

iCASE will be a diverse, comprehensive consortium focused on exposing, encouraging, educating, engaging, and employing the underrepresented minority engineering community.

Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

STEM^3 in South-East Louisiana

STEM^3 plans to help develop a strong technical workforce in the targeted region with a concentration in advanced additive manufacturing technologies.

Texas A&M University, Kingsville

Parallel Pathways of Excellence to Engage Minority Students in Aerospace Engineering

The objectives of this planning project are to create a concept paper for broadening participation in aerospace engineering via a coalition of MSIs, high schools, private sector, libraries, nonprofit, state and governmental organizations, as well as to create a comprehensive action plan with detailed intervention activities, by testing and assessing the impacts of various approaches during this planning stage.

University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff

Developing a Community of Space Scientists

The proposed objectives of this project are to develop plans to engage Arkansas' aerospace community and educational stakeholders in NASA-relevant activities to lay the foundation for faculty, students, and community participation through shared goals and objectives; and to identify activities that will increase the capacity of UAPB's Industrial Technology Management and Applied Engineering program to plan, collaborate and share NASA research with faculty, students, stakeholders, and the community.

University of Hawaii, Honolulu

Planning and Development for a Sustainable STEM-Outreach Program: Hawai'i's Aspiring Engineers Academy

The proposed project aims to develop a strategic plan for an academy designed to provide engineering opportunities for Hawaii's underrepresented and underserved demographic.

University of Massachusetts, Boston

Partners Aligned To Heighten broad participation in STEM (PATHS)

PATHS will build upon established partnerships with Bunker Hill Community College and Boston Public Schools and add a network of supportive organizations, individual NASA-supported scientists and engineers, and local industry leaders to provide opportunities support for pursuing NASA-related careers.

University of Texas, El Paso

Coalition for Inspiration, Education and Research in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Hispanic Serving Institutions ([email protected])

The goal of this planning grant is to complete initiation and planning phases for [email protected], with the overarching goal of supporting broadening participation in electrical and computer engineering.

University of Texas, San Antonio

City-based Integrated Engineering Training Alliance to Engage, Educate and Empower the Next Generation STEM Workforce

Targeting underrepresented student groups, the City-based Integrated Engineering Training Alliance to Engage, Educate, and Transform the Next Generation STEM Workforce will engage industry, government and educational stakeholders to collaboratively establish a tiered educational model for intentionally broadening participation in interdisciplinary aeronautics engineering.

About MUREP

NASA's Minority University Research and Education Project supports the training and development of students and faculty at MSIs in STEM fields by providing opportunities for research and education that inspires and prepares minority students for STEM careers.

An integral part of this mission, NASA MUREP INCLUDES was established to strengthen and develop the research capacity and infrastructure of minority-serving institutions in areas of strategic importance and value to NASA's mission and national priorities.

For more information about MUREP, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/stem/murep/

SOURCE NASA

Related Links

http://www.nasa.gov


TALLAHASSEE, FL -- The Florida Division of Emergency Management has announced that registration is now available for the $380 million Hurricane Michael timber recovery funding program for those in several area counties. Their statement reads as follows:



Today (8/21/20), the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) announced that registration for the $380 million recovery funding program for Floridas timber industry impacted by Hurricane Michael is now available. This program was made available through an agreement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and is administered by FDEM in conjunction with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and technical assistance will be provided through the Florida Forest Service. Registration for the block grant is available here.

To be eligible for the Timber Recovery Block Grant, a producer must be the owner of record or the lessee who has rights to the timber crop at the time of application of a minimum of 10 contiguous acres of nonindustrial private forest land located in one of the following Florida counties: Bay, Calhoun, Franklin, Gadsden, Gulf, Hamilton, Holmes, Jackson, Jefferson, Leon, Liberty, Madison, Okaloosa, Suwannee, Taylor, Wakulla, Walton, and Washington.

Additionally, the Florida Irrigation Recovery Block Grant Program is now available to agricultural producers who suffered damage to their crop and irrigation system as a result of Hurricane Michael. To be eligible for this program, a producer must be the owner of record of center pivot irrigation infrastructure at the time of application and document that the crop growing under the center pivot as of October 10, 2018, sustained a minimum 15 percent crop loss due to Hurricane Michael.

The deadline to register for these programs is Friday, November 20.

FDEM will be conducting community outreach to ensure timber producers have the information they need to apply. Additionally, producers can email questions to [email protected].

For more information about the Timber Recovery Block Grant, visit https://floridadisaster.org/ timber . For more information about the Florida Irrigation Recovery Block Grant Program, visit https://floridadisaster.org/ irrigation .

A previous announcement regarding this program is available

here

. An announcement regarding the USDA agreement for the program is available

here
PORTLAND, Ore., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Steam Turbine Market by Design (Reaction and Impulse) and Application (Power generation, Petrochemical, Oil & Gas and Others): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 20202027." According to the report published by Allied Market Research, the global steam turbine market was estimated at $24.1 billion in 2019 and is expected to hit at $30.2 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 2.8% from 2020 to 2027.

Key determinants of the market-

Rise in demand for energy and reduction in fossil-based energy generation propel the growth of the global steam turbine market. Conversely, higher efficiency of other turbines curtails down the growth to some extent. Nevertheless, advancements promoting the use of steam turbine is expected to create lucrative opportunities in the near future.

Covid-19 Scenarios-

The covid-19 outbreak impacted the global steam turbine market to a great extent. The lockdown has led to shutdown of almost all commercial places, due to which the demand for energy has been declined.

On the other hand, the shortage of workers, due to worldwide lockdown, has reduced the production capacity, thereby impacting the market.

Download Report Sample (175 Pages PDF with Insights) @ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/6028

The impulse segment dominated in 2019 -

Based on type, the impulse segment contributed to nearly two-thirds of the global steam turbine market revenue in 2019. In addition, the segment is expected to maintain its dominance by the end of 2027. The same segment would also portray the fastest CAGR of 3.1% during the study period. This is attributed to rising demand for impulse turbine for low flow and high inlet pressure applications.

The power generation segment to lead throughout 2027-

Based on application, the power generation segment held the major share in 2019, garnering more than one-third of the global steam turbine market. Rise in demand for power generation for thermal, hydel, and nuclear plants drive the growth of the segment. However, the oil & gas segment would grow at the fastest CAGR of 3.5% throughout the forecast period. The growing use of steam turbines in oil & gas industries to generate power is the major factor augments the growth of the segment. In addition, the rise in demand for CHP fuels the segment growth.

Get detailed COVID-19 impact analysis on the Steam Turbine Market: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-for-customization/6028?reqfor=covid

Asia-Pacific to rule the roost in terms of revenue, North America to grow at a significant pace-

Based on region, Asia-Pacific accounted for around half of the global steam turbine market revenue in 2019, and is anticipated to maintain the lion's share till 2027. In addition, the region is anticipated to manifest the fastest CAGR of 3.4% from 2020 to 2027. This is due to rising demand for electricity in the region. Furthermore, factors such as growing economies, rising per-capita pay, and expanding use of transport is anticipated to increase the demand for steam turbine in this province. Moreover, the North America region is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 3.1% from 2020 to 2027.

Key players in the industry-

Arani power systems

Elliott Group

TURBOCAM

Doosan Skoda Power

Chola Turbo Machinery International Pvt. Ltd.

Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Americas Inc.

General Electric (GE) Co.

Turbine Generator Maintenance Inc.

Toshiba Corporation

Siemens AG

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Wind Turbine Market - Global Wind Turbine Market is expected to reach $134,600 million by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 7.2% from 2017 to 2023.

Renewable Energy Market - Global renewable energy market is expected to reach $1,512.3 Billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 6.1% from 2018 to 2025.

Geothermal Power Market - Global geothermal power market is projected to reach $6.8 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 5.0% from 2019 to 2026.

Virtual Power Plant Market - Global virtual power plant market is projected to reach $5.9 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 21.3% from 2020 to 2027.

Diesel Generator Market - Global diesel generator market is expected to reach $37.1 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 9.8% from 2020 to 2027.

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TRAVERSE CITY, MI  A Coast Guard helicopter crew from Michigan is doing its part to help the Gulf Coast, which is bracing for a pair of storms expected to make landfall in the coming days.

The crew from Air Station Traverse City landed in the region over the weekend, according to a Facebook post by the USCG training center in Mobile, Alabama.

As the storms roll in, one last helicopter crew makes it in to join the response against two storms threatening the gulf. Thank you, Air Station Traverse City, the post reads.

The back-to-back punch of storms is expected to being with Hurricane Marco which is tracking near or just off the coast of Louisiana into Tuesday, bringing rainfall, gusty winds and storm surge to parts of the northern Gulf Coast.

Tropical Storm Laura is forecast to reach the Gulf of Mexico early this week, where it is likely to intensify into a hurricane, according to National Weather Service reports.

The area with the highest chance of seeing a hurricane strike from Laura by midweek is along parts of the Texas and Louisiana coasts, but the forecast is changing daily.

Though hurricane season isnt at the forefront of most peoples minds up here in Northern Michigan, its always a busy time for the Coast Guard, a Facebook post from Air Station Traverse City reads. With Hurricane Marco and Tropical Storm Laura headed towards the Gulf Coast, Air Station Traverse City has sent down a helicopter and crew to assist with the response efforts.
BJP President J.P. Nadda on Sunday said that his party will fight upcoming Assembly election in Bihar, along with the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and the (LJP), under the leadership of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

Nadda's statement comes at a time when LJP President Chirag Paswan has taken a tough stand against Nitish Kumar, the JD-U chief.

Paswan, in a statement, said that he will raise issues related to the common people of state. This is also seen as a bid to exert pressure on the JD-U and the BJP to claim more seats to contest.

Chirag Paswan and his father Ram Vilas Paswan are the among prominent Dalit leaders in Bihar, exerting influence in Hajipur, Saran, Chapra and some other key constituencies in and central

As per January 2020, has total 7,21,40,945 voters, and 15 per cent of them belong to Dalit and Mahadalit communities. Paswan also claims to be leader of Muslim community, which forms 17 per cent of the electorate.

Addressing the party's working committee via video conferencing, Nadda said that all the three alliance partners will fight Bihar polls together and emerge victorious.

"Bihar has the capacity to establish itself in the country. The silk industry of Bhagalpur, Litchi farming of Muzaffarpur, paintings of Madhubani, Makhana (food) of Darbhanga have potential to establish themselves as export hubs. We have to become vocal for local to become self-reliant," he said.

"The opposition parties (Mahagathbandhan) is visionless at the moment. Hence, voters of Bihar expect better future only from NDA. The people of Bihar are labourious and have potential to change the status of the state," he added.

--IANS

str/sdr/vd

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
About 50% of all state-licensed child care programs in New Mexico have closed, some of them permanently, due to plummeting enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to officials with the New Mexico Child Care and Education Association.

Despite the key role child care providers are playing in support of other essential industries during the COVID 19 crisis, the child care system as a whole is at risk of collapse due to the economic impact, said Angela Garcia, president of the NMCCEA.

The association is the lobbying, training and advocacy organization representing the states child care providers. Child care is based on tuition, so when enrollment is down, the revenue is down.

And with half as many child care spaces available, when businesses do eventually reopen, parents will have fewer programs available for their children, and that will likely affect the economic recovery, she said.

About 13,900 people work in the child care industry in New Mexico.

Child care programs that remain open during the pandemic face additional expenses, such as the cost of labor and products for regular disinfecting and sanitizing, the cost of personal protective equipment, and the cost of adhering to safety regulations that limit class size, and the expense of keeping children assigned to the same teachers and not allowing smaller classes to be combined, Garcia said.

Factors contributing to shrinking enrollments include parents sheltering their children at home out of fear they may be exposed to the coronavirus in a child care setting, parents working out of their homes and having no need for child care and parents who have lost jobs and can no longer afford child care.

Before the pandemic, there were 740 child care centers, 232 child care homes and 106 school-age programs licensed in the state. They collectively provided 65,692 child care spaces, said NMCCEA Treasurer Crystal Tapia.

At least half of those spaces are in the Albuquerque area, where the majority of providers are located, she said.

The pandemic has reduced the number of spaces to fewer than 32,850 statewide.

Among those enrolled in child care programs prior to the pandemic, 21,000 received child care assistance monthly through the state.

The count of closures and available spaces was based on a survey conducted by the state Early Childhood and Education Department of licensed child care providers, Garcia said.

Members of the NMCCEA also point to Albuquerques free full-day youth programs as a contributor to providers troubles.

The city is offering the programming to kids in kindergarten through eighth grade at a host of community centers.

With the Albuquerque Public Schools announcement that it will continue remote learning through December, Albuquerques programs will include those that support APS distance learning. The Parks and Recreation Department and the Cultural Services Department will also provide a variety of before, during, and after school programming. The programs will be held Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., at 21 community centers and two multigenerational centers. In collaboration with APS, breakfast and lunch will be provided for the participants.

The programs will serve about 1,800 children. Registration is currently open at yc.cabq.gov.

Folks who operate child care programs dont see the free programs as good news, noting that they could accommodate many of these school-age kids.

Were in jeopardy right now, and the city is opening up programs and is undercutting us in a sense. I cant compete with free, said Gabrielle Wheeler, an NMCCEA board member and director of the East Gate Kids Learning Center.

She suggests the city redirect some of its funding to existing child care businesses.

Theyre offering a short-term fix that will have long-term consequences with the closure of child care programs and the loss of jobs, and the loss of infant, toddler and after-school spaces, Wheeler said.

City officials defended the free programs, saying they simply expand what the city already offers. The city has provided regular youth programming at community centers for more than 30 years, so we already had the infrastructure and the expertise to expand the hours with our staff, said Carol Pierce, director of the Albuquerque Family and Community Services Department.

The money to provide the programs in the community centers is coming from the citys general fund, she said. Many of the people who will staff the programs are already on the citys payroll to run playground recreation programs in APS schools. Others are current staff in the community centers. Pierce put staffing costs at about $2.6 million and said she did not anticipate the need to hire additional personnel.

Each child care facility, private or not, is capped by the State Health Order for occupancy and student ratios, so space is limited all across our city.  We have encouraged parents to visit newmexicokids.org to find resources that work best for their families, Pierce said.
President Donald Trump took Ivanka Trump with him on the campaign trail to North Carolina Monday to make up for the convention not being held in the state the whole week.

'I love North Carolina. And I promised my sister-in-law that I would say that with particular emphasis because Lara Trump has told me more about this amazing state than I think just about anywhere,' Ivanka Trump told a crowd at a food production plant in Mills River, outside of Asheville. 'I may know more about North Carolina than I do about New York and I've lived there most of my life.'

Both Ivanka and the president were making up for North Carolina getting to host only a partial Republican convention, which President Trump blamed squarely on the state's Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper - and not his decision to move the big stadium events to Jacksonville, Florida, a plan that had to be cancelled due to COVID-19.

First daughter and White House adviser Ivanka Trump accompanied her father on the campaign trail Monday, making stops in North Carolina, the state that was supposed to host the Republican National Convention for the next week

President Donald Trump (left), Ivanka Trump (center) and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue (right) appeared at the Flavor First Growers and Packers facility in Mills River, North Carolina, a small community outside the more Democrat-friendly Asheville

Through the day, President Donald Trump blamed the cancelled convention on Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and not his decision to move the bigger parts of it to Jacksonville, Florida, plans that had to be cancelled due to the spike in COVID-19 cases in Florida

Ivanka Trump (left) greets Trump supporters at the tarmac in Asheville, North Carolina on Monday. The Trumps visited the state after having to pull most of the RNC out of it. Now the president will deliver his Thursday evening remarks from the White House

President Donald Trump (left) and Ivanka Trump (right) tour the Flavor First Growers and Packers facility in Mills River, North Carolina, which creates some of the USDA- funded Farmers to Families Food Boxes

Ivanka Trump (right) leads her father President Donald tRump and other government officials through the Flavor First Growers and Packers facility in Mills River, North Carolina. North Carolina will again be a key swing state in the November presidential election

Earlier Monday, the Trumps were in Charlotte so President Trump could give remarks to the RNC delegates after getting enough votes to win his party's presidential nomination.

The Trumps then headed to Mills River, a small town outside of the more blue Asheville, where they toured the Flavor First Growers & Packers facility, which is being used to produce some of the Farmers to Families Food Boxesthat Ivanka Trump has been touting on recent trips to Pittsburgh and in Washington, D.C.

'This is truly a win, win, win program,' the first daughter and White House adviser said. 'And in government - you can't say that a lot about government programs especially one of this scale that was mobilized so quickly.'

The program allows farmers and ranchers to sell food that was originally intended to go to restaurants to distributors, which then created boxes and shipped them out to non-profits and faith-based organizations for pick-up from American families.

'This is a historic investment. USDA has never done anything like this,' Ivanka Trump said. 'With this $1 billion addition we're going to keep it going and we're going to keep feeing those in need until this pandemic passes.'

Ivanka Trump told North Carolina supporters how when she met people in Washington, D.C., to discuss the program they 'had tears in their eyes.'

'They had never experienced the produce that was being given to them in these boxes,' she marveled. 'They had never had anything this fresh before and this nutritious before, so the double benefit of being able to feed their families off the amazing product that you all grow on your farms.'

Washington, D.C., like many American cities, doesn't have grocery stores in some sections creating what are called 'food desserts.'

After the stop, the Trumps were headed back to D.C., so the president could watch the first night of the RNC.

Speakers for the first night includes Donald Trump Jr., South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Georgia State Representative Vernon Jones, a Democrat who supports the re-election of Trump, former U.N. Amb. Nikki Haley and Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who pointed guns at protesters in the aftermath of George Floyd's Memorial Day death.
Mumbai, Aug 24 : Axis Bank has proposed to acquire 17 per cent equity share capital in Max Life Insurance.

In a regulatory filing, it said that the parties have executed the definitive agreements for this. Post the acquisition, Axis Bank would have an 18 per cent stake in Max Life.

"Axis Bank now proposes to acquire 17.002 per cent of the equity share capital of Max Life, resulting in total ownership of 18.0 per cent post the transaction. The parties have executed the definitive agreements," it said.

Both Axis Bank and Max Life will shortly approach the respective regulatory authorities, with revised applications for their consideration and approval. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals.

Earlier, the Axis Bank and Max Financial Services Ltd had signed agreements for sale of 29 per cent of the equity share capital of Max Life, a material subsidiary of the company, to Axis Bank which would have the effect of Max Life becoming a 70:30 joint venture between the company and Axis Bank after series of transactions.

"Earlier, Axis Bank and the company (Max Financial) had agreed to certain Value Creation Options and related rights. Based on correspondence from IRDAI received by the company, Axis Bank and the company have agreed to make some changes to the Value Creation Options and factor in some alternate mechanisms subject to regulatory approvals and as may be permitted under applicable law," Axis Bank had said in a filing in July.
A memorial service is planned for 10 a.m. Aug. 31 for Hackettstown police K9 Jada that was stricken Wednesday on the job and died in the presence of her handler Christopher Laver at a veterinary clinic.

The service will be at the police department at 215 W. Stiger St., Sgt. Darren Tynan announced Monday in a news release.

The procession at 9 a.m. will leave Newton Veterinary Hospital, traveling south on Route 206, right onto Greendale Road (Route 611), which turns into Wolfs Corner Road (Route 611), left onto Kennedy Road (Route 611), right onto Route 517, left onto Bilby Road (Route 665), right onto Willow Grove Street (Route 604), right onto Main Street (Route 46), left onto Valentine Street, right onto Beatty Street, and right onto West Stiger to the police department, Tynan said.

Members of the community are invited to attend the service or they can pay respects along the route, Tynan said. Due to COVID-19, anyone attending is asked to wear a face covering if they cant follow social distancing guideline, Tynan said.

Any first responder agencies that are planning to attend the service are asked to call Tynan at 908-852-3302 or email him at dtynan@hackettstownpd.net.

Please subscribe now and support the local journalism YOU rely on and trust.

Tony Rhodin can be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com.
UN says three members of Constitutional Committee, meeting in Geneva after months, infected with coronavirus.

United Nations-mediated talks in Geneva involving the Syrian government, opposition and civil society have been put on hold after three participants tested positive for COVID-19, just hours after the meetings started for the first time in nine months.

The office of UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen on Monday did not identify the affected members of the Syrian Constitutional Committee, tasked with amending the war-torn countrys constitution.

The full constitutional review committee is made up of 150 members divided equally three ways into government, opposition and civil society groups. But only 15 delegates from each of those groups were expected to take part in this weeks small-scale meeting.

Following a constructive first meeting, the Third Session of the Constitutional Committee is currently on hold. The Office of the Special Envoy will make a further announcement in due course, the office said, adding that Swiss authorities had been informed and contact-tracing was under way.

Syrias warring sides were gearing up for a week of talks for the first time since a failed attempt in November last year. So far, they have made little progress in ending the countrys devastating nine-year conflict.

Earlier in the day, Ahmad al-Kuzbari, who is heading the government delegation, and Hadi al-Bahra, leading the opposition delegation, waved as they entered the building, but delegates did not speak to reporters.

Iran, Russia, Turkey and the United States  all stakeholders in Syria  were expected to be on the sidelines. The meeting is the first of its kind since the coronavirus pandemic derailed previous efforts at negotiations.

Moving forward

On Sunday, Pedersen said he had met co-chairs of the government and opposition delegations and with civil society representatives over the weekend.

I am looking forward to a week of substantial discussions on the agenda and moving the process forward, the Norwegian diplomat wrote on Twitter.

Ahead of the convening of the Syrian Constitutional Committee Monday in Geneva, I met w/the Co-Chairs & Middle Third, & I am looking forward to a week of substantial discussions on the agenda & moving the process forward.  Geir O. Pedersen (@GeirOPedersen) August 23, 2020

The Constitutional Committee was created in September last year and first convened a month later.

The second round of talks, planned for late November, never got going after a disagreement on the agenda prevented government and opposition negotiators from the meeting.

Constitutional review is a central part of the UNs peace plan for Syria, which was defined by Security Council resolution 2254, adopted in December 2015.

Pedersen on Friday stressed the urgent need to build confidence between the parties.

He told reporters nobody expected a miracle or a breakthrough; rather the meeting is about looking towards identifying areas where progress might be made.

Amendments to the current constitution that was passed in February 2012 by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in response to the uprising the previous year has been at the core of the drafting groups work.

At the time of the committees establishment, Joshua Landis, head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, told Al Jazeera it was hard to hold up much hope for the committees viability.

The Syrian government has put its foot down and said that only Syrians are going to decide the future of Syria  It has won the war so its unlikely to allow for outside powers and the UN to change the constitution very much, Landis said.
KSA Parks Committee projects slight budget increase

The Kingwood Service Association (KSA) Parks Committee met recently to discuss the 2021 budget. We are projecting to go up, but only by 1.13%, Dee Price, chair, said as she opened the discussion.

The plan includes each of the six Kingwood parks and recreation areas, expected landscaping expenditures for Kingwood entrances at Kingwood Drive and Northpark Drive where major construction is currently underway, and the Lake Houston Parkway entrance at Atascocita. Price pointed out the entrances include $264,000 in unfinished projects and expenses that were not spent in 2020 due to major ongoing road construction.

We are proposing to carry over all of the Kingwood Drive projects budgeted this year and which could not be done because of TxDOT construction and is $102,000. We also recommend the carry-over of $162,000 for the Northpark Drive project at the freeway, Price said. She emphasized the representatives should point out to their community associations that this is to be handled as a 2020 carry-over and not as a new addition to the 2021 budget.

The $264,000 is not billed out to the CAs. This is money that we paid in the past and we are just carrying on with it next year, Price said.

The committee unanimously agreed to submit the proposal to their individual associations for review and suggested changes. The final budget proposal for the KSA Board will be approved by the parks committee at its September meeting.

In other business, Bob Rehak of Kings Forest updated the committee with what he understood the current status to be of the proposed buyout of the Friendswood Development land north of Kingwood. The development, located just north of the Elm Grove Village area, poses a major risk of flooding to the northern areas of Kingwood.

The hot item du jour is what is happening between the city and the county with the purchase of Woodridge Village. Depending on who you talk to, it may or may not come off. I have stopped reporting rumors and started reporting hard facts when they happen. I dont think anything has been signed yet and certainly not approved in Harris County Commissioners Court, Rehak said. He pointed out a 75-day deadline on the idea was put in place by Friendswood Development Company in May. That deadline expired Aug. 3.

So well see what happens, Rehak said. He pointed out two required retention ponds were now completed but were sized using old pre-flood data so they probably will not be adequate in a 100-year storm. He thinks the ponds are only about 60% of the size and capacity now estimated to be needed in such an event.

Ethyl McCormick of Kingwood Association Management provided a detailed update on the use of K stickers for cars and boats to authorize access and parking at River Grove Park and other parking-designated park areas. She said, KSA office has distributed 22,224 numbered K stickers and 4,216 numbered boat stickers. The number of vehicles towed by On-site Towing from River Grove was 14 in the month of July.

McCormick noted the parks are all experiencing higher usage by residents than in the past. She also updated the committee on the feral hog activity reports, noting they were very light during the first two months of the year. However, Syd Furrow of Kings Point commented that he had recently seen indications of lots of activity on the trails on the back side of the Reserve to East End Park.

KSA Parks Committee meetings are normally held on the first Thursday of each month at 7 p.m. at the South Woodland Hills Community Room, 2030 Shadow Rock Drive in Kingwood. They will continue as scheduled using Zoom for teleconferencing until COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted in Houston.
We are witnessing the great Indian Festive season amid the COVID-19 pandemic. We all know what kind of a washout the first half of 2020 has been when it comes to businesses and even personal lives being completely disrupted.

Also read: We focused on repairing our nets when we couldnt go to the sea - Shreyams Kumar

In normal circumstances, brands look at the festive season as an opportunity to gain maximum ROI, leveraging the consumer sentiments during this time. However, the unprecedented conditions have dampened the economy so far. While some are sceptical about businesses picking up during the rest of the year, we are seeing a general mood of optimism.

The festivals of Onam and Ganesh Mahotsav have commenced from Saturday, August 22, 2020. Given the strict Government directives on maintaining social distancing, the huge crowds of shoppers that usually throng the markets during this time might be a lot less this year. Already, the Maharashtra Government has placed restrictions on Ganesh puja pandals.

Amid such a scenario, Adgully has reached out to marketers and publishers across India to gauge the sentiments during the festive season this year as part of our special series on Festive Mood. Over the next few weeks, we will be bringing the views and insights from various markets on how marketers and publishers are endeavouring to trigger a revival and give a boost to festive sentiments.

Continuing with the series, Smrita Murarka, Vice President Marketing & E-Commerce, Duroflex talks about how the mattress giant has been doing during the lockdown and her expectations from the festive season

How do you see the consumer sentiments in the South markets this year? What kind of rebound do you see in these markets during the festive season? What factors will drive this growth? How much do you see festive sales getting impacted due to COVID-19 this year?

We are well into the second quarter of the year and consumer sentiment has been very positive for the brand. We are very strong in the South market and regional sentiments are really important to us.

We kicked off our Onam campaign in the beginning of August. When it kicked off, it was very gloomy because of the situation in Kerala, especially with the rains, but now we have seen an upswing and a lot of demand is coming back. Looking at the numbers, we feel that the festive season has come as a time to take solace from the pandemic and as a way to come out positive. During the pandemic, being at home and celebrating with the family has become extremely important.

I think consumers would want to spend and they will definitely increase spending on categories which are about home which will make them feel more secure and comfortable in the space that they are in.

Being a leader in this category, especially in the South market, we have definitely seen an upswing. Sales have been very encouraging, especially because throughout the pandemic and even now, we have been making conversations on health and safety.

We have focused on communication about how important it is to own a good quality mattress, especially while you are spending more time on it now. We are also launching a new product, which is a mattress protector which will help people stay safe at home. It is Indias first Anti-Viral mattress protector. With the affordable pricing, we plan to enter every home with this product.

What kind of integrated marketing activities are you planning for the festive season? On which platforms will you be investing your ad spends more and Why? What kind of digital push are you looking at?

Many festive campaigns have spoken about the celebration of this season, however we are staying away from that as it isnt realistic in the situation we are in.

Because of the category we function in, we have focused on a communication about sleep building immunity. We really want to be real and we want to treat festivals from a moment where there is an opportunity for customers to buy better quality products to feel safer at home.

All of us know today that digital has been a very strong medium, and luckily for us, we got onto that pretty early on. We have made very strong conversations on digital and will continue to do that. Along with digital, even TV will be extremely important for us because many people are watching TV now.

Do you see retail footfalls increasing during the festive season, given that people are still not venturing out for shopping in a big way? What alternate routes are you looking at to shore up sales  such as e-commerce, online purchases, D2C initiatives?

As an omni-brand, it is very important for us to be available at all touch points and make sure we are communicating about our products and educating the audiences about sleep.

In terms of Retail, it has improved as compared to Q1. We have launched our outlets in Bangalore, which are doing very well under the current guidelines. People are feeling safe to come and try out the products.

We are also reaching the consumer through D2C channels through virtual experiences of the store, online shopping or on phone. We are providing all options to the consumer according to their comfort. We are making sure that we are available everywhere.
Court Arraigns Boat Captain Over Drowning Of 12 Passengers In Lagos

Lagos State has arraigned Elebiju Happiness, owner of the boat involved in the boat capsize that led to the drowning of 12 passengers before the State High Court, in Ikeja.

It was reported how the victims were said to have drowned after the wave of a ship sailing along the Kirikiri waterfront made the boat to capsize.

It was gathered that 20 passengers boarded the boat from Kirikiri to Badagry, but while on the way, the passengers disagreed with Elebiju when he indicated that the fare was N1,500, and they insisted on paying N1,200, but the boat captain allegedly switched off the engine of the craft by the waterfront because of the N300 difference in fare.

However, the wave made the boat to drift towards a stationary barge, where it capsized and 12 passengers drowned.

At the Monday proceedings, Elebiju was arraigned on 10 counts bordering on manslaughter before Justice Josephine Oyefeso.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Following the plea of the defendant, the Director of Public Prosecution, Mrs. Olayinka Adeyemi, told the court that two witnesses are present in court to testify against the defendant.

However, the defence team led by one Mr Ganiyu urged the court to adjourn the matter to prepare for trial on the ground that he was just being served the notice in court.

After the submission of the counsel, Justice Oyefeso adjourned the matter till August 27, 2020, for the commencement of trial and ordered the defendant to be remanded in prison custody.
A Wyoming man, who authorities say was armed with a spear and an ax, was arrested Sunday after an hourslong standoff with sheriffs deputies from inside a Rhododendron cabin.

A deputy initially responded about 11 a.m. to a report of a cabin burglary on Road 27 in Rhododendron, a community along the Mount Hood Corridor. According to the Clackamas County Sheriffs Office, while checking the area, the deputy spotted the suspect, later identified as Nathan Alexander Surface, 38, of Sheridan, Wyoming.

A member of the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office SWAT team with a police. K9 outside a standoff in Rhododendron Sunday.

Police said Surface threatened the deputy with a spear made from a knife strapped to the end of a stick. He then ran into a nearby unoccupied cabin where the standoff began, police said.

Over several hours, Surface armed himself with an ax and knives found inside the home, proceeded to smash things inside the cabin and piled items in front of the doors, barring police from entering, authorities said. After deputies reported seeing him through the windows pouring an unknown liquid inside the cabin, Hoodland Fire was placed on standby.

The countys SWAT and crisis negotiation teams responded and attempted to speak to Surface for several hours, to no avail, police said. By 5 p.m., the SWAT team deployed gas inside the cabin. Surface emerged and was arrested without incident, according to the sheriffs office.

Surface was taken to a hospital, then to Clackamas County Jail. He faces charges of three counts of burglary and one count of criminal mischief.

Anyone with information Surfaces activities can contact the Sheriffs Office tip line at 503-723-4949 or by the online email form at clackamas.us/sheriff/tip.
In an effort to wean Australia off its reliance on coal as a source of power, the federal government is forcefully putting the case for expanding the use of natural gas. It has some strong arguments in its favour. Australia has a plentiful supply, the pandemic has significantly brought down the cost of using gas, and it can be used for base-load and surge capacity, which is vital when bringing more solar and wind capacity into the energy grid.

The policy has the ear of Australia's Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, who earlier this year argued at the National Press Club that "natural gas is already making it possible for nations to transition to a reliable, and relatively low emissions, electricity supply".

Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel supports the increased use of natural gas. Credit:Attila Csaszar

He noted the example of Britain, where coal-fired electricity  which dropped from providing 75 per cent of power in 1990 to just 2 per cent last year  has been mostly replaced by renewables and natural gas, which delivers nearly 40 per cent of its energy needs. And in South Australia, renewables and natural gas each supply roughly half of the state's power supply. With such real-world examples, it would appear a sensible way forward. There is just one potentially very big hitch.

From an environmental perspective, the most compelling argument for natural gas is the perceived acceptance that while it may still be a fossil fuel, it is far less harmful to the atmosphere. But the scientific evidence supporting this claim appears far from absolute.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 05:36:12|Editor: huaxia

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- At least eight people were killed and two others were injured in southeast Brazil after a cargo truck carrying timber spilled some of its cargo before colliding head on into two oncoming vehicles, official sources said on Monday.

The accident in the state of Minas Gerais saw timber fall off the truck as it was going uphill Sunday night on a stretch of road between the cities of Sao Domingos do Prata and Rio Casca.

The truck then collided into two vehicles that were driving in the opposite direction, setting at least one of them on fire, the local Fire Department said.

The vehicle's three occupants were burnt to death. Five people traveling in a van were also killed.

A three-year-old boy, who was rescued alive, suffered a broken leg. Enditem
The court also told the Medical Council of India (MCI), which is the body that conducts the NEET exam, that it should consider holding the exam online from next year

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a plea to set up centres for the NEET exam abroad, and directed the Centre to allow overseas students wanting to appear for NEET 2020 to travel to India on Vande Bharat flights.

The Bench, headed by Justice L Nageswara Rao, added that the students must be quarantined for 14 days. However, the court allowed students to approach the respective state governments with pleas for a shorter quarantine period.

The court also told the Medical Council of India (MCI), which is the body that conducts the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) exam, that it should consider holding the exam online from next year.

"If the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) can have an online exam, then you should consider NEET also to be held in online from next year onwards," the court told the counsel for MCI.

Passing the order, the Supreme Court said, "We request the SG to consult the concerned ministries to ensure that the students who wish to visit India to write the NEET exam should be permitted to travel through Vande Bharat Mission flights."

The court was hearing a petition which sought for the National Testing Agency (NTA) to set up exam centres abroad, so that aspirants can appear for the NEET exam outside India, Bar and Bench reported.

The petitioners submitted that "like JEE, which has exam centres abroad, NEET should also have centres as the students cannot come to India to write the examinations," NDTV reported.

However, according to Hindustan Times, the Medical Council of India, in an affidavit, said, "In order to fairly conduct an examination like NEET, which has to be a uniform examination, it is imperative that the examination is conducted at the same time everywhere, which shall not be possible, if the examination is conducted in outside countries due to various reasons including different time zones, logistical issues, the secrecy of test papers being a booklet-based examination, etc."

The plea comes days after the NTA said that it will conduct the JEE Main 2020 and the NEET 2020 as per schedule in September.

JEE Mains will be held between 1 and 6 September and National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, NEET UG will be conducted on 13 September.

The NTA has also created a detailed protocol on how to conduct the examination. As per a notification by NTA, candidates will be given staggered time slots for reporting at the exam centre to avoid crowding. Both, staff members and candidates will have to undergo temperature scans. Anyone displaying known COVID-19 symptoms will be placed in separate isolation rooms.
By Associated Press

JERUSALEM: Israeli archaeologists announced Monday the discovery of a trove of early Islamic gold coins found during recent salvage excavations near the central city of Yavne.

The collection of 425 complete gold coins, most dating to the Abbasid period around 1,100 years ago, was a "extremely rare" find, Israel Antiquities Authorities archaeologists Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad said in a joint statement.

The trove, which was unearthed by youth volunteers, also included hundreds of smaller clippings from gold coins that would have served as smaller denominations.

ALSO READ | US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives in Israel to press Trump's Middle East peace push

Robert Kool, a coin expert with the antiquities authority, said an initial analysis indicates the coins date from the late 9th century, considered the golden age of the Abbasid Caliphate that controlled most of the Near East and North Africa.

The discovery was among the largest caches of ancient coins found in Israel.

In 2015, amateur divers found around 2,000 gold coins off the coast of the ancient port city of Caesarea dating to the Fatimid period in the 10th and 11th centuries.

"Hopefully the study of the hoard will tell us more about a period of which we still know very little," Kool said.
Breonna Taylor's mother was left waiting for 11 hours before being told by police that her daughter had been shot, she has revealed in a new interview.

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Tamika Palmer recalled the gut-wrenching moment that Breonna's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, phoned her in the middle of the night to say that her daughter had been shot, after 'somebody kicked in the door' to their Louisville apartment.

But Tamika then faced an agonizing wait for information, revealing that police kept her in the dark for hours on end, refusing to tell her where Breonna was, and only delivered the devastating news of her death by telling Tamika 11 hours after the shooting that her daughter 'was sill in the apartment'.

Heartache: Breonna Taylor's mom Tamika Palmer has recalled the night her daughter was shot dead by cops, revealing police left her waiting for 11 hours before revealing she'd been killed

Speaking out: Tamika wrote a first-person piece about her daughter's death for Vanity Fair, which featured a portrait of Breonna on the cover of its September issue

Breonna was shot dead by police officers in her home on March 13 during a no-knock search warrant - but Tamika didn't learn that her daughter had been killed at the hands of the cops until days later, when a friend told her to turn on the news.

Tamika - who also opened up to the publication about her own childhood, and Breonna's youth - says police also refused to let her see her daughter's body until more than 24 hours after her death, when Breonna was taken to a funeral home.

In her candid first-person op-ed for the publication - which featured a portrait of Breonna on the cover of its September issue - Tamika writes that she was awoken in the middle of the night on the day of her daughter's death by Kenny, who phoned her to say that Breonna had been shot.

'Kenny calls me in the middle of the night,' she recalled. 'He says, "Somebody kicked in the door and shot Breonna. I am dead asleep. I dont know what hes talking about. I jump up. I get ready, and I rush over to her house.'

After arriving at Breonna and Kenny's apartment, Tamika was told by an on-duty officer to go to the hospital, where one injured cop and another injured person had been taken.

Tamika waited at the hospital for two hours, before being told that her daughter's name was not in the system, and that staff had 'no recollection of this person being on the way'.

When she returned to Breonna's apartment, she spoke to a detective who grilled her about her daughter and Kenny, asking 'if she knew anybody who would want to hurt' them, and whether Tamika though either of them 'were involved in anything'.

'And I go, "Absolutely not." Both of them got jobs. They go to work. They hang out with each other. Thats about it.'

When Tamika asked where Kenny was, she was told to 'hold on'. The detective - whose name she cannot remember - then left her for another hour, before returning to ask her mother questions about Kenny and Breonna, this time questioning whether the couple 'had been having any problems'.

After once again shutting down the detective's line of inquiry, Tamika is finally told that Kenny has been taken to the police station, where he was 'trying to help [officers] piece together what happened'.

Gut-wrenching: In her piece, Tamika recalled the moment that Breonna's boyfriend Kenneth Walker (pictured) phoned her in the middle of the night to say her daughter had been shot

Agonizing: Despite several attempts to get information from the police, Tamika (pictured on August 13) was left waiting for 11 hours before officers confirmed Breonna had been killed

She was then left to wait for 'a number of hours', until 'about 11 in the morning' when an officer told Tamika that police were done with the scene, and that she would be given access to the apartment as soon as they had left. The cop did not give her any information about her daughter until Tamika pressed him.

'I say, "Where's Breonna, why wont anybody say where Breonna is?" He says, "Well, maam, shes still in the apartment." And I know what that means.'

But Tamika admits that she thought to herself, 'Maybe it's not Breonna,' for hours after that because she was not actually allowed to see her daughter's body, explaining: 'The police never let me see her. But I know its her house, you know what Im saying? But just the fact that I physically havent seen her.'

Tamika recalled her confusion over the circumstances of her daughter's death, writing that she spent hours trying to work out who had kicked in Breonna's door, because the police 'weren't talking to her or telling her anything'.

She added that she spent much of the day crying and 'trying to figure it all out', revealing that she had no idea cops had been responsible for her daughter's death until the following day, when a friend told her to turn on the news.

'...The police arent talking to me or telling me anything. My daughters dead and theyre not telling me anything. And I keep wondering, "Why would somebody do this?" Until I actually learn on the news that the police did this.'

She also discovered that Kenny had not been at the station assisting officers with their inquiries, but that police had initially attempted to charge him with attempted murder after he fired his gun at the cops who broke down their door without warning in the middle of the night.

Tamika lashed out at the police over their handling of the case, questioning how officers could have grilled her about about whether anyone would have wanted to hurt Breonna and Kenny, and asking if the couple might have been fighting, when all along her daughter had been killed at the hands of their colleagues.

She also expressed her hurt and upset over how the case was initially portrayed on the news, recalling how frustrated she was at seeing her daughter and Kenny described as 'drug dealers', with her daughter labeled as a miscreant who had been killed in a 'drug raid gone bad'.

Controversy: The three officers involved (from left, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detectives Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove) have not been charged in the shooting despite protests

'I am pissed off because I know how hard Breonna worked,' she wrote. 'I know that Breonna aint about that life. Breonna couldnt tell you where to buy a dime bag of weed. She isnt that person on the news. Neither is Kenny.'

Tamika was not able to see her daughter's body for 24 hours after the shooting, explaining that the funeral home finally phoned her after midnight the following day, and told her she could come and see Breonna.

'The funeral home calls me when they get her body,' she recounted. The police never let me see her. They arent talking to me.

'Its after midnight [the day after Breonna's death] when I get the call. And they say I can come see her.

'Everybody is with me. My whole family  my four sisters, my dad, my daughter Juniyah, my sisters boyfriend, my boyfriend, the kids, a couple of close friends. Nobody wants to be left out.

'And when we see her body, its just tears and screams. I walk out the home because everybody is just crying. And I am just so pissed off that she is lying there.'

Tamika went on to explain how she and her family began campaigning to earn justice for Breonna, confessing that, at least initially, she felt as though she was screaming into a void - revealing that it 'took about two months before people really started paying attention'.

By that point, the family had laid Breonna to rest and had long-begun their furious fight to see the officers responsible for her death arrested and charged with her murder. It was only when Tamika filed a lawsuit against the Louisville police that she heard from the city's mayor, Greg Fischer, who phoned to offer his condolences in the wake of mounting public outrage over Breonna's death.

After the death of George Floyd, Breonna's case gained fresh public interest - and prompted even more anger, with thousands of people using her image as a symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement. When riots broke out in Louisville, Tamika revealed that Fischer phoned her again, but only - she believes - in an attempt to quell the public fury over her daughter's death.

However she writes that she refused Fischer's request to speak to protesters, insisting that it was 'his fight' and not hers.

'People are getting real antsy, and he doesnt want them to set the city on fire,' she recalled.

Damage control: Tamika says she received a call from Louisville mayor Chris Fischer after protests broke out in the city (pictured) - recalling that he asked her to 'tell the people to stop'

Refusal: 'They are tearing up the city, and he wants me to come and tell the people to stop. But I dont do it. Because I know the people dont want to hear from me,' she wrote

'They are tearing up the city, and he wants me to come and tell the people to stop. But I dont do it. Because I know the people dont want to hear from me. They want to hear from him. They arent looking for me. They want to talk to him. Thats his fight, not mine.'

If anything, Tamika says she feels reassured by the protests; although she was advised not to attend any of the demonstrations out of fear that she might be seen to be 'condoning' any violent behavior, she wrote in Vanity Fair that she is moved by the albeit delayed response to her daughter's death.

'I felt like with the whole pandemic, Breonna would be forgotten, and we would just get swept under the rug,' she added.

But the public fury over Breonna's death at the hands of the police has not taken away the devastation that her family feels, with Tamika writing that the EMT's younger sister Juniyah struggling with depression, while her father - Breonna's granddad - cannot turn on the television because he 'can't stand' to see reports about her death.

'Breonna is like the family glue  even at 26 years old, she is pretty much the glue,' she said.

As well as featuring Tamika's piece, Vanity Fair also paid tribute to Breonna by featuring a portrait of the EMT on the cover of its September issue. The image, which shows Breonna in a blue dress, was painted by Amy Sherald, the artist who created the image of Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery.

And Breonna's family is still continuing to speak out against the three officers involved in her shooting, saying earlier this month that they expect charges to be filed 'sooner rather than later' against the officers who shot her dead in her apartment in March.

But the family's lawyer said they were 'not going to wait forever' after learning that the state's Attorney General is still conducting witness interviews and waiting on ballistics reports from the FBI, 150 days after the killing.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump and co-counsel Lonita Baker stood outside the Kentucky federal courthouse with Breonna's mother Tamika and her aunt Bianca Austin on August 13 to discuss meetings they had had with city officials and prosecutors.

Crump said that following the meeting, he expected charges to be filed against the three plainsclothes officers who shot dead Breonna inside her home while carrying out a no-knock search warrant.

Crump also urged Mayor Fischer to take more action and be aggressive in his pursuit of justice.
The Only Fools and Horses star John Challis has slammed the gentrification of Peckham and called for new laws to stop people being priced out of previously affordable areas.

The actor, 78, described how the south east London neighbourhood where the hit sitcom was based was now full of 'tarted up' buildings and criticised how houses were now being sold for 'extraordinary prices'.

Challis, who became a household name playing the brash cigar-smoking car dealer Boycie in the BBC hit comedy, has now called on laws to be set in place to allow for more affordable housing.

Peckham became a familiar sight to viewers of the show, with its huge grey tower blocks and the fictional Nelson Mandela House where the characters Del Boy and Rodney lived.

Actor John Challis, who played the car dealer Boycie in Only Fools and Horses, has slammed the gentrification of Peckham

But after an influx of middle class families to the area in the last two decades, house prices have now shot up to an average of 485,000.

The district has been gentrified since the early 1980s when Only Fools started filming there and is now flooded with trendy bars and restaurants.

Challis said originally the area 'wasn't particularly pretty' but revealed how he discovered a completely different Peckham with 'tarted up' buildings when he recently visited.

Speaking in the Big Issue, Challis said: 'We started off filming in Peckham and it wasn't particularly pretty.

'I've been back a couple of times to open things or make a personal appearance and there was a lot more buzz about the place.

'As is happening to a lot to London, so-called gentrification is going, people tarting up buildings and trying to sell them for extraordinary prices that nobody can afford.'

The south east London neighbourhood where the hit sitcom was based became famous for its huge grey tower blocks

The actor described how the neighbourhood was now filled with properties that were being sold for 'extraordinary prices'. Pictured: A flat where Only Fools and Horses was filmed is converted into luxury apartments

Warning of the dangers of gentrification he added: 'I think that's happening all over the place, unfortunately.

'Presumably you have to stop it with some legislation and say 'no, you can't put those rents up, there must be affordable housing or people'.

Created by writer John Sullivan, the original Only Fools And Horses was launched in 1981 and slowly built into a television juggernaut. One of its Christmas episodes drew more than 24.35 million viewers.

The popular BBC series won several awards such as six BAFTA Awards, seven British Comedy Awards and three National Television Awards.

In 2019, Sir David Jason, who played Del Boy, said he would be reprising his role one last time.

Speaking about the upcoming project he told The Daily Star: 'I am looking forward to having the opportunity to meeting so many Only Fools fans. Its going to be cushty.'
A man working at a booth gathering signatures to recall Oregons governor was assaulted in Happy Valley Saturday by another man who said the group should be attempting to recall President Donald Trump instead, authorities said.

According to a press release, Clackamas County Sheriffs deputies responded to Oregon 212 near Southeast 152nd Avenue in Happy Valley for a reported assault around 2 p.m.

Responding officers found an injured man on the ground. He was taken to a local hospital for treatment.

A Facebook page for a group called Stop The Abuse - Recall Kate Brown, identified the man who was assaulted as Harland Wright, and said the man was petitioning for their cause when the assault happened.

A GoFundMe campaign for Wright has raised over $3,000.

Authorities said a female petitioner who was at the booth with Wright said a man approached Wright and verbally confronted him and then her. When Wright stepped in to tell the man to stop, she said, he pushed and punched Wright until he fell to the ground.

Deputies arrested Joshua John Thompson, 39, of Damascus near the scene of the attack, officials said, after the other petitioner identified him as the suspect.

According to the sheriffs office, Thompson said he confronted the people at the booth because he thought they should be trying to recall Trump instead of the governor.

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052, lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
During the last few months, actor Namit Das has been looking after the financial requirements of his driver and house help. He informs that the post-lockdown phase has been stressful for them as the members of their families lost other sources of income. Das remarks that the economic threat has posed a challenge of education among the have-nots of our society.

The Wake Up Sid actor is worried and puts forth a big question that has no solution for all as yet. He raises the concern of education for the poor while were coping with the current COVID-19 crisis. He says Virtual learning has not boded well for many who are on the have-nots spectrum. The fees for my drivers children could not be paid because their school is half-open and half-closed. On this account, they left for Uttar Pradesh and they are being informally tutored by a teacher in the inland.

Das adds, I worry about the quality of education thats being imparted across inland areas. A generation of kids will have to lose a year and 2020 might become a gap year that was not intended for many. Not having a smartphone and a tablet means no education - I find that really concerning. Im afraid that the virus might not kill us, but perhaps poverty will if we dont support each other.

Urging people to come forward to help those in need, he says, If you are blessed with privileges you should try to do your bit to reduce suffering. While I have great respect for people who donate generously to causes, I think its important to reach out to those who are in your vicinity. The actor, who has two web show releases this year, has been garnering praises for essaying the baddie in Aarya and Mafia.

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Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar is facing federal charges of bribery, money laundering and racketeering. (Los Angeles Times)

Its no secret that real estate development in L.A. is ripe for pay-to-play political corruption.

For too long, the citys outdated land-use rules have been treated as mere suggestions. Instead, development decisions have more typically been controlled by City Council members, who treat their districts as fiefdoms in which they alone have discretion to decide whether a project gets built or blocked.

Council members have tremendous power to make or break real estate projects, and that influence  over decisions that can cost developers millions of dollars  invites corruption. Usually, developers try to win the favor of an elected official through legal means, including campaign contributions and donations to a politicians favorite charity.

In the case of Councilman Jose Huizar, who is facing federal charges of bribery, money laundering and racketeering, prosecutors allege that he turned his power over development decisions into a criminal enterprise that raked in more than $1.5 million in cash and other benefits from companies looking to build in L.A. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Huizar indictment stands as the extreme example of a broken system in L.A. The city needs to fundamentally change how development projects are approved. It needs clear, modern and objective rules that spell out what can be built where. If a project meets the criteria, then there should be no need to kiss the council members ring. The approval should be granted by the city staff. And if it doesn't meet the criteria, there should be specific conditions and a public process to qualify for an exception.

There are hopeful signs that L.A. might be moving in that direction. Last week Council President Nury Martinez unveiled three proposals to make council approvals of major development projects more transparent and, while not completely immune to council members' meddling, less subject to their discretion.

The more exciting change is happening in downtown, where the Planning Department has unveiled a new community plan that could be a model for development reform citywide.

Story continues

The Downtown Community Plan  also known as DTLA 2040 because it would set the vision for the next 20 years  would be the first plan in the city to do away with the citys Byzantine 800-plus-page zoning code in favor of a more modern one that makes development rules easier for builders and the public to understand.

The new plan is also designed to be more transparent. It lays out what can be built on a particular property and what community benefits the developer must provide to build more than whats allowed by right. The amount of the required community benefits  such as affordable housing units, open space and other community-endorsed options  would be tied to the degree to which the developer wanted to exceed the planned limits for that property.

The goal is to make the rules clear and do away with the case-by-case negotiation between the developer and the council member. It would also prioritize building affordable housing, which residents have been clamoring for. Under the current system, high-rise developers downtown pay community benefit fees, but the majority of the money has gone to redesigning Pershing Square and the proposed street car  two of Huizars pet projects.

The new plan wouldnt do away with council members votes altogether. Some large-scale projects would still have to win City Council approval, as would projects that need variances or conditional-use permits, such as nightclubs. But it would provide more certainty, which could be good for developers and the community.

The downtown community plan is expected to be considered by the City Planning Commission this fall, but its still a work in progress. There are already debates over the affordability requirements  business groups say the plan demands too much of developers, and affordable housing advocates say it demands too little. Downtown is also home to skid row, Chinatown and other low-income communities of color that have been harmed by planning and development in the past. The city needs to ensure they have an equitable voice in their future.

L.A.s culture of pay-to-play has not served communities well. It doesnt produce enough housing and doesnt result in well-planned, equitable neighborhoods. Worse, it breeds distrust in city government. As the new downtown community plan shows, there is a better way to build L.A.
TDT | Manama

His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa was handed yesterday a letter from the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. The letter pertained to the distinguished deep-rooted fraternal relations between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, in addition to HM King Hamads proposal on holding a permanent annual consultation summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation as well as other issues of mutual concern.

HM the King was given the letter as he received Saudi Ambassador Prince Sultan bin Ahmed bin Abdulaziz Al Saud at Al Safriya Palace. The envoy conveyed to HM the King the greetings and appreciation of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and Crown Prince, Deputy Premier and Defence Minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, as well as their sincere wishes of further progress and prosperity to Bahrain and its people.

HM King Hamad requested the ambassador to convey his greetings to the Saudi King and Crown Prince, in addition to his wishes of more progress and prosperity to Saudi Arabia and its brotherly people. HM the King expressed pride in the solid Bahraini-Saudi relations, which are growing steadily thanks to the two kingdoms constant keenness to develop them across various fields.

HM King Hamad noted that throughout their long history, bilateral ties have always been based on solid joint cooperation and solidarity. HM the King lauded the key role played by sisterly Saudi Arabia, under the leadership of King Salman, to safeguard the security and stability of the region, praising the Saudi monarchs ambitious vision, wise stances in support of development efforts, and keenness to champion the issues of rights, justice and peace.
More than 30,000 people have now been tested for the novel coronavirus in Webb County since the pandemic began, 33.9% of whom have tested positive.

But looking only at tests conducted in the last week, of which there were over 3,000, the percentage of people who have tested positive for the virus has fallen significantly. As of Monday, the seven-day positivity rate was 12.9%, compared to mid-July through mid-August, where anywhere from 45% to 63% of people who received a COVID-19 test got a positive result.

Part of this result is due to the city changing its methods for how it records tests. Prior to last Monday, it was on a per person basis but has since switched to account per test result. So for example, if a person had five tests in five days, that would previously had been counted as one positive or negative result. Now, it reflects how many tests that have been taken cumulatively.

This change was made to help Laredo be more uniform with how other areas calculated theirs. It was also said to explain why Laredos test positivity rate was so much higher than other areas.

As the city has not gone back and readjusted the old figures to account for these changes, LMT will now be using the seven-day rolling positivity rate instead of the total positivity rate which encompassed the entire pandemics results. Laredos 12.9% rolling figure is less than Texas 18.3% but more than double the national average of 6.2%.

Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz on Monday said the community can take a small victory lap but that theres still much to do. And with schools opening and Labor Day in two weeks, Laredo is not out of the woods, he said.

On Monday, 34 more positive cases were reported, bringing the cumulative total to 10,164. Most of these, 9,168, are estimated to have recovered, and 769 are active. Whenever there are over 250 active cases, it is considered the highest warning level by the City of Laredo, which encourages residents to stay home as much as possible.

There were 46 recoveries reported, giving the city an average of 71.6 the past four days. The previous 10 days, the city had been reporting an average of 538.6.

Hospitalizations also remain elevated, with 165 patients reported in the hospital Monday. A total of 66 are in the ICU.

Reported deaths continue as well. Four more people in Webb County are deceased, bringing the total to 227 in the community.

Fifty of these deaths have taken place at local nursing homes: 28 at Retama West, two at Retama South and 20 at Laredo Nursing and Rehab, reported Health Authority Victor Trevino.

The city has not provided ages or genders of those that died the past two days. It has, however, updated its overall dashboard with the figures.

In total, there are now 124 males that have died compared to 103 females  meaning all four of Mondays deaths were men. There are now nine more deceased persons in their 70s (52) than any other age group ahead of those in their 60s (43), 80s (39), 90s (33) and 50s (28).

Julia Wallace may be reached at 956-728-2543 or jwallace@lmtonline.com
In his words: "I am just a professional writer, which means I don't do blogs and try and get money for whatever I write."

What I would call the Fair Exam Grades Matter movement now took to the streets

Students hold placards as they protest outside the Department for Education in central London to protest against the downgrading of A-level results. AFP Photo

OF CABBAGES AND KINGS

Time waits for no one

A carriage with a steady pace

Time, they said was a healer

With oblivions embrace

Time was not to be wasted

But what really was there to do

Time takes us into timelessness

I think its about time too

 From Khadiboli to Hyperbole by Bachchoo

In my schooldays in Pune, if you failed a final exam at the end of the year, you stayed in the same class and repeated the year. And the same at the end of that year which led to some classmates being several years older than the class average.

A memorable consequence of this rule entailed a classmate in my final year called Faruq Rehmatullah. He must have been four years older than the rest of us, had a gruff voice and sported a moustache.

Sometime before the final exam our headmaster, Arthur Lunn, interrupted a geography lesson and asked Faruq to please step outside. The entire class in complete silence strained our ears to hear what was being said on the classroom veranda.

Er.. Rehmatullah, you were seen on Main Street yesterday evening wheeling a pram in the company of a young lady, Lunn said.

Yes, sir, said Faruq.

Who was the young lady?

My wife, sir!

And there was a baby in the pram? asked Lunn.

Yes, sir, my daughter, said Faruq.

I need to speak to your father. We cant have married men with families in this school,

Lunn said.

Faruq followed Lunn to his office and returned half an hour later, emptied his desk and left. His toil with annual exams was over.

So, it was with a sense of wonder that I discovered, on taking up my first school-teaching job in London, that pupils went from one year to the other regardless of their achievement in exams. They were graded each year, as in India, but the grade didnt determine promotion to the next year. Only their age did.

British children are obliged to stay in school till they are 16. At 16 they sit an exam, which is a general school certificate called the GCSE. Their scores in the subjects they take in these exams qualify or disqualify them from going on to two further years of schooling.

Those who choose to go on and achieve the grades in their 16-plus exams then spend two further years in school and at the end sit exams called A levels. The grades they achieve in these exams qualify them to join universities or other higher education institutes of their choice, with the universities setting the standard of grade they require for a candidate to qualify. In a normal year, the A level student would specify three universities of their choice in order of preference.

The universities would then say that they require the student to achieve, for instance three A grades in three subjects to gain entry to the chosen course. Or they may say two As and a C would be acceptable.

This Covid year, with schools and exams disrupted since March, the whole system of application to universities, and the qualifying hurdles for entry into the sixth form have been thrown into absolute turmoil.

Normal schooling was interrupted for two to three months before the final exams, which take place in May or early June. Most schools hold mock-exams early in the year to accustom students to the levels and discipline of the finals they face in May.

Their teachers mark these mocks and, on the basis of these and of other forms of assessment through the year, assign each pupil an estimated grade.

This year, because the education ministry under the faltering leadership of the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, a former fireplace and ceramic salesman, cancelled all school final exams. This meant that the normal exam-result qualifications for entrance to universities would not exist.

Gavin then determined, with the help of advisory boffins, that the estimated grades handed out by teachers for the A level pupils would be subject to an algorithm.

This algorithm would take into account the performance of any school over the past few years and then adjust the teacher-awarded grades with reference to this past performance.

Hence, if a school only had one pupil with an A grade in a subject last year, and it was estimated that four pupils had A grades this year, three of those pupils would have their grade arbitrarily, algorithmically reduced to a B or worse to a C or D or U.

This would result, en masse, in what in Britain is known as the post-code lottery.

Allow me, gentle reader, to explain: The country, as in any other country, and its cities have rich areas and poor areas. The schools in the poor areas, attended by the children of the working classes inevitably have lower achievement standards than schools in the posh areas.

The algorithm, with no regard for the effort or real achievement of pupils and teachers, downgrades pupils because they attend schools in the poorer areas of town  each area having a post-code.

The results, subjected to this post-code were published.

Thousands upon thousands of pupils, overwhelmingly from working class families, got grades lower than those predicted by their teachers or specified by universities as qualifying for a place. It was a blow in the teeth of Britains meritocratic system which, since the 1950s and compulsory secondary education has allowed working class generations to progress on the professional and economic ladder.

What I would call the Fair Exam Grades Matter movement now took to the streets. Thousands of pupils protested and scores of court cases were threatened. In a humiliating U-turn, Gavin apologised and reversed his decision.

The algorithm results would be cancelled and students would keep the grades of their mocks exams or their teachers estimates, whichever was higher.

On this issue, without the help of an algorithm, BoJos government gets a U, the lowest possible grade.
Karolinska Institutet and St. Erik Eye Hospital in Sweden have entered into a collaboration with Novo Nordisk A/S to develop a new treatment for age-related macular degeneration.

Novo Nordisk A/S will provide support and SEK 48 million in funding to enable a phase 1 clinical trial where new retinal cells generated from embryonic stem cells will be transplanted into patients. The aim is to develop a completely new cell therapy for this common but currently incurable eye disease.

Karolinska Institutet and St. Erik Eye Hospital have conducted joint research on cell therapies since 2013. The collaboration with the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk A/S is based on this research and will focus on developing new retinal cells from embryonic stem cells with the aim of testing these in a small clinical trial.

The ultimate goal is to find a curative treatment for the severe form of age-related macular degeneration. In age-related macular degeneration, a condition that affects some 1,500 patients in Sweden every year, the cells in the retinal macula stop working normally, causing gradual loss of sight in the central visual field.

The work has progressed all the way from basic research on how embryos and stem cells work, via establishing a new method of production of specific eye cells, to be on track to test these in a first clinical trial.

"This will be the first transplantation of retinal cells differentiated from embryonic stem cells performed in Sweden, and it is a breakthrough that's been made possible thanks to years of hard work by a great many people," says Fredrik Lanner, researcher at the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology and the Ming Wai Lau Centre for Reparative Medicine at Karolinska Institutet.

"With the support of Novo Nordisk, in terms of competence as well as financially, we can now get close to the goal of a new cell therapy."

"We have an effective recipe for producing the cells using a robust yet simple method of cultivation," continues Dr Lanner. "It makes the method easier to scale up for larger volumes and more viable for use in a future cell-therapy product."

In this first-in-human trial, each patient will receive the new cells via subretinal injection. The researchers will, in the first instance, establish the safety of the method, while also studying the cells' ability to adhere and slow down the disease process.

This is in many ways a unique project and it is very exciting that we now have the opportunity to take it further to clinical trials where we hope to be able to save the sight of a large group of patients. But we respect the fact that it is a complex technology and a challenging disease and that it may take many years for this to be developed into a curative treatment." Anders Kvanta, Professor, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet

Kvanta is also a consultant at St. Erik Eye Hospital who is responsible for the clinical study.

"We are excited to enter into this collaboration with Professor Anders Kvanta and Dr Fredrik Lanner," says Jacob Sten Petersen, Corporate Vice President and Head of Stem Cell R&D at Novo Nordisk. "They are both world-leading experts within stem cell research and treatment of eye diseases.

Through this partnership we have a unique opportunity to combine the Novo Nordisk strong stem cell R&D capabilities with cutting edge science and clinical research at Karolinska Institutet and St. Erik Eye Hospital, to develop a novel cell therapy for people living with dry age-related macular degeneration."
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Coronavirus deaths in the United States have dropped below an average of 1,000 per day for the first time in almost a month as the number of daily infections continues to decline across the country.

The number of Americans dying from COVID-19, based on a seven day average, was at 981 on Sunday.

It marks the first time the death toll has dropped below 1,000 after plateauing for the past three weeks.

Deaths are a lagging indicator and can potentially rise several weeks after new cases start to decline.

While still high, the current daily death rate in the US remains below levels seen in April when an average of 2,000 people were dying per day from COVID-19.

Meanwhile, the number of infections across the US have continued on a downward trajectory for more than a month after spiking in the Sunbelt states in June and July.

The average number of cases per day was at 42,600 on Sunday.

The average number of Americans dying from COVID-19 was at 981 on Sunday. It marks the first time the death toll, based on a seven day average, has dropped below 1,000 after plateauing for the past three weeks

The number of infections across the US have continued on a downward trajectory for more than a month after spiking in the Sunbelt states in June and July. The average number of cases per day was at 42,600 on Sunday

The month-long national decline in cases is due mainly to the significant drop off in the hotspot states of California, Arizona, Florida and Texas after infections peaked there in mid-July

Cases are still rising in a handful of states including South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Hawaii, Wyoming and Maine.

The increases in new infections in these states are not enough to reflect an uptick in the national trends and are well below the figures reported in the populous hotspot states of California, Florida, Texas and Arizona.

Coronavirus infections in the US have now topped 5.7 million and more than 176,800 have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic started.

The month-long national decline in cases is due mainly to the significant drop off in the hotspot states of California, Arizona, Florida and Texas after infections peaked there in mid-July.

The hotspot states, as well as others with high infections rates across the country, all implemented mitigation measures around July in a bid to stop the spread of the virus.

Of the hotspot states driving down the national infection rate, California and Texas implemented statewide mask mandates when out in public.

In the absence of statewide orders, some Florida and Arizona counties have required residents to wear masks.

All four hotspot states shut down bars and all but Florida also forced gyms to close.

The current decline in deaths and cases comes a month after President Donald Trump, who for months refused to publicly wear a mask, urged Americans to cover their faces in public to stop the spread.

Of the hotspot states driving down the national infection rate, Texas implemented statewide mask mandates when out in public and ordered all bars to close when cases began to surge in June

California also ordered a statewide mask mandate when infections started surging in mid-June. Gov Gavin Newsom also ordered bars and gyms to close. Infections in California surged in mid-August partly due to a backlog of tests caused by technical glitches that the state says has now been cleared

Florida has no statewide mask mandate but some cities have forced their own orders. Bars were forced to shut down across the state in June following the surge in infections. Health experts say those mitigation measures are why cases and deaths are now dropping

Arizona has no statewide mask mandate but counties were allowed to enforce their own measures. Bars and gyms were ordered to close when there was an uptick of infections in June. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths have now dropped off considerably in the hotspot state

CDC director Robert Redfield had predicted just days ago that deaths would start to decline this week, saying it was a direct result of mitigation measures like mask wearing and the closure of bars in hotspot states.

Redfield said it can often take weeks before the effects of those measures are reflected in the daily numbers due to the lag between deaths and positive tests.

'It is important to understand these interventions are going to have a lag, that lag is going to be three to four weeks,' he said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association last Thursday.

Redfield noted that southern states, which have been the hardest hit amid the pandemic, are seeing a progressive drop in cases.

Health experts in these some of these southern states have also linked the drop off in cases to mitigation measures put in place.

In Florida, a large share of the summer surge in infections particularly occurred in teenagers and young adults who are less likely to be hospitalized and die from the virus.

Cases are still rising in a handful of states including South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Hawaii, Wyoming and Maine. The increases in new infections in these states are not enough to reflect an uptick in the national trends

Experts had warned that younger people, however, could have gone on to infect their elderly or at risk relatives, which could explain the surging death toll in Florida last month.

Dr Mary Jo Trepka, chair of the epidemiology department at the Florida International University, credited the bar closures and local mask mandates for reversing the trends, the New York Times reports.

Dr Jo Gerald, who works on public health policy at the University of Arizona, said the huge decline in cases and deaths in Arizona was a direct result of mask orders, closures of bars and gyms and additional news coverage of the risks.

In South Carolina, cities that enforced mask mandates saw a 50 percent decrease in cases that those that did not require residents to wear face coverings in public, the state's health department have said.

Health experts, however, have warned Americans not to become complacent because, even as COVID-19 infections continue to drop, they are still the highest in the world.

'We basically have 50 laboratory experiments going on right now, and every state has a slightly different policy approach,' Dr Gerald said.

'If we get complacent, this thing could get out of control again. And we'll have even less safety margin to manage it because we're starting from a higher place.'
The Trump administrations move to roll back rules restricting methane emissions from oil and gas has sparked an outcry not just from environmentalists but also from the industry. Several large oil companies have been quick to pledge their continued commitment to cutting emissions regardless.

It would be tempting, for anyone worried about global warming, to take comfort in their resolve and bemoan the Governments apparent strike against climate. Tempting, but misleading.

First, the old Environmental Protection Agency rule was no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. New methane detection data derived by the analytics firm Kayrros from satellite imaging show the rule has not kept the United States from becoming the biggest methane emitter of all oil and gas producers. The EPA regulations were well-intended but cumbersome, and especially poor at leveraging new technologies that can cheaply detect large and easy-to-fix emissions. It was time for a fix.

Rolling back these rules could be a good first step, but only if it paved the way for more practical and effective rules. Private efforts by individual companies, however praiseworthy, will not do the trick. Even large companies cannot fix the problem on their own. No cut from Big Oil can be big enough to offset emissions from smaller players. As long as smaller players continue to spew methane into the air, others will be under a cloud.

Until recently, these emissions could not be comprehensively tracked, let alone benchmarked against those of other producers. That is no longer the case. Powerful algorithms now leverage data from satellites to patrol the globe, hunt for methane hotpots and uncover the offenders.

Many more large methane plumes are being revealed than ever suspected. Most come from oil and gas facilities. A great many come from the Permian Basin in West Texas.

Based on Kayrros analysis of 2019 data from the European Unions Sentinel-5P satellite, which captures both large leaks and clusters of small ones, methane emissions from the Permian have the same global warming impact over 20 years as 100 large coal-fired plants at full blast. U.S. methane emissions are so high as to erode the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal.

Global disadvantage

Large volumes of methane released into the atmosphere could put all U.S. producers at a disadvantage in global markets. The EU is fine-tuning plans to tax oil and gas imports based on their methane footprints. Japanese utilities increasingly aim at net-zero emissions.

Producers whose operating practices and regulatory regimes yield the lowest emission rates will come out on top. Saudi Arabia is a case in point. Based on satellite measurements, its methane footprint, per unit of energy produced, is two orders of magnitude smaller than Algerias. At the other end of the spectrum, the Permians methane intensity is three orders of magnitude larger than Saudi Arabias.

Clearly, the old EPA rule had its shortcomings. As Robert Kleinberg of Columbia University and Andrew Pomerantz of Schlumberger noted in public comments, the leak detection and repair protocol in place since 2016 was too prescriptive. These rules required high sensitivity inspection of a specified list of components and only accepted two means of detection, both of which could pick up the smallest leaks but tended to miss the largest ones.

In theory, new technology could be accepted via rules for alternative means of emission limitation, but these rules were so onerous that no application has been submitted.

Given the opacity around methane emissions, the EPAs approach made sense at the time. But new methane detection technologies, from location-specific drone and aircraft surveys to Kayrros Methane Watcher, have since been deployed that can deliver larger cuts.

It might be a silver lining that the latest EPA rule, which quotes the Kleinberg-Pomerantz submission at length, offers a more pragmatic approach. Procedures for acceptance of novel leak detection technology have been liberalized. On that ground, at least things are moving in the right direction.

Collective responsibility

The climate case for cutting methane leaks is straightforward. Methane emission mitigation from the oil and gas industry is easier and has a larger short-term impact than carbon dioxide mitigation.

The business case is even clearer. Producers will find it increasingly difficult to stay in business while visibly spewing methane into the air. Thanks to new tracking tools, investors can monitor companies, buyers assess the methane intensity of their imports, and operators show proof of their progress in cutting emissions.

The many companies in the U.S. ecosystem share a collective responsibility to cut methane. New policies are needed to shield good performers from the recklessness of others.

The bottom line is the United States needs better methane regulations to compete against other oil and gas producers.

Antoine Halff, a former head of oil analysis at the International Energy Agency, is adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy and chief analyst and founding partner at Kayrros. Andrew Gould, the former CEO of Schlumberger, is a board member of Occidental Petroleum and chairman of the Kayrros Advisory Board.
Theres gamesmanship here. Theyre already starting to try to poke the finger at the post office, which of course is so absurd because as if the post office did such a fabulous job and everything for the last 30 years. But to blame them now, (Democrats are) already trying to set it up that somehow theres a Trump conspiracy to stop this, or to create this fraud, when the whole system is designed to be fraudulent. Thats whats so wrong about this, he said.
Even if it's not a huge purchase, we think it was good to see that Philip Hoskins, the MD & Executive Director of Marvel Gold Limited (ASX:GPX) recently shelled out AU$118k to buy stock, at AU$0.028 per share. While that isn't the hugest buy, it actually boosted their shareholding by 134%, which is good to see.

Check out our latest analysis for Marvel Gold

Marvel Gold Insider Transactions Over The Last Year

Notably, that recent purchase by Philip Hoskins is the biggest insider purchase of Marvel Gold shares that we've seen in the last year. That means that an insider was happy to buy shares at above the current price of AU$0.052. Their view may have changed since then, but at least it shows they felt optimistic at the time. In our view, the price an insider pays for shares is very important. As a general rule, we feel more positive about a stock if insiders have bought shares at above current prices, because that suggests they viewed the stock as good value, even at a higher price.

In the last twelve months Marvel Gold insiders were buying shares, but not selling. The average buy price was around AU$0.024. We don't deny that it is nice to see insiders buying stock in the company. However, you should keep in mind that they bought when the share price was meaningfully below today's levels. The chart below shows insider transactions (by companies and individuals) over the last year. If you click on the chart, you can see all the individual transactions, including the share price, individual, and the date!

There are always plenty of stocks that insiders are buying. So if that suits your style you could check each stock one by one or you could take a look at this free list of companies. (Hint: insiders have been buying them).

Does Marvel Gold Boast High Insider Ownership?

Another way to test the alignment between the leaders of a company and other shareholders is to look at how many shares they own. I reckon it's a good sign if insiders own a significant number of shares in the company. Insiders own 6.0% of Marvel Gold shares, worth about AU$1.3m, according to our data. We do note, however, it is possible insiders have an indirect interest through a private company or other corporate structure. Whilst better than nothing, we're not overly impressed by these holdings.

Story continues

What Might The Insider Transactions At Marvel Gold Tell Us?

The recent insider purchases are heartening. We also take confidence from the longer term picture of insider transactions. However, we note that the company didn't make a profit over the last twelve months, which makes us cautious. While the overall levels of insider ownership are below what we'd like to see, the history of transactions imply that Marvel Gold insiders are reasonably well aligned, and optimistic for the future. So while it's helpful to know what insiders are doing in terms of buying or selling, it's also helpful to know the risks that a particular company is facing. To help with this, we've discovered 5 warning signs (4 don't sit too well with us!) that you ought to be aware of before buying any shares in Marvel Gold.

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.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.



Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
Jedward have become involved in a Twitter spat with The Corrs guitarist Jim Corr after he backed anti-face mask protesters in Dublin over the weekend.

The twins, whose real names are John and Edward Grimes, addressed the demonstrators in a post, telling them to get inside and describing them as selfish low-lives.

The pair turned their attention to the 56-year-old musician after he shared a short video of the protest and praised the great turnout.

Gwan leave the whole country breathless from Covid because of your idiotic behaviour @Jimcorrsays  pic.twitter.com/AptBunlTeY  JEDWARD (@planetjedward) August 22, 2020

Making a pun on The Corrs 2000 hit, they wrote: Gwan leave the whole country breathless from Covid because of your idiotic behaviour.

Corr hit back, writing: Shut up you fools and grow a brain between you.

Jedward continued their wordplay on past Corrs singles, responding: Why dont you just go and Runaway and FYI your sisters never needed you please leave the band.

Drawing a comparison with a 1980s pop duo, Corr replied: Irelands Millie Vanillie have spoken and I shall hand in my notice forthwith.

He added: But lads, I just want to say before sharing a link to the Corrs song I Never Loved You Anyway.

Read More Phil Hogan issues second apology over #golfgate a day after returning to Brussels

Jedward signed off by writing: Twitter fights are so pathetic! We dont have time! Were right youre wrong.

Wear your mask and wash your hands to whoever needs to hear this.

Jim Corr with sisters Sharon, Andrea and Caroline (Chris Radburn/PA)

The twins, who found fame on X Factor in 2009, have been living in Los Angeles with their ex-Celebrity Big Brother housemate Tara Reid during lockdown.

They recently joined Black Lives Matter protests in Hollywood.

Along with his three younger sisters Andrea, Sharon and Caroline, Jim Corr founded The Corrs in 1990, releasing seven studio albums.
DUBLIN, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Single-Cell Analysis Techniques - Global Market Trajectory & Analytics" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This 322-page report presents concise insights into how the pandemic has impacted production and the buy side for 2020 and 2021. A short-term phased recovery by key geography is also addressed.

Global Single-Cell Analysis Techniques Market to Reach $6.4 Billion by 2027

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Single-Cell Analysis Techniques estimated at US$2.3 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$6.4 Billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 16.1% over the period 2020-2027.

Consumables, one of the segments analyzed in the report, is projected to record 16.9% CAGR and reach US$5 Billion by the end of the analysis period. After an early analysis of the business implications of the pandemic and its induced economic crisis, growth in the Instruments segment is readjusted to a revised 13.5% CAGR for the next 7-year period.

The U.S. Market is Estimated at $668 Million, While China is Forecast to Grow at 15.5% CAGR

The Single-Cell Analysis Techniques market in the U.S. is estimated at US$668 Million in the year 2020. China, the world's second largest economy, is forecast to reach a projected market size of US$1.1 Billion by the year 2027 trailing a CAGR of 15.5% over the analysis period 2020 to 2027. Among the other noteworthy geographic markets are Japan and Canada, each forecast to grow at 14.4% and 13.8% respectively over the 2020-2027 period. Within Europe, Germany is forecast to grow at approximately 11.7% CAGR.Competitors identified in this market include, among others:

Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Beckman Coulter , Inc.

, Inc. Becton, Dickinson and Company

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.

Fluidigm Corporation

GE Healthcare

Illumina, Inc.

Merck KGaA

Qiagen N.V.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

Total Companies Profiled: 43

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/1at2if

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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Editorial

What the hecs?

Tehans proposal a big mistake!

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan has been spending this year ensuring that universities are becoming completely inaccessible to poor and working class students. No less than two months ago (Editorial #1921), Tehan announced that the Morrison government would double student fees for courses in the arts and humanities, as well as in commerce and law.

Now, the education minister is announcing that students who fail more than half of their subjects in the first year of a degree will be cut off from the HECS-HELP or FEE-HELP loan scheme.

According to Tehan: These measures will ensure students cant take on a study load they wont complete, leaving them without a qualification but a large debt. This is an excuse for the federal government to further remove itself from its obligation of providing affordable tertiary education.

Students, especially those arriving straight out of high school, wont know what study load they can take on until they actually arrive at their university. Each student adjusts at their own pace, as they familiarise themselves with their new learning environment.

Of course, Tehan, like every other LNP politician, is concerned about those who are rorting the system: The lack of transparency of a students enrolment has allowed some non-genuine students to enrol and re-enrol at multiple providers at the same time. What is a non-genuine student? What percentage of students can be described as non-genuine? Does this percentage hurt the loan scheme enough to warrant these punitive measures? Tehan says that they On average [...] [pass] just one in every five subjects they have attempted  why is this the case? Statements like these should not be accepted on face value and should be subjected to intense scrutiny.

Indigenous students stand to be one of the most affected groups. James Blackwell, a proud Wiradjuri man and currently an Indigenous Student Engagement Adviser at the University of Canberra, writing for The Canberra Times writes: What this round of proposed reforms does is penalise Indigenous students for trying to navigate a higher education system that was not just built without them in mind, but with their exclusion as a goal. [] We take longer on average to complete our degrees, and fail more often doing them [] and the four-year completion rate has never gone above 30 per cent. [] Failure is a necessary part of student growth. We see students every day who have gone from almost flunking out of a degree to being on the path towards graduation.

Disabled students also stand to lose a lot with the new proposed changes. In order to be eligible for youth allowance, students must take on a minimum of three subjects to remain full-time. However, students with disabilities such as mental health issues taking on three subjects can exceed their capacity. Now, with the new proposal by Tehan, these students have the added pressure of losing their loans if they fail to pass their subjects, putting them in a precarious situation between choosing youth allowance or HECS.

According to news.com.au: Education providers will have the ability to give special consideration to students whose academic performance was affected by illness or bereavement. While this may sound like a viable out for disabled students, it hardly can be considered as such. Prior to the new proposal, if students failed for health reasons, they could simply reapply to that specific course. Now, with the new proposal under consideration, this is not the case, and a level of bureaucracy exists where it previously didnt, adding an addition barrier for those students to chase around with applications, doctors certificates, etc. in order to not have their HECS pulled out from under them. In short, it is making those who have suffered and struggled struggle further.

It is imperative that this new proposal be resisted at all costs. Education should be treated as a right, not a privilege. Tehans reforms to education are ensuring that an education (and ultimately a job) is only reserved for those most fortunate and only serves to perpetuate inter-generational poverty.
Motorbike drivers pass by an area where a station of the Ho Chi Minh City Metro Line 2 is planned to be constructed in Tan Binh District, Ho Chi Minh City. Photo by VnExpress/Huu khoa.

Vietnam has decided to cancel a $390-million loan from the Asian Development Bank meant to fund the second metro line in HCMC.

It reduces ADB funding for the Ben Thanh  Tham Luong metro route to $150 million.

The government has been reviewing, restructuring and canceling loans it think are not needed from foreign countries and multilateral organizations.

It has now tasked Ho Chi Minh City with mobilizing funding for the project.
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Like a puppy chasing its tail, some new investors often chase 'the next big thing', even if that means buying 'story stocks' without revenue, let alone profit. Unfortunately, high risk investments often have little probability of ever paying off, and many investors pay a price to learn their lesson.

So if you're like me, you might be more interested in profitable, growing companies, like Manx Financial Group (LON:MFX). Now, I'm not saying that the stock is necessarily undervalued today; but I can't shake an appreciation for the profitability of the business itself. While a well funded company may sustain losses for years, unless its owners have an endless appetite for subsidizing the customer, it will need to generate a profit eventually, or else breathe its last breath.

Check out our latest analysis for Manx Financial Group

How Quickly Is Manx Financial Group Increasing Earnings Per Share?

As one of my mentors once told me, share price follows earnings per share (EPS). Therefore, there are plenty of investors who like to buy shares in companies that are growing EPS. Manx Financial Group managed to grow EPS by 17% per year, over three years. That growth rate is fairly good, assuming the company can keep it up.

Careful consideration of revenue growth and earnings before interest and taxation (EBIT) margins can help inform a view on the sustainability of the recent profit growth. Not all of Manx Financial Group's revenue this year is revenue from operations, so keep in mind the revenue and margin numbers I've used might not be the best representation of the underlying business. Manx Financial Group maintained stable EBIT margins over the last year, all while growing revenue 9.8% to UK20m. That's progress.

You can take a look at the company's revenue and earnings growth trend, in the chart below. Click on the chart to see the exact numbers.

Since Manx Financial Group is no giant, with a market capitalization of UK9.5m, so you should definitely check its cash and debt before getting too excited about its prospects.

Story continues

Are Manx Financial Group Insiders Aligned With All Shareholders?

Many consider high insider ownership to be a strong sign of alignment between the leaders of a company and the ordinary shareholders. So as you can imagine, the fact that Manx Financial Group insiders own a significant number of shares certainly appeals to me. Actually, with 36% of the company to their names, insiders are profoundly invested in the business. I'm reassured by this kind of alignment, as it suggests the business will be run for the benefit of shareholders. Of course, Manx Financial Group is a very small company, with a market cap of only UK9.5m. So despite a large proportional holding, insiders only have UK3.5m worth of stock. That might not be a huge sum but it should be enough to keep insiders motivated!

It means a lot to see insiders invested in the business, but I find myself wondering if remuneration policies are shareholder friendly. Well, based on the CEO pay, I'd say they are indeed. I discovered that the median total compensation for the CEOs of companies like Manx Financial Group with market caps under UK153m is about UK274k.

The Manx Financial Group CEO received total compensation of only UK25k in the year to . This could be considered a token amount, and indicates that the company does not need to use payment to motivate the CEO - that is often a good sign. While the level of CEO compensation isn't a huge factor in my view of the company, modest remuneration is a positive, because it suggests that the board keeps shareholder interests in mind. I'd also argue reasonable pay levels attest to good decision making more generally.

Is Manx Financial Group Worth Keeping An Eye On?

One positive for Manx Financial Group is that it is growing EPS. That's nice to see. The fact that EPS is growing is a genuine positive for Manx Financial Group, but the pretty picture gets better than that. Boasting both modest CEO pay and considerable insider ownership, I'd argue this one is worthy of the watchlist, at least. You still need to take note of risks, for example - Manx Financial Group has 3 warning signs we think you should be aware of.

Of course, you can do well (sometimes) buying stocks that are not growing earnings and do not have insiders buying shares. But as a growth investor I always like to check out companies that do have those features. You can access a free list of them here.

Please note the insider transactions discussed in this article refer to reportable transactions in the relevant jurisdiction.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.



Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
The Ghana Psychological Association (GPA), has celebrate some COVID-19 recovered persons, as part of their efforts to fight the pandemic related stigma.



A statement issued by Dr Collins Badu Agyemang, National President, GPA, which was copied to the Ghana News Agency, said the event was organised as part of GPA's theme for their maiden Ghana Psychology Week celebration dubbed Making Psychology Relevant to the Ghanaian: Before, During and After COVID-19 Pandemic.



The occasion was used to celebrate 10 recovered COVID-19 persons in diverse field of vocation, with some in journalism, health-care, management practitioners, hospitality industry, security services and others.



Dr Badu Agyemang in his address, referred to all recovered ones as heroes and heroines who out of their boldness to support anti-stigma campaign had motivated Ghanaians to desist from stigmatising persons with COVID-19, recovered ones, healthcare workers and their families.



On behalf of the GPA National Executive Board, Dr Badu Agyemang commended the efforts of the heroes and heroines for stepping out boldly to make a statement to all Ghanaians that COVID-19 recovery was just like cold or flu.



"Employers and leaders of organizations must see COVID-19 as an Occupational Health and Safety issue which requires cogent planning to protect employee wellbeing and enhance overall organizational productivity," he said.



Dr Agyemang, thanked the Ghana COVID-19 Private Sector Fund and lauded the support from the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), Ecobank Ghana Limited, the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Global Media Alliance, Locum professional, and partners for lending support to the GPA.



He used the opportunity to thank the organizing committee for the maiden Ghana Psychology Week and encouraged all professional members to promote psychology in their workplaces and immediate community.



Mr Adjetey Anang, a distinguished Ghanaian Actor, who graced the occasion expressed the need to prioritise mental health support in all aspects of our lives.



He opined that recent developments in the creative industry suggest they all need some psychosocial support in their career paths.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Three people were killed and three were wounded during separate incidents in Oakland over the weekend, as an uptick in violence has put the city on course to potentially record its highest number of homicides in years.

The three killings this weekend bring this years homicide count in Oakland to 63, up from the 50 people who had been killed in homicides at this time last year.

At this point in 2018 and 2017 the city recorded 46 and 44 killings, respectively, according to publicly available data. Oakland recorded 78 total homicides in 2019, and 75 in both 2018 and 2017. The figures include homicides which were ruled legally justified, as well as killings from accidents and negligence.

Violent crime, including homicides, had been trending downward in cities throughout the Bay Area at the beginning of this year, and anomalies in year-over-year crime data are not uncommon.

Crime statistics have come under intensified scrutiny in recent months as cities across the country face increasing pressure to allocate funding away from their police departments in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this summer.

The first killing happened shortly before 3 a.m. Saturday, authorities said. Oakland Police responded to the 1000 block of 69th Avenue for reports of a stabbing, where they found a man injured. The victim, an Oakland man whose name was not released by police, later died at the hospital. Police arrested one man in connection to the killing, but have not identified him or said what charges he might face.

Shortly after midnight Sunday, police responded to reports of a shooting at the 2500 block of 99th Avenue, where they found two men  one from Stockton, one from San Leandro  injured with gunshot wounds. One was man pronounced dead at the scene, while the other was taken to the hospital in stable condition, authorities said.

The East Bay Times reported another shooting killed a 30-year-old Vallejo woman and injured two others Sunday morning in the 700 block of 105th Avenue.

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.

The shooting, which was not disclosed by Oakland police by Monday afternoon, happened at a large party, the East Bay Times reported. The Vallejo woman was pronounced dead at a hospital. The two people who were injured  a 29-year-old woman and a 32-year-old man  were hospitalized in stable condition.

Another man who was at the party was struck by an SUV near the scene, the East Bay Times reported. The man, a 25-year-old San Jose resident, was lodged under the vehicle and dragged for a quarter mile. He was hospitalized in critical condition.

The Oakland Police Department did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

Michael Williams is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: Michael.Williams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @michaeldamianw
(PHOTO: The Front Row)

SINGAPORE  Get your fashion fix without having to leave home by tuning in to Singapores Virtual Fashion Festival, The Front Row.

A free-to-watch, seasonless, inclusive, 10-day fashion event, The Front Row, will have virtual runway shows, fashion films and presentations on a 360-degree 3D platform, as well as interactive workshops you can do online and fashion chats with some of the most interesting fashion industry people in Asia.

Visit a virtual Lion City

Singapore already has a reputation for looking like a city of the future - thanks Westworld - but now it really will be. The virtual location of The Front Row is a candy-coloured world of iconic landmarks tricked out for the digital imagination offering different spaces like the Gallery and the Coffeeshop where you can do different things - check out fashion photography, or listen to industry insiders talk about the issues fashion is facing. There is even a virtual Orchard Road of sorts with the Designer Hall where you can directly link to buy the pieces from each designer.

The highlight of the chats will be listening to Minju Kim, the South Korean fashion designer who was the winner of the first season of Netflix's Next In Fashion. She is bubbly and cheerful, but also well aware of whats happening globally in fashion right now. Dont miss her conversation!

You will also be able to find out what makes Singapore designers tick with intimate chats with each designer after their shows and their thoughts on being a part of this rollercoaster industry.

Likewise, the designers will be showing off their skills with hands-on workshops that will cover styling tips, plus information on how to be more sustainable, eco-friendly and ethical when it comes to fashion. And if thats not enough, there will also be surprise giveaways throughout the 10-day event.

What more could you want? Fashion, freebies and fun.

(PHOTO: The Front Row)

24/8 DISRUPTED NARRATIVES

8PM NAFA show

Podcast 3: Fashion Education in the Age of Covid with Anthony Tan, Darren Loh, and Kenneth Lee

Story continues

25/8 SOLIDARITY

8pm Malaysia 1: Brian Khoo

Malaysia 2: Justin Yap

Malaysia 3: Carven Ong

Podcast 4: Malaysian Designers with Adrian Chee, Brain Khoo, Justin Yap and Carven Ong

26/8 SOLIDARITY

8pm Philippines 1: Jolie Lloren

Philippines 2: Paradox Vested Relices

Philippines 3: EZRA Couture

Philippines 4: Bea Samson

Philippines 5: Amato Couture

8:35pm Podcast 5: Inception: The Pilipinas Project with Jesus Lloren, Paolo Raymond, Ezra Santos, Beatrice Samson, Furne One Amato, and Ariel Lozada

27/8 SOLIDARITY

8pm Australia X Singapore: Cool Australia

8:30pm Australia: JUDE

9pm Thailand: Develter X Tube Gallery

28/8 POSTCARDS FROM HOME

8pm Elohim by Sabrina Goh

8:30pm Reckless Ericka

9pm The Front Row X Society A presents: Podcast 6. Discovering the next big Asian Label: How can Asian Designers stand out during the current pandemic with Minju Kim and Pek Lay Peng

29/8 A HANDFUL OF STORIES

2pm Sustainably Fashion Workshop with theKANG

3pm HHER

3:30pm Irene Kusuma Couture

IKV Studio

4pm Graye

4:30pm Shirt Number One

The Front Row runs from Thursday, 20 August 2020, kicking off with runway shows from GinLee Studio featuring theKANG accessories at 8pm, followed by Max Tan at 8:30pm on www.thefrontrow.style. The site will be LIVE on 20 August. Stay up to date with whats happening @thefrontrow.style.
Joe Bidens campaign spokeswoman could barely contain her glee at the news that Steve Bannon is being indicted by the Southern District of New York on a variety of fraud allegations related to fundraising for We Build the Wall, telling USA Today that no one needed an indictment to know that Steve Bannon is a fraud. But a close reading of the indictment shows that the politicization of the DOJ by elements of the radical left has been its own long-running fraud.

Steve Bannon at CPAC in 2017

Photo credit: Michael Vadon, licensed under the Creative Commons Atrribution 2.0

A good friend of mine and former employer, Congressman Steve Stockman, received a federal ten-year prison sentence for crimes he did not commit, in a trial that was a circus. He received horrible legal counsel at trial because most federal criminal defense attorneys are not prepared for a political trial. Similarly, Gen. Michael Flynn pled guilty on the advice of counsel to crimes he did not commit due to a setup that uncovered notes now revealed was instigated by former President Obama while in office, and he struggles now simply to have the charges dismissed even though the prosecutors are on his side. The federal judicial process is so broken for defendants caught in its web that it often seems to even the innocent that the only option is to accept any plea.

The plea rate in federal criminal cases is 95%, the conviction rate for the few cases that go to trial is similarly around 95%. The conviction rate in the Soviet Union was only four points higher.

During the Stockman trial, I saw the federal prosecutors tactics up close. I saw them threaten people to comply with their demands to testify or else they would face prosecution. When I wouldnt talk to them, as an attorney involved in the case, they called the Sheriff on my wife when they knew I was out of the house, asking for the locals to investigate possible child endangerment. I knew people who had years of tax problems that mysteriously went away once they testified the right way. These are the tactics they deploy regularly to get the testimony they want, guaranteeing the sky-high conviction rate.

As an attorney, I regularly interact with people who have varying degrees of knowledge about the law. Many know that specific crimes have specific elements that have to be met before you are guilty of a crime. You cant be guilty of an assault if there was no contact and someone didnt perceive the threat, for example. But for federal fraud, interestingly, there are no elements. Federal fraud also has no model jury instructions, because courts want prosecutors to have the flexibility to capture complex schemes. The effect of this fluidity, then, is to empower prosecutors who want to go after someone for political reasons, to have the disposable catch-all law to do it with, since federal fraud effectively becomes any financial transaction that federal prosecutors dont like.

The indictment says that We Build the Wall raised $30 million. It claims Bannon took around $1 million to a non-profit he controls. It then says that he paid his personal expenses with some of the funds, even though the organization said it was a volunteer organization. That could be as simple as We Build the Wall paying Bannons non-profit for fundraising services and paying Bannon for his expenses. Can a volunteer organization occasionally pay people for work above and beyond the call of a volunteer? Of course, they can, but federal prosecutors will use that nonsense stretch to claim it was effectively defrauding donors because Bannon was actually being paid.

Should a person involved with a non-profit incriminate himself if he tells the public that an organization is a volunteer one even if some people are paid? If one says that all funds go to the mission of the organization, dont the fundraising needs of the organization fulfill that mission? The implications of saying no effectively open almost every operating non-profit of any size to selective prosecution.

In a non-politicized judiciary, the question would be whether any donors made their donation relying on that statement, which almost assuredly they did not. The statement is not material and the reliance by the donor is likely near-zero. But again, from the example of Steve Stockman, the two donors involved in that case both said they didnt care how the money was spent, didnt check in on it, and wouldnt have anyway because the amounts were so small. In political trials the facts dont matter, and Bannon, as with Stockman, will suffer from a media avalanche of criticism swaying the jury and judge to push him into prison.

Think of it in the practical way it probably appeared to the potential donors: if a donation screen said Thank you for supporting our volunteer organization, we will use 100% of your donations for our mission! Would it be fraud if the donor donated, not knowing fundraisers were being paid, and that some donations went to other legitimate administrative expenses? Any reasonable person would say no.

There is also a legal distinction, with little practical difference, between a board member and a director. A board member may be unpaid insofar as they are doing board work. But if a Director or a vendor is doing other work, specialized work, they may be entitled to compensation. There is a very reasonable defense that compensated individuals were performing other paid work while still remaining 100% unpaid for their board work, since those are two different jobs.

It can be tempting to think that Bannon can defend himself, hes famous, hes cashed in on some of his fame. But the range of resources that federal authorities can put on someone is unparalleled, legally collecting evidence for use at trial and illegally obtaining more evidence that it uses to pressure defendants, make threats, and intimidate witnesses. For some reason, people think that the surveillance state is not available to federal prosecutors. Inconsistent prior testimony by federal witnesses, so-called Giglio material, gets turned over to the defense at trial in a stack of papers, Ive spoken with attorneys who dont have time to read them.

Evidence that is supposed to suggest the innocence of a defendant is also supposed to be turned over to the defense prior to trial, so-called Brady material. Yet in many political cases, such as the 2008 Ted Stevens prosecution, it only emerged after the jury returned a guilty verdict -- after an internal FBI whistleblower came forward out of guilt. Its very unlikely Steve Bannon can rely on exonerating evidence and inconsistent witness statements coming forward in time to avoid a conviction. And if he takes a plea, hell never see it.

The defense against these ongoing persecution prosecutions is an informed skeptical public reading between the lines. If Bannon had bought a Lamborghini with his funds, the indictment would have said so. If Bannon had spent it on cocaine and strippers after coming back from the Ukraine and impregnating a stripper in Arkansas, the indictment would have said so. All it says is that he used it on personal expenses.

At one point in the Stockman trial, they were complaining to the jury that Steve paid off a credit card bill that included $8 charges at a Wendys drive-thru. They complained about a 2013 credit card payment from a dolphin ride from 2008 in their 2018 indictment. Thats how far back they had to go to find spending they could make salacious material for the media, judge, and jury. They failed to mention the actual cost was $73.

Anyone who thinks that abuses by a trial court will be corrected by appellate courts is likely unaware that around 5% of federal criminal appeals are granted any relief whatsoever. The narrow band of arguments the appellate court considers worthy of review are usually limited to legal esoterica, such as the grammar of jury instructions, and very rarely what the public would consider actual due process violations during the proceedings.

So, for instance, no attorney involved in the Stockman trial cared to complain that the charges made no legal sense, that Stockman did not personally benefit from the funds raised, that the funds expended were spent on legitimate non-profit activity, or that the actions by a former campaign staffer in mailing out a newspaper critical of John Cornyn was not fraud or that the check that donor Ed Uihlein made to the USPS was not mail fraud and that the thank you letter that the staffer sent to Uihlein was not its own separate count of mail fraud and that someone cashing the check was not wire fraud.

Another indication of how bogus these charges are is that it does not appear as though any actual donor to the organization was complaining. The indictment reveals no chain of donor complaints or state Attorneys General trying to investigate. Most fraudpersecutions by federal authorities really belong in state courts at best and do not rise to the occasion of federal court. The problem with that is that the process penalties are not as large in state court; you dont face a 25-year sentence for mailing a check or moving money between a checking and a savings account, in a simple accusation of theft, conversion, embezzlement, in a state court. The glaring reason this case is in federal court, especially the notoriously political Southern District of New York, is because of politics.

Steve Bannon may be guilty, or he may be innocent of the charges. He may also be innocent or guilty of other unindicted conduct. But no one should think that innocence will save him from conviction or prison; just ask Steve Stockman. After all, Bannon faces essentially the same odds in New York as he would have had under the Soviet judiciary.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 02:32:29|Editor: huaxia

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AMMAN, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on Monday reviewed the latest regional developments and efforts to resolve regional crises.

During a phone call, the two ministers commended the continued progress in mutual relations, reiterating the continuous coordination on resolving regional crises, foremost of which is achieving a just and lasting peace based on a two-state solution and international law, according to a Foreign Ministry statement.

The Palestinian cause is Jordan's central issue, and a two-state solution that guarantees the establishment of an independent Palestinian state along the 1967 borders is the only way to achieve a just and comprehensive peace, Safadi said during the call.

The two sides also discussed the developments related to finding a political solution to the Syrian crisis, which maintains Syria's unity and territorial integrity and restores peace and stability.

Talks also went over the developments in the Libyan crisis, as the two ministers affirmed that there are no military solutions for the crisis. Enditem
It is nice to be able to report on some good news despite the pandemic. Many local small businesses have been able to benefit from State and Federal programs to help them survive the loss of business during these challenging times. Three programs in particular have provided much needed relief locally including the Business Interruption Program (BIG), The Downstate Small Business Stabilization Program and the Payroll Protection Program or PPP. The Chamber is proud to be involved in helping many of these businesses receive funding from the programs.

Last week seven Coles County businesses were awarded grants of either $10,000 or $20,000 from the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunities Business Interruption Grant (BIG) Program. In the first wave of grants, priority was given to small businesses that have been heavily restricted or completely shut down during the pandemic. Specifically, the program includes support for; bars and restaurants, barbershops and salons, and gyms and fitness centers.

The BIG program allocated a certain amount of funding for businesses in disproportionately impacted areas, or DIA's. These are areas throughout the State of Illinois that have been identified as being significantly impacted by COVID-19 and economic stresses. Both Charleston and Mattoon are identified as DIA's and had a better chance of receiving the funding. The BIG program will announce additional rounds of funding in the near future. Businesses can check the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) website for details.

The DCEO has also benefited many area businesses through the Downstate Small Business Stabilization Grant Program funded by a federal Community Development Block Grant. Five Mattoon businesses who applied for the second round of the DCEO's Stabilization Grant Program found out that they received funding. The grants ranged from $15,000 to $25,000. A total of $115,000 of federal funding is coming to Mattoon businesses based on this program. In the first round of submissions, eight area businesses received funding and there are other businesses awaiting a third round announcement.

The Payroll Protection Program through the Federal CARES Act and the Small Business Administration (SBA) is a loan designed to provide a direct incentive for small businesses to keep their workers on the payroll. The SBA will forgive the loans if all employee retention criteria are met, and the funds are used for eligible expenses. The small businesses partnered with accountant firms and local banks that helped guide them through the application process.

In Mattoon 349 different businesses received PPP funding for a total of over $25 million. The amount of local loans/grants ranged from over $5 million for the largest company down to $575 for a sole proprietor. Based on the reporting data from these Mattoon businesses, over 4,183 jobs were saved. An additional round of funding for area small businesses might be part of the new stimulus package that could pass in Congress sometime in September.

Photos: Remember these? A look back at Mattoon businesses through the years

Ed Dowd is the Executive Director of the Mattoon Chamber of Commerce

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BEIJING, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Fang Holdings Limited (NYSE: SFUN) ("Fang" or "we"), a leading real estate Internet portal in China, today announced (1) the appointment of new acting CFO, and (2) its plan of issuance of shares to the management of Fang to raise capital.

Appointment of New Acting CFO

Mr. Ke Wang has been appointed as Fang's acting Chief Financial Officer to replace Mr. Zijin Li, effective August 31, 2020. Mr. Li has resigned from the company for personal reasons. His resignation did not result from any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company's operations, policies or practices. Fang thanks Mr. Li for his efforts and contributions to the Company.

Prior to joining Fang, Mr. Wang was CFO of two companies in Beijing and has extensive experiences in financial management. Mr. Wang has solid accounting background with an MBA and master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Hawaii and a bachelor's degree from the Beijing Institute of Technology.

Plan of Issuance of Shares to Management

Fang plans to raise up to $30 million by issuing Fang's Class A ordinary shares to the management of Fang at market price which is equivalent to $11.84 per ADS, the weighted average closing price of Fang's ADS of ten trading days as of Friday, August 21, 2020. The purpose of the new issuance is to increase cash reserves for debt payback as well as to demonstrate the management's confidence in the company.

About Fang

Fang operates a leading real estate Internet portal in China in terms of the number of page views and visitors to its websites. Through its websites, Fang provides primarily marketing, listing, leads generation and financial services for China's fast-growing real estate and home furnishing and improvement sectors. Its user-friendly websites support active online communities and networks of users seeking information on, and other value-added services for, the real estate and home furnishing and improvement sectors in China. Fang currently maintains approximately 74 offices to focus on local market needs and its website and database contains real estate related content covering 665 cities in China. For more information about Fang, please visit http://ir.fang.com .

Safe Harbor Statements

This press 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. Such forward-looking statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "is expected to," "anticipates," "aim," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "are likely to," "estimates," "may," "should" and similar expressions, and include, without limitation, statements regarding Fang's future financial performance, revenue guidance, growth and growth rates, market position and continued business transformation. Such statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions, and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond Fang's control, which may cause its actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Potential risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, the impact of Fang's business development strategies, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact of current and future government policies affecting China's real estate market. Further information regarding these and other risks, uncertainties or factors is included in Fang's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Fang does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under law.

SOURCE Fang Holdings Limited

Related Links

www.fang.com


White House: 'Breakthrough' Coming for Coronavirus Treatment

By Ken Bredemeier August 23, 2020

The White House says President Donald Trump will announce a "major therapeutic breakthrough" Sunday night for the treatment of coronavirus, the pandemic that has killed more than 176,000 people in the U.S. and infected nearly 5.7 million, more than in any other country across the world.

Trump's announcement is coming a day after he accused, without evidence, "the deep state, or whoever" at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of "making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics."

The U.S. leader claimed, without evidence, in a Twitter remark that officials at the drug regulatory agency "obviously  are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd," the date of his re-election contest against Democrat Joe Biden. "Must focus on speed, and saving lives!"

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said late Saturday that Health and Human Resources Secretary Alex Azar and FDA chief Stephen Hahn would attend the announcement with Trump, a day ahead of the start of the Republican National Convention, where Trump will be renominated for a second four-year term.

Numerous U.S. health experts have said that a coronavirus vaccine will not be available before the end of the year or into early 2021, and then only if tests on the efficacy of the vaccine now starting in several countries, including the U.S., prove successful.

Trump, mindful of accusations from Biden and opposition Democrats that he has bungled the handling of the coronavirus in the U.S., has often said that treatment for the infectious disease is nearing and has contended that the virus will simply disappear.

He has acknowledged that his re-election chances would be helped with a medical breakthrough before Election Day.

As he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination last week, former Vice President Biden said, "After all this time, this president still doesn't have a plan" to fight the pandemic. "He failed to protect America. And, my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable."

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, on the "Fox News Sunday" show, defended Trump's tweet complaining about the pace of testing overseen by the FDA.

"We're not going to cut corners on research," Meadows said. "We are going to cut the red tape. I applaud the president for putting out the tweet."

A Biden supporter, Delaware Senator Chris Coons, said in a separate Fox interview that Trump has "failed to act responsibly" in dealing with the coronavirus.

"He's lost on the highway and refuses to ask for directions," Coons contended. "Donald Trump failed to confront this pandemic."

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There was a mixture of excitement and trepidation among parents and pupils as schools reopened following lockdown.

Primary seven pupils as well as sixth formers returned to classrooms across Northern Ireland on Monday, many for the first time since March.

The full school population is set to return next Monday, although some schools have been open for the children of key workers throughout the pandemic.

Expand Close Teacher Catherine McClean has her temperature checked by assistant teacher Hilary Brennan at St Clares Primary School in Belfast wearing PPE, as primary 7 year pupils are allowed to return to school in Northern Ireland. PA Photo. Picture date: Monday July 03, 2020. See PA story ULSTER Coronavirus. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Teacher Catherine McClean has her temperature checked by assistant teacher Hilary Brennan at St Clares Primary School in Belfast wearing PPE, as primary 7 year pupils are allowed to return to school in Northern Ireland. PA Photo. Picture date: Monday July 03, 2020. See PA story ULSTER Coronavirus. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire

Some parents have expressed concern about the safety of children returning to schools, while others have said it is time to get them back.

Stacey Graham said it was the right thing to do as her 10-year-old son John went back to Forth River Primary School in north Belfast.

For parents like myself who work full-time, we have been trying to balance working, having the fun time with the kids and home schooling. We are not teachers so no amount of home schooling can replace the learning that takes place in the classroom, she told the PA news agency.

My daughter Lily, who is going into P4, was actually crying this morning because John got to go to school first, she loves the social aspect of it, seeing her friends and meeting people.

I think it is really important, especially for people from working class communities who are already disadvantaged, to get out there and get as much education as they can.

She added that John had been due to sit the transfer test, but following lockdown and missing so much school, the family had decided against him sitting the test as it was too much pressure on top of everything else.

Brendan Gallagher said he felt confident about the schools returning as he brought his 11-year-old daughter Abigail to St Clares Primary School in west Belfast.

Its been great, the roads are quieter and were excited to get back, he said.

We feel confident enough (about safety measures), we had good communication from the school over the last few weeks, we have known pretty much what has been happening.

Abigail said she felt a bit nervous, but was happy to see her friends.

Maeve Kennedys son Jonnie, 11, returned to Olderfleet Primary School in Larne, Co Antrim.

Expand Close Jonnie Kennedy was among the P7 pupils who return to school on Monday. (Maeve Kennedy/PA) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Jonnie Kennedy was among the P7 pupils who return to school on Monday. (Maeve Kennedy/PA)

She said he was looking forward to being reunited with his friends.

I think his only reticence is that his grandmother, my mother, is normally where they go after school, and she is shielding, she has a lung condition. At the back of his head there is a niggle about that, she told the PA news agency.

He has a tight wee group of four or five boys that have been together since pre-school, since lockdown they have seen each other outside. Hes looking forward to getting back and into some sort of semblance of a routine, its been a long six months without that.

I think he needed to get back, I have tried to combine remote working and home schooling with his younger brother going into P6 so the last six months have been really difficult at home. And because of the pressure of going into P7 and around the transfer tests, he has worked very hard, but the pressures have been a real challenge.

However, Trevor, a father of five from Co Down, took to social media to express his concerns about children returning to school.

As a family, for us coronavirus is a life or death situation.

My wife who is 32, has been taking immunosuppressants to treat a long-term illness.

Jayne has no immune system to fight coronavirus and falls into the highest at risk category, labelled as vulnerable, he tweeted.

This week will see our five young children return to school, at a time when new daily cases are rising sharply.

The spread across all council areas in Northern Ireland suggests community transfer, which vastly increases the risk to those most vulnerable within our society.

I agree the risk to children themselves is low but that is being used as spin from politicians & school leaders to hide behind the fact that children are spreaders.

The issue is not that of children dying but of whom they will pass the virus too and the long-term consequences.
BERLIN - Tests conducted on Russian dissident Alexei Navalny at a German hospital indicate that he was poisoned, but doctors said Monday they do not believe his life at immediate risk.

The Charite hospital said in a statement that the team of doctors who have been examining Navalny since he was flown from Siberia and admitted Saturday have found the presence of cholinesterase inhibitors in his system.

Cholinesterase inhibitors are a broad range of substances that are found in several drugs, but also pesticides and nerve agents. However, doctors at Charite said at the moment the specific substance to which Navalny was exposed is not yet known.

The patient is in an intensive care unit and is still in an induced coma. His health is serious but there is currently no acute danger to his life, the hospital said in a statement.

Navalny remained in critical but stable condition at the Berlin hospital, with special protection details on hand to ensure his safety, German officials said.

Berlin police and federal agents were posted at the downtown Charite hospital where the 44-year-old is undergoing treatment following his arrival in Germany after Chancellor Angela Merkel personally offered the countrys assistance.

It was obvious that after his arrival, protective precautions had to be taken, Merkels spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters. After all, this is a patient who, with a certain degree of probability, was poisoned.

He wouldnt comment on Navalnys condition, but earlier in the day, Dirk Wiese, the German governments co-ordinator for Eastern European affairs, told public broadcaster ZDF he was currently critical, but stable.

He is now receiving the best possible treatment, Wiese said.

Navalnys supporters believe that tea he drank was laced with poison  and that the Kremlin is behind both his illness and a delay in transferring him to Germany.

Russian doctors have said, however, that tests have shown no traces of poison in his system. The Kremlin hasnt yet commented on the allegation.

Navalnys team last week submitted a request in Russia to launch a criminal probe, but as of Monday, Russias Investigative Committee still has not opened a case, Navalnys spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said.

Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician in Moscow and a close ally of Navalny, in a video statement Monday urged Russias law enforcement to investigate an attempt at a life of a public figure and to look into the possible involvement of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It is Putin who benefits from these endless assaults, Yashin said.

U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said the Navalny case would on the agenda for Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Bieguns visit to Russia that begins Tuesday.

With Alexei Navalny in a hospital in Berlin, our dialogue with Russia must include reemphasizing the importance of free speech and civil society, he told reporters.

If Navalny is found to have been poisoned that would represent a crucial moment in Russia, he said.

The Russian people deserve to see that anybody who would have been involved in a matter like that be held accountable.

Navalny was flown to Germany on Saturday from Siberia after much wrangling over whether he was was stable enough to be transported.

After his arrival, hospital spokeswoman Manuela Zingl said he would be undergoing extensive diagnostic tests and that doctors wouldnt comment on his illness or treatment until they were able to evaluate the results.

On Sunday, Navalnys wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and aide Leonid Volkov visited the Russian opposition leader in the hospital, but didnt speak to reporters.

Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putins fiercest critics, fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Thursday and was taken to the hospital in the city of Omsk after the plane made an emergency landing.

Russian doctors on Monday said two laboratories found no poisonous substances in his system.

If we had found poisoning confirmed by something, it would have been much easier for us, said Anatoly Kalinichecnko, deputy chief doctor of the Omsk Ambulance Hospital No. 1, where Navalny was treated.

But we received a final conclusion from two laboratories that no toxic chemicals that can be considered poisons or by-products of poisons, were found.

The hospitals chief doctor, Alexander Murakhovsky, rejected allegations made by Navalnys team that doctors in Omsk had been acting in co-ordination with Russias security services.

We were treating the patient, and we saved him, Murakhovsky said Monday. There wasnt and couldnt be any influence on the patients treatment.

He wasnt able to identify men in plainclothes spotted in the hospital last week who the politicians allies said were law enforcement and security service agents.

I cant say who they were, Murakhovsky said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week he didnt know anything about security service operatives being present at the hospital.

We in the presidential administration can hardly be interested in who is present in the office of a chief doctor in a hospital in Omsk, Peskov said on Friday.

Like many other opposition politicians in Russia, Navalny has been frequently detained by law enforcement and harassed by pro-Kremlin groups. In 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw antiseptic in his face, damaging an eye.

Last year, Navalny was rushed to a hospital from jail where he was serving a sentence on charges of violating protest regulations. His team also suspected poisoning then. Doctors said he had a severe allergic reaction and sent him back to detention the following day.

___

Daria Litvinova reported from Moscow. Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report.

___

This story has been corrected to show that the last name of the Omsk hospitals chief doctor is Murakhovsky, not Murkhavsky.

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From the major influx of Puerto Ricans to New York City in the 1940s to the more recent migration of Central Americans to the five boroughs, Latinos have steadily broken barriers across all sectors of city life, including politics.

In New York City, Rep. Jose E. Serrano bids farewell to Congress after 30 years serving the South Bronx as the longest-serving Puerto Rican legislator, while on the other side of the Bronx (and Queens), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken the progressive baton, amplifying the concerns of a demographic whose poverty rate  currently at 29% in New York City  ranks the highest of any ethnic group in the five boroughs. Latinos are also being disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City  a statistic that has been linked to poverty  further evidence that while gains have been made, the work for equity continues.

Within these pages, we spotlight the leaders helping to carve a path for greater visibility and a seat at the table, the many men and women who wield power in telling the story of Latinos while demonstrating the impressive strides made.

Thank you to our sponsor

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1. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Congress Member

Ron Adar/Shutterstock

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is considered one of the most powerful foils to President Donald Trump and the GOP writ large, countering their tweets with her own, which are then frequently magnified by the media.

A social media influencer and member of the Squad  four progressive first-term members of Congress who swept into the House in 2018  Ocasio-Cortez has increasingly brought progressivism into the national political conversation, much to the chagrin of moderate Democrats.

But Ocasio-Cortez isnt omniscient. She hasnt done well when handicapping local and national races, including endorsing U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary. Ocasio-Cortez has now entered her second term, fending off two challengers, all while building a progressive wing of the party that can force the establishment to pause.

2. Richard Carranza

Chancellor, New York City Department of Education

Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

Schools chancellor Richard Carranza commands one of the most complex school systems in the country  and he doesnt appear to break a sweat over it. His actions aimed at integrating the deeply segregated school system have been met with both praise and rancor, but its his choice to close schools for more than a month during the coronavirus outbreak that tested his decision-making skills. The move was both an inconvenience and relief to millions of parents. As the new school year draws closer, Carranza will again be under intense scrutiny.

3. Nydia Velazquez

Congress Member

Portrait by Celeste Sloman

The first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, Rep. Nydia Velazquez stays relevant by doing what she does best: advocating for the voiceless. The 14-term Brooklyn legislator has also become something of a stateswoman, advising fellow colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to stand down in targeting her own party. Unlike other veteran Congress members running for reelection, Velazquez didnt face any serious challengers.

4. Robert Mujica

State Budget Director

Brad Trent

With a multibillion-dollar budget hole in need of filling, the tough decisions will be Gov. Andrew Cuomos to make, but state budget director Robert Mujicas to recommend. Mujica, a member of the governors inner circle who has served in the Cuomo administration since 2016, is serving on the MTA board despite failing to comply with a residency requirement that was waived by the state Senate last year.

5. Felix V. Matos Rodriguez

Chancellor, City University of New York

CUNY

As the first Latino chancellor for the City University of New York system, Felix V. Matos Rodriguez reflects the dominant demographics of the systems student body. Presiding over a network comprising 25 campuses and enrollment of more than 275,000 students, Rodriguez has bolstered the economic impact that CUNY schools, particularly Queens College and City College, can generate.

6. Rafael Salamanca Jr.

New York City Council Member

Celeste Sloman

As the chair of the powerful New York City Council Land Use Committee, Rafael Salamanca Jr. has pumped the brakes on rezoning projects across New York City, including the Southern Boulevard rezoning project in the South Bronx, much to the chagrin of Mayor Bill de Blasio. The former Bronx Community Board 2 district manager has impressed colleagues enough that hes being considered for council speaker; he would be the first Bronxite to hold the post.

7. Betty Rosa

Interim Commissioner, State Education Department

Ali Garber

As chancellor of the state Board of Regents, Betty Rosa was in the thick of the back-and-forth over the education funding formula during budget negotiations, legislation to ease school discipline policies and the possibility of banning vape use by teens. Now, as New York grapples with how to start the fall semester during the coronavirus pandemic, the former principal and administrator has taken on a new role as interim state education commissioner.

8. Eric Gonzalez

Brooklyn District Attorney

Brooklyn District Attorney's Office

Eric Gonzalez rose through the ranks of the Brooklyn district attorneys office to become the first Latino district attorney elected in the state in 2017, but he began implementing initiatives well before then. In 2014, Gonzalez rolled out the Conviction Review Unit that has so far exonerated 28 incarcerated men and women while also easing up on marijuana convictions. Gonzalez now worries bail reform could make Brooklyn more susceptible to crime.

9. Adriano Espaillat

Congress Member

Judy Sanders/Office of the Governor

Adriano Espaillat was among the first members of Congress to call for drafting articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, reflecting the majority of constituents in his Manhattan and Bronx district. The first Dominican American member of Congress, Espaillat has spread his wings more forcefully with the creation of the Northwest Bronx Democrats for Change, which looks to give Dominicans an even more dominant presence in the Bronx.

10. Raul Perea-Henze

New York City Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services

Dr. Raul Perea-Henze had been deputy mayor for health and human services for less than six months when COVID-19 stormed New York City. But the Obama administration veteran, whos credited with coordinating early efforts in the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, has risen to the challenge, marshaling his experience at the federal level to get much-needed resources in the fight against the virus.
Lewis Hamilton wants Pirelli to create better tyres for Formula 1.

At Silverstone recently, the six-time world champion won the race with only three tyres intact, following a spate of wear issues among the field.

And then in Barcelona, he won again but only after carefully managing tyre wear by reducing his pace.

"Right now we're doing a lot of management and I don't think the fans want that," Hamilton is quoted as saying by motorsport-magazin.com.

"It's not what the drivers want either. Looking ahead, we really have to put a lot of pressure on Pirelli."

Hamilton says F1 had to push ahead with the 2019 tyres this year because Pirelli "didn't do a great job" developing the rejected new tyres for 2020.

"We need a better tyre that offers us more grip, better safety and that enables us to deliver better racing for the fans," said the Mercedes driver.

Hamilton says the drivers also want to be part of that process.

"We want to help Pirelli make a better tyre, if they can," he said.

(GMM)
First Missile Fired At Ukrainian Plane Did Not Kill Passengers, Iran Civil Aviation Chief Says

Radio Farda, Maryam Sinaiee August 23, 2020

Iran's Civil Aviation Organization Head Touraj Dehghani-Zanganeh says analysis of the data and cockpit talk from the Ukrainian jet shot down by Revolutionary Guard missiles on January 8, 2020 shows the passengers and the crew were not harmed for at least 19 seconds before the second missile hit the plane.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Dehghani-Zanganeh said the data retrieved from the two flight recorders in France shows that the two missiles fired at the plane made contact at 25 seconds apart.

According to Dehghani-Zanganeh, the cockpit voice and data continued to be recorded for 19 seconds after the impact of the first missile explosion, during which time the passengers were alive and the cabin crew who realized the "unnormal situation" tried to navigate the plane until the last minute.

The first missile explosion caused serious damage to the plane, Dehghani-Zanganeh said and added that the damage to the plane's electronic system stopped the flight records after 19 seconds.

Iran at first denied any involvement in the crash, but after three days when overwhelming evidence emerged showing the plane had been shot down, the Revolutionary Guard claimed it was "an accident due to human error" and that the operator of the missile had fired without having orders from his superiors.

Iran also refused to hand over the flight recordings to other countries that could decode the contents for more than six months, after which they were finally surrendered and sent to France for decoding and analysis.

Dehghani-Zanganeh announced that the data from the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder decoded in France has been provided to the other countries whose citizens lost their lives in the crash to offer their own "safety and technical analyses."

He stressed that the data analysis from the flight recorders should not be used for political purposes, and called on all the parties involved to refrain from analyses or use of the data for purposes other than "[contribution to flight] safety measure."

"We assure all the airlines that used the Iranian airspace in the past and are not using it now, as well as those countries that are now using it, that flying in Iran's airspace will be safe and secure," Dehghani-Zanganeh promised.

The announcement has added to the emotional ordeal of the families of the victims, who have been asking on social media why a second missile was fired at the plane, 25 seconds after the first, if it was fired by the operator "mistaking the plane for a cruise missile."

The families of the victims, among others, have asked on social media whether the lives of their loved ones, who were not harmed before the second missile hit the plane, could have been saved, with tweets circulating asking why it had to be fired.

Hamed Esmaeilion, who lost his wife and young daughter in the incident and represents and association of the families of the victims, has called the Civil Aviation Organization's "a shameful performance." In a Facebook post, Mr. Esmaeilion has said that the new information reveals that the crew were alive before the second missile struck and wanted to return to the airport.

"He urge all the safety organizations involved in this case, Boeing and all involved countries to put an end, as soon as possible, to the psychological war waged against the families of the victims," he wrote, urging the involved countries to defend the right of the families of the victims to be present in all stages of the investigation. "After eight months, we no longer can endure such bullying, mean and baseless statements."

Meanwhile, in a tweet on Saturday Sina Rabiei, a student of Tehran University, said Branch 24 of the Revolutionary Guard has sentenced him to three years in prison for "assembly and collusion to act against national security" for participating in the protests that followed the plane crash.

In the past few months the Judiciary has sentenced at least 20 others to prison for participating in the protests in various cities.

Source: https://en.radiofarda.com/a/first-missile- fired-at-ukrainian-plane-did-not-kill-passengers-iran -civil-aviation-chief-says/30798356.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Iraq said it would cut its oil production by another 400,000 barrels per day in both August and September to compensate for its overproduction in the past three months.

Iraq oil minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar said in a joint statement with his Saudi counterpart Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman that Iraq's output cut was in addition to the 850,000 bpd it had committed to cut in August and September under an OPEC+ supply pact.

The total reduction to Iraq's production in August and September will amount to 1.25 million bpd for each month.

"The reduction could be adjusted when the six secondary sources publish their production figures," the joint statement said, referring to oil industry data providers such as the International Energy Agency.

The two ministers stressed their full commitment to an OPEC+ deal curbing oil production.

Abdul Jabbar confirmed Iraq's firm commitment to the OPEC+ agreement, adding that Iraq would reach 100% conformity by the beginning of August.

The two ministers discussed in a phone call the latest developments in the oil markets, continued recovery in global demand and progress made towards implementing the OPEC+ agreement.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies, known as OPEC+, began a record supply cut in May to bolster oil prices hammered by the coronavirus crisis.

OPEC and allies led by Russia, known as OPEC+, agreed to cut output by 9.7 million bpd, or around 10% of global output, from May 1, and to taper off the cuts to 7.7 million bpd from August.

In July, OPEC delivered 5.743 million bpd of its share of the cuts, equal to 94% compliance, a Reuters survey found.

Iraq agreed to cut output by 1.06 million bpd under the deal.

The Saudi and Iraqi energy ministers said efforts made by OPEC+ member states would enhance the stability of global oil markets, accelerate its balancing and send positive signals to the markets, the statement said.

OPEC oil output rose by more than 1 million bpd in July as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf members ended their voluntary extra curbs on top of the OPEC-led deal, and other members made limited progress on compliance.
MUMBAI: Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials on Monday (August 24) visited Mumbai-based Waterstone Resort where Sushant Singh Rajput is said to have spent two months, and also continued the questioning of the actor's friend Siddharth Pithani and cook Neeraj Singh at the DRDO guest house here.

Rajput's accountant Rajat Mewati was also called on Monday for questioning at the DRDO guest house at Kalina in Santacruz. The agency had on Saturday and Sunday too questioned Pithani, Neeraj and Rajput's domestic help Deepesh Sawant. These three were present in Rajput's house at Mont Blanc Apartments in suburban Bandra when the 34-year-old actor was found hanging in his room on June 14.

As per reports, the agency questioned them about the behaviour of Sushant after his break-up with girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty and whether she took financial and professional decisions for Sushant, and if she was really keeping the late actor away from his family. They were also questioned as to why they did not call the police immediately after they saw the actor dead in his room, and why they had brought down the body without waiting for the arrival of the police.

A CBI team visited the Cooper Hospital, where Sushant's autopsy was done, and asked them about the conditions in which the autopsy was carried and who all from the late actor's family were present in the hospital at that time, sources told IANS. The CBI team also questioned the doctors as to why there was no mention of the time of death in the autopsy reports.

The autopsy of Sushant was done on June 15, a day after he was found dead at his Bandra residence.

Sources said that Rhea would also be questioned about the details of Sushant's treatment and why she fired his staff. Below are some of the questions that CBI may ask to Rhea.

* When and why did you leave Sushant's house?

* Was money transferred from Sushant's account to yours?

* Did you give medicines to Sushant?

* What did your doctor say about Sushant?

* Did you go to Cooper Hospital?

* Did you go to the post-mortem house?

* What information did you share with Mahesh Bhatt?

* Did you hire or sack any of Sushant's staff?

* Did Sushant ever spend money on any of your family members?

* How was your relationship with Sushant?

* Did you recommend Sushant to stay at Waterstone Resort?

Sources said that before questioning Rhea in connection with Sushant death case, the CBI wants to get a thorough inquiry on all aspects related to the actor; and hence has been continuously questioning Pithani and Neeraj.
To the Times:

Although Im a man whos gay, I believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Therefore, I oppose same-sex marriage. A brief article in Our Sunday Visitor (July 19-25 edition) noted startling news from Somerville, Mass . On June 25, council members unanimously approved legal domestic relations between two or more adults. These are known as polyamorus relationships.

Without meaning to paint all people in Massachusetts with a broad brush, the state is generally socially liberal. For instance, in 2004, the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, even before the U. S. Supreme Court did nationwide. Although Im a pro-life moderate Republican, I consider myself to be politically liberal on at least several issues. I oppose capital punishment, favor stringent gun control laws, support reasonable laws to protect our environment, and favor increased government programs to assist the millions of Americans in need. So, I dont really consider the Somerville law to be liberal, but a misguided distortion of marriage.

Should we really be surprised that since the definition of marriage has been changed, that further changes would occur, which in my view are wrong? I happened to recall this opinion about the views of some members of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and did an internet search. According to the Washington Times (Aug. 12, 1997), Joyce Price wrote that current and past members of the Utah NOW chapter, quoted in Womens Quarterly, said they saw no reason why the national organization would not support polygamy. At least those who favored polygamy said those involved in such relationships should be consenting adults.

Luci Malin, then the vice-chairperson of Utah NOW, said, If NOW is about anything, its about choice. Sadly, NOW, which in some commendable respects favors equality for women, favors the violence of legal abortion, even for sex-selection reasons. There is evidence that sex-selection abortions, ironically, are generally performed on unborn baby girls.

Finally, a gay rights news source that I found noted that this distorted view of marriage may spread. The source asserted that Somerville councilman J. T. Scott, said that legislators from other cities and states had already called him asking how they could pass similar laws. I hope the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Somerville law.

Tim Donovan, Prospect Park
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 20:03:16|Editor: huaxia

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BEIRUT, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Lebanese President Michel Aoun urged on Monday Carmela Godeau, regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), to assist Lebanon in the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland.

"We urge IOM to assist in the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland as the explosions of Beirut's port left 300,000 citizens homeless and Lebanon already suffers from several issues and problems," Aoun was quoted as saying by a statement issued by the presidency.

Aoun's remarks came during his meeting with Godeau at Baabda Palace.

Meanwhile, Godeau told Aoun that 120,000 Syrians were sent to foreign countries and there exist 3,000 applications by Syrian refugees asking to be naturalized in foreign countries.

"We will continue our efforts to look into applications of Syrian refugees who asked to be transferred to other countries," she said.

Godeau added that she has launched an appeal to help 50,000 people impacted by the explosions that rocked Beirut's port on Aug. 4.

The flow of Syrian refugees to Lebanon has weighed heavily on the country's economy and infrastructure, prompting Lebanese officials to urge the international community for support in guaranteeing the return of refugees.

More than 1 million Syrian refugees are registered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Lebanon, while the Lebanese government estimated the true number of Syrians in the country at 1.5 million. Enditem
Head of Psychology of the University of Ghana, Prof. Joseph Osafo has lauded President Nana Akufo-Addo over his promise to grant students loans and also establish a National Rental Assistance Scheme (NRAS) to enable young Ghanaians to rent affordable apartments.



Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, during the 2020 Manifesto Launch of the ruling New Patriotic Party, noted that this promise will be fulfilled in President Akufo-Addo's next administration.



"It is very key to note that the link between tertiary education and economic development is very, very strong. Countries which have high tertiary enrollment rate, have much higher levels of economic development...One of the problems in getting access to tertiary education in Ghana is affordability...All tertiary students except teacher and nursing trainees who will be on allowances, all tertiary students will now be able to get the option to obtain a student loan without the requirement of a guarantor.



"The current scheme asks for guarantors and you know a lot of people are not willing to put their pensions on line so the students are not able to access it. So you don't need a guarantor, all you need is your national ID card that is all," he said.



Portions of the manifesto further read; ''In the second term of the NPP Government, there will be a greater emphasis on housing delivery... In partnership with the private sector, the Scheme will provide low-interest loans to eligible Ghanaians to enable them pay rent advance. These loans will be repaid on a monthly basis to match the tenor of the rent, and will be insured to ensure sustainability. Government will seed the Scheme with GH100 million which will be leveraged to crowdin additional investment from the private sector.



"The Scheme will target individuals (both in the formal and informal sectors) with identifiable and regular income. The rent advance loans will be paid directly into the bank accounts of landlords, who would have to register with the Scheme'."



Addressing the NPP promises, Prof. Joseph Osafo recounted many people end up in mental hospital due to loss of jobs and their inability to find shelter, hence the need for a government to bridge the gap.



"The loss of job is about four times likely for a person to commit suicide," he said.



To him, should the government implement its rental and loan schemes, it will help to alleviate mental health problems in the country.



''Interventions that will ameliorate this situation is very important. The government's interventions in this regard, I think, it'll be very helpful to contribute towards easing the mental health distress'', he stated on ''Kokrokoo'' on Peace FM.



He called on Ghanaians to support the Akufo-Addo government saying ''once there is a government doing some good work, we are obliged to support it to let it work''.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Inc. magazine announced Ideas Collide on its annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies, making it the fastest growing marketing agency in Scottsdale, Arizona. The custom-marketing agency ranked No. 3037 on the list that represents the most successful companies within the American economys most dynamic segmentindependent small businesses.

I am extremely honored to be included on the Inc. 5000 list for the first time, Ideas Collide President + Founder Matthew Clyde said. The core of our business formula is to give to our team, give to our clients, and give to our community. This recognition validates the tremendous efforts and innovation delivered by our team, Clyde shared. In my view, the unique investment we make in giving first is directly connected to our outstanding business performance.

Not only have the companies on the 2020 Inc. 5000 list been extremely competitive within their markets, but the list as a whole shows staggering growth compared with prior lists as well. The 2020 Inc. 5000 achieved an incredible three-year average growth of over 500 percent, and a median rate of 165 percent. The Inc. 5000s aggregate revenue was $209 billion in 2019, accounting for over 1 million jobs over the past three years.

Our commitment to new emerging marketing technology, developing culture focused brands from the inside-out and enriching the customer journey both in the B2B and B2C space has been an exciting journey, continued Clyde.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000. The top 500 companies are also being featured in the September issue of Inc., available on newsstands August 12.

The companies on this years Inc. 5000 come from nearly every realm of business, says Inc. editor-in-chief Scott Omelianuk. From health and software to media and hospitality, the 2020 list proves that no matter the sector, incredible growth is based on the foundations of tenacity and opportunism.

About Ideas Collide:

Ideas Collide (IC)  est. 2005; is a strategic marketing communications firm that develops custom marketing solutions that drive action and results. Focused on delivering innovation with business and data intelligence has established Ideas Collide as a highly sought out and unique strategic marketing partner. Bring a business challenge to the table and the IC team will invent and integrate marketing solutions to meet the challenge with impact. The firm is comprised of a strong, diverse group of marketing, design and technology professionals that operate with business acumen, an absence of ego and a collaborative, growth mindset. Ideas Collide offers a full suite of marketing services for local and global clients with offices in Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon. Discover more about the IC marketing portfolio, culture and team at ideascollide.com.

CONTACT:

Claudia Kunkel | Public Relations Specialist

claudia@ideascollide.com

480.220.5400

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000

Methodology

The 2020 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2019. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2019 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

About Inc. Media

The worlds most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.

For more information on the Inc. 5000 Conference, visit http://conference.inc.com/.
A massive cluster of fires burning across several counties including Sonoma, Napa and Solano became the second largest in California history Sunday, as firefighters and residents braced for a potential new round of lightning storms that could bring wind gusts and spark new blazes across Northern California.

The LNU Lightning Complex is one of three groups of wildfires that are spreading through dry fields and forests and threatening communities in and around the Bay Area. Firefighters have had a difficult time containing the unprecedented siege of blazes sparked a week ago during a round of thunderstorms that brought lightning but little rain amid a record-setting heat wave.

A group of fires raging in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and several other counties, the SCU Lightning Complex, became the third largest in state history and prompted new evacuations overnight Saturday and warnings for parts of Fremont, Pleasanton and Livermore.

South and west of there, the CZU Lightning Complex slowed somewhat in its push through the Santa Cruz Mountains. But it remained within striking distance of several small towns, including Boulder Creek.

Tens of thousands have been evacuated and hundreds of homes burned, and four have died in the Bay Area. The fires were sending smoke into Bay Area cities, making for some of the worst air quality the region has seen. Many parks were closed Sunday because of the smoke, another disruption for Bay Area residents already cooped up for months during the coronavirus pandemic.

Conditions early Sunday were calm and favorable to making progress, and Cal Fire officials reported slight increases in containment on several fronts. But they warned that it could take weeks to get control of the blazes. There are too few firefighters and not enough equipment to handle this many fires of this magnitude simultaneously.

Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle

Cal Fire representatives said that the LNU, which stands for Lake Napa Unit and has burned 347,630 acres in Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Solano counties, and was 21% contained by Sunday evening.

Were going to be here for a while: weeks and possibly longer, Cal Fire Unit Chief Shana Jones said at a Yolo County news conference Sunday afternoon. Right behind the LNU in size is the SCU Lightning Complex  which had burned more than 340,000 acres of Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties.

Either or both could soon surpass the Mendocino Complex fires, which burned swaths of Mendocino, Lake, Colusa and Glenn counties in September 2018, was contained at 459,000 acres, having destroyed 280 structures.

Between these fires that are rimming the Bay Area in a giant pincer move, Cal Fire was spread so thin that local departments in Yolo County had to start the fight before Cal Fire could free up its own crews.

As Cal Fires unit chief, I dont remember a time that this occurred, Jones said.

Alameda County had largely been spared from evacuation orders until Sunday morning, when the SCU Lightning Complex got closer to homes in the foothills east of Fremont and south of Livermore.

The evacuations orders spread as 25 mph wind gusts picked up in the evening. Firefighter Ryan Cramer, who has been working the SCU fire since Tuesday, said his crew cant help but feel spread thin because of a lack of air support and too few engines as California battles a host of fires simultaneously.

Its just a large expansive area, and not the normal amount of resources, Cramer, 44, said. These fires are growing, and growing and growing.

Late Sunday afternoon, Cal Fire was trying to bolster its forces by hiring as many volunteer, military or out-of-region firefighters and equipment as possible ahead of Sunday nights expected thunderstorm.

This is absolutely instrumental: If there are any cooperators out there that we have not reached out to or have slipped through the cracks, get to the Alameda County Fairgrounds to our 10 oclock cooperators meeting, Cal Fire unit chief Jake Hess said. This is going to be a very long-term incident  and our troops are exhausted.

Also burning out of control but slowing slightly Sunday was the CZU Lightning Complex in coastal San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, which had burned 71,000 acres and was 8% contained. A number of communities remained under threat.

Im definitely nervous about my shop, said Justin Acton, 36, the owner of Boulder Creek Pizza & Pub, who had evacuated from his home in Ben Lomond to Santa Cruz. I keep looking at the fire on the map and see it getting closer and closer.

Already, though, with at least 129 homes destroyed by the CZU fires as of Sunday morning and more burning throughout the day, things wont be the same for area residents. As many as three of Actons employees dont have houses to go back to.

Theres going to be some change, Acton said. Im hoping that the core of the community stays here, but this was a big thing and it could really shake some people out.

Officials on Sunday announced the CZUs first known fatality. The victim was found in a remote area of Last Chance Road just southwest of Big Basin Redwoods State Park.

Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle

Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Chief Deputy Chris Clark said it took a helicopter to retrieve the remains.

I dont want to be standing up here, nor does our office want to be recovering people that are victims of fire, Clark said at a news briefing. We got into this job to help people. ... I think its one of the darkest periods weve been in with this fire.

CZU officials later in the day issued a list of evacuation warnings for the western region of Santa Clara County, including ones for Foothills Park and the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve.

Nowhere was the battle line drawn as heavily as in western Sonoma County, where Guerneville on the Russian River had been evacuated while nearby Healdsburg had not.

The normally touristy wine town was mostly quiet Sunday afternoon, the presence of fire indicated only by the smoky haze in the air and the sound of helicopters whirring overhead as they shuttled water to the Walbridge Fire, part of the LNU complex, to the west of town.

That calm stood in stark contrast to fire hot spots just miles outside of town where residents have been evacuated with homes and property burned and ash still falling like fresh snow. On Mill Creek Road, a short drive out of town, small fires still poured from destroyed tree stumps and smoke billowed out of the ground as if coming from the earth itself.

Helicopters swung low over the road to a nearby property to fill huge buckets of water and immediately head back to the fire, making dozens of trips. Some structures have been badly damaged by the fires along Mill Creek Road, with vehicles and other abandoned belongings blackened and charred.

The firefight was also raging further north near Lake Sonoma, where the hilly terrain is blanketed with smoke like thick fog. The area was also closed to public access and a deserted Lake Sonoma Bridge stretched across the water seemingly into smoky nothingness.

On a ridge overlooking the lake, a team of Cal Fire firefighters were resting in a parking lot stained pink and red with fire retardant from aerial tankers after coming off a 24-hour shift. They said good progress had been made protecting some homes nearby, but some areas near the lake would likely still burn. That area is mostly seeing flareups during the afternoons when the sun heats vegetation and some of their recent work has involved hiking the hillsides near the lake to out spot fires before they could spread further, the firefighters said.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag fire warning starting at 5 a.m. Sunday through 5 p.m. Monday, and while weather service forecasters said the thunderstorms would probably begin early Sunday evening and potentially last until early Monday, the lightning strikes were not expected to be as severe as last weekend.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District extended its Spare the Air alert through Wednesday. Air quality is expected to be unhealthy, with the heaviest impacts in the East Bay and Santa Clara Valley, according to the agency.

By Sunday afternoon, air quality in Pleasanton and Livermore reached levels considered hazardous, the worst rating in the Bay Area so far in this smoke siege year far. Air quality in Concord, Vallejo, Napa, San Rafael and San Pablo reached very unhealthy levels, and it was unhealthy in several other areas.

Even San Francisco, insulated from the fires, was smoky Sunday morning. At the Fort Mason Center Farmers Market, everybody was masked up and shoppers could barely make out Marin County to the north. By midday, a golden haze had covered the city, suggesting late autumn, not mid-summer.

But an onshore flow of ocean air had been starting and stopping and shortly after noon, there seemed to be a positive development when the first forlorn foghorn finally blew on the Golden Gate Bridge.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Rusty Simmons contributed to this report.

Sam Whiting, Kurtis Alexander, Chase DiFeliciantonio and Rusty Simmons are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com, kalexander@sfchronicle.com, chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.com, rsimmons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF, @kurtisalexander, @ChaseDiFelice, @Rusty_SFChron
An independent investigation has been launched into bullying allegations in the Defence Forces cadet school at the Curragh camp in Kildare.

The probe was initiated after a protected disclosure was made by someone working in the school.

The disclosure was made to former defence minister Paul Kehoe, who appointed a senior counsel to examine the complaints.

The allegations were not made by a cadet, but rather a more senior officer who was concerned about the treatment of new recruits.

The former minister ordered an independent investigation into the claims in his last week in office.

The terms of reference for the investigation were drafted by Department of Defence officials and a senior counsel was appointed to oversee the review of the allegations.

Generally, similar allegations are investigated internally by military personnel and an independent probe is seen as a significant development.

The Department of Defence, which is currently part of Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney's portfolio, confirmed an investigation.

"The minister has appointed a senior counsel to review matters pertaining to the conduct of training in the cadet school," a department spokesperson said.

"The review is under way and therefore the matters remain confidential. The minister has no further comment to make," she added.

The Defence Forces also confirmed an investigation is in progress.

"The Defence Forces can confirm that the Minister for Defence has appointed a senior counsel to review a matter pertaining to the cadet school," a spokesperson said.

"Given that the review is ongoing it would be inappropriate to comment further."

Mr Kehoe declined to comment when contacted.

The exact details of the investigation are unclear but it is believed to relate to how new cadets are being treated.

The Defence Forces website says the cadet school's aim is to prepare recruits "morally, mentally and physically" for their role as leaders in the Irish Army. It says it will imbue students with the Defence Forces' "values of respect, loyalty, selflessness, physical courage, moral courage and integrity".

The website also states: "The objective of the course, [which is] the development of leaders of character and competence, is reflected in the concept of developing the whole person.

"This concept requires the provision of the opportunity for increasing self-confidence, inculcating pride in achievement, developing physical and mental endurance, and providing a foundation for intellectual growth."

It is not the first time bullying allegations have been made within the Defence Forces.

Three years ago it was reported that the Defence Forces investigated 10 cases of bullying and sexual harassment of its members within a two-year period.

Between 2014 and September 2017, seven complaints of bullying were made by staff, while three sexual harassment complaints were recorded by the military police.
Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro threatened to punch a reporter on Sunday after he was asked about payments into his wife's bank account.

'I want to punch you in the face, OK?', Bolsonaro replied to a journalist from the newspaper O Globo, according to audio released by the daily.

Reports claim that an aide to the president's son deposited 9,800 in cheques into first lady Michelle Bolsonaro's account, in a case which has dogged the family.

Soon after Bolsonaro's outburst, the newspaper issued a statement condemning his 'aggression' towards a journalist who was 'carrying out a job in a professional manner'.

Outburst: Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro (right) threatened to punch a reporter for asking about payments to his wife Michelle (left)

Such intimidation 'shows that Jair Bolsonaro does not acknowledge the duty of a public servant ... to be accountable to the public,' the statement said.

Brazilian media reported earlier this month that the Bolsonaro aide, Fabricio Queiroz, had deposited the money between 2011 and 2018.

Queiroz was an aide to now-senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the president's eldest son, when he was a Rio de Janeiro state legislator.

The former aide is under arrest in an investigation into bank deposits made at the time amounting to 1.2million reais (163,000).

Queiroz and Flavio Bolsonaro are under investigation for a scheme that allegedly swindled pay from government employees in the years before the elder Bolsonaro became president in January 2019.

The first lady has said nothing about the case.

Questions about Queiroz have continued to hound the Bolsonaro family in an investigation that has appeared to annoy the president.

Anger at corruption among Brazil's elite was partly what propelled Bolsonaro to victory in the 2018 election.

Bolsonaro was surrounded by supporters on Sunday (pictured) while visiting the residence of an adviser in the capital Brasilia

The Globo reporter was part of a group that met Bolsonaro after his regular Sunday visit to the Metropolitan Cathedral in Brasilia.

The president ignored protests from other journalists after the remarks and left without making further comments.

Bolsonaro has also been under pressure over his dismissive handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Brazil has piled up more than 3.6million infections and 114,000 deaths, the second-highest totals in the world after the United States.

The former army captain has played down the virus as a 'little flu' and raged against the lockdowns which many regional leaders imposed against his will.

Like his ally Donald Trump, Bolsonaro has also touted the use of the unproven anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19.

Bolsonaro, 65, spent more than two weeks in quarantine after contracting the virus in early July before later announcing he had tested negative.
When you work for a con man, you may believe that the con is the job, and might soon enough become a member of a club that few would willingly wish to join: call it Convicted and Indicted Associates of the Guy at the Top.

And so it is for Steve Bannon, the onetime head of Donald Trumps presidential campaign, who was arrested last week in connection with a plan to raise private money to build a wall on our nations border with Mexico. You know, the one that Trump long promised Mexico would pay for.

The border wall, it should go without saying, was always a foolish notion. No one who was thinking clearly ever believed that it would be built. Or that it was necessary. Or that it would be paid for by Mexico.

But there were plenty of folks who weren't thinking clearly, obviously. Which helps explain the so-called We Build the Wall campaign, a venture to get people to pony up money to construct a wall. Yes, a privately funded, privately built border wall. What could possibly go wrong?

The charges against Bannon allege that he funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars from that fundraising effort to himself. Three others were also involved in defrauding the account, authorities assert.

It's tempting to suggest that those who'd give money to such an obviously dubious enterprise got only what they deserved when the operation proved to be less than promised.

Consider this: Bannon headed Trumps campaign for a time, and then served in the White House, briefly. A predecessor at the top of the campaign, Paul Manafort, was convicted of tax and bank fraud as well as conspiracy against the United States. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. And his predecessor, Corey Lewandowski, had his own legal difficulties. He was arrested and charged with misdemeanor battery after a female reporter alleged that he had grabbed her arm. Though the charges were dropped, video evidence confirmed her claim.

Sensing a trend?

It's long been clear that Trump sees his time in the White House as a golden opportunity -- to boost the family business. And along the way, it's been increasingly obvious that there've been many in his orbit who are looking for a piece of the action themselves.

The movie could be called The Mob Boss & His Grifters.
Mumbai: At least 100 people are feared trapped in the debris of a five-storey building that collapsed on Monday in an industrial town in western India, a politician said.

Not all the roughly 200 residents of the building in Mahad, about 165 kilometres south of India's financial capital Mumbai, were at home when it crumbled in the evening, Bharatshet Maruti Gogawale, the local politician, said.

Rescue workers look for survivors after the residential building collapsed in Mahad. Credit:AP

"I believe about 100 to 125 people must have been inside at the time of its collapse," Gogawale, who was present at the site, told Reuters.

The building comprised around 47 flats, according to the police department of western Maharashtra state.
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Sao Paulo, Brazil  Mon, August 24, 2020 07:00 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066fe96c8 2 World Brazil,Jair-Bolsonaro,aggression Free

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday threatened to punch a reporter repeatedly in the mouth after being asked about his wife's links to an alleged corruption scheme.

"I so want to pound your mouth with punches," the far-right president said when a reporter from O Globo, posed the question.

The reporter was part of a group that met Bolsonaro after his regular Sunday visit to the Metropolitan Cathedral in Brasilia. The president ignored protests from other journalists after the remarks and left without making further comments.

The O Globo reporter asked about a report in the magazine Crusoe linking First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro to Fabricio Queiroz, a retired police officer, friend of the president, and former adviser to her son Flavio Bolsonaro, who is now a senator.

Queiroz and Flavio Bolsonaro are under investigation for a scheme that allegedly swindled pay from government employees when the younger Bolsonaro was a regional lawmaker in Rio de Janeiro, and before Jair Bolsonaro became president in January 2019.

According to the magazine, Queiroz deposited funds in Michelle Bolsonaro's bank account between 2011 and 2016.

The first lady has said nothing about the case.

Soon after the president's outburst O Globo issued a statement repudiating his "aggression ... towards a journalist from our newspaper that was carrying out his job in a professional manner."

Such intimidation "shows that Jair Bolsonaro does not acknowledge the duty of a public servant ... to be accountable to the public."
Ryanair has said it will hold its annual general meeting (AGM) of shareholders on September 17, unless fresh Covid restrictions interfere with the plan.

In a notice to the stock market, the airline said its AGM will be held in the City North Hotel and Conference Centre, Gormanston, Co. Meath, at on Thursday, September 17.

However, shareholders were warned that the numbers who will be able attend in person will be restricted and are encouraged to instead submit forms of proxy to ensure they can vote without being physically present.

There will be limited ability to facilitate attendance in person, the AGM will be as brief as possible, observing social distancing measures; the venue will be vacated promptly after the AGM and refreshments will not be provided, the company said.

Shareholders were also warned that if it is not possible to hold the AGM in compliance with public health guidelines or applicable law the event may be adjourned or postponed.

The documents circulated ahead of the planned AGM reiterate the airlines warning of the risk of a hard Brexit.

In light of ongoing uncertainty about the negotiation of the future trading relationship between the EU and the UK, we continue to plan for a hard Brexit to occur on December 31, 2020, the airline said.

If that happens Ryanair has previously warned that UK based shareholders will lose their voting rights in the company and would in future only be able to sell their shares to EU nationals.
But frustration and anger over how Black people are treated by police who seem to think they can act with impunity are understandable. Police were apparently responding to a domestic disturbance, and Mr. Blake, according to witnesses, was trying to break up a fight when the incident turned lethal. A video by a bystander shows Mr. Blake, wearing a white tank top and black shorts and appearing to be unarmed, walking around the front of an SUV with two officers a step or two behind him; at least one of them has his gun trained on Mr. Blakes back. As Mr. Blake enters the drivers side, one officer grabs the tail of his tank top and at least half a dozen shots can be heard. Numerous people can be heard yelling and a woman standing nearby jumps up and down in anguish. Inside the car were three children  ages 3, 5 and 8.
UNIVERSITY of Limerick, Limerick Institute of Technology and Mary Immaculate College are to share over 500,000 in student supports.

Minister for State at the Department of Further and Higher Education, Niall Collins has announced a comprehensive financial package of 5 million to support students wellbeing and mental health. UL is to receive 258,000; 176,000 for LIT and 100,000 for Mary I.

The minister said the significant funding increase comes at a time of great urgency around student support and re-opening planning for the next academic year. It reflects the original 2 million funding for student mental health and wellbeing allocated to higher education for 2020 along with a further 3 million as a response to Covid-19.

The funding will be used to recruit additional student counsellors and additional assistant psychologists.

It will also go towards implementation of the Framework for Consent in HEIs; Safe, Respectful, Supportive and Positive: Ending Sexual Harassment in Irish Higher Education Institutions. And implementation of the soon to be published National Student Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Framework.

The HEA will be contacting higher education institutions in the coming week setting out individual allocations and the conditions attaching to the use of these funds in support of student services, student wellbeing and mental health.

Minister Collins said the number one health issue for young people in Ireland today is concerns or worries around their mental health.

"These concerns have been compounded by the isolation and uncertainly brought forward by the Covid-19 pandemic. For students, the college experience has been different this year from ever before. Students have had to adjust to remote learning and carried out without face to face support from their college or their peers.

"For these reasons, I have sought to support student counselling services, key mental health interventions and the provision of a safe, respectful, supportive and positive environment in our higher education institutions. This will help us support students as they return to college in this Covid world," said Minister Collins.

Commenting on the announcement, Dr Alan Wall, chief executive officer, HEA said this additional support, being provided by the minister, is a welcome boost to a higher education sector that enrols in the region of 55,000 new students each year.

"These young and not-so-young students engage in higher education at a sometimes-challenging time of change and progression in their lives. This is a sizeable proportion of our population, and while our health and community services work to support everyone, there can be environmentally specific or transitional issues that arise for both current and new students in higher education.

We will be encouraging institutional leaders to use these new resources to foreground student supports, to build on existing capacity, and to provide better bridges between the various service providers locally, regionally and nationally," said Dr Wall.
If Prashant Bhushan were to be allowed to go scot-free, it would open the floodgates for abuse of the courts, argues Virendra Kapoor.

IMAGE: The Supreme Court of India.

One thing is clear. If the Supreme Court were to heed the incessant media campaign to protect Prashant Bhushan from punishment in the contempt of court case, it would allow him to go scot-free.

No doubt about that.

And, two, allowing the advocate, who seems to have made a career out of running down judges, to go unpunished even after his conviction, encourages others to follow his example -- and try and seek martyrdom and its concomitant celebrity-hood.

The question which public intellectuals, members of the Bar and others keen to save Bhushan from being punished for his tweets is this: Would they have bothered if a little-known lawyer, without the luxury of an anti-Modi media eating out of his hands tweeted but not half as scurrilous tweets as Bhushan's decidedly are, were to be so dealt with by the Supreme Court? We doubt very much.

It is not without significance that the campaigners defending the indefensible Bhushan completely skirt around the actual tweets which have landed him in trouble.

In fact, it is a huge surprise that the Supreme Court did not haul up Bhushan for his earlier claim about '16 former chief justices'.

That was a frontal assault on the dignity and public standing of the court.

If it did not lower the prestige of the highest court in the land in the eyes of the public, nothing else will.

Yet, the court after scheduling a preliminary hearing, deferred the case indefinitely.

It was expected that it would show despatch in defending the honour of its former heads.

The court is still dragging its feet, unwilling to take that particular contempt of court case to its logical conclusion.

As for the two tweets, which have led to Bhushan'S conviction, there is no doubt that no sensible person with due regard for our Constitutional institutions would seek to drag down the higher judiciary to the marketplace for people to abuse it.

But those most arrogantly offering gratuitous advice and reading aloud civics lessons to the judges must ponder for a moment if their actions do not aid and abet a lawyer who has made it a habit to abuse the judiciary every time he fails to get his way.

Pontificating about the founding principles of the Republic and how the courts were supposed to be a bulwark of the citizens's freedoms does not square with the defence of a serial offender who has never hesitated in traducing the highest court in the land.

IMAGE: Activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan.

Of course, it is not hard to fathom Bhushan's personal motive for refusing to make amends even when given the opportunity.

He wants to burnish his self-assumed image as a lone warrior against alleged wrong-doing in the higher rungs of the judiciary.

Consider his statement while refusing to apologise where he talks of this 'moment of history' and his 'responsibility to the future'.

So long as such delusions of grandeur did not pull down a Constitutional institution, which has survived the test of over seven decades, to the level of the street, making it vulnerable to contempt and ridicule by the aam aadmi, it remains Bhushan's personal matter.

But when it crosses the Lakshmanrekha, as it certainly did in the impugned tweets the court hauled him up for, it becomes a matter of grave public interest and deserves to be punished lest it instigate others to throw stones at the top court.

Remember that more than any other institution, courts while dispensing justice rely heavily on precedents, on earlier case law.

If Bhushan were to be allowed to go scot-free, it would open the floodgates for abuse of the courts at every tier of the judicial system.

In this context, we recall a case of contempt tried by the Delhi high court a few years ago.

A newly-launched magazine did a cover story on what it called the integrity quotient of Delhi high court judges.

It polled lawyers to gauge the financial honesty of sitting judges on a scale of one to ten.

The contempt of court case that followed the publication not only resulted in the magazine's editor and its publisher offering an abject apology, but eventually in the magazine's premature demise.

Which brings one to a question for the media warriors now expending a lot of editorial space in the defence of the lawyer who in his own words seeks to make history.

Would anyone have said in so many words what Bhushan said about the former chief justices of India?

Would they have expected to go unscathed if they had excoriated the incumbent CJI on the basis of a mere photograph of him sitting on a parked Harley Davidson?

Defend Bhushan by all means, but at least don't abandon a sense of balance, a sense of perspective in completely glossing over the offensive tweets which without an iota of doubt lower the standing of the highest court in the land in the eyes of the lay public.

And in the end, how the ordinary men and women view the court is all that should matter the most.

However, if Bhushan were to be allowed to 'make history', as he says he wants to, the highest court in the land would score a self-goal, affecting its public dignity and honour.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
Iran Envoy: IAEA chief's Tehran visit not related to so-called snapback mechanism

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 3:08 PM

Iran's permanent representative to Vienna-based international organizations says the forthcoming visit to the Islamic Republic by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has nothing to do with the United States' latest effort to use the so-called snapback mechanism to restore UN sanctions against Tehran.

"This visit is not related to the so-called snapback mechanism and does not come at the US' request. The [IAEA chief Rafael] Grossi's trip [to Iran] takes place on the basis of Iran's invitation," Kazem Gharibabadi said in a post on his Instagram account on Sunday.

He added that the UN nuclear agency's chief will arrive in Tehran on Monday and hold talks with Iranian authorities on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Iranian diplomat noted that Tehran's trust in the IAEA has been damaged in recent months, adding that it is necessary that Grossi's visit be aimed at building trust.

"We will not allow other parties to sway relations between Iran and the agency, particularly under the current sensitive circumstances," Gharibabadi said.

"It is important [for the IAEA] to assure Tehran that the agency will act on the basis of three fundamental principles of impartiality, independence and professionalism, and will not go beyond its standard principles as well as its own independent data when dealing with safeguards-related issues," he pointed out.

The UN nuclear agency chief also in a post on his Twitter account on Saturday confirmed his visit to Tehran "for meetings with Iranian authorities."

He said his talks with Iranian officials would focus on "outstanding questions related to safeguards in Iran."

"I hope to establish a fruitful and cooperative channel of direct dialogue. It is necessary," Grossi said.

The visit takes place over two months after the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution on June 19, put forward by Britain, France and Germany  the three European signatories to the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The resolution, the first of its kind since 2012, urges Iran to provide the IAEA inspectors with access to two sites that the trio claims may have been used for undeclared nuclear activities in the early 2000s.

The Islamic Republic rejects any allegations of non-cooperation with the IAEA, insisting that it is prepared to resolve potentially outstanding differences with the nuclear agency.

Immediately after the adoption of the IAEA report, Gharibabadi deplored it and said, "Adoption of this resolution will neither encourage Iran to grant access to the Agency based on fabricated and unfounded allegations, nor will it force Iran to come down from its principal positions."

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Nine out a 10 people in England live in areas that have not seen a Covid-19 case in a month and new lockdowns are not needed, an expert has said.

Professor John Clancy, from Birmingham City University, has warned that fears of another shutdown are based on 'dodgy data.'

Writing in a blog, he said: ''91 per cent of England (that's 51million people) live in neighbourhoods where there hasn't been a recorded Covid-19 case in the last 4 weeks.'

He added: 'So-called 'spikes' are occurring here, there, and everywhere up and down the country because new testing regimes are causing them either with false positives, picking up residual infections or (usually more likely) suddenly increased testing in specific areas.'

It comes as six more people died yesterday after contracting the disease across all settings - including care homes, hospitals and the wider community - bringing the UK's total death toll to 41,429.

Despite the lower death numbers some local areas, such as Birmingham, could be facing local lockdowns and government scientists have warned a large spike in cases could mean another national shutdown.

Professor Clancy, the former leader at Birmingham City Council said that testing regimes are in 'total chaos' and 'all over the place.'

And he said that 'Just in case' lockdowns 'are simply not an acceptable response to dodgy data. And lockdowns cause deaths.'

Professor Clancy, the former leader at Birmingham City Council said that testing regimes are in 'total chaos' and 'all over the place'

Another 1,041 people have tested positive for coronavirus today bringing Britain's total caseload to 325,642

Some six more people have died today after contracting the disease across all settings - including care homes, hospitals and the wider community - bringing the UK's total death toll to 41,429

The former leader of Birmingham City Council added: 'Covid-19 related deaths are the only real reliable figure throughout this pandemic.

'Where a local area is showing a significant increase in deaths, there is a problem that needs national intervention.

'You can't let local officers and politicians who by definition look at very local contexts to over-react. Which is what they have started to do.'

Responding to concerns Birmingham could face a local lockdown he said the city should be 'congratulated not warned' as other cities with a similar population size have fared worse.

He added: 'Looking at the same statistics, as of yesterday, according to the government's own testing figures, 87 of Birmingham's 132 neighbourhoods (called MSOAs by the government) did not record a single tested positive case of Covid-19 in the last week.

'So 716,000 Brummies live in a neighbourhood where there were no positive tests in the last week.'

It comes after another 1,041 people have tested positive for coronavirus today bringing Britain's total caseload to 325,642.

Today's case total - which is one higher than last Sunday's 1,040 - marks another weekend of soaring figures after 1,288 tested positive yesterday and 1,033 on Friday.

Some six more people have died today after contracting the disease across all settings - including care homes, hospitals and the wider community - bringing the UK's total death toll to 41,429.

The government have drawn up battle plans for the possibility of being hit with a second wave of coronavirus and a No-Deal Brexit simultaneously, it has been claimed

Figures released on Sunday are usually smaller due to a delay in processing over the weekend.

Wales has reported two deaths and 20 cases while Scotland has reported no deaths but 83 new cases.

The Scottish total - its highest in three months - spiked by 73 per cent from Friday's total of 71, and experts have blamed an outbreak at the 2 Sisters meat processing plant in Coupar Angus.

In the UK, there were 1,288 new cases yesterday, compared with 1,077 last Saturday.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon described the large number of cases as being 'of concern'.

Today's figures come as leaked documents reveal that the government has drawn up battle plans for the possibility of being hit with a second wave of coronavirus and a No-Deal Brexit simultaneously.

Leaked documents warn of a potential social care crisis from councils going bankrupt and the army being drafted in to prevent public disorder.

Leaked documents warn of a potential social care crisis from councils going bankrupt and the army being drafted in to prevent public disorder

The revelation puts mounting pressure on ministers to negotiate a deal with Brussels to avoid a double-header in December, when it is predicted the country could be hit by a second spike.

The classified file, seen by The Sun, appears to be in the form of powerpoint slides and is titled 'Preliminary set of Reasonable Worst Case Scenario Planning Assumptions to support civil contingencies planning for the end of the Transition Period'.

It was created by the Cabinet Office's EU Transition Task Force over concerns the government was not doing enough to get a deal signed before the end of the Transition Period on New Year's Eve.

It follows the leak over Operation Yellowhammer in August last year, a civil contingency plan in the event of a No Deal Brexit.

The EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier this week raised concerns by saying getting a trade deal done in time 'seems unlikely'.

The implications of a No Deal on the economy could be far reaching, and would be considerably worsened when combined with a winter virus.

Revealed in the leaked document, Whitehall is planning for the potential of public disorder caused by food shortages and price hikes

Revealed in the leaked document, Whitehall is planning for the potential of public disorder caused by food shortages and price hikes.

Troops may have to be drafted on to the streets to help the police in the worst-case scenario  1,500 are already on stand by.

The problem on food is expected to be worsened if the Port of Dover and the channel tunnel become blocked due to increased checks at the border, with as many as 8,500 trucks lorries lining up on the motorway to Kent.

30 per cent of our food imported from the EU as well as medicines, chemicals for drinking water purification and fuel supply.

It also warns that the Navy might be needed to stop vigilante British fisherman clashing with illegal European fishing boat incursions.

The 'reasonable worst case scenario' also suggests that animal disease might rip through the countryside due to shortages of medicines and the Channel Islands could need military airdrops to avoid running out of food.

As result, social distancing measures and masks will have to continue until 2021.

Downing Street is pushing hard for a trade deal but is making contingency plans for an 'unruly' exit from the EU transition period at the end of December.

With trade talks looking set to go the wire, there is a risk they collapse  putting up trade barriers overnight on 1 January.

The Cabinet Office responded to the leak by outlining a series of contingency plans said to already be in place, including an extra 3billion for the NHS

The Cabinet Office responded to the leak by outlining a series of contingency plans said to already be in place.

The government are believed to have allocated an extra 3billion for the NHS and an extra 600million for social care, although it is not clear if this will go to councils or be organised centrally.

Covid-19 testing capacity will be extended to 300,000 a day and billions of items of PPE delivered to health and social care workers.

A further 775million will be spent on new border and customs infrastructure and new border rules phased in over six months to try to avoid backlogs.

Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove told The Sun: 'We got Brexit done with a great deal in January.

'And we are working flat out to make sure the UK is ready for the changes and huge opportunities at the end of the year as we regain our political and economic independence for the first time in almost 50 years.

'Part of this work includes routine contingency planning for various scenarios that we do not think will happen but we must be ready for, come what may.'
The Ohio Winers will just have to drink alone this year.

Each year since 2001, the group of 14 or 15 wine aficionados from around Hudson, Ohio, has faithfully made a 385-kilometre drive to attend the Niagara Grape and Wine Festival.

But COVID-19 put a cork in this years plan.

The border remains closed, Montebello Park in St. Catharines is off limits, and much of the festival has moved online as virtual events running throughout late August and September.

Thats a shame, said member Gary Rybka, because the group  recognizable by colourful T-shirts with a little wine glass on them  was ready to celebrate its 20th year here.

You guys are so welcoming, and you have really good wine, he said.

We originally came to the festival because of the wine, but now the wine is a bonus. We come for the hospitality, you guys know how to make people feel really welcome.

We feel like were adopted residents.

Rybka and his wife, Christine, are both school teachers who on their own also offer wine classes and tastings.

The first time the Ohio Winers visited the Niagara festival was in September 2001  a week or two after the traumatic terrorist events of 9/11.

We were staying in Queenston, and theres nothing more surreal than waking up to the sound of Apache helicopters flying down the Niagara River, he remembered.

Everyone, Canadians and Americans, were still shaken by the events but the festival that year  it was so heartwarming, people were just welcoming us, said Rybka.

They said they were sorry about what was happening, but we are neighbours. So we refer to you guys as our cousins up north.

The 69th annual festival kicks off on the Aug. 29-30 weekend with Brunch in the Vineyard, adapted as a virtual event.

A full festival schedule, including information on parades and Discovery Pass winery visits, is on the festival website NiagaraWineFestival.com.

As has been said so often about 2020, were looking forward to next year, Rybka said.

We really fell in love with a lot of the wineries there.
"VNG requests TikTok to remove all music segments taken from Zing records from both the TikTok application and the website, and an indemnification for damages of over VND221 billion ($9.5 million),"

wrote VNG's complaint to the People's Court of HCMC.

VNG, Vietnam's leading technology company, has filed a lawsuit against TikTok, the Chinese short-form video platform for not having sufficient licences for the songs being used in its videos.

VNG said TikTok used audio tracks owned by Zing, a VNG subsidiary, without the company's consent.

Illustrative image

According to Reuters, in its complaint to the People's Court of Ho Chi Minh City, VNG seeks damage compensation from TikTok and demands that it ceases the use of Zing's music.

"VNG requests TikTok to remove all music segments taken from Zing records from both the TikTok application and the website, and an indemnification for damages of over VND221 billion ($9.5 million)," the document wrote.

Like other countries, TikTok has become famous in Vietnam, with 10 million users as of August, with millions of short-clips uploaded to the platform.

However, the Vietnam Musicians' Association commented: "TikTok offers a very complex business model, in order to avoid having to comply with copyright regulations in Vietnam".

Around the world, TikTok is in trouble in the US, as the US government sees the application as a threat to national security.

ICTnews contacted Zing and was confirmed about the lawsuit against TikTok.

Specifically, VNG's complaint dated May 28 alleged that there are many videos containing many songs copyrighted by Zing on the TikTok platform. VNG's March 11 report shows that a total of 150 Zing records are used in more than 11 million videos on TikTok's website and app.

VNG believes that the above-mentioned infringement of intellectual property rights by TikTok causes damage to the company, estimated at more than VND221 billion.

According to VNG's complaint, the company sent a letter of warning to TikTok in June 2019, but TikTok did not remove the songs that VNG claimed to be violated.

TikTok's media representative responded to ICTnews that there was no information about the lawsuit.

Hai Dang-Anh Hao
PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. -- The U.S. military relies so heavily on space-based technologies to keep its edge on the battlefield that adversaries see the dependence as a big weakness -- and they're already testing ways to attack it.

Russia recently blasted a torpedo-like anti-satellite missile system through space, a clear signal that it's testing offensive ways to destroy satellites orbiting the Earth. That type of strike that could prove devastating to troops.

"If we don't supply satellite communications that enable a drone to see a potential threat that's coming toward land or maritime forces -- if we don't deliver that capability and they aren't warned -- lives are lost," said Air Force Maj. Gen. John Shaw, commander of the Combined Force Space Component.

Read Next: 'This Is a Big Deal': The Military's Space Mission Has Reached a New Milestone

Shaw and other U.S. Space Command leaders told reporters here Thursday that the U.S. doesn't want warfare to extend into space, but big moves by other countries have made preparing for it a necessity.

China, Russia and Iran, for example, have watched how U.S. forces use space-based technologies on the battlefield. They've now built up their own intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets -- not only to help command and control their own forces, but also to track and target American troops.

"Our adversaries have reorganized for space. They are demonstrating their commitment to space operations [because] they recognize how the U.S. benefits from the use of space," one Space Command official said. "It can be a little bit concerning that near-peer adversaries have that capability."

The Defense Department has, in response, made space a huge priority in recent years. It resurrected the once-defunct Space Command, designating the cosmos a combatant command just like U.S. Indo-Pacific or Central commands. And the new Space Force military branch will train and equip warfighters to operate in that realm.

As one Space Command official here put it, "We are probably better resourced and have more visibility than we've ever had."

A Newly Contested Frontier

Space Command got a new leader last week, freeing up its former commander, Air Force Gen. John "Jay" Raymond, to focus solely on the military's new Space Force branch, which he was tapped to lead. Gen. James Dickinson is now the first Army general to lead SPACECOM.

Assigning SPACECOM and Space Force each their own leader was a milestone moment for military space operations, which will continue to build in the coming years. The military's top civilian and uniformed leaders were here to participate in the change-of-command ceremony.

"For decades, the world has enjoyed the freedom to operate in space," Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Thursday. "... Yet we now find that space has become highly contested, and the gains we possess are threatened."

That matches what Shaw and Air Force Brig. Gen. Shawn Bratton, SPACECOM's deputy director of operations, have seen throughout their careers.

"It's just the nature of competition," Bratton said. "Where's my adversary weak? Where can I compete strongly? We react to them, and they react to us. ... That's the ongoing struggle in the competition phase that we're seeing."

Shaw, who in his current role helps deliver space-based capabilities, such as satellite communications and imaging, to troops on the ground, said space was once a "placid domain." Now, he said, those capabilities are at risk of attack.

He noted the role space operators played earlier this year when Iran struck a military base in Iraq following a U.S. airstrike that took out Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, head of Irans elite Quds force. Space operators were able to spot the threat and quickly alert those in its path.

"My greatest fears were not realized that day because we did respond very quickly ... in terms of warning to troops that were threatened on the ground," Shaw said. "And I believed [that] saved many lives."

Those are the types of space capabilities leaders here say need vital protection. And the new Space Force branch will help ensure the military has properly trained forces who can do that.

"We need to develop that force structure, that expertise," Shaw said.

Aside from bringing back U.S. Space Command and standing up the Space Force, the U.S. is also in the process of updating its National Space Policy. That could lay out how American warfighters fit into the government's overall space strategy.

Bratton said having military space operators involved in those talks could help establish rules and norms beyond Earth, like those that exist in international waters or airspace. Space Command could help shape those future rules, he said, while Space Force develops the troops with the training and experience to operate there.

"[Creating Space Force] was absolutely the right thing to do at the right time," Bratton said.

Responding to Threats

U.S. officials have only recently begun publicizing some of the threats taking place in space.

While leading Space Command, Raymond has at least twice this year blasted Russia over what he called threatening and hostile behavior in space.

After Russia tested what Shaw described as its space torpedo, Raymond said the U.S. stands ready to defend itself and its allies from aggressive actions there. The 2017 National Security Strategy states that any harmful interference or attack on critical space architecture that directly affects a vital U.S. interest "will be met with a deliberate response at a time, place, manner and domain of our choosing."

The U.S. way of life is dependent on its space capabilities, Dickinson told reporters after the change of command ceremony.

"Our economy, our way of life depends on space capabilities," he said. "We have adversaries and competitors now in the space domain that have demonstrated that they want to hold our assets at risk. We need to be able to defend those."

With Space Command -- and now Space Force -- focused on threats beyond Earth, Dickinson said they'll continue tracking and speaking out against bad actors the U.S. faces there.

"Our job ... is to make sure that we watch, and we hold people accountable for what they're doing in the space domain," he said.

That might be easier with some countries than others. Officials said Russia is more likely to publicly show off its capabilities in efforts to deter other nations. China, however, is much more ambiguous, they said. Second only to the U.S. in the number of satellites it launches into space, China rarely offers explanations as to what the tools are doing there.

As warfare grows more technical and networks more linked, protecting space capabilities gets only more important. While costly and time-consuming, Shaw likened the investments he says the military must make in space to those the Defense Department made to build up air warfare capabilities.

"Airpower was rife with a lot of challenges as well," he said. "They could be shot down; they were costly. And someone could ask the question, 'Why do we need these airplanes?' ... I think anyone who would've followed that path would have been in big trouble in the future."

-- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins.

Related: US Space Command Denounces Russian 'Hostile' Anti-Satellite Weapon Test
Lynnwood, Wash.  On a warm summer night, two food trucks pulled onto a tree-lined street in a hilltop neighborhood outside Seattle. The smell of grilled meat filled the air, and neighbors slurped on boba tea drinks. Toddlers, teens, their parents and dogs sat in the grass, chatting behind masks, laughing and mimicking imaginary hugs to stay socially distant while they waited for their food orders.

Long seen as an urban treasure, food trucks are now being saved by the suburbs during the coronavirus pandemic. No longer able to depend on bustling city centers, these small businesses on wheels are venturing out to where people are working and spending most of their time  home.

As food trucks hunt for customers that used to flock to them, they're finding a captive audience thrilled to skip cooking dinner, sample new kinds of cuisines and mingle with neighbors on what feels like a night out while safely staying close to home.

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"This is festival season, fun season. All the stuff we typically do as humans, we can't do anymore," said Matt Geller, president of the National Food Truck Association. "Walking out to a food truck is a taste of normalcy, and it feels really good."

YS Street Food Group owner Yuli Shen discovered the hilltop Seattle-area neighborhood through Facebook, and she and a friend who runs the Dreamy Drinks boba tea truck went out together recently and served customers for three hours.

YS Street Food food truck on Aug. 10, 2020, near the suburb of Lynnwood, Wash., north of Seattle.

It's a change and a relief for Shen. Before the pandemic, she raked in money by parking at Amazon's campus near downtown Seattle, where hordes of office workers would line up for lunchtime Chinese rice bowls. By July, she was frantically searching for somewhere to go.

"It's very hard to find a location to park, and so we have to find a different place and different people. It's harder to run the business, but we're trying," Shen said.

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Weekday lunchtime business is the bulk of the revenue for an average food truck, which may make $800 to $1,200 a day, Geller said. And lucrative appearances at major summer festivals and community events padded them for leaner winter months.

More: Why are home sales breaking these records during the COVID-19 pandemic and recession?

Since stay-at-home orders earlier this year emptied out city centers and canceled gatherings, many food trucks  like brick-and-mortar restaurants  have gone out of business or aren't sure when they'll open again.

Food trucks adjusted their business model as they headed to the suburbs: They focus on dinner, adding kid-friendly options and preparing for larger orders. A new neighborhood means being unsure how many customers they'll get and gambling on how much food to bring. To avoid that, many trucks urge customers to order ahead online.

Geller said the suburban shift has been a boon for food trucks in places like Seattle, Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas. He said people in the suburbs have been good at staying connected with neighbors during COVID-19 through Facebook groups, where food truck gatherings are advertised.

The Dreamy Drinks food truck on Aug. 10, 2020, near the suburb of Lynnwood, Wash., north of Seattle.

B.J. Lofback decided to pivot his Nashville-area food truck and restaurant away from labor-intensive Korean food after laying off most of his staff when business dwindled. He rebranded as Pinchy's Lobster Co. and now sells lobster rolls, which he can largely prep himself.

Without his usual downtown Nashville lunchtimes and music events, he and other truckers began reaching out to homeowners associations in large subdivisions. It's been such a success, he doesn't miss the "stressful, expensive" event schedule. Now, he can keep all the money he earns, instead of paying up to 20% of his revenue in event fees.

"The economics just worked," Lofback said. "Me personally, I'm hoping that even if a vaccine dropped tomorrow and herd immunity was accomplished tomorrow, I hope neighborhoods still have us out."

Piroshky Piroshky, a Seattle institution at the iconic Pike Place Market, lost 90% of its brick-and-mortar business when the pandemic hit, operations manager Brian Amaya said.

The bakery pivoted to online sales, home deliveries and food truck events. Some events featuring its famous hand pies have been as successful as a modest day in a store. The 28-year-old business is considering adding a second food truck.

"It's enough to pay our employees and cover the cost of it and make a little bit of revenue for us to keep going," Amaya said.

The idea was also new to Julie Schwab before she created events that have practically become food truck lore near Lynnwood, Washington, about 16 miles (25 kilometers) north of Seattle.

Dreamy Drinks food truck, Monday, Aug. 10, 2020, near the suburb of Lynnwood, Wash., north of Seattle.

Business owners ask if it's true that one truck made $4,000 in one night. She tells them food trucks make between $1,000 to $4,000 a shift. The high school psychologist also advises other communities that want in on the food truck circuit.

"You look what's happening with everybody coming out, and people are getting to know each other," Schwab said, adding that people wear masks and keep their distance. "It's been really great to build a community despite what's going on with this pandemic."

After hearing how the industry had dried up, Schwab took a stab at organizing an event in June for the only food truck she'd ever tried. Now, she's scheduling trucks seven days a week and into December.

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Thanks to the trucks, Schwab discovered bibimbap, a Korean rice bowl, and she relishes helping small businesses, many run by people of color.

But there's been headaches, too: hours of work scheduling trucks, promoting events and responding to neighbors with questions. Occasionally, trucks are late, unprepared or no-shows.

Christine Thai, a hospital program coordinator, was surprised to learn about the food truck scene in her community when she went to one of Schwab's events recently with her husband and baby. It was a rare outing for the family, and she got to enjoy a strawberry matcha latte.

"The suburbs are getting cool because people don't want to travel anymore," Thai said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Food trucks hit by virus head to the suburbs to survive
The Lucknow district administration and Shia clerics have reached a consensus on letting the faithful keep tazias (a replica of the coffin of Imam Hussain carried during Muharram procession to mourn the martyrdom of the grandson of Prophet Mohammad) at home and observe azadari while distancing socially, but the issue of taking out processions remains unresolved.

Azadari is the name of the practice followed during the month of Muharram (according to the Islamic calendar)mourning the martyrdom of Imam Hussain at the Battle of Karbala about 1,340 years ago. Shia clerics have already moved court for permission to hold the Muharram processions.

District magistrate Abhishek Prakash said, The administration has allowed the Shia community members to keep tazias in their homes and observe azadari during Muharram, but with certain restrictions of social distancing.

Prominent Shia cleric Maulana Kalbe Jawad had staged a dharna on Saturday evening to protest against restrictions imposed in view of the coronavirus disease pandemic.

Following this, the state government directed the district administration to initiate talks with the Shia cleric. District magistrate Abhishek Prakash, along with home secretary SK Bhagat, held a dialogue with Maulana Jawad .

The government has sought a list of Shia clerics in every district, along with their phone numbers, from me. I will provide it. In every district, the Shia clerics will hold a meeting with the districts civil and police officials in order to coordinate the Muharram activities with them. Everyone knows that tazias and azadari are an integral part of observing Muharram, and Shias cannot compromise on these rituals, he said.

We had sought permission for majlis (sermons) in all our Imambaras with a gathering of around 1,000 people. Our Imambaras are quite big and we can follow social distancing norms there. But after high-level talks with the state government, they allowed only seven Imambaras in the state capital to hold 60 minutes of majlis with only 20 attendees. Everyone else can watch online, the Shia cleric added.

The district administration also agreed not to harass those who keep tazias at home and perform azadari, said Maulana Jawad.

He said, Lucknow has a sizable Shia population of over three lakh, which takes out a few processions during Muharram. But due to the pandemic this time, no procession has been allowed. We have gone to court over this and expect a decision in a day or two.
Sexual harassment and assaults against women are not being taken seriously enough in Singapore, activists warn, after students at elite universities were given punishments criticised as too lenient for their crimes

Sexual harassment and assaults against women are not being taken seriously enough in Singapore, activists warn, after students at elite universities were given punishments criticised as too lenient for their crimes.

In the most recent incident, a 23-year-old spent just 12 days behind bars after he tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend during a vicious assault.

The city-state is known for its tough approach to law and order, with vandalism punishable by caning, while drug trafficking and murder carry the death penalty.

But campaigners say crimes against women have long been minimalised -- marital rape was only criminalised this year.

"The justice system is very harsh on people who vandalise state-owned property. But you want to threaten and violate a woman's life? Oh yeah, sure. It's not as serious, is the message (authorities) are giving," said Pamela Ng, a spokeswoman for the Aim For Zero campaign against sexual violence.

There are also concerns the academic potential of male perpetrators is being prioritised over the actual effect of sex crimes on women.

This echoes criticisms of incidents at prestigious schools in the US, including the six-month imprisonment of Brock Turner for three counts of sexual assault, where a judge feared a longer sentence would severely "impact" the Stanford University swimmer.

Last year, National University of Singapore (NUS) student Monica Baey took to social media to protest the light punishment given to a male student who filmed her in a dormitory shower.

Her decision to go public was dubbed the city-state's #MeToo moment and is credited with encouraging other victims to come forward.

But critics say recent cases involving men of privilege show not enough has changed.

- 'Slap on the wrists' -

In July, Yin Zi Qin, a dentistry student at NUS, was jailed for less than two weeks and asked to conduct 80 hours of community service despite pleading guilty to strangling his ex-girlfriend and pressing his thumb into her eye until she lost consciousness.

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The judge opted for softer "community-based sentencing" put forward by the prosecution as he was a first offender, cooperated with authorities, and voluntarily sought counselling and to apologise to the victim.

But it provoked a public backlash with some angry the privileged only get a "slap on the wrists" for serious crimes.

"I can't believe the sentence is so light! I guess NUS students have such a bright future that they can get away with any crime," commented Maruko Chan on a social media post about the ruling.

"Because he's a medical student and a future doctor?... Go ahead do more of wrist slapping," said netizen Huew Lim.

In another case, NUS student Terence Siow Kai Yuan was sentenced to 21 months of supervised probation for molesting a woman on a train and at a station.

The judge rejected the prosecution's call for a custodial sentence saying he had a high chance of being rehabilitated given his academic record and "relatively minor" nature of his acts, according to court documents.

However, his victim told The New Paper, the attack was not "spur of the moment" and the impact on her had not been minor.

Siow was later jailed for two weeks after prosecutors appealed.

Following the July case, women's rights group AWARE raised concerns that more consideration was being shown for the assailant than the impact on the victims.

"Rehabilitation is important but this should not depend on the educational status of the perpetrator," AWARE executive director Corinna Lim adds.

- 'Sexual violence normalised' -

Vanessa who runs Instagram account upand.out, which aims to empower youth, says the system must treat everyone equally.

"23-years-old = fully functioning adult. He is fully capable of higher thinking if he was accepted in one of our top university's most competitive courses. If SG is taking a more compassionate stance for crimes now, it should be reflected in every case," the 22-year-old, who gave only her first name, added.

There were 56 cases of sexual misconduct involving students from six Singapore universities between 2015 and 2017, according to information Education Minister Ong Ye Kung provided to Parliament last May.

NUS toughened penalties for sexual misconduct after the Baey case in 2019, and said Yin Zi Qin is suspended pending disciplinary proceedings.

Despite the growing concerns, Singapore lawyer Gloria James-Civetta cautioned that the judiciary could only operate within the "boundaries prescribed by legislators".

"In some instances, the academic background of the offender may be indicative of the offender's possibilities for reform," she explained.

Singapore has toughened some of its sex crime laws, with "cyber-flashing" -- sending unsolicited images of one's private parts -- and "revenge porn" recently outlawed.

And public anger has forced government action -- Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam has announced a review of how sentencing decisions are made in such cases.

But campaigners warn it will take a shift in attitudes at every level for real change to happen.

Ng says sexual violence has been "normalised" to such an extent that it shaped society's attitudes and responses to crime's against women.

She added: "It's inherited false beliefs that survivors are somehow responsible for the crimes against them and that somehow if you are Singapore-Chinese, male and educated, you are somehow less responsible or accountable for such violent crimes."

cla/sr/lto
Sunday's Last Week Tonight, after a short, NSFW diatribe against the 2016 reboot of Gilmore Girls, was all about President Trump's border wall, "the key promise of his first campaign." When Oliver first covered Trump's wall four years ago, "we discussed how the wall seemed, in addition to being transparently racist, like it was going to be both expensive and pointless," he said. "And while we predicted the whole thing would be a shambles, the extent to which that's been true, even we didn't see coming."

"We thought that tonight, especially ahead of the RNC next week, it would be a good time to give you an update on the status of Trump's border wall, because before he took office, he wanted it to define him as a president," Oliver said. "And that has very much happened, but in none of the ways that he intended." He focused on what Trump has actually built  270 miles of replacement barrier, 5 miles of new wall  the irreversible damage it has caused, and the role played by Fisher Industries and the private Build the Wall project that led to Stephen Bannon's arrest last week.

Fisher Industries, with a history that includes "sexual harassment, tax fraud, federal violations, and child pornography," was turned down for wall contracts by federal engineers, Oliver recounted. But CEO Tommy Fisher directly appealed to Trump through at least 10 appearances on Fox News and hooking up with We Build the Wall, which directed $10 million of its $25 million in private donations to the company. One of the resulting walls "looks like it may either collapse or get pushed over," he said. "And if you know anything about this administration, it will not surprise you to learn that Fisher has now wound up with over $2 billion in border-building contracts."

Oliver said while he predicted Trump's wall would be a disaster, "all of this was stupider than even I thought was possible. Because the fact is, this wall is not a functional barrier. If it's anything, it is a f---ing monument to Trump  which actually makes more sense." Forget Trump's Mount Rushmore pipe dreams, he concluded, "this is his monument. And there's perhaps nothing more emblematic of his presidency than this wall: It's destructive, pointless, ineffective, racist, weak, and something that the damages of which we're going to have to be dealing with for a very long time." Watch below.

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I have written often about the declining resources devoted to the IRS, and how the agency has been forced to reduce the use of compliance audits. Congress both reduces the IRS resources and directs the agency to allocate more of the less to customer service.

IRS audits have long struck fear in the hearts of the bravest of men (using that term universally). The IRS audit is seemingly interesting. It has been the topic of many episodes of situation comedies. The sitcom characters fear leads to hilarity.

Ralph Kramden, star of The Honeymooners, which ran from 1955 to 1956, was terrified by an impending audit when he learned that the $85 he won in a poker game was unreported income.

Archie Bunker of All in the Family similarly had unreported income, this time from driving a cab on Sundays. He told his wife Edith that what a man does on his Sabbath is between him and his maker. He also explained I was exercising my loophole like the big boys.

A substantial body of research shows that if people think the big boys can cheat on their taxes, then why not the regular folk also? So IRS looks to publicize cases where big boys are caught cheating. (See Spiro Agnew, disgraced former U.S. vice president).

Bruce Springsteen had tax issues early in his period of fame. He says he came to the attention of the IRS after appearing on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week. He also said, I never met anyone in New Jersey who paid his taxes.

I dont recall doing a lot of individual returns when I worked in Philadelphia, right across the river from New Jersey. Bruce may have been right about those Jersey boys and girls.

From Kramden to Bunker to the early Springsteen, audits have been portrayed in the popular media as the scourge of the common man. The working stiffs just dont have access to the loopholes of the big boys.

Well IRS says, and we shall see if it aligns with what they do, that the big boys, the really big boys, are in for some heat. By fall they expect to launch hundreds of audits of high wealth individuals and thousands of audits of private foundations.

Private foundations are seemingly the charitable arm of the high wealth individual. Seemingly because they, in practice, often lack a charitable heart.

In the past IRS has been challenged in auditing the linkages between the high wealth individual and his or her private foundation. The new plan is to coordinate the efforts to create the tax equivalent of Poes tell-tale heart. Some high wealth people may soon be losing their sanity, a la the poor bus driver Ralph Kramden.

Not one of the top hundreds of wealthy people in the country? No private foundation? Before you exhale, check your tax return, assuming you are not from New Jersey, to see if you claimed a Section 199A deduction or reported income from a partnership (theres 38 million of you people).

You, too, are in the crosshairs. The Section 199A deduction is the new (2018 on) deduction for qualified business income. Its a high audit risk item. Partnership tax returns have new questions that will also identify audit targets.

As Mick Jagger might say (Shattered), dont you know the audit rate is going up, up, up, up, up, to be a partner you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough.

Now these are, at this time, just the best laid plans of mice and men. It makes sense to target the big boys and their foundations. How many times will Ralph Kramden win $85 in a poker game? How often will Munson need Archie Bunker to drive his cab on Sundays?

But those big boys, now theyve got some loopholes in the castle wall. Will IRS actually seal them? I actually hope so. Most CPAs do. Its been a long time coming and the government does seem to need some money.

My only request? Stay out of New Jersey. It drives the New Yorkers crazy to know that no one in Jersey pays taxes.

Jim Hamill is the director of Tax Practice at Reynolds, Hix & Co. in Albuquerque. He can be reached at jimhamill@rhcocpa.com.
SANTA FE  The candidates for an open New Mexico U.S. Senate seat will appear in just two televised debates this fall  fewer than in many past Senate showdowns.

Democratic candidate Ben Ray Lujan, who is forgoing re-election to his northern New Mexico-based congressional seat to run for Senate, said last week he had agreed to two debates  one sponsored by New Mexicos public KNME-TV and the other jointly by KOAT-TV and the Journal.

That prompted criticism from Republican Mark Ronchetti, who called for debates on three major Albuquerque network stations.

The people of this state deserve to see us exchange ideas and Im ready to do that on all of our major media outlets before ballots go out, said Ronchetti, who worked as a meteorologist at KRQE-TV before launching his Senate bid.

In response to questions, Lujans campaign vowed to work with local media outlets but did not say why he had decided not to participate in additional debates.

We believe these two debates will give voters across the state the best chance to tune in and hear the candidates discuss a broad array of topics, Lujan campaign manager Travis Brimm said.

Libertarian Bob Walsh of Santa Fe is also running for the U.S. Senate seat, which is open because incumbent Democrat Tom Udall decided last year not to seek re-election.
Fisherman Michael Foy has traveled the world fishing the oceans from New Jersey to Hawaii, South Africa and the Caribbean. However, he is being held in a jail cell in Her Majesty's Prison on Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands.

His family is now scrambling to free him, including asking the U.S. government and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for help, reports the Asbury Park Press, part of the USA TODAY Network.

His family said the jail's conditions are "deplorable," from what they've gathered from Foy through phone calls.

"He has rats and cockroaches in his cell, so you can imagine many nights he goes without much sleep," said his sister Kimberly Foy Kelly.

Mike Foy in front of his commercial fishing vessel Rebel Lady. Foy, who is from the Jersey Shore, is in jail in the British Virgin Islands while his family is fighting for his release.

According to the British Virgin Islands Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, on June 8, Foy, 60, of Stafford Township, was caught in territorial waters near Peter Island and Norman Island by Her Majestys Customs.

Foy was the captain of the commercial fishing vessel Rebel Lady, which was carrying 7,000 pounds of fish.

Also on board were Indonesian nationals, who could not speak English and were holders of C-11 transit visas, which are only applicable to persons working on a fishing vessel.

British Virgin Islands authorities said in the statement that Foy admitted to customs officers that he was the captain of the vessel and claimed that he received permission to enter the British overseas territory.

'I was anxious to get home': Point Beach native escapes Peru border shutdown

Investigations by the police found, however, that permission was sought and denied by the chief immigration officer as the borders were closed as part of the territorys response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the statement.

Kelly said authorities asked her brother to follow them into port. Once at the dock, he was taken into custody and his boat was seized.

In the days that followed, Foy's family and lawyers said island authorities seized Foy's catch of tuna and swordfish  with an estimated worth of $56,000. According to Kelly, the fish was removed from the boat by British Virgin Islands authorities and sold.

Story continues

Fishing report: Spanish and king mackerel, houndfish making some noise off N.J. coast

Foy was charged with illegal entry, unregistered and unlicensed fishing, and failure to arrive at a customs port, authorities said in the statement.

His bail was denied on the basis that he has no connection or legal status to the territory, according to a statement from island authorities.

He faces a $511,000 fine and seizure of his vessel, which is outfitted for longline fishing  a technique of floating hundreds of yards of fishing line with baited hooks, his attorneys said.

Electronic monitoring defense

But Foy's attorney says they have a strong defense witness to counter the claims: the U.S. government.

According to his family and lawyers, Foy was taking his four Indonesian crew members to the British Virgin Islands to get their passports stamped in order to legally return to the U.S. when he was arrested.

Wild encounter: Fishermen have close brush with humpback whales off the N.J. coast

The Indonesian crew members must have their passports stamped every 29 days. Foy has been clearing the men through Tortola for the last year and, most recently, did so on April 27 without incident, Kelly said.

Andrew Minkiewicz, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes in maritime and fisheries law, said the Rebel Lady is electronically monitored via satellite tracking by the U.S. government. That tracking, he says, proves Foy never entered island waters as BVI officials allege.

"The satellite tracking system sends a position every hour. Tortola claims he was elsewhere, which is not possible. He was six miles offshore when they claim he was 1 miles," Minkiewicz said.

Six miles would place Foy outside of British Virgin Islands three-mile territorial jurisdiction, he added.

Mike Foy with his granddaughter Syndey in 2019. Foy, who is from the Jersey Shore, is in jail in the British Virgin Islands on illegal fishing charges while his family is fighting for his release.

Minkiewicz said Foy called his agent at Tortola to clear customs and was told to wait offshore. As he was drifting offshore he was approached by customs officials who brought him to port.

"He wasn't aware he was under arrest. He didn't find that out until he got to port," Minkiewicz said.

Foy was first charged with illegal entry. Then, Minkiewicz said, authorities hit him with the additional illegal fishing charge and failure to come to a customs port.

Minkiewicz said BVI authorities claim Foy caught his fish in their waters illegally but their defense is he caught them off the coast of Puerto Rico.

He said every longline vessel must have a camera and video sensor to demonstrate when the gear is put in the water. All of this is part of the U.S. process of managing fisheries.

Injured dolphin eaten by sharks in LBI surf: 'That's what sharks do. They clean the ocean'

They are trying to get Pompeo to enforce the Fishermens Protective Act, which directs that office to take steps to protect a U.S. vessel and its crew if they are illegally seized by a foreign government. They've also set up a petition at change.org to draw attention to Foy's story.

In order for that to apply though, the charges have to be something that is not recognized by the U.S. as against the law.

"We would say being seized while drifting outside of territorial waters would constitute use of the act," Minkiewicz said.

Under the act, any U.S. vessel taken by a foreign government not at war with the U.S. shall be reimbursed by the federal government for the amount of the fine.

According to the act, after the secretary of state has secured the release of the vessel and reimbursed its owner, he is then allowed to take such action that he deems appropriate to make and collect claims from the foreign country for the amount reimbursed.

Coronavirus in NJ: $11M to keep NJ fishing industry alive

If the vessel that is seized is a commercial fishing vessel, the secretary of state is authorized to reimburse the owner for the fair market value of any catch that was spoiled as a result of the seizure.

Minkiewicz said they contacted Pompeo in mid-June and were informed by his staff, they'd look at the case. Pompeo, though, has not taken any action.

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said they have seen media reports of a U.S. citizen detained in the British Virgin Islands, but for privacy issues have declined to speak about the case. The spokesperson issued the following statement:

"We generally do not share information with the media about private U.S. citizens absent their written consent. One of the most important tasks of the Department of State and U.S. embassies and consulates abroad is to provide assistance to U.S. citizens who are incarcerated or detained abroad. Whenever a U.S. citizen is detained overseas, the Department works to provide all appropriate consular assistance."

U.S Sens. Corey Booker and Bob Menendez and Rep. Andy Kim, all New Jersey Democrats, have written British Virgin Islands Deputy Gov. David Archer Jr. saying that they expected a fair trial.

Caribbean comeback: A guide to when travelers can return to the islands

In the letter, the lawmakers told Archer they "will continue to closely follow Mr. Foys case and expect him to be treated appropriately under safe and sanitary conditions. Mr. Foy should be treated fairly, and we support a fair legal process without delay."

Foy is also represented by Paul Edward, an attorney in Tortola. Edwards said Foy has pleaded not guilty to the charges. His trial is scheduled for Sept. 9.

While Foy sits in jail, his four Indonesian crew members, some of whom have been with him for 15 years, are sitting in port and barred from leaving the boat, his attorneys said.

When Jersey Shore native Dan Radel is not reporting the news, you can find him in a college classroom, where he is a history professor. Reach him @danielradelapp; 732-643-4072; dradel@gannettnj.com.

Good to know: Where can Americans vacation internationally right now?

Wow: A New Jersey beach hotel made massive renovations, then the pandemic hit. What happens next?

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Fisherman jailed in British Virgin Islands; family fights for return
President Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, N.C., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Jessica Koscielniak/Pool/Getty Images)

Polling of the Presidential Race Misleads

Commentary

Though without qualifications as a poll-taker, I am a very experienced poll-reader and was formerly the co-owner of newspapers in 30 states of the United States. I do not think that the current and recent polling indicating that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden over President Donald Trump are accurate.

Other polls show that a majority of Americans wont respond candidly in conversation with strangers about politics. And other polls indicate that the majority of Americans expect their neighbors to vote for Trump.

It isnt surprising that in this political climate of extreme division and hostility between the presidents followers and his opponents, there is some reticence to be forthcoming.

Because of the biases of some of the polling organizations, they are effectively Democratic Party fronts; they may be conscientiously administering their polls but the echelon of the public consulted is certain to produce a result favorable to the candidates that they favor. In this category are, among others, Vox, Politico, Quinnipiac, and Monmouth.

Because there remains a gap of 10 to 12 points in the level of support received by Trump between Rasmussen, which gives him 51 percent support and was one of the few polling organizations reasonably accurate four years ago, and the pro-Democratic polling organizations, the blended average of the polls is skewed and is tilted itself since all polls are given equal weighting, a result that compounds the inaccuracies of most of its constituent polls.

Party Platform

While the Democrats and their media supporters have attempted to separate that partys candidates from the policy platform underneath them, the Republicans can presumably be relied upon to remind the voters that however resistant Biden may be to being considered an extremist, hes pledged to the full Green Terror, huge tax increases, restoration of a full shutdown of the economy until the virus is completely eliminated (impossible without a very effective vaccine), opposition to all but state schools and all power to the slothful and corrupt teachers unions, restoration of the Iranian ability to become a nuclear military power in five years, and a cornucopia of other programs that the public dont support but the radical left within the Democratic Party do.

The fact that the Democrats at their convention didnt mention the challenge from China, which all polls show the country as a whole recognizes, and that there was no mention of the extensive urban violence that has plagued the United States this summer, indicate how fragile the apparent Biden lead in the polls is.

The great majority of Americans, including African Americans, strongly disapprove of the level of street violence that there has been in many American cities for much of the summer. All of these cities are governed by Democratic mayors; many of them are African American mayors, as are many of the police chiefs.

The tired narrative of systemic racism is not really believed by most people and doesnt deserve to be believed. It is the default position of African American extremists acquiesced by those who do not have the energy to argue with them. Yet all of this is going to land in the lap of the Democratic candidate since that party showed itself in its convention to be incapable of putting any distance between it and the further fringes of racial politics. The Democrats have not really condemned mob violence.

Voter Contentment

The polling on the issue of the presidents job approval has, unavoidably, been a test of voter contentment through six months of the most dangerous public health challenge in a century, followed by the consequences of the economic response to that challenge, and accompanied by the heaviest and most prolonged outburst of urban violence in America in more than 50 years.

In these circumstances, the question of the presidents approval necessarily becomes a referendum on the current state of contentment of the voters. This couldnt be otherwise and it could not possibly produce a particularly positive result.

But as the public health crisis and the resulting unemployment levels decline, and the Republican campaign requires that the Democrats address the questions of the response to China and more intimately, their attitude to the rioters, who have generally abandoned the pretense of being peaceful protesters seeking racial equality and have revealed their true character as violent anti-white Marxist urban guerrillas, the ability of the Democrats to maintain this straddle will be severely tested.

Under any scenario, polling will quickly evolve from a referendum on the presidents performance to a choice between two contestants for the highest office.

Defamation to Backfire

As is often the case in politics, predictions must largely be based upon intuition, and by this criterion, I suspect that the relentless and wildly excessive campaign of defamation of the president may begin to backfire.

Both Sen. Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama advised followers at the Democratic convention last week that Trump must be removed to prevent the success in the United States of those who, in previous generations, U.S. servicemen and women had died to defeat. This was an indirect assimilation of the constitutionally elected leader of the United States to the Nazis and other unsavory foreign elements.

Dense though the ranks of Trump-haters are, the majority of Americans must by now be tired of the presentation of their president as a person of satanic evil and primitiveness. And this appears to be the only Democratic device to distract attention from the socialist authoritarianism of their program.

They hear, see, and speak no evil of China abroad or of urban guerrilla terrorists at home, and ask the voters to trust them as the only means of emancipating the country from the satanic wickedness of the incumbent.

None of this will work: The public wants to know what the Democrats are going to do about the main issues, and they are tired of pap about George Floyd, tragic though his death was. The canary in the mineshaft who has conveniently died to warn everyone of developing trends are the Never Trumpers.

Sen. Mitt Romney marching in the Black Lives Matter demonstration, and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich standing absurdly at a crossroads in the grass and trying to justify the desertion of his party because of the iniquity of its leader are dead canaries, asphyxiated by the toxicity of their own betrayals.

It has been a part of Democratic strategic dissembling to claim that Biden is riding a bandwagon with a heavy lead toward an almost inevitable victory. This is a reasonable election tactic, but its bunk. There is plenty of room to dislike Trump, but not with the frenzied nastiness of the Obamas and Sanders.

And nothing less than such a campaign of hysterical vilification will distract the country for long from the fact that Biden and Harris are an ambiguous and unconvincing tandem atop a policy engine that is an affront to the intelligence and the interests of most Americans.

Conrad Black has been one of Canadas most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. Hes the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other, which is about to be republished in updated form.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
DEAR ABBY: Three months ago, my husband ran into a second cousin he hadn't seen in 40 years. They were close for a short time during high school and saw each other a couple times after that.

I was not aware until recently that he had looked her up on social media and has been communicating with her every day since then. I didn't think much of it when he did tell me  until one night when he stayed on the computer with her until 3 a.m.

He has lied to me about the number of times he has been online with her and, if she calls or texts, he tells me it is someone else. She sent him pictures  which I saw  yet he denied receiving them. One time he forgot to sign off on a message he sent and, of course, I read it. To my shock, he was confiding a lot of things he has done while married to me that I was unaware of. It hurt me deeply, and I told him so.

Recently I was in the hospital. When I called him a couple of times at night, he claimed he didn't pick up because he was tired. I found out later he was on the computer with her.

I have asked him more than once why this relationship is so private, and he says they are just friends. But when I asked to see some of the things he has written to her, he refused to show me. I said fine, then I will ask her. Well, he blew up!

When I told him it hurts me that he spends so much time with her in the evening, he didn't give an answer. Am I overreacting? If so, can you please tell me how to settle down and deal with what is happening?

 Cousin trouble in Midwest

DEAR COUSIN TROUBLE: You are not overreacting. It's time to do what you said you were going to do  call the woman and ask her what has been going on. After she fills you in, ask yourself if you still want to be married to a man who has cheated on you emotionally and probably physically.

If you feel there is any hope of saving your marriage, offer your husband the option of seeing a marriage and family therapist together. However, knowing he has no compunction about lying to you or any respect for your feelings, you might prefer to simply consult a lawyer about what your next steps should be.

DEAR ABBY: I am an 18-year-old woman. My parents are divorced. My father says I should be out having fun and I owe no explanations to anyone. My mother, on the other hand, is very strict. I respect her wishes and don't do what most people my age would do. I try to be very careful with what I say in any conversation with her, but it always ends up with her very angry toward me. I want to live my life or at least try to. What do I do?

 Clueless teen in Texas

DEAR TEEN: An 18-year-old should be carefree and engaged in self-discovery. But people of every age are having to hunker down and curtail their social activities these days because their lives could depend on it.

And as to owing no explanations to anyone, until you are self-supporting and on your own, you WILL have to be accountable.

Your mother may be feeling insecure because her daughter is now a young adult. She may also be reacting to the "advice" your dad is doling out. You are going to have to figure out what triggers your mother's anger and find a happy medium.
Editor's take: Opting to discontinue the Note line is a risky proposition. While not a world-beater in terms of sales, its no slouch, either. Replacing it with a new and unproven line would be a huge gamble but if Samsung truly believes foldable phones are the future, the Note's second-half flagship slot would certain be an ideal window to try and sell them in.

Samsungs just-releases Galaxy Note 20 could be the final entry in the long-running series of high-end Android handsets.

According to a recent report from Korean publication The elec, Samsungs next flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S21 (tentative name) will arrive in the first half of next year with a stylus in tow for the first time. The publication claims three models of the handset are under development and that the S Pen will only accompany the most expensive version, codenamed O3.

The elec further said Samsung has already decided on the hardware specifications for the S21, noting that it wont include a 3D Time of Flight (ToF) sensor.

Bringing the S Pen to the Galaxy S family sets the stage for the possibility that Samsung could discontinue to Note series. Indeed, with foldables currently vying for attention and large-screen smartphones now the norm rather than the exception, it is entirely plausible that Samsung could phase out the Note and make the Galaxy Fold its new second half flagship.

Image credit: Sushiman, AquaSketches
Will Japan become Five Eyes Sixth Eye?

Japans prospects of becoming a member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance have been hotly debated. With strategic competition between China and the US intensifying, the US is hoping to contain China in terms of intelligence and information. The Five Eyes is traditionally an intelligence-sharing alliance consisting of five Anglo-Saxon countries. It played a vital role in the confrontation between the US and the UK against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries during the Cold War. And yet today, Japan evokes memories of the deeply condemned Cold War by sending the message that it could possibly join this nefarious alliance.

Indeed, it is not new for Tokyo to want to tune into the alliance. Two years ago, the US reached out to Japan in face of the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Washington expressed its will to strengthen cooperation between the Five Eyes and Japan, South Korea, France and Germany. However, the relationship between South Korea and Japan has deteriorated due to economic and historical issues and it was difficult to include both in the Five Eyes alliance.

In 2020, the China-US strategic competition continues to intensify. This has forced the US and the UK to reach out to Japan once again as ganging up against China has become these countries common goal. At the end of July, Japanese Defence Minister Taro Kono said Japan would welcome an invitation to join the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Later, Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi visited the UK. It remains unknown whether the Japan-UK foreign ministers meeting covered the issue of Five Eyes. But given Britains recent criticism of Chinas National Security Law for Hong Kong, it might not be that surprising if London would count on Tokyo to provide intelligence against Beijing.

There is no doubt that in the future, Japan will expand intelligence exchanges with Britain, Australia and other countries. It will certainly strengthen its military relations with the US. For now, Japan has established the 2+2 (diplomacy plus national security) dialogue mechanism with seven countries, including three countries in the Five Eyes (namely the US, the UK and Australia). This is the foundation on which Japan could deepen cooperation with these countries in respect to intelligence sharing. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily mean that Japan will join the Five Eyes alliance led by US and become a sixth eye.

First of all, the Five Eyes alliance was originally formed by English-speaking countries. Once Japan joins the alliance, countries that claim the same ideologies such as South Korea, Germany, France and Italy will have full grounds to participate in the alliance too. For an intelligence-sharing organisation, more members mean more access to diverse information. But it also means a higher risk of exposure. Adding Japan to the alliance as a sixth eye is not merely an issue of adding a new member. It also implies reorganisation of operation and language systems. It is beyond the core circle of Five Eyes and is presumably not what the founding nations were expecting.

Second, be it Five Eyes or Six Eyes, such an alliance reminds the world of the Cold War. In those awful days, countries were forced to take sides and confront one another. The US has previously sent invitations to Germany and France. Even as both free and democratic nations and NATO members, the two countries did not express much intent to join the alliance. Therefore, Japans active response might not be acknowledged by the entire international community.

Third, Tokyo has not reached a consensus on the matter. Part of Japan has never stopped calling for strategic autonomy. Yet integrating its own intelligence system into the Five Eyes will no doubt further subordinate Japan to the US. Also, Japans China policy differs from the other five countries. It takes precautions against China, but it also needs coordination with China. The Five Eyes has a clear target of containing China. This is obviously a dilemma for Tokyo. In the end, Japan needs to weigh between the benefits brought by joining the alliance and the losses caused by deteriorating China-Japan relations.

For China, what matters most is not the number of the eyes in this system. In terms of intelligence-sharing, the content always counts more than the form. Even if Japan has not yet officially become a sixth eye, it has in essence strengthened cooperation with the member states. China should be fully alert and prepare well-rounded counter-measures.

Global Times
With same-day results, individuals can make more informed decisions for themselves and their families, while businesses can protect their employees with more timely data.

CommunityMed Urgent Care, based in Dallas, has added rapid-result testing to its battery of COVID-19 tests, which are available to anyone who wants to get tested. Currently the rapid-result tests are offered at the Cross Roads and Lantana urgent care clinics, and the company has plans to expand to all locations soon.

We know theres a big need in our community for this, said Birken Olson, the CEO of CommunityMed. With same-day results, individuals can make more informed decisions for themselves and their families, while businesses can protect their employees with more timely data.

CommunityMed is administering rapid antigen testing, which is done with a nasal swab that reaches into the back of the nasal cavity. All rapid testing at CommunityMed has received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to create the tests.

Patients who complete the rapid COVID-19 test at a CommunityMed facility will receive the results before they leave on clinic letterhead to take with them as proof of their results. The test can be administered to anyone 3 months of age or older.

CommunityMed accepts most major private insurance carriers, Medicare and Tricare. Patients should check with their insurance to find out what their plans coverage will be for the rapid test. If the test is not covered by insurance, cash-pay rates are available.

All eight CommunityMed locationsincluding Arlington, Cross Roads, Haslet, Lantana, Melissa, Princeton, Prosper and Wichita Fallshave COVID-19 PCR swab and blood antibody tests. The companys healthcare professionals are also available to do on-site testing for groups and companies (for PCR swab and blood antibody tests at this time).

CommunityMed encourages patients to schedule their tests in advance. Patients will check in virtually and complete their paperwork online. Upon arrival for their appointment, patients will text the clinic and wait for instructions to enter the building. There are designated urgent care and COVID testing rooms at each location to avoid cross-contamination.

Patients wanting more details or to schedule any type of COVID-19 test at any location can visit https://communitymedcare.com/covid/

About CommunityMed

CommunityMed Urgent Care operates walk-in medical clinics throughout North Texas in smaller towns in the North Texas region. With clinics in Lantana, Melissa, Prosper, Crossroads, Princeton, Haslet, Arlington and Wichita Falls, CommunityMed offers first-class service, top quality care and a home-town spirit. Visit the company website at CommunityMedCare.com.


Norwegian investor Storebrand Asset Management said Monday it had divested from fossil fuel and petrochemical giants because they lobbied against regulations designed to tackle the climate crisis and speed the greening of the global economy.

Norwegian investor Storebrand Asset Management said Monday it had divested from fossil fuel and petrochemical giants because they lobbied against regulations designed to tackle the climate crisis and speed the greening of the global economy.

The medium-sized institutional investor, with $91 billion (77 billion euros) under management, has unloaded holdings in US oil and gas majors Chevron and ExxonMobil, German chemical company BASF, and British-Australian mining and metals giant Rio Tinto, chief executive Jan Erik Saugestad confirmed in outlining his firm's new policy.

"We have already implemented this climate strategy and divested from those companies," he told AFP in an interview.

"We will now exclude companies that actively work against regulations and policies that are required to reach the climate goals," he said, referring to targets set under the Paris Agreement.

"The Exxons and Chevrons of the world are holding us back."

The 2015 climate treaty seeks to cap global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Burning fossil fuels has been by far the main driver of rising temperatures.

Storebrand has also divested from a score of other energy companies that derive more than five percent of their revenues from carbon-intensive coal or oil sands, including ConocoPhillips and Entergy, and Japanese conglomerate Mitsui Corporation.

Saugestad fired a shot across the bow of European oil and gas majors -- notably BP, Shell and Equinor -- that back the Paris goals and have announced plans to sharply curb their carbon footprints, saying they "cannot rest easy".

- Concrete steps -

"It is important to us that their investments and capex (capital expenditure) plans reflect scenarios to reach the climate agreement," he said.

"Either the company transforms its business activities with larger investment in renewables to become broader energy companies, or makes that cash available to us as shareholders to redeploy through our portfolios."

Total refining and petrochemicals complex near Antwerp /  AFP/File

Shell has said it will shrink its net carbon footprint by 65 percent by 2050, while Total has pledged to be "net-zero" in Europe by 2050, including its own operations and the downstream use of its products.

Total has more than doubled its renewable energy capacity -- from 3 gigawatts to 6.6 gigawatts -- in the last year, and plans to install an additional 4.6GW by 2023.

Shell has probably completed more renewables deals than any other energy major.

But both energy giants continue to invest 90 percent of their capital to develop planet-warming fossil fuels, according to a recent analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) that predicts the companies will fall "well short" of their own sustainable investment targets.

"The proportion of public communications about greener strategies or renewable initiatives... has not been matched by the share of non-oil and gas investment planned," rating agency Standard and Poor's noted recently, referring to the sector as a whole.

Regulators such as Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of England, have warned investors that climate change could lead to stranded assets.

"For us, sustainable development is about providing long-term returns for our stakeholders," Saugestad said.

"We strongly believe that in order to have successful investment, we need sustainable regulations and legislation."

Hit by a double whammy of over supply and cratering demand due to the coronavirus pandemic, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Total reported combined losses of $53 billion for the second quarter of 2020.
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California residents continued to flee Sunday as the state's wildfires worsened despite firefighters working on 24-hour shifts to battle the flames.

The state's largest-ever fires have forced hundreds of thousands from their homes and burned more than one million acres, with fears that more lightning strikes and high winds will start further fires in the days ahead.

There are now nearly a quarter-million people under evacuation orders and warnings.

The National Weather Service cautioned Sunday that yet more dry thunderstorms are on their way, causing concern for the state's fire service which is already stretched too thin.

These conditions 'could cause erratic winds, extreme fire behavior within the existing fires, and have a potential for new fires to start,' the CalFire website said.

Firefighters are already stretched so thin that the state has turned down some local officials' requests for help with equipment or personnel, forcing them to rely on volunteers and local agencies, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The charred remains of La Borgata Winery smolder Sunday in California

A California resident captured this video of the fires as they fled from their home

Fire retardant is dropped on a lightning complex fire in Berryessa Estates in California Sunday

The LNU Lightning Complex Fire engulfs a ridge line Sunday

The weather service also issued a red-flag warning for large swaths of northern and central California Sunday due to the covering of smoke that has dangerously impacted air quality. The smoke has now spread as far away as Kansas.

Thousands of lightning strikes have hit the state in the past week, igniting fires that left smoke blanketing the region, bringing the total area burned to 1.2million, according to CalFire public information officer Jeremy Rahn.

That is considered a stunning toll this early in California's fire season, which normally runs from August to November, and it comes as exhausted firefighters are already struggling to keep up with the far-flung blazes.

Crews from across the U.S. West, military planes and National Guard troops poured into California on Sunday.

The worst of the blazes, including the second and third largest wildfires in recorded California history, were burning in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, where more than 200,000 people have been told to flee their homes.

Resident Austin Giannuzzi cries while embracing family members at the burned remains of their home during the LNU Lightning Complex fire in Vacaville, California, on Sunday, More than 1,000 structures have been destroyed

Burned vehicles and homes have been reduced to rubble after the CZU Lightning Complex Fire went through Sunday

Army National Guard making dips from vineyard pond on the #WalbridgeFire Sunday. @NorthBayNews pic.twitter.com/DFUQrz6FwU  Kent Porter (@kentphotos) August 23, 2020

'Extreme fire behavior with short and long range spotting are continuing to challenge firefighting efforts. Fires continue to make runs in multiple directions and impacting multiple communities,' the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said of the largest conflagration, the LNU Lightning Complex.

About 2,600 firefighters are now tackling the two largest blazes, out of roughly 14,000 battling 'nearly two dozen major fires,' according to Rahn.

With California pleading for outside help, several western states, the federal government and even the governments of Canada and Australia have responded.

'Many of these firefighters have been on the lines for 72 hours, and everybody is running on fumes,' Assemblyman Jim Wood of the Healdsburg district in Sonoma told the Los Angeles Times.

'Our first responders are working to the ragged edge of everything they have.'

The disparate force battling the many blazes now includes 2,400 fire engines, 60 of them from other states, with several hundred more requested, CalFire said.

More than 200 aircraft, including 95 fixed-wing planes, are taking part in what CalFire spokesman Daniel Berlant called 'a significant air force' dropping loads of water, monitoring the spread of flames or ferrying firefighters and equipment.

Some 200 National Guardsmen have also been mobilized to help, he added.

The fires, which were ignited by lightning from dry thunderstorms across Northern and Central California over the past week, have killed at least six people and destroyed some 1,000 homes and other structures.

Resident Katie Giannuzzi reacts while viewing the charred remains of her home during the LNU Lightning Complex fire

Vehicles and homes have been burned after the CZU Lightning Complex Fire went through Sunday

Aerial footage of the fires has shown the dangerous smoke that has now spread as far as Kansas

Video taken by residents escaping from the flames has shown the dangerous conditions

Smoke and ash has blanketed much of the northern part of California for days, drifting for miles and visible from several states away.

The LNU Complex, which began as a string of smaller fires that merged into one massive blaze, has burned across roughly 340,000 acres of Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Yolo and Solano counties, Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said at a news briefing on Sunday.

It is now the second-largest wildfire on record in the state and was only 17 percent contained as of Sunday afternoon. To the south the SCU Lightning Complex was nearly as large, at 339,000 acres, and only 10 percent contained, Berlant said.

It and a fire burning southeast of the Bay Area are among the five largest fires in state history, with both burning more than 500 square miles

At the CZU Lightning Complex fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains. south of San Francisco, authorities said their effort was hindered by people who refused to heed evacuation orders and those who were using the chaos to steal. Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart said 100 officers were patrolling and anyone not authorized to be in an evacuation zone would be arrested.

'What we're hearing from the community is that theres a lot of looting going on,' Hart said. He said eight people have been arrested or cited and 'there's going to be more.'

He and county District Attorney Jeff Rosell expressed anger at what Rosell called the 'absolutely soulless' people who seek to victimize those already victimized by the fire. Among the victims was a fire commander who was robbed while helping coordinate efforts on Saturday.

In Southern California, an 11-day-old blaze held steady at just under 50 square miles near Lake Hughes in northern Los Angeles County mountains. Rough terrain, hot weather and the potential for thunderstorms with lightning strikes challenged firefighters.

Holly Hansen, an evacuee from the LNU fire, was among evacuees from the community of Angwin being allowed to back their homes for one hour to retrieve belongings. She and her three dogs waited five hours in her SUV for their turn.

'It's horrible, I lived in Sonoma during the (2017) Tubbs Fire, so this is time No. 2 for me. It's horrible when you have to think about what to take,' she said. 'I think its a very raw human base emotion to have fear of fire and losing everything. It's frightening.

California wildfires have now burned through more than 1.2million acres as of Sunday evening

A satellite image shows burned vegetation in a rust/orange color while healthy vegetation appears in blue, and active fires from the CZU Lightning Complex Wildfire burn orange/yellow in the Santa Cruz mountains, California o

The smoke has caused another problem for the hundreds of thousands of residents attempting to flee

A firefighter is seen as fire retardant is dropped on a lightning complex fire in California Sunday. Some of the firefighters have been working 24 hours shifts as the service struggles with resources to battle the flames

A wine barrel sits among the charred remains of the La Borgata Winery Sunday

Since August 15, more than 500 fires of varying sizes have burned throughout California. Of those, about two dozen major fires were attracting much of the state's resources.

Most of the damage was caused by the three complex fires. They have burned 1,175 square miles, destroyed almost 1,000 homes and other structures and killed six people, three of whom who were found in a home in an area under an evacuation order.

Officials surveying maps at command centers are astonished by the sheer size of the fires, Cal Fire spokesman Brice Bennett said.

'You could overlay half of one of these fires and it covers the entire city of San Francisco,' Bennett said Sunday.

Responding to the emergency, President Donald Trump on Saturday issued a major disaster declaration to provide federal assistance.

A charred vehicle is parked in front of a home after the CZU Lightning Complex Fire went through

There are some 14,000 firefighters as well as hundreds of volunteers battling against the flames

La Borgata Winery owner Gerry Iulano tastes wine from a burned barrel amidst the charred remains of his winery Sunday

A fire fighter back burns fuel in Ben Lomond, California. More than 70,000 people have evacuated from the area

Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement that the declaration will also help people in counties affected by the fires with crisis counseling, housing and other social services.

Fire officials, meanwhile, have struggled to get enough resources to fight the biggest fires because so many blazes are burning around the state.

The wine country fire has only 1,700 firefighters on scene. By comparison, the state had 5,000 firefighters assigned to the Mendocino Complex Fire in 2018, the largest fire in state history.

'All of our resources remain stretched to capacity that we have not seen in recent history,' said Shana Jones, the chief for Cal Fires Sonoma-Lake-Napa unit.

But many residents have refused evacuation orders.

'At least if we're here, we know exactly what's going on,' Napa resident John Newman, 68, told the San Francisco Chronicle as he sat in a lawn chair in his driveway. 'Family is worried, but it's a little different if you're here firsthand.'

California has already been struggling, more than most with US states with the coronavirus. The combination of that disease and the thick smoke from wildfires has caused what the San Francisco Chronicle called 'a respiratory nightmare.'

A doleful headline in the paper asked, 'What masks can protect you from both smoke and COVID-19?'
The central board of Reserve Bank of India on August 14 approved the transfer of Rs 57,128 crore as surplus, or dividend, to the government for the accounting year 2019-20.

The board also decided to maintain the Contingency Risk Buffer at 5.5 percent - the minimum threshold of 5.5-6.5 percent buffer recommended by the Bimal Jalan committee.

The Union Budget 2019-20 had pegged dividend or surplus from the RBI, nationalized banks and financial institutions at Rs 1.06 lakh crore, up from Rs 74,140.37 crore realized in the previous fiscal.

According to the government's estimates, it had accounted for Rs90,000 crore as dividend from the RBI in 2019-20, then finance secretary Subhash Garg had said.

Listen: Work near home the new WFH says WeWork India CEO Karan Virwani

The RBI, following the recommendations of the Jalan committee had transferred Rs 1.76 lakh crore surplus to the government as interim dividend in August last year.

"That was a one-time transfer that took place, it cannot be replicated every year. As for the balance that is supposed to come from public-sector banks and PSEs, banks have not made that kind of a profit last year. The RBI has also said banks will not be in a position to pay any dividend for 2019-20," Madan Sabnavis, chief economist, Care Ratings said.

Economists and experts have been pegging that the fiscal deficit in FY21 could reach as high as 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In 1990-91, the fiscal deficit reached the 7-percent mark when India was going through the Balance of Payments crisis.

The government's revenue collection has taken a hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the April-June quarter, tax revenue fell Rs 1.3 lakh crore from 2.5 lakh crore in the year-ago period. The revenue shortfall widened the fiscal deficit at the end of June to Rs 6.62 lakh crore, or 83.2 percent of the full-year budget estimate of Rs 7.96 lakh crore, and it is expected to widen further due to the coronavirus-related disruptions.

"It is quite natural that the government will run a higher fiscal deficit purely on the basis of revenue collection. In disinvestment too, there has een no movement so far. So the Rs 2.1 lakh crore divestment target (for the current fiscal) looks very unlikely, especially the one from LIC," Sabnavis said.

The Centre had planned to raise Rs 90,000 crore through a stake sale in LIC and IDBI Bank.

The government has thrice extended the deadline for submitting the preliminary bids for its plan to privatise Bharat Petroleum and Air India.

On the other hand, due to the pandemic, the projected government expenditure would shoot up significantly from the budgeted levels.

The sub-optimal economic activity despite lifting of the lockdown would mean that the government might have to spend more to revive the economy, over and above the committed additional expenditure of Rs 2.5-3 lakh crore.

"The fall in revenue has to be financed by whatever other means are available. As of today, the only means available is higher market borrowing. The government borrowing programme has been significantly increased but we aren't seeing any liquidity ease as of today because there is no commercial demand for credit," Sabnavis said.

The government has announced to increase its market borrowings for FY21 by Rs 4.2 lakh crore.

Which gives way to the question that whether any higher borrowing than this could keep the option of deficit monetisation open. As per the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, the government can directly borrow from the RBI due to exceptional situations.

"This (deficit monetisation) is an option that is open. The RBI governor had once said we can't do it legally, at another time he said we are not considering it. That's the last option that's there," Sabnavis said.
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Seventeen staff and two pupils have tested positive for coronavirus at a school in Dundee just two weeks after schools in Scotland reopened following lockdown.

All staff and children at Kingspark School in Dundee, which reopened along with other schools in Scotland on August 12, have been told to self-isolate for two weeks.

NHS Tayside confirmed positive cases among three 'community contacts' linked to the cluster at the school, which has about 185 pupils aged between five and 18. It has now been closed until at least next week in order to undergo a deep clean.

All pupils at the school, which was purpose built in 2009, have additional support needs - with many also having additional physical disabilities or medical problems.

Kingspark School was closed last Wednesday and all parents received a joint letter from the local council and NHS at the end of last week to keep them updated.

The outbreak in Dundee came as Boris Johnson, back in Downing Street after his holiday in Scotland last week, issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September.

The Prime Minister said in a video posted on his Twitter account that he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health.

He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed'.

Meanwhile, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries claimed pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom.

She said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus.

It came as:

Education Minister Nick Gibb this morning insisted parents will be fined if they refuse to send their children back to school next week;

Mr Gibb also said the Government is sticking by its advice to teachers that they do not need to wear masks despite a growing row with unions over staff safety;

Public Health England data revealed teachers are far more likely to spread Covid-19 than children;

Every school will be provided with coronavirus testing kits so they can quickly check pupils;

Ministers have given the green light for the resumption of breakfast and after-school clubs to provide extra childcare so more parents can get back to work;

Professor Chris Whitty said the chances of many children being damaged by not going to school are clear and so the balance of risk is very strongly in favour of children going to school.

Covid-19 cases have been confirmed at four schools in the Dundee region in recent days

All staff and children at Kingspark School in Dundee (pictured today) will now self-isolate

Deputy Chief Medical Officer says pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus than catch coronavirus as minister insists parents WILL be fined if they keep children at home Pupils are more likely to be hit by a bus on their way to school than catch coronavirus in the classroom, the deputy chief medical officer claimed today. Dr Jenny Harries said the risk of children being involved in a traffic accident or of catching the flu are 'probably higher than the current risk' posed by the deadly virus. Meanwhile, Education Minister Nick Gibb this morning insisted parents will be fined if they refuse to send their children back to school next week. He also said the Government is sticking by its advice to teachers that they do not need to wear masks despite a growing row with unions over staff safety. Public Health England data has shown that teachers are more likely to be infected than their pupils, after one in 23,000 students tested positive during the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays. Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to the classroom when schools reopen in England at the start of September. The Prime Minister said in a video posted on his Twitter account that he knew some parents were 'still a bit worried' about sending children back to school but he insisted it is 'vital' for pupil's physical and mental health. He said the risk of children catching the disease is 'very, very, very small' and the risk of them suffering badly from it is 'very, very, very, very, very small indeed'. The Government remains under pressure over its handling of the return of schools with Tory MPs today complaining ministers have left it 'very late' to persuade parents it is safe. Many pupils in England have not been to class since March, when schools were closed except to look after vulnerable children and those of key workers. Schools in Scotland reopened earlier this month, while those in Northern Ireland will welcome pupils again on Monday. English and Welsh schools will follow suit in September. The Government today stepped up its efforts to prepare for the return of pupils as Dr Harries suggested the risk coronavirus poses to pupils is actually very small. She told Sky News: 'Every time a parent sends their child off to school, pre-Covid, they may have been involved in a road traffic accident  there are all sorts of things. 'That risk, or the risk of seasonal flu, we think is probably higher than the current risk of Covid.' Her comments sparked controversy on social media as some accused her of 'shockingly superficial thinking'. Dr Harries also told the BBC: 'No environment anywhere we can say is 100 per cent risk free so I think we need to make that clear. 'But it clearly is very confusing for parents at the moment and so all the UK chief medical officers and deputy chief medical officers right across Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England have looked at the evidence and put that down on a statement so that parents can understand the risk. 'We think that the risks for children in schools is exceptionally small from Covid but the risks of not attending school are significant.' Mr Gibb said this morning that all pupils must return to the classroom and that fines will be issued to parents who refuse to comply. He said: 'Fines for non-attendance have always been a last resort for head teachers and schools.' On the crunch issue of whether teachers should wear masks, Mr Gibb said the current guidance against doing so will remain in place. He said: 'We are always led by the scientific advice. What the current advice is is that if a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July, all of the hygiene pleasures I have been talking about, then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils.' Asked if he believed the guidance could change, he said: 'We always listen to whatever the current advice is from Public Health England, the chief medical officers, we always adhere to that advice.' Unison is one a number of unions who have called for teachers to be allowed to wear a mask or face covering. 'It's still unclear why government guidance won't allow them, when they're recommended for other workplaces,' the union said. Public Health England data showed the partial reopening of schools before the summer holidays resulted in just one in 23,000 children catching coronavirus. Some 70 children tested positive out of more than 1.6 million who were in class, with many confirmed as having the disease actually being asymptomatic. But some 128 staff members tested positive, with most transmission believed to have taken place between adults. However, while staff are more likely to be infected than pupils they are no more likely to be infected than the general population. Advertisement

Health officials confirmed a single positive case has also been linked to the primary 2A class at St Peter and Paul's School in Dundee.

Parents and grandparents of children who attend St Peter and Paul's were notified of the case by letter today.

They fear more cases or a similar outbreak as the one that forced Kingspark to close.

Becky Sampson, 34, has a daughter in P4 at the school and said she was 'shocked' to hear about about the Covid-19 case.

Ms Sampson, a mum-of-two who works as a nurse, said: 'I just heard this morning. I was shocked when I heard it was linked to the school.

'I don't think the school should be closed for one person but it is scary as well, I see it all at work. I work at a GP surgery so I know all about it.

'The school's just telling people to keep up hand-washing and use hand sanitiser.'

Ian Heggie, 67, has a granddaughter who is in P2 class at the school, and has mixed feelings about his grandchild going to the school.

The retired taxi driver said: 'She's needing an education and hopefully the education department have got the classroom fitted in such a way that she's protected.

'I'm quite comfortable but if there's anymore cases I'd hope her parents would take her out.

'But if everybody behaves themselves there shouldn't be anymore cases.'

One parent of a child at the school said she felt happy with the level of hygiene at the primary, despite the recent positive Covid case.

The mum, who wished to remain anonymous, has a daughter in P4.

'I've got every confidence in the school, they're doing a good job,' she said.' There's a person out in the playground every hour cleaning and wiping things down.

'Right now I feel happy to send my daughter to school but we'll just need to see incase things change.

'She's got a hand sanitiser and washes her hands regularly so they can only do as much as they can.'

A positive case has also been linked to Happy Times out-of-school club at Downfield Primary School in the same city.

The NHS also confirmed that a child attending the nursery at Newburgh Primary School was now isolating at home with other household members.

One concerned mother said news about a case at one of the nurseries in Dundee was 'every parent's worst nightmare'.

She added: 'It's a very worrying development and there's a great level of concern as you'd expect from parents with children at the nursery.

'I have been advised that my child is to isolate for 14 days from the first day they came into contact with the confirmed case, however older siblings will still be required to attend the primary school.

'There's a lot of confusion and anxiety among parents I've spoken to about the situation but we'll follow the advice we've been given.'

Dr Ellie Hothersall, consultant in public health medicine with NHS Tayside, said: 'Since the identification of positive cases at Kingspark, a detailed contact tracing programme has been under way and these linked cases are being identified because of those concerted efforts of Test and Protect.

'We must do everything we can to protect all of our communities against Covid-19 and that is why we have issued the guidance to self-isolate.

'By taking this action we are containing any further spread of infection.we know this may cause anxiety to some parents and children but we must do everything we can to ensure we keep people safe.'

Elsewhere, a member of staff and two pupils at High Blantyre Primary School in South Lanarkshire have tested positive for Covid-19.

NHS Lanarkshire said adults and children connected to primary three or primary four had been asked not to attend class.

They will be offered testing on Wednesday and asked to self-isolate until they receive confirmation of a negative result.

Dr Josephine Pravinkumar, consultant in public health medicine, said: 'We are aware that there will be concern among both children and their parents at this time.

'We would like to reassure the local community that appropriate measures are being implemented.

'Individuals should stay off school or work and get tested if they or their close contacts experience any Covid-19 symptoms, such as a cough, fever or loss of taste or smell, even if they are mild.'

Shelagh Mclean, Fife Council's head of education and children's services, said: 'We are following public health advice and talking with our colleagues in NHS Fife about actions required regarding Covid-19.

'With their direction, we are taking all appropriate actions, including that relating to Test and Protect and contact with any confirmed case linked to one of our schools.

'A joint letter, from us and the NHS, was issued to all parents and carers in Fife at the end of last week to keep them informed.

'We've also issued a comprehensive list of questions and answers to help with any questions that they may have, and reminded them of their responsibilities around quarantining at www.fife.gov. uk/schoolcovidfaqs'

Meanwhile, restrictions have been placed on care homes across Tayside as authorities try to stem the spread of a coronavirus outbreak.

Indoor visits to the premises are due to restart across Scotland today, if deemed safe to do so.

However, the Tayside Incident Management Team (IMT) said this was not possible given the ongoing management of the cluster associated with the 2 Sisters factory, as well as other localised cases in the area.

Dr Emma Fletcher, associate director of public health for NHS Tayside, said: 'The NHS Tayside Health Protection Team and colleagues in the three Health and Social Care Partnerships in Angus, Dundee and Perth and Kinross, together with other partner agencies, determined that the reintroduction of indoor visiting should not go ahead in Tayside at this time due to the ongoing situation at the factory and a number of other clusters and positive cases.

'We know that this will cause a level of anxiety and disappointment amongst care home residents and their loved ones, however we must ensure that we do everything we can to protect care home residents, staff and their families as we continue to address the challenges that Covid-19 presents.'

There have been 110 positive cases linked to the factory cluster, including 96 workers and 14 community contacts.

All staff and their households, including children, have been ordered to self-isolate until August 31. That measure is in force even if they have a negative result.

Dr Fletcher added: 'The increase in positive cases linked to the factory again today is in line with what we expected and we continue to undertake detailed contact tracing of all cases to ensure everyone fully understands what action they must take.

'Over the last week in Tayside as a whole, more than 2,500 tests have been taken at the testing sites across the area, including the two dedicated facilities in Coupar Angus and Dundee brought in specifically to support testing of 2 Sisters factory workers.

'Hundreds of workers have attended for testing and given the volume of testing which has now been completed, we expect positive cases to continue to rise in the coming days as tests are processed and we receive the results.'

All pupils at the school, which was purpose built in 2009, have additional support needs

NHS Tayside has issued the above guidance about the closure of Kingspark School in Dundee

Boris Johnson tells parents it is 'vital' all pupils return to school Boris Johnson wants all pupils back in class next week Boris Johnson today urged parents to send their children back to school in England next week as he said it is 'absolutely vital' classes restart. 'It is vital for their education, it is vital for their welfare, it is vital for their physical and indeed their mental wellbeing, so let's make sure all pupils get back to school at the beginning of September,' he said in a video posted on this Twitter account. 'I think parents are genuinely still a bit worried about their children contracting coronavirus. 'All I can say is the risks are very, very, very small that they will even get it but then the risks that they will suffer from it badly are very, very, very, very, very small indeed.' Advertisement

Mr Johnson today pleaded with parents to send their children back to the classroom in England as he took charge of the drive to get all schools to reopen.

The Prime Minister warned that pupils risk permanent damage to their future life chances if they continue to stay away.

Mr Johnson, who has returned to No10 following his summer break, is in a race against the clock to get schools ready and persuade parents they are safe in time for the start of the new term.

In a video posted on his Twitter account this morning, he said it is 'absolutely vital' that classes restart full time across England next week.

'It is vital for their education, it is vital for their welfare, it is vital for their physical and indeed their mental wellbeing, so let's make sure all pupils get back to school at the beginning of September,' he said.

'I think parents are genuinely still a bit worried about their children contracting coronavirus.

'All I can say is the risks are very, very, very small that they will even get it but then the risks that they will suffer from it badly are very, very, very, very, very small indeed.'

The PM had said in a statement issued overnight that there is a 'moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely'.

'We have always been guided by our scientific and medical experts, and we now know far more about coronavirus than we did earlier this year,' he said.

'As the Chief Medical Officer has said, the risk of contracting Covid-19 in school is very small and it is far more damaging for a child's development and their health and well-being to be away from school any longer.

'This is why it's vitally important that we get our children back into the classroom to learn and to be with their friends. Nothing will have a greater effect on the life chances of our children than returning to school.'

The Government faces a big test to deliver on its promise to get all children full-time back following its shambolic handling of A-level and GCSE results.

Many pupils in England have not been to class since March, when schools were closed except to vulnerable children and those of key workers.
On the Frontline Against China, the US Coast Guard Is Taking on Missions the US Navy Can't Do

Competition with China has drawn more Pentagon resources to the Pacific, but the most visible U.S. military presence there...
New research from Southern Cross University has highlighted the importance of managing the potential impacts of pesticide run-off in areas of intensive coastal agriculture.

Researchers from the University's National Marine Science Centre have demonstrated that imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid insecticide, can impact the feeding behaviour of prawns in a laboratory environment, leading to nutritional deficiency and reduced flesh quality.

"The sobering thing with this study is that it shows that the exposure of prawns to high concentrations of neonicotinoids can have such a significant impact," said lead author and PhD candidate Peter Butcherine whose study focussed on adult black tiger prawns.

"If they are not well managed, these chemicals have the potential to affect the productivity and sustainability of cultured and capture prawn fisheries."

This latest study builds on Peter's earlier work reviewing the risk of neonicotinoid exposure to the shrimp aquaculture industry where he identified a significant problem with these water-soluble pesticides increasingly being detected in coastal waters worldwide.

Prawns and shrimp are in the same animal phylum (category) as insects and therefore share similarities in the nervous system that is the main target for neonicotinoids, explained Professor Kirsten Benkendorff, co-author and Director of the National Marine Science Centre based at Coffs Harbour.

"This means prawns and shrimp are highly vulnerable if they become exposed to high levels of neonicotinoids, either through contaminated water or feed, which often contains plant-based material," Professor Benkendorff said.

Imidacloprid is an agricultural insecticide used in Australia. Peter's research provides evidence that exposure to imidacloprid, at environmentally-relevant concentrations in food or water, leads to decreased food consumption and a loss of weight, as well as changes in the lipid composition of the flesh.

"This laboratory-based study indicates that cultured and wild prawns could be impacted in areas affected by high levels of neonicotinoid pesticide run-off," Peter said.

Sydney rock oysters are also impacted by imidacloprid, according to the findings of a separate study co-authored by Professor Benkendorff.

"These two studies indicate both crustaceans and molluscs are vulnerable to insecticides, weakening their immune system and leaving them susceptible to disease," Professor Benkendorff said.

Professor Benkendorff said further study is required to understand the range of pesticides in Australian waterways and their impacts on estuarine environments.

"Our research identifies the need for effective management of pesticide use and run-off from intensive agriculture in coastal areas with productive seafood industries," she said.

###

Publications:

Peter Butcherine, Brendan P. Kelaher, Matthew D. Taylor, Bronwyn J. Barkla, Kirsten Benkendorff (2020). Impact of imidacloprid on the nutritional quality of adult black tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon). Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 198: 110682. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2020.110682

Butcherine, P, Benkendorff, K, Kelaher, B and Barkla, B. 2019. The risk of neonicotinoid exposure to shrimp aquaculture. Chemosphere 217: 329-348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2018.10.197

Endurance E. Ewere, Amanda Reichelt-Brushett, Kirsten Benkendorff. The neonicotinoid insecticide imidacloprid, but not salinity, impacts the immune system of Sydney rock oyster, Saccostrea glomerata. Science of the Total Environment 742: 140538

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140538
By Helen Macdonald

Grove. 288 pp. $27

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"So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it," Helen Macdonald writes in her new book, "Vesper Flights." In the 41 essays that make up this collection, the author seeks to tell another type of nature story, one that asks readers to see the natural world as something other than a reflection of themselves. Doing so, she believes, may just help us save it.

A former historian of science, Macdonald is as captivated by the everyday (ants, bird's nests) as she is by the extraordinary (glowworms, total solar eclipses), and her writing often closes the distance between the two. None of the book's essays, many of which run for just a few pages, concerns only one thing. A piece given the evocative title "Lost, But Catching Up" opens with Macdonald sharing that she's allergic to horses, dogs and even reindeer. "Indeed, the longer life goes on, the more I realise that most quadrupeds make me ill," she notes with dry amusement. The essay's ultimate focus is on fox hunting, but it also explores loneliness and grief, which, as demonstrated in her best-selling 2014 memoir, "H Is for Hawk," she writes about beautifully.

Macdonald wrote many of these essays for the New York Times Magazine, New Statesman and other publications. Some are being published for the first time, as they "were written for friends, for the joy of exploring a subject, for piecing together a story or investigating something that troubled or fascinated me."

Her curiosity carries her around the globe. In Hungary, she welcomes the arrival of migrating Eurasian cranes, "thousands of beating hearts and eyes and fragile frames of feather and bone." She watches peregrine falcons hunt in Ireland and views an evening migration of numerous bird species from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. In Chile, she follows an astrobiologist into deserts and onto volcanic sites in search of "extremophile life," organisms similar to those that might live on Mars. It's not all high adventure. A trip to Australia's Blue Mountains National Park leaves her feeling dejected and homesick.

Home is England, where Macdonald began life in an incubator as an "exceedingly premature" baby whose twin brother died at birth. She writes of being haunted by isolation, of "feeling unaccountably upset, with a vague, disquieting sense of vertigo." The essays in "Vesper Flights" wrestle with that feeling, which can arise while Macdonald watches hares box in a wheat field beside a highway or while she forages mushrooms in a Suffolk forest. Always, the author pushes through the gloom to look beyond herself, beyond all people, to "rejoice in the complexity of things" and to see what science has to show us: "that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us."

The climate crisis shadows these essays. Macdonald is not, however, given to sounding dire, all-caps warnings. By now, all but those in deepest denial or hiding in the dimmest ideological corners understand that, as the author describes, "we are already inside the apocalypse." But by choosing to act, to "march and cry and mourn and sing and hope and fight for the world," she argues that we can envision a future with us in it.

Even so, Macdonald is direct about the losses to come. "Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief," she writes. To love is to risk letting go, and with quiet heartbreak Macdonald details things that have disappeared from her life, and from the planet: meadows that gave way to housing developments, ash and elm trees felled by disease, flycatchers that vanished after years of nesting near her home.

For all its elegiac sentences and gray moods, "Vesper Flights" is a book of tremendous purpose. Throughout these essays, Macdonald revisits the idea that as a writer it is her responsibility to take stock of what's happening to the natural world and to convey the value of the living things within it. The more people understand that the animals we share this planet with are "creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives," she writes, the more people become invested in these animals' survival and the preservation of their habitats. It's enough, she emphasizes, to care about other beings for their sake alone.

"Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather, passed from existence into a memory that even now batters inside my chest," Macdonald writes. "Look, I can't say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was."

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Cline is a writer and editor in Miami.
The Senate of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka, will Monday morning meet to appoint an acting vice-chancellor as recommended by the Visitor to the institution  President Muhammadu Buhari.

As of Sunday night, more than 140 professors have signed for the convocation of the emergency senate meeting, PREMIUM TIMES learnt. The signatories are already more than half of the senates roughly 230 members and four times more than the required 25 to convey such meetings.

The senate meeting is one of the decisions contained in the federal governments recommendations announced on Friday night, which are aimed at addressing the lingering crisis rocking the university.

The government had also mandated both the pro-chancellor, Wale Babalakin, and the vice-chancellor, Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, to step aside from office pending the conclusion of the task before a seven-member special visitation panel appointed to dispassionately look into the crisis.

The panel is to be chaired by a former vice-chancellor of the Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State, Tukur Saad.

Mr. Saad, a professor, was in office between 2002 and 2007, and was also a resident electoral commissioner in Borno State.

One of the key decisions to be reached at Mondays senate meeting is the appointment of a new acting vice-chancellor for the institution.

Those in contention for the coveted office are more than eight professors including those whose retirement is due in less than four months.

Those who have reportedly signified their intention include a former deputy vice-chancellor of the university, Babajide Alo, and a former registrar of the Joint Universities Preliminary Examination Board (JUPEP), Duro Ajeyalemi.

But others who are being prodded by various camps among the senate members include the former acting vice-chancellor who was controversially appointed by the governing council following the controversial removal of Mr Ogundipe, Omololu Soyombo; two deputy vice-chancellors  Ben Oghojafor and Folasade Ogunsola  and the provost of the universitys college of medicine, Afolabi Lesi.

Others who are being rooted for, include a former director-general of the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC), Duro Oni, and the incumbent dean of the faculty of Law, Ayo Atsenuwa.

Possible criteria

It is not clear what specific criteria the university would use in the selection of the acting vice-chancellor but both Alo and Ajeyalemi have declared their interest. Both men belong to the oldest generation of professors on the campus. Chioma Agomo, the former dean of the Law faculty, who chaired the senate meeting that countered Mr Ogundipes removal and led a three-member committee to submit the senates position in Abuja, also belongs to this generation.

While Mr Ajeyalemi is due for retirement in November, Mr Alo, a former deputy vice-chancellor in charge of management services during the administration of the immediate past vice-chancellor, Ramon Bello, will also exit the system by early 2021. But this is the same argument being deployed by many of the senate members to counter their nomination, PREMIUM TIMES learnt.

Another opinion among many senate members is that the two deputy vice-chancellors, Messrs Oghojafor and Ogunsola, were part of the embattled management of the university, and that they were not impartial in the crisis. Their reappointment as deputy vice-chancellors was also yet to be ratified by the governing council before the imbroglio.

But for the provost of the medical college, Mr Lesi, many are of the view that he is the third in the hierarchy of the universitys organogram. His supporters argue that since he is also a governing council member and was not mentioned in the Saminu Dagari-led committee report that indicted Mr Ogundipe, he should be allowed to step in.

But his opponents have suggested that being a provost should not be seen as an automatic endorsement, and have insisted on giving chance to others. Those who hold this view have suggested the likes of Atsenuwa, who they claimed was part of those who rose to the challenge and represented the senate in Abuja to protest the councils decision.

Meanwhile, a professor of Finance, Ayo Olowe, has canvassed support for Mr Soyombo. In a letter to the university community personally signed by Mr Olowe and distributed via social media on Sunday, he maintained that the federal governments silence on the status of the acting vice-chancellor in its recommendations should be seen as an endorsement.

He, therefore, appealed to the senate to disregard the reported resignation of Mr Soyombo as acting VC, claiming he was yet to formally notify the universitys council through the registrar, Oladejo Azeez.

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He wrote; Luckily for us, though Prof. Soyombo has issued a press statement, he has not submitted any letter to the registrar or governing council stepping down his appointment. This is an internal UNILAG matter not for the press. By implication, he is still the acting vice-chancellor. We need somebody like Prof. Omololu Soyombo to save the university out of the current crisis.

There is yet to be any argument against the former CBAAC DG, Mr Oni, but the former deputy vice-chancellor seems not to be the favourite of many of his colleagues reportedly due to his discipline and principles.

None of the contenders who were approached by our reporter agreed to speak on the matter while other senate members only spoke on the condition anonymity.

ASUU stays aloof

The leadership of the universitys chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has said all the contenders are members of its union, and so it would not support any candidate.

According to the unions chairman, Dele Ashiru, the union stands for due process and it would enjoin the professors who are to take part in the process to ensure that due process is followed.

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ASUU has been vociferous in its opposition against the chairman of the universitys governing council, Mr. Babalakin, especially over the crisis on the campus.

Everyone interested in becoming the acting VC is in one way or the other our member. So it will be wrong for the union to throw its weight behind anyone. However, we will plead with the senate to conduct the process in a very civil and legal way. The university is bigger than anybodys ambition, Mr Ashiru told our reporter on the phone.
Politicians, the unkind suggest, spend their professional lives hiding behind masks, lest ghastly intentions be revealed.

And so it has come to pass.

Ministers Alan Tudge and Michael Sukkar wearing masks on arrival for Question Time on Monday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Parliament House in Canberra was a-swirl with masks as politicians, parliamentary staff and the media mixed for the first time in months, fear of a pandemic infecting the rarefied air and suppressing great egos.

Who was grinning; who was scowling and who was practising the art of factionally-aligned whispering? No one could tell.
Northern California braced Sunday for more lightning strikes that could intensify the hundreds of wildfires roaring through the region that have already consumed more than 1 million acres.

The death toll from the fires, which began after thousands of lightning strikes last week, rose to six Sunday when authorities in Santa Cruz County found the body of a 70-year-old man in the mountains.

Chris Clark, chief deputy with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office, told reporters that the man was found by helicopter in an area near the CZU Lightning fire, which had grown to 67,000 acres and was five percent contained. Clark did not identify the man, saying his family still needed to be notified.

The man was found near his car, likely showing the victim was fleeing flames when he was overcome, officials said.

"It's one of the darkest periods we've been in with this fire," Clark said.

Image: US-WILDFIRES-CALIFORNIA-fire-environment-weather (JOSH EDELSON / AFP - Getty Images)

The National Weather Service, meanwhile, issued its highest fire alert, a red flag warning, from the Oregon border to the Central Coast until Monday afternoon as remnants of Hurricane Genevieve moved up the Pacific Coast. Forecasters said frequent lightning was possible with gusty, erratic winds and little to no rain.

We could see a repeat of what we saw last week  nearly 12,000 lightning strikes, said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, in a briefing Sunday.

The earlier strikes were part of a rare summer thunderstorm that sparked wildfires across Northern California, a region that saw record-low rainfall over the winter and a heatwave after the storm.

President Donald Trump declared a major disaster in the state Saturday as nearly 250,000 people remained under evacuation orders across the region, Berlant said. Hundreds of buildings have burned, according to CalFire.

A sprawling plume of smoke that drifted over much of the Bay Area created some of the worst air quality on the planet, NBC Bay Area reported.

Story continues

Two fires that started during the storm are now the second and third largest in California history  the LNU Lightning Complex, which by Sunday afternoon had scorched 341,243 acres northeast of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the SCU Lightning Complex, which had burned 339,968 acres east of San Jose.

The fires were 17 percent and 10 percent contained, respectively.

Fourteen-thousand firefighters were working to contain nearly 600 blazes across California. The possibility of more wildfires comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged last week that the recent round of lightning strikes had already stretched the states resources.

On Friday, Newsom said the state had asked for help from Australia and Canada. National Guard soldiers have been deployed in the effort, Berlant said, and counties and cities across the region have also dispatched firefighters and fire engines.

States across the West have sent dozens of extra fire engines, Berlant said, and hundreds more were being requested.
Living through this pandemic has resulted in a multitude of lifestyle changes. Notably, most people want things to be easier than ever while s
The highest average wage goes to top managers and IT specialists.

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Career & Employment Guide Source of contacts and up-to-date content for all who want to learn more about the Slovak HR sector. For more details visit our online shop.

The highest average net wage is in Bratislava Region. Moreover, it is the only region in Slovakia where people receive more than 1,000, as stems from the recent analysis of the Platy.sk website.

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The average gross wage in the capital amounts to 1,614 gross, meaning that the average net salary is 1,202.

Employees in all other regions receive a net salary below 1,000; those in Kosice Region and Trnava Region are the closest to this threshold. On the other hand, the lowest net average salary is in Presov Region, where the average employee receives around 770.

The net salary exceeds 1,000 in just two cities: Bratislava and Malacky, the analysis suggests.

Top management and IT belong to the best

The highest average salaries are in top management positions, where the gross wage amounts to 3,138 and net wage to 2,271.

Apart from that, people working in IT receive the most, but the net average wage is almost 1,000 lower than that of top managers.

On the other hand, ancillary workers receive only 718 gross, which represents about 574 net on average. Cleaning staff earns the least, only 636 gross, which represents 516 net.

There are several positions where the net income is lower than 500. This includes ancillary staff in kitchens, school caretakers, maids, seamstresses, doorkeepers, and caretakers, the analysis shows.

Related article
Marquise Lee Love, BLM protester who kicked a defenseless Adam Haner into unconsciousness in downtown Portland last Sunday, turned himself in to the Portland police Friday after evading arrest all week. "Keese," as he calls himself, is being charged with assault, coercion, and riot.

Keese surfaced on social media later that night, apparently under the impression that he'd killed his victim. Incidental to asking for donations, he told his friends on SnapChat that he "[m]ight go to jail for a murder tonight," a clear injustice, because his victim was "a racist [and] all I did was fight him."

Neither Haner nor his girlfriend, Tammie Martin (who was also beaten up) ever put up any kind of fight. All the violence came from Keese and his accessories. As for Haner, he describes himself as a supporter of BLM and has marched in their demonstrations.

Tammie Martin said it was Haner's good deed in coming to the aid of a white transgender being mugged that triggered a mob of activists to charge the couple, screaming that they were "white supremacists."

The brutal Portland attack has generally been framed as a particularly ugly example of the left's descent into unreason and barbarism. But it's really so much less than that  that is, a ghetto assault, incidentally captured on video by a vicious black criminal who loathes white people. That he had assorted white BLM allies helping him commit his attack is an example of how the left's plunge into complete unreason has deprived them of any ability to see straight. Given the opportunity, Keese would gleefully kick all of them to death.

It's true that, since George Floyd, BLM, and Antifa's Pact of Steel have enabled them to commingle their wanton lawlessness toward their respective goals. And it's true that, as Matt Vespa recognizes, most of what we're seeing is "not about Floyd, criminal justice, police brutality, or even racism. It's about Marxist revolution." But Keese Love is no Marxist revolutionary. He's not even a Biden voter. He's a racist street punk who accepted BLM's invitation to come enjoy cop-free downtown Portland. Keese's vile attack wasn't a political statement, and he doesn't hate Haner for being a white supremacist. Keese hates him for being white.

It took Haner to state the obvious thing that even conservative media have been bashful about saying, which is that he was attacked because he was white.

We don't know yet if Keese's arrest will earn him his own mural overlooking some weedy vacant lot, but it definitely won't hurt his standing with BLM.

Clearly, BLM strategists have opted for brute force and racial intimidation. They've deputized the black criminal class, with BLM mouthpieces asserting that looting is "reparations" and attacks on innocent people "fighting white supremacy."

White progressives, many of whom have literally prostrated themselves pledging obeisance to Black Lives Matter, imagine that in return, BLM is going to absolve them of their whiteness and embrace them as members of their racial justice fraternity.

Never going to happen. BLM is a transparently racist movement, and its members have nothing but contempt for every useful white idiot they're only too willing to use.

When Walt Kowalski, the racially insensitive hero of Clint Eastwood's 2008 Gran Torino, rescues lead character Sue, and "Trey," her asinine wigger companion, from a fast-deteriorating run-in with three black thugs in Detroit's inner city, Kowalski can't get over Trey's adaptation of stereotypical black dress and mannerisms. The three thugs don't think much of it, either, especially when Trey tries to ingratiate himself by addressing one of them as "bro."

With the help of his service .45, Kowalski gets the thugs to see sense, but when Trey tries to thank him, Kowalski calls him an insulting name, then asks him, "What's all this bro s---, anyway? ... These guys don't want to be your bro, and I don't blame 'em. Now get your ofay Paddy ass down the road."

I don't think Trey stopped till he got to Portland.

Image: Pixabay.
Why Rahul Gandhi not being at the helm is creating confusion within the Congress

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: The Congress is in disarray and a crucial meeting of the party is set to take place later today. The possibility of Sonia Gandhi stepping down as the president is high and several within the Congress have sought for the appointment of a full time chief, even if it meant the person was not a Gandhi.

Many within the Congress feel the need to have a full time president as they feel this would end the confusion within the party. For instance, Rahul Gandhi after stepping down as the president in 2019 has stopped meeting leaders for discussions on the ground situation. He says that he is no longer the chief and hence is not holding disscussions.

Explained: What happens if Sonia Gandhi steps down from her post in the CWC meeting?

This has however added to the confusion as Rahul Gandhi continues to set the agenda with his tweets and statements. He has launched several all out attacks against Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, which many within the party believe is not suitable. Despite not being the president and also not meeting with party workers, Rahul Gandhi continues to set the agenda and this has left several confused. While many feel that his personalised attacks against the PM is not good, he however maintains that this is the best strategy.

Congress president post, who will lead if not the Gandhis? Big developments | Oneindia News

The big question is who will take over as the president of the party. There is bound to be a pitch for either Sonia Gandhi to continue as president or for Rahul to take over. Both are unlikely to heed to the request. Many in the party would want Priyanka Gandhi to take over, but that scenario looks very unlikely for now.

Today's meeting may not end the logjam and the possibility of a new leader being chosen immediately is unlikely. There is a chance of Sonia Gandhi continuing for sometime before a new leader is chosen.

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Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 10:20 [IST]
T he pace and path of the global economic recovery in the wake of Covid-19 remains extraordinarily uncertain, as countries rebound from mutually reinforcing and profound shocks to both demand (how much people buy and consume) and supply (how these goods and services are provided). Many countries have seen a decade or more of economic growth wiped out in the course of a few months.

For the UK its even more complicated than that. Here, covid-related uncertainty also interacts with a large number of other adjustments. There is the overriding objective of reducing the UKs reliance on South-East England, and closing the economic and social gaps between groups and regions  levelling-up. Theres the target to become a carbon neutral country by 2050  an enormous but correct undertaking. And theres the end of free movement of people and workers between the UK and the EU, changing the composition of Britains labour market.

And then there are the changes to how the UK does business with the rest of the world, driven by a fusion of objectives: democratic control (Brexit), more self-sufficiency (medical equipment), better security (the Huawei ban), and overall less reliance on far-flung parts of the world, most notably China.

The obvious point: the UKs economic recovery is highly complex and any simple answer  on the overall picture or its individual parts is likely the wrong answer. This is particularly true of Brexit. On December 31 (the fifth Brexit deadline in four years) the UKs stand-still transition ends, and Britain and the EU will enter into a fundamentally different relationship, deal or no deal.

Despite the UK-EU talks currently going nowhere  with both sides blaming each other  a deal is probably more likely than not. When up against a hard deadline, European negotiations tend to gravitate towards a deal.

Mats Persson

Whats under discussion is also a pretty limited goods-only Free Trade Agreement, meaning the two sides actually dont have to agree on that much. The EU and UK have overcome greater differences in the past, including in the withdrawal negotiations (in particular the Irish border).

But theres also a distinct possibility that time will run out and the UK will exit on December 31 with no overall agreement, triggering questions around how such a scenario would affect the UKs fragile recovery, and relate to all other adjustments it is going through.

I get this question in particular from businesses thinking about whether to keep people on, and invest as government support schemes come to an end in the autumn and winter, coinciding with the end of the transition period.

Unsurprisingly, there are two polarised schools of thought. The first claims that No Deal adjustments, for businesses and others, have merged with the Covid-19 adjustment anyway. So no big deal. The second is that it would be one economic disaster on top of another, doubling the damage. As so often, the answer is likely more nuanced. Lets take demand, supply and the overall picture in turn.

First, demand. Given how much of the UK economy and its recovery are driven by domestic consumer spending, it would be very bad if a No Deal scenario further dampened consumer confidence going into the new year. However, consumer spending has held up better since the referendum than many had predicted. And I have always been sceptical that Britons, having voted for delivering Brexit will turn around and stop spending because of Brexit. As a driver of consumer behaviour, its dwarfed and largely absorbed by Covid. The caveat is if a No Deal triggers substantially more job losses, given the correlation with consumer confidence, but that is far from certain.

Secondly, supply side and chains. This is different. Covid and Brexit mostly involve different types of value chain disruption.

The former is primarily about hedging against factory shut-downs, outbreaks or a freeze in consumer spending. The latter is primarily about hedging against border delays, new duties or invalid licences. For one, you want to keep as little stock as possible, to manage acute cash flow problems and to keep agile; for the other you want to stock-build to manage unplanned border delays. While the response can clearly pull in the same direction  for example, securing more lorry drivers  and companies absolutely need to make sure Brexit and Covid adjustments work in tandem, the point is its not as simple to say that one effect is absorbed by the other.

In the medium term, Brexit may merge with a wider trend for more local production and shorter supply chains, but that will very much vary between sectors and companies, and depends on a range of other global developments.

Finally, the overall picture. Paradoxically, the zone of economic uncertainty has narrowed since Theresa Mays days, as unlike her preferred outcome, the difference between a goods-only Free Trade Agreement and No Deal isnt that great for several sectors including for services and industries where tariffs are low or zero, such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace. So the difference in overall economic impact between the two scenarios should also be smaller.

A No Deal would, however, probably have a negative impact on the sentiment around the UK and slow its economic recovery via for example less business investment in the short-term according to some heavily caveated modelling Ive seen.

But yet again, other factors, like the policy mix around stimulus, taxation and regulation may be bigger drivers of investment decisions than the precise Brexit outcome. And over the medium to long-term, Brexit isnt even on the same planet as some of the UKs structural adjustments, including Net Zero which will touch every part of society and economy. On the upside, if the UK can pull all of this off, it will come out a strong and highly-dynamic economy.

Mats Persson is a business strategy consultant and a former Downing Street adviser
The beauty of Direct Primary Care is in its simplicity. Theres no health insurance, billing codes, corporations, waiting rooms, or middlemen to worry about  its just you and your doctor. Its the most Direct form of healthcare possible.

Ann Arbor Physician Dr. Jane Klaes announced the opening of her independent primary care practice on August 17th.

Following eight years as a Family Medicine Physician at Integrated Health Associates (IHA), Dr. Klaes opened her own clinic with the vision of providing personalized healthcare in the style of an old-fashioned small town doctor.

Set in the country just west of Ann Arbor, Dr. Klaes practice operates on a Direct Primary Care (DPC) model where patients pay flat monthly membership fees in return for comprehensive, individualized care. Health insurance is not required nor accepted.

The beauty of Direct Primary Care is in its simplicity, said Dr. Klaes. "Theres no health insurance, billing codes, corporations, waiting rooms, or middlemen to worry about  its just you and your doctor. Its the most Direct form of healthcare possible.

Dr. Klaes says that DPC both extends health coverage to people without health insurance and also facilitates stronger doctor-patient relationships than conventional health systems are able to provide.

My practice is a bit like a throwback to the old days, she said. Patients build a relationship with a doctor who knows and cares about them, and they work together towards greater wellness and quality of life. And since patients dont pay extra for each visit, its easier to afford preventive care and get treatment before questions or health concerns pile up.

Dr. Klaes offers direct access to her by phone, text, email or telemedicine and is available for urgent same-day or next-day appointments in virtually all cases.

She is excited to welcome new patients. Visit https://www.drjaneklaes.com/contact if you are interested in joining her practice.

About

Dr. Jane Klaes, DO practices family medicine in Ann Arbor utilizing an innovative approach to healthcare called Direct Primary Care. DPC is a membership-based model in which patients pay a low monthly fee in exchange for high quality, comprehensive care when and how they need it.


The health crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border has been building for the past two years, according to Fr. Olayo-Mendez and his co-authors, in the wake of policy changes and practices enacted or encouraged by the Trump administration that affect migrants ability to seek asyluma right guaranteed under U.S. law. One is metering, which restricts the number of migrants requesting asylum each day at a U.S. point of entry, requiring them to remain in Mexico for their turn to state their claim for asylum. Another is the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, where asylum seekers who have already been received and inspected by the U.S. government must wait in Mexico for their legal proceedings.



The result has been a logjam at entry points along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to A Population in Peril. Since January of 2019, under the MPP, the U.S. government has sent more than 64,000 individuals to Mexico to await legal proceedings; of these, 537 have been granted leave to stay in the U.S., and the average wait time for the initial immigration court date is almost 90 days. They have been joined by thousands more would-be asylum seekers idled by metering. The asylum process often takes three or more interviews before a decision is made. For now, during this time, asylum seekers have to wait in Mexico.



Meanwhile, the report notes, where in past years the typical U.S.-bound migrant was most likely to be a single adult, it is now persons in family units or unaccompanied minors who form the majority: The 64,000 people sent to Mexico under MPP included at least 16,000 children and 500 infants less than a year old. Increasing numbers of these migrants are fleeing poverty or violence, and given the arduous journey many takeoften facing personal as well as financial dangerthey are likely to arrive at the border physically and emotionally depleted. Some, such as mothers, pregnant women, and LGBTQI individuals, are at particularly high risk.



Entry points along the border where asylum seekers must wait are scarcely safe havens, given the spike in demand for essential services like food, shelter, water, and medical supplies. Casas de migrantesshelters run by faith-based organizationsare typically underfunded and overburdened, often forced to ration food or charge for room and board, while rented rooms tend to be costly, overcrowded, and located in unsafe neighborhoods. The options for asylum seekers are to squat in abandoned buildings, sleep in the streets, or join makeshift, large-scale tent encampments.



The report was largely researched and compiled before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, and thus does not address its impact. But Fr. Olayo-Mendez said the coronavirus has unquestionably put a further strain on services and contributed to the overall stress and anxiety among the migrants and those aiding them. [Read more in an opinion piece by the research team on COVID-19 at the border.]
It was still early on Saturday when Danielle Fuentes Morgan, a Black assistant professor at Santa Clara University, heard her brother knock on the door.

"I'm so sorry about this," said Carlos Fuentes, standing on the sunny, palm-lined sidewalk across from the Northern California campus. "They're demanding you come out and vouch for me."

She didn't need to hear more to understand what was happening. Standing right beside him was a campus police officer, who ordered Morgan to show her campus ID, prove she was on the faculty and that she did in fact live in the squat white bungalow she was already standing inside.

The "surreal" experience, Morgan, 36, told The Washington Post, shocked her and yet was an entirely predictable incident all at once.

"No one ever wakes up in the morning thinking that these things will happen," the English professor said. But "being Black in America means there is an expectation that you have to show your papers, that you have to prove you are who you say you are and you belong where you say you belong."

That Morgan was asked to do just that - on the idyllic Jesuit campus in Silicon Valley, where about 2% of the student body is Black and she is one of just seven Black faculty - has rocked the tightknit school, bringing massive online attention to a county that recently declared racism a public health crisis.

In a letter to Santa Clara's students and staff on Saturday, President Kevin F. O'Brien said he was "deeply sorry" about the incident, adding that "racial bias or profiling has no place on our campus."

But Morgan said that the incident was not any worse because of where - or to whom - it occurred. All Black people are too familiar with these kinds of experiences, she said, no matter their standing or accomplishments.

"There is no respectable enough. There is no articulate enough. There is no 'enough' that can protect you from this kind of trauma," she added. "I wasn't surprised. I was just hurt that it was taking place in this place that I love."

A specialist in African American satire and comedy, Morgan had long dreamed of being a professor. While in college and graduate school, she especially looked up to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a celebrated Black Harvard literature professor whose texts on theory and criticism were often the first on her classes' reading lists.

Like Gates, she told friends, she wanted her work to have an influence both within academia and in popular discourse.

A few years later, though, the Harvard professor attracted very different kind of attention. Police officers in Cambridge, Mass., arrested him in 2009 as he was attempting to enter his own house, sparking a heated national debate on racial profiling that culminated in a "beer summit" at the White House.

A little more than a decade later, Morgan found herself in an on-campus situation eerily similar to what her academic icon experienced.

This weekend was supposed to be a reunion of sorts with Fuentes, her 32-year-old brother, a pianist, composer and music teacher who lives nearby in Sacramento. Although the two had made plans to see each other in the winter and early spring, the coronavirus pandemic had kept the siblings apart since Christmas.

Earlier this month, Fuentes was finally able to undergo a strict, 14-day quarantine and drive over to visit his sister and her husband. On Saturday morning, he left Morgan's house for an 8:30 a.m. video call. Across the street on campus, he found a scenic outdoor spot, got out his books and laptop, and got to work.

Then, as Morgan recounted in a Twitter thread that went viral over the weekend, campus police officers approached Fuentes in the middle of his meeting and ordered him to move along.

"He's been Black his whole life," she wrote, "so he said OK."

Four campus police cars then followed him to Morgan's front door, where one officer - whom Morgan declined to identify - "very aggressively demanded" to see her campus ID.

The officer said her brother had been in the bushes and appeared to be homeless, telling Morgan, "[You need] to prove you are who he says you are and that you actually live here."

Her husband Matthew, who is White and works at Santa Clara's marketing and communications office, joined in to push back. So did the officer's supervisor.

"Well, it's not your home," the police told the couple. "The University owns it."

Like others on the block, their house is owned by the university and leased out to early-career, tenure-track faculty, she told The Post. But when a neighbor left their house nearby to walk their dog that morning, the officers declined to ask them for ID, Morgan said.

Moreover, she added, the incident points to how Black students and faculty at Santa Clara have been disproportionately policed. In recent weeks, she told the police officers, White students on campus have been smoking marijuana up and down the street without face masks and without incident.

O'Brien, the university's president, said that campus safety officers would undergo racial sensitivity training and said he's planning a schoolwide conversation on the incident. Santa Clara's Division of Equity and Social Justice has also launched an investigation.

Yet Morgan said the implications of her Saturday morning go far beyond campus.

"It's not extra sad or extra troubling because this happened to a college professor," she said. "It's explicitly sad because this should not be happening in the year 2020."
Shares of Novavax, Inc. NVAX were up 6.2% on Monday after the company announced that it has initiated a phase IIb study to evaluate the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate NVX-CoV2373 in South Africa. The mid-stage study is being conducted in collaboration with Professor Shabir Madhi, who is leading the clinical analysis and Wits University.

The study is being supported by a $15-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Notably, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) is funding the manufacturing of NVX-CoV2373 doses for the above-mentioned clinical study.

Novavaxs stock has skyrocketed 3807.8% so far this year compared with the industrys increase of 2.6%.



The placebo-controlled phase IIb study will have two cohorts wherein one will evaluate the efficacy, safety and immunogenicity in around 2,665 healthy adults while the second will be conducted in approximately 240 medically stable, HIV-positive adult patients.

Upon its potential approval in South Africa, the COVID-19 vaccine will be made available in the country through Novavaxs collaboration with the Serum Institute of India. In August, Novavax entered into a license agreement with Serum Institute of India Private Limited for the development and commercialization of NVX-CoV2373 in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) apart from India.

We note that NVX-CoV2373 includes Novavaxs proprietary Matrix-M adjuvant to improve immune responses and stimulate high levels of neutralizing antibodies. The company initiated a phase I/II study on the candidate in May. In August, it released encouraging results on the first human trial of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate. The clinical trial data showed that the vaccine was generally well-tolerated and elicited robust antibody responses, numerically superior to what was seen in human convalescent sera (antibodies derived from blood donated by people who recovered from the illness).

Novavax submitted the above study outcomes to the FDA and an independent safety monitoring committee. The company plans to begin the phase II portion of this study in the United States and Australia shortly.

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We remind investors that Novavax received a total of worth $2-billion funding, roughly divided into the U.S. Department of Defenses aid of $60 million, the CEPIs $388 million donation and the U.S. governments OWS grant of $1.6 billion for developing NVX-CoV2373.

Significantly, all the above entities are financing several biotechs and large pharma companies including AstraZeneca AZN, Sanofi SNY, Moderna MRNA, Inovio Pharmaceuticals and many universities to accelerate the development of vaccines against COVID-19.

Meanwhile, last week, Novavax signed a Heads of Terms (Term Sheet) with the Government of the United Kingdom, which is looking to purchase 60 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate NVX-CoV2373. The company will also collaborate with the UK government for a phase III study, which will evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine in the countrys population. The study will commence in the third quarter of 2020.

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The marketing playbook for social impact has long been about engaging with the brands community by pushing out a TV ad or a few online messages about a trending cause and strategically fading back into business as usual. Such short-lived efforts have been about engendering goodwill with consumers during a tough time, and, consequently, driving sales. In the past, that bottom-line-minded combo has been OK.

Not quite the case anymore.

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The COVID-19 crisis, Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements like LGBTQ rights have made it abundantly clear such a playbook is no longer authentic enough. Its time for altruism, instead of brands trying to win hearts and minds by acknowledging their own social impact efforts with marketing. Social impact needs to entail one or all of  what I consider to be  the three pillars of charity: money, time and knowledge. If you are not giving back with one of those elements that can actually help and support the cause, you need to reevaluate what more you could be doing to participate.

In a recent chief marketing officer survey, marketing leads said building brand value that connects with customers was their number-one objective. Lets look at brands that are actually achieving that objective by offering money, time and knowledge.

Supporting Community Over Marketing

After George Floyd was tragically killed by the Minneapolis police, the six-year-old BLM movement suddenly was many times more powerful. Brands responded with cash contributions. Walmart Inc. revealed it would contribute $100 million over five years to racial equality, and Target Corp. committed $10 million to Black causes. Rather than running more ads that attach to BLM, dozens of beauty brands like Sephora, Glossier and Anastasia Beverly Hills have instead contributed $1 million or more to social justice causes supporting the Black community.

On another social justice front, Dunkin Donuts struck the right tone in June with Pride Month, which coincided with the historic Supreme Court decision for LGBTQ workers rights. The coffee and baked goods chain donated $1 to hunger relief in June for LGBTQ youth organizations when a customer bought a Pride-themed gift card online.

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All of the above brands hit on a key aforementioned pillar with this effort: they gave money. Its something every brand should be thinking about as people financially suffer from the ramifications of COVID-19.

Sometimes, if there arent additional funds to go directly toward supporting these initiatives, it can be as simple as investing dollars  that would otherwise go to above the line marketing  directly into customers pockets with cash back, which is being offered by dozens of retailers like Adidas, Casper and Sams during the pandemic. The cash-back approach, in particular, is a powerful tool for retailers to demonstrate their commitment to those within their community. Altogether, brands can move billions of dollars to millions of people.

Thinking Beyond Money

They can also give back to communities with another pillar of proper social impact  time  by promoting activism. To commemorate Juneteenth on June 19, Best Buy offered employees a paid volunteer day to engage in peaceful protests, rallies and community service. And Lyft provided Citi Bike users in New York City a complimentary ride if they were participating in the Juneteenth Solidarity Ride. While there were many brands that let employees off that day to reflect on racism and human values, credit to Best Buy and Lyft for going a step further by encouraging activism for social change.

Further, knowledge  another pillar of proper social impact  is power, and brands can help increase awareness in ways that help communities. On that note, kudos to subscription box seller Cratejoy, which highlights black-owned businesses with a standalone category. While such businesses still appear on their regular Cratejoy pages, the brand has made them easier to find by creating the space for them to shine on the site.

Standing on the Right Side of History

Indeed, it shouldnt be hard for successful brands to take a small piece of what they are so fortunate to have (money, time, knowledge) and give it away. Theres actually little excuse to do otherwise.

Dont get me wrong: Driving revenue is critical  but so is doing the right thing. If you are a cmo who needs to convince leadership to invest in the three pillars of social impact, start small  it doesnt need to be a $40 million donation.

Yet, get started because humanity has surfaced as a truly powerful force for the bottom line in 2020. Social impact isnt a box-checking activity  it isnt a give-get. Its a give-give. Being authentic with social impact means not forcing the promotion of it, whether it be expecting it via the cause youre contributing to, or by buying media to do it yourself. It means just doing it because its the right thing to do.

The pendulum has swung, and the clock is ticking. Brands need to be on the right side of history, and they can only do so by giving money, time and/or knowledge rather than merely acting the part.

Amy Vale is chief marketing officer of Dosh. With more than a decade of industry experience, Amy has also lead marketing efforts for Mojivo, Spotify, Charity: Water and Quantcast.
MUMBAI, India, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- SGS is pleased to announce that it has enhanced its material testing capabilities with the introduction of solar simulation testing at its automotive testing laboratory in Manesar, India.

Solar Simulation Test

Solar radiation causes numerous unwanted effects on materials exposed for extended periods. These changes range from aesthetics (like fading colours) to structural changes (increase in brittleness and the loss of various strengths). Solar simulation testing is used to simulate the spectra of natural sunlight to help determine how a material will react when exposed to sunlight over a period of time.

The Solar simulation testing setup comprises of two world class chambers fitted with metal halide lamps which can generate irradiance up to 1200 W/m2, therefore capable of complying with almost all of the automotive industry's testing requirements. The chambers can be used to perform solar simulation tests at various temperatures and humidity conditions, in line with global testing requirements. Multiple chambers with different capacity have been put in place to cater to different specifications that are often required for interior and exterior components.

SGS is pleased to have taken the lead in making available, another new technology to the Indian automotive industry. We are now harnessing our rich, decade-long experience with this best-in-class technology in our laboratories in Germany and China, to serve the Indian industry. With this installation, Indian auto manufacturers will no longer need to send samples outside of the country.

This addition enables SGS to deliver a full range of automotive testing services in India. Our three automotive testing laboratories in Chennai, Manesar and Pune, equipped with the latest technology and equipment, offer the necessary expertise and capabilities to perform tests for metal and polymer materials, dynamics, airbag deployment, corrosion, environmental simulations, vibrations, on-board electronics, VOCs, ELVs and substance of concern.

About SGS

SGS is the world's leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company. SGS is recognised as the global benchmark for quality and integrity. With more than 89,000 employees, SGS operates a network of over 2,600 offices and laboratories around the world.

For further information about these services, please contact:

Shailesh Pandey

Head - Testing Services

Transportation

SGS India Private

t: + 91-9871799293

e: [email protected]

Video: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1232418/Solar_Simulation_Testing.mp4

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/724727/SGS_Logo.jpg

SOURCE SGS
Delhi's authorities said an antibody study in the megacity suggested more than a quarter of the capital's population had contracted coronavirus.

India's confirmed coronavirus cases crossed the three million mark on Sunday, 23 August with nearly 70,000 new infections.

The health ministry said 69,239 cases were detected on Sunday, with 912 deaths taking the total number of fatalities to 56,706. Many experts say, however, that the real scale of the infection is much higher.

The world's second-most-populous nation is currently leading in new infection cases as the virus marches through impoverished rural areas in the north and the wealthier but older populations of the south.

Previously the main hotspots have been the teeming megacities of New Delhi and Mumbai, home to some of the world's biggest slums.

"At the moment we are seeing a fairly sharp rise in cases overall for India," said K Srinath Reddy, of the non-governmental Public Health Foundation of India.

Individual states and cities have imposed localised lockdowns as case numbers have spiked in recent weeks.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government imposed one of the world's strictest lockdowns in late March that has been mostly eased in recent weeks.

But the epidemic has left Asia's third-largest economy reeling, and tens of millions of people have lost their jobs and livelihoods.

Here are some reasons why India is so affected by the virus:

Saturated Cities

Indias first cases were reported in the southern state of Kerala in late January, which was three university students studying in the disease epicentre of Wuhan, China. But community transmission took hold in cities thousands of kilometres to the north, with the financial centre of Mumbai reporting huge spikes followed by New Delhi.

The rise in new infections has since levelled off in Indias two largest cities, with serological surveys showing widespread prevalence among populations.

In New Delhi, a recent government study of 15,000 volunteers showed 29 percent had antibodies for the coronavirus, although the city of 11 million has only 150,000 confirmed cases, suggesting many undetected infections.

Dr Ullas Kolthur Seetharam, a biologist in Mumbai, conducted a survey across the city of 12.4 million in July that found more than half of the people tested in slums had antibodies compared to 16 percent of those tested in organized residential neighbourhoods.

The survey suggested that shared toilets, high population density and lack of physical distancing contributed to the spread.

Any change in the demography will change the prevalence of the virus, Seetharam said.

Geographical Divide

Indias meagre health resources are poorly divided across the country. Government data shows a wide disparity in health indices, with Indias poorest states comparable to sub-Saharan Africa.

Nearly 600 million Indians live in rural areas, and with the virus spreading fast across Indias vast hinterlands, health experts worry that hospitals could be overwhelmed, with less testing making it all the more difficult for the authorities to track and contain the disease.

Indias rural areas have very limited health infrastructure, said epidemiologist Jayaprakash Muliyil. I fear we might soon witness a spurt in cases there.

In Bihar, nearly 90 percent of the population lives in villages. Every year, the state struggles to deal with dengue outbreaks and other seasonal diseases, and it has only one hospital bed and just under four doctors per 10,000 people, according to official data.

Bihar, which is testing 10,000 samples per day, has sought the federal governments help to test 10 times that number. But thats only one part of the problem. Many people are hiding their symptoms and dont opt for tests, complicating the states effort to curb the spread of the virus, officials say.

Ramped up testing

Nationwide, India is testing more than 900,000 samples per day, exceeding the World Health Organizations benchmark of 140 tests per 1 million people. But about a third of these are antigen tests, which are faster but less accurate compared to RT-PCR, the gold standard for the coronavirus.

Uttar Pradesh, with 200 million people Indias most populous state and also one of its poorest, is conducting the most tests, with an average of 110,000 daily.

But new hot spots continue to drive the surge in cases. Uttar Pradesh is now among the five worst-affected states in India, behind Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

Telangana, home to Indias tech hub of Hyderabad, has come under fire for insufficiently testing its 40 million people.

In Hyderabad, which is normally buzzing with activity, ongoing fear of the coronavirus has kept parks, shopping areas and roads quiet.

Telangana has reported about 79,000 total cases. But two prominent scientific bodies  the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology and Indian Institute of Chemical Technology  have warned that an analysis of Hyderabad sewage suggests that the real rate of infection in the city alone could be six times higher than the states reported total.

After testing samples at 10 sewage treatment plants, the scientists reported that about 6.6 percent of Hyderabads population of 10 million  660,000 people  could be infected.

Race to the top

India has the third-highest caseload in the world after the United States and Brazil. But with the rate of infection growing in recent weeks, experts fear India could soon surpass those countries.

For 18 consecutive days, India reported the most number of newest cases in the world. At the same time, the mortality rate dropped to 1.87 percent  far lower than in the other hardest-hit countries.

I dont know what magic people think is going to happen, said Dr Gagandeep Kang, an infectious diseases expert at the Christian Medical College at Vellore, in southern India.

With Indias population of nearly 1.4 billion and the way the virus is spreading through the country, she asked, what makes you think that youre not going to end up with the biggest numbers in the world?

With inputs from wires
South Africa: Health commits to iron out issues of PPE distribution

Health Minister, Dr Zweli Mkhize, has reiterated that no health care worker should be exposed to the risk of contracting COVID-19 on duty due to inadequate training, protection and support, including the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE).

The Health Department met with unions on Saturday to ventilate issues that have caused tension on matters relating to the occupational safety of health care workers, infrastructure and remuneration.

Present at the meeting was the Health Departments senior national officials, provincial Members of the Executive (MECs) and their Heads of Department (HODs).

Despite later claims that the National Education, Health, and Allied Workers' Union (Nehawu) was not present at the meeting, the Health Department said unions were well represented by leadership from Nehawu, the Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa, National Union Of Public Service & Allied Workers, Public Servants Association of South Africa, South African Medical Association Trade Union and Health & Other Services Personnel Trade Union of South Africa.

In a statement released following the meeting, the Health Department said there was clear common ground between government and unions that a zero tolerance stance will be adopted regarding the availability of PPE to all health care workers.

The department reiterated that there is enough PPE stock in the country but acknowledged that the issues pertain to the movement and distribution or redistribution of stock.

Based on all the above, it should be clear to all that the primary protection of health workers is a matter on which we will all agree, with no exception. Our approach must therefore be to support the simple ethos: no PPE, no work.

We believe that this should motivate management and labour to ensure there is not a situation where someone declines to work. It is unfair to put any worker in such an invidious position, the department said.

Joint monitoring of PPE at health facilities

While all parties noted an improvement in the situation since concerns around PPE were initially raised, the Minister has directed that the availability of PPE needs to be jointly monitored on a daily basis at all facilities.

To gain deeper understanding of the issues on the ground, the Minister sampled a number of institutions where there have been complaints and subjected those to investigations.

The department has adopted the strict principle, with immediate effect, that only a report verified jointly by a functional Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) committee will be taken as the final resolution.

As far as the national department is now concerned, any unattended problems will automatically mean that the OHS committee is non-existent or non-functional, and as such, there is non-compliance with legislation. This will invite decisive consequence management.

To ensure that parties engage on the same basis, unions will have direct access to information contained on the departments web-based dashboard and digital stock visibility system, said the department.

This will enable unions, together with management, to conduct daily audits at facility level. It will easily allow for tracking of granular details such as sizes available, quantity and evidence of quality assurance.

This will be very important, as issues of monitoring PPE should best be managed on the ground. Similarly, issues of transportation and distribution of PPE should be managed by the same committees at facility and district level.

The department also highlighted that a common understanding needs to be brokered in regards to the use of PPE in various work settings.

To this end, the meeting recommended that the Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19 collate information from all stakeholders and issue an advisory that can be acceptable to all parties and applied across all provinces.

This will also provide an opportunity for any revisions that need to be considered, based on feedback from health workers.

Caring for health workers

Mechanisms to enhance support for health care workers, who become infected, need to be strengthened.

It will be important to provide a service that encompasses pre-test counselling, post-test counselling, quarantine/isolation support and support for those who fall ill, said the department.

The meeting agreed that there has to be consistency in the implementation of these provisions to address the concerns of the unions.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Friday, August 21



Every day, senior editors at The Sydney Morning Herald make dozens of decisions about what stories to pursue, what angles to take, and how and when to publish them. Most of these calls are instinctive, based on years of collective experience about what best serves our readers.

What is less clear-cut is how we make decisions not to publish certain stories or elements thereof. There are plenty of examples when not reporting something has led to criticism, including accusations of political bias or some other agenda, when the truth can be far simpler - an accidental omission; a simple mistake! But equally often, a vexed issue has led to significant discussion about, as always, whether something is in the public interest.

There have been two examples of the latter this week. The first was whether or not to publish the racist tweet levelled at Sydney Swans youngster, Elijah Taylor. The first-season player was last week banned for the remainder of the AFL season for sneaking his girlfriend into the teams hotel in Perth, in breach of COVID-19 quarantine requirements.



The tweet by an anonymous user or "troll" was simply vile and unacceptable. But was it worth publishing as part of our story to prove just how vile and unacceptable? Or are we just exacerbating the problem, amplifying a racist comment and giving the abuser unwarranted notoriety that in some dark corners of the internet would have been applauded?



The tweet by an anonymous user or "troll" was simply vile and unacceptable. But was it worth publishing as part of our story to prove just how vile and unacceptable? Or are we just exacerbating the problem, amplifying a racist comment and giving the abuser unwarranted notoriety that in some dark corners of the internet would have been applauded?

Harry Cunningham with Elijah Taylor after Sydney's round eight win over Hawthorn. Credit:Getty Images



The Heralds head of sport Ian Fuge raised the quandary with me and we quickly decided little or no purpose would be served by republishing the slur. Had it been made by someone in the public eye, or in a forum where they were easily identified, we might have reached a different conclusion because individuals like that could and should be held accountable for such remarks. But in this case, an investigation by the AFLs integrity unit has failed to identify the user. The matter has been reported to Instagram, where Taylor posted about the abuse, and referred to the office of the nations e-Safety Commissioner for further exploration. All of this occurred on the eve of the AFLs annual Dreamtime round, celebrating Indigenous cultures important place in the code. Hopefully, readers agree it is far better to focus on the condemnation of racism, and the positive progress in stamping it out, than the work of anonymous trolls.
(Newser)  For 64 years, KFC thought the slogan about its fried chicken"It's Finger Lickin' Good"was in fine taste. These days, health experts advise keeping our hands away from our face if we want to stay healthy. We're supposed to clean our hands often, and not by licking them. "We find ourselves in a unique situationhaving an iconic slogan that doesnt quite fit in the current environment," the company's marketing chief said in a statement, USA Today reports. "While we are pausing the use of 'Its Finger Lickin Good,' rest assured the food craved by so many people around the world isnt changing one bit."

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Suspending a marketing slogan is a bit of a marketing campaign in itself, CNN points out. KFC posted a video on YouTube showing "It's Finger Lickin' Good" blurred out on billboards and buckets. The company had received criticism in the UK for sticking to the slogan this spring as encouraging "behavior that might increase the chances of coronavirus spreading," per Fox Business. The KFC website for Ireland and the UK advises customers: "You know that thing you do with your tongue after finishing a delicious piece of chicken? Please ignore it for now." On Monday, the company's statement said the slogan "doesn't feel quite right" these days but will return "when the time is right." (Read more KFC stories.)
Growing up in an area with more green space is beneficial to a child's intelligence, according to a new study that found those in greener urban areas had a higher IQ.

A team from Hasselt University, Belgium, analysed IQs of over 600 children and then used satellite images to examine the green coverage of their neighbourhoods.

The children in the study were all aged between 10 and 15, according to the team, who say a 3 per cent increase in greenery led to an IQ increase of about 2.6 points.

Researchers also found that children in the study had lower levels of behavioural problems if they lived in an area that more green coverage.

IQ point increases as a result of living in a green environment had the biggest impact on those at the lower end of the spectrum as small changes made a big difference.

A team from Hasselt University, Belgium, analysed IQs of over 600 children and then used satellite images to examine the green coverage of their neighbourhoods. Stock image

This is the first time IQ has been considered as a potential benefit of being exposed to green spaces in childhood - other studies have looked at wider cognitive benefits.

The researchers aren't sure exactly why IQ increases with exposure to a green environment, but suspect it could be to do with lower levels of stress.

The data on IQ and location came from the East Flanders Prospective Twin Survey (EFPTS), a registry of multiple births in the province of East Flanders, Belgium.

The average IQ of those involved was 105 but the team found 4 per cent of the children with a score below 80 had grown up in areas with low greenery levels.

It wasn't just intelligence that was impacted by living in an area that was more green - the team found it also helped improve the behaviour of some of the children.

They found that behavioural problems reduced for every 3 per cent rise in greenery.

The team said that a well planned city could offer unique opportunities to create an 'optimal environment' for children to develop to their full potential.

'Whereas in 1950, only 30 per cent of the worlds population lived in urban areas; nowadays, this is already more than half of the global population, and it is expected to increase to 68 per cent by 2050,' the team explained.

'There is more and more evidence that green surroundings are associated with our cognitive function,' study author Tim Nawrot told The Guardian.

'I think city builders should prioritise investment in green spaces because it is really of value to create an optimal environment for children to develop their full potential.'

According to the study authors the benefits of greenery recorded in urban areas weren't replicated in more rural communities - likely because those areas had enough green space for everyone to benefit so the effects weren't as localised.

IQ point increases as a result of living in a green environment had the biggest impact on those at the lower end of the spectrum as small changes made a big difference. Stock image

The authors believe that a combination of lower noise levels and lower stress levels found in green space areas contribute to the improvements in IQ and behaviour.

Part of this is also due to the fact there are more opportunities for physical and social activities in areas with more greenery - which can improve IQ scores on their own.

'Our results indicate that residential green space may be beneficial for intellectual and behavioural development of children living in an urban environment.

'We showed a shift in the IQ distribution of urban children in association with residential green space exposure,' the authors wrote.

The findings have been published in the journal PLOS Medicine.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 21:08:32|Editor: huaxia

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BEIRUT, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- A Syrian citizen was killed by explosion while two others were arrested on Monday during a raid of the internal security forces on wanted suspects allegedly belonging to a terrorist organization in an abandoned house in Akkar, north Lebanon.

A Lebanese security source told Xinhua that the raid came after suspecting that the three Syrian nationals participated in killing three young men on Saturday in the town of Kaftoun in Koura region, northern Lebanon.

The source pointed out that an armed confrontation in Akkar took place during the raid, and one Syrian national was killed as a result of an explosion, without specifying whether it was resulted from the wanted person blowing himself up.

Moreover, the security forces, in cooperation with the Palestinian security forces, raided a day earlier the house of a Palestinian person in the Beddawi refugee camp in the north and arrested a Palestinian suspected of having links to the murder of the three young men.

On Saturday morning, unknown men shot three people dead in Kaftoun.

The three people killed in Kaftoun include two municipality policemen who were on duty guarding the village and the town mayor's son. Enditem
Take a look at some of the biggest movers in the premarket:

AstraZeneca (AZN)  The White House is considering fast-tracking the Covid-19 vaccine candidate being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, according to the Financial Times. The paper said one option being considered is having the Food and Drug Administration give the potential vaccine treatment emergency use authorization.

Pearson (PSO)  Pearson appointed former Walt Disney (DIS) executive Andy Bird as its next chief executive officer. Bird, who will take the top job at the education publisher Oct. 19, was chairman at Walt Disney International until 2018 and helped build the company's consumer digital business.

Blackstone (BX)  The private-equity firm struck a deal to buy the consumer health-care business of Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical for about $2.3 billion. It had been reported last week that the two companies were close to a deal.

American Airlines (AAL)  The airline will receive Environmental Protection Agency approval today to use a new surface coating that kills the coronavirus, according to a Reuters report. EPA officials told Reuters the coating inactivates viruses and bacteria within two hours and is effective for up to seven days.

Microsoft (MSFT)  Microsoft said in a court filing that Apple's (AAPL) actions against Fortnite creator Epic Games will hurt the entire videogame industry. Apple removed Epic's games from its app store for violating its payment rules.

Facebook (FB)  Facebook Chief Marketing Officer Antonio Lucio will leave the social media giant on Sept. 18, according to a Facebook spokesman quoted by The Wall Street Journal. Lucio had joined Facebook from HP Inc. (HPQ) in 2018.

Michaels Cos. (MIK)  The arts and crafts retailer hired Michael Diamond as its new chief financial officer, effective Sept. 1. Diamond had most recently been an executive at restaurant operator Yum Brands (YUM), where he had been CFO for Pizza Hut's U.S. business.

Moderna (MRNA)  Moderna said enrollment levels for its late-stage 30,000 patient Covid-19 vaccine trial have passed the 40% mark. The drugmaker began the study last month and expects to complete enrollment in September.

Delta Air Lines (DAL)  Delta will reinstate 50 international flights to its schedule this winter. Those flights, which include routes from Seattle to Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai, had been suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Apple (AAPL)  Today is the "record date" for Apple's recently announced 4-for-1 stock split, applying to shareholders of record as of the close of business today. The shares are set to begin trading on a split-adjusted basis on Aug. 31.

Pinterest (PINS)  The image-sharing platform was downgraded to "neutral" from "buy" at Citi, part of a report on social media companies that maintains a rating of "neutral" on Twitter (TWTR) and "sell" on Snap (SNAP). Citi feels topline growth expectations for social media companies are too lofty.

Deere (DE)  Bank of America Securities upgraded the heavy equipment maker to "buy" from "neutral," after Deere reported a blowout quarter and raised earnings estimates. The firm said Deere's earnings momentum is clearly building into next year, boosted in part by improved margins in its agriculture business.
Enabling brands to leverage the power of their call center data to improve customer experiences

CHICAGO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- HGS Digital LLC , a subsidiary of Hinduja Global Solutions Ltd (listed in BSE & NSE), today announced its participation as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions Partner program. This unique designation recognizes that HGS Digital is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner that specializes in helping customers add intelligence to their existing contact center solution, leveraging AWS Machine Learning (ML) services such as Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Lex, to gain greater efficiencies and deliver increasingly tailored customer experiences.

With 61 delivery centers in 7 countries, HGS successfully manages billions of customer interactions every year. Their AWS ML-powered solutions include HGS Pulse, an HGS client portal that provides critical operational insights and better decision-making through cognitive analytics of the voice of the customer (gleaned from 100% of all interactions across every channel), as well as sales, marketing, and customer data analytics. In addition, HGS Pulse uses real-time call and email coding categorizations, real-time compliance tracking and team leader monitoring, and predictive analytics.

"I'm ecstatic about the HGS PULSE solution built on AWS. The portal is top-notch! I can get insights around product quality instantly without having to rely on others," said an existing HGS client (over $8 Bn annual revenue).

AWS CCI solutions use a combination of AWS ML-powered services for text-to-speech, translation, enterprise search, conversational artificial intelligence (AI), transcription, and language comprehension capabilities. These solutions give customers who already use popular contact center providers the opportunity to benefit from AWS CCI solutions to enhance self-service, analyze calls in real time to assist agents, and learn from all contact center interactions with post-call analytics. To get started, customers can visit aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/contact-center-intelligence.

"HGS Digital is excited to be a part of the AWS CCI solutions Partner program," said Venkatesh Korla, CEO, HGS Digital LLC. "Our goal is to help clients implement solutions that accelerate operational efficiencies and enable them to leverage the power of their call center data to improve customer experiences."

For more information on HGS CCI solutions, visit https://www.hgsdigital.com/solutions/contact-center-intelligence-voice-of-the-customer-aws.

About HGS Digital:

HGS Digital helps transform businesses into digital Customer Experience (CX) innovators by combining deep domain expertise with an understanding of how people interact with technology. HGS Digital creates frictionless digital experiences that solve business problems and improve customers' lives by tapping into its global team of more than 750 leading digital marketers, strategic thinkers, data innovators, user-centric designers and technologists across the US, UK, India, and the Philippines.

Specializing in a technology-agnostic approach, HGS Digital's customer-first digital, data and intelligent automation solutions help leading brands around the world improve customer engagement, optimize operations, reduce cost and increase revenue. As the digital experience and transformation brand of Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS), HGS Digital delivers leading-edge CX solutions for a wide variety of markets including automotive and manufacturing, CPG, retail, banking, finance and insurance, healthcare, telecom, consumer electronics, the public sector, and travel and hospitality.

Visit https://www.hgsdigital.com/ to learn how HGS Digital can help make your business more competitive.

About Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS):

A global leader in business process management (BPM) and optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, HGS is helping make its clients more competitive every day. HGS combines technology-powered services in automation, analytics and digital with domain expertise focusing on back office processing, contact centers and HRO solutions to deliver transformational impact to clients. Part of the multi-billion dollar conglomerate Hinduja Group, HGS takes a "globally local" approach, with over 37,460 employees across 61 delivery centers in seven countries making a difference to some of the world's leading brands across nine key verticals. For the year ended 31st March 2020, HGS had revenues of US$ 737 million.

Visit www.teamhgs.com to learn how HGS can help make your business more competitive.

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It is an honor to advocate for others, and it is also a tremendous responsibility that we do not take lightly.

Brown & Charbonneau, LLP is proud to announce that Gregory G. Brown has once again been selected by his peers for inclusion in the 27th Edition of The Best Lawyers in America. Brown will be included in the 2021 publication in the practice area of Commercial/Business Litigation and Personal Injury. This is the fourth consecutive year Brown has been recognized for his outstanding work. Attorneys named to The Best Lawyers in America are recognized by their legal industry peers for their legal excellence in specific fields. For the 2021 publication, more than 9.4 million votes were analyzed, resulting in the inclusion of more than 67,000 lawyersrepresenting approximately 5% of lawyers in private practice in the U.S.

Brown is the Founding Partner of Brown & Charbonneau, LLP, an AV-rated business, litigation and family law firm based in Irvine, California. For more than 30 years, Brown has honed his trial and litigation expertise in the areas of contract actions, fraud and breach of fiduciary duty cases, trade secret litigation, partnership disputes, trust litigation, commercial contract disputes, intellectual property disputes, unfair competition, false advertising, shareholder derivative actions, corporate litigation, complex dissolution actions, real estate & construction, personal injury and professional liability suits. Brown is a Certified Trial Specialist, (a distinction earned by approximately 150 lawyers in California), and a member of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA). He is also an AV Rated Attorney by Martindale-Hubbell and has been named to Super Lawyers each year since 2009.

Browns recent notable successes in high profile commercial disputes earned him a spot on the list in the field of Commercial Litigation. For example, Brown, along with Partner Mark Higuchi, recently secured a defense ruling for clients being sued for $12 million in breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, and breach of contract claims. At trial, Trial Specialist Gregory Brown was able to establish a lack of credibility in the Plaintiffs claim, showing that no promises had been made, therefore the plaintiff could not have relied on the alleged promise. Brown also showed in cross examination of witnesses that Plaintiffs had sustained no actual, recoverable damages in both the derivative and individual claims.

Other notable trial wins for Brown include a $2,950,000 verdict for his client in a business fraud case against a publicly traded company and two of its directors, and his successful defense of a Fortune 500 company in a $30,000,000 fraud and breach of contract jury trial.

Of the recognition, Brown said, It really is an honor to be recognized by my colleagues for the work we do at Brown & Charbonneau to help those involved in business and commercial disputes. When we launched our firm in 2002, we committed to providing the highest quality legal representation to each client who entrusted us with their case. It is an honor to advocate for others, and it is also a tremendous responsibility that we do not take lightly. Being recognized for our efforts to achieve this mission in Commercial Litigation shows us that were doing what we set out to do.

Since it was first published in 1983, Best Lawyers has become universally regarded as the definitive guide to legal excellence. Best Lawyers lists are compiled based on an exhaustive peer-review evaluation. Lawyers are not required or allowed to pay a fee to be listed; therefore, inclusion in Best Lawyers is considered a singular honor. Corporate Counsel magazine has called Best Lawyers "the most respected referral list of attorneys in practice."

About Brown & Charbonneau, LLP

Brown & Charbonneau, LLP is one of Irvines top-rated business litigation and trial law firms. Recognized as one of Best Lawyers Top Law Firms, Brown & Charbonneau, LLP focuses its practice on business litigation, commercial litigation, partnership and shareholder disputes, real estate litigation, fraud and breach of fiduciary duty claims, and complex/high net worth family law matters throughout Southern California. Visit http://www.bc-llp.com
Pupils at St Paul's High School in Kelso, the Scottish Borders after returning to school following lockdown - Getty Images Europe

Secondary pupils in Scotland are to be ordered to wear face masks in school corridors and other communal areas but not classrooms, under plans outlined by Nicola Sturgeon.

The First Minister said different groups of pupils are more likely to mix and transmit the virus in these areas thanks to crowding and a lack of ventilation.

Speaking at her daily briefing, she said her government was in the final stages of consulting on the change and an announcement will be made within the next few days.

Although SNP ministers are not consulting on introducing masks into the classroom, she said they could be an option where there are outbreaks. Ministers are also considering whether masks must be worn on school buses.

Ms Sturgeon highlighted new guidance issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) over the weekend that "children aged 12 and over should wear a mask under the same conditions as adults", particularly where they cannot maintain a metre social distancing from others.

She said schools would be responsible for introducing the change in the first instance but it was unclear how it could be enforced if a pupil refused to wear a mask.

A decision is yet to be made on making face coverings mandatory on school buses - PA

Young people returned to Scotland's schools earlier in August with no requirements for physical distancing between younger pupils, and no rules around face coverings.

Some Scottish schools have since requested that pupils voluntarily wear coverings in some circumstances, including schools in the Highlands and James Gillespie's High School in Edinburgh.

But parents campaign group Us For Them Scotland, which has 9,500 members, opposed the move by arguing it would "cause more harm than good".

The group cited an intervention by Prof Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, that the chances of children dying from the virus are "incredibly small" and they much less commonly become seriously ill.

Ms Sturgeon said: "We're consulting on this specific measure because, firstly, mixing between different groups is more likely in corridors and communal areas - increasing the potential for transmission.

Story continues

"Secondly, crowding and close contact in these areas is more likely and voices could be raised, resulting in greater potential for creating aerosol transmission. Finally, there's also less scope for ventilation in these areas."

However, she said they were "not currently consulting on any proposal" to have pupils wear masks in class, saying: "There is greater scope for physical distancing in classrooms and [face coverings] are more likely to interfere with teaching and learning."

She said there would be exemptions for pupils with medical conditions such as asthma and ministers were examining providing masks for pupils who had failed to bring one to school.

Nicola Sturgeon has announced Scottish secondary pupils are to wear face coverings in corridors and communal areas - Getty Images Europe

Ms Sturgeon added: "We are not talking about a mandatory system in the sense of there being penalties and enforcement in schools. I get the sense that schools - while I accept there will be a mixture of opinion around it - are themselves looking to follow this kind of approach."

A recent survey of nearly 30,000 teachers by the Educational Institute of Scotland teaching union found 41 per cent supported the mandatory wearing of face coverings by senior pupils in classrooms.

Larry Flanagan, its general secretary, said the union still believed physical distancing was the best way to stop the virus spreading in schools but welcomed the consultation on using face masks "where physical distancing is difficult."

But Jo Bisset, organiser for Us for Them Scotland, said: "Forcing children to wear masks when theres little, if any, scientific evidence to support such a move could be hugely damaging.

It could have an extremely negative impact on pupils with autism, hearing impairments and conditions such as asthma."

She added: "Parents want to get their children back to school and for that experience to be as normal as it possibly can be."

Willie Rennie, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, said: "This change of policy is the right thing to do and will provide an extra barrier of protection from the virus and reassurance to staff, pupils and parents."
Mark Zuckerberg spent September and October last year warning about the dangers posted by rival tech giant TikTok in what, according to a report on Sunday evening, was a deliberate attempt to turn Washington against the Beijing-owned company, almost a year before he launched his own version of it with Reels.

TikTok has gained more than 100 million U.S. users and is widely seen as the biggest threat to Facebook's dominance of social media.

Instagram, which is part of Facebook, launched Reels on August 5. The company went after TikTok stars with huge followings and offered them large cash sums to switch over to their service.

In September Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, held a series of meetings with political figures - among them Tom Cotton, the Republican Senator for Arkansas and a man known to have the ear of the president.

In October Cotton and Chuck Schumer, the most senior Democrat in the Senate, wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok.

That inquiry led, this spring, to concern from Donald Trump - who has now told the Chinese owners of TikTok to accept an offer to buy the company, or else be banned from the U.S.

Mark Zuckerberg is pictured meeting Donald Trump at the White House in September 2019

Zuckerberg reportedly used the private meetings to warn about Facebook's rival, TikTok

Instagram launched Reels on August 5. It is a short-form video platform built within the app and has many of the same features as TikTok

Also in October, Zuckerberg spoke at Georgetown University, describing TikTok as being at odds with American values.

'On TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of protests are censored, even in the U.S.,' he said in his speech.

'Is that the internet we want?'

Days later, Zuckerberg reiterated his concerns about China during a White House dinner with Trump, the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who has been a backer of Trump, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said Zuckerberg has no recollection of discussing TikTok at the dinner.

Zuckerberg's team also reached out to members of Congress who are tough on China, the paper reported.

He asked them why TikTok should be allowed to operate in the U.S., when many American companies, including his own, cannot operate in China.

In November, Josh Hawley, a Republican Senator for Missouri who also had met with Zuckerberg in September, said in a hearing that TikTok threatens the privacy of American children.

'For Facebook, the fear is lost social-media market share,' he said.

'For the rest of us, the fear is somewhat different.'

Zuckerberg is pictured leaving a meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill in September 2019

Zuckerberg spoke at Georgetown University in October 2019 and warned about TikTok

INSTAGRAM POACHES TIKTOK STARS FOR REELS Last month, anonymous TikTok stars said they'd been offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to switch over to Reels before it launched. According to the sources, Instagram was also offering to pay for the production of some users' videos. Facebook - Instagram's parent company - issued them with non-disclosure agreements to stop them from discussing details of the deals publicly, it is claimed. A Facebook spokesperson told The Journal about the grab for talent that the company had 'approached a diverse range of creators about Reels in several of the countries where its currently being tested.' None of the influencers who have been approached were named but one male user with millions of followers told The Wall Street Journal he would likely join Reels after being approached with an offer. Advertisement

Facebook has established an advocacy group, called American Edge, that has begun running ads extolling U.S. tech companies for their contributions to American economic might, national security and cultural influence.

Facebook overall in the first half of this year spent more on lobbying than any other single company, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

'Our view on China has been clear: we must compete,' said Stone, the Facebook spokesman.

'As Chinese companies and influence have been growing so has the risk of a global internet based on their values, as opposed to ours.'

Kevin Mayer, the CEO of TikTok, in July publicly accused Facebook of trying to unfairly quash competition.

'At TikTok, we welcome competition,' he said in a blog post.

'But let's focus our energies on fair and open competition in service of our consumers, rather than maligning attacks by our competitor - namely Facebook - disguised as patriotism and designed to put an end to our very presence in the U.S.'

Last month, anonymous TikTok stars said they'd been offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to switch over to Reels before it launched.

According to the sources, Instagram was also offering to pay for the production of some users' videos.

Facebook - Instagram's parent company - issued them with non-disclosure agreements to stop them from discussing details of the deals publicly, it is claimed.

A Facebook spokesperson told The Journal about the grab for talent that the company had 'approached a diverse range of creators about Reels in several of the countries where its currently being tested.'

None of the influencers who have been approached were named but one male user with millions of followers told The Wall Street Journal he would likely join Reels after being approached with an offer.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) will file its chargesheet in the 2019 Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 jawans of paramilitary forces in a Jammu court on Tuesday. Sources say that top conspirators from the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammad have been named in the chargesheet.

According to NIA sources, Pakistan used Adil Ahmad Dar, a local resident who rammed an explosive-laden car into a CRPF convoy in Pulwama, as a suicide bomber to project the attack as a result of a home-grown militancy against Indias occupation of Kashmir.

UN-designated global terrorist and JeM founder Maulana Masood Azhar and his younger brother, Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar, have been named as primary accused in the charge sheet, sources said. Seven alleged JeM operatives arrested from Kashmir since February  Mohammad Abbas Rather, Tariq Ahmad Shah, Mohammad Iqbal Rather, Shakir Bashir Magrey, Waiz-ul-Islam, Insha Jan, and Bilal Ahmed Kuchey  have also been named for actively playing a part in the attack.

Pulwama terror attack

At around 3 pm on February 14, 2019, a Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist drove an explosive-laden SUV into a convoy of vehicles carrying CRPF personnel on the Srinagar-Jammu national highway in South Kashmirs Pulwama district. This resulted in the killing of 40 CRPF personnel. As per reports, around 80 kg of explosives were used for the attack. India responded decisively in the early hours of February 26 when Indian Air Force fighter jets bombed Pakistan's terror camp in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.

READ | Pulwama Terror Attack: NIA Makes 7th Arrest In Case; Gets 10 Day Remand For Interrogation

READ | Pakistan ISIs Design Busted On J&K Military Intelligence (MI) Tip-off

India slams Pakistan at UNSC

On 7 August, India registered its strongest condemnation at a High-Level Open Debate of United Nations Security Council (UNSC). India urged the UN to enhance its coordination with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for preventing and combating money laundering & terrorist financing. Listing Pakistan's role in 1993 Mumbai blasts, India said that it has been a victim of terrorism sponsored from across our border.

Pakistan remains in FATF Greylist

On June 25, the global terror financing watchdog, FATF decided to keep Pakistan in the "Grey List". The FATF officials said that the decision was taken in the third and final plenary of the Task Force as the body observed that Pakistan has failed to check the flow of money to terror groups like the LeT and the JeM  both of which are responsible for terror attacks in India.

(PTI Photo)

READ | Pakistan Reveals Dawood Ibrahim's Karachi Home 'White House'; 88 Terrorists Sanctioned

READ | 'Pakistan Admitted Dawood's Presence, Now Hand Over To India': PoK Activist Challenges Pak
By William Schwartz | Published on 2020/08/23

With "Peninsula" actor Kwon Hae-hyo has had his first role as an older character. The veteran fifty-four year old actor plays Elder Kim in that movie, a man of questionable mental faculties who stubbornly insists that help is on the way to help him and his friends leave a Korean peninsula overrun by a zombie apocalypse. But this supporting role in a mainstream movie by no means defines Kwon Hae-hyo, as he is set to star as the lead in "Fukuoka" which comes out on August 27th.

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Kwon Hae-hyo has little fears about getting old, it would seem, as he described his role in "Peninsula" with excitement ahead of the movie's July 15th premiere, stating that he'd never had a chance to play a character explicitly designated as old before. He mentioned child actors calling him grandpa on set as a new experience, but not a surprising one. After all, Kwon Hae-hyo hasbeen referred to as father or uncle set for quite some time now.

"Fukuoka" is one such film. The latest from writer/director Zhang Lu, it features an older man going to Japan to meet a friend he had a falling out with back in college. It's a rare leading role from an actor who generally does supporting ones, often in more artistically minded independent films. In terms of bigger projects, Kwon Hae-hyo has also said that he's appearing in "Bogota: City of the Lost", describing the movie as half-finished with only location shooting in Colombia remaining to be filmed.

Written by William Schwartz

___________

"Fukuoka" is directed by Zhang Lu, and features Kwon Hae-hyo, Yoon Je-moon, Park So-dam, Yamamoto Yuki. Release date in Korea: 2020/08/27.
Two men were arrested early Sunday morning after they were caught trying to load merchandise from a Bayonne warehouse onto a stolen rental truck, authorities said.

Amir Z. Ibrahim, 37, of Rahway, and Anthony Padilla, 43, of Bayonne, were each charged with burglary, theft, receiving stolen property and other offenses, Bayonne Capt. Eric Amato said.

The men were taken into custody at 1:43 a.m. at 8 Hook Rd. after police received a call from the warehouse owner, who told them two men were inside the warehouse. Responding police officers found the rental truck, with the rear cargo door open, parked in the loading bay of the warehouse.

The officers then found Ibrahim operating a forklift and Padilla loading items into the truck, Amato said.

An investigation by Bayonne police determined that several pallets of various merchandise had been shrink-wrapped and moved from their original storage area. Police searching the rental truck recovered bolt cutters, 20 boxes of merchandise belonging to the business estimated to be valued at $5,000, a pallet jack belonging to the business, narcotic paraphernalia, and various loose items stolen from the warehouse, Amato said.

The truck was reported stolen out of Denver, Colorado on June 30.

Police searched Padilla and found used hypodermic syringe and a wallet containing identification and credit cards belonging to numerous people. Padilla had another persons wallet, which contained several pieces of identification, bankcards, and personal papers. A search of Ibrahim led to the recovery of Oxycodone.
It isnt every day we witness the written word clad in paperback and hardcover raise hell. Over the years, we have heard of a number of instances where books have, in fact, stirred controversy, earned great criticism and in some extreme cases even gotten banned.

The latest book that has found itself in the middle of a raging controversy is Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story written by Monika Arora, Sonali Chitalkar and Prerna Malhotra. The book was recently released by BJP national general secretary Bhupendra Yadav during a virtual book launch, however, it was soon met with criticism online which forced publishers Bloomsbury India to withdraw the publication.

 Twitter-Monika-Arora

Now, while there can be multiple reasons why books are met with such fate, right from racial issues to violence, religion, politics and whatnot, this isnt the first time India has witnessed such an uproar over books.



Here are 5 other books which courted controversy in India previously:

1. Freedom At Midnight

 abebooks

Gopal Godse, the younger brother of Mahatma Gandhis assassin Nathuram Godse, threatened to sue Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre who had co-authored the book.

Gopal stated that the authors had "falsely" quoted him as the source of the "slanderous" information claiming that Veer Savarkar had homosexual relations with Nathuram Godse.

Gopal sought proof from the authors to back their claims and said that he had taken necessary steps against the authors for "false, defamatory and libellous allegations". The book was later republished with required changes.

2. The Satanic Verses

 abebooks

Way back in 1988, controversial author Salman Rushdie had his first taste of outrage over his fictional piece of writing titled The Satanic Verses. Muslim groups from all over India protested against the circulation of this book calling it blasphemous and hurtful towards their religion.

Rushdie was accused of misusing freedom of speech and within a month, the import of the book was banned in India and with that, India was the first country to ban this book.

Not only that, but this was also the book that forced Rushdie to go underground after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the novel and issued a fatwa calling for his death.

3. The Moors Last Sigh

 abebooks

We didnt call Rushdie controversial without a reason. A few years after The Satanic Verses uproar, Rushdie yet again found himself in another controversy when The Moors Last Sigh came out in 1995. The book was met with great resistance from the Shiv Sena who believed a character from the book resembled their leader Balasaheb Thackeray.

When it was found that the book also contained a dog named Jawaharlal, the then PM P. V. Narasimha Rao unofficially banned the book. Although, upon the publishers appeal the Supreme Court declared the ban unconstitutional, most booksellers In Maharashtra avoided stocking the book.

4. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

 Wikipedia

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld, this 2011 biographical book allegedly implied that Gandhi was bisexual. Obviously, it enraged many who called it outrageous and soon enough, the book was banned in Gujarat in March 2011.

The then Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily announced that the Centre would ban the book in India. Even Gandhi's grandsons had expressed opposition to the proposed ban.

Many alternate readings of the book claimed that Lelyvelds book was misinterpreted and it didnt suggest that Gandhi was bisexual or racist.

5. The Red Sari

 goodreads

Originally published in Spanish in October 2010, this fictional work of literature was allegedly a dramatised biography of Sonia Gandhi.

Following its launch, the book quickly ran into controversy in India with Congress lawyers and spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi writing to the publishers and demanding a withdrawal of the book from shops. Singhvi claimed that the book violated a person's privacy for monetary gain, distorted facts and misinterpreted details. The book was finally released in India in 2015.

What are your thoughts on criticism and banning on books? Should readers get to choose for themselves what they want to read and believe instead of others dictating it for them? Let us know.
By Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijani manuscript will be included in UNESCO's World Memory Register.

The inclusion was discussed during working meetings between the Institute of Manuscripts and UNESCO.

Initiated by the UNESCO Headquarters and the South Korean National Commission for UNESCO, the meeting was chaired by experts from the Netherlands, Azerbaijan, Australia, South Korea and Australia, Azertag reported.

Chairman of Azerbaijan's commission for UNESCO World Memory Program, the head of the Institute of Manuscripts Teymur Karimli presented the 19th century manuscript to UNESCO experts.

The national commission also included the head of International Relations Department Nigar Babakhanova, deputy director for Scientific Affairs at the Institute of Manuscripts professor Pasha Karimov, Scientific Secretary and associate professor Azizagha Najafov.

At the meeting, Nigar Babakhanova spoke at both the main and plenary sessions on the manuscript inclusion and brought to the attention of UNESCO experts archival documents that would facilitate an objective assessment.

After scientific evaluation, another Azerbaijani manuscript might be included into UNESCO's World Memory Register in the next few months.

In addition, four manuscripts kept at the Institute of Manuscripts - Rustam Jurjani's "Zahireyi-Nizamshahi", Abulqasim Zahravi's "Al-maqalatus-salasim", Abu Ali ibn Sina's "Al-Qanun fit-tibb" and Muhammad Fuzuli's "Divan" have been already included in the register.

Azerbaijan and UNESCO have been enjoying successful cooperation since1992. In 2003, the parties signed the framework agreement on cooperation in the areas of culture, science, education and communication, which allowed Azerbaijan to become one of the donors of UNESCO.

Many Azerbaijan's cultural sites have been included into UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Icherisheher (Old City), Maiden Tower and Shirvanshah's palace were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000, while since 2007 the Gobustan National Historical-Artistic reserve was also listed among these heritages.

Sheki, a significant city at the crossroads of the historic Silk Roads was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List during the 43rd session of the World Heritage Committee held in Baku.

In 2017, UNESCO recognized Azerbaijan's dolma as the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Art of crafting and playing with kamancha, presented jointly by Azerbaijan and Iran, was also inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

UNESCO successfully celebrated the 600th anniversary of the death of the great Azerbaijani poet and thinker Imadaddin Nasimi and the 200th anniversary of the first settlement of Germans in Azerbaijan last year.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
NEW HAVEN  The use of convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19 has yet to show a great deal of promise, though Yale New Haven Health is using it as a treatment in the sickest patients, Dr. Thomas Balcezak, chief clinical officer of the health system, said Monday.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma Sunday.

During an online press conference, responding to reports of people coming down with COVID a second time, Balcezak also said, Right now, the number of patients that have been demonstrated to be truly reinfected with the virus is vanishingly small.

Also, the Phase 3 trial of a vaccine, in cooperation with Pfizer, has more than 300 subjects signed up, but more can volunteer, he said.

Plasma, which is taken from people who have recovered from COVID and who have antibodies in their blood, is being used in every single one of the Yale New Haven Health System hospitals, Balcezak said. Giving plasma to patients has been part of an expanded-access trial at the Mayo Clinic.

He said patients given convalescent plasma may have gotten somewhat better from it, although we have seen no spectacular improvement. He said any benefit is probably quite mild.

Balcezak said one of the challenges in interpreting the data from the Mayo Clinic study was a lack of a control group. There was no placebo arm to that trial. ... So while there was demonstrated to be a little benefit, it was not a remarkable benefit. And because there was no harm demonstrated  and a little benefit, thats why they have granted the emergency use authorization. It is no panacea.

Reinfection

The New York Times reported Monday that a confirmed case of reinfection with the coronavirus had been reported in Hong Kong more than four months after the first infection, suggesting that immunity may last only a matter of months.

I think the remarkable thing here is how few cases of reinfection have been reported around the world, Balcezak said.

And I think while it is only a sporadic case here and there, while millions and millions of people have had this disease, it tends to make me believe that reinfection is extremely rare, he said.

Balcezak said reports that the amount of antibodies in the blood falls rapidly after three or four months has been shown in several studies. But he said little is known about the chances of becoming reinfected. He said as more becomes known it will have implications potentially for how often were going to need to re-vaccinate people.

Dr. Michael Parry, chairman of infectious disease at Stamford Health, said the its difficult to tell from tests for the virus whether it is live or just pieces of virus. This RNA that were detecting we know doesnt always mean live virus, he said. But weve been concerned when we get positive tests that are three months or four months after the initial infection.

Parry said those patients with more severe cases of COVID may be better protected afterward. It seems to be that people who have a mild infection generally have low levels of antibodies, he said. Those levels decrease fairly rapidly over time. As I read this report from Hong Kong, it seemed like that was the case. The person was not very sick, so they were susceptible to a new infection thats perhaps slightly different because it has changed a bit. ... People who are very sick tend to develop high numbers of antibodies and we hope they are more durable and last longer.

Parry said he wouldnt be surprised if people could be infected a second time. I hope its infrequent, but thats a book that still needs to be written, he said.

Vaccine trial

In the Pfizer trial, patients will have six follow-up visits to check their antibody levels for two years after being vaccinated. Balcezak also said antibodies are only one way the body can fight reinfection, such as T cell-mediated immunity and memory B cells, which can last for years.

So its possible that you can have a loss of a large number of antibodies but still remain immune, but that still remains to be figured out, he said.

Balcezak said the vaccine for the Pfizer trial will be arriving soon, possibly this week, but there are challenges, including that the vaccine must be kept at a temperature of 112 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

The Yale Center for Clinical Investigation is conducting the trial and volunteers may sign up to participate at yalecovidvaccine.org.

Balcezak and Marna Borgstrom, CEO of Yale New Haven Health, said they were encouraged by the continued low rates of cases in the state, with only 24 patients in the system as of Monday. But Balcezak cautioned about growing lax about social distancing, mask wearing and hand washing.

Weve seen a little flare-up in Danbury. There have been some additional efforts to try lock down and control crowds in Danbury to try to reduce the spread.

He called the spike a cautionary tale because a resurgence could occur anywhere.

On Friday, the state Department of Public Health reported that there were at at least 178 new COVID-19 cases in Danbury between Aug. 2-20, up from 40 during the previous two weeks.

While its disappointing and unfortunate that theres been a spike in cases in Danbury, I think theyre handling it very aggressively and appropriately, and we are going to need to do the same should we see a spike, Balcezak said.

Borgstrom said there were two fewer cases at Yale New Haven Hospital, totaling 17, and one new case at Greenwich Hospital, which had had no cases the day before. But Balcezak said that patient was a woman coming in to give birth and was found to have COVID-19 because all patients are tested when they are admitted.

We are admitting people for a condition and it may turn out that they have COVID-19 as well  but theyre not cases that are coming in for care because of the COVID-19; theyre coming in because they have other conditions that require care, he said. This disease exists in our communities, whether we recognize it or not.

On Monday, there were four cases reported at Bridgeport Hospital, one at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London and one at Westerly Hospital in Rhode Island. At its peak, there were more than 800 COVID-positive patients in the health systems five hospitals, 450 at Yale New Haven alone. It was really a dire time, Borgstrom said.

She said while many are concerned about college students returning to campus, as of now most of the hospitalized patients are older.

Justin Papp contributed to this story. edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Splitting one type of cancer drug in half and delivering the pieces separately to cancer cells could reduce life-threatening side effects and protect healthy, non-cancerous cells, a new study suggests.

The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that splitting immunotoxins into two inactive and benign parts may set the stage for future, targeted treatments of cancers.

Immunotoxins combine an immune substance with a toxin. The immune substance attaches to cancer cells, allowing the toxin to enter the cancer cell and kill it without harming nearby healthy cells.

The research was designed as a proof-of-concept study, but the researchers found that the functional toxin can be reconstructed in cancer cells in both laboratory cell cultures and in mice.

The search for a cancer cure has led to a number of treatments that destroy cancer cells, but also destroy healthy, non-cancerous cells. That destruction often causes life-threatening side effects.

"The problem is not to kill the healthy cells," said Dmitri Kudryashov, an associate chemistry professor at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study. "What is difficult is to kill only the cancer cells and nothing else."

And while some cancer treatments have been successful at targeting cancer cells, few have been able to do so without also affecting healthy cells.

The key to split immunotoxins is that only cancer cells will receive both parts of the split toxin, said Elena Kudryashova, a co-senior author on the study and a research scientist at Ohio State.

"We have confirmed that when separated, the parts of the split toxin do not harm cells. But when they recombine into the original toxin, the treatment destroys the cancer.

"But to achieve that, both parts must enter cancer cells," Kudryashova said. "What we have achieved so far is the reconstruction of the fully functional toxin upon specific delivery of one part of the split immunotoxin to the cells expressing the other part. The specific delivery of this other part in sufficient quantity is yet to be achieved and is being pursued in the laboratory."

Essentially, when the toxin protein is split and goes into the human body as a cancer treatment, it can't cause harm to healthy cells. But if biochemists can find a way to get both pieces of the protein to enter a cancer cell, the two pieces of toxin can then destroy the cancer.

###

Other Ohio State researchers who worked on this study are a lead author, Vedud Purde, and David Heisler and Reena Shakya.

This work was funded by the National Cancer Institute and a Pelotonia Idea Grant.

CONTACTS: Dmitri Kudryashov, kudryashov.1@osu.edu

Elena Kudryashova, kudryashova.1@osu.edu

Written by: Laura Arenschield, arenschield.2@osu.edu
A university student and his teenage girlfriend were gunned down at a rural farm in an alleged double-murder witnessed by shocked family.

Chelsea Ireland and Lukasz Kosowski, both 19, were shot dead at a property in southeast South Australia about 11.30pm on Saturday.

A 46-year-old man was arrested without incident at the house in Mount McIntyre and charged with two counts of murder.

His identity has been temporarily suppressed for 72 hours to protect the identity of his stepchildren.

Chelsea Ireland and Lukasz Kosowski, both 19, were shot dead at a property in southeast South Australia

Chelsea and Lukasz dated for several years and had travelled the world together, including exploring his Polish heritage.

They attended different Adelaide high schools - Lukasz at Christian Brothers College and Chelsea at St Mary's College.

Lukasz was studying journalism at the University of South Australia while working at KFC, a job he and his friends made numerous jokes about.

His girlfriend was enrolled in mechanical engineering at Adelaide University and working at Baker's Delight.

Chelsea and Lukasz dated for several years and travelled together last year

The nearby village of Kalangadoo is also in shock and the local pub closed on Sunday after locals heard the news.

Inspector Campbell Hill said forensics officers and major crimes detectives flew in from Adelaide to investigate the shooting.

'People that know either the deceased or the accused in this particular matter, we would urge them to call police.'

The accused faced Mount Gambier Magistrates' Court on Monday afternoon when a suppression order was granted for 72 hours.
By Ayya Lmahamad

Imports of perfume and toilet water in Azerbaijan increased by 14.9 percent in quantitative terms in the first half of 2020, local media has reported.

According to the report, the total volume of imported perfumes and toilet water amounted to 719.19 tons worth $7.9 million.

Thus, imports increased by 14.9 percent in quantitative terms and decreased by 10.4 percent in monetary terms, compared to the same period of 2019.

Moreover, during the reporting period, 33.43 tons of perfume and toilet water worth $2.5 million were imported to the country from France.

The list of other major supplies of perfume includes Russia (159.57 tons worth $1.7 million), Spain (17.77 tons worth $587,910), China (260.7 tons worth $582,690), Italy (10.27 tons worth $665,220), Turkey (105.31 tons worth $699,450), Poland (59.4 tons worth $679,160), UAE (27.8 tons worth $344,160), UK (2.13 tons worth $290,930).

It should be noted that in 2019, imports of perfumes and toilet water amounted to 1636.91 tons worth $18.8 million.

Additionally, Azerbaijans overall export to France amounted to $41.1 million, while import amounted to $38.5 million.

Azerbaijans foreign trade turnover amounted to $15 billion in the period of January-July 2020. During the reporting period, export amounted to $9.1 billion, while imports amounted to $5.9 billion.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
The Human Rights Defender of Armenia launched a study right after the release of news about an officer of the Armed Forces of Armenia finding himself in Azerbaijan, as reported the Public Relations Department of the Office of the Human Rights Defender of Armenia.

The videos released by Azerbaijani servicemen showing Gurgen Alaverdyan have been examined and are posted on YouTube and on various Azerbaijani websites.

The study of the videos attests to the gross violations of the officers internationally enshrined rights. In particular, in the videos, Gurgen Alaverdyan is handcuffed and surrounded by Azerbaijani servicemen. The officer of the Armed Forces of Armenia is shown with a winter hat that completely covers his eyes. Gurgen Alverdyan is surrounded by Azerbaijani servicemen who are making degrading statements, acting ironically, constantly humiliating the honor and dignity of an officer, and all the videos are targeted against Gurgen Alaverdyans ethnic belonging, that is, with overt hate speech.

The Geneva Conventions guarantee the right of prisoners of war to respect for honor and dignity which rules out any type of humiliation. Therefore, the behavior of the Azerbaijani servicemen in the videos is gross violations of the rights of Gurgen Alaverdyan.

It is necessary to state that the Azerbaijani soldiers gross violations of rights are a result of Gurgen Alaverdyan getting confused and finding himself in the territory of Azerbaijan.

What is also strictly condemnable is the fact that the mentioned videos are being widely disseminated on Azerbaijani TV stations, particularly, Rahmanzade TV, Yeni Avaz TV, WEST NEWS TV, Beynelxalq Info, Hrbi TV and other television stations.

Ombudsman Arman Tatoyan today addressed international human rights organizations, stating the gross violations of Gurgen Alaverdyans rights, as well as the gross violations of international humanitarian law.

The Ombudsman has also addressed an inquiry to the Ministry of Defense of Armenia, which has additionally clarified that on August 22 at around 7:30 officer Gurgen Alaverdyan, who had gone to the military post to check it, got confused and lost due to strictly unfavorable climate.

The Ombudsman, as well as his representative are constantly in contact with Gurgen Alaverdyans family, as well as the relevant international organizations.
When Lt. General Carl Strock, chief engineer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, accepted responsibility on behalf of the Corps in 2006 for the levee failures that caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, it came as no surprise to many who suspected the disaster was man-made.

With 2020s 15th anniversary of the hurricane and flooding, two new books explore the disaster from different perspectives. Sandy Rosenthal, author of Words Whispered in Water and founder of the citizens group levees.org, chronicles her yearslong mission to unearth a fabric of falsehoods she claims the Corps perpetrated  demonstrating that one person chipping away at questionable explanations can change the national narrative.

The former copywriter, who evacuated New Orleans before Katrina hit, was far from the devastation, in Lafayette, when the storm plowed through.

Two weeks afterward, I learned my house had survived due to the fact that I live on the 'sliver along the river,' above sea level," Rosenthal said. That meant I didnt have to deal with insurance companies or contractors, and could really study the issue.

When the federal General Accountability Office released its report one month after the storm, stating that the Corps designs and builds levees but that locals maintain them, it incensed the citys residents, including Rosenthal  who was told she shouldnt have been living here.

What happened to the levees?

One local scientist believed the city was being blamed for levees built by the Corps that were never capable of withstanding even a moderate hurricane.

+9 Louisiana's flood risk will skyrocket over the next 30 years; here's why Theres a tiny bit of good news and a lot of bad news for Louisiana contained in the rollout of a nonprofits new database of flood risk for m

Ivor van Heerden, now a semiretired coastal scientist, but then LSUs deputy director of its Hurricane Center, was on the case from the get-go.

I went to Gov. (Kathleen) Babineaux Blancos office and told her that there was no way these levees could have overtopped. I explained that we had computer models that took into account storm surges and that these levees must have collapsed, said van Heerden, who holds a doctorate in marine sciences.

Armed later with boat footage he took on Lake Pontchartrain and at the three major drainage canals, he showed 28 breaches where soil had eroded from underneath. It was the beginning of a levee investigation that would ultimately lay the blame at the feet of the Corps.

But challenging the Corps was considered risky. In her book, Rosenthal discusses various civil engineers who she said were told to keep silent. Among them was engineer Gordon Boutwell Jr., the late president of Soil Testing Engineers in Baton Rouge.

A 100-year-old problem

He told me that the Corps came to him and said that if he continued to criticize their work, his firm would be hurt, Rosenthal said. He decided to stay silent but told me that when he was gone, I could publish what he had encountered.

"In 2008, he died of cancer, and I then told his story publicly."

But, Rosenthal says, the list of engineers who were silenced is long. She claims some have been fired or blackballed from their profession. The Corps, when contacted, said it knew nothing of these practices.

LSU fired van Heerden in 2009, after he pounced on the levees' catastrophic structural failure. LSU said he was bringing bad press to the university, threatening state funding. Van Heerden sued, accusing the university of limiting his freedom of speech. LSU settled for $450,000.

In Andy Horowitzs new book, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015, he traces the origin of the problems that now confront New Orleans to decisions 100 years ago, when the city, emboldened by surviving a 1915 hurricane, decided to expand away from the river and essentially away from the safety of higher ground.

+11 Almost 2/3 of Americans live in counties with levees - up from 10 years ago, FEMA data shows The share of Americans living in counties and parishes that are at least partially protected by earthen and concrete levee systems increased t

Those in charge assumed their state-of-the-art drainage system had saved the city, but in 1915, there was no one living in the bottom of the bowl  now heavily populated areas that saw massive flooding during Katrina.

Those who dont live here think that only the poor neighborhoods flooded, Horowitz said. Thats because of the images which were broadcast nightly showing the high water in the 9th Ward, but the truth is that Lakeview was wiped out, too."

Who came back?

However, he said, in the long run, there was truth to the supposition that poor neighborhoods bore the brunt of the flooding.

Fifteen years later, the more affluent Lakeview has come back. But the population of much of the 9th Ward, predominantly lower middle class and Black, is only a fraction of what it was before the flood. He describes the way that the Road Home program, designed to compensate people for their property losses, assessed homes at preflood market values rather than replacement costs, giving far less money for reconstruction to poor communities.

The two Katrina books are very different. Horowitz looks at how the dissolution of public schools, the unabated dredging of south Louisiana by oil companies, the uneven distribution of profits from natural resources, and even the manner in which the Corps does cost-benefit analyses of projects have all changed the landscape of the city.

Rosenthals Words Whispered in Water brings together a cacophony of voices who will no longer tolerate the status quo, not just here, but with levee problems all around the country.

One fact that authors Rosenthal and Horowitz, and scientist van Heerden, agree upon is that with rising sea levels and eroding wetlands, the citys problems are far from over.

Speaking on behalf of the Corps, spokesperson Ricky Boyett said the agency continues to shore up those levees that do not yet meet the 100-year flood standard, but he cautions there is no perfect protection system.

There will always be a bigger storm than the system is designed to defend against. Its not designed to protect lives; its designed to protect infrastructure and property, so its critical that when people are told to evacuate, they get out.

Both new books are available in bookstores.
Yannick Gingras, who will be driving expected favourite Tall Dark Stranger in this Saturday nights $1 million Pepsi North America Cup, will join COSA TV live for a special NA Cup preview show Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m. (ET).

Tall Dark Stranger captured his elimination this past Saturday night with a hard-fought victory by a half length in 1:48.4. The son of Bettors Delight captured the $636,000 Meadowlands Pace earlier this season and is 13-for-15 lifetime with almost $1.5 million earned. His trainer, Nancy Takter, is looking for back-to-back NA Cup titles after having captured last years edition with Captain Crunch.

Bob McClure, who guided Captain Kirk to victory in his Pepsi NA Cup elimination, will also join the broadcast during a pre-taped segment. Captain Kirk is one of three Tony Alagna trainees to qualify for the $1 million final  the others being Capt Midnight and Captain Barbossa.

Greg Blanchard and Mark McKelvie will host the show, which will be aired on multiple Facebook and Youtube channels, as well as the Standardbred Canada website.

Viewers that take part in the nightly poll question will be automatically entered for a chance to win and Urban E-bike, compliments of Hoofbid.com, to be drawn during COSA TVs season finale this November. Tuesdays show will also feature a draw for a $100 HPIBet card, and all viewers who leave a comment during the show will have a chance to win. The draw will be made immediately following the broadcast and the winner announced on the COSA TV Facebook page.

The draw for the Pepsi North America Cup will take place tonight at 6 p.m. and can be viewed on the Woodbine Mohawk Park simulcast show and on their Facebook page.

(With files from COSA TV)
Four years ago at a boisterous, chant-filled Republican National Convention, Donald Trump succeeded in portraying America as a grim, frightful place sowing death and destruction abroad while plagued by poverty, violence and chaos at home.

No small feat, given that the nation was in the midst of a record economic expansion and in the process of winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Were not sure how Trumps rhetoric would go over this year now that the picture he painted four years ago actually bears some resemblance to reality.

Americans in 2020 have good reason to fear, whether for their childrens safety, their loved ones lives or for their own livelihoods as they struggle to hold tight to precarious employment, to keep the lights on and the mortgage paid.

No one could have predicted the deadly novel coronavirus pandemic and Trump certainly didnt start it. The murderous blame for its initial spread lies squarely on China and its deceitful cover-up. But the presidents nonchalance, seasonal flu comparisons, misleading messaging and general logistical incompetence have left us in economic crisis.

More than 5.5 million people in the United States are infected and more than 176,000 have died. Despite hints of rebound, the unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent.

Going into the Republican National Convention this week, Trump will have to do the opposite of 2016: give Republicans, and any uncommitted American voter who may be watching, a little hope.

Not the hope and light and love Joe Biden promised at the Democratic National Convention. People dont turn to Trump for that.

In The Before Times, circa February, concerns of many Trump-supporting Republicans included building the wall, lowering taxes, protecting gun rights, appointing conservative judges, limiting abortion access and standing up to China.

Republican priorities have grown more pragmatic still: They want to live. They want to work. They want to know their president will do a better job of protecting the nation if he is given four more years.

And yes, they want to know that rioting in the streets of some cities following the death of George Floyd while in police custody will cease. Of course, such fires are more easily calmed by leaders who dont fan the flames.

While the grand convention spectacles of Americas major political parties, even in virtual formats, are welcome distractions from our mundane realities while stuck at home, many Americans want more than a big bash.

The glitz, the flowing wardrobe of American flags, the Apprentice-inspired high drama - may not be enough for a Republican voter feeding his kids out of a food pantry for the first time.

Nor is such a voter likely to care much about a dark cloud of bad news hanging over Trumps head from the past week, including his former chief strategist Steve Bannons arrest on fraud charges, another court ruling rejecting the presidents bid to shield his federal tax returns, and his own sister Maryanne Trump Barry saying in secretly recorded audio that the president couldnt be trusted.

Trump will need to persuade voters he has a clear vision for how to steer America out of this pandemic mess, something Democrats struggled to do as well. And Trump will have to do it without the roar of crowds that usually feed him.

Hell get several shots, though, with this apparent plan to speak not once but every night.

Kellyanne Conway, Trumps counselor who is also scheduled to speak, told reporters that we definitely want to improve on the dour and sour mood of the D.N.C. One might assume that also means avoiding the presidents own dour tone in his American Carnage inaugural address, one of the darkest ever delivered.

Republicans other deviation from Democrats - and from history? Ditch the former presidents.

Democrats, in their bid for one big happy family, gave prime time speaking slots to a slew of former Democratic presidents, first ladies and unsuccessful presidential nominees - an approach Conway criticized as old guard-laden.

Trump wont have that problem since the Republican old guard seems content to stay away. That includes his only living Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, the partys 2012 presidential nominee, and Romneys running mate, former House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Its a stark a reminder of how far the GOP has drifted. So is the list of speakers who did make the cut, including the McCloskeys, the St. Louis couple who stood outside their home and pointed guns at passing protesters they claimed to fear, and Nick Sandmann, the former MAGA hat-wearing Covington Catholic student whose exchange with a Native American elder went viral.

The schedule also includes a few of the partys brighter lights: former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, along with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

This years GOP convention must have higher ambitions than paying homage to Trump. Hes no longer just a candidate. Hes the incumbent making the case for four more years amid a monumental crisis.

By the looks of Trumps sagging poll numbers, hes got some explaining to do.
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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Was it all for nothing? With Spain, France and Germany recording the highest number of virus cases since they emerged from lockdown, the danger that Europe blows its best chance of taming the coronavirus grows by the day.

The hope was that we could relax travel and social restrictions this summer because people are much less likely to catch the virus when theyre outside enjoying the warm weather. European economies depend on tourism and couldnt afford a season of empty sun loungers and restaurants. Airlines and hotels would collapse without new bookings, and they implemented new hygiene measures to reassure customers. People were desperate to see friends and families again.

The experiment has backfired. Were not even through August and cases are surging in western Europe, while south-eastern Europe, which avoided the worst of the initial virus wave, is up against it too. Germany won plaudits for its handling of the spring outbreak, but it recorded more than 2,000 new cases on Saturday  the biggest daily jump since April.

One big factor has been the restart of intra-European travel, including people going on vacation or visiting family and friends. Almost 40% of recent German cases are thought to have been contracted abroad, according to the Robert Koch Institute. Thats similar to Italy, where almost a third of new cases were imported from overseas. Italians holidaying on Sardinia have also brought the virus back to the mainland.

There has also been a spate of European cases linked to parties. France  with almost 5,000 new infections reported on Sunday  says this is its main source of new contagion. No wonder the European Unions trade commissioner, Phil Hogan, is under pressure to quit after attending a hotel dinner with about 80 guests, in contravention of Irelands rules.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Europe must avoid closing borders again at any cost. Free movement is central to the EU project, and shutting borders contributed to a collapse in economic output in the spring. Yet politicians cant ignore the fact that people are catching the virus abroad and bringing it home.

Story continues

For those who never travel overseas, for domestic business owners whove already suffered through one lockdown not of their making, and for the medical staff who must treat another cohort of Covid-19 patients, these developments are especially frustrating. The answer is much more rigorous testing and monitoring of returning travelers and much stricter rules around social gatherings.

Fortunately, the number of new hospitalizations and deaths is a fraction of what it was in the spring because there are more cases among young people, who experience either mild symptoms or none at all. The detection of more imported cases points to some improvements in testing. With the summer travel season drawing to a close, the problem of returning travelers should abate somewhat.

But the economic damage done by this new spike is already considerable. Fridays tepid euro-area services data and Ryanair Holdings Plcs decision to scale back its autumn flight schedule suggest consumers are becoming more cautious. The list of countries subject to quarantine measures is growing.

Theres a risk too that infections will begin to spread from young people to the elderly, and that schools and creches will be closed again  every parents and finance ministers nightmare. In the two weeks since theyve reopened, more than 40 Berlin schools have already reported virus cases, forcing pupils and teachers to quarantine, according to the Associated Press.

Merkel and Frances President Emmanuel Macron say theyre determined to avoid new lockdowns but they need to get a grip. Theres plenty governments can do without reimposing draconian measures. Its vital that anyone arriving from a high-risk area is tested. In Germany checks for returning travelers are free. However, local health authorities don't always have the capacity to monitor returning passengers to ensure theyve been tested or quarantined. There are reports of long delays in getting results.

German infections have also surged among parents and children returning from south-east Europe. The DRV German travel associations attempt to blame migrants for this and exonerate package holidaymakers was crude and unhelpful. Popular holiday destinations also feature prominently in the list of imported cases.

A rise in German cases linked to weddings and private parties was hardly a shock because the rules around friends and families meeting vary so widely. Federal states are allowed to set their own guidelines and some are too permissive: In Berlin as many as 500 people can meet inside. In contrast, England restricts private gatherings to a maximum of 30 people and the government has threatened 10,000 pound ($13,000) fines for breaches. Ireland has tightened restrictions so that only six people may meet indoors.(1)

German Health Minister Jens Spahn is right that if we must choose between reopening schools or having parties and attending carnivals, then the choice is obvious. Germany and other countries with surging infections should take their lead from Airbnb Inc., which has banned parties at its properties and put a cap on occupancy of 16.

Unless Europe gets the basics right then countries may be forced to take even more unpopular measures to protect their populations, including advising the elderly to stay home and keep away from younger relatives. The autumn and winter months wont be easy but acting now can avoid unnecessary hardship.

(1) Up to 50 people can attend a wedding.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies. He previously worked for the Financial Times.

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.
The Oyo State Police Command has re-arrested Sunday Shodipe, a 19-year-old man accused of involvement in the rape and murder of some female residents in Ibadan.

The state police spokesperson, Olugbenga Fadeyi, confirmed the development to PREMIUM TIMES Sunday in a telephone interview.

"Sunday Shodipe has been re-arrested this morning and he is in police custody", he told our correspondent.

When asked how the arrest was made, he replied that a press statement would be released later in the day.

This newspaper reported how the police announced that Mr Shodipe escaped from custody last Sunday. He was first arrested on July 17 but escaped on August 11.

The state police command announced a N500,000 reward for anyone who may help in locating him. Two officers were also arrested in connection with Mr Shodipe's escape.

Before now, this newspaper reported various rape cases and killings in Akinyele area of Ibadan during COVID-19 lockdown.

No fewer than three women were raped in the area within two months while more cases occurred across the country.

The Nigerian government has since pledged to take tougher action against rape.
TikTok said it is asking a judge to block the Trump administration from enacting a ban on the social media network, bringing a geopolitical fight over technology and trade into a U.S. courtroom in the run-up to the presidential election.

TikTok said in a blog post Monday that its Chinese parent, ByteDance Ltd., is challenging an Aug. 6 order from President Donald Trump prohibiting U.S. residents from doing business with TikTok under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The order doesnt take effect for weeks, but it escalated tensions as the U.S. declared Chinese businesses a security risk and Beijing assailed the administration as targeting China to score political points. TikTok argues it poses no security threat.

The White House issued a second order Aug. 14 under a separate national security law that would force ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets. The suit sidesteps the second order. That order is based on an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. Decisions by the interagency panel, which is led by the Treasury Department, are all but impossible to overturn in court.

The Justice Department declined to comment on TikToks challenge.

Read More: Why Tencent and WeChat Are Such a Big Deal in China

The suit comes as Trump steps up his campaign against China, betting it will help him win Novembers election despite upsetting millions of younger TikTok users. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has urged American companies to bar Chinese applications from their app stores, part of his Clean Network guidance designed to prevent authorities in China from accessing the personal data of U.S. citizens.

The outcome will also have implications for an increasingly interconnected global economy. Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. are among those already showing interest in buying TikTok.

The challenge faces an uphill fight, according to James Dempsey, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. Courts dont generally review the presidents determinations on questions of national security, Dempsey said before the case was filed.

But the company may be successful with a due process argument that focuses not on the presidents ultimate decision but on the companys lack of an opportunity to respond to the evidence against it, Dempsey said. A First Amendment challenge is also possible, but TikTok will have to establish that it has a First Amendment right to be on the phones of Americans or that TikTok is a publisher, separate from the First Amendment rights of its users.

Read More: Why Trump Is Threatening Your Teens Favorite App

Trump has threatened penalties on any U.S. resident or company that conducts transactions with TikTok or WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app, saying that having Americans personal data exposed to China creates a national security risk. The apps could get bumped off Apple Inc. and Googles app stores.

While the order blocks all transactions involving the WeChat app, it doesnt amount to a broader ban on dealings with its owner, Tencent Holdings Ltd., according to a U.S. official. Still, Tencents U.S.-listed shares fell 7.4% in the immediate response to Trumps Aug. 6 decree.

On Friday, a group of WeChat users sued in a San Francisco federal court saying Trumps ban on the messaging app violated their right of free speech and due process rights because it doesnt provide notice of the specific conduct thats prohibited.

This executive order risks undermining global businesses trust in the United States commitment to the rule of law, which has served as a magnet for investment and spurred decades of American economic growth, TikTok said in a statement hours after Trumps order. And it sets a dangerous precedent for the concept of free expression and open markets.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its health and economic impacts has forced a global rethink of the current multilateral framework and what it means for the future. For Africa, COVID-19 has served as a wake-up call in many ways. The mitigation measures that were put in place by most countries, globally, to contain the spread of the pandemic, and particularly border closures and lockdowns, resulted in reduced economic activity and supply chain disruptions across the whole world, Africa included. Reduced economic activity has meant demand contraction in Africas key markets, who were worse affected by the pandemic, thus depressing export revenues as commodity prices have continued to plummet.

Several African manufacturers have successfully reoriented operations to begin production of Protective Personal Equipment (PPE) and ventilators to meet local demand. However, for the most part, pandemic-related disruptions have exposed African economies overdependence on high commodity prices and exports of raw materials to fund basic government services. Together, disrupted international supply chains and domestic lockdowns created a perfect storm in which income, goods or services stopped circulating as economies came to a standstill. No money, no movement, and a realization that most African countries lack economic diversity and resilience.

So, what is to be done? Simply put, there is a need to focus on fundamentals: producing more of what Africa consumes, and consuming more of what Africa produces. This does not mean cutting Africa off from the outside world. However, it does mean focusing first and foremost on the African market, and other markets secondarily. It means the need to think about Africa more as a single common market to facilitate scaling up. Producing and consuming locally will facilitate the development of supply chains that will offer small companies, and countries, opportunities to leverage their strengths and specializations and feed into large value chain networks that create more value through production, processing and distribution. And it means raising the standards within African supply chains to enable African firms to produce world class industrial products.

To achieve this, there needs to be a concerted effort to shore up manufacturing in Africa. The demand for manufactured goods is already there, as evidenced by the figures on the import of manufactures. Key to enhancing manufacturing in Africa is improving intra-African trade through the effective operationalization of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which would spur industrialization. The COVID-19 crisis has shown that enhanced industrial production in Africa is entirely achievable, especially as countries have struggled to source inputs and products from overseas. African industries do have the potential to respond to demand and in fact, there is potential to leap-frog into advanced manufacturing and create the required capacity to produce quality world class goods.

By extension, the pandemic has also exposed the vital importance of economic capacity not only for socioeconomic development and industrialization but to enhance resilience against crises and exogenous shocks that often occur without warning. Building on existing regional strategies for disaster risk reduction, there is also a need to factor in how pandemics present a multi-dimensional set of risks that require integrated responses to mitigate systemic risks.

The capacity to locally manufacture the basics that are critical during emergenciesfoodstuffs, clothing, shelterand building the markets and supply chains needed to ensure a good supply of these, would contribute significantly to GDP, income and job creation.

The question becomes how to build the markets and supply chains needed to ensure Africa can provide for itself, including during emergencies. For example, Africa has several agricultural commodities on which regional value chains can be constructed. These alone would contribute significantly to GDP, incomes and job creation while also paving a shift into the manufacture of light intermediate goods (e.g., wood products, textiles and leather) adds to the range of possibilities. As Africa builds more critical mass, the continent would increasingly move investment into distribution, data transmission and services to ensure these goods make it to market. Financing and insurance are needed across the spectrum, as are all the skills of the youth and specialists who can help manage the IT and logistics that leverage digital capabilities. This will create high paying, skilled jobs for Africas youth. In other words, there is a need to take a horizontal view of value creation and maximize opportunities to generate these in Africa, for African economies, African businesses, African workers and African consumers.

So how can this be achieved? Fulfilling the African Development Banks High 5s priorities: Light Up and Power Africa; Feed Africa; Industrialise Africa; Integrate Africa; and, Improve the Quality of Life for the People of Africa, would address these challenges on multiple fronts and instrumentalize a tightly interconnected African market. The High 5s address the continents demonstrated need for power generation to electrify households and industries; enhanced transport links to connect African countries by land, sea and air; ICT for communication and digital management of logistics; financial markets to integrate for more and better financial flows for business enterprises to flourish and to meet household needs; and agribusinesses that rely on the latest seed and other technology to produce the crop yields needed to sustain Africas fast growing populations.

By producing what it consumes and consuming what it produces as its countries and businesses progress up the value chain, Africa can build wealth, opportunity and resilience and ensure the successful realisation of Agenda 2063.

Khaled Sherif is the Vice-President, Regional Development, Integration and Business Delivery at the African Development Bank

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In a relief to a 28-year-old Pakistani citizen, stuck in Surat since 2016 following his arrest in a fake currency case, the Gujarat High Court on Monday granted him permission to leave the country.

The court while disposing of a petition moved by Pakistan High Commission issued direction to concerned authorities to complete the formality and allow him to travel back home.

The division bench of justices Sonia Gokani and NV Anjaria passed the order directing the Surat Railway and Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) to issue a no-objection certificate and exit permit respectively to Sajjad Vora that will enable him to leave India.

"The petition of Pakistan High commission is disposed by directing the DSP (District Superintendent of Police) Surat Railway to issue the NOC to Vora by 29 August to travel to his country and further direction is passed to Foreigners Regional Registration Office to issue the exit permit and waive all leviable fees of overstay etc within a period of 7 days from date of NOC. The original visa permit and exit permits to be given to the corpus (petitioner) and he is allowed to go back to his country the way he pleases," Bhatt said.

Initially, Vora had moved a petition through advocate Aum Kotwal seeking permission to travel back home to Karachi and, later, Pakistan High Commission filed a habeas corpus petition through lawyer Jeet Bhatt to seek Vora's custody.

In November 2016, Vora, belonging to Dawoodi Bohra community, had arrived in Surat to participate in religious functions. In December, he was arrested by Surat Railway Police with fake currencies. He was tried by a sessions court which acquitted him in August 2018. The state government challenged the order in the high court which also passed an order in July 2019 upholding the lower court's order.

Vora made representations to local police and FRRO requesting for an exit permit to no avail. Vora himself approached the high court seeking permission to be allowed to go back home. Later, the commission also filed a separate petition. The state government had responded that since it was to file an appeal in Supreme Court against Vora's acquittal. During the pendency of the petition, the government moved the apex court which on July 15 rejected the appeal and confirmed Vora's acquittal.
The President, Nana Akufo-Addo, during the New Patriotic Party (NPP) 2020 Manifesto Launch in Cape Coast over the weekend, made comments to the effect that the John Mahama administration cannot be trusted with Free Senior High School. He made so many other claims which I think are not really the case and needs interrogated further.

The people of Ghana were presented with options in the 2008 elections including free SHS. They voted against the proposal for free SHS. The same people have presented options in 2012 which included free SHS. They voted against free SHS yet again. In 2016, the same people were provided options including free SHS, and they voted for free SHS among other promises.

It was about the choices the people made and what they choose their resources to be used for at any given point in time. At the time, between 2008 and 2016, what was the essence of providing free Senior High School education when basic schools were being carried out under trees? When many are without access to quality healthcare? When many are without access to roads? This is not to say that these conditions arent prevailing today. But, the reality of the Ghanaian ahead of the 2016 elections was that many schools under trees were removed. Many infrastructure at the Senior High School level were added, with new ones started and some completed, including the building of additional public universities which provided assured quality and affordable cost.

At the time of the 2016 elections, more hospitals have been built with many having access to quality healthcare than was the case between 2008 and 2016. Many CHPS compounds were built bringing healthcare closer to the people. Many roads were constructed, providing some relief in the area of roads to a large extend by the 2016 elections.

All these infrastructure requirements were prevalent, albeit improved ahead of the 2016 elections. Indeed, no matter the choice that the people made in public elections, the choices were not made for the other sectors to be abandoned. When the people made their choices between 2008 and 2012 to ignore free SHS, it wasnt that they didnt need education to be free, neither did they opt for quality to be compromised. They however made those choices to include the fact that the various educational infrastructure be improved, and the cost of education as affordable as possible. In living with these silent demands, the then administrations of Atta Mills of blessed memory and John Dramani Mahama, ensured that quality was improved, access was improved, and eventually, progressively free education introduced at the senior high level.

When in 2016 the people wholly opted for the implementation of free SHS, by electing Nana Akufo-Addo, His Excellency, they simply made choice for a wholesale implementation, knowing very well the alternative forgone, as the economists would attribute with opportunity cost. They made a focal decision that should ensure that no cost at all was paid at the senior high level. They were mindful that schools under trees were largely addressed at the basic level although not completely. They were aware that intake had improved at the senior high level through the addition of infrastructure and new schools by the Mills and Mahama administrations. They were aware that space at the tertiary levels were increased for additional admissions. They made these decisions, mindful of the fact that the population continue to increase.

When they made the choice of free SHS as an alternative to whatever the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was promising in 2016, they were aware that there was need to keep the expansion of water, electricity, roads, hospitals, schools as well, as more and more were needed considering the increasing population. They made those decisions with the greatest faith that those being elected, would remain decorum and sensitive to the other needs of Ghanaians including being accountable and bold to deal with corruption.

As Ghanaians would be presented the opportunity to vote in the 2020 December polls, they would make a total assessment of the performance of the Akufo-Addo administration in all areas of governance including their flagship promises that earned their votes.

While at that there are general policy decisions that Ghanaians would expect are held constant. For instance, Ghanaians never elected a government to assume office and increase the number of ministers from 86 to 125, particularly when their performance hasnt set them aside as contributing anything significant to the governance of the people. When they voted in 2016 to elect the Akufo-Addo government, they did so without approving the appointment of family members including daughters and the mother of the presidents child, including cousins, nephews, brothers, sisters, in-laws, family and business associates especially that the appointment of one nephew of the former administration was a motivation for a promise by candidate Nana Akufo-Addo never to appoint his family members and friends into his government.

The people, while voting in 2016, never substituted nepotism for what is the case today, and never sacrificed the need for accountability. They didnt know a time would come when a Managing Director of a Port could be appointed when two years after his appointment, the existence of the said port cannot be traced, yet the Managing Director would keep drawing salary over his position. They never elected that corrupt conducts such as Ameri, PDS, Australia Visa scandal, BOST evaporated oil, among others, would not be investigated and punished. They never opted that a managing director of a state organization would spend 1 million Ghana Cedis ($173,000) to expand a two bedroom house into a four bedroom house, with 11 air-conditioners for this 4 bedroom house.

The people of Ghana, while making that choice in 2016, never expected that their demands for standards and proper execution of decisions would be disregarded. They never expected that the state power would be used to abuse innocent citizens on an election day with impunity without any efforts at punishing anyone as seen during the Ayawaso West Wuogon by-election of 31st January 2019. They never ceded their rights to their mineral royalties in an opaque contractual agreement as we are seeing today.

While they assess government on their big tickets, they would measure the dignity that has been brought to the seat of government. They would measure the Akufo-Addo administration to the extent that they lived their words preached while in opposition, and not based only on what it has done in government. For instance, some of the promises were that they would move the country from taxation to production. The Ghanaian people are in a position to tell how far they lived that promise.

They promised to protect the public purse. The scandals that broke out, the monies that have been lost, the large size of government, among others, would be assessed to evaluate how these protected the public purse particularly how government acted to safeguard the interest of the state in such efforts to fleece the state. For example, when ECG, an organization with assets valued at 20 billion Ghana Cedis ($3.5 billion) was handed over to PDS based on what government described as fraudulent representation, with its attendant loss of USD190 million based on the withdrawn Compact II agreement, the Ghanaian people would hold accountable government decision not to pursue any individual(s) whose actions and inactions resulted in such a loss to the state.

As the people go to the polls in December on who gets the nod to govern for the next four years, some decisions are settled. There is no way Ghanaians or any leader can reverse the free Senior High School policy under implementation. That debate is settled. The only way that would be up for debate is if any of the two major parties were promising a withdrawal of the policy while the other advances arguments of maintaining it. As a result, the discussion must shift to how best that policy can be improved not to compromise on the quality of the future of our children.

As we speak, even government would agree that the free SHS requires a second look. The government agrees more infrastructure is needed to end the obnoxious double track system which has cut down on the contact hours of school children. Government would agree that increased intake means increased need for text books, among others from government at a time that parents are expected to pay nothing. The results of what we saw on our social media and television screens from some senior high schools soon after the commencement of the West African Senior Schools Certificate Examinations (WASSCE), with the braving show of high sense of entitlement, wouldnt be endorsed by any parents, let alone government.

The decision by a government to opt for the investment of public funds into past questions, examiners report and marking schemes and training of teachers in same, instead of ensuring the total completion of the academic syllabus, would be measured as to be either good or bad by the people. Merely implementing free SHS without recourse to ensuring the highest quality, I am not sure is what parents opted for in the 2016 elections when they voted for a decision for the NPP government to come take over the rings of power and to implement it.

I am sure that an assessment of a decision into the next four years, would include how best this whole free SHS enterprise can provide parents the comfort that their childrens future wouldnt be compromised. They would expect the two major political parties to make commitments to that and I have no doubt that if the people do not see that in the ruling government that implemented the policy, they would not remain blinded to an alternative that gives them that assurance. I would rather suggest, that, instead of wasting efforts at creating fears about what the NDC and John Mahama bring to the free SHS table, irrespective of their position in the past, the NPP and Nana Akufo-Addo must spend time promising on what it would do to prevent the scenes that occurred recently that many Ghanaians condemned including the blatant insults on the person of the president by beneficiaries of this free SHS.

Yes, it is true that the NDC and John Mahama, even though evidence abounds that began the progressively free education, were not for the wholesale implementation of free SHS with reasons that include the lack of adequate infrastructure. That notwithstanding, the people of Ghana have opted for it. The next administration wouldnt rely on the personal funds of the president to fund free SHS. The people have chosen the use of part of their resources for the total expenditure on free SHS. Which president cannot commit the peoples resources to what they chose it to be spent on? For this, anyone can do. What would be exceptional is the details of that exercise on how best it would inure to the benefit of the people.

Free SHS has come to stay. Not Nana Akufo-Addo or John Mahama, with the greatest of respect, can cancel it without the total national debate on this whole enterprise. As a result, enough of the threats and fear mongering on this policy. We demand cogent and adequately measurable measures that would assure us quality. Aside free SHS, there are numerous teething problems facing the people. Access and coverage of quality water has dropped from the 76% in 2016 to some 68% in 2019 as a result of increased population without commensurate investment in water infrastructure. Access to electricity is reducing in percentage terms as the rate of expansion has slowed while target for universal access to electricity has been extended.

So much faces the people of Ghana including their roads, schools (beyond the freebies), hospitals, jobs (which remain a challenge to the youth), among others. For instance, during the launch of the NPP manifesto of Saturday 22nd August, no further plan has been laid out on the fate of NaBCo trainees into a next Akufo-Addo administration as their 3 years contracts are due to end in 2021 thereabouts. These ad hoc measures, though addressed a certain need, have failed to tackle them fully, and we should be concerned over how we can solve some of these challenges for good.

I wish to conclude, that, Ghanaians must be respected ahead of this campaign to have the sophistication to discern. The same people who made choices in the 1950s have made their choices into the 2016 elections, and have what it takes to make decisions into the 2020 elections. Fortunately for the Ghanaian people, the two front runners have served one term each and they are in a position to determine their sincerity towards the people. They can measure Nana Akufo-Addo on his delivery regarding the things he projected as wrong under the Mahama regime. They can also measure how the Mahama administration handled similar instances of issues they have witnessed since 2016 and can best judge for themselves who is more sincere and sensitive to their needs.
U.S. President Donald Trump put pressure on the authorities to develop and approve a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, in a tweet on Saturday.

The deep state, or whoever, over at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics.

Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after Nov. 3. Must focus on speed, and saving lives! Trump tweeted.

The tweet was directed at Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the FDA.

Mr Trump has said in the past that he hopes that a vaccine is developed around the time of the election.

Experts, however, have warned that any political interference in the vaccine testing and approval process could cast doubt and undermine its safety and legitimacy.

Any concerns about the vaccine could lead to a lower level of uptake, making it harder to battle the pandemic.

Mr Hahn has repeatedly emphasized that the regulator will stick to its usual stringent scientific processes and has said that it has not faced any pressure to alter its criteria.

Larger clinical studies are under way for several vaccine candidates, involving up to 30,000 subjects.

If these are completed by autumn, the regulator could start the approval process, which is normally costly and lengthy.

U.S. government experts, including the governments infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci, have said they are confident a vaccine could be available in early 2021.

(dpa/NAN)
Egypt received 126,000 tourists since it has reopened its seaside resorts of Sharm El-Sheikh, Hurghada and Marsa Matrouh to international flights and foreign tourists on 1 July after a three-month stoppage due to the coronavirus pandemic, said Khaled El-Anany, the minister of tourism and antiquities.

One suspected coronavirus case was detected among the arriving tourists, he added. "This is a great achievement that demonstrates the success and efficiency of the procedures introduced by the ministry."

El-Anany's statement was made at a meeting headed by Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly in Cairo on Monday. The meeting was attended by Secretary-General of the World Tourism Organisation Zurab Pololikashvili.

Madbouly said the virus hit the world at a time Egypt's tourism was breaking its own records in terms of the number of arriving tourists.

"It will take some time to pick up the same pace due to tourists' reluctance to travel at the time being," the prime minister added.

He stressed Egypts policies target maintaining a balance between the requirements of health and the economy.

Egypt announced the gradual resumption of international flights at its airports nationwide on 1 July. Foreign tourists are allowed to visit three coastal governorates in the first stage of reopening.

The three governorates are South Sinai, where the popular seaside resort of Sharm El-Sheikh is located, the Red Sea, home to the city of Hurghada, and Marsa Matrouh on the Mediterranean Sea.

About 600 hotels nationwide were allowed to reopen, having met the safety protocols announced by the authorities and at a reduced occupancy of 50 percent.

Pololikashvili told Madbouly and El-Anany he is optimistic about Egypts tourism.

He lauded the "tight procedures" Egypt adopted to gradually reopen the tourism sector while preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

Starting from 1 September, travellers arriving in Egypt will be required to present a negative Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) lab test result certificate.

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A new warning over jobs has sparked a Labor call to keep JobKeeper payments at their current rate beyond the end of September to shield workers from a likely surge in unemployment.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese hardened his position by saying there was a "clear case" to keep JobKeeper at $1500 per fortnight while the unemployment rate remained high.

Labor is hardening its position on the future of JobKeeper payments. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

As Parliament resumed on Monday Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was preparing to introduce a bill within days to extend the wage subsidy for six months while cutting the rate to $1200 in October and $1000 in January for full-time workers.

But the government has also received Treasury advice warning that state border controls and Victorian lockdowns could see 450,000 people move back into unemployment by the end of September.
File Photo /Andrea Dixon / File Photo

WASHINGTON  Former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, a Republican who represented Fairfield County in Congress for 12 years until 2009, endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president Monday.

Shays was among 27 former Republican members of Congress to endorse Biden Monday. Shays backed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, in 2016 over then-candidate Donald Trump, after consistently supporting Republican candidates for president and governor previously, he said.
In Malaysia, the Bahasa language is spoken by the majority; however, the country does not have a Bible available in the Bahasa language.

According to The Persecution, the bibles in Malaysia were "written in the country's official language, Malay - in which the word for God is "Allah," as it is in Arabic. However, the Malaysian government claims the word "Allah" is exclusive to Islam and that its use in Christian publications is likely to confuse Muslims and draw them to Christianity."

Therefore, it was easy for Chinese Malaysian Christian to get Bibles in Mandarin without difficulties, but he government has made obtaining the Malay Bibles difficult. In April 2005, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi confirmed that there was no ban on Bibles translate into Malay, but they were required to have "Not for Muslims" disclaimer stamped on the Bibles.

The Persecution reported that "the unofficial ban on the special papers used in the printing of Bibles in Malaysia have emerged." Which some laws prohibited printing or distributing Bibles in the local Bahasa language. Many Christians see this action as the government's efforts for the "progressive restriction of religious freedom" in Malaysia.

As countless numbers of Muslims are coming to Christ in Malaysia, we need to pray that God's Word in print can one day be available to all of them.
New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is on a day's visit to Maharashtra on Saturday, laid foundation stone for the grand memorial of Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in Mumbai.

PM Modi is addressing a public function at the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) ground in suburban Bandra, after laying foundation stone for two Metro rail projects, Elevated Rail Corridors Project and Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL).



Live updates of PM Modi's speech from Mumbai:

5:19pm: PM Modi ends his speech

#A Dishonest people should not underestimate the mood of 125 crore Indians, you should fear them.

#A I want to assure people of India that this battle will not stop till the time we win it.

#A The people of India will not accept corruption and black money.

#A The time of dishonest people is up, this is cleanup campaign.

#A After 50 days, life of honest will ease and dishonest people will start struggling.

#A There were efforts to mislead and even intimidate people but they supported us in the battle against corruption and black money.

#A Our battle to fight corruption has been going on since the day we assumed office. A historic decision was taken on 8th November.

#A The strength of 125 crore Indians will bring about change in this nation.

#A Country will change and prosper. Country will proudly stand in front of the world.

#A Even after 70 years of independence, 18000 villages were forced to live in the 18th century.

#A Development should be sustainable, and should offer opportunity to the poor to empower themselves.

#A Development is the solution to all problems, it is the way ahead.

#A Performing the Jan Pujan of Shiv Smarak was very special. Glad I got the opportunity.

#A Every part of India has so much to offer. There are so many possibilities for tourism.

#A His courage was known but there are so many more aspects of Shivaji Maharaj we must know about. Look at his policies on water, finance.

#A Yes, Mahatma Gandhi fought the British but at the same time he fought for equality in our society.

#A Shivaji Maharaj was a multifaceted personality. So many aspects of his personality inspire us.

#A Even in the midst of struggle, Shivaji Maharaj remained a torchbearer of good governance.

# You can imagine how happy I am feeling today.

# I still recall my visit to Raigad, after I was declared the Prime Ministerial candidate by my party.



4:45pm

# PM Narendra Modi starts speaking at the foundation stone ceremony for various development projects in Mumbai.



4:35pm

PM Narendra Modi lays foundation stone for two metro corridors and other projects at the MMRDA Grounds

Mumbai: PM Narendra Modi lays foundation stone for two metro corridors and other projects at the MMRDA Grounds pic.twitter.com/uMFatINoCJ a ANI (@ANI_news) December 24, 2016

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3:40pm

Prime Minister Narendra Modi pays floral tribute to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj statue at the MMRDA ground



3:00pm

Mumbai: PM Narendra Modi at the Jal Pujan for Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial; poses with the onboard crew. pic.twitter.com/ixgMpZYxzW a ANI (@ANI_news) December 24, 2016

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#WATCH PM Narendra Modi onboard a hovercraft performs Jal Pujan for Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial in Mumbai pic.twitter.com/debHkcLRgE a ANI (@ANI_news) December 24, 2016

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The statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the middle of Arabian Sea pic.twitter.com/j6mk8s5yMH a ANI (@ANI_news) December 24, 2016

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PM Narendra Modi performs Jal Pujan for Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial in Mumbai pic.twitter.com/bmOrtkzC15 a ANI (@ANI_news) December 24, 2016

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PM Narendra Modi onboard a ship, will perform Jal Pujan for Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial in Mumbai pic.twitter.com/qjHXN13QVv a ANI (@ANI_news) December 24, 2016

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PM Narendra Modi onboard a ship, will perform Jal Pujan for Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial in Mumbai pic.twitter.com/qjHXN13QVv a ANI (@ANI_news) December 24, 2016

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Earlier on the day, Modi landed in the metropolis at 11.30 AM and left for MIDC Patalganga in neighbouring Raigad district where he inaugurated the newly-built campus of the National Institute of Securities Management.

The PM then reached Raj Bhavan and later moved towards Girgaum Chowpatty for the Shivaji Memorial event.



He proceeded to the site in the Arabian Sea off Mumbai coast, where the state government was planning to build a mega memorial for Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

The Prime Minister's visit assumes political significance as the high-stake elections to Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) are just a few months away.

The main feature of the Shivaji memorial, slated to cost Rs 3,600 crore, will be a 192-metre-tall statue of the iconic Maratha king. The site is a rocky outcrop, roughly 1.5 km from the Raj Bhavan shore.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis recently said the 'Shiv Smarak' will not only be the tallest memorial in the country, but in the entire world. He had thanked Modi for "making it possible."

The PM will then leave for Pune, where he will lay the foundation stone of the Pune Metro Rail project at the Agriculture College ground there. NCP leader Sharad Pawar will share the stage with Modi at this event.

The memorial project has been facing stiff opposition from fisherfolk and environmentalists, who have alleged that it would affect marine life and ecology of the Arabian Sea.





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The number of Vietnamese using ride-haling services has increased rapidly in recent years, signalling the potential for the development of the sharing economy in the country.

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According to the e-Commerce White Book which the Ministry of Industry and Trade published recently, the percentage of surveyed participants booking a ride via ride-haling platforms on their mobile devices rose to 83 per cent in 2019 from 45 per cent a year ago.

Respondents said that ride-haling services were fast, convenient and safe as drivers information was clear while there were a lot of promotions which made the fees reasonable.

The survey also found that a majority of Vietnamese had demand for participating in sharing economy business models.

Statistics showed 69 per cent had demand for sharing or leasing their idle assets, up from 56 per cent in 2018. In addition, 55 per cent had demand for using or borrowing idle assets.

The percentage of respondents who said that did not know about sharing economy models fell from 20 per cent in 2018 to 11 per cent for those having demand for leasing and 18 per cent for those having demand for borrowing underused assets.

The book also highlighted the rapid development of e-commerce in Vietnam.

The countrys business-to-consumer e-commerce revenue rose by 25 percent to US$10.08 billion in 2019.

The number of online shoppers grew about 1.12 per cent year-on-year to 44.8 million people last year from 39.9 million people in the previous year. Average spending for online shopping was $225 per person, $23 higher than in 2018.



Head of the ministrys e-Commerce and Digital Economy Agency Dang Hoang Hai said 2019 saw a big change of Vietnams e-commerce sector when the country was implementing the governments master plan for e-commerce development between 2016 and 2020.



He noted that e-commerce had smoothed the way for the flow of goods and services and supported firms, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises, in seeking business opportunities in the era of international integration and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.



The book provides readers with an overall picture of Vietnams e-commerce industry from legal environment, logistics infrastructure, payment to use of e-commerce among businesses, exporters and people.



Vietnam has set a target that the e-commerce industry would grow by 25 per cent per year to $35 billion with more than half of the population shopping online by the end of 2025.



According to the e-Commerce White Book 2019, e-commerce revenue jumped 30 per cent from $6.2 billion in 2017 to $8.06 billion in 2018.



The size of the local e-commerce market was expected to reach $13 billion this year.



The e-Conomy SEA 2019 report by Google and Temasek predicted that e-commerce in Vietnam would expand 43 per cent per year in the 2015-25 period, making it the fastest growing e-commerce market in the region.



Vietnam is now the second fastest growing e-commerce market in Southeast Asia, after Indonesia. VNS

E-commerce top players shrink to three The e-commerce market is expected to witness competition between Tiki-Sendo, Shopee and Lazada, after Tiki and Sendo join under the same roof, slated for this year.
Last year, Navalny was rushed to a hospital from jail where he was serving a sentence on charges of violating protest regulations. His team also suspected poisoning then. Doctors said he had a severe allergic reaction and sent him back to detention the following day.
Jerry Falwell Jr. said he planned to resign Monday as president and chancellor of Liberty University only to backpedal on that decision several hours later after it had become public, according to a statement from the Christian university.

Falwell agreed to resign as its President and from its Board of Directors but following media reports about the resignation, withdrew it, the university said in a statement late Monday evening. The universitys board of trustees was scheduled to meet on Tuesday.

The uncertainty over the fate of Falwell, one of President Donald Trumps most prominent evangelical supporters, follows growing scrutiny of his private behavior, including allegations that he and his wife had engaged in an ongoing relationship with Giancarlo Granda, a former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.

Falwell has been on an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty University since earlier this month when he posted, then deleted a photo of himself with his pants unzipped and his arm around his wifes assistant.

Liberty University said in its statement on Monday that it had become clear that it would not be in the best interest of the University for him to return from leave and service as President. Following a meeting of the executive committee of the universitys board of trustees, Falwells expected departure soon became turbulent, according to the university.

After agreeing to resign immediately as President of Liberty University today, Falwell then instructed his attorneys to not tender the letter for immediate resignation, the university said.

Its not clear what step the university or its board may take next, though several news organizations reported that Falwell was in the final stages of negotiating his exit. The executive committee of Libertys board of trustees was set to meet again on Tuesday morning followed by a meeting of the full board.

But Falwells status remained confusing. Late on Monday, Falwell told The Wall Street Journal that he had indeed submitted his resignation.

Story continues

A Liberty University spokesperson earlier Monday responded affirmatively to a reporters text message seeking confirmation of whether Falwell was resigning.

I have not resigned," Falwell told POLITICO on a phone call earlier Monday evening. Asked how the news reports of him resigning had gotten out, he replied, "I dont know."

I have not resigned. I will be on indefinite leave," Falwell repeated.

News of Falwells apparent resignation Monday from the Virginia school followed reports that he and his wife had engaged in an ongoing relationship with Giancarlo Granda, a former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Granda publicly spoke out about his alleged affair with the Falwells, which began in 2012 and lasted through 2019, Granda told POLITICO.

I met Jerry and Becki Falwell as a 20-year-old working my way through college at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Becki and I developed an intimate relationship that went on from 2012 and through 2019 in which Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room, Granda, now 29, said in an email.

On Sunday, prior to a report in Reuters about the affair between Granda and the Falwells, Falwell released his own statement that claimed Granda had had an affair with Becki Falwell without his involvement. Granda denied that statement.

He enjoyed watching us in person and also remotely through video cameras. He also listened to our phone calls, Granda said.

Falwells departure would represent a tectonic shift for Liberty, which has been under the Falwell familys leadership since it was founded in 1971. Falwell Jr. has led the university since his father, Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., died in 2007. During that time, the university expanded to enroll more than 100,000 students a year, many of them online, making Liberty one of the countrys biggest online universities. Liberty also embarked on a $500 million campus renovation, and its endowment grew to $1.6 billion.

In August, Falwell came under scrutiny after he posted, then removed, a photo of himself vacationing on a yacht with his pants unzipped and his arm around his wifes assistant, sparking anger among members of the conservative Liberty community about Falwells behavior.

After he posted the yacht photo, taken during a vacation in Key West, a chorus of critics emerged calling for Falwell to step down. Among those who were critical of the photo were House Republican Conference Chair Mark Walker (R-N.C.), a former Liberty University instructor who said in a tweet that Jerry Falwell Jrs ongoing behavior is appalling, and that the universitys faculty and students deserve better.

Falwell apologized for the photo, saying it was just in good fun and that he had told his family that Im gonna try to be a good boy from here on out. But within a week, the board of trustees took action and placed Falwell on indefinite leave from the university.

FILE - In this March 24 , 2020, file photo, a sign marks the entrance to Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. The university, led by Jerry Falwell Jr., is pushing for criminal trespassing charges to be lodged against two journalists who pursued stories about why the evangelical college has remained partially open during the coronavirus outbreak. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

Last week, a group of 50 pastors who are also Liberty alumni wrote a letter to the universitys board, shared with the outlet CBN News, that called for Falwells permanent removal and said his behavior has embarrassed the many alumni that work hard in our community to not only uphold the reputation of the university but to uphold a positive witness for the name of Christ."

The yacht incident was not the first time Falwells public behavior was deemed to be out of step with the conservative Christian values espoused by Liberty.

In 2019, POLITICO reported on Falwell and family members visiting a nightclub in Miami Beach in 2014, in some cases apparently holding drinks in their hands. Liberty students are discouraged from both co-ed dancing and drinking, which can lead to expulsion.

Earlier this summer, Falwell apologized after tweeting a photo of a face mask decorated with a photo of a person in a Ku Klux Klan mask and a person in blackface. (The photo was meant to jab at Virginia Gov. Ralph Northams history of wearing blackface.)

Some members of Libertys board were also disturbed by Falwells oversight of university funds, sources told POLITICO. That includes Falwells repeated trips on a yacht belonging to NASCAR owner Rick Hendrick, who owns a racing team that Liberty University spends roughly $6 million a year to sponsor, POLITICO reported. (Use of the yacht was not part of the contract between Liberty and Hendricks company, Hendrick Motorsports, a Hendrick Motorsports representative said.)

On Sunday, Falwell said that Granda, the former pool attendant, had become increasingly angry and aggressive toward him and Becki over the years.

He began threatening to publicly reveal this secret relationship with Becki and to deliberately embarrass my wife, family and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies, Falwell said.

Granda said in an email to POLITICO that he was coming forward for a variety of reasons, including some resentment over the amounts paid to acquaintances of his by the Falwells to settle a lawsuit relating to their hostel in Miami, and yes, boiling frustration over the Falwells refusal to purchase my 24.9 percent equity stake in the hostel.


Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  President Rodrigo Duterte will again address the nation in a taped speech to be aired at 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning from Davao City and discuss how COVID-19 funds have been spent, his spokesman said.

Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said the Presidents meeting with the members of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases is still ongoing as of 10:59 p.m. Monday night, the reason why they moved the airing of his weekly address to Tuesday.

Roque and other Cabinet officials have flown to the President's bailiwick in Mindanao via a C130 plane that left Villamor Air Base in Pasay to Davao around 2 p.m on Monday.

"Maga-address po ang ating Presidente. Isa po sa hiningi ng Presidente ngayon para sa talumpati niya ay 'yung report sa lahat ng ahensya ng gobyerno kung paano po nagastos ang mga COVID-related expenses. Ire-report po 'yan ng ating Presidente," Roque said during his noontime press briefing in Malacanang.

[Translation: The President will have a public address. One of the things he asked for his speech is the report from all government agencies on how they disbursed COVID-related expenses. He will report that.]

Malacanang is anticipating the ratification of the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act, a 165.5-billion stimulus program meant to revive the local economy after months of lockdown. The unified version has already been accepted by the Senate last week, and is expected to be ratified by the House of Representatives today, which would allow Duterte to sign the bill into law.

Bayanihan 2 seeks to provide cash assistance and easy loans to small businesses hit by the pandemic the hardest. Roque added that the funds under the proposed law will also boost testing efforts under a 10-billion standby fund, which will also support the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines once ready.

The country has tested 2.15 million individuals as of August 23. The Department of Health said actual tests are now averaging 30,000 daily.

The government has so far spent 376.6 billion for coronavirus response measures, funded by available cash as well as loans from local and foreign sources. Of this, some 200 billion was spent on cash aid to the country's poorest families, the second tranche of which is yet to be completed.

"Humihingi po kami ng abiso kung nagkaroon po ng inconvenience doon sa mga makakatanggap... Hindi naman kinakailangang mag-unahan para kunin 'yung kanilang mga pera sa mga FSPs (financial services provider), hindi po mawawala 'yun," Roque said, adding that some 14.1 million families are expected to receive the second wave of aid worth 5,000 to 8,000.

This is lower than the original 18 million target, which Roque said could not be hit because of double entries from the original list as well as a lower than expected beneficiaries endorsed by local government units.

"Kung hindi man po maibibigay 'yan babalik po 'yan sa national coffers at gagamitin natin sa Bayanihan 2, [If we cannot distribute that, then the money will go back to national coffers and can be used for Bayanihan 2]" Roque said, adding that the Department of Social Welfare and Development can also use the remaining cash to provide aid to other poor families. The funds were meant to cover basic needs during the March to May lockdown of Luzon.

Despite delays, he gave DSWD a passing grade in terms of cash aid releases.

The government also launched the Philippine Humanitarian Assistance Registry (PHAR) website on Monday, which details donations received for the local coronavirus response. The website lists the type of donations received, the donor, value, and the status of the items provided to government agencies for use or distribution.

Roque has repeatedly denied rumors that the President is sick following rumors online about Duterte being airlifted for a medical emergency to Singapore.

RELATED: Healthy Duterte 'amused' by rumors that he's sick  Roque

Duterte last made a public appearance a week ago when he announced the relaxation of quarantine rules for Metro Manila, Bulacan, Rizal, Laguna, and Cavite, which are now under general community quarantine after a two-week lockdown. Roque apologized for describing the President as under "perpetual isolation," saying it was poor choice of words and that he only meant that the Presidential Security Group has been making sure that no outsider gets near him to limit chances of COVID-19 infection.
WESTPORT  First Selectman Jim Marpe has filed a motion for participant status on behalf of the town for the public hearing on Eversources response to Tropical Storm Isaias.

Marpe has also provided testimony to the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority for its public hearing on Eversources rate increase.

While separate topics, both PURA hearings are expected to include discussion on Eversources response to the storm  particularly in Westport, a town news release said.

Eversource must make adjustments to their rate increase calculations to accurately reflect the greater-than-normal electricity demands experienced this calendar year, Marpe wrote in his testimony. It would be unfortunate and irresponsible to Evesource to over-collect revenues during this time of financial hardship and fragile public health.

Marpe said more public transparency was also needed in the process. He said based on Eversources pre-COVID proposal, energy usage was less than projected.

What this says to me is that there is no financial incentive for Eversource to supply energy or promote energy demand, he said. They will generate their revenue regardless.

Marpe said any rate increase PURA allows should directly correlate to improved customer service and a more reliable supply of energy.

Only then will Eversource be beholden to the public it serves, he said.

The first PURA hearing took place Monday; the second hearing is not yet scheduled.

Testimony for the storms response hearing is forthcoming and will detail our towns specific experiences with Eversource during Tropical Storm Isaias, the news release said.

dj.simmons@hearstmediact.com
The comment comes in a response to the Belarusian diplomats' statement on the lack of support on the part of other countries.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine has recommended that their Belarusian counterparts listen to public opinion and not reject friendly advice.

"We understand the emotional overload of our counterparts with the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, but we recommend you not reject valuable friendly advice," MFA speaker Kateryna Zelenko said in response to an earlier statement by the press secretary of the Belarusian diplomacy.

Read alsoBelarus protests: defense minister warns of army use, Lukashenko shows resolve in propaganda video"The experience of the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity teaches precisely that a failure to listen to the opinion of society and friends' advice, while paving a way forward with batons is the path leading nowhere," the official said.

Zelenko also stressed that Belarus is a neighboring state, with which Ukraine has always strived for friendly relations, and wished it to adequately pass all tests it is facing, to strengthen its independence and democracy.

Zelensky's advice and Belarus' response

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an interview with Euronews suggested that Belarus hold a revote in presidential elections.

In an emotional response, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said the Ukrainian authorities should focus on internal issues rather than offer advice to neighbors.
Chinas banking regulator pledged its backing for Hong Kong as a finance hub and reiterated a commitment to opening up the Chinese financial sector amid a deepening standoff with the U.S.

China will provide support for its financial institutions doing business in Hong Kong while complying with regulations and offering services to residents and companies, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said in a statement on its website on Saturday.

Tensions between the U.S. and China over Hong Kong has sparked tit-for-tat sanctions on politicians and officials on both sides that have left global banking institutions walking a tightrope between the two world powers.

A new national security law has fueled concerns about the state of Hong Kongs autonomy from China, including freedoms of the press and the independence of its judicial system. Both have helped underpin Hong Kongs reputation as a global financial hub. The U.S. has also ended preferential trading treatment for the city, which President Donald Trump and his team say was now essentially just another Chinese city.

At present, Hong Kongs financial market is generally operating smoothly and the linked exchange rate system has a solid foundation, which also reflects the confidence of the international market in Hong Kong, the CBIRC said. Hong Kongs status as an international financial center will not be weakened and shaken, but it will become more prosperous and stable in the future.

Bankers and their lawyers from Hong Kong to Washington have been poring over the fine-print to reconcile how they can dodge major consequences from being squeezed between U.S. and Chinese laws. Running afoul of the legislations put companies at risk of fines or losing their license to do business.

What Are the New Laws China Has Passed for Hong Kong?: QuickTake

The CBIRC also said more foreign financial institutions are expected to join or expand in the Chinese market, and are doing their due diligence before entering. Some have submitted preliminary applications to open a unit, it said.

It is expected that more foreign institutions will participate in Chinas financial market in the coming period and become a viable force for the high-quality development of Chinas financial industry, the CBIRC said.

China has approved several applications this year for ventures by foreign financial companies. BlackRock Inc., Singapores Temasek Holdings Pte. and China Construction Bank Corp. received the go-ahead to jointly build an asset-management business. Chubb Limited increased its stake in Huatai Insurance Group, becoming its largest shareholder, while Korean Reinsurance Co. started its China reinsurance branch.

Separately, the CBIRC said the non-performing ratio of loans to small businesses is getting close to the original level that regulators had planned to tolerate, though it is still at a controllable level. China had 13.7 trillion yuan ($2 trillion) of small and micro loans as of the end of June, up 28.4% from a year earlier. Their bad-loan ratio stood at 2.99%, according to the statement.

The banking industry plans to dispose of 3.4 trillion yuan of non-performing assets this year, or 1.1 trillion yuan more than last year to strengthen their balance sheet.

Considering that the coronavirus epidemic is a disaster of the century, and in order for the economy to completely return to normal, more financial contributions are still needed, it said. Ensuring enterprises and stabilizing employment means protecting banks and stabilizing finance. Therefore, the recent increase in the cost of financial risks is both normal and necessary.

China has also introduced a mechanism that will monitor housing property financing, the Peoples Bank of China said in a statement on Sunday after a forum attended by regulators and real estate developers last week. Homes should not be used as speculative investments, and it remains important that land and housing prices are stable, it said.

The forum also studied ways to improve the financial support policy for the leasing market, and called for the speeding up of the formation of a housing system that attaches equal importance to rentals and purchases.

Photo: Buildings are seen from Victoria Peak at dusk in Hong Kong, China, on Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2019. Photographer: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Legislation USA China
A submerged pipeline in the port of Corpus Christi, Texas, exploded and caught fire Friday morning after it was struck by a dredging ship. The explosion killed two crewmen, injured six who required hospitalization and left two crewmen still missing. At least three of the hospitalized crew suffered severe burns, having to be airlifted to a burn unit in San Antonio, Texas.

The Coast Guard suspended its search and rescue mission for the two crewmen who are still missing on Sunday. Capt. Edward Gaynor, the commander of the Coast Guard Sector/Air Station Corpus Christi told the media, Our Coast Guard crews worked intently alongside state and local partners to locate the two crew members who remained missing, but unfortunately, we were unable to locate them.

After the vessel broke up and sank, around 6,000 gallons of diesel leached into the port, which the Texas General Land Office is trying to contain and remove, and the waterways are set to be tested by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The cause of the collision remains under investigation.

Port of Corpus Christi pipeline explosion (Credit: US Coast Guard)

The dredging ship, the Waymon L. Boyd, which had an operating crew of 19, now sits in the bottom of the port after breaking up and sinking following the extinguishing of a second fire later Friday night. It is owned by the Orion Marine Group, which is based in Houston, Texas and is a division of Orion Group Holdings.

Orion Marine Group was awarded contracts earlier this year to dredge the Corpus Christi ship channel for the US Army Corps of Engineers and to dredge a marine terminal facility for a private client, worth over $17 million combined. The work that the crew of the Waymon L. Boyd was performing was part of one or both of those contracts.

The Port of Corpus Christi, finished in 1926, was the fifth largest US port by total tonnage handled in 2018, and one of the leading ports for the moving of crude oil, ranking second in the nation for crude oil exports with the vast majority of its imports and exports being crude. It plays a key role in moving crude from the Permian Basin and the Gulf of Mexico, accounting for around $20 billion in economic activity.

Combined with associated economic activity, the port accounts for around 35 percent of the jobs in the Corpus Christi metro area. In addition to its important role in oil production, the port also serves as an important logistics hub for US imperialism.

As the Port boasted on its website on August 13:

The Port of Corpus Christi continued its support this week for American military readiness, working directly with the U.S. Army in the movement of over 2,500 pieces of cargo. The operation supported the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division... A federally designated strategic military port, the Port of Corpus Christi moves thousands of pieces of DoD cargo annually in support of U.S. military operations and those of the Nations Allies around the world. This weeks operations included six vessels, nearly 200 commercial trucks and more than 600 railcars for unit transport to Fort Hood. Working to ensure our military is in a perpetual state of readiness is a mission the Port of Corpus Christi constantly strives to fulfill, said Charles W. Zahn, Port of Corpus Christi Commission Chairman.

In line with its strategic importance to US imperialism, the port is receiving upgrades to increase the potential volume of military cargo at a time of massive austerity for the working class.

The Channel Improvement Project for the Port, which is set to widen and deepen several channels, was included in the US Army Corps of Engineers Work Plan. The Strategic Plan 2023 from the Ports web page states: When complete, the deeper, wider Corpus Christi Ship Channel will be the deepest on the Gulf Coast at 54 [up from 47] and will afford enhanced operational efficiency and safety.

The port has also been targeted for funding from the White House, with over $100 million included in the 2021 Presidents Budget for the Channel Improvement Project, marking the third year in a row that the port has been included in Trumps proposed budget.
The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) says about 17,440 private and public basic schools have so far been captured to benefit from the one hot meal directed by President Akufo-Addo for all final-year junior high school (JHS) students and their teachers for a 20-day period.



President Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo during his 15th national address on measures taken against the spread of COVID-19, directed the Gender Ministry to provide the meals as they write this year's Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).



The Minister of MoGCSP, Mrs Cynthia Mamle Morrison, in an interview with Accra based radio station, Peace FM, said all was set for the distribution, stating that the first meal; "jollof" rice and an egg, would be served across the country.



She said their monitoring team, representatives of the Ministry and zonal coordinators were all at post monitoring the distribution.



All caterers in the existing school feeding schools have taken their position across the country. The non-school feeding schools would be captured so far as there are form three students, she said.



She said they were working in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Health and Finance, adding that the meals are being funded from the Ministrys feeding programme budget for the year.



One hot meal



Mrs. Morrision gave the assurance that they would be consistent in providing eggs daily, noting that local poultry farmers within the various districts and localities, particularly those in Brong Ahafo and the Ashanti regions farmers have agreed to supply eggs for the programme.



She noted that she would be on the ground, together with the Chief of Staff at the Presidency, Mrs Akosua Frema Osei Opare to get the actual number of all students that would be served the meals.



Some few challenges we have is that some of the schools have their own feeding programme; some parents have also already paid for the childrens feeding, so in cases like that we do not add them to our list, she noted.



In view of the meals to be served, she said "there would be a variety of meals on the menu including, Banku, Beans, Tuo Zaafi, Yam, Waakye among other local foods. This is to allow the caterers to cook meals with ingredients that are readily available in their region.



She assured the public particularly parents that the meals to be served would be of good quality, noting also that local products would be purchased from local farmers.



I have been assured that there would be enough Veronica buckets, soap and adequate water would be available at the schools to ensure proper handwashing, she added.

Source: Graphic.com.gh









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The first picture of a man who was fatally stabbed by thugs armed with swords and machetes in south London has been released by police.

Salem Koudou died from stab wounds only four days before his 21st birthday following a confrontation after a car overturned in Brixton.

Police had been called at 5.55pm on Thursday August 20 after reports of a fight on the Angell Town estate in Brixton.

Salem was found with stab wounds and was taken to hospital but died at 8.53pm.

Police have released the first picture of Salem Koudou who was fatally stabbed by thugs wielding swords and machetes in Brixton on August 22, just four days before his 21st birthday

Detective Chief Inspector Richard Vandenbergh, who is leading the murder inquiry, said: 'Today [24 August], should have been Salem's birthday, but instead of celebrating, his family are suffering the pain and anguish of his loss.

'We need to understand the chain of events that led to this young man losing his life, and for that we need the public's help.

'A post-mortem examination took place at Greenwich Mortuary on Saturday and gave the cause of death as multiple stab wounds.

'An overturned car was found in nearby Marcella Road and is being linked to this incident.

'At this stage it is believed it may have collided with another car before overturning; there were no reports of any injuries directly as a result of this collision.'

The overturned car is sealed off by police tape in Brixton (pictured on August 21). It is being treated as linked to the stabbing of Salem Koudou by police

Witnesses claim to have seen Salem being chased through the streets of Brixton just before 6pm on August 22 before he was fatally stabbed.

Margarida Lopes, 50, said she had seen the victim running through the corridors of her building during the incident.

She said: 'They really jump across the balconies here, from above and over the brick walls. They used to do that some years ago.

'The thing that shocked me was that he was completely naked and nobody was thinking about his dignity.

'He asked for a blanket twice and nobody was doing anything.

'I was about to say something and offer my first aid to support them but the tape was up and everyone was on the balcony looking down.

'I don't know why he was naked but I felt that was very wrong.

Police had been called at 5.55pm on Thursday August 20 after reports of a fight on the Angell Town estate in Brixton (file picture)

'It took a good hour before they took him away so I don't know if he was severely injured and they were trying to stabilise him before taking him away on the stretcher.

'The tops of his legs were bandaged and he had a wound at the top of his chest towards his shoulder.'

Police, the London Ambulance Service and Londons Air Ambulance all attended the scene.

Police said that a 26-year-old man with stab injuries was found near the scene and was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder but has since been released and remains in hospital but his injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.

A 19-year-old man has since been arrested on suspicion of murder and GBH has been released on bail.

Detective Chief Inspector Richard Vandenbergh has urged any witnesses to come forward, especially those who may have video or dash cam footage.

Anyone with information should call 101 or tweet @MetCC and quote CAD 5998/20Aug.
By Lisandra Paraguassu

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro continued his attack on journalists during a public event on Monday, describing reporters as "wimps" and saying they have a heightened chance of dying of COVID-19 because they are not athletic.

The right-wing former army captain has long had a fractious relationship with the media, frequently singling out specific newspapers and journalists for his ire. His followers have also attacked journalists at rallies and other public events.

On Sunday, Bolsonaro told a reporter, "I want to punch you in the face," after the reporter asked about thousands of dollars that were transferred into a bank account of the president's wife by a former aide who is now the target of a corruption probe.

During the Monday event, titled "Defeating COVID-19," Bolsonaro described his own experience battling the virus in July, crediting his use of unproven drug hydroxychloroquine and his self-described history as an athlete for his mild symptoms. He has previously said he believed his athletic past made him immune to the worst of the coronavirus.

"That history of an athlete, the press feasted on it, but when (COVID-19) gets one of you wimps, your chance of surviving is quite a bit lower," Bolsonaro told reporters on Monday, using the Portuguese colloquial word 'bundao'.

"You only know how to do evil, to use a pen largely for evil. Your chance of surviving is quite a bit lower."

Earlier this month, local media reported that the aide, Fabricio Queiroz, deposited 72,000 reais ($12,900) in checks into Michelle Bolsonaro's account between 2011 and 2018.

Queiroz was an aide to now Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the president's eldest son, when he was a Rio de Janeiro state legislator. The former aide has been arrested in an investigation into bank deposits made at the time, amounting to 1.2 million reais.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu; Writing by Gram Slattery; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
The CBI is likely to summon Rhea Chakraborty on Monday in connection with death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput. According to India Today TV, the CBI might summon Rhea to record her statement. Besides, Sushant's friend Siddharth Pithani and cook Neeraj Singh will be questioned again by the investigative agency today. However, Rhea's lawyer Satish Maneshinde said that the actor and her family have not received any summons from the CBI till now.

Pithani, Neeraj as well as Deepesh Swanat were questioned by the CBI sleuths yesterday at the DRDO guest house.These three persons, who were present in the flat when Rajput (34) was found hanging in his room on June 14, were grilled for about five hours.

Later, the three of them were taken to Sushant's residence at Mont Blanc Apartments in suburban Bandra around 2.45 pm on Sunday.

After spending three hours at Rajput's flat, the central agency team left the place along with Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant. The trio was again taken to the DRDO guest house in the evening for interrogation.

A day earlier on August 22, the CBI team accompanied by Pithani, Neeraj, Sawant, and manager Samuel Miranda visited the late actor's house in Bandra to reconstruct the sequence of events before he was found dead.

The CBI took over Sushant's death case after the Supreme Court's order on August 19. The CBI began the probe from August 21 in this case. The CBI squad has tried to recreate the crime scene at the spot during the investigation.

Sushant was found hanging in his apartment on June 14. The Mumbai Police has declared his death a suicide and registered an Accidental Death Report.

Later, Sushant's father, KK Singh filed a police complaint in Patna, accusing Rhea Chakraborty and her family of abetting the actor's suicide and misappropriating his money. In his complaint, Singh alleged that Rhea and her family siphoned off Rs 15 crore from Sushant's bank account.

Also read: Sushant Singh Rajput death case: CBI to recreate death scene at late actor's Bandra flat

Also read: Sushant Singh Rajput death case: Locksmith who opened actor's bedroom door reveals what happened on June 14
A divided federal appeals court is refusing to overturn a jurys verdict that two state troopers didnt use excessive force when they bear-hugged a central Pennsylvania man to get him into an ambulance after he overdosed on insulin.

The decision by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit sinks Thomas A. Woods attempt to secure at least $150,000 in damages from Troopers Prestyn Showers and Timothy Wesesky over the September 2014 incident at Woods home in Port Matilda, Centre County.

Wood claimed in his lawsuit that the troopers, who responded to a 911 call, had grabbed him very roughly in order to stop him and then, when he persisted, they picked him up off of his feet and slammed him down so that his body hit the ground.

When he tried to stand up, one of the troopers responded by pushing their foot upon his neck allegedly standing on his neck, so to speak, in order to painfully pin him to the ground, Woods suit stated. Wood claimed his leg was broken during the incident.

The U.S. Middle District Court jury rejected his excessive force claims after a trial last September.

On appeal to the circuit court, Wood claimed his case didnt receive a fair trial because Middle District Judge Matthew W. Brann refused to allow one of his expert witnesses testify.

Brann excluded that testimony on grounds that it involved use of force policies of other organizations, such as the International Association of Chiefs of Police that did not apply to Showers and Wesesky, Judge Peter J. Phipps wrote in the circuit courts majority opinion denying Woods appeal. Also, that witness would have testified regarding a U.S. Supreme Court decision that set a framework for evaluating excessive force claims.

Phipps concluded that Brann was correct in barring the experts testimony regarding the Supreme Court decision because only a judge may instruct a jury regarding the law. The experts proposed testimony regarding other use of force policies also fell short because it would not have given details of the other organizations or how they formulated their policies, Phipps found.

Judge Marjorie O. Rendell filed a dissenting opinion. She argued that Woods expert should have been allowed to testify that the troopers ignored widely accepted police procedures by using physical force before attempting to de-escalate the situation.
A Wisconsin county again declared an emergency curfew after a night of protests over a video that showed police officers firing several shots at close range into a Black man's back Sunday night.

The curfew will be in effect from 8 p.m. Monday night until 7 a.m.Tuesday, according to the Kenosha Police Department. The Wisconsin National Guard headed to Kenosha on Monday, according to the Kenosha News.

The state Department of Justice is investigating after officers from the department responding to a domestic incident shortly after 5 p.m. were involved in a shooting, according to a news release.

The man who was shot, identified by Gov. Tony Evers as Jacob Blake, was airlifted to a Milwaukee hospital and was in serious condition as of early Monday, police said. Tyrone Muhammad, a member of the group Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change, said Blake's father told him Blake was out of surgery and expected to survive.

On Twitter, Evers said he and his wife hope for Blake's recovery.

"While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country," Evers wrote on Twitter.

A news conference scheduled to take place outside in Kenosha on Monday afternoon was moved to a city building as a safety measure, Mayor John Antaramian said.

Antaramian addressed protesters through a megaphone outside the building, promising that "we are going to make sure that justice is done for everyone." After brief remarks, he went inside.

The mayor abruptly ended this talk to enter the safety building. Lots of shoving ensued pic.twitter.com/nZBZ1bsJUP  elliot hughes (@elliothughes12) August 24, 2020

Police in riot gear pepper-sprayed the crowd; five or 10 people were hit, including photographers from The Associated Press and Getty Images. The crowd, including many members of the media, was not allowed inside.

Story continues

What happened before the shooting?

One of Blake's neighbors said that when he went to a store about 15 minutes before the shooting, Blake was barbecuing with his kids. When the neighbor returned, Blake was trying to break up a fight. Seven or eight police officers arrived. They wanted to talk with Blake, but he wasn't interested and started putting his kids in a vehicle to leave.

Two people who live in the Kenosha neighborhood Blake has called home for about two years said he has five children ranging in age from 3 to 7 and a fiancee.

Hed be out here with us right now. Its a bad dream. Im just waiting for him to come outside, said one of the neighbors, who didn't want his name used because he feared police retaliation.

What does the video show?

Graphic video circulating on social media shows Blake walking toward a car, followed by an officer who has a weapon drawn.

Blake opens the car door and reaches into the vehicle, and an officer tugs on his shirt. At least seven gunshots can be heard, followed by a car horn. Two officers can be seen in the video near the car; it is unclear what happened before the video was recorded.

KPD said "officers provided immediate aid" to the person who was shot. The video circulating online cuts away shortly after the shooting.

Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney who represents Blake's family and the family of George Floyd, a Black man who died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day, shared a video from the incident on Twitter. He said Blake was helping to deescalate a domestic situation, and his three sons were in the car.

"They saw a cop shoot their father," Crump tweeted. "They will be traumatized forever. We cannot let officers violate their duty to PROTECT us. Our kids deserve better!!"

Protests erupt overnight

The incident almost immediately set off unrest in the city about 40 miles south of Milwaukee, which continued early Monday morning.

About 100 people had reached the Kenosha County Public Safety Building by 10:15 p.m., chanting, "No justice, no peace." A line of police flanked the building and moved the crowd away from the building.

Unrest continues: Several fires burn in Kenosha after police officer shoots Black man

By late Sunday, multiple vehicles were set ablaze, and windows were smashed along city thoroughfares as crowds faced off with law enforcement. Officers in riot gear stood in lines, and SWAT vehicles remained on the streets to move people away from city buildings despite the declaration of an overnight curfew.

A city truck burns outside the county courthouse in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23 after a police officer fired several shots at close range into a man's back.

Police set off tear gas canisters, scattering the crowd.

At 11:15 p.m., a city dump truck that had been positioned to prevent traffic from heading toward the police department was engulfed in fire. Some people got close enough to take pictures until someone shouted that the gas tank could blow.

By midnight, the crowd had dwindled to a few hundred people who stood in the square next to the courthouse, watching dump trucks go up in flames. A big boom sounded when one of the tires blew up, dispersing the crowd.

Police deployed tear gas early Monday to disperse hundreds of people who took to the streets. The Kenosha County Courthouse and Administration Building were closed to the public Monday "due to damage sustained during last night's civil unrest," according to Kenosha County officials.

As of 9 a.m. Monday, garbage trucks blocked the entrance to streets outside the County Courthouse, and about 16 sheriffs deputies wearing helmets and holding shields stood outside the building.

Activists say more must be done: Has the nation made progress since George Floyd's death?

Onlookers came to witness the damage and take pictures. Others came with brooms and shovels to clean up the broken glass on the downtown streets. Spray-painted on the courthouse: They kill us because they fear us, honor the dead and Be water, spread fire.

The smell of natural gas was in the air, and firefighters were on scene investigating. Among the damaged buildings: the public library, the Dinosaur Discovery Museum, the Harborside Academy charter school, a law firm, the Postal Service building and the county register of deeds.

Howard Plain walked up to the courthouse, unsure whether it was open  he had a hearing set for the morning. Plain, a Kenosha resident of eight years, said he used to live in Chicago and didnt expect the violence in his city.

Plain said he watched the video of the shooting on Facebook and thought the officers could have deescalated the situation or used a stun gun instead of shooting Blake.

The police could have handled it better, he said.

Joe Biden and other prominent figures react to shooting

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called for an investigation into the incident and the dismantling of systemic racism.

"This calls for an immediate, full and transparent investigation, and the officers must be held accountable," Biden said in a statement. "These shots pierce the soul of our nation. Jill and I pray for Jacobs recovery and for his children."

Wisconsin's governor indicated he intends to take action over the shooting. After invoking the names of other Black people killed by police, Evers said, "We stand against excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites."

More: Prominent figures react to the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha

Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., tweeted late Sunday night, "We shouldnt have to see one more video of a Black human being brutalized and/or gunned down by police in a clear case of excessive or unwarranted force."

She said, "Anybody who doesnt believe we are beyond a state of emergency is choosing to lack empathy and awareness."

Jeffery Robinson, director of the American Civil Liberties Unions Trone Center for Justice and Equality, called the incident "yet another vicious act of police violence caught on camera" and urged elected officials to divert funds away from police departments.

Unfortunately, disgusting acts of police brutality like this will be commonplace so long as police continue to act as an occupying force in Black communities," Robinson said in a statement.

Yesterday in Wisconsin, a police officer shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, a father, 7 times in the back. I am deeply disturbed by the video capturing part of the incident. I urge civil & criminal authorities to pursue an immediate & thorough investigation of the shooting.  Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) August 24, 2020

What's being done?

In a statement early Monday, the Wisconsin Department of Justice said the officers involved in the shooting were placed on administrative leave. The state's Division of Criminal Investigation is heading an investigation into the shooting and seeks to "provide a report of the incident to the prosecutor within 30 days," according to a statement.

The statement provided by the state's DOJ does not identify the officers or indicate why they confronted Blake.

"DCI is leading this investigation and is assisted by Wisconsin State Patrol and Kenosha County Sheriffs Office," DOJ said its statement. " All involved law enforcement are fully cooperating with DCI during this investigation."

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said he will work closely with the district attorney's office throughout the case and hopes Blake will make a full recovery.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is vigorously and thoroughly investigating yesterdays officer-involved shooting in Kenosha," he said in a statement. "As with all investigations we conduct, we will unwaveringly pursue justice in this case."

Evers calls special session on reducing police violence

Evers called lawmakers into session to take action on a package of bills aimed at reducing police violence. The legislation would ban police chokeholds and no-knock search warrants and make it harder for overly aggressive officers to move from one job to another.

Evers proposed the nine bills in early June after Floyd's death, but he did not call a special session, and lawmakers did not debate them.

Among the bills is a measure that would make it easier for people to sue those who unnecessarily call the police in attempts to harass other people or get them to leave a place theyre allowed to be.

Another bill would require those seeking jobs in law enforcement to turn over their employment files from previous policing jobs. Thats meant to prevent officers with troubled histories from moving from one agency to another.

Another bill would require law enforcement agencies to have use-of-force standards that say their primary duty is to preserve life and allow the use of deadly force only as a last resort. The policies would require officers to use the least amount of force necessary to counteract a threat and would require officers to try to prevent their colleagues from using unreasonable levels of force.

Other bills would require all use-of-force policies to be available online and would require an annual report on all police encounters involving the use of force. Another bill would require officers to complete eight hours of training a year on deescalation techniques.

Evers wants the Department of Justice to hand out $1 million in grants to violence-prevention organizations.

Contributing: Jay Cannon, USA TODAY; Molly Beck, Gina Barton, Sophie Carson, Meg Jones and Elliot Hughes, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jacob Blake: Protests erupt after Black man shot by Wisconsin police
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Democratic presidential nominee Joe Bidens campaign is launching a new ad focusing on Republican President Donald Trumps call for a boycott of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., seizing on a ready-made political opportunity they feel can help the Democratic nominee flip the state as the Nov. 3 election approaches.

The Biden campaign has been laying the groundwork to dig in on the economy for weeks, but the Goodyear ad marks a shift to a more offensive strategy for the Democrats, who plan to focus on the economic turmoil in the state, including the presidents attacks against a century-old company. The 30-second spot will run in the Cleveland market next week, timed to coincide with the Republican National Convention where Trump will officially accept the nomination.

A company with a 122-year history in Akron, Ohio, thousands of American workers and competitors all over the world, and a sitting president who is spinning out of control would risk American jobs to try to save his own, the narrator says in the ad.

The ad will also run in the Fayetteville, N.C., market, the site of a Goodyear facility and a pivotal swing state in this years election.

The Goodyear issue started last Wednesday when Trump tweeted to his 85 million followers that they should not buy Goodyear products, apparently upset at the companys dress code that does not allow attire from political campaigns, including his trademark MAGA hats.

Dont buy GOODYEAR TIRES - They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less! (This is what the Radical Left Democrats do. Two can play the same game, and we have to start playing it now!), Trump tweeted.

The move befuddled political observers and enraged Democrats, union leaders and Akron city officials. Goodyear, the largest American tire manufacturer, employs 3,300 people in Ohio and is a cultural landmark for Akron, which is nicknamed Rubber City because of its long history of tire manufacturing.

Some Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine, said they disagreed with boycotting the company, though have declined to comment on if they thought it was appropriate for the president to use his platform to attempt to harm an Ohio-based company from the White House.

Goodyear has all the makings of a Goldilocks issue for the Biden campaign and Trumps detractors: a localized selling point on a national issue of significance to voters. It has already been the subject of a television spot by The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans, in Ohio.

Toni Webb, Bidens Ohio campaign director, said they have no intention of letting up on Goodyear either. Both Biden and Trump have jockeyed for the title as more supportive of American jobs, including dueling Made in America tours earlier in August.

The campaign views the current state of the economy as an opening to try and put Ohio in Bidens column for the presidential election. Trump won the state in 2016 by 8 percentage points, largely on an economic message denouncing trade deals. However, polling has consistently showed a toss-up race in 2020.

And the economy routinely sits atop voters list of most important issues. The country is currently gripped in a recession, with Ohio having lost 495,000 jobs  including nearly 43,000 manufacturing jobs  since the beginning of the year. Unemployment is improving from the 17.6% high in April, but remains elevated at 8.9%.

Part of that strategy will be laid out this week in a counter-programming effort on Tuesday for the Republican National Convention featuring Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Tim Ryan, both outspoken critics of Trump and his call for a Goodyear boycott. The two lawmakers plan to highlight what they view as Trumps broken promises to workers, including the closure of General Motors Lordstown assembly plant.

When Republicans gather this week, our campaign will be reminding them of exactly what theyre celebrating: Ohio continuing to shed manufacturing jobs and struggle due to Trumps mismanaged pandemic response, Webb said. Its more clear than ever that we need a president who will actually fight for workers, create millions of manufacturing and innovation jobs, and make the promise of made-in-America real. Thats Joe Biden  and thats a message were going to take directly to voters in every part of Ohio straight through November.

Democrats are hoping the issue provides a similar outcome to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romneys gaffe saying Jeep was moving all Ohio production to China, which was false. The claim dogged Romney through the campaign, with Democratic President Barack Obama carrying Ohio by 3 percentage points en route to re-election.
Rachelle Peterson of the New York-based National Association of Scholars said there has never been an innocent stage since the Confucius Institutes started in the U.S. about 15 years ago.

Its just that its metastasized  and we have realized its malignant, said Peterson, whose organization is generally conservative.

Now, she said, the Confucius Institute name has become a liability for American colleges. And so, some U.S.-based Confucius Institutes are rebranding themselves as tied to Chinas Ministry of Education Center for Language Exchange and Cooperation.

Others are just dropping the name Confucius Institute, she said. She said its not just the $100,000 and educational materials that have appealed to universities, but also sponsored trips and other lures.

Once the spigots open, additional funding starts flowing, she said. And for China, she said, the institutes provide a built-in surveillance mechanism.

Perlman said there is no question that the Chinese have become more politically aggressive. Both China and the U.S. have become more belligerent, he said.
Dr Alex George visits Where's Your Head At?, Bauer Media's campaign to ensure mental and physical health are given equal treatment, in May 2019. (Ian Lawrence X/Getty Images)

Love Islands Alex George is taking a break from social media for the sake of his mental health, following the death of his younger brother last month.

The NHS doctor is back working at Lewisham hospital, but has told followers he will be going offline to focus on family and friends.

Writing on Instagram, George said: I have decided to take a few weeks off social media. With everything thats happened its important for my mental health that I take some time offline.

Read more: Dr Alex George 'disappointed' by coronavirus antibodies test result

I am focusing on my family and friends as well as looking after myself.

Im also going to spend some time thinking and working on a few projects that are close to my heart. Without doubt A&E will continue to keep me busy too.

He ended the post: Thank you for your support and see you all in a few weeks. Stay safe and be kind to yourselves.

George announced the death of brother Llyr on social media last month.

Read more: Dani Dyer thanks friends for congratulating her on baby news

He shared his grief after the funeral earlier in August, writing: Yesterday I said goodbye to my little brother Llyr Except it wasnt goodbye. Llyr, your dream was to become a doctor, you will live that dream. Every patient I see, we will do it together, you and I.

Your favourite passion is cars, every time I am out driving, I know you will be there laughing and smiling with me. I love you so much Llyr, you are always with me, my boy.

He later thanked his 1.5 million followers for their support, saying: I just want to say thank you to all of you who have supported me. The kindness has been truly overwhelming. Please know it has helped me no end and continues to get me through each day. Thank you.

If you are in need of emotional support you can call the Samaritans 24-hour helpline on 116 123, email jo@samaritans.org, visit a Samaritans branch in person or go to the Samaritans website.
Prime Minister Ludovic Orban, chairman of the National Liberal Party (PNL), stated that the Liberals will discuss "individually" with all MPs on the topic of the censure motion in order to present their point of view, emphasizing that, politically, "we have nothing to discuss with PSD [Social Democratic Party]".

"We are in discussions, in negotiations with the formations, normally, with which we had understandings throughout the years and, also, individual negotiations with all MPs. (...) We are three months before the parliamentary elections, Romanians decide who will lead Romania. In this period the Government is involved in the fight against the epidemic (...), also we have to prepare the start of the school year, we are elaborating the Government's position regarding the partnership agreement with the EU regarding the 2021-2027 EU budget (...) Our objective is for this motion to not pass," said Ludovic Orban, on Monday, upon leaving the PNL headquarters.

He added: "To come and submit a motion of censure three months before the elections seems to me like a gesture lacking responsibility, a politician's gesture."

"I again warn PSD to not mock democracy, to not mock Romania and to stop the motion procedure until the decision of the Constitutional Court," Orban said.
TCN News

Jamiat Ulama-i-Hinds General Secretary Maulana Mahmood Madani responded to the Bombay High Courts verdict on Tablighi Jamaat by calling it a lesson for governments which disregard national interests and indulge in communal politics.

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The High Court in its final statement has quashed all the cases against a total of 29 foreign nationals who were booked under various provisions of IPC, Epidemic Diseases Act, Maharashtra Police Act, Disaster Management Act and Foreigners Act for allegedly violating their Tourist Visa conditions by attending the Tablighi Jamaat annual congregation at Nizamuddin in Delhi during early March. Madani said that the High Courts verdict is a clear mirror in which central and state governments can see their stained faces, as it has defeated the nefarious design of the communal forces and brought justice for justice-seekers.

Speaking on the continued humiliation, media trials and hate speech campaign against the Tablighi Jamaat, Madani has demanded that it is now high time for the concerned to repent about this action taken against the foreigners, and serve justice by taking some positive steps to repair the damage done done by months of social boycott of Tablighi Jamaat members all around the country. He demanded that repairs can only be done when the central and state government withdraw all cases registered against the Tablighi Jamaat members across the country while respective state authorities release those who have been incarcerated.

This verdict has a very important lesson especially for the UP Government which has treated these Tablighi foreigners very badly, he resonated. While referring to the Courts original statements, Madani recalled the old Indian saying Atithi Devo Bhava(Our guest is our God), and questioned whether the current central and state governments really acting as per our great tradition and culture. He continued that even now many are languishing in Allahabads Naini Jail, urging the governments on behalf of the Jamiat to release them and provide proper compensation for their mental and religious persecution.

Much like Jamiats stand against hate campaign, the Bombay High Courts decision has criticized the medias portrayal of foreign nationals who attended Tablighi Jamaat. It said that there was big propaganda in print media and electronic media against the foreigners who had come to Markaz Delhi and an attempt was made to create a picture that these foreigners were responsible for spreading COVID-19 virus in India. The Court recounted that there was virtually huge persecution against these foreigners, which got further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic situation.

The Court pronounced that we need to show more tolerance and we need to be more sensitive towards our guests particularly like the present petitioners. Madani repeated the statements where the High Court has acknowledged that the allegations made against foreign Tablighi Jamaat attendees show that instead of helping them we lodged them in jails holding them responsible for violation of travel documents and for spreading of the virus. He stated that the material produced on the record shows that even under the recently updated Manual of Visa, there is no restriction on foreigners for visiting religious places and attending normal religious activities like attending religious discourses.

Referring to anti-CAA-NRC mass protests all over the country, the High Court has said that most of the persons participating in the protest were Muslims as the CAA is a contention and discriminatory against Muslims. It also acknowledged that Muslims were taking part by holding Dharna at many places in India from at least prior to January 2020 as fear was created in the minds of those Muslims. Such fear in the public minds, the Court maintained, indirectly gave warning to Indian Muslims that action in any form and for anything can be taken against Muslims and therefore there is a smell of malice to the action taken against these foreigners and Muslim for their alleged activities.

Madani hailed the Courts final statement that current circumstances like malice are important consideration when relief is claimed of quashing of FIR leading the Bombay High Court to conclude that the state government acted under political compulsion and action against the foreign nationals can be inferred as malice.
August 24 : While Bollywood celebs have started resuming shooting post the coronavirus lockdown, filmmaker Shakun Batra has also decided to take his untitled film on the floors. Before the pandemic, he had planned to shoot the film in Sri Lanka in March, but now, according to reports, Batra has chosen Goa for the shoot location.

A Mid-Day report suggests that Deepika Padukone, Siddhant Chaturvedi and Ananya Panday were supposed to jet off to Sri Lanka in November as the travel restrictions would hopefully ease in phases over the next few months. But now, the report suggests that the actors and other crew members will leave for Goa next month.

Batra has planned a 25-day shoot schedule in Goa. While the pre-production work has already started to ensure all safety guidelines are followed, Deepika, Siddhant, and Ananya will fly down by the second week of September to kick start the shoot, it is reported. After the first leg of the shoot is over, Shakun and producer Karan Johar will decide if they can shoot the second leg of the shoot in Sri Lanka.

Shakun Batra has directed two films in the past, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu in 2012 and Kapoor & Sons in 2016, which were also produced by Karan Johar.
Three massive wildfires chewed through parched Northern California landscape Sunday as firefighters raced to dig breaks and make other preparations ahead of a frightening weather system. That system was packing high winds and more of the lightning that sparked the huge blazes and scores of other fires around the state, putting nearly a quarter-million people under evacuation orders and warnings.

At the CZU Lightning Complex fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, authorities said their effort was hindered by people who refused to heed evacuation orders and those who were using the chaos to steal. Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart said 100 officers were patrolling and anyone not authorized to be in an evacuation zone would be arrested.

Also read: In just a week, wildfires burn 1 million acres in California

What were hearing from the community is that theres a lot of looting going on, Hart said. He said eight people have been arrested or cited and theres going to be more. He and county District Attorney Jeff Rosell expressed anger at what Rosell called the absolutely soulless people who seek to victimize those already victimized by the fire. Among the victims was a fire commander who was robbed while helping coordinate efforts on Saturday.

Someone entered the commanders fire vehicle and stole personal items, including a wallet and drained his bank account, said Chief Mark Brunton, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

I cant imagine a bigger low-life, Hart said, promising to catch him and vowing the DA is going to hammer him. The Santa Cruz fire is one of the complexes, or groups of fires, burning on all sides of the San Francisco Bay Area. They were started by lightning strikes that were among 12,000 registered in the state in the past week.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning through Monday afternoon for the drought-stricken area, meaning extreme fire conditions including high temperatures, low humidity and wind gusts up to 65 mph (105 kph) that may result in dangerous and unpredictable fire behavior. In nearly a week, firefighters have gotten no more than the 17% containment for the LNU Lightning Complex fire in wine country north of San Francisco. Its been the most destructive blaze, accounting for five deaths and 845 destroyed homes and other buildings. It and a fire burning southeast of the Bay Area are among the five largest fires in state history, with both burning more than 500 square miles (1,295 square kilometers).

In Southern California, an 11-day-old blaze held steady at just under 50 square miles (106 square kilometers) near Lake Hughes in northern Los Angeles County mountains. Rough terrain, hot weather and the potential for thunderstorms with lightning strikes challenged firefighters.
Anthea Turner has admitted she held onto previous relationships because she was scared of being alone - but now feels like a 'more rounded human' after a five-year stint of being single.

The TV presenter, 60, was previously married to Grant Bovey for 13 years, but the couple split after he cheated on her with a woman half her age in 2013.

Her first marriage was to her manager, former DJ Peter Powell, in 1990, but the couple split up eight years later.

Anthea has since found love again with half-Italian business tycoon Mark Anderson, 55, with the couple getting engaged last year after a whirlwind two-month romance.

Anthea Turner has admitted she held onto previous relationships because she was scared of being alone - but now feels like a 'more rounded human' after five years of being single. Pictured with her new fiance Mark Anderson

Speaking to Platinum magazine, she said spending five years by herself before meeting her fiance made her more independent and better equipped to 'deal with things'.

She recalled a time when, shortly after her divorce from Grant, she was on her way to Gatwick Airport to drop off her car before flying to France when she 'burst into tears on the motorway'.

'I just felt so alone,' she admitted. 'Not long after, there was another incident where I felt it again. I blew a tyre on a roundabout at 12.30am so I pulled over and looked in horror at this tyre, thinking, "Normally I would have rung my husband, but I've got nobody to call".

'Growing up, my dad sorted things out like insurance and cars, then I always had what I would call "capable" boyfriends, including my first husband, Peter Powell. He was my manager, a fixer and a sorter.

Anthea was previously married to Grant Bovey (together left) for 13 years, but the couple split after he cheated on her with a woman half her age in 2013. Her first marriage was to her manager, former DJ Peter Powell, in 1990, pictured right, but the couple split up eight years later

'In a relationship, you naturally apportion jobs. It's not even a sexist thing, it's just what happens naturally, but a lot of us hold onto relationships that are not right simply because we live in fear of being on our own. That was me.'

She added: 'Nobody fought harder to save my marriage [than me], but be careful for what you wish. Theres a lovely phrase: "If the door doesnt open, its not your door". It wasnt right, it needed to end and now, standing back, Im really glad it did.'

Anthea said time is a great healer, and after five years during which she underwent hours of professional therapy and developed a 'deep spiritual understanding' of herself, she now feels much stronger.

'In the face of adversity you learn and grow and I'm now a more rounded human,' she explained.

Anthea said time is a great healer, and after five years during which she underwent hours of professional therapy and developed a 'deep spiritual understanding' of herself, she now feels much stronger

'Over those five years by myself I became massively independent and I'm far more comfortable with myself. I have an inner, visceral knowing that I can deal with things.'

Platinum magazine goes on sale on Wednesday

Anthea was introduced to Mark by her friend, fellow TV personality Lizzie Cundy. He proposed after two months during a romantic trip to Rome.

She told Platinum that Mark ticks every box, adding: 'We've had enough experiences in our lives to know instinctively when something is right, and what shone through with Mark was a sincerity and a kindness that hit me like a bolt.

'I love him for the fact he enjoyed doing it so much and also that he enjoyed doing it for me, for us. I've never been loved so much in all my life!'

The couple were forced to postpone their wedding plans due to the coronavirus pandemic. They had hoped to tie the knot in Milan - where Mark's family is from - next month.

Anthea told Hello! they've now decided on next year. She added: 'I am not even in any angst about it. When we do it, it will be small and cute, just with our close friends and family.'

Platinum magazine goes on sale on Wednesday (August 26).
Politics in the Pub Report  Perth

Against the fees hike for Arts and Humanities degrees

In the wake of the announcement on 19th June 2020, by Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan that the government would halve the fees of some STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses whilst doubling student fees for courses in the arts and humanities, the Communist Party of Australia WA Branch decided to hold a Politics in the Pub on the proposed fees hike.

Cardinal John Henry Newman in a famous series of lectures given in the 1850s, argued as part of the idea of the university itself, it should be about, teaching universal knowledge.

Federal Employment Minister Michaelia Cash was also part of this push to save the tertiary education sector which had been reeling from the loss of international students and suspension of on-campus classes as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The event was chaired by Party member, Seamus Carey.

The first speaker was Richard Hamilton, National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) Branch President and Senior Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame, who said the initiative by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison was an ideological attack appealing to the notion that the average Joe the Plumber cannot be expected to fund the arts and humanities, or expected to care about these fields.

However, for Hamilton, these fields and the aesthetic aspect of learning itself are fundamental to human social existence. Hamilton added that with the rapid pace of technological advancement and obsolescence, many courses that are currently on offer may not have jobs at the end for them. In the space of 20-30 years many computer programming positions, long touted as future-proof careers, have already become obsolete.

However, that is not the case for the arts and humanities. The Graduate Outcomes Survey funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment found total employment for graduates of humanities, culture and social sciences (i.e. Arts) courses in 2019 was 83.9 per cent while for science and mathematics it was 82.4 per cent.

It is not as simple as saying the argument about the value of education can be reduced to Arts and Humanities vs Science. Hamilton mentioned how the US Defence Department gives their scientists a whole lot of money and asks them to come back with something as opposed to operating under a grants system which is tied to a specific project or funding outcome being achieved.

The Chancellors of the major universities went cap in hand three times to the Federal government to ask for additional funding to keep universities going after the fallout from COVID-19 and three times the government said no.

The next speaker was Sam, a student activist studying teaching. Sam also suggested the move to double fees for arts and humanities courses was an ideological attack. Sam added that mathematics or science alone does not teach compassion or comprehensive critical reasoning and that we need both arts and STEM education. Sam said it was not only in Australia where right-wing conservative governments were attacking the arts and humanities education and cited the example of Brazil where the right-wing reactionary government of Jair Bolsonaro had cut thirty per cent of funding to all public universities and all funds to arts and humanities courses. However, this does not mean that there wont be those courses on offer  they will continue to be offered, but by universities funded by large right-wing religious institutions who support the ideological world view of the current government. Sam added that in many cases the public funding of STEM subjects has public universities doing the research for the private sector  such as mining companies  for free.

The next speaker was Dr Christopher Crouch, writer and former cultural studies academic who opened with a plea to encourage the mass education of populations around the world as it would give the masses knowledge and the opportunity to plan change.

Opposing greater access to the masses is capitalism which at its core seeks to reduce human relationships to economic relationships. By putting barriers on the accessibility by people to education, capitalism seeks to control the rate of social change  keeping people stuck in the exploitative systems they currently face. However social change happens constantly, even under capitalism.

The notion that studies in liberal arts and humanities was a good thing was taken up by the Catholic cardinal John Henry Newman who in a famous series of lectures given in the 1850s, argued as part of the idea of the university itself, it should be about, teaching universal knowledge. All branches of the human intellect should be taught to help students achieve, a real cultivation of the mind, rather than that which could be obtained from a narrow technical skill. The point of an education was to turn out students with the intellectual capability, to have a connected view or grasp of things.

At the time, continued Dr Crouch, bourgeois culture was revolutionary in its own way, challenging the role of the monarchy, church and industry. The profit of knowledge is that it enriches us all culturally and can effect change. There is then, a community benefit to us all having an education. The 20th Century Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin himself, rallied against economic-reductionist views. The ideal comrade  the tribune of the people  was one who was able to learn how to empower themself and to empower others. The university should be a tribune of the people likewise.

The chair of presentation, Seamus Carey, concluded by asserting, liberating peoples minds is as important a liberation as liberation from their material bonds. The forum was then opened up to a lively Q & A in which there were many contributions from the nearly thirty people who had turned up to the event, including a number of people who had enjoyed the benefits of an arts or humanities degree, and a few students currently embarking on such a course of study who were horrified not only at the financial burden the government is seeking to impose on them but also the consequences of the narrowing of the aims of society and democracy itself.

The Communist Party of Australia condemns the move by the Liberal government of Scott Morrison to significantly increase the cost of arts and humanities degrees while cutting the cost of STEM courses on the assumption that students who studied STEM courses would be more job ready than arts and humanities graduates  when their own data does not support that proposition. The CPA calls for the reintroduction of universal and free education from primary school to university.
The beaches in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach are closed. Road construction projects are temporarily halted. Flood advisories are out for low-lying coastal areas including Dauphin Islands West End Beach.

But aside from the typical precautionary actions taken ahead of tropical weather, this weeks unusual arrival of two storms into the Gulf of Mexico will have minimal effects on Alabama. In fact, the National Weather Service in Mobile reports that Tropical Storm Marco will bring more rain to coastal Alabama than the more powerful Laura, which is expected to develop into a powerful Category 2 or 3 hurricane this week as it heads toward the Louisiana-Texas coast.

You hate to see it go on someone else, said Mike Evans, deputy director with the Mobile County Emergency Management Agency. You are also thankful that thing isnt making a bee-line toward us.

According to the National Weather Service, Marco will bring heavy rain to Mobile and Baldwin counties into Tuesday, with 3-6 inches possible and up to 8 inches in some isolated areas. Wind gusts of 40 to 50 mph are expected along the coast, and high surf advisories in place along the western end of Dauphin Island where flooding often occurs during tropical storms.

With Laura, the effects of that storm will be to the south and west of us. We wont see nearly as much with that, said Don Shepherd, a meteorologist with the weather service.

Tropical Storm Marco much weaker as it nears Louisiana; Laura headed for the Gulf too

Getting the word out

Dauphin Island Mayor Jeff Collier said hes hopeful that Alabamas only barrier island will avoid an inundation of saltwater flooding from Tropical Storm Marco, which began falling apart on Monday and is no longer considered a hurricane threat for Louisiana.

Right now, were monitoring whats going on and taking the actions we can take, and we will keep our fingers crossed that we dont get anything too terrible, said Collier.

The beaches in Dauphin Island are not closed, but Collier said that the citys public works department has removed items from the West End Beach that might be vulnerable to storm surge. He said the city plans to have lighted message boards around town alerting residents about the potential for deadly rip currents.

We have a lot of people who come here for surfacing and we dont have a way to physically close (the West End Beach), Collier said. We close our operations. We get our equipment and things away from there. People like to go and watch the waves and that kind of stuff. Normally, the weather conditions will (naturally) close it for us.

He said the biggest concern is to make sure vacationers are aware of the dangers for storm surge, and that they move their vehicles from flood-prone areas. In July 2019, Tropical Storm Barry sent a surge of water and sand into Dauphin Island and images of a parked 2013 Dodge Charger stuck in the sand was circulated online and became a cautionary tale for people visiting the community.

Thats the last thing we want to see is someone, particularly down here on vacation, they might not be totally aware of whats happening, said Collier. We dont want people to have a bad experience like that. We try our best to get the word out to people so they can avoid those things.

Closed beaches

In Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, double reg flags were flying by Monday afternoon that closed the beaches from the public. The last time the double red flags were flown in the two popular Baldwin County cities was during the entire month of April, when Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey closed the beaches over concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.

Melvin Shepard, battalion chief of beach rescue with the Gulf Shores Department of Fire and Emergency Services, said the double red flags will likely fly through Thursday. He said the storms could produce waves as high as 5 to 8 feet and could bring debris onto the beaches.

Were going to give it until Thursday to make sure there is no debris floating, said Shepard.

With the double red flags flying, anyone caught entering the Gulf could be subject to arrest and a $500 fine.

The occupancy right now for this week is 40%, so we dont have a whole lot of people in town, said Shepard. But if people choose to come down here, we ask that they stay out of the water for their own safety.

Further to the west is the Fort Morgan peninsula, a thin finger of land stretching about 20 miles from Gulf Shores to the open mouth of Mobile Bay. There is no local government entity overseeing the unincorporated area that is filled with beach rental homes. Theres also no formal flag-warning system like Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, and no lifeguards stations are visible on the beaches.

The peninsula has been the site of tragic drownings over the years, as well as dozens of beach rescues annually.

Said Shepard, Were trying to work something out with the state that when the red flags are issued, the waters are closed (along the peninsula). Thats more long-term. Im sure that during this week, the Sheriff will have people down there on the beach.

Baldwin County Sheriff Huey Hoss Mack said his agency has increased patrols and are monitoring the surf and surge potential. Mack said he supports a flag warning system for the peninsula but added the question that needs to be resolved is who would be responsible for putting them out and retrieving them.

Elections to proceed

Shrimp trawlers and fishing boats were secured on the docks of Bayou La Batre, though Mayor Terry Downey isnt anticipating any serious disruptions from the storms aside from some street flooding. He said if need be, the citys community center can be transformed into a shelter. So far, there isnt a need for that.

The citys municipal elections will take place as previously scheduled, on Tuesday. Voters in cities throughout Mobile and Baldwin counties can cast ballots in competitive races for mayor and city council from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and there are no plans to postpone any of the contests.

Downey wont be on the ballot. Hes decided not to run for re-election.

Its about time for me to get a new hat and move on, said Downey.

He will serve as mayor until November and is hoping that a catastrophic storm doesnt occur before then. If one does occur, the city is prepared, he said.

We have a police officer working at the EMA offices, and have the National Guard available, said Downey. As the heat goes up, we turn it up. The heat is not up right now, praise the Lord.
Stanford GSB decides to start its autumn quarter For MBA students mostly online.

With Santa Clara county still on Californias COVID watch list, Stanford Universitys Graduate School of Business today (Aug. 24) announced that it would abandon plans for a hybrid start to the school year and begin the autumn quarter mostly online.

With just a couple of exceptions for a few outdoor class sessions, first-year and second-year MBA students will begin their studies completely online. The school will revisit its decision during the week of Sept. 21. If the county gets off the watch list, its possible Stanford could return to a hybrid combination of in-person and online classes on Sept. 28.

At least through the week of the 21st, there will be no indoor classes, says Paul Oyer, a senior associate dean. It means most of our classes will be online and that means pretty much all of them with a few exceptions where we can hold outdoor sessions. But that doesnt mean we are stuck online for the rest of the quarter. We need to be off the watch list for three consecutive days before we can hold indoor classes, and Santa Clara is making some progress. We can imagine that in a few weeks we can think about indoor classes.

POSITIVE COVID CASES IN SANTA CLARA COUNTY ARE NOW 4.0%, HALF THE STATE THRESHOLD OF 8%

Paul Oyer, senior associate dean for academic affairs

In California, counties are placed on a watch list based on six key metrics: Rates of new cases and tests performed, percentages of positive tests and hospitalizations, as well as available intensive care beds and ventilators. Positive tests in Santa Clara are now running at 4.0%, well below the states maximum threshold of 8%. Santa Clara was added to the list, taken off, then added back on July 12 due to increased hospitalization. A 10% or greater increase in COVID-19 hospitalized patients over the past three days determines whether a county is on the watch list.

Todays announcement follows a virtual town hall with students last week at which administrators said they would make a final decision on how classes would start on Aug. 24. It also follows decisions by many other business schools to largely abandon their plans to go hybrid. Thus far, Wharton, Georgetown, UC-Berkeleys Haas School of Business, and UNCs Kenan-Flagler Business School are among the business schools that have announced decisions to go fully online this fall.

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The uncertainty around it is so great that we wanted to make sure our faculty are preparing for online classes rather than be in a holding pattern, Oyer tells Poets&Quants. And we wanted to give students those assurances as well because if they were rushing to get back here for the quarantine, they now know they have a little more time.

I FEEL AWFUL THAT WE ARE GOING TO START WITHOUT IN-PERSON, INDOOR CLASSES

While the well-publicized outbreaks of coronavirus cases last week on the campuses of the University of North Carolina and Notre Dame did not impact Stanfords decision, they did influence how top GSB deans feel about the move. It made us feel pretty good about what we decided, says Oyer. I still feel awful that we are going to start without in-person, indoor classes. That is very disappointing for everyone. But I feel a lot better about doing what we are doing as a result of what has happened at other schools.

UNC decided to hold all of its courses remotely last week after reporting multiple clusters of positive COVID cases in on and off-campus housing. When officials made the announcement last Monday, 177 students were in isolation and 349 were in quarantine. As of Friday, the school reported 566 positive results out of the 3,583 students that have been tested. Notre Dame, meantime, put all in-person classes on hold for at least the next two weeks after what it described as a dramatic increase in positive COVID cases. As of today, Notre Dame has The total case count for the school now stands at 448 cases. 448 confirmed cases of COVID.

Those outbreaks, however, are largely confined to undergraduate populations. Programming for first-year MBAs at Stanford kicks off on Sept. 4, with Week Zero orientation activities that will be entirely virtual from Sept. 7 through Sept. 11. MBA1s then start the autumn quarter on Sept. 14th. Courses for second-year MBA students begin on Sept. 21st.

ONLY OUTDOOR CLASSES FOR SURE? A LEADERSHIP LAB & AN ETHICS COURSE FOR FIRST-YEAR MBAS

Brian Lowery, senior associate dean of academic affairs

For now, the only courses that Stanford will attempt to hold outdoors on its grounds are a weekly Leadership Lab for first-year students and a course on ethics. The leadership lab typically meets in six-person groups with a second-year MBA as a facilitator. The ethics course, which would also include online content, breaks students down to groups of 18 to 23 students in discussion groups which would be held outdoors.

There are not a lot of classes outdoors because we are limited by space and social distancing., adds Brian Lowery, another senior associate dean at GSB involved in the planning. There will only be small group classes outdoor, and leadership labs and ethics lend themselves to small group learning or small group components. There might be more outdoor sessions with the electives.

Lowery says, however, that Stanford is arranging for much more outside seating than is typical. Every place there can be extra outdoor seating, there will be outdoor seating.

WE ARE IN A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS AND HAVE A GREATER RESPONSIBILITY TO THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY

Still up in the air is what to do about the schools most iconic course known generally as touchy feely. The elective is taken by 95% of the students, most typically in the second year of the MBA program. A t-group component to the course, typically featuring groups of 12 students each with two facilitators, is a core element of the experience. Given privacy concerns over some of the more intimate conversations and interactions that are common during class sessions, it would be more difficult to hold those sessions outdoors. the course The course is going to happen, says Lowery. The question is about the particulars. Its unclear that it can work with face masks and social distancing. What we are trying to figure out is how to protect the concerns of the facilitators and still create a powerful experience for students.

Oyer acknowledges that students will be disappointed in the decision to largely start online. They should be disappointed, he says. We are disappointed. Students would love to spend more time in person and in person with us. But we are in a public health crisis and we have a greater responsibility to the entire community. Having said that, we have to balance that with mental health issues. We dont want our students sitting alone in their apartments doing nothing. So we are working very hard to create opportunities for them to interact with each other and the faculty.

We are trying to get office hours and help sessions in-person outdoors, he adds. Some faculty will not want to do that. We have faculty who have certain risk profiles that they are not going to spend time in person with any sized group. And we are respecting that. But we also are trying to enable student interactions in safe ways. That doesnt mean parties and it doesnt even mean sitting down and having meals together because there are country restrictions on that. But it does mean creating study places outdoors.

TO DIMINISH ZOOM FATIGUE, NO CLASSES WILL BE LONGER THAN 80 MINUTES LONG

Adds Lowery: Our attitude is we are going to do what is allowable within state, county and university guidelines. We are assuming they have the safety of the community in mind and they are the experts.

The school has made a few new changes as a result of preparing for classes during the pandemic. Classes via Zoom will be no longer than 80 minutes long. We were really worried about Zoom fatigue and we knew that no matter what happened people would be on Zoom for a fair amount this quarter so we standardized all our classes on 80 minutes. In the past, some classes were as long as 105 minutes. But the longer you keep people in class, you are having a negative impact on student attention in other classes.

The new time limit on all classes also allows for more time to disinfect classes between in-person sessions when they are again allowed and permits staggered start and stop times for classes to eliminate crowding in hallways. As a result, the number of credits required to graduate with an MBA from Stanford has been lowered to 94 from 98 credits.

STUDENTS ON CAMPUS WILL BE TESTED ONCE EVERY WEEK

For the first time ever at GSB, the school is also making available to returning second-year MBA students a new series called First Lectures, which aims to provide a high engagement experience between small groups of students and some of the schools most talented instructors. A First Lecture will span the length of one day with an instructor leading a group of 20 to 40 students in a series of activities. Students will have the opportunity to participate in up to four different First Lectures of the 22 already on offer that will be held in a Week Zero for MBA2s on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday in the week starting Sept. 14 (see below).

Stanford also announced its testing protocol. All students are required to be tested for COVID upon arrival on campus and then isolate during an interim period until they get their results. Then, throughout the quarter, students will be tested on a weekly basis, though students can access up to two tests per week. All the testing is free of charge and will be administered through Vaden Health Services, the student health center.

Lowery says there is still much in the air. It is fluid in large part because it is a community effort, he says. We are spending a lot of time talking to the students and being as responsive as we can. If we were dictating everything from on top, we could be more certain about it.

DONT MISS:Live Updates: The Covid-19 Impact On B-Schools or Inside Stanfords Efforts To Welcome MBA Students Back To Campus

The post Stanford GSB Will Now Start The Fall Quarter Mostly Online appeared first on Poets&Quants.
When the government takes over education, so does the ideology of the people in government. Parents across the country are making the move to pull their kids out of public schools. (Sidebar: Im going to call them government schools because public is a misnomer: I cant just walk into a classroom at a government school  Id be arrested.)

Why? We are supposed to have the best education system in the world by far. Partly, from the response to the pandemic- parents are either concerned for the safety of their kids or disgusted at the slow re-opening. But mostly in response to the errors that have been made in funding the schools and the ideology that has found its way into classrooms around the country. This social justice warrior learning material is meant to turn our kids into walking Marxists.

Often, well-meaning people push for more funding for government schools, saying that our schools are underfunded when in reality that is not the case. Lets take the Hamilton County schools as an example. We give them over one-third of our budget each year, with 1-2 percent planned increases per school/fiscal year. If we truly were to take that suggestion and raise the budget by 10-15 percent (thats just based on many views, not really on one specific suggestion) then that would not only eat up another large percentage of our budget, it would raise taxes for many people. Charter schools are simply a better, and as many Libertarians say  Taxation is Theft.

Recently, one of my friends, who lives in Southlake, Texas was telling me that a progressive group was trying to implement a microaggression policy whereby things such as facial expressions and body language could be interpreted as racist or homophobic and the student could be suspended. This is just one example of many such policies that come along that cause parents to become disgusted with their childs education and decide to either send them to private schools or homeschool them. Not only are data scores better, so is the experience.

But even discounting money, the data we have from the past 25 years shows that the more school funding increases we give, the lower test scores are. (Now granted, we shouldnt think of kids as test scores in general, but for the sake of argument, lets keep it that way for now.) Why? My theory is that as school budgets increase, so does expenses. Administrators say Oh, we have and extra $12 million this year, lets build a new playground! But really, the desks need replacing, supplies are low, and teachers are long overdue for a raise. The actual problems are overlooked, and people see the need for more funding, and they ask for an increase and so the vicious cycle repeats itself. The funding allocation has to be watched very carefully and then maybe we can think about decreasing the funding for government schools and phasing them out.

These are just some of the issues that I have with our current government school system. I believe that we need to do away with government schools altogether and replace them with charter schools and private schools or, in some cases, homeschooling. I was homeschooled for many years and saw the great effects that it had on me. Socially, I was ready for bigger and better things than my middle school colleagues. Physically, I was feeling the best ever and mentally, I was in the best place possible. Homeschooling is a great option for some, but charter schools also have been proven to be better for students. This is because the learning is more personalized and centered on understanding the concept instead of simply teaching to the test. So really, school choice is the best choice.

William Reynolds




This week is the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution giving women the right to vote. This victory was long fought for over 70 years and the women who fought for this right suffered mightily.

In 1917 suffragists protesting the lack of vote started carrying signs comparing President Wilson to the German Kaiser. President Wilson's patience ran out and police began arresting the protesters en masse. The women were convicted of offenses such as "obstructing sidewalk traffic," and "disorderly conduct." The convicted women were imprisoned in Lorton, Virginia, at the Occoquan Workhouse. With filthy and harsh conditions, the convicted women prisoners protested and were force fed as punishment after they went on a hunger strike.

The 19th Amendment was finally passed in 1920. Far from perfect, the amendment failed to fully enfranchise Black, Asian, Hispanic and Native American women. It was granted in name only, as state constitutional loopholes kept them from exercising that right.

Not until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, were these injustices wiped out, overcoming legal barriers on state and national level. This legislation is considered one of the most far reaching statutes of civil rights legislation in the U.S. and unfortunately has been gutted recently by the United States Supreme Court in the Shelby County vs. Holder, eroding the federal government's ability to enforce the law.

According to the National Geographic, "State legislatures-mainly those controlled by Republicans in states with increased minority turnout-have challenged the Voting Rights Act by passing a wave of new restrictions, including voter ID laws and reduced early voting.

In spite of all these efforts, the 2018 election marked the highest voter turnout seen in midterm elections since 1914. Women broke the records for the number of women running for for state and national offices, continuing to the 2019 midterm elections, and sent a record number of 90 new women to the House of Representatives gaining majority control.

Voting cannot be taken for granted and I am grateful for the early suffragists who would not play nice and back down.

JERI ROGERS

FOUNDER AND EDITOR

ARTEMIS JOURNAL

FLOYD
The New Valley governorate is the countrys biggest in terms of land mass and the smallest in terms of population

Egypt has drafted a plan to deliver natural gas for the first time to the New Valley governorate in the Western Desert, Petroleum Minister Tarek El-Molla said on Monday.

The announcement came following the signing of a cooperation protocol between New Valleys Governor Mohamed El-Zamaloot and the heads of Egypt's Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS) and TAQA Arabia to deliver compressed natural gas (CNG) to the governorate.

The gas deliveries will gradually replace gas cylinders, El-Molla said, adding that CNG is an optimal solution to supply natural gas to the governorate, which is the countrys biggest in terms of land mass and the smallest in terms of population.

The project will be implemented using CNG feeding technology where terminals will deliver gas to 14,000 homes in the governorates Al-Kharga city during the first phase, with other areas to follow later.

Egypt announced in 2018 that it had achieved self-sufficiency in natural gas after the increase in production at recently discovered gas fields.

The country is looking to become a regional hub for liquefied natural gas trade, especially with its major discoveries in recent years including the mammoth offshore Zohr gas field.

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The last surviving tank landing craft used at D-Day which avoided German shelling during the landings only to sink 66 years later in a dock on Merseyside arrived in Southsea today as part of her move to a museum.

Landfall, also known as LCT 7074, was restored at the Portsmouth Naval Base in a 4.7million project and will now go on to grace Southsea Common in Hampshire in front of the D-Day Story museum.

The 194ft (53m), 300-ton vessel was one of 800 such boats which carried tanks and military supplies on to the French beaches at Normandy as part of the Allied invasion force of June 6, 1944.

She narrowly avoided a German shell fire attack, which sank the boat next to her, to offload her first cargo of ten tanks, then spent months ferrying tanks and troops across the Channel.

After the war she became a floating nightclub in Liverpool from the 1960s to the 1980s before being taken to Birkenhead to be repaired, only for the local restoration trust to go bust. Work halted and she sank in 2010.

Restored Second World War landing craft LCT 7074 is moved to its final resting place at the D-Day Story at Southsea today

The landing craft LCT 7074 is transported from the Naval Base in Portsmouth to Southsea in Hampshire today

People watch as LCT 7074 is transported from the Naval Base in Portsmouth to its final resting place in Southsea today

Restored Second World War landing craft LCT 7074 arrives in Southsea today having been transported from Portsmouth

The LCT 7074, the last Second World War tank landing craft, arrives in Southsea today having been fully restored

Restored Second World War landing craft LCT 7074 is transported from the Naval Base in Portsmouth to Southsea today

LCT 7074, a tank landing craft that carried tanks and soldiers to the beaches of Normandy for D-Day, arrives in Southsea today

People watch this morning as LCT 7074 makes her final journey to the D-Day Story Museum in Southsea, Hampshire

The landing craft LCT 7074 on Gold beach on June 7, 1945, in a photograph issued by the National Museum of the Royal Navy

Restored Second World War landing craft LCT 7074 arrives at Southsea today having been transported from Portsmouth

LCT 7074, pictured this morning, is the last Second World War tank landing craft in the UK and one of the last in the world

LCT 7074, pictured today, has been fully restored in a 5million project after she was raised from Liverpool Docks in 2014

Restored Second World War landing craft LCT 7074 arrives at Southsea in Hampshire in the early hours of this morning

But a 5million rescue operation by the Royal Navy's museum then saw her raised four years later and restored at the Portsmouth Naval Base.

But moving the vessel has proved tricky, with her final eight-hour journey to the museum in nearby Southsea initially due to have taken place in the early hours of yesterday before being scuppered by stormy weather.

From D-Day landings to floating nightclub: A history of LCT 7074 Landfall, also known as LCT 7074, is the last survivor of the 800-strong fleet of specially designed landing craft tanks which took part in D-Day on June 6, 1944. The ship which spans across 57 metres carried a crew of 12 men and her job was to transport ten tanks onto the beaches of Normandy. After surviving a German shell fire attack, which sank the vessel next to it, Landfall made it back to Britain and the war then ended. The ship, not intended to last much longer than D-Day, was then repurposed and used as a floating nightclub in Liverpool from the 1960s to the 1980s. During her time as a club she featured in the film Letter to Brezhnev. By the time she was salvaged from the bottom of Birkenhead Docks during a two-day operation in 2014, she was in very poor condition - and the restoration job since has cost nearly 5million. She will now go on display at the D-Day Story museum in Southsea, Hampshire, with the public expected to be able to visit her from October. Advertisement

The LCT 7074 was floated as far as the coastline of Southsea before the accompanying tug boats were forced to tow her back to the naval base.

Restoration of the vessel was overseen by the National Museum of the Royal Navy and Portsmouth City Council and the move had originally been planned for June on the 76th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

But it was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic and the project incurred an additional cost of 75,000.

The mission finally took place during the early hours of this morning thanks to good weather and a high tide.

Landfall was in very poor condition when she was salvaged from the bottom of Birkenhead Docks during a two-day operation in 2014.

After years submerged in muddy water and draped in seaweed, she looked a shadow of the majestic powerhouse she once was.

The wood and metal on the ship took a constant battering and were left discoloured and rusty.

But the large vessel now gleams following the miraculous repair project.

The 'disruptive pattern' used to help the ship with camouflage was brought back with an external paint job along with replica guns and rocket launchers.

And important electrical work was carried out including newly fitted living and working spaces and a new funnel.

Nick Hewitt, head of collections and research for the NMRN, posted in the early hours of today saying the vessel had arrived in Southsea and workers were waiting for the tide to go out.

He said: 'Amazing! Lined up, smooth as anything. The comparison to last night is incredible. Now we wait for the tide to go out so she sits on the pad.'

Once onshore, LCT 7074 will be taken to the museum via crane and will sit under a canopy.

Mr Hewitt said: 'I am so proud and happy. I have been part of this project for six years when she was sitting at the bottom of Birkenhead Docks. I have a huge emotional attachment to it.

Marine archaeologist Stephen Fisher looks inside the landing craft LCT 7074 in April 2019 as restoration work is undertaken

Restoration work is undertaken on the landing craft LCT 7074 at the Naval Base in Portsmouth in April 2019

Marine archaeologist Stephen Fisher looks underneath the landing craft LCT 7074 as restoration work is undertaken last year

Restoration work is undertaken on LCT 7074 at the Naval Base in Portsmouth on April 2019 before she was moved to Southsea

Marine archaeologist Stephen Fisher looks inside the Second World War landing craft in Portsmouth in April 2019

Measurements are taken inside the landing craft LCT 7074 as part of the restoration work in Portsmouth in April last year

The LCT 7074, pictured being repaired in April 2019, has been fully restored after she was raised from Liverpool Docks in 2014

Marine archaeologist Stephen Fisher takes measurements inside the Second World War landing craft in April 2019

The wood and metal on the ship took a constant battering while she was submerged and were left discoloured and rusty

Restoration of the vessel was overseen by the National Museum of the Royal Navy and Portsmouth City Council

The move of the craft was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic and the project incurred an additional cost of 75,000

Important electrical work was carried out including newly fitted living and working spaces and a new funnel

D-Day landing craft LCT 7074 on show at the Naval Base in Portsmouth in September 2015 prior to the major refurbishment

D-Day landing craft LCT 7074 on show at the Naval Base in Portsmouth, Hampshire, in September 2015

Veterans Vic Bignell (left) and David Jefferies (right) onboard D-Day landing craft LCT 7074 in Portsmouth in September 2015

'The transformation has been amazing. The team that has restored it has done the most phenomenal job. Every mark of paint on her was how it was in 1944.

'You can find trace evidence of when she was a nightclub and a repair ship but fundamentally, she looks like the D-Day landing craft she was built to be.'

Used as a meeting point for partygoers, Landfall was modified to load beer barrels and had some additional portholes fitted. And he believes the ship's brief use as a nightclub in Liverpool saved its life.

'It was only designed to last a few months, they were built incredibly quickly to do D-Day,' he added. 'The fact she was used as a nightclub is why she lasted as long as she did. Otherwise, she would have been broken up years ago.

Landfall, also known as LCT 7074 is pictured in a file image having been restored at the Portsmouth Naval Base

The 300-ton vessel Landfall sank in a Merseyside dock in 2010, where it is pictured partly submerged in a file image

Am operation by the Royal Navy museum saw the 59-metre long vessel (pictured prior to refurbishment) raised and restored

The craft became a floating nightclub in Liverpool from the 1960s to 1980s before being taken to Birkenhead to be repaired

The vessel narrowly avoided a German shell fire attack, which sank the boat next to her, to offload her first cargo of ten tanks, then spent months ferrying tanks and troops across the Channel (pictured in Liverpool in August 1972)

The craft was one of 800 such boats which carried tanks and military supplies on to the French beaches as part of D-day

'It's all part of her story and I am really grateful. For all the glitter balls and the stuff we joke about, there was very little removed.'

The mission to transport LCT 7074 to the D-Day Story museum from the Portsmouth Naval Base yesterday had to be postponed due to bad weather.

Mr Hewitt said: 'The team did absolutely everything they possibly could. But to see the boat off the beach and then watch them turn around and go back was just heartbreaking.'

He hopes the public will be allowed to visit the ship from October, where they will be allowed to examine every inch of it.

'When you stand on that very big ship and you realise there were 800 like her at D-Day, then you start to understand the scale and complexity of the D-Day landings,' Mr Hewitt said. 'It will change the way people think.'
The Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use authorization for blood plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 as treatment for the disease. The move comes a day after Trump accused the FDA of slowing the development of vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus in order to hurt his chances in the November election. Trump announced the emergency authorization in a news conference Sunday in which he called it a breakthrough. But health experts warn that while the treatment has shown promise more study is needed before it is heralded as a game changer in the fight against the virus. Although the treatment has already been used in tens of thousands of patients, the authorization makes it easier for some to obtain it.

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The FDA determined that it is reasonable to believe that COVID-19 convalescent plasma may be effective in lessening the severity or shortening the length of COVID-19 illness in some hospitalized patients, the FDA said in a news release. The agency also determined that the known and potential benefits of the product, when used to treat COVID-19, outweigh the known and potential risks of the product and that that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternative treatments. The FDA news release included some glowing praise for Trump by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar: The FDAs emergency authorization for convalescent plasma is a milestone achievement in President Trumps efforts to save lives from COVID-19.

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Everyone pretty much agrees that convalescent plasma could provide some benefit to patients fighting COVID-19 but many scientists and physicians have also warned the evidence is far from conclusive. Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on CBS Face the Nation that while the use of plasma is probably weakly beneficial some officials wanted to see more rigorous data before the decision to authorize it was made. Gottlieb also emphasized that more than 70,000 people have already gotten the treatment, so its widely available right now, patients are getting it. But he did recognize that the emergency authorization would likely make it easier for some people to obtain the treatment.

The authorization had been on hold as top health officials, including Anthony Fauci, cautioned that the data was too weak to warrant the approval, the New York Times reported earlier this week. The skeptical officials pointed to data from the Mayo Clinic and said it was not strong enough. The debate over the use of plasma shows how the White House is pressuring agencies to test and approve treatments for the coronavirus. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said earlier Sunday that the announcement thats coming today should have been made several weeks ago. Trump has publicly advocated for lots of unproven treatments during the coronavirus pandemic. Most famously, Trump touted the use of malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine and the FDA granted emergency authorization to use the drugs to treat COVID-19. The FDA revoked the authorization in June.

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SAMARA, Russia -- A Russian military court has sentenced a prominent opposition activist from the Bashkortostan region to nine years in a high-security prison on extremism charges.

The court in the city of Samara also banned the activist, Airat Dilmukhametov, from administering websites for three years in a case he has rejected as politically motivated.

Dilmukhametov, who was arrested in March 2019, was convicted of issuing public calls to violate Russia's territorial integrity.

The charge stems from a video statement he made in 2018 urging the creation of a "real" federation in Russia with more autonomous rights given to ethnic republics and regions.

Debates over ethnic rights and regional autonomy are especially sensitive in Bashkortostan -- with its sizable populations of Tatars, Bashkirs, and ethnic Russians -- particularly since President Vladimir Putin ordered an end to the ability of it and Russia's 80-plus regions, territories, and republics to mandate regional language instruction in schools.

Dilmukhametov was also found guilty of making public calls for extremism and supporting terrorism.

Those charges are linked to his criticism of regional authorities for incarcerating several Bashkirs on charges of belonging to a banned Islamic group and his public statements about a conflict between local residents and workers from Chechnya in the village of Temas.

Dilmukhametov maintained his innocence in his last address to the court on August 24.

His mother, who attended the hearing, called the ruling "unfair" and said her son was "not guilty of anything."

"How can a person be blamed if he has been fighting for democracy, freedom, [and] for the happiness of his native republic for many years?" Agilyash Dilmukhametova said.

The Moscow-based human rights group Memorial has recognized Dilmukhametov as a prisoner of conscience.

Dilmukhametov's lawyer, Aleksei Zakharov, has told RFE/RL that the case against his client was fabricated by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).

The Supreme Court of the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan recently banned a group, called Bashqort, which for years has promoted Bashkir language and culture as well as equal rights for ethnic Bashkirs.
The Guards said the armed group was 'affiliated with the global arrogance,' a term the Islamic republic uses for its arch enemy the United States.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Monday that its forces killed three gunmen with links to the United States who tried to infiltrate its territory in the country's far northwest.

"Last night, a counter-revolutionary terrorist group... got caught up in an intelligence web of (Guards) fighters in the Maku public area," the Guards' Sepahnews website reported.

The Guards said the armed group was "affiliated with the global arrogance", a term the Islamic republic uses for its arch enemy the United States.

They said the group had "intended to penetrate deep into our country" but added that all three were killed during clashes.

"Significant quantities of weapons, equipment, ammunition and communication systems were seized."

The Maku area is a slither of land in West Azerbaijan province located less than 15 kilometres (nine miles) from Iran's far northwestern border with Turkey.

Iran's west and northwest areas have seen sporadic clashes between its forces and Kurdish rebels in past years.

On May 29, three Iranian border guards were killed in one such clash with "armed insurgents" in West Azerbaijan province.

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Some may argue that politics and deceit go hand in hand.

And they may be right - as politicians do lie and dishonest ones are more likely to be re-elected, according to a new study.

Researchers have found that when politicians take part in a game which incentivizes lying, a large number of them do so.

They recruited 816 mayors in Spain to complete a survey and told them they would only receive their results if they flipped a coin and got heads.

Even though around 50 per cent should have landed heads, nearly 68 per cent of them reported getting it.

Some may argue that politics and deceit go hand in hand. And they may be right - as politicians do lie and dishonest ones are more likely to be re-elected, according to a new study (file photo)

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that mayors who were members of the two major political parties lied significantly more, and that women and men were equally likely to lie.

Researchers also discovered that those politicians who didn't like lying had lower re-election rates, suggesting that 'honesty may not pay off in politics'.

The study, carried out by a team at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, says: 'A common stereotype across countries and time is "All politicians are liars".

'Politicians often face incentives to lie rather than tell the truth, for instance, when damaging information can be hidden or undeserved credit can be claimed.

Researchers also discovered that those politicians who didn't like lying had lower re-election rates, suggesting that 'honesty may not pay off in politics' (file photo)

Speeches made by US politicians 'have the reading age of a 13-year-old' Congressional speeches made by US politicians have become simpler since the 1970s and only require the reading age of a 13-year-old to be followed, a study has found. Computer scientists from Kansas State University analysed two million congressional speeches from Republican and Democrat politicians made from the start of 1873 to the end of 2010 - a total of 138 years of speeches. Text analysis algorithms were used by the researchers to discover how congressional speeches have changed in terms of complexity, emotion and divisiveness. More recent speeches use a smaller vocabulary, simpler language and talk about 'the other party' more than speeches made even a decade ago, the authors found. Researchers compared the vocabulary in the speeches to average US school grade reading levels - for example a 13-year-old would be in eighth grade or UK year nine. Advertisement

'Yet, voters trying to tell honest and dishonest politicians apart face a vexing problem.

'Since politicians who bluff, displace blame or use strategic deception try to appear honest, identifying those who are dishonest is extremely challenging.' They asked the mayors to self-report a coin flip to help determine how many were lying.

Statistically, approximately half should have landed heads while the other half landed tails.

But over two thirds reported getting heads - the most desirable outcome.

Furthermore, 71 per cent of mayors from major parties reported heads, compared to 64 per cent of mayors from smaller parties.

Over two thirds - 65 per cent - of mayors in the survey were sworn in as mayors again in the next election, and these re-elected mayors were more likely to have reported landing heads in the coin toss.

The study continues: 'We first discovered that a large and statistically significant proportion of mayors lied. In fact, they lied more often than other populations previously studied using similar lying experiments.

'While these results appear to confirm the stereotype that politicians are likely to lie, in our game there was extensive variation in this behaviour.

'The evidence suggests that women are equally as likely to lie as men, but mayors of large parties lie more often.' The findings suggest that 'undiscovered lying' helps aid electoral success, 'perhaps because it allows politicians to gain an advantage over their opponents'.

They say that more research needs to be done on how many would lie based on how detectable the lies are, and what impact the lies could potentially have.
- Bong Revilla Jr. shared an important update about his health, a week after he was rushed to the hospital for pneumonia and his ongoing battle with COVID-19

- Revilla shared that he is responding well to the treatment and medications given to him at St. Lukes Medical Center

- According to the senator, he is deeply grateful to all of the healthcare workers who are caring for him and doing their best for him to fully recover

- The actor-politician also thanked all of his fans and followers who continue to pray for his full recovery

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St. Lukes Medical Center (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Source: UGC

Bong Revilla Jr. took to social media to share an important update about his health, a week after he was rushed to the hospital for pneumonia and his ongoing battle with COVID-19.

KAMI learned that Revilla shared that he is responding well to the treatment and medications given to him at St. Lukes Medica Center.

He expressed his deep gratitude to all of the healthcare workers who are caring for him and doing their best amidst the pandemic.

Likewise, Revilla also thanked all of his fans and followers who continue to pray for his full recovery.

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Maraming salamat po sa inyong lahat na hindi bumitaw at tuloy-tuloy na nagdasal para sa aking kalusugan.

I am responding well to the treatment and medication, and with your prayers, I am beating COVID-19.

Thank you dear God for guiding all health workers and giving them the strength to push on in these difficult times, and blessing them with your healing hands for them to in turn heal us.

Salamat sa mga doktor at nurse na susi sa aking paggaling at paggaling ng marami nating mga kababayan. Thank you all. Thank you, Revilla said on Facebook.

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Bong Revilla is one of the incumbent Senators in the Philippines. His wife is Bacoor Mayor Lani Mercado and their son is Cavite Vice Governor Jolo Revilla.

He made headlines recently after he confirmed that he tested positive for COVID-19. The other Philippine senators who also tested positive include Miguel Zubiri and Sonny Angara.

Jolo Revilla also went viral after posting a heartfelt message for his beloved father as he battles with COVID-19.

Please like and share our amazing Facebook posts to support the KAMI team! Dont hesitate to comment and share your opinions about our stories either. We love reading about your thoughts and views on different matters!

Source: KAMI.com.gh
U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw so far is the only Texas Republican expected to be featured during the weeklong Republican National Convention, according to President Donald Trumps campaign.

Crenshaw, a retired Navy SEAL from Houston, is expected to be part of the segment that will include New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. Both are 36 years old, the two youngest Republican House members. That is scheduled to be on the program on Wednesday night, when Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to address the convention.

Crenshaw is just finishing his first term in Congress representing the 2nd Congressional District, which runs from west Houston, north to Spring and east to Humble.

Its another major step in the fast-rising political career of Crenshaw. Just over two years ago, Crenshaw staged a comeback to win a Republican primary against better-funded opponents such as Houston GOP financier Kathaleen Wall and former state Rep. Kevin Roberts. Crenshaw slipped into the GOP primary runoff by edging Wall by just 155 votes, then defeated Roberts in the runoff in May 2018.

IN-DEPTH: Three keys for Joe Biden if hes going to win Texas

Crenshaw grew up in the Katy area. He says he became enamored with the Navy SEALs as a young boy. After graduating from Tufts University, Crenshaw went into SEAL training in 2006 and was twice deployed to Iraq with SEAL Team 3. In 2012, an Afghan interpreter stepped on an improvised explosive device that instantly dismembered the interpreter and blinded Crenshaws right eye.

His rise to national prominence started even before he took office, when Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson mocked Crenshaws eye patch. Crenshaw went on the show where Davidson publicly apologized for the joke. Since then, Crenshaw has been on other national shows including ABCs The View and has been a regular speaker at Republican events such as CPAC, the annual meeting of conservatives in Baltimore.

Crenshaws inclusion in the RNC speakers list comes despite notable clashes with the president. For example, in March 2019 when Trump criticized U.S. Sen. John McCains service to the nations veterans, Crenshaw publicly told him to stop.

Mr. President, seriously, stop talking about Senator McCain, Crenshaw wrote in a tweet.

TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

He also penned an op-ed and released a video opposing Trumps foreign policy as it related to Syria.

While Crenshaw gets a starring role during the convention, other Texas Republicans appear to be on the sidelines.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, former Gov. Rick Perry and U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, were all among featured speakers in 2016. It will be the first convention without Cruz since 2008. Cruz spoke at both the 2012 convention in Tampa, Fla., and in Cleveland in 2016.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is also scheduled to speak at the convention on Tuesday. Paul lived in Brazoria County while his father Ron Paul was a congressman. Rand Paul graduated from Brazoswood High School and attended Baylor University.

Paul is one of six Republican senators so far on the schedule. U.S. Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are the other senators with speaking time at the convention.

Last week, the Democratic National Convention initially had few Democrats on its prime-time speaking lineups. But over subsequent days, Democrats including U.S. Rep. Colin Allred and state Rep. Victoria Neave, both North Texas Democrats, were announced as keynote speakers. Others, including Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo and former Congressman Beto ORourke were featured in other, smaller roles.
Former House of Representatives speaker Yakubu Dogara has dispelled claims he is eyeing a vice presidency in 2023 polls.

Dogara recently left Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to return to the All Progressives Congress (APC) citing differences with governor of his home state of Bauchi, Bala Mohammed of the PDP.

Since then, the social media space has been inundated with stories and images of the former lawmaker indicating he would contest a joint ticket with the APC national leader, Bola Tinubu, who is said to be warming up to contest presidency.

His special adviser on media Turaki Hassan put out a statement on Sunday, saying "2023 is still years away and therefore, it is unnecessary, distracting and insensitive to start making unfounded declarations at this time when all hands ought to be on deck in tackling the challenges of our nationhood.

"Furthermore, to our best knowledge, no political party sells nomination and expression of interest forms for the post of a running mate as he/she is only appointed or selected by a flag bearer.

"It is therefore preposterous for anyone to claim that someone is running for the position of VP when no flag-bearer has emerged," he said.
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One thing is clear as students return to some college and university campuses amid the coronavirus pandemic: It will be very tricky to get this right.

Public health experts are concerned that attempts to start in-person classes too soon and an overreliance on imperfect testing practices could lead students to underestimate the risks of getting infected on campus, potentially seeding new outbreaks and spreading COVID-19. Thats especially true with ongoing community spread of the virus in much of the country and difficulty controlling what precautions students take when theyre not in class.

Some universities opened in-person classes only to suddenly go remote after clusters of coronavirus infections emerged or the number of students testing positive ticked up quickly. Other schools are delaying in-person returns until September or October, and then will limit in-person attendance or require negative test results from everyone returning. Still others are planning only remote classes.

Many of the schools with students on campus are trying to head off an outbreak by requiring that everyone wear masks and practice social distancing.

But even with such precautions in place, experts think safely holding in-person classes at most schools right now will be complicated and expensive. One team of researchers, using a mathematical model, calculated that if schools tested everyone for the coronavirus every two daysand if students faithfully adhered to mask, sanitization, and social distancing guidelinesit would be theoretically possible to have an abbreviated, in-person fall semester without any uncontrolled outbreaks.

Yet the fact that its theoretically possible doesnt necessarily make it achievable, according to A. David Paltiel, PhD, a professor of health policy and management in the public health modeling unit at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Conn., and lead author of that study, which was published in the journal JAMA.

Story continues

Were setting an extremely high bara high bar financially, a high bar logistically, Paltiel says. I suspect that most of the universities and colleges in the country arent going to be able to meet the standard that we said would be required. He says that he and colleagues have received pushback from university representatives who have described such a regimen as not practical or feasible, or even as just science fiction.

That may be true, Paltiel says. But if you really dont think its feasible for your college, you really need to be asking yourself if you have any business reopening.

For those considering heading back to school, heres what experts think students and parents need to keep in mind.

Know the Plan

First and foremost, parents and students should be absolutely clear on what the schools plan is for avoiding outbreaks, says Sharon Nachman, MD, chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at Stony Brook Childrens Hospital in New York. That plan should have details on how schools will deal with hot-button topics, Nachman says, including what happens if someone gets sick and how many classes will be taking place in person.

If students are living on a campus, there needs to be a place for sick students to isolate, and students that have potentially been exposed to the virus need to be able to quarantine, Nachman says.

Schools should explain how they plan to track cases and how theyll notify potentially exposed students. Understanding what happens if the school has to close because of an outbreak is also particularly important, Paltiel says. Schools cant make that decision on the fly, he says; the administrators need to determine in advance the point at which in-person classes are no longer workable.

If the school does have to close because of COVID-19, students may need space to quarantine, especially if they wont be able to travel home without exposing others or without putting vulnerable family members at risk.

Control the Spread

Each schools plan should also include standard infection control precautions. Social distancing should be required. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for institutes of higher education, the highest risk for coronavirus outbreaks is if schools are holding full-sized classes, activities, and events in person. Holding just certain classes and activities in person while ensuring that everyone can remain at least 6 feet apart is lower-risk, though its still significantly riskier than all-virtual learning.

Most colleges have already appreciated that the large lectures are going to be online, Nachman says.

But there are still questions about how to limit class sizes and campus populationssome schools are bringing back only certain students, either staggering groups or holding distanced in-person classes only for classes that require physical participation, such as lab work.

Masks also need to be worn by everyone in a campus community both indoors and anytime its not possible to stay 6 feet apart, according to the CDC guidelines. And while outdoor classes and activities sound like good ways to reduce risk overall, Nachman says, masks should still be worn in those settings if people are going to be close enough to reach out and touch each other.

Roommates need to be on the same page about how theyre interacting with people outside the room, Nachman says. Check to see whether your school has a plan for changing rooms or otherwise resolving conflict that arises regarding different attitudes toward social distancing and infection prevention.

Think Beyond the Bubble

While some campuses are trying to create a sort of bubble, keeping students contained on campus once they arrive, thats not possible for the majority of college students around the country. Only 16 percent of college students live on campus, according to Department of Education data compiled by Robert Kelchen, PhD, an associate professor of higher education at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J. Just over 27 percent of students live with their parents, according to his analysis, a percentage that climbs to about 40 percent for community college students.

Its way more complicated for these students, Paltiel says, because they risk being exposed in the community, especially if spread is high, and because they could expose parents who may be at a higher risk of serious complications from COVID-19.

Commuter students should consider wearing a mask at home, Nachman says, if they decide to attend in-person classes at all. And any student living off campus needs to be encouraged to follow the same social distancing guidelines away from school that they do at school, Paltiel says.

Understand the Limits of Testing

Regular testing of an entire student body could be enough to control COVID-19 outbreaks, if done every two days, according to Paltiels model, as long as students and staff are taking all other precautions to prevent the spread of disease.

But such a program is expensive and logistically complex, especially with widespread testing delays across the country. Some schools are testing only symptomatic students, which will allow too much asymptomatic spread before clusters are identified, Paltiel says. Thats like having fire departments that respond only to calls when a house is known to have burned to the ground, he says.

Some schools have required students to have a negative coronavirus test in the weeks before they arrive on campus, but that isnt sufficient to ensure that a student didnt get infected between taking the test and arriving on campus.

Another concern about testing is that it could provide a false sense of security, says Nathanial Beers, MD, a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician at Childrens National Hospital in Washington, D.C. If students who test negative dont wear face coverings or dont follow social distancing guidelines, outbreaks are likely.

The Legal and Financial Questions

Think twice about signing away any rights if youre asked to sign a COVID-19 waiver, absolving the institution of liability in case of infection. Experts say its worth signing only if the institution is being conscientious and careful about disease prevention, if the risk of infection is worth being there in person, and if you have no choice. (For more information, see CRs article on COVID-19 waivers.)

Some schools have slashed tuition for their online classes; others have not. Some students have even opted to purchase tuition insurance, according to CNBC. What makes sense for each family will vary depending on the school and the student.

Students who are considering a return to in-person classes should talk to the finance or financial aid office to find out whether there will be any sort of housing or tuition refund if the semester pivots to online only.

Persistent Uncertainty

Keep in mind, experts say, that even with a long list of infection control procedures in place, its still possible that the situation will go awry. This is completely new ground for all of us, and we will learn from it each week and each month, Nachman says.

Perhaps most important is that schools should be prepared for when things dont go according to plan, Paltiel says.

On too many campuses everything that could go wrong needs to go right, and thats no way to build a safety net, he says. If you get it right, the students have a great year. If you get it wrong, a lot of people get hurt.





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Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer, and healthier world. CR does not endorse products or services, and does not accept advertising. Copyright  2020, Consumer Reports, Inc.
Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf testifies at a Senate hearing in Washington on March 4, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

DHS Not Sending Law Enforcement to Polling Sites, Wolf Says

President Donald Trumps top Homeland Security official says his department wont send officers or agents to polling sites to oversee the Nov. 3 election.

Thats not what we do at the Department of Homeland Security. We have law enforcement authorities and law enforcement officers at the department. We have express authorities given to us by Congress. And this is not one of them, Chad Wolf, the departments acting secretary, said during an Aug. 23 appearance on CNNs State of the Union.

Pressed on whether he would send agents to polling stations if asked to do so by Trump, Wolf added, We dont have any authority to do that at the department.

Trump has warned about election fraud, pointing to an unprecedented increase in the use of mail-in ballots in primary elections and plans for continued use of remote voting in the national election.

The president said Aug. 20 he intends to send law enforcement officials to polling sites.

In response to a question from Fox News Sean Hannity, he said: Were going to have everything, were going to have sheriffs, and were going to have law enforcement. And were going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and were going to have everybody, and attorney generals.

A White House spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email when asked about the statement that Trump was highlighting that Democrats plan for universal mail-out voting would lead to fraud.

Their attempts to impose a new voting system without the proper guardrails in a hurried fashion ahead of November are reckless, spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said.

Voters fill out ballots during in-person voting in the Kentucky primary at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, Ky., on June 23, 2020. (Timothy D. Easley/AP Photo)

Installing workers at polling sites to monitor voting is common for both parties, but it would be unusual to have nonofficial, private actors there.

It can easily lead to illegal intimidation, discrimination, or disruptions at the polls, the Brennan Center for Justice, which bills itself as a nonpartisan law and policy institute, said in a memo before the 2016 election.

A number of states have prohibitions or limitations against law enforcement at polling sites, including Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

In addition, the military cant be deployed to polling sites unless force is necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, according to federal law.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters over the weekend that they shouldnt pay attention to Trump because hes attempting to suppress the vote.

Hes going to have law enforcement. Thats in their playbook. Weve seen their playbook. Its in their playbook that theyll have people intimidated to vote by having ICE agents or other law enforcement there to instill fear in people as they show up. Why are they here? You know, its scary, she said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Aug. 22, 2020. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) added on Twitter that Trumps plan was meant to use intimidation to drive down turnout.

Marc Elias, a lawyer helping the Democratic Party, suggested hed take Trump to court over the matter.

Wolf also said on Aug. 23 that he hadnt seen evidence that foreign countries are specifically attacking election infrastructure, though he described himself as a consumer of intelligence from the intelligence community.

What were focused on at the department are cyber-threats to election systems, he said. China, Iran, and Russia are among the countries running disinformation campaigns in the lead-up to the election.

We know about the disinformation campaigns that they are doing every day to try to influence the election, he said.

A top DHS cybersecurity expert said last week that the threat of election interference is far lower than in 2016.

Mimi Nguyen Ly contributed to this report.
Former President John Dramani Mahama says he will direct the appropriate authorities to investigate the botched power agreement with Power Distribution Services ( PDS ) if he is elected as President in the 2020 polls.

The former President said there are many unresolved issues surrounding the deal which was cancelled a few months after its operationalization.

If I become President we will investigate PDS especially when it is obvious that persons related to the President were involved in structuring the PDS deal, he said in an interview with TV XYZ.

The former President said there is enough evidence to warrant a probe of PDS.

The government in October 2019 terminated its deal with PDS after it found out that the company presented invalid insurance security for its takeover of ECG assets.

At the time of the decision to terminate the deal, PDS had been managing ECG's assets and parts of its operations for almost seven months.

John Mahama said there is the need for an account to be given of the monies collected by PDS during the time it was managing the country's power sector.

The people of Ghana need to know what happened because this was a situation in which the assets of a state-owned institution were being handed over to a private company. As I speak today, for the period that PDS collected money when they were running the ECG, money that runs into billions of cedis has not been accounted for. People cannot just pocket state monies and walk freely with it, Mahama said.

John Mahamas NDC earlier this month also vowed to prosecute those who were behind the botched deal.

The party said some GHS1.5 billion that the Power Distribution Service (PDS) received from consumers of electricity within the period of its operation in Ghana must be accounted for.

The National Communication Officer of the party, Sammy Gyamfi , said President Akufo-Addo has shown no willingness to prosecute all individuals involved in the PDS scandal and that the NDC shall ensure the arrest and prosecution of persons who directly or indirectly played roles in this stinking PDS scam.

----citinewsroom
LONDON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --

Highlights

Appointment of Nelson Silva as Senior Safety and Social Performance Advisor to lead environmental, health, safety and community initiatives

Demonstrates Appian's commitment to ensuring Tier 1 HSE standards

Nelson brings significant experience with some of the world's leading natural resources companies with a particular focus on Brazil

Appian Capital Advisory LLP ("Appian" or the "Company"), the investment advisor to long-term value focused private equity funds that invest solely in mining and mining related companies, announces the appointment of Nelson Silva as the Company's Senior Safety and Social Performance Advisor ("SSSPA").

In his role as SSSPA, Nelson will assess and advise Appian and its portfolio companies on safety, environmental and community matters, to ensure Tier 1 standards are established and maintained across the business. He will work closely with the management teams of the firm's operated assets including Atlantic Nickel's producing Santa Rita nickel-copper-cobalt project and Mineracao Vale Verde's copper-gold Serrote project in Brazil, while also advising businesses in which the Company holds a significant minority interest including Roxgold's assets in Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire, Harte Gold's Sugar Zone mine in Canada, Peak Resources' Ngualla rare earth project in Tanzania and Kalbar Resources' mineral sands project in Victoria, Australia.

Nelson will also assist the Company with its broader stakeholder initiatives and due diligence on future acquisitions from an environmental, health, safety and community perspective, to ensure that Appian's strong record and operational excellence is maintained.

Additionally, he has been appointed as a trustee of Appian's philanthropic vehicle, the Appian Way Charitable Foundation ("AWCF"), where he will play a central role in AWCF's strategy and operations.

Nelson has spent over 40 years in the natural resources sector, holding leadership roles with major international companies particularly focused on Brazil, coupled with strong environmental, health, safety and community relations experience. Most recently he was Chief Strategy and Performance Officer and member of the Executive Team of Petrobras, and previously CEO of BG Group in South America. He was also President of the Aluminium business and Director of Carbon Steel Materials at BHP Billiton, and prior to that Marketing and Sales Director at Vale. Nelson is also an independent board member of Compass Group Plc (UK), where he is Chairman of the Corporate Responsibility Committee, Nutrien Ltd (Canada), Altera Infrastructure (Norway) and Cosan Ltd (Brazil).

He is a Brazilian citizen, is a graduate of the University of Sao Paulo and holds a masters degree from Fundacao Getulio Vargas.

Michael W. Scherb, Founder and CEO of Appian, commented:

"I am very pleased to announce Nelson's appointment as Appian's Senior Safety and Social Performance Advisor, where he will lead our environmental, health, safety and community initiatives across our portfolio. This reaffirms our commitment to best-in-class HSE practices. His significant experience with some of the world's leading companies will be a real asset to our business, further strengthening our robust policies and procedures. Nelson's appointment comes at a very exciting time for Appian, and he will play a crucial role as we enter our next phase growth."

Nelson Silva, SSSPA of Appian, commented:

"This is a very exciting time to be joining Appian and I am delighted to be part of such an innovative and entrepreneurial firm that places environmental, health, safety and community initiatives at the heart of its business culture. I look forward to working with the business and its portfolio companies, building on the strong foundations already in place, as it continues to be the partner of choice in the metals and mining sector."

For further information:

Finsbury +44(0)20-7251-3801 / AppianCapital-LON@finsbury.com

Charles O'Brien, Ruban Yogarajah, Richard Crowley

Appian Capital Advisory +44(0)207004-0951 / info@appiancapitaladvisory.com

Michael W. Scherb

About Appian Capital Advisory LLP

Appian Capital Advisory LLP is the investment advisor to long-term value focused private equity funds that invest solely in mining and mining related companies.

Appian is a leading investment advisor in the metals and mining industry, with global experience across South America, North America, Australia and Africa and a successful track record of supporting companies to achieve their development targets.
At the key Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting today, it was decided that Sonia Gandhi will continue as the party's interim president for now. Her successor will be elected in the next 6 months.

Earlier during the virtual meeting, Gandhi asked the CWC members to proceed with the process of electing a new president. However, veteran Congress leaders, such as former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and former Defence Minister AK Antony urged Gandhi to continue till a new party president is elected.

The CWC meeting started amid divisions in the party over the leadership issue. The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

Around 20 party leaders had written to Sonia demanding a full-time, visible president and overhauling of the organisational structure including elections to the CWC and reconstitution of the Parliamentary board.

6:10pm: Sonia to remain Congress interim president,next party chief to be elected within 6 months

After a tumultuous CWC meeting, it was decided that Sonia Gandhi will continue to hold the post of Congress interim president for now, ANI reported. Her sucessor will be elected within the next 6 months, the news agency reported while quoting sources

4:10pm: Rahul Gandhi never made 'colluding with BJP' statement: Ghulam Nabi Azad

"Rahul Gandhi never said it, neither in CWC or outside, that this letter (to Sonia Gandhi about party leadership) was written in collusion with BJP," Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said.

4:00pm: Muslim leaders should think for how long they will remain slave of Congress leadership: Owaisi

AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi said that, "Ghulam Nabi Azad used to call us BJP's 'B' team. Now, Rahul Gandhi said he colluded with BJP by signing on the letter". Owaisi added that Muslim leaders in Congress, who are wasting time, should think for how long they will remain slave of Congress leadership.

3:45pm: Congress denies Rahul Gandhi's 'colluding with BJP' remark

The Congress denied that Rahul Gandhi had accused any party leader of "colluding with the BJP", saying he "has not said" a word of that nature nor alluded to it. According to PTI news agency, Gandhi was furious about the timing of letter and it being leaked to the media, and appeared to suggest whether these leaders were "colluding with the BJP".

3:10pm: 'Congress is finished... who stays in what position hardly matters', says Uma Bharti

Amid the debate over who will be the Congress party chief, BJP leader Uma Bharti said that, "Gandhi-Nehru family's existence is in crisis, their political dominance is over, Congress is finished...so who stays in what position hardly matters now".



#WATCH Gandhi-Nehru family's existence is in crisis, their political dominance is over, Congress is finished.. so who stays in what position hardly matters now... Congress should return to Gandhi, the real 'swadeshi' Gandhi without any foreign element: BJP leader Uma Bharti pic.twitter.com/oZQVVmnl7Q ANI (@ANI) August 24, 2020 3:00pm: Congress workers outside AICC office demand party president from Gandhi family only Several Congress workers have gathered in front of All India Congres Committee office in Delhi and raising demand that the party president should be from Gandhi family only. Delhi: Congress workers raise slogans outside AICC office, demanding that Party President should be from Gandhi family.



Congress worker Jagdish Sharma says, "We want Party President from Gandhi family only. Party will be destroyed & break away if any outsider is made President." pic.twitter.com/b5HzTptuhJ ANI (@ANI) August 24, 2020 2:45pm: Convince Rahul Gandhi to become Congress President: Siddaramaiah to Sonia Former Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has urged interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi to convince her son Rahul Gandhi to take up the party's top post if her health does not permit for full-fledged dedication. Besides, Siddaramaiah requested Sonia to continue as AICC president. 2:30pm: Ahmed Patel asks Rahul Gandhi to become party chief Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel has asked Rahul Gandhi to become Congress party president in the CWC meet. 2:20pm: Rahul gandhi never made 'collusion with BJP' statement: Kapil Sibal Veteran Congress leader Kapil Sibal clarified that Rahul Gandhi did not make any remark against him. Sibal tweeted, "Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him". Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him .



I therefore withdraw my tweet . Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) August 24, 2020 2:15pm: No one can save Congress: Madhaya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan stated that, "When Scindia raised his voice, he was accused of colluding with BJP. Now when leaders like Gulam Nabi Azad and Kapil Sibal are demanding full-time party chief, they are also being accused of colluding with BJP. No one can save such a party". 2:00pm: 'Those trying to weaken Congress have colluded with BJP,' says Haryana PCC president Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) President Selja said that those who were trying to weaken the party have "colluded with the BJP". Selja reelased a video, in whic she said, "It is a matter of shame that some people who enjoyed being in power, whose existence is due to Congress are questioning our leadership. Sonia and rahul raised the voice of poor...At a time when BJP is busy trying to weaken democracy, today it is needed that we strengthen the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi so that they can play a greater role in taking the country forward". 1:45pm: We all need to work together rather than fighting, hurting each other: Randeep Surjewala Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala on Monday said that Rahul Gandhi's did not make "BJP colluding" statement in the CWC meet. He urged all the Congress ministers to to work together in fighting Modi-rule. Sh. Rahul Gandhi hasnt said a word of this nature nor alluded to it.



Pl dont be mislead by false media discourse or misinformation being spread.



But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather then fighting & hurting each other & the Congress. https://t.co/x6FvPpe7I1 Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) August 24, 2020 1:30pm: Will quit Congress if found colluding with BJP: Azad tells Rahul Gandhi After Rahul Gandhi's remarks, Ghulam Nabi Azad said that he will quit party if found colluding with BJP. Azad, who is one of the signatories read out the contents of the letter, saying the leaders are not questioning Sonia Gandhi and only wanted organisational reform in the larger interest of the party 1:20pm: Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal hit out at Rahul Gandhi Sibal said he has never made a statement in favour of the saffron party on any issue in the last 30 years.Sibal is among the 23 party leaders who have written to Sonia Gandhi seeking a "full-time" leadership, dissolution of powers to state units and revamping the CWC in line with the party constitution. Rahul Gandhi says we are colluding with BJP



Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party



Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP Govt.



Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue



Yet we are colluding with the BJP ! Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) August 24, 2020

1:15pm: Rahul gandhi questions timing of letter by party leaders to Sonia Gandhi

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has said that (writing a letter to Sonia Gandhi for reforms in party leadership) was done in collusion with BJP.The 50-year-old Congress leader pointed out at the timing of the letter by party colleagues and criticised it. Rahul said, "Why was the letter sent at a time when Sonia Gandhi was admitted in a hospital".
A popular French naturist resort has been hit by an alarming outbreak of coronavirus, with 100 holidaymakers so far testing positive.

Officials in the town of Cap dAdge noted the very worrying spread among the nudist community, citing a 30 per cent positive testing rate as they put in place measures to combat the outbreak.

Local government has asked all residents of the small resort town to be tested. There were 57 positive tests on last Wednesday alone, according to the regional health service.

Restrictions were brought in covering Cap dAdge and the wider Herault region on Friday, making masks compulsory in all public spaces, banning gatherings of more than 10 people and imposing a 1am curfew on bars and restaurants.

A spokesperson for the Herault region said: We are in an alarming situation, therefore we ask that all the people of the village be tested before leaving the place and going elsewhere.

And we also ask all the people who wish to come to this naturist village to postpone their arrival.

Cap dAdge made its name as a naturist resort and attracts up to 40,000 visitors in the summer months, according to the local tourism board.

The outbreak comes as France reported nearly 4,900 new cases of the coronavirus on Sunday, its highest figure since mid-April. Health minister Olvier Veran warned that the situation was risky, and said that the virus was spreading fastest among the under-40s.

The UK recently added France to its no-go list, meaning that returning travellers will be forced to self-isolate at for 14 days.
Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Monday said that he has tested positive for Covid-19 and has requested his close contacts to immediately go into isolation.

I was tested for Novel Corona Virus today. My test report has returned positive. I appeal to all colleagues and associates who came in my contact over the last week to get themselves tested. I request my close contacts to move into strict quarantine immediately, the chief minister wrote on Twitter.

Earlier today, Haryana assembly speaker Gian Chand Gupta and two other BJP MLAs had tested positive for coronavirus. In two days, the monsoon session is set to begin in Haryana. Gupta represents the Panchkula seat, while Goel and Kumar are legislators from Ambala City and Indri, respectively.

Six assembly staffers have also tested positive for the disease.

The assembly speaker and MLAs Aseem Goel and Ram Kumar have tested positive for coronavirus, Haryana health minister Anil Vij, who is also the states home minister, told PTI.
Uzbekistan reports lower construction material imports

24 August 2020

Uzbekistan saw construction material imports decline 20.9 per cent YoY to US$592.2m in the first half of 2020, according to the State Statistics Committee.



The most noticeable decrease was seen in cement imports, which declined by more than 2.2 times to US$48.4m. However, the volume of construction work carried out in the country increased by 5.7 per cent compared to the 1H19.

There are also plans to bring the production of cement to 14.5Mt in Uzbekistan and significantly increase its production of construction materials.

Published under
On the eve of this year's Republican National Convention, it is difficult to say almost anything with certainty about the proceedings. Until recently the RNC was the subject of whispers and lunatic speculation, including from President Trump himself, who suggested that he might accept his party's nomination from the field at Gettysburg or at the foot of Mount Rushmore. It now seems he will deliver remarks live from the White House itself on Thursday evening.

Who else will speak, and when, and from where, is clear only in the barest outlines. The first lady will give an address on Tuesday, presumably without as much assistance from her immediate predecessor as she had four years ago. So, too, it appears, will other members of the president's family, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner. On Wednesday Vice President Pence will speak from Fort McHenry in Baltimore, the site of the battle in 1814 that inspired the composition of the "Star-Spangled Banner."

All of this is mostly in line with what one would expect at one of these events. Other scheduled participants suggest a somewhat different flavor. One is Nick Sandmann, the student from Covington Catholic High School who recently received a large settlement following a successful defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post. Also set to speak are the couple from St. Louis who became famous, or infamous, after aiming weapons at protesters who were trespassing on the grounds of their large home. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell only recently agreed to take part and it is still difficult to say which other sitting Republican politicians will do so.

Still, even from these somewhat dim outlines it is possible to draw some conclusions about the eventual shape the convention will take. Republicans are lucky that they are holding their convention after the DNC this year. Not only does it afford them the chance  I say "chance" deliberately  to learn what works and what does not work in the novel format of a virtual convention; it also allows them to tailor their message.

Story continues

In four nights last week, not a single word was said by any of the DNC speakers, from Democratic nominee Joe Biden on down, about crime, riots, or looting. The calls, which have become a watchword even in moderately liberal circles, for abandoning the electoral college or "packing" the Supreme Court went unmentioned even by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressives. It was a convention that bore very little resemblance to the reality of the Democratic Party in 2020, a tacit admission that its leaders have very little faith in the viability of their own activists' program.

Trump and his colleagues will gladly seize upon this. In the place of fond remembrances of the time the former vice president offered a hug or made a thoughtful phone call, we will likely hear from Americans who had their homes or businesses destroyed and from police officers injured or killed in the line of duty. Whether this law-and-order gambit is successful is another question entirely, but it remains surprising that the Democrats did not attempt to triangulate more last week.

The differences in style and emphasis will extend further, one suspects, to the manner in which the Republican convention is presented to viewers. Flipping through the channels last week it was hard not to notice that while CNN ran very nearly the whole of the proceedings, including the interminable infomercial-like segments, with nary a break, Fox continued with scheduled programming except during the most important speeches. I can say with what I think is not undue confidence that we should expect to see the reverse this week: Fox going commercial-free through patriotic tribute videos while CNN cuts away for "analysis" that consists largely of partisan ranting.

It's almost like the two party system encourages the belief in two different realities or something.

Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.

More stories from theweek.com

Fact-checkers shake their heads at the RNC's 'parade of dishonesty,' 'fire hose of false or misleading' claims

Melania Trump reportedly taped making 'disparaging' remarks about president and his children

The Batman is literally too dark


Two men were shot Sunday night during a gathering of unregulated street racers in North Portland, police say.

Portland police said the shooting occurred on Ramsey Boulevard, a side road off Lombard Street, during an event that may have drawn hundreds of people.

The suspect is outstanding, according to police, and no details about the circumstances of the shooting have been released.

Portland police said responding officers learned one of the men was in a private car headed for a hospital. An ambulance crew met the car about halfway and took the man to the hospital. He was stable.

The other man suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. He was taken to a hospital in a private car and was expected to survive.

Such gatherings of car enthusiasts have long been a problem in the Portland area, with events occasionally drawing as many as 1,000 spectators. Participants regularly block freeways and urban arterials like Marine Drive to perform circle burnouts in the street.

Police ask anyone who saw Sundays shooting or has information about what happened to call 503-823-3333 or email crimetips@portlandoregon.gov. Tipsters should reference case No. 20-260905.

-- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
After the Recession began in 2008, his mother lost her job. We were always one crisis away from not being able to pay rent, and that stress really impacted me as a kid. I got a job as soon as I could, at 16. I wanted to help pay the rent and bills. It was the only way we could get by, he said.

He believes City Council should create a rainy day fund so, when needed, it can kick-start the economy. He also favors a tenants bill of rights, which he believes is critical during the economic crisis of COVID-19.

Longfellow also wants to see Kearneys minimum wage raise to $15 an hour. The average basic cost of living is $14 an hour, he said, but so many people are living below that in our community, especially people working in the service industries, but they arent getting the wage they need just to meet the standard of living.

He still is researching these and other issues. His research helps him analyze issues and determine how to approach them.

Mostly I think of basic ways to approach a problem and whether people have attacked it before. When I cant find precedence, I see what I might be able to do, he said.

Life lessons
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Monday disposed of as "infructuous" a BJP MLA's plea seeking stay on Rajasthan Speaker's decision, which allowed six BSP MLAs to merge with the Congress, in view of the High Court order.

A bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Vineet Saran and M R Shah was informed by senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Speaker, that earlier in the day that the Rajasthan High Court has passed an order on the plea filed by BJP MLA Madan Dilawar.

He said the high court has asked the Speaker to decide on merit, the plea against the merger of six BSP MLAs with the ruling Congress.

Sibal said the high court had also asked the speaker to decide on the matter within three months.

The bench said the plea before it was against an interim order of the high court, and has now become infructuous.

On August 17, the top court had deferred the hearing on Dilawar's plea after it was informed that the Chief Justice of the High Court has reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 and the functioning was postponed till August 19.

Earlier, the top court had refused to pass any interim order on the plea after it was informed that the high court has been dealing with the case.

The BJP lawmaker said the six Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLAs have been wrongly allowed by the Speaker to merge with the ruling Congress party.

Dilawar challenged the high court order which had refused to stay the functioning of these six MLAs as Congress legislators.

Earlier, the apex court had allowed the withdrawal of a petition filed by six Rajasthan MLAs of BSP seeking transfer of the plea pending against them in the high court to the apex court.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Dilawar, had said that the matter can go on before the high court but the issue is what is to be done in the meantime.

Salve, while referring to the September last year order of merger passed by the Speaker, had said there is a "curious situation" as the BSP is saying that they have not merged.

He had said that the apex court should stay the Speaker's order of September last year.

Senior advocate S C Mishra, appearing for the BSP, had said the six MLAs had gone to the Speaker saying they want to merge and the order for the merger was passed "straight away".

ALSO READ | BSP MLAs merger with Congress: Rajasthan HC asks Speaker to hear BJP MLA's complaint

He had said in the Rajasthan Assembly also, these MLAs are not following the whip of the BSP; moreover, it is a national party and split, if any, has to be at the national level.

Dilawar has challenged in the apex court the August 6 order of a division bench of high court which disposed of his plea against the order of a single judge, who had refused to stay the functioning of these six MLAs as Congress legislators.

The single judge of the high court had earlier not granted any interim relief and refused to put a stay on the participation of six MLAs in the proceedings of the House as Congress legislators.

On July 30, the high court had sought response of the Assembly Speaker and its secretary on the pleas challenging the induction of the six MLAs into the Congress.

Two petitions have been filed in the high court, one by Dilawar and the other by BSP National Secretary S C Mishra.

Sandeep Yadav, Wajib Ali, Deepchand Kheria, Lakhan Meena, Jogendra Awana and Rajendra Gudha contested and won the 2018 assembly election on a BSP ticket but they defected to Congress in September 2019.

They had submitted an application for the merger on September 16 last year and the Speaker allowed their induction into the Congress two days later.

The merger was a boost to the Ashok Gehlot-led government as the tally of the Congress increased to 107 in the house of 200.

Dilawar has challenged the merger of the BSP MLAs into Congress, questioning Assembly Speaker CP Joshi's order dismissing his complaint without allowing him to have his say.

Mishra has challenged in the high court the defection of the MLAs, but these legislators had not sought transfer of his plea to the Supreme Court.
Cameron Diaz was joined by husband Benji Madden as the couple went house-hunting in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The retired actress, 47, caught the eye in a black vest top and high slung jeans while casting her eye over an impressive $14million property in her home city.

White trainers completed the look, while a simple handbag rounded things of during her latest appearance with musician Benji, 41.

Stepping out: Cameron Diaz was joined by husband Benji Madden as the couple went house-hunting in Los Angeles on Sunday

In accordance with current safety guidelines the American star wore a protective face covering as Los Angeles continues to fight the threat of COVID-19.

The couple, who are worth an estimated $160 million between them, may well be looking for a larger property after welcoming daughter Raddix in January.

Cameron is thought to have a personal fortune of $140 million, the result of a hugely successful film career spanning three decades.

The actress confirmed her retirement from the film industry in 2018 during an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Her last starring role came four years earlier, in 2014 flop Annie.

Precaution: In accordance with current safety guidelines the American star wore a protective face covering as Los Angeles continues to fight the threat of COVID-19

Speaking earlier this year, Cameron admitted that she might never have had children were it not for close friend Gwyneth Paltrow.

'You used to talk, Id be like: "Im not having kids." And youre like: "You are having kids, youre getting married, youre having children,"' Cameron remembered during an interview for Gwyneth's online brand Goop.

'And I was like: "No, Im not!" And youre like: You have to do it, you have to! And I was like: Im not gonna do it,"' she shared.

Look of love: She married Benji Madden of Good Charlotte fame in 2015 after a 10-month romance, and this January they welcomed their firstborn daughter Raddix

The Charlie's Angels star recalled: 'You were just on me all the time. You were like, "You have to. You dont understand. If you dont do this you will be so sad that you didnt do it."' And so I credit you so much with the fact that you never let up on me.

'You were so, you know, I would say, encouraging and also' prompting Gwyneth to finish: '...a pain in the a**.'

Gwyneth said: 'I think I could see, and I knew what a natural mother you are. Some women arent but you, I was like: "Youre born to do it."'
A business Consultant who allegedly collected US$50,000 under the pretext of seeking a bank loan of US$15 million for the Chief Executive of another company but failed, has appeared before an Accra Circuit Court.

Abassa Haruna Appiah, 53, is alleged to have told his victim that he was the representative of a Canadian Company known as East-West Capital Corp. LLC which is involved in the disbursement of funds to assist in projects.

Appiah who was charged with defrauding by false pretences and two counts of issuing false cheques pleaded not guilty.

The court presided over by Ms. Ellen Ofei Ayeh admitted Appiah to bail in the sum of GH290,000.00 with three sureties one to be justified.

The court said the sureties should be people of substance and they must provide valid Identification cards.

It further ordered the prosecution to file its disclosures and witness statements within 21 days.

The matter has been adjourned to September 28 for Case Management Conference.

Prosecuting, General Sergeant Thomas Sarfo said the complainant, Alhaji Makaila Ahmed Akuamoah, is a Chief Executive Officer of a company in Accra and also a resident of Dome Pillar Two in Accra.

Sergeant Sarfo said the complainant met Appiah in the first quarter of 2018 at Kempinski Hotel and exchanged contacts.

The prosecution said afterwards Appiah struck friendship with the complainant.

He said, The accused, on speaking with the complainant realized that the complainant had a financial challenge and needed funds to augment his business project.

According to the prosecution, Appiah with the intent to swindle the complainant falsely represented to the complainant that, he is the Ghana representative of a Canadian Company by name, East West Capital Corp. LLC.

The prosecution said Appiah convinced the complainant that when given an amount of $50,000, he would be able to secure a loan facility of $15 million to fix the complainant's financial gap.

He said the complainant on September 5, 2018, paid 50,000 dollars to Appiah but after receiving the money, he failed to honour his promise and forged a bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi in Japan letter indicating that the loan has been granted.

The prosecution said checks at the said bank indicated that that letter was a hoax so the complainant started chasing the accused for his money.

The prosecution said Appiah however agreed to refund the money on April 2019 to the complainant and as a result, issued HFC bank cheque with the face value of $50,000 and another cheque from Stanbic bearing the same amount.

He said all the cheques were dishonoured when the complainant presented them.

The prosecution said investigations revealed that Appiah was not the representative of East West Capital Corp. LLC as indicated to the complainant.

According to prosecution after the accused was granted police enquiry bail, he failed to honour calls from the Police.

 citinewsroom
State Sen. Randy Price of Opelika, who has battled COVID-19 for about two months, has moved from a hospital to a rehabilitation center to regain his strength according to a Facebook post from wife, Lee County Revenue Commissioner Oline Price.

Price had been at East Alabama Medical Center and had spent time in the intensive care unit and on a ventilator during his battle with the coronavirus. Oline Price said her husband is now at the EAMC-Lanier Acute Rehabilitation Unit in Valley and she expects him home soon.

Since late June, by the grace of God and thanks to the incredible doctors, nurses and staff at EAMC, along with your constant and unyielding prayers, Randy has fought and defeated COVID-19, Oline Price wrote.

Happy Birthday to the bravest, strongest man I have ever known! Since late June, by the grace of God and thanks to the... Posted by Oline Price on Monday, August 24, 2020

Price was the first Alabama legislator to publicly report having COVID-19. Two other lawmakers from Lee County have also had it.

Sen. Tom Whatley, R-Auburn, said today he tested positive six to eight weeks ago after two negative tests. Whatley said he decided to be tested because he learned he had been around someone with the virus. Whatley said he had some symptoms, quarantined and later tested negative.

Whatley had announced on Twitter last month that he had donated convalescent plasma. Medical officials say people who recover from the virus have antibodies in their blood that can help others and possibly save lives.

I would encourage anybody who has the antibodies to please give, Whatley said.

The other day I donated #plasma at @lifesouthfoundation in Opelika. Everyone has been touched or knows someone touched by the #coronavirus #COVID19 If you can I urge you to donate #blood and or plasma to help in this fight and others. pic.twitter.com/dr52QqpXRW  Tom Whatley (@SenTomWhatley) July 29, 2020

Rep. Joe Lovvorn, R-Auburn, said he and three others in his family got sick from the virus in July and recovered. He said one of his children caught it first.

While we were definitely symptomatic, we were very fortunate to have been mild enough to avoid hospitalization, Lovvorn said in an email. We were fortunate that our kids didnt have to miss school and felt comforted in sending them back to school with antibodies.

Lovvorn and his wife also gave convalescent plasma.

We have lost a dear friend to COVID-19 and have worried about Randy Price and others throughout their battles. We were very conscientious of protecting others and still are acutely aware of wearing masks and keeping a sensible social distance but continue living our lives and thats our message to anyone who asks us about our experience. Be kind to your neighbors, use common sense, and live your life.

In July, Price said his condition was improving and issued a statement thanking people for their prayers and support and encouraging people to wear face coverings and take other precautions.

We all know someone who has COVID-19, and it is so important to follow the advice of public health experts: wear a mask, wash your hands or use sanitizer, respect social distancing, and dont get complacent, Price said in July. If youre in a position to do so, please follow the example of my wonderful wife and donate plasma to help others. Were going to get through this and ultimately prevail over the virus. Until that happens, lets make smart decisions that keep us all happy and healthy for years to come. urging people to le announced his

Price, a business owner and farmer, was elected to the Senate in 2018.

This story was edited at 5:04 p.m. on Sept. 2 to give the correct first name for Rep. Joe Lovvorn. The earlier version referred to him as Jim.
By Ayya Lmahamad

Azerbaijan and Germany foreign trade operations amounted to $420.2 million during the period of January-July in 20, according to the statistical bulletin of the State Customs Committee of August 23.

According to the report, the volume of foreign trade operations between two countries decreased by 2.4 times compared to the same period last year.

Moreover, Azerbaijans goods export to Germany amounted to $116.5 million during the first seven months of the year. It should be noted that foreign trade operations amounted to $600.8 million during the same period last year.

Thus, Germany has purchased 5.1 times less products from Azerbaijan in 2020, compared to the same period of 2019. In addition, Germanys share in Azerbaijans total exports decreased from 4.9 to 1.2 percent of the total volume.

Furthermore, Germanys goods import to Azerbaijan amounted to $303.7 million, while in 2019 it amounted to $406.1 million. Thus, import of German goods to Azerbaijan decreased by almost 33.7 percent.

Meanwhile, Germanys share in Azerbaijans total imports increased from 4.82 to 5.15 percent of the total volume.

Additionally, export/import ratio during the period of January-July 2020 was 28 and 72 percent, respectively.

It should be noted that, during the same period in 2019, export/import ration was 60 and 40 percent, respectively.

Thus, in 2020 export/import ration of the two countries shifted towards the prevailing import.

Azerbaijans foreign trade turnover amounted to $15 billion in the period of January-July 2020. During the reporting period, export amounted to $9.1 billion, which is 61.46 percent from the total volume of foreign trade. Imports amounted to $5.9 billion, which is 38.54 percent from the total volume of foreign trade.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Nutson's Automotive News Wrap-up August 16-23, 2020













AUTO CENTRAL CHICAGO August 23, 2020; Every Sunday Larry Nutson, The Chicago Car Guy and Executive Producer, with able assistance from senior editor Thom Cannell from The Auto Channel Michigan Bureau, compile The Auto Channel's "take" on this past week's automotive news, condensed into easy to digest news Nuggets.

LEARN MORE: Links to full versions of today's news nuggets along with a million pages of the past 25 year's automotive news, articles, reviews and archived stories residing in The Auto Channel Automotive News Library can be found by just copying and then inserting the main headline into the News Library Search Box.

Want more automotive content than our million plus pages?, TV viewers can watch The Auto Channel-TV Network on Hulu, Google, You Tube and of course TUNA Digital Network and Old Fashioned "Free and Clear" OTA (Over the air) TV in Boston and South Florida as well as local cable systems.

Nutson's Automotive News Review - Week Ending August 22, 2020; Last week's important, concise or pithy automotive news, opinions and insider back stories presented as expertly crafted easy to digest news nuggets.

* The California Air Resources Board (CARB) and major automakers confirmed they had finalized binding agreements to cut vehicle emissions in the state, defying the Trump administrations push for weaker curbs on tailpipe pollution. The agreements are with Ford Motor Co, Volkswagen AG, Honda Motor Co, BMW AG and Volvo Cars. The 13 states that follow Californias standards, which represent about 40% of the U.S. auto market, have said they support the agreements. Other major automakers like General Motors Co, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Toyota Motor Corp did not join the California agreement.

* U.S. News has published its annual Best Cars for Teens list. All of the Best Cars for Teens have top-notch safety ratings from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), along with an array of advanced accident-avoidance features, strong reliability records, and positive reviews from the automotive press. The top picks for 2020 can be found here. https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/best-cars-for-teens

* The apex predator has arrived. The all-new 2021 Ram 1500 TRX, the quickest, fastest and most powerful mass-produced truck in the world, fueled by a supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V-8 engine pumping out 702 horsepower arrived this week in a virtual reveal open to the public for all to see on Facebook and YouTube.

* Uber and Lyft are being allowed by an appeals court to continue operations in California while they work through an appeal of the requirement that their drivers be considered as employees. Each company has threatened to shut down if the ruling went into effect because they couldn't make the change overnight. If the two had shutdown the income to their drivers would have stopped.

* Super Cruise is GM's answer to Tesla's Autopilot and was launched in late 2017 on the 2018 Cadillac CT6 sedan. It's an advanced driver-assistance system and arguably one of the best things GM currently offers. But now that the first wave of Super Cruise free trials are about to expire, the automaker wants customers to pay a subscription fee to keep it activated, first reported by Motor Trend and confirmed by Cadillac. Super Cruise is currently offered on a basis of a three-year trial, Motor Trend's Greg Fink writes. After the trial expires, customers will have to pay a subscription fee to keep it turned on.

* New-vehicle buyers are being offered an increasing number of advanced technology features, some of which are hits while others are currently missing the mark. The J.D. Power 2020 U.S. Tech Experience Index (TXI) Study finds that automakers that innovate and are early to offer new technologiesso long as customers value themstand to benefit most as those technologies enter the mainstream. Owners think highly of technologies that provide an extra set of eyes to help them drive their vehicle. Many owners dont trust technologies necessary for more automated driving. Volvo ranks highest overall with and offers a high level of advanced technologies across its entire product lineup. Hyundai ranks highest in the mass market segment.

* A 2005 BMW 5-series sedan was parked in front of a hydrant in the Bronx in New York City this week, apparently for at least four days. Then a fire broke out on the other side of the road and firefighters needed to get a hose from the hydrant to the blaze. The shortest distance? Through the BMW's front windows. The owner told the New York Post he's stressed. This is not the first time firefighters have performed this maneuver. It's common enough that it was in the movie Backdraft.

* The Rebelle Rally is the first all-womens off-road navigational rally raid in the U.S. and the longest event of its kind in the lower 48 states. Started in 2016, the Rebelle features two classes of competition: 4 x 4 and Crossover. In 2020, the Rebelle is going electric, adding a special designation to honor the highest-finishing battery-powered electric vehicle (BEV) and hybrid or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) in each class, with allowances for on-course rapid charging. Rivian will showcase the highly anticipated R1T in the 44 Class. Mitsubishi is returning with the Outlander PHEV in the Crossover Class. Power Innovations will deliver green power for BEV fast charging and base camp support.

* The 2021 Washington, D.C. Auto Show will now be open to the public from Friday, March 26 through Sunday, April 4, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The 2021 version of the show had been scheduled to be open from Friday, January 29 through Sunday, February 7...the usual late January dates for the show. The two-month change in schedule is due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was done to ensure the safety of all involved in this show.

* There's this: Trump urges Goodyear tire boycott after company reportedly bars political attire. And there's this: The lone NASCAR Cup Series driver, Corey LaJoie, with a Trump 2020 paint scheme will continue to use Goodyear tires in upcoming races.

* Another Cannonball Record: Drivers Arne Toman and Doug Tabbutt announced that they completed the cross-country drive from New York City to Los Angeles in 25 hours, 39 minutes, narrowly beating a claimed "sub-26-hour" record publicized in May and besting their own record of 27 hours, 25 minutes that was announced in November 2019. Driving a modified 2016 Audi S6 with a 45-gallon fuel cell they have bested their own achievement with an average speed of 112 mph. Top speed reached on the run was 175 mph. Thanks to Road & Track for this report.

* Marco Andretti brought the family back to the Indianapolis 500 pole position. Driving the No. 98 Honda, Andretti edged Scott Dixon with a four-lap effort of 231.068 mph last Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the Fast Nine Shootout. Andretti's grandfather -- the legend Mario Andretti -- won the Indy 500 pole in 1966, '67 and '87. As drivers, the family has one Indy 500 victory, Mario in 1969.

* And today, Sunday is the 104th running of the Indianapolis 500 but with no fans in the 232,000 seats. With all the seats, suites, and infield the race brings in 300,000 and is usually considered the largest single-day sporting event in the world. New speedway owner Rogr Penske was looking forward to show fans what he has done to the place having spent millions after he bought it. That will have to wait to October or perhaps next year's Indy 500 on the usual May dates.

Stay safe. Be Well.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has started a five-day Middle East tour, saying he hopes to see other Arab states following the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) and normalizing relations with Israel.

Speaking in Jerusalem on August 24 following talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Pompeo said it would "not only increase Middle East stability, but it will improve the lives for the people of their own countries as well."

Israel and the U.A.E. announced on August 13 they were establishing full diplomatic relations in a U.S.-brokered deal that included an Israeli pledge to suspend its plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.

The deal makes the U.A.E. the first Gulf Arab state to establish full diplomatic ties and only the third Arab nation to have active diplomatic relations with Israel.

The move was hailed by several Gulf states but slammed by Iran, Turkey, and the Palestinians.

After Israel, Pompeo is due to visit the U.A.E., Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Sudan, according to unidentified diplomats.

Besides the agreement between Israel and the U.A.E., Pompeo's agenda will include security challenges posed by Iran and China in the region, said sources quoted by Reuters.

Pompeo's agenda also will include security challenges posed by Iran and China in the region, said sources quoted by Reuters.



In Qatar, Pompeo plans to meet with members of the Talban to discuss peace talks between the militant group and the Afghan government that are key to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

U.S. President Donald Trumps senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, plans a separate trip to the Middle East, the AP said, quoting diplomats. Kushner plans to leave later in the week for Israel, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco.

The trips come after the United States formally launched the process of activating the Iran nuclear deal's "snapback" mechanism aimed at reimposing UN sanctions on Iran, citing Iranian violations of the deal.

Pompeo on August 20 submitted a letter to the president of the UN Security Council notifying him of Iran's "significant" noncompliance with the terms of the landmark accord. The move followed the failure of a U.S.-sponsored resolution calling for an extension to an arms embargo on Iran in the Security Council.

The United States and its European allies have sparred over the U.S. approach. Some members of the Security Council have questioned the U.S. right to trigger the snapback since Washington withdrew from the nuclear deal more than two years ago and reimposed unilateral sanctions.

In Jerusalem, both Pompeo and Netanyahu criticized the lack of international support for the U.S. push for the restoration of UN sanctions.

"We are determined to use every tool that we have to ensure [Iran] can't get access to high-end weapon systems," the U.S. secretary of state said. "The rest of the world should join us."

With reporting by AP, BBC, and Reuters
Egypt's prosecution ordered the arrest of men accused of sexually assaulting a girl at Cairo's Fairmont Hotel in 2014, the prosecution stated on Monday.

The prosecution issued a travel ban for the defendants who were also put on watch lists to be interrogated, the statement added.

The incident, dating back to August 2014, has surfaced in July on social media following a series of posts published on an anonymous Instagram account accusing a group of young men of being involved in a gang rape following a dance party at the luxurious hotel.

The incident has been under investigation by the Egyptian prosecution since 4 August when the country's Prosecutor-General Hamada El-Sawy ordered the investigation into the alleged crime upon a letter he received from the National Council of Women on the same day.

The letter detailed a complaint sent to the council by a woman alleging she was raped by several people at the Fairmont Nile City Hotel in Cairo in August 2014. It included testimonies of other people concerning the incident.

In its Monday statement, the prosecution revealed that it questioned the victim and a number of witnesses.

"The investigations are still ongoing," the statement added.

The statement did not expand on the number or names of the accused individuals.

The online allegations claimed the young men hail from families of prominent businessmen.

The incident has gained widespread attention on social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook, with hashtags in Arabic and English, including #Fairmont incident, going viral.

In statements to AFP in late July, the Fairmont Nile City Hotel administration said there is an ongoing internal investigation into the allegation.

This is the second sexual assault case that has caused outrage in the past two months in Egypt, after the recent accusations against alleged serial rapist Ahmed Bassam Zaki.

Zaki was arrested in early July after dozens of women took to social media to accuse him of rape, sexual assault, and blackmail.

Zaki is facing charges of attempting to have sex with two females, including a minor, without their consent. He is also accused of using blackmail to coerce women into granting him sexual favours.

Zaki is currently detained pending investigation.

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Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (C) arrives at the prime minister's office in Tokyo on August 19, 2020. (photo: Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP)

"I've been told today he will receive additional testing after a check-up" last week, government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters at a regular briefing.

"I see him every day and I don't see any change in him," Suga said, in response to questions about Abe's health.

There has been growing speculation about whether the prime minister is sick, possibly with a recurrence of the ulcerative colitis that plagued him during a first term in office and contributed to his resignation just one year into the job.

Even before the unexpected visit to the hospital last week there had been reports in local media claiming Abe was vomiting blood, and confidantes publicly expressed concern that the prime minister was in need of rest.

On August 17, Abe sparked a media frenzy with a previously unannounced visit to the same hospital where he was treated after his resignation.

He spent more than seven hours at the facility, with aides saying he was undergoing health checks but giving no further details. He had already completed his regular check-up in June, raising questions about what the visit involved.

On his return to office in 2012, Abe said he had overcome the ulcerative colitis.

The speculation about Abe's health comes as he breaks the country's record for the longest consecutive term as prime minister.

He was already the country's longest-serving prime minister, counting his first and second terms in office.

But as of Monday, he has been in power for 2,799 uninterrupted days, breaking the record previously set by his great uncle Eisaku Sato.

The record comes at a difficult time for Abe, who in addition to his possible health woes faces plummeting public support thanks to his handling of the coronavirus.

A poll published Sunday by the Kyodo news agency found the approval rating for his cabinet stands at 36 percent, the second lowest since he returned to office in 2012.

The survey conducted over the weekend found 58.4 percent were unhappy with the government's handling of the coronavirus.

While Japan has seen a comparatively small outbreak -- with nearly 62,000 infections and close to 1,200 deaths -- Abe has been slammed for his economic response as well as a widely mocked programme to distribute reusable cloth face masks.
Forecasters are warning of intense thunderstorms Monday afternoon across Central and Western Massachusetts.

The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning for northwestern Worcester County and northeastern Franklin County that will last until 3:45 p.m. and impact more than 10,000 residents.

Quarter-sized hail and wind gusts of up to 60 miles per hour are expected to impact the communities of Bernardston, Erving, Gill, Northfield, Orange, Royalston, Wendell and Warwick. Trees and power lines may be damaged.

Shortly before 2:45 p.m., a severe thunderstorm was spotted near Northfield, a Pioneer Valley town located 10 miles northeast of Greenfield. The storm was moving southeast at 10 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service.

Nearby, a second severe thunderstorm warning was issued in eastern Worcester and western Middlesex Counties, with a storm reported to be moving southeast over Boxborough at 5 mph.

Strong thunderstorms were also identified over eastern Franklin and Hampshire Counties as well. A storm was moving southeast over Sunderland, located 7 miles northwest of Amherst, at 5 miles per hour.

Penny-size hail and winds in excess of 40 mph will accompany this storm, the National Weather Service said. Locations impacted include Amherst, Deerfield, Belchertown, Montague, Granby, Hadley, Sunderland, Hatfield, Conway, Leverett, Shutesbury, Whately, Pelham, New Salem and Wendell.

Another intense thunderstorm was moving east over Agawam and Longmeadow at 10 miles per hour shortly after 2 p.m., according to forecasters. The storm system was expected to impact Chicopee, Springfield, West Springfield and several other Hampden County communities.

Earlier in the day, a severe thunderstorm warning was issued in Southeastern Massachusetts in Attleboro Bridgewater and Taunton.

Forecasters warned of potentially serious thunderstorms throughout Massachusetts Monday that would arrive around 2 or 3 p.m. and last until roughly 8 p.m.

Strong winds, large hail, heavy downpours, dangerous cloud-to-ground lightning as well as brief street flooding is expected, according to the National Weather Service.

In the Bristol County town of Rehoboth, a flash flood warning issued around 2:45 p.m. will last until 4:45 p.m.

Avoid walking or driving through flood waters!, the National Weather Service said. Move immediately to higher ground.

Forecasters are warning of intense thunderstorms Monday afternoon across Central and Western Massachusetts. (National Weather Service)

In the Bristol County town of Rehoboth, a flash flood warning issued around 2:45 p.m. will last until 4:45 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 24, 2020. (National Weather Service)

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Kremlin Critic Navalny Was Under Surveillance During Trip To Siberia, Says Report

By RFE/RL August 23, 2020

Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, who is being treated in a German hospital after a suspected poisoning, was under surveillance by Russian federal security agents during his recent trip to Siberia, according to a Russian newspaper report.

Officers with Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) monitored Navalny's movements, the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said, citing information from sources in Russian security agencies. The surveillance involved plainclothes officers and CCTV cameras, the newspaper said.

The report provides details about where he stayed, what he and his associates ate, and information about his movements. The newspaper said it was significant that in Tomsk his entourage stayed in a hotel, where they rented more rooms than they required and Navalny did not stay in the room that was registered in his name.

"The scale of surveillance does not surprise me at all. We were perfectly aware of it before," Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on Twitter on August 23. "What is surprising about the report is that they did not hesitate to tell everyone about it."

Yarmysh said on August 20 that she believed the politician was poisoned when he drank tea purchased at the Tomsk airport.

Jaka Bizilj, founder of the Cinema for Peace Foundation, which arranged Navalny's evacuation flight out of Russia, was quoted by the Bild newspaper as saying he believes Russian opposition leader will survive the "poison attack" but not without consequences to his health.

"From my point of view, the crucial question is whether he will survive this unscathed and continue to play his role," Jaka Bizilj told the German tabloid in a video interview on August 23. "If he survives this unscathed, which we all hope, he will surely still be out of the political arena for at least a month or two."

German police on August 23 beefed up security at the hospital in Berlin where Navalny is being treated. Social-media posts showed police increasing their presence around the hospital.

Navalny has been classified as a guest of German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a means to ensure that he receives the best possible police protection, according to German state broadcaster ZDF.

Navalny, 44, was evacuated to Germany from the Siberian city of Omsk in the ambulance aircraft arranged by the Cinema for Peace Foundation. He has been in an induced coma since he fell ill on August 20 during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. The plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Omsk when Navalny became ill.

The hospital said in a statement that it would provide an update about his condition and further treatment once tests have been completed and after consulting with his family.

Leonid Volkov, a top aide to Navalny, said on August 23 that businessman and philanthropist Boris Zimin and his family's fund paid for Navalny's flight to Germany.

"What seemed almost impossible yesterday morning, when Omsk categorically refused to give permission for transportation, is now behind us," Volkov said. "Both the doctors of the Charite clinic and the doctors of the intensive-care aviation supported the decision on transportation and recognized it as correct for Aleksei's health," Volkov wrote in Facebook.

The flight would not have been possible, he said, without "the work and the help of a huge number of people, many of whom spent 48 sleepless hours from Thursday morning to Saturday morning."

Volkov thanked Boris Zimin, the Zimin family fund, the German government, and Merkel for providing international support.

According to Volkov, it is too early to make predictions about Navalny's health.

The evacuation flight followed a daylong battle by Navalny's family and supporters to get Russian authorities to agree to allow him to go to the West for what they regard as more reliable, effective, and transparent treatment.

The Russian doctors treating him had refused for hours to allow him to leave, arguing that he was not fit to travel.

With reporting by Current Time, Moskovsky Komsomolets, Reuters, dpa, and the Washington Post

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/kremlin-critic-navalny -was-under-surveillance-during-trip-to -siberia-says-report/30798146.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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On Aug. 5, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the development of a test for the virus that causes COVID-19 that will also detect the presence of Influenza types A and B. Emergency Use Authorization has also been granted for the new test by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This will allow earlier diagnoses of three possible conditions instead of one and the process will also reduce the need for additional time, personnel and equipment.

Three public health laboratories in addition to the CDC laboratories evaluated the effectiveness of the new test. Previously unavailable genomes, or collections of molecular matter in cells, were analyzed in these evaluations. These genomes were not part of the development of previous tests and CDC predicts their inclusion will improve the performance of the test.

Advantages of the new test

The new test, Flu SC2, differentiates the three viruses in the upper and lower respiratory systems. It also accommodates the processing of more tests by laboratories in a given period. Additionally, public health officials will also learn more about trends of the coronavirus, as well as Influenza A and B in a shorter time. One significant advantage of Flu SC2 is that it helps to conserve testing materials at a time when there is such high demand for them.

Diagnostic and antibody tests

Molecular tests and antigen tests are the two methods used to diagnose the active presence of the coronavirus infection. Molecular tests confirm COVID-19 by uncovering the virus' genetic material.

Antibody tests differ in that they detect antibodies created by the body to fight the disease rather than the presence of the disease, itself. Because antibodies are created in response to infection and may linger for weeks after recovery, they are not used to diagnose active infections.

Who should be tested?

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has expanded its goals for COVID-19 testing. Already documenting over 14,000 tests per day, MDHHS is planning to test an average of 15,000 people daily in the future. The criteria for testing include those with symptoms and those who are asymptomatic.

Among those with symptoms who are of high priority for testing are hospital patients, health care workers, first responders and workers and residents of multi-individual care facilities. Individuals exhibiting potential COVID-19 symptoms should also be tested as soon as possible. The potential symptoms include shortness of breath, muscle pain, sore throat, vomiting, diarrhea and loss of taste or smell.

Those without symptoms who should be tested are people scheduled for surgery, anyone who has been in contact with an infected person, and those living or working in nursing homes. Residents and workers at assisted living facilities and places that accommodate large populations, including prisons or jails, should be tested.

Migrant workers and those in contact with them, food processors and people often in contact with large groups should also be tested.

Where testing facilities are located

As of Aug. 19, over 74 million COVID-19 tests had been administered nationwide, according to CDC. The results showed over six million positive results, or about 9% of those tested. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has collaborated with pharmacies and other health-related businesses to expand the number of outlets for COVID-19 tests. In addition to pharmacies, private clinics, large grocery stores with walk-in clinics and large retail outlets with medical divisions are included. The objectives of the initiative include increasing the availability of tests in metropolitan areas and in under-tested or socially vulnerable communities.

There is a quick-find tool for testing facilities on the MDHHS special coronavirus web site at www.michigan.gov/coronavirus.

Ask Dr. Haqqani

If you have questions about your cardiovascular health, including heart, blood pressure, stroke lifestyle and other issues, we want to answer them. Please submit your questions to Dr. Haqqani by e-mail at questions@vascularhealthclinics.org.

Dr. Omar P. Haqqani is the chief of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at Vascular Health Clinics in Midland: www.vascularhealthclinics.org
Kim Kardashian West may be extremely busy filming Keeping Up With the Kardashians, but the hit E! series isnt the only thing in life shes focused on these days.

In addition to her reality show, her makeup brand, KKW Beauty, and her shapewear line, SKIMS, Kardashian West has been busy advocating for prison reform and helping to change the correctional system in the United States.

So far, the reality star has been responsible for freeing several inmates who were wrongfully convicted from jail and intends to keep working with the White House on prison reform, regardless of who becomes the next President.

Kim Kardashian West | Evans Vestal Ward/NBCUniversal/NBCU Photo Bank

Kim Kardashian West started working on prison reform in 2017

Kardashian Wests work with prison reform began in the fall of 2017. While scrolling through Twitter one night, she came across the story of Alice Marie Johnson, a grandmother serving a life sentence in prison for nonviolent drug charges.

This is so unfair https://t.co/W3lPINbQuy  Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) October 26, 2017

RELATED: Kim Kardashian West Is Helping Rapper C-Murder in His Request for a New Trial; Why Hes Behind Bars

After watching the video about Johnsons case, Kardashian West immediately shared the story with her millions of Twitter followers but felt there was still more she needed to do.

While speaking with Time in April 2020, the reality star revealed that Johnsons story was a huge eye opener.

That someone who was a phone mule [received] a harsher sentence than Charles Manson made absolutely no sense to me, she said. It just really broke my heart, and I just wanted to help her. Because [I knew] I could.

Learning of Johnsons case was somewhat of a light-bulb moment for Kardashian West, and soon, she began working on prison reform with lawyers and advocacy groups.

After realizing that Johnson could be freed through a presidential pardon, Kardashian West used her connections to reach out to the White House. She eventually got in contact with Ivanka Trump to discuss the situation.

I called Ivanka and we had a really great conversation about women and wanting to help each other, the mom of four said during a 2018 interview with Today. I knew that she wouldve understood Alice. She immediately was so receptive and so great.

Trump then put Kardashian West in contact with her husband, Jared Kushner, who instantly took an interest in the case, and together, they brought it to the President.

Kim Kardashian West is now studying to become a lawyer

In 2018, Kardashian West met with President Donald Trump to discuss Johnsons case. After she persuaded him to support the First Step Act, which helps nonviolent offenders receive leniency, President Trump granted Johnson clemency.

Since she successfully helped Johnson get released from prison, Kardashian West soon realized that she would like to do more than just bring attention to peoples stories.

In April 2019, she revealed to Vogue that she was studying to become a lawyer with an accredited law firm in San Franciso instead of attending law school.

RELATED: Kim Kardashian Got Into Social Justice Because Shes Raising Four Black Kids

Under the supervision of her two mentor lawyers, Jessica Jackson and Erin Haney, Kardashian West studies eighteen hours a week in preparation to take the bar exam in 2022.

The reality star will continue advocating for prison reform no matter who is President

Since announcing her plans to become a lawyer, Kardashian West has been taking her apprenticeship very seriously and intends to keep working on her law studies as well as her prison reform efforts no matter what.

Though she currently has a lot on her plate being a mom, wife, famous reality star, and savvy businesswoman, the KUWTK star plans to continue working with the White House to free even more people from prison  regardless of who takes on the role of President in the upcoming election.

Shes saying that no matter who is president, she is planning on working closely with them in DC to fight criminal justice and prison reform, an insider recently told HollywoodLife. She doesnt care whos in office for her to work with, she just wants to really help people and do the right thing and she feels she can work with anybody. She knows she has the power to do that.
BOSTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Liberty Mutual Insurance has been awarded an Innovation Award for its new Injured Worker Portal and Workers Compensation Guide.

The award was presented by Business Insurance magazine, a leading industry media company. This is the fifth Business Insurance Innovation Award Liberty Mutual has received since 2015.

Injured worker advocacy is at the core of how Liberty Mutual manages workers compensation claims. Technology drives this approach by improving and simplifying the claims process. The company's Injured Worker Portal and Workers Compensation Guide provide more information to injured workers through an easier-to-access platform and help injured workers access the care they need faster and more easily.

"The Workers Compensation Guide and Portal solve two key issues facing workers compensation policyholders and TPA clients," said Senior Vice President of Workers Compensation Claims Wes Hyatt. "The first is fully engaging injured workers in the claims process, their recovery and eventual return to work. The second is the experience of the injured worker, a paramount concern of mid-size and large employers."

The guide and portal are part of Liberty Mutual's broader investments to improve the digital experience of commercial customers, which also include a recently launched customer portal.

"All of our digital investments are built with a continued flow of first-hand customer input, which helps shape the products we deliver and define the value they provide," said Liberty Mutual Vice President of Commercial Customer Experience Nate Pullen. "We built the guide and portal to respond to the importance risk mangers continually place on the injured worker journey. These products are great examples of our approach to delivering a superior customer experience: listen, focus on user needs, and then solve for them broadly while tailoring solutions for each customer."

Liberty Mutual's award-winning Injured Worker Portal and Workers Compensation Guide are being rolled out to more of Liberty Mutual's workers compensation policyholders and customers of Helmsman Management Services, its wholly owned third-party administrator (TPA).

Liberty Mutual offers workers compensation solutions through its Global Risk Solutions (GRS) division. More information on Liberty Mutual's approach to claims is available here.

Other Innovation awards received by Liberty Mutual include:

Workers' Compensation Automation  Harnesses artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to better manage workers compensation claim costs and fully engage injured workers in their recovery

Liberty Mutual SmartVideo  Delivers personalized online videos to workers comp claimants summarizing key information specific to each claim in order to produce better outcomes more quickly for injured workers

LM Expedite  An application that speeds commercial auto claims by letting drivers take photos of damage and instantly request an estimate from their mobile phones

Managing Vital Driving Performance  Helps reduce commercial auto accidents by quickly sorting through complex telematics data to recommend ways to improve commercial driver performance

RiskTrac Workers Compensation Analytics Interactive Dashboard  A dashboard added to Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.'s risk management information system that provides workers compensation policyholders with a customized predictive model

About Liberty Mutual Insurance

At Liberty Mutual, we believe progress happens when people feel secure. By providing protection for the unexpected and delivering it with care, we help people embrace today and confidently pursue tomorrow.

In business since 1912, and headquartered in Boston, today we are the sixth largest global property and casualty insurer based on 2019 gross written premium. We also rank 77th on the Fortune 100 list of largest corporations in the U.S. based on 2019 revenue. As of December 31, 2019, we had $43.2 billion in annual consolidated revenue.

We employ over 45,000 people in 29 countries and economies around the world. We offer a wide range of insurance products and services, including personal automobile, homeowners, specialty lines, reinsurance, commercial multiple-peril, workers compensation, commercial automobile, general liability, surety, and commercial property.

For more information, visit www.libertymutualinsurance.com.

SOURCE Liberty Mutual Insurance

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Linkedin Linda Sieg (Reuters) Tokyo, Japan  Mon, August 24, 2020 10:45 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066ffd8bb 2 World Japan,Shinzo-Abe,politics,policy Free

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the nation's longest serving premier, visited a Tokyo hospital on Monday as concerns deepened about his ability to continue in his post due to health issues and fatigue from handling the coronavirus crisis.

Here are key elements of Abe's record since returning to office in December 2012. He ended a first troubled 2006-2007 term as premier by quitting abruptly, citing ill health.

COVID-19 response, scandals

Japan has not suffered an explosive virus outbreak, but a recent rise in infections has fuelled concern that Abe is putting too much emphasis on the economy over health.

Abe has drawn fire for an initial response to the outbreak that critics called clumsy and, more recently, for a seeming lack of leadership, including few media appearances.

Dissatisfaction with his response, as well as scandals such as the arrest of a former justice minister and his lawmaker wife on suspicion of vote-buying, have eroded Abe's ratings.

A Kyodo news agency weekend survey showed Abe's voter support at 36.0%, down from 38.8% the previous month and the second lowest since he returned to office in 2012.

"Abenomics"

Abe's signature "Abenomics" policies of bold monetary easing and fiscal spending encountered headwinds last year as a US-China trade war hit exports and a sales tax rise hurt business and consumer sentiment.

Now the pandemic has hit Japan with its biggest economic slump on record. A third straight quarter of declines knocked real gross domestic product (GDP) to decade-low levels, wiping out the benefits of "Abenomics".

Critics have also said Abe relied too heavily on his monetary and fiscal policy without following through on a pledge of a "third arrow" of structural reform to achieve long-term growth despite a fast-ageing and shrinking population.

Security

Abe bolstered defense spending after years of declines and expanded the military's ability to project power abroad.

In a historic shift in 2014, his government reinterpreted the post-war, pacifist constitution to allow troops to fight overseas for the first time since World War Two.

The following year, legislation ended a ban on exercising the right of collective self-defense, or defending a friendly country under attack.

Faced with divided public opinion, however, Abe has not achieved his long-held goal of revising the US-drafted constitution by writing the Self-Defense Forces, as Japan's military in known, into the pacifist Article 9.

Personnel appointments

By creating a Personnel Affairs Bureau at the cabinet, Abe and his right-hand aide, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, gained greater control over appointments of bureaucrats, who for decades have dominated policymaking, shifting the balance of policy power toward politicians.

Diplomacy

Abe has cultivated warm personal ties with US President Donald Trump, averting worst-case outcomes on trade. He has overseen a cautious improvement in ties with China, although a territorial row and Beijing's clampdown on Hong Kong are causing strains. Relations with South Korea turned frigid due to disputes over the wartime past.

Abe has made little progress toward resolving a long-running feud with Russia over disputed islands seized by Soviet troops at the end of World War Two. The row has kept the two countries from signing a formal peace treaty ending the war.

Nor has Abe been able to settle a feud with North Korea over Japanese citizens kidnapped by Pyongyang's agents in the 1970s and 1980s, an issue he put at the center of his political career
Here is the list of stocks that may see trading action today: SBI, BoB: As many as five large banks, including SBI, PNB and BoB, are likely to sell shares to institutional investors in the second half of this fiscal as they look to shore up their capital base amid the coronavirus pandemic impacting the economy. READ MORE Reliance Industries: The company concluded amalgamation and merger amongst its wholly-owned ...

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Panaji, Aug 24 : The oxygen saturation levels of Shripad Naik, Union Minister of State for Defence and AYUSH, have dropped since Monday morning, and his health parameters will be reviewed in the presence of a team of doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said on Monday.

The Chief Minister also said that the AIIMS doctors, who are flying down to Goa on Monday, will decide on whether Naik, who tested positive for Covid-19 around 10 days ago, should be flown to the national capital for further treatment.

"His health is improving, but his oxygen saturation (level) is a bit low since morning. I have spoken to the Union Health Ministry, and AIIMS doctors may also arrive in Goa (on Monday) to take a review of his health. We are monitoring his health," Sawant said.

Naik, a Lok Sabha MP from North Goa, tested positive for Covid-19 on August 12 and was initially advised home isolation.

He was shifted to a private hospital near here after his health condition worsened a few days later.

He has already been administered plasma as well as high flow nasal oxygen treatment.

When asked if he would be shifted to the national capital for further treatment, the Chief Minister said, "The team of doctors from AIIMS will decide on that."

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
A new coronavirus cluster in China's Xinjiang region in July prompted fresh restrictions to curb the spread of infections

Residents in China's northwestern Xinjiang region have complained on social media about what they say are harsh coronavirus lockdown measures in the sensitive region after a local outbreak.

China -- where the disease first emerged -- had largely brought domestic transmission under control through lockdowns, travel restrictions and testing, but sporadic regional outbreaks have emerged.

A new cluster in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi in mid-July prompted fresh restrictions, with 902 cases officially reported.

Officials said this month they had "effectively contained" the spread of the Urumqi cluster, and there have been no new cases reported in the past eight days.

But hundreds of local residents have gone on to local social media forums in recent days to complain about harsh conditions.

With some of the comments removed -- China's internet is heavily censored -- users tried to also voice their complaints on local forums on the Twitter-like Weibo platform in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Social media users shared photos of front doors sealed with steel crowbars, and locks installed by community workers.

"Why can't prefectures with no cases remove the lockdown? Why do you need to lock down the whole of Xinjiang?" read one comment on Weibo, which received thousands of likes.

"Doors have been sealed, this has brought huge inconvenience to workers and people's lives. Prices of daily items have risen... many things I buy are expired."

Some residents also wrote that they were forced by authorities to take Chinese medicine daily, and were required to film themselves doing so.

One video from Saturday showed dozens of high-rise residents in Urumqi yelling from their windows in despair.

Stranded migrant workers, university students, business travellers and tourists also complained about not being able to leave Xinjiang.

"I have even taken three nucleic acid tests... but community workers won't let me leave," one user wrote on a message board run by the state-run People's Daily.

Story continues

Urumqi authorities said Monday that lockdowns would be eased in areas that had no virus cases, according to a report in the state-run tabloid Global Times.

Around half of Xinjiang's more than 21 million people are ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims, many of whom complain of decades of political and religious oppression by China's ruling Communist Party, which the government denies.

Activists have accused the Chinese government of incarcerating about one million Uighurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang camps. Beijing has described them as vocational training centres to counter Islamic radicalism.

lxc/rox/kma
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 16:49:57|Editor: huaxia

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SANAA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Months of heavy rains and floods in Yemen have badly affected thousands of displaced families across the country, worsening the already catastrophic humanitarian crisis driven by the years-long civil war.

In Dharawan camp for displaced people in the northern suburb of the Houthi-held capital Sanaa, the rains and floods have left hundreds of families in appalling conditions.

"We suffer a lot in these old and leaky tents amid this heavy rainfall season and many people have contracted diseases," Abdo Shooai Jawhar told Xinhua.

Jawhar, his wife and their eight children live in a small, dilapidated tent at the center of the displaced camp. They have no food or clean water, and they sleep on the bare ground, wrapping themselves with some tattered blankets.

There is no clinic or doctors in the camp and the families lack access to clean water, soap and sanitary toilets.

Each morning, many of the displaced families walk miles along the highway leading into the northern part of the capital Sanaa, where they beg on the streets for money, food and clean water for their children.

But the constant rains and floods besiege them and prevent them from moving and searching for some bread.

"We fled our home in the province of Saada due to the intensified bombardment... Now we are living here in very bad conditions and we have no income or job," Jawhar cried.

The displaced families, who have fled from several northern provinces, say that they are in dire need of food aid, clean water, medicine, hygiene materials, mattresses, blankets, clothes and new tents to protect them from the cold winter, summer heat and the rainy season.

Yemen has been mired in civil war since late 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthi group seized control of much of the country's north and forced the Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.

The war has killed tens of thousands of Yemenis, destroyed the country's health and economic systems and pushed over 20 million to the brink of famine.

The UN says around 80,000 more Yemeni people were forced from their homes since the start of the year, bringing the total displaced in Yemen to almost 4 million. It says the recent floods have raised the risk of malaria, dengue fever and cholera.

The floods have killed at least 172 people in the government-held provinces and damaged many houses of the residents and swept away hundreds of tents in several displaced camps, a government health official told Xinhua.

Meanwhile, the Houthi-controlled health authorities in Sanaa reported that at least 131 people had died in the floods in the northern provinces under their control. They said millions of the displaced families are the most affected by the heavy rains and floods.

The torrential rain has also damaged UNESCO-listed world heritage sites across the country.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called the donor countries to help the war-torn Yemen, saying the more than five years of conflict have left Yemenis "hanging on by a thread."

He said 24 million people in all, need lifesaving aid in what remains the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

UN aid chief Mark Lowcock said "the biggest challenge is the money," warning that more than 30 of the 41 UN-supported aid programs in Yemen will close in a few weeks if additional funds are not secured. Enditem
The French government will this week agree to impose reciprocal quarantine restrictions on travel from the UK as ministers face growing pressure to reduce the 14 day self-isolation period.

Britain added France to its 'red list' of banned countries on August 15 after a spike in coronavirus cases.

All travellers returning from the country to the UK must stay at home for a fortnight and Paris is now poised to impose its own similar restrictions on people heading in the opposite direction.

Minister for European Affairs Clement Beaune signalled the tit-for-tat action will be set out in the coming days.

'We will have a measure called reciprocity so that our British friends do not close the border in one single way,' he told French TV station France 2, according to comments reported by Reuters.

'For travellers returning from the United Kingdom, there will probably be restrictive measures decided in the next few days by the Prime Minister and by the Defence Council.'

His comments came after it emerged the quarantine period could be slashed to less than a week under plans to introduce testing on arrival at UK airports.

Aviation firms have submitted proposals to ministers which would see people returning from countries on the Government's coronavirus 'red list' tested on arrival.

They would then be tested again between three to five days later, with two negative tests granting the traveller permission to leave self-isolation.

Ministers are said to be due to weigh up the merits of the proposed way forward at a meeting scheduled for later this week.

It comes amid growing concerns that Greece, Switzerland and the Czech Republic could all be subject to quarantine after an increase in cases, with Italy having also recorded a spike.

Minister for European Affairs Clement Beaune signalled the tit for tat action will be set out in the coming days.

Aviation companies are urging ministers to back plans to introduce a dual testing system at UK airports

The Government is under intense pressure to reduce the 14 day self-isolation rules amid fears they are causing lasting damage to the travel and tourism industries.

Swissport and Collinson Group, aviation services companies, submitted plans for a dual testing system to Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Friday, according to The Times.

Many European countries, including Germany and France, already have testing on arrival systems set up at their airports.

The two firms are said to have expressed concerns in a letter to Mr Hancock that the current 14 day rules are preventing people from being able to work and from being able to travel for business while inbound tourism is also being stifled.

Ministers have previously expressed concerns about the prospect of replacing the 14 day blanket quarantine policy with a more nuanced testing system.

They said there was a risk that the testing regime could miss people who have only just been infected because of the amount of time it can take for coronavirus to appear.

However, the aviation and travel industries believe the Government has massively overestimated the number of people who could be missed under such a scheme.

The dual testing system would likely see arrivals from 'red list' countries tested on arrival and then given a home testing swab kit to take with them.

This second test would be conducted three to five days after arriving back in the UK and would be sent to a laboratory for processing.

Two negative tests would allow travellers to exit quarantine and get back to normal life.

The latest push for airport testing comes after the Government last week added Croatia, Austria and Trinidad & Tobago to the banned travel list.

Non-essential travel to France and Spain is already banned after spikes in case numbers.

However, a fall in infection rates means holidays to Portugal are now back on.

Case numbers in a handful of other European nations are now trending upwards, sparking fears of more countries being hit with potential travel bans.

Italy has in recent days recorded 1,000 new daily infections - the first time the number has hit four digits in approximately three months.

The Czech Republic reported on Friday last week its highest daily increase in cases since the start of the coronavirus crisis, with 506, while in Switzerland case numbers are now at a four month record.

In Greece, the rate of infection has stabilised at just above 14 cases per 100,000 people.

The UK Government has set a threshold for imposing quarantine restrictions at 20 cases per 100,000.

Two firms have written to Health Secretary Matt Hancock to make the case for testing people on arrival and then testing them again five days later in order to move away from the blanket 14 day quarantine policy

Split airport in Croatia was busy at the end of last week as UK tourists scrambled to return to the UK before quarantine came into force on Saturday

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said last week when he announced the latest travel advice that people needed to be prepared for a quick change in circumstances when booking holidays.

He said on Thursday: 'Data shows we need to remove Croatia, Austria and Trinidad & Tobago from our list of #coronavirus Travel Corridors to keep infection rates DOWN.

'If you arrive in the UK after 0400 Saturday from these destinations, you will need to self-isolate for 14 days.

'Data also shows we can now add Portugal to those countries INCLUDED in Travel Corridors.

'As with all air bridge countries, please be aware that things can change quickly. Only travel if you are content to unexpectedly 14-day quarantine if required (I speak from experience!)'
If the two storms headed toward the Gulf of Mexico track closely enough, it could set off a rare moment involving an intense dance around their common center.

A National Weather Service post described the phenomenon  known as the Fujiwhara Effect  in those terms after two instances in 2017.

Their circulations sort of detect each other, said Lance Wood, a meteorologist with the National Weather Services Houston/Galveston office, and they can start to move around a common point between them.

TEXAS FLOOD MAP: Your guide to long-term flood-risk data for Houston neighborhoods

Forecasters are keeping an eye on this as Tropical Depression 14 (expected to be named Marco once it strengthens) and Tropical Storm Laura head toward the Gulf of Mexico. As of Friday, Laura was expected to move toward Florida and the northeastern Gulf, while Tropical Depression 14 was headed toward the coast of Texas and/or Louisiana. Both are expected to be in the Gulf of Mexico early next week.

The Fujiwhara Effect is a possibility, Wood said, but it also may not happen. Its too soon to know.

The phenomenon was named for Sakuhei Fujiwhara, who was director of the Central Meteorological Observatory of Japan and first described the interaction of vortices in water in a 1921 paper. He observed the properties of spinning phenomena such as whirlpools and cyclones and saw when two or more drew close to one another they could affect each others the speed, strength and track. The effect can occur when two tropical cyclones get within roughly 900 miles of each other.

It happened twice in 2017, according to the National Weather Service  between hurricanes Hilary and Irwin in the East Pacific and between Typhoon Noru and Tropical Storm Kulap in the West Pacific.

When two hurricanes spinning in the same direction pass close enough to each other, they begin an intense dance around their common center, a NWS post from that year said. If one hurricane is stronger, it could absorb the weaker storm. Two storms closer in strength can be drawn toward each other, spinning each other around before shooting off on their own paths or reaching a common point where they merge. Sometimes, the effect is additive when the hurricanes come together and can create one larger storm instead of two smaller ones.

The Fujiwhara Effect was also credited with changing the course of Hurricane Iris in 1995. The change in heading was probably a consequence of a Fujiwhara interaction between Iris and Humberto located about 750 (nautical miles) to the east, a National Hurricane Center post noted.

Wood is not expecting such dramatic results if the two storms interact next week in the Gulf of Mexico. Hypothetically, he described a situation where both storms strengthen to Category 1 hurricanes (meaning their wind speeds are between 74 mph and 95 mph) and were about 900 miles apart. In this scenario, the common point between the two storms would be in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. This would cause Tropical Depression 14 to slow down a little bit. Tropical Storm Laura would speed up a little.

This potential change in pace is not expected to make Tropical Depression 14 a slow, rainmaking storm like Hurricane Harvey, Wood said.

Its probably going to be pretty subtle, he said.

Wood said the Fujiwhara Effect doesnt happen very often in tropical cyclones. If it occurs this time, it would be next week, closer to when the storms could make landfall.

andrea.leinfelder@chron.com

twitter.com/a_leinfelder
(Natural News) We now have proof that the medical fascists intend to never end the mask mandates, lockdowns and forced quarantine camps that they claim are necessary due to covid-19. All those Orwellian measures are being justified by coronavirus cases stemming solely from people testing positive for the coronavirus. But these tests are largely flawed and produce disturbingly high numbers of false positives. Even when the tests are accurate in terms of a genetic match for the virus, if a person isnt sick with symptoms, then its not a case to begin with.

I explain why merely carrying a virus without symptoms of sickness is not a case in this important medical science article, which is, of course, banned by Facebook, Google and Twitter.

These positive cases are now being used to push global pandemic hysteria, falsely claiming the pandemic is out of control and using that fear to justify endless mask mandates, lockdowns and  soon  vaccine mandates.

By definition, this means the plandemic will never end because there will never be a time when people stop testing positive for the gene sequences that are said to belong to the coronavirus.

And thats by design.

Coronavirus PCR tests match genetic base pairs that already exist in human DNA

In fact, according to this shocking videos posted on Brighteon.com, the coronavirus PCR test uses genetic sequences that are found in all human DNA! This means that as long as human beings are being tested for the coronavirus, there will always be positives which are claimed to be cases.

Its a massive global deception: Cases without symptoms. People arent even sick but they are said to be contributing to an exploding global pandemic that has already come and gone:

So now, when the globalists want to lock down society again, or throw people into quarantine camps against their will, or vaccinate people against their will, all they have to do is increase the testing for a week or two while the hysterical mainstream media reports exploding cases from the increased testing.

Its a massive, coordinated scam. Criminally deceptive medicine. And its all based on wicked globalist agenda, not legitimate science or epidemiology.

And now this elaborate scam is being used to arrest people in their own homes for merely refusing to submit to coronavirus testing. This is happening now in Australia, and in nearby New Zealand, people are being arrested and thrown into quarantine camps against their will, with no escape unless they submit to testing.

The lockdowns, quarantine camps and forced vaccinations are all part of a global genocide program targeting humanity for termination

Understand that the covid-19 plandemic is being used to crush human freedoms and ultimately exterminate up to 90% of the human population. This is being done systematically, deliberately and maliciously. Your own local government is likely complicit in this anti-human plot, and unless you rise up and oppose their anti-human agendas, they will proceed to have you vilified, condemned and ultimately executed.

The coronavirus plandemic isnt merely about globalists making money from vaccines, you see its also about exterminating the vast majority of the human population inhabiting the Earth today. Thats why the top vaccine proponent alive today  Bill Gates  is also the worlds most notable advocate of rapid population reduction measures to eliminate billions of human beings from planet Earth.

I explain the science behind the depopulation agenda in this important podcast:

Stay informed by reading Depopulation.news
By Online Desk

NEW DELHI: A crucial meeting of the Congress Working Committee started here on Monday where Sonia Gandhi told the party that she will quit as the interim party chief amid divisions in the party over the leadership issue.

After asking the CWC to relieve her of the post, she urged the party to start the process to find the new party chief.

"A year has lapsed now. In the interest of the party, I ask CWC to begin deliberations to put in a place of process of transition to relieve me from my duties," said Sonia Gandhi in a statement at the CWC meeting.

She also referred to the letter by Ghulam Nabi Azad, others while offering to quit.

Sonia Gandhi handed over the letter to KC Venugopal replying to note sent by dissidents, contents of which were read out.

Sources said Sonia Gandhi referred to Azad and others twice during her brief address and the issues raised by them.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who spoke after Gandhi, urged her continue and veteran leader AK Antony criticised the dissent letter by some leaders seeking leadership change.

@INCIndia interim chief Sonia Gandhi tells #CWC can't continue and party should start the process to find a president @NewIndianXpress #CongressPresident  richa sharma (@richa_TNIE) August 24, 2020

According to sources, Rahul Gandhi pointed at the timing of the letter by party colleagues and criticised it. He questioned why the letter (over party leadership) sent at a time when Sonia Gandhi was admitted in the hospital.

"It is the CWC and not the media where we put out our thoughts and discuss," he is learnt to have said at the meeting, the sources said.

ALSO READ: Unhappy over Rahul calling shots, party veterans wrote to Sonia

According many reports, Rahul Gandhi also alleged that the dissenters are colluding with the BJP. After Rahul Gandhi's remarks, Ghulam Nabi Azad said that he will quit party if found colluding with BJP.

First public reaction to the comments by Rahul, Senior lawyer and MP Kapil Sibal tweeted: "Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue."

Rahul Gandhi says  we are colluding with BJP 



Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party



Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP Govt.



Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue



Yet  we are colluding with the BJP !  Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) August 24, 2020

The meeting is being attended by veteran leaders including Ex PM Manmohan Singh, Gandhi Siblings, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Amarinder Singh, Mallikarjun Kharge, PL Punia, and many others.

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

Top Congress leaders are expected to deliberate on the issue during the meeting of the party's top decision-making body that is being held virtually.

As the Congress' top decision-making body CWC met virtually to discuss the contentious leadership issue, several party workers gathered at the AICC headquarters raising slogans, asserting that no one except from the Gandhi family would be acceptable as party chief.

Interim party president Sonia Gandhi joins the Congress Working Committee's virtual meeting; the meeting is now underway https://t.co/Ea7oguNhqW  ANI (@ANI) August 24, 2020

Almost all Lok Sabha MPs of the party have written to Sonia Gandhi expressing solidarity and urging her to continue in her post or instal Rahul Gandhi.

Following the dissent letter by a group of senior party leaders, several party men including Punjab CM Capt Amarinder Singh, Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot and Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Bhagel, as well as several state Congress chiefs rallied behind the Gandhis.

They called upon Rahul Gandhi to take over the reins in the event of Sonia stepping down.

However, sources said Rahul Gandhi is unwilling to lead the party.

Sonia took over as interim chief on August 10, 2019 after Rahul stepped down taking responsibility for the partys Lok Sabha debacle.

Rahul Gandhi had resigned from the partys top post in July, 2019.In the letter shared on his Twitter account, Rahul had taken responsibility for the partys massive defeat in the general elections but had added a word of caution for other party leaders.

(With agencies inputs)
At least two people have been killed during inter-ethnic violence which broke out on Saturday northwest of Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. This comes on the heels of the nomination of President Alassane Ouattara to run as the candidate for the ruling RHDP party, for a third term in office.

Clashes occurred in the town on Divo, some 200 kilometres northwest of Abidjan and at least two people were killed, according to hospital sources.

Doctors reported that one man died on Sunday morning from wounds sustained during the clashes, while a second man died in a fire in a bar on Saturday evening, according to witnesses.

Hospital staff also reported that several people had serious injuries from machettes.

On Saturday, Cote d'Ivoire's President Alassane Ouattara was officially chosen as the candidate to represent the ruling RHDP party in the 31 October elections.

Thousands of supporters waving banners and flags turned out for his nomination at the Felix-Houphouet-Boigny stadium in Abidjan.

Ouattara began with a minute of silence in honour of his colleague and former prime minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly, chosen as his successor, but who died suddenly on 8 July.

Rivals Gbagbo and Soro struck off the list

Violent and sometimes deadly protests have spread across the country since 6 August when Ouattara decided to run in the election, going back on his initial promise.

His choice to run for a third mandate has been deemed unconstitutional by the opposition.

Further adding to the tensions, the country's election authorities on Friday rejected appeals by Cote d'Ivoire's former president Laurent Gbagbo and former rebel leader Guillaume Soro to be allowed to run in the October election.

One of the world's biggest producers of coffee and cocoa, Cote d'Ivoire is still traumatised by the post-electoral violence after the 2010 vote, when Gbagbo refused to cede to the victor, Ouattara.
Prominent writers and artists occasionally use cats, dogs, or unusual pets as inspiration for their narratives or paintings. The poet Emily Dickinson had a large dog named Carlo that accompanied her on long walks, mentioning him in a few poems and letters.

Nothing signifies one's social status as a very wealthy high profile figure like having a stable of pets.

Here are a number of examples:

1. Lord Byron

Eccentric British poet Lord Byron could be the OG regarding bending the service pet rules.

The poet was a lover of all types of animals, owning everything from crocodiles to peacocks. However, it was his pet dogs that Byron most adored, reported Cracked.

When Byron attended Trinity College in Cambridge accompanied by his dog, he was stunned to learn that Ye Olde Air Bud cannot be sitting in British Literature 200 next on him. Finding a way around the university rule, it dawned on him that he would not win the battle on having a pup in the classroom. So he grabbed a different type of animal; one that was not explicitly mentioned in the university's rulebook: a bear.

2. Charles Dickens

Being an animal person, the writer owned cats, a canary, dogs, a pony, an eagle, and several subsequent ravens named Grip. The first Grip learned to imitate speech and Dickens fondly recorded his bird's vocabulary, reported Bustle.

When the bird died, Dickens had the raven stuffed and also wrote him into the novel "Barnaby Rudge."

In their travels, Edger Allan Poe met Dickens and Grip. Most Poe scholars think that reading about Grip prompted him to write about ravens as well.

Also Read: Thousands of Chicks Arrive Dead at Farms Amid USPC Budget Cuts

3. Emily Carr

Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr's fascination with animals was detailed in numerous writings. Carr owned an unusual array of parrots, a raccoon, chipmunks, cats, white rats, dogs, and a monkey she named Woo.

According to the 1946 memoir "Growing Pains," "My sister owned a beautiful mare which she permitted me to ride. On the mare, astride as I had ridden in the Cariboo, my sheep-dog following, I went into the woods. No woman had ever ridden cross-saddle before in Victoria! Victoria was shocked! My family sighed. Carrs had always conformed... Too bad, instead of England gentling me into an English Miss with nice ways I was more me than ever, just pure me," reported Invaluable.

4. Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was fond of all types of animals and had numerous unusual pets. In her famous Mexico "Blue House" where she resided and worked, the prominent painter kept many monkeys, an exotic dog of the Xoloitzcuintli breed -- hairless dogs that, it is believed, and parrots.

Among the 143 paintings by Frida Kahlo, 55 are self-portraits that involve at least one of her pets.

Her deer Granizo (Hail) posed with her in numerous photographs, used to sleep with her, and served as inspiration and model for one of her most popular paintings, "Wounded Deer" where she portrayed herself as a deer with a human face.

This list reveals that many influential writers and artists are never satisfied with merely having basic dogs and cats as pets and peculiar pets are one of their trademarks.

Related Article: Nicolas Cage Broke? Actor Spent $150 Million on Islands, Cars, and Zoo Animals



@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The opening ceremony of the International Army Games 2020 (Photo by Lai Yuhong)

By Lai Yuhong and Zhang Zhihua

MOSCOW, Aug. 24 -- The opening ceremony of the International Army Games 2020 (IAG 2020) and the Army-2020 International Military and Technical Forum was held on August 23 in the Patriot Park in the outskirts of Moscow, Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a video-streamed speech that the competition and forum would serve the purpose of strengthening ties between countries in the defense sphere.

President Putin said at the opening ceremony that the military competition events make the international community have the opportunity to see the capabilities of the Russian armed forces, learn about the latest achievements of the Russian and foreign defense industries, as well as successful projects of international cooperation, also facilitate the open and friendly exchange of experience among the participants, and contribute to strengthening peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding among countries and peoples.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said in his speech that the IAG 2020 would bring a visual feast to the participating players and the audience, and the International Military and Technical Forum Army-2020 would serve as a platform to carry out more cooperation projects and strengthen cooperation in terms of international military technology.

The IAG was initiated by the Russian Ministry of Defense. After 7 years of development, it has gradually embarked on a standardized track and become an open international military exchange and cooperation platform with a certain reputation and influence.

The IAG 2020 has been scheduled to run from August 23 to September 5 in Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. A total of 156 teams from more than 30 countries and regions will participate in the competition, with more than 5,000 personnel involved. China has sent 6 teams of more than 260 troops to participate in six contests of the "Tank Biathlon", "Safe Environment", "Masters of Armored Vehicles", "Army Scout Masters", "Open Waters" and "Airborne Platoon".

The International Military and Technical Forum Army-2020 will be held in the Patriot Park and the Kubinka Airport in Moscow from August 23 to August 29, with more than 1,500 enterprises from more than 70 countries and regions involved.
by Pierre Balanian

Several sources say that Lebanons Central Bank has enough reserves for only another three months. After this, subsidies for food and other basic necessities like bread, flour, fuel, and medicine would then end. About 55 per cent of the population could become destitute with 22 per cent sliding into poverty. Just before the recent Beirut explosions the Pm and the central banks governor discussed the issue. Hunger haunts the country as it did a hundred years ago. AsiaNews Help devastated Beirut campaign continues.

Beirut (AsiaNews)  What had been feared for months is happening; Lebanons Central Bank is about to declare bankruptcy.

Some trusted sources told AsiaNews yesterday that in three months the Banque du Libans reserves are likely to drop to US$ 17,5 billion, which it cannot spend because it is legally required to keep 15 per cent of the country's deposits in reserve.

This means that government subsidies for food and other basic items like bread, flour, fuel, and medicines will stop three months from now. Such subsidies cost US$ 700 million a month and are designed to keep prices low.

Now, financial experts and business reports in Lebanon are saying the same thing: the central bank has no more dollars. At present, it is impossible even to find Lebanese pounds. ATMs barely give out a third of the allowable amount and are often empty of cash.

Now ordinary Lebanese expect the banks, the central bank, the governor and the government are preparing to "raid depositors accounts, that they are "filing for bankruptcy", that the banks will merge into one that give shares in lieu of actual money in the accounts," shares that will be worthless in the stock exchange.

The Governor of the Central Bank Riad Salame recently sought an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) equal to his countrys share, 800 million dollars, but, although possibility under the IMF constitution, the request was turned down.

If the Lebanese government withdraws all price support to basic foodstuffs, prices will jump immediately for more than half of the population who already are reduced to one meal a day, instead of the usual three.

Perhaps in the coming months it will be possible to help the poorest with coupons whilst liberalising consumer prices. However, this will turn more than 55 per cent of the population into beggars and threaten 22 per cent of the population, or 850,000 people, with poverty.

Recently, sources close to former Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab (whom people are beginning to call the most honest and loyal head of government Lebanon has ever had) have revealed to the media the contents of his last conversation with Riad Salame, on 30 July.

Riad, we have enough reserves, right?" Diab is supposed to have said. And the governor of central banks answer was: "Yes, we have a margin of 2 billion (dollars)," but added we cannot touch the compulsory reserves" (i.e. 15 per cent of the deposits that banks are required to keep in the central bank, about US$ 17,5 billion).

A few days later, the Port of Beirut was hit by two explosions. Now, with the immediate emergency over, the first shock and pain absorbed, it is back to the festering wound and the rumour mill is now saying that the Central Bank is about to run out of money.

Months ago, the world media predicted a future of hardship and hunger for Lebanon, similar to the disaster of the 1915-1918, when Turkey tried to crush the Lebanese through hunger. History will tell us once again whether hunger and death will be visited upon today's Lebanese.

In order to help the people of Beirut and Lebanon, as well as Caritas Lebanon, AsiaNews has launched a campaign to Help devastated Beirut. Those who want to contribute can make a donation to:

PIME Foundation:

- International Bank Account Number (IBAN): IT78C0306909606100000169898

- Bank Identifier Code (BIC): BCITITMM

- Reason for transfer: AN04  HELP DEVASTATED BEIRUT
analysis

Since its inception in 2002 the African Union has been under pressure to resolve the extensive peace and security challenges facing the continent. In particular, it's tried to address the limitations faced by its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity's (OAU), in this area.

The biggest change has been the shift away from the OAU's so-called non-interference stance to the AU's more interventionist approach. This is most explicitly found in Article 4 of the AU Constitutive Act.

The AU's African Peace and Security Architecture was established when the organisation adopted the Protocol on the Establishment of the Peace and Security Council in July 2002. It is guided by the AU's mandate and its interventionist approach.

The architecture, which has five pillars composed of AU organs and bodies, drives the AU's peace and security work. Its aim is to prevent, manage and resolve conflicts by working collaboratively with the Regional Economic Communities and Mechanisms. Therefore, the peace and security architecture has a role to play from the early warning and conflict prevention stages to that of post-conflict development.

The five pillars are: the Peace and Security Council, the Panel of the Wise; the Continental Early Warning System; the Standby Force, and the Peace Fund.

While not all pillars function as intended, there have nevertheless been a number of success stories in which the architecture was instrumental.

Peace and Security Council

The Peace and Security Council is the main decision-making body of the peace and security architecture and can take decisions on a number of fronts. These include:

implementing the AU's common defence policy,

performing peace making and building functions,

authorising and overseeing peace support missions,

recommending Article 4(h) interventions for situations of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, and

impose sanctions for unconstitutional changes of government, to name a few.

As such, it has issued a plethora of decisions since its inception with varying degrees of success. Most recently, it suspended Mali from the African Union after the coup that ousted President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.

Yet, the Council does not always respond, or is sometimes slow to respond, to developing situations and conflicts. Cameroon, has proved to be one such situation where the Council has remained largely quiet on over the years.

There are a number of reasons for these shortcomings.

First, despite only requiring a majority vote, it is subject to political constraints that hamper its decisions. This is despite the provision that disallows countries that are being discussed from participating in Council meetings concerning them. Such countries are only allowed to make a statement.

There are also financial and personnel constraints. For example, mustering enough troops to fulfil a mandate can be a challenge. And then there's the question of financing, training and equipping them. This is a common problem for the AU's mission in Somalia.

In addition, there has been external influence and undermining of the Council's attempts at conflict resolution. A case in point was NATO's intervention in Libya, which was parallel to the AU's mediation efforts.

Panel of the Wise

The Panel of the Wise acts as the advisory body to the Peace and Security Council. It has a mediation and preventative diplomacy role.

The panel's five elders are chosen based on their contributions to peace, security and development. They work either at the request of the Peace and Security Council, or on the panel's own initiative.

The panel has successfully undertaken various roles, including when there's been need for a neutral, respected diplomatic intervention.

Examples of their work includes interventions in Kenya's post-election violence in 2008, and their reports regarding the Arab spring.

Continental Early Warning System

The mandate of the Continental Early Warning System is conflict prevention and anticipating events.

Both are notoriously difficult. Prevention and anticipation rely on accurate data and political will to act, yet the Peace and Security Council tends to react more to conflicts rather than preempt them.

Reports from the early warning system inform the Council and remain one of the ways it is prompted to meet. To be more effective, the early warning system needs to work more collaboratively with nongovernmental and international organisations, academic institutions and research centres.

While this system continues to suffer from staff and funding shortages, building capacity is ongoing.

African Standby Force

Composed of contingents from the five regions, the African Standby Force's job is to implement decisions made by the Peace and Security Council. This includes authorised interventions, conflict and dispute prevention, observation, monitoring and any type of peace support mission, humanitarian assistance and peacebuilding.

But there were delays in getting it off the ground. Mobilising a standby force from across the 55 states was never going to be easy because the appetite for involvement in peace support operations differs. Second is the diverse states of readiness and capabilities of military, police and civilians across countries and regions.

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Despite the 2003 decision to establish the force, it was only in 2016 that the force was officially considered to have obtained full operational capacity. Since then, it has yet be deployed.

Peace Fund

The Peace Fund is tasked with the mammoth role of ensuring availability of funds.

The vast majority of AU members struggle to meet their membership dues, and self-financing of the AU has yet to prove possible. This means that the fund struggles to secure support from African states.

The fund is financed from the AU's budget, fundraising and voluntary contributions from AU Members, individuals, civil society, international partners, and the private sector.

While $164 million has been raised to date, it is well below the target of $400 million.

Overall, the success of the African Peace and Security Architecture is paramount for Africa's development and human security. Its value in the continent's peace and security agenda should not be underestimated.

Dominique Mystris, Senior Researcher, SA SDG Hub, University of Pretoria
14 dead, scores wounded in twin bombings in Philippines Soldiers stretcher away a colleague injured in a bomb blast in Jolo on Sulu island in the Philippines

At least 14 people were killed and 75 wounded -- including members of the security forces and civilians -- in twin bombings Monday involving a suicide attacker on a southern Philippine island that is a stronghold of Islamist militants, officials said.

The apparently coordinated attacks happened in Jolo in Muslim-majority Sulu, where government-backed security forces have long been fighting the Abu Sayyaf group.

Seven soldiers, a police officer, and six civilians were killed in the two bombings, the first at around midday when an improvised explosive device attached to a motorcycle parked outside a supermarket blew up, Lieutenant General Corleto Vinluan said.

That was followed by a second blast a short time later in the same street when a suicide attacker blew herself up as security forces cordoned off the area, Vinluan said.

A soldier had been trying to apprehend the bomber when she detonated her explosives, he added.

A total of 48 civilians were also wounded along with 21 soldiers and six police.

A soldier saw a person leave the motorbike outside the grocery store "where there were a lot of people" including members of the military. It immediately detonated, Lieutenant Colonel Ronaldo Mateo said.

"Our soldiers are conducting security operations. That was the time that the improvised explosive device detonated," he said.

Abu Sayyaf was "most probably" behind the double bombing, Mateo said.

- Blasts follow arrest -

Listed by the United States as a terrorist organisation, Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of Islamic militants blamed for the Philippines' worst terror attacks as well as kidnappings of foreign tourists and Christian missionaries.

They also have ties to Islamic State militants seeking to set up a caliphate in Southeast Asia.

Monday's attacks come after the arrest earlier this month of an Abu Sayyaf leader on the southern island of Mindanao.

Security forces had been on alert for possible reprisal attacks after detaining Abduljihad Susukan, who is accused of kidnapping and beheading several foreigners.

Story continues

He has been charged with 23 murders, five kidnappings and six attempted murders, police have said.

President Rodrigo Duterte's spokesman Harry Roque condemned the "dastardly attacks" and issued condolences to the families and loved ones of those killed.

"We call on the residents of Jolo to stay vigilant and report suspicious personalities and unattended items in their areas," Roque said.

The Philippine Coast Guard issued a "red alert" for Sulu and several other areas in the restive south as it assists the military and police in responding to the incident.

The explosions happened near a Catholic cathedral in Jolo where two suicide bombers blew themselves up in January 2019 killing 21 people. It was blamed on a group linked to Abu Sayyaf.

str-bur-amj/fox
WHO lauds efforts of Iranian nurses in COVID-19 battle

07/22/20

Source: Tehran Times

The World Health Organization (WHO) has praised the Iranian nurses for playing an effective role in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.



A group of Iranian nurses at the frontline of COVID-19 battle

During the 8th "Triad Meeting" of the International Council of Nurses (ICN), the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), and the WHO which was held online on June 16-18, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom said that in many countries, nurses make up half of the total people providing care, and at the frontline, they are responsible for the quality of the initial care assessment in the health system.



He made the remarks while emphasizing the need to invest in nursing and midwifery and to define nursing as a profession that requires education and management.



Over 600 government chief nursing and midwifery officers, leaders and representatives of national nursing and midwifery associations from more than 145 countries attended the meeting.



The event took place under the dual spotlight of the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife and the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on actions that participants in their respective roles agree to take to support WHO Member States in strengthening nursing and midwifery towards priority health targets, including responding to COVID-19 and achieving universal health coverage.



Maryam Hazrati, the Iranian deputy health minister for nursing, said for her part "Since the outbreak of COVID-19, more than 120,000 nurses have provided direct services to the infected patients and intensive care units in the ICU, as well as providing care at the patients' houses.



Training and empowerment of nursing groups and other service groups in the form of 1,283 courses held by educational supervisors of infection control in hospitals, development of instructions and a standard package of medical and nursing services for patients with mild COVID-19 at home with the aim of reducing out-of-pocket payments, were among the actions taken by the ministry, she explained.



She went on to add that more than 1,300 faculty members, nursing students, and retired nurses joined us as volunteers to provide training and counseling services.



The importance of collaborating and sharing information on the status of nursing to prepare the roadmap and investment priorities and empower nurses and midwives to reduce costs, as well as challenges related to personal protective equipment and protection of health care personnel against violence were other issues discussed at this meeting.



The shortage of 18 million health workers by 2030 in low- and middle-income countries and in other countries and the problems of education, employment, and retention of labor in these countries were also addressed.



The mismatch between the training of human resources and the needs of the population and the problems caused by sending health workers to remote areas are known causes of labor shortages, and in addition, the migration of health workers from developing countries contributes to these shortages.



Hazrati also said in May that some 65 percent of 200,000 nurses in the country was at the forefront of coronavirus fight.



Since March 25, it is reported that 164 healthcare workers in the country have lost their lives due to the coronavirus infection, according to Es'haq Jahangiri, Iran's first vice president.



Doctors, nurses, and other staff are making efforts in overwhelming and frightening conditions, not only because the virus is new or invisible, but because mostly they are overworked and vulnerable to the infection.



Richard Brennan, WHO Regional Emergency Director for the Eastern Mediterranean Region and mission team lead earlier in March said that "Iran's strategies and priorities to control COVID-19 are evolving in the right direction, a comprehensive coordinated approach is being applied, and solid work is being done especially in the areas of case management, laboratories, and risk communications. We are also impressed by the engagement from other sectors of the community.



Health officials and health workers are clearly working very hard, and are committed to controlling this outbreak and saving lives. The government is leveraging the strong national health system and disaster management capacities to respond to the outbreak."



Barbara Rizzoli, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Tehran, also said in May that the actions taken by the Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) to battle COVID-19 outbreak were very significant in various fields, including prevention and treatment.



In the fight against coronavirus, the IRCS, along with the Ministry of Health and other responsible organizations, has undertaken important activities, from rapid diagnosis and screening to providing medical services and shelter, she noted, adding, but the most important activity of this population has been informing the public about healthcare and treatment.
As the nation continues to fight the rampant spread of coronavirus across the states, a new state has been named with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

Mississippi is the only state currently considered a "Red Zone," where daily new cases surpass 25 per 100,000 residents, according to a Harvard Global Health initiative COVID-19 tracker.

Other states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and California are seeing higher total case counts due to their larger populations. But the infection rates in Mississippi are higher per capita compared to these populated states.

Mississippi had reached a total of 77,894 cases and 2,240 deaths, as of Sunday afternoon. Cases have decreased over the past two weeks in the state, but Mississippi officials have warned the public that a new surge might be on its way.

The state health officer for the Mississippi State Department of Health, Thomas Dobbs, MD, MPH, said he expects an even more severe surge this week.

Dobbs said this was due to schools, colleges, and "really, really bad judgment coming together." This could be dangerous in counties with high infection rates. Some Mississippi counties have already topped 100 new daily cases per 100,000 residents.

"A lot of the outbreaks we're seeing at the high schools is because the parents are hosting parties. Senior parties, groups, spend-the-night parties. I don't know why this doesn't scare people, but it's illegal," Dobbs said in a report.

Mississippi School District

Lafayette County School District's whole fourth-grade class will be quarantined in the next two weeks due to more positive COVID-19 cases.

The school district reported on Sunday that three new cases were all located in the Lafayette Upper Elementary School (LUES) faculty.

LUES has six COVID-19 cases among faculty and staff and one positive case among the students. The 14-day quarantine will start on Aug. 24 and will end on Sept. 7. The school district also said they were extending their hybrid return of two split groups.

"We believe taking this step will better protect our students and help our efforts to contain while providing a healthy environment for all of our students and staff," the school district said in a report.

Mississippi Governor on COVID-19

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced two measures to assist students and teachers as more schools continue to reopen.

One expands access to coronavirus testing to teachers, even if they are not showing any symptoms. The other allows emergency telehealth services to be offered at schools for students covered under Medicaid. Reeves noted that this could be an option for about half of Mississippi school campuses.

Reeves said these measures would allow schools, even without school nurses or school-based clinics, to access telehealth services. He added that a physician or a healthcare worker would be able to provide remote services in schools across the state.

Meanwhile, teachers can get a test at the state's primary drive-through site in Jackson, or one of the mobile sites that rotate throughout Mississippi.

Dobbs said 16 new testing teams would begin roving around local health department offices to offer free drive-through testing for educators.

Check these out:

Mississippi Governor Issues Order Delaying School Reopenings as COVID-19 Cases Rise

New Study Suggests Younger Kids Might Be Greater COVID-19 Carriers

Florida Bar and Restaurant Owners Face Foreclosures
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

By Nargiz Ismayilova  Trend:

The share of Turkmenistan in total import of Azerbaijan dropped from 1.15 to 0.84 percent from January through July 2020 of the total import volume, Trend reports citing the statistical bulletin of State Customs Committee (SCC).

Foreign trade operations of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan amounted to $60.7 million in the first seven months of 2020, which is 84.2 percent less compared to the same period of 2019.

The export of Azerbaijani products to Turkmenistan for the reporting period made up $11.2 million, while a year earlier  $14.5 million. Thus, Turkmenistan purchased products from Azerbaijan by 29.4 percent less than in the first seven months of last year. Turkmenistans share in the total export of Azerbaijan did not change, noted the SCCs report.

The report said that the volume of import of Turkmen products by Azerbaijan slumped by almost 96.1 percent, decreasing from $97.3 million to $49.6 million.

Accordingly, the balance of foreign trade turnover of the two countries for the specifying period remained negative, making up $38.4 million, added the report.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @IsmailovaNargis
Photo: @JustinMoris / Twitter

Vancouver Police say a man broke his leg after allegedly being thrown to the ground for asking anti-gay demonstrators to stop chanting.

In an email, VPD Spokesperson Sgt. Aaron Roed tells Glacier Media that officers responded to a disturbance in the area of Davie and Thurlow Streets on Saturday, Aug. 22 around 8 p.m. He says that a group of people using a microphone and amplifier were preaching about religion and anti-gay chants.

"A short time after the preaching started one individual approached the group and asked them to stop the anti-gay chants and to stop speaking into the microphone," writes Roed. "A disturbance ensued and the individual is suspected to have been thrown to the ground, where they unfortunately broke their leg."

Roed adds that two men from the group who were chanting were arrested for aggravated assault and mischief and transported to jail. Since then, both men have been released with conditions to attend court at a later date. They must not have contact with the victim, and are not permitted to go into the area bordered by Comox Street to the North, Burrard Street to the East, Denman Street to the West and Beach Avenue to the South, (this includes English Bay Beach and Sunset Beach).

In a series of Tweets, Sportsnets 650 host Justin Morissette writes that "anti-gay evangelical bullies in the West End" purposefully broke his leg because he told them to stop chanting. He adds that he is going to, "have metal plates in my leg for the rest of my life."

In another Tweet, Morissette writes, "Im only tweeting about this because there have been too many instances of unchecked racism and during the pandemic, videos of people spewing hate while everyone just sits there and ignores it."

Following the incident, Morisette was transported to hospital for treatment.

VPD is requesting that if there is any additional witnesses to the assault to please contact VPD officers to provide additional information.

"VPD will not tolerate any type of hate crimes and will investigate all reports of hate crimes or suspected hate crimes that happen in the City of Vancouver. Public safety will always remain a priority for the VPD and we want everyone to feel safe and comfortable in their communities and neighbourhoods they visit," writes Roed.

VPD is recommending charges of Aggravated assault and mischief. VPD hate crime investigators have been notified and will be investigating this file for any hate related information about the incident.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called for "immediate action against any and all officers who violated the law" during a police encounter Sunday in Kenosha, Wis., that ended when an officer shot an unarmed African-American man numerous times in the back in front of his young children.

That shooting, captured on cellphone video, shows Jacob Blake walking around the front of his SUV to his driver-side door as officers follow him with their guns pointed at him. As Blake opens the door and attempts to enter the car, an officer grabs him from behind and opens fire while Blake has his back turned. Seven shots were fired. Blake was hospitalized in serious condition. Three officers were placed on administrative leave.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers issued a statement identifying Blake as the victim and condemning the shooting. Evers said in part: "While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country."

SEE: Protests Erupt After Wisconsin Police Shoot Black Man in Back

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/8/23/21398607/kenosha-police-shooting-video-officer-shoot-man-in-back-protests

In a statement, CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said:

"Enough is enough. The fact that these horrific and unnecessary shootings continue to occur serves as further proof that we must quickly and radically reform the way that law enforcement agencies operate, especially in communities of color.

"We join Muslims across America in praying for God to grant swift justice and complete healing to Jacob Blake. We also call for authorities to take immediate action against any and all officers who violated the law by confronting and then shooting Jacob Blake after he reportedly attempted to break up a fight."

He noted that last week, CAIR and its Arizona chapter (CAIR-Arizona) demanded a transparent and independent criminal investigation and the firing of officers involved in the 2017 killing of Muhammad Muhaymin Jr., a Black Muslim man.

Video: CAIR, CAIR-AZ Demand Criminal Probe, Firing of Officers Involved in 2017 Killing of Black Muslim Man

https://youtu.be/iZX9xihNIcs

Washington, D.C.-based CAIR and the American Muslim community are standing in solidarity with all those challenging anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and white supremacy.

Video: CAIR-MN, Police Accountability Groups Call for Firing of Minneapolis Police Federation Head

https://youtu.be/zRogRNKqcjo

Video: CAIR Director Nihad Awad Speaks at Unveiling of Black Lives Matter Banner

https://youtu.be/-JqzmtVqORc

CAIR is America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to protect civil rights, enhance understanding of Islam, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.

La mision de CAIR es proteger las libertades civiles, mejorar la comprension del Islam, promover la justicia, y empoderar a los musulmanes en los Estados Unidos.

CONTACT: CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, [email protected]; CAIR Director of Government Affairs Department Robert S. McCaw, 202-999-8292, [email protected]

SOURCE Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

Related Links

http://www.cair.com


The Gulag Archipelago, Part III: A zeitgeist of our civilization By Charlotte B. Cerminaro

If the great poet from Stratford-upon-Avon could have had a glimpse of the twentieth and early twenty-first century society, to what would he have compared it? Certainly not a beautiful summers day; its both unlovely and intemperate. Our very language has de-evolved into a strange mix of PC and catastrophizing, full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing. Would words have failed the bard, in the face of such unfathomable cultural and moral decay? The degeneration of language that began in the latter half of the twentieth century is appalling and confusing to most logicians and historians, let alone writers. Surely the trend toward linguistic annihilation is a very telling clue to our current heading. As the basic tool of communication and a powerful mode for accurate reasoning, learning and emotional expression, we are crippled by its paucity. Spoken and written language is hardwired in our basic operating systems. Information essential to our survival, in the form of language, has been handed down through generations for millennia. Words have also conveyed knowledge of things abstract and intangible but no less real: universal and elemental ideas such as truth, good and evil, the nature of and reason for our existence, understanding and communing with our Creator. So, if language is a necessity for our existence and continuation as a species and its current form has changed dramaticallymuch can be deduced about the degeneration of ideas, critical thinking, ethics, culture and government, not just language and writing as an art. Language, like any mode of artistic expression, communicates vital information as a cultural barometer and a mirror through which the state of humanity is reflected. As such, the epic historical novels of this past century should be able to inform, and possibly transform, what we see. The Gulag Archipelago, written by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, is one such novel. It was in 1970 that the Nobel prize in literature was awarded Solzhenitsyn for his work. A former Gulag prisoner and a powerful writer with a prolific memory, he shocked the world by unveiling one of the most horrific events in historyfrom the Bolshevik revolution to the establishment of the Soviet Union, the previously unknown story of an untold holocaust was a secret kept for nearly 40 years. As a political dissident and enemy of the Soviet government, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was one among millions who were either executed or exiled. Most exiles were sent to Siberian re-education camps, located in a remote and desolate chain of islands. Aside from working as slave labor (think concentration camps) they were re-educated in social compliance by learning a new vocabulary, one that redefined communist ideology as a common good, and the enforcement of this ideology as beneficial, even humane. The Soviet leadership under Joseph Stalin disguised their brutal, genocidal behavior in a cloak of secrecy by closing off all avenues of communication. No media, no writing, no talking or reporting. Instead, the Soviet government became the media propaganda machine--and the rest of the world was largely ignorant of the unthinkable tragedy that was unfolding just over Russias borders. They defined their reality with their words, and changed their words to hide the true nature of their reality. Until 1970, no one knew the full magnitude of the atrocities and crimes against humanity that left over 15 million people dead. Solzhenitsyn understood that the mindless, petty bureaucrats and low-level interrogators were just following orders (a ubiquitous phrase in post-war Germany as well) and that behind the lesser acts of human cruelty lay a much greater evil. The visible figurehead of oppression and injustice, Stalin himself was, unfortunately, not a singularity but a symptom. Soviet Russia was only one among many sites where this growing ideology seemed to defy every law, every code of morality, where humans became monstrous forces of destruction, possessing unthinkable power and malevolence. Three hundred years after Shakespeare walked the earth, another poetone with uncanny insight on world historywrote a short description, chilling in its accuracy and potent use of biblical narrative. The violent geopolitical events that heralded the first World War would only be faintly visible, approaching in the distant horizon when this poem was written, yet it continues to be quoted, excerpts used for book and movie titles and for current political commentary. The reader is faced with a grim reality, the moral insanity and spiritual illness of a world already beyond its tipping point, and the dark, ancient entity at its epicenter. And this is W.B. Yeats conclusion: ...Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand... Hardly are those words out when a vast image troubles my sight: Somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and head of man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about Reel shadows of indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?



- W.B. Yeats The Second Coming Charlotte B. Cerminaro is a Juilliard-trained classical musician who, in addition to being a studio and orchestral musician, enjoys writing.  2020 Home
First in Nation Community College Collaboration Aligns Colorado & California Aerospace Hubs to Create the "Space, Cyber & Supply Talent Development Center"

First in Nation Community College Collaboration Aligns Colorado & California Aerospace Hubs to Create the "Space, Cyber & Supply Talent Development Center"

Denver, CO, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Red Rocks Community College in Colorado and El Camino College in California have announced a first in the nation community college collaboration to create the Space, Cyber & Supply Talent Development Center (SCSTDC). The partnership bridges two different aerospace hubs and maximizes opportunities for partnerships with stakeholders that share economic and workforce development goals in STEM and the aerospace industry. Both colleges have shown strong results in aligning classes with jobs and helping people obtain workplace relevant experience.

Red Rocks Community College is the nations leading two-year institution on the cybersecurity front, with designation from the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, their cybersecurity-related Bachelor of Applied Science degree program, and their regional OSHA training center that serves six states and is authorized by the US Department of Labor.

El Camino College has helped over 6,600 people secure workforce training and apprenticeships leading to in-demand, high-wage jobs at over 250 aerospace companies. El Camino is a leader in the California Apprenticeship Initiative through its aerospace technician apprenticeship program, which is designed to help employers sponsor apprentices. El Camino is also a partner in UCLAs Smart Manufacturing Institute to advance a new workforce development model for education and training. El Camino is part of CASCADE (California Advanced Supply Chain Analysis & Diversification Effort), the Governors Office initiative focusing on the cybersecurity resiliency of Californias defense supply chain.

By aligning the efforts of Red Rocks and El Camino, we will be able to work together to support the robust aerospace sectors in each of our respective regions. I hope the SCSTDC becomes a juggernaut of collaboration for the aerospace industry and most importantly helps people who are unemployed and looking for new opportunities, said Dena P. Maloney, Ed.D., President of El Camino College, the hometown community college to the Los Angeles Air Force Base, which houses the headquarters of the US Space Force's Space and Missile Systems Center.

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Recently, a working group of more than 120 people from across the federal government, industry, and academia met to assess the current health of the space industry. Their recommendations were contained in the State of the Space Industrial Base 2020 summary report, which included insights and recommendations for the industry including the importance of public private partnerships. The report also called for the future of a STEM workforce, stating that talent, vision and education will drive the future of the US space industrial base and that industry must be more proactive in working across the US education system to develop the needed STEM talent.

At Red Rocks, we have the first registered apprenticeship in cybersecurity in the state of Colorado through Northrop Grumman and look to bring that expertise to our collaboration with El Camino. We share an urgency to provide workplace-relevant experience so that students are prepared for new jobs that will ultimately support our economic recovery, said Dr. Michele Haney, President of Red Rocks Community College located in central Colorado, immediately west of Denver and about 60 miles north-northwest of Colorado Springs, the home of the US Air Force Academy and Peterson Air Force Base, the provisional headquarters for US Space Force.

In announcing the Space, Cyber & Supply Talent Development Center, the colleges set three major goals:

Establish a new economic and workforce development educational effort focused on each respective institutions strengths in aerospace and supply chain training; Share specific company connections to further expand opportunities and placements; Reciprocity in instruction and shared best practices.

Americas leadership in space is vitally important to the nations future and critically depends on growing our aerospace workforce, with the needed STEM skills. Community colleges play an important role in talent development and jobs bridge, particularly in aerospace hubs such as Colorado and Southern California. It is important for the Federal government and the Congress to invest in education and job training to ensure our continued leadership in space, said Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael A. Hamel, a former member of the Red Rocks Community College Foundation Board of Directors and the former Commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center. By working together, Red Rocks and El Camino are advancing an ambitious plan that could serve as a national model.

###

About Red Rocks Community College

Red Rocks Community College (RRCC) is central Colorados leading point of entry to higher education and the states competitive workforce. RRCC delivers high quality, cost-effective programs that are nationally recognized, including in-demand workforce certificates, Associate and Bachelors of Applied Science degrees, and a Masters Degree in Physicians Assistant Studies. RRCC is part of the Colorado Community College System, the states largest system of higher education, delivering more than 1,000 programs to over 125,000 students annually through 13 colleges and 40 locations across Colorado. Learn more about Red Rocks at www.rrcc.edu. RRCC Contact: Wren Barnes, Wren.Barnes@rrcc.edu.

About El Camino College

Since 1947, El Camino College has been the community college of choice for the vibrant and diverse South Bay region of Los Angeles. Each year, some 25,000 students are served by El Camino. Thanks to its location in the heart of Southern Californias aerospace industry, El Camino is a trusted community partner that provides cutting-edge training in manufacturing, design, cybersecurity, and other in-demand skills to keep vital workforce pipelines filled. El Camino is also one of Californias leading transfer institutions, consistently ranking among the top 5 community colleges statewide in transfers to the California State University system and in the top 10 for the University of California. Learn more at www.elcamino.edu/. El Camino Contact: Marc Stevens, mstevens@elcamino.edu.

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CONTACT: Fiona Lytle Colorado Community College System (720) 393-9824 fiona.lytle@cccs.edu




SARATOGA  During his tenure as a New York City police officer, Town Justice Daniel Waldron was named in 10 complaints alleging police misconduct, according to a database released last week by the American Civil Liberties Union of New York.

Waldron, who was in the NYPD for 20 years, was named in complaints for allegedly cursing, beating, drawing his gun, pushing and shoving and threatening to arrest, along with other complaints, from 1994 to 2004. But in all instances, Waldron was exonerated, or the complaints were either unfounded or unsubstantiated. Also on one occasion in November 1999, Waldrons use of pepper spray was deemed truncated.

However, the ACLU of New York said that 323,911 complaints filed against 81,550 police officers in the last 35 years shows that the NYPD "is unwilling to police itself" because the complaints were filed "behind a wall of secrecy." Of the hundreds of thousands of complaints, 8,699 led to penalties and only a dozen officers were dismissed by the NYPD after an individual filed a complaint.

The ACLU also put Waldron in a subset of 19,833 officers, about a quarter of them, who had five or more complaints filed against them.

In June, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order on police reform that included "allowing for transparency of prior disciplinary records of law enforcement officers by reforming 50-a of the civil rights law." That led to the ACLU seeking out all of the complaints filed against the NYPD officers.

Waldron, a two-term town Republican, said he cant remember what is in the files as it was too long ago. However, he said complaints against officers are a harassment tactic used by defense attorneys and their clients.

It was common practice then and is common practice now for defense attorneys to typically ask their clients if they made a complaint against the officer because they know it can often help their court case if they can try to cast aspersions on the police officer, Waldron said.

Alleged complaints against Waldron also include abusing his authority to enter and search a premises  once in July 2003 and again in August 2004.

In a press release from the ACLU, Legal Director Christopher Dunn said that the release of the complaints will force accountability and transparency in the NYPD.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Until now, the police accountability process has been at the discretion of the NYPD, which determines which Civilian Complaint Review Board investigations result in discipline and what information is revealed from that process, Dunn said. "The release of this database is an important step towards greater transparency and accountability and is just the beginning of unraveling the monopoly the NYPD holds on public information and officer discipline.

Waldron, a Republican, said he joined the NYPD in 1987 and worked out of the 46th precinct in the Bronx. He was promoted to sergeant in 2001 and moved to the 24th precinct in Manhattan. He said he retired from the NYPD in 2007. Waldron, whose town justice term will expire at the end of 2022, moved to the Town of Saratoga in 2009.

He said as a police officer, he did his job well.

I never acted beyond the scope of my authority, Waldron said. I never abused anyone, never used excessive force and the record reflects that.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York ACLU, said the release of the data will lead to an "honest reckoning with the NYPD's long, violent history."

Sharing information about officers with long histories of misconduct is a public safety imperative and a first step toward justice for people who have experienced police brutality," she said.
IAEA chief's visit to Iran nothing to do with trigger mechanism

ISNA - Iranian Students' News Agency

Sun / 23 August 2020 / 16:02

Tehran (ISNA) - Ambassador and permanent representative of Iran to the International Organizations in Vienna, Kazem Gharib-Abadi stressed that the upcoming visit to Tehran by Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi has nothing to do with a U.S. push to impose so-called "snapback" sanctions on Iran.

"Rafael Grossi will travel to Tehran on Monday and is to meet with the Iranian officials on Tuesday and Wednesday," Kazem Gharib-Abadi said.

"IAEA chief's visit to Tehran is necessary because Iran's confidence in the Agency has been sapped in recent months. The visit by Rafael Grossi comes within the framework of Iran's invitation. It is neither related to the snapback mechanism nor the U.S. demand," he added.

"We don't allow others manage relations between Iran and the IAEA particularly in the current sensitive situation. It is important to assure Tehran that the agency will move based on impartiality, independence and professionalism and will also not take any action far from the standards and the agency's independent data and examinations. If the IAEA does so, misunderstandings will be solved and cooperation will continue," the official stressed.

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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The suspected poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny underscores the dangers Russians face for speaking out against President Vladimir Putin. Its also a warning to those currently protesting for democratic change in neighboring Belarus. So long as Putin remains at the helm, Russia will continue to pose a serious threat to democratic values, in its periphery and beyond.

A coherent strategy to confront this challenge will be essential for the next U.S. administration. It should include responding more directly to Putins provocations, raising the costs for Russian misconduct, and strengthening Americas relationships with its NATO allies. The U.S. shouldnt rule out cooperation with Moscow in areas of mutual interest, but only when doing so demonstrably advances its own security.

Above all, Washington must send clear signals to Putin about the kinds of behavior the U.S. deems unacceptable. The Trump administrations policies have instead been characterized by inconstancy. Since 2017, the U.S. has imposed sanctions against Russian individuals and some government entities for a range of actions, from conducting cyberattacks to meddling in Ukraine to poisoning a former Russian spy living in the U.K. Yet the impact of these measures has been blunted by Trumps resistance to tougher penalties, his acceptance of Putins denial of interference in the 2016 election, and his push to welcome Russia back into the Group of Seven club of industrial nations.

More recently, Trump has refused to respond to intelligence assessments that Russian operatives paid bounties to Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops. The U.S. should avoid a rush to judgment, but the presidents willingness to side with the Kremlins version of events, rather than that of his own intelligence agencies, is disturbing. At a minimum, the White House should suspend high-level communication with Moscow while it conducts a thorough investigation. If the deaths of American troops are traced back to Russian operatives, the U.S. should impose a cost that will make Putin regret those actions.

Story continues

Meanwhile, Washington needs to push back against Putins efforts to divide NATO and subvert the U.S. political system. Military and diplomatic officials should remind their counterparts of Americas capacity to retaliate if Russia attempts to meddle in this falls election. The next administration should repair relationships with NATO partners and work with them on modernizing weapons systems. The U.S. should also reverse Trumps decision to remove some 9,000 troops from Germany, which has cheered Russia at the expense of allies security.

As during the Cold War, the U.S. should look for ways to manage tensions and reduce the risks of catastrophic escalation. Russia lacks the economic power to compete with the U.S., but it possesses the worlds biggest nuclear arsenal and a larger military budget than any European country. Extending and strengthening the New START treaty, a bilateral arms-control agreement thats due to expire next February, is critical for the security of both countries. Seeking collaboration in areas of shared concern  on climate change, say, or space policy  would also make sense.

Engaging with Putin, however, should not mean placating him. Consistent messaging, tougher deterrence measures and resolute support for allies are essential to a successful strategy. Continued drift will only embolden Putin and his operatives, to the detriment of Americas security and the worlds.

Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.

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.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is reportedly in a state of coma and his sister Kim Yo-jong is likely to take over. Several media outlets quoted Chang Song-min, former aide of South Korea's late president Kim Dae-jung, who said that the North Korean leader is likely to be in coma.

"I assess him to be in a coma, but his life has not ended. A complete succession structure has not been formed, so Kim Yo-jong is being brought to the fore as the vacuum cannot be maintained for a prolonged period," said Chang Song-min told The Korea Herald.

Chang claimed to have received his intel from a source in China, according to the news outlet. He also stated that all photos released by North Korea in the recent months were fake.

According to the daily, Seoul's spy agency told lawmakers that a ruling system seems to have been set up by Kim Jong Un, following which he is likely to share authority and responsibility with his most-trusted aides. However, the National Intelligence Agency, said that this is not associated to any serious health issue.

However, Chang said in a social media post that no North Korean leader would entrust any of their authorities to another person unless he or she was too sick to rule or removed through a coup. He reiterated that Kim Jong Un is bedridden and unable to rule.

Kim Jong Un's reported deteriorating health has been making headlines for the past few months. The 36-year-old reportedly underwent a "botched" heart operation that left him gravely ill. There were reports of his death as well. However, those rumours were quashed when the North Korean leader was spotted at a fertiliser factory's opening ceremony.

Also read: Who will become North Korea's leader if Kim Jong Un dies?

Also read: Kim Jong Un resurfaces; makes first public appearance after weeks of health rumours
WILTON, N.Y.  State Police in Wilton arrested Artiqua J. Dubois, 27 and Gaill M. Jones, 51, both of Burlington, Vermont.

The two were charged with felony third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell, felony third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance narcotic drug and misdemeanor endangering the welfare of a child.

State Police stopped Dubois for a traffic violation on I-87 in the town of Wilton. When the Trooper spoke with Dubois, they observed signs indicative of drug use and a vehicle search was conducted. The Trooper located approximately 60 grams of crack cocaine hidden in the diaper bag of a two-year-old child who was seated in the back seat.

Dubois and her passenger, Jones, were taken into custody and transported to State Police barracks in Wilton for processing.

Both suspects were arraigned in Wilton Town Court and released on their own recognizance. They are due back in court on Aug. 25.
Ricketts encouraged parents to get their children tested if they suspect a child has the virus. If theyre showing symptoms or awaiting test results, he said, kids should stay home.

Nebraska Education Commissioner Matt Blomstedt said that it feels right to see kids returning to school and that students, teachers and superintendents are excited.

Even with my own children, Ive seen that, too, that theres an excitement to be able to get back, he said.

Blomstedt said students are learning in school how to be safe.

Ive already been lectured by my own kids on certain things, on how to do best, and how to thoughtfully be safe in public settings, he said, because theyre talking about that in their school setting already.

Blomstedt said hes pleased to see that the procedures for responding to COVID-19 cases involving students are largely working well.

Some of the cases that have been showing up as districts reopen were brought into the schools by people who contracted it elsewhere, Blomstedt said: It wasnt necessarily spread that took place in school.
U.S. President Donald Trump raised the possibility of decoupling the U.S. economy from China, a major purchaser of U.S. goods.



In a Fox News interview airing yesterday Trump initially said "we dont have to" do business with China, and then later said about decoupling: "Well its something that if they dont treat us right I would certainly, I would certainly do that."



Trump entered into a high-stakes trade war with China before reaching a partial Phase 1 trade deal in January. Trump has since shut the door on Phase 2 negotiations, saying he was unhappy with Beijings handling of the pandemic.



In June U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said a decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies will result if U.S. companies are not allowed to compete on a fair and level basis in Chinas economy.
PARK CITY, Utah, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Amp Human, a Park City-based human performance company has been awarded a $1.5 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract by the United States Air Force through the AFWERX innovation program. This award builds upon two previous Phase I SBIR awards through AFWERX and will allow Amp Human to build on its existing success in working with the military to provide unique human performance solutions that enhance warfighter resilience and capabilities.

The Phase II contract will allow Amp Human to develop a better understanding of a new use case of their flagship product, PR Lotion. Amp Human will be exploring a hydration related use case with the 1 SOW (1st Special Operations Wing) Hydration is critical in maintaining elite performance and this partnership will aim to solve a long-standing hydration challenge: "The 1st Special Operations Wing has a national defense-related mission in the area of optimizing human performance, wellness, and resiliency. The first SOF Truth is 'Humans are More Important than Hardware'."- 1 SOW Innovation Personnel

"We're proud to be partnering with the Air Force for the next 18 months on solving this human performance challenge in hydration. Pushing the limits of human performance is core to our business and we look forward to enhancing the experience of aircrew," Erica Good, Chief Operating Officer.

While the partnership with the Air Force will lead to further research and adaptation of PR Lotion for the hydration use case, Amp Human is continuing to push the boundaries of human performance for athletes at all levels by researching and developing more revolutionary human performance products to bring to market.

About Amp Human:

Amp Human is a Park City-based human performance company that provides athletes with solutions to optimize performance. We work to redefine the possibilities of the human body through innovative solutions, education, and cultivating community. For more information visit Amp Human and follow on @amphuman.



Learn more about PR lotion here.

About the AFWERX SBIR Program

AFWERX is the Air Force's team of innovators who encourage and facilitate connections across industry, academia, and the military to create transformative opportunities and foster a culture of innovation. For start-ups and small businesses, AFWERX is working with the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to increase collaboration between the Private Sector and the United States Air Force.

Want to learn more?

PR Lotion for Daily Training

Scientific Advisory Board: What We've Learned From COVID-19

Red Bull Study: PR Lotion & Power Output

Contact: Erica Good, [email protected]

SOURCE Amp Human

Related Links

https://amphumanperformance.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChM


Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  The Solicitor General has filed an urgent motion asking that oral arguments on the anti-terrorism law be cancelled.

Solicitor General Jose Calida filed the 51-page motion before the Supreme Court (SC) on Monday citing logistical restrictions and health threats posed by COVID-19 pandemic, as well as provisions of internal rules of SC and pertinent jurisprudence.

Calida said the high court's internal rules state that it was "not a trier of facts," but instead makes decisions based on "findings of facts before it."

He also said that as it was illegal to hold public gatherings in the light of the pandemic, in-person oral arguments would violate this restriction.

"The conduct of in-court oral arguments would necessarily entail the presence of the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices, at least 300 petitioners and their respective counsels, an estimate of 16 lawyers from the Office of the Solicitor General and their respective support staff, representatives from the respondents, and the members of the Office of the Clerk of Court," Calida said.

"This clearly falls under mass gatherings that are prohibited in areas under general community quarantine," he said in the motion.

He added that even holding the arguments via video conference would still violate quarantine restrictions as people would still need to gather in a confined space.

However, Calida said submitting a memorandum with justices asking clarificatory questions afterwards was a viable alternative to in-person oral arguments.

There are 29 petitions filed against the anti-terrorism law. The high court earlier said it would hold oral arguments on the numerous petitions seeking to junk the controversial Anti-Terrorism Act in September.

Republic Act 11479 or the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 is the most challenged law at the Supreme Court, with law experts, constitutional framers and several groups saying it should be declared unconstitutional.

Among its contentious provisions is the power given to the Anti-Terrorism Council, a body composed of presidential appointees, to authorize law enforcers and military personnel to conduct warrantless arrests and detention of suspected terrorists for up to 24 days.

Petitioners said this violates the three-day period prescribed in the Constitution for pre-trial detention.

They argued that the vague and overly broad provisions of the law can silence government critics for fear of being tagged as terrorists, but lawmakers who authored and sponsored the measure maintained it has enough safeguards against abuse.
It is vitally important to get children back into schools after the lengthy COVID-19 lockdown as being kept away from classrooms for a longer period would be far more damaging than the deadly virus, Prime Minister said in a direct appeal to parents on Monday.

His appeal comes as different parts of the country prepare for the end of the summer break and the start of a new school term, with Scotland and Northern Ireland first in line followed by England and Wales from next week.

Reiterating a joint statement issued by England's Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and his counterparts from different parts of the United Kingdom over the weekend, Johnson said the risk posed to children from the deadly virus is very small and being kept away from classrooms any longer would be far more damaging to their well-being.

As the chief medical officer has said, the risk of contracting COVID-19 in school is very small and it is far more damaging for a child's development and their health and well-being to be away from school any longer, Johnson said in a statement from Downing Street.

This is why it's vitally important that we get our children back into the classroom to learn and to be with their friends. Nothing will have a greater effect on the life chances of our children than returning to school, Johnson, a COVID-19 survivor, said.

"I have previously spoken about the moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely, and I would like to thank the school staff who have spent the summer months making classrooms COVID-secure in preparation for a full return in September.

We have always been guided by our scientific and medical experts, and we now know far more about than we did earlier this year, he said.

Johnson has previously said that schools will be the last places to close in the event of a dreaded second wave of the pandemic or localised lockdowns due to spikes in infections, which has claimed over 41,400 lives in the

The prime minister's intervention follows top medical chiefs calling for the reopening of schools because there was an exceptionally small risk of children of primary or secondary school age dying from COVID-19 but a greater risk to their overall development by staying away from classrooms.

Very few, if any, children or teenagers will come to long-term harm from COVID-19 due solely to attending school. This has to be set against a certainty of long-term harm to many children and young people from not attending school, noted Professor Chris Whitty, the CMO of England, in a consensus statement co-signed by a dozen medical experts.

Control measures such as hand and surface hygiene, cohorting to reduce the number of daily contacts, and directional controls to reduce face-to-face contact remain key elements of maintaining COVID-19 secure school environments and minimising risk, they said.

While most head teachers and teachers' unions are in favour of resuming classes as soon as possible, there are lingering concerns about the welfare of their staff, pupils and their families. They have called for more government help for schools, including a dedicated helpline to assist with queries.

UK Education Secretary Gavin Williamson wrote in The Sunday Times' to reassure parents and pupils that schools were "ready for them" and that the autumn return to schools was "more important than ever".

The Opposition parties have attacked the government for exacerbating the issue with chaos over reports cards issued based on assessments after examinations had to be cancelled due to the lockdown this year.

Pressure has also mounted on the education minister to resign after he was forced into major government U-turn to allow teacher-assessed grades to be counted after a computer algorithm vastly under-estimated students' scores.

I want to see children back at school next month, and I expect the Prime Minister to deliver on that commitment. However, the commitment is now at serious risk after a week of chaos, confusion and incompetence from the government, said Labour Leader Keir Starmer.

Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Layla Moran said the country and "seemingly the PM" had "lost faith" in Gavin Williamson.

"To restore confidence among parents, pupils and teachers the best thing the Prime minister could do is sack him, rather than speak for him," she said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Hong Kong man who recovered from COVID-19 became infected again four-and-a-half months later in the first documented instance of human reinfection, according to scientists.

The patient had appeared to be previously healthy, researchers at the University of Hong Kong said in a paper published in the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The man, a 33-year-old, was cleared of the virus and discharged from a hospital in April, but tested positive again after returning from Spain via the UK on 15 August, following a saliva test at Hong Kong airport.

Some scientists have said that because it is not clear whether the man had contracted the virus again after full recovery, it could be that the sample detected traces of the virus from the initial infection in his body.

Researchers sequenced the virus from the patients two infections and found that they did not match, indicating the second infection was not tied to the first.

He remained asymptomatic for the second infection.

People wearing masks on an underground train in Hong Kong. (Getty)

Whats important to note, is that scientists believe this could be a sign that subsequent infections do not cause as severe an illness as the first episode because of some degree of residual immunity  which may not be sufficient to stop the infection but be enough to reduce the risk of severe illness.

The new report has been greeted cautiously by scientists, with many stating it is too early to tell what the significance of the findings are yet.

Why is this report important?

The first reported case of re-infection raises questions about the durability of immune protection from the coronavirus.

There have been unverified reports of reinfection in China, but this is the first proven case of COVID-19 reinfection.

Medical staff wearing personal protective equipment as they enter Lei Muk Shue care home in Hong Kong last week. (Getty)

The finding suggests that some patients who recover from COVID-19, may only have short-lived immunity, suggesting that they may need vaccines after a certain amount of time has passed, like the yearly flu jab.

The case will likely also be significant for scientists who have been working on treatments using antibodies from recovered coronavirus patients.

Story continues

Read more: Hong Kong to offer free coronavirus testing for all residents

It will also provide clues to how long vaccines will be effective for, and how often people might need a booster dose.

The World Health Organization (WHO) warns it is important not to jump to conclusions based on the case of one patient.

The scientists warn that reinfection is common with other coronaviruses, although other experts say reinfections may be rare and not necessarily serious.

But experts had hoped that the new coronavirus might behave more like its cousins SARS and MERS, which seemed to produce protection lasting a few years.

Clinical Research Nurse Aneta Gupta labels blood samples from a volunteer during the Imperial College vaccine trial, at a clinic in London. The reinfection brings up the question of how long vaccines will be effective for, and for how often people might need a booster dose. (AP)

The finding does not mean taking vaccines will be useless," Dr Kai-Wang To, one of the leading authors of the paper, told Reuters.

"Immunity induced by vaccination can be different from those induced by natural infection," Dr To said. "[We] will need to wait for the results of the vaccine trials to see if how effective vaccines are."

Professor Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at The Norwich School of Medicine, said that immunity was always unlikely.

Commentators have been saying for some time that immunity is unlikely to be permanent and may only last a few months.

Read more: Third of Britons say they may not take coronavirus vaccine

Given the different intensity of the antibody response in people with mild or severe illness and the subsequent decay in levels, it is likely that those with a mild illness will have a shorter duration of immunity than those with severe illness.

For example, those infected develop an immune response as their bodies fight off the virus which helps to protect them against it returning.

The strongest immune response has been found in the most seriously-ill patients.

No cause for alarm

WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said on Monday that there was no need to jump to any conclusions in response to the Hong Kong case.

Instances of people discharged from hospitals and testing positive again for COVID-19 infection have been reported in mainland China.

However, in those cases it was not clear whether they had contracted the virus again after full recovery  as happened with the Hong Kong patient  or still had the virus in their body from the initial infection.

A first case of #COVID19 reinfection from HKU, with distinct virus genome sequences in 1st and 2nd infection (142 days apart). Kudos to the scientists for this study.



This is no cause for alarm - this is a textbook example of how immunity should work.



(1/n) https://t.co/oekESn0Uhq  Prof. Akiko Iwasaki (@VirusesImmunity) August 24, 2020

Professor Brendan Wren, professor of microbial pathogenesis at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: With over 3 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, the first reported case of a potential re-infection with SARS-CoV-2 needs to be taken into context.

It appears that the young and healthy adult has been re-infected with a slight SARS-CoV-2 variant from the initial infection three months previously.

It is to be expected that the virus will naturally mutate over time. This is a very rare example of re-infection and it should not negate the global drive to develop COVID-19 vaccines.

Read more: Dominic Raab slams Russia over alleged coronavirus vaccine theft

Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at Yale University, tweeted shortly after the study was released that the study did not show anything unexpected.

"This is no cause for alarm - this is a textbook example of how immunity should work," she wrote.

'A worrying finding for several reasons'

Its still unclear how rare or common reinfection from the new coronavirus might be, because few researchers have sequenced the virus from each infection.

Weve had, what, 23 million cases documented thus far, but the fact that one out of them at this point has been reinfected should not cause undue alarm as of yet, said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York.

However, it remains very, very concerning  and this does nothing to dispel that  that we may be subject to repeat infection with this virus, he said.

Read more: Head of UK vaccines taskforce 'optimistic' we could have drug by the end of the year

Dr David Strain, clinical senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and chair of the British Medical Associations Medical Academic Staff Committee, said: This is a worrying finding for several reasons.

The first, as is laid out in this manuscript, is that it suggests that previous infection is not protective. The second is that it raises the possibility that vaccinations may not provide the hope that we have been waiting for.

Vaccinations work by simulating infection to the body, thereby allowing the body to develop antibodies. If antibodies don't provide lasting protection, we will need to revert to a strategy of viral near-elimination in order to return to a more normal life.

Coronavirus: what happened today

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Turkey Holds War Games Involving F-16 Jets in Aegean Sea Amid Tensions With Neighbouring Greece

Sputnik News

Lilia Dergacheva. Sputnik International

08:06 GMT 23.08.2020

The announcement by the Turkish defence ministry came as Ankara and Athens continue to argue over gas and oil exploration rights in the eastern Mediterranean.

Turkish air and naval forces conducted joint drills in the Aegean Sea, the country's defence ministry said amid a spiralling row with neighbouring Greece over hydrocarbon resources.

F-16 fighter jets took part in the exercises alongside warships to "enhance, maintain and improve the operational capability of joint inter-forces operations," the ministry posted on Twitter.

The news came as Turkey and Greece, both NATO members since 1952, have been at loggerheads over gas and oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and a day after Turkey declared massive gas discoveries in the Black Sea - something President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin referred to as "just the beginning".

"The work will continue for exploration as well as drilling at the same time. We're very hopeful that it will lead to other fields in the same area," he commented on the vast gas discoveries that Turkey struck under its territorial waters.

Two weeks ago, Ankara sent a warship-escorted research vessel to monitor the waters where Greece claims exclusive rights to the underlying seabed. In response, Athens sent its own warships to the location, placing its military on high alert. France, which has also been at odds with the Turks over their operations in Libya, also weighed in on the controversy, sending warships and planes to carry out joint drills with the Greeks.

Greek officials said Friday that the United Arab Emirates would also dispatch fighter jets to the southern Greek island of Crete for joint training next week.

The Greece-Turkey relationship has nearly always been tense, with the two having found themselves on the brink of a military standoff at least three times since the mid-1970s, including once over drilling rights in the Aegean Sea that separates the two neighbours.



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FPIs stay positive on Indian markets

Overseas investors have put in Rs 41,330 crore in Indian markets on a net basis in August so far as the excess liquidity in global markets found its way to emerging markets like India. Read here to know why they're preferring such markets.

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Kim Jong Un in a coma, sister takes over

South Korean diplomat Chang Song-min, the former aide of South Korean ex-President Kim Dae-Jung has told the media that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is comatose. His sister, Kim Yo-jong has been named de-facto second in command. Read here to know more.

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What's your money on this week?

Looking beyond and after June quarter earnings, investors are now flocking to virus-resilient sectors in the market. Domestic liquidity boosted Indian investor sentiment, moving it in tandem with global markets. As more businesses adapt to the coronavirus and markets learn to cope with it, read here to know which sectors you should be on your checklist.

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Dominic Raab is to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas - Debbie Hill/EPA-EFE

Britains Foreign Secretary will be asked to act as a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians to mediate in the stalled Middle East peace process during a joint visit to Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories on Tuesday.

Amid rising security tensions in the Gaza Strip, Dominic Raab is due to meet with both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and will urge renewed dialogue between their governments in favour of a peaceful two-state solution, the Foreign Office said.

Israels foreign ministry on Monday hailed the unique timing of the visit, a day after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Mr Netanyahu to discuss the Trump administrations own deal of the century peace plan, which has been roundly rejected by the Palestinian leadership.

While Mr Pompeo did not meet with Palestinian leaders, Mr Raabs visit presented a good opportunity to ask the British to impress upon the Palestinians to come to the negotiating table with us its good timing, said Anna Azari, Israels deputy director general for European affairs.

Mr Raabs trip was previously postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and now comes shortly after the United Arab Emirates (UAE) became only the third Arab country to normalise relations with Israel, amid a US-led drive to counter Irans influence in the region.

"The UK remains committed to Israel's security and stability, and the recent normalisation of relations between Israel and the UAE was an important moment for the region," Mr Raab said in a statement.

The UAE-Israeli deal has been loudly celebrated by President Trump but has been condemned by the Palestinians, as well as regional powers such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

As part of the agreement, Mr Netanyahu has paused his controversial planned annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank that Palestinians consider integral to their proposed future state.

"Israel's suspension of annexation is an essential step towards a more peaceful Middle East, Mr Raab added. It is important to build on this new dynamic, and ultimately only the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority can negotiate the two-state solution required to secure lasting peace.

Story continues

During his visit, the Foreign Secretary is also due to meet Benny Gantz, the opposition leader who now shares power with Mr Netanyahu as defence minister and alternate prime minister in an uneasy coalition.

Speaking after his own meeting with the Israeli prime minister in Jerusalem, Mr Pompeo said on Monday that he was confident other nations would soon follow the UAE in agreeing official diplomatic ties with Israel.

But both he and Mr Netanyahu criticised the lack of international support for Washington's call to restore United Nations sanctions against Iran.

The Trump administration has been pushing the UN Security Council to impose "snapback" sanctions over what the United States claims are Iran's violations of the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which Britain, France and Germany have been trying to salvage despite America pulling out in 2018.

"We are determined to use every tool that we have to ensure they can't get access to high-end weapon systems," Mr Pompeo said. "The rest of the world should join us."

As well as visiting the UAE and Bahrain, Mr Pompeo is also due to visit Sudan later this week, where the Arab Leagues historic 1967 policy of refusing to recognise Israel was originally signed, but which is now considered the next country most likely to normalise relations.

"I am hopeful that we will see other Arab nations join in this," Mr Pompeo said on Monday, while publicly reassuring Mr Netanyahu that Israel could maintain its qualitative military edge over Arab rivals, despite the prospect of future US arms sales to the UAE.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas meanwhile called on regional leaders to reject any ties with Israel and to "break their silence" on the blockade of Gaza, which has intensified in recent weeks after fire bomb and rocket attacks were launched into Israeli territory.

The Israeli military said on Monday that fighter jets, tanks and aircraft had struck "military posts and an underground infrastructure" belonging to Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip in response to arson balloons launched into Israel the day before, and rocket attacks on Friday.
President Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance

Video app TikTok on Monday filed a lawsuit challenging the US government's crackdown on the popular Chinese-owned platform, which Washington accuses of being a national security threat.

As tensions soared between the world's two biggest economies, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance -- effectively setting a deadline for a sale of the app to a US company.

TikTok argued in the suit that Trump's order was a misuse of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act because the platform -- on which users share often playful short-form videos -- is not "an unusual and extraordinary threat."

The executive order "has the potential to strip the rights of that community without any evidence to justify such an extreme action," the suit contended.

"We believe the administration ignored our extensive efforts to address its concerns, which we conducted fully and in good faith even as we disagreed with the concerns themselves," TikTok said.

TikTok's kaleidoscopic feeds of clips feature everything from dance routines and hair-dye tutorials to jokes about daily life and politics.

The app has been downloaded 175 million times in the US and more than a billion times around the world.

The Trump administration has separately given ByteDance a deadline to divest TikTok before the app is banned in the United States.

Trump argues that TikTok could be used by China to track the locations of federal employees, build dossiers on people for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

The company holds firm that it has never provided any US user data to the Chinese government, and Beijing has blasted Trump's crackdown as political.

The US measures come ahead of November 3 elections in which Trump, behind his rival Joe Biden in the polls, is campaigning hard on an increasingly strident anti-Beijing message.

Story continues

"The administration failed to follow due process and act in good faith, neither providing evidence that TikTok was an actual threat, nor justification for its punitive actions," the company said.

"We believe the administration's decisions were heavily politicized, and industry experts have said the same."

A lawsuit filed last week against Trump by a freshly-formed "WeChat Users Alliance" takes aim at a separate Aug 6 executive order banning the messaging app popular with Chinese speakers.

"The Executive Order singles out people of Chinese and Chinese-American ancestry and subjects them to disparate treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, national origin, and alienage," the suit argued.

The suit contends the order is illegal, and so vaguely worded that it is not clear whether people using the app to message friends or run businesses will be considered law-breakers. It also says no evidence has been shown that WeChat is a threat to US national security.

The alliance said it is not affiliated with WeChat owner Tencent, based in China.

- Trump vs. China -

Trump has increasingly taken a confrontational stance on China, challenging it on trade, military and economic fronts.

Shortly after Trump announced his moves against TikTok this month, the United States slapped sanctions on Hong Kong's leader over the Chinese security clampdown after last year's pro-democracy demonstrations.

Microsoft and Oracle are possible suitors for TikTok operations.

Reports have said Oracle -- whose chairman Larry Ellison has raised millions in campaign funds for Trump -- was weighing a bid for TikTok's operations in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

TikTok decried Trump's expressed interest in the US getting a share of any sale price because of its role in making it happen.

The president said last week the eventual buyer would have to "make sure the United States is well compensated."

"The President's demands for payments have no relationship to any conceivable national security concern," TikTok said in the suit.

The measures against TikTok move away from the long-promoted American ideal of a global, open internet and could invite other countries to follow suit, analysts told AFP previously.

"It's really an attempt to fragment the internet and the global information society along US and Chinese lines, and shut China out of the information economy," said Milton Mueller, a Georgia Tech professor and founder of the Internet Governance Project.

gc/dw
Phoenix Mills share price gained over 5% in Monday session as the company raised around Rs 1,100 crore from sale of shares to institutional investors via Qualified Institutional Placement (QIP), including the Singapore government.

The QIP (Qualified Institutional Placement) issue was open for subscription between August 18 till August 21.

Besides Government of Singapore that bought 74,38,017 shares for around Rs 450 crore, contributing almost 41% to the proceeds, ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, SBI Mutual Fund and Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund had also participated in the QIP.

Following the updates, Phoenix Mills stock opened at Rs 705.05 and touched an intraday high of Rs 737.15, rising 5.76% on BSE. The stock price of Phoenix Mills also hit low of Rs 700 in the session today.

Phoenix Mills shares have risen 12.31% in the last 3 days of straight gains. Phoenix Mills is trading higher than 5, 20, 50, 100 and 200-day moving averages.

Phoenix Mills stock price has risen 14% in one week and 23% in a month. Market capitalisation of the firm stood at Rs 10,894 crore as of today's closing session.

Earlier in June, the company's board had approved raising of funds up to Rs 1,200 crore through an issue of securities.

The company informed through a regulatory filing, that its capital raising committee of the board has approved the allotment of 1,81,81,818 shares to qualified institutional buyers at the issue price of Rs 605 per share aggregating to Rs 1,099.99 crore.

Phoenix Mills stock price closed 3.96% higher at Rs 724.60 on BSE.

Share Market Highlights: Sensex ends 364 points higher, Nifty at 11,466; Kotak Bank, HDFC Bank top gainers

Gold price resumes fall amid strong dollar; silver rates at Rs 65,900
After declaring bankruptcy, Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh announced it would open a brand new store in an airporta risky move seeing as it's a location that is still experiencing less foot traffic during the coronavirus pandemic (which also accounts for the chain's severe financial losses this year).

The beloved chain, known for its Greek-inspired cuisine, has locations all across the country. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month due to monstrous financial setbacks. The Colorado-based, fast-casual restaurant suffered from financial hardship a bit more dramatically than other chains did during coronavirus, largely because of where the majority of its locations are situated: Primarily in malls, airports, and universities.

CEO James Park told Denver Business Journal that 48% percent of Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh stores are located in airports and universities, many of which never reopened after the initial shutdown in March. Luckily, all 12 of these locations are set to reopen by the end of August. Still, it was necessary for the chain to file for bankruptcy as nearly half of its locations were unable to bring in revenue over the past five monthscoupled with the challenge of landlords not willing to lower rent.

Bankruptcy has not stopped the chain from looking forward though. In fact, Park has ambitious goals for the chain for the rest of the year and into 2021. He plans to open six new stores, one of which will be opening this week in concourse B at Denver International Airport. The chain, which debuted during the 2007 Recession, will also be seeking out more franchise partners to help it recover from the financial blows it already suffered this year.

"It's no doubt a humbling experience. But I stand convicted in the brand. And with the combination of our partners and our pipeline, we truly believe Garbanzo is positioned to come out on top," Park said in an interview with Denver Business Journal. "This is not the end. This is a new beginning."

The new location is the first Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh to offer breakfast options, including Greek yogurt parfaits, build-your-own breakfast bowls, and even a line of healthy grab-and-go foods like hummus snacks and Greek salads called "Frequent Flyers." While an airport is a nontraditional place to have a restaurant, the vice president of marketing for the chain, Devin Handler, described the new-and-improved development strategy as an opportunity to increase travelers' access to healthier food options in the airportan environment that's typically filled with pre-packaged, processed items.

For more, check out 6 Beloved Restaurant Chains That Are in Major Trouble Right Now.
Police have released chilling footage of the moment a gunman opened fire at a group of friends in the Bronx on Wednesday killing a mother-of-three.

NYPD released surveillance footage Sunday showing a lone gunman, clad in black with his face obscured by a hoodie, pacing along East 152nd Street in Melrose letting off a series of shots in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Priscilla Vazquez, 25, was the only member of the group to be shot and she was pronounced dead at the scene from a gunshot wound to the head.

Police also released a clip from a nearby building showing three people getting out of a Chevy Traverse with Pennsylvania plates, which they say was the gunman's getaway vehicle. They added the driver damaged the dark-coloured SUV while fleeing the scene.

Pictured: A lone gunman opens fire on a group of friends in the Bronx on Wednesday, killing a mother-of-three

Pictured: A lone gunman opens fire on a group of friends in the Bronx on Wednesday, killing a mother-of-three

Pictured: A lone gunman opens fire on a group of friends in the Bronx on Wednesday, killing a mother-of-three

According to CBS New York, the bullet that killed the mother-of-three was meant for someone else.

Her aunt Patria Moris, 57, said 'there was a shootout and the bullet wasn't for her'.

'It might have been an ex-boyfriend or maybe it was a stray shooting, I don't know,' she added.

Her sister Angela said she was still 'in shock' from the sudden death and had yet to fully understand what had happened.

Priscilla Vasquez, 25, was found with a gunshot wound to the back of the head on E. 152nd St. in the Bronx. Police say she was not the intended target of the shooting

'I hope it's not true that she's not here, that somebody just shot her in the head,' she said.

Vasquez has been described as a 'great mother' and a 'happy person', as well as a 'strong and independent woman'.

'She had her opinions and she say them, but she loved to be happy, joyful, loved to dance and have a drink,' said Moris. 'She was a very good mom. She raised them well. She was always friendly with everyone.'

No arrests have been made in the case and police are appealing for information.

New York City is enduring a summer of soaring violent crime.

Heat waves, high unemployment, and the grinding misery of social distancing restrictions have all contributed to an atmosphere in which tempers spin out of control, and verbal disputes between strangers often turn violent.

Priscilla Vasquez was hit when the shooter opened fire on a group of people gathered here but cops and her family say that she was not the target of the shooting

As well, gang violence and turf wars have contributed to the shootings, police say.

From midnight to midnight, at least three people died in shootings across the Big Apple on Saturday, including Vasquez.

The long list of shootings Saturday rounded off a bloody week where there were 56 people shot in 44 different incidents.

Last month, shooting incidents across the city were up 177 percent compared to last year.

The shooting happened around 5am on Saturday morning beginning a violent day for NYC

Murders were up 59 percent for the month, burglaries rose 31 percent, and auto thefts increased 53 percent.

Homicides in NYC surged by 29 per cent to 244 from January 1 to August 2 from the same period last year.

The five boroughs have also seen an 84.6 per cent rise in shooting victims to 1,017 during those dates compared with the same period in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Facing pressure from activists, as well as a mounting budget crisis, Mayor Bill de Blasio cut $1 billion from the NYPD's $6billion annual budget.

The mayor has also boasted of the large number of inmates released from Rikers Island due to the pandemic, proudly declaring that city jails had the lowest inmate population since World War II.

In the last five years the number of shootings fell to a low of 754 in 2018, but is now rising

Yet police unions have blamed bail reform, police budget cuts, and anti-cop sentiment for the rise in violent crime.

Last week, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the city's largest police union, took the unprecedented step of endorsing President Donald Trump's re-election campaign.

Governor Andrew Cuomo has blamed police themselves for the rising crime, saying they have done 'very little' to come up with reform plans.

He also threatened to pull funding from up to 500 departments across the state if they do not have reform plans in place by April 2021.

De Blasio (seen earlier this month) cut $1 billion from the NYPD's $6billion annual budget

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has also criticized the police response.

'They need to roll that plan out, and it needs to be a comprehensive plan that all of the community stakeholders and partners are aware of,' Adams said. 'I dont know about the plan theyre doing. That is a problem.'

On Saturday, it was announced that NYPD cops will now have to give up their weekends as the department looks to dampen the violence.

Two-thirds of cops under the rank of captain who have both Saturday and Sunday off are being asked to switch their shifts so they work at least one day over the weekend.

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said the change was being made 'due to the combination of increased violence, ongoing protests, COVID-19 restrictions and reduction to overtime funding'.
Barwa Bank has announced the successful closure of the education investment launched by its wholly owned subsidiary, The First Investor (TFI) Qatar, a leading Shariah investment firm.

In 2013, along with investors and in partnership with Qatar Insurance Company (QIC), TFI provided funding for the construction of two schools in Al Wakra, Qatar and leased the operations to GEMS Education.

The transaction, in line with the planned investment strategy, performed exceptionally well throughout the holding period and initial investors received a net 60 per cent return on investment. During the tenure of their investment, investors received semi-annual dividends equating to an annual cash-on-cash return between 6 per cent and 8 per cent, a statement said.

Khalid Al-Subeai, Group CEO, Barwa Bank Group and TFI Board Member, commented: We are extremely pleased with the performance of the asset. Our investors have enjoyed a strong and steady income throughout their respective holding periods. This investment is an endorsement of our ability to capitalize on well-defined and distinct opportunities alongside reputable partners. We continue to believe in the performance of the Qatari real estate market especially the residential segment, for 2020 and beyond. We remain focused on identifying value-enhancing investment opportunities that are supported by strong fundamentals with minimal risks.

He further affirmed that Barwa Bank Group will continue seeking and offering superior risk-adjusted investment opportunities to esteemed investors in local and international markets.

Further highlighting the rationale behind this strategic partnership between QIC and TFI, Salem Al Mannai, Group CEO QIC Group, said: We consistently endeavour to identify and support initiatives that aim at furthering investment in key sectors that are vital for enhancing the Qatari economy. The Education Fund provided us with one such unique opportunity to support the growth in the education sector, a key pillar in realizing the Qatar National Vision 2030. We will continue to engage in identifying such investment opportunities, which promote the broader agenda at the national level and at the same time provide attractive risk-adjusted returns to QIC Group and its partners. - TradeArabia News Service
Quinnipiac University students have begun their much-anticipated move-in. The university, as well as many in the local community, are eager to see our students back. And while this fall semester will certainly be different than any of the past, the many months of planning  informed by university leaders, students, public-private partnerships and public health experts  have positioned the university to be as safe as possible as we welcome students back to our campuses.

A natural question on the minds of many of our neighbors is: How does the university plan to safeguard the communities we all call home? We understand these concerns as news stories across the country show images of college parties, a lack of physical distancing on campuses and clusters of COVID cases among students.

Quinnipiacs fall reopening plan is guided by scientific and medical expertise in taking every precaution to contain the spread of the pandemic through both physical protections, as well as behavioral measures. A few examples of our actions include:

Requiring all students to test negative for COVID-19 before returning to campus; they are then tested again upon their arrival, followed by weekly testing of approximately 15 percent of all undergraduate students on and off campus for early detection and any rise in infections.

Creating an easy-to-use symptom-checking mobile app that will require all students, faculty and staff to report their symptoms daily.

Strictly enforcing a face-covering policy everywhere outside a students room, or an employees office.

Creating a quick-response, in-house contact tracing team that has completed training from both the state of Connecticut and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health to promptly identify and separate any students, faculty or staff who have been exposed to the virus.

Setting aside space on campus for safe isolation and quarantine, as necessary.

Greatly reducing the occupancy of our residence halls, classrooms and other on-campus spaces.

Instituting a restrictive visitor policy to our campuses and residence halls.

Supplying 69,000 gallons of disinfectant and placing over 5,900 spray bottles in classrooms, residence halls, academic buildings and other facilities to assure clean surfaces.

We recognize that these measures alone, while extensive, are not enough. A critical variable is students behavior and whether they will act responsibly on and off campus.

This is an instance where it truly takes a village. We have asked every student and employee to sign The Quinnipiac Pact, a pledge to promote the health and safety of all community members and neighbors. We have collaborated throughout the summer with our student leaders who have been trained as student health ambassadors.

We are restricting students off-campus gatherings to a maximum of 16 people outdoors and 10 people indoors, rules that are far more stringent than state guidelines. Repercussions for violating these rules begin with disciplinary probation, revoking students participation in on-campus activities, up to potential suspension from the university for extreme violators. And we want our neighbors to feel safe too  the QU Community Concerns Hotline is available for any questions about the Universitys Plan or our off-campus housing, at 203-582-3770, and we will publish on the universitys website each week the results on our on-campus COVID-19 testing that will be performed through the fall.

Of course, conditions may change, and we will need to adapt, in tandem. But weve taken these extraordinary measures because we believe that the educational opportunity of attending college, in person, is vital to an individuals intellectual and emotional development.

Our comprehensive plan enables a healthy university environment for our students, faculty and staff, and is designed to sustain the current low rates of infection in Connecticut  and in our hometowns of Hamden and North Haven, in particular. We hope this plan reassures our community partners that QU is sparing no effort in keeping our neighborhoods healthy and safe.

Judy Olian is president of Quinnipiac University. Dr. David R. Hill, professor of medical science and director of Global Public Health in the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine, is the universitys senior medical adviser on COVID-19.
A conspiracy theorist who claimed ISIS was a myth created by the U.S has been cleared of plotting a terror attack on the British Army or police.

Hisham Muhammad, 26, from Whitefield, Manchester, was accused of planning a 'lone-wolf attack' using knives and other weapons, with the armed forces or police as possible targets, as well as developing a drone to drop a 'harmful device'.

He was arrested in June 2018 along with his cousin Faisal Abu Ahmad, 25, who lived with him, after his landlord became suspicious on seeing knives, a tub of wires and a soldering iron at his home.

However the married father-of-two denied engaging in conduct in preparation for acts of terrorism.

Following a four-day deliberation at the Old Bailey, the jury acquitted him of the terror charge.

Hisham Muhammad, 26, from Whitefield, Manchester, who was accused of planning a 'lone-wolf attack' on the armed forces or police, has been cleared of terror charges

His cousin Faisal Abu Ahmad was also cleared of failing to disclose a plot to authorities.

The court had heard how counter-terror police found two eggs which had been punctured, drained and filled with chilli seeds, shards of glass described by Muhammad as 'Japanese culture Ninja eggs' and a pair of scissors embedded into the side of the sofa during their raid in 2018.

The police also seized knives, a box of welding tools hidden in the fridge and an electrical device with lollipop sticks attached to it.

The defendant was alleged to have researched the military and police, even visiting Castle Armoury Barracks in Bury, Greater Manchester, on the pretext of joining up.

But he denied planning a terror attack in the United Kingdom, either using a drone or knives, and said radical Islam was 'barbaric'.

Giving evidence Muhammad claimed he believed the Manchester terror attack was fake news created by the government to smear Muslims.

He said he searched the internet for information on the atrocity, which claimed 22 lives, 'to find out the truth of what actually happened' but claimed he found nothing to suggest the tragedy was real.

'I watched two different videos of what was happening, and each person was saying something different, I thought it was the government trying to take away people's rights. Mainly Muslims,' he told the court.

During the trial a court also heard how Muhammad, who moved to the UK from Senegal in 2017 to live with Ahmed and his mother, set up a fake escort agency online and made thousands of pounds from men hoping to be set up with a Brazilian woman.

During their raid of his house, counter-terror police found a selection of knives on the windowsill of Muhammad's property

Images taken from Muhammad's home show a variety of materials and appliances on the floor

The Bermudan combed the internet for pictures of naked women which he could use to create fake profiles advertising sex.

He said: 'I found women's profiles online and thought I could make some money off of this. I copied the women's profiles.

'If a woman advertised in Manchester I would copy her profile and put it in London.

'What was that advert advertising?' Bernard Richmond QC, defending Muhammad, asked.

'Basically sex,' came the reply.

Muhammad and his cousin tricked internet users into transferring up-front payments under the pretence of sending an escort to meet them but would block the calls once the money was theirs.

He admitted making 8,000 from the fake escort agency, but said most of it was sent to his wife and family living in Senegal.

He insisted the home-made devices including the drone-like object and 'ninja' eggs were simply products of a 'passion for design' and claimed he liked to 'challenge' himself by making things like a 'coconut hammer' and a 'personal sink bucket' to wash for prayer.

Muhammed told the trial he had researched ISIS and claimed the terror group was a myth created by the U.S to stoke Islamophobia.

Anne Whyte, QC, prosecuting, said Muhammad admitted carrying out 'research' on his Samsung tablet and Nokia phone.

Ms Whyte said: 'He accepted conducting searches about UK armed police, terrorist attacks, British military bases, pressure cooker bombs and drones, saying that he wanted to research all aspects of terrorism so that he could find out the truth.

'He suggested that he did not believe that the Manchester Arena bombing or the Westminster Bridge attack had occurred and questioned whether the video of the killing of Lee Rigby was real.

Muhammad, who denied preparing acts of terrorism, was acquitted of the charges following a four day deliberation at the Old Bailey

'He said that Islamic State could be something America made up.

'He acknowledged looking at a jihadi website 'Jihadology' and watching videos that included fighting and beheadings.

'Hisham said he did this research because he was curious; he wanted to know whether it really happened and what would make somebody do such a thing. Hisham was asked for his views on Islamic terrorism.

'He said that innocent people shouldn't be hurt, and said he disagreed with Boko Haram, Al Qaeda and Islamic State.'

The jury at the Old Bailey deliberated over four days to acquit him of the terror charge after the first jury failed to reach verdicts against Muhammad and Ahmad pair last October.
A restaurant targeted by Vegan activists has been hit by a spate of fake bookings just a week after diners were interrupted by loud anti-meat protesters.

The owners of Lapa Brazilian Barbecue said the restaurant, in Subiaco in Perth, was flooded with fake bookings over the weekend, costing them $5,000.

A week earlier, protesters from the Perth branch of militant animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere shouted 'animals do not want to die' and 'it's not food, it's violence' as they held signs in the packed barbecue restaurant.

Since the protest, Owner Gabby Santo claims Laba is thousands of dollars out of pocket as a result of the spate of fake bookings with more than 100 people not showing up

Owners of Lapa Brazilian Barbecue say the restaurant, in Subiaco in Perth, was flooded with fake bookings over the weekend, losing a total of $5,000 in three days

'On Friday we had about one third of the restaurant empty,' owner Gabby Santo told Nine News.

Online reservations were made under fake emails, names and phone numbers.

'We even had a woman in Queensland answering saying "no, I know nothing about your restaurant",' Ms Santo said.

But the group behind the loud protest the previous week denied the fake bookings had some from any of its members.

Emma Madle said Direct Action Everywhere has no idea who is behind the scam and claims it has turned into a potential smear campaign against the group.

'We don't want the business to experience harm, we just want to raise awareness to the problems with animal product consumption,' she said.

While she denies any involvement, Ms Madle said the people behind the bookings could be a part of the vegan community unhappy with the publicity the restaurant received after the protest.

When asked if the people should stop making fake reservations, Ms Madle did not give a straight "no" but said they should 'question the intention of their actions'.

Emma Madle said Direct Action Everywhere has no idea who is behind the scam and claims it has turned into a potential smear campaign against the group

Protesters from the Perth branch of militant animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere were met with an angry response from a diner (left) after protesting (right) at a busy barbeque restaurant in Subiaco in the Western Australian capital's inner-city

Direct Action Everywhere had booked two tables on August 16 and waited until the seating area was filled before it staged the demonstration.

Guests were largely undisturbed by the protest and the venue experienced a surge in positive publicity as a result.

Footage live-streamed to the group's Facebook page showed the activists chanting at bemused diners for several minutes before patrons could be seen urging them to leave.

'Seriously, get out. You're ruining everyone's dinner,' one person could be heard telling the group.

The chanting continued despite pleas for them to get out, before a man in a white T-shirt who had been berating the protesters came over and snatched their megaphone.

A man in a white T-shirt who had been berating the protesters came over (left) and snatched their megaphone

Direct Action Everywhere had booked two tables on August 16 and waited until the seating area was filled before it staged the demonstration

As the man stormed outside with the megaphone to force the protesters outside, one member of the group made a final plea to diners to re-consider eating meat.

'It might have been two minutes of your time you feel has been ruined - they spend their whole lives suffering inside factory farms for your taste pleasure,' she shouted.

The owner of the restaurant said customers happily went on with their evening after the protesters left, news.com.au reported.

He added the restaurant had received mostly positive feedback on social media about the demonstration.

'Time to check you out!' one person wrote on their Facebook page. 'If they want to eat veggies... thats their choice! But they shouldnt impose it on others.'

The owner of the restaurant said customers happily went on with their evening after the protesters left

'I never heard of you until I heard about the protesting. But if Im ever lucky enough to be in Perth Ill give you guys a go,' another said.

Direct Action Everywhere's Facebook page describes the group as a 'non-violent community of concerned individuals seeking to end the slavery of animals'.

Last month DAE Perth member Tash Peterson, dressed in a bloodied apron with a fake butchered pig's head under her arm and wearing a face mask, protested at a Western Australian McDonald's.

The back of her shirt read: 'Your ''food'' fought for their life. That should leave a bad taste in your mouth.'

Footage shows the 26-year-old holding a sign saying: 'McDonald's tell them the truth'.
SEATTLE, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- REI Co-op today announced its 2020 grant partners, an investment that will total more than $6 million and touch more than 400 nonprofit partners this year. Funds in 2020 will support stewardship work to build and maintain local trails, parks, campgrounds and public lands, and connect people to the outdoors.

This year's co-op investment comes as local trails, parks and campgrounds are seeing increased use as Americans seek adventure closer to home and enjoy activities that are conducive to physical distancing, amid the COVID-19 outbreak. According to a recent KOA study on travel, 47% of people who had a previously planned trip now plan to camp instead, and another by Civic Science found that 43% of Americans over the age of 13 said they'd be doing more outdoor activities due to the COVID-19 social distancing rules.

"Taking care of the outdoors is more important than ever as many of our favorite parks, trails and wilderness areas are seeing more and more use," said Marc Berejka, REI director of community and government affairs, and REI Foundation board president. "As we continue to look to these outdoor spaces for health and solace in these challenging times, it's important that we also give back."

Continuing support for local outdoor nonprofits

In the 82 years since its founding, REI has prioritized stewardship of outdoor places and connecting people to the outdoors. Each year, the co-op invests millions in outdoor nonprofits that steward and maintain local outdoor places and that connect people to the outdoors. In 2019, REI surpassed more than $100 million invested in the outdoors since its founding, and in 2020 continues this investment by supporting more than 400 nonprofit partners including:

Brown Ascenders in California's Bay Area works to increase justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) within outdoor spaces, outdoor-related education and outdoor recreation for Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) adults and youth, while cultivating outlets for community, representation, and growth, and while using climbing as their vehicle. ($6,000)

works to increase justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) within outdoor spaces, outdoor-related education and outdoor recreation for Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) adults and youth, while cultivating outlets for community, representation, and growth, and while using climbing as their vehicle. Freshwater Land Trust in Birmingham, Alabama conserves, connects, and cares for land and water in Central Alabama , creating dynamic green spaces for future generations. REI grant funds will help support the construction of the Jones Valley Trail Extension in downtown Birmingham . This section will link residents of all socioeconomic backgrounds and ages to the outdoors in an urbanized environment. ($8,500)

conserves, connects, and cares for land and water in , creating dynamic green spaces for future generations. REI grant funds will help support the construction of the Jones Valley Trail Extension in downtown . This section will link residents of all socioeconomic backgrounds and ages to the outdoors in an urbanized environment. Friends of the Chicago River is working to holistically heal, transform, and renew the Chicago River system to make it a corridor of accessible and valued open space that will enable people to enjoy a continuous Chicago River trail. ($10,500)

Investment in local nonprofits represents a portion of REI's overall corporate giving. Additional grants are awarded throughout the year, including most recently, a $100,000 pledge to both the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and the National Urban League. The co-op also has provided $100,000 to the American Hospital Association's 100 Million Mask Challenge, and specifically to the HealthEquip platform which matches PPE donors to health organizations in the greatest need.

Support on behalf of members using the REI Co-op World Elite Mastercard

In addition to its annual support of local outdoor nonprofits, the REI Foundation and REI Co-op also announced projects it will fund as part of its annual gift on behalf of its members using the REI Co-op World Elite Mastercard. In the last three years, this investment has focused on stewardship in National Forests and Grasslands. This year, funds will be allocated to the REI Foundation to support a more diverse set of initiatives including National Forests and Grasslands, National Scenic Trails, river cleanups, and rewilding efforts. Each year, REI invests up to $1 million in outdoor stewardship efforts on behalf of its members using the REI Co-op World Elite Mastercard. When REI cardholding members make a purchase, REI donates to stewardship efforts.*

"National Forests will continue to be a large and important part of this effort but broadening the scope of this investment allows us to touch more of the places our members are passionate about," Berejka said.

This year's support generated by credit card usage will go to 11 organizations including:

The National Forest Foundation's Treasured Landscapes, Unforgettable Experiences program. Funding provided to the NFF will support seven projects to restore and steward National Forests and Grasslands. Projects include tree planting in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in Georgia and restoring climbing routes along Cathedral Ledge in the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire , among others. ($575,00)

Funding provided to the NFF will support seven projects to restore and steward National Forests and Grasslands. Projects include tree planting in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in and restoring climbing routes along Cathedral Ledge in the White Mountain National Forest in , among others. Support for the organizations that develop, preserve and promote and sustain National Scenic Trails. Funds this year will support the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Pacific Crest Trail Association, Continental Divide Trail Coalition and the North Country Trail Association. (Four grants, totaling $100,000 )

Funds this year will support the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Pacific Crest Trail Association, Continental Divide Trail Coalition and the North Country Trail Association. (Four grants, totaling ) American Rivers' National River Cleanup(NRC) volunteer engagement program , which mobilizes thousands of river stewards to clean up rivers and waterways in all 50 states. ($40,000)

, which mobilizes thousands of river stewards to clean up rivers and waterways in all 50 states. Continued support for the co-op's rewilding projects in Chicago , Portland, Oregon , Washington, D.C. and along the East Coast Greenway. With 80% of the U.S. population living in cities, REI's rewilding efforts are large, long-term projects that seek to reimagine the way city dwellers connect with the outdoors. (Five grants, totaling $285,000 )

About the REI Co-op

REI is a specialty outdoor retailer, headquartered near Seattle. The nation's largest consumer co-op, REI is a growing community of more than 19 million members who expect and love the best quality gear, inspiring expert classes and trips, and outstanding customer service. REI has 165 locations in 39 states and the District of Columbia. If you can't visit a store, you can shop at REI.com, REI Outlet or the REI shopping app. REI isn't just about gear. Adventurers can take the trip of a lifetime with REI's active adventure travel company, a global leader that runs more than 250 itineraries across all continents. In every community where REI has a presence, professionally trained instructors share their expertise by hosting beginner-to advanced-level classes and workshops about a wide range of activities. To build on the infrastructure that makes life outside possible, REI invests millions annually in hundreds of local and national nonprofits that create access toand stewardthe outdoor places that inspire us all.

* This year, REI will donate $0.10 per REI Co-op World Elite Mastercard purchase transaction made to the REI Foundation, up to $1 million. REI Foundation is a 501(c)(3) private charity that aims to: rewild cities and keep wild places wild; connect underrepresented groups to the outdoors; demonstrate nature's health benefits; and advance climate action. Non-Purchase transactions, including cash advances, convenience checks, balance transfers, and other advance transactions as defined in the Cardmember Agreement, as well as interest charges and fees, do not qualify. Transactions posted in late December of the current year may be applied in the following year. REI may change the benefit or named charity in future years. REI is solely responsible for making the donation.

The creditor and issuer of the REI Co-op Mastercard is U.S. Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Mastercard International Incorporated.

 2020 U.S. Bank

 2020 Recreational Equipment Incorporated. All rights reserved.

SOURCE REI Co-op

Related Links

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Orange County has been removed from California's COVID-19 watch list on Sunday, following a surge in cases and hospitalizations last month.

According to NBC Los Angeles, Orange County has been seeing improvements in many COVID-19 related metrics: case rate, positivity rate, average daily testing, hospitalizations, and percentage of available medical equipment. But it can still be put back on the watch list if it fails to exceed any one of the said COVID-19 metrics.

So far, the Orange County Health Care Agency reports a rate of 5.4 percent of residents testing positive for COVID-19. The rate is lower than the state's desired threshold of eight percent, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The county also has 58 percent of its ventilators and 29 percent of intensive care unit beds available. For the past reported 14-day period, the case rate per 100,000 residents is 90.2.

Reopening Schools Could Be Close for Orange County

With the county off the watch list, it starts the clock for public schools possibly to open in early September.

The state mandates that a county has to be off the watchlist for 15 days for schools to reopen, Dr. Clayton Chau of the Health Agency said.

If Orange County can keep up with its current numbers, K-12 students will likely go back to in-person classes by early September, an ABC report said.

The decision to reopen schools will still depend on individual school districts. County officials said there are currently 24 private elementary schools and one public school district approved to reopen.

There are about 100 more schools that applied for the same permission and are awaiting approval.

"We will have to discuss risks for vulnerable children as well as addressing health issues in children such as obesity, diabetes, etc.," Chau said in an Orange County Register report.

Chau encouraged communities to continue with non-medical public health interventions. He urged them to promote face masks, physical distancing, hygiene measures, and staying at home. Parents must also be given an option for online learning.

Not All Levels Are Offered In-Person Learning

State public health officials and teachers have offered in-person classes for elementary school children only. They understand that online learning can be difficult for young children.

This age group is also believed to be at lesser risk of developing COVID-19 than older children and adults. Chau himself is fearful and anxious about reopening schools.

"Do we expect that there might be an outbreak? Of course," he said. Despite this, he also knows that the pandemic's lockdown has caused emotional turmoil among children.

Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser noted that waivers could be sought to reopen schools if COVID-19 cases fall lower than 200 for every 100,000 people for two weeks.

At present, officials found 275 per 100,000. But Gunzenhauser said these numbers are dropping steadily.

What Other Reopenings Could Take Place

Other than in-person teaching, it is not yet clear what more could shift back to normalcy in Orange County.

Residents and businesses are still bound by the state's July 13 health order that closed indoor malls, gyms, and salons.

The state's Department of Health said these businesses would have to stay closed even if the county is dropped from the watchlist until the order has been updated.

California Governor Gavin Newsom hinted on Wednesday that there might be changes to the state order in the coming weeks.

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Britain must tear up human rights laws to halt the flow of migrants crossing the Channel, Tory MPs warned yesterday.

In a letter to Boris Johnson, the 40-strong Common Sense Group called for 'root and branch reform' of the asylum system to deter people from attempting the hazardous Channel crossing.

They urged the Prime Minister to ban asylum claims from migrants who travel to Britain from another safe country such as France.

Britain must tear up human rights laws to halt the flow of migrants crossing the Channel, Tory MPs warned yesterday

Group founder Sir John Hayes, a former security minister, said the issue should be a 'national priority' in a summer which has seen a record number of illegal crossings.

Removing the right to claim asylum from some migrants would mean re-writing the Human Rights Act, but Sir John said ministers must not shy away from this.

'The Human Rights Act in its current form is not fit for purpose,' he said. 'Of course certain lawful entitlements, such as the right to a fair trial, are important... but the Human Rights Act as it stands is being abused by a whole army of lawyers.

Group founder Sir John Hayes, a former security minister (pictured in 2018), said the issue should be a 'national priority'

The majority of migrants crossing the Channel do not have the right to asylum when their cases are looked at, but even then it is very difficult to remove them without their cases becoming clogged up in the courts.

'Part of our mandate was to create a Tory alternative to the bourgeois liberal hegemony.

'Now is the time to act because the public are sick of this.'

The letter to the PM highlights a range of options for limiting the ability of cross-Channel migrants to claim asylum.

These include a total ban on claims from those arriving from 'safe' countries where they could have lodged a claim. Alternatives include limiting cases to a single application 'to prevent repeated vexatious claims', and strict time limits on the handling of claims.

The intervention comes after more than 5,000 migrants crossed the Channel this year.

Home Secretary Priti Patel has pledged to make the 'incredibly dangerous route unviable' but has not set out any detailed plans.

MPs are now demanding urgent legislation when Parliament r
Namibia diamond mining to recover in 2021  central bank

25 august 2020 News

Namibias diamond mining sector is projected to register a solid recovery in 2021, according to the countrys central bank.

The Bank of Namibia said the diamond mining sector is forecasted to record growth rates of 5.4% and 14.1% in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

The central bank said the sector is now expected to record a decline of 24.6% in real terms during 2020.

The Bank of Namibia had last April said that the diamond mining sector is forecasted to decline by 14.9% in real terms during 2020, a downward revision from a growth of 5.3% projected last February.

Diamonds are considered to be a luxury item, and consumers are expected to shift their focus away from products of this nature as future income remains uncertain, the central bank said in its August economic outlook.

Furthermore, travel restrictions, lockdowns and prevention of large gatherings of people have resulted in prospective buyers being unable to attend auctions to view and purchase diamonds.

The Bank of Namibia said global demand for diamonds had dropped during the first half of 2020, and mines were forced to scale down on production.

De Beers, which mines the bulk of Namibias diamonds through Namdeb, recorded a production increase of 7% to 400 000 carats in the second quarter of the year in the southern African country.

Namibia produced just above 2 million carats in 2019, according to the Kimberley Process.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished






Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The health ministry of the Libyan government of national accord (GNA) says there were no death or serious injuries to protesters during their demonstrations in the capital Tripoli on Sunday
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:47:11|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- More confirmed COVID-19 cases were reported in Asia-Pacific on Monday as India recorded 61,408 new cases, and the Philippines announced 4,686 new infections.

India's total tally rose to 3,106,348, and the death toll surged to 57,542, said the latest data released by the federal health ministry.

As many as 61,408 new cases and 836 deaths were reported during the past 24 hours.

According to the data, there are still 710,771 active cases across India, and 23,38,035 people have been cured and discharged from hospitals.

The number of confirmed cases in the Philippines surged to 194,252 after the Department of Health (DOH) reported 4,686 new cases.

The DOH said the number of recoveries surged to 132,042 after 729 more patients recovered.

The death toll also climbed to 3,010 after 13 more patients died, the DOH added.

Bangladesh reported 2,485 new cases and 42 new deaths on Monday, taking the case tally to 297,083 and the death toll to 4,019, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said.

According to the figure reported by the DGHS under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 13,382 samples were tested in the last 24 hours across Bangladesh.

The total number of recovered patients in the country stood at 182,875 including 3,784 new recoveries on Monday, said the DGHS.

The confirmed cases in Indonesia rose by 1,877 within one day to 155,412, with the death toll adding by 79 to 6,759, the health ministry said on Monday.

According to the ministry, 3,560 more people were discharged from hospitals, bringing the total number of recovered patients to 111,060.

South Korea reported 266 more cases as of 0:00 a.m. Monday local time compared to 24 hours ago, raising the total number of infections to 17,665.

The number of confirmed cases for the past 11 days reached 2,895 due to infections in Seoul and its surrounding Gyeonggi province.

The infections were traceable to church services of Sarang Jeil Church in Seoul and the massive rally held in central Seoul on Aug. 15 by conservative voters and politicians.

Of the new cases, 97 were Seoul residents and 84 were people residing in Gyeonggi province, and 8 were imported from overseas, lifting the combined figure to 2,734.

The Tokyo metropolitan government on Monday confirmed 95 new daily cases, with the figure dropping to the lowest count since July 8.

The latest figure compares to 212 new infections reported on Sunday and 256 additional cases reported in the capital on Saturday.

Monday's figure for Tokyo is the first time since July 8 when 75 cases were confirmed that the number of daily infections has remained below the 100-mark.

The Tokyo metropolitan government said the capital's cumulative total now stands at 19,428, the highest among Japan's 47 prefectures. The nation's total caseload since the outbreak has surpassed 63,000 infections. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:01:12|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump was nominated for a second term on Monday at the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) in Charlotte, North Carolina, which has been scaled back due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump arrived at the Charlotte Convention Center on Monday afternoon, where over 300 delegates met in person for a roll call vote to formally nominate him and Vice President Mike Pence for the 2020 Republican presidential ticket.

Speaking to the delegates, Trump focused on his administration's response to the pandemic and lashed out at Democrats who held their national convention virtually last week and some media outlets' coverage of the RNC.

Trump will deliver an acceptance speech on Thursday night from the White House South Lawn. Enditem
Dr. Anna Banerji knows how tempting it can be to send kids into the classroom with a runny nose or a little cough.

I get it, said the Toronto infectious diseases pediatrician and parent. Youre breathing, youre not throwing up. Take some Advil and go to school.

A lack of child care and a culture that praises perfect attendance made toughing it out, from kindergarten on, the norm in a pre-COVID world.

But those days are over. The threat of outbreaks looms over this September, especially as nearly two-thirds of GTA families plan to send kids back to in-person learning. A student with even one minor symptom  from a sore throat to an upset stomach  could jeopardize an entire school. A new zero-tolerance regime will mean many more absences and huge challenges for families as they try to navigate the shift. But it could also bring some unexpected silver linings if school boards, and employers, can be flexible.

Keeping kids with symptoms home is the most important thing for parents to do, said Banerji. Children often have no signs of COVID-19 or only mild ones, and theres now a long laundry list of them.

If they have an existing issue, like allergies or eczema, thats one thing. But if its something new, and the child is saying that they have a sore throat or a parent notices a runny nose, then it could be COVID, no matter how minor.

If a coronavirus test is negative, Banerji still recommends keeping kids home for a week from the onset of symptoms, which she recognizes is not easy for some parents. She also suggests getting the flu shot.

The provinces plan for reopening schools outlines how some of this new reality will work. All staff and students must self-screen every morning. School boards should provide parents with a checklist of COVID-19 symptoms to do this. If a kid or teacher has even one symptom, they must stay home and get tested. If they are positive, they have to stay in isolation at home and follow local health unit advice.

The reopening plan notes that if someone gets sick at school, they will be taken to a special isolation room to wait until they can be taken home. These rooms  which could be a spare classroom or health room  will have personal protective equipment and be cleaned after each use.

Asked for details on the plan for monitoring health in schools, Ministry of Education spokesperson Ingrid E. Anderson responded in an email that the evidence is emerging and our plan is a living document  its meant to be augmented and adapted to apply the best advice as it emerges.

Boards have already been expanding on the provincial guidelines in their own documents, providing a glimpse of how things will work day to day. At the Toronto District School Board, for example, there will be a second screening conducted when students and staff arrive at schools, according to its return-to-school guide.

Before the first day of school, all TDSB staff will get a full day of health and safety training that will include information on screening and symptoms of COVID-19.

Staff or students with a confirmed case can come back to school 14 days after symptoms appear so long as they are mostly gone. No clearance letter or additional test is needed. The TDSB will track attendance and alert Toronto Public Health to large increases in absenteeism due to illness.

TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird said his board is still working out details, taking the lead from Toronto Public Health.

The public health unit announced last week it will dedicate a team of 70 nurses to schools in the city, on the heels of the provincial announcement to spend $50 million to hire 500 for school reopenings across Ontario.

The (Toronto nurses) will work in liaison and outbreak management roles to guide schools in COVID-19 prevention measures, mental health and well-being promotion and other public health advice to limit opportunities for virus spread in schools, said Dr. Vinita Dubey, associate medical officer of health. They will also conduct outbreak management, case investigations and contact tracing when a case develops in a school.

With almost 800 public and Catholic schools in Toronto, there will be about one nurse for every 11 schools.

However, Dubey said isolation rooms will be staffed by schools.

Asked who would do the secondary screenings, she said the province is developing guidance that will be released shortly for schools and public health on the specific roles for each organization.

Its not clear whether entire classes will be sent home if kids test positive, or at what point a school could be shut down. Dubey told the Star last week health units are also still waiting for guidance from the province on those questions.

In Peel, the message that a safe school is always more important than a perfect attendance record is a tag line for the reopening plan. Public board spokesperson Kayla Tishcoff said parents must use the Ontario COVID-19 self-assessment online tool every morning.

When in doubt, families should take extra care and keep their child home from school, including if they have a runny nose or upset stomach, she said.

Students wont be penalized if they are absent.

If they show a symptom, they will be taken to a room where they can be isolated until a family member comes to pick them up. Schools will identify rooms for this purpose, preferably near an exit, according to Tishcoff. Each room will be supervised by a Peel staff member, who will keep two metres away from the student.

Peels back-to-school plan indicates these rooms will have PPE kits with hand sanitizer, a gown, gloves, eye protection and surgical masks. All the rooms used for isolation will be cleaned and disinfected as soon as students have left, and signs will indicate if a room is available and has been cleaned.

After a positive case, Peel Public Health will help with contact tracing and may recommend closing a class, a section of a class or the entire school, depending on the situation, the plan adds.

If a secondary school student is sent home but still feels up to studying, they may be able to access some remote learning while at home, Tishcoff said. However, the board doesnt plan to offer elementary students the option of dipping into virtual classes when they are home quarantined.

Thats something school boards should do, said Alexandra Bal, an associate professor in new media at Ryerson University, because many kids are going to have to stay home without actually being too sick to learn.

The emerging science has shown that children are more likely to have mild or asymptomatic cases of COVID.

There will be a domino effect of absenteeism, unless both parents and children are allowed to work from home, said Bal.

Schools are going to need to embrace blended learning, letting kids participate in group digital activities from home, for example, or recording classes so they can watch from home. Theres some of this flexibility for older kids already. But for younger ones its still more of an all-or-nothing approach.

I think theyre missing the fact that yes, indeed, attendance is going to be a huge issue, Bal said. And how are they going to support parents?

The guidance from the Toronto and Peel public boards doesnt address what parents should do if they cant stay home from work to be with their kids. Neither does the plan from the province.

A recent report from the Decent Work and Health Network found 70 per cent of low-wage workers dont have paid sick days, its authors warning of a public health hazard that will result in children with COVID showing up in classrooms.

Its going to be very tricky to implement some other aspects of the back-to-school plan, especially with little kids, said Bal  like the on-site isolation rooms, which sound to her like jail.

And not having a backup plan for the students who will be absent is going to be kind of problematic, she said, as they will just start falling behind.

But with the right funding from the province for a blended approach, the system could move toward a model that values learning outcomes instead of bodies in seats.

The entire societys going to have to transition, said Bal. And hopefully schools will adapt to that.

Its all part of a shift toward being engaged rather than being physically present, said Glenda Carleton, president of the Ontario Association for Counselling and Attendance Services.

I dont think its about physically being in attendance. I think we should look at it more from the lens of being present and what does that look like, she said over the phone from Thunder Bay, where shes an attendance counsellor.

Assuming each student can be present every day was not equitable even pre-COVID, as some students were dealing with issues beyond their control, like addictions, mental health or poverty.

The educational regulations that state students need to be in attendance from age six to 16 still stand, but how we view that definitely has to change given the climate that were in right now, she said.

This will be an enormous challenge for parents who cant work from home, especially single parents, said Nikki Martyn, program head of early childhood studies at the University of Guelph-Humber. And the lack of detailed information, and changing plans for the return to school, just make things tougher.

Part of the reason we historically have gotten to this place is because of child care, she said. People who cant take the day off, what are their kids going to do?

She agrees with Bal that students at home should be able to dip into an online format.

But she believes, in the long term, this shift away from gold stars for perfect attendance might actually be a change for the better. And not just for public health.

This might be part of the silver linings that come out of COVID, she said.

Theres long been a stigma around kids taking a day off, and this push of, well everybodys sick sometimes, its just a cold, it will be fine.

Encouraging kids to check in and be more aware of their own health will teach them how to communicate their own best interests, she added.

It may even create more room to take, for example, mental health days, and children will develop resilience from adapting to changing situations.

Sick students staying home will help their classrooms and communities stay well.

But it would be nice if we could teach kids that they too are really important and worth it, Martyn said.
Duty of all to work in partys interest says Shashi Tharoor

Will consider returning as Congress chief says Rahul Gandhi at CWC

On Rahul Gandhi, Sibal reacts then retracts

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: After expressing displeasure over Rahul Gandhi's remarks, Congress leader, Kapil Sibal has now withdrawn his tweet.

Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never what was attributed to him. I therefore withdraw my tweet, Sibal said.

Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him .



I therefore withdraw my tweet .  Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) August 24, 2020

In an earlier tweet, which now stands withdrawn, Sibal said Rahul Gandhi says " we are colluding with BJP. " Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party.

Rahul Gandhi questions timing of letter, accuses dissenters in party of colluding with BJP

Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP Govt.

Congress president post, who will lead if not the Gandhis? Big developments | Oneindia News

Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue.Yet " we are colluding with the BJP," Sibal had written on Twitter.

It may be recalled that 103 Congress workers had written to her seeking a complete rehaul of the party. The letter was signed by former chief ministers and members of Parliament. The letter alleged drift and uncertainty over the leadership. The letter was signed by Kapil Sibal Ghulam Nahi Azad, Milind Deora, Manish Tewari among others.

Sonia Gandhi had indicated that she does not want to carry on as the chief of the party any longer. She is of the view that the party should have a new chief. In a hand written note, Gandhi said that she was not interested in leading the party. She said that she had accepted the post of interim president only after much persuasion and on the condition that the party would find a replacement for her soon.
By Patpicha Tanakasempipat

BANGKOK, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Facebook on Monday blocked access within Thailand to a group with 1 million members that discusses the country's king, after the Thai government threatened legal action over failure to take down content deemed defamatory to the monarchy.

The move comes amid near daily youth-led protests against the government led by the former military junta chief and unprecedented calls for reforms of the monarchy.

The "Royalist Marketplace" group was created in April by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a self-exiled academic and critic of the monarchy.

On Monday night, the group's page brought up a message: "Access to this group has been restricted within Thailand pursuant to a legal request from the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society."

Pavin, who lives in Japan, said Facebook had bowed to the military-dominated government's pressure.

"Our group is part of a democratisation process, it is a space for freedom of expression," Pavin told Reuters.

"By doing this, Facebook is cooperating with the authoritarian regime to obstruct democracy and cultivating authoritarianism in Thailand."

Facebook declined to answer Reuters questions about blocking the group.

The company has said that when it receives complaints of posts violating local laws, it may restrict the availability of the content in the country.

Thailand has strict lese majeste laws that forbid defaming the king, with penalties of up to 15 years in prison.

Earlier this month, Thailand's digital minister accused Facebook of not complying with requests to restrict content, including insults to the monarchy.

On Aug. 10, he gave Facebook 15 days to comply with court takedown orders or face charges under the local Computer Crime Act, which carries a fine of up to 200,000 baht ($6,367.40) and an additional 5,000 baht ($159.18) per day until each order is observed.

"The deadline is almost up and Facebook understands the context of Thai society, so they cooperate," ministry spokesman Putchapong Nodthaisong told Reuters.

The ministry last week filed a separate cybercrime complaint against Pavin for creating the group. ($1 = 31.4100 baht) (Reporting by Patpicha Tanakasempipat, Editing by William Maclean)
New Hyde Park, N.Y.  The statewide positive testing rate for the coronavirus in New York was 0.66% on Sunday, the 17th day in a row the rate has been below 1%.

Its not an anomaly, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said today during a press conference in New Hyde Park on Long Island. Weve been doing a great job keeping control of this virus.

Central New Yorks positive test rate was 0.7% on Sunday and was less than 1% each of the last five days and much of the last month.

Western New York is the only caution flag at the moment, Cuomo said.

RELATED: Cuomo sees coronavirus caution flag in 1 New York region

Hospitalizations due to the virus in New York rose 10 to 482 on Sunday. A total of 120 people were in intensive care units, up 10, and 54 people were intubated, up four.

Another seven people in the state died due to the virus on Sunday, bringing the statewide death toll to 25,295.

New York now has 430,145 confirmed cases of the virus, include 408 new cases on Sunday. The state conducted another 62,031 tests for the virus yesterday.

Its a question of science, not politics, Cuomo said. You can manage a virus, but you have to understand what youre dealing with.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

School, coronavirus, risk: In Syracuse, they dont have the suburbanites confidence

Colleges have told students all the things they cant do. They need to focus on what they can

Downtown Syracuse bar worker and a churchgoer test positive for coronavirus, officials say

Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-282-8598
kali9/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR, ABC News



(KENOSHA, Wis.) -- Authorities issued a curfew in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as angry crowds gathered in protest after a Black man was shot and seriously wounded by police Sunday evening.



Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has also authorized the National Guard to support local law enforcement and "help protect critical infrastructure and assist in maintaining public safety and the ability of individuals to peacefully protest," according to a statement.



I know folks across our state will be making their voices heard in Kenosha and in communities across Wisconsin. Every person should be able to express their anger and frustration by exercising their First Amendment rights and report on these calls to action without any fear of being unsafe, Evers said. This is a limited mobilization of the National Guard focused on supporting the needs of local first responders to protect critical infrastructure, such as utilities and fire stations, and to ensure Kenoshians are able to assemble safely.



The shooting occurred just after 5 p.m. local time when officers from the Kenosha Police Department responded to a reported domestic incident on 40th Street near the intersection with 28th Avenue. The officers provided "immediate" medical aid to the individual who was shot. The person was then flown about 45 miles to Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa, just west of Milwaukee. The individual was listed in serious condition at the time, according to a press release from the Kenosha Police Department.



Police did not identify the wounded individual nor elaborate on what led to the shooting.



Cellphone video allegedly taken by a bystander has been circulating on social media since the incident and has been viewed thousands of times. The video appears to show three officers with their weapons drawn following a Black man as he walks from the back of a vehicle to the driver's side. As the man enters the driver's side of the car, one officer, who is hanging onto the man's shirt, opens fire. Shouting and several gunshots can be heard in the video.



The Wisconsin Department of Justice's Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI), which is investigating the shooting, said all of the officers involved in the incident have been placed on administrative leave.



"All involved law enforcement are fully cooperating with DCI during this investigation," the agency said in a press release. "DCI is continuing to review evidence and determine the facts of this incident and will turn over investigative reports to a prosecutor following a complete and thorough investigation."



Evers has identified the wounded individual as Jacob Blake.



"Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin," Evers wrote in a Facebook post late Sunday. "While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country."







Milwaukee ABC affiliate WISN spoke to Blake's fiance, Laquisha Booker, who said two of their kids were sitting in the back of the car when he was shot by police. She claimed the officers threatened to shoot her as well.



Booker told WISN she never called police and wasn't sure why they were there. She said her fiance wasn't armed and didn't own any guns or weapons.



"It doesn't make sense to treat someone like that," Booker told WISN.



A large crowd of protesters amassed at the scene after the shooting, prompting local authorities to impose the citywide curfew. Officers were seen using tear gas on protesters who had gathered outside the Kenosha Police Department.



Police said they have received "numerous" calls overnight about armed robberies and shots fired in the city.



Authorities later announced the Kenosha County Courthouse and administration building will be closed Monday due to "damage sustained during last night's civil unrest."



Renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump said he has been retained by Blake's family and that the man is in stable condition. Crump claimed that Blake was helping to deescalate a domestic incident when police drew their weapons and Tasered him. As Blake was walking away to check on his kids, the officers fired their weapons several times into his back at point blank range, according to Crump.



"We all watched the horrific video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back several times by Kenosha police. Even worse, his three sons witnessed their father collapse after being riddled with bullets," Crump said in a statement Monday. "Their irresponsible, reckless, and inhumane actions nearly cost the life of a man who was simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident. Its a miracle hes still alive."



"We will seek justice for Jacob Blake and for his family as we demand answers from the Kenosha Police Department," he added. "How many more of these tragic 'while Black' tragedies will it take until the racial profiling and undervaluing of Black lives by the police finally stops?"



On Monday, Evers renewed previous calls for more police transparency, saying Wisconsin legislative leaders "have failed to act" to address the issue.



He also called for a special legislative session to take up a package first introduced earlier this year that establishes statewide use of force standards for police.



"This package invests in community interruption violence programs and works to address the issue of inappropriate use of force by individuals in law enforcement, prohibit dangerous police practices build upon the work of law enforcement standards board and strengthens accountability measures," he said. "These are commonsense policies that transcend political debate.



He said the shooting underscores that racism is a public health crisis that demands immediate action.



The state's lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, also blamed lawmakers for not doing more.



"Let me be clear, this was not an accident, this wasnt bad police work. This felt like some sort of vendetta being taken out on a member of our community, Barnes said. "The irony isnt lost on me that as Jacob Blake was actually trying to deescalate a situation in his community, but the responding officer didnt feel the need to do the same. And now we all know Jacob Blake's name."



He said legislative leaders had ignored calls for change from people in every part of the state and now "another Black man is fighting for his life due to the actions of law enforcement."



"The people of our state are done waiting for the Legislature to act, and so are we," Barnes said. We know we cannot remedy the systemic racism built into all of our systems with just this package of bills, but that does not mean we should stand still."



ABC News' Matt Foster, Sabina Ghebremedhin and Will Gretsky contributed to this report.

Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
The coronavirus pandemic has not hindered apartment construction business in San Antonio, according to an online rental search service.

Other than Austin, San Antonio has seen more apartment completions during the first six months of 2020 than any other city in the United States, a report from RENTCafe says.

RENTCafe released its findings on its apartment trends Aug. 17, showing data that 2,871 new apartment units hit the market in San Antonio during the first half of the year. Austin led the way nationwide with a total of 3,827 new apartment units from January to June.

According to the data, Texas cities were the most active in completing new apartment developments at the city level in the first half of 2020. Houston (2,085), Dallas (1,869) and less-known Farmers Branch in Dallas County (1,161) were also listed in the data.

READ ALSO: Study: San Antonio ranked among most stressed cities during pandemic

The data shows there are 4,595 new apartment units projected for 2020. The Alamo City is predicted to be the 19th city with the most completed projects by the end of the year. Compared to 2019, San Antonio is seeing a 20 percent jump when it comes to new apartment units.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area is first in terms of apartment construction, set to complete 19,318 new units by the end of 2020.

RENTCafe is a nationwide apartment search website that enables renters to easily find apartments and houses for rent throughout the United States.

To compile its report, RENTCafes research team analyzed new apartment construction data across 99 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The study is based on apartment data related to buildings containing 50 or more units. Metros with less than 300 units were not included.

Priscilla Aguirre is a general assignment reporter for MySA.com | priscilla.aguirre@express-news.net | @CillaAguirre
Ghanaian President, Nana Akufo-Addo, has congratulated Nigerian writer, Wale Okediran, on his appointment as the Secretary-General of the Pan-African Writers Association (PAWA).

Mr Akufo-Addo congratulated Mr Okediran in a statement issued by his spokesperson, Nana Bediatuo, on Monday.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Iseyin-born medical doctor and writer was a former House of Representatives member and President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA).

Mr Akufo-Addo, in the statement, charged Mr Okediran to use his new position to further the cause of the association.

The President of the Republic welcomes the appointment of Dr Wale Okediran as Secretary-General of the Pan-African Writers Association (PAWA) and extends his congratulations to him.

With his experience and remarkable achievements, the President is confident that Dr Okediran will work to fulfill the noble objectives of PAWA, the statement said.

The president expressed confidence that Mr Okediran was fit for the position, considering his plethora of experience.

Mr Okedirans appointment had followed the death of Prof. Atukwei Okai, the founding Secretary-General of PAWA.

Mr Okais death had left the position vacant for about two years until the eventual appointment of Mr Okediran. (NAN)
Duty of all to work in partys interest says Shashi Tharoor

With Rahul Gandhi reluctant to lead path, Congress thinks of an alternative plan

CWC: Sonia Gandhi likely to continue as interim chief till full fledged party elections take place

CWC: Elections for full time Congress president likely in September

Will consider returning as Congress chief says Rahul Gandhi at CWC

Congress in crisis: The nine possible outcomes of todays CWC meet

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: A crucial meeting of the Congress Working Committee is underway in which Sonia Gandhi is likely to tender her resignation as party chief.

After 23 leaders had written seeking an overhaul of the organisation, Sonia said that she is unwilling to continue and has asked the party to elect a new chief.

Congress: 5 presidents from Nehru-Gandhi family, 13 from outside since independence

Congress president post, who will lead if not the Gandhis? Big developments | Oneindia News

Let us look at the possible scenarios:

Sonia Gandhi refuses to continue as party president, will ask CWC to elect new chief Party asks Rahul Gandhi to return as party chief Rahul refuses to take over and asks party to elect new chief Rahul accepts demand to lead the party Rahul seeks free hand to overhaul the party and asks for dissolution of CWC Rahul refuses and Sonia requested to stay on as chief until new president is elected Parliamentary board formed to run day to day affairs of party Sonia and Rahul refuse to continue. CWC authorises senior most general secretary to be made interim president until elections within party are held. Sonia Gandhi agrees to continue as party chief
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The Gulf Coast braced Sunday for a potentially devastating hit from twin hurricanes as two strong storms swirled toward the U.S from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Officials feared a history-making onslaught of life-threatening winds and flooding along the coast, stretching from Texas to Alabama.

A storm dubbed Marco grew into a hurricane Sunday as it churned up the Gulf of Mexico toward Louisiana. Winds are forecast to hit Louisiana by as early as 2am Monday morning.

Another potential hurricane, Tropical Storm Laura, lashed the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and was tracking toward the same region of the U.S. coast, carrying the risk of growing into a far more powerful storm.

Laura has already killed at least seven people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti including a mother and her 7-year-old son.

The storm left more than a million in the country without electricity, forced more than a thousand to evacuate and caused several homes along the Isabela River to collapse, authorities said.

As of Sunday night, it is forecast to hit Louisiana by 8pm Tuesday.

Workers board up shops in the French Quarter of New Orleans ahead of Hurricanes Marco and Laura Sunday

People stand in long lines before entering Costo to pick up supplies as they prepare for Hurricane Marco and Laura in Louisiana. The Gulf Coast braced Sunday for a potentially devastating hit from the twin hurricanes

Residents look for salvage items next to the Tet Dlo river after the passing of Tropical Storm Laura in Haiti. The storm has already killed at least seven people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic as it heads toward the United States

People selling from the market walk in the flooded street in Haiti Sunday. The storm gained power as it passed over the country and it expected to be a hurricane by the time it makes land in the United States

People line up to enter retail chain Costco to buy provisions in New Orleans as a state of emergency is declared

'There has never been anything we've seen like this before, where you can have possibly two hurricanes hitting within miles of each over a 48-hour period,' said Benjamin Schott, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service's Slidell, Louisiana, office.

It appeared the storms would avoid being hurricanes simultaneously - something that researchers say has never happened in the Gulf of Mexico at least since records began being kept in 1900.

The National Hurricane Center said Marco was about 240 miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River on Sunday afternoon and heading north-northwest at 13 mph, packing winds of 75 miles per hour.

The center warned of life-threatening storm surges and hurricane-force winds along the Gulf Coast.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, who declared a state of emergency Friday, asked President Donald Trump for a federal emergency declaration.

He warned the state's residents that tropical storm-force winds would arrive by Monday morning and they should be ready to ride out both Marco and Laura.

'Wherever you are at dark tonight is where you need to be prepared to ride out these storms,' Edwards said.

Hurricane Marco is expected to hit Louisiana by Monday morning

The National Hurricane Center said Marco was about 240 miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River on Sunday afternoon and heading north-northwest at 13 mph, packing winds of 75 miles per hour

Hurricane Marco approaching into the US Gulf Coast on Sunday

People in Louisiana headed to stores to stock up on food, water and other supplies.

Laura was headed over Cuba before its path likely takes it to the same part of the U.S. coast as of Sunday evening.

Experts said computer models show Laura could make landfall with winds exceeding 110 mph, and the overlapping storms could bring two feet of rain to south-central portions of Louisiana.

A hurricane watch was issued for the New Orleans metro area, which Hurricane Katrina pummeled in August 2005.

Laura was centered about 50 miles off the eastern tip of Cuba as of Saturday afternoon, and its maximum sustained winds had strengthened to 60 mph. It was moving west-northwest at 21 mph .

It was forecast to move over Cuba on Sunday night or Monday.

Officials in the Florida Keys, which Laura might pass over on its route into the Gulf, declared a local state of emergency and issued a mandatory evacuation order for anyone living on boats, in mobile homes and in campers.

Tourists staying in hotels were warned to be aware of hazardous weather conditions and consider changing their plans starting Sunday.

Storm Laura is expected to increase in power as it moves closer towards to US, strengthening into a hurricane

Laura is also predicted to hit Louisiana by Tuesday evening just a day after Hurricane Marco

Residents of Louisiana began to prepare on Sunday as they were warned to stay at home when strong winds hit Monday

Workers board up windows in the French Quarter in anticipation of Hurricane Marco and Laura Sunday

People tie down their vessels along Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana as they prepare for Hurricanes Marco and Laura

New warnings were added Sunday morning - including a storm surge warning from Morgan City, Louisiana to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and a hurricane warning from Morgan City to the mouth of the Pearl River.

A tropical storm warning included Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, and metropolitan New Orleans.

A storm surge of up to 6 feet was forecast for parts of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi.

The prospect of piggybacked hurricanes was reviving all-too-fresh memories of damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005. The storm has been blamed for as many as 1,800 deaths and levee breaches in New Orleans led to catastrophic flooding.

'What we know is there's going to be storm surge from Marco, we know that that water is not going to recede hardly at all before Laura hits, and so we've not seen this before and that's why people need to be paying particular attention,' Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards warned at a Sunday briefing.

In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, videos on social media showed people wading waist-deep in muddy water in some of the worst flooding the capital has seen in years after Laura hit.

Haiti is especially vulnerable to intense rains due to shoddy infrastructure and deforestation which increases the likelihood of landslides.

A view of collapsed houses, due to heavy rains from storm Laura in the Dominican Republic on Sunday

Street vendors cross a flooded street during Tropical Storm Laura in Haiti Sunday

People watch a building damaged by a river after the passing of Tropical Storm Laura in Haiti

People observe as water runs along the streets of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic causing the collapse of houses

Authorities called on residents along the Artibonite River to evacuate due to risks the Peligre Hydroelectric Dam might burst its banks.

Haiti was the first to report a death from Laura, where a 10-year-old girl was killed when a tree fell on her home in the southern town of Anse-a-Pitres.

Haiti's prime minister said at least four other people had died during the storm, and in the Dominican Republic relatives told reporters that a mother and her young son had died after a wall collapsed on them.

Hundreds of thousands were without power in the Dominican Republic as both countries on the island of Hispaniola suffered heavy flooding.

With hopes dashed that the mountains of Hispaniola would weaken the storm, Cuba scrambled on Sunday to prepare for Laura.

Evacuations were underway in eastern parts of the Caribbean's largest island, where the storm was expected to strike Sunday evening, bringing flooding, before traveling along the entire island on Monday.

Back-to-back hurricanes arriving at the U.S. coast within days 'could result in a prolonged period of hazardous weather,' National Hurricane Center forecaster Stacy Stewart warned on Sunday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent teams to emergency operations centers in state capitals in Louisiana and Texas, said spokesman Earl Armstrong.

The agency is prepared to handle back-to-back storms, he said, pointing to 2004 when four hurricanes took aim at Florida in a six-week period.

Officials in Louisiana's coastal Lafourche Parish ordered a mandatory evacuation for residents of low-lying areas at noon on Sunday.

A flooded garage area in Haiti after Tropical Storm Laura hit

People walk in a completely flooded street due to heavy rains from Storm Laura in the Dominican Republic

A man carries a woman across the Tet Dlo river in Haiti during Tropical Storm Laura

The U.S. Coast Guard also raised its warning for the Port of New Orleans, calling for ships to make plans to evacuate some areas.

The potential for flooding and evacuations added to worries about the spread of COVID-19.

Tulane University, the largest private employer in New Orleans, said it will close its testing center on Monday due to potential flooding and power outages and called on students to maintain social distancing guidelines.

In Grand Isle, at the state's southern tip, authorities were placing sandbags to bolster its protective levy while energy companies continued to pull workers from offshore platforms and shut production in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico wells.

The city of Port Arthur, Texas, said on Sunday that it had run out of sand and sandbags for residents.

Equinor has finished evacuating its Titan oil-production platform in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and shut-in oil production at the facility, a spokesman said on Sunday.

BHP Group Plc also shut and evacuated its Shenzi and Neptune oil platforms, a spokeswoman said.

Oil producers including BP Plc, Chevron Corp and Royal Dutch Shell Plc had shut 57.6 percent of the region's offshore oil production on Sunday. Also, 44.6 percent of the natural gas production was shut.

The region accounts for 17 percent of total U.S. oil production and 5 percent of U.S. natural gas output.
RIVERSIDE, Calif.: The potential loss of his lifes work has kept Vince Bernard up at night, worried about whether he would be able to save his citrus farm.

At Bernard Ranches in Riverside, California, the citrus grower saw more than 3,000 boxes of oranges rot when the coronavirus pandemic forced schools and restaurants to close in March. That loss translated into $36,000.

Lemon sales went from 40, 50 boxes a week to zero. And it was looking increasingly bad," said Bernard.

Bernards worst fears, however, were that his trees would die if he were not able to pay a hefty monthly water bill of $7,000.

I had nightmares of that," Bernard said.

The 68-year-old Bernard soon realized he had to knock on doors to avoid losing his crop of Valencia oranges.

Fighting back tears, Bernard recounted how he went to his old customers and said he would be glad to sell anything at cost, half price or less to stay in business. I told them  Im desperate to keep my lifes work going."

Bernard started selling fruit in 1984. Besides distributing to local restaurants, hotels and schools, Bernard has been relying on The Fruitguys, an online business that delivers farm-fresh fruit to offices and homes nationwide.

With the farming industry suffering across the country due to the pandemic, The Fruitguys have lost 90% of their business.

When Chris Mittelstaedt, founder of The Fruitguys, learned about Bernards dire situation, he offered an alternative.

If I could get 20 weeks in a row of eight hundred bags of oranges sold for him, then that gets him closer to being able to save his ranch," said Mittelstaedt.

Cesar Pascual and his family have worked at Bernard Ranches for 23 years. Pascual says watching Bernards suffering has not been easy.

He has made a tremendous effort in looking for ways to sell the product," Pascual said.

For Bernard, he hopes to survive the pandemic and pass on his beloved trees to his grandchildren.

Im hopeful  well keep going," said Bernard. Southern California groves, theres not very many of them left, period. Ill give this to the kids and itll continue."

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) holds a press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Dec. 9, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Sen. Lindsey Graham Says Hes Voting to Reelect Trump

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced that he is voting Monday to reelect President Donald Trump, with just over 70 days until the election.

Graham, in an opinion article, argued that the president has delivered on his promises, saying that his record is clear. He also downplayed criticisms from a small, outlier group of Republicans who announced they would vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden last week.

To some, President Trumps style and behavior are problematic. Others believe President Trump is just what the doctor ordereda bull in a china shop, Graham wrote. Not only do they approve of what President Trump is doing, they approve of the manner in which hes doing it and believe it should have been done a long time ago.

Among Trumps accomplishments, according to the GOP senator, are rebuilding a military that was left broken down under the prior administration, confirming about 200 district and circuit court judges and two Supreme Court justices, cutting taxes and deregulating the economy, and touted Trumps replacement of NAFTA with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

President Trump has pushed back against Chinese expansion, Chinese misbehavior, intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, and their role in spreading the coronavirus, he wrote, referring to the CCP virus. He added: President Trump has been a steadfast pro-life president and is standing up for religious liberties throughout the world.

He also touted Trumps mantle of law and order amid protests, violence, and unrest that was embraced by far-left agitators earlier this year.

It came about two months after Trump called on voters in South Carolina to cast their ballots for Graham in his November senate reelection bid.

Senator @LindseyGrahamSC is a good friend and strong voice for the people of South Carolina, Trump posted on Twitter in early June. Hes helped us confirm GREAT Judges, rebuild the Military, and keep our Country SAFE. Strong on Life and our Vets. Lindsey has my Complete and Total Endorsement!

While Graham disagreed with Trump on a number of issues, including the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, he has overall been a vocal supporter of the president, including during the impeachment hearings.

Graham, however, was not included among prominent GOP Republicans who are scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention this week. Both Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was also the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will speak at the event on Monday night.

Graham faces Democratic nominee Jaime Harrison, the former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, in the general election.
A Malaysian coroner began an inquest into the death of tragic Irish teen Nora Quoirin, a year after her body was found near a nature resort where she vanished while on holiday.

Nora Anne Quoirins disappeared from her familys cottage at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on August 4th 2019, a day after her family arrived for their holiday.

The disappearance sparked a massive search.

Read More

Her body was discovered on August 13 beside a stream in a palm oil estate about 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) from the resort, police say.

Coroner Maimoonah Aid said the inquest is aimed at determining when 15-year-old Nora died, the cause of her death, how she came to her death, and if anyone was criminally involved.

Negeri Sembilan police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop, the first witness, said the investigation showed no criminal element. He said there was no indication Nora was abducted and no ransom demand.

Police believe Nora climbed out of a window on her own, and the autopsy showed she succumbed to intestinal bleeding due to starvation and stress, he said.

Her mother and father, Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin, say Nora was kidnapped because she had mental and physical disabilities and couldnt have wandered off on her own.

Resort owner Haanim Bamadhaj, who testified via video conference, said Nora's parents had told her the teen only had on her underwear when she went missing and that she would hide when she was frightened.

Recalling the night, Haanim, whose house faces the Quorin's cottage, said it was peaceful and that her dog, who would bark if there were outsiders, was also quiet.

She acknowledged that a window of the cottage that was found ajar the morning Nora disappeared was faulty and could be opened from the outside. But she said there have never been any criminal break-ins in her property since it opened for business 11 years ago.

A recording of the girls mother calling Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here that was used during the search was played to the court.

The coroner earlier this month visited the resort and the place where the body was found. The inquest, which is set to run until September 4th, is to involve 64 witnesses.

The Quoirin family lawyer, S. Sakhty Vell, said Nora's parents couldn't attend the inquest due to the coronavirus pandemic but will testify via video conference. A British doctor who conducted a second autopsy on Nora's body will also testify remotely, he said.

The Quoirin family has sued the resort owner for alleged negligence. They said in their lawsuit that there was no security at the resort and that a cottage window was found ajar with a broken latch on the morning Nora disappeared.

Nora had poor motor skills and needed help to walk and her mental age was about 5 or 6 years old, her parents said in the lawsuit.

Gurdial Singh Nijar, the lawyer representing the resort, told reporters after the first day of the inquest that the incident was unfortunate but there was no culpability" on the part of the resort owner.

Nora's parents have welcomed Malaysia's decision to hold the inquest after police classified the case as no further action. They said the inquest will be crucial in determining the fullest possible picture of what happened to Nora and how her case was dealt with."
Indian low-cost carrier IndiGo does not expect to be profitable in the next 18 months, according to the CEO of InterGlobe Aviation, which operates the airline.

At the moment, the airline is flying at about 32% of its capacity, Ronojoy Dutta said on Friday.

IndiGo is one of the largest carriers in the country, with a fleet size of 274 aircraft as of June. It also operates international flights.

"It's going to be very hard to get profitable at this low levels of flying. But our plan is that we should be at 75% of capacity by early next year. Once we hit that number, we see a better shot at getting profitable," Dutta told CNBC's "Street Signs Asia."

"We won't be profitable for the next 18 months is my guess," he said, adding that the focus right now is getting to positive cash flow.

The company earlier this month said it will raise up to 40 billion rupees ($534 million) in funds through a qualified institutions placement, which allows publicly-listed firms in India to raise funds from accredited investors by issuing shares without undergoing a lengthy regulatory process.

"Our expectation is by mid-next-year, we should be at about 85% of capacity and India's a little different from other mature economies," Dutta said.

He explained that chances are the top-end customer segment, which mainly involves business travel, will take a hit long term. But that is likely to offset by an increased demand in commercial air travel.
CHICAGO>> False claims that Kamala Harris is not legally eligible to serve as U.S. vice president or president have been circulating in social media posts since 2019, when she first launched her Democratic primary campaign.

As a person born in the U.S., at least 35 and a resident for at least 14 years, she is eligible for the nations highest office as prescribed in the Constitution.

President Donald Trump has elevated the conspiracy theory that Harris is ineligible, citing the claim on Thursday without weighing in on its validity and then on Saturday refusing to say whether he believes the California-born senator does or doesnt meet the constitutional requirements of the office he holds.

I have nothing to do with it. I read something about it, Trump said Saturday during a news conference. He added: Its not something that bothers me.  Its not something that we will be pursuing. Asked point blank if Harris is eligible, Trump replied: I just told you. I have not got into it in great detail.

A look at the claim:

THE CLAIM: Harris is ineligible to serve as vice president or president because her mother is from India and her father is from Jamaica. Trump said Thursday that he heard the California senator doesnt meet the requirements, adding, I have no if idea thats right.

THE FACTS: Thats false. Harris was born on Oct. 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, according to a copy of her birth certificate, obtained by The Associated Press.

Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, and her father, an economist from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.

Since she was born on U.S. soil, she is considered a natural born U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment, and she is eligible to serve as either the vice president or president, Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Full stop, end of story, period, exclamation point, Levinson said.

There is no serious dispute in the legal community around the idea that someone born in the U.S. can serve as president, said Juliet Sorensen, a law professor at Northwestern University.

The VP has the same eligibility requirements as the president, Sorensen said. Kamala Harris, she has to be a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years old, and a resident in the United States for at least 14 years. She is. Thats really the end of the inquiry.

However, Newsweek published an op-ed written by John Eastman, a conservative attorney who argues that the Constitution doesnt grant birthright citizenship. Eastman sowed doubt about Harris eligibility based on her parents immigration status. After receiving heavy criticism for publishing the piece, Newsweek defended its decision only to reverse course and apologize.

The false claims first started circulating on social media in 2019, during Harris presidential campaign, and they were revived against last week, days ahead of her selection as Bidens running mate. Facebook posts falsely said she would not be eligible to take over for Biden, because her parents were both immigrants.

I cant believe people are making this idiotic comment, Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University professor of constitutional law, told The Associated Press at the time. She is a natural-born citizen and there is no question about her eligibility to run.

Trump was a high-profile force behind the so-called birther movement  the lie that questioned whether President Barack Obama, the nations first Black president, was eligible to serve. Only after mounting pressure during his 2016 campaign did Trump disavow the claims.
Azerbaijan has already managed to allow a number of gross violations of international humanitarian lawin particular, of the 1949 Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War; Taron Simonyan, an MP of the opposition Bright Armenia Party, wrote about this on his Facebook page.

"Let me recall that Armenian officer Gurgen Alaverdyan had gotten lost due to very unfavorable weather conditions. Search operations are being carried out.

Azerbaijan has already informed that the Armenian officer is under its control, has released a video recording its own violations.

I believe Azerbaijan should be remindedalready by all meansof the international legal instrument that the prisoners of war are under the control of the opposing stated, but not of individuals or the military units that have taken them captive () (Article 12). Prisoners of war must always be treated humanely. (); the imposing of sanctions against them is prohibited (Article 13). Prisoners of war have the right to respect for their person and their dignity in all circumstances (Article 14).

"That reminder must be such as to cause real problems and consequences for that state which constantly violates international law," Simonyan added, in particular.
Goa's professional theatre and



cultural groups, which used to be busy organising shows during the annual Ganesh festival, have got no bookings this time in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, say some organisers.

The state government said it was aware of the problems faced by theatre artists and was hopeful that the culture sector will be able to resume its activities by October or November.

Earlier, various drama and cultural groups used to organise their shows during the 10-day Ganpati celebrations.

The festival this year began on Saturday under the shadow of

"My theatre group used to perform at least 40 to 45 shows during the Ganesh festival. We are blank this time as there are no bookings due to COVID-19 restrictions, said Rajdeep Naik, promoter of Kala Chetana Volvoi, one of the oldest theatre groups in

The state's theatre industry is staring at an uncertain future as nobody knows when cultural activities will resume, said Naik, whose group is known for its epic dramas, including "Firangi Fataas" which delved on the issue of mother tongue as the medium of instruction.

He said at least 25 to 30 professional theatre groups in the state were dependent on the Ganesh festival season to launch a new play or enact old popular dramas for the public.

Restrictions on gatherings due to the COVID-19 pandemic have forced several public Ganeshotsav groups to curtail their celebrations to one-and-a-half days, he noted.

Goa's Art and Culture Minister Govind Gaude said the state government is aware of these problems, but is "helpless" due to coronavirus-related restrictions.

"We are hoping the culture sector will resume by October-November this year. It is entirely dependent on the standard operating procedures that would be released by the Union government on August 30," he said.

He ruled out the possibility of providing any financial assistance to the groups.

Naik said last month, various artists made representations to Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, Union AYUSH Minister Shripad Naik and Gaude.

"We had appealed to the government to get us accommodated in government-run institutions like Doordarshan and the All India Radio. The government can also use our art for creating awareness on COVID-19, he said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) New Delhi, India  Mon, August 24, 2020 08:51 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066ff476a 2 World India,coronavirus,COVID-19,COVID-19-infection,pandemic,SARS-CoV-2,virus-corona,novel-coronavirus Free

India's confirmed coronavirus cases crossed the three million mark Sunday with nearly 70,000 new infections, as the disease continues to surge in the world's second most-populous nation.

The health ministry said 69,239 cases were detected on Sunday, with 912 deaths taking the total number of fatalities to 56,706.

Many experts say, however, that the real scale of the infection is much higher.

Authorities in New Delhi said last week that an antibody study in the megacity suggested more than a quarter of the capital's population had contracted the infection.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government imposed one of the world's strictest lockdowns in late March that has been mostly eased in recent weeks.

But the epidemic has left Asia's third-largest economy reeling, and tens of millions of people have lost their jobs and livelihoods.

Individual states and cities have imposed localized lockdowns -- including Haryana and Punjab, where cases have spiked in recent weeks.

Previously the main hotspots have been the teeming megacities of New Delhi and Mumbai, home to some of the world's biggest slums.

"At the moment we are seeing a fairly sharp rise in cases overall for India," said K Srinath Reddy, of the non-governmental Public Health Foundation of India.
Forest restoration is a crucial element in strategies to mitigate climate change and conserve global biodiversity in the coming decades, and much of the focus is on formerly tree-covered lands in the tropics.

But recent forest restoration research rarely acknowledges the social dimensions or environmental justice implications of such projects. A new study finds that nearly 300 million people in the tropics live on lands suitable for forest restoration, and about a billion people live within 5 miles of such lands. Many of these people live in poverty.

Just and equitable implementation of restoration projects will require that communities be empowered to manage and use local forests, according to the authors of the study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Community management of forest areas includes the rights to access the forests, withdraw forest resources, and manage lands for community benefit.

"We argue that the success of global forest restoration critically depends on prioritizing local communities," said study lead author James Erbaugh of Dartmouth College, who earned a doctorate from the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability.

"Empowering local communities to restore forests can provide human well-being benefits to millions of the most deprived and marginalized people, as well as environmental benefits for all."

Study co-authors include SEAS professor Arun Agrawal, as well as other current and former graduate students and postdoctoral researchers at the U-M school.

Their analysis examines the overlap between opportunities for tropical forest restoration, human populations, development and national policies for community forest ownership. The researchers focused on the opportunities in tropical countries because of the potential there for removing atmospheric carbon, promoting biodiversity conservation and contributing to the well-being of local residents.

For the study, the researchers combined two datasets: one that classifies forest restoration opportunities using demographic, geographic and land-cover data, and another that uses estimates from a land-change model to predict carbon removal from forest restoration.

They found that 294.5 million people live in recently tree-covered areas in the tropics that hold promise for forest restoration--places the researchers call forest restoration opportunity areas. About 1 billion people live within 5 miles of land predicted to be suitable for forest restoration over the next 30 years if a moderate carbon-tax incentive of around $20 per ton of carbon dioxide is implemented.

Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Indonesia have the greatest number of people living in or near forest restoration opportunity areas with the greatest potential to remove heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in forests, according to the study.

Within low-income countries in the tropics, 12% of the population lives in forest restoration opportunity areas, a finding that highlights the potential for improving the livelihood and well-being of millions of people who are often underserved by standard investments in infrastructure and development, according to the authors.

Nighttime satellite images showing the brightness and extent of artificial lighting on the Earth's surface can be used as a proxy for multiple development indicators. In the current study, areas in low-income nations with the least nighttime light radiance and the greatest carbon-removal potential indicated the places where forest restoration projects might best complement sustainable development agendas.

"There are many opportunities in central, eastern and southern Africa to restore forests and provide socioeconomic and infrastructure benefits to local people facing many multidimensional deprivations," said U-M's Agrawal, who is also editor-in-chief of the journal World Development.

"Forest landscape restoration that prioritizes local communities by affording them rights to manage and restore forests provides a promising option to align global agendas for climate mitigation, conservation, environmental justice and sustainable development."

On the other hand, denying decision-making powers to affected locals could pose serious ethical problems, especially if some of those individuals are displaced by forest-restoration projects designed to help mitigate human-caused climate change and preserve biodiversity.

Such exclusion would force some of the most multidimensionally poor people--those who live in rural areas within low-income countries--to move or give up their current livelihood for a global carbon and biodiversity debt to which they contributed little, according to the researchers.

And while local communities should be empowered to manage forests for restoration, opportunities to expand community forest ownership must also be explored, they say..

Most of the forest restoration opportunity areas analyzed in the study are in countries with preexisting legal frameworks for community forest ownership, which represents a stronger set of resource rights than community forest management.

Continued efforts to expand community forest ownership are especially important in countries with a substantial proportion of people living in forest restoration opportunity areas, such as the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Thailand and the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

Forest restoration projects in the tropics involve planting trees on land previously cleared for agriculture, timber harvesting or other purposes. Increasing support for such efforts is becoming available from both government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, Agrawal says.

The authors of the Nature Ecology & Evolution paper support the use of a landscape planning and management tool called forest landscape restoration, or FLR, as a way to include local communities in forest-restoration projects in the tropics. FLR "aims to restore ecological integrity and enhance human well-being on deforested and degraded lands through the inclusion and engagement of local stakeholders," according to the researchers.

Proponents of FLR say it contributes to human well-being through the use and sale of forest products, that it promotes increases in local food and water security, and that it respects diverse cultural values that local peoples hold for trees and forests.

"Our study highlights the critical need for close ties between researchers, decision makers and local communities to secure greater wellbeing for people and ecosystems," Agrawal said. "Those working on forests--whether government agencies or researchers--forget far too often the necessity of working with people, not against them."

###

The paper's authors, in addition to Erbaugh and Agrawal, are U-M graduate student Nabin Pradhan; J. Adams of Dartmouth College; former U-M postdoctoral researcher Johan Oldekop, now at the University of Manchester; D. Brockington of the University of Sheffield; R. Pritchard of the University of Manchester; and A. Chhatre of the Indian School of Business.

The work was supported by the Rights and Resources Initiative and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Graphic

Study: Global forest restoration and the importance of prioritizing local communities

Arun Agrawal
In 2008, Hindu nationalist violence destroyed 395 churches and places of worship of Adivasi and Dalit Christians; 6500 houses. At least 100 people killed; 40 women raped, harassed and humiliated; schools, social services, health centers destroyed or vandalized; more than 75 thousand people displaced; many cases of forced conversion to Hinduism. Until now, no criminal jailed. Out of 3,300 complaints, only a few hundred accepted. Many families are unable to return to their villages of origin for fear of being killed

New Delhi (AsiaNews) - Open trials for 315 cases of violence; justice for the dead and compensation for the destruction as required by a decree of the Supreme Court; favouring the development of minorities; involving their representatives in administrative decisions; cancelling the anti-conversion law in Odisha and making religions neutral towards the state.

These are some of the urgent requests of the victims of the Orissa pogroms (2007 and 2008), contained in an appeal by the National Solidarity Forum (Nsf), published on the occasion of the 12-year anniversary of the massacres and destruction, which many organizations mark tomorrow, August 25th.

In August 2008, a few days after the celebration of Indian independence, a campaign of destruction was unleashed in Orissa against Christians and against their institutions (churches, centers, cooperatives, leper hospitals, dispensaries, ...). The spark that caused the violence was the killing of swami Lakhsamananda Sarasvati, one of the leaders of the VHP (Hindu nationalist and extremist association), immediately attributed to Christians, but in reality the work of a Maoist group. For the NSF, "the organized sectarian attack [was] the largest in the history of India in the past three centuries."

One of the most affected districts was that of Kandhamal.

The Nsf lists the destructions: 395 churches and places of prayer of the Adivasi and Dalit Christians; 6500 houses; at least 100 people killed; 40 women raped, harassed and humiliated; schools, social services, health centres destroyed or vandalized; more than 75 thousand people displaced; many cases of forced conversion to Hinduism.

There were 3,300 reports of violence in Kandhamal, but only 820 were accepted by the police; 518 were registered; the others were considered "false". Of the 518 cases, 247 have already been dealt with; the others are still pending. Among the cases already dealt with, the majority of those were declared innocent. At present, no criminal responsible for the destruction is in prison. According to a study by a Supreme Court adviser, quoted by the NSF, there was a percentage of 5.13% of convictions. Looking at the entire volume of complaints, the percentage is minimal: 1%.

The NSF also recalls that "On August 2, 2016, the Supreme Court ... declared that the amount and extent of the compensation was not satisfactory". Furthermore, the Court found it "sickening" that so many "lawbreakers" were not registered and ordered the review of 315 cases of violence, until then rejected by the police. "Up to now, - continues the NSF - the cases have not been reopened even after 4 years, also due to the fact that the Supreme Court has not set any statue of limitation".

In addition, there are homes, churches, institutions and voluntary organizations, whose properties have been destroyed and [whose name] has never been found on the list of those to be compensated. There are many who have yet to receive compensation for their destroyed home, despite the Supreme Court order. And there are other properties and shops belonging to thousands of people that have not been included in the list or even considered.

Finally, the NSF points the finger at the insecurity of the survivors: "It is truly a tragedy that even after 12 years there are hundreds of families unable to return to their ancient villages for fear of losing their lives. This has a high price on their existence. The displaced within the district now live in new colonies without access to the resources to live on. Migrants, who have left the district forever, are now in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic. Widows and relatives of the killed are fighting a legal battle, but also one to survive, given the fear of threats from fanatics.
Acquisition Expedites Market Entry in Spain, Italy and France

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Afterpay (ASX:APT), the leader in "Buy Now, Pay Later" payments, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with NBQ Corporate SLU (NBQ) to acquire Pagantis SAU and PMT Technology SLU. Pagantis is a European company that offers payment services for ecommerce merchants across Spain, France, and Italy.

With this acquisition, Afterpay is able to expedite its expansion into Europe and capitalize on a market primed for "Buy Now, Pay Later" (BNPL) services. Today, Southern Europe has an addressable ecommerce market which exceeds 150b1 (US$[177b) across Spain, Italy and France. With large millennial populations, a strong fashion and beauty market, and significant consumer debit card usage, there is a strong opportunity to offer BNPL services. The acquisition also allows the company to meet demand from existing global retail customers for Afterpay's BNPL service across their European ecommerce sites.

"Our momentum to date has given us the confidence to expedite our expansion into new global regions. Entering into such internationally relevant markets like the U.S. and the UK and seeing our growth outpace what we experienced in our more mature Australian market, validates the appeal of our product on a global scale," said Anthony Eisen, Co-founder and CEO of Afterpay. "Acquiring Pagantis provides us with the necessary regulatory licensing, resourcing and infrastructure to expedite the launch of Afterpay into key countries in Southern Europe and beyond."

As part of the agreement, NBQ will receive a minimum 50m, with 5m in cash payable at completion of the acquisition and a deferred consideration of a minimum of 45m, payable three years after completion of the agreement. Deferred consideration can exceed 45m, provided the equity value of Pagantis exceeds 45m after three years.

Afterpay will offer Pagantis' BNPL products under its European brand, Clearpay. Pagantis founder and CEO, Rolf Cederstrom, will continue leading the new European team. Pagantis' existing credit products will be discontinued.

Once Clearpay receives the necessary regulatory approval it will be able to offer its products across Spain, France or Italy.

About Afterpay Limited

Afterpay Limited (ASX: APT) is transforming the way we pay by allowing customers to receive products immediately and pay for their purchases over four installments, always interest-free. The service is completely free for customers who pay on time - helping people spend responsibly without incurring interest, fees or extended debt. As at June 30, 2020, Afterpay is offered by more than 55,400 of the world's favorite retailers and is used by more than 9.9 million active customers globally.

Afterpay is currently available in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom, where it is known as Clearpay. Afterpay is on a mission to power an economy in which everyone wins.

1 Source: CNMC, Osservation.net, Handelsverband Deutschland

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The Diocese of Evo, Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to freeze all the accounts of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) because of monumental corruption going on there.

The church made the call in a in a communique issued yesterday at the end of the second session of the fourth Synod of the Diocese which held at St. Matthias Anglican Church, Atali in Obio/Akpor Local Government Area of Rivers State with theme: Stronger and Better Together

The church also called on Buhari to immediately intervene to bring sanity to the commission.

It also frowned at the rising incidence of cases of rape and sexual assault in the country and called on government at all levels to take steps to check the menace.

The church expressed concern over the extreme poverty and the environmental pollution in the Niger Delta region despite the resources at the disposal of states in the region and the NDDC.

The communique was signed by the Bishop of the Diocese, Rt. Rev. Innocent Ordu; the Chancellor, Nlerum Amadi and the Clerical Synod Secretary, Rev. Can. Gospel Onuchukwu,

In its communique, the church expressed disappointment that the NDDC, which was supposed to be an interventionist agency, had turned out to work against the people.

The diocese, therefore, called on Buhari to freeze the accounts of the NDDC, and carry out a total overhaul of the commission and the Niger Delta Ministry.

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The church said the steps had become necessary because of the alleged monumental corruption in the commission and key officers of the National Assembly who were supposed to carry out oversight functions on the interventionist agency.

It said, "Synod condemns the level of alleged corruption involving members of the board and management of the NDDC and key officers of the National Assembly in the finances of the commission and there calls on President Muhammadu Buhari to immediately freeze the accounts of NDDC and carry out a total overhaul of both the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs and the NDDC."

It also expressed concern over the spate of insecurity in country, particularly "the unwarranted killings in the Christian-dominated Southern Kaduna in Kaduna State; armed banditry and activities of Boko Haram in the Northern parts of Nigeria; the menace of herdsmen, armed robbery and kidnappings in the entire country".

It therefore called on the "Federal Government to wake up from its deep slumber and end the bloodbath and restore the sanctity of life, and also the international community not to keep quiet over the security situation in Nigeria".

On COVID-19 pandemic, the Diocese of Evo noted that it had exposed the extent of neglect and decay of the healthcare delivery system and facilities in Nigeria and the urgent need to overhaul the health sector.

It therefore called on everybody to observe the recommended preventive measures by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Federal Ministry of Health against the pandemic.
Louis Theroux attends discusses My Scientology Movie in 2017. (Santiago Felipe/Getty Images)

Louis Theroux thinks he may have overstepped the mark with some of his interview subjects early on in his documentary-making career.

His comments come as the journalist reflected on the past 25 years of his career for The Guardian, noting he had been "a little bit of a tool" in the past and that he saw his younger self as sometimes being "overly pushy and badgering".

"When I look at my own motivations and my own journey, I am forced to face the negative alongside the positive: a tendency, when younger, to maybe be glib, to disarm with the aim of making light of peoples deeply held beliefs, to act the clown, to make fun," he wrote.

Read more: BBC can carry Britains voice to the world, says outgoing chief

"That was part of how I saw my role, to be the straight man in a weird world, and there were times, looking back, when I see I may have gone too far."

Louis Theroux launches Best of Weird Weekends, a collection of the finest moments from his BBC Two series. (Yui Mok  PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

His first TV series Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends  first aired when he was 27  saw him visit groups with extreme views or unusual lifestyles. The first season saw episodes covering subjects such as born-again Christians, survivalists and people who believe in UFOs.

Theroux, 50, said the mistakes he made along the way have helped him to improve his presenting abilities, as he pointed out the more serious subject matter of his recent documentaries, including eating disorders and dementia.

"When I started out in 1994, it would have seemed ludicrous to imagine having the maturity, sensitivity and storytelling chops to make programmes about disability, mental health and addiction, he remarked.

Louis Theroux on the BBC's The Graham Norton Show. (Isabel Infantes/PA Images via Getty Images)

Last year, he described filming a 2000 documentary on Jimmy Savile as the strangest and most upsetting event of his career.

After Savile's 2011 death it was found the DJ had sexually abused at least 72 children and women at the height of his fame, but Theroux said at the time "there wasn't enough to go on to make [Savile's paedophilia] a relevant topic of inquiry".

He explained the interview had been pitched to Savile's team as a means "to slightly poke fun at him".
Explained: What happens if Sonia Gandhi steps down from her post in the CWC meeting?

India

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New Delhi, Aug 24: Congress on Monday is all set to hold a crucial Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting that is expected to determine the person who could be replaced after Sonia Gandhi "formally announces her decision to step down as interim president" of India's grand-old party.

According to reports, the Congress leaders will take part in a virtual CWC meeting today to decide on the crucial matter, hoping to put an end to the party's prolonged leadership crisis.

Goa Congress hails Sonia Gandhis leadership

But, it can be seen that a group of party leaders disagree with the leaders who sent the letter seeking an organisational shift in the party. With this, one is anxious to know what is going to happen in the CWC meeting today.

There are several possibilities that could take place during and after the CWC meeting. The first possibility is that Sonia Gandhi might continue as the President. It is the most likely possibility as all members are expected to appeal to the senior leader to continue as party president.

The Congress crisis: Need for a full time and not part time leader

If Sonia Gandhi refuse to continue as the party president, all the members can demand senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to reclaim his position as the party president. However, with the promises made by the Wayanad MP, Rahul Gandhi might stand by his decision taken a year ago and he will not accept the post in any circumstance.

Congress president post, who will lead if not the Gandhis? Big developments | Oneindia News

In the event of Congress leader's refusal, a demand could be floated for a fresh election. In such situation, the party already has electoral colleges in all the states, only the process of selecting AICC delegates of Haryana and some isolated states remains.

In total, around 9,000 to 10,000 delegates choose the position of president in the event of elections. In 2019, after Sonia Gandhi was made the interim president, the process was to ensure holding elections within six months.

'Reports of Sonia Gandhi resigning as Congress president false: Randeep Surjewala

However, this senario did not pop-up, all thanks to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, a decision can be taken to choose the new president within three-six months. Till then, the party leaders might appeal to Sonia Gandhi to continue as interim president.

With all the political drama taking place in the Congress and still Sonia Gandhi does not accept to become the interim president for a short time, several veteran Congress leaders such as former defence minister AK Antony or former prime minister Manmohan Singh can be selected for the post of interim president.

Also, several other leaders like Mallikarjun Kharge and Sushil Kumar Shinde can also become interim president, following which an election can be conducted for determining the person who will take up the top Congress party post.
Tata Group to launch `Super App'' for digital services: report

Tata Group is planning a fresh push into the expanding tech sector amidst the coronavirus-induced slowdown of economic activities with a new Super App that the company says, will bring together its varied consumer businesses.

The Tata Group, which has a presence in everything  from salt to information technology and from steel to automobiles and aircraft components  caters to millions of consumers within and outside the country. It is natural for any industry to think in terms of dealing directly with the consumer, if and when possibilities open up.

Reports citing Tata Sons chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran said the new platform should be ready to launch in India from December or January. This would help the conglomerate enter the widening, yet highly competitive world of online marketing.

Tata group has long been planning to enter the consumer business in big way and had also proposed consolidation of its consumer product businesses under Tata Global Beverages Limited, which in turn will be renamed Tata Consumer Products Limited to reflect the new strategic direction of the company.

The new entity combining key Tata brands such as `Tata Salt, `Tata Tea, `Tata Sampann and `Tetley will reach over 200 million households, giving it an unparalleled ability to leverage the Tata brand in consumer products, according to Tata Group.

The creation of a focused consumer products company with a combined turnover and EBITDA of Rs9,099 crore and Rs1,154 crore, respectively (based on March 2019 figures), will help the product portfolio of the two consumer-focused businesses to grow their share of the foods and beverages market with a broader exposure to the attractive and fast-growing FMCG sector.

The Tata Group, despite its major presence in the IT sector, has so far lagged in its online marketing business.

Tata Group may also want to take advantage of the now-favourable climate with the government restricting the role of Chinese tech companies amid geopolitical tensions and investor interest created openings for newcomers.

Tata plans to use the `Super App to make available make a range of services that would eventually include food and grocery, fashion and lifestyle, consumer electronics and consumer durables, insurance and financial services, education, healthcare and bill payments, according to Chandrasekaran.

Chandrasekaran is attempting to sharpen Tatas focus on consumer and digital products even as he is trying to streamline the groups convoluted structure, which includes more than 30 operating companies covering a range of industries.
This new data has mental health experts concerned about its ripple effects.



"We don't really know how many people go from suicide ideation onto suicide, says Rajeev Ramchand, senior consultant for epidemiology and suicide prevention at the National Institute of Mental Health.

However, even thoughts about harming one's self suggest significant despair and distress. It's noteworthy and concerning, and we should pay attention to it because it could be indicative of future suicide, says Ramchand.

However, he cautions that what we don't know is if during normal times caregivers have higher suicidal thoughts."

Heidi Donovan, codirector of the National Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Family Support at the University of Pittsburgh, says, Caregiving is hard in the best of times. Everyone is aware of that. I think the compounding effect of the pandemic is making the job more physically, emotionally and financially difficult.

A lot of the services available for caregivers, such as respite and home health care, have been affected by the pandemic. With only online social support available, experts worry that the isolation of caregivers can make the situation worse.

Gilmore says, Now I have very little social life. I always enjoyed a monthly dinner break with friends, and now I don't have that small outlet."

The survey also indicates that unpaid caregivers are doing worse over time. Experts say this is worrisome.

"I think that we as a society and as individuals need to rally around those people we know that are family caregivers. They can't care for their loved ones if they're not first caring for themselves, says Donovan.

Susan C. Reinhard, a nurse and senior vice president and director of the AARP Public Policy Institute, says feeling alone and having no choice in caregiving can be additional major stressors on unpaid family caregivers.

Most unpaid family caregivers say they don't have a choice, and half of them are very stressed, according to the report "Caregiving in the United States 2020 by the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP.

Seventy-two percent of people who say they feel alone as an unpaid family caregiver say they have high emotional stress, according to the study.

"A lot is going to depend on how long someone is giving care, but when you feel you have no control in life, or when you feel stuck, that is a big ordeal, says Reinhard.

"All of us need to think about family caregivers. You need to reach out to them. People experiencing caregiving have no emotional energy to call you, she says.
New Delhi :

Taking further the clean India drive, Ministry of Urban Development has launched a toilet locator app to assist people to find clean public washrooms.

Google Toilet Locator app unveiled by Minister of Urban Development, M. Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday is developed and designed by Google and will also be Google Maps assistive.

The app currently supports two locations for now- Delhi NCR and Madhya Pradesh. It will make available information about as many as thousands of public toilets around the area.

On the launch event, Naidu also revealed that 504 cities and town have till now achieved free of open defecation status and around 739 more cities have made a commitment to achieve the status by March 2017.

With a listing covering almost every area of the Delhi NCR including Ghaziabad, Gurugram, Noida and Faridabad, while the cities of Bhopal and Indore are listed under Madhya Pradesh category.

The Urban Development Ministry in partnership with Google will work closely together to keep adding the data location regarding opening hours and address of over 4,000 public and communal washrooms.

Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and Sikkim are the three states which have announced that all of its cities and towns are Open Defection Free (ODF), while Kerala is expected to become Open Defection Free by March 2018, Naidu informed.

This service will be accessible to users in two languages- Hindi and English. Toilets on the app are also accessible through Desktop apart from the mobile application.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Downing Street was today forced to insist that teachers and pupils in England would not have to wear masks at school  after Scotland said it was preparing to make them compulsory in some situations.

Nicola Sturgeon indicated that they would probably have to be worn in areas such as 'corridors and communal areas'.

And her government said it was close to announcing that staff and children should wear masks when moving around school premises. Miss Sturgeon said: 'We're consulting on this specific measure because, firstly, mixing between different groups is more likely in corridors and communal areas  increasing the potential for transmission.

'Secondly, crowding and close contact in these areas is more likely and voices could be raised, resulting in greater potential for creating aerosol transmission. Finally, there's also less scope for ventilation in these areas.'

Covering up: Girls from Bloomfield Collegiate School in Belfast back at school yesterday. Masks are being encouraged at some schools in the province

The Scottish rethink, coming after a clutch of cases in the country's schools since they reopened, could be followed by a similar move in England  despite Westminster's insistence that it had no plans to review its stance.

It would be the second time a U-turn north of the border has been followed by one in England. Earlier this month, Westminster followed a dramatic change of heart over the marking of exam grades in Edinburgh with one of its own.

Kevin Courtney, leader of teachers' body the National Education Union, said: 'School leaders in England need detailed guidance from Government about what should happen if there is transmission within a school or in the case of a local spike.

21 staff test positive in school outbreak By Josh White A school in Dundee has closed its doors after 21 members of staff tested positive for coronavirus. NHS Tayside yesterday said the number of cases in the outbreak had reached 27 after two pupils and four community contacts also contracted the virus. Kingspark School, which has 185 pupils aged between five and 18 who have additional support needs, has been shut since Wednesday evening. Staff and pupils have begun 14 days of self-isolation. A single positive case was also linked to a primary class at St Peter and Paul's School in the city, with an additional positive case connected to a club at nearby Downfield Primary School. Despite the news, Scotland's Education Secretary John Swinney said there had been only a 'very limited prevalence' of coronavirus cases since schools reopened. Asked about the Kingspark School outbreak, Mr Swinney said: 'I think it's important to indicate that this issue is being taken very, very seriously by our incident management team on the ground. 'There has been extensive testing undertaken and contact tracing, as there should be in any example of a positive case emerging. I think it's also important to recognise that this is one of 2,500 schools that are open across Scotland. 'And over the course of the last couple of weeks in which schools have been opened, we've had some limited examples of the presence of Covid within schools and that's to be welcomed, the fact that it's been a very limited prevalence of Covid in our schools in these early days.' Patrick Roach, head of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, commented: 'It is important that more detailed investigations take place at this school and any other setting where an outbreak occurs, in order to understand how the outbreak has occurred.'  Parents will face 120 fines if they fail to send their children back to school without good reason, the Government has said. Minister Nick Gibb yesterday admitted some parents will have worries but stressed that education was compulsory. 'Fines for non-attendance have always been a last resort for headteachers and schools,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 'What matters is that young people are attending school.' Prosecution can be threatened if the fine goes unpaid. Advertisement

'Many staff, parents and students will be anxious, and face masks will help to alleviate that anxiety. It will go some way towards ensuring there is confidence among parents that schools are safe places.'

At the weekend, Unison's head of education Jon Richards said: 'It's still unclear why government guidance won't allow masks, when they're recommended for other workplaces.

'No one wants to see schools shut down again after a few days because we haven't done enough to put necessary measures in place.'

The Department for Education maintains that even though children over 11 will be expected to cover their faces on school buses, they will not be necessary after arriving.

And the Government yesterday underscored its message.

On widening the use of masks in English schools, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said: 'We are not in a position where we are suggesting that, because we believe there is a system of controls that are there in place for all schools for children to be able to return safely and for staff to be able to operate safely within those schools.'

Boris Johnson and the Government are launching a huge push this week to ensure all school children get back to school next week when the autumn term starts.

The Prime Minister has insisted that it is safe for schools to return and the risks of the virus to children are low, but education unions are still concerned about the lack of safety precautions  suggesting that pupils and staff should wear masks outside the classroom.

The World Health Organisation says children aged 12 and over 'should wear a mask under the same conditions as adults, in particular where they cannot guarantee at least a one metre distance from others and there is widespread transmission in the area'.

But the Department for Education says heads must not force pupils or staff to wear them.

Its guidance says the benefits from wearing masks on public transport or in shops do not apply to the school environment, and misuse could increase the risk of transmissions. And there are also worries about the impact of masks on teaching and communication, especially for children with learning difficulties.

Instead, 'changing habits, cleaning and hygiene are effective measure for controlling the spread of the virus', it says.

Exceptions are where children require intimate care, or if they become unwell with coronavirus symptoms and teachers are unable to maintain a two-metre distance.

Schools minister Nick Gibb said: 'If a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils.'

Geoff Barton of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: 'Schools are working very hard to put in place an extensive series of safety controls to minimise the risk of coronavirus transmission and protect staff and pupils.

'This does not and cannot mean that there is no risk, and this outbreak shows that stark reality very clearly.

'However, the risk posed by coronavirus has to be set against the educational risk to pupils of missing school, and we agree with the Chief Medical Officer that the balance is very strongly in favour of children returning to the classroom.

'What we do need, as a matter of urgency, is for the Government to provide a robust back-up plan over what happens in the event of local closures or a second national shutdown which goes beyond simply returning to a situation where most pupils are learning from home.'

Travelling to school 'is more risky than Covid'

Children are at more risk of being knocked down on their way to school than they are of catching Covid-19 in the classroom, the deputy chief medical officer said on Monday.

Urging all parents to send their offspring back to school next week, Jenny Harries said the risk posed by the virus was minimal.

'Every time a parent sends their child off to school, pre-Covid, they may have been involved in a road traffic accident  there are all sorts of things,' she said.

Back at work: Boris Johnson delivers Monday's video message

'That risk, or the risk of seasonal flu, we think is probably higher than the current risk of Covid.'

Dr Harries also suggested teachers were not at great risk from the return to school, saying staff were more likely to catch the virus from colleagues during their coffee break than they were from their pupils.

Her comments came as Boris Johnson led a concerted push to get all schoolchildren back to the classroom next week.

The Prime Minister said it was 'vitally important' for children to return to school, adding that missing more time in the classroom would be far more damaging than any risks posed to them by the virus.

In a video clip released on his return to work yesterday, he acknowledged that some parents were 'genuinely still a bit worried' about their children contracting coronavirus.

But he added: 'All I can say is the risks are very, very, very small that they'll even get it, but then the risk that they'll suffer from it badly are very, very, very, very small indeed.

'It's vital that parents understand that schools are safe and that teachers have gone to great lengths to get schools ready.'

Downing Street said there was a moral duty to get children back to school next week, with many having been off for six months.

The power for headmasters to fine parents who fail to send their children to school will be restored, but No 10 said this should be used only as a 'last resort'.

Local authorities can fine parents 120  cut to 60 if paid within 21 days  over a child's absence from school, with the threat of prosecution if they fail to pay.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said: 'In terms of fining, we would ask all schools to work with those parents, encourage them to bring their children back, deal with concerns that they have and fining would be very much the last resort.'

A No 10 spokesman told reporters that schools could face temporary closure in the event of local lockdowns. But he said they would be expected to provide remote learning for children stuck at home.

He said the PM expected to see all children back full time and being taught the full curriculum.
The Nigerian authorities have left rural communities at the mercy of rampaging gunmen who have killed at least 1,126 people in the north of the country since January, Amnesty International said today.

The organization interviewed civilians in Kaduna, Katsina, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba and Zamfara states, who said they live in fear of attacks and abductions as insecurity escalates in rural areas. Many of those interviewed described how security forces often arrive hours after attacks have ended, even when officers have been given information about impending attacks. During one attack in Unguwan Magaji in Kaduna state, security forces arrived at the scene but left when they saw the sophisticated ammunition the attackers were using. By the time they returned, at least 17 people had been killed.

Amnesty International has documented an alarming escalation in attacks and abductions in several states in north west and north central Nigeria since January 2020. Worst affected are villages in the south of Kaduna State, where armed men killed at least 366 people in multiple attacks between January and July 2020.

"In addition to the security forces' failure to heed warnings or respond in time to save lives, the fact that no perpetrators have been brought to justice leaves rural communities feeling completely exposed. The President claims he has repeatedly tasked security agencies to end the killing so that Nigerians can go to bed with their eyes closed, but clearly nothing has changed."

Houses burned, villagers abducted

At least 77 people have been killed since January 2020 in the ongoing communal clashes between the Jukun and Tiv ethnic groups in Taraba state, northeast Nigeria. The ethnic conflict between Jukun and Tiv ethnic groups has been on and off since the early 1990's as authorities consistently failed to end the conflict.

On 28 May, at least 74 people were reportedly killed in Sokoto state, when gunmen attacked four villages in Sabon Birni Local Government Area.

According to witnesses interviewed by Amnesty International in Kaduna, Plateau and Katsina states, the attacks are well coordinated. Attackers stormed villages on motorcycles and heavily armed. They shoot sporadically at people, set houses on fire, steal cattle, destroy farm produce and abduct villagers for ransom.

Most villagers told Amnesty International that the government left them at the mercy of their attackers. They complained of receiving little or no help from security officials during attacks, despite informing them prior or calling for help during attacks. They lamented that, in most cases, the security forces arrived hours after attacks.

A witness to an attack in Unguwan Magaji in southern of Kaduna said:

"During the attack, our leaders called and informed the soldiers that the attackers are in the village, so the soldiers did not waste time and they came but when they came and saw the type of ammunitions the attackers had they left. The following morning so many soldiers came with their Hilux pick-up trucks to see the dead bodies."

Escalating violence in southern Kaduna

In response to increasing violence in the south of Kaduna State, the State Governor imposed a 24-hour curfew in affected communities in June 2020, but attacks have continued. Violence has been on and off in southern Kaduna since the aftermath of 2011 elections and authorities have failed to both end the violence or bring the perpetrators to justice.

On 6 August at least 22 people were reported killed when gunmen suspected to be herders attacked four communities in Zangon Kataf Local Government Area of the state.

More than 100 people were killed in July during 11 coordinated attacks in Chikun, Kaura and Zangon-Kataf Local Government Areas of the state. At least 16 people were killed in Kukum-Daji on 19 July 2020, in an attack that lasted for five minutes, when attackers shot sporadically at villagers.

A farmer in Kukum Daji whose son was killed during the attack informed Amnesty International:

"My son was 20 years old, he had just gotten admission at University of Jos. He was at home due to the Corona pandemic, then the attack happened. When I saw his dead body, my body became very weak, I started feeling dizzy, I thought I was going to fall, my whole body was on fire but there was nothing I could do, I just told myself that am leaving everything to God. I will never be happy again in this life for losing this boy. His death has really affected me".

Some victims of the recent attacks in southern Kaduna told Amnesty International that security forces were absent during most of the attacks, arriving only hours after the attackers had left. In rare cases when security forces arrived during attacks, they often came with inadequate intervention.

Humanitarian crisis looms

The violence has forced many farmers and their families to flee their homes. In Katsina state, at least 33,130 people are now in displacement camps, and others have gone to stay with relatives in urban areas. Thousands of farmers could not cultivate their farms during the 2020 rain season because of fear of attacks or abduction.

"This is pushing the region to the brink of a major humanitarian crisis. The Nigerian authorities' failure to stem the violence is costing people's lives and livelihoods, and without immediate action many more lives may be lost."

A 50-year-old farmer in Batsari Local Government Area of Katsina State told Amnesty International:

"Our village has been attacked several times. Not once, not twice, but 10 times. To farm is even a problem, the bandits have stopped us from going to our farms, we only cultivate the farms close to the house but our farmland in the bush, we can no longer go there to farm, they stopped us from going there. My family farm that was not cultivated this year is more than 300 hectares of land."

Abductions

At least 380 people have been abducted for ransom during attacks in Kaduna, Niger, Katsina, Nasarawa and Zamfara states in 2020, mostly women and children. Largely, relatives of those abducted sell all their belongings to pay ransom to the gunmen and those unable to pay are mostly killed.

According to a witness, at least 17 women were abducted on 20 July in Safana Local Government Area of Katsina State, in an attack that lasted for almost three hours.

Arrested for Daring to Seek for Better Protection

Not only has the government failed to take the steps needed to stop these attacks, police regularly punish those who dare to ask for more protection. Amnesty International has documented how farmers, rights groups, and activists are subjected to intimidation, arrest and torture for speaking out against the attacks or asking government to help protect the people.

On 8 August at least 3 people were arrested during a peaceful protest at Refinery Junction, Kaduna South, and on 18 June, at least 20 protesters were arrested and detained for days by police in Katsina State.

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On 17 June, Nastura Ashir Sharif - an activist was arrested for speaking out against the killings and leading protests calling for an end to the rising insecurity in the country.

On 10 April, a youth from the Oureedam community in the Bassa area of Plateau State was arrested after complaining that security forces had arrived late to an attack. He said he was beaten and was made to roll on a wet floor. He was eventually released when a lawmaker representing his community intervened.

Amnesty International is calling on Nigerian authorities to independently investigate all these deaths and ensure accountability by bringing the perpetrators to justice. Spate of these killings is an evidence of failure of authorities to protect the people. Inability of authorities to bring attackers to justice is fueling dangerous conspiracy theories that only escalate the violence.

"The government has an obligation to protect its population. The rising death toll in the north of Nigeria shows just how badly the authorities are failing in this responsibility."

Background

Rising insecurity in several states in the north of Nigeria, including Kaduna, Katsina, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba and Zamfara states, has left thousands dead.

Amnesty International Nigeria has been monitoring the banditry attacks and clashes by herders and farmers since 2016. In December 2018 we published a report, based on years of research, that documents the violent clashes between members of farmer communities and members of herder communities in parts of Nigeria, particularly in the northern parts of the country.
By Carol Mang and Yoyo Chow

HONG KONG, Aug 24 (Reuters) - A Hong Kong tourism company has moved its walking tours online to reach a travel-starved audience unable to explore new places due to coronavirus restrictions.

The company, Walk in Hong Kong, runs free online tours in Cantonese focussed on local history and culture, with help from government subsidies and private donations. While bookings for its regular in-person tours typically took a week to fill, one recent virtual tour filled 70 spots overnight.

It now plans to run such tours in English for an overseas audience on a permanent basis. It expects to start charging around HK$100 ($13) per person from next month.

The tours are filmed with a phone and a gimbal and are interactive, with specialist guests such as architects available to answer questions. Eight people are working in two teams, one on the ground, the other interacting with the audience from a studio in between tour stops.

"We are thinking about turning it into a program that appeals to overseas guests, for example talking about Hong Kong's history and Hong Kong's current events, to explain what is happening to the city," said managing director Olivia Tang.

"We can have hundreds of people from all around the world attend at the same time."

Tourism in Hong Kong has been crippled in the past year first by pro-democracy protests, then by the pandemic. Many countries have also issued travel advisories after Beijing introduced a sweeping national security law last month that tightens the central government's grip on China's freest city.

Tourist arrivals plummeted 99.7% in June from a year earlier to 14,606.

Julianne Chan, 27, joined a recent tour about architecture in Kennedy Town, the neighbourhood where she grew up, after having to cancel a trip to London due to COVID-19.

"During the pandemic ...there's not a lot you can do," she said.

"With these constraints, I would still go on a virtual tour, but if I can choose, I would always opt for just going abroad myself and seeing with my own eyes." ($1 = 7.7501 Hong Kong dollars) (Reporting by Carol Mang and Yoyo Chow; Writing by Marius Zaharia; Editing by William Mallard)
Netanyahu-Pompeo, confident others will follow UAE deal PM, no news on F-35 sale. Pompeo, no nuclear for Iran

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, AUGUST 24 - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both said they are confident that "other Arab nations will follow the deal with the United Arab Emirates", during a meeting on Monday in Jerusalem, where the leaders looked at the next steps to take following the deal. "While I am going to continue this journey, I am hopeful that we will see other Arab nations join in this," Pompeo said. "It will not only increase Middle East stability, but it will improve the lives for the people of their own countries as well," Pompeo said. On the topic of an eventual US sale of F-35 jets to the United Arab Emirates following the deal with the Gulf countries, Netanyahu said he "doesn't have news of a deal for arms sales". "Our position in this regard hasn't changed. In any case, the US guarantees the military supremacy of Israel," he said. Pompeo confirmed Netanyahu's comments, adding, "that supremacy will be guaranteed". Netanyahu addressed the topic of Iran, congratulating the US for its position at the UN Security Council. "As we predicted, the Tehran nuclear deal failed," he said. Pompeo insisted that "Iran will not have nuclear arms". The leaders also addressed the topic of coronavirus. "We spoke of cooperation against the virus that came from China," Pompeo said, reiterating the geographic provenance of Covid-19, in open conflict with the position of Beijing. "Israel is looking for its own vaccine and has no better friend than the United States," Netanyahu said.(ANSAmed). (ANSA).




A German art collector and socialite accused of carrying out a 1million fraud is facing extradition to the UK after being arrested in Lisbon a court heard today.

Angela Gulbenkian, 38, allegedly pocketed 1,143,656.25 in payment for a piece called the Kusama pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama but never handed over the item.

She also allegedly stole a further 50,000 from her friend, Jacqui Ball, who she said she would acquire high-end art for.

Angela Gulbenkian, 38, is accused of carrying out a 1million fraud is facing extradition to the UK after being arrested in Lisbon

Prosecutor Sarah Selby said that Ms Gulbenkian 'was in custody following her arrest in June' after the last Lisbon hearing.

Judge David Tomlinson said: It would be very unfortunate if she left Portugal and went to Germany and the whole process had to be started again.

The Supreme Court of Portugal will issue a decision in the next 60 days so Im proposing another hearing on November 2 to decide the European Arrest Warrant issue.'

The court is 'hoping to work towards a February trial date'.

Gulbenkian grew up in Munich and married the great-grand-nephew of oil tycoon Calouste Gulbenkian, whos fortune funded a multi-billion pound foundation and Lisbon museum.

The Gulbenkians are considered one of Europes wealthiest, most renowned art collecting families.

She became heavily involved in the continental art world, marketing herself as a high-end broker.

In 2017 a Hong-King art firm, Art Incorporated - owned by Mathieu Ticolat - claimed it paid Gulbenkian more than $1.3million for the Kusama pumpkin but never received the piece.

She allegedly pocketed 1,143,656.25 in payment for a piece called the Kusama pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama, pictured, but never handed over the item

The firm filed a civil suit which saw a world-wide freeze on Gulbenkians assets.

She was later accused by her masseuse and friend Jacqui Ball, of stealing 50,000 after also claiming to be an art broker, but again delivering nothing.

Gulbenkian denied both counts of theft last September and gave her address as an apartment at Battersea Power Station.

She had been released on unconditional bail ahead of a trial scheduled for May, but it was postponed due to the pandemic.
Adam Haner, the driver who was dragged from his pick-up truck and beaten by rioters in Portland last week, is questioning the motives of protestors, saying theyre exhibiting the same behavior that theyre trying to stop.

Haners comments came during a Saturday appearance on Fox News Watters World during which he explained that he and his girlfriend, Tammie Martin, had been attempting to aid a woman they saw being robbed when the attack occurred. His good deed left him with black eyes, head lacerations and injuries to his ribs and legs last Sunday.

A crowd of Black Lives Matter and Antifia rioters surrounded Haners truck around 10:30 p.m. after he crashed into a light pole at Southwest Broadway and Taylor Street. At least one individual punched him as he sat inside before he was pulled out of the vehicle and attacked.

I warned everyone to get out of my way when I did start my truck, Haner said. Id been down there long enough. They knew when my truck started, to get out of the way. I was down there for a lengthy amount of time. I managed not to hurt anyone while I was down there, but myself, evidently. I cant say the same for them.

Haner called out Democratic mayor Ted Wheeler, who has given into protestors demands to defund the police, for the polices slow response time. He said it took 10 minutes for help to arrive, kind of a long response time for my issue down there.

Police had deployed a large law enforcement response and encountered a hostile crowd, at the scene, the department said earlier.

Haner then took aim at the rioters, saying, I thought thats what they were down there trying to fight, was this kind of behavior toward them, but theyre exhibiting the same behavior that theyre trying to stop.

He was attacked by a mob of rioters, but the man who allegedly delivered a final crushing kick to Haner, 25-year-old Marquise Love, was arrested Friday and charged with felonious assault, riot participation, and coercion. A video appears to show Love punching Haner several times before kicking his head from behind, knocking him out and causing his head to bleed after it hit the street.

Story continues

Haners attack is the latest in a series of violent demonstrations that have plagued the city and led to the deployment of federal agents  who have since been withdrawn  following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody earlier this summer.

More from National Review
CHICAGO - SEPTEMBER 19: Musician, Singer, Songwriter and Producer Neil Young performs at FirstMerit Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island during 'Farm Aid 30' on September 19, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)

Cameron Crowe has marked the upcoming 20th anniversary of Almost Famous by revealing that legendary musician Neil Young nearly had an incredible cameo in his beloved comedy drama.

Released on September 13, 2000, in the United States, Almost Famous is Crowes semi-autobiographical tale of a teenage music journalist going on tour with the fictitious rock band Stillwater.

Billy Crudup played lead guitarist Russell Hammond in Almost Famous, and during a recent interview with Rolling Stone Crowe admitted that Young was supposed to star in a scene as his estranged father, Harry Hammond.

Read More: Cameron Crowe says 'Fast Times At Ridgemont High's abortion plot would be 'outrageously controversial' now

Neil was going to come backstage in Cleveland with a young wife, Crowe recalled. Theyre complimenting the show, but the young bride is looking at Crudup and hes looking at her; and he realises that the father is being played and is piggybacking on his [sons] success. Its a heartbreaking moment about what success does to an estranged parent.

Neil Young was meant to play the father to Billy Crudup's Russell Hammond (Image by Sony)

But unfortunately Young had to cancel the morning of the shoot, even though costume designer Betsy Heimann had lined up his clothes and everything. This meant that the cool little scene never came to fruition.

Crowe says that Young soon made up for it, though, as he provided one of his songs for the soundtrack.

Read More: Ten of the very best coming-of-age movies

He was first in line to give us the acoustic Cortez The Killer, and he went through his archives to find the perfect take and mixed it and gave it to us. So he giveth and he taketh.

When it was originally released, Almost Famous actually proved to be something of a flop. Having cost $60 million (45 million) to make, it only grossed $47.4 million (36.2 million) across the world. But it has since turned into a cult classic, and even placed 79th in the BBCs poll to find the greatest film since 2000.
Malaysian authorities have opened an inquest into the death last year of Franco-Irish teenager Nora Quoirin

A Malaysian coroner opened an inquest Monday into the death of a French-Irish teenager, a year after her unclothed body was found in the jungle following her disappearance while on holiday.

Malaysian police insisted there was no sign of foul play in the death of Nora Quoirin, a 15-year-old with learning difficulties, and authorities classed the case as "requiring no further action".

But her parents -- who believe there was a criminal element to her death, as they say the teen would not have wandered off alone -- pushed for an inquest, and authorities agreed.

At the start of proceedings in the city of Seremban on Monday, Coroner Maimoonah Aid said: "We are here to answer a few questions -- who is the dead person, when and how she died and whether anyone was responsible."

Quoirin went missing from the resort where she was staying with her London-based family, triggering a 10-day hunt involving helicopters, sniffer dogs and hundreds of searchers.

Her body was discovered close to the jungle retreat and an autopsy found that she probably starved and died of internal bleeding after spending about a week in the dense rainforest.

Sixty-four witnesses are expected to be called during the inquest, and the first was Mohamad Mat Yusop, the police chief of Negeri Sembilan state.

- 'Distraught' -

Mohamad told the court how he was informed the teen had been reported missing on August 4 last year, and he immediately ordered a search operation.

The following day, he visited the Dusun Resort south of Kuala Lumpur, where the girl disappeared from her room the day after her family had checked in.

"The family was distraught when I met them," Mohamad said. "I assured the father we will use all our resources to find the missing girl."

A large screen in the court showed images of the resort, including the bungalow where the family stayed.

Ahead of the inquest, the teen's parents Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin described it as "a crucial element in the fight for truth and justice for Nora".

Story continues

"We hope that all avenues surrounding Nora's disappearance will be fully explored and not just the theory which the police has always favoured," they told AFP in a statement.

Earlier this month, the coroner went to the Dusun Resort and visited the area where the body was found, police said, a trip described by the Quoirin family's lawyer S. Sakthyvell as "quite thorough".

The teenager's Irish mother and French father were not present at the inquest because of the coronavirus pandemic. They will be interviewed by the coroner on a video-conferencing platform.

Other expected witnesses include police, hikers who found her body, and a British forensics expert who will join by video link.

jsm-sr/qan
Pranab Mondal By

Express News Service

KOLKATA: Sonu Sood, who has been winning plaudits for his work in helping migrants and others during the pandemic, has won hearts again after helping out a 12-year-old girl in north Bengals Jalpaiguri.

Touched by a photograph showing the heart-wrenching condition of the Kirshti Chhetris living conditions, Sood reached out to the remote village some 2,500km away from Mumbai and helped build her a new house.

Sood was tagged on Twitter in a post shared by Kirshtis neighbour Sonal Singh. Kirshti was living a shed made of a tattered plastic sheet and a few gunny bags stitched together.

After noticing the photograph of Kirshti Chhetris house, Sood provided the funds for a house.

I never imagined a personality like Sonu will react and respond to my tweet. I am simple person and helping out Krishti was not in my capacity. We will never forget what he has done for the girl, said Sonal.

The girl, daughter whose father lost his job during the lockdown, named the new house Sonu Sood Niwas.

On seeing Krishtis new house, Sood said on his Twitter handle, A nice house has been constructed. Now I can say I have a home in Jalpaiguri.

Raju Karmakar, another one of Krishtis neighbour, said, We witnessed how the little girl was struggling. She and her father used to stay at the shanty in monsoon and winter facing all odds and tough situations. The actor living in thousands of kms away from here reacted to her plight and responded. We all are grateful to him.
Edward Norton is a talented actor with a flair for portraying eccentric, emotional characters. He has appeared in everything from blockbuster action movies to independent dramas, and while he has been heralded by critics as one of the finest performers of his generation, Norton has also been criticized for reportedly being difficult to work with. In addition to being somewhat of a diva on set, Norton has developed a reputation for seriously overstepping when working on a film project.

Edward Norton | Beata Zawrzel/Getty Images

How did Edward Norton become famous?

Edward Norton was born in Boston in 1969. Norton was raised by parents who were very socially conscious and regularly campaigned on behalf of environmental causes, igniting the same passion for social justice in their young son. They also brought him to plays, which inspired him to develop an interest in the theater and acting, according to IMDb. He began acting in plays around his hometown, eventually going on to perform in productions and study at Yale College.

Norton graduated in 1991 and moved to New York City to pursue his acting career. He studied method acting, the acting style made popular by thespians such as Marlon Brando. After a few years of working on various stage productions, Norton began his introduction to films in the mid-nineties. A few of his early roles include parts in movies like Primal Fear, Everyone Says I Love You, and Rounders. By the late nineties, Norton was a big star in Hollywood and had started to receive critical acclaim.

What is Edward Norton best known for?

Bruce Springsteen writes a review of Edward Norton's "Motherless Brooklyn": "The piece burns with the quiet fire and emotionally all-in stakes of a real auteur passion project." https://t.co/ecIvXuqBgC via @variety  Richard Scheinin (@RichardScheinin) December 19, 2019

RELATED: MCU Theory: Edward Norton Wanted His Movie to Focus Less on Hulk, More on Bruce

In 1999, Edward Norton appeared in the thriller Fight Club, also starring Brad Pitt. Norton made a splash and his performance as the films unnamed narrator was heralded as one of the finest acting jobs of the year. Over the next few years, Norton continued to act in well-received movies, such as The Score, opposite Marlon Brando, as well as a few flops, like the legendarily bad film, Death to Smoochy. He also tried his hand at filmmaking, working as a director and producer for several major projects.

Over the past decade, Norton has continued to work in Hollywood on projects that appeal to him. He joined an elite club of action superstars when he played Bruce Banner/The Hulk in the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk, and even though he was miscast, the film received some very good reviews from critics.

Edward Norton is notoriously difficult to work with

Even while Edward Norton made waves in Hollywood in the early days of his career, he slowly began making headlines for other reasons. He is known for being difficult to work with and has reportedly clashed with directors and producers several times regarding the direction or overall vision of the film project in question. In fact, Nortons disposition could be one of the major reasons why the actor never returned to play Bruce Banner in any of the subsequent Marvel films. Reportedly, Norton rewrote the script for the movie right before the film went into production, creating chaos on set and causing tension between Norton and the films director, Louis Leterrier.

Marvel Studios seemed to confirm this rumor by releasing a statement that read, in part: Our decision (to not bring Edward Norton back) is definitely not based on monetary factors, but instead rooted in the need for an actor who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members, according to Screenrant. Additionally, Norton reportedly tried the same tactic on the set of his film, American History X, going so far as to go into the editing room and create his own cut of the film.

In spite of Nortons alleged difficult nature, he is undoubtedly talented  which keeps him a vital force in Hollywood, year after year.
Maika Takita, a research scientist, is one of about 250 workers who needs to access IBM's facilities for her work. Andrew Lindemann/IBM

In early March, IBM's leaders, like many others, faced a difficult question: How do you keep an office open during a pandemic?

IBM decided to use its Yorktown Heights, New York, location as a prototype for reopening its other offices.

Bob Wisnieff, chief technology officer of quantum computing at IBM, helped oversee the effort to reimagine the workplace.

In addition to facility changes, the company has developed an app, Watson Works, that only allows a certain number of workers into the building at one time.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As companies begin considering reopening their offices during the coronavirus pandemic, they are faced with a difficult question  how do you bring employees back to work while also ensuring their safety?

IBM has been dealing with this challenge since early March. The tech giant has about 350,000 employees worldwide, some of whom are considered essential workers.

Bob Wisnieff, chief technology officer of quantum computing at IBM, who oversees some of the company's most expensive equipment, (equipment that needs daily check-ins and tunings) was tapped to help keep IBM's headquarters in Yorktown Heights, New York, up and running.

Wisnieff devised a plan for the headquarters that other leaders could copy and apply to other global locations.

"Our main question was: How can we make sure that the people on site are going to be working as safely as possible?" Wisnieff told Business Insider. "We retooled many many aspects of our site."

Winsieff worked with state officials, an internal crisis response team, and the building's managers, to keep the office up and running for essential workers  like those who oversee IBM's top tech hardware devices. The office has since granted access to 10-15% of IBMs normal Yorktown Heights personnel who may need occasional entry to the technology and space.

Story continues

IBM gave Business Insider a virtual tour of what it's like to work in an office that has been prepped to keep employees safe from coronavirus.

Bob Wisnieff, chief technology officer of quantum computing at IBM, had to figure out how to keep IBM's workers safe during the pandemic.

Bob Wisnieff

Before COVID-19, about 1,300 people would be in the company's Yorktown Heights, New York, location on a given day. But when the pandemic hit, the company could only keep essential workers, about 200-300 people in the office.

Reuters

A group of AI experts at IBM developed Watson Works, a system to make sure there weren't too many people coming in at the same time, and that no one coming in had any symptoms.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

Before being allowed on site, workers have to take their temperature at home, report it, and answer a series of questions about any symptoms.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

If you don't complete the self check-in, you're not permitted to enter the building.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

Workers report which rooms and labs they plan on using, and during which times. That way the cleaning staff is notified when to clean certain areas of the building throughout the day.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

About 10 to 15% of IBM's workforce has been given permission to use the office. Only workers who need to use IBM's high-tech equipment, servers, or labs to run experiments, or who check in on some of the company's most expensive equipment are allowed in the office.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

There are mask dispensers, hand sanitizer stations, and disinfecting wipes throughout the building.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

There are signs, as well as stickers on the floor, to remind people to social distance in communal areas, such as inside bathrooms.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

Maika Takita is a research scientist in IBM's quantum computing lab. She comes into the office about two times a week to use equipment.

Maika Takita

Takita began coming into the office mid-July to use the quantum computing lab.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

She says the process of reporting her temperature and getting approved to enter the building is seamless.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

IBM leaders completely redesigned and restructured the cafeteria to encourage social distancing. They removed seating and added technology like a food ordering system to reduce human contact.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

Workers order their food ahead of time from their phones. When it's ready, a text message is sent. This ensures there aren't long lines during lunchtime.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

Food workers prepare options ahead of time in containers, making ordering faster.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

"The people working behind the counter are all wearing masks and gloves and the way it's set up, I feel safe. I also go to the cafe to grab coffee, where people are socially distanced and I rarely see more than one or two people on line," she said.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

IBM's Yorktown Heights location is a prototype for other offices around the world, some of which will be adopting similar changes.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

Wisnieff said the company will continue to adapt as the pandemic continues.

Andrew Lindemann/IBM

Read the original article on Business Insider
The new normal is making us all do a lot of things differently. We never expected a pandemic to make us use virtual reality and digital avatars.



Recently, the Indian Institute Of Technology, Bombay on Sunday had its 58th Annual Convocation Ceremony but in a Virtual Reality setting amid COVID-19.

 Twitter All India News

IIT Bombay said in a statement, "Keeping in view the safety measures during the ongoing pandemic, the institute held its convocation in virtual reality mode for its graduating students.



IIT- Bombay expressed how it did not wish to deprive the students of their achievements and this was the only possible best way at this time.

The Institute said, "A personalized avatar of each graduate received the degree certificate from the personalized avatar of director professor Subhasis Chaudhari. The medallists also received their medals from the personalized avatar of the chief guest.

The videos of the same have been going viral on the internet.

Checkout the video here-

IIT Bombay holds its 58th convocation ceremony;



Awards Degrees to Students' Virtual avatars.@iitbombay pic.twitter.com/QGnercGhD2  All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) August 23, 2020

The video has already garnered around four thousand likes and around one thousand re-tweets on the internet. Heres what people have to say about the extra-ordinary efforts of IIT Bombay.

This is great idea  Vinayak Nayak (@Vinayaknayak_77) August 23, 2020

awesome. Wonderful initiative.  Rama Venugopal (@ramavenu) August 23, 2020

Awesome  Diva (@Benaam23) August 23, 2020

This is so cool  Richa Jain (@RichaNaja) August 23, 2020

Sirwonderful! Puri gta wali feel h  PRIYAMVADA SINGH (@priyamvada700) August 23, 2020

Nice efforts  Atul Mishra (@atulmishraUTEC) August 24, 2020

I am feeling so jealous now... Just 2 years ago this wasn't there... I gone to collect my degree in person  Ajinkya Jay (@yours_infinitly) August 23, 2020

Now, you can decide whether this is better or worse! The whole process of virtual avatars graduating as students and getting their medals and degrees was put together by around a team of twenty people.

The team also made sure that the students could virtually connect with organized viewing of hostel videos and post the convocation too, IIT- Bombay let people access the campus map and walk through their classrooms as they would have in real life.
A neighbourhood feud has broken out in one of Sydney's most affluent suburbs over proposals to build a floating dry dock in the harbour.

The proposed $5.8 million facility at Berry's Bay on the city's North Shore has been called an 'eyesore' by residents who have long enjoyed picturesque views of the iconic waterfront.

And while the plan has left some fuming, others are fully supportive of the the facility run by the Noakes group as they believe it is needed.

The debate prompted the creation of the 'Say No to Noakes' Facebook group where the discussion quickly turned toxic.

Supporters of the plan slammed the group's members as 'yuppy whining c**ts', muppets', and 'oxygen thieves'.

One comment read: 'I hope you don't fall over and land on the end of my boot kicking your teeth out'.

'Let's move both our boats near his house and power up the needle guns - give him something to really whinge about,' another wrote.

A neighbourhood feud has broken out in one of Sydney's most affluent suburbs over proposals to build a floating dry dock in the harbour (Pictured: Noakes shipyard)

The floating dry dock (pictured) has been docked in Balmain while debate over its future rages on

The group against the plan feel the small, secluded bay is not the right location for the dry dock (Pictured: An illustration of the proposed plan)

The dock on the southwestern side of the existing boat repair building is designed to service commercial vessels measuring up to 60m in length and weighing up to 1000 tons - the largest of it kind in Sydney.

The dry dock has been docked in Balmain while debate over its future rages on.

The group against the plan feel the small, secluded bay is not the right location for the dry dock.

'We simply believe that a floating dry dock does NOT belong in Berrys Bay as it poses environmental, health and safety and noise pollution risks, as well as being an eyesore,' their petition read.

The petition has 518 signatures.

Sean Langman, the managing director of Noakes, told the Sydney Morning Herald the company was 'under siege' and 'set for extermination'.

'We're one of the last surviving shipyards  all of a sudden made pariahs for something that, it's our life.'

An Environmental Protection Agency investigation was launched last August after residents filmed Noakes' employees spray painting the navy's Young Endeavour while it was docked in the water.

The proposed $5.8 million facility at Berry's Bay on the city's North Shore has been called an 'eyesore' by residents who have long enjoyed picturesque views of the iconic waterfront

The debate prompted the creation of the 'Say No to Noakes' Facebook group where the discussion quickly turned toxic (pictured: Comments made on the Facebook page)

Noakes was in breach of its licence conditions because the Young Endeavour was not fully encapsulated during the work.

The company was issued a caution before the EPA changed its licence so it could work over the water.

The move left residents outraged, they then decided to take their complaints to the Navy instead.

'The EPA seemed to be very accommodating to Noakes, which is of great concern,' Karen Foster said.

Following the complaint, the Navy removed the Young Endeavour from the site.

Sean Langman, the managing director of Noakes (pictured), has been caught up in the nasty debate

The group against the plan feel the small, secluded bay is not the right location for the dry dock

Mr Langman involved lawyers after tracking down the names of those who had complained.

In letters sent to the complainants it is alleged the residents' 'false and misleading statements' led to the Young Endeavour's relocation.

They were asked to apologise to the Navy and ask for the Young Endeavour to be returned to the boatyard. However, the residents have refused.

The company is still awaiting approval from the Sydney North Planning Panel.
British Finance Minister Rishi Sunak plans to drop a tax on technology companies such as Facebook and Google because it does not raise much money and could hurt a push for a US trade deal, The Mail on Sunday reported.

Britain introduced the digital services tax in April after slow progress in global negotiations over how to tax tech giants, many of which are US companies.

The tax is expected to raise about 500 million ($654 million) a year for Britain's public finances.

That represents only a fraction of the 200 billion in extra debt the country has racked up since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The tax is also a potential impediment to a post-Brexit bilateral trade deal between Britain and the United States.

France and other countries have adopted or are considering similar taxes.

No one was immediately available for comment at Britains finance ministry.

The Mail on Sunday quoted a finance ministry representative as saying: Weve been clear its a temporary tax that will be removed once an appropriate global solution is in place, and we continue to work with our international partners to reach that goal.
When officers approached the Kia, Tate accelerated in reverse and backed into a tree, according to the charges. He then drove forward in the direction of officers and bailed out of the vehicle as it struck an undercover police car. Tate dropped a firearm to the ground as he ran and was arrested a short distance away, according to the charges.
HOLYOKE  The Holyoke Public Schools received a $274,907 Remote Learning Technology Essentials grants, part of a $32.9 million effort by the Baker-Polito Administration to improve student access as COVID-19 forces school districts to online learning.

Over 250 Massachusetts cities and towns received the matching grants to purchase computers, assistive technologies and boost home internet access. Municipalities can also use the grants for reimbursement costs and technology updates going back to March.

We are grateful to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for awarding this funding to the Holyoke Public Schools through the Remote Learning Technology Essentials Grant, stated Holyoke School Receiver Dr. Alberto Vazquez Matos.

Holyoke Public Schools will buy 737 Apple iPads for K  2 students for remote learning. In 2019, the district outfitted all middle schoolers with iPad Pros and Bluetooth keyboards.

We are excited and eager to provide these essential supports for our youngest learners, Vazquez Matos stated.

He added, We have learned a lot from our remote learning efforts this past spring. This year, every Holyoke Public Schools student will have their own device, and the internet will be provided to students who need it.

The Commonwealth has allocated $928 million to assist school districts with COVID-19 related costs, including $502 million from the Coronavirus Relief Fund, $376 million in federal aid, and $50 million from the Governors Emergency Education Relief Fund for K-12 schools, colleges and universities.

Access to technology is critical for students and their education, Gov. Charlie Baker stated. These technology grants are just one way in which we are working with districts to help them face the challenges associated with COVID-19 and keep kids focused on learning.

Massachusetts Education Secretary James Peyser said, Although these grants were inspired by needs that became apparent because of COVID-19, this technology will strengthen and improve the quality of all students education in a sustainable way. said Education Secretary James Peyser.

Amherst received $24,940, Belchertown $138,427, Chicopee $418,333, Easthampton $78,848, Granby $41,250, Hadley $36,143, Springfield $1.286 million, South Hadley $50,699 and West Springfield $114,641.

The Holyoke Public Schools delayed the 2020-2021 opening to Sept. 14. Except for special needs and vocational students, most Holyoke school children will learn remotely, with teachers holding live sessions and providing online help.
The Supreme Court has reserved its order on the question of whether companies facing insolvency proceedings under Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) can sell their spectrum or not, and how the Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) related dues are to be recovered from them. The apex court will also pronounce its judgement on payment of dues, if any, by Reliance Jio and Airtel against their spectrum sharing pacts with insolvent operators. Jio had signed a spectrum sharing pact with Reliance Communications (RCom), whereas Airtel had a similar deal with Aircel and Videocon.

During hearing on the AGR issue today, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) told the Supreme Court that the guidelines mandate that all liabilities including AGR-related dues should be cleared by telecom firms prior to spectrum trading, news agency PTI reported. The DoT further told the apex court that it can seek to recover dues from sellers and buyers of spectrum, jointly or individually, it further added.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, on behalf of DoT, told the bench of Justices Arun Mishra, S Abdul Nazeer and MR Shah that assessment of dues is under process and once the Supreme Court clarifies the legal position on spectrum sharing, it will move to recover the outstanding amounts from the telecom companies. The DoT added that no demand has been raised against Reliance Jio and Airtel for part dues of Reliance Communications (RCom) and Videocon respectively, PTI reported.

During the hearing, Mehta told the bench that telecom companies are supposed to make two payments -- one at the threshold, when they participate in spectrum auction and the other in instalments over a period of years.

At the outset, senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Committee of Creditors (CoC) of RCom said that right to use spectrum is with the telecom company and it can be sold if the telco wants to.

He said the resolution plan proposes sale of right to use spectrum under trading guidelines and licence agreement recognises spectrum as a security, which can be monetised under the IBC.

The bench said that how can DoT be an arbitrator of how or whether the spectrum can be sold or not.

It observed that the DoT should cancel the spectrum licence if the dues are at a risk of being wiped out.

The bench said the court will cancel allocation of spectrum, if the telecom companies are not ready to pay the AGR related dues.

Telecom companies cannot wipe out AGR related dues by taking someone else's property free of any liability, it said.

Salve that DoT did not even seek any AGR related dues for the small fraction of RCom's spectrum used by Jio.

The bench said then it may have to lay down a law on the issue.

Senior advocate Ranjit Kumar, appearing for CoC of Aircel said that telecom companies cannot operate without the banks and economy will face setbacks, if spectrum sale is not allowed under the IBC.

The bench observed that if spectrum license is cancelled, it needs to be surrendered to the DoT and later auctioned for higher realization.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Airtel said that till now no demands were made against the company by the DoT for the shared spectrum.

The bench observed that trading guidelines mandate clearing of pending dues by seller before entering any kind of sale agreement and if the sellers do not clear their liabilities then according to the guidelines the dues are transferred to the buyer.

Sibal said in that case the DoT should not have waited so long and instead clarified long back if Airtel was to be made liable for Videocon's dues.

Salve said that his client Jio has paid all dues since spectrum acquisition in 2016 as per self-assessment.

On August 21, the top court had directed the DoT to apprise it the basis of spectrum sharing done by telecom companies and how much is the liability of the sharers.

The top court asked the DoT secretary to file a specific affidavit apprising it about who was using the spectrum from the date of grant of license and from which date the respective sharing of spectrum has taken place.

It had asked the DoT what was the amount paid by Reliance Jio for using 23 per cent of Reliance Communication (RCom's) spectrum.

On August 20, the top court had expressed concern over non-payment of the AGR related dues by the telecom companies which are under insolvency saying "without paying for the horse, telcos are taking a ride".

It has observed that it is extremely worried that almost the entire AGR dues will be wiped out in the IBC process.

On August 14, the top court had sought the details of spectrum sharing pact between RComm and Reliance Jio and said as to why the company using the spectrum of the other firm cannot be asked to pay the AGR related dues to the government.

The Centre had earlier told the top court there was a difference of opinion between two of its ministers (DOT and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs) on the issue of sale of spectrum during insolvency proceedings.

The top court has made it clear it will not hear "even for a second" the arguments on reassessment or re-calculation of the AGR related dues of telecom companies which run into about Rs 1.6 lakh crore.

The apex court had in October 2019 delivered the verdict on the AGR issue for calculating government dues of telecom companies such as licence fee and spectrum usage charges.

After the top court had rejected pleas by Vodafone Idea, Bharti Airtel and Tata Teleservices seeking review of the judgement which widened the definition of AGR by including non-telecom revenues, the DoT had in March moved a plea seeking staggered payment over 20 years.

ALSO READ: AGR case: Cancel license, spectrum if telcos' dues are being wiped out, SC to govt

ALSO READ: Supreme Court puts onus of AGR dues of ailing telcos on spectrum users
ATHENS, Greece - Authorities in Greece say four crew members have been injured in an engine-room explosion on a ferry at Iraklio port on the island of Crete.

There were no passengers on board when the blast happened on the 33-year-old Blue Horizon ferry, which is used to service the route between Cretes main port and Piraeus, near Athens.

The Merchant Marine Ministry said the four injured crew members hurt Monday had all been hospitalized. State-run television said one of them was in serious condition.

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Google searches relating to panic attacks surged to an all-time high during the first month of the coronavirus pandemic.

The discovery has raised fears that the Covid-19 pandemic could trigger a mental health crisis and that the true scope of the issue could be enormous.

Researchers focused on US-based Google search queries from 2004 to May 9, 2020 to monitor signs of anxiety in the general public.

After March 13, when Donald Trump declared a national emergency, severe acute anxiety-related searches reached record highs.

The largest increases in queries occurred between March 16 and April 14, cumulatively increasing 17 per cent, the data reveals.

Google searches related to panic attacks surged to all-time highs during the coronavirus pandemic. The discovery has raised fears that the Covid-19 pandemic could trigger a mental health crisis (stock)

Pictured left, a graph showing the amount of queries per ten million related to acute anxiety. Pictured right, the amount of searches compared to the expected average level as illustrated by the 0 line

These include queries like 'am I having a panic attack?,' 'signs of anxiety attack' and 'anxiety attack symptoms.'

The team from University of California San Diego (UCSD) decided to study anxiety attacks as it can often be a common symptom of mental health.

However, on their own merit, a panic attack can be very dangerous and lead to shortness of breath, a pounding heart, chest pain, and an intense feeling of fear.

The increases in Google searches between March 16 and April 14 coincided with several grim landmarks which increased stress among the public.

For example, the roll out of national social distancing guidelines (March 16th), the US surpassing China with the most reported cases (March 26th), the recommendation of facemasks (April 3rd), and the US surpassing Italy for most deaths (April 11th).

Queries returned to typical levels by April 15 through the end of the study.

The team from University of California San Diego (UCSD) studied anxiety attacks as it can often be a common symptom of mental health. The largest increases in queries occured between March 16 and April 14, cumulatively increasing 17 per cent (stock)

On their own merit, a panic attack can be very dangerous and lead to shortness of breath, a pounding heart, chest pain, and an intense feeling of fear.

Dr Benjamin Althouse, a Principal Scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling, said: 'In practical terms, over the first 58 days of the COVID-19 pandemic there were an estimated 3.4 million total searches related to severe acute anxiety in the United States.

'In fact, searches for anxiety and panic attacks were the highest they've ever been in over 16 years of historical search data. '

The researchers say the findings indicate that now, more than ever, there is a need for improved mental health services.

One example they point to is the Call4Calm hotline in Illinois that supports those suffering with acute anxiety.

Co-author Dr. Derek Johnson, a Research Fellow in the UCSD Department of Medicine, said: 'Similar hotlines should be rolled out nationally and prominently featured in the search results of those seeking help online.

'Similar applications to suicide have had tremendous benefits on public health and saved lives.'

Co-author Professor Mark Dredze, of Johns Hopkins University, said: 'The value of monitoring queries goes beyond acute anxiety.

'For instance, during the Covid-19 pandemic we first detected spikes in shopping for unproven therapies and shopping for guns using similar methods, and these can be further extended across public and mental health topics.'

Findings are published in the journal JAMA internal medicine.
A staple in the fields of prairie restoration, pollinator conservation, and entomology is the monarch butterfly. A jet-black body with white spots, brilliant orange and black wings, and a graceful flight pattern; this insect plays an important role in its ecosystem and in our own practices of conservation.

The monarch butterfly is a pollinator, responsible for the successful reproduction of many native flowers. In order to survive it must first rely on a single genus of plants, milkweed. A common sight in prairies and roadside ditches, this plant is toxic to humans and most animals, but it is the only plant monarch caterpillars will eat before they become butterflies. It is this specialized diet, and the species overall importance, that has led to Lime Creek Nature Centers newest project, a monarch rearing station.

Located in the Pollinator Room, the rearing station consists of two mesh cages. The taller of the two is for the caterpillars, and the other is for the adult butterflies. Caterpillars start as eggs and hatch after about three days, then remain as caterpillars for two weeks. A chrysalis (pupa) is formed for another two weeks, and then most adult butterflies will live for an additional four weeks.

IMG_1827.JPG Monarchs feed on their host plant milkweed in the caterpillar cage at Lime Creek Nature Center's monarch rearing station.

In the caterpillar cage, large caterpillars are able to eat milkweed until they climb up and hang from the cage ceiling. Soon after, they form a chrysalis. Once all of the caterpillars form a chrysalis, the lids are swapped on the two cages so new caterpillars can form their chrysalises and the old ones can emerge as butterflies. It is important to keep the old caterpillars separate from the new caterpillars, otherwise there is a risk of parasites being transferred.

After about two weeks in the chrysalis stage, the adult butterflies are ready to come out. When they first emerge, their wings are crumpled, and their bodies bloated. They have to spend the rest of the day pumping all of the fluid in their bodies into their wings so they can fly properly. The wings are also wet and need to dry off before the butterflies can fly properly. If all goes well, the butterflies can be released into the wild by the end of the day or the following morning.

The caterpillars are usually much smaller when they arrive at the nature center. Of the over fifty specimens that have been successfully raised thus far, most were collected at Lime Creeks prairie just north of the parking lot. Nature center staff either find them as eggs or caterpillars on the many milkweed plants found on the prairie.

Eggs and small caterpillars are kept in small condiment containers by themselves until they are about an inch long. The lids have small holes poked in them to allow for air to get in, a milkweed leaf is provided for food or support, and a small moist piece of paper towel is put in as well to provide moisture.

Later they are put in a small plasticware container with a few other caterpillars until they are big enough to be put in the cage. Leaves and a larger moist paper towel are provided as well. Like the separate cages, the separate containers help prevent parasite transfer. Lime Creek tracks how many specimens are collected and how many make it to each life stage, ending in the release into the wild.

Currently, Lime Creek has seen over a hundred specimens come through its doors, but not all of the eggs and caterpillars have been successful. Parasites can threaten even captive caterpillars and monarchs. A microscopic parasite known as Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, OE for short, spreads quickly and prevents the adults wings from developing properly.

Another parasite, the larva of the tachinid fly, lives inside the caterpillar, slowly feeding off of it until it begins to form a chrysalis. From there, the larva bursts out in a move that is fatal to the caterpillar/chrysalis. To date, no caterpillars have been lost to OE, but a few have been victim to tachinid flies. When it comes to rearing monarchs, there are no guarantees. Sometimes things just go wrong, and a perfectly healthy caterpillar will not survive past the chrysalis stage.

Towards the end of the August, butterflies that are released from Lime Creek will also be fitted with a tag. Monarch butterflies make a massive migration to Mexico each winter, and the tags help scientists keep track of the butterflies general movements and how many actually survive the migration.

The butterflies that make it to Mexico will overwinter before they begin back north. The migration back occurs in generations. The first generation will arrive in Texas and raise the next generation which goes further north to do the same thing. Roughly two generations pass by the time the butterflies arrive in Iowa. This magnificent phenomenon, combined with the service of pollination that they provide for us, is why Lime Creek has dedicated this summer (and future summers) to helping keep the monarch population healthy.

Lime Creek encourages visitors to come out and see the monarch rearing station for themselves. For those who would like more information on monarchs as well as ways to get involved, www.monarchwatch.org is the site of Monarch Watch, a program based at the University of Kansas. Information can also be found at www.monarchmania.com, the site for Monarch Mania, a program within Cerro Gordo County. These websites also provide information for individuals interested in tagging monarchs themselves. Lime Creek appreciates the support in this new program and looks forward to the start of the migration!

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(Sharecast News) - London stocks were firmly in the black by midday on Monday, with sentiment boosted by fresh hopes of a coronavirus treatment.

The FTSE 100 was up 1.9% at 6,116.32.



Spreadex analyst Connor Campbell said: "If last week was beset by the economic realities of the Covid-19 pandemic, then Monday is starting out with a (temporary) cure for those concerns -namely, the approval of blood plasma from recovered patients as a treatment against the virus.



"The FDA have granted 'emergency use authorisation' to this method, based on evidence it can reduce the mortality rate of covid-19 patients while aiding their recovery.



"Donald Trump was in danger of undermining sentiment as he once again labelled Covid-19 as the 'China virus' during the announcement. However, the markets were willing to look beyond the President's geopolitical needling to focus on celebrating this moment of progress."



The mood was also lifted by a report suggesting that Trump is considering seeking another FDA 'emergency-use authorisation' for the coronavirus vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University. AstraZeneca shares traded up 3.6% on the news.



Elsewhere , BT rallied following a report over the weekend that the company has asked bankers at Goldman Sachs to update its bid defence strategy following a collapse in the share price. According to Sky News, BT is preparing to defend itself against takeover approaches from industry rivals and buyout firms after the suspension of its dividend sent the shares tumbling to their lowest level in more than a decade.



Neil Wilson, chief market analyst at Markets.com, said: "At a valuation of 10bn, the group has become a definite target. And whilst BT has a lot of legacy baggage - notably 18bn in net debt and a major pension deficit - it's also got the Openreach crown jewel, which would be worse considerably more on its own than the group is valued today.



"Of course, there is no formal offer, but shares could jump further if one emerges. Deutsche Telekom, which owns 12% in BT, is seen as a likely candidate. The question is whether there could be more bombed out UK-listed stocks that could be taken out by a timely takeover...perennial rumour-favourite ITV, for instance?"



Distribution and services group Bunzl rose after posting a rise in first-half profit, reinstating its dividend and announcing the acquisition of a US-based safety business and a flexible packaging distributor in Ireland.



Aerospace and defence engineer Meggitt gained after signing a multi-million pound contract with Japan's MODEC - a specialist of floating production systems for the offshore oil and gas industry - for the supply of pioneering printed circuit heat exchanges.



Cineworld was higher as Peel Hunt said the stock presents "an attractive buying opportunity" for investors with appetite for material risk. The broker, which rates Cineworld at 'buy' with a 180p price target, said the shares should "bounce hard" once investors are reassured over demand.



Market Movers



FTSE 100 (UKX) 6,116.32 1.91%

FTSE 250 (MCX) 17,714.33 0.78%

techMARK (TASX) 3,851.69 2.14%



FTSE 100 - Risers



BT Group (BT.A) 107.40p 5.50%

Anglo American (AAL) 1,927.60p 3.76%

AstraZeneca (AZN) 8,743.00p 3.63%

Royal Dutch Shell 'A' (RDSA) 1,154.80p 3.50%

M&G (MNG) 173.60p 3.33%

Bunzl (BNZL) 2,484.00p 3.28%

Royal Dutch Shell 'B' (RDSB) 1,109.20p 3.16%

Imperial Brands (IMB) 1,292.00p 3.11%

Smurfit Kappa Group (SKG) 2,764.00p 3.06%

BP (BP.) 281.25p 2.89%



FTSE 100 - Fallers



GVC Holdings (GVC) 775.40p -1.37%

Whitbread (WTB) 2,369.00p -1.21%

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) 4,234.00p -1.07%

Compass Group (CPG) 1,156.50p -0.60%

Land Securities Group (LAND) 567.70p -0.54%

International Consolidated Airlines Group SA (CDI) (IAG) 192.30p -0.47%

Coca-Cola HBC AG (CDI) (CCH) 2,010.00p -0.40%

British Land Company (BLND) 359.80p -0.22%

Homeserve (HSV) 1,335.00p -0.15%

SEGRO (SGRO) 969.00p 0.12%



FTSE 250 - Risers



Oxford Instruments (OXIG) 1,566.00p 6.24%

Network International Holdings (NETW) 412.40p 6.23%

Cineworld Group (CINE) 54.06p 5.71%

Pets at Home Group (PETS) 295.80p 4.89%

Avon Rubber (AVON) 3,745.00p 4.32%

RHI Magnesita N.V. (DI) (RHIM) 2,768.00p 4.30%

Aggreko (AGK) 473.00p 3.68%

Cairn Energy (CNE) 135.80p 3.66%

IP Group (IPO) 74.30p 3.34%

Micro Focus International (MCRO) 306.00p 3.27%



FTSE 250 - Fallers



Calisen (CLSN) 168.50p -5.42%

John Laing Group (JLG) 282.60p -3.68%

Shaftesbury (SHB) 506.50p -3.43%

CLS Holdings (CLI) 192.00p -3.03%

Equiniti Group (EQN) 109.20p -3.02%

FirstGroup (FGP) 39.12p -2.35%

Apax Global Alpha Limited (APAX) 157.80p -1.87%

Hammerson (HMSO) 49.07p -1.86%

Royal Mail (RMG) 185.60p -1.75%

Workspace Group (WKP) 578.00p -1.70%
PHOENIX  Phoenix police say four people were arrested during a protest, including three for crimes committed at a previous demonstration.

Several dozen people gathered near Phoenix City Hall Sunday night to protest in the wake of a police shooting of an unarmed black man earlier in the day in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Sgt. Tommy Thompson says officers patrolling the area recognized the driver of a vehicle, 26-year-old Brandon Valentine, as a suspect in an aggravated assault on a police officer at a past demonstration.

According to Thompson, 22-year-old Ryan Tice, another suspect of crimes at a protest, was a passenger in the car.

Officers took both men into custody. Thompson says a search of their vehicle turned up a 9 mm handgun.

Police also arrested 40-year-old Richard Callan, who was among the protesters marching to police headquarters. Thompson says Callan was wanted for aggravated assault on an officer at a past protest.

A fourth protester, 25-year-old Survana Ratnam, was arrested after a confrontation with police. Officers say she threw a water bottle at a police vehicle and then swung an umbrella at an officer, cutting the officers hand.

All four were booked into Maricopa County Jail on charges ranging from aggravated assault on an officer to resisting arrest.

It was not immediately known Monday if any had attorneys who could speak on their behalf.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) says it is well composed to counter what it describes as lies and deception by the ruling NPP in the upcoming General Elections.

At a press conference today, the NDC National Communicarions Officer Sammy Gyamfi stressed that Akufo Addo and his NPP will not be second time lucky with lies and 419 promises in this years general elections.

According to him, Ghanaians are tired of the current government and eager to bring back John Dramani Mahama to deliver them.

It is glaringly clear, that Akufo Addo and his NPP will not be second time lucky with lies and 419 promises in this years general elections. Today, majority of Ghanaians know that the John Mahama-led Rescue Mission is their only hope for the inclusive transformation, true progress we are all yearning for, the NDC National Communication Officer said.

Sammy Gyamfi noted that the country is at a crossroads, and urgently requires honest, visionary, modest, caring, competent and selfless leadership that invests in developmental projects and creates equal opportunities for all and not a select few.

This type of leadership he insists can found in none other than the former president, H.E John Dramani Mahama.

Below is the full speech read by Sammy Gyamfi at the NDCs press conference today:

ELEVENTH (11TH) EDITION OF THE NDCS WEEKLY PRESS BRIEFING ADDRESSED BY COMRADE SAMMY GYAMFI ESQ., NATIONAL COMMUNICATION OFFICER, AT THE NATIONAL HEADQAURTERS OF THE NDC ON MONDAY, 24TH AUGUST, 2020.

OFFICIAL RESPONSE TO THE NUMEROUS LIES PEDDELED BY THE VICE PRESIDENT, DR. MAHAMODU BAWUMIA ON THE INFRASTRUCTURE RECORD OF THE AKUFO ADDO-GOVERNMENT, DURING A RECENT TOWN HALL MEETING AND LAUNCH OF GOVERNMENT DELIVERY TRACKER IN ACCRA.

Good morning distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the media. You are welcome to todays press briefing which will focus on the claims made by the Vice President, Dr. Bawumia during governments recent Town Hall meeting in Accra and the NPPs 2020 manifesto that was launched over the weekend.

The NDC has always been at the forefront of accounting to Ghanaians for their trust anytime we find ourselves in government. As torchbearers of probity and accountability, the NDC acknowledges the duty of every government to account to the people for their mandate and stewardship. Therefore in principle, we have no qualms about the decision by the Akufo Addo-government to showcase its achievements through the Results Fair they held in Accra last week Tuesday.

However, the presentation Ghanaians were fed with by the failed economic messiah turned Mr. Digitization, who has earned the dubious reputation of engaging in the worst kind of political deception and chicanery, Dr. Bawumia, lacked candor and was full of deliberate distortions of facts calculated to deceive the unsuspecting public. The whole presentation was a cocktail of blatant falsehoods, ghost projects, stolen projects and shockingly mediocre accomplishments which will not even pass for the achievements of a rural Assemblyman, let alone a government that has had access to an unprecedented resource envelope of GHS370 billion.

BLATANT FALSEHOODS PEDDELED BY DR. BAWUMIA

Distinguished friends from the media, the Vice President peddled a lot of downright lies during his presentation which we shall disproof this morning through an evidence-based exposition, so that the Ghanaian people will come to know this deceptive Akufo-Addo government for who they really are.

First, Bawumias claim at page 56 of his speech that only 29 community Day SHS (E-Blocks) had been completed by 7th January, 2017 when the erstwhile Mahama government handed over power to the Akufo Addo-government is false.

Ladies and Gentlemen, our handing over notes supported by final payment certificates raised by the contractors who executed and completed those projects show that 46 and not 29 E-Blocks had been completed by the Mahama government at the time of exiting office. This incontrovertible fact was corroborated was by the NPPs own Minister of Education, Mathew Opoku Prempeh in an interview on Ekosisen on Asempa Fm on 6th March, 2017. The claim by the NPP that some of the completed projects had not been furnished, hence were uncompleted is ridiculous as furnishing is not part of the construction process or scope of construction works of the E-Block school projects.

Second, the claim by Dr. Bawumia on page 14 of his speech that the NDC did not complete any major road project in both the Upper East and Upper West regions is a barefaced lie. Contrary to this false assertion, the facts show that within that period, the following major road projects were executed and completed in the Upper East and Upper West regions:

 The Bolgatanga - Bongo road connecting Bolgatanga Municipality to Bongo District was completed.

 The Winkogo - Tongo road connecting Bolgatanga Municipality to Talensi District was completed.

 The Nadowli - Babile - Lawra road was initiated and completed by the NDC.

 Gwollu Town roads in Sissala West.

These are but a few of the several road projects which were executed by the Mills/Mahama administration in the two Regions referenced by Dr. Buwumia between the period 2009 to 2016. His claim that the NDC failed to complete a single major road project in the two regions between 2009-2016 is therefore false.

GHOST (NONEXISTENT) PROJECTS LISTED BY DR. BAWUMIA AND GOVERNMENTS DELIVERY TRACKER AS ACHIEVEMENTS

Ladies and Gentlemen, after a painstaking investigations into the claims made by Dr. Bawumia at the Town Hall Meeting and the delivery tracker which was launched at the program, we have identified hundreds ghost (nonexistent) projects and thousands of stolen Mahama and private-owned projects. For want of space and time, we will limit ourselves to a few examples and support most of them with pictorial and video evidence to demonstrate this point.

1. Bawumias claim at page 41 of his speech that this government is constructing 13 housing units at Sekondi (Ituma Estate) which is about 70% complete is a figment of his own imagination as same does not exist anywhere in the Sekondi metropolis.

2. Bawumias claim at page 41 of his speech that this government is constructing 500 housing units at Sefwi Wiawso which is 20% complete is palpable falsehood, as no such project exist.

3. The claim at page 40 of Bawumias speech that this government is constructing 120 affordable housing units in the Talensi District of the Upper East region which is 20% complete is yet another lie, as no such project exist.

4. Dromankese town roads in the Bono East region have not been tarred as claimed by governments delivery tracker. This is a big insult to the Chiefs and people of Dromankese in the Nkoranza area of the Bono East Region who are enduring untold hardship due to the poor nature of their roads.

5. The claim on governments delivery tracker that this government has rehabilitated the Anyinabrim Primary School in the Sefwi Wiawso Municipality is yet another lie. No such rehabilitation has been undertaken at the said school.

6. The claim on governments delivery tracker that the Akufo Addo-government has constructed an Astroturf in the Adenta constituency is another palpable falsehood, as no such project exists on the ground.

7. The claim on governments delivery tracker of complete electrification of Ananekrom and Pataban townships in the Asante Akyem North Constituency of the Ashanti region is a lie. No such project has been undertaken by this government, as the two towns dont have electricity as we speak.

8. The claim on governments delivery tracker of having constructed the Asuoso-Derma-Techimantia road in the Bono East Region as captured by governments delivery tracker is yet another palpable falsehood, as no such road exists anywhere in the referenced area.

9. The claim on governments delivery tracker about Re-roofing of cluster of schools at Akanteng in the Eastern region is a lie. No such project has been undertaken by this government.

10. The claim on governments delivery tracker about an ongoing 1D1F Palm Oil Processing factory in West Akim is a lie. No such project exist.

11. The claim on governments delivery tracker about an ongoing construction of solar powered water system at Dindani in the East Mamprusi Municipality (Nalerigu/Gambaga) is a lie. No such project can be found in and around Dindani.

12. The claim on the delivery tracker about ongoing construction of a water system at Zangu-Vuga in the East Mamprusi Municipality (Nalerigu/Gambaga) is a lie. As a matter of fact, Zangu-Vuga is in the West Mamprusi Municipality and not East Mamprusi Municipality as claimed. But yet again, there is no such project in Zangu-Vuga in the West Mamprusi Municipality (Walewale) as claimed. Ladies and gentlemen, it is instructive to note that, even in Walewale, the Vice Presidents hometown, Dr. Bawumia is conjuring nonexistent projects which is an insult to his own kinsmen and people.

13. The claim on governments delivery tracker that government has constructed and completed a 1V1D project at Zandua in the West Mamprusi Municipality is false, as no such community exists in the West Mamprusi Municipality.

14. The claim about an ongoing construction of a six (6) seater toilet block for St. Thomas Senior High/Tech at Asamankese in West Akim Municipality is another ghost project, as nothing like that exist on the ground.

15. The claim that there is an ongoing construction of a 12-unit classroom block for Pentecost SHS at Akropong in the Akuapem North Municipality is false, as no such project exist.

16. The claim of having completed a 10-seater toilet facility at Ahibenso in Bodi District is a lie, as no such project exist.

17. Also, the claim that this government has completed the Construction of 1 NO. 6 Units Classroom Block with Auxiliary Facilities at Debiso in the Bia West constituency is a lie, as no such project exist.

18. The claim of having completed the construction of a 16-seater water closet and 4 shower facility in selected communities in Bia West is also a lie, as no such project exist.

19. The claim about ongoing construction of a 2-storey dormitory block for Ghana Senior High School at Damango in the West Gonja Municipality is a fabricated lie, as no such school exists.

20. The claim about construction of a 6-unit classroom block at Jamara in the Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa Constituency is a lie, as no such project exist.

21. No Power Supply System at Afofosu in the Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa Constituency exist contrary to claims by governments delivery tracker.

22. The claim of a 10-seater WC toilet at Anwhiam in the Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa Constituency does not exist.

23. The claim of a 10-seater WC toilet at Asikuma is a palpable lie.

24. The claim of Abamkrom Clinic in the Agona West Constituency of the Central region as contained on governments delivery tracker is a ghost project.

25. The claim by the so-called delivery tracker that the Akufo-Addo government has completed the construction of the Anum Primary school at Anum Apapam in the Asuogyaman District in the Eastern region is a lie. There is no town in Asuogyaman called Anum Apapam, and there is no block constructed by the NPP in Anum Presbyterian Primary School at the Anum that we know in Asuogyaman.

26. The Claim of construction works at Dabala market is a lie. There is no such construction work ongoing in the Dabala market as claimed by the NPP on their website.

Friends from the media, one thing that is clear from the above undisputed facts we have provided is that, the Akufo-Addo government has very little to show for all the unprecedented resources (GHS370 billion) that has accrued to them, such that they have resorted to conjuring nonexistent projects as achievements. This display of odious dishonesty by President Akufo Addo and his Vice, Dr. Bawumia, is an insult to the good people of Ghana who have endured their misgovernance and insensitive policies in the last three and half years.

STOLEN MAHAMA AND PRIVATE-OWNED PROJECTS

Distinguished friends from the media, apart from the hundreds of ghost (nonexistent) projects claimed by Dr. Bawumia and governments delivery tracker as achievements, there are equally thousands of Mahama and private-owned projects that have been appropriated by the 419 Akufo-Addo government. However, for the sake of brevity, we shall cite a few verifiable examples to illustrate this point.

1. Ongoing construction of 2No. 6-unit classroom blocks with auxiliaries, borehole, and 10-seated micro-flush toilet at Soronowse/Kwaedenden in the Tain District. This project was fully-funded and executed by the Rotary Club.

2. Completed 3 unit classroom block at Abomayaw in the Asuogyaman District. This project was fully-funded and executed by Pencils of Promise, an NGO.

3. Completed school block at Surveyline in Asuogyaman District. This project was executed yet again by Pencils of Promise, the same NGO mentioned above.

4. Completed 3-unit classroom block at Tortibo in Asuogyaman District. This project was fully-funded and constructed yet again by Pencils of Promise, the same NGO.

5. Completed 1No 6-unit classroom block at Elluokrom. This is a stolen project, as same was awarded and completed by the erstwhile Mahama government.

6. Construction of 12 Lockable stores at Sefwi Debiso. This project was built by the NDC under the Mills administration.

7. Completed Conversion of Existing Ward to Theatre at Dadieso Hospital in the Suaman constituency. This project was done by the Mahama administration.

8. Completion of health directorate bungalow at Sefwi Debiso in the Bia West Constituency. This is also a Mahama project.

9. Completed construction of 8-unit classroom block at Teong in the Tempane District. This school was constructed by the McDan foundation, an Non-Governmental Organization.

10. Completed construction of Modern livestock market at Possum in Bawku. This project was funded and built by a group of NGOs (Action for Life, Air France and CLIP).

11. Completed CHPS compound at Boadua and Topreman (Akwatia) - This is another NDC project executed under the Mahama regime.

12. Completed 76-unit lockable stores at Asamankese  This is an NDC Project executed under the Mahama regime.

13. Completed Rehabilitation of 3-unit classroom block at Ataaso (Kwahu West - Nkawkaw)  This project was executed by an NGO called Original Volunteers.

14. Yensiso Basic School Rehabilitation (Akuapem North) - This is an NDC Project executed under the Mahama government.

15. 2 Storey 40 Lockable Stores at Srodae(Ho Station - Koforidua)- This is an NDC project executed under President Mahama.

16. Completed Rehabilitation of 3-unit classroom block at Camp-Nsabah (Kwahu West - Nkawkaw)  This project was done by an NGO called Original Volunteers.

17. Six (6)-unit classroom block at Aworodo in the Ajumako Enyan Essiam Constituency. This project was executed and completed by the Social Investment Fund, with Counterpart funding from the District Assembly under the Mahama administration.

18. Two new School Blocks at Breman Fawomanye. These projects were initiated and completed by the Mahama government.

19. Completion of a 6-Unit classroom block at Etsii Abakah. This project was commenced and completed by the Mahama government.

20. Construction of a 6-unit Classroom Block at Breman Bedum. This project was commenced and completed by the Mahama administration.

21. Construction of a 3-unit classroom Block at Brakwa Eshiem. Again, this project was initiated and completed by the John Mahama government.

22. Electricity extension to Assin Donkorkrom, Assin Jerusalem, Assin Camp, Assin Bereku Ninkyiso, Assin Benuye, Assin Atwereboana, Assin Ankaa, Assin Yaw Atta, Assin Kurofofrodo, Assin Kedadwen, Assin Ahasowodze, Assin Aniakragya, Assin Attah Panyin, Assin Techiman, Assin Adu Kwaku and Assin Adabo Twumasi. All these electrification projects in the Assin North Constituency were initiated by the Mills/Mahama administration and completed by the year 2013.

23. The reconstruction of the Essei Lagoon Bridge started in 2011 and completed in 2013.

24. Completed construction of 6-unit classroom block with ancillary facilities at Piiteng in the Wa West Construction. This is false, because this project was completed and handed over in June 2016.

25. Completed extension of Electricity at Poyentanga in the Wa West Constituency. This claim is a lie, because the Poyentanga Electricity extension was done in 2016, and since then, absolutely nothing has been added.

26. Constructed CHPS Compound at Chum - Lambussie District in the Upper West Region. This is another stolen project, because that facility was initiated by the NDC with funding from the 10% salary pay contribution by President Mahamas appointees.

27. Re-roofing of classroom block at Chapuri in the Jirapa Municipality, Jirapa. This project was fully sponsored by sons and daughters of Chapuri after every effort to get government support failed. The desperate attempt to claim credit for it is therefore unfortunate.

28. Completed 6-unit Classroom Block at the Akropong School for the blind. This is a daylight theft by government, because that project was constructed by the MTN Ghana Foundation.

29. What is even pathetic is that, boreholes, and mechanized water facilities that were fully-funded and executed by the Latter Day Saints Charities in 20 communities in the Sefwi Wiawso municipality such as Bosomoiso, Asawinso, Essakrom, Harunakrom, Kunumah, Aprompi, Brekuline, Abidjanline, Kojohunu, Attohkrom among others and communities in the Offinso North District such as, Akomadan, Nkenkaasu and Nkwankwaa, have all been captured by the deceptive Akufo Addo government as their achievements on their so-called delivery tracker. Could it be that someone took monies from government for these projects and decided to use these projects which were fully-funded by the Latter Day Saints Charities as a cover-up?

Friends from the media, as we indicated from the outset, there are thousands of such stolen projects that were undertaken by the erstwhile Mahama administration and other private entities such as NGOs, which have been appropirated by the shameless Akufo Addo-Government through their so-called delivery tracker. We wish to humbly urge you in the media who are the fourth estate of the realm to conduct your own independent District by District fact-check of the projects listed by governments delivery tracker in order to ascertain the truth for yourselves. We have no doubt that your independent checks will confirm the fact that the so-called Government delivery tracker is a scam that cannot be relied upon as a source of credible information by either you in the media or the general public.

FALSE CLAIMS BY DR. BAWUMIA ABOUT COST OF KWAME NKRUMAH INTERCHANGE

Friends from the media, the claim by Dr. Bawumia that the Kwame Nkrumah interchange cost $260 million dollars is a barefaced lie. What Dr. Bawumia did was that he added the cost of two separate and distinct projects (Kwame Nkrumah Interchange and the Ring Road Flyover) and created the impression as though that was the cost of just one project, the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange. He then proceeded to engage in a pedestrian comparison of the cost of projects, which has different scope of works and specifications.

This mischief which was peddled by no less a person than the Vice President of the Republic of Ghana, is shameful and reprehensible to say the least.

For the records, the cost of the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange project as approved by Parliament and expended by the contractor is 74.8 million euros equivalent to $90 million at the time. This fact is contained in the Parliamentary Hansard of 16th August 2012, when the transaction was approved by the 5th Parliament of Ghana, with the full participation and approval of the then NPP minority.

Ladies and gentlemen of the media, after two (2) years after the Kwame Interchange had been approved by Parliament and construction of the project commenced, the Mahama government on 1st October, 2014 laid before Parliament another export credit facility for the design and construction of another project, the Ring Road Flyover, at a cost $170 million. This transaction was approved on 2nd October, 2014 by the 6th Parliament of the Republic of Ghana.

It is important to emphasize, that the two projects (the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange and the Ring Road Flyover) are distinct from each other and were separately approved by Parliament at different periods for different purposes. The scope of work of the two projects are totally different, and so it is disingenuous and shameful for Dr. Bawumia to lump the cost of the two projects together and create the impression that same is inflated.

If Bawumia has any modicum of respect for Ghanaians, he will honorably do the needful by retracting and apologizing for this lie which has further lowered his fast-sinking reputation and sullied his integrity and that of the high office he occupies.

MEDIOCRE PROJECTS CELEBRATED BY AKUFO-ADDO AS ACHIEVEMENTS

Friends from the media, the NDC as a Social Democratic Party appreciates the varying need for projects such as boreholes, poly-tanks, speed ramps, urinals, one-seat unplastered toilets, kitchens, wooden bridges among others at the micro level to serve the needs of our rural folk. This is why thousands of such projects were delivered across the country from 2009-2016 by the Mills and Mahama NDC governments to ameliorate the plight of our rural folks. However, we do not think that it is right for a government that has had access to an unprecedented resource envelope of over GHS370 billion to showcase and celebrate such relatively less substantive projects as achievements.

At best, Unit Committee and Assembly Members should be allowed to take credit for such mundane initiatives. Ghanaians deserve better for the unprecedented resources that have accrued to the Akufo-Addo government in the last three and half years of being in office. As it is often said, to whom much is given, much is expected. Akufo-Addo should therefore be showcasing more substantive and significant projects for the unprecedented resources he has had.

Ladies and gentlemen of the media, may I now invite you to take a look at the very mediocre projects that are being celebrated as achievements by the Akufo-Addo government on their delivery tracker website.

DR. BAWUMIAS FALSE CLAIMS ABOUT ABANDONED MAHAMA PROJECTS

Distinguished friends from the media, Dr. Bawumia created a false impression during his presentation, that the Akufo Addo-government has completed all infrastructural projects they inherited from the Mahama government and that claims that they have abandoned most of these projects are false. Nothing could be farther from the truth than this claim by Dr. Bawumia.

Even though a handful of Mahama projects have been completed by this government upon incessant pressure from the opposition, the media, and traditional authorities, the evidence show that thousands of infrastructural projects such as roads, E-Blocks and other educational facilities, hospitals and health facilities bequeathed to this government by the Mahama administration still remain abandoned and have been left to rot across the length and breadth of the country. We have a list of hundreds of these abandoned Mahama projects scattered across the country that we couldnt capture in this statement for want of space and time, but can furnish each of you with it upon your request.

BAWUMIAS CLAIM THAT THE AKUFO ADDO-GOVERNMENT HAS PERFORMED BETTER THAN THE MAHAMA GOVERNMENT.

As for Bawumias claim, that the Akufo Addo-government has done better than the Mahama government, I am sure you all know by now that that assertion is a joke that should not be given any serious attention by any discerning mind. Throughout last week, we in the NDC, led by my brother Felix Ofosu Kwakye, have shredded this false claim with indisputable evidence and demonstrated that President Mahama has a far superior and towering record of achievements in all sectors of the nation that completely dwarfs the mediocre accomplishments of his successor, President Akufo Addo. Hence, we will not belabor the point today. If our friends in the NPP are still in doubt about this fact, then they should simply encourage their leader, President Akufo Addo to accept the challenge by H.E John Mahama for a debate on their respective records of delivery at a place, time and with moderators and timekeepers of his choice. Perhaps only then, will they see their smoothness level.

As we wait against all hope to see whether President Akufo Addo will accept this challenge, we would like to humbly entreat you, our friends in the media and anybody who is interested in the truth, to compare and contrast the so-called achievements of this government outlined by Dr. Bawumia and their delivery tracker, which in most cases are either ghost, stolen or mediocre projects, to the tangible achievements of the Mahama administration contained in the famous green book, a soft copy of which you can easily download from the internet by clicking this link; https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mhnQ6wLc1SzBxH_2u2UBaEB_S9gWIO_P/view . And you will no doubt come to the conclusion, that President Mahamas achievements in all sectors of the nation towers far above that of President Akufo Addo.

Friends from the media, one may ask why President Akufo Addo has very little to show for the unprecedented resources he has had in the last three and half years. The answer is simple and that is, President Akufo-Addo has very little to show for the unprecedented resources that has accrued to his government because he has favored investments in consumption, corruption and wasteful expenditures since he assumed office to the detriment of Capital expenditure and the productive sectors of the economy.

The paucity of investment in infrastructure by President Akufo-Addo across board, is amply reflected in the decline of Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) to GDP ratio from 4.5% in 2016 to a paltry 1.5% in 2019. Akufo Addos shambolic performance in office is the reason why he is unwilling to debate President John Dramani Mahama on their respective records in office and on issues that matter to the Ghanaian people.

It is therefore bizarre, that in spite of his woefully abysmal performance, President Akufo-Addo is asking the good people of this country for four (4) more years. Four (4) more years to steal more as we witnessed in the BOSTGATE, missing excavators and tricycles, PPA, NYA, and Australia Visa Fraud scandals. Four more years to borrow more for chop chop. Four more years to travel in rented private jets at a cost of $17,000 per hour to the state. Four more years of deception and broken promises. Four more years of economic hardships. Four more years to collapse more businesses and jobs. Four more years of divisiveness, ethnocentrism and alienation of Ghanaians. Four more years of lawlessness, intolerance and violence. Four more years of bastardization of state institutions and harassment of the Auditor General and journalists. Four more years to enrich his family and friends at the expense of the state, like we saw in the PDS scam, and we are now seeing in the new Asaase-Agyapa Royalties scam. Ghanaians know too well that President Akufo Addo doesnt mean well for this nation and cannot endure four (4) years of his maladministration.

NPP 2020 MANIFESTO LAUNCH

Ladies and gentlemen, after delivering just a miserable 14% of their 631 manifesto promises, with a whopping 86% of those promises remaining unfulfilled, the President and his men were at it again in Cape Coast this weekend.

One would have thought that Saturdays charade of a manifesto launch by the NPP would have been preceded by an honest and sincere apology to the Ghanaian people by President Akufo-Addo himself for failing to honour an overwhelming majority of his promises such as has never been seen in the anals of Ghanas history. But as usual, he chose the path of deception in the hope that he will be second time lucky with well-decorated lies and political chicanery. God being so good, he has been exposed so much such that every Ghanaian who followed the manifesto launch knows that the entire exercise was a scam calculated for votes and nothing more.

Friends from the media, one thing that has made this grand deception more manifest is the 2020 manifesto promise of President Akufo-Addo to construct an ultramodern Airport at Cape Coast. In an interview on Cape Coast-based Atlantic FM on Friday, 21st August, 2020 ahead of their manifesto launch, President Akufo Addo made the point that an airport in Cape Coast is not yet justified given the close proximity of Cape Coast to the Capital City of Accra and Takoradi both of which have airports. Yet, in less than 24 hours at the manifesto launch in Cape Coast, his Vice. Dr. Bawumia announced a promise to the people of Cape Coast that they will build an ultramodern airport and habour for them if elected.

This begs the question as to what sort of feasibility was conducted on the Cape Coast Airport project between the time President Akufo Addo spoke on Atlantic FM and the manifesto launched. Just like this kneejerk deceptive promise, the entire 2020 manifesto of the NPP is a 419 promise intended for votes and not meant to be kept.

In all humility, we will like to implore the good people of Ghana to dismiss this 419 NPP manifesto ab initio. This is because, President Akufo-Addo, his Vice Dr. Bawumia and the entire NPP establishment cannot be trusted to deliver on their promises. If President Akufo Addo could break 86% of his first term manifesto promises when he knew he will be seeking a second mandate from the Ghanaian people, then how many of his latest 2020 manifesto promises will he break if elected, now that he will not be seeking another mandate for Ghanaians again? Your guess is as good as mine.

Another point which is worthy of note, is the deafening silence of all the speakers at the launch on the issue of corruption and nepotism, which for us, is ample testament to the fact the fight against corruption and nepotism has been totally lost under Akufo Addo, the Chief Corruption Clearing Agent. Indeed today, his promise to protect the public purse and not to operate a family and friends government, all lie in tatters, trampled upon with indescribable contempt. Akufo Addo has normalized corruption and nepotism in a way never seen in the 63-year history of Ghana and must be kicked out of office come 7th December, 2020.

Ghanaians can simply not forgive the Akufo-Addo government for the naked thievery they have perpetrated on the nation through the stinking PDS scandal, The BOSTGATE five (5) million liters of contaminated fuel scandal, THE PPA scandal, (which was referred to the Special Prosecutor a year ago and has been thrown under the carpet just like many others) The Australian VISA fraud scandal, The Charles Bissue Galamsey fraud scandal, The 500 missing Excavators and the missing tricycles scandal and recently, the Asaase-Agyapa scandal which seeks to steal millions of dollars for a few family members and cronies of President Akufo-Addo.

Also, Ghanaians can simply not forgive President Akufo Addo for his numerous failed promises such as; the one million dollars per constituency every year, 1D1F, 1V1D, double-digit GDP growth, reduced borrowing, move Ghana from taxation to production, One district one hospital, one district one market, one region one theatre, free WiFi for secondary and tertiary institutions and the several hundreds of their 2016 manifesto promises, all of which remain unfulfilled till date.

Friends from the media, the 2020 manifesto of the NPP offers no hope and failed to address the aspirations of Ghanaians. This has been manifestly evident from the nonchalant reception it has received from the general public since it was launched.

Our beloved country is at a crossroads, and urgently requires honest, visionary, modest, caring, competent and selfless leadership that invests in developmental projects and creates equal opportunities for all and not a select few. Leadership that we can trust, for trust maters. And that, we can find in none other than H.E John Dramani Mahama, THE NATION BUILDER.

It is glaringly clear, that Akufo Addo and his NPP will not be second time lucky with lies and 419 promises in this years general elections. Today, majority of Ghanaians know that the John Mahama-led Rescue Mission is their only hope for the inclusive transformation, true progress we are all yearning for. Ghanaians are waiting for President John Dramani Mahama to deliver:

* Free Primary Health Care, to provide free health care at the District Hospital level to CHPS compounds.

* One million jobs for the teeming unemployed people of this country.

* Pay all depositors of the collapsed financial institutions their locked up funds and restore indigenous participation and collapsed jobs in the banking and financial sector

* The Big Push which will ensure a US$10billion investment in infrastructure development in order to create sustainable jobs for Ghanaians.

* The National Apprenticeship program under which, any Ghanaian desirous to learn a craft will be enrolled and trained by a master-craftsperson for free, paid monthly stipends for their accommodation, transportation and feeding, and setup with the necessary tool-kits upon their successful completion of the apprenticeship program.

* Introduce Free TVET up to the tertiary level.

* Legalize the Okada commercial motorbike transport services, to create jobs for the teeming unemployed youth of Ghana.

* scrap corporate income tax for small-scale businesses and new medium-scale businesses who employ 20 people and above, as well as reduce corporate income tax from 25%-15% for all existing medium-scale businesses aimed at enabling them plough back their profits into expanding their businesses and employ more young people.

* Reduce the size of government and channel savings from same into the payment of Assembly Members.

* Create opportunities for all and not just a select few family and friends.

Ghanaians are disappointed in Akufo Addo and are waiting to vote for, THE TRUSTWORTHY NATION BUILDER, John Dramani Mahama because he offers a better program with a solid and unparalleled track-record of delivery.
India and Uzbekistan on Monday co-chaired the first National Coordination Committee meeting, wherein they held "fruitful" discussions on issues of bilateral interests such as Line of Credit (LoC) projects, trade and investment.

The meeting was co-chaired by Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan and Uzbekistan Deputy Prime Minister Sardor Umurzakov.

"Co-chaired 1st India-Uzbekistan National Coordination Committees meeting with HE Sardor Umurzakov. Fruitful discussion on LoC projects, bilateral trade and investment. Confident that committees' work will further deepen India-Uzbekistan strategic relations," Muraleedharan said in a tweet.

India and Uzbekistan have a modest bilateral trade turnover of over USD 300 million. Pharmaceuticals is a major area of both trade and investment by India. Medical tourism to India has increased sharply in the recent past.

Notable Indian investments in Uzbekistan have been made by Indian companies in the fields of pharmaceuticals, amusement parks, automobile components and hospitality industry. A Joint Centre for Information Technology was set up in 2006 and upgraded in 2014.

An IT Park in Tashkent, established with Indian assistance, was inaugurated in July last year.

(ANI)

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F irefighters in California have been racing to prepare for high winds and more lightning as three massive wildfires ravage the state.

The recent lightning-sparked wildfires have exploded in size to become some of the largest in state history, forcing thousands to flee, destroying hundreds of homes and killing at least seven people.

More than 14,000 firefighters assisted by helicopters and air tankers continue to battle the blazes in northern California.

Meanwhile, nearly 250,000 people have now been placed under evacuation orders and warnings.

California Wildfires: August/September 2020 - In pictures 1 /90 California Wildfires: August/September 2020 - In pictures The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area Noah Berger/AP The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area Getty Images A man pulls out a garden hose as he helps Fire Fighters with Cal Fire protect the St. Helena Water Treatment Plant from the Glass Fire in Napa Valley, California AFP via Getty Images An air tanker drops retardant on the Glass Fire burning in Calistoga AP Firefighters knock down flames on a dog house while battling the Glass Fire burning in St. Helena AP Cal Fire Capt. Jesse Campbell works to save the Louis Stralla Water Treatment Plant as the Glass Fire burns in St. Helena, AP The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California Getty Images Embers fly from a tree as the Glass Fire burns in St. Helena AP Grape vines at Chateau Boswell Winery burn as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California Getty Images An air tanker drops retardant as the LNU Lightning Complex fires tear through the Spanish Flat community in unincorporated Napa County AP Chula Vista firefighter Rudy Diaz monitors the LNU Lightning Complex Fire REUTERS Following the LNU Lightning Complex fires, a scorched VW Microbus rests in a driveway of the Spanish Flat community in Napa County AP Fire consumes land recently deforested by cattle farmers near Novo Progresso AP Smoke rises from the LNU Lightning Complex wildfires as seen from an AlertWildfire camera looking east from Mount St. Helena, north of Calistoga, California via REUTERS Firefighters Cody Nordstrom, Kyle Harp and Robert Gonzalez, from left, of the North Central Fire station out of Kerman AP Fire consumes land recently deforested by cattle farmers near Novo Progresso AP Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires leap above Butts Canyon Road AP A charred vehicle is parked in front of a home after the CZU Lightning Complex AP Resident Alyssa Medina reacts after finding an intact cup amidst the burned remains of her home AFP via Getty Images Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires leap above Butts Canyon Road AP Howard Forest Helitack firefighters return to their helicopter after battling the LNU Lightning Complex AP Vehicles and homes have been burned by the CZU Lightning Complex Fir AP AP A vehicle drives along Knoxville Road, with flames from the LNU Lightning Complex in the background in Napa County AP Firefighters take refuge in their trucks in a cleared field as a wildfire also known as the Hennessey Fire jumped Knoxville Berryessa Road, west of Sacramento AP A resident hoses down a burning bicycle and tree as flames from the Hennessey approach a property in the Spanish Flat area of Napa, California AFP via Getty Images An outbuilding burns as the LNU Lightning Complex fires tear through the Spanish Flat area of unincorporated Napa County AP Bill Nichols, 84, works to save his home as the LNU Lightning Complex fires tear through Vacaville AP Residents extinguish spot fires while protecting their property as the LNU Lightning Complex fire burns through the area in Fairfield, California Getty Images A bicycle and palm tree burn at a residence during the LNU Lightning Complex fire in the Spanish Flat area of Napa, California AFP via Getty Images Mobile homes burn at the Spanish Flat Mobile Villa as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire burns through the area in Napa, California Getty Images Firefighters monitor flames as they approach a residence in the valley area of Vacaville, northern California during the LNU Lightning Complex fire AFP via Getty Images Horses stand in an enclosure as the LNU Lightning Complex fires tear through the Spanish Flats community in unincorporated Napa County AP A CalFire crew from Coulterville takes a break while fighting the River Fire near Salinas AP A massive column of smoke rises above Highway 1 just north of the Santa Cruz County line as a section of the CZU August Lightning Complex burns above Waddell Beac AP Debris piles burn as the LNU Lightning Complex fire burns through the area in Fairfield, California Getty Images Fire burns along the closed Interstate 80 Getty Images In this long exposure photograph, flames consumes both sides of a segment of Lake Berryessa during the Hennessey fire in the Spanish Flat area of Napa AFP via Getty Images In this long exposure photograph, embers fly off a burning tree during the Hennessey fire in the Spanish Flat area of Napa, California AFP via Getty Images Mobile homes burn at the Spanish Flat Mobile Villa as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire burns through the area in Napa, California Getty Images Fire crews maintain a backburn to control the River Fire near the Las Palmas neighborhood in Salinas AP Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires burn in unincorporated Napa County AP A pickup truck drives on a freeway overpass as flames from the LNU Lighting Complex Fire approach Interstate 80 on the outskirts of Vacaville, California REUTERS Mobile homes burn at the Spanish Flat Mobile Villa as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire burns through the area in Napa, California Getty Images Firefighter David Widaman directs water onto a tree that had exploded in flame as a fire crew defends a house northwest of Santa Cruz AP A home burns as the LNU Lightning Complex fires tear through the Spanish Flats community in unincorporated Napa County AP Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires lick above a fire truck in unincorporated Napa County AP A flag flies as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires crest a ridge in Napa County AP Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires jump Interstate 80 in Vacaville AP Fire crews maintain a backburn to control the River Fire near the Las Palmas neighborhood in Salina AP Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires jump Interstate 80 in Vacaville AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP Douglas Forest Protective Association AFP via Getty Images AP AFP via Getty Images Getty Images AP Butte County Sheriff Butte County Sheriff Butte County Sheriff Butte County Sheriff

Three groups of fires, called complexes, are burning north, east and south of San Francisco and have together scorched 991 square miles, destroyed more than 500 structures and killed five people.

At the complex in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, authorities announced the discovery of the body of a 70-year-old man in a remote area called Last Chance.

The man had been reported missing and police had to use a helicopter to reach the area, which is a string of about 40 off-the-grid homes at the end of a windy, steep dirt road north of the city of Santa Cruz.

A burnt out car / AP

The area was under an evacuation order and Santa Cruz Sheriff's Department Chief Deputy Chris Clark said it was a stark reminder of the need for residents to leave the area.

"This is one of the darkest periods we've been in with this fire," he said.

The fatality was the first for that area and seventh fire victim in the state in the last week.

During that time a total of 650 wildfires have burned across California, many of them sparked by the more than 12,000 lighting strikes recorded since August 15.

AP

Fire crews did make progress during the weekend, which saw a welcome break in the unseasonably warm weather and high winds. This allowed firefighters to increase what had been precious little containment.

But the National Weather Service has now issued a "red flag" warning through to Monday afternoon for the drought-stricken area.

This means extreme fire conditions including high temperatures, low humidity, lightning and wind gusts up to 65 mph that "may result in dangerous and unpredictable fire behaviour."

A woman stands in the rubble of her home / AFP via Getty Images

Mark Brunton, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), said while he's confident firefighters did the most with the time they had to prepare, he's not sure what to expect.

"There's a lot of potential for things to really go crazy out there," he said.

The LNU Lightning Complex fire in wine country north of San Francisco and SCU Lightning Complex southeast of the city have within a week grown to be two of the three largest fires in state history, with both burning more than 500 square miles.

Fires continue to ravage northern California / AP

The LNU fire has been the most deadly and destructive blaze, accounting for five deaths and 845 destroyed homes and other buildings.

Three of the victims were in a home that was under an evacuation order. Officials surveying maps at command centres are astonished by the sheer size of the fires, Cal Fire spokesman Brice Bennett said.

"You could overlay half of one of these fires and it covers the entire city of San Francisco," Mr Bennett said Sunday.

In Southern California, an 11-day-old blaze held steady at just under 50 square miles near Lake Hughes in northern Los Angeles County mountains.

Fires continue to ravage northern California / AP

Rough terrain, hot weather and the potential for thunderstorms with lightning strikes challenged firefighters on Sunday.

Authorities said their firefighting effort in Santa Cruz was hindered by people who refused to evacuate and those who were using the chaos to steal.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart said 100 officers were patrolling and anyone not authorised to be in an evacuation zone would be arrested.

Holly Hansen, who fled the LNU fire, was among evacuees from the community of Angwin allowed Sunday to go back to their homes for one hour to retrieve belongings. She and her three dogs waited five hours in her SUV for their turn.

Among the items she took with her were photos of her pets.

"It's horrible, I lived in Sonoma during the (2017) Tubbs Fire, so this is time No. 2 for me. It's horrible when you have to think about what to take," she said.

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"I think it's a very raw human base emotion to have fear of fire and losing everything. It's frightening."
M&S is attempting to 'turbocharge' growth through its website in response to the skyrocketing popularity of online shopping in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

M&S (MKS.L) has launched two new trials for its Click & Collect service in response to the coronavirus pandemic  drive-through collection and in-store contactless collection.

For drive-through collection a customer receives their Ready to Collect email including a link to book a collection slot and to give their car registration. This is done via dialogue with a chatbot on text, Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.

The chatbot confirms the time slot and the allocated location where the customer should drive to. When the customer arrives at the store, they press a link on their phone to inform a colleague they have arrived and their parcel is brought to their car.

For in-store contactless collection the chatbot confirms the time slot and the allocated location where they will collect the order and when the customer arrives at the collection point, they pick up their parcel from the allocated shelf the chatbot tells them to go to.

M&S said both solutions will help customers shop safely and conveniently during the coronavirus by eliminating the need to queue when entering the shop and at the Click & Collect desk.

READ MORE: Shoppers hit high streets as retail footfall keeps rising

Before the coronavirus lockdown was implemented across the UK in March, around 70% of online M&S orders were collected in-store, according to the retailer. Whilst this fell to a low of 15% when clothing stores were closed, it has gradually been rising again in recent weeks and is now at around 50%.

The move is part of the retail giants efforts to turbocharge growth through its website in response to the skyrocketing popularity of online shopping in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

M&S is trialling in-store contactless collection at Hempstead Valley, Camberley and Longbridge, and drive-up collection at Camberley.

The retailer is partnering with technology platform Doddle to launch the three-store trials.

Neil Phillips, head of digital operations at M&S, said: Great digital technology in our stores is really important for offering our customers a great experience and for connecting the online and in-store journey.

Story continues

READ MORE: Non-essential spending returns to 2019 levels as lockdown eases

These trials with Doddle offer market leading solutions for Click & Collect, a proposition which will only grow over the coming years as the trend towards online shopping continues to accelerate. Well be listening carefully to our customers feedback.

Gary OConnor, CTO at Doddle, said: We are delighted to be working with M&S to trial new click & collect technology in selected stores. Online shopping has rapidly accelerated, and were confident that our digital in-store collections and drive-up solution will benefit M&S and their customers  with an even more convenient way to receive their purchases.
The Road to 270 is a weekly column leading up to the presidential election. Each installment is dedicated to understanding one states political landscape and how that might influence which party will win its electoral votes in 2020. Well do these roughly in order of expected competitiveness, moving toward the most intensely contested battlegrounds as election day nears.

The Road to 270 will be published every Monday. The column is written by Drew Savicki, a 270toWin elections and politics contributor. Contact Drew via email or on Twitter @DrewSav.

Editor's Note: There are only ten weeks until the presidential election on November 3. At the bottom of this article, we list the current schedule for the remaining ten states in the Road to 270 series.

The most conservative of the New England states, New Hampshire is known for its strong libertarian streak. Home to the nation's first presidential primary every four years, New Hampshire voters enjoy a front row view to American politics.

Geography

New Hampshires two congressional districts split the state east-west, and reflect the cultural, geographic, and political divides in the state well.

NH-1: The 1st District includes the Manchester area and the seacoast. This is traditionally the more Republican leaning of the two districts, partly due to its large presence of Massachusetts expats, many of whom fled the Bay States high taxes. The seacoast is home to wealthy towns and villages, with its largest city being Portsmouth. Saint Anselm College, which houses the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, is here -- it's hosted presidential debates, and is a must-visit venue for serious candidates during the primary season.

The 1st District includes the Manchester area and the seacoast. This is traditionally the more Republican leaning of the two districts, partly due to its large presence of Massachusetts expats, many of whom fled the Bay States high taxes. The seacoast is home to wealthy towns and villages, with its largest city being Portsmouth. Saint Anselm College, which houses the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, is here -- it's hosted presidential debates, and is a must-visit venue for serious candidates during the primary season. NH-2: Home to the state capital of Concord and the tech hub of Nashua, this scenic district covers western New Hampshire. Small, Trump-friendly working-class towns dot the landscape up north while its southern towns, along the Massachusetts border, usually preferred Republicans like Mitt Romney. Located in far northern New Hampshire is Dixville Notch, where every four years, residents cast their primary votes at midnight.

Congressional Politics

New Hampshire is no stranger to competitive congressional races. For election junkies, there is perhaps no greater saga than the four consecutive contests between former Reps. Carol Shea-Porter (D) and Frank Guinta (R). Shea-Porter was elected to the 1st District in 2006, and held it in 2008. Still, Shea-Porters single-digit margins made her a Republican target in the 2010 midterms. Republicans snagged a top recruit in former Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta. Although President Obama had carried the district by 6% two years earlier, Guinta won the election by 12 points. With Obama back on the ballot in 2012, Shea-Porter mounted a comeback and defeated Guinta. In the more anti-Obama 2014 midterm, the national environment favored Guinta, who won the second rematch. Bogged down in a campaign finance scandal, Guinta lost reelection to Shea-Porter in 2016.

An era ended in October 2017, when Shea-Porter announced she was retiring from Congress. Her retirement opened up a crowded field of candidates, including her former Chief of Staff, Naomi Andrews, Levi Sanders (the son of next-door Sen. Bernie Sanders), Marine veteran and Obama admin official Maura Sullivan, and Manchester Executive Councillor Chris Pappas. With support from both the states senators and Rep. Anne Kuster (D), Pappas won the primary with 42% of the vote, setting up a historic election. Pappas, an openly gay politician defeated Republican Eddie Edwards, a retired Black police Chief from South Hampton.

Given the historical competitiveness of the district, Pappas' 8.5% win is rather remarkable, and was slightly better than Barack Obama's win in the district in 2008. Pappas was able to appeal to traditionally Republican suburbanites and likely won back some blue-collar Trump voters. The Cook Political Report recently changed its rating for this district, from 'Leans Democratic' to 'Likely Democratic', citing Pappas' strong fundraising, mediocre opposition, and private polls that show him well-positioned to win reelection.

In western New Hampshire, Democrat Anne Kuster, a former attorney from Concord, has locked down the states 2nd District. Though Hillary Clinton only carried this district by 3% in 2016, Republicans largely threw in the towel against Kuster in 2018. Kuster has proven to be highly popular here and although the Crystal Ball rates the district as Likely Democratic, other outlets like Cook and Inside Elections rate the race as Solid Democratic.

Compared to Obama, Kuster has seen clear weakening among blue-collar voters -- not too surprising, considering the inroads that Trump made with that group in 2016. Still, she made some gains along the Massachusetts border, where Trumps support was comparatively soft.

The state currently has two Democrats in the Senate. This is unusual -- the last time both its senators were Democrats, Jimmy Carter was president. New Hampshire is ancestrally Republican but, unlike the other New England states, its GOP senators dont have a tradition of moderation. Its previous senators, like Bob Smith, Judd Gregg, Gordon Humphrey, and, most recently, Kelly Ayotte, were all fairly conservative.

New Hampshire and Virginia are the only states where both senators are former governors. New Hampshires senior Senator, Jeanne Shaheen (D), served as governor of the state from 1997-2003. A mainstream Democrat, Shaheen has long been in state Democratic politics. She was the New Hampshire Chair of Colorado Sen. Gary Harts 1988 campaign for president and her husband served in that role for Vice President Al Gores campaign in 2000. Shaheen was actually on Gores shortlist for Vice President that year.

As a popular governor, Shaheen was recruited by national Democrats to run for an open Senate seat in 2002. Republicans nominated then-Rep. John E. Sununu, of the 1st District -- his father is former governor and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu. President Bushs approvals were high in 2002 -- the weekend before that election, the president made a stop in New Hampshire, which likely helped Sununu to a 51%-46% win. In a totally different political climate, Shaheen tried for a rematch in 2008, and beat Sununu by 6%. With that, she became the first Democratic senator elected from the state since John Durkin, in 1974.

In 2014, Shaheen faced former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R). Though he represented the Bay State from 2010 to 2013, Brown spent portions of his childhood in Portsmouth, where his parents were from. National Republicans lined up behind Brown, but his loose ties to the state seemed hard to overcome. Public polling showed a tight race and, in the end, Shaheen pulled off a three-point win. Though her overall margin was reduced from 2008, Shaheen actually improved in much of the north -- that area of the state is, geographically, farthest away from Massachusetts, so Browns carpetbagging may have been especially suspect to those voters. In addition, northern New Hampshire is outside the Boston media market so voters in that area would not have been terribly familiar with Brown.

Shaheen is up for reelection this year but Republicans are not making a major play for the seat. After Gov. Chris Sununu (R) opted to run for reelection in 2020, Republican interest in this race quickly disappeared. Although the Crystal Ball is maintaining its rating of Likely Democratic for now, Cook has rated it Solid Democratic the whole cycle. In contrast to its presidential primary, New Hampshire has among the latest congressional primaries -- it'll be on September 8 this year. Both leading Republican candidates have military backgrounds, though Trump endorsed attorney Corky Messner. Regardless, Shaheen shouldnt have much trouble in the fall. Given her strength as an incumbent and her fondly remembered tenure as Governor, she has proven to be an enduring figure in the Granite State's politics.

New Hampshires junior Senator is Maggie Hassan. A longtime state Senator, Hassan was elected governor in 2012, when Gov. John Lynch (D) retired after serving an unprecedented four-term tenure. After two terms as governor, Hassan ran for the U.S. Senate against Sen. Ayotte. Like the presidential race that year, New Hampshires Senate race was extremely close: Hassan won by 1,017 votes, out of almost 740,000 cast. Following the release of the Access Hollywood tape, Ayotte was one of many Republicans who withdrew her endorsement of Trump, which may have cost her support on the right. Hassan credits her son, who has cerebral palsy, for her interest in public service -- in office, she is highly attentive to issues that impact the disabled.

Looking at where Hassan did better than Clinton is quite interesting and shows that Ayotte struggled with a lot of Trump voters. She showed clear weakness in 'Trumpier' blue collar towns while running ahead of Trump in the state's urban and suburban areas. It wasn't enough for her to win though.

With the New Hampshire primary enjoying so much attention every four years, the state's congressional delegation is highly sought after for endorsements but only Rep. Kuster made one this year. Kuster endorsed former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg - who ultimately finished a respectable second place in the state.

State level politics

New Hampshire is one of just a few states in the country that elects no statewide executive offices, besides its governor. Occupants of its other row offices, like the Attorney General and Secretary of State positions, are elected by the legislature. Institutionally, its governor is considered one of the nation's weaker executives. The governor's power is partially shared with a separate executive body, called the Executive Council of New Hampshire. Five members are elected via districts (as of August 2020, Democrats hold a 3-2 majority). The governor retains the power to veto legislation, but the power to make certain executive or judicial appointments is shared with that of the Council. Depending on the party control of the governorship and the Council, they can work in tandem or hamstring one another. New Hampshire, along with neighboring Vermont, are the only states with two-year gubernatorial terms.

The legislature -- known as the General Court -- is among the nations most curious. The state Senate is comprised of 24 members, who serve two year terms. The state House is the largest legislative chamber in the nation, with an astonishing 400 members. Due to the General Court's enormous size, legislators receive just $200 per term as compensation -- so New Hampshire has what is often called a citizen or volunteer legislature. Members have outside jobs that they hold even while they are in session. Such legislatures are most common in New England and the western U.S.

The New Hampshire legislature is frequently one of the most competitive legislatures in the country -- the state House has flipped four times over the past dozen years -- and this year will be no exception. Democrats are currently considered slight favorites to hold the Senate while their majority in the House looks firmer.

Secretary of State Bill Gardner (D) is an institution in the states politics and is a fierce defender of his states presidential primary. Serving since 1976, he has remained in office even when the General Court has been in GOP hands. In December 2018, with a newly-elected Democratic majority in the legislature, Gardner faced a real race from 2016 gubernatorial nominee Colin Van Ostern. Gardner was criticized for taking part in President Trumps (now-defunct) Commission on Election Integrity -- to many Democrats, he was legitimizing the presidents politically-motivated commission. Gardner ultimately kept his job, though the vote was close.

Gov. Chris Sununu was elected in 2016 and reelected in 2018. He is in a historically rare situation: for the first time since the 1870s, the state has a GOP governor and Democratic-controlled legislature. Still, his approval ratings are high, and hes favored for reelection. His political future is uncertain, but he is often mentioned as a possible challenger to Sen. Hassan in 2022.

Presidential politics and 2020 outlook

New Hampshire Polls >>

It is impossible to discuss New Hampshires role in presidential elections without discussing the New Hampshire primary. Every four years, the state holds its first in the nation presidential primary (although the Iowa Caucus is the first contest where delegates are awarded). According to New Hampshire state law, The presidential primary election shall be held on the second Tuesday in March or on a date selected by the secretary of state which is 7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election. In other words, the state is legally obligated to maintain its status as the first presidential primary.

New Hampshire has held a presidential primary since 1916, but the contest gained its modern-day significance in 1952. That year, voters began to vote directly for candidates. After a poor showing in the primary that year - he lost the state to Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver, President Truman dropped out of the race. On the Republican side, it was Dwight Eisenhowers first foray into politics -- his Granite State win showed he was a viable candidate for the nomination.

In an increasingly diverse Democratic Party, New Hampshires relevance in the Democratic nominating process has been questioned. Its heavily white and liberal electorate simply does not match the Partys base. This was shown when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders carried the state in both his unsuccessful presidential runs. Joe Biden -- who won the nomination in large part from his strength with Black voters in later contests -- placed fifth in the Granite State primary.

On the Republican side, New Hampshire is a much better fit for the partys base. In the past three cycles, the winner of the New Hampshire primary has won the GOP nomination. In 1992, incumbent president George H. W. Bushs weakness in the primary -- he beat conservative challenger Pat Buchanan by only 53%-38% -- foreshadowed his general election loss.

The Granite State emerged as a swing state in 1992, when Bill Clinton narrowly carried it over Bush. In fact, aside from Clintons Arkansas home, New Hampshire saw the biggest blue shift from 1988 to 1992: Bush's share plunged from 62% to 38% between the elections. That drop was surely exaggerated by the presence of Reform Party nominee Ross Perot on the ballot. Perot earned nearly a quarter of the vote, polling relatively well in the blue-collar north. For 1996, it basically matched the national vote, going to Clinton 49%-39%. In 2000, George W. Bush won the state with a 48% plurality, thanks to Green Party candidate Ralph Nader receiving 4%.

2000 remains the last time the state voted Republican but, by raw vote margin, it was the closest state in the country in 2016. This cycle, polling of the state has been scarce, and the two campaigns seem more interested in larger electoral prizes. With much of the state located in the expensive Boston media market, the state isn't a terribly efficient one in which to air ads.

As of 2018, 36.5% of Granite State adults hold a bachelors degree or higher, making it one of the nations most educated states. New Hampshire is one of those states where Democrats trading blue collar voters for college educated whites isn't likely to hurt them. The Trump campaign will be holding a rally in Manchester this week but with it playing defense in states like Iowa and Ohio, and given the strength Democrats have shown with college graduates in the Trump era, it seems Biden is favored to carry the state.

Next Week: Michigan

Tentative Schedule: Pennsylvania (9/7), Wisconsin (9/14), Florida (9/21), Texas (9/28), Arizona (10/5), North Carolina (10/12), Ohio (10/19), Georgia (10/26), Iowa (11/2). Dates subject to change.

We use the model powering the 2020 presidential election simulator to determine the following week's state. Specifically, we will look at the 'Battleground 270' results of 25,000 simulations run late Sunday afternoon. Of the states remaining, the next to be covered will be that with the highest likelihood of a Trump or Biden win as of that date. View the current state-by-state probabilities in the table at the bottom of the Battleground 270 page.
The loss ratio of general insurance companies is likely to rise from Q2FY21 as claims from health, fire and motor segments are seeing an increase.

Sources told Moneycontrol that compared to the 102-105 percent loss ratio, prevalent till the end of the June quarter, by the end of September quarter. loss ratio will see a rise to 120 percent.

This means that for every Rs 100 collected as premium, Rs 120 will be paid out as insurance claims.

If the loss ratios rise, underwriting profits of non-life insurers will be hit. This will affect bottom line or profitability in Q2. For customers, this will mean a premium increase from FY22. According to experts, the health and fire insurance segments may see a 5-10 percent rise in premiums.

Also Read: Hospitals and insurers dont see eye-to-eye on COVID-19 treatment costs

Rise in combined ratio

In Q1, the combined ratio stood at 100 percent or below for the industry. For instance, ICICI Lombard had a combined ratio of 100 percent and Bajaj Allianz General had 90.4 percent in Q1FY21.

The combined ratio is the incurred losses and expenses versus the earned premium. This is used to measure the profitability of a non-life insurer. A ratio below 100 percent indicates that the insurer is posting underwriting profit.

In the initial months of the lockdown, policyholders were busy handling remote working and circumstances related to travelling back home. But from mid-July onwards, as things settled, these individuals started filing for claims related to road and fire accidents, and, of course, Coronavirus-related hospitalisation," said the head of claims at a mid-size private insurer.

As far as customers are concerned, the loss-ratio increase will attract a higher premium from the next financial year onwards.

Increase in health and motor claims

The Coronavirus outbreak has led to 1,25,000 health insurance claims being filed so far. The claimed amount is close to Rs 1,700 crore. From July onwards, with the rise in elective surgeries that were postponed, general insurers are expecting a spike in claims from health, leading to loss ratios above 110 percent.

While COVID-19 claims are not as high as anticipated, it is adding to the total loss ratios. Along with regular hospitalisation claims, losses will exceed 110 percent, said the head of claims at a stand-alone health insurer.

In the motor insurance segment, accident claims have started to come in. Insurers said that while April was a total-lockdown situation, individuals were travelling back home in May and part of June.

Also Read: Reporter's Take | Does your insurance cover coronavirus?

In this segment, while the own-damage or vehicle-repair claims have remained under control, third-party insurance claims are being filed. Third-party claims are for road accidents caused by insured vehicles leading to loss of life or serious injuries.

Fire accidents as offices, shops reopen

With several offices, shops and factories reopening from June, the three-month shutdown has damaged machinery and plant parts. Added to this is the heavy rainfall across the country. It has increased the risk of short-circuits in closed units.

Standard operating protocols were not followed by owners of smaller manufacturing units, shops and godowns. This is leading to fire accidents being reported to insurance companies, said the head of commercial insurance at a state-owned insurer.

Also Read: Brace for insurance premium hikes in post COVID-19 era

Close to 100 major and minor fire insurance claims have been reported so far, with claims exceeding Rs 2 crore. Going forward, insurers are planning a premium increase from FY22 to compensate for the claim losses.

Fire and health insurance will definitely see a 5-10 percent price increase next year, said the underwriting head of a non-life insurer.
There are two more casualties with the economic downturn due to the novel coronavirus and both companies have said the layoffs will be permanent.

Seadrill Americas, Inc. at 11025 Equity Dr., announced on Aug. 11 their plans to lay off 168 employees assigned to the West Auriga drilling rig beginning in the month of October.

The company provides personnel supporting the operation of a mobile offshore drilling unit, the West Auriga Rig. The West Auriga is a sixth generation ultra-deepwater drillship with operational history in the Gulf of Mexico.

Cypress Alamo: Alamo replica venue in Cypress facing daunting future amid pandemic

According to their WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988) letter to Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner of their intentions, the West Auriga will soon complete operations under its current contract and is anticipated to be cold stacked or mothballed, a cost reduction step taken when a rigs contracting prospects look bleak or the operation does not justify an adequate return on the investment.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Houston economy reverses course, shedding jobs in July as region struggles to contain COVID

The inability to secure additional work for the West Auriga in the face of the current market and other conditions is sudden, unexpected, and outside of Seadrills control, the letter read.

Under those business circumstances, preparations are already underway to shut down the West Auriga over the next two to three months.

According to Claudia Londono, head of human resources for the company, a small number of employees may receive offers to transfer to other Seadrill positions or locations, but no transfer offers have been extended at this time, and any employees who receive such an offer but reject it will be laid off.

Affected employees have already been notified of their separation dates and that their separation from employment will be permanent. All separations will be complete by Dec. 31, 2020.

No bumping rights, or senior employees displacing junior employees out of their job positions, as a result of the closure of West Auriga.

On Aug. 13, 2020, REX Staffing, LLC provided notice of layoffs for all employees at Country Fresh Products, LLC located at 2008 W. W. Thorne Blvd.

According to their WARN letter penned by company president Tinh Tieu, the layoffs were prompted by Country Fresh leadership to curtail its operations at the facility due to a decline in sales volume and reduction in demand because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The layoffs mean the permanent elimination of 310 REX Staffing LLC employees who are assigned to work at the facility. The last day of employment for the affected employees is anticipated to be Oct. 11, or within 14 days thereafter. Like Seadrill, none of the affected employees are represented by a union, and no bumping rights will exist for Country Fresh Products employees.

The company got into trouble last year with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) when they received a warning letter from the agency because of serious violations with the Ready-to-Eat (RTE) fresh cut produce manufacturing facility.

The letter, sent on Dec. 12, 2019, noted FDA inspectors collected environmental samples from various areas of the facility, including areas near food processing operations. Analysis of the samples found the presence of Listeria monocytogenes, a human pathogen, in the facility.

Based on FDAs inspectional findings and the analytical results for the environmental samples, we determined that your RTE products are adulterated within the meaning of Section 402(a)(4) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) [21 U.S.C.  342(a)(4)], in that they were prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby they may have become contaminated with filth, or whereby they may have been rendered injurious to health, the letter read.

The company did take action and responded to the FDA in emails sent including summaries of sanitation and cleaning procedures, a supplier approval review, training documentation, and other supporting documentation.

However, they did not provide supporting documentation of all their corrective actions.

We will verify the adequacy of your corrective actions during our next inspection, the FDA official wrote in their return letter.

Among the violations was a retail product sample of watermelon spears collected at Wal-Mart on May 9, 2019 by the FDA that tested positive for Listeria monocytogenes.

The watermelon spears were manufactured at the Country Fresh location in Grand Prairie. Whole Genome Sequencing of the sample revealed that it matched an environmental sample collected by the State of Texas in 2013 at the Country Fresh location in Houston, and historical clinical isolates. According to the company, the two Country Fresh locations (Grand Prairie and Houston) shared product, equipment, and suppliers.

The letter ended, You should take prompt action to correct the violations noted in this letter. Failure to do so may result in regulatory action by FDA without further notice, including, without limitation, seizure and injunction.

It is not known if the violations contributed to the closure of the facility as well.

Neither company representatives responded to requests for an interview.

dtaylor@hcnonline.com
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Frank Cullotta, a mobster who was granted immunity for his testimony and spoke openly about organized crime in court and later on his own YouTube show, died on Aug. 20 in a Las Vegas hospital. He was 81.

His longtime friend Adam Flowers said the cause was Covid-19 and underlying conditions.

Though he made his name as a criminal, Mr. Cullotta found a second calling later in life, giving mob history tours in Las Vegas and running his YouTube show, Coffee with Cullotta, about the inner workings of organized crime.
Ministry of Sanitation Water and Natural Resources, Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development in collaboration with Waste Management Experts Zoomlion Ghana Limited on Saturday began the second phase of the disinfection of tertiary institutions in the Upper East region as directed by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo

This comes ahead of the official reopening of schools across the country.

Two schools in the Bolga district namely Bolgatanga Technical University and Millar Institute, a private university were the first schools to benefit from the exercise followed by St. John Bosco's College of Education in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality (Navrongo).

Dr. Paschal B. Atengden, Vice President in charge of Academic Affairs commended the government and Zoomlion Ghana Ltd for instituting this mass spraying program to minimize or curb the spread of COVID-19

"As the first private university in northern Ghana, we wish to further request that when services are being rolled out for the educational system in the country private institutions in education should be Included", Dr. Atengden added

"Since the students in such institutions are equally Ghanaian, they deserve all government assistance to facilitate their education disregarding whether they are in public or private institutions".

Ms.Dianne Adi-Sebarah, Zoomlion Municipal Manager in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality (Navrongo) led the workers to ensure the facilities of the st. John Bosco's College of education school is been disinfected.

Speaking on behalf of the principal at St. John Bosco's College of Education, Mr. John Amoah, the estate manager of the school heaped praise on the government and the Jospong Group for their efforts in ensuring the country defeats the novel Covid-19.

He also highlighted a few challenges the school has been facing and therefore called on Cooperate bodies to come to their aid.

Mr. Issaka Abubakar, Deputy Manager for Zoomlion Ghana Limited in the Upper East Region in his remarks commended his team members for their selfless work.

"I decided to join the team to Navrongo to disinfect the st. Saint John Bosco's College of education but in Regional wide, we have Disinfected five schools that is Bolgatanga technical university, Regentrophen College of applied Science-Namoo, Millar institute, Gbewah college of education in Pusiga. It's been successful to a large extent" he added.
Last Week: GBP/AUD Exchange Rate Fluctuates as Doubts Grow Over UK-EU Brexit Trade Deal

The Pound to Australian Dollar (GBP/AUD) exchange rate edged higher last week, with the pairing rising from lows of $1.814 to highs of $1.840 as concerns over US-China trade relations held down the risk-averse Aussie. However, towards the end of the week, Sterling began to drop on fears of a no-deal Brexit.

Tuesday saw the Australian Dollar (AUD) temporarily benefit from a wait-and-see approach from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). This bought relief to Australian markets as some analysts were expecting a more dovish message.

The RBA said in its minutes:

Members reaffirmed that there was no need to adjust the package of measures in Australia in the current environment.

Members agreed, however, to continue to assess the evolving situation in Australia and did not rule out adjusting the current package if circumstances warranted.

Meanwhile, Wednesday saw the release of Julys Westpac Leading Index, which fell from 0.5% to 0.05%.

Bill Evans, an analyst at Property Observer, commented on the data:

For Australia overall, we expect growth in the economy to be flat in the September quarter before lifting by 2.8% in the December quarter on the assumption that Victoria moves through Stage 4 to Stage 2 and the other states avoid second wave outbreaks.

Sterling edged higher following Wednesdays release of Julys UK CPI figure, which beat forecast and rose from 0.6% to 1% year-on-year.

However, Thursdays release of the UKs GfK consumer confidence figure for August, which held at -27, dampened confidence in the UKs ability to recover its economy from the Covid-19 crisis.

Downing Streets assurances that it was aiming to secure a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU by September, however, buoyed confidence in Sterling.

Nonetheless, these hopes were quickly dampened by criticisms from Michel Barnier, the EUs Chief Negotiator.

Friday saw the GBP/AUD exchange rate dip by -0.2% after Michel Barnier accused the British government of wasting valuable time and making it altogether unlikely of a post-Brexit deal between the EU and the UK.

Fears of a possible no-deal Brexit haunted UK markets on Friday, overshadowing the positive UK services PMI, which beat forecasts and rose from 56.5 to 60.1.

However, with concerns over Brexit eclipsing signs of Britains economic recovery, the GBP/AUD exchange rate suffered.

GBP/AUD Forecast: Could a Dovish Bank of England Weigh on Sterling This Week?

This week is quiet on the UK and Australian economic front, with few economic data releases of note.

Consequently, we will see the Australian Dollar (AUD) mainly driven by risk-sentiment, so any signs of US-China trade tensions escalating would prove AUD-negative.

Australian Dollar (AUD) investors, however, will be looking to Wednesdays release of the Australian construction work done data for the second quarter.

Any improvement could buoy the AUD/GBP exchange rate.

Sterling traders will be awaiting Tuesdays release of the UK CBI distributive trades survey result for August, which is forecast to plummet by -25%.

As a result, we will likely see the Pound suffer as concerns grow for Britains economic health.

Looking ahead to Friday, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England (BoE), is due to deliver a speech.

Any dovishness about the state of the UK economy, however, could further drag down the GBP/AUD exchange rate.

However, if UK-EU relations improve, we could see the Pound (GBP) head higher on renewed hopes of a possible post-Brexit trade deal.
Even as Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi asked the Congress Working Committee members to relieve her from the top post, senior party leaders Manmohan Singh and AK Antony said that she should continue till a new party president is elected, sources said.

IMAGE: Congress president Sonia Gandhi with former prime minister Manmohan Singh and former defence minister AK Antony. Photograph: ANI Photo

Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi asked CWC members "to begin deliberations towards the process of transition to relieve her from the duty of party chief", sources said.

In the virtual meeting, she asked the CWC members to proceed with the process of electing a new President, sources said.

The crucial meeting of the CWC is being held after a controversy erupted over a letter by more than 20 senior leaders calling for 'full time' active leadership, sweeping reforms and raising questions about the party's condition and direction, as well as demanding the election of the CWC.

At the meeting, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi questioned the timing of letter by party colleagues and criticised the move saying that it came when Sonia Gandhi was admitted to a hospital.

"Sonia Gandhi says she has given a note to KC Venugopal, and he will read it out. Rahul Gandhi pointed at the timing of the letter by party colleagues and criticised it," sources said.

"Rahul Gandhi said, why was the letter (over party leadership) sent at a time when Sonia Gandhi was admitted in a hospital," sources said.

Sonia Gandhi was appointed as an interim president on August 10, 2019, by the CWC, after Rahul Gandhi stepped down as party chief, taking the responsibility for party's disastrous defeat in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Congress seems divided over the issue. Gandhi family loyalists and Congress Chief Ministers took on the section of leaders who signed the letter and rallied behind the Gandhi family, calling for Sonia Gandhi to stay or Rahul Gandhi to take charge again.
A massive explosion seen along the Arab Gas Pipeline, outside Damascus early on Monday, resulting in power outages across Syria was likely an attack by Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL), according to Reuters, citing state media and the country's energy minister.

BREAKING: Total blackout in #Syria after an explosion on the Arab Gas Pipeline near al-Dumair and Adraa, Damascus countryside. Electricity minister Mohammad Kharboutli said the incident led to an electricity blackout across Syria. Power is gradually being restored to provinces. pic.twitter.com/hLmNCgpJgc  Richard Medhurst  (@richimedhurst) August 24, 2020

"Assessments show that the explosion ... was the result of a terrorist attack," Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) quoted Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem as saying. There were no further details of how terrorists managed to blow up the 36-inch pipeline.

According to the US envoy for Syrian affairs James Jeffrey, the explosion was likely an attack by the Islamic State: "We are still looking into that. But it was almost certainly a strike by ISIS," Jeffrey said, as cited by Reuters.

Ghanem said electricity was gradually being restored to the country's provinces, and some power returned to Damascus.

The location of the damaged pipeline was between the suburbs of Al-Dhumayr and Adra, and caused a rapid decline in gas supply to the country's top power stations, triggering a nationwide blackout.

Even though the fire was extinguished, blackouts were still seen in the capital, with some power late Monday restored to hospitals and government buildings in Damascus.

Well, looks like they managed to put out the fire. These images show the point of explosion in the gas pipeline. #Syria



h/t @wolfaksh pic.twitter.com/IYfdmutPar  FJ (@Natsecjeff) August 24, 2020

Reuters noted the Arab Gas Pipeline system stretches from Egypt into Jordan and Syria.

Targeting of the pipeline comes as Turkish-backed forces cut water supply to over one million people in the country.

Syria faces increasing economic instability, and a flare-up in fighting following Trump's "secure the oil" policy in the country led to a recent skirmish between US occupying forces and the Syrian Army.
Gov Andrew Cuomo on Monday announced that New York state has recorded its lowest infection rate since the start of the pandemic at just 0.66 per cent.

Of the 62,031 people who were tested for COVID-19 on Sunday, only 408, or 0.66 per cent, tested positive.

But the state is still dragging its heels on reopening - with no plans in place to resume indoor dining.

'Over the past couple of weeks, our infection rate has stayed below one percent,' Cuomo said during his press conference.

'Congratulations to New Yorkers for their hard work in getting us to this point, but we must keep up that work and continue wearing our masks and socially distancing,' he continued.

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Gov Andrew Cuomo on Monday announced that New York state has recorded its lowest infection rate since the start of the pandemic at just 0.66 per cent. Of the 62,031 people who were tested for COVID-19 on Sunday, only 408, or 0.66 per cent, tested positive

'Our progress shows that this virus responds to science, not politics. It's a function of medicine and science and biology and should be treated that way.'

With the additional of the 408 cases, the statewide total of coronavirus infections is now 430,145.

On Sunday, there were seven deaths due to COVID-19, bringing the death toll to 25,295.

Despite the progress that New York has made, the governor did acknowledge a few clusters in Western New York.

One of those clusters occurred at a food processing factory in Chautauqua County.

Another COVID-19 cluster was reported at a steel plant in Erie County and two clusters broke out at two unidentified nursing homes.

'We're focusing on it and trying to understand exactly what is happening,' he said. 'We're looking at it,' Cuomo said, adding that it has raised a 'caution flag'.

According to the governor's press release, Western New York's positive testing rate for the virus increased to 1.8 per cent on Saturday, which is up from 1 per cent.

The number did dip back down to 1.1 per cent on Sunday, but that's still higher than much of the rest of the state.

On Friday, Cuomo cleared the way for gyms to open across New York state as early as Monday.

On Friday, Cuomo cleared the way for gyms to open across New York state as early as Monday

A timeline has also not been set for indoor dining, despite cooler weather expected in just a couple of months

There are more than 5.7 million cases of the coronavirus in the US with at least 176,819 deaths

But in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said gyms will open up for indoor workouts on September 2. Indoor group classes and pools will remain closed, according to the mayor.

Cuomo said that local governments must inspect each gym before or within two weeks of reopening to ensure compliance with COVID-19 protocol.

The mayor is currently prioritizing inspections on schools to ensure they are as safe as they can be before the September 10 start.

A timeline for indoor dining has also not been released despite the cooler weather expected in just a couple of months.

Meanwhile, museums and libraries will be reopening this week.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, pending state and city approval, will reopen on August 29 with new social distancing measures.

The Museum of Modern Art will reopen on August 27 and admission will be free through September 27.

The Whitney Museum of American Art will reopen on September 3 and the Guggenheim will reopen in October.

Other New York museums will reopen in mid September.
They lost legs, arms or their eyesight, but the victims who gathered outside Belfast High Court never lost heart.

Yesterday, their long and exhausting years of struggle finally paid off as a judge declared that The Executive Office had unlawfully refused to advance their pension scheme.

Justice McAlinden delivered a scathing ruling that surely made Sinn Fein squirm.

Every legal argument advanced on behalf of Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill was demolished.

"Arrant nonsense", "a truly shocking proposition", "wilful disregard for the rule of law, or abject ignorance of what (it) means in a democratic society" were just some of the terms used.

How on earth did the party get it legally, politically and morally so wrong? Why fight a battle that you're destined to lose in both a court of law and the court of public opinion? There was never going to be any other outcome.

O'Neill has now agreed to nominate a department and progress the scheme. This embarrassing climbdown forced by the courts could have been avoided.

Why did the Deputy First Minister not just do what she was legally obliged to do months ago? She could have saved victims so much additional trauma.

You'd expect Sinn Fein to at least be PR savvy. The very powerful images of men and women in wheelchairs, or with white sticks, going into court at the start of the case, should have caused a serious rethink in the party.

It argues that the pension scheme discriminates against former republican prisoners.

It could have pursued that issue while allowing those who have suffered the most to apply for and receive the pension they're entitled to.

The Shinners were completely isolated on this one at Stormont and beyond. A section of their own base was certainly put out by the scheme's criteria, but it was by no means a matter which incensed or roused the entire republican community. This wasn't a nationalist versus unionist issue. The victims behind this legal action were from all sections of the community.

There were plenty of people who support justice for the Bloody Sunday families, who believe the state committed many great wrongs over the years, who still wanted the pension paid.

As well as Jennifer McNern's legal challenge, a case was also brought by Brian Turley, one of the 'Hooded Men' subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment by the British Army in 1971.

"As a survivor of torture, I was left with long-term injuries as a result of the actions of the state," he said yesterday.

"The delay in having to wait on my right to a pension can only be described as another form of torture." Turley said O'Neill had "no right" to stop the pension scheme and described her action as "very unprofessional".

Words like that wound Sinn Fein. When the party finds itself on the opposite side to a victim of state violence like him it should know that it's on shaky ground.

Negotiations will continue between Stormont and Downing Street over who foots the pensions' bill. Naomi Long's Justice Department will now be designated to progress the scheme. Victims hope that it will be open for applications before Christmas.

"I feel elated," said Margaret Yeaman who was blinded in an IRA no-warning bomb in Banbridge in 1982 and who has never seen the faces of her grandchildren.

"The ruling has brought immense relief," said Mark Kelly, who lost his legs in a 1976 no-warning UVF bomb.

"It's like a weight lifted off my shoulders," said Philip Gault, left with life-changing injuries as a schoolboy when he was injured in on Bloody Friday in 1972.

"I should never have had to take this case," said Jennifer McNern, who lost her legs in the IRA's Abercorn bomb that year.

As they celebrated their win, the surviving victims remembered those who didn't live to see it, like Paddy Cassidy and Raymond Trimble who died so recently.

It was simultaneously a victory to savour, and to shame so many in society for not delivering for these courageous men and women years ago.
Lucknow, Aug 24 : Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, on Monday, reviewed the progress on implementation of the MoUs signed with Uttar Pradesh Defence Industrial Corridor through video conferencing.

He said that all the proposed work for the Defence Industrial Corridor should be completed within the stipulated time. The Minister said that whatever targets have been set, they have to be achieved under any circumstances.

He said that a cabinet note on the new policy of the Defence Production Department is ready and shall be released in September. Singh said that the state government should maintain regular contact with investors and take prompt action on their issues. Singh also asked to speed up the work of land acquisition in Lucknow and Agra.

Giving details of the progress made on the Uttar Pradesh Defence Industrial Corridor, Chief Secretary Rajendra Kumar Tiwari said that six nodes have been developed in Aligarh, Agra, Jhansi, Chitrakoot, Kanpur and Lucknow.

Tiwari said that the state government has assigned 1,461-hectare land for the purpose, of which 1,310-hectare land has been acquired, which is over 90 per cent of the assigned land.

The Chief Secretary said, so far investments, worth Rs 3,732 crores have been announced in the state.

The Chief Secretary informed that under Aligarh node, complete planning of DPR, town planning, power station, etc., has been done. He assured that the instructions given by the Defence Minister will be followed in letter and spirit and all the targets will be completed within the deadline.

Additional Chief Secretary, UPEIDA Avanish Awasthi said that after the announcement of the establishment of the Defence Industrial Corridor in February 2018, work has been done in the state at a rapid pace.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Punjab National Bank SS Mallikarjuna Rao has said that there will be no layoffs of employees due to the merger of Oriental Bank of Commerce, United Bank of India with Punjab National Bank.

"There will be no retrenchment of employees due to the merger Oriental Bank of Commerce, Union Bank of India with Punjab National Bank," Rao said.

#Correction: There will be no retrenchment of employees due to the merger Oriental Bank of Commerce, *United Bank of India with Punjab National Bank: SS Mallikarjuna Rao, MD & CEO, Punjab National Bank pic.twitter.com/3oyBRdXGg4 - ANI (@ANI) August 24, 2020

The amalgamation of Punjab National Bank, United Bank of India and Oriental Bank Of Commerce come into effect from April 1, 2020.

The merger of the three banks has led to creation of the country's second-largest nationalised bank in terms of business and branch network. "The synergy from the amalgamation will create a globally competitive, next-generation bank, PNB 2.0," said the bank in a press release. The bank added all customers of Oriental Bank of Commerce, United Bank of India will be treated as PNB customers once the merger is complete.

'PNB 2.0' will have a business of Rs 17.95 lakh crore (loans plus deposits) and will be at least 1.5 times that of PNB.

Last year in August, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the consolidation of 10 public lenders into four big banks.

Sitharaman announced that the government had decided to merge Punjab National Bank, Oriental Bank of Commerce and United Bank; Canara Bank and Syndicate Banks; Union Bank of India, Andhra Bank and Corporation Bank; and Indian Bank and Allahabad Bank.

Also Read: Tata Group plans to launch e-commerce 'super app' to take on RIL, Amazon

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WASHINGTON>> President Donald Trump is muddying the facts about mail-in voting and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

Asked to disclaim the racist conspiracy theory that Harris isnt eligible to serve in the White House because of her immigrant parents, Trump repeatedly demurred and said he knew little about it, even as the false rumors swirled on social media over the past week. Harris unquestionably meets the Constitutions requirements to be vice president. On Sunday, Trumps own White House chief of staff acknowledged her eligibility.

Trump also continued to blast mail-in voting as flawed and fraudulent while insisting that absentee mail ballots, especially in states like Florida that he must win in November, are quite fine and safe. There are little differences in security measures between the two.

His weekend claims capped a litany of distortion and falsehoods following Joe Bidens announcement of Harris as his running mate. He misrepresented Bidens position on taxes, persisted in minimizing the coronavirus threat and exaggerated his own record on the economy.

A look at the past weeks rhetoric, also covering Social Security and more:

MAIL VOTING

TRUMP: Absentee is good; mail-in, universal is very, very bad. Theres no way theyre going to get it accurately.  news conference Saturday.

TRUMP: The honorable thing to do is drop the Mail-In Scam before it is too late! Absentee Ballots, like they have in Florida, are good!  tweet Saturday.

THE FACTS: Hes making a false distinction. Mail-in ballots are cast in the same way as absentee mail ballots, with the same level of scrutiny such as signature verification in many states.

In more than 30 states and the District of Columbia, voters have a right to no excuse absentee voting. That means they can use mail-in ballots for any reason, regardless of whether a person is out of town or working. In Florida, the Legislature in 2016 voted to change the wording of such balloting from absentee to vote-by-mail to make clear a voter can cast such ballots if they wish.

More broadly, voter fraud has proved exceedingly rare. The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.

Only nine states currently have plans for universal mail-in voting, where ballots are sent automatically to registered voters. Five of those states relied on mail-in ballots even before the coronavirus pandemic raised concerns about voting in person.

Blasting mail-in voting, Trump in the past week said he may hold up funding for the U.S. Postal Service to impede those votes across the 50 states.

Trump is simply wrong about mail-in balloting raising a tremendous potential for fraud, Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, wrote recently. While certain pockets of the country have seen their share of absentee-ballot scandals, problems are extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail, including the heavily Republican state of Utah.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday on CNNs State of the Union that Trump had requested a Florida absentee mail ballot to vote in November.

___

ON BIDEN-HARRIS

TRUMP, asked about social media claims that Harris is not eligible to run for vice president because her parents were immigrants to the U.S.: I heard it today that she doesnt meet the requirements.  I have no idea if thats right. I would have assumed that the Democrats would have checked that out.  news conference Thursday.

TRUMP, asked about the subject again: I have nothing to do with it. I read something about it.He added: Its not something that bothers me.  Its not something that we will be pursuing. Asked point blank if Harris is eligible, Trump replied: I just told you. I have not got into it in great detail.  news conference Saturday.

THE FACTS: Harris, a senator from California, is without question eligible.

Harris, 55, was born in Oakland, California, making her a natural-born U.S. citizen and eligible to be president if Biden were unable to serve a full term. Her father, an economist from Jamaica, and her mother, a cancer researcher from India, met at the University of California, Berkeley, as graduate students.

The Constitution requires a vice president to meet the eligibility requirements to be president. That includes being a natural-born U.S. citizen, at least 35 years old and a resident in the U.S. for at least 14 years.

I cant believe people are making this idiotic comment, Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University professor of constitutional law, told The Associated Press in 2019, when similar false claims emerged about Harris during her presidential run.

She is a natural born citizen and there is no question about her eligibility to run, Tribe said.

On Sunday, Meadows said he accepted that Harris is eligible to serve as vice president.

Sure, said Meadows, when asked on CNN whether he acknowledges the fact that she meets the constitutional requirements to be president or vice president. And I think the president spoke to this yesterday. This is not something that were going to pursue.

Harris is the first Black woman and Asian American to compete on a major partys presidential ticket. Trump in past years indulged in the false conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born abroad. Only after mounting pressure during his 2016 campaign did Trump disavow the claims.

___

TRUMP: If Biden would win  hes going to double and triple everybodys taxes.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Trump is exaggerating. Wildly so.

Biden would raise taxes, primarily on the wealthy. But a July estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that the increase is a small fraction of what Trump claimed. The former vice presidents plan would raise taxes for the top 1 percent of earners by 13 to 18% of after-tax income, while indirectly increasing taxes for most other groups by 0.2 to 0.6%, the nonpartisan group said.

To put that in perspective, tax collections would increase by $3.4 trillion to $3.7 trillion over the next decade. That is a lot of money. But its not a doubling or tripling. The government is on pace to collect $47 trillion over the next decade, so the Biden plan would be roughly be a 7.8% increase in revenues.

___

TRUMP CAMPAIGN: Not long ago, Kamala Harris called Joe Biden a racist and asked for an apology she never received.  statement Tuesday from Katrina Pierson, Trump 2020 senior adviser.

THE FACTS: She never called Biden a racist.

Pierson appears to be referring to Harris remarks during a Democratic primary debate in Miami in June 2019 when the California senator challenged Bidens record of opposing busing as a way to integrate schools in the 1970s.

Harris prefaced her criticism by telling Biden at that time, I do not believe you are a racist. I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground.

She then went on: It was actually hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. It was not only that but you also worked with them to oppose busing.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, Harris said. She was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

It was a breakthrough moment for Harris at the candidates first debate, stunning Biden, who responded that he did not praise racists and provided a hairsplitting defense of his position on busing. But she did not accuse him of being racist.

___

ECONOMY

TRUMP: The manufacturing sector is booming and the production index is at the highest reading since October of 18, which was an extraordinary period of time.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: The pandemic crushed U.S. factories and the damage persists. There is no boom.

Even after three months of job gains, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the manufacturing sector has 740,000 fewer jobs than before the outbreak. All the factory hiring gains under Trump have disappeared. There were 257,000 more manufacturing jobs on the day Trump became president than now. More important, the jobs recovery has shown signs of stalling. Just 26,000 factory jobs were added in July, down from 357,000 added jobs in June.

The sector has been recovering. Yet after increases in production in June, the Federal Reserve said U.S. factory output was running 11.1% below pre-pandemic levels. Trump cited one component of an index composed by the Institute for Supply Management that indicates factory production grew in July as well. It was the best reading since August of 2018, not October as claimed by the president. But that same report showed that manufacturers are also cutting back on employment, suggesting that a boom has yet to begin.

___

SOCIAL SECURITY

TRUMP: At the end of the year, the assumption that I win, Im going to terminate the payroll tax  Well be paying into Social Security through the general fund.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Under Trumps proposal, Social Security would lose its dedicated funding source.

Payroll taxes raise about $1 trillion annually for Social Security, and the president was unconcerned about the loss of those revenues. Trump campaign officials stressed that the general fund consists of assets and liabilities that finance government operations and could do so for Social Security. The general fund is nicknamed Americas Checkbook on the Treasury Departments website.

The risk is that the loss of a dedicated funding source could destabilize an anti-poverty program that provides payments to roughly 65 million Americans. It also could force people to cut back on the spending that drives growth so they can save for their own retirement and health care needs if they believe the government backstop is in jeopardy.

A 12.4% payroll tax split between employers and workers funds Social Security, while a 2.9% payroll tax finances Medicare. The Social Security tax raised roughly $1 trillion last year, according to government figures. Over a 10-year period, Trumps idea would blow a $13 trillion hole in a U.S. budget that is already laden with rising debt loads.

Trump announced a payroll tax deferral through the end of the year, part of a series of moves to bypass Congress after talks on a broader coronavirus relief bill that has stalled. He says he will make it a permanent tax cut with the help of Congress. Democrats have described that idea as a nonstarter.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday suggested to reporters that Trump misspoke when he said he would eliminate the payroll tax if reelected. She said the president would only push to make the payroll tax deferrals permanent. But Trump clearly said that he would eliminate the payroll tax four times at his Wednesday press briefing and even answered a question about permanently rescinding it.

___

TRUMP, asked how the general fund can sustain the payments: Were going to have tremendous growth.  You will see growth like you have not seen in a long time.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: It is highly unlikely that economic growth would be enough to offset the loss of the payroll tax. Trump has a record of making wildly improbable growth projections. He suggested that his 2017 income tax cuts would propel economic growth as high as 6% annually. That never happened. Growth reached 3% in 2018, then slumped to 2.2% and the U.S. economy crumbled into recession this year because of the coronavirus.

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VIRUS THREAT

TRUMP: You cant compare it to 1917. That was incredible. That was  that was the worst ever by far. That was  you look at  they lost possibly 100 million people.  news conference Saturday.

TRUMP, on COVID-19: Nobody understood it because nobody has ever seen anything like this. The closest thing is, in 1917, they say  right? The great  the great pandemic certainly was a terrible thing, where they lost, anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War; all the soldiers were sick.  news briefing on Aug. 10.

THE FACTS: He got the year wrong for the Spanish flu, as he routinely does, and may have overstated deaths from it. The pandemic spread from early 1918 to late 1920. It killed an estimated 50 million worldwide, with about 675,000 of the deaths in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That pandemic did not end World War II, which came two decades later.

___

TRUMP: Were still in the pandemic, which will be going away, as I say, it will be going away. And they scream, how you can you say that? I said, because its going to be going away.  interview Thursday on Fox Business Network.

THE FACTS: No matter how many times he says it, the virus is not going to just magically disappear.

The virus is now blamed for more than 166,000 deaths and more than 5.2 million confirmed infections in the U.S.  easily the highest totals in the world. In the past week, the average number of new cases per day was on the rise in eight states, and deaths per day were climbing in 26, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the governments top infectious diseases official, has warned that increased cases across the South and West in particular put the entire country at risk. On Thursday, for instance, the rate of positive virus cases in Texas soared to the highest levels of the pandemic, with nearly 1 in every 4 coronavirus tests coming back positive. Nevada had its biggest daily jump in coronavirus fatalities to date.

In February, Trump asserted coronavirus cases were going very substantially down, not up, and said it will be fine because in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather.

Fauci says there certainly will be coronavirus infections in the fall and winter.

___

TRUMP, on whether he still thinks kids are essentially immune from COVID-19: Yeah, I think that, for the most part, they do very well. I mean, they  they dont get very sick. They dont catch it easily.  news briefing Tuesday.

THE FACTS: They arent immune, and he ignores racial disparities among those kids who get infected.

Although its true that children are less likely than adults to develop COVID-19, the CDC has nevertheless counted more than 250,000 infections by the virus in Americans younger than 18, or roughly 7% of all cases. Racial disparities in the U.S. outbreak also extend to children, with Hispanic and Black children with COVID-19 more likely to be hospitalized than white kids.

The total number of kids who have been infected but not confirmed is almost certainly far higher than the CDC figures, experts say, because those with mild or no symptoms are less likely to get tested. Trump also glosses over the fact that kids can spread disease without showing symptoms themselves.

The CDC in May also warned doctors to be on the lookout for a rare but life-threatening inflammatory reaction in some children whove had the coronavirus. The condition had been reported in more than 100 children in New York, and in some kids in several other states and in Europe, with some deaths.

Two recent government reports laid bare the racial disparities.

One of the CDC reports looked at children with COVID-19 who needed hospitalization. Hispanic children were hospitalized at a rate eight times higher than white kids, and Black children were hospitalized at a rate five times higher, it found.

The second report examined cases of the rare virus-associated syndrome in kids. It found that nearly three-quarters of the children with the syndrome were either Hispanic or Black, well above their representation in the general population.

___

NEW YORK VOTING

TRUMP: Ballots are defrauded.  news conference Saturday.

TRUMP: You just look at what happened with the Carolyn Maloney race. They should do that race over, by the way.  When you look at the ballot, the ballots that are missing, and the ballot frauds  nobody knows whats going on with that race, and yet they declared her a winner.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Theres no evidence of fraud in the Democratic congressional primary in New York City that was won by Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Nor did Trump offer any proof of fraud.

New York State decided to allow anyone to vote by mail in the June primary because of the pandemic. More than 400,000 people voted by absentee ballot in New York City, a figure that was 10 times the number of absentee ballots cast in the 2016 primary.

Opening and counting those ballots by elections officials took weeks, leading to a legal dispute over nonfraud issues, such as missing postmarks. Candidates observing the count say that thousands of ballots were disqualified because of technical errors voters wouldnt have encountered if they had voted in person, like problems with their signature.

New York Citys Board of Elections ultimately certified the results six weeks after the election.

___

Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz in Chicago, and Lauran Neergaard, Aamer Madhani and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.
Who gave our former name  the New Hebrides and where did the name originate from?
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Linkedin Ardila Syakriah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 08:39 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066fefc71 1 National AGO-building-fire,AGO,ST-Burhanuddin,djoko-tjandra,bank-bali-case,Jiwasraya Free

A fire that gutted the main building of the Attorney General's Office (AGO) compound in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta, has raised questions over ongoing investigations into high-profile graft cases led by the law enforcement body.

The fire broke out on Saturday evening on the sixth floor of the building before quickly engulfing the entire structure. It lasted for more than 10 hours, according to the South Jakarta Fire and Rescue Agency.

It took 325 personnel and 65 fire engines to extinguish the flames at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday.

The blaze hit at a critical time for the AGO, which is currently working on some of the largest corruption cases in the country. One of the cases involves Djoko Soegiarto Tjandra, a former businessman who has been convicted in the Bank Bali corruption case.

Attorney General ST Burhanuddin told The Jakarta Post on Sunday that the building was the location of the human resources, legal and planning departments. The fire, he said, affected the intelligence office, but the office had a backup of its data elsewhere.

"All case dossiers are safe," Burhanuddin said, adding that evidence and case files were stored in two separate buildings.

Burhanuddin did not dismiss the possibility of arson in an attempt to destroy evidence but he insisted that he would rather wait for the results of the ongoing investigation before jumping to conclusions.

He confirmed that the destroyed rooms included the office of Pinangki Sirna Malasari, a prosecutor who was recently named a suspect for allegedly accepting US$500,000 and meeting Djoko several times when the convict was at large abroad.

The National Police arrested Djoko recently in Malaysia before transporting him back to Jakarta, 11 years after he fled Indonesia a day before the Supreme Court sentenced him to two years in prison for graft and ordered him to pay a fine of Rp 546 billion ($54 million).

Read also: AGO looks into possible crimes in prosecutor's alleged meetings with Djoko Tjandra

Burhanuddin said Pinangki worked for the AGOs planning bureau before he was suspended recently during the investigation.

I would not say no to [forensics] lab findings, but the police investigation is still underway, he said.

The AGOs supervisory unit previously said that Pinangki had committed an ethics violation by going on nine international trips to Singapore and Malaysia in 2019 without permission, allegedly to meet Djoko.

The attorney general said no investigations would be interrupted and all activities from the destroyed building would be moved to the compounds education and training building on Monday.

The office also had to temporarily evacuate 25 detainees, who were originally held up at a separate building, to the South Jakarta District Attorney building to prevent them from being exposed to smoke from the fire.

Aside from the Bank Bali case, the AGO is also investigating a corruption case on ailing state-owned insurer Jiwasraya, which, according to an audit by the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK), had caused Rp 16.81 trillion in state losses, the largest amount of any case in the nations history. The office named 13 asset management companies and Financial Services Authority (OJK) official Fakhri Hilmi suspects, in addition to three former Jiwasraya executives.

Read also: Thirteen companies, OJK official named suspects in Jiwasraya case

"The AGO is now handling many big cases, one of them being the alleged bribery of prosecutor Pinangki. It's not impossible that there were parties who planned to obstruct evidence stored in the building," activist Kurnia Ramadhana from the Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) said.

He said the fire should not be used as an excuse to halt the investigations, highlighting that the AGO had yet to disclose which parties allegedly bribed Pinangki.

This is not the first time that the Attorney General's Office (AGO) building  named a heritage building by the Jakarta administration  has caught fire. In 2003, the office's control room, located next to the then-vacant office for the deputy attorney general, caught fire. The building also experienced two fires in 1979. (JP/Hengky Wijaya)

This is not the first time that the 62-year-old building  named a heritage building by the Jakarta administration  has caught fire. In 2003, the office's control room, located next to the then-vacant office for the deputy attorney general, caught fire. The building also experienced two fires in 1979.

Manlian Ronald Simanjuntak, a civil engineer professor at Pelita Harapan University who studies fire safety, said that the fire was "fatal and cannot be tolerated".

He said the fact that the fire spread easily indicated there were flaws in the buildings design and safety, particularly in terms of fire compartmentation.

"All this time the demand [for fire safety] has been high only with private buildings, while it's been weak with government buildings, as shown by the many instances of fires in the latter," he said, urging the government to review all buildings 40 years or older.

Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Mahfud MD told a press briefing that the National Police's Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim) and the AGO's junior attorney for general crimes were working together to investigate the fire and review the building's construction feasibility.

Mahfud gave an assurance that all case files, including those on Djoko Tjandra, Pinangki and Jiwasraya, were safe, and so he urged against speculating.

"The safety of the data and case dossiers has been ensured by the AGO, and I, as the coordinating minister, will also oversee this carefully and follow the developments. The cases involving prosecutor Pinangki or other prosecutors and officials, they have to proceed transparently and the government must not lie, hiding things in situations like this," he said.
Testing teams have successfully completed a critical milestone focused on demonstrating that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will respond to commands once in space.

Known as a "Ground Segment Test," this is the first time commands to power on and test Webb's scientific instruments have been sent to the fully-assembled observatory from its Mission Operations Center at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

Since reliably communicating with Webb when in space is a mission-critical priority for NASA, tests like these are part of a comprehensive regimen designed to validate and ensure all components of the observatory will function in spacewith the complex communications networks involved in both sending commands, and downlinking scientific data. This test successfully demonstrated the complete end-to-end flow from planning the science Webb will perform to posting the scientific data to the community archive.

"This was the first time we have done this with both the actual Webb flight hardware and ground system. We've performed pieces of this test as the observatory was being assembled, but this is the first ever, and fully successful, end-to-end operation of the observatory and ground segment. This is a big milestone for the project, and very rewarding to see Webb working as expected," said Amanda Arvai, Deputy Division Head of Mission Operations at STScI in Maryland.

In this test, commands to sequentially turn on, move, and operate each of Webb's four scientific instruments were relayed from the Mission Operations Center. During the test, the observatory is treated as if it were a million miles away in orbit. To do this, the Flight Operations Team connected the spacecraft to the Deep Space Network, an international array of giant radio antennas that NASA uses to communicate with many spacecraft. However, since Webb isn't in space yet, special equipment was used to emulate the real radio link that will exist between Webb and the Deep Space Network when Webb is in orbit. Commands were then relayed through the Deep Space Network emulator to the observatory, which is currently inside a Northrop Grumman clean room in Redondo Beach, California.

"This was also the first time we've demonstrated the complete cycle for conducting observations with the observatory's science instruments. This cycle starts with the creation of an observation plan by the ground system which is uplinked to the observatory by the Flight Operations Team. Webb's science instruments then performed the observations and the data was transmitted back to the Mission Operations Center in Baltimore, where the science was processed and distributed to scientists," said Arvai.

When Webb is in space, commands will flow from STScI in Baltimore to one of the three Deep Space Network locations --California, Spain, or Australia. Signals will then be sent to the orbiting observatory nearly one million miles away. Additionally the NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite network, the Space Network in New Mexico, the European Space Agency's Malindi station in Kenya, and European Space Operations Centre in Germany will also aid in keeping a constant line of communication open with Webb at all times.

To complete the ground segment test a team of nearly 100 people worked together through the course of four consecutive days. Due to staffing restrictions in place due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, only seven individuals were present inside the Mission Operations Center, with the rest working remotely to routinely monitor progress. Next up for Webb: observatory level acoustic and sine-vibration testing that will demonstrate that the assembled telescope is capable of surviving the rigors of launch by exposing it to similar conditions.

Webb is NASA's next great space science observatory, which will help in solving the mysteries of our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mystifying structures and origins of our universe. Webb is an international program led by NASA, along with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

For more information about Webb, go to: https://www.nasa.gov/webb
Built-in web server

Warning This web server is designed to aid application development. It may also be useful for testing purposes or for application demonstrations that are run in controlled environments. It is not intended to be a full-featured web server. It should not be used on a public network.

The CLI SAPI provides a built-in web server.

The web server runs only one single-threaded process, so PHP applications will stall if a request is blocked.

URI requests are served from the current working directory where PHP was started, unless the -t option is used to specify an explicit document root. If a URI request does not specify a file, then either index.php or index.html in the given directory are returned. If neither file exists, the lookup for index.php and index.html will be continued in the parent directory and so on until one is found or the document root has been reached. If an index.php or index.html is found, it is returned and $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] is set to the trailing part of the URI. Otherwise a 404 response code is returned.

If a PHP file is given on the command line when the web server is started it is treated as a "router" script. The script is run at the start of each HTTP request. If this script returns false , then the requested resource is returned as-is. Otherwise the script's output is returned to the browser.

Standard MIME types are returned for files with extensions: .3gp, .apk, .avi, .bmp, .css, .csv, .doc, .docx, .flac, .gif, .gz, .gzip, .htm, .html, .ics, .jpe, .jpeg, .jpg, .js, .kml, .kmz, .m4a, .mov, .mp3, .mp4, .mpeg, .mpg, .odp, .ods, .odt, .oga, .ogg, .ogv, .pdf, .pdf, .png, .pps, .pptx, .qt, .svg, .swf, .tar, .text, .tif, .txt, .wav, .webm, .wmv, .xls, .xlsx, .xml, .xsl, .xsd, and .zip.

Changelog: Supported MIME Types (file extensions) Version Description 5.5.12 .xml, .xsl, and .xsd 5.5.7 .3gp, .apk, .avi, .bmp, .csv, .doc, .docx, .flac, .gz, .gzip, .ics, .kml, .kmz, .m4a, .mp3, .mp4, .mpg, .mpeg, .mov, .odp, .ods, .odt, .oga, .pdf, .pptx, .pps, .qt, .swf, .tar, .text, .tif, .wav, .wmv, .xls, .xlsx, and .zip 5.5.5 .pdf 5.4.11 .ogg, .ogv, and .webm 5.4.4 .htm and .svg

Changelog Version Description 7.4.0 You can configure the built-in webserver to fork multiple workers in order to test code that requires multiple concurrent requests to the built-in webserver. Set the PHP_CLI_SERVER_WORKERS environment variable to the number of desired workers before starting the server. This is not supported on Windows. Warning This experimental feature is not intended for production usage. Generally, the built-in Web Server is not intended for production usage.

Example #1 Starting the web server $ cd ~/public_html $ php -S localhost:8000 The terminal will show: PHP 5.4.0 Development Server started at Thu Jul 21 10:43:28 2011 Listening on localhost:8000 Document root is /home/me/public_html Press Ctrl-C to quit After URI requests for http://localhost:8000/ and http://localhost:8000/myscript.html the terminal will show something similar to: PHP 5.4.0 Development Server started at Thu Jul 21 10:43:28 2011 Listening on localhost:8000 Document root is /home/me/public_html Press Ctrl-C to quit. [Thu Jul 21 10:48:48 2011] ::1:39144 GET /favicon.ico - Request read [Thu Jul 21 10:48:50 2011] ::1:39146 GET / - Request read [Thu Jul 21 10:48:50 2011] ::1:39147 GET /favicon.ico - Request read [Thu Jul 21 10:48:52 2011] ::1:39148 GET /myscript.html - Request read [Thu Jul 21 10:48:52 2011] ::1:39149 GET /favicon.ico - Request read Note that prior to PHP 7.4.0, symlinked statical resources have not been accessible on Windows, unless the router script would handle these.

Example #2 Starting with a specific document root directory $ cd ~/public_html $ php -S localhost:8000 -t foo/ The terminal will show: PHP 5.4.0 Development Server started at Thu Jul 21 10:50:26 2011 Listening on localhost:8000 Document root is /home/me/public_html/foo Press Ctrl-C to quit

Example #3 Using a Router Script In this example, requests for images will display them, but requests for HTML files will display "Welcome to PHP": <?php

// router.php

if ( preg_match ( '/\.(?:png|jpg|jpeg|gif)$/' , $_SERVER [ "REQUEST_URI" ])) {

return false ; // serve the requested resource as-is.

} else {

echo "<p>Welcome to PHP</p>" ;

}

?> $ php -S localhost:8000 router.php

Example #4 Checking for CLI Web Server Use To reuse a framework router script during development with the CLI web server and later also with a production web server: <?php

// router.php

if ( php_sapi_name () == 'cli-server' ) {

/* route static assets and return false */

}

/* go on with normal index.php operations */

?> $ php -S localhost:8000 router.php

Example #5 Handling Unsupported File Types If you need to serve a static resource whose MIME type is not handled by the CLI web server, use: <?php

// router.php

$path = pathinfo ( $_SERVER [ "SCRIPT_FILENAME" ]);

if ( $path [ "extension" ] == "el" ) {

header ( "Content-Type: text/x-script.elisp" );

readfile ( $_SERVER [ "SCRIPT_FILENAME" ]);

}

else {

return FALSE ;

}

?> $ php -S localhost:8000 router.php
The food safety agency issued a warning on Monday that the product may contain traces of salmonellae.

The concerned product is listed as "Fruit & Nut Bars - Brazil & Sultana" by the brand "Eat Natural". The bar is available in single and combo packaging.

The products in question weigh 50 gr and contain a specific bar code: EAN 50676262 (single pack) or EAN 5013803666149 (multi pack). The expiration date is set between August 2020 and June 2021.

The product was sold in various stores throughout the country.

People who consume the product may display symptoms such as nausea, stomach cramps, fever, or headaches, in which case a physician should be consulted.

PDF: Statement by the food safety agency (VO)
Fingal County Council has issued a 'Prior Warning Notice' for Velvet Strand, Portmarnock and Loughshinny Beach which remains valid for a six-day period.

The council says a water sample is due to take place on Thursday, and results will be available on Saturday.

They are advising that for now people avoid swallowing water, avoid swimming with an open wound, and also do not swim if you are pregnant or have a weakened immune system.

They are also advising people to wash their hands before handling food if they are at either beach.

The council said "Beach users are asked to respect the advisory notice as it has been put in place to ensure that the health of bathers is not compromised."
Contempt of my own conscience: Prashant Bhushan refuses to apologise to SC

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: Advocate Prashant Bhushan has refused to apologise to the Supreme Court in the contempt case.

On Monday, Bhushan filed a fresh statement refusing to apologise. He said that retracting his tweets, for which he was held guilty would mean contempt of his own conscience. An insincere apology for them now will amount to "a contempt of my conscience and of an institution that I hold in highest esteem, Bhushan also said.

During the earlier hearing, Bhushan had said that he would not apologise.

Prashant Bhushan contempt case: History will judge the court, says Kapil Sibal

Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, he said I do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for magnanimity. I shall submit cheerfully to whatever punishment the court imposes on me lawfully.

Bhushan also said that his relationship with the court was neither of a courtier or a cheerleader but an officer of the court. He also said that he has fought cases for the public interest at some personal and professional cost. My tweets were not done in a fit of absent-mindedness. My expressions are permissible before any democracy.

Justice Arun Mishra remarked that doing good things is welcome. We appreciate all those efforts. But where is the balancing. If you do not balance your comments, you will destroy the institution. We do not punish for contempt so easily. Balancing has to be there, restraint has to be there. There is a Lakshman Rekha for everything. Why should you cross the line, Justice Mishra also said.

When the Bench asked whether they should give Bhushan time to reflect on his statement, Attorney General K K Venugopal said that he should be. He has done a tremendous amount of public good. You have held him guilty for contempt, but do not punish him, the AG also said.

The Bench then asked Bhushan to reconsider his statement observing that it could be very lenient only if the person concerned showed a sense of remorse. The Bench has asked him to respond in two days.

The SC today took up the sentence hearing in the case after it had last week held Bhushan guilty of contempt.

The case concerns Bhushan's comments on the judiciary during an interview to the Tehelka magazine in 2009.

The contempt case was taken on the basis of a complaint by senior advocate Harish Salve. This was in relation to a 2009 interview given by Bhushan to the Tehelka magazine.
By Andrew Goldstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

Schools across the country are experiencing a need for personal protective equipment and cleaning products unlike ever before as they prepare to open the 2020-21 academic year amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

With that need in mind, Highmark decided to launch a program to provide more than 400 schools in Pennsylvania and Delaware with tool kits filled with supplies to help protect the health and safety of students and staff.

We thought, How could we help the schools as they transition back to school? Anthony Benevento, Highmarks market president of Western Pennsylvania, said last week in a phone interview. Thats when we came up with the idea of putting together for them a tool kit program.

Highmark will send letters to school districts under its coverage this week with information about how to receive the tool kits. The health insurance organization covers dozens of schools in southwestern Pennsylvania, including most of the 43 districts in Allegheny County.

The tool kits will contain adjustable face shields for teachers and staff members, adjustable face masks for students, disinfectant hand wipes, one-gallon pumps of hand sanitizer, and signage advising best practices.

Well have a lot of posters that will promote safe practices like social distancing, mask wearing and hand washing, Mr. Benevento said.

The signage is available to all schools, including those outside of Highmarks coverage, on the organizations website.

The insurer also is developing a program to assist schools in West Virginia this year, according to Highmark spokeswoman Emily Beatty. Details remain in the works.

Equipment included in the tool kits will be distributed based on student and staff populations at each school, and districts will have until Dec. 15 to order the supplies.

Mr. Benevento said Highmark will give districts several months to order the tool kits because schools are reopening on various dates, with some not planning for in-person instruction until at least October or November.

Theyre planning different times to go back, he said. Were leaving it up to the schools to order the supplies when theyre ready for it.

Andrew Goldstein: agoldstein@post-gazette.com.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has "strongly reprimanded" his finance minister for challenging the Zambian leader to explain his decision to sack that country's central bank governor, the presidency said Monday.

In a surprise move, Zambian President Edgar Lungu on Saturday fired his respected central bank governor. Denny Kalyalya.

No reason was given for the removal of the governor, who had been credited with bringing stability to the economy.

South African Finance Minister Tito Mboweni reacted angrily, demanding an explanation.

"Presidents in Africa must stop this nonsense of waking up in the morning and fire a Central Bank Governor! You cannot do that. This is not some fiefdoms of yours! Your personal property?! No!" tweeted Mboweni on Saturday.

"That Governor was a good fella. Why do we do these things as Africans. The President of Zambia must give us the reasons why he dismissed the Governor  or else hell is on its way. I will mobilize!"

On Sunday he wrote that his tweets had landed him in hot water, but vowed to not give up.

"Looks like I am in trouble about my statement on the dismissal of the Bank of Zambia Governor! I stand by my statement. Central Bank independence is key. Not negotiable. Let all central bankers speak out!"

He has since deleted the tweets.

A statement from the South African presidency said Ramaphosa "strongly reprimanded" Mboweni following his comments.

He assured the Zambian government that the minister's "unfortunate remarks do not reflect the views of the South African government" and the "issue is being addressed to ensure that such an incident does not occur again".

A former World Bank executive director, Kalyalya's tenure was due to end in 2023.

He was replaced by a deputy secretary to the cabinet, Christopher Mvunga.

Zambian Information Minister Dora Siliya expressed surprise at Mboweni's "immature and improper criticism of a sovereign decision by Zambia".

Story continues

She urged Mboweni to rather focus on coronavirus "problems facing" South Africa.

At nearly 610,000 cases and over 13,000 deaths, South Africa has recorded the highest numbers of coronavirus infections on the continent, accounting for more than half of Africa's total tally.

Zambia has recorded 10,831 cases, of which 279 have been fatal.

sn/ri
Artem Chigvintsev will be back in the ballroom come autumn.

The 38-year-old professional dancer from Russia is set to perform again on the hit TV series Dancing With the Stars, he revealed on Good Morning America on Monday.

This comes just after the Waltz expert welcomed a son with his former dancer partner and now fiancee Nikki Bella on August 2.

Here I go: Artem Chigvintsev will be back in the ballroom come autumn. The 38-year-old professional dancer from Russia will be performing again on the hit series Dancing With the Stars, he revealed on Good Morning America on Monday

Happy daddy: 'I just can't wait to get back,' said the TV star. 'And I want to dedicate this season to my little boy'; he had a son with Nikki Bella earlier this month

Dancing With the Stars is set to return to ABC on Monday, September 14, at 8 pm ET.

'I just can't wait to get back,' said the TV star. 'And I want to dedicate this season to my little boy.'

He was seen on GMA on Monday morning as he filmed from home; Artem had on a denim shirt over a white top as he posed next to flowers.

He loves to show off his body: Artem also laughed about his DWTS costumes

They congratulated the new dad: The Russian dancer chatted it up with the GMA hosts

This is good news for the Salsa aficionado as he was not included in season 28.

His announcement comes a bit late as the other pro dancers were announced on August 18.

Other vets who will be on the show include Peta Murgatroyd, Sasha Farber and Val Chmerkovskiy.

New parents: Nikki and Artem welcomed a son after getting engaged; seen in August 2019

The new faces will be Britt Stewart and Daniella Karagach.

The celebrity contestants have not yet been announced. In the past Marie Osmond, Kim Kardashian and Jane Seymour have competed.

Tyra Banks is the new host as Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews were let go earlier this summer.
CHRISTIANSBURG  Approximately 80% of Montgomery County Public Schools 9,800 students have as of this past week signed up for in-person classes for the school year that will start on Sept. 8.

That signup figure, which MCPS shared Friday, is one of the latest developments in the school districts much debated reopening.

This is definitely the most complex year to prepare for at any time during my 28 years in public education, Superintendent Mark Miear wrote in a recent email. There have been many challenges, but one of the greatest is the ability to know more about this virus. My area of expertise is education. We are fortunate to work with an amazing health department who has kept us informed. I never could have imagined dealing with something like this.

For the neighboring Radford City Schools, the number of students who have chosen the virtual option was 350, or 22%, as of Monday, according to figures provided by the district.

The puzzle that the COVID-19 pandemic dumped on MCPS was evident in the approval of the reopening, a plan that was debated and dissected for more than 10 hours during a July meeting that didnt adjourn until the early morning hours the following day.

The Sept. 8 date was one of the adjustments made and approved by the school board.

The school district initially looked at starting the school year on Aug. 13, but a few school board members raised concerns about the chances of MCPS students and employees remaining a danger to one another in the period shortly after that date.

Health officials have said that they anticipate a notable increase in local cases in the few weeks following the return of Virginia Tech and Radford University students. Tech students living on campus began moving in on Aug. 14, while their Radford counterparts had started returning two weeks earlier.

The MCPS Sept. 8 reopening remained subject to debate until this past week, when some school board members continued to raise questions about whether that date was still too soon. The discussion prompted the board to affirm its position on the reopening, a decision that narrowly passed on a 4-3 vote.

I didnt think Id have to deal with this specific issue, but I ran for the board for this reason, board member Mark Cherbaka wrote in an emailed response to a question about whether he ever anticipated a challenge like the pandemic. I want to help solve difficult problems between stakeholders while bringing the community perspective to bear. Thats the core of our democracy. I cant think of a situation that demands that more than this one.

Cherbaka, who has staunchly opposed the Sept. 8 reopening, said the preparation for the upcoming school year is definitely the toughest of which hes ever been a part. However, he said the districts staff would probably be better positioned to answer that question.

Cherbaka said the pandemic has created unknowns, significantly affected how instruction is delivered and demanded flexibility from everyone.

School board Chairwoman Gunin Kiran, who has twice voted in favor of the reopening date, echoed some of Cherbakas points. The possibility of lives being at stake combined with the absence of a solid blueprint on dealing with the pandemic have made it tough for the district to know what the right decision is, Kiran said.

Our job is to serve our students as best as we can, and they are best served when they are in schools, she said. How you do that under the conditions, in which no one has prior experience, has been the most challenging.

Like several other districts in the region and state, MCPS wont have its students in the classrooms all at once.

The MCPS reopening plan will have 50% of pre-K to 12th grade students attend class on four half-days a week. That means that no more than 50% of students will be scheduled for classes at any given time during the school day. Families, however, are being allowed to choose between in-person and remote schooling.

Remote learning involves the use of online resources and logging into a remote classroom. Students under this option can move back into the classroom and agree to return to in-person instruction if schools open fully before the end of the year.

There is also the MCPS Virtual School, where students at both the elementary and secondary levels stay remote for the entire school year.

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Heavy rains likely in Bengal, Mamata Banerjee expresses concern over possibility of floods

India

pti-Madhuri Adnal

Kolkata, Aug 24: The Met department on Monday warned of heavy rains in south Bengal districts owing to a fresh low-pressure area over the Bay of Bengal, following which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee expressed concern at the possibility of floods and asked officials to be prepared to deal with the emerging situation.

Speaking to district officials from state secretariat 'Nabanna', Banerjee said already some places have got inundated as embankments have been breached. The chief minister expressed displeasure over the embankment repair work done after cyclone Amphan, which hit the state in May.

With over 69 lakh people affected, death toll due to floods in Bihar rises to 21

"Those who do these works should do it more seriously; does it mean the repairs were not done properly in a hurry to complete the work?" she said, directing officials to mend the breaches at the earliest. Banerjee said that while there is a forecast for heavy rain in some districts over the next few days, rivers have already crossed the danger-mark in Malda and some other places. She called for proper planning to ensure that hospitals and healthcare centres are not flooded if the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) releases water from its dams in Jharkhand.

Several areas in Howrah and West Midnapore face flood-like situations every year with the release of water from the DVC dams during the monsoon. Several places in Ghatal subdivision of West Midnapore district have been submerged owing to overflowing of the Shilabati river and continuing rain, officials said.

At Minakha in North 24 Parganas, Bidyadhari river breached embankment at a few places, flooding agricultural fields, they said. The Congress MLA of Sujapur, Isha Khan Choudhury, faced protests at Shamsherganj in Murshidabad district with the people affected by a flood-like situation, demanding measures to ensure that embankments are not breached every year. With a wooden bridge connecting parts of Sabang in West Midnapore and Moyna in East Midnapore district going below the rising water of Chandi river, around 10,000 people have been marooned, a senior district official said.

He said that the district administration will urge the state government for the construction of a concrete bridge across the river. Rajya Sabha MP Manas Bhuniya visited the area, which faces floods regularly, to provide assistance to the affected people.

The Met department has issued an 'Orange Warning' owing to the possibility of heavy rain in Gangetic Bengal with very heavy downpour in some places in the next three days as a result of the low-pressure area. The weatherman said that the low-pressure system is likely to intensify in the next couple of days. Heavy rain is likely to occur in the districts of East and West Midnapore, South 24 Parganas, Jhargram, Howrah, Hooghly, Bankura and Birbhum, while thunderstorm with lightning is likely in other places of Gangetic Bengal, the Met said.

Talacauvery temple chief priest among 5 missing after floods, landslides hit Karnataka

The intensity of the rain is likely to increase in the coastal districts of the state from Tuesday with the low- pressure system becoming more marked, the weatherman said, adding that it is likely to continue till Friday morning. Due to the formation of the low-pressure area over the north Bay of Bengal, fishermen have been advised not to venture into the sea till August 27.

With several rivers in the region already in spate owing to heavy downpour over the past few days, people living in the coastal districts are apprehensive of flooding of agricultural fields and low-lying areas.

The state Irrigation Department said that it is keeping a watch on the situation. Heavy rains lashed Birbhum district, while other parts of Gangetic Bengal also received showers since Sunday morning, the Met department said. Some low-lying areas in the coastal districts of South 24 Parganas and East Midnapore have also got inundated owing to overflowing of some rivers and breaches in mud embankments, district officials said.
Incumbent Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the September 19 governorship election, at the weekend rounded up ward-to-ward campaign in Edo Central. The governor was overwhelmed by the massive grassroots support he received from the rural people in Esan land.

Governor Obaseki had declared: it was a historic moment today at Esan Central Local Government Area of Edo State as the campaign train of the Peoples Democratic Party concluded its campaign tour in Edo Central.

It was highlighted that the round up had commenced with a visit to the Palace of the Onojie of Irrua, His Royal Highness W.O. Momodu, the Okaijesan of Esan land, where the Kings public affairs manager highlighted the people-oriented projects the Obaseki administration has done in Irrua Kingdom.

Accordingly, the Okaijesan of Esan Land commended Governor Obaseki on the several development projects in the constituency which include filling the gully caused by erosion in Ibore, construction of Idumabokhale road, construction of Eigbe road, establishment of Technical College at Usugbenu and the setting up of mechanized Farm at Usugbenu, amongst others.

The traditional ruler subsequently prayed for Governor Obaseki. The royal father promised Governor Obaseki the total support of the Palace and the Irrua Kingdom. We shall all gather here again after the election to celebrate your victory, he declared.

The Edo Governor showed excitement that the royal farther already has documentation of the projects his administration executed in the constituency, he promised to do more after his re-election.

Subsequently, at wards 2 and 3, incumbent Governor Obaseki acquainted his army of supporters that the contract for the construction of Utako  Ujabhole road has been awarded, adding that work is in progress. The people assured the Governor of their total support in the election for his second term.
"Crown" is a new installation by artist Russell Craig on the Municipal Services Building in Center City Philadelphia, Pa. on Sunday, August 23, 2020. Read more

When Russell Craigs older sister completed a drawing of characters from The Simpsons, their foster parents swooned. Attempting to duplicate the attention, Craig tried his hand at a drawing of the Simpsons, only he didnt get the same response.

He kept practicing  drawing images he saw in magazines of LL Cool J and Erykah Badu and whoever was Jet Magazines Beauty of the Week. Working on art allowed Craig to escape the harsh realities of growing up in Philadelphia foster and group homes.

Craigs art practice has evolved over the years into more ambitious projects, such as the vinyl protest mural, Crown, that has been installed on the glass windows of the Municipal Services Building. The mural will be unveiled by Mural Arts and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Thomas Paine Plaza, near City Hall.

When he was called about the mural project I was honored, said Craig, 39. It was perfect for the type of work that I do with social justice.

The mural is located just steps away from where the statue of the former controversial mayor and police commissioner, Frank Rizzo, once stood. The statue was removed in June amid attempts to topple and set it on fire during protests demanding justice for the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other victims of police violence.

The statue symbolized a troubling time in Philadelphia, said Patty Jackson, veteran WDAS radio host. [Rizzo] was very divisive.  He really stoked the flames of the racial strife in the city at that time, as the leader.

There are people who think he was the greatest mayor ever because he was about law and order but for others, the statue is a painful reminder of a racial divide in Philadelphia. The statue was not a good look for this city, Jackson said.

Following the protests, city officials created a steering committee to spearhead reconciliation efforts in Philadelphia.

Early on, one of the desires clearly expressed by this group was to have some public art installation that highlighted and honored the protesters  Crown does exactly that, Kenney said in a statement. Now, these powerful images of people fighting for justice and demanding change will greet those entering the Municipal Services Building.

Crown is Craigs reimagination of the neoclassical masterpiece Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix, which is exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. The mural is set in Philadelphia and incorporates contemporary iconography from the Black Lives Matter movement and marches. It depicts a Black woman as the female allegory of Liberty. The assembled figures in the mural form a crown, a nod to the microscopic shape of the coronavirus.

Craig was inspired by the four protests he attended in Brooklyn, where hes lived for eight months and works as a full-time artist. The first protest he attended was at night, and things got pretty hectic quick, he said, describing the chants and sirens that filled the courtyard of the Barclays Center. It really got me thinking artistically about how I can contribute.

Craig used Adobe Photoshop to brainstorm ideas for the murals layout and went through a handful of ideas before settling on the final. The first [rendering] was too radical, he said. So I calmed down and focused on the protesters.

Craig grew up in North Philly but often moved around in foster care. He has never seen his father and was only 5 years old when he was placed into the foster system with his two older sisters after his mother began to suffer from substance abuse. In 2006, Craig was arrested on a drug possession charge and spent the next seven years incarcerated at Graterford state prison. While there, he learned about Mural Arts Restorative Justice Guild program, which gives inmates and those on probation the opportunity to learn new skills and make a positive contribution to their communities through art and other ways.

A lot of the gentlemen that was in the program were serving life sentences and I had a five- to 10-[year sentence], so I knew one day I would get out, Craig said. But when youre a felon, you cant get jobs easy. So I wanted to be an artist because you can navigate your own schedule or career.

Craigs work combines portraiture with social and political themes, often critiquing the prison system. Hes worked on several murals around Philadelphia and has exhibited at the African American Museum of Philadelphia. His work has also been featured on HBO and in the New York Times. He is a 2017 Right of Return fellow, and a 2018 Ford Foundation: Art For Justice Fellow.

Crown is not only a powerful statement on behalf of Russell, his generation, and peers, but it is emblematic of our core values as a city as it relates to criminal justice reform, said Jane Golden, executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia. The goal is for this piece of public art to become a focal point and a beacon, a source of pride and inspiration, and, most important, a place where healing can begin.
It has been a complicated year for Asian Americans. The coronavirus has spurred discrimination and xenophobia, and the president himself is using the derogatory terms Chinese virus and kung flu. Paranoia in about Chinese espionage contributed to questions about Asian Americans loyalties.

Sen. Kamala Harris official acceptance last week as Joe Bidens running mate could provide an unexpected spark for the Asian American community. She is of Indian and Jamaican descent, making her the first Asian-American vice presidential candidate for a major party. Indian-American political activists have praised her selection, hoping it will invigorate the historically apathetic demographic to turn out in November.

But I am less confident that Harris selection will have much of an impact on the Asian Americans voting habits.

In 1958, while a graduate student at Georgetown University, one of my classmates asked me to support her boss, Sen. John F. Kennedy, in the upcoming election. I knew little about him other than that he lived across the street from me in Georgetown, and that I sometimes saw his wife walking their dog.

I had become a U.S. citizen the year before and, ultimately, voted for Kennedy. I have voted in every presidential election since.

Now, both parties are courting Asian-American voters, but neither fully recognizes the true diversity of interests, experiences and perspectives of this group. Without addressing the issues impeding Asian-American turnout and solidarity among this loosely defined group, Harris mere presence on the ticket is not going to be enough to significantly change voting behavior.

The Asian-American population is estimated to be between 20 million and 22 million. Its members come from more than a dozen different countries, many without voting systems like that of the United States. Outside of states with large, vibrant Asian-American communities such as California and New York, potential voters are often scattered across states and districts and fail to attract significant time or investment political campaigns.

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Lack of English proficiency is another barrier. While outreach to Hispanic voters can be directed by the large Spanish-speaking presence in the United States, Asian Americans speak more than a hundred languages and cannot be as easily targeted.

The media have begun to latch onto Asian Americans untapped potential. According to the Pew Research Center, the Asian-American electorate has grown 139 percent in the past 20 years. In the 2018 midterm elections, Asian-American turnout increased by 14 percent compared to the 2014 midterms, with 77 percent of Asian Americans votes going to Democratic candidates. The major parties waking up to the potential for Asian-Americans voters to sway elections, and are investing resources and personnel in outreach initiatives. The Democratic National Committee and the Trump campaign have full-time staff dedicated to Asian-American outreach. Trumps campaign targeted Indian-American voters following the presidents state visit to India in February. Biden is wooing Asian American caucus-goers in Nevada by touting his support for the Obamas administrations DACA program, which benefited many young Asian Americans.

But I still fear that the media and the major parties fail to understand the complexity of Asian American political attitudes. The diversity of experiences and backgrounds among Asian Americans does not make generalizations easy, yet the media continue to use them to explain Asian American attitudes. Chinese-American support for Trump has been overblown. While some Chinese Americans have turned to Republican candidates in the past five years out of opposition to affirmative action, 61 percent of Chinese Americans voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Much was written about how Nevada was the first litmus test for Asian American voter turnout in the 2020 primaries, but almost no attention was paid to the fact that the majority of Nevadas Asian-American population are Filipinos working in Nevadas hospitality sector. It is overly simplistic to think that this groups voting behavior could be an indicator of how Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean Americans voted in California. By this logic, it remains to be seen whether Kamala Harriss selection as Bidens running mate will be enough to inspire voters from Asian minority populations outside of the Indian-American community.

Harris selection as the vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party could help inspire greater participation, but without more systematic outreach to diverse Asian Americans, the real impact may be negligible.

Chi Wang is the former head of the Chinese & Korean Section at the U.S. Library of Congress and is the co-founder and president of the U.S.-China Policy Foundation, an educational nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C.
Many remember Abercrombie & Fitch, the premier clothing brand for the rich suburban teen who never bothered to learn their maid's last name, as that ridiculous store that hired shirtless models and refused to stock any size bigger than Large. Subsequently, the company also became infamous for the myriad lawsuits these discriminatory policies provoked. But what these plaintiffs didn't realize was that A&F was very inclusive about inflicting its draconic beauty standards on all employees, no matter their rank or background.

It turns out that Abercrombie & Fitch's brand of 'Manson cult, but make it hot' didn't just apply to its clothing but also its corporate culture. In the aughts, store associates, the ones hot enough to survive the hiring process, had to abide by an extensive, ridiculous, "look policy." This policy covered everything from a dress code (only A&F brand clothing) to haircuts (no "extreme styles" like highlights) and even acceptable fingernail length (a quarter of an inch max or you're fired).
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Yes, because of the precautions dentists are taking. In keeping with American Dentistry Association guidelines, patients at the dental school are screened for symptoms both the night before and the day of an appointment. At the dental school, we require patients to wear face coverings when entering the building and our providers wear gowns, gloves, face shields, head covers, surgical gowns and N95 masks. The CDC issued guidelines for re-opening in June, and the American Dentistry Association encourages regular dental visits. The World Health Organization recommends continuing routine care except in hot spots where there is "intense uncontrolled community transmission," which isn't the case in New Jersey right now.Untreated dental disease is only going to get worse. And we know there's a link between oral health and systemic health. For example, poor periodontal health is associated with heart disease. The providers at the dental school are finding that our patients have been eager to come back.None that I know of. Especially for the past 35 years, dentists have known the importance of using PPE and keeping their offices and dental instruments clean. In the 1980s, before the HIV/AIDs crisis, dentists didn't wear gloves, masks, surgical gowns or eye protection. With COVID, when we know more, we'll be able to determine if the extra precautions we're taking are necessary.We've added high-efficiency air filters that improve the amount of outside air and decrease the amount of recirculated air. Student doctors meet patients and bring them to clinics to reduce the number of people in waiting areas. Patients cannot bring extra people unless absolutely necessary. We're at half-capacity so there are 20 feet between every patient. We continue to use high-speed suction devices, now with an additional student assigned just to hold the suction device to ensure the collection of aerosols.Source: Newswise
Danny Cipriani's new fiancee Victoria Rose O'Callaghan has shared an adorable snap of the couple looking more loved-up than ever after announcing their engagement.

The beauty, 39, took to her Instagram account and shared a photo of herself and Danny, 32, enjoying a date at a bowling alley.

The mother-of-two stood behind the rugby star and wrapped an arm lovingly around him as they smiled at the camera.

Date night: Danny Cipriani's new fiancee Victoria Rose O'Callaghan has shared an adorable snap of the couple looking more loved-up than ever after announcing their engagement

Victoria, who is also a grandmother, looked sensational in the photo, sporting a black and white jacket and styling her brunette locks into a high ponytail.

Victoria captioned the heartwarming snap: 'I let him win'.

The comment was well received by Victoria's followers, with one calling the couple 'lovely' and others leaving love heart emojis.

Rugby ace Danny, 32, announced his engagement to the stunning brunette last week.

Granny Cipriani! MailOnline revealed on Thursday that Danny Cipriani's fiancee is a gran and she seems to be a very family orientated and loving person on her social media account

He will become a stepfather to her two children, Jade Austin, 24, and a teenage son, 14, when the pair marry in October.

The sportsman will take on the role of step-grandfather after Victoria's daughter Jade became a mum four years ago.

Danny's fiancee gave birth to her first child when she was just 14, with the pair often mistaken for sisters now that Jade has a daughter of her own.

The pair went public with their relationship in June, with Danny saying the mental health campaigner makes him 'the happiest man in the world.'

Danny, who's previously had long-term relationships with Kelly Brook, 40, and Katie Price, 42, referred to Victoria's children on Instagram, saying: 'You make me want to be the best man I possibly can for you and our family.'

Engaged: Danny and Victoria went public with their romance in June, with Danny saying the mental health campaigner makes him 'the happiest man in the world'

The rugby player found love again four months after expressing his heartache over the tragic death of ex-girlfriend Caroline Flack, who he described as 'so kind and so beautiful' in an emotional video on social media.

Danny's new fiancee was born Victoria Rose O'Callaghan and is from Derby, but has also used the surnames Hare and Newbold throughout her life.

Victoria has had two long-term relationships before falling for Danny, including with Steven Austin, who is the father of her daughter, and ex-boyfriend Gavin Dunnicliffe.

Danny's future wife also had a brief fling with Alex Reid, 45, in 2012, shortly after his split from ex Katie Price.

Victoria welcomed her first child when she was 14 with former partner Steve, who tragically died aged 22 in September 1999, leaving the young mum to raise their baby on her own.

Zara Newbold, 31, who's Victoria's half-sister, told MailOnline of her sibling's difficult past, and said her and Danny are lucky to have found each other.

Family: He will become a stepfather to her two children, Jade Austin, 24, and a teenage son, 14, when the pair marry in October

Speaking at her home in Derby, Zara said: 'She was very young when she had her first baby.

'She and Steve were happy together and I think they would have had a long lasting relationship. But he died in not a very nice accident leaving Vicky with a young baby, which was hard for her.

'We grew up in Derby but Vicky later ventured out, she wanted bigger and better things. She moved to Essex and then London.

'I hope Danny will provide a good, solid and loving relationship for her. That's all she wants, not the fame and fortune.

'She had been single for a while and when she said they were together I wasn't surprised. She knows a lot of A-listers. And we spoke again after he proposed.

'I've not met Danny yet but looking forward to. We've spoken and he sounds very nice, very chilled. She couldn't have met a better person.'

Former flame: Danny was previously in a relationship with presenter Kelly Brook (pictured in January 2009)

Danny revealed he had popped the question to Victoria on Instagram last week, telling his 258K followers that he 'can't wait' to marry her in October.

On Instagram he said: 'You are now my wife-to-be. You're my lover, my best friend, you are so loyal, incredibly intelligent, sexy with so much class.

'I learn from you all the time. I will never get complacent, you deserve the greatest love every day.

'My dream of finding The One I never thought would come true. And it has. I vow to you I am going to turn up every day. Love and support you for the rest of our lives.'

Celebrity pals of Danny's such as Chloe Madeley and Aston Merrygold wished him congratulations after he posted about the happy news.
Victorian Liberals Branch Stacking a Test for PM: Opposition Labor Leader

Opposition Labor leader Anthony Albanese has said the branch-stacking allegations levelled against members of the Victorian Liberals is a test for Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Morrison himself expressed the same sentiment about the opposition Labor leader during the Victorian Labor branch-stacking scandal in June.

Im happy for Scott Morrison to be judged on his own words, Albanese told ABC Radio National on Aug. 24. And if Michael Sukkar is still sitting there at two oclock as a minister, then that is a failure of Scott Morrisons leadership.

Sukkar is the Assistant Treasurer and Housing Minister; he was named in the 60 Minutes report as someone who allegedly benefitted from the branch-stacking but was not said to be actively involved.

Labor is calling for Sukkar to resign from the ministry.

Victorian Liberal powerbroker and former vice-president Marcus Bastiaan has rejected the claims but resigned from the Party anyway.

In a statement, Bastiaan said: The ongoing leaking of years old historic material is an unnecessary distraction for the Liberal Party, and it is with that in mind that I have resigned.

The allegations exposed by Nines 60 Minutes program date back to 2016. Sukkar and veteran MP Kevin Andrews offices were linked to the allegations.

Labor is demanding that Andrews also be sanctioned.

Albanese told ABC Radio National: Someone needs to tell Scott Morrison that hes actually in charge of the Liberal Party. That this is a scandal. That his Assistant Treasurer is in it up to his neck in his own words here. And that his position is untenable .

But Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Sukkar and Andrews had appropriately referred the matter to the Department of Finance for an inquiry.

Frydenberg told 2GB radio: With respect to the program more generally, obviously the language and the conduct will be of real concern to many Liberal Party members. I share those concerns.

The Liberal Party will deal with those matters internally, he said.

Victorias Liberal Party director Sam McQuestin told AAP: The party will be seeking full and detailed responses from party members who were named in the 60 Minutes report or who may be able to provide further information on relevant matters.

Taxpayer-funded electorate staff were allegedly used by members of the partys ultra-conservative faction to recruit new members from ethnic communities and religious groups.

Secret recordings and leaked text messages also exposed plans to remove moderate state and federal politicians.

Sukkar denied any involvement.

I have never authorised taxpayer-funded staff to undertake party political activity outside of (parliamentary) policies and guidelines, he told AAP.

Former defence minister Kevin Andrews said: The suggestion that I would be coerced into making decisions on staffing arrangements in my electorate office by others is untrue.

Labor is pressuring the prime minister to act after leading the charge against branch-stacking claims within the Labor Party in June.

We know what Scott Morrison thinks of branch stacking. In June this year, he had a very clear view. He called it corruption, Labor frontbencher Stephen Jones told reporters.

Scott Morrison should move to sack Michael Sukkar today.

Morrison has argued the allegations are a matter for the Victorian branch.

Victorian Labor Party branch-stacking revelations in June resulted in the removal of three state government ministers.
As the coronavirus pandemic and increased gun violence weighs on Madison residents, Anthony Cooper said he and his skeleton crew of peer support specialists are being torn in two between providing support to families and intervening to stop violence.

The unprecedented public health crisis and its related economic burdens are exacerbating challenges already facing the community. Cooper, the CEO of Focused Interruption Coalition, said everyone is in crisis.

Its a jungle right now and everyone is trying to do the best that they can, but its tough on a whole new different level, Cooper said. No one can really say that theyve been prepared for (the pandemic), but when you talk about the uptick in violence, you have to talk about both.

As of Aug. 17, the Madison Police Department responded to 163 incidents of gunshots fired  up from 86 in the same timeframe last year  which caused 66 cases of property damage and struck 34 people. MPD also recovered 702 shell casings.

The recent death of 11-year-old Anisa Scott, who was riding in a car when a bullet struck her head, has refocused attention on violence in the community.

City officials and community leaders say a citywide response to reducing violence is needed and that the time to act is now. But Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said its important to find a model that works for Madison.

I don't think that there is a national model that we can just adopt wholesale and plunk down here and expect it to work, Rhodes-Conway told the Cap Times editorial board Aug. 14.

Acting Police Chief Vic Wahl said once a potential model is identified, strategies can be built around it. He also acknowledged that enacting a new model wont be an overnight decision because they will be longer-term, more system solutions.

While the wider Madison community is now tuned into the increased violence, City Council President Sheri Carter emphasized that an ongoing commitment to violence prevention, cross-government collaboration and desire to support young adults in the community are critical parts of the solution.

These are ongoing problems that spiral out of control, Carter said. When we misstep, when we relax, when we step back from these issues, then we end up with what we have now.

Apart from government and local organization work, Carter also said community members should commit to reaching out to young adults who may need a sounding board or some additional support.

We have to figure out how we can connect to each other in these challenging times, Carter said.

Community plans

Since the death of Scott, some leaders, including Madison School Board President Gloria Reyes and Dane County Boys and Girls Club CEO Michael Johnson, have offered their own ideas for violence prevention.

Former Mayor Paul Soglin also weighed in via a series of Facebook posts outlining areas to consider including the lack of group homes in Dane County, the role of community organizations and fostering intergenerational wealth.

Reyes, who served as a deputy mayor for public safety in Soglins administration, said that Rhodes-Conways office needs to act with urgency. She recommended a set of six strategies that included boosting funding for the Focused Interruption Coalition, developing public health strategies to address root causes of violence and implementing a Homicide Review Commission in collaboration with the community.

On Aug. 15, Johnson released a statement calling for local officials to revisit a 15-point violence prevention plan that was introduced in 2016 and led to the Focused Interruption Coalition. The plan also includes strategies to get youth jobs, mentor men of color and provide mental health therapy for families.

These proposed ideas have already been vetted and included feedback from young people, hundreds of community residents, victims of violent crimes, formerly incarcerated individuals and leaders from across Dane County, Johnson said in the statement. Now we need to execute. Revisit this plan  the time to act is now.

The city uses a model where trained peer support specialists who are rooted in the community and have experienced violence or incarceration intervene when there is risk of violent activity intervene to disrupt the cycle of violence. The specialists also extend support to those who have been affected by violence.

The city also contracts with JustDane, formerly Madison-area Urban Ministry, to provide peer support for those who have been incarcerated. Additionally, Public Health Madison & Dane County is working to develop a data-driven public health approach to violence prevention.

Rhodes-Conway said the city is looking at the lists from the community and evidence-based work from around the country.

Were doing the work now to make sure we really absorb that information and find the way forward for Madison, the mayor said.

Mental health ambulance model

FICs Cooper said greater funding is welcome but whats also needed is having people who are embraced in what we are doing on a regular basis. He stressed a community approach is needed to effectively serve all those in need.

We do not consider ourselves as having all of the answers, but we do consider ourselves the ones to step up, Cooper said.

Dane County is also involved in the conversation on solutions. One area of collaboration between the city and county is investigating a mental health ambulance, such as the CAHOOTS program based in Eugene, Oregon.

Such an ambulance would provide a non-emergency response to someone who needs help and act as an alternative tool to law enforcement intervening in mental health crisis situations. With emergency personnel operating under the city and the 911 Center within the countys purview, Dane County Board Chair Analiese Eicher said this work has to be collaborative.

This is absolutely something that weve seen that we cant be operating in a vacuum, Eicher said. We really have an opportunity here in this moment and within these strained financial times to make some changes and to prioritize alternatives.

Last Thursday, the Dane County Board announced a resolution that would explore another component of community care: a triage and restoration center. Eicher said such a center would provide comprehensive services for people who might be picked up by police but dont need to be in jail.

Rhodes-Conway recommended exploring a mental health ambulance last August following the release of public video footage showing Madison police using force on a Black teenager experiencing a mental health crisis.

In a speech Aug. 13, Rhodes-Conway said violence prevention will be a priority in the 2021 budget, along with public health and equitable economic recovery. Madison is facing an estimated budget gap of between $20 million and $25 million.

Im really happy that the legislative branches of both the city and the county have taken some steps forward on this, but the big question is going to be when we look at the budget  how do we fit this in with other priorities and how much can we afford to do? Rhodes-Conway said.

Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.

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Bair was introduced to the group after an interview with longtime New York rock radio veteran, Zach Martin ( www.zachmartinrocks.com ) , where the two discovered their mutual passion for suicide prevention and addressing mental health issues.

Suicide is currently the third leading cause of death among young people age 15 to 24. The highest overall rates of suicide are for adults age 40 to 59. Helping this vital non-profit cause that offers a lifesaving services for anyone with suicidal thoughts and their families is a cause close to Bair's heart.

"I lost a friend and member of my team at one of my venues last year to suicide almost exactly a year ago," said Bair. "It really hit me hard, as she was young and had her whole life in front of her. And of course I have known others as well who have unfortunately taken their own life. It's tragic, and I think that we as humans need to be more aware of people who may be in need, even if they may not be overtly projecting their pain."

Martin agreed, saying, "One of my goals is to let people know they have a value. They are important and precious. Let's do all we can to provide resources for those that need our support. One way to accomplish this goal is by suicide prevention. I am going to do all I can to make sure people know that have access to resources that can help."

Bair's new single dives directly into this topic, telling the true story of a young woman who is considering taking her own life, but after being surrounded by support and love, decides she is not just an Ordinary Girl, but extraordinary, and that life is precious. The upbeat single as well as the upcoming EP highlight his storytelling and musical prowess, addressing the timely subject of depression and mental illness with musical grace.

Bair's band, The Zach Bair Band, includes Daniel Dwight, a founding member of platinum-selling band Saving Abel on bass and backing vocals, Jeff Cobble on guitars, who has worked with globally-known "epic" rock act Medieval Steel, and Olive Branch, MS resident Jeff Ward on drums and percussion.

The Ordinary Girl EP contains five new songs plus a remastered version of Rutherford Drive, Bair's hot single from 2019, and was produced in Nashville by Grammy-winner Skidd Mills, known for producing such artists as Saving Abel, 12 Stones, Pop Evil, Skillet and others. It was mastered by another Grammy-winner, Brad Blackwood, of Euphonic Masters, who has done work for such notable artists as Evanescence, Black Eyed Peas, KoRn, Alter Bridge, Keith Urban, and more.

Although Bair is an independent artist through his imprint RockHouse Records, he has assembled a "label" team second to none. His team includes his colleague at VNUE, Lou Mann, who ran Capitol Records as GM and EVP for a number of years, and who went on to serve as president of House of Blues Media Properties (part of LiveNation); and Jody Best, of Best Bet Promotions, who is heading up the promotion of the record to Radio. Bair is in good company with Mann and Best, both of whom have worked with some of the biggest artists in the world, such as Duran Duran, Frank Sinatra, Def Leppard, REO Speedwagon, Boston, and Orianthi, to name a few.

Ordinary Girl is available for purchase and streaming on all major platforms, and the EP will be available September 1st. The Official Music Video may be viewed by clicking this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNxhpEGfL0U

About Zach Bair

Zach Bair is a longtime music and technology entrepreneur and executive, as well as musician and producer. Through Bair's work with DiscLive (www.disclive.net), set.fm (www.set.fm), and VNUE (www.vnue.com), he has produced hundreds of live recordings across the world for such artists as Peter Frampton, Slash, REO Speedwagon, Bad Company, Seether, and most recently, superstar Rob Thomas. He has started multiple companies and raised millions of dollars, including Immediatek which sold to Mark Cuban in 2006; and his first startup, Voyence, which was eventually sold to EMC Corporation (now part of Dell). VNUE is currently rolling out technology called Soundstr (www.soundstr.com) to ensure creators are paid fairly for songs played in public, for example, radio, businesses, bars, etc., and to lower the licensing costs of those types of businesses to encourage more participation.

The Zach Bair Band is an alternative/active/pop rock band from Memphis, TN. Follow Zach and his band on his official social network channels as well as his official website: www.facebook.com/zachbairofficial; www.youtube.com/zachbairofficial; www.instagram.com/zachbairofficial; www.zachbairmusic.com

About American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (www.afsp.org)

Established in 1987, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) is a voluntary health organization that gives those affected by suicide a nationwide community empowered by research, education and advocacy to take action against this leading cause of death.

SOURCE Zach Bair (individual and musical artist)

Related Links

http://www.zachbair.com


SAN DIEGO  Over the past decade, North San Diego County restaurant owners Roddy and Aaron Browning have looked upon Yelp, the high-profile crowd-sourced reviews platform, as something of a necessary evil. A diners positive 5-star review will make their day, but a negative 1- or 2-star review will ruin their week.

But since the pandemic began in March, the Brownings and many other local restaurateurs say recent bad reviews on Yelp  many of them for county-ordered safety and service requirements beyond their control  are making the struggle to survive even harder. Some owners classy, clever and angry written responses to recent low-starred reviews have gone viral.

Meanwhile, Yelp says it has stepped up efforts to remove unfair reviews and it is encouraging its diner-members to show compassion for restaurant owners before they push the publish button.

The Brownings own 10-year-old The Flying Pig Pub & Kitchen in Oceanside and 5-year-old TownHall Public House in Vista. For them, the struggle to keep the doors open is a real and daily battle. Sales are down 60% at both locations, and recent low-starred Yelp reviews have hurt business. One diner complained about the Flying Pigs phone being busy due to a rise in takeout orders. Another said his pork chop wasnt piping hot when it reached the table. And a third was unhappy with their table on the patio at TownHall. Roddy Browning said his efforts to have Yelp remove the most unfair and dishonest reviews has been unsuccessful.

We may miss steps of service here and there but were constantly trying to pivot to make it safe. If you feel you need to write a Yelp review, first look in the mirror and ask yourself, is this going to help this struggling small business? If you really want to help us, tell us when youre there, or call us or email us so we can make it right. We are listening. We are all listening. Dont shame us on the Internet. We need the help right now.

Since March, California has led the nation in restaurant closures. According to a national survey released by Yelp late last month, 15,770 U.S. restaurants permanently closed between March 1 and July 10. In San Diego County, 226 restaurants have closed for good since the pandemic began, Yelp reports.

To clarify the challenges theyre facing to survive, a growing number of restaurant operators are publishing replies to negative reviews they receive on Yelp.

A few weeks ago, an Elite Yelp member named Amanda L. wrote a scathing 2-star review about Parc Bistro-Brasserie in San Diegos Bankers Hill neighborhood after she and three girlfriends showed up without a reservation at the full restaurant on a Saturday evening. The writer made jokes about the advanced age of the people dining there and implied that the owners were sexist in turning her party away.

In a written response, manager Samatha Scholl told the reviewer she should be ashamed of herself for making fun of elderly people who are most at risk during the pandemic. She also wrote that Parc Bistro is running at 25% of capacity and was completely booked the night of their visit.

We are all going through a difficult time and we at Parc Bistro are so grateful for the clientele we have, no matter what their age. To make fun of people because they are old? Really? REALLY? Grotesquely immature and wildly inappropriate, Scholl wrote in the post that earned an outpouring of community support when a reader posted it on the Facebook group page Eating & Drinking in San Diego days later. Yelp officials reported that the writer of the post, Amanda L., took it down herself.

Anderson Clark, the co-owner of Common Stock restaurant in the Hillcrest neighborhood, also took a reviewer named Lisa D. to task for a 3-star review she posted on March 18, one day after the county ordered all restaurants and bars to close. Her review was based on slow service she experienced during a visit to Common Stock the weekend before, when restaurants were already feeling the impact of a sharp decline in business.

Clark responded to the review, which has since been deleted, writing: Normally we would apologize for your less than perfect experience and try to invite you back in for a meal on us. However, since you are the type of person sitting here (on March 18, 2020, in the middle of a national crisis) contemplating what rating we deserve on Yelp, as we face the most existential crisis we have (and perhaps ever will) in the restaurant industry, we hope you dont come back.

And Martin Blair, owner of Kansas City Barbeque downtown, politely wrote an explanation of the countys face-covering mandate to an Arizona tourist named Alex B. who opened his 1-star review on June 20 with the words: Gotta be the worst place to visit in California yet. The review ended with Alex referencing the 1st, 5th and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution on how the restaurant is breaking the law by forcing people to wear masks. After being alerted to the review by the Union-Tribune on Wednesday, Yelp officials swiftly removed it.

Lidiya Kravchuk Harvey, director of brand strategy for the San Diego-based restaurant company Puesto, has written responses to several negative reviews since the pandemic began in order to educate both the reviewers and others who may read the posts. The first negative review to roll in after Puesto closed its restaurants March 17 was on March 18. It was a 3-star review from a writer named Jasmine who complained that she missed the La Jolla locations quick-service, Chipotle-style format  which Puesto discontinued in favor of full, sit-down service in 2013.

Seven years later youre frustrated about a business model that we changed in 2013? I understand if youre frustrated about something we did two months ago, but why would you do it now? Harvey said on Thursday. We literally dont know if well survive, and with reviews like this you just dumped all the salt in our wounds. Normally we address these reviews privately and have a customers always right approach, but I wanted to start addressing these publicly because people have no idea what were going through.

Puesto operates seven restaurants statewide, including three in San Diego, two in Irvine and two in the Bay area. Two have been closed since March due to a lack of outdoor seating. Last month, Puesto opened its long-anticipated Mission Valley Cerveceria location, where they have set up patio seating with umbrellas in the parking lot. Cool night air and heat waves have led to several bad Yelp reviews, along with complaints about long wait times for parties who arrive without a reservation, Harvey said.

We have metrics and predictions about how long a party will sit, but right now all bets are off. People dont have other things to do so we found that predicting wait times is incredibly challenging, Harvey said. A lot of people are dining for longer. We wont make people leave after 90 minutes. Thats not us. But some people are coming and sitting for three to three-and-a-half hours.

Harvey said she has had very good response from Yelp when she has alerted them to negative reviews on issues that related to face-covering orders.

Ill give them credit, she said. Were just enforcing whatever the county and state tell us and theyve been responsive and good about taking those down.

In March, Yelp updated its content guidelines regarding reviews published during the pandemic to give struggling businesses some breathing room.

In an email to The San Diego Union-Tribune, a Yelp spokeswoman said that Yelp has instituted a zero tolerance policy for claims in reviews about businesses changing their operating hours, being closed during regular operating hours or that criticize pandemic-related safety rules. Automated algorithms flag questionable reviews and they are then evaluated by a human content moderator. As more restaurants have reopened since May, Yelp has recorded a rising number of reviews it has removed.

In July, Yelp added ghost text in the text box that members will see when they begin writing a review. It strongly encourages them to keep in mind that many businesses are struggling to stay afloat in these uncertain times. Theres also a new pop-up notification that all Yelp users will see when they sign into the site, reminding them to consider the circumstances the restaurants are facing when reading negative reviews.

Browning said there are several reviews he has asked Yelp to take down without success. He said some Yelp reviewers embellish what they write to add more drama to their story but he has witness statements and video recordings that prove some of the reviews are outlandish falsehoods. Thanks to loyal customers and federal Paycheck Protection Program loans, he and his wife expect their restaurants will survive the pandemic. But he hopes Yelp reviewers will put down their poison pens in the meantime.

Were going to make it, he said, but these people arent making it any easier.



Pam Kragen of The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote this story.

2020 The San Diego Union-Tribune

Visit The San Diego Union-Tribune at www.sandiegouniontribune.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The move would "calm everyone down" and "be fair", the president notes.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for the Belarus authorities to hold a new election to ease mounting tensions.

"Let's imagine that I'm confident about myself, I'm confident in the people's votes, I'm a confident person. How can I calm everyone down? I would definitely say: 'In one month, there'll be a new vote, and I am running in that new election. Whoever wants to run, go ahead.' I'd invite everyone  all international observers, all of them," Zelensky told in an interview with Euronews.

"And I'd tell the people of Belarus: 'Please, elect whoever you want. And after that result, there would be no more questions, I'm convinced about it. If Lukashenko won, he'd win, if someone else won, then it's someone else. But everyone would be calm, without blood. That'd be fair. It would make history," Zelensky concluded.

The Belarusian foreign ministry has snubbed the Ukrainian president's advice, saying Ukraine leadership will long have "more important issues to deal with" than issuing recommendations.

That'd be fair. It would make history

Read alsoLukashenko warns Zelensky against "fomenting riots" in Belarus"You know, Ukraine is a brotherly country to us, and the Ukrainian people are a brother nation for Belarusians. Therefore, of course, at this frankly difficult moment for our country, it would be great to feel some kind of support or at least understanding, not listen to hackneyed advice coming from all sides. Now we definitely don't need it," spokesman Anatoliy Glaz said, according to BelTA.

"However, if you look at the recent history of Ukraine, of course, they do have certain experience in some issues. But the result of these political experiments certainly doesn't convince the Ukrainians, and not only them, of their correctness and expedience. Moreover, in our opinion, the Ukrainian leadership will for many years ahead have many more important issues to deal with inside the country on an everyday basis rather than giving advice to neighbors," the press secretary said.

Belarus elections and protests: reactions

On August 14, the European Union announced it did not recognize the outcome of the presidential elections in Belarus and on August 19 agreed to sanction the country's officials over electoral fraud and violence against protesters.

Ukraine said it "generally shares" the position voiced by the EU.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the election result must be reviewed and those responsible for mistreatments of peaceful demonstrators must be sanctioned.

Estonia and Lithuania have agreed not to buy electricity from the Belarusian NPPs.

Pope Francis made a special address dedicated to the situation in Belarus, calling for an end to violence.

Canada and Ireland have not recognized election results, calling for a revote.

Read also"Threat not only to Belarus": Lukashenko speaks with PutinU.S. President Donald Trump said he would talk to Russia about the Belarus protests. "I like seeing democracy," he told reporters, according to Reuters. "It doesn't seem like it's too much democracy there in Belarus."

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stated the UK did not accept the results of the Belarusian presidential elections, calling for a probe into fraud and sanctioning those responsible, including for the violent suppression of protests.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

Trend:

No one doubts that the Armenian Defense Ministry is openly lying, denying and refuting facts, Trend reports citing the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry.

"The Armenia Defense Ministry, claiming that, allegedly, an officer "strayed and disappeared" during an inspection of a combat stronghold because of unfavorable weather conditions, tries to deny the fact that the commander of a reconnaissance group, Senior Lieutenant Gurgen Alberyan, was captured," said the ministry.

If it werent for the military uniform on the captured officer, the Armenian Defense Ministry would have said he was a shepherd or a mentally ill person. If an officer "disappears" and the public is not informed about it for more than 24 hours, this is a sign of arbitrariness, irresponsibility and indiscipline in the Armenian army, which proves the deliberate concealment of the growing number of crimes and non-combat losses from the public, said the ministry.

Every time a citizen of Armenia, leading or included in a sabotage group, is captured, Armenia, according to the same scenario, declares these persons as lost and missing or as insane rural residents, mentally ill shepherds, criminals and drunks, said the ministry.

The entire responsibility for the aggravation of the situation on the line of contact of troops and on the Armenian-Azerbaijani state border rests entirely with the military-political leadership of Armenia, the ministry said.

At about 05:45 (GMT+4) on August 23, the sabotage and reconnaissance group of the Armenian armed forces made an attempt to commit a provocation in the direction of Azerbaijans Goranboy district. As a result of the decisive actions of the units of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces stationed in this direction, was forced to retreat, incurring losses.

During the battle, the commander of the Armenian sabotage group Senior Lieutenant Gurgen Alberyan was captured.
Jacinda Ardern has extended New Zealand's coronavirus lockdown by four days as the country continues to battle its second wave of infection.

Aucklanders were expecting tough level three restrictions to be eased at midnight on Wednesday but the prime minister pushed that back to 11.59pm on Sunday.

From next week the city will be placed under level two restriction, along with the rest of the nation, meaning cafes and restaurants can reopen but there is still a limit on gatherings.

Residents must also continue to adhere to social distancing rules.

The alert level will be reviewed on September 6 and may be dropped to level one, meaning all restrictions are eased expect for international travel.

Ms Ardern said the government and health officials wanted to ensure they had contained the outbreak before they moved to a lower level.

Jacinda Ardern (pictured) has extended New Zealand's coronavirus lockdown by four days as the country continues to battle its second wave of infection

Auckland streets will remain empty for another week as the lockdown is pushed back (Pictured: Empty streets are seen during Level Three)

The rest of the nation will remain under level two (Pictured: Wellington retail staff follow safe practice protocols during COVID-19 level 2 restrictions)

Face masks will become mandatory on all public transport across the country from Monday to reduce the risk of the virus spreading.

The announcement came as the country recorded nine new cases, taking the total active cases to 123.

The largest cluster is based in Auckland, which was part of the reason for extending the lockdown, Ms Ardern said.

'This is a contained cluster. But it is our biggest one. And that means the tail will be long, and the cases will keep coming for a while to come,' she said during the media briefing on Monday.

Auckland reentered a stage three lockdown from on August 11. Pictured: Police performing checks during the last lockdown

People queue outside a supermarket in Henderson, Auckland, on Wednesday after restrictions were reintroduced (pictured)

'What we need to do is put ourselves in the best long-term position to manage it successfully, and in the most contained way we can.

'Ultimately, our goal needs to be managing this cluster from Level Two as soon as we feel confident we can do that. That means feeling confident we have the perimeter of the cluster well understood and defined, and are not seeing too many cases cropping up that we havent found through contact tracing.'

She said the elimination strategy was the best approach for the long-term benefit of New Zealand.

Adding that they were expecting to see new cases pop up over the next several weeks but heavy restrictions would not need to be imposed every time a new case appeared.

A waiter wearing a mask delivers takeaway coffee to customers waiting outside Dizengoff cafe in Ponsonby, Auckland on Thursday

Police question drivers as they head in and out of Auckland on SH1 north of Wellsford on Wednesday (pictured) amid new Stage Three lockdown

A police officer wearing a mask gets his morning coffee from The Store in Kohimarama as Auckland wakes to a return to Stage Three lockdown (pictured on Thursday)

Ms Ardern encouraged New Zealanders to be vigilant in the weeks ahead by continuing to social distance and wash their hands.

HOW NEW ZEALAND's SECOND OUTBREAK UNFOLDED Four people from the same family tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday

NZ PM Jacinda Ardern ordered a stage three lockdown on Auckland and stage two for the rest of the country effective from Wednesday until Friday night

Four more 'probable' coronavirus cases were detected on Wednesday, all linked to the family cluster

Health authorities are investigating the possibility the virus was imported by freight, and picked up by one of the family members who works at a cold storage company

A ninth COVID-19 case was also detected on Wednesday, in a traveller returning from Pakistan Advertisement

She said in the coming weeks thousands of tests will be done and hundreds of contact tracers would be hard at work to stamp out the virus.

'We have made a choice, and we have a clear plan that means we can get through however long this pandemic is in the world, and keep as much normality, including for our economy, as possible.

'If anyone country knows how to bounce back, it is us. If it feels hard right now, that's because it is - 2020 has frankly been terrible. But we've been strong, we've been kind and we're doing really well.'

The mandatory wearing of face masks comes after several cases contracted the deadly virus on a bus journey between strangers.

'This isnt a decision we took lightly. But we know that masks protect you, and the people around you, and we now have a real-life example of that,' Ms Ardern said.

'They limit the chance of COVID-19 spreading in places where it is often harder to distance yourself, and to trace people.'

The nation had been the envy of the world for its handling of the COVID-19 crisis, with 101 days without a single case of community transmission.

New Zealanders had been enjoying the return of their usual freedoms after an autumn lockdown seemed to have been effective in eliminating the deadly virus.

It has been just under two weeks since the country was thrown back into lockdown after the new cases began to emerge. The source of the outbreak remains unknown.
Funded through a National Science Foundation grant of more than $4 million, researchers at Northern Arizona University are teaming up with Arizona State University and other regional partners in a five-year effort to expand the reach of the Nanotechnology Collaborative Infrastructure Southwest (NCI-SW) to the communities of northern Arizona and the Four Corners region. NCI-SW is the southwest regional node of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure.

Building on the work begun during the first NCI-SW led by ASU professor Trevor Thornton, this next-generation initiative will add the world-class expertise in theoretical and experimental quantum and soft/biological nanomaterials of the NAU team from MIRA! and APMS, led by co-principal investigators, associate professor Ines Montano and professor and APMS department chair Gabriel A. Montano, who are joined by professor Miguel Jose Yacaman. The NAU researchers also bring years of experience in outreach to diverse communities.

"NNCI helps scientists and engineers in diverse fields solve challenging convergent research problems," said Dawn Tilbury, NSF assistant director for Engineering. "Research and education through NNCI will continue to yield nanotechnology innovations--from interconnects for quantum systems to high-resolution imaging to brain-implanted sensors--that bring economic and societal benefits to us all."

NCI-SW as a user facility

The primary role of NNCI centers are as user facilities, providing state-of-the-art instrumentation and expertise to researchers from academia, small and large companies and government scientists and students in nanoscale science and engineering. Currently, 16 NNCI centers exist across the country.

The leaders of MIRA!--director and professor Jen Martinez and chief scientist Gabriel Montano--have extensive experience with the user facility concept. Both were founding staff scientists of the US Department of Energy's Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) user facility prior to coming to NAU.

"Nanotechnology user facilities are incredible hotbeds for scientific discovery," said Montano. "The impact they can have on students is tremendous! Students, particularly from non-research institutions, are able to work side-by-side with experts as they are introduced to the future of science and technology that is nanoscience. Our students at NAU will grow in leaps and bounds working with users, learning about the wide world of research and growing their networks."

The NCI-SW will consist of sites at both ASU and NAU, with MIRA! and APMS facilities serving as the core facility base for the NAU NCI-SW site. Users of the NAU NCI-SW site will have access to capabilities and expertise in characterization and modeling of hard and soft materials. Existing foci are in in situ scanning probe microscopies, optical spectroscopies and modelling and simulation of light-matter interactions, as well as quantum training in areas such as quantum information.

Creating opportunity for the students and communities of northern Arizona and beyond

The addition of NAU extends the geographical reach of NCI-SW, increasing educational opportunities for communities of northern Arizona and the Four Corners region. NAU will lead new initiatives to create educational opportunities with NCI supporting collaborators, including San Juan Community College in Farmington, N.M. and the University of New Mexico-Gallup.

NCI-SW NAU PI and site director Ines Montano said, "NCI-SW enables NAU to introduce the students of northern Arizona and the Four Corners to state-of-the-art research and capabilities in nanotechnology! Instead of just learning about techniques in a book, these students will gain hands-on experience performing research in the MIRA! and APMS NCI site facilities. NAU will serve as a host site for students and teachers to perform summer research and learn about nanotechnology with an emphasis on regional students, and teachers from historically underserved community colleges, colleges and high schools of the Southwest."

NCI-SW NAU will also reach out to residents of Flagstaff and northern Arizona, participating in local events such as the Flagstaff Festival of Science, and partnering with MIRA! and the recently established Center for Quantum Networks (CQN), a partnership with lead institution University of Arizona, to create new opportunities for community engagement.

"The combination of opportunities being created by APMS/MIRA! teams, including the NCI-SW and recently awarded CQN, are very exciting, particularly for the opportunities being created for students and the communities of northern Arizona," said NAU President Rita Cheng.

###

About Northern Arizona University

Northern Arizona University is a higher-research institution providing exceptional educational opportunities in Arizona and beyond. NAU delivers a student-centered experience to its 31,000 students in Flagstaff, statewide and online through rigorous academic programs in a supportive, inclusive and diverse environment. Dedicated, world-renowned faculty help ensure students achieve academic excellence, experience personal growth, have meaningful research opportunities and are positioned for personal and professional success.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative appears to be doing a dance around the issue of tariffs imposed on some European wines in October 2019. A 25 percent tariff was levied on some table wines from France, Germany, Spain, and the UK. It has been described as retaliation for illegal subsidies to Airbus about a decade ago.

Since then, the trade office has dangled the threat of increasing the tariff to 100 percent if the European Union refused to come to the negotiating table. If you enjoy French or Spanish wines, the impact of a 100 percent tariff would be devastating, of course.

There was good news earlier this month when it was announced in a press release from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative that the 25 percent tariff would remain in place and not increase. Big sigh of relief. But that still leaves a sizable financial penalty on certain wines being imported from the EU.

To be clear, the tariff is only on wines below 14 percent ABV (alcohol by volume), but that includes a vast swath of the European wines we like to drink because many never attain the blockbuster alcohol levels that we see in New World wines.

How this impacts you is twofold. The price of some of your favorite wines is likely higher than it was a year ago, and thats if you can find them at all. The reason you may not be seeing some of your favorite European wines is that small importers simply dont have the cash flow, especially amid COVID-19 lockdowns, to bring in these wines at the higher cost.

Small businesses in the wine industry are endangered and rightly angry. The flip side, however, is that EU tariffs on U.S. wines going the other way penalize U.S. wine producers who would like to sell their wines in Europe. If youve ever seen a California cabernet sauvignon on a French wine list, you understand the problem.

The practical solution, it would seem, would be to remove tariffs on wine and spirits in both directions. But that would make too much sense, so it will probably never happen.

Tasting Notes

Wines are rated on a 100-point scale. Wines are chosen for review because they represent outstanding quality or value, and the scores are simply a measure of this reviewers enthusiasm for the recommended wine.

Dutton-Goldfield 2019 Pinot Blanc, Dutton Ranch-Shop Block Vineyards, Green Valley of the Russian River Valley ($30): Fresh and clean, with bright acidity and uncommon minerality, this is another stunning pinot blanc from winemaker Dan Goldfield, who seems to have a Midas touch with the pinot blanc grape variety. In 2019, the long, cool growing season resulted in perfect ripeness and exquisite balance. Aromas of peach, pear, and nectarine dominate this beautifully crafted vintage. Rating: 95.

Dutton-Goldfield 2019 Pinot Blanc, Dutton Ranch-Shop Block Vineyards, Green Valley of the Russian River Valley. (Courtesy of Dutton-Goldfield)

Tongue Dancer 2018 Chardonnay, Pratt Vineyard-Irwin Lane, Russian River Valley ($42): Winemaker James MacPhail strikes again with a chardonnay that strikes the perfect balance between richness and minerality, a chardonnay that offers aromas of lemon creme, baked apple, and pear along with a thread of bright minerality, toasty oak, and a touch of wood spice. Rating: 95.

Tongue Dancer 2018 Chardonnay, Pratt Vineyard-Irwin Lane, Russian River Valley. (Chris Blum)

Turnbull 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, Oakville ($85): The Oakville district of the Napa Valley is undoubtedly one of the finest stretches of terroir in the world for cabernet sauvignon. The 2017 Turnbull Reserve is yet another example from this hallowed ground. This vintage is rich and powerful, and shows notes of ripe blackberry, boysenberry, and cassis with a touch of pencil lead and wood spice. Rating: 95.

Turnbull 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, Oakville. (Courtesy of Turnbull Wines)

Chappellet 2019 Chenin Blanc, Molly Chappellet Signature, Napa Valley ($38): This is the king of California chenin blanc, a grape variety popular in Frances Loire Valley but not widely planted in Napa. Chappellets location on the sunny eastern slopes of the Napa Valley is ideal for chenin, and the result is a dry chenin with exquisite balance and fresh, complex aromas of citrus, melon, and stone fruits. This vintage is nothing short of sensational. Rating: 94.

Chappellet 2019 Chenin Blanc, Molly Chappellet Signature, Napa Valley. (Courtesy of Chappellet)

Pellegrini 2019 Rose, Russian River Valley ($30): This limited production rose from the Russian River Valley could easily pass for one of the dry rose beauties from the south of France. Crisp and refreshing, with mouthwatering acidity and complex aromas of strawberry, pomegranate, and stone fruits, its sunshine in a glass and lip-smacking good. Its a blend of 90 percent pinot noir and 10 percent carignan. Rating: 92.

Pellegrini 2019 Rose, Russian River Valley. (Courtesy of Pellegrini Wine Company)

Flora Springs 2018 Sauvignon Blanc, Family Estate ($30): This historic Napa Valley winery has a long and solid track record with sauvignon blanc. The 2018 vintage is another success story. This vintage is beautifully balanced, fresh, and lively. It has notes of citrus, peach, and lemongrass and a long, impressive finish. Rating: 91.

Flora Springs 2018 Sauvignon Blanc, Family Estate, Napa Valley. (Courtesy of Flora Springs)

Follow Robert on Twitter at @wineguru. To find out more about Robert Whitley and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at Creators.com. Email Robert at whitleyonwine@yahoo.com. Copyright 2020 Creators.com
Earlier this summer, Governor Gavin Newsom released a closure order banning large gatherings and demanding many businesses and organizations to cease in-person operations. Among those affected were churches, who have had to move to online services and worship. However, some see this order as an infringement upon the first amendment rights granted to all U.S. citizens of freedom of religion.

Harvest Rock Church of Pasadena is one such church who believes it important to hold worship in-person, and has continued to do so despite Newsom's orders. Harvest Rock did remark that they ask all attendees to practice safe social distancing, mask wearing, and to stay home should they feel ill at all. However, last Thursday, Pastor Che Ahn of Harvest Rock was sent a letter warning that continued contempt of government orders could result in church closure and jail time for its members. The state attorney declared that "any violations in the future will subject your Church, owners, administrators, operators, staff, and parishioners to the above-mentioned criminal penalties as well as the potential closure of your Church."

Harvest Rock will be represented by Liberty Counsel in its litigation against the government's restrictions. Chairman Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel stated "These actions of the City of Pasadena and Gov. Gavin Newsom are akin to repressive foreign regimes, not America where the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion. The First Amendment erects a wall which the state may not breach to close churches and incarcerate pastors and parishioners."

Staver also elaborated on the unfairness of the church's perscution noting "The City of Pasadena, like Gov. Gavin Newsom, encourages thousands of people to gather for mass protests, but now consider in-person worship to be a criminal offense."
Children sit at individual desks during a lesson at the Harris Academy's Shortland's school in London on June 4, 2020. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Risks From Missing School Are Worse for Kids Than Virus: UK Medical Officers

Missing out on their education poses much bigger risks to children than catching the CCP virus, the UKs chief medical officers have said in a joint statement in support of the governments decision to reopen schools after the summer holidays.

In an unusual move, the chief medical officers and deputy chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales issued a consensus statement on Saturday on the risks and benefits of schools reopening following lockdown measures imposed in March to curb the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits St Josephs Catholic Primary School in Upminster, east London, on Aug. 10, 2020. (Lucy Young/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Our overall consensus is that, compared to adults, children may have a lower risk of catching COVID-19 (lowest in younger children), definitely have a much lower rate of hospitalisation and severe disease, and an exceptionally low risk of dying from COVID-19, the chief medical officers said in the statement.

This has to be set against a certainty of long-term harm to many children and young people from not attending school, they said, adding a lack of schooling increases inequalities, reduces the life chances of children and can exacerbate physical and mental health issues.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson joins a socially distanced lesson during a visit to Bovingdon Primary School, near Hemel Hempstead, on June 19, 2020. (Steve Parsons  WPA Pool/Getty Images)

The international real-world evidence suggests that reopening of schools has usually not been followed by a surge of COVID-19 in a timescale that implies schools are the principal reason for the surge, the chief medical officers pointed out.

In a BBC interview aired on Sunday, professor Chris Whitty, the UKs chief medical adviser and Englands chief medical officer, said the chances of children dying from COVID-19 are incredibly small, but missing lessons damages children in the long run.

Many more were likely to be harmed by not going than harmed by going [to school], he said.

Chief Medical Officer for England Chris Whitty speaks during a press conference about the CCP virus inside 10 Downing Street in London on March 9, 2020. (Alberto Pizzoli /pool/AFP via Getty Images)

A new study released by Public Health England on Sunday shows CCP virus outbreaks and infections in schools are rare.

Since year 1, 2, and 6 pupils returned to school in June amid the initial easing of the lockdown measures, only 0.01 percent of pre-schools and primary schools had an outbreak, all of which were successfully contained and just 70 children and 128 staff were affected.

Schoolchildren have a higher risk of catching the flu or being involved in a road accident than catching the CCP virus, Englands deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries told Sky News on Monday.

On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a direct appeal to parents to return their children to the classroom when schools reopen next week.

Its vitally important that we get our children back into the classroom to learn and to be with their friends, he said in a statement, as nothing will have a greater effect on the life chances of our children than returning to school.

Earlier this month, Johnson said reopening schools in September is a moral duty and a national priority.

Keeping our schools closed a moment longer than absolutely necessary is socially intolerable, economically unsustainable and morally indefensible, he wrote in The Mail on Sunday.

Englands Childrens Commissioner also said schools should be first to open, last to close in any future UK lockdowns, even at the expense of other sectors.

Mary Clark contributed to this report.
The Congress Working Committee (CWC) on Monday resolved that Sonia Gandhi will continue as party president until an All India Congress Committee (AICC) session is convened, rejecting the concerns raised by 23 Congress leaders who criticised the functioning of the party and asked for structural changes in a controversial letter whose contents became public last week.

The CWC  held in the backdrop of the first-ever show of dissent by prominent leaders against the partys first family  authorised Sonia Gandhi to effect any necessary organisational changes, reaffirmed its faith in both Sonia and former president Rahul Gandhi.

There was sharp criticism of those who signed the letter at the partys highest decision-making body, which met for seven hours on Monday and witnessed stormy exchanges between the leaders.The discussion focused largely on the timing of the letter, the intent behind it, and its leak; rather than on its contents.

Rahul Gandhi led the attack on the signatories by saying it came when the Congress was fighting political battles in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and Sonia Gandhi was in hospital. The CWC, in its formal resolution, also emphasised that issues must be raised within party forums in the interest of propriety and discipline, and not through the media or in public fora.

Only four of the 23 leaders who signed the letter are CWC members, which made them eligible to attend the meeting  Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik and Jitin Prasada. Attacked for criticising the leadership, the dissidents expressed their support for Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, claimed that the letter was not intended to question the leadership of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and it had been misconstrued, but asserted that it had been written within the limits of a democratic party.

According to people familiar with the contents of the letter, sent on August 7, a set of leaders  which also included Kapil Sibal, Shashi Tharoor, Manish Tewari, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, and Milind Deora, among others  criticised the lack of honest introspection after electoral defeats, and asked for a full-time, effective, active and visible president; elections at all levels in the party (including the CWC); establishing an institutional leadership model to collectively guide the party; and a national coalition with like-minded parties, among other steps.

HT has not seen a copy of the letter.

Mondays CWC resolution, which is the final word in the party for now, after enumerating the challenges facing the country, stated that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are two voices that have been at the forefront of exposing the governments inadequate responses, divisive politics and audacious propaganda and that the two have inspired a generation of Indians; it pledged to strengthen their hands in every possible way; and asserted that no one will be or can be permitted to undermine or weaken the party and its leadership at this juncture.

According to several leaders present in the meeting who HT spoke to, the proceedings began with Sonia Gandhi reiterating her decision to step down, as she had noted in a letter to party general secretary (organisation) KC Venugopal last week. She took over as interim chief last August, after Rahul Gandhi resigned after the Congress defeat in the Lok Sabha elections. In the interest of the party, I ask CWC to begin deliberations to put in place the process of transition to relieve me of my duties, she wrote in the letter.

There was, however, overwhelming support for Sonia and Rahul Gandhi  among the 52 members who spoke, a majority either wanted Sonia to continue or Rahul to take over, or the former to continue till the latter took over.

According to one person at the meeting, Sonia Gandhi directly addressed Azad, the senior-most leader among the letter signatories, You know me so well, Azad sahib. How could you think that I will take any decision on the leadership issue without consulting party leaders? You could always come and meet me. I retired long ago. I dont want to hang on to this chair. So, whats the motive of this letter?

Rahul Gandhi, too, was critical of the timing of the letter, and referred to the fact that the party was engaged in political battles when it was written (in Rajasthan, it was dealing with an intraparty rebellion led by Sachin Pilot, while in Madhya Pradesh, it faces a set of crucial bypolls), and that Sonia Gandhi was then in the hospital.

According to a second person who participated in the meeting, referring to his mother, Sonia, Rahul said, She didnt want to be Congress president, and I didnt want her to be because of her health, and yet you all insisted that she become [the president]. Why then do you have a problem with her? Challenging her authority and talking about the collective leadership was an insult to her.

Rahul was incorrectly reported on Monday morning to have alleged that the letter-writers were in collusion with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), leading to Sibal putting out a tweet defending his commitment to the party. This, in turn, led to Gandhi calling and speaking to Sibal to clarify he had never made such a remark  which, then, saw Sibal withdraw his tweet.

Former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh said the letter was unfortunate and shouldnt have been written, even as he supported Sonia Gandhis continued stint as president. Former defence minister AK Antony called the letter cruel. Ahmed Patel, among Sonia Gandhis closest aides, said that he was pained that three senior leaders  Azad, Wasnik and Sharma  who occupied positions in the party had signed the letter.

There are times when a person is angry over certain decisions in the party but that does not mean one starts writing letters, he said, according to a person familiar with the proceedings of the meeting. Party general secretary Ambika Soni demanded action against the signatories, and said rules should be the same for seniors and juniors.

But on behalf of the signatories, Azad said that the letter was not directed against Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, and was misconstrued by some people. Azad claimed that for the past month, there had been rumours that Rahul Gandhi did not want to return as president while Sonia Gandhi did not want to remain party chief, and that someone else may be appointed. It was in that context of a possible third person being appointed, Azad said, the letter had been written, to urge the Congress president to discuss and consult with them before appointing somebody to the post.

Mukul Wasnik said he owed a lot to Sonia Gandhi, while Anand Sharma  who was accused by Ahmed Patel of drafting the letter  said that the letter was written with the permissible limits of a democratic party. Prasada said the idea was to only flag organisational issues and the letter wasnt directed at the Gandhis.

Towards the end of the meeting, however, Sonia Gandhi sought to heal the divisions. Quoting her, the partys chief spokesperson, Randeep Singh Surjewala, said, We are a large family, we have differences on many occasions but in the end, we come together as one. The need of the hour is to fight for the cause of the people and forces that are failing this country.

Organisational issues are always addressed and process of constitution and reconstitution is a continuous one.

While no one from the dissenting group wanted to comment officially, one MP told HT, Its the beginning of a process and not the end.

The BJP said it had nothing to do with the Congresss internal matter. As a former Congress person, I can say that the mirror has cracked and it is all out in the public domain, senior leader Tom Vadakkan said.

Mumbai-based political analyst Abhay Deshpande said the dissenting leaders had raised genuine concerns about the functioning of the organisation. They are also worried not only about their future but that of the party as well. For the time being, the issue has been put under the carpet but I am sure it will resurface within next six months if the concerns raised by them are not addressed, he said.

Author and commentator Rasheed Kidwai said, Its going to be a fascinating, protracted battle. The dissenters have many tricks up their sleeve so lets see what happens.
A 22.5 billion baht submarine purchase of two S-26T by the Thailand government from China has irked its citizens. Bangkok Post reported that the submarines are among three items approved in 2017 under a 36-billion-baht contract in a hush-hush manner hoping that the issue would escape public attention.

Amid the economic slump due to COVID-19 pandemic, the recent 22.5 billion baht submarine purchase of two S-26T by the Thailand government from China has irked the citizens. Bangkok Post reported that the submarines are among three items, which the then military regime under Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha, who was the leader of the now-defunct National Council for Peace and Order, approved in 2017 under a 36-billion-baht contract in a hush-hush manner hoping that the issue would escape public attention.

Thailand Navy has reported that the purchase of the first submarine is already complete and will be delivered in 2024. The navy has further said China has agreed to provide free of charge CM-708 missiles, which can be fired from the submarines over a range of 290 km.

Revealing the true nature of the deal, Bangkok Post quoted Yutthapong Jarassathian, a Pheu Thai Party MP and a subcommittee member, as saying that the procurement contract didnt mention an obligation on the Thai government to acquire the other two. On August 23, Yutthapong said the deal was invalid as it was not a genuine government-to-government deal.

Also Read: Trump announces emergency authorization of convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19 patients

Bangkok Post further quoted him as saying that navy chief Adm Luechai Ruddit who signed on behalf of Thailand had no authority to represent the government and the Chinese company, which signed the contract was also not representing the Chinese government either.

For signing such a deal only the Prime Minister or the foreign minister can legally represent the government and only the defence minister is able to be assigned that authority if necessary, he added.

He has also been reported as revealing that there is no part of the contract that stipulates the purchase of a second and third submarine as claimed by the government. As the country could have used the 22.5 billion baht to help people who have been worst affected due to the COVID-19 pandemic like unemployed people and poor families, the opposition bloc is determined to knock the deal down during the lower House debate next month.

Also Read: PLA to carry military exercises in South China Sea amid tensions

Citing the Arms Flows to South East Asia report released in 2019 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Bangkok Post reported that China took the advantage of the large gap created when the military regime under Gen Prayut suffered isolation as several European arms suppliers were forced to re-evaluate their relations with Thailand following the 2014 coup.

China, which was willing to fill the gap, endorsed the military regime, maintaining close ties, and, hence, got orders for tanks, armoured vehicles, and submarines after 2015. In other words, China received a big part of Thailands military budget. (ANI)

Also Read: US Elections 2020: Donald Trumps new commercial ft. PM Modi aims to woo Indian Americans, watch here
Janhvi Kapoor has garnered praises for her performances in all her movies so far, right from her film, Dhadak. But being a star kid, she has not been able to escape the wrath of social media trolls.

The actress, who delivered yet another incredible performance in the recently released film Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, was brutally trolled once again. Janhvi says that she has been getting trolled since the release of Dhadak.

Talking about how she handles the trolling, Janhvi said in an interview with Bollywood Hungama, "I don't allow myself to get bitter about it. When my first film came I even got comments like...good that your mother is not around to see this...I can't allow myself to get bitter or hurt. I'd rather see the criticism as an opportunity to better myself. I would rather live in a bubble where everything is okay and then try to improve myself."

Gunjan Saxena, a biopic on the first lady pilot of the IAF to supposedly fly into combat zone, was marred by controversy. But the film had a positive reception among critics.

Janhvi shared that she never thought the reviews would mean so much to her. "Reading some reviews I had tears in my eyes. I didn't realize how much this acceptance would mean to me. We all say it is enough to work hard and that is enough of a reward. But we all need the audiences' acceptance," she said.

Gunjan Saxena was directed by Sharan Sharma. Apart from Janhvi, it also starred Pankaj Tripathi, Angad Bedi and others.

Janhvi has a number of movies lined up next. She will be seen in Roohi Afzana, Takht, Dostana 2, Rannbhoomi and Bombay Girl.

ALSO READ: Janhvi Kapoor Says She Auditioned For A Dharma Film And Didn't Get It" title="ALSO READ: Janhvi Kapoor On How Her Family Reacted When She Got Trolled: It Hurt My Father

ALSO READ: Janhvi Kapoor Says She Auditioned For A Dharma Film And Didn't Get It" />ALSO READ: Janhvi Kapoor On How Her Family Reacted When She Got Trolled: It Hurt My Father

ALSO READ: Janhvi Kapoor Says She Auditioned For A Dharma Film And Didn't Get It
The City of Welland and Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 1115 are disagreeing on a few things, one of them being how many grievances have been filed by union members this year.

Formal complaints made by the end of the year are expected to be twice the number for 2019, said Steve Leavitt, national representative for the union.

Leavitt later said the most recent grievance filed by one of his unions members was the 20th this year among all three unions that represent municipal employees in Welland. About 15 of them are COVID-19 related.

Unifor Local 199 president Greg Brady said no grievances have been made by any of the outside workers he supports.

Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1633 president Chris Moore did not have exact figures late Monday, but said some greivances have been filed by Welland transit drivers and that he has expressed labour management concerns with the city.

Leavitt said more than half of this years complaints are connected to managers doing the work of the bargaining unit, referring to duties and responsibilities being shifted.

There are two full-time unionized city staffers who have not been called back, one in recreation and culture and the other a parking enforcement officer, said Leavitt.

A grievance filed in March comes from an employee who wanted to wear a mask but was told she couldnt before being sent home by the city. She was away from work for six weeks, said Leavitt.

Id say 2020 was a bad year, in terms of the city-CUPE relationship said Leavitt.

CUPEs three-year contract expires at the end of this year.

The city currently does not have a chief administrative officer. Leavitt hopes this has changed by the time contract bargaining resumes.

If its the present admin folks, I could see it being a very tough round of bargaining, Leavitt said.

Bargaining three years ago was fairly normal without any major concerns and issues, said Leavitt, adding the union had a very good, respectful relationship with the employer at that time.

He said the citys current leadership, which consists of a number of senior staff members, is taking a hard line with arguments against the grievances.

I dont know that the people in charge are well-versed in labour relations, he said.

In April, the city handed out 101 temporary layoff notices to various casual and full- and part-time staff.

There are about 150 CUPE Local 1115 members at Welland city hall, and 15 were laid off early in the pandemic.

Unifor Local 199 represents outside workers including parks and recreation staff, water and sewer worker and facility workers, such as those at arenas.

Twenty-three full-time and 19 casual Unifor workers were laid off by the city early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The citys human resources manager, Andrea Daisley, said only six CUPE grievances have been made this year. She said she could not go on the record about the nature of those grievances.

Im not going to discuss any labour relations issues we have currently going on, she said.

Asked if it should be considered important that a CAO is hired by the time negotiations start near the turn of the calendar year, she said; I dont think I can answer that.

She said it is the right of union members to raise their concerns.

We respect the grievance process. Its part of their collective agreement, and my opinion is that we work well with them, she said.

Mayor Frank Campion could not be reached Monday.

Correction - Aug. 24, 2020: This article has been updated to reflect new information provided by CUPE national representative Steve Leavitt and that he initially provided an incorrect number when asked about how many grievances have been filed by members of his union in 2020. He now says a total of 20 have been filed this year between all three bargaining units that represent various departments within the City of Welland.
Teddy Bear Clinic on hiatus, to return in October 2021

Greenwich Hospitals Teddy Bear Clinic  an annual event that typically draws more than 1,200 children and adults from across the region  will take a hiatus this year because of concerns about the coronavirus.

For 21 years, the Teddy Bear Clinic has entertained and educated youngsters, offering hands-on activities and one-on-one interaction with Greenwich Hospital health-care professionals as children learn about hospital services in a family-friendly environment. The event will return in October 2021.

This popular community event has become a tradition for many families in Connecticut and New York, said Diane Kelly, Greenwich Hospital president. But in order to comply with state rules and protect our community and staff, we made the difficult decision to cancel this years Teddy Bear Clinic. Although Connecticut does not show signs of resurgence at this time, we must remain vigilant because the virus still poses a serious threat. We are extremely hopeful that the Teddy Bear Clinic will be back bigger and better than ever next year.

Greenwich Hospital and all of its offsite locations are completely open, with all services resumed that were temporarily suspended or deferred at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The hospital has implemented numerous measures to keep patients and staff safe, including screening and testing, social distancing and advanced cleaning across all facilities.

Commercial banker joins Fieldpoint Private as it ramps up services

Fieldpoint Private, a wealth advisory and private banking boutique firm serving families and institutions, announced that Earl Tripp Moore has joined the staff at its headquarters in Greenwich as a commercial banker.

The addition is part of a larger strategic expansion of the firms private commercial banking services.

Moore joined from Stamford-based Patriot Bank, where he was a commercial banking team leader. He is Fieldpoints fourth commercial banker, and his move marks the firms growing focus on wealth creators and their businesses.

Moores 20-year financial services career includes commercial banking roles with First County Bank and Connecticut Community Bank, as well as time with Northern Trust and Morgan Stanley.

I began my career as a financial adviser and private banker, so I have long understood the entrepreneur, the enterprise and the family to be parts of the same picture, Moore said. At Fieldpoint, I can function as part of a team to deliver all of the advice and resources that that requires.

H. Russell Holland, who in July was named president and CEO of Fieldpoints banking unit, said Moore will be joined by additional commercial bankers, providing the firms advisers with expert banking partners in each of its markets. Those include Greenwich and New York City, along with a growing presence in the Southeast.

Commercial banking has been around as long as banking itself, said Timothy Tully, Fieldpoint Privates chairman, president and CEO. What we are creating is different. It is private commercial banking, where the clients business and wealth are treated as parts of a larger whole, with resources and professionals brought to bear on all of it, in concert, with a unified philosophy.

Greenwich Art Society prepares for 103rd annual fall show 

The Greenwich Art Society will hold its 103rd annual Bendheim Exhibit this fall.

Entries are open to all artists  both members and nonmembers, which is new for this year. This is an open and juried exhibit with cash awards totaling $2,000.

Due to the pandemic, artwork for inclusion in the exhibition will be selected digitally using EntryThingy from Sept. 8 to Sept.15.

Only the accepted artwork will be brought to the gallery for the exhibition, which will be live and in person. All awards will be determined from the actual work, not from submitted jpegs. Artwork can be dropped off from 2 to 4 p.m. Sept. 26 and Sept. 27.

The categories are oil/acrylic, drawing, pastel, watercolor, sculpture, photography, computer art, fiber arts and other media.

The juror will be Geaninne Gutierrez-Guimaraes, associate curator of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation based in New York. She is responsible for organizing exhibitions and also collaborates on planning Bilbaos exhibition program.

Additionally, she oversees and coordinates the Basque Artist Program, which welcomes two Basque artists to New York to learn about the local art community each year. Gutierrez-Guimaraes received a bachelors in art history from Hunter College and a masters in art history and museum studies from City College of New York.

The exhibition dates are Sept. 30 to Oct. 24, with art to be shown in the Bendheim Gallery at Greenwich Arts Center, 299 Greenwich Ave. Viewing hours will be by appointment from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays and noon to 4 p.m. weekends. The G.A.S. will also produce an online viewing room/virtual gallery space with all accepted works.

For more information on entering the exhibit or viewing it, visit www.greenwichartsociety.org/.
Amid simmering tension between India and China at Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh, Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat has said that a military option to deal with transgressions by the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) in Ladakh is on the cards but Indian armed forces will exercise this option only after the failure of talks at military and diplomatic levels.

"The military option to deal with transgressions by the Chinese Army in Ladakh is on but it will be exercised only if talks at the military and the diplomatic level fail," CDS General Rawat told ANI.

It is to be noted that CDS Rawat was Indian Army chief during the 73-day military standoff against the PLA in Doklam in 2017. CDS Rawat added that Indian armed forces are fully prepared to tackle any threat from China and there is no lack of coordination among the principal intelligence agencies.

Meanwhile, China has proposed that if the Indian Army steps back from the Finger 4 area of Pangong lake, then the Chinese troops will also step back the same distance.

India has rejected this proposal and has demanded that China restore status quo in all areas of eastern Ladakh on the border.

In April, the PLA troops reached Tibet on the pretext of conducting exercises but it violated the agreement reached between the two countries to maintain peace at LAC and built several infrastructures in many places. Apart from troops, tanks, aircraft and other weapons were also deployed in those areas. Since then, the Indian Army and Air Force troops have been stationed at LAC for the past three months.

According to sources, China has said that it is ready for disengagement in Finger 4 area of Pangong lake but India will have to remove its Army and weapons from this area. In return, China said they will also remove an equal amount of soldiers and weapons back from the area. India has completely rejected China's proposal and asked it to go to the old position behind Finger 8.
Flash floods in Turkeys northern Black Sea region have killed six people and search-and-rescue efforts are continuing for 10 others who are missing.

Floodwaters caused by unusually heavy rainfall dragged debris and vehicles along a road, leaving them buried in mud, footage from the province of Giresun showed. Residents were seen clearing streets as construction machines lifted debris.

Speaking in Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the floods had spread to neighbouring provinces as well, causing injuries in Rize and Trabzon.

In the initial reports we received, we had five dead and about 12 wounded as a result of heavy floods, Erdogan said. God willing, we will overcome the damage and destruction here rapidly.

Turkeys Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) said it had sent a team for search-and-rescue operations and teams in other provinces were also on alert.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said 153 people had so far been rescued and nearly 1,000 aid workers were searching for the missing people. He said power had been restored in some areas, but there was extensive damage to the infrastructure.

We were not expecting such a severe scene in the area, he told reporters in Giresun, along with Environment Minister Murat Kurum, who said 17 buildings had collapsed and 361 others were damaged.

Rainfall in Giresun had exceeded averages for the month of August by 1.5 times, but agricultural damage in the region was less than expected, said Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli.
OTTAWAAs with any Conservative leadership race, Erin OTooles victory early Monday morning created both winners and losers within the broader conservative movement.

OToole and his campaign team have already begun the work of setting up the office of the Official Opposition leader and turning their attention to the governing Liberals, with the possibility of a federal election looming.

The Star looked at who immediately benefits  and who could be marginalized  after OTooles come-from-behind victory over Peter MacKay.

UP: Leslyn Lewis (and campaign manager Steve Outhouse)

Lewis came from nowhere to mount a serious bid for the party leadership, raising an impressive $2 million and finishing as the first choice of roughly 20 per cent of voting Conservative party members.

The Toronto lawyer and former Conservative candidate was strongest in the partys heartland, coming first in Saskatchewan and a close second in Alberta, where she was behind OToole but ahead of Peter MacKay. After fellow social conservative Derek Sloans supporters moved behind Lewis as their second choice, she came within 1,600 points of edging out front-runner MacKay for second place.

Both Lewis and her campaign manager, veteran party activist Steve Outhouse, have received praise from across the Conservative family for their strong campaign. Some party insiders have suggested Outhouse should have a role in OTooles office now that the race is over.

DOWN: The front-runner

Speaking of Peter MacKay early in the race, a party source told the Star that front-runner is the most dangerous position in a Conservative leadership race.

Only three years before, the front-runner position was held by Kevin OLeary; then, once the wine-selling television personality dropped out, it was Maxime Bernier. Very few political observers and party insiders headed into the 2017 leadership convention with any doubt that Bernier would take over Stephen Harpers party. The rest, like Berniers role in the Conservative party, is history.

But for the second time in the modern partys history, the smart money bet  of pundits and party insiders alike  lost to a lesser-known challenger.

There will no doubt be a post mortem about what went wrong with the MacKay campaign. But its worth noting that there is considerable overlap in the team that ran Berniers 2017 campaign and MacKays in 2020.

UP: Fred DeLorey

Theres a fair bit of irony in the fact that Fred DeLorey led the team that upset MacKays ascension to the leadership, because some of the veteran political organizers early experiences in politics were supporting MacKay.

DeLorey began his political career volunteering for MacKay in their native Nova Scotia, and rose up the ranks to hold senior positions at the Conservative Party and within the Prime Ministers Office under Stephen Harper. DeLorey also ran unsuccessfully Central Nova, the riding MacKay dominated until he left federal politics in 2015.

A veteran of both federal and provincial conservative politics, DeLorey also managed OTooles failed 2017 leadership bid. Expect him to play a key role, either in OTooles office or on the partys campaign team.

DOWN: The Conservatives mail-opening machines

The Conservatives plan was to have all 170,000 leadership votes tabulated early Sunday evening, with the next leader taking the stage to give their acceptance speech in prime time, carried free of charge by all the major television networks.

But the machines the party used to open envelopes damaged thousands of ballots, leaving party volunteers to manually re-enter the votes for hours on Sunday night. An initial delay of one hour turned into two hours. And then results were expected at 10 p.m. And then it was midnight.

When OToole finally took the stage just before 1:30 a.m., the party had lost the opportunity to showcase its new leader on the evening political shows and on the front pages of newspapers. But at least we had some laughs along the way.
AVON, Ohio, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The paint brushes have been put away and the painter's tape pulled off as the 2020 FrogTape Paintover Challenge participants complete their room transformations. While all of the expert DIYers have accomplished eye-popping makeovers, only one will be named the winner and receive a donation made by FrogTape brand painter's tape to Room to Dream Foundation on their behalf. Now through August 28, the public can visit FrogTapePaintoverChallenge.com/Vote to view the entries and cast their vote.

All voters will be entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win $1,000 to complete their own home makeover. Each vote counts as an entry to win the prize and participants can enter once per day. Winners for both the FrogTape Paintover Challenge and the sweepstakes will be announced on September 4, 2020.

While the contest originally began with 15 participants, celebrity interior designer and FrogTape brand spokesperson, Taniya Nayak, narrowed down the pool to five standout finalists. The guidelines of the makeover contest were simple: the DIYers had to redo their space using only paint, painter's tape, and a $500 budget. Each influencer also was assigned a 2020 FrogTape Design Trend to incorporate into their makeover. Nayak then judged the projects based on originality, use of paint and painter's tape, and how well each of the influencers incorporated their trend.

"From geometric floor patterns and hand-drawn wall designs to bold botanicals and colorful accent pieces, this year's projects were next-level. The participants demonstrated how to harness inner creativity and transform rooms into spaces that are infused with personality, all while staying on a budget," said Nayak. "While it was difficult to select just five projects, these finalists exceeded all expectations and captured the true essence of what the challenge is about. I'm thrilled that a donation will be made to Room to Dream Foundation, a charity very near and dear to my own heart, on behalf of the winning blogger."

2020 FrogTape Paintover Challenge finalists include:

Calling All Creators: Holly transformed a completely unfinished space in her home, her son's basement playroom, into a warm area reflective of the Rich at Heart design trend by harnessing the power of paint and adding depth through textures and patterns.

Dorsey Designs: Sarah channeled her passion for interior design and love of do-it-yourself projects into her son's nursery, incorporating the Place of Zen trend through a fresh coat of paint and hand-drawn wall designs.

House of Esperanza: Monica drew inspiration from the Fun & Fearless trend, infusing vibrant colors and bold patterns into her kids' under-the-stairs clubhouse.

House on a Sugar Hill: Jodi used not only the walls, but also the ceiling and floor of her dressing room as a blank canvas, creating a carefree, yet chic, look inspired by the Bohemian Bold trend.

Within the Grove: Liz integrated the Natural Beauty trend in her living room by bringing in organic elements like beautiful botanicals, a wood slat accent wall and a roman clay fireplace.

To vote for the FrogTape Paintover Challenge winner, view complete sweepstakes rules or learn more about FrogTape brand products, visit FrogTapePaintoverChallenge.com.

FROGTAPE BRAND PRODUCTS

FrogTape brand helps consumers and professionals alike navigate the painting process with high-quality products. FrogTape offers premium-quality, innovative painting tapes that feature the brand's patented PaintBlock Technology, a super-absorbent polymer that seals the edges of the tape to keep paint out and lines sharp. FrogTape, marketed by Shurtape Technologies, LLC, makes it easy to achieve professional-looking results and is the brand pros rate #1 for sharp paint lines with no paint bleed. For more information on FrogTape brand, visit FrogTape.com, like us on Facebook (facebook.com/FrogTape); follow us on Twitter (@FrogTape); follow us on Instagram (@FrogTape); follow our boards on Pinterest (pinterest.com/FrogTape) or watch us on YouTube (youtube.com/FrogTapeTube).

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DUBLIN, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "China's Future in Low Carbon and Clean Energy Industry Expansion" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

In the coming years, low-carbon industry developments will set the economic and business agenda in China and other major economies as climate change becomes more severe in its effects.



The renewable energy and NEV industries will see an accelerated shift in investment activities. Renewable energy and electric mobility are among the most effective tools in the fight against climate change, and more countries are in a joint effort to mature these industries.



Therefore, there will be more room for renewable energy companies to expand their business overseas - especially for Chinese companies as they manufacture renewable energy products way cheaper and in a mass scale due to the economies of scale, government support and experience. Chinese NEV manufacturers also have the same advantage as renewable energy companies in terms of attracting overseas consumers with lower prices.



As a result, this report will look at China's current policy ground and emerging private sector investments for a greener development, with 15 + 1 key studies from various companies in renewable energy and the NEV sector. Furthermore, it will lay out the China-specific opportunities & challenges in these sectors as well as providing key insights for investors and market watchers.

Executive Summary:





China stands to benefit significantly by transforming its pattern of economic activity towards low-carbon development pathways. Such a transformation is not only important in preventing climate change and increasing energy efficiency, but it is also important to capitalize on new growth opportunities as a supplier that can help satisfy the increasing global demand for low carbon technologies -solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles (EV).

stands to benefit significantly by transforming its pattern of economic activity towards low-carbon development pathways. Such a transformation is not only important in preventing climate change and increasing energy efficiency, but it is also important to capitalize on new growth opportunities as a supplier that can help satisfy the increasing global demand for low carbon technologies -solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles (EV). Health crises, the limits of old economic models and energy security are the drivers of China's low-carbon industry expansion, especially the renewable energy sector and the new energy vehicle sector.

low-carbon industry expansion, especially the renewable energy sector and the new energy vehicle sector. The key studies represented in this report shows that government incentives and subsidies played a key role in developing these sectors. Thanks to these policies and subsidies, the country is in a leading position when it comes to renewable energy output and has also established itself as a market leader in other related technologies, like electric storage systems.

However, as renewable energy prices have fallen, renewable subsidies are being phased out. Previously subsidies were provided as to make renewable energy cheaper and competitive against traditional means of energy production. Another reason is the impact of the US-China trade war on China's economy. Now, the government is stricter on its spending and subsidy policies. As a result, wind and solar facilities must now compete directly at auction with other forms of power generation.

economy. Now, the government is stricter on its spending and subsidy policies. As a result, wind and solar facilities must now compete directly at auction with other forms of power generation. Considering this situation, there are various challenges and opportunities for these sectors. Challenges include a highly competitive domestic market, possible subsidy cuts, slowing global demand, the USChina trade war and technological developments that the Chinese industry seems to be following from behind. NEV manufacturers are also facing the same challenges.

Moving into the 2020s, the energy industry will see an accelerated shift to renewable energy projects large and small. Renewable energy is one of the most effective tools in the fight against climate change, and more countries are in an effort to switch their energy systems towards renewables. Therefore, in the future there will be more room for renewable energy companies to expand their business overseas - especially for Chinese companies as they manufacture renewable energy products way cheaper due to economies of scale.

In addition, Chinese NEV manufacturers also have the same advantage as renewable energy companies in terms of attracting overseas consumers with lower prices. Chinese NEVs are almost 75 percent cheaper than those of their overseas counterparts.

Lastly, these industries are welcoming foreign investors and putting efforts into improving their technologies. Foreign investment can contribute to the industrial and technological development of the host country through global integration and technology transfer. These investments increase the competition in the NEV and renewable energy industry at multiple stages of production, thereby improving efficiency.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction



2. Executive summary



3. Low-carbon policy drivers & development in related industries

Drivers of China's switch to low-carbon economy

switch to low-carbon economy Current industry trends

4. Major players - Solar energy industry



5. Major Players - Wind energy industry



6. Major players - New energy vehicle industry



7. The major player - State grid corporation of China



8. Future challenges



9. Challenges for solar and wind energy sectors

Challenges for NEV sector

Future opportunities Conclusion & key insights

10. References

Companies Mentioned



BAIC Motor

BYD

CATL

China Ming Yang Smart Energy Group

Envision Energy

Geely Auto

Goldwind

GuodianUnited Power Technology Company Limited

JA Solar Holdings

Jinko Solar

NEV Industry

NIO

Sinovel Wind

State Grid Corp of China

Trina Solar

Xinyi Solar

Xpeng Motor

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/w9vibw

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Comatose Russian Dissident Visited by Wife in Berlin Hospital

By VOA News August 23, 2020

The wife of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who is being treated for suspected poisoning at a Berlin hospital, visited her husband Sunday, according to the Associated Press.

Yulia Navalnaya and an aide did not speak to reporters as they entered the German capital's Charite hospital to see Navalny. He is in an induced coma and breathing with the aid of a ventilator.

Navalny, who was flying to Moscow from Siberia Thursday, fell ill during the flight, prompting the plane to make an emergency landing in Omsk, in Siberia. His aide said Navalny had drunk black tea at an airport cafe.

Supporters of Navalny, a well-known critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, believe the tea was laced with poison.

Navalnaya pushed to have her husband, 44, flown for treatment in Berlin. After his arrival Saturday, hospital spokeswoman Manuela Zingl told AP he would undergo extensive diagnostic tests and that doctors wouldn't comment on his illness or treatment until they were able to evaluate the results. AP's report did not include a timeframe for that.

On Saturday, Russian health authorities, who at first balked at allowing Navalny to be flown to Germany, said tests hadn't shown any poisons in his system.

Before Friday's decision to allow treatment in Germany, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov indicated the government would help facilitate the move and wished Navalny a "speedy recovery."

Peskov said the government would investigate the incident should toxicology reports show Navalny had been poisoned.

The case has attracted international attention.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron expressed concern last week over Navalny's condition.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden also weighed in, saying Navalny's "coma after being poisoned" was "unacceptable."

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow indicated it was monitoring the situation.

"If true, the suspected poisoning of Russian oppositionist Aleksey #Navalny represents a grave moment for Russia, and the Russian people deserve to see all those involved held to account. Our thoughts are with his family," said U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Rebecca Ross in a tweet.

Charles Maynes in Moscow contributed to this report.

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The current claims over the Coronavirus vaccine, Covishield, are completely false and it will be commercialised when trials prove successful and regulatory approvals are in place, said Serum Institute of India (SII) on Sunday.

SII issued this clarification after reports in the media began appearing which claimed that Covishield- Oxford Universitys vaccine candidate, will be commercialised in a little over two months.

The phase three trials for the Oxford vaccine candidate are being conducted by SII in India.

Serum Institute of India clarifies that the current claims over Covishields availability, in the media are completely false and conjectural. Presently, the government has granted us permission to only manufacture the vaccine and stockpile it for future use, SII said.
The NHS Test and Trace system is directing people to Covid-19 test centres up to 175 miles (281km) away from their homes, it has been revealed.

People with coronavirus symptoms who try to book a test online have reported being told to drive three hours to reach their 'nearest' centre.

And some of them have had to drive past closer testing centres on their way to the farther ones because of a flaw in the Government's booking system.

In one example, a person from Ilfracombe in Devon could be instructed to make the mammoth journey to a test centre in Swansea, across the Bristol Channel.

It would see them drive 175 miles each way, past their nearest drive-through in Taunton, 61 miles (98km) away, as well as Bristol and Cardiff on their six-and-a-half hour round trip.

Labour said problems with the booking system should be resolved as a 'matter of urgency'.

The website flaw is the latest in a stream of criticism against the NHS Test and Trace system, which is considered key to getting Britain back on its feet.

Statistics show the success of contact tracing has dwindled every since its launch at the end of May, with less Covid-19 patients and their contacts picking up the phone.

The Government recently decided to axe 6,000 call handlers to bolster local health teams instead, after it was revealed tax-paid employees were being 'paid to watch Netflix'.

A person from Ilfracombe in Devon is directed to a test centre in Swansea, across the Bristol Channel. It would see them drive 175 miles both ways, past their nearest drive-through in Taunton, 61 miles (98km) away. People with coronavirus symptoms in Felixstowe, Suffolk, have been directed to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, 40 miles (64km) away, despite there being a centre in Ipswich. A person in Gosport, Portsmouth, is directed to the test site at Chessington World of Adventures, in Greater London, a 67-mile (108km) journey. But the closest testing site is just 11 miles away (17.7km), in Portsmouth city

According to the Press Association, people with coronavirus symptoms in Felixstowe, Suffolk, have been directed to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex.

The NHS coronavirus test booking website saying it is just 13.8 miles away.

However, the journey is 40 miles (64km) by car, taking almost an hour to get from one place to another.

And people in the region with symptoms of Covid-19 would be forced to drive past their closest test centre in Ipswich on their way to Clacton.

One person from Felixstowe who tried to book a test online told the news agency: 'If I was travelling by boat, then Clacton would be my nearest test centre.

'I tried to book online but was only given the option of going to Clacton so I called 119. The operator got the same results.

'They told me that it is not just my region - some people in Newcastle are being directed to test centres in Scotland instead of ones in the city.

HOW SUCCESSFUL DOES CONTACT TRACING NEED TO BE? Scientists have repeatedly warned that 80 per cent of all infected people and their close contacts needs to be reached and isolated within 24 hours to keep a lid on the epidemic. Contact tracers need to catch 80 per cent of infections and test suspected patients within three days to keep coronavirus epidemics squashed, a study from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found. The researchers said the reproduction R rate can be kept under one as long as only two in 10 patients slip under the radar. Any more than that risks driving the R - the average number of people each coronavirus patient infects - to the point at which the crisis could spiral again. And people need to be swabbed and given results within three days to ensure they aren't tempted to go outside and mingle with others when results don't come back. Dutch researchers used mathematical modelling to predict how contact tracing systems with varying success could influence epidemics. It found that if testing is delayed by three days or more, even a system that is able to trace 100 per cent of contacts with no delays cannot bring the R value below 1. Another study by researchers from University College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found three quarters of people with Covid-19 would need to be tested and self-isolate to prevent a second wave caused by schools reopening in September. Experts found that, to prevent a second wave when schools reopen, the NHS contact tracing system must reach 68 per cent of cases and their contacts. But the current NHS system is 'not good enough'. It reaches half of contacts and only a fraction of symptomatic cases are tested, according to the team. One of the study authors, Chris Bonell, professor of public health sociology at LSHTM, said the NHS is currently reaching an overall standard of 50 per cent. 'Currently, test, trace, isolating (TTI) is not achieving the levels that we modelled. Looking at the NHS reports from the TTI system, it looks like it's about 50 per cent coverage.' Official figures published on Friday reveal tracers managed to track down just 71.3 per cent of close contacts of infected people in the week ending August 12, the worst figure since the service launched. And some 77.6 per cent of Covid-19 patients were reached in the week to August 12, compared with 81 per cent in the week ending July 22, 79.2 per cent on July 29, and 78.3 per cent on August 5. Advertisement

'I have symptoms so am going to get them checked out. But I can imagine that others would be put off by the prospect of two hours in the car - while driving past their actual nearest centre.'

Another example shows that a person in Gosport, Portsmouth, is directed to the test site at Chessington World of Adventures, in Greater London, taking an hour-and-a-half for a 67-mile (108km) journey.

But the closest testing site is just 11 miles away (17.7km), taking 26 minutes, in Portsmouth city.

A person with Covid-19 symptoms in Weston-super-Mare is directed to a testing centre in Cardiff - which takes more than an hour in the car.

However, there is a drive-through testing site at Bristol airport around 25 minutes away.

Some people with a Southampton postcode are being directed to Swindon - around a four-hour round trip.

Problems with the booking system have been highlighted from early on in the crisis but it appears that glitches in the system are yet to be rectified.

It seems the system flaw disproportionately affects those on the coast because the website thinks their closest location in distance is across water.

Labour said it was 'hugely disappointing' that the issues were still occurring and called on the Government to address the issues as a 'matter of urgency'.

Shadow health minister Justin Madders said: 'From the first days when testing centres were being rolled out, we have heard stories of people being sent unfeasibly long distances just to get a test, but for this to be still happening at this stage is hugely disappointing.

'Quick and easy access to testing are cornerstones of an effective test and trace system but once again the Tories seem unable to get the basics right.

'They must solve these problems as a matter of urgency.'

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: 'NHS Test and Trace is working, it's completely free and is stopping the spread of coronavirus.

'Regional testing slots are allocated based on the nearest testing site with availability and we are working to ensure this takes into account journey times.

'Anyone with symptoms across the UK should get a test as soon as possible.'

It comes after official figures published on Friday reveal parts of the NHS Test and Trace system are performing at their lowest level.

Tracers managed to track down just 71.3 per cent of close contacts of infected people in the week ending August 12, the worst figure since the service launched.

This dropped from 74.2 per cent during the previous seven-day spell and was down on the 91.1 per cent reached in the first week of Test and Trace (week ending June 3).

The Government claims the three per cent decrease is 'mainly due to delay in processing' which saw 681 people not having their cases transferred to the system until after the week ended.

The contact tracing system is also getting worse at getting in touch with Covid-19 patients who have been referred after testing positive.

Some 81 per cent of patients were traced in the week ending July 22, before free-falling to 79.2 per cent on July 29, 78.3 per cent on August 5 and 77.6 per cent the week to August 12.

Scientists have repeatedly warned that 80 per cent of all infected people and their close contacts needs to be reached and isolated within 24 hours to keep a lid on the epidemic.

Justin Madders, Shadow Health Minister, said: 'It's deeply concerning the numbers are heading in the wrong direction again this week, with so many of the close contacts of people who have tested positive, and over 40 per cent of people in the same households, not being reached.

'We urgently need to get test and trace back on track.'

The pressure to improve the system has intensified this month as pupils prepare for a return to school in September.

Even though research suggests children do not play a large role in the spread of Covid-19, school re-openings could lead to a second wave because parents also have to go back to work and other lockdown measures have been eased.

That's unless contract tracing is up to scratch, a study this month revealed, which researchers said was not the case.

In the early days of its launch, the NHS Test and Trace system faced criticism for employing too many call handlers who had nothing to do.

A leaked document seen by the BBC in the first week of running revealed most Britons diagnosed with coronavirus were giving just one close contact to the Government's track and tracers.

Experts suggest people are hesitant about handing over phone numbers of friends and family and decide to tell them about their diagnosis themselves.

It's also thought people don't want to answer 'unrecognisable' 0300 numbers.

To fix the problem, Downing Street announced on August 10 they would focus on a more 'boots on the ground approach' - by giving local health teams the resources to go and knock on the doors of people who are cooperating with the national scheme.

Officials announced that the system would be revamped to use more local resources to stamp out outbreaks.

Local authorities will work with the NHS to set up their own contact tracing system to plug holes in the national scheme.

The changes were the clearest acknowledgment yet by British Prime Minister Boris Johnsons government that the centralised way of tracking down Covid-19 cases and their contacts has come up short.

At the same time, some 6,000 call-handlers - a third of the workforce - will be axed from the central government-run contact tracing system by the end of August amid claims they do not have enough work to do and are paid 'to watch Netflix'.

The 10-an-hour contact tracing staff have complained they are have been sitting around idle without any work to do, passing the time by watching Netflix, playing with their dog or upholstering furniture.

A Department of Health spokesperson said at the time: 'The new NHS Test and Trace service is up and running and is helping save lives. Anyone in this country can now book a test and the majority who book a test get the results back within a day.

'We have over 25,000 contact tracers in place, who have all been trained and are fully supported in their work by public health experts.'

The Government has been urged to cancel contracts with private companies Serco and Sitel to run the Test and Trace system after acknowledging local health teams are best for the job.

Mr Madders said: 'We now need a plan of action from Ministers that sets out what they are doing to address these huge holes in the contact tracing system.

'If this means supporting local areas to establish their own local contact tracing systems and ending the failed contract with Serco  as Labour has been calling for, for some time  then Ministers must get on and implement this without delay.'

NHS Test and Trace is headed by Baroness Dido Harding, who has said there is 'no silver bullet when it comes to tackling coronavirus'.

Tensions have been further fuelled by the appointment of Lady Harding as the head of the new National Institute for Health Protection - an organisation set to replace Public Health England (PHE).

Health Secretary Matt Hancock faced scathing criticism for handing the reins of PHEs replacement to the Tory peer who has no scientific background.

Dr Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at Southampton University, said the new role 'makes about as much sense as Chris Whitty being appointed the Vodafone head of branding and corporate image'.

That was a reference to Harding's previous stint as chief exec of telecoms giant TalkTalk - where she oversaw one of the worst data breaches in the UK that saw hackers to steal bank details from 157,000 customers.

Mr Hancock defended the decision to install Harding as the head of the new National Institute for Health Protection, telling BBC News: 'She's simply the best person who could be doing this job now.'
Attentat a la Bombe aux Phillipines

Un double attentat a la bombe a Jolo, une ile situee dans le sud des Philippines, a fait neuf morts et une dizaine de blesses ce lundi, parmi lesquelles des soldats et des civils.





Cet attentat na pas encore ete revendique, mais larmee soupconne le mouvement islamiste Abou Sayyaf den etre lauteur.





Deux bombes artisanales ont ete declenchees a une heure dintervalle dans le principal centre urbain de lile de Jolo, fief dAbou Sayyaf, un groupe qui a prete allegeance a lorganisation Etat islamique.





Selon larmee, la premiere explosion sest produite vers midi devant un supermarche, a lexterieur duquel deux camions militaires etaient gares. Une deuxieme explosion a suivi, declenchee par une bombe fixee sur une moto en stationnement.





Il sagit de la pire attaque quait connu lile depuis le double attentat contre la cathedrale de Jolo qui avait fait plus de 20 morts et au moins 100 blesses en janvier 2019.




T Muruganandham By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: BJP president JP Nadda on Monday said that the divisive forces are being sheltered in Tamil Nadu and the State government and political parties should be on alert to ensure that these forces do not get strength in Tamil Nadu. He also targeted the DMK saying it has been inciting the feelings against the national spirit.

Nadda was addressing the State executive committee through the video conference.

"There are people who are working against the interest of the nation and they are being provided shelter in Tamil Nadu. I would like to certainly specify here that the administration and the political parties should be on an alert to see to it that divisive forces do not get strength in Tamil Nadu. We have to give a befitting reply to such forces which have been working in the direction which are not in the interest of the nation," Nadda said.

Taking on the DMK, the BJP president said, "We all know that DMK has always been inciting the feelings against the national spirit and they have been anti-development by coming out with issues which are not in the interest of the nation."

Urging the State functionaries to ensure prominent people join the BJP, Nadda said underscored that apart from taking national and State level issues, the BJP functionaries should take up local issues.

ALSO READ | Project Pappu? How the AIADMK & BJP IT wings are working overtime to portray DMK chief Stalin as a dunce

"Each booth should have a Whatsapp group and a very strong information technology group at the State level. What the PM and other leaders say should be put in in the Whatsapp group in regional language so that the people are enlightened. The second content should be about how we react to the State level issues. For example how does the BJP deal with the Karuppar Koottam issue," he added.

The BJP president pointed out that the BJP functionaries cannot make the Whatsapp group interesting if they fail to touch the local issues and address them.

"In the coming times, the BJP will have a good share in the municipal elections, in the local body elections and in the State Assembly elections also. We have to increase our vote share and we have to see to it that how do we have to go about to increase the vote share," he added

Giving a detailed account of the 'Garib Kalyan' package and 'Atma Nirbhar' package, Nadda said, "We should see that these packages are implemented in letter and spirit in Tamil Nadu. Muruganji should hold video conference meetings with MSME sector for which one lakh crore package has been announced and see to it that they are able to get the MSME collateral loans so that they are able to revive their small industries and see to it that Tamil Nadu which is known for home industries and small scale industries so that the economic activity in Tamil Nadu comes out in full pace using the package."

Similarly for farmers, Rs 1 lakh crore has been allocated. The State BJP president should participate in the formation of Farmers Produce Organisations. All the booth committees should be activated to see to it that these FPOs are formed. In Tamil Nadu, small and big cities, none of the small vendors should be left in taking advantage of this scheme. The booth level workers should help these vendors in getting the collateral loans from the banks under the 'Atma Nirbhar' package.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Cleveland City Council will consider a resolution Wednesday that could lead to the city legally challenging Secretary of State Frank LaRoses decision regarding drop-off boxes for absentee ballots during the Nov. 3 elections.

Council President Kevin Kelley says LaRoses recent decision to only allow one secure drop-off box per county is disproportionately unfair to Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, as well as other large urban centers, because they are not easily accessible for poorer residents and the elderly.

Secretary LaRoses order creates an unjust situation where the city of Cleveland, with a population of over 380,000 has the same number of drop boxes  just one -- as places in Ohio such as all of Vinton County, with a total population of less than 14,000, the resolution states.

Cuyahoga County has its drop box in a parking lot behind the home of the Board of Elections at Euclid Avenue and East 30th Street.

Kelley views LaRoses decision as a form of voter suppression, noting that those larger counties tend to be Democratic. He made that argument in an opinion column Sunday published on cleveland.com.

Cleveland has repeatedly been a target of voter suppression through purges, elimination of voter polling places and restrictions on voting by mail, Kelley wrote in the column. Now, in this upcoming election, the coronavirus pandemic has added another layer of difficulty to the voting process.

Thats why more drop boxes, strategically placed in various neighborhoods, are needed, he said in a statement Monday. So that our citizens, especially our elderly, can have easier access to their right to participate in the democratic process.

In previous elections, Cleveland and other densely populated urban areas have been plagued by excessively long lines at voting places, causing frustration and even some to walk away without casting their ballots.

The resolution, sponsored by Kelley, calls on LaRose to reverse his Aug. 12 decision. LaRose said then that he had not received guidance from Attorney General Dave Yost on the legality of allowing additional drop boxes and that he feared to do so could just spark litigation at a time when the start of early voting is approaching.

The Cleveland resolution also asks that Law Director Barbara Langhenry to explore possible legal action against LaRoses order as a possible violation of state and federal voting statutes and rights guaranteed under both the United States Constitution and the Ohio Constitution.

If the resolution is adopted by council on Wednesday, it would need Mayor Frank Jacksons signature for final approval. The plan is to then send it to other to city councils in other major urban centers of Ohio for their consideration.

There is still time to install more ballot drop-off boxes around the city and county so that our citizens wont have to suffer long lines or slow mail delivery, Kelley said. With more drop-box locations they will be able to safely and securely cast their ballots on November 3.

More from Cleveland City Hall

City of Cleveland bans tailgating before Browns home games

Clevelands law director asked to restrain City Council from investigating Cleveland Public Power critic

Traffic at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport up in July, but still a fraction of 2019 levels

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson plans to deliver State of the City address via social media and telephone

Dennis Kucinich again flirts with run for Cleveland mayor in 2021

Coronavirus impact on Cleveland budget led to spending through July outstripping revenues by $13M
Kamdhenu Paints, a leading manufacturer of high-quality emulsions in the country, today started a public interest campaign through an exciting contest on its social media platforms. The contest campaign to promote awareness on available options to protect exterior walls from the harmful effect of rain such as algae, fungus, and more, this campaign is live from today, 22nd August 2020 on social media platforms, Facebook and will go till 24th August 2020.

The gamified campaign involves a bucket of Kamdhenus Weather Classic Max that the users will have to catch inside an outline. Participants can share a screenshot of their catch to stand a chance of winning some exciting vouchers from Kamdhenu.

Catch the bucket of Weather Classic Max to protect your exteriors & share the screenshot with us and get a chance to win... Posted by Kamdhenu Paints onFriday, 21 August 2020

The onset of monsoon is welcomed with joy as it provides relief from the soaring heat and humidity. However, for homes and other structures, constant exposure to rain can be a cause for worry as exterior walls can become damp, causing the concern, without any timely protective measures. Today there are various products available in the market that will help ensure a worry-free monsoon for one and all.

Talking about the contest, Mr. Saurabh Agarwal, Director, Kamdhenu Paints said, Monsoons are here, and so is the danger to exterior walls from harmful showers of rain, algae, fungus, and more. Kamdhenu Paints have always been known to provide a range of Exterior Emulsions that protects the walls against any weather extremes, and this time we wished to convey the same with the help of a small and interesting contest. Our Weather Supreme & Weather Classic Max emulsion range on the exterior walls makes them water and dirt resistant, has anti-microbiological properties, and provides protection from algae & fungus. The objective behind carrying out this contest is to promote awareness and appeal to our consumers to adopt exterior wall protection products.
Interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi is expected to quit from her post on Monday (August 24) during meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), sources said. It is to be noted that the CWC is the highest decision-making body in the Congress.

Sources close to Sonia, who is the longest serving president of the Congress, said that a letter reportedly sent to the party leadership by several senior leaders, including some sitting and former MPs prompted 73-year-old Sonia Gandhi to step down as party president. It is learnt that in the letter, Congress leaders have urged the top leadership to bring all-round changes in the organizational structure of the party.

It may be recalled that Sonia Gandhi took charge as interim president of the Congress after former president Rahul Gandhi resigned following party's massive defeat in 2019 Lok Sabha poll. Sonia's term as interim president ended on August 10, 2020 but she continued to occupy the top post after senior Congress leaders requested her to remain at the helm of affairs until the party elect a new president.

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Sunday backed the Gandhis and said,"What Congress needs is a leadership that is acceptable not just to a few but to the entire party, through its rank and file, and the nation at large," Singh said. He asserted that the Gandhis were the right persons to lead the Congress.

Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel also openly backed Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi and wrote a letter to the Wayanad MP saying, "For every challenge, Sonia Ji and Rahul Ji are the beacons of light. We are all with you. Congress workers in Chhattisgarh and crores from across the country along with citizens are with you."

"The troubled times our country is going through, only your guidance will get rid of those troubles," he added.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot expressed shock at the Congress leaders' move to write a letter to Sonia Gandhi seeking changes in the organizational structure of the party. "I strongly believe that Hon'ble CP Smt Sonia Gandhi Ji should continue to lead the party at this crucial juncture where the fight is to save the ethos of our Democracy. She has always taken challenges head-on," Gehlot said.

Gehlot's former deputy Sachin Pilot also said that Sonia and Rahul are the best persons to lead the Congress. "Mrs Gandhi and Rahul Ji have shown what it means to sacrifice for the greater good of the people and the party. It's now time to build consensus and consolidate. Our future is stronger when we're united. Most Congress workers would like to see Rahul Ji take over and lead the party," Pilot tweeted.

Puducherry CM V Narayanasamy also echoed similar feelings and said, "I saw the news in some newspapers that ex congressmen wanted overhaul and changes in congress party This kind of statement will create confusion in the minds of millions of congressmen This a ploy by BJP to divert the attention of people from facebook controversy."
DOVER, Del., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Chesapeake Utilities Corporation (NYSE: CPK) (Chesapeake Utilities or the Company) today announced that the Company has entered into an agreement with Atlanta Gas Light (AGL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Southern Company Gas, for AGL to construct and maintain a compressed natural gas (CNG) filling station at the Port Fuel Center located in Port Wentworth near the Port of Savannah in Georgia. The station will provide a strategic staging area and CNG supply source for the Company's Marlin Gas Services subsidiary's (Marlin) CNG virtual pipeline operations. Marlin is a premier North American supplier of mobile CNG utility and pipeline natural gas solutions, and the Savannah location will provide greater access to Marlin's customers in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

"With Marlin now fully integrated into the Chesapeake Utilities family of businesses, we continue to look for opportunities for mobile fuel and virtual pipeline solutions that expand our Florida and Delmarva service areas," said Kevin Webber, senior vice president for Chesapeake Utilities Corporation. "This new fueling station not only positions us to support Marlin CNG trailer filling but allows us to extend environmentally friendly service offerings to a variety of new customers in the Southeast."

Atlanta Gas Light has been building and maintaining CNG fueling stations for fleet operators and CNG retailers in Georgia since the early 1990s. AGL currently operates about 275 CNG vehicles across the state in its day-to-day utility operations.

"We have a long history of supporting CNG initiatives and assisting our customers in meeting their sustainability goals by developing and building CNG infrastructure throughout the state so they can deploy clean, efficient natural gas vehicles," said Pedro Cherry, president and CEO of AGL. "We are proud to be Chesapeake Utilities' infrastructure partner on this project and aide in supplying CNG near the Port of Savannah."

Since 1996, Marlin Gas Services has been providing mobile virtual pipeline applications to local gas distribution utilities, municipal gas companies, intrastate and interstate pipeline companies, natural gas producers, various manufacturers and large industrial customers throughout North America. With its experienced and highly trained personnel in combination with its fleet of CNG tankers, mobile compressors and patented offload regulator systems, Marlin Gas Services provides gas supply support during planned interruptions of service as well as responding rapidly to unexpected interruptions.

The Savannah station is designed to serve local CNG fleets as well as renewable natural gas (RNG) fueled vehicles, including high capacity dispensers for fueling Class 8 trucks. The station aligns with the Company's ongoing commitment to environmental responsibility by supplying clean-burning natural gas to fuel vehicles and making it available to customers with limited access to natural gas. CNG-powered vehicles produce lower emissions than gasoline and diesel vehicles, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to 30%, and nitrogen oxide emissions by 85%.

Chesapeake Utilities is also in the process of developing and contracting RNG to supply ultra-low carbon fuel for local fleets. When CNG vehicles are fueled with RNG, the greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by up to 90%, or can even be carbon negative depending on the source of the RNG.

In addition, the CNG station will provide opportunities for both on-port and surrounding logistics centers to take advantage of various types of natural gas-fueled equipment, such as yard tractors and trucks, to advance their sustainability initiatives. Chesapeake Utilities and its affiliates are working with a number of truck and equipment manufacturers and financing entities to establish incentives and reasonable financing terms for fleet conversion; and Marlin will be offering a mobile fueling solution for fleets that are on-port or in the regional logistics centers.

"The Georgia Ports Authority has had a long-term commitment to operating in a sustainable fashion and cutting our environmental footprint, in part by transitioning much of our equipment from diesel to electric power," said Georgia Ports Authority Executive Director Griff Lynch. "Marlin's entry into the Savannah market will provide the support necessary for our port community to expand the migration to fuel options that lower carbon emissions and provide cleaner air."

The Port Fuel Center is a 15-acre fully permitted site with additional fueling amenities, restaurants and a convenience store. The Center will provide the full array of fueling choices, including diesel and gasoline, to serve the more than 12,000 trucks that pass the site daily. The CNG fueling station, which is slated to open in early 2021, has received the endorsement of the city of Port Wentworth and the Georgia Ports Authority.

"The Port Fuel Center is excited to partner with Marlin to bring additional fueling options for its customers, providing increased opportunities to support more sustainable vehicles and equipment," said Sean Register, owner of the Port Fuel Center.

About Chesapeake Utilities Corporation

Chesapeake Utilities Corporation is a diversified energy delivery company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which is engaged in natural gas transmission and distribution; electricity generation and distribution; propane gas distribution; mobile CNG utility services and solutions; and other businesses. Information about Chesapeake Utilities Corporation's businesses is available at www.chpk.com, through the Company's Investor Relations App and on the Annual Report Microsite at cpkannualreport.com.

Please note that Chesapeake Utilities Corporation is not affiliated with Chesapeake Energy, an oil and natural gas exploration company headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

About Atlanta Gas Light

Atlanta Gas Light is one of four natural gas distribution companies of Southern Company Gas, a wholly owned subsidiary of Southern Company (NYSE: SO). Atlanta Gas Light provides natural gas delivery service to more than 1.6 million customers in Georgia. In operation since 1856, the company is one of the oldest corporations in the state. For more information, visit atlantagaslight.com.



About Southern Company Gas

Southern Company Gas is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Atlanta-based Southern Company (NYSE:SO), America's premier energy company. Southern Company Gas serves approximately 4.2 million natural gas utility customers through its regulated distribution companies in four states with approximately 700,000 retail customers through its companies that market natural gas. Other nonutility businesses include investments in interstate pipelines, asset management for natural gas wholesale customers and ownership and operation of natural gas storage facilities. For more information, visit southerncompanygas.com.

About Georgia Ports Authority

Georgia's deepwater ports and inland barge terminals support more than 439,000 jobs throughout the state annually and contribute $25 billion in income, $106 billion in revenue and $2.9 billion in state and local taxes to Georgia's economy. The Port of Savannah is home to the largest single-terminal container facility of its kind in North America, handling 8.5% of U.S. containerized cargo volume and 10% of all U.S. containerized exports in its FY2017. For more information, visit gaports.com.

For more information regarding this press release, contact:

Justin Mulcahy

Public Relations Manager

302.217.7050

[email protected]

SOURCE Chesapeake Utilities Corporation

Related Links

http://www.chpk.com


The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Police Command has rescued two children that were allegedly locked up in a toilet in a house in Garki, Abuja.

In a statement, the spokesman of the command, DSP Anjuguri Manzah, said the two kids were subjected to inhuman treatment by their guardian who lives on the second floor of a two storey-building in the Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA) Quarters, Garki.

He said one of the children, Wisdom Christopher, 9, whom he said miraculously escaped through the window of their guardian's apartment located in a two storey-building, raised the alarm which led to the rescue of the second victim, Angel Nwoga, also 9-years-old, from the apartment.

He said the second victim was rescued from the apartment by operatives from Garki police division and some officials of the Federal Fire Service.

According to him, the guardian of the victims, Mrs. Loveth Ilobi, was reported to have been subjecting the children to inhuman treatment.

"Information has it that she often starved the children and locked them up in the toilet pending her return from work late at night," he said.

Manzah said the culprit had been arrested by police operatives from Garki police division and that investigation had commenced.
American authorities on Sunday announced that doctors could use blood plasma from recovered coronavirus patients as a treatment against the disease

American authorities on Sunday announced that doctors could use blood plasma from recovered coronavirus patients as a treatment against the disease that has killed more than 176,000 in the US.

The move by the Food and Drug Administration comes as President Donald Trump faces intense pressure to curb the contagion that has hobbled the world's largest economy and clouded his once-promising prospects for re-election in November.

"European markets have kicked off the week in style, with the FDA's decision to approve the convalescent plasma coronavirus treatment raising hopes that we could see a vaccine fast-tracked before long," said Joshua Mahony, senior market analyst at IG trading group.

Hong Kong's main stock index meanwhile led gains across Asia, rallying 1.7 percent with traders cheered by a pledge from China's banking regulator that it would continue to back the city as a financial hub after concerns were raised following the imposition of a new security law last month.

Investors will this week be keeping an eye also on a virtual gathering of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for monetary policy guidance after they have already provided already a wall of cash to support the global economy during the pandemic.

The main attraction is a speech by Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell that is slated to take place on Thursday.

"More clarity will no doubt be sought via this week's Jackson Hole symposium," said Ben Emons, of Medley Global Advisors.

Traders are additionally keeping tabs on Washington, where US lawmakers are struggling to reach an agreement on a fresh stimulus package for the American economy.

"Democrats and Republicans are still very far (from) reaching a deal, and this means no further immediate aid in terms of fiscal policy," said Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at Avatrade.

"Investors will like to know how the Fed will use language to make politicians understand in Washington about the importance of another stimulus package."

- Key figures around 1045 GMT -

London - FTSE 100: UP 2.0 percent at 6,118.76 points

Frankfurt - DAX 30: UP 2.4 percent at 13,075.07

Paris - CAC 40: UP 2.3 percent at 5,009.88

EURO STOXX 50: UP 2.3 percent at 3,334.80

Tokyo - Nikkei 225: UP 0.3 percent at 22,985.51 (close)

Hong Kong - Hang Seng: UP 1.7 percent at 25,551.58 (close)

Shanghai - Composite: UP 0.2 percent at 3,385.64 (close)

New York - Dow: UP 0.7 percent at 27,930.33 points (close Friday)

Euro/dollar: UP at $1.1829 from $1.1795 at 2115 GMT on Friday

Dollar/yen: DOWN at 105.72 yen from 105.78 yen

Pound/dollar: UP at $1.3120 from $1.3087

Euro/pound: UP at 90.18 pence from 90.09 pence

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  The Department of Health supports the plan to tap religious leaders to provide guidance, enlightenment, and support to those struggling with their mental health amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Ang Pilipinas, we are highly religious. We always turn to prayers when things go bad...Tinitingala sila ng ating kababayan, malaking tulong kung makakausap nila para magkaroon ng appeasement ang ating kababayan na nakararanas ng depression," Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said on Monday.

[Translation: The Philippines is a highly religious country. We turn to prayers when things look bad. The church leaders are looked up to. It will help if they can reach out so those who have depression can be appeased.]

Inter-agency Task Force chief implementer Carlito Galvez Jr. has expressed concern following the reported increase in suicide cases brought about by the health crisis and loss of jobs, saying the help of church and religious leaders are badly needed.

Vergeire also said families play an important role in the mental health of their members, saying they should be vigilant if an individual is showing signs of depression or anxiety.

She also urged those undergoing alarming changes in their mental wellbeing to call the National Center for Mental Health Crisis hotline.

"Hindi porket tumawag kayo sa hotline ay loko-loko o mayroon kayong sira sa ulo. It is okay not to be okay especially in this situation na mayroong pandemiya," she said.

[Translation: Calling the hotline does not mean you're crazy. It is okay not to be okay especially in this pandemic situation.]

Meanwhile, Cagayan de Oro Rep. Rufus Rodriguez urged the government to hire more guidance counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health experts to help the public cope with the health crisis. He said the national government and local government units should prepare facilities for counseling and treating people with psychological problems.

If you are in need of mental health support, please call the 24/7 National Center for Mental Health Crisis Hotline at (0917) 899-8727 or (02)7-989-8727 or 1553 (Landline-to-landline only).
Iraq's prime minister has vowed to bring rogue gunmen in the country to justice, after one prominent activist who survived an assassination attempt warned the armed groups were succeeding in silencing dissent.

Lodia Raymond, a 27-year-old civil society activist from Basra, says she is in hiding with leg injuries following the attack last Monday that left another activist in hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest.

"I feel the loss of my courage, fear and fatigue is dominant," Ms Raymond said, after her close friend and fellow activist Reham Yaqoub was fatally shot in her car by a gunman on a motorcycle on Tuesday.

"I think that I have lost a large part of my dreams and ambitions," Ms Raymond said, adding that she would no longer attend protests and was considering fleeing Basra.

The attacks come as Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi seeks US support for Iraq's government at a time where it is facing economic and social upheaval, and threats from Islamic State remnants and from rogue militias.

"Outlaw groups are trying to terrorise the people of Basra," Mr Kadhimi said during a surprise visit to the southern city on Saturday, hours after returning from Washington DC.

Security failures that led to the recent attacks were not acceptable, he said, promising to find the culprits. The latest string of attacks in Basra started on August 14, when gunmen killed activist Tahseen Osama.

His death sparked days of street protests in Basra and prompted Mr Kadhimi to fire Basra's police chief and other security officials.

Mr Kadhimi had just left on his visit to Washington when Ms Yaqoub was killed, which analysts interpreted as an attempt to undermine him.

"It was clearly another message to Kadhimi," said Lahib Higel, a senior Iraq analyst for for the Belgium-based International Crisis Group.

"He is the prime minister that came into place because of the protesters, he's supposed to be the one to meet their demands and hold these perpetrators responsible," Ms Higel said.

Mr Kadhami came to power in April in the wake of widespread protests. He pledged to rein in outlaw militias and protect protesters. Since protesters began demanding jobs and an end to corruption last October, more than 600 have been killed in a crackdown by security forces and unknown gunmen.

In a statement on Friday, the UK, European states, Canada and Australia condemned what they described as a "systematic campaign of public threats and intimidation". ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]


LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Rio Tinto Plc said that it will cut this year's bonuses of its chief executive officer and two other senior executives following a review of the company's destruction of two ancient rock shelters in Western Australia.



The review found no single root cause or error that directly resulted in the destruction of the rockshelters. It was the result of a series of decisions, actions and omissions over an extended period of time, the Anglo-Australian mining giant said in a statement.



Rio detonated explosives in May in an area of the Juukan Gorge, destroying the 46,000-year-old Aboriginal heritage site in Western Australia.



The company has cut its chief executive officer J-S Jacques' short-term bonuses of 1.70 million pounds. It will also reduce J-S Jacques' 2016 long-term incentive plan award by 1 million pounds. The long-term incentive is due to vest in the first half of 2021.



Chris Salisbury, chief executive of Iron Ore; and Simone Niven, Group Executive, Corporate Relations will not receive their short-term bonuses of A$1.11 million and 525,000 pounds respectively.



Simon Thompson, chairman of Rio Tinto, said the company will not repeat what happened at Juukan Gorge and it will continue its work to rebuild trust with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.



Thompson said that the company fully recognizes traditional owners must be treated as equal partners which includes regular, open and respectful dialogue.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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A kebab shop in the heart of Brisbane's nightlife precinct has been fined almost $7000 after videos were posted online showing a large crowd of customers breaking out in impromptu dance.

Police said the incident occurred about 3am on Sunday inside the shop, located within the popular Brunswick Street Mall nightlife precinct in Fortitude Valley.

In an update on Monday afternoon, police confirmed detectives from Taskforce Sierra Linnet, which ensures compliance with the health directions, issued the business with a $6772 fine.

"Business operators and patrons are reminded to adhere to public health directions including social distancing measures at all times to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading in Queensland," the Queensland Police Service said in a statement confirming the fine.
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PAGE TITLE .:Secretari a de Educacio n y Deporte - Edo. Carabobo:. DESCRIPTION La educacio n es la excelencia... KEYWORDS Educaci n, Educacion, Secretar a, Secretaria, Gobierno, Gobernaci n, Gobernacion, Carabobo, Tecnolog a, Tecnologia, Escuelas, Escuela, School, Estado, Venezuela OTHER KEYWORDS opcin, naguanagua, de la, carabobo, tweets por, tweets, ni os



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The bear was captured by forest rangers a few hours after the attack - Carabinieri police

A long-running project to reintroduce brown bears to Italy is under intense scrutiny after a male bear attacked an off-duty police officer who was walking in the Dolomites at the weekend.

Experts said it was the first time a male bear has attacked a human in the area -- previous attacks were by females defending their cubs -- and that it represented a dangerous escalation of the threat level.

The 24-year-old policeman was on a walk late on Saturday, prior to starting a night shift, when the bear burst out of the undergrowth near the village of Andalo, in the northern region of Trentino-South Tyrol.

The bear pinned him down, biting him and raking his body with its claws, before lumbering off into the woods. The officer was taken to hospital and was due to be discharged on Monday.

Luckily it was not too serious, said Alberto Perli, the mayor of Andalo. But he has numerous injuries to his back, his arms and legs, as well as scratches all over. It was an unprovoked attack by a male without cubs.

Locals said the bear had become increasingly bold in recent weeks, ransacking rubbish bins and wandering into villages in search of food.

The two-year-old, 265lb (121kg) bear, known to biologists as M57, was captured by forest rangers a few hours after the attack and taken to a wildlife enclosure in Casteller, near the city of Trento.

It is the same enclosure from which another large bear, nicknamed Papillon for its elusive nature, has escaped from twice.

Bears were reintroduced to Italy from Slovenia in the 1990s - Getty

The head of the local government said there are now too many bears and the project has become unsustainable and dangerous.

Given the size of our territory and population, the number of bears is too big to manage, said Maurizio Fugatti, the governor of the autonomous province of Trentino. Some of the bears should be transferred to other parts of northern Italy, he said.

But conservation groups said the problem was not the number of bears, but the authorities failure to manage their relationship with humans.

Story continues

Reacting to this by capturing the bear and placing it in captivity is an implicit admission of the incapacity of the authorities to manage the reintroduction of bears, said the Italian branch of the International Organisation for Animal Protection.

It pointed to the example of North America, where people manage to co-exist with bears and signs in national parks explain how to avoid confrontation. Italy, in contrast, was in the Stone Age with its attitude to the animals.

Brown bears, once driven to the brink of extinction in Italy, began to be reintroduced from Slovenia in the 1990s and there is now a thriving population of around 70 adults. Attacks on humans are rare and the European brown bear is considered much less dangerous than the North American grizzly, which can grow to 900lb.
The New Mexico Technology Flying 40 program, postponed earlier this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, has been rescheduled for the fall and is soliciting applications, according to a news release.

The event recognizes the states fastest growing technology companies and typically culminates in a celebratory event in June.

This year, ranking companies will be celebrated via social media and at the events website.

Company leaders interested in submitting their business for consideration can find online applications and program details at www.flying40.com, and must submit applications by Sept. 11.

Eligibility will be determined in three categories:

 Top revenue growth companies with revenues between $1 million and $10 million.

 Top revenue growth companies with revenues of more than $10 million.

 Top revenue-producing technology companies irrespective of revenue growth.

A list of ranking companies, along with revenue figures, will be published in a special Outlook edition Oct. 26.

The Journal is a media sponsor of the program.

Other program sponsors include the Sandia Science & Technology Park Development Corp., KPMG LLP, New Mexico Bank and Trust, Delta Dental, True Health New Mexico, New Mexico Angels Venture, New Mexico MEP and the City of Albuquerques Economic Development department. Community sponsors include the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce, Sandia Laboratory Federal Credit Union and the New Mexico Tech Council.
Turkeys gold production is expected to rise 16 percent this year, and the central bank will likely buy all of it.

Turkey is poised to produce a record amount of gold this year and the central bank will probably buy all of it  at prices near record highs.

Production by one of the worlds top buyers of the precious metal is expected to increase 16% to 44 tons this year, Hasan Yucel, the head of Turkeys Gold Miners Association, said in an interview.

Legislation introduced in 2017 gives the central bank the right of first refusal to purchase gold mined in the country at prevailing market prices. The value of its gold reserves surged to an all-time high in the week through Aug. 7, only to drop 5% a week later, the biggest decline in five months. That effectively mirrored the moves in market prices over the same period.

The central bank has always been our only buyer since the legislation was changed, Yucel said, predicting that the trend is unlikely to change this year.

The value of the central banks stockpiles have surged even as it ran down foreign-exchange reserves to an almost 15-year low to support its weakening currency.

Turks are big consumers of the commodity, which is used as a traditional gift for events ranging from weddings to circumcision ceremonies. Its typically also used by merchants inside Istanbuls Grand Bazaar, one of the worlds oldest covered markets, to pay rent.

Thats helped keep local demand at about 160 tons for the past 25 years, and consumers are expected to buy at least 150 tons, Yucel said. The countrys gold import bill was $7.2 billion in 2019 for 160 tons, the association said Monday. Imports amounted to 137 tons in the first seven months of the year, it said.

The central bank, based in Ankara, had 583 tons of gold reserves at the end of June, up from 413 tons at end-2019, according to the World Gold Council. While its still far behind top holders like the U.S. or Germany, the Turkish regulator has been the biggest bullion buyer so far this year, adding about 170 tons to its stockpile. In terms of consumer demand, Turkey is the fifth largest.

A spokesman for the central bank declined to comment on its purchasing strategy.

The jump in gold prices has boosted appetite among local investors to produce the metal, even though local consumer demand has cooled as a result, said Yucel, who is also the chief executive officer of Nurol Holding ASs gold-mining unit, Tumad Madencilik AS.

Turkeys recoverable gold reserves of 1,500 tons is a bigger resource for the country than the natural-gas discovery in the Black Sea announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday, he said.

The value-add that the country will have from gold is much bigger than the natural-gas find, making it clear the need for more government support in gold production, Yucel said.

The industry has attracted $6 billion of investment in exploration in the past three decades, he said.

Alamos Gold Inc. of Canada, Nurol, Guris Holding AS and Calik Holding AS plan to invest at least $100 million each in western Turkeys Canakkale and Balikesir regions, or in Artvin province, in the northeastern tip of the country bordering Georgia, Yucel said.

(Adds 2020 import figures in seventh paragraph, further comment in 11th and 15th paragraphs)

With assistance from Tugce Ozsoy and Elena Mazneva.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday appealed to the Centre to postpone the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) due to the prevailing COVID-19 situation.

Aspirants sit for JEE for admission to premier engineering colleges and NEET for undergraduate medical courses.

Banerjee, in a series of tweets on Monday morning, said she was vocal about the issue during the last video conference of chief ministers with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In our last video conference with the Honble PM Shri @narendramodiJi, I had been vocal against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020, which had a huge potential to put student lives at risk," she tweeted.

In our last video conference with the Honble PM Shri @narendramodi Ji, I had been vocal against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020, which had a huge potential to put student lives at risk. (1/2) Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) August 24, 2020

Banerjee appealed to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone the examinations until the situation is conducive again.

Now with the directive of @EduMinOfIndiato conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sep, I would again appeal to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone these examinations until the situation is conducive again. It is our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students," she said in another Twitter post.

Now with the directive of @EduMinOfIndia to conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sep, I would again appeal to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone these examinations until the situation is conducive again. It is our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students. (2/2) Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) August 24, 2020

Earlier, on July 11, Banerjee had written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking his urgent intervention regarding UGC decision to conduct terminal examination for various courses in colleges and universities in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic.

In the prevailing situation, such revised guidelines issued by the UGC, will only adversely affect the interest of students of West Bengal and all over the country. I understand that various states have already raised the issue with the Government of India expressing their concerns and disagreement with the new guidelines, the state chief minister had said.

The Supreme Court had dismissed a plea seeking the postponement of JEE (Main) April, 2020 and NEET (Undergraduate) examinations, which are scheduled to be held in September, amid a spurt in COVID-19 cases, saying precious year of students cannot be wasted" and life has to go on".

The JEE (Main) is scheduled to be held between September 1 and 6, while the JEE (Advanced) on September 27. The NEET will be held on September 13.

On Friday, Education Ministry officials had said the JEE (Main) and the NEET-UG will be conducted in September as scheduled.
"Several teams" are worried about the looming return of spectators to Formula 1 races.

Amid the global coronavirus crisis, the sport only got up and running again thanks to the 'ghost races' concept which excluded fans from attending.

But organisers of the Russian GP are currently selling about 30,000 tickets for the Sochi race, while Portimao in Portugal are making plans for 50,000 spectators.

"According to our information, several teams are concerned about this and fear for the health of their crews," Bild am Sonntag newspaper reports.

Paulo Pinheiro, the Portimao circuit boss, told Speed Week that the 50,000 figure represents about half capacity.

"It is about not overworking our system," he said. "At 50,000, the pressure is significantly lower."

Pinheiro insists that even though lots of spectators will be present, it does not represent a return to normal for Formula 1.

"Just because spectators will be allowed doesn't mean that everything will be allowed," he explained.

"When you buy a ticket, you get it sent to your home along with numerous rules that you have to agree to."

Among the rules are restrictions on where rental cars can be hired from, specific routes to the venue, controlled movement around the circuit, and mask-wearing.

"The mask may only be removed for eating and drinking, and those needing to go to the toilet must do so in consultation with the officials. It won't be like normal," Pinheiro said.

He also said 5,000 extra police will be in the nearby regions to control spectator movement.

"We're going to have a big event, but everyone has to follow the rules," said Pinheiro. "We are the test dummy for all future major events, so the fans have to behave correctly."

(GMM)
The empty bulk carrier was 11 days into a month-long voyage from Singapore to Brazil, where it was due to pick up a cargo, when it ran aground just a mile off the islands southern tip on July 25. About three-quarters of the oil in its tanks  some 3,900 tons of very low-sulfur fuel oil, 200 tons of diesel and 90 tons of lubricant  was transferred off the vessel. The rest leaked into the sea  much of it coming ashore in the Ile aux Aigrettes nature reserve, home to the last remnants of Mauritiuss dry coastal forest and the endangered species that depend on it.
Britain 'will be first' to get doses of Oxford University's Covid-19 vaccine if it works, Number 10 confirmed today amid claims Donald Trump is aiming to fast-track the experimental vaccine into use before the US election this autumn.

White House insiders claim the US President is considering pushing for approval for emergency use of the experimental jab, which is one of the world's most promising candidates.

Early trials have shown promising results, with tests showing the vaccine  being mass-produced by pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca  is safe to use in humans and appears to provoke an immune response.

But AstraZeneca insisted it has not entered any negotiation with the US and Prime Minister Boris Johnson's spokesman said the company had entered into 'a number of agreements with other countries' but that the UK would be 'first' in line.

On the news that Mr Trump was considering fast-tracking the vaccine, one of the UK's top medical officers warned that there should be 'fair distribution' of any working jab and that richer countries should not hoover up all the supplies.

And in a thinly-veiled dig at President Trump, the World Health Organization's boss said a global roll-out of a coronavirus vaccine was in the 'interests of all countries', warning that 'vaccine nationalism' may cause prices to spike and lead to a prolonged pandemic because the poorer countries would be priced out of a jab.

The only country in the world to have approved a vaccine against Covid-19 so far is Russia. But it came under fire for doing so without proper clinical trials.

Risks of using jabs that have not been tested thoroughly include damaging side effects or administering one that doesn't really work. If something goes wrong with an official vaccine, it could further dent already-fragile public faith in vaccinations.

Getting a vaccine into use and slowing down the US's devastating coronavirus crisis  the worst in the world  could look good for Mr Trump ahead of the presidential election in November, when he runs against Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

AstraZeneca, which claims it can manufacture 2billion doses and already operates several facilities in America, has denied it is in talks with White House officials about fast-tracking approval of the jab. The US ordered 300million doses of the vaccine last month.

US President Donald Trump has watched his country gripped by one of the worst Covid-19 crises in the world with more than 5.7million officially confirmed cases of the disease

Boris Johnson's official spokesman said today that people in Britain would be the first in the world to receive Oxford University's Covid-19 vaccine if it is proven to work (Pictured: The Prime Minister at the National Memorial Arboretum in England this month)

AUSTRALIA BUYS OXFORD VACCINE BUT EXPERTS WARN AGAINST RUSHING Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has locked in a deal with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to secure a potential coronavirus vaccine, if its Oxford University phase three trials prove successful. But doctors have warned a coronavirus vaccine may create dangerous side-effects and argued against a 'no jab, no play' policy. Vaccine development is typically a long and complex process that can take up to 15 years. Because of the urgency of the coronavirus pandemic, researchers are fast-tracking their testing, hoping to produce a safe and effective innoculation by next year. Australian Medical Association president Omar Khorshid said even positive phase three trials - mass testing on members of the public - would not prove the vaccine candidate is safe. 'We have to acknowledge it is a rushed approval process and even if the phase three trials on this Oxford vaccine go really well, it's still not absolutely proven that it is safe, not as proven as is normally the case,' he told The Age newspaper. 'That does increase the risk that there might be rare side effects ... that we just don't know about.' Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has been involved in fast-tracking the testing of the Oxford University candidate vaccine. In May, the CSIRO said it was already at the stage of pre-clinical trials - a position that typically takes up to two years to reach. Dr Khorshid said it was expected the Oxford coronavirus vaccine would only be approved for adults in Australia at first. He said the Australian Government's proposal of forcing people to take the AstraZeneca vaccine by tying it to services such as childcare, school or social security payments could not be justified because it had been rushed through clinical trials. Mr Morrison has said he wants to make an approved vaccine 'as mandatory as possible', but it is not going to be compulsory. Deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth said possible punishments for unvaccinated people could include not being able to go to restaurants, travel internationally or catch public transport. Monash University Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences Professor Colin Pouton told The Age it was important that people should have the right to refuse. University of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Professor Heidi Larson, said it was precisely the 'no jab, no play' policies that had sparked the anti-vaccination movement worldwide. Advertisement

Mr Trump has already vented his frustration at the slow process of getting a vaccine, accusing officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of deliberately delaying evaluations until the election is over.

He did announce significant progress yesterday, however, when he confirmed that US hospitals could now use blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients as an emergency treatment, claiming that it could reduce the risk of death by a third.

The President's best hope for getting the jab used before clinical trials have finished would be to get authorisation for 'emergency use' from the FDA.

This is the course of action people briefed on the situation said he is considering taking, the Financial Times reported.

Emergency use authorisation allows officials to push through medical products without proper testing because there is a clear immediate need for them.

It has already been used during the Covid-19 crisis for drugs including the antiviral medication remdesivir, which scientists suggested could reduce the risk of death.

If emergency use were to be granted for the vaccine, it could mean it being pushed out after trials on only 10,000 people even though the FDA standard is for 30,000 people or more.

Large trials are under way in Britain and around the world, but results are not expected for months to come.

But approval for the jab could be made as soon as September, according to an FT source briefed on a meeting between US politicians.

Chief of staff at the White House, Mark Meadows, and the US Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, reportedly confirmed the plan to Democrats at the end of July.

Senior Democratic politician Nancy Pelosi allegedly warned the government against 'cutting corners'.

Top officials have said they would not stand for it if Mr Trump forced through the vaccine without data to prove it was safe.

Dr Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research within the FDA, said he would resign if it happened.

And the assistant secretary for the US Health and Human Services Department, Michael Caputo, denied that emergency use authorisation would be given.

Mr Caputo, who was a member of Donald Trump's campaign team in 2016, said: 'Irresponsible talk of an unsafe or ineffective vaccine being approved for public use is designed to undermine the presidents coronavirus response,' the FT reported.

Commenting on the prospect of the vaccine being fast-tracked in the US, England's deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries said that everyone around the globe should have 'fair and safe access to vaccine development'.

Dr Harries told Sky News: 'We have a global crisis... It is really important that everyone around the world has fair and safe access to vaccine development.

'Obviously those countries which are more developed have the facilities to develop the vaccine and get it safely out to their populations. But I think all public health colleagues would be wanting fair distribution.'

Boris Johnson's office insisted that Britons would not lose out on the jab to other countries.

His official spokesman said today: 'AstraZeneca have entered into a number of agreements with other countries.

'They have the global licensing agreement with Oxford, but we have been clear: once it has been found to be effective, we have signed a deal for 100million doses which means that once it is effective the UK will get first access.'

AstraZeneca, the company manufacturing and distributing the vaccine, denied that it has had discussions with the US about an early deal.

The Oxford University jab is being trialled in the UK but also in other countries such as Brazil and South Africa because they have more cases of Covid-19 than Britain does so it will be easier to test (Pictured: A trial participant in South Africa receives the jab)

GLOBAL VACCINE PROGRAMME 'IN THE INTERESTS OF ALL COUNTRIES', WHO SAYS A globally coordinated roll-out of a coronavirus vaccine will be in the 'interests of all countries', the World Health Organization's (WHO) director general has said in a thinly-veiled dig at President Trump. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned against 'vaccine nationalism' and said competition between rich nations may lead to prices spiking exponentially, which would only prolong the virus. Instead, he urged countries to support the Covax vaccines facility, which has the 'largest and most diverse' Covid-19 vaccine portfolio in the world. He told a WHO press briefing that 172 countries were 'engaging' with the mechanism, which aims to deliver at least two billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021. The US is not involved. Dr Tedros said: 'We're working with vaccine manufacturers to provide all countries that join the effort timely and equitable access to all vaccines, licensed and approved. 'This doesn't just pool risk, it also means that prices will be kept as low as possible. 'New research outlines that global competition for vaccine doses could lead to prices spiking exponentially in comparison to collaborative efforts, such as the Covax facility. 'It would also lead to a prolonged pandemic as only a small number of countries would get most of the supply. Vaccine nationalism only helps the virus.' Nine vaccines are currently part of the Covax portfolio, while discussions were ongoing with four other producers, Dr Tedros said. Advertisement

A statement read: 'AstraZeneca has not discussed emergency use authorization with the US government and it would be premature to speculate on that possibility.

'Late stage Phase II/III trials for AZD1222 are ongoing in the UK and other markets globally, and we do not anticipate efficacy results until later this year.'

The US has been one of the worst hit countries in the world during the Covid-19 pandemic.

More than 5.7million cases have been officially diagnosed and at least 176,808 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins University, which has kept a track on the pandemic since it began in December.

President Trump has been accused of mishandling the crisis and refusing to face up to his government's mistakes, shifting the blame to others and disputing statistics.

Last week the president lashed out at the FDA and accused them of dragging out the process of getting a vaccine ready to go.

He said in a tweet: 'The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics.

'Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!'

The only country to have officially approved a coronavirus vaccine is Russia but the circumstances around it have drawn harsh criticism from scientists.

The jab  given to President Vladimir Putin's own daughter  was reportedly tested on fewer than 40 people before being officially approved.

One scientist blasted Putin's move as 'unethical' because an 'improperly tested vaccine' could have 'disastrous' effects on public health.

While others warned that there is 'no data' to tell whether the Russian vaccine is effective.

Another expert warned that 'the damage from release of any vaccine that was less than safe and effective would exacerbate our current problems insurmountably'.

One expert in Britain said it was 'disturbing' that world leaders might fast-track vaccines or force them through without proper safety testing in order to make political gains.

Professor Danny Altmann, an immunology expert at Imperial College London, said: 'It should be incredibly disturbing to the global medical community to see any potential attempts by any politicians, whether in Russia, the US or elsewhere, to seek to manipulate, short-circuit or exert influence in any way over the agreed scientific protocols that are in place to carefully evaluate comparative safety, immunogenicity and efficacy of vaccines.

'In decades to come, we wont remember which politician polled a few more or less votes.

'But we really wont forget any failed opportunities to put in place the safest most effective possible global programmes to eradicate this pandemic.'

Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca (pictured, a chemist at its HQ in Sydney, Australia) is already manufacturing the vaccine developed by Oxford University so that millions of doses will be ready if it is proven to work

WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE ORDERED OXFORD'S VACCINE ALREADY? UK The UK is the host of research and development efforts of the vaccine, which has been developed by researchers in Oxford and will be manufactured by AstraZeneca, a company based in Cambridge. The British Government has ordered 100million doses of the jab and has already started manufacturing them so they're ready to go if and when clinical trials are successful. The price paid has not been disclosed. US The US Government has ordered 100million doses of the vaccine and contributed $1.2billion (910m) to the research and development of the jab. European Union (EU) The European Commission has agreed a deal for 300million doses of the vaccine if its clinical trials work, with the option to buy a further 100million. The deal has been made on behalf of countries in the EU. The amount of money spent is unknown. Australia Australia has confirmed it ordered enough doses of the vaccine to give one to its entire population of 25million people. It is not clear how many doses the nation has ordered. The UK - with a population of 66m but an order of 100m - ordered more than it needs. China One company in China has agreed a deal with AstraZeneca to make at least 100million doses of the vaccine. Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products, based in the city of Shenzhen, will increase capacity to 200m per year by the end of 2021. Russia A Russian company, R-Pharm, also has a deal to produce and distribute the vaccine, but it is unclear how many it will make or what it will pay to AstraZeneca. Brazil Brazilian officials have set aside $360million (274m) for at least 100million doses of the vaccine. Brazil is currently in one of the worst Covid-19 crises in the world with more than 3.6million official cases so far and 114,000 deaths. Advertisement

While small trials can show whether a vaccine is likely to be safe, the months or years-long Phase III tests which measure effectiveness have not yet taken place, while the WHO has not yet granted approval for the jab.

Oxford University's vaccine, which is being developed with the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, is now in phase three trials in the UK and Brazil.

In these tests the vaccine is being given to tens of thousands of people in real-world environments to see if it protects them from Covid-19. It is the most advanced coronavirus vaccine trial in the world.

Professor Sarah Gilbert, who is leading the Oxford team, is confident the jab could be ready for the most vulnerable people in society by the end of the year.

The team have genetically engineered a virus to look like the coronavirus  to have the same spike proteins on the outside  but be unable to cause any infection inside a person.

This virus, weakened by genetic engineering, is a type of virus called an adenovirus, the same as those which cause common colds, that has been taken from chimpanzees.

The UK Government is not expected to start using the jab until large trials have proved it is safe.

Professor Chris Whitty, England's chief medical officer, said on Saturday it would be 'foolish' to assume a vaccine would be ready before 2021.

Professor Whitty said: 'I would obviously be delighted if it came earlier rather than later but I'd be quite surprised if we had a highly effective vaccine ready for mass use in a large percentage of the population before the end of winter, certainly before this side of Christmas.

'Now that may be wrong, a lot of people are doing a huge amount scientifically, logistically to make sure that's a pessimistic statement, to try and see if we can get a vaccine at extraordinarily fast speed but we have to check it works and we have to make sure it's safe and these things do take time.

'So I think if we look forward a year I think the chances are much greater than if we look forward six months and we need to have that sort of timescale in mind.'

It comes as the World Health Organization's (WHO) director general said a globally coordinated roll-out of a coronavirus vaccine will be in the 'interests of all countries'.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned against 'vaccine nationalism' and said competition may lead to prices spiking exponentially, which would only prolong the virus.

Instead, he urged countries to support the Covax vaccines facility, which has the 'largest and most diverse' Covid-19 vaccine portfolio in the world.

He told a WHO press briefing that 172 countries were 'engaging' with the mechanism, which aims to deliver at least two billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021.

Dr Tedros said: 'We're working with vaccine manufacturers to provide all countries that join the effort timely and equitable access to all vaccines, licensed and approved.

'This doesn't just pool risk, it also means that prices will be kept as low as possible.

'New research outlines that global competition for vaccine doses could lead to prices spiking exponentially in comparison to collaborative efforts, such as the Covax facility.

'It would also lead to a prolonged pandemic as only a small number of countries would get most of the supply. Vaccine nationalism only helps the virus.'

Nine vaccines are currently part of the Covax portfolio, while discussions were ongoing with four other producers, Dr Tedros said.

WHICH TOP VACCINE CANDIDATES HAVE THE UK SECURED DEALS FOR? 1. GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur: 60million doses The Government revealed on July 29 it had signed a deal with pharmaceutical giants GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur If the vaccine proves successful, the UK could begin to vaccinate priority groups, such as frontline health and social care workers and those at increased risk from coronavirus, as early as the first half of next year, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said. Human clinical studies of the vaccine will begin in September followed by a phase 3 study in December. The vaccine is based on the existing technology used to produce Sanofi's seasonal flu vaccine. Genetic material from the surface protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is inserted into insect cells - the basis of Sanofis influenza product - and then injected to provoke an immune response in a human patient. 2. AstraZeneca (manufacturing University of Oxford's): 100million AstraZeneca, which is working in partnership with Oxford University, is already manufacturing the experimental vaccine after a deal was struck on May 17. Professor Sarah Gilbert, who is leading the Oxford team, is confident the jab could be ready for the most vulnerable people by the end of the year. Her comments came after the results from the first phase, published in The Lancet on July 20, showed promise. The team have genetically engineered a virus to look like the coronavirus - to have the same spike proteins on the outside - but be unable to cause any infection inside a person. This virus, weakened by genetic engineering, is a type of virus called an adenovirus, the same as those which cause common colds, that has been taken from chimpanzees. 3. BioNTech/Pfizer: 30million US drug giant Pfizer - most famous for making Viagra - and German firm BioNTech were revealed to have secured a deal with the UK Government on July 20. It reported positive results from the ongoing phase 2/3 clinical trial of one called BNT162b1 on July 1. The company is still running phase 2 trials at the moment. Pfizer's vaccine is one called an mRNA vaccine, which do not directly inject bits of the virus into the body but send genetic material. mRNA vaccines programme the body to produce parts of the virus itself by injecting the body with a molecule that tells disease-fighting cells what to build. The immune system then learns how to fight it. 4. Valneva: 60million The Government has given Valneva  whose vaccine is understood to be in the preclinical stages of development  an undisclosed amount of money to expand its factory in Livingston, Scotland. While the Government revealed a 60million dose deal on July 20, the company said it had reached agreement in principle with the UK government to provide up to 100million doses. Valneva's jab is an inactivated whole virus vaccine, meaning it injects a damaged version of the coronavirus itself into the body. The virus has been destroyed in a way that makes it unable to cause infection, but the body still recognises it as a dangerous intruder and therefore mounts an immune response which it can remember in case of a real Covid-19 infection. 5. Janssen (Johnson & Johnson): 30million The Government has agreed to buy 30million doses of a vaccine made by Janssen if it works. Officials have agreed to help the company in its development of the jab by part-funding a global clinical trial. The first in-human trials of Janssen's jab began in mid-July and are being done on adults over the age of 18 in the US and Belgium. The jab is named Ad26.COV2-S, recombinant, and is a type of jab called a viral vector recombinant vaccine. Proteins that appear on the outside of the coronavirus are reproduced in a lab and then injected into the body to stimulate an immune reaction. The 'Ad' part of the vaccine's name means it works using an adenovirus - a virus best known for causing the common cold - as a vehicle to transport the coronavirus genetics into the body. 6. Novavax: 60million Britain has ordered 60million doses of a vaccine being developed by the US-based company Novavax. It will help to fund late-stage clinical trials in the UK and also boost plans to manufacture the vaccine in Britain. Novavax's jab, named NVX-CoV2373, showed positive results in early clinical trials. It produced an immune response in 100 per cent of people who received it, the company said, and was safe and 'generally well-tolerated'. Novavax's candidate is also a recombinant vaccine and transports the spike proteins found on the outside of the coronavirus into the body in order to provoke the immune system. 7. Imperial College London: Unknown quantity Imperial College London scientists are working on Britain's second home-grown hope for a jab. The candidate is slightly behind Oxford's vaccine in terms of its progress through clinical trials, but is still a major player. The UK Government is understood to have agreed to buy the vaccine if it works but details of a deal have not yet been publicised. Imperial's jab is currently in second-phase human trials after early tests showed it appeared to be safe. Imperial College London will try to deliver genetic material (RNA) from the coronavirus which programs cells inside the patient's body to recreate the spike proteins. It will transport the RNA inside liquid droplets injected into the bloodstream. Advertisement

Fury over Donald Trump's approval of using blood from Covid-19 survivors to treat infected patients as top scientists warn there is no proof it works

Fury erupted today over the controversial decision by the US to approve treating Covid-19 patients using the blood of coronavirus survivors.

Top scientists warned there is no proof the century-old treatment works, despite several studies offering promising results.

The Food and Drug Administration last night gave doctors emergency authorisation to use convalescent plasma, saying the 'known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product'.

Donald Trump called it a 'very big day' at a White House briefing yesterday, adding that the approval was a 'truly historic' moment. The US President also claimed that the treatment was proven to reduce the chance of death from coronavirus by more than one third.

But scientists criticised US officials for making the 'bad conclusion' because the therapy has not been put through the most rigorous human trials, meaning there is no conclusive proof that the treatment works.

One expert, however, called it 'good news' and said he hopes the UK can soon begin to use convalescent plasma routinely.

British researchers leading a major trial into promising therapies  which found that dexamethasone can cut the risk of death in critically-ill coronavirus patients  said the move was 'ripping up good science that protects patients'.

The FDA said more than 70,000 patients had already been treated with convalescent plasma, which sees infected patients given the antibody-rich blood of survivors in an attempt to boost their immune response and fight the disease.

It comes just days after top US experts, namely Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins, reportedly stepped in to pause the authorisation of convalescent plasma because the evidence was not strong enough to do so.

Trump lashed out at the FDA at the weekend and accused the agency of attempting to delay the approval of Covid-19 therapeutics until after the president election in November.

'This is a very big day,' President Trump said at a White House briefing on Sunday, adding the approval was a 'truly historic' moment

Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist from Harvard, said: 'What the hell - This is a bad convalescent plasma conclusionit was not a randomized trial'

Martin Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who is leading the RECOVERY trial, did not welcome the FDA's authorisation

WHAT IS CONVALESCENT PLASMA AND WHERE HAS IT BEEN USED? Convalescent plasma has been used to treat infections for at least a century, dating back to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. It was also trialed during the 2009-2010 H1N1 influenza virus pandemic, 2003 SARS epidemic, and the 2012 MERS epidemic. Convalescent plasma was used as a last resort to improve the survival rate of patients with SARS whose condition continued to deteriorate. It has been proven 'effective and life-saving' against other infections, such as rabies and diphtheria, said Dr Mike Ryan, of the World Health Organization. 'It is a very important area to pursue,' Dr Ryan said. Although promising, convalescent plasma has not been shown to be effective in every disease studied, the FDA say. Is it already being used for COVID-19 patients? Before it can be routinely given to patients with COVID-19, it is important to determine whether it is safe and effective through clinical trials. The FDA said it was 'facilitating access' for the treatment to be used on patients with serious or immediately life-threatening COVID-19 infections'. It came after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that plasma would be tested there to treat the sickest of the state's coronavirus patients. COVID-19 patients in Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai are being treated with this method, authorities report. Lu Hongzhou, professor and co-director of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre, said in February the hospital had set up a special clinic to administer plasma therapy and was selecting patients who were willing to donate. 'We are positive that this method can be very effective in our patients,' he said. Meanwhile, the head of a Wuhan hospital said plasma infusions from recovered patients had shown some encouraging preliminary results. The MHRA has approved the use of the therapy in the UK, but it has not been revealed which hospitals have already tried it. How does it work? Blood banks take plasma donations much like they take donations of whole blood; regular plasma is used in hospitals and emergency rooms every day. If someone's donating only plasma, their blood is drawn through a tube, the plasma is separated and the rest infused back into the donor's body. Then that plasma is tested and purified to be sure it doesn't harbor any blood-borne viruses and is safe to use. For COVID-19 research, people who have recovered from the coronavirus would be donating. Scientists would measure how many antibodies are in a unit of donated plasma - tests just now being developed that aren't available to the general public - as they figure out what's a good dose, and how often a survivor could donate. There is also the possibility that asymptomatic patients - those who never showed symptoms or became unwell - would be able to donate. But these 'silent carriers' would need to be found via testing first. Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda is working on a drug that contains recovered patients antibodies in a pill form, Stat News reported. Could it work as a vaccine? While scientists race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, blood plasma therapy could provide temporary protection for the most vulnerable in a similar fashion. A vaccine trains people's immune systems to make their own antibodies against a target germ. The plasma infusion approach would give people a temporary shot of someone else's antibodies that are short-lived and require repeated doses. If US regulator the FDA agrees, a second study would give antibody-rich plasma infusions to certain people at high risk from repeated exposures to COVID-19, such as hospital workers or first responders, said Dr Liise-anne Pirofski of New York's Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. That also might include nursing homes when a resident becomes ill, in hopes of giving the other people in the home some protection, she said. Advertisement

The new FDA authorisation means those who had coronavirus and recovered can now donate their blood to be used as a treatment for those currently suffering from the disease.

The FDA approves emergency use authorisations during public health emergencies to speed along unapproved therapeutics to treat or prevent serious diseases where there are no other adequate and available alternatives.

For instance, on May 1, the FDA authorised the emergency use of Gilead Science's experimental antiviral remdesivir to treat patients.

'Today I'm pleased to make a truly historic announcement in our battle against the China virus that will save countless lives,' Trump said last night as he was flanked by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn.

The president also claimed the treatment has proven to reduce the chance of death from coronavirus by more than one third.

Mr Azar said: 'I just want to emphasise this point because I don't want you to gloss over this number. We dream in drug development of something like a 35 per cent mortality reduction.'

'This is a major advance in the treatment of patients. This is a major advance.'

Trump claimed that over 100,000 Americans have already enrolled to receive this treatment.

'Based on the science and the data, the FDA has made the independent determination that the treatment is safe and very effective,' Trump assured.

He highlighted that he was not the one pushing for the approval.

Mayo Clinic researchers revealed findings last week that suggested convalescent plasma could improve survival odds for Covid-19 patients.

The study assessed 35,000 patients given convalescent plasma, including a high number who were critically ill.

But the study compared patients who had received the treatment with each other. It looked at mortality rates between patients given high or low doses of antibodies, and between those treated early and later.

This is different to a randomised placebo controlled study  when an experimental drug or therapy is compared with a placebo or alternative medicine to see if it truly offers better survival rates.

Randomised trials are deemed the gold standard for testing if a therapy truly works because they eliminate any bias.

The findings were published on a pre-print server, MedRxiv, on August 12. Because they are not in a medical journal, they have not been scrutinised by other scientists yet, which helps to flag flaws.

The findings show 8.7 per cent of patients treated with convalescent plasma within three days of diagnosis died after seven days, compared to about 12 per cent of patients who were treated four days or more after their diagnosis  a statistical difference of around 37 per cent.

Those treated with plasma containing the highest levels of antibodies had a 35 per cent lower risk of dying within a week compared to those treated with less-rich plasma.

Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist from Harvard, pointed out the 35 per cent reduction in mortality was not between the experiment group and control group.

Reacting to the news of the FDA's authorisation on Twitter, he said: 'What the hell. This is a bad convalescent plasma conclusion  it was not a randomized trial. Trump doesn't care, but FDA head should know better!'

There are two randomised control trials of convalescent plasma therapy ongoing in the UK  the REMAP-CAP trial is seeing if it will help patients in intensive care, while the RECOVERY trial is looking at hospitalised patients.

Martin Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who is leading the RECOVERY trial, did not welcome the FDA's authorisation.

He wrote on Twitter: 'Convalescent plasma for COVID-19. It may work. We hope it will work. But nobody knows if it does. That's why we are studying it in the #RECOVERYtrial. Then we'll know & wont have to guess.'

Another RECOVERY trial lead, Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford, said: 'Allowing widespread use of unproven treatments creates confusion and undermines chances of improving care through proper science.

'This is not "cutting red tape" it's ripping up good science that protects patients.'

But Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist from University of Warwick, was pleased with the developments.

He told MailOnline: 'The FDA emergency use authorisation for convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19 is great news.

'Ive been a strong advocate for this approach since the beginning of the outbreak and, with other colleagues, petitioned the government to investigate its use.

'Convalescent plasma therapy has been used to the prevention and treatment of many infectious diseases for more than a century. Over the past 20 years this approach has been successfully used in the treatment of SARS, MERS and 2009 H1N1 pandemic flu with good safety profile and efficacy.

'I hope the UK trial reports soon and we can begin using convalescent plasma routinely to treat patients with Covid-19.'

Dr Feigl-Ding pointed out that the 35 per cent reduction in mortality was not between the experiment group and control group

Another RECOVERY trial lead, Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford, said: 'Allowing widespread use of unproven treatments creates confusion and undermines chances of improving care through proper science'
There are calls for Melbourne to create shared bubble arrangements amid its Stage 4 lockdown as single people are feeling more isolated under the restrictions.

With Melbourne now just halfway through its six-week Stage 4 lockdown, which could be extended if coronavirus cases dont continue to drop, singles especially are feeling the effects with those who live by themselves reporting higher levels of loneliness.

The latest census data revealed that in Victoria  which reported 116 new coronavirus cases on Monday  one in four households were single-person homes.

People who live by themselves are feeling more alone amid the Stage 4 lockdown. Source: Getty

Research from Swinburne University found those living by themselves were experiencing more feelings of loneliness than those who were not.

The research also associated loneliness with an increase in mental health symptoms.

But with people in Melbourne able to still visit intimate partners amid the lockdown, some say its an unfair advantage over singles who otherwise arent allowed to visit a friend in the same way.

Professor of Global Health at Monash University and clinical psychologist, Jane Fisher, told Yahoo News Australia a shared bubble arrangement would have benefits that would outweigh the harm.

In my opinion, if you follow all the safety requirements like social distancing, wearing masks and not going out if you have symptoms, then its a very good suggestion, she said.

Melbourne woman Kristen Remington agreed, telling the ABC catching up with people via video chats like Zoom was not a substitute for seeing people in person.

She was calling on the government to introduce a shared bubble arrangement for singles, like ones seen in other countries.

I find it quite frustrating that people in relationships can see their partner no matter where they live, she told the ABC.

However, as a single person who lives on my own, I cant nominate one close person who I can see.

How shared bubble arrangement would work

Calls for a shared bubble arrangement in Victoria come after New Zealand implemented it during their lockdown earlier this year.

Story continues

Government advice said a person could leave their residence to visit or stay at another residence under a shared bubble arrangement if one person lived alone in one or both residences, or if everybody in the residences in the shared bubble arrangement were vulnerable.

Professor Fisher said if the Victorian government implemented the plan it would have to trust those under the shared bubble arrangement as it could be complicated to police.

Anything that involves another form of permissions or something you have to register for is going to be a problem, she said.

It would have to be done on the basis of trust and good will.

I think the community has shown willingness to abide by restrictions and this is something that could be presumed people would do in good faith.

Professor Fisher said it would best work the same way as the exemption for intimate partners and would not necessarily have to be an agreement with somebody within the 5km radius.

Its one of the specifics that would have to be worked out. I think it would be safest to keep it within the five kilometres but that would have to change if it was not sufficient for the majority of people, she said.

This solution was tried in New Zealand and as it was found not to be a source of additional transmission, the benefits outweighed the risks

Moderate to severe depression three times higher

A survey conducted by Monash University in April found the rate of moderate to severe depression and anxiety among Australians was about three times higher than at non-COVID times.

It indicated all of us were feeling challenged by this adaptation. All of us had something that was alarming to us, she said.

About 14 per cent of respondents told us at least some of the time they had thoughts theyd be better off dead. Its pretty severe distress.

Earlier this month the Victorian government also revealed grim mental health statistics in the state, with a 33 per cent increase in people aged under 18 presenting at emergency departments after self-harming.

There has been a 9.5 per cent increase year-on-year for presentations of self-harm in emergency departments across all age groups in the state.

Monash University is now conducting another study four months on to understand the experience of Australians as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc in the country.

Professor Fisher expects the distress will be even more intense, especially in Victoria where the lockdown is restricting people from activities like socialising.

My sense is the restrictions are going to have a lasting impact, she said.

The Victorian Government did not respond to questions about whether it would introduce a shared bubble arrangement.

Australians wanting to contribute to Monash Universitys survey can visit Living with COVID-19 restrictions.

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A Detroit woman on Sunday did not have signs of life, according to paramedics who declared her dead.

But that same day, staff at a funeral home found the 20-year-old was breathing and alive, according to Local 4 and clickondetroit.com.

According to Local 4, paramedics with Southfield Fire Department on Sunday responded to a call about a woman in cardiac arrest. Southfield Fire Dept. told Local 4 in a statement, The paramedics performed CPR and other life reviving methods for 30 minutes. Given medical readings and the condition of the patient, it was determined at that time that she did not have signs of life.

Local 4 said it was told that a police officer allegedly saw her move and breathe and called the fire crews back, but fire crews claim those were the side effects of the medication given to her.

The woman was taken to James H. Cole Funeral Home in Detroit. Employees there discovered she was still breathing and called EMS. She was taken to a hospital.

There was no information available on her condition.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 02:03:39|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken in Arlington, Virginia, the United States, on Aug. 24, 2020 shows screens displaying U.S. President Donald Trump speaking during the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump was nominated for a second term on Monday at the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) in Charlotte, North Carolina, which has been scaled back due to the coronavirus pandemic. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump was nominated for a second term on Monday at the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) in Charlotte, North Carolina, which has been scaled back due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump arrived at the Charlotte Convention Center on Monday afternoon, where over 300 delegates met in person for a roll call vote to formally nominate him and Vice President Mike Pence for the 2020 Republican presidential ticket.

"I felt an obligation to come to North Carolina," Trump told the delegates inside a ballroom during the unannounced trip. "It's a place that has been very good to me."

In rally-style remarks, the president touted achievements of his first term, focused on his administration's response to the pandemic, again attacked mail-in voting, and lashed out at Democrats who held their national convention virtually last week and some media outlets' coverage of the RNC.

He also touched upon a series of policy priorities for the next four years if he is re-elected, including creating jobs, cutting taxes, lowering drug prices, and continuing the military buildup.

The nomination was part of the four-day RNC themed "Honoring the Great American Story," with each night having a sub-theme. On Monday, it is "Land of Promise," which a Trump campaign official said honors "the promises President Donald J. Trump has kept since his first presidential campaign."

Speakers for the RNC's opening night will include former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, and the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.

Trump, who is expected to make an appearance on each of the four nights at the RNC, will deliver an acceptance speech on Thursday night from the White House South Lawn.

On Monday, a group of Republicans opposing Trump is holding "Convention on Founding Principles" in Charlotte, a gathering that organizers claimed would be an alternative to the RNC.

More than two dozen former Republican members of Congress, including former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, endorsed former U.S. Vice President and 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for president on Monday.

"Today, given what we have experienced over the past four years, it's not enough just to register our disapproval of the president," Flake said in a live video on several social media platforms explaining his decision. "We need to elect someone else in his place - someone who will stop the chaos and reverse the damage."

Biden, who formally accepted the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination on the final night of its convention last week, leads Trump by 7.6 percentage points nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Trump, however, has repeatedly dismissed polls showing him falling behind. Enditem
(AAP Image/Joel Carrett)

Financial services giant AMP has lost three of its most senior leaders on Monday.

AMP chairman David Murray has resigned from the board of directors, and AMP Capital chief Boe Pahari has also stepped down from his role.

Following Murrays resignation, AMP non-executive board director John Fraser has also chosen to resign.

AMP faced backlash after promoting Pahari to the role of CEO of its Capital arm in July, despite a former sexual harassment allegation levelled against him by a subordinate in 2018.

An AFR investigation revealed that the woman, a senior private equity specialist, had to contact external lawyers to resolve her harassment claim after AMPs HR arm failed to internally address her concerns after an independent review.

According to an external investigation into the matter, Pahari was found to have breached company standards, and consequently paid a financial penalty, received counselling for his conduct and has apologised to the colleagues.

I genuinely regret that my comments made a colleague feel uncomfortable, Pahari said. It was never my intention, but I accept that they had an impact and I apologised and accepted the consequences.

I have learned from the matter and have applied those learnings in trying to ensure that our employees feel safe and valued at work. I am embarrassed by the matter as I believe in building diverse teams and respecting all individuals I work with, both within and outside our business.

At the time, AMP Limited CEO Francesco De Ferrari said Pahari had shown genuine remorse for his comments.

De Ferrari will now assume direct leadership of the AMP Capital business on an interim basis, until a new CEO is found.

In a statement, AMP explicitly stated that the leadership changes were directly linked to the outrage over Paharis July promotion.

Story continues

Outgoing chairman Murray said AMP had to operate under Francesco De Ferrari with the support of investors, clients and staff without distractions.

The Board has made it clear that it has always treated the complaint against Mr Pahari seriously. My view remains that it was dealt with appropriately in 2017 and Mr Pahari was penalised accordingly, Murray said.

However, it is clear to me that, although there is considerable support for our strategy, some shareholders did not consider Mr Paharis promotion to AMP Capital CEO to be appropriate.

Although the Boards decision on the appointment was unanimous, my decision to leave reflects my role and accountability as Chairman of the Board and the need to protect continuity of management, the strategy and, to the extent possible, the Board.

However, Pahari isnt leaving the company  hes returning to a role at his previous level, focusing on the companys infrastructure equity business.

Replacing Murray is AMP and AMP Capital board member Debra Hazelton, who is also a member of multiple committees at the financial institution.

Hazelton holds more than 30 years experience in financial services across the world, including as CEO of Muziho Bank in Australia and CBA in Japan.

She specialises in fixed interest, treasury, institutional banking, risk management and financial markets, and also sits on the board of several organisations.

Make your money work with Yahoo Finances daily newsletter. Sign up here and stay on top of the latest money, economy, property and work news.

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The CWC also authorised the Congress president to bring about necessary organisational changes to tackle the challenges faced by the party.

The Congress, at the end of a nearly seven-hour long meeting of its working committee on Monday, decided that Sonia Gandhi will continue as the interim president till the next AICC session.

In a briefing, senior Congress leaders Randeep Singh Surjewala and KC Venugopal said that the CWC has requested Sonia to continue as the interim president till the next AICC session could be convened and decided to form a committee to help her in day-to-day functioning of the organisation.

The CWC also authorised the Congress president to bring about necessary organisational changes to tackle the challenges faced by the party.

The party further said the CWC unanimously resolved to strengthen the hands of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in every possible way, while making it clear no one will be permitted to undermine or weaken the party and its leadership.

The CWC, the party's highest decision-making body. also resolved that inner-party issues cannot be deliberated through media or in public fora and all such issues must be raised within the party "in the interest of propriety and discipline".

The next AICC session is likely to be held after six months and the party will elect a new president then, Sonia reportedly said . In her concluding remarks, she also said that she was hurt but bore no ill-will towards the leaders who had written a letter demanding sweeping organisational reforms in the party.

We are a large family. We have differences and different views on many occasions. But at the end we come together, as one. The need of the hour is to tackle issues facing the country. Organisational issues, process of constitution or reconstitution is a continuous process. I hold no ill-will for any party member. Keep the party together," she said during the meeting.

As many as 23 Congress leaders, including Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, party MPs and former Union Ministers Anand Sharma, Kapil Sibal, Manish Tewari, Shashi Tharoor had sent a letter to Sonia, calling for full time and active leadership, elections to the CWC and an institutional leadership mechanism aimed at the partys revival.

Sonia offers to quit, colleagues protest

In her opening remarks during the meeting on Monday, Sonia offered to step down from her position and asked the CWC to initiate the process for selecting a new party chief, reported PTI, quoting unnamed sources. The interim president also said that she had given a detailed reply on the issue to AICC general secretary KC Venugopal.

Sonia was made the interim president last year after Rahul Gandhi resigned in the wake of the partys defeat in the Lok Sabha elections.

Speaking after Sonia, former prime minister Manmohan Singh urged her to complete the full session and was backed by former defence minister AK Antony. Both the veterans also criticising the letter which had made it to the media. Antony termed the letter as unfortunate and cruel, according to the Hindustan Times.

Sources told PTI that Rahul Gandhi in his speech questioned the timing of the letter, which was sent to Sonia Gandhi when she was in a hospital and under medication. "It is the CWC and not the media where we put out our thoughts and discuss," he reportedly said.

Row over 'collusion with BJP' remarks

Senior leader Kapil Sibal, one of the signatories of the letters, later lashed out at Rahul for his purported remark that signatories of the letter were working in collusion with the BJP. Taking to Twitter, Sibal said he had had never made a statement in favour of the BJP in last 30 years. Sibal later deleted his tweet, saying Rahul informed him personally that he never said what was attributed to him.

Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him . I therefore withdraw my tweet .  Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) August 24, 2020

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala also clarified that Rahul never made such remarks and warned against being misled by false media discourse. "We all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather than fighting and hurting each other and the Congress," he said.

Sh. Rahul Gandhi hasnt said a word of this nature nor alluded to it. Pl dont be mislead by false media discourse or misinformation being spread. But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather then fighting & hurting each other & the Congress. https://t.co/x6FvPpe7I1  Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) August 24, 2020

Azad, who reportedly said that he would quit if the collusion charges against the leaders could be proved, later said that "some Congress persons" outside the CWC, not Rahul, had levelled the allegations.

"Let me make it very clear that Rahul Gandhi has neither in CWC nor outside said that this letter was written at the behest of BJP," he said.

What I said was, yesterday some Congress person had said that we did it at behest of BJP & in that context I said "It is most unfortunate that some colleagues (outside CWC) have accused us of collusion with BJP, and if those people can prove this allegation, I will resign".  Ghulam Nabi Azad (@ghulamnazad) August 24, 2020

Congress is finished, says BJP

Ealier in the day, some BJP leaders including Uma Bharti and Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, attacked the Congress and said that it would never be able to save itself.

"This is a party which is not ready to listen to truth, which terms those speaking truth as traitors, which terms those indulging in sycophancy as loyal...no one can save such a party," Chouhan said.

"It is heading towards destruction. If anyone speaks truth in the party, then it is alleged that they have colluded with the BJP," he said.

BJP leader Uma Bharti asserted that the dominance of the Congress was over. " The Gandhi-Nehru family's existence is in crisis, their political dominance is over, the Congress is finished.. so who stays in what position hardly matters now... Congress should return to the real Gandhi, the real 'swadeshi' Gandhi without any foreign element," she told ANI.

The letter sent by the Congress leaders to Sonia had triggered an outpouring of support for her to continue in the top post or for Rahul to take charge.

Almost all Lok Sabha MPs of the party wrote to Sonia expressing solidarity and urging her to continue in her post or instal Rahul Gandhi. Several state units including Delhi and Rajasthan passed resolutions favouring the leadership of Gandhis.

With inputs from agencies.
Its raining wireless earbuds these days and to help you with the best wireless earphones we have listed below the top 4 TWS to buy under Rs. 2000. Which are at an affordable price and will not burn a hole in your pocket. These amazing earbuds offer great value for money along with amazing features like google assistance and extended battery life. With these wireless earbuds you can now get rid of tangled cords and have earbuds that are ready to be used as quickly as you can get them out of your pocket. These wireless earbuds are the best even if you are travelling or listening to music while working or attending team calls.

Infinix Snokor iRocker  SNOKOR offers Bluetooth 5.0 for a stable connection, an unmatched bass boost that ensures no shrill at even 20Hz, Goose Egg Design for slip-proof snug fit, long endurance ensuring a maximum playtime of up to 20 hours.The earbuds come equipped with high fidelity speakers for immersive audio quality. It has Google voice assistants which allow them to control their phones using simple voice commands. Each of the earbuds weigh just 4.6 gm, and has IPX 4 that makes them lightweight, and sweat and splash-proof

truke fit Pro  truke Fit Pro is a premium quality innovative dolphin-designed open fit earbuds featuring universal Type-C charging interface, 15 mins quick charge for 1-hour playback, and compatibility with 99% of smartphones & gaming devices. have been ergonomically engineered for maximum comfort and is backed by a 500mAh charging case to get up to 24 hours of music playback. It has instant pairing technology with BT 5.0.

Boat Airdopes 201  The boAt Airdopes 201 Bluetooth earbuds are here to take your music-listening experience to the next level. Equipped with Bluetooth 5.0, these earbuds connect seamlessly to your Bluetooth-enabled smartphone. These IPX4 certified, sweat- and water-resistant earbuds let you enjoy your music as you lift weights or go for a jog early in the morning. The Airdopes 201 also allows you to access your voice assistant at a single press of a button and it gives up to 15 hours total playtime.

mi Earbuds S  mi earbuds S has a punchier Sound. It gives up to 12 Hours of Playback time. It is IPX4 Sweat & Splash Proof & comes with DSP Environmental Noise Cancellation. It has a low latency mode for gaming and the pairing process is super easy. It has a long lasting battery life of up to 4 hours with a single charge and a total of 12 hours with the charging case to give you the best music experience. It is extremely sleek & stylish design that you can carry around seamlessly in your pockets and bags.
Prince Salman, educated at Paris's Sorbonne University, was held for around a year in the high-security Al-Hai'r prison near Riyadh and later in a guarded villa in the capital, sources close to him said

Two rights groups are lodging a complaint to the UN over the "arbitrary" detention of a philanthropist Saudi prince, according to a document seen by AFP, adding to international pressure for his release.

In January 2018, Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, now 37, was swept up along with his father in a royal crackdown, leaving his supporters asking why the minor royal who posed no apparent challenge to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was targeted.

The complaint by the Geneva-based MENA Rights Group and the London-based ALQST follows this month's bombshell US lawsuit by a former senior Saudi intelligence official, Saad Aljabri, who alleges Prince Mohammed tried to have him killed.

The developments have spotlighted royal power plays in the oil-rich kingdom.

Prince Salman, educated at Paris's Sorbonne University, was held for around a year in the high-security Al-Hai'r prison near Riyadh and later in a guarded villa in the capital, sources close to him said.

The prince was moved to a secret detention site in March but was mysteriously returned to the villa two months later, the sources said, after a $2 million US lobbying effort and petitions from European lawmakers calling for his release.

Seeking to further amplify the pressure, ALQST and MENA Rights Group will file a joint complaint on Tuesday with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Geneva over his incarceration.

"Prince Salman and his father have been held for over 2.5 years without any charges," Ines Osman, director of MENA Rights Group, told AFP.

"Their detention has no legal basis."

Saudi authorities did not respond to AFP's request for comment.

- 'Dirty politics' -

After hearing the complaint, a draft of which was seen by AFP, the UN working group is expected to declare an "opinion" on the case in the coming months.

The Saudi government is not legally obligated to respond.

But the case seeks to cast a fresh international spotlight on the plight of the prince -- one of many royal family members incarcerated since the meteoric rise of Prince Mohammed.

Story continues

Most perplexing, the sources say, is that the prince and his father have never once been interrogated since their detention.

"This adds to the arbitrariness of their detention," Osman said.

Prince Salman was among 11 princes detained after they staged what Saudi Arabia's attorney general called a sit-in at a royal palace in Riyadh to demand the state continue to pay their electricity and water bills.

The princes "refused to leave" and were locked up in Al-Hai'r prison for "disrupting peace and order", the attorney general said at the time.

But an associate of Prince Salman disputed the account, deriding it as "dirty politics".

The wealthy prince who offered his staff generous allowances would not care about minor utility expenses, the associate told AFP.

ALQST, founded by activist and former Royal Saudi Air Force officer Yahya Assiri, said the prince was "badly beaten" after being summoned to a royal gathering.

"Some of those present were accused of taking part in meetings and pacts aiming to depose... (the) crown prince, and sharing these ideas with people abroad hoping they would help them," ALQST said.

The current whereabouts of the other 10 princes remains unclear.

- Push for justice -

Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, Prince Salman's father, was detained the next day in an official raid on his home after he "phoned some people in Europe", including a Paris-based lawyer, to help his son, ALQST said.

Surveillance cameras in the home were broken and a number of devices seized as the prince was accused of "communication with foreign entities", the activist group added.

Observers say what may have irked the royal court was Prince Salman's meeting with Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff just before the US elections in 2016.

Schiff is a critic of US President Donald Trump, himself a staunch backer of Prince Mohammed.

Associates of Prince Salman, who is known for his philanthropic activities, say "nothing political" was discussed at the meeting.

In May, leading Washington lobbyist Robert Stryk's Sonoran Policy Group signed a $2 million contract to press US and European governments about the prince's case.

Several European lawmakers have petitioned Riyadh, and one implored the crown prince to release Prince Salman in a personal letter, seen by AFP.

The EU has also raised the issue with the Saudi foreign ministry and the kingdom's Human Rights Commission on "several occasions" without any success, according to internal correspondence dated late March.

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The Rajasthan High Court on Monday asked the state Assembly Speaker to decide within three months a disqualification petition filed by BJP MLA Madan Dilawar against the merger of six BSP MLAs with the ruling Congress.

Allowing Dilawar's plea partially, the court set aside the July 22 order of the Speaker rejecting the disqualification petition filed by him in March this year.

A single-judge bench of Justice Mahendra Kumar Goyal also dismissed another writ petition filed by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the matter, while giving it the liberty to file a disqualification petition with the Speaker.

Dilawar had filed the petition in the high court challenging the merger of six MLAs - Sandeep Yadav, Wajib Ali, Deepchand Kheria, Lakhan Meena, Jogendra Awana and Rajendra Gudha - with the Congress and demanded a stay on the execution of the order passed by the Speaker.

This writ petition is partly allowed to the extent that the order dated 22.7.2020 passed by the Speaker is quashed and set aside. The Speaker is expected to take a decision on the disqualification petition filed by the petitioner within the period of three months from today, the court order said on Dilawar's plea. Rests of the reliefs prayed for, are declined. The application stands disposed of accordingly, the order said.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court disposed of as "infructuous" Dilawar's plea seeking stay on the Rajasthan Speaker's decision, which allowed the six BSP MLAs to merge with the Congress, in view of the High Court order.

A bench of justices Arun Mishra, Vineet Saran and MR Shah was informed by senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Speaker, that earlier in the day the Rajasthan High Court had passed an order on the plea filed Dilawar.

He said the high court has asked the Speaker to decide on merit the plea against the merger of six BSP MLAs with the ruling Congress. The high court disposed Madan Dilawar's writ petition and has asked the assembly speaker to conduct hearing in the complaint filed on March 16 and decide the matter on merit within three months, a counsel for the speaker in the high court told reporters in Jaipur after the high court's judgment.

The six MLAs had contested and won the 2018 assembly elections on BSP tickets and defected to the Congress in September 2019.

Reacting to the developments, MLA Awana said, "I welcome the court's decision. It is the victory of the truth. The MLAs submitted an application for the merger on September 16, 2019 and the Speaker issued an order on September 18, 2019.
The US blood bank marketis expected to reach US$ 6,025. 26 millionby 2027 from US$3,975. 02 million in 2019;it is expectedto grow with a CAGR of 5. 5% from 2020 to 2027. The growth of the marketis attributed to the key factors such as the high prevalence of hematologic diseases and rise in the number of road accidents.

New York, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "US Blood Bank Market Forecast to 2027  COVID-19 Impact and Analysis  by Type, Function, Bank Type, End User" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05953827/?utm_source=GNW

On the other hand, the market growth would be hindered by the disability of blood banks to comply with regulations.

Distracted driving is a growing concern in the US. As per the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the country witnesses ~5.5 million car accidents, accounting for 3 million injuries and 40,000 fatalities each year. Also, ~60,000 injuries and 5,000 deaths occur as a result of truck accidents each year. Rising accident count in the country is leading to high demand for blood for treating trauma cases and carrying out surgeries. For instance, as per The American National Red Cross, a single-car accident patient can require ~100 units of blood. In the last few years, cases of fatal injuries have increased in the US. As per the National Center for Health Statistics, ~31 million injured people seek medical treatment each year in the country. Of these, ~2 million are severe enough to require some form of hospitalization. Apart from this, workplace injuries have also increased in the last few years. As per the National Safety Council, a worker is injured at the workplace every 7 seconds. Thus, increasing accidents, trauma cases, and severe injuries are emphasizing the huge requirement of stored blood, thereby boosting the blood bank market in the country.

Based on type, the US blood bank market is segmented into whole blood, plasma, RBC, platelets, and WBC.In 2019, the whole blood segment held the largest share of the market.



Moreover, the plasma segment is anticipated to register the highest CAGR in the market during the forecast period.

Based on the function, the US blood bank marketwas segmented intotesting, processing, storage, transportation, and collection.The testingsegment held the largest share of the market in 2019 and is anticipated to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Based onbank type, the US blood bank marketissegmented into private and public. In 2019,the privatesegment accounted for a larger share of the market andis anticipated to register a higherCAGR during the forecast period.

The market has been segmented on the basis of end user into hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, pharmaceutical companies, and others. The hospitals segment accounted for the largest market share in 2019, and the market for the same is also anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

A few of the major primary and secondary sources referred to while preparing this report on the US blood bank market areAmerican Association of Blood Banks (AABB), Americas Blood Centers (ABC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05953827/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



__________________________

Story continues

CONTACT: Clare: clare@reportlinker.com US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001




SHANGHAI, Aug. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Noah Holdings Limited ("Noah" or the "Company") (NYSE: NOAH), a leading wealth and asset management service provider in China with a focus on global investment and asset allocation services for high net worth individuals and enterprises, today announced its unaudited financial results for the second quarter of 2020.

SECOND QUARTER 2020 FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS

Net revenues for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB747 .4 million ( US$105.8 million ), a 0.2% increase from the first quarter of 2020, while a 14.2% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019.

(RMB millions, except percentages) Q2 2019



Q2 2020



YoY Change Wealth management 625.6



542.8



(13.2%) Asset management 171.1



181.6



6.1% Lending and other businesses 74.9



23.0



(69.3%) Total net revenues 871.6



747.4



(14.2%)

Income from operations for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB319.5 million ( US$45.2 million ), a 24.7% increase from the first quarter of 2020, and a 26.9% increase from the corresponding period in 2019.

(RMB millions, except percentages) Q2 2019



Q2 2020



YoY Change Wealth management 129.9



196.6



51.3% Asset management 86.8



100.8



16.1% Lending and other businesses 35.2



22.1



(36.9%) Total income from operations 251.9



319.5



26.9%

Net income attributable to Noah shareholders for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB299.6 million ( US$42.4 million ), a 23.3% increase from the first quarter of 2020, and a 19.8% increase from the corresponding period in 2019.

for the second quarter of 2020 was ( ), a 23.3% increase from the first quarter of 2020, and a 19.8% increase from the corresponding period in 2019. Non-GAAP[1] net income attributable to Noah shareholders for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB307.2 million ( US$43 .5 million), a 20.1% increase from the first quarter of 2020, and a 16.7% increase from the corresponding period in 2019.

SECOND QUARTER 2020 OPERATIONAL UPDATES

Wealth Management Business

The Company offers financial products and provides value-added services to high net worth clients in China and overseas for its wealth management business. Noah primarily distributes private equity, public securities, credit and other products denominated in RMB and other currencies.

Total number of registered clients as of June 30, 2020 was 332,157, a 17.1% increase from June 30, 2019 , and a 3.4% increase from March 31, 2020 .

as of was 332,157, a 17.1% increase from , and a 3.4% increase from . Total number of active clients [2] which excluded mutual fund clients during the second quarter of 2020 was 3,367, a 42.8% decrease from June 30, 2019 , and a 17.4% decrease from the first quarter of 2020, as we are continuing in the transition of offering more online mutual fund products to our clients. Counting in mutual funds clients, the total number of clients who transacted with us during the second quarter of 2020 was 14,703, a 48.7% increase from the second quarter of 2019, and a 12.6% decrease from the first quarter of 2020.

which excluded mutual fund clients during the second quarter of 2020 was 3,367, a 42.8% decrease from , and a 17.4% decrease from the first quarter of 2020, as we are continuing in the transition of offering more online mutual fund products to our clients. Counting in mutual funds clients, the total number of clients who transacted with us during the second quarter of 2020 was 14,703, a 48.7% increase from the second quarter of 2019, and a 12.6% decrease from the first quarter of 2020. Aggregate value of financial products distributed during the second quarter of 2020 was RMB21.4 billion ( US$3.0 billion ), a 12.0% decrease from the second quarter of 2019, and a 7.8% decrease from the first quarter of 2020.



Three months ended June 30,

2019

2020 Product type (RMB in billions, except percentages) Credit products 9.8

40.0%

0.2

1.1% Private equity products 7.7

31.5%

2.5

11.9% Public securities products 6.0

24.7%

18.0

83.8% Other products 0.9

3.8%

0.7

3.2% All products 24.4

100.0%

21.4

100.0%

C overage network in mainland China included 264 service centers covering 78 cities as of June 30, 2020 , compared with 306 service centers covering 83 cities as of June 30, 2019 and 292 service centers covering 78 cities as of March 31, 2020. The decrease in the number of service centers and cities is primarily a result of consolidation of duplicate service centers in order to optimize costs and expenses.

in mainland China included 264 service centers covering 78 cities as of , compared with 306 service centers covering 83 cities as of and 292 service centers covering 78 cities as of March 31, 2020. The decrease in the number of service centers and cities is primarily a result of consolidation of duplicate service centers in order to optimize costs and expenses. Number of relationship managers was 1,196 as of June 30, 2020 , a 16.2% decrease from June 30, 2019 , and a 2.0% decrease from March 31, 2020 , primarily as a result of the Company's efforts to streamline operational human resources. The turnover rate of core "elite" relationship managers was 1.4%, compared with 1.0% as of March 31, 2020 .

Asset Management Business

The Company's asset management business is conducted through Gopher Asset Management Co., Ltd. ("Gopher Asset Management"), a leading alternative multi-asset manager in China with overseas offices in Hong Kong, the United States and Canada. Gopher Asset Management develops and manages assets ranging from private equity, real estate, public securities, credit to multi-strategy investments denominated in Renminbi and other currencies.

Total assets under management as of June 30, 2020 were RMB159.4 billion ( US$22.6 billion ), a 1.4% decrease from March 31, 2020 and an 11.8% decrease from June 30, 2019 .

Investment type As of

March 31,

2020



Growth



Distribution/

Redemption

As of

June 30,

2020

(RMB billions, except percentages) Private equity 105.7

65.4%

2.1

0.1

107.7

67.6% Credit 19.9

12.3%

0.1

5.9

14.1

8.9% Real estate 18.2

11.3%

0.7

1.6

17.3

10.8% Public securities[3] 9.2

5.7%

3.2

0.6

11.8

7.4% Multi-strategies 8.7

5.3%

0.2

0.4

8.5

5.3% All Investments 161.7

100.0%

6.3

8.6

159.4

100.0%

Lending and Other Businesses

The Company's lending business utilizes an advanced risk-management system to assess and facilitate short-term loans to high quality borrowers, often secured with collateral. The total amount of loans originated during the second quarter of 2020 was RMB0.1 billion, compared with RMB2.8 billion for the corresponding period of 2019, due to the ongoing impact of COVID-19, and our voluntary reduction of loan origination. Other businesses include an online financial advisory platform.

Ms. Jingbo Wang, co-founder and CEO of Noah, said, "We are very pleased to report strong results for the second quarter of 2020: our Non-GAAP net income rose 20.1% from the first quarter, representing a second highest record since our listing on the NYSE; our operating margin increased to 42.7% due to improved operation efficiency and higher performance income in connection with an increased number of successful primary market exits and a booming A-share market. The transaction value of public securities accounted for 83.8% of the total volume this quarter, demonstrating our continued commitment to distributing more standardized products to our clients. In this quarter, the outstanding amount of onshore mutual funds distributed on our mobile APP Fund Smile exceeded RMB10 billion, and our parallel offshore mutual fund mobile APP iNoah was launched, which jointly form the formation of Noah's global mutual funds platform. We are confident that the momentum we've seen in the past four quarters since our transformation will continue."

SECOND QUARTER 2020 FINANCIAL RESULTS

Net Revenues

Net revenues for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB747.4 million (US$105.8 million), a 14.2% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily driven by decreased one-time commissions and other service fees, partially offset by increased recurring service fees and performance-based income.

Wealth Management Business

- Net revenues from one-time commissions for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB126.0 million ( US$17.8 million ), a 57.0% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to the decrease of transaction value as well as the distribution of lower one-time commission rates products.

- Net revenues from recurring service fees for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB310.3 million ( US$43.9 million ), a 15.5% increase from the corresponding period in 2019, mainly due to the service fees recognized upon liquidation of certain credit products with higher fee rates.

- Net revenues from performance-based income for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB74.5 million ( US$10.5 million ), a 3,671.9% increase from the corresponding period of 2019, primarily due to a significant increase in performance-based income from public securities products as well as certain private equity products.

- Net revenues from other service fees for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB32.0 million ( US$4.5 million ), a 48.1% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to less value-added services Noah offers to its high net worth clients during the COVID-19 epidemic.





for the second quarter of 2020 were ( ), a 57.0% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to the decrease of transaction value as well as the distribution of lower one-time commission rates products. - for the second quarter of 2020 were ( ), a 15.5% increase from the corresponding period in 2019, mainly due to the service fees recognized upon liquidation of certain credit products with higher fee rates. - for the second quarter of 2020 were ( ), a 3,671.9% increase from the corresponding period of 2019, primarily due to a significant increase in performance-based income from public securities products as well as certain private equity products. - for the second quarter of 2020 were ( ), a 48.1% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to less value-added services Noah offers to its high net worth clients during the COVID-19 epidemic. Asset Management Business

- Net revenues from recurring service fees for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB164.0 million ( US$23.2 million ), relatively flat compared with the corresponding period in 2019.

- Net revenues from performance-based income for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB16.1 million ( US$2.3 million ), a 184.9% increase from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to an increase in performance-based income from private equity products.





for the second quarter of 2020 were ( ), relatively flat compared with the corresponding period in 2019. - for the second quarter of 2020 were ( ), a 184.9% increase from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to an increase in performance-based income from private equity products. Lending and Other Businesses

- Net revenues for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB23.0 million ( US$3.3 million ), a 69.3% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019. The decrease was primarily due to reduced loan origination since the second half of 2019 as well as the ongoing impact of COVID-19.

Operating Costs and Expenses

Operating costs and expenses for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB427.9 million (US$60.6 million), a 30.9% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019. Operating costs and expenses primarily consisted of compensation and benefits of RMB330.8 million (US$46.8 million), selling expenses of RMB62.6 million (US$8.9 million), general and administrative expenses of RMB68.5 million (US$9.7 million), provision of credit losses of RMB1.9 million (US$0.3 million) and other operating expenses of RMB20.7 million (US$2.9 million).

Operating costs and expenses for the wealth management business for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB346.2 million ( US$49.0 million ), a 30.2% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to a decrease in compensation and benefits and credit losses.

for the second quarter of 2020 were ( ), a 30.2% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to a decrease in compensation and benefits and credit losses. Operating costs and expenses for the asset management business for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB80.9 million ( US$11.4 million ), a 4.0% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to a decrease in compensation and benefits and credit losses.

for the second quarter of 2020 were ( ), a 4.0% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to a decrease in compensation and benefits and credit losses. Operating costs and expenses for the lending and other businesses for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB0.8 million ( US$0.1 million ), a 97.9% decrease from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to an increase in government grants in the amount of RMB14.6 million ( US$2.1 million ) .

Operating Margin

Operating margin for the second quarter of 2020 was 42.7%, increased from 28.9% for the corresponding period in 2019.

Operating margin for the wealth management business for the second quarter of 2020 was 36.2%, compared with 20.8% for the corresponding period in 2019.

for the second quarter of 2020 was 36.2%, compared with 20.8% for the corresponding period in 2019. Operating margin for the asset management business for the second quarter of 2020 was 55.5%, compared with 50.8% for the corresponding period in 2019.

for the second quarter of 2020 was 55.5%, compared with 50.8% for the corresponding period in 2019. Income from operation for the lending and other businesses for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB22.1 million ( US$3.1 million ), compared with an operating income of RMB35.2 million for the corresponding period in 2019.

Investment Income

Investment income for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB4.7 million (US$0.7 million), compared with RMB11.8 million for the corresponding period in 2019.

Income Tax Expenses

Income tax expenses for the second quarter of 2020 were RMB77.8 million (US$11.0 million), a 15.1% increase from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to higher taxable income.

Income from Equity in Affiliates

Income from equity in affiliates for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB40.7 million (US$5.8 million), a 41.2% increase from the corresponding period in 2019, primarily due to the increase of net income of the funds of funds we manage and invest in as the general partner or manager.

Net Income

Net Income

- Net income for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB301.9 million ( US$42.7 million ), an 18.7% increase from the corresponding period in 2019.

- Net margin for the second quarter of 2020 was 40.4%, up from 29.2% for the corresponding period in 2019.

- Net income attributable to Noah shareholders for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB299.6 million ( US$42.4 million ), a 19.8% increase from the corresponding period in 2019.

- Net margin attributable to Noah shareholders for the second quarter of 2020 was 40.1%, up from 28.7% for the corresponding period in 2019.

- Net income attributable to Noah shareholders per basic and diluted ADS for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB4.86 (US$0.69) and RMB4.84 (US$0.69) , respectively, up from RMB4.09 and RMB4.04 respectively, for the corresponding period in 2019.





for the second quarter of 2020 was ( ), an 18.7% increase from the corresponding period in 2019. - for the second quarter of 2020 was 40.4%, up from 29.2% for the corresponding period in 2019. - for the second quarter of 2020 was ( ), a 19.8% increase from the corresponding period in 2019. - for the second quarter of 2020 was 40.1%, up from 28.7% for the corresponding period in 2019. - for the second quarter of 2020 was and , respectively, up from and respectively, for the corresponding period in 2019. Non-GAAP Net Income Attributable to Noah Shareholders

- Non-GAAP net income attributable to Noah shareholders for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB307.2 million ( US$43.5 million ), a 16.7% increase from the corresponding period in 2019.

- Non-GAAP net margin attributable to Noah shareholders for the second quarter of 2020 was 41.1%, compared with 30.2% for the corresponding period in 2019.

- Non-GAAP net income attributable to Noah shareholders per diluted ADS for the second quarter of 2020 was RMB4.96 (US$0.70) , up from RMB4.25 for the corresponding period in 2019.

Balance Sheet and Cash Flow

As of June 30, 2020, the Company had RMB4,170.7 million (US$590.3 million) in cash and cash equivalents, compared with RMB4,045.8 million as of March 31, 2020 and RMB2,873.7 million as of June 30, 2019.

Net cash outflow from the Company's operating activities during the second quarter of 2020 was RMB9.6 million (US$1.4 million), primarily due to payment of employee annual bonuses and annual tax filing in the second quarter.

Net cash inflow from the Company's investing activities during the second quarter of 2020 was RMB130.8 million (US$18.5 million), primarily due to disposal of various investments in the second quarter.

Net cash inflow from the Company's financing activities was RMB2.2 million (US$0.3 million) in the second quarter of 2020, primarily due to proceeds from issuance of ordinary shares upon exercise of stock options.

UPDATE ON CREDIT FUNDS

As the Company previously disclosed on July 8, 2019, August 29, 2019 and April 24, 2020, in connection with certain credit funds managed by an affiliate of Gopher Asset Management ("Gopher") providing supply chain financing involving companies related to Camsing International Holding Limited ("Camsing"), it is suspected that fraud has been committed by third parties related to those financings. A criminal investigation in China is ongoing, and Gopher is assisting PRC government authorities in their investigation, as well as pursuing all available actions, including filing civil litigations against the relevant parties, to protect investors ("Investor(s)") of the credit funds involved in Camsing incidents ("Camsing Products") who have outstanding economic interests in such products and to recover their assets.

Furthermore, in order to share the growth of the Company with the Investors, to prevent distraction or diversion of its management resources from existing or potential claims, as well as to protect the best interests of its shareholders, the Company has decided to propose a settlement offer to the Investors.

Under the settlement plan, each Investor will be granted a certain number of restricted share units ("RSUs") of the Company, typically over a period of up to ten years, the vesting of which is subject to certain conditions and a schedule not exceeding fifteen years. An investor accepting the offer shall agree to give up all his or her outstanding legal rights associated with Camsing Products and irrevocably release the Company and all its affiliated entities and individuals from any and all claims, known or unknown, that relate to the Camsing Products. Upon vesting of the RSUs, the Investor will receive Class A ordinary shares of the Company. On August 24, 2020, this settlement plan was approved by the board of directors (the "Board") of the Company and a total number of new Class A ordinary shares not exceeding 1.6% of the share capital of the Company has been authorized to be issued each year for a consecutive ten years.

As of the date hereof, there are only claims initiated in China by several Investors against Gopher or its affiliates. These claims are at early stages and their impact on the Company remains unclear.

[1] Noah's Non-GAAP financial measures are its corresponding GAAP financial measures excluding the effects of all forms of share-based compensation, fair value changes of equity securities (unrealized), adjustment for sale of equity securities and net of relevant tax impact, if any. See "Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Results" at the end of this press release.

[2] "Active clients" for a given period refers to registered high net worth clients who purchase financial products distributed or provided by Noah during that given period, excluding clients who transacted on our online mutual fund platform.

[3] The asset distribution/redemption of public securities also includes market appreciation or depreciation.

2020 FORECAST

The Company revises its non-GAAP net income attributable to Noah shareholders for the full year 2020 from the range of RMB800 million to RMB900 million, to the range of RMB900 million to RMB1billion. The revision is based on stronger than expected transaction value and performance income of public securities, improved operation efficiency and optimistic business estimation of the second half of 2020, despite the impact on overseas new insurance transactions from COVID-19 travel bans. This estimate reflects management's current business outlook and is subject to change.

CONFERENCE CALL

Senior management will host a combined English and Chinese language conference call to discuss the Company's second quarter 2020 unaudited financial results and recent business activities.

The conference call may be accessed with the following details:

Conference call details Date/Time: Monday, August 24, 2020 at 8:00 p.m., U.S. Eastern Time Tuesday, August 25, 2020 at 8:00 a.m., Hong Kong Time Dial in details:

- United States Toll Free +1-866-311-7654 - Mainland China Toll Free 4001-201-203 - Hong Kong Toll Free 800-905-945 - Hong Kong Local Toll +852-301-84992 - International +1-412-317-5227 Conference Title: Noah Holdings 2Q20 Earnings Conference Call Participant Password: Noah Holdings Limited

A telephone replay will be available starting one hour after the end of the conference call until August 31, 2020 at +1-877-344-7529 (US Toll Free) or +1-412-317-0088 (International Toll). The replay access code is 10146791.

A live and archived webcast of the conference call will be available at Noah's investor relations website under the News & Events section at ir.noahgroup.com.

DISCUSSION OF NON-GAAP MEASURES

In addition to disclosing financial results prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP, the Company's earnings release contains non-GAAP financial measures excluding the effects of all forms of share-based compensation, fair value changes of equity investments (unrealized), adjustment for sale of equity securities and net of tax impact, if any. See "Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Results" at the end of this press release.

The non-GAAP financial measures disclosed by the Company should not be considered a substitute for financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The financial results reported in accordance with U.S. GAAP and reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results should be carefully evaluated. The non-GAAP financial measures used by the Company may be prepared differently from and, therefore, may not be comparable to similarly titled measures used by other companies.

When evaluating the Company's operating performance in the periods presented, management reviewed the foregoing non-GAAP net income attributable to Noah shareholders and per diluted ADS and non-GAAP net margin attributable to Noah shareholders to supplement U.S. GAAP financial data. As such, the Company's management believes that the presentation of the non-GAAP financial measures provides important supplemental information to investors regarding financial and business trends relating to its results of operations in a manner consistent with that used by management.

ABOUT NOAH HOLDINGS LIMITED

Noah Holdings Limited (NYSE: NOAH) is a leading wealth and asset management service provider in China with a focus on high net worth individuals. In the first half of 2020, Noah distributed RMB44.6 billion (US$6.3 billion) of financial products. Through Gopher Asset Management, Noah had assets under management of RMB159.4 billion (US$22.6 billion) as of June 30, 2020.

Noah's wealth management business primarily distributes private equity, public securities, credit and insurance products denominated in RMB and other currencies. Noah delivers customized financial solutions to clients through a network of 1,196 relationship managers across 264 service centers in 78 cities in mainland China, and serves the international investment needs of its clients through offices in Hong Kong, Taiwan, United States, Canada, Australia and Singapore. The Company's wealth management business had 332,157 registered clients as of June 30, 2020. As a leading alternative multi-asset manager in China, Gopher Asset Management manages private equity, real estate, public securities, credit and multi-strategy investments denominated in Renminbi and other currencies. The Company also provides lending services and other businesses.

For more information, please visit Noah at ir.noahgroup.com.

FOREIGN CURRENCY TRANSLATION

In this announcement, the unaudited financial results for the second quarter of 2020 ended June 30, 2020 are stated in RMB. This announcement contains currency conversions of certain RMB amounts into US$ at specified rates solely for the convenience of the reader. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from RMB to US$ are made at a rate of RMB7.0651 to US$1.00, the effective noon buying rate for June 30, 2020 as set forth in the H.10 statistical release of the Federal Reserve Board.

SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT

This announcement contains forward-looking statements. These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "confident" and similar statements. Among other things, the outlook for 2020 and quotations from management in this announcement, as well as Noah's strategic and operational plans, contain forward-looking statements. Noah may also make written or oral forward-looking statements in its periodic reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in its annual report to shareholders, in press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its officers, directors or employees to third parties. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about Noah's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause Noah's actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement, including but not limited to the following: its goals and strategies; its future business development, financial condition and results of operations; the expected growth of the wealth management and asset management market in China and internationally; its expectations regarding demand for and market acceptance of the products it distributes; its expectations regarding keeping and strengthening its relationships with key clients; relevant government policies and regulations relating to its industries; its ability to attract and retain qualified employees; its ability to stay abreast of market trends and technological advances; its plans to invest in research and development to enhance its product choices and service offerings; competition in its industries in China and internationally; general economic and business conditions in China; and its ability to effectively protect its intellectual property rights and not to infringe on the intellectual property rights of others. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in Noah's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its annual reports on Form 20-F. All information provided in this press release and in the attachments is as of the date of this press release, and Noah does not undertake any obligation to update any such information, including forward-looking statements, as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under the applicable law.

-- FINANCIAL AND OPERATIONAL TABLES FOLLOW --

Noah Holdings Limited Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets (unaudited)

As of

March 31,

June 30,

June 30,

2020

2020

2020

RMB'000

RMB'000

USD'000 Assets











Current assets:













Cash and cash equivalents 4,045,796

4,170,704

590,325



Restricted cash 6,583

4,098

580



Short-term investments 97,863

61,151

8,655



Accounts receivable, net 297,493

334,411

47,333



Loans receivable, net 620,905

619,811

87,729



Amounts due from related parties 757,278

766,189

108,447



Other current assets 196,857

199,908

28,295



Total current assets 6,022,775

6,156,272

871,364

Long-term investments, net 837,449

836,442

118,391

Investment in affiliates 1,325,649

1,291,255

182,765

Property and equipment, net 271,574

262,648

37,175

Operating lease right-of-use assets, net 337,405

343,925

48,679

Deferred tax assets 167,254

164,749

23,319

Other non-current assets 126,369

148,590

21,029 Total Assets 9,088,475

9,203,881

1,302,722 Liabilities and Equity











Current liabilities:













Accrued payroll and welfare expenses 644,420

461,530

65,325



Income tax payable 101,630

77,381

10,953



Deferred revenues 141,228

163,608

23,157



Other current liabilities 369,847

351,690

49,778

Total current liabilities 1,257,125

1,054,209

149,213

Operating lease liabilities, non-current 344,078

346,241

49,007

Deferred tax liabilities 56,804

56,480

7,994

Other non-current liabilities 2,787

3,526

499

Total Liabilities 1,660,794

1,460,456

206,713

Equity 7,427,681

7,743,425

1,096,009 Total Liabilities and Equity 9,088,475

9,203,881

1,302,722

Noah Holdings Limited Condensed Consolidated Income Statements (In RMB'000, except for USD data, per ADS data and percentages) (unaudited)

Three months ended

June 30,

June 30,

June 30,

Change

2019

2020

2020



Revenues: RMB'000

RMB'000

USD'000



Revenues from others:













One-time commissions 193,937

117,085

16,572

(39.6%) Recurring service fees 131,164

152,253

21,550

16.10% Performance-based income 2,051

57,206

8,097

2689.20% Other service fees 139,940

56,197

7,954

(59.8%) Total revenues from others 467,092

382,741

54,173

(18.1%) Revenues from funds Gopher

manages:













One-time commissions 101,104

10,431

1,476

(89.7%) Recurring service fees 303,578

324,174

45,884

6.80% Performance-based income 5,610

33,766

4,779

501.90% Total revenues from funds Gopher

manages 410,292

368,371

52,139

(10.2%) Total revenues 877,384

751,112

106,312

(14.4%) Less: VAT related surcharges (5,786)

(3,674)

(520)

(36.5%) Net revenues 871,598

747,438

105,792

(14.2%) Operating costs and expenses:













Compensation and benefits













Relationship managers (175,898)

(113,044)

(16,000)

(35.7%) Others (261,604)

(217,805)

(30,828)

(16.7%) Total compensation and benefits (437,502)

(330,849)

(46,828)

(24.4%) Selling expenses (79,557)

(62,622)

(8,864)

(21.3%) General and administrative expenses (47,742)

(68,502)

(9,696)

43.5% Provision for credit losses (36,461)

(1,897)

(269)

(94.8%) Other operating expenses (51,063)

(20,715)

(2,932)

(59.4%) Government grants 32,587

56,651

8,018

73.8% Total operating costs and expenses (619,738)

(427,934)

(60,571)

(30.9%) Income from operations 251,860

319,504

45,221

26.9% Other income:













Interest income 29,225

10,530

1,490

(64.0%) Investment income 11,847

4,711

667

(60.2%) Other income 310

4,298

608

1286.5% Total other income 41,382

19,539

2,765

(52.8%) Income before taxes and income from

equity in affiliates 293,242

339,043

47,986

15.6% Income tax expense (67,622)

(77,810)

(11,013)

15.1% Income from equity in affiliates 28,829

40,693

5,760

41.2% Net income 254,449

301,926

42,733

18.7% Less: net income attributable to non-

controlling interests













4,266 2,285 323 (46.4%) Net income attributable to Noah

shareholders 250,183

299,641

42,410

19.8%















Income per ADS, basic 4.09

4.86

0.69

18.8% Income per ADS, diluted 4.04

4.84

0.69

19.8%















Margin analysis: Operating margin 28.9%

42.7%

42.7%



Net margin 29.2%

40.4%

40.4%



















Weighted average ADS equivalent[1]: Basic 61,211,098

61,661,522

61,661,522



Diluted 61,966,245

61,921,913

61,921,913



ADS equivalent outstanding at end of

period 61,259,417

61,698,055

61,698,055







[1] Assumes all outstanding ordinary shares are represented by ADSs. Each ordinary share represents two ADSs.

Noah Holdings Limited Condensed Consolidated Income Statements (In RMB'000, except for USD data, per ADS data and percentages) (unaudited)

Six months ended

June 30,

June 30,

June 30,

Change

2019

2020

2020



Revenues: RMB'000

RMB'000

USD'000



Revenues from others:













One-time commissions 410,580

324,270

45,897

(21.0%) Recurring service fees 263,640

300,710

42,563

14.1% Performance-based income 3,145

71,824

10,166

2,183.8% Other service fees 285,317

122,805

17,382

(57.0%) Total revenues from others 962,682

819,609

116,008

(14.9%) Revenues from funds Gopher

manages:













One-time commissions 209,012

15,180

2,149

(92.7%) Recurring service fees 591,734

627,624

88,834

6.1% Performance-based income 9,368

38,941

5,512

315.7% Total revenues from funds

Gopher manages 810,114

681,745

96,495

(15.8%) Total revenues 1,772,796

1,501,354

212,503

(15.3%) Less: VAT related surcharges (11,314)

(7,799)

(1,104)

(31.1%) Net revenues 1,761,482

1,493,555

211,399

(15.2%) Operating costs and expenses:













Compensation and benefits













Relationship managers (343,166)

(283,096)

(40,070)

(17.5%) Others (498,641)

(412,592)

(58,399)

(17.3%) Total compensation and

benefits (841,807)

(695,688)

(98,469)

(17.4%) Selling expenses (170,013)

(107,162)

(15,168)

(37.0%) General and administrative

expenses (106,743)

(132,187)

(18,710)

23.8% Provision for credit losses (36,010)

(4,706)

(666)

(86.9%) Other operating expenses (101,891)

(53,332)

(7,549)

(47.7%) Government grants 49,367

75,286

10,656

52.5% Total operating costs and

expenses (1,207,097)

(917,789)

(129,906)

(24.0%) Income from operations 554,385

575,766

81,493

3.9% Other income:













Interest income 52,348

32,700

4,628

(37.5%) Interest expenses (430)

-

-

N.A. Investment income 37,510

22,277

3,153

(40.6%) Other expense (income) (1,618)

5,156

730

N.A. Total other income 87,810

60,133

8,511

(31.5%) Income before taxes and

income from equity in affiliates 642,195

635,899

90,004

(1.0%) Income tax expense (147,114)

(146,086)

(20,677)

(0.7%) Income from equity in affiliates 46,952

55,769

7,894

18.8% Net income 542,033

545,582

77,221

0.7% Less: net income attributable to

non-controlling interests 7,273

2,916

413

(59.9%) Net income attributable to

Noah shareholders 534,760

542,666

76,808

1.5%















Income per ADS, basic 8.78

8.80

1.25

0.2% Income per ADS, diluted 8.65

8.76

1.24

1.3% Margin analysis:













Operating margin 31.5%

38.6%

38.6%



Net margin 30.8%

36.5%

36.5%



Weighted average ADS

equivalent[1]:













Basic 60,892,670

61,640,688

61,640,688



Diluted 61,933,765

61,949,755

61,949,755



ADS equivalent outstanding at

end of period 61,259,417

61,698,055

61,698,055





















[1] Assumes all outstanding ordinary shares are represented by ADSs. Each ordinary share represents two ADSs.

Noah Holdings Limited Condensed Comprehensive Income Statements (unaudited)

Three months ended

June 30,

June 30,

June 30,

Change

2019

2020

2020





RMB'000

RMB'000

USD'000



Net income 254,449

301,926

42,733

18.7% Other comprehensive income, net of tax:













Foreign currency translation adjustments 54,495

(7,160)

(1,013)

N.A. Fair value fluctuation of available for sale

Investment (after tax) 2,339





110

(66.9%) 775 Comprehensive income 311,283

295,541

41,830

(5.1%) Less: Comprehensive income attributable

to non-controlling interests 4,199

2,326

329

(44.6%) Comprehensive income attributable to

Noah shareholders 307,084

293,215

41,501

(4.5%)

Noah Holdings Limited Condensed Comprehensive Income Statements (unaudited)

Six months ended

June 30,

June 30,

June 30,

Change

2019

2020

2020





RMB'000

RMB'000

USD'000



Net income 542,033

545,582

77,221

0.7% Other comprehensive income, net of tax:













Foreign currency translation adjustments 23,637

30,159

4,269

27.6% Fair value fluctuation of available for sale

Investment (after tax) 2,387

771

109

(67.7%) Comprehensive income 568,057

576,512

81,599

1.5% Less: Comprehensive income attributable

to non-controlling interests 7,416

2,952

418

(60.2%) Comprehensive income attributable to

Noah shareholders 560,641

573,560

81,181

2.3%

















Noah Holdings Limited Supplemental Information (unaudited)

As of





June 30,

June 30,

Change 2019 2020











Number of registered clients 283,655

332,157

17.1% Number of relationship managers 1,428

1,196

(16.2%) Number of cities in mainland China under coverage 83

78

(6.0%)





























































Three months ended





June 30,

June 30,

Change 2019 2020

(in millions of RMB, except number of active clients and

percentages) Number of active clients[4] 5,882

3,367

(42.8%) Number of active clients including mutual fund clients 9,888

14,703

48.7% Transaction value:









Credit products 9,750

232

(97.6%) Private equity products 7,658

2,551

(66.7%) Public securities products 6,021

17,971

198.5% Other products 934

689

(26.2%) Total transaction value 24,363

21,443

(12.0%)





















[4] "Active clients" for a given period refers to registered high net worth clients who purchase financial products

distributed or provided by Noah during that given period, excluding clients who transacted on our online

mutual fund platform.





Noah Holdings Limited

Segment Condensed Income Statements

(unaudited)







Three months ended June 30, 2020



Wealth

Management

Business

Asset

Management

Business

Lending and Other

Businesses

Total

RMB'000

RMB'000

RMB'000

RMB'000















Revenues:













Revenues from others













One-time commissions 116,719

366

-

117,085 Recurring service fees 151,607

646

-

152,253 Performance-based income 57,206

-

-

57,206 Other service fees 32,163

627

23,407

56,197 Total revenues from others 357,695

1,639

23,407

382,741 Revenues from funds Gopher

manages













One-time commissions 9,860

571

-

10,431 Recurring service fees 160,202

163,972

-

324,174 Performance-based income 17,613

16,153

-

33,766 Total revenues from funds

Gopher manages 187,675

180,696

-

368,371 Total revenues 545,370

182,335

23,407

751,112 Less: VAT related surcharges (2,560)

(693)

(421)

(3,674) Net revenues 542,810

181,642

22,986

747,438 Operating costs and expenses:













Compensation and benefits













Relationship managers (113,044)

-

-

(113,044) Others (129,238)

(70,395)

(18,172)

(217,805) Total compensation and

benefits (242,282)

(70,395)

(18,172)

(330,849) Selling expenses (49,302)

(8,407)

(4,913)

(62,622) General and administrative

expenses (51,735)

(12,994)

(3,773)

(68,502) Provision for credit losses -

-

(1,897)

(1,897) Other operating expenses (17,796)

(1,614)

(1,305)

(20,715) Government grants 14,868

12,549

29,234

56,651 Total operating costs and

expenses (346,247)

(80,861)

(826)

(427,934) Income from operations 196,563

100,781

22,160

319,504

Noah Holdings Limited Segment Condensed Income Statements (unaudited)

Three months ended June 30, 2019

Wealth

Management Business

Asset

Management Business

Lending and

Other

Businesses

Total

RMB'000

RMB'000

RMB'000

RMB'000















Revenues:













Revenues from others













One-time commissions 193,567

370

-

193,937 Recurring service fees 129,698

1,466

-

131,164 Performance-based income 1,984

67

-

2,051 Other service fees 62,032

1,193

76,715

139,940 Total revenues from others 387,281

3,096

76,715

467,092 Revenues from funds Gopher manages













One-time commissions 101,104

-

-

101,104 Recurring service fees 140,316

163,262

-

303,578 Performance-based income -

5,610

-

5,610 Total revenues from funds Gopher

manages 241,420

168,872

-

410,292 Total revenues 628,701

171,968

76,715

877,384 Less: VAT related surcharges (3,070)

(877)

(1,839)

(5,786) Net revenues 625,631

171,091

74,876

871,598 Operating costs and expenses:













Compensation and benefits













Relationship managers (175,851)

-

(47)

(175,898) Others (162,491)

(72,697)

(26,416)

(261,604) Total compensation and benefits (338,342)

(72,697)

(26,463)

(437,502) Selling expenses (70,838)

(4,344)

(4,375)

(79,557) General and administrative

expenses (31,834)

(11,143)

(4,765)

(47,742) Provision for credit losses (31,402)

(2,635)

(2,424)

(36,461) Other operating expenses (32,179)

(2,575)

(16,309)

(51,063) Government grants 8,821

9,144

14,622

32,587 Total operating costs and expenses (495,774)

(84,250)

(39,714)

(619,738) Income from operations 129,857

86,841

35,162

251,860

Noah Holdings Limited Supplement Revenue Information by Geography (unaudited)



Three months ended June 30, 2020

Wealth

Management

Business

Asset

Management

Business

Lending

and Other

Businesses

Total

RMB'000

RMB'000

RMB'000

RMB'000















Revenues:













Mainland China 392,284

150,489

23,407

566,180 Hong Kong 121,176

28,052

-

149,228 Others 31,910

3,794

-

35,704 Total revenues 545,370

182,335

23,407

751,112



Three months ended June 30, 2019

Wealth

Management

Business

Asset

Management

Business

Lending

and Other

Businesses

Total

RMB'000

RMB'000

RMB'000

RMB'000















Revenues:













Mainland China 420,540

145,992

76,715

643,247 Hong Kong 178,002

23,705

-

201,707 Others 30,159

2,271

-

32,430 Total revenues 628,701

171,968

76,715

877,384

Noah Holdings Limited Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Results (In RMB, except for per ADS data and percentages) (unaudited) [5]

Three months ended







June 30,

June 30,

Change



2019

2020







RMB'000

RMB'000



















Net income attributable to Noah shareholders 250,183

299,641

19.8%

Adjustment for share-based compensation 22,994

18,106

(21.3%)

Less: gains from fair value changes of equity securities

(unrealized) 10,775

2,316

(78.5%)

Add: gains from sales of equity securities (realized) 4,951

-

N.A.

Less: tax effect of adjustments 3,977

8,200

106.2%

Adjusted net income attributable to Noah shareholders

(non-GAAP) 263,376

307,231

16.7%















Net margin attributable to Noah shareholders 28.7%

40.1%





Non-GAAP net margin attributable to Noah shareholders 30.2%

41.1%



















Net income attributable to Noah shareholders per ADS,

diluted 4.04

4.84

19.8%

Non-GAAP net income attributable to Noah shareholders

per ADS, diluted 4.25

4.96

16.7%





























[5] Noah's Non-GAAP financial measures are its corresponding GAAP financial measures excluding the

effects of all forms of share-based compensation, fair value changes of equity securities (unrealized),

adjustment for sale of equity securities and net of tax impact, if any.

Noah Holdings Limited Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Results (In RMB, except for per ADS data and percentages) (unaudited)

Six months ended







June 30,

June 30,

Change



2019

2020







RMB'000

RMB'000



















Net income attributable to Noah shareholders 534,760

542,666

1.5%

Adjustment for share-based compensation 52,610

36,397

(30.8%)

Less: gains from fair value changes of equity securities

(unrealized) 19,517

8,399

(57.0%)

Add: gains from sales of equity securities (realized) 9,836

-

N.A.

Less: tax effect of adjustments 9,691

7,548

(22.1%)

Adjusted net income attributable to Noah shareholders

(non-GAAP) 567,998

563,116

(0.9%)















Net margin attributable to Noah shareholders 30.4%

36.3%





Non-GAAP net margin attributable to Noah shareholders 32.2%

37.7%



















Net income attributable to Noah shareholders per ADS,

diluted 8.65

8.76

1.3%

Non-GAAP net income attributable to Noah shareholders

per ADS, diluted 9.18

9.09

(1.0%)



SOURCE Noah Holdings Limited

Related Links

www.noahwm.com


Copper prices rose to Rs 522.15 per kg on August 24 as participants increased their long position as seen by the open interest. Copper prices gained on dwindling stock at LME warehouses, which is at 13-year low, and signs of tightness in the physical market.

Copper prices witnessed correction on Friday with dollar recovery and BREXIT concerns on stalled talks between the UK and the European Union. The expectations of lower supply estimates from the world's top miners may continue to support copper prices to trade higher in the medium term, said Tapan Patel- Senior Analyst (Commodities), HDFC Securities.

In the futures market, copper for August delivery touched an intraday high of Rs 523.40 and a low of Rs 518.55 per kg on the MCX. So far in the current series, the precious metal has touched a low of Rs 441 and a high of Rs 534.40.

Copper delivery for August contract gained Rs 3.35, or 0.65 percent, to Rs 522.15 per kg at 16:04 hours with a business turnover of 3,106 lots. The same for September contract was down Rs 1.35, or 0.26 percent, to Rs 514.20 per kg with a turnover of 3,256 lots.

The value of August and Septembers contracts traded so far is Rs 1,273.09 crore and Rs 321.24 crore, respectively.

LME Copper prices are struggling to sustain above the key resistance of $6645 per tonne. For the short term, we expect prices to trade with positive bias MCX, Copper September contract has important resistance at Rs 525-530 and support at Rs 502 for the coming week, said Patel.

At 10:37 (GMT), the red metal price was up 1.06 percent quoting at $6,560.25 per tonne in London.
A mother who was rushed to Sydney to undergo emergency brain surgery has been forced to recover in hotel quarantine despite her doctor's pleas.

Jayne Brown, 60, was told by renowned neurosurgeon Dr Charlie Teo earlier this month two large tumours on her brain could soon leave her blind or paralysed.

The Queensland grandmother-of-seven was rushed to a Sydney hospital on August 10 for immediate surgery.

Jayne Brown, 60, (right) was rushed to a Sydney hospital for an emergency operation to remove two large brain tumours after her neurosurgeon Dr Charlie Teo (left) said the growths could leave her blind or paralysed

'(Dr Teo) explained everything to me and he just basically said "how soon can you get here"?' Ms Brown told the Sunshine Coast Daily.

The doctor removed the tumours that were embedded into her skull and replaced the infected section with titanium plates.

With the operation finished, Ms Brown and her partner decided to travel back to their home at Mooloolah Valley, south-east of the Sunshine Coast.

The pair planned to isolate at the home and applied to be expempt from spending 14 days in hotel quarantine.

Despite Dr Teo's pleas to the government, Queensland Health said Ms Brown and her partner were required to stay at the Four Points by Sheraton hotel in Brisbane.

After Ms Brown underwent her operation she applied for an exemption to hotel quarantine so she could recover at home. Pictured is her stitches after the operation

Ms Brown will remain at the hotel until August 29 and will be forced to front the $2,800 cost of her stay - on top of the $100,000 fee for her surgery.

She said there was a double-standard for those were granted exceptions, with celebrities such as Kylie Minogue able to quarantine at her Gold Coast residence last month after the star returned from Los Angeles.

'We're both 60, we're responsible people and we've got a property that we can self-isolate on, but instead we're made to go here... If major brain surgery's not exceptional circumstances, I don't know what is,' she said.

'The strange thing is we've got more contact with people here than we would have if we were on our acreage.'

Ms Brown said she was struggling with the minimal pain relief available and wanted to go home so she could recover

The grandmother said she was still trying to get an exemption, but had little hope she would succeed.

Queensland Health said in a statement exemptions to hotel quarantine were rarely approved.

'Our restrictions are strict but necessary to keep Queenslanders safe from COVID-19, which is why we rarely grant exemptions to our quarantine measures,' it said.

'We need to get this right  we have seen other nations, and indeed our neighbouring states, fall to extreme levels of community transmission, illness and death.'

Ms Brown's friend, Simone Darnell, has started a fundraiser to help pay off the $100,000 operation. It has so far raised almost $6,000.
Donald Trump marked his official nomination for a second term with a speech complaining about voting by mail, alleging that his opponents were attempting to steal the November election and accusing Democratic nominee Joe Biden of being a puppet of Beijing.

The President launched into his allegations about mail voting  an option states have greatly expanded this year because of the coronavirus outbreak  even before he thanked delegates gathered at the Republican National Convention in Charlotte for their nomination.

"It's not fair and it's not right," Trump said of mail-in voting. Credit:AP

"It's not fair and it's not right," he complained. "It's not going to be possible to tabulate, in my opinion."

He later alleged, without evidence, that Democratic-run states might mail ballots only to neighbourhoods where members of their own party live.
Twin pop duo Jedward have hit out at Jim Corrs idiotic behaviour after he attended an anti-mask, anti-lockdown protest in Dublin yesterday.

The protest, which took place at Custom House Quay on Sunday, saw hundreds protesting the lockdown and public health advice on face coverings and was organised by Yellow Vest Ireland.

Jim Corr of the band The Corrs was in attendance and called the twin brothers Irelands answer to Millie Vanillie.

Gwan leave the whole country breathless from Covid because of your idiotic behaviour @Jimcorrsays, Dublins John and Edward Grimes wrote on Twitter, referring to The Corrs hit single Breathless.

Jedward slammed the anti-mask protest.

"Dear Dublin Anti Mask Protest [sic]," they added.

"Get the f*** inside you selfish low lives, sincerely the rest of the country."

In response, Jim Corr didnt back down: "Shut up you fools and grow a brain between you."

"Ireland's Millie Vanillie have spoken and I shall hand in my notice forthwith."

However, Jedward refused to back down and said that he is the best background member in the history of Irish music.

Video of the Day

"You're the best background band member In the history of Irish music. Jim 'it really doesn't matter at all, cause we are so young now' and 'irresistible' you're just another #COVIDIOT good luck with your air guitar skills," the brothers wrote.

The Eurovision stars recently received praise for attending Black Lives Matter protests in the US and dismissed comparisons between Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the anti-mask protest.

Everyone has the right to protest but it's not peaceful or making change when the consequences are more deaths! that's not democracy it's murder, they added.

"When your core message is wrong you have no legs to stand on! There's only one Right in this fight against Covid so don't even try to question it! Change your attitude and get with the times.

"BLM protests are for the greater good and have made world change! (sic)"
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Linkedin Muthi Achadiat Kautsar (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, August 25 2020

Indonesians enjoyed a week of celebrations in the third week of August, beginning with the commemoration of the countrys 75th Independence Day anniversary on Aug. 17 and continuing on Aug. 20 with Islamic New Year. On top of that, the government also declared Aug. 21 a collective leave day.

The COVID-19 pandemic aside, Jakartans took advantage of the long weekend, with more than 150,000 vehicles reportedly leaving the capital, according to The Jakarta Post.

Kompas.com quoted Jasa Margas corporate communications and community development group head Dwimawan Heru, who said the number of vehicles that departed Greater Jakarta was up 39.2 percent during the holiday, compared to regular days.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 17:06:00|Editor: huaxia

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ULAN BATOR, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia will offer free flu vaccinations to at-risk groups such as kindergarten children, the elderly, patients with chronic diseases and medical workers before the flu season arrives, the country's health ministry said Monday.

"In the first phase, our country is expected to receive 200,000 doses of flu vaccines through the United Nations Children's Fund in mid-September," Dorj Narangerel, head of public relations and the surveillance department of the health ministry, told a press conference.

Offering flu vaccinations to people, especially children before the start of the flu season, will significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization associated with flu and flu-like illnesses, according to Mongolian health experts.

In Mongolia, the peak flu season is in December, January and February.

Children's wards in hospitals in the Asian country, especially those in its capital Ulan Bator, are always over-crowded in winter. Enditem
For most of the past week, season two of Dirty John has been the most-watched series on Netflix in Australia. Not bad for a show whose title character died at the end of season one.

It's indicative of the enduring appeal of true crime, a genre that is overwhelmingly consumed by women across multiple formats. A 2018 study found 73 per cent of true crime podcast listeners were women; a 2010 analysis found 70 per cent of true crime reviews on Amazon were written by women.

There's been at least one true crime series in Netflix's top 10 for each of the past seven weeks. As of writing, eight of the top 20 shows on Apple podcasts are in the genre.

Amanda Peet in Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story.

For the uninitiated, the first season of Dirty John told the story of drug addict and serial conman John Meehan (played by Eric Bana), who inveigled his way into the life of wealthy interior designer Debra Newell (Connie Britton), and tried to isolate her from her family and siphon off her money before being stabbed to death in August 2016 by Debra's daughter Terra (Julia Garner).
Health Ministry helps man in quarantine to visit his critically-ill wife

The Health Ministry has intervened to help a man who was stuck in quarantine to visit his critically-ill wife.

Yesterday, 44-year-old Lee Kwei Cheong had sought Kepong MP Lim Lip Eng's help to highlight his plight while stuck at Armada Hotel in Johor Bahru after returning from Singapore.

After a press conference where Lee spoke through video call, Lim messaged Health Ministry director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah via Twitter for help.

Lim's political secretary Yew Jia Haur said the Health Ministry officials reached out to Lee within three hours.

"They promised to handle the matter right away," Yew said.

Lee, who was yesterday on his 11th day under quarantine, had appealed to be given an early release instead of the full 14-day quarantine due to his family's circumstances.

This request was granted and he is now travelling from Johor Bahru to Kuala Lumpur to see his wife and children.

Lee, who was given a release today, also expressed gratitude to all who have helped him.

Yesterday, he said his wife was in the hospital fighting a blood infection which had spread to critical organs and his children had to be handed over to relatives to be taken care of.

"The doctor found that the virus in my wife's blood had spread to her heart, lungs and now the brain," he had said.

Lim's 39-year-old wife, Cheah Chan Lian, was initially discharged from Hospital Sultanah Aminah, Johor Bahru after recovering from dengue but was later admitted to Hospital Tuanku Jaafar, Seremban due to a blood infection.

Cheah was then transferred to Pantai Hospital in Cheras for specialist treatment and is now at the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre in Petaling Jaya.

Their three children - aged 12, 14 and 16 - had to temporarily stop going to school since Cheah was admitted to hospital for the second time on July 14 due to the blood infection.

Lee had said that his children need to be transferred to a new school from Johor Bahru to Kuala Lumpur but this could not be done while he was in quarantine and his wife is in hospital.

Story continues

He also recently lost his job as a technician at a Singapore electronics factory where he had worked for 18 years.

The cash-strapped Lee said he had to foot RM2,100 for the quarantine bill and also RM60,000 for his wife's medical bill.

He had also raised the issue of Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Mohd Khairuddin Aman Razali who was only fined RM1,000 for skipping quarantine, asking if he could do the same instead of paying RM2,100 for quarantine.

As part of preventive measures against Covid-19, the government requires all overseas returnees to undergo a 14-day quarantine.
Rules In Place, But Enforcement Is Iffy

Virus Could Demand More Than Just Cleaning Buses

(TNS)  For Community Transit bus driver Kyle Moore, there is one memory that plays all the time.In March, as Moores longtime friend and fellow bus operator Scott Ryan was battling COVID-19 in the hospital, Moore drove Ryans wife and daughter toward the hospital.Hospital staff called as they drove. They werent going to make it in time. Moore listened as the family said goodbye. Thats the biggest thing that plays through my mind: Scott and the suffering he went through by himself  alone, Moore said. I would just like people to consider that.In the early weeks of the local coronavirus outbreak, Ryan became the first bus operator in the area known to have died after contracting COVID-19. He had worried about his safety at work. Two Metro drivers, Samina Hameed and Mike Winkler, have since died after contracting the virus. Nationwide, at least 200 transit workers have died, unions say. An unknown number have gotten sick.Public transit  a system at its most efficient when buses and trains are full  has been remade by COVID-19. Ridership has plummeted and agencies have scrambled to keep drivers and passengers safe as tax revenues evaporate. Six months into the local outbreak, transit workers and riders wonder how they will be protected as the virus rages on and parts of the economy reopen.Like reopening schools, making public transit safe will be key to managing the spread of the virus and ramping up reopening. And like schools, restaurants and other facets of once-normal life, transit could look dramatically different if the pandemic stretches on.Agencies around the globe are examining ideas for safety precautions, like plexiglass shields to wall off drivers and vending machines to sell masks, and more novel efforts like ultraviolet light to zap the virus and artificial intelligence to spot transit stations with low mask use.If we want to get the economy up and running again, we need to make transit available and safe, said Dr. Jerry Cangelosi, a professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington.For drivers labeled first responders early in the local outbreak, that status has outlasted what many imagined. On private transit operator Facebook groups, remembrances for drivers appear from across the country.The general public dont see it, but were seeing [Amalgamated Transit Union] members dying all the time, said King County Metro driver Kenneth Bryant. Were putting our lives on the line getting in these buses.Like so much in a pandemic-plagued world, riding the bus now comes with new rules. At agencies around Puget Sound, masks are required, seats are marked off-limits and only so many passengers can be on each bus to allow for proper distancing.Easier said than done.Many times I think my bus exceeded the limit, but it was too hard for me to concentrate on driving the bus safely [and the passenger cap], said King County Metro driver David Reuter. And what was I going to say? Who was going to have to get off?Early in the outbreak, local agencies encouraged riders to skip certain seats to keep distance and stopped collecting fares to reduce close contact at the front of the bus. Eventually, some capped the number of riders per bus and required masks, but enforcement is tricky. On a recent Sound Transit light-rail trip leaving Pioneer Square Station, one train car had alternating seats blocked off for passenger distancing, while in the next car, nearly all of the barriers appeared to have been removed.At Metro, about 10 percent of trips are exceeding passenger limits, according to June and July data from automatic passenger counters. Community Transit said less than 2 percent of weekday trips were surpassing its limits.If Metro drivers stop to let riders off and more are prepared to board, drivers are instructed to let them on the bus, despite the passenger limits. Riders without face coverings are not supposed to be denied a ride, though some drivers admit theyve ignored that guidance. Some passengers, meanwhile, have complained about seeing drivers not wearing masks.Like in businesses and on state ferries, mask disputes could be an enduring challenge. By October, Metro plans to install mask dispensers on board buses, starting with high-ridership routes, a spokesperson said.When an unmasked rider boarded a Route 10 bus on a recent Thursday afternoon, the driver nudged the passenger over the speaker system, saying the rider was free to get off the bus and wait for another driver who didnt mind an unmasked passenger. The passenger masked up.In complaints to the Washington Department of Labor & Industries (L&I), Metro operators, who also drive Sound Transit buses, raised concerns about passengers boarding through the front doors on Sound Transit buses as well as the rule barring drivers from refusing riders without masks, employees gathering in proximity at a bus base and alleged poor quality of KN95 masks provided by Metro.In a response to L&I, Metro described interactions at the front doors as frequent but very short duration and said it was working on installing partitions to separate drivers from passengers getting on the bus. Metro said it would replace any drivers KN95 masks that fall apart.Sound Transit and Community Transit in Snohomish County have restarted fare collection, with some Community Transit drivers saying the change happened too quickly and puts them at risk. The agency counters that riders only spend a few seconds near the driver and few riders, 4 percent in July, approach the driver after boarding.Because the moment when a rider pays the fare is often just a few seconds, fare collection is probably not the main risk of exposure for drivers, said Dr. Marissa Baker, assistant professor of occupational health at UW. But it can create this culture of its OK to approach the bus driver; things are back to normal, Baker said. Payment and enforcement could be moved off the bus to reduce risk, Baker said.Riders should wear masks, avoid close contact with each other and drivers, try not to talk or laugh while riding and bring an extra mask to change into after getting off the bus, Baker said.With transit systems already in financial distress due to lost tax and fare revenue, making things safe brings a cascade of new challenges.If social distancing remains necessary even as people return to work, more buses will be needed to transport the same number of passengers. So long as buses run on diesel, that will eat away at the environmental benefits of bus ridership. And with budget gaps because of the pandemic, those costs could be out of reach, raising the risk of full buses that bypass frustrated riders or crowd too many riders on board.Metro has laid off 200 part-time drivers, including Reuter, citing financial losses. Metro workers protested the layoffs. Some laid-off drivers will get new roles as county health ambassadors to be stationed at high-ridership bus stops, according to the county.The virus has taken an unequal toll nationally, with Black and Hispanic people overrepresented among those who are diagnosed with the coronavirus. In Washington, Hispanic people have been hard-hit, making up 43 percent of cases in which race and ethnicity is known, though they are just 13 percent of the population.About 37 percent of Metro drivers are Black, compared to 7 percent of the county population; 5 percent are Hispanic, compared to about 10 percent of the county population. As ridership dropped this year due to COVID-19, the routes where ridership remained highest travel through diverse areas of the county. The UWs Baker has estimated that three-quarters of American workers are in jobs that cannot be done at home.Bryant, who is Black and drives two routes that travel through the Central District, said he worries about people of color he sees riding without personal protective equipment, knowing they are likely to have less access to health care than white people.The virus could be very devastating on my community, Bryant said. I want them to have a fair shake on this. Theyre primarily riding the buses now.Baker wondered if service could be restructured.Can we take buses from certain parts of Seattle that are wealthier and have a larger number of folks working from home so we can up the number of buses in communities where people are still going to work? she said.Learning more about the virus could also force more changes.On transit systems across the country, cleaning buses and trains was a major focus early on. More recently, some national observers have wondered if the focus on cleaning surfaces could amount to security theater if it happens in lieu of mask-wearing and other measures.As scientists learn more about the way the virus spreads in the air, new questions focus on the detailed specifications of air filtration on buses and ways to design barriers between bus drivers and riders.If you can make an airplane cabin safe, you can make a bus safe, said Cangelosi, from UW. Airtight barriers that wall off drivers so they are breathing different air than passengers could help, too, he said.Metro has about 800 partitions to install between drivers and passengers boarding the bus, at a cost of about $1,500 each, but ran into a glare issue early in testing and is now fixing the problem, said spokesperson Torie Rynning. After fixing the problem, Metro plans to install the shields on buses in the coming weeks. Community Transit also ran into glare issues and so has not installed barriers.Metro said in April its HVAC filters would help trap droplets carrying the virus. Sound Transit is looking into the air circulation on its buses and trains, but has no immediate plans for changes, a spokesperson said.Local agencies have largely not checked employee temperatures, but Metro and Community Transit now say they plan to install temperature-check machines. Temperature checks are easy and worthwhile, Cangelosi said, though their benefit is limited because people can spread the virus without running a fever.Someday, with enough materials and lab tests, large-scale workplace testing for COVID-19 could be possible, he said.Cangelosi and other researchers have shown that less invasive self-collected swab samples can accurately detect the virus  not just the uncomfortable tests that require collecting samples from deep in the nasal cavity  requiring less protective equipment for health care workers and making large-scale testing more doable.Its certainly not the world were in, but the technology exists, Cangelosi said. Our nation can catch up, eventually, to other nations.
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Back in 2010, Texas-based Anadarko Corp. (now a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp.) and Italian energy giant ENI SpA announced the discovery of approximately 180 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, equivalent to ~29 billion barrels of oil, in Mozambique's supergiant offshore basin of Rovuma, immediately catapulting the south African nation to a potential global LNG superpower.

As expected, there was a stampede of oil and gas majors, including ExxonMobil, Total, Shell, and CNPC (China National Petroleum Corp.), who rushed in to stake their claims.

But now there's a real danger that the biggest investment splurge in Africa could go up in smoke even before it gets properly started thanks to the proliferation of terrorism in the region.

Mozambique could potentially reap nearly $100 billion in LNG revenues, or 7x its annual GDP, over the next 25 years, and boost real growth rate from 4% to between 4.8% and 5.4% (depending on the scenario) thus highlighting the sheer transformative power the project could have on the poverty-stricken nation.

But failure of the LNG projects to take off could deal a severe blow to Mozambique, the world's 6th poorest nation, as well as President Nyusi's government, which is desperate to attract foreign investment.

Growing Insurgency

A notorious terrorist organization that has aligned itself to the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks especially in the Cabo Delgado province.

Over the past three years, the insurgency has killed more than 1,500 people and displaced another 250,000 in the country's north, and no one even knows who they really are, what they want or where their loyalties lie, with the government keen to simply refer to them as a band of criminals. Locals call them "al-Shabaab", according to the Atlantic Council, but their official name--as far as we know--is al Sunna wa Jummah (ASWJ). The group's leadership is unknown.

Story continues

Related: OPEC+ Complied 95% With Oil Production Cuts In July

When they behead someone, there is no message--no demand. It is also unclear whether they have any real connection to the Islamic State, or whether such a connection is still metamorphosing.

The root causes, as always, are underdevelopment and corruption.

It has been about eight months since Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi was sworn in for a second term at the top seat. In his acceptance speech, Nyusi emphasized the importance of peace if the nation is to realize its full potential. Mozambique was plagued by a 16-year civil war that ended in 1992, yet resurgent armed conflict remains a major challenge to this day.

The president also vowed not to fall victim to the African curse where resource-rich nations tend to fare even worse economically than their less endowed peers.

Easier said than done. The previous government has a rather checkered history in terms of maintaining peace, but billions of dollars of natural gas are now on the line.

Last year, the Mozambican government approved the Rovuma LNG Development Plan, which is headed by oil majors ExxonMobil and ENI.

The initial development phase could see the companies pony up more than $60 billion in capex with Mozambique potentially becoming a chief LNG supplier to China after the Asian country launched Blue Sky Defence Action Plan designed to curb air pollution.

Related: Bank Of America: Brent Will Recover To $60 In H1 2021

However, it goes without saying that for this to become a reality, Nyusi will need to guarantee security to all the companies investing in a region where Islamic State-linked insurgents have lately intensified attacks against security forces and civilians. The government will be charged with the task of not only halting the attacks but also addressing the key drivers of the insurgency, including unemployment, poverty, and a general lack of economic opportunities.

That is looking to be a tall order, considering opposition hard-liners have continued with the killings despite Nyusi signing a peace accord with Renamo, the main opposition party, last year that brought a hiatus to the years-long conflict.

Corruption and Hidden Debt



Next, Nyusi will need to address the endemic corruption in the public sector to increase accountability and ensure that gas revenues do not end up in some government official's offshore account.

Just a year into his first term, Nyusi's government was thrown into a tailspin after international donors and the IMF froze monetary aid to the country after discovering that the government had failed to declare $1.2 billion in loans. The fallout hit a new low when the United States charged the former finance minister with money laundering with three Credit Suisse bankers also implicated.

No less than six fraud-related cases are still pending at the courts and Nyusi will have to

ensure this sort of thing never happens again under his watch if he wants to win over long-term investors and goodwill by the international community.

Total and ENI To Carry On

Although Nyusi's government has tried to put on a brave face and insists it can deal with the menace single-handedly, the persistent and disruptive attacks prove otherwise.

But maybe Mozambique's neighbors will come to the rescue.

A couple of days ago, Nyusi took over the reins of power as the chairperson of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) from H.E. Dr John Pombe Joseph Magufuli, President of the United Republic of Tanzania. The 16-nation regional trading bloc pledged to help Mozambique combat terrorism within its borders.

Thankfully, Total and ENI have indicated that they intend to carry on in the midst of the violence and might, hopefully, still be able to deliver within their deadlines. Total says in its website that the Mozambique LNG project is on track for delivery by 2024 though ExxonMobil is yet to make a final investment decision.

Nyusi will be keen to leave a legacy as the president who brought Mozambique from the bottom rungs of the UN development index to a middle-income nation, and the whole world is now watching because nearly 30 billion barrels are at stake.

Ultimately, despite the formidable challenges, Mozambique's LNG resources could spawn one of the continent's rare rags-to-riches stories. The economics are particularly appealing, with the country's low production costs a boon in this era of low energy prices.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

Read this article on OilPrice.com
International Study Led by Researchers at Ben-Gurion University Indicates Wastewater Containing COVID-19 May Be A Serious Threat

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...August 24, 2020 - Wastewater containing coronaviruses may be a serious threat, according to a new, global study led by researchers from the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

The new paper, published in Nature Sustainability, by an international collaboration of 35 researchers, evaluates recent studies on coronaviruses in wastewater and previous airborne infectious diseases, including SARS and MERS. The goal is to evaluate potential threats, avenues of research and possible solutions, as well as garner beneficial perspectives for the future.

"There is ample reason to be concerned about how long coronaviruses survive in wastewater and how it impacts natural water sources," says lead author Dr. Edo Bar-Zeev of the BGU Zuckerberg Institute. "Can wastewater contain enough coronaviruses to infect people? The simple truth is that we do not know enough and that needs to be rectified as soon as possible."

Bar-Zeev, and his postdoc student, Anne Bogler, together with other renowned researchers, indicate that sewage leaking into natural watercourses might lead to infection via airborne spray. Similarly, treated wastewater used to fill recreational water facilities, like lakes and rivers, could also become sources of contagion. Lastly, fruits and vegetables irrigated with wastewater that were not properly disinfected could also be an indirect infection route.

The research team recommends immediate, new research to determine the level of potential infection, if any, and how long coronaviruses last in various bodies of water and spray.

"Wastewater treatment plants need to upgrade their treatment protocols and in the near future also advance toward tertiary treatment through micro- and ultra-filtration membranes, which successfully remove viruses," Bar-Zeev and his colleagues say.

At the same time, wastewater can serve as a canary in a coal mine because it can be monitored to track COVID-19 outbreaks. Coronaviruses start showing up in feces before other symptoms like fevers and coughs show up in otherwise asymptomatic people. Regular monitoring, therefore, can give authorities advance warning of hot spots. BGU researchers recently completed a pilot study in Ashkelon, Israel using new methodology to detect and trace the presence of the virus and calculate its concentration to pinpoint emerging COVID-19 hotspots. Other BGU researchers are working on developing water nanofiltration technologies.

###

BGU researchers who participated in this study include: Prof. Amit Gross, Prof. Noam Weisbrod, Dr. Oded Nir, Prof. Osnat Gillor, Prof. Shai Arnon, Dr. Yakir Berchenko, Prof. Zeev Ronen, Prof. Ariel Kushmaro, Prof. Avner Ronen, and Prof. Jacob Moran-Gilad.

Additional researchers from the U.S. were from Yale University, Northwestern University, Drexel University, Temple University, Rice University, and the University of Notre Dame, Illinois. Other participants include researchers from University Limoges, France; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany; University of Girona, Spain; University of Venice, Italy; ETH Zurich, Switzerland; University College Cork, Ireland; and Tianjin Polytechnic University, China.

About American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (AABGU) plays a vital role in sustaining David Ben-Gurion's vision: creating a world-class institution of education and research in the Israeli desert, nurturing the Negev community and sharing the University's expertise locally and around the globe. Celebrating the 50th birthday of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) this year, AABGU imagines a future that goes beyond the walls of academia. It is a future where BGU invents a new world and inspires a vision for a stronger Israel and its next generation of leaders. Together with supporters, AABGU will help the University foster excellence in teaching, research and outreach to the communities of the Negev for the next 50 years and beyond. AABGU, headquartered in Manhattan, has regional offices throughout the United States. For more information visit http://www.aabgu.org.
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday requested the Centre for the second time to postpone NEET and JEE 2020 in view of Covid-19 crisis in the country. If the exams are conducted as scheduled, it would put students lives at risk, said the CM in a tweet.

In our last video conference with PM Modi, I had been vocal against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020, which had a huge potential to put student lives at risk, Mamata Banerjee tweeted.

With the Education Ministrys directive to conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sept, I would again appeal to Centre to assess risk and postpone these exams until the situation is conducive again. Its our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students, Mamata Banerjees tweet further read.

Despite opposition from several quarters to postpone the national level entrance exams for professional courses, the ministry of education gave directive to conduct JEE from September 1 to 6, and NEET on September 13.

Some students even approached the Supreme Court but it refused to interfere in the exam schedule.

Meanwhile, India on Monday reported over 61,000 fresh cases of Covid-19 and 836 deaths in the last 24 hours, pushing the tally to 3,106,349, including 2,338,036 recovered patients.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:33:41|Editor: huaxia

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TEHRAN, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The imminent visit of the chief of the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA) to Iran is not related to the snapback of sanctions against Tehran recently raised by the United States at the UN Security Council, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said here on Monday.

The forthcoming visit by the IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi to Iran on Monday is in line with the standing cooperation between the UN nuclear watchdog and the Islamic republic of Iran, Zarif was quoted as saying by official IRNA news agency.

The media speculation that links Grossi's visit to the recent U.S. attempts pertaining to the return of anti-Iran sanctions is "a wrong expression," he said.

Working with IAEA serves "transparency" of Iranian nuclear program, he added.

Grossi is scheduled to arrive in the capital Tehran on Monday to meet with high-level Iranian authorities.

During his visit, Grossi will address the cooperation of Iran with the IAEA, and "in particular Iran's provision of access to the agency's inspectors to requested locations," an IAEA statement said on Saturday.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Thursday that Washington started the process to restore all pre-2015 UN sanctions against Iran, alleging that Iran has been "inconsistent" with its obligations under the accord.

U.S. President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the Iranian 2015 landmark deal in 2018 and reimposed major sanctions on the country's energy and financial sectors. In reaction, Iran dropped major parts of its nuclear obligations.

Iran and most of the parties signed the Iranian nuclear deal have argued that since the United States is no longer in the deal, it cannot resort to the trigger of snapback mechanism. Enditem
Hazleton, PA (18201)

Today

Snow showers this morning. Becoming partly cloudy later. Morning high of 36F with temps falling to near 15. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 70%..

Tonight

Some clouds. Low 6F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.
By Online Desk

One person died and over 15 suffered injuries after a five-storeyed residential building collapsed in Maharashtra's Raigad district on Monday.

Around 70 people are feared trapped in the debris after the building, which was around 10 years old, collapsed at Kajalpura in Mahad tehsil around 7 pm, an official said.

There were around 45 flats in the building, the official said, adding 25 persons have been rescued and shifted to a local hospital at Mahad, which is around 170 km from Mumbai.

Teams of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) have been moved to the spot for rescue operations.

Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray spoke to the district officials and asked them to expedite the rescue and relief work, another official said.

Local Shiv Sena MLA Bharat Gogawale said that the NDRF has so far rescued 25 people from this collapsed building debris. He said that the cause of the collapse has not yet ascertained. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray has called and ensured all help to rescue all these trapped people. There is no proper light so generators are used to flash the light and search the trapped people. The rescue operation is in full swing. So far, no report of casualty yet, said Shiv Sena MLA.

Sunil Tatkare, the local NCP MP said that he is in touch with the local administration and spoken with the district collector as well.

A viral video of the collapse showed a plume of dust rising from where the building had stood.

Another video showed police trying to control several onlookers gathered at the collapse site.

(With ENS inputs)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 10:56:41|Editor: huaxia

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TRIPOLI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Twenty-two bodies of illegal migrants were retrieved by the Libyan Red Crescent in the coastal city Zwara, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Libya said on Sunday.

"These painful deaths are the result of the increasingly hardening policy towards people fleeing conflict and extreme poverty, and a failure to humanely manage migration flows," Federico Soda tweeted.

IOM's Missing Migrant Project tweeted last Thursday that 45 more deaths, including five children, were recorded in the largest shipwreck off the country's coast in 2020 and called on migrants not to risk their lives to seek a better life.

Libya became a preferred point of departure for thousands of illegal migrants who want to cross the Mediterranean Sea towards Europe after its leader Muammar Gaddafi was ousted and killed in 2011, creating a state of insecurity and chaos in the country.

More than 7,000 migrants who tried to flee Libya have been rescued or intercepted and returned so far this year, with most ending up in detention, according to IOM Libya.

Migration detention centers in Libya have been overcrowded with migrants despite repeated international calls to close them. Enditem
Kanpur, Aug 24 : An interfaith marriage in Kanpur has kicked up a huge row with fringe religios outfit calling it a case of 'love jihad' even though the bride claims to have converted of her own will and married the groom from a different faith.

The local Bajrang Dal unit has been unwilling to accept the fact that Shalini is an adult and free to make her choices. Bajrang Dal workers, on Sunday night, created a ruckus outside the Kidwai Nagar and even got into an altercation with the police.

Shalini Yadav, 21, a resident of Barra in Kanpur, had recorded a video after marrying her lover who belongs to another religion, and posted it on Facebook last week. In the video, she is seen asking for protection as she faced a threat from her family.

Shalini, in the video also claimed that she had changed her name from Shalini to Fiza Fatima and married Mohd Faisal in court of her own will on July 2 in Ghaziabad. She said that her family had lodged a fake FIR against her husband, accusing him of kidnapping her although she had left her home of her own will on June 29.

Shalini's family had lodged the FIR against Mohd Faisal at the Kidwai Nagar police station.

The Bajrang Dal workers alleged that this was a case of 'love jihad', and Mohd Faizal should be arrested at the earliest.

Dilip Singh Bajrangi, the district convenor of the Bajrang Dal, said, "This is a case of love jihad. The man has lured away the girl and brainwashed her. We will not rest till the police takes action in this matter." The district and police officials, however, were tight lipped on the issue and a police spokesman said that the matter was under investigation.
At a time when the economy faces severe impact of coronavirus pandemic, early onset and good distribution of monsoon has paved the way for robust kharif output, which would bring down prices of various commodities. A report by Crisil Research on Monday said that monsoon rains were 7% above the long-period average as of August 21, 2020. Good spatial and temporal distribution has prompted sowing across crops in most states, it said.

According to CRISIL, the spread of coronavirus pandemic in rural India remains the key issue to watch out. This is because the rural share of COVID-19 cases, which was hovering around 20% in June 2020, has spiked to around 45% now.

The agency expects a 2-3% rise in sown area on-year at around 109 million hectares for kharif season 2020. The area under paddy cultivation is set to increase because of both rains and reverse migration of labour to the eastern and southern states, it said.

Meanwhile, area under vegetables, cotton and maize would be lower than in the previous season as lower prices have discouraged farmers from sowing them.

"The CRISIL Deficient Rainfall Impact Parameter, or DRIP, scores point towards healthy performance of agriculture this year. DRIP, in addition to rainfall deficiency, considers vulnerability arising out of the lack of irrigation buffer across states and crops was red flagging Rajasthan as an adversely impacted state till early August. But with rains catching up, the risk has come down substantially," said Dharmakirti Joshi, Chief Economist, CRISIL.

CRISIL Research's analysis of 25 key agriculture commodities indicates that farm profit per hectare for field and horticulture crops is expected to increase 3-5% in kharif season 2020 on the back of higher crop acreage, expected improvement in productivity, and government support to procurement at minimum support price (MSP).

Besides, adequate water availability for critical growth stages is also expected to increase productivity by 2-3% over a low base of 2019, when delayed onset of monsoon in June followed by excess rains and flood-like situation in August-September damaged crops in most western and southern states, it said.

The report highlighted that kharif output could rise 5-6% on-year to a record, which would put downward pressure on prices of various commodities. Adding to it, government support to paddy procurement (the most critical crop in terms of farm income, given it accounts for around 30% of foodgrains production), incremental sowing of more remunerative crops and improved productivity on-year will boost profitability at an aggregate level. Besides, increase in state advised price for sugarcane is also likely to boost profitability on-year.

Among horticulture crops, apple is expected to witness higher profitability on-year because of improved yield over a low base of 2019 and also on account of anticipated increase in prices. In contrast, weak domestic and international demand will keep cotton and maize prices under pressure.

Meanwhile, prices and profitability of vegetables are also likely to drop over a high base of 2019.

According to CRISIL, effective implementation of central and state government schemes will further support farmer incomes.

By Chitranjan Kumar

Also Read: Coronavirus impact: States stare at tax revenue loss of Rs 3 lakh crore in FY21

Also Read: Businesses with turnover up to Rs 40 lakh exempted from GST
Saudi Arabia has inaugurated the National Grain Company, which will build a grains terminal and storage facilities in Yanbu Commercial Port, to enable it to trade and handle grains.

The company is a strategic partnership between the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company (Salic) and the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia (Bahri).

With an estimated total cost of SR412 million in Phase One, the project aims at meeting the future demand for major grains in Saudi Arabia.

The new companys launch and name announcement ceremony was held at the headquarters of the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture, under the patronage of Eng Abdulrahman Al-Fadhli, Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture and Chairman of Salic, and in the presence of Eng Ahmed Al-Faris, Governor of the Saudi Grains Organization (SAGO); Mohammed Al-Sarhan, Chairman of Bahri; Eng. Sulaiman Al-Rumaih, CEO of Salic; and Abdullah Aldubaikhi, CEO of Bahri.

This partnership aims to oversee the trade, handling, and storage of grains between its sources in all regions of the Black Sea, Europe, South America, and the Red Sea region, contributing to the process of import, transportation, distribution, and storage. The project, at Yanbu Commercial Port, will start with a capacity of about 3 million tons per year by the year 2022, to gradually increase to 5 million tons per year. The new terminal, which will be built according to the highest international standards, will enable the rapid handling of grains and fodder

The new terminal, which will be constructed to the highest international standards, will allow for the rapid handling of grains and fodder, by making the logistics services of the terminal available to all importers for the benefit of both the private and public sectors.

Eng Al-Fadhli said: We are delighted with this partnership, which aligns with SALICs strategy to contribute to achieving food security in the Kingdom, as part of the Vision 2030 objectives. The project will also aid with the provision of basic food products and price stability in the Kingdom, which is tied to global production and consumption rates, the movement of commercial shipping, and global stocks of basic food commodities.

Al-Fadhli added: We are confident that this company will play a major role in strengthening supply chains in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as it will lead to the building of the largest regional center for grains. The new terminal will enhance food distribution solutions in the region by importing, processing, exporting, and storing grains to the Kingdom, thanks in part to the strategic location of Yanbu Commercial Port, a key maritime gateway to receive the Kingdoms imports of strategic goods. This project also reflects Salics strategic objectives to achieve more than 50% of the import coverage rate for all commodities identified as strategic goods, in line with the Kingdoms food security strategy.

Mohammed Al-Sarhan, Chairman of Bahri, said: Our work at Bahri balances demand and supply, harnessing big data to efficiently manage and streamline our fleet operations. Today, we are seizing new expansion opportunities in cooperation with economic entities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to diversify our offerings and provide value-added services, in addition to the development of our main business sectors. Over the years, we have made great efforts to contribute to national food security by transporting nearly 1.5 million tons of grains annually to the Kingdom through our fleet of five dry-bulk carriers. With the addition of four new carriers before the end of this year, Bahri will be able to transport 5 million tons of dry food and various grains, including barley, corn, wheat, soy, and others, annually, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Al-Sarhan added: We are pleased to achieve one of our largest regional-level strategic initiatives. Our joint venture with Salic will link the Kingdom to global grain sources, further contributing to the goals of Vision 2030 to make our nation an international logistics hub, connecting three continents. The Yanbu Commercial Port, overlooking the Red Sea, was chosen as the strategic location following a lease agreement between Salic and the Saudi Ports Authority (Mawani), reflecting the Kingdoms objectives to maintain water security and limit the cultivation of fodder that consumes water in large quantities.

The Yanbu Commercial Port is the perfect maritime gateway for a grain handling terminal of this size and capacity, as most imported grains come from countries along the Black Sea, South America, and parts of North America. New shipments coming from Australia to the Red Sea will also find the terminal beneficial, thanks to its modern offloading, handling, and storage technologies, said the statement.  TradeArabia News Service
CWC briefing by KC Venugopal and Randeep Surjewala underway

The Congress Working Committee briefing is underway. KC Venugopal and Randeep Surjewala are addressing the media. Both leaders read the partys resolution in both English and Hindi.

Senior leaders should raise concerns at party forum only: Sonia Gandhi in concluding remarks

Congress is one big family and I dont hold anything against anyone. But all, especially senior leaders should raise concerns at the party forum only, said Sonia Gandhi in her concluding remarks.

CWC meet ends, Sonia Gandhi to continue as Congress president

The seven-hour long CWC meeting has come to an end. Sonia Gandhi to continue as Congress president till an AICC session is called within six months. A committee will be formed to help Sonia Gandhi in day-to-day functioning.

Ambika Soni demands action against dissenters

Congress leader Ambika Soni has demanded that action be taken against the dissident leaders.

Nobody can question my loyalty to Congress party: Mukul Wasnik

I owe a lot to Sonia Gandhi. Nobody can question my loyalty to the Congress party, says dissident Congress leader Mukul Wasnik.

We should all learn from her: RPN Singhs pitch for Sonia Gandhi

Congress leader Ratanjit Pratap Narain Singh praised Sonia Gandhi for being available 24x7 to guide the party during Jharkhand elections. We won the elections. I want to tell all CWC members that we should all learn from Sonia Gandhi, he told the CWC. RPN Singh also wanted Sonia Gandhi to continue on the post till a new president is elected.

Ahmed Patel criticises dissenters, says Rahul Gandhi should be Cong president

Ahmed Patel criticised the dissenters. Referring to Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mukul Wasnik and Anand Sharma, he said they are occupying key posts in the party and should not have written such a letter. He also said that Rahul Gandhi should take over as Congress president immediately.

Does not reflect well on you to react to hearsay: Congress MP Manickam Tagore on Sibals tweet

Kapil Sibal ji We all have great respect for you. @INCIndia made you cabinet minister and gives lot of importance. you are NOT inside the CWC. You are reacting to a leak that is false. It does not reflect well on a leader as senior as you are, to react to hearsay! Tweeted Congress MP from Tamil Nadu Manickam Tagore.

After clarification on Rahul Gandhis remarks, Kapil Sibal withdraws tweet

Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal has withdrawn his tweet where he expressed unhappiness with Rahul Gandhis reported remarks at the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting.

Rahul Gandhi did not say leaders were colluding with BJP: Surjewala

Randeep Singh Surjewala tagged Kapil Sibals tweet where he said Rahul Gandhi was accusing them of colluding with the BJP, and clarified that the former Congress chief did not say a word of this nature nor alluded to it.

Priyanka Gandhi hits back at Ghulam Nabi Azad

Priyanka Gandhi hits back at Ghulam Nabi Azad, says what you are saying is opposite of what you have written in the letter.

The letter was unfortunate, cruel: AK Antony

AK Antony said the letter of dissenting Congress leaders was unfortunate, cruel.

Begin deliberations to put in a place of process of transition to relieve me from my duties: Sonia Gandhi

A year has lapsed now. In the interest of the party, I ask CWC to begin deliberations to put in a place of process of transition to relieve me from my duties, says Sonia Gandhi.

Never made a statement in favour of BJP in 30 years: Kapil Sibal

Rahul Gandhi says  we are colluding with BJP  Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party. Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP Govt. Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue. Yet  we are colluding with the BJP ! Tweeted Kapil Sibal.

Letter was written in collusion with BJP, says Rahul Gandhi

Writing a letter to Sonia Gandhi for reforms in party leadership was done in collusion with BJP, says Rahul Gandhi: ANI quoting sources.

Ghulam Nabi Azad explains why he wrote the letter, offers to quit

Ghulam Nabi Azad said that he would resign if he was in any manner doing this to help the BJP or doing it at its behest.

KC Venugopal reads out Sonia Gandhis letter seeking to step down from her role

Sonia Gandhis letter seeking to step down from her role was read out by KC Venugopal.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, part of group that wrote letter on Congress overhaul, praises Sonia Gandhi

Dissenting leader Ghulam Nabi Azad praises Sonia Gandhi in key meeting over leadership crisis in Congress.

I am hurt by the letter: Captain Amarinder Singh

Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh said he was hurt by the letter seeking changes in CWC.

Weakening the high command is weakening the party: AK Antony

Weakening the high command is weakening the party. How can my colleagues write such a letter?, asks AK Antony.

Rahul Gandhi condemns timing of Congress leaders letter

Rahul Gandhi condemns the timing of the leaders letter and says it was written at a time when Sonia Gandhi was ill and when the Congress Party was fighting BJP in MP and Rajasthan.

Sonia Gandhi wants a start to process of transition to relieve her from duty

Sonia Gandhi asks leaders to begin deliberation to start a process of transition to relieve her from the duty.

Rahul should take over if Sonia Gandhi unwilling to continue as party chief: AK Antony

Sonia is unwilling to continue as Congress interim chief, Rahul Gandhi should take over, says AK Antony.

Sonia Gandhi should complete full term: Manmohan Singh

Former PM Manmohan Singh says he wants Sonia Gandhi to stay and complete full term.
It is not only the slower-than-expected global oil demand recovery that is weighing on oil prices. Some major geopolitical events and the return of previously curtailed U.S. shale production are set to weigh on the price of oil in the near to medium term. On top of the coronavirus-related demand concerns, the oil market has to reckon with the possibility of more oil returning to the market from Libya, Iran, and the United States.

In Libya, the UN-backed government announced a ceasefire on Friday, and the east-based rival administration also called for a truce in a move that could pave the way to reopening of Libya's oil terminals, if the ceasefire holds.

However, the Libyan National Army (LNA), loyal to eastern Libyan strongman General Khalifa Haftar, said over the weekend that the proposed truce was "media marketing," without explicitly backing or rejecting the ceasefire.

In response to the proposed reopening of oil terminals, Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC) welcomed "the proposal to resume production and export of oil and to freeze sales revenues in NOC accounts in the Libyan Foreign Bank," the state oil firm said in a statement on Friday.

"NOC reiterates its call for all oil facilities to be freed from military occupation to ensure the security and safety of its workers. Once this has been done, NOC should be able to lift force majeure and re-commence oil export operations," the company said.

If the rival factions reach some form of a lasting truce, the potential return of Libyan oil exports would weigh on oil prices as they would increase global supply at a time when demand recovery is very fragile.

Related: Saudi Energy Ministry To Help Build $500 Billion Smart City



"The prospect of Libya, currently producing less than 100,000 barrels/day, now being able to increase production would add further delays to the rebalancing process and it helped to explain the weakness seen in oil prices ahead of the weekend," Ole Hansen, Head of Commodity Strategy at Saxo Bank, said on Friday.

Another geopolitical shift could occur early next year if Democratic candidate Joe Biden wins the presidential election in November. The U.S. presidential election could install a new administration in the White House that would be inclined to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal and potentially ease the current sanctions on Tehran's oil exports as part of the 'maximum pressure' campaign of the Trump Administration. Iran could suddenly turn from a bullish driver for oil prices into a bearish factor if it resumes up to 2 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil exports.

According to Christophe Ruhl, senior research scholar of international and public affairs at Columbia University, the Iran sanctions could be the most significant impact and unknown to oil prices next year.

"The US elections... to me that's still more risk than anything because we don't know what the incumbent is capable of doing and how long that will stretch out and in general just underlines the poor state of the US political society and the economy," Ruhl said on a webinar organized by Gulf Intelligence, The National reports.

Over the next few months, prices could come under further pressure because the oil supply is also set to increase from the United States, where producers are restoring curtailed shale production. As per a Rystad Energy analysis of 25 listed oil firms' Q2 earnings statements, most U.S. operators are set to restore nearly all shut-in oil volumes by the end of the third quarter, with only a handful maintaining some level of curtailment for the rest of the year.

Last week, the oil rig count in the United States saw its largest weekly increase since January, with most of the rigs added in the Permian Basin.

This could be the sign that U.S. oil production is beginning a slow recovery.

"It is difficult to take away too much from one data point, and clearly we would need to wait several weeks to see if this is a trend that continues," ING strategists Warren Patterson and Wenyu Yao said on Monday.

All these bearish supply factors could combine next year to weigh on oil prices, which could still be struggling with a bearish demand factorslower-than-thought rebound in global oil consumption.



By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
COLUMBIA  A Republican former member of Congress from South Carolina and longtime critic of President Donald Trump endorsed Joe Biden for president Monday, arguing the Democratic nominee will help stabilize American politics and restore the country's institutions.

Bob Inglis, who represented the Upstate's 4th Congressional District for six terms before losing to Trey Gowdy in a 2010 GOP primary, told The Post and Courier he was encouraged to see Biden reaching out to disaffected Republicans who believe Trump's character contradicts the party's historic values.

"Joe Biden, because of his life experiences, is a fella who's empathetic and knows about bringing people together and could serve very well in this time when we really need to bring the country together," Inglis said. "We need to stop this nonsense and complete polarization."

While Inglis said he still considers himself a Republican, he said Trump had led the party astray from traditional conservatism, criticizing the president for running up the federal deficit, isolating from ally countries and not doing enough to "provide opportunity for everyone."

"This is dangerous, populist nationalism. It is not conservatism," Inglis said. "I want my party back, and Joe Biden is actually closer to that than Donald Trump."

Inglis, who has emerged as a climate change activist in recent years and was one of two South Carolina voters who sued the state GOP last year for cancelling their presidential primary, was among 27 Republican former members of Congress backing Biden.

While Inglis is not the only Republican former member of Congress from South Carolina to say he won't support Trump, he is the first to publicly back Biden.

Mark Sanford, who lost his GOP primary in 2018 and briefly challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination last year, told The Post and Courier last week he will not vote for Trump but has not decided if he'll back Biden, Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen or someone else.

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"There's a lot of time between November and now to figure out what I'll do," Sanford said.

In a Fox News op-ed Monday, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham brushed off the concerns of anti-Trump Republicans, writing that "most Republicans will enthusiastically support President Trump because he has delivered on policies and priorities that matter to them and their loved ones."

Polls suggest the vast majority of Republican-identifying voters still support Trump.

"The fact is, they were outliers," Graham wrote of anti-Trump Republicans who spoke at last week's Democratic National Convention, including former Ohio Gov. John Kasich. "President Trump enjoys overwhelming support among the Republican faithful."

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said the president has deep support among "real Republican voters and is also making strong inroads in Bidens core Democrat constituencies, like Black Americans, Latinos, and union members."

"Joe Biden has been a failure in the Washington Swamp for a half century, so no one should be surprised when Swamp creatures gather to protect one of their own," Murtaugh said.

Still, Inglis said he remains hopeful the GOP will return to some semblance of its pre-Trump identity if the president loses his reelection bid in November. He pushed back at anyone questioning his Republican credentials, noting he spent decades helping flip South Carolina from blue to red.

"What I say to anybody who calls me a RINO is maybe you're the Republican In Name Only," Inglis said.
Green Movement Leader's Questionable Silence About 1980s Mass Execution of Prisoners

Ahmad Batebi August 23, 2020

Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has been under house arrest since 2011 as one of the leaders of Iran's proreform Green Movement was Iran's Prime Minister between 1981 and 1989.

One can still remember young men and women protesters who were executed in Iran during the 1980s without even establishing their identity. Their pictures appeared in newspapers on the day after the execution so that their families could identify them and take delivery of the corpses for burial.

It might sound unbelievable that thousands were blindly executed, or if they were lucky enough their belongings were confiscated before they were fired from their workplace or school. Others received lashes for listening to music or playing chess.

The years 1981-1989 when Mousavi was the Prime Minister mark one of the darkest periods in man's history as far as violation of human rights is concerned. Documents released by the UNand human rights watchdog show that Mousavi and the offices he controlled ignored the international community and human rights organizations in the same waythat the Islamic Republic does today. Not only individuals and offices working under Mousavi as Prime Minister did not protest what was going on, but they did their best to conceal the violation of human rights in Iran.

In a 2010 interview, Mousavi described the execution of political prisoners in Iran in 1988 as "criminal" and "ugly." This showed a change in his behavior. But what causes sensitivity among his critics is that he does not acknowledge his administration's responsibility for covering up the violation of human rights and for whitewashing the behavior of Islamic Republic officials, particularly Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeyni who ordered the massacre in Iranian prisons.

Mousavi said: "Neither I, nor anyone else among the heads of the branches of government at that time knew about the executions. At a meeting I had with them at the time, none of them approved of such an act. I remember that Mr. Khamenei said at the same meeting that this event will tarnish the face of the regime as if you have poured tar on it."

This comes while Khamenei had said in an interview with Resalat daily in 1988 that political prisoners "deserved" execution. He defended the murders. Meanwhile, then Majles Speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Judiciary Chief Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardabili also defended the executions in January 1989. At the same time, Prosecutor General Mohammad Mousavi Khoiniha said "We are not afraid of the rising number of executions."

In the 2010 interview, in an attempt to clear Khomeyni of the charges, Mousavi said in an unbelievable statement that Khomeyni had notordered the mass execution. He said: "They used Imam Khomeyni's name as an excuse. One of the gentlemen in the board that issued the death sentences believedthat oppositionists should be eliminated. Such individuals joined hands with the man in charge ofthe Evin Prison and started a series of executions that did not serve the regime's interests and were stopped as soon as the officials found out about them."

This contradicts the decree issued by Khomeyni which stated "As the hypocrites do not believe in Islam, those prisoners who insist on their hypocrisy are fighting Allah and should be sentenced to death."

Asked if the decree was about those already sentenced to death or about other prisoners who insist on their position, Khomeyni said: "In all cases anyone insisting on his or her hypocrisy should be executed quickly."

Documents and survivors' reports indicate that the executions started in the summer of 1988 and continued until the next winter and at least 5,000 members or sympathizers of Mojahedin-e Khalq organization, leftist prisoners and members of other parties were killed.

According to former President Rafsanjani, at a September 1998 meeting attended by Mousavi among other officials, which took place after executing some 4,000 prisoners, it was said that Khomeyni had delegated decision making about further executions to those present at that meeting. This shows that not only Mousavi, but all other top officials of the regime knew about the executions.

Speaking about that meeting, Mousavi has said: "At that time, I was committed to defend the totality of the regime as its Prime Minister."He also said in many other occasions that he has kept silent about the massacre.

Keeping silent and not showing interest in speaking about the victims of what Mousavi himself described as crime, as well as fabricating history and undermining Khomeyni's role and the responsibility of other state officials does not relieve Mousavi of his responsibility as the country's Prime Minister. Meanwhile, his mild criticism of his former colleagues is nothing more than nagging. The first conditions indicative of a protest is acknowledging responsibility and trying to make up for the past.

The opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the views of Radio Farda.

Source: https://en.radiofarda.com/a/green-movement -leader-s-questionable-silence-about-1980s-mass -execution-of-prisoners/30797507.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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The United States health watchdog has given emergency authorisation for the use of blood plasma to treat coronavirus patients in the country, saying the benefits of the treatment outweighed any potential risks.

IMAGE: Melissa Cruz, an emergency room technician at Valley Medical Center in Renton who has recovered from the coronavirus disease she contracted from a patient, donates convalescent plasma at the Central Seattle Donor Center of Bloodworks Northwest during the outbreak in Seattle, Washington. Photograph: Lindsey Wasson/Reuters

The US Food and Drug Administration said on Sunday that over 70,000 patients in the country had been treated with convalescent plasma, which is made using the blood of people who have recovered from coronavirus infections.

US President Donald Trump welcomed the move by the FDA on the eve of the four-day Republican National Convention which will renominate him to be the party's candidate in the November 3 presidential election.

"Today I am pleased to make a truly historic announcement in our battle against the China virus that will save countless lives," Trump said at a White House briefing, referring to the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.

"Today's action will dramatically increase access to this treatment," he said, a day after he accused the FDA of impeding the rollout of vaccines and therapeutics for political reasons.



In a tweet on Saturday, Trump said "the deep state, or whoever, at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics.

"Obviously, the are hoping to delay the answer until after [the US presidential election]," he said.

The FDA said in a news release said it has issued an emergency use authorisation for investigational convalescent plasma for the treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalised patients as part of the agency's ongoing efforts to fight COVID-19.

Based on scientific evidence available, the FDA concluded, that this product may be effective in treating COVID-19 and that the "known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product."

More than 176,000 people have died from coronavirus since the start of the outbreak in the US, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Nearly 5.7 million cases have also been confirmed nationwide, making America the worst-hit country in the world after the disease emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan last year.

"The FDA's emergency authorisation for convalescent plasma is a milestone achievement in President Trump's efforts to save lives from COVID-19," said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

"Our work on convalescent plasma has delivered broader access to the product than is available in any other country and reached more than 70,000 American patients so far. We are deeply grateful to Americans who have already donated and encourage individuals who have recovered from COVID-19 to consider donating convalescent plasma," Azar said.



"The data we gathered suggests that patients who were treated early in their disease course, within three days of being diagnosed, with plasma containing high levels of antibodies, benefited the most from treatment. We saw about a 35 per cent better survival in the patients who benefited most from the treatment," Azar told reporters at the White House briefing.

"We dream in drug development of something like a 35 per cent mortality reduction. This is a major advance in the treatment of patients. A major advance," he was quoted as saying by CNN.



But several experts, including Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House's coronavirus task force, have expressed reservations about the robustness of blood plasma studies so far.



"The problem is, we don't really have enough data to really understand how effective convalescent plasma is," Dr Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University and a CNN medical analyst, said on Sunday.

"While the data to date show some positive signals that convalescent plasma can be helpful in treating individuals with COVID-19, especially if given early in the trajectory of disease, we lack the randomised controlled trial data we need to better understand its utility in COVID-19 treatment," Dr Thomas File, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement.



The FDA news release said that based on an evaluation of the emergency use authorisation (EUA) criteria and the totality of the available scientific evidence, the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research determined that the statutory criteria for issuing an EUA criteria were met.



The agency said it determined that it is reasonable to believe that COVID-19 convalescent plasma may be effective in lessening the severity or shortening the length of COVID-19 illness in some hospitalised patients.



"The agency also determined that the known and potential benefits of the product, when used to treat COVID-19, outweigh the known and potential risks of the product and that that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternative treatments," the FDA news release said.
Microsoft's AI for Health supports COVID-19 vaccine development

Given the global urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft's AI for Health program has stepped in to support the development and potential deployment of Vaxine's COVAX-19 vaccine with a philanthropic grant.

Vaxine Pty Ltd, a biotechnology company based in South Australia, uses computational and artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies to accelerate pandemic vaccine and drug development with the aim to reduce drug development processes that normally take decades down to just weeks.

The Microsoft AI and Azure cloud capabilities will help the company accelerate clinical testing of its COVAX-19 vaccine.

"Large international Phase 3 vaccine trials are extraordinarily complex and generate vast amounts of data that needs to be efficiently processed", says Vaxine Research Director, Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky.

"Supported by Microsoft technology, we aim to collect and analyse the COVAX-19 trial data in real time, rather than waiting until the end of the trial before seeing if the vaccine is working, which is the traditional process."

At the beginning of July, Vaxine launched a Phase 1 trial of its COVAX-19 vaccine, with all vaccinations in the 40 volunteers now completed. The focus is now to advance COVAX-19 into pivotal Phase 2 and 3 trials to enable applications for marketing approval before the end of the year.

"We are proud to support the pandemic research being done at Vaxine," says John Kahan, Chief Data Analytics Officer and global lead of the AI for Health program. "Microsoft's AI and Azure technology supports organizations accelerate the work being done to better understand and develop solutions to fight COVID-19 and make them globally accessible."

"This new partnership with Microsoft's AI for Health - together with our existing partnerships with leading universities, manufacturers and government funding agencies - are vital to Vaxine's ability to make its Covax-19 vaccine globally available in the shortest possible time", adds Vaxine Business Manager Sharen Pringle.

This project will also seek to use this live-fire pandemic vaccine development program, to see whether it is possible to re-design the way in which future pandemic trials are designed and managed. The goal will be to reduce the time needed to access valuable results, allowing faster transfer of positive results to clinicians working at the frontline.

Covax-19 was the first Australian-developed COVID-19 vaccine to commence human clinical trials and is based on a recombinant spike protein manufactured in insect cells combined with Vaxine's unique non-inflammatory Advax adjuvant. This is expected to provide a safe and well tolerated vaccine that is able to induce potent T cell responses and antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.

Vaxine background:

Vaxine is an Adelaide-based biotechnology company with a long history of developing vaccines against infectious diseases, allergies and cancer. In 2009 it developed a new swine flu vaccine after initiating human trials within a short three months. In 2019, it created the first drug designed solely by artificial intelligence to enter human trials. Vaxine's use of AI and other technologies is key to its ability to develop pandemic vaccines faster and more efficiently.

###

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
What We Know About the Election Day Asteroid Heading Near Earth

The object has a .04 percent chance of hitting Earth, would disintegrate if it reaches atmosphere

NASA on Saturday said that a small asteroid is headed toward Earth one day before Election Day in November, although the object has around a 0.40 percent chance of actually hitting the planet.

If the object entered Earths atmosphere, it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size, a NASA spokesperson said over the weekend.

NASA scientists have predicted that the asteroid dubbed 2018VP1 with a diameter of about 6.5 feet will pass close to the Earth on Nov. 2, CNN reported, citing data from the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), from Nasas Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The agency said that based on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days, it didnt believe a direct asteroid impact was likely.

Asteroid 2018 VP1 is very small, approx. 6.5 feet [2 meters], and poses no threat to Earth! NASAs Planetary Defense Coordination Office wrote Sunday. It currently has a 0.41 percent chance of entering our planets atmosphere, but if it did, it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size.

Asteroid 2018VP1 is very small, approx. 6.5 feet, and poses no threat to Earth! It currently has a 0.41% chance of entering our planets atmosphere, but if it did, it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size.  NASA Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) August 23, 2020

The space rock also will remain far from the Earth, or about 260,000 miles away, according to Space.com.

The object was discovered by the Palomar Observatory in California in 2018.

NASA has been directed by Congress to discover 90 percent of the near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters (459 feet) in size and reports on asteroids of any size, a NASA spokesperson told The Hill.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 16:05:21|Editor: huaxia

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SYDNEY, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Australian mining giant, Fortescue Metals Group, posted a record profit for the previous financial year, on the back of sustained demand from Chinese buyers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the company revealed Monday.

Boosted by elevated prices for Fortescue's main export, iron ore, which is used to make steel, the company's profit soared 49 percent to 4.73 billion U.S. dollars for the 12 months ending June 30.

During that period, Fortescue exported 178.2 million tonnes of iron ore, the vast majority of which went to China, with revenue from China alone totalling over 12.1 billion U.S. dollars.

In January 2020, Fortescue opened a new office in Shanghai following the successful establishment in 2019 of a wholly owned Chinese sales entity, FMG Trading Shanghai, with the aim of providing directly to Chinese customers in smaller volumes and using the local currency.

In a statement to investors, Fortescue expressed that strength in Chinese demand was expected to continue as the country bounced back from COVID-19, pushing forward with large scale construction projects.

"We anticipate continued recovery in China's economic activity and remain confident in the Chinese government's commitment to urbanisation, which will continue to underpin long-term demand for iron ore," the company said.

The company went on to say that as the home to three out of the world's four largest iron ore producers, Australia's own economic recovery post-COVID-19 was greatly boosted by continued strength in the trade of iron ore between the two countries.

Meanwhile, Fortescue founder and current chairman Andrew Forrest attributed part of the company's more recent success to the embracing of artificial intelligence and automation technology, which he described as "one of the greatest industrial revolutions in history."

He added that sustainability is a crucial part of the company's charter and that carbon neutrality should be achieved as soon as possible. Enditem
hoichoi is thrilled to announce a new series, Tarader Shesh Tarpon, a special tribute dedicated to the departed legends of our time. It is a docu-series, the first of its kind on the departed Indian celebrities as hoichoi is known to experiment and bring forth never-told or never-seen before content pieces with a unique yet strong narrative.

Produced by Nandita Roy and Shiboprasad Mukherjees Windows Production and dated to stream this Mahalaya, Tarader Shesh Tarpon marks one-of-a-kind collaboration between hoichoi and Windows.

Tarader Shesh Tarpon is a unique offering of remembrance to 12 special stars whose contributions, even post death remains relevant and rekindles the essence of Bengalis across the world. The eminent list includes Sushant Singh Rajput, Chuni Goswami, P.K. Banerjee, Rituparno Ghosh, Tapas Pal, Sunil Ganguly, Ajoy Basu, Gopal Bose, Supriya Devi, Krishanu Dey, Mahua Lahiri and Kalika Prasad Bhattacharya across various fields whose contributions have had far reaching effects and continue to inspire, motivate, polarize opinions and at times trigger a debate, even after their death. It is certainly no coincidence that the first 6 episodes will be aired on Mahalaya, arguably considered to be the most auspicious day of the Bengali calendar to pay homage and say prayers to the departed close ones. The connotation of Tarpan is indicative of that very Bengali tradition of offering prayers to our forefathers. Tarader Shesh Tarpon is also an attempt to record a final assessment of their life and times, to revisit the glory days as well as the semi- darkness in the form of controversies which may have engulfed them. It is a final work of respect, curated with utmost sensitivity after thorough research and well-rounded interviews, to etch these personalities in the hearts of the people forever.

Conceptualised & anchored by Gautam Bhattacharya and directed by Aritra Mukherjee of Bramha Janen Gopon Kommoti fame, this series also includes a star-studded team of celebrities like Sourav Ganguly, Soumitra Chatterjee, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Jisshu U S Sengupta, Srijit Mukherji, Shatabdi Roy, Kaushik Ganguly, Saswata Chatterjee, Anindya Chatterjee, Subhash Bhowmick, Aparajita Addhya, Subrata Bhattacharya, Surajit Sengupta, Mimi Chakraborty, Sudipta Chakrabarty, Tnusree Chakraborty, Prasun Banerjee, Mir, Srinjoy Bose, Rachana Banerjee, Monoranjan Bhattacharya, Budhdhadeb Guha, Sudeshna Roy, Abhijit Guha, Tarun Majumder, Ranadeb Bose, Debang Gandhi, Saradindu Mukherjee, Joydeep Mukherjee, Kiran More, Arun Pandey et all, who will share their insights about the erstwhile stars.

Tarader Shesh Tarpon will entail untold and unknown stories of the lives of the legends, unseen photos and videos of their life, stories about their lives by living legends, and soulful Rabindra Sangeet in the background by eminent singers. The list of singers who have performed for this show includes Srikanta Acharya, Jayati Chakraborty, Babul Supriyo, Rupankar Bagchi, Raghab Chatterjee, Aditi Gupta, Durnibar, Roopa Ganguly and Iman Chakraborty. Music direction by Indraadip Dasgupta. Recitation by Bratati Bandopadhyay and Raya Bhattacharya.

Shiboprosad Mukherjee, Co-Founder of Windows Production said, Tarader Shesh Tarpon is a small gesture to show that their contribution is appreciated even after their death. The show will be honored by special guests who will share their insights on the departed celebrities. On the auspicious occasion of Mahalaya we will pay our Tarpon and we hope the audience appreciates it as well. We couldnt think of a better platform than hoichoi to stream our project; ecstatic to finally associate with hoichoi!
Although one of the criticisms of Belaruss president Alexander Lukashenko is that his government handled the Covid-19 pandemic badly, the topic has been notably absent from public debates. Its this dismissive stance towards the coronavirus that the authoritarian leader and the protesters calling for an end to his time in office have in common.

During the recent demonstrations following the presidential election, the crowds in Minsk didnt seem to care about social distancing, very few masks were seen, and Lukashenko himself regularly displayed his defiance of Covid dangers  remember that he even ordered a big victory parade on 8 May. Although one should nonetheless note that Belarus is dealing with outbreaks of the virus better than the neighbouring countries.

For a brief moment, at least, the pandemic was relegated into the background, and we were back to the well-known scene of freedom-loving masses toppling the last dictator in Europe  Minsk as a new Kyiv.

However, this joyful enthusiasm for democracy implies its own blind spot. We should, of course, support the protests: Lukashenko is an eccentric authoritarian leader, a slightly ridiculous figure who runs his state with an iron fist, arresting opponents, allowing very little freedom of the press, etc. However, he cannot be dismissed as simply a failure. What he achieved was economic stability, safety and order, with a per capita income much higher than that in the free Ukraine, and distributed in a much more egalitarian way. But one of his most important profitable enterprises  getting cheap oil from Russia and reselling it to the West  is now over because of low oil prices. So his time has run out.

The ongoing protests in Belarus are catch-up protests, the aim of which is to align the country with Western liberal-capitalist values. But the problems will come after the protesters claim victory for democracy and the first wave of enthusiasm is over. The final outcome might well be a new, more national-conservative figure  something like a Belarussian version of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban or Polands Jaroslaw Kaczynski. That is to say, one should bear in mind the reason for Lukashenkos relative popularity until recently: he was tolerated, accepted even by some circles, precisely because he offered a safe haven against the ravages of wild liberal capitalism (corruption, economic and social uncertainty).

The protests which have been shaking the world the last couple of years clearly oscillate between two types. On the one side, we have the catch-up protests which enjoy the support of Western liberal media: Hong Kong, Minsk etc. On the other side, we have much more troubling protests which are a reaction to the limits of the liberal-democratic project itself: The yellow vests movement in France, Black Lives Matter, and Extinction Rebellion. The relationship between the two resembles the well-known paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. The upshot of which is that in a race between the two, the fleet-footed Achilles cannot ever overtake the tortoise. No matter how quickly Achilles closes each gap, the slow-but-steady tortoise will always open new, smaller ones and remain just ahead of the Greek hero.

Now lets replace Achilles by forces of democratic uprising, and the tortoise by the ideal of liberal-democratic capitalism: we soon realise that the majority of countries cannot come too close to this ideal, and that their failure to reach it expresses weaknesses of the global capitalist system itself. All these countries can do is the risky move of reaching beyond this system, which, of course, brings its own dangers.

Plus we are forced to realise that, while pro-democracy protesters strive to catch-up with the liberal-capitalist West, there are clear signs that, in economy and politics, the developed West itself is entering a post-capitalist and post-liberal era  an era that is dystopian in nature, of course.

 Lukashenko calls on supporters to defend Belarus

Greeces former minister of finance, Yanis Varoufakis, recently pointed out a key sign of things to come: when news of historic recessions in the UK and US broke, the stock market experienced a record high. Although part of this can be explained by simple facts (most stock market highs belong to just a few companies which thrive now, from Google to Tesla), the general tendency is of the decoupling of financial circulation and speculation from production and profit. Netflix is exemplary here: while it loses money, it continues to expand. The true choice is thus: what kind of post-capitalism will we find ourselves in?

As for democracy, lets just take a look at the cover stories in our media. In Poland, liberal public figures complain that they are becoming spectators at the dismantling of democracy. In the US, Barack Obama warned that Donald Trump presents a grave threat to democracy itself, while Trump is giving signs that he will not recognise the result of presidential elections if it is not in his favour  does this not sound like Lukashenko?

So lets wish all the luck to protesters in Belarus: if they win, Covid-19 concerns will return with a vengeance, with all other pressing issues from ecology to new poverty. They will need luck  and courage.
The water level in lakes that supply drinking water to Mumbai has jumped to 94% mainly due to good rainfall received by Mumbai in this monsoon season.

The addition of only one more percent of water in these lakes will make the stock of water in Mumbai sufficient for the entire year.

Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has announced that it will withdraw 10% water cut rule as soon as the water level touches 95%. It may be recalled that the BMC had implemented the rule of 20% cut in water supply in June-July due to less rain but the cut was reduced to 10% after good rains in August.

Mumbai gets water from seven lakes and the total stock of water in these lakes is around 1356732 MLD. Mumbai needs 1447363 MLD of water annually.
Photograph: John Hanna/AP

In the heartland state of Kansas, long seen as deep-red territory where Democrats rarely have a shot at winning key elections, hope is beginning to stir that the party could pull off an unlikely win in a crucial Senate seat.

The state senator Barbara Bollier, a former Republican and physician, is the vehicle for these ambitions  which if they came off could decide whether the party grabs overall control of the US Senate in January.

Bollier has proved to be a formidable fundraiser and, in an interview with the Guardian, described how she plans to attract independents and Republicans in Kansas in the general election against an establishment Republican candidate, the US congressman Roger Marshall.

What I want to highlight is the fact that as a physician, as a current legislator, I am an independent voice and work hard to listen to the people and bring their ideas and needs forward in a bipartisan fashion, cooperating and working together, Bollier said in an interview with the Guardian.

Bollier left the Republican party in 2018. She said she had grown dissatisfied with the partys opposition to Medicaid expansion and record on balancing budgets. She said that those priorities are still in place with me but they were not being followed by the Republican leadership in this state.

They were not following public education, Bollier said, adding that the then Republican Kansas governor, Sam Brownback, put in a horrific tax plan that broke and caused us to have to borrow money to meet our bills. That is not a traditional Republican value, borrowing money. And at a point you realize: I can best represent our people following the values that they want as a Democrat.

Related: Trump may not respect the election. We need a Democratic Senate more than ever | Sidney Blumenthal

Democrats have not controlled a Senate seat in Kansas since 1939 and the state votes reliably Republican in presidential races. But in 2018 Laura Kelly, also a state senator, beat the anti-immigration hardliner Kris Kobach to win the Kansas governors race, a sign that there is a precarious route for Democrats to win statewide.

Story continues

Bollier had also hoped to face Kobach, but Kobach lost to Marshall.

The added rub now is that most campaigning for Bollier has had to be virtual or socially distanced because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Campaigning has been very unique during Covid as weve done a tremendous amount  on the internet, Zoom, Facebook Live, Bollier said. Of course tremendous numbers of phone calls. We did a virtual bus tour. Now that were moving forward in understanding this disease and understanding that if I wear a mask and another person wears a mask and were socially distancing, there will be opportunity to do more of me moving out of my home.

Both Bollier and Marshall are physicians. They both graduated from the same medical school. But they have taken different approaches to campaigning during the pandemic. Bolliers campaign events are distanced and mostly virtual and Marshalls have been in person, mirroring the national strategies of the Donald Trump and Joe Biden campaigns.

Marshall has also said every week he takes two tablets of hydroxychloroquine, the drug Trump has touted as a treatment for coronavirus. Research has found hydroxychloroquine does not prevent Covid-19 and the Food and Drug Administration has warned that there are serious health risks connected to taking the drug.

The divergent approaches in campaigning and public stances on healthcare are what, Democrats hope, will boost Bollier and create an upset win for the party.

Representative Roger Marshall, joined by his wife, Laina Marshall, speaks to supporters near Pawnee Rock, Kansas, on 4 August. Photograph: Travis Heying/AP

Scott Fairchild, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, touted Bolliers background in a recent podcast interview with David Plouffe, former campaign manager for Barack Obama.

I think weve recruited a stellar candidate, Fairchild said. Shes an impressive doctor, moderate Republican turned moderate Democrat. Shes raising a lot of money. I think shes going to make that race really competitive.

Polling generally shows Marshall leading Bollier by single digits. Democrats often point to the cash advantage Bollier had entering the general election  over $4m to Marshalls $600,000. When asked if she thought her chances of winning the seat had shrunk when Marshall beat Kobach, Bollier pushed back and pointed to Medicaid expansion.

This state desperately wants and needs Medicaid expansion and healthcare access. And every one of them stood against it, including Roger Marshall. He still does. And has tried to end the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic, Bollier said.

She added: Four hundred thousand people in Kansas have pre-existing conditions, so you have to have another plan there for them to have insurance. So, no, my campaign speaks for itself.

Another question for the general election is how much damage the divided primary did to Marshall. Trump refrained from weighing in on the primary, though he did congratulate Marshall after he won.

But major Republican organizations have rallied around the Kansas congressman.

Marshalls significant win was a huge, critical victory for the pro-business majority and the business community, Ashlee Rich Stephenson, the political director for the influential US Chamber of Commerce, said in an email.
AI has become increasingly popular in Vietnam with the participation of large technology firms in the field.

AI Smart Warning, a solution to identify actions via cameras, has been introduced by the Vietnam Software and Digital Content Industry Institute to many localities and enterprises.

The solution automatically identifies peoples dangerous actions through security cameras and sends alerts to managers and authorities immediately via software on smartphones.

The technology has high applicability in the fields of security, transport, healthcare, tourism and public administration. The cities/provinces of Quang Ninh, Lang Son, Dong Thap, Ninh Thuan, Thanh Hoa and Bac Giang, and some agencies, including VTC, the State Bank and Ben Tre Police, have registered to use AI Smart Warning.

AI Smart Warning is one of Make in Vietnam solutions being developed by institutes and technology firms, which realizes the Vietnamese ambition to cement its position on the world technology map.

AI has become increasingly popular in Vietnam with the participation of large technology firms in the field.

In the context of global integration and strong development of the 4.0 industry revolution, the government since 2014 has identified AI as a priority for investment and development.

In September 2018, the Ministry of Science and Technology approved the national key science and technology program to 2025, under which many activities to support the development of AI technology will be carried out, creating links among researchers, investors and businesses.

At many conferences and workshops, government officials repeat the view on accelerating the development of AI and considering AI the source technology that drives national productivity.

In October 2019, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc signed the decision on the establishment of the National Innovation Center (NIC), located in Hoa Lac Hi-tech Park. The aim of NIC is to successfully develop Vietnamese groundbreaking technological ideas.

The Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) has been taking measures to help AI research receive capital from domestic and foreign investment funds. A lot of important events have been organized, including the Vietnam Venture Summit held in June 2019. The ministry plans to set up the Vietnam Global Innovation Fund with an aim to train high-quality human resources.

With the governments encouragement, many technology firms have engaged in AI research.

Le Hong Viet, CTO of FPT Group, said FPT has over 70 business clients in finance and banking, and retail and insurance sectors using AI products, bringing direct benefits to 11.5 million people.

As the technological gap between countries is narrowing, those who can take advantage of opportunity will soon reach the goal of a digital society, Viet said.

Meanwhile, Viettel has been developing AI-based apps in many different ecosystems, from healthcare, e-commerce, agriculture and forestry to education, transport, digital banking and smart city.

Three universities have begun providing training in AI, namely the Hanoi University of Science and Technology, HCM City University of Technology and Education and FPT University.

Manh Truong

Make in Vietnam Awards to honor VN digital technology solutions The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) on August 19 launched the Make in Vietnam Awards.
Joe Bidens presidential campaign has launched an effort seeking to engage Republican voters ahead of the November election, with more than two dozen former GOP lawmakers joining a new "Republicans for Biden" initiative on Monday.

The roster of Republicans featured several prominent politicians in crucial battleground states, including former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, an outspoken opponent of Donald Trump who has previously said that a sound defeat of the president would benefit the GOP.

The announcement comes on the first day of the Republican National Convention, in which party leaders decided to throw their full support behind the Republican incumbent  without making any formal changes to its 2016 policy platform.

Other former Republican lawmakers backing Mr Biden as part of the new initiative included former Virginia Senator John Warner and former New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey.

The list also included several former congressmen, from former Arizona Rep Jim Kolbe and former Oklahoma Rep Mickey Edwards to former Mississippi Rep Mike Parker and former Illinois Rep Ray LaHood, who previously served under Barack Obama as the US secretary of Transportation.

In a statement to Fox News announcing the new initiative, a campaign official for the former vice president said Trumps failures have superseded partisanship.

These former members of Congress cited Trumps corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course as a reason why they support Biden, the official told Fox News. These former Members of Congress are supporting Joe Biden because they know whats at stake in this election and that Trumps failures as President have superseded partisanship.

The campaign official also reportedly described the new initiative as a strong rebuke of the president.

Though Mr Trump has enjoyed strong approval ratings throughout his tenure in the White House among Republican voters, a wave of former GOP voices have come out in opposition to the president and his administration.

Mr Flake told the Washington Post in an April interview about the president: I don't know anyone who thinks that this is the future of the party. This is a demographic cul-de-sac we're in, if nothing else. Anger and resentment only go so far; you have to have a governing philosophy.

I don't know of any of my colleagues who really believe this is it, he continued. I just couldn't support [Donald Trump] long before he started to run. The birtherism thing was just too much for me. And then it piled on.

Mr Trump was meanwhile expected to appear all four nights at this weeks Republican National Convention, along with current GOP officials like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
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CWC Meeting meeting Updates: 'Sonia Gandhi has never kept a grudge against anyone and never will. In her concluding remarks, she has said that he has no ill will against those who have written the letter requesting a change in party structure and leadership,' said Randeep Singh Surjewala.

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In a press release issue shortly before the CWC meeting, the Jammu and Kashmir Congress Committee said that it "unwaveringly" supports Rahul Gandhi as the party's chief, "if there is any change in Congress president".

Twenty-three senior Congress leaders, including five former Chief Ministers, Congress Working Committee members, sitting MPs, and former Union Ministers, had written a letter calling for sweeping changes, and organisational elections from the block level till the CWC. Acknowledging the rise of the BJP, the letter noted that the fall in support base and losing the confidence of the youth are matters of serious concern.

Twenty-three senior Congress leaders, including five former Chief Ministers, Congress Working Committee members, sitting MPs, and former Union Ministers, had written a letter calling for sweeping changes, and organisational elections from the block level till the CWC. Acknowledging the rise of the BJP, the letter noted that the fall in support base and losing the confidence of the youth are matters of serious concern.

Congress worker Jagdish Sharma said, "We want Party President from Gandhi family only. Party will be destroyed & break away if any outsider is made President."

Ahead of the Congress Working Committee meet, party workers raised slogans outside the New Delhi headquarters, demanding that the chief should be from Gandhi family.

Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh said, "The family that has sacrificed for the country's independence and thereafter is well known. I do not agree with what is coming in the media. I cannot even imagine a Congress without Nehru Gandhi family."

"We must not forget that in spite of the canard against Smt Sonia Gandhi, she led the Congress Party to victory in 2004 and made Atal Bihari Vajpayee sit at home," Kamal Nath, who is the Madhya Pradesh Congress chief, tweeted.

Meanwhile, Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh said Gandhis were the only recognisable face of the Congress, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Singh, in his statement, said there was a bid by some Congress leaders to challenge the Gandhi family leadership of the party. He added that this was not the time to raise such an issue, given the need for a strong opposition.

As leaders started joining the video-conference CWC meet, Congress leader Sachin Pilot acknowledged Sonia and Rahul Gandhi's "sacrifice for the greater good of the people and the party".

Speaking to reporters ahead of the CWC meet, BJP leader and Madhya Pradesh Cabinet minister Narottam Mishra remarked that there are many eleigible candidates for the post of the party chief, "like Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, Raihan Vadra and Miraya Vadra". "Congress members should understand that Congress is like the school where only headmaster's child tops the class," he said.

Sonia Gandhi started the meeting by requesting members to relieve her of the current role of party chief. She also spoke raised concerns about the India-China standoff in Ladakh.

The Congress Working Committee meeting started behind schedule, with leaders like Manmohan Singh, Captain Amarinder Singh, Ashok Gehlot and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in attendance.

Stating that the letter seeking "sweeping changes" in the Congress comes at a time when the party is putting up a fight in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and Sonia Gandhi was admitted to the hospital, Rahul Gandhi said that he is deeply hurt, CNN-News18 reported.

In a tweet expressing dismay over Gandhi's statement made during the CWC meet, Sibal mentioned his role in defending the party when it was under threat in Rajasthan and Manipur.

Responding to Rahul Gandhi's remark that those who signed the letter seeking "sweeping changes" in the party was written in collusion with the BJP, senior leader Kapil Sibal said that he has never issued a statement in favour of the saffron party in the "last 30 years".

Senior Congress leader and leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said that he will resign from the party if he is found guilty of colluding with the BJP, sources told PTI. Azad, who was subject to harsh criticism while reading a dissenting letter sent to Sonia Gandhi a few weeks ago, was responding to Rahul Gandhi's criticism of the signatories.

Randeep Singh Surjewala had also tweeted after Sibal responded to allegations that signatories of a letter written to Sonia Gandhi advising against spreading "false media doscourse".

Shortly after posting a tweet that said that he has never issued a statement favouring the BJP in 30 years, Kapil Sibal deleted it, following a clarification from Rahul Gandhi.

"It is most unfortunate that some colleagues (outside CWC) have accused us of collusion with BJP, and if those people can prove this allegation, I will resign".

Ghulam Nabi Azad took to Twitter to clarify that Rahul Gandhi never said that the letter of dissent was written at the behest of the BJP. Clarifying his remarks, he said that "some Congress person" had made the allegations and it was in that context that he had offered to resign.

The CWC has drawn to an end after nearly seven hours, said reports. Although the Congress has not released its resolution, reports (read here , here and here ) indicate that Sonia Gandhi is likely to continue as the Congress interim president till the next AICC meeting.

Congress leader KC Venugopal says, "CWC unanimously decides to strengthen the hands of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. The voices of our two leaders have inspired generations. The CWC notes that inner party issues can not be discussed to media and public forum."

The CWC resolves to strengthen the hands of its leaders Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, said Surdeep Singh Surjewala.It firmly states that no one will be given a chance to weaken the party or undermine, especially at a time when democratic rights are under assault under the BJP government.

"The CWC urges and advises all concerned to raise such issues only in party fora in the interest of propriety and discipline," says Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala

"The CWC authorises the Congress President to affect necessary organisational changes that she may deem appropriate to take on the challenges listed above. In the light of the above deliberations and conclusions, the CWC unanimously requests Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the Indian National Congress until such time as circumstances will permit an AICC session to be convened," said Congress leader KC Venugopal

"Sonia Gandhi has never kept a grudge against anyone and never will. In her concluding remarks, she has said that he has no ill will against those who have written the letter requesting a change in party structure and leadership, she just says that any dissent should be raised in the party fora," said Randeep Surjewala.

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh welcomed the unanimous resolution passed by the Congress Working Committee (CWC), asking Sonia Gandhi to continue as party president till the next AICC session, reports News18. He also urged her to take any decisions required , including necessary organisational changes that she may deem appropriate.

Pradesh Congress Committee chief Girish Chodankar said in a statement. He stated that the party should collectively support Rahul Gandhi "who is fighting single-handedly against the mismanagement of economy, COVID-19 and attack on the democracy".

Goa Congress welcomed the (CWC) resolution urging Sonia Gandhi to continue as its interim chief till an AICC session can be convened."The Goa Congress welcomes the CWC's decision urging Sonia Gandhi to continue leading the party as she has the capacity to take along everyone and guide the party," Goa

The BJP took aim at Rahul Gandhi over his purported remarks that the letter by over 20 Congress leaders seeking changes in the organisation will help the ruling party, saying he is "obsessed" with the saffron party and that "one's destruction is near when one stops using his own mind". "So obsessed is Rahul Gandhi with the BJP that he is beginning to see Congress' veteran leaders as those working in 'collusion' with BJP. Someone rightly said when one's destruction is near, one stops using his own mind," BJP general secretary Bhupender Yadav said. The Congress has denied that Rahul Gandhi, its former president, had accused any party leader of "colluding" with the BJP during the CWC meeting.

Gandhi demits the office.Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) chief Ripun Bora said that all members of the party want a permanent president as early as possible. "The APCC and lakhs of party members of Assam want that Rahul Gandhi should come back (as president). We want a consensus decision and it should be taken at the earliest possible time. I also believe that nobody will dispute if Rahul Gandhi becomes the president again," Bora said. However, if he does not want to be the president, "we have to find a new face," the Rajya Sabha MP told PTI.

The Congress' Assam unit on Monday said that it wants senior leader Rahul Gandhi as the party's national president as soon as the interim chief Sonia

CWC Meeting LATEST Updates: "Sonia Gandhi has never kept a grudge against anyone and never will. In her concluding remarks, she has said that he has no ill will against those who have written the letter requesting a change in party structure and leadership," said Randeep Singh Surjewala.

The CWC in its resolution authorised the Congress President to affect necessary organisational changes that she may deem appropriate and urged her to continue as the interim chief till the next AICC session.

The CWC has drawn to an end after nearly seven hours, said reports. Although the Congress has not released its resolution, reports indicate that Sonia Gandhi is likely to continue as the Congress interim president till the next AICC meeting.

Ghulam Nabi Azad took to Twitter to clarify that Rahul Gandhi never said that the letter of dissent was written at the behest of the BJP.

Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel said during the CWC meet that Rahul Gandhi should be elevated to the post of the party chief, which he stepped down from last year.

Kapil Sibal, who responded to Rahul Gandhi after the latter's alleged collusion with BJP" remark at the CWC meet, has now deleted the tweet, clarifying that the former Congress president never made the remarks.

Defending Rahul Gandhi after Kapil Sibal's tweet, Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala appealed against spreading "false media discourse" and stressed on the importance of "fighting the draconian Modi rule".

Amid a debate over the leadership issue, top Congress leaders are holding a meet in New Delhi through video-conferencing on Monday to discuss the matter.

"A meeting of the Congress Working Committee will be held on Monday, the 24 August, 2020 at 11.00 am via video conferencing," AICC general secretary KC Venugopal had said in a tweet.

All permanent and special invitees to the CWC were invited to the meeting, where the leadership issue is also likely to be discussed, besides the current political situation in the country.

There has been a clamour within a section of Congressmen for Rahul Gandhi to take over as the president of the grand old party again.

The CWC meet comes close on the heels of Congress president Sonia Gandhi completing a year as the interim party chief, a post she accepted last year after her son Rahul Gandhi stepped down.

A debate is again raging in the Congress over the uncertainty related to its leadership.

In an official media briefing two days ago, the Congress said its workers across the country want Rahul Gandhi to take charge of the party.
New Delhi, Aug 24 : The carrying of 'tazias' at Muharram in Delhi has been undertaken since medieval times but this will be the first time for 700 years that processions will not be carried out, said Syed Kashif Nizami, the custodian of the revered Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya shrine.

"Even during the Partition in 1947, there was no ban on 'tazia' processions in the dargah, but this time due to the corona pandemic, Delhi and the Central government have not allowed processions to be held in a mass religious programme." "For more than 700 years, the largest 'tazia', decorated with flowers, is kept in the Imambara, which is at a small distance from the dargah. More than four 'tazias' decorated with flowers are kept here." On the 10th day of Muharram, which marks the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet at Iraq's Karbala in 681 A.D, a procession with mourners carrying daggers and knives is carried out from the dargah and the blood oozing out of their self-inflicted wounds is reminiscent of the tragedy.

However, this time around, all such activities have been banned due to the pandemic. So this time only 'tazias' decorated with flowers will be sent to Karbala in the capital.

Gauhar Asghar Kasmi, a member of Shah-e-Mardan Dargah and Anjuman Karbala Committee at Aliganj Jorbagh in Delhi, said: "Every year, the 'majlis' starts from the first day of Muharram. Tazias are also kept at many places. On the 10th day of Muharram, processions reach here with nearly 70 large tazias. Tazias are buried here. A procession of mourners beating their chests take to the streets on Teej, the 12th day of mourning. 'Majlis' are being organised this year only in the Imambaras. People are allowed to participate in the Majlis with observance of social distancing norms." Hindu-Muslim unity is also at display every year on Muharram.

Mohammad Zuhaib Nizami, who is associated with Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya Dargah, said: "Many Hindu families in the vicinity have been part of the 'tazia' processions for many years owing to their faith. A Hindu family in Mehrauli has been doing so for many decades." The coronavirus has also affected the life of people involved in the business of 'tazia'. 'Tazias' are made in thousands in Delhi, but this time due to corona, people are not buying 'tazias' for 'aqidat' (goodbye prayers).
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President Donald Trump talks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Aug. 20, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/Pool/Getty Images)

Manhattan DA Agrees to Delay Enforcement of Subpoena for Trump Tax Returns

The Manhattan district attorneys office has agreed to delay the enforcement of a subpoena for President Donald Trumps tax returns and financial documents.

In a letter sent to Trumps legal team on Aug. 22, the office of New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said the district attorney had agreed to temporarily delay the enforcement of his subpoena until after the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rules on Trumps request to hold a lowers court decision to dismiss his case while the appeal plays out in court.

The deal between the parties comes after the 2nd Circuit Court denied a request to immediately block the district courts ruling, but the appeals court said it would hear arguments on the request for a stay pending appeal on Sept. 1.

Following the district courts ruling, which allowed the Manhattan district attorney to enforce the subpoena, the parties agreed to temporarily delay the enforcement of the subpoena until Aug. 28.

The Aug, 22 letter, which was filed in the court on Monday, further delays the enforcement of the subpoena to give the 2nd Circuit Court time to decide on Trumps request.

The president has been fighting Vances subpoena since 2019. The case went to the Supreme Court after lower courts denied Trumps request for relief from the subpoena.

The Supreme Court ruled that Trump was not absolutely immune from state criminal processes but also opened the door for him to challenge Vances subpoena on other grounds.

Trumps legal team filed a second challenge against the subpoena in late July, arguing that the subpoena was overbroad and issued in bad faith.

On Aug. 20, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero dismissed Trumps latest bid to stop Vances subpoena for eight years of his tax returns and other financial documents from the presidents accountant.

Marrero characterized Trumps newest challenge as a roundabout way for the president to invoke immunity from judicial processes. He said that the presidents move embodies a novel application of presidential immunity to protect the executive branch from judicial process.

At its core, it amounts to absolute immunity through a back door, an entry point through which not only a President but also potentially other persons and entities, public and private, could effectively gain cover from judicial process, the judge wrote.

He also rejected Trumps request to hold his ruling until the appeal has been resolved.

Vance, a Democrat, is subpoenaing for Trumps financial documents as part of a criminal grand jury probe.

Trump has characterized the subpoena as a continuation of the witch hunt, during remarks to the press on Aug. 20.

Theres never been anything like it, where people want to examine everything youve ever done to see if they can find that theres a comma out of place. No president has ever had to go through this, he said.
Dallas Goedert says he felt perfectly fine after getting punched in the face at a South Dakota bar in June.

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The Eagles tight end acknowledged the incident for the first time on Monday during a chat with reporters. Goedert had remained social-media silent since video emerged of the player being punched in the face.

Goedert confirmed what NJ Advance Media previously reported in June, as he said he underwent concussion protocol testing the day after the incident as a precaution and was released.

I havent had to deal with (the case) too much, Goedert said. The next day I was perfectly fine. They put me through concussion protocol just to be safe, but I feel great.

On June 20, police were called to the 1000 block of South Main Street in reference to an assault, according to a statement published to the Aberdeen Police Departments Facebook page. When police arrived, Goedert, identified as an adult male, had been punched in the face. He was taken to Avera St. Lukes Hospital, where he was treated and released, the statement said.

Kyle Hadala, 30, was arrested and charged with two misdemeanors: simple assault attempt to cause bodily injury and simple assault intentionally cause bodily injury, according to court records.

The alleged assault didnt cause serious bodily harm, so the misdemeanor charges were simple under South Dakota law, according to Ernest Thompson, chief deputy states attorney for Brown County.

Hadala was the only person charged with a crime in relation to the incident.

Hadala pleaded not guilty to both charges on July 17. Hadala requested a trial and his next court date is Sept. 30, according to Thompson.

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For the second year in a row, Ukraine marks its Independence Day without a military parade, while a March of Veterans is being held in the city center.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his address to the nation on Independence Day from Kyiv's Sofiyska Square has promised to hold a military parade once the country regains control over all temporarily occupied territories.

The President noted that today, on August 24, as Ukraine is marking the 29th anniversary of its independence, awards will be handed to those "who multiplies our independence daily."

It is thanks to the military and defenders that Ukraine has preserved independence, Zelensky said, adding that today Ukrainians will be able to express their sincere praise and bow to all veterans and volunteers during their march along Khreshchatyk.

Zelensky has stressed that Ukrainian military hardware is now in the east of the country.

"I am sure that this is the way it should be because tanks, armored personnel carriers, and warplanes are not an attraction for Kyiv residents and capital city guests in a country that's defending its sovereignty up in arms. Military hardware should be on the front line, where it's needed now, rather than in a peaceful Kyiv  and this is the only way it should be if we respect our Army," Zelensky added.

Read alsoBelarus protests: defense minister warns of army use, Lukashenko shows resolve in propaganda video"We will definitely hold a parade in the future  a parade of Ukrainian victory, when we get all our people and all our territories back," the president stressed.

"When there is sustainable peace in our land, we will hold a big parade with all our troops and hardware, a parade after which no one else will even consider breaking peace in Ukraine, encroaching on its freedom and independence," the president added.

Meanwhile, the March of Defenders that is launching from Shevchenko Park in Kyiv has already gathered thousands of participants from all over Ukraine, many of whom are veterans of the Ukrainian-Russian war.

Armored personnel carriers, and warplanes are not an attraction for Kyiv residents and capital city guests in a country that's defending its sovereignty up in arms

Independence Day in Ukraine
U.S. Senate report on Russian election meddling fails to present evidence: Russian Foreign Ministry

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 09:35, August 23, 2020

The whole story about Russian interference was "from the very beginning invented in the course of the internal political struggle between various forces in the United States," Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said.

MOSCOW, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- The final volume of a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election fails to present facts and evidence, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Saturday.

"Like the previously released sections of the report, the last part does not contain real facts or evidence," Zakharova said in a statement.

"In fact, it repeats the unfounded accusations we have been familiar with since the Muller report and other U.S. documents came out, including the alleged hacking of the servers of the Democratic Party, the contacts of Trump's staff with Russian citizens, and Russia's desire to undermine the U.S. democracy, etc.," she added.

The spokesperson said Russia had repeatedly noted the unsubstantiated nature of those U.S. claims, adding that the whole story about Russian interference was "from the very beginning invented in the course of the internal political struggle between various forces in the United States."

Russia regrets the damage done to its relationship with the United States and warned Washington against spreading "anti-Russia myths," she added.

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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was probably poisoned but is not currently in danger of dying, according to doctors at the Berlin hospital where he remains in an induced coma, per AP.

Why it matters: Navalny is the best-known critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and several other prominent government critics have been poisoned in recent years.

The Berlin hospital said only that doctors found "cholinesterase inhibitors" in his system  a wide categorization that could encompass substances ranging from household insecticides to VX nerve gas.

What they're saying: "In view of Mr. Navalnys major role in Russias political opposition, the countrys authorities are urgently called upon to fully investigate this act as a matter of urgency  and to do so in a completely transparent way," German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a joint statement.

"Those responsible must be identified and brought to justice."

The backdrop: Navalny became seriously ill shortly after boarding a flight last Thursday to Moscow from Siberia, where he met with opposition politicians.
Vietnam needs at least 100,000 digital technology companies to develop the digital economy, smart urban areas, e-Government and promote the application of digital technology advancements in socio-economic fields. - VNA/VNS Photo

This was a highlight of the draft national strategy for developing Vietnamese digital technology companies which the Ministry of Information and Communications recently made public for comments.

Digital technology companies are expected to play an important role in making Vietnam a developed and industrialised country with rapid, sustainable and inclusive economic development as well as turning Vietnam into a high-income country by 2045.

The Vietnamese Government estimated Vietnam would need at least 100,000 digital technology companies to develop a digital economy, smart urban areas, e-Government and promote the application of digital technology advancements in socio-economic fields as well as accelerate national digital transformation.

Under the draft strategy, Vietnam will focus on developing four types of digital technology companies, namely those developing core technologies, developing digital technology products, providing digital technology solutions and digital-technology start-ups.

By 2025, Vietnam hopes to have 70,000 digital technology companies with a workforce of 1.2 million. Digital technology companies are expected to have revenue growth 1.5-2 times higher than the countrys GDP expansion rate and export growth at 10-20 per cent per year.

Digital companies are expected to contribute 10 per cent of GDP and to bring Vietnam into the top three countries in ASEAN and the top 70 in the world for technology and innovation ranking.

The draft strategy aims for the country to have 100,000 digital technology companies by 2030 with a workforce of 1.5 million. Digital companies would contribute 20 per cent of GDP and Vietnam would be one of the top two countries in ASEAN and the top 50 in the world in technology and innovation ranking.

According to the Ministry of Information and Communications, about 43,000 enterprises currently operate in the information and technology sector together with 17,000 others doing business in distributing and providing IT products and solutions.

The ministry said hitting 100,000 digital technology companies would be challenging, given the country's heavy dependence for core technology on foreign countries, the low added value of IT products and limited innovation capacity and competitiveness, together with increasing competition from international IT companies.

Vietnams competitive advantage of cheap labour was being undermined by breakthroughs in new technologies, the ministry said.

It was critical to develop a national strategy for digital technology, stressed the ministry.

The ministry said the first solution would be improving the legal framework to create a favourable environment for digital technology companies.

The country will also focus on strengthening research and development capacity, developing a robust market for digital technology companies, building a data industry and digital technology ecosystem. Developing human resources in digital technology was also important.

The draft also said the Governments digital technology projects would aim to create a spillover effect.
MILTON, N.Y.  The Saratoga County Sheriffs Office responded to a call of a larceny from a vehicle at the Doubleday Fields on Malta Avenue.

Upon arrival, patrols received reports of two vehicles that had their windows smashed out and items stolen from them. A description of the suspect vehicle was obtained and shortly thereafter, the New York State Park Police advised over the air that they were attempting to stop a vehicle matching that description that was failing to comply heading southbound on U.S. Route 9 in Saratoga Springs.

According to police, the suspect vehicle led police on a pursuit that culminated in the suspect abandoning the vehicle and fleeing into the woods in the area of Phaeton Lane in the Town of Malta.

The suspect was subsequently taken into custody when he exited the woods on Route 9. The suspect was identified as Daquan R. Johnson, 27, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Johnson was charged with third-degree criminal mischief, fourth-degree criminal possession of stolen property, fourth-degree grand larceny, fifth-degree criminal possession of stolen property and unlawful possession of marijuana.

He was also found to have a fully-extraditable warrant from Pennsylvania.

Johnson was arraigned in the Milton Town Court and remanded to the Saratoga County Jail without bail to await further proceedings in the matter.
Delhi HC asks Centre, Google to respond to mans plea to remove articles on his conviction in criminal case

Who is Saurabh Kirpal? Indias likely to get its first openly gay judge of Delhi high court

Delhi HC dismisses plea to stop publication, sale of Salman Khurshid's book : 'Ask people not to buy it'

Tablighi Jamaat: HC transfers cases from various trial courts to Saket

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: The Delhi High Court has ordered the transfer of a batch of cases pending against 27 foreign nationals, who attended a Tablighi Jamaat event here, to the Saket district court so that they are swiftly decided.

The foreigners had allegedly indulged in missionary activities in violation of visa norms and flouted COVID-19 guidelines.

The court was hearing petitions filed by the foreigners who submitted that they have been released after paying fines in a case but are unable to leave the country due to similar pending FIRs.

Tablighi Jamaat: HC quashes 29 FIRs says there is probability they were made scapegoats

Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani directed that the charge sheets arising out of different FIRs mentioned in four petitions be transferred from different trial courts in Delhi to the court of chief metropolitan magistrate, South-East Delhi, Saket district court here.

The high court, which was hearing the matters through video conferencing, passed the order after the counsel for the foreigners urged it to issue directions similar to the one by the Supreme Court on August 6 on the transfer of cases, and the Centre and the Delhi government said they had no objection to it.

Accordingly, the present petitions are dismissed as withdrawn with a direction that all charge sheets in all FIRs from which the present cases arise be transferred to the court of the learned CMM, South East, Saket Court Complex, New Delhi, to be decided expeditiously, in accordance with law, the judge said.

The court directed that the records of all these matters be transferred from respective jurisdictional magistrates to the court of chief metropolitan magistrate, Saket court.

Advocate Ashima Mandla, representing the foreign nationals, said in each of these cases, the offences alleged in the FIRs are either the same as those alleged in the earlier FIR, in which they have pleaded guilty or no offence whatsoever was made out.

The counsel said the proceedings in the earlier FIR were closed after they entered into plea bargaining.

Delhi government standing counsel (Criminal) Rahul Mehra said the state has no objection to this direction being made in all these cases.

Meanwhile, central government standing counsel Ajay Digpaul submitted that look out circulars (LoCs) against these foreign nationals were issued by the Bureau of Immigration, Ministry of Home Affairs at the request and instance of the investigating agency.

Tablighi Jamaat: ED raids several locations in money laundering probe

Once criminal cases are closed in accordance with law and a request for closing the LoCs is received, the Union of India will have no objection to closing all LoCs and permitting the petitioners to exit the country, he said.

According to the separate petitions, the foreigners said they have already admitted their guilt in the FIR lodged by the Crime Branch of Delhi Police in the matter and pleaded for lenient punishment under the provisions of plea bargaining.

They were allowed to walk free on payment of varying fines and pleading guilty for minor offences related to the COVID-19 lockdown violations, the counsel for the foreigners said, adding that their deportation orders were also issued.

However, they are not able to fly back to their countries due to the pendening FIRs lodged at various police stations here, the counsel said.

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Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 9:42 [IST]
Direct tax collections are likely to remain muted in the second consecutive quarter of the current fiscal year with most top Indian cities witnessing double-digit contraction in receipts till August 20. Kolkata emerged the worst-affected metro city, reporting a drop of 60 per cent in the mop up during April-August 20.

It was followed by Chennai and Delhi, which saw decline by 41 per cent and 36 per cent, respectively. Mumbai was, however, one of the least-affected regions, though collection was down there too. Mumbai, which has the highest share of 34 per cent in overall direct tax ...
NEW DELHI: Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday (August 24) offered to step down from all positions in the party after former party president Rahul Gandhi reportedly 'accused the 23 dissent letter writers of colluding with BJP'.

The crucial meeting of the Working Committee took place amid divisions in the party over the leadership issue. A group of 23 party leaders wrote a letter to Sonia earlier this month seeking an overhaul of the organisation. The letter, however, was criticised by Rahul and few other party leaders.

Former union minister Kapil Sibal, who was also part of the group who raised concerns about the leadership and signed the letter, took to social media with a blistering response to Rahul's 'colluding with BJP' allegation, writing, that he had been defending the party for 30 years.

"Rahul Gandhi says we are colluding with BJP. Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress party. Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP Government. Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue Yet " we are colluding with the BJP !" Sibal tweeted.

He, however, later deleted the tweet after receiving clarification on Rahul's remark. "Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him . I therefore withdraw my tweet," Sibal shared on Twitter after deleting his previous post.

Congress's Randeep Singh Surjewala rejected the news reports that claimed Rahul had said anything like this. "Rahul Gandhi has not said a word of this nature nor alluded to it. Pl dont be mislead by false media discourse or misinformation being spread. But yes, we all need to work together in fighting the draconian Modi rule rather than fighting & hurting each other & the Congress," Surjewala said in response to Sibal's tweet.

Sources added that Rahul in his speech questioned the timing of the letter, signed by 23 Congress leaders, and sent to Sonia while she was at Delhi's Gangaram hospital and under medication. "It is the CWC and not the media where we put out our thoughts and discuss," he is learnt to have said at the meeting, the sources said.

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

At the Congress Working Committee, Sonia, the interim Congress President, offered to quit, asking the to initiate the process for selecting a new party chief, sources said. In her opening remarks at the meeting, called in the wake of a section of leaders seeking a 'full time and visible' Congress president, Sonia made the offer to quit saying she had given a detailed reply on the issue to AICC general secretary K C Venugopal.

Sources said Sonia Gandhi referred to Azad and others twice during her brief address and the issues raised by them. She also handed over a detailed reply to Venugopal, who read out its contents at the CWC meeting in which Gandhi sought to be relieved from the post.

Former PM Manmohan Singh, who spoke after Sonia Gandhi, urged her to continue, so did former Defence Minister AK Antony, with both the veterans criticising the letter by some party leaders, including Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik, who are a part of the CWC, the party's highest decision-making body.

On the other hand, Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot and Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Bhupel demanded the CWC to annoint Rahul as the full-time party president.
Floridas school reopening order is unconstitutional, a judge ruled Monday, striking down the controversial provision requiring brick and mortar campuses to open this month for five-day-a-week lessons.

The ruling comes from two lawsuits, one from Orange County and another from the statewide teachers union, both challenging Floridas school reopening order issued by Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran.

The order is unconstitutional to the extent it arbitrarily disregards safety, denies local school boards decision making with respect to opening brick and mortar schools, and conditions funding on an approved reopening plan with a start date in August, wrote Judge Charles Dodson of Leon County Circuit Court, in an order signed Monday.

The states school reopening order, signed July 6, required public schools to open this month or risk losing money for children who attended school online instead of on campus. The Orange County school district, which opened campuses Friday, said it could have lost $22.5 million a month if it did not comply with the state order.
BAD AXE  As teachers and administrators in Huron County work to get their classrooms ready for students when they return on Sept. 8, an ongoing shortage of teachers  substitute teachers in particular  could complicate efforts to keep schools open if a high number of teachers test positive for the coronavirus in a single district.

In the past decade, the Michigan Department of Education has relaxed its requirements for substitutes in an attempt to ease the pressure on schools to keep classrooms fully staffed. Currently, anyone with 60 college credits may teach a class for an entire year. Some Huron County school administrators are concerned the the pool of available subs may shrink if some substitutes are reluctant to return to classrooms due to the pandemic, which is likely due to the fact that a number of subs are retired teachers who may find themselves at higher risk from the virus.

Bad Axe Public Schools Superintendent Greg Newland said the shortage had proven troublesome for administrators long before the coronavirus arrived. Schools in Huron County use a service that provides substitute teachers to schools, and Newland said thats always his first choice when covering a teachers absence. But he also has the option of using his own staff to fill in the gaps, when necessary.

Its all-hands-on-deck, he said. At our high school level, teachers will use their prep periods to fill in for an hour. At the elementary level, we might pull one of our specialist teachers. I know when I was principal, there were times when I would cover.

Newland said in case of a coronavirus outbreak at his school, he envisions it would likely not affect just teachers, and classes would likely transition to an online option, something thats part of Bad Axes learning plan. He said the top priority will always be the health and safety of students and staff.

We wont hesitate to do that, Newland said. Hopefully, we wont be in that position, but we have to keep that in mind.

Martin Prout, superintendent of North Huron Schools, has been an educator for several decades, and he remembers a time when a single permanent teaching position might have hundreds of applicants. One way to get a foot in the door as a young teacher was to serve as a substitute. Over time, the number of college graduates who are interested in entering the profession has fallen, which has led to a shortage of certified teachers. He attributes this trend to state-mandated changes in education and a reduced financial incentive to entering the profession. This has led directly to a shortage of both permanent and substitute teachers.

Theres just not enough people, Prout said. Theres just no one there.

Prout said it could be difficult at times to cover for a teachers absence prior to the arrival of the coronavirus, and this fall could prove to be extremely challenging if one or more teachers tests positive for COVID-19. He described the situation as fragile.

Our teachers are so cohesive, so close, and theyre in the staff rooms together, they hang out together, that if I get more than four that test positive and have to self-quarantine for 10 days, Ill have to shut the school down, Prout said. I cant cover them. There are not enough teachers.

One of the steps North Huron staff members have taken to head off a problem like this one is enlist the help of honor students to start a campaign to encourage their classmates to be diligent about wearing face masks to prevent the spread of the virus. Prout said he knows students are eager to return to their classrooms, see their friends and engage in extracurricular activities such as sports, so the motivation is there to follow health and safety guidelines.

Both Newland and Prout said substitute teachers would be subjected to the same daily health screenings that all staff members will undergo at the beginning of each school day. Each school district has purchased new equipment to conduct temperature checks of those entering school facilities every morning.
An international research team led by the University of Bern has succeeded in developing an electrocatalyst for hydrogen fuel cells which, in contrast to the catalysts commonly used today, does not require a carbon carrier and is therefore much more stabl

Fuel cells are gaining in importance as an alternative to battery-operated electromobility in heavy traffic, especially since hydrogen is a CO2-neutral energy carrier if it is obtained from renewable sources. For efficient operation, fuel cells need an electrocatalyst that improves the electrochemical reaction in which electricity is generated. The platinum-cobalt nanoparticle catalysts used as standard today have good catalytic properties and require only as little as necessary rare and expensive platinum. In order for the catalyst to be used in the fuel cell, it must have a surface with very small platinum-cobalt particles in the nanometer range, which is applied to a conductive carbon carrier material. Since the small particles and also the carbon in the fuel cell are exposed to corrosion, the cell loses efficiency and stability over time.

An international team led by Professor Matthias Arenz from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (DCB) at the University of Bern has now succeeded in using a special process to produce an electrocatalyst without a carbon carrier, which, unlike existing catalysts, consists of a thin metal network and is therefore more durable. "The catalyst we have developed achieves high performance and promises stable fuel cell operation even at higher temperatures and high current density," says Matthias Arenz. The results have been published in Nature Materials. The study is an international collaboration between the DCB and, among others, the University of Copenhagen and the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology, which also used the Swiss Light Source (SLS) infrastructure at the Paul Scherrer Institute.

The fuel cell - direct power generation without combustion

In a hydrogen fuel cell, hydrogen atoms are split to generate electrical power directly from them. For this purpose, hydrogen is fed to an electrode, where it is split into positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. The electrons flow off via the electrode and generate electric current outside the cell, which drives a vehicle engine, for example. The protons pass through a membrane that is only permeable to protons and react on the other side on a second electrode coated with a catalyst (here from a platinum-cobalt alloy network) with oxygen from the air, thus producing water vapor. This is discharged via the "exhaust".

The important role of the electrocatalyst

For the fuel cell to produce electricity, both electrodes must be coated with a catalyst. Without a catalyst, the chemical reactions would proceed very slowly. This applies in particular to the second electrode, the oxygen electrode. However, the platinum-cobalt nanoparticles of the catalyst can "melt together" during operation in a vehicle. This reduces the surface of the catalyst and therefore the efficiency of the cell. In addition, the carbon normally used to fix the catalyst can corrode when used in road traffic. This affects the service life of the fuel cell and consequently the vehicle. "Our motivation was therefore to produce an electrocatalyst without a carbon carrier that is nevertheless powerful," explains Matthias Arenz. Previous, similar catalysts without a carrier material always only had a reduced surface area. Since the size of the surface area is crucial for the catalyst's activity and hence its performance, these were less suitable for industrial use.

Industrially applicable technology

The researchers were able to turn the idea into reality thanks to a special process called cathode sputtering. With this method, a material's individual (here platinum or cobalt) are dissolved (atomized) by bombardment with ions. The released gaseous atoms then condense as an adhesive layer. "With the special sputtering process and subsequent treatment, a very porous structure can be achieved, which gives the catalyst a high surface area and is self-supporting at the same time. A carbon carrier is therefore superfluous," says Dr. Gustav Sievers, lead author of the study from the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology.

"This technology is industrially scalable and can therefore also be used for larger production volumes, for example in the automotive industry," says Matthias Arenz. This process allows the hydrogen fuel cell to be further optimized for use in road traffic. "Our findings are consequently of importance for the further development of sustainable energy use, especially in view of the current developments in the mobility sector for heavy goods vehicles," says Arenz.

###
Holly Willoughby and Susanna Reid led the daytime hosts sharing snaps from their time in lockdown ahead of their return to work in September.

This Morning host Holly, 39, and Good Morning anchor Susanna, 49, have been enjoying breaks with their loved ones since taking a step back from their respective shows in July.

ITV's leading ladies joined the likes of Piers Morgan, Phillip Schofield and Lorraine Kelly in a promotional video as they 'adjust to a new normal' before they make a comeback to screens on September 1 amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Their new normal: Holly Willoughby (L) and Susanna Reid (R) led the daytime hosts sharing snaps from their breaks in lockdown ahead of their return to work in September

In the video, former Celebrity Juice panellist Holly looked focused as she blowdried her tresses, while brunette beauty Susanna enjoyed a sunny stroll in a protective face mask.

Teasing fans what they've been up to during the COVID-19 crisis, Loose Womens Christine Lampard, Andrea McLean, Nadia Sawalha, Brenda Edwards, Stacey Solomon and Judi Love also feature in social media posts.

'Weve had a hair cut', Susanna said, while Piers and Holly added: 'And a pint. We've been reunited with loved ones' as they detailed their time away from their work duties.

Lockdown fun: ITV's leading ladies joined their fellow presenters in a promotional video before they make a comeback to screens on September 1 amid the coronavirus pandemic

Safety comes first: In the video, GMB's Susanna, 49, enjoyed a sunny stroll in a protective face mask, while her co-star Piers Morgan and Kelle Bryan also donned shields in separate photos

Others added: 'Out to eat. Met friends. Back to school.And adjusted to a new normal. Weve had twists and turns. Weve had ups and downs. Weve begun to expect the unexpected.

When mother-of-three Holly asked: 'What will September bring?', her TV husband Phil responded: 'No matter what comes next. Were with you every step of the way.'

Rounding off the clip, former BBC star Susanna said: 'In a world where everything is different', before her co-host Piers ended: 'Not everything needs to be a new normal.'

'We've had haircuts... and a pint': The channel's biggest stars detailed their time away from their work duties

Reassuring: When mother-of-three Holly, 39, asked: 'What will September bring?', her TV husband Phillip Schofield responded: 'Were with you every step of the way'

During the break, Good Morning Britain has been hosted by Kate Garraway, Ben Shephard, Adil Ray, Ranvir Singh, Charlotte Hawkins and Sean Fletcher, and Christine and Andi Peters filled in for Scottish presenter Lorraine's eponymous show.

Meanwhile, This Morning was fronted by Ruth Langsford, Eamonn Holmes, Rochelle Humes, Dermot O'Leary and Alison Hammond.

Holly's recent Portuguese getaway with husband Dan Baldwin and their three children was cut short so that she could quarantine for two weeks before resuming her presenting role on This Morning.

Filling in: During the break, Good Morning Britain has been hosted by Kate Garraway and Adil Ray (pictured)

Fresh face: Christine Lampard and Andi Peters (pictured) filled in for Scottish presenter Lorraine Kelly's eponymous show

Dynamic duo: Meanwhile, This Morning was fronted by Ruth Langsford, Eamonn Holmes (pictured), Rochelle Humes, Dermot O'Leary and Alison Hammond
The Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee on Monday requested Sonia Gandhi to continue as the AICC president as "there is no other leader in the Congress to give a strong leadership."

In case Sonia Gandhi made up her mind otherwise, the APCC wanted Rahul Gandhi to come forward and take up the responsibility as Congress president.

"The APCC unanimously resolved and holds a strong belief that you should continue to lead the party as Congress President at this crucial juncture," APCC president Sake Sailajanath said.

CWC Meeting LIVE Updates

"But if you have made up your mind otherwise and a change is inevitable, I believe that Rahul Gandhi ji should come forward and take up the responsibility of Congress president since the party needs him to lead the struggle from the front as the country faces the biggest challenge ever to its secular democracy and the Constitution," he added.

He wrote a letter to Sonia Gandhi in this regard, referring to media reports of her possible resignation and "controversial letter" purportedly written by some senior Congress leaders.

"I wish to strongly reiterate the fact that currently no other leader in the Congress can give the party a strong leadership and any move to deprive the party of an able, visionary and courageous leadership would give advantage to the divisive and dictatorial forces," Sailajanath said.

Rahul Gandhi has already proved that he "had guts and the commitment" to take on the treacherous enemy with courage and conviction.

"He is fully competent to lead the party to success," Sailajanath added.
Teacher Catherine McClean has her temperature checked by assistant teacher Hilary Brennan at St Clares Primary School in Belfast (Liam McBurney/PA)

The first pupils have returned to schools across Northern Ireland since the coronavirus lockdown started in March.

Some parents have expressed concerns while teachers unions say educators had not been given enough time to respond to rules issued earlier this month.

Northern Irelands chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride has insisted it is safe to return.

Strict social distancing between children may be relaxed if there are hygiene measures in place.

However three schools did not reopen following the detection of Covid-19 cases.

Ballyclare Secondary School is set to reopen on Tuesday following a deep clean and 72-hour incubation period.

St Kevins Primary School and St Louises College, both on the Falls Road in west Belfast have also delayed their reopening following positive cases among the school community.

Some parents have taken to social media to express concern at their children returning to school.

Trevor, a father of five from Co Down, said he is worried as his wife had been shielding during the pandemic.

As a family, for us coronavirus is a life or death situation.

My wife who is 32, has been taking immunosuppressants to treat a long-term illness.

Jayne has no immune system to fight coronavirus and falls into the highest at risk category, labelled as vulnerable, he tweeted.

This week will see our five young children return to school, at a time when new daily cases are rising sharply.

The spread across all council areas in Northern Ireland suggests community transfer, which vastly increases the risk to those most vulnerable within our society.

I agree the risk to children themselves is low but that is being used as spin from politicians & school leaders to hide behind the fact that children are spreaders.

The issue is not that of children dying but of whom they will pass the virus too and the long-term consequences.

However other parents have welcomed the return to school.

Maeve Kennedys 11-year-old son Jonnie returned to Olderfleet Primary School in Larne.

She said he was looking forward to being reunited with his friends.

I think his only reticence is that his grandmother, my mother, is normally where they go after school and she is shielding, she has a lung condition. At the back of his head there is a niggle about that, she told the PA news agency.

He has a tight wee group of four or five boys that have been together since preschool. Since lockdown they have seen each other outside. Hes looking forward to getting back and into some sort of semblance of a routine, its been a long six months without that.

I think he needed to get back. I have tried to combine remote working and home schooling with his younger brother going into P6, so the last six months have been really difficult at home. And because of the pressure of going into P7 and around the transfer tests, he has worked very hard, but the pressures have been a real challenge.

Expand Close Brendan Gallagher dropping off his 11-year-old daughter Abigail at St Clares Primary School in Belfast with teacher Ashleigh Clarke greeting them wearing a protective visor and gloves (Liam McBurney/PA) PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Brendan Gallagher dropping off his 11-year-old daughter Abigail at St Clares Primary School in Belfast with teacher Ashleigh Clarke greeting them wearing a protective visor and gloves (Liam McBurney/PA)

Face coverings are not mandatory for routine use by pupils, Stormonts Department of Education has said.

Education minister Peter Weir said: Schools are not unsafe places for children and they are not unsafe places for teachers either.

Very, very few, if any, children will come to harm as a result of attending school, but there is evidence of the long-term harm to childrens education, life opportunities, mental health and wellbeing from not attending school.

There is clear unequivocal evidence that children are less likely to catch Covid-19, where they do most of them will have mild to moderate symptoms and in most cases they will make a very full recovery.

There is a very, very low  indeed an incredibly low incidence  of serious disease within children and they are also less likely to transmit the virus.

Education Minister Peter Weir visited the Grove Nursery School, Armagh and met Principal Joan Thompson, school Governors and others to discuss education restart and the wellbeing of pupils. pic.twitter.com/VwGX3wgBiu  Education NI (@Education_NI) August 19, 2020

Schools closed in March to help contain the spread of coronavirus.

Pupils in Primary 7, Year 12, Year 14  whose preparation for exams was disrupted by the lockdown  and all vulnerable children are due to return to classes on August 24.

All other pupils will begin the new school year on the week beginning August 31 after months of variable levels of home schooling.

Official guidance recommends the formation of protective bubbles for primary school children and pupils in years 8-10 in post-primary schools.

The department said interactions between different year groups of older pupils should be limited.

Parents, pupils and their teachers face the added strain of uncertainty over the future, Mr Weir has acknowledged.

Countdown to the restart: Unpacking & prepping for the new school year, whatever that might look like. Either way, it is a relief to get back to work. Every teacher I have spoken to wants to get back work safely & begin rebuilding. Kids will need us now more than ever.  pic.twitter.com/ei8sC7widu  Martin Ferguson (@MrFerguson85) August 18, 2020

A total of 42 million has been spent on re-starting schools safely.

A package of measures for the first term covers the cost of substitute teachers and other school expenditure, personal protective equipment, school well-being, transport and special educational needs.

Mr Weir said: I fully recognise the stresses felt by teachers, parents and pupils due to the ongoing disruption and uncertainty regarding the future.

My key priority has always been to ensure all of our children and young people return to school on a full-time basis, as soon as it is safe to do so.
By Yi Whan-woo



The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (AfricaCDC) urged the continent last week not to ease preventive measures against COVID-19 although the pandemic showed a slight decrease.



"We do not want the population to show prevention fatigue," AfricaCDC Director John Nkengasong told a press conference, Aug. 20, calling on Africans to continue wearing masks, maintain social distancing and to increase testing.



The director's comment came after the 55 member-African Union (AU), which governs the AfricaCDC, reported an average of 10,344 new infected cases per day across the continent.



Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director John Nkengasong. / Captured from John Nkengasong's Twitter
KCB Group CEO Joshua Oigara spoke with Nation after the bank announced its half-year results this past week.

KCB has posted a 40 per cent decline in profitability in the first half of the year. Was this expected?

The Covid-19 pandemic was unprecedented, but the performance is better than our expectations. In our forecast, we had expected 33 per cent of our total loan portfolio to be affected by the pandemic. Of our Ksh560 billion ($5.1 billion) loan book, we had expected up to Ksh170 billion ($1.5 billion) to be impacted. We had a situation that badly affected our customers. Although our numbers went down by 40 per cent, we thought our business could have been affected by as much as 75 per cent.

How did international subsidiaries perform during the period?

They have done quite well considering that last year we had a problem in Uganda where one of our big clients delayed in making payments. This has now been resolved.

Overall performance of the subsidiaries was up by 22 per cent compared with last year. In Tanzania and Burundi we didnt see major issues on Covid-19 restrictions, but its still too early to call. In Tanzania we have opted to be conservative, and our profitability in the country was down 30 per cent because we increased our provisions.

Is the first half performance a pointer to what investors should expect for the rest of the year?

Not really. We remain optimistic going to the second half because if you look at our balance sheet there is a 17 per cent growth in income, loans and advances increased by 17 per cent, customer deposits were up 35 per cent and total assets by 28 per cent.

Based on this, we should have a better second half despite the impacts of Covid-19. Also, we have restructured Ksh101 billion (923.2 million) loans, which is nearly all the loans we intend to restructure.

Are you concerned about the increase in non-performing loans (NPLs)?

It is a fact that because of Covid-19 our customers are not able to repay their loans following disruptions and even the shutdown of economies. This is almost behind us and we expect that as customers come back our provisions will definitely go down.

We are also happy because we have seen the reopening of many sectors of the economy like restaurants, hotels, transport and even some partial reopening of schools.

We have to be more conservative and support our customers during this period. When the economy turns around, the customers we supported the most will be on the right side of our business. The NPLs do not worry me because they are in line with impacts of Covid-19 in our markets.

How badly has the restructuring of loans affected your interest earnings?

The only thing is that we have increased is the level of provisions. This is the only impact because we have extended the loan period and waived fees. We have completed most of the loan restructuring. Whats left is not more than five per cent.

How has the consolidation of National Bank of Kenya (NBK) impacted your performance?

It is positive, and we are on track. The only thing that is remaining is putting additional capital of KSh3 billion ($27.4 million), which will be completed by the end of September. We have a plan to recover NBKs non-performing loans. We are confident that by the end of the year the NPLs will have come down from 45 per cent to 30 per cent.

Covid-19 is becoming the new normal. How is this going to change banking?

It is too early to say how banking will change, but our customers are learning about our different channels. We are at a point of reflection and remain optimistic that the world will find a solution to cope with the virus. We have been operating non-stop since March despite the situation, and we will continue to do so.

This interview was first published in The EastAfrican.
MIDDLETOWN  The resurrection of the cozy breakfast and lunch spot across from Superior Court is a story of perseverance, hope and efforts by devoted customers instrumental in its reopening despite the pandemic.

Sabrina Cortes, owner of Cafe 56 on Court Street, at 102 Court St. in Middletown, insists on the freshest food available for her clientele, made from scratch whenever possible.

Cortes, a former executive chef who hails from Guatemala, owns the business in a late 1700s building. She began her endeavor in 2012, after leasing the former Court Street Cafe.

Her logo is the macaw of Mayan culture, which adorns her door and the large artwork on the pained, tin walls.

When the pandemic shuttered businesses, schools, institutions and agencies across Connecticut in mid-March, she closed the restaurant, hoping, like so many, that it only would be for a short time.

Cortes experience applying for a small business loan was fraught with frustration and delays. She may have been discouraged by the mountain of bureaucracy she encountered, but she is not one to give up easily.

Paperwork processors and loan agents are beyond overwhelmed, Cortes knows, and she sympathized with them.

She closed her doors March 23, knowing she would be unable to serve customers after the governor shuttered businesses. Cafe 56 operates on a very low profit margin, said Cortes.

Thats when she applied for assistance from the Small Business Administration relief fund. She was unable to ask for Paycheck Protection Program funds because she doesnt pay herself a salary.

The process was so drawn out, lasting through May, that she had to make the difficult decision to close. At one point, Cortes called the SBA  and was told she was number 1,767. Thats crazy, she said.

Thats when she worked with her landlords to renegotiate the rent through Dec. 31.

She eventually did get the money, with the help of a customer of eight years, meter monitor Fred Kesten, who urged her to fight by emailing state representatives. She reached out to several, all of whom replied in some way.

It was state Sen. Matt Lesser who called Cortes and explained her plight to a contact at the SBA.

Lesser posted about Cortes Saturday on his Facebook page: A few weeks ago, Sabrina told her customers she was shutting down due to the pandemic and people were heartbroken. But then she contacted me, and, working with the great CT team at the U.S. Small Business Administration, we were able to get her the financing she needed to reopen, he wrote.

Not soon after, things began to move quickly, and she obtained the funds. On Aug. 11, she told her devoted customers via social media that she was reopening. Patrons were thrilled, said Cortes, who was trained at the Culinary Institute in San Francisco.

Her expertise is world cuisines  interpreted by her years of experience in the industry.

In Latin America, I ate for 18 years of my life rice and beans, she said. The legume is a staple of meals in Central America.

Families routinely cook five pounds of black beans at the beginning of the week. Each day, some is ladled off and transformed into a variety of dishes, including soup, stew, crispy refried beans, and a dessert with creme fraiche, plantains and cinnamon.

When she graduated from culinary school, with high honors, Cortes prepared food on private sailing vessels, eventually moving to large cruise lines, such as Expeditions Cruises. She traveled to locales such as Antarctica, the Bering Strait, Japan and Cambodia.

Whenever you are grilling burgers  near penguins on an iceberg, what can be better than that? Cortes said.

She was captivated by the bones of the historic building she inhabits, which retains much of the original architecture. Thats when I fell in love with this little place.

Cortes, who lives in East Hampton with her husband, chose Middletown because of its location in the center of the state.

Every week she conjures up a pickup menu representing food from a different part of the globe: France, seared tuna Nicoise salad; Mexico, chicken enchiladas verdes with creme fraiche; American bistro, Angus beef burger on greens (called a meadow); and Spain, Valencian paella with gazpacho and caramel flan.

A pickup meal for two costs $27.50 for two. Vegetarian and gluten-free food also are available.

Cortes insists on the freshest food, including cutting her own potato chips and french fries, and making Portuguese rolls from scratch. I live cooking. Thats my life, she said. Food is languages, and I speak them.

Reservations for pickup must be made two days in advance. The restaurant is open Tuesday to Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. For information, visit Cafe 56 on Facebook, call 860-740-4711 or go to cafe56ct.com.
Michigan firefighters are preparing to leave for California to help fight raging wildfires there.

Department of Natural Resources firefighters will take off-road fire engines to aid in fire containment and suppression efforts on the West Coast, according to a state news release.

The California wildfires have devastated thousands of families, and Michigan is ready to help in any way we can, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement. Were prepared to help our friends on the West Coast protect families, businesses and wildlife from these fires.

She noted that California recently aided Michigan when the state sent ventilators to help with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

The largest current California wildfire is the LNU Lightning Complex fire, which started on Aug. 17. The fire covers 350,030 acres in five Northern California counties. Five deaths have been confirmed as of Monday morning, Aug. 24. It is 22% contained.

The SCU Lightning Complex fire is the second largest current incident in California. It started on Aug. 18. As of Monday morning, it covered 347,196 acres in five counties, and was 10% contained.

There are several other active wildfires in the state. The fires have engulfed vineyards, forced thousands to evacuate and burned homes and businesses.

The DNRs highly trained firefighters regularly assist other parts of the country that are in need, the release said. Out-of-state assignments help them increase their experience and learn skills they can use to fight fires at home. They volunteer through a nationwide cooperative system and are matched with areas with the greatest need for their skills and equipment.

Michigan is fully reimbursed for expenses when firefighters travel to assist other states, the release said.

Plenty of firefighters stay home to make sure Michigans needs are covered while volunteer teams work elsewhere, the release said.

Currently, 15 states - from Florida to Alaska - are battling wildfires, including multiple blazes in Arizona, Oregon and Colorado.

READ MORE:

Seawalls shored up to protect 2 historic Worlds Fair homes on Lake Michigan

Brothers found at scene of Alpena County house fire died in murder-suicide, police say
NORTHPORT, NY  Check out some recent police incidents for the Northport Village area from Aug. 17 through Aug. 23.

The Northport Police Department posted the following information. All charges are accusations and do not signify guilt.

Incidents

A man went to police headquarters on Aug. 17 to report he lost his wallet, which contained his retired NYC Police Identification Card, two days prior. His wallet also holds other important items, including his credit and debit cards.

A woman fainted at Feed and Grain on Main Street on Aug. 18. Northport Rescue brought her to Huntington Hospital.

A man reported his trailer license plate was missing. He searched the area where his trailer was stored and the roads he'd been on and couldn't find it. An affidavit of theft was prepared. The incident was reported Aug. 19.

A man went to police headquarters on Aug. 20 to report a failed identity theft. He said LifeLock notified him on Aug. 14 that someone tried to obtain a COVID-19 relief package using his name. He told police he already contacted the major credit bureaus to monitor his accounts and froze his credit cards as a precaution. The man didn't lose any money and wanted the incident filed for documentation purposes.

A raccoon got stuck in a garbage pail on Bayview Avenue. Police tipped the pail over and the raccoon scurried away. The incident happened Aug. 21.

Police responded to Waterside Road for a report of CPR being done. An officer continued the CPR and helped Northport Rescue apply a defibrillator. The person was shocked seven times and regained their pulse while they were being brought to Huntington Hospital. The rescue happened Aug. 21. The person was brought to the ICU.

Northport police, while working with the Huntington Harbormaster's Office, helped recover a stolen boat on Aug. 21. The vessel was reported stolen off of Bayville Beach in Nassau County and recovered in Northport Harbor. Nassau police were notified of the recovery, and the boat was returned to its owner. The owner responded to Northport Harbor and recovered his vessel.

A loud party was being thrown on Edgaret Place at 12:45 a.m. Aug. 22. Police spoke with a resident who agreed to turn the music off.

Police responded to Nautilus Avenue for a report of unwanted phone calls. A woman said she received two phone calls on Aug. 22 from an unknown man. The woman said the man calling accused her of hitting his car with her car and then hung up. The woman said she had received numerous phone calls from random numbers over the previous few days. The woman said she didn't want the officer to call the man and is satisfied documenting the report for informational purposes.

A vehicle parked illegally at Trinity Episcopal Church was ticketed on Aug. 22.

An intoxicated man was harassing customers in the parking lot of Giunta's Meat Farms. Police brought the man to his home. A trespass affidavit was made on the man for Giunta's, and the man was told he is not allowed back. The incident happened Aug. 22.

Northport police responded to Grant Street to help Suffolk police with an intoxicated man in the road. The incident happened Aug. 22.

An officer found a woman laying in the road on Main Street. She told the officer she fell and twisted her ankle. Northport Rescue brought her to Huntington Hospital. Police did not find any defects in the road, and noted the woman might have been intoxicated when she fell. The incident happened Aug. 23.
There has been a horrendous failure of political leadership in the Republic in the past week. A day after the Covid-19 guidelines were changed, and during a lockdown in three counties, some politicians attended a ridiculous dinner of more than 80 people.

Every one of us has had a moment in these past months where weve wondered were we distant enough, or were we doing the right thing.

Politicians, more than most, must ask such questions all the time  and there is no doubt that what occurred should never have happened. At least, at the time of writing, there have been some consequences.

But what of the other great failure of political leadership that still lies unanswered, consequences be damned?

A Detective Inspector investigating the murder of a serving police officer during a robbery had to approach a Sinn Fein councillor  and he the former Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams  before getting the assistance required of one of their associates, who turned out to be a key witness in prosecuting the case.

Perhaps you are wondering, like me, what possible reason could there be to consult the Sinn Fein hierarchy before helping any police investigation, but in particular the investigation of the murder of a garda.

Whatever you think about the civil rights problems of the late 1960s, and they were certainly there, there was a peaceful response led by the late John Hume and a violent response led by the IRA that led to 25 years of unnecessary bloodshed.

How we have missed the voice of John Hume; hearing his voice again in death, reminding us about the hard-working Catholics who sought and achieved rebalance by honest, peaceful means, with total commitment to their people and a total rejection of violence.

For every act of violence is a choice. And every failure today to renounce that violence has been a choice. And it was a choice in June to venerate so publicly the life of a man so closely linked to those years of violence. And a choice for the Dublin leadership to attend in their numbers.

A choice, let us not forget, also made in serious contravention of the public health guidelines of the day.

And it was a choice for a Sinn Fein councillor not to immediately and unreservedly provide assistance to gardai and it was a choice to refer it instead up the hierarchy of the organisation. And it was a choice to delay returning to the Detective Inspector, by a couple of weeks, before confirming the Sinn Fein associate would co-operate.

And these are just the choices we know about because they are in the public domain. What else should we know? What else is to come  because every few weeks it seems there is something new to react to.

A bit like some of the more unusual political leaders we watch abroad, the danger is there and becomes so much to see that we become inured to surprise. And then it becomes normalised.

None of us should take from the legitimate political success Sinn Fein enjoyed in the most recent election here. Nor should we diminish the concerns of those people who chose to vote Sinn Fein as an expression of a desire for something different, or out of motivated concern for a vision of an improved Ireland.

But could I ask gently, do they now have developing concerns about this command and control model of a political organisation?

None of us is so naive that we pretend there isnt something fundamentally different about Sinn Feins path to engagement in the Republic.

Nor are there many who really believe the trope that Sinn Fein were peacemakers instead of peace-takers.

Sinn Feins IRA were never peacemakers. They were peace-takers who finally, after 25 years, realised their path was ultimately futile and have had to be dragged to peace every step since then.

Through Canary Wharf, through the murder of Robert McCartney, through the Northern Bank robbery.

As recently as the 2020 election, Sinn Fein leaders failed to distance themselves from violence when pressed by the family of Paul Quinn  a family I had the privilege of meeting shortly after I was elected.

Those in loyalism and on the hard-Right of unionism were equally peace-takers and we cannot forget their part either. The viciousness was also there on that side, for example the horror of the Shankill Butchers.

Nor can we excuse the actions of security forces who acted outside the law or with a hand that fell too heavy, too often.

We cannot forget the fundamental unfairness of the civil rights disparity between communities, but nor can we gloss over how this was resolved  by peaceful actors, not by violence.

Republicans have a particular case to answer for their part at this time. Of the 3,523 killed and over 47,000 injured, approximately 60% of the deaths were due to the republican movement, 30% to the loyalist paramilitaries and 10% to security forces.

The key requirement now is leadership that builds relationships so that the awful sufferings of the past are not repeated and the full potential of all of our people together is realised, together.

But central to our democracy is an abhorrence of violence, an unqualified commitment to peace in a peaceful later 20th and 21st century, and as part of the biggest peace project of all in the EU.

Our most basic ask of our political parties in this democracy should be an unqualified rejection of all violence. And unqualified co-operation with the police.

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill is a Fine Gael TD for Dun Laoghaire
Chicago, IL, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 14 lawyers from Clifford Law Offices have been included in the 2021 Edition of The Best Lawyers in America. Best Lawyers is universally regarded as a definitive guide to legal excellence, providing lists in over 75 countries.

Lawyers on The Best Lawyers in America list are divided by geographic region and practice areas. They are reviewed by their peers on the basis of professional expertise and undergo an authentication process to make sure they are in current practice and in good standing.

The following lawyers were named to 2021 The Best Lawyers in America list:

Congratulations to all fourteen attorneys for being selected for the 2021 Best Lawyers in America list.

Recognition by Best Lawyers is a particular honor because its methodology is based on meaningful and substantive evaluations by ones peers, said Robert A. Clifford, founder and senior partner of Clifford Law Offices. The lawyers selected as Best Lawyers at Clifford Law Offices are proud of the work we do every day in helping victims of wrongdoers conduct. It is an honor to be recognized for working for those with a passion that drives us to do what is right every day.

To learn more about Clifford Law Offices, click here.

About Clifford Law Offices

Clifford Law Offices is ranked as one of the top law firms in Illinois as well as in the country. They are recognized leaders in complex personal injury and wrongful death cases such as medical malpractice, aviation litigation, products liability, premises liability, and transportation litigation. Clifford Law Offices has a reputation in class action matters, qui tam litigation or whistleblower cases, and commercial litigation cases.

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Hong Konger Winnie Tong aims to move to Britain with her family in two years, but is stalling on plans to buy a house there after prices jumped almost 15 per cent since April.

The 40-year-old who used to be in two minds about leaving Hong Kong now wants to settle in Birmingham as she is concerned about an increasingly politicised environment for her young children.

"Last year because of the anti-extradition law protests I wanted to migrate more, and it's pretty much this year, because of the national security law that I'm determined to move."

Property agents said they sold more than double the number of apartments to Hong Kong buyers in the past two months, with the spike in purchases mainly for personal use.

"The good quality houses are all sold out and prices are more expensive," Tong told Reuters. "Too many Hong Kong people are snatching up (property) in the UK now."

The UK government in July offered about 3 million British National Overseas passport holders in Hong Kong a path to British citizenship after Beijing imposed sweeping new security legislation in Hong Kong.

"We have never received so many calls from existing clients," said Marc von Grundherr, director of London estate agent Benham and Reeves, which lets UK properties for about 1,000 clients in Hong Kong.

A weaker pound since 2014 and a stamp duty holiday in Britain for homes priced below 500,000 pounds ($654,400), have also encouraged Hong Kong buyers to invest in the UK.

Property agent Arlington Residential in London said it completed more than 10 deals in the past two months, a figure it would normally achieve in a year. Centaline in Hong Kong said it sold around 60 apartments in July alone, adding that they had a waiting list of clients due to a shortage of supply.

Hong Kong investors buy homes anywhere from 300,000 pounds to 50 million pounds ($390,000-$65.50 million) and are increasingly looking outside London, such as in Manchester and Bristol, for cheaper options.

"Because of the situation in Hong Kong, those who didn't know the UK very well are now also looking...and they don't want to commit too much yet because their economic power is not as strong," said David Hui, Centaline Property sales director.

Hong Kong buyers have climbed a notch to become the fifth largest foreign investors in central London in the past 12 months, Knight Frank data showed, after China, the United States, India and Russia. They accounted for 4 per cent of purchases, up from 2.5 per cent in 2016.

Guy Bradshaw, head of London Residential at Sotheby's International Realty UK, said Hong Kong buyers are nervous about the political situation and want to ensure their families are safe and their income is protected.

Some of his clients are well-known and ultra high net worth families who are "ready to pounce if need be" to relocate the whole family, he added.

The surge in interest has prompted some UK developers to pick Hong Kong for their first international launch, versus Shanghai or Singapore previously, agents said.

Battersea Power Station Development Co said inquiries from Hong Kong had climbed 150 per cent since Easter, and it is planning to hold a sales exhibition in Hong Kong later this year.

But finding a good venue for an exhibition could be a challenge as many developers jump on the bandwagon.

Von Grundherr of Benham and Reeves said: "You cannot get a room in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel for a month at the moment - and that will be a small rubbishy room. The good rooms are booked out to the end of the year.
MONDAY, Aug. 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- The coronavirus pandemic has made many people more anxious. But for some, the threat of deadly infection and the drastic changes to everyday life may have triggered panic attacks.

New research found that between mid-March and early May of this year, there were 375,000 more Google searches for anxiety or panic attacks than would normally be expected.

"Right now, a lot of experts are hypothesizing that people's mental health will be affected by the pandemic. But we have little data on how people are actually affected, and that takes time -- months or years -- to gather. That's a huge problem when we have policymakers trying to draft policy when we don't have data," said study senior author Alicia Nobles. She's an assistant professor in the department of medicine at the University of California, San Diego.

"So our team turned to internet searches to see what people were searching for in the United States," Nobles said. There were 3.4 million searches for panic or anxiety attacks in the two months following the March 13 declaration of a U.S. national emergency due to COVID-19, her team found.

Because the data came from internet searches, it's not clear if people were actually having panic attacks or other conditions that have similar symptoms, like a heart attack.

Vaile Wright is senior director of health care innovation for the American Psychological Association. "Symptoms of a panic attack can be very intense, including physical reactions that can feel like a heart attack -- shortness of breath, rapid pounding heart rate, chest pressure and sweating," said Wright, who wasn't part of the study.

If you've never had a panic attack before, or are unsure if your symptoms are a panic attack or a heart attack, seek emergency care, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America advises. It can sometimes be difficult to tell these conditions apart.

What if you're feeling anxious and aren't sure if your symptoms are severe enough to indicate a panic attack? Wright said, "Panic attacks are a sudden episode of intense fear that typically peaks within 10 minutes."

Symptoms of anxiety include: feeling restless, on edge, worried or irritable, getting easily fatigued, having trouble concentrating and experiencing sleep problems. To be considered a generalized anxiety disorder, these symptoms must last at least six months.

The difference between many anxiety symptoms versus panic attack symptoms has to do with intensity and duration, Wright explained. Panic attacks are very intense, but the episodes are separate events.

For the new study, the researchers analyzed information from Google trends to look for searches that mentioned panic attack or anxiety attack from January 2004 through May 9, 2020.

The biggest jump in those searches occurred between March 16 and April 14, 2020. The number of searches was the highest ever recorded, the researchers said. During that time, social distancing guidelines were put into place, states shuttered businesses and schools, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended face masks, and the United States surpassed Italy for the highest number of deaths.

After April 14, searches for panic and anxiety attacks returned to their expected levels.

"In the beginning, COVID-19 was a huge unknown. It could be that over time, people became more resilient," Nobles suggested.

Wright agreed. "In that beginning period when everything had to shut down quickly, there were anecdotal reports of increased requests for benzodiazepines [sedatives that may be prescribed for panic]. But we've come to a new normal and are figuring it out. While there's still uncertainty, people aren't in quite the flight-or-fight mode they were," she said.

Wright's advice if you're still feeling a bit anxious? "It's really important to focus on what's in our control -- our own thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Identify negative patterns, like constant scrolling on your phone, looking at the news and hoping for new info. Take breaks from your devices. Take breaks from the news. Don't watch it constantly. Social media is an anxiety bomb, so limit the time on there," she recommended.

And take care of yourself, Wright advised: "Get enough sleep, eat healthy, be active and maintain social connections [in a safe, socially distant way]. While the anxiety may not go away, all of these things help."

Also, mindfulness, meditation and fun distractions (puzzles like sudoku or dancing in the house) help keep your mind from focusing on your worries, she suggested.

If you have panic attacks, Wright said that talk therapy is an important long-term strategy.

Results of the study were published as a letter Aug. 24 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

More information

Learn more about panic attacks from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.
Demonstrating the deep class chasm when it comes to the pandemic, the Broad Institute is providing select private schools with concierge testing to facilitate their back to school efforts.

Broad is a nonprofit biomedical research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and part of the far-flung Broad Foundation. Nationally, the foundation set up by billionaire Eli Broad is best known for its school privatization policies, including the training of school superintendents through the Broad Academy.

In Massachusetts, Broad has partnered with the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) and PWNHealth, a clinician network, to providing some private institutions regularly scheduled, bulk COVID-19 testing, guaranteeing test results within 24 hours. Such regular testing and quick responses are inaccessible to tens of millions of Americans.

The Broad Institute (Photo: /Wikipedia)

The partnership, called Assurance Testing Alliance, sends test kits to schools where students, faculty and staff self-administer (or, in the case of young students, are administered) the nasal tests. They also ship the tests back to the Broad Institutes lab and provide training, set up for the collection, a software portal to receive results, and various administrative and logistic coordination.

To qualify for this program, schools must commit to testing at a rate of once or twice a week or daily, with at least 1,000 tests to be administered in the fall. At $48-60 per test, the cost is $50,000 and up.

The World Socialist Website has described COVID-19 a poor mans virus. It is also a poor childs virus. Regular testing is one of the crucial factors necessary to contain the spread of COVID-19, but frequent testing of an entire school is only available to the wealthiest private schools in America. The message is clear: send your child to a private school and they can be as safe as money can buy; meanwhile, public schools will be enormous vectors of death and disease.

That the tests are guaranteed to be returned within 24 hours, while most Americans suffering from the symptoms are left waiting for days and even weeks to get their results, further demonstrates the inhumanity of the ruling classs response to the pandemic. The technology and resources for reliable access to testing with fast results exist, but with no significant investment given to public testing, only rich can qualify.

Frankly, even with testing, opening private schools amidst a raging pandemic is by no means safe. Depending on the type of school, students and/or faculty and staff must commute to school and testing, especially self-administered testing, is imperfect. Anything less than daily testing in such a setting leaves plenty of time for asymptomatic carriers to spread the disease.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted this week, overall testing for COVID-19 continue at depressed levels even as public schools and universities reopen and cases continue to climb. The average number of tests on a given day is currently 14 percent lower than its high on July 29, despite the total number of known cases rising 26 percent1.2 million infectionsover that same period.

Broad is apparently also selling its testing services to colleges and universities in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth and the city of Cambridge for select groups such as those in senior housing and long-term care.

Fully titled the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, this is far from the Broad familys first foray into education. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has lobbied for, supported and financed for-profit charter schools to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, and even wrote a guide to closing public schools. The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, which has recently been moved to the Yale School of Management, is a training program that teaches school administrator careerists how to turn education into a profit machine; its graduates have gone on to devastate education in Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and elsewhere.

In effect, Broad, together with a web a similar big business foundations such as Gates, Carnegie, and Walton, have developed a whole organizational infrastructure in education policy, including charter schools, advocacy organization, education consulting and research organizations and countless nonprofitsall aimed at destroying public schools and fully opening the education market to Wall Street.

The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) is a real estate service, which typically rents office space to tech startups. With more people working from home, the CIC was almost certainly losing out on rent it could typically rely on, giving it a vested interest in engineering ways to convince companies it is safe enough to reopen their offices.

Notably, the CIC was founded by two MIT alumni, Timothy Rowe and Andrew Olmsted. The connection to MIT between the CIC and the Broad Institute, and who is being offered this service, does not come as a surprise. Competitive private schools in Greater Boston often serve as a funnel to elite universities in the Northeast, including MIT and Harvard. Wealthy parents often consider the tuition for these schools, which can run at least as high as $50,000 a year, an investment that gives their children a greater chance at being admitted to incredibly competitive universities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated all pre-existing inequalities in American life. Whether it be quality of education, access to elite universities, or health and life itself, the ruling class hoards what it can for itself and leaves the working class struggling to survive.
Daughters take time during pandemic to honor the veteran heroes in Humble Cemetery

On Saturday, Aug. 15, several members of the James Tull Chapter, NSDAR (National Society Daughters of the American Revolution) met to place new markers on veteran graves at Humble Cemetery.

While this group is not officially connected with the Humble Cemetery, DAR members are huge fans of history and preserving things from the past. Group members knew that remembering and memorializing these heroes is both a duty and responsibility.

The chapter was instrumental in getting a Texas historical marker placed at the cemetery. In 2019, while surfing on the internet one day, Connie Grubbs, 2017 Regent (president) for the chapter, had an idea to ensure the veterans of the community would be celebrated in a more visible way.

I wanted to be able to add markers with flags so that they would be less likely to end up wet on the ground or destroyed by mowers and so that the individuals could stand out and be honored, she said.

Grubbs took her idea to Sharon Taylor, the current regent, to gain agreement and approval to purchase new markers which would allow people to better recognize these veterans - no matter the branch of service or wars they served.

Grubbs added, The markers were approved and purchased with funds from the Humble Cemetery Historic Preservation account. The flags that have been used in the past, although nice, they were small, would fall over, and get easily ruined. The new markers purchased by our board are 6 inches in diameter and they can hold a larger flag. The positioning allows the flag to fit in the top, so as to keep them off the ground and away from the weather. These markers are 6 inches in diameter and hold a larger flag that fits in the top for maximized visibility.

The chapter has had a longtime interest in historic preservation. Together the members have cleaned almost all the headstones, except those that are not stable, and they have been able to reset five of the smaller headstones to date. They work diligently around the weather, condition of the ground and the ability to sustain and be outside in the current heat.

We are a small chapter, but we are involved in several activities. Our chapter has made and delivered over 600 masks to people and places that need them and we are still making them. We collect school supplies in the fall for schools in the Humble area and we give them to the schools in January when their supplies get low, Grubbs proudly proclaimed.

This chapter continues to work hard for and within the community. Some of the other ways this chapter gives back is by working at the Bush Intercontinental Airport USO, giving to our police officers and firemen on Sept. 11, communicating awareness at Good Oil Days and more. Many of the donations we receive have been put to use in restoration projects a Humble Cemetery, added Taylor.
North Korean maximum leader, Kim Jong Un is reportedly preparing to hand over power to his sister, British tabloid The Sun reported, quoting a former South Korean diplomat.

The diplomat, an ex-aide to former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung said the isolated state is hiding the truth about their leaders health.

Speaking with local media, Chang Song-min said: I assess him to be in a coma, but his life has not ended.

He spoke as North Korea reportedly handed over some powers to the dictators sister Kim Yo-jong, 33.

Chang added: A complete succession structure has not been formed, so Kim Yo-jong is being brought to the fore as the vacuum cannot be maintained for a prolonged period.

Kim Jong Un, 36, has rarely been seen in public this year with rumours circulating in April that he was in a vegetative state following a botched heart op.

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I remember how participants at a focussed group discussion held few weeks before the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), induced lockdown in Lagos, bemoaned the short falls in the nations housing needs despite the existence of the globally recognized right to adequate housing which is both a human right and one of the basic needs of man borne out of desire for security, privacy and protection from negative impacts of the environment.

Separate from using powerful statistics from credible sources to make it abundantly clear that Nigeria is currently faced with over 17 million housing deficit and may require about 700,000 new houses to be built yearly to close the gap, the gathering which was aimed at finding urgent solution to housing challenge in Nigeria, warned that under this condition, it may be thought audacious to talk of creating a better society while we are still battling with the problems of battered economy arising from corruption, social vices, decayed institutions and homelessness.

The event which had as theme; Abrogation of Land Use Act; Key to Unlocking the Housing Goldmine in Nigeria, was organized by the Social and Economic Justice Advocacy (SEJA). A Lagos based Non-Governmental Organization that among other objectives advocates that international aid to institutions and government in Nigeria should only come in forms of training and technical assistance, not in grants that could be corruptly siphoned by public officials.

Given the aforementioned housing challenges, it is unsurprising that the Lagos state government as part of its ploy to tackling the challenge in the state activated the Public Private Partnership schemes. Akinderu-Fatai, the Honourable Commissioner for Housing in Lagos State, in a recent piece entitled; Resolving Housing Deficit in Lagos, among other things noted that there are over 30 private investors who were in joint partnership with the State in developing some housing schemes.

The involvement of private sector in increasing the housing stock, he noted is quite crucial. It helps in reducing direct governmental expenditure thereby releasing more funds for bridging other infrastructural gaps. While government provides unencumbered land for these investors, the onus then lies on the partner to build according to given and agreed-upon specifications within a time limit. These developers entered into partnership, by a legal relationship with the State Government to build on government acquired land and upon completion give to the State government an agreed number of the housing units which commensurate with the cost of land and a percentage of the profit.

Amongst his analysis, what calls for emphasis here, and relevant to the present discourse, is Mr. Commissioners claim that they are greatly concerned about affordable housing for a large section of the people especially those in the low income bracket.. This is being addressed through the reorganization of our informal sector which is where many of our people operate.

Specifically, while such claims looks good peripherally and may trigger plaudits and encomium, there are major indicators and pitfalls which in my views render the whole conversation as an ungraspable argument that may not hold water particularly when faced with embarrassing facts. Or still typify as mere palliatives that cure the effect of an ailment while leaving its root cause to thrive.

Fundamentally, housing challenge aside presenting the state to the world as a government entity that lacks the prerequisite care for its citizens, the truth is that if the present administration in the state government has clarified processes and opportunities for citizens participation in the development and involvement, or is doing anything substantial to develop effective housing plan and delivery systems for its less privileged citizens, Lagosians will not have to look very far to see the impact. And the state needs no opinion/feature articles on the pages of the newspaper to announce it.The fact they say, speaks for itself.

Using as focal points the administration of Alhaji Lateef Jakande as executive governor of Lagos State in 1979, it is factually documented that his administration sincerely implemented the four cardinal policies of; housing, education, transportation and infrastructure. To demonstrate such resolve, the administration introduced housing and educational programs targeting the poor, building new neighbourhood primary and secondary schools and providing free primary and secondary education. Jakande's government constructed over 30,000 housing units. The housing units were built cheaply, but were of great value. Some of the housing units include low cost estates in Amuwo-Odofin, Ijaiye, Dolphin, Oke-Afa, Ije, Abesan, Iponri, Ipaja, Abule Nla, Epe, Anikantamo, Surulere, Iba, Ikorodu and Badagry.

To fund some of the projects, Jakande increased the tenement rates and price of plots of land in affluent areas of Victoria Island and Lekki Peninsula and the processing fees for lottery, pools and gaming licenses.

For another thing, there are reasons that ring apprehension about the state governments choice of partnership.

Unarguably, Goal 17 of the United Nations 2030 sustainable agenda has partnership and collaboration at its centre and calls for smart, ecosystem thinking, co-creation and alignment of various intervention efforts by the public and private sectors and civil society in bridging infrastructural gap-as it is obvious that the government alone can no longer provide solution to the crushing challenge of inadequate facilities like good roads and housing.

That notwithstanding, previous experience shows that such programme often always becomes more elitist-friendly and manifests capacities that endangers not only states economic security but perpetuate poverty, erode socioeconomic wellbeing and consolidate powerlessness among helpless and hapless citizens.

To further explain the above are some separate but related questions; how much will those houses be sold when completed? Who will monitor/regulate the sales of those buildings in order to protect the buyers interest? How many of the low income earners can afford it? How accessible will the mortgage arrangement? Why is it private sector driven as against direct labour which has in the past proved to be more cost effective? And why is the present narrative by the state devoid of what becomes the fate of the initial occupants of such lands? And most importantly, what is the state governments housing budget for the year?

Regardless of what others may say, the state can shout affordable housing as many times as they want but anyone who believes that property market is a free market is seriously deluded. It does have many characteristics of a free market but it is always subject to periodic manipulation by the operators. It is extremely important to underline that such manipulations have not one objective but two; first of all, the operators as capitalists naturally seek to maximize profit and are not ready under any guise to provide low cost houses. But more significantly, they often always manipulate the government.

You may ask how?

The answer is barefaced. Government routinely partners with the private sector but, their capacity to monitor process is always limited and questionable. Private sector on their part, understand better the location and nature of market failures and the barriers that inhibits such sector. This naturally creates asymmetric business environment and disproportionate advantage.We must not fail to remember that the objective of capitalism is to further enrich people who have money to invest.

In the final analysis, I also hold the opinion that the government must do something to help Lagosians out of the present housing challenge by drawing one or two lessons from Pa Jakande, the peoples Governor style of low cost houses. This should be done not merely for political consideration but from the views of national development and sustenance of our democracy.

Jerome-Mario Utomi is Lagos-Based Media consultant.
The Delhi High Court on Monday extended all interim orders till October 31 in wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, while observing that it would slowly start physical hearings with everyones consent.

An HC bench comprising Chief Justice DN Patel and justices Siddharth Mridul and Talwant Singh extended all orders further till October 31. Earlier they had been extended till August 31.

The court, however, said, Needless to clarify that in case the extension of interim order causes any hardship of an extreme nature to a party to such proceeding, they would be at liberty to seek appropriate relief, as may be advised.

The court also said that 2,900 prisoners have so far been released on interim bail and the idea is to ensure that the released prisoners do not return.

The idea is to ensure that the released prisoners do not return to prison as asymptomatic patients of Covid-19, especially when the prisons are overcrowded, the bench said.
The Civil Aviation Organization of Iran disclosed data from the black boxes of a Ukraine International Airlines passenger plane that crashed near Tehran in January.

The incident investigation team has found out that the block box has stopped recording the flight data at 06:14:56 as a missile with proximity fuze had exploded, Dehqani said, noting that before the explosion, the airliner was flying in normal conditions, Tasnim news agency informs.

The black box recorded all sounds in the cockpit for 19 seconds after the missile explosion, Head of Irans Civil Aviation Organization Tooraj Dehqani said, noting that a three-strong crew of pilots, including a flight instructor, were aware of the abnormal situation and had been trying to control and operate the plane until the last moment.

The flight instructor provided the necessary instructions, as the conversation suggests that the plane had encountered an electrical problem because the flight crew switched on the auxiliary power unit, he added. The Iranian official noted that the flight instructor recognized that both jet engines had been running seconds after the explosion.

There is no sound or sign from inside the passenger cabin, and the conversations and reaction of the flight crew indicates their physical health at those moments, he added.

Considering that recording of the cockpit sounds had stopped 19 seconds after the explosion, and that the second missile had reached the plane at least 25 seconds after the first explosion, there was no analysis of the function and impacts of the second missile from the black box data, Dehqani explained.

In turn, Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Yevheniy Yenin said that the Ukrainian side would continue making efforts in the negotiation process with Iran to hold the Iranian side responsible.

"We will demand guarantees of non-recurrence of these incidents, and, in addition, we will demand compensation for both the relatives of the UIA plane crash victims and for Ukraine. We hope that the Iranian side will provide us with much more information during the next round of talks, no matter how bitter this information may be," Yenin commented on Irans statement.

On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down near Tehran by an Iranian surface-to-air missile, killing 176 people, including nine crew members (all Ukrainians) and 167 passengers (citizens of Ukraine, Iran, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, Germany, and the UK).

On July 18, France's Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority (BEA) received Flight PS752s recorders from Iran. Yenin said that the transcript from Flight PS752's recorders had confirmed illegal interference with the plane.

Negotiations on compensation for the downing of Flight PS752 took place in Kyiv on July 30 with the participation of the Iranian delegation.

Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office announced on July 31 that the next round of talks with Iran on the investigation into the plane crash was scheduled for October.

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New species of Cretaceous brittle star named in honour of Nightwish vocalist

Palaeontologists from the Natural History Museums in Luxembourg and Maastricht have discovered a previously unknown species of brittle star that lived in the shallow, warm sea which covered parts of the present-day Netherlands at the end of the Dinosaur Era. The starfish-like creature was unearthed more than 20 years ago but has only now been identified as new to science. The name of the new fossil pays tribute to Dutch metal vocalist Floor Jansen, in recognition of the mutual inspiration between science and music.

Like so many exciting discoveries, the new fossil species had long passed unnoticed. It was a stroke of luck when a fossil collector noted the fossil of a tiny, starfish-like creature during one of his excursions to the world-famous ENCI HeidelbergCement company quarry near the Dutch city of Maastricht. The specimen was much smaller than other brittle-star fossils occasionally found at the same locality and thus much less likely to be collected. Dr John Jagt, palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in Maastricht, soon identified the specimen as a long-spined brittle-star. "I reckoned the specimen belonged to a group of brittle-stars that is particularly rare in the fossil record but its true identity remained puzzling with the information at hand", Jagt explains. "When examining microfossils extracted from the same rocks that yielded the brittle-star fossil, I noticed microscopic skeletal fragments that seemed to belong to the same species", he continues. 20 years later, Jagt was proved right when Dr Ben Thuy and Dr Lea Numberger, palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg, examined the brittle-star fossils from Maastricht from a different angle, taking into account the latest progress of knowledge in the field. "We were incredibly lucky to have both microscopic skeletal remains and a complete fossil skeleton of the same brittle-star species," Thuy highlights. "This provided an exceptionally complete picture of the species" Numberger continues. That the species turned out to be new to science was exciting in itself but there was more: "The new brittle star must have lived in a shallow, warm sea while its living relatives are found in the deep sea. This shows that there was a major shift in distribution over the past million years," Thuy explains. The experts were even able to gain insights into the mode of life of the new species. "Because the fossil individual was found wrapped around the stalk of a sea lily, we assume that the species lived with and probably even clung to these flower-like echinoderms," Jagt remarks. Interactions or associations between species are only rarely preserved in the fossil record. When scientists discover a new species, they have the privilege to name it. Often, species names refer to a locality or a specific character. Some also honour other experts in the field. In the case of the Maastricht brittle star, Jagt, Thuy and Numberger decided to combine their passions for fossils and heavy metal music and paid tribute to Dutch metal vocalist Floor Jansen and her band Nightwish. "Rock music and fossils are a perfect match. They have been inspiring each other for a long time" Numberger explains. The new fossil, Ophiomitrella floorae, is in excellent company, as can be experienced in the travelling exhibition "Rock Fossils on Tour", celebrating fossils named after rock bands and musicians like Kalloprion kilmisteri, an ancient worm honouring Motorhead's Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, and currently on display (until January 3, 2021) at the Natural History Museum in Maastricht.

###

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PeerJ is an Open Access publisher of seven peer-reviewed journals covering biology, environmental sciences, computer sciences, and chemistry. With an emphasis on high-quality and efficient peer review, PeerJ's mission is to help the world efficiently publish its knowledge. All works published by PeerJ are Open Access and published using a Creative Commons license (CC-BY 4.0). PeerJ is based in San Diego, CA and the UK and can be accessed at peerj.com

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This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
ProctorU, the worlds largest provider of online invigilation services, and Health and Fitness Education (HFE), a UK-based licensure program for fitness industry professionals, today announced a partnership to remotely invigilate HFEs OFQUAL-certified examinations. While COVID-19 continues to impact physical test centers around the world, this new partnership allows HFE to continue delivering high-quality certifications while maintaining exam integrity and test-taker safety.

It was apparent early in the escalation phase of the current COVID-19 pandemic that we urgently needed an alternative way to allow our learners to take their exams and achieve their qualifications, Lee Cain, Managing Director at HFE said.

A remote solution was the only viable option but we had serious reservations about how we could ensure that exam results would reflect a learners true ability. Our professional reputation would be at risk if we were to get this wrong. We prospected with a number of invigilation solutions across the globe but until we road-tested the ProctorU platform, we weren't entirely sure that we could achieve what we wanted to. The fantastic thing about where we are now, is that we have an altogether superior exam experience for our learners. They can literally take their exams securely anytime, anywhere.

This partnership includes a customized integration between ProctorU, HFE and SkillsLogic, a learning management system developer, to create a unique and seamless testing experience for HFE candidates. Using a combination of artificial intelligence and human invigilation, ProctorU monitors HFE exams allowing a candidate to test from the comfort of their home 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As more training moves online, being able to take certifications exams from anywhere is the perfect solution for HFE candidates. The examination process also meets the stringent quality requirements of OFQUAL.

We are thrilled to provide health and fitness professionals in the UK with a convenient way to become HFE-certified, said Scott McFarland, ProctorU CEO. Secure exam delivery through online invigilation gives fitness professionals the convenience to test when they are ready without the health risks of going to a test center while also maintaining the value of the HFE credential.

About HFE

HFE is one of the UKs leading fitness industry education providers with a portfolio of over 30 different exercise, fitness and nutrition qualifications, including personal trainer, Pilates and Yoga. HFE collaborates with SkillsLogic on all things digital learning, to ensure that their learners receive a diverse and superior digital learning experience. The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (OFQUAL) is a non-ministerial government department that regulates qualifications, exams and tests in England.

About ProctorU

ProctorU provides a full suite of online proctoring and identity management solutions for education, professional development and credentialing organizations. With patented, 24/7 live proctoring and a fully-automated platform, both backed by artificial intelligence, ProctorU offers a powerful, convenient and cost-effective alternative to physical test centers. ProctorU increases access to online learning while ensuring exam integrity and accountability for any test-taker. http://www.ProctorU.com
The trio was first grilled at the CBI teams base at DRDO guesthouse before being whisked to Bandra for confirming sequence of incidents

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Sunday revisited the Bandra residence of deceased actor Sushant Singh Rajput to probe his suicide and recreated the incident at the spot in presence of the formers cook Neeraj Singh, house help Deepesh Sawant and flatmate Siddharth Pithani.

The trio was first grilled for hours at the CBI teams base at the DRDO guesthouse before being whisked to Bandra for confirming with the sequence of incidents quoted by them in their statement, some of which allegedly showed discrepancies in comparison to the ones they stated to the Mumbai police.

The officials are tight-lipped about the details given in their respective statements that has the alleged loopholes. The spot probe was carried out in the presence of the forensic team of the CBI. As the investigation has been handed over to them late, the officials are relying on the forensic and technical analysis for a breakthrough to ascertain if there is any foul play in the actors death.

Others will be questioned in connection with the incident soon after the spot probe gathers requisite clarity, said an officer privy to the probe.

The investigators also communicated with the doctors and the staffers of Cooper Hospital, where Rajputs body was taken after his demise for conducting autopsy. The statement of those who conducted autopsy on the actor will be recorded soon.

Multiple teams of the CBI are probing separate angles involved in the alleged suicide. The DRDO and Indian Air Force guesthouses in Santacruz is where the visiting team has set up the base. The CBI will grill Rhea Chakraborty and her family soon in connection with the suicide. They have been named as main accused in the case filed by the Bihar police, the probe of which has been taken over by the CBI.

A team of forensic doctors also arrived at the IAF DRDO guesthous to examine the details of Saturday's findings from the late actor's flat and the doctors of Cooper hospital where his post-mortem was conducted on June 15.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on the other hand are probing into the alleged money laundering that the actors father has accused Chakraborty of. The family alleged that at least Rs 15 crore was fraudulently transferred from his bank account. The ED is investigating the companies that were floated with the actor, Rhea Chakraborty and her brother Showik being appointed directors in.
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The Top 100 has been a must-read for Northern Ireland people in business and beyond for many years. Could this be the year that your company or your client makes it in? While there are many household-name companies who have been fixtures of the Top 100 since it began, the unpredictable global economy means nothing can be taken for granted.

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The Bombay high court has directed the state and railways to deposit the compensation amount accruing in the name of a railway police personnel who died of Covid-19 in the court. The daughter of the police personnel had approached the court seeking proportionate distribution of the compensation amount between the two wives and daughters of the policeman.

The court directed the first wife and her daughter to be present for the hearing, without which, the petition could not be decided and posted the matter for hearing on Tuesday.

A division bench of justice S J Kathawalla and justice Madhav Jamdar, while hearing the petition filed by a woman, was informed by advocate Prerak Sharma that the father of the petitioner was serving as an assistant sub-inspector with the Maharashtra Railway Police Force till his untimely death due to Covid-19 on May 30. Sharma submitted that it was only when his clients mother wrote to the railway authorities to provide her with the employment, gratuity, pension benefits accruing in her late husbands name, she came to know that there was a similar letter written by another woman who also claimed to be the dead policemans wife, having one daughter.

Sharma added that both marriages were registered with the Registrar of Marriages and under section 16 of the Hindu Marriage Act, his client being the child of the second wife had a right to family pension and death-cum-retirement gratuity, hence she and her mother should get an equal proportion in the compensation that has been disbursed by the state government and the railways in the name of her father.

On its part, deputy commissioner of police, Pradeep Chavan, West zone, Railways, submitted that they had already collected the compensation and other benefits for their demised personnel and were willing to hand it over the beneficiary, as per court orders. The state also submitted that it had expedited the disbursal of the compensation and would hand it over as per court orders.

After hearing the submissions, the court sought the presence of the first wife and daughter as without them the court could not decide on the distribution of the compensation on Tuesday and directed the railways to deposit the compensation amount in the court within a week. The court also asked the state to inform when it would be able to deposit the compensation amount of 60 lakhs with the court and posted the matter for hearing on Tuesday.
The Enforcement Directorate in Kolkata on Monday sent notices to five senior Trinamool Congress (TMC) leaders and summoned a suspended Indian Police Service officer in connection with the 2016 Narada sting operation case.

An ED official said on condition of anonymity that the leaders have been asked to furnish details of property owned by their families. The case is also being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The TMC leaders are Lok Sabha members Saugata Roy and Kakali Ghosh Dastidar, former Lok Sabha member Aparupa Poddar, minister Suvendu Adhikari and TMC leader Ratna Chatterjee who is the wife of former Kolkata mayor Sovon Chatterjee who is also an accused in this case.

The suspended IPS officer is Saiyaad Mustafa Hussain Mirza.

Saugata Roy and Suvendu Adhikari said they would give their reply to the ED once they receive the notice. The other three leaders were not available for comments.

Interestingly, the TMC state leadership on Monday evening relieved Ratna Chatterjee of several responsibilities which led to speculations that her husband, with whom she has an estranged relationship may return to the TMC. Sovon Chatterjee officially joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in August 2019, but has not taken part in any activity in the party.

The controversy erupted in March 2016 after Narada News portal uploaded a series of videos purportedly showing a number of high-profile TMC leaders receiving money in exchange for favours to a fictitious company.

Narada was a poll issue during the 2016 assembly polls but the TMC managed to retain power despite a strong anti-corruption campaign by the BJP, Congress and the Left.

The CBI filed an FIR in the Narada case on March 16, 2017 acting on a Calcutta high court order which was upheld by the Supreme Court. The CBI and ED probed bank transactions and wire transfers.

The CBI also registered FIR against then TMC Rajya Sabha MP Mukul Roy who later joined the BJP and became the opposition partys election strategist in Bengal.

Other senior TMC leaders named in the CBIs FIR are lawmaker Sultan Ahmed, Lok Sabha member Prasun Banerjee, urban development minister Firhad Hakim and panchayat and rural development minister Subrata Mukherjee.

Former minister Madan Mitra and legislator Iqbal Ahmed, who later died, were also named as accused under the Prevention of Corruption Act. Mirza was posted as superintendent of police in Burdwan district during the sting operation.
Monday, August 24, 2020

James J. Talerico, Jr., CEO & Founder of Greater Prairie Business Consulting, Inc. has been appointed to three new strategic advisory boards: Sunset Studios, a women-owned agency located in Los Angeles, California that focuses on creative brand development, experimental marketing, and partnerships; The Virginia United Methodist Housing Development Corporation, a non-profit located in Roanoke, Virginia that sponsors and develops affordable housing throughout the State of Virginia; and Work Tribe Dynamics, a researcher and developer of products that empower people at work, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The last business for which Greater Prairie Business Consulting, Inc. served on the company's strategic advisory board was a fast growing B2B service company listed on the Inc. 5,000 List of Fastest Growing Privately Held Businesses in the US for 2020 that was recently acquired by a national competitor.

As a strategic advisory board member, Greater Prairie Business Consulting, Inc. advises businesses on anything from strategic focus, to marketing, recruiting top talent, and profit improvement. Advisory boards are ideal for entrepreneurs who seek top-notch business advice from experts who understand the challenges of managing a small business and have experience consulting with other businesses in their industry.

For more information about Greater Prairie Business Consulting, Inc's strategic advisory board services, contact James J. Talerico, Jr. at 1-800-828-7585.
WARNING - GRAPHIC CONTENT: Neighbours have confronted law enforcement at the scene of a police shooting on Sunday (local time).

Angry crowds took to the streets after a video appeared to show officers shoot a black man in the back seven times as he leaned into a vehicle.

Gov. Tony Evers on Sunday night released a statement on Twitter condemning the broad daylight shooting and identified the victim as Jacob Blake.

Kenosha Police in Wisconsin, said a person was hospitalised in serious condition following a shooting by officers at about 5pm as police were responding to a domestic incident.

In a statement the Kenosha Police Department said Wisconsin Department of Justice would be investigating the officer involved shooting.

Police did not provide details about what led to the shooting, but said the person was in a serious condition in a Milwaukee hospital. Source: Twitter

Police did not provide details about what led to the shooting, but said officers provided immediate aid to the person before he was transported to a hospital in Milwaukee in a serious condition.

In the video posted on social media that appeared to show the shooting from across a street, three officers could be seen shouting and pointing their weapons at the man as he walked around the front of an SUV parked on the street.

As the man opened the drivers side door and leaned inside, one officer grabbed his shirt from behind and then fired into the vehicle.

Seven shots could be heard on the video, though it was unclear if more than one officer fired.

Following the shooting, social media posts showed neighbours gathering in the surrounding streets and hurling comments at police. Some could be heard chanting, No justice, no peace.

A crowd is seen at a home in Kenosha where officers have blocked off an area after the alleged police shooting of a black man. Source: TMJ4

Late Sunday, marchers appeared to be headed to protest outside the police station, which authorities had mostly blocked off.

Outside the station, protesters faced off with officers who wore plastic face masks and held batons that they occasionally used to push people back.

Story continues

Kenosha Police referred all questions to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond to messages seeking to confirm details of the shooting video.

The Kenosha Sheriffs Department and Wisconsin State Patrol were requested at the scene so another law enforcement agency could take over, police said in the news release.

WARNING: this video is extremely graphic.



Police in Kenosha, Wisconsin appear to shoot a man seven times in the back at point blank range after he ignores commands. Were no other non-lethal methods considered, @KenoshaPolice?

pic.twitter.com/dO4VimGCky  Julian Castro (@JulianCastro) August 24, 2020

The city of Kenosha is located on Lake Michigan, about 64.37 Kilometres south of Milwaukee.

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 Twelfth Cambodia Lao PDR  Myanmar  Vietnam (CLMV) Economic Ministers Meeting (EMM) agreed on an action plan for 2020

This is a major event within the framework of the 52nd ASEAN Economic Ministers Meeting (AEM 52) and related conferences held on August 22-30 in Hanoi.

The ministers noted the favourable growth of the CLMVs trade and investment in 2019. Total merchandise trade in 2019 reached $600.8 billion, up 7.6 per cent from 2018. It contributed 21.3 per cent to the ASEANs total merchandise trade, compared with 19.7 per cent in 2018.

Foreign direct investment flows into CLMV countries grew by 6.3 per cent, with Myanmar experiencing the highest on-year growth at 55.9 per cent. In terms of value, Vietnam received the highest amount among the four countries with $16.1 billion.

The ministers expressed concern about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic activities. Although the CLMV countries have tackled the pandemic relatively better than the other ASEAN Member States, they were not spared of the negative effects of the pandemic on socioeconomic development and people's mobility.

Speaking at the conference, Vietnamese Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh said that this is a special year as protectionism continues to increase, along with the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, leading to breakdowns and disruptions in supply chains, economic activities, trade, investment, and tourism, causing hardships for countries and enterprises.

He said that the above difficulties pose many challenges for CLMV countries in both ensuring epidemic prevention and economic recovery as well as implementing a number of projects and activities for CLMV Action Plan for 2020.

On that basis, Minister Tran Tuan Anh proposed CLMV countries to strengthen coordination in policies and measures to overcome difficulties caused by COVID- 19, continue to support activities to connect businesses in a new form, continue to support solving difficulties for businesses in import-export activities as well as problems in border trade activities.

The ministers underscored the importance of enhancing digital connectivity as well as embracing digital innovation, adoption, and skills by government agencies, MSMEs, and the public to mitigate the impact and expedite economic recovery. The ministers affirmed their commitment to enhance cooperation in mitigating the impact of the pandemic and restore business confidence in the sub-region.

Five areas, namely trade and investment cooperation; implementation of regional commitments; pandemic recovery plan; Framework for CLMV Development; and human resources development have been endorsed for the CLMV Action Plan 2021-2022.
Funding will support pre-clinical and clinical development through a Phase 1A/1B trial of IMGS-001, a novel Checkpoint Inhibitor Drug Candidate

IMGS-001 has been designed to overcome resistance to immunotherapies in immunologically cold tumors

HOUSTON, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ImmunoGenesis, Inc. today announced that it has been awarded a $15.5 M grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to advance development of IMGS-001, the companys dual specific Checkpoint Inhibitor and Tumor Microenvironment (TME) remodeling agent. IMGS-001, through its mechanism of action, has the potential to provide superior blockade of the PD-1 pathway and clear out immunosuppressive elements in the TME. This ability to remodel the TME to a more immune supportive environment is believed to be a critical factor in facilitating efficacy in immunologically cold cancers such as prostate, colorectal and pancreatic cancer.

We are extremely excited that CPRIT recognized the therapeutic potential of our novel dual specific checkpoint inhibitor antibody, IMGS-001, with the awarding of a Product Development Grant, commented ImmunoGenesis Founder, Dr. Michael A. Curran. Compared to existing immunotherapy drugs, we believe this antibody will both provide more consistent benefit for patients with immune-infiltrated tumors, and, for the first time, will also benefit patients with immune 'cold' cancers.

IMGS-001 is the keystone asset of our therapeutic platform  it has been rationally designed to improve cancer treatment outcomes through modification of the tumor microenvironment, said ImmunoGenesis CEO and President, James Barlow. Dr. Curran created this next generation checkpoint inhibitor with multi-tasking ability to both provide superior PD-1 pathway blockade and also eliminate immunosuppressive cells. As a result, we believe IMGS-001 will represent a superior foundation of efficacy, particularly in tumors that have not been responsive to current immunotherapies  this efficacy can then be further enhanced through rational combinations.

The award underscores CPRITs mission of supporting novel research. IMGS-001 is based on discoveries made by the laboratory of Dr. Curran at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Oncology Research for Biologics & Immunotherapy Translation (ORBIT) platform, part of MD Andersons Therapeutics Discovery division. The technology was licensed to ImmunoGenesis in 2019. Dr. Currans financial relationship with ImmunoGenesis is managed and monitored by the MD Anderson Conflict of Interest Committee.

Dr. Cindy WalkerPeach, Chief Product Development Officer of CPRIT, said Dr. Curran is a previous recipient of CPRIT funding for research in his lab and CPRIT is thrilled to now fund this exciting company which was founded by Dr. Curran and has the potential to have a significant clinical impact across a wide range of cancers.

ImmunoGenesis is headquartered in Houston and the CPRIT award allows the company to further build-out its management team and corporate infrastructure in the medical community. James Barlow commented ImmunoGenesis is excited to be a part of an increasingly vibrant biotech community in Houston and Texas, in general.

About ImmunoGenesis, Inc.

ImmunoGenesis is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing therapeutics to catalyze effective immune responses in immunologically cold cancers such as prostate, colorectal and pancreatic cancer. These tumor types represent more than half of all cancers, and current immunotherapies have shown limited to no efficacy here. As a result, there is a high unmet need and substantial market opportunity for efficacious therapies.

www.immunogenesis.com

About the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas

To date, CPRIT has awarded $2.6 billion in grants to Texas research institutions and organizations through its academic research, prevention, and product development research programs. CPRIT has recruited 213 distinguished researchers, supported the establishment, expansion or relocation of 42 companies to Texas, and generated over $5 billion in additional public and private investment. CPRIT funding has advanced scientific and clinical knowledge and provided 6.6 million life-saving cancer prevention and early detection services reaching Texans from all 254 counties. On November 5, 2019, Texas voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to provide an additional $3 billion to CPRIT for a total $6 billion investment in cancer research and prevention.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, included in this press release are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements may be identified by terms such as will, could, believe, plan, expect, target, continue, to, and similar terms or expressions or the negative thereof. Examples of such statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the amount of funding we will receive under the CPRIT grant; the development and effectiveness of IMGS-001; and the ability of IMGS-001 to remodel the TME to a more immune supportive environment. We may not actually achieve the plans, carry out the intentions or meet the expectations or objectives disclosed in the forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results and performance to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date of this press release and are based on managements assumptions and estimates as of such date. We disclaim any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

ImmunoGenesis Contact

Bill Tanner

CFO

203-517-8577

bill.tanner@immunogenesis.com
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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 07:30:56|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, attends an activity during the launch ceremony of the 20th National Science and Technology Week in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 23, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Bin)
The government has approved a HCMC proposal to merge the eastern districts of 2, 9, and Thu Duc into one administrative unit, tentatively called Thu Duc City.

To build the new city, Mr. Binh said HCMC authorities must seek advice from foreign experts and investors, including technology, finance and real estate companies.

Such consultations will allow the city to better understand investment needs and infrastructure requirements for Thu Duc City.

The consultations can be done online, he said.

To attract investment, HCMC must make clear how the new area would be distinguished from other urban areas in the country and other financial and technological centres in Asia, he added.

The plan should also be in accordance with the general planning for HCMC and the southeastern region to avoid overlaps that could lead to unnecessary competition within HCMC and the region, according to Binh.
Kohlberg & Company and Abu Dhabi's sovereign investor Mubadala have signed a definitive agreement to acquire a majority stake in PCI Pharma Services, a leading pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical global supply chain solutions provider.

PCI is a portfolio company of Partners Group and Kohlberg is a leading private equity firm headquartered in Mount Kisco, New York with over 30 years of successful experience partnering with management and companies similar to PCI Pharma Services.

Partners Group, the global private markets investment manager, has agreed the sale of its majority equity stake in PCI on behalf of its clients and alongside its consortium partners Thomas H Lee Partners and Frazier Healthcare Partners, said a statement.

Following the sale, to private equity firm Kohlberg and Mubadala, Partners Group will retain a meaningful minority equity stake in the company. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, PCI is a recognised industry leader and trusted partner providing a broad range of integrated pharmaceutical supply chain solutions from the earliest stages of drug development through to commercial launch and delivering ongoing supply with global capabilities for drug development & manufacturing, clinical trials services and commercial packaging services. PCI spans a global footprint of 25 GMP facilities across six countries and employs ~3900 people worldwide.

PCI teams have embarked on a purposeful journey over recent years to transform the company by executing a successful growth strategy providing customers with innovative and integrated supply chain solutions with the industry-leading customer experience by differentiating through investment in global capabilities, operational excellence, technology and our biggest asset, our talented people, said Salim Haffar, PCIs CEO.

Kohlberg brings considerable successful experience in the biopharmaceuticals and medical device areas, and I am thrilled to be continuing with them to accelerate the growth of our commercial, clinical trial services, and development manufacturing businesses under this new alliance. Both Kohlberg and Mubadalas experience and track record in supporting successful management teams will make a great impact on PCIs continued journey of transformation as we focus on building capabilities to support the future demands of our biopharmaceutical customers in our shared goal of bringing life saving medicines to patients worldwide.

"We identified PCI through our Outsourced Pharmaceutical Services White Paper, and our larger industry practice in Pharmaceutical and Medical Products & Services, as a best-in-class company led by a premier management team. We are honored to have the opportunity to work with Salim and his team on their next phase of transformational growth and value creation," commented Chris Anderson, Partner of KohIberg.

KohIberg and Mubadala plan to partner with PCl's management team, led by CEO Salim Haffar, to continue the company's transformation journey by adding specific capabilities and geographies organically and inorganically to improve its customer service experience and enable its customers to bring lifesaving biopharmaceutical therapies to market. Leveraging the global growth trends in biologics and specialized drug therapies, future capabilities include sterile fill finish of injectables, expanding high potent and specialised manufacturing and further geographic expansion into Asia and greater Europe.

We are thrilled to be partnering with PCI's world class management team, and we believe the partnership of Kohlberg, Mubadala and Partners Group is an optimal combination to support management's acceleration of its growth and value creation pathways," said Matt Jennings, Operating Partner of Kohlberg and future Chairman of PCI. "Salim's inspirational leadership, clear vision for the future and focus on expanding customer experience gave us confidence in him and his management team, and the long-term future potential for the PCI business.

Camilla Macapili Languille, Head of Pharma & Medtech, Mubadala, said: Outsourced pharmaceutical services has been a key investment theme for us over the past few years, and we are excited to be partnering with one of the global leaders in this industry. We have been particularly impressed by the quality and depth of PCIs management team, as well as the companys strong execution track record, impeccable values, and distinct vision for the long-term development of their business. We have strong conviction in the companys growth trajectory and are committed to working with Kohlberg and Partners Group to ensure their long-term success.

Remy Hauser, Managing Director and Head of Healthcare, Industry Value Creation, Partners Group, states: "We are extremely proud of our work with PCI Pharma Services. Though the last few months have been immensely challenging ones, the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the essential nature of the services that PCI provides to the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. On more than one occasion, PCI was the critical link in the supply chain responsible for ensuring life-saving medicine reached those in need."

Sujit John, Member of Management, Private Equity Directs Americas, Partners Group, adds: "We initially identified PCI as a prospective investment via our Thematic Sourcing strategy, based on the strong fundamentals supporting outsourced pharmaceutical services. During our ownership, we were able to add significant value to the business through a combination of operational improvements and bolt-on acquisitions. PCI has a strong growth trajectory ahead and we are excited to contribute to that through our continued investment in the company." - TradeArabia News Service
A security guard who worked at the Rydges outbreak hotel said he delivered food while he was positive with COVID-19.

Rydges on Swanston became the source of 90 per cent of Victoria's current COVID-19 cases after an outbreak there in May, the state's inquiry into hotel quarantine has heard.

The security guard, whose identity has been suppressed by the inquiry, contracted COVID-19 while working there in May.

In evidence to the inquiry on Monday, the guard said he thought he had caught a cold while he was working at the hotel. He also noticed other workers there sniffing.
I'm told this is the speech from tonight's Republican National Convention opener that the Trump campaign thinks will get the buzz tomorrow.

What to watch: In the 9 p.m. ET hour, Vernon Jones, a Democratic state representative from Georgia, will argue that Democrats have abandoned Black voters and the working class.

In an excerpt exclusively for Axios, Jones says, "We are free people with free minds. I am part of a large and growing segment of the Black community who are independent thinkers. And we believe that Donald Trump is the president that America needs to lead us forward."

The big picture: The prime-time lineup of Nikki Haley, Donald Trump Jr. and Sen. Tim Scott is aimed at showing the country a diverse GOP, from the former UN ambassador and daughter of Indian immigrants to MAGA icon Don Jr. to the Senate's only Black Republican.

Don Jr., setting a template for the four nights, will paint Joe Biden as a leftist, while stirring in a positive policy vision for a second Trump term.

setting a template for the four nights, will paint Joe Biden as a leftist, while stirring in a positive policy vision for a second Trump term. A source tells me Don Jr. will say that from China to taxes to immigration to free speech to law and order, "In fact, if you think about it, Joe Bidens entire economic platform seems designed to crush the working man and woman."

Potential breakout star: Sean Parnell, a charismatic former Army Ranger whos running in a hotly contested Pennsylvania race against Rep. Conor Lamb (D).

Go deeper: Axios's RNC Dashboard
The deputy involved in a shooting on Saturday night at the Boston Branch subdivision at the 8200 block of Hixson Spring Road was involved in two prior shootings recently, including one fatal one.

The deputy involved was identified as Jordan Long-Ross. He has been placed on administrative leave with pay.

Ronald Hutson, the suspect involved in the Boston Branch incident, has been released from a local medical facility and booked into the Hamilton County Jail.

Hutson is charged with attempted first-degree murder, felony evading arrest, driving on a revoked license, reckless driving and failure to maintain lane.

Hutson, 50, lives at 8208 Hixson Spring Road.

Hutson has an extensive criminal record.

Authorities said deputies had attempted to perform a traffic stop on Hutson.

They said Hutsons Jeep had not maintained his lane and was all over the roadway. Deputies said the vehicle was driving at 70 miles per hour on Sawyer Pike on the wrong side of the 35 mile per hour road.

Police said the Jeep crashed once it reached the 8200 block of Hixson Springs Road. The police report said someone over the radio traffic was heard saying, He tried to run over the deputy.

An investigator said the Jeep was crashed in a curve right ahead of the two patrol vehicles. Police said as a deputy exited his vehicle to get to the Jeep, Hutson accelerated toward him and then continued to drive toward the other deputy.

Authorities said the deputy fired at the suspect and hit Hutson at least twice. Once the Jeep stopped, police took Hutson out of the vehicle and administered aid.

The deputy involved was later identified as Jordan Long-Ross. He has been placed on administrative leave with pay.



Deputy Long-Ross shot and killed a suspect during an altercation after a traffic stop in Sale Creek in May. The person killed was Tyler Hays, 29. That incident happened around 2 a.m. on Crestview Drive. A resident said he and his wife heard 2-3 shots. He said he went outside and heard the deputy say, "I shot him. I shot him." The TBI said Hays ran from and fought the deputy. The medical examiner's report says the victim died of a single shot to his mid-back.

In an incident in June, the Sheriff's Office said Deputy Ross-Long shot at a man who struck his open driver's door as he was exiting his patrol car. Eric Hayes Tyra, 37, was arrested after leading authorities in a pursuit that went into Marion County.

Deputy Long-Ross did not sustain any injuries.

One suspect was shot and was transported to a local medical facility. The extent of their injuries is unknown.

At the direction of Hamilton County District Attorney General Neal Pinkstons Office, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has been requested to conduct the investigation of the incident.
Delaware Countys census count is running into problems  and coronavirus has been no help.

As census workers began going door-to-door last week to garner responses from residents who have not yet filled out their forms, officials involved in the various efforts to gain as comprehensive a count as possible said theres still a long way to go.

Were nowhere where we need to be, particularly in communities like Chester, Frances Sheehan, president of the Foundation for Delaware County, said Thursday during a virtual town hall meeting focused on the release of a Johns Hopkins University assessment of health needs in the county focused on the need for a local health department.

On it, she spoke of the countys vigorous Complete Count Committee formed last September as a way to include community representatives and organizations to reach hard-to-count residents.

In addition, Sheehan said the United Way assisted the Foundation for Delaware County in deploying over $100,000 to non-profits in the county to spread the word about the census and the importance of filling it out.

But its been a real problem, she said. And theres been so much confusion because, of course, with the COVID lockdown, everything stalled like people thought they had until Oct. 31, now they only have until Sept. 30. We really need more people to be engaged. We need people to fill it out because it is going to significantly impact funding for a variety of different services at the county level.

On the county website, a link at https://census-2020-dcpd.hub.arcgis.com/ has been created so people can fill out the census in 13 languages while also seeing where the county stands in response rates. As of Saturday, 69.7 percent of Delaware County had filled out the census form. The translation is Residents who speak Spanish can call 267-453-7289 from Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. for information or help in completing the 2020 Census questionnaire.

Information gathered from the census is used to determine how to distribute $675 billion in federal funds and grants for hospitals, schools, roads, public works and other programs. In 2010, $27 billion was directed towards Pennsylvania, then allocated based on census results. Census officials have said that on average, for each person counted in the census, $2,000 every year for the next 10 years comes back to Delaware County.

The information is also used to draw U.S. Congressional districts and its also used for community planning purposes when businesses are considering investing in areas.

The questionnaire has approximately 10 questions and all of the information on it is confidential and protected by Title 13 of the U.S. Code.

In February and early March, Census Champion trainings were held before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and everything locked down to mitigate its spread.

Delaware County Vice Chairman Dr. Monica Taylor spoke of the effort being taken in areas like Upper Darby, Chester and communities in the southeastern portion of the county that have previously been undercounted.

Weve actually had a long-standing group thats been working to get the information out through the census in working with kind of those high target areas where we had low participation from, she said. Weve been trying to work really closely with them to make sure that were trying to get that communication out through the municipalities, through the local organizations, through our multicultural collaboration and trying to get as much participation in the process.
Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has sent an open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari requesting him to urgently rescind your assent to the Companies and Allied Matters Act, 2020, [CAMA 2020], and to send the legislation back to the National Assembly to address its fundamental flaws, including by deleting the repressive provisions of the Act, particularly sections 839, 842, 843, 844 and 850 contained in Part F of the Act, and any other similar provisions.

The organization is also urging him to instruct the Registrar-General of the Corporate Affairs Commission, Alhaji Garba Abubakar, and Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, SAN, not to implement or enforce the CAMA 2020 until the legislation is repealed by the National Assembly, and brought in line with the Constitution of Nigeria 1999 (as amended), and Nigerias international human rights obligations.

In the letter dated 22 August 2020 and signed by SERAP deputy director Kolawole Oluwadare, the organisation said: With these provisions, the government now has overly broad and discretionary powers to arbitrarily withdraw, cancel or revoke the certificate of any association, suspend and remove trustees, take control of finances of any association, and to merge two associations without their consent and approval of their members.

According to SERAP, Rather than taking concrete measures to improve the legal environment and civic space that would ensure respect for human rights and media freedom, your government has consistently pursued initiatives to restrict the enjoyment of citizens human rights. These rights are protected from impairment by government action.

SERAP said: These restrictions, coupled with repressive broadcasting codes and Nigerian security agencies relentless crackdown on peaceful protesters and civil society, demonstrate the governments intention to suppress and take over independent associations.

The letter, read in part: SERAP is concerned that the provisions would be used by the authorities to exert extensive scrutiny over the internal affairs of associations, as a way of intimidation and harassment, which would eventually unduly obstruct the legitimate work carried out by associations.

We would be grateful if the requested action and measures are taken within 14 days of the receipt and/or publication of this letter. If we have not heard from you by then, the Registered Trustees of SERAP shall take all appropriate legal actions to compel you and your government to take these measures in the public interest.

Please note that SERAP has instructed its Legal Counsel Femi Falana, SAN to take all appropriate legal actions on our behalf should your government fail and/or neglect to act as requested.

Citizens decision to join with others in pursuit of a common goal is a fundamental aspect of their liberty. The right to freedom of association also plainly presupposes a freedom not to associate. This freedom is at risk if the government can compel a particular citizen, or a discrete group of citizens, to merge their associations.

Constitutional guarantees of freedom of association would be very limited if they are not accompanied by a guarantee of being able to share ones beliefs of ideas in community with others, particularly through associations of individuals having the same beliefs, ideas or interests.

Similarly, freedom of association creates a forum for citizens in which they may freely seek, without any unlawful interference by the state, to move public opinion and achieve their goals. That forum cannot exist if the government is at liberty to treat one association as forming part of another or coercing one association to merge with another association.

By seeking to suspend and remove trustees, and appoint interim managers for associations, the government seems to want to place itself in a position to politicise the mandates of such association, and to undermine the ideas that the right to freedom of association and related rights are supposed to protect in a democratic society.

SERAP believes that the government granting itself the powers to suspend and remove trustees of legally registered associations and to take control of their bank accounts constitute an effective restraint on human rights.

Allowing the government to take control of the bank accounts of association would impact on the rights of the associations, and also seriously undermine civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights as a whole.

These rights are in fact parts of the attributes of citizenship under a free government. Liberty includes the right to enjoy the rights to freedom of association, expression and peaceful assembly. Our constitutional jurisprudence and international standards allow only the narrowest range for their restriction.

Combatting fraud, mismanagement, corruption, money-laundering and other modes of trafficking by associations is legitimate. However, it is not sufficient to simply pursue a legitimate interest, limitations need also to be prescribed by law and be necessary in a democratic society.

Under the Nigerian Constitution and international human rights law, controls need to be fair, objective and non-discriminatory, and not be used as a pretext to silence critics. Your government has legal obligations to create an enabling environment in which associations can effectively carry out their legitimate activities.

These restrictions have no legal basis, as they fail to meet the requirements of legality, legitimacy, proportionality and necessity. The Human Rights Council has called on States to ensure that any regulations of associations do not inhibit the independence and functional autonomy [of associations]

We have also sent a Pre-Action Notice of a lawsuit pursuant to Section 17[2] of the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020, to the Corporate Affairs Commission to urgently initiate, promote and support deletion of Sections 839, 842, 843, 844 and 850 and any other repressive provisions of the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020.

In communication No. 1274/2004, the Human Rights Committee observed that the right to freedom of association relates not only to the right to form an association, but also guarantees the right of such an association freely to carry out its statutory activities. The protection afforded by article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights extends to all activities of an association.

According to the Committee, the existence and operation of a plurality of associations, including those which peacefully promote ideas not necessarily favourably received by the government or the majority of the population, is a cornerstone of a democratic society.

Under international law, the use of the term democratic society places the burden on States imposing restrictions on freedom of association to demonstrate that the limitations do not harm the principles of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness.

The Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights has also called on states not to pass legislation that would give the Government control over the right of associations to manage their own activities.

Associations, as organised, independent, not-for-profit bodies based on the voluntary grouping of persons who pursue activities on a wide range of issues, such as human rights, democratic reforms, and social and economic development, are an integral part of democratic institutions.

The right to freedom of association is to be enjoyed alone or in community with others. Without this collective dimension, the effective realisation of the right would often not be possible. SERAP believes that the rights to freedom of association, freedom of expression and peaceful assembly to advance beliefs and ideas are inseparable aspects of the liberty assured by due process of law.

The right to freedom of association is interrelated with other human rights and freedoms, including the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, protection of property, the private life and correspondence, an effective remedy, fair trials; and right to be protected from discrimination.

A genuine and effective respect for freedom of association cannot be reduced to a mere duty on the part of the State not to interfere. Therefore, it is incumbent upon your government and all public authorities to respect and protect this right, and to guarantee the proper functioning of an association, even when they annoy or give offence to persons opposed to the lawful ideas or claims that they are seeking to promote.

Any limitations on human rights, including the right to freedom of association must be proportionate to the interest to be protected, and must be the least intrusive means to achieve the desired objective.

Implementing or enforcing these repressive provisions will have a significant chilling effect on legitimate activities of associations, and would seriously undermine their independence and operations.

SERAP considers the CAMA 2020 the most repressive legislation in Nigerias history, especially given the unlawful and impermissible restrictions contained in Part F of the Act. Sections 831, 839, 842, 843, 844 and 850 of the Act are manifestly inconsistent with sections 36, 39 and 40 of the Constitution of Nigeria 1999.

Under section 831[ii], the government through the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) is empowered to treat any unregistered association as part of an already registered association, and without any lawful justifications whatsoever. The government also has the power to treat two or more associations as a single association on the flimsy pretext that the associations have the same trustees.

Section 839[1] and [7] of the Act also grants the government through the Corporate Affairs Commission the powers to arbitrarily and unilaterally suspend and remove the trustees of any legally registered association, and to appoint an interim manager or managers to run the affairs of any such association, if the Commission reasonably believes that there is misconduct, mismanagement, and fraud in the association, or on the basis of undefined public interest.

The government will determine and decide what constitutes public interest in all cases. The exercise of the powers under section 839[1][7] is subject only to the approval of the supervisory Minister, a political appointee.

Similarly, sections 842, 843 and 844 grants the government through the Corporate Affairs Commission overly broad powers and discretion to arbitrarily, unlawfully and unilaterally regulate the finances of any association, and to take control and take over bank accounts lawfully belonging to legally registered associations under Part F of the CAMA 2020.

Further, section 850[2][e] empowers the government through the Corporate Affairs Commission to arbitrarily and unilaterally withdraw, cancel or revoke the certificate of registration of any duly and legally registered association.

These repressive provisions clearly and directly threaten and violate the rights to freedom of association, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, privacy, property, and other human rights guaranteed under the Nigerian Constitution and international human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights to which Nigeria is a state party.

SERAP notes that legally registered associations have also deposited their constitutions and other documents with the Corporate Affairs Commission under the now repealed and replaced CAMA 2004.

The Commission also enjoyed wide ranging powers under CAMA 2004 to regulate these associations, as the associations are required to periodically report to the Commission. Registered associations are also regulated under other existing laws, including anti-corruption and money laundering laws, the Criminal Code and Penal Code.
Carrie Lam expects Hong Kong residents to cherish Basic Law, "one country, two systems"

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 10:30, August 23, 2020

HONG KONG, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has provided Hong Kong residents with a better life and every resident should cherish the Basic Law and "one country, two systems," HKSAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam said in a video series released on Saturday.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the promulgation of the Basic Law and enhance the public's understanding of the Basic Law provisions, the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau of the HKSAR government rolled out a video series that feature six themes, namely "Origin of the Basic Law," "Drafting and Consultation," "Rights and Freedom," "Rule of Law," "International Financial Center" and "Looking Ahead."

A spokesman from the bureau said the video series review the guidelines of "one country, two systems" and the origin of the Basic Law, examine the safeguard of institutions under the Basic Law, and analyse the ways that the Basic Law enables the HKSAR to preserve its strengths and maintain its prosperity and stability, and its residents to enjoy their pleasant living.

Lam said in the video series that in retrospect, Hong Kong has successfully weathered some economic challenges, demonstrating that the Basic Law is feasible.

Lam stressed that Hong Kong is an inseparable part of the People's Republic of China and the HKSAR is directly under the central government. Therefore, understanding and mastering the relationship between Hong Kong and the central authorities runs through the understanding and implementation of the Basic Law.

She hoped that all Hong Kong residents will work hard to ensure the implementation of "one country, two systems" in Hong Kong.

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This weeks Republican National Convention will be a four-day celebration of President Donald Trump

Protesters rally against a mask mandate, many showing support for US President Donald Trump, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (AFP)

Washington: This weeks Republican National Convention will be a four-day celebration of President Donald Trump, featuring a younger generation that may be hoping for a shot at the White House in 2024, as well as a St. Louis couple who brandished guns at anti-racism protesters. Here is a look at speakers featured in a mix of live and virtual programming that will start on Monday and run from 8:30 p.m. until 11 p.m EDT every night.

TRUMP AND FAMILY

The theme of the nominating convention will be Honoring the Great American Story, and will culminate in a live acceptance speech by Trump on Thursday night from the South Lawn of the White House.

The president, who trails Democratic nominee Joe Biden in opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election, will be the central focus and will speak each night, according to campaign sources, including one event when he will honor doctors, nurses and other workers on the front line of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trumps children, including Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, will also get prominent speaking roles.

Some government ethics experts have expressed concern over the use of federal properties as stages for partisan political speeches, but a law prohibiting the use of federal funds for campaign appearances excludes the president and vice president. In 1940, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted his partys nomination from the White House via radio.

Republicans are looking to strike a more optimistic vision for the country, seeking a contrast with what they saw as the Democrats more ominous perspective laid out at their convention last week.

On Monday, the convention theme will be the Land of Promise, Tuesdays will be the Land of Opportunity, Wednesday will focus on the Land of Heroes and events will conclude on Thursday with the Land of Greatness.

TRUMP CHANGED MY LIFE

Trump has been criticized for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 170,000 Americans and triggered a severe economic downturn, as well as his reaction to nationwide protests over racial injustice and police brutality against Black Americans.

To counter that criticism, the convention will feature everyday Americans who will say that Trump changed their lives in positive ways, according to a member of Trumps campaign.

They will also sound the alarm over the dangers of a Biden victory in November.

Among them will be Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St. Louis couple who drew guns in front of Black Lives Matter protesters who marched through their gated community in July. They were charged with felony weapons offenses, which Trump has called a disgrace. Their attorney, Joel Schwartz, said their appearance had been confirmed by Republican organizers.

Other citizen speakers will include police Sergeant Ann Dorn, whose husband, retired police Captain David Dorn, was killed during violent protests in St. Louis in June; Tanya Weinreis, who will say her Montana coffee shop and employees livelihoods were saved by a loan from the federal coronavirus relief Paycheck Protection Program, and the parents of Kayla Mueller, a humanitarian worker murdered by the Islamic State militant group.

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school massacre, will also speak. He is an advocate for enhanced school safety measures, including armed guards.

2024 HOPEFULS

The convention will also feature Republicans considered prospective 2024 presidential hopefuls.

Vice President Mike Pence will be the main speaker on Wednesday. He will deliver his remarks from Baltimores Fort McHenry, made famous in the War of 1812 when it was successfully defended against an attack by the British navy, inspiring the poem that became the lyrics for the U.S. national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner.

Other speakers include Nikki Haley, Trumps former ambassador to the United Nations; South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and Donald Trump Jr., who some party members want to see continue the Trump legacy.

The Trump campaign also gave speaking roles to members of the Senate and House of Representatives facing tough re-election battles, including Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who defected from the Democratic Party.

Some Republican incumbents facing tough re-election challenges are noticeably absent from prominent speaking roles, however, including Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona.

The Republican lineup will feature fewer women and diverse voices than the Democratic convention. While more than 20 women are scheduled to speak this week, Democratic women dominated last weeks proceedings, with the first three evenings ending with addresses by former first lady Michelle Obama, Jill Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Private Giving to UW Holds Steady for 2020

Private support to the University of Wyoming held steady over the past fiscal year despite unprecedented global economic shifts and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The UW Foundation raised a total of $43.6 million during the fiscal year ending June 30, surpassing the previous years $41.6 million private giving total. The universitys five-year annual fundraising average remains above $50 million.

The unwavering generosity of the UW family is remarkable, says Ben Blalock, president and CEO of the UW Foundation. Even during these historic times of hardship and uncertainty, our alumni and friends, along with our corporate and foundation partners, continue to prioritize support for Wyomings university.

The UW endowment pool now surpasses $585 million, distributed among 1,589 individual endowments. UW has the largest endowment in the Mountain West Conference.

The university has developed a strong public-private partnership with the state of Wyoming, Blalock says.

The states matching funds program has greatly incentivized private giving since 2001. State matching dollars have encouraged private support for major investments in UW endowments and facilities. Since the programs inception, more than $222 million has been invested in UW. Donor gifts have doubled these funds.

In 2020, the Wyoming Legislature added an additional $6.25 million in state matching funds to the UW program to support the Tier-1 Engineering Initiative; the Science Initiative; programs to support endowed professorships; research in agriculture for production, ranch and range management; and endowment support for the College of Law legal clinics and experiential learning programs.

Private giving plays an ever-increasingly critical role in advancing UW, Blalock says.

For more information, call the UW Foundation at (307) 766-6300.
Tracy Henson just wanted her husbands ashes.

By the time she spoke with a cremation company in May, the newly widowed woman from Portola (Plumas County) was an emotional wreck. For more than six years, she had been married to Melford Henson, a 65-year-old carpenter with white hair and a fondness for Chihuahuas. Deemed a low-risk prisoner by the state, he was serving a short sentence for DUI at the California Institution for Men in Chino. Until late April, he and Tracy spoke on the phone every day, planning their reunion; Melford was scheduled to be released by the end of 2020.

But the coronavirus was sweeping through the prisons overcrowded dormitories, and Melford suddenly stopped calling, sending Tracy into a panic. On April 29, a Chino hospital informed her that Melford was there, battling COVID-19; soon he was placed on a ventilator, unable to speak. She never had a chance to say goodbye to her husband before he died on May 6.

Then, grieving and still in shock, she was handed a $900 cremation bill.

During a call with a mortuary service that contracts with the prison, Tracy learned that according to state policy, family members of those who die in prisons  of COVID-19 or any other cause  must pay out of their own pockets if they want to receive the remains of their children, spouses and parents. Melfords cremation and the shipping of his ashes would cost nearly a grand. If Tracy didnt want the remains, the state would cover the expense, she was told, but then her husband would be considered unclaimed, his ashes scattered at sea by strangers.

Hearing that, I cried my eyes out, recalled Henson, who is disabled and relies on Social Security disability benefits. I dont have that kind of money sitting around.

Since the start of the pandemic, 54 incarcerated people have died of COVID-19 in Californias 35 prisons, and even though the deceased were in state custody until they drew their last breaths, the state expects their loved ones to pay burial costs, which can run into the thousands of dollars.

Families and advocates for incarcerated people say the policy is not only cruel, it discriminates against those without means to pay the sudden expenses. And with death numbers rising in the state prisons, the issue isnt likely to go away.

Its a pretty disgusting policy, said attorney Michael Bien, who represents tens of thousands of California prisoners and knows families struggling to scrape up money to bury incarcerated loved ones felled by the virus. He said the state has a moral duty to pay for a basic burial or cremation of people who die in their custody.

This is basic human decency here, Bien said, emphasizing that the financial burden is falling not on those convicted of crimes but on their children and wives and moms.

Prison officials say they are only following procedures set by California law.

Dana Simas, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said that according to state rules, if a family wishes to claim the body of a relative who died in state custody, all burial services  and costs  become the familys responsibility, without any reimbursement from the state. California pays only if the body is considered unclaimed. In that instance, the state contracts with a mortuary to cremate the body  and the corrections department may seize any personal funds or property left over in the dead persons prison account and apply those to cost of burial, according to the state penal code.

The ashes, at that point, are no longer state property and the state does not know what happens to them, Simas said.

It is our highest priority to respect the traditional and religious beliefs of the loved ones of incarcerated persons who have passed away while in CDCR custody, Simas told The Chronicle in a statement. We offer families the ability to provide the burial and funeral arrangements according to their own values and traditions.

There are no federal laws that tell state prisons how to handle burial costs for those in their custody. California is not the only state that requires families to pay if the bodies are claimed; some states dont even pay for the burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies, leaving it for local counties and medical examiners to decide. But at least one state, Arkansas, offers assistance to families who want the remains of their loved ones but cant afford to pay: The Arkansas Department of Corrections provides a service that cremates the body and ships the cremains to the family free of charge, said Cindy Murphy, a department spokeswoman.

Bien has asked the corrections department to reimburse one family for burial costs. He said he will push the state to change its rules, through litigation and by working with advocacy groups to raise the issue with the Legislature and the governors office.

Relatives of prisoners who died of COVID-19 told The Chronicle that by the time they got the burial bills, they were so depleted by the ordeal  and so horrified by the way the corrections department treats families  that they dont have the energy to fight anymore.

I just want to be at peace, said a woman on the East Coast whose brother died of COVID-19 while incarcerated at the California Institution for Men. He was a client of Bien. She asked not to be named because she is grieving and wants privacy.

The womans brother was transferred to a hospital on June 3, she said. The prison never informed her, even though she is listed on his prison paperwork as next of kin, Bien said. It wasnt until June 18 when she received a call from a lieutenant, telling her that her brother was dead.

The next day, June 19, she was sent a telegram from the prison warden, saying that her brothers remains had been released to All Caring Cremations, a firm in Van Nuys. The telegram said to contact the firm and make burial arrangements without expense to the state of California, according to a copy of the telegram provided to The Chronicle.

Deciding that she wanted to keep his ashes, the sister ultimately received an itemized bill for $1,807.57 from a funeral home in San Diego. The bill, also shared with The Chronicle, listed $140 in charges for Direct Cremation, $295 for Refrigeration, $695 for Transfer of Remains to Funeral Home, another $195 Cremation Fee, $195 for Mailing of Cremated Remains and hundreds in additional costs.

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.

The chief operations officer of All Caring Cremations, Alex Matthews, confirmed that All Caring has a contract with the California Institution for Men. He said the contract is just to pick up human remains from the prison and store them temporarily, not to perform burial services.

For some families, the corrections departments policy is especially frustrating because the agency provides almost no information about the COVID-19 status of their incarcerated loved ones while the loved ones are still alive. The first detailed communication is often the bill from the mortuary service.

Beverly Vargas, 63, of Redondo Beach (Los Angeles County), described a month-long nightmare that began in June, when she learned that her brother, Steve Garcia, had caught the virus while serving a 22-year sentence at Avenal State Prison. Vargas learned over the phone from a prison counselor that Garcia was being treated for COVID-19 in a Bakersfield hospital. But the prison gave no details about his condition or information about how to visit him, and over the next days and weeks, Vargas and several of her relatives dialed the hospital and prison repeatedly, their calls going to voice mail.

Youre fighting tooth and nail to get anybody to answer you, Vargas told The Chronicle.

Desperate to visit Garcia and comfort him, Yolanda Meeden, another of his sisters, drove hundreds of miles from her home in Arizona to the Bakersfield hospital in mid-July. The hospital staff didnt allow her to see Garcia, she said, even though she was listed on his paperwork as next of kin. Meeden left a get-well card and a balloon with a security guard in the parking lot.

They say he didnt exist because he was an inmate, Meeden said.

Garcia died a short time later, on July 24.

The family decided to bury him in the family plot at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery, which will cost upward of $16,000.

Nobody has money in our family, Beverly Vargas said. Everybodys been up all night, trying to figure out where to get money to bury him.  I mean, well do whatever it takes  a car wash or whatever we have to do to get the money. They ended up relying on a GoFundMe page to raise the cash.

Tracy Henson, Melfords widow, said the experience with the cremation bill left her feeling even more vulnerable during one of the toughest moments of her life. Ultimately, after receiving a small government stimulus check, she was able to pay a third of the $900 charge. Melfords sister, she said, agreed to pay the rest.

I wanted the ashes at my home, Henson said. And I have them now. Theyre right next to my bed.

Jason Fagone is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jfagone@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfagone
Mumbai crime branch officers arrested a 38-year-old man, identified as Rajendra Mohansingh Rawat alias Raju Nepali, from Borivli on Monday in connection with the murder of a real estate developer at Dharwad district in Karnataka on August 6.

Officers said that Rawat is an associate of gangster Yusuf Suleiman Kadri alias Yusuf Bachkana from the past 10 years and arranged for shooters to murder the developer at the gangsters behest for 10 lakh.

Bachkana allegedly gave Rawat the contract over a financial dispute with the developer. The plot to kill the real estate developer was laid down in June, said an officer from crime branch.

Bachkana, who worked for gangster Ravi Pujari, is currently serving life sentence at Hindalga central jail in Belgavi district of Karnataka for the murder of a builder, said officers.

Rawats name cropped up after the seven people arrested by Karnataka Police in connection with the real estate developers murder revealed his name and claimed that they were given the contract by Rawat.

A police team from Karnataka then came to Mumbai and nabbed Rawat from Borivli area with the help of Mumbai crime branch officers.

We alerted our informant and found out that Rawat was in touch with Bachkana and was still working with him despite the latter being in Karnataka jail. During his interrogation, Rawat confessed that he was given a contract of 10 lakh to arrange shooters. After scrutinising Rawats bank account, we found that 2 lakh was transferred into his account before the murder, said police inspector Sagar Sivalkar of unit 12 of the crime branch.

Rawat has a 2013 attempt to murder case and other cases under the Arms Act registered against him at Kasturba police station at Vanrai police station in 2009.
"SpiceJet is the first and only Indian carrier to operate non-stop cargo services from Europe on a dedicated freighter," the airlines said in a statement. "Adding Netherlands to its international cargo network, SpiceJet carried 13 tonne of cargo supplies to Mumbai."

New Delhi: Airlines major SpiceJet on Saturday operated its first-ever long-haul cargo flight from Amsterdam to Mumbai using its wide-body Airbus A340 aircraft.

According to the airlines, the Airbus A340 freighter aircraft will operate from Mumbai to Khartoum in Sudan on Sunday.

"The A340 freighter will fly from Mumbai to Khartoum on August 23 carrying 40 tonne of cargo," SpiceJet added.

"This will be SpiceJet's first non-stop flight to Africa. The airlines had earlier flown to Sudan via Ras Al-Khaimah (UAE)."

Since March 25, 2020, the airlines has operated more than 5,764 cargo flights and transported over 31,800 tonne of cargo -- this is more than double of all domestic airlines combined together -- carrying medicines and medical equipment and fruits and vegetables to all corners of India and the world.

At present, the airlines' international cargo network spans over 42 international destinations.
Republican leaders in the Pennsylvania Senate introduced legislation Monday that would effectively prohibit the use of mail-ballot drop boxes that President Donald Trump has criticized, make it more likely that a winner in the presidential race is known soon after polls close, and reduce the number of ballots rejected for arriving late.

But the proposal also would give voters less time to request mail ballots, prompting Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to quickly come out against it. That left it unclear Monday whether a fierce political and legal battle over mail voting in a key swing state would be resolved in the state legislature or in the courts.

The changes, along with others in the proposal, would have a significant impact on how votes are cast and counted in an election little more than two months away. The bill was introduced by Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R., Jefferson) and Majority Leader Jake Corman (R., Centre), suggesting it has the necessary support to pass the Senate.

This bill will go a long way toward providing additional confidence in our election process and the results by taking steps needed to increase election access, accountability, and security, Corman said in a statement.

Much of the legislation is focused on mail ballots, which have been the subject of intense scrutiny across the country as Trump has falsely assailed them as prone to widespread fraud, and as mail delivery delays have raised alarm about votes being delivered on time. The use of mail ballots is surging in Pennsylvania and across the country amid coronavirus fears of in-person voting.

 READ MORE: USPS says Pennsylvania mail ballots may not be delivered on time, and state warns of overwhelming risk to voters

The Senate Republicans proposal would move the deadline to apply for a mail ballot earlier, from seven days before Election Day to 15. That would widen the window between requesting and returning a ballot, potentially reducing the number of ballots rejected. But it would also give voters less time to request them.

Thats why Wolf opposes the proposal, said Lyndsay Kensinger, his spokesperson: The governor is opposed to any proposal that would limit Pennsylvanians ability to vote.

This proposal appears to do so by limiting the ability for individuals to cast mail ballots by reducing the number of days Pennsylvanians can request one, she said. The governor will only support an election reform proposal that makes it easier and safer for Pennsylvanians to cast their ballots.

The legislation would allow voters to physically bring their completed mail ballots to their assigned polling places on Election Day, to county courthouses, or to the permanent offices of the county board of elections. That language, however, would likely block counties from setting up satellite offices for early voting and drop boxes, because mail ballots would be returnable to no other location.

They want us to give up the drop boxes. Obviously that is in tune with what Trumps campaign wants, said State Rep. Kevin Boyle, the ranking Democrat on the House State Government Committee, which takes up election legislation. That is particularly troublesome due to the issues with the U.S. Postal Service.

 READ MORE: Philly mail delays are raising alarms about the 2020 election: This is a huge problem

The bill came as a new election law expanding mail voting, the pandemic, and the mail delays have, taken together, created a fever pitch of anxiety around the process of running the election. There are ongoing court battles over the election and, now, the possibility of protracted negotiations in the legislature.

The resulting uncertainty around fundamental rules of how votes can be cast and counted risks confusing voters. It also makes it difficult for elections officials to prepare. Just last week, the Pennsylvania Department of State issued new guidance to counties on how to set up drop boxes. Those would not be legal under the Senate Republicans proposal, and the Trump campaign is suing Pennsylvania in federal court to block their use.

A federal judge in western Pennsylvania put that lawsuit on hold over the weekend while other litigation proceeds in state courts. On Monday, Trump took to Twitter to falsely assail drop boxes as a voter security disaster that make it possible for a person to vote multiple times and are not Covid sanitized. Twitter later attached a warning notice to that post saying it violated its rules against vote suppression.

 READ MORE: High-stakes lawsuits could shape who votes and how ballots are counted in November

Pennsylvania and other states are also suing the Postal Service over the mail delays. And the Pennsylvania Department of State has asked the state Supreme Court to order that mail ballots be counted as late as three days after the election.

The Biden campaign declined to comment on the proposal late Monday. The Trump campaign didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

Legislative leaders and the governors office have been discussing election legislation throughout the summer, and Scarnati said in a statement Monday that we look forward to working with the House of Representatives and Wolf administration to ensure these crucial reforms are in place for the upcoming election.

But the proposed legislation clearly took some leading Democrats in the state House and Senate by surprise.

This was not the product of negotiations between Democrats and Republicans, said Boyle, who represents Northeast Philadelphia. This was news to me.

State Sen. Sharif Street, a Philadelphia Democrat and vice chairman of the state party, said that if the GOP proposal is the opening salvo in a meaningful conversation, were willing to engage. But he expressed concern about how the bill would impact drop boxes.

A spokesperson for Republicans in the State House didnt comment late Monday. A House GOP source, granted anonymity to discuss internal negotiations, said Democratic lawmakers were not involved in the talks between Republicans and the Wolf administration over the proposal. Wolfs spokesperson said the administration was aware of the Republican proposal prior to its release but had yet to provide final feedback.

Counties would be required to pre-canvass mail ballots before Election Day under the legislation, opening and counting those ballots as early as 8 a.m. Saturday but not recording or publishing the results, making it easier for a winner to be known earlier after polls close. Currently, mail ballots cannot be opened until Election Day, meaning it will likely take days to call some races.

Other changes include allowing voters to serve as poll watchers anywhere in the state, not only in their home county as current law requires, just as Trump has promised to have poll watchers across the country; allowing voters to serve as poll workers at any polling place in their county, not only in their home precinct; and requiring counties to email, call, or text any voters whose mail ballot signatures do not match what is on file so they can have an opportunity to fix their signatures before their ballots are rejected.

-Staff writer Julia Terruso contributed to this article.
It takes a certain kind of vision to be a successful CEO, but todays occupants of the top chair also need to embed that vision into their employees.

CEOs who can mentor their employees while heading down the road to progress and innovation with tangible leadership and excellence are bound to bring their vision to reality.

Three local CEOs have been recognized for four of these traits by the Albuquerque Journal.

Dr. Mark Epstein

Mark Epstein, CEO of True Health New Mexico earned both the Leadership and Excellence awards as part of this years Top CEOs program.

A physician as well as an administrator, Epstein brings a wide-ranging background to his position atop the health insurance company.

We have an organization that is really focused on taking care of people as individuals who are going through health issues, he said.

Members may be facing health challenges or financial challenges, but the goal of every True Health New Mexico employee is to make sure its members are properly covered.

We have a lot of heart  and in that heart, there is great opportunity to care for people, not just caring for members, but caring for each other in the organization, Epstein said. As a physician, that is the core of what we do. We support people who are trying to better their lives and better their health.

Epstein took something of a round-about path to his current position.

From a career perspective, my approach has been always to be curious and open to discovery and open to creation, he said. It has not felt like a linear path. Those opportunities need to be prepared for.

It may not have been a linear path, but Epstein has proven to be a perfect fit for True Health New Mexico.

And each day brings something different, which he compares to his days working in the emergency room.

It has a lot of variety to it and thats a rich experience for me, he said. Its not unlike an ER shift, youre not sure what is going to walk through the door and all you can do is make sure the team is ready for anything and you cant ever lose sight of why youre there, which is to take care of people.

Debbie Harms

When Debbie Harms, CEO of NAI Maestas & Ward, first started in the commercial real estate business, she felt a little lost. She said she doesnt want anyone working under her to have that feeling, which is one reason she earned the Mentorship award.

Commercial real estate isnt an easy field to go into, Harms said. There are a lot of intricacies. A lot of a very involved industries. Lots of pieces of the puzzle that have to be put together. If you have a new person coming into this field, there is a lot of information readily available, but its not particularly intuitive to put everything together and see a reasonable outcome at the end.

Harms came into the business with a strong background in the construction industry, working as an accountant with home builders and a large construction company that did commercial projects.

My knowledge in commercial construction helped me dramatically in commercial real estate, Harms said. It wasnt hard, but it would have been so much easier if I had a mentor. If I had someone who really understood what I didnt know. I didnt have that for the first two or three years.

Harms originally worked for the Hines Corp. under Frank and Dolores Hines, for about two years, from 1993 to 1995.

Thats when the Hines took Harms under their wing and really grounded her in the intricacies of the business. When they retired, Harms started her own company, but the Hines remained mentors.

Somebody has to work with a person thats new to the industry, Harms said. It doesnt matter what their age is. The fact that theyre new to the industry means that they have to learn this stuff. And the quicker theyre able to learn and the better theyre able to learn, the better theyre going to do. And thats the ultimate goal, to give good service to our clients.

Dr. Sanjay Kholwadwala

Sanjay Kholwadwala, CEO of Albuquerque ER & Hospital, thought there had to be a better way to service emergency room patients. His commitment to that ideal earned him the Progress award.

I was always interested in administration, but Ive always been a physician first, Kholwadwala said. I thought there could be a different way to do this. Were not spending enough time with patients. Were moving so fast that we had no time to talk with anyone. Doctors and nurses dont talk with the patients and patients feel like theyre not being heard.

Thats not the case at Albuquerque ER & Hospital.

I felt a small hospital was a good idea, Kholwadwala said. I wanted to try something where I can actually speak with patients, sit down with them, spend 30 minutes. Were a smaller hospital with lower volumes and we spend more time and that makes patients happy. Its a lot more fulfilling than spending a minute or two with a patient and moving on.

The success of the new, West Side hospital has been such that Kholwadwala is actively searching for a site in the Northeast Heights to put a second location.

You always question yourself, he said. When you start something new, going against big names in Albuquerque with a small hospital, (I wondered) are we going to be OK? It was tough to start with. But were expanding already. Anytime you expand, its always nerve-wracking, but thats also the fun time.
For the third year in a row, New Jersey has released its controversial rating system that graded every school on a 1-100 scale  a system educators say paints an incomplete picture of the state's 2,100 schools, including those in Haddonfield and Haddon Township.

The new 2020 ratings were established to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced the controversial No Child Left Behind Act. Patch obtained scores that are supposed to compare all schools together, although some complain that it's unfair to rate elementary schools against high schools.



The ratings were also determined before the coronavirus outbreak and the shutting of school buildings in March. Many districts plan to begin the coming school year with remote instruction. Read more: NJ Coronavirus, Reopen Updates: Here's What You Need To Know

The ratings for high schools have been based on graduation and absenteeism rates and standardized scores, while elementary and middle school scores are based on absenteeism, standardized test scores and student progress, according to the state Department of Education.

PARCC scores were factored into past scores. Now the test is named as the New Jersey Student Learning Assessment (NJSLA).

The ESSA was enacted in 2015, and it was intended to "build on key areas of progress in recent years, made possible by the efforts of educators, communities, parents, and students across the country," according to the U.S. Department of Education.



The New Jersey School Boards Association has said a single number or letter grade by itself "draws an incomplete picture of school performance and the quality of education provided to its students."



On the other hand, the New Jersey PTA president has said "parents now have more information than ever before."



"They have the tools to ask questions of their teachers and other stakeholders such as the superintendent, principal, and Board of Education," the PTA said.



Story continues

Based on the reports, it appears that schools that finished with at least a 50 score could be considered average. Schools that finish in the top 20 percent are considered above average.



Patch obtained the "summative determination" scores from the state Department of Education, which shows schools in Manalapan, Millburn and Cherry Hill as having the highest scores, getting a 96.75 or higher. Some schools got a 1.84 or lower (see below).



Some of the analysis gives elementary schools more weight in their scoring because they don't have the exact same criteria as high schools (like graduation rates).

Here's how Haddonfield and Haddon Township schools ranked, with their scores:

78. Haddonfield Memorial High School, Haddonfield School District, Camden 96.34

136. J. Fithian Tatem School, Haddonfield School District, Camden 93.58

296. Van Sciver Elementary School, Haddon Township School District, Camden 85.90

337. Elizabeth Haddon School, Haddonfield School District, Camden 83.94

389. Central School, Haddonfield School District, Camden 81.44

564. Clyde S. Jennings Elementary School, Haddon Township School District, Camden 73.05

669. Haddonfield Middle School, Haddonfield School District, Camden 68.00

765. Haddon Township High School, Haddon Township School District, Camden 63.38

773. William G. Rohrer Middle School, Haddon Township School District, Camden 63.06

875. Thomas A. Edison Elementary School, Haddon Township School District, Camden 58.12

1391. Stoy Elementary School, Haddon Township School District, Camden 33.37

1519. Strawbridge Elementary School, Haddon Township School District, Camden 27.25

With reporting by Tom Davis, Patch Staff

This article originally appeared on the Haddonfield-Haddon Township Patch
A 87-year-old American woman has died after suffering a heart attack while waiting six hours in a vehicle to cross the border back into the US from Mexico, after new restrictions sent wait times skyrocketing.

The elderly woman was stuck in a traffic jam Sunday near the San Ysidro Port of Entry in Tijuana when she went into cardiac arrest, according to the Tijuana Municipal Police Department.

The California resident has not yet been named by authorities.

The police department said it received an emergency phone call from the family at 12:20pm before a paramedics team from the Red Cross was dispatched.

The woman had been waiting in traffic with her relatives since 6am local time, according to Telemundo 40.

Her death came just days after the U.S. Customs and Border Protection brought in more checks at the border amid limitations on non-essential travel.

Tijuana Municipal Police Department got an emergency call from a passenger on a vehicle (left) Sunday after an 87-year-old American woman reportedly went into cardiac arrest and died after spending over six hours waiting to cross the border

A stretcher is set up to transfer the body of an American woman who fell ill and died of an Sunday in Tijuana after she waited more than six hours in a car to cross into the United States at the San Ysidro Port of Entry

'The high temperatures and hours of waiting could complicate the conditions of the woman who lost her life,' one of the paramedics at the scene told Mexican news outlet ZETA Noticias.

Wait times for travelers to enter the United States on vehicles have worsened since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since March 21, the southern international border crossing with Mexico has been limited only to 'essential travel', following orders from President Donald Trump's administration.

But CBP last week announced it would take further steps to reduce non-essential travel at more than a dozen border crossings in Texas, Arizona and California.

The United States on Friday closed lanes at select ports of entry at the border, and was conducting more secondary checks to limit non-essential travel and the spread of coronavirus, a CBP official said.

CBP reported up to four hours waiting time at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry on Saturday

U.S. citizens and permanent residents can still enter the United States from Mexico. The new measures are aimed at those travelers, the CBP official said.

The United States leads the world with more than 174,000 confirmed deaths from the coronavirus, followed by Brazil with 112,000 and Mexico with 59,000, according to a Reuters tally.

'We need people to think twice about non-essential travel and to ask themselves if the travel is worth risking their lives and the lives of others,' El Paso CBP spokesman Roger Maier said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection website reported delays of up to 340 minutes (almost six hours) at 10am Sunday at the San Ysidro crossing.

Telemundo reports that the average wait time for the crossing is usually 74 minutes via the car lanes.

Entry via Ready Lanes, which according to CBP is a 'dedicated lane for travelers entering the U.S. at land border ports of entry with identification that contains a Radio Frequency Identification [RFID] chip' had was delayed by 260 minutes when it normally takes 56 minutes.
Its not clear what happened to the other two requests provided to the U.S. but neither has been recognized by a U.S. court. While Colombian courts have judged Mancuso responsible for more than 1,500 acts of murder or forced disappearance, many of the crimes are not recognized as offenses under U.S. law because they stem from his position atop AUCs chain of command  not specific orders he gave. In 2001, the U.S. designated the AUC a foreign terror organization.
A worker handles a swab test for COVID-19 at a testing site at the Anaheim Convention Center, in Anaheim, Calif., on July 15, 2020. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Orange County Taken Off Californias COVID-19 Watch List

SANTA ANA (CNS)Orange County was removed from Californias COVID-19 monitoring list on Aug. 23, starting the clock for all public schools in the county to potentially reopen in early September.

The state mandates a county must be off the watch list for 15 days before all schools can reopen. Orange Countys data on hospitalizations and other key metrics have been moving in the right direction, with the rate of county residents testing positive after being tested for COVID-19 at 5.4 percent, below the states desired threshold of 8 percent.

Underscoring the positive trends, county health officials reported just 153 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 and one additional death on Aug. 23, bringing the countys totals to 45,954 cases and 897 fatalities.

The data on hospitalizations continued to move in the right direction, with 380 people hospitalized and 111 of those in intensive care. Those numbers were 392 and 110 on Aug. 22, 397 and 117 on Aug. 21, and 400 and 118 on Aug. 20, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency.

The countys case rate per 100,000 residents dropped from 92.9 to 90.2, which is still far higher than the California Department of Public Health threshold of 25 per 100,000 residents.

The county has 29 percent of intensive care unit beds available, which is better than the states 20 percent threshold. And the countys hospitals have 58 percent of their ventilators available, well above the state standard of 25 percent.

The OCHCA reported that 594,082 COVID-19 tests have been conducted, including 5,163 reported Aug. 23. There have been 37,452 documented recoveries.

Orange County could be placed back on the list should it be flagged for exceeding any one of six different metrics for three consecutive days. Those metrics are the case rate, the percentage of positive tests, the average number of tests a county is able to perform daily, changes in the number of hospitalized patients and the percentage of ventilators and intensive care beds available.

The decision to reopen schools would still be left to individual districts. Orange County officials say 24 elementary schools have already been approved to reopen, including six in the Los Alamitos Unified School District.

For parents still leery of returning students to classrooms, Dr. Clayton Chau, the countys interim chief health officer and director of the Orange County Health Care Agency, said the county encourages them to continue online learning, especially children who are at a higher risk.

The county will provide tests for staff and students and a full medical team that includes pediatricians, while infectious disease experts from Childrens Hospital of Orange County and UC Irvine will be standing by to assist when needed, Chau said.

Wednesday was the first day the county fell below the states monitoring thresholds, Chau said.

It is possible various business sectors that are shut down for commerce indoors may be allowed to return to normal, Chau said. County officials are expecting new guidance from the state this week.
Met Eireann has said that Storm Francis will likely lead to some destruction and possible structural damage as it sweeps across Ireland, hitting Cork, Kerry and 10 other counties.

The storm is due to make landfall here on Monday night and a number of warnings have been issued.

Gusts of up to 110km/h are expected in some parts as well as rainfall accumulations of up to 60mm.

Met Eireann has issued a status orange rainfall warning for Connacht, Cavan, Monaghan, Donegal, Wexford, Cork, Kerry and Waterford.

The warning comes into effect at 9pm this evening and is in place until 5pm on Tuesday.

Cork County Council said it has response crews and contractors on standby for the approaching storm.

Council crews have also been removing debris from grates and culverts and additional precautions remain in place at Rossa Road, Skibbereen due to works in progress, while crews also remain on standby in other areas affected by flood events.

Cork County Council expects the impact to include fallen trees and flash flooding, particularly given current ground saturation levels, as well as possible structural damage from high winds.

Met Eireann warned: Intense rainfall associated with Storm Francis is expected at times Monday night and Tuesday, leading to accumulations of 40 to 60mm (higher values in mountainous areas).

Status Orange Rainfall warning has been issued for Connacht, Cavan, Monaghan, Donegal, Wexford, Cork, Kerry and Waterford-

Valid: 21:00 Monday 24/08/2020 to 17:00 Tuesday 25/08/2020

Status Yellow Rainfall and Wind warnings have also been issued https://t.co/ozrQHtoOkt pic.twitter.com/4fXLMVZjzB  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) August 24, 2020

The most intense rainfall is expected to ease off in southern counties during Tuesday morning. Some flash flooding likely.

This rainfall will further elevate river levels and may result in river flooding also.

A status yellow rainfall has been issued for Dublin, Carlow, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Longford, Louth, Wicklow, Offaly, Westmeath, Meath, Clare, Limerick and Tipperary.

That warning comes into effect at 9pm this evening and will be in place for 24 hours.

Met Eireann said that there will be rainfall accumulations of 30 to 50mm with surface flooding.

This rainfall will further elevate river levels and may result in river flooding also.

Meanwhile, a status yellow wind warning has been issued for all of Munster, Dublin, Wexford and Wicklow The warning is in place from 6am tomorrow until 7pm.

Met Eireann said: Very windy or stormy conditions are expected on Tuesday as Storm Francis crosses Ireland.

Southwest winds veering westerly, reaching mean speeds of 55 to 65km/h, will bring widespread severe gusts of 90 to 110km/h (and possibly higher in exposed areas).

Some disruption is likely and possibly structural damage.

A man gets hit by a wave crashing on the Front Strand in Youghal, Co Cork last week. Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Met Eireann's Elizabeth Coleman said: The UK Met Office has just named Storm Francis which is going to track across the county later this evening, overnight tonight and through the day tomorrow morning."

She said the most intense of the rain is expected along southern coastal counties and then also for Connacht and Ulster.

Alan O'Reilly from Carlow Weather says the worst of the conditions will be tomorrow afternoon.

The problem really is its going to be during daylight hours and peaking around lunchtime in some areas tomorrow, he said.

So thats going to have some very strong winds with what we saw from Storm Ellen, fallen trees are possible.

Its not quite to the level we saw from Storm Ellen but it is at a level that at this time of the year when trees are in full leaf that you would expect power outages and some disruption.

With the warnings in place, the Road Safety Authority (RSA) is calling on road users to exercise caution.

A statement said: Drivers are being warned that on top of recent heavy rainfall and severe winds this has the potential to make road conditions even more hazardous so please exercise caution when using the roads over the next 24 hours.

Road users in areas affected by the orange warnings for heavy rain are advised to check local traffic and weather conditions before setting out on a journey.

Dursey Cable Car will remain closed tomorrow and will return to operation only when wind speeds permit.

Waves crash over Ireland's Eye at Howth, in the wake of Storm Ellen last Thursday. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

The RSA is calling on motorists to slow down and leave a bigger space between themselves and the vehicle in front in wet weather conditions.

The also warned:

If the road ahead is flooded choose another route, do not attempt to drive through it. Flooded roads that appear shallow could be deeper than you think. They may also have trees or branches that have fallen that may not be visible.

Road users should always follow recommended routes and obey signs closing roads to traffic.

After going through water, drive slowly with your foot on the brake pedal for a short distance - this helps to dry the brakes.

Drive with dipped headlights at all times.

Control of a vehicle may be affected by strong cross winds. High sided vehicles and motorcyclists are particularly vulnerable to strong winds.

Beware of objects being blown onto the road. Expect road conditions to change quickly in high winds so reduce your speed.

Watch out for falling/fallen debris on the road and vehicles veering across the road.

Drivers should allow extra space between themselves and vulnerable road users, such as cyclists and motorcyclists as they may be blown off course by strong winds.

For pedestrians, cyclist and motorcyclists, the RSA is warning:

Visibility and light is reduced in poor weather conditions. Keep safe by making sure you can be seen. Wear bright clothing with reflective armbands or a reflective belt.

Take extra care when crossing the road or cycling in extremely windy conditions as a sudden gust of wind could blow you into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

Walk on a footpath, where possible and not in the street. If there is a footpath and it is safe to use, look out for falling debris from above, especially in urban areas.

Walk on the right-hand side of the road, facing traffic if there are no footpaths.

Cyclist should ensure that they and their bike are visible to other road users by investing in a good set of front and rear lights (white at the front, red at the back) and by wearing clothes that help you be seen on your bike such as bright and light reflective items.

The new storm comes less than a week after Storm Ellen left more than 140,000 homes and businesses without power.

Storm Ellen hit the country on Wednesday night, with gusts of up to 143 kilometres per hour recorded at Roches Point in Cork.

The worst affected counties for outages are Cork, Tipperary, Westmeath and parts of Galway.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has declared on Sunday a state of disaster for 23 counties in Texas as Hurricane Marco approaches.

Abbott has also requested an assistance from the federal government as Hurricane Marco is expected to make a landfall in Louisiana on Monday before moving into East Texas.

The Texas counties under state of disaster are Aransas, Bexar, Brazoria, Calhoun, Cameron, Chambers, Galveston, Hardin, Harris. Jackson, Jasper, Jefferson, Kenedy, Kleberg, Liberty. Matagorda, Newton, Nueces, Orange. Refugio, San Patricio, Victoria, and Willacy.

Weather forecasters are expecting sustained winds of 75 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service.

Aside from Hurricane Marco, Tropical Storm Laura is also seen to advance into central Gulf Coast on late Tuesday.

The National Weather Service said the storm has a possibility of being strong enough to be a hurricane.

"As Hurricane Marco and Tropical Storm Laura approach Texas, the state is taking necessary precautions to protect our communities and keep Texans safe," Abbott was quoted in a report.

Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Department of Emergency Management, said the storm models have a high degree of uncertainty.

However, Kidd said that Texas is fully prepared for both storms.

If the storms are to land as expected, they could mark the second significant disaster during the 2020 hurricane season in Texas.

This followed by Hurricane Hana with more than 15 inches of rain on South Texas in the late July, as the state fights being the coronavirus hotspot.

Abbott said it is important for anybody who could be in the path of these storms to always heed the warning of what could happen in your community.

The governor added that everybody should understand that the storm is moving swiftly and there could be rising water levels quickly.

Hurricane Marco

The National Hurricane Center upgraded Marco into a hurricane in Sunday, with maximum sustained winds of 75 miles per hour.

The weather forecaster center warned that it could bring "life-threatening" storm surge.

Hurricane Marco is seen to make a direct hit on Louisiana on Monday. The hurricane would be hitting New Orleans with hurricane-force winds.

This with several inches of rain through the area and into North Texas.

The storm was located about 395 miles southeast of Lafayette as of Sunday.

The hurricane center said that dry areas near the coast could experience flooding moving inland from the shoreline.

Tropical Storm Laura

Meanwhile, the Tropical Storm Laura is expected to hit Louisiana and Texas coast on Wednesday with a hurricane-like strength.

However, the Tropical Storm's trajectory is still not known. It is likely to hit the Beaumont, Texas area.

At least five people, with a 10-year-old girl, was killed as Tropical Storm Laura hit Haiti this weekend. Two were killed in the Dominican Republic.

Laura was located at the south of eastern tip of Cuba as of 2.pm. on Sunday, with maximum winds of 50 miles per hour.

Cities in South Texas were the first to found out how to deal with a hurricane during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Check these out:

Gov. Abbott Grilled Over $295M Contact Tracing Agreement

Texas Governor Abbott Says No Statewide Shutdown Amid Surge in Coronavirus Cases

US Gulf Coast on Alert as Two Tropical Storms Threaten Historic Blow
Students from across the country have demanded that CBSE compartment exams be cancelled and entrance exams such as UGC-NET, CLAT, NEET and JEE be postponed in the wake of rising COVID-19 cases.

Over 4,200 students participated in a day-long hunger strike demanding the cancellation and postponement of exams. Using the #SATYAGRAHagainstExamInCovid, students took to Twitter to urge the government to heed to their demands.

Manoj S, a JEE aspirant from Karnataka, said, We have to report to the JEE exam centre at 7 am. My centre is almost 150 kilometres away and there are no train or bus services available currently. Many of my friends have said that their centres are 200 to 250 kilometres away. How are we supposed to travel? How will we write exams wearing masks for seven to eight hours? He urged the government to postpone the exams till normalcy is restored.

Anisha, hailing from Odisha, said with all the hotels and guest houses closed, where would they stay in case they have to travel for exams.

I am from Balasore and my NEET exam centre is in Bhubaneswar. I will have to travel for five hours to take my exam. There are no hotels or guesthouses that are open. Where will we stay? she said.

Siddh Dutt, who will be appearing for CBSE compartment exam, said, I am an asthma patient. I am scared of what may happen to me if I catch COVID-19. Madhurima, who said she has to take four different entrance exams, wants authorities to listen to her appeal -- Please produce a vaccine so that we can take exams. I am a JEE, IISER, DUET aspirant and also have to take another entrance exam, she said.

Md Danish Khan from Bhagalpur in Bihar said he has been allotted an exam centre in Patna, which is a COVID-19 hotspot.

I do not want to risk the lives of my relatives by staying at their place when I go to take the exam. I also stay in a joint family and if I contract the virus, it will create a chain of infection, he said.

A Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) aspirant from Kolkata, who requested anonymity, said she fears for her parents safety during this time.

My father is a diabetic and my mother just had an operation for a tumour. Even if they go to drop me to the exam centre using public transport, I will be putting them at risk. The government is not ready to listen to us.

We will have to sit and write the exams wearing masks, gloves and headgear under hot weather conditions, she said.

Other students also shared similar woes and urged the government to postpone entrance exams and declare the academic year as a zero year.

The Left-backed All India Students Association lent solidarity to the demands of the students.

Top Congress leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, on Sunday, requested the government to defer the all-India medical and engineering entrance examinations taking into consideration the concerns raised by a section of students and parents amid the coronavirus pandemic.

A day ago, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia had appealed to the central government to cancel medical and engineering entrance exams JEE and NEET in view of the COVID-19 situation.

He also an alternative admission methodology should be used this year and the exams should not be conducted.

On Friday, Education Ministry officials had said the Joint Entrance Examination (Main) and the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET-UG) will be conducted in September as scheduled.

Universities and schools across the country have been closed since March 16 when the Centre announced a countrywide classroom shutdown as part of measures to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. A nationwide lockdown was announced on March 24, which came into effect the next day and threw economic activities out of gear.

Indias COVID-19 tally sprinted past the 30-lakh mark on Sunday, just 16 days after it crossed 20 lakh, while 22,80,566 people have recuperated in the country so far pushing the recovery rate to 74.90 per cent, according to the Union Health Ministry data.
An Armenian army officer was taken prisoner by Azerbaijani forces over the weekend in disputed circumstances.

Armenias Defense Ministry said the junior officer, Gurgen Alaverdian, lost his way due to extremely unfavorable weather conditions as he was about to inspect an Armenian frontline position on Saturday evening. It did not specify whether the position is located on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border or the line of contact around Karabakh.

The Azerbaijani military claimed, meanwhile, that its troops deployed in the Goranboy district just north of Karabakh captured Alaverdian while fighting back an Armenian commando attack early on Sunday.

Shushan Stepanian, the spokeswoman for the Defense Ministry in Yerevan, dismissed the claim as disinformation.

There was no [Armenian] sabotage attack, said Stepanian. They are just trying to portray the officer who lost his way as a saboteur.

As of Monday afternoon it was not clear whether the Armenian government has asked representatives the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit Alaverdian in Azerbaijani custody or ascertain his whereabouts. The ICRC has offices in Baku and Yerevan.
WASHINGTON -- Voters who express prejudice against minorities and women are still more likely to support candidates who most closely align with their ideologies, regardless of the race or sex of such candidates, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"There is some evidence that has already cast doubt on the conventional view that racial and gender prejudice hurts politicians who are Black and female," said author Hui Bai, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. "This research shows that how citizens' prejudice plays a role in their political preferences is more nuanced than many people think. Overall, the perceived ideology of the candidate determines whether the candidate will be popular among racists and sexists. Whether the candidate is Black or white, a man or a woman, does not seem to matter."

The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Bai analyzed data from six surveys, three of which were nationally representative, comprising more than 44,800 individuals. Some of the surveys were conducted by independent third parties, and others were partially designed and/or conducted by Bai himself. Each survey included a series of questions designed to measure racism and sexism. For example, the surveys asked participants to rate how unintelligent they think Black people are and how favorably they feel about Black people as ways of measuring racism. To measure sexism, the surveys asked questions such as whether participants think women's place should be in the home as opposed to having a role in society equal to men.

The surveys also asked participants to rate their support of politicians. Some surveys asked about real-life politicians: Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina. Other surveys asked participants to rate their support for hypothetical candidates. Bai also looked at national survey data collected during election cycles from 1972 to 2016 that measured support for congressional and presidential candidates and included items that measured racism and sexism.

Across all the surveys, participants who scored high in prejudice were significantly more likely to support both real and hypothetical conservative candidates, which Bai did not find surprising. What was interesting was that the candidates' race and gender did not seem to matter at all. There was no significant change in support from prejudiced participants when the conservative candidate was Black or a woman compared with when the conservative candidate was white or a man.

"When it comes to supporting a political candidate, the results suggest that ideology is the primary factor that determines whether citizens' prejudice benefits or undermines their support for the politicians, not the politicians' demographic background," said Bai.

"The great insight of this research is that it gets us past the idea that the chief political consequences of racism and sexism are merely to make voters more hostile to candidates of color and to candidates who are women," said Christopher Federico, PhD, Bai's doctoral adviser at UMN. "Rather, the results pretty consistently indicate that racist and sexist attitudes are associated with support for candidates who are less sympathetic to egalitarian goals or who promise to preserve a status quo that includes racial and gender inequality."

However, one type of demographic that still played a role was religious identity. In the last survey, Bai changed the items to measure prejudice against Muslims and then asked participants to rate their support for hypothetical candidates who were either liberal or conservative, and either Muslim or Christian. He found that while, once again, participants with greater prejudice were more likely to support the conservative candidate, there was a significant decrease in support for the Muslim candidates compared with the Christian candidates. This may be because religious identity, unlike race or sex, is an ideology itself, according to Bai.

###

Article: "When Racism and Sexism Benefit Black and Female Politicians: Politicians' Ideology Moderates Prejudice's Effect More Than Politicians' Demographic Background," by Hui Bai, BA, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published online August 24, 2020. Full text of the article can be found online at http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-psp0000314.pdf.

Contact: Hui Bai may be contacted via email at baixx062@umn.edu.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:05:53|Editor: huaxia

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ADDIS ABABA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Africa surged to 1,187,937 as the death toll from the pandemic rose to 27,779, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said on Monday.

The number of people who recovered from their COVID-19 infections rose to 906,691 as of Monday, said Africa CDC, a specialized healthcare agency of the African Union (AU) Commission, in its latest situation update.

South Africa currently has the most COVID-19 cases, which hit 609,773. The country also has the highest number of deaths related to COVID-19, at 13,059, according to figures from the Africa CDC.

Egypt came next with 97,340 confirmed cases and 5,262 deaths, followed by Nigeria with 52,227 cases and 1,002 deaths, Africa CDC said.

The southern Africa region is the most affected area in terms of confirmed cases, followed by northern Africa and western Africa regions, it was noted.

According to the Africa CDC, Ethiopia is also one of the African countries that have reported a growing number of positive COVID-19 cases during the past few weeks.

The East African country had until Monday morning reported 40,671 total confirmed COVID-19 cases as the death toll from the pandemic rose to 678. Some 14,995 patients who tested positive for COVID-19 have recovered so far, according to the Ethiopian Ministry of Health.

On Saturday, the continental disease control and prevention agency had urged the continent to avoid coronavirus "prevention fatigue."

The urgent call was made by John Nkengasong, Director of the Africa CDC, who noted "a slight decrease" in COVID-19 infection rates on the continent, and said this "gives some signs of hope that we are beginning to bend the curve slowly," an AU statement issued on Saturday quoted Nkengasong as saying.

The Africa CDC Director, however, cautioned the continent "to maintain and increase the use of masks, social distancing, and to ramp up testing, even as countries begin to ease lockdown measures."

"We do not want the population to show prevention fatigue," Nkengasong said, adding that "we are dealing with a delicate virus that can easily flare up again very quickly, as has been witnessed in other parts of the world."

In the past week, Africa reported an average of 10,344 new cases per day, compared to 11,494 the week before and 14,447 the previous week, according to figures from the Africa CDC.

The Africa CDC also announced that Africa is working towards "trusted testing" for COVID-19 to protect travel and borders. This will entail mutual recognition of certified COVID-19 testing among all member states, to allow for smooth movement across the continent.

Nkengasong said the Partnership for Increased COVID19 Testing (PACT) "will be used to enhance surveillance in different economic sectors."

The continental PACT initiative, which was rolled out in June when the continent had conducted under 400,000 tests, had a target of 10 million tests across the continent.

A few months later, 10,256,000 tests have been conducted, the majority of them in ten countries that are South Africa, Morocco, Ethiopia, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, Uganda and Mauritius.

The Africa CDC also disclosed a new target of 20 million tests has now been set for the period from now until the beginning of November, to capitalize on the gains recorded so far. Enditem
In a shocking revelation of the climate crisis, a group of British scientists have found that staggering 28 trillion tonnes of ice has melted from the planet since 1994. In a review paper published in the journal Cryosphere Discussions, scientists from Leeds and Edinburgh universities and University College London studied the satellite surveys of glaciers, mountains, and ice sheets between the years 1994 and 2017 to document the impact of global warming.

Based on the observations, the UK scientists made the revelation that by the end of the century, the drastic melting of ice sheets and glaciers can raise the sea levels to possibly reach 3 feet. While talking to the Guardian, the director of Leeds Universitys Center for Polar Observation and Modelling Professor Andy Shepherd explained that every centimetre of sea-level rise implies displacement of nearly one million people from their homelands.

In the whopping loss of 28 trillion, as per the research, 7.6 trillion tonnes from the Arctic Sea, 6.5 trillion tonnes from Antarctic ice shelves, 6.2 trillion tonnes of mountain glaciers, 3.8 trillion tonnes of Greenland ice sheet, 2.5 trillion tonnes of Antarctic ice sheet and 0.9 trillion tonnes of mountain glaciers have reduced in their masses.

It also added, Just over half (60 %) of the ice loss was from the northern hemisphere, and the remainder (40 %) was from the southern hemisphere. The rate of ice loss has risen by 57 % since the 1990s  from 0.8 to 1.2 trillion tonnes per year.

Read - To Reduce Global Warming, Climate-friendly Cooling Must Be Made Essential Post Pandemic

Read - NCPOR Study Notes Dramatic Decline In Arctic Sea Ice As Global Warming Takes Toll

Green ice sheet melted at record rate in 2019

Meanwhile, in a separate analysis about global warming, the scientists found out that the loss of Greenland ice sheet, the largest contributor to the rise in sea level, occurred at a record rate in 2019, surpassing the previous values by 15 per cent. In a study published in the journal Nature states that the scale at which glaciers are melting is unprecedented as per records dating as back as 1948. The immediate cause of such huge loss, explained by the researchers, is the high-pressure systems that became blocked over Greenland last summer.

Not only is the Greenland ice sheet melting, but its melting at a faster and faster pace, said study lead author Ingo Sasgen, a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

Read - Greenland's Ice Sheet Would Continue To Melt Even If Global Warming Stops: Research

Read - Newsom Talks Climate Change At DNC As Fires Rage
In the two years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, public support for school spending surged and K-12 leaders exploited the moment: Districts placed levy increases on the ballot and teachers demanded pay raises.

That support now is starting to dip, according to a recently released survey by the journal Education Next. Thats bad news for districts that will need local property owners to keep cash flowing as state revenue crashes.

Less than half of the respondents this year felt like school spending should increase, though thats still a record high, according to the survey .

During the last recession, public support had dipped more than 20 percentage points to below 50 percent as unmployment increased and Republicans and Democrats alike lashed out at politicians for high tax rates.

But over the years, it bounced back as teachers began to complain publicly about stagnant pay and several large urban districts fell into fiscal distress as state revenue failed to keep pace with increased costs.

The pandemic has sent the unemployment rate skyrocketing again, and many families are on the brink of being evicted from their homes as congressional relief expires.

Some community activists are calling for districts such as Cleveland and Denver to take property tax increase measures off this falls ballot, considering the state of the economy. Property taxes are already disproportionately higher in low-income, majority Black and Latino communities, though their local districts are the ones that will lose the most amount of state aid in the coming years as a result of recession-driven cutbacks.

Despite the pandemic, Milwaukee earlier this year managed to get a historic property tax increase passed amid surging support for public schools.

Education Nexts poll, which asks the public several questions about their perceptions of public schools, found that Democratic, Black, and Latino respondents are more likely to back a boost in funding than are Republican and white respondents.

Read about the polls other findings here .

Follow us on Twitter @PoliticsK12 . And follow the Politics K-12 reporters @EvieBlad @Daarel and @AndrewUjifusa .
Endeavor Schools is offering on-campus options for elementary students enrolled in remote learning programs. The combination of an on-campus experience and extracurricular activities make the Endeavor Schools Learning Labs a fantastic alternative for displaced students this fall.

With the uncertainty surrounding school openings this fall, families need stability and safety so their children can continue their education. For this reason, Endeavor Schools, a top education management and private school company, has created its new Learning Labs Program, which gives elementary students enrolled in remote learning programs an on-campus experience.

Through the Learning Labs Program, elementary students can focus on their work, socialize with peers, and receive teacher assistance throughout the day. They also enjoy the other benefits of being at school, including safe playgrounds for outdoor exercise, healthy food options for lunch, and much more. To keep students safe, Endeavor Schools has enacted a strict safety plan that was developed in coordination with the CDC and Johns Hopkins University.

These qualities are vital components of a well-rounded education, especially for young children. Endeavor Schools designed its Learning Labs to ensure remote learning students have all the educational opportunities they would have during in-person schooling.

We want to ensure that children have an opportunity to enjoy a positive educational experience this fall, said Endeavor Schools CEO, Ricardo Campo. Our Learning Labs Program emphasizes our longstanding commitment to high-quality education while helping families restore normalcy to their lives.

Experienced, Talented Educators

With more than 50 schools across the country and deep experience in teaching elementary school-age students, Endeavors Learning Labs provide a high-quality education program led by a talented team of educators, support staff and seasoned school leaders.

In addition to its talented instructors, high-quality learning materials, and beautiful campuses with a wide array of amenities, Endeavor Schools is also offering STEAM projects and other enrichment opportunities to students enrolled in its Learning Labs.

The combination of an on-campus experience and extracurricular activities make the Endeavor Schools Learning Labs a fantastic alternative for displaced students this fall.

Proven Safety Protocols

The Endeavor Schools Learning Labs will emphasize the school experience while maintaining maximum safety standards. The companys safety plan has been implemented into each one of the companys schools across the country. By exceeding safety standards recommended by federal and state governments, Endeavor Schools has the proven ability to protect its students and staff members.

Staff members have been thoroughly trained in the new safety procedures and have been practicing them for several months. Endeavor Schools never closed during the pandemic so that it could provide childcare and education to children of essential workers. The experience gained over the past several months has enabled the staff to gain valuable experience in safety measures, such as maintaining social distance in the classroom and sanitation practices necessary to reduce risk of viral transmission. The Endeavor Schools teaching staff has expertly adapted to the stringent but necessary conditions that are required in schools today.

We realized early on that essential workers would be counting on us to help them with their childcare needs under new safety guidelines and our teachers stepped up to the task, said Danielle Millman, the Chief Operations Officer at Endeavor Schools. That experience has given our staff the ability to provide education to more students under the current circumstances and we are grateful for the opportunity to continue serving our communities.

The Endeavor Schools Learning Labs Program began operations earlier this month at several of the companys schools in Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Minnesota, and Texas. In September, the program will be offered at schools in Nevada, Oregon, and California, and potentially other markets.

For more information on this program, please visit: https://www.endeavorschools.com/learning-lab-programs/

About Endeavor Schools

Endeavor Schools is a leading education management company with a family of unique, well-established private schools that serve as pillars to their respective communities in a growing number of markets across the US. Each of the companys schools subscribe to proven, research-based curricula that is delivered by seasoned educators and are encouraged to embrace their own uniqueness and traditions. Endeavor Schools supports academic excellence by providing robust tools and resources to help each school thrive.

Founded in 2012, Endeavor Schools is headquartered in Miami, Florida. For more information, visit http://www.endeavorschools.com and follow the company on LinkedIn.
Ive never been much for partisan politics. Ive supported Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Hell, Ive actually been a Democrat, Republican, and independent.

To me, elections are about people. And the two people running for the US president couldnt be more different.

One believes in facts. One does not.

One listens to experts. The other thinks he knows everything.

One looks forward, and sees strength in Americas diversity. The other looks backward, and sees immigrants as enemies and white supremacists as allies.

Heres another difference: One has proven he knows how to handle a crisis by helping to lead the economic turnaround after the 2008 recession. The other has not only failed to lead, he has made the current crisis much worse.

When confronted with the biggest calamity any president has faced in the modern era, Donald Trump spent the year downplaying the threat, ignoring science, and recommending quack cures  which let Covid-19 spread much faster than it should have, leaving hundreds of thousands needlessly sick or dead.

He has failed the American people catastrophically.

Four years ago, I came before this very convention and said New Yorkers know a con when we see one.

But now, Im not asking you to vote against Trump because hes a bad guy. Im urging you to vote against him because hes done a bad job.

Today, US unemployment is at historic highs and small businesses are struggling just to survive. It didnt have to be this way.

Before I ran for mayor, I spent 20 years running a business I started from scratch. So I want to ask small business owners and their employees one question  and its a question for everyone.

Would you rehire  or work for  someone who ran your business into the ground? And who always does whats best for himself or herself  even when it hurts the company? And whose reckless decisions put you in danger? And who spends more time tweeting than working?

Former Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg

If the answer is no: Why the hell would we ever rehire Donald Trump for another four years?

Trump says we should vote for him because hes a great businessman. Really?

He drove his companies into bankruptcy six times, always leaving behind customers and contractors who were cheated and swindled and stopped doing business with him.

Well, this time, all of us are paying the price. And we cant let him get away with it again.

Donald says we should vote for him because the economy was great before the virus. Huh?

Joe Biden and Barack Obama created more jobs over their last three years than the Trump administration did over its first three, and economic growth was higher under Biden and Obama than under Trump. In fact, while Biden helped save 1m auto industry jobs, Trump has lost 250,000 manufacturing jobs.

So when Trump says he wants to make America great again, hes making a pretty good case for Joe Biden.

Look  our goal shouldnt be to bring back the pre-pandemic economy. It should be  as Joe says  to build it back better.

Joes economic plan will create clean energy jobs that help fight another crisis that Trump is ignoring: climate change.

And Joe will rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges  something Trump has incessantly talked about doing. But in the last three and half years, he hasnt done anything. What a joke.

And let me tell you a little secret: Donald Trumps economic plan was to give a huge tax cut to guys like me who didnt need it  and then lie about it to everyone else.

Well, Joe will roll back that tax cut I got so we can fund things our whole country needs  like training for adults who have lost jobs, and making college more affordable, and investing in American research and development so that the products of tomorrow are made here today, by American workers.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden

You know, growing up, I was taught to believe that America is the greatest country in the world  not because we won the Second World War, but because of why we fought it: for freedom, democracy, and equality.

My favourite childhood book was Johnny Tremain, about a Boston boy who joins the Sons of Liberty at the dawn of the American Revolution.

At the end of the book, Johnny stands on Lexington Commons and sees a nation that is green with spring, dreaming of the future. Thats the America I know and love.

Thats the America we are in danger of losing under this president.

So lets put an end to this whole sorry chapter in American history  and elect leaders who will bring integrity, stability, sanity, and competence back to the White House.

Joe and Kamala: Go get em. For all of us.

Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, and served as mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013.
Nokia is expected to launch three feature phones this year that come with 4G support. One of them is even going to come with a dedicated Google Assistant button.

HMD Global has had to push back several launches due to the global pandemic but now the company is poised to unveil the new Nokia-branded smartphones and feature phones.

Nokia recently tweeted a teaser for the launch of its new smartphones in the India market and besides these, the company is going to make an addition to its basic phones category with a new feature phone that will feature 4G connectivity.

According to GizChina, Nokia India is going to reveal new devices on August 25, and going by all reports and leaks, the Nokia C3 is going to make its debut here along with a new feature phone. While Nokia is expected to launch a few more feature phones this year, for now heres a look at the new 4G feature phone thanks to the renders and details that have surfaced online.

One of the leaked devices is a new variant of the Nokia 215. This might be launched as the Nokia 215 (2020) or Nokia 215 4G and it might be the most affordable 4G phone in Nokias portfolio so far. This feature phone is expected to launch without a camera.

The next feature phone in line is the Nokia 225, as per the renders. The Nokia 225 will come with 4G LTE and is going to support apps like YouTube and Facebook.

According to reports from NokiaMob, the Nokia 225 has received FCC approval with model numbers TA-1316 and TA-1282. The date on the display suggests that the feature phones were scheduled to launch on August 3 but HMD Global has to postpone the launch thanks to the pandemic.

The third feature phone does not have a name yet but it carries the Nokia Leo Basic codename. This feature phone is expected to come with WhatsApp and Facebook support. And this is the phone thats supposed to come with a dedicated Google Assistant button. All the three feature phones Nokia has lined up are going to come with KaiOS.

Details about pricing and exact launch are still not available, so well have to wait and watch.
A couple wearing face masks to help protect against the spread of the coronavirus walks along on a nearly empty shopping street in Seoul, Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020. AP



Starting Monday, people in Seoul will be required to wear masks while in public.



Seo Jeong-hyup, acting mayor of Seoul, made the announcement at a press briefing on Sunday, hours after the country reported 397 new coronavirus cases.



South Korea is scrambling to contain the nationwide spread of COVID-19. There have been over 2,600 cases in the past 10 days, following a stretch in which the daily cases stayed in the double digits.



Under Seoul's mandate, residents must wear masks and face coverings at all times in public, except when they're eating or drinking.






Leaked images purporting to show Nvidias upcoming top-end gaming graphics card have surfaced online.

Twitter user @GarnetSunset, who describes himself as a security researcher and software engineer, tweeted two photos of a graphics card that will purportedly be named the GeForce RTX 3090.

The card is placed next to Nvidias current-generation GeForce RTX 2080 in the images for comparison.

Judging by these images, the RTX 3090 is significantly longer and wider than Nvidias current top-end gaming card.

According to the user, it will occupy three PCIe slots, as opposed to the two taken up by the GeForce RTX 2080.

Prices

GarnetSunset initially noted that the price of the card will be $2,000 (R34,200), but later corrected this to $1,400 (R23,980).

The following prices were also listed for the other upcoming Ampere-based graphics cards:

RTX 3060  $400 (R6,850)

 $400 (R6,850) RTX 3070  $600 (R10,270)

 $600 (R10,270) RTX 3080  $800 (R13,700)

Although these appear to align with the pricing of their predecessors, it should be noted that none of these claims has officially been confirmed by Nvidia.

Rumoured specs

Multiple reports have speculated around the possible specifications of the GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards.

Sources who spoke to German news publication Igors Lab previously detailed the memory, interface, TDP, and output specifications of the RTX 3090, 3080, and 3070 GPUs.

According to this information, the RTX 3090 will come with 24GB of GDDR6X memory, a 384-bit interface, and a TDP of 350W.

No detail was available on clock speeds, however.

The table below shows the specifications of the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090 as reported by Igors Lab.

Graphics card Memory Memory interface TDP Outputs GeForce RTX 3090 (Ti/Super) 24GB GDDR6X 384-bit 350W 3 x DisplayPort, 1 X HDMI, 1 x NVLink GeForce RTX 3080 (Ti/Super) 11GB GDDR6X 352-bit 320W 3 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI GeForce RTX 3070 10GB GDDR6X 320-bit 320W 3 x DisplayPort, 1 x HDMI

Release schedule

Nvidia is set to unveil its next-generation of graphics cards on 1 September.

The naming of the cards is not yet confirmed, as the company has previously altered its naming scheme unexpectedly.

In 2014, for example, it jumped the GTX 800 series completely and opted instead for the GTX 900 moniker to succeed its GTX 700 series.

Below are the images of the GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 2080 side-by-side as posted by GarnetSunset.

GeForce RTX 3090 leaked images
English Icelandic

The interim consolidated financial statements of Orkuveita Reykjavikur (OR; Reykjavik Energy) for the first six months of 2020 show stability in operational results and that the group is well positioned to increase investments to ease the downturn in the Icelandic economy. EBIT amounted to ISK 8.1 billion compared to ISK 8.2 billion for the same period 2019 and EBITDA increased year-on-year; from ISK 13.9 billion in Q2 2019 to ISK 14.4 billion in Q2 2020. The OR Groups interim consolidated financial statements were approved today by the Board of Directors. Besides the parent company, the group comprises the wholly owned subsidiaries Veitur Utilities, ON Power, Reykjavik Fibre Network, and Carbfix.



Bjarni Bjarnason, ORs CEO, says the Groups solid finances and stability in operations allow it to increase investments and thereby counter the adverse economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Reykjavik Energys liquidity position has never been stronger.

Decreased impact of calculated metrics

Along with the stability in operational results, the impact of calculated metrics on bottom-line results have decreased since the presentation of the Companys Q1 results. The financial statements are in accordance with IAS 34 on interim financial statements and it follows that changes in expected income from long-term contracts are included in the income statement. The reduction in aluminum prices from the beginning of the year, which affects income from electricity sales, is then calculated many years in advance but is entered in each financial statement. The effect of this on the Groups total performance in the first three months of this year was very large, or just over ISK 10 billion. This decreased by ISK 1.9 billion in the second quarter. These metrics do not affect the company's operating profit, cash position or its ability to invest, but do affect the calculated overall results of the interim financial statements. It is now negative by ISK 0.9 billion, while the corresponding figure was positive by ISK 3.3 billion after the first half of 2019.

Bjarni Bjarnason, CEO:

Now that there is a crisis in society due to the virus, we see how important it is to have managed to turn Reykjavik Energys finances for the better following the economic crash of 2008. Since the economic downturn due to Covid 19 began late last winter, the companies in the group have had the ability to show social responsibility, for example by increasing investments and increasing the number of summer employees.

Reykjavik Energys operating results after the first half of this peculiar year show that we have the strength to continue to contribute to Icelands economy.

Like sometimes before, we see in the Groups financial statements a significant fluctuation due to calculated figures that neither affect EBIT nor cash flow. They are negative this time around, but it does not affect Reykjavik Energy's ability to be among those who will pull the wagon on our way out of the economic downturn in society. However, risk aversion, inherent in the Reykjavik Energy Groups financial structure, have mitigating effects on the income statement with strengthening of the financial position and increased equity ratio.

The pandemic has, of course, had a considerable effect on the operations of OR and its subsidiaries, just like the rest of the world. We were well prepared for it with contingency plans and the responsibility that employees have shown in communicating with customers and among themselves has prevented the epidemic from affecting the Groups services. We have made several changes in our day-to-day behavior, many of which have proven beneficial and will be permanently established when we have averted the threat from Covid-19.

Operating summary and key financial ratios

2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Amounts are in ISK millions at each years price level 1.1.-30.6. 1.1.-30.6. 1.1.-30.6. 1.1.-30.6. 1.1.-30.6. Revenues 20,955 21,612 23,167 23,502 24,272 Expenses (8,215) (8,063) (8,626) (9,571) (9,879) thereof energy purchase and transmission (3,133) (2,898) (3,112) (2,870) (2,824) EBITDA 12,741 13,549 14,541 13,931 14,393 Depreciation (5,303) (4,706) (4,616) (5,728) (6,284) EBIT 7,438 8,842 9,926 8,203 8,109 Result of the period 5,029 7,311 4,200 3,349 (900) Cash flow statement: Received interest income 57 124 99 207 174 Paid interest expense (1,890) (2,013) (2,267) (2,726) (2,655) Net cash from operating activities 11,774 12,652 10,988 13,330 12,520 Working capital from operation 10,617 11,707 12,048 10,027 11,164 Liquid funds 30.6.2016 30.6.2017 30.6.2018 30.6.2019 30.6.2020 Deposits and marketable securities 1,441 4,127 6,259 7,112 13,091 Cash and cash equivalents 7,049 14,151 10,917 14,912 15,097 Liquid funds total 8,490 18,278 17,176 22,024 28,187 Key financial ratios 30.6.2016 30.6.2017 30.6.2018 30.6.2019 30.6.2020 Equity ratio 38.3% 42.6% 47.3% 47.4% 47.2% Current ratio 0.9 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.0 Net cash from operating activities / Net debt 6.0 4.7 5.7 5.0 5.6 Interest coverage 5.6 5.7 4.6 4.6 4.3 ROCE 5.1% 6.4% 6.6% 4.8% 4.2%

Key financial figures

More key financial figures for the Reykjavik Energy group can be found on our website along with financial targets.

The url is https://www.or.is/en/finance/key-financial-figures/

Contact:

Ingvar Stefansson

CFO

516 6100

Attachment
In 2020, the world has been hit by an unprecedented public health crisis, with the effects of Covid-19 being felt across every aspect of peoples lives. This year also marks the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Charter of the United Nations (UN). Now more than ever, the global community must make a concerted effort to forge the better and more sustainable future called for by UN and its member-states. Taiwan is ready, willing and able to be a part of these efforts.

With less than 500 confirmed cases and seven deaths, Taiwan has defied predictions and successfully contained the pandemic. This has all come in no small part due to Taiwans quick response measures, including the establishment of a Central Epidemic Command Centre, the implementation of stringent border controls and quarantine procedures, and transparent information-sharing. And after making sure we had enough supplies to look after our people, we started providing medical equipment and supplies to other countries in serious need.

By the end of June, Taiwan had donated 51 million surgical masks, 1.16 million N95 masks, 600,000 isolation gowns, 35,000 forehead thermometers, and other medical material to more than 80 countries, including India, the United States (US), Taiwans diplomatic allies, and various European nations. We have also joined forces with like-minded democracies to explore the development of rapid test kits, medicines, and vaccines. Working together for the greater good is how the world will defeat Covid-19.

In the Declaration on the Commemoration of the 75th anniversary of UN, governments and heads of States acknowledged that only by working together in solidarity can we end the pandemic and effectively tackle its consequences. They thus pledged to make UN more inclusive and to leave no one behind as the world looks to recover from the pandemic.

Similarly, in July, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that networked, inclusive, and effective multilateralism would aid global efforts to promote recovery and the continued implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We could not agree more. However, this vision seems lacking when Taiwan  one of the worlds model democracies and a success story in containing the current pandemic  continues to be barred from taking part in and exchanging experiences and information with UN system. Not having Taiwans input in UN is a loss to the global community, and will hamper member-states efforts to regain normalcy and implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in full and on time.

Even as the pandemic has made the international community aware of Taiwans unjust and discriminatory exclusion from the World Health Organization and the UN system, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) continues to press UN to use an erroneous interpretation of the 1971 UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 (XXVI) as the legal basis for blocking Taiwan.

The fact is that this resolution does not address the issue of Taiwans representation in UN, nor does it state that Taiwan is part of PRC. In fact, Taiwan is not, nor has it ever been, a part of the PRC. Our president and legislature are directly elected by the people of Taiwan. Moreover, border controls instituted during the pandemic offer further evidence to counter PRCs false claims. UN must recognise that only Taiwans democratically-elected government can represent its 23.5 million people; PRC has no right to speak on Taiwans behalf.

Unfortunately, the 23.5 million people of Taiwan are denied any access to UN premises. Taiwanese journalists and media outlets are also denied accreditation to cover UN meetings. This discriminatory policy stems from the wrongful claims of and pressure from an authoritarian state, and contravenes the principle of universality and equality upon which UN was founded.

The UN Charter begins with We the peoples of the United Nations determined . . . to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights . . . [and] the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small. The ideal of upholding human rights and fundamental freedoms for all laid out in this text must not remain empty words. As it looks ahead to the next 75 years, it is never too late for the UN to welcome Taiwans participation.

Dr Jaushieh Joseph Wu is Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan)

The views expressed are personal
NOAA, HO / NYT

As trajectories released Sunday afternoon showed the paths of both Hurricane Marco and Tropical Storm Laura shift west toward Southeast Texas, multiple schools districts decided to be proactive and cancel classes for the week.

Little Cypress-Mauriceville, West Orange-Cove Consolidated, Bridge City, Orangefield and Port-Neches Groves decided to cancel classes out of an abundance of caution. Orange County, which was home to the majority of the school districts that decided to cancel Sunday, began offering free sandbags Saturday.
Thirty residents and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Floyd E. Tut Fann State Veterans Home in Huntsville since July 24, state veterans officials said today. As of Sunday, 26 active cases remain, officials said. There have been no fatalities.

The state is unsure what caused the outbreak, spokeswoman Alicia Anger said today. As with most cases of COVID, you dont know where it comes from, Anger said. The most recent cases were reported Friday, Anger said. They were found by the homes practice of rolling testing.

The veterans home does not permit visitors like all Alabama homes for senior citizens. Anger said residents have limited exposure to common areas and are required to spend most of their time in their rooms. Residents who test positive are moved to a separate wing with designated staff, she said.

Each resident with COVID has a staff member assigned to him or her. We are doing everything we can to make all staff and residents are taken care of, Anger said.

The facility in north Huntsville has room for 150 residents. It offers skilled nursing care, a memory wing and other services. Residents must be honorably discharged from active duty service in the armed forces to secure a room.

Alabama has 231 nursing homes and 216 of them have reported some exposure to the coronavirus, an Alabama Nursing Home Association spokesman said today. Some had cases earlier in the pandemic and some later, a spokesman said. Research indicates cases in nursing homes track cases in the communities where they are located, he said. More cases in the community means more cases in the nursing homes, and vice versa.
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / Roberts & Ryan Investments Inc., one of America's first Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned (SDVOB) FINRA registered broker-dealers, is proud to announce their participation as co-manager in the record-breaking $4 billion special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) offering from Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Tontine Holdings.

For this offering, Mr. Ackman changed the underwriting model by expanding the roles of minority-owned firms and increasing their underwriting fee participation. The lead underwriting banks, Mr. Ackman, and the minority-owned firms worked side by side, leveraging each other's relationships with Ackman's investing acumen, to maximize the coverage of the targeted accounts. The minority-owned firms got a seat at the table and an opportunity to bring value while being mentored by one of the industry's great deal makers and some of the most prestigious bulge bracket underwriters. The minority-owned firms provided Pershing Square with access to their unique relationships, including niche international money managers and family offices.

Minority-owned firms on Wall Street have long participated in the Debt and Equity Capital Markets for new issues and secondaries as co-managers and selling group members. Their participation comes at the direction of the underwriting banks, and the issuing companies themselves, to further their ESG and diversity initiatives.

Traditionally, the economics for minority-owned firms has been 3% of the total fees generated. Often, multiple minority firms are included in each deal, diluting the economic benefit to each firm. With Pershing Square, Mr. Ackman is looking to set an example for companies in their future issuance of securities by increasing the total minority participation to 20% of the economics.

"This year, through our participation in the Mentor-Protege program and with the support of our mentor Citigroup (CITI), other bulge bracket firms, and corporate issuers, Roberts & Ryan has been growing. We have been a co-manager or selling group member in multiple equity and debt transactions for a variety of companies including CITI, Zoom Info, Warner Music Group, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Becton Dickinson. Roberts & Ryan's participation allows us to further our social mission to donate a percentage of our revenue to nonprofit groups that directly assist veterans in the areas of wellness, mental health, and career transition. As a direct result of Bill Ackman's record-breaking SPAC, R&R can continue to do well by doing good, donating $100,000 each to both Boulder Crest & Year Up," says Brian Rathjen, President of Roberts & Ryan.

Story continues

"We are grateful and honored to partner with Roberts & Ryan, a firm dedicated to service and upholding America's ideals," said John Galante, Managing Director at Year Up, one of the foundations supported by Roberts & Ryan. "Their support will help us continue to create economic opportunity for young adults across the U.S. and reflects Roberts & Ryan's commitment to a diverse, inclusive society."

Mr. Ackman's vision of increasing the economic and functional participation of minority-owned firms will cement their long-term viability in the industry. It will enable minority firms to endure turbulent market conditions if taken up by other issuers.

About Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, Ltd.

Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, Ltd. ("PSTH"), a Delaware corporation, is a newly organized blank check company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with a private company. PSTH's sponsor is 100% owned by the Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P. ("PSCM") funds.

PSTH believes that its unique structure and willingness to acquire a minority interest in a company will help facilitate the completion of a transaction on attractive terms.

About Roberts and Ryan Investments, Inc.

Roberts & Ryan Investments, Inc. is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned (SDVO) broker-dealer with execution capabilities in the capital markets, equities and fixed-income trading. The firm was founded in 1987 by a United States Marine Corps Vietnam combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient.

Roberts & Ryan engages in underwriting and trading of corporate municipal and agency mortgage debt as well as, equity agency trade execution, stock buybacks, and equity underwriting.

The majority of the firm's employees are veterans. The firm is active in donating to charitable foundations that make significant positive impacts in the lives of veterans and their families. Roberts & Ryan will directly support veteran-focused charitable organizations that are best positioned to aid the veteran community.

For more information, contact:

Roberts & Ryan Investments Inc.

Jennifer McDonough, 646-542-0745

Director of Administration

jmcdonough@roberts-ryan.com

Related Images

SOURCE: Roberts & Ryan Investments Inc.





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/603009/Roberts-Ryan-Selected-as-Co-Manager-in-Pershing-Square-Tontine-Holdings-PSTYHU-IPO




Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - August 24, 2020) - Latin American Minerals Inc. (TSXV: LAT) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has executed a Letter of Intent ("LOI") to purchase 100% of the Sail Pond silver-copper-lead-zinc project (the "Project" or "Sail Pond Property") on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland from Altius Resources Inc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Altius Minerals Corp. (TSX: ALS, "Altius").

In consideration for the purchase of the Project, on signing of a Definitive Agreement (the "Agreement"), the Company will issue to Altius 19.9% of the outstanding shares of the company. Other key conditions of the LOI include a minimum expenditure commitment on the project of $500,000 within the first 12 months and $1,000,000 within the first 3 years of signing the Agreement. Additionally, the Company will issue to Altius an additional $200,000 in stock on the earlier of 12 months from the date of signing or on the completion of an equity financing of at least $2,000,000. Altius will retain certain preferential rights as it relates to an underlying 2% royalty.

The 540 claim (13,500 Ha) Sail Pond Property comprises occurrences of silver-copper-lead-zinc sulphide mineralization in bedrock. Mineralization is stratabound and orogenic quartz-carbonate vein-hosted within folded and thrust bounded altered dolostones. The recently discovered occurrences have never been drill tested.

Some highlights of recent rock grab and channel sample assays include*:

Rock grab sample 12591: 2,030 g/t Ag, 7.08% Cu, 9.40% Pb, 0.46 g/t Au (South Zone)

Rock grab sample 8329: 944 g/t Ag, 5.24% Cu, 7.6% Pb, 2.32% Zn, 0.30 g/t Au (South Zone)

Rock grab sample 12744: 803 g/t Ag, 3.58% Cu, 0.11% Pb, 1.04% Zn, 0.17 g/t Au (North Zone);

1.0 m channel sample: 499 g/t Ag, 2.66% Cu, 6.80% Pb, 0.27% Zn, 0.33 g/t Au (Trench SPTR-10; North Zone)

2.9 m combined channel samples: 180 g/t Ag, 0.97% Cu, 0.24% Pb, 0.18% Zn (Trench SPTR-16; North Zone)

* Note: the reader is cautioned that rock grab samples are selective by nature and values reported may not represent the true grade or style of mineralization across the Property.

Some key Project facts include:

Discovered in 2016 by a local prospector;

Approximately $1,000,000 in expenditures over the last three years;

Two broad zones (North and South zones) of mineralization have been defined to date with a combined surface strike length of 9 km and locally up to 200 m in width;

Road accessible, close to deep water port, in close proximity to hydro power, and adjacent to regional services including an airport.

The Company is working with Altius to finalize plans for a Phase 1 exploration program which would be followed by a maiden drill program in 2021. The phase 1 program will look to expand on known mineral occurrences, to discover additional occurrences, and to gain a better overall understanding of the mineralization, with the ultimate goal of providing a ranking of drill targets.

Mathew Wilson, CEO of LAT states: "the Company has spent the last two years examining all options for its future direction. To acquire a project in any market with these surface silver and base metal grades, in such a favorable jurisdiction as Newfoundland, and with district size potential, is an exciting event. In our current market environment, with a favorable long-term outlook for metals, and by adding a partner like Altius, Sail Pond stands out as an ideal project. We look forward to welcoming our new partner and shareholder Altius and moving towards the signing of a definitive agreement."

The Company and Altius have agreed to a 45-day due diligence period prior to the signing of a definitive agreement. The completion of the transaction will require Altius to deliver an updated national instrument 43-101 on the Property and will require the approval of the TSX Venture.

Sampling and Analytical Protocols

Quality Assurance-Quality Control ("QA/QC"). All rock grab samples and channel samples were collected by Altius personnel and were secured and delivered to Eastern Analytical in Springdale, Newfoundland, where sample preparation (drying, crushing and pulverizing) and analytical work was completed, with further analysis completed at ALS Global in North Vancouver, Canada. Blanks and standards were regularly inserted into the sample sequence. For multi-element trace analysis, the sample pulps were dissolved in four acids and analyzed by ICP-OES. For samples exceeding the upper limits of the trace analysis, an ore grade analysis was completed. Samples reporting more than 50 g/t silver were re-assayed with a modified ICP-OAS method with a four-acid digestion. Gold values were determined by 30 g fire assay and AA finish. All data were reviewed and verified by Roderick Smith, Chief Geologist for Altius, a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.

About the Company

Latin American Minerals Inc. is a mineral exploration company.

Qualified Person

Roderick Smith, M.Sc., P.Geo., Chief Geologist for Altius, a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects, is responsible for the scientific and technical data presented herein and has reviewed and approved this project summary.

For more information, please contact:

Mathew Wilson, Mfin, CFA

President and CEO

Tel: 1-416-643-7630

E-mail: information@latinamericanminerals.com

Website: www.latinamericanminerals.com

The Company's public documents may be accessed at www.sedar.com.

For further information, please visit our website at www.latinamericanminerals.com or email us at

information@latinamericanminerals.com.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "would", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the information is provided, and is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information. For a description of the risks and uncertainties facing the Company and its business and affairs, readers should refer to the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change, unless required by law. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Not for distribution to U.S. Newswire Services or for dissemination in the United States. Any failure to comply with this restriction may constitute a violation of U.S. Securities laws.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/62404
Students in HCMC check their notes after taking the literature test in the national high school exam, with Covid-19 fight banners in the background, August 9, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Huu Khoa.

Authorities in Da Nang announced over 12,000 senior students in the city will be tested for Covid-19 before taking the national high school exam next week.

City authorities have sought permission from the Ministry of Education and Training to organize the second phase of the national high school exam between September 2 and 5. Earlier, over 870,000 high school seniors from localities not constrained by the social distancing order took the examination on August 9-10.

Le Thi Bich Thuan, director of the central citys Department of Education and Training, said the pandemic situation in Da Nang, Vietnams biggest Covid-19 hotspot, has gradually been brought under control and that the official exam date depends on the ministrys decision.

In addition to 12,000 high school seniors, around 2,000 examiners will be tested for Covid-19 to prevent its spread.

If a student is found infected with the coronavirus, he/she will be exempted from attending the exam and will exceptionally graduate. This exam is seen as a seminal event in the country, with success or failure having far-reaching impacts. The exam not only fetches learners a high-school diploma but also determines admission to universities and colleges.

Students quarantined after coming in contact with infected patients will take the exam inside their isolation facilities or places nearby under the supervision of medical staff.

All candidates attending the exam are required to wear face masks, have their body temperatures checked and use hand sanitizers.

According to statistics from the education ministry, over 26,000 high school seniors, mainly in Da Nang, Quang Nam and Dak Lak, the countrys Covid-19 hotspots, where social distancing measures were earlier imposed to stem the outbreak, have not yet attended the exam during the first phase.

Thousands of high school seniors only returned to class in March after a prolonged break since the Lunar New Year in January as schools remained closed to curb the coronavirus spread.

This years national high school exam thus came a month and a half late due to the impacts of Covid-19.

Since a new wave of domestic infections returned on July 25, the nation has recorded hundreds of locally transmissions, most linked to the outbreak in Da Nang where social distancing has been imposed indefinitely.

Vietnams Covid-19 tally now stands at 1,016, with 420 active cases. The country has reported 27 deaths due to the pandemic.
Australians buying up camping, fishing and hiking gear has fuelled a massive jump in sales for the first two months of the new financial year at retailing collective Super Retail Group.

The company, which operates Supercheap Auto, Rebel Sport, BCF and MacPac, reported a 32 per cent rise in sales across the group for the first seven weeks of the 2021 financial year, driven by a 72 per cent increase at outdoors chain BCF.

"As states come out of lockdown, the desire to, frankly, get out of the house, get outside and get back to nature has been pretty phenomenal," chief executive Anthony Heraghty said.

"Within the BCF business and in MacPac, where they're not closed, we're seeing very good uptake of camping, fishing and hiking."
I think so often when we speak about refugees or immigrants or refugee aid  even among the liberally minded  theres this idea of the other: These people who arent like me, who come from elsewhere who need my help, and I will be nice, and I will aid them, says Yankovskaya. Rather than understanding on a deeper level that this could happen to any of us.
Gov. Phil Murphy, in the midst of a protracted health crisis and with uncertain fiscal prospects, will on Tuesday present his revised budget proposal for the coming fiscal year.

This address comes six months after he stood before a joint session of the state Legislature with a $40.9 billion spending plan that would have raised taxes on high-income earners to pour more money into k-12, higher education and public-sector pensions.
Amid a global pandemic, unprecedented needs and growing insecurity, aid workers and health-care responders are staying and delivering to the world's most vulnerable people.

Last year was the most violent on record for humanitarians, with 483 attacked, 125 killed, 234 wounded and 124 kidnapped. The UN condemns all attacks on humanitarians.

OCHA and partners present the inspiring stories of humanitarian #RealLifeHeroes who are stepping up to meet the challenges.

Today, World Humanitarian Day, the world honours all humanitarians - many working in their own communities - who are going to extraordinary lengths in extraordinary times to help women, men and children whose lives are upended by crises and the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The dedication, perseverance and self-sacrifice of these real-life heroes represent the best of humanity as they respond to the COVID-19 crisis and the massive increase in humanitarian needs it has triggered.

First responders are often people in need themselves - refugees, members of civil-society organizations and local health workers. They bring food, shelter, health care, protection and hope to others amid conflict, displacement, disaster and disease.

But humanitarian workers are being tested like never before, struggling with unprecedented movement restrictions and insufficient resources as needs are outpacing funds.

And all too often, they risk their own lives to save the lives of others.

In recent weeks alone, despicable attacks have killed aid workers in Niger and Cameroon, and since the onset of the pandemic, scores of health workers have come under attack across the world.

According to Humanitarian Outcomes' Aid Worker Security Database, major attacks against humanitarians last year surpassed all previous years on record. A total of 483 relief workers were attacked, 125 killed, 234 wounded and 124 kidnapped in 277 separate incidents. This is an 18 per cent increase in the number of victims compared to 2018.

This is the eleventh World Humanitarian Day, designated by the UN General Assembly. It falls on the day of the attack on the UN compound in Baghdad on 19 August 2003, which claimed the lives of 22 people including the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Since then, nearly 5,000 humanitarians have been killed, wounded or abducted, and the 2010-2019 decade experienced a 117 per cent increase in attacks compared to 2000-2009.

A surge in attacks against health workers was recorded in 2019, including strikes against medics in Syria and shootings of Ebola workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

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Most of the attacks occurred in Syria, followed by South Sudan, DRC, Afghanistan and the Central African Republic. Mali and Yemen both saw a doubling of major attacks from the previous year. The UN condemns these attacks, and it calls for accountability for perpetrators and justice for survivors. Relief workers cannot be a target.

Mark Lowcock, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said: "To humanitarian workers everywhere doing important, courageous work on the front lines we say Thank You. You are saving lives every day, and as new challenges and crises are piling on to existing ones, your perseverance is an inspiration. Your protection is also paramount to making sure we can deliver to people most in need. The best way to pay tribute to humanitarian workers is by funding their work and ensuring their safety."

This year's World Humanitarian Day comes as the world fights the COVID-19 pandemic. To pay tribute to the efforts of humanitarians, OCHA and its partners present the personal stories of some of the #RealLifeHeroes who are stepping up to meet the challenges, particularly local humanitarian workers.

They include refugees who as health workers are playing essential roles in the pandemic response; Ebola health workers who are stepping in to fight COVID-19; and doctors and nurses who continue to provide critical health care to women and children.

In 2008, the United Nations General Assembly designated 19 August as World Humanitarian Day to raise awareness about humanitarian assistance worldwide and to pay tribute to the people who risk their lives to provide it. World Humanitarian Day was commemorated for the first time on 19 August 2009.
Well, multiple user reports suggest that Samsung Galaxy Buds, Buds+, and the recently launched Buds Live are prone to overheating in direct sunlight.

Users of these true wireless sound devices from Samsung took to various platforms, including Reddit, and the official Samsung community website to report this issue.

Wireless earbuds are the best partners for you when you train, workout, or even if you go for a walk. These earbuds are designed so well, and the ergonomics do not let it fall off your ears. Providing you all the energy from your favorite song.

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However, user reports brought to light that in sunlight or warm conditions, the Samsung Buds, Buds+, and Buds Live get overheated. Ultimately becoming a pain to wear.

Besides, the heating elevates in a matter of minutes. So that is alarming. More trouble is when the buds are exposed to direct sunlight.

Heated Samsung Galaxy Buds keeps beeping continuously until they are cooled down

Notably, the heated Galaxy Buds keeps on being until they are removed from the sunlight and are cooled down. Apparently, as per user reports, this happens when the outside temperature is about 90 to 100F range.

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Things sound even worse because this is a normal temperature for most of the regions on a typical summer morning. I personally use the Galaxy Buds+ and live in India, but I have not encountered such issues as of now.

If this is a widespread issue, which by the looks of it seems yes, then it could be pretty difficult for the users living in warmer climates.

Although the latest Samsung Galaxy Buds Live packs a punch, has a good design, it could be a potential deal-breaker if it cannot survive the morning heat.

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The beeping stops when the Galaxy wearables cool down

The beeping because of overheating stops when the Galaxy Buds cool down. This could be a problem for users who are more actively using the Galaxy wearables during morning hours. Because that is when the heat is at its peak.

In the official community forum, moderators have given a potential workaround for users experiencing such overheating issues. But it does not seem to be any permanent fix for this issue.

Samsung is officially yet to acknowledge and release a statement regarding this matter. We will keep our eyes on the lookout if we come across any potential solution for this Galaxy Buds issue.

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In the meantime, let us know in the comments below if you are also experiencing any such overheating issues with your Samsung Galaxy Buds, Buds+, or Buds Live.

My Galaxy Buds would give me overheat warnings while outside on hot days, so Im going to say no. https://t.co/8UUYz67Un9  MarsNeedsTacos   (@MarsNeedsTacos) May 8, 2019 Advertisement
Tropical Storm Laura is active in the Gulf, and it could potentially impact Houston in a big way this week. The federal government has approved a preemptive disaster declaration for Texas ahead of the storm.

Here are some emergency alerts you should sign up for, as well as emergency numbers to keep on hand.

GET PREPARED: How to get ready for a hurricane, according to Houstonians

AlertHouston

Get specific emergency alerts from the city's Emergency Operations Center, including severe weather alerts, through email, text message, voice call or a mobile app push notification.

Most alerts are targeted to specific locations. Enter up to five addresses to receive updates about your home or a loved one's address. Sign up and learn more at houstonemergency.org/alerts.

Ready Harris Alerts

The Harris County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management sends out important updates during an event or emergency, as well as tips to stay prepared throughout the year.

You can specify if you would like email, text or phone call alerts. Sign up here and learn more at readyharris.org.

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA)

WEA messages are automatically sent to your cell phone, as long as you haven't opted out and have a WEA-capable phone. Government partners, including local and state public safety agencies, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Weather Service, will send out these messages during an emergency in your area.

The City of Houston may issue a WEA warning for:

Terrorist Activity

Citywide Weather Emergencies

Evacuation Orders

Shelter-in-Place Emergencies

Other emergencies which require action to protect life

If you have opted out of Wireless Emergency Alerts, now is a good time to opt back in. Visit ready.gov/alerts for more information.

STORM READY: H-E-B temporarily extends store hours as Texas prepares for storms Laura, Marco

Email alerts from Chron.com and the Houston Chronicle

You can get breaking news and storm updates delivered to your inbox from Chron.com when you sign up at chron.com/newsletters/breaking-news. Here, sign up for news emails (and other newsletters) from the Houston Chronicle and Chron.com.

Other important numbers:
Pressure today grew on Britain to routinely treat Covid-19 patients with the blood of survivors after US officials last night controversially gave the treatment emergency approval  despite no firm proof it works.

The UK has lagged behind America throughout the pandemic, notably being slower to allow doctors to use the antiviral drug remdesivir, to boost swab testing capacity and to restrict international travel into the country.

Regulators at the US Food and Drug Administration approved convalescent plasma for emergency use, claiming that the 'known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product'.

Donald Trump called it a 'very big day' and a 'truly historic' moment at a White House briefing. The US President also claimed that the treatment was proven to reduce the chance of death from coronavirus by more than one third.

But leading scientists hit out at the ruling, calling it a 'bad conclusion' because it has not been put through rigorous human trials where it is compared against a placebo, meaning there is no conclusive proof that the treatment works.

One expert, however, called it 'great news'. Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, told MailOnline he hopes the UK will be able to use the century-old treatment routinely in the near future.

Convalescent plasma is one of the most promising experimental therapies for Covid-19 and is already approved for trial use in the UK. Academics claimed at the start of the pandemic that it could 'make a life or death difference' because it has helped to treat other similar coronaviruses.

NHS officials said results from trials of the treatment  which sees infected patients given the antibody-rich blood of survivors to boost their immune response  were promising. But they warned the findings were not yet conclusive.

Some studies have shown it speeds up recovery and is safe. Others have suggested it makes no difference. Oxford University experts behind the world's biggest trial of therapeutics say 'we don't have enough data to know' it works for definite.

Hydroxychloroquine  the drug backed by Trump early on the in pandemic  was found to have a promising effect in observational studies, such as the ones that have already been conducted on convalescent plasma.

But the anti-malarial was pulled from Oxford's RECOVERY trial, which is also testing convalescent plasma, after 'compelling' results revealed it made no difference to survival rates for patients hospitalised by the virus.

'This is a very big day,' President Trump said at a White House briefing on Sunday, adding the approval was a 'truly historic' moment

Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist from Harvard, said: 'What the hell - This is a bad convalescent plasma conclusionit was not a randomized trial'

Martin Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who is leading the RECOVERY trial, did not welcome the FDA's authorisation

Convalescent plasma is one of the most promising experimental therapies for Covid-19. Blood plasma is a yellowish liquid (pictured) that makes up about half blood volume. After a virus, the plasma contains antibodies that are used to help fight infection

WHAT IS CONVALESCENT PLASMA AND WHERE HAS IT BEEN USED? Convalescent plasma has been used to treat infections for at least a century, dating back to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. It was also trialed during the 2009-2010 H1N1 influenza virus pandemic, 2003 SARS epidemic, and the 2012 MERS epidemic. Convalescent plasma was used as a last resort to improve the survival rate of patients with SARS whose condition continued to deteriorate. It has been proven 'effective and life-saving' against other infections, such as rabies and diphtheria, said Dr Mike Ryan, of the World Health Organization. 'It is a very important area to pursue,' Dr Ryan said. Although promising, convalescent plasma has not been shown to be effective in every disease studied, the FDA says. Is it already being used for COVID-19 patients? Before it can be routinely given to patients with COVID-19, it is important to determine whether it is safe and effective through clinical trials. The FDA earlier in the pandemic said it was 'facilitating access' for the treatment to be used on patients with serious or immediately life-threatening Covid-19 infections'. It came after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that plasma would be tested there to treat the sickest of the state's coronavirus patients. Covid-19 patients in Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai were treated with this method, authorities report. Lu Hongzhou, professor and co-director of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre, said in February the hospital had set up a special clinic to administer plasma therapy and was selecting patients who were willing to donate. 'We are positive that this method can be very effective in our patients,' he said. Meanwhile, the head of a Wuhan hospital said plasma infusions from recovered patients had shown some encouraging preliminary results. The MHRA has approved the use of the therapy in the UK for trials. How does it work? Blood banks take plasma donations much like they take donations of whole blood; regular plasma is used in hospitals and emergency rooms every day. If someone's donating only plasma, their blood is drawn through a tube, the plasma is separated and the rest infused back into the donor's body. Then that plasma is tested and purified to be sure it doesn't harbor any blood-borne viruses and is safe to use. For Covid-19 research, people who have recovered from the coronavirus would be donating. Scientists would measure how many antibodies are in a unit of donated plasma - tests just now being developed that aren't available to the general public - as they figure out what's a good dose, and how often a survivor could donate. Could it work as a vaccine? While scientists race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, blood plasma therapy could provide temporary protection for the most vulnerable in a similar fashion. A vaccine trains people's immune systems to make their own antibodies against a target germ. The plasma infusion approach would give people a temporary shot of someone else's antibodies that are short-lived and require repeated doses. A key advantage to the blood based therapy is that its available immediately and relies only drawing blood from a former patient. It is also significantly cheaper than developing a new drug, which costs millions to take through trials and regulation before mass production. Advertisement

The FDA said more than 70,000 patients had already been treated with convalescent plasma, which sees infected patients given the antibody-rich blood of survivors in an attempt to boost their immune response and fight the disease.

It comes just days after top US experts, namely Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins, reportedly stepped in to pause the authorisation of convalescent plasma because the evidence was not strong enough to do so.

Trump lashed out at the FDA at the weekend and accused the agency of attempting to delay the approval of Covid-19 therapeutics until after the president election in November.

The new FDA authorisation means those who had coronavirus and recovered can now donate their blood to be used as a treatment for those currently suffering from the disease.

The FDA approves emergency use authorisations during public health emergencies to speed along unapproved therapeutics to treat or prevent serious diseases where there are no other adequate and available alternatives.

For instance, on May 1, the FDA authorised the emergency use of Gilead Science's experimental antiviral remdesivir to treat patients.

'Today I'm pleased to make a truly historic announcement in our battle against the China virus that will save countless lives,' Trump said last night as he was flanked by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn.

The president also claimed the treatment has proven to reduce the chance of death from coronavirus by more than one third.

Mr Azar said: 'I just want to emphasise this point because I don't want you to gloss over this number. We dream in drug development of something like a 35 per cent mortality reduction.'

'This is a major advance in the treatment of patients. This is a major advance.'

Trump claimed that over 100,000 Americans have already enrolled to receive this treatment.

'Based on the science and the data, the FDA has made the independent determination that the treatment is safe and very effective,' Trump assured.

Trump  who has praised the antimalaria drug hydroxychloroquine, even though studies have shown it is not effective at treating the disease  highlighted that he was not the one pushing for the approval.

Mayo Clinic researchers revealed findings last week that suggested convalescent plasma could improve survival odds for Covid-19 patients.

The study assessed 35,000 patients given convalescent plasma, including a high number who were critically ill.

But the study compared patients who had received the treatment with each other. It looked at mortality rates between patients given high or low doses of antibodies, and between those treated early and later.

This is different to a randomised placebo controlled study  when an experimental drug or therapy is compared with a placebo or alternative medicine to see if it truly offers better survival rates.

Randomised trials are deemed the gold standard for testing if a therapy truly works because they eliminate any bias.

The findings were published on a pre-print server, MedRxiv, on August 12. Because they are not in a medical journal, they have not been scrutinised by other scientists yet, which helps to flag flaws.

The findings show 8.7 per cent of patients treated with convalescent plasma within three days of diagnosis died after seven days, compared to about 12 per cent of patients who were treated four days or more after their diagnosis  a statistical difference of around 37 per cent.

Those treated with plasma containing the highest levels of antibodies had a 35 per cent lower risk of dying within a week compared to those treated with less-rich plasma.

Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, pointed out the 35 per cent reduction in mortality was not between the experiment group and control group.

Reacting to the news of the FDA's authorisation on Twitter, he said: 'What the hell. This is a bad convalescent plasma conclusion  it was not a randomized trial. Trump doesn't care, but FDA head should know better!'

WHAT ARE THE REASONS FOR AND AGAINST USING PLASMA THERAPY? Convalescent plasma - injecting patients with blood products from people who have already recovered - has produced mixed results in people with Covid-19 so far. A study by the Mayo Clinic in the US, involving 20,000 people, suggested that the procedure was safe and it appeared to reduce death rates from 12 per cent to 8.6 per cent. And a large-scale review by the Cochrane network of scientists did not find evidence that it was harmful, although the quality of evidence, it said, was very low. While it did not find evidence of serious side effects or deaths as a result of the treatment, the Cochrane review also did not find any evidence that convalescent plasma could reduce someone's risk of dying from Covid-19. However, if the treatment is safe and might help to save lives, this could be grounds to test it more and give it to larger groups of people. Trials of a therapy shown to be safe should not throw up any ethical problems, meaning it would be reasonable to test it on more people. Professor Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington, said in a tweet: 'I don't have a position on whether convalescent plasma is safe or effective. It's presumably somewhat safe and there's reason to hope for efficacy.' British doctors are currently allowed to enrol patients in clinical trials of convalescent plasma but it cannot be used as a routine treatment. Approving it for routine use too soon could mean that fewer people are signed up to the trial and there would be less data about how well it worked if their outcomes were not recorded as part of a study. The current system means that everybody who has the treatment is involved in the study and what happens to them is recorded in detail as part of the larger test of how well the plasma therapy works. Advertisement

Dr Feigl-Ding told MailOnline: 'I have very mixed feelings. I dont think they should endorse it with such aggressive FDA move given lack of trial data.

'But if someone is on ventilator, Im not someone to oppose or stop a doctor from trying CP on a patient if out of options.'

There are two randomised control trials of convalescent plasma therapy ongoing in the UK  the REMAP-CAP trial is seeing if it will help patients in intensive care, while the RECOVERY trial is looking at hospitalised patients.

Martin Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who is leading the RECOVERY trial, did not welcome the FDA's authorisation.

He wrote on Twitter: 'Convalescent plasma for COVID-19. It may work. We hope it will work. But nobody knows if it does. That's why we are studying it in the #RECOVERYtrial. Then we'll know & wont have to guess.'

Another RECOVERY trial lead, Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford, said: 'Allowing widespread use of unproven treatments creates confusion and undermines chances of improving care through proper science.

'This is not "cutting red tape" it's ripping up good science that protects patients.'

But Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist from University of Warwick, was pleased with the developments.

He told MailOnline: 'The FDA emergency use authorisation for convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19 is great news.

'Ive been a strong advocate for this approach since the beginning of the outbreak and, with other colleagues, petitioned the government to investigate its use.

'Convalescent plasma therapy has been used to the prevention and treatment of many infectious diseases for more than a century. Over the past 20 years this approach has been successfully used in the treatment of SARS, MERS and 2009 H1N1 pandemic flu with good safety profile and efficacy.

'I hope the UK trial reports soon and we can begin using convalescent plasma routinely to treat patients with Covid-19.'

Professor Stephen Evans, a pharmacoepidemiology expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, also advocated using the plasma therapy.

He said: 'Allowing the use of convalescent plasma seems reasonable, but it is a pity that randomised trials which would provide the best evidence are not conducted in much larger numbers of patients. Patients who have recovered should certainly be encouraged to donate blood if they can and for that to be used for high quality research.'

Professor Dave Roberts, associate director for Blood Donation at NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), said the preliminary results were 'promising' and 'encouraging'.

'However, the research is not conclusive and cannot be easily correlated to our work or other trials,' he said.

Dr Feigl-Ding pointed out that the 35 per cent reduction in mortality was not between the experiment group and control group

Another RECOVERY trial lead, Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford, said: 'Allowing widespread use of unproven treatments creates confusion and undermines chances of improving care through proper science'

'We dream in drug development of something like a 35 per cent mortality reduction,' Azar said of the convalescent plasma treatment. 'This is a major advance in the treatment of patients'

TRUMP COULD FAST-TRACK USE OF OXFORD VACCINE Donald Trump could fast-track the experimental coronavirus vaccine being made by Oxford University to get it into use before the election in the US this autumn. White House insiders claim the US President is considering pushing for approval for emergency use of the jab, which is one of the world's most promising candidates. Early trials have shown promising results, with tests showing the vaccine  being mass-produced by pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca  is safe to use in humans and appears to provoke an immune response. The only country in the world to have approved a vaccine against Covid-19 so far is Russia. But it came under fire for doing so without proper clinical trials. Risks of using jabs that have not been tested thoroughly include damaging side effects or administering one that doesn't really work. If something goes wrong with an official vaccine, it could further dent already-fragile public faith in vaccinations. Getting a vaccine into use and slowing down the US's devastating coronavirus crisis  the worst in the world  could look good for Mr Trump ahead of the presidential election in November. AstraZeneca, which claims it can manufacture 2billion doses and already operates several facilities in America, has denied it is in talks with White House officials about fast-tracking approval of the jab. The US ordered 300million doses of the vaccine last month. Mr Trump will be running against Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who was vice-president to Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017. He has already vented his frustration at the slow process of getting a vaccine, accusing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of deliberately delaying evaluations until the election is over. He did announce significant progress yesterday, however, when he confirmed that US hospitals could now use blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients as an emergency treatment, claiming that it could reduce the risk of death by a third. On the news that Mr Trump was considering fast-tracking the vaccine, one of the UK's top medical officers warned that there should be 'fair distribution' of any working jab and that richer countries should not hoover up all the supplies. Advertisement

'The combined data in the American study required used plasma from many sources, a great variety of different clinical situations and uses different testing methods to other studies. The results are also observational and not the fair comparison we would see using randomised control trial.'

Professor Roberts is one of the lead investigators for convalescent plasma trials being conducted within the NHS.

NHSBT urged British survivors to donate plasma, saying the US findings 'support the need for people to donate' their blood.

A spokesperson for NHSBT said: 'The observational studies coming from America are promising and support the need for people to continue to donate convalescent plasma in England. However, they are not conclusive.

'Randomised control trials are the gold standard for determining the effectiveness of a new treatment. The UK is leading the world in setting up randomised controlled trials for Covid-19 convalescent plasma.

'We need people who have recovered from COVID-19 to offer to donate convalescent plasma at nhsbt.nhs.uk.'

The FDA authorisation comes just days after it was reportedly put on hold due to a lack of evidence.

The FDA was planning to release an emergency use authorisation at the start of August but put it on pause after leading US officials said the evidence was not strong enough to do so at the time, Fox News reported.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, and Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, reportedly urged FDA officials to 'hold off', according to a report.

They said the pre-print study lacked strong enough data to justify an emergency use authorisation.

The FDA revoked its authorisation of the emergency use of the two drugs to treat coronavirus patients on June 15, citing the fact that clinical trials showed the drugs had 'no benefit for decreasing the likelihood of death or speeding recovery'.

Trump has spent the past few months pushing the use of anti-malarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for the treatment of coronavirus.

On Saturday, Trump dredged up a tweet about the FDA revoking the authorisation from two and a half weeks ago and wrote: 'Many doctors and studies disagree with this!'

He did not provide any examples of doctors or studies to back up his statement.

Earlier on Saturday, Trump also accused 'The deep state, or whoever' at the FDA of holding up testing for coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics.

'The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,' Trump tweeted.

'Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!'

Trump tagged Hahn in the tweet.
STACKs growth is directly related to the value we drive for the general contractors, subcontractors, suppliers and manufacturers we support. We are revolutionizing the way preconstruction teams do their jobs.

Inc. magazine recently revealed that STACK Construction Technologies [STACK], provider of the industrys leading cloud-based takeoff and estimating platform for preconstruction professionals, is #2428 on its annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies. This recognition marks the fourth time STACK has been honored for its accelerated growth.

We are honored to be recognized for our fourth consecutive year as one of the nations fastest-growing private companies, said Phil Ogilby, Founder and CEO at STACK. Were thrilled to join this outstanding list of successful businesses, and we truly couldnt do it without the dedication of our amazing team and the support of our incredible construction customers. The cumulative growth of all honorees is phenomenal, especially in todays climate, and its a privilege to be counted among these extraordinary leaders and entrepreneurs.

Todays construction market is more competitive than ever, and a strategic approach to bidding is essential. STACK software helps users to streamline their preconstruction process by reshaping it  from one thats risk-prone and disconnected to one thats efficient, accurate and collaborative. By enabling teams to be proactive, the STACK platform transforms workflows.

STACKs growth is directly related to the value we drive for the general contractors, subcontractors, suppliers and manufacturers we support, Ogilby added. We are revolutionizing the way preconstruction teams do their jobs.

Not only have the companies on the 2020 Inc. 5000 been very competitive within their markets, but the list as a whole shows staggering growth compared with prior lists as well. The 2020 Inc. 5000 achieved an incredible three-year average growth of over 500 percent, and a median rate of 165 percent. The Inc. 5000s aggregate revenue was $209 billion in 2019, accounting for over 1 million jobs over the past three years.

Complete results for STACK and all members of the 2020 Inc. 5000 list, can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2020.

About STACK Construction Technologies

STACK Construction Technologies is the industrys leading cloud-based software solution for preconstruction professionals. It provides a centralized hub where plans, specs and other construction documents can be stored, evaluated, measured and shared with internal and external project stakeholders. Founded and headquartered in Cincinnati, OH, STACK delivers intuitive and innovative software for thousands of subcontractors, general contractors, suppliers and manufacturers to ultimately improve the projects outcome and profitability. STACKs solution powers seamless plan and document management, real-time team collaboration and a more efficient digital takeoff and estimating process. For more information or to see how STACK software is helping preconstruction teams to gain visibility, insight and alignment throughout the bid process, visit http://www.stackct.com.

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000

Methodology

The 2020 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2019. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independentnot subsidiaries or divisions of other companiesas of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2019 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

About Inc. Media

The worlds most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.


New Delhi:

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee will attend a meeting of Opposition in New Delhi on December 27. She will reach Delhi on Monday. Our party supremo will go to Delhi tomorrow and will attend the meeting of Opposition parties on December 27. In that meeting the next line of action will be discussed, a senior TMC leader told PTI.

The West Bengal CM is mustering unity of Opposition parties against the BJP government. Banerjee is likely to hold a separate meeting with Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. Meetings with other opposition parties may also be on the card.

Earlier, Banerjee had staged a dharna against Centres demonetisation move demanding its rollback.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Ambitious: Brian McGettigan of The Address Collective, which consists of three hotels, with a fourth under construction. Photo: Frank McGrath

A new hotel brand, 'The Address Collective', has been launched following a 16m investment by the McGettigan family.

It comes amid what is an exceptionally difficult time for domestic tourism as Covid-19 continues to hinder travel.

The brand is currently made up of three well-established hotels: The North Star Hotel in Dublin 1, The Kingswood Hotel in Citywest, and the Ambassador in Cork.

Following the launch of the new brand, the three will be known as The Address Connolly, The Address Citywest and The Address Cork.

Run by husband-and-wife team Brian and Ciara McGettigan, there will be 480 bedrooms, employing 300 people across the three properties.

The launch of the rebranding comes at an unprecedented time for tourism, with international travel largely curtailed.

Despite this, Mr McGettigan is optimistic about the future of the industry in Ireland.

"We remain steadfast in our decision [to rebrand]. Our long-term vision and strategy is to grow this brand," he told the Irish Independent.

The company is also continuing with its plans to build a fourth Address hotel on Dublin's Parnell Street.

The new development includes almost 9,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. The investment will amount to 34m and is planned to open in 2022 as The Address Parnell.

"The brand is high-quality; all hotels are four-star," Mr McGettigan said.

As well as bringing each of the three hotels up to four-star standard, he says significant investment has gone into the chain's 'Cookhouse' bar and restaurant experience.

"This is a very chic, trendy, contemporary experience. It is very popular for guests and from an off-the-street customer point of view. We do a club lounge as well, [which offers] 24-hour access for guests."

Earlier this year the head of Tourism Ireland, Niall Gibbons, said he expected tourism numbers here to be down by around 80pc this year.

The hotels that make up The Address Collective have been impacted by the fall in visitors, with the three properties reporting mixed performances.

"Regionally, it has been performing quite well, as in our Cork property. The Citywest property has put in a good performance under the circumstances," Mr McGettigan said.

However, things have been more difficult at the Dublin 1 hotel.

"I would certainly say the city-centre hotel is the hardest hit, with all the attractions being closed due to Covid-19. So the city centre is tough, but it will bounce back and tourism will bounce back," he said.

Mr McGettigan has every confidence the group will come through this period of uncertainty.

"We're strong. We've got very good bank support, which is very important, so we will certainly be able to chart ourselves through this," he added.

"We are happy and confident and are ambitious about the future. We have come this far, we are going to keep on going, albeit, I know against the severe backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic."

To assist the tourism industry, the Government launched a number of initiatives as part of its July stimulus.

Included in this is 26m in funding to be administered by Failte Ireland to contribute to reopening costs for businesses, and a 'Stay and Spend' incentive for taxpayers.

It has also agreed to extend the Employment Wage Support Scheme until April 2021, as well as extending the waiver on commercial rates.

Mr McGettigan said the stimulus is welcomed, however he warned it may not be enough for the sector.

"I think they have to go back and look at the VAT and reduce it, and I feel they have to extend rates by maybe up to a total period of 12 months."

The wage supplement, he believes, should be extended beyond April 2021 in order to ensure survival for businesses.

"But it's a very hard balancing act for the Government with news everyday regarding Covid-19, and then obviously to keep the economy on track or get it reopened," he says.

In order to reassure customers and comply with the Failte Ireland Covid-19 Safety Charter in each of the three hotels, the company has spent a considerable amount of money on safety measures.

"The health and safety of our guests is of paramount importance," he says.

Mr McGettigan's domestic ambitions don't stop at the three hotels under management and the additional one currently under construction.

While the number-one priority is getting through Covid-19 and opening the fourth hotel, the company has big plans to expand further.

"We would be open to buying or leasing hotels, or entering into joint ventures in order to expand the business," he said.

In doing so, its focus will be on city-centre locations, at first in Ireland and the UK.

"We would like to get into Belfast, and we'd like to get into Galway. After that, into Glasgow and maybe Manchester."

Beyond that, Mr McGettigan has further plans to crack the European market.

"The UK expansion would probably take a couple of years, and we will look at Europe throughout that time, but Europe would be after that. We will be focused on Ireland and UK expansion, and then beyond."

The wider McGettigan Hotel Group has nine hotels across the country, with Brian McGettigan's brothers and father also involved in the business.
Scientists seek to collect ice core samples before glaciers and ice sheets melt

Posted on 24 August 2020 by Guest Author

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Kristen Pope

Scientists are rushing to sample the cores of rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets, hoping to preserve a rich record of changes in Earths atmosphere and biosphere over the eons. Ice cores contain evidence of trace elements, gas bubbles, dust, pollen, even viruses and bacteria that can be traced back in time to yield vivid images of Earths history and prehistory for those who learn to read them.

Just about anything thats in the atmosphere gets recorded in the ice, says Lonnie Thompson, glaciologist and paleoclimatologist at Ohio State University. Thompson has led more than 60 expeditions to sample ice cores from glaciers and ice sheets in a career spanning over four decades. Some sites he has drilled  including glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro and in Indonesia  while rapidly disappearing, have not vanished. Thompson expects those in Indonesia will do so in the next couple of years. Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State holds thousands of meters of preserved ice cores, safely stored in sub-zero freezers. Studying the ice has already yielded secrets of Earths past related to volcanic activity, changing vegetation and even human manufacturing techniques.

Hoping to add to the collection, Thompson and other researchers are racing to obtain and preserve ice core samples from remote and, for now at least, still icy places around the globe. They hope to find clues that can help learn about that past, and scientists can use ice core samples and the data they contain to test and verify climate change models to better predict the future.

They also hope that preserving the cores will provide future scientists with samples that they can analyze with technology that may not even exist yet. Thompson can envision a day when samples he has collected now can allow future scientists to answer questions people have not yet even thought to ask.

As glaciers and ice sheets form and layers of snow accumulate, the ice slowly spreads out, compressing the layers and thinning over time. Those layers tell stories about the past, much like rings on a tree record signs of fires, drought years, and seasons of ample precipitation. Similarly, the dust in ice core samples contains information about volcanic eruptions and gives clues about droughts, pollen records, and crop and vegetation changes. Scientists studying ice core samples can even learn how past plagues changed society and culture. Researchers found that ice samples dating back to the plague of the 1300s contained less lead than would otherwise be expected, indicating a temporary reduction in smelting and industry during the time.

Thompson and some other scientists believe the COVID-19 pandemic may be observable in future ice core samples. Quarantines and restricted movement led to a reduction in pollution as people stayed home and industry slowed. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and other emissions were reduced in many areas, if only temporarily. Future glaciologists may be able to detect lower levels of nitrates and sulfates in ice, providing a unique snapshot in time.

Facing extreme challenges

Studying ice cores isnt for the faint of heart. Researchers must travel to Earths most isolated regions to collect samples, from Greenland and Antarctica to the slopes of tropical mountains with rapidly melting glaciers. It is always challenging logistically to get a team of researchers to where the ice is, and ice coring work typically occurs in extreme conditions.

Its a truly bizarre and wonderful experience, said Richard Alley, Penn State glaciologist and geologist. In over 40 years studying ice, Alley has spent a lot of time braving extreme weather in polar regions. He has been rewarded with otherworldly scenes while collecting samples and data.

Richard Alley of Penn State on Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand (Photo credit: Geoff Haines-Stiles)

The central part of an ice sheet is pretty subtle. There are snow drifts, and then theres the ice sheet and theres nothing else  its just flat. You go to a place where often the sun never sets  it starts going around in circles  and its snow, and then its snow, and its snow and thats all it is.

Working with fragile scientific equipment in the most remote stretches of the globe leads to its own set of challenges. Researchers have to be resilient, flexible, and creative.

The field is hard, Alley says. Drilling a two-mile-long core of ice is hard. Things always are going to go wrong. The people who do the drilling, the science team, and the whole group just show amazing levels of resilience and innovation to try to get these things built. He notes they return to their homes and laboratories with the data and ice cores they came for, but he says, it doesnt always start working the way it was supposed to.

Alley says samples from his projects are typically shipped to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Lakewood, Colorado. There, researchers carefully slice the cores, providing samples to various teams who perform analyses of everything from dust to isotopes. They also are able to melt a sample from the inner core  a location where it could not have been contaminated by touching anything  and they carefully analyze the stream of meltwater.

Alleys work mainly focuses on the poles  both the Arctic and Antarctic  and he finds some advantages to those research locations, including often being able to fly directly to the research site via ski-equipped aircraft. However, he also points out the necessity of assessing ice samples in other parts of the world. The poles are easier in a lot of ways  theres no meltwater, its cold, and you can get really, really nice records, he says. But its really valuable to be able to get closer to where people are.

Even with the best-laid plans, surprises are common

While conducting research in largely uninhabited polar regions presents an array of challenges, so too does working in the tropics.

Researchers spend years preparing for an ice core drilling project, and Thompson says it can take four or five years of planning and preparation before its time to head to a field location to collect data. During this time, he says, researchers work on putting a capable team together, sourcing all the equipment they will need, embarking on a massive logistics effort, and working with national and local governments as well as local people. But despite their preparatory efforts, trips dont always go as planned.

In 2019, Thompsons team of researchers was on the Peruvian mountain of Huascaran when they received word they needed to leave the mountain within 12 hours because locals did not want them there. With teams spread out over the mountain, Thompson explained that the time frame was impossible to meet and negotiated for two days to extract his team. Leaving the mountain in a hurry, the team was forced to leave ice cores and equipment behind, hoping they could retrieve them later.

Thompson and his team and local authorities met with local people to learn more about their concerns. He learned local residents mistakenly believed his team was planning on developing a gold mine and extracting resources. They were concerned about potential pollution, and when they heard about the ice drilling project, they were upset foreigners were taking ice and removing it from Peru. He says the locals were also concerned that Perus president came to visit the drilling site via helicopter, bypassing the local villages and not listening to peoples concerns about an array of issues  including those unrelated to the scientific research.

Ultimately, the discussions resulted in Thompsons receiving permission to remove his teams equipment and the ice cores from the mountain with the assistance of an Mi-17 helicopter from the Peruvian government.

On a 2010 expedition to a mountain in New Guinea, Thompsons team was planning to drill an ice core from a glacier on a rainforest mountain. A warming world meant the glacier was in imminent peril and, if they didnt obtain samples soon, they might never have the chance. While they received governmental permits and authorization, they soon learned when they arrived in the area that tribal leaders were not on board with the project. Thompson engaged in discussions with people, hoping to find a solution.

In the religion of this tribe the arms and legs of their god are the mountains and the valleys, and the head of the god is the glacier, Thompson explains. And, in their words, we were drilling into the skull of their god to steal their memories. And I said, thats exactly what were doing  we are trying to capture those memories before they disappear because these glaciers will disappear.

He recalls how tribal members discussed the situation, with elders saying the glaciers would always be there and younger members explaining the glaciers were actually retreating rapidly.

By the end of the meeting, the tribes granted permission to continue with the project, drilling the ice cores and bringing them back to Ohio to keep them  and the knowledge they contain  safe for future generations.

Preserving ice-locked records before they disappear forever

Part of the reason researchers believe it is so important to preserve ice core samples while they still exist is so future scientists can one day use technologies perhaps not even imagined today to further analyze them.

The beauty of ice is that it records everything that is in the environment, Thompson says. Unfortunately in todays world, and in the future, many of these archives are going to disappear and we will lose that history.
TWO LIMERICK men are behind the release of four Norwegian white-tailed eagles along the Shannon Estuary.

The project is managed by Castleconnells Eamonn Meskell, of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and Ballyorgan man Dr Allan Mee, of the Golden Eagle Trust.

They are spearheading a landmark year in increasing Irelands small population of the once extinct white-tailed sea eagle  our largest birds of prey

Four Norwegian white-tailed eagles have already been released on Lough Derg with another two birds to be released there later this month.

While, Dr Mee told the Leader four eagles will be released on the Shannon Estuary.

This is not being done on a wing and a prayer. The site has been carefully chosen and the weather conditions have to be right to let them spread their wings.

You need a decent wind. It has been unusually warm and very calm with very little wind, said Dr Mee. Secondly, to quote an estate agent it is location, location, location. The Shannon Estuary fits the bill perfectly.

Killarney and Lough Derg are freshwater lakes. We wanted to release them in a more marine environment but they need trees to nest in and cover for the release as well. It took a bit of finding but we found a nice spot along the Shannon Estuary said Dr Mee.

The Ballyorgan man said it would be impossible to release the eagles without co-operation of local farmers.

I have to praise the farmers. Obviously you have to release them on someones land. They have been very accommodating. I spoke to Limerick IFA chairman Shay Galvin and it has all been very positive.

I think things have changed from when birds were first released. There was a lot of fear and trepidation about what the birds might do. Now people are more relaxed. They are not doing any harm, feeding on fish. They are spectacular birds, said Dr Mee.

More good news is that the first home grown Irish bred white-tailed eagle, a female bred in Clare in 2015, has produced her own chicks and reared them successfully with a Norwegian male.

This is a hugely important milestone for the project and, we hope, the first of many of a new generation of Irish bred chicks to Irish parents. In addition, the release of young eagles on Lough Derg and the Shannon Estuary will be critical in helping bolster the existing population and form the basis of a viable self-sustaining Irish population.

The signs are good that we can achieve this with 10 or more pairs likely to breed annually over the next few years. Eagles are now nesting again in some of our most iconic scenic and cultural landscapes such as near Holy Island on Lough Derg, Killarney lakes, Connemara, Glengarriff and on the western tip of the Iveragh peninsula in Kerry, where they would have nested in historical times, perhaps even on the same islands used back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Its wonderful to see these birds back where they belong, he said.

For more Limerick news click here
RHA is a Scottish brand well known for its premium range of in-ear earphones. RHA recently launched the TrueConnect 2 true wireless earbuds, the successor to the True Connect which was launched last year. RHA claims that the TrueConnect 2 was built on the core principle of the TrueConnect with a huge improvement in battery life. Lets find out what RHA TrueConnect 2 brings to the already crowded true wireless earbuds market in India in this review.

Packaging

RHA TrueConnect 2 packaging flaunts its key features like IP55 rating, 44-hour battery life and 3-year warranty.

Box Contents

TrueConnect 2 Earbuds

TrueConnect 2 Charging Case

USB Type-A to USB Type-C Charging Cable

Silicone Ear tips in various sizes

Design

The charging case is made of soft plastic in black colour with a metallic clasp running around the case. The case is so well-built and feels very premium. The case weighs around 79 grams. The opening and closing of the case feels really good with a nice metallic click.

The case has a subtle RHA branding, three LEDs to show the battery percentage and a USB Type-C port for charging.

Inside the case we have the socket for two earbuds with a small marking to display where to put the right earbud.

Specifications

Driver unit : 6mm

Driver sensitivity : 98dB

Frequency response : 20  20,000 Hz

Weight : 6 grams each earbud

The TrueConnect 2 earbuds are made of soft matte plastic material. The earbuds have capacitive touch surfaces at the back to perform various functions like increasing/decreasing volume, changing tracks and activating voice assistants on the go. The touch surface is super sensitive to touch. I have accidentally paused the music many times while adjusting the earbuds. The volume control using touch surfaces is mostly a hit or miss. Since you have to tap twice to increase the volume and tap thrice to decrease the volume. Coming to the fit of the earbuds.

The TrueConnect 2 earbuds feel small and aimed at a very low profile look. The stem is not as long as Airpods and its very subtle. The earbuds feel so light at 6 grams and the fit is incredibly solid compared to other earbuds I have used. Even Though these dont come with noise cancellation they provide a really good noise isolation. They have two microphones, one in the stem and one on the backside of the bud. The phone call experience has been quite good and clear. The earbuds also comes with an IP55 rating making it ideal for casual walking and light gym activities.

Sound Quality

The sound signature of the RHA TrueConnect 2 can be described as fairly neutral. The people who prefer a neutral sound will like these. The mids and highs are quite good. The problem is with the sound stage. The sound stage is not wider as expected. The instruments and vocals seem much closer to the head. The vocals are clear and crisp but there are slight issues I noticed with the female vocals which made me increase volume at times to listen to the voice clearly. The bass is there but however feels a bit lacking and not well-defined. The low-end bass misses out the thump and rumble. Overall these pair of earbuds sound fairly balanced and serve the purpose very well of everyday listening. The microphone performance of the TrueConnect 2 is pretty good. The two mic setups help reduce the distortion and noise to a limit. The audio is quite clear for voice calls.

There are small latency issues during volume control and changing tracks. The audio latency is on the higher side during gaming and video playback.

Battery Life

The RHA TrueConnect 2 comes rated with 9.5 hours with a charging case providing another 34.5 hours of battery life. The battery life according to my usage is around 9.2 hours with 80% volume most of the time. The charging case provides 3 hours of playback with 15 minutes of charging. However, the full charge of the buds takes around 70 minutes and the charging case took around 3 hours. This is an impressive battery life figure for a TWS.

Conclusion

The RHA TrueConnect 2 is priced at Rs.12,999. You can buy it from the HeadphoneZone. For the price RHA provides a well-built pair of earbuds with good balance sound and an impressive battery life. The noise isolation is very good as well. But it misses out on some things like auto pause when you remove the earbuds and multipoint pairing which other similar priced TWS provides.

Pros

Bluetooth 5.0

Lightweight

Impressive build quality

Well Balanced Sound

Great battery life

3 years Warranty

Cons
On Saturday afternoon, a large crowd of more than 100 far-right activists, including Proud Boys and armed militia members, descended on Portland, Ore., staging a "Back the Blue" rally in front of the Justice Center that houses the downtown police precinct. Hundreds of antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters gathered to oppose the far-right crowd.

People in the far-right crowd came armed with paintball guns, metal rods, aluminum bats, fireworks, pepper spray, rifles and handguns. Some people in the opposing left-leaning crowd brought rocks, fireworks and bottles filled with chemical solutions. Both crowds sported shields and helmets.

The two groups sparred for more than two hours, as people exchanged blows, fired paintballs at each other and blasted chemicals indiscriminately into the crowd. People lobbed fireworks back and forth. At least one person was hit in the abdomen with a device that flashed and exploded, causing bleeding.

The rally followed a much smaller right-wing event last week that ended with gunfire. On Wednesday, Portland police arrested and seized a gun from 27-year-old Skylor Noel Jernigan, a far-right activist who has frequently rallied against antifascists in the city in recent years. Many of the same people came out again Saturday, including Alan Swinney, who brandished a gun and pointed it at the opposing crowd.

As the brawls unfolded, Portland police officers remained at a distance. They made several announcements over loudspeakers, encouraging the crowds to "self-monitor for criminal activity," even as people beat others with sticks, and at least two right-wing activists brandished handguns.

"Each skirmish appeared to involve willing participants and the events were not enduring in time, so officers were not deployed to intervene," the Portland Police Bureau said in a statement.

Police said they did not stop the violence, although the event met the criteria to be declared a riot, because too few officers were available to respond and they deemed it too dangerous to intervene. Officers were tired from responding to a much smaller and less volatile protest that was declared a riot the night before, the bureau said in a statement, and incident commanders also had concerns that officers would be targeted by the crowd.

"PPB members have been the focus of over 80 days of violent actions directed at the police, which is a major consideration for determining if police resources are necessary to interject between two groups with individuals who appear to be willingly engaging in physical confrontations for short durations," the bureau said in a statement. "While the activity in the group met the definition of a riot, PPB did not declare one because there were not adequate police resources available to address such a declaration."

The Portland Police Bureau has struggled to quell confrontations between far-right groups and antifascists in the city since at least 2017, when a string of violent riots broke out over the summer and fall.

The decision not to intervene was a striking contrast to police tactics at several left-leaning Black Lives Matter protests in recent weeks. Officers have consistently declared unlawful assemblies and riots at nighttime protests that have devolved into property damage and projectiles thrown at police. Although those events have involved significant property damage at times, they have not involved firearms or rampant brawling among demonstrators.

Several people were injured in the chaos at the warring protests. Dakota Means, 25, was hit in the eye with a paintball fired by a man in the far-right crowd wearing a tactical vest with a "Texas" patch across his chest.

"I counted six shots - three of them whizzed past me, two of them landed in front of me, but the last one hit me right in the corner my eye, right where the bridge of my nose is," Means said. "I stumbled back and dropped to my knees and passed out for about a minute and then when I woke up there was medics all around me trying to figure out what was happening."

Means, who described himself as mixed-race and a Marine Corps veteran, said that he was at the rally to support Black Lives Matter and to oppose a right-wing crowd that was threatening to shoot civilians.

"They're not welcome in the city," he said. "I'm gonna make sure they're ran out."

The right-wing crowd chanted "USA! USA!" and expletive-filled chants against antifa. The opposing leftists responded with shouts of "Go home, Nazis."

After more than two hours of violent clashes, the far-right crowd retreated to their cars. Antifa demonstrators followed them as they moved through downtown to a parking garage a few blocks away. The two groups lobbed rocks at each other and exchanged more pepper spray.

Amid the right-wing crowd was a well-known Proud Boy, Tusitala "Tiny" Toese, who has frequently brawled in Portland since early 2017.

Last year, he pleaded guilty in a 2018 assault in exchange for a two-year probation that requires him to stay away from protests until his probationary period ends in 2021. Even before he showed up at Saturday's rally, there was an active warrant for Toese's arrest for violating other terms of his probation.

As the far-right crowd left downtown Portland, Toese walked past several Portland police officers who did not attempt to apprehend him.

After the far-right groups had cleared out of downtown, members of the left-leaning crowd reconvened in Terry Schrunk Plaza, which is federal property. Federal police declared the gathering an unlawful assembly and drove the protesters out of the plaza, though the crowd had become largely peaceful as the afternoon waned.
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Faculty across California's 115 community colleges are facing similar challenges this year when it comes to remote learning. Instructors from Sacramento to San Diego need to keep students engaged and prepare them for an increasingly uncertain job market when they graduate.

These common challenges present an opportunity for faculty to learn from each other, and the statewide Information Communication Technologies (ICT) team is helping them do just that through an ongoing webinar series.

Over 30 edited, transcribed webinars of interest to CTE Faculty in IT Future and past webinars at ICTdmsector.org

The series is part of a broader effort by the ICT sector team of State and Regional Directors to keep faculty informed through newsletters, social media and other digital communication tools. Nearly 40 webinars have been held thus far, receiving nearly 3,000 views. Topics include engaging employers, labor market trends and strategies for teaching IT and cybersecurity courses remotely. Registration information for upcoming webinars and access to previous presentations can be found at https://ictdmsector.org/educator-webinars/ .

Some of the most popular sessions included:

The webinar series has drawn positive reviews from faculty throughout the state, as well as California Community Colleges leadership. More than 90% of community college faculty said the webinar series helped them feel more engaged with the ICT educator community, and 97% said they plan to continue attending the presentations this fall.

"I am especially impressed by the ICT Educator Webinar series that was specifically produced for faculty," said Dr. Lynn Shaw, Career Technical Education Curriculum Director for California Community Colleges Academic Senate. "This is an excellent example of a project that directly benefits faculty, especially in this COVID-19 era."

This fall, the series will address important topics including the shortage of cybersecurity professionals, the need for new skills in the 'distance economy' and how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformations on a global scale. All interested educators are invited to attend these sessions. Registration information for upcoming webinars and access to previous presentations can be found at https://ictdmsector.org/educator-webinars/ .

Contact:

Nicole Sherman, (714) 334-0042

[email protected]

SOURCE Information Communication Technologies

Related Links

https://ictdmsector.org


Just last week Thunberg was in Berlin to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg said Monday she has returned to school after a year off campaigning to curb climate change.

"My gap year from school is over, and it feels so great to finally be back in school again!" the 17-year-old tweeted, attaching a smiling photo of herself with a schoolbag on her back and her hands resting on a bicycle.

Thunberg did not say in which city or school she would be continuing her studies.

Since her last school year finished in June 2019, the teenager's travels around the world meant that she ended up doing lessons remotely.

Rather than head into the final years of secondary school, she travelled across the Atlantic by sailing boat -- hoping to highlight the carbon emissions of flying.

Her ultimate destination had been the COP25 UN climate conference in Chilean capital Santiago.

But the event was ultimately shifted to Madrid because of massive unrest in Chile, leaving Thunberg to sail back from the US to Europe on board a catamaran belonging to a young Australian couple.

While in North America, Thunberg rebuked world leaders at the UN, had a repeat visit with former US President Barack Obama, was given the keys to the city of Montreal and travelled around the continent in a Tesla electric car lent by former California governor and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

hdy/tgb/pvh
OTTAWA - Conservative members sought stability Monday in choosing Erin O'Toole as leader after a campaign where he focused on keeping the party close to its "true blue" fundamentals.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 23/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA - Conservative members sought stability Monday in choosing Erin O'Toole as leader after a campaign where he focused on keeping the party close to its "true blue" fundamentals.

O'Toole secured his victory in the leadership race after three rounds of counting.

The results had been expected Sunday night but were delayed into the early hours of Monday morning after problems opening the envelopes containing several thousand of the estimated 175,000 ballots sent in by mail.

"To the millions of Canadians that are still up, that I'm meeting tonight for the first time: Good morning. I'm Erin O'Toole, you're going to be seeing and hearing a lot from me in the coming weeks and months," O'Toole said in his victory speech.

"But I want you to know from the start that I am here to fight for you and your family."

His victory over rival Peter MacKay could spell the end of MacKay's political career. It is also likely to immediately raise questions about the future for progressive Conservatives in the party, who hoped that with MacKay, the party could finally move past the debates around social conservative issues.

In a message on social media, MacKay offered his congratulations to O'Toole after the hard-fought campaign.

"It's now time for our (Conservative) party and movement to come together, and to focus on what's most important: ensuring our country gets moving in the right direction again," he said.

Even if MacKay had won, he would have found himself grappling with the surprise success of Leslyn Lewis, the Toronto lawyer who placed third in the contest, despite never holding office and entering the race as a near-total unknown to most, but not all.

Conservative Party of Canada Leader Erin O'Toole speaks after his win at the 2020 Leadership Election, in Ottawa on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who had endorsed O'Toole, called Lewis a friend, and said her showing in the campaign remarkable.

"Leslyn has broken through many barriers to become a significant voice in Canadian political life. I hope and expect to see great things from her in the future!" he wrote on Twitter early Monday.

Derek Sloan, who was also running with the support of social conservatives, placed fourth with 4,864 of the available points after the first round of counting.

O'Toole's victory reflects a pitch he'd made to both their supporters in the waning weeks of the race, asking them to use the ranked ballot to make him their number 2 or number 3 choice.

His sell: with a seat in Parliament, and the political experience necessary for the job, he was the best choice to lead the party forward, but he would ensure their views would remain respected as well.

A television that will show the broadcast announcing the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada displays a message that the stream will start soon, as the party continues to experience delays due to ballot counting, in Ottawa, moments before midnight on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

Bringing together the party's various factions will be one of O'Toole's challenges, and the results also showed some fault lines regionally.

In the first round, Lewis beat out both O'Toole and MacKay in Saskatchewan and placed second to O'Toole in Alberta, a reflection of her ability to connect strongly with the grassroots there.

With none of the four candidates hailing from the West, all eyes had been on how the party's western base would voice its concerns over the candidates and the campaigns in the vote.

O'Toole spoke to them, to voters in Quebec, and to all prospective Conservative voters in his speech Monday morning, saying that no matter a person's race or religion, sexual orientation, how long they've been in Canada, income level or education, they matter.

"You are an important part of Canada and you have a home in the Conservative Party of Canada," he said.

Peter MacKay, leadership candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada, watches a broadcast show that will announce the party's new leader with his wife Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay and son Kian, 7, in Ottawa on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

O'Toole takes over the party  and the job of Official Opposition leader  exactly a month before the minority Liberal government will deliver a throne speech laying out a post-pandemic recovery plan.

The vote on the speech is a confidence motion and the Liberals have all but dared the Tories to try to bring them down.

The Liberals congratulated O'Toole but also warned him.

"We have a real chance to build a Canada that is healthier and safer, greener, more fair, and more competitive, and while we will have our differences, we hope the Conservative leader will join us in that work," party president Suzanne Cowan said in a statement.

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"We also hope Mr. O'Toole will reconsider continuing to push the same policies of Stephen Harper and Andrew Scheer that he also proposed in this leadership campaign. They would take Canada backward by making harmful cuts to services that Canadians count on, weakening Canada's gun control laws, rolling back our work to fight climate change, and much more."

Much of the leadership race itself was shaped by the pandemic. The vote was supposed to take place in June, but was pushed back and for a time, the campaign itself was paused.

A leadership convention, the kind filled with thousands of supporters, was jettisoned in favour of a hybrid in-person and virtual results reveal after an entirely mail-in ballot vote.

Those had to be returned by Friday. While counting was underway throughout Sunday, the machines tasked with slicing envelopes malfunctioned, requiring several thousand ballots to be extracted and replicated by hand under the close eye of scrutineers.

It led to an excruciating wait for the candidates, their campaigns, and the party staff and volunteers. MacKay passed the time doing push-ups in his hotel suite, O'Toole doing live Zoom chats with supporters.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 24, 2020.
Respond to Gods Call to Seek Justice

God loves justice and calls His people to seek it. But how do we respond to our complexand brokencriminal justice system?

Outrageous Justice is a free small group study developed by Prison Fellowship  to help followers of Jesus explore the American criminal justice system through a biblical lens and learn hands-on ways to pursue justice, hope, and healing in your community.

WHY DO WE NEED OUTRAGEOUS JUSTICE?

God calls us to remember the prisoner (Hebrews 13:3)a call that is more urgent than ever, as witnessed in the alarming statistics about our criminal justice system.

2.2 million Americans are in jail or prison.

70 million adults have a criminal record.

2.7 million children have a parent behind bars.

4.5 million Americans are on probation or parole.

2 out of 3 released prisoners will be re-arrested within three years.

28,000+ people are arrested every day.

OUTRAGEOUS JUSTICE IS OFFERED FREE BY PRISON FELLOWSHIP

Many places of worship are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so this is an excellent opportunity to participate in an exploration of Gods heart for justice. You can request your free digital or hard copy that will include a study guide with action steps, teaching videos, and more. You can host a study of your own or join a free Online Outrageous Justice Small Group.
Australia is facing its first recession in 30 years. The Covid-19 pandemic ended an unprecedented period for the countrys economy which expanded consecutively for decades. Even during the financial crisis of 2008, Australia managed to prevent the faith of other countries. The most obvious reason is the close economic relations with the worlds economic growth engine: China. Canberra, however, has become increasingly bellicose in its opposition to Beijing in numerous cases since the pandemic started.

Australia has managed to balance the countrys most important trade ties concerning China with political and security ties concerning its Western allies and the U.S. more specifically. That has become more difficult recently as Canberra voiced opposition to Beijings handling of the pandemic and internal human rights issues. There is even a discussion of a decoupling that is desirable according to an Australian parliamentary inquiry. In contrast to the United States, however, this is easier said than done.

First, Australia exports either low-value goods or products that can be easily replaced by alternative exporters such as LNG. Chinese importers can increase energy imports from, lets say, Qatar or Indonesia with relative ease. Especially as demand has collapsed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, exporters have fewer options meaning Chinas position has strengthened.

Second, the Chinese economy will remain the biggest contributor to global economic growth despite the trade war with the U.S. and the pandemic. While the Asian countrys economy took a brutal hit during the lockdown in the first quarter of the year, in the second-quarter, GDP grew by an surprising 3.2 percent. With these numbers, China is expected to become the only major economy to expand this year. Related: German Scientists Find New Way To Extract Lithium

Third, Chinese demand is essential to cushion the effects of the coming economic crisis. The bellicose language of certain Australian politicians has created the unflattering presumption that Australia is doing Donald Trumps bidding. The Chinese know they are acting from a position of strength and that Australia is more dependent on them than the other way around. The suspension of imports concerning Australian barley and beef and a warning for Chinese students and tourists against racism showed Beijings many instruments in dealing with Canberra.

According to Keith Pitt, Minister of Resources, weve had over $600 billion worth of investments in the last 10 years. That is a significant investment in resources. A large portion of the production capacity is aimed at the Chinese market. Recently, the insatiable demand for iron ore was underlined with BHP reporting a record export of 1,072 mtpa in June.

The presidency of Donald Trump is creating a difficult political environment for Chinese businesses. Beijing realizes that the current arduous situation wont change any time soon. Sustainable business ties are becoming more important and, therefore, diversification is also high on the Chinese agenda.

Australias mining and energy sectors are attractive due to their efficiency and low costs of production in the country. Political calibrations could change that. Concerning natural gas, the Power of Siberia pipeline is already in operation, making Russia the most important new supplier this year. Also, Beijing may prefer strengthening and extending energy ties with Moscow to lessen dependence on less friendly nations. This could be bad news for exporters in Australia.

Other analysts are warning that Canberras confrontational policies with China could alter the latters investment policies. Beijing strongly encourages and provides favorable funding for investments in African countries that could soon replace Australias mining sector. Trade ties with the continent have been expanding for two decades and the latest tensions with the West could give an additional push to diversify. Projects in among others Algeria, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Gabon, Nigeria, and South Africa are under study or being developed.

The growing trade ties with Africa serve another purpose, namely serving the growing and dynamic population of the continent. As the middle class expands, China will be able to supply ever-larger volumes of products such as household appliances, phones and other consumer products.

While China is facing structural challenges in the West, ties with the developing world are likely to remain growing. Therefore, the latest push by countries such as Australia to decouple could backfire in the long run as China will remain the most important industrial country in the global supply chain.

By Vanand Meliksetian for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
A five-storey building collapsed at Mahad in Maharashtras Raigad district around 6.50 pm on August 24 killing one person and injuring several others. Around 50 persons are still feared to be trapped under the debris.

Three teams of five BN National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) from Pune have reached the spot to carry out rescue operations. According to a Hindustan Times report, 25 persons have been rescued.

Manikrao Jajtap, ex-MLA, Mahad, said: We have already initiated the evacuation work with earth moving machines. In the initial first two hours, we were able to bring out 25 persons."

Raigad district collector Nidhi Chaudhari informed that initially, only the top three floors of the 10-year-old multi-storey building had collapsed.

Home Minister Amit Shah has informed that he has spoken to the NDRF DG and asked them to provide all possible assistance.

The incident occurred when a G+4 building collapsed in Kajalpura area of Raigads Mahad city.Earlier on August 24, a 50-year-old house had collapsed in Maharashtras Nagpur city, in which one person was killed and four injured.
Announcement of Periodic Review: Moody's announces completion of a periodic review of ratings of Hillenbrand, Inc.

Global Credit Research - 24 Aug 2020

New York, August 24, 2020 -- Moody's Investors Service ("Moody's") has completed a periodic review of the ratings of Hillenbrand, Inc. and other ratings that are associated with the same analytical unit. The review was conducted through a portfolio review in which Moody's reassessed the appropriateness of the ratings in the context of the relevant principal methodology(ies), recent developments, and a comparison of the financial and operating profile to similarly rated peers. The review did not involve a rating committee. Since 1 January 2019, Moody's practice has been to issue a press release following each periodic review to announce its completion.

This publication does not announce a credit rating action and is not an indication of whether or not a credit rating action is likely in the near future. Credit ratings and outlook/review status cannot be changed in a portfolio review and hence are not impacted by this announcement. For any credit ratings referenced in this publication, please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page on www.moodys.com for the most updated credit rating action information and rating history.

Key rating considerations are summarized below.

Hillenbrand, Inc.'s (Hillenbrand) Ba1 senior unsecured rating reflects largely predictable revenues from its Batesville segment (20% of revenues), which is slowly declining but maintains high margins and low capital expenditure needs that translate into solid free cash flow. To offset, Hillenbrand has increased its geographic and end-market diversification, as well as scale that results from the Process Equipment Group's (PEG) growth and through the 2019 acquisition of Milacron, a leading manufacturer of plastic technology and processing equipment.

Batesville's contribution to Hillenbrand's cash flow and diversification will be waning over time. Equally challenging is managing the ongoing transformation to a higher growth, industrial-focused company that is more vulnerable to economic cycles. The company has underperformed relative to our expectations following the Milacron acquisition, with weaker than anticipated profits and cash flow. As a result, financial leverage is more elevated than expected and will take longer to bring down. In addition, the COVID-driven recession will weigh on near-to-intermediate term earnings and cash flow.

Story continues

This document summarizes Moody's view as of the publication date and will not be updated until the next periodic review announcement, which will incorporate material changes in credit circumstances (if any) during the intervening period.

The principal methodology used for this review was Manufacturing Methodology published in March 2020. Please see the Rating Methodologies page on www.moodys.com for a copy of this methodology.

This announcement applies only to EU rated and EU endorsed ratings. Non EU rated and non EU endorsed ratings may be referenced above to the extent necessary, if they are part of the same analytical unit.

This publication does not announce a credit rating action. For any credit ratings referenced in this publication, please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page on www.moodys.com for the most updated credit rating action information and rating history.

Eric Greaser Vice President - Senior Analyst Corporate Finance Group Moody's Investors Service, Inc. 250 Greenwich Street New York, NY 10007 U.S.A. JOURNALISTS: 1 212 553 0376 Client Service: 1 212 553 1653 Robert Jankowitz MD - Corporate Finance Corporate Finance Group JOURNALISTS: 1 212 553 0376 Client Service: 1 212 553 1653 Releasing Office: Moody's Investors Service, Inc. 250 Greenwich Street New York, NY 10007 U.S.A. JOURNALISTS: 1 212 553 0376 Client Service: 1 212 553 1653

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Parents fear making kids sit transfer tests in grammar school halls could put their health in danger.

Naomi McBurney began a campaign for them to be allowed to take the exam at their own primary schools before Covid-19 hit. But she said the pandemic and the the restrictions made it unsafe for children to "burst their bubbles" and sit the exam in large groups.

On Thursday the Health Minister announced new limits on social gatherings. He also said he expects there will be Covid cases in schools when they reopen.

Mrs McBurney's petition has topped 6,500 signatures.

She added: "This is imperative now, we've only a few months left and it's [the pandemic] getting worse not better.

"These private providers are saying it's OK to bring hundreds, thousands of primary school students together who wouldn't normally mix together."

But one of the test providers, the Association for Quality Education (AQE), said it would be impossible for children to take the test in their own school unless it was allowed at every campus, but there "no prospect of this happening".

The Department of Education said it was for individual schools to organise procedures with the testing organisations.
A County Kildare mother is desperately appealing for help for her teenage daughter who she fears will die from Anorexia Nervosa, which stemmed from being bullied during primary school. Now a 15-year-old, the girl spends the day from 8am until 10pm, pacing the house, afraid to sit down in case she will put on weight.

Her mother says that she has been in hospital, with just 14 hours to live, with her heart-rate dropping. The mum added: She has spent three weeks in a heart unit. I watched her, she still managed to hide food. I found food in her cardigan pockets, down the back of drawers, in her late nannys memory box, pockets, coats, anything. I am crying out for help.

The mother, who wishes to remain anonymous in the media, says that there is inadequate resources in Ireland to treat children with Anorexia Nervosa.

She said that the hospitals in Ireland are not equipped to deal with children who have the condition. The family are trying to raise 25,000 in a bid to get her daughter the treatment that she needs in the UK.

The mother, said: She self-harms due to being around food. All the food from her school lunches would be hidden everywhere. I took two bags of food out of her room when she got admitted. She paces from 8am until 10pm.

She said: My daughter was very close to my mother. After her nanny died she went vegetarian, and then after that she got bullied. The girls got jealous that she was making friends, she got bullied on Snapchat. She is not allowed to use the phone. They were sending her pictures, they screen shot a picture of her with her father, and said, you are after getting very chubby. They were sending her messages calling her fat, telling her that she was ugly. All I could do was take the phone and internet off her.

The girl was attending a school in Kildare and the children who were bullying her were not in the same school.

The mother said: I am urgently appealing to the public to help me save my daughters life and getting her to the UK for treatment. She was the most bubbly child, out of a group of kids, she was the one who would laugh the loudest.

During the lockdown, this girls parents say that they were unable to access the hospital that she was in for 13 weeks, and that not having her parents to visit during this time has left her in a worse condition with post-traumatic stress. She is now at home with her family.

The HSE say they cant comment on operational matters. To contribute to the fundraiser, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/fighting-ana?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_campaign=p_cp%20share-sheet&fbclid=IwAR31uNjfBmIfLRFLJGPYR1rPQzL-e6gj3Iz9MGo1YGhMwvGADtp
The military junta in Mali proposed a three-year transitional period in the country where President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was ousted last week.

The military junta in Mali are proposing a three-year transitional period in the country where President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was ousted last week, Journal du Mali reports. According to the publication, General Mahamane Toure, a former leader of the Malian army, could become the transitional leader of the country. RFI radio reports that during the three-year transitional period, Mali will have a military-led government.

A delegation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) headed by former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, which arrived in Mali for talks with the military junta on Saturday, called on transferring power in the country to a civilian government, a source told Sputnik.

The delegation also highlighted the efforts of Malis military in avoiding bloodshed in the country after the recent coup. The ECOWAS delegation will continue talks with Malian stakeholders on Monday. A source told Sputnik that three members of the ECOWAS delegation plan to meet with Keita.

Also read: Trump announces emergency authorization of convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19 patients

Also read: US Elections 2020: Donald Trumps new commercial ft. PM Modi aims to woo Indian Americans, watch here

The Malian military ousted Keita last Tuesday. The National Committee for the Salvation of the People was then established.

According to Ismael Wague, a spokesperson for the committee, the military junta plans to appoint either a civilian or military leader for the transitional period in Mali.

Also read: Pak lied about sheltering Dawood, India should press for his deportation: CBIs Former Joint Director
Parents living in low-income highrises in Torontos Thorncliffe Park community are worried about sending their children back to school this fall.

Not only are they fretting over the possibility their youngsters could come in contact with the coronavirus in class, theyre also concerned about getting their kids to school on time, given the new rules about social distancing in their buildings elevators.

Residents are already accustomed to packed elevators at the best of times. Social distancing rules calling for no more than two or three people in an elevator at a time will only exacerbate problems when school resumes, parents in the highly populated Thorncliffe Park community say.

There are about 35 mid-rise and highrise buildings in Thorncliffe, an area near Eglinton Avenue East and Overlea Boulevard, with a population of just over 21,000, according to census figures. The median household income is about $47,000 a year compared to $66,000 annually for all of Toronto.

Some residents who reached out to the Star recently said that before COVID, they often left earlier in the morning with their children for school, because the elevators are so slow and unreliable.

Some have gone for walks after school for more than an hour to wait until the crowds for elevators died down.

One resident said when she needs to leave her building she often travels up several floors from her own so she can get a spot on the elevator going down.

The situation will only become worse when schools open, residents said.

There will be lots of moms and dads coming down elevators with their children in the morning for school  how will we handle this? said Abdul Rauf Jangda, a father of four who lives on the 18th floor at 49 Thorncliffe Park Dr., and who plans to send three of his four children  ages 9, 14 and 15  to school.

Lots of families will be having more challenges, he added.

His building has 20 floors and about 400 units. The building, about 50 years old, has issues with its elevators, Jangda said, adding that of the four, one is often out of service.

He estimates there are about 1,000 children or young students in his building alone, attending schools in the area.

Jangda, an electronic circuit designer who chairs his buildings tenants association, said his highrise and others in Thorncliffe were designed for fewer people than currently live there.

More people are living in these units now due to economic constraints, he said.

Munira Khilji, a mother of two school-aged children and a community leader who lives at 85 Thorncliffe, a 44-floor tower, said elevators are one of the biggest concerns for her and fellow residents.

There are huge bottlenecks. On a regular day the elevator situation in Thorncliffe is already a challenge, she said.

Throw in the social distancing requirements and children heading to school and there will be a big mess, Khilji said.

Theres going to be more tension, more arguments, more stress, said Khilji, who plans to send her children to school.

She thinks a lot of parents may give up on the elevators and keep their children home.

Her building has six elevators that were installed about two years ago, so they work fairly well, but there are often waits of 20 minutes or more due to so many people using them, she said.

Shakhlo Sharipova, who lives at 43 Thorncliffe, has two children, one of whom has special needs.

She is also planning to send her children to school but one of the four new elevators is usually out of service, she said.

Because her son, who has autism, gets agitated waiting for the elevators and bangs his head on the walls in the lobby, Sharipova takes him for walks for an hour or more after school until the lines to go up the elevators die down.

She also said she thinks parents may give up, or instead of sending their children to school five days a week, may opt for only three days.

Schools will need to be very flexible, perhaps leaving their doors open longer so students can get in, Sharipova said.

Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants Association, said about half the citys housing are rental highrises. Many of those buildings have elevator problems, so a lot of children could be impacted once schools reopen.

You could have hundreds of kids in buildings lining up for elevators, said Dent. Many might not be wearing masks, so theres a contagion risk there too.

Elevator maintenance and repair issues need to be made a priority to fix service backlogs, Dent added.

Morguard North American Residential REIT, a real estate investment trust that owns Sharipovas, Jangdas and Khiljis buildings and three others in the Thorncliffe Park community, said in a statement that its developing a plan, guided by the protocols from public health authorities, to ease traffic in its buildings as students return to school.

Recognizing that elevator capacity is limited by government guidelines, additional measures are being introduced, the company said. It includes, during peak times, a member of our staff will be in the lobby to help direct traffic, stairwells will be directional, and elevators will be in full service.

Rachel Chernos Lin, the trustee for the area, said in an email that several Thorncliffe Park residents along with school staff have talked to her about the challenges that many families face getting in and out of the many apartment buildings in a timely manner when school resumes, while social distancing.

I will be raising this issue with the administrators at Thorncliffe Park schools when they return so that it can be taken into consideration as they finalize local plans. My hope is that schools will work with the parent community and possibly community groups and tenant associations to support any unique needs, she said.

As for kids arriving late due to elevators, Chernos Lin said shes sure everyone (at the schools) will be understanding early on as everyone gets used to new routines. We will likely be having a staggered start to the school year, so this should make things easier too.

Toronto public health advises that parents in highrises in the area with elevator issues leave earlier for school.
UNODC supports the municipality of Queretaro, Mexico, in responding to local safety and security needs in times of COVID-19

 UNODC



Queretaro (Mexico), 24 August 2020  During an interactive webinar, policymakers and practitioners discussed the progress made by the Municipality of Queretaro, Mexico, in implementing the recommendations of the 2019 Local Safety Audit, the first audit of its kind ever conducted in the country.

The audit report, developed by UNODC Mexico and the Center of Excellence in Statistical Information on Government, Crime, Victimization and Justice, highlighted a number of crime and victimization concerns as well as a set of recommendations to address them. Key challenges that were raised included gender-based and domestic violence, robbery and theft, drug use, arms trafficking and homicides. From May 2019 until June 2020, UNODC monitored government actions to implement the recommendations and offered technical assistance where needed.

In his opening remarks, Kristian Holge, Representative of the UNODC Liaison and Partnership Office in Mexico, recognized Local Safety Audits as an opportunity to strengthen alliances between citizens and the local government that contribute to building peace and security. Salome Flores, Coordinator of the Center of Excellence, raised the importance of monitoring the local trends, government actions and their impact.

The Municipal President of Queretaro, Luis Bernardo Nava Guerrero, presented the city's efforts to reduce violence through a preventive approach and acknowledged the relevance of the information produced by the Local Safety Audit. He mentioned that 77% of all the recommendations had been addressed so far. He specifically raised the importance of a comprehensive crime prevention model and noted the efforts of the municipality to improve trust between citizens and the local police, which, he said, showed an increase from 7.3% in March 2018 to 14.5% in March 2020*.

A key focus of the webinar was to evaluate the impact that mandatory lockdowns and social distancing policies have on domestic violence and abuse. With this in mind, the Minister of Public Security in the Municipality launched a local Campaign for Vulnerable Groups in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which includes audiovisual material informing about different forms of violence and abuse in times of COVID-19, support services and help lines, as well as health-related messages.

The above activities take place in the context of the global project "Evidence-based policies for improved community safety in cities of Latin America and Africa" and benefits from close cooperation between UNODC and UN-Habitat. The project, which is focused on the implementation of participatory crime diagnoses in eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality (Durban, South Africa), Cali (Colombia) and Queretaro (Mexico), aims to strengthen public policies on security and crime prevention at the local level in order to improve citizens life quality while promoting sustainable development.

___________________________________________________

* As per the National Survey of Urban Public Security of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexico

Further Information

The Audit Report

https://auditoriadeseguridad-cdeunodc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/191008_ALS_Queretaro_Ingles.pdf

Local Safety Audits in Mexico

https://auditoriadeseguridad-cdeunodc.org/

Inter-Agency Statement on Violence against Women and Girls in the Context of COVID-19

https://www.unodc.org/documents/Advocacy-Section/Inter-Agency_Statement_on_VAW_and_COVID_Final.pdf

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) response  UNODC Thematic Brief on gender-based violence against women and girls

https://www.unodc.org/documents/Gender/Thematic_Gender_Briefs_English/GBVAW_and_UNODC_in_COVID19_final_7Apr2020.pdf

Center of Excellence in Statistical Information on Government, Crime, Victimization and Justice

http://www.cdeunodc.inegi.org.mx/
Photo: The Online Mom

A new school year is just around the corner, and this one will no doubt look different from more normal years.

While many parents are still wondering how classes will look and what extra steps are needed to protect their children, at the end of the day most kids will still be going back in some fashion.

That means the usual back-to-school routines will likely be followed.

But in these unusual times, when many Canadians are trying to be extra vigilant about their financial security, should the normal routines be followed?

For example, many parents seem to think that a whole new wardrobe is needed to kick off a new school year.

But is it really necessary? Are the clothes your kid is wearing this week going to be suddenly too small or out of fashion?

Dont get me wrong, I understand students have a list of school supplies they will need to pick up, but that doesnt mean a major spending spree needs to take place.

Half of those supplies are likely still sitting in a drawer from last year if you take some time to dig them out.

And yes, kids seem to grow incredibly quickly, so some new clothes may be required. But a complete wardrobe replacement should really be seen as excessive.

The point of all this? If you spend a bit of time creating a plan before you start spending on back to school wants or needs, youll be much less likely to over-spend.

As an added bonus, involving your child in the planning process can help them learn some valuable financial skills at the same time.

Before you go out shopping (or start shopping online), you should have a list of items you want and those that you definitely need. Consider buying only the items on the need side, or maybe putting a maximum budget to be spent on a few of the items on the want side.

You could even turn this into a friendly competition to see which kid can get everything on their need side for the least amount of money with a prize being an item from the wants.

A little bit of creativity here can go a long way.

When you add up the cost of school supplies, clothing, electronics, and field trip fee and extra-curricular activities, September is an expensive time  even more so in a year when many people have faced reduced hours, job losses or other financial setbacks.

Instead of spending too much on this years back-to-school needs and putting your finances further behind, approach this September with a financial plan to keep things on track.
Sushant Singh Rajputs father KK Singhs lawyer Vikas Singh has claimed that the late actors girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty didnt offer any condolences to his family after his death. Rhea has been named in the FIR filed by Sushants father, who has accused her and her family members of abetment to suicide.

Making new allegations at Rhea, Vikas Singh told IANS in an interview, Rhea has not cooperated with the family, she didnt even offer condolences to the family when the mishap took place. Moreover, when the request for CBI probe was made, they opposed it tooth and nail. She may have put out a video in support of the CBI probe but her legal team opposed the same strongly.

He also pointed out at the broken lockers at Sushants residence. Two lockers from Sushants home were broken, now we dont know who broke it, was it Rhea, was it the staff at his home or someone else, this is a matter of investigation and it would unfold when the CBI would proceed further in the matter, he said.

Vikas Singh said in a statement on Monday that Rhea will be summoned by the CBI only after it has done its spadework. They are examining everybody and once they are able to do their homework properly then only they will start grilling Rhea, he said. He also hinted at the possibility of Rheas arrest if she does not cooperate with the investigation or gives evasive answers.

Also read: Rhea Chakraborty will be summoned by CBI after it does its spadework: Sushant Singh Rajputs fathers lawyer

The CBI questioned Sushants friend Siddharth Pithani, cook Neeraj Singh and domestic help Deepesh Sawant at the DRDO guest house in Mumbai on Sunday. They also visited the actors flat in Bandra with them and the hospital where the actors autopsy was conducted.

Sushant was found dead at his residence on June 14. Preliminary reports claimed that he was suffering from depression and died by suicide.

If you need support or know someone who does, please reach out to your nearest mental health specialist. Helplines: Aasra: 022 2754 6669; Sneha India Foundation: +914424640050 and Sanjivini: 011-24311918

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SAN DIEGO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. today announced selections for the Qualcomm Small Business Accelerator Program, which is designed to help small businesses transition to a mobile-first digital work environment to thrive in today's business climate and set-up for success in the long-term. The comprehensive program was created to provide small businesses with products powered by Qualcomm Technologies solutions, collaboration tools, and technical and integration support, so that the selected businesses can continue to maintain operations throughout the current global pandemic and beyond.

Following the launch of the Qualcomm Small Business Accelerator Program in June, Qualcomm Technologies received more than 375 applications to the program, across 38 states and the District of Columbia. In reviewing the submissions, Qualcomm Technologies recognized ways in which its technology offerings could help small businesses with the digital gaps that prevented them from maintaining operations safely and efficiently. The selected 33 businesses span the healthcare, education, crisis response, arts, environmental services, and other industries, and most identified as women-owned, minority-owned, and/or veteran-owned.

Each selected small business will receive a unique variety of products and technical support valued at up to US$25,000, based on identified need. Product offerings may include mobile computing and connectivity solutions powered by Qualcomm Technologies solutions, such as Always-Connected PCs (4G and 5G cellular-connected laptops), Wi-Fi systems, mobile phones, Bluetooth enabled headsets and active mobile hotspots, along with technical and device integration support.

Official submission videos included songs, poems, and inspiring testimonials from passionate frontline workers, educators, and small business owners and their employees. "Conducting high quality online video-conferencing and whiteboarding internally and externally to improve overall customer experience was a huge motivation for our team to apply and build a relationship with Qualcomm Technologies," said Paul Francis, KIGT, a cleantech and EV charging business from Ontario, California and selected business for the program. "The KIGT team genuinely believes that together with the Qualcomm Technologies team, we can truly reshape 100 years of human habit."

"Becoming a Mobile-First business will go far beyond helping GITC's staff and faculty work more effectively," shared Jessica Baron, Executive Director of San Diego-based education nonprofit, Guitars in the Classroom. "It will supercharge our capacity to serve online, empowering hundreds more educators around the country to participate in our trainings and receive the resources they need to teach their students through the power of song. Through Qualcomm Technologies' generosity, we will now be able to scale up and move the needle on access to music as an integral part of cross-curricular learning for students everywhere."

Qualcomm Technologies and its ecosystem of partners share a commitment to empowering small businesses through technology, and we are pleased to have the support of the following 10 partners:

Bose (Bluetooth headsets)

Jabra (Bluetooth headsets)

Lenovo (5G-enabled PCs)

Linksys (Wi-Fi networking devices)

Microsoft (4G-enabled PCs and software solutions)

Motorola (mobile devices)

Samsung (mobile devices and the 4G-enabled Galaxy Book S PC)

Square (point of sale technology)

Targus (mobile docking stations)

Verizon Business (connectivity solutions)

To learn more about the Qualcomm Small Business Accelerator Program, please visit here.

"Maintaining powerful and stable network connectivity is crucial to business productivity and operations. To aid what is truly the heart and soul of the American economy, especially in these unprecedented times, Qualcomm Technologies and its partners are proud to support these deserving small businesses across the country," said Don McGuire, Vice President, Global Product Marketing, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "We are proud that with deep support from our partners we are able to help these small businesses receive the resources they need to function, collaborate and thrive, and in many cases reshape and transform their businesses through technology. We had an incredible applicant pool, and we're confident those selected will continue doing great work with the products and services from this program."

"At Linksys, we work to provide a networking experience that is reliable, high quality and the most secure under any circumstances, especially in the current remote working environment. Strong Wi-Fi connectivity is crucial for small businesses to prosper. We are excited to provide the best tools available to the selected businesses of the Qualcomm Small Business Accelerator Program and are encouraged by the diverse array of businesses participating in the program," said L.C. Wu, Chief Operating Officer, Connected Home Division (Linksys, Wemo, Phyn), Belkin International.

"Cloud services, software, and highly mobile, always connected devices are being embraced by businesses of all sizes across all industries, including small business," said Matt Barlow, Corporate Vice President of Surface Marketing at Microsoft. "Microsoft knows that our technologies and experiences will be key to helping businesses move forward, collaborate, and maintain safe operations regardless of size. We're pleased to support the selected businesses of the Qualcomm Small Business Accelerator Program through our software solutions including Windows 10, Microsoft 365 and our 4G-enabled Surface Pro X device."

"Small businesses are defined by ingenuity and resilience. At Samsung, we believe if you combine those attributes with the right technology and know-how, these vital businesses won't just survive but thrive, even in the most challenging times. That's why we are proud to support the Qualcomm Small Business Accelerator Program with PCs and mobile devices powered by Qualcomm Technologies. These devices will help level the playing field and help set up the selected businesses for success," said Taher Behbehani, SVP and Head of Mobile B2B, Samsung Electronics America.

"Our dedication to small businesses runs deep and our support of the Qualcomm Small Business Accelerator Program is an example of this commitment. This program will provide businesses with the support and resources they need during this challenging time," said TJ Fox, President, Verizon Business."

About Qualcomm

Qualcomm is the world's leading wireless technology innovator and the driving force behind the development, launch, and expansion of 5G. When we connected the phone to the internet, the mobile revolution was born. Today, our foundational technologies enable the mobile ecosystem and are found in every 3G, 4G and 5G smartphone. We bring the benefits of mobile to new industries, including automotive, the internet of things, and computing, and are leading the way to a world where everything and everyone can communicate and interact seamlessly.

Qualcomm Incorporated includes our licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of our patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of our engineering, research and development functions, and substantially all of our products and services businesses, including our QCT semiconductor business.

###

Qualcomm Small Business Accelerator Program is a program of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Qualcomm is a trademark or registered trademark of Qualcomm Incorporated.

LENOVO is a trademark of Lenovo.

Selected businesses are subject to verification.

Qualcomm Contacts:

Pete Lancia, Corporate Communications

Phone: 1-858-845-5959

Email: [email protected]

Mauricio Lopez-Hodoyan, Investor Relations

Phone: 1-858-658-4813

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.qualcomm.com


U.S. Rep. Andy Kim (D., N.J.) leaves a bookstore in Bordentown earlier this month. He was there to talk with small business owners. Read more

At the Heart of Bordentown Tavern, a neighborhood spot with a curved wooden bar, owner Mary Buhrer prides herself on being able to adapt. When her customers started changing, she added such dishes as tofu nuggets and meatless burgers to the menu.

We have a lot of young people moving to this area, she said earlier this month, her restaurant now outfitted with tented sidewalk tables because of the coronavirus. A lot of vegetarians. People who want to raise their children in a walkable neighborhood. People who care about the environment.

A city of fewer than 4,000 about 10 miles south of Trenton, Bordentown is getting more liberal. In 2018, 70% of those who cast ballots voted to send Democrat Andy Kim to Congress, more than twice the number who backed Republican Tom MacArthur  and compared with 55% for the Democratic candidate in 2016.

Bordentown, where Kim used to live, was one of the Burlington County communities that propelled him to victory two years ago. Now seeking reelection, Kim is expected to face a similarly close race this year in South Jerseys 3rd Congressional District.

And winning places such as Bordentown might not be enough.

 READ MORE: Former construction executive David Richter will face freshman Democratic Rep. Andy Kim in South Jersey

Less than 15 miles away is the border of deep-red Ocean County, part of which is also in the district. Down roads flanked by farmland and churches, on the way to beach towns, are parts of New Jersey where Democrats historically havent had a chance. In 2016, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 33 percentage points in Ocean County  his largest margin in the state.

The two counties underscore how Kims reelection campaign could make for one of the tightest congressional races in the country.

Its two truly distinct segments, said Patrick Murray, a longtime pollster at Monmouth University. Theres no overlap between the two in terms of how they act politically.

In between meeting with shopkeepers in Bordentown this month, Kim said his constituents are worried about the same things regardless of where they live: The pandemic and the economy have taken center stage, while concerns about taxes and the cost of health care persist.

On Long Beach Island, people are worried about flooding, but you go along the Rancocas Creek and theyve got flooding issues there, too, Kim said, referring to places in Ocean and Burlington Counties, respectively. When people have an opportunity to ask a question, theyre often very similar from place to place. Thats why you have to treat these communities equally, and understand that people just want to be talked to with respect about the things that are having an impact on their lives.

Made up of almost all of Burlington County and a large piece of Ocean County, the 3rd District is a longtime Republican stronghold in a Democratic state. Former Eagles tackle Jon Runyan represented the district from 2011 to 2015. Kim flipped it by fewer than 4,000 votes in 2018. If he wins again, hell be the first Democrat in decades to hold the seat for consecutive terms.

 READ MORE: Democrat Andy Kim claims win over U.S. Rep. Tom MacArthur in N.J.s 3rd Congressional District (from 2018)

A former national security aide under President Barack Obama, Kim has proven a prolific fund-raiser, especially for a freshman. Hes raised more than $4 million since joining Congress, and had $3.5 million in campaign cash at the end of June, according to federal filings.

The district spans the pricey Philadelphia media market and the even more expensive New York market, and spending on TV ads underscores how hard-fought the race could be: The campaigns and outside groups had combined to drop about $1.6 million on the airwaves through last week, with $10 million in planned spending through Election Day, according to the ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics.

Burlington County was swing territory a few decades ago, but as the population in towns along the Delaware River changed, it has shifted left. In 2018, Democrats took control of the countys governing board for the first time in 40 years. A year later, they captured all five seats.

About 40% of voters in the district are registered with no party affiliation, making them critical to the outcome of any general election. David Richter, the Republican challenging Kim, called Burlington a purple county where independent voters pick candidates, not parties. In Ocean County, he said, independents tend to vote Republican.

I dont have any doubt that Im going to win Ocean County, and Andy Kim is going to win Burlington, said Richter, a former construction executive who grew up in Burlington County and now lives in Ocean. Whoever wins their county bigger is going to Congress for the next two years.

Kim won 37% of the Ocean County vote in 2018. MacArthur, despite facing backlash from seniors and others for helping draft a bill that would have repealed the Affordable Care Act, won 60% of the vote.

Ocean County is more than 92% white, according to Census data, while Burlington County is younger and more diverse. Fewer residents of Ocean County have college degrees. Both counties have a significant veteran population, and each is home to a military base.

Frank Holman, chairman of the Ocean County Republican Committee, said congressional candidates have struggled with appealing to disparate voters on both sides of the district in recent years.

It comes down to whos more excited about the election, he said.

Ocean Countys population grew 5% over the last decade, due partly to its popularity as an affordable retirement destination near the beach. Orthodox and other Jewish communities put down roots in such towns as Lakewood, shoring up the Republican base, Holman said.

We have a more diverse population now, but theyve stayed in that solidly Republican column, he said.

 READ MORE: His seat at risk, U.S. Rep. Tom MacArthur tries to thread the Trump needle in tense race vs. Democrat Andy Kim in N.J. (from 2018)

State Sen. Troy Singleton, a Democrat who has represented Burlington County in Trenton since 2011, said Democrats have been able to win more local elections thanks not only to a changing population, but also as some voters grow weary of Trump.

People are getting so turned off, and thats created an environment that has put a wind at our backs, Singleton said. Its going to hurt the Republican Party.

Peg Houle, a Democrat running for a seat on her local township committee in Barnegat, Ocean County, said trying to make inroads in a heavily conservative community can be frustrating.

Houle moved to Barnegat five years ago with her husband to retire, and is now active in local politics. In an interview, she conceded she might not have chosen the area had she known what a dramatic effect Trump would have on the political environment.

A lot of Democrats here will not exactly broadcast that they are Democrats, she said. We all have friends who support Trump, and I know there have been some lost friendships.

But the districts divided voters can still find common ground. When she first ran unsuccessfully for township committee last year, Houle proposed ideas for revitalizing the downtown  one of which was to extend the hours of a farmers market to encourage shoppers to stay for dinner. This year, the committee did just that.

So, we dont disagree on everything, she said.
Coal tar derivatives company Epsilon Carbon on Monday said it is planning to invest Rs 500 crore over the next five years to manufacture graphite anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, marking its foray into battery material business. The battery material business will be housed under a new subsidiary, Epsilon Advanced Materials, the company said in a statement.

"The purpose of setting up the subsidiary is to become a preferred supplier of synthetic graphite material to cell manufacturers and energy storage device companies across the globe. The company plans to invest Rs 500 crore in next five years to establish 50,000 tonne anode material capacity by 2025," it said.

Epsilon has commissioned its new manufacturing facility in Karnataka to produce 5,000 tonne anode material annually.

It plans to triple this capacity to 15,000 tonne in 2021 and to 50,000 tonne per annum by 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront the importance of India's economic recovery based on principles of Aatmanirbhar Bharat. India has been pushing for an aggressive EV policy which encourages and ensures that the country's program keeps pace with the global developments," its Managing Director Vikram Handa said.

Historically, China has been supplying more than 80 percent of the global demand for graphite anodes to the total lithium-ion battery (LiB) supply chain.

"To make India self-reliant in e-mobility, the country is aiming towards establishing manufacturing leadership in the EV (electric vehicle) space and Epsilon Advanced Materials' manufacturing leadership in graphite anodes will make India self-sufficient for a key raw material for LiB cells," Handa added.

Apart from the anode material manufacturing facility, Epsilon Advanced Materials has also set up a target-oriented research and development laboratory to cover a complete array of carbon material testing as well as cell and pouch lithium battery cell testing to improve the quality of the material further by continuous development, the company said.
Actor Aamir Ali has shared a bunch of pictures from his Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations on Sunday. However, he was heavily trolled for it.

Aamir visited filmmaker Remo Dsouzas house to celebrate the festival. He then clicked some pictures with Remo and his wife Lizelle and with the decorated Ganpati idol. Faith, hope, wishes, love and blessings, thats what Ganpati this year looked like! With my constants @remodsouza @lizelleremodsouza #GanpatiBappaMorya #Ganpati #Ganesha #BappaMorya, he captioned his post.

Aamirs followers were disappointed at him for celebrating the Hindu festival. However, Aamir gave it back to the haters and replied, For me, God is one. I may pray to Allah, a friend of mine to Ganesha and another to Jesus! It is all about respecting each others beliefs, embracing the learnings of various religions and spreading love, peace, and positivity! We have a deadly virus and a pandemic to fight as a world, lets not break ourselves by fighting within. The screenshot of the message was shared by Pinkvilla.

Also read: Instructor who trained first batch of IAF female pilots slams Gunjan Saxena biopic: No one had to run to their room to change

Aamir was recently in news after rumours of his split with wife Sanjeeda Shaikh surfaced online. However, Aamir told Hindustan Times that All is OK. Aamirs last post about Sanjeeda was on her birthday in December. He wrote, Happy bday love.. Ull always be a part of me n in my heart always.. stay happy n blessed.. #happybirthday. Sanjeeda had also wished him on his birthday in September on Instagram with this message, @aamirali my wish for you is that you continue to love life and never stop dreaming ..i love u HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

Aamir said he was spending time in self-isolation reading books and watching shows. Its inspiring to see some amazing stories, especially German and Spanish shows, and there is something to take back from all other actors performances, he told HT in an interview.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden accepts the Democratic presidential nomination during a speech delivered for the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention from the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., on Aug. 20, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Biden Would Mandate COVID Vaccine

Commentary

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden clearly intends to fight COVID-19 by presidential fiat.

Biden has said that he would impose a national mandate to wear a mask any time you are outside. He also has said that if advised by the scientists, he would completely shut down the countrys economy again.

That brings us to the question of a nationwide vaccine mandate, already under active discussion in political and bioethical circles. President Donald Trump has already stated that he wants COVID-19 inoculations to be made available to the public as soon as humanly possiblethe point of Operation Warp Speedbut has also stated that such shots should be voluntary.

What about Biden? He hasnt said specifically but would probably sayas he has about masks and shutdownsthat he would listen to the experts. If so, there is every reason to believe Biden would impose a national mandate.

Its a well-known maxim in Washington that personnel is policy. The first among Bidens health care advisers is the Obamacare architect and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuelalso a good bet to be Bidens nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services.

Emanuel is a technocrats technocrat. He loves health-related mandates. Indeed, Obamacare was stuffed with them.

When COVID-19 first hit, Emanuel urged the economy to be closed for 18 months, the time then thought to be required to develop a vaccine. More recently, just as the economy is showing signs of renewed vigor, he was the lead signatory in an open letter signed by experts urging the government to impose a new forced six-week shutdown, and this time, do it right (as if the last one didnt cause enough harm).

Moreover, we already know that Emanuel believes in national vaccine mandates. Before the coronavirus was a dark cloud on the horizon, the technocrat published a piece in The New York Times, titled All Children Should Have to Get a Flu Shot, in which he wrote that all children 18 and under be required to take a flu shot every year.

He wrote: The freedom to allow your child to contract and transmit a deadly disease is hardly a real freedom worth protecting. In 1905, the Supreme Court recognized the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccinationin that case for smallpox. The court made it clear that the state may be justified in restricting individual liberty when great dangers threaten the safety of the general public.

This, even though the flu kills fewer than 200 children every year.

Emanuel forgot to mention that there has never been a vaccine mandate imposed on the entire country. Indeed, Jacobson v. Massachusettsthe case Emanuel referenceddoes not stand for the comprehensive proposition that the U.S. government can force everyone to take a vaccine.

Rather, the question was whether an order issued by the Cambridge, Massachusetts, health board requiring all residents to be inoculatedissued during a localized smallpox outbreakviolated the U.S. Constitution. The court said no. In other words, the case approved the very federalism approach that Trump champions, not the imposition of national mandates of the kind Emanuel proposes.

Show Your Papers

It isnt just Emanuel. Around the country, progressive officials and advocates are increasingly urging that COVID-19 vaccines be made mandatory. On Aug. 21, for example, Virginias health commissioner said he intends to impose a statewide COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

A New York State Bar Association committee advocated that it should be mandatory for all Americans to have a COVID-19 vaccine  including those who dont want it for religious, philosophical, or personal reasons.

Meanwhile, on Aug. 6, three influential bioethicists wrote in USA Today: To win the war against the novel coronavirus  the only answer is compulsory vaccinationfor all of us  Do not honor religious objections  Do not allow objections for personal preference, which violate the social contract.

How would the mandate be enforced?

Vaccine refusers could lose tax credits or be denied nonessential government benefits. Health insurers could levy higher premiums for those who by refusing immunization place themselves and others at risk, as is the case for smokers. Private businesses could refuse to employ or serve unvaccinated individuals. Schools could refuse to allow unimmunized children to attend classes. Public and commercial transit companiesairlines, trains, and busescould exclude refusers. Public and private auditoriums could require evidence of immunization for entry.

Authoritarian control of this kind requires the ability to force people to show your papers. And indeed, the authors write: A registry of immunization will be needed with names entered after immunization is completed  Immunized persons will need to receive expiration date-stamped certification cards, which should be issued to all who are immunized in the country, whether here legally or not.

Good grief! Again, these are the kind of politically liberal technocratic experts likely to be advising a Biden administration.

Technocracy

Let me be clear that I am not an anti-vaxxer. To the contrary, I am a big believer in vaccines. I have a flu shot every year. I have received the pneumonia vaccine and am careful to remain current on tetanus protection. I have had the shingles jab. If there was a shot to protect against halitosis, I would take it! In other words, if my doctor approves, I will almost certainly accept a COVID-19 inoculation once it is available.

But I also believe that attempting to coerce all Americans to do likewise would be profoundly unwise and unnecessarily authoritarian. The government cant just pass any law it wants simply because there is a health emergency. A national mandate law would have to be reasonablethe legal standard enunciated in the Jacobson case.

Jacobson dealt with smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases known to man, that is not only a mass killer of adults and children alike, but also, a disease that badly disfigured survivors. In contrast, those at material risk of death from COVID-19still at a lower risk than smallpoxare the elderly and people with serious comorbidities. Almost all children and healthy adults recover from the illness and some experience no symptoms of any kind.

Second, government mandates breed distrust. Considering the brouhaha that has overtaken the country over wearing face masks, just imagine the effort that would be required to force everyone to take a medical substance into their bodies against their will.

Third, the development of somenot allpotential COVID-19 vaccines involves the use of fetal tissue taken from aborted fetuses. Most people might not worry about that. But millions of Catholics and other pro-lifers would simply refuse to be complicit in what they consider an immoral process. The effort it would take to compel them to take the vaccine would rend what little is left of this countrys social fabric.

Finally, we face a real and present danger of technocracythat is, rule by experts. COVID-19 presents those would-be overlords a tremendous opportunity to gain power. If the technocrats can legally coerce us all into taking a vaccine, there isnt much else they couldnt force us to do in the name of health and wellness.

A President Biden would, of course, be free to use persuasive means to convince us all to be inoculated. But impose a national vaccine mandate? I fear he would try. But that wouldnt be the American way.

Award-winning author Wesley J. Smith is the chairman of the Discovery Institutes Center on Human Exceptionalism. His latest book is Culture of Death: The Age of Do Harm Medicine.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Former President John Dramani Mahama says he will not accept the Agyapa Royalties mineral agreements if he is elected President in the 2020 polls.

According to the former president, the deal is shady and his government will not respect it.

In an interview on TV XYZ, John Mahama said the government is better of assigning the royalties to the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund rather than Agyapa Royalties which has been registered in a tax haven.

Parliament recently approved five agreements to create a special purpose vehicle in fulfilment of the Minerals Income Investment Fund Amendment which is yet to be assented to by the President.

Agyapa Royalties established by the government through the Minerals Income Investment Fund will operate as a private sector entity to raise funds from the capital market, both locally and internationally to help the government to finance infrastructural projects.

But John Mahama has kicked against the move.

The government of Ghana, even though the royalties are ours, cannot control that company, meanwhile we have [special purpose] vehicles we can use here. We have the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund. If you assigned the gold royalties to the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund which is a 100 percent [government] entity, it can do exactly the same thing that you want Agyapa to do. If I become president, I will not respect that agreement. Ghanaians cannot accept this. We do not accept that government of Ghana should invest our royalties in an offshore tax haven, he said.

Meanwhile, the former President has given indications that he will cause an investigation into the botched power agreement with Power Distribution Services ( PDS ) if he is elected as President in the 2020 polls.

The former President said there are many unresolved issues surrounding the deal which was cancelled a few months after its operationalization.

If I become President we will investigate PDS especially when it is obvious that persons related to the President were involved in structuring the PDS deal, he said in the interview.

---citinewsroom
JERUSALEM  The backdrop for Secretary of State Mike Pompeos planned speech to the Republican National Convention promised to be spectacular: sweeping views of Jerusalems Old City, with the domes and spires of its holy sites.

But even before his plane touched down in Israel on Monday, Mr. Pompeo was being criticized there and in the United States for breaking a longstanding taboo against mixing diplomacy and partisan politics.

For President Trump, and particularly his evangelical Christian supporters, few locations have the resonance of the holy but fiercely contested city of Jerusalem.

Looking forward to sharing with you how my family is more SAFE and more SECURE because of President Trump, Mr. Pompeo wrote on Twitter. See you all on Tuesday night! He ended the post with a U.S. flag emoji.
A massive crowd of protesters gathered in Minsk on Sunday, answering an opposition call for President Alexander Lukashenkos resignation and defying the Belarusian strongmans warning that stringent measures would be employed to defend the country.

Waving red-and-white opposition flags, protesters chanted "Freedom" as a sea of people, exceeding tens of thousands, according to initial estimates, made their way to Independence Square in the heart of the Belarusian capital.

Minsk never has seen such crowds in its history, said an independent journalist in Minsk in a Twitter post that included photographs of a packed Independence Square.

Authorities issued a warning to Belarusians against participating in "illegal demonstrations" and local news outlets published videos on social media showing water cannon and riot police with shields moving towards Independence Square.

Huge nationwide demonstrations that erupted after the country's disputed August 9 election have presented the biggest challenge yet to Lukashenko's 26-year-old rule and tested the loyalty of his security forces.

Protesters on Sunday marched towards Lukashenko's residence at the Independence Palace, on the northern edge of the capital, the majority gathering at some distance, while a smaller group approached the building, a Reuters witness said.

A helicopter was seen flying out of the residence as protesters milled below, some chanting "coward" as it passed above, apparently referring to Lukashenko, according to the witness. After a while, most of the protesters began to march back towards the city centre.

Video from Belarus on Sunday showed the beleaguered president carrying a rifle and wearing a bulletproof vest as he got off a helicopter that brought him to his working residence amid the 15th straight day of protests. The video was released on the Telegram messaging app on a channel that other media identified as being close to Lukashenkos press service.

Story continues

Lukashenko warns of border threats

Protesters gathered despite an ominous warning by Lukashenko on Saturday that he has ordered his defence minister to take "stringent measures" to defend the country's territorial integrity.

Lukashenko maintained the recent mass protests are being instigated by Western countries, and ordered the army to defend western Belarus, which he described as "a pearl".

"It involves taking the most stringent measures to protect the territorial integrity of our country," he said.

The 65-year-old Belarusian strongman, who said he won a sixth presidential term with 80 percent of the vote in the August 9 ballot, made the comments while inspecting military units in Grodno, near Belarus's border with Poland, according to the president's press service.

The former collective farm director said that NATO troops in Poland and Lithuania were "seriously stirring" near their borders with Belarus and ordered his troops into full combat readiness.

NATO said the claims were "baseless".

"As we have already made clear, NATO poses no threat to Belarus or any other country and has no military buildup in the region," it said in a statement.

Both countries also denied the accusation.

"The regime is trying to divert attention from Belarus's internal problems at any cost with totally baseless statements about imaginary external threats," Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda told AFP.

The Polish president's chief of staff, Krzysztof Szczerski, for his part dismissed the claim that Poland planned to violate Belarusian territorial integrity as "regime propaganda", calling it "sad and surprising".

"Poland... has no such intention," he told the Polish news agency PAP.

'We are not afraid'

Lithuania's foreign ministry announced that US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun will visit Vilnius and Russia next week for talks on Belarus and the elections fallout.

He is notably planning to meet with Lukashenko's election challenger Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania, where she is now in exile, her representatives told AFP.

Tikhanovskaya, who fled Belarus after the disputed ballot in which she claims victory, said Saturday "We are not afraid."

"I am so proud of Belarusians now because after 26 years of fear they are ready to defend their rights," she told AFP.

"I call them to continue, not to stop, because it's really important now to continue to be united in the struggle for the rights."

EU threatens sanctions

The EU last week rejected Lukashenko's re-election and vowed to levy sanctions against what it said was a substantial number of people responsible for rigging the vote and cracking down on protests.

The Belarusian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the opposition's Coordination Council, whose members are seeking new elections and a peaceful transition of power.

Lukashenko has rejected the idea of holding another ballot, dismissed calls to resign and accused the opposition of attempting to seize power.

On Friday he vowed to "solve the problem" of the protest movement.

Tikhanovskaya said this week that Belarusians would "never accept the current leadership again" after the crackdown on post-election protests.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and REUTERS)
GORAKHPUR: A 50-year-old woman and her son were killed in a clash involving two families over an alleged property dispute in Pokhri village under Gagha police station limit in Gorakhpur district, police said on Monday.

The incident happened on Sunday and cases were registered against 10 people with 8 of them arrested so far, they said.

As per reports, Rajesh Dubey and his brother Arvind Dubey of Pokhri village were caught in a property dispute with the family members coming to blows on Sunday.

During the clash between the two families, Rajesh along with his brother-in-law and son allegedly killed Arvind Dubey's wife Hemlata (50) and Arvind's 23-year-old son Harsh Dubey with a spade.

At the time of the murder, Arvind and his son Utkarsh were in a police station to register a complaint against his brother Rajesh and others for beating them up.

Police said the property dispute between the brothers dates back 10 years while adding that both families were staying together before that.

Gorakhpur Senior Superintendent of Police Joginder Singh suspended Gagha police station in-charge Dilip Kumar Singh, sub-inspector Kalpnath Singh and head constable Pramod Singh for carelessness as the two families were fighting since morning over cutting of a mahua tree.

"A mother and son were killed due to a property dispute on Sunday. Police has registered a case against 10 persons, of which 8 persons have been arrested and further action will be taken against the accused under Gangster Act," the SSP said.

Meanwhile, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav took a jibe at the government following the incident.

In a tweet on Sunday, Yadav said, "In the BJP Government, if murders, rapes and kidnapping continue in Gorakhpur, then 'maanyavar' has to change the name of Gorakhpur to 'gunaahpur'. If a person cannot control his city, how can he control the state. Someone should impart to him the knowledge that with crime, development cannot happen."
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Integrated Ventures Inc (OTCQB: INTV) ("Buyer") is pleased to disclose the execution of a Non-Binding Letter of Intent ("LOI") to acquire assets of a privately-held, technology service provider ("Company") and its wholly owned subsidiary, located in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The proposed all-cash transaction is conditional on the completion of standard due diligence, execution of employment agreements with key employees, and other conditions typical for transactions of this nature.

Under terms of executed LOI, the total consideration for the acquisition is $200,000 and consist of (10) initial cash payment of $120,000 and (2) $80,000, in 12 monthly installments.

As of fiscal year-end, December 31, 2019, the Company had generated unaudited revenues of $1.8. For first 6 months of 2020 and during Covid-19 pandemic, unaudited revenues have totaled $750k

The list of assets to be purchased consist of all the its brand(s) and trademarks, all websites and domain-names, all its phone numbers and e-mail addresses, all existing & pending contracts, all its work-in-process, current and pending purchase-orders, project pipeline, proposals, licenses & permits. Employees, all its client & supplier lists, and all the intangible & goodwill assets owned by the Company.

The Company has over (1) 50 active corporate clients, including Eli Lilly, Purdue University, Indiana University and major local hospitals, (2) operations in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky and (3) an extensive experience, servicing many business sectors, including healthcare, utilities, government, financial and telecommunications.

Support services and products for data center market include: (1) rack power installation and distribution (60 amp c13/c14 power monitoring and switching pdus), (2) data center containment solutions (hot and cold isles), (3) access flooring (increases air flow), (4) server and network rack cabinets and (5) testing and assembly stations.

Company's wholly owned subsidiary is focused on ergonomic and technical furniture for corporate offices, plants and labs.

Steve Rubakh, CEO of Integrated Ventures, Inc, adds the following commentary: "Today's announcement is our official launch of the previously disclosed roll-up business plan. Due to increasing demand for data hosting, including due to the current pandemic environment, integration and connectivity, reliable data centers operations are critical for present and future corporate infrastructures. In addition, Company's data center expertise is a perfect strategic and complimentary fit with Integrated Venture's cryptocurrency mining operations. We believe that there is a compelling opportunity for nationwide integration of such niche companies, that offer value-added services. We intend to pursue value-priced, revenue generating acquisitions with focus on accelerated revenue growth and increasing shareholder's value."

About Integrated Ventures Inc: The Company operates as a Technology Holdings Company with focus on cryptocurrency sector. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.integratedventuresinc.com .

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.

Contact:

(215) 613-1111

[email protected]

SOURCE Integrated Ventures Inc.

Related Links

http://www.integratedventuresinc.com


TDT | Manama

Bahrain yesterday announced two more COVID-19 deaths, that of a 78-year-old Bahrain man and 50-year-old expatriate man. The deaths- latest casualties to the Kingdoms battle against the pandemic- were announced by the Ministry of Health on its twitter handle @ MOH_Bahrain. Ministry officials announced the deaths in separate tweets and expressed condolences to the families of the deceased.

The fatalities also increased the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the Kingdom, after detecting its first case in February this year, to 183. Meanwhile, overall recoveries increased by 423 yesterday to reach 45,589, said the Ministry of Health. There are currently 68 coronavirus patients who are undergoing treatment, of which 33 are in a critical condition.

As of yesterday, there are 3,266 active cases in the Kingdom, of which 3,233 cases are stable. The ministry also announced conducting 9,166 COVID-19 tests yesterday, taking the total number of tests conducted in the Kingdom to 1,029,969. Out of the 377 newly detected cases yesterday, 138 are expatriate workers, 231 are contacts of active cases, and eight are travel related.

In the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, there are a total of 702,139 cases and 5,489 deaths with Saudi Arabia being the worst affected with 306,370 cases and 3,619 deaths as of yesterday. Saudi toll also includes the 39 deaths and 1,184 new cases announced yesterday.

The total number of recoveries in the Kingdom also increased to 278,441 after 1,374 more patients got cured of their infection yesterday. UAE yesterday announced 424 new cases, two more deaths and 112 new recoveries. Kuwait yesterday announced 688 new cases, 506 recoveries and two more deaths.
Incheon Metropolitan City Mayor Park Nam-chun speaks during an event for a joint agreement on the personal air vehicles business at the Ongjin County building in Incheon, west of Seoul. Courtesy of Incheon Metropolitan Government



By Bahk Eun-ji



The Incheon Metropolitan Government said Monday it will join forces with related agencies to create a demonstration center for future personal air vehicles (PAVs) and designate a special liberalization zone for PAVs.



The city government signed a business agreement with Ongjin County, Incheon Port Authority and the Central Regional Coast Guard of Ongjin County at the county office to foster the urban mobility business in an effort to strengthen its vision for future mobility.



Under the agreement, the organizations plan to join forces to allow Incheon to be designated as a special zone for drones and other aerial vehicles in November.



Incheon Metropolitan Government previously applied for Jawol Island in Ongjin County as a target area for the special zone.



If Jawol Island is selected by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport as a special liberalization zone, the city government plans to establish an "Incheon PAV Demonstration Support Center" there and accelerate research and development for commercialization of PAVs.



Starting with the project to test the development of routes from Jawol Island through Dukjeok Island to Ijak Island in 2022, the city government plans to carry out demonstration projects with the aim of commercializing them by 2025, including transferring of human and physical resources in connection with the Incheon Port Authority in 2023, and the development of island travel routes in cooperation with the Incheon Tourism Organization in 2024.



If designated, it can receive benefits such as safety certification and flight approval under the jurisdiction of the transport ministry, and radio wave certification from the Ministry of Science and ICT.



The city government has been working on a project to produce PAV prototypes since being selected to do so by the transport ministry in 2018. It plans to open and test-run prototypes next year, since it has formed a consortium with companies specializing in PAVs, as well as Incheon Techno Park and universities. It also plans to open and test-run prototypes next year.



"We will closely cooperate with the government and related agencies so that Jawol Island can be designated as a special liberalization zone. The project will be focused on fostering the PAV industry as a future promising business that leads the future transportation revolution," Incheon Mayor Park Nam-chun said.






World bodys Libya mission calls on GNA to investigate violence against peaceful protesters in the capital.

The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) has urged the internationally-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) to conduct an immediate and thorough investigation after excessive force was used against demonstrators in Tripoli.

Hundreds gathered in the capital on Sunday evening to protest against deteriorating living conditions, poor basic services and corruption in the war-torn country, before security personnel fired into the air to disperse them, according to reports citing witnesses.

UNSMIL calls for an immediate and thorough investigation into the excessive use of force by pro-GNA security personnel in Tripoli yesterday which resulted in the injury of a number of protesters, the UN mission said in a statement on Monday, without specifying how many people were wounded.

Videos and photographs circulating on social media showed men in military attire aiming their guns towards protesters in one of the capitals streets.

Ayman al-Wafi, a young man in his 20s who attended the protest, told AFP news agency that demonstrators had left Martyrs Square after security forces started firing in the air.

"Our sons are in cemeteries & politicians are enjoying life. Our kids even began migrating by boat. Is this what it has come to?"https://t.co/1tTNcs5RsU  Emadeddin Badi (@emad_badi) August 23, 2020

Angered by chronic water, power, and petrol shortages in a country with Africas largest proven crude oil reserves, the mostly young people had marched through the city centre chanting slogans including No to corruption!

Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha called those responsible for the violence outlaws who infiltrated the security forces supervising the protest.

The interior ministry on Sunday evening said in a statement that the men do not belong to the security forces and would be arrested.

The protest came two days after GNA Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj announced a ceasefire in Libyas long-running conflict and called for the lifting of an oil blockade by rival authorities based in the east of the country.

      pic.twitter.com/L3t6a5Id8L  Mohammed Ali (@M_abdusa) August 23, 2020

For more than five years, Libya has been divided into rival camps based in the east and west. In June, Turkish military support for the GNA forced renegade military commander Khalifa Haftars self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) to retreat from a 14-month offensive on Tripoli.

The eastern-based LNA has received backing from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia in a conflict that has become an arena for regional rivalries. Front lines have settled for weeks around the LNA-held city of Sirte, in the centre of Libyas coastline, and Jufra to the south.

LNA spokesman Ahmed al-Mismari on Sunday dismissed the GNAs ceasefire announcement as a ploy.

The initiative that al-Sarraj signed is for media marketing, Mismari said. There is a military buildup and the transfer of equipment to target our forces in Sirte.

Mismari made no reference to a parallel ceasefire call also issued on Friday by the head of Libyas eastern-based parliament, Aguila Saleh.

Saleh has gained influence compared with Haftar since the LNAs retreat.

Some of the protesters in Tripoli carried white flags to show their lack of allegiance to any of Libyas main factions, and pictures of al-Sarraj, Haftar and Saleh with their faces crossed out in red.
Full stops intimidate young people when used in social media communication as they are interpreted as a sign of anger, according to linguistic experts.

Teenagers and those in their early twenties, classified as Generation Z, have grown up with smartphones which they use to send short messages without full stops.

And a study from Binghamton University in New York suggested that people who finish messages with full stops are perceived as insincere.

Linguistic experts are now investigating why teens interpret a correctly-punctuated text as a signal of irritation.

Full stops 'intimidate' young people when used in social media communication as they are interpreted as a sign of anger, according to linguistic experts

The debate was reignited after writer Rhiannon Cosslett tweeted: 'Older people  do you realise that ending a sentence with a full stop comes across as sort of abrupt and unfriendly to younger people in an email/chat? Genuinely curious.'

Several Twitter users expressed disbelief, and, despite her own use of a full stop, one even accused her of 'peak snowflakery'.

That prompted crime novelist Sophie Hannah to reply: 'Just asked 16-year-old son  apparently this is true. If he got a message with full stops at the end of sentences he'd think the sender was "weird, mean or too blunt".'

According to experts, youngsters used to communicating electronically break up their thoughts by sending each one as a separate message, rather than using a full stop, which they use only to signal they are annoyed or irritated.

Dr Lauren Fonteyn (left), from Leiden University, and Owen McArdle (right), from University of Cambridge, have been discussing the change in use of the full stop as youngsters now interpret the full stop as a sign of anger in the age of instant messaging

Some have said the full stop is redundant when used in texting because the message is ended just by sending it.

According to The Telegraph, Linguist Dr Lauren Fonteyn of Leiden University in Holland, tweeted: 'If you send a text message without a full stop, it's already obvious that you've concluded the message.

Full-stops are used to indicate anger or annoyance, 2015 study finds In 2015, a study from Binghamton University in New York suggested that people who finish messages with full stops are perceived as insincere. The study involved 126 undergraduates and the researchers found that text messages ending in the most final of punctuation marks  eg 'lol.', 'let's go to Nando's.', 'send nudes.'  were perceived as being less sincere. Unusually, texts ending in an exclamation point  'lmao!', 'just a cheeky one!', 'what body part even is that? I hope it's your arm!'  are deemed heartfelt or more profound. The authors concluded that punctuation 'is one cue used by senders, and understood by receivers, to convey pragmatic and social information' such as irritation. Research leader Celia Klin said at the time: 'When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses and so on. 'People obviously can't use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them  emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.' Advertisement

'So if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.'

A linguist from the University of Cambridge, Owen McArdle, told the newspaper: 'I'm not sure I agree about emails. I guess it depends how formal they are.

'But full stops are, in my experience, very much the exception and not the norm in [young people's] instant messages, and have a new role in signifying an abrupt or angry tone of voice.'

And the potential change in meaning of the full stop, in relation to online communication, has been debated by linguists for years.

Professor David Crystal, one of the world's leading language experts, argues that the usage of full stops is being 'revised in a really fundamental way'.

In his book, Making a Point, he says that the punctuation mark has become an 'emotion marker' which alerts the recipient that the sender is angry or annoyed.

He wrote: 'You look at the internet or any instant messaging exchange  anything that is a fast dialogue taking place. People simply do not put full stops in, unless they want to make a point.

The full stop is now being used in those circumstances as an emotion marker.'

In 2015, a study from Binghamton University in New York suggested that people who finish messages with full stops are perceived as insincere.

The study involved 126 undergraduates and the researchers found that text messages ending in the most final of punctuation marks  eg 'lol.', 'let's go to Nando's.', 'send nudes.'  were perceived as being less sincere.

Unusually, texts ending in an exclamation point  'lmao!', 'just a cheeky one!', 'what body part even is that? I hope it's your arm!'  are deemed heartfelt or more profound.

Research leader Celia Klin said at the time: 'When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses and so on.

'People obviously can't use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them  emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.'

The full stop derives from Greek punctuation introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the 3rd Century BC.
(Newser)  Sydney Sutherland, 25, went out for a jog Wednesday afternoon and disappeared. Two days later, the Arkansas woman's body was found, and now a farmer who went to school with Sutherland has been arrested in connection with her murder. Quake Lewellyn, 28, is being held on a homicide charge, KAIT8 reports; sources tell KARK he is suspected of capital murder. Jackson County Sheriff David Lucas says Sutherland knew Lewellyn; her jogging route reportedly went by his residence. She also knew the sheriff: "I know this family personally," Lucas said before Sutherland's body was found. "I know this young lady personally. Ive known her and watched her grow up. It hits me personally." (Read more Arkansas stories.)
The family of pro-Pakistan separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani on Monday appealed to people, including journalists, not to circulate any unconfirmed information about his health condition or political opinion as it was taking a "heavy toll" on their personal and domestic lives. In a statement issued in the names of his two sons  Nayeem and Naseem Geelani, the family gave enough indication that they should be spared from any controversial comments as it was affecting the health of the ailing separatist leader as well.

"Past few months have been very hard for all of us. On one hand we are busy dealing with his (Geelani) health condition and we have been consumed physically as well as mentally. On the other hand, continuously dragging the family into his political affairs has taken a heavy toll on our personal and as well as domestic life," the statement read. Geelani announced his resignation from the hardline faction of the Hurriyat Conference, a conglomerate of 16 separatist organisations, following differences with the faction's Pakistan-based unit after his nominee Abdullah Geelani was not accepted as the president.

The sons said people with vested interests have launched a vicious campaign to malign the image of Geelani. "Repeated and fabricated letters in his name, posts, comments and imaginary stories are disturbing and affecting his health very badly. We appeal to all including those in the media fraternity or otherwise not to circulate any information about his health, and similarly, any communication of political nature on his behalf without his representative's authentication," they said.

For his resignation, the 90-year-old separatist leader, who was also a three-time MLA from Sopore in north Kashmir, had also cited differences with other members of the amalgam on the course of action adopted by them post-abrogation of Article 370 last year.
In Open Letter Attorneys Demand Release Of Political Prisoners Amid Pandemic

Radio Farda August 23, 2020

Forty-four lawyers in Iran have urged a prominent Iranian advocate of human rights, Ms. Nasrin Sotoudeh, and other political prisoners to end their hunger strikes and avoid endangering their own lives. The attorneys also demand the release of inmates amid the COVID pandemic.

The attorneys say in an open letter that it is logical, humane, and legal to demand the release of political prisoners and other inmates. They have argued that amid a pandemic granting leave to prisoners is a sound request.

In a letter on August 11, the award-winning lawyer, Ms. Nasrin Sotoudeh had announced that she began a hunger strike. Sotoudeh had also gone on a hunger strike last March to protest unbearable conditions in Iran's prisons.

The widespread coronavirus outbreak in Iran and reports of political prisoners contracting the deadly virus have raised concerns over their safety.

As reported by Sotoudeh's lawyer, Mohammad Moqimi, her client has decided to go on a hunger strike to protest the "unfair" and "illegal" condition of political prisoners in Iran, which has also become "worse" following the outbreak of the coronavirus.

The Atlas of Iranian Prisons also reports that following the outbreak of the coronavirus in Tehran's infamous Evin Prison, dozens of political prisoners in Ward 8 held a sit-in protest on Monday, August 10.

The website advocating prisoners' rights also said that "27 political prisoners participated in the sit-in protest and demanded an immediate investigation into the dire conditions at Evin."

"Ms. Sotoudeh and some of our oppressed compatriots in prison, who do not find a way to reclaim their rights as well as the rights of the people, have gone on a hunger strike as a last resort endangering their own lives," the lawyers said in a letter on Saturday, August 22, adding, "by risking their health, they seek to influence the authoritarian and extra-judicial behavior of the rulers and to convey their message to the people."

Sotoudeh represented many human rights activists, women's rights activists, victims of child abuse, and juvenile defenders on death row. She was previously jailed from August 2010 to September 2013 for her professional and human rights activities.

Last February, French President Macron personally invited Nasrin Sotoudeh, to participate in a G7 council for promoting human rights. "I am pleased to invite you to this initiative to advance real equality between women and men around the world," Macron wrote to Sotoudeh.

Sotoudeh's seat in the council in France was kept vacant and adorned with a bouquet while she was behind bars in Tehran's infamous Evin prison.

Source: https://en.radiofarda.com/a/in-open- letter-attorneys-demand-release-of-political- prisoners-amid-pandemic/30798079.html

Copyright (c) 2020. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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YPSILANTI, MI - Eastern Michigan University has delayed its on-campus move-in for three weeks, citing the COVID-19 outbreaks other universities have had in reopening their campuses.

In a letter to the campus community Monday, Aug. 24, President James Smith said EMU will delay its move-in to Sept. 17, after originally planning on welcoming students back on Thursday, Aug. 27.

EMU still plans to begin its fall semester online on Monday, Aug. 31, but will transition the small number of classes that were scheduled to be in-person to a near fully online schedule through Sept. 20, officials said.

The decision comes after an assessment of the reopening of campuses across the country that has shown increased outbreaks of COVID-19 among students and challenges in limiting social gatherings and parties, Smith said.

CMU threatens to suspend partying students as coronavirus numbers spike

Additional factors in EMUs decision to delay move-in and the start of in-person classes were the upcoming Labor Day holiday weekend and its potential impact on community case numbers, as well as an expected increase in the capacity for increased rapid and reliable COVID-19 testing kits within the month, Smith said.

Health officials predict another spike in cases after the long Labor Day holiday weekend, not unlike what was experienced after Memorial Day weekend when the number of positive cases increased dramatically in early to mid June, Smith said.

The three-week delay in on-campus activity accommodates the 14-day incubation period for cases materializing during Labor Day weekend and allows us to have a safer move-in environment, Smith said.

From the outset of our planning process, we have stated that the health, safety and well-being of our campus community were paramount in our actions. We also made clear that we would evolve our planning in order to be responsive to the changing science, data, government directives and other critical information regarding COVID-19.

Students who have made housing and dining deposits or payments will receive a full pro-rated credit of those deposits and payments for the time period between their original move-in day and their new move-in day, Smith said.

A small number of students including international students, some student-athletes and other individuals who have already moved in to residence halls are being allowed to remain should they wish to during this time, Smith said. Additionally, some students who plan to live in campus housing may have unique circumstances that would call for them to move into their campus housing sooner than provided under this revised schedule, he said.

Such requests will be granted in rare instances, on a case-by-case basis, Smith said. Students living in residence halls will receive additional information via email about how to request such an accommodation.

In-person, on-campus courses were scheduled to make up approximately 20 to 25% of all classes for the fall semester. Smith said there are a small number of exceptions to allow in-person instruction, primarily within the School of Nursing and other Schools in the College of Health and Human Services.

Time and data have proven invaluable in the fight against this disease, Smith said. Delaying move-in will provide valuable information regarding the spread of the disease on college campuses, both in Michigan and across the country. It will allow us additional time to work with local officials around enforcement and increased education.

READ MORE:

Eastern Michigan University was on the rise. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit

Eastern Michigan University ends partnership with Eagle Flight Centre

Plexiglass, hand sanitizer and social distancing: How fall semester at Eastern Michigan University will look
Phoenix, Arizona--(Newsfile Corp. - August 24, 2020) - The Stock Day Podcast welcomed StrikeForce Technologies, Inc. (OTC Pink: SFOR) ("the Company"), a Company that helps to prevent Cyber theft and data security breaches for consumers, corporations, and government agencies. CEO of the Company, Mark Kay, joined Stock Day host Everett Jolly.

Jolly began the interview by asking about the Company's background and current projects. "StrikeForce is a cybersecurity company," explained Kay before elaborating on the Company's numerous products. "We also have a brand new product called SafeVChat," he shared.

"Could you please provide an update on the company's flagship products," asked Jolly. Kay explained that the three flagship products, ProtectID, GuardedID, and MobileTrust, are still available. "GuardedID seems to be the stronger one now, but they are all still selling," said Kay. "We have the same revenues we've been having for the past year," he added, noting that the Company has been selling these products through their website and channel partners. "We have patents in all of them as well, which is what makes them so unique."

The conversation then turned to the Company's newest product, SafeVChat. "It is a video conferencing tool which is absolutely becoming much more powerful during this COVID-19 timeframe," shared Kay. "It is moving along very well. We should be getting into a beta within the next month or so," he continued. "The most important thing about it is that it is the most secure video conferencing software that we are aware of on the market," said Kay. "We are a cyber security company developing video conferencing technology, and we're using our other three products in the video chat itself, so it is very secure."

Kay then shared that the Company is preparing to enter the beta test phase and has already received interest from numerous clients. "Hopefully, it will become our key product," said Kay. "We own the product; we've built the whole thing, other than the public source code, and it will definitely be out there in the near future," continued Kay. "We feel very strong about this."

Jolly asked about a potential price point for the SafeVChat software. Kay shared that the Company will not finalize pricing until the product is ready for release. "We've checked the marketplace and we feel it definitely beats the competition greatly," shared Kay. He then encouraged interested listeners to learn more about SafeVChat by visiting the Company's website.

Kay then elaborated on the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic and what it means for the future of business and education in terms of virtual resources. "We're going to stay in this pandemic mode for quite a while and I think we're changing the way businesses will work and many companies will use video conferencing with numbers in the half of billion range by 2030."

To close the interview, Kay shared that the Company is hoping to launch the beta program for SafeVChat in about one month. He also expressed his confidence in the potential of the Company's security products. "We own all of our six patents at this point and we feel very strong about these products, with other patents pending as well."

To hear Mark Kay's entire interview, follow the link to the podcast here: https://audioboom.com/posts/7665428-strikeforce-technologies-inc-discusses-the-launch-of-safevchat-with-the-stock-day-podcast

Investors Hangout is a proud sponsor of "Stock Day," and Stock Day Media encourages listeners to visit the company's message board at https://investorshangout.com/

About StrikeForce Technologies, Inc.

StrikeForce Technologies helps to prevent Cyber theft and data security breaches for consumers, corporations, and government agencies. It provides powerful two-factor, "Out-of-Band" authentication and keystroke encryption along with mobile solutions. StrikeForce Technologies, Inc. (OTC Pink: SFOR) is headquartered in Edison, N.J., and can be reached at www.strikeforcetech.com or by phone at (732) 661-9641 or toll-free at (866) 787-4542.

Safe Harbor Statement:

Matters discussed in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "may," "intend," "expect" and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those contemplated, expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained herein. These forward-looking statements are based largely on the expectations of the Company and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. These include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with: the sales of the company's identity protection software products into various channels and market sectors, the issuance of the company's pending patent application, and the impact of economic, competitive and other factors affecting the Company and its operations, markets, product, and distributor performance, the impact on the national and local economies resulting from terrorist actions, and U.S. actions subsequently; and other factors detailed in reports filed by the company.

Corporate Contact Info:

StrikeForce Technologies, Inc.

Mark L. Kay, CEO

(732) 661-9641

marklkay@strikeforcetech.com

About The "Stock Day" Podcast

Founded in 2013, Stock Day is the fastest growing media outlet for Nano-Cap and Micro-Cap companies. It educates investors while simultaneously working with penny stock and OTC companies, providing transparency and clarification of under-valued, under-sold Micro-Cap stocks of the market. Stock Day provides companies with customized solutions to their news distribution in both national and international media outlets. The Stock Day Podcast is the number one radio show of its kind in America. Stock Day recently launched its Video Interview Studio located in Phoenix, Arizona.

SOURCE:

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In her first interview since accepting the Democratic vice presidential nomination, Sen. Kamala Harris told ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir that if she had been the presidential nominee, she would have picked Joe Biden as her running mate.

Speaking in their first joint interview since accepting the Democratic nomination, Biden and Harris talked about the highly anticipated vice-presidential selection and how the two became a ticket.

During the early stages of the campaign trail, while Harris was running her own presidential campaign, the California senator was often pressed about whether she would consider being the former vice presidents running mate. She once responded, Biden would make a great vice president.

I think that Joe Biden would be a great running mate. As vice president he's proven that he knows how to do the job and there are certainly other candidates that would make for me a very viable and interesting vice president, she told reporters in New Hampshire last year.

Are you OK with how it turned out? Muir asked during their first joint network interview.

I absolutely am, Harris said.

MORE: TRANSCRIPT: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris' first joint interview with ABC's David Muir

PHOTO: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris celebrate with supporters outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 20, 2020. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

Muir and "Good Morning America" co-anchor Robin Roberts conducted joint interviews with Harris and Biden -- their first since accepting the Democratic nomination -- which was featured in a special edition of "20/20" called "The Ticket: The First Interview," which aired Sunday on ABC.

Harris told Muir Bidens time as Vice President will shape how she does the job, if elected.

Joe Biden is really probably, for me, a model of what makes for a great vice president, and the model for me, if we win, God willing we win this election, Harris said. What he did in, in-- as a partner to Barack Obama, what he did in terms of leading on very significant issues in support of Barack Obama, is really inspirational for me as a model of how I intend to do the job.

Story continues

MORE: Harris to ABCs David Muir: Trump insults are distractions from 'neglect, negligence and harm'

Would you have picked him? Muir asked Harris.

I would have certainly picked him, Harris said. We have a commitment to each other, so in many ways after he chose me, I chose him too.

MORE: Biden to ABC's Robin Roberts: 'I didn't feel pressure to select a Black woman' as running mate

Harris was chosen by Biden in mid-August after a tightly contested selection process conducted by the Biden campaign.

"What strengths, qualities does Senator Harris have that you dont? Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts asked Biden, after noting that hed mentioned earlier in the campaign trail that he wanted to select a vice president that had strengths and qualities that he did not obtain.

PHOTO: Sen. Kamala Harris participates in her first joint interview with her running mate, former Vice President Joe Biden, in Wilmington, Del., on Aug 21, 2020.PHOTO: (ABC News)

She has enormous strength, Biden said. I realized that I drove my staff crazy and everybody else and all of you by not letting anybody know who I picked, he added jokingly.

When selecting Harris, Biden said, he asked that she be the last person in the room on every major decision as he was to President Barack Obama.

And I know she'll have a perspective -- different in many cases than mine just by nature of who we are and our backgrounds and that's why I thought it was so important as well to have a woman as vice president, Biden said.

"Did you ask for any commitments, any guarantees, before you agreed to be VP? Roberts asked Harris.

"No, the thing about Joe Im telling you he just says whats on his mind, he doesnt play games, he doesnt equivocate. One of the first things he said is I want you to be the last person in the room and there was no negotiation at all. It was literally an immediate commitment. Theres so much to get done and I think thats the kind of relationship and partnership that will be necessary to tackle the kind of challenges that we have right now, Harris said.

Kamala Harris tells ABC's David Muir she would have 'certainly picked' Biden as her vice president originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 08/24/2020



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ANGELA AND MICHAEL

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ELIZABETH AND ANDREI

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COLT AND JESS

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KALANI AND ASUELU

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Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.

: Happily Ever After? featured Kalani Faagata having a breakdown about her marriage after a heated confrontation with Asuelu Pulaa 's family, Colt Johnson admitting he talked to other girls during a break with Jess Caroline, Angela Deem threatening to call off her wedding to Michael Ilesanmi , and Tania Maduro and Syngin Colchester getting into an explosive fight in front of his family during Sunday night's Season 5 episode on TLC.: Happily Ever After?'s fifth season also features Paul Staehle Andrei Castravet , and Larissa Dos Santos Lima.Happily Ever After? documents couples -- engaged, married or divorced -- navigating life, hardships, family, children and unexpected obstacles.The new season has already featured cultural differences, in-law arguments, scandals, confrontations and tears, and there is much more to come.Below is the latest on each couple or cast members, according to the eleventh episode of : Happily Ever After?'s fifth season.Following Angela's outburst, Michael told his aunt Lydia that he knew how to handle Angela and there were no more surprises in his relationship after three years together.Michael realized he might have to choose between his family and his future wife, and he told the cameras he just wanted both sides "to be happy." Michael said he "never expected" the conversation with Lydia to take such a course.When Michael arrived back at his apartment where Angela was waiting for him, she immediately announced, "I'm done. It's done. You ain't done nothing but lie to her and to me. You lie to me all the damn time!"Angela said she was furious Michael never stood up for her in front of his aunt. Michael had told his aunt that Angela would change and be submissive in their marriage, so Angela told the cameras he was either lying to her or lying to his family."Michael already knows I am not -- and I repeat, I am not -- going to be the submissive wife that they suggest to Michael that I be," Angela noted in a confessional.Angela screamed at Michael in their kitchen, saying standing up for her is her own American culture and she'd never change her ways. Angela wished Michael had said the dynamic in their marriage would be 50/50."That is not who I want to get married to. I think he needs to get married to his family and let me take my ass back home to America," Angela vented.Angela kept yelling at Michael, "You can't make me [bow down]!" At one point, Michael put a hand up near Angela's face, trying to get her to calm down, but she just screamed, "F-ck you," and called him "a little boy."Angela ran to the bedroom and started to pack her belongings. She shut Michael out of the room and insisted she was going to say "I won't" instead of "I do.""That was the end. I'm going to a hotel. The wedding is off," Angela told her fiance."Listen now, you don't understand what [happened]," Michael calmly replied, suggesting it was all a misunderstanding."I don't have to. I'm not marrying you and that's the end of it. I'm not playing," Angela said. "I have too much to worry about at home to sit here and kiss your whole family's ass."Angela said she wouldn't be cooking Michael's meals and she's an American woman. Angela said she'd only bow down to one man -- Jesus -- and it was ridiculous that Michael and other Nigerian men viewed themselves to be some type of "god" in their culture.Michael told the cameras he just wanted a peaceful and successful marriage, but Angela shouted at her fiance to "kiss my ass." And then she stormed out of their apartment.The next day, Angela told Michael that he had been proclaiming to be one man in front of his family and a different man in conversation with her. Michael apologized, but Angela said his "sorrys [meant] nothing."Michael told Angela that he would never force her to be like a Nigerian woman but he hoped Angela would act a little differently around his family in order to please them and make them happy. Angela said she wasn't going to "pretend."Angela hoped Michael's mother would talk some sense into Michael or else she's be willing to leave Nigeria. Angela said the wedding was going to be "off" if Michael's mother also expected her to be submissive and change for a man.Later on, Angela, Michael, and Michael's brother sat down with Michael's mother Aduke and a translator to have a serious conversation about Michael and Angela being equal partners in a marriage.Angela recalled what happened the previous night and how Nigerian women expected Angela to be submissive in her marriage.Angela explained many women in America believe a relationship should be 50/50. Although Aduke told the cameras she thinks the man should be the head of the household, she told Angela that she had no problem with Angela's outlook on marriage and expectations.Angela was so glad Aduke respected her own opinions, and Aduke said she just wanted to see Angela and her son respect each other and work out their problems as a team."So, is there going to be a wedding?" Michael asked Angela."Well, we have one more mountain to climb, and it's very personal," Angela replied.Angela was referring to how she and Michael may not have children. Angela wanted Aduke's blessing to marry Michael even if she couldn't have a child, but Angela knew that would be a stretch.Angela explained she may not be able to have a baby, but Aduke still gave her consent for Michael to marry. Aduke hoped God would be in her son's marriage and that it would work out.Aduke was certain Michael loved Angela, and she just wanted her son and Angela to continue loving each other forever."Even if I can't have a kid, I love Angela, and that's all that matters," Michael said, adding that he was so happy to have his mother's blessings and prayers.Elizabeth and Andrei picked up Elizabeth's sister Jenn, mother Pamela and stepfather Walter. Andrei apparently promised Elizabeth he would be nice and behave himself, but he just hoped no one would be rude to him.The couple brought Elizabeth's family to the same AirBnB where Chuck and Charlie were already staying, and Elizabeth pointed out Moldova seemed sad and gloomy right off the bat. Andrei admitted Jenn liked to push his buttons, but he tried to keep his cool.Elizabeth had no intention of telling the women in her life about the fight that went down between Andrei and Chuck and Charlie, so she hoped the guys wouldn't inform them. Elizabeth anticipated a fresh start and everyone getting along.That night, Elizabeth got her wish. There was a warm and happy gathering between Elizabeth's family and Andrei's family. Andrei's mother even prepared another huge feast for everyone to welcome them.Pamela acknowledged Andrei's family seemed very sweet so she didn't understand where Andrei got his "gruffness" from.Andrei's brother Radu told the cameras he was glad that Andrei was in better spirits and had improved the mood going into his second wedding with Elizabeth. Elizabeth gushed she was "very happy" with the chill gathering, and Elizabeth told her husband that his great attitude was "very sexy."During Jenn's first morning in Moldova, she admitted she was starving because she didn't like the food. Chuck and Charlie then told Jenn about the fight they had with Andrei the other night and how Andrei had yelled at them to pack their bags and return to America.Charlie felt it was important for Pamela and Jenn to "know the true Andrei," and Jenn said it seemed like Andrei had a secret that he didn't want anyone to find out.Chuck said he saw a completely different side of Andrei during their altercation, and Pamela admitted the story was very "disheartening" and it was going to be "awkward" to go shopping for a wedding dress with Elizabeth.Jenn planned to feed Andrei some drinks and try to get the truth out of him, and Chuck was still curious about why Andrei had moved to Ireland at one point in his life.Elizabeth, Pamela, Jenn and Andrei's sister-in-law Ina then went shopping for a traditional Moldovan outfit for her wedding. Elizabeth agreed to wear traditional attire for the first part of the ceremony and then change into a dress she had bought in Florida for the second portion of the wedding.Jenn said the traditional dress looked "Little House on the Prairie," but Elizabeth seemed happy to please her husband.Ina admitted she had problems with Andrei in the past and they hadn't seen each other in two years. Ina asked Elizabeth's relatives, "How does she live with him?!"Elizabeth overheard the conversation from inside the dressing room and was frustrated with Jenn trying to "talk sh-t" behind her back to Ina, while using the stylist as a translator.Jenn was apparently just hurt Andrei had disrespected her dad and brother, but Elizabeth said the fight didn't involve them and so they shouldn't worry about it.Elizabeth promised her family she had scolded Andrei for his mistakes, and although he sometimes acted like "an assh-le," she still loved him and wanted to be with him. Elizabeth said she could go without a second wedding but was doing it for his family.Colt had been back in America for a few weeks and admitted times were rocky for Jess and himself. Jess apparently didn't trust Colt after he had lied to her about his friendship with Vanessa."Because we're back being long distance, it's gone from bad to worse. We fight almost every day and we've broken up a few times," Colt told the cameras.Colt was then shown FaceTiming with Jess, and he asked her to visit him in Las Vegas because he still loved her and wanted to salvage their relationship.Jess noted she didn't want to meet Vanessa if she visited, and Colt said that was fine."I want you, you're my girl," Colt said, before inviting Jess to stay in his bedroom at his house.Jess didn't think Debbie would be happy with that, but Colt said Debbie seemed to have the wrong impression of his girlfriend. Colt hoped the girls would get along and have "good times and good vibes," but Jess said she was still working on trusting Colt again."I really want to move forward with her... but I haven't been 100 percent honest with Jess. I've been sad about what happened between Jess and I, and one of the times Jess and I broke up, I was lonely and so I started to talk to other women," Colt confessed to the cameras.Colt felt the need to be honest with Jess and explain what happened in order for them to have a healthy relationship, but he didn't want to break the bad news to Jess over the phone because he figured she would break up with him immediately.Colt hoped to work things out with Jess and maintain her trust while coming clean."Jess is going to lose it when she finds out about the girls I've been talking to. I know I can't hide this from her if we're going to have a future together," Colt explained in a confessional.Colt and Debbie were later shown going out for ice cream to spend some quality time together. Colt told Debbie that he wanted to see Jess again soon despite their ups and downs in Brazil.Debbie shared with the cameras how she wasn't in favor of Colt and Jess' relationship, saying Jess was a rebound for his son when he was in a desperate time in his life.Colt admitted to Debbie that he still loved Jess and wanted to be with her, but he had been keeping another secret from Jess as well -- that Vanessa had moved into his home with Debbie as a "roommate" following her divorce.Vanessa apparently moved in with Colt and Debbie a few days after Colt returned home from Brazil. Colt explained that Debbie had invited Vanessa into their home when Vanessa needed a place to stay.Colt believed his chances of Jess forgiving him and staying with him would be better if they discussed everything in person. Colt, however, realized he had an uphill battle with Jess in trying to convince her that she could trust him and he's a good guy in general.Tania and Syngin had a "braai," which is a barbecue using wood in South Africa. The whole family was together, including Syngin's stepfather and brother Dylan.Syngin said he looked forward to a relaxing evening with his family, but the peace didn't last long.Syngin told his loved ones that living in America was never his dream and he'd love to have land and raise a family in South Africa. Syngin said he realized he was missing out on life in South Africa when he had a fun night out with his friends."It really does make me think if being in America is the right decision for me right now," Syngin told the cameras.Tania explained to Syngin's loved ones that she didn't want to raise a family in South Africa because of the poverty and racism, and Tania said she wanted her kids to grow up with people from so many different cultures and backgrounds."If we're going to have kids..." Tania began."Kids? Who said that's ever going to happen?" Syngin asked.Tania rolled her eyes and asked Syngin to "bring it down a notch." She said Syngin was well aware children were a part of her plan even before they got married and so it wasn't okay for him to flip a switch like that."America's not my f-cking dream," Syngin noted.Syngin's stepfather asked Tania to give Syngin time to get his footing in America since he missed his family and didn't have many friends, but Tania just wanted Syngin to "try out a couple" of his goals. Syngin had already been living in the United States for a couple of years, and Tania said she just wanted him to focus on something."I think it's unfair for Syngin to get married if he didn't plan on staying in America. Yes, I can understand it being hard and him being homesick, but I can't understand no steps being taken. I just don't want empty promises... I need to start seeing action," Tania told the cameras.Tania started to cry at the dinner table and begged Syngin to try something out in the United States. Syngin said Tania was looking for a structured man in a relationship but Syngin wasn't structured and had lived an amazing life because of it."You don't need your work permit to try stuff!" Tania yelled at Syngin, before crying about "not feeling heard or appreciated."Syngin insisted he's just a chill guy and won't be pressured to do anything, but Tania said, "It's not about how fast you go, as long as you have a direction. You have no direction and that's what scares me! Take your time, but have a f-cking direction."Tania said Syngin had been telling her about what he wants to do and the life he'd like to have and she's just been waiting to see some action.Syngin told Tania that pushing him wouldn't help the situation, and Syngin's stepfather said Syngin won't be put in his place and he and Tania had a lot of compromising to do.Tania said when she left Syngin to study herbalism in Costa Rica, he just partied and drank with his friends."Your wife said a lot," Syngin's stepfather said."Yeah, as usual," Syngin griped.Syngin suddenly wiped his brow and then Tania left the table in tears. Tania told his family that he didn't want to be married if life was going to be like this.Syngin said he never wanted to feel belittled, but Tania was upset because Syngin didn't want to talk about their issues in front of his family.Syngin admitted he's a laid back procrastinator, and his stepfather advised him to grow with Tania in the same direction. Tania told Syngin that he needed to "level up" and grow up, but Syngin just joked they weren't playing a Supermario game."If two years isn't enough, then we shouldn't do this anymore," Tania told Syngin."Two years is more than enough for me. It's more than enough for me to give you time and it's more than enough for [me to] show you so many chances that you've failed at. You've broken so many promises. That I'm still here is amazement."Syngin said Tania didn't see or appreciate how much he's changed and sacrificed for her, but he reminded her that he's still a free-spirit. Tania argued she's a free spirit as well but would like to achieve her goals.Tania said Syngin owed two months rent on his apartment when they initially met in South Africa and she brought him a long way, but Syngin was tired of the conversation and left it prematurely.Syngin told the cameras he wasn't sure whether he could see himself being happy with Tania for a long time.Kalani met with Asuelu's sister Tammy and mother without Asuelu -- although he knew about the meeting -- in order to talk some sense into them and explain where she and her husband were coming from in terms of their finances."I just don't know why you feel entitled to me and my family's money... At the end of the day, it is going to be what I say," Kalani told Asuelu's relatives.Asuelu's mother explained it's a man's duty in Samoa to take care of his family, but Kalani thought the situation had been taken to an extreme.Asuelu's mother said, "Just give me money. That's all I want."But Kalani said Asuelu was going to be poor if Asuelu gave all of his money to his family in Samoa. Tammy told Kalani to work as well so they could both help Asuelu's family, but Kalani said she wasn't going to leave her babies so she could make money to pay people in a different country.Tammy called Kalani "lazy," but Kalani said she wasn't going to work to give Asuelu's family "free money."Kalani explained Asuelu needed to be responsible for his kids, and then Tammy blamed Kalani for trying to get pregnant in order to essentially trap Asuelu as a husband."This is the craziest thing yet. I can't believe they're accusing me of getting pregnant on purpose, as if Asuelu is this amazing catch when I've never asked anything of him. It's just kind of weird for them to accuse me of things when they're the ones who keep asking me for money," Kalani said in a confessional.Kalani's mother said she had "nothing" because Asuelu listened to his wife."I don't care about the kids. I want to take back my son to Samoa to do his duty as before," Asuelu's mother said.Kalani appeared shocked, and then Tammy advised Kalani to separate from Asuelu. Kalani found the idea of Asuelu abandoning his kids to be absolutely ridiculous just so he could give his family in Samoa money.Tammy accused Kalani of brainwashing and controlling Asuelu, adding, "That's why I don't like you."But Kalani said, "All I've done is love Asuelu."Kalani said she was "done" with this circus, and then Tammy went after her, looking for a fight physically. Tammy screamed at Kalani as Asuelu's mother held her back, and Kalani called Asuelu's relatives "nuts" and said she was done with them and couldn't deal with them anymore.When Kalani returned to Asuelu and her sister Kolini, Kalani shared what had happened and how Tammy had accused her of controlling her husband. Asuelu could tell the conversation went terribly, and he admitted he was mad.Asuelu was also "surprised" to hear his mother said that she didn't care about her grandchildren. Asuelu wondered if Kalani misunderstood the conversation, but Kalani assured her husband that she had wasted her time and money -- and that his family members were "assh-les."Asuelu asked Kalani not to call his relatives "assh-les," but Kalani said Tammy tried to fight with her."If she grabbed me, I would've knocked her out," Kalani insisted to her husband, adding, "If your sister would have touched a freakin' molecule on my body, I would have dropped her. Period!"Asuelu turned the conversation into who would win a fight, which made Kalani even more frustrated and annoyed. Kalani stormed out of the AirBnB and called Asuelu "a lunatic," just like his family.Asuelu called his wife "f-cking crazy" and said she had crossed a line, but Kalani no longer felt supported by her husband. Kalani worried Asuelu was never going to change for the better, and she feared her life was always going to be crazy.Kolini told Kalani that she was too good for Asuelu and didn't deserve to live this way. Kolini advised Kalani not to stay in a relationship just for the sake of her children."I just feel like I'm done," Kalani cried to her sister, who was taking care of Oliver and Kennedy. "I do feel like I love him still. I just feel like every day, it's getting less and less, and I feel like if it keeps continuing on like this, I won't want to be a part of this marriage anymore."After Larissa's court case was resolved, she begun a new chapter with Eric. Larissa wanted to feel like she shared a house with Eric and wasn't just living in his place, so the pair went shopping together.Larissa basically loved everything in the store, but her taste is apparently expensive. She even fell in love with a couch that was nearly $12,000.Larissa said Eric used to be cheap and so he wanted to prove in their revived romance that he had changed. Larissa wanted Eric to spend money on her, but Eric said they weren't even married yet and she needed to pick things out within reason, like things under $400.Larissa then told Eric that she wanted to get "a boob job" and "a nose job." Larissa said she had lost her confidence in her marriage to Colt and Eric made her feel beautiful and sexy, and so she wanted to boost her ego and be exactly what Eric would desire.Eric, however, told Larissa that she had great breasts and he loved her nose.Larissa anticipated all the work would cost around $25,000-$30,000, and she asked to "borrow" the money from Eric's savings. She apparently didn't expect Eric to pay for it, but she was certain Eric had that money.Eric said he would lend Larissa the money with a contract and interest. He wanted there to be conditions in which he'd feel reassurance Larissa wouldn't just take off to Brazil or something like that after getting her surgeries.Eric thought Larissa was stunning already, but he said he wanted to make Larissa happy and feel good about herself.Larissa felt like Eric had lost passion in their relationship when they previously dated, so she wanted to give him a reason to be crazy about her and lust for her more. Larissa told Eric that she wanted to make their sex better and also marry him."I think that this is going to make Eric be committed to be with me. I hope that after my new boobs, Eric is going to ask my hand to marry him," Larissa told the cameras.Eric asked Larissa if she wanted a boob job to "throw it in [her] ex's face," but Larissa insisted she wanted plastic surgery for the right reasons. Eric said Larissa had proven to him that she's capable of lying, but Larissa promised Eric her new body would be for Eric, herself and their relationship.Larissa insisted she didn't care about Colt and if she ran across him in the desert and he was thirsty, she wouldn't give him water.However, Larissa admitted, "I truly believe that when Colt see my new boobs and a lot of attention from men that I'll get, he gonna feel very jealous... I hope karma can find him."Larissa said she believed more than ever that she and Eric could work out long-term and have a very successful relationship.Want more spoilers or couples updates? Click here to visit our homepage!
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Linkedin Inforial (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Mon, August 24, 2020 17:49 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c4016c60 4 Inforial Free

The agricultural sector is the second-largest contributor to the Indonesian economy, with a recorded 2.19 percent year-on-year growth in the second quarter of 2020, according to a report by The Jakarta Post.

It has also helped buffer the national economy while most other sectors, such as transportation and warehousing, suffered steep declines as a result of pandemic-related restrictions.

Agricultural businesses, however, are still hampered by farmers lack of access to funding. Many farmers do not even have a bank account, forcing them to borrow money from their neighbors or tengkulak(village-level commodity middlemen). Not only does this compromise the farmers productivity,it has also compromised their welfare.

This is where homegrown agricultural technology (agritech) start-up TaniHub Groups peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform TaniFund comes to the aid of farmers. TaniFund is part of the TaniHub Group, which encourages the public to invest in an ecosystem seeking to boost farmers access to funding and welfare. TaniFund and TaniHub seek to boost farmers access to bigger funding and markets.The two endeavors are aimed at boosting their productivity and ultimately, the welfare of farmers.

Investing in the local agricultural sector will give you benefits equal to investing in many other financial instruments, including time deposits and government bonds. Investing in the sector also entails lower risks than investing in the stock market, offering investors an average annual return of 12 to 14.1 percent, TaniFund director Edison Tobing said during an exclusive interview on Wednesday.

Members of the public can look at various agricultural projects open for their investment, including a detailed portfolio outlining the feasibility of each project along with investment terms and conditions at tanifund.com.

To manage investment risks, TaniFund, which is registered with and supervised by the Financial Services Authority (OJK), always conducts feasibility studies on the agricultural projects that it seeks to support, before eventually starting a fundraising program.

TaniFund is part of TaniHub Groups comprehensive ecosystem seeking to help farmers run their businesses more effectively. The support also goes beyond tapping into grassroots investments.

TaniFund also closely monitors and supervises farmers as they start working to help them improve their produce quality. Once the farmers harvest their produce, the farmers will give 100 percent of their produce to TaniHub through the TaniSupply distribution chain.

A TaniFund farmer partner lifts a large pack of harvested red curly chilis at a farm in Bogor, West Java. (Courtesy of TaniHub/.)

Afterward, TaniHub, through its smartphone applicationand web-based store, sells the produce to clients that include exporters, local traditional markets, hotels, restaurants and catering companies, modern retailers as well as industries.

The TaniHub Group also helps link these farmers with suppliers of high-quality raw materials such as fertilizerwhile also helping farmers boost their financial literacy and business strategies.

Edison said the TaniHub Group also collaborated closely with agronomists from the Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) in West Java as well as other universities.

Together, we introduce new farming practices to these farmers. We do this in a participative way by conducting new practices alongside the time-tested ones they have already been using for a long time. If the new practice we introduce turns out to be successful, they will be convinced to adopt it, Edison said.

The start-ups support does not concern only the commercial aspects of agriculture but also strives to create a social impact.

Previously, farmers made money only when they were successful in selling their produce. They often lived with little to no money at all, which forced them to borrow money from their neighbors. Using the funds people have invested, we help these farmers have a regular income for their work, he explained.

TaniHub Group employees, TaniFund field operation team members and farmer partners of TaniFund pose for a picture at a farm in Bogor, West Java. (Courtesy of TaniHub/.)

He added that under the TaniFund system, the farmers did not pay their loans by cash.Instead, they settle their loans by supplying TaniHub with their produce. When the targeted tonnage and price of the produceare met at the time of harvest, TaniFund considers their loans settled.

TaniHub also divides the profits of the produce sales with farmers, which will help them further expand their farming activities and employ more local workers.

Under this system, the farmers can also have a positive impact on the economy of their communities, Edisonsaid.

As of June, TaniFund has disbursed Rp 132.66 billion (US$8.9 million) in loans to fund the projects of about 1,800 farmers included in its ecosystem. Of the amount, lenders can receive an average 14.18 percent return per annum.

Currently, most of the farmers still live in Java. We also conducted projects in Ambon, Maluku and West Nusa Tenggara but did not continue them. We are committed to expanding our reach beyond Java by working on Sulawesi island this year, he said.

For 2020, TaniFund has set its sights on disbursing a total of Rp 120 billion to local farmers, driven by more diversified demand, including in terms of rice cultivation and even animal husbandry, specifically breeding goats. The TaniHub Group as a whole, meanwhile, has set an ambitious target of including 1 million Indonesian farmers in its ecosystem by 2021.

With the help of the government and other relevant institutions, as well as agronomists and scholars from related fields, we are confident that we can include more farmers in [the TaniHub Group] ecosystem, Edison said.

The TaniHub Group will also mark its fourth operational anniversary in conjunction with National Agricultural Day, which falls on Sept. 24, with a month-long series of events  mostly virtual  and sales promotions, covering three pillars: community, consumer and corporate.

Under the community pillar, TaniFund seeks to engage local farmers to boost their financial literacy, as well as invite more members of the public to start investing in the local agricultural sector, especially to bolster economic resilience.

Under the consumer pillar, TaniHub seeks to encourage more Indonesians to buy their domestic produce from local farmers. Under the corporate pillar, meanwhile, the TaniHub Group will conduct various writing, photography and videography activities to promote urban farming and honor the hard work of Indonesian agricultural heroes.

Together, we can boost Indonesias agricultural sector productivity, thus maintaining economic resilience amid the tough times of the COVID-19 pandemic.
NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- ATSG, a tech-enabled managed services and solutions company, is proud to announce that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named ATSG to its 2020 Fast Growth 150 list. Each year, CRN recognizes the fastest-growing technology integrators, solution providers, and IT consultants across North America for the substantial growth and performance they've achieved over the previous two years. The elite group of companies named to this year's list have generated a combined total revenue of more than $37.8 billion between 2018 and 2019.

ATSG is proud to have been named in the upper half of this prestigious list," said Anthony J. D'Ambrosi, Chief Executive Officer, ATSG. "Our accelerated growth year after year is a result of our maniacal commitment to our clients; delivering tech-enabled, professional, and modern managed services that are securely designed for today's complex digital environments. Our collaborative culture of innovation continues to thrive during unparalleled circumstances."

Today's solution providers vie for market share within the highly competitive, fast-paced IT channel, making sustained growth and profitability noteworthy achievements. Ranking within the top 150 requires companies to continuously evolve with the seismic shifts taking place within the marketplace. The 2020 Fast Growth 150 list recognizes these companies' extraordinary accomplishments and dedication to the IT channel.

"Evolution within the IT ecosystem is occurring at breakneck speed. The CRN 2020 Fast Growth 150 list highlights the achievements of elite industry-leading companies in the IT channel and their ability to innovate in an ever-changing market," said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. "The extraordinary group of companies on this year's list serve as an inspiration, setting an exemplary level of excellence for us to follow. We are excited to honor these industry leaders and wish them continued success in the years to come."

A sampling of the 2020 Fast Growth 150 list will be featured in the August issue of CRN Magazine. You can view the complete list online at www.crn.com/fastgrowth150.

About ATSG

ATSG is a global, tech-enabled managed services and solutions company focused on innovative services that enable today's digital enterprise and end-user experiences. ATSG provides Intelligent IT through our Technology Solutions as a Service (TSaaS) portfolio to a wide variety of enterprises and organizations; leveraging our comprehensive offerings of rediTech, rediManage, and rediSecure, which deliver reliable, elastic, dynamic information technology, and world-class operations.

ATSG is a privately held company headquartered in Manhattan, New York. For more information on ATSG, please visit us on the web at http://www.atsg.net/, like us on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter, or become a fan on our Facebook page. #AboutATSG

About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers, and end users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequaled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com

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A grieving mother whose son was murdered in the Christchurch mosque attack confronted the terrorist in court today and told him: 'You killed your own humanity.'

Maysoon Salama told white supremacist gunman Brenton Tarrant: 'I can't forgive you... I don't think the world will forgive you for your horrible crime.'

Salama's son, 33-year-old Atta Elayyan, was one of 51 Muslims killed in Tarrant's meticulously-planned gun rampage at two mosques in New Zealand last year.

Tarrant, who is facing life in prison without parole, showed no emotion as he came face-to-face with wounded victims and bereaved families for the first time.

Survivors recalled the horror of hiding under bodies and living with the sound of an automatic rifle ringing in their ears as they gave evidence on the first day of a sentencing hearing expected to last until Thursday.

'May you get the severest punishment for your evil act in this life, and hereafter,' a tearful Salama told the court.

Terrorist: White supremacist Christchurch gunman Brenton Tarrant showed no emotion as he came face-to-face with wounded victims and bereaved families for the first time today

Maysoon Salama (sitting at the microphone), the mother of one of the victims of the Christchurch shooting, in court today where she told Brenton Tarrant that he had 'killed your own humanity' by murdering 51 Muslims in last year's atrocity

Helpless three-year-old was killed by 'precisely aimed' shots Mucad Ibrahim (pictured) was the youngest victim of the Christchurch attack Brenton Tarrant fired two 'precisely aimed' shots to slaughter three-year-old Mucad Ibrahim, the youngest victim of his mosque rampage. Prosecutors told the court today that Mucad was 'clinging to his father's leg' when Tarrant 'aimed directly at Mucad and shot him' at the Al Noor mosque. In the confusion, Mucad's father and brother lost sight of the toddler and only after an agonising search did they discover he had died. His father Aden Diriye was among those who returned to the mosque to pray when it re-opened its doors eight days after the massacre. Family friends remembered Mucad, who was born and raised in Christchurch, as a bright and bubbly toddler who loved playing with an iPad. Ahmed Osman, a close family friend, said Mucad used to cheer from the sidelines as he and Mucad's brother Abdi played football on Friday evenings at a park near the mosque. Another friend, Guled Mire, said at the time that Mucad's parents had moved from Somalia thinking that New Zealand would be a 'safe haven'. 'They were former refugees. Its completely devastating of course. They were fleeing violence and war,' Guled said. Advertisement

Held amid tight security with snipers positioned on rooftops, the hearing was told how the heavily-armed Tarrant opened fire on men, women and children, ignoring pleas for help and driving over a body as he moved from one mosque to the next.

When he saw three-year-old Mucad Ibrahim clinging to his father's leg, Tarrant killed him 'with two precisely aimed shots,' prosecutor Barnaby Hawes told the court.

Tarrant has pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder, 40 of attempted murder and one of terrorism after storming into two mosques in Christchurch, with the rampage ending when police stopped him as he travelled to a third.

Lawyers expect the 29-year-old Australian to be the first person jailed for life without parole in New Zealand.

Wearing grey prison clothing and surrounded in the dock by three police officers, he remained silent, occasionally looking around the room, as Hawes delivered a chilling summary of the facts.

'He admitted going into both mosques intending to kill as many people as he could,' Hawes said.

'He stated that he wanted to have shot more people than he did and was on the way to another mosque in Ashburton to carry out another attack when he was stopped,' he said.

Tarrant was also carrying four modified gas containers which he planned to use to burn down the mosques after he finished shooting, Hawes said.

Prosecutors say the third attack was prevented after Tarrant was rammed by two police officers, dragged out of his car and arrested while on his way to the Ashburton mosque.

Hawes told the court that Tarrant had himself referred to the shooting as 'terror attacks' in an interview with police.

'He intended to instil fear into those he described as invaders, including the Muslim population or more generally non-European immigrants,' Hawes said.

Shortly before the shooting, Tarrant published a 74-page manifesto filled with racist conspiracy theories online.

Tarrant is representing himself at the hearing, but judge Cameron Mander has imposed reporting restrictions to prevent him using the court as a platform for extremist views.

Janna Ezat, the mother of one of the victims, speaks during the sentencing hearing for mosque gunman Brenton Tarrant at Christchurch High Court on Monday

A car parked near Christchurch High Court today was emblazoned with the message: 'Who armed Tarrant?'

Imam Gamal Fouda (pictured left) of the Al Noor mosque leaves the court today after telling the judge that he had 'seen the hate in the eyes of a brainwashed terrorist'

A police sniper is seen on the roof of the High Court in Christchurch as today's sentencing hearing was held amid high security

Mosque shooting survivor Mazharuddin Syed Ahmed makes his victim impact statement during the sentencing hearing in Christchurch today

Brave worshipper who ran at the gunman Naeem Rashid (pictured) bravely tried to tackle the gunman Prosecutors today described the bravery of a worshipper who was killed after charging at the terrorist in the Al Noor mosque. Naeem Rashid ran at Brenton Tarrant from a corner of the room, coming to within feet of the gunman before Tarrant swung round his AR-15 and fired four shots at point-blank range. Rashid then crashed into Tarrant who fell to one knee, before picking himself up and shooting Rashid again. The victim's brave attempt to tackle the gunman was captured on Tarrant's live-streamed video of the attack. 50-year-old Rashid, who was a teacher, and his 21-year-old son Talha were among nine Pakistanis killed during the mosque shootings. Pakistan honoured him posthumously with an award for bravery while Pakistani PM Imran Khan said the country was 'proud of Mian Naeem Rashid who was martyred trying to tackle the white supremacist terrorist'. Advertisement

Abdiaziz Ali Jama, a 44-year-old Somali refugee, saw her brother-in-law Muse Awale shot dead, and said she continued to suffer trauma.

'I see the images and I hear the constant sound rata-rata-rata - the sound of the gun shooting - in my head,' said Jama.

'I have flashbacks, seeing dead bodies all around me. Blood everywhere,' added a son of Ashraf Ali, another victim.

Gamal Fouda, the imam of the Al Noor mosque, said he was standing in the pulpit 'and saw the hate in the eyes of a brainwashed terrorist'.

'We are a peaceful and loving community who did not deserve your actions,' Fouda told Tarrant in court today

'Your hatred is unnecessary. If you have done anything, you have brought the world community closer with your evil actions.'

He added: 'I can say to the family of the terrorist that they have lost a son and we have lost many from our community too.

'I respect them because they are suffering as we are.'

Janna Ezat, whose son Hussein Al-Umari was killed, looked at Tarrant and spoke softly.

'I forgive you,' she said. 'The damage is done, Hussein will never be here. I only have one choice and that is to forgive.'

A small public gallery is in place at the main court, with other survivors and families viewing the proceedings in seven overflow courtrooms due to social distancing rules.

Some injured victims and bereaved relatives had family members around them for support, while others spoke through translators or on pre-recorded videos from abroad.

Mariam Gul, whose parents and sister were murdered, said by video link that Tarrant needed to educate himself and acknowledge that Islam was a religion of peace.

Prosecutors also told of the bravery of Naeem Rashid, who was killed at the Al Noor mosque.

'He ran at the defendant from the south-eastern corner of the room. When Mr Rashid was approximately one metre from the defendant, the defendant swung the AR-15 around and fired four shots at point-blank range,' Hawes said.

'Mr Rashid crashed into the defendant and the defendant went down on one knee,' Hawes said, adding that Tarrant was able to get back up and shoot Rashid again.

At the second mosque, Abdul Aziz chased Tarrant down the driveway screaming at him, prosecutors said, and threw a discarded rifle at his car, shattering a glass panel. Aziz was not injured.

Mohammad Alam gives a victim impact statement as terrorist gunman Brenton Tarrant awaits sentencing

Bereaved relatives leave the court in Christchurch today where the sentencing hearing was held under tight security

Family members of Christchurch mosque shooting victims leave the court where Tarrant is expected to receive the longest sentence in New Zealand history

Justice Cameron Mander, pictured today, is expected to sentence Brenton Tarrant to life in prison without parole

Gunman's meticulous planning for mosque attacks New Zealand prosecutors say shooter Brenton Tarrant meticulously planned the attacks on March 15 last year. They told the court that: Tarrant, an Australian, arrived in New Zealand in 2017 and successfully applied for a firearms licence.

Between late 2017 and early 2019, he purchased a collection of high-powered firearms with military specification sighting systems and telescopic sights. He practised at various rifle clubs.

He accumulated more than 7,000 rounds of ammunition and purchased military-style ballistic armour and tactical vests.

Two months before the attack, on January 8, 2019, Tarrant travelled from Dunedin to Christchurch for reconnaissance.

He studied mosque layout plans and researched what would be the busiest times. He also flew a drone over his primary target, Al Noor Mosque, and focused on the entry and exit doors.

On the day of the attack, Tarrant sent a message to family members describing his intentions.

He then activated a camera with a live-feed via Facebook and launched his gun rampage in the early afternoon.

He was stopped en route to a third mosque after attacking the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre. Advertisement

The court was told Tarrant arrived in New Zealand in 2017 and based himself in Dunedin, 220 miles south of Christchurch.

Once settled in the country, he built up a collection of high-powered firearms and purchased more than 7,000 rounds of ammunition.

Two months before the attack, he drove to Christchurch and flew a drone over the Al Noor mosque, filming the grounds and buildings, including entrances and exits, with detailed notes about travelling between mosques.

On Friday, March 15, 2019 he left his Dunedin address and drove to Christchurch armed with a range of high-powered weapons on which he had written references to historic battles, figures of the Crusades and more recent terror attacks and symbols.

Hawes said the gunman planned his attacks for when the maximum number of worshippers were present, and that 190 people were in the Al Noor mosque for Friday prayers on the day of the attacks.

He had ammunition pre-loaded into magazines, a camera mounted on his helmet to record the attacks and modified petrol containers 'to burn down the mosques and said he wished he had done so,' Hawes said.

In the minutes leading up to the storming of the al Noor mosque, he sent his 74-page manifesto to an extremist website.

He also alerted his family to what he was about to do and sent emails containing threats to attack the mosques to numerous media agencies.

Tarrant has dismissed his lawyers and is representing himself during the sentencing, raising fears he could try to use the occasion as a platform to promote his racist views.

He can choose to speak in court once the survivors have spoken, although Justice Mander will likely shut down any attempts he makes to grandstand.

Mander, who said he had read more than 200 victim impact statements, is expected to hand down a sentence on Thursday.

New Zealand abolished the death penalty for murder in 1961, and the longest sentence imposed since then has been life with a minimum 30-year term.

Mariam Gul (pictured speaking by video link), whose parents and sister were murdered, said Tarrant needed to educate himself and acknowledge that Islam was a religion of peace

The Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, one of the Muslim places of worship attacked by Brenton Tarrant after the he drove to the city and flew a drone over the mosque in preparation

Family members of victims killed in the two mosque attacks arrive outside the High Court in Christchurch on Monday morning
The US-led multinational military coalition against the Islamic State (IS) handed full control of another base to Iraqi security forces over the weekend.

Camp Taji, just a dozen miles north of the capital, is the eighth site yet turned over to Baghdads forces amid the coalitions consolidation following the capture of IS last remaining territory last year.

For the past six years, Camp Taji has served as a primary installation for coalition partners to train the Iraqi army, Iraqi air force, and the [special forces], deputy coalition commander Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman said in a statement.

From this day forward, the [Iraqi security forces] will take full responsibility for the facilities and programs at Taji and continue to use the site to lead and conduct training as part of the mission to defeat Daesh [IS] remnants, Ekman said.

Taji is also the costliest facility returned to full Iraqi control. The coalition said it invested some $347 million in the site, including equipment, aircraft shelters and a renovation of the bases runway.

The base has been home to as many as 2,000 coalition personnel, most of whom left over this summer, according to the statement.

Entering its final stage, the coalition is focusing on mentoring Iraqs commanders at the Union III base in Baghdads more secure Green Zone, rather than training Iraqi forces at satellite bases throughout the country.

The long-planned consolidation was hastened by harassing rocket fire by suspected Iran-linked militias and by the coronavirus pandemic, the coalition has said.

Taji has been repeatedly targeted with rocket fire. More than a dozen people were injured and three coalition-linked personnel  including two US soldiers and a UK soldier  were killed in a March rocket strike on the Taji base.

A previous rocket strike on a shared base near Kirkuk killed an American contractor late last year, bringing Iran and the United States to the brink of conflict in Iraq.

Following a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Washington last week, US President Donald Trump said US troops in Iraq would be leaving shortly, but deferred to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when asked about a timeline.

As soon as we complete the mission, Pompeo said.

US military officials have told Al-Monitor that they expect US troops to remain in Iraq, though ultimately whether they do and for how long is up to the White House.

The top commander of US forces in the Middle East Gen. Kenneth Frank McKenzie has said the coalition can maintain pressure on IS' scattered sleeper cells with fewer American personnel in Iraq.
NEWTOWN  Police are investigating a double murder in the first block of Rockwood Road Sunday.

Newtown Police Chief Christopher Lunn said police were called to a home after a man phoned 911, claiming he had killed his wife and mother. Officers arrived and made contact with a man at the front door where he repeated the claim that he had killed his wife and mother. The man was transported to the hospital for treatment of self-inflicted injuries. Inside the house, police found the bodies of two women.

Police were called to the home about 9:45 a.m.; the emergency medical dispatch had reported an unknown emergency.

Numerous police detectives were standing by on the street just after noon waiting for a search warrant to enter the home, which sits in a quiet residential neighborhood of Newtown just off of West Chester Pike near St. Anastasia Church.

I dont know what happened, said Dory Southscot, a neighbor who lives up the street. They are quiet and they dont come out that much  an occasional birthday party or to say hi when they are walking, but other than that they are really quiet people. 

Southcott said she saw a number of ambulances at the home from both Newtown and Marple and police at the scene.

A taxi, from the Philadelphia Taxi Cab Co. sat backed into the driveway of the two-story home which is situated just off the road in a slight valley. Solar panels cover the roof of the home and a small inflatable childrens pool could be seen in the backyard.

Family members of the victims gathered across the street from the home but declined comment.

Police have not released any additional information about the incident.
Pottsville, PA (17901)

Today

Light snow this morning will give way to some clearing this afternoon. Some sleet may mix in. Morning high of 37F with temps falling to near 20. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 70%..

Tonight

A few clouds. Low 11F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.
And while, what Amala Paul has done for cinema, is a rarity, she is not the only actress to have bared it when the script of a film demanded it. There have been others who are so committed to their art that they've come to terms with the idea that a scene may simply require nudity.
A young man who was caught attempting to smuggle squirrels into Australia from Bali by hiding them down his pants boasted about his mission on Facebook.

Lucas Seth Jolly, now 20, was stopped at Brisbane airport after a friend tipped off authorities about his bizarre plan to bring the rodents into the country.

He had purchased the two juvenile squirrels from an animal market for $15 each and hid them inside his luggage during the flight on December 4, 2018.

Lucas Seth Jolly, now 20, was stopped at Brisbane airport after he boasted on social media about his mission to transport the rodents into the country

Jolly placed the squirrels inside socks before loading them into his suitcases, where they remained for eight and a half hours without food or water.

As he made his way towards Brisbane, Jolly shared a series of photos and videos detailing his smuggling.

He captioned the images with: 'He's ready for the flight' and 'It f***ing worked, f*** all your haters', according to the Sunshine Coast Daily.

Prosecutor Sam Hill told Maroochydore District Court on Monday that Jolly's social media activity had led to his downfall - with one of his followers dobbing him in.

When Jolly arrived at Brisbane airport he collected his bags off the conveyor belt before he walked into a bathroom with his luggage.

Once inside he removed the squirrels and stuffed them down his pants before taking one out as he approached the screening area.

Jolly (left) placed the squirrels inside socks before loading them into his suitcases, where they remained for eight and a half hours without food or water

Jolly then pointed the animal out to a border security officer and said 'hey mate, there's a squirrel on the floor'.

The officer then asked where the second squirrel was before Jolly asked who told them. He then confessed that the second rodent was in his pants.

Mr Hill said the animals likely would have suffered during the eight-and-a-half-hour flight.

'During that time, the squirrels did not have access to food and water, and they were exposed to unregulated temperatures,' he said.

Both creatures were eventually euthanised.

On Monday, Jolly pleaded guilty to a series of offences including importing regulated live specimens in a cruel manner.

Prosecutor Sam Hill told Maroochydore District Court on Monday the animals likely would have suffered during the eight and a half hour flight (stock image)

His defence lawyer, Patrick Meehan, said Jolly had made a reckless mistake he now regretted and had no previous criminal history.

Despite two of his charges having up to a maximum jail sentence of 10 years each Mr Meehan argued it was not appropriate for the crime.

Judge John Allan said he believed the act was due to 'immaturity and idiocy' and the smuggling was not planned.

Jolly was spared his 18 month jail term but only on the condition he maintain good behaviour for the next five years.
The Oklahoman and StateImpact surveyed 136 districts in counties at Orange Level 2 or the higher Red Level and found only six will start the year with distance learning.

The scarcity of schools starting online in areas of high community spread is concerning, said Ashley Weedn, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital at OU Medicine. Roughly a third of the school districts surveyed will require face coverings. Some districts mandate them in hallways and on buses but not in classrooms.

In a county with high community spread, McAlester Public Schools plans to have all of its 3,000 students return Aug. 31. The McAlester school board approved a plan to have its student body alternate in-person classes for the first week of school, beginning Tuesday.
Editor : Ling Xiao

Source : chinadaily.com.cn

China's strict prevention and control measures meant the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country was largely brought under control in early April, which was marked by the lifting of the lockdown on Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province. Nearly four months have passed since the lifting, the city ushered in the hoped-for economic recovery, as prevention and control measures are becoming a new normal.

Work resumption rate in the city's catering industry, which was among the hardest hit by the outbreak, was 78 percent on August 1, up from 13.3 percent on May 1, according to the city's dining industry association. Liu Guoliang, president of the association, said that over 80 percent of businesses are back to work in the industry, which is better than expected.

Under the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, a steady stream of people can be seen along the riverbank from evening to late night, enjoying the coolness, singing or dancing. Many newlyweds leave their footprints in front of the landmark Hankow Customs House, taking photos to mark the occasion of the revived dynamism in the metropolis.

A long queue can be spotted at the entrance of the reganmian shops in the early morning. Among them are not only local regular customers but also many tourists from across the country. Reganmian, or more commonly hot dry noodles, is a traditional Chinese dish originating from Wuhan. It is one of the five most common and popular noodle dishes in China. The noodles in reganmian are cooked in a mixture of water and sesame oil, cooled, tossed and warmed in the same mixture right before serving.

In the famous Jiqing Folk Street, the combination of food stalls and folk artists' performances is full of breath of life. The real appeal, unmistakably, is in that note of vehemence in the local life. It is how the life of the city looks to the people who live it.

Starting from August 8, tourist sites in Hubei province rebounded in business after scrapping entrance fees for domestic visitors, a token of gratitude for nationwide assistance during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The 364 A-level scenic spots in Hubei received 1 million tourists between August 8, the start of the free-ticket policy, and August 10, said the province's culture and tourism department.

A-level tourist attractions in Hubei Province will keep open to tourists from low-risk areas across the country for ticket-free reservations until the end of 2020. The stimulus plan will accelerate the recovery of the local tourism market.

In the Yellow Crane Tower scenic area, a large number of tourists line up to visit through the reserved passage. This landmark building resumed its opening on June 1. The current daily reception volume has scaled up to 50 percent of its maximum reception capacity, which is 25,000 people. It saw tourist arrivals increase more than tenfold week on week. As of August 16, the major scenic spots in Hubei had received 3.262 million tourists.

"We in Wuhan are the safest now." This is the most heard words in Wuhan. From May to June, the city conducted nucleic acid tests on more than 9 million residents. It is a city with a deep "corona memory". Although the South China Seafood Market is still closed, the glasses wholesale market upstairs has reopened. A merchant introduced that the reopened store can enjoy a four-month rent reduction, and some of the original South China Seafood Market merchants have resumed work in some other farmer's market in Wuhan.

The Hongshan Gymnasium, which was once served as a makeshift hospital, has gradually resumed its original function, and began to recruit students for summer swimming classes.

The outpatient hall of Wuhan Union Hospital has also regained its pre-epidemic bustle. Zhang Jinnong, director of the hospital's emergency department, who is both a doctor and a survivor of coronavirus, said that most of the hundreds of COVID-19 patients he has contacted have recovered well.

(Source: China Daily)
The event aimed to discuss priorities of the President of the 75th UN General Assembly and measures to strengthen cooperation between the ASEAN and the UN General Assembly in the time ahead.

Bozkir said his first priority for the 75th UN General Assembly is to successfully organise a high-level debate and a General Assembly meeting to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the UN in September in both virtual and physical forms due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He also planned to promote suitable working methods to ensure health and safety while ensuring the UNs operation.

The President-elect of the 75th UN General Assembly said he will work to enhance the role and position of the UN General Assembly, contributing to promoting multilateralism and the rules-based international system. He appreciated ASEANs role and contribution to the UN, and expressed his hope that ASEAN countries, including Vietnam and Indonesia which are currently non-permanent members of the UN Security Council, will work to promote solidarity and unity of the UN and the UN Security Council.

ASEAN ambassadors and heads of missions congratulated Bozkir for his election as President of the 75th UN General Assembly and voiced support for priorities in his working agenda. They appreciated the UNs efforts in response to COVID-19, and pledged to work to bolster cooperation between ASEAN and the Office of the UN General Assembly President.
British pub operator J D Wetherspoon said on Monday its sales were still down sharply year-on-year despite help from the government's subsidised meal scheme, and called for tax relief for the hospitality sector to be extended.

The company forecast a loss for the year and said it was looking to seek waivers on its loans as it dealt with the financial fallout of months of coronavirus-driven pub closures and subsequent social distancing measures.

Sales have been helped by the government's "Eat out to help out" discount scheme, offering half-priced meals from Monday to Wednesday, it said, and by the addition of extra seating outside.

However they were likely to fall further as the scheme winds down, Wetherspoon said, adding that the government should maintain lower value-added tax (VAT) on meals.

Britain temporarily cut VAT on spending on hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions last month to 5% from 20% to boost demand for services hardest hit by the COVID-19 lockdown.

"If this major step towards tax equality is maintained in the long term, it will result in a significant increase in investment and employment in the on-trade," the company said.

Shares were up 1.6% at 988.5 pence by 0755 GMT.

"What really matters now is how the business fares without the sales incentive and if it can avoid pushing up prices to help claw back some of the lost revenue from earlier this year," AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould said.

"It cannot afford to upset customers who are already in a fragile state of mind."

Wetherspoons said supermarkets had sucked up much of the pub industry's food and beer trade in the crisis.

The company, whose cheaply priced pubs are a fixture in British towns and cities, said earlier this month it will slash up to 130 jobs at its head office and scale back its expansion plans.

Wetherspoon said 844 of its 873 pubs were now open and that like-for-like bar and food sales were down 16.9% in the 44 days to Aug. 16. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire (PANA) - The African Development Bank (AfDB) Group will hold its Annual Meetings for the year 2020 in virtual mode, from August 25 to 27, because of the coronavirus pandemic, a statement from the institution announced on Sunday
CORRECTION  Based on information provided by the U.S. Army, the original version of this story had incorrectly named Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation.

WASHINGTON  The U.S. Army has awarded 10 contracts worth a total of $29.75 million to companies to provide mature technologies in the realm of air-launched effects, or ALE, for future vertical lift aircraft that are expected to come online around 2030, service aviation officials have told Defense News.

Raytheon, Alliant Techsystems Operations of Northridge, California, and Area-I of Marietta, Georgia, were awarded contracts to develop air vehicles.

L3 Technologies, Rockwell Collins and Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation were awarded contracts to provide mission systems.

And Raytheon, Leonardo Electronics US Inc., Technology Service Corporation of Huntsville, Alabama, and Alliant Techsystems Operations LLC of Northridge, California, received contracts to provide ALE payloads.

Through ALE, the Army hopes to provide current and future vertical lift fleets with the eyes and ears to penetrate enemy territory while manned aircraft are able to maintain standoff out of range of enemy attack, Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, who is in charge of the Armys FVL modernization efforts, said in an exclusive interview with Defense News.

To do that, that has a whole host of capabilities embedded in it, and I would say its not just the eyes and ears, but its also, what we are finding, is the mouth, so our ability to communicate by bringing mesh network capabilities, by bringing an ability to hear in the electronic spectrum, and, again, the ability to collect in that spectrum so we can find, fix and finish on pacing threats, he added.

The Army plans to take these already technically mature capabilities through additional technology maturation, Col. Scott Anderson, the unmanned aircraft systems project manager for the Armys Program Executive Office for Aviation, said in the same interview.

Were looking for high technology readiness levels, so best of breed, he said, that we can buy and then we dont have to develop, spend a lot of developmental dollars getting ready to get out the door in a prototype. The air vehicle, payloads and missions systems will all fit into a government-owned architecture by fiscal 2024.

Story continues

The service will first look at each major component of ALE individually, rather than as a whole system, to assess readiness, Anderson said. That will run through most of 2021.

Then in 2022, the Army will take those capabilities and bring them together into a full system prototype working with Georgia Tech, which is helping the service write the underpinnings of the reference architecture, he added.

In the final phase, the Army will integrate the system onto a platform, first targeting the Gray Eagle and AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. Ultimately the ALE capabilities to come out of the effort will be targeted for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) ecosystem, Anderson said.

The Army is planning to field both FARA and a Future Long-Range Attack Aircraft (FLRAA) in the early 2030s.

We want to mature the [ALE] ecosystem and then have it ready to hand off to FARA in full bloom, Rugen added.

The Army has been looking at ALE since roughly late 2017, Rugen said, and has been working to refine the associated capabilities development documents for several years. Army Futures Command Commander Gen. Mike Murray signed an abbreviated capabilities development document in May.

The service has been pleased with what it has seen so far in live prototype experimentation and physics-based modeling within the science and technology community and is prepared to move quickly on the effort, Rugen said.

Army Futures Command is leading a cultural shift, much to the delight of industry

The Army selected Area-Is ALTIUS, the Air-Launched, Tube-Integrated Unmanned System, to launch from a rotary-wing test aircraft  a UH-60 Black Hawk  and was able to demonstrate the concept from a high altitude in August 2018.

Then the service demonstrated the concept again during a ground robotic breach exercise at Yakima Air Base in Washington state in 2019 as well as a launch from a Black Hawk flying at a lower altitude  roughly 100 feet or less.

In March, at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, the Army demonstrated multiple ALEs launched from a Black Hawk at very low altitudes to maintain masking, Rugen said. We got our mesh network extended out to about 60 kilometers, so we were pretty happy with, again, the requirements pace and the experimentation pace with that.

The program will evolve beyond 2024 as the capability will align more closely with fitting into future formations.

Jumping into algorithmic warfare: US Army aviation tightens kill chain with networked architecture

The Army could award future contracts to integrate the capability or could establish follow-on Other Transaction Authority contracts  which is the type of contract mechanism used for the 10 awardees that allows the Army to move faster to rapidly prototype. We have the contractual mechanisms to be flexible and responsive, which is key in a program like ALE, Joe Giunta, executive director of Army Contracting Command at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, said.

Instead of looking for a vendor that could deliver every aspect of a system, we can harvest from across multiple different vendors, who bring, if you will, the best characteristics, Patrick Mason, the deputy PEO for Army Aviation, added.

Then as they merge into our government reference architecture and our open system approach, we are then able to bring those together to create a much more capable product, he said, that fits into the longer term on how we can modify that as technology comes along and we can ramp on increases in technologies as we get out into the 23, 24 time frame and then further into the future as we look out to FY30 and the fielding of FARA, FLRAA and the full establishment of the FVL ecosystem.

The Army released a notice to industry Aug. 12 looking for input on technology that could further advance the capability of ALE against sophisticated adversaries with plans to host an industry day in September.

While the service will prototype mature technologies in the near term, Mason said, when you look at the 25 and 26 time frame, there will be better technologies that are developed around the payload side of the house, advancements in air vehicles or advancements in the missions systems.

The RFI is looking at the next increment that is out there as we move from now in 2020 to what we would have as a residual capability in 24 to what we could move to in 2030, Mason said.
People have this sense to be educated on what is happening in the country and what led up to this point, Nervis said of protests and community tension in Phoenix. We carry a lot of books about social commentary, history and books written by Black authors. I think that is part of the reason why weve seen a dramatic increase in our book sales.
The task force meetings were plagued by indecision, and Pence himself had little expertise in the nuances of the novel virus. Pence was initially dubious of masks and reluctant to implement what he saw as overly long shutdowns that could harm the economy. Short, who controlled the task forces day-to-day operations, was viewed by some of the medical experts as ideological. He was determined to travel, even though other White House aides warned against it. His travel included a controversial trip to Seattle in the early days of the pandemic.
ram.iyer95 BHPian

Join Date: Nov 2018 Location: KL-09 Posts: 121 Thanked: 285 Times

re: Honda Jazz BS6, now launched at Rs. 7.5 lakhs Quote: RoadMonkey Originally Posted by With all due respect, good sir, I disagree with Baleno being a fuss free ownership experience, that is if you fuss over the safety of the ones you love. I happen to be owner of a 2017 Baleno and I'm looking to switch it with a car, even if of a lower segment, because of the safety reasons.



If safety is the area of prime concern, then you shouldn't be looking at the Baleno or even the Jazz sold here, for that matter. The Tata Altroz and the VW Polo are the only India-spec premium hatchbacks that have proven solid NCAP ratings. The Jazz and the Baleno scored 5 and 4 stars respectively in the Euro NCAP test, but we don't know whether the India-spec cars can replicate those scores. And as many experts have already pointed out in the forum, sheet metal thickness and light-feeling body panels cannot be considered as the only factors to gauge a car's safety aspects. The Brezza pleasantly surprised us with a decent 4-Star rating and so did the Toyota Etios. Yes, I do understand that a visibly heavier build gives a reassuring sense of safety and security, but unless all these cars sold here are assessed by NCAP, we can only pray that nothing unfortunate happens. And I'm not supporting MSIL here in any way, as well; they deserve criticism as the NCAP results of some of their popular hatchbacks sold here have not been encouraging at all, despite all the buzz about the Heartect platform being safe while being light, and what not!



Cheers! Buddy, the only point that I wanted to put forth was that the Baleno is not too far behind the Jazz in terms of powertrain reliability, space and practicality. Perhaps I should have substantiated my opinion in a better way.If safety is the area of prime concern, then you shouldn't be looking at the Baleno or even the Jazz sold here, for that matter. The Tata Altroz and the VW Polo are the only India-spec premium hatchbacks that have proven solid NCAP ratings. The Jazz and the Baleno scored 5 and 4 stars respectively in the Euro NCAP test, but we don't know whether the India-spec cars can replicate those scores. And as many experts have already pointed out in the forum, sheet metal thickness and light-feeling body panels cannot be considered as the only factors to gauge a car's safety aspects. The Brezza pleasantly surprised us with a decent 4-Star rating and so did the Toyota Etios. Yes, I do understand that a visibly heavier build gives a reassuring sense of safety and security, but unless all these cars sold here are assessed by NCAP, we can only pray that nothing unfortunate happens. And I'm not supporting MSIL here in any way, as well; they deserve criticism as the NCAP results of some of their popular hatchbacks sold here have not been encouraging at all, despite all the buzz about the Heartect platform being safe while being light, and what not!Cheers! Last edited by ram.iyer95 : 13th August 2020 at 17:28 .
Douglas Dynamics CFO Sarah Lauber

Sarah Lauber pictured at Douglas Dynamics Headquarters with Western MVP 3TM V-plow and truck upfit with Henderson Products stainless steel dump body

Sarah Lauber pictured at Douglas Dynamics Headquarters with Western MVP 3TM V-plow and truck upfit with Henderson Products stainless steel dump body

MILWAUKEE, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Douglas Dynamics, Inc. (NYSE: PLOW), North America's premier manufacturer and upfitter of work truck attachments and equipment, today announced that Sarah Lauber was named among the Milwaukee Business Journals 2020 Chief Financial Officer of the Year award winners. The award recognizes the important work chief financial officers do in making southeast Wisconsin firms and organizations successful.



Lauber, who serves as the Chief Financial Officer and Secretary at Douglas Dynamics, was one of only two honorees among publicly held companies in the southeastern Wisconsin area.

This is a great achievement and very well deserved. After joining Douglas three years ago this month, Sarah quickly became an integral part of our leadership team, noted Bob McCormick, President and CEO. Sarah and her team continually maintain and expand our companys strong financial position, which provides the strong foundation for us to operate effectively and execute our growth plans.

Among her accomplishments, Lauber and her team recently refinanced a $325 million credit facility, further strengthening the Companys balance sheet, which was an important achievement given the economic environment and challenging credit markets. In addition, she and her team have helped the Companys most recent acquisitions improve their overall financial management and processes, making them more efficient and improving margins.

Lauber is proud to serve as the Treasurer and Board member of the Junior Achievement of Wisconsin, helping the organization achieve its mission to prepare todays students for a bright future by giving young people the knowledge and skills they need to own their economic success, plan for their futures, and make smart academic and economic choices.

Story continues

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2afecf80-39be-4b74-8bff-f5fef5653e27

Before joining Douglas Dynamics in 2017, Lauber held financial leadership positions at several public companies in Wisconsin. She was Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Jason Industries, Inc., a diversified industrial company from 2015 to 2017. Ms. Lauber also served as Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis at Regal Beloit Corporation, a manufacturer of electric motors, generators and controls, and mechanical motion control products, from 2011 to 2015. She served as Chief Financial Officer of A.O. Smith Corporations Electrical Products Company (EPC), a manufacturer of electric motors for residential and commercial applications, from 2002 until EPC was acquired by Regal Beloit in 2011. Lauber began her career as an accountant at KPMG.

About Douglas Dynamics

Home to the most trusted brands in the industry, Douglas Dynamics is North Americas premier manufacturer and upfitter of commercial work truck attachments and equipment. For more than 70 years, the Company has been innovating products that not only enable people to perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively, but also enable businesses to increase profitability. Through its proprietary Douglas Dynamics Management System (DDMS), the Company is committed to continuous improvement aimed at consistently producing the highest quality products, at industry-leading levels of service and delivery that ultimately drive shareholder value. The Douglas Dynamics portfolio of products and services is separated into two segments: First, the Work Truck Attachments segment, which includes commercial snow and ice control equipment sold under the FISHER, SNOWEX and WESTERN brands. Second, the Work Truck Solutions segment, which includes the upfit of market leading attachments and storage solutions under the HENDERSON brand, and the DEJANA brand and its related sub-brands.

Media Contact

Katie Sandieson

Director, Corporate Communications

Douglas Dynamics

ksandieson@douglasdynamics.com




Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:08:09|Editor: huaxia

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MUSCAT, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Omani health ministry on Monday announced 740 new COVID-19 infections, raising the total number of confirmed cases in the Gulf state to 84,509, the official Oman News Agency (ONA) reported.

Meanwhile, the overall number of recoveries reached 78,912, while the death toll increased by 28 to 637, according to a ministry statement quoted by ONA.

In addition, 37 patients were hospitalized over the past 24 hours, taking the total number to 406,of whom 149 are receiving intensive care treatment, the statement said.

The Omani authorities this week lifted a ban on night-time movement that was imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19. Enditem
Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, questioned by police over suspected embezzlement, has been banned from leaving the capital.

Former Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz has been released by police after undergoing week-long questioning over suspected embezzlement, his lawyer said.

He has not been charged but his passport, which was taken on his arrest, has not been returned, attorney Taghioullah Aida said on Monday, adding that Aziz has also been banned from leaving the capital, Nouakchott.

Al-Akbar news portal, citing an official source, said the former president has been placed under surveillance by the Economic Crimes Police.

Aziz had gone to the headquarters of the General Directorate for National Security on August 17 after police went to his home and asked him to cooperate with the investigators.

He was released at around 1:30am (01:30 GMT) on Monday, Aida said.

The interest in Aziz stems from major suspicions of maladministration and embezzlement of public assets, a security source told AFP news agency last week.

Aziz, 63, was arrested last week on charges of corruption put forward by a parliamentary committee that has scrutinised his time in power.

The former president initially resisted cooperation with investigators and refused to answer questions. However, he later agreed to cooperate after being pressured by the investigators.





Several former officials suspected of corruption during Azizs era had earlier been questioned by the authorities.

According to Sahara Media, those questioned included close confidants of the former president, including the accountant of the Al-Rahma Foundation established by his son.

High treason

Aziz seized power in 2008 and served two terms as president before being succeeded in August 2019 by Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani, his former right-hand man and ex-defence minister.

Aziz had been kept at arms length by Ghazouani since leaving power.

Little more than four months after he left office, parliament set up a commission of inquiry into his affairs.

Aziz failed to answer a call to testify before the commission in early July.

The MPs then swiftly approved a law to set up a High Court of Justice that would be empowered to try presidents and ministers in cases of high treason.

The parliamentary report was formally handed to the prosecutors this month.

It was followed on August 9 by a government reshuffle that turfed out four former ministers whose names surfaced in the investigation, including former Prime Minister Ismail Ould Bedda Ould Cheikh Sidiya.

Among the issues probed by the commission, according to sources in parliament, were the handling of oil revenue, the sale of state property in Nouakchott, the winding up of a publicly owned food supply company, and the activities of a Chinese fishing company called Pully Hong Dong.

New Prime Minister Mohamed Ould Bilal was a minister for several terms under former President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, who was deposed in the coup led by Aziz.
Gunmen kill, wound several US-backed SDF militants across northern Syria

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 2:12 PM

Unidentified armed men have shot dead and wounded several US-sponsored militants affiliated with the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) across the northern sector of Syria as public outrage boils in areas held by the Takfiris amid worsening security conditions.

Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Syria's official news agency SANA on Sunday that four SDF militants were killed after unknown gunmen fired multiple machine gun shots at them close to the flagstones factories in the al-Jazara neighborhood, the National Hospital in al-Tabqah city, located approximately 55 kilometers (34 miles) west of Raqqah, as well as Abu Quba'i village.

Elsewhere in the northeastern countryside of Syria' Dayr al-Zawr province, an SDF militant was killed by a group of unknown people in the village of al-Ezba, which has been the scene of demonstrations demanding the expulsion of the US-backed Kurdish-led militants.

This came after on Saturday, a number of SDF militants were injured when unidentified armed men attacked their checkpoints in the towns of al-Hawaij and Jadeed Ekedat.

Security conditions are reportedly deteriorating in SDF-controlled areas in Hasakah and Dayr al-Zawr provinces amid ongoing raids and arrests of civilians by the militants.

Local Syrians complain that the SDF's constant raids and arrest campaigns have generated a state of frustration and instability, severely affecting their businesses and livelihood.

Residents accuse the US-sponsored militants of stealing crude oil and refusing to spend money on service sectors.

Local councils affiliated with the SDF have also been accused of financial corruption.

Syrians rally in protest against US military presence in Hasakah

Also on Saturday, dozens of people staged a rally in Syria's northeastern province of Hasakah to denounce a recent US airstrike against government forces, which killed a soldier and wounded several others, and demand the withdrawal of American troops.

The demonstrators took to the streets in the village of al-Bajaria, hoisting the national Syrian flag and carrying banners calling for resistance against US occupation.

The participants emphasized that support for government forces is a patriotic duty for all Syrians, chanting slogans in condemnation of US military deployment to Syria.

The protesters also condemned the deadly US air raid on a Syrian army checkpoint in Tal Dhahab area on August 17.

US military brings in new convoy to Hasakah

In another development, the United States has dispatched truckloads of military and logistical equipment to Syria's northeastern province of Hasakah.

Local sources in al-Swaidiyah village, requesting anonymity, told SANA that a convoy of 50 trucks and tankers accompanied by a number of armored vehicles crossed into the Syrian territory through the al-Walid border crossing on Saturday, and headed toward US positions in the province.

Since late October 2019, the United States has been redeploying troops to the oil fields controlled by Kurdish forces in eastern Syria, in a reversal of President Donald Trump's earlier order to withdraw all troops from the Arab country.

The Pentagon claims the move aims to "protect" the fields and facilities from possible attacks by Daesh. That claim came although Trump had earlier suggested that Washington sought economic interests in controlling the oil fields.

The presence of US forces in eastern Syria has particularly irked the civilians, and local residents have on several occasions stopped American military convoys entering the region.

Syria, which has not authorized the presence of the US military in its territory, says Washington is "plundering" the country's oil.

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Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was back in hospital for additional tests a week after a surprise visit that sparked speculation about his health

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returned to hospital on Monday for more medical checks, a government spokesman said, a week after a first visit that fuelled growing speculation about his health.

"I've been told today he will receive additional testing after a check-up" last week, government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters at a regular briefing.

"I see him every day and I don't see any change in him," Suga said, in response to questions about Abe's health.

There has been growing speculation about whether the prime minister is sick, possibly with a recurrence of the ulcerative colitis that plagued him during a first term in office and contributed to his resignation just one year into the job.

Even before the unexpected visit to the hospital last week there had been reports in local media claiming Abe was vomiting blood, and confidantes publicly expressed concern that the prime minister was in need of rest.

On August 17, Abe sparked a media frenzy with a previously unannounced visit to the same hospital where he was treated after his resignation.

He spent more than seven hours at the facility, with aides saying he was undergoing health checks but giving no further details. He had already completed his regular check-up in June, raising questions about what the visit involved.

On his return to office in 2012, Abe said he had overcome the ulcerative colitis.

The speculation about Abe's health comes as he breaks the country's record for the longest consecutive term as prime minister.

He was already the country's longest-serving prime minister, counting his first and second terms in office.

But as of Monday, he has been in power for 2,799 uninterrupted days, breaking the record previously set by his great uncle Eisaku Sato.

The record comes at a difficult time for Abe, who in addition to his possible health woes faces plummeting public support thanks to his handling of the coronavirus.

Story continues

A poll published Sunday by the Kyodo news agency found the approval rating for his cabinet stands at 36 percent, the second lowest since he returned to office in 2012.

The survey conducted over the weekend found 58.4 percent were unhappy with the government's handling of the coronavirus.

While Japan has seen a comparatively small outbreak -- with nearly 62,000 infections and close to 1,200 deaths -- Abe has been slammed for his economic response as well as a widely mocked programme to distribute reusable cloth face masks.

kh-sah/axn
The sign on the front door of Newtownabbey police station, one of two that had been forced to close

There are now 60 police officers self-isolating after it emerged that eight officers from Antrim Police Station had tested positive for Covid-19.

The PSNI revealed the positive cases on Saturday evening and confirmed that both Antrim and Newtownabbey police stations will remain closed to the public while they undergo a deep clean to prevent further spread of the virus.

It comes as new lockdown restrictions come into force today.

Yesterday, it was announced that 119 more people had tested positive for Covid-19 in Northern Ireland. No new deaths were announced.

Schools are due to open today and from this week indoor gatherings will drop from 10 to six people and outdoor meetings from 30 to 15.

Health Minister Robin Swann also said PSNI enforcement of the Covid-19 regulations would be targeted in virus "hotspot" areas.

The new measures were introduced in response to a spike in cases in Belfast and parts of Co Antrim.

The biggest spike in Northern Ireland in the last week was in Mid and East Antrim, with 101 new cases. Belfast saw 82, and Antrim and Newtownabbey 42.

The death toll, however, remained at 559.

Some 374 people tested positive for the virus over the course of last week.

The number of PSNI officers self-isolating and undergoing testing for coronavirus rose from 51 on Saturday to 60.

Antrim and Newtownabbey police stations will remain closed to the public until further notice.

The Belfast Telegraph put a number of questions to the PSNI regarding the officers who tested positive in Antrim and asked for an update on how many people had been fined for failing to wear a face mask in shops.

In response to the questions on coronavirus, Assistant Chief Constable Alan Todd said the PSNI had "undertaken a range of appropriate measures, in line with public health advice and guidance, to address the spread of Covid-19 within our organisation. We will continue to work with our health care partners in minimising the risk to our officers and staff. "

On the question over face masks, Mr Todd said: "Face coverings have been mandatory in indoor retail premises in Northern Ireland since August 10.

"In that time, retailer groups and representatives are reporting approximately 80 to 90% compliance, which is a significant step in the right direction.

"Inevitably, the first steps in encouraging compliance will fall to the public themselves and to transport operators and businesses.

"Police will continue to work with transport operators and businesses, directing resources to areas of identified need and will continue to do so on the basis of the four 'Es' Engage-Explain-Encourage-Enforce.

"Each and every one of us has a personal responsibility to follow the NI Executive regulations and do everything we can to stop the spread of Covid-19. In line with health advice we would encourage everyone to comply with the health regulations to help keep people safe."

The chair of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland Mark Lindsay said everything will be done to support the officers who have been affected by the outbreak.

"A welfare hub is in operation to support our colleagues at this time," he stated.

Elsewhere, Ross Park Hotel in Ballymena said it was notified by a young member of its part-time staff that he had tested positive for Covid-19.

The person had worked in the premises on Wednesday and showed no symptoms upon his arrival. He is now self-isolating.

Ross Park's Keith Carmichael said the hotel is being deep cleaned, adding: "We have made this public knowledge straight away for guidance of both our customers and staff."

Questions we put to PSNI over Covid-19...
Colombo:

A Sri Lankan court has acquitted five naval intelligence officers accused of killing an outspoken Tamil lawmaker, who advocated greater self-rule for the minority community, 10 years ago during the civil war.

The case had been heard before a special jury for the first time in history and it is the first-ever occasion that a verdict was given after midnight.

Nadaraja Raviraj, who represented the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) from the northern Jaffna district, was shot dead outside his home in his car in Colombo in November, 2006. The police's Crime Investigations Department had found the vehicle and the weapons allegedly used for the murder.

Raviraj was an advocate for greater self-rule for minority Tamils and had explained the Tamil perspective of the conflict in Sinhala, the language of the majority. He was shot dead during the country's three-decade-long civil war with Tamil Tiger rebels, which ended in 2009.

The suspects held were all Naval intelligence personnel who were acquitted and released after they were found not guilty by a special jury. The decision was reached after midnight following a trial which lasted over a month.

One of the suspects had died during the trial, according to reports. The jury has decided that the accused cannot be convicted based only on the fact that they were identified by several witnesses in the case.

The accused were charged on five counts under the provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and PenalCode. The High Court tried three of the suspects in absentia as they were absconding since the beginning of the investigations.

Another suspect former Police Constable Manamperige Sanjaya Preethi Viraj, had turned state witness in the case. He was released Thursday after in the remand custody for almost 20 months.

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Advocate Prashant Bhushan on Monday (August 24) filed a supplementary reply in the suo motu contempt proceeding before Supreme Court for his tweets against former SC judges and mentioned in his reply that he believe that SC is the last bastion of hope for protection of fundamental rights.

Bhushan also said in his supplementary reply that if he retracts a statement before the apex court that he otherwise believe to be true or offer an insincere apology then it would amount to contempt of his conscience and of an institution which he had always respected.

During the last hearing in this matter on Thursday (August 20), the court had sought an unconditional apology from 63-year-old Bhushan and gave him few days to "reconsider" his statement.

The top court had also refused his submission to defer the hearing on his sentence till his review petition against conviction for criminal contempt is filed and decided. While passing the order, the SC had said, You (Prashant Bhushan) are asking us to commit an act of impropriety that arguments on sentencing should be heard by another bench.

On August 14, the SC had held Bhushan guilty of contempt of court for his alleged tweets on Chief Justice of India Sharad Arvind Bobde and his four predecessors.

The apex court had on August 5 reserved its verdict in the matter after Bhushan had defended his two tweets, saying they were against the judges regarding their conduct in their personal capacity and they did not obstruct the administration of justice.

On July 22, the top court had issued a show-cause notice to Bhushan after initiating the criminal contempt against him after taking note of a petition.

While reserving the order in the contempt case, the top court had dismissed a separate petition filed by Bhushan seeking recall of the July 22 order by which the notice was issued against him in a contempt proceeding initiated for his alleged contemptuous tweets against the judiciary.
A South Jersey woman was killed when three vehicles collided Sunday at a Salem County intersection, according to the New Jersey State Police.

A Toyota was traveling north on Fork Bridge Road in Upper Pittsgrove Township shortly before 5 p.m. when the car collided with a Nissan traveling east on Route 40, a police spokesman said.

The Nissan then struck a Honda pickup truck traveling west on Route 40.

Barbara Carman, 72, of Buena, a passenger in the Nissan, died of her injuries, police said. The drivers of the three vehicles and a passenger in the Honda suffered minor to moderate injuries.

No charges have been filed as of Monday afternoon, and the crash remains under investigation.

Motorists traveling on Fork Bridge encounter stop signs at the intersection, while traffic on Route 40 has the right of way.

While a cause for the crash has not been revealed, it was raining at the time, police confirmed.

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Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com.
With a little over two weeks until the first day of school, trustees from a major GTA public school board have penned a strongly worded letter to the province over confusion surrounding the plans for the return to the classroom.

The letter, dated Aug. 21, was sent to Education Minister Stephen Lecce by Andrea Grebenc, chair of the Board of Trustees in Halton, as a result of a motion at their meeting on Wednesday.

The Trustees of the Halton District School Board are greatly concerned and seeking clarification regarding number of items that are critical for back to school planning and ensuring stability and confidence in public education, it reads.

In mid-August, Lecce announced $50 million for school ventilation systems, and $18 million in supports for online learning. He also said boards can dip into rainy day reserve funds to hire extra staff or secure more space for smaller classes. This will free up about $500 million, with the province stepping in with $11 million for the few boards that dont have reserves.

But the letter says there were several items that were concerning in this announcement, including the option of taking reserve funding for smaller class sizes, as it wont be possible to hire enough teachers and secure enough new space to do this with those limited funds.

This is highly confusing and puts our board in a very difficult position, the letter adds.

We cant afford to get rental spaces, we have to hire teachers, we have to arrange transportation and we have to do this within, what two weeks? said chair Grebenc, whos also a trustee in Burlington and a parent with kids in the boards schools.

Its frustrating all the way around.

The trustees copy in the regions Progressive Conservative MPPs on the letter, the area has historically been a stronghold for the party.

Asked about the letter, minister Lecces spokesperson Caitlin Clark wrote in an email the plan to open schools has been informed by the best medical and scientific minds in the country, and is a living document meant to be added to over time.

That plan includes an aggressive masking policy for grades 4-12, hiring over 1,300 custodians and $75M in additional cleaning funding, along with the hiring of 500 public health nurses to support student health in our schools, she said.

We recognize that school boards have developed plans that best suit their local needs. We will never hesitate from taking further action to protect the health and safety of Ontarios students and education staff.

Grebenc said theres been announcement after announcement by the province.

And we are immediately bombarded by our communities looking for what the impact is and we cannot answer their questions because we get the information at exactly the same time, she said.

So we would really like the minister to treat us as true education partners, so theres less confusion for everybody and more confidence, potentially, in the system.

The letter estimates that the board would need 1,200 additional teachers to shrink elementary school classes to 15 students.

The board can unlock just over $7 million from reserves that is not already earmarked for other things such as upgrading facilities, and that works out to about 78 teachers for 80 schools, according to Grebenc. Less than one new teacher per school.

And the complication is that the places where we have the most students are the places where we have no spaces, she said. We are already using every nook and cranny in our schools.

It would take over $1 million to retrofit an older secondary school with a partial air conditioning system, the letter adds, much more than whatever the board will get from the $50 million province-wide to address ventilation concerns in schools.

Cindy Gage, President District 20 Halton Teachers Bargaining Unit, and a secondary school teacher, agrees with many of the concerns outlined in the letter.

As space has long been an issue, there are classes in large storage rooms or work rooms with no windows or AC, she said. And there are not enough spaces available to rent on such short notice for smaller classes, even if there was more funding for teachers.

Most schools in the province are going back as status quo, as normal, and I dont think people understand that, she said. The ministry has put educators in an impossible situation, but they will step up to be there for their students.

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Until its extinction, the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was the largest living carnivorous marsupial, but little data exist regarding its body mass, with an average of 29.5 kg the most commonly used estimate. However, a new study shows the extinct predator, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, only weighed about 16.7 kg on average.

Despite extinction in the 1930s and film footage, the thylacine is a true enigma with almost no direct observations supporting an understanding of their behavior and biology.

Only four reliable records of its body mass can be found in the peer-reviewed literature: 15 kg for an excessively fat male; a 14.97 kg male, and two records from the 1914 death registry of the London Zoo, a 13.2 kg female and a 26.1 kg male.

Beyond these four records, reported thylacine body masses are scant, anecdotal, and problematic, leaving scientists with no clear record of adult body mass.

We wish we could watch just how the thylacine hunted, and what sort of prey it could take  this is our closest look yet at an essential ingredient of the predators behavior, how big it really was, said co-author Dr. Alistair Evans, a researcher in the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University and Museums Victoria.

Using traditional measurement techniques, advanced 3D scanning and volumetric methods, Dr. Evans and colleagues estimated body mass for 93 adult thylacines, including two taxidermy specimens and four complete mounted skeletons, representing 40 known-sex specimens.

The scientists established that there were strong differences in the average male and female body size, with the male mean of 19.7 kg and female mean of 13.7 kg.

The mixed sex population mean of 16.7 kilograms is then well below the 21 kg threshold for when predators are likely to take large prey.

We demonstrate strong differences in average male and female body size,

Adams

This result also fundamentally challenges prior views about the thylacines as a carnivore, and underscores that thylacines were a predator that evolved to consume prey smaller than themselves.

The newly established body mass estimates for thylacines place them as specialists on small prey, challenging prior interpretations of them as convergent with species like wolves that specialise in pack-hunting prey substantially larger than themselves.

Rewriting the thylacine as a smaller animal changes the way we look at its position in the Australian ecosystem  because what a predator can (and needs to) eat is very much dependent on just how big they are, said lead author Douglass Rovinsky, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University

Many of the 19th century newspaper reports just might have been tall tales  told to make the thylacine seem bigger, more impressive and more dangerous!

The results were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

_____

Douglass S. Rovinsky et al. 2020. Did the thylacine violate the costs of carnivory? Body mass and sexual dimorphism of an iconic Australian marsupial. Proc. R. Soc. B 287 (1933): 20201537; doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.1537
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:49:30|Editor: huaxia

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WUHAN, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Police in central China's Hubei Province have arrested 10 people for suspected illegal fishing on the Yangtze River, seizing a haul of fish weighing over a tonne.

Police in Wuhan, the provincial capital, said Monday that the group used banned fishing equipment for illegal fishing in a local section of the Yangtze River.

After receiving a tip-off about the group in early August, the police launched a raid and caught the suspects in action on the early morning of Aug. 19. Five vehicles and one boat were also confiscated.

The banned fishing equipment enabled the group to catch over 1 tonne of fish in a single night, according to the police.

At the start of this year, China began a 10-year fishing moratorium in 332 conservation areas in the Yangtze River basin. It will be expanded to all the natural waterways of the country's longest river and its major tributaries no later than Jan. 1, 2021. Enditem
The former Central Regional Chairman of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr Allotey Jacobs, has said: Initially, we took the one district one factory for a joke but weve realised that it can employ a whole lot of communities.

Mr Jacobs, who joined President Nana Akufo-Addo to officially open the Ekumfi Fruit and Juices factory as well as Casa de Ropa potato factories in the Central Region, told journalists that they should not be surprised seeing me at Ekumfi Fruit Juice and Casa de Ropa [factories].

According to him, the two factories are changing the lives of the locals in the Central region citing Ekumfi alone, where, he said almost about 600 workers have been employed as a result of the fruit juice factory.

And the surprising thing with Ekumfi Fruit Juice [factory] is that, the fishermen are also planting the pineapple, he observed.

At Gomoa Bewadze where Casa de Ropa is located, Mr Allotey Jacobs said the villagers have taken it upon themselves to help [sustain] this factory.

Its employment because they are being paid every month, he said.

And like the President said, 80 per cent of the employees are local women.

That in itself, Mr Allotey Jacobs noted, mean you are putting money into peoples pocket and, therefore, we believe that theres the need for us to co-join with others, especially our entrepreneurs who are coming from the region, for us to help so that in the next four years to come, we may have almost about 20 factories under 1D1F.

Opening Casa de Ropa on Friday, 21 August 2020, President Akufo-Addo described the day as a very happy day for the Central Region, and, indeed, for mother Ghana, especially as he had, on the same way, also opened the Ekumfi Fruits and Juices Factory, in Ekumfi.

This ceremony was in fulfilment of the promise by the government, in partnership with the private sector, to set up, at least, one medium- to large-scale enterprise in every district of Ghana, the President said.

Congratulating the management of Casa de Ropa on the progress they made have, and for being able to process orange fleshed sweet potato into puree, which are further processed into biscuit, bread, crisps and chips using improved production technology, the President noted that 1,150 direct and indirect jobs have been created by the factory.

Another milestone achieved by the factory is the fact that women currently constitute more than 80 per cent of the workforce, as a result of a deliberate policy to empower women. As the African Union Gender Champion, I commend management for this decision, he said.

President Akufo-Addo applauded the decision taken by Casa de Ropa to be a centre of excellence, through the collaboration with universities and other agricultural institutions, to create a platform for research and knowledge sharing between academia and industry.

This factory, gradually, is positioning itself as one of the most innovative food processing companies in the country, with the potential to expand its operations to take advantage of the domestic market for processed food as well as the African market, he added.

The President continued, Government remains committed to supporting private sector operators, like Casa de Ropa, to become globally competitive, and, thereby, take advantage of market integration frameworks such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), whose Secretariat has been established and commissioned in Accra.

Commending the management of Casa de Ropa Ltd for their diligence and commitment to enhance the potential of sweet potato as a new cash crop for farmers in Ghana, the President also commended EXIM Bank for granting a financing facility of about GHS14 million in support of the project, under the 1D1F programme.

---classfmonline
SHIHEZI, China, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Daqo New Energy Corp. (NYSE: DQ) ("Daqo New Energy", the "Company" or "we"), a leading manufacturer of high-purity polysilicon for the global solar PV industry, today announced that it signed a long-term high-purity polysilicon supply agreement with Wuxi Shangji Automation (SSE: 603158) ("Shangji"), a leading high-end intelligent equipment provider for manufacturing industries including the solar PV industry. Shangji started its mono-wafer manufacturing business in 2019 and has quickly been recognized as a high-quality mono-wafer provider.

Under the supply agreement, Daqo New Energy will provide Shangji with high-purity mono-grade polysilicon in a total amount of 21,600 ~ 32,000 MT with 2,400 ~ 3,200 MT in the period from September to December 2020, 9,600 ~ 14,400 MT in 2021 and 9,600 ~ 14,400 MT in 2022. Actual prices will be negotiated by both parties on a monthly basis according to market conditions. As part of the supply agreement, Shangji will make an advance payment to Daqo New Energy.

Mr. Jianliang Yang, Chairman of Wuxi Shangji Automation, commented, "We are full of confidence in the consistent growth of the solar PV market and the fast growing demand for high-efficiency mono wafer products. We are very pleased to establish a strategic relationship with Daqo New Energy, one of the most important high-purity mono-grade polysilicon providers in the industry. We will continue to execute our capacity expansion plan in the mono-wafer sector, with Daqo New Energy as one of our key raw material providers, to produce more high-efficiency mono wafer products to address fast growing demand."

Mr. Longgen Zhang, Chief Executive Officer of Daqo New Energy, commented, "We are very excited to strengthen our partnership with Wuxi Shangji Automation, a very important new customer with a visionary strategy in the mono-wafer sector. Mono-crystalline solar products have already dominated the solar PV market thanks to their high-efficiency and competitive overall costs. We will continue to work closely with leading mono wafer manufacturers with our first-class quality and fast-growing capacity to make solar PV a cost competitive, clean, sustainable, and revolutionary energy resource."

About Wuxi Shangji Automation

Wuxi Shangji Automation Co., Ltd. (SSE: 603185), established in 2002, is a leading high-tech intelligent equipment and technology provider specialized in the R&D, design, integration, manufacturing and service of the cutting process of solar PV, sapphire and semiconductor materials. In 2019, Wuxi Shangji started its business in R&D and manufacturing of mono wafer, which is an intermediate product of widely used high-efficiency mono-crystalline solar PV modules.

About Daqo New Energy Corp.

Daqo New Energy Corp. (NYSE: DQ) ("Daqo" or the "Company") is a leading manufacturer of high-purity polysilicon for the global solar PV industry. Founded in 2008, the Company is one of the world's lowest cost producers of high-purity polysilicon. Daqo's highly-efficient and technically advanced manufacturing facility in Xinjiang, China currently has an annual polysilicon nameplate capacity of 70,000 metric tons.

For more information, please visit http://www.dqsolar.com

Daqo New Energy Corp.

Investor Relations

Phone: +86-187-1658-5553

Email: [email protected]



Christensen

In China

Mr. Rene Vanguestaine

Phone: +86-178-1749-0483

Email: [email protected]

In the U.S.

Mr. Tip Fleming

Phone: +1-917-412-3333

Email: [email protected]

Safe Harbor Statement

This announcement contains forward-looking statements. These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates" and similar statements. Among other things, the quotations from management in this announcement, as well as Daqo New Energy's strategic and operational plans, contain forward-looking statements. The Company may also make written or oral forward-looking statements in its reports filed or furnished to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, in its annual reports to shareholders, in press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its officers, directors or employees to third parties. Statements that are not historical facts, including statements about the Company's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement, including but not limited to the following: the demand for photovoltaic products and the development of photovoltaic technologies; global supply and demand for polysilicon; alternative technologies in cell manufacturing; the Company's ability to significantly expand its polysilicon production capacity and output; the reduction in or elimination of government subsidies and economic incentives for solar energy applications; the Company's ability to lower its production costs; and the duration of COVID-19 outbreaks in China and many other countries and the impact of the outbreaks and the quarantines and travel restrictions instituted by relevant governments on economic and market conditions, including potentially weaker global demand for solar PV installations that could adversely affect the Company's business and financial performance. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in the reports or documents that the Company has filed with, or furnished to, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. All information provided in this press release is as of the date hereof, and the Company undertakes no duty to update such information or any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law.

SOURCE Daqo New Energy Corp.

Related Links

http://www.dqsolar.com


A coronavirus-infected security guard at a Sydney quarantine hotel went shopping at Kmart and Woolworths and renewed his driver's licence while awaiting his test results.

Asad Niaz, from Campsie, was fined $2,000 by police after visiting Westfield Burwood, in the city's inner west, just hours after his COVID-19 swab on Thursday.

The 22-year-old security guard stationed at the Marriott Hotel was advised to go for a test after one of his colleagues contracted the virus.

The pair worked together on August 3.

Asad Niaz, from Campsie, was fined $2,000 by police after visiting Westfield Burwood (pictured), in Sydney's inner west, just hours after his COVID-19 swab on Thursday

Police said Niaz went to the Westfield shopping centre from 6pm to 7pm and shopped at Kmart and Woolworths (pictured) instead of self-isolating

Niaz was told to immediately self-isolate after he was tested in the CBD at about 5pm on Thursday, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Police said Niaz instead went to the Westfield shopping centre from 6pm to 7pm and shopped at Kmart and Woolworths.

He then breached isolation orders the following day by attending NSW Service in Burwood for a licence renewal from 2.30pm to 3pm.

NSW Health contacted Niaz on Friday afternoon after his COVID-19 test came back inconclusive. He was retested at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

The 22-year-old was confirmed to have COVID-19 on Saturday and he was taken to a quarantine facility.

On Sunday, Niaz was hit with two penalty infringement notices for failing to comply with self-isolation directions. He is not facing charges from police.

The 22-year-old security guard stationed at the Marriott Hotel (pictured) was advised to go for a test after one of his colleagues contracted the virus

The security guard went to Kmart at Westfield Burwood (pictured) just hours after his coronavirus test

NSW Health released a warning to shoppers who were at Westfield Burwood from from 6pm to 7pm on Thursday 20 August.

'People who attended the following venues where a previous case visited at the times listed should monitor for symptoms, no matter how slight, and immediately isolate and get tested if they appear,' they said.

Niaz's case was originally uncovered as part of a week-long testing blitz of 700 contacts of the first guard who fell ill.

NSW Labor health spokesman Ryan Park said private security guards should be taken off NSW hotel quarantine if they aren't up to the job.

'If you can't guarantee private security guards can control this very important quarantine arrangement, it's time the NSW Police and ADF get more involved ... This is truly the last line of defence,' Mr Park told reporters.

'That guard was patrolling one of our high-risk areas in the middle of a health pandemic, this is not patrolling a nightclub.'

NSW recorded three new COVID-19 cases in the 24 hours to 8pm on Sunday with just one acquired locally - a contact of a previous case.

Niaz visited the NSW Service centre in Burwood for a licence renewal from 2.30pm to 3pm on Friday

The close contact has been in isolation during their infectious period.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian on Monday said it was a pleasing result, but authorities remain concerned about NSW's rate of community transmission, particularly in western and southwestern Sydney.

The premier noted there have been some 15 COVID-19 cases in those areas over the past few weeks which have not been linked to known clusters.

Seven COVID-19 patients in NSW are in intensive care, with five ventilated.

'NSW has fared the past six or seven weeks as best as we can but of course it's been an enormous community effort,' Ms Berejiklian told reporters, referring to the period in which Victoria has battled a significant COVID-19 outbreak.

'We're at the tail end of what we envisaged would be a particularly critical period, but we're certainly not out of the woods.'
12,5 % Dutch Demand Equals Economic Recession

PHILIPSBURG:--- Gracita Arrindell states Lease of the Peoples Progressive Party stated in a press release, " We can rank amongst the most coveted islands in the Caribbean again and featured positively in the talking points of the best travel and leisure magazines such as Celebrated Living, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast traveler, but we still need to address some fundamental issues before we can rest on our laurels. This goal will require bold approaches to two extremely important matters. Firstly, we need to convince Holland to abandon them out of touch demand of 12,5 % salaries cut. This policy will push St. Maarten even further into economic recession if pursued. Besidess the current Covid-19 pandemic and past and future hurricanes, the roads that led to this current situation are many.

For example, the writing was on the wall decades ago when huge multinational companies such as SHELL and the lucrative offshore banking companies pulled out of the islands in the mid-nineteen eighties (1986 onward) and re-established elsewhere including back to the Netherlands. The constitutional reform discussions were in full force at the time. Very little was done on both sides of the Ocean to make up for the sudden loss of what was once a lucrative income for both government coffers and jobs.

It is terribly unfair for the ordinary citizen to pay for the consequences of bad governance over the past decade or even before. Residents must demand tangible solutions as well as a more proactive approach and accountability from their representatives at both levels of government. The current cutthroat economic approach must make way for a dynamic economic revival plan that will jump-start our stagnant economy. Both Holland and St. Maarten can sit at the table and establish a short- term economic investment plan. This initiative includes a massive infrastructural overhaul of St. Maarten starting with its capital, Philipsburg.

Sadly, the current leadership continues to be a distraction at the expense of the future of our Island and its people.

Arrindell said: Its the economy stupid is a famous quote from former US president Bill Clinton. Instead of protecting the purchasing power of its citizens, this government under the watch of Parliament offers its people as a sacrificial lamb in order to receive temporary liquidity support.

We can all agree now is not the time to order another complete shutdown of our island. We bet on that horse six months ago and we took our eyes off the ball. We lost precious lives and many businesses folded ( over 68 confirmed in Philipsburg) while many fear for their sanity and dignity. We sacrificed 90% of the economy to safeguard 5% of the population.

Gracita continues and states: large cruise-ships once brimming with thousands of visitors now wait silently offshore with a skeleton crew. Ghost -floating -vessels lay fallow hoping for better times. Now more than ever is the time to put our strengths together and revolutionize Philipsburg and surrounding areas.

Turn the tables around and establish an economic task force together with the enterprise- business-minded Rutte cabinet. Wij willen zaken doen said the PM during his visit in 2012. So let's do business but not with the do-nothing paper-pushing list of usual suspects said Arrindell.

This public/ private group can be assembled from a pool of local and international urban planning architects, landscape designers, traffic design specialists, start-up tech gurus and historians. The plan must include the removal of the ever-growing dump, a mini central park, and a beautiful cultural center-library & museum.

Restore and preserve our unique buildings and homes in the area including Lescargot restaurant.

Additionally, the vision must include a business diversity policy that transcends party politics to establish a vibrant mixture of stores and street-side indoor and outdoor restaurants. Creating a new safe and vibrant city center while embracing our cultural heritage must be the result of this partnership. A similar action plan can apply to the other communities of Upper and Lower Princess Quarter, Belvedere, and Simpson-bay Cole-bay and Cay-bay districts. We must take into account the uniqueness of each neighborhood and start the financing of this project with Trust funds that are still left in the bank three years after Hurricane Irma. Our ship of state is currently rudderless and cast adrift in the great unknown of poor governance and special interests. It is time to helm the wheel of our destiny

Gracita concludes and said: the one million dollar bonus offer as an incentive to create the best redesign of Philipsburg and surrounding areas is a small price to pay in exchange for what we have today.

The year 2021 is around the corner. It should not take seven years to get this project off the ground.

As citizens of a great island, we always have a choice between accepting governance by quixotic policies or demand our elected and appointed representatives to act selflessly in the interest of all the people of our island. GREAT BAY needs to be worthy of its name again but before we rise again we must all accept a basic fact. There should only be Sint Maarteners united with one goal-to make the best of our past the worst of our future.
The Bay Area caught a rare break Monday when an anticipated flurry of lightning strikes never materialized, and more help poured in from out of state to quell three gigantic wildfires covering the region.

Yet the scale of damage from those blazes is coming into focus, as they devour houses and forests at a ferocious pace with little containment.

We are essentially living in a megafire era, Santa Clara Cal Fire Unit Chief Jake Hess said Monday, describing out-of-control wildfires that grow more complicated and destructive by the year. He warned that early and large evacuations will become more common as emergency crews scramble to keep up.

Even on a day of relative calm, the winds could shift at any moment, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday, linking the massive fires to climate change. The new conditions  short springs, arid summers and intense weather  are precipitating fires like we havent seen in modern recorded history, the governor said.

Heavy thunderstorms skipped over the Bay Area Sunday night, sparing residents the lightning strikes that sparked hundreds of wildfires last week, creating the current crisis. Instead, the tempests dumped water and a bit of lightning over the Central Valley and in the Sierra Nevada. The Tahoe region endured a lightning storm around 4:30 a.m. and winds of 45 mph.

Most of the Bay Area dodged a bullet, said Roger Gass, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Ten new fires started in other parts of the state, but the onslaught was not nearly as bad as anticipated. And with the weather cooling a bit, the California fire battle  now being waged with more than 14,000 firefighters and more than 2,400 engines  is getting a much-needed assist from nature.

Newsom added that the state has housed 2,211 evacuees in hotel rooms and 17 shelters across the state. And he said California issued safety protocols to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in those shelters, including requiring a health screening upon entrance. Masks and social distancing are also mandatory.

But for fire crews in the Bay Area, it was the lack of lightning and even a little rain that fell that made the biggest impression. That was good news for the thousands of overstretched firefighters battling blazes in the north, east and south parts of the Bay Area, giving them no new big fires to contend with  just the existing ones, which were bad enough, even though crews made some progress overnight.

Weve had a lot of success, and obviously Mother Nature helped us quite a bit with moisture, increased humidity and reduced winds, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Assistant Chief Billy See said Monday at a briefing on the CZU Lightning Complex fires in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties. We will continue to progress as long as the conditions continue to improve.

That conflagration grew only a tad, to 78,684 acres, and containment expanded to 13%. Two hundred seventy-six structures have now been destroyed in both counties, and 25,000 others remainthreatened. More than 77,000 people have evacuated from the fire zone.

So far, the fire has claimed one fatality  73-year-old Tad Jones, who died in a remote area near the end of Last Chance Road. He was apparently trying to flee and was found near his vehicle, said a spokesman for the Santa Cruz Sheriffs Office. Four people in the county are missing.

In the North Bay, stretching down to Solano County, the LNU Lightning Complex  the second most widespread blaze in state history  reached 350,030 acres by Monday, with 22% containment. Cal Fire reported Monday that one more person had also been found dead in that fire, in Solano County, but further details were not available. Cal Fire had previously confirmed four earlier deaths.

Chris Waters, Cal Fire operations section chief, said that overall, conditions had improved in several areas of the fire  particularly in the Meyers Fire north of Jenner. Containment had improved to 95% with 2,360 acres burned. Sonoma County has not reported any deaths or missing people.

Weve got a pretty good handle on that one and were starting to think about repopulating the area, Waters said. He also said crews were working on getting Highway 1 in that area reopened.

Also within the LNU complex, the massive Hennessey Fire in the eastern zone now sits at 293,602 acres, with 26% containment, Cal Fire said.

None of that progress, however, could minimize the heartbreak left behind by the rampaging blazes.

It was utter devastation Monday near Spanish Flat, an area tucked next to the picturesque Lake Berryessa. The entire landscape was charred, and melted street signs stood on the side of the winding roads.

Firefighter Brandon North, 25, said his parents mobile home burned to the ground in a fire that tore through the area last week. It was a cruel irony for him, a firefighter, to have to evacuate his own neighborhood, and then watch his parents home go up in flames.

Ive been to big fires before out of county, he said. But its just a little different when its your front yard.

Fire Tracker Follow wildfires across the state Latest updates on wildfires burning across Northern and Southern California

In Vacaville, Ken Albers slowly shuffled through his torched showroom Monday, passing three of his 16 classic Chevrolets, paint melted and charred, destroyed like the rest of his home.

The 72-year-old retired land surveyor had lived on the 5-acre property for 30 years with his 72-year-old wife, Marci. They were both lifelong collectors. Marci lost her 500 Ginny dolls, stamp collection, antiques, and Ken lost his 500-piece toy train set and 200 plastic car models. And all the classic Chevys melted and roasted  eight were Corvettes.

Its pretty devastating, Ken said. Theres nothing left of the house but the chimney.

The SCU Lightning Complex of fires raging in Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara and several other counties grew to 347,196 acres, with just 10% containment. Twelve structures have been destroyed, and 12 more damaged, Cal Fire reported. Its the third-biggest fire in state history in terms of area burned.

Despite Mondays dawning with no local lightning strikes, Bay Area fire and weather officials cautioned that there was still some danger of dry lightning hitting throughout the day, and that the region remained stretched thin on firefighting crews because of the unexpectedly huge spread of the blazes.

Meanwhile, with fire smoke clogging the air nearly everywhere, air quality remained unhealthy in parts of the East Bay Monday, though it improved a bit throughout the Bay Area as a whole.

The worst air quality in the region, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, was in Livermore, Pleasanton, Concord and Vallejo. Each of those cities reported unhealthy levels of particulate matter from wildfire smoke.

Those readings were at least improvements over Sunday, when Livermore and Pleasanton experienced hazardous levels of pollution, the worst rating. San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose all reported moderate air quality.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Dustin Gardiner, Ryan Kost and Dominic Fracassa contributed to this report.

Kevin Fagan, Trisha Thadani, Matthias Gafni and Rachel Swan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com, tthadani@sfchronicle.com, matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com, rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron, @TrishaThadani, @mgafni, @rachelswan
A 20-year-old Michigan woman with special needs who was found alive at a funeral home on Sunday was about to be embalmed when mortuary staff saw that her eyes were open, according to the family's attorney.

The woman, identified by the lawyer as Timesha Beauchamp, is currently clinging to life on a ventilator at a Detroit hospital, more than 24 hours after she was mistakenly pronounced dead.

The bizarre incident worthy of a horror movie began unfolding just after 7.30am on Sunday in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, where Beauchamp, who has unspecified medical issues, was found unresponsive at her home.

Beauchamp's family called 911 and paramedics from the Southfield Fire Department responded to the address and found the woman not breathing.

Timesha Beauchamp, 20 (left), was about to be embalmed at a Michigan funeral when staff discovered she was alive

A 20-year-old woman was found alive and breathing at James H Cole Home for Funerals in Detroit on Sunday after being declared dead by paramedics

According to a statement from Southfield Fire Chief Johnny Menifee, the first responders performed CPR and other 'life reviving methods' for 30 minutes.

'Given medical readings and the condition of the patient, it was determined at that time that she did not have signs of life,' the statement read.

ClickOnDetroit reported that unnamed sources with knowledge of the case claimed that Southfield police officers observed the patient move and breathe, and summoned the EMTs back, but the paramedics allegedly claimed those were just side effects of the medication given to her.

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger told WXYZ that Beauchamp's godmother, who is a registered nurse, told the medics that she detected a pulse in her.

Oakland County spokesperson William Mullan told DailyMail.com over the phone that after determining that the woman has dead, the EMTs followed standard operating procedure and contacted an emergency room physician at an area hospital, who reviewed the patient's medical data and declared her deceased.

The Southfield paramedics then called the Oakland County Medical Examiner's Office, saying that an official death declaration has been made for the patient and there was no suspicion of foul play.

Southfield Fire Chief Johnny Menifee said in a statement paramedics spent 30 minutes performing CPR on the woman before it was determined she had 'no signs of life'

Based on the information from the fire department and the ER doctor, a forensic pathologist released the body, which was still at home, directly to her family to make funeral arrangements.

Before noon, Beauchamp was picked up and taken to James H Cole Home for Funerals in Detroit, where employees quickly discovered she was still alive and breathing.

'They were about to embalm her which is most frightening had she not had her eyes open. They would have begun draining her blood, to be very, very frank about it,' Fieger told WXYZ.

The management of the mortuary confirmed the facts of the case in a statement to DailyMail.com, saying that staff summoned Detroit Fire Department paramedics, who arrived and transported Beauchamp to a hospital.

'We couldnt believe it,' said Dave Fornell, deputy commissioner of the Detroit Fire Department, who added that her heart rate was 80.

The 20-year-old remained hospitalized as of this afternoon, but her mother said she might not survive.

Speaking to ClickOnDetroit, the mother said her family, including her daughter's twin brother and an older brother, are devastated by the harrowing ordeal.

Paramedics from the fire department contacted an ER doctor, who reviewed Beauchamp's medical data and proclaimed her dead

'Somebody pronounced my child dead and shes not even dead,' said the mother. 'Shes in the hospital.'

She told the news outlet that she got the heartbreaking news that her daughter was 'gone' at home.

'I told them, "Are you absolutely, 100 per cent sure that shes gone?" They said, "Yes, maam, shes gone,"' she recounted.

However, several hours later, she got a call from the funeral home, saying her daughter was alive, breathing and on her way to the hospital.

'Its one of people's worst nightmares to imagine having an ambulance called and instead, sending you off to a funeral home in a body bag,' Fieger said, adding that when mortuary workers unzipped the body bag, they saw Beauchamp alive and with her eyes open.

The attorney, who previously defended the notorious Dr Jack Kevorkian during his euthanasia trial, speculated that the hour-and-a-half delay in Beauchamp's care caused by her trip to the funeral home could prove critical to her chances for a recovery.

DailyMail.com on Monday afternoon reached out to Fieger seeking additional comment on the case.
Chandigarh, Aug 24 : The Haryana government on Monday suspended Inspector General of Police Hemant Kalson, who was arrested on August 22 on the charge of assaulting two women after trespassing their houses in Panchkula district, officials said.

Kalson was also suspended in April last year on the charge of firing in the air with a Constable's semi-automatic firearm outside the Circuit House at Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu.

In September 2018, he was assaulted by passers-by in a case of road rage.

In the latest episode, Kalson has been booked in two cases reported in Pinjore town, some 30 km from here, on August 21. The police officer was allegedly in an inebriated condition.

In the first case, a woman alleged that Kalson forcibly entered her house and beat up her daughter.

In the second incident, a man complained that Kalson abused his wife and assaulted him, besides threatening to shoot him.

Kalson, 55, who was posted as IGP, Home Guards, is presently in judicial custody.
Italy registered 1210 new coronavirus cases Sunday, the highest daily number since May 12 and only weeks after it saw new infections plunge to about 200 a day.

The health ministry also reported 1071 new cases on Saturday, which was the first day since May the daily count topped 1000.

The latest spike is driving fears of a second wave of COVID-19.

Italy, one of Europe's worst-hit countries with more than 35,000 deaths, had managed to contain the outbreak after a peak in deaths and cases between March and April.

Worshipers, some wearing a face mask, attend the Pope's weekly Angelus prayer at St. Peter's Square in The Vatican on August 23, 2020 during the pandemic. Source: AFP/Getty Images

However, it has seen a steady increase in infections over the last month, with experts blaming holidays and night life for causing people to gather in numbers.

The country last recorded a higher figure on May 12, when 1402 cases were reported, six days before restaurants, bars and shops were allowed to reopen after a 10-week lockdown.

Despite the rise in infections, daily death tallies remain low and are often in single figures. Saturday saw just three fatalities, compared to nine on Friday and six on Thursday, health ministry data showed.

coronavirus

The number of new infections remains considerably lower than those registered in Spain and France.

On Saturday, Lazio, around Rome, was the Italian region to see the largest number of new cases, with 215.

Of these, around 60 per cent were people returning from holidays in other parts of Italy and abroad, the region's health chief said.

The northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto, where Italy's epidemic first came to light on Feb. 21, saw 185 and 160 new cases respectively.

Italy has taken countermeasures to try to stem the recent uptrend, shutting down clubs and discos and making it compulsory to wear a mask at night in outdoor public spaces.

Travellers from several non-EU countries have been banned from entering Italy, with restrictions and testing obligations imposed on people returning from hard-hit European countries.

Story continues

Tourists begrudgingly follow virus rules on holiday

In tourist hotspots, like Tuscany, locals were keen to restart the economy, as were officials who said restarting travel in the summer was key to prevent further damage to the economy, according to Italys The Local.

However, this also means those working in the tourism industry are putting their health at risk.

Startling aerial images of a packed beach in Tuscany show tourism in the area is booming.

The images taken earlier in August show hundreds of umbrellas lining the shores of Tyrrhenian Sea beach in Tirrenia, in the Tuscany region.

An aerial view taken from the HH412C helicopter 'Volpe 220' of the Pisa Air Section of the Guardia di Finanza of vacationers on the so-called 'White Beaches', in Rosignano Solvay, Tuscany region.Source: EPA

To ensure those on vacation are not indulging in any illegal activities amid the pandemic, the Italian 'Guardia di Finanza' law enforcement agency does patrol flights over inland areas and the seacoast, EPA reported.

One woman who works for a five-star hotel in Italys most popular tourist destinations said while staff at the hotel wear face masks, guests often wont.

Perhaps five per cent of them actually enter the hotel with a mask on, the woman who chose to remain anonymous told The Local.

An aerial view taken from a helicopter of the Pisa Air Section of the Guardia di Finanza of vacationers on Tyrrhenian Sea beaches in Tirrenia, Tuscany region, Italy, 15 August 2020. Source: EPA

When we kindly ask the other 95 per cent to put the mask on, there is a moment of begrudging acquiescence.

Sicily's governor has ordered all migrant residences on the Italian island to shut down by Monday, part of a push-back by Italian regions alarmed by a surge in COVID-19 cases a few weeks before schools reopen.

But while some new migrants have tested positive, vacationers returning from Mediterranean Sea resorts abroad as well from the Italian island of Sardinia have accounted for far more of Italy's new infections.

Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com.

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Three quarters of teachers across Northern Ireland do not feel it is safe for pupils to return to their school or college as it reopens, a union said.

Youngsters started to return to classes across Northern Ireland on Monday for the first time since the coronavirus lockdown started in March.

Some parents have expressed concerns while teachers unions say educators had not been given enough time to respond to rules issued earlier this month.

Some parents have expressed concerns over the return to school (Liam McBurney/PA)

Justin McCamphill, NASUWT national official in Northern Ireland, said: The fact that 77% of teachers told us they dont feel their school is safe for pupils to return is very concerning.

Teachers and school leaders have worked hard to prepare their schools for young people to return, yet 61% of teachers have not been consulted on risk assessments undertaken in their school or college.

Ministers and school employers must do more to reassure the school workforce, parents and pupils that everything possible is being done to minimise viral spread, and that robust procedures are in place should any outbreaks occur.

Northern Irelands chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride has insisted it is safe to return.

Strict social distancing between children may be relaxed if there are hygiene measures in place.

However three schools did not reopen following the detection of Covid-19 cases.

Ballyclare Secondary School is set to reopen on Tuesday following a deep clean and 72-hour incubation period.

St Kevins Primary School and St Louises College, both on the Falls Road in west Belfast, have also delayed their reopening following positive cases among the school community.

Education minister Peter Weir meets pupils on the student council at St Joesphs Primary School in Carryduff, Belfast (Liam McBurney/PA)

Some parents have taken to social media to express concern at their children returning to school.

Trevor, a father of five from Co Down, said he is worried as his wife had been shielding during the pandemic.

As a family, for us coronavirus is a life or death situation, he said.

Story continues

His wife has been taking immunosuppressants and is labelled as vulnerable.

Trevor said the number of new daily cases was rising sharply.

He tweeted: I agree the risk to children themselves is low but that is being used as spin from politicians & school leaders to hide behind the fact that children are spreaders.

The issue is not that of children dying but of whom they will pass the virus too and the long-term consequences.

Other parents have welcomed the return to school.

Maeve Kennedys 11-year-old son Jonnie returned to Olderfleet Primary School in Larne.

She said he was looking forward to being reunited with his friends but added his grandmother has been shielding with a lung condition.

She told the PA news agency: Hes looking forward to getting back and into some sort of semblance of a routine, its been a long six months without that.

I think he needed to get back. I have tried to combine remote working and home schooling with his younger brother going into P6, so the last six months have been really difficult at home.

She said because of the pressure of going into P7 and around the transfer tests, he has worked very hard, but the pressures have been a real challenge.

Peter Weir said very few, if any, children will come to harm as a result of attending school (Liam McBurney/PA)

Education minister Peter Weir said: Very, very few, if any, children will come to harm as a result of attending school, but there is evidence of the long-term harm to childrens education, life opportunities, mental health and wellbeing from not attending school.

Pupils in Primary 7, Year 12, Year 14  whose preparation for exams was disrupted by the lockdown  and all vulnerable children were due to return to classes on Monday.

All other pupils will begin the new school year on the week beginning August 31 after months of variable levels of home schooling.

A total of 42 million has been spent on re-starting schools safely.

Separately, another 10 cases of Covid-19 have been reported across Northern Ireland in the past 24 hours, the Department of Health said.
Rhythmic and sensational beat producers in Ghana, Qp Music Studio, has opened doors for beat makers in Ghana to compete in the maiden beat challenge.

The competition was launched in Accra on Thursday by Zapp Mallet, a renowned Ghanaian Record Producer at the Qp Music Studio in Abelemkpe.

According to Madam Lillian Kent, Media Relations Officer of Qp Music Production, the aim for this worthy challenge was for Beat Makers in Ghana both recognized and budding to come on board and compete.

Indicating that, the winner of the competition would represent Ghana on the international level in Toronto, Canada.

She highlighted that, Producers are to submit not more than 10 and not less than eight beats for the battle, and added that each beat should not be less than 60 seconds which must be in a form of mp3.

Madam Kent underscored that beats with vocals would not be accepted and rules of the submissions should be strictly adhered to.

Beats submitted would be screened by a jury made up of three members chaired by Zapp Mallet, all the three are industry players, she explained.

The Media Relations Officer announced that the deadline for submissions to be on September 30, 2020, stating that the final battle would be held at Sika Hall at Atinka studios, Accra.

She told Producers to submit their beats at Qp studios in Abelemkpe opposite Marwarko, Accra or send entries via email [email protected]

Madam Kent expressed appreciation to Mr. Samuel Quartey-Papafio, Founder of Qp Music Production for spearheading the affairs of the studio, and giving this opportunity to Beat Makers.
The law on incitement to hatred is contained in the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989.

Having consulted with various stakeholders on the current legislation, the Government is now proposing to introduce new hate speech laws, either by amending the 1989 act or devising a totally new one. The shape the proposed legislation will take is unclear.

There is no accepted definition of hate speech in international human rights law. According to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, hate speech can be explicit or "it can take the form of indirect, coded language".

It points out there is a spectrum and not all such phraseology is criminal. It may include language open to prosecution under the 1989 legislation but also incorporates expressions that don't fall under the above legislation but may justify a civil case or administrative sanctions. It is unclear what this means in practice.

The third group refers to expressions that differ from the previous two categories but cause concern in relation to tolerance, respect and civility.

Various international and national human rights organisations believe the current law is too restrictive and it needs to widen its scope.

Earlier this year Leo Varadkar said hate speech laws were needed to curb racism in Ireland. The extent of racism in this country has not been measured but it seems to be a given that it is common.

There has been little or no discussion on the proposed law. Will it blur the distinction between speech that is hate-filled and violence-inducing on the one hand and that which is distasteful and disrespectful on the other?

Indeed if racism, misogyny, homophobia, religious bigotry and other such hatreds are a large vein in our society then there is no question but that these should be eliminated if possible. But how common are these and why have those engaging in such terrible acts not been charged under the existing law?

Article 40.6.1 of our Constitution allows for freedom of expression and confers on our citizens the right to freely express our beliefs and convictions subject to public order and morality.

So this freedom is not unfettered. In drafting the proposed legislation, the parameters set down in Article 40.6.1 of the Constitution must be satisfied.

A fundamental question to ask is why freedom of expression is necessary. The notion of the 'marketplace of ideas' facilitating open discussion to discover the 'truth' of any idea or proposal has found favour.

It allows our citizens to participate in democracy. But truths are more than just political ideas. Scientific, religious and philosophical thinking are also part of public discussion, into which free people rightly have an input.

There is also a personal reason for allowing freedom of thought and expression. The exercise of reflection and articulating our ideas through speech allows us to flourish intellectually and personally. In so doing we reciprocally facilitate the personal development of others.

Attempts to curtail what we say in public may have the chilling effect of creating a taboo and removing it from the 'marketplace of ideas' while festering in private.

While taboos have their place in society as a protection from the darkest side of human nature, there has to be a balance between expressing ideas that genuinely incite others to hatred and those that are part of robust discussion and controversy.

In Scotland just now there are similar proposals for a hate speech law and, in direct contrast to the dismal silence and seeming acquisition in Ireland, opposition to the proposal there has garnered the support of civil liberties groups, churches, comedians and a motley group who have little else in common.

Surely this is a sign of an active and healthy democracy that an open debate is taking place.

The questions being asked include would JK Rowling's criticism of the trans phenomenon come within the ambit of hate speech?

Would the comedians at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh be guilty of a crime for mocking feminists?

Would those who interpret the Bible literally be homophobic for concurring with the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah?

Most people, I hope, believe that these are topics that should be open to vigorous debate without name-calling and accusations.

The Government has attempted to reassure the public the standard of proof will be "beyond reasonable doubt" and that free speech will not be threatened.

But the reality is that with no agreed definition of hate speech in international law and with much of the offence being subjective and reinforced by identity politics, it is very difficult to foresee any outcome from such laws other than the suppression of free speech.

We in Ireland should heed what is happening in Scotland and act like a mature democracy by breaking our deafening silence.
Nippon Paint allots 60% shares to Wuthelam Group in $12 bn asset deal

Nippon Paint Holdings Co Ltd on Friday announced deal with its joint venture partner Wuthelam Group to acquire 100 per cent ownership in all of their Asian ventures in a deal worth 1.285 trillion yen ($12.18 billion).

Under the agreement, Nippon Holdings Ltd will own 100 per cent of all their Asia businesses while the stake of Singapores Wuthelam Group in the Japanese company will rise to just under 60 per cent from 39 per cent.

The deal involves acquisition of additional equity interests in the companys joint ventures with the Wuthelam Group in the Asia Region, including in the Indonesia Business through conversion to subsidiary, and issuance of new shares through a third-party allotment, and subsequent change in parent company.

Asias top paint maker said it will use the funds raised as well as 100 billion yen in cash to buy out Wuthelam from their Asian joint ventures in countries including China, Malaysia and Thailand, as well as acquire Wuthelams wholly owned business in Indonesia.

As part of the deal, Nippon Paint will sell 1.185 trillion yen ($11.2 billion) worth of shares to Wuthelam.

Nippon Paint Holdings Co Ltd has been collaborating with Wuthelam Holdings Limited and its representative Goh Hup Jin (Wuthelam and Goh Hup Jin and subsidiaries and companies substantively controlled by them collectively, by appointing Wuthelam Group as the companys Asian sales agent in 1962 and establishing a joint venture in Singapore with the aim of expanding its paint business in the Asia region. This was later followed by joint ventures with the Wuthelam Group in Thailand, Malaysia, China, and other Asian countries, securing one of the largest market shares in the region.

In 2014, the company further strengthened this partnership by acquiring majority interests in the JVs, with the aim of further expanding its Asia business. Nippon Paint and the Wuthelam Group have collaborated closely in construction paint in the Asian market and in a wide range of other business areas, including industrial paint and automobile paint for almost sixty years.

The amalgamation move is aimed at maximising shareholder value through construction of a growth base for its Asian businesses and to enhance its financial base for future growth.

Accordingly, the b board of directors of the company adopted a resolution at its meeting on Friday to enter into a transaction agreement with the Wuthelam Group regarding the companys acquisition of the equity interests held by the Wuthelam Group in the target joint ventures and the Indonesia business, which is operated by the Wuthelam Group and in which the Wuthelam Group owns 99.9 per cent of the equity interests.

The board also adopted a resolution to issue new shares through a third party allotment to Nipsea International Ltd (NIL) and Fraser (HK) Limited, both members of the Wuthelam Group.

The 139-year-old Japanese firm is seeking growth outside its mature domestic market, and has prioritised global expansion. Last year, it acquired Australias top paint maker DuluxGroup Ltd in a near $3 billion deal.

Asia is Nippon Paints most important market and accounts for 52% of its revenue, compared with 26 per cent for Japan, according to the companys website.

The company may pursue more M&A deals should it need additional capital, Nippon Paint said during a conference call.

Yuichiro Wakatsuki, chief financial officer of Nippon Paint Holdings, said the deal with Wuthelam would strengthen its balance sheet, and was expected to result in a 0.6 per cent increase in profit margins and earnings per share growth of over 10 per cent.

The Japanese firm will remain listed, and its top shareholder Wuthelam will not sell the company, said Masaaki Tanaka, chief executive officer of Nippon Paint Holdings.

The deal is expected to be finalised in January, after it is cleared by regulators in each of the markets where the businesses operate.
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Long working hours from home, the absence of an office setup, and lack of physical activity because of the challenges posed by Covid-19 are weighing on peoples health and employers are worried. In an effort to ensure employee wellbeing, many are now encouraging staff to enrol for fitness classes at company expense.

While fitness companies have been offering virtual sessions in cities that are under lockdown or where gyms have still not been allowed to open, in cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad, employees have the option of going to the gym.

With the number of companies offering free fitness classes to employees rising over the last few months, corporate spends on wellness over the last few months have increased. And that surge is helping gym owners and fitness experts significantly during a very challenging time for their business.

Better sales conversions

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Earlier when we used to reach out, four out of 10 companies had the inclination and had already assigned budgets towards fitness and wellness services. But post-COVID-19, nine out of 10 companies have increased budgets or allocated budgets to spend on fitness and wellness. For global companies, it is a mandate. Now, even Indian companies are doing the same, said Jayam Vora, Co-Founder of Fitternity, a gym aggregator.

Fitternity has 10,000 gyms and studios on its platform across 30 cities in India. The company is also offering over 2,000 virtual fitness trainers. Inbound enquiries have seen a 300 percent increase and the conversion rate is 4x. So, our sales cycle, which used to take 3 to 4 months for conversion earlier, now takes 15 days to maximum one month, he added.

Across-the-board interest

Companies such as Adobe, IndiGo Airlines, Tata Starbucks, Amazon, Accenture and Ernst & Young, among others, have partnered with Fitternity to offer fitness classes to their employees. Live classes are the most preferred, with 50 to as many as 200 employees joining each session. Over 100 companies have partnered with us. And from January to the new financial year, a lot of these companies will put out large budgets towards this category, said Vora.

Also Read: Staying fit at home | Indoor fitness equipment sales grow nearly 60% during COVID-19 lockdown

Gopal Gera, who runs Goodlife Fitness centre in Kalyan Nagar and Snap Fitness in Basvangudi in Bengaluru, said: In Bengaluru, IT companies and banking and financial services are two big categories. And what we can look for is pharma and institutional led companies in the coming months.

Raj Moveza, who runs 12 gyms called Plej in Bengaluru, and conducts online fitness classes across India, including in Gujarat, Kolkata and Vizag, said that 95 percent of his corporate clients are from IT companies.

Moveza said in the pre-COVID period, getting corporate clients was not an easy task but with companies becoming aware of the importance of employee fitness, more corporates are coming on-board. He added that recently he was approached by IBM for a fitness seminar, an indication that companies are taking the fitness of their employees more seriously than ever.

Concurring with Moveza, Gera, said that there was some push on the corporate side due to PM Narendra Modis Fit India movement in the pre-COVID days, but now the corporate wellness segment has picked up the pace and it will scale new heights because it has become a necessity.

From the employer spending on employees perspective, we are seeing the maximum spend going up to a crore for around 10,000 to 25,000 employees. Globally, we have seen that a very large portion of fitness spends has happened through corporate spends, said Vora.

Hybrid model

Gera added that in Bengaluru, where gyms have reopened, employees coming to gyms are not only increasing footfalls but also helping build consumer confidence.

Vora said that companies have started offering hybrid models  both online and offline sessions  to employees in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and he expects the hybrid model to continue until January next year.

Also Read: Step up your fitness game just like Bollywood celebrities through virtual classes

While the number of companies spending on fitness has more than doubled in the current time, Vora said that for virtual classes, companies end up paying 60 percent of what they pay for physical classes. But the spend has gone up two to three times. Hence, he thinks that there is a lot of potential in this segment.

As Moveza explained, many employees go beyond what their companies offer. We have a lot of clients who have continued even after their companies stopped spending on fitness.
A top German security panel headed by Chancellor Angela Merkel has turned down Pakistans request for supply of air independent propulsion (AIP) systems for its submarines that would allow them to stay underwater for weeks, people familiar with the matter said.

The decision taken by the German Federal Security Council headed by Chancellor Merkel was conveyed to the Pakistan embassy on August 6, people cited above said on conditions of anonymity.

ALSO WATCH | Watch: Emmanuel Macron greets Angela Merkel with Namaste amid Covid crisis

Pakistan had made the request for access to the air independent propulsion system that can recharge submarine batteries without having to surface for longer periods. Pakistan had proposed the upgrade for submarines in its inventory and the Yuan class submarines being manufactured under joint China-Pakistan project in China.

The AIP system would have enhanced the combat capabilities of its submarines by allowing the diesel engines to run without atmospheric air for a week or more.

Conventional submarines have to surface almost every second day to run their air-breathing diesel engines, running the risk of detection.

An Indian official said Germanys refusal to help Prime Minister Imran Khans government with this technology would adversely impact its lethality and vulnerability.

Indias Defence Research and Development Organisation is indigenously developing the system for the navys submarines. Last year, the effort crossed several milestones when it successfully tested a land-based prototype that New Delhi had then declared would have a force multiplier effect on lethality of a diesel electric submarine.

Pakistan watchers in Delhi said the primary reason for Germany to take a hard stance on Pakistans request was being attributed to its role in promoting terror, particularly Pakistans failure to cooperate in identifying the perpetrators of the truck bomb attack on the Germany Embassy in Kabul in May 2017.

Nearly 150 people were killed in the bombing that devastated a central area of Kabul near the embassy. The bombing, counted among the deadliest terror strikes in recent years, was linked to the Haqqani Network that is known in counter-terror circuits to be supported and directed by Pakistan deep state.

The Afghan National Directorate of Security had then gone on record to blame the Haqqani network based in neighbouring Pakistan for the terror strike and accused Pakistans spy agency ISI of helping in planning the attack. German officials have noted that Islamabad hadnt pursued the investigations at its end.

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He added that when a company grows organically, it attracts local people as employees, people who will stay in the area over the long haul.

Organic growth also involves a matter of perspective.

We have a lot to offer here and its a great place to live, Venable said. We have a lot more to offer than what some people think. Sometimes, I dont think we give ourselves enough credit for what we have in the way of potential.

Officially, Venable will take over as executive director on Sept. 1, although Kelley has agreed to stay on until the end of the year.

Were in the process of hiring two new planners and are involved in a number of projects, Venable said. Were fortunate that Jeff is staying with us while we make the transition.

One of first big issues theyll tackle is in helping communities recover from a coronavirus pandemic once the immediate threat has passed.

Through unsettling times, Venable remains optimistic.

I have a passion for the Panhandle and its prosperity, he said. I want to see it grow and develop economically. Its a good place to live and raise a family. I want to see that for everyone.

Jerry Purvis is a reporter with the Star-Herald. He can be reached at jpurvis@starherald.com or at 308-632-9046.
When I think of England in the 1950s, I think of shortages, decline, and despair. Part of that impression stems from the play Look Back in Anger and the movie The Entertainer (also a play)  both by John Osborne  so it might be an exaggeration. But certainly much of the art and literature of 1950s England reflected pure bleakness.

I view the early Beatles as an answer, or at least an antidote, to that bleakness. The Fab Four burst onto the scene with joyful, exuberant music that was devoid of anger and anguish. They were too young, too innocent, and perhaps too influenced by American pop culture to be depressed. The same was true, I think, of many (though certainly not all) major British Invasion bands and duos.

It was true, with caveats, of Gerry and the Pacemakers  the other Liverpool band at the forefront of the Invasion. Like The Beatles, Gerry Marsden and his group (known as Gerry and the Mars Bars until the candy company threatened to sue) were managed by Brian Epstein and recorded by George Martin.

Here is their breakthrough single, How Do You Do It? (1963) (The Swedish girls in the audience dont seem overwhelmed.)



Gerry did not write this bouncy little number, which I believe The Beatles rejected. However, he did write one the groups biggest hits, a tribute to Liverpool called Ferry Cross the Mersey. (1965)

Here, joy and exuberance are replaced by sentimentality and pride in ones city. The song doesnt just turn its back on the darkness and resentments of the 1950s culture, it attempts a refutation of sorts.

For me, the key lyrics are:

People around every corner

They seem to smile and say

We dont care what your name is boy

Well never turn you away. . . So ferry cross the Mersey

Cause this lands the place I love

And here Ill stay.

Here is the song.



It isnt joyful. The opening includes the phrase hearts torn in every way. But the pain is overcome by local solidarity and pride.

Gerry also wrote Dont Let the Sun Catch You Crying. (1964) The struggle to overcome pain is the theme of this somewhat mawkish hit. Optimism prevails, but its a close run thing. Heres the video (afterwards, you can watch him sing the same song plus Ferry in 2011; I think he does a better job this time around):



By 1966, the English pop scene had moved on. The joyfulness was gone and optimism, even if qualified, didnt play. The Beatles Eleanor Rigby (1966) was a return to something like the 1950s view of postwar Britain. So was the beautiful Shes Leaving Home. (1967)

The Beatles werent writing tributes to Liverpool. Their remembrances of Merseyside were captured in the whimsical and strangely matter of fact Penny Lane (1967).

Left behind, and with their popularity rapidly declining, Gerry and the Pacemakers disbanded in 1966 (though Gerry brought the band back in the 1970s).

* * *

Eric Burden of The Animals says that when he came to New York to appear on the Ed Sullivan show, he would grab a taxi as soon as he finished and head to Harlem to imbibe jazz. Ive heard that when Gerry Marsden was in New York for Sullivans show, he went to Broadway to see the musical Carousel.

I dont know if thats true, but Gerry and his band did make a major pop hit of Carousels signature song, Youll Never Walk Alone. (Late 1963) Marsden didnt write the song, of course. The lyrics are by Oscar Hammerstein. But they were right up Gerry Marsdens alley. In fact, Gerry says he fell in love with the song as a kid, so it probably inspired his song writing.

* * *

The story goes that Gerry Marsden presented a disk of Youll Never Walk Alone to Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of Liverpool, FC. Shankly was blown away, and picked it during an appearance on the BBCs Desert Island Discs radio show in 1965.

Liverpool fans, who were singing Beatles songs during matches, started singing Youll Never Walk Alone. Soon, it became the teams anthem, sung with gusto, accompanied by Gerrys recording, by something like 50,000 Liverpool fans before every Liverpool home game.

If only Gerry had been an Everton fan.

Clubs in other countries have adopted the song. It has spread to Glasgow (Celtic United), Dortmund with arguably the strongest fan base in Germany, the Netherlands (Feyenoord), Ukraine (Dinamo Kiev), and even Japan (FC Tokyo). And, of course, Liverpool fans sing it in bars all over the world when they watch their lads play. I had to endure it in a bar in Vienna when the Shite won the 2019 Champions League final.

Thus, in a weird twist, it seems likely that these days more people are hearing, and certainly singing along with, Gerry and the Pacemakers than with The Beatles.

Here is the band performing Youll Never Walk Alone in 1963:



Here is how it looks and sounds when Liverpool fans sing along:



Here is Gerry at Anfield, Liverpools home ground, in 2013, talking about the song and singing it with the teams fans (he appears first at about the 45 second mark):


By Azernews





By Aisha Jabbarova

Azerbaijan has thwarted a provocation attempt by the sabotage-reconnaissance group of the Armenian armed forces, the Defence Ministry reported.

The incident occurred in the direction of the Goranboy district of the front on August 23 at about 05:45.

The Armenian group retreated, suffering losses, the ministry said. During the battle, the commander of the Armenian sabotage group, according to the initial interrogation, First Lieutenant Gurgin Alberyan was taken prisoner.

The ministry reiterated that the military-political leadership of Armenia bears all responsibility for the aggravation of the situation at the front.

It should be noted that Armenia has stepped up its military provocation recently, staging sabotage both on the border and on the line of contact. On July 12, Armenian forces shelled Azerbaijan's positions in Tovuz, Azerbaijan's strategically-important district on the border. The Armenian attack killed 12 Azerbaijani servicemen, including an army general, as well as a 76-year-old civilian. Armenian forces retreated after suffering losses in Azerbaijan's retaliation.
On Monday, August 24, Ukrainians mark the Independence Day.

Ukraine's Independence Day is celebrated annually on August 24 to honour the adoption of the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine by the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991. The Act is a political and legal document that certified the new status of Ukraine.

Ukraine came a long way to independence. The history of the formation of the Ukrainian state has a thousand-year tradition. It began with the existence of the State of the Antes, the state unification of the Polans tribe, and later the formation of the Kyivan Rus. After the disintegration of the Kyivan Rus, the traditions of statehood passed to the Principality of GaliciaVolhynia. Then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania emerged, in which Kyiv and Volyn lands enjoyed considerable autonomy.

In the 17th century, the Cossack state began to form on the territory of modern Ukraine. The Cossacks fought for Ukraine's independence for more than a hundred years, but they never managed to achieve it. In the 18th century, the Ukrainian people lost their statehood and came to be within the two empires  the Russian Empire and the Austria Empire  for the next two hundred years.

In the 19th - early 20th centuries, the Ukrainian national movement evolved and led to the Ukrainian revolution of 1917-1921 and the revival of Ukrainian statehood. The Central Council of Ukraine was formed and proclaimed with its Third Universal the establishment of the Ukrainian People's Republic. The Fourth Universal declared the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic. In 1919, the Unification Act was signed by the Ukrainian People's Republic and the West Ukrainian People's Republic and declared the unity of the Ukrainian lands. However, the Ukrainian People's Republic did not last long.

The Ukrainian people lost a chance to have their own state till the end of the 20th century.

After the August coup in Moscow, seeing the danger looming over Ukraine and continuing the millennial tradition of state formation, Ukraine's independence was proclaimed at an extraordinary sitting of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on August 24, 1991.

This meant that the Ukrainian state had its own indivisible and inviolable territory, in which only the Constitution and the laws of Ukraine have an effect. Ukraine defends and safeguards its statehood, guarantees its citizens the rights and freedoms, independently disposes of its natural resources, conducts its economy, has its own monetary and financial system and currency, pursues foreign policy and establishes equal relations with neighbours, develops science, education, culture.

Ukraine gained the full legal state independence after a national referendum on December 1, 1991, when 90.32% of citizens voted for its independence. By approving the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine on the nationwide referendum, the people brought this document into real force and began a new stage in the development of the history of our state.

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Defence minister Rajnath Singh on Monday instructed Uttar Pradesh government officials to complete the defence corridor work within the stipulated time.

Singh gave the instruction while reviewing, via video conference, progress of the MoUs signed with Uttar Pradesh Defence Industrial Corridor project.

Chief secretary RK Tewari, additional chief secretary Awanish Awasthi, additional chief secretary, infrastructure and industrial development department Alok Kumar and senior officials of the defence ministry were also present on the occasion.

All proposed work of the defence corridor must be completed within the stipulated time, Singh said.

The defence minister also pointed out that a cabinet note on the new policy of the defence production department was ready and would be released next month.

He asserted that the state government must maintain regular contact with investors and take prompt action on their issues. He also stressed on expediting land acquisition work in Lucknow and Agra.

Giving details of defence corridor progress, chief secretary Tiwari said: Six nodes have been developed in Aligarh, Agra, Jhansi, Chitrakoot, Kanpur and Lucknow. The state government has assigned 1461.0579 hectares of land for the project out of which 1310.2532 hectares have been acquired. This is over 90 per cent of the assigned land.

Tiwari said: In Jhansi 1025.4672 hectares of land have been acquired, 95.9340 hectares in Chitrakoot, 47.8440 hectares in Aligarh and 141.0080 hectares in Kanpur.

In Agra, land outside th eTaj Trapezium Zone (TTZ) was being explored and in Lucknow land around the Ring Road is being considered, said the chief secretary.

The chief secretary also told Rajnath that so far investments worth 3,732 crore have been announced in the defence corridor project.

Ordnance factories will invest 1,077 crore, HAL 1,200 crore, BEL 240 crore, PTC industries 115 crore, Bharat Forge 200 crore and MKU 900 crore. Work on these MOUs has already begun, said Tewari.

He said under the Aligarh node, complete planning of detailed project report, town planning and power station, among others, has been done.

Additional chief secretary Awasthi said, Work has been done in the state at a rapid pace. The Defence and Aerospace Manufacturing Employment Promotion Policy, 2018 has been promulgated.
Lost sparkle: Swarovski chief executive Robert Buchbauer is planning to scale down the companys products and focus on up-market items

For more than a century, Swarovski has churned out crystals in every imaginable shape and form, from sparkling dolphin figurines to encrusted fountain pens to glittering mobile-phone cases.

An affordable indulgence rarely costing more than a few hundred euro, Swarovski trinkets have invaded every corner of the world, providing a comfortable life for the family behind the empire and for the people of Wattens, the small town in the Austrian Alps where the company is based.

But as Swarovski celebrates its 125th anniversary, there's little cause for jubilation. Revenue is set to take a hard hit this year, falling by a third to about 2bn; management has announced 6,000 job cuts; and the family risks ceding some control should the new chief executive eventually prevail with his plans for a possible stock-market listing or a strategic partner.

The cracks in the crystal kingdom have exposed a deep rift in the sprawling Swarovski family of more than 200 individuals, many of whom are spread between Austria and Switzerland.

It's from here, on the shores of Lake Zurich, that the company runs its main corporate functions under CEO Robert Buchbauer, himself a member of the clan. For his relatives and the residents of Wattens opposing the radical overhaul, Mr Buchbauer has a tough message: get on board or risk being swept away by the market forces that Swarovski chose to ignore for too long.

"It's very painful for everybody, but we have to take the steps that we should have taken years ago," said Mr Buchbauer.

In the future, Swarovski will focus on higher quality products with unique designs rather than trying to offer everything for everybody, he said: "Swarovski crystals on a 10 T-shirt don't add to our profitability and hurt our brand image."

Swarovski offers a cautionary lesson in the pitfalls of globalisation. Rapid expansion elevated the business from its Austrian backwater onto the world's red carpets and prime shopping streets, but then turned on the company when changing consumer trends blindsided the family long accustomed to profitable payouts.

The coronavirus pandemic has only amplified the crisis, laying waste to the sprawling network of Swarovski boutiques in now deserted shopping malls and airports around the world.

Swarovski's 30,000 employees churn out a vast array of sparkling adornments. Hollywood celebrities from Marilyn Monroe to Audrey Hepburn donned Swarovski-encrusted gowns and jewellery. At this year's Super Bowl concert, Jennifer Lopez paraded a Swarovski crystal manicure during her half-time performance.

But despite its affiliation with the glittering world of high fashion and celebrities, the majority of products costs less than 100.

That places Swarovski into the cut-throat segment of mass-market luxury, with its thin margins and fleeting consumer loyalty.

After years of expansion, Mr Buchbauer says Swarovski needs to refocus and learn that less is more. That means exiting the low-margin wholesale business where cheaper competition from Egypt or China has dented profit.

If Swarovski wants to survive, it needs to offer fewer but more exclusive items under its own brand, and cut back its network of 3,000 boutiques, the CEO says. Mr Buchbauer's vision for the new Swarovski is to sell more carefully curated products tailor-made to match consumer tastes, a turnaround he predicts will take two to three years to execute.

Family-owned luxury companies have struggled to remain independent, with the likes of jewellery house Bulgari or cashmere specialist Loro Piana seeking shelter in a multi-national conglomerate like LVMH.

Others, like high-end winter outfitters Canada Goose and Italian silk-and-leather label Salvatore Ferragamo, have sold shares to the public, easing their access to capital.

Mr Buchbauer's plans have met stiff opposition from other members of the family, who accuse him of causing irreversible damage to the components business run out of Wattens. While his critics concede the company needs an overhaul, they say the cuts are too deep.

"The Swarovski family is shocked," Paul Swarovski, a member of one of the Austrian arms, said in an interview. "There are still lots of opportunities to sell billions of high-quality crystal components around the world, and Robert Buchbauer has to come up with ideas on how to gain these customers rather than shutting things down and laying off expert workers."

Whether Mr Buchbauer gets his way remains unclear. His detractors say he needs approval from a shareholder meeting, which may be hard to come by given the splintered nature of the family. Mr Buchbauer claims he has the required backing from key stakeholders.

The conflict raging at Swarovski coincides with changing trends in consumer behaviour. Today's shoppers like to mix high-end designers with fast-fashion alternatives, often at the expense of the more affordable branded players that occupy the middle of the market, according to Zuzanna Pusz, an analyst at UBS focused on the luxury-goods industry.

The rapid rise of e-commerce has diminished the relevance of physical stores and third-party retailers, long a stronghold for Swarovski. Social media has leapfrogged print advertising and many glitzy events where Swarovski and its shimmering swan emblem were a fixture.

Then there's the push toward premium products and recognisable names, particularly in China. Richemont bought Italy's Buccellati to expand its portfolio of high-end jewellery. LVMH last year agreed to acquire Tiffany for $16bn, picking up one of the best-known names in a highly fragmented jewellery market.

If Swarovski wants to have a future and retain its status as a globally recognised brand, it needs to make the painful cuts now, even if it risks sparking a cross-Alpine family feud, Mr Buchbauer said.

"Bad news always creates lots of emotion," he said. "But in the end it's about the long-term survival of this business."

Bloomberg
A Malaysian police chief has said there was no sign London teenager Nora Quoirin was abducted before she was found dead on a family holiday.

The 15-year-old's body was found naked near a nature resort in the southern Negeri Sembilan state in August last year.

An inquest into her death opened in Malaysia on Monday.

The first witness, the Negeri Sembilan police chief, said the investigation showed no criminal element.

Mohamad Mat Yusop added there was no indication Nora was kidnapped and there was no ransom demanded.

Police believe the Franco-Irish teenager climbed out of a window on her own and the post-mortem examination showed she died from intestinal bleeding due to starvation and stress, he said.

Nora's parents, who have lived in London for two decades, believe she was kidnapped because she had mental and physical disabilities and could not have wandered off on her own.

She was born with holoprosencephaly, a neurological disorder, and her family have described her as very vulnerable".

Her body was discovered on 13 August next to a stream more than 2km from a resort where her family were staying on holiday.

She had disappeared from their cottage on 4 August - a day after her family had arrived.

Haanim Bamadhaj, the resort owner who lives opposite the family's cottage, also gave evidence to the inquest into her death, saying the night Nora went missing was peaceful and her dog, who would usually bark if there were people outside, was quiet.

She acknowledged a window of the cottage that was found ajar the morning Nora disappeared was faulty and could be opened from the outside. But she said there had never been any criminal break-ins in her property since it opened for business 11 years ago.

Recommended Family confirm body found in Malaysia is that of missing Nora Quoirin

The inquest, which is set to run until 4 September, is expected to involve 64 witnesses.

The Quoirin family has sued the resort owner for alleged negligence. They said in their lawsuit that there was no security at the resort and that a cottage window was found ajar with a broken latch on the morning Nora disappeared.

Nora had poor motor skills and needed help to walk and her mental age was about five or six years old, her parents said in the lawsuit.

Gurdial Singh Nijar, the lawyer representing the resort, told reporters after the first day of the inquest that the incident was unfortunate but "there was no culpability" on the part of the resort owner.

Nora's parents, Sebastien and Meabh Quoirin, have welcomed Malaysia's decision to hold the inquest after police classified the case as "no further action".

They had previously urged the Malaysian government to hold an inquest to establish what happened to their daughter.

Additional reporting by Associated Press
House Democrats on Monday sought to join Gov. Phil Murphy in federal court to defend his plan to automatically send absentee ballots to millions of New Jersey voters against a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign.

The motion was filed as President Donald Trump used an appearance at the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte to rail against expanded vote by mail and claim that if he only would lose the Nov. 3 election if it was rigged.

Theyre trying to steal the election from Republicans, Trump said.

Trumps campaign, the Republican National Committee and the New Jersey Republican State Committee have sued to overturn Murphys order to sent ballots to 5.8 million active voters, calling it a brazen power grab.

Murphy has said he wanted to make it easier for more residents to vote by mail rather than in-person due to the coronavirus, though there still be polling places in every municipality on Election Day.

New Jersey voters must be able to safely exercise their right to vote, and any attempt by the Trump campaign and Washington Republicans to undermine that is petty politics at its most dangerous, said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos, an Illinois congresswoman.

Amid a deadly pandemic that has already wreaked havoc on the region, no voter should be forced to choose between safeguarding their health and safely making their voice heard.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Newsletter | Homepage

Trump has sought to distinguish between having voters request by mail or getting one automatically, claiming the latter would lead to massive fraud despite a body of evidence refuting the allegations.

A 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found that the rate of voter fraud for mail-in ballots was 0.00004% to 0.0009%.

And the Washington Post found possible double voting or voting on behalf of dead people in just 372 of 14.6 million ballots cast in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, which send ballots to all registered voters as New Jersey plans to do this fall.

Trump, who flew to Charlotte to address convention delegates while they were nominating him for re-election, talked about the lawsuits his campaign has filed, including in New Jersey.

This is the greatest scam in the history of politics, Trump said. The only way they can take this election from away from us if this is a rigged election.

The controversy has spilled over to the U.S. Postal Service amid concerns that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor, was purposely seeking to hinder the agencys ability to handle an expected surge in absentee ballots.

I am not engaged in sabotaging the election, DeJoy told the House Oversight and Reform Committee at its Monday hearing into service cutbacks and mail delays.

State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal sued the U.S. Postal Service following cuts in service that have led to delivery delays, and the U.S. House voted Saturday to provide $25 billion for the Postal Service and to rescind all of the service changes made since January.

Trump has threatened to veto the bill and most House Republicans, including their leadership, voted no. But 26 GOP lawmakers, including Reps. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd Dist., and Chris Smith, R-4th Dist., bucked their party and supported the measure.

Theyll blame it on the Post Office, Trump said in Charlotte. You can see them setting it up. Be careful and watch it very carefully.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com.
An artificial intelligence (AI) system on Thursday defeated a U.S. Air Force (USAF) F-16 pilot by scoring five straight victories in a simulated virtual dogfighting event hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The U.S. militarys AlphaDogfight Trials sought to demonstrate the feasibility of developing effective, intelligent autonomous agents capable of defeating adversary aircraft in a dogfight.

Developed by defence contractor Heron Systems, the winning AI named Falcon defeated a human pilot with the callsign Banger  a District of Columbia Air National Guard pilot and recent Air Force Weapons School F-16 Weapons Instructor Course graduate with over 2,000 hours of experiencing flying F-16s  by winning 5-0 in one-on-one virtual combat.

Before facing off against a human opponent, Falcon defeated other AI opponents from seven other teams, including Aurora Flight Sciences, EpiSys Science, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Lockheed Martin, Perspecta Labs, PhysicsAI and SoarTech.

Weve gotten an opportunity to watch AI come of age [against] a very credible adversary in the human pilot, said Col. Dan Javorsek, Program Manager in DARPAs Strategic Technology Office.

The AlphaDogfight Trials is all about increasing trust in AI. If the champion AI earns the respect of an F-16 pilot, well have come one step closer to achieving effective human-machine teaming in air combat.

The Heron aircraft depends on a technique called deep reinforcement learning, which allows the program to repeatedly test-run multiple solutions to a given problem and study what works and what doesnt.

The twisting methods adopted by the AI pilot made it difficult for Banger to match Falcon. After getting shot down the first four times, Banger hit speeds over 500 mph and then dropped the jet down to 13,000 feet. However, the F-16 pilot was unable to score a single hit due to the AI algorithms superhuman aiming ability.

Talking about the fight, the human pilot said, Some of the rules and constraints that we normally apply to our human training environment werent there. So you saw the AI maneuvering to a position of advantage where it was able to use its more refined aiming technique with perfect information Outside of that, it was very similar to what we see in our ordinary training in [simulators].

He also acknowledged the potential he saw in the AIs algorithms. If I were to walk away from today saying I dont trust the AIs ability to perform fine motor movement and achieve kills, Id have a lack of integrity, he added.

DARPA plans to convert the lessons from the AlphaDogfight Trials to the real world.

Theres a long way to go. This was a far cry from going out in an F-16 and flying actual [basic fighter maneuvers], Justin Mock of DARPA said. But I think we made a really large step, a giant leap if you will, in the direction were going.
HOUSTON: Some Houston residents say they endured difficult, often hazardous living conditions while waiting months, even years for help from the city to fix flood-damaged homes after Hurricane Harvey.

Sleeping in a closet because it was the only space that didnt reek of mold. Dealing with rodents and roaches that would come in through warped or rotted flooring. Couch surfing at 67 years old until patchwork repairs made a home temporarily habitable.

Those were just some of the things people dealt with as they waited for help they say never came, despite submitting and resubmitting paperwork.

Three years after Harvey, some Houston residents feel angry and abandoned as their repair efforts were bogged down by a city program they described as slow and bureaucratic. The program has finished rebuilding less than 70 homes since it started January 2019.

Some residents, like 70-year-old Doris Brown, turned to nonprofits and the state. They also formed a group the Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus to bring attention to their plight.

We have a right to be angry. We past angry now. We mad as hell, said Brown, whose home had to be rebuilt because of mold.

City officials admit the repair programs progress has been slow but blame this partly on the Texas General Land Office, or GLO, which oversees the funding. The city accused the land office of providing muddled guidance, resulting in rejection of homeowners applications.

The state GLO has not been a good partner with us, said Mayor Sylvester Turner.

The land office said the city was unprepared to run the program and rejected help.

The city of Houstons lack of progress is unacceptable, said GLO spokesperson Brittany Eck.

The city sued the GLO to stop it from taking over the funding. The GLO also began its own repair program in Houston, adding to residents confusion.

The government is bickering over funding as far as who it belongs to, but it really belongs to the residents and the residents are still here waiting with hands empty, said Julia Ordua, with Texas Housers, a nonprofit that works on housing issues.

Harvey dumped up to 50 inches (1.3 meters) of rain in the Houston area after making landfall on Aug. 25, 2017. It killed 68 people and caused about $125 billion in damage in Texas.

The city received nearly $1.3 billion in federal funding to repair and rebuild homes, provide rental assistance and create new affordable housing. A third of the funding nearly $428 million went to a program for home repair and reconstruction.

As of the end of July, the program had fixed 68 homes and reimbursed 73 people who did their own repairs. The land office had fixed nearly 1,800 homes across Texas as of Aug. 13.

In the Houston area, Harvey flooded more than 150,000 homes, with more than 16,000 residents identified as potentially needing repair help.

About 50% of Houston households impacted by Harvey were low- and moderate-income, according to the city. Community advocates say many damaged homes were in Black and Latino neighborhoods that have lacked economic investment and proper infrastructure to keep them from flooding.

Theyre still in the double digits of homes repaired. No matter how you slice it, thats a failure, said Ben Hirsch, with West Street Recovery, a local nonprofit that rebuilt Browns home and that of 59-year-old Lawrence Hester.

For nearly 2 years after Harvey, Hester lived with three relatives in a home that became overrun by black mold, rodents, roaches and sometimes snakes. He used buckets bought at a dollar store to collect water leaking from the Harvey-damaged roof.

Living in those conditions for so long, I felt like it was normal, Hester said.

Hesters home has mostly been rebuilt with a few minor repairs on hold because West Street Recovery stopped construction due to the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic also forced the Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus to move its advocacy efforts online.

Unable to get help from the city, Lloyd Nelms, 41, accepted an offer from the GLO. Every morning during the 17-day construction process, Nelms traveled from his hotel to watch and reassure himself it wasnt a dream. On June 2, he got the keys to his rebuilt home.

I lost hope in the city, but I didnt lose hope in God, said Nelms.

Houston officials say critics are focusing only on the number of finished home repairs and ignoring their other projects, including developing over 3,500 new affordable rental homes and so far helping 136 families through a homebuyer assistance program.

Tom McCasland, director of Houstons Housing and Community Development Department, which runs the repair program, declined an interview request, citing the lawsuit. In a statement, he said his agencys focus remains on helping residents recover.

Residents and advocates say while the GLO has been more responsive than the city, they still have concerns. The biggest one is a rule limiting the number of bedrooms in a rebuilt home. The GLO says this allows more homes to be fixed.

Brown said she and the caucus will continue pushing for change in how disaster victims get help. Shes been inspired in part by recent protests for racial justice.

We are resilient people, Brown said. Were going to continue to fight and were not going to quit because this is our right.

___

Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juanlozano70

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
The Air Intelligence Unit (AIU) in Kozhikode seized 1.69 kilograms of 24-carat worth Rs 86.69 lakh from a passenger on Sunday, informed the Commissionerate of Customs (Preventive), Kochi.

"Air Intelligence Unit, Kozhikode has seized 1.69 kgs of 24-carat gold, valued at Rs 86.69 lakhs, from a passenger travelling from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Kozhikode Airport on August 23," Commissionerate of Customs (Preventive), Kochi said.

The official further said that the was concealed inside the battery case of an emergency lamp.

Further probe underway.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
After Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston area in 2017, waterlogged Houstonians responded with resounding support for flood mitigation projects and for the view that climate change is to blame for the flooding.

A lot has changed in the past three years as entire neighborhoods have seen new construction and the elevation of older homes, and yet a survey of Houston-area residents found attitudes on climate change and support for flood mitigation projects remain remarkably unchanged or have even increased slightly.

Thats despite the fact that flooding, while certainly a continuing threat, has been far more localized in the years since Hurricane Harvey. People have not forgotten the trauma of those weeks in August and September 2017. And as a series of new tropical disturbances once again heads our way, the message couldnt be more timely.

TEXAS FLOOD MAP: Your guide to long-term flood-risk data for Houston neighborhoods

The survey by the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston was conducted earlier this summer, the third in a series tracking residents attitudes and, more broadly, the regions recovery. We found most of those forced from their homes by Hurricane Harvey have either repaired their homes or built new ones, although about 20 percent remain in temporary housing. Pause for a moment and take that in  that is 1 in 5 three years after Hurricane Harvey forced them from their homes.

A strong majority of Houstonians point to global warming as the principal source of recent flooding, and most say climate change is man-made rather than naturally occurring. Support for a wide range of policies designed to reduce the negative impact of flooding remains extraordinarily high, and some of the work has already begun, with bayous widened and bridges raised to expand the waterways capacity and both new and older homes elevated 5 and even 10 feet above street level. You need only to drive near Cypress Creek or through Meyerland and other flood-weary neighborhoods to see the efforts underway to both limit future flooding and, if it happens, allow residents to literally rise above it.

Support for building additional retention basins is nearly universal, at 93 percent, with similar levels of support for widening the areas bayous, elevating homes and banning construction in flood plains.

Perhaps more surprising, three out of four residents in a region known as the oil and gas capital of the world support government funding for the development of wind, solar and thermal energy, as well as for government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Not, of course, that Hurricane Harvey turned all Houstonians into raging liberals.

Two-thirds of area residents said they are either very or somewhat worried about global warming, and 74 percent think the more extreme flooding caused by global warming represents a threat to the Houston area, up from 67 percent two years ago. But there is still sizeable disagreement on the cause, with about 38 percent saying they believe global warming is caused mostly by natural changes in the environment, rather than by human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels.

LIVE UPDATES: Tropical Storm Laura likely to be bigger threat to Houston than Marco

And despite their support for flood mitigation projects, residents arent necessarily enthusiastic about higher taxes to pay for those projects. We found even less support for higher sales taxes than higher property taxes.

About 85 percent, however, said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state legislators should tap the states Rainy Day Fund to address future flooding.

One factor that perhaps dampens support for a tax increase is a lack of public confidence in city and county leaders ability to prevent the negative impact of future flooding, with only 17 percent of residents very confident that local leaders know how to prevent future flooding from having a negative impact on the region.

That rises to 52 percent for those who say they are at least somewhat confident in local leaders, still a tepid vote of confidence considering that some of the work approved by voters in a $2.5 billion bond election in 2018 is underway  a visible sign of action.

So what is the message to local leaders? Its mixed, but the average Houston area resident believes climate change is real, caused by human activity and responsible at least in part for the citys severe flooding. And, they support policies to prevent the adverse effects of future flooding  from restricting development to public subsidies for renewable energy.

The other message? People are reluctant to pay more in taxes to support the changes, in part because they are not entirely confident that local elected officials will use those tax funds to notably reduce the risks of future flooding.

We still have work to do.

Jones is Baker Institute Fellow in Political Science at Rice University. Cross is senior director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston, and Pinto is director of the Center for Public Policy at the Hobby School.
Minister of State Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment Robert Troy has welcomed news that Athlone IT is to receive an allocation of 125,000 to support the wellbeing and mental health of its students.

The funding is part of an overall nationwide financial package of 5 million announced by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD.

Minister of State Troy said: The funding announced today will be used to recruit additional student counsellors and recruit additional psychologists. This will be vital for students going into education this year because the Covid-19 pandemic has created a difficult path for students getting to education.

This funding is be used for the implementation of the Framework for Consent in Higher Education Instutions - Safe, Respectful, Supportive and Positive: Ending Sexual Harassment in Irish Higher Education Institutions and for the implementation of the soon to be published National Student Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Framework.

It is now more important than ever to support student counselling services, and key mental health interventions to provide a safe, respectful, supportive and positive environment in higher education institutions, Minister Troy concluded.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

Trend:

Rector of Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS) Elmar Gasimov met with Vice President for Commerce in CIS countries of the Italian oil and gas company TechnipFMC Luigi Fiorentino.

During the meeting, the sides discussed the projects that are planned to be implemented in Azerbaijan on the initiative of the company.

The meeting was also attended by BHOS graduates who became winners of the project Master's programme on conveying technological knowledge to students studying in the oil, gas and petrochemical fields and who currently work as junior process engineers at TechnipFMC, as well as Executive Office Manager and Project Coordinator of TechnipFMC Sabina Abbasova.

Rector Elmar Gasimov noted that joint work is underway with Italian companies to build and reconstruct enterprises in the country that are related to the engineering, petrochemistry, construction and technology fields.

Joint material, technical, scientific, methodological and organizational measures are being taken to ensure the training of highly qualified specialists in the field of education. The participation of BHOS graduates in the internship programs organized by TechnipFMC and their employment in this company is a clear proof of this cooperation, the rector added.

Vice President of TechnipFMC Luigi Fiorentino, in turn, noted that in Azerbaijan, the company, along with its traditional oil and gas projects, implements projects aimed at developing a sustainable industry, green technologies and that TechnipFMC is one of the largest technology providers in the country.

Currently, a feasibility study is being prepared for the Project on Supporting Processing of Sugar into Bioplastics at the country's first bioplastic (PLA) plant in Mingachevir. In addition, negotiations are underway to create a small enterprise in Ismayilli that will process agricultural waste into bioenergy based on the principle "from biomass to bio-oil."

He also stressed that the goal of TechnipFMC is to develop innovative technologies in Azerbaijan with the help of experienced specialists and to ensure their application in industry from the laboratory stage.

The project provides for the provision of support to specialists working in universities and industrial institutions of the country. At the same time, master programme students of Higher School will participate in projects on conveying technological knowledge, the vice president added.

Luigi Fiorentino also noted that it is planned to organize meetings between representatives of various organizations and companies interested in establishing cooperation in the field of green and alternative technologies, as well as to create the Council on Transition to Sustainable Energy for expanding awareness raising activities in the region.

At the end of the meeting, it was decided to hold a presentation of the Project on the creation of a small enterprise in Ismayilli for the conversion of biomass into bio-oil energy at Baku Higher Oil School with the participation of representatives of relevant agencies.
Bella Thorne has recently taken her art to another medium, joining the adult subscription site OnlyFans.

And the award-winning adult film director has been putting on a sexy display to promote the page to her followers.

She sizzled Sunday in white, as she flashed her taut midriff while stepping out for dinner with boyfriend Benjamin Mascolo at celebrity favorite Nobu Malibu.

White hot: Bella Thorne sizzled Sunday in white, as she flashed her taut midriff while stepping out for dinner with boyfriend Benjamin Mascolo at celebrity favorite Nobu Malibu

The 22-year-old donned a white sleeveless crop top with a matching strap across her waist and a pair of high-waisted pants, which accentuated her curves.

She accessorized with jeweled cat-eye sunglasses, layers of diamond jewelry (including three watches) and a diamond-studded manicure.

Thorne carried a white beaded handbag over her shoulder, while taking precautions against COVID-19 in a silver metallic face mask.

Serving body: The 22-year-old donned a white sleeveless crop top with a matching strap across her waist and a pair of high-waisted pants, which accentuated her curves

Squad: Bella sauntered out of Nobu with a pack of friends

She held hands with her Italian boyfriend, 27, as the arrived at the popular oceanfront sushi bar.

They were joined by several friends, as well as Bella's DJ sister Dani, AKA Com3t.

She embraced her wild sense of style wearing a poofy green dress with Dr. Martens and fishnet stockings.

Showing skin: Bella's underboob made an appearance as she hopped into her ride

Wild style: Bella's sister Dani donned an edgy green dress with Dr. Martens and fishnets

The outing came just days after Bella launched her OnlyFans, charging $102 for a six-month subscription.

The Babysitter actress is reportedly expected to rake in an estimated $1million a month, after briefly crashing the site with her launch.

Although it's not quite clear what kind of content she plans to post, the site is mostly for adult entertainers to monetize their work.

She told Paper: 'OnlyFans is the first platform where I can fully control my image; without censorship, without judgement, and without being bullied online for being me.'

Worth it: The outing came just days after she launched her OnlyFans, charging $102 for a six-month subscription

Breaking the internet: The Babysitter actress is reportedly expected to rake in an estimated $1million a month, after briefly crashing the site with her launch

Thorne previously won the Vision Award at last October's second annual Pornhub Awards, following her adult film directorial debut.

She released Her & Him (featuring ex Mod Sun, 33, on the soundtrack) as part of the adult streaming site's Visionaries series.

It came after the former Disney star released her own nudes in June of 2019, after she was threatened by a hacker.

Thorne posted the screenshots and a note to Twitter: 'F*** u and the power u think you have over me. I'm gonna write about this in my next book. Here's the photos he's been threatening me with, in other words here's my boobies.'

Directorial debut: Thorne previously won the Vision Award at last October's second annual Pornhub Awards, following her adult film directorial debut (pictured in October, 2019)
HUNTINGTON, NY  The Town of Huntington has $2,479,097 in federal funding earmarked to it, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Congressman Tom Suozzi announced Monday. The funds, allocated in the CARES Act through the Federal Transit Administration, will be used for the Town of Huntington HART Bus systems operating expenses during the coronavirus pandemic.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a major impact on public transportation systems throughout the state, which has resulted in a dramatic drop in ridership, officials said. This funding will ensure that those who rely on the Towns buses can continue to safely ride public transit as local communities begin to rebuild and recover from the outbreak. The Town of Huntington operates buses that serve its residents, including disabled persons and non-driving senior citizen residents. The grant is 100 percent federal funds with no local match required, officials said.



"We have fought hard to deliver critical federal funds to public transit systems across New York, including Huntingtons bus system, to provide essential workers and local residents with reliable public transit options throughout this unprecedented health and economic crisis," Schumer said. "We must continue to invest in sustaining our public transit systems because a vibrant bus system is fundamental to recovering from this crisis and rebuilding our communities and economy."



Suozzi said the CARES Act funding will help offset the financial impact the coronavirus had on transit operations throughout New York.

"The challenge is that all New York transit, and all State and Local governments, still need much more help, and [U.S. Senator] Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) refuses to even come to the table," Suozzi said. "Special thanks to Senator Schumer for working with me and the entire New York delegation to fight for our interests. Senator Schumer is always fighting for New York and we know it."

Story continues

Gillibrand said the funds will continue providing public transportation for riders who rely on safe and sanitary transit during the pandemic.

"The busing system in the Town of Huntington is central to the economy and workforce, and we must ensure they have the resources needed to combat the challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis," she said. "Im proud to have secured these funds in the CARES Act to help our communities recover."



This article originally appeared on the Huntington Patch
As tourism gradually reopens, people are planning holidays again but will travel be the same? According to travel influencers, it will be slow, less, but meaningful.

I think Covid-19 has made everyone realise that everything around us is unpredictable. This will encourage more people to take the plunge and travel to places that they have always dreamt of, ticking off their bucket list, says Savi Munjal of a popular travel blog.

Munjals partner, Vidit Taneja, echoes the view and says, Individuals will approach travel in a more responsible and sustainable way than before.

Another travel influencer, Shivya Nath, feels well stop impulsively jet-setting around the world and opt for more meaningful travel. She says, Both in tourism policy and as individual travellers, we are likely to become more inclined towards slow, meaningful, low impact, sustainable travel that supports local communities and minimises our impact on the environment.

Nath also points out that we must learn to live with Covid-19, and the only kind of travelling thatll make sense is slow travel. Getting safely from one destination to another and keeping up with testing /quarantine rules will only be worth it if we plan to spend several months in a place, she says.

Europe is good example as it opened up pretty fast, and Italy and Spain, the hardest hit countries to the pandemic, were the first to reopen for tourists. So travel cannot be as safe as it used to be earlier, feels travel writer Siddhartha Joshi. But, he says, If all the precautions are taken, people will start thinking its safe to travel now. He foresees some changes. Flying will be less common, people may prefer driving to destinations. The trips will be closer to home, and more oriented towards with family or a known group, he says.

Travel blogger Shubham Mansingka anticipates that travellers may choose smaller homestays to staying at hotels. He says, The reason could be people wanting the entire place to themselves rather than being in close proximity to other guests, and at homestays sometimes youre the only guests! Mansingka adds that, When I start travelling next, Id most likely visit a place where I have been earlier as I would know locals beforehand and it can assure me about the safety of the place.

And there are new travel trends emerging, such as drivecations, workations. Munjal says, We believe the future of such -ations is very bright because it targets specific niches. Such strategies are immensely successful and reflective of the future of travel where travellers will not be lumped under homogenous stereotypes. Instead their unique individual needs will be prioritised by tourism boards, destinations, and hotels.

Vana, a wellness retreat in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, has been training the staff to adapt to the new circumstances. Prasoon Pandey, general manager at Vana also anticipates, We see a surge in domestic travellers who are in pursuit of wellness. We believe that more Indians will now search out wellness offerings. More people are looking for places where one can dwell in nature and solitude.

But if travelling involves a constant fear of public spaces and staying away from locals, is it even travelling at all?, questions Nath.

Interact with author/ Sanchita_kalra.

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Schools reopened in Northern Ireland today for the first time since the coronavirus lockdown in March with new policies such as no singing and no indoor PE lessons.

Strict social distancing may be relaxed if there are hygiene measures in place, but some schools in the country will not allow parents past the school gates.

One grammar school in Belfast has made face masks compulsory for pupils and staff while a primary in the city is operating its seven classes as isolated 'social bubbles'.

It comes as Boris Johnson pleaded with parents to send their children back to the classroom as he takes charge of the drive to get all UK schools open next week.

Northern Ireland chief medic Dr Michael McBride insisted it is safe to return to schools, but unions said teachers had not had enough time to respond to new rules.

Teacher Catherine McClean has her temperature checked by assistant teacher Hilary Brennan at St Clare's Primary School in Belfast wearing PPE this morning

Brendan Gallagher drops off his 11-year-old daughter Abigail at St Clare's Primary School in Belfast with teacher Ashleigh Clarke greeting them this morning

At Forth River Primary School in Shankill, Belfast, headmistress Judith Stevenson said it did not have enough space to socially distance all of her 212 pupils.

She told the Guardian that none of the classes will interact with each other and pupils will not use the school hall to eat or have any PE lessons there.

Explaining her ban on singing in lessons, she added: 'Singing was always part of our lessons and was a way to help children get to grips with numbers and words.

'But we can't sing with them because it produces more droplets in the air and so there can't be singing in class.'

Also in the city, the Belfast Royal Academy grammar school contacted parents by email to advise that it is making it mandatory for pupils and staff to wear face coverings when they return to school.

Pupils work in class at Queen's Hill Primary School in Costessey, Norfolk, on July 1

Stormont's Department of Education said face coverings are not mandatory for routine use by pupils.

Northern Ireland's education minister Peter Weir said: 'Schools are not unsafe places for children and they are not unsafe places for teachers either.

'Very, very few, if any, children will come to harm as a result of attending school, but there is evidence of the long-term harm to children's education, life opportunities, mental health and wellbeing from not attending school.

'There is clear unequivocal evidence that children are less likely to catch Covid-19, where they do most of them will have mild to moderate symptoms and in most cases they will make a very full recovery.

'There is a very, very low - indeed an incredibly low incidence - of serious disease within children and they are also less likely to transmit the virus.'

Belfast Royal Academy in Northern Ireland is pictured on August 11. The school told parents it is making it mandatory for pupils and staff to wear face coverings when they return to school

Schools in Northern Ireland - as well as in England, Wales and Scotland - closed in March to help contain the spread of coronavirus.

Pupils in Primary 7, Year 12, Year 14 - whose preparation for exams was disrupted by the lockdown - and all vulnerable children are due to return to classes on August 24.

All other pupils will begin the new school year on the week beginning August 31 after months of variable levels of home schooling.

Official guidance recommends the formation of protective bubbles for primary school children and pupils in years 8-10 in post-primary schools.

The department said interactions between different year groups of older pupils should be limited.

Northern Ireland's chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride has insisted it is safe to return

Parents, pupils and their teachers face the added strain of uncertainty over the future, Mr Weir has acknowledged.

A total of 42million has been spent on re-starting schools safely.

A package of measures for the first term covers the cost of substitute teachers and other school expenditure, personal protective equipment, school well-being, transport and special educational needs.

Mr Weir said: 'I fully recognise the stresses felt by teachers, parents and pupils due to the ongoing disruption and uncertainty regarding the future.

'My key priority has always been to ensure all of our children and young people return to school on a full-time basis, as soon as it is safe to do so.'

Meanwhile Boris Johnson has pleaded with parents to send their children back to the classroom as he takes charge of the drive to get all UK schools open next week.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson poses during a visit to St Joseph's Catholic School in Upminster, East London, on August 10

The Prime Minister warned last night that pupils risk permanent damage to their future life chances if they continue to stay away.

Mr Johnson, who this morning will return to No10 following his summer break, is in a race against the clock to get schools across Britain ready and persuade parents they are safe in time for the start of the new term.

The Government faces a big test to deliver on its promise to get all children full-time back following its shambolic handling of A-level and GCSE results.

Many pupils in England have not been to class since March, when schools were closed except to vulnerable children and those of keyworkers.

Efforts to reopen classrooms were given a major boost last night as it emerged that there was an outbreak of coronavirus at only one in 10,000 schools when some reopened for select year groups in June, according to research by Public Health England.

Mr Johnson declared that there was a 'moral duty to reopen schools to all pupils safely' as he insisted that the return was guided by the Government's scientific and medical experts.
HYATTSVILLE, Md. - Three police officers who were shot while responding to a call Sunday evening in Maryland were ambushed, authorities said.

Within seconds of arriving, they were under fire, Prince Georges County Interim Police Chief Hector Velez told reporters at a news conference Sunday night.

The officers were responding to a reported home invasion about 6:30 p.m. at an address in Hyattsville, a city about 32 miles (52 kilometres) southwest of Baltimore, police said.

Two of the three officers shot were saved by their vests, Velez said. One officer was struck in the chest and had injuries to an arm and a leg. Another officer was shot in the back. The third officer was wounded in the foot.

The officers returned gunfire, and two men were in custody. The men were not injured, police said.

Velez also said the officers provided themselves with self-care after being shot, which allowed them to be transported to a hospital for further treatment.
Welsh Conservatives voice disappointment as wearing of face coverings indoors still not compulsory

This article is old - Published: Monday, Aug 24th, 2020

The Welsh Conservatives have voiced their disappointment that the wearing of face coverings indoors is still not compulsory in Wales.

In England, face masks have been made mandatory to prevent the spread of coronavirus in a number of enclosed settings, including shops and hairdressers.

Despite making face coverings a requirement on public transport, the Welsh Government has not followed suit.

The advice issued by ministers is that three layer masks are recommended in certain situations where social distancing is not possible.

But the Welsh Conservatives say the Labour administration has not gone far enough and should follow Englands lead.

Responding to the governments announcement yesterday regarding the further easing of Covid-19 restrictions, Clwyd West MS Darren Millar said: We welcome the further relaxation of coronavirus restrictions as outlined by the Welsh Labour-led Government, but remain disappointed that the mandatory use of face coverings has not been extended to indoor spaces where social distancing is difficult to maintain.

Wales must maintain a safe and sensible approach to lifting restrictions which maximises personal freedoms while continuing to reduce the risk of the of the virus spreading. Face coverings are a useful tool in this regard.

Although wearing face masks has yet to be made compulsory, such measures could be introduced if cases of the virus increase during the autumn and winter.

Other restrictions outlined by the government which could be imposed include:
Descending

The Privateer is billed as an enduro race bike, and under a strong, aggressive rider there's no doubt it could fill that role, although it can be a handful on slower, tighter sections of trail. There's an endless variety of enduro race courses out there, but many of them tend to have at least a few tighter, more awkward sections, which is where the 161 struggles a bit. To me, it felt more like a burly bike park bike, or something that could be used to access steep DH trails via pedal power when there's no shuttle truck or chairlift nearby.The 161 does best on faster, wide-open tracks  it's more of a speed demon than a trail dancer  and when there's room to straighten it out and let off the brakes the stability at speed is very satisfying. However, despite having 161mm of travel, it's not the plushest ride out there. It takes the edge off big hits but doesn't mute them as much as I'd expected. The flip side to that is it's easy to tell what the back end is doing; there's no vague handling when plowing through rooty or rock-strewn sections of trail.I experimented with different sag amounts and volume spacer configurations, and I found that 27% sag with two spacers gave me the best results. Running more sag had me sitting deeper in the stroke than I wanted, and one spacer had me going through the travel a little too easily. The stock Super Deluxe shock has a medium rebound / light compression tune, but I do wonder if going even lighter with the compression would help increase the level of small bump sensitivity. A coil shock could also help in this department, bumping up the level of grip available in slippery terrain.I had the Guerilla Gravity Gnarvana on hand at the same time as the Privateer, and while the wheelbase lengths are within 5mm of each other, the Gnarvana was noticeably easier to manage, especially at slower speeds. The Gnarvana and its coil shock had a much plusher, ground-hugging feel, while the Privateer sat higher in its travel, and didn't track the ground as well. Looking a little closer at the numbers, the 161 is 20mm longer in reach, which could certainly have contributed to the feeling that I had to work harder to muscle it around. The 161 can feel like a handful at times if you didn't bring your A-game, while the Gnarvana was more forgiving on the days when I felt more like cruising rather than turning the dial up to 11.
As I write this, there are more than 175,000 Americans who have died of Covid-19, and many more are suffering, some in hospitals that no longer have intensive care unit capacity. People in our country are dying at a rate of about 1,000 people per day. Our efforts to control the virus are among the worst in the world, yet Donald Trump brags about the wonderful job he has done.

His answer to concerns about the death rate in the United States was It is what it is. While this has all been happening, he has sent federal troops to Portland to attack protesters. He claims that they are violent anarchists, not peaceful protesters. Yet we have all watched groups of ordinary citizens, including moms and military veterans, attacked by tear gas, beaten and hit by non-lethal weapons that nevertheless do significant damage, simply for affirming their First Amendment rights.

In addition, our country is still making life miserable for immigrants by restricting their rights, separating children from their parents and holding them in detention facilities under sometimes deplorable conditions. Cruelty seems to be the point of these actions by the Trump administration, and they are far from the only examples.
Jerry Falwell Jr, one of the countrys highest-profile evangelical Christians, has claimed that a man who had an affair with his wife tried to blackmail his family.

Mr Falwell, who is currently on a leave of absence as the president of evangelical Liberty University, released a lengthy statement in The Washington Examiner saying he was recovering from the trauma of the experience.

The vocal Donald Trump supporter said he and his wife, Becki Falwell, met a man with whom she later had an affair with during a vacation over eight years ago, he said.

Mr Falwell said that he and his wife met the ambitious young man who was working at [their] hotel and tried to help him advance his career.

Shortly thereafter, Ms Falwell had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved  it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about, Mr Falwell said.

He added: Over the course of the last few months this persons behaviour has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behaviour is to go public.

Mr Falwell accused the man of continuing to threaten to reveal the relationship to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies.

While the statement did not name his wifes former lover, The Examiner identified the man involved as Giancarlo Granda, who has been tied to the family over several years by numerous media outlets.

Mr Granda told The Examiner any allegation of extortion is falsely, defamatory and belied by clear documentary evidence.

The Falwells attempt to sandbag me, and The Examiner, with a last-minute story without providing The Examiner clear evidence that this was not simply an affair with concocted allegations of extortion reeks desperation, he told the newspaper.

Recommended Jerry Falwell Jr leaves university position amid row over picture

He went even further, telling Reuters that Mr Falwell would watch his wife having sex with Mr Granda.

Following his discovery of the affair and alleged blackmail, Mr Falwell said he was seeking mental health counselling to help him cope with the experiences. It was like living on a roller coaster, Mr Falwell said.

The attorney said he forgave his wife for the short lived affair and that he remains fully devoted to his wife.

Ms Falwell and I forgave each other because while her indiscretion may have been more obvious and apparent, I realised that there were important smaller things I needed to do better too, he said.

The accusations come not long after Mr Falwell agreed to take an indefinite leave of absence from his position at Liberty University after he was forced to apologise for a photograph he posted on social media with his trousers unzipped and his shirt pulled up over his stomach.

At the time Mr Falwell, who has held positions at Liberty University since 2007, told WLNI that the photograph was taken during a costume party and was just good fun.

Libertys board has said that the decision on whether or not to retain Mr Falwell had not yet been made.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press
Your cloth face covering should reach above the nose, below the chin, and completely cover the mouth and nostrils. Many items you may already 
NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Process Automation & Instrumentation Market size is expected to reach $80.5 billion by 2026, rising at a market growth of 3% CAGR during the forecast period. This market's growth is propelled by factors such as the increasing value of energy conservation and cost reduction, focus on digitized technology such as IIoT, increased acceptance of industrial automation and maximum resource use.





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Automation can be described as the smooth and efficient implementation of tasks utilizing automated machinery and computers. Automation can be split loosely into three output-based forms, viz. Mass or flow, versatile and batch, or work automation. If the design is not versatile, and the output is high, then it is categorized as mass and flow. If the performance is low, and the process takes place in different batches, it is called batch automation. Unless the production is low, and the design varies according to the requirements of the company, then the classification is called flexible or job.



Instrumentation applies to the instruments used for detection, calculation, regulation, and tracking purposes. Throughout the modern years, different forms of automation have been created such as IT, Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), Robotics, Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) and Numerically Controlled (NC) equipment and tools.



Automation and instrumentation complement each other as devices are to be used for the purpose of automation. The need for efficiency increases through sectors has driven businesses to embrace automation in order to achieve a competitive edge over other competitors. High-risk job environments that need unique and reasonable treatment result in unnecessary human labour. Lower labour costs are therefore expected to perform a positive role in assisting the worldwide demand for automation instrumentation throughout the forecast period. Increasing labour costs have driven businesses to introduce automation with a view to streamlining their manufacturing processes and growing their dependence on expensive human labour.



Based on Instrument, the market is segmented into Field Instrument, Control Valve and Analytical Instrument. Based on Solution, the market is segmented into Distributed & Advanced Control System, PLC & SCADA, Functional Safety, Human Machine Interface and Others. Based on End User, the market is segmented into Chemical, Energy & Power, Oil & Gas, Food & Beverages, Pharmaceuticals, Metals & Mining and Others. Based on Regions, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America, Middle East & Africa.



The major strategies followed by the market participants are Partnerships and Product Launches. Based on the Analysis presented in the Cardinal matrix; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, ABB Group, Schneider Electric SE, Emerson Electric Co., Siemens AG, and Honeywell International, Inc. are the forerunners in the Process Automation and Instrumentation Market. Companies such as Rockwell Automation, Inc., General Electric (GE) Co., Yokogawa Electric Corporation, and HollySys Automation Technologies Ltd. are some of the key innovators in the market.



The market research report covers the analysis of key stake holders of the market. Key companies profiled in the report include ABB Group, Siemens AG, Emerson Electric Co., Schneider Electric SE, Honeywell International, Inc., General Electric (GE) Co., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Rockwell Automation, Inc., Yokogawa Electric Corporation, and HollySys Automation Technologies Ltd.



Recent strategies deployed in Process Automation and Instrumentation Market



Partnerships, Collaborations, and Agreements:



Mar-2020: Yokogawa Turkey Industrial Automation Solutions A.S. (Yokogawa Turkey) signed an agreement with Renaissance Heavy Industries. Following this agreement, the former company aims to provide a control system and field instruments for Zerger gas-fired power plant in Turkmenistan.



Jan-2020: Schneider Electric came into partnership with AutoGrid, the market leader in flexibility management software for the energy industry. The partnership was focused on helping energy providers integrate customer-owned or -operated flexible distributed energy resources (DERs) into their distribution management operations. The joint solution, integrating Schneider EcoStruxure Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) with AutoGrid Flex, the energy industry's first fully-integrated flexibility management application, uses the open standard IEEE 2030.5 to exchange data and control signals.



Jul-2019: General Electric teamed up with Schneider Electric for establishing 4 power control systems in Egypt for implementation of the control system and communication network to improve the operational efficiency.



May-2019: Siemens signed an agreement with HafslundNett, a company that distributes, generates, and supplies the electricity. Under this agreement, the former company was aimed to supply a new Advanced Distribution Management System, which provides a power control system in Norway.



Mar-2019: Rockwell Automation came into collaboration with GE Healthcare. Following this collaboration, the companies integrated their automation, IT, and single-use solution expertise to build bioprocessing operations for the digital age. The two companies aimed to help biopharmaceutical companies create flexible and scalable facilities of the future, focused on rapid response to market demands, streamlined production technologies, and adaptable manufacturing environments. GE Healthcare has also joined the Rockwell Automation Partner Network Program as an OEM Partner to help drive a best-in-class distributed control system offering.



Acquisition and Mergers:



Oct-2019: Rockwell Automation acquired MESTECH Services. Following the acquisition, MESTECH has been leveraging Rockwell's products and solutions in the areas of the process, control, and power information solutions.



Jul-2019: Emerson took over Zedi's software and automation businesses. The addition of Zedi's cloud supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) platform enabled Emerson to help oil and gas producers increase production and lower operating costs through cloud-based monitoring, control, and optimization.



May-2019: Mitsubishi Electric acquired ICONICS, Inc., an industrial automation provider. The acquisition strengthened Mitsubishi's software portfolio and technology for the manufacturing, industrial, and building automation markets.



Feb-2019: Emerson took over Intelligent Platforms from General Electric. The acquisition enhanced its automation for industrial and process customers for increasing its capabilities in machine control.



Jan-2019: Rockwell Automation took over Emulate3D, an innovative software engineering developer. The acquisition helped Rockwell in improving its system planning and decision making.



Jul-2018: ABB acquired GE Industrial Solutions from General Electric. The acquisition strengthened its position in the electrification market in the U.S.



May-2018: Schneider Electric took over Larsen & Toubro (L&T) electric and automation (E&A) business. The acquisition broadened Schneider Electric's business.



Mar-2018: Schneider Electric's Industrial Software business merged with AVEVA. The combined unit has been providing software to transform cost efficiency, safety and compliance, schedule, quality, and safety of the asset delivery processes.



Product Launches and Product Expansions:



Jul-2020: Rockwell Automation released the new SIL 3 Safety Controller Line with Advanced Software Capabilities. The new Allen-Bradley Compact GuardLogix 5380 SIL 3 enabled engineers to scale applications up to and including SIL 3/PLe performance with 1oo2 architecture. The controllers have been designed for helping companies build smarter, simpler, and better-performing machines.



Jul-2020: HollySys unveiled the updated version large scale Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). This new version can be widely used in a variety of applications such as the high-end machinery and equipment control, complex machine control, discrete manufacturing plant control, suitable for transportation, municipal services, water treatment, and public engineering.



Feb-2020: ABB Power Grids launched MicroSCADA X, the industry-acclaimed power and automation control solution, to customers in India. MicroSCADA X features a next-generation human-machine interface (HMI) enabling an intuitive and adaptive experience that provides clear and simplified insights into customers' power infrastructure. The solution offers a world-class, versatile supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system with market-leading functionalities integrated into a single platform.



Feb-2020: Honeywell launched Experion PKS IT Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE), a transformative new technology. This technology enabled industrial manufacturers to lower project delivery and lifecycle costs, better leverage skills, and drive consistent physical and cybersecurity management.



Jan-2020: Yokogawa Electric launched the Exaquantum R3.20, an enhanced version of its plant information management system (PIMS) software package in the OpreX Asset Operations and Optimisation family. Exaquantum supports the digital transformation initiatives of customers in the process industries by gathering large volumes of plant data and transforming it into usable, high-value business information.



Nov-2019: Schneider Electric unveiled the newest generation of its intelligent enclosures for EcoStruxure Triconex safety and EcoStruxure Foxboro distributed control systems (DCSs). This new intelligent enclosure line includes EcoStruxure Triconex safety field mounted intelligent enclosure and Foxboro DCS field mounted intelligent enclosure. These enclosures have been designed for use outdoors (including hazardous areas) for distribution of I/O where and when required.



Nov-2019: Mitsubishi Electric announced the launch of the FX5UC series Premium Micro PLC, the smallest and most powerful compact programmable logic controller. The new PLC diminutive size helps machine builders and manufacturers pack "ever more functionality into a smaller space", while also providing the web access and network connectivity demanded by the latest smart factory applications.



Sep-2019: GE Digital introduced Plant Applications 8.0, industry's first multi-modal Manufacturing Execution System (MES). Plant Applications 8.0 helps manufacturers leverage real-time production data to optimize operations and is the first enterprise-scale MES that supports the discrete, process and multi-modal manufacturing.



Jun-2019: ABB introduced a DC-based power distribution system, Onboard Microgrid. The system was aimed to help the smaller vessels in improving fuel efficiency.



Apr-2019: Honeywell released next-generation Kromschroder BCU 4 Series, all-in-one control system for multi-burner applications. This series provides the effectiveness and utility of the control systems.



Geographical Expansions:



Feb-2020: Yokogawa opened the Open Process Automation (OPA) Test Bed Collaboration Center, located six miles north of ExxonMobil's Houston campus in The Woodlands, Texas. The center has the Test Bed being used for evaluating candidate components and standards that provide the basis for moving OPA technology into initial industrial field trials.



Mar-2019: Yokogawa expanded its reach to Norway by establishing a new subsidiary. The subsidiary has been focused on selling control products and the provision of related services.



Scope of the Study



Market Segmentation:



By Instrument



 Field Instrument



 Control Valve



 Analytical Instrument



By Solution



 Distributed & Advanced Control System



 PLC & SCADA



 Functional Safety



 Human Machine Interface



 Others



By End User



 Chemical



 Energy & Power



 Oil & Gas



 Food & Beverages



 Pharmaceuticals



 Metals & Mining



 Others



By Geography



 North America



o US



o Canada



o Mexico



o Rest of North America



 Europe



o Germany



o UK



o France



o Russia



o Spain



o Italy



o Rest of Europe



 Asia Pacific



o China



o Japan



o India



o South Korea



o Singapore



o Malaysia



o Rest of Asia Pacific



 LAMEA



o Brazil



o Argentina



o UAE



o Saudi Arabia



o South Africa



o Nigeria



o Rest of LAMEA



Companies Profiled



 ABB Group



 Siemens AG



 Emerson Electric Co.



 Schneider Electric SE



 Honeywell International, Inc.



 General Electric (GE) Co.



 Mitsubishi Electric Corporation



 Rockwell Automation, Inc.



 Yokogawa Electric Corporation



 HollySys Automation Technologies Ltd.



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Canadian govt must take money laundering action against Bangladeshis

Capital flight has become a serious concern for Bangladesh's economy. Silently but enormously, money is being laundered to safe destinations worldwide. A section of politicians, dishonest high government officials and businessmen, who have made easy fortunes, are increasingly investing their questionable wealth abroad to ensure a secure future for their families.





According to media reports, as the latest case of fraudulence one P K Halder has swindled worth Tk 3,500 crore abroad, which he took as loans from four non-banking financial institutions. Cunningly, he also took control of the said financial institutions. The institutions are now in dire financial straits. One is on the verge of closure and the others are unable to return their clients' money.





The name of PK Halder came to the limelight during the anti-casino operation. The ACC then opened investigation against 43 people, including PK Halder. He was asked to appear before the ACC for interrogation on November 14 last year. But he did not turn up. The government also issued a travel ban on him on October 3 the same year. He, however, managed to flee the country. He also reportedly transferred most of the money. He is now a fugitive.





As per the website of Canadian government, PK Halder owns a house number 16 on Doncrest Road of Toronto in Canada. Questions of ACC were sent through WhatsApp and email, but no answer from him. Like PK Halder, a number of leaders of both the Awami League and the BNP -- from the central level to associate student bodies -- are learned to have secured their future overseas, by winning citizenship for their families through investment visas or business migration schemes. Many politicians from top to mid-level have settled in Begum Para in Canada and invested in properties there. Besides, many others have settled in Malaysia taking the same business migration scheme. The Canadians know and are shocked that it is so easy for the big corrupt ones to have expensive and showy properties in Canada. But nothing is done to initiate legal action.





Such properties are bought mostly with ill-gotten money, which is being siphoned off from Bangladesh through unauthorized financial channels such as hundi to countries that openly offer fast immigration opportunities through investment. Sources said, there are over 150 properties owned by corrupt politicians from Bangladesh alone in Toronto city in Canada.







An influential AL leader has allegedly bought a mansion in Canada. Another leader of the party, who holds the position of a state minister, has invested in properties in London and Malaysia. There are other AL men who did the same, sources said.





Similarly, a minister of the last BNP-led government has made considerable investments in Singapore. The BNP leader and his family spent most of the last six years there. His son invested in a private port in Sri Lanka. Another former minister of the party and his son have made sizeable investments in properties in the US.





As reported, the four financial institutions grabbed by PK Halder are International Leasing and Financial Services, Peoples Leasing and Financial Services, FAS Finance and Investment Limited and Bangladesh Industrial Finance Company (BIFC).





While taking control of the institutions, he had initially been managing director of Reliance Finance and later of NRB Global Bank. A number of Bangladesh Bank officials reportedly assisted him. Everything happened in the knowledge of two regulatory bodies, Bangladesh Bank and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).







Most of his companies, existing only on paper to get bank loans, have given their office address at Purana Paltan's Eastern Trade Centre and Karwan Bazar's DH Tower. He bought huge amount of shares from the stock market and transferred their sales-proceed money through the institutions he had grabbed. He also reportedly launched companies abroad.





His other companies include P and L International, P and L Venture, P and L Business Enterprise, Hal International, Hal Travel, Hal Trip, Hal Capital and Hal Technology. His other companies are Annon Chemical, Northern Jute, Sukhada Limited and Reptile Farms.





Canada is not to protect those who have stolen public money to buy expensive eye catching properties in Canada to live in luxury. This should be done for the good reputation of Canada that it does not give shelter to the looters from other countries. Their wives were living before but now their husbands have started fleeing the country seeing trouble is coming.
Bali bans tourists for 2020; Syria talks paused as delegates test positive; first vaccine human trial in Italy.

Gaza declared a full lockdown for 48 hours as it reported its first cases in the general population.

The governor of Bali said tourists will not be able to visit the Indonesian island for the rest of 2020 as the number of coronavirus cases in the country keeps mounting.

Australias second-most populous state of Victoria has reported the lowest daily rise in new infections in seven weeks.

Plasma treatment has been given the green light by the Food and Drug Administration in the US, the country worst-affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 23.3 million people around the world have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and more than 15 million have recovered. At least 806,500 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Here are the latest updates:

Monday, August 24

20:35 GMT  Gaza declares a lockdown following first community transmission

Gaza reported its first cases in the general population as authorities confirmed four infections at a refugee camp and security forces declared a full lockdown for 48 hours.

The four cases were from a single family, according to a government statement.

The closure would affect the entire Gaza Strip, according to an official from Hamas, the group that governs the territory.

20:01 GMT  Are EU countries using COVID-19 to clamp down on refugees?





19:33 GMT  Perus pandemic tensions burst with nightclub tragedy

Peru, battling one of the worlds worst coronavirus outbreaks and a five-month lockdown, was reeling after the deaths of 13 people, most of them young women, in a stampede at an illegal nightclub triggered by a police raid.

The tragedy at the club, which authorities called a breeding ground for COVID-19, has exposed tensions in the Andean nation of 33 million people that has one of the worlds worst per capita fatality rates with almost 28,000 deaths.

Infections are rising again in a dangerous second wave and total almost 600,000, the sixth-highest in the world.

A woman sits next to the bodies of people who died after police raided a nightclub for hosting a party in violation of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) restrictions, in Lima, Peru [Angel Taipe/Reuters]

19:10 GMT  HK researchers report first documented re-infection

Researchers in Hong Kong say they have documented the first instance of a man who was reinfected after first contracting the novel coronavirus more than four months ago.

The researchers at the University of Hong Kong said their findings indicate the disease, which has killed more than 800,000 people worldwide, may continue to spread globally despite populations developing herd immunity.

Read the full story here.

18:20 GMT  Frances cases and casualties rise

The circulation of the virus is progressing markedly, and is at its most intense among young adults, Frances health ministry said in a statement [Thomas Samson/AFP]

The number of new cases in France has risen by 1,955 to 244,854 in the past 24 hours, while overall deaths increased by 15 to 30,528.

The country has the seventh-highest death toll in the world, and the government is monitoring the figures closely to see if any new restrictions or lockdowns are needed to curb the spread of the virus.

The circulation of the virus is progressing markedly, and is at its most intense among young adults, the health ministry said in a statement.

17:32 GMT  Irish health chiefs monitoring situation as cases increase

Irish health chiefs have seen a particular increase in cases in Dublin in recent days and are closely monitoring the trend in the most populous part of the country, said Chief Medical Officer Ronan Glynn.

A woman wearing a protective face mask walks past a man painting a mural, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Dublin, Ireland [Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters]

Ireland reported more than 100 COVID-19 cases for the fifth time in 10 days, with almost half of the 147 new infections in the capital.

Glynn said there was no suggestion currently that further measures would be needed in Dublin and hoped nationwide restrictions announced last week would bring cases down.

16:57 GMT  Countries latest figures

Turkey: 259,692 cases (+ 1,443), 6,139 deaths (+18)

Spain: 405,436 cases (+2,060), 28,872 deaths (+3)

France: 244,854 cases (+ 1,955), 30,528 deaths (+15)

16:21 GMT  Bali keeps out foreign visitors

Balis governor says foreign tourists will not be able to visit the Indonesian island for the rest of 2020 due to coronavirus concerns, scrapping a plan to open up from next month.

The opening plan has been cancelled over concerns about Indonesias mounting virus cases and with many foreign nationals subject to travel bans in their home countries.

15:50 GMT  UKs latest figures

The United Kingdom recorded 853 new cases of COVID-19 in the latest daily statistics published, down from 1,041 on Sunday, government figures showed.

Four people died after testing positive for the coronavirus within the previous 28 days, compared with six deaths announced on Sunday.

People wearing protective face masks are seen outside the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham, central England, as the UKs second city, was made an area of enhanced support, because of concern about a spike in cases [Justin Tallis/AFP]

15:30 GMT  Czech govt extends jobs support for virus-hit companies

The Czech government has extended its job support programme for coronavirus-hit companies until the end of October, said the countrys Labour Minister Jana Malacova.

The job furloughing scheme, together with direct compensation payments to the self-employed, represent the two biggest chunks of the governments effort to help the economy hit by the global pandemic.

14:55 GMT  Syria talks on hold as three delegates tested positive

Syrian constitutional talks at the United Nations were put on hold just hours after they began on Monday after three delegates tested positive for COVID-19, the UN said.

The office of UN special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen said it received confirmation that three members of the Syrian Constitutional Committee Small Body tested positive for COVID-19 and the session in Geneva is currently on hold.

14:21 GMT  First volunteer receives Italian anti-virus vaccine





An Italian hospital has injected a first volunteer with an anti-COVID-19 vaccine as part of human trials expected to last six months.

The woman, in her 50s, received the first dose developed by Rome-based biotech company ReiThera at the capitals Spallanzani Institute for infectious diseases.

The trials, developed between ReiThera and Spallanzani researchers, will be carried out on 90 volunteers divided into groups by age to test the efficacy of different dosages of the vaccine, developed since March.

14:03 GMT  Students in Greece to wear masks when schools reopen

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Greek teachers and students will be required to wear masks in class and indoor spaces when schools reopen in September due to a surge in infections, the countrys education minister said.

The rise in coronavirus cases in recent weeks has forced Greek authorities to gradually reimpose restrictions to curb the spread of the novel virus.

13:35 GMT  French libertine nudist resort sees spike in cases

A naturist resort on Frances Mediterranean coast has seen a sharp spike in infections and nudists have been ordered to at least wear masks and practice social distancing, according to health authorities.

Tests had shown a 30 percent infection rate in people who had visited Village Cap dAgde  which advertises itself as a village for naturists and libertines  said the Occitanie region health authority.

That was more than four times higher than the 7 percent rate recorded in other people in the area who had not visited the centre, the authority added.

Hi, this is Virginia Pietromarchi, taking over the coronavirus live-blog from my colleague Shereena Qazi in Doha, Qatar.

12:20 GMT  Bollywoods Bachchan back at work as India relaxes on-set rules

Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan is back at work filming Indias version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire following a bout of COVID-19.

A blanket ban on studio activity in March dealt a huge blow to Indias cinema and TV industries, hitting not just Bollywood  the worlds most prolific film factory  but also regional movie-making hubs and productions for television and streaming platforms.

In June, shooting was allowed again but with strict rules, including a ban on actors and crew aged above 65  including Bachchan, 77  until a court overturned that earlier this month.

The veteran actor, his actor son Abhishek, actress daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai, and granddaughter Aaradhya were all admitted to hospital last month. All four have since been released.

12:08 GMT  Virus-hit Indian resort turns pool into fish farm

A luxury resort in southern India has turned its swimming pool into a fish farm to stop the business sinking.

Normally the 150-metre (500 feet) pool at the Aveda Resort in Kerala state is packed with European tourists. Now thousands of pearl spot fish are causing the splash.

The complex was forced to shut in March when a nationwide coronavirus lockdown was ordered. Few hotels have been allowed to reopen since.





Of those which are still shuttered, not many boast a pool with 7.5 million litres of water, which can be put to an alternative use.

11:33 GMT  WHO says 172 countries engaging with global COVID-19 vaccine plan

Some 172 countries are engaging with the WHO-led COVAX plan designed to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, the World Health Organization said, but more funding is urgently needed and countries should now make binding commitments.

Initially, when there will be limited supply [of COVID-19 vaccines], its important to provide the vaccine to those at highest risk around the globe, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a media briefing.

11:00 GMT  Indonesia secures up to 60 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines

Indonesia has secured a supply of up to 60 million doses of potential COVID-19 vaccines from China and the United Arab Emirates, officials said.

The supply is part of the 290 million vaccines that would be made available for Indonesia throughout 2021, President Joko Widodo said during a cabinet meeting.

During a Chinese state visit last week, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi and State-Owned Enterprises Minister Erick Thohir secured the supply of 50 million doses of a vaccine candidate by Chinas Sinovac, to be delivered between November and March next year.

The first 20 million doses are expected to be delivered by the end of this year.

10:40 GMT  Finland to tighten restrictions on public gatherings

Finland will tighten restrictions on public gatherings from September, limiting them to 50 people unless further measures are in place, due to a recent rise in COVID-19 cases, authorities said.

Having allowed up to 500 people to gather during August, the new limits will apply to both indoor and outdoor public meetings, the state administrative agency said.





Finlands 14-day cumulative number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 inhabitants stood at 5.2 on Friday, among the lowest rates in Europe, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

But the number of cases has been rising in recent weeks, with health authorities counting a total of 7,871 cases and 334 deaths by Friday.

09:50 GMT  Japan marks one year to go until postponed Paralympics

Japan marked one year to go until the opening ceremony of the coronavirus delayed Paralympic Games in Tokyo.

The Olympic host city has been struggling with a resurgence of the coronavirus since early July.

The International Olympic Committee and local organisers decided in late March to postpone the Tokyo Olympics and the Paralympics to summer 2021 because of the rapid spread of the coronavirus.

09:00 GMT  France to reciprocate UKs quarantine rule in coming days

French authorities will in coming days reciprocate the United Kingdoms decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on all arrivals from France, the junior minister for European affairs said.

The UK said on Friday British travellers to France are required to self-certify that they are not suffering from coronavirus symptoms or have been in contact with a confirmed case within 14 days preceding travel.

People stroll down Bordeauxs main shopping street Sainte-Catherine, where wearing a mask is compulsory as of August 15, 2020, to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 [Mehdi Fedouach/AFP]

Since August 15, British authorities have also required travellers returning from France to self-isolate upon their return due to high COVID-19 infection rates in France.

08:10 GMT  Xinjiang residents protest online against virus lockdown

Residents in Chinas northwestern Xinjiang region have complained on social media about the harsh coronavirus lockdown measures in the sensitive region after a local outbreak.

China  where the disease first emerged  had largely brought domestic transmission under control through lockdowns, travel restrictions and testing, but sporadic regional outbreaks have emerged.





A new cluster in Xinjiangs capital Urumqi in mid-July prompted fresh restrictions.

A total of 902 cases have been officially reported in the outbreak.

Officials said earlier this month that they had effectively contained the spread of the Urumqi cluster, and there have been no new cases reported in the last eight days.

08:00 GMT  Tokyos new cases hit one-and-a-half-month low

Tokyo reported 95 new coronavirus cases, marking the lowest single-day tally since July 8, data from the metropolitan government showed.

The cases were confirmed from about 2,900 tests, with those under 40-year-old accounting for 60 percent of new cases.

Total serious cases in the Japanese capital declined by one from the previous day, to 38.

07:47 GMT  Russias coronavirus tally passes 960,000

Russia reported 4,744 new coronavirus cases, pushing its confirmed infection tally to 961,493, the fourth-largest in the world.

Authorities said 65 people had died over the past 24 hours, pushing the official death toll to 16,448.

06:45 GMT  More medical checks for Japan PM as health speculation grows

Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he had undergone more medical tests but declined to provide details.

Abe cut short his first term in office in part because of crippling health problems linked to ulcerative colitis, an ailment he said he had overcome when he returned to power in 2012.

Abe says Japan will allow foreigners with residence status to enter the country from the start of next month [EPA]

But in recent weeks, reports have suggested that the 65-year-old prime minister is ill again, with tabloids claiming he has been vomiting blood and even confidants publicly saying he needed rest.

Read more here

06:35 GMT  Russia may resume flights to seven more countries this week

Russian authorities may this week announce the resumption of international flights to France, Hungary, Malta, Cyprus, Jordan, Egypt and Chinas Shanghai, the Izvestia newspaper cited unnamed airport and airline sources as saying.

Russia grounded international commercial flights during the coronavirus lockdown earlier this year and has so far only resumed flights to London, Turkey, Tanzania and Switzerland.

Russia has confirmed the worlds fourth-largest tally of coronavirus cases. It has recorded close to 5,000 new cases of the virus on a daily basis for the last several weeks.

03:54 GMT  Nearly 1 in 5 refugees in Coxs Bazar have lung disease: Report

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar live in refugee camps in and around Coxs Bazar [File: Damir Sagolj/Reuters]

In Bangladeshs Coxs Bazar, nearly one in five people being treated for medical conditions have a form of lung disease, according to a new report, making them vulnerable to coronavirus as it spreads in the camp where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from Myanmar live.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said many of the refugees face other chronic health conditions, including malnutrition and diarrhoea, in one of the worlds most overcrowded camps.

Officially, there have only been 82 COVID-19 cases and six related deaths, but IFRC said concerns remain high that the figures may not tell the whole story.

03:20 GMT  Hundreds of Filipino teachers, students infected with COVID-19

The Philippine education department reported that at least 311 teachers and 268 students have been infected with the coronavirus.

In an announcement on social media, Education Undersecretary Alain Pascua said that of the total cases, 318 remain active while 22 have died. It was unclear how many of the deaths were teaching staff or students.

The department has postponed the resumption of classes amid fears of the spread of COVID-19, which has infected almost 190,000 and close to 3,000 deaths.

02:48 GMT  Mexico posts lowest weekly coronavirus death toll in two months

Mexico has reported 226 more deaths from the coronavirus, finishing the week with 3,723 fatalities, the lowest total in over two months, according to government figures.

Earlier the government declared the novel coronavirus was in sustained decline in Mexico, although testing rates in the country remain low.

According to Johns Hopkins University, Mexicos coronavirus death toll stands at 60,480  the third-highest in the world. There are more than 560,000 cases, more than 458,000 of whom are considered recovered.

02:13 GMT  US state of Iowa reports first child death from COVID-19

The US state of Iowa has confirmed the June death of a young child under the age of 15 due to complications from coronavirus, the first such confirmed death of a minor in the state.

The confirmation comes one day before dozens of school districts in the state prepared to begin the school year, leaving many educators and parents on edge.

The pandemic has already killed 1,036 people in Iowa. Nationwide, close to 177,000 have died in the US, with an estimated 5.7 million infections as of early Monday.

01:47 GMT  South Korea cases down, but nationwide pandemic alert still up

New coronavirus cases in South Korea slowed down slightly to 266 new cases, but the country remains on high alert nationwide.

Yonhap news agency quoted the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as saying that 258 of the new cases were local transmission.

The country now has a total of 17,665 cases, with no new deaths, keeping the toll at 309.

01:20 GMT  China reports 16 imported coronavirus cases

Chinas National Health Commission (NHC) reported on Monday 16 imported coronavirus cases in the mainland as of the end of Sunday, slightly up from 12 imported cases the previous day.

NHC also said that for the eighth consecutive day, there were no new local infections detected in the country, although 27 new people were said to be asymptomatic.

China has a total of 84,967, while the death toll remains unchanged at 4,634.

00:40 GMT  Seoul to make masks mandatory

According to reports, there have been more than 2,600 cases in the past 10 days in South Korea, prompting the government to warn of a resurgence of COVID-19 [Ahn Young-joon/AP]

The use of masks while outdoors is now mandatory in Seoul, South Koreas capital.

Seo Jeong-hyup, acting mayor of Seoul, issued the order hours after the country reported 397 new coronavirus cases on Sunday  the highest since early March.

According to reports, there have been more than 2,600 cases in the past 10 days. The country has reported almost 17,400 cases and 309 deaths.

00:05 GMT  Australias Victoria reports lowest daily rise in infections in seven weeks

Australias second-most populous state of Victoria has reported 116 new cases of coronavirus, the lowest daily rise in seven weeks.

State capital Melbourne has been under a strict lockdown and curfew since a new wave of the outbreak emerged a few weeks ago. Officials say 15 people died from the disease over the past 24 hours.

Australia now has more than 24,800 cases and 500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Australia now has more than 24,800 cases and 500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University [File: James Ross/EPA]

00:01 GMT  Pakistans Peshawar shuts hotels after employees test positive

Pakistani authorities have closed about two dozen hotels in a scenic tourist area in the countrys northwest after dozens of hotel employees tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the Associated Press.

As many as 47 hotel employees who tested positive were quarantined at the hotels where they worked.

Pakistan has confirmed more than 275,000 infections and nearly 6,300 deaths since reporting its first case in February.

21:30 GMT (Sunday)  US FDA authorises plasma treatment for COVID-19

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorised the use of blood plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to treat those battling the disease.

The FDA said early evidence suggests plasma can decrease mortality and improve patients health when given in the first three days of hospitalisation.

You can read more on that story here.

______________________________________________________________

Hello and welcome to Al Jazeeras continuing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. Im Ted Regencia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

For all the key developments from Sunday, August 23, go here.




Bulawayo High Court judge Justice Thompson Mabhikwa has recused himself from the gold theft case involving Harare lawyer Admire Rubaya and seven others.





Rubaya is demanding over $1.1 million from Justice Mabhikwa in damages for unlawful incarceration. He now wants Justice Mabhikwas fitness to hold office investigated.





Justice Mabhikwas recusal follows a criminal complaint filed against him for allegedly abusing public office after he ordered Rubayas unjustified 10-day incarceration at Khami Remand Prison in June.





Rubaya is facing theft charges or obstructing the course of justice after he defended his then client, Jefat Chaganda, for smuggling 14kg of gold to Botswana.





He wrote to the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (Zacc) and the police on July 28 seeking a probe and arrest of Justice Mabhikwa.





Justice Mabhikwa is denying the allegations, but agreed to pave way for another judge.





On Friday, Justice Mabhikwa issued an order recusing himself, so that justice must not just be done, but must be seen to be done.





The trial is set for continuation on September 8 and all parties have been notified of Justice Mabhikwas decision.





Rubaya was released from Khami Remand Prison after approaching the Supreme Court, which censured Justice Mabhikwas decision to revoke his bail.





He has since approached the High Court seeking leave to sue Justice Mabhikwa for damages suffered because of the detention as his constitutional rights were infringed.





For this reason, he intends to claim payment of the sum of $665 000 and $475 000, being damages in terms of the law.





Rubaya argues that Justice Mabhikwa caused his detention under circumstances where he was constitutionally-bound to presume the lawyer innocent.





He has also written to the Judicial Service Commission, which regulates the conduct of judges, to investigate Justice Mabhikwas conduct.





In his complaint to ZACC and the police, Rubaya alleged that on June 23, in the company of his co-accused, he appeared before Justice Mabhikwa for a pre-arranged remand hearing.





He said he was shocked when Justice Mabhikwa revoked their bail and remanded them in custody, without the State making an application for such incarceration.





Rubaya said Justice Mabhikwa acted with unparalleled caprice to his prejudice in a bid to fast-track a trial he had earlier on postponed to September 8 by the consent of all parties.





He further argued that Justice Mabhikwas decision to mete group punishment on the co-accused persons who were in attendance on June 23, 2020 on the basis of the non-appearance in court of Chaganda was not only unprecedented, but also negated basic fundamental tenets of natural justice.





Rubaya said before his bail was revoked, he had read a Facebook account under the name of Andrew Maimba claiming to be a journalist, who posted on his wall on June 11 warning him of the incident that finally unfolded in court on June 23.





Maimba went on to write a follow-up article on the day he was incarcerated indicating he had advised him of the impending detention, but had not paid heed.





Rubaya said it was cause for investigation that a journalist had knowledge of how court proceedings before Justice Mabhikwa were to unfold 12 days before.





Rubaya is charged along with Chaganda, who reportedly died early this year, the magistrate who tried the case at Plumtree Timeon Makunde, prosecutor Stanley Chinyanganya as well as Sidingumuzi Ncube, Tyson Ruvando, Godfrey Makuvadze, Ladislous Tamboonei and Ladislous Tinacho, who is in charge of the ZRP Minerals and Border Control Plumtree. Chronicle

Bulawayo High Court judge Justice Thompson Mabhikwa has recused himself from the gold theft case involving Harare lawyer Admire Rubaya and seven others. Bulawayo High Court judge Justice Thompson Mabhikwa has recused himself from the gold theft case involving Harare lawyer Admire Rubaya and seven others.





Rubaya is demanding over $1.1 million from Justice Mabhikwa in damages for unlawful incarceration.





He now wants Justice Mabhikwas fitness to hold office investigated.





Justice Mabhikwas recusal follows a criminal complaint filed against him for allegedly abusing public office after he ordered Rubayas unjustified 10-day incarceration at Khami Remand Prison in June.





Rubaya is facing theft charges or obstructing the course of justice after he defended his then client, Jefat Chaganda, for smuggling 14kg of gold to Botswana.





He wrote to the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (Zacc) and the police on July 28 seeking a probe and arrest of Justice Mabhikwa.





Justice Mabhikwa is denying the allegations, but agreed to pave way for another judge.





On Friday, Justice Mabhikwa issued an order recusing himself, so that justice must not just be done, but must be seen to be done.





The trial is set for continuation on September 8 and all parties have been notified of Justice Mabhikwas decision.





Rubaya was released from Khami Remand Prison after approaching the Supreme Court, which censured Justice Mabhikwas decision to revoke his bail.





He has since approached the High Court seeking leave to sue Justice Mabhikwa for damages suffered because of the detention as his constitutional rights were infringed.





For this reason, he intends to claim payment of the sum of $665 000 and $475 000, being damages in terms of the law.





Rubaya argues that Justice Mabhikwa caused his detention under circumstances where he was constitutionally-bound to presume the lawyer innocent.





He has also written to the Judicial Service Commission, which regulates the conduct of judges, to investigate Justice Mabhikwas conduct.





In his complaint to ZACC and the police, Rubaya alleged that on June 23, in the company of his co-accused, he appeared before Justice Mabhikwa for a pre-arranged remand hearing.





He said he was shocked when Justice Mabhikwa revoked their bail and remanded them in custody, without the State making an application for such incarceration.





Rubaya said Justice Mabhikwa acted with unparalleled caprice to his prejudice in a bid to fast-track a trial he had earlier on postponed to September 8 by the consent of all parties.





He further argued that Justice Mabhikwas decision to mete group punishment on the co-accused persons who were in attendance on June 23, 2020 on the basis of the non-appearance in court of Chaganda was not only unprecedented, but also negated basic fundamental tenets of natural justice.





Rubaya said before his bail was revoked, he had read a Facebook account under the name of Andrew Maimba claiming to be a journalist, who posted on his wall on June 11 warning him of the incident that finally unfolded in court on June 23.





Maimba went on to write a follow-up article on the day he was incarcerated indicating he had advised him of the impending detention, but had not paid heed.





Rubaya said it was cause for investigation that a journalist had knowledge of how court proceedings before Justice Mabhikwa were to unfold 12 days before.




US-based Ghanaian law lecturer, Professor Kwaku Asare says expansion in infrastructure is not the solution to Ghanas legal education challenges.



According to him, the New Patriotic Partys (NPP) approach to tackling challenges with legal education in Ghana show the lack of seriousness on the part of the government in dealing with the issue.



It is kind of surprising that after eight years, the solution they were able to come up with in their manifesto was one line talking about legal infrastructure. It connotes a lack of seriousness. We do not really see the problem, he said.



The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia promised to expand infrastructure to increase access to professional legal education at the NPPs 2020 manifesto launch at the University of Cape Coast in the Central Region on Saturday.



But Prof. Asare said breaking the monopoly created for professional legal education to be administered by the Ghana School of Law is the best approach to resolving these challenges and not infrastructure expansion.



I have made it clear in so many instances. There is already an infrastructure in place. The thing that is stopping them now is a law promulgated by the General Legal Council that says that only the Ghana School of Law can offer professional legal education. The law faculty can deliver the legal education that they are talking about.



Professor Asare also said the General Legal Council must be scrapped and replaced with an independent regulatory agency to regulate law education in Ghana.



He has consistently stated that the General Legal Council has departed from its duty of providing persons with law degrees the opportunity to pursue professional education and is instead restricting them.



The Supreme Court recently dismissed a legal action he filed to challenge the status of the Ghana School of Law (GSL) as the only institution mandated to offer professional law programme in the country.







Source: Graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Eleven alleged rapists have now been arrested after a 16-year-old girl claimed she was gang-raped at a hotel in southern Israel.

Two 27-year-old men, believed to be the main suspects, were arrested last week, while nine minors, all thought to be aged 17, were arrested at the weekend.

The girl claims she was attacked in a room at the Red Sea Hotel on August 12 after going there to drink with friends, with witnesses saying up to 30 men were involved.

Two 27-year-old men and nine 17-year-olds have now been arrested over claims they participated in the gang-rape of a 16-year-old girl at this hotel in southern Israel on August 12

Police say the girl's account is credible and tallies up with evidence, including testimony from her friend and CCTV footage which allegedly shows men queuing down a corridor leading to the room.

Officers say it is unlikely that the number of assailants is as high as 30, but believe it is in double digits and are not discounting any possibilities, Haaretz reported.

In addition to the alleged rapists, the hotel manager has been arrested as police charged her with obstructing their investigation and failing to prevent a crime.

A 19-year-old woman was also questioned and released after encouraging people to share video of the attack via WhatsApp.

In a group that was being watched by police, one member asked whether video of the attack actually existed.

'Dont be stingy, share,' the woman responded.

Police say she admitted sending the message, but denied intending to publish the video online and so was released.

The 16-year-old girl is said to be in an unstable mental condition, but is cooperating with police and has said she is willing to face her alleged attackers in court.

She has been placed under police protection after her personal information began spreading online, amid fears she could be intimidated by the men she is accusing.

Protests erupted across Israel after police were told that up to 30 men queued down a corridor of the hotel to participate in the alleged attack

Thousands of marchers took to the streets of cities across Israel last week to demand justice for the girl and an end to violence against women

Police say she was not a guest at the hotel, but had gone there to drink with friends before being taken to a room in a 'dazed' state and assaulted.

A fellow guest at the hotel, who arrived around midnight on the day of the alleged attack, described how people were drinking and smoking throughout the hotel in breach of rules, and that management were uninterested in stopping them.

He added that a large number of young people were gathered in the hallway outside his room which he reported to the manager, but nothing was done about it.

'I have no idea if they were the ones the police are looking for, but a large group of people had gathered there and were making a lot of noise,' he said.

He added that people were smoking and drinking in the pool, including throwing their cigarette butts in the water, despite signs banning smoking in the area.

'There were crazy levels of music and alcohol,' he added. 'The lifeguard himself brought out a food container, filled it with ice so the young folks had somewhere to put their alcohol bottles. They simply opened a bar at the pool.

'I approached the hotel manager to tell her that it was over the top... Her response was: "If you have a problem, you can complain to the municipal inspectors. I don't check what they're doing."'

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned the alleged attack, calling it a 'crime against humanity'.

Marchers in Tel Aviv on August 20 demand justice for a 16-year-old who was allegedly gang-raped in a hotel in Eilat, southern Israel

Activists, who took to the streets earlier this year to protest violence towards women in Israel, returned last week to hold demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The protesters united under the banner 'we won't be silent anymore', with around 1,000 in the capital - where protesters briefly blocked traffic - 150 in Jeruselam, and more in Givatayim, Haifa and elsewhere.

Ilana Weizman of women's rights group HaStickeriot said one in five Israeli women was raped during her lifetime with 260 cases reported every day.

'We must educate our boys on the issue of consent ... from a very young age,' she said.

Many protesters referred to a case last year, when a 19-year-old British woman claimed she had been gang-raped by 12 Israeli males, aged 15 to 18, at a hotel in Cyprus.

The woman's allegation led to 12 Israeli men being detained and subsequently released.

She later withdrew her allegation, but claims she was coerced by Cypriot police into dropping the case.

The woman was given a suspended sentence in January this year after being found guilty of public mischief.
Colombia stopped aerial spraying of illegal coca planatations in 2015 following a report by the World Health Organization on its dangers

Colombia's government said on Monday it will resume the controversial practice of aerial spraying of coca plantations following a spike in gang-related violence.

Colombia's is the world's biggest producer of cocaine, the raw material of which is coca leaves.

It stopped aerial spraying in 2015 over health concerns but has long come under pressure from the United States -- the largest importer of Colombian cocaine -- to take measures to curb coca production.

"Restarting aerial spraying is absolutely indispensable," Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo said at a press conference alongside the armed forces high command.

Former president Juan Manuel Santos ended the practice of aerial spraying using the herbicide glyphosate in 2015 after the World Health Organization said it was "probably carcinogenic."

But two years ago, at the end of his term in office, Santos announced Colombia would resume the practice after three years of manual destruction of illegal coca plantations.

Authorities, though, have set a condition that the spraying can only recommence once an official plan has been designed to minimize the adverse effects of the chemical substances.

Local people oppose aerial spraying as it affects their ability to legally grow coca leaf, which is used throughout the Andes as an infusion or to chew.

Environmentalists and farmers also oppose the practice due to its impact on traditional crops and water sources. Farmers also claim the spraying has killed their livestock and made them ill.

The government claims its the only effective method against illegal drug plantations.

Holmes Trujillo said authorities expect to meet the requirements within a few weeks.

The government of President Ivan Duque -- who was elected in 2018 on a promise to be tough on crime -- has been under pressure following a surge in violence around the country, which it blames on drug-traffickers.

On Friday and Saturday alone, 17 people were killed in three massacres. Authorities say 36 people have been killed in related gang violence since August 11.

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As well as drug-traffickers, various armed groups competing for power, territory and influence are financed by illegal mining.

Colombia has 154,000 hectares of crop plantations used to produce cocaine, the United Nations said in 2019.

Illegal coca plantations have been reduced since Duque came to power from a high of 171,000 hectares in 2017, but cocaine production has remained stable.

dl/vel/rsr/bc/dw
Figure 1:

Recent THC Drill Results and Planned Drilling (Mineralization Footprint Projected to Surface)

Recent THC Drill Results and Planned Drilling (Mineralization Footprint Projected to Surface)

Figure 2:

Section through OKD038, 041 and 049 reported in this news release. A  A in Figure 1

Section through OKD038, 041 and 049 reported in this news release. A  A in Figure 1

Assays received for a further ten holes of the 2020 drill program at Twin Hills Central with eight holes returning significant intercepts, including: 268m @ 0.60g/t (OKD049: 77  345m), incl. 22m @ 1.40g/t 203m @ 0.74g/t (OKD041: 25 - 228m), incl. 92m @ 1.00g/t 98m @ 0.97g/t (OKD038: 85 - 183m), incl. 29m @ 1.44g/t 57m @ 1.06g/t (OKD036: 39 - 96m) 32m @ 1.23g/t (OKD046: 20  52m)

Higher grade gold mineralization confirmed down dip to 300m in hole OKD049 open at depth

Fully funded to expedite drill program for maiden resource estimate

The expanded Twin Hills drill program now comprises 31,000m of diamond drilling and 8,000m of RC and percussion drilling for resource definition and exploration respectively

10,000m of this expanded program has been completed so far, with four diamond rigs and two RC rigs currently active on site

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Osino Resources Corp. (TSXV: OSI) (FSE: RSR1) ("Osino or the Company), is pleased to announce the receipt of assays for a further ten drill holes at Twin Hills Central (THC). The results from these in-fill and expansion holes confirm the lateral continuity and depth extension (down-dip) to approximately 300m of previously identified gold mineralization at THC.

Significant intersections were returned in eight of the holes including very wide mineralized zones in the western portions of THC in an area referred to as the bulge. Holes OKD049 and OKD041 are considered exceptional for their mineralized widths of 268m at 0.60g/t and 203m at 0.74g/t (including 92m at 1.00g/t and 22m at 1.40g/t respectively).

All four holes on the section labelled A  A on Figure 1 (OKD035, 38, 041 and 049) intersected the same higher grade shoot previously reported in holes OKRD024 (92m @ 1.40g/t) and OKD031 (150m @ 0.98g/t, incl. 61m @ 1.51g/t), 100m to the west, indicating the significant lateral continuity of this mineralization. Please refer to the drill plan and intercepts on Figure 1 for further details.

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This large-scale mineralized shoot is plunging to the northeast and will be followed in that direction with further in-fill drilling.

David Underwood, Osinos Vice President Exploration commented: The higher-grade shoot on the west side of Twin Hills Central is really shaping up in size and continuity. The shoot has now been delineated to 300m down-dip with over 200m in strike, plunging to the northeast. The low-grade halo surrounding the shoot is over 200m wide providing an ideal bulk mining target. After the recent oversubscribed financing and the consistently excellent drill results at Twin Hills Central, we have decided to accelerate the maiden resource estimate with additional diamond and RC drill rigs to get the necessary drilling done by October 2020. Thereafter we will be drilling a large number of exploration targets from the recent IP survey as well as geochemical and magnetic targets that remain to be tested within the Twin Hills camp.

Mineralization remains open down-dip (refer to the cross section in Figure 2) and will be further tested down-dip and along strike (to the east and west) in follow-up drilling planned for the remainder of 2020.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b07f9cbc-f39f-412e-9ce3-360ba0b5133c

The holes reported thus far in 2020 are all part of the THC resource definition drill program and were designed with particular focus on:

Testing the down-dip extension of the mineralized zone in the western bulge area of THC

Testing lateral continuity and the southern margin of the mineralization in the eastern shoot of THC

Drilling for parallel mineralized zones on the north side of THC

Testing down-dip and strike extensions in the bulge area



Three holes were drilled on a fence line 100m east of the holes reported in May 2020, including OKD031 (150m @ 0.98g/t incl. 61m @ 1.51g/t), indicated by Section line A  A on Figure 1 above.

These three holes all returned positive assays with OKD038 containing 98m @ 0.97g/t (incl. 29m @ 1.44g/t), OKD041 containing 203m @ 0.74g/t (incl. 92m @ 1.00g/t) and OKD049 containing 268m @ 0.60 (incl. 22m @ 1.40g/t). See cross section in Figure 2.

These holes prove the continuity of this mineralization both down dip and along strike to the east and west linking with the other previously reported 100 gram-meter holes.

The drilling confirms that the mineralization is continuous within a steeply north dipping, ductile shear zone with gold associated with arsenopyrite and pyrrhotite but little to no quartz veining.

This style of mineralization is analogous to other large-scale, greywacke hosted gold deposits including Macraes in New Zealand (10Moz) and Otjikoto in Namibia (2.5Moz).



A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8986715b-5710-4fd8-a937-edcf83b1ca5b

The linking of the three 100m-spaced fence lines containing the mineralized halo will contribute a more accurate model of the plunge and azimuth of the higher-grade halo.

The mineralization remains fully open to the east and will be tested in the course of 2020 drill program. Further deep holes (300 - 400m) will be drilled from the northern side of the mineralization to confirm down dip extension and search for parallel shoots.

Testing lateral continuity and southern margin of mineralization in the eastern shoot



Two holes (OKD036 and OKD039) were drilled as in-fill in the eastern lobe of THC and both returned positive assays with wide intercepts of gold above 1g/t.

The eastern lobe has a strike extent of about 600m to date and is open to the east. Four holes (OKD042, 044, 046 and 048) were drilled along the southern margin of THC to close off the mineralization in that direction  see plan in Figure 1. The mineralization intersected along the margin is consistently higher than 1g/t Au.

Testing for parallel zones to the north of THC

Following the IP results released August 5, 2020 a series of holes were included in the drill plan to the north of the main THC mineralization to check for possible shallow parallel shoots. A single hole OKD050 was drilled north of the western bulge to a depth of 230m but did not intersect any gold mineralization.

Twin Hills Drill Program for the Remainder of 2020

The 20,000m drill program announced on February 27, 2020 has been expanded to include an additional 2,000m of diamond drilling for resource definition as well as 9,000m of diamond and 8,000m of RC drilling for exploration drilling. The exploration drilling is intended to make satellite discoveries elsewhere along the Twin Hills gold system, in particular further testing of the previously described targets at Twin Hills West, Clouds, the area to the south of Barking Dog (the various Dog targets) and the recently identified IP targets (refer to news release dated August 5, 2020).

Drilling carried out to date in 2020 has been orientated diamond core, which has resulted in significantly slower drill progress compared to late 2019, when some of the holes were drilled using RC drilling. RC drilling is significantly faster and cheaper than diamond drilling, but by virtue of the sample produced (chips versus oriented drill core) it offers significantly less geological information. For the remainder of 2020, Osino will utilize a mixture of RC and diamond drilling for both resource definition and exploration drilling.

Maiden Resource Drill Program

An accelerated resource drill program has now been finalized in conjunction with CSA Global South Africa, who will act as consultants for the maiden resource estimate. In-fill drilling is planned on a grid of 50 x 50m over the 1,300m strike length of mineralized area at THC, with holes varying in depth from 200 to 400m. The holes will be drilled at an angle of -60 degrees and on an azimuth of 160 degrees (SSE), although several vertical hole have been included to link the top of one hole to the base of another and confirm continuity between holes for modelling purposes. See Figure 1.

The resource drill program is currently underway and is scheduled to be completed in early October. The drilling will be undertaken by four diamond drill rigs and two RC rigs, which will be used on the shorter in-fill holes.

Hole From To Width Grade X Y #OKD012 (Ext) 1,2 210 291 81 0.84 600051 7584577 incl. 20 2.03 and 313 357 44 0.75 incl. 4 1.35 incl. 3 1.68 #OKD0331 63 288 225 0.64 600066 7584531 incl. 15 1.22 incl. 10 1.32 incl. 15 1.06 #OKD0341 209 254 45 0.84 599994 7584441 incl. 16 1.04 #OKD0351 31 121 90 0.86 600215 7584426 incl. 15 1.26 OKD0361 39 96 57 1.06 600592 7584711 incl. 39 50 11 1.21 incl. 54 62 8 1.29 incl. 68 96 28 1.25 and 114 118 4 1.42 and 126 129 3 1.77 and 153 157 4 1.60 OKD038 13 19 6 1.04 600198 7584473 and 49 53 4 1.19 and 60 69 9 1.29 and 85 183 98 0.97 incl. 128 157 29 1.44 incl. 166 183 17 1.16 OKD039 42 80 38 1.15 600684 7584741 42 59 17 1.45 OKD0411 25 228 203 0.74 600179 7584516 incl. 33 39 6 1.43 incl. 64 68 4 1.11 incl. 71 79 8 1.02 incl. 121 213 92 1.00 incl. 216 219 3 1.49 incl. 222 228 6 1.18 OKD042 No significant intercepts 600666 7584656 OKD044 25 35 10 1.33 600759 7584697 OKD046 20 52 32 1.23 600842 7584733 OKD048 132 141 8 1.48 600974 7584679 OKD049 77 345 268 0.60 600144 7584610 incl. 77 86 9 1.65 incl. 157 165 8 1.15 incl. 247 255 8 1.53 incl. 315 337 22 1.40 OKD050 No significant intercepts 599920 7584641

Table 1: Summary of Drill Intercepts from Drilling to 12th August 2020 at Twin Hills Gold Project

# Previously reported in Technical Report filed June 26, 2020

1 Unconstrained intersections

2 Hole previously drilled to 200m, extended in current program

Notes: All reported intercepts are apparent widths rounded to the nearest meter. True widths are unknown at this stage. Included intercepts are at 0.4g/t cut-off, minimum 2m wide and no more that 2m internal dilution. Collar positions are in UTM WGS84, not yet surveyed accurately.

Qualified Person

David Underwood, BSc. (Hons) is Vice President Exploration of Osino Resources Corp. and has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this news release and is a registered Professional Natural Scientist with the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (Pr. Sci. Nat. No.400323/11) and a Qualified Person for the purposes of National Instrument 43-101.

Quality Assurance

All Osino sample assay results have been independently monitored through a quality assurance/quality control ("QA/QC") program including the insertion of blind standards, blanks and duplicate samples. QA/QC samples make up 10% of all samples submitted. Logging and sampling are completed at Osinos secure facility located in Omaruru near the Twin Hills Project. Drill core is sawn in half on site and half drill-core samples are securely transported to the Actlabs sample preparation facility in Windhoek, Namibia. The core is dried, crushed to 95% -10mesh, split to 250g and pulverised to 95% -150mesh. Sample pulps are sent to Actlabs in Ontario, Canada for analysis. Gold analysis is by 30g fire assay with AA finish and automatically re-analysed with Gravimetric finish if Au >5g/t. In addition, pulps undergo 4-Acid digestion and multi-element analysis by ICP-AES or ICP-MS. RC drill samples are prepared at Actlabs sample preparation facility in Windhoek, Namibia. The RC chips are dried, crushed to 95% -10mesh, split to 250g and pulverised to 95% -150mesh. Sample pulps are sent to Actlabs in Ontario, Canada for analysis. Gold analysis is by 30g fire assay with AA finish and automatically re-analysed with Gravimetric finish if Au >5g/t.

About Osino Resources

Osino is a Canadian gold exploration company, focused on the acquisition and development of gold projects in Namibia. Having achieved our initial vision of finding Namibias next significant gold deposit, we are now focused on rapidly advancing the exciting Twin Hills gold discovery and to make new discoveries elsewhere along the belt. This we will achieve with Osinos winning formula of combining innovation & drive with technical experience & strong financial backing.

Our portfolio of exclusive exploration licenses is located within Namibias prospective Damara mineral belt, mostly in proximity to and along strike of the producing Navachab and Otjikoto Gold Mines. Osino is targeting gold mineralization that fits the broad orogenic gold model. We are actively advancing a range of gold discoveries, prospects and targets across our approximately 7,000km2 ground position by utilizing a portfolio approach geared towards discovery.

Osinos focus in 2020 is on further advancing the Twin Hills and Goldkuppe discoveries within the developing Karibib Gold District, testing our Otjikoto East and Otjiwarongo targets and generating new ones on our remaining licenses. Our core projects are favorably located north and north-west of Namibias capital city Windhoek. By virtue of their location, the projects benefit significantly from Namibias well-established infrastructure with paved highways, railway, power and water in close proximity. Namibia is mining-friendly and lauded as one of the continents most politically and socially stable jurisdictions. Osino continues to evaluate new ground with a view to expanding its Namibian portfolio.

Further details are available on the Company's website at https://osinoresources.com/

CONTACT INFORMATION

Osino Resources Corp.

Heye Daun: CEO

Tel: +27 (21) 418 2525

hdaun@osinoresources.com

Julia Becker: Investor Relations Manager

Tel: +1 (604) 785 0850

jbecker@osinoresources.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.




Port Jackson talk

US marines out of Darwin!

I dont have an especially long memory, but it seems to me that when your country is taken into a pointless, disastrous, and costly war, like the Iraq war, on the basis of lies told to you by your supposed friend and ally, that is something you should commit to memory.

For my money that meant that every subsequent military overture coming from the USA [after the War on Terror] should have been treated with circumspection at least, if not with a high level of suspicion. Were not going to let you do that to us again! should have been our guiding principle. Trust should have been severely compromised.

But what happened? With no debate in our Federal Parliament, no discussion in our media, with only a few days forewarning, President Barack Obama and our Prime Minister of the time, Julia Gillard, on 16th November 2011, jointly announced that there were to be US marines stationed in Darwin.

Instead of being even the slightest bit suspicious, Australia just buckled to pressure from the USA and invited their marines to come in. The fact that we did this so soon after the Iraq episode is the first reason for resenting the presence of the marines. But there are other compelling reasons as well.

Now, I dont claim to be a military expert, but a background in Sociology tells me one thing that is significant. One of the ways that any government, maintains its legitimacy as a government, is that it claims and maintains a monopoly on all the violence that takes place within its borders. Any violent act, other than those committed by the government or its agents, is criminal. The state assumes full control of all the violence that takes place and, accordingly, full control of all the armed forces within its borders.

There are a few situations in which the presence of foreign forces can occur. At one extreme when one country has been overtaken by another, for example when Allied forces occupied Germany following WW2.

Another situation might be where one country feels itself to be under some immediate threat, so invites or allows an ally to boost its defence. I suggest that such a scenario only crops up in extraordinary circumstances and that the general rule is that foreign armed forces are not permitted on the sovereign territory of any self-respecting nation.

The reason for this is clear. It is because those forces are not under the command of the host government, because they take their orders from the foreign power. Their presence forms a weakness in the nations defensive cordon, a weak link in the chain. For there is always the possibility that such foreign force can do something that the host nation does not approve of, and that the government of the host has therefore lost that precious monopoly on violence.

And it is this precise situation that prevails with US marines in Darwin.

I think it is now within the realms of possibility that the USA might, for example, want to take action against Chinas fortified islands in the South China Sea  whether Australia were to support it or not  and that the marines stationed in Darwin might form part in such an action.

This is all hypothetical, of course. I am not predicting this scenario. I am simply saying that it is not beyond the realms of possibility. And, that being the case, Australia is taking a completely unnecessary risk by allowing them to be stationed here.

The Darwin contingent is here for a protracted period, every year, for an agreed period of at least twenty-five years, taking us up to 2040. This is not a short-term arrangement. This is an ongoing presence, through which a small part of our nation is being routinely occupied by foreign troops.

Next, consider how the presence of US marines in Darwin might be viewed from Chinas perspective. The growing enmity between the USA and China is out in the open, and there should be little doubt that China regards the USA as a threatening entity. One only has to look at a map with US bases highlighted to see that they form a ring around China.

When Obama came to Australia to announce the arrival of the marines, it was also to announce the USAs pivot to the Asia Pacific region. That was in 2011. News that islands in the South China Sea were being militarised by China came through in 2013. I put it to you that that militarisation, which current leaders complain about so loudly, was a legitimate, defensive response to Obamas announcement.

The point to be made is that by entertaining the marines, Australia becomes an integral part of the aggressive moves being made by the USA as it tries to contain Chinas ascendance.

The grim scenario of war between the USA and China is a possibility that comes a fraction closer every time one of the leaders of the USA or Australia has anything to say on the subject. The recent AUSMIN communique announced expansion to training exercises involving the MRF-D [Marine Rotational Force  Darwin] and the establishment of a strategic military fuel reserve in Darwin. From the tone of such pronouncements, enmity between Australia and China could become a reality. And in the horrifying scenario of actual hostilities, Darwin could find itself, once again, the target for attack.

Anyone who feels re-assured by the presence of the [US] marines, who thinks that they are here to help protect us, should think again. For their presence makes us less safe.

There is another aspect I want to mention. The fact that we have allowed US marines to stay in Australia in some way gives the message that, as a nation, we dont quite believe in our own ability to look after ourselves. So, I want to introduce an element of patriotism in what I have to say. I firmly believe that we Australians can and should stand up and look after ourselves. We like to think of Australia as an independent nation  we should put that thought into action, assert our independence, and take full responsibility for our own defence. However, the current situation is entirely contrary to that! As things stand, we are so enmeshed within the alliance with the USA, that we can hardly do anything, militarily, without the USAs approval. Perhaps the most important aspect of the MRF-D is that it is symbolic of Australias entanglement in the great network of the USAs military empire.

Australia has been too trusting of our duplicitous and dangerous ally, the USA.

We have sent the wrong message to China, who might now become an enemy.

We have placed ourselves in more danger than we need.

It is time to re-assess Australias entire defence policy and our alliance with the USA. We should not, and can no longer, rely on it to guarantee security. IPAN [Independent and Peaceful Australia Network] is to conduct a peoples inquiry into this very matter, starting later this year. It is time, I believe, to seek out ways to unravel the tightly knit fabric of our military relationship with the USA.

There is no better place to start this process than with the MRF-D, which is why my colleagues and I want to show them the door. We say US marines out of Darwin! and Terminate the Force Posture Agreement, under which they are here, year after year. Or, to express it less politely, we say Lets give em the Boot!

* Nick Deane is a member of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network.
Except for all the masks, the recent move-in days at two universities in the Washington region looked at least somewhat like the back-to-school rituals of any other year. Moms and dads and siblings hauled boxes of gear into student dormitories. Beds were made, walls decorated.

Catholic University in Washington served an outdoor barbecue lunch one afternoon last week for families. George Mason University in Fairfax County, Va., handed out room keys at EagleBank Arena. The countdown was underway to the first classes on Monday.

But the coronavirus pandemic is shadowing the feel-good moments at these schools and others that are bringing students to campuses across the country despite the public health crisis. The questions for students, parents, professors, staff members and administrators are whether and how the school year can launch safely. And what will it take to avoid sending students home before the fall term even reaches the first day of fall?

Catholic and George Mason officials say extensive restrictions on operations, combined with a public health campaign, will help them pull it off. On the other hand, some schools elsewhere that were equally confident of their in-person plans were forced to retreat to online instruction this month after worrisome outbreaks in their communities. The fiscal stakes are high: Opening at least partly in person helps schools secure tuition and housing revenue in a time of tight budgets.

Many students at these two universities remain optimistic.

"As long as everyone looks out for each other, we can stay safe," said Ryan Walczak, 18, of Allentown, Pa., who sat with other Catholic newcomers at the barbecue.

Alexa Allen, 18, of Silver Spring, Md., brought to George Mason a form that showed she had tested negative for the novel coronavirus. That was a requirement for students to check in. "With all the precautions they're taking, I think it's pretty safe for now," Allen said.

Ordinarily, the nation's capital is a thriving college town. This fall, much of Washington's student-driven bustle will be missing as American, George Washington, Georgetown and Howard universities hold most classes online and provide housing only for students in special circumstances.

Outside the city, the University of Maryland at College Park will teach undergraduates remotely for its first two weeks, starting Aug. 31, a slower move toward face-to-face classes than originally planned. In Charlottesville, the University of Virginia opted for a similar two-week delay. It will start remote teaching Tuesday.

Upheaval at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill showed the risk of aggressive opening plans. The university started its term in person on Aug. 10, but a week later it switched to all-remote instruction for undergrads after coronavirus cases spiked among students.

Gregory Washington, George Mason's president, cited the Chapel Hill episode in an email exhorting his students in Virginia to be diligent about wearing masks, keeping six feet away from other people and socializing only in very small groups.

"Let's all do the right thing," Washington recently wrote to students. "Mason's story does not have to be UNC's story. But it's up to each of us. Let's be safe this semester and get through to December to give ourselves something to celebrate at the end of the year."

As Virginia's largest public university, George Mason enrolled more than 37,000 students last year. Many are graduate students or undergraduates who live off campus. In response to the pandemic, the school switched much of its instruction to an online format, slashed classroom seating capacity and allowed professors to choose whether they wanted to teach remotely or face to face.

It also limited undergraduate housing. A little more than 3,000 undergraduates are expected to live on campus this semester, about half the normal total. Everyone who comes to campus will be required to answer daily public health screening questions.

In addition, the university periodically will administer viral testing to groups of students who do not have symptoms of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, to check for potential outbreaks. Lawn signs dotting the campus show masked figures greeting one another with elbow bumps, not handshakes. "Patriots protect Patriots," they declare, referring to the university mascot.

"As of right now, we've done what we can to set ourselves up for success," said Shannon Davis, a professor of sociology who chairs the university's Faculty Senate. She said George Mason officials have been responsive to faculty concerns, taking steps such as installing microphones in classrooms to help ensure that professors are heard when they speak through masks.

Some faculty members say it's premature to teach in person. Others are unsure.

"I'm not optimistic that we'll stay open that long," said Peter Stearns, a professor of history and former George Mason provost. Students tend to gather, he said, in ways that make public health rules difficult to enforce. "It's all about the numbers. We'll see what happens."

Parents are watching keenly, too. Anita Gardner, mother of Alexa Allen, said she had "begged" her daughter to wait until January to come to George Mason. On Wednesday, she dropped Allen off at Taylor Hall. "Just no way I could not let her come," Gardner said. She described herself, jokingly, as a "panicky parent."

Across the hallway, Hannah Cook, 18, from Fauquier County, Va., said a key factor in her decision to come to the campus was technology. "Where I live, there's no high-speed Internet," she said. Cook showed off the masks, hand sanitizer, face shield and spray bottle of lemon-scented Lysol that she brought with her for antiviral peace of mind.

At Catholic, the university plans to house about 570 freshmen and offer at least some classes in person. That will be a vast depopulation on the campus of the 5,700-student university. (Nearby, Trinity Washington University also plans to have some undergraduates living and learning on its District of Columbia campus.)

"We remain confident that we can attend properly to a smaller cohort, while providing our freshmen with the best possible transition to college," John Garvey, Catholic's president, said in a message to students.

Unlike George Mason, Catholic did not require proof of a negative coronavirus test to move in. University officials cite guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that does not recommend entry testing of students, faculty members and staffers.

Christian DiPalermo was grateful for the chance to drop off daughter Olivia, a freshman, at Catholic. He pulled a big purple suitcase from the trunk of his SUV and set it down next to a pile of her belongings - a wicker basket full of shoes, a new mattress topper, a cream-color shag rug.

"She missed her prom," said DiPalermo, of Long Island, N.Y. "She had a graduation that was in a parking lot. I'm going to miss her, but I'm excited for her to have the opportunity to go to college in person."

Normally, move-in happens on a single, festive August day. This year, the event was smaller and slower, spread over three days to help families keep distance from one another. They came and went in scheduled blocks of time, to avoid crowds, with each student allowed two helpers.

The lobby in Opus Hall, a dorm with single- and double-suite bedrooms, was equipped with hand-sanitizer stations. Walls were plastered with reminders - in English and Spanish - to "stop the spread of germs" by wearing masks and staying home when feeling sick. Stickers on the carpet had simple instructions: "PLEASE KEEP 6 FT APART."

Mary Ann Poeschl, 50, from Clinton, Conn., said she felt reassured sending her son, Connor, 18, to college after seeing the steps Catholic had taken to keep students safe and communicate with families. But she had lingering doubts as she stood outside Opus Hall with her husband and son.

"I'm trying not to worry that he gets sick," Poeschl said. "I'm trying to trust the university, that they'll take care of him."

Garvey took to Twitter to remind those living on campus to #maskup.

"I ask our community to take all precautions to stop COVID. We can stay open if we work together," he wrote.

The campus recently opened a testing center, with a focus on testing symptomatic students and those who have come into direct contact with positive cases of the coronavirus. Students who test positive for the virus may be asked to isolate themselves in a residence hall reserved for positive cases.

This summer, the D.C. mayor announced that travelers from coronavirus hot spots - including California, Florida, Illinois and South Carolina - must self-quarantine for two weeks. The restrictions disrupted reopening plans at other schools that intended to house students on campus.

On one of the recent move-in days, new arrivals from Colorado, Pennsylvania and South Carolina talked around a table, wearing masks, while ABBA's "Dancing Queen" played through a set of speakers. Another group of Catholic students sat closely around a picnic table and shared a box of doughnuts - most but not all wearing masks.

Students under self-quarantine may leave their rooms, but not the campus, a school official said. After a summer of being isolated in their respective hometowns, some students were eager to mingle with one another.

Ryan Tufford, 18, of Mount Holly, N.J., was unloading a car with his mother. He vowed to stay safe by wearing a mask and avoiding parties.

"I know it exists," Tufford said of the coronavirus, "but I think I'm smart enough to make the right decisions."
Bachelor star Nicole Campbell is known for her girl-next-door charm.

But the 26-year-old has proved she has a wild side after a topless photo shoot resurfaced of the Sydney dancer this month.

In the racy images, she looks every inch the bombshell while flaunting her sensational curves on a Byron Bay beach.

No wonder Locky is smitten! The Bachelor star Nicole Campbell sizzles as she poses topless for a racy photo shoot on a Byron Bay beach

The beauty appears joyous as she makes a hand-bra while posing during golden hour.

A small tattoo on the side of her chest is also exposed in the stunning images.

Beauty: Nicole is known for her girl-next-door charm

Nicole has became an instant fan favourite on The Bachelor after she attracted Locky's eye and was handed the triple threat rose following her exuberant entrance during the premiere of the show.

The thrill-seeker couldn't help but praise Nicole when the big moment came to hand out the bloom.

A delight! The beauty has became an instant fan favourite on The Bachelor after she attracted Locky's eye and was handed the triple threat rose following her exuberant entrance during the premiere of the show

'You came out... amazing!' he began, referring to Nicole's dazzling red carpet arrival.

'You taught me how to dance,' he continued. 'I didn't think I was gonna do that.'

Locky went on to say that he loved the beauty energy and vivaciousness.

'Every time I was walking around, you were always the life of the party, and that's amazing to me,' he said.

It's all coming up roses: Locky gave Nicole the highly coveted triple threat rose (pictured) during the premiere episode of this season

'I said before this all started, if a girl jumps into my arms, that's gonna be a winner for me,' he added, before handing Nicole the coveted rose.

Nicole subsequently impressed Locky on their singles date last week.

The Bachelor continues Wednesday at 7.30pm on Channel 10
Washington:

US President Barack Obama has signed into law the USD 618 billion defence budget for 2017, which enhances security cooperation with India and conditions nearly half of the funding to Pakistan on a certification that it is taking demonstrable steps against the Haqqani Network.



Currently vacationing in Hawaii, Obama on Friday signed the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) 2017, which asks Defence Secretary and Secretary of State to take steps necessary to recognise India as Americas major defence partner.



A summary of the bill released by Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Senator John McCain said NDAA-2017 enhances security cooperation between the US and India.



It also asks the administration to designate an individual within the executive branch who has experience in defence acquisition and technology to reinforce and ensure, through inter-agency policy coordination, the success of the Framework for the US-India Defence Relationship; and to help resolve remaining issues impeding US-India defence trade, security cooperation, and co-production and co-development opportunities.



The NDAA, which among other things creates a USD 1.2 billion Counter-ISIL Fund, imposes four conditions on Pakistan to be eligible for USD 400 million of the USD 900 million of the coalition support fund (CSF).



The US Defence Secretary needs to certify to the Congress that Pakistan continues to conduct military operations that are contributing to significantly disrupting the safe haven and freedom of movement of the Haqqani Network in Pakistan and that Islamabad has taken steps to demonstrate its commitment to prevent the Haqqani Network from using any of its territory as a safe haven.Early this year, US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter refused to give a similar certification to Pakistan due to which it was not given USD 300 million under coalition support fund.



In his signing statement, Obama did not mention to any of these provisions of the bill, but he did expressed disappointment over certain other provisions in NDAA-2017.



He said: I remain deeply concerned about the Congresss use of the National Defence Authorisation Act to impose extensive organisational changes on the Department of Defence, disregarding the advice of the Departments senior civilian and uniformed leaders.



The extensive changes in the bill are rushed, the consequences poorly understood, and they come at a particularly inappropriate time as we undertake a transition between administrations. These changes not only impose additional administrative burdens on the Department of Defence and make it less agile, but they also create additional bureaucracies and operational restrictions that generate inefficiencies at a time when we need to be more efficient.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 15:43:53|Editor: huaxia

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BOGOTA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- A pilot program to reopen restaurants in Colombia's capital city here has been announced after they were forced to close for five months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chia, a town located to the north of Bogota and a popular weekend getaway for residents, announced that 14 restaurants would be open for trial operation until Aug. 31. The restaurants will definitively resume operation as early as Sept. 15 if the pilot result turns out to be good.

The program basically entails adopting strict social distancing and protective measures, such as taking the temperature of clients and staff members before they enter a restaurant, to ensure the safe operation of businesses.

Andres Carne de Res, a renowned restaurant in Chia, is on the pilot list. "We have high expectations. We hope to be able to host people under the protocols we have and above all to provide work for our employees, who need it so much," Jose Julian Bermudez, the restaurant's operation manager, told Xinhua.

"We are taking care of the safety of both employees and diners who visit us, and what we hope is that people are encouraged to come and have an enjoyable experience under this new normal," said Bermudez.

Digital menus, which customers can get through scanning a QR code displayed on each table, servers with protective equipment, and a maximum capacity of no more than 50 percent are just some of the steps the restaurant has taken to build up customers' confidence, so that they would return for traditional Colombian cuisine.

"The stay inside the restaurant will be (limited to) a maximum of two hours as part of this opening pilot scheme. We cannot sell alcoholic beverages. We have to abide by these rules. However, as the days go by and we see good results ... we will move forward to offer more things inside the restaurant," said Bermudez.

"It is a great relief to see so many people be able to return to work and we, as customers, will be the first to notice whether these restaurants are complying with the necessary controls. It is a joint effort for everyone's well-being," Beatriz Correal, a visitor to the area, told Xinhua. Enditem
(TNS)  The founder of company formed two decades ago on an ice plateau in Antarctica, says his goal today is to serve his West Virginia neighbors with innovative answers to several challenges.Mike Masterman, a Morgantown resident who for years managed the United States research center at the South Pole, created Extreme Endeavors to tackle some of the biggest environmental and safety issues facing the state today.Mastermans team is using the fledgling Internet of Things to deploy the evolving technology in all its research and development projects. The company was an early member of Fairmonts High Technology Foundation.The Internet of Things is a system of interrelated computing devices embedded into everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data without the need for human interaction. IOT, for short, is now found in everything from refrigerators to vacuum cleaners.Extreme Endeavors has created a way to remove rare earth elements from acid mine drainage discharged from the regions abandoned coal mines. Among the most desired natural resources in the world, rare earth elements power everything from smartphones to rechargeable batteries.In the U.S., approximately 15,000 tons of these elements are used annually, nearly all of it imported from China. The company created a mobile processing plant for West Virginia Universitys Water Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy to capture and remove the valuable minerals from acid mine sludge.Mastermans team of engineers and software developers have advanced a proprietary, totally-remote building security system that allows video and three-dimensional imagery of a home or building to be viewed live from anywhere in the world.The company also outfitted the aptly-named Hellhole cave in Germany Valley with sensors monitoring environmental change in an effort to protect the habitat of two species of endangered and federally-protected bats.But Extreme Endeavors most resounding success of late is its protection of West Virginias fresh drinking water supply.Several state Public Service Districts and water associations have been updated to what Masterman calls the most advanced water monitoring system in the world.The new systems fully automate all water supply monitoring, allowing for continuous observation and reliable real-time information, while safeguarding residents drinking water.It replaces the old hands-on way of data acquisition by employing small Internet nodes that read data from whatever appliance is attached to it, Masterman said. Why would taxpayers want to pay someone to ride around turning a pump on and off or constantly checking water levels? When a computer can sit there and do that, it saves the taxpayers money.The system features continuous pump and voltage monitoring, automated analysis of water flow, real-time tank levels and water loss updates.Because its a web-based system, crucial information may be accessed at home on a laptop or personal computer, on a smartphone, or at a command center in a Public Service District office. Satellite and cellular communication, powered entirely by off-grid energy sources, transmit data continuously.The end result is easy up-to-date monitoring and the ability to see an entire public service districts water system information at a glance on one screen, said Masterman. These features are unheard of in most other water systems right now.The company has installed its system in water districts from the eastern panhandle to the Ohio River, including several PSDs in nearby Taylor, Harrison, Barbour, and Upshur counties.I think one of the most important advances weve made in our technology is making it web-based. What that means is you dont need to install a separate app for Android and another for iPhone. The exact same system, interface and functionality a water employee sees on his desktop computer is available on any device, said Travis Miller, a software engineer with Extreme Endeavors.Miller said the companys custom-made products are developed specifically for each water district.We dont have a prepackaged solution we force on a customer. We provide solutions that are tailored exactly to what a customer wants and needs. The customer provides feedback to us as we develop their solution, so they get the functionality and usability they expect, Miller said.Rocky Gallo is a water operator with the Century Volga PSD near Philippi. He said Extreme Endeavors automation of the districts drinking water system was a game-changer for his crew.If we have a break, we see it immediately and were out there right away fixing it, Gallo said. Weve eliminated the problem of tanks running dry. Weve eliminated boil water advisories. We can monitor our entire water system on one screen. Its been very helpful.Masterman said West Virginians assume fresh, clean water as their right and his company is employing the best technology available to ensure they receive it.Go turn on your water faucet. You expect clean water. Were simply enabling that to happen, he said.
Private equity funds are safe for your retirement portfolio. Mutual funds that invest in sustainable energy are not.

Thats not my view at all.

To the contrary, I consider private equity funds, with their high fees and opaque performance, to be largely inappropriate for the vast majority of people, including me, when it comes to nailing down a secure retirement. And I accept the validity of numerous studies that have found that mutual funds that emphasize sustainability can be just as safe  and generate returns just as strong  as those that hold the overall stock market.

But two recent moves by the Labor Department imply that private equity funds ought to be more welcome in 401(k) accounts all over America, while so-called E.S.G. mutual funds  those that focus on environmental, sustainability and governance factors  should be treated more cautiously than they are now.

These Labor Department regulations are curious in their own right. They allow private equity investments in workplace retirement plans and restrict E.S.G. investing in the same plans.
The protest reportedly started at 1.30pm on August 22 and involved the protesters marching to Parliament Square as well as Buckingham Palace.

Similar protests have been held in Liverpool and Manchester.

Protesters were encouraged to wear white t-shirts to the march.

'Freedom For The Children Global Walk London' took to Facebook to explain more regarding the protest.
China has launched first of the four advanced naval warships it is building for Pakistan, amid deepening economic and defence ties between the two all-weather allies.

IMAGE: Pakistani naval servicemen pull the filling nose for refuelling drill during the sea phase of Pakistan Navy's Multinational Exercise AMAN-19, in the North Arabian Sea, Karachi. Image used only for representation. Photograph: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

The launching ceremony for the first warship was held at the Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai on Sunday.

Pakistan-China defence ties turn a new chapter with the launch of the first ship of Type-054 class frigate, Pakistan's state-run APP news agency reported.

The Type-054 class, equipped with the latest surface, subsurface, anti-air weapons, combat management system, and sensors will be one of the technologically advanced surface platforms of the Pakistan Navy fleet, the report said.

Pakistan signed a contract with the China Shipbuilding Trading Company Ltd. (CSTC) for the delivery of two Type-054 A/P frigates in 2017.

Last year, the Chinese official media reported that under a major arms deal between the two all-weather allies, China would build four advanced frigates for Pakistan Navy.

The terms of the deal and the price of the ships were not revealed.

The launching of the ship coincided with the 2nd strategic dialogue between Foreign Minister of China Wang Yi and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi held at the Chinese holiday resort of Hainan on August 21.

Meanwhile in Islamabad, Foreign Minister Qureshi said on Monday that China and Pakistan were strategic partners. He said the cooperative relationship between Pakistan and China was an answer to objections regarding the ambitious USD 60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Addressing the media on his return from China, Qureshi said Pakistan and China were pursuing the project and its pace of implementation would increase and it would benefit the entire region.

The CPEC, which connects Gwadar Port in Pakistan's Balochistan with China's Xinjiang province, is the flagship project of China's ambitious multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The CPEC is a collection of infrastructure and other projects under construction throughout Pakistan since 2013. Originally valued at USD 46 billion, the projects were worth USD 62 billion as of 2017.

India has protested to China over the CPEC as it is being laid through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The BRI was launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping when he came to power in 2013.

It aims to link Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Gulf region, Africa and Europe with a network of land and sea routes. It is seen as an attempt by China to further its influence abroad with infrastructure projects funded by Chinese investments all over the world.
 Flash

Russia is interested in cooperation with China on 5G technology, TASS news agency reported on Sunday, citing Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

"We will definitely not follow the example of the Americans, who simply demand that everyone not cooperate on 5G with China, in particular with Huawei," Lavrov said at the All-Russian Youth Educational Forum "Territory of Meanings."

"On the contrary, we are interested in interacting with countries in order to jointly create modern technologies and implement them into practical life," he added.

According to Lavrov, relevant ministries and departments are actively involved in the distribution of this technology in Russia.

For Russia, as well as for the whole world, 5G is a very important topic, the minister noted.
MBABANE - There is more in the dealings of a local company that buys fruits and vegetables in South Africa for distribution in the country than meets the eye.

This, after police officers at Ngwenya Border Gate found parcels of dagga hidden in a secret compartment in the truck which belongs to Sibu Bens Fruits and Vegetables. It has since been discovered that the Mazda mini-truck was in fact specially designed to smuggle dagga for many dagga dealers in the country and the vegetable business was allegedly used as a decoy.

The name and emblem of the company is inscribed on both sides of the truck. The owner of the truck was allegedly paid lucrative sums of money to smuggle dagga into the Republic of South Africa by local dagga dealers. He was allegedly paid monies ranging from E10 000 to E35 000.

Possession

The director of public prosecutions (DPP) has since obtained an order to seize the truck in terms of Section 42 of the Prevention of Organised Crimes Act (POCA) of 2018. The driver of the truck was also found in possession of E10 000 cash which was also confiscated by the State in terms of the Act. In its application, the Crown argued that the truck was instrumentality of unlawful activity, used in a bid to smuggle dagga into the Republic of South Africa. In her founding affidavit, Principal Crown Counsel Elsie Matsebula, who is the Head of the Assets Forfeiture unit informed the court that the truck was found in the process of smuggling dagga into the neighbouring country.

It was professionally packed in vacuum plastic bags. Arrangement was made by a security officer, who once worked at the border, to have a drug enforcement officer allow the passage of the dagga through the border, submitted Matsebula. She informed the court that the consignment consisted of 58 parcels or vacuum blocks that totalled a weight of 78 kilogrammes. Matsebula said the driver of the truck, Mndeni Mhlanga, had no licence to export the dagga, neither had he declared the consignment with the Customs desk.

The false compartment was created by welding a false metal dividing the loading bin into two compartments. The dagga was hidden in the compartment underneath the open bakkie space making it very hard to detect, said the principal Crown Counsel. She told the court that the false compartment was fully accessed upon calling the registered owner of the truck, Ben Sibu Dlamini. Matsebula said Sibu opened the false compartment by removing some bolts and nuts that were used to screw a foreign metal used to create the compartment.
I believe that we can all be part of a better America by doing what each of us can, in both our personal and professional lives, to embrace and encourage equality.

Fred Alger Management, LLC (Alger), its affiliated entities, and its employee-supported charitable initiative, the Alger Candlelight Giving Program, today announced a contribution of $150,000 to charities that focus on social justice or are dedicated to addressing inequality, along with an employee matching program for these same organizations.

We have been deeply committed to bettering our community for much of our history and as a way of helping our neighbors, we have targeted our campaign to the local chapters of national organizations that are on the forefront of social justice issues, said Dan Chung, CEO and chief investment officer of Alger. I believe that we can all be part of a better America by doing what each of us can, in both our personal and professional lives, to embrace and encourage equality, he added.

The following non-profit organizations will receive $10,000 each from Alger:



Equal Justice Initiative

The Bronx Defenders Bail Reform Initiative

Brooklyn NAACP

New York Civil Liberties Union

Jay Heritage Center

All Stars Project

New Jersey Institute for Social Justice

Avenues for Justice

NYC Anti-Violence Project

The Knowledge House

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

The ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts

The Boston Racial Equity Fund

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City

Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA)

In addition to the firm donations, Alger has expanded its employee matching program. The firm will match charitable donations up to $10,000 per Alger employee to any of the above-listed organizations.

I am hopeful that we are witnessing the catalyst of dramatic change for the better, Dan said.

Algers charitable efforts, including the Alger Candlelight Giving Program and the firms Matching Gift Program, are further ways that Alger and its employees are dedicated to giving back to the community and to those who are less fortunate. Algers Candlelight Giving Program, established in 2007, is managed by Alger personnel with the goal of creating meaningful volunteer opportunities and enabling the firm to positively engage with the community. For a full list of Algers charitable efforts, visit http://www.alger.com/charitablegiving.

About Alger

Founded in 1964, Alger is widely recognized as a pioneer of growth-style investment management. Headquartered in New York City with affiliate offices in Boston and London, Alger provides U.S. and non-U.S. institutional investors and financial advisors access to a suite of growth equity separate accounts, mutual funds, and privately offered investment vehicles. The firms investment philosophy, discovering companies undergoing Positive Dynamic Change, has been in place for over 50 years. Weatherbie Capital, LLC, a Boston-based investment adviser specializing in small and mid-cap growth equity investing is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alger. For more information, please visit http://www.alger.com.
by Mathias Hariyadi

The companies Sinovac Biotech and Sinopharm will provide the basics for the drug. Some 1,620 Indonesian volunteers are being tested. Since July, China has been testing the vaccine on medical staff and border officials. With millions of citizens vaccinated, the government of Joko "Jokowi" Widodo hopes to jumpstart the economy.

Jakarta (AsiaNews)  Thanks to cooperation with China, Indonesia will produce 50 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, this according to Bambang Heriyanto, Corporate Secretary of state-owned PT Bio Farma.

Last Thursday, during a visit to the Chinas Hainan island, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi announced the signing of two preliminary agreements with Sinovac Biotech.

The Chinese company will provide the basics to produce 40 million doses of the drug. Another 10 million will be produced with the help of Chinas Sinopharm as well as G42 Healthcare, a pharmaceutical company based in the United Arab Emirates.

The Chinese vaccine will be made available to PT Bio Farma by November. Production will then start in Bandung (West Java), in January at the latest, as soon as a third round of clinical trials is completed with 1,620 volunteers, including West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil, who will be vaccinated tomorrow.

Zheng Zhongwei, director of the National Health Commissions (NHCs) science and technology development centre, said yesterday that the coronavirus vaccine has been tested since July on a select group of workers, including medical staff and border inspection officials.

Chinese authorities noted that the vaccine has shown no contraindications.

Yesterday Indonesia, the nation most affected by the pandemic in Southeast Asia, reported 2,032 new cases, bringing the total to more than 153,000 with 6,680 deaths.

The spread of pulmonary illness has prompted the government to impose a lockdown, which has brought the countrys economy to its knees.

In the second quarter of 2020, GDP contracted by 5.3 per cent, the first time in more than 20 years. Analysts estimate that it will shrink by 2 per cent in 2020; last year, it grew by 5 per cent.

According to Dahlan Iskan, Indonesia's Minister for State-owned enterprises under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004-2014), administering the vaccine to millions of people will boost economic recovery, especially if the first to benefit are industrial workers.
Washington, Aug 24 : US President Donald Trump's re-election campaign has announced a set of core priorities for his second term ahead of the four-day 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) set to begin from Monday.

The priorities, under the banner of "Fighting for You", will focus on jobs, eradicating Covid-19, healthcare, education, immigration, innovation, foreign policy, and other areas, Xinhua news agency quoted the campaign as saying on Sunday night.

If re-elected, Trump has vowed to create 10 million new jobs in 10 months, develop a vaccine against the coronavirus by the end of this year, establish permanent manned presence on the Moon, and send the first manned mission to Mars, among others.

The campaign also said Trump will continue to pursue his "America First" foreign policy.

The President "will further illuminate these plans during his acceptance speech Thursday", it said.

"Over the coming weeks, the President will be sharing additional details about his plans through policy-focused speeches on the campaign trail." Trump's speech to accept the 2020 Republican presidential nomination will be delivered on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday night despite criticism that he should not use a federal property as the backdrop for a campaign event.

This year's RNC will kick off on Monday in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Over 300 delegates, a small portion of the total, will meet in person there to formally nominate Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for the 2020 Republican ticket.

The Republican National Committee said on Sunday that it "has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform".

The committee "enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden administration", said a statement.

"The 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention." Party platforms are traditionally used to lay out the party and candidate's ideas, beliefs and goals.

In 2016, the Republican platform was 54 pages long.

This year's Democratic platform is 91 pages long.

Former Vice President Joe Biden formally accepted the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nominee on the final night of this year's Democratic National Convention last week.

Presently, Biden leads Trump by 7.6 percentage points nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Trump, however, has repeatedly dismissed polls showing him falling behind.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
ALTON  The Hayner Public Library District is now offering outdoor voter registration to Madison County residents.

The first opportunity is planned 3-5 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 27, at the entrance to the Hayner Genealogy & Local History Library, 401 State St., Alton. Additional opportunities are planned 9-11 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 1 and 3-5 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3. More dates and times will be added as needed.

Since our library facilities are closed except for curbside pickup, I dont think people know where to go to register to vote, said Hayner Public Library Executive Director, Bernadette Duvernoy.

Two forms of identification will be required to register, with at least one of the forms showing the registrants name and current address.

We do it hands free, said Duvernoy. Well fill the form out and we will have pens so people can sign their names. And then well throw the pens out.

Patrons who register to vote using the librarys outdoor voter registration service, also will be required to wear masks and practice social distancing during the registration process.

Additional information on voting, elections, polling locations, early voting, voting by mail, grace period registration, and more can be found at madisonvotes.com. Online Illinois voter registration is available at ova.elections.il.gov.

Other questions may be directed to Mary Cordes at the Hayner Public Library District, 618-462-0677.
HALIFAX - A Halifax-area company is rolling out five automated drug dispensers across Canada this week, which can provide safe, doctor-prescribed medication to opioid addicts by scanning their palm.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MySafe Verified Identity Dispensers are shown in this undated handout photo. A Halifax-area company is rolling out five drug-dispensing machines across Canada this week that it says will help battle the country's opioid crisis. Dispension Industries Inc. says its machines, which look like an ATM and weigh 360 kilograms, can dispense drugs such as hydromorphone to people addicted to opioids by scanning their palm. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO, Dispension Industries Inc. *MANDATORY CREDIT*

HALIFAX - A Halifax-area company is rolling out five automated drug dispensers across Canada this week, which can provide safe, doctor-prescribed medication to opioid addicts by scanning their palm.

Corey Yantha, president of Dispension Industries Inc., said his company's machines will be leased to pharmacies and safe injection sites in Dartmouth, N.S., London, Ont., and Vancouver and Victoria, B.C. Dispension will provide all of the data-management services.

"A person can access the machine by simply scanning their palm and the machine will know that this person gets this dose (amount) and it will dispense their medication within 15 seconds," Yantha said in a recent interview.

The machines look like ATMs, weigh about 360 kilograms and are called MySafe Verified Identity Dispenser. They are tamper-proof and provide a safe way for addicts to get clean opioids such as hydromorphone instead of off the street.

The initiative is an extension of a pilot project using the machines that began late last year in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside  an area that has been at the centre of the opioid crisis.

It's estimated more than 15,000 Canadians have died of an opioid-related overdose since January 2016. More than 5,000 of those deaths have occurred in British Columbia alone.

"We've had a pilot going in Vancouver since December," Yantha said. "We dispensed nearly 4,000 packets of clean opioids to people who were at risk."

The MySafe pilot project is the brainchild of Dr. Mark Tyndall, who has spent 20 years working in harm reduction and is a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia's school of population and public health.

He said the initial pilot enrolled 20 people, with 10 to 12 participants who remain active for follow-up surveys. Tyndall said there were no overdoses involving people who used the machines and about a third of participants have claimed to have stopped their street drug use.

"The sample size is really small obviously, but it's had a huge impact to the people's lives that are currently using it," he said in a recent interview. "We need more numbers to really show that's happening and the deployment of five more machines will give us some more evaluative power to do that."

A study published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal called on Canada to seek a new approach in battling the overdose crisis.

The study's lead author, Dr. Alexis Crabtree of the University of British Columbia, said an often-overlooked approach is the use of opioids such as methadone and buprenorphine to treat opioid addiction. Researchers showed that few people with those kinds of opioids in their system overdose.

Tyndall said there is street-level support for safe, drug-supply efforts such as the MySafe program.

"The problem right now is getting the system engaged," he said. "Providing an actual safe supply still has a lot of barriers because, in fact, we are asking physicians to prescribe drugs where they have been told not to prescribe because they are dangerous. So getting over that hurdle is ongoing."

Tyndall said the machines are programmed to an individual drug user's needs, while giving them a certain amount of autonomy and also freeing them from stigma.

"If they know that they have a secure supply of these drugs their life changes automatically," he said. "They don't have to get up in the morning and go and steal something or find money in the informal economy."

People registered for the program have to have a history of overdose and also must have tested positive for fentanyl in their urine. An encrypted profile is created for them using data from urine samples and from a biometric scan of the vein patterns in their palms.

Incorporated since 2017, Dispension had been focused on securing distribution of regulated products such as medical and recreational cannabis.

"In 2018 we shifted gears," Yantha said, "to using this technology for harm reduction. We think this (MySafe) is an innovative, cost-effective approach in dealing with an overdose crisis that has dragged on far too long."

Earlier this month, Dispension received a $500,000 loan from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency to help build dispensing machines for the program.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 24, 2020.
Police said the 14-year-old boy was the passenger in a Nissan Sentra, which police found crashed into the pole and a fence in the 100 block of North Jackson Street. Officers who responded to the scene around 11:30 p.m. found the unresponsive youth in the roadway with his friend trying to aid him, Waukegan police Commander Joe Florip said.
It is only a simulation. It's also the worst-case scenario. One day, it could be reality.

"Hurricane Phoenix" is the hypothetical disaster that would change life in the Tampa Bay area forever.

Imagine a Category 5 storm that drowns South Tampa and turns St. Petersburg into an island. The bridges rendered impassable, the airports unusable and the region's communities left on their own until help arrives. Power loss in some areas could last months. The beaches would be wiped away, as would tourism. Nearly every small business could die. Recovery would take a decade.

That is the vivid and grim picture painted by Hurricane Phoenix 2.0, the doomsday scenario hurricane simulation conducted by the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council.

If all that sounds hyperbolic, it's not. The Tampa Bay area is considered to be one of the most vulnerable population centers to a hurricane strike. The fact that we haven't been hit by a major hurricane in 99 years is nothing more than luck, experts say.

Phoenix 2.0 is the update to the council's widely-cited 2009 Phoenix simulation, which first explained how devastating a major hurricane could be. It would create millions of tons of rubble and economic damage equivalent to erasing a small nation.

The report arrives at a particularly salient moment: Climatologists predict 2020 may be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record.

But there is no simulating the human toll of such a storm.

It's impossible to calculate exactly how likely a hurricane like Phoenix is to strike Florida, much less the bay area. Only four Category 5 storms have hit the U.S. mainland in almost 170 years of recorded history. Yet, the National Hurricane Center estimates that statistically the Tampa Bay area should get hit by a Category 3 or higher storm about every three decades.

"You don't need a 5 to bring Tampa Bay to its knees," said Hurricane Center spokesman Dennis Feltgen.

One might think the worst-case scenario would have the storm's eye going right over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and marching into Tampa Bay.

It is not. The worst-case scenario is actually the simulated path of Hurricane Phoenix, approaching from the southwest and making landfall at noon north of Tampa Bay's mouth.

The planning council's model targets Indian Rocks Beach  that allows the counterclockwise rotation of the storm to sling Gulf water into the bay, raising the surface waters until they overflow into communities like an unattended bathtub with the faucet left running.

The water would rise so dramatically that most of downtown and South Tampa would be under at least 12 to 15 feet of water, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency software tool used to estimate losses from potential disasters.

The edges of the South Tampa peninsula, all of Davis and Harbour islands, the Channel District and the banks of the Hillsborough River would see water 21 feet or higher.

Westchase and Oldsmar would be entirely underwater, with surge extending all the way inland to Gunn Highway.

One would be able to swim U.S. 41 from the Manatee River to the Ikea store in Ybor City.

The swollen Tampa Bay would meet the Gulf of Mexico in Seminole, swallowing much of mid Pinellas County: The Gateway area, Feather Sound, Pinellas Park, Lealman, Kenneth City and east Largo would all be under water, plus everything south of 22nd Avenue S in St. Petersburg. The intersection of Fifth Avenue N and 34th Street would be the center of St. Pete Island.

The highest surge would hit 42 feet.

The beaches as we know them would be gone.

Hurricane Phoenix would have sustained winds of 160 mph, making it a Category 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. That is strong enough to destroy framed homes, tear roofs apart and decimate trees and power poles.

Wind gusts would reach the 200 mph mark. The takeoff speed of a Boeing 737 is about 150 mph, meaning a Phoenix-like storm could toss passenger jets aside like toys.

The simulated storm retains Category 5 strength as the eye cuts diagonally across the region, moving northeast through mid-Pinellas, the northwest corner of Hillsborough and central Pasco. By the time it reaches eastern Hernando, it would be a Category 4.

From daybreak until 7 p.m., the entire region  Citrus, Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco, Pinellas and Manatee counties  would be lashed by hurricane-force winds of at least 74 mph.

If what was left of Mexico Beach after a direct hit by Hurricane Michael in 2018  the last Category 5 storm to make landfall in Florida  serves as a comparison, Phoenix would destroy almost everything in its path.

The simulation, done at the planning council's behest by disaster planning and preparedness contractor Critical Integrated Solutions, serves dual purposes:

"It's both a warning about the chilling impacts of a catastrophic storm and a call to action for people to plan and prepare for a severe hurricane today  even if they've weathered many hurricane warnings in the past," said planning council executive director Sean Sullivan in an email to the Times.

Phoenix 2.0 echoes the last major hurricane to make landfall in Tampa Bay: The 1921 Tampa Bay hurricane, which came ashore Oct. 25 in Tarpon Springs, just 20 miles north of Phoenix's simulated landfall in Indian Rocks Beach.

Also known as the Tarpon Springs hurricane, the Category 3 storm leveled the region with up to 115 mph winds. It's 11-foot storm surge flooded downtown Tampa and turned St. Petersburg into an island. It killed eight people when the population was just 135,000 or so, and caused $10 million of damage in 1921 dollars.

The region rebuilt, driven by leaders who "sought to cover up the damage caused by the hurricane and rushed to draw attention back to the 'paradise' they marketed as Florida," according to a 2008 article that Nicole Cox wrote for the journal Tampa Bay History.

That notion of paradise persists a century later, strong enough to attract people to the bay area's endangered beaches, vulnerable coastline and expensive, low-lying neighborhoods, despite the risks.

But risk, said Jeff R. Temple, psychology professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, exists everywhere. Nearly every part of the U.S. faces a worst-case scenario.

"If it's flooding, mudslides, or earthquakes, or fires, or hurricanes, or tornadoes, it's really inescapable," said Temple, whose home, just blocks from the beach, was destroyed by Hurricane Ike in 2008.

After Ike, he said he wouldn't rebuild in Galveston. But 12 years later, he still lives there. He's resigned to another hurricane. If he has to, he'll rebuild again. Humans are like that. "We have to be resilient," he said, "we have to have short memories."

But humans are also more reactive than proactive, Temple said. Maybe Phoenix 2.0 can convince Tampa Bay residents to better prepare for their worst-case scenario:

"By putting this (model) out there, people might take it more seriously."

Not much has changed since the original Phoenix study. The new simulation predicts 10 percent higher storm surge due to Kelvin waves, large-scale waves that can change ocean height. Sea level rise in the past decade has had a negligible impact.

What has changed is the Tampa Bay area itself.

The estimated 3.1 million residents makes Tampa Bay the 17th largest economy in the U.S. If the bay area were its own country, it would have the 55th largest economy in the world.

There are also more than 400,000 more people living here compared to 2009. Downtown St. Petersburg and Tampa are more built out and at risk of flooding. Density has also increased. There are more businesses and homes in the way of storm surge, more structures with roofs to fly off. Many of those are now 11 years older.

Of the six counties' more than 1.35 million buildings, the simulation shows more than 103,679 buildings would be severely damaged or destroyed. That is an increase from the 92,827 buildings lost in the old simulation.

The 2009 storm was estimated to cost the area $233 billion in economic losses and create 41 million tons of physical wreckage.

Eleven years later, the same storm would cost the area in excess of $300 billion in losses, and leave behind more than 50 million tons of wreckage.

The damage would be worst in Pinellas County. Not one household or commercial building would have power immediately after the storm. More than 70 percent of businesses would be completely destroyed, and the county's mobile home parks would cease to exist.

The further from landfall, the better residents may fare. Hillsborough would be mostly without power, and more than 60 percent of businesses would be destroyed. Pasco County would go completely dark, and 50 percent of businesses would be gone.

What is different about Phoenix 2.0 is that it comes with a program to help small businesses prepare for and survive a major storm.

The simulation estimates 40 percent of small businesses wouldn't reopen following the storm. Within a year, 25 percent more would close.

Two years out, 90 percent of small businesses would fail because of a storm.

"So we have a lot to protect," Sullivan said.

Death is the biggest concern of Pinellas County Emergency Management Director Cathie Perkins. No amount of messaging to the public or advanced preparations can eliminate the fatalities that will result from the massive evacuation, the storm and its aftermath.

"There will inevitably be loss of life," she said.

The 2009 Hurricane Phoenix simulation estimated the storm would cause nearly 2,200 deaths; the 2.0 simulation didn't estimate a death toll or the storm's effect on poverty.

But Sullivan said the suffering will be worse among underprivileged communities, where people likely live at or below the poverty line and in older structures. They will also be less likely to buy seven days' worth of food in preparation for a storm. State officials say that's how long it could take for help to arrive.

The pandemic will also present challenges, Perkins said, for both citizens and planners. Emergency officials have made alterations to their shelter plans to accommodate pandemic risks. Pinellas County Administrator Barry Burton said each evacuee taking shelter needs 60 square feet of space instead of the old figure of 20 square feet to maintain social distancing and prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

But the pandemic has enhanced cooperation between faith groups, feeding organizations, mental health experts and governments to prepare for that aftermath, Perkins said. Those strengthened relationships would become critical if a Phoenix-like storm were to strike.

Still, governments and nonprofits can only do so much. Perkins said residents need to prepare on their own: They'll need masks and sanitizer to stay safe in shelters and at least seven days of food, water and medicine to live on after a storm.

It will take time for help to reach them, and even more time to stabilize that help for the hard months to come.

"I can't do it alone," she said.

Local governments say they're doing what they can to prepare for the worst-case scenarios outlined in the Phoenix 2.0 simulation.

If a hurricane damages the bay area's three bridges  which are most vital to Pinellas County  Perkins said they're ready for that. They've already talked with state and federal agencies about using amphibious vehicles to shuttle emergency supplies across waterways.

But a full scale recovery effort would stall if a major storm wipes out the bridges and other critical roadways, said Hillsborough County's Metropolitan Planning Organization executive director Beth Alden.

For every 2 weeks a critical road is out of service after a storm, the loss to the regional economy is equivalent to what it would have cost to have built the road to withstand such a storm in the first place.

Mitigation, like preventative health care, is fiscally responsible, said Whit Remer, Tampa's sustainability and resilience officer.

Every dollar invested in girding infrastructure for a major storm pays for itself four-fold.

"Is it worth it to make these investments now?" Alden asked. "And the answer is, 'Oh yeah, it's definitely worth it.'"

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Activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan refused to offer an apology to the Supreme Court on Monday for his two tweets against the judiciary saying what he expressed represented his bona fide belief which he continued to hold.

An insincere apology would amount to the contempt of my conscience and of an institution, Bhushan said in his supplementary statement filed in the suo motu contempt case against him by the top court, taking note of advocate Anuj Saxena's complaint.

An apology for expression of beliefs, conditional or unconditional, would be insincere, he said.

On August 20, the top court had granted time till August 24 to Bhushan to reconsider his defiant statement refusing to apologise and tender unconditional apology for contemptuous tweets against the judiciary and rejected his submission that quantum of punishment be decided by another bench.

Bhushan said as an officer of court he believes as a duty to speak up when he believes there is a deviation from its sterling record.

Therefore I expressed myself in good faith, not to malign the Supreme Court or any particular Chief Justice, but to offer constructive criticism so that the court can arrest any drift away from its long-standing role as a guardian of the Constitution and custodian of peoples' rights, he said.

He said, My tweets represented this bona fide belief that I continue to hold. Public expression of these beliefs was I believe, in line with my higher obligations as a citizen and a loyal officer of this court. Therefore, an apology for expression of these beliefs, conditional or unconditional, would be insincere.

Bhushan further said that an apology cannot be a mere incantation and any apology has to, as the court has itself put it, be sincerely made.

This is especially so when I have made the statements bona fide and pleaded truths with full details, which have not been dealt with by the court. If I retract a statement before this court that I otherwise believe to be true or offer an insincere apology that in my eyes would amount to the contempt of my conscience and of an institution that I hold in highest esteem, he said.

Bhushan said he believes the Supreme Court is the last bastion of hope for the protection of fundamental rights, the watchdog institutions and indeed for constitutional democracy itself.

It has rightly been called the most powerful court in the democratic world, and often an exemplar for courts across the globe. Today in these troubling times, the hopes of the people of India vest in this court to ensure the rule of law and the Constitution and not an untrammelled rule of the executive, he said.

The activist-lawyer said that he has never stood on ceremony when it comes to offering an apology for any mistake or wrongdoing on his part and it has been a privilege for him to have served this institution and bring several important public interest causes before it.

I live with the realization that I have received from this institution much more than I have had the opportunity to give it. I cannot but have the highest regard for the institution of the Supreme Court, he said.

Bhushan in his two-page supplementary statement said that it is with deep regret that he read the August 20 order of this court as at the hearing the court had asked him to take 2-3 days to reconsider the statement he made in the court.

However, the order subsequently states: We have given time to the contemnor to submit an unconditional apology, if he so desires, he said.

The apex court on August 14 had held Bhushan guilty of criminal contempt for his two derogatory tweets against the judiciary saying they cannot be said to be a fair criticism of the functioning of the judiciary made in the public interest.

He faces simple imprisonment of up to six months or with a fine of up to Rs 2,000 or with both as punishment.

On August 20, the top court, while reserving its verdict on the quantum of sentence to be awarded to Bhushan in the case, also rejected his submission seeking deferment of the hearing till his yet-to-be-filed review plea against its verdict, which held him guilty of contempt of the court, is decided.

The top court had said that it would hear the matter on August 25 for considering the unconditional apology if filed by Bhushan.

Reminding Bhushan of lakshman rekha', the top court had asked as to why it has been crossed and observed that it has been asked to commit an act of impropriety by sending the case to some other bench for hearing the arguments on quantum of sentence in the contempt case.

We can give you time and it is better if you (Bhushan) reconsider it. Think over it. We will give you two-three days' time, the top court had told Bhushan, who held his ground by refusing to apologise for the tweets.

I did not tweet in a fit of absence mindedness. It would be insincere and contemptuous on my part to offer an apology for the tweets that expressed what was and continues to be my bona fide belief," Bhushan had said.
New Delhi, Aug 24 : Microsoft on Monday announced a new programme to build quantum computing skills and capabilities in the academic community in India. The programme will train 900 academicians from top institutes in the country.

Quantum computers will enable new discoveries in the areas of healthcare, energy, environmental systems, smart materials, and beyond. Microsoft is bringing the capabilities to develop for this quantum future to the Cloud with "Azure Quantum".

As part of this initiative, Microsoft Garage is organising a virtual 'Train the Trainer' programme from August 24-29 in collaboration with Electronics and ICT Academies at Malaviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT), Jaipur and National Institute of Technology, Patna, the company said in a statement.

The programme will train 900 academicians from across the country through Electronics & ICT Academies at IIT Kanpur, IIT Guwahati, IIT Roorkee, MNIT Jaipur, NIT Patna, IIIT-D Jabalpur and NIT Warangal.

"Through this initiative in India, we aim to develop skills in quantum at scale, which has the potential to trigger the new frontier of innovation, shaping the future of the IT industry in this part of the world," said Rajiv Kumar, Managing Director, Microsoft India Development Center, and Corporate Vice President, Enterprise+Devices India.

The quantum training programme supports an initiative by Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) to enhance the skills of the academicians in imparting next level technological skills for future generations.

Key themes would include an introduction to quantum information, quantum concepts such as superposition and entanglement, processing of information using qubits and quantum gates, as well as an introduction to quantum machine learning and quantum programming, Microsoft said.

"Through this, we aim to equip academia in India with the requisite knowledge to develop a comprehensive Quantum learning curriculum in their institutions and help develop these skills among some of the brightest minds in the country," said Reena Dayal, Director, Microsoft Garage India & Chair for IEEE Quantum SIG.

Azure Quantum is an open cloud ecosystem enabling developers to access diverse quantum software, hardware, and solutions from Microsoft and its partners.
PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc attended the virtual third Mekong-Lancang Cooperation (MLC) Leaders Meeting on August 24, together with high-ranking leaders from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and China.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the virtual third Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Leaders Meeting on August 24 (Photo: VNA)

Themed "Enhancing Partnership for Shared Prosperity", the meeting reviewed the MLCs recent cooperation and discussed orientations to promote its collaboration in the coming period.

Regarding the cooperation results, the leaders highlighted important progress made since the second Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Leaders Meeting such as progress in cooperation in Mekong River water management, including the organization of the first Ministerial Meeting of Lancang-Mekong Water Resources Cooperation, and the initiation of cooperation between the MLC and the Mekong River Commission. More than 300 technical assistance projects have been implemented with the support of the MLC Special Fund while the Mekong Research Centre and specialised cooperation centres were established.

Regarding the future cooperation orientations, the leaders reaffirmed their determination to jointly build a MLC region of peace, stability, sustainable development and prosperity; and agreed to promote cooperation on three specific pillars.

On security - politics, the countries agreed to maintain high-level exchanges; strengthen dialogue between political parties, parliarments, governments and localities; and promote cooperation in solving non-traditional security issues and in public health to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, and restore economic growth. The meeting welcomed China's proposal to establish the MLC Special Fund for public health to support the regional countries response to the pandemic and the health sector later.

In terms of economy and sustainable development, the MLC countries will promote regional connectivity in both hard and soft infrastructure; facilitate investment trade and public-private cooperation; step up cooperation in rural development and poverty reduction, development of digital economy and science-technology, management and sustainable use of water resources in the Mekong River, environment and biodiversity protection.

Regarding culture - society and people-to-people exchange, they will implement educational cooperation activities and training programmes to develop high-quality human resources that meet market demand in the era of the fourth Industrial Revolution; while promoting tourism cooperation and cultural exchange.

They also agreed to make more effective use of the MLC Special Fund and improve the quality and practicality of the project, thereby bringing pragmatic benefits to the people of the six countries.

The leaders spent much time discussing cooperation in the management and use of water resources in the Mekong River. They agreed that in the face of the increasingly serious impacts of climate change, riparian countries should further promote the sharing of hydrological data of river basins, conduct joint research and policy dialogue, manage floods and droughts, and closely coordinate with the Mekong River Commission.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said China is ready to share the year-round hydrological data of the Lancang River, which is a section of the Mekong River flowing through the Chinese territory, and wishes to discuss the building of a channel sharing hydrological data between Mekong-Lancang countries and the implementation of joint cooperation projects on flood and natural disaster warning.

Speaking at the event, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc highlighted the criteria that the MLC needs to ensure to successfully realise the set objectives for a MLC region of peace, prosperity and sustainable development. They are cooperation on the basis of trust, sincere, and frank and friendly relations; ensuring the principles of equality, consensus, mutual benefit, and respect for international law; and taking people-centered and sustainable development as a consistent content.

He stressed the need to attach importance to finding solutions to common challenges and ensuring the legitimate interests of the member countries.

The MLCs activities must be conducted on the basis of promoting the strengths of the member countries, he said, adding that the regional countries should work harmoniously with ASEAN and other Mekong cooperation mechanisms.

In the context of the region facing unprecedented challenges, the PM emphasised that the MLC should focus on cooperation to minimise the negative effects of the COVID-19 and prevent disruptions in the supply chain, as well as to meet the production and business needs of enterprises.

They need to share information on and experience in COVID-19 prevention and control in a regular, timely and transparent manner; and promote cooperation in vaccine production and facilitate vaccine access, Phuc said.

The country should also cooperate in the use and management of Mekong River water resources and seek long-term solutions to the sustainable development of the basin; share year-round hydrological information and data; strengthen the network of automatic water resources monitoring stations; consolidate natural disaster forecasting and warning systems; and coordinate with the Mekong River Commission and international partners.

At the end of the meeting, the leaders of the six member countries adopted the Vientiane Declaration and witnessed the transfer of the role of MLC co-chair from Laos to Myanmar.

Vietnam actively contributes to Mekong  Lancang cooperation: Deputy FM

As a reliable partner and responsible member of the international community, Vietnam has actively participated in and effectively contributed to the Mekong  Lancang Cooperation (MLC) mechanism from the very first days of its establishment, stated Permanent Deputy Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son.

In an interview granted to the Vietnam News Agency on the occasion of the virtual third Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Leaders' Meeting on August 24, Son said Vietnamese ministries and sectors have actively taken part in drafting documents in a constructive and cooperative spirit, for the common interests of the whole region.

At the event, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and senior leaders from other member countries discussed major issues affecting the regions sustainable development and necessary solutions to related challenges, the Deputy FM stressed.

The meeting focused on reviewing the implementation of the first 5-year cooperation plan in the 2018-2022 period among its six member nations  China, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and their future cooperation orientations, he noted.

The leaders appreciated the practical and effective implementation of cooperation in the three key pillars of security and politics, economy and sustainable development, and cultural exchange between the MLC member countries, especially the MLC Plan of Action for 2018-2020, which has benefited people and enterprises.

The close and effective cooperation among the member nations was also shown clearly in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in recent times, he said.

The leaders also applauded achievements in the regional cooperation in the last two years, Son said, noting that the countries have implemented more than 300 technical assistance projects across areas, including trade, investment, tourism, agriculture, and water resources management.

A number of specialised cooperation centres such as the Global Centre for Mekong Studies, the Water Resources Cooperation Centre, the Centre for Environmental Cooperation, and the Centre for Agricultural Cooperation, were established and have seen stable operation, he said.

The leaders affirmed their determination to promote cooperation to address environmental and socio-economic challenges facing the countries, through expanding cooperation in the three main pillars and five priority areas, including connectivity, production capacity cooperation, cross-border economic cooperation, agriculture and poverty alleviation, and water resources management.

The highlights that were agreed upon by the leaders at the meeting include strengthening cooperation in public health to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic via joint research activities, policy dialogue and sharing experience in disease prevention and control, improving the capacity of the countries in handling urgent medical problems, and ensuring equal access to vaccines and medicine.

Development of infrastructure, digital economy and hi-tech agriculture, climate change adaptation, environmental management, ensuring stability of production and regional supply chains, and cooperation in education-training and human resources development were also key issues put on table, Son said.

According to Son, the meeting spent a lot of time discussing cooperation in managing water resources in the Mekong River, and the leaders agreed to further strengthen cooperation in managing and using the Mekong River water resources sustainably.

The six countries will organise a periodic MLC Ministerial Meeting on water resources cooperation, promote policy dialogue, share information, data and experience in cross-border water management, build a channel sharing information on water resources, conduct joint studies on Mekong River water resources and collaboration activities on climate change adaptation, hydropower dam safety, and flood and drought management.

The leaders also highly valued the proposal to set up a hydrological data centre and share data sources for the Mekong countries in the context of severe drought.

Thai PM proposes four Mekong-Lancang cooperation areas

Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha proposed four major cooperation agenda in the virtual 3rd Mekong-Lancang Cooperation (MLC) Leaders Meeting, chaired by Laos on August 24.

According to Thai Government Spokesperson Anucha Burapachaisri, PM Prayut said the four areas of cooperation that Thailand attaches importance to include water resources management in the Mekong River, public healthcare cooperation, promotion of sub-regional connectivity, and post-COVID-19 economic recovery.

The leader spoke highly of the increasingly close cooperation among the MLC member nations, saying that the meeting demonstrates the commitment of all parties to continuously expand their cooperation in the context of a series of challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The event serves as a forum for the countries to coordinate actions in order to turn challenges into opportunities for strengthening cooperation and partnerships, he said.

Thailand believes that the Vientiane Declaration will underline the MLC's collective commitment to further enhancing political and security cooperation, as well as in economic cooperation and sustainable development, among others, he stressed.

The MLC cooperation mechanism, grouping Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and China, was initiated by Thailand in 2012. Vietnam has actively participated in and made significant contributions to the mechanism. VNA
Bomb attacks in southern Philippines

Suspected Islamic militants set off powerful bombs in a southern Philippine town on Monday, killing at least 10 soldiers and civilians despite extra tight security because of threats of attacks by the Islamic State group-aligned militants, military officials said.

Regional military commander Lt Gen Corleto Vinluan said at least five soldiers and four civilians were killed in the first attack when bomb attached to a motorcycle exploded at noon near two parked army trucks in front of a grocery and a computer shop in Jolo town in Sulu province.

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Bomb attack It was a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device which exploded while our soldiers were on a marketing run, Vinluan said.

A second blast nearby, apparently from a female suicide attacker, occurred about an hour later and killed the bomber and a soldier, Vinluan and other officials said.

A third unexploded bomb was reportedly found in a public market. Jolo was immediately placed in a security lockdown by troops and police.

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Bomb attack

Nearly 40 soldiers, police and civilians were wounded in the bomb attacks, military and police officials said.

The first bombing was carried out near a town plaza and a Roman Catholic cathedral in the predominantly Muslim province.

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There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but the military blamed an Abu Sayyaf militant commander, Mundi Sawadjaan, for the bombings.
La Siesta hotel and hospitality chain is now up for sale in Hanoi's Old Quarter

At the afternoon in a weekend of early-August, Tran Quang Hoi, director of Ecobuy, a consultant firm specialising business plan control and M&A support for Japanese partners, was constantly chatting with overseas clients looking for investment opportunities in Vietnam, even amidst the difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic cannot stop the investment. In addition to the processing and manufacturing industry, hospitality is emerging as a promising sector for investors, and we have received hundreds of orders recently, instead of the dozens in the same period last year, asserted Hoi.

According to Ecobuy, this is a good chance for both local and foreign investors to pour into hospitality, which had been abandoned in the past months, pushing owners to the point where they cannot sustain losses any longer. Seeing the potential of this sector, a lot of Japanese investors including Supper Hotel, Kuretakesou Inn, Toyoko Inn, Daiichi Jyutaku, Watabe, Sakura, and Azumaya are looking for hospitality projects to acquire.

"They are interested in projects under construction or finished, or operating with hundreds of bedrooms in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and popular tourism locations, Hoi added.

Meanwhile, according to Sohovietnam Real Estate Consulting JSC, the demand for buying hospitality projects is increasing. Particularly, investors are looking to put an estimated VND8-10 trillion ($347.83-434.8 million) into hotels and resorts.

Hospitality is still a spotlight of Vietnam, the profitability of these projects is certain, especially those that are bought cheap, a Japanese investor asserted.

According to Savills Vietnam, the performance of hotels has been hugely impacted by COVID-19. Average occupancy has dropped to approximately 20 per cent across the first half, which has put financial pressure on hotel owners, especially at new hotels.

Most investors are approaching this sector now expecting to pick up a few distressed assets and hold them until the market bounces back after the pandemic. However, no one is prepared to sell at a loss even now, as the market still offers multiple options to restructure debts for owners to overcome their momentary difficulties. We have not seen many completed mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals in the hotel sector since the beginning of the year, Hoang Nguyet Minh, associate director of investment, Savills Hanoi told VIR.

Most developers are looking for land developments at present so that they can wait out market recovery. Land prices remain unchanged since before COVID-19.

While there are operating hotels available for sale, the pricing is still high, and whoever acquires the hotels now might just take on the challenges shouldered by the current owner, with prospects bleak at least till the end of the year. The upside of M&A during the pandemic is that good hotels would not be on sale if there was no novel coronavirus, so investors can potentially find high-value assets in the 3-5-star segment.

The hospitality market cannot get by with just domestic travellers, especially as the market has been growing strongly in Vietnam in recent years. However, as soon as COVID-19 is under control, Vietnam can reopen international flights, and hospitality will be the first sector to recover and even grow stronger, Minh from Savills Vietnam asserted.
The water level in the Yamuna rose close to the warning level on Monday, after Haryana released nearly 30,000 cusecs of water into the Hathnikund barrage in five stages starting midnight, flood control officials said.

The water level recorded at Delhis Old Railway Bridge was 204.38 metres, flowing close to the warning level of 204.50 metres. This was after 5,883 cusecs water was released from Haryanas Hathinikund barrage at 8am, said officials of the Delhi governments Irrigation and Flood Control (I&FC) department. By 4pm, however, the water level had receded slightly and was at 204.30 metres.

The I&FC officials said the water level has not risen beyond 204.38 metres since 8am and, unless Haryana releases a high volume of water, the level is likely to remain below the warning mark.

Although the release of water into the barrage every four hours is a regular exercise, during the monsoon, the volume is exponentially higher, owing to rainfall in the hilly regions and the accumulation in the barrage.

According to flood control officials, at midnight Sunday, Haryana released 3,060 cusecs of water after which the level at the Old Railway Bridge touched 204.25 metres.

At 4am, 3,060 cusecs more was released and the level became 204.36 metres. Then at 8am, 5,883 cusecs was released after which the level rose to 204.38 metres, the closest it went to the warning mark. At noon, 10,231 cusecs more was released into the barrage, but by then, the water level had started receding and was recorded 204.26 metres. At 4pm, 7,330 cusecs more was released and the water level was recorded at 204.30 metres.

Water is released into the barrage every four hours. On a regular basis, only 350 cusecs of water is released. During the monsoon, because of a higher volume of water in the barrage coupled with the rainfall in the hilly regions, more water is released, which leads to a surge in the Yamuna level. It takes about 36 to 72 hours for the released water to reach Delhi. We are continuously monitoring the water level, Sanjeev Kumar, SDM (Preet Vihar) and officer-in-charge, Flood Control.

Last year, Haryana had released more than eight lakh cusecs of water a day, after which the water level had breached the danger mark of 205.33 metres. The river had inundated low-lying areas and evacuation and relief operations had to be launched by the Delhi government. The government had pitched over 1,300 makeshift tents to temporarily house those who were shifted out of flooded areas. The water level had hit a high of 206.60 metres, before it started receding.

Kumar said preparations are already underway in case a higher volume of water is released and evacuation operations are needed to be launched. We have identified locations for pitching tents. But this time, since social distancing norms are prevalent on account of Covid-19, we have also identified schools where people can be housed while maintaining a physical distance of six feet from one another, Kumar said.

Delhi had witnessed major floods in 1978 when the water level in the Yamuna rose to the highest ever level recorded of 207.49 metres.

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The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) was founded in 1985, three years after Ayn Rand's death, by Ed Snider and Leonard Peikoff, Rand's legal heir. The stated purpose of the Institute was "to introduce young people to Ayn Rand's novels, to support scholarship and research based on her ideas, and to promote the principles of reason, rational self-interest, individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism to the widest possible audience."

The current website states: "ARI also engages in research and advocacy efforts, applying Rand's ideas to current issues and seeking to promote her philosophical principles of reason, rational self-interest and laissez-faire."

ARI's first projects were college scholarship essay contests based on Rand's novels and developing a network of college clubs in order to study Objectivism. They were worthy projects that introduced people to Ayn Rand's ideas. Over time, however, the intellectuals at the Institute have become involved in political analysis and authoritatively pronounce their conclusions on controversial topics that Ayn Rand herself didn't address directly, dismissing those who disagree and refusing to consider that they might be wrong about those conclusions.

Here are a few of the controversies:

Political position. The Ayn Rand Institute website states, "We are neither of the right nor the left[.]" Yet Ayn Rand defined the right as "those who are predominantly in favor of individual freedom and capitalism  and the word 'leftist' to denote the views of those who are predominantly in favor of government controls and socialism." By her own definition, ARI should be on the right.

Trump. Yaron Brook, who was executive director from 2000 to 2017 and is the current chairman of the board, said it is a huge mistake to be a Trump-supporter and that there is no way in hell that Ayn Rand would have voted for Trump. ARI put out an article by Onkar Ghate, its chief philosophy officer, claiming that Trump won the presidency because he projected himself as a dictator and that this revealed disturbing things about the American citizens.

Ayn Rand had some views about whom to vote for in past elections. In the run-up to the 1972 election, Rand wrote that she did not like Nixon but advocated voting for him because while Nixon could not be counted on to save the country, for certain McGovern could destroy the country. She said, "It is against statism that we have to vote. It is statism that has to be defeated  and defeated resoundingly." She was consequently very happy to see the Americans elect Nixon.[1] For certain, Hillary Clinton could destroy the country, yet Ghate and Brook were not happy when Trump was elected. Intellectuals at ARI voted for Hillary Clinton and plan to vote for Biden, who could also destroy the country.

Brook even went so far as to say anyone who supports Trump is a 5th-column Objectivist. Come to find out, Leonard Peikoff donated to the Trump campaign in February 2020.

Toward the end of Brook's podcast on January 2, 2018, he said, "Do I buy that Trump colluded with the Russians? Yeah, I believe that[.] ... I don't have any evidence to support it[.]" Brook is forming a conclusion without proof. This is not objective and is in conflict with Rand's philosophy, which is based on reason.

Immigration. Many of the intellectuals at ARI support open immigration, which has created a firestorm among Objectivists. The open immigration side claims that Rand was in favor of it based on a comment that she made about it during a question-and-answer period after one of her lectures. They do not talk about what she might have said today based on the context of how our country and the world has changed since she was alive.

Ghate thinks controls on immigration will hasten the decline of the culture. Harry Binswanger, a former associate of Ayn Rand, founder of ARI and current member of the board of directors, defends open immigration without border patrols, border police, border checks, or passports, but without citizenship or voting rights. "I'm very afraid that the actual reason for limiting immigration is xenophobia, which is simply a polite word for racial bigotry."

Leonard Peikoff understands that the context has changed. In 2013, he stated that immigration today means the destruction of this country because the majority of immigrants will vote Democrat. Yaron Brook didn't agree. He and Peikoff later had a debate about their disagreement about immigration.

Polyamory. In Brook's podcast of December 17, 2018, he was asked about polyamory. He told the caller he doesn't see anything morally wrong with it as long as people are up front about what they are doing so to go ahead and try it. This sounds as though he is advocating hedonism, which Rand was adamantly against.

Black Lives Matter. On October 17, 2015, Brook said, "Black Lives Matter has a legitimate base. But then they spout all this Marxist nonsense and they accuse all white people of being racist." What is the movement's legitimate base? He does not say, but a group that espouses Marxism is Marxist and does not have a legitimate base. Ayn Rand was one of the staunchest opponents to communism and would have never given a shred of legitimacy to Black Lives Matter.

White Privilege. Greg Salmieri, an intellectual at ARI, thinks we should be sensitive to the idea of white privilege. He said the legitimate part of white privilege is that there are some issues such as bigotry and discrimination that you are insulated from noticing if you are in a group that doesn't face it. Salmieri likes the term "white blindness" instead of "privilege."

Are people determined to be insensitive to certain injustices because of the group they are in? And the group they are in is determined by the color of their skin? This is racism according to Rand's definition.

Many ARI intellectuals and employees are careful to say their views are their personal views and do not reflect those of ARI, but then they resort to intimidation by accusing others of not being "real" Objectivists or "fifth column" Objectivists because they disagree on some issue. On October 24, 2017, Brook said on Facebook, "Just to be clear  no one speaks for Ayn Rand and Objectivism other than Ayn Rand. But I do speak for ARI." What is that supposed to mean if ARI is seeking to "promote the philosophical principles" of Ayn Rand?

ARI people should feel free to express their personal views, but it should not be done under the auspices of Ayn Rand's name. An organization dedicated to the philosophy of reason should welcome debates about the controversial subjects of the day rather than insist that it has all the answers, because it doesn't. These people disagree even among themselves, as Brook did with Peikoff. Furthermore, their personal views are coming under the Institute's name, not just them individually. Ideal, the Institute's publication, promotes certain political positions, and it leans left.

ARI started out with good intentions, but the danger of having an organization in the name of Ayn Rand is that the public can think the ideas coming from that organization reflect her views. If some people in the organization misapply her philosophy that becomes a major problem. Rand was opposed to Objectivism becoming an organized movement. One of her concerns was that her views might be misrepresented.[2] She was right to be concerned.

Susan Hanson has studied Ayn Rand's philosophy since the 1960s.
Former prime minister John Howard has been taken to hospital for tests.

The 81-year-old was taken in an ambulance after visiting his GP in Sydney.

His office said he is having checks as a precautionary measure but did not say what the checks were for.

Former prime minister John Howard (pictured with wife Jeannette in 2019) has been rushed to hospital

The health issue is not thought to be related to coronavirus.

Five years ago the former Liberal Party leader was treated for blocked arteries at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney and had two stents inserted.

Mr Howard was prime minister from 1996 to 2007.

His most notable achievements include bringing in new gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre and introducing the nationwide value-added tax.

On his 80th birthday last year, he said: 'I feel the same as I did yesterday.

'I'm very happy to be alive and to have had the privilege of being born in Australia.'

In April Mr Howard said Scott Morrison is handling the coronavirus crisis 'very well' and that the pair regularly spoke on the phone.
Parliament House is lit up at dusk in State Square on October 6, 2013 in Darwin, Australia. (Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

Incumbent Northern Territory Government Likely to Retain Power, Amid Struggling Economy

Chief Minister Michael Gunners Labor government looks to retain power, as vote counting continues on Aug. 24 in the Northern Territory (NT) election. However, the minister will have to contend with a struggling economy and ballooning public debt in a post-pandemic environment.

The three-way race, which also includes conservative-leaning Country Liberal Party (CLP), and newcomers Territory Alliance, is the first major political contest in Australia since the COVID-19 outbreak.

Chief Minister Michael Gunner told supporters on Aug. 22 that he was very confident Labor would form the next government after Labor secured 38.9 percent of the primary vote, compared to the CLPs 31.8 percent.

Northern Territory border into South Australia, on Oct. 19, 2015. (Mark Kolbe/Getty Images for The World Solar Challange)

Gunners team is on track to take at least 12 seats in the 25-seat NT Legislative Assembly, with expectations 13 seats will be secured, delivering a majority for the incumbent government.

In 2016, Labor won government in a significant victory taking 18 seats and ousting the CLP.

According to Prof. Rolf Gerritsen from Charles Darwin University, the Labor vote has normalised in the latest election.

The lower Labor vote (in 2020) was because it was artificially high in the big swing they got in 2016, when they won 18 seats. So, it was a normal correction,' he told The Epoch Times on Aug. 24.

For various reasons, they were very unpopular before COVID-19 hit, so their primary vote improved over the election period, he continued.

In February, the Johnston byelection saw the Labor Party poll just 30 percent of the primary vote, winning the seat on preferences.

The result foreshadowed shifting public sentiment toward the party, with a struggling economy, and concerns over public debt, which has increased from $1.7 billion in 2016, to $8.2 billion in 2020.

Tourists gather to watch sunset colours on Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, after a permanent ban on climbing the monolith at the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australias Northern Territory on October 26, 2019. (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)

However, with the advent of COVID-19 lockdowns, the Gunner government has benefitted, according to Gerritsen.

He presented himself as the harried protector of Territorians lives, a stance Labor took into the election, he wrote in The Conversation.

The recession receded into the background of public consciousness, he continued.

The NT election also saw one of the lowest turnouts for Indigenous voters, highlighting the disconnect between indigenous communities and politics.

For example, only 24 percent of the 1,529 enrolled residents at Maningrida voted, a town located in regional Arnhem Land.

According to Gerritsen, Indigenous communities may have decided its a waste of time voting for anybody in the NTs whitefella politics.

He told The Epoch Times however that: The low turnout of Indigenous voters wont have much effect because they are mostly locked up in separate bush seats.

Labor performed best in the NTs capital city Darwin.

Vote counting is still ongoing for Arnhem, Barkly, Brennan, Braitling, Daly, Katherine and Namatjira.
By Monday afternoon, Michigan officials should have a better idea of just how daunting balancing the state budget will be this year.

The Michigan Department of Treasury and House and Senate fiscal agencies are meeting Monday to come up with an updated estimate on how much money the state can expect in tax revenue for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
RICHMOND, Va.  Jerry Falwell Jr.s future at evangelical Liberty University was unclear late Monday, with a senior school official saying he had resigned from his leadership post but Falwell telling at least one news outlet that he does not plan to leave permanently.

A formal announcement from the school was expected later Monday, according to the school official, who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it. The disclosure of Falwells resignation followed the publication of news stories about his wifes sexual encounters with a much younger business partner.

But Virginia Business reported that Falwell, who was already on an indefinite leave of absence, said in a phone interview he has not agreed to leave the post permanently, nor does he plan to.

Falwell did not return a call from the AP seeking comment.

The uncertainty developed a day after Falwell issued a statement to The Washington Examiner publicly disclosing that his wife had an extramarital affair and saying the man involved had been threatening to reveal the relationship to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies.

Falwell said he was seeking mental health counseling after dealing with fallout from the affair, which he said he had no role in.

Over the course of the last few months this persons behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public, the statement said.

But hours before Falwell resigned, Reuters reported that Falwell knew of his wifes affair and participated in some of the liaisons as a voyeur. The news agency based the information on an interview with Giancarlo Granda, whom they identified as the man involved in the affair.

Attorneys for Falwell and attorneys for the school were negotiating the details of a possible departure late Monday, according to a person close to the schools of board trustees who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss it.

Falwell, an early and ardent supporter of Trump, began a leave of absence from the university on Aug. 7 after an uproar sparked by a photo he posted on social media showing him with his pants unzipped, stomach exposed and arm high around the waist of his wifes pregnant assistant. Falwell has said the photo was taken at a costume party during a family vacation.

Critics of the photo said it was evidence of hypocritical behavior from the leader of a university where students must follow a strict code of conduct that includes modest dress and a ban on alcohol consumption and premarital sex.

The possible break with Falwell came amid growing calls for an overhaul of leadership at the school, where alumni recently launched a campaign urging him to step aside.

I really think the board of directors should have done this a long time ago, and if theres anybody who needs to go next, it needs to be them, said Maina Mwaura, a Liberty graduate who helped organize a June letter from Black alumni criticizing Falwell.

This school has become the laughingstock of the country, Mwaura added, noting that the board could have prevented the current furor had it acted more quickly to rein in Falwell. The founders son was given a long leash for poor behavior, Mwaura said, because he was the rainmaker who brought in significant financial resources.

Falwells work to shore up Libertys finances after taking over as president in 2007 bolstered his already significant goodwill among the schools board members, several of whom were close to his late father. But as the younger Falwells propensity toward divisive public behavior grew  and particularly after his endorsement of Trump in early 2016  dissatisfaction built up with what some critics saw as a shift toward being conservative first and Christian second.

--The Associated Press

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Huntsville, Alabama, man Rodney Smith Jr., whose incredible project of traveling to all 50 states to mow lawns for disabled veterans began in 2016, is now adding grocery and supply drops to his mission. Smith founded Raising Men Lawn Service, an organization that teaches kids to mow free lawns for those in need in their community, as explained to People of Alabama.

Now with the pandemic forcing many sick and elderly people to shelter in place for several months, Smith has expanded his mission.

Besides mowing lawns, he drops off essential supplies such as hand sanitizer, fresh fruit, water, toilet paper, and other items for those who cant get outside of their house, as he told Al.com.

(Illustration  Sergey Lavrentev/Shutterstock)

Smith told WZTV that he received a divine calling in 2015 to mow lawns for those who couldnt after witnessing an elderly man struggling with his. That night I decided to mow free lawns for the elderly, disabled, single moms, and veterans, she said.

Originally from Bermuda, Smith studied at Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, which became his home base ever since. From that initial kind gesture came a vision that would take Smith through all 50 states, leaving neat and tidy lawns, not to mention grateful owners, all along the way.

His act of service inspired a lot of appreciation online, and donations from people on social media literally fueled his lawnmower and his project.

(Illustration  Robin J Gentry/Shutterstock)

Once he got going, Smith enlisted hundreds of thousands of children across the United States to get involved through his foundation. We have boys and girls taking part in the program, he told Good Morning America. We are trying to encourage boys and girls to get out there and make a difference, one lawn at a time.

After achieving his goal of mowing in all 50 states in 2019, Smith hasnt stopped. Im just mowing and doing what I love to do best: helping others, he told Al.com. Meanwhile, he created a 50 Yard Challenge, in which kids agree to mow 50 different lawns in their community. When they reach their target, the foundation gives them a free lawn mower and string trimmer, plus a leaf blower.

The pandemic has also added a new dimension to his work. While he can no longer give a big hug to the people whose lawns he mows, Smith can be of service by dropping off much-needed supplies to those who are at risk and cant go out.

The people whom Smith helps are obviously grateful to have someone bring them basic essentials as well as to have their lawn taken care of. They know this, too, shall pass, and things will get better, Smith said. So far the reaction to Smiths enhanced lawn care and delivery has been enthusiastic among people sheltering at home.

As for the future, Smith has lots of ideas to expand on the work of the foundation, including another 50 States, 50 Yards tour. Of course, Smith remains committed to showing veterans that they matter. We need to help our veterans  we need to do more, he told CNN. They have sacrificed their lives so the least we can do is help them when they need it.

We would love to hear your stories! You can share them with us at emg.inspired@epochtimes.nyc
A Sherman Oaks, California, estate with an interesting Hollywood connection is now on the market for $5.475 million. The secluded compound, consisting of a five-bedroom main house and a three-bedroom guest cottage, was once owned by jazz musician Ray Anthony, who was a popular big-band leader in the 1940s and 50s. He was rumored to have had a romance with Marilyn Monroe, though in 2018 the now-98-year-old Anthony told The Hollywood Reporter that the pair were just friends. It is also rumored that the iconic actress lived with him in his Spanish-style house for a time.

Speculation aside, what is known for sure is that Anthony threw a huge, star-studded party in Monroes honor at the home in 1952. And, according to the propertys real estate agent, the dwelling has welcomed other A-list guests in the years since, including Quincy Jones, Sharon Stone, and Gene Simmons.

See the video.

The residence sits on a little over half an acre and has a classic stucco exterior and red terra-cotta roof tiles. Inside the main house, quite a few rooms feature eclectic decor, including the kitchen, which has distressed wood cabinetry. The living room is decorated in earth tones and features an intricately patterned bar area and upholstery on the walls behind it. Large windows look out from the space to the red-brick pool deck, which has a large staircase leading to an upper portion of the property. A metal spiral staircase leads from the living room up to the second floor, where the main suite and two of the guest bedrooms are located.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
President Donald J. Trump applauds during a rally in Old Forge Pa., Thursday, August 20, 2020 Read more

The Republican National Convention begins Monday, offering President Donald Trump and his party the chance to offer a rebuttal to scathing attacks tossed out by prominent Democrats  including former President Barack Obama  during their convention last week.

Unlike the Zoom-style convention Democrats aired last week, Republicans say they are opting for a mostly live event that will look and feel similar to gatherings in years past, though obviously with fewer people. It will culminate with Trump delivering his acceptance speech as the partys official nominee Thursday in the South Lawn of the White House, a major break from presidential norms that have seen candidates keep the office of the president and the campaign separate.

After initially pulling out of North Carolina due to coronavirus restrictions, much of the convention will be held across several federally owned venues. That includes Fort McHenry in Baltimore and the Andrew Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., which is just around the corner from the Trump International Hotel (which increased its rates for the nights of the convention, according to the Daily Beast).

While Donald Trump, Jr., the presidents oldest son, is the featured speaker Monday, Pennsylvania congressional candidate Sean Parnell is also scheduled to speak on the conventions opening night.

Heres everything you need to know to watch or stream the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention:

What time does the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention start?

The primetime portion of the Republican National Convention is scheduled to begin at 8:30 p.m. Eastern and last two and a half hour.

The convention will stream live on the RNCs website and across all their social media channels. In Philadelphia, it will also air live on NBC, ABC, CBS, and WHYY, with most networks opting to carry the final hour beginning at 10 p.m. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News will also offer live coverage starting hours before the event begins, each offering their own analysis.

Comcast Xfinity X1 subscribers can watch all the programming by simply saying RNC into their remote.

You can watch live here on Inquirer.com, courtesy of the Washington Post:

Who will be speaking Monday night?

On Sunday, Republicans released a list of the major speakers each night, but suggested there might be a surprise or two. Speakers expected to take part Monday, in no apparent order, include:

Maryland congressional candidate Kim Klacik

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was killed in the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting

Mountain Mudd Espresso owner Tanya Weinreis

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St. Louis couple charged after pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott

Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise

Pennsylvania congressional candidate Sean Parnell

Trump campaign official Kimberly Guilfoyle

Donald Trump, Jr.

Whats the full schedule for the 2020 Republican National Convention?

The Republican National Convention will take place over four nights this week, from Monday to Thursday. Convention programming is scheduled to air live each night from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern.

Here are notable speakers for the remaining nights of the convention, including local lawmakers:

Tuesday: First Lady Melania Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Eric Trump

Wednesday: Vice President Mike Pence, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst

Thursday: President Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew

Who wont be speaking at the Republican National Convention?

While the Democrats convention included a ideology-diverse array of speakers (including two former presidents) and a handful of Republicans, a number of high-profile Republicans arent scheduled to speak at this weeks convention.

President George W. Bush, former First Lady Laura Bush, and former Vice President Dick Cheney arent on the schedule, which isnt all that surprising considering none spoke on behalf of Trump in 2016 (Bushs Secretary of State, Colin Powell, spoke at the Democratic National Convention).

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who currently holds the third-highest position in Republican House leadership, it currently not slated to speak. Neither is Utah. Sen. Mitt Romney, though thats hardly surprising considering hes the sole Republican to vote in favor of impeaching Trump.

What are conventions like this actually for?

While political conventions have largely grown into television events designed to promote political parties and their leaders, the business of the convention includes formally nominating the primary winner  in this case, Trump  as the partys official presidential nominee. That roll call vote (with a reduced delegate count due to coronavirus regulation) took place in-person earlier today in Charlotte.

Another important function that usually takes place is formalizing a party platform. On Sunday, Republicans announced due to the scaled back convention they will adjourn without adopting a new platform. Instead, according to a new resolution, Republicans will continue to enthusiastically support Trump and his agenda.
The March of the Defenders of Ukraine has started in the Taras Shevchenko Park in the center of Kyiv.

A correspondent of the Interfax-Ukraine agency reports that tens of thousands of combatants, activists of various political forces and townspeople gathered in the park and on the nearby streets of the capital.

Veterans of the war in Donbas formed 48 columns, in front of the March are the mothers and family members of the killed servicemen, relatives of those killed on Maidan during the Revolution of Dignity, the Ukrainian military who were wounded in the battles in Donbas.

Also among the first will be activists of the FreeRiff, FreeKuzmenko, FreeDugar movements, accused in the Sheremet case.

People fill the entire Shevchenko Park, Volodymyrska Street from the intersection with Shevchenko Boulevard to the intersection with Lev Tolstoy Street, as well as Shevchenko Boulevard from Tereschenkivska Street to the Universytet metro station.

It is planned that the column of participants in the March of the Defenders of Ukraine will pass down Shevchenko Boulevard, turn to Khreschatyk and go to the European Square, where the action "No jokes with independence" will take place.

Thousands of people came to support the veterans and take part in the procession.
China on Sunday launched an advanced warship for Pakistan, the largest it has built for any country, and the first among the four most sophisticated naval platforms it is readying for the Pakistan navy amid deepening military and strategic ties with Islamabad.

Also read: India rejects J&K reference in joint Pak-China statement

Local media said the Type 054A/P, a guided missile frigate, is the largest combat ship China has sold to a foreign navy and is an important milestone for Chinas military export sector.

The acquisition of the warship will double the combat power of the Pakistani Navys surface fleet, Chinese state media reported. By 2021, the Pakistan navy is expected to have three more similar warships in its fleet.

The Chinese state-owned Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai held the launch ceremony for the advanced warship with top officials and naval officers attending the function.

The shipyard is a wholly owned subsidiary of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, the largest builders in the country.

The ship launch took place two days after Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi discussed the situation in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi during the second round of the China-Pakistan foreign ministers dialogue in Hainan, off the south China coast.

President Xi Jinping called Pakistan a good brother and a good partner in a recorded message to his counterpart President Arif Alvi after the meeting.

New Delhi is currently locked in tension with both China and Pakistan over disputed boundaries and the abrogation of Article in Jammu & Kashmir.

India would be closely monitoring the military cooperation between its two hostile neighbours.

It is worth noting that the 054A/P was purchased by Pakistan as the successor to the F-22P frigate, and the F-22P frigate is an export model developed by China on the basis of the 053H3 frigate. China has been working hard to promote the Type 054A frigate to the international market, local news website ifeng.com reported.

Type 054A is the best frigate in service with the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), experts say. The warship has a fully loaded displacement of about 4,000 metric tons and is equipped with advanced radars and missiles.

The Type 054A is a multi-role frigate and is recognized as the backbone of the PLAN fleet of surface combatants with 30 vessels in commission. They have a length of 134 meters, a beam of 16 meters for a displacement of 4,000 tons, the navalnews.com, a website tracking naval technology, said in a report on the launch.

They have a crew complement of 165 sailors and are fitted with a PJ26 76mm main gun, 8 C803 anti-ship missiles, 32x VLS cells for HQ-16 surface to air missiles, 2x Type 730 30mm CIWS, 2x Triple Torpedo launchers, the website added.

Cao Weidong, a senior researcher at the PLAs Naval Military Studies Research Institute, told the newspaper that it seems that all weapons and radars on the new ship will be made in China which reflects our progress in the industry and the Pakistani Navys confidence in our technology and capability.

China and Pakistans military ties have rapidly deepened in recent years.

The new version of the fighter aircraft jointly developed by China and Pakistan with upgraded fighting capabilities, for example, made its maiden flight in December and the first batch is set to be inducted by Islamabad in 2020.

The JF-17 Block 3 aircraft was flown above Chengdu in southwest Chinas Sichuan province in December, the Aerospace Knowledge magazine said in a report in January.

The single-engine, multi-role combat aircraft has been developed jointly by the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC) and the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation of China.

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In an already turbulent year, the BBC Proms has become another subject for hot debate.

Over the weekend, reports emerged in The Sunday Times saying that two songs  "Rule Britannia" and "Land Of Hope And Glory"  may be cut from the iconic Last Night of the Proms, due to the association the tunes have with colonialism.

While the BBC has yet to even cement its plans for the Last Night, the Sunday Times rumblings have caused a stir, with many leaping to defend the two songs, while others have said that the decision to axe the numbers is a fair move given the circumstances  in a year when the Black Lives Matter movement has created important and pressing conversations about race and history across the world.

Now the UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has waded into the debate  before any public decisions have been made by the broadcaster (the BBC told Sky News yesterday that they are "still finalising arrangements"). Taking to Twitter, Dowden said that he plans to chat to the BBC and wanted to make sure that the two songs, which he describes as "the highlight" of the evening, remain in place.

Dowden added: "Confident forward-looking nations don't erase their history, they add to it." Many have quickly responded to Dowden's claims, with one tweeter wondering why the MP is focussing on song choices at the Proms rather than the thousands of creative workers that remain unemployed and without support during the pandemic.

Talking to The Guardian, the founder of Chineke! (an orchestra where the musicians are majority Black, Asian and ethnically diverse) Chi-chi Nwanoku said of "Rule Britannia": "It's so irrelevant to today's society. It's been irrelevant for generations, and we seem to keep perpetuating it."

Historian David Olusoga added in an interview on BBC Five Live that, as a Black man, it makes him feel "uncomfortable" to hear the song, and that he'd rather the Proms instead featured William Blake and Charles Hubert Parry's "Jerusalem"  seen by many as an unofficial national anthem.

The Proms has embraced innovation this year, adapting their programming to suit the ongoing pandemic. Orchestra sizes will be reduced with no live-audience in-situ at the Royal Albert Hall. Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska will become the second female conductor to oversee the final night.

The numbers were previously cut in 2001, four days after the 9/11 attacks when they felt tonally inappropriate.

Update: The BBC has confirmed that new orchestral versions of "Land Of Hope And Glory", and "Rule, Britannia!", as well as a new arrangement of 'Jerusalem" will appear this year.

You can see what stagey offerings BBC iPlayer has here
PHOENIX, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CopperPoint Insurance Companies, a western-based super regional commercial insurance company, announced Kathleen Ziegler has joined the company in a newly created role as Senior Vice President, Operations.



Kathleen will be responsible for overseeing business operations, procedures and efficiency to support CopperPoint and its agency/broker partners. She will also be instrumental in integrating operations for the CopperPoint Family of Insurance Companies: CopperPoint, Alaska National and PacificComp, leveraging opportunities to improve the operating platform and shared services approach.

Kathleen brings an extensive background in business start-ups, driving innovation and leading and transforming businesses within the insurance industry, said Scott Shader, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at CopperPoint Insurance Companies. As a seasoned insurance executive, we look forward to her operational expertise, strategic planning experience, leadership presence and the impact she will make as we continue the integration efforts for our growing family of companies.

Most recently, Kathleen served as the Head of Distribution at Blackboard, an AIG-owned technology-focused subsidiary where she was responsible for developing and managing broker relationships and contributing to the overall build of this middle-market commercial insurance start-up. She began her career at Accenture and progressed to roles of increasing responsibility at Zurich, Marsh and AIG most notably Head of Operations and Technology for the US at Marsh and Northeast Regional Vice President of Zurichs commercial market business.

Kathleen is a strong proponent of advancing women in business and served as an executive sponsor for AIGs Women & Allies Employee Resource Group. She was also on the steering committee of Marshs internal womens group and founded the global womens network at Zurich in 2007, which is still in place today.

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and French from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics from the University of Kansas.

About CopperPoint Insurance Companies

Founded in 1925, CopperPoint Insurance Companies, www.copperpoint.com , is a western-based super regional commercial insurance company and a leading provider of workers compensation and commercial insurance solutions. With an expanded line of insurance products and a growing 10 state footprint in the western United States, CopperPoint is in a strong position to meet the evolving needs of our brokers, agents and customers. It has $4.8 billion in total assets and an enterprise surplus of over $1.4 billion.

CopperPoint Mutual Insurance Holding Company is the corporate parent of CopperPoint Insurance Companies, Pacific Compensation Insurance Company and Alaska National Insurance Company. All companies are rated A (Excellent) by AM Best.

Contact:

Michael Goldman

mgoldman@copperpoint.com

602.686.7726

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/92944ec3-5c38-464b-9c33-13ce6eb584a6
Passengers at Heathrow as travel chiefs warn 90,000 roles have been placed at risk or axed. Photo: PA

More than 90,000 workers have lost their jobs or been placed at risk of redundancy in Britains ailing travel industry, new figures suggest.

Industry chiefs warned stop-start quarantine rules, the wind-down of the furlough scheme and the end of the peak summer season could trigger tens of thousands more job losses.

A survey by the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) suggests almost two-thirds of firms have either slashed staff or began consulting over job cuts. Among those who have not, four in five expect to do so in the coming months.

The figures lay bare the scale of the crisis facing the sector, which has been ravaged more than most by the pandemic. Leading airlines have warned they expect to wait years before passenger numbers return to pre-virus levels.

READ MORE: UK temp jobs on the rise as redundancies grow

ABTA said on Monday it had written to UK chancellor Rishi Sunak with a list of demands. It is calling for the UK government to extend the furlough scheme for the hardest-hit firms, offer grants to travel firms, and announce a holiday on air passenger duty.

The association is also demanding more mass testing and a move to releasing UK travel advice and quarantine rules on a regionalised basis, rather than blanket national policies.

It comes after widespread frustration in the sector that the Canary Islands and Balearic Islands were included when Spain was added to the quarantine list, despite relatively low infection rates.

ABTA said it was difficult to see how Britain could reopen travel to major economies like the US without a move to more regionalised quarantine rules.

READ MORE: Eat Out to Help Out is propping up Wetherspoon during COVID-19

With the governments stop-start measures, the restart of travel has not gone as hoped for the industry, and sadly businesses continue to be adversely affected and jobs are being lost at an alarming rate, said the organisations chief executive Mark Tanzer.

Coming towards the end of the traditional period for peak booking, we have hit a critical point as existing government measures to support businesses begin to taper off, the consequence of which, according to this survey of ABTA Members will be ruinous for more peoples livelihoods.

He said even firms that would normally thrive had fallen into administration, and warned that without further help more are sadly set to follow.
The governments of India and Nepal, last week, had organised the eight Joint Working Group (JWG) meetings last week. The discussions of the meetings: included reviewing of the bilateral development projects, oil and gas projects that are undertaken at the present and those which can be undertaken in future.

Read | Indian Railways officers to coach Nepal technicians to operate Janakpur-Jaynagar route

Read | 'India-Nepal territorial dispute can only be solved through dialogue': Nepal Foreign Min

"The Joint Working Group was incepted in the year 2017, to make the ties between Indian Oil Corporation Limited(IOCL) and Nepal Oil Corporation(NOC) stronger. The first meeting of the same was held in January this year," said a press release from the Indian Embassy of Kathmandu.

What were the agendas of the two meetings?

The virtual level meeting had been organized on August 21.

"The meeting aimed to discuss the implementation of various projects under bilateral cooperation between the two countries," said a press release by the Ministry of foreign affairs, Government of Nepal.

Read | India's longest 'Over River Ropeway' now operational in Assam

The attendees to the meeting included the Export-Import Bank of India(EXIM), Ministry of External Affairs, Embassy of India in Nepal, and CLPIU Building, Government of Nepal.

Virtual working level meetings between Exim Bank, MEA, Embassy of India in Nepal and CLPIU Building, Govt of Nepal held on 13 Aug and 21 Aug to discuss reconstruction projects under LoC IV.  IndiaInNepal (@IndiaInNepal) August 22, 2020

The meeting had been co-chaired by Shankar Das Bairagi, the foreign secretary and Vinay Mohan Kwatra, the Indian ambassador to Kathmandu.

The second meeting, which had taken place on 13 August, aimed at discussing future areas of cooperation in the petroleum and supplying petroleum products to Nepal.

The 2nd meeting of the India-Nepal Joint Working Group on Oil and Gas cooperation held through video conferencing. Details at:

https://t.co/7GIqJQegG9  IndiaInNepal (@IndiaInNepal) August 22, 2020

BN Reddy, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Prem Kumar Shrestha, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Supplies, Government of Nepal, were the co-chairs to the meeting.

The other dignitaries to the meeting included Embassy of India in Kathmandu, representatives from India Public Sector Undertakings(PSUs) dealing in oil and gas such as Indian Oil Cooperation Limited(IOCL), Gas Authority of India Limited(GAIL) and Hindustan Petroleum Cooperation Limited(HPCL), Ministry of Finance and Foreign Affairs of Nepal and Nepal Oil Cooperation(NOC).

"Satisfaction over the functioning to Motihari-Amlekhgunj Petroleum Products Pipeline, that was inaugurated between the two nations in September last year, was expressed during the meeting," said a press release.

The pipeline, which is the first of its kind in the South Asian region, is the majority supplier of fuel to Nepal from Amlekhgunj Depot of Nepal Oil Corporation(NOC).

Both India and Nepal had discussed future areas of cooperation within the sector, including the possibility of supplying petroleum products to the Himalayan country.

"Both nations encouraged the companies to work in close cooperation with each other and expand their engagement in the sector of petroleum," further added the press release.



(With Inputs from ANI)

Read | Sanjana Sanghi hits 2 mn followers on Insta as she celebrates one month of 'Dil Bechara'
An elderly business owner in a COVID free town in country Victoria has fronted police head-on in a brazen stand against lockdown restrictions.

Glenn Floyd walked into Castlemaine police station - 120km north-west of Melbourne - and asked police to charge him for failing to wear a mask.

The outspoken local, who until recently ran The Painter & Writer Gallery in Maldon, filmed his protest which he plans to use in court.

Glenn Floyd is a 74-year old grandfather who claims his business has been destroyed by COVID lockdown in country Victoria

A policeman at Castlemaine reads through some documents dumped on him during Mr Floyd's protest

The protest appeared to gain some approval from at least one policeman, who is captured on the video declaring: 'I like what you're doing'.

Maldon has a population of about 1500 people and as of Friday, when Mr Floyd carried out his protest, had no active cases of COVID-19.

In an eight minute video, uploaded to social media, Mr Floyd brands Victoria a Gulag - a reference to the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced-labour camps set up by order of Vladimir Lenin in the 1930s.

As of August 6, until at least September 13, regional Victorians are only allowed to leave home for four reasons  to go shopping for food and essentials, work and study, caregiving, and exercise.

They are also now required to wear masks when they venture outside of their homes.

Mr Floyd said the COVID-19 lockdown, which remains in Stage Four in Melbourne, had cost him six months of income, which he claimed had been destroyed by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.

'This evil ghoul, Premier Denial Andrews, has destroyed our town and my life,' he said.

The 74-year old, who is pushing ahead as a federal Senate candidate in 2022, claims the mask wearing laws have no legal binding under the Federal Biosecurity Act.

Before walking into the police station, Mr Floyd said he planned to take his fine all the way to the High Court if need be.

Glenn Floyd will take his fine for not wearing a mask to the High Court of Australia

Mr Floyd described the streets of his home town in country Victoria as a Ghost Town

Mr Floyd operated a small gallery in country Victoria, which has been decimated by the lockdown restrictions in Victoria

Biosecurity Act 2015 During the human biosecurity emergency period, the Health Minister may: Issue any direction to any person (section 478) Determine any requirement (section 477) That the Minister considers is necessary to: Prevent or control the entry to, emergence, establishment, or spread of COVID-19 in Australia Prevent or control the spread of COVID-19 to another country or Implement a WHO Recommendation under the International Health Regulations. The Minister must also be satisfied that the direction/requirement is: Likely to be effective in, or contribute to, achieving the purpose for which it is to be given Appropriate and adapted to achieve the purpose for which it is to be given No more restrictive or intrusive than is required in the circumstances If the direction/requirement is to apply during a periodthat period is only as long as is necessary. These requirements and directions may be given 'despite any provision of any other Australian law'. Section 474 requires the Minister to exercise these powers personally, they cannot be delegated. Advertisement

'Rise up fellow patriots. Do not wear masks. Defy every unlawful law of this Denial Andrews megalomaniac,' he said.

Video captured by Mr Floyd shows police immediately ask him to put on a face mask upon him entering the police station.

'No, that's why I'm here,' he responds. 'I'm actually here protesting, if I have to be fined I will be fined. I'm wishing to register a protest.'

'Why?' the confused officer asks before heading out back to get his sergeant, who asks the same question.

'I refuse to and I wish to be fined sir,' Mr Floyd responds.

'You're joking,' the sergeant says.

Mr Floyd argues that under the Biosecurity Act, only a federal authorised biosecurity officer has the right to issue a biosecurity order.

'Not the police, not Daniel Andrews. And he didn't do it by law. He actually issued it as a edict. So actually to issue it conflicts with the Federal Biosecurity Act 2015. It's in conflict,' he says.

'So just about every ticket we've written is going to be withdrawn now are they?' the sergeant asks.

'If what you're saying is right, they're all going to be withdrawn. They're untested in court yet anyway.'

However, Mr Floyd isn't just a frustrated gallery owner, but the leader of a kooky pseudo-political group that's campaigning to end psychiatry.

Mr Floyd claims to run the 'Abolish Psychiatry Party' and on a website he operates has posted a photo of renowned Professor Patrick McGorry with a swastika painted on his forehead.

On the video, he launches into a rant about about some dubious 'COVID-19 facts' - and makes the bizarre claim the lockdown is part of a global conspiracy to get seven billion people to be vaccinated.

'I've got three children and seven grand children and I will not tolerate this massive tyranny,' he says.

The video ends with the sergeant telling Mr Floyd to stop filming him so they can have an off-camera conversation.

The protest has been applauded on a social media site that is rallying against the lockdown laws.

It has received almost 400 comments and been shared more than 700 times.

'This man should be the prime minister,' one supporter posted.

'Absolute gentleman. Went about it the right way. I suspect the cop probably agreed with him after he switched the camera off,' another wrote.

Mr Floyd took his protest to the Castlemaine Police Station (pictured)

A police sergeant said he would fine Mr Floyd as requested

A document issued to police by Mr Floyd during his protest last Friday

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He said the fountain is one of Charles Clements most-recognizable public works in Tucson. The piece was one of five commissioned from local artists when El Presidio was being revamped as a public plaza in the late 1960s. Other pieces have been lost or broken.

The goal of the fountain was to create an allegory to this regions relationship with water and how precious water is, according to Clinco, who said it is stylized with the brutalist architecture of the time period.

It has since remained an indelible and iconic feature of the plaza, he said.

That fountain has really been the backdrop of peoples weddings and graduations, as well as protests and celebrations. It really is our civic space, and that fountain has played such an important role in that public space, he said.

Plans were put in place to revamp the fountain alongside the January 8th Memorial, which serves as an ode to the 2011 shooting that left six Tucsonans dead and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others wounded.
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo announced recently that are hiring new 400 positions. He is inviting the defunded police across the country to apply in the new positions.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told the "Fox and Friends Weekend" on Sunday that they will be hiring new 400 police officers. His priority is the police officers who were defunded across the country. During the interview, he announced that the Houston Police Department is hiring.

Acevedo said that Houston is very fortunate because they have a mayor and a council that understands the community does not want less policing, does not want to defund the police, they want better policing, and they want good cops.

He made the comments amid the growing push across the country to defund the police following the death of George Floyd that caused nationwide violence and peaceful protests. It also includes African-Americans who died under police custody.

However, Houston will hire 400 new positions instead of defunding the police department. Acevedo is inviting the police officers who were aid off from their department across the country to join their rank. For as long as the police officer has no record of any form of brutality and racism issue.

Meanwhile, local governments in other parts of the country like in Austin, Texas considered to cut and to defund their police departments. They voted to cut off the budget in an amount of $150 million. However, Houston's decision is to hire.

Acevedo noted that he wants to implement a new program making it easier for out-of-state officers to take positions on Houston's force. He said, "if you have three years of honorable service, with a good service record and you want to come here, instead of a six-month academy, it's a 10- week academy."

Following it, the qualified applicants or those who will pass will be put on-field training and they will make sure that these police officers will subscribe to the values of the city and the department as they become part of the Houston Police Department.

When he was asked if how he will ensure that Acevedo will not just hire police officers but also those with accelerated training, he said that the hiring process is critical. Also the policies, and procedures and the training in their departments are critical.

Acevedo went on and said, "If you're going to come here to do the right thing, follow the training that's provided and actually treat people the way you'd want to treat your own family, then you're coming to the right place, but if you want to be one of them, I call them the 'bushels of apples of bad cops' because there's more than just a few bad cops, don't come to Houston."

This is a big challenge for the Houston Police Department Chief Art Acevedo to hire more police officers amid the crisis police officers are facing across the country due to police brutality and other related racist issues.

Check these out!
The Ministry of I&B, in consultation with the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, has prepared the Guiding Principles and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) on preventive measures for Media Production, released today by Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Shri Prakash Javadekar in New Delhi.

The highlights of the guiding principles include the general principles which have been given by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare including inter alia non-essential activities not allowed in the containment zone in COVID-19, employees with high risk to take extra precautions, as also use of face covers/masks, frequent hand washing, provision of hand sanitizers etc. and respiratory etiquettes specifically with regard to the Media Production.

Media Production is a major economic activity that has contributed immensely to the GDP of our country. Given the current COVID  19 Pandemic, it is crucial that various stake holders involved in activities of Media Production take suitable measures to restrict the transmission of the pandemic, while at the same time resuming/conducting their operations and activities.

The Ministry has formulated the general SOPs taking into consideration international practices notified in the sector including physical distancing, designated entry and exit for shoot locations, sanitization, safety of staff, contact minimization and following of travel related guidelines issued by MHA including quarantine/isolation. Specifically, with regard to face masks, as per international practices, face mask has been made mandatory for cast and crew except for actors in front of the camera.

The Guiding Principle and SOP may be used by all States and other stake holders and State Governments while resuming Media Production.

Releasing the guidelines Union Minister Shri Prakash Javadekar said the SOP follows international norms. This will help give a fillip to the industry which has been affected due to coronavirus for close to 6 months now and people will welcome this move by the Ministry. Shri Javadekar also said that the move is also aimed at boosting the economy as the film and television sector provides employment to large number of people.

The Minister expressed hope that all the States will accept the SOP and implement it and will add to the conditions if needed. The SOP has been issued in consultation with Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Ministry of Home Affairs.
Pregnant women should avoid caffeine altogether for the sake of their babys health, a study warned last night.

The research suggested there was no safe level of consumption whether with child or trying to conceive.

Based on 48 studies over 20 years, it concluded that even minimal caffeine intake raised the risk of miscarriage, stillbirth or low birth weight.

But experts said the warnings were alarmist and flew in the face of studies showing moderate amounts were safe.

Women should consume no more than 200mg a day  roughly two cups of coffee, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). Last night it insisted it would not change this advice.

The analysis of 48 studies over 20 years, concluded that even minimal caffeine intake raised the risk of miscarriage, stillbirth or low birth weight. (File photo)

But Professor Jack James, the author of the new paper, claims thousands of babies are harmed every year when women consume supposedly safe levels of caffeine.

The studies he assessed at Reykjavik University in Iceland found that even low levels of caffeine could increase the risk of miscarriage by up to 36 per cent, stillbirth by up to 19 per cent and low birth weight by up to 51 per cent. Childhood leukaemia and obesity were also potential risks.

Professor James calculated that if every pregnant woman in Britain consumed 200mg of caffeine a day, 70,000 babies would be harmed.

He claims that this is probably an underestimate because many women drink more than the advised maximum.

Caffeine is a habit-forming substance consumed daily by the majority of pregnant women, the professor wrote in the BMJs Evidence-Based Medicine journal.

HOW MUCH CAFFEINE IS SAFE? The EU's food safety watchdog advised a daily limit of 400mg for adults in its first guidelines on caffeine intake in 2015. European Food Safety Agency officials suggested pregnant women should keep intakes below 200mg. It also advised children to consume no more than 3mg of caffeine per KG of body weight - the equivalent of two mugs of milky tea for a child of four. Health officials warned those who break the limits run the risk of a host of health problems, from anxiety to heart failure. Its warning also showed links between high caffeine intake in pregnancy and having a baby that is underweight. The NHS says too much caffeine can cause a miscarriage. There are also links to birth defects. However, with coffee far from the only food or drink to contain caffeine, people may unintentionally be going over the safe limit. Advertisement

He said that usually caffeine was rapidly absorbed by the body, with peak concentrations occurring within an hour.

It then takes around five hours for blood levels of caffeine to halve, with the level declining gradually thereafter.

But he said that during pregnancy it took the body far longer to get rid of the substance. By the 38th week of pregnancy, it could take 18 hours for caffeine levels to halve.

Professor James said this meant an unborn baby could be exposed to the drug for several hours  having a profound impact on its developing body such as speeding up the babys heart rate and the blood vessels in its brain constricting.

He wrote: Indeed, newborn infants of caffeine-consuming mothers have been reported to experience caffeine withdrawal symptoms including disturbed sleep, vomiting, increased frequency of irregular heartbeat and respiration, and increased fine tremors.

However Dr Daghni Rajasingam, RCOG spokesman, said women did not need to completely forgo tea and coffee while pregnant  advice that would not change in light of the review.

Other  and potentially more reliable  research has found that pregnant women do not need to cut caffeine out entirely because these risks are extremely small, even if the recommended caffeine limits are exceeded, she said.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists advice to limit caffeine intake to 200mg per day  the equivalent to two cups of instant coffee  still stands. Dr Adam Jacobs, associate director of biostatistics at Premier Research, warned that the harms found in the paper may not have been due to caffeine at all.

He said: Given that pregnant women have been advised to avoid excessive caffeine consumption for at least the last 40 years, you might expect that women who drink coffee during pregnancy are generally less likely to follow health advice, and possibly in some ways which are quite hard to measure.

Current guidance on the NHS website suggests pregnant women should limit the amount of caffeine they consume to 200 milligrams a day

Dr Luke Grzeskowiak, of the University of Adelaide in Australia, added: The authors conclusion that all pregnant women and women contemplating pregnancy should avoid caffeine is overly alarmist and inconsistent with the evidence.

Critics said Professor James had simply reassessed existing data, which had previously been interpreted as showing that moderate intake is relatively safe.
Many readers, but likely not as many in the general population, will recall that the vogue for city living is a fairly recent phenomenon. In most of the post-war era in the US, the ideal was suburban living, the single family home with a yard so children had a place to play. After all, everyone was supposed to marry and have 2.3 kids. Cities were places where young people got experience and older men worked to support their families.

Large cities fell into disfavor in the 1970 as they came to be seen as hotbeds of crime and white flight became widespread. The exodus further eroded strained tax bases.

Well focus on New York City as the canary in the coal mine for what is coming for other cities if Covid-19 isnt tamed by say mid 2021, particularly since commentators are already worrying about fiscal-crisis-level damage to the Big Apple. For instance, Wolf Richter has a piece documenting how San Franciscos financial district has become a ghost town which well discuss briefly. Heavily tourism-dependent towns are also due to take worse hits than similar-sized brethren.

The Wall Street Journal has a new story tonight on how employers are facing worker revolts about bringing them back to offices, which does not bode well for the recovery of urban centers. Key sections:

This summer, executives at health-care-technology firm Epic Systems announced a plan: Most of the 9,500 employees at its 1,000-acre campus in Wisconsin would be expected back in the office in September. The company, like many others, says its employees do their best work when they can collaborate in the same space. But blowback to the mandate was swift. Employees expressed fears about safety and spreading the new coronavirus. Local health officials questioned the move. So Epic joined legions of other companies making late-in-the-game changes to office-reopening plans, saying this month that staffers could work from home at least through the new year. Expecting the virus to be under control by Labor Day, many employers had hoped to bring white-collar workers back to the office next month. But as cases rose in dozens of states throughout the summer, major school districts settled on remote or hybrid instruction, complicating the picture for working parents. Some employers have already scuttled plans to force office workers back so soon. They include some of the countrys biggest companies. In an August survey of 15 major employers that collectively employ about 2.6 million people, 57% said they had decided to postpone their back-to-work plans because of recent increases in Covid-19 cases. Nearly half said they were putting in additional safety measures for when they reopen, such as redesigned workspaces and temperature checks. Only one respondent said the summer surge of infections hadnt affected its timeline or plans for bringing workers back.

In the 1970s period of revulsion about cities, New York City was the sickest:

I spend the summer in New York City in 1980 and moved there in 1981. It was grimy. There were a lot of petty robberies, but if you lived in at least an OK neighborhood and didnt go to risky areas in the late evening, personal safety wasnt a real risk. But even then, it was the place to be for so many lines of work: dance, theater, visual arts, advertising, publishing, finance, law. It was also a magnet for top journalists and medical professionals. But I ran into people even as late as the mid-1980s who had nearly had their businesses fail during the fiscal crisis and still seemed traumatized when the topic came up. They had little confidence in the resurgence of prosperity then.

As Ive recounted, New York Citys population of the city rose not just due to growth of jobs but also the increased tendency of mid and upper income workers to bring up their children in the city. And the long-term plan for New York City, of it becoming a bedroom community for the wealthy and professionals, was coming to fruition (if you were a fan of sort of thing) via formerly commercial neighborhoods like Soho and Tribeca becoming playgrounds for the affluent, and Harlem and areas colonized by artists gentrifying.

Another chapter in this progression was New York, along with other world cities becoming a place where the super-wealthy would buy apartments as investments. They were often kept vacant or little used. New York hadnt gone as far as, say, Fulham Road near Sloane Square, in terms of looking like it had been hit by a neutron bomb. But some buildings like the former Plaza Hotel, converted into condos, even had articles written about how creepily empty they were.

Now this has all gone splat. High end real estate prices are cracking as the citys budget becomes a black hole, assuring coming deep and painful cuts in services. The press was already reporting that rats were becoming bolder due to restaurants no longer producing anywhere near their former level of throw-away food, in combination with the city sanitation services having already cut back on their schedules.

The first adverse development was underway before Covid-19 hit, that of the super-rich cooling on New York City. Some of that was due to increases in mansion taxes and transfer taxes on very high end properties. I imagine another chilling effect came from an initiative to disallow corporations to buy properties without disclosing who the owners were; that followed a New York Times expose on some of the corporate-owned units in the Time Warner Center, which found some could not be traced at all and others had decidedly seedy (as in crime connected) shareholders. The threat was to make real estate sellers subject to know your customer type requirements, not just banks.

On top of that, lots of new apartment buildings designed for the top wealthy had just come on the market. From the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Covid-19 Pounds New York Real Estate Worse Than 9/11, Financial Crash:

The Covid-19 crisis has delivered a stunning gut-punch to the New York City luxury real-estate market, applying downward pressure at a rate that surpasses both the 2008 financial crisis and the period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the West Chelsea district, a recently built ultra high-end boutique condominium known as the Getty slashed prices for its remaining units by as much as 46%. One full-floor, four-bedroom apartment at the Peter Marino-designed building was lowered to $10.475 million from $19.5 million. The crisis comes at a time when sales and prices in the luxury market were already under pressure. Its not like New York City is all of a sudden on sale. New York has been on sale for the past 24 months, said Tal Alexander, a luxury agent with Douglas Elliman. Sellers who are motivated and want to do deals need to add on another layer of discount.. New listings were down by 21%, while new listings priced at $4 million and above were down by almost 35%. For luxury homes sold in the second quarter, prices were also down by about 11%, according to a report by Douglas Elliman. Agents said the greatest discounts are in new developments, where developers with stacks of inventory need to move product to meet loan repayment deadlines. Any developer who broke ground after 2016 in Manhattan is going to be lucky to get most of his equity out, Mr. Korolik said.

The flip side is this is way way way short of the distress during the fiscal crisis or even the much-shorter-lived bottom of the nasty 1991-1992 recession. Then some co-ops were sold for $1 plus proof of enough income to cover the maintenance. There were so many buildings seized by the city, mainly in Harlem, that it also created a homesteading program: the city would let someone take over a house if they could show they had plans for fixing it plus the skills and funds needed for the repairs.

Or as Kurt Andersen, founder of Spy Magazine, said in an interview in the New York Times:

I know people who are trying to buy and sell real-estate right now and I havent heard that you can suddenly get a one-bedroom apartment for $200,000.

But things look set to get worse before they get better. From yet another Wall Street Journal piece, this one today on the New York City budget crisis:

New York City faces a $9 billion deficit over the next two years, high levels of unemployment and the prospect of laying off 22,000 government workers if new revenue or savings arent found in the coming weeks. The growing economic crisis, brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, has alarmed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo so much that he recently asserted greater control over a panel overseeing the finances of the nations largest city Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has grown concerned about the direction of the city budget, state Budget Director Robert Mujica said in an interview. The city had to cut billions to balance its latest budget, but it still has major funding challenges. Local officials have called on Congress to approve a relief package for the city, but talks about a bill are ongoing. As a backstop, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio asked state lawmakers for authorization to borrow up to $5 billion to fund operating costs. Democrats who control the state Senate objected, and the request hasnt been granted. A lot of the same things that occurred in 1975 are reoccurring, [state Budget Director] Mr. [Robert] Mujica said. And if thats the case, and the citys going to be in a level of fiscal distress, we want to know early.

Axios confirms the downbeat take:

Where it stands: A throwdown between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the citys unions over New Yorks massive municipal budget deficit could make matters much worse.

De Blasio has appealed to Albany and Washington for relief, but so far is hearing, Talk to the hand.

Hes threatened to fire 22,000 city employees unless unions agree to trim $1 billion in labor costs.

Meanwhile, trash is piling upin city parks, the citys EMS union chief says that people will die if first responders are cut, and New Yorks teachers have threatened a sickoutto protest de Blasios plan to open schools on Sept. 10.

And there are plenty of signs of trouble:

Until the pandemic struck the city, La Jornada food pantry used to hand out groceries to roughly 1,000 families a week. Now, the number tops 10,000. . .Across the five boroughs, the hungry is in the hundreds of thousands, the Food Bank of New York estimates.  Jennifer Taub (@jentaub) August 23, 2020

And collapsing confidence in Mayor DiBlasio:

Parents in New York City are Baffled that @NYCMayor has no plan to test all entering schools https://t.co/CmbcrTgDvA @UFT  Brian Gibbons (@BrianUFT) August 22, 2020

And although it is only one opinion, developers tend to be bullish. From CNBC, New York City may take a decade to recover from coronavirus pandemic, says developer Don Peebles:

I think New York will ultimately come back. Itll come back differently. Itll be a different place, and it will be much more affordable, said [Don] Peebles, CEO of privately held Peebles Corp., which has a corporate office in lower Manhattan. He added on The Exchange, I think its going to take New York about a decade or so to dig out of this. Maybe longer. But its not going to be soon. Peebles said he foresees challenges ahead for New York City in attracting and maintaining new residents and businesses going forward. Among them is the strength of other U.S. cities, especially in places with a more tax-friendly environment, he said.

I hate to sound like a Republican but the New York City corporation tax is a big disincentive. And there is an unincorporated business tax too.

While New York Citys tsuris gets a lot of coverage, it is not alone. As we mentioned, Wolf Richter has a photo essay of San Francisco. From the set up:

The data of how work-from-home impacts office patterns in a city like San Francisco are grim. According to Kastle Systems  which provides access systems for 3,600 buildings and 41,000 businesses in 47 states, and therefore has a large sample of how many people are entering offices during the Pandemic  office occupancy in San Francisco was still only at 13.6% of where it had been at the beginning of March, meaning it was still down by 86.4%, just above New York City:

And some of his images, taken at the AM rush hour on August 18:

On Columbus Street, looking at the intersection with Montgomery Street, with the Transamerica Pyramid in the background. Im standing in the middle of the street to take this photo. Why? Because I can:

..On Montgomery, getting closer to Clay Street:

..Intersection of Montgomery and California, another main drag, so to speak. The cable car rails have been unused since March, cables turned off. Looking south on Montgomery, across California:

If you have time, I suggest you look through all of Wolfs images. They look an awful lot like Midtown when I was there in July.

These cities will all limp through. But how long it takes and how much they change is very much an open question.
As we stood there talking, the world seemed full of possibility. The random encounter reminded me of something I'd been missing. The previous afternoon, I'd stepped down from my position as Acting Home-School Principal to my two children and fled to the mountains. I needed space. Like everyone else, I'd been stuck inside for weeks. The invisible virus was everywhere. The most simple and mundane acts had become fraught with danger. What I'd missed, I realised, was other people. Not just friends, but crowds and strangers. "We're all in this together", but we were also all apart  sharing food pics from our kitchen islands. And yet, as he opened up to me, I held back. I could have told him that my dad had a stroke several years ago and was now dead. Or that, like him, I had my own relationship issues. I could have said that, as he did, I sometimes wondered about the line between friendship and love. Instead, we talked about rocks. I said that the mountains felt ancient; he said he'd studied geology. We were standing on the remains of an eroded plateau. The oldest rocks were older still  created from the debris left by a shallow sea. Enormous pressure and the action of time had left these dramatic escarpments, gorges and caves. My new friend talked excitedly about a secret spot near Lithgow where you could find sapphires as big as grapes. It was getting late; the shadows deepening across the valley. In the city, people were fighting over toilet paper. After half an hour, I realised that I was starting to get cold. Actually, I was very cold. In the mountains in autumn it can be lovely in the sun, but as soon as the shadows hit it's absolutely freezing. I was also out of water, and needed to get back to the car before it got dark. I said my goodbyes and walked away. He remained at the railing, as though waiting for the next walker.

About three weeks later, back in my little city flat, I stumbled upon a Facebook post by Katoomba/Leura RFS: It was a notice about a missing person, and there on my phone was a photo of the man I had met. Loading He'd been last seen on April 22  weeks after our meeting at the lookout. "It's believed he was going for a bushwalk," the post said. "However, he failed to return home and his friends and family have not been able to locate or contact him." It added: "Serious concerns are held for his welfare."

My friendly stranger, my fellow frequenter of deserted, forbidden lookouts in the mountains. I had no idea what to do. I thought about calling the police, but doubted that I had anything useful to offer. I kept a close eye on social media for updates. A few days later, the Blue Mountains Gazette had an article. A body had been found in bushland in Katoomba. It was thought to be the missing bushwalker. The circumstances of his death weren't suspicious and investigations were continuing, the reporter said, in what seemed cryptic double-speak. I asked a friend who works at a newspaper if that meant suicide. "It could be," she said, "but it could mean other things." Had he suffered another stroke and fallen over the edge? The road he'd been found near was Cliff Drive. The afternoon that we'd met, he'd told me he'd previously done the steep climb I'd just completed, but not since he'd had a stroke. It affected his movement on one side of his body and also meant that he slurred his words sometimes. This had led to him being refused service at pubs.

"Although it's possible that I actually was drunk on a few of these occasions," he'd added with a wry smile. A month later, I returned to the mountains, hoping this would help me remember the conversation more clearly. Most strangers are invisible to us. They're anonymous blurs that we don't remember and rarely truly "see". There was something about that moment and that place that had brought this one particular person into sharp focus. While it was hard to comprehend the human tragedy of the pandemic, the thousands dead, the loss of this one person had affected me deeply. At Three Sisters, I got out and walked along the cliff to the lookout. When I was almost there, I found the way was blocked. A police car was parked right across the track. Through the windscreen, two officers were keeping watch. There was no way back to the lookout. I stood on the track on my own and wondered what to do next. Eventually, I drove back down to Sydney.

A few weeks later, I found the man's son on Facebook. He'd published a few posts about his dad's passing. There was a photo his dad had taken two hours before he died. It was a familiar landscape; an ocean of trees and blue sky. It wasn't taken where we met, but the view was essentially the same. It looked like a perfect day. I wondered what he'd seen when he looked out into all that space. Loading In another post, the son described visiting the morgue. His father's body was entirely covered except for his left arm. He said that it looked waxy but was somehow characteristically "his". He also posted about what he'd said to his dad in the morgue, to say goodbye: "You've totalled your Hyundai and I am a little bit envious of you surfing that cosmic skyway right now. I wish I could see it."
Lawyer Prashant Bhushan stood his ground on Monday, refusing to apologise to the Supreme Court for his posts on Twitter criticising the top court and Chief Justice of India (CJI) SA Bobde.

In a statement he submitted to the apex court, Bhushan said the views he expressed represented his bona fide (good faith) beliefs and, therefore, offering an apology for expressing such beliefs would be insincere.

An apology cannot be a mere incantation and any apology has to be sincerely made. If I retract a statement before this court that I otherwise believe to be true or offer an insincere apology, that in my eyes would amount to the contempt of my conscience and of an institution (Supreme court ) that I hold in highest esteem, he added in the supplementary statement submitted through advocate Kamini Jaiswal .

According to the details available on the Supreme Court website, the case will be taken up on Tuesday to consider the effect of the supplementary statement submitted by Bhushan.

The Supreme Court , on August 20, asked Bhushan to reconsider his stance and offer an apology by Monday failing which, it cautioned the activist lawyer, it would proceed against him and punish him for criminal contempt of court. Even at the time, Bhushan said that while he appreciated the courts move of giving him time, he would not change his mind.

I believe that the Supreme Court is the last bastion of hope for the protection of fundamental rights, Today in these troubling times, the hopes of the people of India vest in this Court to ensure the rule of law and the Constitution and not an untrammelled rule of the executive. This casts a duty, especially for an officer of this court like myself, to speak up, when I believe there is a deviation from its sterling record, Bhushan said.

He maintained that the tweets put out by him were in good faith and were not intended to malign the apex court or the CJI but only offered constructive criticism so that the court could arrest any drift away from its longstanding role as a guardian of the Constitution.

In the written arguments submitted separately by Bhushans counsel, senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan, reliance was placed on attorney general (AG) KK Venugopals opinions regarding corruption and nepotism in the judiciary. The AG , during the hearing of the matter on August 20, asked the apex court not to punish Bhushan while highlighting that he himself made a speech in 1987 pointing out certain ills plaguing the judiciary.

Contemnors (Bhushan) comments were opinion made in good faith founded on true facts. Similar opinions were made before (in 1987) by the Attorney General. On this basis, the Attorney General has counselled against punishment, Bhushan said in his written submissions.

The court found Bhushan guilty of the offence of criminal contempt on August 14. According to the Contempt of Courts Act, the offence carries a punishment of up to six months in prison or a fine up to Rs 2,000 or both.

Bhushan posted two tweets, one against the Supreme Court on June 27 and another against CJI Bobde on June 29.

Bhushans first tweet said: When historians in the future look back at the last six years to see how democracy has been destroyed in India even without a formal Emergency, they will particularly mark the role of the SC in this destruction, and more particularly the role of the last four CJIs.

The second referred to CJI Bobde and said: The CJI rides a Rs 50-lakh motorcycle belonging to a BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] leader at Raj Bhavan, Nagpur, without wearing a mask or helmet, at a time when he keeps the SC on lockdown mode denying citizens their fundamental right to access justice!

Mehek Maheswhari, an advocate, filed a petition before the Supreme Court on July 9 seeking initiation of contempt of court proceedings against Bhushan for the tweets. Based on Maheshwaris petition, the court took suo motu {on its own}cognizance of the matter and listed the case for the first time on July 22 and issued notice to Bhushan the same day.

After a day-long hearing on August 5, the Supreme Court pronounced its verdict on August 14, holding Bhushan guilty of criminal contempt of court. It however, kept the matter for further hearing on August 20 to decide on the sentence to be imposed on Bhushan.

When the case was taken up on August 20, Bhushan read out a statement prepared by him. In his statement, Bhushan expressed dismay at the judgment of August 14 convicting him, stating that the conclusion against him was arrived at without providing any evidence of his motives. He said that he was standing by his tweets, which he described as an attempt to discharge his duty towards the country. He also invoked Mahatma Gandhis stance in a case slapped against him by the British government.

I can only humbly paraphrase what the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi had said in his trial: I do not ask for mercy. I do not appeal to magnanimity. I am here, therefore, to cheerfully submit to any penalty that can lawfully be inflicted upon me for what the Court has determined to be an offence, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen, Bhushan said.

The three-judge bench headed by justice Arun Mishra maintained that it could show leniency only if Bhushan expresses regret and reconsiders the statement made by him on August 20 declining to apologise.

We have given time to the contemnor to submit unconditional apology, if he so desires. Let it be filed by August 24, the order said.
Aug 24 (Reuters) - Shares of Canadian miner Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd plunged 47% on Monday after media reports said the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump plans to block its proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, despite denials by the company over the weekend.

The Trump administration in July proposed approving a permit for the copper-gold mine, boosting a project the administration of former President Barack Obama tried to halt on environmental grounds.

Bloomberg on Sunday cited a person familiar saying the Trump administration is planning to block the controversial project.

The Washington Post on Saturday cited sources saying the administration would pause the permit process on grounds the company must do more to show how it will reduce environmental harm caused by the project.

Politico first reported Trump was planning to block the proposed mine, which environmentalists argue would damage the surrounding salmon-rich habitat, and the people and wildlife that depend on it. Northern Dynasty denied that report.

The Vancouver-based miner referred questions on Monday to a company statement saying it had launched an advertising and outreach campaign targeting the Trump administration.

It said rejecting the Pebble Mine after extensive study by federal, state and local regulatory agencies would politicize the permitting process and slow the U.S. economic recovery.

(Reporting by Jeff Lewis; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday said he wanted to do everything to maintain his health and do his utmost at his job, making brief remarks following his return from a second hospital visit that has stoked concern about his health.

Abe, who has been the target of deepening speculation that he may resign due to his health issues, on Monday visited a Tokyo hospital for the second time within days.

He was speaking to reporters after returning to his official residence from the hospital.

(Reporting by Tokyo bureau; Editing by Tom Hogue)
A photo of the Pallas Athene fountain in front of the Austrian Parliament, in Vienna, upload on June 3, 2011. (pressdigital/Istock Photo)

Austria Expels Russian Diplomat, Moscow Calls Move Damaging

VIENNAAustria is expelling a Russian diplomat for breaching the Vienna Convention governing diplomats privileges and immunities, an Austrian Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.

His behavior is not in accordance with the Vienna Convention, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said, declining to elaborate further on the case.

The Russian Embassy responded on Twitter: We are outraged by the unfounded decision of the Austrian authorities, which is damaging to constructive relations.

The expulsion is notable in Austria, which has been more reluctant than some of its Western neighbors to expel diplomats in the past.

Austria declined to join the majority of EU countries that expelled Russian envoys in 2018 over the poisoning in Britain of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.

By Francois Murphy
Meanwhile, Carman is hosting an online funding page to raise money for the girls funeral. Other groups are collecting clothing and money for all the families affected by the fire. Clothing and donations are being accepted in the mobile home park office.
Trump is trailing Biden in the polls: Getty Images

A Donald Trump election ad has faced ridicule after it claimed he was the "most pro-gay president in American history".

The claim was made by Robert Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence, in an ad released by the Log Cabin Republicans.

"President Trump is the most pro-gay president in American history  I can prove it," Mr Grenell said in the ad. "There are tens of thousands of gay conservatives just like me who also won't be silent. Gay people don't have to vote Democrat because Donald Trump is the most pro-gay president in American history."

Mr Grenell then claimed that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had a longer history of opposing policies that would help the LGBTQ community than Mr Trump.

"As a United States senator, Joe Biden said gay people couldn't receive security clearances because we would be a security risk," Mr Grenell said in the ad, in reference to comments Mr Biden made in the 1970s. "As a US senator, Biden supported 'don't ask, don't tell' and the Defense of Marriage Act. Biden voted to cut off federal funds to any school that teaches acceptance of homosexuality."

"Joe must have been terrified when Donald Trump appointed me as acting director of national intelligence," he added.

These comments are not entirely accurate of the situation. The first sentence referred to a comment Mr Biden made in 1973. During a neighbourhood meeting, Mr Biden was asked about anti-gay civil service regulations.

"My gut reaction is that they are security risks, but I must admit I have not given this much thought," he responded. "I'll be darned."

It is worth noting that Mr Grenell claimed in the ad that the former vice president was against "security clearances", but he actually responded to civil service regulations. Mr Biden also didn't take a strong position on the matter when addressing it at the time.

Story continues

Mr Grenell went on to state that Mr Biden supported "don't ask, don't tell", but this statement distorts the facts.

The "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule was enacted by the Clinton administration in 1993. Bill Clinton's intention was to lift the ban within the military that prevented gay service members from serving. But instead a compromise was reached in Congress that said military applicants would not be asked their sexual orientation but they could be kicked out if it was discovered they were gay.

Mr Biden opposed making the amendment and instead wanted Mr Clinton to set the policy as how he originally wanted it. After the amendment failed, Mr Biden voted for the overall defence bill that included "don't ask, don't tell".

The Obama administration later repealed that policy in 2010, a fact not mentioned in the ad.

It was correct, though, that Mr Biden supported the Defense of Marriage Act signed by Mr Clinton in 1996. But then in 2012, as the country evolved, Mr Biden vocally came out as supporting same-sex marriage and celebrated when the decision from the 2014 Supreme Court made it possible in every state across the country. He even officiated a wedding in 2016 between two men.

Mr Grenell's claim that the former senator "must have been terrified" by his appointment as an openly gay acting director of national intelligence in 2016 was likely inaccurate, at least for the reason he alluded to.

Both Republicans and Democrats were against Mr Grenell's appointment as he had no prior experience in national intelligence before the appointment, not because he was gay.

"As one of the four authors of the law that created the DNI back in 2004, I care deeply about that position and believe the person needs experience in the intelligence community, which regrettably Ambassador Grenell does not have," Senator Susan Collins, Republican with Maine, said after Mr Grenell was appointed.

His position in the Trump administration was temporary and only lasted three months.

GLAAD released an ad attacking Mr Trump's position on LGBTQ policies while in office.

The anti-Trump advertisement, which will air on Fox News all week, involves a gay man speaking to his mother about LGBTQ policies and where the sitting president stands.

"Ma, do you know that I could be evicted for being gay? Or turned away at the ER?" the man tells his mother in the ad. "Donald Trump opposes the bill that would change that."

In 2019, it was announced that Mr Trump opposed the Democrats attempt to pass the Equity Act, which would create a national standard for LGBTQ nondiscrimination.

"The Trump administration absolutely opposes discrimination of any kind and supports the equal treatment of all," a Trump administration official said at the time. "However, this bill in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights."

GLAAD's president and CEO Sarah Ellis, when speaking to The Daily Beast, said the organisation did not consider Mr Trump an ally to the community.

"Trump claimed he would support the LGBTQ community in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech, but what his administration has given us is exactly the opposite," Ms Ellis said.

Besides the Trump administration opposing the Equity Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave permission to homeless shelters to ban transgender people, the Justice Department supported some adoption agencies from allowing same-sex couples to adopt children, and the administration filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to not expand Title VII protections for LBGTQ people, Ms Ellis said.

"Trump's decision to appoint Grenell did not result in changes helpful to the LGBTQ community  and his so-called effort to decriminalize being LGBTQ worldwide went exactly nowhere," she told the publication in response to Mr Grenell's ad.
We had no major announcements this week, which allowed the pair of Ultras to retain the top two spots - the Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra still ahead of the Galaxy Note20 Ultra.

The Realme X7 is just around the corner and it appears quite a few a paying attention as it made the top 3 before it made the stage.

The Redmi Note 9 Pro leads the vanilla Note 9 in fourth and fifth as another rumored phone, the Zenfone 7 took sixth in the week leading to its announcement.

The OnePlus Nord has slipped all the way down to seventh, as the veteran that is the Galaxy A51 is now eight.

The Redmi 9 retains ninth as its K30 Ultra stablemate enters the top 10 in the final spot.

This leaves no room in this week's edition of the chart for the Galaxy M31s, Google Pixel 4a and the Microsoft Surface Duo.
US President Donald Trump speaks during an event at the Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant, Aug. 6 in Clyde, Ohio. AP-Yonhap



By Kim Yoo-chul



Ahead of the upcoming U.S. presidential election, the issue of the alleged theft of trade secrets relating to electric vehicle (EV) lithium-ion battery technology between LG Chem and SK Innovation is becoming a political matter with the Korean companies being asked to agree on what has become a "multi-billion" dollar fight.



Such a scenario is gaining clear momentum after U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, Gainesville, asked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to probe what he referred to as "an ongoing effort to illegally employ foreign nationals" at the SK Innovation battery plant in the state of Georgia. SK Innovation is expected to employ more than 2,000 people at the plant in line with the expansion of its production facilities.



The U.S. politician reported the matter to top federal officials citing a May 29 incident at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, when border officials say they "intercepted 33 Korean nationals  who were attempting to enter the United States with fraudulent work authorizations."



SK Innovation officials declined to comment. However, the requests by Collins came as settlement talks are currently under way between LG and SK legal representatives. The USITC recently ruled in favor of LG Chem in a preliminary ruling. Specifically, it said SK Innovation stole LG's battery trade secrets. The body plans to issue a determination in October this year, which if adverse, could block SK from importing equipment to outfit its Georgia plant which in turn could seriously jeopardize contracts with EV manufacturers such as Volkswagen.



LG Chem officials said the company "doesn't want to see a worst-case scenario" reiterating its stance that an agreement could be reached following an apology by SK and a commitment not to repeat "wrongdoings." Of note is that the USTR is in a position to veto a final ruling by the USITC.



SK Innovation is expecting the possible reelection of U.S. President Donald Trump would provide a "fresh impetus" from its standpoint in terms of reversing the USITC ruling.



But industry officials contacted by The Korea Times said Sunday the request by the U.S. politician was demonstrating the de-facto hope by the Trump camp of a settlement in the case as the spread of the pandemic is taking a toll on the recovery trajectory in the U.S. economy.



A recent report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) said a lot of U.S. economists are worried about slowing growth, rising debt and uncertainty over Trump's trade war with China. The CFR said more competitive foreign economies and the rise of automation are reshaping the U.S. labor market, and noted the ongoing criticism by U.S. politicians who said global trade deals were resulting in the losses of manufacturing jobs.



"Clearly, the legal tussle between LG Chem and SK Innovation isn't a matter only between them. The issue is being complicated as a lot of interested parties are involved. The impact of the final USITC ruling will depends on the U.S. presidential election which is approaching. LG and SK will initiate relevant processes for an eventual settlement anytime now," a senior industry executive familiar with the issue said.



SK Innovation is building a new battery plant in Georgia with an investment of 1.1 trillion won. The plant is scheduled to begin operations in 2022. In April, it decided to make an additional 894 billion won investment to build a second plant, there.



As the settlement efforts are reaching a climax, legal representatives for the two Korean companies are discussing details related to the finalization of terms. Sources familiar with the matter said SK Innovation hopes to make a one-off payment of between 1.5 trillion won and 1.8 trillion won to LG Chem, while LG Chem is seeking a comprehensive cross-licensing contract in return for a settlement before the final USITC ruling.



LG officials said its 2017 agreement with China's ATL, for which the latter agreed to pay 3 percent of its sales of safety-reinforced separators is far from the possible settlement with SK in terms of the gravity of the issue. ATL infringed on three of LG's battery separator patents.



"Just like U.S.-based mobile chipset giant Qualcomm is doing to LG Electronics, LG Chem was hoping to receive royalties in sync with the amount of battery sales from SK's battery plants for a certain period. That scenario, if it happens, will clearly help LG Chem continuously invest in its battery business but will be a burden for SK. The point will be how they find a middle ground," the executive added.


(TNS)  After terrorists slammed a plane into the Pentagon on 9/11, ambulances rushed scores of the injured to community hospitals, but only three of the patients were taken to specialized trauma wards. The reason: The hospitals and ambulances had no real-time information-sharing system.Nineteen years later, there is still no national data network that enables the health system to respond effectively to disasters and disease outbreaks. Many doctors and nurses must fill out paper forms on COVID-19 cases and available beds and fax them to public health agencies, causing critical delays in care and hampering the effort to track and block the spread of the coronavirus.We need to be thinking long and hard about making improvements in the data-reporting system so the response to the next epidemic is a little less painful, said Dr. Dan Hanfling, a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit that helps the federal government solve technology problems in health care and other areas. And there will be another one.There are signs the COVID-19 pandemic has created momentum to modernize the nations creaky, fragmented public health data system, in which nearly 3,000 local, state and federal health departments set their own reporting rules and vary greatly in their ability to send and receive data electronically.Sutter Health and UC Davis Health, along with nearly 30 other provider organizations around the country, recently launched a collaborative effort to speed and improve the sharing of clinical data on individual COVID-19 cases with public health departments.But even that platform, which contains information about patients diagnoses and response to treatments, doesnt yet include data on the availability of hospital beds, intensive care units or supplies needed for a seamless pandemic response.The federal government spent nearly $40 billion over the past decade to equip hospitals and physicians offices with electronic health record systems for improving treatment of individual patients. But no comparable effort has emerged to build an effective system for quickly moving information on infectious disease from providers to public health agencies.In March, Congress approved $500 million over 10 years to modernize the public health data infrastructure. But the amount falls far short of whats needed to update data systems and train staff at local and state health departments, said Brian Dixon, director of public health informatics at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis.The congressional allocation is half the annual amount proposed under last years bipartisan Saving Lives Through Better Data Act, which did not pass, and much less than the $4.5 billion Public Health Infrastructure Fund proposed last year by public health leaders.The data are moving slower than the disease, said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. We need a way to get that information electronically and seamlessly to public health agencies so we can do investigations, quarantine people and identify hot spots and risk groups in real time, not two weeks later.The impact of these data failures is felt around the country. The director of the California Department of Public Health, Dr. Sonia Angell, was forced out Aug. 9 after a malfunction in the states data system left out up to 300,000 COVID-19 test results, undercutting the accuracy of its case count.Other advanced countries have done a better job of rapidly and accurately tracking COVID-19 cases and medical resources while doing contact tracing and quarantining those who test positive. In France, physicians offices report patient symptoms to a central agency every day. Thats an advantage of having a national health care system.If someone in France sneezes, they learn about it in Paris, said Dr. Chris Lehmann, clinical informatics director at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.Coronavirus cases reported to U.S. public health departments are often missing patients addresses and phone numbers, which are needed to trace their contacts, Hamilton said. Lab test results often lack information on patients races or ethnicities, which could help authorities understand demographic disparities in transmission and response to the virus.Last month, the Trump administration abruptly ordered hospitals to report all COVID-19 data to a private vendor hired by the Department of Health and Human Services rather than to the long-established reporting system run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The administration said the switch would help the White House coronavirus task force better allocate scarce supplies.The shift disrupted, at least temporarily, the flow of critical information needed to track COVID-19 outbreaks and allocate resources, public health officials said. They worried the move looked political in nature and could dampen public confidence in the accuracy of the data.An HHS spokesperson said the transition had improved and sped up hospital reporting. Experts had various opinions on the matter but agreed that the new system doesnt fix problems with the old CDC system that contributed to this countrys slow and ineffective response to COVID-19.While I think its an exceptionally bad idea to take the CDC out of it, the bottom line is the way CDC presented the data wasnt all that useful, said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California-San Francisco.The new HHS system lacks data from nursing homes, which is needed to ensure safe care for COVID-19 patients after discharge from the hospital, said Dr. Lissy Hu, CEO of CarePort Health, which coordinates care between hospitals and post-acute facilities.Some observers hope the pandemic will persuade the health care industry to push faster toward its goal of smoother data exchange through computer systems that can easily talk to one another  an objective that has met with only partial success after more than a decade of effort.The case reporting system launched by Sutter Health and its partners sends clinical information from each coronavirus patients electronic health record to public health agencies in all 50 states. The Digital Bridge platform also allows the agencies for the first time to send helpful treatment information back to doctors and nurses. About 20 other health systems are preparing to join the 30 partners in the system, and major digital health record vendors like Epic and Allscripts have added the reporting capacity to their software.Sutter hopes to get state and county officials to let the health system stop sending data manually, which would save its clinicians time they need for treating patients, said Dr. Steven Lane, Sutters clinical informatics director for interoperability.The platform could be key in implementing COVID-19 vaccination around the country, said Dr. Andrew Wiesenthal, a managing director at Deloitte Consulting who spearheaded the development of Digital Bridge.Youd want a registry of everyone immunized, youd want to hear if that person developed COVID anyway, then youd want to know about subsequent symptoms, he said. You can only do that well if you have an effective data system for surveillance and reporting.The key is to get all the health care players  providers, insurers, EHR vendors and public health agencies  to collaborate and share data, rather than hoarding it for their own financial or organizational benefit, Wiesenthal said.One would hope we will use this crisis as an opportunity to fix a long-standing problem, said John Auerbach, CEO of Trust for Americas Health. But I worry this will follow the historical pattern of throwing a lot of money at a problem during a crisis, then cutting back after. Theres a tendency to think short term.
But perhaps the second study, which remains unpublished by a medical journal, provides the most insight. Researchers in the Netherlands halted the trial early. Why? Because they measured the antibody concentrations not just of the donor plasma, but of the recipients. They found something surprising. Most of the covid-19 patients in the throes of the illness already had high levels of these antibodies. This is an important insight into why plasma transfusions have failed for so many illnesses in the past, such as Ebola. If plasma is akin to bringing a knife to a gunfight, adding a few more knives will not suffice.
Saudi Arabia has inaugurated the National Grain Company, a strategic partnership between the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company (Salic) and the National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia (Bahri).

With an estimated total cost of SR412 million in Phase One, the project aims at meeting the future demand for major grains in Saudi Arabia.

The new companys inauguration and name announcement ceremony was held at the headquarters of the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture, under the patronage of Eng Abdulrahman Al-Fadhli, Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture and Chairman of Salic, and in the presence of Eng Ahmed Al-Faris, Governor of the Saudi Grains Organization (SAGO); Mohammed Al-Sarhan, Chairman of Bahri; Eng. Sulaiman Al-Rumaih, CEO of Salic; and Abdullah Aldubaikhi, CEO of Bahri.

This partnership aims to oversee the trade, handling, and storage of grains between its sources in all regions of the Black Sea, Europe, South America, and the Red Sea region, contributing to the process of import, transportation, distribution, and storage. The project, at Yanbu Commercial Port, will start with a capacity of about 3 million tons per year by the year 2022, to gradually increase to 5 million tons per year. The new terminal, which will be built according to the highest international standards, will enable the rapid handling of grains and fodder

The new terminal, which will be constructed to the highest international standards, will allow for the rapid handling of grains and fodder, by making the logistics services of the terminal available to all importers for the benefit of both the private and public sectors.

Eng Al-Fadhli said: We are delighted with this partnership, which aligns with SALICs strategy to contribute to achieving food security in the Kingdom, as part of the Vision 2030 objectives. The project will also aid with the provision of basic food products and price stability in the Kingdom, which is tied to global production and consumption rates, the movement of commercial shipping, and global stocks of basic food commodities.

Al-Fadhli added: We are confident that this company will play a major role in strengthening supply chains in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as it will lead to the building of the largest regional center for grains. The new terminal will enhance food distribution solutions in the region by importing, processing, exporting, and storing grains to the Kingdom, thanks in part to the strategic location of Yanbu Commercial Port, a key maritime gateway to receive the Kingdoms imports of strategic goods. This project also reflects Salics strategic objectives to achieve more than 50% of the import coverage rate for all commodities identified as strategic goods, in line with the Kingdoms food security strategy.

Mohammed Al-Sarhan, Chairman of Bahri, said: Our work at Bahri balances demand and supply, harnessing big data to efficiently manage and streamline our fleet operations. Today, we are seizing new expansion opportunities in cooperation with economic entities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to diversify our offerings and provide value-added services, in addition to the development of our main business sectors. Over the years, we have made great efforts to contribute to national food security by transporting nearly 1.5 million tons of grains annually to the Kingdom through our fleet of five dry-bulk carriers. With the addition of four new carriers before the end of this year, Bahri will be able to transport 5 million tons of dry food and various grains, including barley, corn, wheat, soy, and others, annually, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Al-Sarhan added: We are pleased to achieve one of our largest regional-level strategic initiatives. Our joint venture with Salic will link the Kingdom to global grain sources, further contributing to the goals of Vision 2030 to make our nation an international logistics hub, connecting three continents. The Yanbu Commercial Port, overlooking the Red Sea, was chosen as the strategic location following a lease agreement between Salic and the Saudi Ports Authority (Mawani), reflecting the Kingdoms objectives to maintain water security and limit the cultivation of fodder that consumes water in large quantities.

The Yanbu Commercial Port is the perfect maritime gateway for a grain handling terminal of this size and capacity, as most imported grains come from countries along the Black Sea, South America, and parts of North America. New shipments coming from Australia to the Red Sea will also find the terminal beneficial, thanks to its modern offloading, handling, and storage technologies, said the statement.  TradeArabia News Service
Kerala Assembly passes 'unanimous resolution' against leasing Trivandrum airport

India

oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P

Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 24: The Kerala Assembly Monday passed a "unanimous resolution" demanding the withdrawal of Union Cabinet's decision to lease out the international airport to Adani Enterprises Ltd. Moving the resolution, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said the Centre should re-examine its decision and the operation and management of the airportbe handed over to the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) in which the state government has stake.

Despite the state government agreeing to give the amount quoted by Adani Enterprises, the Centre's decision to privatise the airport cannot be justified, he said. Though the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, Ramesh Chennithala, supported the resolution against privatisation of the airport, he slammed the government saying it had "double standards" on the issue.

The 1991 saga has hit the Congress once again

He said the government attacked the Adani group in public, but had secretly helped them by consulting a law firm close to it and alleged that there was a "criminal conspiracy". Chennithala also wanted to know why CIAL (Cochin International Airport Ltd), the airport company had not been appointed as consultant.

"A conspiracy has been held to help the Adani group," Chennithala alleged and said, "Keeping in mind the state's interests, the Opposition is supporting the motion and we agree with the spirit of the resolution."

Congress in crisis: The nine possible outcomes of todays CWC meet

When the chief minister stood up to speak again, the opposition benches raised voicein protest. Vijayan said the state government's stand on the airport is an "open book". The firm had only done "legal vetting" and had no role in deciding the amount quoted by the state in the bidding process, he said.

After the brief discussion, Speaker P Sreeramakrishnan declared that the "resolution has been passed unanimously". However, the BJP, which had organised a protest outside the Assembly demanding the chief minister's resignation in the gold smuggling case, alleged the resolution was not "unanimous" as their lone representative in the House, O Rajagopal was "not allowed to speak".
By the end of 2021, two fashion giants will stop their use of certain animal materials in their products - Prada will stop using kangaroo leather and Valentino will stop its use of alpaca wool.

Prada joins the brigade of other renowned fashion brands namely Versace, Victoria Beckham, Chanel and others who have banned leather made from kangaroos. Versace also announced going fur-free on the runway earlier this year.

The Prada Group, which comprises brands such as Prada, Miu Miu, Churchs, and Car Shoe, confirmed to Italian animal rights group Lega Antivivsezione Italiana (LAV) that it will cease the purchase of any new kangaroo leather. This decision will spare the Australian animals immense suffering.

K-Leather

According to Peta.org.uk, Some 2.3 million kangaroos are reportedly killed every year for their skin. To produce leather, the animals are first shot. Then, the injured kangaroos  as well as orphaned joeys  are decapitated or hit sharply on the head to destroy the brain before their skin is torn off so it can be exported and made into accessories often labelled as k-leather.

Graphic photos of charred kangaroos and reports of their habitats having been destroyed by the bushfires in Australia has led people to demand an end to this government-sanctioned slaughter. Were delighted that Prada has made the right decision to end its involvement in the barbaric killing, Peta.org.uk continues saying.

The exotic skins industry is also responsible for the inhuman slaughter of crocodiles, snakes and ostriches, all of whom have died for fashion.

Alpaca wool, famous for its soft and lustrous fibres, is used in some Valentino creations. These are harvested from live Alpacas from the worlds largest privately owned alpaca farm, Mallkini, located in Peru.

PETA recently revealed rough treatment of these animals at the hands of the shearers, which caused social media backlash. Valentino has said that it would hence severe all ties with Mallkini.

Valentino joins other high street fashion brands such as Marks and Spencer, H&M Group, Gap and Uniqlo in banning the use of Alpaca wool.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Saumya Sharma Saumya Sharma enjoys writing, reading and watching short and long-form content across the vast expanse of the world, in all forms - print, web, 70mm and more. A soul traveller by choice, she sometimes finds herself well-blended amongst Mango people, thinking about life as we know it. She has been in the digital content and social media marketing space for the past seven years and counting. She is fond of dogs, haikus, limericks and poetry. ...view detail
Police have not been able to trace panchayat member Nisar Ahmad Bhat who went missing from Shopian in south Kashmir on August 19.

Meanwhile, in an audio message, terrorists have claimed to have killed Bhat, police said. A senior police officer said that according to Bhats family, he had gone to Shopian on Wednesday. He has been missing since. He (Bhat) was booked under PSA in 1995. There are 12 FIR against him and efforts are on to trace him, the officer said.

Also read: Dont delay development projects, Jammu and Kashmir L-G tells officers

The officer also said that the audio clip seems fake. We are investigating every aspect of this case. The 2.56-minute message, purportedly released by terrorists, claimed that Bhat had been killed and buried at an unidentified place.

In the clip, an unidentified person can be heard saying that Bhat was involved in anti-movement activities and had met his fate. We have been after him for a long time and finally got him, the person said in the clip.

The message claimed that the body hadnt been handed over to his family because of Covid-19. We understand the pain of the family. To avoid the spread of Covid-19, the body wasnt given to his family. Just as the Indian forces, after killing our comrades, bury them in unmarked graves at unidentified locations, the message said.

Earlier, on August 2, Shakir Manzoor, who was working with 162 Territorial Army battalion in south Kashmir, was abducted from Kulgam district. His burnt vehicle was found later. The jawan could not be traced despite a search operation by army and the police in Shopian and Kulgam areas.

A similar message was released later, claiming that Manzoor was killed and buried at an undisclosed location.

In the last two months, five BJP leaders, including two sarpanches, have been killed in different parts of Kashmir. Earlier in July, Congress sarpanch Ajay Pandita was killed in Anantnag district which forced many panchayat members to resign from their parties.

The government also shifted dozens of panchayat members and block development council (BDC) members, majority of them from the BJP, to safer places after an evaluation of threats from terrorists.

Soon after taking charge, Jammu and Kashmirs new Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha had said adequate security would be provided to panchayat members and political workers in Kashmir.

Sinha was speaking at a function in Srinagar in which a large number of panchayat workers participated and demanded security in the backdrop of attacks on BJP workers in different parts of the Valley.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 16:37:12|Editor: huaxia

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TOKYO, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Tokyo metropolitan government on Monday confirmed 95 new daily cases of COVID-19, with the figure dropping to the lowest count since July 8.

The latest figure compares to 212 new infections reported on Sunday and 256 additional cases reported in the capital on Saturday.

Monday's figure for Tokyo is the first time since July 8 when 75 cases were confirmed that the number of daily infections has remained below the 100-mark.

The Tokyo metropolitan government said the capital's cumulative total now stands at 19,428, the highest among Japan's 47 prefectures. The nation's total caseload since the outbreak has surpassed 63,000 infections.

The Tokyo metropolitan government has continued to urge Tokyo residents to refrain from traveling outside the prefecture, as well as avoid dining out in groups, even those including small gatherings held in close proximity with others, in a bid to curb the virus' spread.

Establishments serving alcohol such as restaurants, bars and karaoke parlors have been requested to shorten their opening hours until the end of August.

They have been asked to shut their doors at 10:00 p.m. to limit the number of patrons drinking into the night as another means to try and limit the virus' spread as people's inhibitions tend to lower once intoxicated, including mask wearing and maintaining appropriate social distancing measures.

The metropolitan government has described the situation in the capital of 14 million as "extremely severe" and has said that the "utmost caution is still required" while maintaining its alert level at the highest on its four-tier scale meaning "infections are spreading."

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike has said that a Tokyo-specific state of emergency could still be declared if the virus' resurgence worsens. Enditem
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has "strongly reprimanded" his finance minister for challenging the Zambian leader to explain his decision to sack that country's central bank governor, the presidency said Monday.

In a surprise move, Zambian President Edgar Lungu on Saturday fired Denny Kalyalya from his post as governor of the Bank of Zambia.

No reason was given for the removal of the governor, who has been credited with bringing stability to the economy.

South African Finance Minister Tito Mboweni reacted angrily in a series of tweets and demanding an explanation.

"Presidents in Africa must stop this nonsense of waking up in the morning and fire a Central Bank Governor! You cannot do that. This is not some fiefdoms of yours! Your personal property?! No!" tweeted Mboweni on Saturday.

"That Governor was a good fella. Why do we do these things as Africans. The President of Zambia must give us the reasons why he dismissed the Governor or else hell is on its way. I will mobilize!"

On Sunday he wrote that his tweets had landed him in hot water, but vowed not to give up.

"Looks like I am in trouble about my statement on the dismissal of the Bank of Zambia Governor! I stand by my statement. Central Bank independence is key. Not negotiable. Let all central bankers speak out!"

He has since deleted the tweets.

- 'Strongly reprimanded'-

A statement from the South African presidency said Ramaphosa had "strongly reprimanded" Mboweni.

He had assured the Zambian government that the minister's "unfortunate remarks do not reflect the views of the South African government" and the "issue is being addressed to ensure that such an incident does not occur again".

A former World Bank executive director, Kalyalya's tenure had been due to end in 2023. He was replaced by a deputy secretary to the cabinet, Christopher Mvunga.

In a statement on Monday, the International Monetary Fund said it had noted the "change in leadership" and called for the central bank's "independence and credibility" to be maintained.

Story continues

Zambian Information Minister Dora Siliya has meanwhile expressed surprise at Mboweni's "immature and improper criticism of a sovereign decision by Zambia".

In a tweet on Sunday, she urged Mboweni to instead focus on the coronavirus "problems facing" South Africa.

With nearly 610,000 cases and more than 13,000 deaths, South Africa has recorded the highest numbers of coronavirus infections on the continent, accounting for more than half of Africa's recorded fatalities.

Zambia has recorded 11,148 cases, of which 280 have been fatal.

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A New York man was arrested Friday at Newark Liberty International Airport after he tried to bring a loaded handgun through security in a carry-on bag, Transportation Security Administration officials said Monday.

TSA officers found the 9-mm handgun, which was loaded with five bullets, as the carry-on bag it went through a checkpoint X-ray machine. They alerted Port Authority police, who confiscated the gun and arrested the man on weapons charges. TSA officials only identified him as a resident of Monsey, New York.

So far, this makes the ninth firearm that agents have detected at Newark airport this year, said Lisa Farbstein, a TSA spokeswoman. Last year, TSA agents found 11 guns at checkpoints in Newark Airport.

Nationally, 4,432 firearms were discovered by TSA officers in carry-on bags at checkpoints across the country in 2019, approximately a 5% increase nationally in firearm discoveries from the total of 4,239 detected in 2018.

Travelers can find information about how to properly travel with a firearm on the TSA website. Travelers should also contact their airline additional requirements the carrier has for traveling with firearms and ammunition.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com.
-- Governments at different levels in China have made concerted efforts to help enterprises resume production, in a move that helps stabilize the global supply chain.

-- During the COVID-19 epidemic, China's manufacturing sector has withstood the "stress test" from the virus, and helped ensure a steady global supply of medical goods, as well as stable industrial and supply chains, said Xin Guobin, vice minister of industry and information technology.

-- During the epidemic, China's business environment and stable industrial supply chain have won widespread recognition from foreign investors.

NANJING, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese carmaker SAIC MAXUS Automotive Co., Ltd. has managed to buck the trend of a global automobile industry recession amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with vehicle sales rising by 26.4 percent year on year in July.

"Our team has gone through all of our 1,288 suppliers to sort out possible problems early during the epidemic, which is full of twists," said Wang Ying, general manager of SAIC MAXUS's Nanjing Plant in east China's Jiangsu Province.

"We even requested the local authorities to help transfer parts and even equipment from Wuhan, a strategically important city of China's automobile industry that was hard hit during the epidemic," said Wang.

Thanks to the resilient supply chain in the world's largest auto market, SAIC MAXUS resumed full operations of its four manufacturing bases on Feb. 24.

Ambulances are seen at a modifying workshop of SAIC MAXUS Automotive Co., Ltd in Wuxi, east China's Jiangsu Province, Feb. 16, 2020. (Xinhua/Ji Chunpeng)

China's broader auto industry has seen a recovery. Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) showed that the country's automobile production and sales increased by 21.9 percent and 16.4 percent, respectively, year on year in July.

BACK ON TRACK

Governments at different levels in China have made concerted efforts to help enterprises resume production, in a move that also helps stabilize the global supply chain.

According to Wang, the company's auto parts imports were affected as the epidemic quickly swept the world. "Thankfully, the local government quickly helped us find substitute domestic suppliers, which were key to the recovery of the automobile industrial chain."

"Authorities also sent medical supplies, such as masks and disinfectants, to help us resume production at the very beginning of the epidemic," Wang added.

Workers from Macheng City of central China's Hubei Province arrive by chartered bus at Kunshan City, east China's Jiangsu Province, March 22, 2020. (Xinhua/Ji Chunpeng)

The quick industrial production resumption across China has helped the company ensure the smooth operation of its global supply chain by exporting product parts to Europe and the United States via intercontinental trains and ships, said Steve Jin, plant manager of ASSA ABLOY Entrance System Suzhou Co., Ltd. in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou. The ASSA ABLOY Group is a global leader in access solutions with factories in more than 70 countries.

"Orders for our swing doors have increased by 20 percent and 19 percent year on year in the American and European markets so far this year," said Jin. "Manipulators and other components of these swing doors are made or purchased by the Suzhou plant."

Xin Guobin, vice minister of MIIT, said China's industrial performance has improved month by month with effective epidemic control and policy support.

Statistics showed that China's industrial output went up by 4.8 percent year on year in June, picking up from the 4.4 percent and 3.9 percent expansion in May and April, respectively.

SUPPLY CHAIN STABILITY

During the COVID-19 epidemic, China's manufacturing sector has withstood the "stress test" from the virus, and helped ensure a steady global supply of medical goods, as well as stable industrial and supply chains, said Xin.

According to Jin, the pedestrian access door business of the ASSA ABLOY Group has established four plants in America, the Czech Republic, Canada, and China. As a global purchasing center, the Suzhou plant also supplies some of the core components for the other three factories.

The Suzhou plant also produces many half-finished goods of the pillar products to reduce the costs of raw materials and labor in the entire supply chain.

Photo taken on Aug. 21, 2020 shows the assembling sector of ASSA ABLOY Entrance System Suzhou Co., Ltd in Suzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province. (Xinhua)

"The fact that the Suzhou team has been able to maintain product supply during these challenging times is vital to our ability to continue operations across the world, including installing and servicing key infrastructure like healthcare," said David Johansson, PDS Supply Chain Director of ASSA ABLOY.

As the pandemic swept other parts of the world, fast-recovering Chinese companies are playing a role in stabilizing the global industrial supply chain.

The Nanjing High Accurate Drive Equipment Manufacturing Group Co., Ltd. (NGC), one of the world's leading wind-turbine gearbox suppliers, saw sales increase over 30 percent year on year during the Jan.-July period.

The company is expected to accomplish a sales record in 2020, as it has attracted new customers in the global market, and is seeing strong sales growth in the European and Asian markets.

As an important link in the industrial supply chain, the company focuses on product development and technological innovation, with all its products owning their intellectual property rights, according to Hu Yueming, NGC's chairman and general manager.

During the epidemic, China's business environment and stable industrial supply chain have won widespread recognition from foreign investors. Statistics from the Ministry of Commerce showed that China saw an 8.4 percent year-on-year increase in the actual use of foreign investment in the second quarter of this year.

MIIT Vice Minister Xin said China will focus on increasing the stability and competitiveness of its industrial and supply chains, and improve the industrial foundations and level of modernization for the industrial chains.
Sam Jairo Omindo is a self-taught designer and founder of Genteel Kenya. Founded three years ago, Genteel has made big strides in placing the local fashion industry on the international fashion scene.

Describe the Genteel Man

The Genteel Man is a culturally conscious, self-aware and confident person. He has a good sense of style and is unapologetic about it. He is good at what he does and excels on many levels in his career. He spares time for the important things and people in his life. You can always count on him to show up for your surprise party. In short, you realise that being a Genteel Man isnt just a thing; its a lifestyle. A choice.

Which local or international brand would you love to partner with for a collaborative shoot?

I would love to partner with Ralph Lauren or Ozwald Boateng. I feel like they are brands that have captured the cultural spirit of their respective origin countries, and have successfully showcased them through clothes.

Lauren has managed to recreate the American culture and way of life, and showcased this in his pieces, while Boateng has carried the full weight of his native Ghanian culture and transmitted it through his subtle prints.

What are three must-haves from your current collection?

In the face of Covid-19 and people spending more time at home, I feel that a combination of the semi-casual White Popote Pale Shirt and Beige Kila Mahali Khaki pants offer the versatility and comfort needed to transition between the home office and outsiding with your friends and family (of course while maintaining social-distancing). Not to forget the GenTara face masks, which come in a variety of colours and shades.

What steps have you taken to stay relevant during this pandemic?

With support from the British Council, Metta & Fashion Scouts UK, we partnered with Vintara Collections to create our three-ply GenTara Facemasks aimed at keeping people safe during the pandemic. For every box of masks bought, we donate one mask. We partnered with SOMO, a non-profit organisation offering support and training in low-income areas like Kibera, to help us distribute the masks.

What should the Kenyan government do to support and promote the fashion sector?

It should revive the local textile industry to ensure that we have access to cheaper fabrics, which will help reduce the cost of our products.

Secondly, the government should set aside funds to be accessed specifically by the fashion sector. This would help the creative sector, which is greatly underfunded but has a chance to grow and employ more people.

Source: Sunday Nation
Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Apple Inc. plans to start reopening U.S. retail stores that had been closed over the past several weeks due to local Covid-19 spikes, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is slated to open a small number of stores as soon as the end of August, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous discussing plans that havent been made public. In most cases, the stores will operate on an appointment-only basis for the immediate future, the people said.
Actress Shefali Jariwala, who is best known for her Kaanta Laga music video, appeared in Bigg Boss 13. She has been quite open about her desire to adopt a baby and has previously called Sunny Leone her inspiration, after the latter adopted her daughter Nisha. She was also seen talking about it on Bigg Boss with fellow contestant Hindustani Bhau.

However, her plans to bringing an adopted baby girl home have been delayed due to the lockdown, she admitted in an interview with Mumbai Mirror, adding, "Research, paperwork and counselling sessions take time, but we are positive." Shefali further revealed that she would want her first child to be adopted and may consider giving birth biologically later.

On the work front, Shefali will soon be seen in an episode of The Kapil Sharma Show. She is also working on remake of a hit song of the nineties with Mika Singh. The song title has been kept a secret for now. The duo recently shot for the music video for the song amidst the lockdown.

"Mika and I have been friends for over a decade, and have been wanting to do something together for a long time. It's only during the lockdown when Mika sent me this song, I was immediately on board," Shefali said about her upcoming collaboration.

About the track, she added, "It's a remake of a song from the '90s, but the flavour is completely different. Mika has composed and sung the song brilliantly. It's a classy track with a sensuous and mysterious undertone, showcasing the side of love that has never been attempted before."

(With inputs from IANS)
Do not take off your mask when talking to people regardless of who they are. Protect yourself, protect your family, protect your friends, protect your colleagues, protect us all and help stop the spread of Covid-19. All it takes is one simple mistake, so you should be extra careful and do not take anything for granted. Before I got sick, I heard the saying that treat everyone as a potential threat, and that is exactly the case when it comes to this deadly virus, he said.
A homeless 12-year-old girl who is back on the streets after leaving hospital following two suicide attempts has penned a heartbreaking Facebook post about wanting to die.

The Gold Coast teenager, who is under the care of Child Safety, has slept in tents and toilet blocks since March after being ousted from her foster care home of ten years.

Since the removal, she has become a member of a teen gang, been sexually assaulted, and tried to take her life twice.

In her latest post online, she offered a chilling glimpse into the devastating toll her tough circumstances have taken.

A Gold Coast teenager (right) has penned a heartbreaking Facebook post detailing how she tried to kill herself because she didn't care about living after being ousted from her foster care home and becoming homeless

'I stopped looking both ways before crossing the street and I stopped counting the pills before taking them and I didnt do it BC (because) I wanted to kill myself I did BC I stopped careing (sic) wether (sic) I died or not,' she wrote, the Gold Coast Bulletin reports.

After being ordered out of home, she was taken to a residential care facility - accommodation for the most troubled youths.

During that time, she joined the teen gang, where she was sexually assaulted and self harmed.

She lost her bed in March after a violent altercation involving a friend from the gang broke out inside the home.

She resorted to living in a tent on a beach, until she was moved on by council workers, then shifted to sleeping outside shops in Southport and a public toilet in Eagleby.

In June, she was hospitalised after developing a staph infection on her back.

Several attempts to reunite with her former carers have failed, but family friends say she still wants to return.

The LNP have now called for an independent inquiry into the child safety system.

It is understood Child Safety recently gave her permission to stay with the friends mother and later organised hotel accommodation.

In her latest post online (pictured), the 12-year-old offered a chilling glimpse into the devastating toll her tough circumstances have taken

However, last Friday they had no accommodation and were forced to sleep in a toilet.

Family friends said they enrolled into school for three days, but the girl dropped out after she being teased by peers for not having 'proper family'.

Mudgeeraba MP Ros Bates believes it will be another 24 hours before accommodation can be secured for the child.

'Its been almost two months since Deb Frecklington and the LNP released our plan to overhaul the child safety system and introduced a Child Protection Force and yet nothing has changed,' Ms Bates said.

'This poor 12-year-old girl is yet another tragic example of Labors broken system.

The girl has been given a phone.

Child Safety Minister Di Farmer previously said she cannot comment on individual cases but said it was 'distressing' and heartbreaking to hear tragic stories of young women in such terrible circumstances.

For confidential support call the Lifeline 24-hour crisis support on: 13 11 14
CAUSE CHILDREN TO HAVE A LOW IQ: Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found in May 2019 that children born to mothers who live in polluted areas have an IQ that is up to seven points lower than those living in places with cleaner air.

CAUSE CHILDREN TO HAVE POORER MEMORY: Researchers at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health found boys exposed to greater levels of PM2.5 in the womb performed worse on memory tests by the time they are 10.

DELAY THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN: Youngsters who live less than one-third of a mile away from busy roads are twice as likely to score lower on tests of communication skills in infancy, found researchers at Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health in April. They were also more likely to have poorer hand-eye coordination.

MAKE CHILDREN MORE ANXIOUS: University of Cincinnati scientists claimed pollution may alter the structure of children's brains to make them more anxious. Their study of 14 youngsters found rates of anxiety was higher among those exposed to greater levels of pollution.

CUT YOUR CHILD'S LIFE SHORT: Children born today will lose nearly two years of their lives because of air pollution, according to a report by the US-based Health Effects Institute and the University of British Columbia in April 2019. UNICEF called for action on the back of the study.

RAISE A CHILD'S RISK OF AUTISM: Researchers at Monash University in Australia discovered youngsters living in highly polluted parts of Shanghai have a 86 per cent greater chance of developing ASD. Lead author Dr Yuming Guo said: 'The developing brains of young children are more vulnerable to toxic exposures in the environment.'

CAUSE ASTHMA IN CHILDREN: Four million children around the world develop asthma each year because of road traffic pollution, a major study by academics at George Washington University estimated. Experts are divided as to what causes asthma - but exposure to pollution in childhood increases the risk by damaging the lungs.

MAKE CHILDREN FAT: University of Southern California experts found last November that 10 year olds who lived in polluted areas when they were babies are, on average, 2.2lbs (1kg), heavier than those who grew up around cleaner air. Nitrogen dioxide pollution could disrupt how well children burn fat, the scientists said.

LEAVE WOMEN INFERTILE EARLIER: Scientists at the University of Modena, Italy, claimed in May 2019 that they believe pollution speeds up ageing in women, just like smoking, meaning they run out of eggs faster. This was based on them finding almost two-thirds of women who have a low 'reserve' of eggs regularly inhaled toxic air.

RAISE THE RISK OF A MISCARRIAGE: University of Utah scientists found in January that pregnant women are 16 per cent more likely to suffer the heartbreak of a miscarriage if they live in areas of high pollution.

RAISE THE RISK OF BREAST CANCER: Scientists at the University of Stirling found six women working at the same bridge next to a busy road in the US got breast cancer within three years of each other. There was a one in 10,000 chance the cases were a coincidence, the study said. It suggested chemicals in the traffic fumes caused the cancer by shutting down the BRCA genes, which try to stop tumours growing.

DAMAGE A MAN'S SPERM: Brazilian scientists at the University of Sao Paulo found in March that mice exposed to toxic air had lower counts and worse quality sperm compared to those who had inhaled clean air since birth.

MAKE MEN LESS LIKELY TO GET SEXUALLY AROUSED: Scientists at Guangzhou Medical University in China found rats exposed to air pollution struggled to get sexually aroused. Scientists believe it may also affect men, as inhaling poisonous particles may trigger inflammation in blood vessels and starve the genitals of oxygen  affecting men's ability to become sexually aroused.

MAKE MEN MORE LIKELY TO HAVE ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION: Men who live on main roads are more likely to have difficulty getting an erection due to exposure to pollution, a Guangzhou University in China study suggested in February. Toxic fumes reduced blood flow to the genitals, tests on rats showed, putting them at risk of developing erectile dysfunction.

RAISE THE RISK OF PSYCHOSIS: In March, King's College London scientists linked toxic air to intense paranoia and hearing voices in young people for the first time. They said uncovering exactly how pollution may lead to psychosis should be an 'urgent health priority'.

MAKE YOU DEPRESSED: Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers found in January that that the more polluted the air, the sadder we are. Their study was based on analysing social media users in China alongside the average daily PM2.5 concentration and weather data where they lived.

CAUSE DEMENTIA: Air pollution could be responsible for 60,000 cases of dementia in the UK, researchers from King's College London and St George's, University of London, calculated last September. Tiny pollutants breathed deep into the lungs and enter the blood stream, where they may travel into the brain and cause inflammation  a problem which may trigger dementia.
By Aisha Jabbarova

Azerbaijan has thwarted a provocation attempt by the sabotage-reconnaissance group of the Armenian armed forces, the Defence Ministry reported.

The incident occurred in the direction of the Goranboy district of the front on August 23 at about 05:45.

The Armenian group retreated, suffering losses, the ministry said. During the battle, the commander of the Armenian sabotage group, according to the initial interrogation, First Lieutenant Gurgin Alberyan was taken prisoner.

The ministry reiterated that the military-political leadership of Armenia bears all responsibility for the aggravation of the situation at the front.

It should be noted that Armenia has stepped up its military provocation recently, staging sabotage both on the border and on the line of contact. On July 12, Armenian forces shelled Azerbaijan's positions in Tovuz, Azerbaijan's strategically-important district on the border. The Armenian attack killed 12 Azerbaijani servicemen, including an army general, as well as a 76-year-old civilian. Armenian forces retreated after suffering losses in Azerbaijan's retaliation.

Azerbaijan and Armenia are locked in a conflict over Azerbaijans Nagorno-Karabakh breakaway region, which along with seven adjacent regions was occupied by Armenian forces in a war in the early 1990s. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and around one million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNews
Clashes between protesters and police, such as the one seen here in Portland, Oregon, have become a regular occurrence in America following the death of George Floyd in May - Dave Killen /The Oregonian

Protests erupted in the U.S. city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, following a police shooting there of a reportedly unarmed black man, prompting officials to impose a curfew.

The victim, identified by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers as Jacob Blake, was hospitalized in a serious condition on Sunday evening after police shot him multiple times, local media reported.

Crowds gathered at the scene and threw bricks and Molotov cocktails at police, according to reports in social media.

"We stand against excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites," governor Evers wrote in a tweet.

The shooting happened at around 5 p.m. local time in Kenosha as officers were responding to a "domestic incident". The victim was immediately taken to a hospital by the police, according to a statement issued by the Kenosha police department.

Wow. This Black man was shot several times in the back by @KenoshaPolice today. He was getting into his car after apparently breaking up a fight between two women. Hes in critical condition now. We demand JUSTICE! #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/I1reDEp4nw  Ben Crump (@AttorneyCrump) August 24, 2020

No further explanation was given by the police as to what led to the shooting.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice said early on Monday that officers involved in the shooting had been placed on administrative leave.

The state's Division of Criminal Investigation is heading a probe into the shooting and said in a statement it will seek to "provide a report of the incident to the prosecutor within 30 days," U.S. media reported .

Story continues

A video circulating on social media and cited by the U.S. press showed the man walking towards a car followed by two officers and one of them shooting him as he opens the car door.

Multiple fires were set at the scene by a crowd that gathered to protest against the incident, according to various U.S. media reports.

Social media posts showed large crowds marching down streets and throwing Molotov cocktails and bricks at the police, with one officer reportedly injured. The police responded by imposing a city-wide curfew until 7 a.m.

There have been ongoing protests in the United States against police brutality and racism since the death on May 25 of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
<! Professor Agboola Gambari, Chief of staff to President Buhari >

By Ismaila Chafe

The Presidency has condemned the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), for twisting the import of a video showing the Chief of Staff to the President, Ibrahim Gambari and former Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole

A presidential source described the PDP action as a complete waste of time.

The PDP had in the last few days addressed several press briefings over the video clip, where the word arrest was mentioned and had imputed many interpretations to it.

However, a Presidency source told State House correspondents that the opposition party should not have maligned the Chief of Staff to the President.

He noted that the many efforts so far put into discrediting Gambari had continued to fail in the face of his solid credibility.

The source was reacting to the recent call by the PDP to the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) and other international bodies to place visa restriction on Gambari, Oshiomhole, and other individuals as punishment for allegedly plotting to truncate democracy and good governance in Nigeria.

But despite the Presidencys clarification and assurances by President Muhammadu Buhari and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to ensure free and fair poll in the state, the PDP has called on the international community to deny visas to members of the APC for plotting to endanger democracy and enthrone bad governance, the source maintained.

At press conference last week, National Chairman of the PDP, Uche Secondus, had said: We wish to also draw the attention of the international community to this gross abuse of power to undermine the democratic process by critical staff that should defend it.

We demand appropriate sanction of the individuals involved in this anti-democratic act; they should be given visa restrictions to any democratic countries.

But the Presidency source said Gambari was only doing his job of leading the former APC National Chairman to meet with the President and besides, Oshiomhole had repeated what he said in the video at a press briefing after meeting with the president.

Oshiomhole, had while briefing State House correspondents, after meeting with President Buhari, said he came to plead with the President to ensure security for the upcoming Edo State governorship election, citing threats of violence by the opposition.

Lastly is to say that the outgoing governor is talking more about violence and violence. You must have watched him on Channels Television where he said he will meet violence with violence and we are saying no, there will be no violence.

It will be like celebrating Christmas or going to do a plebiscite between MoU, which Edo people have now codenamed memorandum of underdevelopment and a governor with a clear simple agenda, which is the product of his brains.

So, I shared these with Mr President and I said all we just need is good security. If APC man commits an offence, arrest him, if a PDP man commits an offence, arrest him.

Once its not all about sermon; sermon does not change the heart of the devil. What changes the heart of men is the fear of sanctions.

Once one person is arrested from APC, another person is arrested from PDP, if they are found involved in unlawful possession of firearms and they misuse those firearms and they are arrested and prosecuted, the message is clear.

The Presidency source, however, wondered why the PDP had decided to mudsling with what he described as an incomplete information, saying no one knew how the conversation started or how it ended.

What PDP is doing is called playing the devils card, which is all about suggesting ideas into peoples heads, the truth does not matter in such an atmosphere.

What I am convinced of is that even the leaders of the PDP know what they are doing is wicked and unethical, but since it is politics, they believe anything goes.

How do you know the arrest in the conversation is for PDP elements? The target in this mudslinging is the Chief of Staff to the President, but their mistake is that this is not a man for this sort of politics.

Hes way above petty politicking. Hes a career diplomat and hardly interested in this kind of politics, those who know him, know this much about him, he said.

It would be recalled that Gambari was appointed Buharis Chief of Staff after the death of Abba Kyari in May.

Related
24 Aug  Being away from Hong Kong does not mean one should be taking time off from activism, as former TVB actor Joe Tay illustrated recently by attending a protest in Canada.

As reported on Epoch Times, the actor who self-exiled himself to Canada with his wife, was spotted at a Hong Kong rally in Toronto, singing "Glory to Hong Kong" and leading the protesters to several chants like "Sanction the CCP!" and "Recover Hong Kong!"

Speaking about the protest, Joe, who was wearing a badge that expresses support for Next Media's Jimmy Lai whose office was raided by the authorities last week, stated that Hong Kong is no longer the same after Lai's arrest.

"The freedom of the press in Hong Kong is dead. Hong Kong is dangerous now. People will suffer and more young people will disappear," he said.

As for the reason why he returned to Canada instead of staying in Hong Kong, Joe stated that he was inspired by political leader Nathan Law, who "escaped" to Britain and fought on the international front.

"I will continue to fight in Toronto in the future," he added.

(Photo Source: Apple Daily)
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 30: Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) returns to the Senate floor following a recess in the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on January 30, 2020 in Washington, DC. The trial has entered into the second day of the question phase where Senators have the opportunity to submit written questions to the House managers and President Trump's defense team. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has warned that some Americans may be "unwittingly" promoting Russian propaganda that is intended to interfere with the 2020 US elections.

In an interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Mr Warner called for the members of his committee to do a better job publicising the Russian disinformation effort so Americans know to avoid repeating Kremlin-sourced talking points.

Mr Warner highlighted a counterintelligence report from last week that said Russia was meddling in the public discourse surrounding the 2020 election to help Donald Trump against Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Its incumbent on the intelligence community to lay out more of the facts of what we know about that disinformation campaign, the Virginia Democrat said.

My fear is there may be Americans that are unwittingly promoting that Russian disinformation campaign, and I think they need to be briefed so they dont become, frankly, agents in effect of this disinformation campaign, he said.

The Senate Intelligence panel, which is chaired by GOP Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, released the final volume of its report on Russian election interference efforts in 2016.

That report delivered several damaging statements about Mr Trump's 2016 campaign and the lengths to which his advisers encouraged Russian interference.

Ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is serving a seven-year prison term related to financial fraud and corruption, was identified in the Intelligence Committees report as a grave counterintelligence threat due to his business and political ties to powerful Russia-sympathetic Ukrainians.

Mr Manafort, the president's son Donald Trump Jr, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, all three attended a meeting with a Russian government-linked lawyer in June 2016 where they were promised dirt on the Democratic nominee that year, Hillary Clinton.

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And while Mr Trump was solidifying his hold on the GOP nomination in 2016, his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was helping him pursue a deal for a Trump Tower project in Moscow that required the government's permission.

One of the most high-profile ways Russia interfered in the 2020 US election was by hacking Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails and releasing them through WikiLeaks.

The report on former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation from 2017 to 2019 into Russian election subversion revealed how the Russian intelligence agency GRU worked in tandem with WikiLeaks to release the hacked documents shortly before the election.

The report concludes that instead of condemning Russias actions, the Trump campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trumps electoral prospects, a remarkable statement from a panel that includes staunch Trump allies such as senator John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks, the committee writes in its report.

The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort, the report continues.

Read more

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Dubai-based wasl properties has announced the leasing of 126 residential units from its residential portfolio across Dubai in six hours as part of its Summer Deals campaign that was launched on August 20.

This achievement reiterates the companys solid strategic approach and its well-thought-out plans, both of which contribute to consolidating its position as a leading company in a highly competitive market, said a statement from wasl.

The company had announced that the leasing process would be completed conducted online, marking a first for Dubais real estate market.

This allowed potential customers to reserve their desired units by submitting all the required personal details as well as settle and receive their lease contracts, all within a few minutes.

Moreover, to ensure transparency, wasl livestreamed the leasing process and performance on Instagram, becoming the first regional developer to do so, it stated.

The Dubai property group had released 500 units as part of its Summer Deals campaign, and due to the increasing demand, it announced the extension of the deals by an additional week until Thursday (August 27).

On the day of the campaign, wasl offered 5 to 10% on the rental fee, depending on the location, type, and size of the unit, and the possibility of making payments through 12 checks, said a company spokesman.

"Owing to the growing demand, wasl expects to lease an additional 200 units into the market as part of the campaign. All existing tenants can also benefit from these offers by moving to new units, upgrading, or downgrading based on their desired units and locations," he stated.

"Thanks to wasls diverse portfolio, which includes over 50,000 residential and commercial unit spread across the emirate, and its special prices and services, the occupancy rate at wasl has now reached 85%," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Its fair to say the federal Conservatives had a trying time with respect to announcing its new party leader on August 23. Several thousand ballots had been unfortunately shredded in a sorting machine, and had to be reproduced by hand to be properly counted.

When the dust finally settled in the wee morning hours in Ottawa, Erin OToole emerged victorious over Peter MacKay on the third ballot. The Tories, to their credit, had chosen very well and very wisely.

Its no secret that I publicly endorsed OToole last month. Although I wasnt involved in any Tory leadership campaign, and had no dog in this fight, the former Veterans Affairs Minister clearly had the most intelligent, detailed and realistic vision.

OTooles plan is fiscally conservative. He strongly supports the free market economy and private enterprise. He wants to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers, repeal the federal carbon tax, implement pay-as-you-go legislation for the federal deficit, end corporate subsidies, and initiate an allowance for a one-time, $50,000 RSP withdrawal to be invested in ones business, among other things.

He also took a balanced approach when it came to social conservatism. He wants to double the child care expense deduction to help young families, for instance. He also supports gay rights and a womans choice to have an abortion, but believes the Tories must respect all our members, which includes social conservatives.

OToole has therefore followed former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harpers successful model of incremental conservatism. This establishes a proper balance of fiscal and social conservative policies that appeal not only to party members, but also Canadians from all walks of life who worry about high taxes, big government, family values and individual rights and freedoms.

This political formula led Harper to three straight federal election victories in 2006, 2008 and 2011. OToole is obviously hoping to replicate these powerful moments. Nevertheless, he knows that relying on past political achievements wont create a path to electoral success in 2020 and beyond.

Canadian politics and society have changed since Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took power five years ago. Certain time-honoured strategies related to politics and economics need to be modified or crafted differently to appeal to young people, minority groups and so forth. Political movements like Black Lives Matter have brought social awareness to the table. Growing distrust for capitalism and privatization is evident. And the coronavirus pandemic has led some Canadian individuals and business owners to become fearful of an uncertain future.

Meanwhile, OToole has to overcome several potential hurdles. Hes not well known (yet) outside of Canadian conservative circles. His leadership style and personality will obviously be different than Harpers or even Andrew Scheers. There will be disgruntled Conservatives that he needs to keep in the political tent. The honeymoon period for a Canadian political leader is frightfully short these days, too.

But theres no reason to believe OToole, whos been a Tory MP since 2012 and understands the day-to-day grind of his current vocation, cant move the political needle in his favour.

OToole started that process in his acceptance speech. He introduced himself several times to the television audience. He was smiling and upbeat. He welcomed MacKay, Leslyn Lewis and Derek Sloan on stage to help rebuild the Conservative family. He spoke of inclusion and party unity. He used his true blue Conservative credentials to promote a far-reaching political and economic vision that will build support throughout our country.

The newly-minted Conservative leader also started the important process of differentiating himself from Trudeau. Not by constantly criticizing the embattled left-leaning PM, but rather emphasizing the need to build political and personal bridges. We must continue to point out Liberal failings and corruption, he said last night, but we must also show Canadians our vision for a stronger, prosperous and more united Canada.

Thats what Harper successfully accomplished for nearly a decade, until Canadians decided they wanted political change. Thats what Scheer was unable to properly communicate with voters, which is one of the main reasons he lost last years federal election.

OTooles political destiny has yet to be written. But the opening paragraph of the first chapter is already intriguing.
Near Zaitseve and Avdiyivka, terrorists fired provocative shots, also doing reinforcement works toward Ukrainian defense lines near Maryinka.

Occupiers over the past day three times violated the agreements on full and comprehensive ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, reached on July 22 within the framework of the Trilateral Contact Group on Donbas settlement.

That's according to a morning update by the Joint Forces Operation Command, released on Facebook.

Near Zaitseve, Russian occupation forces fired several small arms shots. Small arms and a grenade launcher were also fired near Avdiyivka, the report adds.

Read alsoOSCE urges sides to continue making all efforts to keep sustainable truce in DonbasNo combat losses were reported over the past day.

Ukrainian forces have revealed enemy attempts to do engineering works toward Ukraine's defense lines near Maryinka from the temporarily occupied settlement of Oleksandrivka.

"Since day-start on August 24, silence has prevailed in all sectors of the front line," the report says.

The Command has noted that the situation in the JFO zone remains under full control of Ukrainian troops.

Donbas truce: background

Parties to the Trilateral Contact Group (Ukraine, Russia, and the OSCE) on the peace settlement in Donbas on July 22 agreed on a full and comprehensive ceasefire along the contact line from July 27.

On the very first day of the newly-agreed truce, Russia's hybrid military forces mounted three attacks on Ukrainian positions. More provocations have been reported since.
The Block's Daniel and Jade revealed the heartbreaking reasons why they applied for the competitive home renovation series.

On Monday night's episode, the couple expressed hope to use the show's prize money to cover their close to one million dollar debt, incurred after bushfires ravaged their South Australia farm.

They also revealed they were hoping the show would be able to provide them with financial support to look after their six-year-old daughter Isla, who has a rare chromosome disorder.

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In tears: The Block's Daniel and Jade revealed the heartbreaking reasons why they applied for the competitive home renovation series

Speaking of Daniel and Jade - who came in second place during the 'beach box' challenge - host Scott Cam explained: 'If anyone needs a win in life, it's Daniel and Jade.

'Like many of our nation's farmers, they have been battling droughts since 2016 - and just last Christmas, they were dealt another devastating blow.'

Daniel then revealed: 'Just before Christmas in 2019, I got a phone call saying that my farm was on fire. Twenty minutes later, my neighbour called me and said, "Daniel, it's all gone!"'

The farmer stated that he now has to pay an eye-watering $4,000 monthly bill to have his cows fed on someone else's property.

Devastation: On Monday night's episode, the couple expressed hope to use the show's prize money to cover their close to one million dollar debt, incurred after bushfires ravaged their South Australia farm

Tough times: The farmer stated that he now has to pay an eye-watering $4,000 monthly bill to have his cows fed on someone else's property

When quizzed further on what getting some extra cash would mean to them, Jade explained: 'The reason we applied [to The Block] was because of our daughter, Isla. We're very lucky because she's alive.'

Welling up with tears, Jade continued: 'Isla was born premature, and she was in the hospital for five and a half weeks, and then we brought her home.

'One morning, I went into her room and saw that she was not the right colour. She was blue and frothing at the mouth. I let out a scream.'

Family: They also revealed they were hoping the show would be able to provide them with financial support to look after their six-year-old daughter Isla, who has a rare chromosome disorder

Welling up with tears, Jade continued: 'Isla [[pictured] was born premature, and she was in the hospital for five and a half weeks, and then we brought her home'

Daniel heartbreakingly added: 'It's a scream you never want to hear.'

Jade said: 'She has a chromosome disorder. She's one of eight in the world to have this disorder. Isla goes to speech classes, occupational therapy, and physio weekly.

'We applied because just a little bit of financial support can help Daniel be around just a little bit more often. We can be a family and help each other, and Isla can get any extra help she needs.'

Daniel and Jade are up against Jimmy and Tam, Luke and Jasmine, Sarah and George and Harry and Tash.

Jade continued: 'One morning, I went into her room and saw that she was not the right colour. She was blue and frothing at the mouth. I let out a scream'

Jade added: 'She has a chromosome disorder. She's one of eight in the world to have this disorder. Isla goes to speech classes, occupational therapy, and physio weekly'

Monday night's episode saw the pairs choosing the homes they would be renovating in order of their ranking of the 'beach box' challenge.

They were then given the task of designing the guest bedroom for their new digs with a $19,000 budget.

The Block continues on Tuesday night on Channel Nine at 7.30 pm.
As the Republican National Convention gets underway, some commentators have taken to comparing Donald Trump to Richard Nixon. Both were cocksure Republicans who played fast and loose with the facts on their way to winning public office. Both clashed with the media and oversaw historic racial tensions. And both eventually faced impeachment threats over the ways they used their power.

But theres a better comparison to a prior president; if Trump resembles any 1970s politician, it isnt Nixonits Jimmy Carter.

While both Nixon and Trump were ruthless politicians, there are actually more differences between them than similarities. Nixon was a self-made man and a Navy veteran who honed his political chops by famously winningand losingelections in the 1950s and 60s en route to becoming a skillful political operator. Trump, by contrast, didnt serve in the military and built on family success to become a television personality who only later wandered into politics. What Nixon and Trump share in demeanor, they lack in nearly every other aspect of their lives.

At first glance, it may seem even stranger to compare the Manhattan real estate developer to a mild-mannered Georgia peanut farmer instead, and a president with serial marriages and allegations of sexual improprieties with a monogamous, Sunday school-teaching Southern Baptist.

But politically, Trump and Carter have more in common than one might think, and the comparison goes well beyond Trumps recent attempt to broker peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as Carter did with Israel and Egypt. Indeed, if recent polls hold, their ultimate political fates will be more alike than different, forever united in history as one-term presidents who were largely unable to rise to the challenges of their day.

When Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, his victory was hailed as a triumph of the outsider. No governor had been elected president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the White House had generally been occupied by senators and former vice presidents who might best be described as Washington insiders.

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No wonder, in a nation reeling from Watergate and Nixons subsequent pardon, voters looked for leadership without the stench of the swamp. Carters close-fought victory in the Electoral College reflected his ability to attract Southern Democrats, who now leaned Republican in presidential elections, to his side and produced an electoral map that hadnt been seen since 1960and hasnt been seen since his victory. (Clinton, the next Democratic president after Carter, managed to win a few states in the Deep South, but the shift to Carter in 1976 was largely temporary.) The region voted for Reagan and Bushand more recently against Obamaas it became reliably Republican at the presidential level. And in the lead-up to Donald Trump in 2016, the electoral map remained largely consistent.

In short, Carter was the right person at the right time to draw enough of those voters back into the Democratic tent to win election.

Flash back to 2016, and we see Trump also realigning the American electoral map, making inroads into working-class Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin that hadnt voted for a Republican in a presidential election since the 1980s. As with Carter, Americans elected Donald Trump as an anti-establishment outsider who promised to drain the swamp and change the way conventional Washington does businessmessaging that his campaign is still using as an incumbent in 2020. Trumps 304-227 victory in the Electoral College was similarly narrow to Carters 297-240, and whether he will be able to replicate this map in 2020 remains to be seen.

As were seeing in real time, Trumps presidency will be singularly characterized by his ability (or inability) to rise to the challenges that now threaten his time in officein much the same way that Carters electoral success ultimately depended on his handling of the Iran hostage crisis and the economic difficulties of his day.

Like Carter, Trump is running for reelection with an economy in recession. One of the most critical difficulties faced by Carter in the 1980 campaign was Reagans question, Are you better off than you were four years ago? Rather few can answer yes to that todayand the same was true for Carter.

At first, Carters response to the recession received high marks from voters. His now infamous malaise speech in July 1979, criticized in years since, was viewed overwhelmingly positively at the time. Carters poll numbers rebounded such that by the start of 1980, he led presumptive Republican nominee Ronald Reagan by more than 30 percentage points in some polls.

Much of the Trump presidency tells a similar story. Trump never had the same high approval ratings, but for perhaps even longer than Carter, he seemed to be well-positioned for reelection.

And despite a blue wave in the 2018 midterms, Trumps record on the economy pointed toward victory in 2020. He oversaw a bullish stock market, record low unemployment, and the strongest economic expansion since at least the mid-1990sall traditional indicators of strength.

But Trumps fortunes changed dramatically this past spring, first with the rise of the novel coronavirus, and then with the development of civil and racial unrest in Americas cities. In both cases, his actionsor with respect to coronavirus, his inactiononly exacerbated these problems and threatened his chances of a victory in November. Teargassing peaceful protesters to secure a photo op for evangelicals, then sending heavily armed federal law enforcement officers to Portland, Ore., echoes Carters failed attempt at rescuing the hostagesonly to have things blow up in his face.

Both presidents had the opportunity to turn things around and rescue their popularity based on Americans desire to do something in times of crisis.

The problem comes when that something doesnt work, often because it runs up against factors that cannot be changedwhether foreign hostage-takers or a rampant virus. The Trump administration is likely to keep spending madly, but all the deficits in the world cannot bend the laws of viral spread.

Carter and Trumps inability to respond effectively to their respective crises also stems from an unwillingness to engage with Congress and develop the relationships necessary to sway the legislature their way. While both had big plans for changing Washingtonfor Carter, it was energy and welfare reform; for Trump, a smattering of new trade deals, building the Wall and repealing Obamacareneither mastered the levers of Congress and how to pull them to their advantage. Ultimately, they were stymied when crises struck and all the wheels of government needed to turn together.

The seeds of these late-term failures were sown early in their terms. Trump and Carter both had a few, early successes. Both were able to deregulate massive swaths of American industry, and both signed tax cuts in the second year of their administration. Cartermuch more of a fiscal hawk than the current Presidentaimed for a balanced budget but, like Trump, also faced a breakdown within his own party over health care.

More often, though, Carter struggled to advance his domestic legislative priorities. He began his term with his party in control of both houses of the legislature, but Congress rejected his welfare reform plans and Democratic leaders famously scuttled his plans to wind down a collection of what he saw as pork-barrel water projects in their districts. Later, they would even override his veto of a bill that repealed oil import fees, the first time they had done so for a majority party president in 28 years.

Likewise, when Donald Trump took office with Republican control of the House and Senate, he began hitting walls right away. Despite years of promises, the party was not able to take action on rolling back Obamacare, the signature achievement of Trumps predecessor. Trump was not able to sell the issue to the public or members of Congress, and the majority-led bill famously went down in the Senate when John McCain cast the deciding vote against it. Trumps much-vaunted border wall also failed to gain traction despite unified party rule, and he even tried to shift funds from the military budget to get his way. Unlike Carter, Trump quickly gave up working with Congress. In discussions over the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and later with Covid relief, Trump had Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin take over the role of chief negotiator with Congress, relegating the president to the sidelines.

But no matter the amount of effort they put in, both presidents ended up acting largely alone until they hit existential threatswhether hostage-takers or a virusthat required seamless coordination among power centers. The failures that followed were almost predictable, whether an unsuccessful rescue attempt or an uncontrolled pandemic.

Nonetheless, just weeks before Election Day, some polls showed Carter ahead, and Trump was still seen as a favorite as recently as June. It is still possible that events will change in the late days of the race, catapulting Trump to victory. as Ronald Reagan was in 1980. But Trump is now the incumbent, which puts him in a very different position from Nixon and Reagan before him. And if historical trends hold, those of us on the center right should be very concerned indeed.

The countrys tilt against Trump may have come later in the campaign than it did against Carter, but the end result looks likely to be the same. And if that is the case, then the legacy of the 2020 election might have implications far beyond our current times.

If Trump is our generations Carter, then 2020 just might look more like 1980 and make 78-year-old Joe Biden the Ronald Reagan of our timesa broadly popular figure rising out of the malaise and establishing a legacy for his party for the next generation. A strange turn of events, no doubt. After all, although history rarely repeats, it may yet again rhyme.
Last week Uber and Lyft threatened to shut down in California if they were forced to comply with a law that would require them to classify their freelance drivers as employees. An appeals court granted the companies a temporary reprieve on Thursday, allowing them to operate with independent contractors while they fight the court order. However, the companies are already preparing for the day of reckoning should they lose their legal battle and reportedly considering switching to a franchise model. Under the plan, the companies would license their brand names and technology to owners of traditional taxi fleets. The fleet owners would employ the drivers, allowing Uber and Lyft to continue to avoid the costs associated with employment.

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Should they go through with the plan, it would actually represent a return to the roots of the gig economy, which began with older business models like franchising. It would also emphasize that addressing misclassification issues is not enough. The problem of large corporations using legal strategies to skirt laws protecting workers goes far beyond misclassification and the so-called gig economy. The essence of the gig economy is control without responsibility: Uber and Lyft use electronic surveillance and algorithmic carrots and sticks to coordinate the activity of drivers, without triggering the legal responsibilities and costs that go with employment. Gig companies argue that despite being subject to this algorithmic control, each driver is not an employee but rather an entrepreneur running an independent business.

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Uber and Lyft can pull this off because they are following in the footsteps of franchisors like McDonalds and Jiffy Lube, which decades ago pioneered the legal mechanisms of gaining control over far-flung business empires without triggering legal employment relationships. These mechanisms, known in antitrust law as vertical restraints, are contract terms that minutely prescribe the product offerings, hours of operation, and even the precise way cashiers greet the customer for each unit in a franchised chain. Vertical restraints are why every McDonalds looks the same, even though most of them are owned by independent franchisees. During the initial franchising boom in the 1960s, many legislators and courts were hostile to the idea of large corporations dictating to independent small businesses how they must run their businesses. As a congressional staffer put it to a franchisor during a 1965 hearing, if [a franchisee] is told what product he has to buy, what prices he has to charge, what operation he has to operate in, then he is no longer independent, is he? As is happening now with Uber and Lyft, the ensuing congressional hearings, Federal Trade Commission investigations, and court cases debated whether franchising would become a viable business model. In 1977, a landmark court case between a television manufacturer and its franchisee, Continental TV v. GTE Sylvania, decided the issue of vertical restraints in favor of franchisors. Henceforth, franchisors would have wide latitude to impose contractual controls on nominally independent businesses. Uber and Lyft would follow in their footsteps.

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The problem of corporations using legal mechanisms to avoid responsibilities to workers is much larger than the gig economy. Franchising is just one example of what David Weil, dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, calls fissured workplaces, in which lead firms replace direct employment of workers with outside contractors such as temp agencies, subcontractors, and franchisees. The lead firm controls how the work is done through vertical restraints and similar legal mechanisms but without having responsibilities to the workers doing the work. Workplace fissuring reduces wages by blocking workers from access to higher wages, career ladders, and workplace protections such as union rights with the lead firm. Importantly, solving misclassification issues will not help workers in fissured industries, since they are legal employees of some company, just not the company that controls their working conditions. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 10.6 million independent contractors in the U.S., Weil estimates the size of the fissured workplace to be more than double that amount.

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So how would switching to a franchise model affect Uber and Lyft drivers? Law scholar Veena Dubal of the University of CaliforniaHastings (who was recently targeted on social media by an advocacy group funded by Lyft and Uber) points to a similar 2014 case where a court ordered FedEx to stop misclassifying its drivers. FedEx responded with a franchiselike model in which it outsourced delivery routes to independent service providers (ISPs) who hired individual drivers as employees. The result was hardship for both ISPs and their employees. As the lead plaintiffs attorney in the misclassification case against FedEx, Beth Ross, put it:

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FedEx doesnt pay [the ISPs] enough to really compensate the people who drive for them. A lot of them do not provide workers compensation or provide overtime. One plaintiff from [the misclassification case], for example, has nine drivers and four of them are on public benefits. And not because he doesnt pay them every penny he can. He does not even have health insurance for himself and his family.

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Similarly, when McDonalds franchisees complained that franchisor control over their prices squeezed their profits, a franchisee reported that McDonalds told her to just pay your employees less. The essence of workplace fissuring is control without responsibility. Because under a franchise model Uber could still impose vertical restraints to severely limit the prices, territories, and other options available to fleet owners to make profits, it is unlikely Uber and Lyfts franchisees would be in a position to raise wages for drivers.

This is not an argument against AB5, the California law that would make Lyft and Uber reclassify their drivers as employees. Ending misclassification is an important first step. But to solve the problem of corporations avoiding responsibilities to workers, we need additional policies. Large corporations must be forced to choose: Do you want control with responsibility to workers, or are you willing to relinquish control to truly independent entrepreneurs? Small business owners deserve to have freedom from excessive control by corporate masters through excessive vertical restraints. Workers, meanwhile, need expanded joint employer rules against lead firms in fissured workplaces, which would make lead firms jointly responsible, along with their contractors and franchisees, for the wages and working conditions of workers.

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Uber and Lyft have long maintained that they are a not taxi companies, but tech platforms matching buyers and sellers of taxi services. The problem, however, is that the algorithms do more than match buyers and sellers. They set the prices customers pay, determine the wages drivers receive, and discipline underperforming workers. Like postwar franchisors before them, Uber and Lyft are betting that using new techniques to control a business empire will allow them to pioneer a new frontier unburdened by old regulations. The early enthusiasm over techs disruption of existing industries is starting to wane. The future of many industries now depends on how courts and legislators answer this question: Is this innovation, or regulatory arbitrage?

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

For more of Slates business coverage, listen to Slate Money.
Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales joined over 40 officials from across the country calling on district attorneys and state attorney generals to reject endorsements and campaign contributions from police unions.

Elected prosecutors can no longer "cling to the status quo and pretend there are no issues with the way things have been done" after protesters from around the country have heavily criticized the American legal system, the 41 prosecutors said in a joint statement.

"Campaign endorsements and contributions send a message," the statement said. "They tell citizens that the candidate  in this case, a prosecutor seeking election  aligns with the values and interests of the donor or endorser. And they create a perceived (if not actual) impression that the elected official is beholden to that group. So what are the values and interests of police unions that elected prosecutors will be perceived as aligning with?"

FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox

Protests calling for racial reform began after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed while in Minneapolis police custody in May. In San Antonio, there have been calls to reduce the San Antonio police budget and animosity toward the police union for "helping keep bad cops" on the force.

During a meeting with the Express-News Editorial Board in June, Gonzales said his office has strengthened its scrutiny of police use of force and now presents evidence on all police-involved shootings to a grand jury to determine whether charges are warranted. Since entering office nearly two years ago, he said he has taken steps to protect the public from police officers who use excessive force or harbor bias toward minorities.

In June, protesters called on Gonzales to reopen the cases on the deaths of Marquise Jones, Charles Chop Chop Roundtree Jr., Antronie Scott  three Black men killed by SAPD officers. Gonzales, however, said there isn't new evidence to warrant reopening the cases.

READ ALSO: San Antonians remember those who were fatally shot by police or died after violent encounters with officers

The prosecutors' joint statement mirrored protesters' concerns, saying the unions have been the most vocal opponents of reform and changes.

"It has become increasingly clear that  despite what they might say  the interest being advanced by police unions is not the safety of our communities, but rather protecting themselves and maintaining the harmful, broken criminal legal system," the statement said.

The statement also cited conflict of interest to objectively review an instance of police misconduct while accepting political and financial support from police unions.

A study of 1,400 individuals conducted by Data for Progress and The Justice Collaborative Institute showed that a majority of voters supported the initiative while less than 25 percent oppose it.

Taylor Pettaway is a breaking news and general assignment reporter for MySA.com | taylor.pettaway@express-news.net | @TaylorPettaway
Tropical Storm Laura is forecast to gain strength rapidly as it moves into the Gulf of Mexico late Monday, and is expected to become a hurricane before hitting the Texas or Louisiana coast within 48 hours, forecasters said.

Residents along the U.S. Gulf Coast prepared for what could be deadly winds, rains, and storm surges.

Laura comes on the heels of Tropical Storm Marco, which weakened sooner than expected. The rare threat of two possible hurricanes in the Gulf at once, however, took nearly 10% of the United States crude oil production offline, as energy companies shuttered operations to ride out the weather.

The National Hurricane Center warned that potentially deadly storm surges could hit from San Luis Pass, Texas, to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, in the next two days.

The mayor of Port Arthur, Texas, an oil town of 54,000 people 85 miles (137 km) east of Houston, issued a mandatory evacuation, giving residents until 6 a.m. on Tuesday to leave. Several other cities asked for voluntary evacuations.

Lina Hidalgo, the chief executive of Harris County, which includes Houston, urged residents to be prepared and not to get cocky" by failing to prepare for the worst.

Were leaving no stone unturned with our preparation. Now it is your turn," Hidalgo told a news conference.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner at the same news conference urged residents to prepare, though he added Laura was not expected to stall over the region and dump as much rain as Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which led to deadly flooding.

HOWLING WINDS

Laura traced the southern coast of Cuba on Monday, but the brunt of the storm was offshore, helping the largest island nation in the Caribbean avoid serious damage after Laura killed at least 10 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The storm downed trees in Cuba, ripped away flimsy roofs and caused minor flooding on Sunday evening, according to residents and news reports. In Jamaica, there were reports of landslides and flooded roads.

I slept well last night, except when the wind howled," Nuris Lopez, a hairdresser, said by telephone from a town in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra mountains in Cubas eastern Granma province.

Laura was heading toward the Gulf of Mexico at 20 miles per hour (31 kilometers per hour), according to the NHC. By Tuesday, it was expected to have reached hurricane strength. By Wednesday night, stronger still, it was expected to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, the NHC said.

OIL HIT HARD

Despite Marcos weakening, with the NHC predicting it would slow to a tropical depression by Monday night, that storm still threatened to soak the Louisiana coast.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent teams to operations centers in Louisiana and Texas.

This years hurricane season has been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, forcing many people to weigh the risks of leaving their homes and potentially exposing themselves to the virus.

Officials in Louisiana said that testing for COVID-19 was suspended in the state on Monday and Tuesday.

Energy companies moved to cut production at U.S. Gulf Coast oil refineries after shutting half the areas offshore crude oil output as back-to-back storms took aim at the coast.

Producers have shut more than 1 million barrels per day of Gulf Coast offshore oil production, 9% of the nations total output, facing a storm that is forecast to become a damaging Category 2 hurricane.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Flags of 10 ASEAN member countries hang on poles at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta. / Courtesy of ASEAN



The following is a joint statement by the ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Youth (SOMY) on the occasion of the International Youth Day, Aug. 12.  ED.



In commemoration of International Youth Day on Aug. 12, 2020, the ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Youth (SOMY) expressed great appreciation to young people from across ASEAN for their unique and valuable contributions in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.



Youth makes up one third of the overall 650 million ASEAN population. This segment of the population is confronted by significant challenges brought about by the pandemic situation.



Despite the trying circumstances ASEAN youth are currently facing, it is inspiring to witness that they remain dynamic in empowering their communities to become more adaptive and resilient. In the face of the evolving pandemic, the strong passion, creativity and innovative mindset of ASEAN youth power them through this crisis.



During the first episode of the Interactive Webinar Series on ASEAN Youth and COVID-19:



#ASEANYouth at the Forefront of COVID-19 Response held on July 27, the valuable experience, insights and recommendations shared by youth speakers from diverse backgrounds  a volunteer, a medical technologist, a social entrepreneur and a biodiversity and nature conservation champion  are a source of hope and inspiration. The webinar was jointly organized by the ASEAN Secretariat, the ASEAN Foundation, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity, in commemoration of International Youth Day.



ASEAN youth have been increasingly involved in the pandemic response as medical front-liners, implementers of social welfare projects and initiators of groundbreaking enterprises, as well as social innovators. In doing so, they have amplified the important role of youth as catalysts in driving social progress, economic growth and environmental sustainability, ultimately contributing toward achieving the ASEAN Community Vision 2025 and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).



Recalling the adoption of ASEAN Youth in Climate Action and Disaster Resilience Day by the ASEAN Leaders in 2018, stronger coordination should be pursued among stakeholders in mobilizing youth participation both in pandemic response and post-pandemic recovery efforts, and in addressing similar challenges in the years to come.



Cognisant of the important contributions of ASEAN youth in mitigating the impacts of COVID-19, the ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Youth and relevant development actors will work to expand opportunities to involve Millennials and Gen-Z from across the member states in harmonizing the co-existence between society, technology and the environment.



ASEAN Youth Ministers commit to place high on the agenda the promotion of digital skills to enable youth to be future-ready, as well as the provision of spaces for youth to become more involved in policy discourse. To this end, in the next five years, the SOMY aims to promote the synergy of efforts in the five domains of ASEAN Youth Development Index: education; health and well-being; employment and opportunity; participation and engagement; and ASEAN awareness, values and identity.



Youth are the future of ASEAN. Today, ASEAN celebrates the contributions the youth have made to the strength and dynamism of the region. Moving forward, it is important to ensure that they are adequately supported to embrace the new normal and are not left behind. As ASEAN jointly strives to build back better, it is crucial for us to work together to empower our youth to thrive in an ever-changing world.


The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is developing a wind farm, the first of its kind on an Indian reservation in North Dakota.

About 60 turbines are slated to dot the Porcupine Hills, a badlands-esque part of Sioux County between Fort Yates and Porcupine.

Thats a really good spot for wind right there, said Fawn Wasin Zi, chairwoman of SAGE Development Authority, the public power authority the tribe recently formed.

Tribal leaders have nixed moving ahead with a wind farm in the past, reaching the conclusion that they would have little ownership of such a facility if a developer were to build one on Standing Rock.

"We want more ownership up front," Wasin Zi said.

To aid in that effort, Standing Rock over the years has secured small grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to study wind development potential on the reservation, as its long been something the tribe has wanted to pursue. With that work done and with the right approach moving forward, the tribe now hopes to attract a developer aligned with its values to build the project.

Standing Rock is pursuing the idea amid its fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which has spurred efforts to harness renewable power on the reservation. A small solar farm already exists in Cannon Ball. Standing Rock is working with advisers, including LIATI Capital, Connexus Capital and Hometown Connections, to make the wind farm come to fruition.

The wind farm would be named Anpetu Wi, which in Lakota means the breaking of the new day. The Lakota people traditionally have prayed at that time, SAGE General Manager Joseph McNeil said.

Youre praying for guidance, youre praying for wisdom, youre praying for whats best for the day for your family, for the people, he said. This is really how we look at this project, as a prayer to guide our people into the future, into the new day.

The wind farm would have a 235-megawatt capacity with the potential to expand down the road. SAGE recently filed an interconnection request with the Southwest Power Pool, which oversees the power grid in a number of central states, including in parts of North Dakota.

McNeil said he anticipates the interconnection process to take at least two years as the grid operator studies plans for the wind farm. In the meantime, SAGE plans to work on other aspects of the project, including building access roads through the area this year in an effort to make use of the Production Tax Credit, a federal wind incentive expiring at the end of 2020.

SAGE also intends to do other work, such as identifying the exact location for each turbine with the help of Standing Rocks Tribal Historic Preservation Office, which will survey the area for any cultural resources that should be avoided. The project also will need various environmental analyses.

As were doing this, were building the capacity to do this again, McNeil said.

Philanthropic foundations already have contributed nearly $2 million toward those efforts, and SAGE is launching a crowdfunding initiative at www.anpetuwi.com to raise another $1.5 million to complete the work.

SAGE is seeking donations as the tribes resources have been drained amid the coronavirus pandemic and a drop in revenue from Prairie Knights Casino following the pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017, McNeil said.

Our tribe has been pretty strapped to support a project like this, he said.

The total project cost is estimated to be $325 million. SAGE plans to secure that funding through additional crowdfunding and by partnering with a developer and investors. SAGE also hopes to court an entity to purchase the power generated by the wind farm.

SAGE leaders envision that the wind farm, once built, eventually would generate revenue for the tribe, as well as provide construction and maintenance jobs for tribal members.

Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates has offered a wind turbine technician program in the past, and a similar program could emerge again to train workers.

We want to partner with our local tribal college and perhaps other college partnerships to bring that education here so that we will train people in renewable energy technology, Wasin Zi said. We want to be the place where people go for that training.

Reach Amy R. Sisk at 701-250-8252 or amy.sisk@bismarcktribune.com.

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Midland County recorded five new confirmed coronavirus cases Monday, while a health department reports 82 cases now have been related to Central Michigan University students returning last week to the Mount Pleasant area.

The Central Michigan District Health Department, which oversees Isabella County, said 75 of the cases are confirmed and seven are probable.

"Our investigations have shown that many individuals that have tested positive live with several roommates or have attended large social gatherings," according to a CMDHD press release issued Monday afternoon. "Case counts include current students, former students and those living in the community who were identified as being associated with other cases related to return to school."

The CMDHD issued an emergency order late Monday afternoon to limit the size of social gatherings or events within Union Township and the City of Mount Pleasant. No more than 25 people may gather at outdoor events. The order takes effect at 8 p.m. Monday and will remain in effect until amended or rescinded

Fall on-campus classes began Aug. 17 at CMU.

CMU, on its website, said it will remain open for face-to-face instruction for as long as officials are able to manage and mitigate the risks related to COVID-19. The website showed 54 new confirmed cases for the week of Aug. 17-23; there were five new confirmed cases the week before. The university is reporting 79 positive cases since June 15.

"There is no set threshold or number of cases that would trigger a shift to remote instruction," says a statement on CMU's website. "If we reach a point in which it is no longer safe to offer in-person instruction, we have prepared for a variety of scenarios and possible futures, including a shift back to remote-only instruction. We will monitor our situation carefully and make adjustments and decisions appropriately as we move forward."

If a college student tests positive and is living in Isabella County, the case is counted in Isabella Countys totals, according to the release. If a college student tests positive and is living at their permanent home residence outside of Isabella County, the case is counted in their home countys totals.

Students who are sick and return to their permanent residence to quarantine still will be counted in the total number associated with the CMU outbreak. These cases are identified in the Michigan Disease Surveillance System with a unique identifier, health officials said.

The state on Friday announced an issue with the reporting of electronic lab results and said higher than expected numbers of daily case counts should be expected for a few days as the valid results are processed and entered into the reporting system.

With Monday's numbers, Midland County's pandemic total stands at 301 confirmed cases with 84 probable cases and 10 deaths.

Monday, Aug. 24 daily numbers

Bay County: Nine cases were added; pandemic total stands at 697 cases, 83 probable, 39 deaths.

Gladwin County: No cases were added; pandemic total stands at 67 cases, seven probable, two deaths.

Isabella County: 40 cases were added; pandemic total stands at 297 cases, 40 probable, nine deaths.

Saginaw County: 29 cases were added; pandemic total stands at 2,245 cases, 142 probable, 127 deaths and three probable deaths.

The state on Monday added 868 new cases and four deaths.

Overall, Michigan is at 97,660 cases and 6,397 deaths.

Testing

The state report shows as of Aug. 24, Midland County has performed 10,263 diagnostic tests and 745 serology (antibodies) tests, totaling 11,008 tests. Gladwin County is listed as having administered 3,998 diagnostic tests and 127 serology (antibodies) tests, totaling 4,125 tests.

Midland County's seven-day rolling positivity rate on Aug. 21 was listed at 2.0%, and low risk of spread. Gladwin County was listed at 1.2% and low risk. The Saginaw region, which includes 12-counties including Midland, Gladwin, Bay and Saginaw counties, was listed at 4.0% and medium risk and Michigan at 3.3%, and medium risk. A positivity rate of less than 3% indicates a lack of community spread, according to Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, Department of Health and Human Services chief medical executive.

As of Aug. 24, MidMichigan Health  which covers a 23-county region and has medical centers at seven sites, including Midland  has completed a total of 18,715 tests. Of those, 17,629 were negative, 220 positive and 866 are pending.

Nursing Homes

Brittany Manor in Midland is listed in the state report as having four cumulative cases and one death among residents as of Aug. 23, and five cumulative cases and no deaths among staff. Midland King's Daughters is reporting one cumulative case among staff and Medilodge of Midland is reporting two cumulative cases among staff. The other reporting facility, Stratford Pines, is reporting no cases.

Gladwin Pines Nursing Home is listed as having two cumulative confirmed cases and no deaths among residents as of Aug. 23, and one confirmed case and no deaths among staff. Gladwin Nursing & Rehabilitation Community, the other long-term health facility reporting to the state, is reporting one cumulative confirmed case among residents and three cumulative cases among staff.

Recovered

As of Aug. 20, the Midland County health department website lists 259 recovered cases and 28 hospitalizations since the pandemic start.

The state lists the total recovered at 72,580 cases, as of Aug. 21, which represents COVID-19 confirmed individuals with an onset date on or prior to July 22, according to the state website, mich.gov.

Midland County Health Department data

People younger than 40 make up 57.2% of total Midland County cases, confirmed and probable, as of Aug. 20.

Of Midland County's 369 confirmed and probable cases, 79 cases are in 0-19 age range; 74 in 20-29 age range; 58 in 30-39 age range; 53 in 40-49 age range; 50 in 50-59 age range; 22 in 60-69 age range; 19 in 70-79 age range, and 14 in 80+ age range, as of Aug. 20.

Of Midland's 10 deaths, five have been female and five male. One was between the ages of 50-50; three were between ages of 70-79, and six were 80 years and older.

As of Aug. 20, 81.9% of cases have fallen within the 48640 and 48642 (mostly Midland) zip codes. Next highest were 48657 (Sanford) with 7.% of cases and 48618 (Coleman) with 6.2% of cases.

Cases by race, as of Aug. 20: 87.9% were listed as caucasian; 2.3% as Black; 4% as Asian; 1.1% listed as two or more races; and 6% were unknown.

MidMichigan Health statistics

Patient census: MidMichigan Health system is listed as having eight COVID-19 patients, including one COVID-19 patient in ICU, and 68% bed occupancy, as of Aug. 24.

PPE days on hand as of Aug. 24: The health system reported 15-21 days for N95 masks; 0-6 days for surgical masks; 7-14 days for surgical gowns; 21+ days for shields and 7-14 days for gloves.

Need help?

If you think you've been exposed to COVID-19 and develop a fever and symptoms such as cough or difficulty breathing, call your health care provider for medical advice. If he/she isn't available, call MidMichigan Urgent Care in Midland at 989-633-1350 or MidMichigan Medical Center's Emergency Department in Midland at 989-839-3100.

MidMichigan Health has a COVID-19 informational hotline with a reminder of CDC guidelines and recommendations. The hotline can be reached toll-free at 800-445-7356 or 989-794-7600. Michigan Department of Health and Human Services also has a hotline number for Michigan residents for questions about COVID-19. The number is 1-888-535-6136 and is available seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Residents can also e-mail COVID19@michigan.gov. E-mails will be answered seven days a week between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

If you are feeling anxious, stressed, depressed and feel you need to talk to someone, reach out to Community Mental Health for Central Michigan by calling 800-317-0708.

Recommendations for public

 Socially distance at least 6 feet from non-household members.

 Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth.

 Wash hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom, before eating and after blowing your nose, coughing or sneezing.

 If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol based sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol.

 Always wash hands with soap and water if hands are visibly dirty.

 Wear face coverings in public.

 Stay home when sick.

 Covering coughs and sneezes.

 Throw used tissues in the trash right after use.

 Routinely clean frequently touched objects and surfaces using a regular household cleaning wipe or spray.
Love Island star Marcel Somerville was attacked by a masked gang armed with machetes in an apparent carjacking attempt at the weekend, it was reported today.

The father-to-be, 34, was reportedly set upon by four men on mopeds who swung blades towards him as he made his way to a restaurant in east London.

Mr Somerville today told the Sun he had been left 'shaken' by the incident, adding: 'I was understandably shaken by what happened but I'm fine and not hurt at all.'

The musician, who recently announced he is expecting a child with his fiancee Rebecca Vieira, had reportedly been driving with his friend when the pair 'noticed some people on mopeds getting close to them.'

Love Island star Marcel Somerville (pictured) was attacked by a masked gang armed with machetes in an apparent carjacking attempt at the weekend, it was reported today

A source close to the reality star told OK!: 'Each time they stopped at a set of traffic lights the mopeds would pull up next to them on either side of the car and just looked shady.

'Then when Marcel and his friend pulled into a side street to park up they saw the mopeds head towards them again. Each moped had two people on and they kind of circled around the car.'

The insider explained how when Mr Somerville opened the car door, two of the masked men swung their machetes towards him.

The Love Island star then shut his door and locked the car from the inside as his attackers shouted at him to 'get out of the f***ing car.'

The father-to-be, 34, was reportedly set upon by four men on mopeds who swung blades towards him as he made his way to a restaurant in east London

Mr Somerville (pictured with his fiance) today said he had been left 'shaken' by the incident, adding: 'I was understandably shaken by what happened by I'm fine and not hurt at all.'

'Marcel and his mate sped off and headed away as fast as possible,' the source added.

'It was a terrifying experience but nobody was hurt in the end and the car just had a few scratches on it.'

It is unclear whether the gang were attempting to steal Mr Somerville's car or the Rolex watch he was wearing at the time.

The musician, who was part of the hip hop group Blazin' Squad, found fame on the third series of Love Island in 2017.

He recently announced he is expecting his first child with girlfriend Rebecca, 24.
A two day event around the theme of Preparing to make the transition from secondary school to third level takes place in the Temperance Hall, Longford next Tuesday and Wednesday, August 25 and 26.

Also read: Longford schools in huge safety push ahead of return



The Longford Africans Network, in collaboration with Longford County Library, is hosting the programme which will explore the opportunities and challenges for young people moving to third level.

Day One, Tuesday, August 25 from 12 noon to 2pm will focus on health and wellbeing. Session 1 is Minding Your Mental Health and guest speakers include Victor Connell, Mandy Adegboyega and Paul Marsden.

Session 2 is on the topic of Career Choices and Review and the speaker is Linda Duignan, Longford College of Further Education.

Also read: New college campaign launched to increase student diversity

Day Two, Wednesday, August 26, also runs from 12 noon to 2pm, with college and careers on the agenda.

Session 1 is Preparing for College: Experience of 1st Year Students in College and speakers will be Eric Ehigie, Kofi Appiah and Sinead Mullally. There will also be a presentation on Local Supports - Longford Community Gardai with Lionel Mullally.

Session 2 explores Volunteering: Longford Volunteers and the speakers will be Terri Doherty, Coordinator Longford Volunteer Centre and John Farrell, Longford Tidy Towns.

Also read: Longford school principals fully focused on re-opening plan

There will also be musical performances, on day one, by Esther Imonivwerha and on day two, with Sinead Mullally.

To register for the Preparing to make the transition from secondary school to third level event, details and relevant links can be found on the Longford Africans Network Facebook page.
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   Ronald Inglehart,   Foreign Affairs ().

 . Ronald Inglehart   ,      Michigan,    World Values Survey ().

In the early years of the twenty-first century, religion seemed to be on the rise. The collapse of both communism and the Soviet Union had left an ideological vacuum that was being filled by Orthodox Christianity in Russia and other post-Soviet states. The election in the United States of President George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian who made no secret of his piety, suggested that evangelical Christianity was rising as a political force in the country. And the 9/11 attacks directed international attention to the power of political Islam in the Muslim world.

A dozen years ago, my colleague Pippa Norris and I analyzed data on religious trends in 49 countries, including a few subnational territories such as Northern Ireland, from which survey evidence was available from 1981 to 2007 (these countries contained 60 percent of the worlds population). We did not find a universal resurgence of religion, despite claims to that effectmost high-income countries became less religiousbut we did find that in 33 of the 49 countries we studied, people became more religious during those years. This was true in most former communist countries, in most developing countries, and even in a number of high-income countries. Our findings made it clear that industrialization and the spread of scientific knowledge were not causing religion to disappear, as some scholars had once assumed.

But since 2007, things have changed with surprising speed. From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied43 out of 49became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.

Growing numbers of people no longer find religion a necessary source of support and meaning in their lives. Even the United Stateslong cited as proof that an economically advanced society can be strongly religioushas now joined other wealthy countries in moving away from religion. Several forces are driving this trend, but the most powerful one is the waning hold of a set of beliefs closely linked to the imperative of maintaining high birthrates. Modern societies have become less religious in part because they no longer need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major world religions have instilled for centuries.

Although some religious conservatives warn that the retreat from faith will lead to a collapse of social cohesion and public morality, the evidence doesnt support this claim. As unexpected as it may seem, countries that are less religious actually tend to be less corrupt and have lower murder rates than more religious ones. Needless to say, religion itself doesnt encourage corruption and crime. This phenomenon reflects the fact that as societies develop, survival becomes more secure: starvation, once pervasive, becomes uncommon; life expectancy increases; murder and other forms of violence diminish. And as this level of security rises, people tend to become less religious.

THE RISE AND FALL OF FAITH

Our earlier study, published in 2011, compared levels of religious belief measured as early as 1981 with findings from the latest surveys then available, from around 2007, bridging a period of roughly a quarter century. In each survey, respondents were asked to indicate how important God was in their lives by choosing a value on a scale ranging from oneNot at all importantto tenVery important.

Examining how a countrys level of religiosity changed over time led to some striking findings. A majority of the countries surveyed showed upticks in a belief in the importance of God. The largest increases were in former communist countries. For example, from 1981 to 2007, the mean score of the Bulgarian public rose from 3.6 to 5.7. In Russia, it rose from 4.0 to 6.0. In part, this growth in religiosity was a response to the severe decline of economic, physical, and psychological security experienced after the Soviet Union disintegrated; religion was filling the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of communism. Religious beliefs also increased in many developing countries outside the former Soviet Union, including Brazil, China, Mexico, and South Africa. On the other hand, religion declined in most high-income countries.

Since 2007, there has been a remarkably sharp trend away from religion. In virtually every high-income country, religion has continued to decline. At the same time, many poor countries, together with most of the former communist states, have also become less religious. From 2007 to 2019, only five countries became more religious, whereas the vast majority of the countries studied moved in the opposite direction. (For a graph of these shifts, click here.)

India is the most important exception to the general pattern of declining religiosity. The period of the study coincides roughly with the return to power of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, whose brand of politics seeks to conflate national identity with religious identity. The BJP government has advocated policies that discriminate against the followers of other religions, particularly Indias large Muslim minority, polarizing communities and whipping up religious sentiments.

The most dramatic shift away from religion has taken place among the American public. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the worlds more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. Near the end of the initial period studied, Americans mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishingly sharp decline. For years, the United States had been the key case demonstrating that economic modernization need not produce secularization. By this measure, the United States now ranks as the 11th least religious country for which we have data.

Influential thinkers from Karl Marx to Max Weber to Emile Durkheim predicted that the spread of scientific knowledge would dispel religion throughout the world, but that did not happen. For most people, religious faith was more emotional than cognitive. And for most of human history, sheer survival was uncertain. Religion provided assurance that the world was in the hands of an infallible higher power (or powers) who promised that, if one followed the rules, things would ultimately work out for the best. In a world where people often lived near starvation, religion helped them cope with severe uncertainty and stress. But as economic and technological development took place, people became increasingly able to escape starvation, cope with disease, and suppress violence. They become less dependent on religionand less willing to accept its constraints, including keeping women in the kitchen and gay people in the closetas existential insecurity diminished and life expectancy rose.

Secularization doesnt happen everywhere at once; it occurs when countries have attained high levels of existential security, and even then it usually moves at a glacial pace, as one generation replaces another. It can even reverse itself, with societies becoming more religious if they experience prolonged periods of diminished security. Secularization has been gradually taking place since the nineteenth century, starting with the societies of western Europe and North America that were most secure economically and physically and then spreading to more and more parts of the world.

Although secularization normally occurs at the pace of intergenerational population replacement, it can reach a tipping point when the dominant opinion shifts and, swayed by the forces of conformism and social desirability, people start to favor the outlook they once opposedproducing exceptionally rapid cultural change. Younger and better-educated groups in high-income countries have recently reached this threshold.

LOSING THEIR RELIGION

Several other factors beyond rising levels of economic and technological development help explain the waning of religion. In the United States, politics accounts for some of the decline. Since the 1990s, the Republican Party has sought to win support by adopting conservative Christian positions on same-sex marriage, abortion, and other cultural issues. But this political appeal to religious voters has had the corollary effect of pushing other voters, especially those who are young and culturally liberal, away from religion. It once was generally assumed that religious beliefs shaped political views, not the other way around. But recent evidence indicates that the causality can run the other way: panel studies have found that many people change their political views first and then become less religious.

The uncritical embrace of President Donald Trumpa leader who cannot be described as a paragon of Christian virtueby many prominent evangelicals has led other evangelicals to fear that young people will desert their churches in droves, accelerating an ongoing trend. The Roman Catholic Church, for its part, has lost adherents because of its own crises. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center found that fully 92 percent of U.S. adults were aware of recent reports of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and about 80 percent of those surveyed said they believed that the abuses were ongoing problems that are still happening. Accordingly, 27 percent of U.S. Catholics polled said that they had scaled back their attendance at Mass in response to these reports.

But perhaps the most important force behind secularization is a transformation concerning the norms governing human fertility. For many centuries, most societies assigned to women the role of producing as many children as possible and discouraged divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and any sexual behavior not linked to reproduction. The sacred writings of the worlds major religions vary greatly, but as Norris and I have demonstrated, virtually all world religions instilled these pro-fertility norms in their adherents. Religions emphasized the importance of fertility because it was necessary. In the world of high infant mortality and low life expectancy that prevailed until recently, the average woman had to produce five to eight children in order to simply replace the population.

During the twentieth century, a growing number of countries attained drastically reduced infant mortality rates and higher life expectancies, making these traditional cultural norms no longer necessary. This process didnt happen overnight. The major world religions had presented pro-fertility norms as absolute moral rules and stoutly resisted change. People only slowly gave up the familiar beliefs and societal roles they had known since childhood concerning gender and sexual behavior. But when a society reached a sufficiently high level of economic and physical security, younger generations grew up taking that security for granted, and the norms around fertility receded. Ideas, practices, and laws concerning gender equality, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality are now changing rapidly.

This shift is quantifiable. Data collected in the World Values Survey over the years offer a glimpse of a deep transformation. The survey uses a ten-point scale based on each countrys acceptance of divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. The tipping point is around the middle of the scale, at 5.50: lower scores indicate that a majority of the countrys people harbor more conservative views, and higher scores indicate that a majority have more liberal views centered on individual choice. Around 1981, majorities in every country for which we have data supported pro-fertility norms. Even in high-income countries, the mean scores ranged from as low as 3.44 (Spain), 3.49 (the United States), 3.50 (Japan), 4.14 (the United Kingdom), and 4.63 (Finland) to as high as 5.35 for Swedenthen the most liberal country but with a score still slightly below the scales tipping point. But a profound change was underway. By 2019, Spains mean score had risen to 6.74, the United States to 5.86, Japans to 6.17, the United Kingdoms to 6.90, Finlands to 7.35, and Swedens to 8.49. All these countries were below the 5.50 tipping point when first surveyed, and all of them were above it by 2019. These numbers offer a simplified picture of a complex reality, but they convey the scale of the recent acceleration of secularization.

This trend has been spreading to the rest of the world, with one major exception. The populations of the 18 Muslim-majority countries for which data are available in the World Values Survey have stayed far below the tipping point, remaining strongly religious and committed to preserving traditional norms concerning gender and fertility. Even controlling for economic development, Muslim-majority countries tend to be somewhat more religious and culturally conservative than average.

THINGS WONT FALL APART

For centuries, religion has served as a force for social cohesion, reducing crime and encouraging compliance with the law. Every major religion inculcates some version of the biblical commandments Thou shalt not steal and Thou shalt not kill. So it is understandable that religious conservatives fear that the retreat of religion will lead to social disarray, with rising corruption and crime. But to a surprising extent, that concern is not supported by the evidence.

Since 1993, Transparency International has monitored the relative corruption and honesty of government officials and business people around the world. Each year, this watchdog group publishes the Corruption Perceptions Index, which ranks public-sector corruption in 180 countries and territories. These data make it possible to test the actual relationship between religiosity and corruption: Is corruption less widespread in religious countries than in less religious ones? The answer is an unequivocal noin fact, religious countries actually tend to be more corrupt than secular ones. The highly secular Nordic states have some of the worlds lowest levels of corruption, and highly religious countries, such as Bangladesh, Guatemala, Iraq, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, have some of the highest.

Clearly, religiosity does not cause corruption. Countries with low levels of economic and physical security tend to have high levels of religiosity and also high levels of corruption. Although religion may once have played a crucial role in supporting public morality, that role shrinks as societies develop economically. The people of religious countries are slightly more likely to condemn corruption than the people of less religious countries, but the impact of religion on behavior ends there. Religion may make people more punitive, but it does not make them less corrupt.

This pattern also applies to other crimes, such as murder. As surprising as it may seem, the murder rate is more than ten times as high in the most religious countries as it is in the least religious countries. Some relatively poor countries have low murder rates, but overall, prosperous countries that provide their residents with material and legal security are much safer than poor countries. It is not that religiosity causes murders, of course, but that both crime and religiosity tend to be high in societies with low levels of existential security.

The evidence suggests that modern societies will not descend into nihilistic chaos without religious faith to bind them, but that may not always have been the case. In early agrarian societies, when most people lived just above the survival level, religion may have been the most effective way to maintain order and cohesion. But modernization has changed the equation. As traditional religiosity declines, an equally strong set of moral norms seems to be emerging to fill the void. Evidence from the World Values Survey indicates that in highly secure and secular countries, people are giving increasingly high priority to self-expression and free choice, with a growing emphasis on human rights, tolerance of outsiders, environmental protection, gender equality, and freedom of speech.

Traditional religions can be dangerously divisive in contemporary global society. Religions inherently tend to present their norms as absolute values, despite the fact that they actually reflect their societies histories and socioeconomic characteristics. The rigidity of any absolute belief system can give rise to fanatical intolerance, as the historical conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and Christians and Muslims have demonstrated.

As societies develop from agrarian to industrial to knowledge-based, growing existential security tends to reduce the importance of religion in peoples lives, and people become less obedient to traditional religious leaders and institutions. That trend seems likely to continue, but the future is always uncertain. Pandemics such as the COVID-19 one reduce peoples sense of existential security. If the pandemic lasts for many years or leads to a new Great Depression, the cultural changes of recent decades might begin to reverse.

But that shift remains unlikely, because it would run counter to the powerful, long-term, technology-driven trend of growing prosperity and increased life expectancy that is helping push people away from religion. If that trend continues, the influence that traditional religious authorities wield over public morality will keep shrinking as a culture of growing tolerance becomes ever stronger.





: foreignaffairs.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:25:49|Editor: huaxia

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HARARE, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Zimbabwean government on Monday called on the public to avoid unnecessary traveling, particularly in cities during peak hours to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said while the government is aware of the difficulties brought about by the lockdown for about five months, citizens must, however, avoid the temptation of unnecessary travel.

"Let us not violate the movement restrictions that are in place to protect us and others as well as the wearing of masks in public places," Mutsvangwa said in a statement.

There is currently a 10-hour night curfew beginning at 8 p.m., which has recently been shortened from 12 hours, while inter-city travel remains banned.

As of Sunday, Zimbabwe had recorded 5,930 COVID-19 cases, including 4,872 recoveries and 155 deaths.

"Experts have informed us that those who will win this war are those who adapt to the new normal which entails adopting the protective and preventive measures that curb the spread and transmission of COVID-19. This is a new normal. Let us all accept it and adapt our lifestyles to it," Mutsvangwa said. Enditem
Tatiana Purcell holds a sign in support of Black Lives Matter during a protest on King St. in Shippensburg, Pa., on June 9. Similar demonstrations were held in nearby Chambersburg, prompting Franklin County District Attorney Matt Fogal write an open letter in support of the movement. Read more

A Republican prosecutor in central Pennsylvania has lost the support of his local party after writing a public letter in support of Black Lives Matter and calling on fellow Republicans to vote against President Donald Trump.

Matt Fogal, Franklin Countys district attorney since 2009, wrote in early June about how protests in Chambersburg had prompted him to support the Black Lives Matter movement. He said in an interview with The Inquirer that he wrote the letter because he felt an obligation to show what side of history he was on.

This is an unprecedented time, and I wanted to make sure those I serve here know what side of history Im on in this moment, and where I encourage them to be, he said at the time.

In a response letter published over the weekend by a local conservative blogger, the chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party said it was formally censuring Fogal and would not support him for reelection in 2023 or for any public office. The chair, Allen B. Coffman, called Black Lives Matter a radical and violent movement.

You also stated that all lives matter was wrong and part of the problem, Coffman wrote. We strongly disagree with your view. There is no more inclusive statement than all lives matter.

Coffmans letter misleads when it conflates the worldwide protest movement known as Black Lives Matter with a loosely organized activist organization of the same name, calling it a self-admitted Marxist revolutionary group dedicated to the dissolution of America, its heritage and its culture, including the nuclear family.

The broad Black Lives Matter movement is focused primarily on anti-Black racism, particularly in policing. The movement has drawn millions of Americans into the streets in protest and has widespread public support, according to polls.

Fogal declined to comment Monday. The Franklin County GOP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Black Lives Matter. Period. Full stop, Fogal wrote in his June letter, which was published in several local newspapers and shared widely on social media. I confess, when I first heard the phrase, my immediate reaction was that All Lives Matter. I was wrong and part of the problem.

He also called on the GOP to ditch Trump. For my fellow Republicans, I encourage you to exhibit political courage and never put the party before the country or conscience, he wrote. In Union There Is Strength.

Fogal met with the partys executive committee earlier this month about his comments, but the censure letter said the meeting only served to reinforce our concerns that you have departed from the sensible conservative views of the vast majority of your fellow citizens.

The censure letter also noted interviews Fogal gave to The Inquirer and the New York Times. These papers do not reflect the views of conservative Republicans nor are they a local paper of record, Coffman wrote.

Republicans outnumber Democrats by about 2-1 in Franklin County. The county supported Trump with 72% of the vote in 2016. Chambersburg, the county seat, was one of several small Pennsylvania towns where demonstrations were held after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In Pennsylvania, there were protests supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in at least 56 of the states 67 counties. Of the towns in those counties that saw demonstrations, at least 40 were ones Trump won in 2016.

Fogal, an independent turned Republican, would be up for reelection to what would be his fourth term in 2023. He is a member of the Army National Guard who responded to Hurricane Katrina, and was deployed to Kosovo and Afghanistan.
Afterpay shares have hit a new record high after the local buy now, pay later (BNPL) heavyweight announced plans to buy European rival Pagantis for 50 million ($82 million), in a deal that it hopes will accelerate its move into new markets.

Afterpay on Monday said the European Union was the next logical step in its overseas expansion after it has already launched in the United States and the United Kingdom, pointing to a potential 300 billion e-commerce market in the EU. Investors welcomed the news sending Afterpay shares up 4.8 per cent to a record close of $82.73.

Afterpay, which has seen a stunning surge in its stock price from less than $10 in March when coronavirus panic hit markets, will report its full-year results on Thursday.

Afterpay CEO Anthony Eisen said the deal would provide the necessary licences, resourcing and infrastructure to expand into Europe. Credit:Elke Meitzel

The company is buying Pagantis, which is licensed by the Bank of Spain and provides BNPL and traditional credit products in Spain, France, Italy, with regulatory approval to operate in Portugal.
SACRAMENTO, Calif., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- In an effort to avert a secondary health care crisis resulting from people avoiding necessary medical care, California hospitals are launching a statewide public service campaign aimed at reassuring people that hospitals are safe and ready to care for everyone in need during the pandemic.

"Care Can't Wait" is centered around a 30-second animated video that describes the concrete safety precautions California hospitals have implemented to ensure the well-being of everyone seeking care  both patients with symptoms of COVID-19 and those with non-COVID conditions. The video is being distributed to TV and radio stations across California. Additionally, a dynamic social media presence is planned.

"We understand some people may have concerns about coming to a hospital during this unprecedented public health crisis," said Carmela Coyle, President & CEO of the California Hospital Association. "But deferring necessary medical care is not the right answer. We want everyone to know that if you or your loved one is experiencing signs of a serious medical condition, hospitals are safe, ready, and waiting to care for you."

Coyle noted that hospitals across the state have implemented a number of new and enhanced procedures to ensure the safety of patients, employees, and visitors, including:

Screening and temperature checks of everyone entering a facility

Separate triage and treatment areas for COVID and non-COVID patients

Enhanced deep cleaning procedures utilizing UV disinfecting technology and anti-viral cleaning products

Requiring that all hospitals workers, patients, and visitors wear face masks at all times

The campaign comes at a time when many Californians remain concerned about the safety of seeking medical care from physicians and hospitals because of the pandemic. More than 76% of Californians responding to a recent online poll said they have a medium-to-high concern about returning to regular health care activities because of COVID-19. And in a recent Harris Poll, one in four people said they would rather stay home if they experienced a heart attack or stroke.

Additionally, a National Cancer Institute model of breast and colorectal cancers predicts there will be 10,000 excess deaths in the U.S. over the next 10 years because of pandemic-related delays in diagnosing and treating these diseases. Also, the number of vaccinations for kids in California dropped by nearly half this past April compared to the previous year, as many parents avoided doctors' offices because of the pandemic.

"The fact that so many people are hesitant to seek necessary medical care is very alarming  and points to a secondary health care crisis in the making," Coyle said. "Not only are we in the midst of the pandemic, but we face an even greater disease burden resulting from undiagnosed or untreated illnesses, and missed preventative health opportunities."

"For everyone's health and well-being, California's hospitals urge everyone to seek care when they need it," Coyle added. "Do this for yourself and for your loved ones."

SOURCE California Hospital Association

Related Links

http://www.calhealth.org


Detroit Firefighter Dies Rescuing 2 Small Girls in River

A Detroit firefighter died after helping save two girls in a river on Friday night, authorities said.

Sgt. Sivad Johnson of the citys fire department went missing after he and several others went into the Detroit River to save two small girls from drowning, the Michigan State Police said.

When the little girls were safe, their parents took them home. Later (30-45 minutes), the 10-year-old girl realized she could not find her father and called 911. It is believed the father may have been dragged underwater by the rip-current and no one noticed, police said in a statement.

Johnsons body was found on Saturday.

While Johnson, 49, was technically off-duty, first responders are never really off-duty, police said.

He saw people that needed help and he didnt hesitate to jump in the water to save them, police said.

According to a GoFundMe fundraiser launched for Johnsons family, he leaves behind 16-year-old and 10-year-old daughters.

Detroit Fire Department Director Dave Fornell told the Detroit Free Press that Johnson was respected by many.

From what I hear from the people who worked with him, he was a tremendous leader, a firemens fireman, he touched a lot of people, Fornell said. The biggest thing was he jumped in the river there to rescue some kids he didnt even know. He was off-duty and with his 10-year-old daughter.

Johnson told a crowd in Flint, Michigan, in 2018 that his brother was a firefighter for 11 years. Both men followed in the footsteps of their father, who fought fires for two decades.

That is actually a very proud thing for me to say. Ive met a lot of great men and women on the job, and through some of the things weve been through and shared, weve grown close like a family, he said at the time.

Johnson received a medal of valor from the Detroit Public Safety Foundation in 2017 for his bravery.

Jamal Johnson, the sergeants brother, told reporters on Saturday that he was a strong admirer of Sgt. Johnson.

He was my idol, he said, reported WDIV. He was always a hero to me.

Johnson in his 2018 talk recounted efforts to save peoples lives, telling a captivating story about an attempted rescue.

Thats the part of the job that sucks to me the most, he said. I mean, I know we cant save everybody, but we try. Its never easy, and it never feels right to lose a human life when youve been called to rescue them. But it comes with the job.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  President Rodrigo Duterte is unlikely to stay in office beyond his term in 2022 despite appeals from supporters to lead a revolutionary government, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said Monday.

Nilinaw natin na ang Presidente natin ay pinuno ng isang constitutional government at hindi po natin kinakailangan ang revolutionary government sa ngayon, Roque told reporters during his briefing.

[Translation: We have already clarified that the President is heading a constitutional government so we do not need a revolutionary government for now.]

Come 2022, he is welcoming transferring reign of power to his duly-elected successor, Roque added.

Kung kayo po ay nagkakaroon ng agam-agam na he (Duterte) will stay beyond his term, that is the farthest from the mind of the President and I can assure you that po, he added, reiterating that the administrations current focus is on the pandemic.

[Translation: If the public is worried that Duterte will stay beyond his term, that is the farthest from the mind of the President and I can assure you that.]

Critics, including public officials, took a swipe at the call of the Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte-National Executive Coordinating Committee last week to have a revolutionary government and fast-track federalism before the Presidents term ends in 2022.

Interior Undersecretary Jonathan Malaya told CNN Philippines on Monday that the group never consulted them regarding the validity of such a proposal.

Vice President Leni Robredo had also called the move illegal and nonsense as a subject of attention amid the ongoing crisis.

Roque noted, however, that despite such an appeal not being among any constitutional option, this does not mean that Duterte will drop his push for federalism.

Meanwhile, MRRD-NECC National Deputy Spokesperson Bobby Brillante said that he understands the response from government regarding the groups proposal of a revolutionary government.

Dapat lang naman. Bakit naman nila kami susuportahan? This is a people-initiated movement. Our purpose is to transform the political system, he told CNN Philippines.

[Translation: Thats right. Why would they support us? This is a people-initiated movement. Our purpose is to transform the political system.]

Duterte had previously campaigned on a promise to shift to a federal form of government to spur development in the provinces, but has not actively hinted on his next steps to push federalism in the past years.

Lawmakers from the House and Senate have also not tackled any charter amendments since session resumed, stressing that their focus is on the governments COVID-19 fight for the meantime.
Its a game of high stakes and high-return potential. Were talking about investing in bargain priced healthcare stocks. For some, the risk associated with these plays is enough to keep them away. That said, other market watchers see the opportunity at hand as too enticing to ignore.

What makes these stocks risky? Given the nature of the healthcare industry, many companies rely on a few key indicators such as study results or regulatory approvals to determine if theres a clear path forward.

Therefore, any positive development can act as a catalyst that sends shares blasting off towards the moon. Disappointing news will also send shares flying, but in the opposite direction.

Understanding the risk involved, we used TipRanks database to pinpoint two compelling healthcare stocks trading for less than $5 per share. Each has earned a Strong Buy consensus rating from the analyst community and brings massive growth prospects to the table. Were talking about triple-digit upside potential here.

Synlogic Inc. (SYBX)

Standing at the intersection of biology and engineering, Synlogic uses synthetic biology to develop living therapeutics programmed to treat disease in innovative ways. With multiple potential catalysts on tap for the rest of 2020, some analysts believe that its $2.19 share price presents an attractive entry point.

Representing H.C. Wainwright, 5-star analyst Raghuram Selvaraju cites the initiation of the Phase 2 clinical trial of SYNB1618, its orally administered synthetic biotic medicine, in patients with phenylketonuria (PKU), a condition that causes decreased metabolism of the amino acid phenylalanine (Phe). The trial is designed to evaluate safety and tolerability as well as the therapys ability to lower Phe levels.

In an attempt to limit the risks associated with COVID-19, the company recently altered the trial to give patients more flexibility, with the participants now able to choose home-based or office-based visits. Management still expects to kick off the trial in 2H20.

Story continues

The potential catalysts dont end there. The continuation of dosing in the monotherapy arm of the SYNB1891 Phase 1 clinical trial, which is studying the immuno-oncology (I/O) candidate in patients with advanced solid tumors or lymphoma, could also drive significant upside, in Selvarajus opinion. The company is hoping to release interim data before the end of 2020.

Additionally, the analyst will be watching out for investigational new drug (IND)-enabling studies of SYNB8802, SYBX's asset designed as a treatment of enteric hyperoxaluria, which is set to enter clinical evaluation in early 2021.

Expounding on this, Selvaraju stated, We believe that demonstration of progress with these preclinical programs may galvanize investor interest, since that would signal expansion of Synlogic's portfolio and indicate continued execution capability even under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To this end, Selvaraju rates SYBX a Buy, along with a $13 price target. This figure conveys his confidence in SYBX's ability to soar 504% in the next twelve months. (To watch Selvarajus track record, click here)

Turning now to the rest of the Street, other analysts also like what theyre seeing. 4 Buys and a single Hold add up to a Strong Buy consensus rating. Given the $9.75 average price target, the upside potential comes in at 353%. (See SYBX stock analysis on TipRanks)

Evolus Inc. (EOLS)

Relying on a customer-centric approach, Evolus is a performance beauty company thats focused on bringing breakthrough products to market. Currently going for $3.55 apiece, now might be the time to snap up shares, so says the analyst community.

SVB Leerink analyst Marc Goodman tells clients that Q2 Jeuveau sales landed $6.5 million above his original estimate. The strong showing came as a result of a more robust recovery of normal aesthetics business across the U.S., with approximately 90% of the sales being generated in the second half of Q2 as some offices reopened after COVID-19-induced shutdowns.

Higher-than-anticipated gross margin, an 8% increase in purchasing accounts during the quarter as well as rising re-order rates also contributed to Jeuveaus impressive performance. Even though Jeuveau has a solid standing in the U.S. neurotoxin market, and the company believes the market will continue to rebound in 2H20, year-over-year declines could still be in store. However, Goodman commented, Given that most investors had very low expectations into Q2, we wouldnt be surprised to see the stock uptick nicely...

That being said, Goodman notes that investors need to have some patience with respect to the International Trade Commission (ITC) litigation. As no significant updates were provided by management, the analyst is waiting for the judges final decision on November 6, which he argues will either be a positive ruling for Daewoong/Evolus or a settlement. To this end, he is still positive on the long-term prospects for Jeuveau.

Reflecting other highlights for Goodman, EOLS customers stated that June was the best month of this year, due to high pent-up demand during lockdowns.

Evolus used its proprietary digital platform to launch two new initiatives: (a) a consumer loyalty program Evolus Rewards which within 30 days had over 1,300 purchasing accounts opting into the program (~30% of the customer base) and 16,500 patients enrolled, and (b) Evolus 350 promotional programs offering a flat $350 price per vial on purchases made via the Evolus Practice app. Together, these initiatives plus corporate restructuring reduced non-GAAP operating expenses by ~37% vs Q1, the analyst noted.

In line with his optimistic take, Goodman rates EOLS an Outperform (i.e. Buy) along with a $10 price target. This target brings the upside potential to a whooping 197%. (To watch Goodmans track record, click here)

Most other analysts dont beg to differ. 4 Buy ratings and a single Hold add up to a Strong Buy consensus rating. The $8.40 average price target implies shares could soar 149% in the coming year. (See Evolus stock analysis on TipRanks)

To find good ideas for healthcare stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.
China Creates, Recruits Social Media Accounts to Sway Public Opinion, Documents Show

A series of Chinese government documents reveal local authorities methods for monitoring and controlling public opinion on the internet, including how they recruit popular social media accounts or create their own to post pro-government content, monitor content that is unfavorable to the regime, and handle public relations disasters.

Authorities outlined a bureaucratic process for how to handle negative public opinionwhen netizens express displeasure at the government, in a series of internal government directives leaked to The Epoch Times by a trusted source.

Cultivating Pro-Government Influencers

In a document marked secret that contained minutes from a meeting of directors of the Henan Province Network Information Office, officials noted the importance of cultivating pro-government social media influencers through recruiting existing accounts and creating their own.

A document marked secret that explains the importance for local authorities to cultivate pro-government social media influencers. (Provided to The Epoch Times)

The pro-government social media influencers are required to post or repost official rhetoric and commentaries on their accounts. Authorities should also organize large numbers of paid internet commentators to follow such accounts and like those postsin order to create buzz online that favors the government, while expanding the influence of pro-government and government-run accounts, according to the meeting minutes.

Meanwhile, authorities should also increase surveillance and censorship over influential social media accounts, the document said. Automated technology and manual surveillance should be employed to track certain key groups and public and individual accounts on WeChat, QQ, and other popular social media, it added.

When and Who to Monitor

In one document issued by the local Nanyang city branch of the Chinese regimes chief online censorship agency, the Cyberspace Administration, authorities outlined two main categories of content to closely monitor: significant online public opinion and general internet public opinion.

A document issued by the local Nanyang city branch of the Chinese regimes chief online censorship agency, the Cyberspace Administration, detailing how to deal with internet public opinion. (Provided to The Epoch Times)

The former refers to online content about major disasters or public safety incidents; events that draw a lot of media attention; posts that involve the interests of large groups or affect political security; and more, according to the document. Political security is an oft-used term referring to the stability of the Chinese Communist Partys rule.

General internet public opinion refers to sensitive topics circulating on a smaller scale, such as through chat groups, independent online commentators, or the accounts of influential media, public intellectuals, and social media influencers.

Another document from Henan Province that was disseminated to lower-level governments explained that local authorities should respond to any negative news or public opinion about authorities circulating online, by mobilizing different government agencies, such as the propaganda, cyber, public security, and other departments.

The directive outlined a seven-step process to deal with the online posts, such as monitoring, assessing, regulating public opinion, and timely guidance of comments.

Another Cyber Army

In addition to the Chinese regimes 50 cent army of hired professional trolls who post pro-regime comments and verbally attack those who disagree with the government, an internal official document also revealed that the Chinese Communist Party has begun recruiting internet surveillance volunteers.

A July 22 notice issued by the Anyang City Cyberspace Administration stated that all county governments must form a team of such volunteers, with no less than 30 people.

The volunteers would be responsible for inspecting and searching for harmful political information on portal websites, search engines, social media platforms, blogs, forums, live-streaming platforms, short video platforms, and mobile app stores.

Handling Negative Public Opinion

The Epoch Times also obtained copies of online public opinion special reports from the Nanyang city branch of the Cyberspace Administration, dated March 17 to May 11, which recorded examples of how the local government handled negative public opinion.

For example, earlier this year, a social media account reported about companies that illegally built property at the local Longshen Industrial Park and profited off renting or selling the real estate. Netizens expressed outrage at the news.

The report said authorities were successful in quickly spotting the negative opinion and guiding online comments to be favorable toward authorities. After the local government launched an investigation into the companies and announced the results, public opinion and sentiment are now calm, the report concluded.

Also in April, local news reported that Tanghe County education officials visited local schools without wearing masks during the spread of COVID-19. Local authorities communicated and coordinated with relevant media to delete the initial post, along with reposts and comments about the news on social media platforms, according to another report.
Turkish military holds coordinated drills in Aegean Sea amid tensions

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 9:04 AM

Turkish air and naval forces have carried out joint training exercises in the Aegean Sea, amid escalating tensions between Turkey and Greece in the eastern Mediterranean Sea over gas and oil exploration.

The Turkish Defense Ministry announced in a tweet that the country's F-16 fighter jets took part alongside warships to "enhance, maintain and improve the operational capability of joint inter-forces operations."

The announcement came as NATO members Turkey and Greece are facing off in the eastern Mediterranean Sea over energy exploration and a day after Ankara declared the discovery of huge natural gas reserves off its Black Sea coast.

Turkey is involved in a dispute over oil and gas exploration rights with Greece and Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean.

Earlier in the month, Turkey dispatched a warship-escorted research vessel to explore for energy resources in the disputed waters of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, where Greece claims exclusive rights to the seabed. Athens responded by sending warships to the area and placing its military on alert. France, in clear signaling of support for Greece, also dispatched warships and planes for joint drills with Greek forces.

French President Emmanuel Macron has also called for EU sanctions against Ankara for "violations" of Greek and Cypriot sovereignty over their territorial waters.

The EU fully backed Greece's maritime claims last week and sanctioned two Turkish energy executives, warning Ankara to "immediately" stop its oil and gas exploration activities in the eastern Mediterranean.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has, however, vowed to continue the country's energy exploration in the disputed waters despite warnings from the EU and a military buildup by France.

Turkey had paused the research activities on a request from Germany but restarted them after a maritime agreement was signed between Greece and Egypt. Ankara described that agreement as "worthless" and an attempt to keep Turkey out of the region.

Father of Turkey's maritime doctrine warns France

In an interview with AFP on Saturday, retired Turkish admiral and author, Cem Gurdeniz, censured France's decision to send warships to help Greece in its Mediterranean standoff with Ankara and said the provocative move was adding "fuel to the fire."

The 62-year-old father of Turkey's controversial new maritime doctrine criticized the French president's "everyday verbal threats," and said France should avoid escalating tensions with Ankara.

"For many Turks now, France is acting like an 'enfant terrible'. Can you imagine, they are threatening Turkey?" Gurdeniz said. "If France continues such provocative actions... that would not serve regional peace and stability  that would add fuel to the fire and France should avoid that."

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TDT | Manama

Artificial Intelligence (AI) regional researcher and expert Bahraini Dr Jassim Haji has been honoured for his major contributions to the field. Dr Haji was recognised during a virtual annual award ceremony held by the Middle Easts leading and oldest technology media and research group Tahawultech and Computer News Middle East (CNME)- Dubai, for celebrating technology leaders that have shown the way during the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis.

Dr Haji was declared the winner of Transformation Leader for 2020 for his contributions towards AI, including research and publications, during the past six months. The award is the first of its kind in the Middle East to be granted since the outbreak of COVID-19, and it aims to honour technological transformation leaders for their efforts and ideas in AI, whose importance has increased during the COVID-19 crisis, not only in Bahrain but all over the world.

Dr Haji affirmed that Bahrain has made major strides in using artificial intelligence at the public and private levels, and cited its use in tracking COVID-19 patients, discovering medicines, teleworking, education, industry, electricity, workers, and robots, among others. He was the only winner from Bahrain. He has also claimed more than 20 international and regional individual accolades for his innovations and contributions to technologies and AI in past years.
Tragic: Nora Quoirin disappeared while on holiday in Malaysia in August last year. Photo: Family Handout/PA Wire

The inquest into the death of tragic teenager Nora Quoirin begins today in Malaysia.

Her devastated family feel the hearing they campaigned for is "a crucial element in the fight for truth and justice".

A Malaysian coroner's court will probe the circumstances surrounding the death of the teenager who had special needs, after she disappeared from her family's holiday chalet at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on August 4, 2019.

Nora (15) was the eldest child of her London-based Irish mother Meabh and French father Sebastien Quoirin.

Her unclothed body was discovered 10 days after her disappearance. She was found lying beside a small stream about 2km from the resort.

Despite a major search involving helicopters, sniffer dogs and hundreds of volunteers, no sign of Nora was found until it was too late.

The location where she was finally discovered by a group of hikers who had volunteered to join the search had already been scoured many times during the search operation for the teenager.

A post-mortem found she had most likely died from starvation and internal bleeding after spending about a week in the dense rainforest.

There were no marks of struggle on her body and there was no evidence anyone had inflicted any violence upon her.

Both the Irish and French police who were present at the post-mortem were satisfied with the work of the pathology team.

Police Chief Mohamad Mat Yusop said authorities had found no evidence of foul play and the post-mortem also found she had not been sexually abused.

The only marks on her body were visible abrasions on her feet. She wasn't sunburned, and there were no mosquito bites.

"This doesn't fit the argument that she was out in the jungle by herself for seven days," Mr Quoirin said.

Malaysian police insisted there was no sign of foul play and authorities closed their enquiries within days of the discovery of her body.

However, Nora's parents believe she was abducted and they fought doggedly for this inquest.

In a recent interview with the Irish Times, her mother said she has always believed that Nora was the victim of a crime.

"I felt this within two minutes of discovering that she wasn't there," Ms Quoirin said.

Nora's parents are convinced she could not have reached the spot where she was found without another person.

"Had she gone three metres, she would have tripped and seriously hurt herself.

"There was total darkness. There was not even any moon that night," said Mr Quoirin.

Among the major questions that loom large for them is the fact the latch on the lounge window in the chalet was found to be broken, leaving it ajar.

"Somebody opened that window, and it wasn't us," Ms Quoirin said.

She hopes the inquest will answer some of the haunting questions that remain.
Thousands of firefighters living and working on the front lines of dozens of blazes across Northern California are facing the deadly combination of heat, smoke and flames, along with the invisible threat of COVID-19.

Public health and fire officials began preparing months ago for a catastrophic fire season on top of a devastating pandemic. But there are limitations to how well they can protect the firefighters themselves when the best tools at hand  face coverings and social distancing  arent practical in wildfire conditions.

The concerns are multilayered. Most important: No one wants firefighters to get sick, for their own sake. Also, the state cant afford to pull crews off duty when staff resources are so thin. With personnel coming to the region from throughout the state as well as other parts of the country, public health experts fear a super-spreader event if someone infected on the front lines brings the virus back home.

Youre bringing people together from disparate locations, and putting them into teams and theyre working in very close quarters. Theyre being housed in very close quarters. And theres the question of whether the smoke and the exhaustion increases their chances of more serious illness, said Art Reingold, a UC Berkeley infectious disease expert who has been advising the U.S. Forest Service on coronavirus prevention among firefighters.

Its a very challenging set of circumstances, he said. And Im afraid we dont have very good answers.

About 12,000 firefighters have been deployed across the state, most of them battling the two-dozen mega-fires sparked by lightning in Northern California this week. But state and local fire officials say they still are so short of staff that theyre having to make difficult decisions about what they can save as the blazes rage out of control on multiple fronts.

Between the firefighters living and working together in the field, and the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated from their homes and are seeking shelter under chaotic conditions, public health officials fear theyll see new surges in coronavirus cases from the fires. Thats especially concerning as the state continues to grapple with a swell in infections from June and July.

The American Red Cross and other agencies are opening more shelters across the region, and admitting fewer people to each site to allow for social distancing. Theyre sending evacuees to hotels when possible. Shelters also are screening people for symptoms of COVID-19 and requiring face coverings.

But the firefighters present a unique challenge. Its harder for them to maintain social distance when they sleep and eat together. They frequently drive to distant fires in cramped trucks with the windows rolled up. They often cant wear face coverings while they work due to the extreme heat. In their downtime, wildfire crews typically live in massive camps with hundreds of their peers.

Those camps this year have been replaced by much smaller, scattered shelters, where crews of five to 20 hunker down together and avoid close interactions with others, fire officials said. Even among their units, firefighters are advised to sleep far apart if they can, or at least head to feet for some extra breathing room. Theyre told to wear masks when possible.

Sticking to these pods should prevent the spread of infection among much larger groups if one person falls ill, infectious disease experts say. It also means that fewer firefighters will need to be quarantined  and pulled off duty  if one case is identified.

If youre having to quarantine or isolate people, or people are sick and cant work  those workers are a precious commodity, Reingold said.

Firefighters are monitored for symptoms of COVID-19, fire officials said. Theyre told to report any symptoms, and are checked periodically for fevers. But officials are struggling to find a way to identify asymptomatic cases. Testing for the coronavirus is not regularly done among firefighters, and some individuals have requested tests before they go home, to make sure they arent infected and wont spread the virus to their families.

Its the perfect storm: Bring people in from all over the western United States to work together in a communal setting, and then send them back, said John Swartzberg, a UC Berkeley infectious disease expert who also advised the U.S. Forest Service.

We havent figured out a way to make things perfect, but I think we made it better, he said, referring to protocols such as keeping crews separate that have been put in place.

No COVID-19 cases have been identified among firefighters battling the infernos that exploded earlier this week. But infections among close-working fire crews have been a concern since March. Cases have been reported among training camps and people confronting smaller fires earlier in the year.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

In July, the coronavirus hit several Northern California training sites for prison firefighting crews, who play a critical role in Cal Fires wildfire response. Outbreaks forced some camps to shut down and cut the ranks of inmate firefighters in half, including people infected and close contacts who were placed in quarantine. The state hired nearly 600 seasonal firefighters to replace those crews.

The U.S. Forest Service, which supplies firefighters from within California and outside the state, has reported 73 COVID-19 cases among about 5,000 staff since March, officials said Friday. Most of those cases were among firefighters, and all but four have fully recovered and returned to work.

So far, and things can change at any moment, we have been having some success in how we manage COVID. Were going to do everything we can to safely suppress the virus, said Randy Moore, the regional forester for the Pacific Southwest Region of the Forest Service.

Moore said fire officials are closely watching crew members for signs of fatigue in addition to COVID-19 symptoms, noting that exhaustion could make them more vulnerable to illness. Wildfire crews usually work for 14 days straight then take two days off. Infectious disease experts agreed that could be a concern.

Another worry is that exposure to smoke could lead to more infections or more serious illness among firefighters. Studies have found that poor air quality from fires can lead to more cases of influenza and other respiratory illnesses, but its not certain that means firefighters are at greater risk of COVID-19.

We have to stay vigilant, said Tony Scardina, deputy regional forester with the U.S. Forest Service. If we let our guard down, we will see spread of the virus occur and that could affect our firefighting.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday


By Patrick Njoroge





NAIROBI  "We are experiencing the sharpest decline in per capita income since 1870," United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) Antonio Guterres pointed out in a recent speech, warning that the COVID-19 crisis has put 70-100 million people at risk of being pushed into extreme poverty. Preventing that outcome will require concerted and comprehensive action to reboot and rebuild the global economy in a sustainable, inclusive way. Technology  in particular, new digital-finance tools  can play an important role in this process.



During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital services  from telemedicine to remote work to online learning  have been a lifeline for the millions of people subjected to lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders. Digital finance has been essential to facilitate many of these processes, enabling people to pay for goods and services, receive compensation for their work, access social-assistance payments, and secure financial support, such as bank loans, for their distressed businesses.



Even before the pandemic, the need to harness the power of digital finance for the good of the planet and its citizens was increasingly being recognized. Indeed, that was the central goal of the UNSG's Task Force on Digital Financing of the Sustainable Development Goals, on which I have served for the last 18 months.



The task force includes government ministers, tech entrepreneurs, CEOs of banks and investment institutions, civil-society representatives, officials of multilateral institutions, and intellectual leaders. But our forthcoming final report, "People's Money: Harnessing Digitalization to Finance a Sustainable Future," focuses on the needs of ordinary people.



The financial system, the report concludes, must serve individual citizens, as savers, investors, borrowers, and taxpayers. It must leverage digital technology to put people back in the driver's seat of their finances, so that they can invest in themselves and their families, communities, countries, and the planet. Governments, regulators, and financial institutions should support and facilitate the disruptions that will get us there.



There are already useful models of such disruption. Africa  especially my country, Kenya  has led the way in embracing financial technology, beginning with mobile money. Kenya's M-Pesa  a mobile phone-based money-transfer, payments, and micro-financing service  has been a powerful force for expanding financial inclusion. Since 2006, the share of Kenya's population with access to financial services has surged from 26 percent to more than 82 percent.



Government agencies, too, have embraced online payments  a development that has boosted public confidence in digital financial services. Today, more than 90 percent of payments on Kenya's centralized e-government platform (eCitizen) involve mobile money.



Government- and central bank-enabled innovation and a learning-by-doing approach have played a major role in driving this progress. For example, Kenya's M-Akiba, launched in 2017, is the world's first mobile-only government bond. Unlike existing government bonds, which required a minimum purchase of KES50,000 ($460), M-Akiba allows citizens to invest as little as $30. As a result, Kenya's capital markets have become accessible to the general population, while the government has unlocked an entirely new investor base. Not surprisingly, 85 percent of those who invested in the initial M-Akiba offering were purchasing government bonds for the first time.



Yet, although Kenya  as well as several other African countries, such as Rwanda, South Africa, and the Seychelles  has made huge strides in seizing the opportunities of financial technology, it still has a long way to go. At a time when economies are becoming increasingly intertwined, and digital business models require economies of scale to thrive, creating regional and even global digital-finance ecosystems is essential.



The Central Bank of Kenya is taking a leading role in this process. In collaboration with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, we are learning how to foster a vibrant financial-technology sector that stretches across Africa and Asia.



The more dynamic and expansive that sector is, the better it will be for our respective populations. After all, bringing the previously unbanked into the financial system directly supports economic growth and the creation of decent jobs, reducing economic inequality, poverty, and hunger. Combined with new digital-finance innovations, greater inclusion can expand access to quality education, clean water and sanitation, and more, thereby improving overall health and wellbeing.



Moreover, by strengthening households' capacity to save, financial inclusion creates more investable capital, which can be lent to small and medium-size enterprises and finance green infrastructure development. Digital financial innovations connecting people, money, and data help to unlock these investments.



Ensuring that digital financing truly serves the people, however, will require effective oversight. When people gain access to finance for the first time, they are vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. This is especially true when it happens on a large scale, as market concentration increases the power of large digital-finance platforms, many of which already operate globally.



Unless those platforms are subjected to adequate regulation and monitoring, the consequences will be dire, not only for individual users, but also for sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Developing economies would bear the brunt of these failures.



The COVID-19 crisis is a tragedy. But it is also an opportunity for change. After decades of rising inequality and unsustainable investment, we have the tools and knowhow to do better. We just need the will to use them.





Patrick Njoroge is governor of the Central Bank of Kenya. This article was distributed by Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).


CAIRO (Reuters) - The Syrian government said an explosion on a main gas pipeline traversing the Middle East on Monday was the result of a terrorist attack, and the United States said it suspected Islamic State militants of carrying out the sabotage.

The blast caused a blackout across Syria, but power was gradually being restored, officials said.

It took place on the Arab Gas Pipeline between the towns of Ad Dumayr and Adra, northwest of the capital Damascus.

"Assessments show that the explosion...was the result of a terrorist attack," Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem said, quoted by state news agency SANA. He did not provide further detail.

In Geneva, the U.S. envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, said there had been an upsurge in Islamic State activity in the southeast of the Syrian desert. Islamic State lost its last territory in Syria in March 2019 but pockets of fighters remain.

"We are still looking into (the explosion). But it was almost certainly a strike by ISIS," Jeffrey told reporters at the start of U.N.-sponsored talks on the Syria conflict.

The Arab Gas Pipeline system extends from Egypt into Jordan and Syria. Syrian state-run Ikhbariya TV channel showed footage of a large fire after the explosion. The channel said later the blaze had been extinguished.

A Damascus resident said power had returned to the city.

In 2013, much of Syria was hit by a power cut after rebel shelling hit a gas pipeline.

(Reporting by Hesham Abdul Khalek in Cairo, Ghaida Ghantous in Beirut and Angus MacSwan)
CLEVELAND, Ohio - You can call it abnormally dry, but most of northern Ohio is not in what is considered to be a drought.

The designation of moderate drought is reserved in the northern part of the state for a stretch roughly from Mansfield to Canton, and areas west of Sandusky, according to the last map released Thursday by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Nevertheless, Cleveland has gone 16 out of the last 18 days with no rain being recorded at the official weather station at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. There was 1.15 inches on Aug. 18 and 0.21 on Aug. 19.

For our area in northern Ohio, it looks like just parts of the area in Cuyahoga County would be included in what is abnormally dry. Some of the surrounding counties have had a little more rain, said Karen Clark, a meteorologist for the weather service in Cleveland.

Things could change this week.

We do have a chance of rain tomorrow (Tuesday) and Wednesday. Then later this week, heading into Friday, we have the remnants of tropical storm Laura heading up from the Ohio Valley.

At mid-day Monday, the Cleveland forecast called for a 30% chance of rain later in the day, 50% on Tuesday, and 30% both Wednesday and Thursday.

But no rain at Hopkins doesnt mean no rain in Greater Cleveland. For example, parts of the area, including Brecksville, did have some rain on Sunday.

A drought is defined as a period of unusually persistent dry weather that persists long enough to cause serious problems such as crop damage and/or water supply shortages, according to the weather service. The severity of the drought depends upon the degree of moisture deficiency, the duration, and the size of the affected area.

Drought is widespread in the western United States.National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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Modern Family alum Jesse Tyler Ferguson beamed while burping his six-week-old baby boy Beckett Mercer in a new snap shared on Sunday by his husband of seven years, Justin Mikita.

It was the same day the Montana-born, New Mexico-raised 44-year-old took to Twitter to find out what his fans' favorite brands were for baby clothing.

Jesse - who boasts 7M social media followers - wrote: 'I wanna know where you like to get all your goodies for your little one below!'

'The new normal': Modern Family alum Jesse Tyler Ferguson beamed while burping his six-week-old baby boy Beckett Mercer in a new snap shared on Sunday by his husband of seven years, Justin Mikita

Last Monday, Ferguson shared a sneak peek of his Pottery Barn Kids-sponsored nursery designed by Breegan Jane 'with whimsy, love, color, gender neutral, fun vibes.'

In the video, the 34-year-old lawyer sang a lullaby to their newborn as the five-time Emmy nominee wisecracked: 'You should know Beckett is wearing a "525,600 minutes" [RENT-themed] onesie.'

Jesse and Justin - who originally met at Equinox in West Hollywood - welcomed their bundle of joy via surrogate at Summerlin Hospital Medical Center in Nevada on July 7.

'I wanna know where you like to get all your goodies!' It was the same day the Montana-born, New Mexico-raised 44-year-old took to Twitter to find out what his fans' favorite brands were for baby clothing

His other half: Last Monday, Jesse shared a sneak peek of his Pottery Barn Kids-sponsored nursery designed by Breegan Jane 'with whimsy, love, color, gender neutral, fun vibes'

In the video, the 34-year-old lawyer sang a lullaby to their newborn as Ferguson wisecracked: 'You should know Beckett is wearing a "525,600 minutes" [RENT-themed] onesie'

Bundle of joy: The five-time Emmy nominee and Mikita - who originally met at Equinox in West Hollywood - welcomed their son via surrogate at Summerlin Hospital Medical Center in Nevada on July 7

Ferguson will next play investment counselor Mason Marzac in a Broadway revival of Tony-winning play Take Me Out, which is scheduled to premiere April 22 at the Hayes Theater in Manhattan.

However, all Broadway dates are tentative until the coronavirus pandemic subsides enough in New York where there's been 232K confirmed cases leading to over 23K deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The four-time SAG Award winner famously earned $500K per episode to portray lawyer and married father-of-one Mitchell Pritchett in the ABC mockumentary sitcom, which concluded on April 8 after 11 seasons.

COVID-19 willing! Jesse will next play investment counselor Mason Marzac in a Broadway revival of Tony-winning play Take Me Out, which is scheduled to premiere April 22 at the Hayes Theater in Manhattan
New Delhi, Aug 24 : Hackers could exploit an unpatched flaw in Google Drive to distribute malicious files disguised as legitimate files on systems worldwide.

The Hacker News reports that Google is aware of the latest security issue that is found in the "manage versions" functionality in Google Drive.

The functionality allows users to upload and manage different versions of a file.

A system administrator by the name of A. Nikoci allegedly reported the flaw to Google and later disclosed it to The Hacker News.

"The affected functionally allows users to upload a new version with any file extension for any existing file on the cloud storage, even with a malicious executable".

Google was yet to issue an official statement on the report.

According to Nikoci, "a legitimate version of the file that's already been shared among a group of users can be replaced by a malicious file".

"Google lets you change the file version without checking if it's the same type. They did not even force the same extension," he was quoted as saying.

Google last week patched a security bug that impacted both its Gmail and G Suite email servers publicly disclosed by security researcher Allison Husain.

Both Gmail and Drive faced an unprecedented outage last week. Those affected took to social media, reporting issues with opening attachments, failed logins and emails not landing in their inboxes.
Steve Plank, of Syracuse, and Mark Field, of Auburn, submitted this commentary on behalf of SAMED, the Syracuse Area Middle East Dialogue group. SAMED is comprised of Americans, in equal numbers of Arabs, Jews, and general community members, who have been meeting for over 30 years to build friendship, trust, and understanding, while considering ideas to help end the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Friends are indispensable in life. Each supports the other. Each stands by the other. However, friends  true friends  also tell each other the truth, even when that truth is uncomfortable.

The United States has been a friend to Israel from that nations founding. When the Provisional Government proclaimed a new State of Israel on May 14, 1948, the United States, on that same date, through a telegram from President Harry Truman, formally recognized the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel. That notwithstanding, the United States long has had a policy of urging a two-state solution for achieving Israeli security, Palestinian aspirations and a measure of stability in the Middle East.

After the swearing-in of the new Israeli government on May 17, 2020, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated his intention to annex large parts of the Palestinian Territories known as the West Bank that was occupied by Israel in 1967. Annexation was to be completed by January 2021. Israels annexation plans were developed with the tacit approval of the United States. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the issue was an internal Israeli matter. Annexation is a direct violation of the Geneva Accords and is being condemned by traditional friends of Israel in Europe, Jordan and most international agencies. Annexation, as Russia did in the Crimea, is a violation of international law and is universally condemned, except by the United States in this particular case. U.S. support for this clear violation of international law will dangerously erode the credibility of a rules-based international order and will contribute to regional instability.

Israel has stated it would not offer citizenship to the Palestinians in the lands it intends to annex. The move would deprive the Palestinians control of vital water resources and agricultural products. This action will deprive the Palestinians of any hope of fulfilling their aspirations for a national state of contiguous land with true self-determination.

For Israel, annexation goes against the countrys security and diplomatic interests. Israels chief of staff, other high ranking security officials, and over 280 former generals and their ranking equivalents in the Shin Bet, Mossad, IDF and Israeli National Police force have spoken out forcefully about the impossible security responsibilities annexation would entail and the dangerous political instability it could instigate.

The recently announced agreement between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel, known as the Abraham accords, brings diplomatic, economic and security ties between Israel and an Arab Government for only the third time in Israels existence. Israel has agreed to delay the annexation for an indefinite period of time. The deal may realign alliances in the region helping to contain Irans ambitions among other benefits. The arrangement however, fails to address the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands. Palestinian longing for a state with self-determination is not advanced by this agreement. It is noteworthy that relief from over 50 years of the deprivation of basic human rights suffered by the Palestinians was decoupled from previous Arab government demands before offering normalization with Israel.

Israel could not go forward with annexation plans without the consent of the United States. All Americans who seek justice, security for Israel and a fair treatment of the Palestinians should raise their voices in strong protest of these plans, before they reappear. Annexation is illegal, immoral, and will destroy the possibility of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Since annexation may only be delayed, members of SAMED ask everyone in our community to join us in letting our representatives and leaders know we strongly condemn our governments support of Israels maintaining plans for annexation of Palestinian land.

Also in Opinion: Centros hiring of insider CEO walks fine ethics line (Editorial)
The MoU is meant to provide training for students of mechanical engineering, telecommunications engineering, petroleum engineering and pharmacy

The Lebanese-Egyptian Business Council and the Beirut Arab University signed on Monday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) providing free Egyptian internships for youth in Lebanese universities, a statement by the university said.

The MoU is meant to provide training for students of mechanical engineering, telecommunications engineering, petroleum engineering and pharmacy.

Students who undergo this internship program will be given priority to work at Egyptian companies, the statement said.

The 45-day program will include a graduation project on an industrial idea that involves Egypt and Lebanon, said Mona Wahba, head of the trade representation office at the Egyptian embassy in Lebanon, according to Egypts state news agency MENA.

Wahba said this initiative will start with Beirut Arab University and will then be transferred to other Lebanese universities. The initiative will initially include 40 students in the engineering and pharmacy fields and will then secure training in Egyptian hospitals for students at Lebanese medical and nursing colleges.

We view Lebanon as an economic partner with whom we can achieve the model of economic and industrial integration, Wahba added.

The Lebanese-Egyptian Business Council will take care of all expenses of travel, accommodation and training for those involved in the programs, said a statement by the Egyptian embassy in Lebanon.

This MoU represents a glimmer of hope for Lebanese students and youth amid these hard circumstances, head of the university Amr Al-Adawi said, affirming that a university degree alone is insufficient for youth to be eligible for work after graduation.

Egyptian ambassador to Lebanon Yasser Elwi also hailed the initiative, saying it reflects 60 years of Egyptian-Lebanese cooperation and aims to enable Lebanon to restore the pioneering role that it deserves.

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Musician, Mzbel, has been arrested by the Greater Accra Regional Police Command.

According to reports, television personality, Stacy Amoateng, reported the controversial musician to the police Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service for defamation of character.

Police Public Relations Officer of CID, DSP Juliana Obeng confirmed this to Adom News Monday.

Mzbel also known as Nana Akua Amoah is reported to have said Stacy is HIV positive per information she got from prophet Nigel Gaisie.

Mzbel came to the CID headquarters on her own but she was officially arrested she added.

DSP Juliana Obeng said the musician has been cautioned on Section 208 of the Criminal Code which is on publication of false news.

But she added that, Mzbel is still in police custody pending investigations.

Adomfmonline
By Tom Arnold

LONDON (Reuters) - The COVID-19 pandemic has forced sovereign wealth funds to think the previously unthinkable.

With prime office blocks lying empty around the world, hotels half-vacant and retailers struggling to stay afloat, the funds are retreating from many of the real estate investments that have long been a mainstay of their strategies.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) invested $4.4 billion in the sector in the first seven months of 2020, 65% down from the same period a year ago, according to previously unpublished data provided to Reuters by Global SWF, an industry data specialist.

The nature of property investments is also shifting, with funds increasingly investing in logistics space, such as warehousing, amid a boom in online commerce during the pandemic, while cutting back on deals for offices and retail buildings.

Such shifts in behaviour can have seismic effects on the global real estate market, given such funds are among the largest investors in property and have interests worth hundreds of billions of dollars in total. Three sovereign funds sit within the top 10 largest real estate investors, according to market specialists IPE Real Assets.

A big question is whether the changes are structural for the funds, for which property is an asset-class staple at about 8% of their total portfolios on average, or a temporary response to a huge, unexpected and unfamiliar global event.

"Real estate is still a big part of sovereign wealth fund portfolios and will continue to be so," said Diego Lopez, managing director of Global SWF and a former sovereign wealth fund adviser at PwC.

"What COVID has accelerated is the sophistication of SWFs trying to build diversification and resilience into their portfolio - and hence looking for other asset classes and industries."

Sovereign funds have been more bearish on property than public pension funds, another big investor in the sector, Global SWF found. While they have outstripped the pension funds in overall investment across most industries and assets this year, by two to one, that ratio is reversed for real estate.

For a graphic on Sovereign wealth fund property holdings:

Story continues

https://graphics.reuters.com/SWF-REALESTATE/dgkpllmyopb/chart.png

FUTURE OF THE OFFICE

Funds are nursing hits to their existing property portfolios stemming from the introduction of lockdowns and social-distancing restrictions. While other parts of their portfolio, such as stocks and bonds, have rebounded from March's trough, a real-estate recovery is less assured.

Property capital value globally is expected to drop by 14% in 2020 before rising by 3.4% in 2021, according to commercial real estate services group CBRE. Analysts and academics question whether the pandemic's impact may prove long-lasting, with more people working from home and shopping online.

"I think there's a real threat to some commercial business districts in the big cities as I can't see us all return to the 9-to-5 schlep in, schlep out," said Yolande Barnes, a real-estate specialist at London university UCL.

The value of property assets of some funds has fallen in 2020, with those experiencing the biggest drops including Singapore's Temasek Holdings and GIC, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), according to data compiled for Reuters by industry tracker Preqin.

Those four funds have collectively seen the value of such assets drop by $18.1 billion to $132.9 billion, the data showed.

Reuters was unable to confirm whether the fall was due to lower valuations or asset sales. The funds either declined to comment or did not respond.

Many sovereign funds do not publicly disclose data on property investments, with Norway's one of the exceptions.

The Norwegian fund, which has around $49 billion invested in real estate, up from $47 billion at the end of 2019, said last week its unlisted property portfolio returned minus 1.6% in the first half of 2020.

Sovereign funds have also largely steered clear in 2020 of new direct investments in London or Los Angeles, hotspots in normal times, according to property services firm Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), which said SWFs were "on the defensive".

LOGISTICS AND BIOTECH

The funds' advance in logistics properties, such as warehousing and goods distribution centres, comes at a time of high demand as people have bought everything from toilet paper to trainers from home during lockdowns.

So far this year, logistics have accounted for about 22% of funds' real-estate investments by value, compared with 15% in 2019 as a whole, the Global SWF data shows.

Meanwhile, investments in offices have fallen to 36% from 49% last year, and in retail property to zero versus 15%.

Marcus Frampton, chief investment officer at the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC), told Reuters that real-estate deal volumes had "slowed down substantially" in general, but that, anecdotally, he saw activity in industrial facilities like logistics and "multi-family" apartment blocks.

The wealth fund's holdings have risen to $4.7 billion, up from $4 billion at the end of June, after the purchase of multi-family and industrial REIT stocks on July 1, Frampton said.

"Commercial warehouse activity is strong," he added.

In a sign of the times, Temasek participated in a $500 million investment in Indonesia-based e-commerce firm Tokopedia in June.

In contrast, physical retail, a significant part of many funds' holdings, has been hit hard. QIA-owned luxury retailer Harrods in London has reportedly forecast a 45% plunge in annual sales, as visitor numbers plummet. Many other retailers have sought to renegotiate rents.

The outlook appears brighter for some fledgling sectors such as biotech, which has come to the fore during the pandemic.

"We have seen significant demand for life sciences space. That's ranged from office to specialist lab and warehouse space," said Alistair Meadows, JLL's head of UK capital markets.

For a graphic on Sovereign wealth fund real estate deals:

https://graphics.reuters.com/SWF-REALESTATE/oakpeogkmpr/chart.png

DISTRESSED OPPORTUNITIES

The U.S. office market is expected to face its first year since 2009 of more space becoming vacant than leased, according to CBRE.

Still, investors are betting on a rebound of sorts in some quarters. For example, Canary Wharf Group, partly owned by the QIA, unveiled plans last month for a large new mixed-use development, including business space, in London's financial district.

And while hotels face huge challenges, occupancy rates are expected to rebound near to pre-COVID levels - but not until the end of 2021.

The Libyan Investment Authority has experienced problems with the operating expenses of some of its properties, including some hotels in Africa owned by its subsidiary, Chairman Ali Mahmoud Hassan Mohamed told Reuters.

But it remains committed to its real-estate portfolio, estimated at $6.6 billion in its latest valuation in 2012, as it was able to restore its value, he said.

Crises can also present opportunities, however.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, some funds may look for bargains as distressed properties emerge.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, which operates a fund, told Reuters it would "closely monitor market conditions with a view to capturing appropriate opportunities".

And in an uncertain world, some academics argue that property remains a solid bet for savvy investors.

Barnes of UCL said sovereign funds could be "lighter on their feet" than some other institutional funds and more able to adjust their behaviour to suit changing circumstances.

"Real estate is one of the better sectors to be in, in a world of turmoil," she added. "But it's very much about picking the right real estate."

(Reporting by Tom Arnold in London; Additional reporting by Alun John in Hong Kong, Gwladys Fouche in Oslo, Saeed Azhar in Dubai and Anshuman Daga in Singapore; Editing by Pravin Char)
C hina has been administering experimental coronavirus vaccines to key workers since July, a government official has reportedly said.

Groups facing high infection risks, such as medical workers, have been given vaccinations under an "emergency use" programme.

China has not specified how many people have been vaccinated or which product has been given.

Zheng Zhongwei, the head of the National Health Commissions science and technology centre, is said to have told state media organisation CCTV on Sunday that the government had authorised emergency use of a Sars-Cov-2 vaccine for workers including health workers and border officials.

According to the Guardian, he said: Weve drawn up a series of plan packages, including medical consent forms, side-effect monitoring plans, rescuing plans, compensation plans, to make sure the emergency use is well regulated and monitored.

Mr Zheng added that they planned to scale up the testing to other groups before autumn and winter.

Countries are racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine (file photo) / via REUTERS

The country has gone seven days without reporting a locally transmitted case.

Authorities could consider modestly expanding the emergency use programme to try to prevent outbreaks during the autumn and winter.

Before the official launch of the programme in July, China's military approved the use of CanSino's vaccine in June.

The World on Coronavirus lockdown 1 /60 The World on Coronavirus lockdown Getty Images A UK government public health campaign is displayed in Piccadilly Circus Reuters Chinese paramilitary police and security officers wear face masks to protect against the spread of the new coronavirus as they stand guard outside an entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing AP A usually busy 42nd Street is seen nearly empty in New York AFP via Getty Images Bondi Beach, Australia Getty Images Military vehicles cross Westminster Bridge after members of the 101 Logistic Brigade delivered a consignment of medical masks to St Thomas' hospital Getty Images View of the illuminated statue of Christ the Redeemer that reads "Thank you" as Archbishop of the city of Rio de Janeiro Dom Orani Tempesta performs a mass in honor of Act of Consecration of Brazil and tribute to medical workers amidst the Coronavirus (COVID - 19) pandemic Getty Images Rome AFP via Getty Images An Indian man paddles his bicycle in front of a mural depicting the globe covered in a mask, as India remains under an unprecedented lockdown over the highly contagious coronavirus Getty Images Aerial view of the empty 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires in Argentina AFP via Getty Images A view of an empty Grand Canal Reuters Las Ramblas, Barcelona, Spain Getty Images Aerial view of the empty Central cemetery in Bogota, Columbia AFP via Getty Images The facade of the Palacio de Lopez (seat of the government palace) AFP via Getty Images Miami, Florida AFP via Getty Images Aerial view of the empty Simon Bolivar park in Bogota AFP via Getty Images An LAPD patrol car drives through Venice Beach Boardwalk AP Venice Beach, California Getty Images Los Angeles, California Getty Images Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Australia Getty Images Many shops stand shuttered on the Venice Beach boardwalk Getty Images Empty escalators are seen at a deserted train station during morning rush hour after New South Wales began shutting down non-essential businesses Reuters A nearly empty Times Square in New York AFP via Getty Images Caracas AFP via Getty Images Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador AFP via Getty Images A general view of an unusually quiet Midland Park in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images A general view of an unusually quiet Civic Square at lunchtimein Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images A policeman rides his motorcycle wearing a face mask in front of a closed shopping mall in Buenos Aires, Argentina AFP via Getty Images Florida Keys AP The historic Channel 2 Bridge closed to fishermen, bikers and pedestrians in Florida Keys AP The Beach on Scenic Gulf Drive near Seascape Resort in south Walton County, Florida sits empty of tourists AP Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Australia Getty Images A deserted Rajpath leading to India Gate in New Delhi AFP via Getty Images A general view is seen of a closed Luna Park in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A general view is seen of a closed Luna Park in Sydney, Australia Getty Images Empty roads are pictured following the lockdown by the government amid concerns about the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Kathmandu, Nepal Reuters An empty New York Subway car i AFP via Getty Images The empty pedestrian zone is seen in the city of Cologne, western Germany, AFP via Getty Images Place de la Comedie in the city of Montpellier , southern France AFP via Getty Images An empty street in Kuwait city AFP via Getty Images A building is covered by the Portuguese message: "Coronavirus: take precaution" over empty streets in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, AP A general view shows an empty street after a curfew was imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Reuters Parliament of Canada is pictured with empty street during morning rush hour AFP via Getty Images A near empty beach on Southend seafront in England PA Near empty Keswick town centre in Cumbria, England PA

Meanwhile state media reported in June that employees at state-owned firms travelling overseas were allowed to take one of the two candidate vaccines being developed by CNBG.

Four of the world's seven vaccines that are in the third phase of trials are from China.

Two of the candidates are from China National Biotec Group (CNBG), a unit of state-owned pharmaceutical giant China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm).

Sinovac Biotech is developing the third candidate called CoronaVac, while CanSino Biologics is working with state military research unit Academy of Military Medical Sciences on Ad5-nCoV.

Argentina, Peru, Morocco, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have allowed CNBG to run Phase 3 trials. It's not immediately clear if the company's two vaccine candidates will be tested in those countries.

Indonesia and Brazil are helping with Phase 3 trials of Sinovac's CoronaVac, while Bangladesh aims to run a late stage clinical trial for the experimental vaccine.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Russia have agreed to conduct Phase 3 trials of CanSino's candidate, while Mexico has signed an early agreement with the Chinese firm for a late-stage trial.
Richa Sharma By

Express News Service

The much hyped dissent by senior leaders turned out to be whimper on Monday with the Congress Working Committee requesting Sonia Gandhi to continue leading the party until a new leader is elected.

The CWC makes it clear that no one will be or can be permitted to undermine or weaken the party and its leadership at this juncture, said the CWC resolution, sending strong message to dissenters.

The seven-hour CWC meeting saw the veterans who wrote to Sonia seeking collective leadership being cornered with a majority of the members condemning their move and some demanding action against them for indiscipline.

According to sources, Rahul Gandhi was unsparing in his speech and said the move by these leaders will benefit only the BJP. Upset by the insinuation, senior party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad threatened to quit from all party posts.

Congress general-secretary Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra, then, took a jibe at Azad that what he said in the meeting was contrary to the letters content.

Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal, too, expressed his anguish but later clarified he was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him.

After the CWC meeting, a few veteran leaders met at Azads residence to discuss the future course of action.

Sonia Gandhi to remain Congress party's interim president for now, new chief to be elected within next 6 months. Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting has concluded after 7 hours: Sources  ANI (@ANI) August 24, 2020

The meeting started with the partys organisations incharge K C Venugopal reading out Sonias statement asking CWC to begin deliberations to put in place a process of transition to relieve me from my duties.

This made her two confidantes former PM Manmohan Singh and A K Antony requesting her to continue lead the party while calling the letter by his party colleagues as unfortunate and cruel.

A majority of the CWC members lend weight behind the Gandhis and said Sonia should continue to lead the party till Rahul takes over the reins.

Congress-ruled CMs, senior leader Ahmed Patel and other CWC members were unanimous that only a Gandhi can keep the party together. However, sources said Rahul is still reluctant to take the hot seat.

An AICC session is likely to be called within six months to elect the next leader.

Four of the letter signatories, who are part of the CWC, clarified that the letter was to bring focus on organisation restricting and settling leadership issues and never questioned Sonias leadership.

Azad and Anand Sharma said they have not breached party discipline while Ambika Soni sought action against the dissenters as per the party constitution.

In her concluding remarks, Sonia said she was hurt by the remarks in the letter but doesnt hold any ill will against party colleagues.

ASLO READ | 'He never made such remarks': Congress denies Rahul Gandhi's 'colluding with BJP' comment

Dont discuss party issues through media: CWC resolution

The Congress Working Committee (CWC) takes note of the letter of Congress President Sonia Gandhi addressed to General Secretary (Organisation) as also a letter written earlier by certain Congress leaders to the Congress President.

The CWC has extensively deliberated on the letters and, after detailed discussion, places on record the following:

First, the last six months have seen the nation in the throes of multiple crises. We have been beset by (i) the Corona pandemic that continues to claim thousands of lives, (ii) downward-spiralling economy, (iii) massive job losses and growing poverty, and (iv) brazen aggression into and occupation of Indian Territory by the Chinese.

Second, the two voices that have been at the forefront of exposing the Governments inadequate responses, divisive politics and audacious propaganda are of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. Sonia Gandhis hard questions on the handling of the migrants crisis put this Government to shame. She ensured that Congress- ruled states tackled the pandemic effectively and provided access to healthcare and treatment to all sections of the people. Her leadership has rankled and embarrassed those occupying the highest offices in this government. Rahul Gandhi has resolutely led the fight against the government from the front.

The CWC, reflecting the overwhelming view and desire of the rank and file of the Congress, unanimously resolved to strengthen the hands of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi in every possible way.

The CWC makes it clear that no one will be or can be permitted to undermine or weaken the party and its leadership at this juncture. The responsibility of every Congress worker and leader today is to fight the pernicious assault on Indias democracy, pluralism and diversi ty by the Modi Government.

Third, and most importantly, the voices of our two leaders have inspired a generation of Indians, both within and outside of the Indian National Congress, to rise and demand answers from this Government which seeks to desperately distract the people through shallow and manufactured issues.

After day long deliberations at #CWC, Sonia Gandhi to continue lead the @INCIndia till a new president is elected @NewIndianXpress #CongressPresident  richa sharma (@richa_TNIE) August 24, 2020

It is under their leadership that crores of Congress workers and supporters have reached out to fill the large, callous gaps in governance left by this Government as a result of which millions belonging to the poor and middle classes have been unjustly deprived of their rights and their livelihoods.

Fourthly, the CWC notes that inner-party issues cant be deliberated through the media or in public fora. The CWC urges and advises all concerned to raise such issues only in party fora in the interest of propriety and discipline.

Fifthly, the CWC authorises the Congress President to affect necessary organisational changes that she may deem appropriate to take on the challenges listed above. In the light of the above deliberations and conclusions, the CWC unanimously requests Sonia Gandhi to continue to lead the Indian National Congress until such time as circumstances will permit an AICC session to be convened.

Dont weaken leadership

CWC said nobody will be allowed to undermine Cong leadership. The responsibility of every Congress worker and leader is to fight the pernicious assault on Indias democracy, pluralism and diversity by the Modi govt, it said
A black Santa Clara University professor said campus police on Saturday made her prove she lived in her own house.

Danielle Fuentes Morgan, 36, who is an assistant professor in African American satire and comedy, said she opened the door to the officers but was still asked to show identification to prove it was her home.

In a series of tweets which have since gone viral Morgan recounted how her brother, composer and pianist Carlos Fuentes, 32, had been questioned by security while he sat working on the campus.

She said: 'One officer followed him to my house. I opened the door and my brother said, "I'm so sorry about this. They're demanding you come out and vouch for me." I, of course, knew exactly who "they" were.'

Morgan explained how her brother had come to visit her, her children and husband after safely quarantining for two weeks and following a period of eight months of not seeing each other.

She described how 'campus security came up to my brother in the midst of his meeting and told him to move along', adding: 'He's been Black his whole life so he said ok. They followed him.'

Danielle Fuentes Morgan, 36 said she opened the door to the officers on Saturday but was still asked to show identification to prove it was her home. Her brother, composer and pianist Carlos Fuentes, 32, was approached as he sat working

In a series of tweets which have since gone viral the assistant professor in African American satire and comedy recounted how her brother was questioned

Morgan added: 'He moved toward the street which he thought was no longer on campus. They told him to leave. By this point there were four campus security cars.'

She says Carlos was then followed to her home where 'the officer very aggressively demanded to see my campus ID "to prove you are who he says you are and that you actually live here".'

The academic says she then when to get her white husband who told the cops she was 'not obligated to show' her ID.

President Kevin F. OBrien said he was 'deeply sorry' for the incident

Danielle Fuentes Morgan is an assistant professor in African American satire and comedy

She added: 'I asked why I needed to show ID at my own home. He said "Well, it's not your home. The University owns it".

'I told them that I was one of 7 Black faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences and that our student body population is 2% Black. I told them that the anti-Blackness they espouse and practice is part of the reason why.

'I also told them that white students have been running around -- maskless -- banging on the houses on this street at midnight and smoking weed from apples on campus and this is apparently "just what happens." But my brother is a threat.

'Our neighbor came out at this point to walk his dog. My husband asked if they wanted to check our neighbor's ID and they said "No, of course not." He said, "That's exactly the point."

'My husband asked why they brought four cars. They said for safety. He asked for whose safety. They said "the officers's safety." He told them that he didn't care about their safety and was concerned for his brother-in-law's safety.

The officer said her brother had been 'in the bushes' and it was 'suspicious' and they thought he may have been homeless, Morgan tweeted

'At this point, they told us they didn't have any guns on them, so my brother wasn't in danger. I was aghast that they explained he wasn't in danger because they weren't armed, not because he wasn't a threat or because they wouldn't hurt him, but because they COULDN'T.'

The officer said her brother had been 'in the bushes' and it was 'suspicious' and they thought he may have been homeless, Morgan tweeted.

President Kevin F. OBrien said he was 'deeply sorry' and 'racial bias or profiling has no place on our campus' in a letter to Santa Claras students and staff.
Game of Thrones alum Sophie Turner 'welcomed' a sentimental prop from the set to her $14.1M 10-bedroom mansion in Encino's gated Royal Oaks Colony on Saturday.

It was the dire wolf-carved throne upon which the British 24-year-old's character Lady of Winterfell Sansa Stark was crowned Queen in the North during the HBO series finale - titled 'The Iron Throne' - which aired May 19, 2019.

'Sansa, Thank you for teaching me resilience, bravery and what true strength really is. Thank you teaching me to be kind and patient and to lead with love,' Sophie - who boasts 15.4M followers - wrote at the time.

'Welcome home!' Game of Thrones alum Sophie Turner 'welcomed' a sentimental prop from the set to her $14.1M 10-bedroom mansion in Encino's gated Royal Oaks Colony on Saturday

'I grew up with you. I fell in love with you at 13 and now 10 years on at 23 I leave you behind, but I will never leave behind what you've taught me.

'To the show and the incredible people who make it, thank you for giving me the best life and drama lessons I could have ever asked for. Without you I wouldn't be the person I am today.'

Turner's other souvenir came in the form of a left forearm tattoo of the House of Stark logo over Lord Eddard 'Ned' Stark's (Sean Bean) phrase 'the pack survives' from the first season.

Artist Lauren Winzer branded the Survive actress - whose character used to own a dire wolf called Lady - with the GOT ink on June 9, 2018 at the Hunter and Fox Tattoo Studio in Australia.

Queen in the North! It was the dire wolf-carved throne upon which the British 24-year-old's character Lady of Winterfell Sansa Stark was crowned during the HBO series finale in 2019

Sophie wrote at the time: 'Sansa, Thank you for teaching me resilience, bravery and what true strength really is. Thank you teaching me to be kind and patient and to lead with love. I grew up with you. I fell in love with you at 13 and now 10 years on at 23 I leave you behind, but I will never leave behind what you've taught me'

Permanently branded: Turner's other souvenir came in the form of a left forearm tattoo of the House of Stark logo over Lord Eddard 'Ned' Stark's (Sean Bean) phrase 'the pack survives' from the first season

Sophie's newly-blond husband Joe Jonas Instastoried the throne with a gif of a blonde blue-eyed lady sipping tea captioned: 'And that's the T' (for truth).

Turner and the Arizona-born, New Jersey-raised 31-year-old welcomed their first child - daughter Willa - on July 22.

On August 15, the Dark Phoenix star made her first public mention of parenthood by referring to Joe as her 'love/bub/baby daddy' for his birthday.

The Survive actress' newly-blond husband Joe Jonas (L) Instastoried the throne with a gif of a blonde blue-eyed lady sipping tea captioned: 'And that's the T' (for truth)

'Baby daddy': Sophie and the Arizona-born, New Jersey-raised 31-year-old welcomed their first child - daughter Willa - on July 22

The Joe Biden supporters - who celebrated their first wedding anniversary in May - began their romance in early November 2016 after attending a pre-MTV Europe Music Awards Kings of Leon concert in the Netherlands.

Jonas Brothers' track What a Man Gotta Do was nominated for best pop song at the 37th Annual MTV Video Music Awards, which air live next Sunday.

Joe, Nick, and Kevin face heavy competition against Justin Bieber with Quavo, BTS, Halsey, Lady Gaga with Ariana Grande, and Taylor Swift.

Who will win? Jonas Brothers' track What a Man Gotta Do was nominated for best pop song at the 37th Annual MTV Video Music Awards, which air live next Sunday

No longer taking place at Brooklyn's Barclays Center: BTS, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, The Weeknd, Maluma, J Balvin, CNCO, Doja Cat, and Roddy Ricch are slated to perform at 'various outdoor locations around New York City'

The Grammy-nominated boyband technically originated as a solo project for Nick back in 2005 before the siblings began writing songs together.

BTS, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, The Weeknd, Maluma, J Balvin, CNCO, Doja Cat, and Roddy Ricch are slated to perform at 'various outdoor locations around New York City' (rather than Brooklyn's Barclays Center).

Fans can vote for VMA winners across 15 gender-neutral categories through this Sunday.
Perched atop the Downtown Clinic in Laramie youll find rows of solar panels soaking up rays of Wyoming sunshine.

The electricity generated from the solar array and battery covers 98% of the medical clinics electricity costs. Thats a big deal for the clinic, which primarily serves low-income and uninsured patients needing care. Those savings each year translate into 60 additional primary care visits, 200 prescriptions and 20 eye exams.

This is one of several renewable energy projects made possible through Rocky Mountain Powers Blue Sky program. The voluntary program gives the utilitys customers a chance to chip in a couple bucks each month to equip community-based organizations around the state with solar, micro-hydro and wind systems. The Blue Sky program is now celebrating its 20th year.

The solar array and the backup battery has allowed us to expand our services and add a vaccine program, said Pete Gosar, executive director of the Downtown Clinic. And in response to COVID-19, we are able to offer a drive-thru testing program for our clients. The impact of these programs on the health of our clients, their families and the entire community cannot be overstated.

Two years ago, the Downtown Clinic received the $33,675 grant raised by Blue Sky participants to install the 7 kilowatt solar energy system to the facilitys rooftop. The Wyoming-based commercial and residential solar energy company Creative Energies Solar installed the system for the clinic.

The system came in handy when, on July 31, a power outage swept through Laramie, including the neighborhood where the Downtown Clinic sits. Services at the clinic continued all the same and its vaccines were preserved, thanks to the battery storage. It ensured electricity continued to hum along, even during the blackout.

The benefits of the solar panels go far beyond just cost savings or emergency response, according to Gosar.

Free health care shouldnt be substandard health care, Gosar said. Free health care should be innovative. (The solar installation) is another step to say to patients, Hey, youre in a really interesting place, and there are people in that community who think that youre important.'

Other Wyoming organizations that have had help transitioning to renewable energy through the program include the Lander Care and Share Food bank, the Girl Scout Council of Wyoming and The Soldiers House.

The power comes from the sun, Rocky Mountain Power spokeswoman Tiffany Erickson said. The (organizations) can then redirect the funding that they were previously putting into operation, utility and maintenance costs and refocus it on other tenants of their programs to better serve their communities and their clients and those that theyre helping.

How does it work?

About 5,000 customers voluntarily opt in to contribute to Rocky Mountain Powers Blue Sky program.

Customers select how much of their energy usage they want to offset with renewable energy certificates. These certificates then fund additional utility-scale renewable energy development and community-based projects, like the Downtown Clinics solar panels and battery. The added cost for the customer starts at around $1.95 a month.

PacifiCorp, the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power, provides customers in six states with power, including Wyoming. Through the program, customers across the utilitys vast service territory have helped generate 9.2 million megawatt-hours of renewable energy for 160 organizations in the past two decades. For perspective, that amount of power could provide electricity to about 938,000 homes for an entire year.

In PacifiCorps latest integrated resource plan, published in October 2019, the utility announced plans to invest heavily in expanding transmission lines, in tandem with an ambitious vision for new renewable energy infrastructure.

The utility company is on track to complete several utility-scale renewable energy projects by the end of the year. The myriad developments are part of the utilitys Energy Vision 2020  a $3.1 billion renewable energy initiative launched in 2017 to increase the utilitys renewable portfolio and save ratepayers costs down the road. By the end of 2020, the utility will have added 1,150 megawatts of new wind resources to the state.

Follow the latest on Wyomings energy industry @camillereports

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North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un (L) and sister Kim Yo Jong attend the Inter-Korean Summit at the Peace House in Panmunjom, South Korea, on April 27, 2018. (Korea Summit Press Pool/Getty Images)

Kim Jong Un Delegates Powers to Sister, Close Aides: SK Intelligence

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has reportedly handed part of his authority to his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, and some close aides, South Koreas spy agency said on Aug. 20.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said during a closed-door briefing to South Korean lawmakers Thursday that the dictator is delegating responsibilities to officials including his sister, who is now involved in leading dealings with Washington and Seoul.

Currently, Kim Yo Jong, the first vice department director of the Workers Party Central Committee, is steering overall state affairs based on the delegation, South Koreas intelligence agency was quoted as saying in the briefing to the National Assemblys Intelligence Committee.

Chairman Kim Jong Un is still maintaining his absolute authority, but some of it has been handed over little by little, the agency said. Yo Jong is the de-facto No. 2 leader, but [the North Korean leader] has not selected a successor.

Other changes made include the handing over of power in the economic sector to Pak Pong Ju, vice chairman of the State Affairs Commission, and the new premier Kim Tok Hun, the NIS said.

Choe Pu Il, the partys department director for military affairs, and Ri Pyong Chol, vice chairman of the partys Central Military Commission have been given partial authority over the military, according to the agency.

The NIS said the power-sharing arrangement appears to be aimed at alleviating leadership strain and dividing responsibility for failed policies.

Lawmaker Ha Tae-keung paraphrased NIS officials as saying there are no problems with Kim Jong Uns health. Earlier this year, there was frequent speculation about Kims health after he missed the April 15 commemorative event for his grandfather, North Koreas founder Kim Il Sung. Kim had attended every one of those annual celebrations since he took power in 2011.

When rumors and speculation arose in April about the North Korean leaders health, his sister was seen as a possible placeholder to take over the family dynasty until one of Kims children is old enough.

Kim Yo Jong, believed to be in her early 30s, has been absent, however, from several recent high-level meetings, such as a plenary gathering of the ruling Workers Party on Wednesday, said NK News, a Seoul-based website that tracks North Korea.

That has stirred some speculation about a possible demotion.

The NIS said Thursday that the North Korean leader has, as of Aug. 20, made 132 public appearances this yeardown 65 percent from the same timeframe last year. The agency said Kim is prioritizing party sessions over public on-site visits.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Falwells work to shore up Libertys finances after taking over as president in 2007 bolstered his already significant goodwill among the schools board members, several of whom were close to his late father. But as the younger Falwells propensity toward divisive public behavior grew  and particularly after his endorsement of Trump in early 2016  dissatisfaction built up with what some critics saw as a shift toward being conservative first and Christian second.
Vengo de Japon. With those words Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo introduces himself to us in Stone Cut, the short film from NOWNESS above. Since coming to Barcelona in 1978, Sotoo has not just mastered the Spanish language but converted to Roman Catholicism and dedicated much of his life to laboring on the completion of the most famous building in Spain: Antoni Gaudis magnum opus, the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia. Not that it was quite so revered when Sotoo first encountered it: Back in the day, no one really cared about Sagrada Familia, he says. There were stones and rubble, but it was mostly an abandoned ruin. This situation lasted many decades.

Even the young Sotoo himself had no interest in the architect of Sagrada Familia, but back then it was mandatory to know Gaudis name. Slowly, my interest in Gaudi started to grow in me. And today it keeps growing. As it should: for more than 40 years now, Sotoo has worked to complete what Gaudi left unfinished at the time of his death in 1926, a decade before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. That bitter conflict not only put a stop to the construction of Sagrada Familia for nearly two decades, it also damaged what had already been built: the sculptures of its Porta del Rosari, for example, which it has fallen to Sotoo to restore.





Sculptures constitute much of the elaborate decoration of Sagrada Familias exterior and interior, both of which present the viewer with nary a straight line nor a flat surface. Even in the incomplete building, the effect is at once organic and otherworldly. Gaudi is way beyond where we are today, says Sotoo, and his filmmaking countryman Hiroshi Teshigahara must have shared that sentiment, having paid tribute to the architect with a worshipful 1984 documentary. The project of realizing the architects unprecedented aesthetic vision  the result of a conversation with God about something very big and profound  continues to this day, 138 years after the commencement of its construction, which moved slowly even during Gaudis lifetime. My client, history remembers him having said, is not in a hurry.

The current push to complete Sagrada Familia has a more pressing deadline: the year 2026, the centenary of Gaudis death, at which time less than a quarter of the project was complete. (You can see a 3D rendering of the remainder of the process in this video from the Sagrada Familia Foundation, previously featured here on Open Culture.) But that time frame only covers completion of the structure, including the eighteen spires Gaudi envisioned as representing the Twelve Apostles, the Virgin Mary, the four Evangelists, and Jesus Christ. The decorative elements should be finished by the early 2030s, granting more breathing room to artisans like Sotoo  who, having spent four-decades being reshaped by Gaudi himself, knows that architectural genius cant be rushed.

via Aeon

Related Content:

Watch Antoni Gaudis Unfinished Masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, Get Finally Completed in 60 Seconds

The Isamu Noguchi Museum Puts Online an Archive of 60,000 Photographs, Manuscripts & Digitized Drawings by the Japanese Sculptor

A Virtual Time-Lapse Recreation of the Building of Notre Dame (1160)

An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, Its Set to Become a Mosque Again

The History of Western Architecture: A Free Course Moving from Ancient Greece to Rococo

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
With business down to zero due to the Covid-19 lockdown, stakeholders in Darjeelings hotel and tourism business want the administration to allow movement of tourists from next month.

They want the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (GTA) to decide a date for reopening the tourism sector, which is the principal employer for the local people.

The GTA earlier announced that tourists would be allowed to enter Darjeeling from July 1 but withdrew the decision and extended the lockdown till July 31 due to the rise in the number of Covid-19 cases.

The Darjeeling Hotel Owners Association, Himalayan Transport Coordination Committee and Darjeeling Home Stay Owners Association on Sunday held a meeting with other stakeholders and adopted a proposal to be submitted to the GTA.

The GTA is likely to take a call soon but tourists would be allowed in a phased manner, insiders aware of the developments said.

Samrat Sanyal, general secretary, Himalayan Hospitality and Tourism Development Network, said, There should be a proper roadmap for the tourism industry. Local communities need to be taken into confidence and Covid-19 protocols have to be followed before tourists are allowed.

Sandipan Ghosh, secretary, Eastern Himalaya Travel and Tour Operators Association, said, Its time to let tourists come to Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong in phases.

Both Sanyal and Ghosh said that people associated with the industry can no longer bear the loss in business.

Four people who used to drive or own cars used for ferrying tourists have died by suicide.

Suraj Sharma, assistant director, GTA tourism, said We will soon hold a meeting and take a decision.

Sharma, however, did not predict any date for relaxing the lockdown.

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Linkedin (Reuters)  Mon, August 24, 2020 14:01 514 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c400e27b 2 News United-Kingdom,France,travelers,travel Free

Travelers from the United Kingdom to France are required to self-certify that they are not suffering coronavirus symptoms or have been in contact with a confirmed case within 14 days preceding travel, the British government said on Friday.

The United Kingdom has said travelers returning from France on or after Aug. 15 should self-isolate upon their return, due to high COVID-19 infection rates in France.

The imposition of quarantine conditions have hit Britons' favorite holiday destinations in the middle of summer and as the travel industry fights for survival.

Earlier this year the British government was criticized for being too slow to lock down at the beginning of the pandemic when many cases were thought to have arrived from holidaymakers returning from Italy. The UK's quarantine policy began in June.

Other countries including Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia and Austria are already on the government's quarantine list.
Melbourne were coming off three wins in a row when they faced the Bulldogs in round 13.

But the wins, against two bottom teams and the recently struggling Pies, appear to have flattered them.

This week on the Real Footy podcast, Michael Gleeson, Jake Niall and Caroline Wilson discuss the disappointing Demons. When they're good, they look great. But they seem to have failed to fix issues in their football department, despite off-field achievements.

Plus, what should the Dees do with Tom McDonald? Will we see Nathan Jones back on the field? And did Braydon Preuss make the wrong call when he moved to Melbourne?
In fact, Exelon shareholders would no doubt be fine writing these assets off their balance sheet. Exelon prematurely shut down its Oyster Creek nuclear plant in New Jersey in 2018, as well as its Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 2019. Both of these plants could have operated at one or more 20-year license periods beyond these dates, meaning that for want of short-term revenue support, New Jersey and Pennsylvania lost more than half a century of clean energy for millions of people.
By Janet Hook Los Angeles Times (TNS)

WASHINGTON  Joe Biden, girding for a week of attacks at the Republican National Convention, previewed his response Sunday by laughing off questions about his mental acuity, denying he supported defunding the police, and leaping to defend his running mate, Kamala Harris, against President Trumps attacks.

In the Biden-Harris ticket's first joint television interview since being formally nominated at their party's convention last week, Biden said his selection of Harris was not a response to pressure to pick a Black woman as his vice presidential nominee.

"I didn't feel pressure to select a Black woman," he said in an interview with ABC, according to video excerpts released in advance of its broadcast in full. But he added: "The government should look like the people, look like the country."

Asked to respond to Trump's attacks on her as "mean," "nasty" and "disrespectful," Harris laughed and dismissed the insults as a diversionary tactic.

"I think that there is so much about what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth that is designed to distract the American people from what he is doing every day," she said. "That is about neglect, negligence and harm to the American people."

Biden jumped in to add that Trump was incompetent and that his attacks were out of bounds and unpresidential.

The idea that he would say something like that, no president  no president  has ever said anything like that, Biden said. No president has ever used those words.

The interview gives voters the first unscripted, extended look at the dynamics between the running mates, a historic pairing between a 77-year-old white man who, if he wins the presidency, would be the oldest person to assume the office, and a 55-year-old who is the first Black woman and first Asian American on a national party ticket. Biden and Harris have made joint campaign appearances, and they sat for a joint interview with People magazine last week. But ABC was granted the first broadcast interview, which was conducted by Syracuse native David Muir and Robin Roberts.

Despite their differences of background and generation and their sometimes-bitter competition during the 2020 presidential primary, Biden and Harris have a relationship of some warmth and affection because Harris, while serving as California's attorney general, had been close to Biden's late son, Beau, then the attorney general of Delaware, who died of cancer in 2015 at age 46.

In the interview, sitting at a significant distance from Harris and the interviewers in accordance with health protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden said that choosing Harris as his running mate was "an easy decision to make."

"I cannot understand and fully appreciate what it means to walk in her shoes," he said. "What we do know is that we have the same value set."

It remains to be seen in the coming weeks exactly what role Harris will play in the campaign. For now, both nominees are sticking to virtual campaigning and lying low while the spotlight turns to Trump and his party during this week's GOP convention. The ABC interview gives Biden and Harris a chance to answer some of the criticisms that Republicans are expected to highlight.

When asked about Trump's questions about his mental acuity, Biden laughed and welcomed the comparison to Trump's fitness.

"Watch me," he said. "Mr. President, watch me. Look at us both, what we say, what we do, what we control, what we know, what kind of shape we are in."

Trump hailed his own mental acuity by boasting he "aced" a cognitive test, although the test questions are mostly rudimentary. Biden has brushed aside Trump's suggestions that he should undergo such testing.

When Biden was asked about statements the former vice president made that he was a transitional figure in the Democratic Party, he denied that meant he intended to be a one-term president. He said he "absolutely" would consider serving two terms.

A central GOP line of attack is that Biden is not the political moderate that he claims to be; Republicans sometimes portray him as a Trojan horse for the partys extreme left wing. In the interview, Biden denied  as he has on many occasions  that he supported defunding the police, which is a rallying cry of many Black Lives Matter activists and other progressives who believe that public resources should be shifted from armed law enforcement to social services. Bidens criminal justice plan actually calls for increasing funding for community policing.

"I don't want to defund police departments," he said. "I think they need more help; they need more assistance."

Much of the Democratic convention spotlighted criticism of Trumps handling of the coronavirus crisis, which has killed more than 176,000 people in the U.S. and led to economic calamity. Trump for months insisted that the outbreak would eventually disappear and pressured governors to lift stay-at-home restrictions. In the ABC interview, Biden said he would take far stricter actions  even imposing severe quarantine restrictions on the country  to contain the virus spread if scientists said it was necessary.

"I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus," Biden said. "That is the fundamental flaw of this administration's thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus."

And if scientists said it was necessary to shut the country down to do so, Biden said, I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists.
WASHINGTON  A Texas A&M professor was charged with conspiracy, making false statements and wire fraud on allegations that he was secretly collaborating with the Chinese government while conducting research for NASA, the Department of Justice said Monday.

According to a criminal complaint, Zhengdong Cheng, 53, a professor in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M and a NASA researcher, obscured his affiliations and collaboration with a Chinese university and at least one Chinese-owned company.

"The terms of Cheng's grant prohibited participation, collaboration or coordination with China, any Chinese-owned company or any Chinese University," the DOJ wrote in a release.

"Once again, we have witnessed the criminal consequences that can arise from undisclosed participation in the Chinese government's talent program," Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers said in a statement. "The Department of Justice will continue seeking to bring participation in these talent programs to light and to expose the exploitation of our nation and our prized research institutions," he added.

The DOJ has previously described China's Thousand Talents Plan as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party to "attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China's scientific development, economic prosperity and national security." Through this program, the Chinese government would "often reward individuals for stealing proprietary information," the DOJ said.

"While 1.4 million foreign researchers and academics are here in the U.S. for the right reasons, the Chinese Talents Program exploits our open and free universities," said Ryan Patrick, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, adding that ties to the Chinese government must be disclosed.

Cheng was hired by Texas A&M in 2004 and worked for the Guangdong University of Technology in Guangdong, China, from 2012 to 2018, according to the criminal complaint.

Texas A&M System Chancellor John Sharp said the university worked with the FBI during the investigation into Cheng.

"We worked closely with the FBI on this case and we gladly will work with them again as needed," Sharp told KBTX-TV 3. "No one in higher education takes security as seriously as we do at The Texas A&M University System."

Cheng's arrest comes almost two months after the Justice Department announced the indictment of a Harvard professor who allegedly made false statements to federal authorities regarding work at Wuhan University of Technology in China.

The Justice Department alleges that Charles Lieber, 61, the former chairman of Harvard University's Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, became a contractual participant in China's Thousand Talents Plan for at least three years.
Breonna Taylor covers Vanity Fair's September issue, in a stunning blue portrait by the artist who painted Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery.

Artist Amy Sherald's 2018 portrait of the former First Lady became instantly iconic, but the 46-year-old painter says that her Vanity Fair cover is a contribution to the 'moment and to activism  producing this image keeps Breonna alive forever.'

Speaking to the magazine, she described Breonna  the 26-year-old woman who was killed by plainclothes police officers who stormed into her Louisville home with a no-knock warrant while she was sleeping on March 13  as an 'American girl, ... a sister, a daughter, and a hard worker. Those are the kinds of people that I am drawn towards.'

This month: Breonna Taylor covers Vanity Fair's September issue, in a stunning blue portrait by Amy Sherald

Tragic: Breonna, 26, was killed by plainclothes police officers who stormed into her Louisville home with a no-knock warrant while she was sleeping on March 13

The artist: Amy Sherald's 2018 portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama hangs in the National Portrait Gallery

Vanity Fair's September issue is certainly a unique one in its focus, and is the latest in a wave of major magazines spotlighting racial justice this month.

It was guest edited by author Ta-Nehisi Coates, with a cover featuring a painting of Breonna as well as an interview with her mother, Tamika Palmer, inside.

Pictured: Michelle Obama's portrait

For the cover, Sherald had to get more creative than usual, since she typically works from a photo she takes of her subject  which wasn't possible in Breonna's case.

Instead, she photographed someone who was physically similar, and also studied photos of Breonna to best capture her.

Sherald normally would photograph her subject and paint from there. in this case, she found a woman who was physically similar, and studied Breonna from photos.

'She sees you seeing her. The hand on the hip is not passive, her gaze is not passive. She looks strong!' Sherald said. 'I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice.'

She painted Breonna in a custom-made crepe dress by Atlanta designer Jasmine Elder of JIBRI, which she thinks is something Breonna would have liked.

She also did the whole thing in blue, a nod to Breonna's birthstone, aquamarine, and added a gold cross necklace and an engagement ring in recognition that her boyfriend had been planning to propose.

Sherald said of Breonna: 'I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it kind of reminds me of Lady Justice'

Breonna's boyfriend was about to propose, and on the Vanity Fair cover, she wears the engagement ring she never got to wear in real life

Controversy: The three officers involved (from left, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detectives Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove) have not been charged in the shooting despite protests

In her editor's letter, editor-in-chief Radhika Jones says that her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was also photographed holding the actual engagement ring that he was never able to propose with.

In the magazine's cover story, Ta-Nehisi Coates reconstructs a first-hand account from Breonna's mother, Tamika Palmer, based on several interviews.

Palmer described her daughter as a 'good baby' and an 'old soul,' a 'quick student' who loved cars and wanted to be a nurse.

'I have so many stories,' she said. 'I think about how I had to tell Breonna how to make chili a hundred times, and she would still call me when she would go to the store.

'[She'd be] calling me like, Mama, what do I need to buy for chili? Blah, blah, blah. And I would say Breonna, can you write this down, because I dont understand why I got to tell you this all the time. And she would say, I dont need to write it down, I can just call my mama.'

Palmer recalled the horrible ordeal of the night Breonna was killed. She says that Breonna's boyfriend called her in the middle of the night to tell her that her daughter had been shot  and when she arrived at her apartment, she was told to go to the hospital.

She spent hours at the hospital before it became clear that Breonna wasn't there and wasn't coming.

After she returned to Breonna's apartment, she was repeatedly brushed off by police, who didn't tell her that her daughter was dead inside until 11 in the morning  nearly 11 hours after she was shot.

'On the news they are saying its a drug raid gone bad. And its so common to hear these things  drug raid. Cops met with gunfire. One suspect dead. The other in custody. And thats how theyre describing what happened with Breonna,' she remembers.

Big deal: Vanity Fair's July/August issue featured Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis on its cover  and was the first cover ever to be shot by a Black photographer

The snapper: Dario Calmese, who has been shooting for the magazine since last year, earned the long-overdue honor last month

'That is how its being portrayed on the news. And I am pissed off because I know how hard Breonna worked. I know that Breonna aint about that life. Breonna couldnt tell you where to buy a dime bag of weed.

'She isnt that person on the news. Neither is Kenny. So somebody has to do something. Somebody has to help me.'

The new issue of Vanity Fair marks just the second time in the magazine's 107-year history that a black artist is behind the cover.

The magazine's July/August issue featured an image of Viola Davis on the front, which was shot by photographer Dario Calmese.

Calmese was the first-ever black photographer to shoot a cover for the publication  a groundbreaking moment he took seriously.

'I did know that this was a moment to say something,' the 38-year-old, who attended School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and now directs fashion shows for the label Pyer Moss, told the New York Times. 'I knew this was a moment to be, like, extra black.'

In introducing last month's issue, editor-in-chief Jones highlighted the excitement of Calmese's participation.

'This month brings its own milestone. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first Vanity Fair cover made by a Black photographer,' she wrote in her editors letter. 'This is his first major magazine cover, and we celebrate him and honor his vision at this heightened moment in American history.'

The magazine has also had a dearth of Black cover stars. In the 35 years before Jones became editor, just 17 covers featured solo Black stars.

She has added nine more, including Breonna, since she took over the role two and a half years ago, and also featured two interracial married couples.

Front and center: Breonna also covers the September issue of O, The Oprah Magazine

Change: It marks the first time in the magazine's 20 years that Oprah hasn't posed for the cover

Meanwhile, artistic renderings of Breonna's image grace two major magazine covers for September: In addition to Vanity Fair, she is also on the cover of O, The Oprah Magazine.

The issue features an image of Breonna created by 24-year-old digital artist Alexis Franklin.

In her editor's letter, Oprah  who has appeared on the cover of every single issue of the magazine up until this point  said that she and her magazine staff gave Breonna the September cover in an effort to 'use whatever megaphone we have to cry for justice.'

'What I know for sure: We cant be silent. We have to use whatever megaphone we have to cry for justice. And that is why Breonna Taylor is on the cover of O magazine,' Oprah wrote in her What I Know For Sure column.

She said that Breonna  who loved cars, chicken, hot sauce, and music, and who was saving to buy a house  was just like her.

'Breonna Taylor had plans. Breonna Taylor had dreams,' she wrote. 'They all died with her the night five bullets shattered her body and her future.

'I think about Breonna Taylor often. She was the same age as the two daughter-girls from my school in South Africa whove been quarantining with Stedman and me since March.

Artist: The new issue features an image of Breonna created by 24-year-old digital artist Alexis Franklin

'I am so happy to play a small part in this long-overdue, world-changing narrative on racial injustice and police brutality,' Alexis said

'In all their conversations I feel the promise of possibilities. Their whole lives shine with the light of hopefulness.

'That was taken away from Breonna in such a horrifying manner. Imagine if three unidentified men burst into your home while you were sleeping. And your partner fired a gun to protect you. And then mayhem.'

Oprah revealed that she'd spoken to Breonna's mother, Tamika Palmer, who was having 'a particularly bad day dealing with the loss and the grief of knowing that her daughter is gone forever.'

'Those of you whove lost loved ones know that the pain comes in waves and that any little thing can trigger it. A song. A scent. A word. A thought,' she wrote.

'The day I called, Ms. Palmer was dealing with the emotion of it all. She told me, I cant stop seeing her face. Her smile. Its what I miss most about her. I still cant grasp the concept of her being gone. It feels so surreal. Im still waiting for her to come through the door."'

Not only does O, The Oprah Magazine highlight the tragedy of Breonna's death, Oprah also stresses the fact that there has been no justice.

Spotlight: Oprah erected 26 billboards with O, The Oprah Magazine cover of Breonna Taylor across Louisville, Kentucky

'Demand that the police involved in killing Breonna Taylor be arrested and charged,' the billboard reads, directing people to visit UntilFreedom.com

Spreading the news: The billboards have been placed across the city in various public places

'As I write this, in early July, just one of the three officers involved has been dismissed from the police force,' she added, referring to Brett Hankison, who has not faced any charges. 'This officer blindly fired ten rounds from his gun, some of which went into the adjoining apartment.'

'The other two officers still have their jobs,' she added, referring to Jon Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, who were only placed on administrative leave and have also not faced charges.

Oprah also erected 26 billboards, one for every year of Breonna's life, across the city of Louisville, Kentucky demanding justice. Each one features the Oprah magazine cover and a call to action to visit UntilFreedom.com: 'Demand that the police involved in killing Breonna Taylor be arrested and charged.'

Until Freedom is 'an intersectional social justice organization rooted in the leadership of diverse people of color to address systemic and racial injustice.' They recently announced that the 'entire team' is relocating to Louisville for the 'foreseeable future' to fight for justice for Breonna.

The billboard also includes the Oprah magazine logo and a quote from the mogul herself: 'If you turn a blind eye to racism, you become an accomplice to it.'
Hezbollah ready to make sacrifices to defend Lebanon: Nasrallah

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 5:43 AM

Hezbollah's secretary general has expressed the resistance movement's readiness to make sacrifices in order to defend Lebanon and protect its national interests, blasting the United States for warmongering against countries across the world.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks during a televised speech late Saturday on the third night of the mourning month of Muharram.

He said that Hezbollah considers it a duty to defend Lebanon and the nation if they are attacked.

According to Islamic values, he added, it is obligatory to help all human beings regardless of their affiliations while geographical and political borders must never be a barrier in this regard.

The Hezbollah chief also noted that supporting the Palestinian people and fighting Syria terrorist groups serve Lebanon's interests.

"It was Hezbollah's duty to fight Daesh in Syria and Iraq in order to prevent it from achieving any victory and expanding [the so-called] caliphate into other regional countries," he said.

Nasrallah further emphasized that Hezbollah will never abandon delivering on its responsibilities in Lebanon and the neighboring countries, adding that the group takes into consideration Lebanon's national interests.

He also condemned Washington's political meddling and military intervention in most of the world countries.

"The United States wages war and holds a right for itself to crush the bones of innocent children in Yemen and elsewhere, but no one can say a word condemning its aggression," Nasrallah said.

"Why do you hold the right to interfere in the affairs of countries and initiate a war, but we and others do not have the right to extend a helping hand to the countries whose rights have been violated?" he asked addressing American officials.

As the Lebanese ask all the world countries for assistance during disasters and wars, they must not reject that some Lebanese groups help certain Arab countries in the region, including Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen.

Hezbollah was established following the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon.

Since then, the resistance movement has grown into a powerful military force, dealing repeated blows to the Israeli military, including during a 33-day war in July 2006.

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The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Polaris Bank Limited, Tokunbo Abiru, has announced his retirement from the service of Polaris Bank, effective August 31, 2020, having completed his second two-year tenure at the helm of the Bank.

In an emotion-laden farewell message to staff of the Bank, Mr. Abiru explained that having served meritoriously in the banking industry for nearly three decades, he had resolved to retire to enable him contribute his quota in other areas of the society.

PREMIUM TIMES learnt that Mr Abiru will immediately join politics to enable him to take a shot at the senatorial slot for Lagos East District which became vacant following the death of Senator Adebayo Osinowo who died on June 15 at 64.

The banker is among strong contenders for the ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for the forthcoming senatorial byelection in Lagos.

Sharing his scorecard while serving as the CEO of the Bank, Mr. Abiru noted: It gives me great pleasure to say that, with the support of the Board, Executive Management and all of you, we have delivered on the mandate given to us by the Central Bank of Nigeria upon assumption of office in 2016.

Going down memory lane, he reminded staff of the banks poor state before he assumed office in 2016 as the Group Managing Director of the erstwhile SkyeBank.

He noted that all prudential ratios were out of compliance with regulatory requirements, Capital was negative, the loan book was mostly delinquent, while liquidity faced deposit attrition.

Furthermore, the IT infrastructure was dilapidated and employee morale was low, resulting in erosion of public confidence.

He praised the staff for working with him to reverse the trend and bring about an institution that has become a compelling case study in corporate turnaround within Nigerias financial services industry.

We have reversed almost all regulatory ratios for good and currently rank amongst the very best in the industry, Mr Abiru said. There can be no better testament to the much-improved state of the Bank than the full year 2019 results in which the Bank posted Profit After Tax (PAT) of N27billion.

To buttress the fact that this is sustainable, the Banks first half 2020 result showed a PAT of over N18billion, despite the tremendous headwinds brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We also commenced the refreshment of the Banks IT infrastructure, which had largely become outdated and dilapidated due to years of under-investment. As a result of the successful completion of the first phase of the IT Refresh Program, which consisted mainly of upgrade of the infrastructure and digital platforms, and relocation of the Banks Data Centres to Tier III data locations as mandated by CBN regulations and in line with global best practices, the Banks customers are now experiencing significantly improved service delivery.

In addition, by introducing and committing resources to the Agency Banking model, we have contributed in no small measure to deepening financial inclusion for the unbanked and under-banked throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria.

He restated that todays Polaris Bank has been successfully positioned as a bank of choice in Nigeria due to the work that has been put in by the various stakeholders including the loyal customers of the Bank.

On the issue of leadership succession, Mr. Abiru said, During this period leading to my final disengagement, I will work closely with the CBN, the Board of Directors and Executive Management of our Bank to ensure a seamless transition and smooth handover to my successor.

Tokunbo Abiru was appointed the Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the then SkyeBank in July 2016.

Before his appointment, he had served in several capacities in some of the leading Banks in Nigerias banking industry, including at one time as an Executive Director at First Bank of Nigeria Plc.

He was at various times nonexecutive director in some leading companies, including Econet (now Airtel) Mobile Networks Limited, and FBN Capital Limited (now FBN Merchant Bank Limited).

Mr Abiru also had a brief stint in public service, having served from 2011 to 2013 as Commissioner of Finance for Lagos State Government under the leadership of Governor Babatunde Fashola (SAN).

Following the establishment of Polaris Bank in September 2018, the Central Bank of Nigeria affirmed the performance of the banks Board of Directors, and reappointed Mr Abiru to lead the new Bank.
LETHBRIDGE, ALTA.A police force in southern Alberta says one of its officers has been charged with assault stemming from an altercation with a prisoner.

In a news release Sunday, the Lethbridge Police Service says the male prisoner was not injured during the incident on Feb. 9 at its short-term holding facility, but a complaint was made under the Police Act to the provinces director of law enforcement.

While it says the matter was deemed in-scope, Albertas police watchdog agency was not assigned and Lethbridges Professional Standards Unit was directed to conduct the investigation.

It says the completed investigation was forwarded to prosecutors for review and a charge of assault was recommended.

David Easter is charged with one count of assault and is scheduled to appear in Lethbridge Provincial Court in November.

Easter has been relieved from duty without pay pending the outcome of the matter in court.

In this case I believe exceptional circumstances exist that warrant the relief of duty without pay for the good of the Police Service and to uphold the public expectation that police officers be held to the highest standards, Chief Scott Woods said in the release.

The release notes that the chiefs decision to relieve the officer from duty without pay must be reviewed by the citys police commission within 30 days.

Earlier this summer two Lethbridge police officers were temporarily demoted after they conducted unauthorized surveillance on then-environment minister Shannon Phillips in April 2017.

Alberta Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer has directed the provinces police watchdog to determine if there are grounds for a criminal probe in that case.

Police in Lethbridge are also being investigated by an outside force after a restaurant worker in a Star Wars stormtrooper costume who was carrying a plastic gun was forced to the ground and ended up with a bloody nose on May 4.

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A paedophile who told a boy the abuse was 'good for him' and bought him ice cream afterwards has been jailed for at least four-and-a-half years.

Peter Hartland, now 70, repeatedly abused the boy, then aged 12 or 13, between 1973 and 1974 while working as a fitter and turner at Bendigo, north-west of Melbourne.

He told the boy the abuse was 'good for him' and 'this is good'. The pedophile also bought the child ice cream before and after raping or molesting him.

Hartland was jailed in Victoria's County Court on Monday for seven years, with a non-parole period of four-and-a-half years.

Peter Hartland has been jailed for repeatedly raping a boy aged 12 or 13 between 1973 and 1974 and told the victim the abuse was 'good for him' (stock image)

He pleaded guilty to six counts of indecent assault and five of buggery in February.

The abuse left the boy feeling 'angry, scared and dirty'. It stopped after he began running away to hide at a creek near his house when he heard Hartland's car.

'This man took my childhood, innocence, education and personality and affected very aspect of my life for his own sexual pleasure,' the survivor told the court in a statement.

As a boy, he never learned to read or write properly and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He also turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with the pain and struggled to form relationships.

Peter Hartland pleaded guilty to six counts of indecent assault and five of buggery in February and on Monday was jailed at Victoria's County Court for seven years

Sentencing Judge Frank Gucciardo said Hartland used a 'vile disguise of affection' to groom the boy for abuse.

The pedophile's crimes represented an 'egregious and fundamental' abuse of a child as well as his parents' trust, the judge added.

'His body remembers the trauma, as does his mind,' Judge Gucciardo said.

'Both the community and the court abhor this kind of sexual exploitation of children.'

The victim first reported the matter to police in 2017, with a phone call between him and Hartland - in which the offender admitted his crimes - recorded about two years later.

Hartland will be placed on the sex offender registry for life.
When youre ready to glue, first spread wax paper under the area where epoxy might drip out. Then mix the epoxy components. After looking at your pictures, Tiano suggested that you might need about one ounce total, but you might want to mix a bit more to make sure you have enough. So pour  to  of an ounce of Part A into the measuring cup, and then add an equal amount of Part B to bring the total to one or 1 ounces. You can use metric measurements if they are an easier way to ensure that you get equal amounts. Mix thoroughly. Using the acid brush, dab and spread the epoxy over both mating edges. Just a film, Tiano said, not gooey, gooey. Work quickly, because you have only 30 minutes of open time with the epoxy.
The Conservatives have decided Erin OToole is the man to lead them into the next election, whether its later this year or in 2021.

So why does it feel like 1988 all over again?

Because thats the year the fledgling Reform Party mustered 72 candidates to run against Brian Mulroneys Progressive Conservatives. They didnt win any seats that election, but the results in the west were encouraging, especially in Alberta where a number of Reformers placed second to the PC candidates.

Those rumblings that eventually destroyed the PC party can be heard again in the western provinces, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan. And they will no doubt get louder now that the Conservatives have elected a leader who does not hail from the west like Stephen Harper and Andrew Scheer.

Given that many westerners  especially those in Alberta and Saskatchewan  believe the west will never get a fair deal as long as the Trudeau Liberals hold power in Ottawa, its hard to believe that the upstart Reformers once felt the same way about the Mulroney Conservatives.

But they did.

Even after Mulroney named Alberta MP Don Mazankowski as deputy prime minister, the PC government still wasnt good enough for Reformers.

In 1988 the Reform slogan was the west wants in, because Reformers believed western interests were not taken seriously enough by the powers that be in Ottawa.

Now some of those same early Reformers are saying the west wants out, and they are busy organizing political parties and recruiting candidates to run in the next federal election.

The federal wing of this independence movement  Wexit  is now led by Jay Hill, a high-profile former Reform MP. Wexit has been officially recognized as a political party by Elections Canada, and plans to run candidates in the next election.

Erin OToole will never be able to give the west what it wants, says Hill, because OToole will have to cave to the wishes of people in Ontario and Quebec, and for most people in those vote-rich provinces, the interests of the west are never high on their priority lists.

On the provincial front the Wildrose Independence Party has gotten the nod from Elections Alberta and also plans to run candidates in the next election. It is attracting former members of the right-wing Wildrose Party and even some former provincial PC cabinet members.

The time for asking Ottawa for a fair deal is over. The time for half-hearted conservatism is over. Albertas time as subservient to the Laurentian elite is over. The time has come for we as Albertans to stand up for ourselves and put our house in order. Its time to radically alter our relationship with Ottawa, says Paul Hinman, former Wildrose MLA and now interim leader of the new party.

Alberta premier Jason Kenney is trying to straddle the chasms between competing conservative creeds.

He supported Erin OToole for the leadership, so it was not surprising OTooles resource policies looked like they had been written by Kenney. But now OToole will have to convince voters in Quebec and Ontario that those policies will work for them as well as they would for Albertans.

Kenney also has to worry about independence movements bleeding his right flank. And on top of that he must figure out how to boost his general popularity, which has sunk somewhat as Albertas once robust economy falters and the government openly fights with doctors and battles parents over its back-to-school plans.

Kenney also seems to have lost his buddy Doug Ford to the other side as Ford now openly praises the Trudeau Liberals, something Kenney would never do. Even if those same Liberals buy a contentious oil pipeline so Alberta can ship its oil offshore and then deliver $1.7 billion for the cleanup of abandoned oil wells.

The problem for Conservatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan is that while the Liberals can never do enough to satisfy them, their habit of voting Conservative en masse ensures they will always be taken for granted by whatever party is in power.

Thats not a winning strategy, and so the western conservative infighting to find a path to victory is bound to heat up even as the new Conservative leader tries to find his footing.
The real level of unemployment is higher in states and territories that have closed their borders to other parts of Australia.

Australia's official unemployment rate stood at a 22-year high of 7.5 per cent in July.

A Treasury analysis, however, showed the 'effective unemployment rate' - which also includes workers receiving $1,500 a fortnight JobKeeper wage subsidies to stay home - was 9.9 per cent.

Across most of Australia this real level of unemployment, taking into account those who have a job but are working zero hours, has fallen since April, during the first full month of lockdowns.

The Northern Territory has Australia's effective unemployment rate of 12.1 per cent - despite the easing of COVID-19 restrictions. Pictured are drinkers at Darwin's Moonsoons bar

The Northern Territory was the exception with the effective unemployment rate rising from 11.2 per cent in April to 12.1 per cent in July - the highest in Australia despite the easing of coronavirus restrictions.

Re-elected Labor Chief Minister Michael Gunner promised during the election campaign to bar Australians from COVID-19 hot spots for at least 18 months.

Victorians and anyone who has been to greater Sydney aren't allowed to set foot in the NT and Mr Gunner suggested more places could be added to the black list.

'We're much more likely to add spots than remove them, we've got an indefinite ban on Victoria and Sydney keeps bubbling away to the point where I can't give you a date where that will ever lift,' he said last week ahead of Saturday's election.

Queensland has Australia's second-highest effective unemployment rate of 11.4 per cent.

Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, facing an election on October 31, is banning residents from New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory from entering her state, even though Canberra has had zero cases since July 10.

Regional areas of NSW also have active COVID-19 cases in the low, single digits.

Queensland has Australia's second-highest effective unemployment rate of 11.4 per cent. Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, facing an election on October 31, is banning residents from New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory from entering her state, even though Canberra has had zero cases since July 10. Pictured is Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast

Tourism-dependent Queensland has an even higher rate of effective unemployment than the 10.5 per cent figure for Victoria, where Melbourne and the neighbouring Mitchell Shire are in a strict, Stage 4 lockdown with an 8pm to 5am curfew.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said state border closures were delaying the economic recovery.

'There is still a long way to go through this crisis and high frequency data is showing signs that the jobs recovery may be slowing as state border closures have been tightened,' he said.

EFFECTIVE UNEMPLOYMENT RATE PER STATE 2020 State April May June July NSW 15.8 13.5 10.4 8.5 VIC 14.6 13.1 11.7 10.5 QLD 15.1 15.2 12.1 11.4 SA 15.3 13.7 11.2 9.8 WA 14.4 14.4 10.7 9.8 TAS 14.1 14.5 10.8 7.9 NT 11.2 11.3 12.3 12.1 ACT 9.8 8.3 6.2 5.2 AUSTRALIA 14.9 13.9 11.2 9.9 Source: Treasurer Josh Frydenberg

The ACT, which has no border restrictions for those outside Victoria, has Australia's lowest effective unemployment rate of 5.2 per cent.

Intriguingly, Tasmania had the second-lowest effective jobless rate of 7.9 per cent - even though anyone who has been COVID-19 hot spots in Sydney and Brisbane must obtain written approval to enter the island state.

NSW is only banning Victorians and had an effective jobless rate of 8.5 per cent - a level also below the national average of 9.9 per cent.

Western Australia which is barring everyone except designated workers and those with compassionate reasons, also has a lower-than-average effective unemployment rate of 9.8 per cent.

South Australia, which requires visitors NSW and the ACT to self-isolate for 14 days, also had an effective jobless rate of 9.8 per cent.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is reportedly in a coma and his sister Kim Yo-jong will be exercising de facto control over national and international matters, several media outlets reported.

The 36-year-old, who reportedly handed over some powers to his sister three days ago, is in a coma, but his life has not ended, Change Song-min, a former aide to South Koreas late president Kim Dae-jung, told local media outlets, The Mirror reports.

Over the weekend it was reported by CNN that South Koreas National Intelligence Service (NIS) informed the hermit countrys top politicians that Ms Yo-jong is now de-facto second in command.
INDIANAPOLIS  Martin Pritikin called a Friday (Aug. 21) decision by the State Bar of California truly a watershed moment in legal education.

Concord Law School at Purdue University Global was granted full accreditation by the State Bar of California.

Being fully accredited provides us additional credibility and recognition, said Pritikin, dean of Concord Law School. It acknowledges that we can meet all the educational objectives of a regulator. Concords mission since its inception over 20 years ago was to make high-quality legal education affordable and accessible by delivering it fully online. I am thrilled that the State Bar of California has recognized that quality.

Accreditation of our convenient and affordable programs expands opportunities to access legal education for students who are otherwise highly qualified but who cannot move their families or change their employment status to attend a traditional law program, Purdue Global Chancellor Frank Dooley said.

As a result of being granted accreditation, students in Concords JD program no longer have to take or pass Californias First Year Law Students Exam. Concords first accredited term will begin Sept. 24. Pritikin expects interest and enrollment in Concord to increase.

Having been a tenured professor and administrator at a brick-and-mortar law school, I know that Concords program rivals that of most traditional schools, Pritikin said. This shouldn't be surprising; after all, if you can function as a lawyer almost entirely online, why not train to be a lawyer online as well?

The Committee of Bar Examiners deemed that Concord is in full compliance with the guidelines governing accredited law schools and, therefore, was not required to have a period of provisional accreditation, as typically is the case for law schools seeking full accreditation.

The State Bar of California is one of the few bodies in the country other than the American Bar Association to accredit law schools. State regulation of non-ABA law schools was designed to facilitate lower-cost law school options, particularly in regions not served by traditional schools. Although the ABA has temporarily suspended limits on online learning due to the coronavirus pandemic, the ABA accreditation standards generally limit law schools to being one-third online. Concord opened as the nations first fully online law school in 1998.

Concord was the first online law school to apply for full accreditation when that path opened up in July 2019 and subsequently was the first school to have its inspection site visit conducted entirely remotely in March 2020 during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Until last year, only registration, not accreditation, was available to fully online law schools in California.

About Purdue University Global

Purdue University Global is the extreme personalization online university, providing students the competitive edge to advance in their chosen careers. It offers a hyper-tailored path for students to earn an associate, bachelors, masters or doctoral degree, based on their work experience, desired pace, military service, previous college credits and other considerations  no matter where they are in their life journey. Purdue Global serves more than 31,000 students (as of June 2020), most of whom earn their degree online. It also operates several regional locations nationwide. Purdue Global is a nonprofit, public university accredited by The Higher Learning Commission. It is affiliated with Purdue Universitys flagship institution, a highly ranked public research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana. Purdue University also operates two regional campuses in Fort Wayne and Northwest, Indiana, as well as serving close to 6,000 science, engineering and technology students at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus. For more information, please visit purdueglobal.edu.

About Concord Law School

Concord Law School is part of Purdue University Global, a public, nonprofit school within the respected Purdue University system. Founded in 1998, Concord was the first U.S. law school to offer students a traditional law school program online, including interactive live classes, frequent testing with extensive feedback, and nationally respected faculty members. Offering rigorous, rewarding online degree programs, Concord provides students with a first-rate law school education that is affordable and reflects the needs of todays employers, delivered in a convenient, highly supportive environment. For more information, please visit concordlawschool.edu.

Writer, Media contact: Tom Schott, 765-427-1721, tschott@purdue.edu

Sources: Frank Dooley, frank.dooley@purdueglobal.edu

Martin Pritikin, mpritikin@purdueglobal.edu
Driving west on Interstate 10, Ilona Gordon saw a Cinemark movie theater and envisioned a massive conflict involving magic.

Even from the highway, it felt very open, a great place to set a big battle, she says. The C in the Cinemark had fallen off. It looked perfect.

Under the pen name Ilona Andrews, Ilona and her husband, Andrew Gordon have repeatedly made Houston a battleground for their Hidden Legacy books, an urban fantasy series full of familiar places and landmarks like Allen Parkway, Eleanor Tinsley Park, even a Cajun Kitchen on Wilcrest, set in an unfamiliar world teeming with magic, the result of a serum used to cure a pandemic in the 1800s.

Houston readers are very particular about their city, Ilona says. They love it very much. So weve learned to be very careful. If somebody is going from point A to point B, we want to be sure they take the right roads. Weve enjoyed it because these books have been so connected to the city.

By these books, Ilona refers to the couples best-selling Hidden Legacy books, which welcomes a new title, Emerald Blaze this week. Its the fifth book in the series (along with a novella) that the couple has written as Ilona Andrews, following their Kate Daniels series of urban fantasies that started in 2006.

Author event When: 7 p.m. Monday Details: bluewillowbookshop.com See More Collapse

And by Houston readers, shes referring to a regional subset of a dedicated following Ilona Andrews has built over the past 15 years, thanks to the couples fan engagement through its website.

Our Houston readers are especially plugged in with this series, she says. Theyve been the best part of it.

The Gordons are a fascinating success story in fantasy and romance. Ilona was born in the Soviet Union and moved to the States as a teenager. She met Andrew at Western Carolina University.

Ace Books published their Magic Bites, in 2007, introducing readers to Kate Daniels, a mercenary working in an alternative Atlanta, where magic and technology function intermittently.

For us, these stories are about what happens when theres a shift in the power dynamic in society, Ilona says. A lot of times in our society there are old ways to power: wealth, obviously; technology; dominating market space; old political family clubs. We introduced magic into that like throwing a wrecking ball at societal structure.

This approach has sent their work routinely to various best-seller lists. Ilona and Andrew (who answers to Gordon in fan circles) both repeatedly speak to their preference for an insular life with two kids and several dogs at their Hill Country home, despite working in a writing genre that thrives on reader interactivity. Prior to the pandemic, they did their duty appearing at book events and conventions.

Their Hidden Legacy series came about almost by accident. A friend who writes vampire novels for Avon Books recommended them to Erika Tsang, an editor at Avon Books. Before they even had a fully developed proposal for a new series, they had an offer from the publisher.

So they had a green light for a story that hadnt been conceived. Jill Smith, a reviewer for Romantic Times, told Ilona she hoped shed do something related to a family.

So I thought, Oh, OK, we should do a family story, she says.

Which was also wish fulfillment for us, Andrew adds. Neither of us has a big family. I was raised by an aunt and uncle.

Ilona adds that her family didnt entirely approve of her chosen vocation.

I dont have anybody to share our success with, she says. For years and years, Id tell (my father) about how these books were doing. And he would sigh heavily and say, Thats good. No matter how much acclaim or how much money we earn, Im still an abject failure until I get my bachelors degree. Its an old Russian mindset. If its not academic, its not enough.

So family is at the center of the Hidden Legacy novels, starting with Burn for Me, released six years ago. It introduced Nevada Baylor, a detective whose magic allows her to know when someone is lying. Hers is a world with familiar geographic locations but an entirely unfamiliar societal structure based around families and their magic. The family proved crucial, both as a source of support and conflict as well as subsequent novels. As the series developed, Ilona Andrews transferred focus from Nevada to her sister Catalina, who is the protagonist in Emerald Blaze, working as a deputy for the Warden of Texas, monitoring magic usage while also nursing a heart broken by a Prime (the highest rank of magic user) named Alessandro, who finds his way back into her life.

The novels are further populated by a conspiratorial matriarch, various wielders of magic, monsters and, well, handsome and mysterious men with opaque intentions.

There was a practical element to it, Andrew says. If the Nevada book did well, we could always do a book on one of the siblings. But still, when we started this, we didnt think there would be five books.

They liked the idea of setting their action in Houston, though an alternate Houston in an alternate society in which magic has created a different hierarchy. Andrew cites Robert B. Parkers Spenser novels as an inspiration for the way they made use of Boston.

Places like Houston and Atlanta are a big part of Americana, Ilona says. They have distinct moods and layouts. Theyre no more or less worthy than London or Boston or New York. Why not set these stories in the South?

To describe the alternative Jersey Village of Emerald Blaze is to spoil a nasty surprise.

Much as the couple has reinvented Houston in their series, as Ilona Andrews the two have also recreated the idea of an author/reader community. Both Ilona and Andrew engage actively with their readers through their site and their blog. They also routinely present previously unpublished content on the site for fans to read free of charge. They returned to the Kate Daniels world with a new project titled Ryder that has been made available for free, one chapter at a time on their site. Blood Heir, the complete finished novel, will go on sale in January.

When COVID hit, I had to unplug and turn off email a little bit, Ilona says. The slog of grief and anxiety and death was so heavy. But we started getting emails, people whose parents had died or people who were sick and scared, asking if wed post some little thing. This was not something we planned to do.

Adds Andrew: Others would tell us that one of our books took them out of these difficult places for an hour. For us, thats the best thing we can do. Take somebody out of reality for a little bit.

andrew.dansby@chron.com
The BidenSanders Plan for Destroying America

Commentary

A couple of nights ago, the celebrated author, lawyer, and talk show host Mark Levin took a busmans honeymoon and joined Sean Hannity at Fox News to talk about the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations.

Recommendations for what? you ask. Why for Combating The Climate Crisis And Pursuing Environmental Justice, Protecting Communities By Reforming Our Criminal Justice System, Building A Stronger, Fairer Economy, and so on, and so on.

Of all the strange political platforms you have ever read, I reckon this is the strangest.

Even stranger is the fact that its been proposed not by a double major in gender studies and climate change at a tony college or university but by two important people, one of whom is the Democratic candidate for president, the other who seems to be the ideas man behind the empty shell that is the Democratic candidate. (There is actually some poetic justice in the fact that Bernie Sanders, the man who could never be president, may live to see his radical ideas put to work in America. Poetic justice for the Democratic establishment, that is, mere disaster for the rest of us.)

There are other strange things about the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations (if I were writing in German, by the way, I would have translated Unity as Gleichschaltungthe name for the system of coordination by which Nazi control was established throughout German society).

Levin zeroed in on an important oddity in his discussion with Sean Hannity.

Nobody is discussing [the manifesto], he said. No newsroom read it. Its not discussed at the Democratic National Convention.

It should be discussed. It should occupy the front pages and the editorial pages of every newspaper in the country. Because the Biden-Sanders Task Force Recommendations isnt only the strangest real-life political platform put forward in the United States, its also the scariest.

But what is the burden of the document? Levin cuts to the chase: Its 110 pages  [about] how they will destroy your country. Should the Democrats win, he warned, everything about your country is going to change for the worse. America will not look like America again. Weve tried these failed experiments throughout Europe, weve tried them throughout the Third World. You get poverty, you get dislocation, you get massive inequality, you get a police state. Thats what they stand for. Thats it.

Bureaucratese

I think Levin is right. The Biden-Sanders document deploys the usual bureaucratese in describing its aims.

We can and must build a thriving, equitable, and globally competitive clean energy economy that puts workers and communities first and leaves no one behind.

Okee-doke. Thriving is a nice word. We all want our country to be thriving. The same goes for those other emollient words and phrases: Equitable, for example. There is a common sense of that word that we all applaud, captured by talk of equality of opportunity (as distinct from equality of outcome). Ditto for being globally competitive, and so on, and so on.

But how do we do all that, comrade? Theres the rub, for it turns out that these abstractions are empty semantic vessels that mean different things, depending on who fills them.

What, for example, do you think of when you hear the phrase clean energy? The authors of this document, invoking the authority of scientists and public health experts, demand that the United States achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, and no later than 2050.

Think about what that would mean. Net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and as soon as possible.

Under President Donald Trump, the United States became energy independent and, indeed, became a net exporter of energy. That was a huge boost to U.S. and indeed world prosperity. Energy equals prosperity. What the world needs, as the energy expert Robert Bryce once observed, is cheap, abundant energy. Period. Full stop. End of discussion.

The Biden-Sanders plan would happily scrap all that: Democrats commit to eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035  through technology-neutral standards for clean energy and energy efficiency. Within five years, we will install 500 million solar panels, including 8 million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines.

And thats only the beginning. They also want to retrofit 2 million low-income households with solar panels at taxpayer expense, and eventually end the use of oil, gas, and coal, entirely. Like the brownouts and blackouts in California? Get ready to have them as a nationwide feature.

And theres more, much more. They want to gut the power of the police, thereby assuring more crime.

The plan proposes a sharp increase in the corporate tax rate, thereby assuring that American businesses will be less competitive on the world stage.

They propose a huge expansion in public-sector unions, thereby assuring that the symbiotic relationship between those unions and the Democratic party continues.

They propose a nationwide minimum wage of $15 per hour, thereby assuring that many more employees will find themselves out of work.

Recently, Trump has made progress at rescuing the suburbs from Barack Obamas attack on local zoning rules. They want to reverse all that, making the suburbs look as much like the inner city as possible.

In order to effect the kind of wealth redistribution Dems dream about (for others, mind you, not for themselves), the plan calls for a radical overhaul of the tax code to be more progressive.

A guiding principle across our tax agenda is that the wealthiest Americans can shoulder more of the tax burden, including in particular by making investors pay the same tax rates as workers and bringing an end to expensive and unproductive tax loopholes.

Who would doubt it?

Greed for Power

I hope everyone will take time to peruse this document. As I say, it is written in the abstract argot forever favored by apparatchiks. But its import is as toxic as a poisoned-tipped sword.

This is the language of the modern totalitarian, greedy for power, greedy to destroy individual liberty and human thriving for the sake of imposing their abstract idea of equality on a genuinely diverse and multifaceted country.

Among other things, its a profound rejection of the wisdom of the founders. In Federalist 10, James Madison noted that differences in possession of property arise from the diversity of the faculties of men. This diversity is an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests, that is, the imposition of a one-size-fits-all equality.

Hence, the protection of these faculties, Madison wrote, is the first object of government.

The Biden-Sanders plan is a frontal assault on private property and everything that Madison and his colleagues labored to protect. Levin is right. Should Biden be elected, the people who would govern in his name would destroy America as we know it.

Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
By ICH & Agencies

August 23, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - Donald Trump has no principles and people cant trust him according to his eldest sister, the first rebuke of the president from any of his siblings to be made public since he took office.

In secretly recorded audio published by the Washington Post on Saturday, Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal judge, talks candidly to the president's niece, Mary Trump, about her relationship with her brother, apparently unaware that she is being recorded.

In response to the report's publication, Trump said in a statement released by the White House: "Every day its something else, who cares."
ISTANBUL  The death toll from flooding in northern Turkey climbed to eight while another eight people were missing on Monday, sounding an alarm over the rapid development and climate change that have transformed the Black Sea region and unleashed a series of deadly disasters in recent years.

Search and rescue efforts continued on Monday after torrential rains set off flash floods at the weekend in the province of Giresun. Among the dead and missing were five security officers after their vehicles were pitched into a ravine when a road collapsed. Emergency workers rescued 157 people.

Hardest hit was the town of Dereli, whose name means with streams, in Giresun province. Footage from the town of 2,000 people showed cars upended and streets blanketed in mud, rubble and large boulders.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised tax deferrals for those who suffered losses in the flood and to rebuild homes and businesses. The latest flooding requires natural disaster-prone Turkey to reassess how it builds its infrastructure, housing and businesses, he also said.

Due to difficult [economic] conditions of the past, development in the Black Sea that does not pay enough attention to the reality of the geography we live in has emerged. Earthquakes, floods, landslides and other disasters that exceed our will and power are forcing us to change our priorities, Erdogan said after a cabinet meeting in comments broadcast live.

Almost 100 surrounding villages were inaccessible after roads were washed out and power was cut to 38 villages, said Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu. No estimate for the cost of the damage was immediately available. CNN Turk reported that 200 businesses were badly damaged. At least 17 buildings were destroyed across Giresun province and more than 360 were damaged.

Some 135 millimeters (5.3 inches) of rain fell in the area in 24 hours, or 1.5 times the average rainfall in the entire month of August, Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said. This is the first time Ive seen such a large natural disaster, he said.

Yet deadly floods in Turkeys Black Sea region have become worryingly common due to poorly constructed and situated buildings, including within river valleys and on narrow flood plains. Dam-building, mining projects and new highways have also altered the regions geography over the past two decades.

Some 120 people have died in floods and landslides in Black Sea provinces since 2002, excluding the latest disaster, the opposition People's Democratic Party said on Monday. In an emailed statement, the party blamed a 330-mile (530-kilometer) coastal road that opened in 2007 and a series of hydropower projects for blocking runoff from rivers and streams to the Black Sea. It accused the government of putting developers profits above lives.

Pakdemirli said the government is preparing a master plan for the region to reduce flooding but that eliminating the risk was impossible even if you are a superpower or super state.

Activists fear that the damage caused by two decades of shoddy development is irreversible.

This is a political disaster, facilitated with the states permission. We cannot call this a natural disaster when its mans intervention that is the underlying cause, said Omer San, a spokesman for the environmental group Brotherhood for Rivers Platform (DEKAP).

Over the last decade, we have seen local climatic change that has intensified rainfall over a smaller territory. Rain that in the past would fall over 120 kilometers of land now falls on five, San told Al-Monitor. The coastal road was built with stones extracted from nearby quarries where dynamite was used, which has destroyed tracts of bedrock, disrupting water absorption, he said.

Turkeys emerald-green Black Sea mountains are blessed with a network of 120 or so rivers and streams, and the area receives the countrys most rainfall. It is an important agriculture center for hazelnut and tea production.

DEKAP has campaigned against the construction of hundreds of run-of-the-river (ROR) hydroelectric plants in the Black Sea since 2010.

Turkey currently has 478 hydroelectric power plants and is planning to build another 534, making it one of the worlds most active dam-building nations, according to the US-based nongovernmental organization International Rivers.

Earlier this year, the historic town of Hasankeyf was inundated for the Ilisu Dam, causing an international outcry for destroying cultural heritage and displacing tens of thousands of people in the countrys mainly Kurdish southeast. Iraq has also accused Turkey of exacerbating its water crisis with the dam.

ROR dams in the Black Sea are perceived as less environmentally harmful than large-scale projects like Ilisu because they do not require reservoirs. Instead, they reroute the flow of river water through pipes and tunnels, often underground. However, they devastate biodiversity, disrupt the hydrological cycle and diminish agricultural irrigation and drinking supplies.

So far, the ROR plants that have opened meet less than 5% of Turkeys electricity needs, San said. Instead, the plants are a byproduct of the global carbon emissions trade, used by polluters to offset emissions they release elsewhere, and often remain idle or underutilized.

Despite years of scientific reports, court decisions [stopping projects] and public opposition, the government is pressing ahead. Whenever there is a disaster and a loss of life, it promises to compensate people with money, but there has yet to be any work done to restore the natural balance and stop future disasters, San said.
Photo: (Photo : Facebook/The City Mission )

Ohio newlywed couple, Tyler and Melanie Tapajna, decided to donate their wedding reception food to the homeless. They had arranged to have a more traditional celebration for their wedding before the pandemic happened, but their plans had to be changed to keep their friends and family safe.

The Parma, Ohio couple booked a DJ and local caterers to feed 150-people for their big day in August. Due to the coronavirus, many events got canceled, and the couple had to change their plans. For safety reasons, the pair chose not to proceed with their previous plan of a large gathering.

Choosing to donate reception food rather than have a big wedding

Instead, they decided to donate what would have been their food for their big day to a local women's shelter. Melanie told CNN that they had to choose between having a grand wedding or donating the food to the needy. She said that they were more excited to be donating their food than be stressed for their wedding.

See also: Mom Was "Blown Away" by Strangers' Sweet Gesture upon Hearing Abou Son's Leukemia

They had a small backyard wedding on August 15, with immediate family members. After the party, the Ohio newlywed couple proceeded with their donation at Laura's Home Women's Crisis Center. It is a Cleveland, Ohio, women and children's facility run by "The City Mission."

Thankful for the couple's big heart

"The City Mission" wrote on their Facebook page their thanks for the couple. It wrote that they are praying for the immense blessings for the marriage of the couple. It also wrote their thanks for inviting their guests to their wedding feast.

See also: Sweet 11-Year-Old Girl Writes Letter to Hardworking Mailman, Viral Story Turned to Children's Book

The couple wore their wedding outfit as they serve food for the people. Tyler wore his black and white tuxedo, while Melanie wore her white lace wedding gown. They both wore face masks, hairnets, and gloves to prevent spreading the deadly virus.

The CEO of "The City Mission," Rich Trickel, said that the Ohio newlywed couple fed 135 women and children with their reception food. They had fried chicken, green beans, salad, and mac and cheese. Trickel said that what they experienced has never happened before. He coordinated with the caterer, Betty's Bomb Ass Burgers, and the couple to get the food delivered.

See also: Pregnant Colombian Woman Thanks People for Helping Her Raise Money for Delivery

He found it unbelievable that the women and kids in their building have experienced a wedding like never before. The couple is hoping that their donation has served as an inspiration for other people whose plans were also been affected by the pandemic. Melanie said that at times like this, you can help others by giving back to the people.
Philadelphia, August 24, 2020 - Since 1960, Holstein dairy cows have exhibited a substantial decline in fertility, with serious economic consequences for farmers. Genetic selection programs in the United States and elsewhere have emphasized milk production at the expense of other traits. Attention has turned to improving these neglected traits for better overall well-being of cows and to ameliorate dairy producers' profitability. In a recent article appearing in the Journal of Dairy Science, scientists from the University of Minnesota examined the effects of crossbreeding on fertility and milk production across three generations in a large sample of Holstein and crossbred cows.

Although in recent years Holstein breeding programs have made strides toward remedying the problem of diminished fertility, crossbreeding is often seen as a possible means to achieve greater and more rapid gains, while eliminating concerns about inbreeding.

"A larger response in phenotypic fertility will be experienced over a shorter period of time from crossbreeding than from selection within a pure Holstein population," explained lead author Amy Hazel, PhD, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA. Whether this is true, and whether crossbred cows can compete with Holsteins in a high-producing commercial dairy setting, were questions that the team investigated.

Purebred Holsteins were compared with cows from a three-breed rotation of Holstein with Viking Red and Montbeliarde in this 10-year study with initial enrollment of 3,550 Holstein cows from Minnesota commercial dairies. The team found that each combination of two- and three-breed crossbred cows demonstrated significant advantages over pure Holsteins for all fertility traits at each studied lactation. This confirmed expectations, but what about the possibility that milk production might be negatively affected by crossbreeding?

"Because of the global predominance of high-producing Holsteins, some dairy producers have been concerned that crossbred cows will have poorer milk production traits," observed Prof. Hazel. "But our study found little, if any, loss of fat and protein production for crossbred cows compared with their Holstein herdmates."

As dairy producers place increased emphasis on minimizing the major expenses for cows--including feed intake, repeated inseminations, health treatments, and premature replacement--this large and carefully designed study confirms that strategic crossbreeding can improve fertility of dairy herds, reduce costs of insemination, and result in more efficient milk production, without significant losses in milk composition.

Additionally, a larger effect should be the longer herd life of crossbred cows compared with pure Holsteins. Although further research remains to be performed, this study establishes the Viking Red and Montbeliarde breeds as highly complementary for crossbreeding with Holsteins and well suited for milk production in high-performance dairy herds.

###
A trail of evidence and interviews with his relatives suggest he became radicalised while travelling through Europe with an inheritance from his father when he was 20, and by connecting with extremists he met on the internet. Brenton Tarrant in court. Credit:Stuff/NZ In a manifesto that Tarrant distributed online before the attacks, he wrote about his hatred for Muslims and non-European immigrants, expressing a belief in the racist "great replacement theory", which centres on the notion that falling birth rates among white people will lead them to be replaced by non-white people. The attack took place during Friday prayers. Tarrant killed 42 people at Al Noor mosque (two others later died in the hospital) and seven more at the Linwood mosque a few kilometres away. The youngest person killed was three years old. Tarrant used five weapons he had bought legally. It was the worst mass shooting in New Zealand's history and led to an overhaul of national gun laws, with a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons and a gun buyback that has collected 56,250 prohibited firearms.

What makes the sentencing so complicated? Tarrant has hoped to gain notoriety through his crimes, which he livestreamed on Facebook, bringing the violence directly to large numbers of people. He recently fired his lawyers and decided to represent himself, making the sentencing a potential venue for the promotion of his abhorrent views, which have inspired other attacks. Media outlets from all over the world plan to cover the sentencing. Without counsel, Tarrant may have more opportunity to speak and try to confront the families of his victims. At least 66 people plan to deliver victim statements, either read aloud or submitted in writing.

"The unfortunate bottom line is no one really knows how it's going to go," said Alexander Gillespie, a law professor at the University of Waikato. "This is his last public performance, so for someone who has committed such an act, you can guarantee he will try to do something  and you just have to reduce that risk." What is the court doing to keep Tarrant from exploiting the situation? The judge in charge of the case, Justice Cameron Mander, has put in place a series of restrictions on media coverage that aim to keep provocative moments that might incite hatred from being shared immediately, if at all. In a memo sent to journalists last week, Mander warned that he had the right to set limits on what they reported. "The court may determine what information can be published about a hearing and when it can be published," he wrote.

Other rules are already in place. Any republication of the manifesto and the video of the attacks "is prohibited and constitutes an offence", according to Mander's statement. But doesn't Tarrant have a right to address the court? Defendants in New Zealand are typically granted the right to provide information that could mitigate their sentence. But the judge is expected to be strict about keeping in check what can be said. The reason a defendant committed a crime is a factor that often helps determine punishment. But Tarrant's motivation is not in dispute, because he pleaded guilty to terrorism, said Kris Gledhill, a law professor at Auckland University of Technology, who recently outlined what to expect from the sentencing. "That should allow the judge to control the hearing firmly." So-called standby counsel may also help. The judge has appointed a lawyer to act in this capacity to "advise the offender about the law and the court process and to provide the offender with assistance if sought".

What is the maximum or most likely sentence? Life in prison is the country's most severe criminal punishment, and its Sentencing Act requires a minimum period of imprisonment before the possibility of parole: 10 years for murder and, in very serious cases, at least 17 years. There are no concurrent life sentences. But the Sentencing Act also states that the court can require that a life sentence for murder be served without the possibility of release. Such a sentence has never been imposed in New Zealand. Many New Zealanders believe that Tarrant will be the first to receive one. How do victims of the shooting feel about the process?

Many victims and their families have been struggling with a flood of emotions in the run-up to the sentencing. Wasseim Alsati, 36, a barber who was shot along with his daughter Alen, six, at Al Noor mosque, had to travel back to New Zealand from overseas, making use of an exception to the country's border lockdown specifically for the sentencing. Loading He said he had made the trip from Turkey, where he was seeking treatment for Alen, because "this was the only chance I would have to stand before him and say 'Look what you have done'". His daughter, he said, still wakes up in the middle of the night screaming and cannot walk more than a few metres without falling down because of the lasting effect of the shooting.
Sudhir Suryawanshi By

Express News Service

MUMBAI: The leadership challenges in Congress has broadened the divide between party leaders in Maharashtra. While some in Congress extended their support to the Gandhi family, the estranged leaders raised question over the functioning of the party.

Maharashtra Minister Sunil Kedar said that leaders -- Prithviraj Chavan, Milind Deora and Mukul Wasnik, who had written a letter to party president Sonia Gandhi, are not loyal to the Congress and Gandhi family.

It is shameful that Mukul Wasnik, Prithviraj Chavan and Milind Deora raised questions on the leadership of Gandhi family. These leaders must apologies for their actions, otherwise, Congress workers will not allow them to move freely in the state. Congress can give a fight to BJP only when the party is led by Gandhi family members. This is high time to stand behind Sonia Gandhi's leadership, said Kedar.

The Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) passed a resolution urging Sonia Gandhi to continue as the party president. However, if she wants to step down, then she should be replaced by her son, Rahul, the state unit said.

READ | 'He never made such remarks': Congress denies Rahul Gandhi's 'colluding with BJP' comment

MPCC president Balasaheb Thorat said Rahul Gandhi should lead the party, if he is not ready then Sonia Gandhi should continue as president.

Former state Minister Prithviraj Chavan also issued a statement standing behind Gandhi. Interestingly, former Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam also came out in support of Rahul Gandhi and termed this letter of Congress leader as a conspiracy against Gandhis.

Sources in Congress said, Rahul was unhappy with general secretary Mukul Wasnik, ergo he chose Rajeev Satav to fill the vacant Rajya Sabha seat.

Moreover, former Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Chavan has been sidelined in the alliance government as well as in the party. Former Minister Milind Deora too fell from grace in the eyes of Gandhis for his "inactiveness and selective approach to attack the BJP government.

All three leaders had no role in the party, therefore out of insecurity, they joined the rebellion group within the party. But their attempt of attacking and going against Gandhi family collapsed because of the aggressive approach of Rahul Gandhi in the meeting on Monday. The questions raised were genuine but they unnecessary leaked the letter and raise the issue at the wrong time, said a highly placed source in Congress.

Another senior Congress in Maharashtra who is close to Rahul said that this time Rahul is ready to take charge of the party but on a condition to run the party according to his wish. The old guard was an obstacles new idea and plans therefore this time, he did not want them in his new team. Rahul Gandhi wants to restructure the Congress party from top to bottom. He wants to get rid of all these leaders once for all, said the person close to Gandhi.
Many television actors resumed work after the lockdown was eased. Although the production houses are taking necessary precautions to keep the virus at bay, of late, a few actors and crew members have tested positive for Coronavirus. Recently, Kushal Tandon, who resumed shoot for his web series in Mumbai's Film City, had developed COVID-19 symptoms. The actor seemed quite worried as he took the COVID-19 test and was waiting for result. Finally, he heaved a sigh of relief after the production team of his show sent him his report. The Beyhadh actor tested negative for Coronavirus.

Kushal revealed to TOI that he felt relaxed after a stressful day. He also added that people whom he met recently were also anxious as they were worried about themselves. He further said that he will resume work from today, as he has to complete the shoot so that the show can release on time.



The actor was quoted by the leading daily as saying, "Thankfully the report has come out to be negative and not only me but people whom I had met recently too felt relaxed after a stressful day. I was flooded with messages and calls ever since the news of me showing COVID-19 symptoms came out. People whom I had met recently were really anxious because they too were worried about themselves. I was flooded with congratulatory messaged on WhatsApp. I didn't know how to react to those smileys and messages."

When asked if he will resume work from today, he said, "Of course, I need to finish the shoot so that this web show can be launched on time. Though I still have body ache and cough and cold, I will be going back to the shoot on Monday."

Also Read: Kushal Tandon Develops COVID-19 Symptoms While Shooting For A Web Show, Gets Tested!

Also Read: Ankita Lokhande & BF Vicky Jain Request Everyone To Join Global Prayer Meet For Sushant On I-Day
In France, Yellow Vest protesters agitated for more benefits paid for by the wealthy, and the government of President Emmanuel Macron blamed capitalism for fueling inequality. Atop Spains coalition government, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and his Spanish Socialist Workers Party want to fund more social spending with higher taxes on wealthy individuals. Elsewhere, some socialist movements are in decline. Germanys Social Democrats ended 2019 more unpopular than at any time in living memory. In the U.K., the opposition Labour Party was trounced at the polls in December under an avowed socialist who proposed re-nationalizing rail, energy and water companies. And Ecuador, once associated with authoritarian socialist regimes such as those in Venezuela and Nicaragua, is moving in a new direction under President Lenin Moreno, who unexpectedly steered the country to the right after taking office, spurring violent protests that forced him to move the government out of the capital temporarily.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 09:48:38|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese delivery services giant SF Express's trial to transport cargo in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been successful, the company said.

Large UAV FH-98 took off from an airport in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region on Friday and landed at the destination airport in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region after a flight of around one hour, said SF Express.

It was the first trial by SF Express to transport cargo using a large UAV.

FH-98 has been jointly developed by SF Express and China Aerospace Times Electronics Co., Ltd., based on the China-developed Y-5B freighter.

With a maximum takeoff weight of 5.25 tonnes, the FH-98 is among large UAVs in the country. It has been designed for large payloads up to 1.5 tonnes with a cabin space of 15 cubic meters.

The UAV model is capable of short takeoffs and landing and a cruising speed of 180 kph, thus making it suitable to serve a regional express hub and nearby cities. It is expected to greatly enhance the efficiency of regional logistics, said SF Express.

SF Express in 2017 set up Fonair, a subsidiary, to handle business on the large UAV. To date, Fonair has been given permission to use nine air routes to conduct test flights. Enditem
GPR Ventures has acquired a 79,200 square foot industrial property in Lincoln, closing escrow on August 20. Lincoln is a thriving community with strong growth potential, and we are excited to expand our footprint further in Placer County and the region with this acquisition.

GPR Ventures has closed escrow on the purchase of a 79,200 square foot property located at 1501 Aviation Blvd. in Lincoln. The building is currently 100 percent occupied by two tenants, including the local field office and repair center for business-jet aircraft developer Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. and Sacramento Valley RV, a family-owned RV service company. The acquisition is the 23rd purchase for GPR Ventures, whose total portfolio is primarily comprised of commercial developments in Sacramento County and Placer County.

Lincoln is a thriving community with strong growth potential, and we are excited to expand our footprint further in Placer County and the region with this acquisition, said GPR Ventures co-founder and Managing Principal Phil Rolla. The combination of a well-maintained building with a strong tenant base drew us to this property, and we are committed to actively supporting its upkeep.

TWEET THIS: Real estate investment firm #GPRVentures has purchased a 79,200 sq ft property in Lincoln, marking the 23rd purchase for the company within the #Sacramento region. The building is 100 percent occupied with 2 tenants. #business #commercial #realestate

Sacramento holds a promising future, even in the midst of so much uncertainty for the industry, said Glen Yonekura, GPR Ventures co-founder and Managing Principal. While many other major and mid-level markets are experiencing a downturn, Sacramento continues to grow and provide new opportunities, which is incredibly positive for the market.

Planned Capital Improvements

GPR Ventures expects to complete a full roof replacement in the coming weeks. Additional maintenance needs, such as asphalt repairs and HVAC replacement, will be completed as needed. Landscaping upgrades will include tree trimming to enhance visibility throughout the property.

For more information on GPR Ventures and its complete portfolio, visit https://www.gprventures.com/.

About GPR Ventures

Founded in 2011, GPR Ventures is a privately held real estate investment firm with offices in Silicon Valley and Sacramento that specializes in providing real estate opportunities for a select group of sophisticated investors. GPR Ventures uses a dynamic, fully developed process and the acquisition-to-disposition expertise of founders Glen Yonekura and Phillip Rolla to yield consistent results. GPRs portfolio includes 66 buildings totaling over 2 million square feet and an additional 26 acres of land. For additional information, please visit GPRVentures.com or call (916) 921-5005.


Representative image

Iran's constitutional watchdog on Monday set June 18 as date for the country's next presidential election, a vote that will choose the successor to President Hassan Rouhani who has served two four-year terms in office. The watchdog, the Guardian Council, approved the date, Iranian election headquarters chief Jamal Orf told the official IRNA news agency.

Candidates hoping to run in the balloting are to apply in early April for approval; the final list is to be announced in early June.

Under Iranian law, an incumbent president cannot run for a third term if he has already served for two consecutive terms in office. Rouhani was first elected in 2013 and reelected four years later.

Rouhani has been under increasing pressure from the US sanctions since President Donald Trump two years ago pulled America out of the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. The deal curbed Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Trump also imposed severe sanctions on Iran, sending its economy into a downward spiral.

Iran is now grappling also with the Trump administration's push to impose so-called snapback sanctions over what Washington says is Iran's violation of the nuclear deal.

In February, Iran held parliamentary elections that saw a turnout of 42.57 per cent  the lowest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and a sign of widespread dissatisfaction and the state of the economy amid intense US pressure. The newly elected house is dominated by conservative lawmakers.

Iran is also facing the Mideast region's largest and deadliest outbreak of the coronavirus, with over 358,000 registered cases, including 20,643 deaths.
Led by researchers in the Nossal Institute for Global Heath at the University of Melbourne, the project is analysing the stories and collating key lessons about health systems' responses to the pandemic across a range of places and over different time periods.

Arising from the lessons learned during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-16, the project also aims to enable frontline workers to feel heard. The World Health Organization (WHO) said engaging with and supporting health workers was key to overcoming the outbreak and it believes these insights are crucial in fighting COVID-19.

University of Melbourne lead researcher Daniel Strachan said that during the current pandemic it is critical to find novel ways to engage with healthcare workers and discover, in real time and without filtering, what their frustrations, obstacles, triumphs and difficulties are.

"We want to know what helps and what works well during these crises. Healthcare workers may have previously been unable to voice their concerns about their work for a range of reasons. We want to give them that chance as well as to share their successes, " Dr Strachan said.

The COVID-19 Health Worker Voices WhatsApp channel was developed in conjunction with researchers in the Melbourne eResearch Group within Melbourne School of Engineering's School of Computing and Information Systems and supported by Amazon Web Services. It is completely anonymous, using artificial intelligence to transcribe audio into text and automates text analytics, e.g. sentiment analysis, for researchers to later examine. Importantly the data set is not available to anyone but the researchers and it is fully encrypted on the Cloud.

"By giving health care workers access to an anonymous and encrypted application, we hope that they will feel able to voice the things that matter most to them," Dr Strachan said.

"Unlike other projects that ask how healthcare workers are faring, our project is unprompted and gives power to health workers to determine what is important to them and what they feel needs sharing. After all, they are in the best position to judge."

WhatsApp is viewed as widely accessible, enabling the participation of healthcare workers from high, middle and low income countries and well as urban, semi urban and rural settings.

"It was important to make this as accessible and easy to use for healthcare workers as possible. Using a simple interface that allows workers to record voice memos gives us access to authentic and unfiltered responses." Said Head of Nossal Institute's Health Systems and Financing unit Katherine Gilbert.

Stories of challenge and innovation will be captured, as the needs and capacities of health systems evolve during the current crisis.

"It's hoped that the simple voice memos will give us insight into the specific challenges they face, as well as solutions proposed and innovations undertaken, by both health workers and the health systems in which they work," Dr Strachan said.

"The stories will also convey the range of coping strategies adopted by health workers over time."

Researchers also hope the sharing of stories may also be cathartic for health workers during a pressurised time.

The project is open to all healthcare professionals including GPs, non-GP specialists, nurses, carers and allied health professionals.

The app itself was developed within approximately one month, demonstrating the ability of the Melbourne eResearch Group to quickly and effectively respond to the research software engineering needs of the University and wider community.

Health workers can share their story by going directly to COVID-19 Health Worker Voices hosted by WhatsApp on their smartphone and texting "hello" to start. More information on the COVID-19 Health Worker Voices website

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Scientists have reported the worlds first case of a human being reinfected with the coronavirus in a discovery that could have significant implications for the development of vaccines, and hopes of natural immunity against the virus.

Researchers at Hong Kong Universitys department of microbiology said genetic sequencing of the virus showed that a Hong Kong man was infected twice by different versions of the coronavirus months apart.

According to the study, the patient was a 33-year-old man who was in good health. When he was first infected, he suffered a cough, sore throat, fever and headache for three days. He had a test that confirmed Covid-19 and he was hospitalised on 29 March.

He was discharged on 14 April after two negative swab tests.

Four months later, he was returning to Hong Kong from Spain via the UK when he tested positive during entry screening at Hong Kong airport on 15 August. He was hospitalised again but had no symptoms throughout.

Experts cautioned against jumping to conclusions based on a single case, but they acknowledged that the discovery was a concern.

Announcing the results, the Hong Kong University researchers said: An apparently young and healthy patient had a second episode of Covid-19 infection which was diagnosed 4.5 months after the first episode.

This case illustrates that reinfection can occur just after a few months of recovery from the first infection. Our findings suggest that Sars-CoV-2 may persist in the global human population as is the case for other common-cold associated human coronaviruses, even if patients have acquired immunity via natural infection.

Since the immunity can be short-lasting after natural infection, vaccination should also be considered for those with one episode of infection.

Patients with previous Covid-19 infection should also comply with epidemiological control measures such as universal masking and social distancing.

If the research, published in the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, is correct, then it could mean that vaccines against the virus do not give permanent protection and people will not be able to rely on being immune to the virus after recovering from an infection.

Dr David Strain, from the University of Exeter, said: This is a worrying finding for several reasons. The first, as is laid out in this manuscript, is that it suggests that previous infection is not protective. The second is that it raises the possibility that vaccinations may not provide the hope that we have been waiting for.

Vaccinations work by simulating infection to the body, thereby allowing the body to develop antibodies. If antibodies dont provide lasting protection, we will need to revert to a strategy of viral near-elimination in order to return to a more normal life.

There have already been a number of reports of patients being reinfected with the virus, but these were based on clinical features of the disease. In this case, however, scientists used genetic sequencing to analyse the separate strains of the virus.

Dr Jeffrey Barrett, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, urged caution over the news, arguing that it was hard to draw conclusions until the full research study had been published.

He said: This is certainly stronger evidence of reinfection than some of the previous reports because it uses the genome sequence of the virus to separate the two infections. It seems much more likely that this patient has two distinct infections than a single infection followed by a relapse.

An important point about this one case, which is not mentioned in the press release, is that the second infection is asymptomatic. It was caught by screening tests on returning passengers at HK airport, and the individual never developed any symptoms from their second infection.

He said that given the number of global infections so far, one case of reinfection was not surprising and he warned that the research implications were too broad given it was based on one case.

This may be very rare, and it may be that second infections, when they do occur, are not serious (though we dont know whether this person was infectious during their second episode).

Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said: The significant thing here is that being reinfected with a mutated strain demonstrates that it is more likely to be reinfection, rather than the same infection that has hung around because the virus has not actually been got rid of, as some people have suggested happens.

The finding of a mutant strain is absolutely nothing to be shocked or surprised by. It would actually be more interesting if there were no mutations cropping up.
A still from Sir Steve McQueen's Mangrove (BBC)

Mangrove will open the BFI London Film Festival, it has been announced.

It is one of five films from director Sir Steve McQueens Small Axe anthology series for BBC One.

It will be part of the festivals expanded online presence and regional screenings, prompted by the coronavirus pandemic and concerns over accessibility.

The majority of this years festival will feature virtual premieres from a programme of more than 55 films, many with an introduction and Q&A, as well as talks, roundtables and a new exhibition of immersive art.

Mangrove, which stars Letitia Wright, Shaun Parkes and Malachi Kirby, will receive its European premiere on 7 October.

Read more: The best British films of the 2010s

The film comes after the 50th anniversary of the march of 150 protesters of West Indian, African and South Asian heritage in Notting Hill, west London.

Director Steve McQueen attends the 2018 SFFILM Awards Night. (Steve Jennings/WireImage)

They marched to local police stations in protest against police harassment in their communities including the Mangrove restaurant, and nine protest leaders  Frank Crichlow, Darcus Howe, Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Barbara Beese, Rupert Boyce, Rhodan Gordon, Anthony Innis, Rothwell Kentish and Godfrey Millett  were arrested and charged with incitement to riot.

The group later became known as the Mangrove 9.

Sir Steve said: I couldnt be happier that Mangrove will open this years BFI London Film Festival. Although the themes are universal, Mangrove is a London story. It may have happened 50 years ago, but its as relevant today as it was then.

Festival audiences will be invited to book tickets to preview the film for free at venues across the UK on 7 October ahead of its broadcast on BBC One this autumn.

Festival Director Tricia Tuttle, right, and director Steve McQueen pose for photographers upon arrival at a party organized after the screening of the film 'Widows' showing as part of the opening gala of the BFI London Film Festival in London, Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018. (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)

Tricia Tuttle, director of the BFI London Film Festival, said: This new series from Oscar-winning director and BFI fellow Steve McQueen could not be more timely in the context of recent global protests around anti-black racism and inequality, and McQueen has been a powerful voice in challenging the status quo and demanding inclusion within the British film industry.

Story continues

His Widows also opened the 62nd BFI London Film Festival (LFF) in 2018 and we have never had the same filmmaker open the LFF twice in such a close time frame; thats both a testament to the urgency of the film and potency of his filmmaking.

Mangrove and 11 other new films from the programme will screen in previews across the UK, in partnership with a UK-wide cinemas network, to craft the most audience-accessible version of the festival to date.

The event will run from 7-18 October.

Small Axe will premiere on BBC One and iPlayer this autumn and air on Amazon Prime Video in the US.
LOS ANGELESIn September of 2018, just three months after the Federal Communications Commission abolished its own net neutrality rules, Californias then-Governor Jerry Brown signed the states own net neutrality lawa bill considered the nations toughest on enforcing open internet standards on telecom companies who do business in the countrys most populous state.

The FCC has contended that its rules repealing the 2015 net neutrality regulations also prevented states from imposing their own legal open internet standards. California passed its law anyway. But the state agreed to put the law on hold until a federal court ruled on a lawsuit over the FCCs net neutrality repeala decision which came last October.

Though the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC had the right to repeal net neutrality, the judges also made clear that Commission Chair Ajit Pais contention that state-level laws were invalid as well would not fly. The decision cleared the way for California to put its 2018 net neutrality legislation onto the books.

But that hasnt happened yet, and now several powerful opponents are taking steps to prevent the Golden State from ever putting the law into action. The latest such foe, as of last week, is the United States Chamber of Commerce, according to a report by MediaPost.

The Chamber filed a brief as part of a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against California, to stop the net neutrality law.

Net neutrality rules require that internet service providers treat all online data traffic in neutral fashion, neither slowing down some traffic, nor giving an online fast lane to other content providers.

Because there is no principled way to limit regulation of the Internet to a single state ... Californias new regulatory regime raises more questions than it answers, the Chamber of Commerce said in the brief, filed in U.S. District Court in Sacramento.

The Chamber and the DOJ want federal Judge John A. Mendezwho was appointed in 2008 by President George W. Bushto slap California with an injunction, barring the state from imposing its own net neutrality rules, despite the D.C. Courts decision allowing state-level net neutrality.

The DOJ lawsuit was filed within an hour of when Brown signed the law in 2018, but was on hold as California waited for the D.C. Courts ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Mozilla Foundation and several other open internet advocacy groups.

Several major broadband industry lobbying groups also joined the DOJ lawsuit. The Chamber of Commerce in its filing last week argued that it would be profoundly inequitable to force internet providers to come into near-immediate compliance with net neutrality rules in California.

Photo By Lars Nissen / Pixabay
A man charged with the murder of a popular apprentice plumber at a birthday party in a Melbourne high-rise has claimed he was only acting in self-defence.

Rian Farrell, 22, of Newport, who at his last court appearance in June tried to do a runner, is accused of murdering 'class clown' Liam Cahill, 22, who was celebrating a friend's birthday at a party on the 15th floor of a Docklands high-rise on May 30.

Farrell appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Monday via videolink from his prison cell where his lawyer, Stary Norton Halphen's Sam Norton, called on police to drop the murder charge.

Rian Farrell, 22, of Newport, burst out into tears and tried to make a run for it in June. He has been charged with one count of murder but is claiming self defence

Liam Cahill (pictured left) a popular young apprentice plumber from Pascoe Vale, Melbourne, was allegedly stabbed to death in June in front of horrified party goers

One of Rian Farrell's mates connects with a cameraman outside the Melbourne Magistrates' Court in June

Farrell is accused of stabbing to death Mr Cahill about 10.30pm before fleeing the high rise apartment by climbing down the wall.

Mr Norton told the court that he was in discussions with police and prosecutors to withdraw the murder charge.

Failing that, he said he would apply to have the offence discharged by the court.

Outside court, Mr Norton told Daily Mail Australia his client had acted in self defence against his alleged victim.

It remains unclear what sparked the alleged attack against Mr Cahill, who reportedly knew his alleged killer.

Farrell's Facebook page gives away little indication to a motive.

On May 28 - two days before the incident - Farrell appeared to be interested in purchasing a Playstation 4.

On the day of the alleged murder, witnesses reported hearing the noise of an altercation throughout the building, with one resident telling of their fear when they heard a young woman screaming.

'It was so loud we thought it was on our floor, but I think it was downstairs,' the resident told the Herald Sun.

'It was terrifying.'

The fight was heard by another resident, Rocky Petrelli, who lives in a 14th floor apartment below.

Rian Farrell, 22, of Newport, sat gasping for air throughout most of his short filing hearing in June before going ballistic when two mates sitting in the court room shouted out to him

Close friend Macayla Dickson wept as she described Mr Cahill's generous spirit. Pictured: Liam Cahill (left) and Macayla Dickson (right)

Liam Cahill (left) was allegedly stabbed to death in June after an alleged fight at a party on the 15th floor of the M Docklands, Melbourne. Pictured with close friend Macayla Dickson.

'It was just really noisy, it was like there was elephants stomping the ground in the apartment above, that's what I could hear below,' Mr Petrelli told Seven News.

The apprentice plumber from Pascoe Vale in Melbourne's north was allegedly stabbed several times before his accused killer fled, climbing down two balconies on the side of the building in a desperate bid to escape.

One of the apartments he's accused of trying to break into during his alleged escape bid was Mr Petrelli's.

'It's pretty scary that you think that it's a safe building especially when you're on the 14th floor and you've got someone jumping balconies to try and escape the building,' Mr Petrelli said.

He was unsuccessful, and climbed down another balcony to the 13th floor where he ran through an unlocked apartment in his bid for freedom.

The suspect was tackled to the ground by police a short distance away.

Mr Cahill was given first aid by another resident of the building, but couldn't be saved.

The alleged murder traumatised the other party guests who had to be comforted by police at the scene.

'Why did you do this to me?' screamed a woman at the scene.

A young woman with bright red hair was seen screaming in the lobby, falling to her knees in distress before being comforted by police and led away.

A television cameraman films a friend of Rian Farrell outside a Melbourne court in June. The cameraman was attacked seconds later

Liam Cahill (pictured right) enjoying the ocean last year. The young apprentice plumber loved life and brought joy to many people with his fun-loving sense of humour

A suspect was tackled and arrested by police a short distance from the scene. The suspect can be seen in CCTV footage lying on the ground in a corridor behind a stack of toilet rolls

Police and emergency services swarmed the building at about 11pm, arresting a suspect.

Police could be seen leading young people sobbing with grief from the building.

Mr Cahill's friends took to social media to leave tributes for him, saying how much they loved the popular young tradesman.

'I will love you forever brother, I am going to miss you everyday. Thank you for every single memory together,' wrote one friend on Facebook.

Close friend Macayla Dickson wept as she described Mr Cahill's sense of humour.

'He was just the best person. Just always had a laugh and always the class clown and just had his heart out for everyone,' she told Nine News.

Mr Dickson wrote on social media: Waking up seeing all these posts praying to God its all a joke. I am so grateful for having the pleasure of being in your life. I love you and I hope youre at peace now... forever be in my heart.'

A distraught red-haired woman was comforted by emergency services and led away on in June after the alleged stabbing

Liam Cahill (left) being cheeky with the lads. His many friends poured out messages of grief on social media, saying they would never forget him, and they would cherish their memories

Forensics teams scoured the apartment building on Sunday

Macayla Dickson (pictured left) said close friend Liam Cahill (right) was like the 'class clown' and would make everybody laugh

On Monday, Farrell sat quietly as the brief hearing took place via videolink.

At his last appearance, he had appeared in shock as his lawyer told the court this was his first time in prison.

The short filing hearing had otherwise gone to plan until two mates disrupted the hearing.

The pair - who both wore hats inside the court room in a blatant sign of disrespect for the magistrate - yelled out 'stay strong brother' as Farrell was being led from the prison dock by two security guards.

The exchange saw Farrell burst out into tears and attempt to rush for the prison dock door.

Farrell was tackled and wrestled into an adjoining room as he cried out to his mates, telling them he loved them.

Farrell could be heard screaming from behind the locked prison door as his crying mates rushed outside of the court house.

Once on William Street, the hatted duo had no intention of talking to the waiting media pack, with one lout lashing out at a television cameraman.

The veteran cameraman shook off the ugly confrontation.

Farrell was remanded in custody and will face Melbourne Magistrates Court again in a month.
Italian COVID vaccine human testing starts Italy will not be slave of other countries says Spallanzani doc

(ANSAmed) - ROME, 24 AGO - Human testing on an Italian-made COVID vaccine started on Monday.



The first volunteer, a woman, was inoculated at Rome's premier infectious disease hospital, the Spallanzani.



She said she was "proud" to have been the first to take a dose of the vaccine.



"I hope to be useful to our country", she added.



The vaccine has been produced by the Italian biotechnology firm ReiThera of Castel Romano near Rome.



"Today, an historic phase in research begins," said Lazio Governor Nicola Zingaretti, whose government helped fund the project.



Spallanzani doctors said they hoped to produce the vaccine by next spring.



Health Minisyer Roberto Speranza said "Italian research has met the challenge".



Lazio health councillor Alessio D'Amato said "the vaccine will allow us to emerge from the nightmare".



Spallanzani scientific chief Giuseppe Ippolito said Italy would not be "the slave of other countries" in the vaccine field.



Several other countries including Russia and Australia have announced vaccine testing. (ANSAmed).




FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- BIS Digital, Inc., a pioneer in digital recording and integrated AV technology solutions, is pleased to announce the successful acquisition of the digital recording and AV solutions divisions of Office Business Systems Holdings, Inc. (OBS) in Fairfield, New Jersey. Established in 1965, OBS is a leading provider of digital dictation, speech recognition, and communications recording technology solutions in New Jersey and the surrounding states. The addition of OBS accelerates BIS Digital's growth strategy and marks its entry into the Northeast corridor.

BIS Digital, Inc.

This acquisition broadens BIS Digital's range of digital dictation and speech recognition solutions including Philips, Olympus, Winscribe, and Nuance Dragon as well as ASC traditional telephony, Voice over IP and radio communications recording solutions. It also extends its reach into the healthcare and legal markets, adding to its foothold in government, law enforcement and court systems.

"We're excited to bring the OBS talent in technical service and sales to preserve the strong customer relationships they have built over many years," said Steve Coldren, president of BIS Digital. "This way, the transition for current OBS customers will be seamless, and we can offer them a full spectrum of integrated AV technology including video conferencing, live streaming and wireless presentation solutions."

"All signs pointed to BIS Digital as an ideal partner," according to Doug Smith, president of Office Business Systems. "Our firms share a customer-centric business approach, entrepreneurial spirit and decades-long tradition of providing reliable AV recording solutions," he said.

About BIS Digital

BIS Digital provides high-quality AV, recording and conferencing technology for courts, law enforcement and government. Its digital court recording software, DCR, serves as the centerpiece of its comprehensive 360-degree service that includes system design, hardware procurement, installation, integration, training, and technical support. To learn more about how BIS Digital improves operations with innovative technology solutions, visit bisdigital.com.

Contact

Judy Franke

Director of Marketing

BIS Digital

[email protected]

800.834.7674 x4520

SOURCE BIS Digital, Inc.

Related Links

http://bisdigital.com


The next morning, the woman said, she woke up naked in his bed with vaginal and abdominal pain. She grabbed her clothes and left. Later that day, she said, she asked McGreevy what happened, and he said they hooked up, but she told police that she did not consent to sex.

She said that she told him that she had no memory of the night and that McGreevy told her, You wanted it.

A third woman, now 36, said McGreevy sexually assaulted her in June 2010. According to an affidavit, McGreevy had invited the woman to the movies with friends, but when the woman arrived, McGreevy was the only person there.

McGreevy told (the woman) some of the people had canceled and others were meeting them at the movie theater; no one ever came to the movie theater, according to the affidavit.

McGreevy then drove the woman back to her car, which was parked outside his theater production building at 222 S. 19th St. The woman said he grabbed her hand, took her into the green room and sat her on the couch, forcing her to perform oral sex.
By ANI

MUMBAI: Actor Rhea Chakraborty and her family have not received any summons from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), so far, in connection with the death case of late actor Sushant Singh Rajput, said her lawyer on Monday.

"Rhea Chakraborty and her family have not received any summons from the Central Bureau of Investigation, so far. If they receive a summon, they will appear before the agency," Satish Maneshinde, lawyer of the actor.

The Enforcement Directorate had already questioned Chakraborty twice -- on Augut 9 and 10 -- and 56 persons' statements and other relevant evidence have been collected.

The agency had on July 31 registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) in the case after FIR was filed by KK Singh, the late actor's father, against Chakraborty in Bihar on July 28. In his complaint, KK Singh had alleged that around Rs 15 crore was withdrawn from Rajput's bank account in the last one year and transferred to "accounts that had no link with him".

On Saturday too, the teams of the CBI and the Mumbai Police visited the residence of Rajput as a part of the investigation in the case related to his death. Both Neeraj (Sushant's cook) and Siddharth Pithani were grilled by the probe agency in connection with the case.

On August 19, the Supreme Court had asked the probe agency to investigate the case related to the actor's death, while holding that the FIR registered in Patna was legitimate.

The single-judge bench of Justice Hrishikesh Roy had observed that the Bihar government was competent to recommend transferring the case to the CBI. It had also asked the Mumbai Police to hand over all the evidence collected so far in the case to the CBI.

The agency has registered an FIR against Rhea Chakraborty and others in connection with the actor's death after the Centre accepted Bihar government's recommendation to transfer the probe in the matter from Patna.

The FIR was registered in Patna on a complaint filed by the actor's father KK Singh under sections related to abetment to suicide.

Rajput was found dead at his residence on June 14.
A state program that has provided free wireless hotspots to 26 rural Western Massachusetts communities that lack high-speed internet has been extended to the end of the year.

The program designed to help people who are working and going to school remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic began in April and was slated to end in September. The program has now been extended through the end of the year, according to officials from Gov. Charlie Bakers office.

The program is run by the Massachusetts Broadband Institute at MassTech and KCST USA, operator of the state-owned MassBroadband 123 fiber optic network. The hotspots offer 250 megabit per second wireless connections free to towns and residents. The sites were connected with the support of the regional service providers AccessPlus, Crocker Communications, and Westfield Gas and Electric, officials said.

Each site will provide residents with instructions on how to access the hotspots. People using them are urged to follow social distancing guidelines by staying at least six feet from anyone else. More information about the program is available on the MassTech website at https://broadband.masstech.org/wifi.

The locations of the sites are as follows: Ashfield, Belding Memorial Library; Becket Town Hall; Blandford Town Hall; Charlemont, Hawlemont Regional School; Chesterfield Town Offices; Colrain Public Library, Cummington Town Hall; Florida Senior Center; Goshen Town Offices; Hancock Elementary School; Hawley Town Offices; Heath at the former Heath Elementary School; Leyden Town Offices; Monroe Town Offices; New Braintree, Leroy Pollard Memorial Library; New Marlborough Library; New Salem, Swift River School; Petersham Town Offices; Sandisfield Town Hall; Savoy Town Hall; Tolland Town Hall; Warwick Community School; Washington Town Hall; Wendell Town Offices; Windsor Town Hall and Worthington, R.H. Conwell Elementary School.

Officials meanwhile continue to extend permanent high-speed broadband to rural communities. Services have been added to 21 of the 53 communities identified and 11 additional communities should have service by the end of 2020.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  The Michigan Attorney Generals lawsuit against major global chemical producers like 3M and DuPont, which made toxic fluorochemicals that have caused widespread pollution, is moving forward.

Judge George J. Quist denied multiple dismissal motions, allowing the case to advance following oral arguments on Friday, Aug. 21 in Kent County Circuit Court, according to state attorney general Dana Nessels office.

The case now moves to discovery, a pre-trial phase in which litigation parties seek documents and other evidence.

We are eager to proceed with discovery and push the case forward now that the defense motions have been denied, said Nessel in a statement. The courts orders affirm that the state can continue to make its case to hold these companies responsible for the impacts of these forever chemicals on the environment and on public health.

In January, Nessel sued multiple chemical companies seeking damages for environmental contamination caused by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. The state claims the manufacturers concealed the risks posed by the chemicals and misled the public by promoting subtly-altered chemical varieties as safe alternatives.

The case was transferred from Washtenaw County in March.

Quist denied eight motions to dismiss last week and granted one, for Arkema France.

Remaining defendants include 3M, E.I. DuPont De Nemours and Company, The Chemours Company, The Chemours Company FC LLC, DowDuPont Inc., Corteva Inc., DuPont De Nemours Inc., Dyneon LLC, Archroma U.S. Inc., Archroma Management LLC, Arkema Inc., AGC Chemicals Americas Inc., Daikin America Inc., Daikin Industries Ltd., Solvay Specialty Polymers USA LLC.

The case is separate but related to a pair of new lawsuits filed in state and circuit court last week, which make similar claims against many of the same companies.

The cases aim to recover damages and costs from tackling PFAS contamination, which has been found at 138 locations and in the drinking water serving 1.9 million in Michigan.

The initial case has excluded claims related to contamination caused by PFAS-based firefighting foam, which has used for decades by the military, airports and municipal fire departments. Instead, the case is litigating damage from the legacy of commercial PFAS usage in Michigan.

The large and diverse family of fluorinated PFAS chemicals has been highly prized by industry due to their ability to withstand heat and repel grease, oil and water.

The majority of PFAS contamination sites in Michigan are related to industrial use of the chemicals, which, because they bioaccumulate in people and animals, and dont easily breakdown in the environment, have earned the nickname forever chemicals.

Exposure to certain PFAS chemicals is considered harmful at the low parts-per-trillion level and can, among other things, increase the risk of kidney and testicular cancer, suppress the bodys immune system response, cause pregnancy complications and low birth weight.

High profile examples of industrial PFAS pollution in Michigan include the Wolverine World Wide tannery pollution in Rockford and Belmont, discovery of highly-contaminated municipal water in the city of Parchment traced to a former paper mill, and a multi-county fish advisory on the Huron River traced to a chrome plating company in Wixom.

Nessel signed contracts last fall to pursue PFAS litigation with three out-of-state firms collaborating on a three-year contingency fee deal, known as the Fields Team.

On the administrative side, new enforceable rules requiring testing and potential filtration for PFAS in public water system took hold in Michigan this month.

Related stories:

Michigan PFAS site list surges past 100

Substantial drops seen in PFAS entering Michigan waterways

In quest to destroy PFAS, MSU diamond tech shows promise

Questions raised about adequacy of Rogue River PFAS testing

Michigan collects 30k gallons of toxic PFAS firefighting foam

Slotkin amendment would help arm Michigan for PFAS battle
Jio Platforms is expected to use its 388 million mobile phone subscribers as the cornerstone of an e-commerce and digital services business to rival Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart.

On July 15, 2020, Google agreed to invest Rs 33,737 crore (Rs 337.37 billion) for a 7.7% stake in Jio, Reliance Industries's technology venture, and to cooperate on technology initiatives, including development of affordable smartphones.

Jio also revealed that it secured Rs 730 crore (Rs 7.3 billion) from wireless technology leader Qualcomm by selling a small stake in its technology venture, adding to a slew of investments since April that has crossed Rs 1.18 lakh crore.

'Qualcomm Ventures' investment will translate into a 0.15 per cent equity stake in Jio Platforms on a fully diluted basis,' the company said in a statement.

With this deal, Reliance has sold 32.97% stake in Jio Platforms Ltd -- the unit that houses India's youngest but largest telecom firm Jio Infocomm and apps.

In total, Jio has raised Rs 1,52,055.45 crore.

Qualcomm, which is the 12th marquee firm to have set a sight on India's hottest digital play in as many weeks, values Jio Platforms at Rs 4.91 lakh crore, the statement said.

Proceeds from the stake sales in Jio Platforms along with the Rs 53,124 crore (Rs 531.24 billion) raised in a rights issue in June and from sale of a 49% stake in its fuel retail network to BP last summer for Rs 7,000 crore (Rs 70 billion), will help the company become net debt-free, Reliance announced last month, once the promised funds come in (75% of the funds from the rights issue will come in next year).

As of March, Reliance had a net debt of over Rs 1.6 lakh crore.

The Jio Platforms deal spree began on April 22 when social networking giant Facebook agreed to acquire a 9.9% stake for Rs 43,573.62 crore (Rs 435.73 billion).

Since then, six US private equity firms invested in Jio: Silver Lake Partners bought a 2.08% stake for Rs 10,202.55 crore (Rs 102.02 billion), Vista Equity Partners paid Rs 11,367 crore (Rs 113.67 billion) for a 2.32% stake, General Atlantic acquired a 1.34% stake for Rs 6,598.38 crore (Rs 65.98 billion), KKR paid Rs 11,367 crore (REs 113.67 billion) for a 2.32% stake, TPG bought a 0.93% stake for Rs 4,546.80 crore (Rs 45.46 billion) and L Catterton picked up 0.39% for Rs 1,894.50 crore (Rs 18.94 billion).

The investment arm of computer chip giant Intel Corp picked up a 0.39% stake for Rs 1,894.50 crore (Rs 18.94 billion).

Jio Platforms has also received a funds from the Middle East which started with Mubadala Investment Co which picked up a 1.85% stake for Rs 9,093.60 crore (Rs 90.93 billion) and was followed by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, buying a 2.32% stake for Rs 11,367 crore (Rs 113.67 billion). The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority picked a 1.16% stake for Rs 5,683.50 crore (Rs 56.83 billion).

Jio Platforms -- which is amassing a wide range of services from music streaming to online retail and payments -- is expected to use its 388 million mobile phone subscribers as the cornerstone of an e-commerce and digital services business to rival Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart.

Jio has become Reliance's growth engine, combining with the company's fast-growing retail arm to help in offsetting the decline in oil and petrochemicals.

Please click to check Reliance Jio's total stake sale at a glance:

Information: PTI

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com and Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
The Goa unit of the Congress party unanimously welcomed the decision of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) to continue with cas the interim president saying that she alone had the capacity to unite party workers.

Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat said that the party would emerge stronger under her leadership.

Welcome decision by [the] CWC to authorize @INCIndia President Smt. Sonia Gandhiji to affect necessary organisational changes that she may deem appropriate to tackle all challenges faced by the party. I am confident that [the] Congress Party will emerge stronger and victorious in days ahead, Kamat tweeted.

Kamat was among the first local leaders on Sunday night to throw his weight behind the Gandhi family saying that they alone would be the right people to take the party forward.

On Sunday evening, Kamat had said that Sonia Gandhi had led the Congress party keeping everyone united during the crisis and the only question was how to strengthen her and Rahul Gandhi to defeat the divisive BJP.

Similarly, state Congress president Girish Chodankar called for greater unity in the party.

@INCGoa welcomes CWC decision urging @INCIndia Chief Sonia Gandhi to continue guiding & keeping the party united. V urge all #Congress to unitedly support @RahulGandhi as he single handedly leads India against attack on the Constitution, our Democracy, the mismanagement of the economy & Covid-19, Chodankar tweeted.
Congress party president Sonia Gandhi is likely to offer her resignation from her post in the today's CWC meeting, scheduled to be held at 11 am. A letter reportedly sent to the party leadership and signed by top Congressmen and Congresswomen, including former union ministers, ex-chief ministers, sitting Members of Parliament (MPs) prompted the 73-year-old party's interim chief to make this decision.

The letter is thought to have urged the top leadership to bring about change in the organisational structure. However, it also stressed that the Nehru-Gandhi family will "always remain an integral part of the collective leadership" of the Congress party.

After details of the letter became public, sources close to Sonia Gandhi said that in response, she might quit as party's interim chief and ask the leadership to scout for a full-time president. Soon after, Congress' chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala denied reports and claimed that Sonia Gandhi has not communicated any such decision to him.

While Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, his counterparts in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan Bhupesh Baghel and Ashok Gehlot, Congress leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and former ministers Ashwani Kumar, Salman Khurshid and KK Tewary backed the Gandhis, those wanting changes included Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Kapil Sibal, Mukul Wasnik, Manish Tewari, Shashi Tharoor and ex-Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda.

Sonia Gandhi is the longest-serving Congress party president from 1998-2017. She has been the interim president of the party since 2019. Sonia reluctantly took over as interim chief on August 10 last year following a request from the CWC after her son Rahul Gandhi declined to stay in a chief post the 2019 Lok Sabha poll debacle.

All eyes are now on the CWC meeting to see whether Sonia Gandhi resigns as she did in 1999 after the then Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Sharad Pawar questioned her foreign origins. The CWC eventually rejected the resignation and Pawar along with P A Sangma and Tariq Anwar had to quit the Congress to form the NCP.

Congress leaders backing Sonia Gandhi

1. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh was one of the first leaders who came out in support of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. "Sonia Gandhi should continue to helm the Congress as long as she wants," he said in a statement, adding that Rahul Gandhi should thereafter take over as he is fully competent to lead the party.

2. Bhupesh Baghel, chief minister of Chhattisgarh who defeated one of the BJP's longest-serving chief ministers- Raman Singh wrote, "For every challenge, Sonia Ji and Rahul Ji are the beacons of light. We are all with you. Congress workers in Chhattisgarh and crores from across the country along with citizens are with you".

"The troubled times our country is going through, only your guidance will get rid of those troubles," Baghel added.
Police gather in front of the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Wisconsin Governor Sending National Guard to Kenosha

National Guard members are rushing to Kenosha to help patrol city streets in the wake of rioting overnight Sunday.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announced that 125 members will be in the city by Monday night to help protect critical infrastructure and assist in maintaining public safety and the ability of individuals to peacefully protest.

Evers, a Democrat, said the limited mobilization was ordered based on requests from local officials.

National Guard members will be focused on supporting the needs of local first responders to protect critical infrastructure, such as utilities and fire stations, and to ensure Kenoshians are able to assemble safely, he added in a statement released by his office.

Maj. Gen. Paul Knapp, Wisconsins adjutant general, said soldiers and airmen are prepared to help preserve public safety.

A group of Black Lives Matter protesters hold a rally on the steps of the Kenosha County Courthouse, which was closed because of damage inflicted by rioters just hours earlier, in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Morry Gash/AP Photo)

Rioters smash windows at the Kenosha County Administration Building during unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via Reuters)

In a separate video announcement, Evers urged people gathering to protest to remain peaceful and wear masks because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chaos erupted in Kenosha, a town of some 100,000 on Lake Michigan south of Milwaukee, late Sunday after police officers shot Jacob Blake while responding to a 911 call.

Rioters burned a number of businesses and looted others.

Law enforcement officers in riot gear were seen Monday protecting buildings from further harm.

Kenosha County officials said both the courthouse and a nearby administration building would be closed for at least one day because of damage inflicted by rioters.

The county later declared a statement of emergency and said a curfew will begin at 8 p.m. and run through 7 a.m. Tuesday, east of I-94.

The public needs to be off the streets for their safety, officials said in a press release.

A protestor shines a flashlight in the direction of Kenosha County Sheriffs Deputies outside the Kenosha Police Department in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via Reuters)

Garbage and dump trucks were set ablaze by rioters near the Kenosha County Courthouse where they had been set up to prevent damage to the building, in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020. (Sean Krajacic/Kenosha News via AP)

Democrats immediately condemned the shooting even though the video clip that circulated widely online was just 19 seconds.

This was not an accident. This wasnt bad police work. This felt like some sort of vendetta being taken out on a member of our community, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Democrat, said during a virtual briefing. He claimed that Blake was trying to de-escalate the situation.

Yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said in a statement.

President Donald Trump was being briefed before noon on the matter, the White House said.

Other officials asked the public to wait until an investigation is finished into the shooting.

I support a full and thorough investigation into the events leading up to yesterdays officer-involved shooting in Kenosha, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in a statement. While emotions are understandably running high in the Kenosha community and elsewhere, I urge any demonstrators to remain peaceful and give our justice system the opportunity to work.

Burned out vehicles are seen after a night of riots and unrest in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Morry Gash/AP Photo)

Demonstrators march in protest of last nights police shooting, in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Until that investigation is completed, we ask that you withhold prejudgment about the incident and please let the process take place, Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha Professional Police Association, a police union, said in a statement to news outlets.

As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident, he added.

The video shows two officers following Blake as the man reached into a vehicle before being shot.

In a brief statement, the Kenosha Police Department said officers were responding to a domestic incident.

After the shooting, officers provided immediate aid to Blake and he was taken via Flight for Life to a hospital in Milwaukee, the police said. Blake was in serious condition.

The Wisconsin Department of Justices Division of Criminal Investigation is investigating the officer-involved shooting, with help from the Wisconsin State Patrol and the Kenosha County Sheriffs Office.

The officers involved were placed on administrative leave.

According to a criminal complaint obtained by The Epoch Times, Blake was charged last month for trespassing, third-degree sexual assault, and disorderly conduct. Blake is accused of having sex with a woman with the initials LNB on May 3 in Kenosha without that persons consent, according to the complaint.

Evers on Monday also signed an executive order convening a special session of the state legislature on policing accountability and transparency.

Jake Loewen is seen cleaning up through a broken window at the Harborside Academy in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Morry Gash/AP Photo)

Windows are boarded up at a school near the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Bills he wants to be passed would establish statewide use of force standards for all law enforcement agencies, create a $1 million grant program to fund community organizations, and prohibit no-knock warrants.

Evers is upset that the legislature has so far refused to take up legislation dealing with the issues despite his urging.

This is not the time for politics. I am urging Republican leadership to rise to this important moment in history, to put people before politics, and to put lives of black Wisconsinites above politics, Evers said at the virtual briefing.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, said in response that he spoke to Evers earlier in the day by phone and requested he work with lawmakers through a task force on racial disparities that Vos formed on Monday.

We have an opportunity to bring people together to find solutions. Instead, the governor is choosing to turn to politics again by dictating liberal policies that will only deepen the divisions in our state, he said in a statement.

But some lawmakers signaled support for Evers move. The time for change is now, Senate Minority Leader Janet Bewley, a Democrat, said in a tweet.
Egypt has taken several steps to provide assistance to Lebanon, including launching an airlift to provide humanitarian aid and relief supplies following the Beirut blast

Two military planes carrying the ninth shipment of Egyptian aid to Lebanon in the form of 28 tons of food and medical supplies arrived from Egypt to Beirut on Monday morning, Egyptian state-run news agency MENA reported.

The package, which arrived at Beiruts Rafic Hariri International Airport, is the latest Egyptian support shipment to Lebanon after a deadly explosion in the capital earlier this month killed at least 177 people and injured thousands.

It comprised of aid presented from Egyptian non-profit organizations, including the Egyptian Food Bank and the Righteousness and Piety Association.

The explosion, the most powerful ever to rip through Beirut, caused property damage worth $10 to $15 billion and left the port district a wreck of mangled masonry and disabled the main entry port for imports that feed a nation of more than 6 million people.

Egyptian Ambassador to Lebanon Yasser Elwi received the two planes, along with Egypts Consul General Ahmed Imam and Egyptian Consul Wael El-Sisi.

In a meeting with Elwi on Monday, Lebanese Foreign Minister Charbel Wehbe expressed appreciation to Egypt for the huge aid it has provided Lebanon since the blast occurred, a statement by the Egyptian Embassy in Lebanon said.

Wehbe said the aid reflects historic and strong relations between the two countries and their peoples.

Wehbe and Elwi also discussed political developments in Lebanon, including the need to accelerate efforts to hold binding parliamentary consultations to form a new government.

Egypt has taken several steps to provide assistance to Lebanon, including launching an airlift to provide humanitarian aid and relief supplies to help in reconstruction efforts.

The first batch of Egyptian aid was delivered to Lebanon on 5 August, one day after the blast, with a planeload of medical supplies.

The aid mainly included dozens of tons of flour to ensure bakeries can continue to produce bread, as strategic stocks of wheat and flour were destroyed in the explosion.

Also, an Egyptian field hospital in Beirut is providing aid to victims of the blast.

On 4 August, a fire broke out at Beirut port, igniting 2,750 tons of highly-explosive ammonium nitrate stored at the port. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

Documents have emerged showing that the country's top leadership and security officials were aware of the chemicals that had been stored there for years.

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ANKARA  Flash floods in Turkeys northern Black Sea region killed five people, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday, and authorities were searching for 11 missing people.

Floodwaters caused by unusually heavy rainfall dragged debris and vehicles along a road, leaving them buried in mud, footage from the province of Giresun showed.

Residents were seen clearing streets, as construction machines lifted the debris and cleared roads.

Speaking in Istanbul, Erdogan said the floods had spread to neighbouring provinces as well, causing injuries in Rize and Trabzon.

In the initial reports we received, we had five dead and around 12 wounded as a result of heavy floods, Erdogan said.

God willing, we will overcome the damage and destruction here rapidly, he said.

Turkeys Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) said it had sent a team for search and rescue operations and that teams in other provinces were also waiting on alert.

In a statement, it said that there was no acess to Giresuns Dereli district via the main road after streams overflowed.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said 153 people had so far been rescued and nearly 1,000 aid workers were searching for the missing people.

He said power was restored in some areas, but there was extensive damage to the infrastructure.

We were not expecting such a severe scene in the area, he told reporters in Giresun, along with Environment Minister Murat Kurum, who said 17 buildings had collapsed and 361 others were damaged.

Rainfall in Giresun had exceeded averages for the month of August by 1.5 times, but agricultural damage in the region was less than expected, said Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli.
Marco weakened into a tropical storm on Sunday night just before its anticipated landfall over southeast Louisiana, while a strengthening Tropical Storm Laura continued to move toward the Gulf of Mexico and brought heavy rains to Cuba and Jamaica, according to the National Hurricane Center.

UPDATE: Tropical Storm Marco weakens slightly; hurricane warning dropped for Louisiana: See track

Tropical Storm Marco is located about 185 miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River and moving north-northwest at 12 mph. It has maximum sustained winds of 70 mph.

Because Marco weakened, NHC said the Hurricane Watch from Intracoastal City to west of Morgan City was canceled. The storm is expected to rapidly weaken on Tuesday as well.

Forecasters said Sunday night the storm is expected to reach Louisiana's coast some time Monday afternoon and move near or over the state's coastline toward Texas through Tuesday.

The storm could bring 3 to 5 inches of rain with isolated maximum amounts reaching 10 inches in the northeast and north-central Gulf Coast on Tuesday. Forecasters said flooding is possible in these areas.

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Tropical Storm Laura is currently located 125 miles southeast of Camaguey, Cuba. It continues to head in a west-northwest direction at 21 mph with sustained winds of 65 mph.

Forecasters expected Tropical Storm Laura will form into a hurricane on Tuesday morning around the same time it reaches the southeastern Gulf of Mexico.

Laura's current track shows it reaching Louisiana's coast near the Texas border on Wednesday evening. The storm is expected to bring 5-10 inches of rain with isolated amounts of 15 inches near the Louisiana and Texas border and in the Mississippi Valley from late Wednesday to Friday.

Widespread flash and urban flooding is a possibility, forecasters said.

Here are all the watches and warnings impacting Louisiana:

A Storm Surge Warning is in effect for Morgan City, Louisiana to Ocean Springs, Mississippi; Lake Borgne

A Hurricane Warning is in effect for Morgan City, Louisiana to the Mouth of the Pearl River

A Storm Surge Watch is in effect for Sabine Pass to Morgan City, Louisiana; Ocean Springs to the Alabama/Florida border; Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Maurepas, and Mobile Bay

A Hurricane Watch is in effect for Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Maurepas, and Metropolitan New Orleans

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the mouth of the Pearl River to the Mississippi/Alabama border; Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Maurepas, and Metropolitan New Orleans; and Cameron to West of Morgan City

A Tropical Storm Watch is in effect for Mississippi/Alabama border to the Alabama/Florida border

The next full advisory and forecast will be issued at 4 a.m. Monday.

Don't miss a storm update this hurricane season. Sign up for breaking newsletters here. Follow our Hurricane Center Facebook page here.
The updates about the health of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are being keenly tracked across the world. The 36-year-old, who took over the reins in 2011 has skipped several public appearances in the last few months, giving rise to speculation that something is not right.

A journalist, who has extensively travelled in the Hermit Kingdom, has claims that Kim is dead. Roy Calley told some media outlets that there are such levels of secrecy in North Korea that even those living in the country do not know what the reality is.

The journalist said that the major changes being introduced by Kim - like making his sister the de facto second-in-command - point towards something major happening in the country.

ALSO WATCH | Kim Jong-un reportedly in coma, sister Kim Yo-jong may take over: Key details

Calleys comments came amid reports emerging from South Korea that Kim is in coma. I assess him (Kim Jong Un) to be in a coma, but his life has not ended, several media outlets quoted a former aide of South Koreas late president Kim Dae-jung as saying.

Jang also posted on social media, according to local media outlets, that no North Korean leader would entrust any of his authority to another person unless he was too sick to rule or was removed through a coup - pointing towards the transition of power to Kims younger sister Kim Yo Jong.

He, however, insisted that the North Korean is still in coma and that Kim Yo Jong is not his successor, according to reports from South Korea.

The last official reports from North Korea stated that Kim Jong Un has issued a dire warning for the countrys economy amid reports that he delegated some power to his sister, including responsibility for relations with the US.

The state media in North Korea reported last week that Kim told a gathering of ruling party leaders that the country faced unexpected and inevitable challenges in various aspects and that his development goals had been seriously delayed.

The unusually candid assessment came as sanctions, flooding and the coronavirus pandemic pushed the North Korean economy toward what was expected to be its worst contraction in more than two decades.

Hours later, South Korean lawmakers told reporters that the countrys spy agency determined that Kim had delegated responsibility for relations with Seoul and Washington to his younger sister, Kim Yo-jong. While she had taken an increasingly public role in diplomatic matters, such as responding to a letter from US President Donald Trump earlier this year, one lawmaker described a more formal power-sharing arrangement.
NYU Tandon professor Maurizio Porfiri 'teleports' behavior of live zebrafish from one tank to another in real time, allowing researchers to isolate critical elements of animal behavior; the work, using robots, offers new tools for studying social

BROOKLYN, New York, Friday, August 14, 2020  Teleporting is a science fiction trope often associated with Star Trek. But a different kind of teleporting is being explored at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, one that could let researchers investigate the very basis of social behavior, study interactions between invasive and native species to preserve natural ecosystems, explore predator/prey relationship without posing a risk to the welfare of the animals, and even fine-tune human/robot interfaces.

The team, led by Maurizio Porfiri, Institute Professor at NYU Tandon, devised a novel approach to getting physically separated fish to interact with each other, leading to insights about what kinds of cues influence social behavior.

The innovative system, called behavioral teleporting  the transfer of the complete inventory of behaviors and actions (ethogram) of a live zebrafish onto a remotely located robotic replica  allowed the investigators to independently manipulate multiple factors underpinning social interactions in real-time. The research, Behavioral teleporting of individual ethograms onto inanimate robots: experiments on social interactions in live zebrafish, appears in the Cell Press journal iScience.

The team, including Mert Karakaya, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NYU Tandon, and Simone Macri of the Centre for Behavioral Sciences and Mental Health, Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Rome, devised a setup consisting of two separate tanks, each containing one fish and one robotic replica. Within each tank, the live fish of the pair swam with the zebrafish replica matching the morphology and locomotory pattern of the live fish located in the other tank.

An automated tracking system scored each of the live subjects locomotory patterns, which were, in turn, used to control the robotic replica swimming in the other tank via an external manipulator. Therefore, the system allowed the transfer of the complete ethogram of each fish across tanks within a fraction of a second, establishing a complex robotics-mediated interaction between two remotely-located live animals. By independently controlling the morphology of these robots, the team explored the link between appearance and movements in social behavior.

The investigators found that the replica teleported the fish motion in almost all trials (85% of the total experimental time), with a 95% accuracy at a maximum time lag of less than two-tenths of a second. The high accuracy in the replication of fish trajectory was confirmed by equivalent analysis on speed, turn rate, and acceleration.

Porfiri explained that the behavioral teleporting system avoids the limits of typical modeling using robots.

Since existing approaches involve the use of a mathematical representation of social behavior for controlling the movements of the replica, they often lead to unnatural behavioral responses of live animals, he said. But because behavioral teleporting copy/pastes the behavior of a live fish onto robotic proxies, it confers a high degree of precision with respect to such factors as position, speed, turn rate, and acceleration.

Porfiris previous research proving robots are viable as behavior models for zebrafish showed that schools of zebrafish could be made to follow the lead of their robotic counterparts.

In humans, social behavior unfolds in actions, habits, and practices that ultimately define our individual life and our society, added Macri. These depend on complex processes, mediated by individual traits baldness, height, voice pitch, and outfit, for example  and behavioral feedback, vectors that are often difficult to isolate. This new approach demonstrates that we can isolate influences on the quality of social interaction and determine which visual features really matter.

The research included experiments to understand the asymmetric relationship between large and small fish and identify leader/follower roles, in which a large fish swam with a small replica that mirrored the behavior of the small fish positioned in the other tank and vice-versa.

Karakaya said the team was surprised to find that the smaller  not larger  fish led the interactions.

There are no strongly conclusive results on why that could be, but one reason might be due to the curious nature of the smaller individuals to explore a novel space, he said. In known environments, large fish tend to lead; however, in new environments larger and older animals can be cautious in their approach, whereas the smaller and younger ones could be bolder.

The method also led to the discovery that interaction between fish was not determined by locomotor patterns alone, but also by appearance.

It is interesting to see that, as is the case with our own species, there is a relationship between appearance and social interaction, he added.

Karakaya added that this could serve as an important tool for human interactions in the near future, whereby, through the closed-loop teleporting, people could use robots as proxies of themselves.

One example would be the colonies on Mars, where experts from Earth could use humanoid robots as an extension of themselves to interact with the environment and people there. This would provide easier and more accurate medical examination, improve human contact, and reduce isolation. Detailed studies on the behavioral and psychological effects of these proxies must be completed to better understand how these techniques can be implemented into daily life.

###

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research.

The study, Behavioral teleporting of individual ethograms onto inanimate robots: experiments on social interactions in live zebrafish,is available at iScience: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004220306088

Note: Images and video available at nyutandon.photoshelter.com

About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly). A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention and entrepreneurship and dedicated to furthering technology in service to society. In addition to its main location in Brooklyn, NYU Tandon collaborates with other schools within NYU, one of the countrys foremost private research universities, and is closely connected to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. It operates Future Labs focused on start-up businesses in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and an award-winning online graduate program. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu.
A variety of supermarkets, a university campus cafe, butcher shops and a bakery are among more than 15 new sites added to the list of locations visited by COVID-positive patients while infectious.

Queensland Health also announced on Monday night that personal protective equipment was mandatory for staff, patients and visitors in hospitals in the Greater Brisbane area.

The list length was stretched to 77 locations on Monday night following the latest additions by Queensland Health, in relation to cases linked to the Brisbane Youth Detention Centre cluster.

The University of Southern Queensland campus in Springfield. Credit:Google Maps

Among the significant new additions were the University of Southern Queensland Campus cafe in Springfield on Thursday from 12.05pm-12.13pm.
Investigators decision to open abuse of office case against Bashkir bar chamber head invalidated

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

16:16 24/08/2020

MOSCOW, August 24 (RAPSI)  A court in Ufa, the capital of Russias Republic of Bashkiria, on Monday invalidated an investigators order to open a criminal case over abuse of office against a former president of the Republican Bar Chamber Bulat Yumadilov, the bars statement reads.

The Investigative Committee was ordered to rectify its violation.

In March, Yumadilov was charged with abuse of power and released on travel restrictions.

According to the investigation, in December 2014, in solving a question on the conclusion of an agreement on the lease of premises for the Bar Chamber offices location the accused for his familys profit illegally withheld from the Chambers Council information that his spouses mother was an owner of the considered premises. Moreover, he did not say that the building requires repair and that the rent was overpriced.

Investigators claim that in a similar was in 2016 Yumadilov organized another rent of premises belonging to the mother of his wife at an inflated price. In total, they insist, over 5 million rubles (about $70,000) were spent from 2014 to 2019 for the overpriced premises rent.




 Flash

At least 10 were killed, including a suicide bomber, and 40 others wounded in twin blasts in Sulu province in the southern Philippines on Monday, the army has said.





Western Mindanao Command chief Lieutenant General Corleto Vinluan said at least five soldiers and four civilians were killed in the back-to-back blasts, while 18 soldiers and 22 civilians were wounded.





He said that one suicide bomber was also killed in one of the blasts.





Lieutenant Colonel Ronaldo Mateo, the spokesman for the army's 11th infantry division based in Sulu, said a bomb attached to a parked motorcycle exploded at 11:53 a.m. local time in front of a grocery store, while the second blast occurred at 1:00 p.m. local time near the cathedral in Jolo, the capital of Sulu province.





"The blasts occurred in a village called Walled City. It's in the center of Jolo," Mateo said.





He said troops were deployed in the area to secure the grocery stores along the busy street, adding that soldiers and policemen were posted in the area daily to maintain peace and order.





He said the motorcycle was parked beside the military truck just outside the store before the bomb detonated. "Two to three minutes after the motorcycle was parked, the improvised explosive device went off," he said.





"The second bomb is believed to have been carried out by a suicide bomber," Mateo added. The military is verifying reports that the second explosion was carried out by a female bomber.





"Most probably these terrorist acts may have been perpetrated by the Abu Sayyaf group," Mateo said.





Jolo has long been a base for the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.





Twin blasts also hit the Jolo Cathedral on Jan. 27, 2019, that killed 23 and injured 95.





The Abu Sayyaf group is a loose band of violent extremist groups in the southern Philippines. The group, which has an estimated 400 fighters, is active in the impoverished island provinces of Sulu and Basilan.





The group is responsible for the series of kidnappings, deadly bombings, ambushes of security personnel, public beheadings, assassinations, and extortion in the Mindanao region.





The group has been terrorizing the Philippine southern region since the 1990s, preying on foreign tourists, businessmen, and fishermen not only from the Philippines but also from Indonesia and Malaysia and hide them in Philippine jungles or remote islands.




After reaching peak intensity during the middle of the week, Typhoon Bavi barreled into the Korean Peninsula on Thursday packing winds of 133 km/h (83 mph) as it moved onshore. This is equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane in the Atlantic and East Pacific basins.

Bavi made landfall over the North Hwanghae and South Hwanghae provinces in western North Korea early Thursday morning, local time, passing just north of the capital city, Pyongyang.

The above satellite image shows Tropical Storm Bavi spinning across the Yellow Sea on Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 25. (RAMMB/CIRA)

The North's Korea Central TV reported damage to houses and public facilities where the storm made landfall as well as snapped trees and utility poles. Roads were flooded, including Nampo located closer to Pyongyang.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP

Flooded roadways were common across the region, after the storm produced widespread rainfall totals of 100-200 mm (4-8 inches) in a couple of hours on Thursday. Anju reported 224 mm (8.81 inches) of rainfall from Bavi.

"In South Korea, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety reported damages to buildings, walls, roads and other structures," stated a report from the Associated Press.

A bicyclist stops to view fallen trees from a typhoon on a main road in Pyongyang, North Korea, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020. A typhoon damaged homes and other buildings, flooded roads and toppled utility poles on the Korean Peninsula before weakening to a tropical storm. (AP Photo/Cha Song Ho)

More than 9,300 homes lost power in South Korea after Bavi lashed the region on Wednesday and Thursday, added the Associated Press. But by Thursday afternoon, it had been restored to most homes, including over 3,500 in cities and towns near Seoul and around 900 in the southern resort island of Jeju, which was hit by the typhoon on Wednesday.

By Thursday afternoon, power had been restored to most of more than 9,300 South Korean homes, including over 3,500 in cities and towns near Seoul and around 900 in the southern resort island of Jeju, which was hit by the typhoon on Wednesday.

Story continues

Conditions rapidly improved across the Korean Peninsula by Thursday evening as the storm moved northward into China and began to lose wind intensity. Bavi has since been designated an area of low pressure by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).

Although the threat for damaging winds will lessen after the storm moves inland, Bavi can bring the risk for heavy flooding rainfall across northeastern China and extreme southeastern Russia into Friday.

Bavi first developed as a tropical storm just east of Taiwan on Saturday morning, local time, according to the JMA.

Bavi was able to strengthen in the presence of the warm waters of the East China Sea and an area of light wind shear, or the change in direction and speed of wind in the atmosphere.

As Bavi spun near the central Ryukyu Islands from Sunday into Monday, it battered the region with rough surf, bands of heavy rain and strong winds as it strengthened into a typhoon.

The island of Okinawa had wind gusts to near 90 km/h (60 mph) and up to 300 mm (12 inches) of rain. This was despite the core of strongest wind and heaviest rain remaining to the west of the island.

Bavi pulled away from the Ryukyu Islands and toward the Korean Peninsula, lashing the region with bands of heavy rain and damaging winds on Wednesday.

The storm reached peak intensity on Wednesday afternoon while crossing the Yellow Sea, with the equivalent wind speed of a Category 3 hurricane in the Atlantic or eastern Pacific.

On Wednesday morning, local time, a wind gust to 117 km/h (73 mph) was reported on Jeju Island.

Bands of rain and gusty winds swept across Jeju and mainland South Korea through Wednesday night.

Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios.
BAY CITY, MI  Police have identified a woman whose burned body was recently found in northern Bay County.

Sheriff Troy R. Cunningham said investigators have determined the body found the afternoon of Aug. 17 was that of Heidi E. Dowd, 36, a resident of the West Branch area. Autopsy results have also determined Dowds manner of death was homicide and the cause of death was a gunshot, Cunningham said.

Other details remain scarce and the investigation is open with no suspects in custody. Investigators are also working to determine how Dowds body wound up in Bay County.

Were working with a bunch of (police) agencies throughout the state, Cunningham said, adding deputies have found no record that Dowd had been reported missing prior to her bodys discovery.

Dowds is the first homicide the Bay County Sheriffs Office has investigated so far in 2020, the sheriff added.

Dowds body was found about 1:30 p.m. on Aug. 17 behind an abandoned building in an open area on Neuman Road in Mount Forest Township, Cunningham previously said.

The propertys owner had called police upon discovering the body, Cunningham has said.

The body appeared to have been where it was found for less than a week, the sheriff has said.

Cunningham urged anyone with information regarding the matter to call the Bay County Sheriffs Office at 989-895-4050.

Read more:

Unidentified womans burned body found in rural Bay County

Man in stable condition after being shot 4 times in Saginaw

Teen boy killed in motorcycle crash in Huron County
SARAJEVO, Bosnia - Authorities in a northeastern region of Bosnia, decrying an alleged failure by other parts of the country to share the load of a lingering migration crisis, have set up roadblocks to prevent Europe-bound migrants from entering the territory under their jurisdiction.

In an apparent violation of Bosnias human rights and immigration laws, local authorities deployed police officers to the main highway connecting the Krajina region to the rest of the country with orders to stop and turn back all the migrants they encounter.

In response, the police forces of adjacent administrative regions started blocking migrants from walking back to their areas.

Krajina authorities began enforcing their decision to ban all new migrants arrivals in the last three days. In that time, around 200 people, including women and children, were taken off buses and trains and left trapped on the side of a road near the town of Bosanska Otoka.

Ali Razah, who is from Pakistan, said various police units had blocked him and other migrants from moving in any direction.

There is no food, no water, nothingand we are staying on the grass, he said.

When other nations in the Balkans and central Europe closed off previously established migration paths, Bosnia became a bottleneck for thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa seeking better lives in Europe.

Migrants mostly enter Bosnia across the Drina River, on its eastern border with Serbia. From there, they traverse the impoverished and ethnically divided country to reach Krajina, which stretches along a highly porous segment of Bosnias border with EU-member Croatia.

Local authorities in Krajina have long accused Bosnias central government of subjecting the migration crisis to political infighting and failing to provide them with any practical help.

Bosnian Serb hard-line leader Milorad Dodik, who currently holds a seat in Bosnias multi-ethnic joint presidency, has blocked efforts to deploy the army along the border with Serbia to stem the influx of migrants.

Dodik, who has repeatedly pressed for Serbs to separate from multi-ethnic Bosnia and unite with Serbia proper, has used the migration issue to promote his Serbian-first position. He refused to accommodate any migrants in the countrys autonomous Serb-run half and instead pushed them into Krajina.

Bosnia went through a bloody inter-ethnic war in the 1990s that killed more than 100,000 people and left millions homeless. The U.S.-brokered 1995 peace deal for Bosnia has split the country along ethnic lines into two highly autonomous parts - the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation.

The two parts are linked by a complicated network of central, multi-ethnic governing institutions which are supposed to rule by consensus but instead tend to turn even the most mundane issues into numbing political tugs-of-war.
Garbage and dump trucks were set ablaze on Sunday by rioters near the Kenosha County Courthouse where they had been set up to prevent damage to the building. The building was still damaged and was closed on Monday. Read more

KENOSHA, Wis.  Anger over the shooting of a Black man by police spilled into the streets of Kenosha for a second night Monday, with police again firing tear gas at hundreds of protesters who defied a curfew, threw bottles and shot fireworks at law enforcement guarding the courthouse.

The southeastern Wisconsin city became the nation's latest flashpoint in a summer of racial unrest after cellphone footage of police shooting Jacob Blake  apparently in the back, as he leaned into his SUV while his three children sat in the vehicle  circulated widely on social media Sunday. The 29-year-old was hospitalized in serious condition.

The shooting drew condemnation from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who also called out 125 members of the National Guard on Monday after protesters set cars on fire, smashed windows, and clashed with officers in riot gear the previous night.

Police first fired tear gas Monday about 30 minutes after the 8 p.m. curfew took effect to disperse protesters who chanted, No justice, no peace as they confronted a line of officers who wore protective gear and stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the courthouse entrance. But hundreds of people stuck around, screaming at police and lighting fires, including to a garbage truck near the courthouse.

Tensions had flared anew earlier Monday after a news conference with Kenosha Mayor John Antarmian, originally to be held in a park, was moved inside the citys public safety building. Hundreds of protesters rushed to the building and a door was snapped off its hinges before police in riot gear pepper-sprayed the crowd, which included a photographer from The Associated Press.

Police in the former auto manufacturing center of 100,000 people midway between Milwaukee and Chicago said they were responding to a call about a domestic dispute when they encountered Blake on Sunday. They did not say whether Blake was armed or why police opened fire, they released no details on the dispute, and they did not immediately disclose the race of the three officers at the scene.

The man who said he made the cellphone video, 22-year-old Raysean White, said he saw Blake scuffling with three officers and heard them yell, Drop the knife! Drop the knife! before the gunfire erupted. He said he didnt see a knife in Blakes hands.

Warning: The video below contains gun violence.

The governor said he has seen no information to suggest Blake had a knife or other weapon, but that the case is still being investigated by the state Justice Department.

The officers were placed on administrative leave, standard practice in a shooting by police. Authorities released no details about the officers and did not immediately respond to requests for their service records.

Evers was quick to condemn the bloodshed, saying that while not all details were known, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said the officers must be held accountable.

This morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force, he said, just over two months before Election Day in a country already roiled by the recent deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Those shots pierce the soul of our nation.

Republicans and the police union accused the politicians of rushing to judgment, reflecting the deep partisan divide in Wisconsin, a key presidential battleground state. Wisconsin GOP members also decried the violent protests, echoing the law-and-order theme that President Donald Trump has been using in his reelection campaign.

As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident, Pete Deates, president of the Kenosha police union, said in a statement. He called the governors statement wholly irresponsible.

The shooting happened around 5 p.m. Sunday and was captured from across the street on the video posted online. Kenosha police do not have body cameras but do have body microphones.

In the footage, Blake walks from the sidewalk around the front of his SUV to his driver-side door as officers follow him with their guns pointed and shout at him. As Blake opens the door and leans into the SUV, an officer grabs his shirt from behind and opens fire while Blake has his back turned. Seven shots can be heard, though it isnt clear how many struck Blake or how many officers fired.

White, who said he made the video, said that before the gunfire, he looked out his window and saw six or seven women shouting at each other on the sidewalk. A few moments later, Blake drove up in his SUV and told his son, who was standing nearby, to get in the vehicle, according to White. White said Blake did not say anything to the women.

White said he left the window for a few minutes, and when he came back, saw three officers wrestling with Blake. One punched Blake in the ribs, and another used a stun gun on him, White said. He said Blake got free and started walking away as officers yelled about a knife.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, representing Blakes family, said Blake was simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident.

Police did not immediately confirm either man's account.

Blakes partner, Laquisha Booker, told NBCs Milwaukee affiliate, WTMJ-TV, that the couples three children were in the back seat of the SUV when police shot him.

That man just literally grabbed him by his shirt and looked the other way and was just shooting him. With the kids in the back screaming. Screaming, Booker said.

Blakes grandfather, Jacob Blake Sr., was a prominent minister and civil rights leader in the Chicago area who helped organize a march and spoke in support of a comprehensive housing law in Evanston, Illinois, days after the 1968 slaying of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Rachel Noerdlinger, publicist for the National Action Network, told The Associated Press that the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke Monday to Blakes father, who called the civil rights leader for his support. Blakes father will speak at Sharptons March on Washington commemoration on Friday, Noerdlinger said.

Karissa Lewis, national field director of Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 150 Black-led organizations that make up the broader Black Lives Matter movement, said the shooting was yet another example of why activists have called for defunding police departments.

Theres no amount of training or reform that can teach a police officer that its wrong to shoot a Black man in the back seven times while his children watch, Lewis said in a statement first shared with the AP.

Online court records indicate Kenosha County prosecutors charged Blake on July 6 with sexual assault, trespassing and disorderly conduct in connection with domestic abuse. An arrest warrant was issued the following day. The records contain no further details and do not list an attorney for Blake.

It was unclear whether that case had anything to do with the shooting.

Crump, who has also represented the Floyd and Taylor families, said Blakes family has asked that demonstrations in response to his shooting remain peaceful.

They dont believe violence to be the solution, he said.

For more than 100 years, Kenosha was an auto manufacturing center, but it has now largely been transformed into a bedroom community for Milwaukee and Chicago. The city is about 67% white, 11.5% Black and 17.6% Hispanic, according to 2019 Census data. Both the mayor and police chief are white. About 17% of the population lives in poverty.

Webber reported from Fenton, Mich. Associated Press reporters Scott Bauer and Todd Richmond in Madison, Wis., Jeff Baenen in Minneapolis, Aaron Morrison in New York City, and Mike Householder in Kenosha contributed.
The single big incident of this year will push about 27 million learners in the Philippines to rely largely on internet connection as they shift to a new normal of learning in the next quarter.

In a few months, its expected that multiple devices and online services may be shared in Filipino homes because of convenience. Connecting to WIFI at home would also be more economical for most Filipino families.

Practicing cyber hygiene should be more emphasized, recommends cybersecurity company Kaspersky. Using stronger passwords, two-factor authentication, and virtual private networks (VPNs) are among the top three security tools to use, according to Kaspersky.

Stronger password and two-factor authentication

In a Kaspersky survey, it showed that 38% personally use their computers while 47% personally use their laptops. For each person using the same device in one household, Kaspersky recommends that each user account should have its own separate password. Distrust is not an issue here but family members may be tricked to give the password away or just accidentally leak it.

Experts at Kaspersky recommend that kids never create usernames out of their real names that may reveal their other personally identifiable information (PII) such as location or age.

On the other hand, enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) is like having a door with two locks in the account log in process --- one is a traditional password and the second one could be something else. When enabled, it means that an attacker has to figure out your password and be in possession of your device to be able to login into your account. Second authentications are usually codes sent via email or SMS. And there are also authenticator apps and hardware tokens which provide more features and useful options.

Which online accounts of individual users need two-factor authentication? Maybe not all. But for children going back to school soon, this additional layer of security will have to be enabled on their primary and secondary emails as well as on their social media accounts which are being required by teachers for them to be able to join online classes. Parents or guardians meanwhile would find that two-factor authentication will be useful to be used on their online bank accounts as well as device accounts such as for iOS and Android gadgets.

Whats a VPN and how does it work?

Another security tool that is often overlooked is the VPN. Short for Virtual Private Network, a VPN works by encrypting your online presence.

A VPN masks your IP address by rerouting it through a specially configured remote server run by the VPN host, where the VPN server becomes the source of your data. This makes it impossible for your internet service provider or any other third party to see what websites you are visiting or what information you are entering.

A VPN also works like a filter that turns all the data you are sending and receiving into gibberish. Even if someone did get their hands on this data, it would be useless.

Web-savvy users utilize VPNs for these top four reasons:



Security - for protection against phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc. Privacy - to prevent spying and data theft Changing/hiding the virtual location - so that the websites a user connects to can only see the VPN servers IP address and location, not the users Bypass local bans and blocks - so a user can still access websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia in countries where these are restricted, like in China

Longtime Internet users have found that VPNs have been one of the best ways to protect online privacy and hide personal information from prying eyes.

In a Kaspersky survey, 54% percent of Southeast Asian Internet users are currently using VPNs from their trusted VPN provider. The same survey revealed that the respondents common reasons for using VPNs are to use online services or sites that are not available in their respective countries (66%), to hide their web history and online activities (47%), to protect their data from cybercriminals (50%), and to access school networks, computers or servers remotely (33%).

Using a VPN is worth considering if you regularly connect to public WIFI networks. You never know who could be watching your internet traffic from the other side. Potential data they can steal from you include passwords, personal data, payment information, even your whole identity.

As of June 30 this year, some 4,248 of the target 23,100 WIFI hotspots have already been installed under the Free Wi-Fi for All program of the government.

As more live sites are being deployed particularly within public school locations to support the new normal approach in learning, VPNs would come in handy.

How do I get a VPN on my system?

There are different ways to implement a VPN. One is to get a standalone which is advisable for home and small businesses. VPN extensions can also be added to most web browsers while others like Opera come with their own already built in.

Having several devices to a single internet connection would work best with a router VPN. Large enterprises have their VPNs customized. A number of VPN options are also available for mobile devices.

Security software providers like Kaspersky also provide comprehensive solutions with VPN features such as Kaspersky Total Security, which guarantees maximum security.

The VPN feature of this multi-device family security solution uses an encrypted tunnel to help protect the data you send and receive online. It helps you to hide your browsing --- even from your internet service provider --- and stop hackers from reading your emails, bank details and personal data.

Free VPNs do exist, but they are usually not as secure as paid options are. You must also be sure to choose a VPN provider you trust and which has invested in the most secure solutions. Remember, if your VPN provider is compromised, you and your data will be too.

Filipino children and their families, just like their counterparts in other parts of the world, are now bracing for a different learning experience. To succeed in the new way of learning, browsing the internet safely and privately will have to be a part of their new student life. By incorporating the security practices of using stronger passwords, 2FA, and VPN into their digital life, it will be easier to just focus on learning and not really think about getting into trouble, comments Mary Grace Sotayco, Kaspersky territory manager for the Philippines.

The latest version of Kaspersky Total Security is available in the Philippines for PC and Mac, and retails for Php1,390 from leading IT stores nationwide.
JUPITER, FL--AUG. 24, 2020--A heart attack can leave parts of the heart permanently scarred and stiff, resulting in prolonged disability and potential progression toward heart failure. Scientists have studied various ways to repair or regenerate such damaged heart tissue, with limited success.

A new study from Scripps Research Chemist Matthew Disney, PhD, shows that by targeting an essential biomolecule that surges in failing heart muscle, it may be possible to one day heal damaged heart tissue with medication.

In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Chemistry, the Disney collaboration describes the discovery of the first compounds able to restart cellular production of a factor called VEGF-A, short for vascular endothelial growth factor A, in cellular models. Research over many years has shown VEGF-A acts as a signal to stem cells, causing them to rebuild blood vessels and muscle in damaged heart tissue, and improve blood flow.

Targeting RNAs, the "middleman" between genes and protein production, makes logical sense, but doing so with medicines was once deemed unfeasible. RNAs were long thought to be poor small-molecule drug targets due to their simple four-base makeup and dynamic shape. Through the years, Disney and colleagues have developed an array of computational and chemical tools designed to overcome those barriers.

"During a heart attack, the injury causes proteins that could promote new, healthy blood vessel growth to go silent," Disney explains. "We analyzed the entire pathway for how the protein is silenced, and then we used that information to identify how to reinvigorate its expression."

Lead author Hafeez Haniff, a graduate student at Scripps Research, Florida, analyzed the genomics underlying VEGF-A production to assess optimal RNA drug targets, working in collaboration with scientists at AstraZeneca. The team selected a microRNA precursor called pre-miR-377, finding it acts like a dimmer switch for VEGF-A production in failing heart muscle.

They then used Disney's computational and chemical tools, in conjunction with a diverse set of compounds from AstraZeneca's collection, in search of chemical partners able to selectively bind to the key conserved structural features of pre-miR-377.

"A remarkable on-target specificity is achieved by combining the active compound with other helper molecules," Haniff explains.

Other strategies that have been attempted to boost VEGF-A production include administration of VEGF-A itself, or delivery of messenger RNA that encodes for the protein.

"Each of these approaches uses large compounds that can have limited distribution to diseased tissues, compared to potential specific, RNA-binding small-molecule lead medicines," Disney says.

The compound has, so far, been tested in cells, not whole-animal models of heart failure, Disney notes.

"We delivered a lead small molecule compound to reprogram the cell's software to force it to re-express VEGF-A," Disney says. "Transforming TGP-377 into a potential medicine that reaches patients will take considerably more time and research."

Disney called their success a "test case" that shows it is possible to reliably and predictably develop medicinal compounds for pre-defined RNA targets and induce protein production in cellular models.

Malin Lemurell of AstraZeneca, calls it a potentially important first step.

"The ability to design small molecules capable of interacting with and modulating RNA could open new avenues to target challenging disease pathways that have previously been considered undruggable," says Lemurell, who is head of Medicinal Chemistry, Research and Early Development, Cardiovascular, Renal and Metabolism, BioPharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca. "This research has enabled the generation of quality tool compounds that will be useful to probe this mode of action further."

Because of the largescale screening done to identify TGP-377, Disney says the group expanded by 20-fold the data set of known RNA-binding small molecules generally, with implications for multiple incurable diseases.

"There are potential RNA drug targets for nearly every disease." Disney says. "We now have a much greater toolbox to search for lead molecules with medicinal potential."

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That song was not it. Not even remotely. Just keepin it real, Tyrese once told a woman he thought was Amber Rose, the model/actress/activist/etc., but was instead Amber Tamblyn, the comedic actress who had sent him prank Awareness Raps with lines like You have the right to get strangled by a bra strap/anything you sexualize with can and will get shot at with a Glock cap.

That PBC on Fox card Saturday was not it. Just keepin it real.

It wasnt as deliberately farcically bad as Tamblyns stunt, of course. Maybe not even that bad, all things considered. It just wasnt it.

On a weekend when ranked fighters actually faced one another (!), all three A-side fighters were in measuring stick fights, some less challenging than others. So were gonna keep this pretty short.

Shawn Porter, a top welterweight, took on one of the nights two Sebastians, Formella, who had only fought in Germany and, once, Sweden. His competition to acquire an undefeated record was thusly about what you might expect. Really, all he offered on paper was a chance to see if Porter, with his rugged style, had lost anything. In the ring, he was a competent pro who put up a game effort, and he took the kind of loss that was punishing but not so punishing that it shaved years off his career, and that might have even given him something to build off. Anyway, measuring stick, Porter proved that Porter is still Porter: a guy who throws a ton of punches, some awkwardly and some well, who swarms with a body attack and is on track to remain a nuisance to anyone above him in the division who steps into the ring with him.

Now, the other Sebastian  Fundora  had a little bit of a tougher fight on paper. The gigantic 66 junior welterweight was in against gatekeeper Nathaniel Gallimore. Gallimore isnt just a gatekeeper in name, either: Hes the kind of gatekeeper who has genuinely stood in front of the gate and slammed down a staff Gandolf-style and said, You shall not pass! to Jeison Rosario a few years ago. We all have our fetishes, in the words of my colleague Brent, and one of mine has been for praying mantis-thin giants who have no business fighting on the inside or throwing a billion punches when they could easily jab from range, yet this writer had previously been unimpressed by Fundora. This time, he beat the brakes off Gallimore, after backing him off following a 1st round rush to the inside. The ref stopped said beating in the 6th. Fundoras still far too hittable but if you thought he was contender after this (measuring stick), you wouldnt be insane.

Middleweight Joey Spencer scored a 3rd round knockout of the cards other Shawn, West. He was asked after the fight if he wanted to move up from six- to eight-round bouts. Yeah, look, when youre PBC Prospect of the Year twice in a row, its time to move up a couple notches on the measuring stick.
A first-time mother who tried unsuccessfully for a baby for three years fell victim to the 'postcode lottery' of IVF after she moved to her husband's GP surgery and was then told the local funding body was 'too broke' to offer treatment for free.

Samantha Anderson, 30, from Croydon, South London, spent three years trying to fall pregnant with her husband Tommy, 31, before their wedding in September 2017.

When their efforts failed because of Tommy's low sperm count, Samantha  who works as a nanny  went to see her original GP in nearby Bromley but was advised to register at the same surgery as her husband in Croydon, three miles away.

But at their first appointment, the couple were told by a doctor that the IVF treatment they needed would not be free because the clinical commissioning group (CCG)  which funds local services  in Croydon was 'too broke'.

And because Samantha had already registered at the surgery with her Croydon address, she was not able to move back to her old GP in Bromley, even though they would have paid for one cycle of IVF.

Samantha and Tommy, who is a vehicle recovery specialist, were then told IVF treatment through the NHS would cost 5,500 for a single cycle and so they opted to pay 3,600 for treatment privately.

Fortunately, after months of stress and anguish, Samantha fell pregnant in February 2019 after just one IVF cycle with Harley Street clinic abc ivf and her 'cheeky and boisterous' son Alfie was born in October last year.

Samantha Andrews, 30, from Croydon, South London, fell victim to the 'postcode lottery' of IVF after she moved to her husband's GP surgery and was told the local funding body was 'too broke' to offer fertility treatment for free. Pictured: Samantha and husband Tommy, 31, with their baby son Alfie, who was born in October 2019 after they paid for private IVF treatment

Samantha was advised to move to her husband's GP, Shirley Medical Centre in Croydon. The couple had struggled to conceive because of Tommy's low sperm count. IVF on the NHS was set to cost them 5,500 so they opted for cheaper private provider abc ivf. Pictured: Them with Alfie shortly after his birth last October

A map showing the three-mile distance between Samantha's first and second GP surgeries

However, the mother said it is 'ridiculous' that an effective postcode lottery exists, meaning some couples cannot access free IVF treatment at all, while others can get 'two or three' cycles before they need to pay.

Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recommend that three cycles of IVF should be offered on the NHS to women under 43 who have been trying to conceive through regular unprotected sex for two years.

But because of financial restrictions, the number of CCGs in England offering three IVF cycles has fallen from 16 per cent (33) to 11.5 per cent (24) in a year. In 2013, the figure was 24 per cent.

Seven areas now have an outright ban on funding IVF; a figure which has more than tripled in five years.

Some families are therefore forced to try to move across the country for treatment, while others travel abroad.

Croydon CCG stopped funding even one cycle of IVF for couples in 2017, unless they had exceptional circumstances.

Although it came too late for Samantha, this decision was reversed in April this year, allowing women up to the age of 42 to access one cycle.

'Cheeky and boisterous' Alfie was born in October last year after Samantha's first cycle of IVF was successful

She first opted to see the doctor two months after her wedding and after three years of trying and failing to get pregnant.

The Bromley GP said Samantha should move to Tommy's surgery - Shirley Medical Centre - so they could be treated together.

But Samantha said she was never warned by her GP in Bromley - at Trinity Medical Centre, which is now closed - that the Croydon CCG might not offer free treatment.

At the new surgery, which is just three miles from her old one, Samantha said she was told by a doctor that fertility tests would be carried out but that, 'just so you know we don't provide IVF for free.'

However, the mother said that she 'never thought' IVF would be needed so did not worry about it.

Because the couple, who moved to Kent two weeks ago, had recently signed a six-month tenancy, moving back to Bromley  where one free IVF cycle was offered because it was in a different CCG  would have been very difficult.

The mother said it is 'ridiculous' that an effective postcode lottery exists, meaning some couples cannot access free IVF treatment at all, while others can get 'two or three' cycles before they need to pay

While her tests revealed she had no fertility problems, Tommy was told he had a low sperm count.

The couple were then referred to a fertility clinic at Croydon University Hospital  which was previously known as Mayday hospital  but had to wait six months for an appointment.

'The doctor referred us and we had to wait six months and it wasn't until our first appointment that we were told we had fertility issues,' she said.

'We never expected IVF until we got to the clinic.'

'It was in the same department as the anti-natal clinic and so I was sitting in the same department as pregnant women and I found that quite upsetting,' she added.

Samantha said she and Tommy then had to wait three months in between appointments for further test results because staff refused to give them out over the phone.

The clinic the couple opted for in December 2018  abc ivf on London's Harley Street  provided a cheaper service. One cycle of IVF cost them 3,600

Samantha had two embryos which had been fertilised with Tommy's sperm implanted in her in February 2019. She had a miscarriage of one of the embryos eight weeks later but there were no complications with the other. Pictured: The couple with Alfie as a newborn

It was then that they were told they needed IVF treatment and it would cost 5,500.

'We came away and thought "do we want to pay for it in a clinical hospital or a more personal setting?", That is when we decided to go private,' she said.

The clinic the couple opted for in December 2018  abc ivf on London's Harley Street  provided a cheaper service.

They were told that blood tests which had already been carried out on the NHS could be sent to the clinic but Samantha said Croydon hospital 'lost' the results.

'It would have cost us 500 to get them re-done. I had to call the hospital to find out where they were,' she said.

'I couldn't get through to the manager of the fertility clinic. I made a formal complaint and within 24 hours they found Tommy's blood test results.

'It took me two weeks to get them and we had a plan of when I was going to start my cycle.

'It was really stressful and Mayday did not make it any easier. It just made the decision to go private a lot easier,' she added.

Samantha said abc's 'professionalism' was what most impressed her.

'The office wasn't clinical, it didn't feel medical. They were trying to save us money,' she said.

In January 2019, the couple had their first appointment.

The couple got married in September 2017 but had been together for three years before that

'They showed me how to inject myself. They showed Tommy how do it for me. They included Tommy in the whole process.'

The mother had one injection to stimulate egg production and another to stop her from having her period so that any eggs she produced could be collected.

Out of eight which were collected, seven were fertilised using Tommy's sperm and five were still growing after five days.

Samantha then had two of them implanted in her and then found out two weeks later after a pregnancy test that both embryos were still growing and so she was pregnant with twins.

'When we did that pregnancy test and it came back positive we sat there crying. I didn't feel like I could be that lucky,' she said.

However, the mother then suffered what she called a 'bittersweet' miscarriage of one of the twins after eight weeks.

She initially thought she was no longer pregnant at all but was told there was nothing wrong with the other foetus.

'When I started bleeding I thought this is over,' she said.

'I went to hospital and they were like "have you had two embryos put back" and that is when we realised I was still pregnant.

Speaking of her 'postcode lottery' ordeal, she said: 'I think it is ridiculous. IVF is just not considered important enough'. Pictured: The couple and Alfie during a recent day out

'It was bittersweet because yes I had a miscarriage but I was still pregnant.'

She said her pregnancy was 'straightforward' other than her needing to have a c-section because baby Alfie was breeched  lying bottom-first rather than head-first, as is normal.

But she said the first few months of Alfie's life were hard.

'I am constantly worrying whether I am doing the right thing. It has only really been since he got into a routine at about six months that I started to relax and enjoy being a mum.

'The first six months were really hard.

'Now it is amazing, he sleeps through the night, he is crawling and he says mum and it is the best feeling in the world.

'People take for granted being able to fall pregnant. For us it is not a luxury, it is a struggle,' the mother added

'Alfie is really boisterous. He is into everything. He is cheeky. He is a very happy baby. The only time he cries is when he is hungry or tired.

'All his first experiences, when he said Mum and Dad, you can never forget, you will never be able to take them away.'

Speaking of her 'postcode lottery' ordeal, she said: 'I think it is ridiculous. IVF is just not considered important enough.

'People take for granted being able to fall pregnant. For us it is not a luxury, it is a struggle.

'Someone else could have six kids walking down the road and you think I can't have a baby but you've got six, how is that fair?

She added that all couples should have access to at least one free cycle.

Praful Nargund, co-founder and managing director of abc ivf, said: 'abc ivf was developed following ten years of dedicated research to deliver evidence based, ethical and successful treatment at an affordable cost.

Samantha and Tommy at their gender reveal party, when they discovered they were having a boy

'The cost savings we devised are passed on direct to our patients, and we are proud to be the first and only network of dedicated affordable IVF clinics in the UK.

'Through a combination of simplified treatment protocols and a streamlined patient journey, supported by digital technology, we are able to offer the most affordable IVF in the UK without compromising our quality of care and success rates.''

'While we continue to campaign to end the current NHS IVF postcode lottery, we are delighted to be able to help the hundreds of women and couples across the country who have let us know that they wouldnt have been able to access IVF treatment without the help of abc.

'We are thrilled to have helped Samantha and her partner and enable them to achieve their dream of parenthood; something so many take for granted.'

Shirley Medical Centre was approached for comment.

A spokesman for the NHS in South West London, which the Croydon CCG is part of, said that a decision was made in April to 'consistently' offer IVF to women in the area.

They added that around 200 women in Croydon are expected to benefit within the next year.
India has found a large-scale dumping of optic fibre cables from China, days after Beijing extended anti-dumping duty for five years on import of fibre optic product made in India, which could trigger a similar tariff measure to check influx of the Chinese product in the Indian market, two officials aware of development said.

The government is considering imposing remedial duty on the import of single mode optical fibre as an investigation by the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) has confirmed its dumping mainly from China, the officials said requesting anonymity. The DGTR is a single-window agency for administering all trade remedial measures including anti-dumping, countervailing duties and safeguard measures.

After a detailed investigation, the DGTR on Friday concluded that import of single mode optical fibre at dumped rates is threatening to cause serious injury to Indian manufacturers and recommended imposition of a 10% safeguard duty on its import from all countries except for developing nations barring China, the officials said. The government had already raised basic customs duty (BCD) on it by 5% in July 2019.

The finance ministry is expected to take a final decision on this matter soon, they said. Single mode optical fibres are used as a medium for telecommunication operations such as community access televisions (CATV), fibre to the home (FTH) and computer networking because it is flexible and can be bundled as cables.

Effectively, the measure is against Chinese firms as combined import from all other developing countries is less than 9%. China alone has a share of over 84% in its import, one of the officials said.

The DGTRs recommendation came close on the heels of Chinese commerce ministrys punitive tariff on the same product imported from India for five years, effective from August 14.

According to officials, China is resorting to tariff barriers as its companies are suffering from overcapacity, and also diverting its exports to the Indian market after global boycott of the Chinese products. Based on complaints by the domestic optic fibre industry, the DGTR had initiated the investigation on Chinese dumping on September 23 last year. It had issued a primary finding on November 6 last year, but its recommendations could not be implemented at that time, the first official said.

A second official said India is very cautious about Chinese unfair trade practices especially after June 15. Sino-Indian tensions have shot up after a violent brawl between Chinese and Indian soldiers on June 15 along the Line of Actual Control in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh in which 20 Indian army personnel and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers were killed.

Divakar Vijayasarathy, founder and managing partner at consultancy firm DVS Advisors LLP, said, The precursor for this issue has been laid much before the border issue with China. However, the timing of the notification of the findings and recommendations indicate towards China considering the fact that in November the same was not notified.

Dumping is an unfair trade practice that entails the export of a product at a price lower than its value and is countered by punitive actions, which are acceptable measure under multilateral trade agreements, the officials said. Remedial actions include imposition of anti-dumping duty (against under-priced imports), safeguard measures (imposition of a duty, a quota, or both against unexpected import surge) and countervailing duty (against export subsidies) to protect domestic units.

India has taken a tough position against unfair Chinese trade practices as it is committed to protecting domestic industry under the governments Make in India campaign, the officials said.

India-China bilateral trade is heavily tilted in favour of China. According to trade figures released by the General Administration of Customs of China (GACC) in mid-January 2020, Indias trade deficit with China was $56.77 billion in 2019; bilateral trade amounted to about $92.68 billion last year, a 1.6% annual increase.

Given the domestic economic scenario, the finance ministry is expected to accept this, Vijayasarathy said adding that the move cannot be linked to China alone as the government has been indicating its intentions of protecting the domestic industry.

In the budget, customs duty was increased for more than 10 products. Since China is a major supplier for India with huge trade surplus, any action on imports across the board would impact China. Atmanirbhar Bharat itself is to restrict the influence of China on Indian markets and with relationships soaring, indirect economic sanctions will help both in hurting China and giving a boost to the fortunes of the domestic industry, he said.
BJP president JP Nadda on Monday (August 24) launched a scathing attack on DMK saying that Stalin-led party is anti-development and it has been inciting feelings against the national spirit. Nadda made the statement while addressing Tamil Nadu BJP's virtual state executive meeting. The BJP president claimed that the DMK has been looking for opportunities to see to it that the assimilation into national mainstream is always disrupted.

"DMK has been inciting feelings against the national spirit. They have been on a lookout to see to it that the assimilation into national mainstream is always disrupted. They have been anti-development," Nadda was quoted as saying by ANI.

Nadda also accused the DMK of sheltering people who are anti-India and are not working in interests of the nation. The BJP president appealed to the people to remain on alert and give a befitting reply to DMK in the upcoming local body and Assembly poll in Tamil nadu.

Nadda remarked that the BJP workers are doing good work in Tamil Nadu, adding that the saffron party will have a good share in local body elections and in Assembly poll too.

It is to be noted that in Tamil Nadu, BJP is in alliance with ruling AIADMK and it is expected that the two party would fought the next Assmebly election together against DMK.

The Assembly poll in Tamil Nadu are scheduled to be held in 2021 and the main contest woudl be between AIADMK-BJP combine and the alliance of DMK-Congress. After the demise of DMK patriarch Karunanidhi, his son Stalin has taken the charge of the party. The upcoming Assembly poll would be first poll after the demise of both Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa
Top Congress leaders are expected to deliberate on the issue of leadership during the virtual meeting of party's top decision-making body

Congress President Sonia Gandhi, party leaders Manmohan Singh, AK Anthony, Ghulam Nabi Azad and KC Venugopal during the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting to discuss the prevailing situation in northeast Delhi, at AICC headquarters in New Delhi. PTI file photo

New Delhi: A crucial meeting of the Congress Working Committee started here on Monday amid divisions in the party over the leadership issue and indications that Sonia Gandhi may offer to resign.

The party is divided on the leadership matter with a section demanding collective leadership and another reposing faith in the Gandhi family.

Top Congress leaders are expected to deliberate on the issue during the meeting of the party's top decision-making body that is being held virtually.

Sources said Sonia Gandhi may offer to resign at the meeting after around 20 leaders wrote to her demanding a full-time, visible president and overhauling of the organisational structure including elections to the CWC and reconstitution of the Parliamentary board.

After the start of the meeting with remarks by K C Venugopal, Sonia Gandhi will make her introductory remarks kicking off the deliberations.

Massive support poured for the Gandhis on Sunday after the "pro-reform" leaders went public, with Congress chief ministers leading the calls for Sonia Gandhi to stay until Rahul Gandhi takes charge.

Almost all Lok Sabha MPs of the party have written to Sonia Gandhi expressing solidarity and urging her to continue in her post or instal Rahul Gandhi.

Several state units including Delhi and Rajasthan passed resolutions favouring the leadership of Gandhis after a letter from a section of senior party leaders demanded sweeping reforms in the party, going to the extent of questioning the current CWC's ability to guide the party in the fight against the BJP.

Ironically, at least three of the dissenters are themselves part of the same CWC. These include Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma and Mukul Wasnik.

Several party leaders, while supporting the continuation of Gandhis at the helm, accused those behind the letter of playing into the hands of the BJP and attempting to weaken the party at a time when there was a need to close ranks against the NDA government.

Haryana Congress chief Kumari Selja said, "we stand firmly behind Sonia Gandhi. This is the time to close ranks against the BJP and not the time to show cracks."

The dissenting leaders, meanwhile, also said that the party has failed to conduct an honest introspection of its losses in 2014 and 2019, adding that the uncertainty over leadership has demoralised workers.

This is the second challenge to Sonia Gandhi's leadership after the one in 1999 when the then leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Sharad Pawar challenged her foreign origins in order to keep her from being named the party's prime ministerial face in the general elections that year.

Sonia Gandhi had resigned in the CWC, which rejected her move unanimously bringing her back as party president. While Sonia went on to become the longest serving Congress president, Pawar and rebels had to quit to form the NCP.
As Elon Musk's Tesla blows the doors off Toyota, it is painfully clear how slow Japan Inc. has been to get the memo.

It is easy to get sidetracked by the spectacle surrounding a man of Howard Hughes-like eccentricity. Musk's Twitter feed alone is almost as nutty as @realDonaldTrump -- and apt to send Tesla shares for the occasional wild ride.

Even though it sells a fraction of the 10 million vehicles each that Toyota and Volkswagen do annually, Tesla's market capitalization is in overdrive. The most financially valuable auto company dwarfs the combined market cap of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler. Its roughly $370 billion valuation is equivalent to Hong Kong's annual gross domestic product. Fitting perhaps, with Tesla taking China's market by storm.

Not that Japan has noticed. Musk once hoped it would be his second-biggest market. Japan sales are such a small share of the 367,500 cars Tesla delivered in 2019 that it does not disclose them. Explanations why include: limited brand recognition; a small dealer network; questions about its capacity to service cars; a direct-to-customer model at odds with Japan's obsession with hospitality-centric shopping.

At the same time, Musk appears to confront a John DeLorean problem. Will posterity also remember Musk as a brash showman who couldn't deliver on his hyped vehicles? Clearly, Tesla's share-price-versus-sales ratio has many on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley with popcorn out waiting for the bubble to burst.

But forget the stock rallies and weird founder worship that fuel the Muskian cult of personality. The Tesla-versus-Toyota drama says a few things about why Japan Inc. is stuck in first gear as upstart economies throughout Asia shift upward.

One is a continued obsession with hardware over software. What Toyota long missed about Musk is that he is not selling cars. He is selling an iPhone with wheels. The vehicle itself is merely a medium to market the software undergirding the iTunes-like community that he is building.

The data Tesla collects from users, their environs, interests, tendencies, travel habits and the range of behaviors will arguably be more valuable than the engines and high-performance batteries powering them. This enables Tesla to hone the customer experience, while discerning where the market will veer next.

Tesla reminds Japan that disruption is a necessary evil for economic evolution. In a February 17 deep dive into Toyota's Tesla problem, the Nikkei Asian Review looked at Japan-centric worries about upending supply chains. Tesla makes its own chips and constantly tweaks its Model 3, Model S and Model X vehicles on the fly.
Jerry Seinfeld has told the people who are 'wailing and whimpering' that New York City is dead to get a grip because it will 'sure as hell' bounce back as the city continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic and escalating crime and homelessness.

In an op-ed in the New York Times on Monday, Seinfeld, who has lived in NYC for 44 years, slammed those who have been fleeing the city in droves ever since the pandemic broke out in March.

The comedian's comments were in direct response to a viral blog post written earlier this month by NYC comedy club owner and hedge-fund entrepreneur James Altucher.

Altucher - who Seinfeld labeled a 'putz' - declared that the city was dead and would never recover again as he said he fled with his family to Miami following the week of looting and riots that plagued the NYC in June.

In response to Altucher's claim that New York would never bounce back, Seinfeld insisted that it would because of 'tough New Yorkers' who stayed behind to rebuild it.

Seinfeld, who has an estimated net worth of $950million, lives in an apartment overlooking Central Park on the Upper West Side and also has a sprawling waterfront mansion in the Hamptons which he purchased for $32 million from Billy Joel back in 2000.

Jerry Seinfeld told the people who are 'wailing and whimpering' that New York City is dead to get a grip because it will 'sure as hell' bounce back as the city continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic and escalating crime and homelessness

Many wealthy New Yorkers fled the city in favor of their Long Island homes as New York became the global epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak five months ago.

It is not clear where Seinfeld has been spending the majority of his time during quarantine.

Despite acknowledging that he does in fact have a place to retreat to outside the city, Seinfeld vowed to 'never abandon New York City'.

Singling Altucher out for moving to Miami, Seinfeld wrote: 'You found a place in Florida? Fine. We know the sharp focus and restless, resilient creative spirit that Florida is all about. You think Rome is going away too? London? Tokyo? The East Village?

Seinfeld's comments were in direct response to a viral blog post written earlier this month by NYC comedy club owner and hedge-fund entrepreneur James Altucher. Altucher - who Seinfeld labeled a 'putz' - declared that the city was dead and would never recover again

'They're not. They change. They mutate. They re-form. Because greatness is rare. And the true greatness that is New York City is beyond rare. It's unknown. Unknown anyplace outside of New York City.

'You say New York will not bounce back this time. You will not bounce back. In your enervated, pastel-filled new life in Florida. I hope you have a long, healthy run down there. I can't think of a more fitting retribution for your fine article.

'This stupid virus will give up eventually. The same way you have. We're going to keep going with New York City if that's all right with you.

'And it will sure as hell be back. Because of all the real, tough New Yorkers who, unlike you, loved it and understood it, stayed and rebuilt it.'

One of Altucher's main arguments for NYC not bouncing back was that unlike in previous times of crisis - like 9/11 or the crime wave of the 70s - there is nothing currently bringing people back because people are working remotely.

Seinfeld, however, argues that working remotely isn't sustainable because there is no 'energy' in doing that and 'everyone hates it'.

'Guess what: Everyone hates to do this. Everyone. Hates,' Seinfeld wrote. 'You know why? There's no energy.

'Energy, attitude and personality cannot be 'remoted' through even the best fiber optic lines. That's the whole reason many of us moved to New York in the first place.

New York City - and in particular Manhattan - is currently grappling with escalating homelessness and crime amid the COVID-19 pandemic

In addition to the pandemic, New York City has also grappled with a dark week of looting in June as some Black Lives Matter protests turned violent and the ongoing struggle against escalating crime and homelessness

'You ever wonder why Silicon Valley even exists? I have always wondered, why do these people all live and work in that location? They have all this insane technology; why don't they all just spread out wherever they want to be and connect with their devices? Because it doesn't work, that's why.

'Real, live, inspiring human energy exists when we coagulate together in crazy places like New York City.

'He says he knows people who have left New York for Maine, Vermont, Tennessee, Indiana. I have been to all of these places many, many, many times over many decades. And with all due respect and affection, Are. You. Kidding. Me?!

Seinfeld said the last thing anyone needed at the moment was the negativity Altucher showed given the 'challenges' everyone is facing right now.

'The last thing we need in the thick of so many challenges is some putz on LinkedIn wailing and whimpering, 'Everyone's gone! I want 2019 back!',' he wrote.

'Oh, shut up. Imagine being in a real war with this guy by your side. Listening to him go, 'I used to play chess all day. I could meet people. I could start any type of business.' Wipe your tears, wipe your butt and pull it together.'

Numerous business leaders have suggested in recent weeks that the damage to NYC's economy could last for years or decades to come as a result of the mass exodus of residents and businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Just last week, a coalition of New York City restaurants are threatening to sue Mayor Bill de Blasio after he admitted there was 'no plan' and refused to give a timeline for when indoor dining can return amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The New York City Hospitality Alliance on Thursday demanded that de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo release a plan for when indoor dining can resume across the city.

In response to Altucher's claim that New York would never bounce back, Seinfeld insisted that it would because of 'tough New Yorkers' who stayed behind to rebuild it. Pictured above is an empty Times Square on August 16

Numerous business leaders have suggested in recent weeks that the damage to NYC's economy could last for years. Just last week, a coalition of New York City restaurants are threatening to sue Mayor Bill de Blasio after he admitted there was 'no plan' and refused to give a timeline for when indoor dining can return amid the COVID-19 pandemic

Indoor dining was part of phase three of Cuomo's reopening plan for the state.

New York City entered phase three in early July but Cuomo and de Blasio have only so far allowed outdoor dining in NYC's five boroughs. Every other county in New York state are currently allowed to have indoor dining at reduced capacity.

The Alliance has argued that it has been more than six weeks since indoor dining was put on hold indefinitely but there is still no plan.

They say gyms, which were in phase four, and schools have already been given reopening plans or guidelines.

New York currently has a positive test rate of 0.72 percent, which is among the lowest in the country. The state's infection rate has been below 1 percent for 14 straight days.

In addition to the pandemic, New York City has also grappled with a dark week of looting in June as some Black Lives Matter protests turned violent and the ongoing struggle against escalating crime and homelessness.

Crime has shot up in recent weeks, particularly shootings.

During July, there were 244 citywide shootings, compared to the 88 shooting incidents in July 2019 - a 177 percent increase.

Police leaders in the Big Apple have placed the blame squarely on Mayor Bill de Blasio, citing his move to slash $1billion from the NYPD's budget as part of the issue.

President Donald Trump has seized on this and vowed, without explaining how, to revitalize the city if he wins the November election.

The spread of homelessness across Manhattan has been rife of late with new ramshackle encampments emerging all over the city along with hotels that are being used to house 13,000 people who were previously in shelters that were closed to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks.
Kanpur, Aug 24 : A child was injured in Kanpur when a crude bomb exploded, police said.

SP Deepak Bhuker said a pig died in the explosion in Babu Purwa of Bagahi area late on Sunday. A dog squad and a forensic science laboratory (FSL) team were called in to carry out investigations. The injured child has been hospitalised and is out of danger.

The window panes of vehicles parked near the spot were shattered and a wall also developed cracks. Security in the area has been beefed up.
NEWPORT, Ark. - A man was jailed without bond Monday on suspicion of capital murder, kidnapping and rape in the death and disappearance of a 25-year-old woman who was last seen out jogging in rural northeast Arkansas.

Quake Lewellyn, 28, made his first court appearance Monday afternoon after he was arrested in the death of Sydney Sutherland, Jonesboro TV station KAIT reported.

Sutherland was last seen jogging near Newport, about 80 miles (130 kilometres) northeast of Little Rock. A body was found in the area Friday, and authorities confirmed Saturday that it was Sutherland.

Judge Harold Ervin set a next court appearance for Oct. 1 for Lewellyn, of Jonesboro, who did not respond to reporters questions as he arrived at the courthouse Monday.

Jackson County Sheriff David Lucas said Friday that Sutherland had known the person who was arrested but offered few details about what may have happened.
Thank you for joining Marissa Calligeros and I for our rolling coverage today. Much of the news focused on the behaviour of security guards working in Melbourne and Sydney's quarantine hotels.

In Melbourne, a Rydges hotel security guard who caught COVID-19 told Victoria's inquiry into hotel quarantine that he delivered food while awaiting his test result, and again after he was told to self-isolate, and that security guard at Sydney's Marriott Hotel infected with COVID-19 has been fined $2000 for failing to self-isolate and going to a shopping centre while he waited for his test result.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Credit:Joe Armao

The other big revelation was that Victorias state of emergency could be extended for up to another 12 months, but Premier Daniel Andrews needs the support of the opposition and crossbenchers in parliament first.

Here are some of the other key developments of the day:

The royal commission into aged care has rebuked the federal government for failing to act on persistent problems across the sector, with new research sparking a clash in Parliament over measures that might have saved lives.

The new coronavirus case numbers in Victoria over the past few days have been extremely reassuring, Deakin University epidemiology chair Catherine Bennett says. The state recorded 116 new cases on Monday  the lowest daily increase since July 5.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews all but conceded on Monday that the grand final was lost to the state and said he would continue negotiations with the AFL to get the best compensation for Victoria.

A new data dashboard will be released by Victoria's Health Department that provides more information on coronavirus cases in local council areas. People will be able to see if a known case has visited their local supermarket, cafe or other location;

About 15 "mystery" cases in NSW are not connected to any known clusters, prompting Premier Gladys Berejiklian to encourage more people to come forward and get tested;

Genomic testing is required to determine if Queensland's latest COVID-19 cluster is linked to the two women who returned from Melbourne infected with the virus last month, the state's Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young says;

Businesses that have fallen off JobKeeper will retain the power to cut staff hours by as much as 40 per cent if they can show their turnover has fallen at least a tenth under a Morrison government plan to save jobs.

No bintang? Foreign tourists are expected to be locked out of Bali until 2021; and

Aucklands level three lockdown has been extended by four days, while wearing face masks on public transport will be mandatory, after nine new cases emerged.

You can follow all the updates in our live coverage on Tuesday here.
If you're having trouble deciding on a new vehicle, check out the model comparison pages on the Honda of Bellingham website.

When looking for a new vehicle, there are several brands and vehicle types to consider. Customers who are struggling to choose between two brands or two different vehicles can find help on the Honda of Bellingham website. Located in Bellingham, Washington, this Honda dealership encourages shoppers to utilize their model comparison pages. Drivers who are reaching the final steps of deciding on a vehicle, are encouraged to check out these pages.

If they are looking to buy a sedan, they should check out the 2020 Honda Accord vs 2020 Toyota Camry research page. This comparison focuses on comparing the starting MSRP, engine horsepower, engine torque and cargo space of both models. The page also provides information on available features of the 2020 Honda Accord.

If a potential client is looking to buy an SUV, they should check out the 2020 Honda Pilot vs 2020 Kia Sorento comparison page. This research page compares the starting MSRP, engine power, engine torque and cargo space of these SUVs. Customers will also find information on available features of the 2020 Honda Pilot on this page.

Car buyers who are interested in checking out these comparison pages and other model research pages, can find them at hondaofbellingham.com. If they have any questions about these models they can contact the sales team by calling 833-331-0699. Honda of Bellingham is open Monday through Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m and on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The dealership is located at 2010 Iowa St. in Bellingham.
Black Restaurant Week, an annual celebration of African-American, African and Caribbean cuisine nationwide kicked off in the Bay Area on Friday, Aug. 21. With COVID-19 in mind, this year's restaurant week won't include its usual live events and in-person dinners, but the show must go on. Instead, diners can play Black Restaurant Week Bingo, marking off a space for each Black-owned restaurant they visit for takeout or outdoor dining.

According to co-founder Falayn Ferell, skipping the restaurant week this year wasn't really even a consideration.
louisiana

Tensions high after fatal police shooting

LAFAYETTE, La.  Community activists said they will present their frustrations and demand racial justice from the leaders of a Louisiana city on Sunday, following a night of violence that erupted after police shot and killed a Black man.

Dozens of people took to the streets of Lafayette on Saturday in response to the death of Trayford Pellerin, 31. On Friday night, officers followed Pellerin on foot as he left a convenience store where he had created a disturbance with a knife, Louisiana State Police said. Stun guns failed to stop him, and the officers shot Pellerin as he tried to enter another convenience store, still with the knife, according to a news release.

The shooting was captured on video, and the state ACLU condemned what it described as a horrific and deadly incident of police violence against a Black person. Both the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center quickly called for an investigation.

Saturday afternoons protest started peacefully, but violence broke out as night fell  leading to officers clearing the crowd with smoke canisters, Trooper Derek Senegal said.

Local activists blamed outside agitators for the violence, which they said broke out after the local protest ended Saturday. Jamal Taylor, a community activist, said Sunday that he did not recognize people shown in videos setting fires.

Officials said at a news conference late Saturday that fireworks had been shot at buildings and fires set in the median of a road where demonstrations had taken place.

Our intent is not going to be to just let people disrupt our town and put our citizens and our motorists and our neighborhoods in danger, Interim Police Chief Scott Morgan said.

Arrests were made, Morgan said, but an exact number wasnt immediately available.

Afghanistan

Official says roadside bombing leaves 7 dead

KABUL, Afghanistan  A roadside bombing on Sunday in eastern Afghanistan killed seven civilians, a provincial official said, the latest in relentless deadly violence in the country amid new uncertainties over the start of talks between the Taliban and the Kabul government.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing in Ghazni provinces Jaghatu district. Three women, two children and two men died when their vehicle struck the roadside bomb, said Wahidullah Jumazada, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

The expected start of talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban has stalled after Kabul said it would not release the last 320 Taliban prisoners it holds until the insurgents free more captured Afghan soldiers.

iran

Data retrieved from downed Ukraine plane

TEHRAN, Iran  Iran has retrieved some data, including a portion of the cockpit conversations, from the Ukrainian jetliner that was accidentally downed by the Revolutionary Guard forces in January, killing all 176 people on board, an Iranian official said Sunday.

Thats according to a report on the website of Irans Civil Aviation Organization, which described the officials remarks as part of the final report that Tehran plans to issue on the shootdown of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.

The development comes months after the Jan. 8 crash near Tehran. Iranian authorities had initially denied responsibility, only changing course days later, after Western nations presented extensive evidence that Iran had shot down the plane.

The shootdown happened the same night Iran launched a ballistic missile attack targeting U.S. soldiers in Iraq, its response to the American drone strike that killed Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3.

florida

Punches thrown over Trump, Biden signs

DEBARY, Fla.  A Florida supporter of President Donald Trump has been charged with a misdemeanor after deputies say he punched a Joe Biden supporter in a dispute between the neighbors over their yard signs.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal reports that Anthony Tony Vullo, 55, is charged with misdemeanor battery after Volusia County sheriffs deputies say he punched his 48-year-old neighbor, Joseph Lebert, on Friday outside their homes in DeBary.

According to court records, Vullo had pulled up Leberts Biden sign and tossed it into Leberts yard. Vullo told reporters he did it because Lebert had put up his sign to block his Trump sign.

Lebert confronted Vullo and Vullo punched him in the face, deputies and a neighbor say. Vullo told the paper that Lebert swung at him first.

Vullo was released from jail Saturday and ordered to stay away from Lebert.
A dentist anywhere in the world specializes in treating mouth-related health issues. He or she can remove a molar, fix a tooth or make a filling. But in Yemen, a dentist can be detained and be accused of espionage. Then his execution and a public display of his body can happen in broad daylight.

On Aug. 15, al-Qaeda operatives in Yemens Bayda province killed Madhar al-Yousifi, a 40-year dentist, and tied his body to a makeshift cross. The militants alleged that Yousifi was spying on them so that they could be targeted by American drones.

Yousifi, originally from Yemen's Taiz province, spent over 10 years in the al-Sawma district of Bayda in his dental clinic.

Two months ago, he quarreled with his wife, leading to a divorce. This dispute reached al-Qaeda operatives at the request of the divorced wifes family, the victim's brother said.

The group incarcerated the dentist for two months and trumped up charges to justify his killing and the takeover of his properties. Though the dentists brother managed to get a written document from Yousifis ex-wife saying she was withdrawing her case, al-Qaeda declined to set him free.

Before his execution, al-Qaeda recorded a video of the victim saying he conspired against al-Qaeda operatives and planted microchips in some locations. However, rights activists said al-Qaeda members coerced Yousifi to confess to crimes he never committed or even thought of.

In a country such as Yemen where the state is absent, a civilian such as this dentist can do nothing to confront a militia group like al-Qaeda. When militants dominate, lawlessness prevails and these militias take it upon themselves to decide who is the good citizen and who is not.

Ghamadan al-Yousifi, a Yemeni writer and an old school friend of the dentist, said what happened is mind-boggling. He wrote, At first glance, I could not believe that this took place in Yemen, and it turned out that this young man was the son of my village, the dentist Madhar Mohammad [Yousifi].

Ghamadan al-Yousifi had known the dentist since childhood. He said Madhar al-Yousifi was a brilliant student in our school. He studied medicine, then worked in Bayda province and everyone who knew him recognized his work.

Governments, organizations and individuals have deplored the summary execution. Yemen's government said the killing is "a despicable crime." Information Minister Muammar al-Eryani said the government is committed to confronting terror groups whatever their names and wherever they are.

Over the last six years, the Yemeni government has been fighting Iran-allied Houthis in several provinces, and this has created room for the growth of al-Qaeda and Islamic State militants.

Michael Aron, the British ambassador to Yemen, described what al-Qaeda did as appalling. The brutal killing of Dr. Madhar al-Yousifi is at the hand of al-Qaeda in Bayda  [and] is a disgusting act. Yemen needs peace and security to completely get rid of terrorism, Aron tweeted.

The Geneva-based SAM for Rights and Liberties organization said, The perpetrators forced him to make confessions under duress and they granted themselves the authority to detain, investigate, prosecute and execute him though they have no legal authority.

Bayda is one of the hotbeds of al-Qaeda militants in Yemen. In January 2017, on orders of President Donald Trump, the United States launched a ground operation in the Yakala district of the province. The raid left at least 16 civilians (including an American girl), a US Navy Seal and 14 suspected al-Qaeda militants dead. Today, al-Qaeda still has a considerable presence in some areas of Bayda and drone strikes have not been an effective approach to thwart the growth of extremist groups in Yemen.

Mohammed Samei, a Taiz-based journalist, told Al-Monitor that the Taizi dentist was the victim of the absence of the rule of law in an al-Qaeda-controlled area in Bayda province. He said, Taizi people like Yousifi can be found in all Yemeni provinces working or running their own business or service centers. Instead of rewarding him for a decadelong health service in Bayda, al-Qaeda rewarded him with death. It is really worrying to see this mayhem and lawlessness.

Samei said, The ideological groups are hard to negotiate with. They think they are following Gods instructions and feel no guilt when they harm people. The ideal way to deal with them is confronting them and stopping their extremism. To do this, we need a powerful government.
Palmer vs. WA

A man against the people

The WA branch of the Transport Workers Union (TWU WA) reported online that they have been inundated with messages from transport workers who want to refuse to load trucks and refuse to deliver to the Sino Iron mine in Cape Preston owned by Clive Palmers company Mineralogy. This is in response to Palmer pursuing two major court cases against the Western Australian government: one to force the WA government to open its borders to the other states, and the other a claim for over $27b (potentially over $30b) of lost profits due to a WA government decision in 2012 to reject his proposal for a different mining project.

TWU WA said Palmer wants to infect WA by opening the borders for his own selfish greed. On top of that he wants to rob every man, woman, child and baby by suing our state for $30b [] this parasite can leave our state alone.

Palmer initiated the latter case less than a week after Prime Minister Scott Morrison reversed his earlier position on Palmers other case to open the WA border, and announced that the Commonwealth was withdrawing its earlier support to Palmers case. However, the federal government has chosen not to withdraw the evidence it supplied earlier to support Palmer, despite the plea of WA Premier Mark McGowan for them to do so.

Nonetheless, with the loss of the federal governments support, Palmers border case is less likely to succeed, and his new case for tens of billions of dollars appears an attempt to hold the WA government to ransom. The WA government has quickly passed new legislation to block Palmers claims, however it is still unclear whether this will be upheld by the court.

Although Palmer has tried repeatedly to appeal to the Western Australian people to support his actions, taking out many advertisements in various newspapers, on radio and online, he has found very little sympathy. Multiple public polls have shown that the overwhelming majority of Western Australians support the closed border, and Premier McGowan is receiving unprecedented public support: a 26th July poll of the Perth metropolitan area conducted by The West Australian showed eighty-six per cent public approval of McGowan.

Thanks to the successful handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the state, in a major part due to the closed border, life in Western Australia has mostly returned to normal. Western Australians wish to keep it that way, and although the severe restrictions on interstate travel have impacted many people, most view that as a small price to pay to ensure the health of West Australians and prevent further economic damage and deaths. Palmers rhetorical appeals about safeguarding our freedom, and flippantly likening McGowan to the Nazis, do not resonate with the people, who know that whatever Palmers concept of freedom is, it means little to the dead.

Palmers other case relates to his claim of lost profits due to the previous WA Liberal governments decision to reject his proposal for the Balmoral South iron ore project in 2012. Palmer had intended to sell the project on to a Chinese company, and believes the WA state government should pay him the profits he would have made, had it not been rejected.

It is a vile hypocrisy that Clive Palmer uses his wealth to bombard Australian media with anti-China propaganda, spreading fear about influence by the Communist Chinese Government and Chinese companies operating in Australia, while suing the Western Australian government for not allowing him to sell a mine to a Chinese company!

Not only that, but the Sino Iron mine mentioned above is operated by CITIC, a Chinese state-owned company, due to a deal between CITIC and Palmers company Mineralogy. On the Mineralogy website, which also contains a lot of Palmers anti-China, anti-communist propaganda painting Chinese state-owned enterprises as sinister forces of Communist influence, the page about the Sino Iron project has a completely different tone, singing the praises of the expertise and skills of Chinese [] world leaders in this field, and saying the project provides an excellent opportunity for Australia to benefit from exposure to international skills and processing technology. [] This project [] is testament to the quality of the deposit as two major Chinese companies have now invested substantial effort and funds to develop these projects.

Not only is it obscene and disgusting that Palmer believes he is entitled to a massive payout from the WA government, and cares more for his own financial gain than for the welfare of the whole West Australian people who would be severely impacted by a $27 b hit to state finances, it is equally absurd that the existing laws allowed for such a claim. The state governments new legislation is a band-aid solution which should hopefully block Palmers claim, but it should raise significant questions about our current legislation and the right of businesses or individual capitalists to sue the state for lost profits.

It should also highlight to the people the absurd amount of power which obscenely wealthy individuals such as Palmer have to pursue their personal interests regardless of the interests of millions of working people, and influence and obstruct processes on the scale of the whole country. While Palmers disruptive and contradictory actions and views have alienated many of his own class, which at least partly constrains his ability to get whatever he wants, we should be even more wary of the rest of the capitalist class when they act in agreement. Palmer is an embarrassment to his class because he displays openly the utterly unfair privileges and power held by all the immensely wealthy.
Devika Rotawan (21), the youngest survivor and an eye-witness to the November 26, 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, has moved the Bombay high court (HC),seeking direction to Maharashtra government to allot residential premises for her impoverished family and also to make provision for her undergraduate education.

Also read: Pakistan bans 88 new terrorists in bid to slip out of FATFs grey list

Rotawan has filed a petition through advocate Utsav Bains in high court. The petition has expressed apprehension that her family would have to face homelessness because they had not been able to pay monthly rent for their room in a chawl (tenement) at Subhash Nagar in Mumbais Bandra (East) owing to acute financial constraints.

She said because of several morbidities, it was not possible for her father and brother to earn a livelihood and they have defaulted in making their monthly rental payments.

Rotawan, who has recently taken admission to an undergraduate course in humanities at Chetana College in Bandra and plans to pursue a career in civil services, was nine years old at the time of the 2008 Mumbai carnage.

A bullet had pierced her right thigh, as two outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants from Pakistan had fired indiscriminately on passengers at the crowded Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) and also hurled grenades at them.

Rotawan, who was to travel with her parents to Pune by a train, fell unconscious shortly after she was hit by a stray bullet.Police took her to the adjoining Saint Georges Hospital, where she underwent six surgeries within a month and a half and was bed-ridden for another six months due to post-operative care.

Rotawan has pleaded before HC that following the Mumbai carnage, several representatives of the Central and state government visited their room in the chawl and assured to provide them accommodation under the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) quota because of their acute poverty.

The officials, she claimed, also assured to make adequate arrangements for her education, and monetary assistance over and above what was required for her medical treatment.

However, the petition cited that all the government assistance received by her was required to be spent on her treatment and post-operative care.

Her petition cited that despite the fact that she was a victim of a dastardly terrorist attack and she along with her father proved to be key eye-witnesses against Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the sole 26/11 attacker caught alive and hanged to death in November 2012, the authorities did not take care of her familys needs to date.

In 2009, she had also approached various government authorities requesting them to extend rehabilitative measures for her family and also sent several representations.

However, all our efforts went in vain, the petition added.

All kinds of assurances were made, but they turned out to be hollow promises until the 26/11 trial was in progress, the petition stated .

The plea also prayed before HC that rehabilitative measures prove to be elusive after the memories of terror attacks fade from the publics consciousness because of the absence of a definitive law or policy to safeguard the victims needs.

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President Donald Trump listens as Dr. Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, speaks during a media briefing in the James Brady Briefing Room of the White House on Sunday. Read more

Calling it a very historic breakthrough, President Donald Trump announced an emergency authorization Sunday for doctors to treat COVID-19 patients with plasma: the liquid portion of blood donated by people who already have recovered from the disease.

The move was made by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which had held off on doing so earlier this month amid uncertainty about whether the treatment was beneficial.

As on other occasions during the U.S. response to the pandemic, questions of science were overshadowed by accusations of politics. Without any evidence, the president suggested the FDAs delay had been an attempt to hinder his chances in the Nov. 3 election. Critics countered that the opposite was true: that the president had pushed the agency to cut corners, acting faster than it normally would in order to boost his political fortunes on the eve of the Republican National Convention.

Politics aside, the reality is that plasma is a low-risk approach that has been used to treat infectious diseases for more than a century, such as in a 1934 outbreak of measles at the Hill School in Pottstown. The evidence that plasma may help COVID-19 patients is preliminary, but many physicians have nevertheless embraced it as a plausible therapy for those who suffer severe symptoms of the coronavirus.

Thats because donated plasma contains antibodies: proteins that the donors immune system made to fight off the virus. Antibodies remain in a persons blood even after recovery, so in theory they can be transferred to sick patients whose immune systems have yet to make the proteins  giving them a head start in fighting the disease.

But there are caveats. The levels of antibodies vary from donor to donor, and some flavors of these proteins are more effective at neutralizing the virus than others. That is why scientists have pushed for randomized trials  carefully controlled studies in which some patients are randomly selected to receive precise amounts of antibody-laden plasma, while others get a placebo. Only then could researchers nail down exactly how much the drug contributed to patient recovery.

Critics said the FDAs move to allow emergency use of plasma could make it harder for scientists to compare patients who get the treatment with those who do not, because everyone would want it.

 READ MORE: A Pennsylvania doctor used plasma to stop a virus outbreak -- in 1934

Among them was Harvard physician Ashish Jha, the incoming dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, who voiced concerns in a tweet Sunday before Trumps announcement of the emergency use authorization (EUA).

Ive been optimistic about convalescent plasma as therapy, Jha said. But optimism isnt science. We need results of adequately powered randomized trials. Issuing an EUA without it would make such trials harder. And erode the credibility of the FDA. And ultimately, harm people with COVID.

Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, Calif., was more blunt, tweeting that FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn had caved to Trumps pressure, falsely promoting the use of plasma as a breakthrough.

Hahn, who joined the president at the news briefing Sunday, called the treatment promising but did not respond to a media question about whether he had been pressured to authorize it. He urged those who have recovered from COVID to sign up to donate plasma at coronavirus.gov.

Earlier, Trump reiterated his claim that some in the FDA and the department of Health and Human Services had wanted to move slowly on plasma for political reasons  a serious accusation to make about agencies staffed with career scientists. The president acknowledged wanting regulators to move quickly and cut through unnecessary barriers, but said his own motives were free of politics.

I think that there mightve been a holdup, but we broke the logjam over the last week, he said. This has nothing to do with politics. This has to do with life and death.

The largest study of plasma in COVID-19 patients is being conducted by researchers at the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins University, and other institutions. It is not a randomized study, and thus falls short of the gold standard of scientific evidence, but includes data on thousands of patients who have received plasma at hospitals across the country. Among them are more than 50 patients treated at the Virtua Health network in South Jersey.

So far, patients who received plasma within three days of diagnosis have been more likely to survive than those who got it at least four days after diagnosis  though the results have yet to be published in a medical journal. And patients who received plasma with higher titers of antibodies fared better than those who got plasma with lower levels of the immune-system proteins.

Eric Sztejman, medical director for Virtuas intensive care units, agreed that a randomized trial would constitute stronger evidence, but nevertheless said the results in patients under 80 were encouraging.

The study suggests that if you transfuse plasma early with a high antibody titer, these patients may do well, he said.

Virtua has been treating patients with plasma since April, when answers for COVID were scarce.

What was really important was giving the patients a chance, Sztejman said. We felt that this was a safe way to do it. I personally felt we needed to give them something.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Low 4F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Low 4F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph.
Residents in China's north-western Xinjiang region have complained about what they say are harsh coronavirus lockdown measures on social media.

A new COVID-19 outbreak, infecting at least 902 people, emerged in the Muslim-inhabited region's capital Urumqi in mid-July and prompted tough restrictions from the Chinese government.

The officials said this month they had 'effectively contained' the spread of the Urumqi cluster, and there have been no new cases reported in the past eight days.

But hundreds of local residents have claimed online that they are still unable to leave their homes and forced to take medicine daily.

Residents in China's north-western Xinjiang region have complained about what they say are harsh coronavirus lockdown measures on social media. The file picture shows medical workers conducting coronavirus testing on residents in Urumqi, Xinjiang region of China on August 13

A new virus cluster emerged in the Muslim-inhabited region's capital Urumqi in mid-July and prompted tough restrictions. The file picture taken on June 21 shows a group of Uighur women working at a factory in Yecheng county of China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region

China - where the disease first emerged - had largely brought domestic transmission under control through lockdowns, travel restrictions and testing, but sporadic regional outbreaks have emerged.

Xinjiang's capital city, Urumqi of 3.5million, reported on July 16 its first COVID-19 infection - a 24-year-old female retail worker - in five months.

With some of the comments removed - China's internet is heavily censored - users tried to also voice their complaints on local forums on the Twitter-like Weibo platform in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Social media users shared photos of front doors sealed with steel crowbars, and locks installed by community workers.

A new coronavirus cluster in Urumqi, capital of the Muslim-inhabited region in mid-July, prompted fresh restrictions, with 902 cases officially reported. The file picture shows a medical worker collecting a swab from a male resident in Urumqi, Xinjiang on July 19

'Why can't prefectures with no cases remove the lockdown? Why do you need to lock down the whole of Xinjiang?' read one comment on Weibo, which received thousands of likes.

'Doors have been sealed, this has brought huge inconvenience to workers and people's lives. Prices of daily items have risen... many things I buy are expired.'

Some residents also wrote that they were forced by authorities to take Chinese medicine daily, and were required to film themselves doing so.

One video from Saturday showed dozens of high-rise residents in Urumqi yelling from their windows in despair.

Stranded migrant workers, university students, business travellers and tourists also complained about not being able to leave Xinjiang.

'I have even taken three nucleic acid tests... but community workers won't let me leave,' one user wrote on a message board run by the state-run People's Daily.

Urumqi authorities said Monday that lockdowns would be eased in areas that had no virus cases, according to a report in the state-run tabloid Global Times.

The COVID-19 outbreak in Xinjiang has fuelled fears for the millions of Uighur people who are believed to be detained in what Chinese government called 're-education' facilities.

Fears have arisen that a COVID-19 outbreak erupting China's Xinjiang could infect millions of Uighur allegedly detained inside the region's 're-education camps'. The file picture reportedly shows detainees in a Xinjiang re-education camp located in the far western Chinese region

This photo taken on May 31, 2019 shows watchtowers on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained

Xinjiang's capital city, Urumqi of 3.5million, reported on July 16 its first COVID-19 infection - a 24-year-old female retail worker - in five months.

Many of the infected patients were said to be ethnic minorities, according to Sun Chunlan, China's Vice Premier, without specifying the residents' ethnicities.

Around half of Xinjiang's more than 21 million people are ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims, many of whom complain of decades of political and religious oppression by China's ruling Communist Party, which the government denies.

Activists have accused the Chinese government of incarcerating about one million Uighurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang camps. Beijing has described them as vocational training centres to counter Islamic radicalism.
Other countries with a large number of cases including Brazil, Russia, Spain and the United States of America, all have more people heading to work.

Mehul Mehta (name changed), who is employed with one of the large audit firms in Mumbai, has been working at home for months now.

While his organisation has said it may consider calling employees back in a couple of months, he doesnt believe a quick return is likely.

He isnt the only one sitting at home though.

Workplace visits are down by a third in India, and the country lags many other emerging market peers in people going back to their workplaces, shows a Business Standard analysis of Google data.

Other countries with a large number of cases including Brazil, Russia, Spain and the United States of America, all have more people heading to work.

While this may reflect people working from home to an extent, broadly fewer people reporting to work can also be an indicator of the economic recovery.

Manufacturing company workers for example, cannot work from home.

Google uses location data to understand how people are moving during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It provides information on visits to various categories of places including offices across countries.

Google computes the percentage change in workplace visits by comparing it to a baseline value for the same day of the week, calculated on a median basis during the 5-week period Jan 3Feb 6, 2020.

Business Standard subtracted Googles percentage fall figure from 100 to arrive at visits relative to normal times.

The calculation used a seven-day rolling average for all countries except Russia; where only the August 7 data was used based on information available on the Google website.

More people are still heading out than during the worst of the lockdown.

Thats a positive sign, said Care Ratings chief economist Madan Sabnavis.

He added however, that periodic shutdowns have continued in a localized fashion which has been a problem.

India is one of the few countries where it has been forced to open up despite cases not reaching a plateau.

The only reason it did so was because the economic costs of continuing the lockdown made continuing unsustainable, noted Sabnavis.

India was actually doing better a month ago, when workplace visits were closer to 70 per cent of the normal. It has gone down since.

Rising cases are likely to result in more lockdowns, which could be a drag on gross domestic product (GDP), according to a 26 July India Economic Watch report from foreign financial services entity BofA Securities.

Every month of lockdown costs one per cent or 100 basis points (bps) in gross domestic product (GDP), according to the report by analysts Indranil Sen Gupta and Aastha Gudwani.

They expect the current financial years GDP contraction to be six per cent, with a nine per cent rebound the next year.

Rising...cases will likely stretch the current restrictions... to mid-November, it said.

Economies are starting to come out of their slump globally, noted an August 7 Global Economics report from foreign financial services group Morgan Stanley authored by a team including chief economist and global head of economics Chetan Ahya; and economists Derrick Y Kam, Nora Wassermann, Julian M Richers, Frank Zhao.

The global recovery is progressing well and is transiting from the sharp jump in monthly indicators in May-June to a natural moderation in the pace of improvement since July as we have already made up a lot of lost ground, it said.
PITTSBURGH, PA  The Allegheny County Health Department has shut down Lefty's, a popular bar on Penn Avenue in the Strip District, because of multiple violations of the state's coronavirus restrictions on bars and restaurants.

The posted COVID-19 indoor capacity of the facility is 22 persons. During a recent inspection, 33 people were present inside the bar, not including those waiting in line for takeout drinks. Twelve people were observed in the designated outdoor dining area on the sidewalk directly in front of the bar; six were seated, six standing. That violated an estimated maximum of seven people seated outside on the sidewalk.

Patrons were seen consuming alcohol after completing their meals. The bartender stated that customers where waiting for meals, but was unable to provide proof.

Lefty's will be closed for at least a week and must submit a written COVID-19 prevention plan before being allowed to reopen.

See the entire inspection report here.







This article originally appeared on the Pittsburgh Patch
The AIADMK government has pushed the economy and industrial development of the State into an abyss, turning the future of youth into a big question, DMK President M K Stalin said on Sunday.

The states unemployment problem had gone up like never before to a level that was double that of the national average  it increased to 49.8 % against the national average of 23.5 % - Stalin said in a statement.

Since December 2019 unemployment had gone up ten times due to the wrong policies of the government, Stalin alleged, adding it had destroyed the hopes of the youth.

Alleging that the government was making empty announcements, putting out needless advertisements and giving out tenders on commission basis, he said the continuation of the lockdown with no regulations and not knowledge of scientific reasons putting people into hardship.

By continuing the e-pass system with its inherent irregularities even after the National Disaster Management Authority had directed the removal of the system, the government tied up their people in their homes, restricting their movement, he pointed out.

He referred to a joint survey by Tamil Nadus Economic and Statistical department and the Madras Institute of Development Studies that revealed a job loss for at least one person in 53 per cent of the households in the State between March and May alone.

Stalin said both urban and rural areas were affected, according to the survey which had put the figures in cities as 50 per cent and villages as 56 per cent.

In general, the job loss in the unorganized sector alone was 83.4 percent among daily wage earners, which prompted the DMK to demand a payment of Rs 5000 cash as relief to every family, he said, adding that the government failed to do it putting the people in deep financial crisis.

Besides reiterating the demand for payment of Rs 5000 to poor families, Stalin also wanted the government to bring out a white paper on the new investments made in the State and the job opportunities that it would provide since the Chief Minister and Ministers had been harping on attracting new investments and the signing of MoUs.
The Piluttis

The allure of the front porch

by Cynthia Furlong Reynolds

Published in August, 2020

Graphic artist/illustrator/author Deb Pilutti spent the early quarantine days organizing and clearing out her basement, creating a larger studio for her artwork. But the porches, not the basements, initially attracted her family to the Eberwhite neighborhood.



"We came here by accident," Pilutti says. "We lived a half mile away and we often walked downtown to Washtenaw Dairy. When we passed this street, we admired the front porches and the way the neighbors were always out socializing."



In 1994, they moved into a charming circa-1928 house with a big front porch in the post-World War I neighborhood. "Our decision to move didn't affect my husband's commute [Tom is a Ford engineer in Dearborn], but we decided this was the way we wanted to live," she says. "It turned out to be a great place to raise a family and participate in Ann Arbor's rich downtown life."



Now that the children have scattered to D.C. and San Francisco, the Piluttis occasionally discuss downsizing, but they aren't ready to pack. "We like to walk with a purpose--and we can easily walk to the library, Michigan Theater, the restaurants and bars and bookstores downtown. That's reason enough to stay."



Trained in graphic design at Purdue, Pilutti worked in Chicago and St. Louis before moving to Ann Arbor so her husband could attend grad school. She created the website for Ann Arbor-based olliebollen.com, becoming a partner and designing some of the toys and children's products it sold. But she dreamed of combining her love of reading with her passion for illustrating.



A chance encounter with children's writer Nancy Shaw led her to membership in the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Then a mutual friend introduced her to a local manuscript critique group for children's writers. She dipped her toe in the waters of children's publishing, juggling painting with her freelance graphic design assignments. And then one day she told herself she had to treat children's books as a full-time

...continued below...

job--"but it was definitely a leap of faith to go out on my own."Her ideas come in myriad ways. She grins and explains, "It's a very messy process that involves a lot of staring and thinking." Her books often start with random sketches and doodles, until one catches her eye and inspires a story. "I ask questions and explore topics I like or think are funny. I'm often drawn to the idea of unlikely friendships."The results? Eight books and two awards: she was a finalist for the Michigan Great Reads Great Books Award (for The Secrets of Ninja School) and won the International Picture Book Show Award (for Idea Jar).Covid-19's lockdown gave her the time and energy to create a basement studio, but Pilutti says she's not sure how being at home all the time will affect her career or the publishing industry. "My days haven't changed remarkably, except my husband now works at home. And," she adds, smiling again, "before the quarantine, much of my staring was done in coffee shops."We'll see changes in publishing after this, I'm sure. But one thing will remain the same: we still need stories. Lots of stories. Good stories." [Originally published in August, 2020.]
Skeletons of monkeys have been discovered in an animal cemetery near the Red Sea port Berenice that experts believe were kept as household pets some 2,000 years ago.

The port was used by both Romans and Egyptians who imported the animals from India, as 3D scans and bone comparisons reveal the animals were the same species of those living in the Asian country.

The team found a number of skeletons arranged like sleeping children, decorated with shells and some buried near mummified kittens.

Many of the skeletons were of younger monkeys, which experts say was a result of the animals inability to adapt to their new homes and the lack of nourishment.

Skeletons of monkeys have been discovered in an animal cemetery near the Red Sea port Berenice that experts believe were kept as household pets some 2,000 years ago

Researchers have been working at this site for over a decade and during this time have uncovered monumental fortresses, defense walls and a massive underground complex, as reported on by The First News.

The animal cemetery and other ancient artifacts were found by a team from the Warsaw University's Center of Mediterranean Archeology, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Delaware.

When the monkey remains were first pulled from what was once an ancient seaport in Egypt, experts had believed they belonged to a native species.

However, following a number tests using 3D scanners and bone comparisons, the team determined the animals had made their way to the area from India.

The port was used by both Romans and Egyptians who imported the animals from India, as 3D scans and bone comparisons reveal the animals were the same species of those living in the Asian country

The team found a number of skeletons arranged like sleeping children, decorated with shells and some buried near mummified kittens

Professor Marta Osypinska, a zooarchaeologist from the Polish Academy of Sciences, said: 'We believe that the influential Romans who lived in Berenice, a faraway outpost, in the first and second, wanted to make their time pleasant with the company of various animals.'

'Among them were also monkeys.'

The team believes these creatures were household pets due to how they were buried  in an animal necropolis and arranged like sleeping children

One of the bodies was covered in a woolen fabric and two others had large shells placed by their heads.

Also buried near one of the monkeys was a very young piglet and three mummified kittens.

Researches have been working at this site for over a decade and during this time have uncovered monumental fortresses, defense walls and a massive underground complex

The seaport was taken from the Egyptian by invading Romans who used it as a connection between Egypt, the Middle East and India. The conquerors used this port as a trading post, as experts have uncovered a number of preserved goods such as skins and textiles from China and India

Osypinska said: 'This is a unique finding. Until now, no one has found Indian monkeys in the archaeological sites in Africa. Interestingly, even ancient written sources don't mention this practice.'

The seaport was taken from the Egyptian by invading Romans who used it as a connection between Egypt, the Middle East and India.

The conquerors used this port as a trading post, as experts have uncovered a number of preserved goods such as skins and textiles from China and India.

The skeletons show that these monkeys traveled thousands of miles away from their home, which many times resulted in an early death for the animal.

Professor Osypinska said: 'It involved providing the animals with adequate food and water during a few weeks' cruise across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.

'Unfortunately, after reaching Berenice the monkeys couldn't adapt and died young. It was probably caused by s lack of fresh fruit and other necessary nourishment.'
China's strategic focus on strengthening self-sufficiency while deepening opening-up will cement its economic resilience and provide global investors with stability despite the lingering uncertainties brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, analysts said on Sunday.



Their comments were based on the country's recently strengthened commitment to establishing a "dual circulation" development pattern, in which domestic and foreign markets can boost each other, with the domestic market as the mainstay.

"Dual circulation" is widely seen as the most important policy direction after the well-known supply-side structural reform drive, and will likely serve as the policy framework of the upcoming 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), said Li Lin, chief economist at Beijing-based fintech conglomerate CreditEase.

The pattern focuses on fully utilizing domestic resources to empower the economy while furthering opening-up efforts, which marks a difference from the past development mode featuring rather heavy reliance on external demand and production factors, especially in natural resources and high-end technology, Li said.

At a symposium with entrepreneurs in July, President Xi Jinping explained the consideration behind the proposed new pattern: In the face of an external environment characterized by rising protectionism, a global economic downturn, and a shrinking international market, China must give full play to the advantages of its huge domestic market to boost its economy and the global recovery.

Efforts should be made to elevate the modernization level of the industrial and supply chains, promote scientific and technological innovation, and speed up breakthroughs in core technologies, Xi said.

Cheng Shi, chief economist at corporate financing platform ICBC International, said the "dual circulation" development pattern will help the Chinese economy better defend itself against protracted external uncertainties.

"The focus on improving domestic economic circulation will make China's development less confined to unstable external factors, but remain deeply blended with and benefit from international economic exchanges," Cheng said.

On the one hand, by attaching greater importance to expanding domestic demand and addressing weak links in the supply system, the "dual circulation" pattern will make China's economy less dependent on external factors, he said.

On the other, the country will continue its opening-up efforts and diversify its trade partners based on a win-win mindset, making its external economic circulation less vulnerable to protectionist measures from one or two countries, he said.

China's more resilient economy under the "dual circulation" pattern will help the nation's equities better withstand volatility in overseas markets, analysts said, attracting global investors seeking relatively stable returns.

"Uncertainty does remain elevated amid the COVID-19 pandemic and casts a cloud over Chinese equities, but the long-term trend of global investment flowing into the Chinese market will not change, given its steady economic prospects under the dual circulation pattern," said Cheng.

Since this month, investors in the Chinese mainland stock market started to sell expensive tech shares to capture the rally in undervalued cyclicalsstocks most affected by macroeconomic or systematic changes in the overall economy.

But analysts said the correction could have signaled mid-to long-term buying opportunities. As China steps up efforts to strengthen self-sufficiency, domestic brands engaged in technological innovation should see faster growth and lead the market uptrend, they said, adding that the consumption upgrading and financial sectors are also expected to benefit.

"For many industrial and tech sectors, this (the dual circulation pattern) means more onshore sourcing, onshore substitutes as backups or import substitution," said Wendy Liu, head of China Strategy at UBS Investment Bank.

Zhang Xia, chief strategist at China Merchants Securities, said that the market value of the high-end automation sector in the A-share market could see a 10-fold increase over the next decade as leading domestic companies stand out and become more capable in competing with foreign giants.
By Express News Service

MANGALURU: The Udupi town police have registered an FIR over the suspicious death of a 26-year-old woman who died after she was reportedly administered an injection for headache at a private hospital.

The hospital had also issued a report showing that she was COVID-19 positive.

Shivaprasad, the womans husband and vice-president of Udupi BJP Yuva Morcha, and his family suspect the authenticity of the COVID-19 report, stating that two separate tests done after her death gave contradictory results and alleged that it was an attempt to cover up the alleged negligence by the doctors.

In his complaint, he has alleged that his wife Sriraksha was taken to CSI Lombard Memorial (Mission) Hospital on Friday after she complained of recurring headaches.

The doctors who attended to her, administered an injection.

After returning home, she reportedly fell unconscious and was rushed back to the hospital, where she was declared brought dead.

Shivaprasad told The New Indian Express that he wants to know the cause of his wifes death. He said they will hold a protest at Kaup on Monday, seeking a CBI probe into the incident.

The couple have two kids  a three-year-old and a one-year-old.

Udupi Town police inspector Manjunath said they have lodged an FIR based on Shivaprasads complaint and are investigating.
H undreds of soldiers are kicked out of the British army every year for taking drugs and the number is growing steadily each year, official figures show.

About 660 soldiers and reservists were discharged from the army in 2019 after tasting positive for illicit substances, up from around 630 in 2018 and 570 the year before, according to Ministry of Defence data.

The figures, which were first obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information request, reveal that about 270 soldiers were dismissed after positive tests in the first half of 2020.

Members of the armed forces routinely undergo drugs testing, but tests are thought to have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

British soldiers in Afghanistan / Getty Images

Before Covid-19 hit the UK there were around 80,000 random tests annually, with some people tested more than once and others left untested.

Some 79,620 people serve in the regular army, while there are also 29,980 reserves.

Cocaine is by far the most common drug used by army personnel, followed by cannabis and ecstasy. Ketamine, steroids and benzodiazepines also showed up in many tests.

Niamh Eastwood, from the drug information charity Release, said drugs were common in all walks of life, so army personnel taking them was unsurprising.

Royal Marines on operations in Afghanistan / MoD/PA Wire

She told the Guardian: Drug use is ubiquitous in society whether in the military, medicine, journalism or even amongst those vying for leadership of the Conservative party.

The high level of discharges for this activity demonstrates how our current drug laws destroy lives.

"Simply ingesting one substance can destroy your career, whilst other substances, like alcohol, are proactively encouraged as part of the culture.

Not everyone who tests positive is sacked from the army. If a young soldier who has a promising career fails a test, there is a chance they could be kept on.

British troops prepare to leave for a warzone / PA Archive/PA Images

Anyone who is fired for failing a drugs test is ineligible for the "bounty" payment offered to people rejoining the army within ten years of leaving.

An army spokesman told the Standard: "The army does not tolerate drug abuse within its ranks as it is incompatible with military service and operational effectiveness.

"Army personnel caught taking drugs can expect to be discharged.

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"It is untrue that those discharged for any drugs-related reason would later receive a payment under the bounty scheme.
The 360 shows you diverse perspectives on the days top stories and debates.

Whats happening

Over the weekend, hundreds of Save the Children rallies were held in cities across the country. On the surface, the demonstrations appeared aimed at raising awareness of human trafficking. But many of the marches were planned and carried out by followers of a growing and dangerous conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

The core of QAnon is a belief that a high-ranking government insider  known as Q  is working alongside President Trump to take down an international child-trafficking ring run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles led by prominent Democrats and Hollywood celebrities. The conspiracy sprouted up on the fringe website 4chan in 2017 and has gradually spread to become more popular on mainstream social media sites, especially Facebook. The FBI declared QAnon a domestic terror threat in 2019 following a string of violent incidents carried out by followers.

QAnon has also slowly begun to have an impact on U.S. politics. Signs featuring QAnon slogans have been spotted at Trump rallies. Dozens of candidates who either openly follow QAnon or hinted at their support have run for Congress. One of those candidates, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, appears likely to be elected to the House of Representatives in November.

Trump has amplified QAnon-affiliated social media accounts hundreds of times throughout his first term in office, but hadnt directly addressed the conspiracy until last week, when he said he has heard these are people that love our country. Some other prominent Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have dismissed QAnon despite the presidents qualified endorsement of the movement.

Why theres debate

As QAnon has grown, conspiracy theory experts have become increasingly concerned about the movements infiltration into politics. One of the dangerous things about QAnon, they say, is how it can overlap with mainstream political movements  like combatting human trafficking or supporting Trump  with messages that either obscure or subtly hint at the the more extreme elements of the conspiracy. As a result, many voters may find themselves unwittingly spreading QAnon propaganda or supporting candidates they may not know follow the conspiracy.

Story continues

Trumps willingness to accept support from QAnon followers could help the movement further entangle itself in GOP politics, to the point where it becomes a prominent wing of the party for years, some argue. Greenes probable election to Congress could mark the birth of a QAnon caucus similar to the tea party movement that exerted heavy influence over the GOP in the early years of the Obama administration, some observers say. There are also fears that the movements most committed acolytes, who hold an almost religious devotion to the cause, may seek to influence the upcoming election through violence.

Others are doubtful that QAnon will have a lasting influence on American politics. Despite its current rise in popularity, most voters know little or nothing about QAnon. As the public becomes more informed about the movements absurd and disturbing beliefs, the thinking goes, its more likely to become a turnoff than a rallying cry. QAnons foundational myth centers on Trump being an all-knowing puppetmaster in the nations highest office. The conspiracy may fizzle if he loses the election in November and has to give up the presidency.

The vision of QAnon as the next tea party has many logical holes in it, some argue. The tea partys central ethos  low taxes and a reduction of the federal deficit  meshed well with traditional Republican beliefs. QAnons radical conspiracies lack a coherent policy platform for GOP politicians to latch onto. Outside of Trump, virtually no prominent mainstream Republicans have embraced QAnon supporters. Many, including Vice President Mike Pence, have dismissed the movement. Greene has even attempted to distance herself from previous statements supporting QAnon. All this suggests that the conspiracys ability to infiltrate the party may be extremely limited.

Perspectives

QAnon could become the new tea party

Like the Tea Party before it, QAnon stands poised to march, overrun town meetings, and get out the 2022 vote to thwart any meaningful action on climate change, on structural racism and sexism, and economic inequality in America.  Will Bunch, Philadelphia Inquirer

QAnon has lacks the policy agenda it needs to be a lasting political force

QAnon  lacks the leadership structure and the dark-money connections of the early tea party. It also lacks realistic goals or anything resembling a coherent policy agenda. Its followers are internet vigilantes gripped by paranoid and violent revenge fantasies, not lower-my-taxes conservatives or opponents of the Affordable Care Act.  Kevin Roose, New York Times

The conspiracy doesnt motivate voters

Theres no evidence at all that the fact that these candidates won has anything to do with Q.  Conspiracy theory researcher Joanne Miller to Los Angeles Times

Republicans are helping QAnon grow

QAnon has been supported, amplified, and winked at enough by far-right Republicans  the president and his sons, Michael Flynn, the freedom caucus  that dozens of candidates for office are using it to reach potential voters.  Disinformation researcher Molly McKew to CNN

The movement is smaller than media reports make it seem

The rise of Q shouldnt be exaggerated. Surely, most Republicans arent even aware of this dreck from the far reaches of the internet, and the Q caucus in the House might number around one or two in the next Congress. Almost every political movement has an outlandish fringe that marinates in paranoia and is prepared to believe  or invent  the worst about the other side.  Rich Lowry, Politico

The conspiracy allows voters to overlook the failures of the Trump administration

The rise of QAnon makes sense. It's the perfect mechanism, in Trump's America, for conservatives to tell themselves a story about how they're noble warriors for truth and justice in the face of overwhelming evidence that they're not. Hardly anyone likes to face the genuinely bad things they've done, and QAnon provides Trump-loving conservatives a fable to justify all their dreadful choices.  Amanda Marcotte, Salon

A small number of QAnon supporters in Congress could influence the entire GOP

What House Republicans are looking at next year is a minority in which the people who know how to govern will be gone, and their replacements will include people who either subscribe to or dont rule out! the dumbest conspiracy theory in existence, or have otherwise been marinated in a very-online conspiracy media bubble that make the days of Fox News as the central misinformation organ look quaint.  Jim Newell, Slate

The overlap between QAnon beliefs and Republican political interest fuels the conspiracy

The erroneous ideas defining QAnon  that Trump is a messianic figure fighting the so-called deep state, that he alone can be trusted, that his opponents include both Democrats and Republicans complicit in years of wrongdoing and that his rivals are not just misguided but criminal and illegitimate  represent core tenets of the presidents reelection campaign, especially as his poll numbers slump.  Isaac Stanley-Becker, Washington Post

The GOP is hesitant to reject the conspiracy because they need the votes of supporters

Of course, most Republicans are fully aware that QAnon peddles absurdities and falsehoods. But theyre afraid to cross Donald Trump, and they think QAnon can help them win in November.  Jonathan Zimmerman, USA Today

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Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images
50 pastors who graduated from Liberty University demand Falwell be permanently removed

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A group of 50 ministers who graduated from Liberty University have sent a letter to school leadership demanding that President Jerry Falwell Jr. be permanently removed from office.

Falwell agreed to take an indefinite leave of absence earlier this month following a controversial social media post showing him with unzipped pants and his belly hanging out while his arm was wrapped around his wife's pregnant secretary who wasn't able to zip up her pre-pregnancy shorts.

The letter was sent to Libertys board of trustees and acting University President Jerry Prevo, according to Faithwire.

The alumni told the university that the Lynchburg, Virginia-based evangelical Christian school needed new leadership that represents the heart of Liberty University's mission.

It is because of our deep love for Liberty University and our great optimism for its future that we write to you today to urge you, the Board of Trustees, to permanently remove Mr. Falwell as president and chancellor and replace him with a new leader, read the letter, in part.

We do not write out of any personal vendetta against Mr. Falwell. We recognize that under his leadership, since his father's death in 2007, the school has experienced significant financial and institutional growth and added important programs that are poised to shape a generation of Christian leaders in nearly every field of study.

The letter echoes the demands of a website called Save71, a group of alumni who posted a statement arguing for Liberty to remove President Falwell and replace him with a responsible and virtuous Christian leader.

To do this, the board should appoint an independent committee of leaders from within the Liberty community, as well as leaders outside of it, to begin the search for a new president, the group states on its website.

The Board of Trustees must acknowledge the damage President Falwell has done to Liberty and the hypocrisy and corruption that has soaked into parts of its culture.

While some have argued for only Falwell's removal, Liberty alumnus Curt W. Olson argued in an op-ed published by The Christian Post Friday that more leadership should be removed.

Olson cited several questionable business and professional actions Falwell has taken while president of the university, believing that the trustees were also in the wrong.

"Isnt it the responsibility of the Trustees to make sure the President is doing the right thing for and by the university? If Trustees were doing their job, this should never have come this far," wrote Olson.

In recent times, Falwell has garnered controversy for his strong support of President Donald Trump and for social media posts that some either disagreed with or found offensive.

Falwell elicited a great deal of criticism, for example, when he posted, then deleted, the photo of himself wearing unzipped jeans while on a yacht during his family's vacation.

In an interview with the WLNI program "MorningLine" earlier this month, Falwell explained the context of the photo.

Shes pregnant (wife's assistant), so she couldnt get her pants zipped, he told the radio program. I had on a pair of jeans I havent worn in a long time, so I couldnt get mine zipped up, either. And so, I just put my belly out like hers.

Falwell went on to say, I should never have put it up and embarrassed her, adding that he has apologized to everybody.

Some charged Falwell with hypocrisy, citing among other things Liberty Universitys code of conduct that prohibits students from consuming media that contains lewd lyrics, anti-Christian message, sexual content, nudity, pornography either on or off campus.

Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire noted that Liberty students could be expelled and have in the past been penalized for participating in similar activities.

It's extremely poor leadership ... to publicize yourself doing the very thing you punish other people for doing, said Walsh.

On Aug. 7, the university announced that Falwell was taking an indefinite leave of absence and that Board of Trustees Chairman Prevo was assuming the role of acting president.

This was a decision that was not made lightly, and which factored the interests and concerns of everyone in the LU community, including students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff, leaders of the Church, as well as the Falwell family, Prevo said in a statement.

To support Jerry through this period, we ask that our entire community lift him up in prayer so he may be able to fulfill Gods purpose for him and for Liberty University.
Thousands of Israelis demonstrated and observed a symbolic work stoppage on Sunday to denounce sexual violence against women following the alleged gang-rape of a 16-year-old girl in a Red Sea resort.

The hour-long strike at noon was held "to protest the growing violence against women and girls in Israel, and lack of sufficient punishment", said women's group Bonot Alternativa.

One of the event's organisers, Ariel Peleg, told AFP at least 30 organisations and companies, including municipalities and Microsoft Israel, took part in the vigil which fell on the first day of the Israeli working week.

In the evening, demonstrations were held throughout the country, with thousands attending the main event in the coastal city of Tel Aviv.

An AFP report there said many of the participants wore red clothes at the request of the organisers.

'Crime against humanity'

The "women's strike" was organised after reports in recent days of the alleged rape of an intoxicated teenage girl by a group of men at a hotel in the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

Police said 11 suspects, including nine minors and a woman said to be the manager of the hotel, had been arrested in connection with the affair as part of an "ongoing investigation".

In a statement on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the reported rape, which triggered protests in several cities, as "a crime against humanity".

Responding to public outrage, Tel Aviv authorities on Sunday erased a "Peeping Toms" mural that had long been a fixture of the city.

"Freedom of expression and the arts are important values in our city, but because the painting was seen as acceptance of a forbidden and criminal act, we have decided to say goodbye to it," Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai wrote on Twitter.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)
A lobster shack is covered with colourful buoys in Maine in USA. Loop Images | Universal Images Group | Getty Images

The United States and the European Union have been embroiled in trade disputes over the last years, but a mini deal announced Friday marked a critical de-escalation in transatlantic tensions. The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, has agreed to end tariffs on U.S. frozen and live lobster for the next five years, with the aim to make this change permanent. The deal has yet to be approved by other European institutions, but it is a welcomed step by the struggling industry, which has had to cope with a trade war with China and fewer sales to the EU since the latter reached a wide trade agreement with Canada in 2017. In return, the U.S. will slash by 50% duties on certain EU goods, including crystal glassware and prepared meals. More broadly, the announcement has opened the door to further trade agreements between both sides of the Atlantic.

Shane Walker, a worker at Maine Coast, sorts through a crate full of Lobster at the Boston Fish Pier on Jan. 15, 2020. Blake Nissen | Boston Globe | Getty Images

"We intend for this package of tariff reductions to mark just the beginning of a process that will lead to additional agreements that create more free, fair, and reciprocal transatlantic trade," the two chief negotiators, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Commissioner Phil Hogan, said in a joint-statement. Tweet 1 The White House has clashed with the EU over trade on different occasions, mainly since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Trump has often criticized the EU's trade practices and threatened to impose duties on European carmakers. The U.S. approved steel and aluminium tariffs on the EU back in 2018; opened an investigation into European plans to impose a tax on digital giants; and slapped 25% levies on certain EU goods for previous state subsidies to Airbus. However, the U.S. and the EU said Friday's deal marked the first time in more than 20 years that they decided to cut tariffs.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said on Sunday he wanted to punch a reporter in the face for asking about bank deposits made in the account of his wife, First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro, by a former aide to one of his sons.

I want to punch you in the face, OK? the right-wing president replied to the reporter from the O Globo newspaper, according to audio released by the daily.

Earlier this month, local media reported that the aide, Fabricio Queiroz, deposited 72,000 reais in checks in the first ladys account between 2011 and 2018.

Queiroz was an aide to now Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the presidents eldest son, when he was a Rio de Janeiro state legislator. The former aide is under arrest in an investigation into bank deposits made at the time amounting to 1.2 million reais ($213,500).

Questions about Queiroz have continued to hound the Bolsonaro family in an investigation that has appeared to annoy the president and dent his promise not to tolerate corruption.

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Al-Azhar believes the bill, which was provisionally approved by parliament last month, endangers its independence

Related Regulating fatwas: Bizarre edicts Ahmed El-Tayyeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, has asked the parliament to allow him to attend a plenary session during which a controversial draft law on the Sunni institution will be discussed.

Al-Azhar believes the bill, which was provisionally approved by parliament last month, endangers its independence.

El-Tayyeb was quoted by Al-Azhars official Facebook page as asking to attend the session to give the institutions view, in case the parliament insists on passing the bill despite the constitutional violation it comprises.

Drafted by Osama Al-Abd, the head of parliaments religious endowments committee, and other MPs in 2017, the law aims at granting Dar Al-Iftaa, the state institution responsible for issuing Islamic religious opinions (fatwas), financial, technical and administrative independence, according to a report by a committee formed of members from the endowments, planning and constitutional parliamentary committees.

The law also aims to restructure authorities and powers of the grand mufti, the head of Dar Al-Iftaa, as well as the appointment procedures, period of tenure and procedures to renew the term of the mufti.

Al-Azhar believes the new law will establish an independent authority that is under the justice ministry and is not supervised by Al-Azhar.

El-Tayyeb, in his Sunday statements, said the draft law, if given final approval by the parliament, will build authorities parallel to Al-Azhar, and undermine its powers and message.

He also said that fatwas are part of Islamic affairs and religious sciences, which are referred to the supervision and review of Al-Azhar.

He presented a copy of a circulated report allegedly issued by the legislative department of the State Council, as the authority in charge of revising draft laws before issuance, stressing that it constitutes an explicit violation of the constitution.

The constitution designates Al-Azhar the main reference concerning all Islamic religious matters, including answering religious inquiries, presenting religious opinions on contemporary financial transactions and debunking misconceptions, said a letter sent by Al-Azhars Council of Senior Scholars to the parliament in July.

The body warned that assigning an authority that belongs to the justice ministry and is not affiliated with Al-Azhar to carry out these tasks violates the constitution and the independence of Al-Azhar, adding that Dar Al-Iftaa will accordingly become an entity that is independent from Al-Azhar and will carry out its message without any participation from Al-Azhar.

Any Islamic religious authority established and working to achieve its [Al-Azhars] message is necessarily considered an integral part of Al-Azhars message, the letter said, noting that Al-Azhar should therefore supervise this newly established authoritys work, given the constitutional powers granted to Al-Azhar.

Osama Al-Abd has said the bill will stem the tide of bizarre fatwas.

Grand Mufti Shawki Allam told MPs there is a need to end fatwa chaos by entrusting Dar Al-Iftaa with the exclusive prerogative to issue fatwas.

The law states that a Mufti Preparation Centre be set up to provide muftis with scientific training and qualifications. At the end of the preparation period, each mufti will be granted a diploma and licence to issue fatwas on specified religious issues. No religious scholars will be allowed to issue fatwas without the diploma, the mufti said.

The July report considers this academic mission stipulated by the draft law to be a violation of the mission of Al-Azhar, which is tasked with issuing scientific certificates in Islamic sciences.

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Lugano, Switzerland, 25 August 2020 - Recommendations on the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) for patients with metastatic cancers are being launched today [25 August] by the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), the leading professional organisation for medical oncology.

"These are the first recommendations from a scientific society about the use of NGS," said Dr. Fernanda Mosele, first author of the recommendations paper, medical oncologist at Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France. "Our intent is that they will unify decision-making about how NGS should be used for patients with metastatic cancer."

NGS is a technology that is used to assess the sequence of DNA in genes. Hundreds or even thousands of genes can be quickly sequenced at the same time at a relatively low cost. It is extensively used in oncology, particularly in metastatic cancer, to determine the mutations in a tissue sample from a tumour. The aim is to select treatment according to the genomic alterations detected in the tumour, applying so-called precision medicine.

"Although NGS has been widely implemented, until now there were no recommendations from scientific societies on how to use this technique in daily clinical practice to profile metastatic cancers," said Mosele.

The ESMO Translational Research and Precision Medicine Working Group developed the recommendations on the basis of the ESMO Scale for Clinical Actionability of molecular Targets (ESCAT) ranking for genomic alterations occurring in the eight cancers responsible for the most deaths worldwide. For each tumour type, experts used the ESCAT ranking and prevalence of alterations to calculate the number of patients that would need to be tested with NGS to identify one patient who could be matched to an effective drug in daily practice.?

In the paper published in Annals of Oncology (1), ESMO makes recommendations at three different levels: recommendations for daily practice with an impact on public health; recommendations for research to improve access to innovation; patient-centric recommendations.

From a public health perspective, NGS should be routinely used in patients with these metastatic cancers: advanced lung adenocarcinoma, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, cholangiocarcinoma.

In addition to its use in those four cancers, patients with other cancers could decide together with their doctor to order NGS on a large panel of genes - providing there is no extra cost for the public healthcare system and the patient is informed about the relative likelihood of benefit (patient-centric perspective).

"This recommendation acknowledges that a small number of patients could benefit from a drug because they have a rare mutation," said Dr. Joaquin Mateo, co-author and Chair of the ESMO Translational Research and Precision Medicine Working Group, group leader, Prostate Cancer Translational Research, Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), Barcelona, Spain. "When an alteration is uncommon, it will be difficult to gather enough patients in research studies to generate the evidence necessary for using NGS. So, beyond the cancers in which everyone should receive NGS, there is room for physicians and patients to discuss the pros and cons of ordering these tests."

The third recommendation is that clinical research centres should perform NGS to generate more evidence about the use of this method and accelerate drug development. "To improve understanding of how to treat patients based on precision biomarkers, we need to accumulate data from thousands of patients," said Mateo. "ESMO is calling on university hospitals and research institutions to generate data and make it accessible to advance innovation. This will enable us to learn how best to use this technology in other tumour types."

Mateo noted that one of the advantages of testing multiple genes simultaneously using NGS is that it only requires small amounts of tissue, thereby avoiding the need for numerous biopsies. "However, we cannot forget that sometimes cancers change over time as they adapt to new therapies," he added. "So, we have to balance testing a lot of alterations at the beginning with being aware that some of them may change over time."

Evidence for the cost-effectiveness of using multigene sequencing in daily practice is currently weak. ESMO's recommendation is therefore that large panels of genes can be used if they generate an acceptable increase in the overall cost, drugs included. Considering that the results of NGS panels could lead to prescription of expensive drugs outside of their approved indications, volumes of NGS procedures should be regulated at the national level. The recommendation from the expert panel is therefore that the use of off-label drugs matched to genomics is done only if an access programme and a decision-making procedure has been developed at national or regional level.

Mateo said: "This paper highlights how difficult it is to move precision medicine approaches from research into everyday clinical practice. For example, we need to address the issue of rare cancer subtypes or biomarkers more common in specific populations that may be underrepresented. ESMO is committed to bridging the gap between research and practice by providing evidence-based guidance on the use of NGS that leads to equal access to the best care for all patients with cancer."

###

References

1 Mosele F, Remon J, Mateo J, et al. Recommendations for the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) for patients with metastatic cancers: A report from the ESMO Precision Medicine Working Group. Ann Oncol. 2020. https://www.annalsofoncology.org/article/S0923-7534(20)39971-3/fulltext

About the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)

ESMO is the leading professional organisation for medical oncology. With more than 25,000 members representing oncology professionals from over 160 countries worldwide, ESMO is the society of reference for oncology education and information. ESMO is committed to offer the best care to people with cancer, through fostering integrated cancer care, supporting oncologists in their professional development, and advocating for sustainable cancer care worldwide. http://www.esmo.org
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to postpone the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) due to be held in September.

In our last video conference with Honble PM Shri @narendramodi Ji, I had been vocal against the UGC guidelines mandating completion of terminal examinations in Universities/Colleges by the end of September 2020, which had a huge potential to put student lives at risk, tweeted Banerjee.

Now with the directive of @EduMinOfIndia to conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in September, I would again appeal to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone these examinations until the situation is conducive again. It is our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students, she said in a second tweet.

Adhir Ranjan Chowdury, leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, also wrote to the Prime Minster on Sunday urging him to postpone NEET and JEE.

Students in West Bengal and several other states have been demanding postponement of these examinations over the past few days. The All India Students Association (AISA), a Left organisation, has planned protests in Kolkata and other cities.

On Monday afternoon, the West Bengal education department held a meeting in Kolkata, where officials discussed the pros and cons of postponing the academic year in secondary and higher secondary schools under state boards instead of curtailing the syllabus as earlier proposed by some people to help students cope with the syllabus.
A school in Scotland remains closed after 22 people tested positive for coronavirus.

Kingspark School in Dundee was closed last Wednesday and pupils and staff were asked to self-isolate for 14 days.

NHS Tayside said 17 staff and two pupils at the special needs school had tested positive for COVID-19, as well as three community contacts.

Restrictions have been placed on care homes in Tayside to stop the spread of coronavirus in the area.

The Kingspark School in Dundee is closed after a coronavirus outbreak. (Google)

The Kingspark outbreak has spread to two other schools in Dundee.

A primary two class at St Peter and Pauls School must self-isolate until 2 September after a positive test.

And children who went to the Happy Times out-of-school club at Downfield Primary School have also been asked to quarantine after someone tested positive.

Dr Ellie Hothersall, consultant in public health medicine with NHS Tayside, said: Since the identification of positive cases at Kingspark, a detailed contact tracing programme has been under way and these linked cases are being identified because of those concerted efforts of Test and Protect.

We must do everything we can to protect all of our communities against COVID-19 and that is why we have issued the guidance to self-isolate. By taking this action we are containing any further spread of infection.

We know that this may cause anxiety to some parents and children but we must do everything we can to ensure we keep people safe.

Update from the Incident Management Team (IMT) which is working with Dundee City Council, Scottish Government and Public Health Scotland to provide advice and support in the cluster linked to positive COVID-19 cases in Kingspark School, Dundee https://t.co/LJqURt2FDD  NHS Tayside (@NHSTayside) August 23, 2020

Paul Clancy, Dundee City Council executive director of children and families services, said: I would like to reassure families that this action is being taken to keep everyone safe.

Story continues

This is our paramount concern and we cannot be complacent.

On Monday, Boris Johnson urged parents to send their children back to schools when they reopen in England and Wales next month.

Schools in Scotland have already reopened, while those in Northern Ireland did so on Monday.

Englands deputy chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries said children are more likely to get the flu or be in a road accident than catch coronavirus at school.

Coronavirus: what happened today

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WASHINGTON/CHARLOTTE: Republicans formally backed President Donald Trump`s re-election on the first of four days of a scaled-back convention meant to highlight his pre-pandemic record and sow doubts about Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Trump formally secured the votes he will need to claim the party`s renomination in Charlotte, North Carolina, where party members are meeting amid a coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 176,000 Americans, erased millions of jobs and eroded the president`s standing among voters.

The partly virtual, partly in-person extravaganza studded with Trump family members will feature the president speaking every day, even as protesters target the convention site. It marked contrast with Democrats, who opted for an entirely virtual format to nominate Biden, a former vice president, and running mate Senator Kamala Harris. That change was intended to reduce the risk of the virus being spread at the political event.

"The choice in this election has never been clearer, and the stakes have never been higher," Vice President Mike Pence told attendees at the start of the Republican convention. Biden, 77, is leading Trump, 74, in opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election. Biden and his fellow Democrats portrayed Trump as a force for darkness, chaos and incompetence while stressing the Democrats` diversity and values like "empathy" and "unity."

Republicans said their convention would offer a more hopeful message, with an emphasis on "law and order," gun rights, tax cuts and the "forgotten" men and women of America. Republicans opted not to vote on a traditional platform document detailing their policy goals, instead of saying that it supports what Trump is doing. Trump`s campaign released a series of bullet-point goals, including a promise to "create 10 million new jobs in 10 months."

In another contrast with the Democratic event, which featured all three living former Democratic presidents, and prior nominees, the Republican event will not include speeches from that party`s past living president or candidates. Neither former President George W. Bush nor 2012 Republican presidential nominee Senator Mitt Romney, who voted to convict Trump at the president`s impeachment trial, plan to speak. Also, absent from the schedule are several Republicans facing close elections in November, including Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

With the pandemic not yet under control, good news has been in short supply for Trump. His performance as president was sharply criticized by Biden and former President Barack Obama at the Democratic convention. Biden`s campaign said Trump would attempt to change the subject, delivering "more desperate, wild-eyed lies and toxic division, in vain attempts to distract from his mismanagement," according to spokesman Andrew Bates.

"What they won`t hear is what American families have urgently needed and been forced to go without for over seven consecutive months: any coherent strategy for defeating the pandemic."

BREAK WITH TRADITION

The president, a former reality television star, plans to hold several live events with in-person audiences during the Republican convention, in contrast to Democrats, who showed pre-taped segments or delivered speeches in mostly empty venues to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Trump traveled on Monday to North Carolina, the venue for the scaled-back event. Trump`s planned daily speeches are a break with the tradition of the nominee keeping a low profile before an acceptance speech on the convention`s final night. During the roll-call vote on Trump`s renomination, David Bossie, a longtime Republican operative who announced Maryland`s nomination vote, in an apparent slip-up described his state as "home of the Underground Railroad, and two of our greatest segrega-, abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman."

Overnight, demonstrators and law enforcement clashed for a third straight night near the Charlotte Convention Center with police using pepper spray on the crowd. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in a statement that officers arrested five people late on Sunday.

On Tuesday, Trump`s wife, Melania, will give a speech from the White House, while Pence follows on Wednesday from Baltimore`s Fort McHenry historic site. Trump will accept his party`s nomination on Thursday night before a crowd on the White House South Lawn. Democrats have criticized the move as a partisan use of the public property.

"Trump has four days to make two cases: One is `we know what we are doing and have done a great job, obviously interrupted by the virus,`" said Constantin Querard, president of Grassroots Partners, an Arizona-based conservative political consultancy. "And then you have to knock the Democratic ticket for being as far-left as they are," he said.

Trump, who uses pejorative nicknames to demean his opponents, previewed his attacks on Biden, whom he frequently derides as "Sleepy Joe," in a rebuttal address after the Democratic convention finished last week. Peter Trubowitz, a professor at the U.S. centre of the London School of Economics, said he expected Republicans to launch "a full-throated attack on Biden`s fitness to be president" throughout the convention. "It will be less about his age ... and more about questioning his `independence` from Democratic constituencies that the Trump campaign is defining as `radical,` `socialist,` and a threat to law and order,`" he wrote.
(Natural News) Left-wing rioters and terrorists deployed rifles against a Sheriffs Dept. Bearcat vehicle on Sunday night, revealing the rapid escalation of Leftists and their desire to engage law enforcement with force as a way to spark a hot civil war in America.

The lawless actions by yet more left-wing rioters followed an incident where a black thug with a long criminal record of domestic abuse and sexual assault broke away from police custody and was filmed reaching into his vehicle most likely to acquire a weapon. He was shot by police, which is of course what any reasonable law enforcement officer would do when a criminal thug appears to be reaching for a gun in his vehicle.

But according to the lawless Left in America today, all black criminal thugs must be allowed to shoot police officers without any resistance from police, because the very act of policing is now considered racist. So any time a police officer uses force to stop a black criminal thug from murdering people, left-wing rioters go insane and start burning down their own cities and looting retail establishments.

You can see the justified shooting here as the black suspect ignores police orders and lunges into his vehicle, most likely to grab a weapon:

https://twitter.com/nolimitchrizi/status/1297684746370252806

Now, in response to that shooting, left-wing rioters have escalated their action to include facing off with Sheriffs Dept. armored vehicles using rifles and firing rounds at the vehicle. As Breitbart reports:

Armed rioters shut down streets in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Sunday night as the city fell into chaos after a police-involved shooting earlier in the evening. A large group of rioters  including at least two armed rioters  blocked a police armored car from proceeding down a street. After a standoff, the police began throwing tear gas canisters from the top of the vehicle to disperse the crowd. Moments later, gunshots rang out after one of the protesters appeared to open fire.

In summary, armed left-wing protesters opened fire on a Sheriffs Dept. vehicle in an attempt to kill as many law enforcement officers as they could. Fortunately for the deputies, the vehicle has ballistic protection properties.

At this point, obviously, the deputies would have been justified in opening fire on all the armed protesters that were threatening them. Instead, they threw tear gas out of the top of the vehicle, then drove off after the rioters moved out of the way. Its worth noting here that the driver of the sheriffs vehicle also would have been justified in hitting the accelerator and running over the lawless, violent rioters in order to escape the kill zone trap that armed rioters were obviously setting for law enforcement here.

As expected, lawless Leftists proceed to set fire to everything in sight

Following their live rifle assault on the Sheriffs Dept. vehicle, radical, lawless Leftists proceeded to set fire to everything in sight, torching multiple vehicles in the streets and in a nearby car dealer parking lot.

It should alarm you how normal this is. Another night of rioters doing whatever they want. This time in Kenosha, Wisconsin. pic.twitter.com/Ivt7HH5htt  The Columbia Bugle  (@ColumbiaBugle) August 24, 2020

This is how the Joe Biden-supporting Left now operates in America: Burn everything down and shoot law enforcement members.

Meanwhile, nobody in America is bothering to shoot back (yet). Thus, we find ourselves in a hot civil war, where only one side is fighting. Its the lawless Left, run by mentally ill lunatics who murder their own babies and hate America, Trump, free speech and Christians. They despise the rule of law and want to eliminate law enforcement so they can carry out violent crimes without being stopped. This is what the Left wants for America: Collapse and CHAOS.

Watch my new interview with a combat veteran who warns that America will descend into kinetic civil war:

Lets be clear here: Democrats and Leftists are now 100% in favor of total immunity for all black criminal thugs, murderers, rapists and drug dealers

We need to be clear in understanding what Leftists and Democrats are demanding in all this. Their position is that no black criminal thug should ever be arrested, handcuffed or shot by police, no matter what they are doing, including when theyre reaching for firearms to shoot police.

The radical, lawless Left believes that all police are always bad, and that police should be completely disbanded from society, turning over every American city to lawless black thugs, gang bangers, rapists, arsonists, murderers, child traffickers, gun runners and drug dealers. This is the demand of the radical Left today: That crime is good, but police are bad.

White thugs, on the other hand, would never be afforded such privilege. Its only thugs of color who are to be granted complete immunity from law enforcement.

Thats why Leftists go insane every time another black criminal thug gets shot by police. Because in their minds, the criminal thugs are the good people. Democrats literally want to live in collapsed, Third World societies run by black warlords who abide by no law. This is what they are demanding, which is of course a pro-crime, pro-rape, pro-arson, pro-murder society, much like CHAZ / CHOP in Seattle, the utopia of the mentally deranged Left. And thats why their own left-wing cities are collapsing into runaway violence, of course, with record shootings in NYC over the weekend and 60+ people shot in Chicago in just the last three days.

So instead of saying that criminals should be stopped, lunatic left-wing nut jobs  who, lets face it, are universally mentally ill  claim the police need to be stopped. And having black skin, according to the radical Left, should mean you are immune from all police action. Black privilege is now demanded so that black criminals can carryout all their crimes with impunity, even as we already know most violent crime in America is carried out by Blacks.

Heres the opportunistic looting that took place as the violence was being unleashed by left-wing rioters. These people always see chaos as an opportunity to steal sh#t and get more free stuff by committing even more crimes:

BLM rioters not holding back by vandalizing and looting local businesses here in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/wzfWq9OlUU  Drew Hernandez (@livesmattershow) August 24, 2020

And heres a different left-wing mob in the same city, hurling bricks at police officers and striking one in the back of the head as Democrats cheer:

https://twitter.com/BotchlaUS/status/1297727292324683776

There were also reports of Molotov cocktails being thrown at the scene as well, reports Breitbart. The violence quickly spread and eventually large mobs began looting shops and stores throughout the city.

Rioters were reportedly chanting, This is what democracy looks like, demonstrating their stunning ignorance and lawlessness. This isnt what democracy looks like; its what a Third World society run by black criminal thugs looks like, actually.

We cant have a society where every time a black criminal thug is shot by police, hoards of lawless left-wing lunatics set fire to everything and assault law enforcement with rifles

As you observe all this unfolding, do not forget that the new DNC logo reads, Death to America.

Radical Leftists in Portland have also rolled out bloody guillotines as they carry Black Lives Matter signs and threaten violence against members of law enforcement:

We obviously cant live in a sustainable society if the radical Left is going to unleash total chaos, arson and shootings every time a black criminal thug is engaged by police. At some point, we have to reestablish the rule of law.

And that means declaring all these Antifa / BLM rioters to be domestic terrorists, then engaging them with force.

If police wont do it, sooner or later the pro-America citizens will, and then well find our nation in a collapsed civil war scenario, with blood in the streets and the total collapse of civil society.

Its time to arrest all the treasonous traitors and enforce the rule of law in America

Thats what George Soros wants, of course, which is why hes funding most of these actions. Its also what Democrat lawmakers like Rep. Ayanna Pressley are openly calling for. They want violence in the streets because they know Joe Biden is an Alzheimers patient and wont survive the first debate. Since Democrats cant win in an honest election, theyd rather burn down the country and unleash mass chaos, then blame Trump for everything.

Its time for President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, roll out the military police and arrest all the treasonous traitors who are deliberately trying to destroy this nation through the use of violence, disinformation and chaos. That would include a long list of communist-sympathizing Democrats in Congress as well as fake journalists who are actually communist operators working at treasonous disinfo hubs like CNN and MSNBC.

The CEOs of the tech giants must also be arrested and charged with treason, for they have silenced all the voices of reason in America while amplifying the voices of chaos, lawlessness and terrorism. Facebook and Twitter are actively supporting left-wing terrorist groups and allowing their platforms to be used to coordinate these terrorism actions that threaten the lives of law enforcement.

Its time to arrest all the traitors, enforce the rule of law and take America back from the terrorists who are trying to burn it down. Standing back and watching America burn is not a strategy thats going to work. Where is the DOJ? U.S. Senators? President Trump?
An ex-husband got a samurai sword and used it to mutilate the genitals of his ex-wife's new boyfriend. Not satisfied with his grisly work, he used knives as well. Apparently, his actions cut the boyfriend's romance with his ex-partner, permanently.

The woman, Nuria Rodriguez Gonzalez, was hospitalized after she escaped from her ex-husband. However, the terror of what she witnessed left a horrific mark on her mind, reported Meaww.

Spanish national Carlos Sande Fidalgo tied her up in the vacation home of the slain victim near the Spanish border. In six hours, the ex-husband brutally cut teh genitals of 53-year-old Luis Miguel Fernandez, cited The Sun.

He bound the woman in electric cables while he used knives and a samurai sword to slice and dice the older man's male parts while she watched. Fernandez, the lover died at the brutal ministration of the ex-husband.

The ex-wife was treated for shock and injuries because of the wires tied tightly on her wrists and legs. Soon after, the police went hunting for her ex-husband. However, Fidalgo was discovered dead by the authorities. He died by jumping off a bridge and falling to his death. One reason for the savage killing is that he was not able to move on from his separation from Gonzalez. He enjoyed what he did by the gruesome act of letting her watch as he slashed the other man, noted Mail Online.

Also read: Saudi Arabia Kills 180 People by Letting Their Heads Roll

After the incident, the ex-husband used his ex-wife's jeep and crashed it somewhere. Then he switched to the black BMW 740 that he drove. The car was found near the bridge where he leapt to his demise. As reported by the Daily Mail, the corpse of Fidalgo, a real estate businessman in Galicia of Vigo in Spain, was seen on Wednesday, August 19, close to Rande Bridge on Vigo Bay.

The Portuguese daily Diario de Noticias wrote that the suspect placed a tracking device on his ex-wife's jeep. He did this to monitor her and know where she is after the break up that happpend early in this year, according to Lipstick Alley.

This love triangle reveals that the ex-wife's lover was originally from France. The hometown of Fernandez in Galician Estrimo was shocked at his brutal death. Residents paid their respects to their hometown boy, Fernandez with placards expressing the horror of how he died on August 21.

According to the police who are investigating the samurai sword murder, the ex-husband tracked down the house of Fernandez. After locating the rental home that his ex-wife and her lover stayed, he planned his attack.

Related article: Hartford Man Decapitates Roommate With Samurai Sword Over Heated Argument

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
FP Trending

Based out of Tokyo, the space startup ispace has been developing its private lunar lander, set to be launched sometime in 2022. It announced on Thursday, 20 August that the firm has raised as much as $28 million from its Series B funding round and this will help in the landers first and second mission.

Alongside the project, the firm also announced a new data platform business. Titled Blueprint Moon, this business concept will collect lunar data, apply it to tools and applications, and provide the information to other companies, space agencies, research organizations and others to help in mission planning and lunar surface development.

This new business concept was launched in anticipation for increased activity and permanent human presence on the Moon in the coming years, which ispace believes could generate economic activity, read the official statement.

As a TechCrunch report points out, commercialization of space has NASA and other government and private firms working extensively.

According to a report by Space.com, the startup was established as part of Google's Lunar X Prize competition and its first lander Hakuto-R is expected to receive the bulk of the funding. The total amount of funds went up to $125 million after the recent funding round but Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, refused to offer estimates for lunar lander costs or launch service fees.

However, the statement did specify that a part of the fund will be also used to broaden the possibilities of the lander for the third commercial mission and beyond.

This new investment and launch of our new lunar data offering concept will not only support the steady development of ispace's business but will also prove that ispace can lead globally in the development of the lunar economy, said the CEO.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 24

By Jeila Aliyeva - Trend:

Planes from Belarus with Turkmen citizens, who were unable to return due to the termination of air traffic caused by the coronavirus pandemic, have arrived at Turkmenabat International Airport (Turkmenistan), Trend reports with reference to Turkmenportal information portal.

In accordance with recommendations of World Health Organization (WHO), all citizens who arrived on a charter flight from Belarus will undergo a mandatory two-week quarantine.

A plane with Turkmen citizens from India also arrived in Turkmenistan, said Arzuw NEWS information portal.

Those who returned from India also couldnt arrive in Turkmenistan earlier, due to the termination of air traffic caused by the coronavirus pandemic and have to spend two weeks in quarantine.

There are no registered cases of coronavirus infection in Turkmenistan, but Turkmenistan is taking all necessary sanitary measures to prevent the virus from entering the country.

Earlier, the country adopted the mandatory wearing of masks in public places, as well as the need to provide a COVID-19 absence certificate s when using flights.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @JeilaAliyeva
SHELTON  Residents have established a GoFundMe page to financially assist the four police officers who were recently terminated.

The page, established Thursday by residents Michelle Laubin and Chris Jones, raised nearly $7,000 in less than one day. By Monday evening, they were just shy of $10,000.

My heartbreaks for them, Jones said. They all have families and kids. This is about family.  These are our neighbors and friends. We wanted to help out with their family situations in this difficult time for them.

Chief Shawn Sequeira said he fired officers John Napoleone and Michael McClain and Lt. Dave Moore last month for dereliction of duty. Napoleone and Moore are the police union president and vice president, respectively.

According to their termination letters, Napoleone and McClain were fired for allegedly failing to properly investigate a domestic violence complaint against a Bridgeport police officer and Moore for allegedly covering it up. Sequeira said an internal affairs investigation led to the terminations.

Weeks later, Sequeira fired officer Caroline Moretti for allegedly lying and for conduct unbecoming a police officer in connection with photos posted on the police unions Facebook page, which appeared to show officers changing their clothes outside, according to her termination letter.

Sequeira said an internal affairs investigation led to the firing of Moretti.

All four have filed grievances over their firings.

READ MORE: After complaint female officers couldnt use restrooms, Shelton Police set up portables

READ MORE: Internal affairs investigating six Shelton police officers put on leave, chief says

READ MORE: Possible indecent exposure investigation after photos allegedly show police changing outside

Laubin, who is a member of the citys Board of Apportionment and Taxation, said action needed to be taken to support the officers who are being left with no means of paying their bills and feeding their families.

They have done nothing wrong, but they are being targeted by the city administration, Laubin said. While they are going through the grievance arbitration process with the state Labor Board, they have no way to support themselves.

Sequeira called claims of retribution or targeting officers absolutely not true.

No one wants to see anyone get fired, Sequeira said. I personally hired (Moretti). I did not want to see her fail. But this is black and white, not subjective. They lied and attempted to cover it up. That is unacceptable.

Sequeira said people make mistakes  and we are willing to retrain, to work with them  but you need to own up to your mistakes, and we can try to get past it. If you lie and cover it up, unfortunately, you are probably going to be terminated.

Laubin said the fired officers cannot get other law enforcement positions under the circumstances, and, in some cases, their certifications as law enforcement officers are at risk.

These are officers who have done heroic things for the people of Shelton, in some cases literally rescuing people from burning buildings, Laubin said, referring to Morettis help pulling a 91-year-old man out of a burning High Street home June 24, and how they are being mistreated by the city is simply beyond comprehension.

We hope that the people of Shelton will rally around these heroes and help them and their families in their time of need, Laubin added

The funds raised on the page will be distributed to the officers, who Laubin and Jones said were subjects of retaliatory disciplinary punishment by Sequeira and need money to pay for basic expenses and support their families, and then to funding their legal fight against the city.

brian.gioiele@hearstmediact.com
Apple is soon going to open its third Apple Store in Singapore and its first store in the world that sits on a body of water. The store is located at Marina Bay Sands which is located at Singapores bayfront. The companys retail stores are always known for their iconic architecture and design but the one at Singapores Marina Bay Sands easily take the cake for being the most unique.

Apple says that an elevated boardwalk and underwater passage connect the pavilion to the shore and to the MBS mall. The dome-like structure is covered with glass panels that reflect on the towering skyline of the Downtown Core and the bayfront water. As night approaches, the sphere has a gentle warm glow which is similar to the traditional lanterns carried during Singapores mid-Autumn festival.

Apple Marina Bay Sands is coming soon to Singapore, celebrating the first Apple store in the world that sits on the water. As with every Apple store around the world, Apple Marina Bay Sands will bring the best of Apple to our customers, at an iconic location in Singapore. We cant wait to see you soon an Apple spokesman said.

Apple already has two retail stores in Singapore, one in Orchard road and another in Changi Airport. The first one was opened in 2017 and it was the first Apple store in South-east Asia.

We Want to Hear From You

What do you think about the design of Apples latest retail store in Singapore? Do you think such unique architectural designs add to the overall shopping experience when buying an Apple product?

[Image Source: Today Online
Kington, UK -- (SBWIRE) -- 08/24/2020 -- E-Tech, a leading file repair and data recovery service offers a service known as SuperCondense.



This service will significantly reduce the file size of your QuickBooks data file resulting in higher responsiveness and faster performance, higher network stability, less prone to data corruption issues and a significantly reduced file size.



Inactive customers, vendors and items are required to stay under the 14,500 limit for Pro/Premier in order to convert large files to QuickBooks Online and makes upgrading to newer versions faster and easier.



Intuit says that a Pro or Premiere file should not exceed 150Mb and an Enterprise file, 1GB. QuickBooks Repair Pro's SuperCondense service expels old data whereby the size of the file is deceased by as much as 80 percent. "The SuperCondense feature is an advanced version of the Condense feature in QuickBooks and has proven to have far more extensive results with both document size and the QuickBooks' pace," E-Tech's John Rocha said.



The QuickBooks condense operation condenses closed transactions into summary journal entries. If any list items are not used, they are deleted from QuickBooks. There are some transaction types the Condense operation will not remove. With E-Tech's SuperCondense Service, QuickBooks users can bring down any file size so they can easily upgrade to QuickBooks Online.



QuickBooks Online can only convert desktop data files under 350MB in size. With E-Tech's SuperCondense Service, QuickBooks users can bring down any file size so they can easily upgrade to QB Online. The service results in smaller QuickBooks files lesser prone to corruption or crashingwith faster load times and functionality. With less space on the hard drive, QuickBooks systems are also easier to update with new versions.



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Nouakchott, Mauritania (PANA) - Opposition and black nationalist movement, under the umbrella of the Coalition Vivre Ensemble (CVE), has denounced what it called "land hoarding" in the Senegal River Valley (southern Mauritania) which are later sold off to foreign companies and speculators, PANA reported, quoting a statement obtained from Nouakchott on Monday
A Connecticut town has named its sewage plant after John Oliver, with officials there telling the comedian 'it's full of cr*p, just like you'.

The new name comes after the August 16 episode of HBOs 'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver', in which he mocked the town during a segment exploring racial disparities in the jury selection process.

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton announced the name change in a video posted on his Facebook page on Saturday that shows him at the sewage plant.

Oliver had revealed that Connecticut's jury selection computer program did not summon anyone for service from the cities of Hartford or New Britain, due to errors.

The host points out that the two communities accounted for 63% of the African-Americans in the district, and 68% of the Hispanic population.

British born Oliver then told viewers: 'If you are going to forget a town in Connecticut, why not forget Danbury because, and this is true, f*** Danbury.'

But the city's Republican mayor hit back, saying: 'We are going to rename it the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant. Why? Because it's full of cr*p, just like you, John.'

A mocked up green road sign next to him reads: 'John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant.'

Mayor Mark Boughton announced a move to rename Danbury's local sewage treatment plant after John Oliver, pictured, following the comedian's expletive-filled rant about the city

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton stands in front of the Danbury Wastewater Treatment Plant in as he announces a tongue-in-cheek move to rename the facility after John Oliver

In the segment, Oliver noted the city's 'charming railway museum' and its 'historic Hearthstone Castle.'

But added: 'I know exactly three things about Danbury.

'USA Today ranked it the second-best city to live in in 2015, it was once the center of the American hat industry and if youre from there, you have a standing invite to come get a thrashing from John Oliver - children included - (expletive) you.'

It wasn't exactly clear why Oliver singled out Danbury for ridicule. A message seeking comment was left for his agent Sunday.

Oliver had previously made fun of Boughton and other American mayors in 2017 over videos they made seeking to attract Amazon's second world headquarters.

In a video, Boughton asks Alexa where the best place for the facility would be, and Alexa says Danbury.

In Boughton's new video, he also mentions that Amazon has decided to open a distribution facility in Danbury, although it's not the second world headquarters.

'And, oh by the way, thanks for showing that Amazon video,' Boughton says to Oliver at the end of the video. 'We did get Amazon here in Danbury.'
There has been huge confusion at specialist graduate recruitment websites in the last few days after the Department for Work and Pensions told This is Money that companies shouldn't advertise roles under the Kickstart Scheme yet.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak revealed the scheme nearly two months ago in his mini-budget and said more details would be provided in August about how companies could go about hiring unemployed youth claiming Universal Credit.

But last week the DWP urged companies not advertise Kickstart Scheme roles yet. Recruiters are now appealing for clarity, with many roles already listed.

Missing details: It's not entirely clear when the final details of the Kickstart Scheme will come to light - pictured, Chancellor Rishi Sunak

One has already said it would look to scrap the Kickstart jobs on its site without notice to companies using the platform to recruit young workers.

Asked whether he'll inform companies individually of the setback Michele Trusolino, chief executive and co-founder of graduate recruitment app, Debut, said: 'The companies that have listed the roles are not our clients  so it wouldn't be our place to do so.

'Following the news, we may look at delisting those roles which will be discussed this week.'

The Graduate Project, a specialist recruitment website, slammed the DWP for lack of clarity on the matter.

4 Questions employers want answers to now The Graduate Project have highlighted four questions that employers still want answers to from the Department for Work and Pensions about the Kickstarter Scheme. These are: How do employers apply?

Will the draw down in funding to employers be similar to the Furlough scheme?

What is the exact eligibility of candidates?

What level of training needs to be provided e.g. how often and whether they need to be accredited?

Tolga Alkansoy business manager for the company said: 'Following the DWPs advice to remove adverts, if we are required to take down adverts we will of course adhere to the rules and we will also inform our clients.

'However, our priority is to continue supporting our clients with finding young people who meet the current criteria given for the scheme.

'DWP have stated that they can still not comment further on a date since the announcement in July.

'This again highlights how frustrating the process has been for our clients, employers and The Graduate Project.

'The lack of information coming from DWP with regards to dates, the mechanism of funding and application leaves much to be desired.'

Kept in the dark

Since last week's warning by the DWP, recruiters have shared their frustrations after being kept in the dark for several weeks.

Further details regarding the Kickstart Scheme, which was announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak in his mini-budget nearly two months ago, were meant to be relayed this month.

Michele Trusolino, CEO and co-founder of Debut says one of the key factors in uptake of the scheme will be how easy it is for employers to use

But last week the DWP told This is Money: 'We will be publishing details about the Kickstart Scheme and how employers can get involved shortly.

'Until then, we urge employers to be patient and to not start advertising roles they want to be covered by the scheme.'

This is the latest blow for unemployed youth and the confusion surrounding the Kickstart Scheme also follows the A-Level and GCSE exam results fiasco.

Trusolino said: 'As we have seen with the A-Level U-turn, clarity in communication is vital and having a moving target of requirements and start dates only serves to disincentivise employers and young people in participation.'

What is the Kickstart Scheme? The Kickstart Scheme is a six-month high-quality work placement designed to get long-term unemployed young people onto the career ladder. Skills minister Gillian Keegan describe the scheme as focused on 'individuals furthest from the jobs market and at risk of not ever entering it'. The Kickstart Scheme will directly pay employers to create new jobs for six months provided they:  Can prove that the role is a new job and addition to the company;  Hire young workers aged between 16-24 years of age;  Hire workers that are currently claiming Universal Credit;  Made the young recruits work for a minimum of 25 hours per week and paid at least the National Minimum Wage. The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, said: 'That means for a 24 year old the grant would be around 6,500.'

Delay in apprenticeships?

The delay in providing further information on the Kickstart Scheme is having repercussions elsewhere.

As we have seen with the A-Level U-turn, clarity in communication is vital and having a moving target of requirements and start dates only serves to disincentivise employers and young people in participation Michele Trusolino, co-founder, Debut

Alkansoy explained: 'We have already partnered with Opportunity Access - a specialist training provider to support us in offering a broad range of training to candidates on the scheme, but the lack of communication and clarity is making planning difficult.'

He warned this could affect apprenticeships and many companies who urgently need to hire.

Alkansoy said: 'The lack of clarity on the above is having an adverse effect on all businesses, especially SMEs that are keen to use the scheme to bounce back and support young people's futures.

'Big statements and posturing are futile without substance and clarity alongside.

'We have been inundated with current clients and new employers speaking to us about how to gain access to the scheme and how they are planning to use the scheme to not only get their business moving again, but to upscale and push their business forward during these difficult times.

Tolga Alkansoy business manager at The Graduate Project has also criticised the DWP for lack of information on the Kickstart Scheme

'The majority of these clients are also looking to top up wages and offer more hours and we will now have to go back and make them aware there are further delays which will delay the recruitment process and the growth of UK businesses.

'We are finding that the announcement of the scheme may also prompt employers to hold off on hiring apprentices as the Kickstarter scheme does initially seem more favourable and we have seen this over the last month or so.

'Ultimately the longer the delay, the more employment opportunities for young people will be missed.'

Trusolino added: 'Any help young people can get is vital.

'One of the key factors in uptake of the scheme will be how easy it is for employers to use.

'We would urge the DWP to outline the full requirements as quickly as possible and have a plan for if there is a second wave of lockdowns and many of these young people cannot make it into their places of work.'
COUNTRIES have different names for their economic recovery programs.

As governments slowly ease quarantine restrictions, the next priority after ensuring safety protocols is on how people and businesses can recover. The recovery plans of these countries are focused differently, depending on what their people need. Our local planners can take an idea or two from them.

In the United States, there are programs named New York Forward Loan Fund to support small businesses, Paycheck Protection Program to offer businesses loans to ensure payment of salaries of their employees, then another for economic injury disaster.

The Philippines has the Bayanihan 2 proposal that aims to set aside P165.5-billion as the second stimulus measure to be enacted by Congress, to allow government to strengthen its response to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic and offer aid to targeted businesses in transport and tourism.

Cebu City and Province have their respective bounce back, recovery measures. The Cebu Provincial Government will give P5,000 to P10,000 cash aid as negosyo kits to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Some 20,000 MSMEs in Cebus seven districts stand to benefit from the assistance. Those in low-income groups and displaced workers may also avail themselves of the aid to start a business.

The Cebu City Government, for its part, approved last week the creation of a comprehensive recovery program. It is still to be formulated, no program yet, just an agreement that there should be a bounce-back plan or socio-economic strategy, Councilor Alvin Dizon said. Dizons other concern was that the program is democratized so civil society can be part of the collaborative effort.

What makes a good economic recovery plan for local governments? They can take their cue from how other governments, including our national administration, are doing it.

Scotland has decided on a jobs-focused recovery plan, seeing the importance of collaborating with businesses and trade unions. Scotland has a strong trade union sector.

Story continues

The programs in New York specify that beneficiaries should not have availed themselves already of other recovery packages. Those who received aid from another program cannot apply for the new one. This ensures a wider spread of people to get financial assistance.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom has been using the build, build, build slogan as a recovery strategy but got widely criticized for a lack of focus on generating jobs. But he said building new schools, green buses, broadband infrastructure and hospitals would create a new opportunity guarantee to workers.

A province in Canada sees its recovery strategy in urging people to buy locally-made products and use local services.

Jobs-focused. No double benefits or no receiving cash aid twice. Buy and use local. And, if you build infrastructure, they have to address needs under a new normal. These are concerns local recovery planners should consider.
Ravindra Rao

Soybean September futures at National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange ( NCDEX) that slumped more than 3 percent in the second week of August recovered more than 2 percent to settle a tad below Rs 3,800 per quintal on August 21.

A good run in edible oil prices in domestic and international markets, lower supply in physical markets due to heavy rains and substantial discount from mustard lifted prices.

Soymeal prices have surged more than Rs 30,500 per tonne in Jaipur last week, whereas soya oil prices are also ruling on a strong note due to good demand ahead of festivals. However, concerns over supply pressure from the new crop, expected in the coming weeks, and expectation of a bumper crop could keep soybean gains in check for the week.

Listen: Work near home the new WFH says WeWork India CEO Karan Virwani

Following an improved rainfall activity and acreage, the Soybean Processors Association of India (SOPA) has pegged Indian soybean output to reach a historic high of more than 122 lakh tonne this year.

Having said that, increased MSP near Rs 3,880, demand from edible oil institutions to curb cheap overseas imports and huge discount from mustard may support soybean at lower levels in coming weeks.

CBOT Soybean November contract continued with marginal weakness on August 21 and it settled near 905 cents/bushel, down by 0.1 percent from the last session but up by 0.7 percent from last week.

Earlier in the week, it reached multiple-weeks high of 919.5 cents/bushel. Despite considerable soybean imports by China, improved prospects of higher yields in US ahead of harvesting and recent upward revision of US soybean production and stock estimates by USDA have kept CBOT soybean gains under check.

Against steady tone in BMD CPO, CBOT soya oil continued to trade strong during the third week of August as it rose by nearly 2 percent to settle near 31.7 cents/pound on August 21.

Lower soybean stock in Brazil and good demand by China lifted soya oil in the last couple of weeks. However, profit-booking in soybean and expectation of a bumper crop in the US might keep the oil rangebound with negative bias for the week.

Overlooking strong run in the international market, soy oil September contract at NCDEX remained steady for yet another week and settled near Rs 869/10 kg on August 21. Due to mixed cues from the domestic and international market, soy oil futures have been trading near Rs 870 kg since the beginning of August.

Huge imports of soy oil by India in July and upcoming soybean crop against lower stock in Brazil and US, lower palm oil inventories, good demand by China are keeping soya oil supported at current levels.

However, demand rationalisation from higher price levels and expectation of bumper oilseed output in India may keep soy oil range-bound with negative bias for this week.

Steady tone prevailed in BMD CPO as all the gains of the first three sessions were erased by profit-taking on August 21. Palm oil third month futures at Malaysia (Nov) settled near 2,681 MYR/ton on the day, down by 2 percent from the last session and 0.2 percent from last week.

Palm oil futures, which fell by 2.6 percent in the second week of August amid lower exports in first 20 days of the month and higher than expected stocks in Malaysia in July, recovered almost all the losses in the first three sessions of last week on the back of strong cues from Soy oil.

However, profit-booking from higher price levels and expectation of lower imports by India in the coming months due to higher imports in July and bumper oilseed crop may keep BMD CPO range-bound with negative bias this week. However, labour shortage is likely to trim palm oil output in Malaysia in the coming months, which could support CPO at lower levels.

Against steady tone in BMD CPO, MCX CPO August contract rallied by 1.7 percent last week to settle near Rs 758 per 10 kg on August 21. Higher imports (8.2 lakh tonne in July) and over performance from international peers may keep MCX CPO range-bound with negative bias this week.

September mustard futures continued to outperform edible oil complex and surged by more 2.5 percent to settle above Rs 5,200.

After falling by 0.7 percent in the second week of August, mustard strongly bounced back amid reports of strong demand for oil even at higher price levels. Mustard supply during August 1-20 fell by 40 percent MoM. However, new crop arrivals of soybean and reports of higher edible oil imports last month may cap the gains.

(The author is VP- Head Commodity Research at Kotak Securities.)

The views and investment tips expressed by experts on moneycontrol.com are their own and not those of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is constructing 6,240 two-bedroom (2BHK) houses in Rampally near Singapore Township, with facilities on par with gated communities, to provide dignified housing to weaker sections of the society.

The civic body is providing the required infrastructure and civic amenities at an estimated cost of Rs 541.83 crore. The housing project, constructed through shear wall technology, is nearing completion and will be handed over to the beneficiaries soon, GHMC Mayor Bonthu Rammohan said after inspecting the construction works on Sunday.

Mayor Bonthu Rammohan inspects the

2BHK houses built at Rampally

The Mayor said the construction was taken up as it was the dream project of Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao. The project is in the final stages of construction, and at most places about 70 to 80 per cent of the work is complete.

Rammohan, along with public representatives and officials of GHMC, HMWS&SB and HMDA, inspected the houses on Sunday. The project was undertaken in 41 acres of land in 52 blocks, with each block consisting of a stilt plus 10 floors pattern. It will have a shopping complex of two floors with 88 shops. The project was taken up using a latest technology termed shear wall technology to complete it in a short time.

The houses are being built on par with the facilities provided in gated communities, like roads, electricity, sewage plant, park, greenery, walking track, bus terminal etc. The construction cost of each flat is Rs 7.90 lakh and the cost for amenities is Rs 75,000, which comes up to a total cost of Rs 8.65 lakh. The entire cost of the project is funded by the government.

The Mayor instructed officials to speed up the remaining works and to complete them by the end of September.
Madagascar police have recaptured 11 out of 31 escaped prisoners one day after a breakout that ended in a deadly shootout, the justice ministry said Monday.

Police opened fire on scores of inmates trying to flee Farafanga prison on Sunday, capturing 37 but killing 20 and wounding eight in the process.

Thirty-one managed to escape the prison, located in the southeast of the Indian Ocean island, and were still on the run late on Sunday.

The justice ministry said 11 of those escapees had since been caught and that one had been found dead, leaving 19 to account for.

Forty-eight inmates have been captured (in total) so far and another death has been recorded, bringing the number of fatalities to 21, the ministry said in a statement on Monday.

Mass prison escapes are not uncommon in Madagascar. In 2016, around 40 detainees broke out from a high-security prison in Toliary in southern Madagascar.

The police and army were called in on Sunday after almost 100 prisoners turned against guards with rocks and a stolen gun.

The ministry said the weapon had been recovered and has vowed to boost security at penitentiaries across the country.

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More than half of the Gulf of Mexicos US offshore production is shut as region braces for two storms.

Oil prices rose on Monday as storms headed for the Gulf of Mexico shut more than half of the regions offshore production, with the more dangerous of the two storms expected to strike later in the week.

Brent crude settled at $45.13 a barrel, gaining 78 cents, or 1.76 percent, while United States West Texas Intermediate crude settled at $42.62 a barrel, rising 28 cents, or 0.66 percent.

Energy companies shut more than 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of offshore crude oil supply in the US Gulf of Mexico and evacuated more than 100 production platforms because of the twin threat from Tropical Storms Marco and Laura.

Marco reached the coast Monday, and Laura was expected to accelerate to a hurricane and hit by midweek.

US petrol futures jumped roughly 7 percent as refiners idled plants as a precaution.

As is often the case within the energy complex, developments that are bullish to the products can be bearish to the crude futures as crude demand from the refiners is curtailed, said Jim Ritterbusch of Ritterbusch and Associates.

The storms could also curtail US exports. Brents gains outpaced US crude on expectations that other countries might be able to boost exports while Gulf facilities are shut.

Because the US is a major exporter, some of the supplies that we normally would be exporting are going to be stuck in the harbour, said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago. Thats going to offset what were losing in production.

Motiva Enterprises began preparations to shut its Port Arthur, Texas, crude refinery, the countrys largest, sources told Reuters News Agency.

Total SA also cut production to minimum at its 225,500 bpd Port Arthur refinery and was preparing for a possible shutdown.

Also supporting oil prices was a Financial Times report that US President Donald Trump is considering fast-tracking an experimental COVID-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.

AstraZeneca denied having discussed an emergency use authorisation for its potential vaccine with the US government and called speculation of such use premature.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Clevelands Police Union is staying neutral in the presidential election in 2020.

You can listen online here.

In 2016, the police union endorsed Donald Trump for president, causing some division among members and angering members of the Black Shield, a union representing Black officers. It was a decision that led to Steve Loomis losing his spot as the union president. The Republican National Convention is this week, and Ohio will be represented as U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan of Urbana and Cleveland native JaRon Smith, Trumps director of urban affairs and revitalization, will speak. And Cuyahoga County is standing by its recommendation that schools start the year with remote learning.

Hear cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn discuss these stories and more in todays podcast.

The podcast is a summary of cleveland.coms morning newsletter The Wake Up. You can receive The Wake Up through email at 5:30 a.m. each weekday by subscribing here.

You can get our podcasts delivered directly to your phone, and we have an Apple podcasts channel exclusively for this podcast. Subscribe here.

Do you get your podcasts on Spotify? Find us here.

If you use Stitcher, we are here.

RadioPublic is another popular podcast vehicle, and we are here.

On Google Podcasts, we are here.

On PodParadise, find us here.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

Trend:

Commander of the Azerbaijani Navy, Rear Admiral Subhan Bakirov, met with a delegation headed by Deputy Commander of the Russian Navy, Vice Admiral Vladimir Kasatonov, Trend reports citing the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense.

During the meeting, issues of military cooperation in the Caspian Sea, the organization of mutual visits of warships of the two countries and other issues were discussed.

Following the meeting, a press conference was held with the participation of the heads of the delegations of the participating countries, members of the judicial committee, as well as local and foreign journalists.
(Newser)  Now that he's safely in Berlin, a seriously ill Alexei Navalny is being treated and monitored by doctors, and now the German government is saying the 44-year-old Russian opposition leader needs police protection, as it seems fairly clear what happened to put him in this state. "Because one can assume with a certain likelihood that we are dealing with a poison attack, protection is essential," Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel, said at a news conference on Monday, the Guardian reports. And indeed, security has been upped at the Charite hospital, where Navalny reportedly remains unconscious after being flown there Saturday from Russia. The hospital has said he's going through thorough testing for poisoning, but it notes it could take awhile to find out the results.

story continues below

Navalny's family is staying mum on what they may know so far, though an aide said Sunday he's in stable condition. Seibert added what may be seen as somewhat obvious. "The suspicion is not that Mr. Navalny poisoned himself, but that someone poisoned Mr. Navalny," he said. "And there are, unfortunately, one or two examples of such poisonings in recent Russian history." Russian doctors said they didn't think Navalny had been poisoned, though Navalny's supporters say those doctors are likely feeling Kremlin pressure. Some hopeful news for him: It looks like he'll pull through, though not without struggle, according to the founder of the organization that flew him to Berlin. "Navalny will survive [the] poison attack, but be incapacitated for months as a politician," the Cinema for Peace Foundation's Jaka Bizilj told the German tabloid Bild, per Reuters. (Read more Alexei Navalny stories.)
Battle of Britain 80th Anniversary

Royal Air Force Amateur Radio Society (RAFARS) members will operate GB80BOB, a special event call sign for the 80th anniversary of The Battle of Britain. It will be active between the 1st and 28th of September 2020.

Following OFCOMs relaxation of the requirement for public access for SESs due to current social distancing rules, the station will be operated from various RAFARS members QTHs.

Operation will be on all bands, as conditions allow, SSB and CW. A special QSL card is available.

Details are at www.rafars.org/gb80bob/ and QRZ.com
(Photo : Unsplash) (Photo : Google Blog) (Photo : Unsplash)

Microsoft Corporation's video conferencing application, Teams, receives new calling and experience updates for its mobile-based application on both iOS and Android that proves a great competition and direct rivalry to the popular Zoom Video Communications' app.

Forbes report new updates by the Microsoft Teams that is sure to rival the famous Zoom application, that grew its popularity amongst the global crisis brought upon by the Novel coronavirus.

Working from home or remote work is a set-up for most employees and businesses, and the means of contact moved from messages and e-mails to video conferencing to ensure efficiency and excellent communication. The Novel coronavirus or COVID-19 contributed to the promotion of remotely working and empowered video conferencing. However, Microsoft Teams is still widely available for personal and non-professional video-calling settings.

Microsoft Corporation's new updates, however, give its significant changes only to the smartphone platform. These new features enable mobile device users an array of technical aspects that complements the ease of use and functionality of the application.

ALSO READ: Best Ways To Earn Money Online According To The Coronavirus Pandemic Period

Microsoft Teams' August 2020 Updates and Enhancements

iOS Users

Apple's iOS users get a more extensive enhancement of the grid-view for their mobile devices with iPhones getting to see eight participants at the same time with a new two by four (2x4) grid. On the other hand, iPad tablet users get a three by three (3x3) grid view that totals to nine persons appearing in a single page group.

The new update also minimizes the use of data by the app and reduces consumption while the video conference rolls-on. Microsoft also enabled an easy single sign-on capability that uses your Teams profile and organization credentials for bots and tools in the application.

Version 2.09 also enables users of the Apple devices a voice-generated assistant, Microsoft's Cortana to command the application to perform the following tasks: sending messages, answering and making calls, joining meetings, sharing files, and more. However, Microsoft notes that this is currently available for the United States region only and will soon apply to other countries.

Android Users

Google's Android OS users can invite and generate free meetings for non-Teams users that boosts the application's reach and availability to non-users. Android users are also given the ability to search within the messages in groups, channels, or even private ones that gives an ease of usage to navigate the application. This feature is called the intelligent search to find documents and other files in the conversation.

Users of the platform are also able to upload images to their gallery and an enhanced 'Safe Key' setting for security. An organized new feel for the application will be seen by users with group dashboards to arrange the meeting and tools to use.

Direct competition for Zoom

Zoom's video conferencing application offers ease of usage to users, especially to those who are compelled to undergo video conferencing at all times. However, Microsoft challenges these advanced features with their new updates that can encourage users to switch their patronization.

Microsoft's soon-to-be update for the video conferencing platform is to enable a 49-user channel that can accommodate a large volume of participants. Teams also offer a 20,000 "view-only" participants and 1,00 interactive meetings. That is a massive number for a video call and directly challenges Zoom who has 100-maximum participants for its basic or free plan within 40 minutes. Zoom boasts of a paid program that can accommodate up to 500 users for an unlimited time.

Microsoft also plans to roll-out side-menu or side-bar that users can rearrange and customize for ease of use.

ALSO READ: Apple Only Wants One Thing From Epic's Fortnite: 'Get us Paid!'





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Written by Isaiah Alonzo

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A protester shines a flashlight in the direction of Kenosha County sheriffs deputies outside the Kenosha Police Department in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Reuters)

He Just Got Bricked: Officer Injured During Wisconsin Riots

An officer responding to riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was apparently knocked out by a brick, according to video footage of unrest on Sunday night.

The police department in Kenosha hasnt yet responded to a request for comment.

A video posted on Sunday night shows two officers walking around a Kenosha Police Department squad car as fires and fighting could be seen in the background. An officer is then seen suddenly collapsing on the ground.

He just got bricked, someone yelled. Others shouted epithets at the police officers.

Officer down, police officers were heard saying on the scanner, reported The Journal Times. It also said that Molotov cocktails were thrown amid reports of property damage, looting, and arson attacks.

It was not clear if the injured officer was from Kenosha police or another law enforcement agency brought in to deal with the riots. Police have not provided an update on the officers condition, although the video showed other officers rushing over to drag him to safety.

Hundreds of demonstrators went on the streets in Kenosha, located about 40 miles south from Milwaukee, after a black man, Jacob Blake, was shot by an officer in the city.

A man on a bike rides past a city truck on fire outside the Kenosha County Courthouse during unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via Reuters)

Rioters smash windows at the Kenosha County Administration Building during unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via Reuters)

Video footage also shows that a car dealership was torched amid the unrest.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, on Sunday night condemned the incident in which Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight.

While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country, he wrote.

We stand with all those who have and continue to demand justice, equity, and accountability for Black lives in our country, the Wisconsin Democrat continued. In the coming days, we will demand just that of elected officials in our state who have failed to recognize the racism in our state and our country for far too long.

He didnt make any mention of the riots and arson attacks in Kenosha.
Supreme Court on August 24 dismissed a petition seeking postponement of Maharashtra's engineering entrance test MHT CET 2020 exam date. MHT CET or Common Entrance Test is an annual entrance exam conducted by the Government of Maharashtra.

While dismissing the petition, the apex court said, "We have allowed conducting of NEET & JEE exams. How can we stop exams in one state?"



MHCET exams:#SupremeCourt dismisses plea which sought postponement of Maharashtra's Engineering entrance test.

SC: We have allowed conducting of NEET & JEE, how can we now stop exams in one state? You should have checked our orders#Maharashtra#MHCET  Bar & Bench (@barandbench) August 24, 2020

Expressing displeasure, SC said, "You (petitioner) should have checked our orders."

The Supreme Court on August 17 had dismissed a plea seeking postponement of JEE (Main) April 2020 and NEET-Undergraduate examinations, which are scheduled to be conducted in September, amid a spurt in the number of COVID-19 cases, saying the precious year of students "cannot be wasted" and life has to go on.

Track this LIVE blog for all the latest updates on coronavirus pandemic

There have been demands from several students and parents to postpone the entrance exams in view of increasing coronavirus cases.

JEE Main 2020, NEET 2020 exam dates: Supreme Court dismisses plea to postpone exams

The JEE (Main) is scheduled to be held between September 1 and 6 while the JEE (Advanced) on September 27. The NEET will be held on September 13.

On Friday, Education Ministry officials had said the JEE (Main) and the NEET-UG will be conducted in September as scheduled.

JEE Main 2020 is for admission into premier engineering colleges, while NEET 2020 for undergraduate medical courses.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday urged the government to consider the concerns of students on the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and arrive at an acceptable solution.

"GOI must listen to the #StudentsKeMannKiBaat about NEET, JEE exams and arrive at an acceptable solution," Rahul Gandhi tweeted. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, too, appealed to the Centre to postpone the JEE and NEET due to the prevailing COVID-19 situation.

Banerjee appealed to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone the examinations until the situation is conducive again.

"Now with the directive of @EduMinOfIndiato conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sep, I would again appeal to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone these examinations until the situation is conducive again. It is our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students," she said in a Twitter post.



Now with the directive of @EduMinOfIndia to conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sep, I would again appeal to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone these examinations until the situation is conducive again. It is our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students. (2/2)  Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) August 24, 2020

(With inputs from PTI)
KAMPALA  Stanbic Bank has unveiled the Trade Club, a new solution that allows business people in Uganda to grow their enterprises by getting access to contacts, market information and a platform to network with counterparts across the world.

Jonathan Wamara, the Head Universal Trade at Stanbic Bank said, We are pleased to introduce Trade Club. Its a new solution designed for Ugandan businesses to connect with other businesses locally, regionally and internationally with a view of easing both import and export trade. This is a free digital networking platform enabling us to positively contribute to the growth of our business clients, because when they grow and prosper so do we. By growing our customers businesses we can deliver towards our purpose of driving Ugandas growth.

The platform offers trade expertise for importers and exporters across 190 countries along with over 200 pages of trade information for both importing and exporting, customs information, market analysis and other relevant reports. Trade Club has a match-making algorithm that automatically suggests new counterparts that Ugandans can do business with.

These suggestions are based on your business interests. The platform introduces you to new contacts (suppliers/customers) that you require to grow your business. Our customers are looking for solutions to simplify their lives and make it easier to do business. Particularly now, amidst the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we must relentlessly innovate with solutions to kick-start recovery and survival in a tough business climate, Wamara said.

To get into the Club, Stanbic requires applicants to have an active business account with the bank, must be Know-Your-Client (KYC) complaint, must be creditworthy and must have a confirmation from their relationship manager to the effect that the client has the capability to trade internationally.

Stanbic already offers some of the best trade financing solutions in Uganda, but the Trade Club will now allow members exclusive access to traders across the world. The new product underlines Stanbic Bank as an innovator and market leader in the provision of trade financial solutions. However, the basic aim is to find markets and grow Trade Club members businesses.

Wamara said, Traditionally, we as a bank had always come in to support our clients to facilitate trade with buyers and sellers after they have already agreed terms, but with this platform the bank and our clients, will have an opportunity to walk together along the journey of, sourcing for genuine suppliers and buyers across various markets, discussion of trade terms and facilitation of the actual transactions by providing financial services like Trade Finance, Forex Solutions and Bancassurance.

He said in terms of support, when a client joins the Trade Club, a Community Manager is assigned to them to assist with any needs the client may have regarding the Club, especially with suggestions and tailored reports among others.

Wamara said, You will receive regular business opportunities suggested by our Community Manager. Choose to engage or discard them if they are not interesting for you. You can also add them to your contact book. You also have the option to ask our Community Manager for specific and customized matchmaking.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:20:29|Editor: huaxia

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TAIPEI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Taiwan's economic affairs department on Monday declared that the operator of the e-commerce platform Taobao Taiwan is a mainland investment and will be fined.

The department claimed that Taobao Taiwan's parent company, British-registered Claddagh Venture Investment Co., was controlled by mainland-based Alibaba Group, though Alibaba Group only holds 28.77 percent of its shares.

A company is deemed a mainland investment if more than 30 percent of its shares are held by a mainland entity.

Taobao Taiwan will face a fine of 410,000 new Taiwan dollars (about 14,000 U.S. dollars) for breaching the laws on mainland investments, the department said in a statement.

Claddagh Venture Investment Co. should fix its problems within six months or stop Taobao Taiwan's operation, the department said.

The company can either transform its ownership structure to become a foreign company as Taiwan requires, or abide by the rules that apply to mainland-invested companies, which would mean it could not have advertisements on its website or use third-party payment systems, the department said.

Claddagh Venture Investment Co. opened a branch in Taiwan in July 2019, and started to operate Taobao Taiwan in October 2019. Enditem
Photo: Lynn Cole

A 150-pound tortoise who escaped from a Tennessee home has been returned after 74 days, managing to make it less than a mile during his slow and steady journey.

Though the African Sulcata Tortoise named Soloman crawled away from his Ashland City enclosure more than two months ago, he was discovered just an eighth of a mile away from home last week, his owner, Lynn Cole, told WKRN-TV on Friday.

Cole said a man and his son spotted Solomon grazing in a valley at a construction site and returned him within minutes.

He didn't seem to make it far, but Cole said the true extent of the 15-year-old tortoise's trek remains a mystery.

I guess that we will never know the full details of Solomons great adventure and how he managed to elude us all for so long," Cole told the news outlet.

No matter his travelled course or intent, thanks to the gentleman and his son who happened to be driving by at that moment, Solomon is now safely at home and, as such, so much joy has been returned to our family.

Cole said Solomon is a beloved pet who has been with their family since birth. The owners said they would pay his rescuers a reward for returning him home.
     ,     .    (1929-1932)     ,     ,       .     New Deal,        ,    .    11      ,         .     2008      ,         .   ,                 .           .

              ,   The Pandemic and Political Order (     )  Francis Fukuyama,      /     Foreign Affairs ().

 Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama ,  ,   ,    .         The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

Major crises have major consequences, usually unforeseen. The Great Depression spurred isolationism, nationalism, fascism, and World War IIbut also led to the New Deal, the rise of the United States as a global superpower, and eventually decolonization. The 9/11 attacks produced two failed American interventions, the rise of Iran, and new forms of Islamic radicalism. The 2008 financial crisis generated a surge in antiestablishment populism that replaced leaders across the globe. Future historians will trace comparably large effects to the current coronavirus pandemic; the challenge is figuring them out ahead of time.

It is already clear why some countries have done better than others in dealing with the crisis so far, and there is every reason to think those trends will continue. It is not a matter of regime type. Some democracies have performed well, but others have not, and the same is true for autocracies. The factors responsible for successful pandemic responses have been state capacity, social trust, and leadership. Countries with all threea competent state apparatus, a government that citizens trust and listen to, and effective leadershave performed impressively, limiting the damage they have suffered. Countries with dysfunctional states, polarized societies, or poor leadership have done badly, leaving their citizens and economies exposed and vulnerable.

The more that is learned about COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, the more it seems the crisis will be protracted, measured in years rather than quarters. The virus appears less deadly than feared, but very contagious and often transmitted asymptomatically. Ebola is highly lethal but hard to catch; victims die quickly, before they can pass it on. COVID-19 is the opposite, which means that people tend not to take it as seriously as they should, and so it has, and will continue to, spread widely across the globe, causing vast numbers of deaths. There will be no moment when countries will be able to declare victory over the disease; rather, economies will open up slowly and tentatively, with progress slowed by subsequent waves of infections. Hopes for a V-shaped recovery appear wildly optimistic. More likely is an L with a long tail curving upward or a series of Ws. The world economy will not go back to anything like its pre-COVID state anytime soon.

Economically, a protracted crisis will mean more business failures and devastation for industries such as shopping malls, retail chains, and travel. Levels of market concentration in the U.S. economy had been rising steadily for decades, and the pandemic will push the trend still further. Only large companies with deep pockets will be able to ride out the storm, with the technology giants gaining most of all, as digital interactions become ever more important.

The political consequences could be even more significant. Populations can be summoned to heroic acts of collective self-sacrifice for a while, but not forever. A lingering epidemic combined with deep job losses, a prolonged recession, and an unprecedented debt burden will inevitably create tensions that turn into a political backlashbut against whom is as yet unclear.





The global distribution of power will continue to shift eastward, since East Asia has done better at managing the situation than Europe or the United States. Even though the pandemic originated in China and Beijing initially covered it up and allowed it to spread, China will benefit from the crisis, at least in relative terms. As it happened, other governments at first performed poorly and tried to cover it up, too, more visibly and with even deadlier consequences for their citizens. And at least Beijing has been able to regain control of the situation and is moving on to the next challenge, getting its economy back up to speed quickly and sustainably.

The United States, in contrast, has bungled its response badly and seen its prestige slip enormously. The country has vast potential state capacity and had built an impressive track record over previous epidemiological crises, but its current highly polarized society and incompetent leader blocked the state from functioning effectively. The president stoked division rather than promoting unity, politicized the distribution of aid, pushed responsibility onto governors for making key decisions while encouraging protests against them for protecting public health, and attacked international institutions rather than galvanizing them. The world can watch TV, too, and has stood by in amazement, with China quick to make the comparison clear.

Over the years to come, the pandemic could lead to the United States relative decline, the continued erosion of the liberal international order, and a resurgence of fascism around the globe. It could also lead to a rebirth of liberal democracy, a system that has confounded skeptics many times, showing remarkable powers of resilience and renewal. Elements of both visions will emerge, in different places. Unfortunately, unless current trends change dramatically, the general forecast is gloomy.





RISING FASCISM? Pessimistic outcomes are easy to imagine. Nationalism, isolationism, xenophobia, and attacks on the liberal world order have been increasing for years, and that trend will only be accelerated by the pandemic. Governments in Hungary and the Philippines have used the crisis to give themselves emergency powers, moving them still further away from democracy. Many other countries, including China, El Salvador, and Uganda, have taken similar measures. Barriers to the movement of people have appeared everywhere, including within the heart of Europe; rather than cooperate constructively for their common benefit, countries have turned inward, bickered with one another, and made their rivals political scapegoats for their own failures.

The rise of nationalism will increase the possibility of international conflict. Leaders may see fights with foreigners as useful domestic political distractions, or they may be tempted by the weakness or preoccupation of their opponents and take advantage of the pandemic to destabilize favorite targets or create new facts on the ground. Still, given the continued stabilizing force of nuclear weapons and the common challenges facing all major players, international turbulence is less likely than domestic turbulence.









Poor countries with crowded cities and weak public health systems will be hit hard. Not just social distancing but even simple hygiene such as hand washing is extremely difficult in countries where many citizens have no regular access to clean water. And governments have often made matters worse rather than betterwhether by design, by inciting communal tensions and undermining social cohesion, or by simple incompetence. India, for example, increased its vulnerability by declaring a sudden nationwide shutdown without thinking through the consequences for the tens of millions of migrant laborers who crowd into every large city. Many went to their rural homes, spreading the disease throughout the country; once the government reversed its position and began to restrict movement, a large number found themselves trapped in cities without work, shelter, or care.

Displacement caused by climate change was already a slow-moving crisis brewing in the global South. The pandemic will compound its effects, bringing large populations in developing countries ever closer to the edge of subsistence. And the crisis has crushed the hopes of hundreds of millions of people in poor countries who have been the beneficiaries of two decades of sustained economic growth. Popular outrage will grow, and dashing citizens rising expectations is ultimately a classic recipe for revolution. The desperate will seek to migrate, demagogic leaders will exploit the situation to seize power, corrupt politicians will take the opportunity to steal what they can, and many governments will clamp down or collapse. A new wave of attempted migration from the global South to the North, meanwhile, would be met with even less sympathy and more resistance this time around, since migrants could be accused more credibly now of bringing disease and chaos.

Finally, the appearances of so-called black swans are by definition unpredictable but increasingly likely the further out one looks. Past pandemics have fostered apocalyptic visions, cults, and new religions growing up around the extreme anxieties caused by prolonged hardship. Fascism, in fact, could be seen as one such cult, emerging from the violence and dislocation engendered by World War I and its aftermath. Conspiracy theories used to flourish in places such as the Middle East, where ordinary people were disempowered and felt they lacked agency. Today, they have spread widely throughout rich countries, as well, thanks in part to a fractured media environment caused by the Internet and social media, and sustained suffering is likely to provide rich material for populist demagogues to exploit.





OR RESILIENT DEMOCRACY? Nevertheless, just as the Great Depression not only produced fascism but also reinvigorated liberal democracy, so the pandemic may produce some positive political outcomes, too. It has often taken just such a huge external shock to break sclerotic political systems out of their stasis and create the conditions for long-overdue structural reform, and that pattern is likely to play out again, at least in some places.

The practical realities of handling the pandemic favor professionalism and expertise; demagoguery and incompetence are readily exposed. This should ultimately create a beneficial selection effect, rewarding politicians and governments that do well and penalizing those that do poorly. Brazils Jair Bolsonaro, who has steadily hollowed out his countrys democratic institutions in recent years, tried to bluff his way through the crisis and is now floundering and presiding over a health disaster. Russias Vladimir Putin tried to play down the importance of the pandemic at first, then claimed that Russia had it under control, and will have to change his tune yet again as COVID-19 spreads throughout the country. Putins legitimacy was already weakening before the crisis, and that process may have accelerated.

The pandemic has shone a bright light on existing institutions everywhere, revealing their inadequacies and weaknesses. The gap between the rich and the poor, both people and countries, has been deepened by the crisis and will increase further during a prolonged economic stagnation. But along with the problems, the crisis has also revealed governments ability to provide solutions, drawing on collective resources in the process. A lingering sense of alone together could boost social solidarity and drive the development of more generous social protections down the road, just as the common national sufferings of World War I and the Depression stimulated the growth of welfare states in the 1920s and 1930s.









This might put to rest the extreme forms of neoliberalism, the free-market ideology pioneered by University of Chicago economists such as Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and George Stigler. During the 1980s, the Chicago school provided intellectual justification for the policies of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who considered large, intrusive government to be an obstacle to economic growth and human progress. At the time, there were good reasons to cut back many forms of government ownership and regulation. But the arguments hardened into a libertarian religion, embedding hostility to state action in a generation of conservative intellectuals, particularly in the United States.

Given the importance of strong state action to slow the pandemic, it will be hard to argue, as Reagan did in his first inaugural address, that government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. Nor will anybody be able to make a plausible case that the private sector and philanthropy can substitute for a competent state during a national emergency. In April, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, announced that he would contribute $1 billion to COVID-19 relief, an extraordinary act of charity. That same month, the U.S. Congress appropriated $2.3 trillion to sustain businesses and individuals hurt by the pandemic. Antistatism may linger among the lockdown protesters, but polls suggest that a large majority of Americans trust the advice of government medical experts in dealing with the crisis. This could increase support for government interventions to address other major social problems.

And the crisis may ultimately spur renewed international cooperation. While national leaders play the blame game, scientists and public health officials around the world are deepening their networks and connections. If the breakdown of international cooperation leads to disaster and is judged a failure, the era after that could see a renewed commitment to working multilaterally to advance common interests.





DONT GET YOUR HOPES UP The pandemic has been a global political stress test. Countries with capable, legitimate governments will come through relatively well and may embrace reforms that make them even stronger and more resilient, thus facilitating their future outperformance. Countries with weak state capacity or poor leadership will be in trouble, set for stagnation, if not impoverishment and instability. The problem is that the second group greatly outnumbers the first.

Unfortunately, the stress test has been so hard that very few are likely to pass. To handle the initial stages of the crisis successfully, countries needed not only capable states and adequate resources but also a great deal of social consensus and competent leaders who inspired trust. This need was met by South Korea, which delegated management of the epidemic to a professional health bureaucracy, and by Angela Merkels Germany. Far more common have been governments that have fallen short in one way or another. And since the rest of the crisis will also be hard to manage, these national trends are likely to continue, making broader optimism difficult.









Another reason for pessimism is that the positive scenarios assume some sort of rational public discourse and social learning. Yet the link between technocratic expertise and public policy is weaker today than in the past, when elites held more power. The democratization of authority spurred by the digital revolution has flattened cognitive hierarchies along with other hierarchies, and political decision-making is now driven by often weaponized babble. That is hardly an ideal environment for constructive, collective self-examination, and some polities may remain irrational longer than they can remain solvent.

The biggest variable is the United States. It was the countrys singular misfortune to have the most incompetent and divisive leader in its modern history at the helm when the crisis hit, and his mode of governance did not change under pressure. Having spent his term at war with the state he heads, he was unable to deploy it effectively when the situation demanded. Having judged that his political fortunes were best served by confrontation and rancor rather than national unity, he has used the crisis to pick fights and increase social cleavages. American underperformance during the pandemic has several causes, but the most significant has been a national leader who has failed to lead.





If the president is given a second term in November, the chances for a broader resurgence of democracy or of the liberal international order will drop. Whatever the election result, however, the United States deep polarization is likely to remain. Holding an election during a pandemic will be tough, and there will be incentives for the disgruntled losers to challenge its legitimacy. Even should the Democrats take the White House and both houses of Congress, they would inherit a country on its knees. Demands for action will meet mountains of debt and die-hard resistance from a rump opposition. National and international institutions will be weak and reeling after years of abuse, and it will take years to rebuild themif it is still possible at all.

With the most urgent and tragic phase of the crisis past, the world is moving into a long, depressing slog. It will come out of it eventually, some parts faster than others. Violent global convulsions are unlikely, and democracy, capitalism, and the United States have all proved capable of transformation and adaptation before. But they will need to pull a rabbit out of the hat once again.









: foreignaffairs.com
The Nifty50 came close to reclaiming its crucial resistance level of 11,500 on August 24 but the bears pushed the index lower but it still managed to close above 11,450 to a near six-month high.

The index hit an intraday high of 11,497 and a low of 11410. The Nifty50 finally closed 94 points higher at 11,466. Similar action was seen in the S&P BSE Sensex that rallied more than 360 points to close at 38,799.

The rupee jumped 0.7 percent to 74.31 against the US dollar, its best level since March 18.

The rally was led by financials as more businesses resumed operations after lockdowns and hopes of a treatment for COVID-19 brightened, said a Reuters report.

Experts are of the view that the trend remains on the upside but there could be some resistance above 11,500, experts said.

Global cues helped the Indian market to close in a positive territory with the exceptional strength shown in US futures, Hong Kong and European markets. News of a stimulus package later in the week helped boost the overall sentiment, Shrikant Chouhan, Executive Vice President, Equity Technical Research at Kotak Securities told Moneycontrol.

Going ahead, the Nifty 50 faces resistance at 11,500 and 11,600 levels. We recommend investors to buy round the support levels, which exist at 11,400 and 11,350.

Also Read: Gainers & Losers: 10 stocks that moved the most on August 24

We have collated views of experts on what investors should do on August 25 when the market resumes trading:

Mazhar Mohammad, Chief Strategist  Technical Research & Trading Advisory, Chartviewindia.in

Despite positive close and an attempt by the bulls for a decisive breakout above its sluggish phase of the last couple of trading sessions, the weight of technical evidence, at this juncture, continues to favour the bears as the majority of technical oscillators/indicators are in a sell mode.

If the Nifty slips below 11410 in the next session, then it may attract some selling pressure on an intraday basis but unless 11,289 is breached on a closing basis, the bearish sentiment may not get strengthened in the near term.

If the bulls manage to push themselves beyond 11,497 then the intraday rally may get initially extended towards 11,533 but a close above the said hurdle is required to strengthen the bullish sentiment.

For the time, traders should consider long positions only on a close above 11,533, whereas intraday shorting can be done below 11,400 for a target close to 11,330 levels.

Ajit Mishra, VP - Research, Religare Broking Ltd

We reiterate our positive view on the index and expect the Nifty to test 11,600 soon. With no major event, markets will continue to take cues from global indices.

The recent buoyancy in the banking space is indeed a positive sign, however, any fresh escalation between India and China at LAC may dent the momentum. We suggest following the trend while keeping strong risk management in place.

Chandan Taparia, Motilal Oswal Financial Services Limited

The Nifty index opened positive and witnessed buying interest by heading towards 11,500. It formed a bullish candle and gave the highest daily close since February 27.

It has been forming higher lows and immediate supports are shifting higher from 11,250 to 11,350 zones. The major trend is positive and recent consolidation breakout could commence the next leg of rally ahead of its August F&O expiry.

The Nifty has to continue to hold above 11,350 to witness an upmove towards 11,600 while on the downside, the medium-term support exists at 11,250-11,200 zones.
Five reinfected Covid-19 cases reported

Two more Covid-19 patients in Vietnam have tested positive again after being discharged from hospital.

Patient 348, 39 years old, in Hanois Bac Tu Liem District returned to Vietnam on June 6 and was quarantined in a college in Hanoi.

Five reinfected Covid-19 cases reported.





On June 18, he, his wife and their three children all tested positive for the virus. They were sent to the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanois Dong Anh District for treatment. Until August 8, they were discharged from the hospital following their full recovery.

However, on August 23, they were provided with Covid-19 tests. The husband tested positive again for the virus while his wife and children remained negative.

He was moved to the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases again, while his wife and his children have continued isolating themselves at their home.

Another re-infected Covid-19 case is a 19-year old student, Patient 564 from the central province of Quang Nam.

She first tested positive for the virus on August 1 and was released from hospital on August 18. But, on August 22, she had a light fever and her test result came back positive for the virus. She is now being treated at Quang Nam General Hospital.

Local authorities have sterilised the two patients' houses and defined people who had come into close contact with them.
Situated in a spot almost directly in front of the library on a warm Sunday afternoon at the Philomath Farmers Market, Sweet Shire Farms Catherine Buskirk responds to questions from a couple of customers.

Perhaps the colorful cherry tomatoes caught their eye or maybe a few of those good-looking peppers that would cook up just right on the grill. There were even some potted celosia plants for the taking.

Everythings done by hand for the most part, husband and co-owner Brendan Buskirk said about the small, urban farm, which has a quarter-acre of growing space in Albany. Just trying to stay connected with where food comes from and teaching our children how food is produced and how it tastes.

Across the lot in a space closer to the sidewalk and street, Katie Gonzales runs the stand for Hiatt Farm, a family-owned business located just south of Corvallis that she and her husband are taking over from parents.

I think weve seen not only returning people every week, but new people coming through, Gonzales said. Its been nice to see. Theres been some different vendors and a lot of us that have been here every week.

Sweet Shire Farm and Hiatt Farm are among those that have been regulars all summer at the markets pilot run on Applegate Street. The final chance to check out the market will be this coming Sunday from 2-5 p.m. before it closes up for the season.

Mark McGuire, president of the nonprofit Bountiful Backyard and chair of the farmers' market steering committee, called this summers trial run a great success.

The community and vendors seemed to have received it quite positively, said McGuire, adding how important it was to receive support from the city, library and others. We were able to extend the market beyond our originally planned six-week pilot for four more weeks. ... It was very exciting to see that growth in just our first little pilot season.

The Buskirks played a role in the markets direction with an invitation to serve on the committee this past winter when the market was being organized. Sweet Shire Farm could offer input from their experiences at the Lebanon and Albany farmers markets.

Were definitely considering coming back to this, Brendan Buskirk said. The amount of people that came through was more at the beginning and its kind of waned a little bit but I dont know if thats just because of (a lack of) advertising  just for people to know that its even here.

Hiatt Farms Gonzales likes the Sunday afternoon time frame for the market.

It works really for us, she said. I think we catch people coming back from the coast, which is nice. I think better signage would help improve with that.

The markets organizers want to hear that type of feedback from vendors as they look ahead to next year. Its not official, but McGuire does anticipate the market returning in 2021.

The steering committee still needs to meet after the markets over and send out surveys for feedback to the vendors and discuss issues and ways to improve, McGuire said. A formal decision hasnt been made but theres no reason that I can think of right now of why we would not be back next year.

Besides improving signage, other issues that could be topics of discussion include attracting more volunteers, possibly adding market days and potentially adding a multi-sourced CSA.

The CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture, could possibly hand off or deliver baskets of produce to customers who dont necessarily want to shop or cant get to the market site at all.

That would be an exciting addition if we can work that out, McGuire said.

As Gonzales mentioned, McGuire also said Sunday afternoons seem to work well for vendors and customers.

It does seem like its busier toward the beginning and lighter toward the end and so its possible that well move it to an earlier hour but thats not set in stone or anything, thats an idea well discuss, he said.

Gonzales would like to see a program seen in Corvallis where we can accept cards and hand out tokens for accepting WIC and Farm Direct (Nutrition program) checks  something the neighboring market does itself so the small farms dont have to. I think that would improve sales. We take cards at our stand but I know that Ive heard other people dont and I think it would improve sales for everyone if they could do the token system.

McGuire said no numbers have been tracked on the number of visitors and the only possible limitation was making sure no COVID-19 restrictions were occurring.

But were nowhere near people being so packed in that they cant keep 6 feet of distance of anything, McGuire said. It does seem like theres a steady trickle of folks coming in the entire time.

Meanwhile, the number of vendors participating at the Sunday afternoon market grew a bit over the course of the summer.

Vendor quantity has increased and stayed pretty consistent after the first several weeks to 15 to 19 vendors each week, he said. It varies, some vendors commit to one or two markets other than an entire 10-week season, but the vendor interest has picked up and thats been a real indicator of success.

The market is operating under Bountiful Backyard, an organization with 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. The steering committee includes representation from the Oregon State University Extension Service Small Farmers program, city of Philomath and Philomath Community Services, as well as a handful of local farmers such as the Buskirks to help guide the effort.

As long as we can keep the vendors happy, that means that theyre making a sufficient profit to stay with us and also the more vendors we have, the more folks we have who will help us promote the market and thats pretty critical, McGuire said.

The idea of hiring a market manager had been floated during the organizational phase leading up to this summer, but the expense seems to be too high. The committee applied for a grant which would fund such a hiring for the next three years, McGuire said, but no word is expected on that until September.

Plan A is to get a team of volunteers in place that are all committed and capable of handling the market for next year, he said.

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Telemedicine, online ordering, and home delivery  innovations spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic  have encouraged more people than ever to explore whether cannabis might be a good health choice for them. Read more

Getting medical marijuana has never been easier in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Telemedicine, online ordering, and home delivery  innovations spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic  have streamlined the process and encouraged more people than ever to explore whether cannabis might be a good health choice for them.

But patients new to the program face a bewildering array of cannabis products when they make their first foray into state-approved marijuana retailers, which in Pennsylvania are called dispensaries.

Back in the day you got whatever your dealer had, and it was always this is really good s, said one patient from West Chester, who started using cannabis to treat his depression in the 1970s. Now theres dozens  if not hundreds  of products and varieties.

So how does a newbie decide which product  let alone how much of it  will be right for them?

Under state law, Pennsylvanians can obtain a doctors recommendation for marijuana if they have any one of 23 serious qualifying conditions. Those ailments range from chronic pain to anxiety, terminal illness to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Among the largest demographic venturing into the program are the elderly, who are using marijuana to treat chronic pain, anxiety, glaucoma, cancer, and other terminal illnesses.

They need guidance. Many are completely naive to the substance, having ignored the cannabis counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

I see tons of geriatric patients who want to know how to make the first step, said physician Sue Sisley, a cannabis researcher based in Arizona who consults as a medical director for several Pennsylvania medical marijuana companies including Whole Plants and Penn Health Group.

Reliable information can be harder to obtain than the medicine itself, Sisley said. Thats because the federal government has impeded clinical research that would help us understand which strains, products, and dosages are best for which illnesses.

But she notes that Canada and Israel are working with others in the U.S. to put the building blocks in place.

Patients have to go on their own personal odyssey, she said. Everyones body chemistry is different, so its important for every patient to experiment until they find the right fit. No one fits a cookie-cutter algorithm.

Physician Glenn Rosen of Parkside Family Medicine in Germantown sees a lot of value in medical marijuana but generally avoids recommending it to patients with severe psychological problems, such as extreme bipolar disorder or schizophrenia because you could potentially induce a psychotic episode. I also dont think youd want someone who has mania to an extreme to be involved in the program.

Rosen wont recommend marijuana to younger patients who have early onset depression. And he screens for certain drug use.

If anything, there are certain medications youre trying to get people off. If someone is on a benzo[diazepine] or an opioid, your hope is to get them into the program and get them off those other drugs and get them on a medication thats a lot safer.

He is also cautious about recommending marijuana for teenagers due to potential effects on the developing brain. No one can speak on any expert level on the long-term effects, but the same goes for Adderall or Ritalin.

So generally start slow and try varieties of cannabis that have low levels of the psychoactive compound called THC, advises Sisley and other cannabis health experts.

You dont need a high-potency product, said Ryan Goodchild, director of education at TerraVida Holistic Centers, a chain of marijuana dispensaries in Sellersville, Malvern, and Abington.

More nuanced products are favored by patients and consumers with years of cannabis experience.

Going for a cannabis variety with the highest percentage of THC can be akin to guzzling straight 151 proof rum. Youll feel it, but it wont necessarily feel good.

My staff gets frustrated when people think THC is the be-all and end-all of good marijuana, he said. Its not. Its more complicated than that.

Theres another myth that cannabis experts would like to dispel for both cannabis newcomers and old heads: the alleged effects of the varieties called indica and sativa.

The rule of thumb used to be that indica was more relaxing and sativa more stimulating, said Andrew Atterbury, chief pharmacist at Ethos Medical Marijuana Dispensaries in Philadelphia and Montgomeryville.

The rhyme was that indica would put you in da couch,  Atterbury said. But theres been so much crossbreeding that those descriptions have become mostly useless. They primarily define the plants morphology or shape. Moving outside those categories can be more helpful.

Finding the right ratio of THC to CBD is what patients need to determine first. CBD, also known as cannabidiol, is another compound found in marijuana.

THC is thought to block the perception of pain, Goodchild said, while CBD is believed to reduce inflammation and anxiety.

Some strains are turbocharged with extraordinary amounts of THC and have negligible amounts of CBD. Others offer a more balanced one-to-one ratio.

Strain names can be worthless, said Sisley, who serves as principal investigator at Scottsdale Research Institute.

For instance, a strain called Blue Dream pulled from 10 different retail outlets can be wildly different because the genetics vary, she said. Thats why you want to stick with the biochemical profile of the material noted on the label.

Every marijuana product sold in Pennsylvania and New Jersey is required to be labeled with the proportions of THC, CBD, and other notable molecular compounds.

A dispensary pharmacist, or a salesperson called a budtender, can help patients navigate those products.

Still, looking for the best strain may prove futile.

The best strain may be the only strain thats available at your local dispensary, said Atterbury of Ethos. Its slowly getting better, but there remains a problem of supply meeting demand. So what we sell most is what we have available.

Terpenes, dozens of molecules that give cannabis its distinctive rainbow of aromas, can boost efficacy through a phenomenon called the entourage effect.

Limonine, a terpene which carries a citrusy scent, is considered energizing. Myrcene, which produces a skunky or diesel odor, contributes to a more relaxing couch-lock feel.

To find the most effective product for them, patients should keep a journal, said Goodchild of TerraVida.

Many of the strains have a strong effect on [disturbing] short-term memory, so its important to note how quickly they take effect, and how long theyre effective for, he said. Record how the strain affects you at different times of the day and how it affects your mood.

Most important, start slow. Patients can choose products they can inhale  usually flower  an oil to place under the tongue, a pill, or salve. Buy  and try  small amounts first.

Just because youve rolled a joint doesnt mean you have to consume it all in one go, she said. Begin with one or two inhalations. And if you must drive, wait three or more hours before you get behind the wheel.

Sisley recommends that concentrates  because they are extraordinarily potent  be used only by patients with a lot of cannabis experience.

If a patient consumes too much and starts to feel psychotic or paranoid, Sisley advises phoning a poison-control center.

Theyre accustomed to getting calls and can walk you through a negative experience, Sisley said. The paranoia usually lifts in 30 minutes.

If you go to the ER, all they can do is offer some supportive care, she added. Youll only be wasting your time and get a huge bill a month later.
A cafe at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was temporarily shut down over the weekend after a dining services employee was diagnosed with the coronavirus, officials said.

The staff member at Blue Wall Cafe who tested positive for COVID-19 was last on campus Friday, Aug. 21, a spokesperson for the university told MassLive.

The cafe was shut down for the weekend. Public health regulations call for a 24-hour closure, but out of an abundance of caution, Blue Wall was closed for 48 hours, the spokesperson noted.

Contact tracing was conducted, and the cafe was properly cleaned, according to the university.

The staff member is self-isolating off campus, and the case investigation is in progress. Any person who was directly exposed to the individual is expected to be notified by public health officials, the UMass spokesperson said.

UMass Dining planed to reopen Blue Wall on Monday and close Roots Cafe, which was designated as a temporary back-up to Blue Wall.

Although opening Roots is possible later in the fall semester, Blue Wall is larger and provides for a more socially distanced, longterm dining location amid the current circumstances, the university said.

The employee who tested positive for the coronavirus was diagnosed as part of UMass Amhersts asymptomatic testing program, which requires that staff and faculty who work on campus be tested weekly for the virus.

Students who live on campus or off-campus students who go to the university for face-to-face classes, internships or work are required to be tested upon arrival and then twice a week, according to UMass.

As of April 5, 19 cases of the coronavirus have been reported among students and staff at the university. Six cases were confirmed in August, according to UMass Amhersts COVID-19 dashboard, which was launched last week to track public health data related to the virus on campus.

The most recently reported coronavirus case among the university community was confirmed Sunday, the dashboard said. A student who lives off campus tested positive for COVID-19. The student is recovering and self-isolating off-campus. There was no campus exposure.

While the universitys dashboard said an employee was reported to have the coronavirus on Aug. 21, it did not specify where the person was working, whether it was the worker at Blue Wall.

UMass Dining also posted to social media Friday to say Blue Wall was closed for two days but did not disclose in the post that the closure was because an employee tested positive for COVID-19.

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A US delegation has met with officials to discuss the suspension of water pumping in Hassakeh and its effects on residents reports North Press.

A US Department of State delegation met with representatives of the Autonomous Administration to discuss the water crisis in Hassakeh, from which the city has been suffering from for a while now.

The US State Department representatives in northern and eastern Syria, Zahra Biel and Emily Brand, met yesterday with five people from the Autonomous Administration.

The meeting focused on the water crisis that has been ongoing for two weeks in the city. The Hassakeh delegation held Turkey responsible for cutting off the water, while the American side submitted an objection document.

The delegation demanded the urgent intervention of US forces to resolve the water crisis, while the US side promised to pressure Turkey to solve the crisis.

Hassakeh has been suffering from a water crisis for 20 days, following the suspension of pumping at the Alouk Water Station. Alouk is under the control of National Army factions.

Alouk Water Station is the main station that feeds Hassakeh. It includes about 30 wells, only about half of which are functional.

The water crisis in Hassakeh has provoked, over the past few days, reactions by the Syrians, given the fact that it could affect the lives of thousands of civilians, considering the Alouk station is the main source of water supply to Hassakeh.

While the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) accused the National Army factions and Turkey of being behind the water crisis, by deliberately stopping the pumping of water from Alouk, military sources close to the latter said that the suspension of pumping came after the SDF cut off the power in Ras al-Ayn and Nabe al-Salam.

The absence of official statements, whether on the part of the National Army or SDF, about the real reasons that led to the water crisis, resulted in a plethora of reactions from Syrians in different areas of Syria.

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.
(TNS)  With many municipalities facing tight budgets for 2021, the Wisconsin Policy Forum has created a data tool that shows budget trends over time and in comparison to neighboring municipalities.The data is from 2018 because data from 2019 was not widely available. However, WPF President Rob Henken said it still provides valuable insight going into 2021 budget discussions.Its a way to see how things are going pre-pandemic, to show how prepared communities are to weather the storm as a result of the economic downturn, Henken said.Where Racine does wellFor a city that has faced serious financial woes each budget session, the City of Racine has seen little growth in spending, year to year, and does relatively well with spending per capita for some services, though not all.Compared to other Racine County municipalities, the City of Racine has the third-lowest general government costs per citizen in the county, followed by Mount Pleasant and the Village of Rochester. And it only increased by 4.6% from 2017 to 2018.The city also provides street maintenance at a lower cost per capita than its neighbors and has a lower debt burden per capita. On operating spending  which includes parks, public health, public works and libraries  it spent less per resident in 2018 than Mount Pleasant, which was probably due to heavy investments in preparation for Foxconn.Racine probably also benefits from economies of scale which makes it cheaper per person to undertake any particular project. Also, services such as street repair and garbage collection tend to be delivered more efficiently in a compact urban area than in a sprawling suburb.Another positive Henken pointed to in Racines 2018 budget was that it had a healthy fund balance. Unfortunately, in her presentation on the upcoming 2021 budget discussions, Kathleen Fischer, interim city administrator and assistant budget director, said those balances have gone down since then to help balance the books in 2019 and 2020. She said she did not feel it would be a good decision to dip into them any further for 2021.The bad news is it means theyre a little less prepared than they were two years ago for the effect the coronavirus is going to have, Henken said. Its still relatively healthy. Its one of the positive notes when looking at the City of Racines finances.Where it doesntWhere the city far outspends any municipality per capita is in public safety services. Mount Pleasant isnt too far behind on spending for fire and EMS, but for policing, the city pays far more per capita than any other municipality in Racine County.One concern is whether sustaining those levels of spending on those services is having a detrimental effect to other services, Henken said. Maintaining these services in the face of stagnant property tax growth and stagnant state revenue is difficult and increasingly more difficult.Fischer said public safety accounts for half of the citys operations budget. With contracts set to expire at the end of the year, the new contracts with the Racine Police Association and Firefighters Association will have a sizeable impact on the citys 2021 budget.The city receives far more shared revenue from the state than its neighbors but that shared revenue has remained stagnant. From 2017 to 2018 it increased by 0%, continuing the citys reliance on property taxes for revenue.Racines tax burden hit homeowners particularly hard because they bear most of the burden: 73.6% of the property tax base is residential, 20.5% is commercial, 3.7% is manufacturing and 2.2% is classified as other.In Mount Pleasant, the tax base is 67.6% residential, 25.4% commercial; the City of Burlington is 62.7% residential and 27.9% commercial. So while Racines general budget per capita is lower than Mount Pleasant and Burlington, in Racine homeowners are paying the brunt of the taxes.It probably also stings Racine homeowners the worst because they have the least to spare. The chart that shows the average reported income in each municipality in Racine County shows the City of Racine is dead last.The Wisconsin Policy Forums Municipal Datatool can be accessed at: wispolicyforum.org/research/municipal-datatool-examining-and-comparing-wisconsin-cities-and-villages/
Were standing in defense against govt overreach, Pastor Rob McCoy says after court ruling

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After a court held Pastor Rob McCoy and his California church, Godspeak Calvary Chapel, in contempt for failing to obey a COVID-19-related restraining order prohibiting indoor worship services, the pastor said it was a small price to pay to stand in defense of a governments overreach.

Were standing in defense of a governments overreach and a government that would call the church nonessential. Its a small price to pay and Im good with it, McCoy said.

On Friday, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Vincent ONeill Jr. issued the ruling, fining the chapel $3,000, which includes $500 for every violation. County officials had recommended $6,000 in fines against the church for holding six indoor services over the past two Sundays.

I didnt want this but I am a pastor. We live in a nation that allows us to worship and thats why were doing what were doing, the pastor said, as he spoke to journalists outside the court.

In a YouTube live video on Saturday, Pastor McCoy said, This is not an issue of religious liberty or the church being singled out. This is an issue of all Americans being adversely affected.

He said it was a small price to pay for liberty.

McCoy said the coronavirus cases were drastically dropping and the continued restrictions didnt make sense. He rebuked the media on Sunday, saying that out of the 102 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in Ventura County, "two of them died from COVID" while "the other 100 died with COVID."

"Report the truth and quit keeping us enslaved to the deception of this," he said in comments directed to the media. He noted that his church has been open since May 31 and that no one from his congregation has reported contracting the coronavirus during worship services.

During his live video on Saturday, McCoy interviewed a Christian couple that owns The Peoples Gym. The county had secured a restraining order against them for reopening the fitness center two months after it remained closed.

McCoys church presented a $15,000 check to the couple.

The pastor insisted that it was not a political issue.

"Were watching as our neighbors are being devastated, their businesses are being shuttered, their lives are being just absolutely crushed by these draconian measures," McCoy said. "This is what were up against. Its tyranny. And we will live free ... It is our right and duty to push back."

McCoy also spoke with former mayor of Californias Nevada city, Reinette Senum, who describes herself as a progressive lesbian. She recently stepped down from her City Council position after decrying California Gov. Gavin Newsoms COVID-19 restrictions as illegitimate and unenforceable.

The economic, physiological, psychological and emotional damage were enduring completely outweighs any benefits were seeing, she said at the time, according to The Union. She said the city also received a letter from the governor warning noncompliance with the mandate would jeopardize its eligibility for state funding. Im deeply disturbed that our governor continues to hold us all over a barrel, she said.

Her term as mayor expired at the end of June, but she had been elected in March to continue as a City Council member for the next four years.

She told McCoy she had lost 90% of her friends because of her stand against the governors mask orders.

McCoy said officials are using the new coronavirus data to frighten us  and pitting us against each other.

Last week, a prosecutor warned Pastor Che Ahn of Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena that he, church staff and attendees could face jail time if they continued to defy government COVID-19 orders by holding and attending in-person worship services.

Pastor Ahn was sent a letter from Chief Pasadena Assistant Prosecutor Michael P. Dowd, warning him of the consequences if his church continued to defy Newsoms orders prohibiting in-person worship in counties on the states watchlist.

The governors order provides added restrictions on in-person gatherings in as many as 42 counties throughout the state that are included in the states COVID-19 monitoring list.

According to Liberty Counsel, the added restrictions apply to about 80% of the states population. In counties not included on the states coronavirus monitoring list, limited in-person worship is allowed but with no singing or chanting. At least three churches have filed a lawsuit against the statewide ban on singing in church.
A BBC boss has revealed that EastEnders actors have been kissing through perspex screens during filming to ensure that social distancing guidelines are followed.

Speaking at the Edinburgh TV festival earlier today, BBC drama boss Piers Wenger said that shows have had to come up with 'ingenious' new ways of filming scenes with close body contact.

Perspex sheets have been introduced for scenes involving kissing so that actors don't actually touch lips when filming.

Speaking at the Edinburgh TV festival, BBC drama boss Piers Wenger (pictured middle on April 8, 2017, at the BFI & Radio Times TV Festival) said that shows have had to come up with 'ingenious' new ways of filming scenes with close body contact

The screens are then edited out of the footage during post-production.

Another social distancing solution mentioned by Wenger was keeping cast and crew members in 'bubbles' so that they would not have to socially distance during filming.

The drama boss said that shows such as Eastenders and The Pursuit of Love are among the productions finding news ways to work around restrictions.

BBC's director of content Charlotte Moore also spoke at the festival and said that the BBC has had to be nimble-footed and agile when producing shows in order to work out what they were able to make and what could be edited.

The drama boss said that shows such as Eastenders and The Pursuit of Love are among the productions finding news ways to work around restrictions (file image)

Wenger also commented on diversity during his appearance and he said: 'The industry is not diverse, as Steve McQueen said, it is racist. Something has gone wrong and we are working on putting that right.'

The BBC has also reportedly been considering dropping Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia from the Last Night of the Proms amid fears of criticism in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement because of their apparent links to colonialism and slavery.

However, in a statement this evening, the BBC said a new arrangement of Jerusalem will be performed, along with orchestral versions of Land Of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia!

It was reported the BBC was considering dropping Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia from Last Night of the Proms but in a statement this evening they have confirmed orchestral versions will be played this year

The statement read: 'With much reduced musical forces and no live audience, the Proms will curate a concert that includes familiar, patriotic elements such as Jerusalem and the national anthem, and bring in new moments capturing the mood of this unique time, including You'll Never Walk Alone, presenting a poignant and inclusive event for 2020.'

Conductor Dalia Stasevska, 35, from Finland, is said to believe this year's ceremony without an audience is 'the perfect moment to bring change', but critics have accused the BBC of pandering to political correctness.

The BBC said: 'We very much regret the unjustified personal attacks on Dalia Stasevska, BBC Symphony Orchestra principal guest conductor, made on social media and elsewhere. As ever, decisions about the Proms are made by the BBC, in consultation with all artists involved.'
The Indian equity benchmarks ended in the green, tracking positive global cues, on August 24.

The 30-share Sensex closed 364 points, or 0.95 percent, higher at 38,799.08 and the Nifty settled at 11,466.45, up 95 points, or 0.83 percent.

As per Siddhartha Khemka, Head - Retail Research, Motilal Oswal Financial Services, global cues were positive after US regulators authorised the use of blood plasma from recovered patients as a treatment option.

"On the domestic front, favourable government policies continue to push markets higher, especially midcaps and smallcaps. Chemical stocks were in action after the government imposed anti-dumping duty of $137 per tonne on phosphoric acid import from Korea for five years," Khemka said.

Going forward, he expects the positive momentum in the market to continue in the near term driven by positive news flows around the vaccine development and favourable policies. However, he does not rule out intermittent profit-booking given the tepid economic data and lofty valuations. "Technically, the Nifty may advance towards 11,600 while support exists at 11,200," he added.

We have collated 14 data points to help you spot profitable trades:

Note: The open interest (OI) and volume data of stocks given in this story are the aggregates of three-month data and not of the current month only.

According to pivot charts, the key support level for the Nifty is placed at 11,419.07, followed by 11,371.63. If the index moves up, the key resistance levels to watch out for are 11,505.57 and 11,544.63.The Bank Nifty outperformed the Nifty, closing 2.39 percent higher at 22,833. The important pivot level, which will act as crucial support for the index, is placed at 22,529.57, followed by 22,226.13. On the upside, key resistance levels are placed at 23,016.97 and 23,200.93.Maximum Call open interest of 36.17 lakh contracts was seen at 11,500 strike, which will act as crucial resistance in the August series.

This is followed by 11,600, which holds 29.30 lakh contracts, and 11,700 strikes, which has accumulated 28.19 lakh contracts.

Call writing was seen at 11,800, which added 3.4 lakh contracts, followed by 11,600, which added 2.28 lakh contracts, and 11,700 strikes, which added nearly 2 lakh contracts.

Call unwinding was seen at 11,400, which shed 4.9 lakh contracts, followed by 11,900 strikes, which shed 3.8 lakh contracts.

Maximum Put open interest of 39.33 lakh contracts was seen at 11,000 strikes, which will act as crucial support in the August series.

This is followed by 11,400, which holds 34.25 lakh contracts, and 11,200 strikes, which has accumulated 30.43 lakh contracts.

Put writing was seen at 11,400, which added 17.53 lakh contracts, followed by 11,500, which added 6.78 lakh contracts, and 11,100 strikes, which added 6.74 lakh contracts.

Put unwinding was witnessed at 12,000, which shed 18,825 contracts.

A high delivery percentage suggests that investors are showing interest in these stocks.

Based on the open interest future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which long build-up was seen.

Based on the open interest future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which long unwinding was seen.

An increase in open interest, along with a decrease in price, mostly indicates a build-up of short positions. Based on the open interest future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which short build-up was seen.

A decrease in open interest, along with an increase in price, mostly indicates a short-covering. Based on the open interest future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which short-covering was seen.

(For more bulk deals, click here Atul Auto, Can Fin Homes, IRCON International, Jyoti Resins and Adhesives, Kirloskar Electric Company, Phillips Carbon Black, Ruchira Papers, Panache Innovations, Goodluck India, Hindustan Hardy Spicer, etc. Axis Bank: The lender proposed to acquire 17 percent share of Max Life, resulting in total ownership of 18 percent post the transaction.

Jet Airways announced the 14th meeting of Committee of Creditors (CoC) is scheduled to be held on August 25.

Wipro announced a partnership with a standard initial margin model (SIMM) vendor, Quaternion Risk Management to offer SIMM-in-a-box to financial institutions covered under uncleared margin rules (UMR).

IRB Infrastructure Developers: Q1 loss at Rs 30.14 crore against a profit of Rs 206.62 crore YoY. Revenue from operations at Rs 1,022.3 crore against Rs 1,773.04 crore YoY.

NOCIL: Consolidated Q1 FY21 PAT at Rs 11.95 crore against Rs 32.88 crore YoY. Revenue from operations at Rs 106.51 crore against Rs 229.59 crore YoY.

JSW Energy: Executive Director and CFO Jyoti Kumar Agarwal has tendered his resignation.

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) net bought shares worth Rs 219.07 crore, whereas domestic institutional investors (DIIs) sold shares worth Rs 335.64 crore in the Indian equity market on August 24, as per provisional data available on the NSE.
Canadas Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government is dramatically scaling back the financial assistance provided the millions of workers who have lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, Chrystia Freeland, the newly-appointed finance minister, announced that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) will be terminated at the end of September, and that the financial aid for the vast majority of the more than 4.5 million jobless workers now dependent on the CERB for their livelihood will be slashed by 20 percent.

This attack on working people and their families is central to the ruling elites homicidal back-to-work and back-to-school drive, which is aimed at forcing workers to return to unsafe workplaces so as to generate profits for big business and investors.

The majority of those now receiving the CERB, which pays a miserly $500 a week, will be transitioned to Employment Insurance (EI). This change will result in most cases in a 20 percent cut in their weekly assistance, from the lordly sum of $500 to just $400.

In steps that only highlight how impoverished the EI program has become after decades of Liberal and Conservative cuts, the government has temporarily eased the number of hours of work needed to obtain benefits and raised the minimum weekly payout.

However, overall, eligibility requirements remain much more stringent than for the CERB. EI claimants can be required at any time to prove they are actively seeking employment. Failure to do so can result in sanctions, including the loss of all benefits.

Under EI rules, even if they cannot find work, many of those now unemployed will be threatened after just 26 weeks with the loss of all EI benefits and destitution.

All of this will, and is meant, to push the jobless into competing for low-paid, precarious employment opportunities.

That the government is determined to dramatically curtail assistance to those without work or unable to work due to the pandemic is underscored by the modest sums the government has budgeted for its post-CERB worker-support programs. A mere $15.3 billion is being injected into EI, while $22 billion has been set aside for three new makeshift benefits, all of which will last for just one year. The Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) will provide $400 per week for a maximum of 26 weeks for jobless workers ineligible for EI, principally the self-employed and contract gig workers. The same requirements for accessing EI, including the need to actively seek employment, will apply to the CRB.

The Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit and Canada Recovery Caregivers Benefit are cheapened replacements for other elements of the CERB program. The Sickness Benefit will provide $500 per week for two weeks to workers who become sick or must self-isolate, but only if their employer does not provide paid sick leave.

The Caregivers Benefit will provide financial support to parents or family members who have to stay home to look after a child or other relative during the pandemic. However, the government has made clear that this benefit will be paid only in the event of COVID-19 closures. Parents who wish to keep their children at home for fear of infection in overcrowded and under-resourced schools will not be eligible for the benefit. Additionally, only one adult member of a household can claim the $400 weekly payment at any one time.

The presentation of the Liberal governments new package of post-CERB measures was preceded by weeks of internal squabbling that culminated in last Mondays resignationin reality, forced departureof Finance Minister Bill Morneau, a former corporate CEO who enjoys close ties to Bay Street.

In the weeks prior to Morneaus announcement that he was stepping down to seek the post of OECD secretary-general, the corporate media was full of reports of disagreements between Morneaus office and Trudeaus staff on various aspects of government policy. These included the decision to raise the wage subsidy paid to employers to help cover workers wages from the original level of 10 percent to 75 percent, and over whether the CERB was too generous and a disincentive to work. These factional conflicts point to the deepening crisis of the minority Trudeau government, which is under mounting pressure from big business to accelerate the onslaught on the working class so as to make it pay for the Trudeau government and Bank of Canadas $650 billion bailout of the banks and financial markets.

Under these conditions, and with Morneau increasingly discredited by the ongoing WE Charity scandal, Trudeau concluded that a new face with the political clout to impose deeply unpopular measures was necessary. For a week prior to Morneaus resignation, staff in the Prime Ministers Office leaked a steady stream of embarrassing details about the finance ministers disagreements with Trudeau to the Globe and Mail and other publications.

Trudeau also announced Wednesday he was proroguing parliament until September 23. This anti-democratic manoeuvre is aimed at suppressing further embarrassing revelations about the Liberals incestuous, corrupt ties with WE, and enabling the government to seize back the political initiative.

When parliament reconvenes, the government will present a Throne Speech, outlining its plans for the next stage in the recovery. Both the Throne Speech and the new shrunken financial support for working people impacted by the pandemic will need to secure parliaments approval, which means one of the three major opposition parties will have to vote with the government.

The Liberals and media have made much of the fact that Freeland is Canadas first female finance minister. The real reason for her appointment is that she is a notorious right-winger and war-hawk, touted by the corporate media as a safe pair of hands, whom Trudeau calculates can mollify his big business critics and oversee the acceleration of the back-to-work drive.

In her previous roles, Freeland has spearheaded the governments rearmament program, its courting of Trump in the NAFTA renegotiation, and since last falls election its outreach to the hard-right provincial governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. Predictably, one-time Trump enthusiast Ontario Premier Doug Ford was one of the first to applaud Freeland on her appointment as finance minister, hailing her as amazing and incredible. Ford, whose government has imposed savage social spending cuts and real wage cuts on one million public sector workers, added, Ill have her back. Ill help her any way we can.

In her remarks announcing the winding down of the CERB, Freeland made clear that the Liberal government is curtailing and phasing out even the limited measures it took to mitigate the pandemics impact on working people, and is now focused on ensuring economic recovery, i.e., boosting corporate profitability. As we shift from our initial emergency response to a safe and prudent restart, as we shift to living with COVID-19, declared Freeland, our approach also needs to evolve. Underlining that the government plans to unveil a broad range of pro-business measures when parliament reconvenes, Freeland added that the ending of CERB marks only the first step in the Liberals recovery plan.

There is nothing safe or prudent about the policies being pursued by the Canadian ruling elite. The Liberal government has spearheaded the reckless back-to-work drive, which has been implemented most aggressively by hard-right provincial governments in Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta. Workplace safety regulations have been systematically ignored or abused, and the vast majority of complaints filed by workers over unsafe conditions have been curtly dismissed by provincial and federal labour boards.

Freelands insistence that workers learn to live with COVID-19 is in line with the demands of the Trump administration and the Democrats in the United States, who have allowed the virus to run rampant. As deaths in the US rapidly approach the 200,000 mark, a bipartisan drive is well-advanced to reopen schools across the country, subjecting teachers, parents, and students to life-threatening conditions. This criminal campaign is being justified by the need to get back to normal conditions, and to learn to live with COVID-19.

A central role in enforcing the ruling elites reactionary back-to-work agenda is being played by the trade unions and New Democratic Party. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the unions have shut down all expressions of working class opposition, including teacher strikes in Ontario and protests by health workers and others over a lack of personal protective equipment.

At the same time, the unions have deepened their long-standing partnership with the Liberal government and big business, as shown by their participation in a series of closed-door meetings with business lobby groups and government officials to plot the economic recovery. A joint statement released after one such consultation in April pledged the participants would work to create conditions so that Canadian businesses can come roaring back after the crisis.

For its part, the NDP has provided critical parliamentary support to the Liberal government. In May, it backed the Trudeau governments move to suspend regular parliamentary sittings until September.

With the Quebec First Bloc Quebecois announcing that it will vote against the Throne Speech, the NDP has rushed to signal that it can be persuaded to once again come to the Liberals rescue.

Even so, such is the state of crisis facing Canadian capitalism, it cannot be excluded that the parliamentary support for the Trudeau government could suddenly evaporate. While some sections of big business continue to believe that the Liberal government, due to its phony progressive image and partnership with the unions, remains the best vehicle for imposing their class war agenda, others are dissatisfied with what they consider to be impermissible delays in slashing financial support to workers and using the crisis to step up capitalist exploitation.

The latter faction doubts whether the Trudeau government, weakened by a series of scandals and increasingly discredited in the eyes of the population, is capable of implementing the attacks on the working class they see as essential in the coming months. As Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said with regard to the Liberal governments proposal to transfer most CERB claimants to EI, This is just too low a bar for many part-time workers to return to their pre-COVID employment.

With the official opposition Conservatives selecting their new leader this past weekend, powerful forces within the corporate elite could quickly coalesce behind the drive to bring an even more reactionary government to power to implement sweeping austerity measures.
Chandigarh, Aug 24 : Punjab Police and the state Excise Department have been shielding the liquor mafia and Congress leaders who are involved in the multi-crore liquor scam, former Union Minister and ex-state BJP President Vijay Sampla said on Monday.

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh should respond as to why despite repeated requests from the Enforcement Directorate (ED), copies of over 13 FIRs registered against the liquor mafia in Patiala, Mohali and Ludhiana are not being provided, Sampla said in a statement here.

In addition, the details of the accused are not being provided to the ED, he said.

Suspecting money laundering, the ED has sought certain details from the Punjab government. The Senior Superintendents of Police in Patiala, Mohali and Ludhiana (rural) have been sent letters but none of them have replied yet, Sampla said.

The ED has also written to the Director General of Police and the Secretary of the Excise and Taxation Department, but none of them responded, he said.

"This makes it clear that the government is shielding Congress leaders, MLAs, ministers and officials who are involved in this scam," Sampla said.

He said more than 120 people have died after consuming illicit liquor, but the government is shielding the accused.

"Chief Minister Amarinder Singh should immediately take up this matter and provide information to the ED," he added.
Using the fraudulent pretext of protecting medical privacy, a growing number of states and school districts across the United States are deliberately concealing information from the public on COVID-19 outbreaks in schools that have reopened. These include the states of Maine, Virginia and Oklahoma, as well as Camden County, Georgia, and Orange County, Florida. In Tennessee, Louisiana, and many other states, the decision is left to each individual county, and an unknown number of county officials are concealing outbreaks in schools from the public.

Following an outbreak in Camden County in early August, Deputy Superintendent Jon Miller sent a districtwide email to administrators, writing, Staff who test positive are not to notify any other staff members, parents of their students or any other person/entity that they may have exposed them. The district has not publicly confirmed a single case, while the virus is raging throughout the state, and there have been rumors of infections at multiple schools.

This criminal policy of concealment has become the modus operandi across industriesincluding in logistics, auto, meatpacking, health care, and moreand serves as a primary mechanism for implementing the homicidal return-to-work campaign of the ruling class. If cases are concealed and no one knows whether their coworkers have been infected, the powers-that-be can justify reopening while the pandemic spreads even more rapidly.

Washoe County Schools Superintendent Kristen McNeill talks to students returning to Greenbrae Elementary School in Sparks, Nev., on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020 (AP Photo/Scott Sonner).

The American ruling class, like its counterparts in Sweden and many other countries, is actively seeking to develop herd immunity based on infecting huge sections of the population, which will produce further mass deaths. Already, over 180,000 Americans have been killed as a result of this murderous policy. In Sweden, authorities deliberately kept schools open in pursuit of herd immunity, producing a per capita death rate nearly 10 times that of its neighbor, Finland, which in contrast closed schools and most businesses.

The drive to reopen schools is now the linchpin of the broader campaign to resume production in the US and globally. In order to force parents back into unsafe factories and workplaces, the ruling elites in the US, Brazil, Britain, Germany, Australia and a growing number of countries are determined to force educators and children back into unsafe classrooms. Setting a precedent of not reporting COVID-19 outbreaks in schools in the US will have immense ramifications for the working class internationally.

Since late July, there have been well over 2,800 reported infections of students and staff from at least 800 schools in 46 states. Dozens of schools in Florida have reported infections, with at least 1,200 confirmed cases. In Mississippi, 71 of the states 82 counties have reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools, and at least 200 students and 250 teachers have tested positive statewide.

In Georgia, at least 84 schools have already had outbreaks, with a combined 337 confirmed cases. In the Cherokee County School District alone, nearly 2,500 students and 62 staff members have gone into quarantine.

No doubt authorities also fear that the release of information about new outbreaks will provoke teacher strikes and student walkouts. The drive to reopen schools has already encountered enormous opposition. Since the beginning of July, there have been hundreds of protests in nearly every state. Last week, nearly half of all teachers and support staff in J.O. Combs Unified School District, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, carried out a wildcat sickout strike.

The news that districts are keeping COVID-19 cases secret was widely shared in the dozens of Facebook groups that have formed to oppose school openings. In one group in Rhode Island, which has over 15,000 members, a member commented, By staying hush, they are aware that basically, it could kill people. I cant believe whats happening. Another wrote, This makes tracing impossible. Absolutely irresponsible and dangerous. Denial is just going to make a bad situation worse!

Last week, the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee was founded to organize the immense opposition to the drive to reopen schools and the assault on public education. Safety committees, which are independent of the unions, are being built on district and state levels. These committees demand the immediate release of all known and suspected COVID-19 cases at every school and workplace, and comprehensive testing and contact tracing programs, which are the prerequisite of any rational plan to contain and eradicate the virus.

Even the most basic right to information can only be secured through the independent initiative of educators, parents and students. The teacher unions at every level, and both the Democratic and Republican parties, have made clear that they will facilitate the covering up of this vital information, and do everything they can to keep educators isolated by district and state.

The situation is now critical. The lives of hundreds of thousands are on the line. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security quietly branded teachers and all education workers critical infrastructure workers on the instructions of the Trump White House. The DHS is the same agency that oversees the paramilitary BORTAC forces which Trump deployed in Portland and other cities last month, as part of his preparations to erect a presidential dictatorship.

By attaching this label to educators, Trump is enabling state and local officials to invoke national security and use their repressive state apparatus to force teachers and school workers back to work, even if they are known to have come into contact with someone infected with COVID-19.

Demonstrating the manipulation of science in the interests of the ruling class, last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued updated guidelines that fully sanction the reopening of schools. Where outbreaks of COVID-19 occur, the guidelines advocate the short-term suspension of individual classes and the cancellation of events and afterschool activities, rather than the shutdown of the entire campus.

While acknowledging that children of all ages are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection, the CDC downplays the danger by claiming that the children only might play a role in transmission. This is despite multiple comprehensive studies proving that children do transmit the virus. The CDC concludes that in-person learning is in the best interests of students, ignoring the permanent physical and emotional damage that will be inflicted upon children who spread the disease to teachers, parents and grandparents, dwarfing any disruption caused by online learning.

In the struggle for their health and safetyand for the social interests of the vast majorityeducators, parents and students must base themselves on the latest science, which proves demonstratively that reopening schools is a deadly endeavor.

The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is working to coordinate a unified opposition to the nationwide campaign to reopen schools. We will do everything in our power to assist in the building of local rank-and-file committees in every school and neighborhood, to unite with broader sections of the working class in preparation for a nationwide general strike to halt the reopening schools, stop the spread of the pandemic, and save lives.

Everything depends on the independent initiative of educators, parents, students and the entire working class. We urge all those who support these principles to get involved with our work, share our statement widely, join our Facebook group, and build rank-and-file safety committees at your schools, workplaces and neighborhoods to prepare for the struggles ahead.
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Linkedin Inforial (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Tue, August 25, 2020 00:01 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c402038a 4 Inforial Free

Tokocrypto announces Toko Tokens as new DeFi initiative

The annual Indonesia Blockchain Week (IBW) 2020 kicked off on Aug. 18, with an audience of more than 2,500 tuning into the opening ceremony.

Organized by Tokocrypto Digital Exchange, a leading regulator and one of the largest digital exchanges in Indonesia, IBW 2020, for the first time ever, is being hosted completely online, with Indonesians and people from all over the world able to participate.

The opening ceremony of IBW 2020, which started at 7 p.m., was streamed through Tokocrypto's social media accounts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which is also where streams of other webinar events can be accessed.

Tokocrypto CEO and cofounder Pang Xue Kai, Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Swipe CEO and founder Joselito Lizarondo and Tron CEO and founder Justin Sun were among the guests of honor to grace the grand opening ceremony of IBW 2020.

Pang Xue said during the opening ceremony, Indonesia Blockchain Week series was created with the intention of bringing about greater awareness and education on blockchain technology and its potential for the people of Indonesia.

He went on to say, This years theme of decentralized finance [DeFI] was chosen because of the overwhelming interests coming from the people of Indonesia and DeFis potential to enhance Indonesias financial industry.

Pang Xue expressed hope that through IBW 2020, we can create an open and transparent conversation on DeFi where all Indonesians can participate in and share their thoughts on how Indonesia can benefit from this new application of blockchain technology.

The ongoing IBW 2020, which is free and open to the public to participate, will run through Aug. 27, with multiple webinars discussing the latest wave to hit the blockchain space  DeFi.

The event features online webinars focusing on the different aspects of DeFi such as peer-to-peer lending, staking, savings, payments and mobile wallets.

The webinars will discuss topics ranging from differences between traditional financial systems and a decentralized financial system, to how Indonesians can earn additional income from DeFi initiatives.

Indonesia Blockchain Week, organized by Tokocrypto, is cohosted by Binance and supported by Swipe, Syntethix Network, Aave, Tezos Foundation, Switcheo, Kyber Network, Trust Wallet, Waves, Coinmarketcap, Harmony and Bidao, as well as numerous Indonesian communities and media partners. There are many attractive prizes worth more than tens of millions of rupiah in total up for grabs for participants of IBW 2020.

Tokocrypto introduces its first DeFi initiative: Toko Token

Meanwhile, to coincide with celebrations of Indonesias 75th Independence Day, Tokocrypto has proudly announced Tokocryptos first DeFi initiative, Toko Tokens (TKO).

Introduced during Kais keynote address during the opening ceremony, Toko Tokens will be available from the end of August 2020 as a reward system to users who join Tokocrypto and share their referral codes.

In line with Indonesias 75th Independence Day, for every successful referral, both the referrer and referee will be rewarded with 75 Toko Tokens each. DeFi elements such as staking, savings and lending will be introduced into the Toko Tokens ecosystem.
Tommy Stallings never envisioned the time would come when he would consider voting for a Democrat.

Raised in a Christian community in Lubbock, Texas, the 43-year-old says his faith has always guided his politics towards conservative, Republican values. In 2016, the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was clear to him.

"Hillary Clinton is on murals down here - murals that look like the devil," he said. "It's just been browbeaten into us that she's this awful swamp creature that's out for herself." But four years on, Mr Stallings regrets his decision to vote for Mr Trump, finding himself disillusioned with the US president - and his party.

He says his unease with Mr Trump began early into his presidency, noting his "foul mouth" and rapid-fire tweets. But his "breaking point" came in July 2018, during the president's press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, when Mr Trump defended the Russian president against the US intelligence agencies' assessment that Moscow had meddled in the US election.

So this November he intends to vote for Joe Biden, the first time he has voted for a Democrat in his life.

A Democratic candidate, no matter who they are, does not check off any of the policy boxes that I hold near and dear to my heart," he admitted, but, he said: "This guy [Trump] is not fit to serve."

It is an argument that seems to have growing appeal among Republican voters, even in deep red Texas.

The state has some of the worst coronavirus rates in the country and the president's handling of the pandemic has come under scrutiny. So recent polls have put Mr Biden and Mr Trump neck and neck in Texas.

Some pundits have gone so far as to suggest that, this November, the Lone Star could turn blue for the first time since 1976. Facing a convergence of crises - the pandemic, a recession and growing racial tensions - just 10 weeks from his re-election, Mr Trump's job approval ratings are falling among his once unshakeable base.

It is a pattern that can be seen in polling among all the groups that handed Mr Trump his victory in 2016 - from evangelical Christians in the southern US to blue collar workers in the country's Rust Belt.

The group abandoning Mr Trump in the greatest numbers appears to be the over-65s. Some 56pc of them voted for him in 2016 according to data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, but Mr Biden enjoys a five-point lead among older voters in the average of current polls.

One such voter is Jay Copan, a retired 68-year-old from Raleigh, North Carolina. Mr Copan, who voted for Mr Trump in 2016, is "fiscally and socially conservative" and approves of several of the president's actions such as nominating conservative judges, implementing tax cuts and cutting red tape for businesses.

But, he says, "he has proven during the Covid crisis, during the George Floyd crisis, he couldn't be a leader": "When you add all those things together, there's simply no way that I could explain to my grandchildren that this is rational behaviour for a president of the United States."

Mr Copan said he felt comfortable supporting Mr Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris, who have run on a centrist platform. "I will certainly have differences of opinion on some of his policies, but I think that Joe Biden is a very decent and honourable man."

This week, Mr Trump is expected to visit Mr Copan's home state of North Carolina, where parts of the Republican convention are being held because it is such a battleground for November.

But Mr Copan believes that, like him, many in the state suffer from what he calls "buyers' remorse". ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
WhatsApp has been working on some new features for the app. The messaging app is planning to roll out several features like a group ringtone for group calls, new sticker animations and overall User Interface (UI) improvements for calls. These new features are available on the latest Android beta update of the app. Apart from this, WhatsApp is also working on an advanced search mode and multi-device feature, according to WAbetainfo.

A couple of new features have been rolled out for Android beta testers and in order to access the features, the users will have to update their WhatsApp to the 2.20.198.11 version on Playstore, according to WABetainfo. The most prominent update is the new group call ringtone feature. With this new feature every time a user receives a group call, WhatsApp will play a new ringtone. On the current version of the app, the same ringtone is played every time a user receives a call whether it is from a single person or a group.

WhatsApp is also working to improve the sticker animations. WhatsApp has implemented a new type of animation for animated stickers, looping them at most eight times instead of just once. "Long animated stickers (so animated stickers having a lot of frames) will loop less times. With the 2.20.198.11 update, the feature should be available for everyone now," Wabetainfo wrote.

WhatsApp is also working on redesigning the user interface for calls. WAbetainfo has shared a screenshot of the new user interface. In it, WhatsApp has moved all the icons cons including the camera reverse icon, the message icon, the video off and audio off icon and the information icon to the bottom of the call page.Wabetainfo states that all the features are currently under development and it could be rolled out on the main version of the app only after WhatsApp is done testing and improving them.

Also Read: Tata Group plans to launch e-commerce 'super app' to take on RIL, Amazon

Also Read: JEE Mains 2020: Students go on hunger strike, demand postponement of JEE, NEET entrance exams
PHILADELPHIA  Several hundred firefighters battled a massive fire at a large warehouse in north Philadelphia early Sunday, and one firefighter was reported injured.

Officials said the fire broke out at about 2 a.m. Sunday in the structure in the Nicetown/Tioga neighborhood. Images from the scene showed flames shooting into the sky with large plumes of smoke wafting above.

Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel told reporters that about 300 fire and emergency personnel and 60 vehicles were called on to battle the blaze, which he said could have taken out the entire block without their efforts. Temple University's nearby administration building was undamaged, officials said.

One firefighter was injured, but a condition report wasn't immediately available.

Thiel said the blaze was brought under control shortly before 11:30 a.m. Sunday, but fire crews will likely be on the scene for several days mopping up and extinguishing hot spots.
Over 26,000 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates in 620 public and private Junior High Schools in the Upper East Region will effective today, Monday, August 24, enjoy governments hot meal daily till they write their final exams.

It will be recalled that President Akufo-Addo in his 15th address to the nation on measures taken to stem the spread of COVID-19 indicated that, the Gender, Children and Social Protection Ministry will on Monday, 24th August provide one hot meal per day to all final year JHS students and staff.

In a press release issued by the Upper East Regional Secretariat of the Ghana school feeding programme and copied to Citi News, caterers are poised to prepare delicious and balanced meals for the beneficiary candidates.

Regional coordinator of the GSFP, Mrs. Georgina Ayamba, stated that meals for candidates will be ready by 12:00pm, adding that, caterers are to source foodstuff locally.

She assured that her outfit will monitor and time resolve any challenge that emanates from the exercise.

Below is the press release

GHANA SCHOOL FEEDING PROGRAMME

REGIONAL COORDINATING COUNCIL

Tel: 0246451322

Our Ref. No: Republic of Ghana Date: 08/23/2020

GOVERNMENT DIRECTIVE TO PROVIDE ONE HOT NUTRITIOUS

MEAL FOR JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL CANDIDATES

The Upper East Regional Secretariat of the Ghana School feeding programme will effective Monday, August 24, 2020 commence the feeding of Junior high school candidates and teachers in both public and private schools in the region.

The intervention is in line with His Excellency President Nana Akufo Addo's government response to the plight of basic school pupils especially Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the intervention, all BECE candidates will be served a hot meal daily till they commence and end their final exams.

Let me assure the beneficiary candidates and school authorities that, our caterers have been trained and are poised to prepare delicious balanced meals for the candidates.

In the Upper East Region, over 600 caterers will be cooking for over 24,000 candidates in public schools and 2,000 candidates in private schools.

Caterers are entreated to cook on time and serve the candidates their hot meals by 12:00pm daily.

Caterers shall prepare their meals under strict hygienic conditions with foodstuff and ingredients sourced locally from their respective areas.

The secretariat shall monitor and timely redress any challenge that may emanate for the exercise.

We are grateful that, for the first time in the history of Ghana, BECE candidates are going to be fed daily till they finish writing their BECE.

Let me entreat the candidates as they enjoy their meals to take their studies seriously in order to excel and benefit from government's flagship programme free senior high education policy.

Thank you

Signed

Ayamba Georgina

GSFP

Regional Coordinator

---citinewsroom.com

---
Psoriasis affects around 0.44% to 2.8% of the Indian population

Even though we pride nature for creating a harmoniously functioning species - humans, it has left several millions across the world with its own defense system attacking itself, creating pain and discomfort while performing even the simplest of tasks. With autoimmune diseases tripling in the past few decades, the need for further research on these debilitating conditions is evident due to the lack of a cure and their recurring natures.

One such disease that affects around 0.44% to 2.8% of the Indian population is Psoriasis. Due to certain signals sent to the immune system, skin cells are considered to be harmful leading to an increase in the production of cells, thus resulting in red, flaky and silvery scaled areas on the skin. To make matters worse, about 94% of patients experience relapses, ranging from two weeks to nine years, never being fully relieved from this painful condition.

Even in the relatively mild winters in most parts of India, about 46% of patients experience a greater intensity of the patches due to the cold climate, while 43% seem to recover from the gentle heat of the summer season.

While being mainly prevalent in males as compared to females, symptoms usually occur in ones thirties or forties. Thus these extreme occurrences have fueled Indian research on psoriasis to mainly study the effect of the human leukocyte antigen, which in most cases helps the body differentiate between the human cells and those of pathogens.

Furthermore, a greater importance has been given to comorbidities such as cardiovascular diseases and metabolic syndrome, which are factors that heighten the risk to the heart, mostly present in the the Indian society

Genetic composition, with environmental factors, creates a need for a well structured and personalized treatment plan to help relieve the stress and discomfort associated with psoriasis not only for the patients but for their families as well. While modern medicine has greatly reformed the treatment, many physicians, mainly in the rural parts of India, advocate for ayurvedic and siddha influenced medical treatments such as mixtures of a variety of herbs and Wrightia tinctoria oil, followed by deep massages.

However, more research in this field has proved that this form of treatment could worsen the condition in most patients, especially in those prone to chronic recurrences, the most commonly experienced type of psoriasis in India.Thus patients are more often prescribed drugs including etanercept, infliximab, itolizumab and secukinumab due to promising results in terms of alleviating symptoms over a long period of time. These drugs fall under the category of biologics and are recommended when a patient fails to respond to phototherapy or has reached a limit to the safe exposure to ultraviolet radiation.

More widely used in past few years, they help treat cases where psoriasis is relatively severe. By binding with those molecules and cells that increase inflammation and aid the maturation of T cells, these drugs are proven to be more effective in Indian patients.

Glenmark, based in Mumbai, was responsible for developing and releasing the first oral medicine for psoriasis in India. Prescribed to patients in a moderate or extreme condition, Apremilast or Aprezo proves to be safer and more effective without the need for patients to receive medical support while taking the drug.

Alzumab, a revolutionsing drug, has recently been released into the pharmaceutical market by Biocon, based in Bengaluru. By being injected rather than consumed, it allows patients to take fewer doses over a long period of time. Proving to be 50% cheaper than more commonly used drugs, Alzumab serves to be an effective method of decreasing treatment cost, thus making it more accessible for the public.

Making a mark in the treatment of psoriasis, Cadilla, based in Ahmedabad, has introduced several new drugs into the market. This includes Fluocinonide cream which recently received approval for its sale by the USFDA. Having anti-inflammatory uses, this cream could be used to treat numerous skin diseases such as eczema, dermatitis and psoriasis. By partnering with Lipidor, based in Stockholm, these companies are developing a new drug, APK-02, to be released by 2022. Going into the third phase of testing this year, the drug has shown positive results on multiple patients with differing skin types in India.

Psoriasis, a disease that has prevailed since the 19th century, has only recently been stressed on by Indian research companies in their effort to combat this autoimmune disease. New medicines move to replace the older, more traditional techniques, proving to be more effective and affordable for the general public. With no cure, one can only hope to lessen the symptoms and prevent relapses, thus allowing for a better quality of life and decreased economic burden.

Nysa Adurkar, Mumbai
The Senate Minority Leader, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, has described the recent closure of hundreds of shops belonging to Nigerians in Ghana by the Ghanaian authorities as a clear case of official endorsement of Xenophobia.

Abaribe, in a release on Sunday by his spokesman, Uchenna Awom, stated that the latest acts against Nigerian traders in Ghana was also criminal and very disturbing.

According to him, Ghana's action against nationals of other countries particularly Nigerians, points to State endorsement of xenophobic attacks.

"The authorities in that country needs to prove us wrong by putting a halt to further closure of the shops and attacks on Nigerians in compliance to the Economic Community of West African Countries (ECOWAS) protocol", he said.

According to him, the latest actions of the Ghanaian government called to question their real intentions towards Nigeria and Nigerians, despite the fact that Nigeria had through her Foreign Affairs Minister, reached an agreement with Ghana Investment Promotion Council on this matter.

"And now they are reopening the matter. So what has changed? Nigeria I believe has done her best in the promotion of good neighbourlines, it is now Ghana's to reciprocate and allow our people in that country to carry out their legitimate businesses unhindered", Abaribe stated.

He described as a wilful denigration of sub-regional brotherhood and one that is in clear conflict with ECOWAS protocol, Ghana's recent regulations, which stipulates that retail trade is the exclusive preserve of Ghanaians.

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"So what's the point having an economic community if at the end of the day each country resolves to make laws and regulations that are in contradiction with the binding protocol. This is quite absurd as it negates the spirit that propelled the formation of ECOWAS in the first place", Abaribe added.

The ranking Senator accordingly urged ECOWAS to brace up and come clear in the prevailing circumstances to address the member-country behaviour and its far reaching implications in her protocol, particularly the issue of free trade and movement among the peoples of the West African sub-region.

It is very unfortunate, Abaribe emphasised, that Ghana, which hitherto has been enjoying a robust relationship with Nigeria, has in recent times been treating Nigerians resident in Ghana with so much contempt and underserved reprehension.
AUSTIN  As the Republican National Convention gets underway this week, President Donald Trump is facing a question that hasnt been seriously asked of a Republican presidential candidate in decades.

Can he win Texas?

Trump has continually laughed off the prospect during stops in the state dating back to last year.

Donald Trump isnt going to lose Texas, Trump told the crowd at a rally in Dallas.

While Trump has scoffed at early polls that show a close race between himself and Democrat Joe Biden, its more than just his trademark bravado. His campaign  despite all the Democratic fanfare in Texas  says it is far more organized and structured going into 2020, which has his supporters convinced that they will increase his margin of victory in the state from four years ago.

Heading into the fall, Trumps Texas campaign has already held more than 1,100 events around the state, made more than 3.2 million calls to supporters and knocked on nearly 400,000 doors despite the additional safety precautions called for by the pandemic.

We have been very active and on the ground nonstop almost since 2016, said Toni Anne Dashiell, the Texas Republicans national committeewoman and former chair of the Kendall County Republicans.

IN-DEPTH: Three keys for Joe Biden if hes going to win Texas

Particularly over the past year, Trumps campaign has routinely held day of action sessions where volunteers reach out to voters, help more people get registered and train more volunteer activists to prepare for the massive get-out-the-vote operation that will shift into high gear over the next 71 days. While COVID-19 has limited the ability to gather, the campaign says those day-of-action sessions have shifted online.

It is a big change from 2016 when Trump wasnt able to lock up the GOP nomination until May, leaving most of the on-the-ground organizing in Texas to the Republican National Committee. Trumps team didnt fully take control until well into the summer.

Neighborhood by neighborhood

Trump won Texas in 2016 by 9 percentage points. While a comfortable margin, it was the smallest margin of victory in Texas for a Republican presidential candidate since 1996 when former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole won the state by 5 percentage points.

Trump campaign officials say they left votes on the table in 2016. Last fall, Donald Trump Jr. and then-Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said their plan for Texas was to cultivate legions of neighborhood volunteers to buttress the campaign.

This fight is fought neighborhood by neighborhood, Parscale said.

TEXAS OIL SPEAKS: Oil donors flock to Trump as Biden hardens climate stance

Parscale said data from 2018 shows that turnout for Trump was 15 percent higher in neighborhoods with designated team leaders. In 2016, the Trump campaign had about 3,000 neighborhood team leaders nationwide. Going into 2020, Trumps campaign was banking on growing that network. Now they say they have more than 177,000 trained team leaders nationwide.

That, they say, is the key to mobilizing voters over the next three months.

There is so much excitement out there for the president, Dashiell said. We have a real plan of action and we have more volunteers.

Were ready

After the conventions, both parties will enter a new phase in the campaign as they start activating get-out-the-vote programs that have been months in the making.

Weve got to own the ground, U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, told Democratic Party activists on a Zoom call earlier this week.

Texas Democratic Party officials say theyve already reached out to more than 3.5 million potential Democratic voters over the last two weeks and have sent vote-by-mail applications to 1.7 million more Texans in preparation for the final stretch of the campaign.

Republicans have carried Texas in 10 consecutive presidential elections.

But U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who narrowly won reelection in 2018, has been warning the party faithful that they are facing a different Democratic opposition than many have seen in decades. He told state Republican activists last month that the battle for the White House in Texas is a real race.

Let me tell you right now, every one of those crazed leftists that showed up in 2018 are showing up in 2020, Cruz said. And they are even angrier.

Public polling over the summer has supported Cruzs contention. Four polls in July in Texas showed Biden, the former vice president, and Trump in a virtual tie in three  Biden was up 5 percentage points in the fourth poll.

While Trump has boasted about being able to hold onto Texas, his reelection team says it has never taken victory for granted. Dashiell said that is why every weekend has been a buzz of training volunteers and prepping for the fall get-out-the-vote operation.

This didnt just happen overnight, Dashiell said. We have been building and preparing for a longtime. Were ready.

jeremy.wallace@chron.com
3 1 of 3 New Haven Police Department Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 3 of 3





NEW HAVEN - A defendant charged with committing three robberies at commercial sites had his sentencing postponed Monday because his attorney was called away on a federal case and there was a glitch with the video feed from prison in which the defendant is being held.

Jose Cubiz, 42, of New Haven, robbed the Shell gas station on Willow Street in New Haven on April 22, 2019, then robbed a Dunkin Donuts on State Street in Hamden the following day, according to police. He also robbed the Bank of America branch on Sargent Drive on May 1, 2019, police said. He pleaded guilty to the robbery charges in the three cases, records show.
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The National Hurricane Center cautioned that Storm Marco could still cause life-threatening storm surges and dangerous winds along the Gulf Coast

Port-au-Prince, Haiti: After a day as a hurricane, Tropical Storm Marco approached Louisiana for an expected landfall around midday Monday, while Tropical Storm Laura was forecast to move along Cuba's southern coast during the day before entering the Gulf of Mexico and heading toward the same stretch of US coast later in the week, most likely as a hurricane.

Laura caused the deaths of at least 11 people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, while knocking out power and causing flooding in the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola.

Marco had grown into a hurricane early Sunday, but the National Hurricane Center said its sustained winds decreased to 70 mph (110 kph) after nightfall. The center cautioned that Marco could still cause life-threatening storm surges and dangerous winds along the Gulf Coast. It was centered about 185 miles (295 kilometers) south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River land heading north-northwest at 13 mph (20 kph) late Sunday.

Laura was centered about 125 miles (200 kilometers) southeast of Camaguey, Cuba, late Sunday, and had maximum sustained winds of 65 mph (100 kph). It was moving west-northwest at 21 mph (33 kph) and was predicted to strengthen into a hurricane by Tuesday morning as it followed a path likely to take it to the Louisiana coast by Wednesday night, forecasters said.

In the wake of Laura's passage through the Caribbean, authorities on Sunday reported at least 11 deaths.

Haitian civil protection officials said they had received reports a 10-year-old girl was killed when a tree fell on a home in the southern coastal town of Anse-a-Pitres, on the border with the Dominican Republic. Haiti's prime minister said at least eight other people died and two were missing. In the Dominican Republic, relatives told reporters a collapsed wall killed a mother and her young son.

Hundreds of thousands were without power in the Dominican Republic amid heavy flooding in both countries.

Despite Marco's weakening, a storm surge warning remained in place from Morgan City, Louisiana, to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and a hurricane warning was kept from Morgan City to the mouth of the Pearl River. A tropical storm warning included Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana, and metropolitan New Orleans.

A storm surge of up to 6 feet (2 meters) was forecast for parts of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi.
Several leaders, including many MPs, wrote to Sonia Gandhi, either calling for her to continue or urging Rahul Gandhi to take charge.

Several Congress leaders on Sunday threw their weight behind the Gandhi family amidst a growing tumult with the party deeply divided on the leadership issue on the eve of the crucial Congress Working Committee meeting.

After 23 party leaders wrote to Sonia Gandhi seeking revamp of major bodies, sources close to her said she might offer to step down in the CWC and ask the party to look for a full-time president. AICC media chief Randeep Surjewala, however, denied it.

Having a "full time" leadership that is active in the field and "visible" in party offices, dissolution of powers to state units and revamping the CWC in line with the party constitution are some of the far-reaching suggestions made by 23 senior Congress leaders in the letter to Sonia Gandhi, sources said.

As the news of the letter spread, several leaders, including many MPs, wrote to Sonia Gandhi, either calling for her to continue or urging Rahul Gandhi to take charge.

Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel, Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot, Puducherry chief minister V Narayanasamy, Congress leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and former ministers Ashwani Kumar, Salman Khurshid and KK Tewary, among others, backed the Gandhis.

Opposing the bid to challenge the Gandhi family leadership, Amarinder Singh said this was not the time to raise such an issue.

"The move by these Congress leaders to demand a rehaul of the party at this critical juncture would be detrimental to its interests, and the interests of the nation," he said in a statement.

Gehlot said Sonia Gandhi should continue to lead the party and if she has made up her mind, then Rahul Gandhi should come ahead and be the Congress president as the "country faces the biggest challenge to save its democracy".

Congress leader Sachin Pilot, who recently rebelled against Gehlot and later called off his rebellion against the state government after the intervention of Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, said, "Mrs Gandhi and Rahul ji have shown what it means to sacrifice for the greater good of the people and the party."

"It's now time to build consensus and consolidate. Our future is stronger when we're united. Most Congress workers would like to see Rahul ji take over and lead the party," he said.

Baghel wrote a letter to Rahul Gandhi, urging him to return as the president of the party.

"Hon'ble Sonia ji and Rahul ji are the ray of hope for us in every challenge. We are all with you. Millions of party workers and people of Chhattisgarh and the entire nation are with you..," he tweeted.

Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath said any suggestion or criticism of the leadership of Sonia Gandhi is absurd.

"I appeal to Mrs. Sonia Gandhi to strengthen the Congress Party as the President and continue to lead the Congress," he said in a tweet in Hindi.

Delhi Congress also passed a resolution calling for Rahul Gandhi to be made the party chief.

The Indian Youth Congress also passed a resolution that Rahul Gandhi must be made party's president. In their tweet carrying the resolution, the IYC used the hashtag 'My Leader Rahul Gandhi' which was used by several Congress leaders.

Senior party leader Digvijaya Singh said it is a time for the Congress to be united and asserted that he cannot imagine a Congress without the Nehru- Gandhi family.

Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Satav also wrote to Sonia Gandhi, saying the Congress is "safe only in your hands or that of Rahul Gandhi".

Karnataka Congress chief D K Shivakumar, in a letter to Sonia Gandhi, expressed support for the leadership of the Gandhis.

"Entire Congress Party in Karnataka stands by the leadership of Smt. Sonia Gandhi and the Gandhi family. Mrs. Gandhi has led the Congress during times of crisis and saved our party," he said in a tweet.

"Anything that has to be discussed must be done so in the party forum and not in the media," Shivakumar tweeted.

Lok Sabha MP Manickam Tagore too demanded Rahul Gandhi's return as Congress president.

Shashi Tharoor, who was among the 23 leaders who wrote the letter expressing concerns over the party's situation, put out a cryptic tweet quoting Jawaharlal Nehru that said "we have become prisoners of the past".

"Without passion and urge, there is a gradual oozing out of hope and vitality, a settling down on lower levels of existence, a slow merging into non-existence. We have become prisoners of the past and some part of its immobility sticks to us," he tweeted, quoting Nehru.

Former Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah tweeted, "It is unfortunate that the leadership of Gandhi family is being questioned by few. In these difficult times of undeclared emergency and attack on democracy by BJP, we should collectively strive to strengthen Congress and not weaken it."

Ashwani Kumar and Khurshid both argued that elections would be divisive and consensus should be given a chance.
The fresh currency turbulence in Turkey saw the price of the US dollar rise about 11% in two weeks earlier this month. But rather than hiking interest rates against the sharp fall of the Turkish lira, the central bank decided Aug. 20 to continue curbing the liquidity it provides to banks. In other words, instead of directly raising rates, the central bank has passed the buck to banks, forcing them to sell foreign currency and increase yields on deposits to secure the liquidity they need. Inevitably, banks have hiked rates on loans as well, as a result of which the credit-driven economic warm-up since June is giving way to a cooling period. Yet another problem exacerbated by rising foreign exchange prices needs to be dealt with, namely the rollover of a bulky external debt.

According to central bank data, the external debt set to mature over 12 months amounts to $171.4 billion as of June. The sum represents nearly 40% of Turkeys foreign debt stock, which totals about $430 billion and amounts to more than 60% of the gross domestic product, which is expected to fall to some $700 billion this year.

How will the Turkish economy cope with such a hefty external debt amid an outflow of vital foreign capital that has been going on for two years?

A way out that is increasingly imposing itself is to offer asset swaps to creditors, including company shares and valuable real estate, especially in Istanbul.

Turkish Airlines and the Istanbul Financial Center  both in the portfolio of the Turkey Wealth Fund, controlled by President Recep Erdogan and Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak, who is the presidents son-in-law  are seen among the assets that might be offered for such swaps.

In the private sector, the operators of Istanbuls ambitious but troubled new airport and others involved in large infrastructure projects are similarly looking to sell assets or shares to roll over debt.

The Qataris are seen as the primary potential buyers.

The central bank data shows that the public sector is saddled with 35% of the short-term debt, with the rest owned by the private sector. The three public banks  Ziraat, Halk and Vakif  need to roll over $33 billion over 12 months. The second-largest short-term public debt belongs to the central bank, which needs to repay the $16 billion it obtained from Qatar and China as part of currency swaps to shore up its depleted foreign reserves.

The external debt the private sector needs to roll over 12 months amounts to $111 billion, including $61 billion owned by companies and the rest by banks.

The option of fresh external borrowing to roll over debt has become too costly, with Turkeys risk premium on credit default swaps reaching the region of 550-600 basis points in mid-August. This makes Turkey the riskiest country by far among emerging economies. The risk premium of South Africa, which trails closest behind, is about half of Turkeys.

And the downtick in asset prices amid the global economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic is inevitably weakening the hand of those who seek to sell assets in exchange for debt.

While many businesses are already changing hands in Turkey, the banking community is abuzz with talk that major handovers are in store in the industry and the construction, tourism and civil aviation sectors. The rate of bad loans stands at 4.4% currently, but is expected to increase in the coming period because the bad loan classification period was doubled to 180 days of overdue as part of pandemic relief measures. Thus, company handovers are expected to intensify down the road amid fresh loan defaults, debt executions and bankruptcies.

Those most likely to seek debt-asset swaps are the companies involved in the so-called megaprojects, including motorways, bridges, airports and power plants, built as public-private partnerships in recent years. Many companies  chief among them the contractors of the giant Istanbul Airport, the third bridge and the underwater tunnel linking the European and Asian shores of the Bosporus and a number of motorways  used external loans to finance the constructions and are now facing major foreign exchange losses due to the slump of the lira. A dollar was worth 3-4 liras at the time they borrowed, but the price of the greenback is now well above 7 liras.

The treasury provided guarantees to $17.2 billion loans used by private companies in seven megaprojects. Hence, some of those liabilities might turn into public debt down the road and private entities might be taken over by the Turkey Wealth Fund in an alternative form of debt-asset exchange.

The fund, too, is seeking to monetize assets in its portfolio. On account of the $15 billion owed to Qatar by the central bank, Qatar has been offered major sections of the Istanbul Finance Center, a sprawling complex still under construction, and a deal seems to be imminent. The Doha-based Qatar Financial Center is reportedly planning to open offices in the Istanbul Finance Center as part of efforts to expand Islamic finance services to clients in Europe.

Ankara would be eager for more deals with Qatar to manage debt, counting on the thriving ties between the two governments. The assets seen as potential subjects to sale offers include Turkish Airlines, which incurred 2.2 billion liras ($304 million) in losses in the pandemic-hit second quarter and needs substantial financial support, the Istanbul Airport, which can handle 90 million passengers per year but has come to operate at less than 10% capacity only a year after its pompous inauguration, and even Ataturk Airport, which has become idle due to the new one.

The Qataris may be interested in such deals, but what concerns them the most is the future of Erdogans government, whose popular support has been waning amid economic woes. The next elections are scheduled for 2023, yet the oft speculated prospect of early polls seems to be forcing the Qataris to take it slow. A new government is expected to review the economic deals concluded under Erdogan, and what such scrutiny might unearth is anyones guess, given the lack of transparency that has surrounded cooperation with Qatar. Some transactions might even land in court.
A dead girl 'woke up' for an hour before 'dying again' after her body was placed in a bath to be cleaned for burial, it has been reported.

The 12-year-old's eyes opened, she re-gained her heartbeat and her body warmed and began to move, the shocked family told local press.

Doctors rushed to their home in East Java, Indonesia, to give the child oxygen, but she 'died again' an hour later.

The girl - named Siti Masfufah Wardah - was declared dead at 6pm on August 18 in Dr Mohamad Saleh Hospital, Probolinggo, following organ complications due to chronic diabetes. Her family had taken her home at 7pm.

The bodies of patients who die of heart failure have been known to briefly develop a pulse again - in a condition known as Return of Spontaneous Circulation (ROSC).

Around 82 per cent of cases occur ten minutes after death, according to a 2007 report published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Siti Masfufah Wardah opened her eyes again, re-gained her heartbeat, and her body warmed and began to move after it was bathed at the family home in East Java, Indonesia

Her father Ngasiyo, 40, told local media: 'When her body was being bathed, her body temperature suddenly warmed.

'And her closed eyes suddenly re-opened. And we found her heart was beating again and her body moved.'

After her death was confirmed a second time, Siti's body was washed again and buried at the Lambangkuning Village Cemetery.

Lumbang Police Chief AKP Muhammad Dugel confirmed the incident and said investigations were ongoing.

Her father Ngasiyo, 40, pictured, said it happened when they were bathing her body for burial

Signs of ROSC can include breathing, coughing and movement, or a palpabale pulse, according to NHS England

It states in notes for ambulance staff that ROSC is 'the main objective for all out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and can be achieved through immediate and effective treatment at the scene'.

As many as 2,583 patients were resuscitated causing ROSC observations in 2017.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 16:35:29|Editor: huaxia

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GAZA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli warplanes on Monday morning carried out raids against military posts belonging to the Islamic Hamas movement in various areas in the Gaza Strip, said Palestinian and Israeli sources.

Palestinian security sources told Xinhua that the Israeli artillery attacked two Hamas monitoring sites, in eastern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, while the warplanes struck an agricultural land in Khan Younis.

No injuries were reported, but the attack caused considerable damage in the bombed places, according to the security sources.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army said in a press statement that the "Israeli raids came in response to the continuation of the launch of balloons attached to incendiary or explosive materials into Israeli towns."

"We are working with determination against any attempt to commit acts against our residents in the towns adjacent to the coastal enclave," added the statement.

On Sunday night, Israeli authorities dealt with 28 fires resulted from arson balloons launched by Gaza's youths at Ashkelon, Sha'ar Hanegev and Eshkol in southern Israel, according to Israeli security sources.

Since Aug. 6, the Palestinian coastal enclave has witnessed military tensions with the Israeli army, as the Palestinian youths have been restoring the launch of incendiary balloons toward Israeli cities adjacent to the strip.

As a result, Israeli warplanes targeted dozens of military sites belonging to the Hamas movement, in response to the launch of arson balloons.

The violence came amid weeks of tensions, which, according to Palestinian and Israeli commentators, was triggered by Israel's refusal to allow the transfer of Qatari money to the besieged Palestinian enclave. Enditem
Syracuse, N.Y.  Syracuse police have identified the woman fatally shot early Sunday on the citys North Side.

Jimmia J. Chambers, 34, of Syracuse, was shot in the stomach at about 2:40 a.m. on Josephine Street, near Butternut Street, Syracuse police spokesman Sgt. Matthew Malinowski said.

Chambers was taken to Upstate University Hospital, where she later died.

Syracuse police found multiple spent casings at the scene, but have not made any arrests in the homicide, Malinowski said.

Syracuse police ask anyone with any information to call them at (315) 442-5222.

Have a tip or a story idea? Contact Catie OToole: cotoole@syracuse.com | text/call 315-470-2134 | Twitter | Facebook
The Ghana Immigration Service has distanced itself from a suspected armed robber, Samuel Akure who was arrested at Sefwi-Asempaneye in the Juabeso District of the Western North Region last week.

According to the GIS, the suspect was dismissed from the service in June 2020 after he deserted his duty post for more than 21 days and failed to appear before the Central Adjudicating Panel to explain his absence from duty.

The Ghana Immigration Service wishes to state categorically that the said suspect  Samuel Akure  is not a serving officer of the GIS. He was dismissed from the Service on 22nd June 2020 for deserting his duty post for more than 21 consecutive working days. The dismissal was a decision taken by the Central Adjudicating Panel of the GIS after he failed to honour the panels invitation to explain why he deserted his post for more than two years without permission, the GIS said in a statement.

It said his dismissal was subsequently effected afterwards.

A report by the Ghana News Agency said Samuel Akure was arrested together with Abunbunlar Ebenezer, 31, illegal miner, Bashiru Adaza 20, illegal miner and Kwasi Isaac 24, a motor rider.

Chief Superintendent Nana Kwaku Duah, the Western North Regional Crime Officer at a press briefing last week said the police had a tip-off that three motorbike riders had robbed a mining firm at SefwiBonzian.

He said the police with the said information rushed to the scene around 1400 hours on the said day and managed to arrest three of the suspects.

According to the Crime Officer, a search conducted on them revealed, one locally manufactured pistol, a single barrel gun, eight live cartridges, one military uniform, one Immigration officers' uniform, a pair of desert boots, two face masks, a cutlass, crash helmet a gold detector and eight mobile phones.

Chief Supt Duah further disclosed that Samuel Akure, the said Immigration officer later reported at the Police station to claim ownership of the retrieved items saying he left them on a motorbike.

The crime officer said two of the suspects confirmed knowing Akurey as an immigration officer, so the police cross-checked with the Ashanti Region Immigration command which confirmed him as an Immigration officer but indicated that he did not sort for permission at the time of his arrest.

However, the Immigration Service Headquarters said it had severed ties with the suspect before his arrest.

The GIS will not shield any Officer who goes contrary to the laws of the Service and the country at large, and that, any incident of infraction of the law, involving any service person, will be thoroughly investigated and the case dealt with in accordance with the GIS Regulations, the Immigration Service in its statement said.

---citinewsroom
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Operatives of the Nigeria Police Force, Oyo State Police Command, have re-arrested the notorious murder suspect, Sunday Shodipe who escaped from lawful custody on 11th August, 2020. He was re-arrested today, Sunday, 23rd August, 2020 by Police operatives at the Bodija area of Ibadan, the Oyo State Capital.

It would be recalled that the erstwhile fugitive is a prime suspect in multiple murder of innocent citizens at Akinyele Local Government Area, Moniya, Ibadan, Oyo State.

The Inspector General of Police, IGP M.A Adamu, NPM,mni while commending the Commissioner of Police, Oyo State Command, CP Joe Nwachukwu Enwonwu and his Team for a job well done, equally expressed his sincere appreciation to the citizens for their support and understanding while the manhunt for the rearrested Shodipe lasted.

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Meanwhile, the IGP has warned against any form of complacency on the part of the operatives of the Oyo State Police Command, stressing that all hands must be on deck to bring the case to a positive and successful closure.

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PORTLAND, Ore., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Portland General Electric Company (NYSE: POR) ("PGE" or the "Company") today provided a business update in connection with energy trading activity in certain wholesale electricity markets that has resulted in realized and unrealized losses of $127 million as of August 24, 2020.

Background and Formation of Special Committee

PGE personnel entered into a number of energy trades during 2020, with increasing volume accumulating late in the second quarter and into the third quarter, resulting in significant exposure to the Company.

In August 2020, this portion of PGE's energy portfolio experienced significant losses as wholesale electricity prices increased substantially at various market hubs due to extreme weather conditions, constraints to regional transmission facilities, and changes in power supply in the West. During this time period, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) declared a Stage 3 Electrical Emergency and ordered the first rolling blackouts in the state of California since 2001.

As a result of the convergence of these conditions, the Company's energy portfolio, as of August 24, 2020, has experienced realized losses of $104 million and unrealized, mark-to-market losses of $23 million. Total third quarter losses in the portfolio are estimated to be up to $155 million subject to market conditions  although the ultimate amount of losses could exceed that amount.

The increase in net variable power costs due to this trading activity will be recognized in PGE's results of operations. There will be no impact to customer prices, as the Company will not pursue regulatory recovery. The Company noted that the loss does not impact PGE's ability to serve customers.

Promptly upon learning of the issue, the PGE Board of Directors formed a Special Committee comprising five independent Board members (John Ballantine, Jack Davis (Chair), Kathryn Jackson, Neil Nelson and Charles Shivery) to review the energy trading that led to the losses and the Company's procedures and controls related to the trading, and to make recommendations to the Board for appropriate action. The Special Committee has retained Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP as its independent legal advisor, which expects to engage additional advisors on behalf of the Special Committee during the course of this review.

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is serving as the Company's legal advisor, and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC is serving as its financial advisor. PGE has engaged and is actively working with an external consultant to perform a full operational review of the Company's energy supply risk management policies, procedures and personnel. In addition, PGE has placed two individuals on administrative leave, pending review, and enhanced oversight including implementing immediate supervisory and reporting changes in advance of the conclusion of a broader evaluation.

Annual Earnings Guidance

PGE is revising its full-year 2020 guidance from $2.20 to $2.50 per diluted share to $1.30 to $1.60 per diluted share due to the impacts of higher net variable power costs. This guidance is based on the following assumptions:

Higher third quarter net variable power costs of up to $155 million ;

; Annual retail deliveries flat, weather adjusted, year over year;

Average hydro conditions for the year;

Wind generation based on five years of historical levels or forecast studies when historical data is not available;

Normal thermal plant operations;

Operating and maintenance expense between $550 million and $570 million , which includes a full-year forecasted bad debt expense of $15 million due to moratoriums on collection activities and customer disconnects; and

and , which includes a full-year forecasted bad debt expense of due to moratoriums on collection activities and customer disconnects; and Depreciation and amortization expense between $410 million and $430 million .

The Company believes the impact of this event is isolated to 2020, and reaffirms 4% to 6% long-term diluted earnings per share growth based on previous guidance. The Company does not expect any change to its dividend guidance.

Financing and Liquidity

PGE continues to have a strong balance sheet and ample liquidity.

As of August 24, 2020, the Company maintains short-term liquidity of $155 million cash, a $500 million revolving credit facility, which has a maturity date of November 2023, and a $220 million letter of credit facility, of which $172 million remains available. The Company has $75 million of commercial paper outstanding.

PGE expects to fund estimated capital requirements with cash from operations, issuances of long-term debt securities of up to $325 million, and the issuance of commercial paper, as needed.

PGE believes that the issuance of secured long-term debt, as well as other sources of liquidity, such as borrowings under its revolving credit facility, the expected ability to issue short-term debt, such as commercial paper, and unsecured long-term debt, and cash expected to be generated from operations provide ample liquidity to meet the Company's anticipated capital and operating requirements.

About Portland General Electric Company

Portland General Electric (NYSE: POR) is a fully integrated energy company based in Portland, Oregon, with operations across the state. The company serves approximately 900,000 customers with a service area population of 2 million Oregonians in 51 cities. PGE has 16 generation plants in five Oregon counties, and maintains and operates 13 public parks and recreation areas. For over 130 years, PGE has delivered safe, affordable and reliable energy to Oregonians. Together with its customers, PGE has the No. 1 voluntary renewable energy program in the U.S. PGE and its 3,000 employees are working with customers to build a clean energy future. In 2019, PGE, employees, retirees and the PGE Foundation donated $4.7 million and volunteered 32,900 hours with more than 700 nonprofits across Oregon. For more information visit portlandgeneral.com/news.

Safe Harbor Statement

Statements in this press release that relate to future plans, objectives, expectations, performance, events and the like may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding the estimated total third quarter loss due to energy trading activities; the Company's full-year earnings guidance (including expectations regarding the impacts of higher net variable power costs, annual retail deliveries, average hydro conditions, wind generation, normal thermal plant operations, operating and maintenance expense and depreciation and amortization expense); the Company's long-term diluted earnings per share growth; the Company's future dividend guidance; the Company's ability to fund estimated capital requirements with cash from operations, issuances of long-term debt and the issuance of commercial paper; as well as other statements containing words such as "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "promises," "expects," "should," "conditioned upon," and similar expressions. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation: the outcome of the review being conducted by the Special Committee; the impact of the recommendations of the Special Committee on the Company and its operations; the time and expense incurred in implementing the recommendations of the Special Committee; any reputational damage to the Company relating to the matters underlying the Special Committee's review; demand for electricity; the sale of excess energy during periods of low demand or low wholesale market prices; operational risks relating to the Company's generation facilities, including hydro conditions, wind conditions, disruption of fuel supply, and unscheduled plant outages, which may result in unanticipated operating, maintenance and repair costs, as well as replacement power costs; failure to complete capital projects on schedule or within budget, or the abandonment of capital projects, which could result in the Company's inability to recover project costs; the costs of compliance with environmental laws and regulations, including those that govern emissions from thermal power plants; changes in weather, hydroelectric and energy markets conditions, which could affect the availability and cost of purchased power and fuel; changes in capital market conditions, which could affect the availability and cost of capital and result in delay or cancellation of capital projects; the outcome of various legal and regulatory proceedings; general economic and financial market conditions; severe weather conditions, wildfires, and other natural phenomena and natural disasters that could result in operational disruptions, unanticipated restoration costs, or liability for third party property damage; and cyber security breaches of the Company's customer information system or operating systems, which may affect customer bills or other aspects of our operations; and widespread health emergencies or outbreaks of infectious diseases such as the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which may affect our financial position, results of operations and cash flows. As a result, actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are based on information available to the Company on the date hereof and such statements speak only as of the date hereof. The Company expressly disclaims any current intention to update publicly any forward-looking statement after the distribution of this release, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions or otherwise. Prospective investors should also review the risks, assumptions and uncertainties listed in the Company's most recent annual report on form 10-K and in other documents that we file with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, including management's discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations and the risks described therein from time to time.

Media Contact:

Brianne Hyder

503-464-8596

Dan Katcher / Jamie Moser / Arielle Rothstein

Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher

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Investor Relations

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SOURCE Portland General Electric
Members of the (TDP) on Sunday staged a protest at the party office in Nandigama town in Krishna district demanding Amaravati should continue to remain as the sole capital of

The TDP leaders and cadre raised slogans "No to three capitals, Amaravati is the sole capital".

Former minister Devineni Umamaheswara Rao and former MLA Tangirala Saumya took part in the protest and planted saplings at the party office.

TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu on Sunday slammed YS Jaganmohan Reddy government for going ahead with its three capitals plan, stating that it has "no approval" of the people of

TDP leaders are supporting the agitation for keeping Amaravati as the one and only Capital of that began on December 18, 2019. The agitation began in protest against the 3 capitals announcement made by Reddy in the State Assembly on December 17.

Andhra Pradesh High Court had on August 14 ordered the state government to follow the status quo until August 27, the day of the next hearing, regarding the three-capital cities decentralisation act.

The state government had issued two gazette notifications regarding the Andhra Pradesh Decentralisation and Inclusive Development of All Regions Act 2020 and the Capital Region Development Authority (Repeal) Act 2020 after state governor Biswabhusan Harichandan gave assent to both the bills on July 31.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
How does Trumps 2nd-term agenda compare with the 2020 Democratic platform?

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The Trump campaign released on Sunday its second-term agenda, a set of policy priorities that will stand in place of a traditional Republican platform and offer a distinctly different vision than the 2020 Democratic platform released last week.

The Republican National Committee unanimously voted to forgo a party platform, according to a resolution released by the committee Sunday night. Instead, the Republican Party will back President Donald Trumps conservative America-first agenda and will go without adopting a new party platform until the 2024 convention.

The decision comes as the Republican National Committee significantly scaled back the size of this years convention for safety reasons during the pandemic.

While the 2020 Democratic Party Platform, released last Tuesday, was over 90 pages long and the Republican 2016 platform was 58 pages long, Trumps second-term agenda released yesterday consists of policy proposals outlined in 50 short bullet point sentences that represent core priorities for a second term.

The entire agenda document is under 4,000 words and claims to offer a stark contrast to the gloomy vision of America projected by Joe Biden and Democrats.

Trump plans to expand on his second-term agenda during his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday night and also in the coming weeks through policy-focused speeches on the campaign trail.

Trumps second-term agenda is broken down into 10 sections: jobs, eradicate COVID-19, end our reliance on China, health care, education, drain the swamp, defend our police, end illegal immigration and protect American workers, innovate for the future, and America first foreign policy.

Meanwhile, sections of the Democratic platform call for the building of a stronger, fairer economy, achieving universal, affordable, quality health care, and healing the soul of America by protecting LGBTQ+ rights and rights of other groups. It also seeks to repeal many of the Trump administrations pro-life policies and narrow the view of religious freedom to eliminate discrimination.

Police

Amid calls from Black Lives Matter activists to defund police departments, Trump is calling for the full funding of and the hiring of more police and law enforcement officers.

As riots and violence have taken place in some cities nationwide, Trump also wants to bring violent extremist groups like Antifa to justice, up the penalties for assaults on police officers and end cashless bail.

Trumps agenda also calls for the prosecution of drive-by shootings as acts of domestic terrorism.

While there have been calls for the defunding of police by protesters nationwide since the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day as they want to transfer that money to fund organizations that help marginalized communities, the Democrat platform does not call for the defunding of police departments.

However, the platform stresses that we need to overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom and called police brutality a stain on the soul of our nation.

As Biden has been criticized for his support of the 1994 tough-on-crime bill, Democrats seek to end the era of mass incarceration and dramatically reduce the number of Americans held in jails and prisons while continuing to reduce crime rates.

Biden's campaign website vows to invest $300 million into a program created by the 1994 crime bill that would fund the hiring of additional police officers and training on "how to undertake a community policing approach."

Democrats also support eliminating the use of cash bail and believe no one should be imprisoned merely for failing to pay fines or fees.

This is the moment to root out structural and systemic racism in our criminal justice system and our society, and reimagine public safety for the benefit of our people and the character of our country, the platform reads.

The Democrats also seek to reinvigorate community policing approaches and improve accountability and transparency by ensuring compliance with the use of body cameras. Democrats will also seek to limit the sale and transfer of surplus military weapons to domestic law enforcement agencies, a policy President Trump reversed immediately upon taking office.

We cannot create trust without holding those in power accountable for their actions. Democrats will reinvigorate pattern-or-practice investigations into police misconduct at the Department of Justice, and strengthen them through new subpoena powers and expanded oversight to address systemic misconduct by prosecutors, the platform states. Far too often, the law has shielded police officers who stand accused of heinous violations of civil and human rights.

COVID-19

One of Trumps second-term goals is to develop a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020 and foster a return to normal in 2021.

Trump also wants to make all critical medicines and supplies for healthcare workers in the U.S. and refill stockpiles and prepare for future pandemics.

The coronavirus was also a major focus of the Democratic platform and convention last week as the party cast blame on Trumps abject failure to respond forcefully and capably to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The party also cast blame on the president for the economic impact the pandemic has had by using the term Trumps recession on several occasions in the platform.

The platform goes as far as to say that Trumps failure to lead makes him responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. However, the platform doesnt acknowledge some of the missteps of Democratic officeholders.

The Democratic platform calls to make COVID-19 testing widely available, convenient and free for everyone. Democrats seek to increase funding to states that are conducting contact tracing.

The platform also supports making an eventual COVID-19 vaccine free to everyone regardless of their wealth, insurance coverage or immigration status.

Democrats also want to make grants and loans available to small businesses. Democrats believe that the federal government should pick up 100 percent of the tab for COBRA insurance to keep people in their employer-sponsored plans if they have lost their job during the pandemic.

Immigration

Trump is seeking to build on his staunchly conservative immigration policies in a second term. He famously promised during his 2016 campaign to build a wall on the U.S. southern border.

With construction in progress, the president and his administration seek to end sanctuary cities and block illegal immigrants from becoming eligible for taxpayer-funded welfare, healthcare, and free college tuition.

Trumps document states that the administration would seek to require new immigrants to be able to support themselves financially. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court backed a Trump administration rule that makes it harder for immigrants to apply for visas and green cards if they use government assistance such as food stamps, housing benefits or Medicare.

Trump also wants mandatory deportation for non-citizen gang members and vows to dismantle human trafficking networks that are smuggling people in through the U.S. border. He vows to bar U.S. companies from replacing U.S. citizen employees with lower-cost immigrant workers.

The Democratic platform criticizes exclusionary immigration policies and calls for creating a 21st-century immigration system. It calls to rescind Trumps national emergency and stop funding for the ineffective wall on the southern border.

Additionally, Democrats will terminate the Trump Administrations discriminatory travel and immigration bans and support legislation to ensure that no president can enact discriminatory bans ever again.

The Democrats will also reinstate and expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that the Trump administration has tried to end that provides deportation protections for immigrants who came to the country illegally as children.

Democrats also oppose a Trump administration policy, which was struck down by a court earlier this summer, that would require asylum seekers to first seek asylum in countries they passed along the way before seeking asylum in the U.S.

We will reverse Trump Administration policies that prevent victims of gang and domestic violence, as well as LGBTQ+ people who are unsafe in their home countries, from being eligible to apply for asylum, the platform reads.

Religious freedom

Trumps second-term agenda document doesnt specifically address the topic of religious freedom even though the president and administration have touted themselves as champions of religious freedom at home and abroad.

In the 2016 campaign, Trump promised Christian conservatives that he would protect the religious freedom rights of individuals and organizations to uphold traditional stances on marriage and sexuality that oppose homosexuality.

Over the last four years, the Trump administration has enacted guidance instructing federal agencies to promote religious freedom as much as reasonably possible under the law. The Trump administration has upheld a broader view of religious freedom rights as highlighted under the First Amendment and Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In the Democratic platform, Democrats seek a more narrow view of religious freedom as several cases have been fought in recent years against Christian business owners and organizations accused of discriminating against LGBT individuals as they tried to uphold policies that reflect their religious convictions.

Democrats believe that freedom of religion and the right to believe  or not to believe  are fundamental human rights. We will never use the protection of that right as a cover for discrimination, the platform reads.

The Trump administration has been supportive of exemptions for religious organizations that partner with governments to provide crucial services that would allow those businesses to operate following their religious convictions.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration enacted policies making it harder for faith groups to be federal contractors if they enforced employment policies that discriminate against LGBT individuals.

The Obama administration also enacted policies that mandated organizations to provide birth control in their healthcare plans and required faith-based hospitals, doctors and insurance providers to accommodate patients seeking transgender surgeries.

We condemn the Trump Administrations discriminatory actions against the LGBTQ+ community, including the dangerous and unethical regulations allowing doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies to discriminate against patients based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, the platform reads. Democrats will reverse this rulemaking and restore nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV/AIDS in health insurance, including coverage of all medically necessary care for gender transition.

We will also take action to guarantee that LGBTQ+ people and those living with HIV/AIDS have full access to needed health care and resources, including by requiring that federal health plans provide coverage for HIV/AIDS testing and treatment and HIV prevention medications like PrEP and PEP, gender confirmation surgery, and hormone therapy, the platform adds.



Abortion

While the Trump second-term agenda does not specifically mention the issue of abortion, the Democratic Platform has a section titled Securing Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice.

Democrats are committed to protecting and advancing reproductive health, rights, and justice, the platform reads. We believe unequivocally, like the majority of Americans, that every woman should be able to access high-quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion.

Trump has been touted by pro-life movement leaders as the most pro-life president in U.S. history and became the first president to attend and give a speech at the March for Life rally in Washington, D.C., in January.

His administration has passed several pro-life friendly policies that have restricted the promotion of abortion overseas and domestically.

Among many things, the Democratic platform calls for the repeal of the Title X rule enacted by the Trump administration that bans Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics that receive Title X family planning funding from referring patients for or providing abortions.

As a result of the rule, the nations largest abortion provider announced last August that it would leave the Title X program rather than alter its policies.

The Democratic Party Platform also seeks the repeal of Trumps expanded Mexico City Policy, which prohibits federal funding to nonprofit organizations that perform and promote abortions overseas as a form of family planning.

It also calls for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, a decades-old rule that prohibits tax dollars from being used to fund abortions. Presidential nominee Joe Biden reversed his longstanding support for the rule last year.

The platform also opposes Food and Drug Administration restrictions to medical abortion pills that the party claims are inconsistent with the most recent medical and scientific evidence and that do not protect public health.
Pune, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global aircraft engine market size is projected to reach USD 85.44 billion by the end of 2027. The increasing investments in technological integration will play a huge role in the growth of the market in the coming years. The presence of several large scale companies across the world will have a huge impact on the growth of the overall market. According to a report published by Fortune Business Insights, titled Aircraft Engine Market Size, Share & COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Engine Type (Turboprop, Turboshaft, Turbofan, and Piston Engine), By Technology (Conventional Engine, Electric/Hybrid Engine), By Component (Compressor, Turbine, Gear Box, Exhaust Nozzle, Fuel System, and Others), By Platform (Commercial and Military), By End-Use (OEM, Aftermarket), and Regional Forecast, 2020-2027. The market was worth USD 79.93 billion and will exhibit a CAGR of 11.27% during the forecast period, 2020-2027.

Aircraft engines are products that are associated with any type of propulsion system in the aircraft and are the power component for the entire system. These engines are responsible for the performance of the aircraft and are directly proportional to the operating efficacies of the engine with regard to speed, propulsion, thrust, and flight. The massive investments in the development of an efficient aircraft engine will have a massive impact on the growth of the overall aircraft engine market in the coming years.





Gain More Insights into this Research with Table of Content:

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/aircraft-engine-market-101766





The presence of several large scale manufacturers will also emerge in favor of the growth of the overall market in the foreseeable future. Technological advancements in manufacturing processes as well as the equipment used in the production side will bode well for market growth.

Reduction in Production Rates during the Covid-19 Pandemic will have a Negative Impact on Market Growth

The recent coronavirus outbreak has created a sense of panic across the world. Accounting to the increasing cases of coronavirus and the rapid spread of the disease, governments across the world have been compelled to impose strict lockdowns and advise social distancing practises. The efforts taken to curb the spread of the disease, although for the brighter cause, have had a negative impact on this market. The reduction in production rates as well as capacities will prove denting to the overall market in the coming years.

Increasing Number of Company Mergers and Acquisitions will have a Massive Global Impact

The report encompasses several factors that have contributed to the growth of the overall market in recent years. Among all factors, the increasing number of company mergers and acquisitions as well as collaborations among major businesses and organizations has made the highest impact on market growth. The report focuses on a few of the major company collaborations of recent times and discusses their impact on the growth of the global aircraft engines market.

In November 2019, Rolls Royce announced that it has bagged a contract from the US Navy for the development and maintenance of the V-22 Osprey engines. Throught this contract, the company will provide support for the V-22 AE1107C at several aircraft production sites. The contract, said to be around USD 1.2 billion, will indirectly influence the growth of this overall market in the coming years.





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North America to Emerge Dominant; Presence of Several Large Scale Companies will Aid Market Growth

The report analyses the latest market trends across five major regions, including North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. Among all regions, the market in North America is projected to emerge dominant in the coming years. The product applications have provided the platform for the companies operating in the market. The presence of several large scale companies will also bode well for the growth of the market in this region. As of 2019, the market in North America was worth 31.01 billion and this value is projected to increase at a considerable pace in the coming years. The market in Asia Pacific will rise at the highest CAGR in the coming years, driven by the increasing aircraft production in several countries across this region.



List of the Leading Companies Profiled in the Aircraft Engine Market Report are:



CFM International SA (Paris, France)

Honeywell International Inc. (North Carolina, United States)

GE Aviation (Ohio, United States)

Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc. (London, United Kingdom)

Safran SA (Paris, France)

International Aero Engines AG (Connecticut, United States)

MTU Aero Engines AG (Munich, Germany)

Textron Inc. (Rhode Island, United States)

United Technologies Corporation (Connecticut, United States)





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Detailed Table of Content:

Introduction Research Scope Market Segmentation Research Methodology Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Dynamics Market Drivers Market Restraints Market Opportunities

Key Insights Key Industry Developments  Key Contracts & Agreements, Mergers, Acquisitions and Partnerships Latest technological Advancements Porters Five Forces Analysis Supply Chain Analysis

Quantitative Insights- Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Global Aircraft Engine Market Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Global Aircraft Engine Market Steps taken by Industry/ Companies/ Governments to overcome the impact Key Developments in the Industry in Response to COVID-19 pandemic Potential opportunities due to COVID-19 Outbreak

Global Aircraft Engine Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2016-2027 Key Findings / Summary Market Size Estimates and Forecast By Engine Type Turboprop Engine Turboshaft Engine Turbofan Engine Piston Engine By Technology Conventional Engine Electric/Hybrid Engine By Component Compressor Turbine Gear Box Exhaust Nozzle Fuel System Others By Platform Commercial Narrow Body Wide Body Business Jet General Aviation Aircraft Commercial Helicopter Military Fighter Aircraft Military Transport Aircraft Military Helicopter By End-Use OEM Aftermarket By Region North America Europe Asia pacific Rest of the world



TOC Continued!!!







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Industry Developments:

April 2020  GE Aviation announced that it has bagged a contract from the US Air Force. The contract is said to be worth USD 707 million and is aimed at building F110 turbofan fighter aircraft engines for Slovakia, Taiwan, Bulgaria, and Qatar.





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President Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands before their meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, on Feb. 25, 2020. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

IndiaChina Stalemate Pulls India, US Closer

The stasis on the IndiaChina border is setting in motion closer relations between India and the United States as well as the emergence of India as more of balancing power in relation to China, experts say.

Indias defense establishment hosted a high-level meeting on Aug. 22 to discuss the stalemate between the Indian and Chinese militaries on Indias western border.

Indias military had a bloody conflict with the Peoples Liberation Army on June 15, in which 20 Indians and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers were killed. The faceoff between the two militaries on the disputed border called the line of actual control (LAC) began in May, following a decade-long pattern of temporary incursions across the LAC.

The clash badly damaged the bilateral relations between the worlds two most-populous nations, although the developments imply that India is becoming more of a balancing power against China, Zack Cooper, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email.

From an American point of view, this is healthy for the region, as it will help to provide more of a counter-balance to Chinas influence in the Indo-Pacific, Cooper said, when asked how the IndiaChina stalemate will affect the United States.

With a combined population of more than 2.74 billion people, India and China comprise 36 percent of the worlds population and are two of the worlds top five economies. However, the two neighbors contrast politicallyone a communist nation and the other a democracy.

The current stalemate between India and China is the outcome of Chinese revisionism and expansionism, which is visible in other contested areas such as the South China Sea, Priyajit Debsarkar, the author of several books and a geopolitical analyst with the London-based think tank Bridge India, told The Epoch Times in an email.

It is a crisis, which is symptomatic of the Chinese Communist Partys behavior, that is deliberately trying to undo all rules of international order created by notions of democracy and liberal values, Debsarkar said.

Obviously, the U.S. can hardly ignore the bearing of this bilateral issue on the current global order. At the same time, the U.S. understands that while the Chinese see the peaceful rise of India, as a threat, the U.S. and the liberal world see Indias rise as inevitable and in the greater interest of liberal international order, he added.

Indian soldiers walk at the foothills of a mountain range near the northern Indian town of Leh on June 25, 2020. (TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP via Getty Images)

Developments

Indias Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Bipin Rawat told the Indian daily Hindustan Times in an Aug. 24 report that a military option is possible if talks dont succeed between India and China. Meanwhile, defense minister Rajnath Singh chaired a two-hour meeting on Aug. 22 with the countrys national security adviser and the heads of its army, navy, and air force.

This meeting was preceded by the Army head meeting the top seven army leaders from around India to discuss the security situation and operational preparedness on both the northern and western fronts with China and Pakistan, The Times of India (ToI) reported.

A week ago, Indias top defense leaders had a meeting with its external affairs ministry and defense ministers after which the Indian media was replete with reports about the country not relenting from its stand of the LAC being non-negotiable.

The LAC is simply not negotiable. Our troops will remain forward deployed in eastern Ladakh till the Chinese soldiers withdraw, an unnamed official told ToI.

After the Aug. 22 meeting, Indian officials again said theres no change in the conflict on the LAC.

China is indulging in ping-pong tactics by shuttling the ball between diplomatic and military talks, without any serious attempt at conflict resolution, another senior official told the ToI.

Aparan Pande, a research fellow and the director of the Washington-based Hudson Institutes Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia, told The Epoch Times on a chat platform that the IndiaChina stalemate will deepen whats already started between India and the United States and its allies.

The more China refuses to budge, the more India will come closer to the U.S. and the more U.S. will be happy to provide military and economic support, said Pande, who on Aug. 21 released a book, Making India Great: The Promise of a Reluctant Global Power.

In response to a question about the changing U.S. relationship with China and its emerging partnership with India, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on July 15 at a press conference that India is a great partner.

Sandeep Kaur (C) and her brother Prabhjot Singh (2R) react after laying the wreaths of flowers on the coffin of their father and soldier Satnam Singh who was killed in a recent clash with Chinese forces in the Galwan valley area, during the cremation ceremony at Bhojraj village near Gurdaspur on June 18, 2020. (Narinder Nanu / AFP via Getty Images)

We talked about the conflict they had along their border with China. Weve talked about the risk that emanates to India from the Chinese telecommunications infrastructure there, Pompeo said.

I think the whole world is coalescing around the challenge that we face and the democracies, the free nations of the world, will push back on these challenges together, he added. Im very confident of that.

The situation on Indias western border will bring more institutionalized cooperation between the worlds two largest democracies, India and the United States, said Krzysztof Iwanek, the head of the Asia Research Centre, War Studies University (Poland), and contributor to The Diplomat magazine.

While New Delhi is unlikely to become a U.S. formal ally, this deepening of ties will take a form of more frequent and possibly partially more institutionalized cooperation: more intelligence sharing, more equipment transfers, strengthening of QUAD, maybe even new defense agreements or American training for chosen members of Indian armed forces, he told The Epoch Times in an email.

QUAD refers to the quadrilateral security dialogue between the United States, India, Japan, and Australia. The think tank Stimson Center describes it as an important part of the geopolitical rebalancing in the Indo-Pacific region.

Pande emphasized that while IndoU.S. ties will become closer and the partnership will deepen, itll not lead to a military treaty between the two.

Indian External Affairs Ministry said a no to the alliance, she said. Things dont change so soon. Between countries like India and the U.S., it always takes time.

Meanwhile, as the stalemate continues with both sides refusing to budge, Pande said the coming months are going to become tougher on the rough Himalayan terrain where even in June when the bloody conflict happened, the temperatures were sub-zero degree Celsius.

We had military exercises in the mountains before. Whether both will do it right now, not sure but will all depend on if both DC and Delhi want to send a message to China and also if they want to ramp up or cool things down, said Pande when asked if the world should expect joint military exercises between India and the United States in the coming months.

She noted that Chinese behavior can be unpredictable as the last and the only war between India and China started when China attacked India in October during the snow and winter of 1962.

Normally both sides withdrew during winter and left small numbers [at the heights.] This time it will be large numbers all through snowy winter, said Pande adding that China will try to send a message to the world that it is stronger than India, and India will counter it.

The U.S. will support India, said Pande.

Indian Congress Party supporters leave Chinese goods on a flag displaying the country of China, along with an inscription reading Boycott Made in China, during an anti-China demonstration in Kolkata, India, on June 18, 2020. (Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP via Getty Images)

Collaboration of the Century

Debsarkar said that the stalemate between India and China is a defining moment in unfolding power arrangements in which he believes India will play a crucial role globally into the distant future. He defined the trajectory of the IndoU.S. relationships in this context as robust, bipartisan, and multidimensional.

India will fulfill the aspirations of the U.S., be it by supplying medicines to heal the planetary pandemic apart from the ties enshrined in trade and people. The relationship is every day evolving and is deeply rooted and can be certainly coined as the Collaboration of the Century,' he said.

Iwanek said the stalemate will accelerate various emerging geopolitical equations in the region.

Growing U.S.-India cooperation, growing India-China rivalry (and the failure of their dialogue), growing China-Pakistan cooperation, and Indias deepening interest in modern Western defense technology: American, French and Israeli, he said, adding that a major change would be India apparently abandoning its policy of keeping its political and economic relations with China separate.

Iwanek says Beijing has the capacity to simultaneously sustain tensions on Indias border as well as with its neighbors, and India remains at the weaker side of the conflict.

Debsarkar said in this scenario, the United States has an abiding interest in preventing a major catastrophe and helping to restore tranquility for the world order of peace, prosperity, and democracy.

The bilateral bond between the U.S. and India is manifested in multiple layers with the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act [ARIA] as one focused in the Indo Pacific region. Joint collaboration and commitment to generate a policy framework is something that will bring lasting peace and prosperity for the entire region, Debsarkar said.

The $2.5 billion ARIA, which was passed by Congress in December 2018, provides a broader statement for the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy.

Without strong leadership from the United States, the international system, fundamentally rooted in the rule of law, may wither  It is imperative that the United States continues to play a leading role in the Indo-Pacific, ARIA (pdf) notes.

Debsarkar says the United States must stand up against unprovoked naked aggression especially to defend the free world order.
President Xi calls for more awareness of area's status, function during inspection tour China has vowed to step up the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta in order to make the region become the pacesetter of the new development pattern, with the domestic market being the mainstay and the domestic and foreign markets complementing each other. During his inspection tour of Anhui province last week, President Xi Jinping called for a stronger awareness of the status and function of the deltawhich involves Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces and Shanghai municipalityin China's economic and social development in order to promote the region's integrated development amid grave and complex domestic and international circumstances. Xi made the remarks while presiding over a symposium on advancing the integrated development of the region in Hefei, the capital of Anhui. The symposium was attended by Vice-Premier Han Zheng and other senior officials of related departments from the central government as well as related provincial-level officials. Noting that the region should rise to be the trailblazer of China's technological and industrial innovation, Xi said the entire delta region should not only provide quality products but also serve as a source of high-level technologies to support the country's high-quality development. He underscored the need to make faster progress in developing the region to a new height of reform and opening-up. Efforts should be made to improve the business environment in line with world-class standards, and attract talent and enterprises from home and abroad with a development environment that has a high level of openness, services, innovation and efficiency, Xi said. The president also called for efforts to promote the facilitation of trade and investment and strive to make the delta region an important bridge between the international and domestic markets. Xi's remarks came as the country is striving to accelerate the establishment of a "dual circulation "development pattern, in which the domestic economic cycle plays a leading role while the international economic cycle is its extension and supplement. The development pattern aims to cope with an external environment characterized by rising protectionism, a global economic downturn and a shrinking international market. China unveiled a plan for the integrated development of the delta in December last year as part of its national strategies for integrated regional development, which also involve integrated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The delta region, considered to be China's most vibrant area in terms of technological innovation and economic development, has a built-in advantage in advancing the new development pattern, since it boasts abundant talent, strong manufacturing, well-developed industrial and supply chains and vast market potential. A draft of the spatial planning for the region's integration demonstration zone, an area of 2,400 square kilometers at the border of Shanghai municipality and Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, was published on June 18 to seek opinions from the public. It set out a blueprint for infrastructure construction, natural and cultural heritage conservation, and transportation routes, as well as industrial parks in the area by 2035. According to the plan, the area will have a population of 3.8 million and generate 1.5 billion yuan ($216.8 million) in GDP per square kilometer per year. Zhejiang, which boasts the nation's most vibrant private economy, is planning to invest over 200 billion yuan in the construction of major projects concerning the integration of the region this year. Zhejiang should fully utilize its booming private sector, which accounts for over 60 percent of its GDP, 70 percent of taxation and exports, and 80 percent of its gross employment, in regional integration, Weng Jianrong, deputy director of the Zhejiang Provincial Development and Reform Commission, said in July. Zhou Jun, Party secretary of the Hangzhou branch of internet giant NetEase Inc, said Zhejiang should take full advantage of its strength in the digital economy sector to construct a "Digital Yangtze River Delta".During the speech at the symposium, Xi urged Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang and Shanghai to prioritize key areas and major fields including integrated circuits, biomedicine and artificial intelligence, and he called for efforts to foster the innovative development of micro, small and medium-sized technology companies. Zhang Mizhi, a research fellow at the Shanghai Institute for Science of Science, said he believed more national-level strategic scientific and technological forces and innovative resources will be deployed in the delta region in the coming years. With high-level manufacturing, strong consumption power and an advanced export-oriented economy, the delta region will set an example for the future development of other city clusters regarding the "dual circulation "development pattern, he said. "Anhui will strive to improve its innovative capacity and the development of emerging industries, and become a demonstration area for ecologically friendly development," said Zhong Lan, director of the Anhui Provincial Development and Reform Commission's Office for Integrated Development of the Yangtze River Delta. "In the future, more infrastructure ... will be built to connect cities in the region, and local people will be able to enjoy more shared high-quality medical and educational resources," Zhong said.


LIMA: Peru, battling one of the worlds worst coronavirus outbreaks and a five-month lockdown, was reeling on Monday after the deaths of 13 people, most of them young women, in a stampede at an illegal nightclub triggered by a police raid.

The tragedy at the club, which authorities called a breeding ground" for COVID-19, has exposed tensions in the Andean nation of 33 million people that has one of the worlds worst per capita fatality rates with almost 28,000 deaths.

Infections are rising again in a dangerous second wave and total almost 600,000, the sixth highest in the world.

With Latin America an epicenter of the global COVID-19 pandemic, countries are grappling with how to slow the spread of infections while easing quarantines in the face of rising public anger at the tough economic and social impact.

The police raid in the early hours of Sunday morning, which prompted a rush for the clubs exit, was to enforce a ban in effect since March on bars and nightclubs. This month the government has re-tightened rules on social gatherings.

Geraldine Sanchez, who visited the club with her sister hours before the incident, told Reuters TV they had only planned to stay a short time at the venue before going home. Her 24-year-old sister died in the stampede.

Thank God I was saved. Otherwise I could have suffocated and died there like my sister," she told Reuters at the door of the morgue in search of information about the body of her sister. Tear gas bombs were fired and women were scared."

The government has denied that the police used tear gas or weapons in the raid, while President Martin Vizcarra has called for strong punishment of the nightclubs owners. Police say a preliminary examination indicated no use of tear gas.

The clubs owners and many of the partygoers have been arrested or detained, and many have tested positive for COVID-19, the government has said.

Reuters was unable to reach the owners for comment.

BREEDING GROUND FOR INFECTION

Authorities said the party at the club had risked spreading the virus. Eleven of the 13 victims tested positive for COVID-19 and 15 of the 23 detained also, police said.

The nightclub was a breeding ground for the transmission of this disease: there was a viral load because it was a closed environment," Claudio Ramirez, a health ministry official, told reporters after rapid tests on attendees.

Images on social media and TV footage showed police officers hammering at a door to rescue victims. On the stairs were shoes, broken bottles and masks.

The nightclub had not had an operating permit since 2016. We dont know how it operated," councilman Javier Sulca, from the Los Olivos municipality of Lima, told reporters.

Peru was one of the first in the region to impose a strict lockdown, which failed to slow the rise in infections, while hammering the mining-driven economy, which contracted 30% in the second quarter of the year, one of the deepest in the world.

The tragedy could open another flank of criticism of the governments handling of the pandemic. Vizcarras popularity remains high, but has fallen in recent months. On Monday, the opposition-dominated Congress summoned Interior Minister Jorge Perez to explain what happened at the club.

On social media, many were critical of those who went to the club, though others called for an investigation into the actions of the police over the deaths.

Attributing the blame to the young people who attended the disco is to have lost social empathy," Marcel Velazquez, a Peruvian professor of history and literature, wrote on Twitter.

Several of the deceased are my daughters age, I feel the pain of the parents."

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
But caste, the stratification of humanity into desirables, undesirables and those in-between, is fixed and rigid. And in America, black people, whether blonde and blue-eyed like former NAACP chief Walter White, or dark of hair and skin like actor Sterling K. Brown, are always at the bottom of that hierarchy.

Caste is the bones, race the skin, writes Wilkerson. Which is to say, it is the excuse, the justification.

Germany in the 1930s, she reminds us, was a caste system; in fact, the Nazis modeled their oppression of the Jews on Americas Jim Crow laws, which they greatly admired. India still maintains a complex caste system. On a 1959 visit, Martin Luther King Jr. was initially a bit shocked and peeved to hear himself introduced to a group from the lowest caste as a fellow untouchable. It took him some time to recognize the truth in what hed heard. Like every other Negro, he later wrote, I am an untouchable.
Police have detained two persons, including a Chinese woman and a Tibetan man, for their alleged connection with Charlie Peng, a Chinese national who was involved in a 1,000-crore hawala racket and had snooped on the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

State police and investigating agencies have also established the money transactions between the two and Charlie Peng through a company named SK Traders, chief minister Jai Ram Thakur told reporters after the state cabinet meeting.

They were being paid to track and report the movement of the Dalai Lama, said the CM adding that the state government has beefed up the security of the 85-year-old Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

Thakur said the state police and Intelligence Bureau (IB) were carrying out a joint investigation into the matter.

The Chinese woman has been identified as Lanhu alias Leena, who was living in Bir village of Kangra district for quite long with her two daughters. She was detained near Dharamshala. The other person is Sonam Wangchuk, who reportedly works at a Tibetan school in Chauntra town of Mandi district.

The CM said he has spoken to the director general of police and further details were awaited.

Meanwhile, sources revealed that the security agencies were also questioning two more people closely associated with Wangchuk, who allegedly distributed the hawala money to get information on Dalai Lamas movement. The transactions into his account were done through nationalised banks.

When contacted, Kangra SP Vimukt Ranjan refused to comment stating he was not probing the matter.

The income tax department had recently arrested Charlie Peng who is accused of allegedly running a hawala racket. Peng was allegedly holding a fake Indian passport. He is accused of creating a web of sham companies which he used to launder hawala funds to and from China. He had also bribed monks in the Majnu-Ka-Tila settlement in Delhi to snoop on the Dalai Lama.
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Linkedin (Reuters) Berlin, Germany  Mon, August 24, 2020 07:05 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066fe980b 2 Environment Germany,summer,environment,heatwave,climate,tree Free

Residents of Germany's capital Berlin can do their bit to ensure the city's trees get enough water during the hot summer months as part of a new neighborhood initiative.

The platform, dubbed "Giess den Kiez" - which can loosely be translated as "water the 'hood" - was launched by CityLAB, a foundation-backed body that looks at future concepts for Berlin's metropolitan area.

On an interactive map, users can trace and track 625,000 trees in Berlin, including their type, age and water needs.

Read also: In rewilding Europe, letting nature do the work is no walk in the park

Once an account has been set up users can exchange information, enabling better coordination to take care of trees in the city.

"And each time a tree has been watered it can be entered into the system, with the correct amount of liters which shows other users that you've taken care of a tree," Malgorzata Magdon of the CityLAB initiative said.

The city of Berlin said that due to extreme weather, including storms and drought, there were 7,000 fewer trees at the end of 2019 compared with 2016

Topics : Germany summer environment heatwave climate tree
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 18:57:58|Editor: huaxia

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MALE, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The government of the Maldives has enforced new lockdown measures including restrictions on vehicle movement and closing times for shops amid a second wave of surging COVID-19 cases, local media reported Monday.

The Health Emergency Operating Center (HEOC) announced that land vehicles would be banned from travelling in the Greater Male Region between 8:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. local time, with violators facing fines up to 65 U.S. dollars. Pedestrians are allowed to stay outdoors until 10:00 p.m. local time.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) has said that the restrictions on vehicular movement have been implemented to restrict the movement of young people aged between 20 and 40, who have been the main vectors of a recent surge in COVID-19 infections.

Meanwhile, the government also announced that restaurants and cafes would have to close by 9:30 p.m. local time.

The HPA has said that new restrictions would be applied on a weekly basis based on an assessment of the COVID-19 situation in the country.

The government in Male has continued to crackdown on individuals violating anti-epidemic measures. As many as 1,844 people have been fined and 2,444 cautioned by police for violating health guidelines including a 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew implemented in the Greater Male Region.

The government has announced that the third round of mass inspections of private and public establishments will be conducted by the Maldives Police Service in association with the HPA, in order to ensure strict adherence to official health guidelines.

Establishments found violating health guidelines will be closed for up to five days and can face fines up to 65 U.S. dollars. Inspections were first carried out on July 12 and from July 29 to Aug. 8, reviewing 1,390 and 1,545 establishments respectively.

The Maldives currently has 6,779 confirmed cases of COVID-19, of which 4,222 have recovered and 26 have died. Enditem
Discover the new showrooms, shops and galleries that have recently swung open their doors across the country, a sunny sign during a challenging time. Read on for Business of Homes latest roundup of openings to have on your radar.

CALIFORNIA

Ethan Allens San Mateobased design center has recently opened in the Hillsdale Shopping Center. Previously located in the Bridgepointe Shopping Center, the new location features touch-screen consoles, an expanded sample library, and a new product gallery to showcase the brands furnishings and decorative accessories.

EAST COAST

Christina and Emmanuel Di Donna, co-founders of Di Donna Galleries in New York, have opened Selavy, a new art and design gallery concept in Southampton with curated vignettes that can be seen from the street. Passersby can find more information about the pieces online, where art objects, lighting and furniture are available for purchase.

Serena & Lily has opened its 13th retail locationand first mid-Atlantic storefrontin Marylands Bethesda Row shopping district. The 3,000-square-foot showroom features shiplap fireplaces and wainscoting and a gallery wall showcasing works by local artists, alongside the brands signature offerings of coastal furnishings and home decor.

The new Eleish Van Breems Home showroom in Westport, Connecticut Courtesy of Eleish Van Breems

Scandinavian home furnishings and antiques brand Eleish Van Breems Home has expanded its trade-only presence with a new 2,400-square-foot studio in Westport, Connecticut, which will feature products by Lee Industries. Eleish Van Breems Studio sits just around the corner from the companys flagship retail location, and features the brands to-the-trade furniture offerings, including frames, cushions, and a full range of Lee fabrics.

Direct-to-consumer custom furniture retailer Interior Define has opened a seventh Guideshop location, this time in Philadelphia. Originally scheduled to open in late March, the showroom is now open to the public by appointment only.

MIDWEST

Italian kitchen, bath and living brand Scavolini is opening a new showroom at the Michigan Design Center after nearly a decade in nearby Birmingham. Beginning September 1, the luxury kitchen and bath solutions will be available to the greater Troy design community.

SOUTHEAST

A bedside vignette from Arhauss new Nashville store Courtesy of Arhaus

Home decor and furniture retailer Arhaus has opened a new store inside The Mall at Green Hills in Nashville, Tennessee. The new location brings together the brands retail offerings and its complimentary design services in an 11,500-square-foot space.

SOUTHWEST

California Pools & Landscape has opened a new design center in Queen Creek, Arizona, bringing the latest in outdoor pool design to the brands third brick-and-mortar location. The family-owned company has been operating in The Grand Canyon State for more than 30 years.

INTERNATIONAL

Italian furnishings designer Henge has opened a new 2,200-square-foot showroom in the Yakimanka District in Moscow. The two-story space showcases the brands furnishings, upholstery, lighting and accessories.

Homepage image: The new Interior Define showroom in Philadelphia | Courtesy of Interior Define
South Korean diplomat Chang Song-min -- former aide of South Korean ex-President Kim Dae-Jung  has told the media that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is comatose.

He claimed that the North Korean leaders health is fast deteriorating and his sister Kim Yo-jong has already been declared the de facto second-in-command.

As per a Wion News report, Chang Song-min has claimed that Kim Yo-jong has been entrusted with the responsibility of managing diplomatic relations with the United States and South Korea.

He reportedly got the information from a source in China.

During his interaction with the South Korean media, Chang Song-min said: I assess him to be in a coma, but his life has not ended. A complete succession structure has not been formed, so Kim Yo-jong is being brought to the fore as the vacuum cannot be maintained for a prolonged period.

This got further air after South Korean spy agency also said that Kim Jong Un has partly delegated authority to his sister according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency.

He however believes that the power restructuring is not an obvious indication that Kim Yo-jong will succeed Kim Jong Un as the future leader of North Korea.

Chang also confirmed raging rumours by claiming that the latest photographs of Kim Jong Un being circulated by state-controlled North Korean media were fake.

Twitter had recently been abuzz with controversy theories of a body double being used after some social media users had spotted marked differences in Kim Jong Un's facial features in the photos of him attending a launch event as against his past photos.

Earlier in April, it was reported that Kim Jong Un has had a heart surgery after which it was said that he was missing for nearly three weeks. Kim Jong Un also suspiciously missed his grandfather Kim Il Sung's birth anniversary leading further rumours.

After several reports South Korean spy agency later denied that Kim Jong Un had any heart surgery.

The North Korean government didn't explain about his absence.
Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle are among those scheduled to speak Monday during the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Like last weeks Democratic gathering, the GOP convention be truncated, running from 8:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. through Thursday, and largely remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Four members of Congress will speak: U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate; House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana; and two lawmakers who have been among Trumps biggest defenders in the House: Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Jim Jordan of Ohio.

And former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, will get a speaking role as well.

Other speakers include:

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.

Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones.

Amy Johnson Ford, whose sentence was commuted by Trump after being lobbied by reality TV star Kim Kardashian West.

Natalie Harp, a member of the Trump campaigns advisory board.

Charlie Kirk. who runs the conservative student group Turning Point USA, a conservative student group.

Kim Klacik, the Republican candidate in the Baltimore congressional district whose residents had been represented by the late Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings and Trump said were living in hell.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, arrested on felony charges after pointing guns at peaceful protesters marching past their St. Louis home.

Sean Parnell, Pennsylvania congressional candidate.

Andrew Pollack, who lost his daughter in the Parkland, Florida, high school massacre.

Tanya Weinreis, a Montana small-business owner who received a paycheck protection program loan.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com.
A Music Industry Call To Protect Democracy, Get Out The Vote

In this op-ed Stephen Love introduces us to Socially Driven Music, a social and political organization aimed at harnessing the power of the music industry to protect democracy and encourage voter participation.

Op-ed by Stephen (Steve) Love of Socially Driven Music

Where is the music industry as the country teeters on the brink of a possible Trump second term that would indelibly transition America into an unrecognizable society antithetical to the foundation and morality that the generations who came before us (especially The Greatest Generation) sacrificed blood and treasure to protect, advance and improve? Silence is complicity. Democracy can be fragile, is not pre-ordained, and requires dedication to preserve. Click on the essay immediately below for a factual reminder of some of Trumps divisive, incompetent and unconscionable actions:

Socially Driven Music began as a plan to guide music creators in improving their livelihoods while intersecting with and championing social causes. We quickly recognized that this is best made possible by influencing the politics integral to it all. Were now turning our attention to the election and are positioned to help energize voter turnout nationally and in targeted locations down ballot. SDM is a clarion call and bridge that connects grassroots groups with passionate artists with shared values. We are a non-partisan company, albeit appalled by Trump and determined to help restore the Soul of America.

How can we allow ourselves to succumb to a helpless inevitability that Trump, a dim-witted, bloviating, self-serving, racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, xenophobic, sociopathic pathological liar and wannabe authoritarian, will be re-elected and allowed to fundamentally change the United States? And what about Trumps puppeteer enablers (McConnell, Graham, et al) and obsequious sycophants (Jordan, Nunes, Scalise, et al) whove earned their own defeat?

Its disheartening and very troubling to think that approximately 34% of the country might support someone who demonstrably abhors them and whose actions are constantly contrary to the very tenets embraced by his evangelical followers? Its inconceivable and reprehensible that they dont dismiss an alternate reality where up is down, night is day and wrong is right. Why do they chose to ignore facts (including the fact that fewer Americans would have died had Trump embraced scientific COVID-19 advice) and adhere to this clownish, provocateur, and the dangerous, misinformation, echo chamber business model of Fox News, Limbaugh, et al (actual fake news)? Why dismiss the award-winning information exposed and admonitions expressed by the New York Times, Axios, Daily Beast, Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, etc., (who at least try to get it right) and written about in so many publications by renowned authors like Bob Woodward and insiders like John Bolton and Mary Trump, among many others? How about believing nonpartisan, established trustworthy fact checkers like Politifacts and FactCheck.org (a project of the Annenberg Foundation)?

At a time when socially and politically conscious music is at least as relevant as it was in the 60s and 70s, were hearing repetitious productions, versus inspired songs, about nothing  in the midst of crisis after crisis.

Itcouldnt be that todays tired and vacuous excuses for pop music, such as the unimaginative, shameless play for attention that is Cardi Bs and Megan Thee Stallions (slang notwithstanding, does she know what a real stallion is?) adolescent WAP, have left no room for quality pop songs and meaningful rock  music that motivates listeners to think about how we might introspect towards joining together for a better quality of life. Its not shocking in 2020 to hear explicit language in hip-hop (or in other genres) and to see corresponding attempts at provocative videos, and this record/video is simply a boring escalation in a race to be the most outrageous. In fact, its a reflection of a permissively vulgar political climate creeping into pop culture. It is insulting and condescending to consider this distraction as anything but a Trumpian-style juvenile spectacle which any aspiring kid musician out there would have had the good sense to discard as unworthy of anyones ears. Its chart success will be as transient as any novelty record before it. Wouldnt Cardi and Megan have been better served personally and professionally as role models singing/rapping about ways to overcome any number of problems facing their adolescent audiences and the rest of us?

Where are the socially poignant songs and videos that can energize us and call us to action, to motivate us to activism? Is it because artists and songwriters believe that they are no longer relevant and there is no significant platform for new music from them in the age of Spotify and streaming music? This would be fallcious thinking. In fact, there are legions of listeners who are disenfranchised by the mostly pablum being released currently. Its either simple and offensive for the sake of offending, or what used to be called Bubblegum music, such as Harry Styles Watermelon Sugar. The industry is always renewed and reinvented from the outside (independent artists) in a creative drought such as now. Now is the inflection point for a paradigm shift and a renaissance of thought provoking music.

Bereminded of the socially poignant music that motivated us in the past and is still relevant (check out all 92 songs on the complete Spotify playlist!):

spotify:playlist:2rQ2OfRmwAOb1lOkITNYvb

And be introduced to another Jimmy Webb masterpiece that reminds us to be kind at a time of overwhelming despair and insecurity (performed by Jimmy and the incomparable Thelma Houston, accompanied by a school choir) thats just been released:

There is no dearth of material to write and sing about. One such starting point may be joining us in caring about the destruction of the U.S. Postal Service, a violation of a centuries old public service, and of the heroes who continue to bring us our mail each day despite COVID-19. We must stop Trumps attempt to disable the Post Office to interfere with mail-in ballots and the election (unintentionally affecting essential other mail), and his push to ultimately privatize the USPS for the financial benefit of his cronies. Please see the Socially Driven Music U.S. Postal Service campaign on Causes.com.

Socially Driven Music (SDM) was created to improve the livelihoods of music artists and songwriters by connecting them and their fan bases to social causes, hyper-locally (see a list of causes on the dropdown menu of our landing page). #MusicThatMatters #MusicPurpose. Frustrated that your voice isnt being heard? We can amplify it! Music Artists and Songwriters (legacy and emerging) join with each other, industry mentors, causes, political campaigns, and fans in innovative strategies for positive change. SDM is the music industrys de facto advocacy/activism group. We increase music revenue through altruism and, by extension, the encouragement of a return to the tradition of socially poignant music in this divisive current climate.

SDM is the first to encourage local artists to volunteer as poll workers to incentivize voter turnout (well help organize Zoom and other virtual conferences if COVID-19 precludes usual physical voting in some areas). Socially Driven Music invites local artists and songwriters around the country to join us by signing up using the link immediately above. We will then reach out to established artists in or near your zip code to participate alongside you. SuperFans of local talent become the connection between the musicians and local social impact issues and other fans for the reciprocal benefit of all.

In addition to Power The Polls, we have partnered with several other get out the vote organizations, including Headcount and When We All Vote, as well as two PACs. Were proud to help recruit a new generation of poll workers this November. Learn how you can help ensure a safe and fair election in YOUR community:

Ifyou are a local music artist or songwriter with a fan base who is interested in visiting or working at a polling place (for however long you wish) or would like more information about virtual interaction to motivate voter turnout, please contact us at http://bit.ly/SDMMailChimp or mailto:info@sociallydrivenmusic.com or on Slack at https://bit.ly/Socially-Driven-Music-Slack-Invite

Finally, wed like to know about your favorite social impact new music. Add to our list on our Facebook Group Page.

PS: For those music business executives wanting a roadmap to the future of the industry, here are some of the reasons you need to talk to Socially Driven Music:

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Five new councillors are set to start their terms at the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) on Monday.

This follows their appointment by Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, as published in the Government Gazette on 21 August 2020.

The newly-appointed Council members will take their oath of office today and commence their four-year term to serve and execute their mandate in the public interest, ICASA said in a statement.

Keabetswe Modimoeng, who was appointed as chairperson, is set to serve for a five-year term.

The other four appointees are Peter Zimri, Luthando Mkumathela, Yolisa Kedama, and Charles Lewis.

ICASA acting chairperson Palesa Kadi welcomed the new councillors.

She said the Authority faced the significant task of developing evidence-based regulations to level the playing field within the ICT industry.

The incoming councillors possess vast experiences in their own right and we intend to tap into their intelligence as we continue to regulate in the public interest, said Kadi.

The councillors will be sworn in by Judge JCW Van Rooyen at ICASA Head Office from 16:00 today where they all will commit to serving the South African public without fear or favour and in line with their mandate as enshrined in the Constitution and the ICASA Act, ICASA added.

Minister is defying Parliament  DA

The latest appointees bring the total number of ICASA councillors to eight, with one vacancy still having to be filled.

Minister Ndabeni-Abrahamss decision not to appoint a sixth new councillor, as recommended by Parliament, has been slammed by the Democratic Alliance (DA).

DA MP Phumzile van Damme has said the party will request that the Speaker of Parliament, Thandi Modise, subject Ndabeni-Abrahams to disciplinary action following her latest decision to ignore Parliament.

While this may seem a minor infraction, it is not, Van Damme stated.

She explained this was the second time the minister decided to override the National Assemblys decision on appointments to the ICASA Council.

Last month, Ndabeni-Abrahams wrote to the Speaker seeking to reject the National Assemblys proposed list of candidates to serve on the Council, Van Damme said.

By doing so, she not only violated the ICASA Act, but the constitutional principle of the separation of powers, she added.

The portfolio committee would not grant a request by the minister to fill only four of the six vacancies, neither would it alter the skills set in its recommended list, or change the order of priority for its recommendations.

That the minister has now only appointed five, and not the six as per the decision of National Assembly is a brazen middle finger at Parliament, and must be dealt with harshly, Van Damme said.
WASHINGTON: U.S. President Donald Trumps sister, a retired federal judge, called him a liar with no principles" in audio recordings made public this weekend, the latest attack on the presidents character in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election.

Maryanne Trump Barry, 83, also criticized the Republican president for phoniness" and cruelty" in interviews that were secretly recorded by her niece Mary Trump during a series of conversations in 2018 and 2019, according to The Washington Post, which obtained the recordings from her.

The remarks surfaced days before Republicans convene to back Trump for another four years in the election against Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Last week, more than 70 former Republican national security officials endorsed Biden, saying Trump had engaged in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as president."

Trump dismissed his sisters remarks in a written statement.

Every day its something else, who cares," he said. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!

Trump Barry could not immediately be reached for comment.

In one of the recordings, some of which were also obtained by Reuters, Trump Barry addressed the presidents suggestion in 2018 - while she was still a sitting judge - that he might send her to the border to deal with a surge in migrants.

All he wants to do is appeal to his base, Trump Barry said. He has no principles. None."

Mary Trump, the presidents niece and a trained psychologist, published a tell-all book in July in which she concluded he likely suffers from narcissism and other clinical disorders.

Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump, said she taped the conversations as part of a legal dispute over her inheritance following the death of Fred Trump Sr., the presidents father and her grandfather, in order to protect herself."

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Advice for meeting like-minded people

Dear June:

Midlife, I was caught up with my job, marriage, caring for aging and then dying parents, etc. Then I turned 60, only to find myself single, without children or a family, and just plain lonely. For a while, I was looking to remarry, but found dating sites were not for me as I wanted more wholesome men. I turned my focus from dating to just finding friendships. It is difficult to just meet people, male or female, to develop friendships. My job isnt really offering that avenue, nor my hobbies, nor do I have a church to draw from. I dont drink, and I dont dance, and I dont have a pet. Any suggestions?

Lonely in a small town,

Cathy R., Kansas



Dear Cathy,

True friendships are really a blessing and they seem to come up in unlikely places. It may also be that one person will not fulfill all your wishes for a friendship, so perhaps there are several people who can each fill a part. For example, maybe a friendship from the past can be rekindled? Maybe this person is in your season of life, and you can understand, empathize with, and support one another.

It may also be nice to meet people who share your interests. Now is not the time for traveling, but maybe in the future, a group tour in your area of interest might be a way to meet like-minded folks. Or maybe you could try a solo trip. Generally, when we travel, we become more open to making new connections, and sometimes these last a lifetime.

Closer to home, perhaps taking a workshop or class in a nearby town or city might also be a good way to meet like-minded people.

Another way to fill the void more locally is to see where you might be of service in your community. This may not lead to close friendships, but being of service also fills the heart. Does the idea of working with children or the elderly appeal? Or maybe giving a class in your hobby area? Organizing a clean-up in a local park? Making baked goods for families in need? Or you could offer to come over and hold the infant of a neighbor so she can take a break.

There are so many ways to give; choose one that inspires you.

********************************

********************************

Dear June,

I am a homeschooling mom of two young children. I have been involved in a very wonderful co-op for the last two years. However, this year for personal reasons, I decided to go with a private school-type of homeschooling. I still wish to remain friends with our former co-op families; however, some dynamics are currently making this difficult.

Before I made my decision to leave the co-op, three other ladies and I had been talking about forming our own smaller group. Then, one of the ladies (lets call her Friend #4) decided to join a different co-op but did not tell us right away. We found out when we started trying to plan our own co-op and now the rest of us are hurt, and we dont know what to do about Friend #4. We really needed her guidance and light. I didnt feel we could be successful without her. She said that she didnt mean for it to seem like we couldnt have our other co-op still, but the other ladies (rightfully, in my opinion) feel that we should invest our time in just one circle of friends.

Im disappointed right now because I shared something very sensitive yesterday (in a text), and Friend #4 didnt even comment. This tells me that she is shying away from us because she has some discomfort about the way she handled the situation (although I freely admit that I am not a mind reader). Personally, I am not nearly as upset as my other two friends are. Friend #4 has almost as many children as the rest of us put together. So I get why she did what she did. She has to do whats best for her family, right? But now if I even hang out with her, or let her daughter hang out with my daughter, my other two friends are going to be angry. What do I do with everyone?

Adrianne B., California



Dear Adrianne,

Human dynamics can be so complexespecially among us ladies and especially when times are stressful. Giving grace to others can really take so much burden off our shoulders. It sounds like you are already doing this, but try pushing it a bit further.

There could be any number of innocent reasons for Friend #4s poor handling of the co-op situation and her silence after your text. It may also be you are seeing a weak, thoughtless side of her, or perhaps she is also overwhelmed and struggling. In any case, the beauty of giving grace is that you dont need to know, you can just allow her (and your other friends) to be where they arefaults and all.

From within gracewhich should be a calmer placedo some deep, honest reflection, and then have a heart-to-heart conversation with Friend #4 about how you and the group may have come across to her.

It may be painful to hear her reasons for leaving, so you may want to wait until you feel grounded and able to listen. Using some terminology from nonviolent communication may also help keep the conversation on the right track.

Hopefully what comes to light will also help your other friends understand and let go of any hard feelings toward Friend #4. But if they continue to be upset and your daughter really enjoys the company of Friend #4s children, I see no reason why you shouldnt get together. Of course we should be considerate of others emotions, but we cannot let them dictate our lives.

Do you have a question for our advice columnist, Dear June? Whether its a frustrating family matter, a social etiquette issue, a minor annoyance, or a big life question, send it to DearJune@EpochTimes.com or Attn: Dear June, The Epoch Times, 229 W. 28th St., Floor 7, New York, NY 10001

June Kellum is a married mother of two and longtime Epoch Times journalist covering family, relationships, and health topics.
Deep chest compressions prevent brain damage during cardiac arrest

Sophia Antipolis, France - 24 Aug 2020: Deep chest compressions can crack ribs, but they reduce brain damage during cardiac arrest, reports a study presented today at ESC Congress 2020.1

Study author Dr. Irene Marco Clement of University Hospital La Paz, Madrid, Spain said: "Deep chest compressions improve blood flow to the brain, improving survival and brain function."

CPR guidelines are updated every five years and are used to train health professionals and members of the public. The 2010 recommendation for deeper chest compressions generated concerns over the possibility of increasing CPR-related injuries.

This study examined the impact of this advice on neurological outcomes in survivors of cardiac arrest. It also assessed the rate of CPR-related injuries and their association with prognosis.

The study limited participation to comatose survivors of cardiac arrest, since they would have received prolonged resuscitation. In contrast, survivors who regain consciousness have generally received an immediate electric shock and brief chest compressions to restore circulation. "We wanted to analyse the effect of deep chest compressions during prolonged resuscitation, when they could make a real difference to outcomes," said Dr. Marco Clement.

In 2006 to 2020, the study enrolled consecutive patients admitted to an acute cardiac care unit after a cardiac arrest in hospital or in the community. Patients were divided into three groups corresponding to updates of the CPR guidelines: 2006-2010, 2011-2015, and 2016-2020.

The study included 510 patients who survived cardiac arrest and were admitted to hospital while unconscious. The average age was 63 years and 81% were men. CPR by lay bystanders and the use of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) progressively increased over the study period.

After 2010, there was a higher proportion of CPR-related injuries: 12.7% in 2006-2010, 23.5% in 2011-2015, 22.7% in 2016-2020 (p=0.02). Just over half of patients survived and were discharged from the hospital (51.6%). Brain performance at three months significantly increased over the course of the study (i.e. it was highest in the 2016-2020 group).2

Patients with CPR-related injuries were more likely to have better brain performance. Nearly two-thirds (65.1%) of patients with injuries had high brain function compared to 43.2% without injuries (p

"Survival and neurological outcome improved significantly during the 14-year study," said Dr. Marco Clement. "Members of the public increasingly came to the rescue with CPR and there was greater use of AEDs. Injuries from CPR rose, but these patients were less likely to have brain damage."

She noted that lay people have been reluctant to do CPR during the COVID-19 pandemic due to fear of infection. She said: "Personal safety always comes first, and resuscitators should only do what they feel comfortable with. If you are concerned about possible contagion, you could omit mouth-to-mouth breaths: chest compressions alone may be as effective as conventional CPR."

How to improve survival and prevent brain damage from cardiac arrest

* Ask a bystander to call emergency services and find an AED.

* Start deep chest compressions immediately.

* Do not delay CPR by trying to find a pulse.

###

Notes to editors

Authors: ESC Press Office

Mobile: +33 (0)7 85 31 20 36

Email: press@escardio.org

The hashtag for ESC Congress 2020 is #ESCCongress.

Follow us on Twitter @ESCardioNews

Funding: None.

Disclosures: None.

References and notes

1Abstract title: Impact of resuscitation guidelines updates on global outcomes after cardiac arrest.

2Neurological outcome after cardiac arrest was assessed using the Cerebral Performance Category (CPC) score.

About the European Society of Cardiology

The European Society of Cardiology brings together health care professionals from more than 150 countries, working to advance cardiovascular medicine and help people lead longer, healthier lives.

About ESC Congress

ESC Congress is the world's largest gathering of cardiovascular professionals contributing to global awareness of the latest clinical trials and breakthrough discoveries. ESC Congress 2020 takes place online from 29 August to 1 September. More information is available from the ESC Press Office at press@escardio.org.

This story has been published on: 2020-08-24. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
BSP president Mayawati on Monday lashed out at the Uttar Pradesh government over the law and order situation in the state and asked if this was Ram Rajya .

Citing recent cases of crime in some parts of the state, Mayawati demanded strict action against those involved in them There is a spurt of crime in the state like rape of a Dalit minor in Sitapur, murder of a young man and breaking his sons hand for refusing to do bonded labour in Chitrakoot, and double murder in Gorakhpur. Is this the Ram rajya of the government? Strict action should be taken against culprits, this is the demand of BSP, she said in the tweet.
Jacksonville, Florida, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global Warming Solutions, Inc. (PINKSHEETS: GWSO) is pleased to announce that it has signed an agreement with New Zealand CARBON COMPANY, LTD. (https://humates.co.nz/) to manufacture and sell HCU (Humate Coated Urea) in New Zealand.

For more than 50 years, countries with adequate supplies of high-quality humates have been using the product to improve soil quality and boost plant growth. The volume of trial work and scientific study is huge. Results indicate that humates reduce the amount of fertilizer needed and improves production, both quantity and quality. More production for less cost!

Although humates use is associated with organic fertilizers, its biggest impact is on urea and other traditional applications. More than 90% of world's industrial production of urea is destined for use as a nitrogen-release fertilizer. Urea is usually spread at rates of between 40 and 300 kg/ha (35 to 270 lbs/acre).

The global urea market is currently estimated to be worth $64.1 billion and is estimated to be growing at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of approximately 2 percent until 2022, according to Beroe, Inc., a procurement intelligence firm. The global urea capacity is projected to increase by 17 MT (million tons) to reach 226 MT by 2021, moving towards a potential growing surplus in the long-term.

During the last decade GWSO, under the leadership of Dr. Vladimir Vasilenko created and tested a new Humate Coated Urea formula on local farms in Canada. GWSO and Carbon Company, LTS have agreed that there's a lot of potential, and some significant cost savings for farmers in New Zealand from using HCU instead of traditional urea applications. Urea comprises about half a New Zealand farmer's fertilizer costs. Our product will benefit New Zealand farmers tremendously while opening a market entry opportunity for GWSO.

Under the Agreement, the Parties agreed to open HCU manufacturing facilities to produce HCU and sell this product to local farmers, expanding operations to farmers in other countries like Australia, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, India, and the USA.

Utilizing the soil to a much greater extent via carbon sequestration is a potential game changer. It's so much more cost-effective than many of the other CO2 reduction measures readily available in today's market. New Zealand Humates & GWSO's HCU project will open new horizons for the global economy.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

How is HCU better than other nitrogen fertilizers? It requires less fertilizer and lower fertilizer costs for farmers and growers, provides greater nitrogen and nutrient availability, boosting crop yields, reduces nitrogen, mineral and nutrient leaching, improving our environment. It is more ecologically friendly to the Nature! It stimulates plant growth and Photosynthesis (CO2 absorption by leaves) and, as a result, increases yield. HCU does not suppress biological processes; instead, it enhances the level of micro-nutrients, nutrient availability and soil biology processes.

We encourage farmers and policymakers to embrace technology in order to:

(1) reduce fertilizer costs,

(2) minimize the need for and use of chemical fertilizers,

(3) improve the size and nutritional value of crop yields,

(4) decrease nitrogen and CO2 leaching into the atmosphere and waterways,

(5) sequester CO2 from the atmosphere, which can potentially be used by farmers to bank carbon credits that they can trade for profit on a national/global carbon trading mechanism,

(6) take immediate effective action on climate change.

About Global Warming Solutions, Inc.

Global Warming Solutions, Inc. (GWSO) develops and commercializes technologies that help mitigate Global Warming and its effect on our planet. The Company targets two areas that help reduce the extent of Global Warming and fight issues that have risen in consequence: Clean Energy and Carbon Control. Current climate models predict that global temperatures will rise sharply over the next century. The increase in temperatures can be slowed or eliminated by decreasing the amounts of greenhouse gases released into the Earths atmosphere. Global Warming Solutions seeks to leverage its experience and management to help make a difference in the fight for climate control.

To learn more about Global Warming Solutions, Inc. Visit: http://www.gwsogroup.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking within the meaning of applicable securities laws. While these forward-looking statements represent the Companys current judgments, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect the opinions of the Companys management only as of the date of this release. Please keep in mind that the Company is not obligating itself to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. When used herein, words such as: potential, expect, look forward, believe, dedicated, building, or variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in any forward-looking statements made by the Company herein are often discussed in filings the Company makes with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) available at www.sec.gov and on the Companys website at https://www.gwsogroup.com.

Contact:

Vladimir Vasilenko

CEO

Global Warming Solutions, Inc.

Vladimir@gwsogroup.com
I.Coast president urges peace as he files candidacy for elections Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara hands over his application form during the submission of his candidacy in the October election

Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara called for peace after clashes that have claimed at least eight lives as he filed his candidacy on Monday for elections less than three months away.

Clashes broke out after Ouattara, who initially said he would not stand again, changed his mind following the sudden death of prime minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly, his anointed successor.

"I know I can count on all my fellow citizens to ensure that this election is peaceful and that Ivorians can make their choice in peace, without violence," Ouattara said as he left the headquarters of the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI) in Abidjan, flanked by most members of the government.

"We will submit to the verdict of our citizens. The citizens will remember our record, which is an exceptional record over the past nine years... I have a vision of stability, security, peace and happiness for Ivorians," he said.

The constitution limits presidents to two terms, but 78-year-old Ouattara and his supporters argue that a 2016 constitutional tweak reset the clock, allowing him to seek a third.

Six people were killed and about 100 were injured in demonstrations that erupted after Ouattara announced on August 6 that he would seek re-election following Gon Coulibaly's death in July from a heart attack.

At least two more were killed at the weekend in clashes at Divo, 200 kilometres (120 miles) from Abidjan, after Ouattara formally accepted his nomination by the ruling RHDP party.

Opposition and civil society groups say Outtara's move to stand again in the October 31 vote amounts to a "coup".

The world's top cocoa grower remains scarred by a brief civil war that erupted after 2010 elections, when then president Laurent Gbagbo refused to cede to the victor, Ouattara. Months of violence claimed around 3,000 lives.

- Gbabgo barred -

Challengers to the incumbent include 86-year-old former president Henri Konan Bedie for the main opposition party PDCI.

Story continues

Two former ministers and Ouattara allies, ex-foreign minister Marcel Amon-Tanoh and ex-education minister Albert Toikeusse Mabri, are also running.

But election officials have rejected appeals by Gbagbo and former rebel leader Guillaume Soro to be allowed to compete.

Gbagbo was freed conditionally by the International Criminal Court (ICC) after he was cleared in 2019 of crimes against humanity.

His return to Ivory Coast would be sensitive before the presidential election. His Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party urged him to throw his hat in the electoral ring.

Soro, a former rebel leader, has been forced into self-imposed exile in France in the face of a long list of legal problems at home.

He was a leader in a 2002 revolt that sliced the former French colony into the rebel-held north and the government-controlled south and triggered years of unrest.

He was once an ally of Ouattara, helping him to power during the post-election crisis in 2010. The two eventually fell out.

pgf/erc/ri
A central Illinois congressman will host a Facebook live event with the Illinois Republican Party on Thursday.

Rep. Rodney Davis is scheduled to broadcast via live-stream Thursday night, the same night President Donald Trump accepts the nomination at the Republican National Convention to seek reelection.

Davis will be joined by Esther Joy King, an attorney from East Moline who is the Republican nominee for Illinois 17th Congressional District now held by Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos.

Davis spokesman Aaron DeGroot said that the event will be an informal discussion with King.

The time of the Davis and Kings Thursday broadcast is still to be decided. Davis is an honorary chair of Trumps campaign.

 Marco Cartolano
Senior Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway conducts an interview with Fox in the James S. Brady press briefing room at the White House in Washington on Aug. 21, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Kellyanne Conways Departure a Big Blow to Us: White House Official

A top White House official on Monday described the departure of adviser Kellyanne Conway as a big blow.

Kellyannes going to be missed. America loves her. We certainly will miss her here at the White House. But listen, this is all about making a priority for family. Thats what this presidents about, and thats what Kellyanne Conways about, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said during an appearance on CBS This Morning.

Itll be a big hole, a big blow to us.

Conway, 53, announced Sunday night her plan to leave the Trump administration at the end of the month.

Conway said she is doing so to focus on her family. Her husband George Conway, is leaving the Lincoln Project, a political action committee composed of former and current Republicans who oppose President Donald Trump.

Leading up to the moves, Conway family drama involving their teenage daughter had increasingly spilled into the public view, with encouragement from reporters at outlets including the New York Times.

Meadows said White House staffers will be praying for Conway as she transitioned away from the role shes held since Trump entered office in 2017.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, right, returns to the West Wing following an interview outside the White House, in Washington on Aug. 21, 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

I believe if you ask Kellyanne Conway, she believes she made the right decision for her family, he said, immediately dismissing speculation from the anchor that Conway was leaving because she fears Trump will lose in November.

Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Meadows said Conway was a vital part of the Trump team, both on the campaign and once the president took office.

Her decision, which is obviously a private decision for her, is one that were going to embrace and encourage her as she refocuses back with her family, Meadows added.

That doesnt surprise me for her as much as it is really one that is to be supported by everyone here at the White House.

Conway, who was Trumps campaign manager when he won the 2016 election, is on the Republican National Convention speaker schedule for Wednesday.

The White House has not yet announced a replacement for Conway.
A man stops to read a mural about the fentanyl and opioid overdose crisis, in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, in a file photo. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)

Decriminalizing Hard Drugs May Not Be Such a Good Idea

Commentary

Canadas chief health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, contended on June 21 that, as part of addressing the opioid crisis, talks are needed on decriminalizing hard drugs. Following Tams remarks, federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu said that while decriminalization is not a silver bullet solution, it is something the government is deliberating.

The tragic increase in drug overdoses has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the call for decriminalization has a somewhat longer history.

Some seven years ago, a weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article advocating the decriminalization of drugs. Then, economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy argued that the war on drugs had failed and the risk of maintaining current laws was far too high. They called for the legalization of drug use as the ultimate solution to the drug abuse problem.

Decriminalization is not legalizationit just means that those caught using drugs wont face criminal chargesbut it can be a stepping stone to legalization.

As always, the argument for the legalization of drugs goes something like this:

Firstly, governments spend a great deal of money trying to prevent drug abuse. Secondly, laws against using and selling drugs result in the unnecessary imprisonment of offenders. Thirdly, criminalizing drugs makes their sale very lucrative, violent, and destructive in the neighbourhoods where business is done. And finally, increasing access to a safer supply of legal drugs and providing supervised consumption sites reduces the danger of death by overdose.

None of these arguments for legalization are ignorant or irrational, but some have posed the question: Are they right?

Writing in a 2013 edition of First Things magazine, Catholic scholar R.R. Reno invited readers to consider a different perspective on the legalization of drugs. He begins with an analogy to no-fault divorce. Clever people, he said, argued that traditional divorce laws were unworkable. They did more harm than good. We were told that social change was inevitable and that punitive divorce laws just make a bad situation worse.

Some argued that existing laws disproportionately disadvantaged poor people who could not pay for lawyers, etc. Better, therefore, to decriminalize divorce, as it were, Reno wrote. Yes, it might lead to an increase in divorce, but not by much, and in any event the social benefits would far outweigh the negatives.

A similar argument is used to promote the legalization of drugs. Advocates hold that legalization may lead to some increase in drug use, but they say it will take the stigma out of addiction, which will help people get help to beat their affliction. The same argument was applied to no-fault divorce, predicting it would take the stigma out of splitting up and lead to better outcomes for kids and parents.

Reno predicted that governments would move to legalize drugs, but said people like Becker and Murphy were kidding themselves about the projected outcomes. As has been the case with the rest of the cultural revolution of the last fifty years, he wrote, the meritocrats will use their new freedom wisely, while the weakest and most vulnerable members of society wont. Drug use will join illegitimacy, family instability, and educational dysfunction as problems to be managed and ameliorated.

In addition, drug legalization could amount to a war on the weakest and most vulnerable among us. No-fault divorce became law in most North American jurisdictions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the next decade, divorce rates among elites went up, Reno wrote. Then they stabilized and went down. Today rich people rarely divorce. The rate is higher than before no-fault, but much lower than most people realize. Its at the levels of society that can least afford it that divorce is most common.

The same top versus bottom societal consequences are a potential long-term result of hard drug legalization. Children socialized by upper middle-class parents are more sensitive to the risk of acquiring a criminal record. Even if hard drugs are legalized, they will have the social capital and family support necessary to resist some of the worst temptations of hard drug abuse.

At the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder, children who lack family support and social capital will be more likely to become victims in a new regime of legalized drugs, just as many became victims of no-fault divorce, single parenthood, and the broader implications of the sexual revolution.

Canadians may take some comfort in Hajdus remark that decriminalization is not a silver bullet solution. But when permanent state bureaucrats like Tam start telling citizens what we should be discussing, we would be well-served to start giving the matter our critical attention. Medical health officers in British Columbia, Toronto, and Montreal have also called for decriminalizing hard drugs to address the opioid crisis, as has B.C. Premier John Horgan.

There are some very good reasons why we have longstanding laws against hard drug abuse. As Reno pointed out almost a decade ago, discerning the common good requires more than doing calculations to minimize social costs.

This is more than just a health debate. The issue of decriminalizing hard drugs goes to the very core of what it means to preserve a dignified and well-ordered life for all Canadians.

William Brooks is a writer and educator based in Montreal. He currently serves as editor of The Civil Conversation for Canadas Civitas Society and is an Epoch Times contributor.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
It is an enduring political question amid a pandemic recession, double-digit unemployment and a recovery that appears to be slowing: Why does President Trump continue to get higher marks on economic issues in polls than his predecessors Barack Obama, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush enjoyed when they stood for re-election?

Mr. Trumps relative strength on the economy, and whether Joseph R. Biden Jr. can cut into it over the next 10 weeks, are among the crucial dynamics in battleground states in the Midwest and the Sun Belt that are expected to decide the election. Many of these states have struggled this summer with rising coronavirus infection and death rates as well as job losses and vanishing wages and savings  hard times that, history suggests, will pose a threat to an incumbent president seeking re-election.

Yet polling data and interviews with voters and political analysts suggest that a confluence of factors is raising Mr. Trumps standing on the economy issue, which remains a centerpiece of his pitch for a second term and is expected to be a major theme of the Republican National Convention this week.

The president has built an enduring brand with conservative voters, in particular, who continue to see him as a successful businessman and tough negotiator. Many of those voters praise his economic stewardship before the pandemic hit, and they do not blame him for the damage it has caused. In interviews, some of those voters cited record stock market gains  although only about half of Americans own any stock at all  as evidence of a rebound under the president.
The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has described the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) manifesto as recycled promises which do not inspire hope.

According to the opposition party, the promises outlined by the NPP don't reflect the work done by the party in its over three years in office.

The Deputy General Secretary for the NDC, Peter Otukunor in a Citi News interview said the NPP's 2020 manifesto promises are not feasible and do not give Ghanaians the right information to make a meaningful decision come December 2020 hence must be ignored.

You will see clearly that the manifesto they put out was not a manifesto that inspires hope. We expect that a manifesto for a government that is in power will inspire hope and provide the needed vision that Ghanaians can rely on to make any meaningful decisions but here we are, it is the same old recycled, outrageous promises without any basis or clear direction. Most of the promises were made because they think that they have to say something, Mr. Otokunor said.

The NPP on Saturday August 22 launched its 2020 manifesto which features a breakdown of what the party believes are worthy achievements of its first term in office, based on which it is seeking a second term mandate as well as promises of things it would do if it is granted another term by Ghanaians.

The 216-paged manifesto is themed Leadership of Service; Protecting Our Progress, Transforming Ghana for All.

Meanwhile, the NDC is yet to outdoor its manifesto. It has provisionally set August 29, 2020, for the launch of its manifesto for the 2020 elections.

Ahead of that event, hints of some promises have already been announced by the partys flagbearer John Mahama.

Among them are free primary healthcare, a $10-billion accelerated infrastructural plan, youth in tree planting programme.

---citinewsroom
The Philippines has become more aggressive in sending its ships and aircraft to challenge Chinese ships within the Filipino EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) which extends 380 kilometers from the coastline. In the last two decades China has aggressively asserted its claimed ownership of most of the South China Sea. This claim was first made after World War II but not often acted on, except in the 1970s against Vietnam. In the last decade China has more aggressively asserted its claims om the South China Sea but has not opened fire on anyone illegally operating in the South China Sea. There has been some violence against Filipino fishing boats operating within the Filipino EEZ. This included a May 2020 incident when Chinese coast guard ships seized fishing equipment from a Filipino fishing boat that was actively fishing. This angered many Filipinos, and encouraged the government to keep up the hostile statements and military activities against the Chinese intruders.

In 2016 an international court declared the Chinese claims illegal. China ignored the ruling and has been protecting Chinese claims mainly through propaganda and intimidation. The Philippines admits that it has not got sufficient military forces to oppose China. The local coalition opposed to the Chinese claims does have the military capability to block Chinese forces. That coalition includes the United States, Australia, Japan and South Korea and several other local nations. For the moment it is a war of words and its up to China to escalate that to open warfare. China has not opened fire since 1974 when they fought a naval battle with the South Vietnamese near the Paracel islands, and took control after sinking one of the four Vietnamese warships and chasing the others away. Since Vietnam was united in 1975 China has continued to claim areas within the Vietnamese EEZ and used intimidation to enforce those claims.

Plagues

The nationwide quarantine was lifted two months ago, except for Manila and other major cities. There are calls to keep the lockdown in cities, despite the fact that the quarantine in urban areas is crippling the economy. The government has not got the resources to feed and care for so many urban Filipinos who are confined to their homes. Many of the confined are going hungry and not willing to quietly starve to death. People are defying the lockdown to survive all manner of privation. In the last week some quarantine restrictions have been lifted in Manila and other cities. More are to follow.

Covid19 cases in the Philippines were concentrated in cities, especially the capital Manila. Overall, the Philippines has suffered 27 covid19 (coronavirus) deaths per million population so far, which is up from nine per million in early June. Confirmed cases per million has gone from 200 to 1,730 known cases of the virus per million people. In early April the government ordered a nationwide lockdown to halt the spread of the virus and make it easier to treat those who have it. Many Filipinos did the simple math and realized that the efforts to halt the spread of the virus are more dangerous than the virus itself.

Neighbors Malaysia currently has had 286 cases and four deaths per million, Singapore has 9,700 confirmed cases per million and five deaths per million while Indonesia has 560 cases per million and 24 deaths per million. The Philippines has an advantage because it has no land borders with any other nation. The Philippines consists of 7,600 islands, which further limits the spread of the virus. The number of confirmed cases is more a matter of how many people could be tested. An accurate count of covid19 deaths depends on the ability to test those who die, or are dying from covid19. This coronavirus has symptoms similar to many other existing diseases and the breathing problems that often kill covid19 victims are similar to those dying from pneumonia. This is a common cause of death for the elderly or those already weakened by other diseases. These comprise a disproportionate number of known covid19 fatalities. The number of confirmed cases is just that, people who have been tested and found to be, or has been infected. Its been known from the beginning (thanks to being able to test everyone on cruise ships and warships) that 80 percent of the population suffers no ill effects from the virus and half those who do get it feel no ill effects. The death rate for covid19 is low compared to the killer epidemics of the past (smallpox, typhoid, and so on) but higher than most strains of influenzas that appear each year. Scary but not that scary.

Offshore Blowback

A major side effect of the covid19 pandemic is the reduction in remittances sent back to the Philippines by the ten million Filipinos who work overseas. In 2019 this came to $33.5 billion, which was about nine percent of national GDP. In 2020, for the first time since 2001, there will be no growth in remittance income which will decline a few percent at most. Those overseas Filipinos are ten percent of the population. In effect, a fifth of the Filipino workforce is employed outside the Philippines and twelve percent of households in the Philippines depend on remittance income. Filipinos are very popular overseas workers because of their energy, skills and ability to speak English well. There are no jobs at home for all this talent because of the corruption that stifles economic growth. The Philippines is among the ten most corrupt nations in the world.

Worldwide, Filipino remittances income has the greatest impact on the home country. Two other nations (China and India) receive more remittance income ($60-70 billion each) but both these nations have far larger populations and GDP. In 2020 remittance income declined less than did the GDP of overseas countries where Filipinos worked, indicating that even in a virus induced global recession the Filipinos were more effective at coping with the disaster.

August 18, 2020: In the south (Lanao del Sur province) ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) took credit for killing a policeman. The few dozen ISIL members here formerly belonged to BIFF (Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters), a group originally created to demand independence for the Moslems in the south. By 2014 the majority of Moslems and Christians in the Philippines agreed to an autonomous Moslem region on the southwest coast of Mindanao (the large southern island) and the string of smaller islands (Sulu, Basilan, Tawi, Tawi) extending from southwestern Mindanao towards Malaysia. The new Moslem entity (Bangasamoro) has more autonomy, but makes the Moslems down there responsible to maintaining the peace. This is no small matter because, more than elsewhere in the Philippines, the Moslem south has long had many more clan militias that believed it was their right to engage in private wars. Not all the clans share the official attitudes about who has the right to make war in Bangasamoro.

Bangasamoro governs the four million Moslems in Mindanao. Down there the Moslems are outnumbered by Christians who had moved there in the last half century. Nationwide there are about 11 million Moslems and nearly 90 million Christians. The Christian Filipinos are better organized, more industrious and more economically successful. The Moslems believe they should run Mindanao even if they are the minority, because Mindanao is the local "Islamic homeland." While some in the government are willing to concede this, the Christian majority in Mindanao (and the rest of the Philippines) does not. Because of this groups like BIFF are treated as outlaws in Bangasamoro and have lost support and members since 2014.

August 13, 2020: Senior Abu Sayyaf leader Anduljihad Susukan surrendered to the government. This was arranged by one of the local militias in Bangasamoro that used to be tolerant of Abu Sayyaf but are now hunting the Islamic terrorists. Anduljihad Susukan recently lost an arm in combat. The army thought Susukan was dead but Susukan had survived the wound and sought out MNLF leader Nur Misuari, who agreed to arrange for Susukan to surrender to the government. Susukan is wanted for 23 murders and five kidnappings plus other crimes. The MNLF is a Moslem separatist group that made peace with the government in the 1990s and helped with the establishment of Bangasamoro. The MNLF still controls some armed militias.

August 10, 2020: In the north (Ilocos Sur province) an army patrol encountered five NPA rebels, who fired on the soldiers. One soldier, all five NPA and a civilian bystander died.

August 4, 2020: In Beirut, Lebanon four Filipino expatriates were killed and twenty wounded when a warehouse with 2,700 tons of explosives in it detonated, killing nearly 200 people and wounding over 5,000. Lebanon has thousands of Filipino workers and many of them have been leaving because of the growing disorder and violence there. That mayhem has crippled the local economy, which leads to high unemployment rates. Filipinos tend to go back to the Philippines before seeking another overseas job.

July 31, 2020: In the south (Davao del Norte province) a firefight between troops and NPA rebels resulted in one NPA gunman killed while the rest got away. The fighting caused over 500 local civilians to flee their homes to avoid the gunfire.

In the north (Ilocos Sur province) a soldier was killed and three wounded when his patrol encountered NPA landmines.

July 29, 2020: Nineteen days after it was put into service the frigate BRP Jose Rizal (FF-150) departed to participate in the 2020 RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) naval exercises during August 17 to 31. These are held every two years and not all Pacific rim nations are invited. In 2018 a Chinese intelligence collection ship arrived off Hawaii to unofficially observe the RIMPAC international military exercises. In late May the United States withdrew its invitation for China to attend the 2018 RIMPAC. This exercise has been held since 1971 and is currently held every two years for nations that are dependent on freedom of the seas in the Pacific Ocean. During the Cold War (that ended in 1991) RIMPAC was about how to deal with the Russian threat. China was first invited to attend in 2014. RIMPAC is the largest international naval exercises held anywhere. There are usually twenty or more nations participating plus other invited to observe. Even when China was invited to observe RIMPAC one of their Chinese intelligence collection ships would show up as an unofficial observer.

This is the first time the Philippines has been able to attend with a modern warship. The Jose Rizal is the first of two South Korean frigates that were ordered in 2016. These cost $169 million each and are smaller versions of the South Korean FFX (Incheon class) frigate.

The Rizal class frigates are 2,600-ton ships armed with a 76mm gun, a SMASH 30mm autocannon RWS (Remotely Operated System). This is Turkish system using the American Bushmaster 2 cannon. It has 150 rounds of ammo that can be fired singly or at up to 200 rounds a minute (3-4 a second) at targets up to three kilometers distant. The Italian 76mm cannon is also RWS and can fire 85 rounds a minute at targets up to 20 kilometers distant. Rizal is equipped to handle a CIWS (close in weapons system) like Phalanx but is not yet armed with one. There are also mounts for four 12.7mm machine-guns.

The Rizal is called a missile frigate because it has lots of missiles. There are four South Korean anti-ship missiles (sort of improved Harpoons) with a range of 160 kilometers. There are also four South Korean 320mm lightweight anti-submarine torpedoes with a range of 19 kilometers. There are two twin-launchers for Mistral heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles with a range of six kilometers. There is also space for an eight cell VLS (vertical launching system) but, as with the CIWS the fire control system can handle these if installed. There is also a hanger and landing pad for a helicopter. There are also two RHIBs (rigid inflatable speedboats) for landing parties.

Leaving out the CIWS and VLS cells and using the simpler Mistral anti-aircraft missiles kept the price down. The Rizal can also handle a towed sonar but does not have one. There is a sonar built into the hull. There is a 3-D air search radar as well as a navigation radar, a fire control radar and an electro-optical tracking system. The Rizal has a crew of 65 with accommodations for twenty more sailors plus 25 passengers. Top speed is 48 kilometers an hour and range is 8,300 kilometers. Endurance is 30 days. While the Rizals are capable to long-range cruises most of their time will be spent patrolling coastal waters and the Filipino EEZ. Given that the Philippines consists of 7,600 islands, there is plenty of coastline. Some of those islands are in the South China Sea and claimed by China.
VDI

VMware Updates Horizon, Adds More Cloud Support

VMware has launched a new version of its flagship virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform with the introduction of Horizon 8.

VMware Horizon 8 is designed to help IT organizations more efficiently manage and scale virtual desktop and application delivery across public and private clouds from a single control panel. The company said that new capabilities would include:

More hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options, covering Google Cloud VMware Engine, Horizon on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and Horizon on Azure VMware Solution.

New instant clone capabilities previously only available in pricier editions of Horizon 7. This kind of provisioning helps IT directly provision "instant" clones without requiring a parent virtual machine, thereby freeing up memory resources and increasing the number of desktops possible per host, reducing costs.

New RESTful APIs, to help IT in automating capabilities of Horizon 8, including monitoring, entitlements, and user and machine management.

Optimized support for Microsoft Teams video and audio, and continued support for Zoom and Cisco WebEx, to deliver a better user experience from virtual desktops.

The ability to publish Linux applications directly from a Linux server in the Horizon platform, reducing the costs associated with licenses from other operating systems.

The company said that Horizon 8 would help IT "deliver more secure virtual workspaces," by letting them establish and verify end user identity with built-in multi-factor authentication and enabling conditional access policies for virtual desktops and applications.

IDC Research Manager Shannon Kalvar said in a press release that "unifying physical device management (including PCs, Chromebooks and phones), digital workspace creation/operations and client workspace security into the overall platform is an attractive proposition for customers that are already invested in it."

The company also released several additions to its VMware Workspace ONE, its digital workspace platform.

Pittsburgh Technical College , a private, non-profit in Pennsylvania has been using Horizon for several years, according to CIO William Showers. "When we made the decision to transition all on-campus activities to a virtual environment as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, our biggest challenge was navigating how to keep the family atmosphere of our tight, single-campus location alive and well online. VMware's digital workspace solutions played a key role in helping us do that." He explained that Horizon has allowed faculty and students to access collaboration tools and high-computing programs, such as immersive 3D-graphics datasets, from their virtual desktop to teach and learn remotely. "The process for accessing these tools is the same as before--the only thing that has changed is the user's location. I'm certain that if we hadn't made the investment in VMware Horizon, this transition would not have been as seamless, and we would have found ourselves playing catch-up when the pandemic hit."
Man Shot Multiple Times by Wisconsin Police Responding to Domestic Incident

A man is in hospital in serious condition after he was shot multiple times in the back on Sunday evening after he resisted police in Wisconsin.

The shooting happened just after 5 p.m. local time in the town of Kenosha as officers responded to the domestic incident.

According to local media reports, at least half a dozen witnesses say the man, now identified as Jacob Blake, 29, was trying to break up a fight between two women. It is believed children were at the scene when the shooting happened.

Kenosha News reported that police had used a stun gun on Blake after they arrived in response to the domestic dispute.

The shooting was captured on video, which showed Blake resisting police instructions as two officers with their guns drawn tried to stop him from walking to a car. As Blake opened the car door and leaned into the vehicle, at least one officer opened fire, shooting Blake in the back. Witnesses told Kenosha News at least seven shots were fired.

It is not immediately clear whether Blake had a weapon. Witnesses told the news outlet that Blake was unarmed. The Kenosha police were not wearing body cameras.

Blake was provided immediate aid by police and then taken to Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee by Flight for Life, according to a statement issued by the Kenosha Police Department.

Another video showed female police officers sitting with two black women on the grass after the shooting. Other police officers were talking with another black woman who was accompanied by a child. The woman, believed to be Blakes fiancee, was screaming when Blake was shot by police.

According to court records, Blake had an arrest warrant issued last month for trespassing, third-degree sexual assault, and disorderly conduct. He was charged in 2015 with resisting arrest.

The details surrounding the situation that led police to open fire on Blake remain unclear. The officers involved in the shooting will be investigated by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Division of Criminal Investigation, police said.

The department said early Monday that officers involved had all been placed on administrative leave.

The states Division of Criminal Investigation is heading a probe into the shooting and said in a statement it will seek to provide a report of the incident to the prosecutor within 30 days.

The video footage of the shooting, but not what led to the shooting, has since been circulating online, causing crowds of people to gather and demonstrate at the scene. Black Lives Matter protesters were among those protesting at the scene.

Shooting Sparks More Protests and Violence

Locals in the area initially gathered at the scene of the shooting, attracted by the strong police presence as more law enforcement officers arrived at the crime scene.

Kenosha News reported that about an hour after the shooting, local Black Lives Matter protesters along with a member of the Lake County movement started arriving in protest of the shooting. The crowd reached more than 60 people, according to various media reports.

As the night went on, protests turned violent, with multiple fires being set at the scene and at then later at the local police station.

Rioters threw bricks at police vehicles to drive the police out of the neighborhood. One officer was hit on the head and knocked out, according to various reports.

Rioters also set fire to garbage trucks that were used to block the streets around the police station and sheriffs office.

The Kenosha County Courthouse was also set on fire as rioters started looting the city.

Kenosha County declared a state of emergency curfew from 10:15 p.m. Sunday night until 7 a.m. Monday for public safety reasons.

Earlier in the night, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, made a statement about the incident on Twitter.

Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kathy and I join his family, friends, and neighbors in hoping earnestly that he will not succumb to his injuries. And we stand against excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with black Wisconsinites, he said.

I have said all along that although we must offer our empathy, equally important is our action. In the coming days, we will demand just that of elected officials in our state who have failed to recognize the racism in our state and our country for far too long.

Zachary Stieber and Reuters contributed to this report.
DUBAI (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates and Israel on Monday agreed to enhance bilateral cooperation in the health sector following an accord between the countries to normalise relations 10 days ago, UAE state news agency WAM said.

The health ministers of the two countries discussed cooperation on pharmaceuticals, medical research and COVID-19 in a telephone call. A statement from Israel's Health Ministry added that they agreed on "initial and immediate cooperation" in the health sector.

Israel and the UAE have agreed to normalise diplomatic ties and forge a broad new relationship under a U.S.-sponsored deal, making the UAE the third Arab country to have formal diplomatic ties with Israel after Egypt and Jordan.

The two countries will each appoint representatives and set up business delegations, the Israeli health ministry said.

The countries will also work to create a student exchange program once the coronavirus pandemic conditions allow, it added.

Since the deal, the countries have signed a few agreements on technologies to fight the coronavirus. Several small-scale medical and defence collaborations were announced in the weeks preceding the normalisation agreement.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington in Dubai and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Editing by Alison Williams, Kirsten Donovan)
American filmmaker, Matt Reeves has finally debuted the first official teaser trailer for The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, at DC Fandome.

American filmmaker, Matt Reeves has finally debuted the first official teaser trailer for The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, at DC Fandome. Earlier this year, production on the film had to be halted, owing to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. So, the trailer that you see below has been put together using the 25 to 30 percent of the stuff that was filmed during that short period.

The trailer immediately gives off an R-Rated, psychological crime-thriller vibe, with Paul Dano as The Riddler setting up a dead body and a set of clues for the Batman to follow. The body, presumed to be of the mayor of Gotham, has his faced covered with duct tape and a text in red which says, NO MORE LIES. After which, we are introduced to Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon and the Gotham City Police Department, as they venture into the deeply disturbing crime scene. Set in the universe of Year-2 Batman, it looks like the Dark Knight and the Commissioner are on somewhat reasonable terms, as he steps into the vicinity showing off the grandeur, that is, the new sleek-looking Batsuit. We also get our first look at Robert Pattinson as the billionaire playboy philanthropist, Bruce Wayne, in the gothic backdrops of the corrupt and volatile city of Gotham. Selina Kyle played by Zoe Kravitz also shares a decent amount of screentime, flaunting her cat-like agility and reflexes, while attempting to rob a safe locker in the very crime scene. Collin Farell manages to capture the aura of the criminal mastermind, The Penguin, thanks to the fat suit and the prosthetics that shape his crooked image. Towards the end of the trailer, we also get an insight into the young, brash version of Batman, that we will be encountering in this film, as he takes on a bunch of goons in a rather brutal and ghastly beatdown. Which is then followed up by the deep, husky baritone uttering the words, Im Vengeance. The trailer also features some glamour shots of the all-new, vintage-looking Batmobile firing up and an array of mind-blowing action sequences, that seems to have been picked up straight from the comic books.

Matt Reeves The Batman is currently under production and will be out sometime in 2021 (speculated release date - 1 October 2021). At the event, the director also shared some new information on the upcoming Batman spin-off drama series, focussed around the corruption, within the confines of the GCPD. Set to debut on the new streaming platform, HBO Max, the series will be a prequel to his aforementioned, The Batman movie. And will be set in Year-1 of the first establishment of the masked vigilante.

Earlier this month, we had reported on an upcoming Robert Pattinson starring Netflix psychological thriller - The Devil All The Time, of which you can check out further details here. The entirety of the Batman trailer features a dark and gloomy song from Nirvana called Something In The Way, which you can check out below if you are interested.
Megan Chambers, a graduate student at North Carolina State, said she won't vote for Trump but has not yet settled on Biden. (Noah Bierman / Los Angeles Times)

If Democrats are to have a shot at winning North Carolina in Novembers presidential election, they need to close the deal with voters like Megan Chambers.

Chambers is one of hundreds of thousands of out-of-state transplants  many highly educated and from Northern cities  who have helped transform many of the state's rural communities into suburban subdivisions and shopping centers linked by a maze of wide highways.

The influx also has propelled a shake-up of the state's politics and its effect on the national political map, giving Democrats new life in the traditionally conservative South.

Yet the shift is incomplete. Chambers, a 26-year-old graduate student, believes President Trump is ignorant and self-centered. But she has reservations about 77-year-old Joe Biden due to his age and other reasons, and is considering an obscure third-party candidate.

I don't know anybody that is really, really excited and loves Joe Biden, Chambers, an Ohio native, said amid the peaches and tomatoes at a farmers' market in Raleigh.

Polls show Biden and Trump locked in a dead heat in North Carolina, perhaps the closest contest of the battleground states.

Trump almost certainly needs North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to win reelection. It's one reason Republicans initially chose Charlotte, the states biggest city, to hold their four-day national convention, which starts Monday.

The coronavirus crisis put severe limits on in-person attendance and the party will instead hold most of its events online, as Democrats did last week.

The state is not as critical for Biden given his hold on vote-rich California and New York, and his apparent advantage in other major swing states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But a Biden win here would almost guarantee his path to the White House. And North Carolina also could hand Democrats control of the Senate, and thus of both houses in Congress, giving a Democratic president the ability to make major legislative changes.

Story continues

Given the high stakes, the parties are spending a fortune on TV advertising.

Polls show Sen. Thom Tillis, the Republican incumbent, trailing Cal Cunningham, his Democratic challenger. Their campaigns and outside groups are spending $10 million a week on television ads, according to a Democratic operative who tracks the money.

The presidential race, including the Democratic primary last spring, has generated nearly $160 million in television spending so far, the operative said.

Its going to be very expensive and brutal and youre seeing unknown third-party money coming in in droves, said Pat McCrory, a former Republican governor who is now a radio host.

McCrory got slammed by the demographic shift in his 2016 reelection race.

He won 72 of the states 100 counties, but narrowly lost to Roy Cooper, a Democrat who racked up big margins in the suburbs and cities, including Charlotte, where McCrory had served as mayor for 14 years.

New York has moved to North Carolina, McCrory said.

Morgan Jackson, a political advisor to Cooper and Cunningham, said Virginia is a better comparison. The once reliably Republican state has trended Democratic in recent years due to the growth of diverse and liberal suburbs near Washington, D.C.

In addition to statewide races, Democrats in North Carolina are expected to pick up at least two U.S. House seats and hope to win back the state legislature, in large part because the courts struck down gerrymandered district maps last year and ordered new ones more favorable to Democrats.

If Democrats win either the state House or Senate, they will have a voice in drawing up the next set of maps following the 2020 census, which could help their party at the national level for the next decade.

Valerie Biden Owens, sister of Joe Biden, participates in a virtual town hall.

But Democrats have seen their hopes dashed here in the past.

In presidential races, Democrats have won only once in the past four decades  when Barack Obama eked out a tight win over Sen. John McCain in 2008.

Four years later, Democrats nominated Obama for a second term at a convention in Charlotte, but Obama lost narrowly to Mitt Romney. North Carolina was one of only two states that flipped that year.

In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton here by 3.6 percentage points.

Since then, the states voter rolls have grown by about 160,000 people, almost as many votes as Trump's winning margin. To win, Biden would need many of the new residents, and also inspire more young and Black voters  who make up about a fifth of the electorate  to turn out.

The pandemic has made organizing and get-out-the-vote efforts more difficult. A virtual watch party held on Zoom during last weeks Democratic National Convention lacked the pizzazz of an in-person event.

I am so happy to be with you today. I wish I was physically there, said Rep. Karen Bass, the Los Angeles Democrat who Biden had considered as a running mate before he picked Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

I want to be, hugging you, but this is the best we can do, Valerie Biden Owens, Joe Biden's sister and longtime campaign leader, responded. "It's working pretty darn well. ... We're rocking it."

The campaign said the Zoom call drew hundreds of people, but it's unclear if it helped raise enthusiasm for Biden.

The key group in this election is still people who are Democratic leaning but dont like Biden," said Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, a national Democratic firm based in the state.

Brandy Allen, a 27-year-old on a lunch break from her job as a cashier at a Harris Teeter supermarket, said she did not vote in 2016 but plans to show up this time.

Allen said the recent death of civil rights leader John Lewis had inspired her, but said she has not heard much from the Biden campaign or the Democratic Party, despite her interest in healthcare and the environment.

I dont know if Ive seen them reach out to us, said Allen, who is Black.

Michael Whatley, chairman of the state GOP, said he has sent fliers urging voters to register for absentee ballots and has instructed county leaders to reassure voters that the system is safe, despite Trump's unfounded charges that mail-in ballot will lead to rampant fraud.

Whatley blames the states economic woes  8.5% unemployment in July  on Coopers cautious approach to the pandemic. But Cooper has proven popular and most polls show a majority of voters blame Trump for the countrys coronavirus failures.

Robert Farrow, left, a retiree who voted for Gary Johnson in 2016, plans to vote for President Trump this year. He's sitting with his friend Dean Patton in Cary, N.C., after having coffee at a bagel shop. (Noah Bierman / Los Angeles Times)

Trump hopes that voters will overlook his perceived failings, and that enough white conservatives will help him hold onto the state.

Robert Farrow, a 78-year-old retiree who moved six years ago from Ventura to Cary, a Raleigh suburb, said he probably would hold my nose and vote for Trump, despite misgivings about the presidents character. In 2016, he voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson, the first time in his life that he failed to vote for a Republican presidential candidate, he said.

Were voting for a commander in chief, he said, explaining why he is with Trump this time around. Not a pastor.
HOUSTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Blindster, the leading custom window coverings business showing people how easy it is to install blinds, is proud to announce the year-to-date donation of $60,848 to United Way to support their Response & Recovery Fund for Covid-19 across the United States.

Despite the possible detrimental impact of the Houston based, family-run business from the pandemic, Blindster knew that they still wanted to be involved and enacted the COVID-19 Program, with $2 of every purchase at www.Blindster.com being donated to United Way's COVID-19 Response & Recovery Fund. Blindster, the leading custom window coverings business showing people how easy it is to install blinds, is proud to announce the year-to-date donation of $60,848 to United Way to support their Response & Recovery Fund for COVID-19 across the United States.

When the pandemic hit, small businesses and large corporations alike were faced with extreme uncertainty. Despite the possible detrimental impact of the Houston based, family-run business from the pandemic, Blindster knew that they still wanted to be involved and enacted the COVID-19 Program, with $2 of every purchase at www.Blindster.com being donated to United Way's COVID-19 Response & Recovery Fund .

"When the pandemic hit and as things progressed, we knew that even as a small business, it was our civic responsibility to support and assist where we could," states Founder and CEO, Kyle Cox. "It is not just the big players that can support our nation's communities in need. We are a family-owned company that knows the impact of any level of support and how far just a little can go."

With every product sold on Blindster.com, $2 was donated directly to United Way to help fund critical services such as rent and mortgage assistance, donations to food pantries, shelter options and more.

Blindster is known for custom-made blinds, shades and shutters that anyone can hang. With the best products and variety of colors, DIY-ers and non-DIY-ers can install Blindster blinds so easily that the company guarantees the blinds will fit even if there is a mistake, with their Fit-or-Free Guarantee. In addition, Blindster offers a no tools line of exclusive blinds and shades that can be installed without any tools via a patent-pending mounting bracket, leaving no holes in the window frame.

About Blindster

Blindster offers high-quality, custom-made window treatments direct to consumers at prices far below retail. Many people believe custom window treatments are a job just for professionals. Our mission is to show everyone how easy it is to do it yourself and save money. In fact, we're so confident you can measure and install custom blinds yourself we guarantee our blinds will fit your windows even if you make a mistake. All Blindster products are backed by a limited lifetime warranty and a 60-day satisfaction guarantee. For further information, please visit www.Blindster.com .

Media Contact

Nicole Boyd

Firecracker PR

[email protected]

1-888-317-4687 ext. 705

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On Sunday, the CBE offered T-bills in Egyptian pounds, on behalf of the finance ministry, worth EGP 20.5 billion over two terms to provide finances for the same purpose

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) is set to offer two types of treasury bills (T-bills) in Egyptian pounds on Monday worth EGP 19 billion, including 91-day term T-bills worth EGP 8.5 billion, and 266-day term T-bills worth EGP 10.5 billion in order to bridge the states budget deficit gap.

The two types of T-bills will be offered on behalf of the finance ministry.

The maturity date of the 91-day term T-bills is scheduled to be on 24 November 2020, while the maturity date of the 266-day term T-bills is expected to be on 18 May 2021, according to the CBE.

On Sunday, the CBE offered T-bills in Egyptian pounds, on behalf of the finance ministry, worth EGP 20.5 billion over two terms to provide finances for the same purpose.

The first offer was 182-day term T-bills, which managed to attract 166 bids worth EGP 19.17 billion. The accepted bids were 106 with a total of 12.4 billion, which exceeds the required amount estimated at EGP 9.5 billion, according to the CBE.

The second offer was 375-day term T-bills, which managed to attract 200 bids worth EGP 28.88 billion. The accepted bids were 150 at a total of EGP 24 billion, which surpasses the required amount estimated at EGP 11 billion, according to the CBE.

Offering T-bills in auctions is an instrument Egypts government counts on to deal with the states budget deficit, which was widened under the pressure of the COVID-19 crisis to 6.5 percent of GDP in FY2019/2020, which ended in June, up from 6.2 percent in FY2018/2019.

Egypts FY2019/2020 budget deficit recorded EGP 389.1 billion, around $24 billion by the end of May, according to the Ministry of Finance.

In May, Moodys expected Egypts total budget deficit-to-GDP ratio to reach 7.9 percent in FY2019/2020 and to increase to 8.5 percent in FY2020/2021, with the ability of attaining initial surpluses in lower numbers than the targeted rates that were expected before.

Moodys also projected that Egypt will witness a setback in its domestic growth rates in the short run to under 3 percent in FY2020/2021, with pressures placed on public finance, debt, and payments balance performance.

Moodys has kept Egypts credit rating at B2 with a stable outlook recently, which is the same rating announced in April.

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Citizen scientists found more than 1,500 brown dwarves  'cool worlds' that are more massive than planets but lighter than stars  in our galactic neighbourhood.

The discoveries were part of 'Backyard Worlds: Planet 9', a project which recruited more than 100,000 people to scour astronomical data for new 'nearby' objects.

Some of the brown dwarves are even among the coolest of their type known  with temperatures close to that of the Earth and the potential to harbour water clouds.

The closest of the newly-discovered brown dwarves lies just 23 light years from the Earth, with many of the others within 3060 light years, astronomers said.

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Citizen scientists found more than 1,500 brown dwarves  'cool worlds' that are more massive than planets but lighter than stars  in our neighbourhood. Pictured, an artist's impression of one of the newly-discovered brown dwarves, with the Milky Way in the background

'These cool worlds offer the opportunity for new insights into the formation and atmospheres of planets beyond the Solar System,' said paper author and astronomer Aaron Meisner of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s NOIRLab.

'This collection of cool brown dwarfs also allows us to accurately estimate the number of free-floating worlds roaming interstellar space near the Sun.'

Brown dwarves are the 'cooling embers' of space  to small to support the nuclear reactions that power stars, they are faint and challenging to spot, which is why astronomers have been hunting for them close by, in our galactic neighbourhood.

Experts believe that brown dwarves cool as they age, starting at near-stellar temperatures but cooling until they are on a par with planets like Earth  a hypothesis which the recent findings have provided evidence to support.

The Backyard Worlds project recruited more than 100,000 citizen scientists to study trillions of pixels of telescope images looking for the subtle signs of planets and brown dwarves moving out in space.

According to the astronomers, there is still no substitute for the human eye when it comes to scouring telescope images for subtle evidence of moving objects  despite recent advances in machine learning and supercomputer hardware.

The astronomical data studied was collected by the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Although the researchers have only published data on the coldest 95 of the finds, the volunteers have identified more than 1,500 brown dwarves in the astronomical data  a record-breaker for any citizen science program by a factor of 20.

'It's awesome to know that our discoveries are now counted among the Suns neighbour and will be targets of further research,' said paper co-author and citizen scientist Jim Walla added.

The discoveries were part of 'Backyard Worlds: Planet 9', a project which recruited more than 100,000 people to scour astronomical data for new 'nearby' objects. Pictured, one of the newfound brown dwarves as seen in data from Legacy Surveys DR8 (left) and WISE (right)

The project made use of Astro Data Lab, a special online portal that allows researchers and citizen scientists to explore massive astronomical catalogues  containing billions of objects  with ease.

'This paper is evidence that the solar neighbourhood is still uncharted territory and citizen scientists are excellent astronomical cartographers,' said paper author and astronomer Jackie Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History.

'Mapping the coldest brown dwarfs down to the lowest masses gives us key insights into the low-mass star formation process while providing a target list for detailed studies of the atmospheres of Jupiter analogues.'

The astronomical data studied was collected by the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, pictured

'Its great to see such thrilling results from NOIRLabs efforts to broaden participation in astronomy research,' said NSF astronomer Chris Davis.

'By making archival data from NSFs Mayall and Blanco telescopes publicly available and easily accessible [...] folks with a fascination for astronomy can make a real contribution to science and to our understanding of the Universe.'

'Vast modern data sets can unlock landmark discoveries and its exciting that these could be spotted first by a citizen scientist,' agreed Dr Meisner.

'Members of the public can play an important role in reshaping our scientific understanding of our solar neighbourhood,' he concluded.

The full findings of the study were published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Pierre Dieulefils was born in Malestroit Village in the Bretagne region of France in 1862. He joined the army in 1883 and was later assigned to Indochina in 1885.

Two years later, he was discharged and returned to France. In 1888, he returned to northern Vietnam and became a professional photographer and postcard publisher.

In 1905, he went to Saigon and then traveled to Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. In 1909, he gathered a set of photos on Indochina and published a photo book entitled "Indo-chine Pittoresque & Monumentale: Annam - Tonkin". The work earned him a gold medal at the Brussels International Exposition of 1910. In 1913, he returned to France, spending most of his time composing poetry. He died in his hometown of Malestroit in 1937.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 06:04:26|Editor: huaxia

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BRUSSELS, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The European Commission on Monday presented proposals to the Council of the European Union (EU) to grant 81.4 billion euros (96 billion U.S. dollars) to 15 EU member states to help them mitigate the effects which the COVID-19 pandemic has had on employment.

As planned, the countries will be receiving assistance through the instrument for temporary Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE), designed to help protect people in work and jobs affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

"Just four months after I proposed its creation, the Commission is proposing to provide 81.4 billion euros under the SURE instrument to help protect jobs and workers affected by the coronavirus pandemic across the EU," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Once the EU Council approves the proposals, the financial support will be provided in the form of loans granted on favorable terms from the EU to member states. Loans will be underpinned by a system of voluntary guarantees from member states, the Commission said.

Aiming to assist the countries to address the sudden increases in public expenditure to preserve employment, the support will help cover the costs directly related to the financing of national short-time work schemes and similar measures, particularly for the self-employed.

Among the 15 candidates on the list are hardest hit countries like Italy, which will get 27.4 billion euros, and Spain, to be granted 21.3 billion euros. Poland is likely to get 11.2 billion euros, Belgium 7.8 billion euros, Romania 4 billion euros and Greece 2.7 billion euros.

One of the EU's three temporary safety nets worth 540 billion euros in total, SURE is a temporary scheme that can provide up to 100 billion euros of loans.

Endorsed by EU leaders in April, the package became operational on June 1, 2020. While all member states are able to make use of the instrument, SURE acts as a particularly safety net for workers in the hardest-hit economies. (1 euro = 1.18 U.S. dollars) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 11:52:29|Editor: huaxia

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BAMAKO, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- The mediation delegation of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Saturday night concluded a second round of meetings with members of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) which overthrew Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita on Tuesday.

"We reached a number of agreements, but we have not agreed on all the issues," head of ECOWAS delegation, former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, told the press, noting that this is not the first time the military intervened in Mali's politics, and that the delegation hopes the country will move on.

CNSP spokesperson Ismael Wague said that they had reached "some points of compromises on certain aspects" and the negotiations would continue on Monday.

No further details were given by the two parties.

According to local media, the nature of the transitional government and the release of the president are key issues of negotiation.

Keita, a democratically-elected president, announced late Tuesday night, under the pressure of mutinous soldiers, his resignation and the dissolution of the National Assembly and Prime Minister Boubou Cisse's government.

Hours after Keita's forced resignation, the ECOWAS decided to suspend Mali from all ECOWAS decision-making bodies, close all air and land borders with Mali, and stop all economic, commercial and financial flows and transactions between member countries and Mali.

The 15-nation regional bloc also activated the ECOWAS Standby Force. Enditem
TORONTO - The economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic will take longer than originally expected, with British Columbia among the provinces best positioned to rebound, the Conference Board of Canada suggests.

The Ottawa-based think tank predicts Canadas real gross domestic product will fall by 8.2 per cent this year and that it will take until the end of 2021 for the countrys economy to return to its pre-pandemic output.

But the Conference Board also projects that in B.C., real GDP will fall by just 5.5 per cent this year and grow by 6.7 per cent in 2021.

B.C. was very successful in containing the virus early on so that managed to dampen the impact of the closures, it dampened the impact on the labour market, and already we are seeing a fairly good situation because of that, said Pedro Antunes, the boards chief economist.

B.C. is facing a deep recession nonetheless, its just relatively better than other provinces this year.

The quarterly report looked at each province and found that while Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador avoided the high COVID-19 infection rates that plagued Ontario and Quebec, they were hit by low oil prices.

The board looked at regional differences ranging from the shuttering of Nova Scotias Northern Pulp mill to trade agreements affecting Saskatchewans fertilizer and potash industries.

The report says B.C., on the other hand, has not only limited COVID-19s spread but has also received a boost from construction, major energy projects and a strong balance sheet at the provincial government level.

Overall, the report found that people are quickly being rehired to work B.C.s hardest-hit industries, including construction, retail, hotels and restaurants.

Whats really driving the B.C. economy is this huge liquified natural gas project developing in the province, Antunes said.

This pandemic is strange, in the sense that incomes have been really well supported through the crisis. So home renovation, construction, and home building is holding up a lot better than we thought it might early on, and that is supporting the forestry sector.

By contrast in Alberta, consumer confidence has faltered as businesses plow money into debts accumulated during the shutdown. The Conference Board noted that for Albertas oilsands mines, stopping production is costly because there are fixed, ongoing expenses that arent covered by current oil prices.

Alberta is projected to bounce back in 2021, but Antunes said it is not a good news story, since the economy is coming back off such a low baseline.

One factor that could bolster oil prices going forward, said the Conference Board, is increased demand for transport and travel, which has been restricted by the pandemic.

Restoring travel levels will be key for other provinces as well. The lack of travel has pinched the tourism sector in Prince Edward Island, the aerospace manufacturing industry in Manitoba and immigration levels in Nova Scotia, the Conference Board said.

Eastern Canada and some of the smaller provinces were less hit by the virus itself, said Antunes.

But when you look at the sectors in particular  things like accommodation, anything associated with tourism, anything associated with air transportation, flight simulator technology, aerospace companies, manufacturing branches  all of this is going to face a much longer recovery.

The report also keyed in on provinces beset by their connections to the U.S., where the outlook could change sharply if the current surge in COVID-19 cases ... isnt brought under control quickly. In Ontario, auto exports to the U.S. hinge on customers coming to dealerships, while New Brunswick manufacturers also rely on the U.S. market, the report said.

We are an economy, in general, thats very dependent on trade, Antunes said.

We have seen the U.S. being not very successful at all at containing the virus  We need the U.S. to do well through this crisis if we are to do well as a nation.

The report authors said their forecasts assume that a COVID-19 vaccine will be offered in Canada by June 2021 and that there will be no national lockdown for COVID-19 containment going forward, although there may be regional shutdowns.

Still, the boards report raised concerns about an uptick in COVID-19 cases in some provinces that were previously able to re-open businesses, such as B.C. and Quebec. The report said clusters of COVID-19 in B.C. are a cause for concern, noting that Ontarios higher case count was more easily offset by work-from-home options for the financial sector.

(Early) measures allowed Quebec to restart non-essential industries in May, earlier than other provinces, and this has mitigated the damage to the balance sheets of many Quebec households and businesses, said the report.

However, there may be a price to pay for these earlier reopenings.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 24, 2020.
S teve McQueen today said he is proud that his drama about Seventies race relations in Notting Hill will open this years BFI London Film Festival.

McQueens film Mangrove tells the story of the Mangrove 9  a group of black Londoners who clashed with police during a protest in 1970. The 55-day, highly-publicised trial that followed became the first judicial acknowledgement of racially-motivated hatred within the Metropolitan Police.

The film, which stars Black Panther actor Letitia Wright, will have its European premiere on October 7, opening the 12-day festival. For the first time, the festival will be part-virtual and national  with screenings available online and in some cinemas across the UK.

Speaking to the Standard, McQueen, 50,  whose film 12 Years A Slave won the Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe for best picture in 2013  said opening the festival was an acknowledgement of a story that had been swept under the carpet in recent years.

To the fore: Mangrove covers 70s race relations in Notting Hill

He said the film, which also stars Shaun Parkes and Malachi Kirby, gave those involved in the protest credit for the sacrifice that they had made for liberty. McQueen said parallels could be drawn between race relations then and now.

He added: What is interesting about the Mangrove 9 is how similar it is today. In how people have mobilised, be it the Black Lives Matter Movement or the MeToo movement. We can only do things if we mobilise together.

The full programme for the festival, in partnership with American Express, will be announced at an online launch on September 8.
The theater also plans a return to past practice with a repertory-style staging of two William Shakespeare plays, Measure for Measure (directed by Henry Godinez) and Twelfth Night (directed by artistic director Barbara Gaines). The theater also still plans to produce Daryl Clorans previously announced 1960s-infused production of As You Like It, which includes 20 songs associated with The Beatles. That production was first seen at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Canada, although it will be re-created for Chicago.
The Nebraska State Patrol got to the bottom of an unusual mystery Thursday.

Call it the case of the abandoned tank.

On Thursday morning, a Nebraska State Patrol trooper was made aware of a large military vehicle sitting on a parked trailer at the Interstate 80 on-ramp near Overton.

Spokesman Cody Thomas said the trooper found the vehicle and noticed markings that identified it belongs to the South Dakota National Guard. The State Patrol since has learned that the trailer was abandoned sometime Wednesday by the driver for a trucking company contracted to move it for the Guard.

The vehicle, which is part of the South Dakota National Guard 211th Engineer Company, had been heading to South Dakota after a training mission in California.

Thomas said the State Patrol is working with the South Dakota National Guard to return it to them and locate the driver who abandoned it.

Reach the writer at 402-473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSpilger

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the death of the second president of Azerbaijan, Abulfaz Elchibey, a democrat, romantic, symbol of the republic's liberation movement, for whom the interests of the people and sovereign Azerbaijan were paramount. It was Elchibey who, during the political crisis in July 1993, invited the political heavyweight Heydar Aliyev to Baku, who, having stood at the head of the republic, managed to defend the independence of Azerbaijan and strengthen its statehood.

Abulfaz Elchibey remained in the memory of his contemporaries as a deeply decent and modest person. Before taking the highest government post, he lived with his family in a hostel for a long time, and after his death he left behind neither villas nor palaces.

Elchibey enjoyed unheard-of popularity among young people. In the 1980s, he spoke at the House of Students of the Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov on Vernadsky Avenue, and his then listeners will forever remember Elchibey as an interesting and bright interlocutor.

And today the name of Abulfaz Elchibey remains in the heart of every Azerbaijani. The memory of him is alive. The Heydar Aliyev Foundation recently renovated the second president's apartment.

A person who, in general, is far from politics until the end of his life remained an intellectual, loyal to democratic values. And the main values for him remained the sovereignty and prosperity of Azerbaijan, the withdrawal of the occupiers from Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions, the return of internally displaced persons to these lands, the restoration of peace on earth, where again the citizens of Azerbaijan - people of different nationalities would live together in peace and harmony as it was before 1988, when the "interested forces", pursuing geopolitical goals, inflated the territorial conflict between neighbors.
A man was infected with the coronavirus after recovering from an initial bout in April in what scientists said was the first case showing that re-infection may occur within a few months.

The 33-year-olds second SARS-CoV-2 infection was detected via airport screening on his return to Hong Kong from Europe this month. Researchers at the University of Hong Kong used genomic sequence analysis to prove that he had been infected by two different strains. The information technology worker didnt develop any symptoms from his second infection, which might indicate any subsequent infections may be milder, the researchers said.

Our findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may persist in humans, Kwok-Yung Yuen and colleagues said Monday in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The findings are reminiscent of the coronaviruses that cause the common cold, and suggest SARS-CoV-2 may continue to circulate even if patients have acquired immunity via natural infection or via vaccination, they said.

While some patients have tested positive for the virus over many weeks, even after their symptoms have resolved, scientists havent fully understood whether these cases reflect lingering traces of the virus, a re-eruption of an infection, or a new infection.

This is the worlds first documentation of a patient who recovered from COVID-19, but got another episode of COVID-19 afterwards, the researchers said in an emailed statement.

Worldwide, some 24 million people are known to have been infected with COVID-19, Maria van Kerkhove, the World Health Organizations technical lead on COVID-19, told reporters in Geneva Monday. Most patients  even those who have a mild case  mount an immune response to the infection, she said. Whats not known is how strong and how long that response lasts.

Its important to document cases like the one described in Hong Kong, but not jump to any conclusions, Van Kerkhove said. Studies tracking larger numbers of cases over time are needed to better understand the quality and durability of recovered patients neutralizing antibody response to SARS-CoV-2, she said.

Before this report, many believe that recovered COVID-19 patients have immunity against re-infection, however, there is evidence that some patients have a waning antibody level after few months, the University of Hong Kong researchers said in the statement.

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'It will fail anyway:' Russia on US push to restore Iran sanctions

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 8:50 AM

Russia says the United States' attempt to force the return of all United Nations (UN) sanctions against Iran will fail, but may undermine the world body in the process.

"It will produce no result anyway, but it might eventually lead to a very serious scandal and a rift within the UN Security Council, and, in the final analysis, undermine its authority," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with Russia's TASS news agency on Sunday.

He called the bid "reckless," and said, "We understand that the vast majority of nations realize the incorrectness and counter-productivity of this attempt."

The United States is trying to invoke a "snapback" mechanism in a 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran  from which Washington has withdrawn  to force the return of the UN sanctions.

The parties to the deal that the United States withdrew from in 2018 are Iran, the UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany.

The US's withdrawal also violated Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorses the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

In a long-shot attempt, however, the United States is claiming that it can invoke the deal's stipulations because it is still "mentioned" in the resolution as a partner.

The UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany have all said they oppose the US's gimmick.

In addition, eight other members of the Security Council have also reportedly opposed the bid.

Foreign Minister Lavorv said what the US was trying to do had no legal basis and its argument was merely "legalistic, quasi-juridicial."

Lavrov pointed to how Washington faced a similar defeat when it recently tried to have an arms embargo on Iran extended beyond its expiry date of October as per the JCPOA. Only the Dominican Republic backed the United States in that bid.

"We explained it all clearly to our American partners. Nevertheless, they made the decision to submit a relevant resolution," Lavrov said.

"Generally speaking, I think they knew what the result will be, but, evidently, they wanted to send a message about their determination to settle this matter, and would attempt to ensure the adoption of a new resolution," the top Russian diplomat said.

According to the Russian foreign minister, neither Russia nor the other JCPOA participants see any legal, political, or moral grounds for "deriding UN Security Council's decisions and the Council itself in such a brutal fashion."

Washington's attempts, he said, shows it is trying to do away with the notion of "international law" and replace it with a "rule-based order."

"There have been many examples of this, and they are becoming more and more frequent. This is a very dangerous tendency," Lavrov added.

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And yet, Trump has somehow managed to convince millions of Americans that he is not the cause of the chaos, but that he is somehow the last rampart against it. Other Trump supporters realize that he is the cause of the chaos, and they actually cheer it.

As Trump said Friday while speaking at the 2020 Council for National Policy Meeting in Arlington, Va:

Im the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness and chaos. And thats what it is. Im representing you. Im just here. And Im not sure its an enviable position, but thats what it is. Thats what it is.

He continued: You know, when I made that statement, I was a little embarrassed by it because it sounds so egotistical. Its like an egotistical statement. And I was a little embarrassed: Im the only one. But there was no other way to say it. We have to win the election.

He is selling the fear of a dystopian Joe Biden/Kamala Harris future. It is a fear of loss: loss of racial privilege and protection, loss of economic stability, loss of religious liberty, loss of gun culture and loss of political power and control.

Trump has taught conservatism to cowards. He has taught conservatives to see monsters in shadows. He has taught them to view fear as power.

Trump will no doubt bring his fear message to this weeks Republican National Convention, hoping to alter the polling that has remained stubbornly steady.

But, if that doesnt work, expect Trump to take an even more dramatic step. Time is winding down. The election is in a few months. He needs a narrative-altering event, and dont put anything past him. He would be willing to create one, even if it damages the country and its institutions.
The health condition of Union AYUSH Minister Shripad Naik, undergoing treatment for COVID-19, fluctuated from 'really bad' to stable during Monday but he is stable now, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant said.

Goa Medical College and Hospital (GMCH) Dean Dr Shivanand Bandekar said the oxygen saturation levels of Naik had dropped in the morning, following which he was shifted on a non-invasive ventilator.

"His condition is stable now," he added.

Meanwhile, a joint team of doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Command Hospital, Delhi, has decided against shifting the North Goa MP to the national capital.

The team came down to Goa on Monday night to examine Naik, who has been undergoing treatment at a private hospital near Panaji since he tested positive for coronavirus on August 12.

"Naik's health is stable and doctors feel that, at this juncture, there is no need to shift him to Delhi for further treatment. The team of doctors from the AIIMS and Command Hospital would review Naik's health condition on Tuesday," he said.

The chief minister said doctors are satisfied with the treatment being given to Naik at the private hospital.

"Naik's condition was really bad in the early hours on Monday after which I called up Union Health Minister Harshvardhan urging him to send the team of experts from AIIMS, New Delhi.

"During the day I spoke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and also our party President J P Nadda informing them about the health condition of Naik," Sawant told reporters.

He said all the health parameters of Naik are currently stable, 'but the infection in his lungs has increased compared to the last time'.

Sawant also informed that the COVID-19 test conducted on Naik came positive on Monday.

"The test will be repeated on Tuesday," he added.
(Photo : Screenshot from: @ahmdnazrafq Twitter Account ) Floating Apple Store in Singapore: This is How it Could Look Like (Photo : Screenshot from: Apple ) Floating Apple Store in Singapore: This is How it Could Look Like (Photo : Apple ) Floating Apple Store in Singapore: This is How it Could Look Like

Apple is set to open its third physical store in Singapore, located at Marina Bay Sands. The first one is standing at the Orchard Road, while the other set at Jewel Changi Airport. As of now, the iPhone company has not detailed the physical design of the retail store, but officially confirms that the store would have a one-of-a-kind structure, unlike their other stores around the globe.

Why third Apple Store in Singapore is a must-see sight

Imagine entering an Apple Store-- full of iPhones, iPad, Mac Book, etc-- while you're in the middle of a huge bay. That is how Apple is set to bring their products to its Singaporean customers in the Asian city.

For the third time, the big tech company is scheduled to create their retail store in one of the most visited cities in Asia.

This store, however, is not like any of the Apple stores in the world. It has its very unique design structure, in a very distinct location.

According to the official announcement, the third store would be located 'by the Bay.' 9to5Mac noted that the Apple structure in Marina Bay Sands would be an orb or dome-like spherical design that would be floating in the middle of the Bay.

There are still no images of the actual store, but it is expected that the opening date of the store would be sooner than later.

"Apple Marina Bay Sands will be at the heart of creativity, a place we've made for you to capture your ideas and passions. It will be a space for you to explore, connect and create something new. We can't wait to see where your imagination takes you," said on the announcement.

9to5Mac also noted that:

"During the day, the store's glass panels reflect the towering skyline of the Downtown Core and motion of the rippling water.

At night, the sphere glows with a gentle warmth, evoking the design of traditional lanterns carried during Singapore's

Mid-Autumn Festival."

History of Apple stores in Singapore

In 2017, Apple opened its first Singapore-based retail store in the city. It was located at one of the most busiest parts of the city called Orchard Road.

As usual, Apple has adopted its principle of supporting clean environment for their store due to Orchard Road's 16 interior trees. It stands in front of a 120-foot glass facade wherein the main store is positioned.

Want to visit the third store in Singapore?

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Jamie Pancho

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
xHelper/Triada malware pre-installed on thousands of low cost Chinese Android devices in emerging markets

Posted by Publisher Telecommunication

London, August 24, 2020  Pre-installed malware signing mobile users up to subscription services without their permission has been seen on thousands of low cost devices made by Chinese manufacturer, Transsion. That?s according to new findings released by Secure-D, Upstream?s full stack anti-fraud platform, following a full investigation into the origin of the detected suspicious transactions.

Secure-D caught and blocked an unusually large number of transactions coming from Transsion Tecno W2 handsets mainly in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, and South Africa, with some fraudulent mobile transaction activity detected in another 14 countries. To date, a total of 19.2m suspicious transactions ? which would have secretly signed users up to subscription services without their permission ? have been recorded from over 200k unique devices.

Secure-D?s further investigation discovered components of the xHelper/Triada malware preinstalled on 53k Transsion?s Tecno W2 smartphones, a low-cost handset model typically bought by those on a lower income.

Geoffrey Cleaves, Head of Secure-D at Upstream, commented: ?This particular threat takes advantage of those most vulnerable. The fact that the malware arrives pre-installed on handsets that are bought in their millions by typically low-income households tells you everything you need to know about what the industry is currently up against.?

Based in Shenzhen, China, Transsion Holdings is one of the country?s leading mobile phone manufacturers, selling 124 million mobile phones globally in 2018 according to its own company data. Its handsets are prevalent in emerging markets, especially in Africa, where according to IDC it is the top selling mobile phone manufacturer. Its Tecno, Infinix and Itel brands held a combined 40.6% share in the African smartphone market and a 69.5% share in the feature phone market during the last quarter of 2019. Transsion manufactured handsets can also be found in many Asian countries.

Triada malware acts as a software backdoor and malware downloader. It installs a trojan (a piece of malicious code designed to look normal) known as ?xHelper? onto compromised devices. The xHelper trojan persists across reboots, app removals and even factory resets, making it extremely difficult to deal with even for experienced professionals, let alone the average mobile user. When exposed to the right environment, for example, a particular phone network, xHelper components can make queries to find new subscription targets and submit fraudulent subscription requests on behalf of the phone?s unsuspecting owner. These requests are automatic  meaning they do not require the phone owner?s permission ? and invisible. Had they been successful, they would have consumed each user?s pre-paid airtime ? the only way to pay for digital products in many emerging markets.

Secure-D?s investigation found evidence in code and from traffic data to link at least one of the xHelper components (known as ?com.mufc.umbtts?) to subscription fraud requests via Transsion?s W2 Tecno-branded handset, which runs on Android OS. In the period under investigation Secure-D detected and blocked nearly 800k xHelper suspicious requests from W2 devices.

Google, developers of Android OS, has attributed the presence of the Triada malware to the actions of a malicious supplier somewhere within the supply chain of affected devices.

No signs of Triada malware were found to affect other mobile phone models created by Transsion.

Geoffrey Cleaves, from Upstream, said: ?Mobile ad fraud is fast becoming an epidemic which, if left unchecked, will throttle mobile advertising, erode trust in operators and leave users saddled with higher bills. A unified approach is needed to raise awareness.?

A report published by Upstream at the beginning of 2020 revealed that last year a staggering 93% of mobile transactions had been blocked by Secure-D as fraudulent. Over 98,000 malicious Android apps were discovered, as well as 43 million infected devices in 20 different countries. Secure-D currently covers 31 mobile operators across 20 countries.

For a more in-depth look at the state of malware and mobile ad fraud in emerging markets such as Asia and South Africa, readers can access Secure-D?s report, entitled The Invisible Digital Threat.
Alisha Rahaman Sarkar By

Online Desk

It was on July 4 that Mamata Banerjee called for a flight ban from six cities with a high number of COVID-19 cases.

The embargo on the arrival of flights from Chennai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune, Nagpur and Mumbai, which was initially imposed for a period of 14 days from July 6, has now gone on to be extended till August 31. West Bengal has also barred all operations at the Kolkata airport on the days of bi-weekly total lockdown.

But, despite the selective flight ban, there has been no tangible reduction in the state's COVID-19 positivity rate, suggests data.

On July 5, when Mamata Banerjee announced the flight embargo, the state had recorded 22126 cases. The state's coronavirus tally went up to 65258 on July 30. As of August 20, the state has a total 1,29,119 COVID-19 cases.

The state also has a high positivity rate of 8.9 per cent as opposed to the country's average rate of 6.8 per cent.

A closer look at the state government's policy to prohibit entry of COVID-19 cases from outside Bengal highlights several loopholes.

READ| Hit hard by COVID-19 outbreak, Bengal weavers migrate to other places for jobs

The government cherry-picked six cities that had the maximum number of coronavirus cases as of July 5, but, later while announcing the extensions, did not consider the inclusion of cities with rising numbers.

Telangana, for instance, has a seven-day average positivity rate of 19 per cent, the highest in the country. Karnataka too has a high positivity rate of 16 per cent. Then there is Andhra Pradesh, which has again witnessed a sudden spike in cases, taking the state's COVID-19 positivity rate to 9.29 per cent. But flights from cities in these states remain allowed to bring in passengers to Kolkata.

And while Mamata put a halt on flight operations from Delhi, which has an average positivity rate of 16 per cent, special trains from the city to Kolkata continue to ply.

Notably, the Railways Ministry had issued an advisory asking persons with comorbidities, pregnant women, children below 10 years and persons above 65 years of age to avoid travel by trains. With flights from Delhi banned, do people in these high-risk categories even have an option?

The selective flight embargo has understandably irked several Bengalis stranded in these six cities, away from their families.

"I need to go home to my parents. They are both old and the situation in Kolkata is not improving. In these trying times, the Chief Minister should have shown compassion, but instead, she declared a flight ban. I can't take a train back home as it's too risky. How long should one wait," said Srinjini Ghosh, a young professional based in Delhi.

Criticising the ban, netizens have also taken to Twitter to share their disappointment with the state government.

Earlier this month, two travel agents' organisations had written to the chief secretary urging the Bengal government to reconsider the decision to suspend passenger flights to Kolkata while citing the body blow it has inflicted on them.

Oddly enough despite the state holding firm on the ban on flights from these cities in the face of all this, there have been major failures.

In July, a 34-year-old man flew from Delhi to Kolkata via Guwahati with a COVID positive report in his pocket.

The New Indian Express, in fact, came across more than one instance of people stuck in these six cities hopping airports to reach Kolkata.

A Delhi-based young man, who had to recently rush back to Kolkata for a family emergency, decided to try his luck by landing up in Lucknow and taking a flight from there to Kolkata.

"I was allowed to exit the airport without any self-isolation stamp. In fact, they didn't even check my temperature or any app. I was amazed at the level of callousness that the authorities showed. Weirdly, they asked us to submit the face shield that we had been wearing throughout the journey," he said.

Allegations have also been levelled against the authorities for letting passengers walk scotfree without home quarantine stamps.

But the bigger question is about how viable this ban is and for how long can such a selective containment policy continue even when the list of top six cities in terms of the rate of infections is changing?

Dr Oommen John, secretary, Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics said, "We forget to consider that trains are running and people are using other means to travel. Ad hoc measures such as selective flight ban are unlikely to help. Any public health measure needs to be informed by evidence.

The strategies should be measured and reviewed regularly and based on the results new approaches should be adapted".
OTTAWAEven amid a global health crisis and unprecedented economic disruption, Erin OToole has national unity on his mind.

Eastern Canada  that is, east of Manitoba  does not understand the extent of the simmering anger in the Prairie provinces, the Ontario MP and Conservative leadership candidate says.

We have a lot of division in this country that I think much of it was caused by Trudeau government policies, and I dont think the government actually realizes how fragile things are, OToole said in a recent interview with the Star.

Particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan, but we also have the Bloc Quebecois back in third-party status in Ottawa. A lot of those national unity things stem from the economic policies of the Trudeau government  (We need to) address rising dissatisfaction within parts of Canada.

In a Conservative leadership lacking a Western standard-bearer, the MP from a riding just east of Toronto has attempted to harness that alienated energy towards putting him in the partys top job. Hes been running an underdog campaign, hoping to spoil what was expected to be a coronation for Peter MacKay.

OToole and his team have run a disciplined, strategic race focused on cobbling together enough support from the disparate corners of the Conservative movement  westerners, social conservatives, Quebec members and anyone else who will lend their support.

They all respect him because he respects them, is how one of his supporters described the strategy early in the race.

To his detractors, it looks more like pandering.

OToole has attempted to project himself as a true-blue crusader, implying that his rivals  chiefly MacKay  are less conservative.

Whether that gambit was successful will be revealed when the party tallies the tens of thousands of mail-in votes on Aug. 21. But what is clear is that the persona OToole has projected throughout the campaign has surprised many who have watched the Durham MP throughout his political career.

His pledge not to pander to the Ottawa press corps was a head-scratcher for many journalists, whove known him as an accessible and affable contact within the Conservative movement.

His courtship of social conservative votes was not particularly surprising  he needs them to win  but it hasnt convinced the hardline anti-abortion crowd.

And his vow to take the fight to cancel culture and the radical left came as a surprise to those who viewed him as a more moderate voice from the Harper era.

With respect, I dont think you were paying attention, OToole told the Star.

A few years ago, when Trudeau took the name of Langevin off the Langevin Block  the Parliament Hill building that houses the Prime Ministers Office  I not only criticized him, I wrote a series of articles on this sort of trend of present-ism  judging the past by the morals of today  and how Trudeau is using these sort of things to write his political narrative. And I think its dangerous.

I may not have used the term radical left back then, but that sort of cancel culture, that sort of erasing history, Ive been talking about for a few years, he said. Everything Im running on in this campaign I ran on three years ago.

Am I more animated? Am I more frustrated? Am I more concerned about the future of the country?

Absolutely.

Born in Montreal, OToole served for 12 years in the Canadian Armed Forces, including on search and rescue missions and as a tactical navigator out of Halifax. After leaving the air force, OToole got a law degree at Dalhousie University and worked as a corporate lawyer. It was on the East Coast that OToole met his wife, Rebecca, with whom he has two children.

OToole comes by politics honestly  his father, John OToole, represented Durham as a Progressive Conservative MPP at Queens Park between 1995 and 2014.

When I was in the military, my dad ran in the Mike Harris 1995 Common Sense Revolution election, and thats where I really made the decision that one day I would love to run for office, OToole said.

I saw the role my dad had in the community, helping people. At Christmas, people would come by with cards thanking him for helping with something for the business or their farm. And I just saw the impact.

OToole ran and handily won a 2012 byelection after Conservative MP Bev Oda resigned in scandal, and held the seat through the Conservatives general election defeats in 2015 and 2019.

Hes pointed to his re-elections as proof he knows how to win as a Conservative in Ontario, a region where Andrew Scheers campaign failed to make gains in 2019 despite considerable effort.

Durham, however, is a much safer seat for the Conservatives than some ridings in the vote-rich GTA suburbs.

Asked what he thinks has been the biggest barrier to reaching those voters, OToole said the Conservatives have tried to fight the last two elections exclusively on the economy, rather than talking about a broader spectrum of issues that Canadians care about.

The fundamental thing that I think we were out of step on in the last two elections was the environment. Ive said that many times, he said.

We have to be able to show Canadians that our strength on the economy doesnt mean we ignore all other issues  If Canadians want to know what the Conservatives ideas are or plans are on the environment, on Indigenous reconciliation, on any issue that Canadians are looking for some leadership, we have to have a plan and an approach. We cant just run on the economy.

But this being a contest to win over the Conservative grassroots, leadership candidates have to tread very carefully when pitching environmental policy. When OTooles platform revealed he intended to have industrial emitters pay for their pollution  a similar idea to what Scheer proposed in the 2019 election  he was lambasted by competitors for supporting a modified version of Justin Trudeaus carbon tax.

Ditto for his original promise to end fossil-fuel subsidies, which his campaign document originally referred to as a form of corporate welfare. OToole beat a hasty retreat on that one, reversing his position the following day.

Those were rare missteps from his campaign, which has been staffed by veteran conservative activists and operatives, including many who also worked on OTooles 2017 leadership bid.

Leading the team is Fred DeLorey, a longtime Conservative hand who held senior positions in the party during Stephen Harpers tenure, and served as Premier Doug Fords director of field operations. Melanie Paradis, Jim Burnett and Dan Mader  who have all worked for the Ontario PCs or federal Conservatives in recent years  are serving as OTooles deputy campaign managers.

Walied Soliman, the Canadian chair of law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, chairs the campaign.

But one of the most notable additions to OTooles team has been Jeff Ballingall, the founder of conservative social media pressure group Ontario Proud and the chief marketing officer for the right-leaning politics website The Post Millennial.

Ballingall grew his network into a significant player in Ontario politics, which was widely seen as a factor in the 2018 defeat of Kathleen Wynnes Liberals, using quick videos and provocative language to boost his messaging across social media. Ballingall has attempted to replicate that success with a national Canada Proud account.

Ballingalls fingerprints can be seen on OTooles digital campaign, which has zeroed in on hot button political issues that make people mad on the internet. And its been successful  the OToole campaign has routinely led the rest of the pack in online engagement.

Whether that online engagement will translate into snail-mail ballots remains to be seen.

Nearly 270,000 members of the Conservative Party of Canada are eligible to vote for the partys next leader. To be counted, the ballots  on which party members rank the candidates in order of preference  must be received by Aug. 21 at 5 p.m. EDT.
Lea Michele, a former star of Glee, has given birth to her first child, People reports.

Michele, 33, and her husband, Zandy Reich, welcomed a baby boy named Ever Leo on Aug. 20.

Michele, born Lea Michele Sarfati, is a New York native who grew up in Tenafly. She starred as Rachel Berry in Foxs Glee from 2009 to 2015.

Is Ever Leo a Leo?

Yes. Ever just made the cutoff, as Leo season ends Aug. 22.

Michele, an alumna of Tenafly High School, was first publicly linked with Reich in 2017 after they met at her best friends wedding. Reich proposed to Michele in April 2018 and they got married in March 2019.

Reich, 37, who grew up in Philadelphia, is president of the clothing brand AYR.

Micheles pregnancy became news in April, when fans noted that she was pregnant the same year Berry, her Glee character, was pregnant in the show.

Michele, who started performing on Broadway when she was a child, also starred in the Fox series Scream Queens from Glee co-creators Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan before the show was canceled in 2017. She appeared as Valentina Barella in The Mayor on ABC.

In June, Samantha Marie Ware, a former Glee cast member, accused Michele of abusive behavior on the set.

Ware, who played Jane Hayward on the show, tweeted the allegations in reply to a tweet Michele posted about George Floyd.

George Floyd did not deserve this, Michele had tweeted, referring to the May 25 death of Floyd after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyds neck. This was not an isolated incident and it must end. #BlackLivesMatter.

Floyds death sparked protests against police brutality and racial injustice across the country.

LMAO remember when you made my first television gig a living hell?!?! Ware, 28, tweeted in reply to Michele. Cause Ill never forget. I believe you told everyone that if you had the opportunity you would sh*t in my wig! amongst other traumatic microagressions that made me question a career in Hollywood ...

Other actors from Glee tweeted their own claims about Michele.

Girl you wouldnt let me sit at the table with the other cast members cause I didnt belong there, Dabier Snell tweeted.

Actress Jeante Godlock replied to Wares tweet.

Did somebody say cockroaches? she said. Because thats what she used to refer to the background as on the set of glee. but we grow up and we dont stay background forever sooooo...

Lea treated me so subhuman i left the set of Glee, Willam Bart Belli tweeted. Pass the (emoji for popcorn).

The allegations caused the meal kit delivery service HelloFresh, which had a partnership with Michele, to sever ties with the actress.

HelloFresh does not condone racism nor discrimination of any kind, the company said. We are disheartened and disappointed to learn of the recent claims concerning Lea Michele. We take this very seriously, and have ended our partnership with Lea Michele, effective immediately.

Michele deleted her tweet and issued a statement on Instagram.

While I dont remember ever making this specific statement and I have never judged others by their background or color of their skin, thats not really the point, what matters is that I clearly acted in ways which hurt other people, she said as part of the statement. Whether it was my privileged position and perspective that caused me to be perceived as insensitive or inappropriate at times or whether it was just my immaturity and me just being unnecessarily difficult, I apologize for my behavior and for any pain which I have caused. We can all grow and change and I have definitely used these past several months to reflect on my own shortcomings.

I am a couple months from becoming a mother and I know I need to keep working to better myself and take responsibility for my actions, so that I can be a real role model for my child and so I can pass along my lessons and mistakes, so that they can learn from me, she continued. I listened to these criticisms and I am learning and while I am very sorry, I will be better in the future from this experience.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a voluntary subscription.

Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Send a coronavirus tip here.
Rumble

Flossey is living a wonderful life on a beautiful farm in Millbrook, Ontario. It's what is knows an "ethical farm" where cows have space to roam and graze instead of being kept indoors for most of their lives. Flossey's farm has vast expanses of lush, green grass, rolling hills, ponds full of fresh water, and forested areas for shade. This is life as it should be for these gentle creatures. Dave is a farm hand who often helps out with some of the chores and animal care. He decided to take a break on this warm, summer day and he took a seat on the hill overlooking the pasture.
US-POLITICS-VOTE-REPUBLICANS

Delegates cheer as President Donald Trump speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 24, 2020, in Charlotte. Credit - Brendan SmialowskiAFP/Getty Images

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIMEs politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

Republicans are starting their convention tonight facing the same challenges that the Democrats largely navigated during theirs last week, running teleprompters from afar, choreographing dozens of live-shots remotely and stitching together a narrative with often-competing ideological instincts. But they have an additional challenge: theirs is the party in control of the White House and President Donald Trump has consistently drawn poor marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Republicans will still plan on gathering in Charlotte, N.C., for a four-day celebration of All Things Trump. The backdrop is a nation that saw civilian unemployment spike from 3.5% in February to 14.7% in just two miserable months. At its worst (so far), 23 million Americans were counted as unemployed. Its tough to campaign for a second term when the economy remains in tatters.

And yet we are about to watch Republicans try.

The details about what would be taking place in real-time and what would be pre-taped were still coming together on Monday afternoon, as were discussions about how, exactly, you have a political convention from afar but also in-person. Most of the line-up is in promotion of the President and his re-nomination, and little is focused on building the GOP brand.

Trump has been personally overseeing many of the preparations, which came together hastily after Trump said in late July that he would abandon Charlotte for Jacksonville, Fla., only to reverse course when Jacksonville told him that he would have to follow pandemic-informed restrictions on massive gatherings. Organizers and strategists have been trying to figure out how to sell Trump to weary Americans ready for their kids to go back to school, their spouses to go back to offices and their grocery stores to stop feeling like battlefields.

Story continues

There are a couple spots of sunshine for Team Trump, according to public-opinion polling. Trump has a greater hold on his supporters at this moment than four years ago, according to surveys. In the latest Washington Post/ ABC News poll, 73% of Trump backers say they are with him based on the quality of Trumps candidacy, and not out of worries about Biden. Thats a major turn-around from four years ago, when concerns about Hillary Clintons candidacy provided 56% of Trumps support in August of 2016. Only 40% of Trumps backers in that survey said that they were with him based on, well, him.

Nor is the economic implosion necessarily a drag on the President, polling shows. Only 68% in The Post/ ABC poll said the economy was not doing well. When Barack Obama was running for re-election in 2012, 84% said they thought the economy was doing badly, despite the fact that unemployment was 8.1% then, compared to the 10.2% in the latest Labor Department survey. When George W. Bush was at the same point heading into his 2004 re-election, the number of people who said the economy was lousy was 55%. (Unemployment stood at 5.4%.) So its entirely possible Trump pays little to zero price for a tanked-but-recovering economy.

Meanwhile the opinions of white voters, who are forecast to account for about 7-in-10 voters come November, seem to have grown less hostile to Trump during his tenure. Four years ago, negative opinions about Trump outpaced positive ones by a 54% to 35% margin. These days, theyre about even, according to the NBC/ Wall Street Journal survey.

Thats not to say Trumps backers are in the majority. In just one of the 21 Washington Post/ ABC polls has Trump been in a position of having a net job approval. He has never enjoyed a net positive in his personal favorability. And even his truest of believers are starting to tell pollsters they have increasing fears that they or someone they know will contract the coronavirus and that they think it is less under control than ever.

Polls arent predictive, and there is still a ton that can upend this election. The pandemic shows no signs of slowing, Trump has shown little discipline and could derail even the most tightly scripted of evenings, and there is no shortage of cash funneling into both campaigns and their outside allies. Foreign interference continues from rivals Russia, China and Iran, according to a bipartisan Senate study released this month.

But if youre sitting in a Republican conference planning the next two months and change, theres still reason to think theres a shot. And if youre getting ready to watch the show this week, brace yourself for a lot of MAGA, economic sunshine and explicit appeals to white folks.

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the daily D.C. Brief newsletter.
The mayor upended traditional political calculations last year when she pushed through a budget without major property tax hikes or other fee increases to plug what she said was an $838 million shortfall. Politicians typically pack tax increases into their first years budget to attempt to keep the backlash as far from the next election as possible, but Lightfoot relied on several one-time fixes including a huge tax increment financing surplus, $215 million from debt refinancing and the elimination of vacant positions in city government to help plug last years deficit.
All the top Congress leaders in Karnataka including KPCC chief DK Shivakumar, Working Presidents of the state unit Eshwar Khandre and Saleem Ahmed, senior leader Mallikarjuna Kharge, leader of opposition in the assembly Siddaramaiah and various other leaders from the state have come out in support of the Gandhi family leading the Congress party.

Even as the CWC deliberations were going on today, Siddaramiah wrote a letter to Sonia Gandhi on the issue. Stating that this is not the first time that the Congress was facing difficulties, he said that only the Gandhi family had held the party together during tough times.

Claiming that the country was in an undeclared emergency with democratic pillars under attack from the BJP, and that only Congress could protect principles enshrined in the Constitution, Siddaramiah said, We as a party should be united to be effective in our relentless fight to make our country better. This is possible only if the Gandhi family leads the party and that is the opinion of all leaders, supporters, and workers.

He also requested her to convince Shri Rahul Gandhi to take up the position (of party president. KPCC president DK Shivakumar released a video as a follow up to his letter to Sonia Gandhi in which he said that only the Gandhi family could keep the party together. Asserting that all matters should be discussed within party fora and not on public platforms, Shivakumar appealed to her to continue as Congress chief.

Several other leaders including working presidents of the state unit Eshwar Khandre and Saleem Ahmed, former KPCC president Dinesh Gundu Rao as well as several others requested the Gandhi family to continue leading the party.

Senior leader and RS MP Mallikarjuna Kharge in a series of tweets said, The party should not forget the sacrifices and contributions made by the Nehru-Gandhi family for over a century. They have stood like a rock for the idea of India and ensured we have built an equitable society and strong democracy.

He also said, During this time of crisis, all leaders and workers of INC India should stand by Smt Gandhi and strengthen the party. If for any reason, she herself is unwilling to continue, I believe that Sri Rahul Gandhi should take over as President immediately and put all uncertainties to rest.
China's ruling Communist Party is to end Mongolian-medium education in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, which borders the independent country of Mongolia, according to an overseas-based rights group.



Hundreds of teachers in Tongliao and Ulaanhad cities have been called to urgent, secret meetings at primary and secondary schools in recent days, where they were told that the Chinese government has ordered them to switch to Chinese-medium education from Sept. 1, the New York-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC) said in a report on its website.



"The fate of Mongolian language education seems to be sealed," an ethnic Mongolian teacher said in an audio statement quoted by SMHRIC. "This not only is unconstitutional but also is a flagrant violation of the basic human rights of the Mongolian people from a universal human rights perspective," the teacher said, adding that they had been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements before leaving.



"All teachers were warned not to raise any questions or opinions of opposition," it quoted a second teacher as saying via WeChat.



Government censors have also shut down a popular Mongolian-language social media platform and censored comments on the policy on WeChat, the report said.



Southern [Inner] Mongolia has quickly become a police state again in the past few days as the tension has risen between the government and the Mongolians who are about to be deprived of their last symbol of national identitythe Mongolian language," ethnic Mongolian blogger Nasandelger posted to the social media platform WeChat.



SMHRIC said ethnic Mongolians have been protesting in recent days after a government document detailing the plan was leaked.



The authorities responded by targeting the Mongolian-language social media app Bainuu, the group cited activists as saying.



"The systematic crackdown really started [with] the total shutdown of all Bainuu chat groups last Wednesday around 4:00 p.m. local time," the group quoted Bainuu user Dugar Zaisan as saying.



"Then almost 72 hours later, around 4:00 p.m. Saturday local time, the timelines and walls of all Bainuu users became unavailable," the message said.



WeChat discussions and posts on the changes, which are euphemistically referred to in official documents as "bilingual education," are being deleted in large numbers, while hundreds of WeChat users have received visits and warnings from state security police, SMHRIC said.



"At least 28 people in our WeChat groups, mostly consisting of concerned parents and students, were either summoned or visited by state security personnel in a single day," the group cited an ethnic Mongolian user Oyuungerel as saying via WeChat.



Users warned



The group said some 450 Southern Mongolian WeChat users have been warned by local State Security and Public Security authorities either over the phone or in-person not to spread information about the bilingual education program online.



Writer Sechenbaatar told SMHRIC he had received a visit from government officials and state security police officers two days ago, during which they warned him not to speak out on the language policy on social media.



"Seventy years of killing and political oppression do not seem to be enough," Sechenbaatar said in an audio message posted online.



"Now the Chinese are about to cut our tongues off, too! Feet shackled and tongues cut off, our nation and our people are soon to be pushed into a dark and bottomless grave," he said.



SMHRIC quoted a third ethnic Mongolian teacher from Tongliao as saying that there is an official directive from Beijing with its characteristic red letterhead circulating among schools in the area, although teachers weren't allowed to read it directly.



Yes, there is a secret official document from the central government," the teacher told SMHRIC. "The school authorities and the personnel from the Bureau of Education showed us the red letterhead of the official document but declined to show us the contents."



An official who answered the phone to SMHRIC in the Heshigten Banner education bureau near Ulaanhad city confirmed the reports.



"[Ethnic] Mongolian students in elementary schools must start learning Chinese from first grade as opposed to second grade starting this September," he said in an audio interview posted to WeChat.



Political studies will be taught in Chinese from Sept. 1 in Mongolian-medium schools with further subjects to follow in the next two years.



"[This comes] directly from the central government," he said.



The news comes after a visit by Ge Weiwei, a high-ranking Communist Party official in charge of ethnic minority education policy, to Tongliao on June 3.



Strong opposition



This change has met with strong opposition among ethnic Mongolians, the SMHRIC said.



"Mongolians from ordinary herders to prominent intellectuals, from students to professors, have all expressed their opposition to the new policy through Chinas only available social media outlet, WeChat," it said.



If our language is wiped out, we as a distinct people will also cease to exist, it quoted Chimeddorj, a professor at Inner Mongolia University, as saying in a video statement.



Parent Nasanbayar commented via WeChat that he would take his children out of school rather than allow them to lose their Mongolian identity.



"The Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government decided to implement a policy to ban Mongolian language education completely starting September 2020," Chogt Oghonos, ethnic Mongolian professor at Shizuoka University in Japan, said in a video statement referring to the changes as "cultural genocide."



SMHRIC director Enghebatu Togochog said the policy is the culmination of three decades of discriminatory policies in the region.



"Rural Mongolian schools have already been wiped out and the number of students taught in Mongolian has declined by 80 percent since the early 1980s," he said. "Our traditional way of life has been completely destroyed and our identity obliterated. Now, if we lose our language, then we have nothing else to lose."



"[This is] the finishing touch on Chinas cultural genocide in Southern Mongolia."



Call for independence



The new policy sparked immediate calls for independence for Inner Mongolia from China, including by ethnic Mongolian rights activist and former political prisoner Hada.



"Even if this round of our resistance moment ends up with failure in the face of Chinas brutal crackdown, the moment itself will help lay the firm foundation of our future movement for independence," Hada said in a statement posted online.



One parent from Left Ujumchin Banner, a county-like administrative division of Inner Mongolia, recorded his conversation with state security police, who warned him off commenting on the language policy.



"Let me make myself clear to you. If I were afraid of speaking, I would have not spoken," Suhee is heard telling police on the recording posted online.



"If you want to arrest me, go ahead and have [the police] arrest me, and throw me into your jail as political prisoner," he tells them. "I am not afraid of dying now."



Mongolian wrestlers said they would be going on strike in protest at the policy, SMHRIC said.



Reported by RFA's Mandarin and Cantonese Services. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
The various inquiries and commissions under way  bushfires, aged care, disability and COVID-19  will identify significant areas for improvement in shared responsibilities between the Commonwealth and states. We can only hope that in the future it will no longer be acceptable for the Commonwealth to withhold funding from the states to acquire more firefighting helicopters or for there to be unclear primary responsibility for allowing cruise ships to dock.

The tragedies and dysfunctionalities that are presented over and over to those inquiries provide stark evidence that the Australian federation is no longer fit for purpose. There is duplication and uncertainty at different levels of government and there is a clear absence of designated primary accountability by governments.

An aged care home resident being evacuated in Melbourne. Credit:Justin McManus

Improved communication and the creation of a shared vision between the Commonwealth and the states is important, but can only achieve so much. Constitutional reform is too hard and too slow. Short of a complete reset, the only realistic solution is a devolution of powers and responsibilities by the Commonwealth to the states. This rather turns on its head what has been up until now the glib answer of eliminating or disempowering the states.

In mid-2014, then prime minister Tony Abbott announced terms of reference for a white paper on the reform of the federation. There was a clear commitment to the concept that responsibility should lie with the lowest level of government possible (known as subsidiarity), but it proved to be a fruitless exercise because, among other things, taxation reform  the elephant in the room  was left to a separate process. Discussion papers were prepared covering health, education and housing. The health paper made no mention of aged care, perhaps not surprisingly, given that it has taken the pandemic for politicians to understand the interconnectedness between health and aged care. The white paper exercise was shelved when Abbott lost the prime ministership.
One of the waste collection contractors was also arrested for allegedly handing the bribe to the district head, the ACA said

The head of the Old Cairo district in south Cairo has been arrested after being caught red-handed while accepting an EGP 400,000 bribe, Egypts Administrative Control Authority (ACA), which is in charge of countering corruption, said on Sunday.

According to a statement by the ACA, the official received the bribe from a garbage collection contractor in return for not terminating a contract with several waste collection contractors and allowing them to receive late financial dues.

One of the waste collection contractors was also arrested for allegedly handing the bribe to the district head, the ACA said.

The state security prosecution ordered the detention of the two defendants pending investigation.

In January last year, former head of the Old Cairo district Mohamed Zein El-Abdin was also arrested for receiving EGP 2 million from a demolition contractor working with the district in return for disbursing funds owed to the contractor by the district, according to the ACA.

Zein El-Abdin has been detained since his arrest pending investigations.

The ACA, the state body responsible for enforcing laws and regulations within state bodies, has been waging a national campaign on corruption in recent years.

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Hyderabad, Aug 24 : Telangana Governor, Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan's comments on the state government's handling of Covid-19 situation has ignited a fresh row with the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) finding fault with her and the opposition parties defending her.

While the defence by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was expected, what came as a big surprise was the main opposition Congress suddenly supporting the Governor.

BJP leaders launched a counter-attack on the TRS but the Congress went a step ahead and urged the Governor to send a report to President Ram Nath Kovind about the TRS government's "complete failure" in handling the Covid-19 situation.

"If the government has failed to respond to the Governor's suggestions, she must use her discretionary powers to send a report to the President," said state Congress leader Gudur Narayan Reddy.

He said the Governor should have summoned the Chief Secretary and ordered him to act on her suggestions. "Instead of complaining about inefficiency of the state government, the Governor should have played a proactive role by asking the officials to implement her suggestions," said Narayan Reddy, who is the treasurer of the party's state unit.

He also urged the Governor to make public the letters she wrote to the state government giving suggestions on Covid-19 situation as people have a right to know.

The Governor, herself a doctor, is mincing no words in highlighting the failure of the KCR government in the pandemic management. She has been pulling up the government over testing, containing the spread of virus, or providing treatment.

While the TRS has largely been ignoring the Governor's comments and her tweets, party legislator Shanampudi Saidi Reddy stirred up a hornet's nest by stating that she was acting like the BJP President. "Sorry to hear that the Governor of Telangana is acting as BJP president. Our beloved CM is a role model for most of the states," tweeted Saidi Reddy.

The MLA later deleted his tweet, apparently on the direction of the party leadership.

A section of the party leaders believe that reacting to her remarks would give them more public attention. Party sources say the leadership has asked the leaders to simply ignore her comments.

Saidi Reddy's outburst against the Governor was sparked by her remarks in a recent interview to a news channel.

Soundararajan, during the interview, expressed dissatisfaction with the Telangana government's poor rate of testing and its reluctance to engage private hospitals for testing initially.

She even alleged that Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao did not take her suggestions to handle the crisis in the right spirit, and did not return the courtesy of responding to her. "I had written 6-7 letters to the Chief Minister. My views should have been considered as sensible and not sensational," she was quoted as saying.

Last month, Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar and then Principal Secretary, Health, Shanti Kumari had reportedly defied the Governor by skipping a meeting with her. She had called them to Raj Bhavan for a meeting to discuss the Covid situation but they preferred to give it a miss, citing preoccupation with some other meeting.

The Governor took to Twitter on many occasions to express her concern over what she called poor testing in the state. Her statements, her sudden visit to Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) to interact with Covid patients and her virtual meetings with eminent people including a former Health Secretary, a former Director General of Police, researchers, members of Indian Medical Association and representatives of private hospitals to take stock of Covid situation all have not gone down well with the KCR government.

The state government has an uneasy relationship with the Governor, considering her background as the BJP national Secretary and President of the party's Tamil Nadu unit.

Political observers say her comments provided ammunition to the opposition parties to step up their attacks on the TRS government.

Last week, the Governor expressed concern over a new study that at least six lakh people in Hyderabad may have been infected by Covid. With her tweet, she tagged a report of the study conducted by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB).

She also warned that the state government might find the going difficult in eradicating Covid-19. She pointed out that testing, testing, testing, tracking and treating is the mantra of the World Health Organisation (WHO), and wanted to "re-stress view of WHO unless adequate numbers of testing is done, our efforts to eradicate Covid-19 in Telangana will be difficult." Following Saidi Reddy's outburst, the BJP leaders launched a counter attack on the TRS, accusing it of undermining the office of Governor. They demanded an apology from the MLA and also the Chief Minister.

BJP MLC N. Ramchandra Rao alleged that KCR government is trying to browbeat the office of the Governor by making wild allegations against it. "TRS leaders have attributed motives to the office of the Governor, unmindful of the fact that she is the constitutional head of the state," he said.

He alleged that this is not the first time that the government has done this, adding that when she wanted to hold a meeting with the Chief Secretary to take stock of Covid situation, the Chief Minister prevented officials from attending.

He said that the Governor's statement vindicates what the BJP has been contending since April this year that the government has been "criminally apathetic" towards taking measures for preventing the spread of Covid.

BJP spokesman K. Krishna Sagar Rao termed the MLA's comments as "irresponsible" and "disrespectful" to the constitutional head of the state.

Asked about the Governor's comments, Union Minister of State for Home, G. Kishan Reddy said at a news conference on Sunday that she made the observations in her personal capacity and denied that this has anything to do with the Centre or the BJP.

The minister also stated that the Governor, herself being a doctor, was advising the government on how to handle the situation.
BJP leader Jyotiraditya Scindia on Sunday said that although the Congresss top leadership had offered to make him the deputy chief minister of Madhya Pradesh after the 2018 state polls, when he was still in that party, he had turned down the offer as he decided to work for the people.

He alleged that the Congress had betrayed the people of the state with false promises to come to power.

The Congresss top leadership had offered me deputy chief ministers post. Instead, I decided to work for the people, the BJP Rajya Sabha member said while addressing his partys three-day long membership drive, which will end here on Monday.

This is for the first time that Scindia has publicly admitted that he was offered this post by the Congress.

Also read | PM imposed lockdown to protect people, Kamal Nath imposed it on common mans entry to secretariat: Scindia

In March this year, veteran Congress leader Digvijaya Singh had said that Scindia was offered the post of MP deputy chief minister, but Kamal Nath had refused to accept a chela.

Scindia said, I understood that Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh will ruin the Congress government in 15 months. The Congress betrayed the people with false promises like waiver of farm loan in 10 days in order to come to power in the state. Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi had promised that farm loans of up to to Rs 2 lakh will be waived within 10 days or else the chief minister will be sent back on the eleventh day, he said.

Congress made false promises to come to the power in the state, he alleged.

Scindia had quit the Congress in March this year and later joined the BJP.

On the Congresss agitation against the BJPs membership drive in Gwalior, Scindia said, At least they (Congress leaders) came out of their houses to protest against BJPs drive five months after losing the government in MP. With an eye on the by-elections to 27 assembly constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, especially in Gwalior- Chambal region of the state that accounts for 16 of these seats, the ruling BJP has launched the membership drive here on Saturday.

Twenty-two rebel Congress MLAs in Madhya Pradesh, mostly from the Scindia camp, resigned in March, reducing the 15-month-old dispensation led by Kamal Nath to a minority and paving the way for the BJP to form the government in the state.

These former MLAs had later joined the BJP.

The BJP then sent Scindia to Rajya Sabha, while many of his loyalists got important portfolios in Shivraj Singh Chouhans cabinet.

Last month, three more Congress MLAs in the state resigned and joined the saffron party, taking their number to 25, while two assembly seats had fallen vacant due to the demise of legislators.

The Congress now has 89 MLAs in the House, while the ruling BJP has 107. The effective strength of the 230-member House has come down to 203 due to the resignations and deaths of legislators.
AND WE'RE BACK!!!

Coronavirus Still Hurting Kansas City Supply Chain

Appliance and parts shortage felt by KC customers and shops A nationwide appliance and parts shortage has retailers and repair shops scrambling to meet demand. Brian Pippen with Appliance Care Company in Belton, Missouri says he's had customers waiting for months for parts and for new appliances.

Considering Iconic Infrastrutrue

From Milling Grain To Feeding And Entertaining Communities: How Midwest Elevators Gain New Lives Reliable Street, on the northwest edge of Ames, runs parallel to the train tracks for two blocks. From the late 1800s to the mid-20th century, it was the main drag for the township of Ontario and in 1898, the Lockwood Grain and Coal Company began operating a flour mill and grain elevator on the north side of the street.

Show-Me The COVID Plan

Business survey gave reopening advice to Missouri governor With Missourians under a stay-at-home order this spring as a coronavirus precaution, the Associated Industries of Missouri began surveying businesses to gauge how they were affected and gather suggestions for reopening the economy. The results went straight to Gov. Mike Parson's top staff, according to email records provided to The Associated Press under the state Sunshine Law.

Demi Ups Her Game

Demi Rose Elevates Herself With Lowered Swimsuit Neckline Demi Rose is elevating every aspect of herself while taking her bathing suit to plunging territory. The 25-year-old model and social media sensation updated her Instagram over the weekend to snag a quarter of a million likes overnight - Demi, followed by 14.3 million, had dropped another of her legendary swimsuit snaps, but this one wasn't shouting out Fashion Nova.

Speaker Will Concede

Pelosi says she would accept the results if Trump wins reelection House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday said "of course" she would accept November's election results as legitimate if President Donald Trump were to win reelection, but added that she and Democrats would not ignore Russian interference in the election.

Biden Bandwagon Bolstered By Republicans

More than two dozen former Republican lawmakers endorse Joe Biden on first day of GOP convention More than two dozen former Republican lawmakers announced Monday they are endorsing Joe Biden for president.

Convene With Prez Trump

Trump campaign unveils convention speakers, POTUS to speak every night President Trump will not just be delivering an address on the final night of this week's Republican National Convention to accept his nomination for the presidential election -- he will be appearing every night of the convention. Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller confirmed the reports during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

World Against Hate

Christchurch mosque gunman Brenton Tarrant faced down in court by survivors A WHITE supremacist who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand was faced down in court by brave survivors of the horrific attack. Australian national Brenton Tarrant, 29, watched without emotion on Monday as relatives of his victims recounted the horror of the Christchurch mosque terror attack.

Zuck Against Tech Rivals

Mark Zuckerberg reportedly warned President Donald Trump about the rise of Chinese tech firms Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned President Donald Trump at a White House dinner last October that Chinese tech firms posed a direct threat to the U.S. business, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal that cites people claiming to be familiar with the matter.

Foodie Share Participation Awards Amid 2020 Hot Mess

The James Beard Foundation Will Not Announce Remaining Award Winners for 2020 There will be no more James Beard Award winners this year. The James Beard Foundation announced today that it will not present winners in the remaining categories at its upcoming Awards ceremony, scheduled for Fri., Sept. 25.

Kansas City Cool Down Strategy Amid Coronavirus

Kansas City restaurants with unique concept open amid pandemic KANSAS CITY, Mo. - There's a new spot for those looking for a cool treat on a hot day. Frozen Gold opened Saturday following months of delays because of the coronavirus pandemic. "We put everything on pause, wait until we can make sure that we have our safety protocols correct and all our hygiene practices correct," Nate Lotz, director of operations at Frozen Gold said.

Katie Predicts Hotness

Hot and dry forecast for metro through Wednesday Hide Transcript Show Transcript A NICE, LAST SUMMER WEEKEND TO ENJOY. KATIE: WE HAVE A WARM SUMMER WEEKEND IN PROGRESS. TODAY'S HIGH WILL BE 93 DEGREES. IT MAY FEEL LIKE IT IS 95. WE HOLD ONTO THIS HEAT THROUGH WEDNESDAY FOR SURE. BY THE WAY, THE HEAT INDEX FOR MONDAY AND TUESDAY COULD BE AS HIGH AS 98.

Once againinspires this peek at pop culture, community news and top headlines to start the work week for those lucky few who still have a real job.is the song of the day and this is thefor right now . . .
An EV has to be purchased along with the battery as there are hardly any battery swapping, rental, or leasing business models available across India.

IMAGE: Mahindra's electric vehicle, ATOM. Photograph: Saumya Khandelwa/Reuters

The governments move to allow companies to sell electric two- and three-wheelers without pre-fitted batteries has largely been hailed as a move towards reducing costs and creating a clean transport ecosystem but its execution may hit speed breakers.

The transport ministry recently said the battery, which accounts for 30-40 per cent of the total cost of an electric vehicle (EV), could be provided separately by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) or energy service providers.

Though this would make the upfront cost of EVs lower than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, a section of the industry is sceptical on how it would work.

Sohinder Gill, director general, Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles (SMEV), said delinking of batteries from EVs is a good idea, however, a lot needs to be done before it becomes practically implementable and beneficial to customers.

To a B2C customer, an EV still has to be purchased along with the battery as there are hardly any battery swapping, rental, or leasing business models available across India.

But it makes good sense in B2B, where we can have captive swapping stations and business models for batteries-as-a-service, said Gill.

He said SMEV has sought clarifications on various aspects of the policy and hopes the government would address them soon.

Mahesh Babu, managing director and chief executive of Mahindra Electric, said no country in the world allows registration of EVs without a battery.

"We will explain to the government that this notification has created confusion.

"A vehicle is manufactured, tested and sold as an integrated vehicle, and the OEM is responsible for the warranty.

"This move has not been thought through and the industry has not been consulted, he said.

Experts also said this move would create confusion in terms of incentivising EV sales because under FAME (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of (Hybrid &) Electric Vehicles) scheme the same is done based on the size of the battery.

A large section of the EV industry is, however, upbeat. Naveen Munjal, MD of Hero Electric, welcomed the move and said: I am excited about the possibilities that exist in making EVs accessible to every individual in the country.

"All we need is a combination of such pioneering policies for it to work for us as per plan in the long run.

"For this to take off, and be able to efficiently pass on the benefit to the consumer, we ought to work towards a strong infrastructure that allows EV owners to charge and swap batteries wherever they require.

Tarun Mehta, chief executive and co-founder, Ather Energy, said the new policy is a great move for both customers and OEMs.

While the new policy opens up new opportunities in financing options, it will take some time for consumers to understand and adopt this model of ownership.

"In the long run, it will be a big boost to the Indian EV industry. It will also make it easier for new players to join the industry, he said.

Jeetender Sharma, MD and founder of electric two-wheeler maker Okinawa, said it is motivating that the government is working towards accelerating adoption of electric mobility.

Selling EVs without pre-fitted batteries will widen the scope for manufacturers as well as buyers.

"We are swiftly adopting the much-needed flexibility and comfort in the EV ecosystem.

"Tax rebates will help drive the demand better. This is also expected to reduce the overall cost of acquisition of the product by saving amount in the vehicle registration procedure, thus offering affordability, Sharma said.

A spokesperson from Ampere Electric also said the move would reduce the cost of acquisition of EV and more people would shift from traditional to a more sustainable and affordable green mobility solution.
More than a dozen prominent evangelicals are appealing to first daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump to help ensure the Trump administration adheres to federal anti-trafficking law in its treatment of unaccompanied migrant children.

In a letter to President Donald Trumps daughter sent Monday, the evangelical leaders laud Ivanka Trump for her recent declaration that human trafficking is the gravest of human rights violations." They urge her to use your significant influence within the administration to help end the suspension of a federal anti-trafficking law that had provided safeguards for unaccompanied children who cross the border.

For many evangelical Christians throughout the United States, fighting human trafficking and standing for vulnerable children are key policy priorities, the evangelicals wrote in their letter, which was shared in advance with The Associated Press.

The signatories added that they support measures to protect public health, but we believe our government can take appropriate precautions to minimize any public health concerns without disregarding the life-saving protections guaranteed by the anti-trafficking law, which was suspended by the Trump administration in the first month of the coronavirus pandemic.

The AP reported last month that the administration has detained migrant children as young as 1 in hotels before deporting them rather than moving them to facilities under the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The suspended 2008 law, named for the late Christian abolitionist William Wilberforce, requires that unaccompanied migrant children who may be vulnerable to trafficking be transferred from the Department of Homeland Security to HHS custody.

Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said he and other Christian leaders who signed the letter see a continuum of issues, that in particular relate to children, that we feel as followers of Jesus it is incumbent upon us to speak up.

Their aim, Kim said in an interview, is ensuring there is a consistent ethic we pursue as a nation with respect to the protection of the vulnerable.

The evangelicals note in their letter that several of their groups work in Central America and can attest to the high risk of trafficking, violence and exploitation facing many children expelled back to the countries they attempted to leave by seeking asylum in the United States.

In addition, the letter notes that the administration's acknowledged practice of expelling unaccompanied migrant children after they have tested negative for the coronavirus indicates that applying the anti-trafficking protections of the 2008 law would not pose a pandemic-related risk.

We must not allow COVID-19 to serve as a pretext for abandoning our national commitment to standing for vulnerable children and against the scourge of human trafficking," it said. "Our faith compels us to speak up for these children.

Other signatories include Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Conventions Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Edgar Sandoval Sr., president of World Vision U.S.; Scott Arbeiter, president of World Relief; and Chris Palusky, president of Bethany Christian Services.

Many of the signatories are members of the Evangelical Immigration Table, a group of faith-motivated advocates for comprehensive immigration reform. Members of that group pressed the Trump administration for changes in its pandemic-related immigration policies in April.
The denial of the proposed dispensary at 12-14 W. Maple St. came after almost 12 hours of discussion during a virtual Zoning Board of Appeals meeting. It was the first time since recreational marijuana became legal that the city rejected a proposed site. Six proposed dispensary sites, including the one on Maple Street, have gone before the board.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

By Samir Ali - Trend:

Declaration of autumn sowings in the Electronic Agriculture Information System (EAIS) for 2020-2021 will begin in Azerbaijan from September 2020, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Agriculture told Trend.

Under the new subsidy mechanism, subsidies are provided to agricultural producers following their declarations.

Farmers in their account in the EAIS should select their areas of activity, provide information on the crops that they will plant over the next four years, including this fall. According to the declaration of autumn sowing, an electronic application is generated in the system. The electronic application contains information about the farmer's agricultural activities, land plot, and autumn sowing, as well as the amount of the subsidy to be paid. Before confirming the application, the farmer can make changes to it, said the ministry.

After confirmation of the electronic application, data monitoring is carried out. Upon completion of monitoring, the amount of the subsidy is transferred to the applicants Farmer's Card.

The ministry added that farmers will not be able to receive subsidies regarding the autumn sowing in the following cases:

- if the farmer is not registered in EAIS;

- if the seeding coefficient for the districts determined by the decision of the Council on Agrarian Subsidies is 0;

- if sowing will be carried out on plots, the category of which doesnt apply to agricultural land plots, as well as pastures;

- during 2020, if the amount for the declared sown area and perennial planting exceeds the amount determined by the monitoring results by 20-50 percent;

- during the current and subsequent years, if the amount for the declared sown area and perennial plantings exceeds the determined amount based on the monitoring results by over 50 percent;

- if the necessary documents and information are not submitted properly or on time.

Moreover, farmers who have tried to spend the subsidy for other purposes in the past and or cash out 75 percent of the non-cash subsidy will also be ineligible for the subsidy.

Declaration of autumn crops will continue until the end of the year.

Under the rules for using EAIS and for technical support on declaring issues, farmers can contact the state agrarian development centers and the ASAN Service centers.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  The New York City Police Benevolent Association (PBA) has announced its endorsement of Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis in the upcoming congressional election for New Yorks 11th District, which covers Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn.

PBA President Pat Lynch made the announcement Monday morning outside One Police Plaza in Manhattan.

The largest municipal police union in the world, the PBA represents approximately 50,000 active and retired NYPD police officers.

Malliotakis, Lynch said, has always stood by the men and women of the NYPD during her five terms in the state legislature, calling her a true friend and saying we have work to do.

This is the most hotly contested race in New York City this November, and it creates the opportunity for our members, their families, friends and all supporters of the NYPD to send a resounding message to every elected official in New York City, Lynch said.

Law-abiding New Yorkers are ready to take this city back, he continued.

Malliotakis said she is proud to accept the PBAs endorsement, adding she was always taught by her parents to respect and honor the NYPD.

I continue to hold that belief today on both a personal level and as an elected official, Malliotakis (R-East Shore/South Brooklyn) said.

In Congress, I will do what I have always done; fight to get the NYPD the funding they need, work to create common-sense legislation that supports law enforcement, not criminals, and do anything I can to honor and support any member of law enforcement and their families when an injury or death occurs in the line of duty. Thank you for support, I will never forget it. Stay safe, she said.

ANTI-POLICE MOB

During the announcement, Lynch called out Rep. Max Rose (D-Staten Island/South Brooklyn), saying he and other elected officials have joined the anti-police mob.

Her opponent, Congressman Max Rose, has claimed he supports law enforcement. But when it came time for him to stand tall and show that support, he chose the opposite. He chose to take part in a June demonstration on Staten Island where marchers carried signs reading, Abolish the NYPD, Blue Lives Murder and Defund the Police as the crowd chanted those slogans and others as they converged on the 122nd Precinct, Lynch said.

Congressman Rose, you cant have it both ways. You made your choice. Now New York City police officers will make ours, he said.

When asked about Lynchs comments, a spokesman for Rose referred to his endorsement from the New York State Court Officers Association and remarks made by President Dennis Quirk.

Now more than ever, we need elected officials who work with law enforcement to keep our communities safe -- Max Rose has done that and more. He has secured millions of dollars for the NYPD to fight terrorists, took on his own party to demand changes to flawed New York State bail reforms, and made sure our 9/11 and COVID-19 first responders received the benefits they earned, Quirk said.

Roses camp also referred to his column in the Staten Island Advance, titled Defunding the police is shortsighted and wrong, as well as money he helped secure for Homeland Security, increases in law enforcement mental health programs, and helping to ensure that Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahons office was not cut during #DefundThePolice efforts in the City Council.

PBA ENDORSES TRUMP

The PBA also endorsed President Donald Trump, who tweeted out his endorsement of Malliotakis for Congress and recently spoke about her and Rose during an interview.

On August 14th we endorsed President Trump. If he is to succeed as President, he needs like-minded Americans serving in the House and the Senate. In addition, there are currently no Republican members of the New York City congressional delegation. How can our city, our police officers or our citizens expect to get a fair deal out of a Washington, when we dont have a Republican member of Congress advocating for us in that two party town? Lynch said.

Trump told the New York Post that Rose is a fraud, and Staten Islanders should not be represented by him; he said Malliotakis would do a great job.

FOLLOW KRISTIN F. DALTON ON TWITTER.
NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Attorney Advertising -- Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC notifies investors that a class action lawsuit has been filed against American Electric Power, Inc. ("AEP" or the "Company") (NYSE: AEP) and certain of its officers, on behalf of shareholders who purchased or otherwise acquired AEP securities between November 2, 2016 and July 24, 2020, inclusive (the "Class Period"). Such investors are encouraged to join this case by visiting the firm's site: www.bgandg.com/aep.

This class action seeks to recover damages against Defendants for alleged violations of the federal securities laws under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) the Company covertly participated in the "the largest public corruption case in Ohio history"; (2) the Company secretly funneled substantial funds to Ohio political organizations and politicians to bribe politicians to pass Ohio House Bill 6, which benefitted the Company and its coal-fired generation assets; (3) the Company partially funded a massive, misleading advertising campaign in support of HB6 and in opposition to a ballot initiative to repeal HB6 by passing substantial sums through a web of dark money entities and front companies in order to conceal the Company's involvement; (4) the Company aided in subverting a citizens' ballot initiative to repeal HB6; (5) as a result of the foregoing, defendants' Class Period statements regarding the Company's regulatory and legislative efforts were materially false and misleading; (6) as a result of the foregoing, the Company would face increased scrutiny; (7) the Company was subject to undisclosed risk of reputational, legal and financial harm; (8) the bribery scheme would jeopardize the benefits the Company sought by HB6; (9) as opposed to the Company's repeated public statements regarding a move to clean energy, it sought a dirty energy bailout; (10) as opposed to the Company's repeated public statements regarding protection of its customers' interests, the Company sought an extra and state-mandated surcharge on its customers' bills; and (11) as a result of the foregoing, defendants' statements about its business, operations, and prospects, were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times.

A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to review a copy of the Complaint you can visit the firm's site: www.bgandg.com/aep or you may contact Peretz Bronstein, Esq. or his Investor Relations Analyst, Yael Hurwitz of Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC at 212-697-6484. If you suffered a loss in AEP you have until October 19, 2020 to request that the Court appoint you as lead plaintiff. Your ability to share in any recovery doesn't require that you serve as a lead plaintiff.

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC is a corporate litigation boutique. Our primary expertise is the aggressive pursuit of litigation claims on behalf of our clients. In addition to representing institutions and other investor plaintiffs in class action security litigation, the firm's expertise includes general corporate and commercial litigation, as well as securities arbitration. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Contact:

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC

Peretz Bronstein or Yael Hurwitz

212-697-6484 | [email protected]

SOURCE Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC

Related Links

https://www.bgandg.com/


LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / Compare-autoinsurance.org (https://compare-autoinsurance.org/) has launched a new blog post that presents several useful tips that will help first-time drivers get cheaper car insurance.

For more info and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.org/how-to-insure-first-time-drivers

First-time drivers are paying some of the most expensive car insurance policies. The lack of experience behind the wheel is the reason why car insurance companies charge more on the premiums of first-time drivers.

To make their car insurance rates cheaper, first-time drivers should follow the next tips:

Join an existing plan . First-time drivers, especially teen drivers, are seen as risky by insurance providers because they lack experience, may text and drive, and are more likely to get distracted. Joining the family's insurance plan is one way to get affordable rates.

Choose a slightly used vehicle . When buying the first car, first-time drivers should consider buying a cheaper slightly used car if they want to get cheaper premiums. The cost to replace a vehicle plays into the overall premium.

Raise the deductible . First-time drivers who select full coverage car insurance can save some money by raising the deductible. The deductible is the amount the policyholder pays before the insurer pays to fix the vehicle.

Consider buying liability insurance only . First-time drivers who have an older car or can afford to replace their vehicle in case of an at-fault accident should consider buying only liability insurance. This policy gives no protection to the vehicles and it covers only the other driver's bodily injury and property damage.

Avoid tickets and car accidents. Being a safe driver is the best way to keep insurance rates low. First-time drivers should do their best to avoid distracted driving, speeding tickets, at-fault accidents, and DUIs.

Improve the credit score . Car insurance companies are allowed to use the credit score to rate drivers in every state but California, Hawaii, and Massachusetts. Drivers can improve their credit score by getting their first credit card, paying off their credit balance monthly, or by becoming authorized user on an account with excellent payment history.

Shop around. First-time drivers should get as many quotes as they can and compare them. To finish this task faster, first-time drivers should go to a brokerage website.

Ask for discounts. To make their policies more affordable to drivers, insurance companies offer all types of discounts such as good student discount, graduating a defensive course discount, getting a married discount, installed anti-theft devices discounts, telematics discounts, multi-policy discount, pay in full discount, and more.

Story continues

For additional info, money-saving tips and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.org/

Compare-autoinsurance.org is an online provider of life, home, health, and auto insurance quotes. This website is unique because it does not simply stick to one kind of insurance provider, but brings the clients the best deals from many different online insurance carriers. In this way, clients have access to offers from multiple carriers all in one place: this website. On this site, customers have access to quotes for insurance plans from various agencies, such as local or nationwide agencies, brand names insurance companies, etc.

"Getting affordable car insurance as a first-time driver is not an easy task, but there are several methods that can help them pay less on their monthly premiums", said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company.

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View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/602981/Top-Tips-That-Will-Help-First-Time-Drivers-Get-Cheaper-Car-Insurance




The 95-year old Second World War veteran, Private Joseph Ashitey who set himself the challenge of raising funds to support frontline workers in the fight against the coronavirus disease in the country has been honoured by the Ghana Armed Forces.



Private Ashitey undertook a 2km walk along the Osu Oxford Street for seven continuous days to raise GH290, 000 for the fight against COVID-19.



His effort attracted international recognition and earned him the Commonwealth Points of Light Award in the UK.



For his outstanding effort, Private Ashitey was conferred and decorated with the rank of Warrant Officer I which is the highest rank at the Junior Division of the Ghana Armed Forces.







Source: graphiconline.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
ANN ARBOR, MI  A man accused of robbing an Ann Arbor burrito place in 2018 who was arrested after robbing it again in early 2020 is heading to trial on multiple felony charges.

Shawn Derek Webster, 34, of Ypsilanti Township, was bound over for trial on 10 felony charges after a preliminary examination on Tuesday, Aug. 18, court records show.

Webster is charged with three counts of armed robbery, three counts assault with intent to rob while armed, two counts felony firearms and one count each of felon in possession of a firearm and felon in possession of ammunition.

The charges stem from an armed robbery at Hungry Howies Pizza, 3365 Washtenaw Ave., on Aug. 9, 2018, and an armed robbery six days later at BTB Burrito, 810 S. State St., the Ann Arbor Police Department said.

Burrito bandit, pizza pilferer busted for armed robbery, police say

Webster allegedly entered an unlocked rear door at BTB Burrito at about 3:15 a.m., brandished a silver handgun and robbed the late-night establishment before fleeing, police said.

BTB Burrito was robbed again at about 2:30 a.m., Jan. 5 under similar circumstances, but with Webster being identified as the suspect in the robberies, police said.

Webster was located and arrested Jan. 24 in connection with the robberies and arraigned later that day.

Websters case has been assigned to Washtenaw County Trial Judge Archie Brown with his first pretrial hearing scheduled for Sept. 30.

He currently remains lodged in the Washtenaw County Jail with bond set at $350,000.

Webster is a felon after pleading no contest to armed robbery in 2005 and later pleading guilty several fleeing and eluding police charges, according to Michigan Department of Corrections records.

Armed robbery is punishable by up to life in prison.

More from The Ann Arbor News:

Eastern Michigan University delays move-in 3 weeks, citing other campus coronavirus outbreaks

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Learning pods have arrived in Michigan. Heres why theyre causing controversy.
In a vicious and menacing slander posted on Facebook on August 18, Jose Maria Sison, the founder and ideological leader of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), has attacked Joseph Scalice, a leading scholar of Philippine history, as a pathologically rabid anti-communist and CIA psywar agent posing as an academic Trotskyite.

Sisons extraordinary outburst was in response to the announcement that Scalice will deliver an online lecture on August 26 hosted by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he is a postdoctoral researcher. The lecture will explore the historical parallels between the CPPs support for fascistic Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 and the endorsement of the Marcos dictatorship by an earlier Communist Party.

Scalice, who is fluent in Tagalog and has a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, is widely known and respected as a scholar in the United States and in South East Asia. His Ph.D. thesis on the CPPs history has attracted a significant interest in the Philippines, where workers and youth, as well as academics, are seeking to understand the underlying roots of the CPP's repeated betrayals. Scalice has contributed essays on Philippine history, politics and social conditions to the World Socialist Web Site.

Utterly incapable of defending the CPPs political role, Sison reprises his long personal involvement in Stalinist and Maoist denunciations, threats and violence in branding Scalice as an agent of US imperialism. He denounces the futile attempts of Trotskyites to blame the CPP and its front organisations for the rise to power and current criminal rule of the traitorous, tyrannical, genocidal, plundering and swindling Duterte regime.

It is a matter of record, well known in the Philippines, that the CPP and its front organisations supported the fascistic Duterte when he won the presidency in 2016 and staged rallies in his support. On the occasion of Dutertes first State of the Nation address, BAYAN, the CPPs umbrella front group, staged a rally of nearly 40,000 people and invited Dutertes newly appointed chief of police, Ronald dela Rosa, to address it. The CPPs youth front, Anakbayan, welcomed Dutertes speech as a breath of fresh air.

Several prominent figures nominated by the CPP accepted posts in Dutertes administration. These included leaders from two organisations tied to the political line of the CPP. Rafael Mariano, the longtime head of the Kilusang Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (KMP) peasant organisation, was put in charge of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR). Joel Maglungsod, vice president for Mindanao of the trade union umbrella organisation Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), was made undersecretary of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE).

Far from breaking from Duterte as he launched his war on drugs, the CPP welcomed the campaign of extrajudicial killings directed at the most oppressed layers of the population, and, in its official newspaper, Ang Bayan, called on the revolutionary forces to cooperate with it. The war on drugs became a campaign of mass murder in which over 30,000 people have been killed in the past four years by police and paramilitary forces.

Scalice in his writings has not only documented the repeated betrayals of the CPP and its various breakaway organisations, but explained that they are rooted in the reactionary nationalist ideology of Stalinism and its Maoist variant. Its perspective of the two-stage theory declares that in countries with a belated capitalist development, such as the Philippines, socialism is off the agenda and the working class and peasant masses have to support the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie.

In the Philippines, the Stalinist Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) claimed that Ferdinand Marcos represented the progressive layers of the bourgeoisie. It backed him to win the presidency in 1965 and worked to subordinate workers and peasants to Marcos as he prepared to assume dictatorial powers through the declaration of martial law in 1972.

Sison was a member of the PKP youth wing who was expelled from the party in 1967 and founded the CPP in 1968. While Sison opposed the pro-Moscow PKP, neither he nor the CPP ever reexamined the theoretical roots of the PKPs treachery or broke from Stalinism. He propagated a Maoist version of the two-stage theory that was responsible for painting one or another faction of the bourgeoisie as progressive, right up to the point when, having stabilised its rule with the CPPs assistance, the ruling class turned on its allies and working people.

The traitorous, tyrannical, genocidal, plundering and swindling Duterte regime is just the latest in a series of Philippine governments helped into power by the CPP and/or rival Stalinist parties.

The menacing threat contained in Sisons libelous attack on Scalice must be taken seriously. Sison and the CPP have a long record of physical violence and murder against their political opponents, including dissident members of their own party. His denunciation of Trotskyites recalls the slanders of Stalin and his gangster regime, which murdered an entire generation of revolutionaries in the purges of the 1930s, culminating in the assassination of Leon Trotsky in August 1940.

We call on our readers to oppose Sisons slander against Joseph Scalice. Statements of opposition should be posted and circulated on social media. The WSWS also urges the widest attendance at the lecture that will be delivered on Wednesday (click here to register). We have been informed that more than 1,000 people in the Philippines and throughout Asia have already registered. Dr. Scalice has also received principled support from academics.

The CPP no longer commands the respect and support of broad layers of working people in the Philippines that it did in the 1970s and 1980s. It has fragmented into rival parties that compete with each other to ally with one or another faction of the Philippine bourgeoisie in return for crumbs of privilege and power. But the stultifying legacy of Stalinism and Maoism remains, not only in the Philippines but throughout the region.

Scalices lecture will provide an introduction to workers, youth and intellectuals who want to understand the reasons behind the CPPs betrayals and are looking for a political perspective upon which to base the struggle against authoritarianism in the Philippines.
Institutions offering MBA and PGDM courses have been allowed to admit students based on marks obtained in qualifying undergraduate exams as several entrance tests could not be conducted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) said. The technical education regulator has also clarified that the relaxation is being made available only for the 2020-21 academic session and should not be seen as a precedent for future academic years.

"All-India tests like CAT, XAT, CMAT, ATMA, MAT, GMAT and the Common Entrance Test of respective states are the qualifying tests for admission to MBA or the Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) course. In many states, some of these entrance tests could not be conducted due to the fear of coronavirus spread, and there is no indication as to whether these tests are postponed or likely to be held or cancelled," AICTE Member Secretary Rajive Kumar said.

Also read: JEE Mains 2020: Students go on hunger strike, demand postponement of JEE, NEET entrance exams

"AICTE, being more a facilitator than a regulator, considered alternative proposition through which selection of the students could be made for admission to PGDM course which will benefit both the institutions as well as the students. "Therefore, in the current scenario, the PGDM and MBA institutions are allowed to admit students on the basis of marks obtained in qualifying examinations by preparing a merit list in a transparent manner. However, first preference will be given to candidates who have appeared in any of the entrance tests and have qualified, irrespective of their marks secured at degree level as long as minimum marks are secured," Kumar added.

The council has directed institutions to select candidates based on merit in the qualifying UG exams if there are vacant seats available. "The states may also use this relaxation while allotting seats through counselling. It may be noted that this relaxation to the PGDM and MBA institutions shall be applicable only for the academic year 2020-21, this cannot be taken as a precedent for the future academic years," Kumar said.

Also read: UGC Final Year exams case: Supreme Court to give its verdict soon

Universities and schools across the country have been closed since March 16, when the Centre announced a countrywide classroom shutdown as part of measures to contain COVID-19. A nationwide lockdown was imposed on March 25. While several restrictions have been eased, schools and colleges continue to be closed.

Also read: JEE, NEET 2020 exam dates announced; Centre releases schedule after admit cards
A local police chief has told a Malaysian inquest into the death of Nora Quoirin there was "no indication" she was kidnapped.

A Malaysian coroner began an inquest on Monday into the death of a French-Irish teen, a year after her naked body was found near a nature resort where she mysteriously vanished while on holiday.

Nora Anne Quoirins disappearance from her familys cottage at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on August 4 last year, a day after her family arrived for their holiday, sparked a massive search operation.

Her naked body was discovered August 13 beside a stream in a palm oil estate about 2.5 kilometres (1.6 miles) from the resort.

Coroner Maimoonah Aid said the inquest is aimed at determining when Nora died, the cause of her death, how she came to her death, and if anyone was criminally involved.

Negeri Sembilan police chief Mohamad Mat Yusop, the first witness, said the investigation showed no criminal element. He said there was no indication Nora was abducted and no ransom demand.

Police believe Nora climbed out of a window on her own, and the post-mortem showed she succumbed to intestinal bleeding due to starvation and stress, he said.

Her Irish mother and French father, Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin, say Nora was kidnapped because she had mental and physical disabilities and could not have wandered off on her own.

Resort owner Haanim Bamadhaj, who gave evidence via video conference, said Noras parents had told her the teenager only had on her underwear when she went missing and that she would hide when she was frightened.

Recalling the night, Ms Haanim, whose house faces the Quorins cottage, said it was peaceful and that her dog, who would bark if there were outsiders, was also quiet.

Location of where Nora Quoirins body was found in Malaysia (PA Graphics)

She acknowledged that a window of the cottage that was found ajar the morning Nora disappeared was faulty and could be opened from the outside. But she said there have never been any criminal break-ins in her property since it opened for business 11 years ago.

A recording of the girls mother calling Nora darling, Nora, Nora, mummy here that was used during the search was played to the court.

The coroner earlier this month visited the resort and the place where the body was found. The inquest, which is set to run until September 4, is to involve 64 witnesses.

The Quoirin family lawyer, S Sakhty Vell, said Noras parents could not attend the inquest due to the coronavirus pandemic but will give evidence via video conference. A British doctor who conducted a second post-mortem on Noras body will also give evidence remotely, he said.

The Quoirin family has sued the resort owner for alleged negligence. They said in their lawsuit that there was no security at the resort and that a cottage window was found ajar with a broken latch on the morning Nora disappeared.

Nora had poor motor skills and needed help to walk and her mental age was about five or six years old, her parents said in the lawsuit.

Gurdial Singh Nijar, the lawyer representing the resort, told reporters after the first day of the inquest that the incident was unfortunate but there was no culpability on the part of the resort owner.

Noras parents have welcomed Malaysias decision to hold the inquest after police classified the case as no further action. They said the inquest will be crucial in determining the fullest possible picture of what happened to Nora and how her case was dealt with.
The Kerala legislative assembly on Monday defeated the no-confidence motion moved by the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) against the Pinarayi Vijayan government brought in the backdrop of the sensational gold smuggling case. This is the first no-trust motion against the government which has completed four years and four months in office.

The motion moved by senior Congress leader V D Satheesan was defeated by 47 votes, while 87 legislators opposed it 40 supported it. The house witnessed turbulent scenes during the day-long discussion and the CM took three and a half hours to reply to the barrage of charges.

While the UDF listed a number of allegations including the recent gold smuggling case, the alleged commission in the Life Mission project and the gift higher education minister KT Jaleel received from the consulate of the United Arab Emirates, the LDF denied all charges saying the opposition was worried over the growing popularity of the government.

The debate turned noisy at regular intervals as members of both camps traded charges against each other. Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala said never in the history of the state had three central agencies frequented the state secretariat and there are reports more agencies will be roped in to probe the gold smuggling case.

A week after the seizure of 30 kg gold from a consignment in the UAE consulate in the state capital, the CM was forced to suspend his powerful private secretary M Sivasankar, a senior IAS officer. But the opposition said the CM was trying to get away by sacrificing his secretary and he knew about main accused Swapna Suresh and her alleged deals.

Besides smuggling, during investigation, many alleged irregularities also cropped up. The Enforcement Directorate found that Suresh had accepted Rs four crore commission in the Life Mission project. It is a Rs 20 crore project intended to build free apartments for the flood-affected with the help of the UAE-based charity organization Red Crescent.

The ED and NIA had also started an investigation against minister KT Jaleel who reportedly accepted some fund and 4000 kg gift from the consulate in March. Though the minister pleaded that these consignments were holy books the opposition alleged that some of the packets contained smuggled gold. Even if the ministers version was right, he cant get away from the foreign exchange management act, experts said.

But the CM said central agencies were deployed after he wrote to the Prime Minister and the government was not worried over the probe. He asked the opposition to wait till the probe was over. He also took a dig at the principal opposition party Congress saying most of its leaders are in a race to join the BJP. He said with mere allegations nobody can browbeat his government which has managed the Covid-19 pandemic successfully and brought in many new programs for the poor.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ramesh Babu Ramesh Babu is HTs bureau chief in Kerala, with about three decades of experience in journalism. ...view detail
PARKLAND, Fla.  A group of survivors from the 2018 Florida high school massacre is hitting the road to help register young voters across the country before the November election, seeking to bring about their vision for gun reform.

The student group March For Our Lives will visit nine states starting Monday, including Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Texas and Georgia, creating on-the-ground art exhibitions that will parallel digital rallies all aimed at capturing the elusive, hard to engage youth vote. Their first stop is in Miami.

Each stop will feature public art exhibits to raise awareness on issues that intersect with their mission for gun violence prevention, including racial injustice, immigration, health care and economic inequality.

The group was founded by David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, Jaclyn Corin and several other students after the 2018 Valentines Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that left 17 dead. Since then, the student group has rallied hundreds of thousands around the country for tighter gun laws, including a nationally televised march in Washington, D.C, that landed on the cover of Time magazine and received the International Childrens Peace Prize from Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

March For Our Lives is partnering with organizations including Dream Defenders, United We Dream, Sunrise Movement and International Indigenous Youth Council.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:48:33|Editor: huaxia

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BAMAKO, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Spokesman of Mali's National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) Ismael Wague told the press on Monday that "nothing has been decided with the ECOWAS mediation team".

"I would like to point out that at this stage of the discussions with the ECOWAS mediation team, nothing has been decided. At no time has there been any talk of a government with a military majority, and so on," he stressed.

"Any decision related to the size of the transition, to the transitional president, to the formation of the government will be made between Malians, with political parties, socio-political groups, unions, signatory groups (of Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation in Mali Resulting from the Algiers Process), civil society, in accordance with our first declaration," he said.

"I want to reassure everyone that no decision will be taken on the transition without this massive consultation", he said.

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita announced Tuesday evening, under pressure from mutinous soldiers, his resignation and the dissolution of the National Assembly and that of the government of Boubou Cisse.

A few hours after Keita's resignation, the CNSP announced, in its first statement, that it was seeking "the stability of the country which will allow us to organize general elections within reasonable time limits to allow Mali to acquire strong institutions that are capable of managing our daily lives as well as possible and restoring confidence between the rulers and the ruled".

A mediation team from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), led by former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, is in Bamako since Saturday to meet with all parties in order to find a peaceful solution to the situation in Mali.

At the end of the negotiations on Sunday evening, Jonathan declared that "we reached a number of agreements, but we have not agreed on all the issues".

For his part, Wague said that "some points of compromises on certain aspects" were reached by the two sides.

The negociations are expected to resume on Monday. Enditem
Eddie O'Connors Mainstream Renewables has appointed Mary Quaney as chief executive.

Ms Quaney, who joined the company in 2009, has been in the role of chief financial officer since 2017.

The appointment follows the resignation of Andy Kinsella, who served as Chief Executive since 2016.

Commenting on the appointment, Mr OConnor said: Mary brings significant experience and a record of success that will be critical as we continue to build the company across the world as the transition to renewable energy accelerates.

Mr O'Connor - a former Bord na Mona chief executive - owns 55pc of Mainstream, with management and other investors owning the remainder.

Earlier this year it was reported that the company could be sold for 1bn.

Industry publication SparkSpread, which first reported that Mainstream could be sold off, said that the company could be valued at more than 1bn based on the previous price of its shares.

Mainstream employs 270 people and has offices in 13 countries. In 2018, the group generated revenue of 632.2m and a net profit of 487.5m.

Last year, Mainstream bought out its two minority partners -Barclays and Japanese conglomerate Marubeni Corporation - using proceeds from the more than 500m (570m) sale of its 450MW Neart na Gaoithe offshore wind project, SparkSpread noted. Barclays and Marubeni owned a combined 25pc of the business.

Mainstream had previously confirmed that it planned to raise capital, but not that it would consider an outright sale of the business.
Thiruvananthapuram, August 24 : Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday tabled a resolution in the Kerala assembly requesting the BJP-led central government to review its decision to lease the Thiruvananthapuram international airport to industrialist Gautam Adanis Adani enterprises limited.

The assembly passed the resolution unanimously. The resolution asked the central government to hand over the right to manage and operate the airport to a special purpose vehicle floated by the state government.

Even though the resolution was carried unanimously, the ruling LDF and the opposition UDF were not quite on the same page.

Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala slammed the LDF government for roping in Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas as legal consultant for the auction of the airport. Gautam Adanis daughter-in-law is a partner in the legal consultancy.

The state government had betrayed the public by running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, Chennithala alleged.

Alleging a conspiracy by the state government to help the Adani group, Chennithala sought to know why the LDF government passed over CIAL (cochin international airport limited) and roped in Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, which had links with Adani, as consultancy for the bidding process.

The chief minister termed as unfortunate the opposition UDFs comments on the issue. Refuting the oppositions charge of the state government being in cahoots with the Adani group, Vijayan clarified that the terms of the bid for the airport were decided by an expert committee formed by the state government and not the legal consultancy.

However, opposition legislator V D Satheesan upped the ante by alleging that the Adani group had advance knowledge of the amount the state government had decided to bid in the auction.

Satheesan alleged that the accounting organization (KPMG) chosen by the KSIDC for the airport auction had leaked the amount to be bid by the state government to the Adani group.

The KPMG had recommended to the state government to quote a price between 131 and 151 rupees per passenger.

TIAL, the special purpose vehicle floated by the KSIDC to participate in the bid, had in the event quoted 135 rupees per passenger in the bid. TIAL had the right of first refusal, meaning it could lose the bid only if the Adani group quoted a price that was 10 per cent higher than TIALs, he said.

So the Adani group needed to bid at least 167 or higher to win the bid. In the event, they quoted a price of 168 rupees per passenger, which sealed the auction in their favor, the congress legislator pointed out, buttressing his charge that the bid amount was leaked to the private group.
Indias longest river crossing ropeway  across river Brahmaputra  was opened to the public on Monday, nearly 11 years after work on it was started.

The 1.8-kilometre-long ropeway, built at a cost of 56 crore, extending from central to northern Guwahati, will reduce travel time between both banks to just eight minutes.

The ropeway was inaugurated by finance, PWD, education and health minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma. Development minister Siddhartha Bhattacharya and member of Parliament Queen Ojah were also present.

It is a matter of pride and satisfaction that we now have the longest river crossing ropeway in India in our state. This is also the first ropeway in the state, said Sarma after the inauguration.

Every day, hundreds of people cross the Brahmaputra using ferries, but the service gets discontinued for several days during peak monsoon, when the water level in the river crosses the danger mark. Inauguration of the ropeway will address that problem.

Each cabin on the ropeway will be able to ferry 30 passengers at a go and nearly 250 persons would be able to cross the river every hour. However, due to Covid-19 protocols in place, only 15 passengers would be allowed per commute for the time being.

The ropeway will have two terminals  one near Nehru Park at Panbazar in Guwahati and the other across the river at Rajadwar village, behind the Dolgobinda Temple.

The ropeway, which operates on a twin-track, single-haul, bi-cable double reversible jig back system, was constructed by Kolkata-based Samir Damodar Ropeways, with technical and logistical support from Swiss firms.

The project was cleared by the state government in March 2006 at a cost of Rs28 crore and work on it started in December 2009. However, the work came to a halt in 2011 as the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) objected to it, saying it posed threat to Urvashi island on the Brahmaputra.

After obtaining necessary clearances in 2015, work on the project restarted in 2017. A trial run of the ropeway was conducted in March before the Covid-19 restrictions came into place.

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The Supreme Court declined to pass a direction to the Central government to hold the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) Undergraduate (UG) 2020 examination in Gulf countries but asked the government to allow students to come via Vande Bharat Mission flights to give their exams. The exam conducted will be offline and the students who fly in will have to maintain the 14 days quarantine in view of public health.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to pass a direction to the Central government to hold the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) Undergraduate (UG) 2020 examination in Gulf countries but asked the government to allow students to come via Vande Bharat Mission flights to give the exams.

A bench of Justice L Nageswara Rao said that the quarantine norms are mandatory for students who would come from the Middle East countries to give exam but allowed petitioners to approach State authorities to seek relaxation. The bench said the exam will be offline and the students who fly in will have to maintain the 14 days quarantine in view of public health.

The top court asked Solicitor General Tushar Mehta to speak to ministries concerned to ensure aspirants, for the NEET scheduled on September 13, residing in the Middle East are permitted to come to India in Vande Bharat Mission flights.

Also Read: UGC Final Year Exams Guidelines 2020: SC likely to announce verdict on August 26

Recently, the Medical Council of India has told the apex court that postponement of the NEET-UG 2020 examination of this year any further shall be a drastic deviation from the academic schedule which may affect the subsequent academic years of the students.

The MCI, in an affidavit, had said the plea for overseas examination centres for NEET (UG) does not deserve indulgence from the top court in view of the fact that the Government of India has permitted travel to and from other countries, through Vande Bharat Mission.The Central government, under the Vande Bharat Mission, has permitted Indian citizens, including overseas citizens of India, to come to India by special flights, the affidavit has added while seeking dismissal of the plea.

Also Read: SSC CPO 2019-20 Admit Card for Medical Exam released; download @ ssc.nic.in

The top court was hearing a plea filed by parents of nearly 4,000 NEET (UG) candidates, who sought to alternatively postpone the examination until the COVID-19 pandemic normalises.

The parents of these candidates, who reside in Doha, Qatar, Oman, and UAE, have approached the apex court challenging the Kerala High Court June 30 order which had dismissed their plea.

In their appeal against the Kerala High Court order, the general secretary of Kerala Muslim Culture Centre in Qatar, Abdul Azeez said that the National Testing Agency (NTA) had the capability and willingness to open exam centres in Gulf countries as they had been doing so for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) (Main).

Earlier, the NTA had told the court that it is not possible to have overseas examination centres NEET (UG) 2020 as the examination is conducted in paper book format. (ANI)

Also Read: Mamata Banerjee appeals to Centre to postpone JEE, NEET exams
The National Organizer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Sammi Awuku has reiterated that going into the 2020 election, the party would campaign based on its records and what they could do better for Ghanaians.

He said this during NPPs manifesto launch at the University of Cape Coast over the weekend.

Sammi Awuku disclosed that he is proud of President Akufo-Addos leadership and achievements so far.

We are very happy and we are willing to fight on the record of what we have achieved across since we assumed into office.

That is what the election should be. What you have been able to do and plan to do, Sammy Awuku told Kwaku Owusu Adjei on Accra-based Kingdom FM 107.7

We have to be very insistent on looking at the records of the two leaders in the period of their governorship. I think that is inescapable, as far as this contest is concerned.

Sammi Awuku said it was important for Ghanaians to ask who better could manage the affairs of the country, both in normal times and in extraordinary times.

According to him, for the first time in the countrys history, Ghanaians were going to the polls with the two major parties being led by a President and his predecessor, something that had never happened before.

---KingdomfmOnline
Monday, August 24th, 2020 (9:26 am) - Score 10,810

Cable ISP Virgin Media UK has today discounted the price of their ultrafast broadband and weekend calls package, which for example drops their 108Mbps (10Mbps) plan to just 27 per month for the first 18 months of service (51 a month thereafter). A number of other offers have also been introduced.

As usual this offer is for new customers only and they can expect to receive a Hub 3.0 wireless router (Hub 4.0 on 1Gig), an 18-month minimum contract term, unlimited usage, access to Virgins UK network of WiFi hotspots, internet security / parental controls and email.

On top of this anybody taking out one of the operators selected triple-play TV, broadband and phone bundles will now also be given the option of receiving either a Bose Portable Home Speaker or 150 bill credit. The downside is that these promotions will only be available to order between now and 11:59pm on Wednesday 26th August 2020.

Otherwise the new broadband and phone prices are as follows, albeit with an additional requirement to pay a 35 one-off setup fee on top.

54Mbps (5Mbps) Fibre Broadband + Phone

PRICE: 28 per month for 18 months (45 thereafter) 108Mbps (10Mbps) Fibre Broadband + Phone

PRICE: 27 per month for 18 months (51 thereafter) 213Mbps (20Mbps) Fibre Broadband + Phone

PRICE: 33 per month for 18 months (57 thereafter) 516Mbps (36Mbps) Fibre Broadband + Phone

PRICE: 45 per month for 18 months (69 thereafter)

We should point out that the 108Mbps option being cheaper than 54Mbps is not a typo, the operator is clearly trying to encourage more adoption of their ultrafast class packages (just remember that 108Mbps is till more expensive post-contract). Virgin Media also offers a 1Gbps tier in some areas, which has different pricing by starting at 62 per month (standalone) and comes attached to a guaranteed price freeze for at least 24 months.
Whether you are black, white, brown or from any race or creed, he said, whether you are LGBT or straight, whether you are an indigenous Canadian or have joined the Canadian family three weeks ago or three generations ago  whether you worship on Friday, Saturday or Sunday or not at all, you are an important part of Canada and you have a home in the Conservative Party of Canada.
AUSTIN  Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday said the states current coronavirus statistics are far more accurate than they were over the past several months, as the state has nearly finished documenting more than 850,000 backlogged tests that have skewed a key indicator of the severity of the outbreak in Texas.

The state has dealt with two separate testing backlog issues throughout the month of August, attributing one to an outdated reporting system and a second to coding errors with data from three private labs.

Problems with the backlog date back to the beginning of the pandemic. State health officials disclosed the extent of them to the public last week, as counties statewide questioned an influx of old results indicating a surge in positive tests, even as lab-confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations have declined.

The data that we have now is far more accurate than what we had last month and maybe even a couple of weeks ago, Abbott said. That data should be very close to being perfectly accurate in the coming weeks and coming months.

A state health department spokeswoman told Hearst Newspapers last week that at that time there was no way of knowing the true rate at which Texans are testing positive for the virus, since the backlogged tests date back to March.

IN-DEPTH: Texas positivity rate, Abbotts key metric in fight against COVID, proven unreliable

Abbott has based decisions on whether to shutdown businesses and public activity based on the positivity rate throughout the pandemic and has said that a sustained rate below 10 percent could prompt further reopenings.

The governor did not say whether he regretted using the skewed positivity rate earlier in the pandemic to make reopening decisions. But Abbott did say that every decision that Ive made has been a decision that is in the best interest of the health and safety of the people of the state of Texas and based upon the data and medical advice available to him at the time.

He stressed that the number of people hospitalized  data that is very accurate and very current  has been declining, an encouraging sign that Texas is on the mend from its midsummer surge.

On Sunday, the seven-day positivity rate stood at 16.2 percent, an increase from 12.7 percent the day prior. Such spikes have been common over the past month, as the backlogged data was being included with the daily test results.

Meanwhile, lab-confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations continue on a downward trend, with about 5,200 Texans admitted as of Sunday. Nearly 11,000 people were hospitalized during the states peak in mid-July.

The state cleared its first backlog, including about 346,000 tests, in the days after a system upgrade on Aug. 1. Before the update, the state could process only 48,000 tests a day  creating spillover throughout July, when as many as 67,000 tests were conducted daily.

Officials have attributed the second backlog to a series of coding errors from three private labs  Quest Diagnostics, Walgreens and CHRISTUS Health  that added up to more than 500,000 outdated test results. State officials said most of the tests are from June and July, likely indicating that the states resurgence of coronavirus earlier this summer was worse than known at the time.

There may still be some lingering challenges with some of the private labs and their ability to give us immediate, updated test results, Abbott said. We are continuing to work with those private labs for a quicker turnaround.

COVID POLITICS: Will attacking Abbotts COVID response lead to a Texas takeover by Democrats?

The state sends lab results to counties for vetting before including them in its daily reports on the Texas coronavirus tally. Some counties are still working through the lab backlog, which state health officials last week said would be resolved within a few days.

That decentralized reporting system has also introduced errors into the states coronavirus statistics. Local health departments report their numbers to the state differently  some differentiating between old and new cases, while others group them together.

That disparity means that some of the states most recent testing numbers include results from weeks or months ago. State officials have since hired outside consultants to review the data collection process and decide whether to overhaul the current statistics presented to the public.

The state health department did not immediately respond Sunday to questions about the status of the consultants review.

cayla.harris@express-news.net
Bleu Hilburn Bleu brings innovative ideas, customer-centric problem-solving and team-building skills to help us grow in these sectors.

Logistics executive Bleu Hilburn is returning to Crowley Solutions as vice president of business development for all government services. In this role, Hilburn will develop strategies to build a customer pipeline, qualify opportunities, and manage all aspects of marketing, bid and capture management to drive growth and build deep relationships with government customers for Solutions.

Hilburn, a 2015 Thomas Crowley Award winner, the companys highest honor for employees, will start Aug. 31 and report to Shiju Zacharia, senior vice president and general manager, Crowley Solutions.

Hilburn played a leading role in Crowleys successful bid to land the U.S. Transportation Commands Defense Freight Transportation Services (DFTS) contract in 2016-17. In addition, he helped lead Crowleys government response to the 2017 hurricanes, including relief and recovery efforts in Puerto Rico resulting from Hurricane Maria.

In advancing to leadership roles, including vice president at Crowley, Hilburn led logistics support in 2015 that was critical to relief efforts as part of Operation United Assistance in West Africa during the Ebola virus crisis. Crowley supplied emergency shipping, warehousing, trucking, stevedoring, customs brokerage and other logistics services in partnership with the U.S. government, including support for 3,000 deployed troops and 17 treatment centers.

We are looking at further enhancing our growing global service offerings to government customers in the maritime, expeditionary logistics, supply chain, energy and technology domains to support our warfighters and first responders, said Zacharia. Bleu brings innovative ideas, customer-centric problem-solving and team-building skills to help us grow in these sectors.

Hilburn joined Crowley in 2012 after a career in the U.S. Army as a transportation and logistics officer. He retired after battalion command as a lieutenant colonel. He earned a bachelors degree in marine transportation from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, a masters degree in business administration from Nova Southeastern University and a masters degree in military art and science from the United States Army Command and General Staff College.

Prior to rejoining Crowley, Hilburn was vice president of business development at American Roll-on Roll-off Carrier Group, a New Jersey-headquartered organization specializing in transportation, shipping and logistics, where he led several successful bids for large government contracts.

About Crowley Solutions

Crowley Solutions provides global supply chain solution services including truck, rail, air, and ocean transportation as well as global freight forwarding; maritime solutions comprised of naval architecture and marine engineering services, vessel management, chartering, towing, port and range operations, and foreign military sales; energy services including petroleum storage, distribution by sea and land, fuel over the shore and liquefied natural gas solutions, and technology solutions that move customers to the forefront of transportation management, data analysis, automation and cyber security.

About Crowley

Jacksonville-based Crowley Holdings Inc., a holding company of the 128-year-old Crowley Maritime Corporation, is a privately held family- and employee-owned company that provides marine solutions, energy and logistics services in domestic and international markets. Crowley operates under four business units: Crowley Logistics, a logistics supply chain division that includes ocean liner services; Crowley Shipping, which encompasses ownership, operations and management of conventional and dual fuel (LNG) vessels, including tankers, container ships, multipurpose, tugboats and barges; engineering; project management; and naval architecture through its subsidiary Jensen Maritime; Crowley Fuels, a fuel transportation, distribution and sales division that also provides liquefied natural gas (LNG) and related services; and Crowley Solutions, which focuses on global government services and program management, government ship management, expeditionary logistics and government-oriented freight transportation services. Additional information about Crowley, its subsidiaries and business units may be found at http://www.crowley.com.
MIAMI, FL, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - Cansortium Inc. ("Cansortium" or the "Company") (CSE: TIUM.U), (OTCQB: CNTMF) a vertically-integrated provider of premium-quality medical cannabis operating under the Fluent brand, continued its Florida expansion with the August 21st opening of its 21st Florida dispensary, its third of 2020.

The Company's newest dispensary is located at 1406 N. University Drive, Coral Springs, FL, conveniently located to both I-75 and the Florida Turnpike. The 4,200 square foot site is the first dispensary in Coral Springs, the fifth largest city in Broward County. The new dispensary is over 10 miles from the next closest dispensary.

Cansortium's Executive Chairman Neal Hochberg noted, "We continue to expand our Florida dispensary network, enhancing access to premium-quality Fluent cannabis products for medical marijuana patients across the state. We are currently targeting opening four additional dispensaries across Florida over the next four months to further capitalize on our position in Florida."

The Fluent brand continually strives to set the standard for premium quality, consistently-formulated cannabis products. Each of the Company's Florida dispensaries carries a complete assortment of Fluent premium dried flower, and full spectrum concentrates and cartridges as well as creams, drops, capsules and suppositories. All Fluent products in the Company's Florida dispensaries use high-quality cannabis that is cultivated, processed and packaged in the Company's Florida facility in strict compliance with Florida regulations. For consumers, the sleek, modern dispensaries provide a warm, welcoming, professional environment, with private consultation rooms and knowledgeable staff who carefully guide patients in selecting the right products and carefully safeguard patient privacy.

For a complete list of Fluent dispensary locations, current promotions and rewards programs and hours of operation, or to explore the entire Fluent product line and place an online order for home delivery anywhere in Florida, visit https://getfluent.com/.

About Cansortium Inc.

Headquartered in Miami, Florida, and operating under the Fluent brand, Cansortium is focused on being the highest quality cannabis company in the State of Florida driven by unrelenting commitment to operational excellence from seed to sale. Cansortium has developed strong proficiencies in each of cultivation, processing, retail, and distribution activities, the result of successfully operating in the highly regulated cannabis industry. In addition to Florida, Cansortium is seeking to create significant shareholder value in the attractive markets of Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the Company has secured licenses and established operations.

Cansortium Inc.'s common shares and warrants trade on the CSE under the symbol "TIUM.U" and "TIUM.WT.U", respectively, and on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol (OTCQB: CNTMF). Investors can find current financial disclosure and Real-Time Level 2 quotes for the Company on www.otcmarkets.com.

Forward-Looking Information

Certain information in this news release, may constitute forward-looking information. In some cases, but not necessarily in all cases, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "targets", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "an opportunity exists", "is positioned", "estimates", "intends", "assumes", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate" or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "will" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances contain forward-looking information. Statements containing forward-looking information are not historical facts but instead represent management's expectations, estimates and projections regarding future events.

Forward-looking information is necessarily based on a number of opinions, assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Company as of the date of this news release, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to the factors described in the public documents of the Company available at www.sedar.com. These factors are not intended to represent a complete list of the factors that could affect the Company; however, these factors should be considered carefully. There can be no assurance that such estimates and assumptions will prove to be correct. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release, and the Company expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter statements containing any forward-looking information, or the factors or assumptions underlying them, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

SOURCE Cansortium Inc

Related Links

https://www.getfluent.com/


By Lai Yuhong, Tian Dingyu and Zhang Zhihua

BEIJING, Aug. 24 -- The International Army Games 2020 (IAG 2020) kicked off on August 23, local time. This is the seventh consecutive year that Chinese troops have gone abroad to participate in this competition. Our reporter interviewed Major General Alexander Peryazev, Deputy Chief of the General Department of Combat Training under the Russian Armed Forces and Chief Referee of the IAG 2020 at the event briefing held in Russia on the evening of August 20, local time.

Question: The Chinese military has participated in IAG for many years. What is your impression of the performance of the Chinese military over the years?

Answer: I think that Chinese soldiers are respectable opponents in all competitions they participate in. They are highly disciplined. They have demonstrated a high degree of professionalism, and are regarded as role models for the Russian army. The competitions held in China are well organized, including the competition facilities, the fulfillment of competition requirements and the training support for participants. Judging from their awards and rankings, the participating military members are very strong opponents.

Question: Under the special circumstances in which the global pandemic risk is still high this year, the Chinese military continues to go to Russia to participate in IAG. How do you feel about this?

Answer: I would like to express my gratitude for your support, and also the support of the other over 30 countries participating in the competitions. All countries are very earnest in preparing for the competition and preventing and controlling the pandemic, such as complying with the quarantine rule before the team members arrive in Russia. The various measures taken by China and us will surely yield positive results.

Question: Could you please brief us on the overall situation of this year's competition?

Answer: A total of 156 teams from 32 countries participate in the competitions this year. The competitions will be held in five countries including Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

The competitions, including those held in several other countries, have more than 5,000 participants. Different contests require different equipment. For example, the Aviadarts contest will involve drones, and the Sea Cup contest will use ships. Some other competitions use tanks, armored vehicles, etc.

We Russian army have professionals in various respects, and every game is supported by technical personnel to ensure the smooth progress of the competition in Russia. Just like in previous years, the Chinese side held the part of the IAG in Korla with a high level of preparation and guarantee work. I believe that working with China, Russia will be able to present a wonderful competition.

Question: As the big centerpiece of the IAG, what are the difficulties in the preparation of this year's Tank Biathlon contest, and what are your expectations for this year's competition?

Answer: The results of the Tank Biathlon contest are getting better and better every year. It unbelievable that the competition equipment could achieve such good results in speed, mobility and shooting.

Every year, the players whoever has higher professional quality, whoever is more tenacious, and whose equipment is more dependable will win. This shows that not only the tank team, but other support personnel also need to coordinate and stimulate morale to ensure that the team members complete their tasks well.

The environment of the Tank Biathlon event is very complicated and the weather is changeable. But in any case, the competitions are always intense. It is normal to encounter difficulties in organizing the event. Like the Chinese side, this is the daily combat training of our troops.

During the preparation, the participating team members must fully prepare for the competition, with the maintenance personnel taking care of the equipment and the engineering troops keeping eyes on the competition venue. Everyone performs his duty. These works all belong to the daily training content for participating countries.

Question: Could you please introduce the measures to prevent and control the COVID-19 pandemic in this competition and the forces devoted to this aspect?

Answer: First of all, Russian side will communicate the pandemic prevention requirements to everyone together with all competition organizers. Relevant anti-pandemic measures are strictly implemented at the competition venue.

Russia will try its best to prevent too much contact between the participating teams, members and the audience. The camp, canteen, and equipment storage place will be disinfected regularly. The training grounds like Alabino will also adopt the same sanitation and pandemic prevention measures.
The national leadership of the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) has criticised the recommendations of President Muhammadu Buhari towards addressing the lingering crisis rocking the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akoka.

This is as the governing council of the university is set to meet between Monday and Tuesday to either ratify or reject the Senates appointment of the university.

In a letter addressed to the president on Monday and signed by its national president, Samson Ugwoke, the union said the membership of the seven-member visitation panel saddled with the responsibility to look into the issues surrounding the perennial crisis on the campus, does not give hope for a fair judgement.

SEE ALSO:

The letter, a copy of which PREMIUM TIMES obtained, is titled; Observations on the Visitors Directives Setting up a Special Visitation Panel at the University of Lagos and Ordering of a Special Senate Meeting of the University: A Call for Review.

SSANU said the panel, whose members are mostly retired vice-chancellors, will likely tilt the scale of its recommendations to favour the embattled vice-chancellor of the university, Oluwatoyin Ogundipe.

It reads in part: The composition of the Special Visitation Panel with a preponderance of Professors (ASUU members) is an indication that the decisions of the Panel would be tampered with by ASUU. The fact that they are former Vice- Chancellors also implies the tendency to protect one of their own  an embattled Vice-Chancellor.

The union called for a fresh composition of the membership of the panel, suggesting retired registrars, retired bursars to be coopted, and that it should be chaired by a prominent Nigerian who is integrity personified.

Also, the union condemned the decision to ask the universitys pro-chancellor and council chairman, Wale Babalakin, to recuse himself from official duty. It said the decision has simply painted the council chairman in bad light.

The statement further stated that; It would have been fairer if the Visitor had directed the entire Council to recuse itself from official duties until the end of the panels assignment than asking Babalakin alone to recuse himself.

SSANU added that holding a Senate meeting without a vice-chancellor in office is null and void, and that the presidents recommendation has further confirmed the reservation.
Grinning broadly as the boom flies over her ducking head, Hayat Mehood suddenly turns her boat through the wind, successfully shifting direction.

She is one of 16 children living in direct provision in Cork who learned to sail at Oysterhaven this summer through non-profit organisation SafeHaven, which aims to equip disadvantaged children with new skills that could change the course of their lives.

The ultimate aim is to train these children to become instructors, giving them a chance to work as soon as they leave the system.

Hayat, who turned 13 in late July, now dreams of "trying every watersport" and teaching people how to sail, in addition to her long-term goal of becoming a dentist.

She has been living in direct provision for the last four-and-a-half years, first in Dublin and now in Cork City, after her family fled violence in South Africa.

She joined children, aged 10-13, from Togo, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Nigeria who also left the confines of direct provision for the open water at Oysterhaven.

At the start of the course, when asked how happy she was on a scale of one to ten, she said "four". On leaving, that score had soared to "more than ten".

"I loved it and I appreciate it so much," said Hayat. "I loved the company, the movement, the boat, the water  everything. I loved tacking [turning the boat] and capsizing the most!"

Romeo Sounou taking part in the SafeHaven initiative at Oysterhaven. Picture: John Allen

Shauna Fallon, who works in refugee law and co-founded SafeHaven, said this is the first year of the programme, which she hopes to continue so that children such as Hayat can ultimately get work teaching sailing.

Shauna was inspired to start SafeHaven thanks to a subsidised programme, through Sligo County Council, that she was invited on herself as a child, which taught her to sail age 11.

"I was from a very rural community where no one learned to sail," she said.

"I loved it and I became a sailing instructor at 17. That took me all around the world, crossing the Atlantic and visiting places like Bermuda.

"It opened up so many opportunities for me which I would not have had without a subsidised project like this.

"It showed me that you can give a lifeline to a kid which can completely change their life.

"The kind of feedback we get from kids is 'this is the best thing I've ever done in my life'.

Children in direct provision have not had a great time so it's not really surprising that they are so blown away by this.

"Hayat was a real star, she took to it straight away. She is one of the students we want to train to be a future instructor."

Shauna was working in immigration law in London when she developed an interest in social integration.

She was visiting a Buddhist monastery in the UK in 2014 where she met the Oysterhaven activity centre's owners when a family member was being ordained as a Buddhist monk.

They struck up a friendship and she later asked if they could run an integration project for youths onboard their sail training vessel, the Spirit of Oysterhaven, with 50% Irish and 50% new arrivals to the country.

"They were hugely supportive," said Shauna. "This whole project would not have happened without their support that very first year when we didn't have two pennies to rub together and it was just an idea.

"Their yacht, the Spirit of Oysterhaven, was the vessel we had our first voyage on.

"They said, 'We'll make this happen no matter what'.

Read More Children in close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19 were not contacted for nine days

"So it's nice to go back to them now with a new project. They're a very good centre and they have a unique instructor-training panel that teenagers can join. They go sailing at weekends throughout the year so there's that opportunity for kids who don't own a boat or come from a wealthy background to get their skills up to a level where they can become an instructor."

Shauna said some of the children on SafeHaven's courses this summer were first introduced to watersports by another Cork charity, Welcome Wave, which teaches children in direct provision to surf.

Welcome Wave was founded by Sara and Sam Hunt, after the death of their baby daughter Zoey in March 2018.

The couple wanted to help other children in memory of their daughter by sharing their love of the ocean and surfing with them.

They plan to run surf courses from Cork beaches this September for children in direct provision.

"It's such a joy to do because it's making kids happy," said Shauna.

All the logistics and scrambling around for money is worth it when you see the big, happy smiles on kids' faces.

To donate or learn more, go to www.safehavenireland.com or donate to Welcome Wave at https://ie.gofundme.com/f/5r8kmp4.
Downing Street said today workers who want to return to their workplace should put pressure on their bosses to allow it.

No10 said businesses had an obligation to offer staff 'Covid-secure workplaces' if they cannot work from home amid reports many City firms are plotting to retain home working into 2021.

NatWest is among banks that has told staff they will not return to offices in London and elsewhere this year, while Virgin Money is considering not bringing back some workers at all.

Additionally, the head of human resources at Swiss-owned bank UBS predicted that the future would see more flexible working patterns, including more working from home.

The rise in home working sparked fears for the future of businesses and workers in ancillary service industries reliant on commuters.

But many offices will struggle to bring all their workers back to workplaces because of current social distancing rules.

Asked if the return of English schools next week should herald a wider return to work, the Prime Minister's deputy official spokesman said: 'We have been clear that if you can't work from home you should speak to your employer and it is up to employers to provide Covid-secure workplaces so people can attend work where needed.'

Natwest is among banks telling staff they will not return to offices in London and elsewhere this year

UBS and Virgin Money are considering not bringing back some workers at all

Matt Hancock launches plan to test four MILLION people daily Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track. The Health Secretary is said to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year. Currently the NHS and private testing centers have a capacity of around 326,000, although because of the current level of infection, only around 190,000 are being carried out. A massive expansion of the testing regime is seen as a key requirement of easing lockdown measures further as the public continue to be wary of a return to workplaces. 'It is at an embryonic stage and it's going to take a hell of a lot of work. It is nicknamed Operation Moon Shot because that is what a moon shot is like: it seems very hard but it's important and we want to land it,' a source told the Telegraph. Advertisement

Nat West Group has told told City staff not to expect a return to the office this year, the Financial Times reported.

It also claimed Virgin Money's non customer-facing staff have been told they may work from home the majority of the time.

Lloyds Bank is also said to be examining the best use of its office space.

Stefan Seiler, the human resources chief at Swiss bank UBS told the FT: 'We have proven that working from home is possible for most roles.

'What is clear is that there will be more working from home, we will see more flexible work arrangements.'

It came as London mayor Sadiq Khan faced criticism over his perceived failure to persuade people to return to their places of work.

Natwest announced in July that said that an estimated 50,000 of its employees will work from home into 2021.

Earlier this month it was revealed fewer British office workers have returned to their workplace than in any other major European country.

Little more than a third (34 per cent) of UK staff were back at their desks, with the remainder continuing to work from home.

This contrasted with 83 per cent of French office staff and 70 per cent of Germans, according to a survey by researchers at investment bank Morgan Stanley.

However, their analysis found that Britons who have returned to their offices are doing so for more days a week than continental rivals.

Almost half (46 per cent) of UK workers who have returned are working at least five days a week from their office, far more than in France, Germany, Italy or Spain.

The figures come amid a high street bloodbath with retailers experiencing massively reduced footfall.

Test and Trace online booking flaw sends people on 350-mile round trip for Covid test The NHS Test and Trace system has faced fresh criticism for a flaw in its online booking system which tries to direct people to test centres more than 100 miles away. Some people with coronavirus symptoms who try to book a test online are directed to centres which would take them more than three hours to reach by car. A person from Ilfracombe in Devon who has symptoms of Covid-19 - including a persistent cough, fever or loss of sense of taste or smell - is directed to a test centre in Swansea when they try to book a test online. This would see them drive past centres in Taunton, Bristol and Cardiff on their six-and-a-half hour round trip, driving 175 miles in each direction. People in Felixstowe, Suffolk, have been directed to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, with the Government coronavirus test booking website saying it is just 13.8 miles away. However, the journey is 40 miles by car, taking almost an hour to get from one place to another. And people in the region with symptoms of Covid-19 would be forced to drive past their closest test centre in Ipswich on their way to Clacton. Labour said problems with the booking system should be resolved as a 'matter of urgency'. One person from Felixstowe who tried to book a test online told the PA news agency: 'If I was travelling by boat, then Clacton would be my nearest test centre. 'I tried to book online but was only given the option of going to Clacton so I called 119. The operator got the same results. 'They told me that it is not just my region - some people in Newcastle are being directed to test centres in Scotland instead of ones in the city. 'I have symptoms so am going to get them checked out. But I can imagine that others would be put off by the prospect of two hours in the car - while driving past their actual nearest centre.' Another example shows that a person in Gosport, Portsmouth, is directed to the test site at Chessington World of Adventures, in Greater London, rather than a Covid-19 drive-through test site in Portsmouth. Driving from Gosport to the Portsmouth centre takes around 26 minutes for the 11-mile trip, while driving from Gosport to Chessington takes almost an hour-and-a-half for a 67-mile journey. A person with Covid-19 symptoms in Weston-super-Mare is directed to a testing centre in Cardiff - which takes more than an hour in the car. However, there is a drive-through testing site at Bristol airport around 25 minutes away. Some people with a Southampton postcode are being directed to Swindon - around a four-hour round trip. Problems with the booking system have been highlighted from early on in the crisis but it appears that glitches in the system - which seem to disproportionately affect those on the coast - are yet to be rectified. Labour said it was 'hugely disappointing' that the issues were still occurring and called on the Government to address the issues as a 'matter of urgency'. Shadow health minister Justin Madders said: 'From the first days when testing centres were being rolled out, we have heard stories of people being sent unfeasibly long distances just to get a test, but for this to be still happening at this stage is hugely disappointing. 'Quick and easy access to testing are cornerstones of an effective test and trace system but once again the Tories seem unable to get the basics right. 'They must solve these problems as a matter of urgency.' Advertisement

Face masks chaos as Nicola Sturgeon is poised to order children to wear mouth coverings in Scottish school corridors and communal areas - as Boris rules them OUT for teachers and pupils

Nicola Sturgeon today signalled secondary school pupils and staff in Scotland will be asked to wear face masks when they travel between classes - as Number 10 ruled out a similar move in England.

The Scottish First Minister said her government is consulting on exactly when and where the coverings will be required as she cited concerns about ventilation issues in corridors and communal areas.

However, Downing Street said there are 'no plans' for the UK Government to change its approach to the issue in England.

The Prime Minister's deputy official spokesman said the wearing of masks would risk 'obstructing communication' while ministers insisted face coverings are 'not necessary' if guidance on school hygiene is followed.

The difference in approach is likely to cause confusion among parents and pupils as all four of the home nations try to get schools back up and running.

Nicola Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that her government is consulting on requiring pupils to wear face masks when travelling between classes

Boris Johnson today issued a plea to parents to send their children back to school in England next week. Downing Street has ruled out forcing pupils and staff to wear masks

Education is a devolved issue which means the administrations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can adopt their own policies.

The UK government's current guidance for England does not recommend teachers or pupils should wear face masks.

But Ms Sturgeon told her daily coronavirus briefing that Scotland's Education Secretary John Swinney is in the final stages of consulting with teachers and councils on the issue.

She said recommendations would not include pupils wearing masks while in the classroom.

The move follows requests from some schools north of the border for pupils to wear face coverings.

Ms Sturgeon said: 'We're consulting on this specific measure because, firstly, mixing between different groups is more likely in corridors and communal areas - increasing the potential for transmission.

'Secondly, crowding and close contact in these areas is more likely and voices could be raised, resulting in greater potential for creating aerosol transmission.

'Finally, there's also less scope for ventilation in these areas.'

She said decisions are yet to be made on whether the guidance would apply to school transport and that decision will be made in the coming days.

Asked if the UK Government would follow Ms Sturgeon's lead on the issue, the PM's deputy official spokesman said: 'There are no plans to review the guidance on face coverings in schools we are conscious of the fact that it would obstruct communication between teachers and pupils.'

Earlier, the UK Government's Schools Minister Nick Gibb had said masks are 'not necessary' for teachers or pupils.

He told the BBC: 'We are always led by the scientific advice. What the current advice is is that if a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July, all of the hygiene pleasures I have been talking about, then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils.'

Asked if he believed the guidance could change, he said: 'We always listen to whatever the current advice is from Public Health England, the chief medical officers, we always adhere to that advice.'

Unison is one a number of unions who have called for teachers to be allowed to wear a mask or face covering because of staff safety concerns.

'It's still unclear why government guidance won't allow them, when they're recommended for other workplaces,' the union said.
The latest forecast cone for Tropical Storm Laura has taken a turn to the west, again raising concerns that the storm could make landfall in Southeast Texas this week.

A tropical storm warning was in effect for Haiti on Sunday night. Laura is expected to strengthen after it moves into the Gulf of Mexico, and could become a hurricane late Tuesday or Tuesday night.
There is a criminal enterprise which has stolen billions from South Africans over the last decade without as a much as a criminal case against them.

If you think we are talking about the Gupta family, think again. The culprits here are rogue wireless application service providers (WASPs) and content subscription services.

These rogue WASPs fraudulently subscribe South Africans to content subscription services without their knowledge or consent.

Through these fraudulent subscriptions, they steal millions in airtime from mobile subscribers every day.

The exact scale of this fraud has never officially been reported, but conservative estimates by industry players suggest it runs into billions of rands.

What is of particular concern is that criminals are using gateways provided to them by the mobile operators to commit this crime.

Mobile operators like Vodacom, MTN, and Cell C make it possible for WASPs to directly bill mobile users through carrier billing. They are basically given the keys to subscribers accounts.

Mobile operators can block WASP billing by default, but despite a decade of fraud and billions in airtime stolen, they refuse to implement this solution.

The problem goes even deeper. In some of the cases where airtime was stolen, the mobile operators themselves acted as the WASP.

That means the airtime was stolen from Vodacom and MTN subscribers through fraudulent subscriptions to content services offered by Vodacom and MTN themselves.

What this fraud looks like

When people think of multi-billion-rand fraud they expect large corrupt deals with Eskom, the SAA, or the government.

In the case of rogue WASPs, however, the amounts are very small. They only steal of few rand per user per day.

What makes this crime so lucrative is that they steal airtime from a large number of victims  sometimes tens of thousands of users per day.

For example, a rogue WASP can fraudulently subscribe 60,000 mobile users to their services and bill them R5 each per day. This adds up to R110 million per year.

Most of this money lands up in the pockets of rogue WASPs and mobile operators as pure profit.

The beauty from a criminal perspective is that no subscriber will open a criminal or civil case for a few hundred rand  it is simply not worth the trouble.

The criminals know this, which is why they could steal billions from South Africans without a single criminal prosecution for this crime.

The mobile bills below show what the crime looks like in real-life  small amounts stolen from large numbers of South Africans each day.

No risk of criminal prosecution

As described above, the criminals behind subscription fraud face virtually no risk of criminal prosecution if they are caught.

When a mobile subscriber falls victim to criminals stealing their airtime, all they can do is to ask for their money back and block WASP subscriptions.

One would think the mobile operators will take criminal steps against fraudsters abusing their billing system and stealing money from their subscribers, but this is not the case.

In fact, they simply pass the buck. Vodacom told MyBroadband only the defrauded party  the mobile subscriber  is permitted to open a police case.

This means that rogue WASPs can abuse the systems provided to them by Vodacom to steal subscribers money without any real risk of criminal prosecution.

The criminals have become so brazen that they are not even willing to stop stealing when they are caught.

In many cases, Vodacom had to go to the High Court to terminate WASP provider agreements of these rogue WASPs.

MTN, in turn, told MyBroadband that WASPs and content providers are not the criminals.

In our experience, none of our WASP partners have been the actual perpetrators of stolen airtime from our customers, MTN said.

MTNs comment is perplexing, as many WASPs have been fined by the Wireless Application Service Providers Association (WASPA) for stealing airtime from MTN subscribers in the past.

In fact, MTNs own Internal WASP Service has been found guilty and fined by the WASPA for not adhering to its code of conduct.

Cell C told MyBroadband it has no reason to take severe action against WASPs because it has implemented double opt-in for all WASP services.

As with MTN and Vodacom, numerous Cell C subscribers continue to complain about subscribed to WASP services without their consent.

There are many examples of rogue WASPs bypassing double opt-in measures, but Cell C does not seem to be concerned about this issue.

What became apparent is that the mobile operators have never taken criminal action against rogue WASPs who have stolen money from their subscribers.

MyBroadband could not find evidence of any criminal case and successful prosecution against a WASP which committed fraud.

Even WASPA general manager Ilonka Badenhorst did not want to engage much on criminal matters related to rogue WASPs.

Instead, she told MyBrooadband for criminal matters, including alleged theft, a member of the public will have to lodge their complaint with the appropriate authority to be dealt with in the relevant forum.

This raises the question of why mobile operators are so resistant to take serious action, including opening criminal cases, against this criminal enterprise which steals money from their subscribers.

Industry speculation suggests that it is because they are making a large amount of profit from this fraud on their networks.

Others told MyBroadband the mobile operators are running rogue WASP services themselves, which is why they are avoiding criminal action against fraudulent WASPs.

What WASPs accused of airtime theft say

MyBroadband contacted six WASPs accused of airtime theft, and only one of them responded. It said:

We have no evidence or reports of service activation without the customers consent. Payment by credit card or carrier billing adheres to the mandatory regulatory standards.

It added that people whose airtime was stolen should raise any billing enquiries with the relevant service provider and or payment provider to identify the nature of the charges.

Other WASPs blamed content providers for the fraudulent billing, saying they are mere conduits for the billing from third parties.

MTN even blamed malware and bots installed on users smartphones and click-jacking for this fraud.

When mobile devices are infected with malware, consumers, who experience its effects, such as unwanted charges and data depletion, tend to blame the mobile operator or WASPs, MTN said.

Like customers who have been affected by mobile ad fraud, the adverse effects from this criminal enterprise are also felt by mobile operators and content providers.

When MyBroadband asked MTN who benefits from this fraud, it said it receives a portion of revenue.

However, we do refund customers if it has been found that the subscription was fraudulent.

From these responses, it is clear that neither mobile operators nor WASPs want to claim responsibility for this fraud.

With billions stolen from South Africans  often the poorest members of society  one would have expected strong action from the operators and authorities.

This did not happen, allowing criminals to steal large amounts of money from mobile subscribers for over a decade.

Here are the official responses from the Vodacom, MTN, and Cell C regarding WASP subscription fraud and airtime theft on their networks:

Vodacom

We take a hard line in the event that a third-party contravenes any agreement they may have with Vodacom or the likes of WASPAs code of conduct. We have and will continue to suspend and terminate the services of WASPs and their affiliate content aggregators and will continue to investigate reported transgressions and then ensure that we take appropriate action. Vodacom is fully committed to assisting relevant authorities in instances where customers open criminal cases. In terms of the criminal process in South Africa, only the defrauded party is permitted to open a police case. Vodacom has won a number of High Court cases that have resulted in the termination of WASP provider agreements. As matters stand, all WASP providers must be a member of WASPA. We have temporarily suspended the services of a number of Direct Charge to Bill (DCB) / third party provider partners. These provide a service on Vodacoms behalf and appear on a customers bill as a Vodacom service. As we indicated previously, Vodacom will require all DCB partners / third party providers of content services to become members of WASPA.

MTN

In our experience, none of our WASP partners have been the actual perpetrators of stolen airtime from our customers. Instead, when MTN receives complaints, our first action is to suspend content partners from acquiring customers until channels through which the fraudulent subscriptions have transpired have been investigated and closed. In all cases our WASP partners have been fully supportive and refunded customers in full. Our findings indicate that the problem is not with the WASPs but with fraud in downstream advertising channels. They may advertise through an affiliate network which in turn has advertising partners who have later been found to behave fraudulently. The root cause of almost all the fraud we see on our network comes from malware and bots installed on users phones, or from click-jacking. When mobile devices are infected with malware, consumers, who experience its effects, such as unwanted charges and data depletion, tend to blame the mobile operator or WASPs. However, WASPs and content providers are not the criminals. Like customers who have been affected by mobile ad fraud, the adverse effects from this criminal enterprise are also felt by mobile operators and content providers. MTN has very strict policies and processes in place to prevent such fraud from happening. As a result, mobile ad fraud on our network is significantly lower than on other networks in developing countries. Despite our best efforts, we are aware that some click-fraud can bypass our systems. That is why we have implemented additional measures to prevent the scourge of click-fraud from impacting our customers. Even if a bot or malware has subscribed someone to a service, our double opt-in requirement forces a confirmation button to be clicked. In addition, we send an SMS to the customer advising them that they have been subscribed to a service and giving them 24 hours to cancel the subscription without being charged. In many of the cases, it is this SMS from MTN which triggers alarm from customers, and they have not been charged because of this measure. We also send a weekly SMS to customers for each service alerting them to the fact that they are subscribed, and including a link to unsubscribe. MTN views mobile ad-fraud as a serious issue and remains committed to taking additional steps to address this. As further evidence of our commitment to treating our customer fairly at all times, should our investigation show that a customer has been the victim of fraud of this nature, we will refund in full.

Cell C

Cell C has had no reason to go this route [lay criminal charges or take other severe action] due to the double opt in for all WASP services. It aims to provide an extra layer of protection for Cell C customers. Double opt in requires for the customer to opt in with the WASP Service Provider first and then affirm the subscription on the Cell C network independent of the WASP Partner.

This is an opinion piece.

Now read: Vodacom caught stealing airtime from its own subscribers
This article by Paul Szoldra originally appeared on Task & Purpose, a digital news and culture publication dedicated to military and veterans issues.

Rob O'Neill wants to speak to the manager of Delta after being banned from the airline for sharing a "joke" photo on Twitter that was critical of mask-wearing.

If someone felt uncomfortable, Ill put the mask on, ONeill told Fox Business on Friday. I dont have a problem with that. I do have a problem being ordered to do it. I dont think I violated the policy. Id love to talk to the CEO, Mr. Bastian, about it. Id like to help them because their image right now isnt very good and I have a million miles on Delta.

O'Neill, 44, a former Navy SEAL widely credited with firing the shots that killed Osama bin Laden, was banned from the airline after posting a photo that was later deleted, which showed him maskless on a flight with the caption, "I'm not a p--sy."

According to the company's policy, passengers and employees on Delta flights are required to wear face masks for "the duration of the flight," except for "limited time while eating or drinking." O'Neill claimed his mask was in his lap, and he was eating and drinking at the time.

"I had six masks with me because I was flying," O'Neill told Task & Purpose on Saturday. "I take them off to eat but generally wear them. If it makes other people comfortable, I wear them. I'm not anti-mask, just pro humor."

O'Neill told Fox Business that he posted the photo "as a peaceful protest" to his Twitter followers, though it wasn't exactly clear what he was protesting (O'Neill did not respond when asked).

"Part of every customers commitment prior to traveling on Delta is the requirement to acknowledge our updated travel policies, which includes wearing a mask," said Morgan Durant, a spokesperson for Delta Air Lines. "Failure to comply with our mask-wearing mandate can result in losing the ability to fly Delta in the future."

Asked what would happen to O'Neill's frequent flyer miles or whether Delta CEO Ed Bastian would meet with him, Durant declined to comment.

O'Neill said later that his wife deleted the original tweet that was posted to his nearly 385,000 followers, and he maintains the photo was a joke. The conservative military veteran often intersperses jokes with political commentary on his social media accounts, though he has repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of masks and criticized orders mandating their use.

The Centers for Disease Control recommends all people over the age of 2 wear a mask while in public to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), especially when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain. Many states have mandated the wearing of masks in public, including O'Neill's home state of Montana, which requires members of the public to wear face coverings in indoor spaces and during some outdoor activities.

"I'm not anti-mask," O'Neill told Fox Business. "I don't think you should be ordered to do it."

On Thursday, O'Neill shared an article written in April by researchers at The University of Minnesota saying that there was limited data on the effectiveness of masks. Despite its headline of "Masks-for-all for COVID-19 not based on sound data," the researchers wrote, "We support the wearing of face coverings by the public when mandated and when in close contact with people whose infection status they don't know."

They went on to encourage everyone to limit time spent indoors since "cloth masks and face coverings likely do not offer the same degree of protection as physical distancing, isolation, or limiting personal contact time."

Additionally, the article shared by O'Neill is more than four months old. According to guidelines posted by the CDC earlier this month, new scientific evidence has emerged that "shows masks reduce the spray of droplets when worn over the nose and mouth."

The U.S. has had more than 5.5 million cases of COVID-19, resulting in more than 174,000 deaths, according to the most recent figures from the CDC. More than 40,000 are currently hospitalized.

The number of positive tests for COVID-19 has decreased since mid-July, according to the CDC.

This article has been updated with a comment from O'Neill received after publication.

More articles from Task & Purpose:

'Navy SEAL Karen' berates coffee shop barista after being told to wear a mask

Lucky Coast Guard dog

Feds say wounded Air Force vet used We Build The Wall funds to buy luxury fishing boat named Warfighter
Indias Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat on Sunday made it clear that India is open to opt for a military option to tackle the transgressions by the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army in Ladakh.

Speaking to Hindustan Times, General Rawat said the option will be exercised only if all talks between the two armies and the diplomatic option fail to yield results.

Whole of government approach is adopted to peacefully resolve any such activity and prevent intrusions. Defence services always remain prepared for military actions should all efforts to restore status quo along the LAC do not succeed, General Rawat told Hindustan Times.

Defence minister Rajnath Singh, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval are reviewing all options to restore status quo ante in Ladakh, he said.

India and China have held several rounds of military and diplomatic talks in the last two-and-half months but no significant headway has been made for a resolution to the border row in eastern Ladakh. On Thursday, the two sides held another round of diplomatic talks following which the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said they had agreed to resolve outstanding issues in an "expeditious manner" and in accordance with the existing agreements and protocols.

However, sources said the meeting could not produce any significant outcome. The formal process of disengagement of troops began on July 6, a day after a nearly two-hour telephonic conversation between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on ways to bring down tensions in the area. However, the process has not moved forward since mid-July.

Government sources had on Friday said that Chinese military is not serious about resolution of the border standoff in eastern Ladakh and it is faced with an "unanticipated" consequence for its "misadventure" due to a strong response by the Indian Army.

The sources said there has been a stalemate in the military talks as the Indian Army was strongly insisting that the Chinese PLA must restore status quo ante of April this year to resolve the over three-month-old border standoff.

The Indian Army has clearly stated to China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) that "shifting" of the Line of Actual Control(LAC) is not acceptable to it, the sources said, adding the Chinese military is now desperately attempting to give "ex post facto strategic meaning" to its actions in eastern Ladakh. "Due to the strong response of Indian Army, the PLA is faced with unanticipated and unintended consequences of its misadventure," said a source, adding it is looking for a "face-saving exit strategy".

The PLA has pulled back from Galwan Valley and certain other friction points but the withdrawal of troops has not moved forward in Pangong Tso, Depsang and a couple of other areas, sources said. In the five rounds of Corps commander-level talks, the Indian side has been insisting on complete disengagement of Chinese troops at the earliest, and immediate restoration of status quo ante in all areas of eastern Ladakh prior to April.

Even as both sides are engaged in diplomatic and military talks, the Indian army is making elaborate preparations to maintain its current strength of troops in all key areas in eastern Ladakh in the harsh winter months. Chief of Army Staff Gen MM Naravane has already conveyed to all the senior commanders of the Army, overseeing operation of the frontline formations along the LAC, to maintain a significantly high state of alertness to deal with any Chinese "misadventure", the sources said.

The Army is also in the process of procuring a number of weapons, ammunition and winter gears for the frontline troops, they added. The temperature in some of the high-altitude areas along the LAC drops to minus 25 degree celsius in the winter months. The tension between the two sides escalated manifold after the violent clashes in Galwan Valley on June 15 in which 20 Indian Army personnel were killed. The Chinese side also suffered casualties but it is yet to give out the details. According to an American intelligence report, the number of casualties on the Chinese side was 35.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday remembered former Union finance minister Arun Jaitley on the first anniversary of his death for his diligent service to the country and his wit, intellect, legal acumen.

On this day, last year, we lost Shri Arun Jaitley Ji. I miss my friend a lot. Arun Ji diligently served India. His wit, intellect, legal acumen and warm personality were legendary, the Prime Minister tweeted.

The Prime Minister also tagged a video of his comments during a prayer meeting in his memory.

On this day, last year, we lost Shri Arun Jaitley Ji. I miss my friend a lot.



Arun Ji diligently served India. His wit, intellect, legal acumen and warm personality were legendary.



Here is what I had said during a prayer meeting in his memory. https://t.co/oTcSeyssRk  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) August 24, 2020

Modi had mourned Jaitleys death, saying he has lost a valued friend. He was in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on the second leg of a three-nation visit when the news of the former finance minister came.

Also read: Not just my father, he was Indias son, writes Sonali Jaitley

Union home minister Amit Shah also tweeted to praise the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stalwart.

Remembering Arun Jaitley ji, an outstanding politician, prolific orator and a great human being who had no parallels in Indian polity. He was multifaceted and a friend of friends, who will always be remembered for his towering legacy, transformative vision and devotion to nation, Shah said.

BJP president JP Nadda also paid his homage to Jaitley on his first death anniversary.

Salutes to ex-finance minister Shri Arun Jaitley, a brilliant leader, thinker, Padma Bhushan awardee, on his first death anniversary. The unending contribution of his public welfare policies and schemes in nation building will always be remembered, Jadda tweeted.

Jaitley had died of multiple organ failure at Delhis All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) at the age of 66 on August 24, 2019, two weeks after he was admitted to the premier hospital.

Modi had handpicked Jaitley to be the finance minister after the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) swept to power in 2014. Jaitley who had been battling a series of illnesses had asked Modi to exclude him from the government in 2019.

He was the second BJP stalwart to die in less than three weeks after former external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj died on August 6 last year.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 18:39:09|Editor: huaxia

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VIENNA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) daily basket price stood at 44.92 U.S. dollars a barrel on Friday, compared with 45.05 dollars per barrel on Thursday, according to OPEC Secretariat calculations released Monday.

Also known as the OPEC reference basket of crude oil, the OPEC basket, a weighted average of oil prices from different OPEC members around the world, is used as an important benchmark for crude oil prices. Enditem
A structural engineer was expected to investigate on Saturday what caused a roof to collapse in western Kentucky, damaging at least three businesses.

Shattered glass and debris were found in the street when authorities responded late Friday in downtown Henderson, the fire department shared in a post on Facebook.

Someone had called 911 to report an explosion, but the fire department said the roof of one building collapsed. Then, a wall between that business and another collapsed, causing the buildings roof to come down and damage a third adjoining business.

Officials dont believe an explosion occurred.

The structural engineer was to determine the integrity of the building and assess whether it will need to be torn down.

No injuries were reported.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Kentucky
That's all from us today. Thanks very much for reading and for your feedback.

As of this evening there are 3965 active cases of COVID-19 in Australia: 3738 (94 per cent) are in Victoria, 196 in New South Wales, 18 in Queensland, nine in Western Australia, three in South Australia, one in Tasmania and zero in the ACT and Northern Territory.

Let's take a look back at the major stories of the day:

This is Rachael Dexter signing off.

As always, if you appreciate our COVID-19 coverage and are an avid reader of the blog, please consider taking out a subscription to The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald to support what we do.

Stay safe, look after one another and goodnight.
Three miners have been rescued after spending four days trapped underground in a Colombian coal mine.

Video captured the moment that Manuel Sanchez, Eduardo Mateus and Antonio Salas emerged from the mine in Lenguazaque, Cundinamarca.

They had been trapped 88 feet below the surface after their mine cart derailed Wednesday night and caused a tunnel to collapse.

The group tried to walk their way to the El Alisal mine exit but found their path was blocked.

The workers, who were all on the job for less than a week, at one point huddled as a group and thought they would never see their families.

One of the three miners (covered in the gold foil sheet) is extracted from the coal mine on Sunday night in Cundinamarca, Colombia

Colombian President Ivan Duque Marquez (picture second to the right with a blue a face mask) applauds one of the three miners who were rescued after being trapped underground for four days

Manuel Antonio Sanchez said he and the other two miners used a hose from a punctured pump to yell for help after they got trapped inside a coal mine in Cundinamarca, Colombia, on Wednesday. The three men had been in the job for less than a week

The trio was greeted by family members and President Ivan Duque, he briefly offered words of encouragement to each of the men as they were safely pulled out.

'Thank God we stood together, three colleagues giving each other morale and as well as from those the coworkers outside,' Mateus, 40, told local reporters Monday.

'We started crying and some were sad. We said 'God has brought us here.' We already began to tell ourselves how old each one was and we said, 'this is where our beautiful God has brought us to.''

Sanchez used one of the two hoses that were connected to a pump to get the attention of their other coworkers outside the coal mine.

Rescue workers pull out one of the three coal miners who spent 96 hours inside a coal mine in Colombia

Eduardo Mateus, 40, is the youngest of the three coal mine workers who were safely extracted from a coal mine by a rescue team Sunday night in Colombia

Antonio Salas said he kept his hopes alive after he spoke to his daughter and made drawings of her during the four days he spent with his two coal mine coworkers trapped 88 feet below the surface

'We were stuck with no way out. We turned back, we went to the bottom [of the mine]. There were just two hoses, the big one, the pump was punctured,' Sanchez said. 'So I looked at two hoses, one for compressed air and another other, and I cut it off and started screaming through the hose when they answered me upstairs.'

The trapped mine workers spent their time telling jokes, sharing stories and sleeping, and had food and beverages delivered to them via a tube.

Salas, 45, had his eyes covered to protect them from the light as he was the first of the three miners pulled out of the cave at 9pm local time.

He had made drawings of his daughter to pass the time underground.

Sanchez followed by being extracted from the mine and was immediately placed in an ambulance. Mateus, the youngest miner of the group, was the last to get out.

All three men were taken to Ubate Central Hospital where they will remain under observation.
This brings the total to 106,757 cases registered since the coronavirus outbreak.

Ukraine's health ministry over the past day reported 1,799 new active COVID-19 cases.

"Over the past day, 1,799 people fell ill, including 127 children, as well as 86 medics," Health Minister Maksym Stepanov told a Kyiv briefing on Monday, August 24, according to an UNIAN correspondent.

Read alsoBatkivshchyna Party leader Tymoshenko tested positive for coronavirusHe went on to say that 279 people were hospitalized and 22 COVID-19 deaths were recorded, while 289 patients recovered.

The information is confirmed by the interactive map of COVID-19 spread, designed by the National Security and Defense Council.

Over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian labs ran 13,542 coronavirus tests, including 9,350 PCR and 3,192 ELISA.

"In terms of regions, over the last day the largest number of cases was reported in Chernivtsi region (241), Kyiv (209), Ivano-Frankivsk region (170), Odesa region (145), Lviv region (142), Kharkiv region (141), and Ternopil region (139)," said Stepanov.

Since the pandemic outbreak, 106,757 people have contracted the novel coronavirus in Ukraine, 52,524 recovered, and 2,293 died.

Quarantine in Ukraine: background
Protesters gather near the site of the police shooting, Kenosha, Wisconsin on Sunday: AP

The Wisconsin National Guard has been deployed to Kenosha one day after Jacob Blake was shot by police officers.

Governor Tony Evers authorised the deployment on Monday and about 125 members are expected to get to the Wisconsin city by the evening.

The decision comes after the city experienced violence and rioting on Sunday evening as a reaction to Mr Blake getting shot by Kenosha police officers seven times in the back.

Mr Blake's identity was revealed by Mr Evers and other officials later on Sunday after the shooting. The 29-year-old was taken to Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee where he remains. His cousin revealed on Twitter that Mr Blake was out of surgery and currently recovering in the ICU.

Video footage showing the altercation between police officers and Mr Blake sparked outrage from the public. In the video, taken by a bystander, it shows Mr Blake walking around to the driver's side of his vehicle while officers followed him. When he reached into the car, one officer then shot Mr Blake in the back seven times.

Two officers have since been placed on administrative leave following the incident, and the Wisconsin Department of Justice was currently investigating the altercation. The department said the officers were cooperating with the investigation.

The National Guard being called to Kenosha comes after protests turned violent on Sunday evening. Protesters set fire to cars and local businesses, smashed windows and clashed with police in riot gear.

Mr Evers said the responsibilities of the National Guard officers on Monday evening would be "guarding infrastructure and making sure our firefighters and others involved are protected" .County officials have also set a curfew starting at 8pm in an effort to keep protests peaceful.

The governor was quick to condemn the incident between police and Mr Blake on Sunday evening after he saw video footage.

"What we know for certain is that he is not the first black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country," Mr Evers said, adding he has seen no information to suggest Mr Blake had any weapon on himself but it was all "undergoing a thorough investigation".

The incident has spread across the country after footage was shared widely on social media. This has sparked prominent celebrities, politicians and athletes to react to the news of another unarmed black man being shot by police.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden called for an "immediate, full and transparent investigation" while stating it was time to "dismantle systemic racism". He also called for the officers involved to "be held accountable" for their actions. President Donald Trump has not publicly addressed the shooting.
Denver, CO, Aug. 24, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Red Rocks Community College in Colorado and El Camino College in California have announced a first in the nation community college collaboration to create the Space, Cyber & Supply Talent Development Center (SCSTDC). The partnership bridges two different aerospace hubs and maximizes opportunities for partnerships with stakeholders that share economic and workforce development goals in STEM and the aerospace industry. Both colleges have shown strong results in aligning classes with jobs and helping people obtain workplace relevant experience.

Red Rocks Community College is the nations leading two-year institution on the cybersecurity front, with designation from the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, their cybersecurity-related Bachelor of Applied Science degree program, and their regional OSHA training center that serves six states and is authorized by the US Department of Labor.

El Camino College has helped over 6,600 people secure workforce training and apprenticeships leading to in-demand, high-wage jobs at over 250 aerospace companies. El Camino is a leader in the California Apprenticeship Initiative through its aerospace technician apprenticeship program, which is designed to help employers sponsor apprentices. El Camino is also a partner in UCLAs Smart Manufacturing Institute to advance a new workforce development model for education and training. El Camino is part of CASCADE (California Advanced Supply Chain Analysis & Diversification Effort), the Governors Office initiative focusing on the cybersecurity resiliency of Californias defense supply chain.

By aligning the efforts of Red Rocks and El Camino, we will be able to work together to support the robust aerospace sectors in each of our respective regions. I hope the SCSTDC becomes a juggernaut of collaboration for the aerospace industry and most importantly helps people who are unemployed and looking for new opportunities, said Dena P. Maloney, Ed.D., President of El Camino College, the hometown community college to the Los Angeles Air Force Base, which houses the headquarters of the US Space Force's Space and Missile Systems Center.

Recently, a working group of more than 120 people from across the federal government, industry, and academia met to assess the current health of the space industry. Their recommendations were contained in the State of the Space Industrial Base 2020 summary report, which included insights and recommendations for the industry including the importance of public private partnerships. The report also called for the future of a STEM workforce, stating that talent, vision and education will drive the future of the US space industrial base and that industry must be more proactive in working across the US education system to develop the needed STEM talent.

At Red Rocks, we have the first registered apprenticeship in cybersecurity in the state of Colorado through Northrop Grumman and look to bring that expertise to our collaboration with El Camino. We share an urgency to provide workplace-relevant experience so that students are prepared for new jobs that will ultimately support our economic recovery, said Dr. Michele Haney, President of Red Rocks Community College located in central Colorado, immediately west of Denver and about 60 miles north-northwest of Colorado Springs, the home of the US Air Force Academy and Peterson Air Force Base, the provisional headquarters for US Space Force.

In announcing the Space, Cyber & Supply Talent Development Center, the colleges set three major goals:

Establish a new economic and workforce development educational effort focused on each respective institutions strengths in aerospace and supply chain training; Share specific company connections to further expand opportunities and placements; Reciprocity in instruction and shared best practices.

Americas leadership in space is vitally important to the nations future and critically depends on growing our aerospace workforce, with the needed STEM skills. Community colleges play an important role in talent development and jobs bridge, particularly in aerospace hubs such as Colorado and Southern California. It is important for the Federal government and the Congress to invest in education and job training to ensure our continued leadership in space, said Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael A. Hamel, a former member of the Red Rocks Community College Foundation Board of Directors and the former Commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center. By working together, Red Rocks and El Camino are advancing an ambitious plan that could serve as a national model.

###

About Red Rocks Community College

Red Rocks Community College (RRCC) is central Colorados leading point of entry to higher education and the states competitive workforce. RRCC delivers high quality, cost-effective programs that are nationally recognized, including in-demand workforce certificates, Associate and Bachelors of Applied Science degrees, and a Masters Degree in Physicians Assistant Studies. RRCC is part of the Colorado Community College System, the states largest system of higher education, delivering more than 1,000 programs to over 125,000 students annually through 13 colleges and 40 locations across Colorado. Learn more about Red Rocks at www.rrcc.edu. RRCC Contact: Wren Barnes, Wren.Barnes@rrcc.edu.

About El Camino College

Since 1947, El Camino College has been the community college of choice for the vibrant and diverse South Bay region of Los Angeles. Each year, some 25,000 students are served by El Camino. Thanks to its location in the heart of Southern Californias aerospace industry, El Camino is a trusted community partner that provides cutting-edge training in manufacturing, design, cybersecurity, and other in-demand skills to keep vital workforce pipelines filled. El Camino is also one of Californias leading transfer institutions, consistently ranking among the top 5 community colleges statewide in transfers to the California State University system and in the top 10 for the University of California. Learn more at www.elcamino.edu/. El Camino Contact: Marc Stevens, mstevens@elcamino.edu.

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Wearing face masks can lull people into a false sense of security  making them more careless and less likely to follow social distancing rules, a study has found.

Psychologists from the Warwick Business School found that people felt more comfortable sitting or standing closer to others while wearing a mask.

Furthermore, people appear happy to keep a smaller distance from other who are also wearing face masks, the researchers reported.

These effects were more pronounced among those people who believe that face masks are effective at preventing the spread of coronavirus.

Given this, it could be difficult now to reestablish social distancing measures if they are needed in the event of a second wave of cases, the researchers warned.

The results appear to support the opinion of the Swedish Public Health Agency's chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, who has been critical of face masks.

He said that the evidence in support of their effectiveness is 'astonishingly weak' and that they encourage people to feel complacent about gathering in close proximity.

However, the findings contradict those of another recent study, which concluded that face mask wearers are 13 times more likely to keep up social distancing.

Wearing face masks can lull people into a false sense of security  making them more careless and less likely to follow social distancing rules, a study has found (stock image)

'Our findings appear to be a classic case of risk compensation,' said paper author and cognitive psychologist Ashley Luckman of the Warwick Business School.

'Wearing masks brings down the overall risk of spreading COVID-19, so people feel safer and are more willing to take other risks, such as decreasing the physical distance between them and others.'

'If the Government's aim is to minimise transmission of the virus, its guidelines must be clear enough to prevent this trade-off, emphasising that masks are not an alternative to social distancing.'

In their study  conducted before it became mandatory for face coverings to be worn in shops in England  Dr Luckman and colleagues showed 800 participants in the UK pictures of people sitting, standing, or walking.

Each person was asked to indicate how close they would be willing to stand to the individual in the photograph in different scenarios, including indoor and outdoor settings  as well as whether both people, just one, or neither wore a face mask.

The team found that, in each scenario, people were more likely to tolerate a reduced distance between themselves and others if they or the other person wore a mask.

In fact, participants wearing a mask reported feeling comfortable standing just 1.8 metres from others on average  compared with wanting to keep more than two metres apart without a face covering.

According to the researchers, those with the strongest belief that masks would help prevent them from catching COVID-19 were the most prepared to stand closer to others if they wore masks.

However, those who believed themselves to be at the greatest risk of being admitted to hospital due to the virus were more likely to want to keep their distance.

The findings suggest that it could be difficult now to reestablish social distancing measures if they are needed in the event of a second wave of cases, the researchers warned

'Our results could be particularly relevant for countries where mask usage is now high, but social distancing guidelines have been relaxed,' said paper author and behavioural scientist Daniel Read, also of the Warwick Business School.

'If countries need to return to greater levels of physical distancing due to a second wave of cases, that may be harder to implement than it was when mask use was low at the start of the pandemic.'

'We need more evidence to determine at what point the risks of reducing physical distance outweigh the benefits of wearing a mask,' he added.

'Clearly, the greatest benefit results from using masks to complement social distancing, rather than replacing it.'

A pre-print of the researchers' article, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, can be read on the OSF Preprints website.
Assemblies of God head warns church on election season: Don't let division seep in

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In a pastoral letter, Doug Clay, the head of Assemblies of God, urged the leaders of the denominations 13,000 congregations in the United States to be extremely cautious as the upcoming election season will certainly be divisive. While maintaining spiritual unity, he said, they should advocate for biblical justice and liberty.

Polarization and politics naturally go together, wrote Clay, the general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, USA. Its the Spirit who brings unity.

Polarization in 2020 has risen to a higher level and has trickled down to even mundane decisions, the AG leader acknowledged. We should be extremely cautious that we do not allow division to seep into Christs Church that will inevitably lead to self-destruction.

Clay called on the church leaders to focus on the denominations mission, which is evangelism, worship, discipleship, and compassion, and not on politics.

He noted that its becoming more and more difficult to be salt and light in our culture, as the changing realities of politics arent helping us to fulfill our mission.

His comments come as a Pew survey shows that a growing percentage of Americans (currently 91%) believe conflicts between Republicans and Democrats are strong. The Pew Research Center said in October 2019 that "the level of division and animosity  including negative sentiments among partisans toward the members of the opposing party  has only deepened."

Amid such division in the country, Clay urged, While others may be focused on endless debates and the things that divide society, the Church should be known for sharing the hope of the gospel. Dont let the news make you bitter against those who lack faith in Christ. Let it motivate you to be all the more committed to evangelism.

Talking about the importance of worship, he wrote, Of all people, Gods people should know that our answers are not in politicians, but in the power of Christ. Like Nehemiah, may our hearts grieve for our nation and may we intercede in fasting and prayer. Nothing is too hard for God!

The denominations members and adherents need a biblical understanding of the issues we are facing in our society in order to make informed decisions in the voting booth, he said.

While he didnt make any specific references to issues America is currently dealing with, from responses to the COVID-19 pandemic to the ongoing demonstrations for racial justice, Clay listed five key long-term issues: biblical justice, religious liberty, sanctity of life, marriage and family, and court appointments.

Advocating for the poor and the downtrodden in society is Gods work, he pointed out. For the Church, the chief tool in this advocacy is the gospel itself.

Religious freedom, Clay continued, is far more than just freedom to worship in a church setting.

It means that people should not have to go against their beliefs to conform to the government. Religious freedom protects the right to speak and live according to our beliefs, peacefully and publicly.

On sanctity of life, he noted that nearly one in five new lives in the country is snuffed out before their first breath, quoting stats by pro-choice organization the Guttmacher Institute.

Clay called the family "Gods original building block of society, its the foundation for every dimension of human life. But opponents of marriage seem to be relentless at removing this foundation of civilization.

On court appointments, he noted that its easy to focus on the executive and legislative branches of government, but its becoming increasingly common for judicial interpretations and rulings to have a profound impact on moral aspects of our society.

He stressed that each decision should be based on its impact on the Kingdom of God and on our neighbors.

"In doing so, we make sure our priorities are His priorities and that we are others-centered rather than self-centered," he said.
More than 650 wildfires are blazing in California after unprecedented lightning strikes, storms, and a heatwave that has set new records in the state and NASA's Terra satellite captured the smoke-engulfed state on Aug. 24, 2020.

The two largest fires still burning the state are both named after the firefighting units that are battling them and the fact that both began with lightning strikes. The LNU Lightning Complex and the SCU Lightning Complex are both located in northern California. The LNU (Lake Napa Unit) Lightning Complex has burned 347,630 acres and is 21% contained and the SCU (Santa Clara Unit) Lightning Complex has consumed 343,965 acres and is 10% contained according to the CAL Fire website. These two fires are now second and third on the list of California's largest wildfires.

Even discounting these fires there are still hundreds of other fires burning across the state as can be seen in this Terra satellite image taken on Aug. 24, 2020. Red dots litter the landscape designating areas which are most likely fires--so many fires, in fact, that the dots blur together and individual fire are no longer visible.

More insidious than the fires is the smoke that rises from the landscape. This aerosol image below shows not only California being affected by the heavy smoke as seen in the visible image above, but the smoke has traveled across much of the United States affecting areas from California all the way to Minnesota and Nebraska and air currents will undoubtedly carry the smoke across the entire U.S.

The aerosol index provides information about the presence of particles in the air. According to NASA Worldview: "The Aerosol Index is a unitless range from < 0.00 [clear] to >=5.00, where 5.0 [deepest red] indicates heavy concentrations of aerosols that could reduce visibility or impact human health. The Aerosol Index layer is useful for identifying and tracking the long-range transport of volcanic ash from volcanic eruptions, smoke from wildfires or biomass burning events and dust from desert dust storms, even tracking over clouds and areas of snow and ice." In this image deep red areas can be seen in California but can also be seen as far east as Minnesota meaning the heavy aerosols do not necessarily diminish as they travel on the air currents.

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NASA's satellite instruments are often the first to detect wildfires burning in remote regions, and the locations of new fires are sent directly to land managers worldwide within hours of the satellite overpass. Together, NASA instruments detect actively burning fires, track the transport of smoke from fires, provide information for fire management, and map the extent of changes to ecosystems, based on the extent and severity of burn scars. NASA has a fleet of Earth-observing instruments, many of which contribute to our understanding of fire in the Earth system. Satellites in orbit around the poles provide observations of the entire planet several times per day, whereas satellites in a geostationary orbit provide coarse-resolution imagery of fires, smoke and clouds every five to 15 minutes. For more information visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/missions/index.html
Shrimp exports to South Korea are likely to increase by 5 per cent this year due to steady demand, high export prices and tariff incentives under a bilateral free trade deal, the Viet Nam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers has said.

South Korea is the fifth largest importer of the crustacean from Viet Nam, and accounts for 10.7 per cent of the latters total exports.

Though not increasing sharply this year, exports to South Korea have been in positive territory since the beginning of the year. Shipments in the first seven months have been worth US$179 million, a 5.8 per cent increase year-on-year.

In the second quarter they were worth US$91.2 million, up 4.9 per cent, with white-legged shrimp and tiger prawn accounting for 83 per cent and 12.1 per cent.

Under the Viet Nam-South Korea Free Trade Agreement, Viet Nam is exempt from import tax on shrimp in South Korea up to 15,000 tonnes a year. Viet Nam only ships around 2,500 tonnes.

To utilise the opportunity, experts said shrimp exporters need to improve quality and remain abreast of South Koreas procedures and requirements to overcome technical barriers.

Ho Quoc Luc, chairman of shrimp exporter Fimex Viet Nam, said local authorities need to call for investment in building shrimp farms of international quality, build irrigation and other infrastructure and enable high-quality shrimp production.

Companies must ensure quality and comply strictly with all the terms in their contracts such as delivery time and packaging design, he said.

In recent years Viet Nam has been the leading shrimp supplier to South Korea, accounting for 52 per cent of that countrys total imports.

The key export markets are Japan, the EU, South Korea, China, and the US.

According to VASEP, exports in the first five months of the year were up 2.3 per cent at $1.2 billion, with white leg shrimp and tiger prawn accounting for 69.5 per cent and 19.2 per cent. -- VNS
Reduced resilience of plant biomes in North America could be setting the stage for the kind of mass extinctions not seen since the retreat of glaciers and arrival of humans about 13,000 years ago, cautions a new study published August 20 in the journal Global Change Biology.

The warning comes from a study of 14,189 fossil pollen samples taken from 358 locations across the continent. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology used data from the samples to determine landscape resilience, including how long specific landscapes such as forests and grasslands existed - a factor known as residence time - and how well they rebounded following perturbations such as forest fires - a factor termed recovery.

"Our work indicates that landscapes today are once again exhibiting low resilience, foreboding potential extinctions to come," wrote authors Yue Wang, Benjamin Shipley, Daniel Lauer, Roseann Pineau and Jenny McGuire. "Conservation strategies focused on improving both landscape and ecosystem resilience by increasing local connectivity and targeting regions with high richness and diverse landforms can mitigate these extinction risks."

The research, supported by the National Science Foundation, is believed to be the first to quantify biome residence and recovery time over an extended period of time. The researchers studied 12 major plant biomes in North America over the past 20,000 years using pollen data from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database.

"We find that the retreat of North American glaciers destabilized ecosystems, causing large herbivores - including mammoths, horses and camels - to struggle for food supplies," said McGuire, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Biological Sciences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "That destabilization combined with the arrival of humans in North America to land a one-two punch that resulted in the extinction of large terrestrial mammals on the continent."

The researchers found that landscapes today are experiencing resilience lower than any seen since the end of the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions.

"Today, we see a similarly low landscape resilience, and we see a similar one-two punch: humans are expanding our footprint and climates are changing rapidly," said Wang, a postdoctoral researcher who led the study. "Though we know that strategies exist to mitigate some of these effects, our findings serve as a dire warning about the vulnerability of natural systems to extinction."

By studying the mix of plants represented by pollen samples, the researchers found that over the past 20,000 years, forests persisted for longer than grassland habitats - averaging 700 years versus about 360 years, though they also took much longer to re-establish after being perturbed - averaging 360 years versus 260 years. "These findings were somewhat surprising," said McGuire. "We had expected biomes to persist much longer, perhaps for thousands of years rather than hundreds."

The research also found that forests and grasslands transition quickly when temperatures are changing fast, and that they recover most rapidly if the ecosystem contains high plant biodiversity. Yet not all biomes recover; the study found that only 64% regain their original biome type through a process that can take up to three centuries. Arctic systems were least likely to recover, the study found.

Landscape resilience, the ability of habitats to persist or quickly rebound in response to disturbances, have helped maintain terrestrial biodiversity during periods of climactic and environmental changes, the researchers noted.

"Identifying the tempo and mode of landscape transitions and the drivers of landscape resilience is critical to maintaining natural systems and preserving biodiversity given today's rapid climate and land use changes," the authors wrote. "However, resilient landscapes are difficult to recognize on short time scales, as perturbations are challenging to quantify and ecosystem transitions are rare."

Contrary to prevailing ecological theory, the researchers found that pollen richness - indicating diversity of species - did not necessarily correlate with residence time. Ecological theory suggests that biodiversity increases ecosystem resilience by improving "functional redundancy," allowing a system to maintain stability even if a single or several species are lost. "But species richness does not necessarily reflect functional redundancy, and as a result may not be correlated with ecosystem stability," the researchers wrote.

The study used pollen data from five forest types--forest?tundra, conifer/hardwood, boreal forest, deciduous forest, and coastal forest, five shrub/herb biome types--Arctic vegetation, desert, mountain vegetation, prairies, and Mediterranean vegetation, and two no?analog biome types--spruce parkland and mixed parkland.

The Neotoma Paleoecology Database contains fossil pollen and spores that are ubiquitous in lake and mire sediments. Collected through core sampling, the samples represent a wide diversity of plant taxa and cover an extended period of time.

Though the effects of climate change and human environmental impacts don't bode well for the future of North American plant biomes, there are ways to address it, Wang said. "We know that strategies exist to mitigate some of these effects, such as prioritizing biodiverse regions that can rebound quickly and increasing the connectivity between natural habitats so that species can move in response to warming."

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This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grants DEB?1655898 and SGP?1945013. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

CITATION: Yue Wang, Benjamin R. Shipley, Daniel A. Lauer, Rozenn M. Pineau, and Jenny L. McGuire, "Plant biomes demonstrate that landscape resilience today is the lowest it has been since end?Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions," (Global Change Biology, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15299
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump is promising to outline an optimistic vision for America at this weeks Republican convention. But hell be speaking to a public deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country and overwhelmingly dissatisfied with his and the federal governments handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Most Americans think there isnt enough being done to help individual Americans, small businesses or public schools as the pandemic stretches on, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Overall, just 31% of Americans approve of Trumps leadership on the pandemic, a significant drop from 44% approval in March, when the virus began sweeping through the United States.

The publics negative assessment of how Trump is handling the crisis puts him on the defensive as his November face-off against Democrat Joe Biden nears. One of Trumps challenges as his convention opens on Monday night is to convince Americans that anything about his response to the pandemic will change or improve if voters give him four more years in office.

Yet Trump has shown little willingness to acknowledge that a course correction of any kind is needed. Hes repeatedly cast the virus as all but defeated, even when cases were sharply increasing, including in states he needs to win in November. Hes also insisted the U.S. has vastly outperformed other countries in tackling the pandemic, despite the fact the U.S. has the most confirmed cases (more than 5.7 million) and most confirmed deaths (more than 176,000) of any country in the world.

To be persuasive, there needs to be a strategy and not just rhetoric, Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said of Trumps challenge this week.

The president heads into his four-night nominating convention with an overall approval rating of 35%. Thats down from 43% in March but still within range of where Trump has been for much of his presidency. Where he falls within that range as Election Day nears could make a difference to his reelection prospects.

His support continues to be driven overwhelmingly by Republicans, with 79% approving of his job performance compared with just 5% of Democrats.

Trump must also contend with Americans persistently negative view of the countrys direction as he asks voters to stay the course instead of handing the reins over to Biden. The AP-NORC poll finds that just 23% think the country is heading in the right direction, while 75% think its on the wrong path.

Republican strategist Gail Gitcho said the national mood makes it imperative for the president to strike an optimistic tone during his convention.

The most important time for optimism is when pessimism is rampant, said Gitcho, who advised Sen. Mitt Romneys 2012 presidential campaign. Thats when it is most needed and works best.

The presidents highest marks continue to come on the economy: 47% of Americans approve of his stewardship of the economy, though that, too, is down from 56% approval in March. Trump is expected to lean hard into his economic credentials during the convention, arguing that when the pandemic subsides, he can again lead the country into a period of sustained growth and job creation.

Trumps advisers are also seizing on remarks Biden made last week in which he said he would shut the country down to stop further spread of the virus if thats what public health experts recommend. They believe Americans are weary of pandemic restrictions and focused instead on ways to safely keep the economy up and running.

Biden, in an interview with ABC News, said he would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus.

As the country grapples with how to keep businesses afloat and open schools for in-person learning, Americans see little help flowing to those who need it most. Two-thirds of Americans say the government is doing too little to help the individuals and small businesses. A similar share thinks the government needs to do more to help public schools with their finances.

The poll was conducted after Congress left for its August recess without passing a new round of pandemic assistance. House Democrats approved a $3 trillion relief package that included money for schools, state and local governments and other entities, but Republicans balked at the price tag and some of the provisions. Its unclear whether lawmakers can break the logjam when they return to the Capitol in September.

The lack of action on Capitol Hill appears to have contributed to Congress sinking approval rating. Just 13% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing during the pandemic, down from 31% in March. The federal government as a whole has also taken a hit with the public, with approval down from 38% in March to 23% now.

Americans remain more positive in their views of how state governments are handling the pandemic, with 44% approving of their states performance. Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans to approve of state government, 51% to 41%.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,075 adults was conducted Aug. 17-19 using a sample drawn from NORCs probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

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Online:

AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/.
By Ayya Lmahamad

Azerbaijan continues construction works on the improvement of water supply in the country.

Fifty percent of work on construction of the reservoir and the main pipeline has been completed in Neftchala city that has been experiencing water supply problems.

The construction is part of the project on improvement of water supply to Neftchala and nearby settlements in line with the presidential order of December 11, 2019 On measures for reconstruction of water supply and sewerage systems in Neftchala.

It was decided, first of all, to provide the city with water from a reliable source such as the Shirvan-Mugan group water pipeline. In order to supply water to the city of Neftchala in a self- flow regime, construction of a reservoir with a capacity of 7,500 cubic meters in the area of Salyan city began at a relatively high altitude.

Meanwhile, a 44 kilometers long main water pipeline with 560 mm diameter pipes from the warehouse to Neftchala is being constructed.

Currently, more than 40 percent of the works on construction of the reservoir have been completed and work has been completed on the 22-kilometer section of supply pipeline. Thus, 50 percent of works on construction of the reservoir and the supply pipeline have been completed.

Moreover, the construction is expected to be completed in November current year. In addition, water supply will be provided once the new main water pipeline is connected to the existing network in Neftchala.

It should be noted that within the framework of the project on reconstruction of drinking water supply and sewerage systems in Neftchala, 118 kilometers of drinking water and 116 kilometers of sewerage networks will be created in Neftchala, as well as in the settlements of the Bank and Kurkand, adjacent to the city center. An 8.6 kilometers long sewerage collector and a 4,000 cubic meters per day wastewater treatment plant will be built to manage and treat wastewater.

Moreover, the second phase of the reconstruction project of Gazanarhi canal is implemented for improvement of water supply or arable lands in Agsu region.

It should be noted that the reconstruction of the existing canals will provide irrigation water to the land with total area of 7,000 hectares.

Work is currently underway in the Agsu river, 2.6 kilometers north off the city. Water will flow from the facility with the capacity of 5 cubic meters per second through a 10.9 km long concrete channel and 645 meters of precast steel pipes.

Additionally, construction of 11 locks, water intakes, silt canals, 4 directional dams, leveling and water intake facilities, as well as a construction of a roadblock in this area was completed. Overall, work on the main pumping station is completed on 90 percent.

It should be noted that in the government session on July 23, President Ilham Aliyev urged the government to take measures to eliminate the water shortage problem in the country. Furthermore, on July 28, Ilham Aliyev signed the Order on additional measures to ensure the efficient use of water resources in the country.

Azerbaijans water reserves are estimated at 30.9 billion cubic meters, out of which 33 percent are local inland waters and 66 percent are transboundary rivers.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  As Metro Manila eases back into General Community Quarantine, here are some online and socially-distanced events to look into this week.

"Heneral Luna" online premiere

TBA Studios celebrates the tail end of History Month with a free screening of Jerrold Tarogs critically acclaimed 2015 biopic, Heneral Luna. The live premiere will be screened on TBA Studios YouTube page on Friday, Aug. 28, 2020 at 9 p.m.

For updates, visit their Facebook Event page or watch the film directly on their YouTube channel.

"Sa Kuwento Namin: E-Storytelling ng mga Alamat ng Filipinas"

In line with Buwan ng Wikas 2020 theme Wika ng Kasaysayan, Kasaysayan ng Wika, Sentro Rizal of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Adarna House and Likha-an teamed up to present digital adaptations of Philippine mythology and legends. Sa Kuwento Natin: E-Storytelling ng mga Katutubo at Orihinal na Alamat ng Filipinas will be held on Saturday, Aug 29, 2020, from 6 to 7 p.m. The event will explore the work of Virgilio S. Almario, National Artist for Literature.

Listen to adapted stories on their YouTube channel.

#StayWtihC1: Dahling Nick screening

Cinema One, Digital MNL, Nick Joaquin, He Lives., and Intramuros Organization join together for a week-long screening of Dahling Nick, a film celebrating the life and works of legendary writer and National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin.

The movie will be screened for free on their YouTube channel from Aug. 21 to 26.

"Drawing the Line: Recognizing the Various Shapes and Forms of VAWC"

Violence against women and children (VAWC) is a issue not to be taken lightly. UP Paralegals Association, Gabriela Womens Party, and The Coalition Against Trafficking Women in Asia-Pacific will be holding a webinar addressing this topic, so that VAWC can be recognized more in the context of human rights and the practice of law. The talk will be held on Friday, Aug. 28, 2020 from 4 to 6 p.m. through Zoom.

Pre-register for limited slots here.

Visayan Tattooing and Tattoo Designs

Cebuano cultural initiative Gabii sa Kabilin will be holding the third part of their series of webinars this week, as a collaboration with Museo Sugbo. Featured artist Piper Abas from Atawu Culture and Tradition will be delivering a talk on Visayan tattooing and tattoo designs on Friday, Aug. 28, 2020 from 3 to 5 p.m.

Watch the webinar on Facebook or Gabii sa Kabilins YouTube channel, and pre-register to participate here.

Objects of Desire

Art gallery and furniture store Aphro will be holding an exhibit, entitled Objects of Desire, featuring 25 different artists including Baby Evil, Miguel Puyat, and Stanley Ruiz. The show will begin its run on Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2020 in Aphros space in Chino Roces, Makati City.

For inquiries, send Aphro Living a message on Facebook.
MANILA  Two powerful explosions set off by two suicide bombers ripped through heavily populated areas of a southern Philippine island on Monday, killing at least 14 people and wounding 75 others in a known stronghold of the extremist group Abu Sayyaf.

There was a heavy explosion around noon near the town plaza on Jolo Island, Capt. Rex Payot, a spokesman of the joint police-military antiterrorism task force, said.

Police and military reports said soldiers and civilians were killed instantly in the first blast, which occurred as army personnel were assisting local municipal officials in carrying out Covid-19 humanitarian efforts.

Not long after, a second explosion hit near the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Last year, a suicide bomber at the same cathedral killed at least 23 people just as worshipers were gathering for Sunday Mass.
The Bengaluru Benedictine monks who have top chefs saying cheese!. Image Source: IANS News

The Bengaluru Benedictine monks who have top chefs saying cheese!. Image Source: IANS News

The Bengaluru Benedictine monks who have top chefs saying cheese!. Image Source: IANS News

The Bengaluru Benedictine monks who have top chefs saying cheese!. Image Source: IANS News

The Bengaluru Benedictine monks who have top chefs saying cheese!. Image Source: IANS News

The Bengaluru Benedictine monks who have top chefs saying cheese!. Image Source: IANS News

The Bengaluru Benedictine monks who have top chefs saying cheese!. Image Source: IANS News

The Bengaluru Benedictine monks who have top chefs saying cheese!. Image Source: IANS News

Bengaluru, Aug 24 : A bunch of city-based Benedictine monks dabbling in the business of cheese-making to sustain themselves for more than a decade, have top chefs in town lining up for their choice Italian cheeses.

The monks have been supplying their wares to top hotel chains in the country for quite some time now.

"We have been selling cheese for more than a decade already and many five star hotels buy cheese from us," Jinse Puthuppallimyalil, a monk from the Vallombrosian Benedictine Order (OSB) told IANS on Monday.

Vallombrosa majorly makes Italian cheese with varieties such as olive stuffed bocconcini, mozzarella, burrata, mascarpone, ricotta, cheddar, parmesan, pizza cheese and goat cheese.

According to Puthuppallimyalil, Benedictine monks have two main missions, prayer and working for their own sustenance. This motto is followed by all the Benedictines the world over.

Some monks run schools, some do manual work like growing vegetables, a few run a school in Kerala and others.

In Bengaluru's suburb Kengeri, the Benedictines have a big cattle farm. Each Benedictine community finds its own work to support itself financially.

"The main motto of Benedictines is prayer and work. Each Benedictine community has to find some work for its sustenance. So one of our pioneers studied in Italy to set up the Vallombrosa cheese brand," he said.

K.L. Michael, the pioneering monk established Vallambrosa in 2006 after spending eight years in Italy, where he picked up the Italian fromage or cheese making skills.

"Michael personally visited many cheese companies in Italy. He has friends in the European country," said Puthuppallimyalil, explaining how Michael picked up the art of making cheese.

The Italy-returned monk presented his cheese idea to his fellow monks, who accepted and supported his brainchild, achieving success after many trials.

Incidentally, the monks did not spend any money on publicity, Vallombrosa found fame just by word of mouth publicity from a few chefs.

Manjeet Singh, a chef with Herbs and Spices restaurant which used to function on Koramangala 80 feet road, a posh Bengaluru locality, promoted Vallombrosa cheese. Singh also happens to be the friend of Michael.

Soon word went around about Vallombrosa to many other chefs.

"Now when a chef moves from one hotel to another, he will call us. Like that, word about Vallombrosa spread everywhere. We have not paid even five rupees for advertising," said the monk.

Oberoi and Taj group of hotels are some major hospitality players who regularly buy from the local Benedictines, considering its quality.

Within India, Vallombrosa's cheeses has buyers in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and several other places.

Recently, the cheese brand even received an order from a Singapore buyer for a consignment.

As many as 10 monks produce 100 kg cheese in a day but these dynamics have changed because of Coronavirus.

"Before the lockdown, we used to make 100 kg cheese per day. Now that Covid has affected many hotels, we are making less cheese and have also changed our policy. Lockdown has really affected our operations," said the monk.

From being only a B2B seller, Vallombrosa is now supplying to customers in B2C model as well, without any minimum order quantity frills.

"We don't have any minimum quantity condition, how much ever a customer wants we will give them," said cheese maker.

A number of families living near Vallambrosa in KR Puram and other places in city are sending cheese orders for home delivery, especially from the start of Covid lockdown.

Encouragingly, the monks have started receiving many enquiries about their cheese, including phone calls and messages on whatsapp.

The cheese not only sustains the monks but is also supporting a programme which trains priests.

Buffalo milk is the chief ingredient of Vallombrosa cheese. As the monks do not have a buffalo farm, they are sourcing milk from two to three sellers.

"We are also planning to raise a goat farm near Hosur to meet our goat cheese ingredient demand, Vallombrosa's most expensive cheese," he said.

In India, the Benedictine order is headquartered in Kottayam, Kerala and internationally in Italy. The Kottayam seminary was founded in 1988.

By 2018, Benedictine Confederation had 7,500 monks, belonging to 19 different congregations with regional differences, particular missions and specific spiritual traditions.

As many 13,000 nuns and sisters also belong to the Benedictine order.

(Sharon Thambala can be contacted at thambalasharon@gmail.com)
A journalist working with a Hindi news channel was on Monday night shot dead in Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, police said.

He has been identified as Ratan Singh (45), they said.

Ratan Singh, a journalist working with a Hindi news channel was shot dead on Monday night in Phephana. He has been identified as Ratan Singh (45). We are investigating the case," Additional Superintendent of Police Sanjay Yadav said.
A wild monitor lizard sparked chaos when it rampaged through an office in Thailand. The 7ft long reptile forced its way inside the building by crawling through panels in Samut Prakan province on August 16. Footage shows the raging animal trying to squeeze itself into a room while the terrified staff locked themselves inside. One of the employees, Ton, who was able to record the chaotic scenes said they were afraid the reptile could bite them. He said: "Sometimes there are snakes and small geckos coming into the building. But this is the biggest we have ever met so far." Office workers at the provincial government office were heard screaming in the video trying to get away from the huge reptile. The monitor lizard was later caught by animal services and released into the canal near the building. It is believed to have entered the building while searching for food.
A GROUP that calls itself Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte National Executive Coordinating Committee (MRRD-NECC) is calling for a revolutionary government led by President Duterte.

Under its proposal, the RevGov would replace the constitutional government with an authoritarian government.

The authoritarian rule would mean it could exercise all the powers it wants: change or replace officials and personnel in departments and offices; modify, suspend or abolish laws, regulations, structures, and processes; and use the country's resources and otherwise govern whichever way they prefer.

Who would be the ruler? It says the new government would be "led" by Duterte. It would then be an extension of the Duterte administration, with the stark difference that it would no longer operate under the Constitution.

What RevGov will do

A RevGov could do two major things it might not be able to do, given the Covid-19 pandemic and the little time left for the Duterte administration:

[1] It could free itself of the constitutional and legal limits on its power to change the rules and manage public dissent; and thus

[2] It could change the rules -- among others, term limit of public officials, policy against political dynasties, authority of national government over local governments -- even without public debate and formal approval by the people as required in the Constitution.

Definitely, administration under a RevGov could speed up the key charter changes, including the shift to federalism and right of elected officials to stay in office for as long as what would please them.

A plan, not a plot

A revolutionary government, being an assault on the Constitution, is supposed to be planned in secret. It's mostly a plot, a conspiracy. And it is done against the will of the republican and democratic government in place, not with its consent and blessing. It ousts present rulers, not keeps them in power under the new authority.

About 300 people reportedly met at Clark Freeport to organize MRRD-NECC. That, before a smaller group began promoting it like a new business product: publicly and with a lot of hype.

Story continues

Organizers must have asked the president beforehand. It is not known if he had given them his blessing, although some time ago he publicly floated the idea of a revolutionary government. And the MRRD-NECC organizers sought a meeting with the top police official and maybe the high military commander. Asking the public officials to dump a Constitution that they're bound to defend would be weird. But it's hardly novel.

Oath to Constitution

Government officials, elected or appointed, from the civilian persons in authority to the men and women in uniform, are bound by oath to uphold and protect the Constitution. You don't publicly invite them to abandon the Constitution and set up a banana government with the same rulers in place.

It's awkward. And it flirts with the criminal act of inciting to sedition, with the incumbent law enforcers complicit to the crime. The law on inciting to sedition (Art. 142 of the Revised Penal Code) may have enough to cover it: statements or writings that "lead or tend to stir up the people against the lawful authorities or to disturb the peace of the community." And could there be rebellion, when the "revolt" is staged with the help of the sitting rulers themselves?

But they may be experimenting with some untried theory in law, as they did in past. Those prosecuted may argue that they're not inciting people to sedition when the president himself, with the cooperation of the police and military, would submit to, and agree to lead, the new form of government. And who'd sue them in the first place?

Plan hooted down

To the credit of those in the hierarchy of power affected, lawmakers, PNP and AFP top officials, the opposition -- along with church leaders, lawyers groups, and others in the private sector -- have slammed the proposal. Even Malacanang stepped back a bit, saying it would focus on the more pressing problem of the pandemic. But it didn't quell the discussion: people are free to voice their opinion about it, spokesman Harry Roque said.

Some administration critics are being blunt. Former senator Antonio Trillanes IV asked, "What the f**k, what are these guys smoking?" Vice President Leni Robredo tagged it "malaking kalokohan, a big joke."

Others call it as it is: The Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) says the RevGov is "repugnant to constitutionalism." The Catholic bishops group CBCP says it is "immoral," apparently referring to the present leaders benefiting from the rules they themselves would change.

Small comfort

A Duterte partisan was heard on radio, saying people should be glad that those who're advocating for a revolutionary government are being "open and transparent" about their proposal.

Small comfort though. That does not guarantee that they are not plotting other moves towards the same goal.
If you're looking for a multi-bagger, there's a few things to keep an eye out for. One common approach is to try and find a company with returns on capital employed (ROCE) that are increasing, in conjunction with a growing amount of capital employed. Basically this means that a company has profitable initiatives that it can continue to reinvest in, which is a trait of a compounding machine. So when we looked at ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP) and its trend of ROCE, we really liked what we saw.

What is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?

For those that aren't sure what ROCE is, it measures the amount of pre-tax profits a company can generate from the capital employed in its business. To calculate this metric for ConocoPhillips, this is the formula:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.047 = US$2.8b  (US$63b - US$4.1b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to June 2020).

So, ConocoPhillips has an ROCE of 4.7%. On its own, that's a low figure but it's around the 5.8% average generated by the Oil and Gas industry.

See our latest analysis for ConocoPhillips

roce

In the above chart we have measured ConocoPhillips' prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you're interested, you can view the analysts predictions in our free report on analyst forecasts for the company.

What The Trend Of ROCE Can Tell Us

Even though ROCE is still low in absolute terms, it's good to see it's heading in the right direction. The figures show that over the last five years, returns on capital have grown by 69%. That's not bad because this tells for every dollar invested (capital employed), the company is increasing the amount earned from that dollar. In regards to capital employed, ConocoPhillips appears to been achieving more with less, since the business is using 43% less capital to run its operation. If this trend continues, the business might be getting more efficient but it's shrinking in terms of total assets.

Story continues

In Conclusion...

In a nutshell, we're pleased to see that ConocoPhillips has been able to generate higher returns from less capital. Astute investors may have an opportunity here because the stock has declined 12% in the last five years. So researching this company further and determining whether or not these trends will continue seems justified.

One more thing, we've spotted 4 warning signs facing ConocoPhillips that you might find interesting.

While ConocoPhillips may not currently earn the highest returns, we've compiled a list of companies that currently earn more than 25% return on equity. Check out this free list here.

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. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.



Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
With hundreds of thousands of protesters flooding the streets of Minsk in recent days as Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka put the military on high-alert warning of a foreign-backed plan to oust him, the standoff in Belarus shows no signs of subsiding.

The embattled strongman has been back-footed by the massive, unprecedented demonstrations demanding he resign in the wake of the August 9 presidential election the protesters view as fixed.

And with nowhere else to turn to, he has gone looking to the Kremlin for support.

Lukashenka -- in power for more than a quarter-century -- has in recent days even accused European Union countries of plotting a "color revolution" to topple him and warned that NATO is massing troops on Belarus's western border.

The military alliance flatly rejects the charges in what appears an attempt by Lukashenka to elevate his full-blown domestic crisis into a geopolitical one reminiscent of standoffs between Russia and the West across the former Soviet Union.

Despite Lukashenka's rhetoric, the events in Belarus remain domestically driven.

EU flags and ambitions of Western integration have not been a factor in the demonstrations that have spread across the country, with protesters and opposition figures such as exiled presidential candidate Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya repeating that the protests are motivated by the desire to freely choose a leader and are not part of an anti-Russian or pro-Western movement.

But with poor relations and high suspicions between Moscow and the West, the EU and Russian responses to ongoing developments in Belarus are being shaped -- for better or worse -- by past experiences in Georgia, Ukraine, and Armenia.

"Everybody knows the Russian playbook after 2014 and is concerned about it, but the West and Russia are being far more careful now than before," Paul Stronski, a former director for Russia and Central Asia on the U.S. National Security Council who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told RFE/RL. "The protests in Belarus are not geopolitical and the West isn't looking to change that."

Walking A Tightrope

European leaders have been quick to express solidarity with the protesters, but the EU has offered a calibrated response to the crisis that suggests the bloc's leaders are wary of antagonizing the Kremlin to avoid military intervention by Russia on Lukashenka's behalf.

While eager to defend democratic values, fair elections, and the rule of law, European leaders have hedged their response. EU foreign ministers have called the election results fraudulent, agreed on sanctions, and demanded the release of protesters unlawfully detained, but have not backed the opposition's call for new elections.

Instead, the bloc has urged dialogue between the government and the opposition to foster a "peaceful transition of power."

"The tone from the EU suggests a clear acknowledgement of a Russian role in the outcome and that there is still some hope that it's possible to engage with Russia constructively," Joerg Forbrig, the director for Central and Eastern Europe at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, told RFE/RL.

Crisis In Belarus Read our ongoing coverage as Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka continues his brutal crackdown on NGOs, activists, and independent media following the August 2020 presidential election, widely seen as fraudulent.

Finding a constructive solution with Russia on the stalemate in Belarus would involve the EU overcoming the lack of trust that cratered relations with Moscow following its 2014 annexation of Crimea and the ensuing war in eastern Ukraine.

But the events in Belarus vary markedly from those in neighboring Ukraine in 2014, which were a direct response to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's decision to abandon European integration and reforms in favor of the Moscow-led Eurasian Union. This led to the EU and Ukraine's future political orientation becoming a central factor of the protest movement that led to Yanukovych's departure and Russia's intervention.

In Belarus, the situation remains different, with the focus on the erosion of rights and opportunities during Lukashenka's 26-year reign as president.

This has led some commentators, such as former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, to argue that the 2018 revolution in Armenia -- where mass demonstrations led to the resignation of longtime President Serzh Sarkisian -- is a more instructive example for Belarus.

In an August 18 op-ed, Bildt said Armenia offered the best template for current developments in Belarus, where fresh elections could pave the way for a new government. While Armenian protests pushed out Sarkisian, the new administration led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has retained the country's pro-Russian policies.

"To ensure a smooth process, Belarus's external orientation should be kept off the table," Bildt wrote. "The election and broader struggle must be solely about democracy within the country, and nothing else."

"Russia doesn't always intervene if a previous partner loses an election. They can live with power transfers and Armenia is the best recent example of that," said Forbrig. "Russia is still shaping its approach in Belarus and has shown in the past it can be adaptable."

Looking For A Toolbox

But unlike Sarkisian in Armenia, Lukashenka shows no signs of leaving office on his own accord and shouted at protesters during a visit to a factory that "there will be no new election until you kill me."

Despite the nationwide protests against his rule, Lukashenka still appears to enjoy overwhelming support among the military and security services and, unlike in Armenia, the Belarusian authorities had no qualms about using force against their citizens, violently breaking up demonstrations, detaining people in mass, and reportedly torturing protesters.

With Lukashenka making it clear he intends to hang on to power and no clear path towards a political transition on the horizon, the EU has few other policy options than the sanctions and support that it has already offered.

Maryia Sadouskaya-Komlach, a Belarusian journalist and program coordinator at Free Press Unlimited, told RFE/RL that she believes the EU was not making enough use of the preexisting mechanism it already possesses, in particular the European Endowment for Democracy (EED), an organization founded by the bloc to support civil society and political activists. The EED has been notably quiet during the weeks of protest in Belarus, which Sadouskaya-Komlach thinks sends a signal of indifference to the protesters.

Meanwhile, sanctions appear to be the main option in the EU's toolbox, but with Belarus being sanctioned in some form or another by Europe since 1997 and not having changed course by now, the utility of the sanctions seems limited. "The EU wants to use targeted sanctions as a symbol of its tough actions against Lukashenka, but it is instead a symbol of its policy failure," Sadouskaya-Komlach said.

A Confused Kremlin

The current situation is also a policy conundrum for the Kremlin.

Regardless of how the current situation ends, Moscow will retain significant influence in Belarus.

The economy relies heavily on Russia, which effectively subsidizes Minsk with low-cost oil and gas shipments and the two countries are well-integrated -- a union that the Kremlin is keen to deepen.

Furthermore, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lukashenka have a famously tense relationship, with the Belarusian president eroding his own standing with the Kremlin by resisting Putin's push for deeper economic union.

But Lukashenka's dominance of Belarusian politics creates a quandary for Russia.

Unlike in Ukraine, where the Kremlin has spent decades cultivating pro-Russian politicians, parties, and oligarchs, Belarus has few alternatives for Moscow to support. Similarly, Tsikhanouskaya, who is in exile in Lithuania, and her campaign, which allowed members of Belarus's traditional Western-funded opposition to dominate the postelection Coordination Council, are viewed with suspicion by Moscow.

"This can't be a situation like Armenia because Lukashenka won't give up," Angela Stent, a former U.S. national intelligence officer on Russia and a professor at Georgetown University, told RFE/RL. "I can't see him giving up peacefully, let alone negotiating him leaving the country or holding new elections."

For the time being, Moscow appears to be backing its problematic partner in Minsk as he tries to cling to power.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently warned that the situation in Belarus was a "continuation" of the tug-of-war between Russia and the EU over Ukraine in 2014 and claimed that the thus far very peacefully protesting opposition wants "bloodshed."

"No one wants a repeat of Ukraine in 2014 and no one wants to do anything that will provoke Russia," Stent said. "There is a very limited toolbox for the West here."
Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have visited citizen of Armenia Narek Sardaryan, who is in Azerbaijan.

In early August, the International Committee of the Red Cross visited citizen of Armenia Narek Sardaryan, who is in Azerbaijan, and provided the opportunity to exchange family letters in accordance with procedures, Head of Communication Programs for the Delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Armenia Zara Amatuni told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Earlier, the news service of the National Security Service of Armenia had reported that on July 8, 2020 at around 11:00-12:00 resident of Nerkin Khndzoresk village of Syunik Province, citizen of Armenia Narek Sardaryan (born in 1990) got lost while grazing his cattle in the pastures of the administrative territory of Gorayk village of Syunik Province of Armenia, which borders Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of the Republic of Azerbaijan. It turned out that Sardaryan got confused after searching for his lost cattle and crossed over to the territory of Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic where he was captured. Sardaryan is described as a patriot, a calm and diligent person who has never had problems with local self-government bodies and law-enforcement authorities. Sardaryan has a family and children who he takes care of. Currently, measures are being taken to help return him to Armenia.
Documents and court records from the England and Wales high court show that Abdulrahman Bashir lied in his denial of being sentenced to jail by the court.

This newspaper had reported how Mr Bashir, an oil magnate and the Chief Executive Officer of Rahamaniyya Oil and Gas, was sentenced to 10 months imprisonment in the United Kingdom.

Documents obtained by PREMIUM TIMES and the records available on the UK courts website showed that in February, Justice Butcher ruled that Mr Bashir be imprisoned for ten months for breaching multiple orders of the court in a pending suit instituted by Sahara Energy Resources Limited.

He was sentenced for disobeying multiple orders of the court, including Justice Robin Knowles judgement of August 1, 2019 and Justice Bryans order of September 6, 2019.

The court also gave a binding indication that the sentence could be reduced to six months if Mr Bashir complied with the relevant order which had previously been breached.

Mr Bahirs company, Rahamaniyya Oil and Gas Ltd, was fined 500,000 while its manager, Adebowale Aderemi, was fined 10,000.

Those orders required Rahamaniyya Oil and Gas Ltd to comply with requests for the release of 6,400.69MT gas oil to Sahara Energy Resource Ltd or its agent from Rahamaniyya Oil and Gas Ltd, Jetty 6.436181, Ibafon, Kirikiri Waterfront, of Aero Maritime Street, Apapa, Lagos, Nigeria (the Terminal).

He breached those orders by failing to allow, or procure Rahamaniyya Oil and Gas Ltd or its servants or agents to allow, the release of the said gas oil from the Terminal, court documents read.

In December 2018, Ultimate and Sahara entered into a settlement agreement, in which Ultimate confirmed that the value of gas oil that had been delivered was USD 10,760,728.77, and agreed to make a series of monthly payments for the gas oil.

Court records showed that some payments were made, in consequence of which some 8,566.469 metric tonnes of gas oil was released to Ultimate. Ultimate, however, reneged in implementing the terms of the settlement agreement in full by making all the payments due.

After various warnings, on May 10, 2019, Sahara terminated the settlement agreement, notifying Ultimate that its agent, Asharami Synergy Plc, would take delivery of part of the remaining gas oil from the terminal.

Thereafter, various attempts made by Sahara to obtain delivery of the gas oil, including issuing an order on 12 July 2019 for the entirety of the 6,400.69 MT of the gas oil which remained at the terminal, failed.

The release order was not complied with and this led to the lawsuit.

It should be noted that Mr Bashirs prayer for the conviction to be set aside in June was unsuccessful. His excuses were thrashed by the UK court.

Denial

Meanwhile, Mr Bashir, in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES on Saturday, agreed that there was a deal struck with Sahara Energy Resources but denied the claims of the UK lawsuit, saying the CEOs of the two firms received the news with surprise.

We wish to clarify that such claims are false, harmful and misleading, as both firms met today at Sahara Energy Corporate office in Abuja to strengthen their mutual business relationships, the company said, quoting Dada Awosika, Mr Bashirs lawyer.

Below are the documents:

Nigerian-oil-magnate-jailed-in-UK

U-turn

When contacted on Saturday evening, Mr Awosika later confirmed the existence of the jail sentence and the pending lawsuit.

He refused to affirm or deny the comments credited to him by the company in the earlier publication.

The external solicitor, who was employed by Rahamaniyya group in the heat of the crisis, said there is an agreement with the aim of quashing the jail sentence and fine in England.

Mr Awosika further explained that the company did not take the lawsuit seriously because the UK court does not have jurisdiction on the matter.

Rahamaniyya took legal advice that the court in England does not have jurisdiction on the case because the product is here in Nigeria. We paid money for arbitration. They requested the money for the oil.

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He noted that there was an arrangement in December to pay for the product but Mr Bashirs company reneged on the contract because he could not raise the money then and the pandemic dealt a blow on the company finances.

Mr Awosika told PREMIUM TIMES that, in respect to the latest agreement, Mr Bashir paid back $1.4 million between June and July.

We entered an agreement in June and this man started paying back with an understanding that if we are able to pay everything back, we will now quash the payment of the fine and the conviction. Rahamaniyya has paid back 1.4milliion US dollars and Sahara has agreed that if you pay me, well all go back to English court to say he has finally complied.

Mr Awosika said he could not immediately provide the evidence of payment because he was not authorised to do so.

The management of Sahara Energy Resources limited could not be reached to comment for this story as multiple telephone calls and texts sent to the companys official lines were not responded to.
Matt Hancock is said to be planning an astonishing rise in the number of coronavirus tests carried out, with a target of four million per day to get the economy back on track.

The Health Secretary is said to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year.

Currently the NHS and private testing centers have a capacity of around 326,000, although because of the current level of infection, only around 190,000 are being carried out.

A massive expansion of the testing regime is seen as a key requirement of easing lockdown measures further as the public continue to be wary of a return to workplaces.

But the scale of the plan will raise some eyebrows after Mr Hancock's struggles throughout the pandemic to dramatically up the testing rate.

His test and trace scheme, run by Tory peer Baroness Harding, has also come in for major criticism.

'It is at an embryonic stage and it's going to take a hell of a lot of work. It is nicknamed Operation Moon Shot because that is what a moon shot is like: it seems very hard but it's important and we want to land it,' a source told the Telegraph.

The Health Secretary is said to be preparing what has been dubbed 'Operation Moon Shot with the aim of increasing daily tests by around twelve-fold by early next year.

A massive expansion of the testing regime is seen as a key requirement of easing lockdown measures further as the public continue to be wary of a return to workplaces

Brits back sharing a UK vaccine breakthrough with the world Britons would rather make a Covid-19 vaccine available everywhere than keep it exclusively for people in the UK, a survey has suggested. A poll commissioned by anti-poverty organisation The ONE Campaign showed the British public reject 'vaccine nationalism', with 82 per cent saying knowledge should be shared with other countries. Among those polled, 76 per cent think when a Covid-19 vaccine is found it should be made available for all countries at the same time, with 77 per cent saying there should not be a difference between when rich and poor regions get treatment. Seven in 10 believe health workers and doctors in other countries should get the vaccine first, even if healthy people in the UK have to wait a bit longer. The polling also showed that people want to fight Covid-19 on a united front, with 73 per cent saying they will only feel safe when every country has eradicated the disease. Romilly Greenhill, UK director of ONE, said: 'While this virus thrives anywhere, it threatens people everywhere. 'British people clearly understand this global pandemic demands a global response. It simply won't work for each country to go its own way. These findings show the public rejects vaccine nationalism. 'The public believe that when a Covid-19 vaccine is available, it should be shared equitably.' :: The data was gathered from interviews with 2,083 UK adults online between August 14-16. Advertisement

The paper reported that he was seeking a testing scheme that could identify those without symptoms, who are often missed by current regimes.

Last week he promised a widespread screening programme by Christmas to give the country back its 'freedom'.

Ministers are confident that faster tests - providing results in as little as ten minutes - can be used to fight any resurgence of Covid-19 this winter.

Entire towns or cities will be tested if they suffer a rise in infections. Staff at workplaces which have been found to be breeding grounds for the virus - such as food factories - could also be subjected to regular screening.

In addition, data-tracking will be stepped up to find flare-ups sooner and prevent city-wide lockdowns. The Office for National Statistics' Covid-19 infection survey, carried out in England every fortnight, will be increased from 28,000 participants to 150,000 by October, before expanding further to cover 400,000 people.

The two-year project is set to cost 750million - but ministers hope this will represent good value if it leads to more targeted action and fewer large outbreaks.

Unveiling the plans last week, Mr Hancock pledged tests would be carried out on 'an unprecedented scale' in 'one of the biggest expansions of surveillance testing we have ever seen', starting immediately. He said ministers were 'working as fast as we can' to 'make it the norm that people get tested regularly, allowing us therefore to allow some of the freedoms back'.

Earlier this month, two tests which give results in 90 minutes were rolled out with the hope that they could eventually be deployed nationwide.

DNANudge won a 161million order for 5.8million tests, the equivalent of 27 per swab. The other test is made by Oxford Nanopore.

It came as Boris Johnson pleaded with parents to send their children back to the classroom as he takes charge of the drive to get all schools open next week.

The Prime Minister warned that pupils risk permanent damage to their future life chances if they continue to stay away.

Mr Johnson, who has returned to No10 following his summer break, is in a race against the clock to get schools ready and persuade parents they are safe in time for the start of the new term.

The Government faces a big test to deliver on its promise to get all children full-time back following its shambolic handling of A-level and GCSE results.

Many pupils in England have not been to class since March, when schools were closed except to vulnerable children and those of keyworkers.

In a video posted on Twitter this morning, the Prime Minister said: 'It's absolutely vital that pupils get back into school in September.

'It's vital for their education, it's vital for their welfare, it's vital for their physical, and indeed, their mental wellbeing. So let's make sure that all kids, all pupils, get back to school at the beginning of September.'

Mr Johnson continued: 'I think parents are genuinely still a bit worried about their children contracting coronavirus. All I can say is the risks are very, very, very small that they'll even get it, but then the risk that they'll suffer from it badly are very, very, very, very small indeed.

'I think it's vital that parents understand that schools are safe and that teachers have gone to great lengths to get schools ready. They've been doing it all throughout the pandemic, by the way.

'Lots of schools have been open and looking after kids very, very successfully and will take steps to ensure that groups aren't mixed up, that we have washing of hands and all the other disciplines you need to prevent spread of the virus.'
There is no release date yet for Laabam, bankrolled by Vijay Sethupathi and P Arumugakumar.

The trailer of Vijay Sethupathis Tamil film, Laabam, has been released. Directed by SP Jananathan, Laabam has Sethupathi playing the role of a social activist who bats for agriculture and is on the verge of a revolution.

The trailer delves into the grim reality of framers in the state and, also talks about how corporate and industrial sectors plunders the resources for their own benefits. Sethupathi's character brings puts up a fight for the farmers and encourages them to fight for their hard-earned profits. However, while his actions cause a stir with the economy, they also directly affect the interest of the powerful (one essayed by Jagapathi Babu), who would rather put a halt on this revolution.

Check out the trailer here

Early this month, Sethupathi had shared stills from dubbing sessions for the film. The photos see technicians wearing masks and gloves in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

Laabam also stars Shruti Haasan, Kalaiyarasan, Prithivi Rajan and Harish Uthaman in pivotal roles. The film marks Haasans return to Tamil film industry after two years. She was last seen in the 2017 Tamil actioner Singam 3.

Bankrolled by Sethupathi and P Arumugakumar, the makers are yet to announce a release date for Laabam.
By PTI

BERLIN: In an avant garde move, Berlinale festival directors on Monday announced the 2021 edition of the movie gala will be merging the performance awards, paving the way for a gender neutral category.

Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, director duo behind the Berlin International Film Festival, also said the next year's showcase will be held as a "physical" event in accordance with the then-applicable rules and regulations, thus ensuring the greatest possible security for all guests amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We believe that not separating the awards in the acting field according to gender comprises a signal for a more gender-sensitive awareness in the film industry," the directors said in a press release on the festival's official website.

A hybrid model - blend of online and offline activities - is intended for the European Film Market (EFM), the release further stated.

"Festivals and markets are places of encounter and communication. This applies to the public as well as to the industry. We see an important and unique feature of festivals in their lively relationship with the audience. In times of the corona pandemic, it has become even clearer that we still require analogue experience spaces in the cultural realm. We are pleased that festivals with physically present audiences are slowly taking place again around the world, and we wish our colleagues much success," added Rissenbeek and Chatrian.

Going forward, the awards for the best actor and best actress will be replaced by a "Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance" and a "Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance" each awarded on a gender-neutral basis.

In addition, the "Silver Bear Jury Prize" constitutes a further new awards category.

The former "Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize" was suspended in 2020 due to new findings about the position of the first Berlinale director, Alfred Bauer, under National Socialism, and this prize will no longer be awarded in the future.

According to the release, the evaluation of an external specialist historical study on Alfred Bauer will be available in late summer and then published.

Moreover, it has already been decided that in 2021 the section Generation will only show feature-length films with a running time of at least 60 minutes - and no short films - in its two competition programmes Generation Kplus and Generation 14plus.

This year's edition of the Berlinale ran from February 20 to March 1, before the coronavirus pandemic hit the world.

The festival will take place from February 11 to 21.
Carlos Martinez spent nearly 48 years as president and CEO of the National Veterans Outreach Program, developing it from scratch and expanding its work beyond Vietnam vets to those who served in later wars and also needed help.

Described as a humble yet visionary leader, he was buried Monday at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery along with his wife, Rita.

Martinez, 73, died of COVID-19 on Aug. 4, just three weeks after Rita Martinez, 74, died July 13 from the same cause.

Carlos was a veterans veteran and touched and saved many veterans lives, said Larry Romo, national commander of the American GI Forum of the United States, from which the outreach program began as a spinoff project in 1972. He was well-respected in the veterans community, locally, statewide, nationally.  He was a dear friend.

Pallbearers brought Martinezs flag-draped casket and placed it before a crowd of more than two dozen at Shelter No. 3, then brought his wifes casket forward.

The Fort Sam Houston Memorial Services Detachment fired three rifle volleys and a bugler sounded taps as those in the shelter and across the street saluted. In the silence that followed, a pair of airmen slowly folded the American flag that had covered Carlos Martinezs casket.

The nationally chartered GI Forum membership organization and the Veterans Outreach Program are different entities. The founder of the GI Forum, Dr. Hector G. Garcia, created the outreach program to serve returning Vietnam veterans. It has helped with housing support, job placement, emergency needs and other services.

A lot of people get confused with that aspect, but were two different organizations. I always explain to people theyre like our parents, the GI Forum, said Yolanda Saurez, senior vice president of the outreach program. They created this organization, so I always refer to them as our parents.

The program had changed more than 450,000 lives over 43 years, Martinez wrote in a 2015 opinion piece in the San Antonio Express-News.

Martinez was a very unassuming person, and the program he developed was a model for the country, said Queta Rodriguez, a regional director for FourBlock, a career readiness nonprofit that helps veterans. She got to know him when she was the Bexar County veterans service officer.

It just really had a huge, huge impact on the lives of veterans and their families, she said.

Martinez was born in San Antonio and grew up on the West Side, attending Lanier High School. His parents, Sotero and Margarita Martinez, were from Mexico and met in an orphanage. He grew up in a rough neighborhood but took pride in his rise, working during the day while earning a bachelors degree in management at night from Our Lady of the Lake University.

He later got a masters degree in business administration there, going to school on weekends and working during the week.

Martinez served as an Air Force crew chief, once getting orders for Vietnam that were canceled.

He would tell me how he remembers when he and his friend were walking home and he heard shots and they ran because they were not sure what was going on, said Saurez, who worked with Martinez for 43 years, starting out as his secretary. He would talk about things like that as he was growing up, and he was very proud of the fact that he succeeded in what he did.

Martinez took the job of president and CEO when the outreach program began in 1972. He served on the Veterans Affairs Departments Advisory Committee on Homeless Veterans and its Womens Veterans Advisory Committee, among other panels, and was a member of an advisory council for the Military Service Initiative of the George W. Bush Institute. He was on the board of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans at the time of his death.

Saurez noted that he discussed veterans issues with five American presidents: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Martinez is survived by two sisters, Carmen Berlanga and Alicia Martinez; a brother, Henry Martinez; and daughters Angela D. Alderete and Cynthia J. Rosas.

An obituary on Porter Lorings website said some of Martinezs deeds werent well known because he was also a very humble and modest man.

He was a very kind person, he was a visionary and intellectual individual, Saurez said. When I started working with him, we had a $100,000 grant with the city of San Antonio, and today were over a $20 million organization with five subsidiary corporations under the parent corporation. With his 48 years in service he was  the one that created all this.

Romo, the GI Forum commander, who also is a retired Air Force Reserve lieutenant colonel and a former director of the U.S. Selective Service, recalled how Martinez helped homeless veterans in the San Antonio area.

Not only did he touch veterans, but when they built Haven for Hope, the city of San Antonio went to see how the (GI Forums veterans outreach program) runs the Veterans Residential Center for guidance in their plan for Haven for Hope, he said. Heaven has a new angel.

Sig Christenson covers the military and its impact in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Sig, become a subscriber. sigc@express-news.net | Twitter: @saddamscribe
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 16:25:46|Editor: huaxia

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Fire is seen at the al-Arabi gas pipeline in the countryside of Damascus, Syria, on Aug. 24, 2020. An explosion in the al-Arabi gas line in the countryside of Syrian capital Damascus at dawn on Monday caused a massive power outage in the country, state news agency SANA reported. (Str/Xinhua)

DAMASCUS, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- An explosion in the al-Arabi gas line in the countryside of Syrian capital Damascus at dawn on Monday caused a massive power outage in the country, state news agency SANA reported.

The gas line was exploded between the towns of Dumair and Adra in the countryside of Damascus, causing a huge fire and a power outage in the country as a result of a decrease in the gas feeding power stations.

Workers immediately started working to put down the fire and assess the damage.

Oil Minister Ali Ghanem said the explosion was the result of a "terrorist" act.

The minister said maintenance work started, adding that power stations will be fed with gas in the next hours to return the situation to normal.

For his side, Electricity Minister Zuhair Kaharboutly said the electricity started gradually returning to Syrian areas including Damascus and vital institutions like hospitals.

The explosion is the sixth of his kind to target the same gas line during the more than nine-year-long war in Syria.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported the explosion, saying it caused no human casualties but big damage.

It said the electricity outage blanketed most Syrian provinces.

The UK-based watchdog group said no party has claimed responsibility for the attack but previous similar ones were carried out by the Islamic State group. Enditem
The senate of the University of Lagos (UNILAG) will on Monday meet to appoint an acting vice-chancellor as recommended by President Muhammad...

The senate of the University of Lagos (UNILAG) will on Monday meet to appoint an acting vice-chancellor as recommended by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, the VC of the institution, was earlier removed by the varsitys governing council during a meeting presided over by Wale Babalakin, its pro-chancellor and chairman.

The council had thereafter named Omololu Soyombo as the acting VC in a decision that a member of the council claimed ridiculed the varsitys rules.

According to Premium Times, over 140 professors signed for an urgent senate meeting, where the signatories exceeded half of the senates 230 members and four times more than the required 25.

It is understood that the emergency senate meeting is one of the decisions contained in the federal governments recommendations announced on Friday night to address the crisis in UNILAG.

Buhari had directed Ogundipe and Babalakin to step aside and allow the senate of the university to nominate an acting vice-chancellor.

Reacting to the directive in a statement on Saturday, Soyombo said he had stepped down with immediate effect in obedience to the directive of the president.

The news of the setting up of a special visitation panel to the University of Lagos by the federal government was received in the evening of Friday, 21st August 2020. The government also directed the university senate to nominate an acting vice-chancellor for the university, for confirmation by the governing council, he had said.

With this, I am stepping down, with immediate effect, as acting vice-chancellor of the university.
Donald Trump Jr retweeted a right-wing commentator on Monday who called attention to the prior criminal convictions of an unarmed black man who was shot by police over the weekend.

A widely-spread video shows Jacob Blake, 29, attempting to enter his SUV while a police officer is following him closely. As Mr Blake goes to enter the vehicle, the police officer grabs his shirt and fires seven times into his back. Mr Blake goes limp and falls onto his SUV's horn.

Mr Blake's three sons were in the back seat of the vehicle and witnessed the shooting.

Police said they were called to the scene to respond to a domestic disturbance, but it is unclear who called the police and what was happening prior to the video. Two officers are on administrative leave over the incident.

On Monday, right-wing commentator Andy Ngo wrote a tweet pointing out Mr Blake's criminal history. Mr Ngo has built a following by travelling to cities where civil unrest is occurring and reporting on events in a way that feeds into the right-wing culture war narrative championed by Mr Trump and his allies.

In Mr Ngo's tweet, he points out that Mr Blake at one point was arrested for pulling a gun on another patron at a bar. During the arrest, Mr Blake caused "a soft tissue injury" to a police officer, which Mr Ngo describes as "a history of assaulting police." He was charged with resisting arrest, carrying a gun while intoxicated, endangering safety-use of a dangerous weapon, and disorderly conduct.

Mr Ngo also referenced Mr Blake's past charges for a third-degree sexual assault and domestic violence. Neither of those crimes carry death penalties.

In addition to amplifying Mr Ngo, Mr Trump Jr also conflated protesting and rioting in a tweet on Monday in response to the unrest sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin.

The president's son posted a video that showed lines of burning vehicles in the lot of a flaming car dealership, and wrote "Peaceful Protests."

The video, posted by another right-wing Youtuber, includes the caption "Up close look at the car dealership fire set by BLM arsonists in Wisconsin."

Protests and some rioting, which included looting and arson, broke out in Kenosha, Wisconsin following the shooting of Mr Blake. As of Monday, there is no evidence that suggests the arsonists were connected to the Black Lives Matter movement at either an organisational or ideological level.

Mr Blake is recovering in the hospital and is expected to survive.

The video of the shooting was released by attorney Ben Crump, who is also representing the family of George Floyd.

The state's governor, Tony Evers, released a statement Sunday concerning the shooting.

"Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin," he wrote. "While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country."

Mr Evers said he stands with the protesters.

"We stand with all those who have and continue to demand justice, equity, and accountability for Black lives in our community," he said. "And we stand against excessive use of force and immediate escalation when engaging with Black Wisconsinites."

Mr Trump Jr is an obedient booster of his father's talking points and culture war rhetoric. On Twitter, he regularly posts condemnations of protesters and uses fear mongering language to appeal to the party's base.

"Folks, this is coming to a town near you if Democrats win in November," he wrote on Monday on a video he retweeted that shows a burning business. "Is this still "peaceful protesting?" Has a single democrat denounced this anarchy yet? It is up to you if you want this in your backyard or not."

The vast majority of protesting and the much smaller number of incidents which have involved looting or property destruction have occurred in cities, and even then only in specific sections of the cities.

He has also railed against antifa - which Trump-world uses as a catch-all to demonise street-level protesters - and once even directed his followers to a fake antifa Twitter account in an attempt to prove antifascists were going to commit acts of violence.

It later was discovered the group Mr Trump Jr was referencing was a white nationalist group posing as an antifascist group.
Jerusalem, Aug 25 : US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US will continue to ensure Israel's military edge in the Middle East under any future weapons deals involving the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

"The United States has a legal requirement with respect to qualitative military edge. We will continue to honour that," Pompeo said on Monday while making joint statements in Jerusalem alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Xinhua news agency reported.

Netanyahu said he was reassured on the issue by the state secretary.

Pompeo said he hoped that other Arab countries would follow the United Arab Emirates and form diplomatic ties with Israel. "I am hopeful that we will see other Arab nations join in this," Pompeo said.

A US-brokered deal to normalize ties between Israel and the UAE was announced on August 13.

Last week, local Israeli media reported that the White House is planning a "giant" sale of F-35 warplanes as part of the deal.

Pompeo arrived in Israel on Monday, kick-starting his five-day trip to the region. He has meetings scheduled also with Israel's Alternate Prime Minister and Defence Minister Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi.
nView Health, a provider of software solutions that help identify, diagnose and monitor patients with behavioral health conditions, announced today that it will be presenting at the annual International Society for Pediatric Innovation (iSPI) Leadership Summit. This virtual event is being held today and hosted by Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center. Thomas Young, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder of nView Health, will be presenting on innovation in pediatric mental health assessments during the conference.

The online summit will gather pediatric hospitals from across the world to exchange ideas and discuss their innovations, successes and challenges. In a series of highly interactive discussion groups, iSPI hopes to encourage collaborative problem-solving in the area of pediatric health.

Mental health and physical health go hand-in-hand, said Tiffani Ghere, CHOC Children's and International Society for Pediatric Innovation. Supporting innovative technologies and solutions that will help ensure access for every child to mental health treatment is a great example of why the iSPI network exists."

nView Health provides digital DSM-V behavioral health screeners, assessments and follow-up trackers for both adults and pediatric patients. The digital M.I.N.I. Kid module helps healthcare providers more accurately identify, diagnose and monitor adolescents who are at risk for the 24 most common and clinically relevant psychiatric disorders and disorder subtypes. The nView pediatric solutions include a digital screener, an evidence-based interview and automated monitoring surveys so pediatric behavioral health patients can get the care they need faster.

According to Jim Szyperski, CEO of nView Health, The mental health challenges our nation has been facing for decades has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, and childrens hospitals are looking for answers. Engaging with iSPI members through this forum and within the context of pediatric innovation, we will be able to more rapidly advance real solutions that address the many behavioral health challenges that are overwhelming our pediatric populations today.

About nView Health

nView Health offers behavioral health technology that enables healthcare professionals, researchers, and educators to rapidly deliver the right diagnosis, resulting in the right treatment at the right time. Its signature product, the digital M.I.N.I., allows providers to deliver validated diagnostic behavioral health screens, interviews, outcome tracking, and billable services to patients in a simple, easy-to-use platform. To learn more, please visit http://www.nview.com or follow nView on LinkedIn or Twitter.

About iSPI

The International Society for Pediatric Innovation (iSPI) was formed to address the unmet need for an open global network focused on innovation leadership. With 30+ member institutions and partners from around the world, iSPI aims to be the global convener for pediatric innovation, enabling exploration, fostering collaboration, and driving insightful change to transform child health. iSPI provides a unique opportunity for pediatric leaders to be at the cutting edge of technological influence and creative energy through the exchange of ideas, data, knowledge and experience. To learn more, please visit http://www.ispi4kids.org.
Samira Salem

CUNA Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Samira Salem spoke to Associations Now recently about CUNAs plans to ensure DEI is a consistent part of the credit union movement, CUNAs report to the board on advancing service to Black communities and more.

Salem said that DEI is in credit unions DNA, as they were created to provide opportunities for populations and communities that wouldnt otherwise have access to the financial system. With the recent events and protests around the country, CUNA found it especially important to detail measurable ways it, and credit unions, can commit to action.

Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic, Salem said CUNAs DEI plans are more important than ever.

We know COVID and the recession are having a disparate impact on vulnerable populations, Salem told the publication. This is the time to double down on DEI efforts for credit union employees and their members. It lines up well with our philosophy of people helping people.
New Delhi:

A Delhi court granted bail to chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday in a case of allegedly giving false information in an affidavit filed in the run up to 2013 assembly polls.

Metropolitan magistrate Ashish Gupta granted the relief to Kejriwal, who appeared in court in pursuance to its direction, on a personal bond of Rs 10,000 and posted the matter for next hearing on April 7, 2017.

The court had on August 31 exempted the CM from appearance for one day while directing him to personally appear before it on Saturday, considering that bail proceedings were pending.

Kejriwal was allowed exemption by the court on the ground that he could not appear due to "exigencies of work and some important meetings and discharge of his duties".

The court had summoned Kejriwal in February this year on a criminal complaint filed by Neeraj Saxena and Anuj Agarwal on behalf of the NGO, noting that the politician had prima facie "willfully concealed" and "suppressed" his details in 2013 elections.

It had noted that there was "sufficient ground" to proceed against him on allegations that he had concealed his correct address and suppressed the market value of his property in his affidavit to the Election Commission.

Earlier, the NGO had approached Delhi high court with a plea seeking quashing of Kejriwal's nomination papers on the ground of "illegalities" in his affidavit.

High court had refused to entertain the plea and directed the petitioners to approach a magisterial court for remedy.

The NGO in its petition before the high court had alleged that Kejriwal had violated provisions of the Representation of the People Act by submitting an affidavit which had incorrect details of his assets and income at the time of filing of the nomination.

The offence under section 125-A of the Act entails a punishment of six months jail term and/or fine or both.

The complaint was filed under several sections of RP Act and IPC for the alleged offences committed by him before holding the office of the chief minister of Delhi.

The complaint alleged that Kejriwal falsely gave his Delhi address so as to qualify for contesting polls in the capital though he was living at Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh. This prima facie amounted to willful concealment, suppression and furnishing of false information, it was claimed.
I think its definitely a noble cause that RCare has. I can definitely see how this product would help a vulnerable part of the population. It feels good knowing this will help keep those people safe.

RCare, Inc., maker of nurse call and monitoring solutions, is collaborating with Alfred University to test its new geo-fencing system, GEO. Integrated with RCares nurse call system platforms, GEO is designed for residents in memory care. Less restrictive than a locked ward, the system allows residents greater independence and autonomy, automatically sending an alert to caregivers if a resident moves outside of defined safe areas.

But COVID-19 created challenges for the companys product release. During the pandemic, RCare needed a creative but effective solution for beta testing our new products, said Nick Garofoli, Director of Operations and Technology at RCare. We were ready to test GEO, but a beta with one of our communities wasnt an option during the pandemic. Garofoli, a 2009 graduate of Alfred University and recipient of the schools Marlin Miller Outstanding Senior Award, received an email from University President Mark Zupan seeking proposals for student internships, and immediately saw the possibilities.

RCare worked with Alfred to create a unique student internship opportunity. They hired Aanu Adeloye, a senior at Alfred who is majoring in Mechanical Engineering and Physics, and minoring in Mathematics. His job was to work closely with RCare to reproduce on campus the situations that a resident would experience in a community. Because of the pandemic, Adeloye had found himself unable to return to his home in Nigeria for the summer. When the opportunity to work with RCare came up he jumped at it. I think its definitely a noble cause that RCare has. I can definitely see how this product would help a vulnerable part of the population. It feels good knowing this will help keep those people safe.

Alfred University has a long history of partnering with area companies, which Garofoli says has been beneficial for the students and for the companies. David Gottfried, Alfred Universitys Deputy Director of Business Development agrees. We do a lot with industry at Alfred. We place a great deal of importance on giving students the experience of solving meaningful challenges for a company. It provides our students with opportunities to get hands-on experiences in projects that could help them in their future careers.

Internships and co-ops are a vital component of Alfred Universitys learning and future success for students at Alfred University, according to Jodi Bailey, Alfred Universitys Director of Marketing. She said that last year 71 students participated in an internship. Students find them extremely helpful in defining career goals as well as identifying personal strengths they have in the workplace, and providing them with better preparedness for the world of work.

With GEO, senior communities can define customized geographical safe zones for residents who need them. Caregivers receive an alert if the resident moves outside the safe area. The system is ideal for residents who need extra monitoring, without locked doors or the embarrassment of sirens or alarms. It is scheduled for release later this year.

About RCare

RCare is a global provider of nurse call and personal emergency response systems for the entire spectrum of eldercare and senior living. Our components integrate into a variety of healthcare communication systems to create efficient and verifiable responses to medical emergencies. RCare works together with distribution partners to build individualized, flexible and seamless systems to enhance both caregiving and resident quality of life. Contact info@rcareinc.com or call 585-671-4144.

About Alfred University

Founded in 1836, Alfred University has a long-standing reputation for excellence. An outstanding record of academic achievement and numerous campus activities combine to create an enriching and satisfying college experience emphasizing applied and experiential learning. More than 1,600 undergraduate and 300 graduate students choose from over 50 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Comprised of the College of Business, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, School of Art & Design, Inamori School of Engineering and Performing Arts Division, Alfred University has developed a rich and diverse set of curricular offerings, structured without barriers so that students can mix and match programs to help them meet their educational goals. Alfred Universitys research and outreach programs provide an important complement to the Universitys academic offerings. These programs range from scientific research and product development, to community and business support, to the development of new art forms. http://www.alfred.edu
(Photo : Tech Times)

According to a Nielsen study, 92% of consumers globally trust recommendations from family and friends instead of through paid forms of advertising. This basic statistic proves that the most powerful asset for any brand is their existing customer base. Yet, many corporations spend millions on advertising to lure new audiences, while overlooking the potential to market to their current customers.

Word of mouth, also referred to as WOM, at its core, is essentially the process of influencing and encouraging satisfied consumers to endorse the business. According to marketing expert and owner of The Lighting Studio, Miami, Gustavo Tello, "By providing a quality product or service and engaging with the consumers, it creates a positive experience that motivates them to promote the same to their network either in person or on social media. This creates a domino effect and also proves to be a cost-effective technique to generate new leads and increase conversions."

Sharing his success with the word of mouth strategy, Tello discusses the key points that ensured his customers would recommend the studio in the most trustworthy context:

Build Trust

Trust plays a significant role as it directly influences the intention of the buyer. It is imperative to build your reputation and brand loyalty online and offline with the existing patrons as potential customers trust recommendations of consumers who have had an epic experience with the brand. 90% of people read reviews or ask around before deciding whether or not to make the purchase. A positive review or recommendation gives the necessary push that results in a purchase. It also helps to ask satisfied consumers for written feedback and reviews as user-generated content bolsters the business's reputation on social media and helps with gaining exposure.

Engage with Consumers

Engaging with consumers makes a positive impact on their psyche. Be it by initiating a friendly conversation and having a pleasant attitude or through contests, quizzes, and hashtags on social media to encourage interaction, re-tweets, and shares to skyrocket popularity. Other useful techniques are listening to the consumers to make them feel acknowledged and valued and promptly replying to comments and feedback.

Referral Programs

Another form of word of mouth advertising is to establish a referral program. Offering an incentive to consumers such as discount coupons, money, etc. in return for a referral or liking and sharing posts, nudges consumers to participate, resulting in increased leads and sales for the business.

Generate buzz

Social media is dominated by influencers who use their status to generate online buzz around the product/service and convince their followers who implicitly rely on them to trust the brand. Collaborating with influencers is an effective strategy to reach the target audience, build awareness, and go viral.

Emotional Incitement

Brands that incite an emotional response in their consumers are more likely to gain from the word of mouth marketing than their counterparts. Consumers love to share their experiences or promote something that resonates with their beliefs and values. For instance, posting about a social cause to show support provokes an emotional bond with the community and generates social media shares.

With a Master's degree in Business Administration and a career spanning 20 years, Tello's exceptional marketing expertise has helped him establish a successful relationship with his customers, enabling him to catapult his lighting studio into a profitable business. His advice to budding entrepreneurs, "In a hyper-connected world, it is crucial to connect with consumers rather than 'collecting' them, as favorable recommendations are far more compelling than a media advertisement."

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Renters organise eviction defence

On Wednesday, 12th August, the Renters and Housing Union (RAHU) held its first Eviction Defence forum. Speakers from Brisbane and Sydney shared ideas and experiences resisting eviction. A resident spoke from the public housing towers, which were placed into hard lock-down, and a presentation was given by a RAHU member on the political and economic position of landlords, real estate agents and renters. These efforts are part of the preparations for what is looking to be a very bleak October.

On the 29th September, the eviction moratorium in Victoria will be lifted. This situation may change as this paper goes to print. Regardless of whether the eviction moratorium is extended or not, the underlying problems with the housing market will remain until there is a fundamental restructure of property in this country. At the start of October, JobKeeper and JobSeeker, which are keeping millions of workers afloat, will be reduced. Employment prospects across the country have not improved, nor is there a Jobs Guarantee plan in place. The economic situation is looking dire. The ongoing struggle between the financial interests of property owners and peoples basic housing needs is increasing in intensity.

Renters are still struggling to negotiate rent reductions as landlords and agents ignore directions from state and federal government to negotiate in good faith and form partnerships. Landlords are dragging renters into Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) to attempt tenancy terminations (during the eviction moratorium) based on undefined terms in the temporary COVID-19 Omnibus changes to the Residential Tenancies Act. No fault evictions are continuing.

In this environment the need for eviction defence once again arises. In the 1930s the Communist Party of Australia formed the Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM), local bodies which formed Anti-Eviction Committees (AEC). UWM speakers would address lines of the unemployed while they were waiting to collect their rations (1930) or coupons (1931 onwards). The AECs would organise pickets and occupation of dwellings where the bailiff was attempting an eviction. They would keep these pickets up as alternate housing was organised for the occupant. At the time private bailiffs would be appointed by a court to carry out evictions. This changed in June 1931 when the police began to carry out joint operations with bailiffs. This is the situation which persists to this day.

Landlords are hoping there are still some people left with stable incomes as the real situation of our over-valued property market begins to be revealed. To retaliate for the shame of providing a discount on rent, tenants will be given the boot. Notices will be served so that landlords can ostensibly move back into the property or renovate (keep your eyes peeled for misuse of the HomeBuilder aka Kitchen Reno package). Large claims to bonds are already being made and these will escalate as landlords do whatever they can imagine to claw back some of what they lost.

A myriad of defence ideas were put by the speakers. These included naming and shaming agencies and landlords who are unfairly evicting tenants since landlords and agencies are sensitive to public-image damage and are unaccustomed to public scrutiny. Successful eviction resistance depends on community connections. Do you know your neighbours? Talk to them. On eviction day, sympathetic neighbours will be very important in providing community dissent to eviction. Homeowners can stand in solidarity with renters. Property owners contacting agents and telling them they will not conduct business with an agency based on eviction activity is powerful.

The final months of this year are going to be a melee of VCAT rulings, rising poverty and eviction actions. As renters, we can take grim solace in the fact that the value of the property market is falling. Until then we must organise.

Join RAHU www.rahu.org/join-rahu
How Can Universities Raise the Bar for Remote Learning?

Christopher Martin: A lot of us in the spring semester felt like, okay, we have to go fully online, and that means we have to create the exact classroom experience on the internet. So everybody assumed "Oh, I guess we need to use a Zoom or a GoTo Meeting for and meet at the regular time each and every week." And it turns out that that's not necessarily always the right way to do it. Of course, for some classes, it's necessary to always have a live session or at least sometimes to have a live session. But focusing on course design, and whether or not it has to be live all the time, reconceptualizing, and thinking about it like, "What is the outcome that you're desiring for the course and are there other ways to achieve that?"

So, for instance, my brother Dave has just finished his first year of college (Go Dave!), and he's taken a public speaking course. And when he told me about that, I assumed, "Oh, they probably just spun up a Zoom session every week and gave presentations." And he said, "No, we used our Zoom sessions just to discuss best practices--what works, what doesn't work in public speaking. And then all the students actually recorded their public speaking presentations privately in their own homes, and then uploaded them into the LMS where students were able to go in on their own time and provide commentary and actually point out timestamps where 'There's something you said at this point that, you could have maybe done better,' or 'I really liked how you did this at this point.'"

And students were able to go back and watch themselves, which I think was a really interesting way to do it. I think it's much more helpful in that case to learn that way, because you're replaying your own public speech that you might've only given once and not been able to rewatch. So, things like that, just thinking about formatting and knowing the tools well enough to be able to provide suggestions for courses and for faculty who are looking to do this, to recreate their classes in an online setting.

Eric Nisly: Going forward, we're really looking at a plan for over four years: every classroom, having recording capabilities and conferencing capabilities too. In two-and-a-half months, Notre Dame has pushed up the start of the fall semester by two weeks now. We need to have every room to be able to be a hybrid. Some students will be able to be on campus, and we're expecting some students won't be able to. So with the expectation that every, every professor needs to be able to be recording every session, that's going to be a pretty intense lift here over summer to be equipping a few hundred classrooms of going from 15 to 400 locations to be doing records. The storage and the data contracts all have to be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, depending on which one you're talking about for the load. We've already scaled Zoom to be able to handle the conferencing, but the records of Zoom meetings like we're doing with this one, recording it for later, when you do a session with your class, you need to be able to record it.

We also just built out a full global classroom--that's what we've labeled it. There is another version--I'm not gonna say which university, cause I'll probably get it wrong--they had what they call the "Wow room," and we looked at some of that, and made it to where a professor can walk in, there's an actual operator there, large multiple screens to be able to see the students, to be able to interact with them more natively--as well as you can be natively in video. So you have large monitor on one side where everybody's speaking, then a large monitor being able to show who's talking and a large Microsoft Surface so that they can be doing more diagramming as opposed to needing to have a lightboard and changing camera angles.

But being able to integrate more interactive tools in one location and a more dynamic teaching process for those higher-end classes that need more interaction with the professor and with the content to be able to discuss the parts like formulas and outcomes and diagramming so that there is a much larger interaction. So we've equipped some of our studios that way. And then every classroom is going to be equipped with lecture capture and video conferencing.

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With 161 new recovered cases in the past 24 hours, the recovery rate of the Covid-19 positive cases in Manipur reached 68.92 percent on Sunday.

The recovered cases are from Central Armed Police Force (CAPF) and other Covid care centres of the state, as per the latest data available with the state health authority on Sunday.

So far, 3,616 persons out of the states total Covid-19 positive cases (5,246) have recovered from various COVID care centres in the state.

Also read: A day after hitting 1 million mark, 800k tests on Saturday

The number of active cases is 1,608. The recovery rate is 68.92 percent, says Dr Kh Sasheekumar Mangang, additional director and spokesperson of the health department in a press release on Sunday.

In the past 24 hours, 67 persons (39 male, 22 female) from the general population and 47 from CAPF were confirmed as new Covid-19 positive cases, the release said. They are from VRDL (Virus Research & Diagnosis Laboratories) of RIMS, JNIMS, Raj Medicity, Babina Diagnostics Centre, Imphal West RAT, Imphal East RAT, Bishnupur RAT, Ukhrul and Thoubal. The patients come from areas like Imphal West, Imphal East, Bishnupur, Chandel, Noney, Ukhrul, Kakching and Thoubal, the press release said.

Seven persons out of the general population are returnee from other states whereas the rest 60 are locals without any significant travel history. They are being shifted to the Covid Care facilities, it said. All necessary medical precautionary measures like containment and contact tracing are in place.

Today, there is no report of death. The cumulative number of deaths is 22, the release said. The state had reported its first death due to Covid-19 on July 29 while the first case was registered on March 24.
Joanna Williams, founder of the textile library Kneeland Co., has been one of L.A.s best-kept secrets for eight years, sourcing vintage Celia Birtwell fabrics, Mexican rebozo fringe and Pakistani swat embroidery as inspiration for brands including Isabel Marant, Topshop, Nike and Ralph Lauren Home.

Now she is showcasing her eye for style in a new e-commerce shop.

The site is a curation of Williams treasures, or rarities, as she calls them, from the colorful storefront she opened in March adjacent to her textile library in L.A.s West Adams neighborhood.

Among the items on offer are hand-sculpted floral candlesticks from Oaxaca (shes sold more than 500 via Instagram this summer, in four sizes starting at $35 each); hand-block print tablecloths and napkins by L.A. designer Gregory Parkinson; whimsical candelabras and plates by British ceramist Claudia Rankin, who is inspired by Picasso and Sonia Delaunay; embroidered pillows from Lebanon-based Kissweh; lavender grosgrain ribbon-tied espadrilles from Es Par Ta in Barcelona, and more.

With a wicker elephant basket in the window, a bench full of colorful embroidered pillows, and tabletops covered in pattern, the shop is a visual delight that Williams had been wanting to incorporate into her business since she moved from her original location in Atwater Village late last year.

I was open one week, then we got the stay-at-home order, she said of how the lockdown slowed her roll. Everyone was at home, and with my textile business, I didnt know what would happen. I had a couple of Zoom meetings and requests via e-mail. But then I started thinking, What more can I do with the store?'

She turned to Instagram to start telling the stories behind the objects and accessories she had selected for the brick-and-mortar store, and what they meant to her. It changed everything, I started selling like crazy. People are discovering so much on Instagram. They are sitting at home, and instead of clothes and shoes, they want to surround themselves with meaningful things that bring joy and happiness.

Story continues

Williams had no plans to do e-commerce. But I didnt expect to be packing and shipping so much, and eventually it just made sense to have this other facet of the business, she said, adding while the textile side has picked up slightly in recent months, she certainly isnt traveling 70 percent of the year like she used to sourcing fabric and trimmings. To replenish product for the store and web site, she has been relying on existing relationships with artists, artisans and designers in Mexico, India, Europe and elsewhere.

And for those in L.A., the physical location is also open by appointment. Stop in and Williams will share a peek at her archives in the library, including 18th-century Chinese embroidered silk panels and 19th-century block prints. At the end of the day, brands still need ideas and inspiration. If anything, they might cut down on budget and buy less  maybe twice a year rather than three or four times. But a lot of my small designer friends are being even more thoughtful about what they are making, she said. They want to do less but more meaningful and beautiful.

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ADRA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 24th August, 2020) A large amount of gas has burned during an explosion that took place in the Syrian Adra industrial zone near Damascus, Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Ali Suleiman Ghanem said on Monday.

Earlier in the day, Syria's official news agency, Sana, citing Ghanem's statement, reported an explosion at a pipeline in the south of the country, leaving entire Syria without power. Minister of Electricity Mohammad Zuhair Kharbutli said that specialists managed to restart some power stations, provide power to vital facilities, and begin gradually restoring power to several provinces.

"The volume of gas [moving through the pipeline] is about seven million cubic meters a day [over 247 million cubic feet]. I think that a quite significant amount [of gas] has burned  all that was being pumped before the pipe was shut down," Ghanem told journalists.

The Russian Center for Syrian Reconciliation said it will monitor repairs at the site.
(TNS) - Marco, now a Category 1 hurricane, and Tropical Storm Laura are both forecast to hit the Louisiana coast next week at hurricane strength, according to the National Hurricane Center..Hurricane Marco formed in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday afternoon as Tropical Storm Laura continued churning through the Caribbean Sea.Lauras forecast has it at hurricane strength on Tuesday and Wednesday.Based on the latest forecast track, each storm would be making landfall at hurricane strength in Louisiana, west of New Orleans, with Marco landing Monday afternoon, and Laura about 60 hours later.If Laura and Marco became hurricanes simultaneously in the Gulf of Mexico, it would be an unprecedented occurrence, though, based on the latest advisorys paths and intensities, it is a long shot.As of 12:30 p.m., Marco was about 475 miles southeast of Layfayette, La., and was moving north-northwest at 14 mph with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph. A Category 1 hurricane forms when sustained winds are in the range of 74 to 95 mph.By late Saturday night, the National Hurricane Centers forecast track for Tropical Storm Laura had shifted west, putting the entirety of Florida outside the storms predicted path, though the Keys are expected to feel its impact.A tropical storm watch remained in effect Sunday for the Florida Keys from Ocean Reef to Key West. A tropical storm watch means that tropical storm conditions are possible within the watch area, generally within 48 hours.Tropical Storm Lauras sustained winds had increased to 50 mph by Sunday morning.However, Laura is not forecast to strengthen much until Monday when it enters the Gulf of Mexico, the NHC said in its 11 a.m. advisory, though it is expected to bring swells, rainfall and/or heavy wind in portions Cuba, the Bahamas and the Keys. Hispaniola could see life-threatening flooding and storm surge.Residents should continue to monitor the storm and be prepared for severe weather, 20-30 mph winds with gusts up to 50 mph, and strong squalls, said Shannon Weiner, emergency management director of Monroe County, which includes the Florida Keys.Hazardous weather is expected in the Keys early Monday through early Tuesday, Weiner said Sunday.Lauras center was located just west of the west coast of Haiti, according to an 11 a.m. forecast discussion, which also stated that upper-level winds and warm Gulf waters will be conducive for further strengthening once Laura passes over the Caribbean Islands.Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said in the 11 a.m. Sunday advisory that Laura was moving toward the west-northwest at around 21 mph. According to the advisory, the storm was about 95 miles southeast of the eastern tip of Cuba, where it is expected to make landfall Sunday before entering the southeastern Gulf of Mexico late Monday.A Hurricane Hunter aircraft investigated Laura and found it had become ragged and disorganized. By late Saturday, forecasters shifted the storms track west enough to take the whole of Florida out of the predicted potential path.Both storm tracks are unusually close to each other. If and how the two storms will interact with each other are highly uncertain, forecasters said.The Cuban government issued a tropical storm warning for its eastern provinces and the Bahamas issued a watch for Andros Island, while previous warnings for Laura had been posted for Puerto Rico, the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, Haiti and the Bahamas and several others in the eastern Caribbean.Heather Carruthers, the mayor of Monroe County, which includes the Florida Keys, declared a state of emergency on Friday, ordering the mandatory evacuation of all live-aboard vessels, mobile homes, recreational vehicles, travel trailers, and campers. The order was rescinded Sunday morning, citing the latest forecast.Also on Friday, Gov. Ron DeSantis sent a letter asking President Donald Trump to declare a pre-landfall emergency in 34 counties, including Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.Laura will bring swells, rainfall and/or heavy wind in portions of Hispaniola, Cuba, the Bahamas and the Keys this weekend.South Florida residents should continue to monitor its progress.Marco is the 13th named storm of the hurricane season. Tropical Storm Laura was the 12th storm of the year, matching the record for the most number of tropical storms before September. The only other time that happened was in 2005, the year of Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma.The next named storms of 2020 are Nana, Omar, Paulette, Rene, Sally, Teddy, Vicky and Wilfred.Staff writers Wayne K. Roustan, David Fleshler and Keven Lerner contributed to this report.Click here to have breaking news alerts sent directly to your inbox.2020 the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)Visit the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) at www.sun-sentinel.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Ontario is poised to expand the COVID-19 guidelines for social circles, allowing families to have more than one group of 10 people for close contact as children prepare to go back to school in September.

I see the pressure to do that, chief medical officer Dr. David Williams told a news conference as the Ministry of Health reported 105 new cases on Monday, down from 115 cases on Sunday, 108 on Saturday, and 131 on Friday.

With students returning to classrooms, families will effectively have more than one social circle, and expanding the concept will help families keep better track of potential exposures, making it easier to track down any cases that develop, Williams said.

He has asked experts on the provincial governments public health measures table to come up with detailed guidelines for Ontarians to have more than one circle in a planned way.

If youve been good at monitoring your one circle, how can you do it with two, three, four or five circles? Williams added.

We want to set that up and ready for school. If youve got multiple children, youve got multiple cohorts to manage.

While the popular perception is that a low level of new cases and COVID-19 fatigue led to people ignoring the advice to have just one social circle of 10 people without pandemic precautions such as physical distancing, the doctor said people have become fairly adept adept at shifting their circles and taking timeouts in between to make sure they are virus-free.

The new infections Monday mean Ontario has 1,036 people fighting active cases of the novel coronavirus. The number topped 1,000 over the weekend for the first time since early this month after falling as low as 891 active cases on Aug. 13.

The new cases reported Monday are concentrated in Toronto, Peel and Ottawa with just 20 throughout the rest of the province, mostly in the southwest. There were no new cases in northwestern Ontario or eastern Ontario, with the exception of the nations capital, according to the Ministry of Health data gathered at 4 p.m. Sunday.

Locally, 30 of Ontarios 34 public health units are reporting five or fewer cases, with 19 reporting no new cases, Health Minister Christine Elliott said on Twitter.

Toronto had 226 cases, Peel had 233 and Ottawa had 152. The age category with the most active cases is people in their 20s, with 274 infections.

Ministry of Health figures showed 40 people across the province in hospital for COVID-19, including 12 in intensive care and seven of them on ventilators to breathe.

Labs throughout Ontario processed 18,790 tests on Sunday.

A Star compilation of data from health units at 5 p.m. Monday found 160 new and probable cases since the same time Sunday, but the number includes cases from health units that dont report new infections over the weekend. There have now been at least 43,597 cases since late January with 2,834 deaths.
Higher cost of financial risk 'normal and necessary'

From:ChinaDaily | 2020-08-24 06:45

The recent increase in cost of financial risk is "both normal and necessary", considering the massive impact of COVID-19 on the economy, and the financial sector is expected to make a greater contribution to further boost economic recovery, according to a regulatory official.

By the end of June, China's outstanding balance of nonperforming loans to small businesses with a total credit line of up to 10 million yuan ($1.45 million) per borrower, namely, the balance of nonperforming "inclusive loans"or loans to such small businessesreached 0.4 trillion yuan, up 9.25 percent from the beginning of this year. The nonperforming inclusive loan ratio was 2.99 percent, 0.88 percentage point higher than the NPL ratio of various types of loans.

"The current nonperforming inclusive loan ratio is close to the level of tolerance for NPLs we set previously," said a spokesman for the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission.

"However, considering that the novel coronavirus outbreak is a disaster of the century, the financial sector still needs to contribute more to support complete economic recovery. In addition, ensuring security in enterprises and stabilizing employment will help to secure banks and stabilize finance. Therefore, the recent increase in cost of financial risk is both normal and necessary."

Inclusive finance has made great progress in China in terms of quantity and quality.

"Our inclusive finance is gradually realizing precision irrigation (reaching more precisely to targeted customers and businesses) through reform and opening-up, technology empowerment and strengthened management. The credit risk is generally controllable," the spokesman said.

Financial institutions in the banking sector are stepping up efforts to dispose of nonperforming loans and increase provisions for possible loan losses.

"Based on the actual situation this year, the banking sector plans to dispose of about 3.4 trillion yuan of nonperforming assets for the whole year, up by 1.1 trillion yuan from last year. As a result, China will further strengthen the risk resistance ability of its banking sector," the spokesman said.

More pressure expected

Zeng Gang, deputy director-general of the National Institution for Finance& Development, said China may come under the pressure of rising financial risks in the next two quarters, especially in the first quarter of next year, as risk may further arise from delayed repayments on inclusive loan principal and interest. But it will depend on the progress of pandemic control and the economic recovery.

"Further strengthening policies to support small businesses is a crucial part of risk control in the future," Zeng said.

"Apart from responding to these policies, banks should also step up technology innovation to reduce costs effectively with the help of the internet, big data, and combined online and offline operations. This will also help banks identify the clients that are worthy of lending to through more precise identification and evaluation of risks based on big data."

At the same time, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission will fulfill its commitment to opening-up, continue to steadily raise the level of opening-up of the banking and insurance sectors while ensuring financial security, keep improving regulatory measures and enhance the capacity of financial management and risk control by opening-up.

The regulator has given approval to foreign banks and insurers to establish nearly 100 institutions of various types in China since 2018.
Sambal : , Aug 24 (IANS) The Uttar Pradesh State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (UPSCPCR) has taken cognizance of an 18-page suicide letter, addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The 16-year-old student, who had allegedly killed herself on the eve of Independence Day raised concerns over various issues such as corruption, deforestation, rising pollution, among others, and stated that these pressing matters have compelled her to commit suicide.

The state child rights committee has now sent a letter to the Prime Minister, requesting him to discuss the issues mentioned by the Class 10 student, in his 'Mann Ki Baat' radio show.

Dr. Vishesh Gupta, president of the UPSCPCR said: "We have taken cognizance of the issues mentioned by the student. She raised some valid issues and requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take note of it. The letter has been forwarded to the Prime Minister's office." The student died in her village in Sambhal. Three days later, the Sambhal Police had recovered a suicide note from her house which was addressed to the Prime Minister.
The trial run in the Sonamura-Daudkandi inland waterways protocol route is scheduled for the first week of September, chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb informed on Monday.

The Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority has given permission for the trial run of the voyage from Daundkandi (Cumilla) to Sonamura via river Gomti. The river was chosen for having sufficient water for movement of boats and small ships.

Historical moment of Tripura! Trial Run of Ship is to be conducted in first week of September. Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority has given permission for trial run of voyage from Daundkandi (Cumilla) to Sonamura via river Gomti, tweeted the chief minister.

During the trial run, 50 MT cement will be transported in a barge from Dhaka to Sonamura. This is the first time any kind of goods will be reaching Tripura by ship, said the CM.

He also expressed his gratitude towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi, shipping minister Mansukh Mandavia and Bangladesh government for their cooperation.

The Sonamura-Daudkandi route was included in the Indo-Bangladesh Protocol (IBP) routes that was signed by both High Commissioner of India in Bangladesh Riva Ganguly Das and shipping secretary of Bangladesh Mohammad Mezbah Uddin Chowdhury at Dhaka this May.

According to a survey conducted by the Bangladesh authorities, 89.5 kilometres out of 90 kms of the Sonamura-Daudkandi protocol route falls in Bangladesh and 500 metres in India.

Earlier last month, a floating jetty on Gomati river was launched as part of the Indo-Bangladesh international inland waterways project.

According to the plan, small boats having capacity to carry 50 tonne of goods would start moving through this route to Bangladesh with the setting up of a temporary jetty soon.
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise (Psalm 51:17).

Its quite possible you have heard this verse of Scripture before. You may have even applied it in some way or fashion to your life or circumstance. To gain true understanding of this verse it requires an answer to the question: what is a contrite heart and spirit?

Psalm 51:17 says God wont despise this, so clearly this is something we should have or desire to have. If there is something that we can offer to God that he wants, than that is absolutely worth investigating. I believe grasping the full meaning of this verse will require us to consider it from two perspectives. So lets get started.

What Is a Contrite Heart and Spirit?

Perspective 1  Surrender to Gods Will

There are a few key words in this verse. Lets examine what they mean.

Broken - Comes from the Hebrew word meaning to break or break in pieces.

Contrite - Comes from the Hebrew word meaning to crush.

Heart  Comes from the Hebrew word meaning inner man, mind, or will.

Spirit  Comes from the Hebrew word meaning breath or wind.

Lets put all of these definitions together so we can understand what a contrite heart and spirit really is. A contrite heart or spirit is when a persons inner man or will has been broken so they no longer run after the things they want, but surrender to the things that God wants. A broken heart or will says I will no longer do this my way or on my terms but I will surrender to your ways. This type of heart, that is fully surrendered to God, he will never turn away.

I know conceptually that may make sense to you. However, how does this look in real life application? In a practical sense this may mean surrendering your career choices, your ministry choices, your marriage choices, basically running every aspect of your life through the sieve of Gods purpose and plan for your life.

What is also important in this verse are the words my sacrifice. Sacrifice only works if you are willing to offer up something of real value to you. If what you are offering has no value, then it is not a sacrifice. Consider this question for a moment. Are you willing to lay down everything you are and everything you want, which includes your hopes, dreams, plans, and your future?

When you come to the place where you can lay down everything you want to take on what God wants for your life, you are offering something of real value to God. Is it any wonder that he would not reject this type of sacrifice?

What Is the Context of This Verse?

Prospective 2 - Brokenness over Sin

Understanding the context of this verse will give you another way of looking at this verse and will help you understand even more what a contrite heart and spirit is. Psalm 51 was written after Nathan had confronted David with his sin. If you are not familiar with the story of David and Bathsheba, go read 2 Samuel 11-12.

Long story short, David committed adultery with Bathsheba and she got pregnant. He then had her husband killed to cover the tracks of his sin. Since no sin is hidden from God, Nathan confronts David. In his repentance, David penned Psalm 51.

Within this Psalm you will see another answer to the question of what a contrite heart and spirit is. Psalm 51 is all about David being broken over his sin against God, which is another aspect of a contrite heart. How do you respond when you have sinned? David was crushed in his spirit when confronted with his sin. This is the response to sin that God desires in you and me.

I also want you to consider Psalm 51:16:

You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.

God doesnt just want you going through some ritual that you think will appease him, especially if it is dealing with repentance. Simply put, God doesnt just want outward transactions; God wants inward transformation.

If we are not careful we can make the whole experience of serving God transactional. You read your Bible, go to church, pay your offerings and do all the transactional things that are required. The problem is the transactions can become ritualistic, almost like a checklist. Even though you may check the boxes, there is no real transformation. This is not what God is after. He desires true transformation which only comes when there is a change on the inside, aka within the heart or spirit of a man or woman. This is what God is looking for. When you come with a heart that is crushed and broken over your sin and have a true desire for repentance, God will never despise that.

Let me put it in even plainer language, God doesnt want your stuff or anything you can do for him more than he wants you and your heart. Dont bring your service, your gifts, your time, your talents, or your treasure unless you have brought your heart first. When you lead with bringing your broken heart, you are bringing the type of sacrifice that God will not turn away.





Photo credit: Getty Images/Predrag Images

How Do Other Translations Word This Verse?

When you look at this verse in other translations you begin to see this verse in its complete meaning. It brings full clarity and answers the question of what a contrite heart and spirit is. Here is Psalm 51:17 in a few different translations:

AMP - My [only] sacrifice [acceptable] to God is a broken spirit; A broken and contrite heart [broken with sorrow for sin, thoroughly penitent], such, O God, You will not despise.

CSB - The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God.

CEV - The way to please you is to feel sorrow deep in our hearts. This is the kind of sacrifice you wont refuse.

ERV - The sacrifice that God wants is a humble spirit. God, you will not turn away someone who comes with a humble heart and is willing to obey you.

MSG - Going through the motions doesnt please you, a flawless performance is nothing to you. I learned God-worship when my pride was shattered. Heart-shattered lives ready for love dont for a moment escape Gods notice.

TPT - The fountain of your pleasure is found in the sacrifice of my shattered heart before you. You will not despise my tenderness as I humbly bow down at your feet.

What Does It Look Like for Us to Have a "Contrite Heart and Spirit"?

When you consider Psalm 51:17 there are two questions I want you to think about. I believe how you answer them will give you some insight into whats going on in your heart today.

1. What is your attitude towards sin in your life?

2. What is your attitude towards following Gods plan for your life?

What God desires is a heart that is contrite. A heart that is crushed over any presence of sin in your life and surrendered to the plan he has for your life. If you will live your life with these two things at the forefront, if you will allow them to guide how you live and how you make decisions, you will put your heart in a position that God will never despise.

More and more as I read Scripture, I realize that its not about just getting the facts right or gathering information. Dont get me wrong, it is extremely important to get the facts and information right because they do matter. What I am discovering however is that facts alone are not enough. After all, didnt the Pharisees and teachers of the laws have all the facts?

What God is after is not just Christians who know the facts, who can quote all the verses, who may even know all the Greek or Hebrew. All that is great and wonderful. However, as wonderful as that is, what God is after is your heart. The truth is if your heart is not yielded, broken, and contrite, then knowing the facts doesnt mean that much. I challenge and encourage you to be a person who knows the facts but more importantly who yields their heart. At the end of the day the yielded heart, which is your sacrifice, is the type of heart that God will never turn away.

Photo credit: Getty Images/Katarzyna Bialasiewicz
MBABANE  The shot Mangwaneni resident claims he was from the shops and was not part of the protestors.

Sanele Sukati (25) is currently admitted to the Mbabane Government Hospital after he was shot by police officers during the demolition of alleged illegal structures at Mangwaneni last Friday. He said an X-ray report showed that the rubber bullet was lodged in his ear and doctors said they would not remove it until the swelling subsided. According to Sukati, he was on his way home from the shops to buy bread when he was hit by what he believes was a stray bullet. Sukati said upon witnessing a group of residents and police officers littered around the area, he tried to negotiate his way through. However, he said while trying to pass through, the police, under the Operational Support Services Unit (OSSU), began shooting. They also fired teargas canisters at the crowd of more than 1 000 people.

Bullet

Sukati said he was hit by the rubber bullet close to his left ear and he fell to the ground. According to Sukati, he was traumatised by the incident and wondered what had happened.

He said he later realised that he had been shot and remained on the ground until some of the residents came to his rescue. Ncamsile Matsebula, who is the victims mother, said she was disturbed by the incident. Matsebula claimed that after the shooting, police did not bother to take her son to the hospital but a good Samaritan from Mangwaneni did. Instead, she said police refused to take her injured son and hurled insults at the residents who were insisting that they should take the injured Sukati to the hospital.

She said she was informed of her sons shooting incident while at the market place as she was a vendor. She said on the fateful day, she woke up and went to the clinic as she was not feeling well. Upon her return, she stated that she received the news of her sons shooting and immediately rushed to the hospital where she found him in bed. Matsebula said what worried her was the fact that her son was not a violent person and ever since the protest began at Mangwaneni, he had never been part of the crowd. She said her homestead was not even affected by the impasse between the residents and the Municipal Council of Mbabane.
On Thursday, the LA County Superior Court stated that there would be no court order that prevents Grace Community Church from holding their weekly indoor worship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jenna Ellis, a representative of Thomas More Society and attorney of Grace Community Church stated that LA county has been hounding Pastor MacArthur and his church. Prior to this report, they had sought to shut down the church three times and will continue to do so. At this point, Ellis regarded LA County's actions as a violation of constitutional rights.

As of last Sunday, the court held Grace Community Church in contempt of court after their in-person worship. In addition, the county fined the church a total of $20,000 ($8,000 in fines and attorneys' fees and $12,000 in fines for violations of court).

"Pastor MacArthur is standing firm that church is essential and has no plans to yield to this tyrannical board, which is clearly defying the constitution's mandate to protect religious liberty."

To uphold Pastor MacArthur's decision, Sun Valley Church, one of the campuses of Grace Community Church, has been holding in-person worship for the past four weeks regardless of the governor's lockdown orders. Ellis provides the reasoning, stating that Church is considered as essential.

In response to LA County's actions against Pastor MacArthur and Grace Community Church, Grace Community Church filed a lawsuit against the restrictions set in place, accusing the government of restricting gatherings selectively. The lawsuit compares the treatment of its religious gatherings compared to the recent protests against police brutality in Los Angeles.

"As His people, we are subject to His will and commands as revealed in Scripture," stated MacArthur, joined by the pastors and elders of the church. "Therefore, we cannot and will not acquiesce to a government-imposed moratorium on our weekly congregational worship or other regular corporate gatherings. Compliance would be disobedience to our Lord's clear commands."

Pastor MacArthur went on to say that he isn't surprised by the actions of the County and the opposition they face. His reasoning is that as a congregation they will always have to fight as Satan will "find all kinds of ways to try to silence the Church."

"The Church in America has been so caught up in pragmatism; it has drunk the Kool-Aid of trying to devise a religion that non-religious people will like and accept, that it's afraid to be courageous because it might offend somebody," he concluded."
Spurred by dissatisfaction with the University of Virginias pandemic response, a group of UVa employees is announcing Monday that they are forming a union and want officials to reconsider their plans for the fall semester.

The group of employees currently is mostly made up of graduate student workers. The union, part of United Campus Workers, also would include undergraduate student workers, faculty and staff, including those in the UVa Health System.

[United Campus Workers-Virginia] was formed over the summer as a direct result of growing dissatisfaction with the universitys repeated sidelining of student and worker input when developing its pandemic response, organizers said in a news release.

State law bars the university from recognizing the union but doesnt prevent employees from unionizing. Employees involved with the effort said they hope to put public pressure on UVa officials to support changing to law to allow collective bargaining for state employees. UVa staff members previously had a union from 2002 to 2008.

UVa employs about 28,000 people, according to its human resources website. Organizers didnt say how many would be eligible to join the union or how many support the effort.

Last year, a group of undergraduate student workers threatened to strike and explore unionizing if their working conditions didnt improve. That threat was called off because state law bars strikes among state employees and they would have been fired for doing so.

Evan Brown, a doctoral student in the biology department and member of the unions steering committee, said the group mostly consists of graduate students but they do have some staff, faculty and undergraduate employees on board.

We want to illustrate that were trying to look out for everybodys interests, he said.

Brown said a key issue among employees is safety and health concerns related to the return of students. Some employees have said they felt forced to work on Grounds when they werent comfortable doing so.

With students coming in, everybody is worried about getting coronavirus, he said, adding that going online shouldnt mean lost wages for employees.

He said he didnt feel like he had a voice in the decisions made for the fall semester.

Organizers said in announcing the campaign for an online-only semester that they are worried about a lack of transparency and unclear priorities from UVa leadership and the reliance on student self-governance to avoid a local outbreak.

Its clear that workers and staff concerns are not at the front of their mind, said Crystal Luo, a doctoral student in the history department and member of the steering committee.

More information about the groups demands regarding the fall semester can be found at unitedcampusworkers.org/virginia.

Some universities that have brought students back in recent weeks have had to switch to online classes shortly afterward after rising COVID-19 cases among students.

Organizers specifically cited the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as an example. UNC sent students home after 135 students tested positive during the first week of classes.

UNC is not that different from UVa, Brown said.  Theres no reason to think things will be different.

UVa officials have said they will announce by this Friday if they decide to change course for the fall semester.

Organizers also support demands for racial equity from other students groups.

It was important that we build on the work already being done here at UVa rather than reinventing the wheel, Luo said. We want the union to help bring people and resources together.

The employees are forming the union through United Campus Workers, an affiliate of the Communication Workers of America that has local chapters in eight states, mostly in the Southeast. With Mondays announcement, the employees are forming the ninth chapter and hope to expand to other public universities in the state.

Employees at the College of William & Mary started a union last year.

Luo said the UVa group chose to organize with United Campus Workers because of its track record at other public universities and ability to secure gains without official recognition.

University staff previously were represented by the CWA, but the Staff Union at the University of Virginia was shut down in 2008 after the group didnt meet the CWAs membership requirements.

Brown said this latest organizing effort is different because it includes all employees at the university.

If enough people join us and support each other and as long as we all share the vision that we want to improve this university, then we can improve it for the most exploited and disregarded employees, he said.

The union wouldnt cover contract workers, some of whom were furloughed when the university ended in-person classes in March. UVa later established a $2 million fund to help those contract employees following several news reports about the struggles they were facing. Those directly employed through the university continued to receive paychecks.

Luo said unionizing now gives the employees a way to speak as a group and talk about common interests and issues such as health care.

We want to have an honest conversation about how the university treats its employees, she said.

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A team at Jodrell Bank spotted a pattern in the bursts (Getty)

Astronomers have welcomed back a mysterious radio burst from space, which repeats in a regular pattern lasting more than 100 days.

Researchers at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Macclesfield spotted the radio burst (FRB 121102), which repeated in a pattern lasting 90 days, followed by a silent period of 67 days.

This month, other telescopes have detected new bursts from the same location  and theyre on schedule, Science Alert reported.

Astronomers have urged observatories to monitor the location to see if it follows its predicted pattern, which would mean the bursts cease later this month or in early September.

Fast radio bursts are bright pulses of radio emission just milliseconds in duration, but incredibly energetic, detected by telescopes on Earth.

Theories of what causes the bursts range from highly-magnetised neutron stars blasted by a nearby supermassive black hole to signatures of technology developed by advanced civilisations.

Read more: Astronomers close in on source of mysterious radio bursts from space

Another team from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, detected bursts between 2017 and June 2020, and predicted a "pattern" lasting 161 days, according to research uploaded to the pre-print server arXiv.

Researchers led by Pei Wang of Chinas National Astronomy Observatory monitored the location of FRB 121102 between March and July.

On 17 August, the team detected 12 bursts from the location.

Wang and his team wrote: With this putative period, the projected turn-off date is around August 31st - September 9th, 2020.

Alternatively, if the source is continuously on after the projected turning-off time, it suggests that the putative period of the source is not real or has evolution. We encourage more follow-up monitoring efforts from other radio observatories.

Earlier this year, researchers at Jodrell Bank analysed the Fast Radio Burst, or FRB, and found a cyclic pattern lasting 157 days.

Analysing 32 bursts, researchers noticed bursts observed in a window lasting approximately 90 days followed by a silent period of 67 days.

Story continues

Read more: What are fast radio bursts, and why do they look like aliens?

The presence of a repeating pattern could imply that the powerful bursts are linked to the orbital motion of a massive star, a neutron star or a black hole.

Dr Kaustubh Rajwade, of University of Manchester, who led the July research, said: "This is an exciting result as it is only the second system where we believe we see this modulation in burst activity.

Detecting a periodicity provides an important constraint on the origin of the bursts and the activity cycles could argue against a precessing neutron star."

Read more: Telescope detects 100 mysterious radio signals from billions of light years away

The existence of FRBs was only discovered in 2007 and they were initially thought to be one-off events related to a cataclysmic event such as an exploding star.

This picture partly changed once FRB 121102, originally discovered with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico on 2 November 2012, was seen to repeat in 2016.

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Michigan clerks are now accepting applications for absentee ballots ahead of the November election.

As part of the weekly series MichMash, public radio station WDETs Jake Neher and MLives Cheyna Roth talk with voter rights advocate, Aghogho Edevbie, the Michigan State Director for All Voting is Local, about how voters can make sure their ballots are counted.

You can listen to Neher and Roths full conversation with Edevbie on the player above.

Right now there is quite a bit of uncertainty in the world about voting. State election officials are expecting absentee voting number to be high this year for a lot of reasons. One being that our laws have gotten more friendly towards absentee voting, but also because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Theres also uncertainty surrounding absentee voting due to new policies by the United States Postal Service and ongoing concerns about USPSs ability to get mailed in ballots to clerks offices in time.

When it comes to voting, the number one thing people need to do is make a plan, said Edevbie.

Voters can now request their absentee ballot for the November election, and Edevbie said youll want to mail your ballot as quickly and efficiently as possible. Starting on Sept. 24, voters can also go to their clerks office and vote early by absentee ballot in person. You can also always vote in person on Election Day.

But whichever way you choose, you have to make sure that your ballot is in by 8:00 p.m. on Election Day.

That is critical, said Edevbie. Theres no leeway on that. So voters should get their absentee ballots early and return them either by mail or preferably by a Dropbox.

Poll workers will continue to play a critical role in this upcoming election, but theres a concern that there wont be enough poll workers to keep up with the scale of voters this election is likely to bring, in part because poll workers tend to be the population most at risk for COVID-19, the elderly.

Poll workers are the bread and butter on the election process, Edevbie said. We really have to have them, not only to make sure that polling locations on Election Day are functioning well, but also that we have enough people to count the absentee ballots in a efficient and steady manner.

Edevbie said the number one thing you can do if youre concerned about the election is to sign up to be a poll worker.

There needs to be some changes to our state laws when it comes to voting, Edevbie said. Right now, bills in the state House would allow for ballots postmarked by the day of an election to be counted. Edevbie said he would also like to see legislation that allows clerks to open up absentee ballot envelopes, up to 24 hours ahead of time, and verify that the ballot is correct, then set it aside while still in the secrecy sleeve.

Its a very small change, he said. But it gives clerks a lot more time to get things done.

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24)  The case involving former American Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton is now deemed closed after he withdrew his appeal at the Supreme Court to review his conviction for killing Filipino transgender woman Jennifer Laude in 2014.

The high court's third division on June 15 granted Pemberton's urgent motion to withdraw his petition to review the guilty ruling issued by an Olongapo court.

In the decision released to the media on Monday, the Supreme Court said Pemberton has accepted that his conviction will become final and executory once he withdraws the criminal and civil aspects of the appeal he filed in 2017.

"This case is considered closed and terminated," the resolution read.

The former Marine withdrew his appeal on June 2, the same day the Philippines terminated the suspension of the Visiting Forces Agreement  the decades-old military pact between the Philippines and United States.

RELATED: Pemberton transfer to Bilibid sought after VFA termination

Pemberton will continue to serve the rest of his sentence. The American soldier has been detained at the custodial center in Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City since 2015.

The Olongapo Regional Trial court sentenced Pemberton to six to 12 years of imprisonment for homicide on December 1, 2015. His prison sentence was reduced to to a maximum of 10 years. The Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in 2017.

He was convicted of homicide after 26-year-old Laude was found lifeless  naked, neck blackened with strangulation marks, and head rammed into a toilet  in a motel room in Olongapo City after their night out on October 11, 2014. The then-19-year-old Pemberton admitted to choking her after learning that she was also a man.

TIMELINE: Revisiting the Jennifer Laude murder case
Kim Kardashian West may have considered calling it quits from Kanye West, but after spending some quality time together, it seems divorce is no longer on the table.

On Aug. 23, the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star shared her first photo with the rapper since his controversial Twitter rant back in July. While many were convinced Kardashian West had finally reached her breaking point with West, it appears the pair are back on good terms as they continue to prioritize their marriage.

Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West |David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West recently experienced a rift in their marriage

The Wests marital problems started on Jul. 19, when the rapper held his very first presidential rally in South Carolina.

During the event, the rapper shockingly revealed some personal information about their relationship, which quickly swept the internet.

RELATED: Kim Kardashian West Is Upset With Kanye West for Putting Her on Blast at Campaign Rally, Report Says

After his controversial statements made headlines, West took to Twitter to call out his wife for trying to fly to his Wyoming ranch with two doctors to lock [him] up. He also called out her mom, Kris Jenner, for ignoring his phone calls and said she was not allowed around their kids: North, 7, Saint, 4, Chicago, 2, and Psalm, 1.

But the most shocking claim of all came when West revealed he wanted to divorce Kardashian West in a since-deleted tweet. I been trying to get divorced since Kim met with Meek at the Warldolf for prison reform,' he wrote. Meek is my man and was respectful. Thats my dog Kim was out of line.

Despite the Grammy-winner taking some major jabs at his wife, the KKW Beauty mogul kept quiet regarding his behavior. But a few days after his Twitter tirade, Kardashian West issued a statement on Instagram where she acknowledged Wests mental health struggles and asked the media to show compassion.

After sharing her statement, West publicly apologized to the reality star on Twitter, writing, To Kim I want to say I know I hurt you. Please forgive me. Thank you for always being there for me.

KimYe just took a family trip to save their marriage

Though he set out to right his wrongs and apologized to his wife, West still kept her at a distance as he shot down almost every attempt she made to try to see him in Wyoming.

After several failed attempts, Kardashian West finally reunited with the rapper at their second residence in the Mountain State. Upon her arrival, the SKIMS founder was photographed crying while having what appeared to be a heated conversation with her husband.

At the time, sources reported that Kardashian West was prepared to end their relationship, but it was later revealed West had suggested they take a family trip to potentially save their marriage, which the reality star agreed to.

RELATED: Inside Kim Kardashian and Kanye Wests Caribbean Getaway To Save Their Marriage

She wants to do everything she can to save her marriage, the source told People. Its all very complicated though. Kim wants him to get proper help, and Kanye still doesnt want to. Kim is just taking things day by day right now.

The couple and their four kids reportedly traveled to the Dominican Republic for a week. While there, KimYe focused on their marriage as they enjoyed spending quality time as a family.

They decided to travel together so they can be away in private, an insider revealed. Between the kids, work, and dealing with Kanyes bipolar episodes, its been hard for her to think clearly.

Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West are spending more quality time together

Since returning home from the Dominican Republic, the Wests have been prioritizing their marriage, and so far, it seems their efforts are working.

On Aug. 23, Kardashian West took to Instagram to share several photos of herself and her family during a recent trip to Dunton River Camp, Colorado.

In the last snapshot of the slideshow, the mom of four can be seen posing alongside West, sister Kourtney Kardashian, and family friend Harry Hudson, marking the first photo she has shared of her husband since break-up rumors made headlines.

The photo comes days after West shared a video on Twitter of the pair kissing during what appeared to be a Sunday Service concert.

WERE STEPPING OUT ON FAITH, he captioned the clip, shared on Aug. 19.

While the future of KimYes marriage remains unclear, it seems to us that they arent calling it quits anytime soon.
Ukrainian intellectuals and academics, journalists and political scientists support the demonstrations in Minsk and the resistance of the Belarusians to Lukashenko. Yesterday a human chain of 30 km in the Baltic republics. In the Belarusian capital, 200,000 people challenge the ban on demonstrations and demand the presidents resignation. Lukashenko publishes photo in a bulletproof vest and Kalashnikov.

Kiev (AsiaNews) - "Your freedom" is tied to "ours"; "Your victory will be our victory": thus some leading figures from Ukrainian civil society - mostly intellectuals and academics, including AsiaNews columnist Kostiantyn Sigov - have expressed solidarity with the Belarusian demonstrators who arecalling for new elections and since yesterday also the explicit expulsion of President Alexandr Lukashenko, in power for 26 years.

Yesterday, two weeks after the elections suspected of fraud, almost 200,000 people took to the streets in Minsk, demanding the dictators resignation. The police forces warned that the demonstration was not authorized and blocked many metro stations, forcing demonstrators to walk to Independence Square, the site of the rally.

Lukashenko strengthened security around the presidential palace and had himself photographed holding a Kalashnikov and wearing a flak jacket, saying he would fight to the death to maintain power.

Visiting the Grodno military base, the day before, on the border with Poland and Lithuania, Lukashenko denounced foreign powers whom he claims are fomenting the revolution in Belarus. Poland and Lithuania have denied the charges.

What is happening in Belarus in recent weeks recalls what happened in Ukraine in February 2014, when a series of demonstrations from all social strata and bloody clashes with the military forces forced the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovyc out after a few weeks.

Yesterday, as a sign of solidarity with Belarusians, tens of thousands of people in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia formed a human chain of 30 km, renewing the so-called "Baltic Way", which in 1989 saw 2 million people linked to each other to the other through the three Baltic states which after several months declared independence from the Soviet Union.

Here is the appeal of "Ukrainian civil society" in solidarity with Belarus:

Dear Belarusian sisters and brothers!

We are following events in your country with a mixture of joy and apprehension.

We feel joy because we are watching how your great nation, our neighbor and friend, is waking up. We worry, however, because we have been hearing from the news about new and new victims.

We, Ukrainians, have also come through these trials and ordeals. They are certainly not over. But we have chosen our path. The path is long and difficult, but we will not let it slip away.

We dont have any intention to lecture you, because today it is not us but you who are showing to the whole world what it means to stand for freedom and dignity.

We only want to express our fraternal solidarity with you.

We worry about you, we are proud of you, and we love you.

We wish you victory, as your victory will also be our victory.

For Your and Our Freedom!

Long Live Belarus! Glory to Ukraine!

For the full list of 25 signatures of philosophers, writers, historians, journalists, entrepreneurs, scientists and political analysts follow see here.
The South African Banking Risk Centre (SABRIC) announced on 19 August that a data breach at Experian exposed the personal banking-related information of as many as 24 million South Africans and nearly 793,749 businesses.

Following the report, Experian issued a statement of its own to clarify the nature of the incident, saying that it was not hacked and that no financial information was compromised.

While Experian was trying to downplay the severity of the leak, South African banks were providing clients with tips on how to keep themselves safe from potential identity theft and phishing attacks.

This has caused a lot of confusion and raises questions regarding the severity and potential impact of the leak on South Africans.

According to Experian, an individual in South Africa who claimed to represent a legitimate client fraudulently requested services from the company.

Experian duly provided the data the customer requested because that is the business it is in  it collects, enriches, and sells peoples personal data for a variety of applications including consumer credit, risk analytics, debt management, marketing services, consumer insights, and direct marketing (i.e. spam).

Experian is not unique. Credit bureaus around the world offer the same services.

The real issue  You have no control over who can access your data

In other words, based on Experians explanation, there is nothing unusual about the personal data it gave to the alleged fraudster. The issue is that the person obtained the data under false pretences.

Experian assured banking clients that although it had brought to bear the full might of the law, the perpetrator was not trying to do anything particularly nefarious.

Our investigations also show that the suspect had intended to use the data to create marketing leads to offer insurance and credit-related services, Experian said in its statement.

We can confirm that no consumer credit or consumer financial information was obtained. Our investigations do not indicate that any misappropriated data has been used for fraudulent purposes.

Experian said that upon discovering the incident it notified the National Credit Regulator and the Information Regulator, and engaged with BASA, SABRIC, and the prudential authority at the SARB.

What many people may not realise is that this is an example of South Africas protection of personal information regime working as intended.

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) took effect from 1 July 2020 and it contains provisions that cover the disclosure of incidents where peoples personal data has been exposed.

While POPIA does place some additional responsibilities on companies who process peoples personal data in South Africa, there is nothing stopping credit bureaus from gathering and selling your personal information.

The real question South Africans should ask is: Why is it still possible for legitimate information brokers like credit bureaus to sell your personal data without telling you who they are selling it to?

What is the risk to me?

Assuming that this data leak indeed did not include credit or financial information and that the alleged fraudster did not distribute the data but intended to use it for direct marketing, then this leak is not serious at all.

However, if the alleged fraudster shared that data with someone who had greater ambitions than sending spam, that could put peoples identities at risk.

SABRIC expressed this well in its original statement to the media on the Experian incident.

The compromise of personal information can create opportunities for criminals to impersonate you but does not guarantee access to your banking profile or accounts, SABRIC said.

However, criminals can use this information to trick you into disclosing your confidential banking details.

How to protect yourself

SABRIC and Experian offered useful advice on steps you can take to protect yourself from identity theft:

Monitor your credit report. This will let you know if someone is trying to apply for credit in your name. Experian (My Credit Check) and XDS (Splendi) currently offer unlimited free credit reports. TransUnion lets you request one free credit report every 12 months. If you suspect that your identity has been stolen, immediately apply for a free Protective Registration listing with Southern Africa Fraud Prevention Service (SAFPS). You can contact [email protected] , or request a listing via the SAFPS website.

In addition to the above two steps, banks and security experts have offered the following general advice to protect your identity, especially after a data leak:

Monitor your accounts. Keep an eye on your bank and credit card accounts. If you see transactions that you do not recognise, contact your bank to query them.

Keep an eye on your bank and credit card accounts. If you see transactions that you do not recognise, contact your bank to query them. Enable SMS alerts. Banks let you customise when you receive SMS alerts for transactions on your account. This may attract a fee, so ensure you know how much it will cost to receive SMS alerts for lower value transactions.

Banks let you customise when you receive SMS alerts for transactions on your account. This may attract a fee, so ensure you know how much it will cost to receive SMS alerts for lower value transactions. Sign up for an identity theft monitoring service. XDS and TransUnion offer identity monitoring services in South Africa. TransUnions is priced at R99 per month and includes SMS and e-mail alerts if your information is detected on the dark web, and identity theft insurance to the value of R100,000.

XDS and TransUnion offer identity monitoring services in South Africa. TransUnions is priced at R99 per month and includes SMS and e-mail alerts if your information is detected on the dark web, and identity theft insurance to the value of R100,000. Be vigilant online. All of the usual advice for staying safe online still applies. Dont open any strange attachments or click on any links in e-mails, SMS messages, or WhatsApps claiming to be from your bank, SARS or any similar institution that handles your personal information. Rather type their website addresses directly into your browsers URL bar. Beware messages that try to trick you into clicking on links or opening attachments through too-good-to-be-true offers or fear.

All of the usual advice for staying safe online still applies. Dont open any strange attachments or click on any links in e-mails, SMS messages, or WhatsApps claiming to be from your bank, SARS or any similar institution that handles your personal information. Rather type their website addresses directly into your browsers URL bar. Beware messages that try to trick you into clicking on links or opening attachments through too-good-to-be-true offers or fear. Change your online banking passwords, if you want. Though no bank data was leaked, change your online banking passwords if it will make you feel safe. Remember to choose a strong password and do not reuse a password you have used elsewhere.

This is an opinion piece.
The Economic Commission of West Africa States (ECOWAS) in conjunction with its donors and financial partners has donated 3.399 metric tons worth of cereals as humanitarian assistance to support the most vulnerable populations affected by the COVID  19 pandemic.

This was disclosed in a statement on Monday by Ezeaja Ikemefuna, for the director information of the Ministry of Agriculture.

According to the statement, the 3.399 MT of cereals donation by ECOWAS was received on behalf of the federal government by the Minister of State for Agriculture and Rural Development, Mustapha Shehuri.

The minister, while receiving the cereals at the handing over ceremony at the grain depot at Hotoro, Kano in Kano State over the weekend, stated that Nigeria has taken notice of this kind gesture by ECOWAS.

Be rest assured that the 3,999 MT of cereals will be distributed to vulnerable populations affected by the negative impact of COVID-19, terrorism, inter community conflicts and drought.

According to him, the Federal Government, through the Ministry recently released 70,000 MT of assorted grains from its strategic grains reserves to cushion the effect of COVID- 19 Pandemic.

He said, in order to address the incessant worrying food crisis in the West African Sub- region especially the Sahel, the Heads of Government of ECOWAS member states decided to set up Regional Food Security Reserve (RFSR) Programme.

He noted that this necessitated the signing of the Contract Agreement between ECOWAS and the Ministrys Department of Food & Strategic Reserve on 7th July, 2017.

This includes keeping a substantial quantity of food in her Food Reserve that can be used for interventions in case of emergencies and to boost food security within the ECOWAS member States.

The Government of Federal Republic of Nigeria loaned 5,000MT of assorted grains from ECOWAS Stock which was agreed to be paid back on grain for grain basis, he said.

He further stated that, modalities had been put in place to replace the ECOWAS Stock before the advent of COVID-19 Pandemic.

That notwithstanding, I can assure you that the Stock will be replaced in due course, he said.

Mr Shehuri thanked the ECOWAS, developmental partners and Kano State Government for their contribution and support towards averting a food crisis in Nigeria and West Africa region in general.

In her goodwill message, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Farouk, assured the food items provided by the ECOWAS Commission will reach the most vulnerable in our society, which will work towards mitigating the risk of food insecurity at this critical time.

She acknowledged the critical role played by the Minister and Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in facilitating the delivery of the food items.

While giving his goodwill message, the Minister of State, Foreign Affairs, Zubariu Dada, appreciated the ECOWAS Commission for its programme towards migrating the impact of COVID 19 pandemic in the West Africa region.

He also pledged continuous support of the Federal Government of Nigeria towards the programmes of the ECOWAS commission.

In his remarks, the ECOWAS Commissioner for Agriculture, Water Resources & Environment, Mr. Sangare Sekou said in compliance with the Management rules adopted by the Member States, food from the Regional Food Security Reserve alongside with national governments efforts, Countries with larger populations that are most stricken by food insecurity are ones chosen to receive food donation.

He stated that those donations were directed to the most vulnerable populations living in Burkina Faso, the Republic of Niger, Mali and the Federal Republic of Nigeria, mostly in the North Region.

He commended the European Union, French Development Agency, among others, for technical and financial assistance provided pro currently to ECOWAS.
You might say Lauren Kattenbusch was destined to fly.

The daughter of a pilot, she and her father would put together model airplanes while she was growing up. Her mother also worked in the aviation industry and the most common conversation in their Fall River, N.S., home was about flight.

I was always around airplanes, said the 23-year-old Kattenbusch.

After graduating from high school, she attended university, studying sciences at the University of Ottawa, but still she knew her true career waited for her in the sky.

After a couple of years in Ottawa, Kattenbusch applied to Gander Flight Training and headed east.

Victoria MacKenzies path to the cockpit was different. Being a pilot wasnt her plan when she filled out an application for a flight attendant position with Provincial Airlines.

She got the job, but it wasnt long before the 28-year-old from St. Johns found she wanted to be controlling the plane instead of serving the passengers on it.

In her two years with PAL, she saw several of her flight attendant colleagues make the transition to flight school, and her path was set.

I wasnt long in the plane before I knew that I wanted to fly it, she said.

Earning their stripes

On July 22, Kattenbusch and MacKenzie earned their commercial pilots licences, marked by a third white stripe.

The licenses mean they have the ability to fly any single-engine, non-high-performance aircraft in Canada. That does not include airline passenger planes.

The pair did their sign-offs and received their three bars on the same day.

It is exciting, said MacKenzie. It almost seems like it didnt happen.

According to the International Society of Airline Pilots, just over five per cent of the pilots worldwide are female.

At Gander Flight Training, Kattenbusch and MacKenzie are two of the 15 female students who have been working to raise that percentage.

Weve seen that number increasing in recent years, said Gander Flight Training general manager Darlene Colbourne. We certainly focus our recruitment on that.

(The numbers are) up because of our increased marketing initiatives and (by) showing females that (aviation) is not only for the males. It is certainly a career that females can enjoy.

Colbourne started in her position more than two decades ago. She took a break for several years, but returned to the flight school a couple of years ago.

Sometimes aviation gets in your blood and it doesnt leave you, said Colbourne explaining her decision to return.

Not just would-be pilots tilting the balance

One of the things she noticed on coming back was a change in the gender balance.

Currently, of the 80 students working to be pilots at the school, 15 are women. But it doesnt stop there. The chief flight instructor, two other flight instructors and the schools owner are female.

Recently, seven of the 15 female students gathered Inside a flight school classroom to talk about their aims. They come from Corner Brook, Cape Breton, St. Johns and elsewhere, and as was the case with Kattenbusch and MacKenzie, their background stories differ.

For example, frequent traveller Paulina Stagg had just returned from vacation in Dubai when her boyfriend half-heartedly suggested she learn to fly because she did so much.

She took him up on the suggestion.

Every time I get in the plane, I get butterflies, she said.

They also know their chosen career paths will likely make them role models.

There are a lot more women talking about it now, agreed Taylor Hefferan. Since coming here, weve had seminars and things that celebrate women in aviation.

Nevertheless, there are still battles to fight and stigmas to shatter, and theyre getting support as they do it.

I get a lot of praise from my home community, and not only from my home community, but also my province for following my dreams, said Chantel Gould, a member of the Wekoqmaq First Nation in Cape Breton.

Since beginning their training, the student pilots have gone into high schools to speak about their experiences and goals. While on a recent trip to Nova Scotia, Kattenbusch and fellow aspiring pilot Courtney Trimm were mistaken for flight attendants, even though they were in their pilots garb.

They quickly corrected the mistaken impression.

It is so liberating, Trimm said of being able to help change views and attitudes. Its  badass. It is so exciting.

Having a desire to enter an industry is one thing. Finding the path that allows you to do that is another.

Each of these women want to get into the flight industry, but outside of Kattenbusch, they were left looking for a road map at the outset.

They feel like thats changed in recent years for the better.

I see changes for sure. When I left high school, I didnt know this place (Gander Flight Training) existed. It is only when I started thinking about making a change in my life that I and looking for flight schools, said Shannon Murphy, noting Gander Flight Training now goes to high schools promoting itself  to both young men and women.

They know they wont get there right away, but finding a place in the captains chair in the cockpit of a plane flying for a major airline is the goal for these women.

For now, they know that could be flying bush planes in the north, staying as close to the tree line as they can.

And wherever it happens, in whatever type of aircraft, its flying.

Youre in control, said MacKenzie. Its cool, its fun and you get to say youre doing something that not a lot of people do.

This reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.
BRIDGEPORT  A very public and violent feud between two city families ended in a courtroom Friday when Jayvell Washington was sentenced to 40 years for killing his ex-girlfriends brother during a shootout at a Reservoir Avenue gas station last year.

You embarked on a life of criminality and anti-social activities against the public at large and against your in-laws, Superior Court Judge Alex Hernandez chastised Washington, who was making a rare in-person court appearance since the pandemic. Firearms are the devils right hand and the devil was not letting go of you as you continued with this life of criminality and today the bill is coming due.

On March 12, the first day the pandemic was declared in the state, the 41-year-old Washington, of Bridgeport, was convicted by a jury of first-degree manslaughter with a firearm, criminal possession of a pistol and carrying a pistol without a permit in the Jan. 27, 2019, fatal shooting of 50-year-old Eugene Rogers.

Video from the gas station played for the jury during the trial showed Rogers approach Washingtons car. The drivers side door opened, Rogers pulled out a handgun and then tumbled backward onto the ground. The video shows bullet shells being ejected both from Rogers gun and from the open car door.

Rogers was shot once in the head, according to the autopsy report.

In his final argument, DeJoseph claimed Washington fired a total of four shots at Rogers and therefore the jury should discount any defense claim that Washington fired in self-defense. Rogers gun only fired one shot.

Washingtons lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Jared Millbrandt, argued Friday for a new trial for his client, arguing that the jury had been under too much pressure that day because the governor announced he was shutting down the state. Hernandez denied his motion and continued with the sentencing hearing.

Because of ill feeling between the Rogers and Washington families that previously led to a courthouse melee, security was tight in the Fairfield County Courthouse Friday. A dozen judicial marshals ringed the inside of the courtroom.

This is not Dodge City, Kansas, in the 1800s, this was Bridgeport on a Sunday afternoon, argued Senior Assistant States Attorney Michael DeJoseph. This was a callous, cowardly act  society needs to be protected from Mr. Washington; it needs to be protected from him for an awfully long time.

Washington smiled as he was sentenced by the judge.

Whenever there is a life lost, its tragedy, Washington said.

According to trial testimony, at one point Washington had been part of the Rogers family and had a daughter with the victims sister, Quesha Rogers.

But the breakup had been messy, according to court papers, and she got a restraining order against him.

Eugene Rogers death was the latest in gunfire exchange between the Rogers clan and Washington.

On July 1, 2017, Chaz Rogers was shot to death on Stratford Avenue. His older brother, Hassan Boobie Rogers, was later arrested for allegedly shooting at a friend of Washingtons whom he blamed for killing his brother. That case is still pending.

Mayor Joseph Ganim was nearly hit with gunfire while visiting the Rogers home on Trumbull Avenue to console them for Chaz Rogers death.

Then on July 23, 2017, Eugene Rogers was walking on Trumbull Avenue when, police said, he was shot twice in the abdomen by a man later identified as Washington. Rogers recovered. Washington was arrested in that shooting and charged with attempted murder, first-degree assault, illegal use of a firearm and criminal use of a firearm.

Washington was out on bail in that case and wearing a GPS anklet when the exchange at the gas station parking lot happened, according to police.

I pray that this all now comes to an end, Rogers uncle, Robert Whisnant, told the judge Friday.

I would like to thank the Bridgeport Police Department for a quick and speedy arrest and the state of Connecticut for this day when Jayvell Washington was convicted of killing my son, said Rogers mother, Diane Rogers.
Chinese inactivated COVID-19 vaccine starts phase-3 clinical trials in Argentina

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 09:21, August 23, 2020

BEIJING, Aug. 22 (Xinhua) -- An inactivated COVID-19 vaccine developed by China has started phase-3 clinical trials in Argentina, according to its developer China National Biotec Group (CNBG), which is affiliated to Sinopharm.

The launch ceremony of the phase-3 clinical trials was held in Beijing Friday after the CNBG obtained the certificate of approval for the process.

This is an achievement brought about by CNBG's international cooperation in a bid to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The inactivated vaccine received approval for phase-3 clinical trials in the United Arab Emirates on June 23, and in Peru and Morocco on Thursday.

The CNBG will work together with a company in Argentina to promote research and development related to the inactivated vaccine.

Liu Jingzhen, chairman of Sinopharm, said the phase-3 clinical trials will help fight the epidemic and contribute to the building of a community of health for all.

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Stormy CWC expected: Sonia Gandhi likely to step down

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: Congress president, Sonia Gandhi is likely to announce her decision to step down following today's meeting of the Congress Working Committee. It may be recalled that 103 Congress workers had written to her seeking a complete rehaul of the party.

Sonia Gandhi asks Congress to find a new president, says won't remain the president | Oneindia News

The letter was signed by former chief ministers and members of Parliament. The letter alleged drift and uncertainty over the leadership. The letter was signed by Kapil Sibal Ghulam Nahi Azad, Milind Deora, Manish Tewari among others.

'Reports of Sonia Gandhi resigning as Congress president false: Randeep Surjewala

Sonia Gandhi has indicated that she does not want to carry on as the cheif of the party any longer. She is of the view that the party should have a new chief. In a hand written note, Gandhi said that she was not interested in leading the party. She said that she had accepted the post of interim president only after much persuasion and on the condition that the party would find a replacement for her soon.

Congress leader, Randeep Singh Surjewala said that reports of Sonia Gandhi resigning from her post of Congress president are false. However the CWC to be held later today is expected to be a stormy affair with several leaders expressing unhappiness over the style of functioning.
 Flash

A botched police raid of a nightclub in Peru's capital Lima left at least 13 people dead and another six injured as panicked clients stampeded toward the exit, authorities said on Sunday.

According to an Interior Ministry statement, about 120 people were gathered for a party inside the Thomas Restobar in the Los Olivos district, despite the current ban on social gatherings due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Around 9 p.m. local time Saturday, "personnel from the National Police's Green Squad were alerted by the neighbors" to the illegal gathering and went to investigate.

"Faced with the police raid, which did not use any type of weapon or tear gas, those attending the party tried to escape through the only exit door, getting trampled and trapped between the door and a staircase in the premises," the ministry said.

Three of those injured were police officers "who were trying to free and help the trapped people," the ministry added.

"The Interior Ministry deeply regrets the death of 13 people as a result of the criminal irresponsibility of an unscrupulous businessman, and extends its deepest condolences to their families," the statement said.

Peru's President Martin Vizcarra lamented the incident, saying "I am sorry and sad for the people and the families of the people who lost their lives."

Vizcarra said he felt "anger and scorn" toward those responsible because "they are risking the lives of people" for profit, and called for "a rigorous investigation, and a fine for the owners and organizers of such events that will serve as an example."

The president noted gatherings are temporarily banned to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, which has infected some 585,236 people and killed 27,453 in Peru, according to the Health Ministry.

Officials arrested 23 people, and are looking to identify the owners of the club and the party organizers. Of the 23 people arrested, 15 tested positive to a rapid COVID-19 test, said Vizcarra.
The on Monday directed the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (DMC) to release the pension of its retired employees, payable for the month of April this year, by the end of August.

A division bench of Justices Hima Kohli and Subramonium Prasad also issued a notice seeking the response of Delhi government and North DMC on a plea seeking to release the up-to-date pension of the retired employees of North DMC and to release the pension punctually.

The High Court listed the hearing on the petition, filed by an organisation Nagar Nigam Sewa Nivrit Karamchari Kalyan Samiti through advocate Ranjit Sharma, for further hearing on September 21 and asked North DMC to come prepared with instructions as to the timeline within which the arrears of the pension shall be released to the retired employees.

Standing Counsel advocate Mini Pushkarna accepted notice on behalf of the respondent North DMC and said the corporation had released the pension of its retired employees till March 2020 and steps shall be taken to release the pension for the month of April 2020 at the earliest.

The association, in its plea, sought a direction to the respondents to release the pension of the retired employees of the North DMC up to date and for direction to the respondents to release their pension on time every month with further direction to them to release the anears of the benefits of VIIth pay commission to them without further delay.

The petitioner also sought a direction to provide cashless medical facilities to all retired employees who have deposited the subscription fee on retirement for cashless treatment in empanelled hospitals.

Nagar Nigam Sewa Nivrit Karamchari Kalyan Samiti is an unregistered body of retired employees of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, who are above the age of 75 and physically disabled to seek redressal of their grievance.

It submitted that the petition is for the benefit of a large number of retired employees who are either individually litigating on the issue or are in the process of filing litigation for payment of pension every month and on time and for release of the benefits of the Vllth Pay Commission.

The petitioner said that the retired employees of North DMC have been facing the problem of non-payment pension since the year 2015.

"This problem was in South and East DMC also, however, both South and East DMC have regularized payment of pension with some delay. The problem in North DMC has been worsening. The North DMC has been paying the salary and pension of retired employees after a delay of two to three months," the plea said.

"Besides, the North DMC has not paid arrears of the benefits of the VIIth Pay Commission to the teachers and the retired teachers till date despite various representations," it added.

The plea said that the retired employees of North DMC are facing immense problems in meeting their daily expenses and added that some of them have medical problems, which require urgent treatment and care.

"These retired employees do not have any other source of livelihood other than their pension. If the pension is released after a lapse of two to three months, it is imaginable what difficulties they would be facing," the plea said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Inc. 5000 list is a respected mark of success and Im so proud of the work our team put in to earn this honor, says Anthony P. Solazzo, CEO of e-TeleQuote.

e-TeleQuote Insurance, Inc. (https://www.etelequote.com) has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States, earning a spot on the 2020 Inc. Magazine 5000 Ranking. This is the fourth time e-TeleQuote has earned its way onto the Inc. 5000 list.

In the past three years, e-TeleQuote has recorded revenue growth of 392%, which has fueled major expansions, as well as record-setting bonuses and compensation for its licensed Medicare advisors. The company now serves clients from seven locations across the United States, all of whom are currently working from home. The organizations active client list includes more than 100,000 Medicare beneficiaries.

The Inc. 5000 list is a respected mark of success and Im so proud of the work our team put in to earn this honor, says Anthony P. Solazzo, CEO of e-TeleQuote. We have grown explosively these past few years, even during a unique transition to remote work during this pandemic. Our commitment to safeguarding the health of our employees and continually serving our customers has led to remarkable expansion and improvement.

The ranking was unveiled by Inc. Magazine on its website on August 12, 2020. Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles, can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

e-TeleQuote is still growing, and actively seeking licensed insurance agents across the United States and Puerto Rico, including bilingual agents. Agents are provided with all equipment, leads, and tools necessary to assist Medicare beneficiaries with comparing and enrolling in Medicare plans. While the company is specifically staffing for the Annual Enrollment Period beginning in October, positions are full-time and year-round. You can learn more by visiting https://www.etelequote.com/careers.

About e-TeleQuote and easyMedicare.com

e-TeleQuote Insurance, Inc., the owner and operator of easyMedicare.com, is an independent digital insurance marketplace providing individuals the ability to purchase Medicare insurance from the comfort of their homes. The company diligently researches available plan options from multiple insurance carriers, helping people choose a plan that best suits their needs. e-TeleQuote provides personal consultation through experienced licensed Medicare advisors who suggest plan coverage options based on an individuals particular needs. The company has proudly served over 100,000 Medicare beneficiaries across the United States.
This is against the constitution that allows councils to operate and manage their local authorities. The rebels have no locus standi to recall MDC-Alliance councillors and must stop now. It is against the law. How can you recall from nowhere the first citizen of the capital city. These guys are joking with the peoples vote, he said
After totally losing his role in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, Johnny Depp also missed his chance in bagging other movie roles.

Multiple media outlets previously reported that Depp started to lose a grip on his career after his ex-wife, Amber Heard, penned a damaging op-ed for Washington Post.

Although his fans did their part to defend Depp and allow him to get back his award-winning role, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that Disney chose Margot Robbie to lead the remake of the film.

Because of this, rumors about Depp begging "Avengers" star Robert Downey Jr. to give him a job in Hollywood emerged.

While it has not been confirmed whether the "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" actor will finally star in another movie again, there are currently three potential films that he can play in the future.

Unmentioned Role In "Sherlock Holmes 3"

Following the gossips about his talks with the "Iron Man" actor, Depp reportedly received an offer from RDJ for a role in "Sherlock Holmes 3."

Although it remains unknown what particular role RDJ offered, it is worth noting that winning a casting spot could make Depp shine again.

The previous installment of "Sherlock Holmes" earned a massive worldwide total sales of $543.4 million, making it the 12th highest-grossing film of 2011.

Whether it is a supporting or a villain role, he could surely give justice to the character since most of Johnny Depp's movies show his dark side.

Bounty Hunter in "Ghost Rider"

As a huge fan of "Ghost Rider," Depp is said to be eyeing for a role in the reboot as well, and he would love to play Bounty Hunter's role.

We Got This Covered first reported the possibility of the actor landing on the role earlier this month. The news outlet said that a source disclosed the information to them, noting that Depp wants to live up to the character's moniker and ride a black horse.

However, Kevin Feige already secured the slot for Keanu Reeves.

In 2019, the 46-year-old Marvel Studios president opened up to ComicBook.com about his efforts to invite Keanu to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

"We talk to him for almost every film we make," the MCU big boss revealed. "I don't know when, if, or ever he'll join the MCU, but we very much want to figure out the right way to do it."

Feige reportedly started luring Keanu since the 2000 film "X-Men."

With that said, if Depp wants to be part of the movie, he might need to find a different role.

Joker in "The Batman" Franchise

Several famous stars have performed the role of Joker over the years in live-action films, including Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix.

Currently, only Ledger and Phoenix are the actors who won an Oscar for playing the Joker.

But a fan and illustrator named BossLogic shared a glimpse of how Depp could slay the character in the future as well.

The said Instagram user took digital sorcery to the next level by using Depp's photo from "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" and turning it into breathtakingly cool fan art.

The artist shared the before and after photo along with the caption, "I removed a moustache.... #joker #johnnydepp."

If it happens, then this could be a great addition to other must-watch Johnny Depp movies.

READ MORE: Goodbye, Pirates! Johnny Depp Lands BRUTAL Role in 'Waiting for the Barbarians'
A shoplifter who was caught stealing luxury goods from a supermarket curled up on the floor and threw a tantrum 'like a five-year-old' after being apprehended by security staff.

In the sixth episode of Shoplifters: At War with the Law, which airs tonight on Channel 5, the security team at Weston Favell shopping centre in Northampton observed a man stealing more than 70 worth of luxury food goods, including organic chocolate, wine and a 14 jar of honey at a supermarket.

The man - who didn't speak English and struggled to give a name of date of birth to the guards - was taken back to their holding room for questioning when he left the self-service till without paying for most of the items.

Since the stolen goods were worth less than 200, the police weren't called, and staff told him he was banned for 12 months instead.

But as the man was being escorted to the bus stop, he threw himself onto the ground and sat in child's pose, screaming and crying.

'The male was obviously quite hysterical,' one of the guards at the scene said.

'It crosses your mind whether it's genuine or if he's trying to put on an act and get off lightly.

'Is he known to police or doing this so he doesn't get caught by police? You just have to deal with it as you see fit,' he explained.

The security team watched the man for over an hour on CCTV as he loaded up his supermarket trolley with expensive goods, and snuck them into his backpack racking up 72.84 of items.

A shoplifter who was caught stealing luxury goods from a supermarket curled up on the floor and threw a tantrum 'like a five-year-old' after being apprehended by security staff at the Weston Favell shopping centre in Northampton

While in the holding room, the man sobbed and was unable to answer questions from the team.

Lyndan, a security guard with expertise in cross examination, repeatedly asked the man what his name and date of birth was, but he struggled to communicate when the thief claimed to be Bulgarian and unable to speak English.

'When is your birthday, calm calm, you tell me your birthday or we call the police,' Lyndan asked him.

He eventually got the man's name from his bank card, and he confessed he didn't speak Bulgarian but instead Spanish.

'He doesn't need the items he concealed, it wasn't bare necessities, it was a lot of alcohol,' Lyndan explained after he left.

Lyndan, a security guard with expertise in cross examination, repeatedly asked the man what his name and date of birth was, but he struggled to communicate because the thief (right) claimed to be Bulgarian and unable to speak English. He then escorted him out

'I think he was trying to guilt trip us, make us feel sorry for him, and then after let us say, fine on your way,' he continued.

'At the end of they day we can't take that risk, if it is an act and he thinks he can fool us it won't be long until it's he's back and will do it again.

'You don't know people's reason for theft, but on the flipsdie I have a job to do, and he knows right from wrong'.

Once the guards managed to communicate he needed to leave the centre, Lyndan walked him out to the bus stop.

But on his way, the man dropped to the floor and curls up, screaming and crying while Lyndan asked: 'My friend, are you okay?'

'It's not often that people throw themselves to the ground, its usually what we see five year olds see themselves do, it could have been an act, it could have been anything,' he added.
The daughter of a man with stage four cancer has spoken of her horror after finding out her dad has been cared for on the same ward as a Covid-19 patient.

It comes as visits to patients at Craigavon Area Hospital have been scaled back as virus cases in Northern Ireland continue to rise.

Health bosses are currently battling to stop a second deadly wave and concerns are rising over the safety of some of the most vulnerable people, including cancer patients and care home residents.

As a result the Southern Trust is implementing measures, including restricting hospital visits, in a bid to keep patients safe.

However, the daughter of a cancer patient in the hospital has raised concerns about her father's safety.

According to the woman, the person with Covid-19 has been cared for in a side room of the ward, but she believes this is insufficient to protect the other patients.

"I think it's an absolute disgrace," she said.

"It isn't good enough for my dad or anyone else on that ward. They are gambling with people's lives.

"My dad has cancer, he isn't happy about it at all, and he has actually asked to be moved so he won't be in danger.

"We're all horrified, our family is going through enough at the moment without having to worry about this extra threat to his health.

"They're supposed to be set up and ready for patients with Covid-19, so I can't understand how this has been allowed to happen." The woman plans to report her concerns to health watchdog the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA), the body that ensures hygiene standards in hospitals.

"The patient with Covid-19 was in a side room with the door pulled over most of the time, but as far as I'm concerned it isn't good enough," she added.

"Patients were allowed two visitors in twice a day and that's now been reduced to one visitor for an hour a day and it's because Covid has started to increase again.

"If they're saying Covid is so dangerous that they are reducing visiting hours, how can they have someone with Covid on a ward with cancer patients and other vulnerable patients?

"There are patients in there in their 90s. I don't have a medical background but it just seems like they are taking a dangerous gamble."

Alliance MLA Paula Bradshaw, a member of the Stormont health committee, said she was concerned by the development and has called for the Health Minister to provide clarity on the matter.

"It is unclear to me how this situation could have arisen," she said.

"Healthcare settings have clearly been raised as among the higher risk locations for Covid-19, which is why the Nightingale facility and Covid Centres were established.

"It would be useful to have clarity from Robin Swann as to what the guidance is in this area and how it aligns with the scientific evidence."

According to Cancer Research UK, people with cancer are among those at higher risk of complications if they contract Covid-19.

This is because cancer and their treatment can weaken their immune system, making it more difficult for them to fight the infection.

Some cancer treatments, including chemotherapy, can stop the bone marrow from making enough white blood cells.

As a result a decision was taken to stop chemotherapy for many cancer patients during the first wave of the virus.

The Southern Trust last night said that there were no Covid-19 patients on the ward in question.

It continued: "However, patients and relatives can be fully assured that robust infection prevention and control measures are in place throughout the hospital.

"We would advise anyone with concerns to speak to a member of staff who will be able to provide reassurance directly."

The Department of Health has been contacted for comment.
(Natural News) If you still wondered if there was a double standard practiced by the deep state when it comes to holding Democrats and Trump supporting Republicans accountable, you can disabuse yourself of the uncertainty.

Because without a doubt, the deep state simply doesnt hold Democrats accountable. For anything. Ever. Or Trump-hating RINOs like the late Sen. John McCain and current Utah Sen. Mitt Ill Never Be President Romney.

Case in point: When a Democrat lawmaker calls for sedition, openly and brazenly, and nothing happens.

Last week Rep. Ayanna Pressley, an unhinged Squad member from Massachusetts, called on Americans to take to the streets because she knows deep down there is no way in Hades that Sleepy Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris of California are going to beat President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in November (unless, of course, they cheat using ballot harvesting and vote fraud).

UNHINGED: Squad member Democrat Rep. Ayanna Pressley calls for targeting GOP officials with unrest in the streetshttps://t.co/peHGAZMh7T pic.twitter.com/wR20ddCVks  RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 15, 2020

This is as much about public outcry, organizing and mobilizing and applying pressure so that this GOP-led Senate and these governors that continue to carry water for this administration, putting American people in harms way, turning a deaf ear to the needs of our families and our communities  hold them accountable, she told another unhinged Left-wing hack, MSNBCs AM Joy Reid.

Make the phone calls, send the emails, show up, she continued. You know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as theres unrest in our lives, and unfortunately, theres plenty to go around.

Now, if that isnt a massive dog whistle to the equally unhinged anarchists, Marxists, Antifa types and other Left-wing losers to blow up the country city by city later this fall, then nothing is.

To be fair, Pressley isnt the first Democrat to call for violence and unrest in our streets.

In February 2019, Crazy Maxine Waters, for the second time in less than a year, called on political opponents of President Trump to take to the streets to disrupt or destroy the civil society, ostensibly to protest his decision to declare a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border.

I really expect were going to have a growing number of Republicans that are going to join with us in this disapproval. Yes, theyre concerned if a Democratic president gets elected then they can use emergency powers to do a lot of the things they dont like, Waters said then.

Ive been talking about impeachment for a long time. Im absolutely stunned and amazed that the American people have taken so much off of this president. This president has lied, I think its been documented, 8,000 times in the last two years, she told (who else?) MSNBC, calling the thousands of migrants moving to the border at the time in caravans fake.

The Americans have taken too much off of this president. He is dishonorable. He does not deserve to be president of the United States. As a matter of fact, he loves Putin, dictators, loves Kim Jong-un, talking about theyre in love now, she lied.

And so its time for everybody to stand up. All hands on deck to refuse this president these fake emergency powers that he would like to have. And so Im urging everybody get together  rally in every community across this country all this weekend, send a message to Washington, D.C., No, Mr. President, were not going allow you to do this, she said.

Unreal.

A year earlier, you may recall that Waters told her supporters to directly confront Trump administration officials and supporters of the president wherever they found them and tell them theyre not welcome anymore, anywhere.

Pot meet Kettle for the party that preaches tolerance like no other. This isn't the fringe of the Dem Party. This is the Dem Party & the next Chair of the House Fin Svcs Cmte if Dems gain control of House this Nov. pic.twitter.com/5mkMe3KgF1  Lee Zeldin (@leezeldin) June 25, 2018

Can you imagine if a white Trump supporter said that Americans should tell a black congresswoman shes no longer welcome anymore, anywhere?

Of course not. Because a Trump supporter would never do that.

In any event, it is high time Democrats who call for the destruction of our civil society be held accountable for the sedition they are really calling for.

Sources include:

NaturalNews.com

TheNationalSentinel.com
Huawei Technologies Ghana has donated ultramodern ICT Lab facilities to the Ghana Telecom University College (GTUC) Tesano main Campus, Accra in the bid to enhance the teaching of ICT and Engineering to help boost the ICT talent ecosystem development in Ghana.



The donation counts as one of Huaweis numerous Corporate Social Responsibility in the ICT domain which aims at providing Tertiary institutions focused on ICT and Telecom Engineering with the needed support to develop and advance the knowledge of local ICT talents, whiles offering hands-on training to equip students for the job market.



In ensuring that the lab is fully operational and serving its purpose, Huawei has equipped it with nine (9) ultramodern facilities worth over GHC 100, 000.00 ($20,000.00) which include 5 switches (three Cloud Engine S5737-S24P4X and two S5731_S24P4X) and 4 routers (four AR6140_9G_ACC13_Britian).



Mr. Kwaku Essuman Quansah, the Deputy Managing Director, Huawei Technologies Ghana who presented the equipment said over the past 3 years, Huawei has partnered about 12 universities in the country.



In March, 2020, Huawei offered free professional ICT training focused on HCIA- Routing and Switching for over 30 lecturers and IT professionals in Ghana at GTUC. The company also donated similar lab facilities to Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and Cape Coast University.



Huawei he said, is committed to building resilient and long-lasting partnerships with educational institutions focused on promoting ICT in Ghana and intends to extend the gesture to other schools like the University of Ghana.



Mr. Quansah also mentioned that, Ghana Telecom University College, being one of the countrys top universities is the first to benefit from the initiative this year.



He said, Huawei will continue to stay committed to ICT development through meaningful CSR projects to help bridge the digital divide as Information Communication Technologies bring digital to every individual, home and organization for a fully connected intelligent world.



Speaking at the event, the acting President of GTUC, Prof. Emmanuel Ohene-Afoakwa thanked Huawei for their support and dedication in training more Information Communication Technology talents in Ghana through ICT academy partnerships.



He reiterated that GTUC being one of Ghanas top ICT training institutions would work closely with Huawei to reestablish a well advanced ICT academy in Ghana to train individuals, institutions and organizations that need special skills and expertise to serve the needs of the whole nation.



Huawei launched the ICT Academy in Ghana in 2017 and has since through its partnership with over 12 leading Ghanaian Universities trained over 3500 students in latest ICT technologies as part of its commitment to the government of Ghana to train over 5000 Ghanaians in ICT by 2024.



Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Sami Brady is heading back to Salem!

Alison Sweeney will return to "Days of Our Lives" when the show resumes production next month. The 43-year-old actor will reprise her role as scheming Samantha "Sami" Brady for an "emotional storyline," the show's producers revealed Monday in a press release.

Alison Sweeney (Paul Archuleta / Getty Images)

"It is always a beautiful day in Salem when we get to welcome Alison Sweeney back to the canvas," executive producer Ken Corday said in a statement. "Sami Brady is an integral part of our shows history, and we are elated that shes coming home again."

Alison Sweeney and Bryan Dattilo on

The dramatic new storyline "will center around family and her recently SORASed daughter Allie Horton (Lindsay Arnold)," according to the show. (Soap opera buffs use the term "soap opera rapidly aging syndrome," or SORAS, to describe a character whose age has accelerated over a short amount of time.)

Sweeney joined the cast of the long-running NBC daytime drama in 1993 when she was just 16. She left the series 21 years later in 2014. The Daytime Emmy Award nominee has returned to the show for short arcs every year since 2017.

Related: Alfonso has played Hope Williams Brady on the daytime drama since 1983.

Sweeney had already finished shooting an arc on "Days" when the coronavirus outbreak forced production to shut down. Those episodes began airing in July and will run through the end of September.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 22:04:34|Editor: huaxia

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TRIPOLI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) on Monday called for "immediate and thorough" investigation into suspected excessive use of force by the UN-backed government's security against demonstrations in the capital Tripoli.

"The excessive use of force by pro-GNA security personnel in Tripoli on Sunday ... resulted in the injury of a number of protesters," UNSMIL said in a statement.

The rights to peaceful assembly, protest and freedom of expression are "fundamental human rights and fall within Libya's obligations under international human rights law," it noted.

The demonstrations were motivated by frustrations about sustained poor living conditions, shortages of electricity and water and a lack of service provision throughout the country, the statement explained.

"Given the continuing immiseration of the Libyan people and the ever-present threat of renewed conflict, it is past time for Libyan leaders to put aside their differences and engage in a fully inclusive political dialogue," it said.

A day earlier, the Interior Ministry of the UN-backed government said some individuals posing as security personnel fired at the demonstrations "in an attempt to create chaos."

"The security services and departments spotted and identified those individuals in order to arrest them. They are neither police officers nor affiliated to the Interior Ministry," the Ministry said in a statement. Enditem
Of the 55 prime ministers who held office in Britain, 20 were educated at Eton College, seven attended Harrow School, and six went to Westminster School.

These institutions offer both education and affiliation; having the right friends is important in life. Nor are humans the only social-climbers. A paper just published claims that bottlenose dolphins also form old boy networks.

For the last 30 years, zoologists have studied dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, logging the ages genders and behaviours of 1,700 individuals.

Recent research has focused on youngsters from birth to age 10, examining how juvenile male and female bottlenose dolphins navigate this vulnerable period.

Grouping patterns and social associations in the absence of adults have been identified.

Baby bottlenoses, the research shows, remain close to their mothers for the first three to four years of life. Then they begin making excursions on their own, approaching other dolphins.

Engaging in group activities, they may swim closely together, rub flippers, and imitate each others behaviour.

Youngsters move frequently from one group to the next, some remaining around for as little as 10 minutes before heading off to join another one. In due course, an individual starts spending more of its time with a few close associates.

Each sex, the scientists found, does its own thing; females prefer to be with females, males with males. Segregation is driven by same-sex preference rather than opposite-sex avoidance. Females tend to spend more time on their own.

Read More Donal Hickey: Landscape pretty as a picture with wild flowers

Males, being more gregarious, cast a wider social net. They form strong same-sex associations and engage in more affiliative behaviour than their sisters. Females engage in less social activity, spending more time hunting for food than do males.

Family and friends are important to dolphins, so networking during the childhood years is crucial. As adults, they will tend to live in pods, typically of about 15 members. These associations may endure for years, with younger members joining and leaving from time to time.

Shoals of fish can be herded and targeted co-operatively. An individual might call on others for help when danger threatens. There are records of females being assisted during childbirth. A mothers friends will babysit a calf, allowing her time off for fishing.

But dolphins also have a dark side.

Just as a male lion, taking over a pod, kills the cubs of his predecessor so as to bring their mother into heat, a male dolphin will kill a youngster occasionally, so that he can impregnate its mother.

Fungie, the famous Dingle Bay resident, might appear to be a loner, but hes not. He seems to have shunned others of his kind, in favour of human contacts.

As is the case with highly intelligent social animals generally, dolphins are slow to mature sexually; females dont give birth to their first calf until age 10.

The long childhood, the researchers suggest, allows the youngsters to assess potential associates without the stress of having to compete for breeding partners while doing so.

How do bottlenoses recognise their friends? Do they use secret fin-shakes or are there dolphin equivalents of the Eton Boating Song in their extensive vocal repertoires?

Janet Mann et al. Juvenile social dynamics reflect adult reproductive strategies in bottlenose dolphins. Behavioural Ecology 2020
Mustapha Baba-Shehuri

The Federal Government of Nigeria has revealed that it borrowed 5,000 metric tonnes of grains from the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS).

Nigeria is one of the top countries among the 15 member states of the ECOWAS.

The Federal Government on Sunday said a total of 5,000 metric tonnes of assorted grains were borrowed by Nigeria from the food stock of the Economic Community of West Africa States.

According to the Minister of State for Agriculture and Rural Development, Mustapha Baba-Shehuri, the FG borrowed 5,000 metric tonnes of assorted grains from ECOWAS.

Punch reports that the Minister made this known while receiving the 3,999 tonnes of cereals donated to the Federal Government by ECOWAS with its donors and financial partners.

Baba-Shehuri explained that to address the incessant worrying food crisis in the West African sub-region, especially in the Sahel, the heads of government of ECOWAS member states decided to establish a Regional Food Security Reserve Programme. The minister said;

The government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria loaned 5,000MT of assorted grains from ECOWAS stock which was agreed to be paid back on grain for grain basis

Modalities had been put in place to replace the ECOWAS stock before the advent of COVID-19 pandemic. That notwithstanding, I can assure you that the stock will be replaced in due course.

On the donation by ECOWAS, the minister said it would be used to support the most vulnerable populations to help mitigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria.
A female rapper running to become the first black mayor of a South Carolina town has been arrested on accusations she staged her own kidnapping and beating, streaming the incident live on Facebook to gain sympathy votes.

Sabrina Belcher, 29, was arrested and charged with conspiracy and filing a false police report after Sumter police say the footage that she broadcast live on Facebook of her being kidnapped, beaten and robbed earlier this week was all part of an elaborate ruse.

Alleged accomplice Christopher James Eaddy, 34, was also charged with conspiracy in the case, Sumter PD said in a news release.

According to their arrest warrants, Eaddy told officers Belcher hired him to help stage the incident and make it look like an opposing candidate in the election was behind the attack. Police say Belcher confessed to staging the crime.

They staged a kidnapping and beating in order to garner publicity, sympathy and votes in the November election, the department said.

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Sabrina Belcher, 29, was arrested and charged with conspiracy and filing a false police report after Sumter police say the footage she broadcasted live on Facebook of her being kidnapped, beaten and robbed earlier this week was all part of an elaborate ruse. Alleged accomplice Christopher Eaddy was arrested too (right)

According to their arrest warrants, Eaddy told officers Belcher hired him to help stage the incident and make it look like an opposing candidate in the election was behind the attack

The incident began Tuesday when Belcher walked into the police department to meet with officers just before 11:30pm, where she told them she had been assaulted and kidnapped by an unknown man during an attempted robbery, police said.

According to investigators, Belcher was injured and she also told them the man had knocked out the windows of her car during the assault.

Police said Belcher was taken to the nearby Prisma Health Tuomey Hospital for her injuries to be assessed and she was later released.

In footage of the staged kidnapping, Belcher is shown driving in her car as a man, who is not visible in frame, is heard ordering her to f***ing drive.

At the beginning of the three minute clip, the man is seen pulling Belcher by the hair as shes driving, telling her b***h I told you not to f*** with me.

Belcher is heard pleading with the man, screaming for him to stop. The man continues to strike and jostle with Belcher as she is driving.

The assailant then warns, Im going to f***ing kill this b***h, several times as Belcher cries in apparent distress.

In several instances she glances down to the camera, telling the man Im sorry  Im sorry, as he tells her to take the next left turn.

Make a left b***h or Imma f***ing kill you, he warns again.

Belcher streamed the alleged shame kidnapping live on Facebook, showing her being struck by an assailant who orders her to drive

The assailant then warns, Im going to f***ing kill this b***h, several times as Belcher cries in apparent distress

When the vehicle appears to come to a halt, the man grabs Belcher and the two become ensnared in a struggle.

While much of the altercation is obscured in darkness, the man appears to be hitting and pulling at Belcher, as she screams Ive got kids, Ive got kids.

The man then appears to striker her with a metal bat three times in the stomach. Belcher looks at the camera again and puts her hands up to her face as if to stop blood from pouring out from her nose.

The sound of windows smashing is then heard, with the man seemingly smashing the passenger and drivers side windows, as well as the windshield, as Belcher initially reported to police.

Police say Belcher admitted to orchestrating and faking the crime. She allegedly paid Eaddy to beat her and damage her car

Belcher, meanwhile appears to take cover from the shattering glass. She is pulled out from the car and the video comes to an abrupt end, showing the shattered windscreen.

In reporting the incident, police say Belcher gave a fake name for her attacker.

Officers later determined she was in contact with Eaddy whom she had worked with days prior to concoct and stage the reported incident, police said.

Belcher had reportedly attempted to discredit a fellow candidate in the video, police said, declining to specify further. They also said she and Eaddy had ongoing plans to smear other mayoral candidates.

According to their arrest warrants, Eaddy told officers Belcher hired him to help stage the incident and make it look like an opposing candidate in the election was behind the attack.

He also reportedly sad Belcher agreed to pay Eaddy to damage her vehicle and simulate assault. Police say Belcher admitted to orchestrating and faking the crime.

This was simply an effort to create disorder and discontent in our community for personal gain, Police Chief Russell Roark said in the news release. As a result, a valuable number of resources, including personnel, man hours of the police department as well as local medical professionals, were wasted based on false information.

Police declined to specify which of the five other mayoral candidates Belcher reportedly attempted to smear. Her opponents include two city council members and a controversial former S.C. congressional candidate, Archie Parnell, The State reported.

Belcher had reportedly attempted to discredit a fellow candidate in the video, police said, declining to specify further. They also said she and Eaddy had ongoing plans to smear other mayoral candidates'

A GoFundMe campaign set up by Belcher for her campaign had reached just $25 of its $10,000 goal by Monday afternoon, after nearly a month since it was launched. The total sum was made in one single donation from an anonymous source

Parnell ran for Congress in 2018 when decades-old allegations that he had beaten his ex-wife surfaced.

According to Belchers campaign page on Facebook, she is the first Black female candidate ever to run. Sumter has a population that is 47.9 percent Black, Census.gov statistics show.

The page describes her as a decorated community activist and local volunteer as well as a volunteer firefighter in Sumter County. Her platform includes a bid for 24/7 police presence during school bus hours to help protect our children.

Its not so much about the race because I have actually lived here long enough to see that theres a lot of different injustices and things that could be better, Belcher said in a June interview with a local newspaper. We are learning to come together, and we are learning to show that its not about the color of your skin.

A GoFundMe campaign set up by Belcher for her campaign had reached just $25 of its $10,000 goal by Monday afternoon, after nearly a month since it was launched. The total sum was made in one single donation from an anonymous source.

Belcher is charged with filing a false police report of a felony and conspiracy. Eaddy is charged with conspiracy. Both were booked Wednesday at the Sumter County Sheriffs Office Detention Center and have since posted bail.
Both events important milestones to highly anticipated public listing

TORONTO, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Field Trip Psychedelics Inc. ("Field Trip" or the "Company"), the company redefining mental health and well-being through its ground-breaking work in psychedelics and psychedelic-enhanced psychotherapy, today announced it has closed the first tranche of its Series B financing (the "Financing"), raising gross proceeds of $11.0M from a broad base of investors. The Financing was completed through a brokered private placement for which Canaccord Genuity Corp. and Stifel Nicolaus Canada Inc. jointly acted as lead agents.

The proceeds from the Financing will be used to continue Field Trip's rollout of its Field Trip Health centers across North America, which are providing best-in-class psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, and to further advance its pioneering work with its next generation psychedelic molecule, FT-104, and its advanced research and development on psilocybin producing mushrooms in partnership with the University of West Indies.

The Company recently announced the opening of the New York location of its Field Trip Health centers, following the opening of its Toronto location earlier this year, and will shortly be announcing the opening of its Santa Monica location.

Ronan Levy, Executive Chairman of Field Trip Psychedelics, said, "Our ability to secure this private placement validates the strength of our business strategy, brand and the incredible team of physicians, psychologist, therapists, scientists and employees at Field Trip. It is also reflective of the rapidly increasing interest in the investment community in the science of psychedelics compounds and their incredible potential across a number of applications. Securing these funds strengthens our balance sheet and provides us with capital to execute against these growth plans."

Sean Trigony, CEO and Founder of Los Angeles-based Seven Hound Ventures, which participated in the financing, said: "Field Trip's management team has a strong track record of establishing and growing medical clinics, and the science team behind Field Trip Discovery is unparalleled. We are excited to see them applying this experience to the emerging psychedelics industry, building both the infrastructure needed to deliver treatments, as well as the next generation of psychedelic molecules targeting 5HT2A receptors."

Amalgamation Agreement with Newton Energy Corporation

The Company also announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement dated August 21, 2020 (the "Amalgamation Agreement") with Newton Energy Corporation ("Newton") (TSXV: NTN.H) and Newton's wholly-owned subsidiary, Newton Energy Subco Limited ("Newton Subco"), pursuant to which the parties intend to complete a going-public transaction for Field Trip (the "Transaction").

The going-public Transaction is structured as a three-cornered amalgamation, which will result in Field Trip becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Newton by amalgamating with Newton Subco, and the security holders of Field Trip becoming security holders of Newton. In connection with the completion of the Transaction, it is intended that Newton will change its name to "Field Trip Health Ltd." (the "Resulting Issuer"). The Amalgamation Agreement will be made available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Field Trip and Newton anticipate the closing of the Transaction (the "Closing") will occur on or about September 29, 2020. The Transaction is subject to the receipt of all necessary regulatory and shareholder approvals as well as the satisfaction of conditions to the Closing as set out in the Amalgamation Agreement.

"As pioneers in developing an entirely new industry in a profoundly transformative therapeutic modality, access to capital will be one of the key characteristics that distinguishes the leaders in the psychedelics industry," added Levy. "Our team has demonstrated great success in raising capital to date, and our public listing will provide us with more diverse financing options that will ensure our continued success and further lower our cost of capital."

About Field Trip Psychedelics Inc.

Field Trip is the world's first mental wellness company at the forefront of the scientific re-emergence of psychedelics and psychedelic-enhanced therapies. With Field Trip Health centres opening across North America and advanced research on plant-based psychedelics through Field Trip Discovery, we help people from those in treatment to those seeking accelerated personal growth, with a simple, evidence-based way to heal and heighten engagement with the world.

Learn more at https://fieldtriphealth.com

Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains projections and forward-looking information that involve various risks and uncertainties regarding future events and are not guarantees of future performance of the Company. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results and the Company's plans and objectives to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information. These and all subsequent written and oral forward- looking information are based on estimates and opinions of management on the dates they are made and expressed qualified in their entirety by this notice. The Company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking information should circumstance or management's estimates or opinions change.

SOURCE Field Trip Psychedelics Inc.
(Newser)  Brenton Tarrant has admitted carrying out the worst mass shooting in New Zealand's historyand he could receive the harshest sentence the country has imposed since it abolished the death penalty decades ago. The 29-year-old Australian appeared in a Christchurch court Monday on the first day of a four-day sentencing hearing. He has pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder, and one count of terrorism in connection with shootings at two mosques in the city last year, and could become the first person in New Zealand history sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole, the BBC reports. The court heard that Tarrant had planned to attack a third mosque and intended to burn down all three buildings to "inflict as many casualties as possible." The youngest victim was 3 years old.

story continues below

Tarrant's detailed plan of attack, which included flying a drone over one of the mosques three months prior to the attack as part of his planning, was read aloud in court after Justice Cameron Mander warned that it would be "distressing," reports the New Zealand Herald. During the hearing, Tarrant, who expressed white supremacist beliefs online, was confronted by survivors of the March 15, 2019, attack and some of those who lost relatives. "I weep every day for him and for my familys loss," Janna Ezat, mother of Hussein Al-Umari, 35, told the court. "I decided to forgive you, Mr. Tarrant, because I dont have hate, I dont have revenge," she said, per the Washington Post. Temel Atacocugu, who was shot nine times, described lying under a pile of bodies in the Al Noor Mosque. "I could feel the blood and brains of the person upon me running down my face and neck. I couldn't move or make a sound as the gunman would have executed me as he did the others." (Read more Brenton Tarrant stories.)
Open letter to unions and trade bodies

The widow of Pc Andrew Harper has written to unions seeking their support for her campaign to create a new law meaning those who kill emergency workers are jailed for life.

Lissie Harper has contacted the Fire Brigades Union, the Prison Officers Association, Unison, Unite, the Royal College of Nursing, the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council in an attempt to harvest the backing of hundreds of thousands of emergency service workers.

Mrs Harper said it was her strong belief that society must offer the greatest protection for those killed protecting it, adding that she did not believe current laws reflected that.

In her open letter, Mrs Harper said: For too long have criminals been able to commit crime, cause harm and take the lives of the innocent. This needs to change and I need your support in order to do that.

Pc Harper, 28, had been married for four weeks when he and a Thames Valley Police colleague responded to a late-night burglary in Sulhamstead in August last year.

Two of Pc Harpers killers, 18-year-olds Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, last week lodged applications with the Court of Appeal seeking permission to challenge their convictions and their 13-year jail sentences.

They were jailed alongside Henry Long, 19, who was handed a 16-year sentence.

All three were acquitted of murder during a trial at the Old Bailey but were sentenced for the lesser charge of manslaughter after Pc Harper got caught in a crane strap attached to the back of a car driven by Long, and was dragged to his death along dark country lanes.

Those sentences have also been referred to the Court of Appeal by Attorney General Suella Braverman for judges to decide whether they were too lenient.

More than 450,000 people have signed a petition backing Harpers Law, which would see anyone convicted of killing an emergency services worker given a life sentence.

In her letter today (Monday), Mrs Harper said: To take a life should mean a life sentence in prison.

That is what Harpers Law will provide  an appropriate deterrent and a suitable punishment.

Far too often our heroes are taken for granted, attacked and assaulted. And on rare occasion their lives are cruelly taken.

My husband was one of these heroes, one of the protectors who gave everything to his job as a police officer.

He was an impressive police officer and never did anything by halves.

Yet it is now, after his life has been taken that he has been let down, let down by the very laws that he fought to implement every day that he proudly wore his uniform.

He deserved so very much more than that.

I want to change the way that our country views our emergency services workers.

I want our Government to offer them the most protection they can.

Ultimately, I want to provide justice for those who will deserve it most of all.

She added: To take the life of an emergency services worker should mean facing a life sentence in prison.

Lets give our protectors the ultimate protection.

Lets show the criminals and killers of this world that they cannot cause our heroes to fall without paying the price, we will not let this stand any longer.

She urged emergency services workers to keep spreading the word about Harpers Law, and asked them to contact politicians and to share the petition to achieve the legal change.

Mrs Harper added: I hope that together we will achieve Harpers Law.
On Oct. 13, 2012, in Lordsburg, Timothy Young allegedly turned a corner without using his turn signal.

We know about it because Young was pulled over by a Hidalgo County sheriffs deputy.

As he was writing the ticket, the deputy thought Young was acting squirelly. Or, in the more formal language of an opinion issued in June of this year by the New Mexico Court of Appeals, his demeanor and actions during the stop gave rise to a suspicion that he was transporting contraband.

When a drug-sniffing dog alerted to the car seat, but the deputy still couldnt find any drugs, he and his lieutenant decided to take Young to the Gila Regional Medical Center for an abdominal X-ray and rectal exam.

See what happens when you dont use your blinker?

The lieutenant wrote an application for a search warrant and supporting affidavit.

But he botched it. His affidavit asserted his belief that Young had drugs in or on his person, but the application requested permission to search only the car, not Youngs body. A judge issued the warrant four hours after the initial stop.

At the medical center, armed with a warrant that authorized a search of a car, Dr. Bryant Beesley performed the invasive exam. Neither the digital probe nor the X-ray revealed any drugs. Seven hours after the ordeal began, Young was released without charges.

In 2014, he filed suit. Among other claims, he contended that Dr. Beesley deprived him of his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches.

Constitutional rights define a citizens relationship to the government. Normally, only government employees can be held liable for infringing civil rights. Dr. Beesley was privately employed. But theres no doubt he acted under color of state law, as the civil rights statute requires, when he performed a search at the request of officers.

Doctors and other workers who participate in police activities need to know they will be held to the same constitutional standards as the officers themselves.

Dr. Beesley raised the defense of qualified immunity, a legal term much in the news recently.

The term is misleading in one important aspect. In medicine, partial immunity can exist. Not in law. Judges and prosecutors are immune from civil suits for actions taken in the course of their duties. Police officers arent. Qualified immunity means non-immunity.

The phrase is an unnecessarily cryptic (and procedurally convoluted) way of setting out the legal standard that must be met before an officer can be held liable for violating a suspects civil rights.

The right to be free from unreasonable searches is guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the federal Constitution. But after specifying standards for the issuance of warrants, the amendment gives no further guidance as to what counts as reasonable.

Since the early 1960s, judges around the country have been engaged in an effort to catalog every possible variety of encounter between cops and suspects, classifying each as either reasonable or unreasonable.

But the variety of possible human encounters is infinite. The project of identifying every single one of them, pinning each like a butterfly specimen in an album, is literally unending. There is always something new.

The leading legal treatise on the Fourth Amendment is already 6,000 pages long. Thats 111 pages of commentary for every word of the amendment. Supplements are added regularly because precedent-setting decisions are issued every working day.

Obviously, it would be absurd to demand that non-lawyers master that entire enormous body of case law, and even more ridiculous to require them to anticipate what comes next.

So on the one hand an ever-expanding body of case law evaluates the constitutionality of police practices. On the other hand, police officers cant be expected to know most of it.

Faced with this dilemma, the Supreme Court developed a clumsy workaround  a kludge  and called it qualified immunity. The term is a label, not a description.

In effect, the court divided Fourth Amendment rights into two classes. Law enforcement officers (and ER docs) can be sued for civil rights violations only when they violate a suspects class A rights, which legal jargon designates clearly established (again, a label, not a description). Violations of class B rights may lead to suppression of evidence in a criminal prosecution but wont support a civil rights lawsuit.

In short, the law in this area is a mess. Its baffling even to judges. The trial judge failed to properly categorize the rights at issue in Youngs case against Dr. Beesley, obliging the Court of Appeals to order a do-over.

After the opinion was filed this June, the doctors lawyers notified the court that he died in 2018.

Joel Jacobsen is an author who in 2015 retired from a 29-year legal career. If there are topics you would like to see covered in future columns, please write him at legal.column.tips@gmail.com.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 16:53 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c4014c28 1 News #Bali,Uluwatu,Kecak-dance,digital-payment,QRIS,health-protocol,travel,destination,Bali-tourism Free

Amid the pandemic, Uluwatu Temple Outer Area Tourism, famous for its thrilling kecak dance performance, has officially launched a digital payment service.

According to the Tourism and Creative Economy Ministry's Regional II destination development director, Wawan Gunawan, the Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard (QRIS)-based payment system allows for a faster, easier, cheaper and more secure service, as it will minimize physical contact.

"Hopefully, it will help revive tourism and the creative economy in Uluwatu," added Wawan in a statement on Sunday.

The kecak dance at the Uluwatu Temple Outer Area is one of Bali's must-watch art performances, regularly attracting 6,000 to 8,000 visitors per day before the pandemic. Taking place at the temples amphitheater right on the edge of a cliff, it is usually held late in the afternoon with a dramatic sunset over the Indian Ocean as a backdrop.

The tourist destination was closed for some time but recently reopened, although with a lower number of visitors.

As a precaution, health protocols are being implemented, including requiring the dancers to wear face masks, lowering the number of dancers and changing the choreography to allow for physical distancing. Visitors are also required to wear face masks, wash their hands using soap or hand sanitizer and maintain a safe distance according to the signage on their seat.

"The pattern of tourists in this Adaptasi Kebiasaan Baru [Adopting New Behaviors] period has changed. They tend to look for services that implement health protocols such as social distancing and avoid direct physical contact. Hopefully, QRIS will help these tourists feel safe and comfortable during their visit," said Bali Governor I Wayan Koster.

Koster is hopeful that all tourism players and the public will be able to implement health protocols correctly, with discipline, commitment and responsibility. "If done right, hopefully Bali's tourism will soon improve, so that in 2021 it will acquire an overall green zone status."

Bali has reopened to domestic tourists, but plans to welcome foreign visitors have been pushed back until at least at the end of this year due to the still alarming situation. (wir/kes)
If Chrystia Freeland really wants to build back better, heres where she needs to start, Aug. 20

Without a solid footing on which to Build Back Better, it will amount to a stutter in the pandemic litany.

After all, the Liberal government is merely repeating what it has done since the spring  patch up the frayed social fabric exposed by the pandemic.

Unfortunately, extending CERB yet again and tweaking the EI program continues this band-aid-approach.

We can only hope, therefore, the Liberals will return in the fall with bold, solid and sweeping plans to rebuild the better Canada we want.

Nothing less will do.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must return to us with bold policies on everything from a guaranteed basic income to support the most vulnerable Canadians, a national plan to care for seniors and their caregivers, to a green infrastructure strategy which supports a sustainable economy.

Bold moves like these may ensure confidence in government, and so avoid a disruptive election in the thick of a health, social and economic crisis.
Judge denies motion for 3 Ore. Christian schools to reopen in-person classes

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A federal judge in Oregon has ruled against three Christian schools seeking to re-open for in-person learning this fall, arguing that the states restrictions on in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic are constitutional.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman ruled in favor of Gov. Kate Browns June executive order last Thursday and denied a motion by Horizon Christian School, McMinnville Christian Academy and Life Christian School.

In my view the religious institutions here in K-through-12 arent being treated in any way differently than public K-through-12 institutions, U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman ruled, according to Oregon Live.

John Kaempf, an attorney representing the three schools, argued that the schools want to be treated the same as universities and daycare centers, which are allowed to open for in-person instruction.

The lawsuit claims that Browns order violates the First Amendment rights of the institutions.

Zoom learning is not what Christian learning is about, Kaempf contended in court, according to the Associated Press. My clients are called to communal in person faith-based learning.

Oregon attorney Marc Abrams argued that the restrictions in place were necessary due to the risk to public health caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Gov. Browns executive order initially allowed in-person learning at public and private K-12 schools with the condition that they follow guidance by the Oregon Health Authority and Oregon Department of Education.

But under Browns extended order, a county must have 10 or fewer COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents and have 5% or fewer positive tests per week to reopen for in-person instruction. Also, the state must have 5% or fewer positives tests.

According to a report from The Oregonian last week, 5.4% of tests statewide are coming back positive while the statewide infection rate was 50 per 100,000 residents. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been nearly 25,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Oregon since the pandemic began.

The schools argued that their institutions will be irreparably harmed and could be forced to close entirely if they are not allowed to hold in-person classes.

Religious schools serve as an essential service, the schools legal filing reads. The educational, psychosocial, and emotional wellbeing of plaintiffs students must take precedence. Not only is plaintiffs students wellbeing on the line during the pandemic, but so is plaintiffs viability as religious organizations.

However, Mosman, a George W. Bush appointee, argued that the states interest in mitigating that spread of the virus outweighs the interests of the schools.

The harm the state is trying to prevent is death and not just death as in a few, but the possibility of a widespread pandemic killing our most vulnerable citizens, Mosman was quoted as saying.

Other private schools in Oregon are also looking to open for in-person classes this fall.

Two schools in Deschutes County sent a letter to Brown on Aug. 10 asking her to re-examine the states metrics for school reopening to provide more lenient guidelines, according to The Redmond Spokesman.

Brown stated last week at a press conference that the infection rate in the state is still too high to get our kids safely back into the classrooms in most of our schools this fall.

To keep students, teachers and staff safe in our schools across the state, we need to see a much more rapid decline in case numbers, and we need to see it quickly, she said, according to The Chronicle.

Private Christian schools across the nation are facing similar struggles.

In Texas, a Christian school announced last week it plans to hold in-person classes with social distancing measures despite a county-wide ban on in-person public and private school classes to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

Laguna Madre Christian Academy in Port Isabel, a K-12 school, intends to resist an order enacted by officials in Cameron County with its plan to reopen on Aug. 31 for in-person instruction.

Jeremy Dys of the First Liberty Institute, a legal nonprofit that represents the academy, sent a letter to Cameron County Chief Legal Counsel Juan Gonzalez about the matter on Aug. 18.

[P]rivate, religious institutions retain the freedom to determine when it is safe to resume in-person meetings or instruction, not the State of Texas, nor Cameron County. Cameron Countys order must yield, Dys argued in the letter, citing earlier guidance from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stating that private schools are exempt from closing in-person instruction.

In California, religious schools are suing Gov. Gavin Newsom over his order prohibiting in-person instruction at public and private schools during the pandemic.
Cairo is keen on negotiating with Addis Ababa and Khartoum over the dam Ethiopia is building on the Blue Nile to reach a fair and balanced agreement that preserves Egypt's riparian rights and the interests of the three countries, Deputy Foreign Minister Hamdi Loza told European ambassadors to Egypt.

In a meeting the foreign ministry held with European ambassadors in Cairo on Monday, Loza reviewed the latest developments on the current talks mediated by the African Union (AU) on the long-running dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).

He said Egypt wanted to brief the European ambassadors on the updates of the negotiations to inform the international society of the latest developments in the "vital" file, a statement by the Egyptian foreign ministry read.

"It is also the result of the strategic relations between the European Union and the three negotiating parties," the statement added.

Negotiations to reach a deal over the filling and operation of the nearly $5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) were launched last month after the talks between the three countries had reached deadlock last year, and so did negotiations sponsored by the US and World Bank in February.

The downstream countries are seeking a legally binding deal on the filling and operation of the dam.

The talks stumbled earlier this month for one week after Addis Ababa's proposal that contained guidelines for filling the GERD.

Egypt said the draft proposal put forward by Ethiopia lacked the guidelines for operating the dam, any elements indicating a binding deal, or a legal mechanism to settle disputes.

Sudan threatened earlier this month to withdraw from the talks if Ethiopia insisted on linking an agreement on the dams filling to a deal on sharing the waters of the Blue Nile.

The mega-dam, built 15 kilometres from the Ethiopian border with Sudan, has been a source of contention between the three countries.

Cairo fears the project will significantly cut its crucial water supplies from the River Nile, while Sudan fears it could endanger the safety of its own dams.

Ethiopia says the massive project, which it hopes will make it Africas largest power exporter, is key to its development efforts.

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By PTI

MUMBAI: CBI officials probing Sushant Singh Rajput's death case on Monday visited a Mumbai-based resort where the actor is said to have spent a couple of months, and also continued the questioning of the actor's friend and cook at the DRDO guest house here.

Rajput's accountant Rajat Mewati was also called on Monday for questioning at the DRDO guest house at Kalina in Santacruz, where the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sleuths probing the case are staying, an official said.

A CBI team on Monday reached the Waterstone Resort in suburban Andheri, where Rajput is apparently spent about two months, for questioning its staff in connection with the probe into his death, according to the official.

The probing team went to the resort on Sunday also, but left as its staff members were not there.

ALSO READ | Sushant Singh Rajput death: CBI visits late actor's flat, questions friend, house helps

Meanwhile, Rajput's accountant Mewati, flat-mate Siddharth Pithani and cook Neeraj Singh reached the DRDO guest house for questioning by the CBI, the official said.

The CBI questioned Pithani, Neeraj and Rajput's domestic help Deepesh Sawant on Saturday and Sunday also.

These three were present in Rajput's house at Mont Blanc Apartments in suburban Bandra when the 34-year-old actor was found hanging in his room on June 14.

On Sunday, the CBI team questioned Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant at the DRDO guest house and later took them to the late actor's residence.

After spending three hours there, the central agency team left the place along with Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant, who were then again taken to the DRDO guest house in the evening for questioning, the official said.

Forensic science experts were also part of the CBI team which visited Rajput's residence, the official said.

ALSO READ | Sushant Singh Rajput death: Hyderabad VR developers statements might unlock mystery

On Saturday also, the CBI team accompanied by Pithani, Neeraj and Sawant visited the late actor's house to reconstruct the sequence of events before he was found dead.

On Friday, the CBI officials had recorded the statements of Pithani and Neeraj.

The Supreme Court last week upheld the transfer of an FIR, lodged by Rajput's father in Patna against actor Rhea Chakraborty and others for allegedly abetting his suicide, to the CBI.

After Rajput was found hanging in his apartment in June, the Mumbai Police registered a case of accidental death.

Later, Rajput's father filed a police complaint in Patna, accusing Chakraborty and her family of abetting the actor's suicide and misappropriating his money.
ICICI Lombard to acquire Bharti AXA's general insurance business

ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company will acquire the business of Bharti AXA General Insurance Company Ltd in a share-swap deal, the non-life insurer stated in a regulatory filing late on Friday.

The boards of ICICI Lombard and Bharti AXA General met on Friday to approve the signing of definitive agreements for demerger of Bharti AXA's non-life insurance business into ICICI Lombard through a scheme of arrangement.

As per the swap agreement, shareholders of Bharti AXA General will receive two shares of ICICI Lombard for every 115 shares of Bharti AXA General held by them as of the date on which the scheme of arrangement is approved by the board of directors of the two companies.

ICICI Lombard said the share swap ratio, recommended by independent valuers, has been accepted by the boards of the two companies.

Under the terms of the agreement, on closing, AXA and Bharti will receive a total of 35.8 million shares of ICICI Lombard, valued at 521 million euros, at current market prices, which is the closing price of ICICI Lombard stock on 21 August, according to an AXA statement.

According to ICICI Lombard, the proposed transaction would enable it to consolidate its market and become the third largest non-life insurer in the country with a market share of about 8.7 per cent.

The acquisition will help ICICI Lombard expand its distribution network through Bharti AXA General's existing distribution partnerships.

Employees of the combined business will also benefit via greater opportunities across functions and geographies, ICICI Lombard said.

The closing of the transaction is subject to various conditions, including regulatory approvals from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India, Competition Commission of India, The Securities and Exchange Board of India, Stock Exchanges, Reserve Bank of India, National Company Law Tribunal and approval of shareholders of both ICICI Lombard and Bharti AXA General, amongst others.

"This is a landmark step in the journey of ICICI Lombard and we are confident that this transaction would be value accretive for our shareholders.

"We are excited by the capabilities and strengths that Bharti AXA will add to our franchise. The company has a talented employee base with a strong cultural fit, and we look forward to welcoming them to the ICICI Lombard family.

"We would also like to reassure Bharti AXA's policyholders and channel partners of seamless business continuity and maintaining highest standards of customer service," Bhargav Dasgupta, MD & CEO of ICICI Lombard General said.

"We are delighted that the partnership between Bharti and AXA has been successful in laying down a solid foundation in the domestic insurance landscape. Over the past few years, our business demonstrated consistent growth, forged productive partnerships and increased the distribution footprint significantly. We are confident that the proposed amalgamation of our business with ICICI Lombard will bring greater business synergies and create value for all stakeholders," Rakesh Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti AXA, said.

According to ICICI Lombard, the Implementation Agreement contains customary terms for a transaction of this nature, including representations, warranties, indemnities and non-compete covenants from the relevant parties.

Post deal, the promoter holding in ICICI Lombard will be 48.11 per cent and public will be 51.89 per cent. Both Bharti and AXA will be public shareholders.

In a communication to colleagues, Bharti AXA General's MD & CEO Sanjeev Srinivasan said once the regulatory approvals are obtained, an interim committee with representation from both the companies will be set up for successful completion and transition of the business.
Johannesburg  South Africa, with one of the worlds highest COVID-19 infection rates despite some of the toughest measures to contain the pandemic, could see overall GDP plunge nearly 8 percent this year, a new report by UNDP and other UN agencies in South Africa finds.

The assessment, which will inform policy and program responses, projects South Africas economy will recover slowly through 2024, with some 54 percent of households that have been pushed out of formal jobs at risk of falling into poverty. A return to pre-2019 economic activity may require at least five years without major, far-reaching interventions.

Older people, women, those with disabilities, and the less educated have been hit hardest, the report says, with 34 percent of households likely to exit the middle class. Women, particularly in the poorest female-headed households, disproportionately bear the brunt of the impact of COVID-19, the report says.

"Inequalities within and among nations are being exposed and exacerbated by COVID-19, as the poor and vulnerable are unable to protect themselves," said UN Resident Coordinator Nardos Bekele-Tomas. "While Government social protection grants tend to target the poorest, this study posits that care and support needs to be provided to those at the borderline of the poverty line, such as the vulnerable middle class, to reduce their likelihood of slipping into poverty."

The personal testimony of Khumbulile Thabethe, a single parent with three children, was a stark reminder of how the virus impact hits hardest on the most vulnerable ones. "I've had to prioritize food over winter clothing for my three kids. Lockdown started in the warmer months and as we moved to the colder months, I could not cope," she told the audience.

The assessment, released 19 August, was conducted through economic modelling and surveys by phones, text, and email in English, Zulu, Xhosa, Setswana, Sepedi, and Sesotho.

Under its pessimistic scenariowith a prolonged economic and social reopening and the pandemic lasting for 30 monthsSouth Africas GDP could drop 7.9 percentage points in 2020, compared with pre-pandemic projections, and more than 80,000 people would lose their jobs. Under an optimistic scenario, GDP would likely fall 5.1 percent.

Sectors that will fare relatively better are those deemed essential, including the health sector, the food and agriculture sector, financial and insurance service sectors, and telecommunication services. Those hit harder include textiles, glass products, footwear, education services, catering and accommodation, beverages, and tobacco.

But COVID-19 also represents an opportunity for broad and lasting change to address social and structural flaw exposed by the crisissuch as inequality, extreme poverty, inadequate health services, high-levels of gender-based violence, and poor urban planning, the report says.

As of Friday, South Africas confirmed COVID-19 cases surpassed 600,000, despite one of the worlds toughest lockdowns. It now accounts for more than half of confirmed cases in Africa and nearly half its deaths, according to a tally by Reuters of WHO data. In March, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a three-week lockdown with strict curbs on travel and movement, enforced by the military.

Next steps

UN/UNDP recommendations to mitigate the pandemic in South Africa include:

For families, tailoring interventions according to household poverty levels, family size, and gender dimensions.

For public- and private-sector employers, refining interventions depending on workers skills and educational levels, notably supporting re-training of some workers, especially in hard-hit sectors.

For government, extending social protections to households on the brink of poverty but not classified as poor and directing more support to economic sectors where growth will most likely occur.

For hospitals and health care facilities, ensuring a safer environment for staff and increasing equipment and staff.

On the ground in South Africa

At the country level, UNDP in South Africa is helping to address job losses by providing training and small and matching grants to micro and small businesses, with a focus on those owned by youth and women in the most vulnerable townships. UNDP is also partnering with the Water Research Commission of South Africa that will fast-track development and promote promising innovations in the water sector, expanding access to water and sanitation for people in South Africa and the rest of the African continent.

In June, UNDP donated medical and personal protective equipment (PPE) to the city of Johannesburg including 20,000 surgical masks; 2,000 face shields; 10,000 hair nets; 1,000 surgical goggles; 5,000 sterile gloves; 5,000 disposable overalls; 5,000 disposable aprons; 200 forehead thermometers; 5,000 cloth reusable masks; 2,000 hand sanitizers; and 1,000 containers of anti-bacterial soap.

In July, UNDP provided northeastern Gauteng Provincewhich accounts for 32.2 percent of all COVID-19 cases in South Africa, second only to the Western Capewith a similar shipment including 40,000 surgical masks; 4,000 face shields; 20,000 hair nets; 2,000 surgical goggles; 10,000 sterile gloves; 10,000 disposable overalls; 10,000 disposable aprons; 500 forehead thermometers; 10,000 cloth reusable masks; and 2,000 hand sanitizers.

The South African start-up Ztlo Rewards, winner of UNDP and UNICEFs Big Think Challenge, has pivoted to COVID-19 response through their Stay Home, Keep Safe initiative, allowing thousands of young people to gain real-world rewards for washing their hands, cleaning their homes, and caring for loved ones.
A HCMC court sentenced a Malaysian woman to death on Monday for transporting 3.3 kilograms of cocaine from Brazil to Vietnam.

Kalaivani G Muniandy, 40, was found guilty of "illegal transporting of narcotic substances."

Kalaivani G Muniandy is escorted out of the court in HCMC after being sentenced to death for drug smuggling, August 24, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Hai Duyen.

She was arrested in October 2018 on landing in HCMC on an Emirates flight from Dubai. Customs officials at the Tan Son Nhat Airport checked her suitcase and found 3.3 kg of cocaine hidden in food boxes.

Muniandy said when she worked as a security guard at an airport warehouse in Malaysia, an Indian man gave her the phone number of a man called Prakash, who specialized in labor export and drug trafficking.

She and Prakash, whose nationality has not been disclosed, made contact on WhatsApp.

Prakash asked her to be a liaison for his counterparts in foreign countries and transport goods for him. She accepted the proposal and was paid 6,000 ringgit ($1,436) each trip apart from travel and accommodation expenses.

In late September 2018, Prakash booked flights for her from Malaysia to Sao Paulo in Brazil where she was given a suitcase containing four food boxes and asked to deliver them to a hotel in HCMC.

She told investigators that she didnt know the drugs were hidden inside the boxes.
In good times and in recent past, Ghulam Nabi Azads residence in south Delhi had been the go to place to sort and diffuse the crisis the Congress party faced. As leader of party in Rajya Sabha and also former UP incharge, Azad was one of the main trouble shooters for the party. But as cars drove in to his home a little after the Congress Working Committee meeting ended, it was another kind of crisis that need to be diffused. And this one involved Azad himself.

Some of the signatories to the letter bomb were seen at Azads residence. Mukul Wasnik, Shashi Tharoor, Kapil Sibal and Manish Tewari met at Azads home. Sources say they were briefed on what happened at the CWC earlier in the day. But the seriousness of the attack they faced at the meeting was not lost on them.

Sources say that senior leaders took on the letter writers at the CWC, asking them what their real intention was in writing the note. They were asked as to why couldnt they discuss this at party meetings. When they replied that meetings were not held, immediately a list was taken out and the details of the number of meetings called by Sonia Gandhi were read out.

Despite the denial, three members who attended the meeting confirmed to News18.com that Rahul Gandhi questioned the timing of the letter. Why was this letter written when my mother was in hospital? ..and wont such a letter help the BJP?

Ahmed Patel, KC Venugopal, AK Antony, Manmohan Singh and other seniors were angry and questioned the need to write this letter. Ambika Soni went to the extent of suggesting that action must be taken against the dissenters.

Sources say that at the meeting at Azads residence, some raised the concern that despite Sonia Gandhi saying they should be forgiven and move on, the reality is that this is unlikely to happen.

Some call it a cleaning up and purging action by handful of powerful chiefs in the party. The letter is unlikely to have been leaked by the letter writers. The leak, which is believed to have come from the other side, suited the purpose of those who want to keep the Gandhis powerful. Its demolished the rebellion for now that has made the Gandhis even more powerful. But whats more important, it has paved the way for Rahul Gandhi to take over in future with his own team.

Its an open secret that Rahul has not been comfortable working with some who were part of his mothers team. His earlier attempts to ease them out was unsuccessful. He and his sister can never get over the fact that many of these seniors did not stand by junior Gandhi during his campaign against PM Modi in 2014 Lok Sabha polls. After Mondays fireworks at the CWC, the issue seems settled. The letter writers are unlikely to be accepted and their political growth is likely to be in jeopardy.

So whats at stake for them? Most of those who wrote the letter have been feeling left out. With a new crop of leaders coming up, those who were powerful once and were crisis managers like Anand Sharma, Azad, Wasnik are now being left out.

Shashi Tharoor has often faced suspicion within his own party for charting his own course and also enjoying PMs support on key issues. Jitin Prasada, Milind Deora once very close to Rahul Gandhi are now out in the lurch. The class of 23, as they are being called, have been almost wiped out. This new age plan has made Gandhis more powerful and also sent the message that eight of you are either with them or you are out in the cold".

In the next few days, the party will see some sweeping organisational changes. New faces and leaders will come up. But with the turn of events, one thing becomes clear  the Congress cannot look beyond the Gandhis.
AETNA SPRINGS, Calif.: More dry-lightning hit Northern California on Monday after sparking over 625 wildfires the past week but firefighters got some relief as temperatures eased off record highs.

The worst of the blazes, including the second and third largest in California history, burned in the San Francisco Bay Area with roughly 240,000 people under evacuation orders or warnings across the state.

Much of North California, including the Sierra Nevada Mountains and coast, was under a red flag" alert for dry lightning and high winds, but the Bay Area got a reprieve as storms skipped the area, the National Weather Service reported.

Close to 300 lightning strikes sparked 10 blazes overnight and more sleeper fires" were likely burning undiscovered in areas shrouded by dense smoke, Governor Gavin Newsom said.

One huge blaze blackened ancient coastal redwood forests south of San Francisco that have never seen fire due to usually high relative humidity levels, Newsom said.

We are in a different climate and we are dealing with different climate conditions that are precipitating fires the likes of which we have not seen in modern recorded history," Newsom told a news briefing.

The wildfires, ignited by over 13,000 lightning strikes from dry thunderstorms across Northern and Central California since Aug. 15, have killed at least seven people and destroyed over 1,200 homes and other structures.

Evacuees returned to homes burned by the LNU Lightning Complex wildfire, the second largest in state history, raging in mountains around 45 miles west of Sacramento.

Nothings left, but were safe," said a man, who did not give his name in an online video showing everything but his patio furniture destroyed at his house near Vacaville.

Smoke from fires that have burned over 1.2 million acres (485,620 hectares), an area more than three times larger than Los Angeles, created unhealthy conditions for much of Northern California and drifted as far as Kansas.

The LNU fire was 22% contained as of Monday while to the south, east of San Jose, the SCU Lightning Complex was nearly as large at 347,000 acres and only 10% contained.

Im nervous; I dont want to leave my house, but lives are more important," Penny Furusho told CBS television affiliate KPIX5 after she evacuated from the south flank of the SCU fire.

With lower temperatures, clouds gathered over coastal forest north of Santa Cruz helping firefighters achieve 13% containment on the CZU Lightning Complex fire.

With the increase in humidity, the fire has actually extinguished itself," Cal Fire Operations Chief Mark Brunton told a press briefing.

Over 14,000 firefighters are on the wildfires, with 91 fire crews traveling from seven states and National Guard troops arriving from four states, Newsom said.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Los Angeles legal community raised more than $600,000 for the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank during this year's Food From The Bar Campaign. The Food Bank will be able to provide more than 2 million meals for those who are facing food insecurity throughout Los Angeles County.

Food From The Bar has raised more than $5 million since it began in Los Angeles in 2009. The effort is timed to replenish Food Bank resources during the summer months  a particularly difficult time for parents with children who rely on school meals and who lose access to those meals when school is not in session.

"The pandemic is impacting residents in LA County, and the Los Angeles legal community is continuing its fight against hunger by providing these funds," said Los Angeles Regional Food Bank President and CEO, Michael Flood. "We are extremely grateful for all of the individuals, firms and organizations involved in this year's campaign during such an important time. Thanks to community members like you, our work is possible."

During the month-long Food From The Bar fundraising and volunteering effort, 67 legal organizations, including legal firms, law schools and legal services organizations, participated in a friendly competition to see who could raise the most funds, acquire the most food, and work the most volunteer hours for the Food Bank. Because of the current pandemic, Food From The Bar has transitioned to a virtual fundraising campaign. All other aspects of the campaign have been postponed indefinitely. Due to the devastating impact of the Coronavirus this year, the campaign will support the Food Bank to meet the increased demand for food assistance.

This year's Overall Winner was Munger, Tolles & Olson.

"Kudos to the Food Bank for providing the opportunity for the Los Angeles legal community to contribute to our neighbors' wellbeing during these very trying times," said Kathleen McDowell of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP. "Even while working from home and social-distancing, we were thrilled to continue the Food from the Bar tradition and support the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank."

Before the outbreak, one in five people living in Los Angeles County faced food insecurity, and that number has only gone up amid the pandemic. The Food Bank, through direct distribution and its agency partners, serves the largest county in terms of population in the country, distributing well over 1 million pounds of food every week. Between mid-March and the middle of August, food distribution from the Food Bank's two distribution centers has increased by 114% compared to the pre-pandemic period. Nearly 77 million pounds of food, the equivalent of roughly 60 million meals, have been distributed to children, seniors, families and individuals through partner agencies and direct distributions.

To see a list of firms and recognition levels as well as a list of special awards, please visit www.lafoodbank.org/foodfromthebar .

About Food From The Bar:

Launched in 2009, the Food From The Bar campaign is an annual, four-week effort led by members of the legal community, focused on providing nutritious meals for children in Los Angeles County. Legal teams compete to see who can raise the most donations and clock the most volunteer hours. For more information, visit LAFoodBank.org/foodfromthebar.

About Los Angeles Regional Food Bank:

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank has been mobilizing resources to fight hunger in Los Angeles County since 1973. To support the Food Bank's vision that no one goes hungry in Los Angeles County, food and grocery products are distributed through a network of 600 partner agencies and directly to families, seniors, and children through direct distribution programs. The Food Bank has distributed more than 1.5 billion pounds of food, the equivalent of 1.2 billion meals since 1973. In response to the Coronavirus crisis, the Food Bank has increased food distribution by 114 percent, distributing nearly 77 million pounds of food from mid-March through the middle of August. The Food Bank is a 4-star rated charity by Charity Navigator. For more information, visit LAFoodBank.org.

Contact: David May, Director of Marketing & Communications

Phone: (323) 234-3030 x 134

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Los Angeles Regional Food Bank

Related Links

http://www.lafoodbank.org


P upils returning to school in England will not be required to wear face coverings even as Scotland considers bringing them in for crowded areas such as corridors.

The World Health Organisation and UN childrens agency Unicef advise that children aged 12 and over should wear a mask under the same conditions as adults, in particular when they cannot guarantee at least a one-metre distance from others and there is widespread transmission in the area.

Schools Standards Minister Nick Gibb had indicated that hygiene measures put in place in classes meant that masks were not required .

But in Scotland, Education Secretary John Swinney is consulting with teachers and councils on the possibility of bringing in guidance on wearing face coverings in schools.

PA

Mr Gibb told the BBC: If a school puts in place the measures that are in the guidance that we issued in early July, all the hygiene measures that Ive been talking about, then masks are not necessary for staff or pupils.

Englands deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries said the evidence on whether children over 12 should wear masks in schools was not strong.

Dr Harries told Sky News that in children under 15 compliance is very poor and other measures being taken in schools  such as children sitting side by side or back to back meant masks were not needed.

We also need to think through the sort of psychosocial effects of masks for children, its a learning environment, and we need them to learn for life, she added.

A Number 10 spokesman said: There are no plans to review the guidance on face coverings in schools.

We are conscious of the fact that it would obstruct communication between teachers and pupils.

PA

The WHO and Unicef suggested that face shields may be an alternative in situations such as speech classes where the teacher and pupils need to see each others mouths.

In Scotland, Mr Swinney is in the final stages of consulting with teachers and councils on the issue.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the recommendations would not include pupils wearing masks while in the classroom but suggested they could cover other parts of schools such as corridors.

The WHO/Unicef guidance states children aged five and under should not be required to wear masks.

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For children aged six-11, consideration should be given to factors including whether there is widespread transmission and the potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and development.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has agreed for setting up a multispecialty hospital near the upcoming Jewar airport which will provide free treatment to farmers and the poor, BJP MLA Dhirendra Singh said on Monday.

The Jewar MLA said he met with the chief minister and also the state's health minister Jai Pratap Singh in Lucknow on Sunday and submitted a proposal for the construction of the hospital in his constituency in Gautam Buddh Nagar district.

Singh said he apprised the chief minister regarding the need for a good hospital at Jewar with a trauma centre as people from the low-income group have been facing difficulty for a long time, and the high-cost private facilities have added to their woes.

"The honourable chief minister has given in-principle approval for building a super-specialty hospital near Jewar airport and work on it will start soon," Singh said in a statement, adding treatment for farmers and the poor will be free of cost at the facility.

Singh said in addition to Gautam Buddha Nagar, the hospital will also be useful for people in nearby districts of Aligarh, Bulandshahr and Hathras as well as those from neighbouring Haryana districts.

Soon land identification will also be done for the hospital via the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA), he added.

Meanwhile, work is underway for the phase I -- spread over 1,300 hectares -- of the international Greenfield airport at Jewar and is expected to go functional after two years.

When fully-built, the airport would be spread over an area of 5,000 hectares with international operations and is touted to be India's biggest aviation project at a cost of Rs 29,560 crore, according to officials.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires leap above Butts Canyon Road in California (Noah Berger/AP)

Three massive wildfires chewed through parched Northern California landscape on Sunday as firefighters raced to dig breaks and make other preparations ahead of a frightening weather system.

That system was packing high winds and more of the lightning that sparked the huge blazes and scores of other fires around the state, putting nearly a quarter-million people under evacuation orders and warnings.

At the CZU Lightning Complex fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, authorities announced the discovery of the body of a 70-year-old man in a remote area called Last Chance.

The man had been reported missing and police had to use a helicopter to reach the area, which is a string of about 40 off-the-grid homes at the end of a windy, steep dirt road north of the city of Santa Cruz.

Authorities also said their efforts had been hindered by people who refused to heed evacuation orders and those who were using the chaos to steal.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart said 100 officers were patrolling and anyone not authorised to be in an evacuation zone would be arrested.

What were hearing from the community is that theres a lot of looting going on, Mr Hart said, adding eight people had so far been arrested or cited.

Expand Close Firefighter Cody Nordstrom monitors hot spots while fighting the CZU Lightning Complex Fire (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp Firefighter Cody Nordstrom monitors hot spots while fighting the CZU Lightning Complex Fire (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)

He and county District Attorney Jeff Rosell expressed anger at what Mr Rosell called the absolutely soulless people who seek to victimise those already victimised by the fire.

Among the victims was a fire commander who was robbed while helping coordinate efforts on Saturday.

Someone entered the commanders fire vehicle and stole personal items, including a wallet and drained his bank account, said Chief Mark Brunton, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The Santa Cruz fire is one of the complexes, or groups of fires, burning on all sides of the San Francisco Bay Area.

They were started by lightning strikes that were among 12,000 registered in the state in the past week.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning through Monday afternoon for the drought-stricken area, meaning extreme fire conditions including high temperatures, low humidity and wind gusts up to 65 mph that may result in dangerous and unpredictable fire behaviour.

Expand Close A charred vehicle is parked in front of a home in Boulder Creek, California (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp A charred vehicle is parked in front of a home in Boulder Creek, California (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)

In nearly a week, firefighters have gotten no more than the 17% containment for the LNU Lightning Complex fire in wine country north of San Francisco.

It has been the most destructive blaze, accounting for five deaths and 845 destroyed homes and other buildings.

It and a fire burning southeast of the Bay Area are among the five largest fires in state history, with both burning more than 500 square miles.

In Southern California, an 11-day-old blaze held steady at just under 50 square miles near Lake Hughes in the northern Los Angeles County mountains.

Meanwhile, firefighters were frantically preparing for thunderstorms that will bring high winds and dry lightning, a term used when such storms have little or no rain.

Since August 15, more than 500 fires of varying sizes have burned throughout California, scorching 1.2 million acres, or 1,875 square miles.

Expand Close The LNU Lightning Complex fire has killed four people and destroyed 845 structures (Noah Berger/AP) / Facebook

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Whatsapp The LNU Lightning Complex fire has killed four people and destroyed 845 structures (Noah Berger/AP)

Of those, about two dozen major fires were attracting much of the states resources.

Most of the damage was caused by the three complex fires.

They have burned 1,175 square miles, destroyed almost 1,000 homes and other structures and killed five people, three of whom who were found in a home in an area under an evacuation order.

Other casualties included ancient redwood trees at Californias oldest state park, Big Basin Redwoods, plus the parks headquarters and campgrounds.

Smoke from the fires made the regions air quality dangerous, forcing millions to stay inside.

Responding to the emergency, President Donald Trump on Saturday issued a major disaster declaration to provide federal assistance.

Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement that the declaration will also help people in counties affected by the fires with crisis counselling, housing and other social services.
The Deputy Governor of Delta state, Deacon Kingsley Otuaro says Governor Ifeanyi Okowa administration has created the enabling environment for business to thrive in the oil and gas-rich state.

Otuaro who made the statement during an inspection tour of SEEPCO LNG plant, Ogbagwu, Ogume, Ndokwa West Local Government Area, Delta State, said Delta state is opened for investors to come in and invest in the state.

Delta State is open to prospective investors in the areas of agriculture, solid minerals, oil and gas, science and technology among others, Otuaro said, stressing that the impact of the multi billion naira gas processing plant at Ogume on the state and national economy cannot be over emphasized.

He solicited for stronger partnership between the state government, the company and Ogume community, and commended the youths and elders of the host community for providing a conducive environment for the construction of the gas plant without any form of disturbances or crisis.

He stressed that, the state government had institutional structure for peace building, and advised officials of the company to carry the state government along when signing any memorandum of understanding with the community in order to forestall any misunderstanding.

The deputy governor commended SEEPCO for citing the multi-billion naira gas plant in the state, adding, The project was key in harnessing the rich gas reserves that abound in the state.

Commissioner for Oil and Gas in the state, Prince Emmanuel Amgbaduba at the event, said, Delta State is rich in oil and gas, hence the need for investors to take advantage of the conducive environment and invest in the state.

Vice President, SEEPCO Group of Companies, Mr. Sandeep Singh said, the project which is a multi-billion naira gas processing plant had 95 per cent input from local content, including laying of 100 kilometres of pipeline to the plant while the others which are highly technical were fabricated from USA, UK, India and Germany.

He noted that the gas plant which is the latest technology in the industry will also have a 1, 000 megawatts independent power plant that will feed Asaba and environs.

Also, the Head of Project, Mr. Santil explained the project design, diagram and benefits via a projector before conducting the Deputy Governor and his entourage round the plant stated, When completed, the plant would provide about 700, 000 metric tonnes of processed gas daily.

He said, SEEPCO was the first company in Nigeria to go for a mounted bullet storage facility for propane, butane and LPG which is considered the safest mode of bulk hydrocarbon.
Because of the demographics, the racial makeup of the population approaching retirement age, over the coming years the representation of Black or African American officers in the department is likely to go down substantially while the representation of Latinx officers is likely to increase proportionally over coming years, Witzburg said. I think those are important considerations as we think about hiring and recruiting in the department, and appropriate decisions about assignment and so on.
Alice Paul. Thomas Edison. Frank Sinatra.

Those were the three famous New Jerseyans mentioned as state Republican Chairman Doug Steinhardt cast all 49 delegate votes for President Donald Trump on Monday at the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Steinhardt drew the task that normally would fall to the delegation chairman, former Gov. Chris Christie.

Unlike the Democratic convention, where states voted remotely, a shrunken number of GOP delegates gathered in person in Charlotte to renominate Trump. They sat socially distanced at long tables arranged in rows rather than clustered together.

While several other state chairmen droned on, Steinhardt was short and sweet.

President Trump and Vice President Pence have kept their promises to the American people, he said, before ticking off the list of famous New Jerseyans.

Steinhardt also mentioned the beautiful Jersey Shore.

The Jersey Shore also figured prominently in the Democratic roll call, as Gov. Phil Murphy stood on the Asbury Park boardwalk in casting the states votes for Joe Biden.

Murphy cast those votes in memory of all those we have lost, in solidarity with those who are sick or struggling, and in eternal gratitude to our historic frontline workers.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com.
Iran slams the United Arab Emirates for peace with Israel By Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Segall

Following the announcement of an agreement to establish diplomatic ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Irans political and military leadership issued strong warnings to the UAE of negative consequences if the actions permit Israel to expand its influence and activities in the region. Treason against the Palestinian people and against the Islamic claim to Jerusalem is the recurring theme in the statements issued by the Iranian regime representatives. The Iranian leadership emphasized the resilience of the resistance front in the region (comprising Palestinian terror organizations, pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq, Hizbullah, the Houthi movement in Yemen, and Shiite opposition organizations in the Gulf countries). In this context, Iran and Turkey compete in terms of who will condemn louder and be more active since Turkey has also denounced the Israel-UAE deal. At the same time, Iran fears the deepening and institutionalization of Israels economic activity in the Emirates. According to Tehran, Israel can use the UAE as a springboard for its intelligence-security activities on the other side of the Arabian Gulf, especially during this sensitive time for Iran, during which it has been prone to fires and explosions at facilities tied to Irans nuclear program. It should be emphasized that delegations from Israel have already been leaving for the United Arab Emirates. Business agreements have already been signed between the two countries regarding fighting the coronavirus. All these advancements raise concerns in Tehran. Moreover, Irans threatening tone is intended to deter similar moves by other Gulf countries especially Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia that can feel encouraged by the UAEs decision and normalize their relations with Israel while moving closer to the United States and realizing President Trumps Deal of the Century Peace Plan. The heads of the Iranian army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps directly and blatantly threaten the Gulf States and, in particular, the United Arab Emirates. The Iranian military chief of staff warned, The government of the UAE will face similar consequences to that of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat due to its shameful actions. A statement issued by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps made it clear, and not for the first time, that after signing the agreement, the residents of the Emirates Crystal Palace are likely to face many dangers in the future because of signing the agreement with Israel. It should be emphasized that in recent years, the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen launched several cruise missiles toward the airport in Abu Dhabi and toward critical infrastructures in the Emirates. Moreover, the know-how regarding the manufacturing of the cruise missiles and ballistic missiles was provided by Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps. The UAE plays a crucial role in stabilizing the southern region of Yemen, although it has recently reduced its activities in the country. Rouhani: Emirates Chose the Wrong Path Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, criticized the agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel and even threatened to take several steps if the agreement develops any further. Rouhani said, Unfortunately, the UAE made a very big mistake, and we very much hope that the UAE would rectify this mistake and recognize that this is a wrong path that is neither in the interest of the rulers nor their security. We warn them that if they allow Israel to gain a foothold in the region, we will relate to them and deal with them differently. I urge them to be cautious  The UAE made a wrong calculation because it cannot achieve security and stability by drawing closer to the enemies of Islam and Iran. Rouhani defined the agreement as treason against the Palestinian cause, the Islamic nation, and Jerusalem (al-Quds). He said that the deal coincided with Donald Trumps election campaign. He further added that the agreement was directed by the Trump administration and not Israel and the United Arab Emirates themselves. Rouhanis Chief of Staff, Mahmoud Vaezi, described the UAE move as a treacherous and divisive mistake that history will not forgive. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: The Agreement Will Speed Up the Destruction of Israel A statement issued by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps condemned, as expected, the normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel and defined it as a strategic mistake that would speed up the destruction of the Zionist regime. The statement also emphasized that the agreement is the ultimate treason against the Palestinian cause and Jerusalem. According to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the peace deal between Israel and Emirates effectively recognizes Israel, weakens the resistance, sidelines the Palestinian cause, and promotes the Deal of the Century. The announcement also states that the agreement is a poisoned knife in the back of the Islamic nation. The statement threatens that the United States and supporters of the despicable Abu Dhabi-Tel Aviv agreement from within and outside of the region, will not only fail to fulfill the interests of the Zionist regime but also shatter the desire to create a New Middle East, exposing the residents of the Emirates, especially residents of the Crystal Palace in the UAE to many dangers in the future. The statement concludes that following their treason against the Islamic nation, Emirates rulers will be increasingly hated and that in the face of this humiliation, they must sooner or later expect a response from the local population and other Islamic nations, who will not allow the Palestinian cause to be suppressed via psychological warfare and false images of the Zionist media. The Iranian armys chief of staff condemned the normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel and implicitly threatened the life of the UAE ruler Muhammad bin Zayed. The Palestinian issue is alive and dynamic, and it will not be long before Muhammad bin Zayed will face the negative consequences of his shameful actions, similar to the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He added that the Resistance camp would continue to serve as a defender of the Islamic world despite the poisoned arrows fired against it by the United States, the Zionist regime, and a number of reactionary figures. History will not forget the betrayal of the oppressed Palestinian people. Major-General, Mohsen Rezaee, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and now secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council, said that over the past ten years Abu Dhabi had become a safe haven for Israel, which has set up spy and intelligence networks of the Mossad against the countries in the region. He added that the agreement will not deflect the loyal Arab and Muslim fighters, and they will not betray the Palestinian people  Greater Palestine will soon be liberated from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea thanks to the persistence and patience of its fighters and residents, whereas history will forget the unworthy ones, those who stab the nation in the back. Hossein Amir-Abdulaahian, the special aide to Ali Larijani, the president of the Islamic parliament in international affairs, noted that the agreement is against peace and security and serves to further the Zionists crimes. Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, Vice Secretary and Spokesman of the Guardian Council of the Constitution, said that the agreement is nothing less than the occupation of the Emirates in exchange for the abolition of the annexation of the West Bank. He described the United Arab Emirates as part of Israels territory. Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior Irans adviser to the Supreme Leader in international affairs, also described the agreement as a betrayal of Islamic states and criminal neglect of the Palestinian cause. From Ali Akbars perspective, this agreement will lead to Emirates alienation and isolation from the Islamic states. Velayati urged Islamic states to reject the move taken by the United Arab Emirates and make every effort to help the Palestinian people. Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, visiting in Beirut after the disastrous port bombing, confirmed in a telephone conversation with his colleague, Foreign Affairs Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, Riyad al-Maliki, that Iran will support the Palestinian peoples struggle and their national rights aspirations. During his visit to Lebanon, Zarif also spoke on the telephone with the head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ziad Nahala, and sent him a similar message. Both the conservative and reformist Iranian press aligned themselves with the official Iranian regimes position as well as with the heads of the Iranian security establishment and defined the agreement as a betrayal and a dubious deal. The ultra-conservative newspaper, Kayhan, which serves as the Iranian leaders mouthpiece, printed a blaring headline on August 15, 2020: The UAE is now a legitimate target for the Resistance forces. Kayhans English edition chose the title Deal with the Devil. The conservative newspaper Siyasat-e Rooz had a double-headline: The Zionist Union of the Emirates and Ben Zayed kisses Trumps blood-dripping shoe. The Javan newspaper printed the following headline: The betrayal and stupidity of the Emirates alongside a picture of Palestinian protesters against Bin Zayed in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Tensions between Iran and the United Arab Emirates Will Grow The UAE used to be a major channel for Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions. However, in the last year and even more since the outbreak of the Corona plague, this channel has been blocked. The United Arab Emirates has taken a number of actions against syndicates that were involved in smuggling goods to Iran. It seems that with the closer relations with Israel and the United States, the UAEs activity to prevent smuggling from and to Iran will continue. In Iran, calls were heard to hurt the enemy. These calls were directed especially against the Emirates and the Emiratess Crystal Palace (a hint at the UAE business centers), which is waging war against Iran. Dissatisfied with the UAE, Iran is expected to take several steps and increase its military activity and civilian presence in the disputed islands with the UAE at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz (Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb). Iran will signal to the Emirates that there is a price for its actions, and Iran intends to prove it. At the same time, Iran might once again threaten the freedom of navigation in the Arab Gulf region, warn the United Arab Emirates, and even encourage demonstrations against the UAEs rulers. Tehran is confronted with several developments and has to deal with multiple crises simultaneously  both internal ones and in the international arena. The corona plague continues to take a heavy economic and civilian toll on the country. In Lebanon, together with Hizbullah, Iran faces the consequences and challenges of the blast in the Beirut port and among the local residents, which undermines its dream to establish the Second Islamic Republic. Finally, in the international arena, despite the U.S. Security Council victory and the failure of a proposed arms embargo, supported by the Gulf States, Iran will be further mired regarding its nuclear deal especially since the Trump administration is determined to resort to the snapback mechanism to automatically restore the U.N. sanctions on Iran that existed before the 2015 JCPOA agreement. IDF Lt.-Col. (ret.) Michael (Mickey) Segall, an expert on strategic issues with a focus on Iran, terrorism, and the Middle East, is a senior analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and at Acumen Risk Advisors. Home
By Nazish Hussain, TwoCircles.net

Jamshedpur: Family of an auto repair shop owner Mohammad Naushad (45), from Golmuri area of Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, have accused the state police of torturing Naushad in custody leading to his death.

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Talking to TwoCircles.net, the family members said that on 10 August, in Golmuri, police personnel from Burmamines Thana and Golmuri Thana in Jamshedpur arrived at Mohammed Naushads home at noon and ordered him to come along with them. They asked Nausad to come along for interrogation, the family said.

When the family inquired why they needed to interrogate him, the policemen just asked Naushad to come along. They took Naushad in a jeep, the family said.

When the family went to the police station on the same day, they didnt find Naushad there.

When we reached Golmuri Thana, Naushad was not there, Yusuf Patel, brother in law of Naushad told TwoCircles.net.

We kept enquiring about his whereabouts but could not locate him. Around that time one of my relatives called and told us that he had seen Naushad in Burmamines Thana. He said that Naushad was not able to walk properly and was being carried by the police. But upon reaching Burmamines thana, we were not allowed to meet him, Yusuf said.

Yusuf said that police simply refused that they had brought Naushad there. At 3:30 pm we received a call saying, Your patient is in serious condition in MGM hospital, he adds.

Yusuf said that when the family arrived at the hospital they found two policemen there, who told them they were from Burmamines Thana.

At the hospital, the doctor told us that Naushad is paralyzed from one side. We saw there were bruises on his body. We recorded that and took photos, says Yusuf.

At midnight, the family took the injured Naushad to TMH hospital. He remained under treatment for a few days and on August 13 the TMH hospital started pressuring the family to discharge Naushad from the hospital and take him home, the family claims.

Where do we take him in this condition? He is not even able to take food without the help of a pipe, questioned the family of Naushad. To which TMH replied that they are under pressure to release the patient, says Yusuf.

On August 16, Naushads family paid the hospital bills and he was discharged and taken home.

The family approached health minister Banna Gupta, who arranged an ambulance for them to take the patient to Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in state capital Ranchi. In RIMS there was no doctor. We returned back on 21 August. That day, seeing his critical condition, we took him to a local doctor. During that time Naushad passed away, says Yusuf.

Yusuf is mournful about the sad demise of his brother-in-law and blames Jamshedpur police for his death.

They did not file any case nor did they register FIR against him. They just took him and beat him so badly that he could not walk on his own. After this, they just kept him in the hospital and left. Police beat him and tortured him so much resulting in his bad condition because of which he died later, he said.

On August 21, Naushads family and some locals protested and demanded filing of FIR against the police personnel and compensation of Rs 25 lakh to the family.

The police gave us in writing that they would do post mortem in front of the magistrate with videography and if they find proof of physical torture by police, they will take action against the erring cops. Only after this, they handed the body to the police, Yusuf said.

Speaking to TwoCircles.net, Jamshedpur City SP, Subhas Chandra Jat said, There was an allegation that he (Naushad) buys stolen auto parts. We brought him to the thana on 10 August. He had a blood pressure issue. There at the police station, his blood pressure increased and we admitted him to MGM hospital after that he was taken to TMH hospital, and added that DSP Traffic probed the allegations against Naushad which could not be proved. On August 16, he was discharged from THM hospital and August 21 he died. We did postmortem in the presence of magistrate with videography so that there wont be any question of discrimination.

Reacting to the police version that Naushad was suffering from high blood pressure, Yusuf says, There is nothing like that. He was only 45 years old and till date, he never had any illness whatsoever. He never took any medication for high blood pressure or anything, as he never had any such health issue.

Yusuf further says that the Police didnt admit injured Naushad at MGM hospital. They did not admit him. Naushad was lying outside of the hospital. When we arrived at the hospital, police just left, he says.

State general secretary of All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM), Reyaz Sharif says, Even if he had some record, police dont have any right to physically torture him so much that he would reach such a stage and die. In normal conditions, no one would get brain haemorrhage. There are marks of physical torture on his body. He was physically tortured and maybe because of which he got hypertension, and after that, he got paralyzed. So what the family is saying can be seen clearly.

Naushad was the lone breadwinner of the family. He is survived by a 10-year-old son and a wife. In this lockdown, they were already disturbed and facing difficulties. And now the police took his life. There is no one to look after his family now. For what police have done they should be brought to justice, says Yusuf.

According to Yusuf, at the hospital where the post mortem was conducted, there were around 8-10 policemen. When we showed them the bruises on his body they said that is just a black mark. I argued it is a bruised mark caused by injury, after 10 days it would turn black. However, the police insisted on writing it as a black mark. I said to the police, you can write what you please. We will settle this in court, he said.

After the post-mortem Naushad was buried on the evening of August 22.
HOUSTON - (Aug. 24, 2020) - A chameleonlike protein in neurons can change its mind, and in the process change our brains.

Scientists at Rice University and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) uncovered new clues in the protein CPEB3 as part of their dogged pursuit of the mechanism that allows humans to have long-term memories.

The study by Rice theoretical biophysicist Peter Wolynes and Neal Waxham, a neurobiologist at UTHealth's McGovern Medical School, provides insight into a positive feedback loop between forming the actin backbones that give dendritic spines their shape and flexibility and the actin-binding domains in CPEB3, a functional prion that binds RNA which also forms long-lived aggregates that may indeed store the stuff that memories are made of.

Protein-folding models by Wolynes and his group at Rice's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) and experiments at UTHealth turned up previously unknown structural details for CPEB3 and how it binds to actin, as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper.

In the process, they also examined the key role played by a protein known as SUMO, a regulator that attaches to and detaches from other proteins in cells to modify their functions. The researchers suspect it helps to regulate when and how CPEB3's chameleonlike ends (the N-terminus and C-terminus) bind to either SUMO or the flexible, filamentous actin (f-actin) spines in dendritic spikes.

CPEB3 proteins are soluble when attached to SUMO, which also buries their actin-binding sites. But during synaptic activity, they can be "deSUMOylated" and become available to bind with the hydrophobic binding pockets along f-actin filaments.

The models show that when attracted to actin, CPEB3 transitions from a coiled coil of helices into a beta sheet structure that "zips" into a hairpin configuration that allows it to aggregate with other CPEB3 proteins.

Upon aggregation, CPEB3 appears to translate its target messenger RNAs, which include actin mRNA that strengthens the synaptic junctions essential to memory, completing the positive loop.

"This is a more ambitious project than the actin-CaM kinase study, where we also simulated a really huge actin system with a really huge protein," Wolynes said. In that study, published a year ago, CTBP researchers modeled how a central protein (CaMKII) holds parallel actin filaments together, a state that could be visualized in an electron microscope by Waxham's lab.

Now the researchers are defining the structural details that allow CPEB3 to bind to either actin or SUMO, but not both. "One of the main aspects of this paper is to reconcile those two quite different parts of the story," he said. "We think the CPEB terminals are chameleonlike because they let the molecule choose whether it will interact with the SUMO or with the actin.

"We're not to the end of the story yet," Wolynes said. "But the latest results put us in a reasonable place to say more about the mechanism."

###

Rice graduate student Xinyu Gu is lead author of the paper. Co-authors of the paper are Rice alumni Nicholas Schafer of Schafer Science and Mingchen Chen, Rice academic visitor Qian Wang and UT Health medical student Sarah Song. Wolynes is Rice's D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science and a professor of chemistry, of biochemistry and cell biology, of physics and astronomy and of materials science and nanoengineering and co-director of the CTBP. Waxham is the William M. Wheless III, Professor in Biomedical Sciences and a professor of neurobiology and anatomy at UTHealth, and a member of the faculty of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

The National Science Foundation, through its support of the CTBP and a RAISE grant, funded the research.

Read the abstract at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2012964117.

This news release can be found online at https://news.rice.edu/2020/08/24/protein-chameleon-colors-long-term-memory/

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Related materials:

Scientists advance search for memory's molecular roots: http://news.rice.edu/2019/08/26/scientists-advance-search-for-memorys-molecular-roots-2/

Wolynes Research Lab: https://wolynes.rice.edu

Waxham Lab: https://sites.google.com/uth.edu/waxham-lab/home

Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https://naturalsciences.rice.edu

Videos:

https://youtu.be/U99c0txELWU

Researchers at Rice University modeled the binding structures of actin and associated proteins they believe are responsible for the formation of longterm memory. Here, the beta hairpin form of zipper sequence is a potential core for the formation of intramolecular beta sheets. In the predicted complex structure of F-actin and three PRD+ABD constructs shown above, the three PDB+ABD constructs are shown in rainbow color, from blue to red, from N-terminal to C terminal. The surfaces of first 4 negative residues of actin mono-mers are colored in red and the surfaces of the two positive ends of the zipper sequence is colored in blue. (Credit: Center for Theoretical Biological Physics/Rice University)

https://youtu.be/o7h_H9Ag-qk

Researchers model the binding structures of actin and associated proteins they believe are responsible for the formation of longterm memory. An annealing simulation created at Rice University shows F-actin attracts the 2 ends of zipper sequence to facilitate the formation of the beta hairpin form. The surface of the 4 negative-charged residues in actin is shown in red. The surface of the positive-charged residues at the 2 ends of the zipper sequence is shown in blue. (Credit: Center for Theoretical Biological Physics/Rice University)

Images for download:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/08/0824_MEMORY-3-small-1.jpg

Researchers at Rice University modeled the binding structures of actin and associated proteins they believe are responsible for the formation of longterm memory. Here, the beta hairpin form of zipper sequence is a potential core for the formation of intramolecular beta sheets. In the predicted complex structure of F-actin and three PRD+ABD constructs shown above, the three PDB+ABD constructs are shown in rainbow color, from blue to red, from N-terminal to C terminal. The surfaces of first 4 negative residues of actin mono-mers are colored in red and the surfaces of the two positive ends of the zipper sequence is colored in blue. (Credit: Center for Theoretical Biological Physics/Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/08/0824_MEMORY-2-SMALL-1.jpg

Xinyu Gu.

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2020/08/0824_MEMORY-1-WEB.jpg

Peter Wolynes, left, and Nicholas Schafer. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

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
OMAHA, Nebraska -- A three-year legal effort to gain restitution for the death of a 29-year-old Lakota and Kiowa man who died in June 2017 after an encounter with four police officers ended last week when the city council here voted to approve a $550,000 settlement with the mans family.

The councils 7-0 vote on August 18 effectively ended one phase of the effort to gain justice for Zachary Bear Heels, who died after being Tased 12 times and punched 13 times in the head by police officers before dying.

But those involved in the settlement, including Bear Heels family and attorney, said they arent happy with the outcome of the familys lawsuit against the City of Omaha.

My life is just, its still destroyed because I got to live with this now, said Renita Chalepah, Bear Heels mother. Im not happy with the settlement. No amount of money is ever going to bring him back.

Activist Mahmud Fitil wore a t-shirt in honor of Zachary Bear Heels to an Omaha City Council meeting on August 18, 2020. Bear Heels, a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe who also was Kiowa, died June 5, 2017, after an encounter with four police officers who shocked him 12 times with a Taser and punched him 13 times in the head. Photo by Kevin Abourezk

Mitchell Chalepah, Bear Heels younger brother, said he believed his mother was coerced into accepting the settlement, which will only provide $150,000 to his mother. His mothers attorney will get $150,000, and Bear Heels father will get $150,000.

Mitchell Chalepah said Bear Heels father had little to do with raising Bear Heels or caring for him as he dealt with the symptoms of mental illness. Bear Heels suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

I feel like my mom was forced into taking this settlement, he said. Im not happy with it.

But Renita Chalepahs attorney, Garvin Isaacs of Oklahoma City, said his client wanted to accept the settlement, despite his recommendation that she force the City of Omaha to defend itself in the courtroom.

At least the family got what they wanted, but I think theres a lot more that wouldve been awarded if we had gone to trial, Isaacs said.

He said he had hoped to tell Bear Heels story to a jury and hold accountable the officers and others who failed him.

What happened to them was criminal misconduct by bullies with badges, Isaacs said. Nobodys above the law, not even police officers.

"Loving Son, Brother, Grandson, Nephew, Uncle" -- Zachary Bear Heels was laid to rest in Apache, Oklahoma, following his death in Omaha, Nebraska, in June 2017. His headstone is seen in this courtesy photo.

On June 5, 2017, Bear Heels was traveling from the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota back to his home in Oklahoma City when he was kicked off the bus in Omaha for acting erratically. His relatives have said he wasnt taking his medication.

Officers Scotty Payne, Ryan McClarty, Jennifer Strudl and Makyla Mead were called to the Buckys Convenience Store at 60th and Center streets. When they arrived, the officers attempted to put Bear Heels in a police cruiser, but he resisted and a struggled ensued.

The officers managed to get Bear Heels hands cuffed behind his back and put him on the ground, sitting with his back against the rear passenger tire of the cruiser. But then Payne began shocking the handcuffed Bear Heels, who was demonstrating no threat to the officers, with his Taser gun.

At that point, Bear Heels managed to pull a wrist out of one of the cuffs, and McClarty began punching him in the head and face and pulling on his hair. Eventually, other officers arrived on the scene, and the officers managed to zip-tie Bear Heels hands behind his back and place him face-down on the pavement.

Two officers took turns putting their full weight on Bear Heels back, and when the officers turned him over to put him on a gurney, Bear Heels was dead.

Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer fired McClarty, Payne, Strudl and Mead. A coroners physician who conducted an autopsy on Bear Heels later concluded his death was attributable to excited delirium and not necessarily related to his injuries or shocks.

Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine filed assault charges against Payne and McClarty, but an Omaha jury acquitted Payne in December 2018. A few months later, Kleine dropped the assault charge against McClarty as well.

Then in April, an arbitration panel formed to decide whether the four officers should get their jobs back ruled that McClarty, Strudl and Mead should be rehired while Payne should not.

A protester displays a sign outside the Omaha City Hall on August 18, 2020, during a demonstration showing support for a proposal to shift $2 million out of the city's police department and into job training and health programs. Photo by Kevin Abourezk

On Tuesday, several Omaha citizens and activists spoke to the Omaha City Council and criticized the city for failing to protect Bear Heels and for offering his family such a small amount of money as restitution.

Matthew Lemar of Omaha criticized the arbitration process that allowed three of the four officers to get their jobs back.

While I hope that this settlement can bring some solace and comfort to Miss Chalepah, the fact that three of the four officers who were complicit in the death of Zachary remain on the police force is unconscionable, he said. In no other profession could you either actively participate in or be complicit in the death of a mentally handicapped man and still have a job.

He called on the city to reform the arbitration process to ensure officers who are fired for brutalizing innocent citizens dont get their jobs back.

Activist Mahmud Fitil stands outside city hall in Omaha, Nebraska, on August 18, 2020, following a city council meeting in which the council approved a $550,000 settlement with the family of Zachary Bear Heels. Bear Heels died June 5, 2017, after an encounter with four Omaha police officers. Photo by Kevin Abourezk

Sarah Brumfield of Omaha said Omaha citizens will now bear the brunt of the Bear Heels settlement, including the cost of paying the three rehired officers salaries. And Brumfield quoted Bear Heels sister, Adrianne Chalepah: Zack wasnt just a police brutality victim. He was an uncle, son, friend, classmate, nephew and grandson. They ripped our family in half and left us in pieces.

Omaha activist Mahmud Fitil urged the city to reallocate some police funds and put it toward mental health care. With the police budget taking up 40 percent of the citys budget, little money remains for other community needs, he said.

Perhaps cops shouldnt be responding to mental health crisis calls, but who else would? Fitil said. All we have, all we have for resources are the police because they take over 40 percent, and you want to give them more?

Recently, Omaha City Councilman Chris Jerram proposed shifting $2 million from the police departments budget and redirecting those funds to job training and health programs. Responding to the proposal, Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said he would have to cut four police officers if his budget were reduced by $2 million.

Protesters stand outside the city hall in Omaha, Nebraska, on August 18, 2020, during a demonstration showing support for a proposal to shift $2 million out of the city's police department and into job training and health programs. Photo by Kevin Abourezk

This week, Fitil offered the City Council a suggested list of officers that Schmaderer should fire if forced to cut his staff: Officer Dave Staskiewicz, who served as the expert witness for Paynes defense and trains OPD officers on the use of Tasers, and Officers McClarty, Strudl and Mead.

Now is the chance for Chief Todd Schmaderer to finally clean house due to budget concerns and reallocating those funds where theyre needed and getting rid of problematic officers, Fitil said.

We ask for everyone to remember Zachary Bear Heels.

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SHANGHAI, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Music China, jointly organized by CMIA, Shanghai INTEX and Messe Frankfurt, returns to Shanghai New International Expo Centre from October 28-31, 2020. Despite the pressure caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Shanghai, as China's expo centre, has already witnessed many successful tradeshows since July, such as China Joy and Shanghai Book Fair.

Music China, widely accepted as one of the world's largest tradeshows of musical instruments, has been playing an important role in the global music industry. Each year, exhibitors from around the world attend to showcase their premier products, and music traders come to grasp the latest trend of the industry and seek for new business opportunities. Last year, Music China hosted more than 2,400 exhibitors from over 34 countries and regions, drawing 122,519 attendees from 78 countries and regions. It has no doubt become the best gateway to get firsthand information of the market.

Embracing its 19th edition, Music China will continue to make the most of its advantage and serve as a business match-making platform. Brands who will exhibit on Music China 2020 includes AKG, Aria, AXL, Bechstein, Buffet, Casio, Conn-Selmer, Dunhuang, Fengling, Hsinghai, JBL, Jinyin, JOYO, Kawai, Levy's, NUX, Parsons, Pearl River, PianoDisc, Pioneer DJ, Saga, Samick, Schimmel, Seiler Steinway, Taylor, Yamaha, and Yanagisawa. They are expected to delight the audiences with their premier collection of products, including musical instruments, audio and sound products, music-making software, music education and online apps.

As global travel has been limited due to the pandemic, overseas audiences may not be able to come to the show in person. To assist them, Music China is establishing an exhibition platform online -- a "cloud expo" breaking the limitation of space and time and gathering all the stakeholders of the global industry altogether. Wherever you are, and whatever time it is there, you can enjoy the same function as of the on-site expo, viewing product display, interacting with exhibitors, or attending multiple events. The online Music China will enable you to "visit" the show at home.

Online Exhibition

Based on the official website, the online exhibition will display a selection of exhibitors' products and their VR booths. If interested in a particular product or company, audiences can click to "Reserve" a time to chat with the exhibitor in private.

Broadcasting Room

Exhibitors will broadcast in livestream rooms, introducing their products and interacting with the audiences. The rooms are categorized by product catalogue, where audiences can choose the products and companies of interest.

Despite of the ongoing epidemic, the world is getting back on track with continuous efforts made by each country and region. Music China, in this difficult situation, is still striving to act as the platform for brands to make a sound in the global market, as well as for audiences to seek for potential business opportunities.

For more information about Music China 2020, please visit our official website: www.musicchina-expo.com . We look forward to seeing you this autumn.

Contacts:

Miss Arlene Zhu

+86-21-6295-5609

[email protected]

SOURCE Shanghai INTEX
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

Trend:

The US Government, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department, is providing an additional $1.47 million to help Azerbaijan respond to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trend reports with reference to the US embassy in Azerbaijan.

An additional $1 million will fund a component of USAIDs Private Sector Activity to provide advisory services to the Government of Azerbaijan and technical assistance to small and medium-sized agriculture and agritourism enterprises to help them succeed through the challenges presented by the pandemic.

Separately, $471,000 in new State Department funding will provide shelter, food, and access to medical and social services for vulnerable migrants affected by the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to control its spread have been very challenging to small and medium-sized businesses in the United States, Azerbaijan and around the globe. This additional funding, provided by the American people, will help owners of small and medium-sized businesses in Azerbaijan and their employees survive and succeed through the crisis. We want the people of Azerbaijan to know that we will continue to stand with them throughout the COVID-19 crisis and our recovery from it, says U.S. Ambassador Lee Litzenberger.

The United States has now provided over $5 million to support Azerbaijans response to the immediate and longer-term health and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These funds have contributed to the provision of food and hygiene supplies to over 3,600 vulnerable individuals across the country; communications to educate people on steps they can take to prevent and respond to the spread of the virus; and the successful REACT-C19 project, which brought 19 doctors from Turkey to work as consultants to help improve local hospitals. The United States is funding the following organizations for COVID-19 response in Azerbaijan, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, International Committee of the Red Cross, International Organization for Migration, Azerbaijan Red Crescent Society, and the UN Childrens Fund (UNICEF).

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the United States has provided $20.5 billion in assistance specifically aimed at fighting the pandemic around the world.
The White Houses first move was to say that holders of Hong Kong passports will lose some special privileges -- until now, theyve been exempt from certain requirements on mainland Chinese who travel to the U.S. Trump also said Hong Kong will lose some benefits related to U.S. exports. His administration then sanctioned 11 senior officials including the citys leader, Carrie Lam, and said the U.S. would cease selling defense equipment to Hong Kong, suspend its extradition treaty and end reciprocal tax treatment on shipping. Trump has so far offered few specifics about the broader impact of his order, but some banks in Hong Kong have already taken tentative steps to avoid potential violations. In deciding how far to go, Trump has to weigh consequences for the U.S. economy, including the U.S.-China trade deal that Trump had considered one of his biggest achievements and which could affect his odds of winning re-election.
BRIDGETON  Its been said that nobody drops off a casserole when somebody in your family suffers a setback from mental illness.

Compared to other diseases, stigma is partly to blame. So is the shortage of viable treatment options for behavioral health patients.

Between 1990 and 2010, the region lost 42% of its acute care beds for psychiatric patients, or 817 beds, according to the Behavioral Health Network of Greater St. Louis. That doesnt include the big hit in 2010 when the state closed its Metropolitan St. Louis Psychiatric Center emergency department at 5351 Delmar Boulevard.

Since then, behavioral health patients have increasingly flocked to emergency rooms at numerous hospitals. Experts say thats not a good fit and often results in long wait times and meager access to follow-up treatment.

Now there is some hope on the near horizon.

SSM Health Behavioral Health Urgent Care opens here this week on the DePaul Hospital campus. It will treat people suffering from chronic mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression and anxiety, as well as addiction to alcohol and opioids, which continue to hammer the region.

On Monday, the facility will be blessed by a pastoral care staff member. Starting Wednesday, the urgent care will be open every day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. There are eight rooms, including two for telehealth. Walk-in patients will be evaluated and put on a wellness path, which may require quick access to medication, follow-up treatment, housing or all three.

We are getting them aligned with the right care, in the right place, at the right time, so they are not going to have to wait as long to be cared for, Michelle Schafer, regional vice president of behavioral health for SSM Health, said during a recent tour of the facility.

Theres a stack of bus passes to draw from as needed and a bus stop on nearby St. Charles Rock Road. Ambulances and police can drop people off at a side entrance near a circle drive. Health insurance is accepted, but not required. Theres no co-pay.

If you dont have access to insurance, we are not going to turn you away, Schafer said.

She said SSM committed $2 million for construction costs and will operate the urgent care with the assistance of community partners. The facility, which is next to DePauls behavioral health outpatient clinic, will lean heavily on follow-up services at seven community mental health centers, including BJC Behavioral Health, Places for People and the Hopewell Center, which contract with the state to provide treatment. Preferred Family Healthcare and Queen of Peace Center, which help people addicted to opioids and other drugs, are also involved.

The urgent care center will be able to secure follow-up appointments with those providers and other agencies. Schafer said she hopes more mental health and drug treatment centers will participate.

We are not competing against each other anymore, Schafer said. We are coming together collaboratively to enhance the health of the community and use dollars differently so we can help more people.

She said SSM Health would monitor performance data and share findings so the urgent care center can be used as a model to replicate.

The goal is to build multiple behavioral urgent cares around the community, Schafer said.

Suzanne King, president of Mental Health America of Eastern Missouri, said she and many other partners helped design the center, which she described as the first of its kind in the region.

We are hopeful that this will relieve some pressure on the emergency rooms by allowing people who are in a psychiatric crisis but dont have a medical need to be in the ER, they can get the help they need quicker, King said by email.

According to one study, emergency room visits by people with mental illness increased by more than 40% between 2010 and 2016 in St. Louis County. DePaul Hospital has been one of the busiest.

Wendy Orson, chief executive of the Behavioral Health Network of Greater St. Louis, predicted the urgent care clinic would have a significant impact on addressing holes in the safety net.

You can set up a little clinic anywhere, but having those partners are the key because it allows us to establish a coordinated response to connect care, Orson said.

She said the urgent care project was the result of a recent effort by the St. Louis Regional Health Commission to explore the possibility of opening a 24-hour access triage center for people suffering from behavioral health disorders, as well as alcohol and opioid dependency. But a study found that it wasnt feasible.

We decided a decentralized triage component would be a better fit for the region, said Orson, who was part of the planning group.

That is what DePauls urgent care center will be.

As another component of the decentralized triage concept, she added: We are trying to find funding to open a sobering center in the city.

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New Delhi/Islamabad: Days after Pakistan reiterated UN sanctions on Afghan Taliban, Islamabad has "invited" members of the grouping for talks.

Pakistan foreign ministry spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said a delegation of the Afghan Taliban is visiting Pakistan upon the "invite of the Foreign Ministry" to discuss the "way forward in the Afghan Peace Process."

On August 18 a statutory notification was issued by Pakistani government with list of Taliban members sanctioned by United Nations security council.

Pakistani Foriegn Ministry said the notification only reflects "information contained in the list entry of UN-designated individuals/entities" and "reports in certain sections of the media about Pakistan imposing new sanctions measures...are not factual."

The notification includes Taliban's Chief negotiator Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who will be in Islamabad for talks and meet Pakistan's foriegn minister SM Qureshi.

While being on sanctions list means asset freeze, arms embargo and travel ban, members of the group are allowed to move since they got exemptions till September 2020 by United Nations security council. They have got limited asset feeze exemption as well to the point of financing travel exemptions.

Taliban members visited Pakistan last time in October 2019. Back then, the Pakistani FM had greeted the Taliban members at the Pakistani Foriegn Ministry with warm hugs and handshakes, raising eyebrows.
- Jessy Mendiola and Luis Manzano shared an exciting and meaningful new video on YouTube

- The famous showbiz couple discussed the comments of bashers that hurt and offend Jessy

- The actress admitted that she gets offended by netizens who say that Luis is not serious with her and that is why they are still not married

- It turned out that those bashers constantly tell Jessy that Luis would never propose to her because he is a womanizer who will soon leave her to be with other women

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Jessy Mendiola (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Source: UGC

Jessy Mendiola featured her boyfriend, Luis Manzano, in a new episode of her popular YouTube vlog.

KAMI learned that the lovebirds discussed the comments of bashers that hurt and offend Jessy.

According to Jessy, she gets offended by netizens who say that Luis is not serious with her and that is why they are still not married.

Those bashers tell Jessy that Luis would never propose to her because he is a womanizer who will soon leave her to be with other women.

However, the actress said that she trusts Luis with her whole heart and that she knows he will stay loyal and committed to her. She added that she is annoyed that many netizens spend their time making assumptions about relationships they know nothing about.

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Matagal na tayo na tapos pinepressure nila tayong magpakasal. Na-o-offend ako kapag sinasabi ng mga tao na Luis will leave you.

Although alam ko naman na it wont happen. Hindi yan mag-po-propose kasi babaero yan.

This is the person I love and I trust him with all my heart. Nakaka-inis lang, bakit kailangan mo mangialam sa ibang relasyon, Jessy explained.

PAY ATTENTION: Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news!

Jessy Mendiola is a popular actress and endorser in the Philippines. She is in a relationship with actor-host Luis Manzano, the ex-boyfriend of Angel Locsin. Luis also used to be the boyfriend of Jennylyn Mercado.

Luis went viral recently for praising his mother, Vilma Santos, for voting in favor of renewing the franchise of ABS-CBN. 70 congressmen voted against it while only 11 congressmen, including Vilma, voted in favor of the Kapamilya network.

In another social media post that caught the attention of netizens, Jessy Mendiolas boyfriend made fun of Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roques statement that the Philippines has won against the UP scientists regarding their projected number of COVID-19 infections by the end of June.

Please like and share our amazing Facebook posts to support the KAMI team! Dont hesitate to comment and share your opinions about our stories either. We love reading about your thoughts and views on different matters!

Source: KAMI.com.gh
ISLE ROYALE, MI - Theres not much that stumps researchers involved in the worlds longest-running predator/prey study on Michigans remote Isle Royale, but scientists made a first-time find recently when they examined a moose skeleton.

The bull moose was wearing a radio collar when he died in early May, and research teams on the island only recently were able to retrieve the collar and study the big animals bones.

It appeared to have died of malnutrition, but there was an interesting twist when we looked closely at his skull, researchers said this weekend on the studys Facebook page. Although the bull moose was old, he did not show any of the skeletal pathologies that we often see in old moose that perish from malnutrition, like arthritis, osteoporosis, and periodontal disease.

Isle Royale is an archipelago that sits in Lake Superior. Its about 15 miles from the Canadian mainland, and 60 miles from Michigans Upper Peninsula. It can be reached by boat or sea plane. For 62 years, its been a wilderness classroom for the study of wolves and moose by researchers from Michigan Technological University.

A moose skeleton on Isle Royale. Photo courtesy of the Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale group and Michigan Technological University.

At last count from the 2019 MTU study, there were more than 2,000 moose on the island. There are also believed to be 15 wolves, seven females and eight males. These include the islands last native-born female and 14 new wolves that have been trapped and brought to the island from Minnesota, Michigans Upper Peninsula, mainland Ontario, Canada, and Michipicoten Island in northeastern Lake Superior, Ontario, Canada. The new wolves are part of the National Park Services plan to bring more big predators to the island to help control the rising moose population, which is overbrowsing areas of the islands wilderness.

New counts of wolves and moose are expected soon in an MTU annual study.

Researchers have been on the island this year studying both the wolf and the moose populations. In the case of this dead bull moose, his body was found sprawled on the ground, laying on its right side. Wolves did not consume any part of the carcass, officials noted.

When they looked closely at the mooses skull, they saw a thick piece of wood had became firmly stuck across his upper palate. They noted it was the first time weve recorded this at Isle Royale.

A peek inside the skeleton of a moose found dead on Isle Royale. A stout stick is jammed across the top of the palate. Photo courtesy of the Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale group and Michigan Technological University.

Mapping of the bulls movements from his radio collar showed he moved normally in April, then died in early May, researchers said.

The stick in the mouth probably interfered enough with his forage intake that it increased the negative energy balance that is common for an Isle Royale moose in late winter, and he evidently didnt have body reserves adequate to overcome the deficit. The stuck stick did not result in an infection, it just became a mechanical hindrance to proper feeding, the scientists said.

READ MORE

Isle Royales last native male wolf killed by new wolves

Unknown wolf visitors, rebuffed incest highlight new Isle Royale report

The mysteries of Michigans Cemetery Island
A n inquest has begun in Malaysia into the death of London teenager Nora Quoirin, a year after her body was found near a nature resort where she disappeared while on holiday.

The French-Irish teen's disappearance from her familys cottage at the Dusun eco-resort in southern Negeri Sembilan state on August 4 last year, a day after her family arrived for their holiday, sparked a massive search operation.

Her naked body was discovered August 13 beside a stream in a palm oil estate about 2.5 kilometres (1.6 miles) from the resort.

Coroner Maimoonah Aid said the inquest is aimed at determining when Nora died, the cause of her death, how she came to her death, and if anyone was criminally involved.

Nora and her mother Meabh, left / PA

Police have said there was no sign the teen was abducted or raped, with an autopsy showing the 15-year-old succumbed to intestinal bleeding due to starvation and stress.

But her Irish mother and French father, Meabh and Sebastien Quoirin, believed Nora was abducted as she has mental and physical disabilities and could not have wandered off on her own.

The coroner earlier this month visited the resort and the place where the body was found.

The inquest, which is set to run until September 4, will involve 64 witnesses.

Meabh and Sebastian Quoirin, centre, thank the search team / AFP/Getty Images

The Quoirin family lawyer, S Sakthyvell, said Noras parents could not attend the inquest due to the coronavirus pandemic but that they will testify via the videoconferencing app Zoom.

A British doctor who conducted a second autopsy on Noras body will also testify remotely, he said.

The Quoirin family has sued the resort owner for alleged negligence. They said in their lawsuit that there was no security at the resort and that a cottage window was found ajar with a broken latch on the morning Nora disappeared.

A Malaysian 'Bomoh' or shaman, was assisted with the search effort / EPA

Nora had poor motor skills and needed help to walk and her mental age was about five or six years old, her parents said in the claim.

Noras parents had welcomed Malaysias decision to hold the inquest after police classified the case as no further action.

They have said the inquest will be crucial in determining the fullest possible picture of what happened to Nora and how her case was dealt with.
At stormy CWC reactions, retractions and offer of resignations

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: The Congress Working Committee has turned out to be a stormy affair. The meeting convened to decide on a leadership change has turned into a war of words after Rahul Gandhi accused the leaders who wrote the letter seeking an overhaul of colluding with the BJP.

Rahul Gandhi at the meet criticised the leaders for going public with issues concerning the party. These are issues to be discussed at the Congress Working Committee and in the media he said. He also criticised the letter written by the leaders and also questioned its timing.

Sonia Gandhi offers to resign as party chief, asks CWC to start process to elect new chief

Sibal was the first to react and said Rahul Gandhi is accusing them of colluding with the BJP. He took to twitter to say, Rahul Gandhi says " we are colluding with BJP. " Succeeded in Rajasthan High Court defending the Congress Party. Defending party in Manipur to bring down BJP Govt.Last 30 years have never made a statement in favour of BJP on any issue.Yet " we are colluding with the BJP.

Congress president post, who will lead if not the Gandhis? Big developments | Oneindia News

However Sibal went on to withdraw his tweet. Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never what was attributed to him. I therefore withdraw my tweet, Sibal said.

Minutes later, news agency PTI while citing sources said that even Ghulam Nabi Azad offered to quit. Following Gandhi's remarks, he offered to quit if found to be colluding with BJP.

It may be recalled that 103 Congress workers had written to her seeking a complete rehaul of the party. The letter was signed by former chief ministers and members of Parliament. The letter alleged drift and uncertainty over the leadership. The letter was signed by Kapil Sibal Ghulam Nahi Azad, Milind Deora, Manish Tewari among others.

On Rahul Gandhi, Sibal reacts then retracts

Sonia Gandhi had indicated that she does not want to carry on as the chief of the party any longer. She is of the view that the party should have a new chief. In a hand written note, Gandhi said that she was not interested in leading the party. She said that she had accepted the post of interim president only after much persuasion and on the condition that the party would find a replacement for her soon.

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Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 14:15 [IST]
ATHENS, Greece - Greece and Bulgaria sought to reduce their reliance on Russian gas with the signing Monday of an agreement that will allow Bulgaria to participate in a planned liquefied natural gas terminal in northeastern Greece.

The project, which has strong support from the United States, is aimed at boosting energy diversification in southeastern Europe, a region largely reliant on Russian natural gas.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his Bulgarian counterpart, Boiko Borisov, were present for the signing of the agreement under which Bulgarias state-controlled Bulgartransgaz will acquire a 20% stake in the Greek company, Gastrade, that is developing the LNG terminal outside the Greek city of Alexandroupolis.

This large investment will help our ultimate goal of turning our easternmost port into a global energy hub, Mitsotakis said.

The benefits are also geopolitical: A new axis of diversification of natural gas routes is being created not only for Bulgaria but also for central Europe which will no longer have a single source of energy.

Bulgarian participation in the venture is tied to a separate pipeline project that will be used to transport the gas northward.

Mondays ceremony was also attended by the U.S. ambassador to Greece, Geoffrey Pyatt.

The terminal at Alexandroupolis is due to start operating in 2022.

Read more about:
Three suspects have been arrested by the Tesano Police for possession of two locally made pistols. They also had in their possession other implements suspected to have been stolen from a robbery escapade.



Three suspects have been arrested by the Tesano Police for possession of two locally made pistols.



They also had in their possession other implements suspected to have been stolen from a robbery escapade.



Deputy Superintendent of Police Effia Tenge, Head of Public Affairs Unit (PAU) of Accra Regional Police Command gave their names are Ato Kwamina, 26, Isaah Emmanuel, 20 and lbrahim Abubakari, 21.



She said on August 19, 2020, about 0230 hours security details were at Abeka Junction Operation Calm Life Snapcheck duties when they spotted the suspects in a commercial vehicle heading towards Accra.



"They were highly suspected by the police and a search conducted on the suspect discovered the offensive weapons to which they admitted ownership," she said.



DSP Tenge mentioned other items found on them including six (6) live BB cartridges, one Toshiba laptop, one wrist watch, one small cutter, screw driver, two mobile phones and two power banks.



She said the suspects are currently in custody and assisting investigation.

Source: GNA









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'COVID-19 proved the urgent need for international cooperation and coordination to overcome the crisis,' Minister Rania Al-Mashat said

Egypts House of Representatives has approved on Monday two international cooperation agreements with the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD) worth of total of $53 million to support the state's efforts to combat COVID-19.

The approval includes a loan agreement signed on 5 March between Egypt and the IBRD (an arm of the World Bank Group) worth $50 million to fund the emergency response to combat COVID-19 in Egypt.

The approval also includes a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Egypt and the AFESD to provide aid worth 1 million Kuwaiti dinars, equivalent to $3.2 million, to support the fight against the pandemic.

The two agreements come within the framework of the Global Partnerships for Effective Development Cooperation multi-stakeholder platform launched in April 2020, which aims to strengthen partnerships to harmonise all development interventions to maximise work towards ending poverty, fighting inequality and addressing the urgency of climate change, according to Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat.

COVID-19 proved the urgent need for international cooperation and coordination to overcome the crisis and support countries to achieve the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, as no country will be able to overcome the current crisis on its own, Al-Mashat said.

Al-Mashat clarified that the agreement signed with the IBRD helps in providing medical equipment, training medical personnel, equipping quarantine rooms and treatment centres to combat the virus, and mobilising rapid response teams to track contacts of cases, in addition to developing tools to improve public awareness on HIV prevention, as well as innovative monitoring and evaluation of social distancing strategies.

She pointed out that the MoU with the AFESD aims to contribute to meeting urgent needs to support efforts to combat the COVID-19 and limit its spread, as well as to cover the costs of basic medical equipment, medicine, and means of monitoring to limit the spread of the virus, all of which helps protect citizens.

Al-Mashat stressed the importance of these agreements to achieve Goal 3 of the Sustainable Development Goals for good health and wellbeing, as well as Goal 17 for partnerships to achieve the goals, noting the ministrys persistent efforts to push for a human-centred economy within the framework of cooperation between development partners to win international assistance for projects that are in line with the National Development Agenda 2030.

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The crucial Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on Monday will discuss the leadership issue in the context of 23 party leaders, including Kapil Sibal, Shashi Tharoor, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Prithviraj Chavan, Vivek Tankha and Anand Sharma, seeking an overhaul of the organisation and interim chief Sonia Gandhi (73) unwilling to continue and having asked the party to elect a new president.

A look at the likely scenarios:

 Gandhi refuses to continue as the partys interim chief, asks CWC to elect a new president

 The CWC requests Rahul Gandhi to lead the party. He refuses and asks the leaders to find a non-Gandhi as the Congress president

 Rahul accepts the demand and takes back his resignation, but seeks a free hand in overhauling the organisation, including dissolution of the CWC

 Rahul refuses and the CWC requests Gandhi to stay on until a new president is elected. Also forms a parliamentary board for the day-to-day functioning of the party, as per the demands of leaders, who wrote to Gandhi seeking an overhaul of the organisation

 Both Gandhi and Rahul refuse and the CWC authorises the senior-most general secretary to officiate as the interim president until internal elections are held and a new chief is elected

 Outpouring of support for the Gandhis from many party leaders and those who wrote letters are silenced. Gandhi agrees to stay on as the Congress chief

.
An asteroid which is projected to come close to Earth later this year has a 0.41 per cent chance of hitting the planet, according to Nasa data.

The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), from Nasas Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the celestial object, known as 2018VP1, is predicted to pass near Earth one day before the US presidential election on 2 November.

The space agency said there were three potential impacts but, based on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days, it did not think a direct impact was likely.

Nasa

2018VP1, which was first identified at Palomar Observatory, California, in 2018, is not considered a potentially hazardous object due to its small size - with a diameter of 0.002 km (about 6.5 feet), according to Nasa data.

Potentially hazardous objects - usually asteroids or comets - are those which have an orbit taking them close to Earth and are large enough to cause significant regional damage if they ever hit the planet.

Earlier this week, an asteroid flew just 1,830 miles over the southern Indian Ocean - the closest such an object has flown past Earth on record.

The object, known as asteroid 2020 GC, was spotted by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a robotic camera which scans the sky, and is thought to be roughly the size of a large car.

Its small size meant asteroid 2020 GC did not pose much of a threat to Earth as it would have likely broken up in the planets atmosphere if it was on course for direct impact.

Its really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close, because we can see the Earths gravity dramatically bend its trajectory, Paul Chodas, director of CNEOS, said of the discovery.

Our calculations show that this asteroid got turned by 45 degrees or so as it swung by our planet."

Read more

Asteroid flies by Earth closer than any seen before, Nasa says

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The intervertebral discs connect the vertebrae and give the spine its mobility. The disc consists of a cartilaginous fibrous ring and a gelatinous core as a buffer. It has always been assumed that only humans and other mammals have discs. A misconception, as a research team under the leadership of the University of Bonn has now discovered: Even Tyrannosaurus rex could have suffered a slipped disc. The results have now been published in the journal "Scientific Reports".

Present-day snakes and other reptiles do not have intervertebral discs; instead, their vertebrae are connected with so-called ball-and-socket joints. Here, the ball-shaped end surface of a vertebra fits into a cup-shaped depression of the adjacent vertebra, similar to a human hip joint. In-between there is cartilage and synovial fluid to keep the joint mobile. This evolutionary construction is good for today's reptiles, because it prevents the dreaded slipped disc, which is caused by parts of the disc slipping out into the spinal canal.

"I found it hard to believe that ancient reptiles did not have intervertebral discs," says paleontologist Dr. Tanja Wintrich from the Section Paleontology in the Institute of Geosciences of the University of Bonn. She noticed that the vertebrae of most dinosaurs and ancient marine reptiles look very similar to those of humans - that is, they do not have ball-and-socket joints. She therefore wondered whether extinct reptiles had intervertebral discs, but had "replaced" these with ball-and-socket joints in the course of evolution.

Comparison of the vertebrae of dinosaurs with animals still alive today

To this end, the team of researchers led by Tanja Wintrich and with the participation of the University of Cologne and the TU Bergakademie Freiberg as well as researchers from Canada and Russia examined a total of 19 different dinosaurs, other extinct reptiles, and animals still alive today. The researchers concluded that intervertebral discs not only occur in mammals. For these investigations, vertebrae still in connection were analyzed using various methods.

Surprisingly, Dr. Wintrich has now also been able to demonstrate that remnants of cartilage and even other parts of the intervertebral disc are almost always preserved in such ancient specimens, including marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus. She then traced the evolution of the soft tissues between the vertebrae along the family tree of land animals, which 310 million years ago split into the mammalian line and the dinosaur and bird line.

Intervertebral discs emerged several times during evolution

It was previously unknown that intervertebral discs are a very ancient feature. The findings also show that intervertebral discs evolved several times during evolution in different animals, and were probably replaced by ball-and-socket joints twice in reptiles. "The reason why the intervertebral disc was replaced might be that it is more susceptible to damage than a ball-and-socket joint," says Dr. Wintrich. Nonetheless, mammals have always retained intervertebral discs, repeating the familiar pattern that they are rather limited in their evolutionary flexibility. "This insight is also central to the medical understanding of humans. The human body is not perfect, and its diseases reflect our long evolutionary history," adds paleontologist Prof. Dr. Martin Sander from the University of Bonn.

In terms of research methods, the team drew not only on paleontology, but also on medical anatomy, developmental biology and zoology. Under the microscope, dinosaur bones cut with a rock saw and then ground very thinly provide information comparable to histological sections of fixed and embedded tissue of extant animals. This makes it possible to bridge the long periods of evolution and identify developmental processes. Prof. Sander remarks: "It's truly amazing that the cartilage of the joint and apparently even the disc itself can survive for hundreds of millions of years."

Dr. Wintrich, who now works at the Institute of Anatomy of the University of Bonn, is pleased about the cooperation between the fields that has made this interdisciplinary understanding possible in the first place: "We found that even Tyrannosaurus rex was not protected against slipped discs." Only bird-like predatory dinosaurs then evolved ball-and-socket joints as well and saddle joints, still seen in today's birds. Likewise, such ball-and-socket joints were a decisive advantage for the stability of the spine of the largest dinosaurs, the long-necked dinosaurs.

This bridge between paleontology and medicine is seminal in Germany. The anatomist Prof. Dr. Karl Schilling from the University of Bonn, who was not involved in the new study, reports: "In the USA, in contrast, dinosaur researchers and evolutionary biologists are often closely involved in medical training, especially in anatomy and embryology. This gives young doctors a perspective that is becoming increasingly important in a rapidly changing environment."

###

Publication: Tanja Wintrich, Martin Scaal, Christine Bohmer, Rico Schellhorn, Ilja Kogan, Aaron van der Reest & P. Martin Sander: Paleontological evidence reveals convergent evolution of intervertebral joint types in amniotes, Scientific Reports, DOI:10.1038/s41598-020-70751-2

Contact:

Dr. Tanja Wintrich

Anatomisches Institut

Universitat Bonn

Tel. +49-(0)228-7360055

E-mail: tanja.wintrich@uni-bonn.de

Prof. Dr. Martin Sander

Institut fur Geowissenschaften

Universitat Bonn

Tel. +49-(0)228-733105

E-mail: martin.sander@uni-bonn.de
EDWARDSVILLE  On her way out of the Madison County Administration building, Miranda Williams stopped to look at a new historical display in the lobby.

She had just registered to vote. Ironically, the exhibit was on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

I renewed my license last week, but I wanted to come up and make sure (she was registered to vote), Williams said. I wasnt registered so I got registered today.

She took some time to look at the exhibit with her daughter and niece.

I love it. Its history that everyone should come up and look at, Williams said.

Madison County Historical Museum Director Jon Parkin said the pop-up exhibit Rightfully Hers by the National Archives honors the ratification of the amendment giving women the right to vote went on display Tuesday in the Administration Building, 157 N. Main St., Edwardsville. The display will run through Nov. 6.

Parkin said Rightfully Hers contains simple messages exploring the history of the ratification of the 19th amendment, womens voting rights before and after its passing and its impact today.

Despite decades of marches, petitions and public debate to enshrine a womans right to vote in the constitution, the 19th Amendment  while an enormous milestone  did not grant voting rights for all, Parkin said.

He said the challenges of its passage reverberate to the ongoing fight for gender equity today.

Co-Curator of Rightfully Hers Jennifer N. Johnson said the ratification of the 19th Amendment was a landmark moment in American history that dramatically changed the electorate, and although it enshrined the U.S. Constitution fuller citizenship for women many remained unable to vote.

Additional information on Womens Suffrage can be accessed at: https://museum.archives.gov/rightfully-hers.

An online exhibit on Womens Suffrage Movement in Madison County can be found at: https://madcohistory.org/online-exhibits/womens-suffrage-movement-in-madison-county/.

According to the Madison County Historical Societys website, much of the activism regarding womens suffrage was centered in Alton, while the political conversation among women in Edwardsville focused on temperance

Its interesting how different towns will stake out different agendas, Parkin said.

One of the earliest references to womens suffrage was an editorial in the May 24, 1867 edition of the Alton Telegraph.

It states Considering the matter as an abstract question, the argument  preponderates in favor of granting them the rights. They are subject to taxation and to the control of the laws, and hence  they should be permitted to vote 

However, it also said that the right should not be forced upon them and that there were concerns that It would not be the refined, intelligent, moral and religious portion of [women] who would turn out and press their way to the polls, through crowds of drunken, profane and filthy men; but, on the contrary, it would  be the ignorant, debased and immoral . .

The same page also noted that a Womans Suffrage Association had been formed in St. Louis.

The fight went on for decades.

One of the things that is really interesting, is that even though around the 19th century and into the 20th century, women did not have the franchise, but they were learning and working and organizing, Parkin said.

He added that women, who were some of the major players in the abolitionist and temperance movements, were getting an education in political organization that fed into the success of the suffragette movement.

In 1913 the Illinois General Assembly passed the Magill Bill, granting woman partial voting rights.

Women could vote in most local elections, but could not vote for city police magistrates or the county treasurer. They were still barred by the Illinois constitution from voting for governor or state and federal legislators.

Illinois women first voted on Nov. 7, 1916, and separate ballot boxes were provided for men and women.

According to the website, women continued to fight, and in Illinois they considered two approaches: a constitutional convention or a constitutional amendment to the state constitution.

Most suffragists in Alton favored the constitutional convention method, it stated. Although creating a new state constitution would take longer than introducing an amendment, they felt an amendment that could only be voted on by men would likely fail.

A state constitutional convention was called in early 1918. It was eventually submitted to the voters in 1922 and failed dramatically, but by that time the 19th Amendment had been passed.

It had been passed by Congress in June 1919, and with the ratification by Tennessee in August 1920, became official.

Rightfully Hers is organized by the National Archives and Records Administration. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, the National Archives has launched a nationwide initiative and major exhibition that explores the generations-long fight for universal woman suffrage.

The exhibition is presented in part by the Womens Suffrage Centennial Commission and the National Archives Foundation through the support of Unilever, Pivotal Ventures, Carl M. Freeman Foundation in honor of Virginia Allen Freeman, AARP, and Denise Gwyn Ferguson.
(Natural News) In any war, the successor lives to write history; thats why controlling the covid-19 narrative is so important for the authoritarian elites who are calling the shots. Facebook has announced they will only allow information on their platform that is approved by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, while agreeing to disparage, defame, block and shadow ban any information to the contrary.

This is one of many warning signs that the covid-19 outbreaks are less a pandemic and more so a planned set of controls that are being rolled out not only for political reasons, but also to restrict personal liberty, force people to do things against their will, control the free market economy, and cover up crimes of the medical and pharmaceutical establishment.

Controlling the narrative using Wikipedia as a libelous weapon

As social media platforms fall in line with governing authorities such as the WHO and the CDC, they have become tools of defamation, manipulation and censorship, shunning truthful testimony and evidence from front line journalists, whistle-blowers, doctors, nurses and scientists.

Wikipedia is currently being used as a libelous, defamatory tool to control the covid-19 narrative, to not only cover up the crimes of governments and pharmaceutical companies, but to also disparage and discredit anyone who dissents to the official government narrative on covid-19. These systems of information and thought control have been set up over time, in preparation for global events such as covid-19 outbreaks. Wikipedia is the go-to destination for people, places and things, and is even used by the all-knowing Amazon Alexa to brainwash the public on select topics, to steer the public away from valuable sources of truthful information.

Wikipedia was once an unbiased, open source platform. Over the years it became hijacked by politically-motivated financiers who use it to smear, disparage and discredit their competition. Wikipedia is now supported by the Wikimedia foundation, which is funded by politically motivated financiers, some named and some anonymous. In exchange for their funds, these financiers are allowed to use Wikipedia as a libelous, defamatory tool to destroy the reputation of journalists, doctors, scientists and other skeptics and truth tellers.

Just look what they have done to discredit Dr. Judy A. Mikovits, an intelligent research scientist who made important discoveries on retroviruses in vaccines and their connection to chronic fatigue syndrome. Wikipedia claims that her medical claims are discredited, that she is a promoter of conspiracy theories, and has been accused of scientific misconduct. The attack on Mikovits and her work is conducted because she worked closely with Dr. Anthony Fauci and openly speaks about his corrupt connections, scientific fraud and misguided advice. (Watch the Dr. Judy Mikovits interview with the Health Ranger discussing the coronavirus pandemic, Fauci fraud, NIH corruption and more)

Wikipedia is part of a larger network of deception

After the smears are written and published on Wikipedia, these politically-motivated financiers can lock their targets out so they cannot make corrections to their own biography. There is no recourse or appeal to restore ones own reputation on Wikipedia, forcing many intelligent researchers, journalists and scientists to be victims of libel indefinitely. The narrative is further controlled by fact checking organizations like News Guard, Snopes, PolitiFact, etc. that go along with these wicked narratives and personal hit jobs. These fact checkers are neither factual nor independent  just political spin machines that are part of a greater network of thought control.

Like Facebook, Wikipedia has decided there is an approved narrative on all topics of health, as long as it is in line with the public pronouncements of the WHO and the CDC. Whatever the WHO and the CDC recommend is considered the end-all doctrine, presumed to be 100 percent accurate and authoritative  advice that is used to fuel government mandates and to control populations.

And that is exactly what is happening: Sickness is being used as a weapon to control people and information is being controlled to manipulate people into compliance.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com
The W.O. Decker tugboat from the South Street Seaport sits docked Friday afternoon, Aug. 21, 2020, at the Hudson River Maritime Museum in Kingston, N.Y. The W.O. Decker is the last surviving New York-built wooden tugboat. Bulit in 1930, it originally had a steam-powered engine, but was refitted with a diesel engine in 1986, when it was donated to the Seaport Museum. The tugboat will be at the Maritime Museum through the end of September for maintenance, but no tours will be offered.
The owners of an animal farm and market are outraged after discovering on social media that a group of teenagers broke into their farm, stole from their market, and even rode their donkeys in the petting zoo after putting lipstick on one of them.

The incident occurred at approximately 10 p.m. when Jimmy Abma, a fourth-generation farmer of Abma Farms in Wyckoff, New Jersey, got a Snapchat photo of a teenage girl sitting on one of his donkeys.

Abma, who lives on the farm with his wife, immediately went to go investigate and found about a half-dozen teenagers running around the premises before allegedly taking off with farm property.

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PHOTO: Jimmy Abma in Wyckoff, New Jersey, is outraged after discovering that a group of teenagers broke into his farm, stole from his market, and even rode his donkeys in the petting zoo on Saturday, Aug. 22, 2020. (ABC News/WABC)

MORE: First dog to test positive for COVID-19 in North Carolina dies

We must explain the seriousness of this break in, Abma Farms posted on their Facebook page in the aftermath of the trespassing and break in. First and foremost, we are a working farm, and four families (and four generations) live here. This is our home. Second, from a human safety standpoint, breaking in to animal pens with no animal training is dangerous. Animals can kick, rear up, and trample you. In the dark, anything can happen. Third, the safety of OUR animals has been compromised and that IS. NOT. OKAY. Our animals are now shaken and skiddish (sic) compared to their normal relaxed nature. This is very troubling to us. A couple of our animals got loose from gates left open but after thoroughly searching this morning, all animals are accounted for.

Abma spoke to ABC News New York City station WABC and said that his biggest concern at the moment is the animals.

All the gates were open in the pens, a couple of the animals you couldnt even get close to, Abma told WABC. They were all skittish, they were all jumping around. This our house. This is our yard. This is our livelihood. With something like this, it is almost like you just get sucker punched in the side and you really have to go around say is it really worth it? Do I really need to keep my zoo open for all these frustrations?

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MORE: 27-day-old elephant with developmental impairments dies at St. Louis Zoo

PHOTO: The owners of an animal farm and market in Wyckoff, New Jersey, are outraged after discovering that a group of teenagers broke into their farm, stole from their market, and even rode their donkeys in the petting zoo on Saturday, Aug. 22, 2020. (ABC News/WABC)

MORE: Incredibly rare blue lobster saved from certain death by Red Lobster employees

Abma Farms said that their barnyard will be closed on Monday so that a veterinarian can complete a full wellness and health check on all animals.

As for the suspects involved with the trespassing and break in of Abma Farms, Jimmy Abma says that they are grateful for the outpouring of love and support he has received from the community but, ultimately, he wants the perpetrators caught and to pay for what they have done.

Everybody has been concerned, everybody is concerned about the animals, the well-being of everything that has gone on, said Abma. Everybody wants us to bring these kids up to speed and make sure that they have to deal with what they did.

Kids break into farm and abuse petting zoo animals, owners find out on social media originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:21:11|Editor: huaxia

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KABUL, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan Ministry of Interior on Monday appointed a new police chief for the country's capital Kabul after a sharp rise in security incidents in the capital.

Major General Juma Gul Hemat, who has held different military posts, has been appointed as the new police chief of Kabul, the ministry confirmed in a statement.

Over the past years, the capital city with a population of nearly 5 million has been hit by a series of terror attacks by the Taliban insurgents and militants of the Islamic State (IS) opposing the government.

On Saturday, an army colonel, his driver, and a civilian were killed and four people were wounded in a shooting attack and four separate bomb explosions in Kabul, while four army personnel were shot dead on western outskirts of Kabul on Friday. Enditem
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- At a time of high U.S. unemployment and in an election year, the H-1B visa program has become a hot-button issue. President Donald Trump in June ordered a temporary ban on such skilled foreign workers, though his administration has carved out exceptions after court challenges by business groups and others. Trumps rival for the presidency, Joe Biden, has promised to end Trumps ban, expand the number of skilled-worker visas and drop limits for individual countries. Bloomberg Opinion columnists Rachel Rosenthal and Noah Smith, both of whom have written about this issue, recently got together online to debate it.

Noah Smith: In a recent article, you criticized the H-1B program, arguing U.S. companies dont need these workers because they arent suffering a skills shortage. But this seems a bit like saying I dont need a free $100 because my bank account isnt suffering a money shortage. Skilled immigration seems like a thing where more is simply better, and framing the conversation in terms of shortages makes little sense.

Theres copious evidence of the benefits H-1B workers provide their native-born peers. Two of these, surprisingly, are higher wages and more jobs. Research has found that when a city gets more H-1B workers, employment growth for college-educated native-born workers in that city accelerates, and wages rise. H-1B workers might compete with educated native-born workers within specific companies, but this effect is overwhelmed by the investment a pool of skilled foreign workers attracts. Effectively, by bringing skilled workers here, we prevent tech investment from going elsewhere. And that benefits native-born workers. And research shows H-1B workers increase innovation, both in patenting and new product development.

So we shouldnt depict the H-1B program as a zero-sum game between foreigners and native-born Americans, as Trump would have it. Instead, bringing skilled workers to the U.S. is a win-win.

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Rachel Rosenthal: I couldnt have said it better myself: Corporate America sees H-1Bs as a free $100 bill. Make that free stacks of $100 bills. Companies stand to save billions of dollars a year by hiring cheaper guest workers.

The whole point of the H-1B visa to address a deficit of skilled Americans, so framing the debate around shortages makes perfect sense. Not only is there no evidence of a shortage, but hundreds of thousands of surplus guest workers compete for a limited supply of jobs.

Can you name a single market where excess supply over a 30-year horizon would be considered healthy? The labor market is no exception. Just take a look at whats happening in computer occupations, where most H-1Bs end up. Wage growth has flat-lined. And a study with access to companies actual wage records, using confidential Treasury Department data, found H-1Bs have an insignificant effect on patenting, lead to lower average employee wages and raise corporate profits. Research that relies on questionable evidence and methods, or conflates immigration and guest-worker policy, often only serves the interests of tech-industry employers.

(Consider, too, that top H-1B employers are IT services firms  not exactly the bleeding edge of patent generation. And whether patents are a proxy for innovation remains an open question.)

Its tempting to say theres no such thing as too much talent. But that assumes workers are like cans of tuna. Rather, human capital is a perishable good  you cant stockpile it. Even a one-year delay of entry to the labor market can hurt wages. This is what makes conversations about H-1Bs contributions to the economy a distraction. The problem is the scale of the program, which caps opportunities for qualified Americans, including women and minorities. Blacks and Latinos proportion of computer science bachelors degrees earned, for example, far exceeds their representation in the IT workforce.

Even defenders acknowledge this visa category needs reform. What changes would you propose?

NS: When I say the H-1B program is like a free $100 bill, I dont mean for corporations; I mean its a free $100 bill for the American people, including both the college-educated and the non-college-educated. The economy and the labor market are not a zero-sum game; the pool of jobs is not fixed.

The reason is that if companies dont hire skilled tech workers in the U.S., theyll hire them somewhere else  in India, or Israel, or South Korea, or Canada. Tech companies already have plenty of research offices overseas; its not hard for them to invest more in those other countries, if thats where the talent is. By letting skilled workers into the U.S., we make sure investment dollars stay here, and our domestic tech industry expands. That raises wages and employment for native-born Americans.

The paper I linked to before, which you suggest isnt objective, is not the only one that finds this. A 2015 paper by economists Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr, and William F. Lincoln finds the exact opposite of the study you cite  namely, that the more H-1B workers a company can hire, the more educated native-born workers it tends to hire as well. A 2010 paper by economists Sunil Mithas and Henry C. Lucas, Jr. finds H-1B workers arent underpaid relative to the native-born. A 2017 report by the National Academy of Sciences surveys the research and concludes several studies have found a positive impact of skilled immigration on the wages and employment of both college educated and noncollege-educated natives.

So no, the H-1B program is not responsible for low wage growth in computer occupations. And it doesnt cap opportunities for Black and Latino Americans. In fact, it expands those opportunities.

Thats not to say the program is perfect; few programs are. In his book The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society, Harvard economist William Kerr gives some recommendations. One of these is to let H-1B workers self-sponsor for green cards; this will prevent them from being tied to one employer during the application process. A second reform is to raise the minimum wage for H-1B workers, so spots go to highly productive inventors and engineers rather than to less-productive IT outsourcing workers.

But despite the need for reform, the H-1B program is good for American workers overall, and should be expanded in size.

RR: Gene Nelson earned his PhD in biophysics in 1984. At one point, he struggled to get a job designing toilets and scraped by making $300 a week teaching at community colleges. Salil Choudhary worked in IT his entire career. He went from making as much as $250,000 a year to $50,000 after opting to leave an industry with diminishing prospects. Another woman I spoke with  having spent the past quarter of a century working in IT at a major U.S. insurance company  recalls watching colleagues get corralled into conference rooms to get laid off en masse. She senses shes next.

These are the faces behind the data you refute. Do you want to be the one to tell them this program is good for American workers overall? Not to mention the thousands of others from Vanguard Group Inc., Southern California Edison Co., the University of California system, the Walt Disney Co. and the Tennessee Valley Authority (until Trump fired its chairman). Do you also tell the 15 million unemployed the pool of jobs is limitless?

If you dont want to believe these human stories or data from the U.S. government on wage trends or the principle of supply and demand, just consider what top H-1B employers have said in their own SEC filings about their business models and the cost of U.S. hires. Due to a vigorous focus on domestic (local) employment across many markets during the Covid-19 crisis, [restrictions on guest visas] are expected to increase substantially, resulting in increased expenses, Infosys Ltd. recently reported.

We can play academic Ping Pong all day. A major problem with the Mithas and Lucas study on wages, for example, is that its based on a salary survey conducted by an IT publication and a management consulting firm. The research I cited earlier uses actual Treasury payroll information and company financials. For readers interested in going down the rabbit hole on the Kerr, Kerr and Lincoln paper, I would point them here. And if youre going to talk about competitiveness, consider that companies compete, not countries.

I agree with the idea of raising the minimum wage to prioritize the best applicants. We also need a labor market test that requires employers to recruit U.S. workers and make sure they arent displaced. (For anyone who thinks that already happens, watch this immigration law firm explain how companies game the system. Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker, its marketing director said.)

But if you want to understand the problem, talk to the real people living it. If the H-1B program is meant to expand opportunities for Americans, its doing a dismal job, particularly for older workers (in tech, thats anyone over 35). Many of the people I spoke with said theyd never let their children work in the industry. Thats a shame.

NS: Youre right that I can come back with more and more academic studies; and Im sure you can find some way to question the integrity of the authors of each and every study. Im also sure you can counter those papers with any number of anecdotes of people who believe they lost their IT jobs because of competition from foreign workers, rather than from COVID-19, bad management decisions, or a host of other reasons the U.S. economy fails its workers.

Im at a natural disadvantage there; because the benefits of the H-1B program are diffused throughout entire industries and cities, its hard to point to individual Americans and say See? This person got an IT job because the H-1B program lured tech industry investment to her city! Even companies who think they got a bargain on a foreign worker might themselves not recognize how H-1Bs contribute to the ecosystem that benefits native-born workers.

But once we start thinking of jobs, including IT jobs, as a fixed pool to be divided, it takes us to all kinds of dark places. It takes us to the expulsion of a million Mexicans (including American citizens) in the Great Depression, which was intended to save American jobs but clearly failed to do so. It takes us to the Chinese Exclusion Act, done partly in response to workers fears that Chinese laborers were undercutting their wages.

No immigration restriction in U.S. history has, to our knowledge, ever succeeded in raising wages or employment for the native-born. But people like presidential advisor Stephen Miller, who want to prevent U.S. demographics from changing, are eager to use misguided labor-protectionist arguments to further their schemes for racial engineering. They know the H-1B program is the gateway to permanent immigration for many (mostly Asian) workers.

Rachel, if Im not mistaken, you and I are both Jewish. Our own immigrant ancestors suffered discrimination from some native-born Americans who were afraid theyd be displaced from elite universities and skilled jobs. But our ancestors successes did not come at the expense of Christians. Instead, their skills complemented each other, and the nation became richer for it. H-1B workers from China, India, and elsewhere deserve the same chance our own ancestors received. America will be richer and stronger if we let them come.

RR: Lets be clear. The H-1B program is for guest workers, not immigrants. Because 70% of H-1Bs come from one country, theres a green-card backlog that can stretch decades. This leaves visa holders in perpetual limbo, reliant on their employers and vulnerable to exploitation. Summoning anti-immigrant history and rhetoric may be convenient, even evocative, but our grandparents have no place in this debate.

You may recall I concluded my piece suggesting the U.S. needs a less convoluted way to help the worlds best and brightest become citizens. If the H-1B program is supposed to do that, it has failed. If the H-1B program is supposed to fill a shortage, it has failed. (The data in my piece will walk you through the math on this.)

The proposition has never been to abolish the H-1B visa category. Rather, Ive sought to establish that the supply of qualified Americans and permanent residents is large enough to question the scale and implementation of it. Why does Corporate America perpetuate the skills gap myth? Quite simply, because employers have an interest in hiring cheaper labor. My analysis is based on data from government sources, as well as interviews with tech workers, lawyers and academics, not to mention the former congressman who wrote the original H-1B statute.

But dont take my word for it. Crisil, a unit of S&P Global, has written that Indian IT firms (among the biggest H-1B employers) rely on labor arbitrage for maintaining margins. Our own Bloomberg Intelligence analysts published a note last week discussing the impact of hiring locally in higher-cost regions like the U.S. This is the message to people with money on the line.

My piece only reflects a splinter of the work done by academics like Ronil Hira of Howard University, Hal Salzman of Rutgers University and others, who have spent years analyzing how visa programs impact the labor market and what can be done better. Unfortunately, their suggestions keep meeting resistance from vocal and deep-pocketed employers. Yet theyre not the ones who need the megaphone.

I was moved by the reaction I got to my article. From displaced workers, I heard relief someone was finally paying attention. Many have suffered financial hardship, depression and worse. Who can blame them? All they hear from friends and family is some version of, If theres a shortage, why cant you find a job? Whats wrong with you? Even more surprising, though, were the replies from people whove been through the H-1B system. Rather than a flood of messages telling me how I got it all wrong, the overwhelming response was thank you.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Rachel Rosenthal is an editor with Bloomberg Opinion. Previously, she was a markets reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers joined the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Reclamation in signing an interagency memorandum of understanding today during a ceremony on National Hydropower Day. The agencies agree to collaborate on common issues and leverage resources to further the nation's hydropower generation.

Ryan A. Fisher, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works); Brenda Burman, Commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation; and Daniel R. Simmons, Assistant Secretary of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Department of Energy, signed today's agreement during the ceremony held at the Hoover Dam Visitor Center in Nevada.

The agencies, in partnership with the Power Marketing Agencies, agree to create an action plan designed to adapt hydropower to the changing energy landscape. The action plan will focus on developing projects and activities using data driven, risk-based decision-making and consider projects in the areas of asset management, improving the value of hydropower, workforce training, water supply reliability, and environmental outcomes.

"This agreement will allow the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers through its Civil Works mission to continue its partnership with federal and industry partners as we work together to enhance and manage our nation's hydropower program," said Fisher.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Hydropower Program is the largest generator of hydropower in the nation, with 75 power-producing dams housing 356 individual generating units. USACE's hydropower assets generate more than 70 billion kilowatt hours per year of clean renewable energy, or enough clean energy to power 10 cities the size of Seattle.

Additional information is available at https://www.usbr.gov/power/SignedHydropowerMOU.pdf.

SOURCE United States Army Corps of Engineers
OTTAWA - Canadians can expect to see a different Snowbirds show next year  including fewer low-level and low-speed manoeuvres  as the military is placing new restrictions on its famed aerobatics team following two crashes in less than a year.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Canadian Forces Snowbirds jets are seen in the background as a woman attaches a sign to a fence in Kamloops, B.C., Monday, May 18, 2020. The military's Snowbirds are being allowed back into the air after a deadly crash in May saw the aerobatic team's iconic jets grounded in British Columbia for more than three months. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

OTTAWA - Canadians can expect to see a different Snowbirds show next year  including fewer low-level and low-speed manoeuvres  as the military is placing new restrictions on its famed aerobatics team following two crashes in less than a year.

The restrictions were revealed Monday as the Royal Canadian Air Force announced the Snowbirds' iconic Tutor jets were allowed back into the air after being grounded for more than three months following a deadly crash in British Columbia.

It's believed the plane went down after striking a bird shortly after takeoff from Kamloops on May 17. Capt. Jennifer Casey, the team's public affairs officer, was killed after trying to eject, while the pilot, Capt. Richard MacDougall, sustained serious injuries.

The crash was the second in less than eight months after another Tutor went down in the U.S. state of Georgia in October. A flight investigation found a problem with the plane's fuel-delivery system and flagged concerns with the ejection system.

A report released in June found that the ejection seat got tangled with the pilot's parachute as he tried to escape. The pilot sustained minor injuries.

Similar concerns about the ejection system were raised by investigators after the Kamloops crash, which remains under investigation.

Col. Ron Walker, commander of the Snowbirds' home base in Saskatchewan, 15 Wing Moose Jaw, said the Tutors have remained in Kamloops as investigators have pored over the causes of the two crashes and worked to ensure the planes are safe to fly.

Yet while the lifting of the grounding order means they can now be flown back to Moose Jaw, Walker said it could actually take a couple of weeks for them to return. That is because the pilots have to be recertified to fly the planes.

While such recertification is required and usually completed each year, Walker said that "because the pause has been so long, most of the qualifications and currency that the pilots have has lapsed."

"So we're going through a special process  a bit unprecedented, frankly  to recertify the pilots," he told The Canadian Press in an interview.

Even after the Tutors are back, there are no plans for aerobatics shows this year. The Snowbirds cancelled their demonstration season earlier this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather, Walker indicated the team will start looking to next season.

That season is likely to look different for the Snowbirds and spectators, as Walker said there will be new restrictions on the Tutors' minimum flying height and speed are following a detailed risk assessment that was launched because of the two crashes.

"We've looked at the whole flying show and some of the manoeuvres, and that review is still underway," he said.

"But you'll probably see a bit of a different show next year, where we'll avoid some low and slow-flying manoeuvres, if you will, to allow in the event of another bird strike, for example, to be able to have more time to react."

There are also new rules on the minimum length of runway from which the Snowbirds will fly, which Walker acknowledged could prevent the team from participating in some communities' air shows.

Walker could not say how long the restrictions would be in place, including whether they might remain until the Tutor fleet, which is more than 55 years old, is replaced.

The Air Force is also ordering additional maintenance and preventive measures on the Tutors, including special engine inspections before flights are allowed to resume. And it is replacing the engines on three out of 23 of the planes.

"We determined there were some engines that had high amounts of flying hours on them," Walker said. "So those are being replaced. And there's a few additional preventative measures that are being implemented on the technical side or the maintenance side."

While the restrictions aim to give pilots more time to react, they do not address the concerns raised about the Tutors' ejection seats, which a military report in 2016 recommended should be upgraded.

The Department of National Defence has said it is in the early stages of assessing ways to upgrade the ejection system as part of an overall refit of the Tutor fleet to keep it flying through 2030.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 24, 2020.
A new OnePlus Nord update improves the phones camera, battery life, and more. The company has started rolling out this update already, though it may take a couple of days for you to get it.

As per usual, this is a staged rollout. In other words, it is rolling out in stages, but everyone should get it within a week or so. There is a chance this update will get pulled if major issues pop up, though, of course.

This OnePlus Nord update improves the phones camera, and its battery life

In any case, this OnePlus Nord update is highly focused on camera and battery life improvements. It improves image clarity for the front-facing camera in low light.

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On top of that, it improves image clarity of the phones macro camera, says OnePlus. General power consumption has been improved, and the same goes for the charging experience.

Several additional entries into the changelog can be spotted on the companys website. OnePlus says that it improved the volume adjustment interface with this update as well.

The system reboot issue when free-form is enabled has also been fixed. The last entry has to do with the OnePlus Notes app. The issue of this app always running in the background has been fixed.

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For those of you who are wondering, this update is marked as OxygenOS 10.5.5. It is rolling out to all variants of the OnePlus Nord, Global, EU, and India variants.

The update is rolling out over the air. If you do have any issues with it, you can report it to the company. This is how you can do that if you stumble upon issues.

The Nord is the newest smartphone from the company

The OnePlus Nord is the companys newest smartphone. It is the second mid-range phone OnePlus ever announced, as its a spiritual successor to the OnePlus X.

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OnePlus did not release a mid-range smartphone for a long time, but it doesnt plan to stop with the Nord. Several additional devices are rumored to arrive this year, aside from the OnePlus 8T series.

OnePlus seems to be looking to expand its smartphone portfolio quite a bit. The company had a tendency to release four devices per year for several years now, but that will change by the end of 2020.

The OnePlus Nord will likely stay the most powerful mid-range smartphone OnePlus will release this year, though. Other rumored devices are inferior to the Nord, at least based on the rumors / leaks weve seen thus far.
Kansas City, Mo.-based insurance broker Lockton has added Kelly Conway as chief people officer.

In this position, Conway will lead Locktons people strategy, focusing on continuing to attract, develop, and retain industry-leading talent to support the companys growth.

In addition to taking responsibility for central HR functions, Conway will partner across the organization to enhance the experience of all Locktons people.

As part of this critically important role, she will work alongside Pam Popp, chief inclusion officer, and Brian Roberts, chief diversity officer, to lead strategies and initiatives ensuring the perspectives and backgrounds of each member of the Lockton team is valued as an essential part of the organizations collective success.

Conway joins Lockton from Stryker where she served most recently as vice president of human resources for the organizations global quality and operations group. Prior to Stryker, Conway had more than 15 years of human resources experience from TomoTherapy, Coca-Cola, and Bank of Arizona/New Mexico. She has experience leading a global HR business partner function as well as talent management, recruitment and training, and development functions.

Source: Lockton Companies

Topics Training Development Lockton
President Donald Trump View Photo

President Trump declared that a major disaster exists in the State of California and ordered Federal aid to supplement State, tribal, and local recovery efforts in the areas affected by wildfires beginning on August 14, 2020, and continuing.

Trump is Mondays mornings Newsmaker of the Day on KVML.

The Presidents action makes Federal funding available to affected individuals in the counties of Lake, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma, and Yolo.

Assistance can include grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses, and other programs to help individuals and business owners recover from the effects of the disaster.

Federal funding is also available to State, tribal, and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations on a cost-sharing basis for emergency protective measures in the counties of Lake, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma, and Yolo.

Finally, Federal funding is available on a cost-sharing basis for hazard mitigation measures statewide.

Pete Gaynor, Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Department of Homeland Security, named Willie G. Nunn as the Federal Coordinating Officer for Federal recovery operations in the affected areas.

Damage assessments are continuing in other areas, and more counties and additional forms of assistance may be designated after the assessments are fully completed.

Residents and business owners who sustained losses in the designated counties can begin applying for assistance tomorrow by registering online athttp://www.DisasterAssistance.gov or by calling 1-800-621-FEMA(3362) or 1-800-462-7585 (TTY) for the hearing and speech impaired. The toll-free telephone numbers will operate from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. (local time) seven days a week until further notice.

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard every weekday morning at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45 on AM 1450 and FM 102.7 KVML.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:14:11|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC), a sub-regional cooperation mechanism established in 2016 by China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, has yielded fruitful results.

The six countries share the same river -- called the Lancang River in China and the Mekong River when it flows through the other five countries before emptying into the sea.

The following are key facts and figures about the LMC.

-- A cooperation framework of "3+5+X" was brought up during the 2nd Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Leaders' Meeting in 2018.

The "3+5+X" mechanism of cooperation refers to the three cooperation pillars of political and security issues, economic and sustainable development and cultural and people-to-people exchanges; the five key priority areas of connectivity, production capacity, cross-border economic cooperation, water resources and agriculture and poverty reduction; as well as cooperation in broader areas such as the digital economy, environmental protection, customs and youth.

-- LMC Special Fund, aiming to provide 300 million U.S. dollars in five years to support small and medium-sized cooperation projects proposed by the Lancang-Mekong countries, has supported more than 410 projects to improve people's livelihood.

-- Construction of the Kunming-Vientiane Railway to link China and Laos is proceeding smoothly, with over 90 percent of the bridges and over 96 percent of the tunnels along the Yuxi-Mohan section, the Chinese section of the China-Laos Railway, having been completed.

-- Lancang-Mekong countries have implemented a series of cooperation projects in agriculture, helping local farmers to optimize the variety of agricultural and livestock products and strengthen agricultural trade and enhance their agricultural production skills.

-- China has been dispatching experts to Cambodia for the country's poverty relief since 2017.

A water supply project has been completed and is expected to be put into use in October. Nearly 4,000 people will have access to clean tap water, which will completely solve the drinking water problem in two targeted villages. Enditem
WASHINGTON (AP)  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent a cable to all U.S. diplomatic missions last month warning American diplomats that under federal law they should not take overt sides in the presidential campaign. On Tuesday, he plans to ignore his own warning by speaking to the Republican National Convention endorsing President Donald Trump for a second term.

Pompeo's message to State Department employees reminding them of restrictions on political activity under the Hatch Act was not unusual. Similar, if not identical, cables have been sent by successive secretaries of state every presidential election year. None of his predecessors, however, has disregarded those instructions so obviously.

Despite State Department assurances that Pompeo will be speaking to the convention in his personal capacity and wont violate the Hatch Act, Democrats and other critics have cried foul. They accuse the countrys top diplomat of inappropriate political behavior that has been anathema to his predecessors and of trashing his own admonition to State Department staffers.

The department works to advance the national interest abroad on behalf of all Americans in a non-partisan fashion," Pompeo said in the July 24 cable. Known as an ALDAC, short for the distribution list to ALL DIPLOMATIC AND CONSULAR posts, the cable was sent over Pompeo's signature as are all such messages from State Department headquarters.

"It is important to remember that in order to avoid any confusion or misperception in this regard, the departments longstanding policy is that U.S. citizen employees and family members may not engage in partisan political activity while posted or on TDY abroad, even on personal time, the cable said. TDY is an acronym for Temporary Duty.

Similarly, presidential and political appointees and career (senior executives) are subject to significant restrictions on their political activity; they may not engage in any partisan political activity in concert with a partisan campaign, political party, or partisan political group, even on personal time and outside of the federal workplace, the cable said.

The cable was released late Monday by Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a fierce Pompeo critic who is engaged in multiple battles with the secretary over what he believes to be inappropriate and possibly illegal partisan behavior. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the cable independently and verified its authenticity.

Story continues

Once again, the rules go out the window for Secretary Pompeo when they get in the way of serving his political interests and Donald Trump," Engel said in a statement. "Mr. Pompeo should show real respect for American law, diplomacy, and diplomats, and should follow his own guidance, cancel the speech, and watch the RNC from his hotel room after the workday is done.

The State Department has defended Pompeo's decision to appear at the convention. Officials have noted that Hatch Act rules for Senate-confirmed political appointees like the secretary are slightly less restrictive than those for rank-and-file diplomats.

Secretary Pompeo will address the convention in his personal capacity, the department said. No State Department resources will be used. Staff are not involved in preparing the remarks or in the arrangements for Secretary Pompeos appearance. The State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance.

Meanwhile, a person close to Pompeo said four teams of lawyers, including the State Department legal counsel, have reviewed the speech that will be recorded in Jerusalem and broadcast in prime-time at the Republican convention on Tuesday to ensure that it does not cross ethical lines. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

That person and the State Department said no taxpayer money was used in the production of the video, which was filmed in Jerusalem on Monday on the first stop of a multination trip to the Middle East that is dominated by official government business.

Looking forward to sharing with you how my family is more SAFE and more SECURE because of President Trump," Pompeo tweeted after the RNC announced his appearance. The State Department followed quickly with comments distancing the agency from the planned remarks.

The person close to Pompeo said the short address would focus on Trumps accomplishments in making Americans and the world safer and promoting his America First foreign policy. The speech will not delve into Pompeos own activities as secretary of state, the person said. Pompeo is likely to tout Trumps Mideast policies and the recent agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates to normalize relations.

Critics, though, say Pompeo is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the Hatch Act by using government resources to travel to the venue and jeopardizing long-standing tradition that domestic politics ends at the waters edge when it comes to diplomacy.

At the same time, they complain that in using Jerusalem as the venue, Pompeo is further politicizing the U.S.-Israel relationship with a pitch for Trump's reelection.

It is unprecedented and highly unethical for a sitting secretary of state to address a political convention while on official foreign travel," said Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. In addition to violating the Hatch Act, Secretary Pompeos plans to speak at the Republican National Convention from Jerusalem underscore the presidents ongoing effort to politicize the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Trump has proudly claimed the mantle of being America's most pro-Israel president ever and as proof pointed to his decisions to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, move the U.S. Embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv, recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and sideline the Palestinians. Such actions have won him high praise from conservative Israelis and American Jews but also appealed strongly to evangelical Christians in the United State whose support Trump is counting on in November.

While previous secretaries of state have naturally supported the policies of the presidents they served, they have steered clear of public political endorsements, sometimes going to great lengths to avoid their parties' conventions.

Previous secretaries of state have shunned overtly partisan rhetoric, and some have made a deliberate point of being out of the country and unavailable during their political parties presidential nominating events.

Like two of his predecessors, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, both of whom were unsuccessful Democratic Party nominees for president, Pompeo was a member of Congress before joining the executive branch. But both Clinton and Kerry eschewed the Democratic National Convention while they served as Americas top diplomat.

When President Barack Obama was officially nominated for a second term during the party convention in 2012, Clinton was half a world away, traveling to the Cook Islands, Indonesia, China, East Timor, Brunei and far eastern Russia. When Clinton was nominated in 2016, Kerry was traveling in Europe and Southeast Asia.

Its not just Democrats. When Republicans nominated John McCain in 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on a trip to Portugal, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
Manitoba reported 72 new cases of COVID-19 Sunday, eclipsing the previous record  established just the day before  for the highest daily case total since the pandemic began.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 23/8/2020 (514 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba reported 72 new cases of COVID-19 Sunday, eclipsing the previous record  established just the day before  for the highest daily case total since the pandemic began.

The spike in cases is being driven by clusters on "multiple" Hutterite colonies, but Manitobas chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin is refusing to say how many colonies have been impacted by the virus.

The grim milestone comes on the heels of the 42 cases announced Saturday  at the time the worst daily total Manitobans had seen  and continues a concerning trend of worsening test-positivity rates that have rocked the province during the past month.

Manitobas five-day test-positivity rate currently sits at 2.7 per cent. In the past, Roussin has said if that number hits three per cent, the province may have to look at increased restrictions.

Of the 72 cases announced Sunday, 47 were linked to what Roussin called "communal living communities" where public health officials recently conducted "proactive testing campaigns."

"The increased amount of testing is indicative of the communities taking this seriously and trying to work with public health," Roussin said.

"The vast majority of the transmissions we see are from close, prolonged contact, and that includes household members, and so if the nature of your living situation has more close contacts then were more likely to see transmission."

Forty-five of the new cases were from the Prairie Mountain health region, 16 from the Southern Regional Health Authority, nine from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, one from the Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority and one from the Northern health region.

Roussin confirmed the northern case is not on a First Nations community. And despite calls from First Nations advocates and organizations to tighten travel restrictions up north, Roussin said the province has no plans to do so at this time.

Kenny Wollmann, a member of the Hutterian Safety Councils COVID-19 task force, said hes worried the recent uptick in cases could lead to increased stigmatization for Hutterite communities, stressing that the vast majority of them are taking the pandemic very seriously.

But as a "visible cultural minority," Wollmann said stigmatization is nothing new for Hutterites.

"Cases have always been expected in Hutterite communities since the province began reopening and weve been preparing for a day just like today," Wollmann said.

"The communities are responding well and if a community refuses to respond well were confident Manitoba public health has the tools in its toolbox to respond accordingly."

Since March, the Hutterian Safety Councils COVID-19 task force has been attempting to educate and inform various colonies on what steps they need to take to protect themselves during the pandemic.

Wollmann said most colonies have been receptive to the task force's message and have taken concrete action to address the threat posed by the virus. But he concedes  just as in wider society  a minority of people on colonies are skeptical of the idea the pandemic poses a serious public health threat at all.

"We have people who have been very proactive from the beginning and have taken this very seriously. At the same time, were dealing with some people who are very dismissive of COVID-19 and think its a scheme by somebody designed to do something bad," Wollmann said.

"We deal with the same variety of responses the rest of society has been dealing with."

Of Manitobas 944 cases of COVID-19, 356 remain active while 576 are classified as "recovered." Seven people are currently in hospital, including one in the intensive care unit, while 12 people have died.

More than 1,800 tests were performed Saturday and the five-day test positivity rate is 2.7 per cent.

Health Minister Cameron Friesen urged Manitobans to look beyond Sundays "large number" of new cases and understand the province cannot be "defensive and changing, broadly, our direction with every hiccup that comes along  we do need to learn to live with the virus."

With flu season approaching, Roussin said the province is aware it will "see increased respiratory illness." He suggests employers, and society more broadly, should prepare for "absentee rates that we probably havent experienced before."

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Roussin also said Manitobans should not just focus on total COVID-19 case counts. Equally important is the extent to which community spread exists and whether theres a strain on the healthcare system, he said.

Meanwhile, NDP Leader Wab Kinew called upon the provincial government to mandate mask usage in all indoor public places, as well as certain outdoors public spaces where "you may cross paths with large groups."

"Manitoba should mandate masks We need to take strong action now because what we do today will determine how much community spread is happening when kids go back to school in a few weeks," Kinew said.

"If we dont do anything now to arrest that spread, its going to accelerate right at a time when kids are going back into the classrooms, and they could then become vectors for increased community transmission."

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe
Hurricane Marco and soon-to-be Hurricane Laura are approaching the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes get their energy from ocean heat, and being in the warmest waters on Earth right now will likely spell danger.

Hurricane Marco earned its current status on Sunday morning. It is still getting fueled by the warmest waters of the Gulf Coast, and so is Laura.

Hurricanes form at waters that are at least 79 degrees Fahrenheit, but that is on the low end of the scale. Warmer temperatures can make to build up some more, as with Hurricane Marco and Laura.

The warmest waters on earth right now can be found in the Gulf as it flows at 86 degrees, reported Forbes.

Marco and Laura to Strike Back-to-Back

Hurricane Marco is expected to bring a storm surge of four to six feet in parts of the Louisiana coast. It is highly likely that coastal water levels will be much higher in the area once Laura passes by.

It usually takes several days for a storm surge to subside, maybe a bit longer if there are heavy rains over a large area.

Yale Climate Connection said, though, that Marco will likely leave coastal water levels a feet or two higher as it is a relatively smaller storm.

Marco's center was shown in models to parallel to the coast. Models also show that it will move westward without coming inland.

It is believed that the intensity of wind and surge in some areas could expand, but go down with time.

As for them arriving two days apart, it is unlikely that they will merge into one storm. It is a rare case where the resulting storm isn't going to be stronger than the two original ones.

The two of them being in the Gulf Cost two days apart isn't a common scene, though. In fact, there are only two other times that the Gulf of Mexico had two storms in it at the same times.

One instance was in 1933 and the storms were much further apart. One struck near Brownsville,Texas and the other hit Florida's east coast.

Hurricanes haven't made landfall within 60 hours of each other, said Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University.

Laura Poses Worrisome Threat

Once Marco hits inland, Laura is expected to follow by late Wednesday or early Thursday, reported Washington Post.

"Although not explicitly shown, Laura could threaten the northwestern Gulf coast near major hurricane strength," the National Hurricane Center said on Sunday afternoon.

Dr. Michael Ventrice, IBM of The Weather Company said simulations of laura is "bone chilling" prior to landfall. He said it poses a "very dangerous scenario" in the Texas-Louisiana area.

Marco has a possibility of disintegrating once it makes landfall, maybe even earlier. But this is not the case for Laura.

Laura briskly went across the Dominican Republic and Haiti on Sunday. The storm looked well-structured on satellite.

It also appeared to have not been affected by nearby terrain. That meant the storm isn't growing weaker over land.

As it survived landfall, it could grow into a more intense storm once it reaches the Gulf.

The unique meteorological situation is not lost in experts. They realize the dangers of it and warn many to stay safe amid the two storms hitting while there is a pandemic.

Check these out!

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, learns about the business losses caused by COVID-19 and flooding, and inspects the situation of consumption and tourism recovery in Ciqikou, a business district in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, Aug. 20, 2020. Li made an inspection tour to the flood-hit Chongqing Municipality in southwest China. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

CHONGQING, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has stressed solid work in flood control and relief as well as restoration and reconstruction, and continued efforts to consolidate the economic recovery momentum amid reform and opening up.

Li, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks during an inspection tour in the flood-hit Chongqing Municipality in southwest China.

The Yangtze River and one of its main tributaries Jialing River have recently encountered sudden flood peak rarely seen in history in Chongqing.

Li rushed directly to the flood-hit areas upon his arrival. In Shuangba Village of Tongnan District, he walked past roads covered by mud to visit villagers' flooded homes to learn about the damage, and visited a temporary shelter site to learn about life of the affected people.

He also visited damaged farmland and greenhouses, asking local authorities to beef up support for production recovery.

While visiting a key reservoir of the city, Li stressed strengthening policy research and establishing a mechanism for directly benefiting disaster-hit areas, and supporting local governments in the restoration of projects damaged in the floods and the construction of urban infrastructures for flood control and drainage.

In Ciqikou, a business district on the banks of the Jialing River with the flood water yet to fully recede, Li visited multiple businesses, communicated with local people and tourists to learn about the business losses caused by COVID-19 and flooding, and inspected the situation of consumption and tourism recovery.

Noting that accelerating the full resumption of the service industry will play a vital role in consolidating the economic recovery momentum, Li urged efforts to facilitate the normal operation of the sector to unleash huge consumption potentials.

Li visited the office of ZBJ.com, a crowdsourcing platform offering services to small and medium-sized enterprises and spurring job creation, and Changan Automobile Co., where he highlighted the launch of more pro-consumption products. He also visited Chongqing BOE Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd, where he called on the western region to further rise in the industrial chain and promote high-quality development.

During his inspection tour to the enterprises, Li said China's macroeconomic performance in recent months has demonstrated the positive effects of enforcing the policies to ensure stability on six fronts and security in six areas.

By ensuring the security of over 100 million market entities and fulfilling the task of adding over 9 million urban jobs in 2020, China can achieve a positive annual economic growth, Li said, adding that continued efforts should be made and uncertainties during the development process should be well addressed.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, visits a government affairs hall at Liangjiang New Area in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, Aug. 21, 2020. Li made an inspection tour to the flood-hit Chongqing Municipality in southwest China. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

Li also called for more efforts to stimulate the vitality of market entities through measures including tax and fee cuts.
The Kyiv police have received a series of anonymous reports of the alleged mining of a number of objects and buildings throughout the capital, mainly in the central part of the city, the press service of the National Police of Ukraine has told the agency.

"The 102 line received several anonymous reports about the alleged mining of a number of objects, in particular, in the center of the capital. The police are checking this information," the police said.
US official joins Taiwan's president in marking controversial anniversary

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 9:39 AM

The United States' top representative in Taiwan has for the first time joined the self-ruled island's leader in a controversial ceremony commemorating the anniversary of Taiwan's last major battle with China.

Taiwan's president Tsai Ing-wen laid a wreath and bowed her head in respect at a memorial park on Kinmen Island on Sunday, marking the 62nd anniversary of the battle.

Brent Christensen, the head of the American Institute in Taiwan and considered the United States' de facto ambassador, offered his respects, too, standing behind Tsai.

The institute said Christensen had laid wreaths at a monument honoring two US military officers who allegedly died in a 1954 Chinese attack on Kinmen.

Taiwan's presidential office thanked Christensen for his participation.

The United States has no diplomatic relations with Taiwan, recognizing Chinese sovereignty over the self-ruled island. But it has been courting Taipei in an attempt to unnerve Beijing.

Earlier in August, a top US cabinet official visited Tawian, also marking a first time that such a high-level visit was taking place.

China has pursued Taiwan's reunification ever since the island broke away from the mainland during a civil war in 1949.

China firmly opposes any official exchanges between the United States and Taiwan.

Relations between the United States and China have hit the lowest level in decades under Trump. The two countries are at loggerheads over a range of issues, including trade, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the coronavirus pandemic.

The US has been significantly ratcheting up tensions with China in all of those cases.

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The chorus for postponing various examinations, including NEET and JEE, grew louder on Sunday with over 4,000 students observing a day-long hunger strike to press for the demand in view of rising COVID-19 cases.

The protest came on a day Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the government must listen to the 'mann ki baat' of students and arrive at "an acceptable solution" and his party demanded that the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test and the Joint Entrance Examination be deferred.

According to the leftist All India Students Association, over 4,200 students observed the day-long hunger strike at their respective home demanding that CBSE compartment exams of Classes 10 and 12 be cancelled and entrance exams such as the UGC-NET, CLAT, NEET and JEE be postponed.



Using the hashtag, SATYAGRAHagainstExamInCovid, many students also took to Twitter to appeal to the government to heed to their demands.



Manoj S, a JEE aspirant from Karnataka, said, "We have to report to the JEE exam centre at 7 am. My centre is almost 150 kilometres away and there are no train or bus services available currently. "Many of my friends have said that their centres are 200 to 250 kilometres away. How are we supposed to travel? How will we write exams wearing masks for seven to eight hours?"



He urged the government to postpone the exams till normalcy is restored.



Anisha, hailing from Odisha, said with all the hotels and guest houses closed, where would they stay in case they have to travel for exams.



"I am from Balasore and my NEET exam centre is in Bhubaneswar. I will have to travel for five hours to take my exam. There are no hotels or guesthouses that are open. Where will we stay?" she said.



Siddh Dutt, who will be appearing for CBSE compartment exam, said, "I am an asthma patient. I am scared of what may happen to me if I catch COVID-19."



Madhurima, who said she has to take four different entrance exams, wants authorities to listen to her appeal -- "Please produce a vaccine so that we can take exams. "I am a JEE, IISER, DUET aspirant and also have to take another entrance exam," she said.



Md Danish Khan from Bhagalpur in Bihar said he has been "allotted an exam centre in Patna, which is a COVID-19 hotspot".



"I do not want to risk the lives of my relatives by staying at their place when I go to take the exam. I also stay in a joint family and if I contract the virus, it will create a chain of infection," he said.



A Common Law Admission Test aspirant from Kolkata, who requested anonymity, said she fears for her parents' safety during this time.



"My father is a diabetic and my mother just had an operation for a tumour. Even if they go to drop me to the exam centre using public transport, I will be putting them at risk. The government is not ready to listen to us.



"We will have to sit and write the exams wearing masks, gloves and headgear under hot weather conditions," she said.



Other students also shared similar woes and urged the government to postpone entrance exams and declare the academic year as a "zero year".



The AISA lent solidarity to the demands of the students.



A day ago, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia had appealed to the central government to cancel medical and engineering entrance exams JEE and NEET in view of the COVID-19 situation.



He also said an alternative admission methodology should be used this year and the exams should not be conducted.



On Friday, Education ministry officials had said the Joint Entrance Examination (Main) and the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET-UG) will be conducted in September as scheduled.



Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union president Aishe Ghosh said student representatives of some universities, including Hyderabad Central University, Aligarh Muslim University and JNU, have written to the National Testing Agency over issues pertaining to the recently declared exam date of UGC NET.



Universities and schools across the country have been closed since March 16 when the Centre announced a countrywide classroom shutdown as part of measures to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. A nationwide lockdown was announced on March 24, which came into effect the next day and threw economic activities out of gear.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, August 24

By Jeila Aliyeva - Trend:

The Mejlis of Turkmenistan (Parliament) has adopted several resolutions on the ratification of certain international documents, Trend reports with reference to Turkmenistans State News Agency.

The following resolutions were adopted: "Ratification of the protocol on environmental impact assessment in a transboundary context to the framework convention for the protection of the marine environment of the Caspian Sea", "Ratification of The European Agreement on Main International Traffic Arteries (AGR) ", "Ratification of the European Agreement on Main International Railway Lines (AGC )", "Ratification of the European Agreement on Important International Combined Transport Lines and Related Installations (AGTC)", "Ratification of the European Agreement supplementing the Convention on Road Traffic (1968)", "Ratification of the European Agreement supplementing the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals of 1968", "Ratification of the amendment to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (the Montreal Protocol) ".

Furthermore, the Turkmen Mejlis also adopted resolutions on accession to several international agreements, in particular, the following resolutions were adopted: "Accession to The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals ", "Accession to the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations (Rome Convention) ", "Accession to the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA)", "Joining the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (MVT)."

Turkmenistan held the tenth session of the sixth assembly of the Mejlis of Turkmenistan through video conferencing on August 22, 2020.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @JeilaAliyeva
While COVID-19 walloped many sectors of the economy with stay-at-home orders, shutdowns and layoffs, the medical marijuana industry appears to be booming, with the overall market doubling in size since February.

As of now, the market is $1.3 billion, with sales from (growers/processors) to dispensaries more than $528 million and sales from dispensaries to patients close to $800 million, said Nate Wardle, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of Health. For comparison, as of Feb. 10, the total sales were just under $700 million, with $282 million from (growers/processors) to dispensaries and sales from dispensaries to patients at approximately $415 million.

Pennsylvania joined the ranks of states providing a medical marijuana program with a bill signed by Gov. Tom Wolf in April 2016. The program came online with deliveries to patients about two years later.

The state initially counted 17 serious conditions that could be treated with marijuana following doctor approval, though that list has since been expanded to 23. Wardle said Friday that the top three medical conditions in the state cited to receive a prescription for medical marijuana are chronic pain, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The law allows for a maximum of 25 grower/processors in Pennsylvania, as well as up to 50 licenses for dispensaries. Each dispensary may have up to three locations, for total of 150 dispensing sites.

Wardle said Friday that as of August 14, some 366,146 patients and 1,968 physicians have registered with the state. There are currently 1,416 approved practitioners and 231,760 active certifications, he said, though the state is seeking more pediatric specialists to be approved practitioners.

More than 120,000 patients are visiting a dispensary each week, this is up from 73,000 in February, said Wardle. Weekly purchases are close to 370,000 products, up from 178,000 in February.

As of Friday, there were 89 operational dispensaries and 22 operational grower/processors in Pennsylvania, Wardle said. Only 19 of the grower/processors are currently shipping product to dispensaries, but he said two more are expected to be shipping in the near future.

Though there have been shortages reported from time to time  including as recently as last week  Wardle said there have not been any widespread droughts of medical marijuana in Pennsylvania.

Our grower/processors are expanding their facilities to ensure we have product available, he said. What shortages do sometimes occur is with specific products and strains. Again, we are working to alleviate these as those within the medical marijuana program share information regarding the products that they are using.

Representatives for Herbology, which runs the only Delco dispensary in Morton, did not return a call Friday to gauge their experience with shortages. But Jon Cohn, CEO of Agri-Kind Inc., reported some competitors had seen product losses due to mold or bacterial issues through a particularly humid July.

A lot of people say we overdesigned our facility for humidity problems, but as it turns out, I think we right-designed it because were not failing microbial tests like many cultivators are, said Cohn. We were hearing from dispensaries that we deliver to that other cultivators are having trouble with supply at this point. Historically, August, September is a dryer time for cannabis, but frankly in Pa., from our perspective, its entirely humidity driven.

Humidity is a make-or-break issue for cannabis growing. Cohn said that when propagating earlier in the plant cycle, marijuana plants require almost a steam room atmosphere with 80 to 85 percent humidity. But humidity becomes the enemy near the end of the flower cycle because it can cause mold and microbial growth inside of buds, ruining crops, so it ideally needs to drop down around the 38 to 42 percent range as harvest nears.

Where people struggle is the end of flower, Cohn said. If the flowers are too dense and the room is too humid, the vapor builds up in the flower and then you end up with mold and microbials. Its definitely a challenge that people deal with in general.

Cohn said Pennsylvania also has a very strict testing regimen, which is good for the end consumer but also sets the bar fairly high in terms of getting flower to market.

It really does protect the patients, he said. It makes it much more challenging for the growers, but, you know, its not like we all dont know the rules. And to that end, I think its somewhat remarkable theyve been able to build the program theyve built with the tight legislation, but still having really strong access to the medicine for the patients.

Agri-Kind, an offshoot of Agronomed Pharmaceuticals in Exton, opened in June 2019 with a 48,000-square-foot facility on the 100 block of Broomall Street in Chester.

The company announced a planned expansion just a few months after beginning operations, but was hampered by coronavirus until just recently. Cohn said that expansion is now underway, however, and is expected to triple yields by as soon as the first quarter of 2021.

Our flower space is almost double, and then were going to go double-tier in that space, he said. You dont always get exactly two times your supply  you get about 1.75 because you lose some efficiencies on that second tier  but were pretty much doubling our flower space and were planning on getting 1.66 times the amount of actual flower in that space, which would yield about three times total.

Cohn says Agri-Kind hopes to have plants in the new space by the end of the year and the first orders on those products to market about two months after that.

The company is currently at capacity in its space, he said, but is increasing yields through proprietary methods that have produced denser flower and more of it per square foot, which is the best the company can do until construction is finished.

Cohn said the pandemic has not impacted Agri-Kind or its approximately 50 employees too badly. There were some challenges around healthcare and child care, he said, and a couple of hiccups in the supply chain for things like packaging materials as China shut down early on  right around the time of Chinese New Year, which always impacts supply chains anyway  but nothing that resulted in shipments being delayed more than an aggregate of a week or two over the past six months.

When we saw what was happening with COVID, we did preorder a lot of nutrients and things for the cultivation side, which insulated us and gave us at least a couple of months  in case there really was a bigger supply problem, he said.

Agri-Kind also implemented procedures early on like temperature checks for employees and luckily no employee had contracted the virus as of Friday, Cohn said.

Cohn said he has also been keeping an eye on legislative proposals to move Pennsylvania to a recreational state. A couple of bills have been floated already and even some Republicans who would have balked at the idea last year are starting to come around on the idea as a way to repair the states devastated economy, he said.

Now with the need for tax dollars to repay (the Paycheck Protection Program federal loan program) and keep the economy alive, I think its a strong possibility, said Cohn. I also think its going to be influenced by other states.

Neighboring New Jersey is reportedly eyeing the same measure as early as November, he noted, which could force Pennsylvania to follow suit or lose out on a potential windfall of tax revenues. Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale estimated in 2017 that the state could reap $200 million in annual taxes if it goes the recreational route.

No state wants to lose tax revenue to a bordering state, said Cohn. Especially when theres a lot of commuters, theres a lot of people here who vacation in New Jersey and vice versa, and a lot of people who work in Philadelphia and live in Cherry Hill. That border is a lot more open than Ohio and Pennsylvania, where its just not as populated.
Animated personalised avatars of students received their degrees, awards, and medals from simulations of the chief guest and professors.

The Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai took virtual graduation to the another level by awarding medals and degrees to the digital avatars of their students. The 58th annual convocation ceremony of IIT-Bombay was held in virtual reality due to the virtual graduation. Even though students along with the chief guest Nobel prize winner Professor Duncan Haldane couldnt gather for the convocation, they attended the ceremony via digital avatars on a virtual stage.

Keeping in view the safety measures during the ongoing pandemic, the institute held its convocation in virtual reality mode for its graduating students, the IIT- Bombay said in a statement.

A personalised avatar of each graduate received the degree certificate from the personalised avatar of director professor Subhasis Chaudhari. The medallists also received their medals from the personalised avatar of the chief guest, the institute added.

ALSO READ : CSIR-UGC NET 2020: NTA reopens application window,know last date and how to apply

4 out of 10 leading tech companies  @Microsoft , Alphabet, @IBM & @Adobe have CEOs of Indian origin; two of them  @sundarpichai and @ArvindKrishna are IIT graduates  Stephen Schwarzman, Chairman/CEO of @blackstone at @iitbombay's Virtual Convocation pic.twitter.com/poxRSRxFCz  PIB in Maharashtra  (@PIBMumbai) August 23, 2020

The participants were 3D avatars of the actual students and the ceremony was broadcasted live to their computers.It created quite a buzz among students, who took to social media to post snippets from the ceremony.

ALSO READ : BPSC Polytechnic Lecturer Recruitment 2020: Heres how to apply online

Graduated, on 58th convocation of IIT Bombay.

My avatar receiving award of a degree as a DAAD scholar. We can say the future is here. We can work on a similar model for Nepalese universities for different events.@moenepal @DAADIndia @IndiaInNepal @RONBupdates pic.twitter.com/0bIr4HrM85  Akash deo (@talk2sohan) August 24, 2020

Congratulations to Dangu Er Porag Chakma for being conferred with B. Tech (Metallurgical) from IIT Bombay today. He is the son of Dg Kalyan Moy Chakma from Rajiv Nagar (Amsury) within Mamit district, Mizoram and is also the first Chakma graduate from the IIT Bombay. pic.twitter.com/rrsJzjhDQV  The BorapansuryTimes (@thebpstimes) August 23, 2020

It took a team of around 20 people more than two months to put together this beautiful ceremony.Well, it sure looked like a convocation the students will remember for a long time. Congratulations to the graduates of Subhasis Chaudhari
ISLAMABAD - A Taliban political team arrived in Pakistan on Monday as efforts appear to be ramping up to get negotiations underway between the Afghan government and the insurgents.

The start of the talks, envisaged under a U.S.-Taliban peace agreement signed in February, was hampered by a series of delays that have frustrated Washington. Some had expected the negotiations to begin earlier this month.

The Taliban delegation, led by their political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, will discuss with Pakistans leaders the recent developments in Afghanistans peace process, as well as relaxation and facilitation of peoples movement and trade between the two neighbouring countries, tweeted Suhail Shaheen, the spokesman for the Taliban political office.

Islamabad is thought to wield influence over the Taliban, though there is mistrust on the part of some within the movement toward Pakistan.

Pakistans Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told reporters he would meet with the Taliban delegation on Tuesday. Islamabads role is only to facilitate the peace process, and its up to Afghans to decide the way forward, he said.

The majority of Afghans believe the only way forward is through reconciliation but the decision to reconcile has to be taken by Afghans themselves, Qureshi said.

The visit comes a day after the Taliban chief announced a powerful negotiating team that includes nearly half of the Taliban leadership council and has the power to set agendas, decide strategy and even sign agreements with the Kabul government. That Taliban team is headed by Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai.

Earlier, Pakistan approved several orders to implement U.N. sanctions against a number of outlawed groups, including the Taliban. The sanctions restrict travel, freeze assets, limit fundraising and outlaw weapons sales. At the time, Shaheen told The Associated Press the restrictions could hurt the peace process.

The U.N. has allowed travel for the purpose of peace negotiations, but only for a limited number of Taliban figures.

Islamabad has had an uneasy relationship with Baradar, who spent eight years in jail in Pakistan until his release in 2018. He and Washingtons peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad negotiated the U.S.-Taliban deal and signed it on Feb. 29. The deal has been touted as Afghanistans best chance at peace in four decades.

The deal also sets conditions  linked to Taliban commitments to fight terrorism  for the U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan, which would end the longest-ever U.S. military engagement. U.S. troops have begun withdrawing and by November, fewer than 5,000 American soldiers are expected to still be in Afghanistan, down from 13,000 when the deal was signed.

The Kabul government and the Taliban are deadlocked over outstanding prisoner releases. Kabul insists the Taliban free 22 Afghan commandos they hold captive while the Taliban demand the release of a final 320 Taliban prisoners held in Afghan jails.

The release of the remaining prisoners was approved by a traditional Afghan council, or Loya Jirga, called by President Ashraf Ghani earlier this month. The council approved the immediate release of the prisoners but later the government announced the Taliban were still holding Afghan soldiers and halted the process.

Abdullah Abdullah, a former presidential candidate who has long been at odds with Ghani, urged the immediate release of the last Taliban prisoners. He said the jirga was the final arbiter.

We are calling for the completion of the prisoner exchange, & immediate beginning of the intra-Afghan talks to put an end to agony of a nation, Abdullah, who heads the High Council for National Reconciliation, the body charged with engaging the Taliban, tweeted Monday.

It is not clear how Pakistan could break the impasse. Both Kabul and Washington would want to see a reduction in violence going into the talks.

The Taliban have held to their promise not to attack U.S. and NATO troops but have been staging near-daily attacks on Afghan government forces. They say a permanent cease-fire will be part of the negotiations once they begin.

___

Associated Press writer Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.

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Real Americans and self-respecting individuals everywhere despise queuing with a passion. Standing in a slowly-moving queue, such as at the DMV, seems to them like a foretaste of Hell. One might even say that being made to wait in line to vote is a poll tax, and a tax that folks would gladly pay to avoid. If you think that's harsh, then look at these photos of Americans waiting in line to vote. When one considers how unpleasant "the several States" have made in-person voting, with lines of voters stretching out into the streets and around polling places, one can see how the electorate might welcome a little relief, even if that relief were as open to fraud as mail-in ballots.

Although Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 (i.e., the Elections Clause) confers on "each State" considerable powers regarding elections, it also says Congress has a say in elections. Because only citizens can legally vote in elections for federal officials, federal elections should be totally separate from state and local elections. In other words, when one votes for president and members of Congress, those offices should be the only thing on the ballot.

Two years ago, I wrote that having separate elections for federal officials would be a way to expedite in-person voting. And that's because with a maximum of only three choices to be made (or even just one if a straight-party option were allowed), voters could vote much more quickly. You see, the problem with our "mixed" elections, with both federal and non-federal items on the ballot, is that the states and local governments load up the ballot with lots of officials and even initiatives and amendments that force people to take time, hence the hated queues.

Some say the federal elections of 2020 will be the most consequential in our lives. When one looks at the radical new members of the U.S. House, it's easy to concur with that assessment. Democrats' current snit concerns the postal system.

The U.S. Postal Service may still be "the nation's second-largest civilian employer" (Walmart's still the largest). At Postal Facts, we read fact #49: "The Postal Service processes and delivers 472.1 million mail pieces each day." That would mean that on average, each of America's 330 million residents receives about one and a half pieces of mail per day.

A moment's reflection and some basic math should tell sentient Americans that if all U.S. residents were eligible to vote and were to vote by mail, it would burden the USPS by a total of 660 million additional pieces of mail, well less than what the USPS delivers on two average days. But not all 330M of us are eligible to vote, and not all the states are engaging in universal mail-in voting. The actual number of mail-in ballots may rise this year to around 80 million  approximately one extra piece of mail for every fourth American on each of only two days.

Yet Democrats tell us that the ramped up use of mail-in ballots in this year's elections is going to overwhelm the postal system and that Congress needs to appropriate billions of dollars more to the USPS so it won't be swamped with millions of main-in ballots. (The next thing Democrats will tell us is that to save the election we must "flatten the curve" at the USPS.)

So the extra $25B Democrats want for the postal system is bailout money, especially for the postal workers' pensions and health care; it has nothing to do with some alleged postal crunch due to mail-in voting. Nonetheless, mail-in ballots do involve a real crunch.

The real crunch of mail-in ballots comes after the states have received them back from the voters, when the states must verify that each ballot they receive back was filled in by the voter to whom it was sent. But how will they do that? How can they know that the ballot they're vetting was actually filled in by Mrs. Smith and not by her radicalized college student granddaughter? Mrs. Smith may have been comatose or on a ventilator fighting for life against the Wuhan virus when her mail-in ballot arrived in the mail. At the very least, mail-in voters should be required to have their ballots stamped by notaries public. But that would require them to leave their houses during a pandemic, and we can't have that.

Even if the voter were required to stick his thumbs in an ink well and then press said thumbs on his ballot, it wouldn't mean anything unless election officials verified the prints. Not all citizens have their prints on file at the FBI. If vote-counters can't verify that a ballot was used by the person to whom it was sent, then it must be rejected. But will they reject it?

Mail-in voting is a disaster waiting to happen. So when the president touched on the possibility of delaying the election, he had a legitimate point. Mail-in ballots are the new means by which Democrats can stuff ballot boxes. There is no reason why Americans should accept as legitimate the vote counts in states that use mail-in voting or automatic voter registration or allow foreigners to vote in non-federal elections, as the registrars in the blue states don't check even the most basic thing when registering voters, which is to confirm citizenship.

Even if voter registries were correct and contained only eligible citizens, with mail-in ballots, there'd still be the toil of having to process them  i.e., verifying that the ballots were used by the people they were sent to. But the registries are notoriously incorrect, so with mail-in ballots, there's still the toil of vote-counters having to determine if the ballot was used by a U.S. citizen. If vote-counters can't verify the citizenship of the person who used the ballot, it must be rejected. But will it be?

Some states with mail-in voting haven't abandoned other types of voting, which sets up the possibility of double-voting. On August 19, The Hill reported that "[New Jersey's] Gov. Phil Murphy (D) issued an executive order requiring every voter in the state receive a mail-in ballot, in addition to being allowed to vote in-person if desired." The governor seems to want to complicate the work of New Jersey's vote-counters, as he has just made it easier to double-vote.

The election systems we have today aren't any better than the ones we had in the 2000 debacle. The Federal Election Commission can't be blamed for this, nor will it be any help in fixing it, as the issues are beyond the FEC's mission. The U.S. Supreme Court may not want to weigh in on the presidential election because the last time it did so, in 2000, the image of the Court was tarnished, and Chief Justice Roberts can't have that. Perhaps, if there's enough disagreement about the legitimacy of the vote counts, Americans might have to settle for their president being decided by a commission, such as the Electoral Commission that decided the presidential election of 1876. Or perhaps the election can be decided by another civil war, which we may be overdue for anyway.

Just as Democrats lie about the postal service, they lie about the integrity of mail-in voting. Democrat vote-counters will want to accept every ballot regardless of signature discrepancies, lack of postmarks, and any other uncertainty. Republican vote-counters must insist that all requirements be met before accepting any ballot. Democrats are going to attempt to steal the November elections; that's what they do. So Republicans, especially in mail-in ballot states, must be prepared to sue and be sued. Gird your loins, GOP...the Dems are "going postal."

Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.
By ANI

NEW DELHI: Actor Sonu Sood who had earlier launched a job portal 'Pravasi Rojgar' to help migrant labourers, on Monday said he will also be offering accommodation to the 20,000 workers who have been employed in a garment unit in Noida through the application.

'Dabangg' actor who is being hailed as the 'messiah' for his philanthropy work, took to Twitter to share about his new initiative aimed at providing accommodation to the migrant workers.

"I am delighted to now offer accommodation for 20,000 migrated workers who have also been provided jobs in garment units in #Noida through @PravasiRojgar. With the support of #NAEC President Shri Lalit Thukral, we will work round the clock for this noble cause @lalit_thukral," he tweeted.

I am delighted to now offer accommodation for 20,000 migrated workers who have also been provided jobs in garment units in #Noida through @PravasiRojgar. With the support of #NAEC President Shri Lalit Thukral, we will work round the clock for this noble cause @lalit_thukral pic.twitter.com/XejomrrPaL  sonu sood (@SonuSood) August 24, 2020

Sood who is currently helping scores of countrymen coming from the underprivileged section, began his journey in philanthropy by arranging safe road travel for migrant travels stuck in various parts of the country to reach their native places.

He later launched a job portal for migrant labourers by collaborating with several employment providers.

The 47-year-old actor has since then been helping different people reaching out to him through social media.
LUCY NICHOLSON/Reuters

Billionaire Investor Leon Black, a founder of Apollo Global Management, will reportedly be subpoenaed in connection with his business relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, according to The New York Times.

Denise N. George, the US Virgin Islands Attorney General, seeks access to Black's financial statements and tax returns.

Due to the coronavirus, it's unclear when the subpoenas will be served.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Denise N. George, the US Virgin Islands attorney general, has made it clear that billionaire investor Leon Black will be subpoenaed for information regarding business ties with Jeffrey Epstein, The New York Times reported.

Black, a founder of Apollo Global Management, will reportedly be forced to hand over financial statements and tax returns for various entities, including Black Family Partners, Elysium Management, and Apollo Global Management.

According to the New York Times, Black has said that Epstein offered up advice on how he should approach tax strategy and estate planning.

Epstein died by suicide, according to New York City's chief medical examiner, while facing charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy.

Business Insider previously reported that "Epstein served as the director of the Debra and Leon Black Family Foundation from at least 2001 through 2012, tax documents searchable on ProPublica's database show  including for years after he pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in 2008 and registered as a sex offender," adding, "There's no evidence that either the Debra and Leon Black Family Foundation or the Blacks are linked to any wrongdoing."

The exact date the subpoenas will be served is unclear due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Read the original article on Business Insider
HONG KONG, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Cord Blood Corporation (NYSE: CO) ("GCBC" or the "Company"), China's leading provider of cord blood collection, laboratory testing, hematopoietic stem cell processing and stem cell storage services, today announced its unaudited financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2021 ended June 30, 2020.

First Quarter of Fiscal 2021 Highlights

Revenues increased by 2.8% year-over-year ("YoY") to RMB280.9 million ( $39.8 million ).

( ). New subscribers and accumulated subscriber base were 17,233 and 849,933 [1] , respectively.

, respectively. Gross profit increased by 4.3% YoY to RMB237.5 million ( $33.6 million ). Gross margin improved to 84.5% from 83.3% in the prior year period.

( ). Gross margin improved to 84.5% from 83.3% in the prior year period. Operating income increased by 18.8% YoY to RMB133.5 million ( $18.9 million ).

( ). Operating income before depreciation and amortization [2] ("non-GAAP operating income") increased by 16.8% YoY to RMB145.9 million ( $20.6 million ).

("non-GAAP operating income") increased by 16.8% YoY to ( ). Net income attributable to the Company's shareholders increased by 22.3% YoY to RMB132.5 million ( $18.8 million ).

"Despite the ongoing challenges brought on by the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and sluggish consumer sentiment, we recorded 17,233 new subscribers during the first quarter of fiscal 2021," commented Ms. Ting Zheng, Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of GCBC. "As we continue to navigate the current situation, we will remain vigilant to the long-term consequences of the pandemic and the constraints it has cast upon our business environment, as well as any potential developments in the regulatory regime that governs China's cord blood banking industry. We will also continue to pursue business opportunities as we expand our service offerings to support the long-term growth of the Company."

Summary - First Quarter Ended June 30, 2019 and 2020



Three Months Ended June 30,

2019

2020 (in thousands) RMB

RMB

US$ Revenues 273,375

280,913

39,761 Gross Profit 227,626

237,450

33,609 Operating Income[3] 112,386

133,509

18,897 Change in Fair Value of Equity Securities 9,979

18,405

2,605 Net Income Attributable to the Company's

Shareholders 108,344

132,509

18,756 Earnings per Ordinary Share(RMB/US$)









 Basic 0.89

1.09

0.15  Diluted 0.89

1.09

0.15











Revenue Breakdown (%)









Processing Fees and Other Services 61.3%

57.5%



Storage Fees 38.7%

42.5%















New Subscribers (persons) 20,815

17,233



Total Accumulated Subscribers (persons) 770,699

849,933[1]





Summary - Selected Cash Flow Statement Items



Three Months Ended June 30,

2019

2020 (in thousands) RMB

RMB

US$ Net cash provided by operating activities 169,756

99,829

14,131 Net cash used in investing activities (6,625)

(7,444)

(1,054) Net cash provided by financing activities -

-

-

First Quarter of Fiscal 2021 Financial Results

REVENUES. Revenues increased by 2.8% YoY to RMB280.9 million ($39.8 million) in the first quarter of fiscal 2021. The increase was mainly driven by the larger client base and the increase in storage fee revenues, which outweighed the decrease in processing fee revenues.

By the end of June 2020, the Company's accumulated subscriber base grew to 849,933[1] and revenues generated from storage fees increased by 12.7% YoY to RMB119.3 million ($16.9 million) in the reporting quarter. Storage fee revenues increased to 42.5% of total revenues from 38.7% in same period last year.

During the quarter, the COVID-19 pandemic continued to affect the Company's hospital channels and business operations, as well as general consumer sentiment-resulting in the new subscriber numbers for the reporting period decreasing by 17.2% YoY and 6.8% quarter-over-quarter to 17,233. Revenues generated from processing fees and other services in the reporting quarter decreased by 3.5% YoY to RMB161.6 million ($22.9 million), with decreases in such activities offset in part by the full period contribution of the revised processing fee pricing.

GROSS PROFIT. Gross profit for the reporting quarter increased by 4.3% YoY to RMB237.5 million ($33.6 million). Gross margin improved to 84.5% from 83.3% in the prior year period.

OPERATING INCOME. Facing challenges caused by the pandemic, the Company took measures to control operating expenses. As a result, operating income for the reporting quarter increased by 18.8% YoY to RMB133.5 million ($18.9 million). Operating margin expanded to 47.5% in the reporting quarter from 41.1% in the prior year period. Depreciation and amortization expenses for the first quarter were RMB12.4 million ($1.7 million), similar to that in the prior year period. Non-GAAP operating income[2] improved by 16.8% YoY to RMB145.9 million ($20.6 million).

Research and Development Expenses. Research and development expenses for the first quarter decreased by 7.6% YoY to RMB4.3 million ($0.6 million).

Sales and Marketing Expenses. As the Company continued to tighten sales and marketing expenses and maintain only essential promotional activities, sales and marketing expenses for the reporting quarter decreased by 9.2% YoY to RMB55.1 million ($7.8 million). Sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of revenues were down to 19.6% from 22.2% in the prior year period.

General and Administrative Expenses. General and administrative expenses for the first quarter decreased by 10.8% YoY to RMB44.5 million ($6.3 million), mainly driven by lower staff costs, fees, overhead and provisions. General and administrative expenses as a percentage of revenues decreased to 15.9% from 18.3% in the prior year period.

OTHER INCOME AND EXPENSES.

Change in Fair Value of Equity Securities. In the first quarter, the Company recognized an increase in fair value of equity securities, or "mark-to-market gains," of RMB18.4 million ($2.6 million), up from RMB10.0 million in the prior year period. The changes were mainly attributable to the valuation of the Company's investments in equity securities.

NET INCOME ATTRIBUTABLE TO THE COMPANY'S SHAREHOLDERS. Due to the increase in operating income and the increase in fair value of equity securities, income before income tax for the first quarter increased by 24.0% YoY to RMB160.4 million ($22.7 million). Income tax expense for the reporting quarter was RMB26.0 million ($3.7 million). Net income attributable to the Company's shareholders for the reporting quarter increased by 22.3% YoY to RMB132.5 million ($18.8 million). Net margin for the first quarter improved by 7.6 percentage points to 47.2%.

EARNINGS PER SHARE. Basic and diluted earnings per ordinary share for the first quarter fiscal 2021 increased by 22.5% YoY to RMB1.09 ($0.15).

Corporate Developments

On June 4, 2019 , the Board of Directors of the Company (the "Board") received a non-binding proposal letter from Cordlife Group Limited ("Cordlife"), a company listed on the Mainboard of the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited ("SGX"), pursuant to which Cordlife proposed to combine the businesses of Cordlife and the Company, by way of a statutory merger. According to the letter, Cordlife would issue approximately 2,497.9 million ordinary shares at an issue price of SGD0.5 per ordinary share in exchange for all of the outstanding ordinary shares of the Company at $7.50 per ordinary share. Upon completion of the proposed transaction, the Company's ordinary shares would be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and Cordlife ordinary shares would continue to trade on the SGX. On June 5, 2019 , the Board formed a special committee of independent directors (the "Special Committee") who are not affiliated with Cordlife to evaluate such proposal.



On November 11, 2019 , the Company appointed Mr. Jack Chow as an independent non-executive director ("INED") of the Board. Mr. Chow has extensive professional experience and a broad network in the finance and investment industry. He replaced Mr. Mark Chen as a member of the Audit Committee and Ms. Jennifer Weng as a member of the Special Committee. Mr. Chow also joined the Board's Compensation Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee.



On February 6, 2020 , the Company appointed Mr. Jacky Cheng as an INED of the Board. Mr. Cheng has extensive professional experience and knowledge in legal and compliance and Chinese laws. He joined the Board's Compensation Committee as a member and the Company's Special Committee as a member. Currently, the Special Committee is composed of four members, including Mr. Mark Chen , Dr. Ken Lu , Mr. Jack Chow , and Mr. Jacky Cheng .





, the Board of Directors of the Company (the "Board") received a non-binding proposal letter from Cordlife Group Limited ("Cordlife"), a company listed on the Mainboard of the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited ("SGX"), pursuant to which Cordlife proposed to combine the businesses of Cordlife and the Company, by way of a statutory merger. According to the letter, Cordlife would issue approximately 2,497.9 million ordinary shares at an issue price of per ordinary share in exchange for all of the outstanding ordinary shares of the Company at per ordinary share. Upon completion of the proposed transaction, the Company's ordinary shares would be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and Cordlife ordinary shares would continue to trade on the SGX. On , the Board formed a special committee of independent directors (the "Special Committee") who are not affiliated with Cordlife to evaluate such proposal. On , the Company appointed Mr. as an independent non-executive director ("INED") of the Board. Mr. Chow has extensive professional experience and a broad network in the finance and investment industry. He replaced Mr. as a member of the Audit Committee and Ms. as a member of the Special Committee. Mr. Chow also joined the Board's Compensation Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. On , the Company appointed Mr. as an INED of the Board. Mr. Cheng has extensive professional experience and knowledge in legal and compliance and Chinese laws. He joined the Board's Compensation Committee as a member and the Company's Special Committee as a member. Currently, the Special Committee is composed of four members, including Mr. , Dr. , Mr. , and Mr. . The Company cautions its shareholders and others considering trading its ordinary shares that no decisions have been made with respect to the Company's response to the proposed transaction with Cordlife. The proposed transaction is still subject to various conditions, including but not limited to, completion of due diligence, parties entering into a definitive agreement, and/or each of Cordlife and the Company obtaining its relevant regulatory and shareholder approvals. In addition, litigation has been filed in the Cayman Islands challenging the proposed transaction. There can be no assurance that any definitive offer will be made, that any agreement will be executed, or that this or any other transaction will be approved or consummated.

Conference Call

The Company will host a conference call at 8:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, August 25, 2020 to discuss its financial performance and give a brief overview of the Company's recent developments, followed by a question and answer session. Interested parties can access the audio webcast through the Company's IR website at http://ir.globalcordbloodcorp.com. A replay of the webcast will be accessible two hours after the conference call and available for seven days at the same URL above. Listeners can also access the call by dialing 1-855-824-5644 or 1-646-722-4977 for US callers, or +852-3027-6500 for Hong Kong callers, access code: 11021450#.

[1] During the three months ended June 30, 2020, 17,233 new subscribers were recruited. The Company reclassified 394 private cord blood units as donated cord blood units during the three months ended June 30, 2020, after the Company determined that the recoverability of these prior private cord blood banking subscribers was remote. Therefore, the Company terminated their subscription services according to the subscription contracts and these units are being treated as if they were donated cord blood units and will be part of the Company's non-current inventories. Hence, the net accumulated subscriber base was 849,933 as of June 30, 2020.

[2] See exhibit 3 to this press release for a reconciliation of non-GAAP operating income to exclude the non-cash items related to the depreciation and amortization expenses to the comparable financial measure prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles ("U.S. GAAP").

[3] The reported operating income for the three months ended June 30, 2019 and 2020 included depreciation and amortization expenses related to property, plant and equipment and intangible assets of RMB12.4 million and RMB12.4 million ($1.7 million), respectively.

Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures

GAAP results for the three months ended June 30, 2020 include non-cash items related to depreciation and amortization expenses. To supplement the Company's unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements presented on a U.S. GAAP basis, the Company has provided adjusted financial information excluding the impact of these items in this press release. The non-GAAP financial measure represents non-GAAP operating income. Such adjustment is a departure of U.S. GAAP; however, the Company's management believes that these adjusted measures provide investors with a better understanding of how the results relate to the Company's historical performance. Also, management uses non-GAAP operating income as a measurement tool for evaluating actual operating performance compared to budget and prior periods. These adjusted measures should not be considered an alternative to operating income, or any other measure of financial performance or liquidity presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP. These measures are not necessarily comparable to a similarly titled measure of another company. A reconciliation of the adjustments to U.S. GAAP results appears in exhibit 3 accompanying this press release. This additional adjusted information is not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for U.S. GAAP financials. The adjusted financial information that the Company provides also may differ from the adjusted information provided by other companies.

About Global Cord Blood Corporation

Global Cord Blood Corporation is the first and largest umbilical cord blood banking operator in China in terms of geographical coverage and the only cord blood banking operator with multiple licenses. Global Cord Blood Corporation provides cord blood collection, laboratory testing, hematopoietic stem cell processing and stem cell storage services. For more information, please visit the Company's website at: http://www.globalcordbloodcorp.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains 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 relate to future events or the Company's future financial performance. The Company has attempted to identify forward-looking statements by terminology including "anticipates", "believes", "expects", "can", "continue", "could", "estimates", "intends", "may", "plans", "potential", "predict", "should" or "will" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. These statements are only predictions, uncertainties and other factors may cause the Company's actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. The information in this press release is not intended to project future performance of the Company. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, the Company does not guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. The Company expectations are as of the date this press release is issued, and the Company does not intend to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date this press release is issued to conform these statements to actual results, unless required by law.

The forward-looking statements included in this press release are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions about the Company's businesses and business environments. These statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events and are not a guarantee of future performance. Actual results of the Company's operations may differ materially from information contained in the forward-looking statements as a result of risk factors some of which include, among other things: the effects of the current COVID-19 outbreak, including the inability of the Company's salesforce to return to work due to current lockdowns implemented in various cities in the PRC and the imposition by some hospitals in the PRC of restrictions on entrance to solely to hospital staff and patients; levels of consumer confidence in the healthcare services sector generally in the PRC as a result of the outbreak; the length of the COVID-19 outbreak and severity of such outbreak across the globe; the pace of recovery following the COVID-19 outbreak; continued compliance with government regulations regarding cord blood banking in the People's Republic of China, or PRC and any other jurisdiction in which the Company conducts its operations; changing legislation or regulatory environments in the PRC and any other jurisdiction in which the Company conducts its operations; the acceptance by subscribers of the Company's different pricing and payment options and reaction to the introduction of the Company's premium-quality pricing strategy; demographic trends in the regions of the PRC in which the Company is the exclusive licensed cord blood banking operator; labor and personnel relations; the existence of a significant shareholder able to influence and direct the corporate policies of the Company; credit risks affecting the Company's revenue and profitability; changes in the healthcare industry, including those which may result in the use of stem cell therapies becoming redundant or obsolete; the Company's ability to effectively manage its growth, including maintaining effective controls and procedures and attracting and retaining key management and personnel; changing interpretations of generally accepted accounting principles; the availability of capital resources, including in the form of capital markets financing opportunities, in light of legislative developments in the U.S. affecting listed issuers whose independent registered public accounting firms are based in China and not subject to U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board inspections, international pressure on trade and currency against the PRC and its potential impact on the PRC consumer behavior, as well as general economic conditions; the non-binding proposal letter from Cordlife and the potential transaction contemplated by such letter, and other relevant risks detailed in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States.

This announcement contains translations of certain Renminbi amounts into U.S. dollars at specified rates solely for the convenience of readers. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Renminbi to U.S. dollars as of and for the period ending June 30, 2020 were made at the noon buying rate of RMB7.0651 to $1.00 on June 30, 2020 in the City of New York for cable transfers in Renminbi per U.S. dollar as certified for customs purposes by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Global Cord Blood Corporation makes no representation that the Renminbi or U.S. dollar amounts referred to in this press release could have been or could be converted into U.S. dollars or Renminbi, at any particular rate or at all.

For more information, please contact:

Global Cord Blood Corporation

Investor Relations Department

Tel: (+852) 3605-8180

Email: [email protected]

ICR, Inc.

William Zima

Tel: (+86) 10-6583-7511

U.S. Tel: (646) 405-5185

Email: [email protected]

EXHIBIT 1

GLOBAL CORD BLOOD CORPORATION UNAUDITED CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS As of March 31 and June 30, 2020



March 31,

June 30,

2020

2020

RMB

RMB

US$

(in thousands except share data) ASSETS









Current assets









Cash and cash equivalents 5,473,373

5,565,529

787,751 Accounts receivable, less allowance for doubtful accounts (March 31, 2020: RMB111,869;









June 30, 2020: RMB115,852 (US$16,398)) 104,251

111,635

15,801 Inventories 43,758

52,460

7,425 Prepaid expenses and other receivables 44,785

79,533

11,257 Total current assets 5,666,167

5,809,157

822,234 Property, plant and equipment, net 522,679

516,621

73,123 Operating lease right-of-use assets 4,548

4,027

570 Non-current deposits 347,360

349,245

49,432 Non-current accounts receivable, less allowance for doubtful accounts (March 31, 2020: RMB71,421;









June 30, 2020: RMB71,721 (US$10,151)) 160,031

179,123

25,354 Inventories 85,109

86,569

12,253 Intangible assets, net 92,823

91,668

12,975 Investment in equity securities at fair value 101,306

119,427

16,904 Other equity investment 189,129

189,129

26,769 Deferred tax assets 50,701

51,810

7,333 Total assets 7,219,853

7,396,776

1,046,947











LIABILITIES









Current liabilities









Accounts payable 19,992

14,307

2,025 Accrued expenses and other payables 113,989

127,987

18,115 Operating lease liabilities 1,717

1,738

246 Deferred revenue 402,751

404,405

57,240 Income tax payable 32,329

31,548

4,465 Total current liabilities 570,778

579,985

82,091 Non-current deferred revenue 2,289,762

2,314,880

327,650 Non-current operating lease liabilities 1,782

1,754

248 Other non-current liabilities 450,900

459,891

65,093 Deferred tax liabilities 18,140

17,789

2,519 Total liabilities 3,331,362

3,374,299

477,601







EQUITY









Shareholders' equity of Global Cord Blood Corporation









Ordinary shares









- US$0.0001 par value, 250,000,000 shares

authorized, 121,687,974 and

121,551,075 shares issued and outstanding

as of March 31 and June 30, 2020,

respectively 83

83

12 Additional paid-in capital 2,101,582

2,101,582

297,460 Treasury stock, at cost (March 31 and June 30,









2020: 136,899 shares, respectively) (2,815)

(2,815)

(398) Accumulated other comprehensive losses (94,663)

(95,102)

(13,461) Retained earnings 1,877,940

2,010,449

284,561 Total equity attributable to Global Cord Blood









Corporation 3,882,127

4,014,197

568,174 Non-controlling interests 6,364

8,280

1,172 Total equity 3,888,491

4,022,477

569,346 Total liabilities and equity 7,219,853

7,396,776

1,046,947

EXHIBIT 2

GLOBAL CORD BLOOD CORPORATION UNAUDITED CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME For the Three Months Ended June 30, 2019 and 2020



Three months ended June 30,

2019

2020

RMB

RMB

US$

(in thousands except per share data)











Revenues 273,375

280,913

39,761 Cost of revenues (45,749)

(43,463)

(6,152) Gross profit 227,626

237,450

33,609 Operating expenses









Research and development (4,701)

(4,345)

(615) Sales and marketing (60,637)

(55,060)

(7,793) General and administrative (49,902)

(44,536)

(6,304) Total operating expenses (115,240)

(103,941)

(14,712) Operating income 112,386

133,509

18,897 Other income, net









Interest income 6,220

6,767

958 Foreign currency exchange (losses)/gains (28)

42

6 Change in fair value of equity securities 9,979

18,405

2,605 Dividend income 507

-

- Others 340

1,723

244 Total other income, net 17,018

26,937

3,813 Income before income tax 129,404

160,446

22,710 Income tax expense (19,476)

(26,021)

(3,683) Net income 109,928

134,425

19,027 Net income attributable to non-controlling interests (1,584)

(1,916)

(271) Net income attributable to Global Cord









Blood Corporation's shareholders 108,344

132,509

18,756











Earnings per share:









Attributable to ordinary shares









- Basic 0.89

1.09

0.15 - Diluted 0.89

1.09

0.15











Other comprehensive income/(losses),









net of nil income taxes









- Foreign currency translation adjustments 10,353

(439)

(62)











Comprehensive income 120,281

133,986

18,965











Comprehensive income attributable to









non-controlling interests (1,584)

(1,916)

(271) Comprehensive income attributable to









Global Cord Blood Corporation's shareholders 118,697

132,070

18,694

EXHIBIT 3

GLOBAL CORD BLOOD CORPORATION RECONCILIATION OF NON-GAAP OPERATING INCOME For the Three Months Ended June 30, 2019 and 2020



Three months ended June 30,

2019

2020

RMB

RMB

US$

(in thousands)











GAAP amount of operating income 112,386

133,509

18,897











Depreciation and amortization expenses[4] 12,445

12,356

1,749











Non-GAAP operating income 124,831

145,865

20,646

[4] Depreciation and amortization expenses related to property, plant and equipment and intangible

assets respectively.

SOURCE Global Cord Blood Corporation
UK & Ireland Sunday Briefing: Benny Glaser Wins Sunday Main Event

August 24 2020

Benny Glaser is a three-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner. All three of the mixed game specialists bracelets stem from non-Holdem events. Glaser showed the world he knows his way around a No-Limit Holdem tournament by taking down GGPokers Sunday Main Event on August 23.

A bumper crowd of 1,583-players paid the $200 entry fee for the tournament and created a $291,272 prize pool. A handful of players sporting the Union Jack against their name reached the money places, but the night belonged to Glaser.

He came out on top and saw his $200 investment swell to $44,260. Perhaps well see more NLHE action from Glaser in the future?

Chris Moorman hit a rich vein of form on August 23 and managed to cash in several events. His biggest prize came courtesy of his third-place finish in the High Rollers Main Event $1K, which saw 384-players buy-in. Moorman just ran out of steam and had to make do with the $35,718 consolation prize.

Check out the list below to discover what else Moorman and his fellow Brits, and Irish grinders, won at GGPoker.

Gavin Cochrane  second-place in the High Rollers Blade PLO $5K for $69,791

quackhouse  third-place in the WSOP Side Event: BIG 500 for $65,590

Arthur meiiYunqi Conan  first-place in the High Rollers Battle Royale $525 for $48,627*

Stephen Chidwick  fifth-place in the High Rollers Blade Mulligan $5K for $43,575

Ben Farrell  second-place in the Sunday Monster Stack $200 for $35,900

whatariver1  fourth-place in the High Rollers Main Event $1K for $26,254

Tamer Gr8full Kamel  seventh-place in the WSOP Side Event: BIG 500 for $17,529

MickeyM  ninth-place in the WSOP Side Event: $1,260 Bounty Six Shooter for $17,036*

Stephen Chidwick  sixth-place in the High Rollers Blade Closer $5K for $11,358

Chris Moorman  fifth-place in the WSOP Side Event: $140 Forty Stack for $5,978

Chris Moorman  eighth-place in the Bounty Hunters Sunday Special $105 for $3,109*

lwolfwhite  ninth-place in the Bounty Hunters Sunday Special $105 for $2,615*

Euan ChrisFinch Baxter  eighth-place in the WSOP Side Event: $140 Forty Stack for $2,284

Should we say goodbye to nine-handed tournaments?

Chidwicks impressive results continued over at partypoker where he won the $5,200 WPT High Roller. The popular Brit only had to outlast 12 opponents but those 12 were some of the best players in the world. Chidwick got his hands on the top prize after defeating Russia's Sergei Vasilev heads-up for the title.

The other Chidwick cash came in the $10,300 WPT High Roller. He finished third for $34,000 with only Rok Gostisa and champion Kahle Burns outlasting him.

Irelands Marc Macdonnell walked away with the lions share of the $100,000 prize pool in the $215 WPT Mini Knockout Turbo. Macdonnell won the $7,218 top prize plus an additional $7,039 from the bounty prize pool.

The UKs Max Waterhouse finished fifth in the same tournament and banked a combined prize worth $4,415.

Can anyone catch Dvoress in the POY race?

There was plenty to shout about over at PokerStars too where Stuart guitey Guite finished third in the $215 Sunday Warm-Up for an $11,083 score.

Three of our players navigated their way to the nine-handed final table of the Hotter $109. Dan3534" finished ninth for $938 with galfano79 of Ireland banking $4,662 for their fourth-place exit. turnmea4h emerged victoriously as the tournaments champion and turned their $109 into a much more substantial $12,199.

Benny RunGodlike Glaser reached a 'Stars final table, namely the $215 NLO8 Sunday Supersonic. Glaser fell in second and had to make do with the $3,554 second-place prize. Rob robc1978 Cowen fell shy of the final table, finishing in eighth for $675.

Some of the other PokerStars results included:

StupidFr3nch  fifth-place in the $1,050 Sunday Cooldown for $4,891*

Mitch sirkingmitch Johnson  seventh-place in the $109 Bounty Builder for $4,753*

Conor 1_conor_b_1 Beresford  first-place in the $1,050 Sunday Supersonic for $3,244

Keith Kungfumonk Johnson  eighth-place in the Hotter $215 for $1,794*

Benny RunGodlike Glaser  fourth-place in the $109 Sunday KOmania for $1,311*

Finally, over to 888poker which was a happy hunting ground for Corky3991. The Brit finished third in the $100,000 Sunday Mega Deep for a $10,000 addition to his bankroll. The tournament overlaid once again with only 834 of the required 1,000 entrants taking to the 888poker tables.

cooper789 was the fifth-place finisher in the $20,000 Sunday Challenge PKO. This weighed in at $684 from the main prize pool plus an additional $137 worth of bounties.
By Sumeet Chatterjee, Yimou Lee and Anthony Esposito

HONG KONG/TAIPEI/MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Taiwan-based electronics manufacturers Foxconn and Pegatron are among companies eyeing new factories in Mexico, people with direct knowledge of the matter said, as the U.S.-China trade war and coronavirus pandemic prompt firms to reexamine global supply chains.

The plans could usher in billions of dollars in badly needed fresh investments over the next few years for Latin America's second-largest economy, which is primed for its worst recession since the 1930s Great Depression.

Foxconn <2317.TW> <2354.TW> and Pegatron <4938.TW> are known as contractors for several phone manufacturers including Apple <AAPL.O>. It was not immediately clear which companies they would work with in Mexico.

According to two of the sources, Foxconn has plans to use the factory to make Apple iPhones. However, one of the sources said, there had been no sign of Apple's direct involvement in the plan yet.

Foxconn is likely to make a final decision on a new factory later this year, and work will commence after that, the two people said, adding there was no certainty the company would stick to the plan.

Apple spokesman Josh Rosenstock declined to comment.

Pegatron is also in early discussions with lenders about an additional facility in Mexico mainly to assemble chips and other electronic components, said the people, who declined to be identified as the talks are confidential. Pegatron declined to comment.

Foxconn has five factories in Mexico mainly making televisions and servers. Its possible expansion would underscore a broader and gradual shift of global supply chains away from China amid a Sino-U.S. trade war and the coronavirus crisis.

The plans come as the idea of "near-shoring" gains ground in Washington. The Trump administration is exploring financial incentives to encourage firms to move production facilities from Asia to the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Story continues

Brandishing a new deal locking in free trade with the world's biggest consumer market, Mexico also has geography, low wages and time zones in its favor. Despite the global recession and concerns about the business climate under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, government data shows foreign investment largely holding up so far this year.

"The company indeed has contacted the (Mexican) government," a third source said about Foxconn, adding the talks were at an early stage and rising cases of coronavirus in Mexico were a major concern for the possible investment.

Taipei-headquartered Foxconn, formally called Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, said in a statement that while it continued to expand global operations and is an "active investor" in Mexico, it had no current plans to increase those investments.

Reuters in July reported Foxconn planned to invest up to $1 billion to expand a factory in India where it assembles Apple iPhones.

Foxconn Chairman Liu Young-way told an investor conference in Taipei on Aug. 12 the world was split into "G2" - or two groups - following Sino-U.S. tensions, saying his firm was working on "providing two sets of supply chain to service the two markets."

"The world factory no longer exists," he said, adding that about 30% of the company's products were now made outside China and the ratio could increase.

Foxconn unit Sharp has said it is stepping up television production in Mexico. Sharp last year said it would set up a plant in Vietnam to shift part of its China production. It said it had no further information to give.

China's Luxshare Precision Industry Co <002475.SZ> is also considering building a facility in Mexico this year to offset the tariff war between the world's two largest economies, the two sources said.

It was not immediately clear which product lines were being considered by Luxshare, which according to media reports is a leading manufacturer of Apple Airpods. Luxshare did not respond to a request for comment.

The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Mexico, which represents Taiwan's government in the country, said it had heard Foxconn was interested in building another factory in Ciudad Juarez, in the northern border state of Chihuahua.

"Pegatron, I also understand, wants to move a production line from China to Mexico," the office's Director General Armando Cheng told Reuters. He said he did not know details of either company's plans.

"Mexico is one of the ideal countries for companies considering readjusting their chain of suppliers," Cheng said.

The scale of investment by Asian electronics contract manufacturers, and the employment they would create in Mexico, are not yet clear.

Promised investment in new manufacturing capacity has not always materialized.

In 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump said Foxconn would build a $10 billion plant employing 13,000 people making LCD panels in the state of Wisconsin.

Those plans have shifted dramatically. In 2019 the company downgraded the size of the planned factory. In April, Foxconn said it would make ventilators at the plant in partnership with Medtronic.

STRETCHED SUPPLY CHAINS

Coronavirus ground cross-Pacific supply chains to a standstill, stranding automobile, electronics and pharmaceutical components from China, exacerbating firms' concerns about having their productive base an ocean away from American consumers.

Additionally, the newly implemented United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal requires more locally sourced inputs for tariff-free exports to the United States.

Mexico has spoken to a host of foreign companies in an effort to lure business from Asia to capitalize on the trade deal and was preparing to speak to Apple about relocating manufacturing, Economy Minister Graciela Marquez told Reuters in July.

She said she had not spoken to Foxconn, Pegatron and Luxshare directly. A senior government official said those companies were among others interested in investing in Mexico.

The government did not respond to a request for further comment prior to publication.

Despite the potential and solid investment figures, many investors see Lopez Obrador squandering a historic opportunity.

"It could have been a tidal wave," said Eduardo Ramos-Gomez, a partner at Duane Morris & Selvam, a law firm working with Taiwanese and Chinese companies looking at Mexico.

Critics cite Mexico's poor handling of the pandemic - it is third in global deaths  along with Lopez Obrador's meddling in private investment decisions such as the cancellation of a $1-billion brewery by U.S. firm Constellation Brands <STZ.N>, the scrapping of a major airport project and pressure on energy companies.

The government has denied such decisions were anti-business.

Regardless, Mexico's appeal is attracting some.

Samuel Campos, an executive managing director of real estate brokerage Newmark Knight Frank, said his company is currently helping two Chinese companies, one in the autos sector and the other in manufacturing, relocate to an industrial cluster in Mexico.

Campos said electronics, medical and automotive firms in Asia are likely to help drive investments into Mexico in the fourth quarter this year.

For Alan Russell, chief executive and chairman of Tecma Group, a company managing factories in Mexico, manufacturers in China that want to keep market share in North America have few choices.

"They're going to have shorten their supply chain and be more regional," he said. "It seems the virus has tipped the scale."

(Reporting by Sumeet Chatterjee in Hong Kong, Yimou Lee in Taipei and Anthony Esposito and Daina Beth Solomon in Mexico City; Additional reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Josh Horwitz in Shanghai; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Cynthia Osterman)
A zonal multi-stakeholder platform meeting has been organized for stakeholders to discuss issues of Illegal Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing in the area.



The meeting, also provided the space for dialogue and discussions on issues among fisheries stakeholders to promote stakeholder involvement and participatory planning in fisheries management.



It was organized by for key stakeholders including, members of the IUU, Community Monitoring Groups (CMGs), Fisheries Commission Officers, traditional leaders, fisher folks, Kpando Municipal Assembly, the Ghana Agricultural Workers Association, Ghana Inland Fishermen Canoe Association and Fisheries Enforcement Unit of the Ghana Navy.



Participants were also trained on the use of IUU-ICT Mobile App called DASE (Evidence) for monitoring, reporting and documenting IUU cases in the Inland Fishing Zone in the lake Volta.



The District Fisheries Commission Officer, Mr Wendell Papafio, said the IUU fishing was under the Far Ban Bo Protecting Fisheries Livelihoods project in Ghana, which seeks to improving Fisheries governance and IUU through engagement with fishers and stakeholders to improve on monitoring, reporting and prosecution of Fisheries infractions.



The project is being implemented by Friends of the Nation (FoN), CARE and Oxfam with funding from the European Union in Ghana.



The Executive Director of Friends of the Nation (FoN), Mr. Donkris Mevuta, presented five mobile phones to the members of the CMG to support the combat of IUU fishing in the inland fishing sector and explained that the smart phones were to be used for evidence gathering of IUU fishing activities.



Mr Mevuta said the App on the phone would allow the evidence to be shared with regulators for effective deterrence.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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FMCA is a nonprofit association for owners of all types of RVs. Through a special, discounted rate, new and existing owners of Dynamax and Forest River motorhomes  Berkshire, Georgetown, FR3, Sunseeker, and Forester  will have the opportunity to join thousands of other RV enthusiasts whose travel experiences have been enhanced by FMCA.

FMCA, the worlds largest nonprofit association for RV owners, has announced that it has entered into a partnership with Dynamax and Forest River Motorized (Berkshire, Georgetown, FR3, Sunseeker, and Forester) to help enhance the RV lifestyle for owners of these types of RVs. Dynamax and Forest River Motorized have always put customer service and quality first, and FMCA has strived to do the same.

This partnership just makes sense, said FMCA CEO Chris Smith. Dynamax and Forest River Motorized are instrumental in helping folks realize the dream of RV ownership. Then FMCA takes it to the next level with the resources and opportunities we provide for our members."

Through a special, discounted rate, new and existing owners of Dynamax and Forest River motorhomes  Berkshire, Georgetown, FR3, Sunseeker, and Forester  will have the opportunity to join thousands of other RV enthusiasts whose travel experiences have been enhanced by FMCA.

Those who take advantage of this offer to join FMCA will have the opportunity to enjoy camaraderie and friendships among RVers who share the common interest of travel, while receiving a wealth of benefits and services designed to meet the needs of RV owners. FMCA members have exclusive access to RV discount club savings, RV lifestyle resources, the monthly Family RVing magazine, RV rallies, education, and so much more.

Im thrilled to welcome Dynamax and Forest River Motorized owners to FMCA through this terrific partnership, said FMCA national president Jon Walker. Im equally excited to show them all the different benefits, educational opportunities, and social connections available to them when they become a member of the best RV club in North America.

For more information about everything FMCA has to offer, visit FMCA.com.

ABOUT FMCA: ENHANCING THE RV LIFESTYLE

FMCA is the worlds largest nonprofit association for recreation vehicle (RV) owners. The organization maintains its national headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, and currently has nearly 150,000 active members. FMCA offers its members a number of benefits, including a subscription to its monthly magazine, Family RVing; a medical emergency and travel assistance program valued at $200-plus per family; a tire purchasing program; group rates on a roadside assistance program, RV and auto insurance, and RV tours and caravans; and discounts on mobile internet access plans from Verizon and Sprint. Perhaps the most important benefit of FMCA membership is the camaraderie and friendships that develop among people enjoying the common interest of RV travel. For more information, visit FMCA.com or call (513) 474-3622 or (800) 543-3622.
Daniel Biro travelled around North America for 15 years, playing music and drinking a lot of coffee. Over those years he developed not only a taste for good coffee, but a solid business plan as well.

He launched Rapids End Coffee Roastery at 721 Rye St., sharing the parking lot with Norm's Cash and Carry. With lots of variety to choose from, you can pick up Rapids End Coffee at the Main Ingredient, the Silver Bean, Kit Coffee, Revelstoke, Kitchen Pharmacy and Daniel is always open to new retailers. Or order online and have it delivered. Just Google Rapids End Coffee for the website, Facebook or Instagram.

Dewar's on the move

To boldly go where theyve been before, John and Kelly Dewar recently announced that John Dewars Auto Source is moving back to their original location at 1838 Ashburnham Dr., across from the PUC.

Theyll still be carrying their great selection of late model, low KM vehicles. Opening day is next Sept. 1. So next week, when you go straight to the source go to Ashburnham, just North of Lansdowne. Visit Autosource.ca.

Women Breaking Barriers

Women Breaking Barriers is a new program for female-led businesses and startups in science, technology, engineering, math and social innovation.

This program will intake two cohorts of 10 women aged 18 or older through six months of fast-tracked programming and mentorship to reduce barriers to grow and scale their businesses. With targeted training, mentorships, collaboration, and access to funding through Community Futures, the program culminates in the opportunity for each business to pitch to the Peterborough Region Angel Network. Applications for the first cohort are due this Thursday at noon. Details at innovationcluster.ca.

Rocklands

Congratulations to Brian Edwards of Rocklands Shows, who recently celebrated 40 years and over 5000 shows in the music business.

Brian, his wife Barbara want to thank the Rocklands team and dozens of good people in the music business who have given them their trust over the years.

Lindsay Broadband

And congratulations to Lindsay Broadband and Accelleran who recently announced that Cogeco Communications Inc. is testing their one-box small cell solution on Cogecos network in the province of Quebec. A local company is solving some rural internet issues.
Gov. candidate Nicole Galloway releases her plan to fight the coronavirus in Missouri JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Gubernatorial candidate Nicole Galloway has released a plan for how she would take on the coronavirus pandemic in Missouri. "Missouri needs a reset on COVID-19," Galloway's plan states. "COVID-19 has taken a major toll on our rural and urban communities, revealing countless economic, racial and public health disparities.

Here's a glimpse at a Missouri political and public health gambit that might offer hope to votes in KC & STL who haven't heard much from Jeff City about the pandemic.Read more:
Wastewater containing coronaviruses may be a serious threat, according to a new, global study led by researchers from the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

The new paper, published in Nature Sustainability, by an international collaboration of 35 researchers, evaluates recent studies on coronaviruses in wastewater and previous airborne infectious diseases, including SARS and MERS.

The goal is to evaluate potential threats, avenues of research and possible solutions, as well as garner beneficial perspectives for the future.

There is ample reason to be concerned about how long coronaviruses survive in wastewater and how it impacts natural water sources. Can wastewater contain enough coronaviruses to infect people? The simple truth is that we do not know enough and that needs to be rectified as soon as possible." Dr Edo Bar-Zeev, Study Lead Author, BGU Zuckerberg Institute

Bar-Zeev, and his postdoc student, Anne Bogler, together with other renowned researchers, indicate that sewage leaking into natural watercourses might lead to infection via airborne spray.

Similarly, treated wastewater used to fill recreational water facilities, like lakes and rivers, could also become sources of contagion.

Lastly, fruits and vegetables irrigated with wastewater that were not properly disinfected could also be an indirect infection route.

The research team recommends immediate, new research to determine the level of potential infection, if any, and how long coronaviruses last in various bodies of water and spray.

"Wastewater treatment plants need to upgrade their treatment protocols and in the near future also advance toward tertiary treatment through micro- and ultra-filtration membranes, which successfully remove viruses," Bar-Zeev and his colleagues say.

At the same time, wastewater can serve as a canary in a coal mine because it can be monitored to track COVID-19 outbreaks. Coronaviruses start showing up in feces before other symptoms like fevers and coughs show up in otherwise asymptomatic people.

Regular monitoring, therefore, can give authorities advance warning of hot spots. BGU researchers recently completed a pilot study in Ashkelon, Israel using new methodology to detect and trace the presence of the virus and calculate its concentration to pinpoint emerging COVID-19 hotspots. Other BGU researchers are working on developing water nanofiltration technologies.
Antibiotics are among the most important discoveries of modern medicine and have saved millions of lives since the discovery of penicillin almost 100 years ago. Many diseases caused by bacterial infections - such as pneumonia, meningitis or septicaemia - are successfully treated with antibiotics. However, bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics which then leaves doctors struggling to find effective treatments. Particularly problematic are pathogens which develop multi-drug resistance and are unaffected by most antibiotics. This leads to severe disease progression in affected patients, often with a fatal outcome. Scientists all over the world are therefore engaged in the search for new antibiotics. Researchers at the University of Gottingen and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry Gottingen have now described a promising new approach involving "antivitamins" to develop new classes of antibiotics. The results were published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Antivitamins are substances that inhibit the biological function of a genuine vitamin. Some antivitamins have a similar chemical structure to those of the actual vitamin whose action they block or restrict. For this study, Professor Kai Tittmann's team from the Gottingen Center for Molecular Biosciences at the University of Gottingen worked together with Professor Bert de Groot's group from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry Gottingen and Professor Tadgh Begley from Texas A&M University (USA). Together they investigated the mechanism of action at the atomic level of a naturally occurring antivitamin of vitamin B1. Some bacteria are able to produce a toxic form of this vital vitamin B1 to kill competing bacteria. This particular antivitamin has only a single atom in addition to the natural vitamin in a seemingly unimportant place and the exciting research question was why the action of the vitamin was still prevented or "poisoned".

Tittmann's team used high-resolution protein crystallography to investigate how the antivitamin inhibits an important protein from the central metabolism of bacteria. The researchers found that the "dance of the protons", which can normally be observed in functioning proteins, almost completely ceases to function and the protein no longer works. "Just one extra atom in the antivitamin acts like a grain of sand in a complex gear system by blocking its finely tuned mechanics," explains Tittmann. It is interesting to note that human proteins are able to cope relatively well with the antivitamin and continue working. The chemist de Groot and his team used computer simulations to find out why this is so. "The human proteins either do not bind to the antivitamin at all or in such a way that they are not 'poisoned'," says the Max Planck researcher. The difference between the effects of the antivitamin on bacteria and on human proteins opens up the possibility of using it as an antibiotic in the future and thus creating new therapeutic alternatives.

The research project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

###

Original Publication: F. Rabe von Pappenheim et al. Structural basis for antibiotic action of the B1 antivitamin 2?-methoxy-thiamine. Nature Chemical Biology (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41589-020-0628-4

Or: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-020-0628-4

Contact:

Professor Kai Tittmann

University of Gottingen

Molecular Enzymology Group

Julia-Lermontowa-Weg 3, 37077 Gottingen, Germany

Tel: +49 (0)551 39177811

Email: ktittma@gwdg.de

http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/sh/198266.html

Professor Bert de Groot

Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry

Computational Biomolecular Dynamics Research Group

Am Fassberg 11, 37077 Gottingen

Tel: +49 (0)551 2012308

Email: bgroot@gwdg.de

http://www.mpibpc.mpg.de/degroot
The United Nations said Friday it had gained access to Mali's ousted president and other detainees who have been held by mutineers since a military coup on Tuesday.

The UN's announcement comes amid mounting international pressure on the new junta and ahead of a mass rally by an opposition coalition in support of the mutineers.

There had been no word about President Ibrahim Keita's whereabouts until now.

On Tuesday, Keita dissolved parliament and then resigned after being detained at gunpoint, deepening the crisis facing a country struggling to fend off an insurgency by Islamist militants.

Since then, no one knew where he was and whether he was still alive.

According to the UN's peacekeeping mission MINUSMA, Keita is being held in a villa in Kati near the capital Bamako, along with his prime minister Boubou Cisse. They have no access to TV, radio or phone.

UN visit

In a tweet, MINUSMA wrote that a human rights team went to Kati on Thursday night in the framework of its mandate to protect human rights and was able to gain access to Keita and other detainees.

Hier dans la soiree une equipe des #DroitsdelHomme de la MINUSMA s'est rendue a #Kati dans le cadre de son mandat de protection des droits de l'homme et a pu avoir acces au President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita ainsi qu'aux autres detenus. #Mali  - MINUSMA (@UN_MINUSMA) August 21, 2020

The 75-year-old ousted leader "looked tired but relaxed" they said, describing his conditions as "acceptable."

The other detainees are being held in a training centre, where they are sleeping on mattresses and watching television, according to witnesses to the visit.

Two prisoners released

A member of the junta, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it had authorised a UN human rights mission to visit all 19 prisoners in Kati, including Keita and Cisse.

The source added that the junta had released former economy minister Abdoulaye Daffe and Sabane Mahalmoudou, Keita's private secretary.

"Two prisoners have been released. There are still 17 in Kati. This is the proof that we respect human rights," the junta member said.

The reported release came shortly before mass rallies, staged by a protest coalition that had been demanding Keita's resignation and has since embraced the mutineers.

Fragile transition

The rebel soldiers named their organisation the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, under the leadership of a 37-year-old colonel named Assimi Goita, and vowed to create a transitional council and stage elections within a reasonable time.

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The junta's spokesman, Ismael Wague, said on Thursday: "A transitional council, with a transitional president who is going to be either military or civilian will be appointed."

The transition will be the shortest possible, he told France 24 television.

The international community has joined African leaders in condemning Mali's latest putsch and demanded the detained leaders be freed.

West African leaders to send envoys to Mali to restore "constitutional order"

Leaders of the 15-nation West African regional group Ecowas on Thursday demanded Keita be restored as president and bluntly warned the junta that they bore responsibility for the safety and security of the detainees.

Ecowas has vowed to dispatch a high-level delegation to ensure the immediate return of constitutional order. It is scheduled to arrive on Saturday.
White, who claimed to have made the video, said that before the gunfire, he looked out his window and saw six or seven women shouting at each other on the sidewalk. A few moments later, Blake drove up in his SUV and told his son, who was standing nearby, to get in the vehicle, according to White. White said Blake did not say anything to the women.
By Laman Ismayilova

International Committee for Museums and Collections of Arms and Military History (ICOMAM) will hold its conference in Azerbaijan. The conference is expected to take place in 2023 for the first time in Baku.

The decision on holding the event was made on the basis of a presentation made by the board member and First Deputy Chairman of Qasr Cultural Heritage and Historical Monuments Preservation Public Union, ICOMAM member, Parvin Gozalov, Azertag reported.

Parvin Gozalov has been a member of the Board of the Public Union since 2007. He was elected as ICOMAM member within the 25th ICOM General Conference held in Japan.

ICOMAM fosters the study of arms, armor, artillery, fortifications, uniforms, flags and medals. It develops and maintains relations between museums and other institutions concerned with the preservation and interpretation of such artifacts.

The organization is the only International Committee of its kind dealing comprehensively with this particular subject area in the museum field.

The Committee actively holds triennial congresses and annual symposia or conferences and organizes the triennial Justus Lipsius Award for outstanding published research in the field.

The organization seeks to explore both the technical development of the material culture of its subject area and the often profound impact this has had on national and international politics and economics, society and art.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Premier League clubs now know who they are preparing for on the opening day of the 2020-21 season with the fixture list released last week.

But one other key aspect of preparations for the new campaign is ongoing: the rebuilding of squads.

The transfer window is open until October 5 - although a domestic-only one will stretch until October 16 - and there are plenty of exciting deals being thrashed out all over the country and continent.

Here, Sportsmail's ALEC FENN will bring you the latest deals, news and gossip.
OTTAWAErin OToole styles himself true blue. He won the Conservative leadership that way.

With handout photos of the candidate in his Royal Canadian Air Force jacket, and a campaign call to Take Back Canada, OTooles campaign framed him as the authentic incarnation of the partys ideals.

Now the prospect of a snap federal election looms within weeks of him succeeding Andrew Scheer as Conservative leader, raising the question of how that true-blue persona might translate into votes from the population at large.

Heres a look at some choice policies from OTooles leadership platform that show the direction in which he wants to take the country if he beats Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals in the next federal campaign.

Pandemic recovery

While the Liberals are crafting plans to build back from the COVID-19 crisis, OTooles platform also includes a range of proposals to recover from the damage of the pandemic. Like the Liberals, OToole wants Canada to increase its capacity to build its own personal protective equipment. His platform also speaks of extending employment insurance to ineligible workers after the Canada Emergency Response Benefit winds down, a policy the Trudeau government is also pursuing.

To address problems in long-term-care settings, among other shortcomings, OToole says he would call a royal commission on the pandemic response within 100 days of taking power.

OToole says he would also increase the Canada Child Benefit each quarter of the year until the end of 2021, increasing total payouts by $12 billion. And he would divert funding for agricultural research to help the private sector grow more food in Canadian greenhouses year-round.

His platform also includes vague promises to cut taxes and balance the federal budget on a prudent timeline.

Climate plan

OToole picks up the Conservative antipathy to the federal carbon tax, although his platform includes plans for a national price on greenhouse gas emissions. OTooles platform says he would scrap the existing system in favour of a carbon price on industry alone  not on consumers through the tax on gas and other fuels.

He also promises an effort to end energy imports from countries outside North America, to support the export of liquified natural gas, and to help oil and gas companies become carbon-neutral.

The platform doesnt include targets for emissions reductions.

The new leader has also promised to repeal the Liberal governments ban on oil tanker traffic off the northern coast of British Columbia, as well as the new environmental assessment scheme for major projects, which Conservatives say blocks resource development because its too onerous. He would also pass a new law to make it easier and quicker to green-light pipelines deemed to be in the national interest.

Criminalize rail blockaders

After the Wetsuweten solidarity movement sparked protests and rail blockades across Canada last winter, OToole promises to enact a new law  the Freedom of Movement Act  that would make it a specific criminal offence to block train tracks, airports, seaports and the entrances to businesses. This is necessary to prevent radicals from shutting down the economy, OTooles platform says. The law would also increase punishments for people who hinder the proper functioning of energy transportation infrastructure.

OToole would also use the Constitutions notwithstanding clause to ensure courts cant strike down mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain crimes, such as murder, kidnapping, sexual assault and trafficking illegal handguns.

Confront China

Accusing the Trudeau government of weakness, OToole vows to take a more aggressive stand against China on the world stage. He would ban Chinese telecom giant Huawei from taking part in the development of Canadas 5G network infrastructure. He would impose sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials involved in the detentions of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, as well as those involved in the crackdown on Hong Kongs independence, cyberattacks on Canadian firms, and human rights abuses against the countrys Uighur Muslim population.

On top of that, OTooles platform says he would lead try to lead an international coalition to decouple free and market societies from China. The effort would include trying to persuade the G7 countries, India, South Korea and Australia to ban Chinese state-controlled companies from accessing capital markets, while Canadas default position would be to block such firms from taking over companies in this country.

Defund the CBC

Describing his plan for modernizing Canadas public broadcaster, OToole would stop funding CBCs digital arm within a new Conservative governments first mandate. He would also slash funding to CBC English television and the CBC News Network by 50 per cent and try to privatize them within that first term.

However, the platform says OToole would keep government funding intact for Radio-Canada and other minority language services in Canada, and keep CBC Radio, which is commercial-free and maintains the original public interest mandate.

Read more about:
Times Union

Join Table Hopping's Steve Barnes live on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube at 1 p.m. Tuesday for a conversation about the state of the restaurant industry with Nancy Bambara, vice president and chief operating officer of DZ Restaurants in Saratoga.

This is part of a series of Times Union Live discussions with a range of Times Union journalists covering the COVID-19 pandemic.
By Deborah Spigner

As we bid our final farewell to the legendary activist and advocate, Rep. John Lewis we are reminded that the disease that took his life is one that plagues specifically African Americans in our communities. His battle with pancreatic cancer that took his precious life away from us was, according to Congressman Lewis, the worst battle of his life. A legend because of his stance on civil rights and the price he paid with the blows to his body, he ultimately succumbed to a dreadful disease that deviously affects the lives of our loved ones of all ages and is a diagnosis that is dreaded by many who knows its frightful prognosis.

According to Johns Hopkins Medicine and Pathology, only about 2% of the cancers diagnosed each year are cancer of the pancreas yet the five-year survival rate is less than 5%, making pancreatic cancer the third leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. But a further troubling statistic for this disease is that the incidence is 50% to 90% higher in African Americans than in any other racial group in the United States, according to John Hopkins Medicine and Pathology. African Americans also have the poorest prognosis of any racial group because they often are diagnosed with advanced, and therefore, inoperable cancer.

The advocacy group Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PANCAN) put out a statement following Rep. Lewis death that emphasized that African Americans also are less likely to receive surgery than any other racial group in the United States. According to PANCAN, many studies have been conducted to determine why there is an increased risk of pancreatic cancer among African Americans, which suggests that environmental and socioeconomic factors may be important. Cigarette smoking, which causes about 25% of pancreatic cancer, is more common among African Americans and therefore may partially explain the disparity. Other risk factors for pancreatic cancer that are more common in African Americans include diabetes mellitus, pancreatitis, and being overweight. In 2020, its estimated that 57,600 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Each year, advocates for pancreatic cancer go down to Washington D.C., displaying the purple colors that represent pancreatic cancer advocacy to lobby Congress to increase funding for one of the deadliest of cancer diseases. In 2009, I made the trip to the U.S. Capitol to advocate on behalf of my husband who passed away in 2007 from this devastating disease. He was a 51-year-old African American male. At the point of his diagnosis, three months before his passing, he was not a diabetic nor did he have a history of smoking. In fact, Bernard was neither a drinker nor a smoker.

We had been married for just over three and a half years and had an almost 3-year-old son. Based on his family history though, Bernard was very likely to be a pancreatic cancer victim although neither he nor I was cognizant of this information at that time. Both his parents had some high-risk factors. His mother was a smoker and his father was a type 2 diabetic. Although Bernard himself didnt smoke or was not a diabetic, his genetic traits could have ultimately led to his dire prognosis.

The COVID 19 pandemic is also underscoring that there are clear racial disparities in health outcomes for racial and ethnic groups due to the systemic health and social inequities. The inequities that are often ignored by our elected officials who too often paint a rosy picture for the world that America leads the world in quality of life issues. As I write this, I think of all those who may be locked out of the dream because of where they fall on the economic ladder.

John Lewis fought for all of us. He was preceded by many strong advocates and will be followed by many great ones but his singular involvement in the fight for racial injustice is monumental. Yet, he succumbed, like Bernard, to this inequity. Battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer takes your pride away, so much more than the batons that Lewis and his fellow civil rights activists faced on the bridge that day in Selma, Alabama.

In January 2019, Congressman Alcee Hastings also announced he was diagnosed and was being treated for stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He is still waging his battle and with any luck, he will be able to enjoy many years of living with this disease but the odds are not in his favor. He is an African American male, 83 years old. Rep Lewis and Hastings have both enjoyed a long life beyond the years of many like my husband Bernard, who died at age 51. Ultimately though, these precious lives will be undermined by this dreadful disease.

On July 31, Congressman Andre Carson announced that the amendment he was sponsoring to increase funding for pancreatic cancer had passed, a homage to his friends Lewis and Hastings. The amendment to strengthen pancreatic cancer research and expand early detection research of pancreatic cancer becomes significantly less deadly when caught early, yet theres no dedicated early detection initiative for this type of cancer. Lets keep our fight for social and racial equity and dont let the batons of ignorance and arrogance prevent us from defeating these common enemies.

Deborah Spigner, a professional consultant, is an advocate for pancreatic cancer awareness. She lives with her family in Metuchen.

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CAIRO: An explosion on the Arab Gas Pipeline that caused a power blackout in Syria on Monday was the result of a terrorist" attack, state media cited the energy minister as saying.

Ikhbariya TV channel showed footage of a large fire after the explosion, which officials said occurred between the towns of Ad Dumayr and Adra, northwest of the capital of Damascus. The channel later said the fire had been extinguished.

Assessments show that the explosion  was the result of a terrorist attack," state news agency SANA quoted Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem as saying. He did not provide further detail.

The electricity minister earlier said that power was gradually being restored to the countrys provinces. A resident in Damascus said power had returned in the capital.

In 2013, much of Syria was hit by a power cut after rebel shelling hit a gas pipeline during the countrys civil war.

The Arab Gas Pipeline system extends from Egypt into Jordan and Syria.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Maharashtra Congress minister Sunil Kedar initiated a war of words after he reiterated that at least three senior Congress leaders must apologise for raising questions on Gandhi familys leadership.

The three leaders mentioned in his tweet  Prithviraj Chavan, Milind Deora and Mukul Wasnik chose to remain silent over the harsh statement.

I whole-heartedly support Hon Sonia Gandhi ji as president. Its shameful on Mukul Wasnik, Prithviraj Chavan and Milind Deora to raise questions on leadership of Gandhi family. These leaders must apologise for their act immediately. Otherwise, Congress workers will see how they move in the state freely. Congress can give fight to BJP govt only when party has Gandhi as its head. This is high time to stand firmly behind Soniajis leadership, Sunil Kedar tweeted late last night.

A senior Congress leader came out in support of Kedars statement but opined that the language was too harsh. This is the sentiment of the cadres in the State. We want Rahul Gandhi to be at the helm. Though Sunil Kedars statement comes across as very rude, he has reflected our sentiments. He shouldnt have talked about this so openly. But Congress is a democratic party. So everyone is vocal with their opinion, he said on condition of anonymity.

Sources close to the leaders who wrote the letter to Congress leadership on August 7, seeking a full-time willing president for the party, said the controversy was unnecessary.

It was an internal letter written to point out the issues in the party. It was strictly confidential. The concern was that the party should have a full-time, willing, working president, a senior leader said on condition of anonymity. However, the discussion is based on the contention that a faction of Congress does not want Rahul Gandhi to be at the helm of the affairs.

That is not the case. The case is that the party should be headed by someone who is available full-time and is willing to handle the responsibility. A president cant say, he wont meet a specific leader for a few months. He or she cannot be available for party affairs. If Rahul Gandhi is willing to take back his resignation and is willing to accept the role, nobody has any problem, a Congress leader said.

After Sonia Gandhi has made it clear that she will not be the party president, the party is in turbulence over the choice of the next leader. Sonia Gandhi had agreed to be an interim president. It is a stop-gap arrangement, it cannot go on for a year or more. She has already clarified that due to health reasons, she wont continue, he added.

In Maharashtra, several senior Congress leaders in the state who have served some of the top positions in politics now lie sidelined.

Meanwhile, like a few other Congress committees, Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee too passed a resolution seeking that if Sonia Gandhi steps down, Rahul Gandhi should take over the control of the party.

The senior Congress leaders of Maharashtra have hereby unanimously resolved that madam Sonia ji Gandhi should continue as it is only because of her leadership our party came in power. She has made several sacrifices to rebuild the party and is still very actively involved in all the decisions pertaining to the party. In case she refuses our request, we would seek Shri Rahul Gandhi to immediately take over as the AICC president, stated the resolution passed by Balasaheb Thorat and seconded by Ashok Chavan.
The NEWBIE project competition to identify the best new entrant farmer has opened for entries. This competition is open to those who have entered farming, changed enterprise or diversified their business in recent years.

The competition opens August 24 and is open to those who have started their new enterprise since 2014. Entry to the competition is free and will have one overall winner.

The winning entry will receive a 500 contribution towards training, or an international study trip, along with a plaque for display on the farm. A video featuring the winner will be produced and added to the NEWBIE library.

This is a great opportunity for new entrants to farming, to showcase their business success to date, and the subsequent publicity will be hugely advantageous in promoting their products. Shortlisted applicants will have the benefit of a farm visit from the judging panel, which will critically assess the business and future plans.

You can enter the competition on the Teagasc website.

NEWBIE case studies

A key element of the NEWBIE project are the 90 case studies carried out with new entrants across the partner countries, featuring inspiring stories from participating countries. This allows for sharing of information and insights between countries and potential new entrants can easily browse through examples on the NEWBIE map.

Rory McGorrion  Kildinan Farm

Rory McGorrion, a native of Dublin City, returned to work in Cork following 10 years in Australia. Rory and his wife Sheila bought Kildinan farm, initially for the dwelling house that was located on the farm.

When Rory was made redundant from his printing job, the family began to look towards the land on which their house was located to seek out an income. Working initially with numerous vegetable crops selling locally and at farmers markets, Rory and Sheila decided to consolidate their business focusing on salad leaf crops.

Rory tells his story in the following video.

James and Edmond Gough  Farm Partnership

James Gough farms in partnership with his father Edmond in Co Waterford. A carpenter by trade, James found himself at home on the farm when construction quietened down. James set about starting his own enterprise on neighbouring rented land which he ran successfully for a number of years while also working on Edmonds holding.

The decision was then made to consolidate the enterprises through a farm partnership. Animal husbandry was streamlined, infrastructure was shared and James was no longer confined to the more difficult ground all year round. The partnership has given James a stake in the home farm and the impetus to grow the herd and improve grazing infrastructure.

James and Edmond share their experience of the farm partnership in the following video:

NEWBIE Project

The competition is run by the NEWBIE network, an EU funded Horizon 2020 project which aims to encourage and assist new entrants in the agricultural sector. There are nine partner countries from across Europe participating in the project. The main goal of the NEWBIE network is to increase innovation, entrepreneurship, and resilience in the European farming sector by enabling new entrants to successfully establish sustainable farm businesses in Europe.

New entrants are defined in the NEWBIE network as anyone who starts a new farm business, or becomes involved in an existing farm business, including newcomers to the sector, successors and existing farmers who have diversified their farm business. New entrants to agriculture have traditionally faced a number of barriers when establishing a farm business. These include access to land, labour, capital, infrastructure, labour and knowledge.

Key elements of the project include case studies, a video library, national competitions, discussion circles and international knowledge exchange sessions. Further information on the NEWBIE project can be found on the Teagasc website.

Are you a new entrant to farming who has been farming for 2 years or more? Check out the New Entrant of the Year competition and be in with the chance to win on the Teagasc website.

Sponsored by
Americas educational system is terribleso bad, I think, that it poses a serious threat to the thriving, and even the survival, of the republic. That is the context in which all, or nearly all, public schools shut down last spring as a result of coronavirus hysteria. The results were disastrous. Once learning went virtual, something like 20% to 30% of students never even logged in once. They never completed an assignment, never took a test, and so on. And, of course, these were precisely the students who need our schools the most.

Now, with the 2020-21 school year fast approaching, teachers unions have demanded that schools remain closed, at least until voters and taxpayers accede to fantastical lists of demands. Teaching school is alleged to be unreasonably dangerous, even though there is not a single documented case in the world of a student transmitting COVID to a teacher, and even though clerks at Total Wine storesto name just one exampleare brave enough to work. So schools across the country are remaining closed for the foreseeable future.

This could be seen as a disaster, or perhaps as an opportunity. Parents who have been abandoned by the public schools are looking for alternatives. Some are home schooling; some are putting their kids in private schools; some are forming neighborhood groups to hire tutors. There is, in short, a powerful movement brewing to liberate parents and students from the failed public school system and, above all, from the teachers unions.

Shamefully, some union zealots and establishment figures are trying to prevent parents from responding appropriately to their abandonment by the public school system. At AmericanExperiment.org, my colleague Catrin Wigfall documents one such attempt: MN professors tell white parents to keep kids in public schools to show they arent racist.

Abby Rombalski (University of Minnesota) and Anita Chikkatur (Carleton College) opined in MinnPost that white parents should keep your children enrolled in their current or local public school to show anti-racism. [W]hite America owes Black students a large educational debt, and funding public schools is one part of paying back that debt. Well-resourced, culturally relevant public schools are an important facet of society that values Black lives and BIPOC children.  Leaning into your local public school is an anti-racist move to support schools through enrollment, advocacy, and community building. Hmm. Its curious Rombalski and Chikkatur so strongly believe that public schools are paying back students of color by providing them with the education they need. Despite research that shows Minnesota is one of the most generous states in the nation with regard to funding for districts with high populations of low-income students and students of color, the states public school system has failed to meet the educational needs of these student populations for decades.

The link goes to Catrins own just-published paper, titled ALLERGIC TO ACCOUNTABILITY: Minnesotas public schools have little to show for decades of increased spending. The paper demonstrates that despite lavish funding, Minnesotas public schools achieve mediocre, and declining, results. In particular, they fail the states African-American children.

The papers most striking finding, in my opinion, is that black public school children in Mississippi significantly outperform black public school children in Minnesota on objective tests, despite far less spending on education. And the gap is growing; the performance of black children in Mississippi is improving, while the performance of black children in Minnesota is getting worse.

A mountain of empirical data shows that there is no correlation between spending on public schools and educational attainment. (See Catrins linked paper.) Given the terrible performance of Americas public schools, the teachers unions insistence that they be shut down indefinitely should be seen mostly as an opportunity. The time has come for parents, students and taxpayers to declare independence. The alternatives to the public school system that they pursue can only be an improvement.
AUBURN, Ala., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Chicken Salad Chick, the nation's only southern inspired, fast casual chicken salad restaurant concept, announced today it will be expanding in Kentucky with its newest restaurant in Owensboro. Following the brand's first-to-market opening in Lexington in 2018, the Owensboro location marks the state's second Chicken Salad Chick, with an additional Kentucky restaurant slated to open in Crestview Hills early next year. The Owensboro restaurant, which is located at 2596 Calumet Trace, will celebrate its grand opening on September 1 and will offer free chicken salad for a year to the first 100 guests. Those awarded will be properly distanced and will receive a designated return time upon arrival to spread out the number of guests at the restaurant throughout the day.

Chicken Salad Chick is closely following Kentucky's state and local guidelines for COVID-19 procedures and will open the Owensboro restaurant at limited capacity with social distancing measures in place. All employees will be wearing masks and gloves, as well as practicing proper handwashing and food safety protocol, and all guests will be required to wear masks until seated for dining. The Owensboro restaurant also features patio seating and a drive-thru for added convenience.

During grand opening week, guests will experience the southern hospitality that Chicken Salad Chick is known for, with modified giveaways and specials that include:

Tuesday, September 1  Free Chicken Salad for a Year  The first 100 guests will receive one large Quick Chick of chicken salad per month for an entire year, with one of those lucky guests randomly selected to win one large Quick Chick of chicken salad per week.* Any guest not part of the first 100 in line can make an in-store purchase and enter for a chance to win free chicken salad for a year.**

 Free Chicken Salad for a Year  The first 100 guests will receive one large Quick Chick of chicken salad per month for an entire year, with one of those lucky guests randomly selected to win one large Quick Chick of chicken salad per week.* Any guest not part of the first 100 in line can make an in-store purchase and enter for a chance to win free chicken salad for a year.** Wednesday, September 2  The first 100 guests to purchase the Chick will receive a free Chick Special redeemable on the next visit.

The first 100 guests to purchase the Chick will receive a free Chick Special redeemable on the next visit. Thursday, September 3  The first 50 guests to purchase a Chick Trio will receive a free Chick tumbler.

The first 50 guests to purchase a Chick Trio will receive a free Chick tumbler. Friday, September 4  The first 50 guests to purchase a Chick Trio will receive a free Chick tote.

The first 50 guests to purchase a Chick Trio will receive a free Chick tote. Saturday, September 5  The first 50 guests to purchase two large Quick Chicks will receive a free large Chick cooler.

The Owensboro restaurant is owned and operated by first-time Chicken Salad Chick franchise owners Danny, Sara and Matthew Duggar, and Hannah Witherspoon of Ems Chick, LLC. Danny and Sara bring more than 30 years of small business experience to the brand, while children Matthew and Hannah have worked as an optometrist and dental hygienist, respectively, for more than a decade. The family first experienced Chicken Salad Chick's made-from-scratch chicken salad while on vacation in Destin, Florida and after learning about the growth opportunities in their home state of Kentucky, decided to open a location of their own. The Owensboro restaurant will mark the group's first Chicken Salad Chick, with plans to open two additional locations in Evansville, Indiana and Bowling Green, Kentucky over the next couple years.

"Gathering around the dinner table or sharing a booth at a restaurant has always been a special experience for my family, as it gives us the chance to break away from life's everyday stresses and enjoy each other's company," said Sara Duggar. "Chicken Salad Chick's family-oriented atmosphere is a perfect backdrop for these types of memorable dining experiences and the fresh chicken salads are sure to satisfy even the pickiest of eaters. From savory and sweet to spicy and nutty, it will be hard to choose just one favorite, but a debate over which is the best flavor definitely makes for a fun lunchtime conversation. We can't wait to serve the Owensboro community and are thrilled to finally be opening a Chicken Salad Chick of our own."

Chicken Salad Chick in Owensboro will be open Monday  Saturday from 10a.m.  8p.m. For more information, visit www.chickensaladchick.com. Follow Chicken Salad Chick on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for the latest news and trends.

*Guests should arrive between 7-10am to get checked in, while maintaining social distancing. The first 100 guests will be assigned a number and designated return time between 9:45-11:15am. Upon return, guests will make a purchase of "The Chick" or anything of greater value and scan the code '1st 100 Spot' on the CravingCredits app to officially secure your spot. If you are late, or miss return time, your spot will be awarded to next in-line. Guests much be 16 years or older, redemption begins 9/7.

**Eligible winners must be 16 years or older and are required to download the Craving Credits app. 10 winners will be drawn at the end of the day. Redemption will start 9/7.

For more information on giveaways and specials, visit https://www.facebook.com/ChickenSaladChickOwensboroKY/.

About Chicken Salad Chick

Founded by Stacy Brown in Auburn, Alabama, in 2008, Chicken Salad Chick serves full-flavored, Southern-style chicken salad made from scratch and served from the heart. With more than a dozen original chicken salad flavors as well as fresh side salads, gourmet soups, signature sandwiches and delicious desserts, Chicken Salad Chick's robust menu is a perfect fit for any guest. Today, under the leadership of Scott Deviney and the Chicken Salad Chick team, the brand has more than 165 restaurants in 17 states and is continuing its rapid expansion with both franchise and company locations. Chicken Salad Chick has received numerous accolades including rankings in Franchise Times' Fast & Serious and Fast Casual.com's top Movers and Shakers for the third consecutive year, QSR's Best Franchise Deals for the second consecutive year and Franchise Business Review's Top Food Franchises in 2020. See www.chickensaladchick.com for additional information.

Contact:

Nikki Rode

Fish Consulting

954-893-9150

[email protected]

SOURCE Chicken Salad Chick

Related Links

http://www.chickensaladchick.com


Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 16:34:49|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, inspects ecological restoration work in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province, Aug. 21, 2020. Han made a three-day trip to the cities of Nanjing, Suzhou and Wuxi in Jiangsu from Aug. 21 to Aug. 23. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao)

NANJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng has stressed efforts to enhance the driving role of innovation and further improve the ecological environment in the promotion of high-quality development.

Han, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks during a three-day trip to the cities of Nanjing, Suzhou and Wuxi in east China's Jiangsu Province from Aug. 21 to Aug. 23.

During his stay in Jiangsu, Han visited domestic and foreign enterprises and a lab, as well as an R&D and manufacturing base, to inspect the R&D and application of internet technologies, the development of high-end manufacturing and strategic emerging industries, work resumption, the implementation of government support policies and employment situation.

Work should be done to promote organizational and institutional innovations to attract talent and shore up weak links in key technologies, he said, encouraging enterprises to become more digitized and intelligent while strengthening the capabilities of system integration and independent innovation.

Meanwhile, Han urged efforts to unleash the potential of the domestic market, ensure the stability of industrial and supply chains and push for the upgrade of traditional industries and the development of emerging ones, pledging that China will firmly promote a higher level of opening-up and improve its business environment.

Han also inspected local water pollution treatment and ecological restoration work. He called for consolidating outcomes of pollution control and pushing for further progress in the protection of the Yangtze River and pollution treatment in the Taihu Lake. Enditem
By Trend

Turkeys tourism industry could generate $15 billion (TL 110 billion) by the end of 2020, a senior industry representative said, as the sector slowly recovers from the coronavirus pandemic with a rising number of international arrivals, Trend reports citing Daily Sabah.

Birol Akman, chairman of the Anatolian Tourism Operators Association and board member of the Tourism Promotion and Development Agency (TGA), told Anadolu Agency (AA) Sunday that the country could no longer reach its pre-pandemic goal of receiving 60 million tourists this year.

Yet, he added that the strict implementation of social distancing and other safety measures could help the tourism sector recover from the crisis faster.

Akman noted that the industry could see earnings as high as $15 billion by the end of the year if tourists continue to arrive at this level and the pandemic remains under control with no second wave.

According to official figures released last week, Turkeys most popular tourist destination Antalya welcomed more than 1 million tourists between Jan. 1 and Aug. 19 from 31 countries. While nearly 300,000 Ukrainians preferred the city for their holiday, 281,000 tourists came from Russia, followed by 221,000 Germans and 85,000 British tourists.

While the sector enjoys a rising number of tourists, the figures are nowhere close to that of the previous year. In 2019, tourism revenues hit $34.52 billion and nearly 52 million visitors arrived in the country, a rise of 13.7% from 2018. The Mediterranean resort city Antalya alone received more than 15 million visitors from 193 countries, setting an all-time tourism record.

However, Akman said he is hopeful that the tourism sector will recover thanks to the countrys success in both keeping the pandemic under control and its efforts to offer a safe tourism experience to visitors.

He said 50,000 tourists arrive in Antalya each day and 90% of hotels reopened their doors due to the high mobility of tourism activities in the city.

Some might think rules have been loosened in the Mediterranean region, but thats not true. Inspections continue and health measures are still in place, he said.

He also stressed that Turkey is the safest place for tourists to travel to and to receive medical treatment if the need arises.

Isolation rooms at hotels for COVID-19-positive tourists

Meanwhile, the Tourism and Culture Ministry announced a revision in its Safe Tourism Certification Program and said tourists that test positive for the virus during their vacation could isolate inside the hotels where they were spending their holiday.

According to the new decision, hotels with a safe tourism certificate are required to provide patients who tested positive during their holiday with a safe isolation room.

The decision to stay at hotels will be up to the visitors if hospitals deem that they could recover in isolation without additional medical care. COVID-19-positive tourists will not be allowed to leave their room until they test negative for the virus.

Hotels are obliged to reserve one isolation room for every 50 regular rooms. They are also not allowed to accommodate COVID-19-positive visitors with others on the same floor or they must leave at least two rooms next to the isolation room empty.

Patients will also have special personnel, who will not leave the hotels premises and will receive health screenings regularly, according to the new changes.

Hotels that do not follow the new amendments will lose their safe tourism certificate and will no longer be permitted to operate during the pandemic, the ministry said.

---

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BERLIN - The organizers of the Berlin International Film Festival say they will stop awarding separate acting prizes to women and men beginning next year.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 24/8/2020 (513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FILE - In this Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2020 file photo, workers roll out the carpet for the 70th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival, in Berlin, Germany. Organizers of the Berlin International Film Festival say they will stop awarding separate acting prizes to women and men beginning next year. Berlinale organizers said Monday, Aug. 24, 2020 that the performance awards will be defined in a gender-neutral way at next years festival. (Britta Pedersen/dpa via AP, File)

BERLIN - The organizers of the Berlin International Film Festival say they will stop awarding separate acting prizes to women and men beginning next year.

Berlinale organizers said Monday the performance awards will be defined in a gender-neutral way at next year's festival, for which a physical event is planned.

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The festival awards a Golden Bear for the best film and a series of Silver Bears, which until this year included best actor and best actress honours. Organizers said those prizes will be replaced with a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance and a Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance.

In a statement, the co-heads of the festival, Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, said "not separating the awards in the acting field according to gender comprises a signal for a more gender-sensitive awareness in the film industry."

At the same time, the Alfred Bauer Prize, which is named after the festival's founding director, will be permanently retired. The prize was suspended this year due to revelations about Bauer's role in the Nazis moviemaking bureaucracy.

Commenting on the decision to hold a physical event next year, despite uncertainties due to the coronavirus pandemic, the two directors stressed the need for a "lively relationship with the audience."

"In times of the corona pandemic, it has become even clearer that we still require analogue experience spaces in the cultural realm," they said, noting that other festivals have also resumed holding physical rather than virtual events.

The 2021 festival is scheduled for Feb. 11-21. This year's festival was one of the last major events that took place before the coronavirus pandemic largely shut down public life in Germany.
Coronavirus testing in Germany

An employee takes a throat swab sample from a woman seeking a test for possible COVID-19 infection at a test station in Bonn, Germany on Aug. 24, 2020. Credit - Andreas RentzGetty Images

Preliminary research released Monday suggests its possible to get COVID-19 twicebut experts say the news is not as concerning as that headline may seem.

The new research, which was accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, details the case of a 33-year-old man living in Hong Kong. He first tested positive for COVID-19 in late March and developed symptoms including cough, sore throat, fever and headache. He made a full recovery, but again tested positive for COVID-19 while traveling home from Europe in mid-August. This time, he did not have any symptoms.

The Hong Kong-based researchers behind the study say the mans case is the first proven example of reinfection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. There have been other documented cases of patients who tested positive for COVID-19 multiple times, but it has not been clear whether theyre truly reinfected or if some of the virus genetic material lingers within the body, leading to repeated positive tests. Viral sequencing, however, showed the Hong Kong patient was infected by two different strains of SARS-CoV-2, which suggests he indeed got sick twice.

But in some ways, the case is actually encouraging, says Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the study.

Theres no need to panic over this reinfection news, Iwasaki says. Even though he got reinfectedthis is a good example of how immunity should work in a person.

By that, Iwasaki means that the mans first infection likely protected him enough that he did not develop symptoms during his second infection. Theres no guarantee all patients immune systems will react that way, Iwasaki says, but its still a promising sign.

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Its hard to draw sweeping conclusions from one case of apparent reinfection, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia Universitys Mailman School of Public Health. (She also notes the paper was circulated without the researchers raw data, which makes it hard to assess the science.)

One potential red flag is that the researchers found that the Hong Kong patient did not test positive for antibodiesproteins the body dispatches to fight an infection, and which may help prevent future infectionsafter his first bout of COVID-19. (According to the study, the patient did develop antibodies after his second positive test.) Its possible that the first time he got sick, he was tested too early to detect antibodies, or that they were present at low levels missed by the test, the study notes. But if he truly did not develop any antibodies, his case may be an anomaly rather than an example, since most patients do develop at least some antibodies, Rasmussen says.

Studies have shown that antibody levels decrease quickly in the months after a coronavirus infection, but researchers still dont know how well, or for how long, COVID-19 antibodies provide immunity. Unfortunately, the Hong Kong patients case doesnt help clear that up. We still cant make conclusions about people who do test positive for antibodies, Rasmussen says.

Its also not clear whether the man was contagious during his second brush with coronavirus. The amount of virus in his system suggested he could pass it to others, but theres no evidence as to whether he did.

Thats an important question, Iwasaki says. If reinfected patients are contagious even if theyre asymptomatic, herd immunitythe point at which enough of a population is immune to a disease to slow its spreadwould be difficult to achieve without a vaccine.

The study is an important starting point for understanding coronavirus reinfection, but it will take more data to make any broad conclusions.

Theres been more than 24 million cases reported to date, the World Health Organizations Maria Van Kerkhove said at a briefing Monday. And we need to look at something like [the possibility for reinfection] at a population level.

If reinfection does turn out to be common, Rasmussen says, it could be an argument for vaccinating even those who have recovered from COVID-19. But right now, its difficult to apply the papers findings at scalebeyond urging everyone, whether theyve had COVID-19 or not, to wear a mask and continue practicing social distancing.
Texans have found themselves in the middle of some serious drama in Republican National Conventions in years past.

Heres a look back at memorable moments involving former Gov. John Connally, future President George H.W. Bush, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, and former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul.

TED CRUZ

The Houston Republican became Donald Trumps most significant primary challenger in 2016. In May, Cruz would drop out of the race, but not before winning 11 states and amassing the second-highest number of delegates in a battle that had frequently turned bitter.

Still, when it came time for the convention in Cleveland, Cruz was given a prime time speaking spot on the third night of the convention, just before Mike Pence would speak.

When Cruz was called on stage, he congratulated Trump on his victory, but boos rained down on him as it became clear he would not endorse Trump. The next day Cruz defended his decision by saying I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father.

RON PAUL

In 2012, Texas Congressman Ron Paul ran for president against eventual nominee Mitt Romney. Although he lost, Paul built a passionate following with his Libertarian views.

While Paul was offered a chance to speak at the convention, he had to agree to endorse Romney and to have his speech first reviewed by the Romney camp.

It wouldnt be my speech, Paul told the New York Times then. That would undo everything Ive done in the last 30 years. I dont fully endorse him for president.

After negotiations broke down, Romneys team when to Plan B  making a video tribute to Paul that resembled a movie trailer.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH

In 1980, when Houstons George H.W. Bush arrived in Detroit, he did not expect he would leave the city as Ronald Reagans running mate.

The former CIA director had lost to Reagan in the primary, but Reagan had not named a vice president as the convention started. Reagan and his team were negotiating with former President Gerald Ford about the position late into the evening when the deal fell through. At 11:38 p.m., Reagan called Bush to see if he wanted the position.

No one was more surprised than I was when I answered the phone in my hotel suite and Ronald Reagan was on the other end of the line, Bush said in his book All The Best.

Reagan would go to the floor of the convention just past midnight to announce Bush would be his vice presidential pick.

In joining the Reagan ticket, Bush gave a less than 7-minute acceptance speech on the final night of the convention.

JOHN CONNALLY

Conventions in the 1970s were very different. In 1976, Ronald Reagan took to the floor of the convention to challenge the renomination of President Gerald Ford. Although Ford appeared to have enough delegates to win, Reagan triggered a procedural vote that was seen as a key test to whether Ford would survive.

It was right before that vote that former Texas Gov. John Connally was tasked with delivering a speech to distracted delegates in Kansas City as vote wrangling was ongoing.

Connally had been a Democrat as governor but three years before his speech he had switched to the Republican Party. There was a lot riding on the speech. Ford still hadnt named a running mate, and Connally was seen as a potential vice presidential candidate that could help Ford win southern states against Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter.

But Connallys speech received mostly polite applause as he failed to mention Ford or Reagan by name during the nearly 30-minute talk. Texas Monthly would call the speech a clunker and Ford bypassed Connally, instead picking U.S. Sen. Bob Dole to be his running mate. Connally would run for president in 1980, but his campaign never got far off the ground.

Watch Connallys speech here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4901321/user-clip-connolly1976
(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administrations increased scrutiny of college endowments and pension funds backing Chinese firms is creating more roadblocks for venture funds looking for the next big tech winner.

Just six U.S.-dollar funds with exposure to China have sought to raise capital this year, down from 21 last year, according to researcher Preqin. Of those, only one has managed to complete a preliminary closing, compared with 10 last year.

Its a drastic reversal of the venture boom that fueled Chinas tech industry in the past decade. The U.S. State Department has asked colleges and universities to divest from Chinese holdings in their endowments, warning of potentially more onerous measures on holding the shares. Thats on top of a wider campaign to curb Chinese tech champions and slow the money flowing into what are some of the worlds largest tech companies, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and TikTok owner Bytedance Ltd.

Read more: U.S. Warns Colleges to Divest China Stocks on Delisting Risk

A total decoupling of U.S. funding and Chinese technology would also hurt American investors, said JP Gan, founding partner of Ince Capital, which last year raised $352 million for its first fund with the backing of University of Pittsburgh, Duke University and Carnegie Mellon University.

U.S. pension funds and endowments have been the biggest beneficiaries from investing in the China growth story, he said.

While some venture funds including DCM and Jeneration Capital were able to close financing rounds this year, those efforts started last year. Preqin tallies the initiation of a fund based on public filings such as with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The coronavirus has hit funds globally. In the U.S., while fund launches didnt see as drastic a fall in relative terms, new funds with U.S. exposure seeking money fell by 6% to 646. The number of funds that managed to complete an interim closing fell 76% to 14 compared with last year.

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Investors raising U.S.-dollar funds to target Chinas fast-growing tech industry usually seek backing from American pensions or endowments. That backing has helped create some of the biggest private tech firms like artificial-intelligence giant SenseTime Group Ltd. -- currently fundraising at an $8.5 billion valuation -- and Jack Mas Ant Group, which could be worth $210 billion based on Bernstein estimates.

Some of the worlds biggest private equity funds, including Silver Lake Management LLC, Carlyle Group Inc. and Warburg Pincus LLC, have pinned their growth on investing in Chinese companies. All three put at least $500 million in Ant and stand to generate up to 40% returns when the firm goes public.

Chinese companies can still look to listing in Hong Kong, allowing investors to realize their gains. Ant Group for example is seeking to raise about $30 billion in Hong Kong and Shanghai, people familiar have said. And in recent years, investors shaken by volatile markets have increasingly shifted to parking their money with the biggest funds with a proven track record.

Read more: Ant IPO Bonanza Looms for Silver Lake, Carlyle, Warburg

The State Departments letter warned endowments it would be prudent to divest from Chinese stocks in the likely outcome of a wholesale de-listing of Chinese companies from U.S. exchanges by the end of next year.

The U.S. Senate in May passed a bill that threatens to remove all Chinese companies from U.S stock exchanges, unless a U.S. accounting regulator is allowed to inspect their auditors. The House of Representatives has also acted on its version of the bill, making it more likely that some form of legislation will be enacted.

Those bills were initiated in the fallout of scandals at Luckin Coffee Inc. and TAL Education Group.

Read more: U.S. Moves to Tighten Regulations for Chinese Stock Listings

The global market value of Chinese firms facing delisting from the U.S. totaled $1.9 trillion at the end of 2019, according to Will Cai, a partner and head of capital markets at law firm Cooley Asia.

These companies have generally outperformed their American peers. The BNY Mellon China ADR Index, which tracks U.S.-listed Chinese firms, surged more than 389% in the past 16 years, versus 208% for the S&P 500 Index.

American investors could lose the opportunity to cash out their billions of dollars of investment before a company starts generating returns, and lose a channel to invest in growth, said Cai.

(Updates with Ants IPO in 10th paragraph)

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.
Austria's chancellor Sebastian Kurz. His government has relatively warm ties with Russia - AP

Austria on Monday expelled a Russian diplomat for reported industrial espionage, prompting protests and a tit-for-tat response from Moscow.

The Austrian foreign ministry said the diplomats behaviour was not in accordance with the Vienna Convention, without providing further details.

But the local tabloid Kronen Zeitung said the diplomat had for years worked as an intelligence handler, running a source in a major technology company who recently confessed to espionage.

The Russian Embassy said it was outraged by the unfounded decision of the Austrian authorities, which is damaging to constructive relations.

Moscows foreign ministry later said it would expel an Austrian diplomat in response.

Austria and Russia have relatively warm ties. Two years ago Karin Kneissl, then the Austrian Foreign Minister, raised eyebrows when she invited Vladimir Putin to her wedding and shared a dance with the Russian President (below).

Austria's Foreign Minister Kneissl dances with Russia's President Putin at her wedding in Gamlitz - REUTERS

Vienna was one of the few European capitals not to expel Russian diplomats in solidarity with the UK in the fallout of the 2018 Skripal spy poisoning in Salisbury.

The expulsion is not the first espionage incident to trouble relations between the two countries this year.

In June, a retired Austrian army colonel was found guilty of spying for Russias military intelligence service for more than two decades. He was sentenced to three years.

Vienna is home to a large number of Russian diplomats working at the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe and the UN.
When algae and bacteria with different swimming gaits gather in large groups, their flocking behaviour diminishes, something that may reduce the risk of falling victim to aquatic predators. This finding is presented in an international study led from Lund University in Sweden.

Flocking behaviour arises seemingly spontaneously in a group of independent individuals without a clear leader. This behaviour occurs among many types of organisms, from bacteria to mammals and humans. In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at Lund University examined the flocking behaviour of two different types of microorganism. By studying the backwashes - fluid flows - created around the organisms as they swim, the researchers have been able to find out how they affect each other.

"We have looked at a mixture of two types of swimmers. Those that use 'breaststroke', namely certain types of algae, and those that swim with a 'propeller' behind them, like most bacteria", says Joakim Stenhammar, chemistry researcher at Lund University.

Previous research has shown that microorganisms with the same swimming technique can sense, and are affected by, each other's fluid flows. This means they can move in a synchronised way over long length scales several times faster than an individual bacterium can swim.

However, in the new study the Lund researchers could establish through using computer simulations and theoretical models that this flocking behaviour completely disappears when microorganisms with different swimming styles are mixed.

"Their collective fluid flows then behave as though the individuals could not sense each other's presence. You could say that the microorganisms gain a cloak of invisibility", says Joakim Stenhammar.

The new study is an important piece of the puzzle in understanding how flocking behaviour works in biological systems. Now the work will continue with the study of increasingly detailed models of how actual microorganisms behave. This will enable comparisons between the theoretical results and experimental observations.

"On a biological level there may be advantages from symbiotic ecosystems in which bacteria and algae live together. The suppression of flocking behaviour may reduce the risk of being eaten, as many aquatic predators sense the fluid flows to localise prey", concludes Joakim Stenhammar.

###
The event was jointly held by Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF) Central Committee, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations on the occasion of Vietnams 75th National Day (September 2).

The book consists of 75 works and seven creative science-technology solutions selected from 157 works proposed by ministries, organisations and localities, said VFF President Tran Thanh Man.

The book aims to encourage individuals, agencies, organisations and enterprises to strongly engage in creative activities, scientific research and technology development in all fields, he added.

Speaking at the ceremony, Politburo member and Permanent member of the Secretariat Tran Quoc Vuong spoke highly of applicable creative scientific and technological works.

He proposed that relevant agencies should continue encouraging sectors at all levels, as well as Vietnamese people at home and abroad, to join efforts in creative works and the research and application of scientific and technological advances, thus contributing to national growth.
(Newser)  Scott Peterson is still a murderer in the eyes of the law, but he is no longer on death row because of it. California's state Supreme Court upheld the high-profile murder convictions for Peterson, now 47, in the deaths of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn child in 2002, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. However, the court ruled 7-0 that the the judge in his case made "clear and significant" mistakes during the death-penalty phase of the trial, including the dismissal of jurors who had expressed opposition to the death penalty. That left a jury predisposed to handing out capital punishment, argued Peterson's lawyers, per the Modesto Bee.

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"While a court may dismiss a prospective juror as unqualified to sit on a capital case if the jurors views on capital punishment would substantially impair his or her ability to follow the law, a juror may not be dismissed merely because he or she has expressed opposition to the death penalty as a general matter," Justice Leondra Kruger wrote, per KCRA3. Prosecutors will now have to decide whether they want to retry the death-penalty portion of the case. Peterson, who continues to proclaim innocence, was convicted in 2004 of killing Laci in their Modesto home on Christmas Eve. The bodies washed up on the shore of San Francisco Bay months later, near the spot where Scott Peterson said he had gone fishing. Laci, 27, was 8 months' pregnant at the time of her death. (Her mother remembered their last visit.)
" " Dyneema is trademarked as the world's strongest fiber. Photo courtesy of Dyneema

Chemistry has allowed humans to create a myriad of new inventions and improve on innumerable existing ones. Through research, we've created synthetic materials that are stronger than the metals we've used for centuries. One synthetic fiber invented in the last several decades is being implemented into many protective gear and vehicles because of its sheer strength and durability. Militaries, law enforcement and civilian industries are using the synthetic fiber called Dyneema to protect lives and equipment.

Dyneema is a high-strength synthetic fiber that is capable of protecting an individual or vehicle from threats like an improvised explosive device (IED) or shots from an AK47 [source: Dyneema ]. If you took a block of Dyneema and block of steel, on a weight-for-weight basis the block of Dyneema would be 15 times stronger than the steel block [source: Dyneema]. The lightweight fiber is strong and moldable, yet it can withstand significant explosions and extreme weather conditions. There are other synthetic fibers similar in characteristics, like Kevlar, but only Dyneema is trademarked as the world's strongest fiber [source: Dyneema].

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Dyneema is advantageous to police forces and militaries not only because it's able to withstand extreme conditions and explosions, but also because it's lightweight and can be applied to many kinds of vehicle designs and specifications. Even though Dyneema is being used to help save lives and protect vehicles, it isn't only used in these life-threatening situations. Dyneema is also created for commercial use in the shipping, medical, and metalworking industries as well.

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Read the next page to find out what makes Dyneema the world's strongest fiber.
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Energy companies moved to cut production at US Gulf Coast oil refineries on Monday after shutting half the area's offshore crude oil output and evacuating employees as back-to-back storms Marco and Laura take aim at the coast.

Tropical Storms Marco and Laura, a rare double-team assault on key US oil regions, threaten to bring days of heavy rains and strong winds this week. Producers have shut more than 1 million barrels per day of Gulf Coast offshore oil production, 9 per cent of the nation's total output.

Workers were evacuated from at least 114 offshore platforms over the weekend, according to the U.S. Interior Department's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

Tropical Storm Marco began falling apart Monday, easing one threat to the Gulf Coast but setting the stage for the arrival of Laura on Thursday as a potentially supercharged Category 3 hurricane with winds topping 110mph and a storm surge that could swamp entire towns.

Motiva Enterprises on Monday started preparations to idle its large Port Arthur, Texas, crude oil refinery, said people familiar with plant operations. Total SA also reduced production at its refinery in the same city, according to people familiar with its operation.

Gulf Coast refiners and offshore producers account for 45 per cent of all US oil processing and 17 per cent of oil output.

Vessel traffic was closed at the Ports of New Orleans, Baton Rouge and from the lower Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the largest Gulf Coast oil-export facility, also halted operations at its marine terminal on Sunday.

Other refineries, including Exxon Mobil, Valero Energy and Royal Dutch Shell, are planning to maintain operations at Louisiana plants as the first cyclone arrives on Monday, people familiar with those refineries said. Storm Marco is expected to drop up to five inches of rain along the Louisiana coast.

Scroll down for video

Tropical Storms Marco and Laura, a rare double-team assault on key US oil regions, threaten to bring days of heavy rains and strong winds this week, but by 4pm on Monday, Marco had started to fizzle out with 40mph winds

As of 4pm on Monday, there were some areas in Louisiana that were on a Tropical Storm Watch

Valero on Monday began a partial shutdown of its Port Arthur plant, while Exxon's Beaumont, Texas, plant was weighing plans for dealing with Storm Laura.

During 2017's Hurricane Harvey, which occurred three years ago this week, five feet of rain fell on east Texas, forcing Motiva to halt its Port Arthur plant operations for nearly two weeks and others to take shorter shut-downs.

The mayor of Port Arthur on Monday said he was monitoring storm forecasts and was considering a mandatory evacuation of residents that would begin on Tuesday at 6am.

Still a tropical storm for now, Laura churned just south of Cuba after killing nearly a dozen people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where it knocked out power and caused flooding in the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola.

Laura was not expected to weaken over land before moving into warm, deep Gulf waters that forecasters said could bring rapid intensification.

'We're only going to dodge the bullet so many times. And the current forecast for Laura has it focused intently on Louisiana,' Gov John Bel Edwards told a news briefing on Monday.

Shrimp trawlers and fishing boats were tied up in a Louisiana harbor ahead of the storms. Red flags warned swimmers away from the pounding surf.

Laura was not expected to weaken over land before moving into warm, deep Gulf waters that forecasters said could bring rapid intensification

As of 5pm, forecasters have issued Tropical Storm Warnings for the Florida Keys (bottom right)

Refineries, including Exxon Mobil, Valero Energy (pictured) and Royal Dutch Shell, are planning to maintain operations at Louisiana plants as the first cyclone arrives on Monday, people familiar with those refineries said

Electric utility trucks are staged along Lake Pontchartrain as in preparation for Tropical Storm Marco on Monday in Kenner, Louisiana

Cobie Brown and Ken Allen (l-r) fill sandbags as they prepare for the arrival of Tropical Storm Marco and possibly Hurricane Laura on Monday in Morgan City, Louisiana

A food bank that has been twice as busy as normal since March providing meals to people affected by the pandemic prepared to shut down for a few days because of the weather, but not before distributing a last round of provisions to the needy.

'We're very tired,' said Lawrence DeHart, director of Terrebonne Churches United Foodbank in Houma.

State emergencies were declared in Louisiana and Mississippi, and shelters were being opened with cots set farther apart, among other measures designed to curb infections.

'The virus is not concerned that we have hurricanes coming, and so it's not going to take any time off and neither can we,' Edwards said.

Louisiana was trying to avoid opening state-run shelters because of the COVID-19 threat. The governor encouraged evacuees to stay with relatives or in hotels. But officials said they made virus-related preparations at state shelters in case they are needed.

As Marco collapsed, the National Hurricane Center canceled all tropical storm watches and warnings. Marco's winds died down to 40mph as it sloshed 40 miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River.

By midday Monday, an airplane monitoring the system could only find a small area of wind strong enough to keep Marco a tropical storm, and those winds were not near the ragged center. Because strong crosswinds were decapitating the storm, Marco was expected to lose tropical storm designation late Monday, the hurricane center said.

While Marco weakened, Laura's potential got stronger, and forecasters raised the possibility of a major hurricane that would pummel western Louisiana and eastern Texas from late Wednesday into Thursday.

Once Laura passes Cuba, the system could quickly strengthen over warm water, which acts as fuel to supercharge the storm. Forecasters predicted winds of 105mph before landfall, but some models showed an even stronger storm with winds exceeding 110mph.

According to Weather.com the center of Laura is most likely to make landfall somewhere from the upper Texas coast to the southwest or central Louisiana coast.

'There has never been anything we've seen like this before, where you can have possibly two hurricanes hitting within miles of each over a 48-hour period,' said Benjamin Schott, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service's Slidell, Louisiana, office.

Louisiana residents (pictured pumping gas at a Costco on Sunday) prepared to flee the state ahead of tropical storms Marco and Laura

Residents of New Orleans were seen standing in long lines before entering a Costo to pick up supplies as they prepare for the two storms on Sunday

Robert Nguyen buys gas for his generator in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, on Sunday in advance of Marco, which is expected to make landfall late Monday

Paul Humphrey, of New Orleans, loads plywood into his truck, to board a friend's home in preparation for the arrival of storms Marco and Laura

Workers board up shops in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Sunday in advance of Tropical Storm Marco, which is expected to make landfall on the Southern Louisiana coast

The combination of the rain and storm surge in a day or two means 'you're looking at a potential for a major flood event that lasts for some time,' said weather service tropical program coordinator Joel Cline. 'And that's not even talking about the wind.

Together, the two storms could bring a total of two feet of rain to parts of Louisiana, perhaps raising the storm surge to more than 10 feet along the Louisiana coast and pushing water 30 miles up the rivers in a worst-case scenario, said Schott.

That would mean that some towns along lakes and rivers could be swamped.

The double punch comes just days before the August 29 anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which breached the levees in New Orleans, flattened much of the Mississippi coast and killed as many as 1,800 people.

August Creppel, chief of the United Houma Nation, was worried about the group's 17,000 members, spread out over six parishes along the Louisiana coast.

He took part in a ceremony Saturday at the Superdome in New Orleans that included Native American singing and prayers to commemorate the hurricane's 15th anniversary.

'We know our people are going to get hit. We just don't know who yet,' said Creppel, who has been in contact with the Red Cross to get supplies once the weather eases.

For the residents of the Louisiana coast, 'they're certainly lucky that Marco is not worse than it is,' said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. 'This will come and go, and they can get ready for Laura. That'll be the main attraction.'

Meanwhile, Laura drenched much of Cuba as it headed northwest at 20mph with top sustained winds of 60mph.

Forecasters have also issued a tropical storm warning for parts of the Florida Keys as Tropical Storm Laura makes its way through the Caribbean. The warning affects the middle and lower Keys from Craig Key to Key West.

Codi Thompson (left) and Dexter Thompson enjoy the beach as Tropical Storm Marco makes its way through the Gulf of Mexico on Monday in Biloxi, Mississippi

A kite surfer enjoys the wind in Lauderdale, Florida, on Monday. Parts of Florida were issued a Tropical Storm Warning ahead of Tropical Storm Laura

Storm clouds from Tropical Storm Marco approach above a line of sand bags in Jean Lafitte, Louisiana, on Monday

Aureland Moak (left) helps Darren Anderson unload sand bags in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, on Monday. South Louisiana is bracing for the impact of two storms in one week with Tropical Storm Marco making landfall Monday night

Workers protect some windows and glass doors of the Paseo del Prado Hotel during preparations for the arrival of Tropical Storm Laura in Havana on Monday

According to the National Weather Service, tropical-storm-force winds are expected in the lower and middle Keys later Monday, 'particularly during squalls associated with passing rain bands'. The area may also see winds ranging between 25 to 35mph and gusts as high as 45 to 50mph in squalls.

On the Louisiana coast at Holly Beach in an area nicknamed the 'Cajun Riviera,' Eric Monceaux was frantically packing what he could take with him. Hit first by Hurricane Rita in 2005 and again by Ike in 2008, he does not plan to come back if Laura does its worse.

'That would be strike three,' he said. 'Im 62, and I gave it two strikes. The third one is "strike three, you're out" like a baseball game.'

Closer to New Orleans In Belle Chasse, Chris Leopold stocked up on propane at a hardware store after a weekend spent getting ready for rough weather.

'You pick up everything off the ground, bring in what you can, tie down any boats you have, empty your refrigerator, cut the power, cut the water and say your prayers on the way out,' he said.

Many Louisiana residents started preparing to flee the state ahead of both Marco and Laura on Sunday.

Along the main drag on the barrier island of Grand Isle, south of New Orleans, Starfish Restaurant manager Nicole Fantiny could see an exodus of people driving off the island. 'They are all packing up and leaving,' she said.

Fantiny wasn't planning to leave, at least for Marco, but she was anxious about the possible one-two punch from both storms. Her husband works with the towns fire and police departments, so she said they are always among the last ones to leave. 'My house was built in 1938 so I think we're good,' she said hopefully.

This NOAA satellite image shows Tropical Storm Laura moving south of Cuba (right) and Tropical Storm Marco in the US Gulf Coast (above)

Greg Johnson (left) and Isaac King work together to fill sand bags on Courthouse Road in Gulfport, Mississippi, on Sunday, as coastal residents prepared for impact of two possible back-to-back hurricanes

Workers for the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - West, close floodgates in Harvey, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans on Monday

The floodgates in Harvey, Louisiana, were closed ahead of Tropical Storm Marco's landfall on Monday

Marco had grown into a hurricane early Sunday, but the National Hurricane Center said its sustained winds decreased to 70mph after nightfall and then to 40mph by noon on Monday.

President Donald Trump approved Louisiana's request for federal help related to the pair of storms, Gov Edwards said in a news release Sunday.

He had submitted the request to Trump and the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Saturday.

Trump also approved an emergency declaration for Mississippi, according to a White House news release late Sunday.

University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy warned that anyone in New Orleans should be alarmed by the threat. At issue from possible dual hits: whether the levee system can withstand the stress, he said.

In New Orleans, the city's aging drainage system has been a particular point of concern in recent years after an intense 2017 storm flooded streets and raised questions about the system's viability.

Because the city is surrounded by levees and parts are below sea level, rainwater must be pumped out to prevent flooding.

Any storm system that sits over the city and dumps rain for extended periods of time, or bands of rain that come in rapid succession, is a cause for concern.

Laura could hit further west in the Gulf, possibly into Texas instead of Louisiana, he said. If it hits Louisiana that would break the record for two named storms hitting the state so close together. The current record is five days apart in 1885, Klotzbach said.

And there's one long-term possibility that adds to the risk. As Laura moves north after landfall into Oklahoma, there's a chance it will be caught up into the jet stream, travel east and emerge over North Carolina and return to tropical storm status, McNoldy and Klotzbach said.

Laura caused the deaths of at least 11 people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti (pictured), while knocking out power and causing flooding in the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola

A woman is helped by a man to cross a flooded street during the passing of Tropical Storm Laura in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sunday

People look at a street destroyed by heavy rains caused by tropical storm Laura, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on Sunday

A couple takes some of their belongings out to the street after their home flooded during heavy rains caused by tropical storm Laura, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on Sunday

New Orleans resident Matthew Meloy and two friends loaded a van with cases of bottled water in the parking lot of a New Orleans Walmart Sunday. He said they still have a lot of storm preparations ahead.

'Check the batteries, flashlights, stocking up on food and trying to park the car on the highest point possible we can find,' he said. 'I already spent like 40 minutes this morning filling up the tanks in the cars.'

Tourists were strolling through the New Orleans French Quarter under overcast skies as workers boarded up shop windows. Louisiana corrections officials were evacuating 500 inmates from a jail in Plaquemines Parish, near the coast, to another facility in preparation for the storms.

Laura caused the deaths of at least 11 people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, while knocking out power and causing flooding in the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola.

The deaths reportedly included a 10-year-old girl whose home was hit by a tree and a mother and young son who were crushed by a collapsing wall.

Haitian civil protection officials said they had received reports a 10-year-old girl was killed when a tree fell on a home in the southern coastal town of Anse-a-Pitres, on the border with the Dominican Republic.

Haiti's prime minister said at least eight other people died and two were missing.

In the Dominican Republic, relatives told reporters a collapsed wall killed a mother and her young son.

Hundreds of thousands were without power in the Dominican Republic amid heavy flooding in both countries.
Asus Zenfone 7 series has leaked yet again, just days ahead of its official launch on August 26.

Asus Zenfone 7 series has leaked yet again, just days ahead of its official launch on August 26. The Zenfone 7 and Zenfone 7 Pro have been the centre of the rumour mill from quite some time now, with key specifications and even details on pricing leaked earlier this month. Today, details about the Zenfone 7 have been posted online in multiple leaks that give us a look at the design renders of the new phone by Asus.

The new leaks were posted online on Slashleaks including a picture of the retail box that reveals key specifications and renders of a transparent case for the Zenfone 7. These new details corroborated with our earlier report on the specifications of the Zenfone 7. The box reveals that the Zenfone 7 features a 6.67-inch Full HD+ display and is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor with a triple camera setup consisting of a primary 64MP camera, a 12MP secondary camera and an 8MP camera. The phone will come in multiple variants but the box details this variant as the one with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage.

Another leak reveals the Zenfone 7s transparent case and we can see that there are three cameras housed in the Flip camera mechanism. It can also be noted here that the Zenfone 7 is looking to feature a side-mounted fingerprint sensor as opposed to the rumoured in-display sensor. As per an earlier leak, the Zenfone 7 was spotted using a Goodix gf3626 sensor which was expected to be a side-mounted fingerprint sensor.

It is also rumoured that the Zenfone 7 could feature a 60Hz display panel and it is the Zenfone 7 Pro that gets a high refresh-rate screen instead. Moreover, the retail packaging of the upcoming phone was also leaked online and posted on Twitter alongside a picture showcasing the back panel of the Zenfone 7.

Asus Zenfone 7 leaked specifications and pricing

Asus Zenfone 7 is slated to feature a 6.7-inch LCD screen with a Full HD+ (2340 x 1080 pixels) resolution and 60Hz refresh rate. The Zenfone 7 will also come with a dedicated microSD card slot allowing users to expand the storage further. It is expected to come with a triple camera setup, housed in a flip camera module. The main camera, according to the leak is a 64MP Sony IMX686 followed by a 12MP ultra-wide-angle camera and an 8MP camera

The latest Zenfone 7 leak also corroborates some earlier rumours that the Zenfone 7 will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset while the Zenfone 7 Pro is expected to come with the Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset paired with up to 16GB RAM. The rumoured pricing of the phone pits at EUR 499 for the base variant with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage and EUR 549 for the maxed-out variant with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage.

This roughly translates to a starting price of around Rs 44,000 by direct conversion. Considering that the Asus 6Z was launched in India starting at Rs 31,999, we expect the company to go aggressive with the pricing of the Zenfone 7/Asus 7Z in India. However, theres currently no word as to when the Zenfone 7 will launch in India.
Clinton, N.Y.  Police are investigating an attempted abduction that happened near the Hamilton College campus in Clinton Saturday morning.

State Police said a woman, who was not a student, was walking along College Hill Road around 8 a.m. when a man approached her, threatened her and demanded that she come with him.

The woman yelled for help. As a bystander approached, the man ran away. She was not injured. Police do not believe the man was armed.

State police described the man was a white man in his early 20s, around 5-feet-6-inches tall and medium build, with dark hair and blue eyes. An alert issued by Hamilton College on Saturday said the man was dressed completely in black.

The incident happened near the Half Way House, a stone gazebo on College Hill Road east of campus.

State police ask anyone that was in the area of the Half Way House between 7 and 8 a.m. Saturday and may have seen someone fitting the suspect description to call police investigators at (315) 366-6000.
The acutely ill Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has arrived in Germany from Siberia for treatment.

He is in a coma after drinking what his supporters suspect was poisoned tea; they accuse the authorities of trying to conceal a crime.



Doctors treating him in Omsk had insisted on Friday that he was too ill to be moved.



But they later said his condition was stable enough for the flight. His wife Yulia is travelling with him.



On Saturday morning, Mr Navalny's medical evacuation flight - paid for by the German non-governmental organisation Cinema for Peace - landed at Tegel airport in Berlin. He is being treated at the Charite hospital in the German capital.



The founder of the Cinema for Peace Foundation, activist and filmmaker Jaka Bizilj, told reporters outside the hospital that Mr Navalny's condition was "very worrying".



"It's not only about the question if he will survive this," he said. "It's a question what kind of damage there is, if he will survive this and come back to normal fully."



Mr Navalny's personal doctor, Anastasia Vasilieva, was not allowed to see him while he was in hospital in Russia. But she said she was hopeful he could recover now that he was in Germany.



"I'm sure that they can treat him and do everything to eliminate this toxic agent from his body."



Medical staff treating Mr Navalny at the hospital in Omsk said before his flight that his life was not in immediate danger.



Mr Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, earlier tweeted: "Massive thanks to everyone for their support. The struggle for Alexei's life and health is just beginning."



Ms Yarmysh said it was a pity that doctors had taken so long to approve his flight as the plane and the right documents had been ready since Friday morning.



Mr Navalny fell ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on Thursday, and his plane made an emergency landing in Omsk.



A photograph on social media appeared to show him drinking from a cup at a Tomsk airport cafe before the flight. His team suspects a poisonous substance was put in his tea.



Disturbing video appeared to show a stricken Mr Navalny howling in agony on the flight. Passenger Pavel Lebedev said he had heard the activist "screaming in pain".



Source: BBC









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Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 01:39:22|Editor: huaxia

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A picture of a victim is seen among candles during a mourning ceremony for the victims of the Ukrainian plane crash, in Tehran, Iran, on Jan. 11, 2020. (Xinhua/Ahmad Halabisaz)

All the plane's parameters were normal until the impact of a first missile, says an Iranian official while revealing details of final report on crashed Ukrainian plane.

TEHRAN, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Head of Iran's Civil Aviation Organization revealed on Sunday details of Iran's final report on the crash of Ukrainian passenger plane PS752 that occurred near Tehran in January, official news agency IRNA reported.

According to the data extracted from the jetliner's flight recorders, all the plane's parameters were normal until the impact of a first missile at 6:14:56 a.m. (Tehran time), Touraj Dehghani Zangeneh said.

After the impact, the black box inside the flight cabin continued to record the voices of four people of the crew who noticed the situation was "abnormal" and tried to retake control of the aircraft.

The recording stopped 19 seconds later, before a second missile was shot and arrived near the aircraft, 25 seconds after the first strike.

Because the first missile explosion sent shrapnel into the plane, disrupting both the CVR and FBR aircraft's black boxes, it is not possible to analyze the activity and effects of the second missile, Dehghani added.

The data were extracted in France by French technicians between July 17 and 24, in presence of representatives of the United States, Ukraine, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, without technical difficulties.

Dehghani Zangeneh thanked the French Civil Aviation Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for its cooperation.

The Ukraine PS752 flight was hit by Iranian missiles after taking off in Tehran's airspace on Jan. 8, killing all 176 people onboard. Iran said that its forces "accidentally" shot down the plane. 
New Delhi: Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha and senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Monday that a letter signed by him and 22 other party leaders was being misconstrued because only parts of the document, addressed to interim party chief Sonia Gandhi, were out in the public domain.

Speaking to HT after an acrimonious Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting, he also clarified that the letter, which criticised the partys functioning and called for more transparent internal processes, was not against Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi.

What I said at the working committee meeting was that unfortunately most of the people have not seen the full text of the letter. Because in the leak, which is unfortunate, only some portion of the letter has come out. Without going into the full text of the letter, some of our Congress colleagues yesterday said that this was being done at the behest of the BJP. I have said that if any of those people and leaders will prove that it was done at the behest of the BJP, I will resign. In that context, I said that I will resign if they prove it and I did not ask Rahul Gandhi to prove that. I have not resigned, he said.

In the letter, Azad and others sought a complete overhaul of the organisation, including full-time president, a parliamentary board if a someone outside the Gandhi family became the party chief and collective leadership. Azad had sent the letter to Sonia Gandhi on August 9 and then a reminder on August 17, after which Sonia Gandhi wrote to party general secretary in-charge of organisation, KC Venugopal, to begin deliberations to put in place a process to elect a new president. Azad read the letter out at the Congress working committee meeting on Monday.

Azad said there were rumours for the past one month that Rahul Gandhi did not want to return as Congress president and that Sonia Gandhi did not want to continue as the partys interim chief beyond August 10, when she completed one-year term.

There were also suggestions that Sonia Gandhi might appoint somebody to the post and the letter was written in that context, he told the CWC.

Azad said the letter was written to urge the Congress president to discuss and consult with them before appointing somebody to the post. Should a third person be appointed to the top post he or she has to do certain things such as form the parliamentary board, be active and have collective leadership, he told the CWC.

Azad further said the letter was actually dos and donts for the third person and that they should be consulted before appointing anybody because of the importance of the position of party president.

Addressing a news conference at the party headquarters in Delhi after the meeting, Venugopal said Azad told him that all of them are part and parcel of the CWC resolution, which noted, among other things, that inner-party issues cannot be deliberated through the media or in public fora. The CWC urges and advises all concerned to raise such issues only in party fora in the interest of propriety and discipline, the resolution read.

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The beautiful and unique geography of the islands of The Bahamas make it a favorite destination for tourists and adventure-seekers alike and a core part of the Bahamian landscape is welcoming visitors with open arms to experience local food, art and more.

In September of 2019, Hurricane Dorian pummeled The Bahamas for over two days, thoroughly devastating the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama and forcing many people there to evacuate.

The storms destruction coupled with the decrease in population and visitors caused many local businesses on the islands to close either to make repairs or to determine if reopening was even an option. The Bahamas have weathered strong storms before, but none were like Dorian. It was the most intense and formidable storm to hit The Bahamas in recorded history and the aftermath left business owners wondering if operations would ever go back to normal.

Thanks to the American Red Cross and the Bahamas Red Cross, some local business owners are getting help as they try to pick up the pieces.

To support local entrepreneurs, the American Red Cross has partnered with the organizations CORE and Mercy Corps to support micro, small and medium-sized businesses in Abaco, Grand Bahama and the surrounding cays by providing cash grants to help recover from the storm and make improvements. Many owners are also given access to business training on skills like accounting and marketing and free business mentorship.

On Sweetings Cay off the east end of the island of Grand Bahama, small roadside shops and restaurants were hit especially hard with the almost complete lack of tourism after the storm. Winifred Mitchell lives a short walk from the empty lot where her restaurantdestroyed by Hurricane Dorianused to be.. Winifred says the cash she got from the Red Cross offered hope and optimism for the future.

By mid-March, many businesses already affected by Dorian were further plunged into uncertainty as a global pandemic took hold of the islands. The Red Cross continues to provide grants to businesses in an effort to help them endure both crises.

On Abaco island, a mother/daughter printing and embroidery business started overhauling their business model after Dorian when the pandemic created more challenges. Ruth Saunders says Dorian tore the roof off the trailer that housed all their printing machines including a new investment that didnt last.

We bought a brand-new machine, a brand new 60-inch printer two months before the storm and its in the ocean, Ruth said. Together with her daughter Blair, they converted their business from an office space they could no longer afford to a new mobile business inside the repaired trailer with new equipment making signs and prints thanks to a grant funded by the Red Cross. Ruth says customers have been steady as many other people are replacing signs and things that were lost in Dorian. They say its hard work in the meantime as the COVID-19 has presented new challenges, but they are determined.

We are grateful and thankful that you considered us and as you can see we have not let you down we are pushing forward day after day after daywere very grateful and very thankful for every dollar, Ruth said.

The American Red Cross and Bahamas Red Cross will provide ongoing support to people made vulnerable by Hurricane Dorian and the COVID-19 pandemic. Over $760,000 has already been distributed to local businesses through these grants.

American Red Cross in the Bahamas

The American Red Cross has been working in The Bahamas since Hurricane Dorian hit in September 2019, supporting the Bahamas Red Cross and the global network of Red Cross and Red Crescent network to distribute emergency relief items, food, water, and millions of dollars in cash--in addition to repair work and rental assistance to people affected. Thanks to the amazing generosity of the American public, the Red Cross is able to continue providing critical support to families still working to overcome the intense challenges presented by a hurricane. In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Red Cross continues to keep safety the main priority and is adapting our programs and efforts to follow all health guidelines while still delivering our mission. For more information on Hurricane Dorian recovery, visit www.redcross.org/dorian.
But pushing back the deadline would only kick the budget crisis down the road. The two parties are at loggerheads over several key issues  including judicial appointments and the annexation of West Bank settlements  and the government has been beset by infighting. Gantz also complained that Netanyahu left him and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi in the dark about the deal announced earlier this month to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates.
The Crown: Part Twenty-One By Michael Moriarty

Before I add the postlude commentary to the Aberfan episode by reminding my readers of how vitally and profoundly important I consider this television series to be?! I will look, and occasionally, a rather savage kind of examination of not only THE CROWN but the extraordinary woman who, most fearfully and humbly took on the weight of what undeniably appears to be a most pathetically dying institution, that of the dinosaur-like monarchy! The most recent in the historically longest line of Emperors and Empresses of the now, most nostalgic notion of The British Empire! Now merely a Commonwealth?! In some corners of the very Marxist New World Order, an enemy of the future! Regarding that?! We shall see. Upon concluding Aberfan, there are the following written statements on the television screen: The Aberfan disaster claimed 144 lives

Of which 116 were children. According to those close to her,

The Queens delayed response to the disaster

Remains her biggest regret as Sovereign. Since 1966,

She has returned to the village

More than any other member

Of the Royal Family.

Bubbikins! Title of the next episode. In this episode, in some corner of an increasingly troubled Athens, Greece, the indisputably wealthy Mother Superior in an Order of Nuns she created herself, had, at some time, been wealthy enough to pay for the housing and to supply her fellow nuns with the money to support their good deeds. Her money has obviously run out. The character who introduces us to this nunnery, once he hears that the Mother Superior is penniless?! He says that the Order must be disbanded. Cut to Washington D.C. and a television interview with the Duke of Edinburgh, husband to Queen Elizabeth of England on Meet the Press. The first question by the interviewer to Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, is why, if hes married to The Queen, isnt he called King, instead of Duke?! To which the Duke acknowledges the seeming inconsistency, calling it Monstrously unjust! Then the matter of salary for the Royal Couple. Apparently the Queen has not had a pay raise in over 15 years. Phillip acknowledges that as fact. Meanwhile, in New York a British journalist, in America to cover a Muhammed Ali story, calls his editor to sell a 600 word, front page article on the plight of a Royal Couple about to go into debt. The Queen and the Nun! Somewhat similar stories, eh? The solution for the Royal financial crisis, in the 600-word article we anxiously await: Sell off the Royal Couple! The ire in closed meetings is even greater. Apparently the Royal Couple cost the British people at least 2 million pounds a year. The yearly income of most Britons per year, 1,607 pounds! The Royal Family?! It costs more than four times that! Per day!!! Now, cries Englands Charlotte Corday of the French Revolution, theyre asking for more!!! Side comments?! Its not cheap playing polo! And finally, push to shove, even Prime Minister Wilson must say that for the richest woman in the world to cry poverty in the present financial situation England finds itself in?! And the Royal Couple are asking for a pay raise? Even I, said Wilson, find myselfconflicted. Prince Phillip tells the Queen, in regard to the semi-French Revolution brewing, even within their own Prime Minister, Leave it with me. What does that mean? asks the Queen. It means, replies the Prince, this needs a response! A robust response!! Phillip You deserve to be paid properly! Then he adds, We deserve to be paid properly!! Then he adds, I wont rest until we are! Obviously, as they say, There will be more to come! Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@shaw.ca. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@MGMoriarty

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Eurostar has announced a launch date for its 40 London-to-Amsterdam rail service.

Rail passengers will be able to travel directly from the capital to the Dutch city from the end of October, the rail company said.

Launch: Rail passengers will be able to travel directly from the capital to the Dutch city from the end of October

The return service starts on October 26 and will enable travellers to travel to the Netherlands' capital in four hours and nine minutes, with tickets costing at least 40 each way.

Passengers will also be able to go from Rotterdam, located south of Amsterdam, back to St Pancras International in London in three hours 29 minutes. Tickets go on sale from September 1.
The 2020 Republican National Convention will be held in Charlotte, North Carolina on Monday and will formally re-nominate the Trump-Pence ticket. Among many others, President Donald J. Trump is scheduled to speak each of the four nights of the convention.

Some RNC remarks will also be delivered remotely amid the coronavirus pandemic but a small number of delegates from each state will assemble in Charlotte, North Carolina to formally re-nominate the Trump-Pence ticket and begin the proceedings. The number of delegates attending is 336, according to an RNC official.

Each day has been designated a theme; Monday: Land of Promise, Tuesday: Land of Opportunity, Wednesday: Land of Heroes and Thursday: Land of Greatness.

The Monday night event will conduct the roll-call vote to formally re-nominate Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for the Republican Partys presidential ticket.

Trump will accept the nomination from the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday, according to USA Today. Vice President Pence will do the same Wednesday at Fort McHenry in Baltimore.

Im doing it live, unlike Michelle Obama, Im doing it live, Trump said, referring to a speech from the former first lady during the first night of the Democratic National Convention. And itll be Thursday night, itll be at the White House on the South Lawn.

The RNC lineup includes Congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik, Alice Marie Johnson and Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018.

Democrats dont want you to see this.



Theyre scared that Im exposing what life is like in Democrat run cities.



Thats why Im running for Congress

Because All Black Lives Matter

Baltimore Matters

And black people dont have to vote Democrat

Help us win https://t.co/CSOjc9aQlS pic.twitter.com/XnEDTaDDIG  Kimberly Klacik (@kimKBaltimore) August 17, 2020

Klacik posted a video on social media of her walking the streets of Baltimore highlighting problems in the city.

Democrats think black people are stupid, said Klacik. They think they can control us forever, that we wont demand better and that well keep voting for them forever, despite what theyve done to our families and our communities.

Klacik lists statistics of Baltimores high crime and murder rates and interviews black residents who oppose defunding the police.

Johnson is a former federal prisoner whose sentence was commuted after reality TV star Kim Kardashian West championed her cause at the White House after a meeting with Trump.

Trump's decision comes amid a recent flurry of pardons issued by the president, who has seemed drawn to causes advocated by conservatives, celebrities, or those who once appeared on his former reality show, "The Apprentice."

Sixty-three-year-old Johnson was convicted in 1996 for her involvement in a Memphis cocaine trafficking organization and sentenced to life imprisonment and released in August.

Armed homeowners Mark and Patricia McCloskey, standing in front their house along Portland Place confront protesters marching to St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson's house in the Central West End of St. Louis. St. Louis top prosecutor told The Associated Press on Monday, July 20, 2020 that she is charging a white husband and wife with felony unlawful use of a weapon for displaying guns during a racial injustice protest outside their mansion. (Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP File)AP

A couple that waved weapons at protesters, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, are also scheduled to speak on Monday.

A video posted online earlier this year showed 63-year-old Mark and his 61-year-old wife, Patricia, standing outside their Renaissance palazzo-style home in a St. Louis well-to-do Central West End neighborhood as protesters marched toward the city mayors home to demand her resignation. He could be heard yelling while holding a long-barreled gun. His wife stood next to him with a handgun.

Protests are also planned outside the convention being organized through social media. The event is called Resist RNC 2020 block party in Marshall Park and will have speeches from activists and organizers like Kristie Puckett Williams, Charlotte NAACP President Corine Mack, and Claire Tandoh from Kidz Fed Up.

Liz Millsaps Haigler, a spokesperson for Resist RNC 2020, the group organizing the Monday event, said the gathering is intended to be peaceful and family-friendly. The group has a microphone permit for the park and the event is scheduled to take place between 4:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.

When to watch the 2020 RNC

There will be four nights of programming, Monday through Thursday, from 8:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Where to watch the RNC

Broadcast networks and cable TV outlets, plus C-SPAN and PBS, will cover the RNC extensively.

It will also be live-streamed on the conventions Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Twitch pages, plus Amazon Prime Video.

Monday: Land of Promise.

Senator Tim Scott

House Republican Whip Steve Scalise

Rep. Matt Gaetz

Rep. Jim Jordan

Nikki Haley

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel

Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones

Amy Johnson Ford

Kimberly Guilfoyle

Natalie Harp

Charlie Kirk

Kim Klacik

Mark and Patricia McCloskey

Sean Parnell

Andrew Pollack

Donald Trump, Jr.

Tanya Weinreis

Tuesday: Land of Opportunity.

First lady Melania Trump is slated to speak from the White House.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

Sen. Rand Paul

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds

Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron

Pam Bondi

Abby Johnson

Jason Joyce

Navajo Nation vice president Myron Lizer

Mary Ann Mendoza

Megan Pauley

Cris Peterson

John Peterson

Nicholas Sandmann

Eric Trump

Tiffany Trump

Wednesday: Land of Heroes.

Vice President Mike Pence will speak from Baltimore at Fort McHenry. Second lady Karen Pence will also give remarks Wednesday.

Second Lady Karen Pence

Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem

Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York

Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York

Former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell

White House adviser to the president Kellyanne Conway

Keith Kellogg

Jack Brewer

Sister Dede Byrne

Madison Cawthorn

Scott Dane

Clarence Henderson

Ryan Holets

Michael McHale

Burgess Owens

Lara Trump

Thursday: Land of Greatness.

President Trump will deliver his acceptance speech from the White House.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California

Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey

Ivanka Trump

JaRon Smith

Ann Dorn

Debbie Flood

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Franklin Graham

Alice Johnson

Wade Mayfield

Carl and Marsha Mueller

Dana White

Related Content:
At the ceremony on July 24, Mr. Trump promised that he was doing something that is going to be incredible for the American public, taking a worn page from old Democratic playbooks, which have had that partys candidates campaigning on drug prices for years. Mr. Trump in 2016 embraced a Democratic plan to allow the federal government to negotiate drug prices. But in the face of opposition from his party, his promise took a novel turn: He would allow European countries, many of them social democracies, to negotiate prices, then latch on to the price points they secured.

While the president has implied that his favored nations order would affect all pharmaceuticals, in reality it would affect only a small fraction of drugs: those, like chemotherapy infusions, that are administered in a doctors office. Even to do that, an order alone would not be enough to change policy; that would require notice-and-comment rule-making that could take months or longer.

Sections of Mr. Trumps document visible in the photograph, and transcribed by a reporter at Modern Healthcare magazine, make reference to this need for rule-making.

Its very frustrating to see the president tweeting as if this has already happened, because it has not, said Rachel Sachs, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies pharmaceutical policy.

Phillip J. Cooper, a professor of public administration at Portland State University and the author of By Order of the President, a book about presidential documents, said that federal law required signed executive orders to be published in the Federal Register. No favored nation order has appeared, so the missing order either violates the law or is incomplete.

If it was publicly signed, I have no idea what the ground would be for withholding it, Mr. Cooper said.
Walmart-owned PhonePe, which was hived off as a separate entity from Flipkart, is working on an initial public offering (IPO) by 2023 at a valuation of $7-10 billion.

PhonePe is planning a separate listing in the US or India, depending on the market conditions, according to a Business Standard report. Flipkart, too, is planning a US listing by 2022, the report added.

US retail giant Walmart acquired a 77 percent stake in Bengaluru-based Flipkart in May 2018.

"The Walmart leadership has told PhonePe and Flipkart about building the 'path to profitability' and PhonePe has set a target to be profitable by 2022," a source told the publication.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.

Listen: Work near home the new WFH says WeWork India CEO Karan Virwani

"All employees at PhonePe have started working towards that goal. The company is partnering and providing value-added services to kiranas and on-boarding merchants," a source told Business Standard.

The financial technology company has launched six insurance and mutual fund products over the past four months.

PhonePe, along with Google Pay and Paytm, accounts for a significant portion of transactions made through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
(ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, AUGUST 24 - Local residents in Velika Kladusa, in the far northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina at the border with Croatia, staged new protests against a consistently increasing number of migrants. Local residents denounced violence, thefts, and intimidation on the part of groups of refugees loitering in the area. The residents complained of an increasing threat to their safety. Incidents and fights among rival groups of migrants are also frequent, requiring law enforcement to intervene. With the resumption in recent weeks of migrants journeying along the Balkan Route, an increasing number of refugees in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina are trying to cross the border into Croatia and continue on to Western Europe. Some of the migrants refuse to be hosted in local migrant reception centres, instead preferring to remain free to pursue any chance to cross the border. Local authorities estimate there are at least 7,000 migrants currently in Velika Kladusa and Bihac.(ANSAmed). (ANSA).


New Delhi, Aug 24 : Paytm has grabbed 50 per cent share in the payments to merchants (P2M) segment in India and the financial services platform has emerged as the most integrated payments provider in the fintech space, a new report said on Monday.

Paytm has a strong presence in the tier 3 and below market with over 16 million merchants on its platform, according to the report by RedSeer Consulting, a Bengaluru-based consulting and research firm.

The report said that the current 160 million unique mobile payment users will multiply by five times to reach nearly 800 million by 2025.

"Paytm has the highest top of mind recall and unaided awareness among merchants followed by Phone Pe and Google Pay. When asked from which payments app do you accept payments, over 68 per cent of merchants cited Paytm," the findings showed.

Paytm's P2M consumers had the highest satisfaction leading with an NPS (net promoter score) of 42 per cent.

According to the RedSeer report, the Payment gateway aggregator market in India currently stands at Rs 9.5 trillion and is expected to grow by 2.4 times, driven by large value transactions.

"It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19 per cent in the next five years to reach Rs 22.6 trillion by FY 2025. The payment gateway market today is very competitive, and all leading players are fighting for the market share. Paytm leads this pack and has grown the fastest," it said.

Paytm's all-in-one Android point of sale (POS) machine is touted as a highly customisable device that can be used in different sectors.

"Paytm is on track to enable over half a billion people with digital financial services and providing banking facilities to the unbanked," said Narendra Yadav, Vice President, Paytm.

"Going forward we will bring out more innovations in the fintech space that will help transform India and possibly set new examples globally".

The company has been successful in becoming the largest player in terms of consolidated revenue of Rs 3,579 crore in the FY 2019.

Paytm offers a multitude of services like payments, insurtech, wealthtech, lending, Payments Bank, Payment Gateway, EDC, eCommerce and more.
NIIT Technologies is targeting to become a $1 billion company, and has plans to expand in the healthcare segment, a top official has said. Currently, the company, which is now getting rebranded as Coforge, has an annual revenue of $600 million.

CEO Sudhir Singh, however, did not give any timeline to achieve the $1 billion (Rs 7,489 crore) revenue target, but maintained that the brand is now confident of attaining it organically without any acquisitions.

When asked about reports of a merger with Hexaware, which is also majority owned by NIIT's promoter Baring Private Equity, Singh said the company has already clarified on this issue earlier and added that it has set clear aims for the future.

We have set a clear path to a billion dollars as an organization. This will include expanding in the banking, insurance and travel verticals and we will also expand into healthcare as an expertise. We will also industrialise our capabilities in artificial intelligence, cloud and data services, he told PTI.

After attaining the $1 billion revenue target, the company will be aiming to be among the top three players in each of the verticals it is engaged in, Singh said, conceding that it will take long for that and it would also mean the company takes on the IT biggies.

He said the company has never talked about the intent of clocking $1 billion in revenue in the past but is now confident enough about attaining the number and hence worth mentioning.

The company wants its growth to be predictable, sustainable and profitable, Singh said, adding that rendering the high-margin services in the digital segment will also be a special focus.

He said the revenue will grow by 7 percent in the ongoing September quarter over the preceding June quarter and the company will notch a mid-single digit revenue growth for the fiscal year.

It is also confident of a 1.50 percent rise in the operating profit margin on a sequential basis during September quarter and maintaining the number above 18 per cent over the medium term.

Singh said the digital stream  which now contributes 40 percent to the total revenue  accrues in wider profit margins and the company has a target to take its contribution to 45 percent.

From a hiring perspective, Singh said the company will add employees on a net basis in 2020-21 but did not share the number of staff to be added.

The rebranding exercise was carried out to reflect the faster growth pace, Singh said, adding that as per the share sale to its new promoters, the company was to have a new identity within 18 months.
The Chinese-owned video-sharing firms action comes on the first day of the US Republican Party convention.

TikTok plans to file a lawsuit against President Donald Trumps administration as soon as Monday over an executive order banning transactions with the Chinese app in the U.S., the company has said.

The move comes on the first day of the Republican National Convention, four days of celebrating a president whos made tough on China a centerpiece of his re-election bid and has dangled the idea of decoupling from China altogether.

TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance Ltd., said Saturday it would challenge the order banning transactions with the popular social media app. The company said it strongly disagreed with concerns raised by Trump. He subsequently gave it a 90-day deadline to divest its U.S. operations.

The skirmish is the latest between the Trump administration and China as Novembers U.S. vote approaches and Trump makes his case for a second term.

Its likely to come up frequently during the Republican meeting, at which Trump is expected to speak each night and multiple members of his family will also appear.

The topic that Americans are going to hear from Donald J. Trump is how we are going to fight China and the China virus, Peter Navarro, White House trade adviser, said on Fox News Sunday.

Decoupling Threat

We are coming hard at the China virus, said Navarro, using a slur for Covid-19 popular with Trump and his administration.

The president, in an interview to air on Fox News Sunday night, raised the idea of a total split from China, according to an advance transcript from the network.

You were asking a second question, would you ever just decouple? Not do business with China? Because you know, we dont have to, Trump said. Well its something that if they dont treat us right I would certainly, I would certainly do that.

Chinese and U.S. officials were scheduled to talk over the weekend about the current state of the countries phase one trade deal. No readout has come as of Sunday night in Washington.

Preference for Biden

Republican officials have also criticized Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for not mentioning China during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last week.

At the Republican gathering, advisers want Trump focused on the economy and the coronavirus. When those two subjects come up, China is usually not far behind.

Youve seen the intelligence reports: China very much wants Joe Biden to win, Trump said Friday in remarks to a conservative group. That would be very insulting if they wanted me to win. I dont think so.

The Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, opined last week that Biden would be smoother to deal with for Beijing, a comment seized upon by Republicans.

The proposed Democrat platform on foreign policy showed that if Biden wins, the U.S. will remain tough on China, the paper wrote. But tactically, the U.S. approach would be more predictable, and Biden is much smoother to deal with than Trump  a viewpoint that is shared by many countries.
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Photographs show the devastating aftermath of a night of violent protests spurred by the police shooting of an unarmed black man in Kenosha on Sunday that turned the city into the nations latest flashpoint in a summer of racial unrest.

In a bid to stave off another night of chaos, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said 125 members of the National Guard would be in Kenosha on Monday night with responsibility for guarding infrastructure and making sure our firefighters and others involved are protected.

The Kenosha Police Department declared a state-of-emergency curfew for Monday night beginning at 8pm until 7am the following morning, according to a post on the police department's Twitter feed.

The moves come after rioting and looting erupted in the wake of the shooting involving Jacob Blake, 29, who was shot in the back seven times in front of his three children after police were called to his home to reports of a domestic dispute yesterday.

Video of the shooting of Blake quickly went viral, with angered protesters setting cars on fire, smashing windows and clashing with officers dressed in riot gear across the city throughout Sunday evening and into the early hours of Monday.

Shocking pictures from downtown Kenosha captured on Monday showed dozens of burned out cars lining the streets, several businesses decimated by vandalism and numerous others looted and marred with graffiti.

Family members have since posted that Blake is in a stable condition at the ICU in Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee. But police in the area remain on high alert with more violent protests are expected later tonight.

Scroll down for video

Aftermath of last night's riots are laid bare at one autoshop, showing the business charred and burned with dozens of cars also burned out, out front

The interior of a burned out restaurant is seen on Monday after a night of unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin

Kenosha residents woke Monday morning to broken and charred storefronts, with dozens of cars and trucks in the street burnt out, such as this one above

One local business hit particularly hard by the unruly scenes was Car Source, a local automobile dealership

Shocking pictures from downtown Kenosha captured on Monday showed dozens of burned out cars lining the streets, several businesses decimated by vandalism and numerous others looted

Witnesses reported that at least three police officers had their guns drawn as Jacob Blake (seen above in the white t-shirt) was walking away from them in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday

Wisconsins governor summoned the National Guard to head off another round of violent protests Monday after the police shooting of an unarmed black man in Kenosha turned the city into the nations latest flashpoint in a summer of racial unrest

Kenosha residents woke Monday morning to broken and charred storefronts, with dozens of burnt out cars and trucks lining the street.

One local business hit particularly hard by the unruly scenes was Car Source, a local automobile dealership.

The front lot of the building, typically filled with rows of pre-owned four-wheel offerings, instead resembled a scrap heap Monday, with charred metal remains and other debris scattered out-front.

The dealership is located just blocks from the Kenosha County Courthouse, which was also badly damaged in the riots.

Prior to the overnight destruction, Car Source had more than 140 vehicles available for sale, according to its website.

The owners spoke to CBS about their devastation to have awoken this morning to find their business destroyed.

A reporter, Drew Hernandez, posted to Twitter a series of videos showing the gradual destruction of Car Source.

Around 2:20am., Hernandez posted footage of what appeared to be a flaming flare positioned under a seat in the back of an open vehicle.

BLM rioters are setting multiple dealership cars on fire in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/PCZWrvU5Nj  Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) August 24, 2020

A dump truck that was parked at an intersection to prevent traffic from moving toward the police department was also set on fire

The letters 'BLM' are emblazoned in blood-red paint on the outside of a vandalized jewelry store in downtown Kenosha

The front lot of the building, typically filled with rows of pre-owned four-wheel offerings, instead resembled a scrap heap Monday, with charred metal remains and other debris scattered out-front

People walk past a lot with burned out used cars after a night of unrest spurred by the shooting of Blake earlier Sunday

Within 10 minutes, the truck appeared to have gone up in flames, with the fire extending to neighboring vehicles, the subsequent footage shows.

A different video appears to show multiple fires set throughout the car lot as car horns and loud bangs can be heard blaring in the background.

The fire continues to spread farther throughout the parking lot as smoke billows from the area and at least one small explosion can be seen.

The city's downtown area was closed Monday due to damage sustained during last night's civil unrest, according to a post on Kenosha County Government's Facebook.

The dealership is located just blocks from the Kenosha County Courthouse, which was also badly damaged in the riots

The owners spoke to CBS about their devastation to have awoken this morning to find their business decimated

A cell phone store which is between the shooting scene and downtown is shown Kenosha, Wisconsin Monday August 24, 2020 after it was broken into and looted overnight

A vandalized city police car is shown outside Kenosha County Public Safety Building in downtown Kenosha

A woman holds a US flag and a sign as she stands next to burned out cars that reads: 'God + Law + Order'

Workers board up windows and doors of a hotel and local academy in anticipation of more chaos on Monday night

Elsewhere overnight, one Kenosha police officer was filmed collapsing to the ground face-first close to where Blake was shot after being struck by a brick that was thrown towards cops during a stand-off.

He just got bricked! He just got bricked! someone close to the person recording screams, as others in the mob cheer, clap and shout anti-cop sentiments.

In a bid to stave off another night of chaos, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said 125 members of the National Guard would be in Kenosha on Monday night with responsibility for guarding infrastructure and making sure our firefighters and others involved are protected.

Several other protesters jumped on top of police squad cars and smashed windows in separate footage from the scene.

Another clip shows a row of protesters walking toward a line of police officers clad in riot gear as simmering tensions threaten to escalate the situation.

A dump truck that was parked at an intersection to prevent traffic from moving toward the police department was also set on fire.

The shooting of Blake occurred just after 5pm as officers were responding to a 'domestic incident,' the Kenosha Police Department said in a news release.

In the video, three officers could be seen shouting and pointing their weapons at Blake, who walked around the front of an SUV parked on the street.

As Blake opened the driver's side door and leaned inside, one officer grabbed his shirt from behind and then fired into the vehicle.

At least seven shots could be heard, though it was unclear if more than one officer fired.

Blake's three children were inside the SUV and watched as their father was gunned down, the family's attorney, Ben Crump, confirmed.

The images above show the moments leading up to the shooting. Blake (seen in the white shirt) walks away from a police officer who has his gun drawn and is ordering him to stop

The image above shows the moment a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer fired at least seven shots into the back of Jacob Blake as he was getting into an SUV in a residential neighborhood

'They kills us because they fear us, honor the dead', a scrawl of graffiti reads on the wall of the Kenosha County Court House

City vehicles which were used to block access to the Kenosha County Court House in downtown are charred as of Monday

Two men photograph burned vehicles after a night of unrest over the police shooting of a black man in Kenosha

Volunteers sweep up debris as police in riot gear stand outside the Kenosha County Court House, with the world 'Be Water, Spread Fire' written in black paint on the front of the building

A small group of demonstrators march in protest of last night's police shooting close to where Blake was shot

Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian uses a bull horn to talk to people gathered in front of the police station on Monday

The national guard have also been called in to attempt to defer any of the widespread vandalism and looting that occurred overnight

Several witnesses said that Blake tried to break up a fight between two women outside a nearby home, according to Kenosha News.

Before resorting to gunfire, the police attempted to subdue Blake with a Taser, to no avail, it was reported.

Benjamin Crump shared video of the incident on his Twitter feed, and confirmed today he is now representing Blake's family, and will 'demand answers' from police.

'We all watched the horrific video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back several times by Kenosha Police. Even worse, his three sons witnessed their father collapse after being riddled with bullets.

'Their irresponsible, reckless and inhumane actions nearly cost the life of a man who was simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident. It's a miracle he's alive.'

The officers were placed on administrative leave, standard practice in a shooting by police, while the state Justice Department investigates. And Kenosha County imposed an 8 p.m. curfew to try to head off another round of violence Monday night.

Crump is the attorney who represents the family of George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man who died in the custody of Minneapolis police in late May.

Floyd's death ignited massive nationwide protests and rioting as millions took to the streets over the course of several weeks to demand the police officers responsible be tried and convicted.

Blake is seen far left with his three children. Witnesses said all three of his kids were in the back seat of the SUV when their father was shot

A dump truck that was parked in an intersection so as to prevent protesters from reaching a police station was set on fire on Sunday

A man confronts police outside the Kenosha Police Department late on Sunday night

Video of the shooting quickly went viral, with angered protesters setting cars on fire, smashing windows and clashing with officers dressed in riot gear across the city throughout Sunday evening and into the early hours of Monday

A man on a bike rides past a city truck on fire outside the Kenosha County Courthouse

A line of officers in right gear face-off against a line of protesters stood unmoved in front of the an tensions boiled over late Sunday

Angry residents gathered near the scene of the shooting in Kenosha on Sunday night

Tensions ran high near the crime scene on Sunday as neighbors gathered to vent their anger at police over the shooting

In a statement denouncing the Kenosha shooting, Gov. Evers said: While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

Democratic nominee Joe Biden also responded in outrage of yet another example of excessive force against the African America community, calling for an immediate, full and transparent investigation.

This morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force, he said, just over two months before Election Day in a country already roiled by the recent deaths of Floyd, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Those shots pierce the soul of our nation.

Biden added that the officers must be held accountable for the shooting.

Republicans and the police union accused the politicians of rushing to judgment, reflecting the deep partisan divide in Wisconsin, a key presidential battleground state. Wisconsin GOP members also decried the violent protests, echoing the law-and-order theme that President Donald Trump has been using in his reelection campaign.

As always, the video currently circulating does not capture all the intricacies of a highly dynamic incident, Pete Deates president of the Kenosha police union, said in a statement. He called the governors statement wholly irresponsible.

Online court records indicate Kenosha County prosecutors charged Blake on July 6 with sexual assault, trespassing and disorderly conduct in connection with domestic abuse. An arrest warrant was issued the following day. The records contain no further details and do not list an attorney for Blake.

It was unclear whether that case had anything to do with the shooting.

A man records cell phone video as tear gas is used on protesters outside the Kenosha Police Department

Protesters walking toward a line of police officers clad in riot gear as simmering tensions brew

A group of protesters convene on Kenosha's court house to resume demonstrations on Monday afternoon, ahead more turbulent scene anticipated to arrive this evening

Police try to secure the public safety building from protesters Monday, Aug. 24

A police officer is seen speaking to protesters amid a scramble outside of the public safety building

'Lets race out voices until every black life is valued', one demonstrator's placard reads

'The only thugs I see are cops' one demonstrator holds up on a sign in front of a line of heavily-armored officers

Jake Loewen is seen cleaning up through a broken window at the Harborside Academy Monday

Laquisha Booker, who is Blakes partner, told NBCs Milwaukee affiliate, WTMJ-TV, that the couple's three children were in the back seat of the SUV when police shot him.

That man just literally grabbed him by his shirt and looked the other way and was just shooting him. With the kids in the back screaming. Screaming, Booker said.

Crump, meanwhile, called the officers actions irresponsible, reckless and inhumane.

Wisconsins Republican Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke cautioned the public and elected officials against "racing towards judgment," given how few details were known.

The frustration & anger that many in our communities are feeling must be met with empathy, but cannot be further fueled by politicians statements or actions that can stoke flames of violence," tweeted Steineke, who is white.

A massive crowd is currently gathering in front of the Kenosha Police Station, hours after cops shot Jacob Blake https://t.co/7fdcnjNtD4  philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) August 24, 2020

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers released a statement saying he was 'hoping earnestly' that Blake 'would not succumb to his injuries'
As Australia relaxed visa rules for thousands of Hong Kong residents studying and working in the country, analysts say many more will likely emigrate from the city in the wake of a draconian national security law imposed by China following months of pro-democracy protests.



New regulations took effect in Australia on Monday granting automatic five-year visa extensions to 14,000 skilled migrants and graduates from Hong Kong residents already there, with a pathway to permanent residency at the end of the five years.



Future applicants who fill gaps in Australia's labor market will also have the option of applying for visa extensions and residency.



Analysts told RFA they expect a growing number of Hongkongers to take advantage of that offer, as well as relaxed immigration rules offered by the U.K. and the democratic island of Taiwan.



Hong Kong political commentator Sang Pu estimated that more than 10,000 local residents will take advantage of Taiwan's fast-track humanitarian offer to migrants fleeing Hong Kong, which recently saw a draconian state security system put in place under Beijing's direct control, and with the involvement of mainland China's feared state security police.



He said anyone with assets will likely move them offshore, and many won't return to live in the city either.



"Hong Kong will never be the same again," Sang said. "Xi Jinping is intent on defeating Hong Kong now."



National Security Law



The imposition of the National Security Law for Hong Kong on July 1 launched a crackdown on peaceful dissent and criticism of the government in schools and colleges, in the media and on the streets.



The law bans secessionist, subversive, and terrorist words and deeds, as well as collusion with foreign forces to interfere in Hong Kong's internal affairs, charges which carry a maximum sentence of imprisonment for life.



On Aug. 10, Hong Kong police arrested pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai for "collusion with foreign powers" and raided the newsroom of his flagship newspaper, the Apple Daily.



Charges of "collusion with foreign powers" appeared in the law after repeated claims from Beijing that last year's anti-government and pro-democracy protest movement was instigated by "hostile overseas forces."



"It is not just the Democratic Party and the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movement in China, or the Hong Kong Professional Teachers' Union that are in trouble; it is the whole community," Sang said.



"Because everyone took part in the anti-extradition movement," he said in a reference to mass public protests over plans by chief executive Carrie Lam to allow extradition to mainland China.



"The state security police are now operating in Hong Kong, national security education is in full swing, and there are national security courts," he said.



"It will be the same as the purge on human rights lawyers and rights activists in mainland China," Sang said.



Recent emigre



A YouTuber from Hong Kong who gave only the nickname Eagle said she emigrated to Taiwan after witnessing the way riot police deployed tear gas, pepper spray and "non-lethal" bullets against mostly unarmed demonstrators during last year's protest movement.



"I burst into tears when the woman paramedic got shot in the eye on Aug. 11, because ... [I knew] Hong Kong had changed," Eagle told RFA. "Why is Hong Kong so dangerous now? I couldn't allow myself or my family to remain in such a dangerous place."



"Now that the National Security Law has been implemented, I feel that I have done the right thing," she said. "First of all, the law is targeting more and more Hong Kong people, and secondly, the threshold for immigration in Taiwan has been raised, so if I had tried to move now, I might have missed the boat."



A total of 5,858 Hongkongers have already made the move to Taiwan this year, with around 500 continuing to make the move each month in the first seven months of this year. Online queuing systems to apply to move there are full, and have been extended in a bid to accommodate the exodus.



Veteran hedge fund manager Victor Ng said people are already moving their money offshore.



"The most commonly used offshore accounts are Citibank, DBS and Singapore Centre," Ng told RFA. "People want to be free to do as they please as long it doesn't harm anyone, so they're going to leave Hong Kong for freer countries."



"[Socioeconomically], anyone from the middle class upwards will leave, and consumption will fall, and all sectors will be hard hit," he said. "Our universities, which were ranked among the top 1,000 globally, will go the way of those in mainland China."



'Repopulating' Hong Kong



Ho-fung Hung, associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S., said the ruling Chinese Communist Party has likely already factored in the exodus into its plans.



"The whole idea was that they wanted to keep Hong Kong but not its people," Hung said. "They can repopulate it, because Hong Kong still has value for them as an offshore financial center."



"But it won't do them much good, because the rest of the world is already treating Hong Kong like the rest of China, legally speaking, so they are shooting themselves in the foot," he said.



Reuters reported on Monday that Hongkongers are buying up property in the U.K., sending prices rising in some locations by as much as 15 percent since April.



Property agents told the agency they had sold more than double the number of apartments to Hong Kong buyers in the past two months, mostly as family homes rather than for renting out to tenants.



The U.K. government has offered some three million British National Overseas passport holders in Hong Kong a path to British citizenship, while a weaker pound and a stamp duty holiday have increased the attractiveness of U.K. property.



Reported by Gigi Lee and Tam Siu-yin for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Fans celebrate Bayern Munich's victory, Sunday Aug. 23, 2020, in Marseille, southern France, after the Champions League final soccer match between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich being played at the Luz stadium in Lisbon, Portugal. (AP)

Paris: Almost 150 people were arrested as Paris Saint-Germain fans set cars ablaze, smashed shop windows and clashed with police in the French capital after the team's Champions League final defeat to Bayern Munich, police said Monday.

The violence occurred around the Parc des Princes stadium and on the Champs-Elysees avenue during and after the match on Sunday night, police said on Twitter.

Thousands of supporters had gathered at the Parc des Princes to cheer on PSG, lighting flares and chanting as they watched the 1-0 defeat in Lisbon on a big screen.

The trouble lasted several hours, as groups of fans threw bottles and fireworks at police, who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, an AFP reporter said.

On the Champs-Elysees, vehicles were set on fire, windows broken and shops vandalised.

Police said 148 people were arrested "in particular for damage, violence or throwing projectiles".

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said 16 police were injured, 12 shops attacked and about 15 vehicles damaged overnight.

In a tweet on Sunday night, he condemned the "unacceptable" violence and thanked the police who arrested "small violent groups, troublemakers."

Social distancing measures were ignored inside and outside the Parc des Princes among fans who had hoped to see their Qatar-owned team's first triumph in Europe's top club competition.

Police said 404 people were stopped for not wearing face masks as part of regulations aimed at curbing the coronavirus outbreak.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo had earlier called for "mature celebrations" should PSG beat Bayern, after supporters clashed with police following their 3-0 win over RB Leipzig in the semi-finals.

"I'm gutted! They wasted too many chances and unfortunately in the final that just doesn't fly," said Nicolas Mounier as he left the stadium peacefully.

"We are disappointed but we weren't dreadful," another PSG fan, Anne Vaneson, told AFP.

"In the first half, we were on a level playing field but we paid for a dip in performance in the first 20 minutes of the second half."
Researchers have shown that night-time coughing, measured via a smartphone app, can indicate that asthma is getting worse.

The study, presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress [1], is the first of its kind to measure patients' coughing over a series of nights and shows that it is a sign of their asthma deteriorating.

Researchers say the app could represent a new way to help patients and their doctors monitor asthma and adjust medication to keep symptoms under control.

The study was led by Dr Frank Rassouli, from the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen, Switzerland. He told the virtual conference: "Until now, we haven't had a reliable tool for measuring peoples' asthma symptoms overnight, so we know very little about night-time coughing and what it means.

"The current focus of our research group is using technology and simple interventions to improve the management of chronic lung diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Smartphones have lots of potential to monitor different symptoms and detect changes early, so we worked with our research partners from University of St. Gallen and ETH Zurich to develop an app for measuring coughing."

The study involved 94 asthma patients who were being treated at two clinics in Switzerland: the Lung Centre, Cantonal Hospital, St Gallen and the mediX Group Practice, Zurich. Each patient visited their asthma clinic at the beginning and end of the study and were assessed for their use of asthma treatments, symptoms such as shortness of breath and whether their asthma had any impact on their daily life.

For 29 days in between they slept with a smartphone in their bedroom with the app running that measured the noise of their night-time coughing. The app also prompted patients to report their night-time symptoms.

The researchers found that the amount of night-time coughing varied a lot from one patient to the next, but they also found a strong correlation between an increase in night-time coughing over the course of a week and a subsequent worsening of asthma symptoms.

Dr Rassouli said: "Our results suggest that night-time coughing can be measured fairly simply with a smartphone app and that an increase in coughing at night is an indicator that asthma is deteriorating. Monitoring asthma is really important because if we can spot early signs that it's getting worse, we can adjust medication to prevent asthma attacks."

Now they have used the smartphone app to successfully monitor coughing in people with asthma, Dr Rassouli and his team plan to try the same technology out with people who have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Thierry Troosters, who was not involved in the study, is President of the European Respiratory Society and Professor in Rehabilitation Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium. He said: "Asthma is a common condition, affecting millions of people in Europe alone. It cannot be cured, but by ensuring that patients use their treatments as prescribed by their doctors, asthma can usually be well-controlled. Uncontrolled asthma can interfere with school or work and lead to serious asthma attacks.

"This study offers a potential new way to monitor patients for signs that their asthma might be getting worse, and the fact that it works via a smartphone makes it accessible to most patients. The app could also make it easier to gather lots of data to study night-time coughing in asthma and other respiratory conditions. The elegant mix of easy and available hardware such as a smartphone, combined with artificial intelligence that can work with 'noisy' data, will provide clinicians with additional eyes and ears to judge the clinical condition of their patients in real life, rather than only at the doctors' office.

"Asthma patients should still consult their doctor if they feel that their symptoms are worsening in any way, even if technologies like this do not highlight an increase in night-time coughing or other symptoms."

###
PHOENIX  A Scottsdale woman celebrating her 105th birthday Tuesday will be honored with a drive-by celebration by the city.

Athena Wright will be celebrated Tuesday morning with a drive-by birthday parade. Members of the Scottsdale fire, library, police, solid waste and water departments will sing "Happy Birthday" to the 105-year-old at the Pueblo Norte assisted living facility as she sits outside at 9 a.m. Additionally, Scottsdale Mayor Jim Lane has declared Tuesday "Athena Wright Day."

Wright was born on Aug. 25, 1915, just three years before the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, making the coronavirus the second pandemic she has lived through.

Wright became a registered nurse right out of high school and eventually joined the U.S. Army in 1941, prior to Pearl Harbor.

"I asked why [she enlisted] and she said that all the boys were joining up and since she was single she decided to do the same," her daughter, Diane Wright, said in a statement.



She worked as a nurse at several station hospitals in Australia and in the jungles of New Guinea. There, she met her husband, a major in the medical corps, and became pregnant with Diane. She returned to the U.S. and was relieved from active duty in December 1944. She was awarded Bronze Stars for her service.

The Wright family eventually settled in the Washington, D.C. area where Wright's husband helped set up the Veterans Administration. Wright worked at the Mt. Alto Veterans Hospital before transferring to the National Institutes for Health, where she worked until retirement. She moved to Scottsdale in 2000.

A spokesman for the city said the drive-by is only for the groups it has arranged to participate.

This article originally appeared on the Phoenix Patch
Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 24 : On expected lines, the no-confidence motion moved by the Congress-led UDF was defeated easily by the Pinarayi Vijayan government in Kerala, but all the corruption issues raised by the opposition were sidestepped by the Chief Minister in a nearly four-hour long speech, where he read out the progress card of his government.

The no-confidence motion was moved by senior Congress leader V.D. Sateeshan.

When the motion was put to vote after almost 10 hours of debate, the opposition could secure only 40 votes, while the treasury bench managed 87 votes.

Those who spoke from the opposition highlighted all the corruption cases that have been in the news for the past few months, including the Sprinklr data scam, the gold smuggling case, corruption in the Life Mission project and the protocol violation of State Higher Education Minister K.T. Jaleel.

But while replying to the motion, Vijayan read out his government's achievements similar to that of a progress report and on numerous occasions the opposition members expressed their ire as they waited for the CM's response on the various corruption cases.

Vijayan gave a clean chit to Jaleel and said that he had done no wrong.

"It was the UAE Consulate which contacted Jaleel and gave food kits and the holy Quran, which he distributed. He has done no wrong at all," said Vijayan.

The opposition members lost their cool after three hours and with Vijayan continuing to ignore all the grave corruption issues, they trooped into the well of the House and started to raise slogans.

After sitting down for few minutes amid the din, Vijayan slammed the Congress and the BJP for joining hands against his government.

"Now one doesn't know if the Congress is the B team of the BJP or vice-versa. Everyone knows that they are hand in glove and the BJP state president is spreading canards against the government. All the allegations are baseless and the people of Kerala know us and we also know the people. Likewise, the people also know the present opposition," said Vijayan.

Like on a few earlier occasions, Vijayan again raked up the solar scam which took place during the Oommen Chandy government, where a conwoman, Saritha Nair, used a few staff of Chandy to cheat investors promising them solar panels.

"We all saw the shameful incident of a Chief Minister (Chandy) sitting before a judicial commission. Such a thing had never happened before in Kerala. Also, everyone knows how Nira Radia was making Cabinet ministers in the UPA government. We are not like them," said Vijayan.

Earlier, Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala said that contrary to the previous Left governments, where the CPI-M always had an iron grip on the government, this time the CPI-M state secretary has turned out to be a mere onlooker.

"Vijayan has turned into an autocrat and not even a single minister has the guts to speak against him. Even though he controls everything, he has no clue of what's happening in his office. But people know everything," said Chennithala.

Later while speaking to the media after the motion was defeated, Chennithala said this was the 16th no-confidence motion moved in the Assembly and Vijayan has run away without even answering the basic issues raised by the opposition.

"No Chief Minister in the past ran away like this. We raised eight specific corruption allegations and surprisingly, he failed to answer any of them. It was most surprising that when Vijayan spoke against Emergency, Congress and such things, he did not speak a word against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This clearly shows the relationship between the BJP and Vijayan. Technically we have lost the motion, but the people of Kerala now know everything and we will continue our protest against the most corrupt government in Kerala," said Chennithala.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 02:14:30|Editor: huaxia

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BEIRUT, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Lebanon's number of COVID-19 infections increased on Monday by 457 cases to 13,155 while the death toll went up by three to 126, the Health Ministry reported.

Lebanon has closed all shops, malls, pubs and other public places in an attempt to restrict the spread of COVID-19 in the country.

Also, official authorities urged people to wear masks and respect social distancing measures to stop COVID-19 spread.

Lebanon has been fighting against COVID-19 since Feb. 21.

The country has received several donations from different countries for the fight against COVID-19 including China which offered on June 11 around 17,500 masks, 1,500 protective gears, 1,320 goggles and 1,000 shoes covers to Lebanese public hospitals. Enditem
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of an emergency use authorization (EUA) for convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19 patients has stoked fears among some observers that the White House may pressure the agency to authorize a vaccine before the November 3 election.

On Sunday, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Alex Azar and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn cited positive statistics that showed a 35% reduction in mortality through the use of convalescent plasma from a non-peer-reviewed study.

The data we gathered suggests that patients who were treated early in their disease course, within three days of being diagnosed, with plasma containing high levels of antibodies, benefited the most from the treatment, Azar said.

We dream in drug development of something like a 35 percent mortality reduction. This is a major advance in the treatment of patients, he added.

But Dr. Howard Koh, former HHS assistant secretary and professor of public health at Harvard, told Yahoo Finance that the portrayal of the statistic is incorrect. Where Hahn claimed a 35 in 100 improvement, the number is more like 3 in 100, based on the Mayo Clnic data.

I think the announcement was way too premature. It shakes the confidence of the medical community about the rigor of the FDAs decision-making process right now, Koh said, adding that even as recently as a couple of days ago, there was tremendous internal debate from experts like NIH director Francis Collins and NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci about whether or not to approve the treatment.

This study from Mayo Clinic was not and is not intended to be a clinical trial. That comes from their own internal descriptions, he said.

The move comes as the coronavirus crisis continues to escalate, raising the urgency for effective treatments and cures. While a significant find, experts point that it was not from studies which had a placebo control group the gold standard for medical professionals to consider using new treatments.

Story continues

Moreover, health experts are worried politics is at play, since its the third EUA for a treatment issued by the FDA this year. The other two were for Gilead Sciences (GILD) remdesivir which is still being used and hydroxychoroquine, which was eventually revoked.

Dr. Dara Kass, a Yahoo Finance contributor and an emergency medicine doctor at Columbia University, said on Monday that the use of convalescent plasma has been in use for decades, insisting theres no breakthrough here.

Raising questions about how the data was used, she suggested the administration was bullying the FDA, raising questions about how that would affect vaccine development, which could yield a breakthrough by years end.

Koh echoed similar sentiments, saying, What this announcement does is raises a lot of red flags about the future vaccine.

Cases in the south are beginning to subside. (Graphic: David Foster/Yahoo Finance)

Not the same as approval

President Donald Trump touted the treatment Sunday, saying that the FDA has made the independent decision to authorize the plasma, and that his administration cleared the logjam to approving it in the past week, even as he insisted the decision had nothing to do with politics.

Hahn explained that like remdesivir, the authorization is a legal route for the FDA to expand use and access to the treatment, even as more data is being collected.

This is not the same as an approval, he said, adding that the data he has seen is significant.

There was a really good rationale for why this might work. We are waiting for more data, were going to continue to gather data, but this clearly meets the data weve established for an EUA, Hahn said.

Convalescent plasma is taken from recovered patients, relying on the antibodies they have built up to help patients still battling the virus. The FDA granted expanded access and federal funding helped support the program at Mayo Clinic in April. To-date, more than 100,000 individuals have enrolled, with more than 70,000 having received treatment, according to Hahn.

Questions about who is donating, and how long after recovery, add uncertainty to the quality of the supply, and much is still unknown about the long-lasting effects of antibodies, according to experts.

Dr. Kevin Tracey, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health, told Yahoo Finance Monday that while more than 600 individuals have received plasma treatment at the New York health system, the data is still unknown.

But moving forward, without a placebo arm already in place, it is unlikely clinical trials will see robust enrollment, because the patients can opt to directly have access rather than sign up for the 50% chance of receiving the treatment.

That happened to remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine, and now it happened to convalescent plasma, Tracey said.

The World Health Organization also expressed its concern, with chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan saying the treatment is still experimental.

Vaccine approval fears

The weekend move by the Trump administration is raising concerns about the vaccine race, despite repeated assurances from the FDA to wait until a vaccine is proven safe and effective.

A rising number think Trump may pressure the FDA to do so before November 3. Some companies are expected to provide early read-outs of the clinical trials results by September and October, but a full regulatory review is still required.

Financial Times reported that the White House is trying to push for an early authorization for AstraZenecas (AZN) vaccine candidate with Oxford University.

Dr. Peter Marks, the FDAs leading vaccine expert, recently said he would resign if the FDA approves an unproven vaccine.

So far, AstraZeneca, Moderna (MRNA), and Pfizer (PFE) with BioNTech (BNTX) are the leaders among developed countries, with Phase 3 trials testing 30,000 participants. Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) recently announced the largest trial expected to start next month of 60,000 participants.

Novavax (NVAX) announced it is entering Phase 2 trials for an older population, to study its vaccine candidate. That is in addition to an existing Phase 2 trial on 18-55 year olds being conducted in South Africa.

The two trials are focused on testing the vaccine for safety, after which the company can enter Phase 3 to test on a larger population, and study the effectiveness and durability of the vaccine.

Anjalee Khemlani is a reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter: @AnjKhem

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Vice President Mike Pence will hold a campaign rally outside a Michigan airport Friday, one day after the Republican National Convention ends.

Pence is scheduled to visit Avflight Traverse City, a company that provides services to the airport industry, for a 5 p.m. event promoting President Donald Trumps reelection campaign. Pence is scheduled to make an appearance in Minnesota earlier in the day, according to the campaign.

The campaign stop comes after the four-day GOP convention finishes from Charlotte, N.C. Pence is scheduled to formally accept the Republican Partys nomination for vice president Wednesday and Trump will accept the presidential nomination Thursday.

Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes in 2016, a margin of 0.3%. Political forecasters expected the state to continue a nearly three-decade trend of voting for Democratic presidential candidates, but Trump instead flipped Michigan and two other Midwest states.

Michigan remains at top prize for both parties in the 2020 election. Last weeks Democratic convention featured several speakers from the state and party officials said winning Michigan back is a high-priority.

Republican organizers are also keeping a focus on Michigan.

The Trump campaign opened a field office in Traverse City earlier this month. The surrounding Grand Traverse County is in a traditionally Republican part of Michigan, though Traverse City itself contains more people who voted Democrat in 2016.

Traverse City sits inside a Republican congressional district held by U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Watersmeet. Voters in Michigans 1st Congressional District, which covers the entire Upper Penninsula and northern counties in the Lower Penninsula, voted for Trump by a 21-point margin in 2016.

The Friday Traverse City event is open to general admission. Doors open at 3 p.m. on Aug. 28.

Scheduling details provided by the Trump campaign did not indicate whether the event would be held outside, something the campaign has done in other states to comply with social distancing guidelines.

Trump held airport rallies in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania last week. The president is scheduled to visit New Hampshire on Friday.

Pence last visited Michigan on June 18. The vice president dined with Republican U.S. Senate candidate John James, toured two Sterling Heights manufacturing companies and spoke at an event hosted by America First Policies, a political committee created to promote the Trump administrations policy agenda.

READ MORE ON MLIVE:

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Read Gretchen Whitmers full speech from the 2020 Democratic National Convention

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Corruption Threatens Beirut Revival

By Lisa Schlein August 23, 2020

The U.N. Development Program warns widespread systematic corruption and lack of accountability in Lebanon will impede Beirut's efforts to recover from the August 4 blast that has devastated the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.

A special report by the UNDP describes how deeply the rot has penetrated Lebanese society. At the Port of Beirut alone, the report finds lack of accountability has resulted in a financial deficit of nearly $800 million a year. It says the overall estimate of the annual cost of corruption is expected to be well over $1 billion.

Arkan El Seblani, the chief of UNDP's Anti-Corruption and Integrity unit for Arab States, says corruption permeates the whole society and carries a huge cost.

"According to some estimates, the cost of corruption in Lebanon is equal to $5 billion a year. So, putting that number in perspective, it is about nine percent of the country's GDP. And this is only the direct cost and does not include indirect costs, opportunity costs and also the social costs in terms of the health and well-being of citizens," he said.

The explosion at the Port of Beirut has resulted in deep human suffering. Critics blame the devastating blast on corruption and negligence. They note authorities had repeatedly dismissed warnings to remove the tons of explosive ammonium nitrate, which was stored in unsafe conditions at the seaport warehouse.

El Seblani says who exactly is to blame for the explosion may never be known. However, he says lack of accountability for this catastrophe is likely to have an impact on response and recovery efforts. He says it is likely to dissuade international donors from funding the city's rehabilitation needs.

"Leakage and embezzlement of money and goods, bribes and kickbacks in construction projects, as well as political co-optation of related efforts are all real and present in the context of Lebanon. And, this is not only limited to resources through the government institutions," he said.

El Seblani notes the corrupt networks that have infiltrated the public sector over the years also have set up their own organizations and alliances in the private sector and even in civil society.

The government adopted the country's first-ever national anti-corruption strategy in May. El Seblani says UNDP will work to see that provisions in the strategy are implemented. These include stronger anti-corruption laws and ensuring the independence and effectiveness of the judiciary and of oversight bodies.

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Prime Minister Ludovic Orban said on Monday that the government is complying with the law, adding that the Ministry of the Environment will take all necessary measures in the case of the court ruling on the Chiajna landfill.

Bucharest District 1 Mayor Daniel Tudorache on Monday asked the Minister of the Environment Costel Alexe to send the Environmental Guard to the Chiajna-Rudeni landfill, claiming that waste is being stored illegally in the area.

The Bucharest Tribunal on August 14 ruled to cancel the Integrated Environmental Permit for waste disposal on the last two surfaces still functional of the Chiajna-Rudeni landfill.

Tudorache reprimanded Alexe for not taking any measures for 10 days to implement the court's ruling.

He mentioned that he would also send a request to Prime Minister Ludovic Orban to comply with this court ruling and solve the issue of the citizens in the northern part of Bucharest.
'Our air force can strike them with impunity.'

IMAGE: An Indian Air Force fighter flies high over Ladakh.

Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar (retd) PVSM, AVSM, VM & bar, ADC retired as the Air Officer Commanding of the prestigious Western Air Command in October 2019.

The air marshal has also commanded the Eastern Air Command based at Shillong and flown 42 different types of aircraft in his 38-year career in the Indian Air Force.

"We need a change in focus in war -- of fighting with China and need to prepare for the same soonest!", Air Marshal Nambiar tells Air Commodore Nitin Sathe (retd).

IMAGE: The first five Rafale combat aircraft from France arrive at the Indian Air Force's Air Force Station in Ambala. Photograph: PTI Photo

How will the Rafale change the dynamics of future conflicts?

How does it compare with the Chinese fighters of the J-20 class?

In your view, should we go in for more of these aircraft or do with the less costly MiG-29 upgrade and the SU30 class of aircraft from Russia?

Yes, the Rafale definitely changes dynamics for future wars.

You see, in Kargil, we were the only ones who had real long range beyond visual range missiles to thwart the Air to Air threat.

Therefore, we had the advantage and could fly around with impunity as the F-16s of the Pakistanis and their missiles were no match to ours.

In the interim, Pakistan acquired the AMRAAM (AIM 120-C) missiles which had longer reach than ours.

Therefore, the advantage shifted to the other side for a while.

It is like fighting a man with a spear holding a dagger.

The dagger can only get the spear out when it is pointing the other way-and that isn't easy.

We have set it right with the acquisition of the Meteor missile on the Rafale and the advantage shifts back to us with the Rafale.

It is more sophisticated, has more stealth and therefore the balance of power will shift back to us now.

The Pakistanis cannot attempt a mission like the one they did on February 27 last year anymore-unless they are foolish enough to accept losses.

Rafale, therefore, brings in a far better capability and is far more potent than even the J-20 class of the Chinese aircraft which I will talk about now.

In my opinion, the J-20 is 'all show and no go'.

Although it looks good like a F-22 raptor, it is 'khokla '(empty) inside.

How can an aircraft be stealthy with Canard wings?

My sense is that it is at best as good at stealth as a SU-30 which is fairly big!

So I do believe that it is no threat at all even if we look at the systems and sophistication that it claims it has.

IMAGE: An Indian Air Force fighter flies over Ladakh.

Look at our own geography as compared to theirs.

See where their main bases are located deep inside their territory.

The ones in the TAR (Tibetan Autonomous Region) are at high altitudes which makes it difficult for them to operate the J-20s from.

Also see their air defence.

It is shadowed by the mighty Himalayas and therefore the reaction time available is that much lesser.

Even if they have the good air defence weapons like the S-300 and 400 like us, it is difficult to deploy such heavy stuff at vantage points in the mountains simply because they have to be moved on roads and deployed near roads and in valleys.

So their potency is as such reduced since they can't 'see' much due to the terrain.

Therefore, our air force can strike them with impunity once we sort out whatever air they can use from the forward airfields.

You see, it is not about numbers here, it is the qualitative edge we have over them that will make a difference.

Which brings me to the point of Rafale versus the Su-30/MiG 29.

We have almost 250 plus of these and are increasing their strength with new purchases to make good the earlier losses.

In my opinion, if we had a trade-off possible, we could do with a 100 odd Rafales rather than the older technology.

In today's war, it is the side which has technical superiority which is at an advantage.

Technology is a force multiplier. It allows you to fire the magic bullet to get through the door first.

Once you have broken in, it is a matter of time before you would have put out China's front tier airfields and air defence.

Then the playing field is all ours.

We can even use our MiG-21s and even the Hawks against them and decimate them.

I am of the opinion that we have the wherewithal, resources, training and geography on our side.

We have to be buffoons to lose from this advantageous position!!

A conventional war with China is so different from how we fight Pakistan.

With Pakistan, we carry out conventional employment of air power and also support our ground and naval forces while we take out strategic and tactical targets for our own benefit.

With China, things will be different.

The Chinese will be fighting with stretched logistics and at high altitudes.

The targets in Tibet (front tier) may/may not be of so much strategic importance and will always be in support of the ground battle.

The only targets other than the airfields in the front tier would be logistics nodes and roads and bridges etc along the roads which lead to the front.

So, as I visualise, we will be largely in support of the ground battle barring some effort to neutralise their scant air force operating from the forward airfields.

The Chinese air force is no threat.

We need a change in focus in war -- of fighting with China and need to prepare for the same soonest!

Air Commodore Nitin Sathe retired from the Indian Air Force in February 2020 after 35 distinguished years of service in the IAF.

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com
YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. The ICRC Yerevan office is awaiting an official confirmation regarding an Armenian servicemans purported unintentional border crossing into Azerbaijani territory due to bad weather-related disorientation and subsequent capture.

In the event of having confirmation regarding officer Gurgen Alaverdyans incident, appropriate actions will be taken under relevant procedures, ICRC Armenia Communications chief Zara Amatuni told ARMENPRESS.

The ICRCs standard procedures require official confirmation from Armenian and Azerbaijani authorities of the news on the serviceman being lost or having appeared on the other side of the border in order to launch proceedings.

Unconfirmed Azerbaijani media reports earlier claimed that the Azerbaijani military have seized the Armenian officer on their side of the border.

In turn, the Armenian Defense Ministry has said that Officer Gurgen Alaverdyan was disoriented due to bad weather conditions and got lost while working at his outpost on August 22, 19:30. The Armenian military said they have launched search operations.

The Azerbaijani news media even tried to falsely present the Armenian serviceman to be a saboteur, but the Armenian side dismissed it as disinformation.

Reporting by Norayr Shoghikyan; Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
CEO raised concerns about with lawmakers in the US months before the Donald Trump administration started portraying the short video-sharing platform as a threat to national security, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Zuckerberg argued that TikTok, owned by Chinese unicorn ByteDance, is not committed to freedom of expression and represents a threat to the technological supremacy of the US, the report said on Sunday.

In late October last year, Zuckerberg even took the opportunity to make a case against the rising Chinese Internet when the US President hosted a private dinner with the CEO at the White House, the WSJ report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The CEO apparently argued that Washington should be more concerned about the Chinese Internet than reining in Facebook.

Similar arguments were also made during his meeting with several senators following which the concerns were shared with other authorities and the government eventually started a national security review of the company.

Earlier this month, Trump issued an executive order that gives ByteDance an option to divest its business in the US within 90 days.

Facebook recently launched the Reels feature in Instagram which offers TikTok-like functionalities.

Meanwhile, media reports said that is prepared to legally challenge the first executive order signed by Trump to prohibit its China-based owner ByteDance to do any business in the US.

The executive order "directed the Secretary of Commerce to come up with a list of transactions involving ByteDance and its holdings that should be banned after 45 days".

Trump issued another executive order on August 14, giving ByteDance an option to divest its TikTok business in the US within 90 days.

The order came after Microsoft revealed its intentions to buy TikTok business in the US.

Several other names of tech giants are floating around in the public domain, including Twitter, Oracle and now Alphabet, who may buy the US operations of TikTok.

--IANS

gb/na

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
On Monday (August 24), icare interim chief executive and managing director Don Ferguson and board chair Michael Carapiet, as well as board members David Plumb and Gavin Bell, attended a Parliamentary hearing as part of the 2020 review  which commenced in March  of the workers compensation scheme in New South Wales.

On the same day, icare released a fact file containing details in respect of key matters that have been brought into the spotlight of late. Issues addressed in the fact file include icares contracts, the calculation of pre-injury average weekly earnings, as well as the organisations group executive remuneration.

Meanwhile it was noted that a corporate governance expert will be appointed by the new icare board committee. The expert, according to the insurer, will act as a standing advisor to the committee and independent third parties to assist with the boards own evaluation.

Read more: icare interim boss addresses the industry

The icare board recognises that good governance is critical for public confidence in the Nominal Insurer scheme and its management, and that it is critical to the success and sustainability of the scheme, stated icare in a release.

The board is deeply concerned about the issues raised and recognises the need for further action, notwithstanding the fact many of these matters have been the subject of thorough, independent reviews and investigations, including by appropriate authorities.

A review of existing structures and policies will be undertaken, said icare, as the board acts to ensure that the highest standards are met. Board member Lisa McIntyre has been tapped to chair the corporate governance committee.

Earlier this month, NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet and Minister for Customer Services Victor Dominello announced a separate icare assessment headed by retired Supreme Court Judge, the Hon Robert McDougall QC. Findings of the thorough examination, according to The Australian, arent likely to be available until after a year.
This is the call you hope you never get, said Prince Georges County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who appeared with the police chief Sunday evening at University of Maryland Prince Georges Hospital Center. Theres no way to express properly the heroism that was involved tonight. All three of these officers are nothing short of heroes. They ran toward danger tonight . . .
His next big film has been delayed multiple times, but a full trailer dropped this weekend.

And Chris Pine looked to be in a thoughtful mood on Monday as he went for a drive in his vintage red Alfa Romeo convertible in Los Angeles, California.

The Star Trek actor, who turns 40 on Wednesday, allowed his mop of light colored hair to blow in the breeze as he sped along while wearing classic sunglasses.

Steve Trevor rides again: Chris Pine looked to be in a thoughtful mood on Monday, as he went for a drive in his vintage red Alfa Romeo convertible in Los Angeles

Chris also wore a short-sleeve floral shirt in shades of cream and red-orange.

The actor was seen driving solo, although he has often been seen during this period of quarantine with his partner, British actress Annabelle Wallis.

Pine had somewhat of a big weekend, as his film Wonder Woman 1984 enjoyed newfound buzz as part of DC's FanDome virtual convention.

Zooming along: The Star Trek actor, who turns 40 on Wednesday, allowed his mop of light colored hair to blow in the breeze as he sped along, also wearing classic sunglasses

What a teeny automobile: The actor was seen driving solo in his fancy Italian car

The film, which is the Eighties-set sequel to 2017's DC Comics hit Wonder Woman, has been delayed for release countless times.

First, it was pushed from last fall to this spring, but then due to the coronavirus pandemic WW1984 was pushed from June, to August, to October.

The film costars Gal Gadot in the titular role of Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, who serves as the love interest to Pine's Steve Trevor.

On his way: Chris also wore a short-sleeve floral shirt, in shades of cream and red-orange

With his better half: While Chris was seen on his own on Monday, he's often been spotted during quarantine out with his partner, British actress Annabelle Wallis; seen here on Aug. 14th

The film also brings on new blood in the form of Kristen Wiig, who will portray new villain Cheetah.

Another supervillain role in the new film is going to Pedro Pascal (of The Mandalorian fame), who will play the dangerous telepath Max Lord.

Chris was joined by his cast mates Gadot, Wiig, Pascal, along with WW1984 director Patty Jenkins and surprise guests Lynda Carter and Venus Williams this weekend for a DC Fandome Virtual Panel, where the new trailer was shown.

Big weekend: Pine had somewhat of a buzzy weekend, as his film Wonder Woman 1984 enjoyed some newfound attention as part of DC's FanDome virtual convention

In good company: Chris was joined by his Wonder Woman 1984 cast mates along with director Patty Jenkins and surprise guest Lynda Carter this weekend for a DC Fandome Virtual Panel

In addition to seeing more of Chris' character Steve, who was believed to be dead at the close of the first film, the latest trailer for WW 1984 contained some standout moments as it revealed Wiig's look in full Cheetah-mode for the first time.

The original Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter, made a surprise appearance on the panel, after it was rumored that she has an unbilled cameo in the upcoming sequel.

Judging from the new trailer as well as those that preceded it, a lot of the levity and comedy in the new film looks like it will come from Chris, who is playing a fallen World War I pilot who somehow finds himself alive in the 1980s and must learn to adjust.

Reunited: Wonder Woman 1984 costars Gal Gadot in the titular role of Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, who serves as the love interest to Pine's Steve Trevor

Judging from the new trailer: A lot of the levity in the new film looks like it will come from Chris, who is playing a fallen World War I pilot who finds himself alive in the 1980s
WASHINGTON>> President Donald Trump is muddying the facts about mail-in voting and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

Asked to disclaim the racist conspiracy theory that Harris isnt eligible to serve in the White House because of her immigrant parents, Trump repeatedly demurred and said he knew little about it, even as the false rumors swirled on social media over the past week. Harris unquestionably meets the Constitutions requirements to be vice president. On Sunday, Trumps own White House chief of staff acknowledged her eligibility.

Trump also continued to blast mail-in voting as flawed and fraudulent while insisting that absentee mail ballots, especially in states like Florida that he must win in November, are quite fine and safe. There are little differences in security measures between the two.

His weekend claims capped a litany of distortion and falsehoods following Joe Bidens announcement of Harris as his running mate. He misrepresented Bidens position on taxes, persisted in minimizing the coronavirus threat and exaggerated his own record on the economy.

A look at the past weeks rhetoric, also covering Social Security and more:

MAIL VOTING

TRUMP: Absentee is good; mail-in, universal is very, very bad. Theres no way theyre going to get it accurately.  news conference Saturday.

TRUMP: The honorable thing to do is drop the Mail-In Scam before it is too late! Absentee Ballots, like they have in Florida, are good!  tweet Saturday.

THE FACTS: Hes making a false distinction. Mail-in ballots are cast in the same way as absentee mail ballots, with the same level of scrutiny such as signature verification in many states.

In more than 30 states and the District of Columbia, voters have a right to no excuse absentee voting. That means they can use mail-in ballots for any reason, regardless of whether a person is out of town or working. In Florida, the Legislature in 2016 voted to change the wording of such balloting from absentee to vote-by-mail to make clear a voter can cast such ballots if they wish.

More broadly, voter fraud has proved exceedingly rare. The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.

Only nine states currently have plans for universal mail-in voting, where ballots are sent automatically to registered voters. Five of those states relied on mail-in ballots even before the coronavirus pandemic raised concerns about voting in person.

Blasting mail-in voting, Trump in the past week said he may hold up funding for the U.S. Postal Service to impede those votes across the 50 states.

Trump is simply wrong about mail-in balloting raising a tremendous potential for fraud, Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, wrote recently. While certain pockets of the country have seen their share of absentee-ballot scandals, problems are extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail, including the heavily Republican state of Utah.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday on CNNs State of the Union that Trump had requested a Florida absentee mail ballot to vote in November.

___

ON BIDEN-HARRIS

TRUMP, asked about social media claims that Harris is not eligible to run for vice president because her parents were immigrants to the U.S.: I heard it today that she doesnt meet the requirements.  I have no idea if thats right. I would have assumed that the Democrats would have checked that out.  news conference Thursday.

TRUMP, asked about the subject again: I have nothing to do with it. I read something about it.He added: Its not something that bothers me.  Its not something that we will be pursuing. Asked point blank if Harris is eligible, Trump replied: I just told you. I have not got into it in great detail.  news conference Saturday.

THE FACTS: Harris, a senator from California, is without question eligible.

Harris, 55, was born in Oakland, California, making her a natural-born U.S. citizen and eligible to be president if Biden were unable to serve a full term. Her father, an economist from Jamaica, and her mother, a cancer researcher from India, met at the University of California, Berkeley, as graduate students.

The Constitution requires a vice president to meet the eligibility requirements to be president. That includes being a natural-born U.S. citizen, at least 35 years old and a resident in the U.S. for at least 14 years.

I cant believe people are making this idiotic comment, Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University professor of constitutional law, told The Associated Press in 2019, when similar false claims emerged about Harris during her presidential run.

She is a natural born citizen and there is no question about her eligibility to run, Tribe said.

On Sunday, Meadows said he accepted that Harris is eligible to serve as vice president.

Sure, said Meadows, when asked on CNN whether he acknowledges the fact that she meets the constitutional requirements to be president or vice president. And I think the president spoke to this yesterday. This is not something that were going to pursue.

Harris is the first Black woman and Asian American to compete on a major partys presidential ticket. Trump in past years indulged in the false conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born abroad. Only after mounting pressure during his 2016 campaign did Trump disavow the claims.

___

TRUMP: If Biden would win  hes going to double and triple everybodys taxes.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Trump is exaggerating. Wildly so.

Biden would raise taxes, primarily on the wealthy. But a July estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that the increase is a small fraction of what Trump claimed. The former vice presidents plan would raise taxes for the top 1 percent of earners by 13 to 18% of after-tax income, while indirectly increasing taxes for most other groups by 0.2 to 0.6%, the nonpartisan group said.

To put that in perspective, tax collections would increase by $3.4 trillion to $3.7 trillion over the next decade. That is a lot of money. But its not a doubling or tripling. The government is on pace to collect $47 trillion over the next decade, so the Biden plan would be roughly be a 7.8% increase in revenues.

___

TRUMP CAMPAIGN: Not long ago, Kamala Harris called Joe Biden a racist and asked for an apology she never received.  statement Tuesday from Katrina Pierson, Trump 2020 senior adviser.

THE FACTS: She never called Biden a racist.

Pierson appears to be referring to Harris remarks during a Democratic primary debate in Miami in June 2019 when the California senator challenged Bidens record of opposing busing as a way to integrate schools in the 1970s.

Harris prefaced her criticism by telling Biden at that time, I do not believe you are a racist. I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground.

She then went on: It was actually hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. It was not only that but you also worked with them to oppose busing.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, Harris said. She was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

It was a breakthrough moment for Harris at the candidates first debate, stunning Biden, who responded that he did not praise racists and provided a hairsplitting defense of his position on busing. But she did not accuse him of being racist.

___

ECONOMY

TRUMP: The manufacturing sector is booming and the production index is at the highest reading since October of 18, which was an extraordinary period of time.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: The pandemic crushed U.S. factories and the damage persists. There is no boom.

Even after three months of job gains, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the manufacturing sector has 740,000 fewer jobs than before the outbreak. All the factory hiring gains under Trump have disappeared. There were 257,000 more manufacturing jobs on the day Trump became president than now. More important, the jobs recovery has shown signs of stalling. Just 26,000 factory jobs were added in July, down from 357,000 added jobs in June.

The sector has been recovering. Yet after increases in production in June, the Federal Reserve said U.S. factory output was running 11.1% below pre-pandemic levels. Trump cited one component of an index composed by the Institute for Supply Management that indicates factory production grew in July as well. It was the best reading since August of 2018, not October as claimed by the president. But that same report showed that manufacturers are also cutting back on employment, suggesting that a boom has yet to begin.

___

SOCIAL SECURITY

TRUMP: At the end of the year, the assumption that I win, Im going to terminate the payroll tax  Well be paying into Social Security through the general fund.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Under Trumps proposal, Social Security would lose its dedicated funding source.

Payroll taxes raise about $1 trillion annually for Social Security, and the president was unconcerned about the loss of those revenues. Trump campaign officials stressed that the general fund consists of assets and liabilities that finance government operations and could do so for Social Security. The general fund is nicknamed Americas Checkbook on the Treasury Departments website.

The risk is that the loss of a dedicated funding source could destabilize an anti-poverty program that provides payments to roughly 65 million Americans. It also could force people to cut back on the spending that drives growth so they can save for their own retirement and health care needs if they believe the government backstop is in jeopardy.

A 12.4% payroll tax split between employers and workers funds Social Security, while a 2.9% payroll tax finances Medicare. The Social Security tax raised roughly $1 trillion last year, according to government figures. Over a 10-year period, Trumps idea would blow a $13 trillion hole in a U.S. budget that is already laden with rising debt loads.

Trump announced a payroll tax deferral through the end of the year, part of a series of moves to bypass Congress after talks on a broader coronavirus relief bill that has stalled. He says he will make it a permanent tax cut with the help of Congress. Democrats have described that idea as a nonstarter.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday suggested to reporters that Trump misspoke when he said he would eliminate the payroll tax if reelected. She said the president would only push to make the payroll tax deferrals permanent. But Trump clearly said that he would eliminate the payroll tax four times at his Wednesday press briefing and even answered a question about permanently rescinding it.

___

TRUMP, asked how the general fund can sustain the payments: Were going to have tremendous growth.  You will see growth like you have not seen in a long time.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: It is highly unlikely that economic growth would be enough to offset the loss of the payroll tax. Trump has a record of making wildly improbable growth projections. He suggested that his 2017 income tax cuts would propel economic growth as high as 6% annually. That never happened. Growth reached 3% in 2018, then slumped to 2.2% and the U.S. economy crumbled into recession this year because of the coronavirus.

___

VIRUS THREAT

TRUMP: You cant compare it to 1917. That was incredible. That was  that was the worst ever by far. That was  you look at  they lost possibly 100 million people.  news conference Saturday.

TRUMP, on COVID-19: Nobody understood it because nobody has ever seen anything like this. The closest thing is, in 1917, they say  right? The great  the great pandemic certainly was a terrible thing, where they lost, anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War; all the soldiers were sick.  news briefing on Aug. 10.

THE FACTS: He got the year wrong for the Spanish flu, as he routinely does, and may have overstated deaths from it. The pandemic spread from early 1918 to late 1920. It killed an estimated 50 million worldwide, with about 675,000 of the deaths in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That pandemic did not end World War II, which came two decades later.

___

TRUMP: Were still in the pandemic, which will be going away, as I say, it will be going away. And they scream, how you can you say that? I said, because its going to be going away.  interview Thursday on Fox Business Network.

THE FACTS: No matter how many times he says it, the virus is not going to just magically disappear.

The virus is now blamed for more than 166,000 deaths and more than 5.2 million confirmed infections in the U.S.  easily the highest totals in the world. In the past week, the average number of new cases per day was on the rise in eight states, and deaths per day were climbing in 26, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the governments top infectious diseases official, has warned that increased cases across the South and West in particular put the entire country at risk. On Thursday, for instance, the rate of positive virus cases in Texas soared to the highest levels of the pandemic, with nearly 1 in every 4 coronavirus tests coming back positive. Nevada had its biggest daily jump in coronavirus fatalities to date.

In February, Trump asserted coronavirus cases were going very substantially down, not up, and said it will be fine because in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather.

Fauci says there certainly will be coronavirus infections in the fall and winter.

___

TRUMP, on whether he still thinks kids are essentially immune from COVID-19: Yeah, I think that, for the most part, they do very well. I mean, they  they dont get very sick. They dont catch it easily.  news briefing Tuesday.

THE FACTS: They arent immune, and he ignores racial disparities among those kids who get infected.

Although its true that children are less likely than adults to develop COVID-19, the CDC has nevertheless counted more than 250,000 infections by the virus in Americans younger than 18, or roughly 7% of all cases. Racial disparities in the U.S. outbreak also extend to children, with Hispanic and Black children with COVID-19 more likely to be hospitalized than white kids.

The total number of kids who have been infected but not confirmed is almost certainly far higher than the CDC figures, experts say, because those with mild or no symptoms are less likely to get tested. Trump also glosses over the fact that kids can spread disease without showing symptoms themselves.

The CDC in May also warned doctors to be on the lookout for a rare but life-threatening inflammatory reaction in some children whove had the coronavirus. The condition had been reported in more than 100 children in New York, and in some kids in several other states and in Europe, with some deaths.

Two recent government reports laid bare the racial disparities.

One of the CDC reports looked at children with COVID-19 who needed hospitalization. Hispanic children were hospitalized at a rate eight times higher than white kids, and Black children were hospitalized at a rate five times higher, it found.

The second report examined cases of the rare virus-associated syndrome in kids. It found that nearly three-quarters of the children with the syndrome were either Hispanic or Black, well above their representation in the general population.

___

NEW YORK VOTING

TRUMP: Ballots are defrauded.  news conference Saturday.

TRUMP: You just look at what happened with the Carolyn Maloney race. They should do that race over, by the way.  When you look at the ballot, the ballots that are missing, and the ballot frauds  nobody knows whats going on with that race, and yet they declared her a winner.  news conference Wednesday.

THE FACTS: Theres no evidence of fraud in the Democratic congressional primary in New York City that was won by Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Nor did Trump offer any proof of fraud.

New York State decided to allow anyone to vote by mail in the June primary because of the pandemic. More than 400,000 people voted by absentee ballot in New York City, a figure that was 10 times the number of absentee ballots cast in the 2016 primary.

Opening and counting those ballots by elections officials took weeks, leading to a legal dispute over nonfraud issues, such as missing postmarks. Candidates observing the count say that thousands of ballots were disqualified because of technical errors voters wouldnt have encountered if they had voted in person, like problems with their signature.

New York Citys Board of Elections ultimately certified the results six weeks after the election.

___

Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz in Chicago, and Lauran Neergaard, Aamer Madhani and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

Fact check: Harris meets constitutional requirements

Fact check: Trumps flawed justification for postal cuts

Fact check: Michelle Obama and the kids in cages

Fact check: Dems on minimum wage and poverty
You are here: Arts

Beijing is offering movie ticket coupons worth 10 million yuan (about 1.4 million U.S. dollars) to its residents to revitalize the film market affected by the COVID-19 epidemic.

Moviegoers can redeem the coupons until Nov. 16 via the WeChat official account of Beijing Culture-easy Card, and use them on several major movie ticket selling platforms.

Authorities announced Saturday the move designed to reignite consumers' enthusiasm for cinemas. Theaters in Beijing resumed operations on July 24 after months-long closure amid the epidemic.

Beijing will also host special screening activities, both online and offline, during the Beijing International Film Festival which kicked off on Saturday.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 14:19:32|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The recruitment exam for civilian employees of the Chinese armed forces was held in 59 cities across the nation on Sunday, according to the People's Liberation Army Daily.

More than 270,000 people sat for the exam, contending for over 24,000 posts.

Candidates for interviews will be released in mid-October.

In the Chinese military, "civilian employees" refer to those who work in management or professional technical posts but are not in active service. Enditem
<! Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi at the Emene Secondary School, scene of the bloody clash between IPOB and Nigerian security >

By Abankula

Ahmed Abdulrahman, the Police Commissioner in Enugu state has given an official account of the bloody clash between security agents and members of the Indigenous People of Biafra(IPOB).

But it is not all the truth as IPOB offered a different version.

The clash at Emene Community Secondary School in Enugu on Sunday led to many deaths.

The police gave an official death toll of four. But IPOB claimed 20 of their members were killed.

Abdurahman said his command also arrested five IPOB members.

One of the arrested IPOB members, Ebube Agu told journalists that they were having a martial art training for self defence when they were attacked by the security agents.

Agu said that they were not armed as claimed by the police.

Abdulrahman, in his own account said trouble started when operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) went on a covert operation in Emene early Sunday morning.

But they were overwhelmed and two of their officials allegedly abducted by IPOB members.

Abdurahman said that the DSS operatives called in the police and the army for reinforcement.

He noted that the police were able to rescue one of the DSS officials in a building where he was held hostage. The DSS later claimed it lost two of its men.

However, four persons lost their lives; two were hacked to death with machetes and one passerby set ablaze.

Many of the IPOB members also escaped with bullet wound and police have started tracing them, he said.

Abdurrahman urged health facilities to treat anyone with bullet wounds but should report such cases to the police.

In a statement, the DSS confirmed that said two of its men died during the clash.

The service said a comprehensive investigation had commenced into the incident, according to its

Public Relations Officer, Dr Peter Afunanya.

The DSS wishes to inform the public that its patrol team was, today (Sunday), attacked in Emene, Enugu State by members of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra.

The service lost two personnel in what was clearly an unprovoked violent attack launched by IPOB on the team.

The secret police condoled with the families of the departed officers and also prayed for the repose of their souls.

On Sunday evening, Gov. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu State appealed to people of the state to remain calm as normalcy has returned to the state after the clash.

Ugwuanyi made the appeal when he visited the Emene school, the scene of the clash on Sunday in Enugu.

But it appears that peace may be elusive in the state, as the leader of IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu has issued an order, suspending all meetings in the state, but also asking members to kill many securitymen, in retaliation, for every IPOB member killed.

He stated: This evening, Sunday 23rd August 2020, I am giving the order that wherever a Biafran is killed, I want 100 police and army officers that perpetrated the crime, to be killed. We are no longer going to allow that impunity to continue.

They are going to bury their own soon and that is, if they will find their dead bodies. I will make sure that they will never find them. You see these Fulani idiots in our land, in eight weeks, we are not going to give them a dime. They think that we are going to keep quiet because we value life.

I am suspending all IPOB family meetings in Enugu and we are going to deal with this people. We own our land, you people (Fulanis) are visitors including the idiot who calls himself, a police commissioner.

You came to our land to kill our people. The day we will come out armed, you will be crawling on the ground. Anywhere the police or the army kills a Biafran henceforth, we will retaliate, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu said.

Related
The leader of the evangelical Liberty University released a statement addressing an affair his wife had with a man who he says later tried to extort his family.

Jerry Falwell Jr., currently on a leave of absence from the university, said that he is seeking help for the "emotional toll" of an affair, the Associated Press reports.

Falwell said the man was trying "to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies.

"Over the course of the last few months this person's behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public," said the statement, which was provided to The Associated Press on Monday.

In his statement, Falwell said he and his wife met the man she had an affair with during a vacation over eight years ago. The man was working at the hotel where the Falwells stayed, the statement said.

Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved  it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about, Falwell said in the statement.

Falwell has been on indefinite leave since early August as president and chancellor of the Lynchburg university founded by his late father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr.

He stepped down after an uproar sparked by a photo he posted on social media that showed him with his pants unzipped, stomach exposed and arm high around the waist of a woman who was not his wife, AP reports.
As seen recently with Peacock's Brave New World and Apple TV+'s Servant, future dystopian series are all the rage.

And now HBO Max is getting in on the trend with Alien auteur Ridley Scott, who is making his television series directorial debut for American audiences next month with Raised By Wolves.

The streaming service dropped the second trailer for the show on Monday, and the vision found therein is at once hypnotic and terrifying, following a nascent civilization on a far-off planet that sees androids raising a new breed of humanity.

Creepy android: HBO Max is getting in on the future dystopian trend with new series Raised By Wolves, which sees Alien auteur Ridley Scott making his television series directorial debut for American audiences

'A new world, a new start,' a voice is heard saying in the beginning of the ethereal trailer, as a ship launches into the void of space and soon lands on an exotic planet.

'It won't have the same problems that ended our world on Earth.'

Soon, mysterious humanoid androids are seen, wearing futuristic helmets.

They are tasked with birthing, and then raising, human children, who are branded 'the future of humanity.'

New life, sort of: The second trailer for the show dropped Monday, following a nascent civilization on a far-off planet that sees androids raising a new breed of humanity

Out there: Mysterious humanoid androids are seen, wearing futuristic helmets

The very creepy images include a fetus or newborn that looks like it's being unwrapped from a plastic encasement.

Very quickly, it becomes clear that atheism is the law of the land in this new outworld colony, as religion is what seemingly ended civilization back home.

And then the stakes are set: this new civilization is threatened by a mysterious enemy, who has 'built an ark' that is headed toward them on 'the only known planet' able to support human life.

Progeny: The androids are tasked with birthing, and then raising, human children, who are branded 'the future of humanity'

The stakes are set: This new civilization is threatened by a mysterious enemy

Futuristic: They have 'built an ark' that is headed toward them

Raised by Wolves stars Amanda Collin (Splitting Up Together), who plays Mother  one of the primary androids charged with protecting the children.

Her buzzcut and otherworldly styling make her look like a contemporary update of Gozer from 1984's Ghostbusters.

Opposite her is Travis Fimmel of Vikings fame, who plays Marcus, one of the enemy agents hurtling toward their home.

Newborn: The androids and children live on 'the only known planet' able to support human life

Raised by Wolves stars Amanda Collin, who plays Mother: One of the primary androids charged with protecting the children

Opposite her: Travis Fimmel of Vikings fame plays Marcus, one of the enemy agents hurtling toward their home

'We must rescue our stolen children,' Marcus is heard saying in the trailer

'We must rescue our stolen children,' he is heard saying in the trailer before he squares off against a menacing-looking Mother.

Other cast members include Abubakar Salim from Fortitude, Jordan Loughran of Emerald City fame, Matias Varela from Narcos and Point Break, Felix Jamieson from Game of Thrones, Ivy Wong (Star Wars: Rogue One, Maleficent 2) and Ethan Hazzard.

The look and feel of many of the shots in the trailer  mainly of spaceship interiors and set pieces that look like sleep pods  are highly reminiscent of Scott's timeless franchise-launching film Alien from 1979.

Other exterior shots call to mind another hallmark of American sci-fi  Terminator  which is from the mind of Aliens director James Cameron.

Reminiscent of a classic: The look and feel of many of the shots in the trailer  mainly of set pieces that look like sleep pods  are highly reminiscent of Scott's timeless Alien from 1979

Similar to the Nostromo: Same goes for certain shots of spaceship interiors

Remarkable visual: Other images in the trailer are starkly original and imaginative

But other exterior shots call to mind another hallmark of American sci-fi: Terminator, which is from the mind of Aliens director James Cameron

Ridley, who is credited as director and executive producer of two episodes of Raised By Wolves, is also known for classics such as 1982's Blade Runner.

The new series was created by Aaron Guzikowski, the screenwriter of 2013's Prisoners starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis.

The highly-anticipated 10-episode series will premiere September 3rd on HBO Max.

Close encounter: Collin as Mother's buzzcut and otherworldly styling make her look like a contemporary update of Gozer from 1984's Ghostbusters
Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the treatment may be effective but that 'it doesn't look like a home run'

Health experts are divided over the recent approval of convalescent blood plasma as a treatment for coronavirus patients in the US.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced the experimental therapy had been issued emergency use authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The commander-in-chief lauded the news as a ''very big day' and 'truly historic' just one day after suggesting, baselessly, that the FDA is waiting to approve treatments and vaccines until after the presidential election in November.

At the same press conference, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar noted a Mayo Clinic study in which there was 35 percent decrease in mortality among patients younger than age 80 who received plasma.

Some physicians and the American Red Cross have praised the approval and say they've seen plasma help save the lives of patients.

Dr Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University in the UK, called the approval 'great news' and said he hoped hospitals in the country will be able to use the treatment regularly very soon.

But others say the value of the treatment has yet to be established and say it might not be effective.

Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist from Harvard, says the '35 percent' figure is misleading because the treatment was tested between two groups receiving plasma and not against a control group.

On Sunday, the FDA approved convalescent plasma therapy for emergency use authorization in coronavirus patients, with President Trump hailing the decision as 'truly historic.' Pictured: Trump announces the FDA's decision on Sunday in the Press Briefing Room of the White House

Convalescent plasma therapy is when the liquid portion of blood is taken from a recovered coronavirus patient. Pictured: Phlebotomist Samatha Gallegos talks with Oklahoma Secretary of Transportation Tim Gatz as he donates convalescent plasma at the Oklahoma Blood Institute in Oklahoma City, August 12

It is transferred into a sick patient in hopes they will develop the antibodies needed to fight off the infection. Pictured: Collected plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 in Bogota, Colombia, August 20

Convalescent plasma therapy is an experimental treatment in which plasma from a recovered COVID-19 patient is used on an infected patient in critical condition.

The hope is that the antibodies and immunity in the blood of a healthy person will be transferred to a sick person.

Ideally, the infected person will then develop the antibodies needed to fight off the coronavirus.

The treatment was first used during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, a situation similar to the current pandemic.

People can donate plasma more than once, but have to wait several weeks after donating.

WHAT IS CONVALESCENT PLASMA THERAPY? Convalescent plasma therapy is an experimental treatment in which the liquid portion of blood is taken from recovered COVID-19 patients. This portion of the blood contains antibodies that have been developed against the virus. It is transferred into a sick patient in hopes they will develop more antibodies to fight off the infection. Donors have to confirm they had the virus and are fully recovered. The FDA has also mandated that patients who receive plasma must be experiencing conditions such as life-threatening respiratory failure or multiple organ failure. At least 600 patients have received the treatment as part of a national study. The American Red Cross says it has produced 32,000 units of plasma from about 14,000 donors so far. Advertisement

In April, the FDA allowed use of convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19 patients, but said it must be on a case-by-case basis, and patients who receive it must be experiencing conditions such as respiratory failure or multiple organ failure.

Doctors at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester said they gave plasma to a patient who was near death. Within a few hours, his vital signs improved and he began to recover, WCVB reported.

Since April, the American Red Cross has collected plasma from more than 14,000 donors and has distributed more than 32,000 products to hospitals throughout the country, according to a press release.

'This [emergency use authorization] will help ensure more patients have access to this potentially lifesaving treatment, providing greater hope to individuals and their families during this difficult time,' the organization wrote.

Even physicians, such as Dr Justin Maykel, a colon and rectal surgeon at UMass Memorial, donated his plasma after recovering from the coronavirus.

In May, a study from Mount Sinai in New York City compared 39 coronavirus patients who received plasma infusions compared to 156 who did not.

Researchers found patients who received plasma needed less oxygen support, were less likely die and more likely to be discharged from the hospital.

Nearly 13 percent of plasma patients died and 72 percent were discharged in comparison with 24 percent of control patients who died and 67 percent who were discharged.

'I just want to emphasize this point because I don't want you to gloss over this number,' HHS Secretary Azar said during the Sunday press conference, referencing the Mayo Clinic study.

'We dream in drug development of something like a 35 percent mortality reduction. This is a major advance in the treatment of patients. This is a major advance.'

Trump claimed that more than 100,000 Americans have already enrolled to receive this treatment.

But leading scientists say the study is a 'bad conclusion' and that there is no conclusive proof that the treatment works.

The findings that led to emergency use authorization were published on a pre-print server, MedRxiv, on August 12.

This means the research has not been peer-reviewed yet, a process in which scientists can scrutinize the findings - and often reveals flaws.

Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Monday that the treatment may be effective but that 'it doesn't look like a home run.' Pictured: Gottlieb speaks during his confirmation hearing before a Senate committee, in Washington, DC, April 2017

Some scientists met the decision with skepticism, and said the figure showing that mortality was reduced by 35% is 'misleading'

Among 35,000 coronavirus patients, the team said there were fewer deaths among people given plasma within three days of diagnosis and also among those given plasma with the highest levels of antibodies compared to less-rich plasma.

Those treated with plasma containing the highest levels of antibodies had a 35 per cent lower risk of dying within a week compared to those treated with less-rich plasma.

But it was not a formal study because patients were treated in different ways in hospitals around the country.

This means the Mayo Clinic cannot prove the plasma - as well as the other care they received - was the real reason for improvement.

What's more, experts say the '35 percent mortality reduction' is a misleading figure.

This is because researchers compared patients receiving plasma early on in infection compared to later, not plasma versus a placebo - the 'gold standard' of clinical trials.

The findings show 8.7 percent of patients treated with plasma within three days of diagnosis died after seven days, compared to 11.9 percent who were treated four days or more.

That's an absolute difference of 3.2 percent, not 35 percent, and not compared to a control group.

Additionally, the 35 percent figure comes from the relative risk of death in the high-plasma group as opposed to the low-plasma group after seven days.

Former FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Monday that blood plasma may work, but that it's not the be-all and end-all treatment.

'I think that this could be beneficial. It might be weakly beneficial,' he said on Squawk Box.

'It doesn't look like a home run, but right now we're looking for singles and doubles. There aren't really going to be any home runs on the horizon until we can get the other therapeutic antibodies on the market and hopefully eventually vaccines and better therapeutics.'

Meanwhile, World Health Organization (WHO) says blood plasma is 'experimental' and that early results showing its success may are still 'inconclusive.'

The WHO's chief scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan said studies looking at convalescent plasma have been small and provided 'low-quality evidence.'
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev extended condolences to Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili.

"Dear Madame President,

We were deeply saddened by the news of many casualties in the result of the bus crash in the territory of your countrys Dusheti municipality," Azerbaijani president wrote.

"On the occasion of this tragedy, on my own behalf and on behalf of the people of Azerbaijan, I extend my heartfelt condolences to you, families and relatives of the victims, friendly people of Georgia, and wish the recovery to the injured," the head of state wrote.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Member of Parliament for Assin Central Constituency, Kennedy Agyapong has said the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has failed the people of Central Region hence attempt by the party to choose Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang as the running mate for the opposition National NDC is a plan to deceive the people of Central Region.

According to him, the NDC has always benefited from votes in the Central region but has failed woefully to lay infrastructure projects that will develop the region.

He further stressed that, the NPP has proven over the years to be development drivers in the region hence the people of the Central region must reject the NDC and give massive endorsement to President Akufo-Addo in the 2020 elections.

The lawmaker stated that the choice of Naana Opoku-Agyemang will not change the minds of the people of the Central region to vote against NDC.

Hon. Kennedy Agyapong stated that President Akufo-Addo is a visionary, bold, courageous leader and one of the most consistent politicians.

We have a President who is not thinking about elections tomorrow. President Akufo-Addo is putting in place generational legacies that many young people will grow one day to see. That is the type of President we have,Kennedy Agyapong exclusively told Kwaku Owusu Adjei on Accra-based Kingdom FM 107.7 during NPPs manifesto launch at the University of Cape Coast over the weekend.

What has NDC done for the people of the Central region? They always deceive us for votes that is why Ghanaians and people of Cape-Coast must not vote for NDC again, he added.

---KingdomfmOnline
As Taiwan develops stronger ties with the United States and postures against PLA's growing belligerence and military might across the Taiwan Strait, a restless Beijing has now threatened war against the nations for challenging its One-China policy. Referring to escalating tensions due to 'reckless' military drills in both Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, Beijings mouthpiece Global Times' Editor said there are growing concerns over the risk of military conflict between the nations.

There is growing concern over risk of war, with the US & Taiwan challenging "One-China principle" by demonstrating stronger political relations combined with US' blatant show of muscle in Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. The situation is heading toward spiraling out of control. pic.twitter.com/oSYhd6xsHW  Hu Xijin  (@HuXijin_GT) August 23, 2020

READ | US 'committed' To Assisting Taiwan Strengthen Self-defense Capabilities

Taiwan hits back at China

The threat comes a day after Taiwans Defence Ministry took to its anti-aircraft, anti-tank and vessel missiles combat in mock invasion drills in the Taiwan Strait. On August 22, Taiwanese fighter aircraft flew across the de facto median line, issuing warnings to China not to underestimate the islands defence capabilities in cross-Strait military exercises.

"The most egotistical country can thoughtlessly provoke a war and the most ignorant government can be caught in the flames of war, Taiwans Defence Ministry said in a statement. Repeated provocation by China's People's Liberation Army will no longer work, the ministry added.

In the drill, Taiwans military fired ballistic missiles from assault helicopters and fighter jets dropped bombs on targets at sea and the islands shore. Tanks and missile trucks fired from land during the large-scale military drill throughout the island.

READ | US Navy Aircraft Carrier Conducts Exercises In South China Sea; Beijing Miffed

US backs Taiwan, crushes claims over the South China Sea

Taiwans armed forces drill came as Peoples Republic expanded its military activity surrounding the island in the disputed South China Sea.

As Taiwan showcased its military might against the rival nation, the United States Navy aircraft carrier conducted maritime exercises in the South China Sea to crush the countrys claim over the international waters. The exercise was conducted by the US from its legitimate military base in the Philippines.

While China cries foul, several tiny nations in the region like Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam have called out the country for its 'false' territorial claims accusing China of expanding its territories by building artificial islands in the region.

READ | Taiwan Releases Military Exercise Video Showing Troops Fending Off Attack From China

READ | 'Don't Do To Others What You Don't Want,' Chinese Stooge To US Over Drills In S. China Sea
Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) has achieved outstanding results in Strategic Planning & Execution Practice Positioning Study conducted by Palladium Group, the international authority for Balanced Scorecard framework.

The study evaluated the positive effects of implementing the Execution Premium Assessment (XPA) strategy and compared Dewa practices with around 200 global organisations who are the best in class Hall of Fame organisations in strategic planning and execution.

The Dubai utility scored 4.3 while the Hall of Fame Average Score is 3.8.

"Our strategy is inspired by the directives of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, who transformed government work to compete with the private sector in many areas. We believe that the right planning is key for proper management to achieve desirable results and pave the way for the future," remarked Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of Dewa.

"This is according to long-term strategies that are approved after several brainstorming sessions among our teams, who research and identify the requirements and responsibilities of each team member. This ensures keeping pace with rapid change and maintaining excellence," he stated.

According to him, Dewa is committed to raising awareness and strategic thinking among society to include all stakeholders, to provide the highest levels of performance and enhance competitiveness.

Al Tayer pointed out that Dewa had always adopted ambitious strategies ensuring the water and energy sectors reach advanced positions globally.

"In 2000, we began applying the Balanced Scorecard framework and continued to develop its strategic planning mechanism to become the first government organisation in the Middle East and North Africa to win the Hall of Fame  the highest international award in strategic planning," he added.

Khawla Al Mehairi, Executive VP (Strategy and Government Communications) said: "At Dewa, we ensure systematic strategic planning to anticipate and shape the future. We also enhance our social partnership and provide consultation in training and education, in collaboration with world-class organisations."

She said Dewa strived to enhance the capabilities of its employees in preparing future strategies, developing, and implementing them in accordance with its vision.

"This is in addition to identifying the required skills to implement the strategies; using the latest strategic planning tools, including 3G Balanced Scorecards; outlining performance indicators and smart objectives to measure efficiency and reliability, among others," remarked Al Mehairi.

Prof Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School and one of the creators of the Balanced Scorecard, said he was impressed with the recent work done by Dewa in updating its strategy map and strategy execution framework."

It was an early adopter that we learned from, so we could extend the model to other organisations in the region. Dewa recognised that excellence and strategy execution is a journey and an ongoing process of learning and improvement, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
A man uses his mobile phone as he walks past advertising for iPhones outside an Apple store.

Apple's South Korean unit has proposed measures to address antitrust concerns and offered to provide 100 billion won ($84.02 million) worth of support programs for small businesses, consumers and others, the country's competition watchdog said on Monday.

Apple Korea has been under investigation by the Korea Fair Trade Commission over allegations it abused its dominant position by forcing mobile carriers to pay for advertising and warranty repairs, the commission has said.

Apple has agreed to fix "unfair" terms with mobile carriers as part of its proposal, the KFTC said in a briefing. For example, Apple will discuss how to share advertising costs with telecoms firms, which will help reduce burdens to carriers, the KFTC said.

Apple Korea was not immediately available for comment.

Out of the 100 billion won, Apple pledged to offer 40 billion won to build a center to support research and development for Korea's small manufacturers and 25 billion won to establish an "academy" to provide education to developers.

Another 25 billion won will be used to give consumer discounts on warranty repair costs and other benefits.

The regulator will close the case without concluding whether Apple did anything illegal if it finds the proposed remedies reasonable after collecting public opinion.

In 2019, Apple held an 18% share in South Korea's mobile phone market, the home turf of Samsung Electronics, which controlled 65% of the market, according to data from researcher Counterpoint.

Apple faces antitrust pressure in other countries. In March, French regulators fined Apple 1.1 billion euros ($1.23 billion), saying the iPhone maker was guilty of anti-competitive behavior toward its distribution and retail network. Apple said at that time that it would appeal to the decision.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Monday pledged to share year-round hydrological data for the Mekong River, addressing recent concerns raised by countries in the Lower Mekong who are facing low water levels and drought conditions during the current wet season.

The Chinese premier made the commitment during a summit of Lancang-Mekong leaders on Monday, after the Mekong River Commission (MRC), which has China only as a dialogue partner, called for year-round data sharing in June to improve flood and drought monitoring along the critical water body.

Lancang-Mekong Cooperation includes China and five lower Mekong countries  Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam. Chinas absence as a member of the MRC means that it does not have to submit hydropower dam proposals to the intergovernmental body.



Speaking at the virtual summit, Li Keqiang said China had provided wet season hydrological data for the Lancang River, the name for the river in China, to the Mekong countries, and had offered a timely update of upstream water levels.

China also made extra efforts to increase outbound water flow in drought season to help downstream lower countries to mitigate drought, he said.

Starting from this year, China will share Mekong River hydrological data the whole year with the Mekong countries, Li Keqiang added.



A press release from the Cambodian Foreign Ministry lauded Chinese commitment to share more hydrological data and assistance in maintaining water resources cooperation.



Prime Minister Hun Sen, in his speech at the summit, said Cambodia had benefited from the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation with 55 projects funded by China to help Cambodia. He also appreciated the data sharing commitment from China.

The joint agreement in finding a solution related to the most sensitive topic of trans-bordering water management is another major success in our cooperation, he said. While low water levels have plagued the Mekong River and affected the 60 million people dependent on it as an inland fishery, it has also resulted in a drier Tonle Sap lake. The MRC said in early August that the Tonle Sap, which relies on reverse flows from the Mekong River during the wet season, has recorded the lowest flows since 1997. The lake is critical as a source of fish, both for sustenance and livelihood, for the millions of Cambodians dependent on the lake.

At the time, the MRCs chief executive officer, An Pich Hatda, appealed to all six countries along the Mekong River to share flow data in a transparent and speedy manner.



Cambodian government officials have also hinted at upstream hydropower dams in China causing low water levels downstream, but have routinely cited climate change and the El Nino effect as the cause of these issues.

In a press conference on August 11, Te Navuth, secretary-general of the Cambodia National Mekong Committee, said that the main reason for water shortages in the Mekong River and Tonle Sap lake was the absence of no rain and drought caused by the El Nino effect.

He conceded that the dams along the Mekong River had a minor contribution to low water levels.



Brian Eyler, the Southeast Asia program director at the Stimson Center in Washington D.C., said Chinas pledge for year-round data sharing provided little detail about the kind of data that will be shared. He said China should share information related to dams on the upstream.
Not all migrant workers fly to work. But, 20 labourers from Bihars Samastipur district, 86 km north-east of Patna, are lucky. The labourers will fly from Patna to Delhi by a GoAir evening flight on August 27.

Delhi-based mushroom farmer Pappan Singh Gahlot, who they refer to as their maalik (master), has paid for their airfare, which he claims cost him Rs 1.04 lakh. In addition, he is also paying for the travel expenses of these workers from Samastipur to Patna by reserved taxi.

Gahlot had sent home 10 of his labourers by flight to Patna on May 28, after they were stranded in the national capital during the lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

Some of these labourers have been working with him since the beginning when he took to mushroom farming 27 years ago.

The tickets are slightly cheaper this time. They have cost me Rs 5,200 per head, as against Rs 6,800 during the lockdown, said Gahlot over phone from Delhi. While 10 labourers will fly for the second time, 10 others are first-time fliers.

I had a cheaper option, to get them back by train, as the fare of Rajdhani Express was Rs 4,000 per head. However, I want my workers to experience the joy of flying for the first time even if it costs me some extra money. We have a close bond, said Gahlot.

Gahlots only remorse is that he will be engaging only 20 workers this time as against 50 for mushroom cultivation, which will be on a smaller scale between September and March.

I will reduce by half my mushroom cultivation, which I used to do on a 3-acre plot of land. The pandemic has had an effect on its sale, with stocks of canned mushroom lying idle as the hotel and hospitality industry is at an all-time low, he added.

Gahlot had the option of hiring people from Delhi and neighbouring areas, but he believes in rewarding loyalty, as people like Lakhindra Ram, 55, have been working with him for the last 27 years. His son Navin Kumar, 25, has been working for Gahlot for the last 10 years and his brother Praveen Ram has also been working for the last five years.

We never dreamt of flying, it has been possible only because of our maalik. We were initially scared when the plane took off, but later enjoyed our air travel, said Navin.

He has been a messiah for us. Even when we had no work and nothing to eat during the three-month lockdown period in Bihar, he transferred money up to Rs 3,000 per month for all those who used to work with him and even the first-timers going to work in Delhi, added Navin.

Bihar received around 20 lakh migrant workers from different parts of India during the lockdown.
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Manila, Philippines  Mon, August 24, 2020 14:24 514 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c400f1a9 2 SE Asia China,South-China-Sea,Philippines,territorial-disputes Free

China's "nine-dash line" used to claim most of the South China Sea is a fabrication, the Philippine defense minister said, as he accused Beijing of illegally occupying Filipino maritime territory.

The remarks late Sunday come amid a fresh row between Manila and Beijing over the disputed Scarborough shoal, which has long been a flashpoint between the two countries.

The Philippine foreign ministry last week lodged a diplomatic protest over what it said was the "illegal confiscation" by China's coast guard of fishing equipment near the shoal.

China seized Scarborough from the Philippines in 2012 following a tense standoff.

The shoal, one of the region's richest fishing grounds, is located 240 kilometres (150 miles) west of the Philippines' main island of Luzon and 650 kms from the nearest major Chinese land mass, the southern island province of Hainan.

"That area is within our EEZ," Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told reporters in a text message, referring to the country's exclusive economic zone.

"Their [China's] so-called historical rights over an area enclosed by their 9-line doesn't exist except in their imaginations.

"Our fishermen are within our EEZ and likewise our ships and planes conduct patrol sorties within our area.

"They [China] are the ones who have been doing provocations by illegally occupying some features within our EEZ. Hence they have no right to claim they are enforcing their laws."

Beijing claims the majority of the sea, often invoking its so-called nine-dash line to justify its alleged historic rights to the key waterway that is also contested by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan and Brunei.

It rejected a 2016 UN-backed tribunal's ruling that its claims were without legal basis.

China's foreign ministry on Friday defended the coast guard, saying they had carried out law enforcement activities and "their actions are understandable".

It also accused Philippine military aircraft of invading Chinese airspace in another disputed section of the sea and urged Manila to "immediately stop illegal provocative activities".

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's spokesman has played down the spat which comes as the coronavirus-ravaged country seeks to secure a coronavirus vaccine from China.

"Our diplomats routinely lodge protests like that if we believe our sovereign rights are violated," Harry Roque said Friday.

"But it will not affect the overall good relations between our country and China.

Philippine-China relations have improved under Duterte, who revived once-icy diplomatic ties after being elected in 2016 when he largely set aside maritime disputes in favor of wooing Chinese aid, trade and investment.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told Duterte in Beijing last year that its position on the sea was not up for negotiation, a spokesman for Duterte said at the time.
Nuclear Reactor Development History

Nick Touran, 2020-01-12. Reading time: 85 minutes

You have to know the past to understand the present  Carl Sagan

The dream for economical nuclear power was born well before the discovery of nuclear fission, but the quest for it began in earnest in the late 1940s and involved some 100,000 persons for several decades in the USA alone. This page is a grand tour of reactor development programs from 1945 to about 1970, also known as the nuclear heyday. As we proceed with new reactor development programs today, remembering what was done back then may help us navigate developments of the future.

Our economics page discusses developments and economics from 1970 to the present.

The starting point

When nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, 235U existed at 0.7% in natural Uranium (decayed down from over 25% when Earth was formed). Without isotopic enrichment available (of uranium or hydrogen in water), only a handful of configurations could sustain a chain reaction. Enrico Fermi and co. figured it out by 1942, and operated the first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1), using pieces of natural uranium metal dispersed carefully in a lattice of high-purity graphite blocks in a Chicago squash court.

Note: This is written largely from the US perspective. Developments in other countries are not well covered here. Also, the chains of events are difficult to classify so the time linearity of the following is not perfect.

Nuclear weapons production reactors

Vast wealth and effort was first invested in nuclear reactor development because the unique characteristics of the atomic chain reaction could provide fundamental and dramatic military strategic advantages. Accordingly, the first high-power reactors were designed and built to produce plutonium as fuel for nuclear explosives. As in CP-1, they had natural uranium fuel dispersed in a graphite moderator.

Workers laying graphite in the Hanford B plutonium production reactor under construction (from HAER-WA-164)

Unlike CP-1, the Hanford reactors were cooled with ordinary water. Since water is a neutron absorber, the reactor had to be large, and it required extra-pure graphite with minimal neutron-absorbing impurities (like boron). It also needed a lot of metallic natural uranium. Eugene Wigner proposed cooling with low-pressure, low-temperature water instead of high-temperature, high-pressure helium because he was worried that the fuel would not survive high temperatures, and that pumping and maintaining an inventory of helium would be challenging. His calculations showed that a water-cooled reactor would indeed chain-react, and his unwavering drive to beat the Nazis bolstered his confidence. Water-cooled reactors were built.

After the plutonium-producing B reactor at Hanford was operational, the scientists who designed it began imagining a better time, beyond the war, when the newfound power of the atom could be applied to the peaceful enrichment of humankind. The first documented reactor innovation sessions occurred around this time. Many reactor concepts were dreamed up at these New Piles Committee meetings. No one knew whether nuclear-powered electricity generating stations could be cost-competitive with conventional power plants.

Some early reactor ideas from MUC-LAO-42. See also the Piles of the Future Review from October, 1944 where a longer discussion of their views of future reactors is recorded. They thought pressurized water would lead to corrosion issues at high temperature and considered liquid metal (specifically lead-bismuth) to be the most promising coolant. Written 5 days after Hanford B came online, it does have a pretty funny suggestion about gold being the best shield.

Putting nuclear heat to work

After the war, the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took responsibility for US nuclear technology, as authorized by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Building up new weapons material production capabilities and weapons technology dominated its efforts, but power reactor development did legitimately begin at this time.

Truly exotic energy conversion was seriously considered in the 1940s (thermionics, endothermic chemical reactions, etc.), but converting heat to electricity in a standard steam cycle was considered the easiest way to reach economical nuclear power. This conversion requires high-temperature, long-endurance fuel that can withstand an intense radiation environment. This was a fundamental technological departure from the plutonium-production reactors, which generated heat only as a nuisance and were kept at low temperature. Robert Oppenheimer explained this well.

In 1947, the AEC proposed and funded four new reactors, all of which made use of new availability of enriched uranium rather than natural uranium. All four were completed in the early 1950s:

Fast reactor  A fast reactor to explore the possibilities of breeding (now known as EBR-1)

Navy thermal reactor  a prototype for submarine propulsion (now known as STR or S1W)

Materials Testing Reactor (MTR)  A testing facility to investigate potential materials to be used in power reactor construction. The resistance of materials to the environment required for power production was the primary challenge of power reactor development.

Knolls intermediate reactor  to explore the possibilities of breeding and to develop usable power (soon repurposed as another submarine prototype, called SIR and/or S1G)

The first three were built in Idaho, thus creating what was then called the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) and is now the Idaho National Lab (INL). The fourth was built north of Schenectady, NY in a giant sphere at the center of Knolls Atomic Power Labs Kesselring site. During design of the MTR, Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) built a mechanical mockup reactor, which they then converted to a real reactor called LITR: the first water-cooled, water-moderated reactor.

The LITR, the first water-cooled, water-moderated reactor, in 1950 at ORNL (CC-BY-2.0 ORNL) The MTR under construction in 1951 (source) The MTR core (AEC photo)

Specialized military reactors after WWII

As nuclear weapons have orders of magnitude more destructive force over conventional explosives, nuclear engines for submarines, ships, rockets, and aircraft offer orders of magnitude more range than conventional fuels. Accordingly, the next major application of the chain reactor was in specialized military contexts.

Naval reactors

The nuclear-propelled Navy was developed by Captain Hyman G. Rickover. Rickovers role in the development of naval propulsion goes without saying, but his influence on the commercial industry simply cannot be overstated. He was born in 1900 in a Polish ghetto, moved to New York at the age of 6, and then to Chicagos West Side. He entered the Naval Academy in 1918 and requested submarine service in 1929. He translated Das Unterseeboot from the Imperial German Navy as a labor of personal interest. In 1937, he became a Engineering Duty Only (EDO) officer, focused on the design, construction, and maintenance of ships. After WWII ended, he was sent to Oak Ridge to learn about nuclear technology as part of a team to investigate nuclear ship propulsion. He established himself as the leader of the team and fought hard to secure funds and authority to kick off the naval reactors program.

He kicked off two reactor development programs in parallel for naval propulsion: the sodium-cooled beryllium-reflected/moderated reactor (Project Genie) and the pressurized water reactor (Project Wizard).

The STG/S1W Nautilus PWR prototype in Idaho (NRL Atomic Age) The sphere for the SIR/S1G Seawolf sodium-beryllium prototype in New York (from Atomic Shield, higher-res from LIFE)

The PWR and the Nautilus

Alvin Weinberg and the Oak Ridge team suggested using pressurized water as a submarine reactor coolant and moderator for two reasons: (1) the distance neutrons in water travel is one-fifth the distance they travel in graphite, so the water reactor could be very compact (good for small enclosed spaces), and (2) water systems are simple, familiar, and reliable in a naval context. The ORNL team made preliminary sketches of such a reactor.

The preliminary work of ORNL was transferred to Argonne along with a team of engineers who were coming off the just-cancelled Daniels Pile project, which had attempted to develop a high-temperature pebble-bed gas-cooled power reactor using highly-enriched uranium.

Against the prevailing wisdom (e.g. of Weinberg), Rickover boldly decided to build the full-scale Nautilus prototype reactor (STR) in Idaho without first building a much-cheaper pilot model. Simultaneously, construction of the Nautilus submarine itself began in Connecticut. Rickovers ruthless and aggressive schedule was driven by a conviction that whoever developed nuclear engines first would rule the seas.

Rickover strictly required that the two projects fit together. At one inspection, he forced the Idaho team to move a coffee maker outside the hull since it would not be in the real submarine.

During STR development, the effect of radiation on components and equipment was tested in the MTR. Vast programs successfully developed the hermetically sealed pumps with appropriate bearings, thin stainless steel or Inconel liners, motor winding cooling, and high-pressure electrical terminal seals. A complete line of hermetically sealed, hydraulically operated stainless steel primary system valves was developed. Welding of heavy wall stainless piping was developed. Weldability and weld cracking as functions of material composition was found and understood. Design criteria for auxiliary systems supporting waste disposal, coolant purification, emergency cooling, fuel handling, ventilation, as well as feasible engineering techniques to satisfy the requirements were developed.

STR went critical on March 31, 1953 and reached full power by May 31.

After a massive reactor technology development program and the operation of a land-based prototype reactor in Idaho, the second major application of nuclear reactors became the propulsion system of naval submarines, marked by the message from the USS Nautilus on Jan 17, 1955:

UNDERWAY ON NUCLEAR POWER

The launch of the USS Nautilus (SSN-571). Click the photo to enlarge; you will not be disappointed. (Credit: Naval History and Heritage Command photo UA 475.05.02)

The astoundingly high energy density of nuclear fuel allowed the submariners to gallivant on wild new adventures, such as reaching the North Pole under ice for the first time and circumnavigating the world in one non-stop submerged session for the first time. Such high adventures are remembered by people who were young at the time (like Gwyneth Cravens) as deeply inspiring.

The SIR and the Seawolf

The sodium-cooled intermediate-spectrum power breeder that GE was working on for the AEC at KAPL got swooped into the Naval Reactors development program, and its first reactor became the land-based prototype for the USS Seawolf. At first, Rickover preferred the sodium-cooled approach with a beryllium reflector/moderator because it used silent electro-magnetic pumps and offered very high thermal efficiency. The prototype (S1G) experienced leaks in the superheaters due to an incompatibility between the liquid metal sodium and the particular steel used. Because of Rickovers insistence in building prototype concurrently with the real thing, the real Seawolf also experienced superheater leaks. They plugged tubes, performed difficult repairs (sodium has high induced radioactivity and high chemical reactivity), and eventually bypassed the superheater. Seawolf worked at reduced efficiency, logged some tens of thousands of hours, but eventually had its propulsion system swapped out for a PWR.

Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion

Alongside the naval propulsion project, the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program was launched. Long-range bombers that could stay in the air for months or years at a time with unlimited range were thought to be militarily important. In addition, significant R&D on nuclear-powered cruise missiles and scramjets was performed.

A nuclear-powered jet engine concept (from APEX-901) An actual test of a nuclear-powered jet engine in Idaho, called HTRE-2 (photo by me)

The ANP was a massive program spanning more than 10 years and a billion (1955) dollars. JFK ended the program early in his presidency at the recommendation of Alvin Weinberg. Progress in ICBMs effectively eliminated the need for nuclear-powered bombers. The molten salt reactor technology still actively discussed today is a direct descendent from this massive development program.

The Army Nuclear Power Program

With the Navy and Air Force reactor programs in full swing, the Army was not to be left out. The Army Nuclear Power Program (ANPP) focused on the deployment of very small reactors to remote locations. It got going in the late 1950s and early 1960s, well after the Navy and Air Force programs. Small nuclear reactors were built and tested at factories and then transported to, re-assembled, and operated in a military ice base in Greenland (Camp Century), McMurdo Station in Antarctica, the Panama canal on a mobile barge, Sundance Air Force Station in Wyoming, and Fort Greely, Alaska. An exotic nitrogen-cooled truck-mounted model was developed and tested in Idaho but not deployed.

After the STG and Nautilus, the third PWR to operate was the first plant built under the ANPP: the APPR-1 (later designated SM-1). It was built by Alco and Stone & Webster, and came to power in April, 1957. While the Shippingport design effort predates APPR-1 effort (discussed below), the APPR-1 team pioneered some ideas, such as the vertical vapor container, as opposed to Shippingports horizontal ones. They innovated a lot while considering internal missile protection, but ended up with a rather expensive reinforcing job.

Before fabricating the fuel, Alco Products built a critical testing facility to perform zero-power experiments with their proposed fuel and control design. The mock-up core was built in a 2500 sq. ft. facility, and by 1957 they were soliciting other companies to perform related experiments in it.

The PM-3A and PM-2A remote military reactors in Antarctica and Greenland were also PWRs.

The development of civilian reactors

AEC Civilian Reactor Programs

The AEC executed several programs specifically dedicated to the quest for economical nuclear power. In this period, its prospects were highly tentative, and the magnitude of work needed to achieve it was regularly estimated somewhat accurately (3-5 years to make a little power, 20-30 years before contributing significant power). Nonetheless, everyone was eager to see if it could be done.

The 5-year plan

In 1954, the AEC announced the government-funded Five-Year Plan to explore reactor concepts from a commercial point of view. They included:

Shippingport Pressurized Water Reactor

Experimental Boiling Water Reactor (EBWR)

Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE)

Homogeneous Reactor Experiment-2 (HRE-2)

Experimental Breeder Reactor-2 (EBR-2)

Atoms for Peace

Eisenhower (the first Republican president in 20 years) vastly increased the AECs focus on private participation in nuclear technology with his famous December 1953 Atoms for Peace speech. The first international conference on peaceful uses of atomic energy was held in Geneva in 1955. It was an incredible event filled with optimism and excitement. Private funding, ownership, and operation was on its way.

Schematic view of the reactor that ORNL flew in and built at the Geneva conference (from delegation report) People viewing the reactor at the UN conference on Atoms for Peace (from delegation report)

Volume 2 of the delegation report (June 24, 1955), recorded AEC Chairman Strauss giving a rousing speech about how American industry was willing to cover 90% of the Power Development Reactor Program plant costs. He also hinted at the political situation, justifying the stockpiling of weapons as protection against menaces from those who have destroyed freedom in the expansion of their own ruthless philosophy. While investments in conventional weapons could only be recovered as scrap in times of peace, the nuclear material being stockpiled could be used later for peaceful purposes:

But when the day comes that our atomic armament is no longer required to deter aggression, the nuclear material which it contains can be easily converted into energy sources to provide very great amounts of power to turn the wheels of industry, furnish us with light, heat, transportation, and the many other conveniences and blessing of peace. We who work in the Atomic Energy Commission work with the vision of that day before us.

Sidenote: this vision really did come true when between 2003 and 2013, fully 10% of the USAs electric power was derived from dismantled ex-Soviet nuclear bombs.

Certainly Atoms for Peace contained an element of propaganda. All involved wanted to realize a peaceful application for horrifying weapons. By this time, thermonuclear fusion H-bombs had been developed, which were literally 1000x more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Their horrible implications almost defy comprehension. Nonetheless, applying the newfound force of nature to the betterment of civilization by making useful power was a noble goal.

Pressure from abroad Competing with other countries was a top concern voiced frequently in Congressional hearings from the early 1950s. The UK got the first full-scale commercial production of electric power from a dual-purpose plant (Calder Hall) in 1956. The Soviet Union, via Dr. Ivan Kurchatov, explained that they would have 2,500 MWe of nuclear capacity by 1960, with developments ongoing in the following reactor types: Water-moderated and cooled thermal and epithermal 200 MW reactors

Graphite-moderated steam and water-cooled reactors of the type used at the existing 5 MW USSR station

A heterogeneous heavy water-moderated, gas-cooled reactor

A unit with water-moderated thermal reactor and a turbine operated by slightly radioactive stream fed directly from the reactor

A homogeneous heavy-water moderated thermal breeder with thorium fuel

A thermal graphite-moderated sodium-cooled reactor

A fast sodium-cooled breeder on the U-Pu fuel cycle (Recall that heavy water, also called D 2 O, is water with the hydrogen atoms replaced with isotopically-enriched deuterium. It has very low neutron absorption and is a best-in-class moderator.)

The Power Demonstration Reactor Program

The AECs Power Demonstration Reactor Program (PDRP) kicked off after the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 allowed private ownership and operation of reactors. It involved 3 separate requests for proposals from private industry wherein the AEC would provide nuclear fuel and perform research and development work necessary to bring forward commercial nuclear power plants.

The three invitations between 1955 and 1960 are visible in the figure below, with some straggling proposals trickling in around 1960. Utility consortiums sent in significant and bold proposals covering a diverse range of reactor types and sizes including pressurized and boiling water reactors, an organic cooled/moderated reactor, two nuclear superheat BWRs, a sodium-cooled fast reactor, and a sodium/graphite intermediate reactor.

The reactors of the 3+ phases of the AEC's Power Demonstration Reactor Program (PDRP). These were funded jointly by the AEC and the commercial partners. Note that several of the reactors are what we would consider today exotic.

The commercialization of the pressurized water reactor

The positive experiences with the STR and the APPR-1, plus a strong desire to stay ahead of the Russians and to catch up with the UK resulted in strong support for a large-scale water-cooled demonstration reactor. At the same time, a troubled aircraft carrier prototype reactor program was just defunded by Eisenhower. The project was converted to a commercial power prototype called Shippingport. It would become the USAs first commercial nuclear power plant.

Construction of a boiler chamber in the Shippingport PWR (from Library of Congress One of the Shippingport heat exchangers being installed. The plant had 2 steam generators of the Babcock and Wilcox U-tube design and 2 Foster Wheeler straight-pipe designs (from Lib of Cong.)

The initial Shippingport core used highly enriched uranium. High temperature, high-burnup fuels in water conditions were developed. Metallic uranium fuel in water failed rapidly. They found promising results when they alloyed uranium with molybdenum, niobium, and both. Alloys with 3.8% Silicon with intermetallic U 3 Si silicides were also promising (more recently revived under the name Accident Tolerant Fuels), but a suitable clad fabrication process with this fuel was elusive. A high-temperature in-pile loop had to be developed to carry out this alloy development program (at both MTR in Idaho and NRX in Canada). Troubles with Uranium-Molybdenum cladding were encountered, and high medium-speed neutron absorption was discovered. Along the way, it was discovered that the ceramic uranium oxide was surprisingly good as a reactor fuel.

Many lessons were learned in early Shippingport operation. Valves sometimes bounced between open and closed during the operation of other valves, and valves drifted from closed to open in certain situations. Pressurizer steam relief valves leaked due to thermal distortions. Leaks in four steam generators were found, caused by stress corrosion. Pieces of the turbine moisture separator ended up breaking off and lodging in the turbine low-pressure blades due to vibrations. Excessive fission products appeared in the coolant, likely due to defective UO 2 blanket rods.

Despite the trouble, Shippingport was a successfully-operated plant, but its capital cost was about 10x more than an equivalent fossil-fueled plant. Economical nuclear power was elusive.

Given the realities of Shippingport, utilities continued in their hesitation. The PWR was urged toward commercialization by the AECs public/private PDRP. The Yankee reactor at Rowe was proposed in the first round of the PDRP by a consortium of 10 New England utilities, who funded the entire capital cost. It reached full power of 110 MWe in Jan 1961. Yankee Core I was the first to use UO 2 fuel with stainless steel cladding. The Yankee experience was very positive from R&D to construction to operation. They completed the plant 23% below projected capital costs. Now things were looking up.

Indian Point was a 163 MWe PWR that went critical in August 1962 with homogeneously mixed oxides of highly enriched uranium and thorium. Its purpose was to develop the thorium fuel cycle for power breeding in order to extend the resources available to PWRs in the event of a global-scale fleet ramp-up. The benefits of thorium fuel proved elusive, and so the second core was low-enriched UO 2 with no thorium.

Also in 1962, the small 20 MWt Saxton PWR hook-on reactor became critical in Pennsylvania. It added nuclear-generated steam to an existing fossil-powered turbine.

San Onofre and Connecticut Yankee came online in 1968, and then somewhat of a deluge of orders became the majority of todays nuclear fleet.

The Palo Verde Nuclear Station, made of 3 giant PWRs in Arizona that went into service in the late 1980s ( source

A land-based prototype for the NS Savannah merchant ships core was built and operated in Lynchburg, VA in February, 1960. This reactor had full-length fuel assemblies and provided information needed before finishing the NS Savannah plant.

Nuclear-powered merchant ships could help decarbonize and clean up international shipping. However, the one such operating vessel is basically forbidden from most international ports. So either hearts and minds would have to be wholesale changed, or some kind of nuclear-powered deep-sea tugboat/barge system is needed to progress in this idea.

On the military side, dozens of land-based prototypes of new naval PWRs have been built, along with hundreds of their deployed at-sea counterparts (mostly in subs and aircraft carriers, but also in a few Destroyers).

Many variations on the PWR, like the thorium-fueled spectral shift control PWR were studied but didnt break through.

The N-reactor at the Hanford site was a dual-purpose water and graphite moderated variation on a PWR used to make power for the area as well as weapons materials. This was a somewhat significant deviation from the low-temperature earlier production reactors.

As cost dynamics pressured PWRs in the 1970s, simpler and more economical designs were developed. France chose a standard PWR and built them in bulk. South Korea also developed highly-optimized PWRs based on CE designs. This will be covered in a follow-up article.

The development of the boiling water reactor

With the PWR developed for naval propulsion, the Argonne National Lab (ANL) set forth to develop a simpler and cheaper water-cooled reactor intended specifically for power production. The Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) avoided the 2000 psi pressure, reduced the required pumping power, and eliminated the costs and complications of intermediate heat exchangers (i.e. the steam generators). For the most part, it was able to leverage the materials and fuel work already done for PWRs.

Boiling water in a reactor was mentioned on the front page of the New York Times in 1939. Early concerns about whether a reactor with boiling in the core would be stable were investigated in lab tests of heat transfer in boiling water at the ANL. After calculations suggested stability was possible, Argonne performed a series of BOiling water ReActor eXperiments (BORAX) with real chain reactions at the NRTS in Idaho to prove it.

BORAX-1 was built by the AEC in a hole in the ground. It proved that BWRs could be self-regulating, though it indicated oscillatory chugging with 1 second frequencies given certain large reactivity insertions. A larger experiment, BORAX-2, was built to ensure stability at higher powers. It was re-designated BORAX-III with the addition of a turbine, which subsequently powered the entire town of Arco, ID for one hour.

Positive indications in these small experiments motivated the creation of a small but prototypic reactor called the Experimental Boiling Water Reactor (EBWR) rated at 5 MWe. R&D plus construction were estimated to cost $17 million.

The EBWR was built at ANL. It was a direct-cycle BWR making saturated steam at 600 psig (489 F). A complete, integrated power plant was necessary to answer questions associated with direct coupling between the reactor and the power generating equipment: uncertainties in induced radioactivity, reactivity feedback, corrosion, erosion, leakage, and water quality control. The EBWR was unusually flexible because it was an experimental plant intent on providing as much information about future BWR operation as possible. It accommodated future conversion from light water moderator with natural circulation cooling to forced circulation and heavy water moderation.

General Electric rallied hard for the 1954 changes to the Atomic Energy Act allowing private ownership and operation of nuclear facilities. Before it passed, they had three nuclear departments: operating the Hanford production reactors, doing submarine testing at KAPL, and working on the aircraft nuclear propulsion project. They also contributed significantly during the Manhattan Project. After the 1954 act, they added a fourth nuclear division: an atomic power equipment department.

At this time, General Electric (GE) boldly took on a contract to build what became the large-scale Dresden BWR. They started performing vast amounts of commercial nuclear R&D on their own dime because they were convinced at this time that commercial nuclear was going to be big business. Regarding the proposed large-scale Dresden BWR, GEs VP McCune said in 1956 that:

I have already testified that the developmental work required to produce this plant, particularly fuel element development, will be very expensive. Unless we obtain substantial future business, we will lose considerable sums on the Dresden station. At the time we contracted to build this plant for Commonwealth, we were well aware of this. We are aware also of the difficult technical problems ahead of us and of the large investments in developmental facilities, these very expensive tools of the trade, which would be required. Moreover, when we signed the Commonwealth contract, we faced serious problems in addition to the technical ones. The regulatory and licensing situation was still unsettled. The Commission was just beginning to break down the information barriers. Above all, the liability problem had not been resolved. Nevertheless, we took on the Dresden station because we were convinced that by doing so we would serve the long-run interests of our share owners, our responsibilities to the system of private enterprise, and the national interest. Out decision to go forward was also based on the belief that Congress expected this kind of a job to be done by private industry. We had faith that Congress, and particularly this committee, as well as the Commission, wanted to encourage private development and would take all reasonable steps to promote that development.

Soon, GE enlisted services of their steam turbine-generator department for the plant design, their induction motor department for special motors, their carboloy department for fuel development, their general engineering lab for instrumentation, and their R&D capabilities, also for fuel development. They created the 1,600-acre Vallecitos Atomic Laboratory in California to be their component testing grounds, with a hot lab and an experimental physics building containing a critical experiment facility. They went so far as to build the Vallecitos BWR (VBWR) on the site with 100% private capital to help GE staff gain the knowledge and experience necessary to deliver on the large-scale Dresden BWR project. It was about the same size as the AECs EBWR (Senator Anderson even prodded McCune about what theyd learn at VBWR that wasnt learned at EBWR), but featured a dual cycle, where steam could be generated from the stream drum or from a lower-pressure steam generator. This was expected to improve load-following capabilities. It was also higher pressure: 1000 psia instead of 600.

As Dresden was being designed, GE had 2,250 scientists and engineers in their four nuclear departments.

Given their experience operating the Hanford production reactors, GE spent a lot of their own money exploring the design of a graphite-moderated electricity-producing plant. They also looked hard into homogeneous reactors. But, when the time came, they decided that the BWR design was the most promising, and they leapt in full-force with the Dresden contract. Specifically, Dr. Walter Zinn's confidence in the ANL-designed BWR is what convinced GE to go for it rather than the homogeneous reactor.

Dresden featured a dual-cycle steam system, and produced power in April, 1960. The plant operated well. After Dresden came Humboldt Bay with natural circulation.

There was one tragedy along the BWR development pathway. The Armys SL-1 in Idaho was part of the Army Package Power Program, previously called the Argonne Low Power Reactor, ALPR. It was designed to be built on the tundra above the DEW line to power radar stations. It suffered an explosion on January 3, 1961 that resulted in 3 casualties. SL-1 was a small, natural circulation, direct cycle BWR designed and built by ANL. ANL directed the project, and Pioneer Service & Engineering Company was the A/E. Operation was turned over to Combustion Engineering after the plant was operational.

The SL-1 reactor in Idaho in 1960, before the accident (from DOE)

Before the accident, the reactor had been shutdown and the night-shift workers were preparing for a power ascent. The procedure required them to lift the inserted central control rod about 4 inches to hook it back to the drive mechanisms. For a reason that will forever be unknown, the worker lifted the rod quickly by 20 inches. A prompt-supercritical (e.g. very fast) chain reaction ensued, vaporizing and expanding fuel before the water had time to boil and add its negative feedback component. After the core was at very high power (around 20 gigawatts), the vaporizing fuel elements vaporized and rapidly boiled the water. The steam accelerated the seven-foot column of water above the core, slamming it into the lid of the pressure vessel at 160 feet per second, forming a massive water hammer. The shield plugs ejected at up to 50 feet per second, along with much of the shielding. The three military personnel who were on top of the reactor head at the time suffered fatal and gruesome injuries (one was pinned to the roof through the groin by an ejected moderator assembly). The creation of 10,000 psi pressure from the water hammer within the sealed pressure vessel had not been expected. Had the vessel featured an open top, for example, the most destructive effects would not have occurred. It became an important lesson to never put reactors into such a configuration.

Analysis showed that the control rod was pulled with less than full force. Some have gone so far as to hypothesize that a love triangle was involved, and that this accident was a murder-suicide by nuclear chain reaction. (This seems very unlikely). In any case, a cleanup ensued and the site is now barely noticeable as you drive through the Idaho sagebrush.

Big Rock Point in Charlevoix, MI (critical on September 27, 1962) first conducted a 4.5 years AEC research program demonstrating high power density cores that had been tested in VBWR. Obtaining more power out of a volume would possibly allow smaller pressure vessels and uprates at existing plants. After the tests, the plant switched over to producing commercial power for the region, which coincidentally is where I spent my childhood. I grew up about 10 miles from Big Rock, which operated well until my teens.

The Big Rock Point nuclear plant near Charlevoix, MI was an experimental BWR (from DOE

Elk River was another small hook-on reactor that added steam to an existing conventional plant. It was a BWR though, and a part of the PDRP. Its criticality was 2 years behind schedule. Steel strikes and other strikes delayed the project, as well as hairline cracks discovered in the cladding inside the pressure vessel. Repairs were made and authorization to operate was given. It was coupled to a coal-fired superheater.

In 1964, GE sold the Oyster Creek reactor to Jersey Central Light at a guaranteed fixed capital cost that was competitive with fossil fuels. Widespread euphoria spread throughout the nuclear developers. At a State of the Lab speech, Alvin Weinberg shouted:

Economic nuclear power is here!

Between 1963 and 1966, 10 utilities purchase 12 PWRs and BWRs from GE and Westinghouse under these turnkey contracts.

Alas, the turnkey era was short lived. The reactor vendors struggled to make money on these sales. Coal executives claimed that GE had priced Oyster Creek below cost. GE denied this, saying theyd make a small profit unless unforeseen difficulties were encountered. The plants were still large, complex, and expensive. Increasing public scrutiny and the associated regulatory instability caused various cost escalations.

Today, multiple PWRs have had to shut down prematurely due to intractable steam generator problems. This at least partially validates the major BWR advantage of having a direct primary cooling loop.

Advanced-model BWRs were developed in more recent years, focusing on simplicity and economics.

The Hallam sodium-graphite reactor in Nebraska

Ok, you may have been aware of the developments so far, but lets now dip into some of the more exotic developments of the days gone by.

Liquid metal is an excellent coolant fluid, enabling low-pressure operation, phenomenal heat transfer, and thrillingly little corrosion. It was used in the EBR-I fast-neutron reactor in 1951. Since fast-neutron reactors require far more fissile material to start up, a sodium-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor was envisioned as a potential candidate for producing low-cost nuclear electricity. This would allow low-pressure operation without all the expensive and thick pressure containment systems and backup cooling while also allowing the reactor to run on natural or very-slightly enriched fuel.

On the downside, many liquid metals are chemically reactive with water, air, and concrete, and the complications related to inerting the environment and dealing with leaks and fires would have to be weighed against the aforementioned benefits. Additionally, sodium becomes highly radioactive as it passed through a nuclear core. The combination of radioactivity with chemical reactivity necessitates an additional intermediate heat transfer loop, especially when a metal-water steam generator is used. The extra loop comes expensive additional equipment: pumps, valves, instrumentation, controls, heaters, and piping.

North American Aviation contributed $2.5M to the $10M cost of research, development, and construction of the 20 MWt Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) at Santa Susana, CA.

Heavily informed by the AECs S1G submarine prototype reactor in New York and the Sodium Reactor Experiment north of LA, the Hallam Nuclear Power Facility was a 75 MWe attempt to approach commercial viability of a sodium-graphite reactor. It was proposed in the first round of the PDRP.

The component testing and R&D in advance of Hallam operation was astounding. In spite of experience acquired at from the smaller SRE, Atomics International still knew they needed to build much of the equipment at the larger scale in order to shake down the scaled-up designs. For example, they built an entire mockup fuel handling facility and a full-scale fuel handling machine and operated it at temperature, in sodium! This allowed them to fix scaling design issues as well as to practice the various fuel handling activities that would be required in the operation of the plant.

The Hallam facility was built relatively quickly but struggled with reactor problems during the shakedown period. After many repairs and lessons, the issue of rupturing moderator cladding and subsequent over-expansion and closing-off of coolant channels was the final straw. Consumers Public Power District chose to not purchase the facility from the AEC, and it was grouted in place by 1969.

The Hallam Nuclear Power Facility grid plate during construction (from Mahlmeister 1961)

Today, the fossil side of the plant still operates, and if you look at a satellite view you can see the perfect outline of the nuclear part partially entombed in beautifully cut grass, which is actually part of the containment. You can also see a big coal train right outside

Interesting thought Since Hallam operated, vast amounts of experience have been gained in sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactors. Its curious to wonder if a sodium-graphite reactor with that expanded knowledge-base wouldnt perform significantly better than Hallam did. Then again, some of the worlds newfound sodium experience (e.g. Monju, SuperPhenix) has not been positive.

Organic cooled/moderated reactors: Piqua in Ohio

The second solicitation for the PDRP specifically sought small reactors. The Piqua proposal fit the bill, at just 11.4 MWe. It featured organic coolant and moderator made of terphenyl isomers (hydrocarbons). It was supposed that organic coolant would lead to low capital costs. The low vapor pressure of the coolant allowed low-pressure operation at high temperatures, reducing the weight and bulk of the pressure vessel while increasing the thermal efficiency. Organic coolant also has low corrosion, allowing conventional materials like carbon and low-alloy steel to be used rather than stainless steel in the pressure vessel, pumps, pipes, etc. Lastly, induced radioactivity in pure organic liquids is very low, unlike in the liquid metals.

The price to pay for the benefits of organic coolant comes in the form of decomposition cleanup and purification systems. Radiation and heat both cause the fluid to break down into water vapor, hydrogen, methane, and other hydrocarbons. Also, the heat transfer characteristics are generally worse than for water, requiring high surface area fuel element design.

The AEC contracted Atomics International (AI) to do research and development at the Organic Moderated Reactor Experiment (OMRE) in Idaho. This established the basic feasibility of organic-cooled reactors, and allowed AI to build experience in the system. They measured coolant properties, fabricated fuel, built and operated the reactor, measured heat transfer, operated purification systems, built control rod test towers, built a hot cell to examine irradiated fuel, and performed dozens of other R&D tasks.

As a follow-up to OMRE, the AEC contracted AI to build the Experimental Organic Cooled Reactor (EOCR), also at the NRTS. This facility was built to 99% completion by the contractor, but ended up never operating.

The OMRE established the organic-cooled concept sufficiently to motivate the Piqua team to submit a proposal for a commercial plant.

The business plan for Piqua was that the AEC would own and operate the plant for 5 years, selling steam to the city for the same price of conventional fossil-fueled steam. After 5 years, the city would have an option to purchase the plant from the AEC. Given their experience from the OMRE, Atomics International was again contracted to design and build the Piqua plant.

Piqua was brought to criticality on June, 1963, and reached full power in January 1964. The plant produced 20% of Piquas power in 1965, and the city proudly referred to itself as The Atomic City.

Piqua operational history in 1964 (from Progress report 5)

In 1966, two control rods were found to not move freely in their guide tubes, and four fuel elements required abnormally high forces to unseat and would not reseat. The obstruction was found to be a carbonaceous deposit. Fuel was shipped to Atomics International for hot cell examination, where a hard continuous film was found on the surface, patches of film were found on the tips of the cladding film, and the inner moderator space was found to be full of carbonaceous material. A three-phase core disassembly/rehab program was developed.

As the rehab was ongoing, it became clear that Milton Shaw, the director of Reactor Development at the AEC, had given up on the organic concept:

There is an expression used around our office about reactor projects. It is not those that have the slow death that worries us; it is those that have a life after death.

He concluded that the AEC would support the Piqua facility but would otherwise discontinue all work on the organic cooled concept. The writing was on the wall. In the FY1969 authorization hearings of the AEC, the announcement to terminate the Piqua contract was made:

The Commission is in the process of terminating the operating contract for the Piqua reactor project. Several factors entered into this decision including: an increasing need for available resources (manpower and funding) by higher priority programs; little programmatic interest since support for organic cooled and moderated reactors and the HWOCR concept has been phased out; the technical problems which continue to delay reoperation of the plant and the unlikelihood of the City to purchase the plant.

Today the small dome still stands, and it looks like its used as a warehouse. The City had to change its nickname to The City of Opportunity.

A 23-minute video explains Piqua in some detail.

Fate of molten salt Notably, Milton Shaw is much derided for focusing all reactor development efforts on the fast breeder program around this time. In particular, Oak Ridges Alvin Weinberg and Shaw fought at this time over the fate of the molten salt reactor program. Apparently, the organic reactors and molten salt reactors are brethren in this.

Atomics International: reactor development badasses extraordinaire Take note that the AEC contractor, Atomics International designed and built those last two wildly innovative reactors. They had a process: Explore feasibility in the Santa Susana lab

Build and operate a small reactor experiment to shake it down at power

Perform large-scale component development, building and operating them in mock-up facilities

Build a medium-sized municipal reactor in a rural town to produce power Their component development and testing facility at Santa Susana was incredible.

Direct nuclear superheat in Puerto Rico and South Dakota
The Arlington, Va., mansion, fronted by massive columns five feet around and a sweeping portico, sits high on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River with a commanding view of the nation's capital. Two White men who lived in this storied home occupied a lofty perch as well: George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of George and Mary Washington, and General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

And yet, as is so often true with American history, a scratch to the glossy surface soon reveals the African Americans who also spent their lives here. They were as remarkable as the families that had enslaved them.

There was Charles Syphax, who married the Black daughter of Custis in the mansion's parlor, an almost unheard-of privilege granted Maria Carter by her biological father. About 40 years later, during the Civil War, Selina Norris Gray, the enslaved personal maid of Custis's White daughter, who had married Lee, rescued family heirlooms from marauding Union soldiers.

Now, as monuments to the Confederacy fall and the names of some connected to the country's racist history are removed from public buildings, a congressman from Virginia is proposing legislation to change the name of "Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial" back to, simply, "Arlington House."

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who has been reading Ibram Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," said he is struck by how wrongheaded it is to memorialize Lee at the National Park Service site.

"It's about recognizing, finally, that there's been an enormous amount of systemic racism and that we have to own it and do our best to reverse it," Beyer said.

Descendants of Charles Syphax have been courting lawmakers for the past few months to make the change, said Syphax family historian Steve Hammond, who lives in Sterling, Va. The family's effort is motivated as much by a desire to accurately honor the full history of the property and the enslaved people who lived there as it is by any antipathy toward Lee.

Topping the list of the enslaved occupants of Arlington House estate are the Syphaxes, a prominent Black family whose achievements defied the odds. Its members include William Syphax, son of Charles and Maria Carter, who was appointed chairman of the D.C. Board of Trustees of Colored Public Schools. In 1870, he organized the college preparatory high school for Black students that would later become Dunbar High School, for decades one of the most prestigious Black schools in the United States.

"The fact that historically the site has Lee's name attached to it automatically narrows how people think about the site," said Hammond, who is working with the National Park Service to re-envision how the home is presented when it is reopened this year after a restoration. "The stories of others who lived there get pushed to the background. My goal is to bring those stories to light."

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George Washington Parke Custis began building the mansion in 1803 on the 1,100-acre estate that his biological father had bequeathed him. Custis named the property Arlington after the Custis family homestead on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Enslaved people were forced to build the imposing home, which was the first example of Greek Revival architecture in the United States. The mansion honored Custis's adoptive parents - George Washington and Custis's grandmother, Martha, by her first marriage - and housed an impressive collection of Washington family artifacts.

Like many prominent White men of his time, Custis had White children born through marriage and Black offspring born of rape. Maria Carter was the daughter of Custis and an enslaved woman named Arianna Carter. In 1821, Custis allowed Maria Carter to marry Syphax, a Mount Vernon enslaved man he inherited from his grandmother, in the mansion's parlor. (It was a religious ceremony only; enslaved people could not legally marry.) Ten years later, in 1831, Mary Anna Custis married Robert E. Lee there, too, in the house where they raised their seven children.

Hammond surmises that, despite being enslaved, Maria Carter had a relatively tolerable existence inside the mansion as the personal maid of her younger White half-sister Mary Anna. Charles, who supervised the mansion's dining room, and Maria Syphax had 10 children. Custis sold Maria and her first two children to the Quaker owner of an apothecary shop, who freed them, while her husband remained enslaved, albeit while living with his family, Hammond said.

Custis gave his Black daughter 17 acres of land on the Arlington estate, Hammond said. Maria Syphax's "white cottage was surrounded by tall trees and pleasant stretches of grassland and the place was beautiful as well as homelike," according to the Arlington Historical Society.

After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Mary Custis Lee departed Arlington House to join her husband, leaving the mansion and many George Washington family heirlooms in Selina Norris Gray's care. Union soldiers came to occupy the home that year, and Gray noticed that some relics were missing. She reported the stolen objects to Union Army Gen. Irvin McDowell, who secured the house from thieves who then shipped the remaining artifacts to the Patent Office for safekeeping, according to the National Park Service. In later decades, Gray's children shared key details about the layout and furnishings of Arlington House that guided preservationists in restoring the home.

Why did Gray help rescue cherished artifacts from the family that enslaved her? Why would she care? Hammond suggests that as the personal maid to Mary Custis Lee, she felt a special connection to the first U.S. president. Also, he notes, the sprawling estate was Gray's home, too, even if it amounted to one room for her husband, Thornton, and eight children in the slave quarters.

By the end of the Civil War, the Union dead were quickly filling up nearby military cemeteries, so the U.S. Army began to bury them on the vast acreage surrounding Arlington House. In 1864, Arlington National Cemetery came into being, in part to dissuade Lee from ever trying to return.

The government first restored the house to the period of George Washington Parke Custis's ownership, then in 1955 a joint resolution of Congress designated it the Custis-Lee Mansion. In 1972, Congress passed a law that gave the mansion yet another name: Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial.

Nearly half a century later, the Fairfax County School Board has voted to rename Robert E. Lee High School after the late congressman and civil rights giant John Lewis. Further south, in Richmond, the state is fighting in court to remove a Lee statue from Monument Avenue as lawmakers in Congress push to move a statue of the Confederate general from the U.S. Capitol.

The Syphax family has been recruiting other lawmakers to join with Beyer to change the name.

Craig Syphax said that the mansion's current name greatly overstates Lee's role in the site's history, which is primarily that of the Washington family and the generations of enslaved people who lived there.

Some Syphax ancestors are buried on the property. Sometimes, Craig Syphax said, when he visits the estate he senses their spirits. "I can feel something brush by me or touch me or a wind that comes through and no one knows where it came from."

As he and Syphax work with the National Park Service to re-present the property, Hammond said he wants to bring his descendants and others who were enslaved on the property to life for visitors.

The family includes many leaders in the Arlington community and beyond. William's brother John was born free and held several elected offices, including supervisor of the Arlington Magisterial District, delegate to the General Assembly and justice of the peace. Other family members include the legendary Howard University surgeon Burke "Mickey" Syphax, the late congressman Julian Dixon, D-Calif., and activist-entrepreneur Tracey Syphax. The Syphaxes also fought in four wars, Hammond said, including two surviving World War II veterans now in their 90s.

Despite lobbying to remove Lee's name from the house, Hammond confesses a desire embodied in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. "I have a dream that one day . . . the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."

He would like the Syphaxes to sit down with the descendants of Robert E. Lee, whose wife was the half-sister of Maria Carter Syphax. At minimum they could acknowledge and explore the past, he said.

"But I believe that when you consider where our country is, it would be an extremely powerful statement for these two families to come together and talk about our past . . . and heal."
A new two-stage surgical approach for cancer prevention is highly acceptable among premenopausal women at high risk of ovarian cancer, according to research led by Queen Mary University of London

A new two-stage surgical approach for cancer prevention is highly acceptable among premenopausal women at high risk of ovarian cancer, according to research led by Queen Mary University of London.

For women at high risk of ovarian cancer, the standard preventive practice is to offer removal of both the fallopian tubes and ovaries, but the surgery induces menopause in women who have not yet reached this stage of life. Early menopause is associated with side effects like increased risk of heart-disease, osteoporosis, neurocognitive decline and sexual-dysfunction. Hence, some women at high risk of ovarian cancer delay surgery until after they reach menopause. During this period they remain at much higher risk of ovarian cancer.

A proposed alternative is a two-step surgical protocol, which delays the induced menopause caused by the removal of the ovaries. In this protocol, the fallopian tubes are removed as an initial step to offer some risk reduction, and ovary removal is delayed until a later stage when women have reached menopause. This procedure provides some ovarian cancer risk reduction while avoiding detrimental consequences of premature surgically-induced menopause.

69 per cent interested in new surgical option

In the multicentre UK study, published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and funded by the Rosetrees Trust and Barts Charity, researchers examined the acceptability of the proposed alternative two-step surgical protocol. The 638 study participants were all at increased risk of ovarian cancer; 346 had undergone standard risk reducing surgery, and 337 had not.

Among those who had undergone standard preventive surgery, 9.4 per cent of premenopausal and 1.2 per cent of postmenopausal women regretted their decision. Of premenopausal women who had not undergone standard surgery, 69 per cent found it acceptable to participate in a research study offering the proposed new surgical option. 38 per cent of women who had undergone standard surgery would have potentially (in hindsight) opted for the new two-step operation. The new two-step surgical protocol was particularly acceptable to women concerned about the sexual dysfunction side effects of ovary removal.

Patients sought for clinical trial into new surgery protocol

Lead researcher Professor Ranjit Manchanda from Queen Mary University of London and Barts Health NHS Trust said: "Undergoing an operation to prevent ovarian cancer can be a complex decision making process. Although removal of tubes and ovaries prevents ovarian cancer, it can lead to early surgical menopause which has significant detrimental consequences on long-term health. A number of women opt to delay or decline preventive surgery as a result.

"The new two-step operation offers additional options for women (who may have not undergone surgical prevention) to reduce their ovarian cancer risk while avoiding the negative impact of early menopause. Our study shows a large proportion of eligible women wish to consider this. UK women who wish to do so now have the option of joining the PROTECTOR (Preventing Ovarian Cancer through early Excision of Tubes and late Ovarian Removal) study (http://www.protector.org.uk)."

Dr Faiza Gaba from Queen Mary University of London added: "While hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been shown to mitigate some symptoms, it does not appear to alleviate sexual-dysfunction or increase satisfaction levels following standard preventive surgery involving removal of ovaries. However HRT-use in breast cancer unaffected women undergoing premenopausal removal of their ovaries is essential to reduce the risk of heart disease, osteoporosis and neurocognitive decline. The new two-step surgery offers further options to women considering surgical prevention."

Treatments designed around women's individual needs and choices

Dr Vineeth Rajkumar, Head of Research at Rosetrees Trust said: "Rosetrees Trust is delighted to have supported Professor Manchanda's study, which has paved the way for a clinical trial that could make a difference to thousands of women at risk of ovarian cancer."

Victoria King, Director of Grants at Barts Charity added: "Barts Charity is proud to support the PROTECTOR trial, a trial which could make a huge difference to women with increased risk of ovarian cancer. It is hugely important to us that it carries the potential for better informed decision-making for women themselves and treatments designed around women's individual needs and choices."

###

This study is supported by researchers from Queen Mary University of London; Barts Health NHS Trust; University of Hertfordshire; University College London; Manchester University; Guy's Hospital, London; Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust; Ninewells Hospital, NHS Tayside; Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge; London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

More information

Research paper: 'Attitudes towards risk?reducing early salpingectomy with delayed oophorectomy for ovarian cancer prevention: a cohort study'. F Gaba, O Blyuss, D Chandrasekaran, M Osman, S Goyal, C Gan, L Izatt, V Tripathi, I Esteban, L McNicol, K Ragupathy, R Crawford, DG Evans, R Legood, U Menon, R Manchanda. British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Doi 10.1111/1471-0528.16424
TAT holds forum to boost Elephant Care Tourism

The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) is to step up collaboration and communication with Thai government authorities to better monitor the elephant tourism attractions in response to foreign media reports about alleged abuse and mistreatment.

Monday 24 August 2020, 10:20AM

The subject was discussed at a special forum organised by TAT on Aug 14 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Speakers included Senator Weerasak Kowsurat; Sumart Indaramanee, Chairman, Ecotourism by Klong Noi Community Club, Surat Thani; and Dr Sittidej Mahasavangkul, Special Advisor, Elephant National Institute.

Also joining the expert panel were Dr Chatchote Thitaram, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Chiang Mai University; Dr Somchuan Rattanamangkalanond, Deputy Director-General of the Livestock Development Department; Laithongrien Meephan, owner of the Ayutthaya Elephant Kraal and President of the Thai Elephant Conservation Club; and Theerapat Trangprakan, Chairman of the Thai Elephant Alliance.

The forum was initiated by Srisuda Wanapinyosak, TAT Deputy Governor of International Marketing  Europe, Africa, Middle East and Americas, who also shared the TATs initiatives on Elephant Care Tourism at the forum.

Elephants have played a very important role in Thai society and culture beyond just their economic value. Thailand has more domesticated elephants than anywhere else in the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously affected the elephant tourism attractions. Their owners and hundreds of employees are in a state of crisis with no income. Without tourists, providing the elephants with basic health and hygiene care is not possible. Because they are large animals, caring for them costs significantly more than other animals, especially if they are sick.

Releasing elephants back to nature is also difficult and unsustainable. Domesticated elephants are unfamiliar with life in the forest and can pose a danger if they venture into townships and villages. But most importantly, the dwindling forest areas are not enough for the hordes of these elephants.

TAT Governor Yuthasak Supasorn said, This forum was designed to brainstorm amongst a broad cross-section of stakeholders in response to media reports about alleged maltreatment of animals (monkeys and elephants) for tourism.

It is well-known that elephants have been an integral part of Thai society for centuries. Thailand also has a Thai Elephant Day. We honour elephants as an important animal of Thailand. Elephants and Thai people have lived side by side for centuries. For them, elephants are members of their families.

Elephants have also become very important to the tourism industry. There are more than 3,000 elephants in the tourism business or reared elephants nationwide. They live in 250 elephant camps in 22 provinces across the country. Research by the Faculty of Economics, Chiang Mai University has estimated that elephants generate over B6 billion a year in tourism income.

Mr Yuthasak added, In the past, elephants were mostly trained and nurtured for deployment in the forestry industry. After 1989, the government issued a decree to abolish forest concessions without measures to support them. As such, the domesticated elephants found it difficult to return to their natural habitat, and tourism offered one alternative means of survival. As a result, similar to many other sectors in those times, elephants have taken on a new role in the tourism industry. Hence, TAT can and should play an important role in solving problems and creating a more sustainable sector.

The Governor said that as part of TATs vision for Thailand as a preferred destination, a strategy for sustainability has been established under the project called Elephant Care Tourism in order to offer tourism that cares about the Thai elephant.

This, he said, will be based on three pillars: 1) elephant welfare 2) elephant conservation, and 3) clear standards. It will operate under a strategy known as the 3Cs (Communication, Collaboration, Compromise):

Communication for wider public awareness through factual information about taking care of elephants in Thailand. This is an important issue, which should enhance public understanding based on accurate information. Collaboration with each other in working under international norms. The entire tourism industry must discuss the matter jointly, including both Thais and expatriates. Compromise on standards that are acceptable to all parties, which will allow us to move forward positively and constructively for a common benefit.

I hope that todays forum will lead to the adoption of the 3Cs to ensure the sustainability of the Thai Elephant Industry or Elephant Care Tourism, Governor Yuthasak said.

The forum also heard of various legal and regulatory moves that will further strengthen this effort. One of the most important steps regarding elephants in Thailand is the news that a standard is on the way.

The Department of Livestock Development has proposed a standard of domesticated elephant welfare care to the Minister of Agriculture to propose to the Cabinet for promulgation as a compulsory standard. This will be based on the Cruelty Prevention and Animal Welfare Act. When the standard regulation is enforced, establishments with elephants will be examined and regularly audited.

The Department of Livestock, together with the Department of Provincial Administration and the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, will jointly expedite the proposal of the Elephant Act to create a specific government unit that will take care of domesticated elephants and captive elephants. No such unit has existed so far.

A National Elephant Care Master Plan has been drafted but is still awaiting clearance by the Office of the Permanent Secretary for the Prime Ministers Office.

The Department of Livestock Development has also set up a system for the authorities to be notified in the event of an animal being abused or mistreated. The public can do this directly via the DLD4.0 mobile application.

The forum was broadcast live via Facebook. The morning session had over 20,000 viewers/listeners. The afternoon session had 15,000 viewers/listeners. There were 200 shares.
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany Heiko Maas laid flowers at the Wall of Remembrance of the Fallen Defenders of Ukraine.

"The visit of German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas to Kyiv has begun. Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba and his German counterpart laid flowers at the Wall of Remembrance of the Fallen Defenders of Ukraine, the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine informs.

As noted, the negotiations between the foreign ministers are underway.

The Wall of Remembrance of the Fallen Defenders of Ukraine is a wall of the St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery near the Mykhailivska Square in Kyiv. Photos and information about more than 4,000 servicepersons of the Armed Forces, the National Guard, the State Border Guard Service, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Security Service of Ukraine and the National Police, as well as the volunteers, are posted on eleven parts of the Wall of Remembrance.

Ukraine marks the Independence Day on August 24.

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By 7:10 a.m. Monday, 10-year-old Allie Stidham had prepared a peanut butter sandwich, stuffed nine notebooks into her bulging backpack and checked the tires on the black-and-blue bicycle she planned to ride to Eagle Springs Elementary School.

As her mother monitored The Weather Channel for hurricane developments, Allie moved with such anxious energy that she finished her morning chores 20 minutes before Eagles Springs Elementary opened to students for the first time in 5 1/2 months.

I think its going to be kind of normal, but Im just nervous about all the rules, because I love to hug people, Allie, a fifth-grader, said as she waited for the bottom of the hour to approach.

As the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to upend the Houston area, Humble and Lamar CISD on Monday became the regions first school districts to welcome back large numbers of children for in-person classes, with more than 35,000 students projected to arrive on campus.

The two districts, located on opposite corners of the Greater Houston area, resumed face-to-face classes for slightly less than half of their students while also hosting online-only classes for families who remain fearful of sending their children back into school buildings. With limited exceptions for some students with disabilities, all of the Houston regions largest public school districts have kept campuses shuttered since mid-March due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The kids came in very excited and ready, said Humble Elementary School third-grade teacher Kirsten Boston, whose seven-student class Monday was about half as large as last year. Of course, they had questions, but they always do on the first day. It was really nice because it felt like home again.

The reopening of Humble and Lamar schools came as many health officials argue it is too early to resume in-person classes. However, many parents and educators concluded the academic, behavioral and social benefits of face-to-face instruction outweigh the public health risk.

In Humble, which started the first three weeks in online-only classes with limited exceptions, about 60 percent of the districts roughly 45,000 students are expected to attend in-person classes. The district allowed all elementary school students to return to campuses Monday, though middle and high school students will split time between in-person and virtual classes.

At Humble Elementary, about 300 students traveled to campus Monday morning while another 300 continued to learn online. Children arriving in person were greeted by smiling teachers wearing face shields, masks or a combination of the two. A sign at the front entrance warned about the symptoms of COVID-19, while hand sanitizer stations dotted the hallways and locks covered drinking fountains.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Texas plans to collect, publish data on school-based COVID cases

In non-pandemic times, family members could enter the campus and walk children to their classrooms on the first day  a tradition on hold amid the pandemic.

This year, because we want to make sure everybody is socially distanced and we screen people as they come in, we didnt have that opportunity, Humble Elementary Principal Veronica Hernandez said. I think thats hard as a parent. We just feel like its a rite of passage.

Boston wore a face shield Monday morning as she read the book First Day Jitters to students sitting a few feet apart on a rug and seats. One child donned a mask while her classmates did not  which met Humble protocols that only require children ages 10 and up to wear face coverings.

We practice safety and hygiene and how we interact with each other regularly, so its just kind of adding that factor of making sure that everyone sanitizes their hands and spaces out a little more, Boston said.

Humble plans to resume full-time, in-person classes for middle school by Oct. 12, while high school will go full-time when the local COVID-19 test positivity rate reaches 5 percent or a vaccine is available.

Harris Countys 14-day, rolling average test positivity rate fell to 11 percent as of late last week, down from a peak of 23 percent in early July.

Humbles reopening bucked the guidance from Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Public Health Executive Director Umair Shah, who said local schools should stay closed until the area outbreak declines. Under current trends, Harris County remains at least a few weeks away from meeting benchmarks that Hidalgo and Shah set for starting to partially reopen campuses.

Gov. Greg Abbott, however, said county and city government officials do not have the legal authority to preemptively close campuses, leaving that power to local school boards. Abbott has not yet issued an executive order overriding a Harris County order to keep campuses closed through Labor Day, but county officials did not enforce their mandate Monday.

In Humble, advocates for reopening argued families should have the option to choose in-person classes, and they noted the districts outbreak is less severe than other corners of Harris County. The five zip codes encompassing Humble currently report about 2.8 active cases per 1,000 people, compared to 5.3 cases per 1,000 people throughout the county.

On HoustonChronicle.com: 10 superintendents oppose Harris County school reopening guidelines

In Lamar, about 45 percent of families in the 35,850-student district chose in-person classes for their children. Unlike Humble, the district is allowing students in all grades to return full-time.

Lamar staff members and children in grades four through 12 are required to wear face coverings while on campus. Numerous health and safety protocols have been implemented, such as staggering transition times, limiting the number of people in common areas and making hand sanitizer available.

I think we had a really great rollout after being on the campuses and seeing how the protocols were put in place, Lamar Chief Academic Officer Theresa Mossige said. As we begin looking through the rest of the week, its about continuing to monitor those actions and habits, to make sure theyre ingrained.

For Elida Zuniga, the mother of a kindergartner, sixth-grader and 10th-grader in Lamar schools, the restart of in-person classes allows her to keep her job as a cashier  though safety fears persist.

I think everybody is scared, Zuniga said as she waited Monday afternoon in the Navarro Middle School pickup line. Im scared, too, but life has to continue. We need to keep sending our kids to school, as we always do.

A few of the Houston areas medium- and large-sized districts are scheduled to resume some in-person classes next week, including Clear Creek and Pearland ISDs. Several plan to start face-to-face classes during the week of Labor Day, such as Cy-Fair and Katy ISDs.

Houston ISD will not bring back students until mid-October at the earliest. Campuses in Alief and Fort Bend ISDs remain closed indefinitely.

jacob.carpenter@chron.com
Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a press conference in Islamabad on Monday that during his recent visit to China, the issue of Indian occupied Kashmir also came up, where Beijing dismissed Indian claims over the valley. Qureshi said that China had rejected Indias August 5 move and termed it unilateral.

Qureshi also explained that the purpose of his recent visit was to understand [Chinas] current state of mind and gauge their stance on India. I can tell you that I didnt see any hesitation, their (Chinas) stance is very clear, he said.

China has made clear that it views Indias measures of August 5, 2019 [in Kashmir] illegal, said Qureshi. China does not stand in agreement with Indias position on Ladakh and Kashmir, he added.

According to Qureshi, the stand off between India and China remains unresolved despite five rounds of negotiations between the two. He categorically rejected Indias objections to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor as well.

The foreign minister also touched upon the relations of other regional countries with India, saying that the impression that Saarc member countries were leaning towards India was dissolving.

He referred to Indias conflict with Nepal and the recent resolution passed by the latters parliament in that regard in addition to a lack of warmth in Indias ties with Bangladesh.

Speaking on Indian atrocities, the minister said that India has failed to project the impression that things are improving in occupied Kashmir.

The International Crisis Group called the situation in the valley a resistance movement, and has demanded that India rescind its August 5 decision, he said.

The Pakistan foreign minister said that Prime Minister Imran Khan raised the matter of IoK before the United Nations, adding that India is running away from the matter and lying to the global community.

Qureshi said that New Delhis August 5 move had made matters worse for the people of the occupied territory. He said that anger and frustration are on the rise in the region due to restrictions and a communications blackout imposed by authorities.

The foreign minister said that Indias move had crippled occupied Kashmirs economy, wondering how investment could thrive with so many armed personnel holding the local population hostage.
Lee Smith on The Permanent Coup and Why Clinesmith Is Likely Just the First Indictment

The Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the Mueller investigation, the impeachment inquiry, the weaponization of the coronavirus, and now the riots raging in major U.S. cities are all intrinsically linked, says investigative journalist Lee Smith.

According to him, these were operations with a common purpose: to remove from office the man who obstructed plans to radically transform America.

His new book is titled The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President.

Smith says the coup isnt just about President Trump, and it will outlast the 2020 election, regardless of who is elected president. It is a battle over the future of America.

This is American Thought Leaders , and Im Jan Jekielek.

Jan Jekielek: Lee Smith, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Lee Smith: Thank you, Jan. Its great to be with you once again. Thanks very much for inviting me to spend this time with you.

Mr. Jekielek: Youve written this fascinating book Ive been reading over the past few days, chapter after chapter riveting. Ill recommend it at the outset. But tell me a little bit about this permanent coup. What do you mean by permanent coup?

Mr. Smith: There are two different things that I meant by it. First, you and I have spoken actually a number of times now about the Trump-Russia collusion, Russiagate, however we want to discuss it. This was the first operation that was targeting first candidate Trump and then President Trump, and then it turned into the Mueller investigation from that. That rolled into the impeachment inquiry [and] the impeachment process. That then rolled into the weaponization of the coronavirus to target the Trump administration. After that, weve seen riots in the streets of virtually every major American city.

So in part, the permanent coup refers to the number of operations that have been targeting the president and his supporters for the last four years. The other thing it refers to when I say the permanent coup, theres a purpose behind the coup. It wasnt just a deep state phenomenon, some sort of organism arising here out of Washington.

The purpose of it was they were very frustrated, they were furious, when Hillary Clinton was not elected president and when Trump was elected. That meant that they were not able to implement, finalize, complete Barack Obamas policies, impose his worldview. So this is what weve seen in the last four years: A struggle to hold down Trump in order to have someone come in after, to finalize, again, to complete Obamas policies. Remember, he was talking about the total transformation of America.

This is the struggle that weve seen unfolding the last four years between a very traditional view of America protecting and promoting individual liberties, the sanctity of life, the importance [and] the centrality of a family and communitya standard but important view of Americaversus a very different view of what America should be. And this is a fight that will continue regardless of what happens this November, whether Donald Trump is reelected or whether Joe Biden is elected instead.

It really is a contest which has turned very vicious and very ugly for what America should look like and will look like. And so I talked in part in the book also about some of the people who have been invested in that struggle. Of course, Congressman Devin Nunes, whom Ive written about before.

Someone else whos a very important part of the book [is Michael Flynn]. The book details exactly the different things that have been done to General Flynn, the different ways theyve tried to destroy him, and so I have an interview with the general which concludes the bookvery interesting and important insights from the general. But these are people who are heavily involved, who are invested, in this fight for what our country is going to look like and what the future of our country is going to be.

Mr. Jekielek: This is really fascinating. Of course, General Flynn is constantly, lately in the news because of this, you could call it, never-ending case. We thought it might be closed when the DOJ [Department of Justice] decided to drop the charges, but that isnt how it turned out. And now were at the point of an en banc review of the D.C. Circuit. Why dont you tell us just where things are at right now in your mind, and what does your book have to say about this case?

Mr. Smith: Again, my book describes why General Flynn was targeted by various figures, including the FBI, the CIA, the outgoing White House as well, and then it explains how the special counsel investigation set up General Flynn. Theres a chapter in the book which is called, The Scope. Its chapter seven which describes what the special counsel team did when they came in.

And when you look at it in a particular way, they were hurting sons to get at the fathers. So they did this with General Flynn. They went after General Flynns son to go after him. A lot of people forget this. They also went after Donald Trump Jr. to try to get at the president. Another story I tell in there is about a Turkish businessman who had partnered with General Flynn and they wanted him to turn on Flynn.

So if you look at what the special counsel did, strictly in human terms, its appalling. They tried to hurt fathers through their sons. They tried to get friends, business associates, to turn against each other. Its extremely destructive. Its not just un-American or anti-American; its really inhuman. What they did and how they tried to hurt people on a human scale.

To come back to where we are with General Flynns case at present, many peoplewe spoke briefly before about how many people are listening now to the proceedings when theyve been able to hear them on C-SPAN. The amount of people who are listening to this case, its quite a few people who are heavily invested in it, and theyre heavily invested in the outcome of what happens to General Flynn.

And of course, it largely has to do with General Flynns storya man who served his country for over three decades in uniform, he served in very high-level positions including head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was President Trumps first national security adviser. So of course its people looking at that and wondering, If they can do this to General Flynn, they can basically do this to anyone. And this is a very important part of why people are following this because a lot of people, I think, are getting the very clear sense that what were watching unfold in this case is a two-tier system of justice, and I think its very astonishing.

Its very astonishing for people to watch this. People get treated unfairly in our justice system all the time. It happens. Its a very sad fact, and we want to correct and change that as much as possible. But to watch an active operation to damage General Flynn when the Department of Justice has filed a motion to drop the case and the one branch of our government, the judiciary, will not let it go, its very disturbing and very surprising and says very worrying things about the future of our justice system.

Mr. Jekielek: Based on everything that you know, and you certainly know a lot looking through your book and the previous book of course, The Plot Against the President, where do you expect things to go now?

Mr. Smith: I believe, Im very confident, weve seen some developments now in the investigation [by] Mr. John Durham. Attorney General Barr appointed him in May 2019 to start investigating, to start investing in the case. Im optimistic. Im sure youve been following one of the lawyers at the FBI, a high-level lawyer, a gentleman whos part of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and was also rolled over to the special counsel team, a man named Kevin Clinesmith, has pled guilty to making false statements.

And it looks from some of the different news reports and from what experienced legal hands, former prosecutors and whatnot have explained to me, it appears pretty clear that Mr. Clinesmith has made an agreement to cooperate with the investigation. Along with many people, Im optimistic, finally, that Mr. Durham will get to the bottom, and there will be indictments for people having committed crimes, starting in 2016, targeting the Trump campaign. So again, Im optimistic about that.

Mr. Jekielek: So of course, Kevin Clinesmith is the one who altered an email that basically made it look like Carter Page was not a CIA asset, sensibly allowed for these FISA applications to go through. One of the things I keep hearing is that this is just some low-level guy, actually, from all sides of the spectrum. You said hes a high-level guy. What are you thinking?

Mr. Smith: What I mean is that someone who has that level of input over that is someone who is in a position that commands a certain amount of authority. So he is accountable for what he did wrong. He was not bringing coffee to the senior agents of the Crossfire Hurricane team. Hes not the guy in the mailroom. That said, I think it is also quite clear that he is not the one who gave the order and who said, I think its a good idea. Lets get a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on Carter Page so we can spy on the Trump campaign.

I think its very clear to all involved that this was not simply a mistake, that this was an operation that involves many people. And again, from reports and from what people who have a very good understanding of how these cases and prosecutions run, it appears that Mr. Clinesmith is likely cooperating, which will involve pointing to other people, both people on his level and presumably people above him as well, who were involved in targeting the Trump campaign.

Mr. Jekielek: I found it really fascinating how you described three vantage points, basically, that were meant to show there was Russia collusion: you had Alfa Bank, you had Sergei Millian who, frankly, a lot of people havent heard much about, and Carter Page, who a lot of people have heard a lot about.

Mr. Smith: What happened was that I started to look more into the story of Sergei Millian, which Id never really looked at before. And once I started to understand what had happened, what theyd done to him, how he had been set up by Fusion GPS and the FBI, [and] how they sicked the press on him, I started looking more and more to his story, and its terrible what they did to him.

They tried to identify himthey did. They identified him as a dossier source; they identified him as a Russian spy. They started a counterintelligence investigation on him in October. They were really looking to destroy him. Many of the other people who have been hurt Hes an American. Hes a naturalized American citizen. Hes been living outside the country now for a couple of years, I guess, and its terrible what they did.

As I started looking more and more at the story, I knew Carters story pretty well. The Alpha Bank story, I knew less well. But I started to recognize that all these stories were intended to converge at a particular time before the 2016 election.

I went back at a certain time, and I saw Christopher Steeles interview with Kathleen Kavalec, a State Department official. This was in October 2016, and he actually described it that way. He said [that] there were three different Trump-Russia channels, and he said, Carter Page, Sergei Millian, and the Alpha Bank, so I was very happy to see that I was following a correct lead.

What was supposed to happen was these were all supposed to come together on October 31, 2016. If you look at the number of stories that dropped, there was a Financial Times story on Sergeiagain, just a smear campaign. There was a David Corn story going after Carter Page, October 31. October 31, there was Franklin Foers Slate story about Alpha Bank. The big story was supposed to be a New York Times story, putting it all together, saying that, yes, this was the heart of collusion.

This was supposed to be the October surprise that was going to utterly destroy the Trump campaign. Remember, they all expected that Hillary Clinton was going to win, but this was going to be the coup de grace. This was going to be the end of the Trump campaign.

Well, it didnt work out that well. It didnt work out that way because someone at the FBI walked the Russia collusion investigation back. In my book, in the book here, The Permanent Coup, I explained that this appears to have been intra-FBI, intra-intelligence service wrangling.

But it was all supposed to blow up in this New York Times story and Fusion GPS, as they explained in their own book, they were furious at the Times. They thought that the Times had blown the story. What they meant by that is the Times have blown the operation which was supposed to destroy Donald Trump as well as the damage that had already [been] done to Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The further damage was supposed to do to Carter Page and Sergei Millian, and of course now weve seen the directors of Alpha Bank have taken Christopher Steele to court in London, so its very important.

One of the things that Ive tried to do in both of these books is discuss the human cost. How many people have been hurt by this, including, of course, President Trump, which has come out oftentimes in many of his own statements, but General Flynn, Carter Page, Sergei Millian is another person, [and] George Papadopoulos. [There are] a number of people whove been terrifically hurt by this, by political dirty tricks, an operation that was using the resources of the federal government for political purposes.

They didnt care whose lives they destroyed, they didnt care who they hurt, they didnt care who they bankrupted, they didnt care who they put in jail, and its a terrible chapter. Its a terrible chapter in our history. The point of calling it The Permanent Coup though is we see this attitude continuing. We see right nowdo people care?

We talk so much about racial justice; weve spoken so much about these things. Do people care about the number of Americans whose businesses were destroyed? Or the people who were hurt during these riots? Do people care? Weve talked so much about the coronavirus. Americans obviously understood, it wasnt just a two-tier system of justice. Theres a two-tier system of relevance, a two-tier system of meaning.

The people who wanted to go to church, the people who want to bury their fathers [or] their mothers, the people who want to celebrate their marriage in publicthese people were not important. These people stay home. If you want to open your business and you want to protest it, Go to hell. Stay home. Put on a mask. Thats how part of the population was treated.

The other part of the population, if you feel that you want to go to the streets of Washington D.C. right here, and you want to set fire to a church, and you want to try to destroy a hotel, and if you phrase it in terms of peaceful protesting and systemic racism, help yourself. Help yourself. So again, two-tier system of justice and two-tier system of citizenship, of relevance.

Its a terrible thing that happened. And again, thats because they treated people like Carter Page and Sergei Millian, Svetlana Lokhova is another person, Michael Flynn, they treated these people like garbage, and thats where we are right now. Large parts of this country regard their neighbors, fellow Americans, fellow citizens, as garbage. Their lives just arent worth that much. Its terrible. Its terrible where we are right now.

Mr. Jekielek: What about the human cost to you for covering all this stuff? Those of us who have decided to cover Russiagate

Mr. Smith: Ive been so fortunate. Really, Ive been blessed. Ive gotten to write books. Ive gotten people read them; people have bought them, amazingly. And seriously, Ive been extremely lucky, and getting to cover this. Seriously, getting to meet people like you, getting to speak with you, Ive terrific colleagues who are interested in this stuff. Getting to meet Congressman Nunes, his team Kash Patel, Jack Langer.

And to get to write about something so important about which way our country is going, how are we going to live as Americans. Will we embrace each other with all of our differences, our debates, and our competing interests? Will we find a way to live together or are things going to get worse? So getting to write about that and getting to engage with people about this, its an enormous blessing. I feel that the things that have, whatever has been a pain, whatever has been a nuisance, well worth it.

Mr. Jekielek: Have you lost friends?

Mr. Smith: Yes. But I mean writers lose friends all the time. If youre writing, and if you have strong opinions, you should lose friends. It just happens. That also means maybe that friendship wasnt that serious or wasnt grounded in the important and respectful place where writers, people who are exchanging ideas, should be grounded. Its OK. I take you as a serious person. I know youre a serious person. If you think this, Ill listen to you for at least a little while, and then Ill make an argument with you. If you lose those connections, they werent worth it to begin with.

Mr. Jekielek: Its interesting because you did mention earlier, and this is at the professional level, but Im thinking at the personal level, Ive been following all sorts of stories of families not talking to each other because they have, as youre suggesting, very, very different visions of the future. Theres media that are misleading people as to realities. Some people believe those things and these things cause rifts among even people as close as families. Ive heard of people [with] deep friendships of 30 years that endedreal, real stories that Im aware of like this. Thats kind of what Im trying to get at.

Mr. Smith: No, no, I dont mean to be Pollyannaish, but its really been such a huge blessing, and I think weve talked about this before. Weve talked about the problems with the press; weve talked about the problems with the media, but one of the real great things about this time isI know a lot of people have different issues with social media, rightly sobut the number of people who are out there on Twitter, on Facebook, on Parler, who not only want information, but who are producing and providing information. So thats fantastic.

Yet some of the people, some of the relationships that I may have lost or are no longer as strong as they were in the past, [are balanced by] the number of people Ive gotten to meet since then, the number of people Ive corresponded with on Twitter, its fantastic.

There was a time when my wife thought I only had imaginary friends on Twitter. She saw me sitting there and corresponding with different people who were using pseudonyms, and she said, These are all your fictional friends on Twitter. No, theyre real. But really to get information from them, to learn from them. And I do also feel in a larger way, not just me, I do feel that even though its partly a dire moment for the country, I feel that lots of people have also come together, right?

I feel that lots of people have come together and said, Yeah, we realize this is a tough time. How do we stick together? What kind of community do we build out of this, out of the problems that were having when we see these things melting down, or when we see these things beingsomeone burning them down? How have different people come together? So again, Im not just looking at it through rose-tinted lenses, but Ive felt especially blessed with what Ive gotten to do and the people Ive gotten to meet and the work Ive gotten to do.

Mr. Jekielek: Lee, youre one of the few journalists out there who has been following Crossfire Hurricane, the whole Russia collusion story, for some time and helping everyone understand.

Mr. Smith: Thanks, yeah.

Mr. Jekielek: But this is just a part of your book. I mean, you dedicate multiple chapters to it. What is your kind of idea behind this piece? What are you trying to achieve with the book?

Mr. Smith: The American political system is set up so that you have competing forces, right? We have different people within a certain framework who have different worldviews, right. We have two parties. Its a two-party system, which actually has worked very well for this country for quite a long time. I know that many people think that we should fragment and we should have a number of different European style parties, but the two party system works very well for us.

What weve seen happen here the last four years is weve seen not just unconstitutional and illegal actions, weve seen actions that have gone outside of how our political system, how our political process is supposed to work. Weve really seen the adoption, the co-optation of third world norms. And this is one of the reasons why this story has been extremely important to me from the beginning, having covered the Middle East and looking at this, watching different things unfold, different features that one normally associates with third world polities. So to see this happening inside the United States is a huge concern.

And of course, it went from Russiagate to a weaponized investigation, the Mueller investigation, then it turned into a nonsensical impeachment process, which was patternedagain, I explained in the bookwhich is patterned precisely after what they did with the Steele dossier. So to see these things unfold again and again, and to see the press offer itself up as a platform for these operations, I think that all Americans should be extremely concerned to see whats unfolding here.

And I think a lot of Americans would be very concerned, whether these are centrist or whether these are Democrats, if they were getting the news and the information theyre supposed to be getting. But what weve had instead is weve had a media that isnot partisan [exactly]. Ive worked in the press for a long time. My father was a journalist. My grandfather, great grandfather were all journalists. Im familiar with the fact and comfortable with the fact that the press tends to lean toward the left. Thats not what weve been seeing here the last several years. What weve been seeingsomethings entirely different.

To offer itself up as an information operation is not right or left. This is what we see in hard security regimes in the Middle East. This is what we see with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes around the world. So its not a right or left issue. So of course, this media is not providing the information, telling American viewers, American media consumers, what has actually been happening here because they are participants.

They are the essential ingredient in this operation, targeting not just President Donald Trump, but our republic, targeting our political processes, our traditions, our mores. The Constitution is an extremely important document. It is our founding document. However, without the mores that bind us together as Americans, without the respect that were supposed to have for each other as Americans, the Constitution isnt worth much.

There has to be a fundamental level of respect between other Americans for our neighbors, fellow citizens, people who live all the way across the country. Were seeing this threatened right now, the fabric that is supposed to keep us together. This is one of the things that weve seen unfold over the last several months with the riots ravaging American cities.

Mr. Jekielek: So, you mentioned you used to cover the Middle East.

Mr. Smith: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: Frankly, you wrote predominantly, from what I saw, looking at the Middle East. So the level of importance of this situation is what got you to shift into reporting on this whole Crossfire Hurricane? No, I guess early on it was unmasking.

Mr. Smith: I recognized unfortunately, a lot of similarities. For instance, the coordination between the intelligence services and the press. This is how the Middle East works. This is how typical operations work there. Ive said this before, but the two major ministries in hard security regimes are the Ministry of the Interior, which covers the intelligence services, and the Ministry of Information, which covers what goes by the press in third world regimes.

And these are the two outfits that coordinate to wage operations, internal domestic operations, against political enemies, against the regimes adversaries. And this, what weve seen here, it predates Crossfire Hurricane, it predates Russiagate. I started noticing this when the Obama administration started to market the Iran deal, how they were using the press to target domestic enemies there. So yes, this is one of the things that concerned me greatly, that I saw different third world norms becoming naturalized in the American political system.

Mr. Jekielek: Very curiously, youre talking about taking things back before Crossfire Hurricane and into basically generating support for the Iran deal. But actually, in the book, you go quite a bit further back, and you have a whole chapter dedicated to China, which is of course one of my favorite topics. And you take us way back into the 90s, where the process of normalization, of stronger relations with the Chinese Communist Party and so forth. So tell me a little bit about this. I read that chapter with rapt fascination.

Mr. Smith: Thanks, thanks.

Mr. Jekielek: You pointed out some very, very interesting things, even a few that I wasnt entirely aware of.

Mr. Smith: Okay, Im very proud of that. Thats good.

Mr. Jekielek: How does the whole China piece fit into this puzzle? I think thats something that not a lot of the viewers are going to be necessarily expecting.

Mr. Smith: Right. China has become something since even before the 90s, since about the 70s, with Henry Kissingers and the president he served, Richard M. Nixons, outreach to China, which was a strategic gambit to advance the interests of the United States against the Soviet Union, a more dangerous communist country at the time in the 70s. Since then, American policymakers, people in Washington, have not sufficiently revisited our opinions about China.

There were different outliers. There were different voices of reason, people who were saying things. And I point to Kissinger to say that this is not a Democratic problem; its not a Republican problem. Its a Washington problem. Some people on both sides of the aisle, its people who come here to do work to sell influence and to buy influence.

In the 80s, the congressman from Missouri, Richard Gephardt, who was also a 1988 presidential candidate, sounded a message very similar to Donald Trumps once he started worrying about American jobs. He started worrying about people who were shipping jobs off. At the time he was worried about South Korea and Japan as well, but then China became a very big concern for him.

And the way that people targeted Gephardt, the press, opponents, targeted Gephardt was eerily similar to the way theyre going after Donald Trump now. Any idea of saying, Wait a minute, lets look at whats happening here. Lets find out whats happening to American jobs. And why are we selling out American jobs to foreign adversaries? Donald Trump, the way theyve shut him up is by calling him a racist, right? This is the instrument that theyve used to go after Trump.

Well, strangely or not strangely, this is one of the same tactics they used to keep Gephardt down as well. They called him a xenophobe. They called him a racist. Gephardt also had a description for the swamp that sounded very similar to Donald Trumps. He talked about policymakers. He talked about thought leaders. He talked about the authors of opinion editorials, academics, and this is the same message that Trump sends out as well.

Why do you have all these people who are agreeing on this one thing? Why are they all here in Washington? Why do they all agree about the centrality and the significance of the Chinese Communist Party? And when you have someone who comes in and says, Wait a minute, this is a problem, actually, for a number of different reasons.

Its a problem in terms of the American workforce. Its also a problem in terms of American national security. And Trump has found allies on China, most of them right now on the Republican side, though, historically, there have been Democrats who have been very good on China. You dont have to go all the way back to 1988 and find Gephardt. Even more recently, there have been senators who have been very good on China.

Why more of them arent standing up now and joining Donald Trump is bad. Its understandable in terms of partisan politics. But its a terrible thing for the country, especially right now. This is a country that has taken a number of body blows. One of them has in particular come from China, referring to [what] we were speaking about before: they say the Chinese Communist Party flu, right. This is a very serious thing. So it would be important for American officials, American policymakers to join together on this, that this is a problem. Were not there yet.

Mr. Jekielek: So Lee, what is the Chinese Communist Partys role in this permanent coup?

Mr. Smith: Right. When I talk about in the subtitle, its our Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President. One of the important things to understand here is that its what we Americans have done to ourselves, right? We have brought in foreign powers to take sides.

If you look at what Washington is, Washington is a place oftentimes where foreigners come here and try to get us as Americans to intervene on their behalf, against their own rivals in their own countries, in their own communities. Whats happened here in many different ways is we have dragged in foreign powersand this is part of the story I tell about Ukraine as wellit is we who have invited in foreign powers to play a part in our political process.

There is no reason that China has to have that large a say. There was nothing in that, I know this part of Chinese Communist Party information operations. But theres nothing inevitable about the rise of China. There is nothing that says that China will come to dominate not just the United States but must come to dominate the entire world. Its we who not only collaborated on that, but we who have made that happen. Its we whove made that inevitable.

And so when I talk about how this is part of the book, [its] because again, its not just an operation against Donald Trump. Its not just going after Donald Trump, or even his supporters. Its going after an American way of life, our own traditional way of life, how Americans live, how Americans work, how they raise families, and certainly the threat by shipping over jobs to China, American jobs.

Moving American jobs to China, this is a very big deal. This weakens an enormous part of our workforce. This has been hurting our neighbors. This has been destroying our neighbors, fellow Americans. So again, insofar as the permanent coup is going after, again, not just Trump, but regular Americans, yes, what Washington [is doing], the different arrangements that policymakers have been working up here with China, is an attack on America.

That chapter on China describes the role that Senator Dianne Feinstein has played regarding China and regarding American policy. Look, in many ways in the 1970s, it was exciting for people to reach out to China, a very hopeful time in different ways. And in some ways this policy started as a time of hope. Lets see if we can drag the Chinese Communist Party out of communism and bring them into the community of nations.

Well, that is not what has happened, and this policy, this idea has failed. So why are people still involved? Why is Dianne Feinstein, why does she continue to defend the Chinese Communist Party? And Im not just talking about what the party does inside of China. Im not just talking about what its done in Hong Kong, what its done to the Uyghurs, but also what is happening here in the United States. What is the role of the Chinese Communist Party? Isnt it right for American policymakers to represent their constituents at home? Instead, they are defending foreign powers who are hurting her constituents, who are hurting other Americans.

Mr. Jekielek: You describe Senator Feinsteins relationships with very, very high-level leaders, for example with Jiang Zemin, who basically rose to power through what they called pacifying Tiananmen Square in 1989, really ultimately perpetrating the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Mr. Smith: Right, right. And her explanation for thatshe boasts about having been a friend of Jiangs for a long time, and she talked, she gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal shortly after Tiananmen Square [and] said, Well, my friend Jiang told me that there was no police there, so all they really had was the army, and I think its time for us to put all this behind us. Im not saying that she is singly responsible for holding Jiangs feet to the fire of Tiananmen. That is not singly her responsibility. But I mean, at this point, its just obscene.

The amount of time that has gone by and the people who continue to defend. Many people in the book, Senator Cotton, Representative Mike Gallagher, these are people whove been very good, very good on China. And theyre pointing to the different problems that Beijing poses for American national interest. Weve seen different fights over Huawei and ZTE, and look at the number of Americans who are representing those interests. We have Democrats, we have Republicans who are representing the interests of adversarial powers.

The thing about Donald Trump is he is the one president who has brought this to light. And he has been engaged in this fight. And I do believe that one of the reasons that he has met so much resistance in Washington from many people has been what hes been saying about China. This has been a problem. This has been a problem with a number of different policymakers and people across the board, Democrats and Republicans, that hes taken on this fight, just as it was a problem for Dick Gephardt back in the 80s.

Mr. Jekielek: Is China somehow involved in trying to influence US politics as we speak?

Mr. Smith: The coronavirus may be the most profound influence operation in American politics in American history. I mean, we dont know yet or I dont know. I dont think either of us know whether or not it was intentional. But we see the different things they did.

They closed off internal travel from Wuhan, and they kept external travel going. In a sense, they directed death outwards. They certainly could have warned the United States and the rest of the world. If you look right now at the tally, the tally is astonishing: how many dead, how many American dead, how many dead around the world, [and] how many Americans out of work. Its hard to imagine.

It would be hard to imagine a Soviet strike during the heart of the Cold War, with 200,000 dead and many tens of millions out of work. They would have been quite pleased with such a strike. I dont think that we should respond to it as a nuclear attack, but its a very serious thing that happened.

And I think actually, I think that President Trump deserves a lot of credit to try to keep it on a low burn right now. We have lots of other concerns. I dont think that he should beyou can see that hes frustrated about this and hes angry, but its a very good thing that picking a fight with China over this is not at the top of his list. I think its good to keep calm, but we need to look at this quite clearly and seriously and see what happened. Its astonishing.

Oh, yes, its affecting this election. Its affecting how we Americans have lived since, certainly since March. It will continue to affect how we live for at least many months to come, if not many years to come.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, lets talk a little bit about your work. I was pretty fascinated to discover that you were actually the editor of The Village Voice literary supplement back in the day, and I thought, Wait a sec, there was a Village Voice, wasnt there?

Mr. Smith: Yes! Most of the magazines that Ive worked at in my career no longer exist. The Village Voice is one of them. The Weekly Standard is another. I think there are others and of course, The Village Voice and The Weekly Standard are on different sides of the political spectrum. So I worked at The Village Voice in the 90s, and I was the editor of the literary supplement, The Village Voice literary supplement, which was a huge, another [great job].

That was a great job. I got to meet terrific people. I worked with a lot of novelists, people like David Foster Wallace, Jeff Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, terrific writers, great novelists. One of the things that Ive been thinking about in terms of novels in the 1990s and whats happened with Spygate is if you look, the big novelist of the moment since the post World War II period, people like Don DeLillo, people like Robert Stone, people like William Gaddis, theyve written these extraordinarily large, expansive, somewhat paranoid novels in part, novels of suspicion, novels about worried about whats going on here in Washington. Whats going on, Libra II is about the assassination Libra; Im thinking Mao IILibra is about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of Kennedy. So it talks about the CIA.

If you look at these different things that novelists have been concerned about in the post World War II period, the dangers of the state, the dangers of the intelligence services, what is the United States doing abroad? And we spoke about China before. What are Americas entanglements abroad? All of these have very much been in the air.

People ask me why I found whats happening with the collusion story, or Spygate, whatever you want to, however we want to describe it. Well, Im surprised that more people who spent their formative years reading these books, reading these novelists dont recognize more easily whats going on. Yes, what Don DeLillo has been writing about, parts of what David Foster Wallace wrote about, these things are actually going on.

Stop imagining that they would only take place in a particular corner of the public sphere, in a partisan corner that youd prefer they appear in so it doesnt have to make you think about whats happening over here. They are happening. So yes, I think that working at The Village Voice at that time and that particular period absolutely prepared me to see what was happening here in Washington. The press, the intelligence services, and political figures, teaming to go after their adversaries.

Mr. Jekielek: Who should read the book?

Mr. Smith: What Ive been trying to do with this book, with my articles, with the plot against the president is trying to explain the things. Yes, there are different parts where I will intervene editorially and point to different things that happened. The most important thing that I think that Im doing here though is Im filling out whats happening in time, the chronology, to explain to people how these things unfolded, what these operations [are], to understand whats happened here, alright?

You need to knock them down to their foundations. By foundations, I mean timelines and actual quotations, what people have said. If you look at how prestigious press organizations have covered these things, what theyve done is the way they fill in, the way they tell these stories is, the mortar is the way that they build these narratives, as they call them. The mortar is the nonsense.

Thats the information operation. Thats how theyre trying to target people. Well, George Papadopoulos did this and that. Sergei Millian is a Russian spy, right? Thats the information operation part of what theyre doing.

What Ive done is Ive knocked down these structures to look at the essential story, to try to give people a sense of where we are. Many Americans across the country understand precisely whats happened here. They know what this story is about. They know who the bad guys are. They know who the good guys are. Ive tried to explain this story, so that they can show, they can have some support for their friends, their family members to explain, No, this is really what happened. Ive tried to document this so that people can understand it a little better themselves and so that it will help them explain it a little better themselves. Does that make sense?

Mr. Jekielek: It does. And indeed, to your point, Lee, at the beginning of the book, theres this kind of massive timeline that youve put together that basically starts the book and sets the tone for what were about to read, which I frankly, appreciated a lot. Bringing a whole lot of different, lets call it, operations, as you call them, or different areas of inquiry together into one timeline is very interesting.

Mr. Smith: I think its very important. Again, I think that people have a pretty good idea why its called, one reason anyway, why its called the Permanent Coup. If you look at the timeline, you see these things falling. For instance, Robert Mueller, on July 24, 2019, came in and gave his testimony before House committees. That was the end of the special counsel investigation. Yes. Have nothing. No collusion. Nothing. Within less than 24 hours is when they started the Ukrainegate impeachment operation.

So you see how its been constant. Theyve continued to turn the spigot for the last four years. Its astonishing, really, what the country has gone through. I mean, he deserves a lot of credit to see what the president has managed to accomplish, in spite of the different operations intended to destroy him the last four years.

Mr. Jekielek: What are some of those accomplishments in your view? Aside from the UAE-Israel Abraham Accords.

Mr. Smith: What do you mean aside from? I mean that in itself is a very big deal. Thats enormous, yeah.

Mr. Jekielek: I think its hard to imagine. I imagine a lot of people think its positive.

Mr. Smith: Oh, yes, I think its a very big deal. Look, people have spent so much time looking at the Palestinians and the Israelis. Sadly, Palestinians are a sub-state entity, run part by an aging sclerotic, kleptocracy, Fatah, and a terrorist group, Hamas. The Israelis now have an agreement with a major oil producer, with billions of dollars to invest in tech and the hyper-advanced Israeli tech industry. These are exciting things. And with luck, more of the regional actors will make peace with Israel. And at a certain point, the Palestinians will say, What are we going to do? I guess we should make peace too, get on with our lives, move forward. Thats an excellent thing.

Lets come back to China for a second. I think the fact that the President has recognized theres a problem with China, the fact that hes trying to, he is, addressing this issue, [and] that hes talking forthrightly about our concerns with China right now, these are all very big deals.

I think one of the most important things that Trump has done, though, is I think hes given a lot of people hope. Right? First of all, by fighting and then second of all, by giving, by listening to people. I think people really did feel that here in Washington, people dont pay attention, that people arent listening. Donald Trump showed that he was listening to people and that their fight is his fight. And this is a very important thing. I think its a very important thing for people. Its astonishing when you think about it.

We talked before about how Gephardt was criticized for trying to take on unfair trade practices. Again, the unfair trade problem is Washington, as Trump has said. See, I dont blame the Chinese for it. That was Americans who made these bad deals. But the fact that a lot of people feel that here in Washington, policymakers, no one is listening to them. Or theyre insulted, chastised for What do you mean you care about American jobs? What do you mean you think American jobs are important? Thats why you want to close the border. Well, thats why you want to put tariffs on China so we can preserve American jobs. What kind of racist are you? I mean, where does that come from?

An American president, its his responsibility to take care of Americans, and all of a sudden thats turned around and hes racist. This sounds like Chinese Communist Party messaging. Well, if you take any position against the Chinese Communist Party, you must be a racist. How is that? Hes the American president hired to advance the interests of Americans at home and abroad.

Mr. Jekielek: So Lee, we mentioned the Iran deal a little bit earlier. In the book, you make the case basically, that the previous administrations focus on making the Iran deal happen actually figures significantly into all these operations, as you describe them, that are happening today.

Mr. Smith: It was the centerpiece or it was the premier foreign policy initiative of the Obama administration. It was very important for them to sell it. And thats when their surveillance of domestic opponents first came to my attention. They started targeting Congress and their opponents on the Hill, and they were also going after pro-Israel activists as well. And that rolled intoafter they managed to push the deal through in July 2015 in Viennathat rolled into their surveillance of the Trump campaign, in particular, their surveillance and their targeting of General Flynn.

Remember, General Flynn had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and he saw precisely what the Iranians were up to. He saw how many American deaths theyd caused, how much American blood theyd shed. So for him the idea of legitimising, legalizing their nuclear weapons programwhich is what the Iran deal didit seemed to him insane. Michael Flynn, like the president he served, was determined to undo the Iran deal, and thats why the White House targeted Michael Flynn.

Mr. Jekielek: Lee, who did you write this book for?

Mr. Smith: Well, Im very flattered and honored that I have, that there are a lot of people who read the first book and who read my work, and they said such nice things about it, and they bought the book. I think most of the time though, and certainly with this book, I was thinking about my father as the ideal reader.

My father is a retired journalist [who] worked for many publications. And I think that he is very surprised to find that the press has been lying about so many different things. I think that hes coming to that recognition now. And so I wanted to be able to explain to him and other people, decent, honest Americans with whom you may have political differences and debates.

We might not agree about everything, but this is supposed to be the place where we have real information to make decisions, important decisions about how we live with each other at home and how we advance our shared interest abroad. And right now, the lies that are put forth in the press, its not just to advance political candidates. Its not just to advance certain interests. They are intentionally divisive. Theyre intentionally harmful, driving us toward conflict.

And the idea that somehow theyve injected these insane conspiracy theories into the American public sphere, like Russiagate, the power of that conspiracy theory. It will be at least a generation if not more, before most of this country understands that was just an obscene conspiracy theory. But how dangerous that is for America, for all of us, even people who dont like Donald Trump, how dangerous and divisive that is, so I wanted to write for decent people who I think need to understand the truth, need to understand what happened. I tried to explain it as clearly as possible and as fairly as possible.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Grocery giant on Monday said it would create 16,000 new permanent jobs in Britain to support the exceptional growth in its online business since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As the supermarket's online business continues to grow, the number of new roles may increase further in the coming months, the company said.

said the new roles will include 10,000 pickers to assemble customer orders and 3,000 drivers to deliver them, plus a variety of other roles in stores and distribution centres.

The supermarket expects the majority of these roles to be filled by colleagues who joined on a temporary basis at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but who now want to stay with the business permanently.

Roles will first be offered to these temporary colleagues, with remaining vacancies then recruited externally.

These 16,000 jobs are in addition to the 4,000 permanent jobs already created since the start of the pandemic.

"Since the start of the pandemic, our colleagues have helped us to more than double our online capacity, safely serving nearly 1.5 million customers every week and prioritising vulnerable customers to ensure they get the food they need," CEO Jason Tarry said in a statement.

"These new roles will help us continue to meet online demand for the long term, and will create permanent employment opportunities for 16,000 people across the "

Before the pandemic, around nine per cent of Tesco's sales were online. The figure is now more than 16 per cent of sales, with Tesco expecting online sales of over 5.5 billion pounds this year, up from 3.3 billion pounds last year.

--IANS

gb/na

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Army Maj. Brent Taylor knew the only way to train Afghan forces to take over their own security was by forming real relationships with them. Tragically, in November 2018, he was killed by one of the men he was training who had been radicalized. Maj. Taylor was just 39 years old.

His great leadership capacityhis commitment and love for these peopleis really what cost him his life, his widow, Jennie Taylor, said.

Taylor remembers her husband as old-fashioned, traditional, driven, and respectful. She joked that he would have been happy to have been born in colonial times. He was also fun-loving and had a wonderful sense of humor. She remembered how he and his fellow soldiers sang 12 Days of Christmas with a Lord of the Rings spin on his first deployment.

He had a sense of duty that drove him in everything he did, but he also really knew how to have fun in life, Taylor said.

Service and Faith

Taylor said God inspired her husbands service as mayor and city councilman in their hometown of North Ogden, Utah. He always valued people and empowered them to be their best. It was his patriotism and sense of duty that led him into the Army.

He always from a young age had a sense [that] he was part of something bigger than himself, Taylor said.

Furthermore, he saw his family as a gift and responsibility from God. He would come up with his own creative tales for bedtime stories with the underlying principles he wanted to teach their children. He taught his kids the value of work by planting crops and raising chickens on a small farm they owned.

He was very deliberate. Day-to-day things had meaning, Taylor said.

Faith in God was what allowed Taylor and her seven children to cope with his death.

God can make reason of all things that happen, she said. I think when it happened, God was saying: Have faith in me and Ill help you make sense of this. Ill help you still find beautiful happiness in life.

Jennie Taylors faith was what helped her cope following her husbands death. (Courtesy of Jennie Taylor)

I really believe even though my husbands body is deadthis is not the end of his life.

Taylor learned how to be humble and ask for other peoples help when she needed it most. She also discovered the good that people can do when the unimaginable happens.

Maj. Taylor had been a student at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, and when he was killed, his professors agreed to grant him his doctoral degree posthumously. During these discussions among his professors, someone suggested forming a scholarship in his name.

Instead of dwelling on her husbands death, Taylor began by hosting a fundraiser on what would have been her husbands 40th birthday on July 5, 2019.

I didnt want to just spend his birthday crying, Taylor said. She invited friends and community members to thank them for their support during Maj. Taylors deployments and after his death.

Honoring Heroes

Ultimately, she founded the Major Brent Taylor Foundation as a vehicle for donations to the scholarship fund for both universities. The organizations mission is to train future leaders, honor military members and their families, and engage with the community.

To date, the foundation has raised funds for two undergraduate and two graduate scholarships. Taylor helps honor service members and veterans by assisting their families and telling the stories of military service members on social media. Before his death, Maj. Taylor was able to help engage the community through concerts in the park and fundraising for a local amphitheater. Now, every Veterans Day, the foundation holds a blood drive in his honor.

Brent really believed that the way to strengthen a community was to bring people together. He would talk a lot about how we have far more that unites us than divides us, Taylor said. We just need to remember that.

Jennie Taylors efforts to honor fallen military and first responders started with the Major Brent Taylor Foundation and Follow the Flag. (Courtesy of Jennie Taylor)

Taylor also had become involved with an organization called Follow the Flag when community members asked to borrow its gigantic Fourth of July flag to honor Maj. Taylor, who had been mayor of North Ogden at the time of his death.

That ignited a patriotic movement in town and led to the purchase of another large flag called The Major to honor him. Every Veterans Day, it hangs in a canyon close to their home. It was after this series that Taylor embarked on a journey to honor our nations service members and first responders.

Taylor has helped families grieve, comforted them, and has assisted with the funeral arrangements for other military members who have been killed in action, such as pilot Kenneth Allen, from North Ogden, who was killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan in December 2019, as well as for local police officer Nate Lyday, who was killed in the line of duty.

Theres something about the bond you create with someone when you help them through their own tragedy, Taylor said.

In addition to Taylors efforts to help these heroes families, she recently supplied the National Guard in Salt Lake City with food and water during the riots that marred the peaceful protests over the police killing of George Floyd.

Two days later, Taylor and others visited with more refreshments and expressed their gratitude for their service.

Taylor is currently fundraising for a Gold Star Memorial in North Ogden. The national movement honors not only the fallen, but also their families.

The monument is designed without a single name on it, but instead features a cutout silhouette of a service member. Taylor wanted to offer a gift to her community that would ensure that the price of freedom is never forgotten. The plan is to place the monument between North Ogdens city hall and the community library.

I feel like North Ogden is a Gold Star community, Taylor said.
The US has moved more military vehicles, including oil tankers, into Hassakeh province, from Iraq writes Al-Masdar.

The US Coalition brought military equipment, logistical materials, and oil tankers, to their bases in Hassakeh Governorate, local reports said on Saturday.

According to the reports, more than 50 US military vehicles, including a number of tanks, entered Syrias Hassakeh Governorate on Saturday via the al-Walid Crossing that links the country with Iraqs Nineveh Governorate.

The sources indicated that the convoy also includes trucks, tanks, oil tankers, accompanied by a number of armored vehicles.

In recent months, the US military has brought thousands of trucks loaded with weapons and military and logistical equipment to Hassakeh through illegal crossings to reinforce its presence east of the Euphrates.

The Syrian government has condemned the presence of the US in eastern Syria, calling on Washington to immediately withdraw their forces from the country.

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.
Arrests follow violent clashes between rival groups of protesters in the citys downtown area earlier in the day.

Portland police said they arrested 14 people overnight after officers were hit by rocks, bottles and paintballs, following violent clashes between rival groups of demonstrators that roiled the citys downtown area earlier in the day.

Police said they declared a riot just before midnight on Saturday after a group of about 250 people, many of them wearing black and carrying shields, helmets and gas masks, tried to march on a government building that has often been the scene of violence during nearly three months of nightly protests.

Crowd control munitions were used, but not tear gas, the police department said in a statement on Sunday.

Demonstrations against racism and police brutality have swept the United States since the death in May of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Near-daily demonstrations have gripped Portland since Floyds death.

Earlier on Saturday, there were scuffles in downtown Portland between anti-racism protesters and right-wing demonstrators. Participants clad in body armour and helmets traded punches and blasts of pepper spray as police officers mostly looked on, according to video of the clashes posted on social media.

Downtown Portland saw scuffles between anti-racism protesters and right-wing demonstrators [Maranie Staab/Reuters]

In a statement, Portland Police said there had been questions about why the afternoon gathering was not declared a riot and why city police officers did not intervene. Incident commanders have to determine whether police action will make things more dangerous, the statement said.

In this case, there were hundreds of individuals and many weapons within the groups and an extremely limited amount of police resources actually available to address such a crowd, police said.

Additionally, (Portland police officers) have been the focus of over 80 days of violent actions directed at the police, which is a major consideration for determining if police resources are necessary to interject between two groups with individuals who appear to be willingly engaging in physical confrontations for short durations.

President Donald Trumps administration in July deployed federal forces to deal with the protests in Portland. On Friday, he denounced the demonstrations as crazy and said cities run by Democrats had descended into chaos. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is a Democrat.

Demonstrations against racism and police brutality have swept the United States since the death of George Floyd [Maranie Staab/Reuters]

Portland police said this week that they have declared a riot at least 18 times since May 29.

On Sunday they said the 14 people arrested were arrested on charges including rioting, assaulting a public safety officer, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
She has a glamorous work wardrobe that many women can only dream of.

And Myleene Klass flashed a hint of her bra under a sheer leopard print top on Monday morning as she made her way to the Global Radio studios in central London.

The radio presenter, 42, teamed the stylish number with chic jogging bottoms as she headed inside to present her Smooth FM show.

Animal print: Myleene Klass flashed a hint of her bra under a sheer leopard print top when she made her way to work at the Global Radio studios in central London on Monday morning

She rocked a partially sheer animal print top with ruched detailing and a frilled-v-neck on the front.

Myleene paired the look with a pair of comfortable yet chic black jogging bottoms with red stripe piping that lined the sides.

She draped a classic scarlet Chanel bag in a quilted finish over her shoulder which perfectly complemented her trousers.

Stylish: The radio host, 42, teamed her top with casual tracksuit bottoms as she headed to her Smooth FM show

The mother-of-three added another designer touch with her timeless black and gold rimmed Chanel necklace.

She also sported other necklaces, contrasting rings and a pair of oversized '60s inspired shades which brought together her eclectic outfit choice.

Myleene donned a pair of black military boots as she made her way to the studio entrance.

Sporty chic: The mother-of-three kept things comfortable with her pair of black tracksuit bottoms that featured red stripes and perfectly matched her scarlet quilted Chanel handbag

Hairdo: The windswept beauty sported her caramel tresses in a voluminous loose wave hairstyle and opted for a natural makeup look that complemented her features

She sported her long bob in a glamorous loose wave and opted for light makeup look that highlighted her natural beauty.

Myleene looked effortlessly stylish and care-free, despite her recent social media run-in with a troll who claimed her boyfriend Simon Motson will cheat on her.

The broadcaster posted a gallery of sweet images with the PR executive beau, 45, on Wednesday to celebrate five years since they had met and a troll wrote underneath: 'Not long before this one cheats on you. Dear oh dear, heading for the lawyers are we?'

Chic: The poised radio host looked up to the sky as she arrived at work and strolled in wearing a pair of military inspired black leather boots

In a pointed response, she fired back: 'He wishes! Cheating exes usually get a house, a car and a fat pay-off.'

Her words appear to be a dig at her ex-husband Graham Quinn, who left her on her 34th birthday in 2012.

The heartbreaking incident came just six months after the couple's wedding, but they had been together for 11 years at the time, after meeting when Graham became the bodyguard for Myleene's pop group Hear'Say in 2001.

The former couple are parents to two daughters, Ava, 13, and Hero, nine and Myleene was devastated to learn that he had secretly bought a bachelor pad for himself  meaning that he must have been planning his departure for some time.

Fashion-forward: Myleene displayed her eclectic fashion sense with her collection of bohemian-style necklaces, a gold watch and vintage-inspired brown tinted shades

Sensational: The 42-year old showed off her ageless beauty and fashion sense as she smiled for the camera upon her entrance to the studio

Heartbreak: The mother-of-three separated from her bodyguard ex-husband Graham Quinn in 2012 after he left her on her 34th birthday and bought a bachelor pad behind her back

The broadcaster was said to be blindsided by the split after supporting Graham, but it was never publicly confirmed if he cheated.

Myleene is now in a happy relationship with PR exec Simon who she began dating in 2015 after being introduced by two mutual friends.

They welcomed their first child together, son Apollo, in August last year.

The presenter, took to Instagram on Wednesday to share a selection of photos from her relationship with Simon, gushing she 'loved him forever and always.'
Police discovered a "heavy duty weapon" during a search related to violent dissident republicanism at a Lurgan park on Sunday.

Detectives from the PSNI's Terrorism Investigation Unit (TIU) found the weapon during planned searches in Lord Lurgan Park.

Police said the searches were in relation to an "ongoing investigation into violent dissident republicanism".

Amongst the items seized for forensic examination was a "partially constructed, improvised heavy duty weapon".

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Rowland, of the TUI, said: Using a public park to store such items is irresponsible and demonstrates a complete disregard for the members of this community, including many families and young children who use this park for recreation.

"I want to appeal to anyone who has seen anyone acting suspiciously in the area of the park or in the local area, or has any information, to contact police on 101 or contact the independent charity Crimestoppers and speak to them anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Gov. Phil Murphy on Monday remembered Vernetta McCray, the veteran Department of Children and Families employee who was fatally shot outside her Trenton home Friday, as a dedicated worker who fought hard to battle the violence that took her life.

McCray, 39, was outside her Hampton Avenue home just before 9 p.m. when she was hit with a stray bullet, authorities said. She was rushed to the hospital, but died from her injuries the following day.

Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora said McCray was returning home from work when she was shot in what he described as another senseless act of violence in the east section of the capital city.

On Monday, Murphy said McCray dedicated her life to the Department of Children and Families to protect vulnerable children.

She and her colleagues knew, in many cases, all too well, the dangers of gun violence in the communities in which many of DCFs clients live, Murphy said at his coronavirus press conference in Trenton. Sadly, such an act took her from us.

I thank Vernetta for her career of service to New Jerseys children, the governor continued. I send my prayers to her family, and to Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer and Vernettas DCF family, as well. May she rest in peace.

Trenton is in the midst of a violent summer. McCray marks the citys 26th homicide so far, compared to 15 total in 2019 and 16 in 2018. Twenty-two of 2020s killings are shootings.

After starting the year with two homicides in two months, Trenton exploded with street violence in March, April and May, when stay-at-home orders were in place to battle the spread of the coronavirus. Three people were killed on one night in early April, and five people were slain over seven days in May.

The violence led Gusciora to invoke a city-wide curfew earlier this year to keep people inside, to help crime and the coronavirus.

Officials will also deploy additional officers to areas that have experienced surges in violence.

NJ Advance Media reporter Kevin Shea contributed to this report.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a voluntary subscription.

Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
With the start of the school year right around the corner, many families have had to decide whether to send their children back to the classroom, participate in virtual learning or home-school. As families plan what their school year will look like, Seymour Library wants to help. We have created a new web page geared towards students, educators and homeschooling families. Our "Resources for Educational Exploration & Homeschooling" page provides lists and descriptions of library resources (both hands-on and online), virtual programs and activities, and community connections  all in one place. It makes browsing and finding free (with your library card) educational resources that the library offers that much easier!

These resources are meant to help families expand upon their own home-schooling/education curriculum. You can explore the full web page at seymourlibrary.org/homeschool. Here is a sample of what the web page has to offer"

Library resources hands-on and online

Seymour Library offers access to a variety of hands-on and online tools to encourage learning and discovery for children and teens in our community, including learning backpacks, technology and science tools ,digital databases for homework help, and more.

Learning backpacks are a fun way to explore a variety of topics. Each backpack contains books and activities centered around a different theme. So children and families can discover engineering, electricity, rocks and minerals, outer space, telling time, fossils, nature and more together.

Library user power tip: Discover! Kits may be geared towards adults, but are a great resource for parents and caregivers to explore music, art and more with children. Some of the kits include a theremin, violin, ukulele, watercolor and sketching.

Enhance your lesson plan by checking out the librarys telescope, microscope or Google Cardboard.

Kids InfoBits, Opposing Viewpoints in Context, Mango Languages and NoveList K-8 Plus are just some of the online databases available to use with your library card. Learn a new language, get some homework help, or find your next great read!

Our e-library is another great resource to utilize. Many of our e-resources have options for children.

Kanopy Kids offers enriching, educational and entertaining films and TV series for children.

Working on the art portion of your home-school curriculum? CreativeBug offers art and craft video tutorials for all age groups. Choose the "Kids" option under classes and try making galaxy slime, drawing manga or making yarn birds, felt puppets and more!

Virtual programming and field trips

Upcoming educational virtual programs for families will be announced in this section and links to past programs will be available.

Seymour Library will also be collaborating with some of our local community partners to bring you "field trips," programs that highlight our historical and cultural neighbors in Auburn. Visit seymourlibrary.org/homeschool to discover more.

Community power user tip: Many of Auburns local museums and arts organizations are opening back up for tours by appointment and offer virtual program options.

Additional resources and community events

At the heart of Seymour Library and this web page is our community. The "Additional Resources and Community Events" section features community events and resources recommended by other libraries and homeschooling families.

As we continue to grow and expand this page, we would love to hear from you. Let us know what books, resources and virtual programs you would like to see offered by emailing us at seymourlibrary@seymourlib.org.

Library news and announcements

Caregiver kits: Caregiver kits are a new resource for caregivers of people with dementia or Alzheimer's disease. These kits are filled with memory-stimulating images and activities that caregivers can use to engage those suffering from memory loss. Each kit also contains the book, "A Caregiver's Guide to Dementia: Using Activities and Other Strategies to Prevent, Reduce and Manage Behavioral Symptoms" by Laura N. Gitlin and Catherine Verrier Piersol, with advice for caregivers.

The caregiver kits were purchased through funds from a Finger Lakes Library System Outreach Mini Grant and are available for checkout to any Finger Lakes Library System cardholder. Get a preview of the kits and put them on hold by visiting seymourlibrary.org/caregiver-kits.

Lobby and curbside pickup

The library is open for lobby and curbside pickup 2 to 7 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, and noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays.

We will continue to update you on the librarys Facebook page (facebook.com/seymourlibrary), e-newsletter, and website (seymourlibrary.org). Please continue to contact us with your questions at (315) 252-2571 or seymourlibrary@seymourlib.org.

Jackie Kolb is community services coordinator at Seymour Library in Auburn. For more information, visit seymourlibrary.org or call (315) 252-2571.

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More than 90,000 travel sector jobs have been lost or placed at risk since the coronavirus crisis started, the association of travel agents and tour operators has said.

ABTA has written to Chancellor Rishi Sunak asking for Government measures to support businesses, warning that the job situation in the industry had reached a 'critical point' due in part to restrictions brought in to control the outbreak.

The travel association warned that around 39,000 jobs have already been lost or placed at risk across the outbound travel sector since the pandemic started - with the figure rising to more than 90,000 when supply chains are also considered.

A survey of ABTA members, published this morning, found 18% of jobs in outbound travel had already been lost or placed at risk, but 78% of businesses yet to enter redundancy conversations were expecting to do so in coming months based on current trading conditions.

ABTA said there was optimism that the travel industry can recover if offered the right support by Government (pictured: A passenger at the airport in Split, Croatia, August 21)

STA Travel UK said in a statement on Friday that while it had taken measures to mitigate the impact of Covid-19, sales had not picked up due to 'consumer uncertainties, further restrictions and renewed lockdown measures'

The group is calling on the Government to adopt a 'regionalised' approach to quarantine rules and use the Autumn Budget to announce an air passenger duty holiday covering summer 2021 to incentivise people to book holidays.

How thousands of travel sector jobs have been lost or put at risk amid the coronavirus pandemic ABTA has warned that around 39,000 jobs have already been lost or placed at risk across the outbound travel sector since the pandemic started - with the figure rising to more than 90,000 when supply chains are also considered. Listed below are the number of jobs lost or placed at risk that have been declared publicly: August 17: easyJet: 670 (4,500 worldwide)

August 17: Jet2: 102

August 11 - InterContinental Hotels - 650 worldwide

August 6 - Travelex - 1,300

August 3 - Hays Travel - up to 878

July 9 - Eurostar - unknown number

June 30 - Airbus - 1,700

June 24 - Swissport - 4,556

June 19 - Aer Lingus - 500

June 11 - Heathrow - at least 500

June 11 - Bombardier - 600

May 29 - Belfast International Airport - 45

May 13 - Tui - 8,000 worldwide

May 12 - Carnival UK (owns P&O Cruises and Cunard) - 450

May 11 - P&O Ferries - 1,100 worldwide

May 5 - Virgin Atlantic - 3,150

May 1 - Ryanair - 3,000 worldwide

April 28 - British Airways - 12,000

April 23 - Safran Seats - 400 Advertisement

ABTA's chief executive Mark Tanzer said more businesses would fall into administration unless the Government took action.

He added: 'With the Government's stop-start measures, the restart of travel has not gone as hoped for the industry, and sadly businesses continue to be adversely affected and jobs are being lost at an alarming rate.

'Coming towards the end of the traditional period for peak booking, we have hit a critical point as existing Government measures to support businesses begin to taper off, the consequence of which, according to this survey of ABTA members, will be ruinous for more people's livelihoods.

'Travel desperately needs the Government in its next review to provide tailored support or tens of thousands more jobs will be lost.'

His comments come days after student travel firm STA Travel UK ceased trading, claiming it was left with 'no choice' following the impact of the coronavirus crisis on tourism.

The travel agency, which specialises in package tours for backpackers and young people, has more than 50 stores across the UK.

STA Travel UK said in a statement on Friday that while it had taken measures to mitigate the impact of Covid-19, sales had not picked up due to 'consumer uncertainties, further restrictions and renewed lockdown measures'.

Earlier this month the world's largest tour operator TUI announced a 1.3billion loss after coronavirus shut down global travel - but said its bookings are up by 145 percent for summer 2021.

The company announced it slumped to a huge loss in the third quarter as the coronavirus pandemic ravages the global travel sector.

The German tourism giant, which had already announced job cuts and store closures, posted a bottom-line net loss of 1.42 billion euros (1.3 billion) in the period from April to June.

In the same period a year earlier it booked net profit of 22.8 million euros.

The Hanover-based company had previously announced that it would axe 8,000 jobs worldwide to reduce costs

ABTA is calling on the Government to adopt a 'regionalised' approach to quarantine rules and use the Autumn Budget to announce an air passenger duty holiday covering summer 2021 to incentivise people to book holidays (pictured: TUI,

It was also revealed earlier this month that 4,500 jobs at easyJet were at risk worldwide

ABTA said that the Government's job retention scheme had been a 'significant' help for businesses in the travel industry, with nine out of 10 businesses taking part in the scheme to support staff.

But 65% of businesses have either had to make redundancies or have started a consultation process, it added.

The travel association said there was optimism that the travel industry can recover if offered the right support by Government, with four in 10 businesses confident travel can return to 2019 levels by 2022.

But if the Government does not provide tailored support for the travel sector, 83% of firms estimate that it will have a 'critical or serious' impact on their business, Abta warned.

Abta also called on the Government to provide recovery grants, extend other business support measures into 2021-22, and give ongoing salary support.
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Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 08:08 514 6657ac82168da9fa101c8a4066fed115 1 Editorial COVID-19-in-Indonesia,Sri-Mulyani,state-budget,healthcare,Indonesia Free

Reform may be easier said than done. However, we agree with Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawatis statement in a live broadcast interview with The Jakarta Post on Aug. 19 that the pandemic presents an opportunity for reforms in Indonesia.

The coronavirus has exposed weaknesses in Indonesias healthcare system and social safety net database, which means there is plenty of room for reform. The pandemic should be speeding up reform that brings about more inclusive public services, especially in the desperately needed areas of health care and social protection.

Read also: Indonesia looking at near-zero growth as govt struggles to spend budget, Sri Mulyani says

Indonesias ratio of hospital beds per 1,000 people is lower than many other countries at 1.2. In comparison, India has 2.7 beds per 1,000 residents, China has 4.3 and the highest is Japan at 13. Indonesias low number of labs, healthcare workers and equipment are also of great concern.

The Social Affairs Ministrys integrated social welfare data (DTKS) is still not capturing the depth of the most economically vulnerable groups of society. To make matter worse, data discrepancy has led to slow or mistargeted distribution of COVID-19 relief.

The state budget has been adjusted to focus on supporting the healthcare system and provide government aid to help soften the impact of COVD-19 on peoples purchasing power. The Rp 695.2 trillion (US$47 billion) COVID-19 containment budget is focused on healthcare spending, social safety nets and business rescue programs.

However, budget disbursement has been slow, with only 20 percent of the COVID-19 budget being spent as of Aug. 5. Only 39 percent of the overall state budget had been disbursed mid-year. Sri Mulyani said many ministers who were new to the bureaucracy were having difficulties adjusting to the dynamics of the pandemic while still maintaining state budget accountability.

That said, bureaucratic and public service reform is paramount to recovery. The government, with its ability to spend big to jack up the economy, needs to step up its game.

It is encouraging to hear from Sri Mulyani that despite the current short-term crisis, the government is not losing sight over its long-term vision and reform agenda, in which human capital development has taken center stage.

Read also: Indonesia aims for structural reforms as pandemic poses 'short-term challenge' to economy

The 2021 state budget, which has taken the themes acceleration of economic recovery and strengthening reforms, will see budget increases for education  pivotal for human capital development  and infrastructure, which is expected to increase mobility and productivity.

Only with tough bureaucratic reforms can these plans materialize. The government plays a big role in containing the effects of the pandemic. The people can participate by buying products from small local businesses, while the various institutions within the private sector can conduct reforms to help the country survive the pandemic.

Take the resilience of small and medium enterprises as an example. Although some have been forced to close shop, a lot more have quickly reformed their way of doing business, swiftly pivoting toward digital platforms to survive the pandemic.
VANCOUVERCanada needs a new approach to tackle its overdose crisis, says the lead author of a new study that highlights a prevalence of overdoses involving non-prescribed fentanyl and stimulants in British Columbia.

There have been more than 15,000 apparent opioid-related deaths in Canada since 2016.

British Columbia has recorded more than 5,000 deaths from illicit drug overdoses since declaring a public health emergency in 2016.

The study, published on Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, looked at 1,789 overdose deaths in British Columbia between 2015 and 2017 in which the coroner was able to determine the substances relevant to the deaths.

It reported that despite decreases in the prescription of opioids across the province, the death rate from illegal drug overdoses has continued to rise.

Dr. Alexis Crabtree, the studys lead author and resident physician in public health and preventative medicine at the University of British Columbia, says it highlights what isnt working when it comes to tackling the overdose crisis.

What we found is that this overdose crisis is not driven by prescribed medications and de-prescribing initiatives alone wont solve the overdose crisis, she said in an interview.

In most cases where prescribed opioids were implicated in a death, the toxicology report also flagged the non-prescribed opioids in the persons system, Crabtree added.

The studys findings also highlight the declining role of prescription opioids and heroin in the overdose crisis and the rise of synthetic opioids and stimulants.

The current strategies on battling the overdose crisis must do much more than target de-prescribing opioids, the study concludes.

Men continue to dominate the overdose death toll, making up more than 80 per cent of deaths, with people between the ages of 31 to 49 making up the predominant number of deaths.

One aspect that is often overlooked is the efficacy of methadone and buprenorphine, opioids used to treat opioid addiction, Crabtree said.

The study showed that few overdoses involved people with those opioids in their system, which Crabtree said she believes should make doctors feel more comfortable in prescribing them to drug users.

In B.C., the provincial government expanded the access to a safe supply of prescription drugs near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to concerns about the number of overdose deaths arising from isolated drug users.

That program, and subsequent concerns raised over the prescribing of illicit-alternative drugs, prompted the decision to publish the study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Crabtree said.

A question or concern physicians have is is the medication Im prescribing contributing to overdoses? said Crabtree. I can understand why people have that concern. I think these results are really reassuring that prescribed medications are not a driver of overdose risks and supports physicians to prescribe under those risk mitigation guidelines.

She said she agrees with the recommendations of provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry who called for the decriminalization of people who possess small amounts of drugs in a 2019 report.

At the time, Henry wrote that the province cannot wait for action at the federal level.

She reiterated those recommendations in June 2020, which saw 175 suspected overdose-related deaths.

COVID-19 has made clear the government can act in a very fast and effective way when it prioritizes a response to a public health emergency, said Crabtree. I would love to see that same effectiveness applied to responding to the overdose emergency and protecting the health of people who use drugs.

More access to overdose prevention and supervised inhalation sites should be some of the next steps forward both in B.C. and across the country, she added.

The federal government launched a national consultation on supervised-consumption sites last week, seeking comments from a variety of Canadians, including those who operate the sites and those who use them.

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Lili Reinhart has her first leading film role in the new teen romance "Chemical Hearts." (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

This morning, Lili Reinhart woke up and read a headline about herself. It said that shed broken up with her boyfriend, Riverdale co-star Cole Sprouse, and was so heartbroken that she felt like she was dying.

Then she got pissed. She and Sprouse had, in fact, split in March; the actor would confirm as much on Instagram a few days later. But she had yet to utter a word about the separation to the press.

So, sleep still in her eyes, she logged on to Twitter and said that her words had been used for clickbait  that shed never speak so candidly about a private relationship. Even if she used to pose with Sprouse on magazine covers and walk the red carpet with him at the Met Gala.

Quotes taken from my most recent interview are not about a breakup. They are about the depression Ive felt over these last few months. Tired of people taking my words out of context and piecing together their own story for clickbait.  Lili Reinhart (@lilireinhart) August 18, 2020

But it can be difficult to draw those boundaries when youve established yourself as one of the most open young Hollywood stars. At 23, Reinhart speaks freely about her bisexuality, body image and mental health. She has weighed in when her colleagues have been accused of sexual harassment and racism. And over the next few weeks, shes unveiling two intensely personal new projects: Chemical Hearts, a film for which she channeled her own battle with depression, and Swimming Lessons, her debut book of poetry.

With nearly 25 million Instagram followers  a product of her role as Betty Cooper on the CWs Riverdale  she finds herself weighing her natural inclination towards transparency against the judgment of the public.

This pandemic has been incredibly hard, and its hard to stay positive, she admits. I want to post sad songs on my Instagram just like everyone else does. But I hold myself back, because I know I have millions of people watching me who want to dig through every little thing I post and try to figure out the meaning behind it.

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Amidst the pandemic, Reinhart moved into her first house  what TMZ referred to as a $2.7-million Spanish beaut in Encino. Thats where she is today, surrounded by new furniture that doesnt feel like hers yet. Her dog, Milo, is barking at the UPS delivery man. Shes wearing a Playboy T-shirt she bought from PacSun.

Since Riverdale shut down production in Vancouver in March, Reinhart has mostly spent her time alone here. Shes tried to look at quarantine as an opportunity  writing in her journal, learning how to meditate, meeting weekly with a therapist, reading self-help books.

Obviously, Im dealing with a lot of depression. So how do I find a light at the end of the tunnel? she says. I really wanted to go out of my way to find the root of it. Now, when I feel something come up, I let it come out. Because otherwise, its literally harming my body and my brain. Allow your body to feel what it feels. That is literally how you heal.

Cole Sprouse and Lili Reinhart walk the red carpet together at the 2019 Met Gala. (Evan Agostini / Invision / Associated Press)

Almost as soon as Riverdale thrust her into the spotlight in 2017, Reinhart revealed that shed had depression since she was 13. Since then, its become something she feels fans identify her by  a responsibility she has mixed feelings about. As she writes in Swimming Lessons:

People wish for me to be this

trailblazing girl.

The one who has marked out a

path for others to follow

on how to be happy,

how to fight when your limbs feel broken.

Sometimes I feel like a fraud.

Which is partly why Chemical Hearts appealed to her so much. In the film  which is now streaming on Amazon, and on which she also serves as executive producer  she plays Grace, a high schooler grappling with the grief of surviving a car accident that killed her boyfriend. When she starts falling for a new boy (Austin Abrams), her sadness begins to overtake the fledgling relationship.

I used a lot of my own inner turmoil, Reinhart says of the role. I dont really describe myself as bubbly or joyful. Im making myself out to be, like, the Grinch over here. But Ive lived with depression for a long time now, so playing a girl who is clearly feeling somber and going through heartache and grief wasnt so foreign to me. It wasnt that hard for me to access.

When she began work on the film in 2019, Reinhart had just wrapped a supporting turn in the female-empowerment stripper drama Hustlers. Though shed had small parts in a few independent films before, Hustlers marked the first time people really saw Reinhart act outside of the soapy teen TV series. Opposite the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu and Keke Palmer, she was memorable as a wide-eyed dancer who vomits any time shes anxious. It was a comedic part, and director Lorene Scafaria says she liked Reinhart for it because, like the actress, the character is seen as a pretty face, and if youre not looking closely enough, you dont see shes really deep and soulful.

I met Lili right after Luke Perry passed away, so it was a really hard moment in her life, recalls Scafaria, referring to the death of Reinharts Riverdale co-star. In the moment, I wasnt sure what part of that was her own personality or how much of it was circumstantial. I think the surprise with her is that she runs very deep. Her fan base might look at her and think shes so beautiful and has a great life and all these gifts, so I think its so important that she does show the world what she goes through. Im really proud of her for not presenting herself in a wine-and-roses way.

Because of Riverdale, Reinhart has a lot of young fans. She says she doesnt want to come off as a bad role model to them, so she doesnt promote drinking alcohol in her personal life and tries not to curse on her Instagram stories. Richard Tanne, the director of Chemical Hearts, says that since meeting her last year he constantly hears the actress mention her fans and what theyre looking for.

Ive heard her say Oh, my fans are dying for the trailer, I wish we could speed it up a few days, he says. She has a truly dedicated legion of followers, some of whom have a social media presence entirely devoted to her as a human being. Im sure that back in the '90s, when Julia Roberts was becoming a huge star, there were people connecting to her in the same way that people are connecting to Lili. But I have to imagine that because of the accessibility of social media, theres a more potent form of loyalty.

Lili Reinhart and Austin Abrams star in "Chemical Hearts." (Amazon Studios)

It remains to be seen how strong that loyalty might be as Reinhart inevitably transitions away from "Riverdale." Like her co-stars Sprouse, Charles Melton and KJ Apa, her first starring movie role is coming in the form of a young romance. This makes sense to her: The show does, after all, position them as "romantic leads  hot, young teenagers who are horny and ready for love." But she says her film ambitions are actually quite serious. She'd love to model a career after Tilda Swinton, a "chameleon" who she admires for always showing a different side of herself on screen.

"I would like people to start seeing me as a film actress," Reinhart acknowledges. "I want people to see me and know: 'Hey, I'm in this for the long haul.' This is a career for me. I'm not just gonna be on 'Riverdale' for five years and then disappear."

For now, though, Reinhart is still on "Riverdale," which will soon enter its fifth season. She flew back to Canada this past weekend, where she and her cast mates will have to stay until Christmas due to COVID-19 traveling restrictions. The last five months marked the longest the cast has ever been apart, a period during which many of them also weathered controversy.

In June, Vanessa Morgan tweeted that she was "tired of how Black people are portrayed in the media," implying that her "Riverdale" character Toni Topaz was one of the roles "being used as side kick non dimensional characters to our white leads. Or only used in the ads for diversity but not actually in the show." The show's creator, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, issued a public apology and vowed to "do better to honor her and the character she plays. As well as all of our actors and characters of color."

Reinhart, who said she's "grown closer" with Morgan through the phone in recent months, said Aguirre-Sacasa called the entire cast after his posts in an effort to "make sure we all felt comfortable."

"I mean, the show historically has been pretty white," Reinhart says. "Roberto is very conscious of it now to make sure that that doesnt happen again and Vanessa doesn't feel that shes put in that position again. I feel as a producer now moving forward how important it is that Im not stereotyping, stereocasting anything  really making sure Im going out of my way to do right by Black people, by transgender people, by people who dont look like me."

KJ Apa, left, Camila Mendes, Cole Sprouse and Lili Reinhart in a scene from the CW's "Riverdale." (Jack Rowand / The CW)

A couple of weeks after Morgan spoke out, she and other "Riverdale" stars came under fire when anonymous Twitter accounts accused her, Sprouse, Reinhart and Apa of sexual abuse. Some of the tweets were later deleted, while some of the nameless accounts admitted they had been lying. Even though Reinhart "knew this person was lying," she was also worried about how to respond to the allegations because she didn't want to "victim-shame."

"It's a twisted world we live in, because it takes so much for someone to come forward about something they've been through, and especially to name their abuser," she said. "So when people do that falsely, it hurts the entire movement. It just makes us go back, like, 7,000 steps. It's so discouraging."

I have always taken sexual assault allegations seriously. But it was proven that this account was created specifically to create false stories about me and my cast. I cant think of something more twisted than lying about sexual assault. It invalidates the men and women who are- https://t.co/qcZMXYPNLQ  Lili Reinhart (@lilireinhart) June 22, 2020

She ultimately decided to tweet about the allegations in an attempt to shut them down  largely because "as someone who has experienced sexual coercion myself, I wasn't going to sit there and have someone falsely accuse me." In 2017, after victims of Harvey Weinstein first began to come forward publicly, Reinhart took to her Tumblr account to write about a negative experience she'd had in the industry when she was 16. In her post, she wrote about how a "significantly older" colleague on a project who was in a "position of power over [her]" tried to force himself on her. Looking back, Reinhart says, she wishes she hadn't written about the experience when she was "still trying to wrap [her] brain around it." She doesn't plan on naming the individual because "this person is irrelevant anyway, so it's not like I'd be taking down their career."

"And that person told me it didn't happen," she says. "I didnt want to be invalidated. So I think in choosing to not name them, I knew they werent going to come back at me trying to defend themselves. I could just tell the story as it was."

Tumblr was also where Reinhart first began to share her poetry, which will be published by St. Martin's Griffin on Sept. 29. She began writing poetry when she was 16, first taking bits of diary entries and expanding upon them. She developed an affinity for poets like Lang Leav who write in cute little paragraphs, finding comfort in words from others she felt had similar depths of emotion. Now, she writes her poems in the Notes app on her iPhone, and has already completed an additional 100 since finishing Swimming Lessons.

Lili Reinhart's poetry debut, "Swimming Lessons." (St. Martin's Griffin)

Readers of the book will no doubt parse Reinhart's poetry as they do Taylor Swift's lyrics, searching for coded references to Sprouse. Some of them more blatantly refer to her ex, like a poem about the "flushed faces" of the fans with "trembling hands" who want to be close to the man who she knows "better than anyone in the world." Others  about a girl who overlooked cheating because she "craved passionate, overwhelming euphoria"  are more oblique.

"Some of them are obvious for a reason, because Im not badmouthing someone," Reinhart says. "I was speaking very fondly of someone I was in love with. I dont feel any shame from it. People will 100% read between the lines, make their own conclusions  thats fine. Im not going to encourage it, but Im going to say that a lot of the poems were coming from emotion rather than an actual event."

The publication of "Swimming Lessons" will no doubt force Reinhart to further examine her relationship to the public, who she alternately seems torn between pleasing and ignoring. Earlier this year, for instance, she revealed on Twitter that she felt insecure about her body next to her "perfectly chiseled" co-stars. She says she did it because she wanted to show her fans that unlike some actors  many of whom she has witnessed not eating for 12 hours before they appear scantily-clad on-screen  she has an "average" body.

"I don't have the CW girl body  tiny waist, nice-shaped legs, skinny, small, tiny," Reinhart says now. "I had to do a bra and underwear scene in this last season and I felt really insecure about it. I really, really didnt want to do it. I didnt tell anyone this. I wasnt pressured into doing it. I did it because it was my job. But I felt bad about myself doing it. I really did. And this is where it gets complicated. I cant preach body positivity if I dont practice it. So even if Im not feeling amazing about my body, I felt it was important for me to do the scene anyway in my bra and underwear so people could see my body as it was. I did it for the people who feel like they need to look a certain way."

Lili Reinhart says she battles her own insecurities, but "I can't preach body positivity if I don't practice it." (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

But when it comes to the trolls who "hide behind a fake Twitter account and call [her] fat," Reinhart grows angry. She says she doesn't respect anyone who comments on another's body, and would never take the opinion of "such a bottom-feeder" seriously.

"You go on Instagram, and Im like, Oh, look, all these people with these beautifully toned bodies and then go to the beach  does anyone on the beach in the real world look like that? I dont see anyone looking like this. Instagram and Victorias Secret runways are not a portrayal of how people look in real life."

But Instagram is also where Reinhart has gone to reveal some of the most private things about herself. In June, she used the platform to come out as a "proud bisexual woman"  something she says she decided to share almost on a whim. Growing up in Ohio, Reinhart says she first questioned her sexual orientation when she was in the fifth grade while waiting at the bus stop.

"I thought: 'Do I like girls? I don't know,'" she recalls. "As I've gotten older, the answer has become 'Yes. Clearly, I do.' ... I think I just felt at this point in time: Why not? If suddenly I started dating a girl publicly, I didn't want people to be, like, what the ...?

"Not that I would even owe anyone an explanation. Because I don't."
Opponents to Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka turned out in droves over the weekend, packing the streets of Minsk and showing that after days of tough talk from Lukashenka, they arent ready to give up. But what about the Kremlin? Its an open secret that they dont think very much of Lukashenka, but whats the alternative? Irina Lagunina, director of special projects at RFE/RLs Russian Service, joins Senior Correspondent Mike Eckel to discuss what Moscow wants out of Belarus.
Pham Thai Lai, president and CEO of Siemens ASEAN and Vietnam

What will be the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreements (EVFTA) effect on Vietnams economy in terms of exports and investment?

I would like to congratulate the Vietnamese government and its people for making the EVFTA a reality.

It is a great foundation to further boost trade, to attract more investment, to create more jobs, and to foster sustainable development between the EU and Vietnam. In the coming years, I strongly believe that we can expect a robust investment growth from the EU to Vietnam and a substantial increase in export from Vietnam to the EU as a result of the removal of over 99 per cent of tariffs on goods traded between the two economies.

Furthermore, Vietnams commitment to ensure a more open and transparent business environment will help to increase the investment flow from high-valued projects of the EU in Vietnam. This will enable Vietnam to become a hub for trade and investment activities of the EU in Southeast Asia.

The increase in value chains and value-added services will support Vietnam to restructure its economic growth model and will be a key driver for Vietnams ambition to become an industrialised nation in the near future.

What are the clearest advantages and barriers for Vietnamese enterprises today?

FTAs offer Vietnam great advantages in terms of export, and at the same time help to diversify its import markets. Not only can Vietnam gain benefits from significant tariff reduction but also from having ample opportunities to access and expand to new markets worldwide.

Vietnams deep global integration has also enabled the local business community to access state-of-the-art technologies, as well as to expand business relationships internationally. For example, FPT Group has been selected to be Siemens global partner for MindSphere  a cloud-based, open Internet of Things operating system.

However, competitive pressure will certainly be intensified and increased while one of the biggest challenges of Vietnam is from the stagnation of the local enterprise system. Their adaptability to the market economy is generally weak.

Vietnamese enterprises, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises, are facing many difficulties such as backwards technology, low labour productivity, weak competitiveness, inadequate management and leadership skills, and especially lack of capital investment. They also have limited knowledge about international business law and international integration, as well as limited international business experiences.

Other emerging challenges, such as the scarcity of natural resources and requirements for environment protection and CO2 emissions reduction, have also forced enterprises to invest in clean and green technologies, which are often very costly.

What should Vietnam do in order to achieve more sustainable growth, increase national competitiveness, and be well prepared for Industry 4.0?

Vietnam needs to focus on three basic factors  the establishment of a stable legal framework to support business; development of a high-skilled labour force; and improvement of basic infrastructure. In particular, Vietnam has to develop a smart infrastructure roadmap in order to build the countrys sustainable future over the coming years and decades.

Such a roadmap will need to take a holistic view at all vital development areas for the country, including infrastructure projects in the areas of power generation, transmission and distribution, and energy efficiency and transportation, but also building up skilled workforce capacities.

Digital and smart infrastructure ranging from digital factories, highly efficient power plants, smart grid, smart building, or seamless mobility systems are key levers to strengthen the basic infrastructure in Vietnam, and at the same time help to drive efficiency and increase productivity.

Our most comprehensive product lifecycle management portfolio helps VinFast to fulfill its vision of building the first Vietnamese car in record time, whereas our efficient combined cycle power plants significantly contribute to mitigating CO2 emissions in Vietnam.

Siemens smart grid solutions automate and stabilise Vietnams power grid and help to cope with fluctuating energy sources such as wind or solar power.

Digital twin buildings offer new dimensions to optimise the energy usage and operation of buildings. Lastly, digital railways provide new opportunities for cities and train operators to run railways that are interactive and self-managing, and at the same time they provide passengers with a new level of connectivity besides convenience and comfort when moving around.
In 2018, Joan McNeil opened her mail one spring day to find a letter with devastating news: Her former student had been killed in Afghanistan

As McNeil walked back to her house, she began to sob. Her mail carrier saw her distress and came to her side.

"He read the letter and put his arms around me, and we sat in my grass and I cried," McNeil, a 56-year-old retired teacher from Chandler, Arizona, told NBC News by phone. "My kids are at college and I was by myself, but I wasnt alone."

McNeil is one of thousands of Americans across the country who have spent weeks waging a grass-roots campaign to save the Postal Service, which they say plays a vital role in their communities. These Americans have been showing their support of the federal agency by writing to their representatives, buying stamps and postal supplies, and sharing stories on social media about their appreciation for the service.

Supporters like McNeil say they don't trust Postmaster General Louis DeJoys promise on Aug. 18 to suspend further changes to the Postal Service until after the November 2020 presidential elections. Despite DeJoys assurance that he wanted to avoid even the appearance of disruption to mail-in voting, he stopped short of promising to reverse changes already made, some of which predated his appointment, such as the removal of blue mailboxes and the decommissioning of 671 letter-sorting machines at facilities across the country.

Fears of 'permanent damage'

Though DeJoy claims to have stopped these activities, the reduction in mail capacity, and the doubt that has now arisen for citizens, leads me to believe that there will be ongoing trouble, McNeil said. She fears permanent damage has already been done.

Activists Sunday evening danced and sang in front of DeJoys Washington D.C. home, chanting No justice, no sleep! and calling for increased funding for the agency and assurance that the Postal Service would be resourced to effectively handle mail-in-ballots. The events organizers, Shut Down DC, called DeJoys backtracking the previous week a big victory, but reminded attendees: Were not done.

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The protest came a day after the House voted 257-150 to pass a bill to fund the service with a further 25 billion dollars and fully reverse previous cost-cutting changes, which is expected to meet resistance in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Sharon Pardini has voted through mail-in ballots in the last three elections, and says her community of Richland, Washington, has always previously trusted the system. She has a disability and struggles to stand in line for long periods, but after receiving notice that her mail-in ballot might not be counted in time for Novembers election, hand-delivering it to her polling station is the only way she feels confident casting her vote.

Im not relying on the USPS since DeJoy has taken over, Pardini, 63, told NBC News over the phone. I want to make sure my vote is counted.

Critics have pointed to DeJoys avoidance of questions about the disproportionate effect changes to the Postal Service have on often-marginalized groups such as the elderly, veterans, or those in rural communities, where USPS is often the only delivery option available for essential goods like prescription medication.

Literal life and death concerns

Terry Hogue, 63, and her husband, Ralph Hogue, are one of the 46 million American households served by USPS rural service. Hogue says the damage caused by significant delays in deliveries of essential goods, particularly prescription medication, continues to hurt her family

A veteran of the Vietnam War, Ralph Hogue relies on USPS and UPS to deliver lifesaving medication to treat his diabetes, autoimmune disorders and other health conditions. About half of Ralph Hogues essential medication deliveries, including insulin, have been slow to arrive at their rural unincorporated community of Caddoa, Colorado. Terry Hogue fears that even if they do receive the medication, heat damage caused by the delays could make the medication ineffective. But they have no choice but to wait.

People in rural communities have very limited resources. We have to be able to rely on the postal service that's always been there for us, she said. We've kind of taken them for granted, and we can't any longer.

As concern grows over changes to the Postal Service, some protesters wanted to show their appreciation for their neighborhood mail carrier by using the hashtag #MyBestUSPSMail on Twitter. In these posts, verified by NBC News Social Newsgathering team, users thanked postal workers not just for the goods they delivered, but also for becoming pillars of the community.

In some communities, the Postal Service is a lifeline for the most vulnerable, some social media users said.

"Every day, the postman would knock and shout 'Hello!' to my mother who was elderly," wrote Debbie Daro, 67, from Metuchen, New Jersey on Twitter. "He always made sure she answered before he left."

Tuesday a 'Day of Action' to thank postal workers

Americans supporting the USPS plan to rally at in-person demonstrations outside post offices across the country on Tuesday in a Day of Action organized by the American Postal Workers Union (APWU). The union is calling on the Senate to approve the additional $25 billion emergency funds laid out in Saturday's bill, much of which they say would help cover revenue losses and operations expenses from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as for an end to what they call "the mail slowdown policies" implemented under DeJoy.

Ahead of Tuesday, APWU President Mark Dimondstein urged union workers and volunteers to fight for the service, the only government agency to be explicitly established in the United States Constitution.

Whats at stake is whether the public postal service is going to continue to belong to all of you, belong to all of our families, and belong to our neighborhoods, Diamondstein said during a Facebook live on Aug. 21.

But reforms have already left some questioning whether they will be able to depend upon the institution in future.

Its pretty bad when you cant trust the United States Postal Service. Its supposed to be neutral, said Pardini, who plans to submit her Washington state mail-in ballot in person this November. Its not supposed to be a Democrat versus Republican thing. Its mail.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 13:56:52|Editor: huaxia

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New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks at a press conference in Wellington, New Zealand, Aug. 24, 2020. The COVID-19 restrictions in New Zealand's largest city Auckland will continue at the current Alert Level 3 until Sunday night, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday. Wearing masks are also mandatory from Monday on public transport, said the prime minister. (Xinhua/Guo Lei)

WELLINGTON, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The COVID-19 restrictions in New Zealand's largest city Auckland will continue at the current Alert Level 3 until Sunday night, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday.

Wearing masks are also mandatory from Monday on public transport, said the prime minister.

The rest of the country other than Auckland will remain at Alert Level 2, Ardern said while announcing the government decision after a Cabinet meeting.

Previous decisions require Auckland to remain in COVID-19 Alert Level 3 till Wednesday, Aug. 26, with the rest of the country staying in Alert Level 2 with relaxed restrictions.

Under level 3, businesses are required to implement COVID-19 safety measures, but most people are encouraged to work from home and school children learn from home.

Ministers met on Monday to review whether community transmission has been contained in Auckland. An Auckland family cluster was identified two weeks ago as New Zealand's second wave of COVID-19 transmission started.

The prime minister acknowledged "the cost to business, the cost to the Auckland economy" under the higher level of COVID-19 restrictions, while stressing risks of people leaving and entering Auckland under the lower Alert Level 2.

"It's a finely balanced decision, but the right one, I believe," Ardern said.

"We may not have any choice about whether or not the world is in a global pandemic but we do have choices about how we deal with it," she said.

Ardern also announced the decision to make masks mandatory on public transport at Alert Level 2 and above, which will take effect from Monday. According to the rule, public transport includes planes, buses, taxis and rideshare services like Uber, but children are not required to wear masks.

"This is a commonsense approach to protect everyone's health," she said.

New Zealand confirmed eight new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, and it also reported one probable case.

One confirmed case is an imported one reported from a managed isolation facility in Auckland. The person who has tested positive is a woman in her 30s.

The other eight cases, seven confirmed and one probable, are in the community and are all linked to the Auckland cluster, according to a health ministry statement.

One of the cases had contact with another confirmed case on bus transport. Four are household contacts of confirmed cases. One has had contact with a confirmed case at a church. Two are workplace contacts - one of these is the probable case, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield told a daily briefing.

These cases brought the total number of confirmed cases to 1,332, which is the number reported to the World Health Organization, Bloomfield said.

The total number of active cases in New Zealand is 123, of which 19 are imported cases from managed isolation facilities, he said. Enditem
The CIA Democrats in the 2020 elections

By Patrick Martin

August 23, 2020 " Information Clearing House " - In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seatsnearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements.

Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one-quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives.

In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale: besides the reelection campaigns of the 11 representatives who won seats in the House in 2018, half a dozen of those who lost 2018 races are running again in 2020. Some of these are running for House seats again, while others have been promoted by the Democratic Party leadership and are running for the US Senate. And an entire new crop of military-intelligence operatives is being brought forward, some running for Republican seats targeted by the Democratic leadership as possible takeovers, others in seats not currently considered competitive.

The bottom line: at least 34 Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives have a primarily military-intelligence background, up from 30 in 2018, as well as three of the partys 35 candidates for the US Senate, compared to zero in 2018. For each branch of Congress, this represents about 10 percent of the total.

As we explained in 2018, the extraordinary influx of candidates coming directly from the national-security apparatus into the Democratic Party is a two-sided process: the Democratic Party establishment welcomes such candidates as a demonstration of the partys unshakeable devotion to the interests of American imperialism; and military-intelligence operatives are choosing the Democratic Party over the Republican Party in large numbers because they are attracted by the Democrats non-stop campaign against the Trump administration as too soft on Russia and too willing to pull out of the Middle East war zone.

CIA Democrats for US Senate

Three Democrats seeking US Senate seats in November have a primarily military-intelligence background, including two who ran unsuccessfully for House seats in 2018. In each case, the CIA Democrat won a contested primary, with the support of Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), defeating a more liberal candidate.

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Cal Cunningham was the choice of the Democratic Party establishment to be the partys candidate for US Senate from North Carolina, challenging first-term incumbent Thad Tillis. He defeated Erica Smith, an African-American state senator who ran on a more liberal platform, supporting Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

While Cunningham served one term in the North Carolina state senate, beginning in 2001, his principal role has been as an attorney, both in private practice and in the military. He enrolled in the Army Reserve after the 9/11 attacks, joining the Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps, and was sent to both Iraq and Afghanistan to handle criminal cases involving members of the US military and military contractors in the two war zones.

According to his campaign biography, Cal has served with various units from Fort Bragg, including XVIII Airborne Corps and First Special Forces Command (Airborne). In recent years, Cal has trained special operations forces at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. Cal continues to serve in the rank of Lieutenant Colonel with an Army Reserve unit that trains one weekend a month.

Cunningham is relying heavily on his association with the military in a state which hosts the fourth largest number of military personnel, including such bases as Fort Bragg (Army) and Camp Lejeune (Marines). His campaign web site declares, At Fort Bragg and abroad, the paratroopers, Reservists and special operators Cal served with in the Army taught Cal a deeper form of patriotism and honor.

Also running for US Senate seats are two female former pilots, Amy McGrath and Mary Jennings Hegar, who are challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, and former Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn in Texas, respectively. McGrath defeated Charles Booker, an African American state legislator backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to win the Democratic nomination in Kentucky. Hegar defeated state senator Royce West of Dallas, also African American, to win the Democratic nomination in Texas.

McGrath was perhaps the most heavily publicized of the military-intelligence candidates in 2018, when she narrowly lost a race against Republican Congressman Andy Barr in Kentuckys 6th Congressional District, centered on Lexington. She has been able to raise phenomenal amounts of money, partly because of her high-profile military careershe retired as a lieutenant colonel as a Marine Corps fighter pilotand partly because her opponent, McConnell, is so widely hated.

Despite her war chest of more than $40 million, however, McGrath is a decided underdog against McConnell, who himself has a huge campaign fundraising machine and is finishing his sixth six-year term in the Senate.

MJ Hegar was an Air Force helicopter pilot who spent three tours of duty in Afghanistan on search and rescue operations, in the course of which she was shot down once by Taliban fire, wounded, and received a Purple Heart. She came to prominence through a lawsuit against the Pentagon policy of barring women from combat. She narrowly lost a 2018 race against Republican Congressman John Carter in a district outside Austin, Texas, in the course of which her five-minute campaign video, promoting her military record in a noxious combination of militarism and feminism, became a viral sensation and raised millions in donations over the internet.

Hegar received the nod from the DSCC after former congressman and failed presidential candidate Beto ORourke declined to challenge Cornyn. She survived a primary and runoff, but is considered a longshot candidate against Cornyn, a three-term incumbent.

Eleven campaigns for reelection

All 11 CIA Democrats first elected in 2018 are running for reelection. Five are considered prohibitive favorites to win: Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Chrissy Houlahan and Connor Lamb in Pennsylvania, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, and Jason Crow in Colorado. The remaining six are in competitive races: Jared Golden in Maine, Max Rose in New York, Tom Malinowski and Andy Kim in New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger and Elaine Luria in Virginia.

That distinction made, however, competitive is a relative term. All six are favorites to win reelection, particularly because President Trump is projected to lose heavily in each of their statesMaine, New York, New Jersey and Virginia. Only in Maine, where the state awards its electoral vote by congressional district as well as statewide, is Trump mounting a significant campaign, seeking to take the electoral vote of Goldens 2nd Congressional District, as he did in 2016.

From a fundraising standpoint, the most reliable indicator of successand ruling class supportin American legislative contests, the 11 CIA Democrats must be considered overwhelming favorites to retain their seats. They have raised a combined total of $42 million. Their 11 Republican opponents have raised a combined total of $10 million. Only Republican Thomas Kean, opposing Malinowski in New Jerseys 7th Congressional District, has a campaign war chest comparable to the incumbents, but still only half as large.

Let us recall briefly who these 11 representatives are and their military-intelligence background:

Jason Crow, Colorados 6th Congressional District: Paratroop commander in Iraq war, then Army Ranger special forces in Afghanistan for two tours.

Jared Golden, Maines 2nd Congressional District: The only rank-and-file soldier in the group, spent four years as a Marine infantryman, deploying to Afghanistan in 2004 and to Iraq in 2005-2006.

Chrissy Houlahan, Pennsylvanias 6th Congressional District: A 10-year veteran of the Air Force, leaving it as a captain.

Andy Kim, New Jerseys 3rd Congressional District: Civilian war planner and adviser to US military commanders in Afghanistan, Iraq director for National Security Council under President Obama.

Connor Lamb, Pennsylvanias 17th Congressional District: Marine Corps captain and Judge Advocate General (prosecutor) until 2013, now major in the Marine Corps Reserves.

Elaine Luria, Virginias 2nd Congressional District: Navy commander, deployed six times to Middle East and Western Pacific, commanded assault craft supporting a Marine Corps deployment.

Tom Malinowski, New Jerseys 7th Congressional District: Assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in the Obama administration.

Max Rose, New Yorks 11th Congressional District: Army combat officer in Afghanistan 2012-2013, still in the active reserves.

Mikie Sherrill, New Jerseys 11th Congressional District: Navy helicopter pilot, with 10 years active service in Europe and the Middle East.

Elissa Slotkin, Michigans 8th Congressional District: CIA agent with three tours in Iraq, National Security Council for both Bush and Obama, assistant to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, then principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

Abigail Spanberger, Virginias 7th Congressional District: CIA operations officer stationed in Europe for nearly a decade.

In each case, the candidates moved seamlessly from positions as military commanders, intelligence operatives or foreign policy officials to running for Congress as candidates of the Democratic Party. Only Golden ran for a lower office, winning a seat in the Maine state legislature, before seeking a seat in Congress.

In their first two years in Congress, the CIA Democrats carried out two significant common actions. The five womenHoulahan, Luria, Sherrill, Slotkin and Spanbergerformed a joint fundraising committee to promote female candidates who shared their military-intelligence background. And six of themCrow and the five womenco-signed an op-ed in the Washington Post in September 2019 calling for an impeachment probe into President Trumps dealing with Ukraine. This was a crucial turning point in the effort that culminated in Trumps impeachment three months later.

Likely reinforcements for the CIA Democrats

Four of the military-intelligence candidates who lost congressional races in 2018 are running again in 2020, and are likely to win seats in Congress.

Dan Feehan, Minnesota 1st Congressional District: A military officer who served two tours in Iraq between 2005 and 2009, where he headed an Army Ranger sniper team, Feehan then joined the Obama administration, first as a White House aide, then as an acting assistant secretary of defense. He narrowly lost a race in 2018 for the southern Minnesota seat previously held by Democrat Tim Walz, now governor of Minnesota. Republican Jim Hagedorn, who won by only 1,312 votes in 2018, announced in February that he was being treated for stage-four kidney cancer, but he remains a candidate for reelection. Feehan has substantially outraised Hagedorn, by $2.2 million to $1.6 million, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission through July 15.

Gina Ortiz Jones, Texas 23rd Congressional District: An Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, Ortiz Jones followed up a 12-year military career with continued work as a US government adviser in Latin America, South Sudan and Libya, then reviewed foreign investments from a national security standpoint for the Office of the US Trade Representative. In 2018 she lost a tight contest, by a margin of 340 votes out of more than 200,000 cast, against Republican incumbent Will Hurd, himself a former CIA agent, in the congressional district that comprises most of the Texas-Mexico border region, from El Paso to Laredo. Hurd has now retired, leaving Ortiz Jones the likely favorite to succeed him. This will be another spy vs. spy contest, against whichever Republican hopeful prevails in a lengthy primary recount. Tony Gonzales is a 20-year Navy veteran and intelligence officer specializing in cryptology; Raul Reyes is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel specializing in cyberwarfare operations. Ortiz Jones has raised a massive $4.1 million for her campaign, more than double the sums raised by Gonzales and Reyes combined, and leads them by 10-1 in terms of cash on hand.

Sara Jacobs, California 53rd Congressional District: An Obama State Department official turned Hillary Clinton campaign aide, Jacobs was engaged in counterterrorism work in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, according to her campaign website, and advised Clinton on foreign policy. She lost a Democratic primary in 2018 in the adjoining 49th Congressional District, where millionaire attorney Mike Levin went on to win the seat for the Democrats. After longtime incumbent Representative Susan Davis announced her retirement in the heavily Democratic 53rd District, Jacobs switched districts in an attempt to capture the vacant seat. She finished first in the all-party primary in June, and will face another Democrat, state legislator Georgette Gomez, in the November election. While Gomez is a local elected official who is running on the basis of her Hispanic identity, Jacobs has far more financial resources, as the granddaughter of Qualcomm founder and CEO Irwin Jacobs.

Sri Preston Kulkarni, Texas 22nd Congressional District: After running an unexpectedly competitive race in 2018 against Republican Representative Pete Olson, Kulkarni is now considered the favorite following Olsons decision to retire rather than seek reelection. Kulkarni is a career State Department official who boasts of his role in defense of American imperialism. His campaign website declares: From Jerusalem to Iraq to Russia, Sri served in some of the toughest places in the world, representing the interests of the United States... Of South Asian descent on his fathers side, Kulkarni is running in a district in the southwest suburbs of Houstononce held by right-wing Republican Tom DeLaywhich has undergone rapid demographic change due to an influx of Asian immigrants.

There is a fifth military-intelligence candidate who is considered a likely winner in 2020, Jackie Gordon, a retired career military police commander, who is seeking the seat left vacant by the retirement of Republican Peter King in the 2nd Congressional District of New York, on Long Island. Gordon spent 29 years in the military, including multiple tours of duty in combat zones: as a battle captain in Baghdad during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and as Commander of the 310th Military Police Battalion in Afghanistan in 2012 according to her campaign website, as well as an operations officer at Guantanamo Bay, the US base which is the site of a notorious prison and torture center. Gordon, who is African American, was elected to the Babylon Town Council while still on active duty and retired from the Army Reserve in 2014 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seatsnearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale.

More military-intelligence and FBI candidates

The number of contested congressional seats in 2018 was unusually large, as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee targeted 115 seats, about half of those in the Republican caucus. Candidates from military-intelligence backgrounds won the nomination for 30 of those seats, making them the largest single occupational group, ahead of lawyers (20), state and local politicians (26), businessmen (15), and others (24).

The likely takeover targets have shrunk in number because of the Democratic success in 2018. Only 31 seats are on the DCCCs red-to-blue shopping list, and even of these, one is held by a Democrat already. That leaves 30 seats now held by Republicans but targeted for potential takeover. Of these, five have military-intelligence operatives as the Democratic nominees: Feehan, Jones, Jacobs, Kulkarni and Johnson, profiled above.

Another 18 military-intelligence candidates are running in districts held by Republicans that are not currently considered competitive but could become so in some cases if the Democratic edge in the election widens significantlyit is currently averaging about seven percent in the polls. The number of CIA Democrats in the House of Representatives could rise to as many as 20, depending on political shifts between now and November 3.

Reviewing the biographies of these candidates, based on the information they themselves chose to present on their campaign websites, gives a glimpse of the social types who are being attracted to and mobilized by the Democratic Partys campaign against Trump, and particularly by the incessant claims that Trump is a Russian stooge and that his victory in 2016 was the product of Russian meddling in the elections.

By region, these candidates include:

Northeast

New Jersey, 4th Congressional District: Stephanie Schmid, a retired Foreign Service officer, is opposing incumbent Christopher Smith, an anti-abortion zealot who has held the seat for 40 years. A former attorney, Schmid joined the Foreign Service in 2011 and worked in Haiti, Brazil and Washington, D.C. Her website declares, Stephanie has proudly served with Republican and Democratic leaders who have always put country before party.

Pennsylvania, 13th Congressional District: Todd Rowley, a retired FBI counterintelligence officer, is the Democrat opposing first-term Republican John Joyce. Rowley is a former policeman, state trooper and paramedic who spent 24 years as an FBI agent engaged primarily in paramilitary and counterintelligence operations, including liaison with the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence.

Maryland, 1st Congressional District: Mia Mason is a retired 20-year military veteran, who completed a total of 5 combat tours between Iraq and Afghanistan while serving in the Navy and Army, according to her campaign website. She was discharged from the military for being gay and then brought back in. She was onboard USS Kitty Hawk CV-63 for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. She is opposing five-term Republican incumbent Andy Harris in a district that comprises the rural eastern shore of Maryland.

Pennsylvania, 14th Congressional District: William Marx retired from the Marines after a 16-year career and is now a high school teacher and local councilman. He is running against first-term incumbent Republican Guy Reschenthaler in this southwest Pennsylvania seat.

Midwest

Ohio, 14th Congressional District: Hillary OConnor Mueri was a Navy pilot, who flew combat missions during the Iraq war to provide close air support to ground forces. She went to law school after the military, specializing in product litigation in the aviation industry. Mueri is running against four-term incumbent David Joyce in a mixed suburban and rural district extending northeast from Cleveland along Lake Erie.

Wisconsin, 1st Congressional District: Roger Polack was recruited by the US intelligence services while a student at the University of Wisconsin and trained to specialize in Asian affairs. His web site declares: Roger served multiple tours as a civilian intelligence officer in Afghanistan, spending 20 months on the ground first as an analyst for, and then Deputy Director of, the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell. He sat face to face with Taliban detainees, helped plan law enforcement and military operations, and managed the intelligence priorities of 40 civilian and military staff.

In other words, the Democratic candidate in the district formerly held by Republican Paul Ryan, now by first-term Republican Bryan Steil, should be investigated for possible connections to torture and assassination. But in the eyes of the Democratic Party leadership, this record is a credential, not the mark of Cain.

Indiana, 3rd Congressional District: Chip Coldiron is an Army veteran deployed twice to Afghanistan, who became a health care worker and then schoolteacher after leaving the military. He is running against four-term incumbent Jim Banks in a district centered on Ft. Wayne.

South

Kentucky, 6th District: Josh Hicks is a Marine veteran turned policeman. In his four years on active duty, he was deployed twice with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, rising to the rank of sergeant. He went to work as a policeman in eastern Kentucky, becoming a member of the SWAT team. He is running against four-term incumbent Andy Barr in a district centered on the city of Lexington.

North Carolina, 11th Congressional District: Morris Davis is the former chief prosecutor at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, although he was forced out by the Bush administration because he objected to the use of testimony obtained through torture of detainees. The Guantanamo posting was the culmination of a 25-year military career as a Judge Advocate General in the Air Force. Davis is running for the Asheville-based seat formerly held by Mark Meadows, now White House Chief of Staff for Trump. He was initially a heavy underdog to 25-year-old Madison Cawthorn, a right-wing activist who won an upset victory in the Republican primary, but Cawthorn is now caught up in a scandal over social media postings of his trip to see Hitlers vacation hideaway in the Bavarian Alps, which he tweeted was on his bucket list of must-see locations.

Georgia, 1st Congressional District: Joyce Marie Griggs retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel after a 33-year career in Army intelligence. She won the Democratic primary to face incumbent three-term Republican Buddy Carter in a district centered the city of Savannah. According to her website: Among her many decorations, medals, and badges are the Bronze Star, Defense Meritorious Service, and Global War on Terrorism Service medals, and the Parachutist badge. Griggs had three tours in Iraq in 2007, 2008 and 2010.

Georgia, 9th Congressional District: Devin Pandy, like Griggs, is a career Army intelligence officer, who initially specialized in electronic warfare systems maintenance and was deployed overseas five times, to Panama, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer 2. He boasts of coming from an Army family, with his grandfather in World War II, his father in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, and his brother and sister-in-law also in the military. Pandy is the Democratic candidate for the seat vacated by right-wing Republican Doug Collins, who is running for US Senate. He will face Republican Andrew Clyde, a businessman and Navy veteran with a huge financial advantage.

Florida, 1st Congressional District: Philip Ehr is a repeat candidate from 2018, when he lost to incumbent Matt Gaetz, perhaps the most fervent Trump supporter in Congress, by a 2-1 margin in a district that comprises Pensacola and much of the Florida Panhandle. According to his campaign website, in the course of his 26-year career as a Navy seaman and pilot: He flew reconnaissance missions in the Cold War, Desert Storm and post-9/11 operations; oversaw U.S. air operations in NATOs 78-day bombing campaign in the Balkans; organized operational intelligence support to non-DOD Federal agencies; improved electronic warfare readiness of Allied forces; and provided strategic advice to senior leaders in Washington and London.

Florida, 12th Congressional District: Kimberly Walker was in the Army for eight years, then a prison guard, and is now a civilian employee of Centcom, the US military command for all operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan, headquartered in Tampa. After the military and prison system, Walker was hired as an IT contractor at MacDill Air Force Base, then accepted a position as a Software Engineer at United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). Later she became a contractor for Centcom headquarters. She is the Democratic candidate against four-term incumbent Republican Gus Bilirakis, who has a 50-1 advantage in terms of fundraising.

Florida, 18th Congressional District: Pam Keith is a former Judge Advocate General in the Navy, who continued in the legal profession and became a legal counsel to Florida Power & Light. Keith lost the Democratic primary in 2018 to another military-intelligence candidate but ran again in 2020 and won Tuesdays primary easily. She will oppose two-term incumbent Republican Brian Mast, himself a combat veteran who lost his legs to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

Alabama, 1st Congressional District: James Averhart retired from the Marine Corps as a Chief Warrant Officer Five after a 30-year career, mainly as a military policeman, rising to head the Marine Corps Correction Service (the prison for Marines convicted of criminal offenses on duty). He was in combat in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm (the two phases of the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War). As the Democratic candidate in the Mobile-based 1st Congressional District, left vacant by the retirement of Republican Bradley Byrne, Averhart is a prohibitive underdog to Republican nominee Jerry Carl, a Mobile County commissioner, who has raised $1.7 million to Averharts $50,000.

Oklahoma, 2nd Congressional District: Danyell Lanier is a Navy veteran and health care trainer who won an uncontested primary for the Democratic nomination against five-term incumbent Republican Markwayne Mullin. Laniers website gives little biographical information about her. Mullin has raised $1.3 million compared to $18,000 for Lanier.

Colorado, 4th Congressional District: Ike McCorkle is a retired Marines Corps special forces officer, who boasts of a military family, including two grandfathers, his father, a brother and two cousins. According to his campaign website, he retired in 2014 to recover from eighteen hard years of service in the USMC Infantry and Spec Ops communities. McCorkle deployed six times overseas, four times in combat, was wounded multiple times, and medically retired with the rank of captain. He is the Democratic candidate in the heavily rural district covering the eastern third of Colorado, against three-term incumbent Ken Buck, an extreme right-winger.

Utah, 2nd Congressional District: Kael Weston spent seven years as a military adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than any other State Department official. According to his campaign website, he was State Department Political Adviser to a dozen Marine commanding generals, including during and after the biggest battle of the Iraq War (Fallujah, 2004-2007). He also played a significant role in Afghanistan, in the city of Khost and as a Marine Corps adviser in Helmand province, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds against the Taliban. Weston is a published author and has written regularly for the corporate media on counterterrorism and military subjects. He will be the Democratic candidate against four-term incumbent Republican Chris Stewart, who is a heavy favorite and enjoys a 4-1 fundraising advantage.

Some conclusions

There is one other aspect of this list that has political significance. It represents the intersection of the pro-imperialist orientation of the Democratic Party and identity politics. Of the 18 candidates given thumbnail descriptions above, six are African American (Griggs, Pandy, Walker, Keith, Averhart and Lanier), and three more are white women (Schmid, Mason and Mueri). In other words, half of these military-intelligence candidates are examples of diversity, although enabling minorities and women to commit the same crimes previously committed by white men would not seem to be an improvement.

Not every one of these 18 candidates is a monster or a war criminal. But then there are those whose background is so filthy that they provide an unanswerable argument against claims, put forward by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, that it is possible to reform the Democratic Party and even to transform it into a vehicle for social progress.

What does it say about the Democratic Party that it has, among its candidates for Congress, a half dozen career military intelligence operatives, the longest-serving civilian adviser to US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, and the former overseer of prisons for the Marine Corps? What of the record of FBI counterintelligence officer Todd Rowley? His campaign website deserves a more extended citation:

Todd served as the FBIs senior liaison representative to the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) regarding the FBIs role in support of and counterintelligence efforts related to U.S. government overseas sensitive and classified construction projects in critical threat countries. Todd regularly interacted with FBIHQ and USIC senior executive managers and personnel throughout the USIC, representing the FBIs security and counterintelligence interests related to a host of critical threat and national security matters Todd traveled overseas extensively in support of this critically important mission. During Todds distinguished FBI career, he was entrusted with some of our countrys most sensitive and classified intelligence information and was called upon to provide testimony in Federal Court and Grand Juries, as well as being the affiant in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) proceedings.

What does such an individual see in the Democratic Party? And equally important, what does the Democratic Party see in him?

This list, however tediousand hideousis instructive. It gives a picture of the social elements that comprise a significant fraction of the Democratic Party. These candidates, drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus, demonstrate the real nature of this organization, a political instrument of Wall Street and the imperialist state.
This was an extremely tragic and unnecessary event, which resulted in the loss of four young adults, River Forest Police Chief James OShea said in a statement. Speed and other reckless actions do kill and I would ask the motoring public to follow state traffic laws and exercise caution on our roadways. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all the families, friends and any others impacted by this heartbreaking incident.
Protesters gather near the site of a police shooting in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020. Rioting took place in the city overnight. (WDJT-TV via AP)

Trump to Be Briefed on Police Shooting of Wisconsin Man

President Donald Trump will be briefed on Monday on the police shooting of a black man in Wisconsin.

I am certain he will be briefed on the full matter as he is on each and every matter, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters outside the White House.

Riots erupted in Kenosha, between Chicago and Milwaukee, after officers shot the man, identified as Jacob Blake.

Blake was rushed to the hospital in serious condition. He is alive.

Meadows said he was briefed on the matter earlier Monday and asked Attorney General William Barr, who was already scheduled to go to the White House, to brief the president and others on the shooting because they want a full understanding of what happened.

A window is spraypainted at the Kenosha County Administration building next to the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wis., during unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake on Aug. 23, 2020. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via USA TODAY via Reuters)

Its too early to tell in terms of what actually happened from what I was briefed on, Meadows said.

Obviously the video tells a story that is troubling and yet, at the same time, well get a full briefing within the next couple of hours.

Kenosha officials said officers were responding to a domestic violence call when they encountered Blake. It wasnt clear whether he was a suspect or just in the area. Court records show Blake was charged last month with two misdemeanors and third-degree sexual assault, a felony.

Video footage appeared to show the officers shooting Blake as he tried to enter a vehicle.

Officers provided immediate aid to the man, who was transported via flight to Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee.

A firefighter is seen near a burnt out truck near the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Morry Gash/AP Photo)

Wisconsin officers and Kenosha Sheriffs Department deputies were called to the scene to take over from Kenosha officers. The state Department of Justice is probing the matter.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said Blake was shot in the back multiple times in broad daylight.

Kathy and I join his family, friends, and neighbors in hoping earnestly that he will not succumb to his injuries, he said in a statement, calling for action from elected officials across the state on racism and alleged excessive use of force by the police.

Laquisha Booker, Blakes fiancee, told TMJ that police shot him numerous times for no reason.

Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in a statement that the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force.

This calls for an immediate, full and transparent investigation and the officers must be held accountable, he said.
Officers deployed tear gas early Monday to disperse hundreds of people who took to the streets following a police shooting in Kenosha that also drew a harsh rebuke from the governor after a video posted on social media appeared to show officers shoot at a Black mans back seven times as he leaned into a vehicle.

A person was hospitalized in serious condition following a shooting by officers about 5 p.m. Sunday as officers were responding to a domestic incident, the Kenosha Police Department said in a news release. Police did not provide details about what led to the shooting, but said the person was transported to a hospital in Milwaukee for treatment.

By late Sunday, multiple vehicle fires had been set and windows smashed along city thoroughfares as crowds faced off with law enforcement. Officers in riot gear stood in lines and SWAT vehicles remained on the streets to move people away from city buildings despite the declaration of an overnight curfew. Tear gas was used to disperse groups of people, according to reporters at the scene.

In the video posted earlier on social media that appeared to show the shooting from across a street, three officers could be seen shouting and pointing their weapons at the man as he walked around the front of a parked SUV. As the man opened the drivers side door and leaned inside, one officer grabbed his shirt from behind and then fired into the vehicle. Seven shots could be heard on the video, though it was unclear if more than one officer fired.

Gov. Tony Evers on Sunday night condemned the shooting of the man whom he identified as Jacob Blake, saying in a statement that while we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice, which is investigating the shooting, did not release any details about the involved officers except to say they have been placed on administrative leave.

Following the shooting, social media posts showed neighbors gathering in the surrounding streets and hurling comments at police. Some could be heard chanting no justice, no peace while others appeared to throw objects at officers and damage police vehicles.

Later Sunday, in a scene that mirrored the months of protests over racial injustice around the world that have followed the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black people killed by police, marchers headed to the Kenosha County Public Safety Building, which authorities mostly blocked off. Protesters marched along lines of cars honking on their way to the station. Some police officers were positioned on the roof of the station as people continued toward the building.

Outside the station, protesters clashed with officers dressed in riot gear that included plastic facemasks and held plastic shields and batons that they occasionally used to push people back.

Evers meanwhile indicated an intention to further respond to the shooting.

I have said all along that although we must offer our empathy, equally important is our action, he said. In the coming days, we will demand just that of elected officials in our state who have failed to recognize the racism in our state and our country for far too long.

The city of Kenosha is located on Lake Michigan, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Milwaukee.
China is widely infamous for its public surveillance tactics. The nations communist party is known for imposing complete surveillance on its citizens, something that has always attracted criticism on grounds of going against fundamental rights of privacy. Now, a group of hackers named CCP Unmasked has claimed to have hacked at least three Chinese companies, which they have claimed in interviews to be social media surveillance agencies. While the claim itself is not particularly shocking, it is interesting to note how government-aligned or empaneled social media companies are using increasingly invasive tactics to snoop on citizens of a nation. Additionally, documents revealed from the CCP Unmasked hack further claim that these firms also have working social media surveillance models for Facebook and Twitter  both platforms that are banned in the Chinese cyberspace.

According to a report by Motherboard, the documents, which were partially vetted by the publication, show a considerable degree of authenticity. The three companies noted in the hackers documents include Hong Kong-based Knowlesys, Guangzhou-based YunRun Big Data Service, and Beijing-based OneSight. Each of these companies appear to offer similar services, including a whole suite of cyber espionage tactics. According to reports on the internet, Knowlesys is a noted social media firm, which has claimed to be working with intelligence, security agencies, national militaries and police organisations for over eight years. Some of its previous, documented work that is indexed in public domain include monitoring of messages, social media profiles, geolocation data and public opinion via behavioural analysis on social media, and scraping of private data include relationship status and more. Knowlesys has also offered demonstrations to monitor public opinion during elections  a contentious topic that has seen giants such as Facebook come under scrutiny.

In China, however, things work a bit differently. As a Knowlesys document shows, its services offered to governments and other in-power authorities also include monitoring social media platforms for anti government groups. While the act in itself can qualify as a severe breach of the sanctity of the electoral process, as well as a citizens fundamental right to privacy, it is apparently accepted practice in China  something that falls in line with what multiple reports on Chinas public surveillance system has revealed. Recently, a News18 report investigated growing voices of dissent by Chinese nationals on social media platforms  something that the nations Communist Party cuts down on severely and actively.

RELATED NEWS SC Refuses to Hear Plea for Probe into Chinese Surveillance, Asks Petitioner to Make Representation

What is also particularly concerning is how Knowlesys and other companies appear to have similar services and models prepared for platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as well, which are banned in China. This indicates that the services may not be central only to China, and such social media surveillance tactics may be adopted by other nations as well. This further raises concerns regarding high profile elections, and questions the state of a democracy, as well as how such levels of surveillance can affect it. Social media surveillance can typically help parties in power to push political propaganda in order to inject bias into the election process, thereby crushing down on the presence of an effective opposition in the system.

While such information about China is not new, it remains to be seen if any further data sets arise regarding other possible clients that firms like Knowlesys work with. Over the past few years, platforms like Facebook have come under increasing scrutiny for not doing enough to prevent external bodies influence public opinion on the influential social media platforms. While most of these companies have, over time, claimed to be intermediaries to avoid making political statements, platforms like Twitter have recently implemented censors on inflammatory posts made by national heads  in turn reflecting the increasing need for action by social media platforms, in order to prevent social media firms from impacting electoral processes.
Huaweis 5G wireless and core network equipment (5G RAN gNodeB, 5G Core UDG, UDM, UNC, UPCF) and LTE eNodeB has passed the GSMAs Network Equipment Security Assurance Scheme (NESAS). GSMA NESAS boosts the industrys confidence in telecom network equipment, making it a practical choice for the industry and an important consideration for all regional markets, to jointly promote the development of more aligned mobile communications market.

NESAS is a standardized cybersecurity assessment mechanism jointly defined by GSMA and 3GPP, together with major global operators, vendors, industry partners and regulators. It provides an industry-wide security assurance framework to facilitate improvements in security levels across the mobile industry. It is a voluntary scheme through which network equipment vendors subject their product development and lifecycle processes to a comprehensive security audit against the currently active NESAS release and its security requirements.

GSMA NESAS, which is widely accepted in the industry, ensures that the relevant equipment meets the Schemes 5G network security and reliability requirements. The integrated assessment process avoids fragmented assessments and their resulting costs, while improving the transparency of security protection levels in the industry through visual and measurable results. NESAS covers 20 assessment categories, defining security requirements and an assessment framework for 5G product development and product lifecycle processes. Additionally it uses security test cases defined by 3GPP to assess the security of network equipment.

Devin Duan, Head of 5G E2E Cybersecurity Marketing, Huawei, said, GSMA NESAS is the latest approach in assessing the network security of mobile communications. In the 5G era, NESAS provides a standardized and effective cybersecurity assessment, which allows the communications industry to ensure fairness. The Assessment is also a valuable reference for stakeholders, such as operators, equipment vendors, government regulators, and application service providers. Huawei has always focused on technology-driven cybersecurity. We welcome NESAS with full support and collaboration. We also invite the entire industry to jointly promote the development of a more aligned mobile communications market.

For Huawei, cybersecurity assurance is a shared goal between Huawei, customers, supervisory authorities, and other stakeholders. Trust in cybersecurity has become a major global concern as the world becomes more digital. Huawei believes that trust must be based on verifiable facts, which should in turn be based on shared standards. We believe that this is an effective way to build trust in the digital era. Huawei supports GSMA and 3GPP in developing a global standardized security assessment, an idea that has largely been accepted as an industry consensus. NESAS promotes this concept, and as such, Huawei urges the industry to widely adopt NESAS.

Prior to passing GSMA NESAS, Huawei also passed the 5G cybersecurity test by Chinas IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group. These test specifications are based on the 3GPP international standards for 5G security assurance.
A family home where a disabled elderly woman was left to rot in her own excrement in squalid conditions has been put on the market.

Ann Marie Smith died in the Royal Hospital in Adelaide on April 6 from septic shock, multiple organ failure, severe pressure sores and malnourishment.

The 54-year-old had cerebral palsy and relied on carers under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

She lived along in a house on Bradman Court, which was advertised for sale on Saturday for $929,000.

Ann Marie Smith (pictured) died after being allegedly left to rot in her own waste at her home in Adelaide

Ms Smith's three-bedroom home has been put on the market for sale for $929,000 (pictured)

Ms Smith lived out her final days rotting in her own excrement in this room before she was taken to hospital

Her former carer Rosemary Maione was charged with manslaughter after allegedly leaving Ms Smith stucka cane chair in the living room.

The three bedroom home has been described by realtors as 'light, bright and airy' and 'the perfect home base for work and play'.

An open plan design stretches between three living areas, with a gourmet kitchen, double garage and separate laundry.

The master bedroom has a walk-in wardrobe, with built-in wardrobes in the other two bedrooms, as well as air conditioning, gas hot water and a rainwater tank.

Ms Smith inherited the house and a large estate after her father passed away in 2009.

Realtors have described Ms Smith's home as 'light, bright and airy' and 'the perfect base for work and play'

The open plan design stretches between three living areas, with other features including a gourmet kitchen, laundry and double garage

Doctors lodged a complaint to the Health and Community Services Complaints Commissioner about the lack of care Ms Smith was subject to before her death.

'Unable to care for herself, she was living her days and sleeping at night in the same woven cane chair in a lounge room for over a year with extremely poor personal hygiene,' Detective Superintendent Des Bray said.

'That chair had also become her toilet and there was no fridge in the house and investigators were unable to locate any nutritional food in the house.'

The concrete slab beneath the carpet where Ms Smith was left to rot was stained after being left for so long.

Maione was granted bail to remain under home detention and will appear in Adelaide Magistrates Court in April 2021.
The aviation industry last night accused ministers of using 'outdated algorithms' to delay plans to cut quarantine times for travellers.

As Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Iceland edged closer to the UK's quarantine list, airport officials said the Government was dragging its heels on testing proposals. These plans would do away with the need for passengers to self-isolate for a full 14 days.

Heathrow last week unveiled a facility with the capacity to carry out swab tests on thousands of travellers.

Officials say the scheme will help rescue the industry and wider economy by cutting the quarantine to just five days, and eventually three.

Airport officials have accused the Government of dragging their heels on testing proposals, as Heathrow unveiled a facility to carry out swab tests (above) last week

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said research shows airport tests would detect only 7% of asymptomatic cases. Above, nurse Natasha Owen gets ready to swab passengers at Heathrow

But the plans have been dismissed by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, who claims the latest research suggests airport tests would detect only 7 per cent of asymptomatic cases.

Collinson and Swissport, the aviation companies that developed the Heathrow scheme, hit back.

They claimed this statistic is based on 'outdated Public Health England modelling based on computer algorithms'.

They say evidence from other countries' test-on-arrival schemes suggest the risk of missing asymptomatic carriers is so small that passengers may need just one test, rather than the proposed two.

A Department of Health spokesman said: 'Any potential change would need to minimise the chance that positive cases are missed.'

The subject of airport testing is due to be discussed at a Cabinet meeting today.

It came amid fears a rise in infections could see more countries added to the quarantine list this week.

Downing Street officials are keeping a particularly close eye on data from Greece, where an estimated 100,000 Britons are currently on holiday.

Greece's cumulative number of cases over seven days - a key metric closely-watched by Downing Street - was yesterday [SUN] at 14.2 infections per 100,000 people.

This is well below the Government's threshold of 20, meaning Greece is unlikely to face new quarantine measures before the majority of schools go back on September 2.

Industry expert Paul Charles said it would take a 'major surge in cases for Greece to go anywhere near the Government's 'red' list of countries.

The testing plans would do away with the need for passengers to self-isolate for a full 14 days, cutting the quarantine to just five days, and eventually three

Collinson and Swissport, who developed the Heathrow scheme, claimed ministers were using 'outdated Public Health England modelling based on computer algorithms'

The outlook is less positive for Switzerland which logged a seven-day cumulative total of 19.8 cases per 100,000 residents on Sunday - meaning it is likely to face quarantine restrictions by the end of the week.

The Czech Republic, which is on 17.8 cases, is also at risk, along with Iceland on 16.5.

By comparison, Portugal is on 13.9 cases, Turkey 10.9, Italy 7.8 and Cyprus 9.7 - meaning those popular holiday destinations are not at risk of new restrictions.

Singapore, which is on less than the UK with 10.4 cases, could also have quarantine restrictions removed this week unless case numbers rise dramatically.

Any change to the quarantine arrangements is likely to be announced on Thursday night following meetings with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, Public Health England and officials from the devolved administrations.

The addition of new countries to the 'red' list would require all arrivals to self-isolate for 14 days with a deadline of 4am on Saturday.

It is feared this could cause chaos over the busy bank holiday weekend, when flight schedules are already full to bursting.

Sudden changes to quarantine rules for Spain, France and Croatia triggered a rush to return home, with some forced to pay hundreds to beat the deadline before the new rules kick in.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway announced Sunday that she would leave her post by the end of the month.

She announced her departure from the White House through a statement posted on social media. Her husband, George Conway, is also withdrawing from the Lincoln Project. He has been known as a frequent Trump critic.

George and Kellyanne said they are leaving to focus on their children, as reported by the Deadline.

In her statement, Kellyanne said that leaving her White House position was completely her "choice and voice."

"In time, I will announce future plans. For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama and more mama," she said.

Kellyanne has also served as Trump's campaign manager for the 2016 race. She is known to be the first woman who successfully steered a White House bid.

Conway described her time in the Trump administration as "heady" and "humbling," reported The Guardian.

She added that the men, women, and children she's met during her time in the White House have made her realize that public service can be meaningful and consequential.

"For all of its political differences and cultural cleavages, this is a beautiful country filled with amazing people," she noted.

A Couple of Political Contrasts

When it came to the White House, the Conways haven't been in many agreements.

As a counselor to President Donald Trump, Kellyanne is one of Trump's strongest defenders. She appears on TV and the White House press briefings on a regular basis.

As a lawyer, George hasn't been one to agree with his wife's support for the President. He was one of Trump's strongest critics. He had been considered for multiple posts in the Justice Department early into Trump's stay in office.

As per a CNN report, he had backed not only Trump's impeachment but also questioned the President's mental state.

Under the Lincoln Project, he produced some memorable ads working for Trump's ouster. George is also known for countering Trump's own tweets with quick retorts.

But as he steps away from the Lincoln Project, he also said he'd be on a Twitter hiatus as well. In a tweet, he noted that despite taking a break from the social media site, he would continue his passionate support to the Lincoln project and its mission.

Matching Interests for Their Family

Kellyanne noted that she and her husband disagree on plenty of matter, but they are united when it comes to their kids.

They took into account that their four children, who are in their teens and 'tweens, are starting a new school year. They are in middle school and high school, which will be done remotely from home for at least a few months.

The couple knew their kids would need a certain level of attention that is as unusual as as this time of pandemic.

Kellyanne was scheduled to speak at this week's Republican National Convention, but it is not yet clear if she would still do it.

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Residents attempt to loot overturned food trailer after Costa Maya highway accident

Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Q.R.  A collision between two transport trucks along a Costa Maya highway left one vehicle in the ditch and the other, overturned. The accident happened shortly after noon Sunday along the federal highway about an hour south of Tulum.

Reports say the two vehicles collided when one invaded the oncoming lane of the other. Upon impact, the weight of the food load of the semi caused the trailer and cab to become separated, resulting in the trailer rolling off the road and landing on its roof. The driver of the Yucatan-plated unit was unhurt from the accident.

As the accident hit social media, nearby residents began to arrive at the scene in an attempt to loot the food from the overturned trailer. However, elements from the National Guard arrived on scene and proceeded to guard the site to prevent potential looting.

Traffic was backed up as several large tow trucks were called in to removed the two large units from the sides of the highway. Neither driver was hurt in the accident.
Iran envoy: IAEA chief visit to Tehran nothing to do with US bid with UNSC

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Aug 23, IRNA -- Iran's Ambassador to the Vienna-based international organizations Kazem Gharibabadi has said that the upcoming visit to Tehran of Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi has nothing to do with US bid with the UN Security Council.

IAEA chief's visit to Tehran is necessary because Iran's confidence in the Agency has been sapped in recent months, Gharibabadi said in an Instagram post.

Grossi's visit is necessary to build confidence, Gharibabadi noted.

As the official said, the IAEA chief is to fly to Iran on Monday (August 24) and is planned to meet with the Iranian officials on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Grossi is visiting Iran within the framework of invitation from the Iranian side, Gharibabadi underlined.

He added that Tehran does not let others manage relations between Iran and the IAEA particularly in the current sensitive situation.

Last Thursday, the United States called for activating trigger mechanism within the framework of the 2015 nuclear deal, aka Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and re-imposing sanctions against Iran, while Washington is no longer a member of the international deal as it withdrew unilaterally from it in May, 2018.

The US call for trigger mechanism rejected by the United Nations Security Council a day after it was proposed.

It is important that the IAEA chief assures Tehran that the Agency will move towards three principles of professionalism, impartiality and independence, and will also not take any action far from the standards and Agency's independent data and examinations, Gharibabadi stressed.

If the IAEA does so, misunderstandings will be removed and cooperation will continue, he added.

Grossi, through a Twitter post on Saturday, said that he is to travel to Iran on Monday to hold talks with Iranian officials on remaining questions about Safeguards Agreement.

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The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has set a maximum 20 minutes target, within which to respond to emergencies and disasters across the country.

The Director-General of NEMA, Muhammadu Muhammed, announced the target at a one-day retreat for Heads of Territorial, Zonal and Operations Offices of the agency on Monday in Abuja.

The theme for the retreat is: Effective and Efficient Service Delivery at Operational Level.

Mr Muhammed said that the essence of the retreat was to discuss with the field officers so as to improve service delivery at the operational level.

He added that as disaster managers, they must fashion out measures for intervention and initiate disaster risk reduction strategies suitable for their respective community.

Delivering effective and efficient service calls for serious commitment on our part.

We are, therefore, setting targets for ourselves, he said.

According to him, there will be an awareness campaign on reducing the risk of flooding and other disasters and the development of resilience among communities through the implementation of the Sendai Framework of Action.

Other targets are responding to all catastrophic disasters in the country, shortening the response time to emergencies and disasters to 20 minutes.

The agency will also ensure availability and workability of all rescue equipment for the country; implementation of the humanitarian  development nexus; support for the provision of basic needs for IDPs in catastrophic disasters and support for the coordination of safe and dignified return of IDPs in the country in collaboration with other stakeholders.

Mr Muhammed said that a collective effort from all staff of the agency was needed to succeed in the set targets.

The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Saadiya Farouq, declared the retreat open.

READ ALSO:

Ms Farouq charged retreat participants to represent the government well as they carry out their duties.

She said their roles as field officers, therefore, is not to wait for disasters to happen, but to go for assessment or make a report to the headquarters.

You must cascade the policies of the government into the local levels and improve the knowledge of the people in disaster risk reduction.

Disaster prevention education provides people with the knowledge and skills needed to systematically recognise hazards and vulnerabilities.

This is to reduce the physical risks in their environment, make use of capacities and resources, and protect themselves and others from hazard impacts, she said.

Similarly, Sam Tende, Guest Speaker at the event, said there must be a change in attitude in other to render effective service to humanity.

He charged the field officers to develop their abilities and become professionals by taking ownership of each task given to them.

Mr Tende, a professor, said that for an operational manager to be effective and efficient, he or she must demonstrate trust, share information, provide opportunities for everyone to win, provide feedback and admit mistakes.

(NAN)
Strict fines will be applied for the spam texts that are so popular in Viet Nam since October 1. - Photo cafef.vn

She let her mother take care of the one-year-old baby and went to another room to shout at the unknown caller.

I dont want to buy a house and never call me again! she shouted.

Spam calls and texts are par for the course in Viet Nam, a country with approximately 130.4 million telephone subscriptions.

According to the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC)s department of telecommunications, it found 49 million spam calls from more than 26,700 phone numbers that disturbed about 18 million subscribers in Viet Nam within a month. Most of the calls and texts provide information on real estate, insurance, financial services and English courses.

After years of ineffective measures, the Governments Decree 91/2020/ND-CP on the prevention of spam messages, spam emails, and spam calls will come into effect on October 1.

Under the decree, the Ministry of Information and Communications from the MICs Authority of Information Security will operate a system at the number 5656 (system 5656) where phone users can forward the spam text and call they receive and let relevant units fine the spammers.

For the first time, Viet Nam will have a national list of subscribers who do not want to receive any advertising text messages (National Do not call - DNC) so users on the list won't receive spam messages or calls. Local phone users can register on the list via the system 5656.

Advertisers, telecommunications and internet service providers who make calls or send advertising text messages to the phone numbers on the list will be fined up to VND100 million while telecommunication carriers who still allow the calls and texts to go through will be fined from VND140 million to VND170 million.

According to the decree, advertisers can only send advertising text messages if they send a copy of each text message to the system 5656 as well.

According to the decree, firms providing internet and telecommunication services have to comply with the MICs requirements on the prevention and handling of spam.

Though she's happy with the decree, Thu is still sceptical about how effective it will be.

There have been so many unsuccessful actions to stop spam in Viet Nam as the messages and calls can bring profit to the providers. Can a decree prevent them all or will the providers have other ways to let them happen again? she asked.

I have been so disappointed with former regulations that failed to stop the spammers. Now we just wait and see," she said.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Aug. 24

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Export of wood and furniture from Turkey to Uzbekistan dropped by 30.88 percent from January through June 2020, having made up $17.9 million, Turkey's Trade Ministry told Trend.

In June 2020, the export of wood and furniture from Turkey to Uzbekistan decreased by 29.05 percent compared to June 2019 and amounted to $3.5 million.

The export of wood and furniture from Turkey to the foreign markets decreased by 5.2 percent from January through June 2020, compared to the same period of 2019, and amounted to $2.5 billion.

According to the ministry, Turkeys export of wood and furniture for the reporting period made up 3.3 percent of the country's total export.

In June 2020, Turkey exported wood and furniture worth $459.8 million to the world markets, which is 32.3 percent more compared to the same month of 2019, the ministry said.

Turkey's export of wood and furniture in June 2020 amounted to 3.4 percent of the country's total export.

Over the past 12 months (from June 2019 through June 2020), Turkey exported wood and furniture worth $5.4 billion abroad.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
New masking requirements: Effective immediately, anyone entering the Milwaukee VA Medical Center and its community clinics MUST wear a medical-grade cough, surgical, procedural or N95/KN95 mask.      . Appropriate masks will be available at all facility entrances. Anyone entering the facility, even those fully vaccinated, must wear a mask at all times.

Prepare for a visit: Due to COVID-19, the Milwaukee VA Medical Center is restricting visitation. Learn more here.

COVID-19 vaccines: All Veterans, spouses and caregivers can get a COVID-19 vaccine at VA by appointment only. To schedule a shot, call 414-384-2000, ext. 49069.

All COVID-19 shots are given in the ZIHP/Quick Shot clinic, located in Building 70, directly west of the main hospital. Learn more here.

Visit our vaccine information page.
Kylie Jenner is one of the worlds biggest celebrities, a young star who rose to fame on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Jenner is fabulously wealthy, and although Forbes dethroned her from her former billionaire status, Jenner is not struggling in any sense of the word.

She is a fan of extravagant vacations and although she is noted for her tropical trips to places like Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean, she also enjoys getting away to a private resort a little closer to home.

Kylie Jenner loves tropical vacations

Kylie Jenner | Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images

RELATED: TikTok Artist Removes Kylie Jenners Rumored Plastic Surgery to Show What She Would Really Look Like

Jenner does everything big. In addition to her massive collection of luxury cars, and of course, her closet full of designer handbags, Jenner enjoys getting away from it all and going on regular vacations.

Jenner doesnt just head to Destin, Florida, however  she prefers staying in the lap of luxury at some of the most expensive resorts in the furthest-flung areas of tropical paradise, usually with her family in tow. Of course, she documents it all for the gram, even when staying at the most exclusive of vacation spots.

Recently, to celebrate her 23rd birthday, Jenner jetted away to Turks and Caicos to stay in a private villa boasting eleven bedrooms and a stretch of private beach. Jenner brought along her family and friends for the excursion, including her sisters, her daughter Stormi, and her best friend Stassie.

While she was on vacation, Jenner shared a number of photos to social media, revealing that she enjoyed the best of everything during her birthday getaway. It is clear that a beach vacation is where Jenner really feels her best  still, if she doesnt want to deal with the hassle of an hours-long plane ride, she heads somewhere much closer to her home state of California.

Where does Kylie Jenner vacation domestically?

Earlier this summer, Jenner shook off the quarantine blues by vacationing at the Amangiri resort in Canyon Point, Utah. The resort is located within a cluster of national parks and offers stunning views of the surrounding desert. It features minimalist decor and styling, making it perfect for documenting on social media, and has an incredible on-site spa.

It reportedly sits on six hundred acres of private land, ensuring that any celebrities who visit get to experience ultimate privacy as well as the serene beauty of the area. Plus, the resort advertises private transport to and from the resort  so the celebrities who visit never have to worry about encountering locals who might reveal their location.

During her trip to Amangiri, Jenner didnt post any pictures of the spa itself, but she did share several photos of her daughter Stormi enjoying the resort, staring at fish in one of the pools, and exploring their terrace. Jenner isnt the only celebrity who has taken advantage of the resorts natural beauty and private location. Over the years, many celebs have stayed at the Utah resort, proving that sometimes, closer to home is better.

Celebrities love the Amangiri resort

In addition to Jenner, celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Gordon Ramsay, and Drew Barrymore have all stayed at the Amangiri resort. The resort and the area surrounding it have also served as the filming location for several major Hollywood movies, including the John Travolta movie Broken Arrow.

Celebrities who stay at the Amangiri resort can also enjoy area amenities like hot air ballooning and horseback rides  that is, if they ever feel inclined to leave the resort in the first place.
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Tata Steel has reported 472 positive COVID-19 cases among its employees across its major manufacturing locations in India, Chairman N Chandrasekaran recently said.

Of these, 361 have recovered and eight have died, Chandrasekaran added.

As of March 2020, the company had 32,364 employees on its rolls and over 50,000 workers on contract.

Company executives said the incidence of the virus is low when compared with the large number of workers that come in daily across its three major facilities, in Jamshedpur, Angul and Kalinganagar.

COVID-19 cases have been reported in manufacturing companies across sectors, including in auto and heavy equipment. Among steel makers, JSW Steel had reported a little over 900 cases in early August. To control the spread, the company had asked over 11,000 workers to stay at home.

COVID-19 Vaccine Frequently Asked Questions View more How does a vaccine work? A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine. How many types of vaccines are there? There are broadly four types of vaccine  one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine. What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind? Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time. View more Show

Tata Steel had introduced the POD concept in its manufacturing locations to counter COVID-19. "These measures are beyond the stipulated SOPs, which anyway are being strictly followed by the organisation," the company had said recently.

How does the Pod work?

The staff is seated into small units called Pods, thus limiting their interaction with each other. Each pod has about 10 workers.

"All of the members have to maintain mandatory social distancing. Additionally, to reduce the risk of contamination across shifts, a 30-minutes air gap is maintained between two shifts," the company said.

In the first 15 minutes, each work area and tools are sanitised. In the next 15 minutes, workers in the ensuing shift enter through a separate gate. The work areas and tools are again sanitised before being used.

Commenting on the advantage of the Pod system, Tata Steel said:

"As the procedure itself delineates, this process limits the spread of the virus across pods. If one person is infected, the entire pod is quarantined, but the rest of the pods can continue to work. It ensures business operations as the requisite workforce is present to do the job. Besides in case of any COVID19 positive case, the pod system enables contact tracing."

A recent Telegraph report had said the company has moved to a 12-hour shift at its Jamshedpur, to reduce the movement of workers. In Angul and Kalinganagar, it had been operating on a 12-hour shift but moved back to the usual 8-hour schedule.
Traders work at the Citadel Securities post on the floor of the NYSE

(Reuters) - Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel and Citadel Securities, which provides trading services to asset managers, banks, broker-dealers and hedge funds, will open a new office in Singapore, Citadel said on Monday.

The two businesses, which have 17 offices across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, are also continuing to grow their presence in Hong Kong, according to an emailed statement.

Citadel Securities is expanding its existing footprint in Shanghai and Sydney, the statement added, without mentioning how many new jobs will be created as a result of these steps.

The expansions in Hong Kong and Shanghai comes in the midst of escalating U.S.-China tensions over issues like trade tariffs, sanctions, and a barrage of Washington's actions against China.

Citadel, which managed $34 billion of assets globally as of early July, has operated in the Asia-Pacific region since 2005, while Citadel Securities has operated in the region since 2009.

The news was reported earlier by Bloomberg, which cited data showing Citadel Securities accounted for about 20% of over $15.5 billion U.S. shares traded in March, when the coronavirus pandemic and a Russia-Saudi Arabia oil price war triggered a market sell off.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)
Minsk, Aug 24 : Opposition supporters in Belarus have held a mass rally in the capital Minsk, two weeks after a disputed election gave President Alexander Lukashenko another term in office.

Correspondents in the city said tens of thousands filled the central square despite a heavy police presence, the BBC reported on Sunday.

The protesters say Lukashenko stole the election and want him to resign.

The president has vowed to crush unrest and blamed the dissent on unnamed "foreign-backed revolutionaries".

Recent protests were met with a crackdown in which at least four people were killed. Demonstrators said they had been tortured in prisons.

According to official results, Lukashenko - who has ruled Belarus for 26 years - won more than 80 per cent of the vote in the 9 August election and opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya 10 per cent.

There were no independent observers and the opposition alleges massive vote rigging.

Tikhanovskaya, who was forced to flee to neighbouring Lithuania the day after the election, vowed to "stand till the end" in the protests.

Tens of thousands of people - from the elderly to those with small children - poured into Independence Square on Sunday. Many were carrying the opposition's red and white flags, and chanted "freedom" and anti-government slogans.

Pro-opposition media say 100,000 people took part. State television put the crowd at 20,000.

After gathering in the square, some demonstrators moved towards the "Hero City" war memorial and the presidential palace. They were blocked by a security cordon before dispersing.

State television released a video showing Lukashenko arriving at the presidential palace by helicopter, wearing a flak jacket and carrying an automatic weapon.

Similar demonstrations were held in other Belarusian cities. Meanwhile in Lithuania, thousands of people - including President Gitanas Nauseda - formed a human chain from the capital Vilnius to the Belarusian border in solidarity with those protesting in Minsk.

More human chains were planned in the Estonian capital Tallinn and in Prague in the Czech Republic.

This weekend's rally in Minsk follows the country's biggest protest in modern history last Sunday, when hundreds of thousands filled the streets. Strike action in key factories across Belarus is also keeping up the pressure on the president.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 20:57:45|Editor: huaxia

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VIENTIANE, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- The following is the full text of the Vientiane Declaration of the Third Mekong-Lancang Cooperation (MLC) Leaders' Meeting issued on Monday.

We, the Heads of State/Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia, the People's Republic of China, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, the Kingdom of Thailand, and the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, held the 3rd Mekong-Lancang Cooperation (MLC) Leaders' Meeting on 24 August 2020 through virtual meeting under the theme of "Enhancing Partnership for Shared Prosperity".

1. The world economy is facing both expanding opportunities and rising challenges, complicated by profound and rapid changes in the world. Reaffirming that strengthening multilateralism to support win-win cooperation is essential for addressing challenges and ensuring the benefit to all members. MLC is contributing to the socio-economic development of regional countries and enhancing the well-being of their people, narrowing the development gap among countries, supporting the ASEAN Community building as well as advancing South-South cooperation and enhancing the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

2. Recalling our firm commitment as embodied in the Sanya Declaration of the First LMC Leaders' Meeting to build a Community of Shared Future of Peace and Prosperity among Mekong--Lancang Countries and the Phnom Penh Declaration of the Second MLC Leaders' Meeting to envision Our River of Peace and Sustainable Development, as the foundation for Mekong-Lancang Cooperation development.

3. Expressing our common aspiration and collective commitment to advance the MLC development to realise the enormous and untapped development potentials through creating conducive environment of lasting peace, stability, solidarity and harmony which will contribute to sustainable development and shared prosperity in the Mekong--Lancang region as well as jointly addressing socio-economic and environmental challenges faced by the region.

4. Reaffirming the principles of consensus, equality, voluntarism, mutual consultation and coordination, common contribution and shared benefits and respect for the United Nations Charter, ASEAN Charter and international laws, as well as in accordance with domestic laws, and regulations and procedures of each member country.

5. Reiterating that the Mekong-Lancang Cooperation has witnessed substantive development in various areas since its inception in 2016 and its importance, together with Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), visions of other Mekong sub-regional cooperation, in contributing to prosperity and sustainable development, advancing South-South cooperation as well as enhancing the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

6. Welcoming the successful convening of the Fourth MLC Foreign Ministers' Meeting on 17 December 2018 in Luang Prabang Province, Lao PDR, and the Fifth MLC Foreign Ministers' Meeting on 20 February 2020 in Vientiane, Lao PDR where a number of strategic policy documents, such as the Joint Press Communiques of the Fourth and the Fifth MLC Foreign Ministers' Meetings were adopted and the Progress Reports on Implementation of the MLC Five-Year Plan of Action (2018-2022) were circulated.

7. Welcoming the upgrading of the MLC Water Resources Cooperation, appreciating China's intension to share of hydrological information of the Lancang River throughout the year, and the successful convening of the First Ministerial Meeting of Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation in December 2019 in Beijing, PR China during which the Joint Statement of the Ministerial Meeting of Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation and the List of Proposed Projects on Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation were endorsed with a view to ensure sustainable use of water resources. Commending the active steps taken to establish partnership between MLC and Mekong River Commission, including the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Mekong-Lancang Water Resource Cooperation Center and MRC Secretariat to strengthen the cooperation among riparian countries and create synergy in regional water resources cooperation for future sustainability and shared benefits in the basin.

8. Highly appreciating China's continued support to LMC Special Fund to implement regional projects with an aim to promote capacity building in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution, people to people's exchanges and further advance socio-economic development in the region. Commending the importance of these projects, and hope that the Fund could further support more practical and effective projects for the well-being of the peoples of the six countries.

9. Appreciating member countries' joint endeavor to control the COVID-19 pandemic in the spirit of solidarity and cooperation, mutual help and support with regards to the sharing of information on the outbreak and technical guidelines for prevention, control, diagnosis and treatment as well as recognizing their active efforts made to fight against the pandemic in a timely manner. Welcoming China's announcement of the establishment of the LMC Special Fund for Public Health within the framework of the LMC Special Fund to support public health cooperation projects of the six countries in the future.

10. Commending the fruitful outcomes achieved by the Joint Working Groups (JWGs) of the key priority areas, the highly efficient operation of the Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation Center, the Mekong-Lancang Environmental Cooperation Center, the Mekong-Lancang Agricultural Cooperation Center, the Mekong-Lancang Youth Exchange Cooperation Center, the Mekong-Lancang Vocational Education Training Center and the Global Center for Mekong Studies (GCMS), believing that the JWGs and cooperation centers have played active roles in advancing the practical cooperation in their respective areas.

11. Endeavoring to further pursue the MLC spirit of openness, inclusiveness, take into account the national strategies, development visions and sectoral and master plans of the respective Mekong-Lancang countries, and enhance complementarity with the priority areas of the ASEAN Community building and the ASEAN-China Cooperation, while seeking synergy and complementarity with existing regional cooperation mechanisms including ASEAN, Belt and Road Initiative, ACMECS, Mekong River Commission and the Greater Mekong Subregion Economic Cooperation Program.

12. Looking into the future, we emphasize the importance of further strengthening and deepening the cooperation in the three pillars areas and five priority areas and may explore new cooperation areas that respond to the evolving and emerging development needs of the Mekong-Lancang countries.

WE HEREBY DECLARE:

I. Enhancing Partnership on Political and Security Cooperation

The Political and Security Pillar is of crucial importance to the MLC Cooperation. We have witnessed that multi-level cooperative mechanisms are effective channels for facilitating communication, strengthening policy coordination and enhancing political mutual trust. Therefore, we endeavor to further support the following measures:

1.1 Strengthen high-level exchanges and dialogues among political parties, parliaments and government officials in accordance with the spirit and principles of MLC. Promote exchanges and dialogues among local/regional governments of border areas as well as border management departments of the six countries in line with domestic rules and regulations of each member country.

1.2 Enhance partnership to ensure lasting peace, stability, solidarity and harmony while upholding the principle of equality, mutual benefits, respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and non interference in other countries' internal affairs, and respect for international laws and norms in order to create favourable conditions for sustainable development and shared prosperity.

1.3 Enhance cooperation, exchange of information, and capacity building to address non-traditional security issues, including, climate change, disaster prevention, infectious diseases including pandemics, illicit drug trafficking, money laundering, and cyber crimes, human trafficking, smuggling and trafficking of firearms and ammunition, as well as in the areas of humanitarian emergencies such as floods, droughts and landslides, transboundary haze situation and ensuring food, water and energy security.

1.4 Strengthen cooperation on public health to address the challenges posed by COVID-19 and ensure social and economic recovery by promoting information sharing, experience exchanges and cooperation in scientific field, community-based public health intervention as well as joint research and development, engage in policy dialogue and exchanges on epidemics control and treatment, ensuring equitable access to vaccines and medicines, strengthening collective response and resilience to future public health emergencies. Support the important role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the global response to the spread of COVID-19, and oppose any form of discrimination, stigmatization, racism and xenophobia in our response to the pandemic. Cooperation and exchanges among the respective Centers for Disease Control and other relevant institutions in the region and their contacts with ASEAN and the World Health Organization on public health will also be enhanced, as designate a new contact point of MLC, so as to protect peoples' health, safety and the socio-economic development of the six countries, contribute to build a healthy community of Mekong-Lancang countries.

1.5 Facilitate experts, business managers, high-skilled labour exchanges and maintain the stability of production and supply chains through enhanced connectivity, trade and investment facilitation, promote digital technology and innovation such as e-commerce and digital economy, promote discussion on MLC network of "fast lane" and "green channel" so as to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on the socio-economic development of the Mekong-Lancang countries.

II. Enhancing Partnership on Economic and Sustainable Development Cooperation

The Economic and Sustainable Development Pillar reflects an essential component and the main driving force for the MLC Cooperation toward regional development and economic growth. In order to sustain the growth trajectory and bring tangible benefit to the people and prosperity for all, the MLC calls for enhancing hard and soft infrastructure connectivity, deepening industrial restructuring, unimpeded trade, financial integration, promoting information and communication technology, science, technology and innovation, enhancing environment protection, sustainable energy generation and utilization, agriculture competitiveness and poverty reduction, integrated rural development and a better cooperation between the government and the private sector. Therefore, we endeavor to support the following measures:

2.1 Strengthen intra Mekong-Lancang countries connectivity and inter regional connectivity by developing MLC plan on connectivity cooperation to reinforce trade, investment, power connectivity, cooperation on industry, science and technology, innovation, infrastructure, transportation facility, and aviation, road, rail linkages, tourism and people-to-people linkages of the six countries in complementarity with the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025. Enhance financial support to Mekong-Lancang regional connectivity by various measures, including Mekong-Lancang Inter-Bank Cooperation Mechanism for connectivity.

2.2 Encourage synergy between development of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor and the Mekong-Lancang Economic Development Belt taking into account the need to aligning with the economic and development strategies and the comparative strengths of Mekong-Lancang countries, enhancing trade connectivity, economic resilience and industrial integration, accelerate MLC countries' industrialization, modernization and innovation during the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution.

2.3 Reinforce efforts in strengthening cooperation in rural development and poverty eradication throughout the Mekong-Lancang region in line with the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Cooperation Initiative on Poverty Reduction in East Asia via efficient and effective implementation of the projects under LMC Special Fund, Pilot Projects of Poverty Reduction Cooperation in East Asia as well as other cooperation projects in poverty reduction.

2.4 Intensify efforts to finalise the Five-Year Development Plan for MLC Cross-Border Economic Cooperation with a view to enhancing cooperation among the member countries in such areas as trade, investment, regional power trade, e-commerce, economic and technical cooperation, industrial development, cross-border economic cooperation zone, manufacturing and trade facilitation. Countries may select at least one cross border cooperation zone to develop as a pilot project for the best practice, in accordance with domestic laws and regulation of each country.

2.5 Finalize the Three-Year Action Plan on Production Capacity Cooperation among Mekong-Lancang countries in accordance with the Joint Statement on Production Capacity Cooperation among Mekong-Lancang Countries, along with implementing the Multi-Nation Multi-Park cooperation, with a view to promoting investment, job creation, capacity building, poverty reduction, technical and innovation cooperation, enhancing MLC members industrial transformation and their standing in the regional and global value chain as well as optimizing regional productivity distribution, taking into account proper business code of conduct, international practices, the principles for mutual benefits and win-win results and the complementarity between local, national and regional development strategies.

2.6 Further strengthen cooperation on sustainable management and utilization of water resources: convene Ministerial Meetings of Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation regularly and fully harness MLC Water Resources Cooperation Joint Working Group as the coordination mechanism of decision making for this area, and the Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation Center as the supporting platform. Promote the implementation of Five-Year Action Plan on Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation (2018-2022); conducting policy dialogues, sharing of data, information and experiences in the implementation of transboundary water resources management, enhancing technical cooperation and exchanges, carrying out joint researches and analysis related to Mekong-Lancang water resources, public participation in the exchange of views, and promoting capacity building in water management and enhancing pragmatic cooperation in such areas as climate change adaptation, dam safety, drinking water safety, flood and drought disaster management. Support establishment of Mekong-Lancang Water Resources Cooperation Information Sharing Platform.

2.7 Encourage further regional green and sustainable development by implementing the Mekong-Lancang Environmental Cooperation Strategy and the Green Lancang-Mekong Initiative, with a view to contributing to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In particular, strengthen environmental policy cooperation both among environmental departments and cross sectors through inter alia roundtable dialogues; establish capacity building partnerships and enhance pragmatic cooperation on climate change and air quality improvement, ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation, as well as urban environmental governance etc.; conduct all these pertinent activities among MLC countries with the support of the Lancang-Mekong Environmental Cooperation Center.

2.8 Accelerate the implementation of the Three-Year Plan of Action on Mekong Lancang Agricultural Cooperation (2020-2022) to promote closer agriculture exchanges and cooperation among member countries in advancing green, sustainable, and innovative agriculture development in the region. Continue to utilize the Lancang-Mekong Agricultural Cooperation Center in China, as a platform for MLC member countries to enhance the cooperation in agricultural science and technology transfer exchanges, capacity building and knowledge sharing, joint research, investment and trade cooperation, and promote sustainable agriculture development, supporting production capacity of green agricultural products in the Mekong-Lancang region.

2.9 Further promote engagement between the public and private sectors, involving especially MSMEs and young entrepreneurs, and woman entrepreneurs with the focus on promoting the use of digital technology and facilitating access to financial resource to realize potential investment and business opportunities in various Mekong-Lancang countries. Enhance better interaction and stronger linkages among Mekong-Lancang businesspeople by way of exploring an opportunity to establish the MLC Investment Promotion Forum and development of Mekong-Lancang Business Council to stimulate frequent holding of trade and investment promotion activities such as organizing international trade and investment fairs, road shows, exhibitions, and business-matching sessions.

2.10 Strengthen intellectual cooperation among members particularly in the forms of joint-research and development projects, plan for technology cooperation and joint workshops in various topics in order to enhance economic growth in environmentally-friendly manner and to find the most appropriate solutions for environmental risk with concrete plan of action in economic cooperation among MLC countries.

2.11 Encourage further cooperation in finance and experience sharing on the use of local currencies in regional trade and investment in order to promote healthy growth of the regional economy as well as explore new ways to cooperate in investment financing that can support infrastructure development in the Mekong-Lancang countries, while leveraging existing financial mechanisms offered by international financial institutions and facilities such as the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the World Bank among others.

Strengthen cooperation in new growth areas such as digital economy, artificial intelligence, to support socio-economic recoveries of the MLC Member States from the impact of the COVID-19 situation and to promote long-term sustainable economic growth.

III. Enhancing Partnership on Social, Cultural and People-to-People Exchanges

The Mekong-Lancang countries, which are geographically linked and bounded by the shared river, diverse and unique traditions, cultures and local values, enjoy good neighborliness and strong friendship for decades. Therefore, we endeavor to support the following measures:

3.1 Enhance greater people-to-people connectivity through education, intellectual, tourism cooperation, information and broadcasting cooperation and cultural exchanges, taking into account the value of inherited heritage in respective MLC countries.

3.2 Strengthen the educational cooperation and exchanges among the six MLC member countries to promote cooperation among universities and colleges in Mekong--Lancang region, encourage joint training and research programs, academic exchange and explore a mechanism for mutual recognition and encourage the cooperation on credit exchange among colleges and universities, with an aim of increasing high-quality human resource development, educational and life-long learning exchanges, so as to reduce the human resources development gap and to build a future generation of competitive workforce in the region that can respond to the needs of the marketplace and social development during the 4th Industrial Revolution era.

3.3 Further explore an intellectual cooperation exchange model that incorporates government, business, academia, research and think tanks, media, women and youth to provide innovative ideas to support the long-term development of the MLC.

3.4 Strengthen intra MLC tourism cooperation through the promotion of green, sustainable tourism, eco-tourism, agri-tourism, sport tourism and cultural and heritage tourism, gastronomy and community-based tourism leading to the establishment of the Mekong-Lancang Tourist Cities Cooperation Alliance and explore the possibility of establishing a medium/long term tourism development vision of the MLC, and build a stronger, more sustainable and resilient tourism economy. Encourage and involve youths in tourism products development and promotion activities.

3.5 Promote cooperation on culture and arts through cultural organizations, artists and cultural tourists, as well as continue to explore the possibility of building a Mekong Lancang cultural exchange platform.

3.6 Promote the utilization of the existing tourism arrangement among the Mekong-Lancang countries including self-driving tour, more air carriers and direct flights connecting regional destinations, travel facilities as well as development of tourism historical route/corridors connectivity to promote ancient capitals and cultural heritage sites.

IV. Enhancing Partnership on MLC Cooperation Mechanism

4.1 Continue to optimize the existing multi-layered framework comprising of Leaders' Meeting, Foreign Ministers' Meeting (FMM), Senior Officials' Meeting (SOM) and Diplomatic and Sectoral Joint Working Group Meeting in order to improve policy planning and effective coordination as well as shaping the long-term strategic planning of the MLC development.

4.2 Strengthen communication and coordination among the MLC National Secretariats/ Coordination Units of the six MLC member countries as well as reinforcing the capacity of their staffs so as to ensure the effective implementation of the MLC 5-Year Plan of Action and MLC Projects.

4.3 Finalize the Plans of Action in each priority area, which will serve as a guiding document to better facilitate related cooperation and project implementation as well as effectively implement to the MLC 5-Year Plan of Action with a view to supporting socio-economic development and generating tangible benefit to the people in the region.

4.4 Efficiently utilize the LMC Special Fund and effectively implement the cooperation projects noted by the Third Leaders' Meeting. Improve the quality of projects and efficiency of implementation and encourage the Fund to support more practical and effective projects for the well-being of the peoples. Mobilize other financial resources from the governments, business sector as well as international financial institutions to support priority projects and initiatives that are aligned with the Leaders' vision and the Foreign Ministers' directions.

4.5 Promote public awareness of MLC through various activities as well as commemoration of the annual MLC Week during the week of 23 March, as inspired by the holding of the First MLC Leaders' Meeting in 2016 in China. Enditem
"Wonder Woman 1984" just unveiled a new action-packed trailer showing the multi-talented Kristen Wiig as the new villain.

During DC Comics' FanDome virtual event over the weekend, director Patty Jenkins -- alongside cast Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, and Pedro Pascal -- appeared for a Q&A session before releasing the new trailer.

Fans got to see a glimpse of Wonder Woman (played by the 35-year-old Israeli actress) battling the archaeologist Barbara Minerva (played by Wiig), who later becomes her archenemy Cheetah.

In the scene, Wiig's character walked down the lobby wearing thigh-high boots and an animal print dress as she stared at Gadot's Wonder Woman.

"You've always had everything while people like me have had nothing. Well, now it's my turn. Get used to it," Wiig said in the trailer.

While locked in a fight against Cheetah, Wonder Woman asked her: "Barbara, what did you do?"

In the same scene, Gadot was seen wearing a gold suit with wings.

Aside from the human-cheetah hybrid, another nemesis of the Amazon princess in the upcoming film is the businessman-turned-supervillain Maxwell Lord. The character, which was played by "Game of Thrones" actor Pedro Pascal, has the ability to manipulate the minds of others.

Surprise Appearance From Former "Wonder Woman" Lynda Carter

On the other hand, the panel was surprised by the appearance of a special guest in Lynda Carter -- who portrayed the character of "Wonder Woman" on TV from 1975 to 1979.

The 69-year-old actress said she is "beyond excited" for the movie's sequel.

"I've been a fan from day one of Patty's when she was first attached to this film," Carter shared.

Carter also revealed her daughter's reaction to the "Wonder Woman" reboot and even thanked the director and Gadot for the great execution of the film.

"When my daughter saw Gal as Wonder Woman, she said, 'Mom, I finally get it - I finally understand why everyone idolizes you. I finally get what Wonder Woman means to everyone... so thank you Gal...thank you, Patty."

Jenkins then expressed her appreciation for the support of the former Amazon princess.

Furthermore, the director went on and shared that when she first spoke with Carter, she explained that the team would not revamp "Wonder Woman" but will "take the torch and pass it forward."

Fans Are Thrilled for "Wonder Woman 1984"

Meanwhile, fans flocked to social media to show how thrilled they are for the upcoming movie.

"The Wonder Woman 1984 trailer is awesome. The Movie is giving TDK esque feels. It is more practical effects than CGI and that's awesome. I'm excited. #DCFanDome," one fan wrote alongside a screenshot of Gadot and Wiig's fight scene.

Meanwhile, another user expressed excitement for the release of the film on theaters: "I don't want to see any more trailers for Wonder Woman 1984, I want to see the movie Wonder Woman 1984."

"Wonder Woman 1984" Launch Date

The much-anticipated movie was originally set to hit the big screen this June 5, butit was delayed to August 14th due to the pandemic.

Warner Bros. then postponed the launch of "Wonder Woman 1984" and moved it to October 2.

READ MORE: Wonder Woman 1984: Cast, Plot, Cheetah and Everything We Need To Know
A t least 90 people are feared to be trapped after a building collapsed in a western Indian town, according to reports.

Three floors of a five-storey building collapsed in Mahad, in the state of Maharashtra, shortly before 2pm UK time on Monday, a local politician said.

Some 28 people have reportedly been rescued from the rubble so far and are being treated for injuries in the town, which is about 100 miles south of Mumbai.

"We have five to six relief teams at the spot. More teams will be arriving here," Maharashtra minister Adil S. Tatkare added.

The ten-year-old building contained more than 40 flats. Several residents to a safe spot when the building began collapsing, according to a second local politician.

Local officials are still trying to work out how many people were in the building when it collapsed.

Initially the top three floors of the building collapsed when some people came out," district official Nidhi Chaudhari told the Hindustan Times.

"The injured have been sent to government hospital.

The area has recently been hit by heavy rains which have caused widespread flooding, according to local media.

The Indian minister of Home Affairs called the incident "very tragic".

He tweeted: "The collapse of a building in Raigad, Maharashtra is very tragic. Have spoken to [India's disaster response agency] to provide all possible assistance, teams are on the way and will be assisting with the rescue operations as soon as possible.

"Praying for everyones safety."

More to follow...
Jordan will extend an overnight curfew beginning Tuesday amid a surge in new COVID-19 cases, in what Minister of State for Media Affairs Amjad Adaileh said is now the second wave of the virus.

Authorities are extending an overnight curfew for Jordanians from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., with businesses not permitted to operate between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. On Friday, a 24-hour curfew will be in place in Jordans two biggest cities, Amman and Zarqa.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Omar Razzaz said the government will not spare any effort to protect Jordanians from the virus and officials are planning area-specific restrictions.

The Middle Eastern country of nearly 10 million people is struggling with a spike in infections. The number of confirmed cases is now averaging 20 to 35 each day, up from fewer than 10.

On Monday, health authorities announced 30 new cases and two more deaths, bringing the total to 1,639 cases and 14 deaths. Of the two deaths, Jordanian Health Minister Saad Jaber said one was a 99-year-old woman and the other is an Arab national who entered Jordan on a private jet to receive medical treatment for a critical condition.

Jordan imposed one of the worlds harshest lockdowns in March with an around-the-clock curfew that included bans on taking walks outside and going to grocery stores. By April, officials had eased the lockdown and taken steps to reopen the economy.

Jordanian authorities blame the spike on truck drivers and others entering Jordan from the Jaber border crossing with Syria. To stave off future infections, Jordan closed the entry point earlier this month. Last week, Jordan imposed a lockdown on the border district of Ramtha, and authorities are reevaluating procedures at the Omari border crossing between Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
New Delhi: High Court on Monday (August 24) issued notices to the Centre, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and others on a plea, seeking action against Google Pay for allegedly violating RBI guidelines on localisation, storage and sharing of data.

The plea sought directions to Google India Digital Service Pvt Ltd to give an undertaking to not store data on its app under UPI ecosystem and further not to share the same with any third party, including its holding or parent company.

A bench of Chief Justice DN Patel and Justice Prateek Jalan on Monday seeks response of all respondents and slated the matter for further hearing on September 24.

Abhishek Sharma, the petitioner, also sought a direction to the RBI to take action and impose a penalty on Google Pay on account of its serious violations of applicable laws.

"Google India launched, `Tez`, a mobile payments service targeted at users in India which later folded into the new `Google Pay` app. `Google pay` is a third party app which facilitates payment in the UPI ecosystem and is able to do the same by partnering with various PSP/acquirer banks," the plea said.

"Further, `Google Pay` is regulated by respondent number 2 (National Payment Corporation of India) which is responsible for granting permission to Payment Service Provider (PSP) as Banks and to Third-Party Apps (TPAs) to operate under the UPI network," it added.

The plea sought a direction to the RBI to take appropriate punitive action against the NPCI and revoke its authorisation to operate and regulate the UPI payment system, on account of risking customer payments data its failure to audit Google India Digital Service Pvt Ltd and take any steps against it despite its acts of flagrant and serious non-compliance of applicable laws.

It also alleged that Google Pay is further violating the UPI procedural guidelines by sharing personal sensitive user data in complete breach of binding regulatory guidelines.

"That the procedural guidelines governing `Google Pay` prohibits sharing of user data by TPA and cast a specific liability on the PSP banks to ensure that no such data is shared by TPA in contravention to the applicable norms and law," the plea said.

However, it said that Google Pay by way of "Combined Google Pay Terms" is openly sharing it with its own group companies as well as third parties and is also monetizing the same.

The plea also claimed that Google Digital Service Pvt Ltd, vide its product `Google Pay`, seeks to access the location of the users in the name of security and uses the same to gain revenue from offering highly targeted or personalized advertising opportunities to advertisers.
Wisconsin governor Tony Evers ordered 125 National Guard members to the city of Kenosha on Monday, following riots that erupted after police shot a black man while responding to a domestic violence call on Sunday.

The guard members will be charged with guarding infrastructure and making sure our firefighters and others involved are protected, Evers told reporters.

Video of the incident showed police shooting Jacob Blake in the back while responding to the call, and drew immediate condemnation from Evers. Full details of the incident have not yet been released.

At a press conference on Monday, Kenosha mayor John Antaramian and various community representatives called for all demonstrations to be peaceful.

When moments like this come, we have to come together to make it better, Tim Mahone, a board member of the philanthropic Mahone Foundation based in Kenosha, said through tears. Please dont destroy our community.

Demonstrators gathered at the site of the shooting soon after the incident, and rioters have set fires on the street where the shooting took place and have attacked police officers. A fire was also started near the Kenosha city courthouse.

Things have been very heated, tons of damage to cop cars, an officer was actually knocked out, an observer told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The city of Minneapolis suffered millions of dollars in damages, including burned and looted buildings, from riots in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. Minnesota governor Tim Walz called the National Guard into Minneapolis on May 28, three days after Floyds death.

More from National Review
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 21:22:22|Editor: huaxia

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TEHRAN, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) has agreed to provide "conditional access" to the locations requested by the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA), Tasnim news agency reported Monday.

Iran was not initially opposed to the IAEA's demand for inspection of two locations in Iran, respectively near Shahreza city in the central province of Isfahan and near the capital Tehran, Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the AEOI, said Sunday.

However, the IAEA's questions must be based on serious evidence and documents instead of "mere allegations," he noted.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the IAEA, is scheduled to arrive in Tehran on Monday to meet with the Iranian authorities.

During his visit, Grossi will address the cooperation of Iran with the IAEA, "in particular Iran's provision of access to the agency's inspectors to requested locations," an IAEA statement said Saturday. Enditem
Lukashenko on Sunday afternoon arrived in the presidential palace sporting an assault vest and holding an automatic rifle without a magazine, along with his 15-year-old son Nikolay in full tactical gear.

Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin has warned of the possible use of army to disperse protesters rallying under the flags he claims were once used by Nazi troops.

"We can't watch rallies being organized in sacred places today under flags once used by Nazis when they carried out there massacres of Belarusians, Russians, Jews, and people of other nationalities. Therefore, from now on, we're taking these locations under our protection," reads Khrenin's statement posted by the ministry's press service via Telegram.

The statement was unusually politicized for a defense agency and emotionally charged through caps lock.

It came as tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Belarusian capital Minsk on Sunday, August 23, as citizens continue challenging the results of the latest presidential election that gave Alexander Lukashenko another term in the top office after 26 years of continuous rule.

Meanwhile, a helicopter brought to the presidential palace in Minsk Alexander Lukashenko sporting an assault vest and holding an automatic rifle without a magazine, along with his 15-year-old son Nikolay in full tactical gear, also armed.

In a series of videos spun by Telegram channels on Sunday night, Lukashenko was first shown flying over Minsk, landing near the presidential palace, and then approaching to and addressing riot police officers with the words of praise for their support  met with massive applause.

"We will deal with them," Lukashenko was heard saying in front of the police, obviously meaning protesters.

"We're with you till the end," officers were heard telling Lukashenko.

Belarus protests: background

On August 9, presidential elections were held in Belarus. The country's Central Election Commission announced the final election results. In particular, 80.1% of voters supported incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko, 10.1% voted for Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, 1.67% for Anna Kanopatskaya, 1.2% for Andrey Dmitriev, and 1.14% for Sergei Cherechnya. Some 4.59% voted against all candidates.

Thousands of residents of Belarus took to the streets to protest what they believe is a rigged vote count. Riot police violently cracked down on protesters. Belarus' Ministry of Internal Affairs said about 7,000 protesters had been detained in different cities since August 9. On the evening of August 13, the authorities started to release detainees.

On August 14, the European Union announced it did not recognize the outcome of the presidential elections in Belarus. On August 19 leaders reportedly agreed on sanctions to be introduced over election rigging and violence against protesters.

The March of Freedom, the largest protest in the history of Belarus, took place on August 16 in Minsk. Hundreds of thousands of people joined in.

On August 20, the Prosecutor General's Office opened a criminal probe into the attempt by the opposition to "seize power".

Lukashenko has repeatedly claimed "foreign interference" in the election and the external efforts to foment protests. He spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin who had promised him comprehensive assistance upon request.
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Proponents of Senate Bill 793 (SB 793) held a press conference today denouncing civil rights leaders who have spoken out against the racist law that would single out and criminalize Black smokers who use menthol cigarettes. Just this past weekend, the evidence of 'unintended consequences' was shown yet again as another American city explodes with protests over the killing of an unarmed Black man.

SB 793 inexplicably provides exemptions for wealthy cigar and pipe smokers and other ethnic communities who smoke tobacco-flavored hookah pipes  but not for Black smokers, nearly nine out of 10 of who prefer menthol.

"Tone deaf liberal white lawmakers are trying to push through a tobacco flavor ban that discriminates against Black people. It's shameful," said Reverend K.W. Tulloss, president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles and co-founder of Neighborhood FORWARD.

Hundreds of Black leaders have expressed deep concern over SB 793. In the course of the debate over this bill, many pressing and critical issues have been raised concerning both the public health and the criminal justice implications of a ban on cigarettes that are preferred by people of color.

Gwendolyn Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, who was killed by New York police officers for selling single cigarettes, lent her voice to oppose SB 793."It gives police another excuse to harass and harm any Black man, woman or child they choose," said Carr. "Our leaders should know better. A bad law has consequences for mothers like me."

"Our collective primary interest is protecting the public, specifically communities of color, from abuse at the hands of both corporate influences and law enforcement," said Tulloss. "It is unjust to expect communities of color to choose between greater public health protections and basic civil rights. We do not accept the premise that we must choose between the two, that these interests are mutually exclusive, or that this debate is zero-sum."

Neighborhood FORWARD continues to push for a meeting with both Governor Newsom and Speaker Anthony Rendon to voice concerns over the profound impact SB 793 will have on the Black community's small business owners, who have already been devastated by the COVID-19 global pandemic and lack of funding received from the Paycheck Protection Program under the CARES Act.

Rev. Tulloss will be joined by other opponents of SB 793 today at 4 p.m. PDT at the City of Refuge  South Parking Lot. All media is invited to attend.

CONTACT: Mariah Kerns, [email protected], 314-440-3605

SOURCE Neighborhood FORWARD
A rediscovered sculpture of two people sunbathing has finally gone back on display at Waterloo station after an absence of 70 years.

The Sunbathers, created by Hungarian artist Peter Laszlo Peri, was originally placed at the entrance to the tube station to welcome visitors to the Festival of Britain in 1951.

The event, including the commissioned public artworks, was organised by Clement Attlee's Labour government to boost the nation's morale after the war and bring culture to the masses.

The artwork was then thought to have been lost, but was later found painted pink in the grounds of a hotel in Blackheath after Historic England held an exhibition at Somerset House highlighting missing post-war art.

A successful crowdfunding campaign allowed the sculpture to be restored to its original terracotta colours after 15,000 was raised.

A number of Peri's artworks are on display on buildings around London, including a tribute to children killed in the Blitz on Darley House in Vauxhall.
DANBURY  Naugatuck Valley Community College will not open its Danbury campus for the next two weeks due to a spike in coronavirus cases in the city.

The campus will be closed and classes will be held online from Monday until Sept. 6. The closure does not affect the main Waterbury campus.

The decision comes two days after Western Connecticut State University told students they could not return to the residence halls for at least two weeks, with classes being held only online.

Danbury has seen a rise in new coronavirus cases, with the state putting the city on a COVID-19 alert on Friday night.

The community college decided not to open the campus in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus and on the recommendation of the commissioner of the Department of Public Health.

This decision was made out of an abundance of caution, to protect the health of all students, faculty, and staff, the college said in a statement.

Students and faculty will meet virtually through the Blackboard platform at regularly scheduled days and times starting on Wednesday, when classes were typically planned to start.

We understand that delaying the on-ground learning experience is inconvenient and disappointing to students and their families, the college said in a statement. However, it is our responsibility to follow state recommendations to keep our students, faculty, and staff as safe as possible while doing our part to prevent further spread in the community.
Washington: A NASA researcher and Texas A&M University professor has been charged with accepting federal grant money while hiding work he was doing for an university established by the Chinese government as well as his affiliation with Chinese-owned companies.

Zhengdong Cheng faces charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and false statements, according to a criminal complaint released by the Justice Department on Monday. He was arrested on Sunday.

The Department of Justice seal. Credit:Bloomberg

The case against Cheng is part of a pattern of Justice Department prosecutions against researchers at American universities who are accused of concealing their professional relationships with Chinese universities.

The Trump administration has been particularly concerned that professors could exploit their ties to China, and their participation in talent recruitment programs, to steal intellectual property for Beijing's economic benefit.
Before making the decision to file a claim to their insurers, drivers should carefully analyze if it's worth it. Drivers who are not at fault and suffered minor damages should avoid filling claims to prevent their premiums to increase substantially, said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director

Compare-autoinsurance.org has launched a new blog post that presents how car insurance premiums will change for a policyholder who files a claim after an accident.

For more info and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.org/car-insurance-after-an-accident-how-are-premiums-affected/

Before making a claim to the insurance provider, drivers should consider a few things before making this move. According to a recent study, drivers who make a single auto insurance claim saw their premiums increase on average by 44.1%. Also, the reported premium increases werent for individuals who have a history of unsafe driving. Even after a single claim, premium increases can be significant.

Drivers who want to file a claim after an accident should consider the following:



How much the premiums will rise. The increase drivers can expect to see on their insurance premiums after an at-fault accident varies by location, driving record, vehicle, and the insurance company. Drivers can expect anywhere from a 23% to 73% increase in premiums in year one after an at-fault accident.

Insurance premium increase by state. Some states report costlier increases than others. Drivers living in states such as North Carolina, Massachusetts, Texas, New Hampshire, and California can expect to see their rates increase after an accident from 57.3% to 63.1%. On the other hand, drivers from Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Maryland will see their rates go up anywhere from 21.5% to 30.6%. Increases in the premium paid can last as long three to five years after an at-fault accident if the damages to the vehicle exceed over $2,000.

How to lower the premiums. Be prepared and purchase accident forgiveness. Not all companies offer this, but those that do will give the policyholders a one at-fault accident forgiveness with no increase in premium if they fit certain criteria. Other methods involve raising the deductible and improving the credit score. Furthermore, policyholders should avoid filing claims for small things after they have filed a claim on an at-fault accident.

Which claims affect the premiums the most. Bodily injury claims can cause the premiums to spike the most. A single bodily injury claim will result in an average premium increase of 48.6%.

What if the policyholder isnt at fault. Whether or not the rates will increase after an accident in which the policyholders were not at fault is insurance provider specific. Some companies will not increase the premium for drivers involved in their first accidents, but if they suffer several accidents, even if they are not at fault, it could result in an increased premium.

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Facebook has agreed to pay tax its French operations over a 10-year period from 2009, and to pay 50 percent more tax in the current year. The dispute between France and the United States on the digital giants tax had escalated to the extent that the United States in July unveiled heavy import duties on France. Many American technology firms have their EU headquarters in low-tax-regime countries. (Photo | Flickr - Jimmy Baikovicius)

Paris: US social media giant Facebook on Monday said it had agreed with the French government to pay 106 million euros ($125 million) in back taxes for its French operations over a 10-year period from 2009, and to pay 50 percent more tax in the current year.

The payment by American digital giants of tax on revenues in the country in which they are accrued has been the subject of a longstanding conflict between France and the United States. Many have their EU headquarters in low-tax-regime countries.

We take our tax obligations seriously, pay the taxes we owe in all the markets in which we operate and work closely with tax administrations around the world to ensure compliance with all applicable tax laws and resolve any disputes, a Facebook France spokesperson said in a statement.

The statement said that since 2018, Facebook changed its sales structure so that income from advertisers supported by our teams in France is registered in this country.

This year we are paying 8.46 million euros ($9.98 million) in income tax, an increase of almost 50 percent compared to last year, it said.

We have also entered into an agreement with the tax authorities covering the years 2009-2018, under which we will make a payment of 106 million euros.

The dispute between France and the United States on the digital giants tax has escalated to the extent that the United States in July unveiled heavy import duties on France.

The office of US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer found Frances digital services tax was discriminatory and unfairly targets US digital technology companies, and said it would impose punitive duties of 25 percent on $1.3 billion worth of French products.

But it will hold off on collecting the fees to allow time for the dispute to be resolved.

Big EU countries say the so-called GAFAGoogle, Apple, Facebook and Amazonare unfairly exploiting tax rules that let them declare profits in low-tax havens, depriving governments of a fair share of their fiscal payments.

In the meantime, France, Britain, Spain, Italy and others have imposed taxes on the largest digital companies.

US officials have slammed these moves as discriminating against American firms, and say any new levies should come only as part of a broader overhaul of international tax rules.

In January, 137 countries agreed to negotiate a deal on how to tax tech multinationals by the end of 2020, under the auspices of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

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Businesses which were hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic but have bounced back should expect to be excluded from the extended JobKeeper scheme.

The federal government has softened plans to extend industrial relations exemptions to companies no longer eligible for JobKeeper, and plans to exclude those which have fully recovered from the pandemic crisis.

The backdown comes after the Australian Financial Review revealed a third of listed companies on JobKeeper recorded profit growths.

They included Premier Investments, the company that owns popular retailers Smiggle, Portmans, Just Jeans and Peter Alexander, despite temporarily laying off 9,000 staff for two months in the height of the pandemic.

Companies hit hard by the pandemic but have since recorded profit growths may not excluded from JobKeeper exemptions. Pictured are queues outside a Melbourne Centrelink in the height of the pandemic

Finalising the last details of JobKeeper 2.0 will be high on the federal government's agenda when parliament resumes this week.

Labor has called on the government to abolish plans to lower the job subsidy rate of the revamped scheme in the wake of Melbourne's Stage 4 lockdown which has forced thousands of businesses to close their doors.

The $1,500 per fortnight JobKeeper rate will be replaced a two-tiered system with a $750 subsidy for those who worked fewer than 20 hours a week before the crisis struck, and $1,200 for all others.

The government wants to include industrial relations exemptions which allowed companies eligible JobKeeper to change staff hours and duties without breaching the Fair Work Act.

It proposed the new legislation would also apply Fair Work Act exemptions to all employers who qualified for the first round of JobKeeper but not the second and still needed ongoing flexibility.

Some companies on JobKeeper recorded profit growths included Premier Investments, the company behind popular brands such as Smiggle (pictured)

The government appears to have softened its stance following strong opposition from the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

Businesses were eligible for the original JobKeeper scheme if they could show they suffered a 30 per cent plunge in revenue in early 2020 compared with the same month in 2019.

Under the revised JobKeeper 2.0, businesses with an annual turnover of less than $1 billion must demonstrate turnover has dropped more than 30 per cent between this September quarter and the same quarter last year.

A source told the Australian Financial Review businesses that failed the 30 per cent turnover test but no longer qualified for JobKeeper would be subject to a new, turnover test to determine whether they were still financially 'distressed''

They would then qualify for Fair Work Act exemptions but remain ineligible for JobKeeper.

Not all businesses that qualified for the initial round of JobKeeper will be eligible for the extended scheme which begins in late September. Pictured is a Centrelink queue at Southport on the Gold Coast in March

Starting September 28, the six month JobKeeper extension until the end of March will cost an additional $16.6billion.

The legislation would scale back JobKeeper payments from $1,500 to $1,200 at the end of September, and then down to $1000 from January to March.

Labor frontbencher Julie Collins called for the JobSeeker subsidy to be retained at existing rates for six months

'The decisions made to the rates were made prior to the outbreak in Victoria. It is up to the government to consider whether the new rates are sufficient or not.'

ACTU secretary Sally McManus agreed.

'We would urge them to reconsider that because for quite a long time we are going to be in a situation where there's high unemployment and obviously with the Melbourne lockdown, people need that support and they're going to need that support in an ongoing way,' she added.

Premier Investments temporarily stood down 9,000 staff from its retail brands, including Smiggle. Pictured is a closed store in Melbourne in the height of the pandemic

But Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has refused to back down and is focused on passing legislation to reduce and extend JobKeeper wage subsidies and the JobSeeker dole payment.

'That's obviously important to give businesses and working Australians who rely on these payments certainty that the arrangements remain in place,' he told reporters.

'At some point we need to get back into a situation where viable, profitable businesses pay for the wages of their employees out of their income rather than on the basis of taxpayers' support.

The original JobKeeper of $1,500 a fortnight for 3.5 million workers cost $70billion, revised down from $130billion.
Editors Note: A previous version of the story incorrectly stated Worcester police had made arrests in the connection with the Aug. 16 shooting.

Police in Worcester have issued arrest warrants two men in connection with the death of a man who was shot in the head on last week, authorities said Monday.

Warrants for Robert Dupuis, 30, of Worcester, and Malek Matos, 34, of Worcester were issued Monday in connection to a fatal shooting on Cambridge Street on Aug. 16, police said. Each man was charged with a host of gun-related offenses, but neither was charged with murder.

They face charges of assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon, armed assault with intent to rob, assault and battery by discharging a firearm, unlawful carrying of a firearm, unlawful carrying of a loaded firearm, possession of ammunition without a FID and use of a firearm in committing a felony.

On Aug. 16, police responded to 50 Cambridge St. for a report of a man shot in the hand, authorities said. When officers arrived, they found Dupuis suffering from a gunshot injury to his hand, police said. He was transported to the hospital, treated and released.

Soon after, a male, who police didnt publicly identify, arrived at the hospital after being shot in the head. The man later died at the hospital, police said.

After an investigation, police obtained arrest warrants for Dupuis and Matos.
For the last 21 years, 47-year-old Surender Singh travels from Haryanas Sonipat to north-west Delhis Adarsh Nagar in a DTC bus spending nearly two hours every day with one motive in mind - to help children from marginalised families get a better education.

Singh, a primary teacher at a North Delhi Municipal Corporation school in Sarai Pillai thala in Adarsh Nagar, is among the 47 teachers selected for the national teachers award 2020. He is also a mentor teacher with 11 North Delhi Municipal Corporation-run schools under him. He is known for his innovative idea of modifying the nibs of fountain pens to help children improve their handwriting in their initial days at school.

A majority of the students who come to us are from very poor families and they do not get any guidance at home. When they come to us, they dont even know how to hold a pencil. To help them write better, I came up with this idea of changing the nibs of fountain pens and make them sharp as wooden pens that we would use earlier with ink. I cut the nib with a pair of scissors and rub them on a stone to sharpen their edges. I also distribute ink pots to students regularly. It helped them a lot in improving their handwriting. Teachers from many other schools adopted my idea, he said.

Surender Singh, a primary teacher at a North Delhi Municipal Corporation school in Adarsh Nagar, is among the 47 teachers selected for the national teachers award 2020.

Also read: UP government teachers team up to help colleagues in tough times

Singh had also helped hundreds of his students to crack the entrance exam of Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalayas (popularly known as RPVVs) - a system of schools run by the Directorate of Education (DoE) for class 6. I hire a bus and take them to the entrance centres as well, he said.

When asked if he does not get demotivated since there are regular complaints of delay in distribution of salaries at the North Delhi Municipal Corporation-run schools, he said, Its definitely problematic for us all but we cant stop working. We have a huge responsibility as teachers.

Ira Singhal, deputy commissioner of north civic body, said, Its a huge moment of pride for the corporation. We are hoping for more teachers from municipal corporation schools to get recognised in future.

Jyoti Arora, principal of Mount Abu Public School in Rohini sector B-8, is the only one who won the award from across the CBSE-affiliated schools in the country this year. The 51-year-old has been working in the education sector for the last 27 years.

Arora is known for several innovative community service projects including converting an old school van into a 3D lab. We have installed a 3D screen on the bus with content on health, science and hygiene. The bus goes to nearby MCD schools and slum areas accompanied by some teachers and gives a digital exposure to kids there. The kids in municipal schools and slum areas are deprived of technology. It gives immense satisfaction to see those kids wearing 3D glasses and watching content on day-to-day life things such as photosynthesis and cleanliness, she said.

Besides, Arora also conducts several programmes on sustainable development goals in her schools and has also written books on healthy food habits for kids. With every recognition comes responsibility. The award will give us the motivation to do more in future, she added.

The Union Education Ministry, earlier known as Human Resource Development Ministry, gives national teachers awards every year recognising their achievements in the field of education.

The teachers apply for the award online and get shortlisted at three levels - district, state and national. The department of school education and literacy of the education ministry constitutes an independent jury at the national level to select the awardees. This year, 153 teachers were shortlisted and 47 of them were selected for the award.

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Follow up to WMCC, India-China military commanders set to meet

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 24: The military commanders of India and China are likely to meet soon to follow up on the recent diplomatic level talks that were held last week.

While no date has been fixed as yet, sources tell OneIndia that there is a likelihood of the meeting being held sometime this week.

The Chinese troops have disengaged and moved back from the Galwan Valley and Hot Springs. However they are yet to vacate the Pangong Tso Finger areas.

Out at two, still at three: Why are the India-China talks not moving forward

Sources said that the Chinese are yet to vacate Depsang and Gogra. A read out by the Ministry of External Affairs said that both sides agreed to resolve the outstanding issues in an expeditious manner and in accordance with the existing protocols. "The two sides were in agreement that restoration of peace and tranquillity in the border areas would be essential for the overall development of bilateral relations," the read out also said.

Further the two sides which held the Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) agreed to hold more diplomatic and military level talks to ensure that there is complete disengagement.

Even after the last meeting the MEA had said that both sides agreed that an early and complete disengagement of troops along the LAC in accordance with bilateral agreement and protocols was essential for overall development of bilateral relations.

It may be recalled that the seventh meeting of the WMCC was held last month. Both sides had agreed on complete disengagement along the LAC at eastern Ladakh. The talks are headed by the joint secretary level officials from both sides.

The Chinese have not disengaged in the Finger Area, Depsang Plains and Gogra despite multiple rounds of talks. The Chinese have been camping in the Finger Areas for the past three months and have been constructing bunkers and sangars.

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Story first published: Monday, August 24, 2020, 8:38 [IST]
MOSCOW -- For almost a decade, Syarhey Kozlovich had been employed by the sprawling apparatus of Belarusian state TV. From his debut as a lowly member of the technical team in 2011, he worked his way up to becoming a presenter on Belarus-1, the country's main television channel.

The day after the fraud-marred August 9 election that extended the 26-year rule of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, however, Kozlovich decided he'd had enough. Thousands of people, among them his friends, had taken to the streets of Minsk to protest the results, only to be met with a violent police crackdown.

In an Instagram post, Kozlovich announced he was quitting. "This was a childhood dream that I devoted 10 years to," he wrote on August 11. "But yesterday I sat in the studio for the final time."

Less than two weeks later, Kozlovich's position had been filled, as had the jobs of numerous other state journalists across Belarus who had quit or been fired for supporting the opposition movement.

The jobs weren't filled by fellow Belarusians, though, but by state TV journalists from Russia, which has backed Lukashenka and was now apparently assisting his efforts to retain power.

Belarus's government channels are used to lauding the policies and pronouncements of Lukashenka, the former collective-farm boss who has ruled the small post-Soviet state since 1994. State news agencies have for years been issuing press releases expressing similar sentiments.

Lukashenka's government initially denied the reports that Russian journalists had arrived to guide coverage, but the atmosphere on state media soon changed.

With opposition protests convulsing the country almost daily, gone were the staid updates about harvest yields or the latest coronavirus figures. Slick propaganda videos slamming protesters as agents of the West began appearing.

"Paid-off scum who refer to themselves as the people are ready for $20 to sell their own mothers," read the text in one such clip posted by the state news agency BelTA, superimposed over images of angry mobs wreaking havoc. "Now they want to return to our streets, to dismantle everything we've spent so many years building."

The arrival of journalists from Russia isn't the same thing as Moscow's dispatch of "little green men" who mysteriously appeared in Crimea prior to Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014, and later turned out to be Russian troops in disguise.

But, critics say, they, and the media messaging they're bringing, are a clear indication of how Moscow hopes to strengthen Lukashenka's position.

"Two planes filled with Russian journalists arrived to fill our places in exchange for high salaries," Alyona Martinovskaya, a journalist at Belarus-3, told the Tut.by news agency on August 19.

Crisis In Belarus Read our ongoing coverage as Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka continues his brutal crackdown on NGOs, activists, and independent media following the August 2020 presidential election, widely seen as fraudulent.

The revelation resounded with observers both in Belarus and abroad amid widespread questions about the Kremlin's reaction to Belarus's unrest. It's also stoked speculation over what other moves Russia might take to shore up Lukashenka's government or even help stamp out the protest movement.

In an interview with RFE/RL, Kozlovich said state TV's coverage of the protests were for him the "final straw." "I had a morning shift live on air, where we were supposed to discuss events that had happened the previous night," he said. "I understood that this information, even if not utterly fabricated, was nonetheless so biased that it presented a completely different picture of events."

It wasn't just state TV that was mobilizing in the effort to rally support for Lukashenka.

On the Telegram messenger app, the channel of Lukashenka's press pool launched a series of "stickers"-- simple images that users can attach to a message--that profess support for Lukashenka's campaign to crush the opposition or even defend harsh police tactics.

The information offensive appeared to coincide with measures to restrict the spread of competing facts.

Prior to August 9 election, at least 100 foreign journalists were denied accreditation to enter the country and cover events, according to the country's journalism association. Several foreign reporters who did enter have been beaten and deported from the country, often slapped with a five-year entry ban.

On August 17, Komsomolskaya pravda, a popular Moscow-based tabloid that also publishes a Belarus edition, planned to place on its cover a photograph of the largest opposition protest in the country's history, when an estimated 200,000 gathered the previous evening.

But the printing house announced that its printing press broke, and the edition never came out. A few days later, according to multiple reports, the government began blocking several dozen opposition-friendly websites.

On August 21, Lukashenka finally confirmed that he had "asked the Russians" to send "two or three teams" of Russian journalists to work in the state media holding company that includes Kozlovich's Belarus-1 channel.

In an appearance before factory workers in the town of Dzyarzhynsk, Lukashenka said the imported journalists' job was to replace those employees who had "jumped onto the streets and begun protesting."

One of the teams would join his presidential press pool, he said, adding, "Let our youth see how they work."

With reporting by Current Time
Days after the government announced a policy change to encourage self-reliance in the defence sector, a Defence Research and Development Organisation team on Monday told the government that 108 systems and subsystems would be delivered by the Indian industry within the next 18 months. The list of 108 items that the industry would design, develop and manufacture was handed over to Defence Minister Rajnath Singh by DRDO secretary Dr G Satheesh Reddy.

This initiative will pave the way for Indian Defence industry to develop many technologies towards building an AtmaNirbhar Bharat, defence minister Rajnath Singh tweeted after the meeting with the DRDO delegation.

Singh said he had been apprised about the systems and subsystems that had been identified for development by Indian industry. The list, reviewed by HT, includes mini and micro UAVs, mine laying and marking equipment, armoured engineering reconnaissance vehicle and fuel system components for aircrafts.

The DRDO will provide its support to industries in this development process, the minister said.

Of the 108 items, 68 items would be developed before the end of this year. The remaining 40 items are targeted to be manufactured by the end of 2021.

The government had earlier this month gone public with plans to restrict imports in the defence sector over the next five years, putting out a list of 101 items that would to be produced within the country by 2024. Singh had then made it clear that the embargo on imports would kick in between 2020 and 2024.

The decision was taken in consultation with the defence industry. The list of weapons and systems to be placed on the restricted import list includes artillery guns, missile destroyers, ship-borne cruise missiles and long-range land attack cruise missiles.`
MUMBAI: As the Central Bureau of Investigation is probing the death case of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, it has now emerged that celebrity manager Disha Salian's phone had remained active even after her death.

Salian, the former manager of Sushant, was found dead under mysterious conditions on June 8, six days before Sushant's death. According to the Mumbai Police, Disha had committed suicide by jumping off a building.

Now, sources close to developments in Disha Salian's death have claimed that her phone remained active for more than a week even after her death. As per the sources, several internet calls were placed from Disha's phone between June 9 and June 17. However, it remains unclear who used her phone after her death.

Zee News got access to Disha's call log which shows that on June 6, two days before her death, three calls were placed from her phone. Whereas on June 7, two separate calls were placed from her phone, at around 12:02 am and 12:57 am.

On June 7, Disha had made at least 36 calls, including a phone call to her friend Ekta, at around 12:10.

According to an eyewitness to the case, while the Mumbai Police had reached the spot after Disha's death within a few minutes of the incident, her phone was not confiscated by the officials.
3 Attacks in Colombia Kill at Least 17

By VOA News August 23, 2020

At least 17 people were killed in three attacks across Colombia in regions contested by criminal groups, drug traffickers, and dissidents of the demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.

Officials and local media reported on Saturday that the attacks occurred within 24 hours in three Colombian provinces.

Colombia's President Ivan Duque condemned the violence.

"The rejection of violence is because it mainly hurts the young people of Colombia," he said. "It hurts that in recent years we have seen that the main victims of violence are youth. It hurts that in many communities these armed groups have always tried to recruit children."

The attacks in the Columbian provinces of Cauca and Narino claimed the life of 12 people, six in each, while the attack in the province of Arauca left five people dead.

Just a week ago, eight people were killed by an unidentified armed group in a contested drug trafficking area in Narino. Five other people were killed on August 11 in a neighborhood in the eastern part of the city of Cali.

More than 260,000 people have been killed and millions displaced during Colombia's decades-long drug trafficking conflicts that have involved drug gangs, other criminal groups and former members of FARC who reject the Duque's 2016 peace deal.

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The Kerala Assembly Monday passed a "unanimous resolution" demanding the withdrawal of Union Cabinet's decision to lease out the international airport here to Adani Enterprises Ltd. Moving the resolution, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said the Centre should re-examine its decision and the operation and management of the airport be handed over to the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) in which the state government has stake.

Despite the state government agreeing to give the amount quoted by Adani Enterprises, the Centre's decision to privatise the airport cannot be justified, he said. Though the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, Ramesh Chennithala, supported the resolution against privatisation of the airport, he slammed the government saying it had "double standards" on the issue.

He said the government attacked the Adani group in public, but had secretly helped them by consulting a law firm close to it and alleged that there was a "criminal conspiracy". Chennithala also wanted to know why CIAL (Cochin International Airport Ltd), the airport company had not been appointed as consultant.

Also read: Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri explains why Adani Group got Kerala airport lease

"A conspiracy has been held to help the Adani group," Chennithala alleged and said, "Keeping in mind the state's interests, the Opposition is supporting the motion and we agree with the spirit of the resolution." When the chief minister stood up to speak again, the opposition benches raised voice in protest.

Vijayan said the state government's stand on the airport is an "open book". The firm had only done "legal vetting" and had no role in deciding the amount quoted by the state in the bidding process, he said. After the brief discussion, Speaker P Sreeramakrishnan declared that the "resolution has been passed unanimously".

However, the BJP, which had organised a protest outside the Assembly demanding the chief minister's resignation in the gold smuggling case, alleged the resolution was not "unanimous" as their lone representative in the House, O Rajagopal was "not allowed to speak". "But, we are with the people of the state in the airport matter," BJP state chief K Surendran told the media.

Also read: Kerala opposes Trivandrum airport transfer to Adani group, 'will not cooperate'

Police, meanwhile, removed the BJP workers who squatted in front of the Assembly gate in protest. The all-party meeting called by the Chief minister on August 20 had decided to move a resolution against the Centre's decision and to demand its withdrawal. Vijayan had twice written to the Prime Minister seeking the withdrawal of the decision. The Centre had decided to lease out airports at Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram through public-private partnership (PPP) mode.

Adani Enterprises had won the rights to run six airports--Lucknow, Ahmedabad,Jaipur, Mangaluru, Thiruvananthapuram and Gywahati through the PPP model after a competitive bidding process in February 2019.

Also read: Cabinet approves leasing out of Jaipur, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram airports to Adani Group

Also read: DGCA to inspect airports hit by heavy rains after Kerala plane crash
Former senior intelligence operative and now Iraqs Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, spent last week in Washington trying to maintain his exceptionally dangerous balancing act between Iran and the U.S. On the one hand, Iraq has a multi-layered relationship with Middle East powerhouse, Iran, enforced by Tehran through its ongoing on-the-ground presence of political, economic, and military proxies. On the other hand, Iraq has a shorter but nonetheless highly eventful history with the worlds number one superpower, the U.S., which demands an increase in its own on-the-ground presence in the country, particularly relating to its oil and gas sectors, in return for not sanctioning Iraq and giving it financial support.

The immediate concern of al-Kadhimi is to secure sufficient funding from the U.S. to avert another round of extensive protests, violence, bloodshed, and death. The latest short-but-disastrous oil price war instigated by the Saudis pushed Iraqs financing firmly into the red, with its oil-related revenues falling by nearly 50 per cent. Its finances were further negatively impacted by the enduring effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and by ongoing arguments with the government of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in the north over oil-for-budget disbursements. These factors forced Baghdad into proposing delaying foreign debt payments, introducing salary cuts of 60 per cent for various state sector employees, and reducing all non-essential spending.

It also pushed Iraq into producing much more oil than its OPEC+ production quota, meaning that it will have to make up for this overshoot by producing less. This, in turn, will reduce its already-decimated state revenues. This cash crunch could not have come at a worse time as, in the coming few weeks, al-Kadhimi needs need to come up with at least IQD12 trillion (US$10 billion) just to pay the next two months salaries of more than four million employees, retirees, state beneficiaries, and the food relief for low-income families. These groups together constitute the majority of households in Iraq and it is believed in senior Iraq government circles that any failure to pay any of these obligations could result in the sort of widespread protests and bloodshed that occurred at the end of last year. Related: Saudi Energy Ministry To Help Build $500 Billion Smart City

It is little wonder, then, that al-Kadhimi was doing the rounds in Washington last week looking for money and willing to promise the U.S. anything in return. Top of the list is to put more distance  economically, militarily, and politically  between Iraq and Iran. Matters in this regard had reached yet another crunch point for the U.S. only recently, with the flip-flopping of Iraqs dealings with Iran that brought Baghdad to the brink of being sanctioned by the U.S. itself. Specifically, having looked on as Iran was able to sell its oil in vast quantities through Iraqs export channels, launch attacks against U.S. military targets in Iraq, and provide financing routes for money into and out of Iran the U.S. had finally had enough in April.

Instead of the rolling 90- or 120- day waivers granted by Washington for Iraq to continue to import Iranian electricity and natural gas in the past, the U.S. granted a waiver of just 30 days, its shortest ever. At the same time, new sanctions were announced against 20 Iran- and Iraq-based entities that were cited as funnelling money to Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps elite Quds Force. To avoid wider sanctions at that point, al-Kadhimi promised the U.S. that it would allow a raft of in-principle agreed contracts with U.S. companies to finally go ahead, with a substantial presence of U.S. security personnel on the ground to safeguard these interests. This, the argument ran, would help to put distance between Iraq and Iran and this was a key reason why Iraq received a new 120-day waiver in May from the U.S. for its continued importation of electricity and gas from Iran.

Just ahead of al-Kadhimis arrival in Washington last week, then, five U.S. companies  Chevron, General Electric (GE), Honeywell International, Baker Hughes, and Stellar Energy, signed agreements with the Iraqi government for deals aimed at boosting Iraqs energy independence from Iran, worth at least US$8 billion. Among the most noteworthy of these, according to the relevant statements, is that Chevron is to examine the potential for exploration work in the long-sidelined Nassiriya oilfield, estimated to hold about 4.4 billion barrels of crude. GE, meanwhile, said it had signed two new agreements with the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity valued at over US$1.2 billion to undertake maintenance programs across key power plants in the country and to bolster its transmission network. Honeywell also said that it is negotiating with Iraq in a deal that would involve the development of the Ratawi oil field, the construction of a gas processing hub, and new electricity generation. Related: General Haftar Rejects Libyan Truce, Calls It Marketing Stunt

That this last deal may well involve the participation of Saudi Arabia at an oil field lying just 100 kilometres from the Iranian border is reason enough to conjecture that it will absolutely not go ahead. This is despite the deal apparently being a key condition of the current Presidential Administration for the extension of Iraqs next waiver on importing Iranian electricity when the current one expires in September. In this context, Iraq has a long history of promising the U.S. one thing and then either completely ignoring what it said or doing the exact opposite, which was the broader reason why the U.S.s patience ran out in April. As sources in Washington close to the Presidential Administration spoken to by OilPrice.com in April put it: Weve been down this road before with Pakistan  [with] the government pretending to help in the fight against AQ [Al-Qaeda] but at the same time the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] offering all the help it could to [Osama] bin Laden and were not playing that game again.

The parallels between Iraq and Pakistan from the U.S. perspective go beyond just money, as U.S. President Donald Trump made clear recently. At the beginning of January, after Iranian surface-to-surface missiles hit two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. troops, Trump said that he would impose sanctions directly on Iraq if the U.S. military was forced out of the country by further such incidents. Even after this, though, 30 107-mm Russian-made Katyusha rockets were fired at the U.S. allied Camp Taji military base north of Baghdad, killing three service members. This attack was in the same style as the rocket attacks on 4 January on the U.S.s Balad Air Base near Baghdad and on the Green Zone, with both reportedly being Iran-sponsored retaliation for the U.S.s assassination of Irans General Qassem Soleimani. There have been at least 15 further attacks on U.S. military and neo-military personnel in Iraq by Iran proxies this year alone, according to U.S. military sources.

For these and other reasons, there is no reason to expect any other of these new deals with U.S. companies to come to fruition, any more than ExxonMobils much-vaunted and much-delayed participation did in Iraqs crucial Common Seawater Supply Project (CSSP). ExxonMobil was brought into the CSSP in 2010 at a time when Baghdad was looking to raise its oil production capacity to 12 million bpd by 2018, to overtake Saudi Arabias output. After various false starts, ExxonMobil withdrew from the project but the real reason why is instructive as to why any project by an established U.S. company will not go ahead in Iraq.

The central problem for ExxonMobil was always that the three key risk/reward elements of cohesion, security, and streamlining in the contract were profoundly unbalanced, a senior source who works closely with Iraqs Oil Ministry told OilPrice.com. Cohesion means that the facilities are completed in full and in order, security relates to the personnel and to the soundness of the business and legal practices involved, and streamlining means that any deal should continue, regardless of any change in government in Iraq, he added. Problems first arose for ExxonMobil over the approval of contracts for service work, obtaining visas for workers, and customs clearance for vital technical equipment, he said. Historically, in Iraq, such problems could only be fixed by payments to various officials connected to these areas, as has recently been shown up even in something as important as the F-16 program at the Balad Air Base, he added.

This feeds into the other elements of the risk/reward matrix that are susceptible to corruption, according to the independent group, Transparency International. As summarised in its Corruption Perceptions Index, Iraq demonstrates: Massive embezzlement, procurement scams, money laundering, oil smuggling and widespread bureaucratic briberyand political interference in anti-corruption bodies and politicisation of corruption issues, weak civil society, insecurity, lack of resources and incomplete legal provisions severely limit the governments capacity to efficiently curb soaring corruption. ExxonMobil, or any U.S. company of its stature, said the source, simply cannot afford to become involved in this type of environment due to the risk of damaging its own reputation or the reputation of the U.S. as a whole.

By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
In this week's TravelSkills on SFGATE newsletter...

This week SFO revealed that it now has a rapid COVID-19 testing site in operation for airline and airport workers only. Time will tell if it will one day open for travelers as it has in many other countries. Might getting tested for COVID-19 become the new normal for air travel? Read: SFO opens first airport COVID-19 rapid testing site in the US

In airline news: American will pull 15 pins out of its domestic route map in October; United increases frequencies to Shanghai from SFO and Emirates plans a return to the airport next month; Uniteds SFO-Santa Maria service is delayed again; United and Air Canada change aircraft from SFO to Vancouver and Toronto respectively; Volaris will add a new route to Mexico from Mineta San Jose; Delta will continue its empty middle seat policy through the year-end holidays and also extends its change fee waiver; and Southwest adds new service to a Colorado ski destination. Read: Routes: American shrinks in small towns, United to China, Emirates, Delta middle seat

Youd think that all those road warriors who used to rack up 20, 30, or 40 trips a year for their employer or their business would be the first to head back to the airport in the wake of the coronavirus travel crash. But its starting to look like business travel will take years to return to its former volume  if it ever gets there at all. Read: When will business travel recover? Probably not for years

A former Navy SEAL who has said he killed Osama bin Laden has been banned by Delta Air Lines after removing his face mask during a flight. He tweeted about his ban on Thursday, and the airline confirmed the action. ONeill posted a selfie showing himself, with no mask, on a Delta Connection flight Wednesday from Minneapolis to Newark, New Jersey. Gimme a break! Apparently he now wants a meeting with Delta's CEO. Read: Delta bans purported bin Laden killer for not wearing a mask

No aloha. If you were hoping to escape California wildfire season and jet off to Hawaii, you'll have to push those plans back... again. After dropping hints last week that Hawaii might not reopen to tourists on Sept. 1 after all, Gov. David Ige has made it official, pushing back the reopening date. Read: Hawaii delays tourist reopening until the fall

Surf Air, the membership-based, all-you-can-fly private air operator that whisked Silicon Valley executives from meeting to meeting along the West Coast, is expanding its leisure flights in response to growing demand from well-heeled Californians who want fewer strangers sitting next to them on their next trip. The Southern California-based company last week began selling private charter flights designed for weekend getaways. Read: As business travel wanes, airline woos wealthy weekend getaway crowd

Tell your friends about TravelSkills on SFGATE and have them sign up for our FREE weekly email alerts or forward this email to them!

The coronavirus pandemic has created new fissures in society along generational and political lines, and a new poll indicates those cracks are showing up among airline passengers, too. A new consumer survey of 10,000 travelers who flew at least once in the year before the pandemic found that their comfort level with returning to the skies varies considerably by age, political affiliation and length of flight. Read: Will most air travelers be young Republicans in the future?

Chris McGinnis is SFGATE's senior travel correspondent. Email: chris@travelskills.com | Twitter: @cjmcginnis | Facebook: @TravelSkills
(CNN)  Ever since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered clubs, bars and concert halls around the world, music fans have been dreaming of the day they can once again visit a busy, sweaty venue to enjoy a gig with friends.

With infection rates rising in many European countries, this dream could be far off for now. But some music fans in Leipzig, Germany, have been given the chance to rock for a day in the name of science  with the help of some glowing hand sanitizer and electronic trackers.

Researchers in the German city of Leipzig staged a 1,500-person experimental indoor concert on Saturday to better understand how Covid-19 spreads at big, busy events, and how to prevent it.

At the gig, which featured a live performance from musician Tim Bendzko, fans were given respiratory face masks, fluorescent hand gel and electronic "contact trackers" -- small transmitters that determine the contact rates and contact distances of the individual experiment participants.

Using data from the contact trackers, scientists from The University of Halle will monitor the number "critical contacts" had by each participant during specific times and locations, while the residue left by fluorescent hand gel will identify frequently touched surfaces. Researchers hope to use the data to find ways to bring big events, including sports, back safely.

Professor Michael Gekle, the dean of the university's medical faculty and a professor of physiology, told CNN the experiment was being conducted to better prepare authorities on how to conduct events in the upcoming autumn and winter seasons.

"We cannot afford another lockdown," he said. "We have to gather the data now in order to be able to make valid predictions," he said.

"There is no zero risk if you want to have life. We want to give the politicians a tool in order to decide rationally whether to allow such an event or not. That means they have to have the tool to predict how many additional infected people such an event will produce," he said.

Researchers directed volunteers to run three scenarios -- one that simulated a concert pre-coronavirus, a second simulating a concert during the pandemic, with improved hygiene measures in place, and a third, with reduced participants. Scientists will gather the data, apply a mathematical model, and evaluate the hygiene interventions, with conclusions ready by the end of the year.

Researchers believe this is the first time an experiment of this scale has taken place in Europe, but say that different considerations would have to be applied depending on the type of event, the behavior of concert goers and whether patrons were allowed to consume alcohol.

"Of course, a concert with Rammstein would be different," he said.

Gekle told CNN that due to a low prevalence of the virus in the states of Saxony and Lower Saxony, participating in the study was low risk for volunteers, who underwent coronavirus testing 48 hours before participation, and were wearing masks during the show. "It's safer than flying to Majorca," he said.

The number of coronavirus infections in Germany has been climbing again since the end of July. On Saturday, the country saw its highest number of daily infections since April 26, with 2,034 new cases of Covid-19, according to Robert Koch institute, the country's center for disease and control.

The experiment may have been controlled, but for some in the crowd -- despite the lack of alcohol -- it felt like a return to normality.

"This was our first real applause from the audience in months," Bendzko told CNN. "The atmosphere is surprisingly good -- it almost felt like a real concert.

"I wish that it will be possible to play at big concerts again someday soon," he said. "But we all understand that we now have to live with the virus and we have to take a certain risk."

Elli Blesz, 20, from Leipzig told CNN: "The atmosphere was really great, we all enjoyed the music -- it was nice to listen to live music after six months."

And Kira Stuetz, a 26-year-old student who attended the concert with her husband, said: "It was a little crazy." Recalling one of the pre-coronavirus simulations, where audience members sat together, she said that "at first it almost felt wrong all people came so close together. We thought this 'is a dream' because it's not allowed to be sitting together so close! But then it was really cool. I could not believe it that we were at a real concert again!"

Organizers around the world have been dipping their toes into the water to see when and how live events can be brought back in a world still suffering from the coronavirus pandemic -- in the UK, event organizers trialled concerts at an outdoor, purpose-made socially distant concert venue, where patrons sat in small groups on distant, raised platforms.

Some venues are experimenting with virtual events, drive-through concerts, mandated personal protective equipment, or temperature checks on arrival.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Fans crowd into an indoor concert in experiment on how to return to normality."
Rio Tinto today published the board review of cultural heritage management, following the destruction of the Juukan rockshelters in May 2020 (https://www.riotinto.com/news/inquiry-into-juukan-gorge). The review details what elements of Rio Tinto's systems, decision-making processes and governance failed to work as they should have and sets out recommendations to prevent a similar incident occurring in the future.

The board review builds on Rio Tinto's submission to the Inquiry by the Australian Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia. While the submission sets out details of Rio Tinto's relationship with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people (PKKP) from 2003 to 2020 and the circumstances that led to the events that occurred in the Juukan Gorge, the board review addresses why it happened and how Rio Tinto can improve internal processes and practices within Iron Ore and across Rio Tinto.

The board review concluded that while Rio Tinto had obtained legal authority to impact the Juukan rockshelters, it fell short of the Standards and internal guidance that Rio Tinto sets for itself, over and above its legal obligations. The review found no single root cause or error that directly resulted in the destruction of the rockshelters. It was the result of a series of decisions, actions and omissions over an extended period of time, underpinned by flaws in systems, data sharing, engagement within the company and with the PKKP, and poor decision-making.

The review details a number of areas where Rio Tinto can improve, strengthen or amend practices, work culture and governance, including:

Strengthening communities and heritage systems, processes and teams within operations to ensure that heritage issues are accorded equivalent priority alongside safety and operational performance. This includes improved processes for escalating heritage issues to more senior decision-making levels and the need for a greater prioritisation of partnerships and relationships with Traditional Owners and First Nations people from senior operational leaders and teams;



Strengthening oversight of operational, communities and heritage practices and performance by establishing a new Social Performance function reporting to the Group Executive, HSE, Technical and Projects. This aims to ensure that communities and heritage issues are managed with the same rigour and discipline as applies to health, safety and the environment. This team will regularly review the operational performance of communities and heritage at Rio Tinto's global operations in accordance with our standards and provide best practice sharing and knowledge;



Strengthening the Group's audit capability through the introduction of more effective internal audits to ensure conformance with Rio Tinto and independent International Heritage Standards and Guidelines; and



Strengthening board oversight and assurance to enhance governance and overall accountability.

In light of the findings of the review, the board has decided that J-S Jacques, chief executive; Chris Salisbury, chief executive of Iron Ore; and Simone Niven, Group Executive, Corporate Relations, will not receive a performance-related bonus for 2020 under the company's Short-Term Incentive Plan (STIP). In addition, J-S's 2016 Long-Term Incentive Plan (LTIP) award, that is due to vest in the first half of 2021, will be reduced by 1 million (subject to vesting). The rationale for this decision is outlined in the Addendum to the review.

Simon Thompson, chairman of Rio Tinto, said "While the review provides a clear framework for change, it is important to emphasise that this is the start of a process, not the end. We will implement important new measures and governance to ensure we do not repeat what happened at Juukan Gorge and we will continue our work to rebuild trust with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.

"We fully recognise traditional owners must be treated as equal partners which includes regular, open and respectful dialogue. We look forward to continuing our engagement with the PKKP on a joint initiative to learn the lessons from Juukan and to strengthen our partnership.

"It is clear that no single individual or error was responsible for the destruction of the Juukan rockshelters, but there were numerous missed opportunities over almost a decade and the company failed to uphold one of Rio Tinto's core values respect for local communities and for their heritage. We are determined to learn, improve and rebuild trust across various internal and external partners. I look forward to working with J-S, Chris and Simone to drive change and improvements in order to re-establish Rio Tinto's credentials and strengthen heritage management across the business."

The review findings complement and continue to inform Rio Tinto's ongoing cooperation with the Inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia. Rio Tinto also continues to support the West Australian Government's planned reform of the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA).

The review is available at https://www.riotinto.com/news/inquiry-into-juukan-gorge.

Notes to editors

Based on last year's STIP payments and the current share price, the effect of these decisions is forecast to reduce the pay of each individual (to be disclosed more fully in Rio Tinto's 2020 remuneration report) as follows:

STIP LTIP** J-S Jacques 1,701,000 1,000,000 Simone Niven 525,000 N/A Chris Salisbury A$1,106,000 N/A

Indicative figures, using 2019 actual STIP earned as a proxy.

** Reduction to be applied to the vesting of the 2016 LTIP award, subject to performance.

This announcement is authorised for release to the market by Rio Tinto's Group Company Secretary.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200823005017/en/

Contacts:

media.enquiries@riotinto.com

riotinto.com

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Category: general
Authorities have made an arrest after they found the remains of two people who were murdered and stuffed into suitcases on a beach in West Seattle.

Killed by their landlord

According to KING-5, the 62-year-old suspect, Michael Dudley, was arrested last week on suspicion of shooting the 27-year-old victim Austin Wenner and 35-year-old victim Jessica Lewis.

The authorities stated that ten days before their remains were found, the neighbors reported hearing shouting and gunshots from the home of the suspect. But when the authorities arrived, he did not answer the door.

Back in June, a couple of teenagers were filming a TikTok video at Duwamish Head in Seattle when they found a suitcase. They opened it to find plastic bags inside.

Also Read: Missing Mom Found Dead, Possibly Tortured With All Teeth Removed

After the witnesses called the police, investigators confirmed that the bags contained human remains and they found another bag of remains in the water.

According to KOMO News, the autopsies showed that Wenner had been shot in the torso and Lewis had been shit multiple times.

KING-5 was able to get a copy of the court documents showing that the victims had been renting a room from Dudley at his home, and a dispute over rent resulted in a double murder.

The suspect is now being held on a $5 million bail for double homicide.

Similar incident

In June 2020, the body of 25-year-old Christina Gribbin was found inside a suitcase dumped on a Kensington street. According to the police, the woman was dead at the scene.

At the time, authorities said that the victim is white, but did not specify anything else. No age or even immediate cause of death was given. Police called the death suspicious.

In July 2020, an arrest was finally made. The murderer, Aaron Mosher from New Jersey, was arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy, tampering with evidence, abuse of corpse and obstruction of justice.

An attorney representing Mosher, Jef Henninger, said that his client did not kill the woman and he argued that based on the information that was gathered, the woman died of natural causes and not at the hands of Mosher or anyone else.

Gribbin had two sons, and she lived in Honey Brook. She graduated from Twin Valley High School and studied LPN nursing at Columbia College of Missouri.

In July 2020, a tenant decapitated his landlord after a rent dispute. The 42-year-old Jerry Thompson was arrested after the authorities found the decapitated body of his roommate, Victor King.

The two had a dispute over rent, and King called 911 to report that Thompson had been threatening him and terrorizing him with a sword. According to a warrant, King gave the officers Thompson's cell phone number, but it did not say if the police talked to Thompson at all.

According to CNN, the police received calls from a neighbor and from King's friend who were concerned about his safety. The police entered the residence, and they found King's body on the floor.

The medical examiner investigator's preliminary observations suggested that the victim's injuries were caused by a massive edged weapon that caused lacerations to his right arm, upper chest and across his neck, causing decapitation.

Thompson is now detained with a $2 million bond.

Related Article: Kentucky Man Who was High on Meth Tried to Sell 4-Year-Old Boy at a Gas Station

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Nearly 8000 fed-up residents and businesses are calling on the state government to invest more in the Armadale region to help tackle stubbornly high crime and unemployment rates.

City of Armadale resident and property developer Elton Swarts became so frustrated with the lack of attention from successive governments he started a petition with a list of requests, including setting a jobs target and moving an entire government department to the city.

Nearly 8000 people are calling on the state government to do more for the Armadale region. Credit:Erin Jonasson

So far the petition has received more than 7800 signatures. When it is tabled in parliament, it will be one of the biggest received by the McGowan Labor government during its 3 years in power.

Armadales local unemployment rate has been significantly higher than the states average rate for more than a decade. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, 9.5 per cent of the working population was without a job  4 per cent above the states average, according to Department of Employment statistics for the March quarter.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 00:17:05|Editor: huaxia

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ADEN, Yemen, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Two civilians were killed during armed clashes between security forces and unknown gunmen in Yemen's southern port city of Aden on Monday, a government official told Xinhua.

The hours-long clashes in Aden's neighborhood of Mansourah also injured several including security troops and the militants, the local official said on condition of anonymity.

Various medium and heavy weapons were used in the clashes, causing partial damage to citizens' homes, the source added.

Meanwhile, a statement released by Aden's police command confirmed that one of its patrols "was attacked by gunmen in Mansourah, leaving one of the security members injured."

Reinforcements arrived later and began a search for the attackers who fled and used residential buildings as shield, according to the statement.

Aden is considered Yemen's temporary capital where the Saudi-backed Yemeni government has been based since 2015.

The impoverished Arab country has been locked into a civil war since late 2014, when the Houthi rebels overran much of the country and seized all northern provinces, including the capital Sanaa. Enditem
The Trump administration is considering fast-tracking an experimental COVID-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca Plc and Oxford University for use in the United States ahead of the November 3 elections, the Financial Times reported.

One option being explored would involve the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) awarding "emergency use authorization" in October to the potential vaccine, which was developed by Oxford and licensed to AstraZeneca, the FT reported.

AstraZeneca denied having discussed an emergency use authorization for its potential vaccine with the U.S. government.

Also read: Joe Biden says he'd shut down economy if scientists recommended

"AstraZeneca has not discussed emergency use authorization with the U.S. government and it would be premature to speculate on that possibility," a spokeswoman for AstraZeneca said in a statement.

The company said that the late-stage Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials for its vaccine candidate are still ongoing in the United Kingdom and other markets globally and that it did not anticipate efficacy results until later this year.

Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, told top Democrats that the administration was considering fast-tracking a vaccine in a July 30 meeting with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, FT said, citing a person briefed on the meeting.

Also read: COVID-19 vaccine: China okays emergency usage among high-risk people

There are no approved vaccines for COVID-19, but AstraZeneca's shot, called AZD1222, is widely seen as one of the leading candidates.

However, the relatively small UK trial by AstraZeneca was not designed to produce sufficient data of the kind that would be required for emergency authorisation in the United States, sources cautioned FT.

Also read: COVID-19 in US: Donald Trump approves plasma treatment, calls it 'breakthrough' move
They say the Government should commit 5m a year for the next three years for measures which engage local communities on the need for climate action, including protection from severe weather.

The Community Foundation for Ireland is making a submission to Government saying that community engagement, education and awareness would help ensure support for the wider 500 million Climate Action Fund and its major infrastructure projects.

They say an investment of just 1 per citizen per year would also encourage extra support from philanthropy  including legacies, family donations and the private sector.

They also say they are seeking to establish a climate justice fund worth 1.25 million a year.

The fund would be cased on the Mary Robinson Foundations definition of climate justice, which links human rights and development to achieve a human-centred approach, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable people and sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its impacts equitably and fairly.

[Community initiatives

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The foundation say that thriving communities rely not only on people but also on a number of aspects such as a healthy biosphere, sustainable/circular economies as well as innovative community initiatives that support more vulnerable members.

The types of projects which could be developed include community energy projects, sustainable shopping as well as the development of pollination corridors.

Publishing the submission Denise Charlton, chief executive of The Community Foundation for Ireland, said: Again this summer we are seeing the impact of global climate change on our communities. A season which started with the threat of drought is ending with high winds, torrential rains and August storms with flooding and extensive structural damage.

"The debate about whether action is needed is over. Now we must work to try and ensure that the plans in place to help our communities, counties and our country become successfully sustainable are delivered.

"Ensuring community education, awareness and support is key to achieving this. For a relatively small investment this localised engagement could create a wider understanding of why the radical changes being proposed by Government are needed
Australian scientists have called for the platypus to be listed as a vulnerable species in Victoria state, after research found dwindling numbers of the semi-aquatic mammal because of loss of habitat and a warming climate.

Ecologist Joshua Griffiths, who supervised the collection of data that led to the recommendation by a scientific advisory panel, said the platypus population across the state had likely fallen by about 30% in the last 20 to 30 years.

We have seen major declines in population in Victorias western regions, localised extinctions and the kind of things that are affecting the platypuses are going to increase in future, Griffiths told Reuters.

Land-clearing for agriculture, mining and forestry had been the biggest factor in the destruction of habitat over several decades but last summers bushfires have greatly compounded the impact.

A lot of that area got burned by the recent bushfires, so the situation could actually be worse than what we think at the moment, he said.

The bushfires, which lasted from September last year until February, killed nearly 3 billion koalas, kangaroos and other Australian animals and destroyed a wilderness area the size of South Korea.

A vulnerable tag is given to animals that face a high risk of extinction in the wild in the medium-term, though are not considered critically endangered.

Once on the vulnerable list, the government can deploy more resources to protect the animals habitat.

Each state in Australia makes their own classifications of vulnerable or endangered. The platypus is already listed as endangered in South Australia.

The strange-looking, duck-billed animals with webbed feet that lay eggs are mostly seen across Australias eastern seaboard, from the far north of Queensland state to the island state of Tasmania.

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)

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Aug 24 (Reuters) - Auto consultant LMC Automotive on Monday cut its estimate for a decline in full-year global light vehicle sales, citing a speedy recovery for the sector hit by the coronavirus crisis.

Global light vehicle sales are expected to fall about 16.7% to about 75 million units this year, improving from a prior estimate of a drop of about 19%, LMC said.

"Light vehicle sales were just over 90 million units in 2019, so the selling rate in July shows a market running at almost 97% of last year's total," LMC said. (https://bit.ly/3lcO6l3)

Since hitting a bottom in April, auto sales have seen a V-shaped recovery as economies reopen following easing of lockdowns, resulting in major automakers scrambling to ramp up production and boost weak inventories at dealerships.

China has been among the strongest markets to recover, the auto consultant said, with the United States seeing a tempered rebound amid a renewed surge in COVID-19 cases.

Western Europe produced a 'normal' market level in July, while India and Brazil, though slow to recover, were now gaining traction, the firm said.

LMC, however, remains concerned if the pace of sales in July can be sustained through the rest of the year, as pent-up demand slows and government incentives expire.

"When job and business support schemes end, or are tapered, a renewed macroeconomic slump could emerge, damaging underlying vehicle demand," the firm said. (Reporting by Ankit Ajmera in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
The discovery of major natural gas deposits in waters surrounding Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete has triggered a scramble for energy riches and revived old regional rivalries

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas will hold talks in Greece and Turkey on Tuesday in a bid to help defuse mounting friction over gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean.

The discovery of major natural gas deposits in waters surrounding Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete has triggered a scramble for energy riches and revived old regional rivalries.

The biggest tensions are between historically uneasy NATO allies Turkey and Greece, which almost went to war over some uninhabited islets in the Aegean Sea in 1996.

Germany has sought to mediate in the conflict, while fellow EU heavyweight France has taken a tougher line against Ankara, sending warships to help Greece in the standoff.

A German foreign ministry spokesman, Christofer Burger, told reporters Monday that Haas would speak with his counterparts in Athens and then Ankara, with joint news conferences planned in both capitals.

In Greece, Maas will also meet Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras.

"We take the tensions there very seriously," Burger said.

"We are worried that the tensions could further weigh on the relationship between Turkey and the EU and that further escalation could have grave consequences."

Germany currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told the briefing that it was "essential" that Germany "remain in dialogue with both sides".

"The aim is for Greece and Turkey to resolve their problems with each other directly."

Last week, EU foreign ministers convened an emergency video conference after Greek and Turkish warships collided in hotly disputed circumstances.

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A file photo of California Assemblyman Miguel Santiago speaking at a press conference at LA County + USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, Calif., on April 14, 2020. (Presley Ann/Getty Images for Emergency Supply Donor Group)

California Transgender Wellness Bill Raises Questions About Minors

A new bill proposing a state Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund has become the subject of debate between lawmakers and Californians.

The purpose of AB 2218, authored by Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles), is to fund grants to organizations serving people that identify as transgender, gender nonconforming, or intersex (TGI).

Funds would be dedicated to TGI-specific housing programs and partnerships with hospitals, health care clinics, and the medical providers to provide TGI-focused health care  and related education programs.

The measure passed the state Senate Appropriations Committee 52 on Aug. 20. A second reading on the senate floor was scheduled for Aug. 24.

Opponents worry the funding will help procedures to block puberty in minors, and that this may cause those minors to become permanently sterile. Proponents of the bill argue that its about other forms of help for transgender peoplethat the use of puberty blockers is rare and can be halted without leading to sterility.

Puberty Blockers

Greg Burt, director of capitol engagement for California Family Council, told The Epoch Times: These drugs will sterilize you, especially if you take puberty blockers, which start before a child is transitioning through puberty, and then you give them cross sex hormone. These kids arent going to have biological children.

Burt referred to a consent form issued by the Center for TransYouth Health and Development at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles.

The form, titled Pubertal Blockers for Minors in Early Adolescence, states: If your child starts puberty blockers in the earliest stages of puberty, and then goes on to gender affirming hormones, they will not develop sperm or eggs. This means that they will not be able to have biological children.

Then, in text that is underlined and italicized, the form reads: This is an important aspect of blocking puberty and progressing to hormones that you should understand prior to moving forward with puberty suppression.

Its a two-step process: first, puberty is blocked, then hormones are administered. The form clarifies that if a child doesnt proceed to the second step, pubertal development will resume in 6 to 12 months and fertility would ostensibly be maintained.

Forms with similar warnings have been issued by British Columbia Childrens Hospital in Canada and Fenway Health Clinic in Boston, Massachusetts.

When you read the risk of puberty blockers, the language is emphatic, Burt said. So thats not just a slight warning. Thats almost like a promise.

Its not like buying Tylenol

Thomi Clinton, executive director of Transgender Health and Wellness Center in Cathedral City, California, said its not easy for minors to procure hormone blockers.

Its not like buying Tylenol over the counter, Clinton told The Epoch Times. [The process] is complicated. They have to go through a lot of mental health [screenings], they have to go meet a doctortheres a lot of hurdles.

Clinton said hormones reduce sperm and egg production. But lets say the child goes, You know what, this is not who I am. They can be taken off puberty blockers and they start developing again.

Clinton, whose Wellness Center is a co-sponsor of AB 2218, said the pandemic has exacerbated a health crisis in the transgender community, which added extra urgency to ensuring that the bill passes.

The trans community is a very unique community, and so it has unique needs. And theyre pretty much, in my opinion, being overlooked by a lot of general funding thats going out there.

Help for Transgender People

According to a recent survey Clinton conducted among transgender individuals in the Inland Empire, 81 percent have recently contemplated suicide and 54 percent have made attempts.

Its alarming, Clinton said. This [bill] would specifically help that community and focus on their needs, which is access to health care, and social services. What I would like to see is that all of them are working, all of them are paying taxes, all of them have housing, they can pay their rent, they can get a car, instead of them constantly being [a] burden on everybody, tax-wise.

Everyone should work, everyone should have access to health care if they need it, and be productive members of society and contribute, Clinton said.

Burt said he isnt against much of what the bill provides transgender people, but he would like to see language added to prevent certain treatments and procedures for minors.

Were not complaining about everything thats in the bill. Were just complaining about the part that they call health care, the surgeries and the drugs that are permanently damaging people, Burt said. Thats what were highlighting. And were highlighting it because its becoming a trend in California government to promote this type of transitioning in elementary schools.

He said its about adults being able to decide for themselves what they want, but minors being easily persuaded. No 11- and 10-year-old knows who they are. And many of these kids, once they go through puberty, they change their mind.

So just make the bill [say] we will not fund any treatment that harms reproductive systems until a kid is 18, he said. I mean, can we just agree that this is really, really bad for minors?

Legislators who support the bill argued at an Aug. 10 Senate Health Committee meeting that the bill doesnt say anything about sterilizing youth.

Unfortunately, people have been misled, Santiago, the bills author, said. Let me be very clear and set the record straight: Nothing in this billnothing, I will repeattalks about sterilizing kids.

Several senators who voted in favor of the bill reported receiving hundreds of call from concerned constituents.

I felt bad for the people who were calling to ask us to vote no because I do think they were misled, Sen. Connie Leyva (D-San Bernardino) said at the same meeting. There is nothing in this bill that talks about sterilizing children. It really talks about health care for individuals who identify as transgender.

Though the bill doesnt mention sterilizing minors, the concern among critics remains that funding clinics and organizations that provide puberty blocking services to minors may have that result.

Other critics object to the cost.

A No Vote

Sen. Patricia Bates (R-Laguna Niguel) was one of the two senators who voted No on the bill.

With California struggling to fund existing health care programs due to COVID-19 and the resulting economic shutdown, I do not believe it is prudent to create new spending commitments like AB 2218, she said in a statement released to The Epoch Times.

While the exact amount of funding for the bill has yet to be determined, the Department of Finance declined to support the measure at an Aug. 17 Senate Appropriations Committee meeting.

Were opposed to this measure because it would likely result in general fund impacts not included in the 2020 Budget Act, said Jolie Onodera, legislative director of the Department of Finance. I would note that this bill would create cost pressures to the Department of Public Health, potentially in the low millions of dollars to support additional staffing, resources and contractors needed for this program.

Bates also said the supports for transgender youth the bill is meant to promote are already present in the medical profession: It is important to note that all medical professionals are already trained to be culturally and medically sensitive toward all patients, regardless of gender identity.
President Donald Trump, who was on Monday formally nominated by Republicans to seek a second term, has vowed to prohibit American companies from replacing local workers with lower-cost foreign workers, a key fallout of outsourcing, and continue his hardline position on immigration.

We have to win. This is the most important election in the history of our country, President Trump said in an unannounced appearance at the convention, based in Charlotte, after securing the nomination. He will formally deliver the acceptance speech on Thursday, from the White House.

Called Fighting for You, the agenda also promises to end reliance on China by encouraging American companies to bring back operations and continue the presidents America First foreign policy, of ending wars and ensuring allies pay their fair share towards common defence.

The agenda was released on the eve of the four-day Republican Party convention that nominated Trump on Monday morning as its nominee for the November 3 election, with Vice-President Mike Pence as his running mate. They are up against Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, and his running mate, Kamala Harris.

Just hours ahead of the convention, Kellyanne Conway, counsellor to the president, announced she is leaving to spend more time with her children. Its time for less drama, more mama, she said in a statement. Conway and her husband, George Conway, a conservative lawyer were a widely watched DC couple. As Conway remained one of the presidents fiercest defenders, the husband was an acerbic Trump critic.

The 50-point agenda builds on the incredible achievements of the presidents first term in office, the campaign said in the announcement, and added that it will reflect his optimism and certainty in Americas greatness.

Its a bare-bones announcement that lists out the presidents 50 second-term priorities, which he will flesh out in his acceptance speech on Thursday, the final day of the convention, and on the campaign trail.

Prohibit American Companies from Replacing United States Citizens with Lower-Cost Foreign Workers, the agenda said in a section headlined End illegal immigration and protect American workers, which indicates both continuity and hardening of the Presidents position on immigration.

It hits at the core of the outsourcing industry in the United States that has engendered and supported IT giants from many countries  and include TCS, Infosys and Wipro from India.

Trump has been turning up pressure on the outsourcing industry  centered around H-1B non-immigrant short-term work visas  from practically the first quarter of his presidency.

Earlier this month, Trump issued another executive order prohibiting federal government agencies from contracting work to companies that use foreign workers. At the same time, the president instructed the labor department to finalize guidance to prevent H-1B employers from moving H-1B workers to other employers job sites to displace Americans workers.

Trump has suspended all legal immigration  Green Cards  and short-term non-immigration work visas, such as H-1B, till the end of December to ensure millions of Americans laid off because of the Covid-19 epidemic have a first shot at jobs that become available.

Other elements of the agenda on immigration were a continuation of the current policies, such as ensuring new immigrants dont need state help, block illegal immigrants from taxpayer-funded programmes and free college tuition.

Ending endless wars and getting allies to pay their fair share will be Trump 2.0s America First foreign policy, which continues the emphasis on bringing home troops from Afghanistan and making NATO allies ramp up their respective defence. Other foreign policy priorities include wiping out global terrorists that threaten Americans and build a great cyber security defence system and missile defence system.

Other priorities were aimed at addressing domestic issues such as tackling the Covid-19 epidemic, finding a vaccine, defend police (against calls for defending them by anti-racism activists), cut drug prices and other promises on healthcare, and education.
Pink Moon Midnight Blue holds a photo of her friend Angela Martinez, left, on Aug. 18 in Reseda. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Angela Martinez died young, her death a tragedy to the many who knew and loved her. Her death became a rallying cry. A controversy. And, ultimately, a tale about identity and being oneself.

Her story begins in San Bartolome Quialana, a small Zapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. She came into this world two months prematurely, a tiny newborn who wouldn't cry or open her eyes. Her parents, who had already lost five young children  some from measles, another from a lump in his throat  feared they would lose her too.

They prayed to Dios Sol [sun god] to give them a child, said her brother, Plutarco Martinez.

Her story ends in Los Angeles, where she died last month at age 41. She had worked at a Burger King in Santa Monica, where she was known for her joy and generosity.

She would always show up with a smile on her face, said Yolanda Garcia, a co-worker from Tlacolula, Oaxaca. She was strong and would always offer to help me when I carried the heavy potato boxes.

But over the last year, Martinez's health had begun slipping. She had kidney problems and trouble breathing, said Julio Hernandez, her roommate of 23 years. In early July, as the novel coronavirus ravaged Los Angeles, Martinez's symptoms worsened.

She continued to work, but Garcia and other co-workers began to worry that Martinez had the virus.

Angela Martinez and Victor Mina pose for a photo at Martinez's birthday party in 2004. "My daughter loves her like a tia," Mina said. (Victor Mina)

One night, Martinez started feeling pain all over her body. Her head throbbed. Hernandez offered to call an ambulance. Martinez refused. She feared catching COVID-19 in the hospital.

Estas pendejo. Quieres que me maten ahi? Martinez told Hernandez. Youre dumb. Do you want them to kill me there?

Martinez died at home on July 6 in Hernandez's arms.

Hernandez suspected she died of a heart attack. Her co-workers thought it was COVID-19, a fact eventually confirmed by the coroner in August. But initially her manager at Burger King blamed it on a hormone overdose.

The Burger King manager's assertion, set against the backdrop of a pandemic disproportionately infecting and killing Latino workers in essential jobs, set off a furor, with activists calling it transphobic and bigoted. Martinez's co-workers prepared to go on strike and called on Burger King to better protect its workers. A social media blitz was unleashed.

Story continues

Burger King said the restaurant was investigating the managers "transphobic" comments, calling them inaccurate and unacceptable."

On the Friday afternoon of the strike, protesters in cars and co-workers on foot jammed the drive-through of the Burger King, holding up white roses in her honor and clamoring for people to say her name. Dozens of media outlets  Telemundo, Insider, the Sun and ABC News  descended upon the eatery.

A video of the protest  showing demonstrators with posters of Martinez's face against the transgender pride flag  was posted on Twitter with the hashtag #TransLivesMatter. It quickly went viral.

And that's when a second controversy unexpectedly began.

Her loved ones accused activists behind Fight for $15, an advocacy group for fast-food workers, of misgendering Martinez on social media and making her the face of a movement of which she never asked to be a part.

Martinez's friends said she had been meticulous about not referring to herself as transgender. Though Martinez went by "she," she was neither man, nor woman. She was "muxe."

::

The muxe identity, which Martinez held dear, has existed as a respected third gender in Zapotec cultures in Oaxaca for centuries, especially in the southeastern area of Istmo de Tehuantepec. Muxes, pronounced moo-shehs, have coexisted and even become leaders in their communities, said Felina Santiago, a 52-year-old muxe from Juchitan, Oaxaca.

Theres men, theres women and theres muxes, Santiago said. Im in the middle of the two. Im only muxe.

The notion of a third gender has existed for centuries in different cultures worldwide. In some Native American cultures, the term "two-spirit" is an umbrella term describing those who fulfill a third gender. In South Asia, there are more than half a million officially recognized hijras. In Thailand, there are the kathoeys. In Ethiopia, the ashtime. And in Polynesia, the fa'afafine.

Gender identity can be a complex and highly sensitive issue  and never more so than after those who don't conform to the gender binary die, said Drian Juarez, vice president of programming at TransCanWork Inc. And if someone has died, they cannot tell the tale of who they were, or choose the words used to describe them.

"It's about honoring somebody's spirit, rather than labeling," Juarez said. Referring to the discussion following Martinez's death, "I think it highlights just how multifaceted and complex identity really is."

Juarez said she believes that Martinez's co-workers and Fight for $15 likely had the "best of intentions" when initially protesting and using her name.

"Many of Angelas co-workers understood her to be a trans woman, but we now know that she may have identified otherwise in other circles," Fight for $15 said in a statement.

In life, Martinez was supportive of her transgender friends, like Pink Moon Midnight Blue, who said Martinez "adored me in my transness." But that's not how Martinez saw herself.

"She always found it problematic that her own identity wasn't addressed correctly in trans spaces," Midnight Blue said.

Little wonder, then, that friends complained that trans activists were, as Midnight Blue wrote on Facebook, "exploiting her image without permission. She was not trans, my sister was muxe and indigenous people are tired of the erasure of our identities."

Pink Moon Midnight Blue was a close friend of Angela Martinez, who died recently of COVID-19. Midnight Blue, wearing a dress that Martinez gave her, is transgender and said Martinez pointedly said she was neither man, nor woman, nor trans, but muxe. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Midnight Blue recalled that when she and Martinez worked at a trans woman-owned El Pollo Loco, where a third of the employees were transgender, National Geographic,  and other media outlets, including the L.A. Times  invited workers to be interviewed for features on the inclusive restaurant.

Martinez declined to participate with a simple phrase, "Aqui, la trans eres tu," she told Midnight Blue. "Here, the trans woman is you."

In Martinez's hometown of San Bartolome Quialana, there were only a few muxes, and it took some time for Martinezs family to fully embrace who Martinez was, her brother said. She started her transition after she got to L.A. and it wasnt until 2008 when the two visited their pueblo that Martinezs parents saw her express her muxe identity for the first time.

They received her as their child, Plutarco Martinez said. They realized that were all human beings and we cant judge people who were born with that gift. Theres no reason to.

Angela Martinez, left, dances with close friend Janel Castaneda at the annual Vela Muxe at Casa Vertigo in downtown L.A. (Janel Castaneda)

In Los Angeles, Angela Martinez had embraced her identity with such joy that she was considering running for muxe queen  a title presented at the Vela Muxe, an annual celebration of the Oaxacan culture and identity at Casa Vertigo in downtown Los Angeles, said Janel Castaneda, a close friend of six years.

The L.A. celebration mirrors the colorful and food-filled festival in Juchitan, where it originated. There, thousands of tourists celebrate the Indigenous traditions of the community and locals crown a muxe as queen.

She wanted to be queen, Castaneda said. In my eyes, she already was one.

::

On a typical day before work, Martinez would fix herself un cafecito using the Oaxacan coffee beans that made her reminisce about her hometown.

As she sipped her coffee, she fed and watered her "children": some stray cats, her rescued Chihuahua named Daisy (after TV host Daisy Fuentes), and her houseplants. She was especially fond of orchids  beautiful and delicate but notoriously finicky  and had a knack for reviving them when they were close to death.

Each day, she caught the bus, finishing her makeup and listening to Alejandra Guzman and Los Heroes del Silencio on her way to work at Burger King.

The group that fully embraced Martinez in her muxe identity was her beloved pandilla. Her gang. Her friends, who included Midnight Blue and Castaneda, loved her as heart and glue of the group.

La pandilla got together every Thursday to bowl at Shatto 39 Lanes in Rampart Village or to sing karaoke at Martinez's house. Martinezs witty humor kept the group laughing. She could take just about any random word and make a joke of it.

Angela Martinez, far right, and la pandilla would go bowling or sing karaoke every Thursday night. (Janel Castaneda)

Por que somos de lo peor? she would ask, jokingly. Why are we the worst?"

A few years ago, Midnight Blue was staying in a shelter after leaving a toxic partner. Martinez immediately asked her to come live with her, even if space was tight. Midnight Blue was one of the nearly half a dozen people to whom Martinez gave a place to sleep.

I immediately found a sister, Midnight Blue said. I realized then that her kindness was not of any other person that I knew.

Midnight Blue said they would talk for hours into the night, watching the stars in the sky. No one knew exactly why she chose the name Angela, but her house was filled with trinkets, sculptures, paintings and antiques depicting angels. She even had angel wings tattooed on her back.

One time she asked me, Do you think angels exist? Midnight Blue said. Her greatest wish was to see an angel. I think she forgot that she was one of them.
TikTok user Claudia Conway announced on Sunday that she is officially pushing for emancipation following a history of tension and claims that her mother Kellyanne Conways job ruined my life to begin with.

Kellyanne resigned from her post as Senior White House Advisor gratefully & humbly shortly afterwards, alongside her husband George Conway who said he was stepping away from Project Lincoln to devote more time to family matters.

Politics has long divided the Conway family, with neither George, Kellyanne or their 15-year-old daughter able to see eye to eye on issues.

Though George and Kellyanne are both Republicans, George told Yahoo News Skulldugger podcast that the [Trump] administration is like a s**t show in a dumpster fire - even co-writing a New York Times opinion piece titled We Are Republicans, and We Want Trump Defeated.

Claudia Conway with her mother Kellyanne Conway

Claudia has more left-leaning views, pinning a tweet to her account urging her audience to vote as we must get [Trump] OUT.

Topics she has tackled on social media include qualified immunity and the Black Lives Matter movement. At one point she also encouraged her followers to leave one-star reviews on properties belonging to Trumps hotel empire.

She added that she and her father agree on absolutely nothing other than their shared desire to vote Trump out of office, while adding that she found it heartbreaking that [Kellyanne] continues to go down that path after years of watching her children suffer. However, she also urged users to direct no hate to my parents please.

For more on where the Conways stand, heres a breakdown of their views.

Kellyanne Conway

AP

Kellyanne has been one of the most visible faces of the Trump campaign since 2016. Though she has now announced she is stepping down as White House Senior Advisor, she played a pivotal role in helping Trump to the White House.

Kellyanne, who is still set to speak at the Republican National Convention this Wednesday, is a Republican. In her resignation statement, she also reaffirmed her support for Trump and said his leadership has had a measurable, positive impact on the peace and prosperity of the nation.

Unlike her daughter, she is also anti-abortion and has previously spoken at events such as March For Life. However, she told the Washington Post she [doesnt] judge women who have chosen to have abortions.

George Conway

George is also a Republican, though is strongly anti-Trump. The lawyer was heavily involved in The Lincoln Project, which is described as an anti-Trump super PAC by The Washington Post, up until he stepped down yesterday.

He has criticised Trump at length for his Twitter behaviour, calling Trump a pathological liar and Idiot-in-Chief. However, he does not appear to share his daughter Claudias more liberal views, as Claudia said politically, we agree on absolutely nothing.

She continued: We just both happen to have common sense when it comes to our current president. stop stanning him. She has previously said on TikTok he is also anti-abortion and "very conservative and likes capitalism."

Claudia Conway

@datjerseygirl YEAH SORRY I HAD TO COME BACK TO POST THIS BUT  original sound - datjerseygirl

The 15 year old social media star, like her father, is very anti-Trump and holds more liberal views. Claudia has shared videos on TikTok promoting the Black Lives Matter movement - urging people to continue to fight for the arrest of police officers involved in the case surrounding the death of Breonna Taylor - and additionally spoken about being pro-choice while raising awareness about qualified immunity. She has also referred to Trump as "Captain Clementine" in the past and is one of four children.

Yesterday, she also said she was DEVASTATED beyond compare that her mother was speaking at the RNC on Wednesday. She also retweeted a poll from a user which asked which of four progressive moms should adopt her, with Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coming in first place amidst other votes for Democrats Rashia Talib, Ilhan Omar and Katie Porter.

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She additionally tweeted at AOC let me intern for you and has retweeted AOC, Ilhan Omar and Barack Obama. Though Claudia has previously criticised Joe Biden, she has advised her followers: Reminder that a third party vote is a vote for trump!! dont feed into the fire. we must get him OUT.
(Natural News) Sara Gideon, one of Joe Bidens supporters who made an appearance at the recent virtual Democratic National Convention, is a far-left politician from Maine who many are unaware led the charge in her state to kill a legislative bill that would have outlawed a gruesome form of sexual abuse known as female genital mutilation.

According to Gideon, it is racist to tell Muslims and black people from Africa  these being the two groups that mutilate female genitals the most  that they cannot sever the clitorises of their infant girls while sewing their vaginas closed. The tolerant thing to do, in Gideons view, is to continue to allow the practice unabated.

Except for two outliers, Gideon and her Democratic colleagues uniformly shot down the bill, which was proposed by Maine Republicans. They decided that little girls do not deserve to maintain their female reproductive organs, and should instead have them surgically destroyed if the cultures into which they were born dictate as such.

Gideon, who was speaker of the Maine House of Representatives at the time, argued alongside other Democrats that it would be racist for the legislature to try to impose criminal penalties on those in Maine who engage in female genital mutilation. These would be mostly people from Somalia where, according to the United Nations, female genital mutilation is nearly universal.

Gideons efforts have helped make Maine one of only 12 states that have not banned female genital mutilation, writes Yuichiro Kakutani for Free Beacon. Such a legacy threatens to complicate her cultivated image as a champion of womens rights, one built on her consistent support for abortion access and the #MeToo movement.

Gideon is a nasty woman who does not care about others

Gideons phony pro-women image has garnered for her hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations. She also tried to push a different bill that  instead of banning female genital mutilation  would have funneled about $150,000 in taxpayer money from state coffers to education programs that teach Mainers about female genital mutilation.

This money would have gone to a group known as the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine, which is run by Fatuma Hussein, a personal friend of Gideon.

This bill was designed to funnel money to Fatuma Husseins Immigrant Resource network so they could educate the Somali community on why, naughty, naughty, its bad to cut your little girls genitals,' stated Republican state legislator Heather Sirocki.

A survivor of female genital mutilation by the name of F. A. Cole testified before the Maine legislature in favor of the bill to ban female genital mutilation, only to be grilled and humiliated by Gideon and her Democratic colleagues. Cole actually ended up suffering from a panic attack as a result, and yet Gideon could not have cared less.

I couldnt even breathe  thats how bad it was, Cole recalls as she stood in the chamber hallway during a break, only to have Gideon pass by her coldly, not even acknowledging Cole or showing any concern for her suffering.

But this woman just walked on by us as if I wasnt even a human being, Cole explained. And that told me a lot about the type of person [Gideon] is  she just doesnt care.

Because of Gideons successful killing of said bill, Maine is now a safe harbor for mutilators of girls genitals, according to Elizabeth Yore, an international child rights attorney.

So much for Democrats like Gideon representing and supporting womens rights.

For more related news about phony Democrats who pretend to care about human rights while selling out their constituencies to the highest bidders, read MedicalViolence.com

Sources for this article include:

FreeBeacon.com

NaturalNews.com
Albany Police Department

ALBANY  A downed utility pole forced the city on Monday to close Northern Boulevard at Livingston Avenue.

Crews from National Grid are on the scene making repairs, police said.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- New Dorp Lane served as the first neighborhood in the borough to offer street closures in the Open Dining program offered through the Department of Transportation. Yet with backyard seating and copious sidewalk space the corridor now sees a very limited shutdown on weekends only on 9th Street.

The original street closure arrangement came in July after a request from Councilman Steven Matteo (R-Mid-Island), to close the stretch of New Dorp Lane for outdoor dining opportunities. It has morphed since its introduction last month: originally the Lane was shut on Friday and Saturday nights between Hylan Boulevard and South Railroad Avenue. The program will extend to Oct. 31, 2020.

Why did the New Dorp Lane District BID and the Staten Island Economic Development Corp. (SIEDC) change the plan?

Niles French, vice president of project for the SIEDC and New Dorp BID director said, We didnt anticipate the high level of curbside pickups originally. Weve been pivoting on that. La Strada and Taste of India got street permits but then ended up using their backyards.

Right now most every restaurant on the strip has some kind of outdoor arrangement starting with Trackside Bar and Grill, Cafe Con Pan and Cantina Mexicana.

Also in the sidewalk supping game are Fresh Tortilla, Wing World, Precious Island Tea House, 99 Flavors, Jade Asian Bistro, Pronto Pizzeria, Gioves Pizzeria, Sobol Acai Bowls and Beyond, Giacamos Pizzeria, Piece A Cake and its sister bakery Cookie Jar, Something Sweet and SIPS + Maker.

More formal setups include those in backyards of Taste of India II and La Strada. Briosos position on the corner the Lane allows it to populate a swath of 9th street with tables and chairs.

A lot of people didnt want to go through DOT and hire an architect, said French.

If the sidewalk dining effort demonstrates anything its the collaboration among various city officials, said French, specifically Matteo and the Small Business Services commissioner Jonnel Doris.

New Dorp Lane has only seen one closure during coronavirus crisis. According to the SIEDC, that would be Limitless Fitness.

Pamela Silvestri is Advance Food Editor. She can be reached at silvestri@siadvance.com.
Enough! Time to Stop Losing Youth to Secular Humanism

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Hamilton Strategies

Aug. 24, 2020

ATLANTA, Aug. 24, 2020 /Christian Newswire/ -- Road Trip to Truth, the radically new 13-episode series from Producer Todd Friel, airs on major television networks across the U.S. and Great Britain in January 2021.

"We are losing Evangelical youth to secular humanism," said John Faberez, host of Road Trip to Truth. "Poll after poll reveals that 60-80 percent of Evangelical youth go to university and leave their faith behind, and statistics reveal that suicide is the number TWO cause of death among 10 to 34-year olds. It's time to equip kids, and train their parents to equip their own kids, to understand the only true source of hope and healing."

Road Trip to Truth directly tackles the issues that lead so many astray. Those issues include the origin of life, godless evolution, postmodernism and atheism. There is an answer to the rising 'backslider rate,' and the shocking number of deaths from suicide and depression."

Road Trip to Truth is fresh, fast paced, produced with excellence, respectful, thoughtful, powerful and game changing.

Like no other television series, Road Trip to Truth focuses on the answers to the deepest questions youth across America are asking. This program focuses like a laser at youth AND their parents to winsomely address the secular humanistic ideas that are stealing, and even killing our evangelical youth.

For more information on the upcoming series Road Trip to Truth, or if you are interested in airing the program on your station, please contact Hamilton Strategies, Media@HamiltonStrategies.com, 610-584-1096, ext. 100.

SOURCE Hamilton Strategies

CONTACT: 610-584-1096 ext. 100, Media@HamiltonStrategies.com
By Associated Press

BERLIN: Alexi Navalny's wife and a top aide visited him Sunday in a Berlin hospital where the comatose Russian dissident is being treated by German doctors after a suspected poisoning.

Navalny was flown to Germany on Saturday from Siberia after doctors determined he was stable enough to be brought to the capital's Charite hospital for treatment.

After his arrival, hospital spokeswoman Manuela Zingl said the 44-year-old would be undergoing extensive diagnostic tests and that doctors wouldn't comment on his illness or treatment until they were able to evaluate the results.

On Sunday, Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and aide Leonid Volkov visited the Russian opposition leader in the hospital, making no comments to reporters.

Navalny, a politician and corruption investigator who is one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics, was admitted to an intensive care unit in the Siberian city of Omsk on Thursday.

His supporters believe that tea he drank was laced with poison and that the Kremlin is behind both his illness and a delay in transferring him to Germany.

ALSO READ | Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny 'stable' in Berlin hospital

Navalny fell ill on a flight back to Moscow from Siberia on Thursday and was taken to the hospital after the plane made an emergency landing.

While his supporters and family members insist that Navalny was poisoned, doctors in Omsk have denied that, theorising a metabolic disorder was the most likely diagnosis and that a drop in blood sugar may have caused Navalny to lose consciousness.

Russian health authorities on Saturday said that tests done so far haven't shown any poisons in his system.

When German specialists arrived aboard a plane equipped with advanced medical equipment Friday morning at his family's behest, Navalny's physicians in Omsk initially said he was too unstable to move.

The dissident's supporters suggested that was just a ploy to delay his departure until the poison was out of his system.

The Kremlin denied that resistance to the transfer was political, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that it was purely a medical decision.

However, the reversal to allow him to leave came as international pressure on Russia's leadership mounted.

Navalny's own doctor, Yaroslav Ashikhmin, who has treated him since 2013, said the politician has always been in good health, regularly went for medical checkups and didn't have any underlying illnesses that could have triggered his condition.

Like many other opposition politicians in Russia, Navalny has been frequently detained by law enforcement and harassed by pro-Kremlin groups.

In 2017, he was attacked by several men who threw antiseptic in his face, damaging an eye.

Last year, Navalny was rushed to a hospital from jail where he was serving a sentence on charges of violating protest regulations.

His team also suspected poisoning then.

Doctors said he had a severe allergic reaction and sent him back to detention the following day.

If he was poisoned, it would not be the first time a prominent, outspoken Russian was targeted in such a way or the first time the Kremlin was accused of being behind it.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW), the global cybersecurity leader, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Crypsis Group, a leading incident response, risk management and digital forensics consulting firm. Under the terms of the agreement, Palo Alto Networks will acquire The Crypsis Group for a total purchase price of $265 million, subject to adjustment, to be paid in cash. The proposed acquisition is expected to close during Palo Alto Networks' fiscal first quarter, subject to the satisfaction of regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

As threat actors continue to professionalize and grow in sophistication, the risk of revenue and reputational impact of a security breach increases dramatically. In order to focus on the health and growth of their business, organizations need trusted partners to not only quickly and efficiently respond to and contain attacks but also leverage their learning and insight to prevent future attacks.

Palo Alto Networks already provides best-in-class prevention, detection and response capabilities through Cortex XDR. The addition of The Crypsis Group's security consulting and forensics capabilities will strengthen Cortex XDR's ability to collect rich security telemetry, manage breaches and initiate rapid response actions. The Crypsis Group's experts and insights will also fuel the Cortex XDR platform with a continuous feedback loop between incident response engagements and product research teams to prevent future cyberattacks. The company expects to integrate The Crypsis Group's processes and technology into Cortex XDR to further enhance its ability to safeguard organizations at every stage of the security lifecycle.

The Crypsis Group's more than 150 security consultants have handled some of the most complex and significant cybersecurity incidents, responding to more than 1,300 security engagements per year. Named one of the Top 10 Digital Forensics Services Companies of 2019 and 2020 by Enterprise Security magazine, The Crypsis Group has served more than 1,700 organizations across the healthcare, financial services, retail, e-commerce and energy industries. The firm's CEO, Bret Padres, will join Palo Alto Networks.

The Crypsis Group currently operates as part of the ZP Group, an organization with a portfolio of companies specializing in breach response, national security solutions and IT staffing.

QUOTES:

"The proposed acquisition of The Crypsis Group will significantly enhance our position as the cybersecurity partner of choice, while expanding our capabilities and strengthening our Cortex strategy. By joining forces, we will be able to help customers not only predict and prevent cyberattacks but also mitigate the impact of any breach they may face."

- Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks

"We have dedicated ourselves to creating a more secure world through the fight against cybercrime. Together with Palo Alto Networks, we will be able to help businesses and governments better respond to threat actors on a global scale."

- Bret Padres, CEO of The Crypsis Group

"Bret Padres and the Crypsis leadership team have built a world-class incident response and digital forensics company. I cannot think of a better organization to leverage and scale the services that Crypsis offers than Palo Alto Networks."

- Justin Jordan, chairman and CEO of ZP Group

About Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks, the global cybersecurity leader, is shaping the cloud-centric future with technology that is transforming the way people and organizations operate. Our mission is to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life. We help address the world's greatest security challenges with continuous innovation that seizes the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, analytics, automation, and orchestration. By delivering an integrated platform and empowering a growing ecosystem of partners, we are at the forefront of protecting tens of thousands of organizations across clouds, networks, and mobile devices. Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. For more information, visit www.paloaltonetworks.com.

Palo Alto Networks, Cortex XDR, and the Palo Alto Networks logo are trademarks of Palo Alto Networks, Inc. in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other trademarks, trade names, or service marks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking" statements that are based on our management's beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding our intention to acquire The Crypsis Group, expectations regarding the timing of when the acquisition will be completed, the expected benefits of the acquisition of The Crypsis Group to us, our market position, and our customers, the expected impact of the acquisition on our offerings, our expectations regarding our existing and acquired offerings performing as intended, and our integration plans. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. There are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this press release, including risks associated with new product and subscription releases, including our limited operating history; risks associated with managing our growth; our ability as an organization to successfully integrate The Crypsis Group and acquire and integrate other companies, products or technologies in a successful manner; the risks associated with new products and subscription and support offerings, including the discovery of software bugs; our ability to attract and retain new customers; delays in the development or release of new subscription offerings, or the failure to timely develop and achieve market acceptance of new products and subscriptions as well as existing products and subscription and support offerings; rapidly evolving technological developments in the market for network security products and subscription and support offerings; length of sales cycles; and general market, political, economic and business conditions. Additional risks and uncertainties are included under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations," in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") on May 22, 2020, which is available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Additional information will also be set forth in other filings that we make with the SEC from time to time. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made or to update the reasons why actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

SOURCE Palo Alto Networks, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.paloaltonetworks.com


More schools are announcing campus closures this week as communities prepare for a possible category 2 hurricane later this week.

Due to the uncertain trajectories of the storms in the Gulf of Mexico Lamar State College Orange will close at 12:30 pm today, Monday, August 24, LSCO spokesperson Amy Moore said in a statement.

Classes will resume Monday, Aug. 31.

All classes, including online and virtual classes are canceled this week.

The decision came after meeting with local officials.

Beaumont ISD announced the cancellation of all classes just before noon Monday.

Tropical storms Marco and Laura are predicted to impact the Beaumont area with high winds and potential flooding beginning Tuesday, August 25, 2020, the district said in a statement. Out of an abundance of caution for our students, parents and staff, Beaumont ISD campuses and district offices will close at 1 p.m. Monday, August 24, and will be closed for the remainder of this week.

Virtual learning will not be required for the remainder of the week as a result of the closures.

District events, including meal distributions held this week will also be suspended until virtual instruction resumes district officials said in an announcement.

Marcia Stevens, the Superintendent of Schools for the Beaumont Diocese also announced that all Catholic schools in Southeast Texas would be closing their campuses due to the possibility of inclement weather.

Little Cypress-Mauriceville, West Orange-Cove Consolidated, Bridge City, Orangefield and Port-Neches Groves all decided to cancel classes Sunday out of an abundance of caution. Orange County, which was home to the majority of the school districts that decided to cancel Sunday, began offering free sandbags Saturday.

Vidor ISD also canceled both virtual and in-person instruction Sunday.

We will not be offering virtual education during this time, a statement from the school said. We ask that you all focus on your safety and health during this time and we will keep you updated with regard to school re-opening and other news.

Port Arthur ISD followed suit Monday morning, announcing their decision in a letter to staff.

Due to the threat of Tropical Storm Laura the Port Arthur Independent School District will close from Tuesday, August 25, through Friday, August 28, Superintendent Mark Porterie said.

Faculty and staff were asked to place all essential items on tables or shelves to avoid damage from rising water.

Teachers should take their lap top computers with them and continue to engage students with updates and information, Porterie said in the letter. We are asking teachers to instruct students to bring their devices with them if they evacuate and to keep current with assignments designed to continue learning through this disruption. Teachers are instructed to use asynchronous learning tools available with Schoology to keep students engaged in the learning process while the district is closed.

Lumberton ISD invited students back to campus Monday morning although they said they were monitoring the situation.

Lamar State College Port Arthur closed their campus in response to a mandatory evacuation order issued for the city by 6 a.m. Tuesday.

The campus will reopen when threats to the community no longer exist, LSCPA President Betty Reynard said. Online classes will continue to meet as conditions warrant.

Lamar University cancelled classes for the rest of the week Monday night, urging students to seek shelter off campus.

Lamar University officials have continued to monitor Tropical Storm Laura and the potential impact to our region. The current track of this storm poses an increased risk to Southeast Texas, LU spokesperson Shelly Vitanza said. Therefore, the university will suspend all in-person residential classes starting Tuesday. Additionally, the campus will close tomorrow, Tues., Aug. 25 at 12 p.m. All online courses will continue to meet. These actions will take place until further notice, with the expectation of reopening campus Sunday afternoon in preparation for Monday residential classes.

On campus residents are encouraged to seek shelter off of campus unless they are unable to do soNederland ISD, which doesnt start class until next Monday closed their campuses for the rest of the week just after noon Monday.

Hardin-Jefferson ISD in Sour Lake announced that they would cancel all in person and online classes for the remainder of the week.

We do, however, encourage all students to be prepared for possible future districtwide remote learning, a statement from the district said. In the event that your family is evacuating, please bring your students school-issued devices and materials.

Lumberton ISD, which had class on Monday, also cancelled all in-person and online classes.

Bob Hope Charter school, which has campuses in Beaumont and Port Arthur delayed their virtual start in anticiptaion of the storm.

This post will be updated.

isaac.windes@hearstnp.com

twitter.com/isaacdwindes
FOR the first time ever, a former Securities and Exchange (SEC) chairperson is giving an online lecture on the rules governing Corporations Vested with Public Interest. Atty. Teresita Herbosa and Access MCLE have designed an interactive online course that will impact banks and quasi banks, non stock savings and loan associations, pawnshops, corporations engaged in money service business, preneed, trust and insurance companies and other financial intermediaries. While serving as the chairperson of the SEC, Herbosa implemented significant reforms in the commission and introduced changes to the Corporation Code of the Philippines. Her proposed amendments passed legislative process and were reenacted in 2019 as the Revised Corporation Code of the Philippines, which together with a colleague, she authored in a book titled The Revised Corporation Code, Its Theories and Applications. Herbosa, who ranked 16th among the successful examinees in the 1977 Bar Examinations, is now a professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law and the De La Salle University College of Law. Prior to serving as the SEC Chairperson from 2011 to 2018, she engaged in private practice of law at the Angara Abello Concepcion Regala and Cruz Law Offices (Accralaw) specializing in litigation and dispute resolution for 33 years. She has rejoined Accra as Of Counsel in 2019. SPONSORED CONTENT
Hurricane Sandy nearly wiped out the dance studio Carrie Daniels founded 21 years ago. The coronavirus pandemic threatened to do it again, as worried families stayed away.

But the Take a Bow Performing Arts Center, in New York Citys Brooklyn borough, is remaking itself this school year as a remote learning help center. It will support up to 15 students at a time as they work through online lessons from their schools in a safe and socially distanced way, Daniels said. When the virtual school day is done, the center will offer dance, drama, yoga, meditation, and other activities.

Youve got to make these kids feel safe, youve got to let these parents know theyre safe, Daniels said.

Millions of students are enrolled in school districts that are starting the 2020-21 school year offering only hybrid or fully remote classes. And with months to plan this time around, school districts have promised more robust remote learning, with more opportunities for teachers to interact directly with students.

But a long day of remote learning still leaves parents and caregivers juggling child care and work.

Enter programs like the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Clubs, which have long provided before- and after-care at schools. They are now shifting to offering socially distanced learning camps during school hours all over the country, using their own facilities as well as community spaces.

Smaller family child-care providers are offering such services as well. And enterprising businesses that have not typically provided full-day care during the school year, such as Daniels with her dance studio, are seeing an opportunity to help fill the child-care gap as well.

Its not quite school, but it works for parents looking for options, providers say. But at the same time, it raises the same questions of safety that have driven the discussion around school reopenings. If traditional face-to-face instruction has been deemed too risky for teachers and students, are these newly formed care programs any safer?

That question has been particularly pointed for providers who care for infants, toddlers, and small children. Many of those small businesses have had to stay open to survive through the economic downtown. Running on thin profit margins in the best of times, theyve struggled to pay for all the safety changes required of them, said Ashley C. Williams, a senior policy analyst for the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California Berkeley.

And its some of the same small preschools and day-care programs that parents are turning to now to help care for their school-age children.

What is the difference between an early educator and a teacher? Williams said. Why is child care expected to carry or save the economy as if early educators are any more immune to the coronavirus?

But providers who normally offer day camp and overnight camp programs say they have developed a safety net of precautions that, when followed diligently, can keep kids and camp employees safe while still providing the social outlets that children need.

Those protections, outlined in a field guide developed by the American Camp Association and the YMCA of the USA, include mask wearing, frequent hand washing, and keeping children in small cohorts rather than allowing them to mix freely in large groups. Many remote learning support programs say theyre adhering to those standards.

The camp providers who have followed the field guide feel a comfort in being able to run these programs as well as they ran their day camps this summer, said Tom Rosenberg, the executive director of the American Camp Association. Some well-publicized virus outbreaks this summer occurred where the guidelines were not being followed completely or consistently, he said. Rosenberg said a camp director told him that good enough is not good enough in this case.

The variety of providers that have sprung up to offer child care during remote learning speaks to the need. In some cases, it is the districts themselves that are offering the programs. Adams 12 Five Star Schools, a district in Thornton, Colo., plans to offer a free learning pod experience supervised by district staff to students, based on academic and family need. Kim Walsh, who is directing the program, said parents have shown tremendous interest, even for their middle and high schoolers.

Seeing how many district staff members have stepped forward to say they want to be part of the pod program has been a huge point of pride, Walsh said.

Larger providers are also in the mix.The Boys and Girls Clubs of America has 1,300 sites, mostly in urban areas, that plan to offer what they are calling learning pods or safety zones, according to Misty Miller, the organizations senior vice president for organizational development. How many children will ultimately be served is still in flux, since programs have to reduce capacity for safety.

The Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Houston opened its Blue Learning Labs a few days ago, with the ultimate goal of serving around 600 children and youth, said Kevin Hattery, who is CEO of the Houston clubs. More than 50 different school districts operate within its region.

Keeping in line with the Boys and Girls Clubs mission of serving children from low-income families, the fee is about $30 for eight weeks, Hattery said. But providing these programs is an expensive service.

There is not a funding mechanism that is there to support what were doing. Our budget is ballooning significantly to help fill this gap, Hattery said.

Peter Rosario, the president and CEO of Ocean County YMCA in Toms River, N.J., has moved the exercise equipment out of his facility in order to fit more kids in.

In a normal year, the YMCA would provide before- and after-care for 1,000 children attending the Toms River, Lakewood, Manchester, and Berkeley Township districts. With the distancing and space restrictions imposed by the coronavirus, it hopes to serve 85 to 90 children at the YMCA itself, with another 50 to 75 in school buildings. Families would pay $250 a week for a child, including before- and after-care.

Were so blessed to have school districts that are phenomenal partners, Rosario said. The YMCA was already used to providing academic enrichment activities to children through summer programs, which it hopes to continue during these new child-care programs, Rosario said.

And thats important, because this is going to be the next two to three years that we have to work together to rebuild our kids. The amount of learning loss will not be made up just through school.

Zoila Carolina Toma, who runs a home-based child-care program in Signal Hill, Calif., is expanding her program to support children engaged in online learning. In addition to her two children, a 3rd grader and a 1st grader, she can care for eight more. Shes planning to charge around $200 a week. Her neighborhood is served by the Long Beach district in Los Angeles County.

But expanding beyond her typical population of babies and preschoolers comes with a number of costs. Shes purchased extra laptops and headphones in case the students devices are broken. Shes hired an employee with the skill to help troubleshoot computer glitches. Shes even had to buy new furniture; chairs that are suitable for toddlers wont work for older children expected to sit and pay attention for an hour or more at a stretch.

Most of the children, they grow with me and then leave when they start school, she said. I have had cases where some of the parents are reaching back to me now.

She added, I am not going to say no. For one thing, she said that keeping sibling groups togetherfor example, a preschool age child and an older siblinghelps prevent the spread of the virus as well as providing a safe place for the child to learn. But all of the extra supplies add up, she said. And she also wonders about juggling schedules, if one child has a break while another is still supposed to be paying attention to schoolwork.

You dont need to change diapers, you dont have to feed them with a spoon, but theres other challenges that comes with a school-age child, Toma said.

For Take A Bow, all of this is new. One of Danielss longtime students, now a dance instructor, is also a newly minted elementary school teacher who isnt in the classroom due to a pandemic-caused hiring freeze. That instructor will be supervising the lessons along with other assistants, said Daniels, who has also installed air purifiers, and hand-sanitizer dispensers and bought a portable whiteboard for class work. Families can pay $75 a day or $250 for a full week. New York City schools currently plan to offer students a mix of in-person and remote instruction.

My silver lining to only having 40 students during the summerabout half normal enrollmentis I was able to learn how to do this, Daniels said. It went so smooth, everyone is healthy, everyone is good, they were so happy to be here.

She hopes the school year will be the same.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has criticised the ruling African Nation Congress on grounds of rampant corruption by some members of the party. In a series of tweets, Ramaphosa said the ANC was, and still is, a huge part of South Africas corruption problem.

Read: African Cheetah Arrives From South Africa Via Singapore At Mysore Zoo

Ramaphosa stands against corruption

In his letter, Ramaphosa referred to instances of recent scandals where ANC members were implicated in wrongfully awarding tenders for COVID-19 protective gears, accusations of awarding jobs as favours as well as the issue of state capture. The President added that while the problem of corruption is not exclusive to the ANC, it still stands as the number one accused.

Another instance that was highlighted by the South African President was about food parcels meant for the poor being used by local ANC leaders to obtain political favours. While the South African government under President Ramaphosa had begun the fight against corruption, the effort requires the commitment of all those involved.

Cyril Ramaphosa added that corruption in South Africa has denied the people of their rightful money and services and also resulted in dysfunctional infrastructure in certain parts of the country.

Read: South African President Lifts Coronavirus Lockdown Restrictions As Cases Drop

Let this be a turning point in our fight against corruption. pic.twitter.com/qw8MCZl9Li  Cyril Ramaphosa  #StaySafe (@CyrilRamaphosa) August 23, 2020

As President of the African National Congress, as part of the national leadership collective, I am fully aware of the decisive mandate we have been given by #ANC54 to end all forms of corruption, and to renew and rebuild our movement. This is the mandate I intend to fulfil. pic.twitter.com/NwIyko5c95  Cyril Ramaphosa  #StaySafe (@CyrilRamaphosa) August 23, 2020

Ramaphosa, in his letter, reiterated that the people of South Africa were the inheritors of the legacy of Luthuli, Tambo and Mandela. He said the stark reality ANC, which has ruled South Africa for 26 years, must be confronted.

Ramaphosa came to power in 2017, after replacing then-President Jacob Zuma as the leader of the ANC. The South African leader came to power vowing to take strong action against corruption which Zuma was unable to eradicate.

Read: West African Leaders Press For Mali President's Release

Read: About 300,000 People Arrested In S Africa For Breaching COVID-19 Lockdown Laws
U.S. President Donald Trump holds a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Aug. 19, 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Trump Approves Disaster Assistance for Louisiana Ahead of Tropical Storms

President Donald Trump on Aug. 23 has approved an emergency disaster declaration for Louisiana and ordered that federal assistance be made available to help the state ahead of tropical storms Laura and Marco.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Aug. 24 that Marco is about 85 miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River, and moving northwest at about 6 mph. A storm surge warning was issued for Morgan City, Louisiana, to Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and a tropical storm warning was posted for Intracoastal City to the AlabamaMississippi border. The NHC also issued a tropical storm warning for Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Maurepas, and Metropolitan New Orleans.

Laura, which is currently near Cuba, might be the more destructive of the two storms. Its expected to strengthen into at least a Category 1 hurricane this week, and its cone of uncertainty suggests Laura might hit the TexasLouisiana border area on the morning of Aug. 27.

Hurricane and storm surge watches will likely be required for portions of the U.S. northwest Gulf coast area by this evening, the NHC wrote.

Trump announced a state of emergency on Aug. 23 during a press conference about the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House said that disaster relief efforts will be coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The National Hurricane Center photo shows tropical storms Marco and Laura as of 10 a.m. on Aug. 24. (NHC)

The White House said that those agencies will coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe.

Trump, in a news conference, said he approved the emergency declaration after a request from Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas declared a state of disaster in his state as the two storms approached.

It is incredibly important for anybody who could be in the path of these storms to constantly heed local warnings about what could happen in your community, Abbott said on Aug. 24 at a news conference. Understand this is very swift-moving, and there could be rising water very quickly.

Over the weekend, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves similarly declared a state of emergency over the two storms.

We are in unprecedented times, Reeves said in a news conference. We are dealing with not only two potential storms in the Gulf of Mexico in the next few hours, we are also dealing with COVID-19. Because of COVID-19, our shelter space is limited compared to how it normally would be. What that means to you is, should you need to get out, should you need to move north or perhaps east or  west, you need to make plans early to do so.
The drawn-out ding-dong between Amigo Holdings and its founder James Benamor is still keeping investors on their toes.

In a blog posted on Friday night, Benamor set out a series of proposals including his own return to the troubled lender as chief executive. He blasted the previous board, led by then-boss Hamish Paton and chairman Stephan Wilcke who resigned in June and July respectively, as 'contemptuous and lazy' in their treatment of shareholders and customers.

If the company does not listen to his proposals, he added, he would put them to a shareholder vote.

But in its comeback yesterday, Amigo urged Benamor 'not to waste further time and expense' for either himself or the company.

There was a further slap in the face for Benamor as Amigo said its new chief executive Glen Crawford  whom he had praised, and wanted to keep on to run the lending business  would resign if the maverick founder returned.

Amigo told investors: 'Mr Crawford has made it clear to the board that he is not prepared to work with Amigo in any circumstances where Mr Benamor returns to Amigo's governance structure in a position of influence.'

Benamor continued the spat on Twitter, writing: 'It's unfortunate that, when forced to choose a position, [Crawford] publicly chose 'against'. But in my opinion, the chances that Glen would actually resign if this proposal was voted in are roughly 0 per cent.'

Amigo, which lends to customers with a poor credit score if they have family and friends willing to pay the loan if they can't, has been struggling with a series of complaints. The lender is trying to resolve matters with the City watchdog, but has admitted it could have to pay out millions of pounds in compensation.

Benamor, who rejoined the company's board earlier this year before quitting in despair, alleges the firm has been mismanaged and believes he could do a much better job.

Shares tumbled 30.1 per cent, or 5.36 per cent, to 12.46 per cent yesterday, as shareholders digested Amigo's reluctance to rehire its founder.

On the FTSE100, pharmaceuticals firm Astrazeneca was on the rise after President Donald Trump said he was considering fast-tracking the Covid-19 vaccine it is working on for use in the US.

The vaccine, which is being developed along with Oxford University, is widely seen as one of the leading candidates to get approval. Astra's shares climbed 2.1 per cent, or 174p, to 8611p.

It helped the blue-chip index rise 1.7 per cent, or 102.84 points, to 6104.73 points, though the largest gain came from BT, where takeover speculation prompted a climb of 7.1 per cent, or 7.2p, to 109p. The FTSE250 index of mid-sized companies managed to cling onto gains, ending the day up 0.6 per cent, or 107.39p, at 17685.07p.

Gold miner Petropavlovsk left investors pondering over its direction, after announcing that its proposed auditor PwC had quit due to concerns over the company's governance.

The mysterious firm, which was recently hit by its second boardroom coup in as many years, said it was trying to appoint more independent directors and improve its transparency.

The latest shake-up at Petropavlovsk began in June when rival Russian miner UGC and a group of other investors ousted half the board. One of the directors to leave was Pavel Maslovskiy, the founder, who failed to get himself reinstated at a crunch shareholder meeting this month.
Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

Hospitals, medical research institutes, as well as governments, across the globe are hiking their healthcare IT spending to bring reforms in both, operations and outcomes. Instating databases is turning out to be more of a necessity for healthcare institutions, particularly for the field of radiology.

Criticality of data produced and used by radiologists is compelling them to utilize speedy & error-proof data transference systems. Correspondingly, the transformation of global healthcare industry through digitization trends is also necessitating the deployment of radiology information systems .

Get Sample Copy of Report @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/2816

Company Profiles

Cerner Corporation

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc.

Epic Systems Corporation

General Electric Company

Koninklijke Philips N.V.

Siemens AG

McKesson Corporation

Merge Healthcare Incorporated

Medinformatix Inc.

Novarad Corp.

Get To Know Methodology of Report @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/2816

In its latest publication, Persistence Market Research has compiled more of such factors that will keep driving the growth of global radiology information system market in the years to come.

According to this report, the global market for radiology information systems, which is presently valued at US$ 580.2 Mn, is anticipated to soar at 8.3% CAGR and reach US$ 1,179.2 Mn value by the end of 2024.

Titled as Radiology Information Systems Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2016-2024, the report reveals that global demand for radiology information systems continues to grow on the account of rising incidence rate of lifestyle-related diseases.

Increasing consumer awareness to radiological procedures, and easy accessibility to these technologies are also serving as proponents for adoption of radiology information systems. Since installing radiology information systems supports a value-based healthcare model, medical practitioners are also promoting it as the immediate future of digitalized radiology.

The report reveals that in 2017 and beyond, the demand for cloud-based radiology information systems will remain considerably higher than on-premise systems.

Deployment of cloud-based radiology information systems is projected to bring more than US$ 800 Mn by the end of 2024, while revenues emanating from on-premise deployment will soar at 7.3% CAGR. During the forecast period, a little over 45% of global revenues will be accounted by sales of radiology information software.

Access Full Report @ https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/checkout/2816

The adoption of radiology information services is also slated to grow robustly, while radiology information hardware is likely to incur a moderate dip in revenues.

Through 2024, medical institutions adopting radiology information systems will continue to do so on integrated platforms. Similar to the current scenario, integrated radiology information systems will procure over three-fourth of global market value by the end of 2024.

Standalone radiology information systems, however, will be valued at just over US$ 280 Mn by the end of projection period. And, hospitals will undoubtedly be the largest end-users of radiology information systems.

More than US$ 600 Mn worth of global radiology information system revenues will be emanating from hospitals spanned across the globe. Adoption of such systems will also be considerably high in diagnostic labs and ambulatory surgical centers.

By the end of 2024, North America will remain as the largest market for radiology information systems in the world. In 2016, the regions radiology information systems market was valued at US$ 269 Mn.

Meanwhile, Europes advanced healthcare infrastructure will also work in the favor of radiology information system adoption. Throughout the period, Europes radiology information system revenues will soar at a health CAGR, and contribute to nearly 23% share. Although, fastest revenue growth is expected to be recorded by Latin America and the Asia-Pacific regions  revenues from which will surge at more than 8% CAGR.

Report To Be Covered

Sales Revenue: Market Share, Growth Rate, Current Market Analysis.

Market Share, Growth Rate, Current Market Analysis. Product Revenue for Top Players : Market Share, Growth Rate, Current Market Situation Analysis.

: Market Share, Growth Rate, Current Market Situation Analysis. Industry Trends : United States and Other Regions Revenue, Status and Outlook.

: United States and Other Regions Revenue, Status and Outlook. Market Segment : By Types, By Applications, By Regions/ Geography.

: By Types, By Applications, By Regions/ Geography. Market Environment : Government Policies, Technological Changes, Market Risks.

: Government Policies, Technological Changes, Market Risks. Market Drivers : Growing Demand, Reduction in Cost, Market Opportunities and Challenges.

: Growing Demand, Reduction in Cost, Market Opportunities and Challenges. Competitive Landscape: By Manufacturers, Development Trends, Marketing Area
A Washington County jury has acquitted a man accused of following a woman off a MAX train in Aloha and allegedly trying to assault her under a nearby bridge.

Washington County prosecutors last March charged Oneal Payne, then 31, with three felony counts: kidnapping, sexual abuse and an attempt to commit a felony. He also faced two related misdemeanors.

A judge dismissed one of the misdemeanors and, last week, a jury acquitted him on the other four counts.

We are very happy that the jury set emotion aside and was able to evaluate the objective evidence for what it truly showed. This was a trial where the justice system worked the way it should, said Cameron Taylor, Paynes attorney.

Stephen Mayer, a spokesman for the Washington County district attorney, said: While we always respect a jurys verdict, we are disappointed in the outcome of this case. The victim immediately sought help from law enforcement, and cooperated through a lengthy litigation process. We appreciate her courage, and will continue to seek justice for victims of sexual assault.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699

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The wife of Bob Saget has described him as "the best man I've ever known" in her first TV interview since his death. Kelly Rizzo told US talk show Today the late comedian was always "kind and loving to everybody". Asked on Today what he had been like at home when no audience was present, Ms Rizzo said: "The same".
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 08:33:44|Editor: huaxia

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LISBON, Aug. 23 (Xinhua) -- Midfielder Thiago Alcantara intensely celebrated the UEFA Champions League title won Sunday by Bayern Munich after their 1-0 victory over Paris Saint-Germain at Estadio da Luz, in Lisbon.

Considered one of the best players in the decision, the Italian naturalized Spaniard highlighted the team's joint work.

"We were having a wonderful year and we are deserved winners. I am the happiest man in the world for playing in this team, winning this way and being part of this wonderful group," said Alcantara.

Asked what Bayern Munich's secret was, he preferred to point out that the merits were "from the whole team, not only from those on the field but from those who came in as well. We did a terrific job to win that title. We were champions!"

Another player who entered the middle of the match and put the Parisian goal in danger was the Brazilian midfielder Philippe Coutinho, who said he was "happy as hell" to get a title of this magnitude in his farewell to the German club since he belongs to Barcelona and returns to Spain for the next season.

"We are living in a crazy year. Nobody expected this, and I hope everything will return to normal. It was a year of ups and downs, but I never stopped working. It was my last game with this shirt and we had a great campaign. We are all to be congratulated," he commented.

"I will be back with a lot of desire. Winning titles is always the goal. Champions are Europe's main competition. It took a while, but it came," celebrated the midfielder. Enditem
I May Destroy You (HBO at 9) When Arabellas memory of Jan. 22 comes flooding back to her, she drags the last of her demons out.
File image of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his sister Kim Yo-jong (right) (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is comatose and with his health deteriorating rapidly, his younger sister Kim Yo-jong had been declared the de facto second-in-command, according to South Korean diplomat Chang Song-min, former aide of former South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung.

Reports suggest that Kim Yo-jong has been entrusted with the responsibility of managing diplomatic relations with the rivals the United States and South Korea. North Korea has not responded to these news reports.

While the succession plan of the North Korean regime is not known publicly, it is widely believed that Kim Yo-jong would be a frontrunner to take over the reins of the secretive country.

Listen: Work near home the new WFH says WeWork India CEO Karan Virwani

Here are seven things you need to know about Kim Yo-jong:

> Believed to be in her early 30s, Kim Yo-jong is the only close relative of the North Korean leader to play a public role in the countrys politics.

> According to North Korea Leadership Watch, she attended primary school in Bern, Switzerland around the same time Kim Jong-un was studying there. She lived in a private home and was attended to by staff and watched over by bodyguards.

> Kim Yo-jong is thought to be four years younger than her brother and was rarely seen in public until 2010. However, her public appearances have increased since. She had also become a regular face in her father Kim Jong-ils core team in 2011.

> She is believed to have worked behind the scenes in North Korea's crucial propaganda agencies. This had led to the United States adding her to the list of sanctioned senior officials in 2017 because of human rights abuses and censorship.

> During the 2018-2019 flurry of international diplomacy, Kim Yo-jong garnered global attention by leading her countrys official delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea

> Kim Yo-jong was seen dashing about to make sure everything went well for her older brother during bilateral summits, including holding an ashtray for him at a train station on his way to a meeting with US President Donald Trump in Hanoi, Vietnam.

> Earlier this year, she took on a more public policy role , cementing her status as an influential political player in her own right. In March, state media carried her first ever statement, in which she criticised South Korean authorities. That was followed by several more, including a response to comments by Trump, and a warning that the North would cut communications with South Korea.
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki plans to meet leaders of opposition parties on Wednesday to discuss the situation in Belarus, the PM's Chief of Staff Michal Dworczyk said on Monday.

"Today the prime minister will send official invitations for the meeting on Wednesday, whose main topic will be the situation in Belarus. This situation should be considered outside the current political dispute," Dworczyk told private television broadcaster TVN24.

"We would like to talk with the representatives of other parties about further steps, as there is no doubt that this extraordinary situation in Belarus will not end soon," Dworczyk also said.

Tens of thousands of protesters demanding Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko step down defied a warning from the military on Sunday and flooded into Minsk, briefly gathering near the president's residence, before dispersing peacefully.

"For the first time in Belarus we have to do with demonstrations not by opposition parties or groups. These are Belarusians demonstrating, who want to live in a free country and have the right to democratic election," Dworczyk said.

(Reporting by Agnieszka Barteczko; Editing by Kim Coghill)
The debate over the origins and molecular structure of 'Oumuamua continued today with an announcement in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that despite earlier promising claims, the interstellar object is not made of molecular hydrogen ice after all.

The earlier study, published by Seligman & Laughlin in 2020--after observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope set tight limits on the outgassing of carbon-based molecules--suggested that if 'Oumuamua were a hydrogen iceberg, then the pure hydrogen gas that gives it its rocket-like push would have escaped detection. But scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) were curious whether a hydrogen-based object could actually have made the journey from interstellar space to our solar system.

"The proposal by Seligman and Laughlin appeared promising because it might explain the extreme elongated shape of 'Oumuamua as well as the non-gravitational acceleration. However, their theory is based on an assumption that H2 ice could form in dense molecular clouds. If this is true, H2 ice objects could be abundant in the universe, and thus would have far-reaching implications. H2 ice was also proposed to explain dark matter, a mystery of modern astrophysics," said Dr. Thiem Hoang, senior researcher in the theoretical astrophysics group at KASI and lead author on the paper. "We wanted to not only test the assumptions in the theory but also the dark matter proposition." Dr. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Professor of Science at Harvard and co-author on the paper, added, "We were suspicious that hydrogen icebergs could not survive the journey--which is likely to take hundreds of millions of years--because they evaporate too quickly, and as to whether they could form in molecular clouds."

Traveling at a blistering speed of 196,000mph in 2017, 'Oumuamua was first classified as an asteroid, and when it later sped up, was found to have properties more akin to comets. But the 0.2km radius interstellar object didn't fit that category, either, and its point of origin has remained a mystery. Researchers focused on the giant molecular cloud (GMC) W51--one of the closest GMCs to Earth at just 17,000 light years away--as a potential point of origin for 'Oumuamua, but hypothesize that it simply could not have made the journey intact. "The most likely place to make hydrogen icebergs is in the densest environments of the interstellar medium. These are giant molecular clouds," said Loeb, confirming that these environments are both too far away and are not conducive to the development of hydrogen icebergs.

An accepted astrophysical origin for solid objects is growth by sticky collisions of dust, but in the case of a hydrogen iceberg, this theory could not hold together. "An accepted route to form a km-sized object is first to form grains of micron-size, then such grains grow by sticky collisions," said Hoang. "However, in regions with high gas density, collisional heating by gas collisions can rapidly sublimate the hydrogen mantle on the grains, preventing them from growing further."

Although the study explored destruction of H2 ice by multiple mechanisms including interstellar radiation, cosmic rays, and interstellar gas, sublimation due to heating by starlight has the most destructive effect, and according to Loeb, "Thermal sublimation by collisional heating in GMCs could destroy molecular hydrogen icebergs of 'Oumuamua-size before their escape into the interstellar medium." This conclusion precludes the theory that 'Oumuamua journeyed to our solar system from a GMC, and further precludes the proposition of primordial snowballs as dark matter. Evaporative cooling in these situations does not reduce the role of thermal sublimation by starlight in the destruction of H2 ice objects.

'Oumuamua first gained notoriety in 2017 when it was discovered screaming through space by observers at Haleakala Observatory, and has since been the subject of ongoing studies. "This object is mysterious and difficult to understand because it exhibits peculiar properties we have never seen from comets and asteroids in our solar system," said Hoang.

While the nature of the interstellar traveler is currently an unsolved mystery, Loeb suggests it won't remain so for much longer, especially if it's not alone. "If 'Oumuamua is a member of a population of similar objects on random trajectories, then the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (VRO), which is scheduled to have its first light next year, should detect roughly one 'Oumuamua-like object per month. We will all wait with anticipation to see what it will find."



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By Laman Ismayilova

People's Poet of Azerbaijan Fikrat Hojayev has been awarded with Istiglal order. During the phone call, President Ilham Aliyev congratulated the poet on his jubilee and wished him new success in his creative activity and good health.

President stressed the poet's contribution to Azerbaijani literature, noting that his works have always been of great interest among readers.

In his turn, Fikrat Hojayev expressed his gratitude to the head of the state. He regarded Istiglal Order as a high appreciation of his work by the state.

The poet emphasized that the great national leader Heydar Aliyev always paid great attention to the country's literature and culture. He stressed that this tradition has been successfully continued by President Ilham Aliyev.

The poet's works have been published in the press since 1956. He has toured extensively around the world, dedicating poems to national liberation movements in many countries. His poems have been translated into a number of foreign languages.

Music pieces were also composed for his poems "My heart", "Gunay", "The night is too long" and others.

In 1968, he was awarded the Azerbaijan Komsomol Prize for his poems "Wheels Turn Back", "Wounded Flowers" and "The Artist Thinks" about the heroism and self-sacrifice of young people. He was also presented Humay Prize for his poetry work in 1998.

He also worked at Azerbaijan Radio and Television Broadcasting Committee, "Azerbaijan Youth" newspaper and "Azerbaijan" magazine. He also served as an executive secretary for international relations at Azerbaijan Writers' Union.

Since 1987, he has been the editor-in-chief of Gobustan art collection.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
250,000 people asked to flee Californias biggest-ever wildfires

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Californias biggest-ever wildfires have killed at least five people, damaged or destroyed more than 3,100 structures and burned more than one million acres, putting nearly a quarter-million people under evacuation orders and warnings, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

As the fires burning across five counties in northern and central parts of the state became the second-largest fire in California history on Sunday, crews from across the U.S. West, military planes and National Guard troops arrived in California, Reuters reported.

Over 200 aircraft are already dropping loads of water, monitoring the spread of flames and ferrying firefighters and equipment, according to AFP.

The fires were ignited by lightning from dry thunderstorms in the region. As more dry thunderstorms have been forecast, more wildfires are expected, the National Weather Service has warned, issuing red-flag warnings for large parts of northern and central California.

These conditions could cause erratic winds, extreme fire behavior within the existing fires, and have a potential for new fires to start, the CalFire website said.

The blazes are also threatening parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, the forested region near the University of California at Santa Cruz and a large part of the area between San Francisco and the state capital of Sacramento, according to Reuters.

About 14,000 firefighters were working to douse the blazes, but containment of the major ones remained low. The state has requested other states and local jurisdictions to provide additional support.

Since last week, hundreds of fires of varying sizes have burned throughout the state. About two dozen of them are major fires.

President Donald Trump issued a major disaster declaration Saturday to provide federal assistance.

According to the American Lung Association, the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the health risk posed by smoky air and extreme heat, as inhaling smoke and ash may further weaken lungs of people with the disease, Afif El-Hassan, a physician spokesman for the lung association, was quoted as saying.

Due to smoke, churches near the fire areas had to cancel in-person services on Sunday.

Big Valley Grace Community Church in Modesto announced on its website and social media that the congregation would meet online only.

Because of the air quality, because of the fires that are burning close by, the smoke that is coming to our valley in Modesto, we are not going to meet on the Field on Sunday, Rick Countryman, co-senior pastor, said in a video message to his congregation.

Meanwhile, CrossCity Christian Church in Fresno, in partnership with Convoy of Hope, is helping meet the physical and spiritual needs of those impacted during times of domestic devastation.

Currently the COH Disaster Services are on the ground distributing meals and supplies to the recent widespread damage in Iowa and in route to the current wildfires in California, it said. Your ongoing financial partnership through your CrossCity Tithe, and Offerings through our One Day Fund, are tangibly providing hope and shining the light of Christ during these dark circumstances.
A brave Christchurch massacre victim has recalled the horrifying moment he hid beneath dead bodies to save himself from a crazed gunman.

The four-day sentencing hearing for Australian mass shooter Brenton Tarrant began in Christchurch High Court on Monday morning.

Victims and family members of the 51 people murdered by the 29-year-old travelled from across the world, Australia and New Zealand to give evidence.

Turkish immigrant Temel Atacocugu, who was shot nine times and seriously wounded in the left arm, jaw, chest, left thigh and lower legs, stood by his teenage sons as he fronted his attacker in court.

Australian mass shooter Brenton Tarrant appeared in Christchurch High Court on Monday morning (pictured) for his four-day sentencing hearing over the March 15, 2019, mosque massacres

Mr Atacocugu described how he 'thought he was going to die' when Tarrant opened fired in Al Noor mosque on March 15 last year.

The father called on his former military training and played dead - a decision he credits with saving his life.

'The gunman and I looked into each others eyes, I saw the moment when I was the target of his gun,' he said, news.com.au reports.

'As I lay under the bodies in the mosque I thought I was going to die. I tried to lie as still as possible when the gunman came back a second time. I knew if I moved he would have executed me as he did the others. I could feel the blood and brains of the persons above me running down my face and neck.'

Turkish immigrant Temel Atacocugu (pictured) recalled how blood and brains were dripping onto his face as he hid beneath bodies in order to save his life

The moment of truth has arrived for victims of the Christchurch mosque attacks, dozens of whom will attend court for the terrorist's sentencing

'I know if I had moved I wouldnt be here today.'

Mr Atacocugu is one of sixty-six that will be offered the chance to speak and share their loss.

Justice Cameron Mander will bear their suffering in mind when giving his sentence at the end of the lengthy hearing, which is expected to be life imprisonment, and possibly with no chance of parole.

'That's never been imposed in New Zealand,' renowned local lawyer Nigel Hampton QC told TVNZ.

'But (Justice Mander) in his discretion can say 'sorry but no, you're serving life imprisonment without the right to apply for parole'.'

Sixty-six will be offered the chance to speak and share their loss in a Christchurch court over four days, beginning Monday

Victims and family members of the 51 people murdered by Australian man Brenton Tarrant have travelled from across the world, Australia and New Zealand to take part

On March 15 last year, Tarrant attacked two Christchurch Mosques, killing 51 worshippers while live-streaming his crimes (pictured, Al Noor Mosque)

On March 15 last year, Tarrant attacked Al-Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre, killing 51 worshippers while live-streaming his crimes.

Those videos and images continue to live on dark corners of the internet despite the efforts of the NZ Government and tech companies to remove them.

Tarrant has pleaded guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders and one terrorism charge.

He also sacked his legal team last month and will represent himself.

Mr Hampton said Tarrant's decision to represent himself and be present in the courtroom, and the sheer weight of family members to give evidence, would mean 'the emotional temperature in that courtroom is going to rise considerably'.

However, not all of the 50-plus victims who have travelled from around the world - including Australia, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Jordan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Fiji, Egypt and Singapore - will make it to Christchurch.

Nine who were granted entry by the government 'have been unable to reach New Zealand in time due to COVID-related travel disruptions', according to Victims Support NZ.

They will instead watch the livestream of proceedings from their hotel rooms where they are undergoing mandatory isolation.

A victim speaks during the sentencing of Brenton Tarrant at the High Court

Justice Cameron Mander will bear their suffering in mind when giving his sentence at the end of the lengthy hearing, which is expected to be life imprisonment, and possibly with no chance of parole (pictured, family and survivors of the Christchurch mosque shootings outside of the Christchurch High Court on Monday)

Armed police officers patrol the rooftop of the Christchurch High Court on Monday

Christchurch's justice precinct has been transformed ahead of the week, with Tarrant reportedly staying in the building which houses both the courtroom and police headquarters in the city's CBD.

The 29-year-old returned to Canterbury on Sunday for the first time since the atrocity, flown from Auckland on an Air Force Hercules plane and taken by local police and corrections staff.

Heavily armed police are stationed on both sides of the building, which has been barricaded off from the street, with local media capturing images of military-style vehicles in the precinct.

Armed police also are also keeping watch outside the two mosques that Tarrant attacked.

Christchurch's justice precinct has been transformed ahead of the week, with Tarrant reportedly staying in the building which houses both the courtroom and police headquarters in the city's CBD (pictured, people wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch in 2019)
Vice President Mike Pence waves after speaking on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, N.C., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Chris Carlson-Pool/Getty Images)

Mike Pence Nominated by GOP as Vice President: Four More Years

Vice President Mike Pence was nominated by the GOP to be President Donald Trumps vice president at the Republican National Convention in North Carolina on Monday.

Pence, in a speech in Charlotte, accepted the nomination from former Gov. Scott Walker.

I want to thank you for the honor of this day, Pence, the former Republican governor of Indiana, said. America needs four more years of President Donald Trump in the White House, he said.

The vice president said that Trump has bolstered the U.S. economy, promoted a pro-life agenda, secure borders, and more.

Joe Biden and the Democratic party have been taken over by the radical left, Pence said, adding that they will raise taxes, provide abortion on demand, and allowed unfettered immigration.

Were going to black the blue, he said, referring to law enforcement and the wave of anti-police sentiment that was triggered by George Floyds death in May. Nightly riots and unrest have continued in a variety of U.S. cities this summer.

Vice President Mike Pence speaks to delegates in the Charlotte Convention Centers Richardson Ballroom in Charlotte, N.C. on Aug. 24, 2020.

(Travis Dove-Pool/Getty Images)

Pence also said that the GOP is working to secure 2 million volunteers and a large grassroots movement to secure Trumps reelection.

Pence, who was named by Trump to head the U.S. pandemic task force earlier this year, won the unanimous support of the Republican delegates.

I am proud to announce the vice president, Michael R. Pence, has the unanimous support of this convention to be the Republican Partys nominee for the office of Vice President of the United States of America, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said earlier in the day.

Trump will also visit a facility in North Carolina that produces food boxes as part of a COVID-19 aid program.

President Donald Trump (L) and Vice President Mike Pence give a thumbs up after speaking on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, N.C., on Aug. 24, 2020. (Chris Carlson-Pool/Getty Images)

Some of the speakers on Tuesday include First Lady Melania Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Eric Trump, Nicholas Sandmann, and more.

On Wednesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), South Dakota Kristi Noem, Kellyanne Conway, Lara Trump, are slated to speak.

And on Thursday, Housing Secretary Ben Carson, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ivanka Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, UFC president Dana White, and several more will speak.

Pence is slated to give his official nominating speech on Wednesday in Baltimore.
Pakistan: Rowing make-do boats, kundi fishers get their hooks into livelihood

August 24,2020 | Source: The International News

You may have witnessed a large number of fishing vessels -small and large- leaving jetties in coastal villages to catch fish early in the morning; however, a strange breed of improvised one-manned boats have also started testing the fishful seawaters. A small number of community individuals rowing their own tiny makeshift foam-built boats have started catching attention as they move to reach nearby creeks in search of livelihood. They carry different tools, like minor fishing nets, ropes, hooks, water bottles, and food items.



After reaching there they anchor their tiny boats, fastening them with hooks, and get down to business. It depends on the situation. They use small nets and fishing hooks with shrimps on them as bait to catch fish from the seawater, mainly nearby mangroves forest channels. We do not have boats now, but have long experience of working on larger boats as crew members. When they (boat owners) saw we were getting weaker for the work they fired us instantly, pushing us to live a challenging life, said Majeed Mosani, affectionately called Chhapa, while narrating a hopeless tale of his life.



Mosani aka Chhapa owns a foam-built boat that he rows to unknown destinations everyday and is optimistic to continue work despite challenges. Chhapa has a lifelong experience of going to sea since grooming age. He never thought of giving up in any difficulties he faces during work. I still have power in my arms to row this tiny boat to reach a site where I can find a huge stock of fish. I return with a small catch to sell it in the local market to earn bread and butter for my family, he said.



Recalling the past days, he said he along with other fishermen used to go to the Sea View beach area in Karachi on bicycles with small nets to catch fish from the beachside. We had to stay at the beach for a few wee hours to catch some fish and move back to the market. Now due to rapid development of infrastructures on beaches we have lost that once rich source of income. Since then we are struggling to face the challenges created by the unchecked development, which has deprived many fishermen of their sources of income, Mosani said.



He said following the COVID- 19 pandemic outbreak they had to stay home for a long time. It was hard to feed our families during the lockdown. There was a dire need for us to resume fishing activities through these makeshift boats, he said. These discarded foam-built boats have a short history. Well experienced fishermen instead of sitting idle at home collect discarded foam pieces, which they fill in the large bags and stitch them up together.



Since these people make such boats for themselves they keep each and every thing in mind to run it in the seawater and move back safely. They are natural swimmers and do not care of any rough sea weather. Abdul Rehman, another fish worker running a similar foam-built boat, said they would travel up to eight to 12 kilometers off the jetties to reach the places, where they would find a larger size fish, having a high price in the local market. They are well-calculated as they catch fish during sixseven hours usually from 6 am to around 1 pm. Because their itty-bitty boats neither have any ice box to preserve the fish for longer time nor have the capacity to carry heavy load during the trip. Therefore, they return earlier to sell their product at high rates.



They believe that the fish kept in ice boxes on larger boats is usually damaged. Thus, people prefer to take their fish, which is safe and fresh. There are a large number of fishermen, who are more comfortable to have these tiny foam-built boats to work individually, instead of going on trips for a week or more days. They calculate the share they get through boats is smaller than the product they bring themselves, individually. It is because the tiny boat cannot take more people for a trip.



Akhtar Shaikh, a small-scale trader said there were around 10-12 fishermen from Rehri Mayan, located on the outskirts of Karachi, using these tiny boats to catch fish.  Similarly, more fishermen from different localities like Ibrahim Hydri, Chashma Goth, Bengali Para, and other areas of Karachi coast have adopted this practice to make both ends meet for their families, Shaikh said. They are careful about the sea tides and rough water, he said adding they usually travelled to Korangi Creek, Korangi Harbour, Port Qasim, and neighbouring areas and return within time to reach the market to sell their product.



These small boats do not need fuel or any burden, rather the community people physically row it with oars. The species they bring back are locally called dandia, hira, kapartan, danthi, khirkhation, khusar and others, which they sell for up to Rs550/kg. The same fish being brought by larger boats gets lower rates of Rs350-400/kg. It is because larger boats keep fish in the ice box for many hours, which damages seafood. That is the only reason that these foam boat fishermen earn enough than those who spend more time in the sea and sometimes return empty handed or with a little catch due to weather ups and downs.



These poor fishermen proudly say the market people prefer to buy their catch, which is safe compared to the one coming through larger boats. There are dealers in the market, who buy these specific seafood products for their safety and freshness. Big boats have huge ice boxes, in which they keep fish for a long time and the product loses freshness. These dealers have a network to buy fish from these individual workers in different coastal villages at higher rates, encouraging them to continue supplying it. Therefore, each individual operates his own tiny boat and earns more income compared to working as a boat crew member. Each fisherman earns from Rs500 to 1800 daily, depending on tides and availability of fish. They are locally known as kundi fishermen and people prefer to buy fresh products from them. They keep a close eye on the tides and usually move their tiny boats to channels under mangroves forests to catch fish.
Islamabad, Aug 24 : The Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is likely to lodge an appeal with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) on Thursday against suspension of its flight operations to and from the bloc's member states for six months, sources said.

The decision to suspend the flag carrier's flight operations, in the wake of Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan's disclosure during a speech in the National Assembly about the grounding of 262 pilots whose commercial flying licences were found 'suspicious', was enforced on July 1., reports Dawn news According to sources, the appeal has been prepared by the PIA and the authorities concerned and it will be presented to the Aviation Division before lodging it with the EASA.

The sources said that after the issue of pilots' suspicious licences came to light and the EASA suspended authorisation of PIA flights to and from the EU member countries, the agency asked the Pakistani authorities to clarify 11 points - safety management system (SMS) being the most important one.

The EASA also asked as to how the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority (PCCA) had been functioning, how it issued commercial pilot licences to applicants and how the candidates solved their examination papers.

According to the sources, before lodging the appeal with the EASA, the PIA will give a presentation in the Aviation Division.

Before the EASA suspended the PIA flights on July 1, the airline was given an opportunity to voice its opinion on the agency's intentions to suspend the authorisation.

The PIA provided its opinion, but it was declared insufficient by the EASA.
The wrecked car is taken away from the scene of the tragedy. Photo: North West Newspix

A Donegal seaside town will come to a standstill today when a father and his two children who died in a horrific car crash are laid to rest.

John (49), Tomas (14) and Amelia Mullan (6) will be buried after the 11am funeral Mass at St Pius X Church in Moville.

The children's mother and John's wife, Geraldine (45), will lead mourners at the funeral.

Ms Mullan, a nurse at Letterkenny University Hospital, was the only person to survive when the family's car slid across a wet road last Thursday night at Quigley's Point and crashed into Lough Foyle.

Ms Mullan managed to climb on to the roof of the upturned car and was rescued a short time later. However, her husband and children perished in the accident.

In keeping with government Covid-19 guidelines, only a small number of people can attend today's funeral.

However, hundreds of people are expected to line the route from the family's home to the church.

The funeral Mass, which will be conducted by parish priest Fr Pat O'Hagan, will also be streamed online on www.movilleparish.com.

Among those who will attend the funeral mass will be Ms Mullan's family, who will travel from her hometown of Williamstown, Co Galway.

Mr and Ms Mullan met when Geraldine treated John's sick mother and the pair fell in love.

Gardai are investigating if ongoing roadworks on the R238 could have played a part in the crash.

It has been confirmed that the road had been resurfaced a couple of days beforehand.

It was also a wet and dark night when the tragedy occurred as the family returned from bowling in Derry.

Local people also said there was an extremely high tide that night and waves were breaking over the embankment and on to the road.

Road warnings about traffic repairs lined the side of the road where the crash happened. It is also believed some line markings along the road had not yet been completed before the accident occurred.
NEW YORK CITY  Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday held a dedication officially renaming East River State Park as Marsha P. Johnson State Park in honor of the LGBTQ activist largely credited for her role in the Stonewall Riots and subsequent LGBTQ civil rights movement.

In a news release, the governor's office said a public art installation honoring Johnson, and park facilities will be improved, marking the largest investment in the park since it opened.

The park's dedication fell on Johnson's 75th birthday, 28 years after her death.

"Too often, the marginalized voices that have pushed progress forward in New York and across the country go unrecognized, making up just a fraction of our public memorials and monuments," Cuomo said in a statement. "Marsha P. Johnson was one of the early leaders of the LGBTQ movement, and is only now getting the acknowledgement she deserves. Dedicating this state park for her, and installing public art telling her story, will ensure her memory and her work fighting for equality lives on."



On Monday, the first phase of public art in Johnson's memory was installed: a decorative fence around the park's perimeter decked out with colorful flowers that emulate John's distinct personal style.

The park was also outfitted on Monday with signage telling the stories of Marsha's life and her work toward equality for LGBTQ people and those living with HIV/AIDS.

Johnson helped establish a shelter for LGBTQ youth in New York and was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front. She was also a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or S.T.A.R., and an activist with ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).



"The Marsha P. Johnson State Park honors the transgender woman of color, who led the fight for equal rights and justice for all," Lieutenant Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement. "With the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement, now more than ever we must continue the fight for LGBTQ equality and racial justice in our society."

Story continues

Several additional park improvements are set to be completed by summer 2021, the release states. They include:

Constructing a new park house/education center with classroom space, public bathrooms and a park ranger contact station

A natural outdoor Marsha P. Johnson art gallery including educational material about the LGBTQ movement designed with input from the New York City LGBTQ community

Infrastructure upgrades to concrete pads, park furniture, gantry walls and stormwater systems

Decorative wall treatments for an existing storage building to supplement the exterior fence.

Renderings depicting the park's future design are available online from NY State Parks.

This article originally appeared on the New York City Patch
At first blush, theres not much an online makeup business and an empanada shop have in common.

But making and selling mineral makeup in the virtual world turned out to be the ideal primer for making and selling savoury half-moon pastries in real life in St. Catharines for Nelson and Jenny Flores.

The couple runs Fiesta Empanada, a 10-month-old enterprise thats a nod to a food thats hundreds of years old. Its the latest entrepreneurial endeavour by the business-minded husband and wife team and perhaps the most heartfelt.

The small shop on St. Paul Street near Meridian Centre is the next progression in a business that started last November as a stall at the St. Catharines Farmers Market, where the Floreses started selling their Filipino empanadas stuffed with chicken, beef, spinach and feta, and a vegetable mixture.

But first, there was the makeup business. It was a venture spearheaded by Jenny, who worked from home while raising the couples two children, and was helped along by tech-savvy Nelson, a software engineer for Meridian Credit Union.

She made the makeup, he handled the website. Business boomed until the balance between it and family became unwieldy to manage.

Everything happens for a reason, Nelson said. We did that for the learning.

Their next endeavour got them closer to the food industry. They launched a party equipment rental business, loaning out snow cone and popcorn machines.

All the while at home in St. Catharines, where the couple came in 2006 from Manilla via Singapore, Jenny would cook the foods of their homeland. And when it came time to celebrate something, she would either make empanadas herself or the couple would drive eight hours to a New Jersey bakery to get their fill.

The turnover-style pastry, with a tender and slightly sweet crust enveloping gently spiced filling migrated across the globe with Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s.

Empanadas trace back to 16th-century northern Spain and spread to Argentina, Chile, Indonesia and Philippines as Spain colonized those regions. The pastries vary somewhat in filling, flavour and form in each country today, but have endured, even as colonies regained their independence.

In Philippines, Nelson and Jenny said the hand pies were eaten at parties and to mark special occasions. If made by hand, the process is time-consuming, which means its not an everyday food, even though empanadas are a fan favourite.

Whenever Jenny made her empanadas, friends and family encouraged her to do something more with them.

The seed to sell them at farmers markets was planted and nurtured by the inspiration the couple found at local supper markets, where people gathered to dine casually for a night, rather than shop for the week ahead like at traditional farmers markets.

We thought if other people could (sell food at supper markets) we can do it, too, Nelson said. We just have to have a good product. It was finding the courage to launch the business.

That wasnt in short supply for these practised entrepreneurs. Still, they decided to focus solely on empanadas to start, including adding a vegan offering, rather than launching Fiesta Empanada with a laundry list menu.

The couple sold small quantities of empanadas Saturdays at the St. Catharines Farmers Market. Mornings would be early  or the nights long  to prepare. It would take four hours to make just 80 empanadas by hand when they started working out of Commis Culinary Work Space in the citys north end late last year.

These days, with a custom mold and a dough machine at their shop, they can turn out 200 in that time.

With every empanada they sold, they gleaned positive feedback and saw their stock sell out faster each week. The market also gave the couple an opportunity to tell people that empanadas are as much Filipino food as they are South American.

Not a lot of people knew that and wondered if we were credible producing empanadas, Nelson said. But people appreciated it and liked it, and we saw we had to figure out how to add more services.

Enter their storefront, which opened earlier this summer and came from the need for a space where they could turn out larger orders.

It was never in the plans, but after connecting with the St. Catharines Enterprise Centre for help growing the business in a sustainable way, the Floreses won a $5,000 grant. It was the push they needed to turn Fiesta Empanada into more than a weekend hustle and become Niagaras first Filipino bakery, selling mamon, an individual-size sponge cake, and ensaimada, a sweet brioche topped with icing and cheese, alongside their flagship baked empanadas.

It happened so fast. Because of the grant, it gave us the confidence we could compete, Nelson said. But a storefront wasnt on the radar.

Still, it became the crux of their business plan after the COVID-19 pandemic cancelled supper markets and drastically changed farmers markets this season.

No worries. People have come from as far as Montreal for their empanadas. They still sell out quickly, even though theyre making more and more often. And theyve become a favourite for more than the local Filipino community, confirming the couple made the right decision.

Im really happy when people appreciate the product, not just because we have a good product but because we can share the culture with people. Why focus on a demographic who only know the product? Focus on people who dont know the product and get them to enjoy it, Nelson said. Thats the achievement  to get people to know our empanada and how we like it back home.
This January 1970 photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign shows her (left) with her sister, Maya, and mother, Shyamala, outside their apartment in Berkeley, Calif., after her parents' separation. (Kamala Harris campaign via AP) Read more

Listening to Sen. Kamala Harris accept the Democratic nomination for vice president of the United States, I immediately thought of Matt Damon  and a unique psychological burden for immigrants.

On the third night of the all-virtual Democratic National Convention, Harris delivered a speech from Wilmington. She introduced herself to the American people: a daughter of an immigrant from India and an immigrant from Jamaica rising to be the first Black and first South Asian woman on a major party ticket. She spoke about her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, and the strength she derived from her.

Harris said: I keep thinking about that 25-year-old Indian woman, all of five feet tall, who gave birth to me at Kaiser hospital in Oakland, Calif. On that day, she probably could have never imagined that I would be standing before you now and speaking these words: I accept your nomination for vice president of the United States of America.

As an immigrant, I could feel the weight of Harris mothers story and sacrifice on her shoulders. It is also when I thought about Damon and his surprising role in helping me define what so often keeps me up at night.

In the last minutes of the Steven Spielberg World War II movie Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks character  who led a group of soldiers, most of whom died, across France to retrieve Pvt. Ryan, portrayed by Damon  tells the private to live a life that will make it all worth it. In the final scene, an old Pvt. Ryan visits Hanks characters grave with his family. He asks his wife: Tell me Ive led a good life.

Pvt. Ryan walked around for decades with a burden especially familiar to immigrants and children of immigrants  living a life that proves great sacrifice was worth it.

For many immigrants, that sacrifice comes in the form of separating from family, risking deportation, and being disconnected from culture and language. For many of their children, the sacrifice could mean adult parents living in a strange land, not knowing the language, and feeling culturally adrift.

As an extremely privileged immigrant  white, documented, from a country the president doesnt consider a shole, and with means  the sacrifice of my story is not as dramatic and with much less risk. Still, I carry it daily.

 READ MORE: Learn to say Kamala Harris name, and mine, too | Opinion

Ever since I moved to the United States from Israel, every inch of the Atlantic Ocean between me and my family has been constantly present. The distance became somehow even larger after my daughter Mara was born two and a half years ago. Living so far away from my family, particularly my 106-year-old grandmother, parents, brother and sister, and niece and nephew, deprived Mara of consistent interaction with them, and them from reveling in Maras growth. It feels like a sacrifice I alone decided that people I love must take.

The distance again became even larger with the coronavirus pandemic. We had to cancel an April trip to Israel, and both times we rescheduled it since. I dont know when next Mara and my family will be together  and Im extremely aware of the impact that has on them, on her, and on me.

The way to cope with the distance is to assess my life for being worth it. If my wife and I excel in our careers, if Mara is a happy and healthy child, then we can rationalize the sacrifice. Any achievement, anything that feels extraordinary  something that might not have happened had I stayed in Israel  becomes a data point to justify the pain that comes with the desire to just be together. Any period of depression and dissatisfaction represents a failure to live up to the promise of immigration  mainly when each one immigration story impacts the lives of so many.

Adding to the pressure is Americas obsession with exceptional immigration stories  often told through racist model minority or escape from so-called third world framing. Stories of immigrants who achieved the extraordinary get held up as a baseline. In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said Harris story is the American story. But just like the vast majority of children of nonimmigrant families, most of us will not hold powerful elected office.

 READ MORE: Kamala Harris applauds Bidens audacity to choose a Black woman to be his running mate

Immigrants and children of immigrants dont get to just be. We always have something to prove, to ourselves and others  that it was worth leaving home, and that we seized every possible opportunity that comes with living in the United States. In what is overall an ordinary life, its hard to imagine an achievement that will be big enough to settle the score.

Listening to Harris tie her acceptance to her mothers immigration story, I couldnt help think of all the nights fellow immigrants and children of immigrants wondered if they would ever be able to definitively say that their sacrifice, or, more importantly, our familys sacrifice for us, was, in fact, worth it.

There is no one moment that can lift a complex emotional burden completely, though being nominated as the next vice president of the United States is probably as close as it gets. Most immigrants and children of immigrants will never get that moment  but it doesnt make our immigration story any less worthy.
Irish consumer sentiment slipped in August after local COVID-19 lockdowns and stricter nationwide restrictions that the survey's authors said may cause some to re-assess how long the disruption will last.

Ireland has adopted one of the most cautious approaches in Europe in fighting the virus, with a slower reopening of its economy and maintanance of many restrictions for longer failing to halt a fresh spike in new cases this month.

The KBC Bank consumer sentiment index fell to 58.9 from 62.6 in July. That was still well above a low of 42.6 in April when activity ground to a near halt and led to the largest monthly drop on record in what was Europe's fastest growing economy.

"There have been some very positive elements in recent spending data that, together with the trend in consumer confidence in recent months, point to a clear turnaround in sentiment and spending from April's low-point," KBC Ireland chief economist Austin Hughes said.

"However, the muted survey results for both July and August suggest that we may be seeing a limited rebound rather than the first signs of a lasting recovery in Irish economic conditions of late."

Hughes said the August data should not be seen as signalling any major mood swing on the part of Irish consumers and that in the circumstances of reimposed restrictions, it might be argued that the decline was reasonably contained.

With elevated uncertainty but spending power supported and some 'pent-up' demand ready to be released, it is possible that the sentiment survey could overstate the weakness in consumer spending in the near term, he added.

"The key unknown is whether sentiment or spending will adjust as 2020 progresses," Hughes said. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
China's "nine-dash line" used to claim most of the South China Sea is a fabrication, the Philippine defence minister said, as he accused Beijing of illegally occupying Filipino maritime territory.

The remarks late Sunday come amid a fresh row between Manila and Beijing over the disputed Scarborough shoal, which has long been a flashpoint between the two countries.

The Philippine foreign ministry last week lodged a diplomatic protest over what it said was the "illegal confiscation" by China's coast guard of fishing equipment near the shoal.

China seized Scarborough from the Philippines in 2012 following a tense standoff.

The shoal, one of the region's richest fishing grounds, is located 240 kilometres (150 miles) west of the Philippines' main island of Luzon and 650 kms from the nearest major Chinese land mass, the southern island province of Hainan.

"That area is within our EEZ," Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told reporters in a text message, referring to the country's exclusive economic zone.

"Their (China's) so-called historical rights over an area enclosed by their 9-line doesn't exist except in their imaginations.

"Our fishermen are within our EEZ and likewise our ships and planes conduct patrol sorties within our area.

"They (China) are the ones who have been doing provocations by illegally occupying some features within our EEZ. Hence they have no right to claim they are enforcing their laws."

Beijing claims the majority of the sea, often invoking its so-called nine-dash line to justify its alleged historic rights to the key waterway that is also contested by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan and Brunei.

It rejected a 2016 UN-backed tribunal's ruling that its claims were without legal basis.

China's foreign ministry on Friday defended the coast guard, saying they had carried out law enforcement activities and "their actions are understandable".

Story continues

It also accused Philippine military aircraft of invading Chinese airspace in another disputed section of the sea and urged Manila to "immediately stop illegal provocative activities".

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's spokesman has played down the spat which comes as the coronavirus-ravaged country seeks to secure a coronavirus vaccine from China.

"Our diplomats routinely lodge protests like that if we believe our sovereign rights are violated," Harry Roque said Friday.

"But it will not affect the overall good relations between our country and China.

Philippine-China relations have improved under Duterte, who revived once-icy diplomatic ties after being elected in 2016 when he largely set aside maritime disputes in favour of wooing Chinese aid, trade and investment.

Chinese President Xi Jinping told Duterte in Beijing last year that its position on the sea was not up for negotiation, a spokesman for Duterte said at the time.

str-mff-amj/fox
- There are many social media users who are still wondering who Sarah Balabagan is

- The said woman made noise recently after revealing that Arnold Clavio is the father of her eldest child

- Sarah was a former domestic helper who suffered serious abuses in the United Arab Emirates

- According to her, she was 17 years old when she got pregnant with her first daughter

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Sarah Balabagan recently made headlines because of her intriguing revelation involving veteran Kapuso broadcast journalist Arnold Clavio.

KAMI learned that the said woman claimed that the prominent reporter is the biological father of her 22-year-old daughter.

While many people are still shocked because of the confession, some important details about Sarah surfaced in the online world.

Armold Clavio (Photo from his Instagram account)

Source: Instagram

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It was reported that the said woman became a domestic helper in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) at the age of 14. Her recruiter faked her documents so that she could qualify for a job.

In 1994, she got involved in a serious crime. She was found guilty of murder. The victim was her employer who sexually abused her. She was convicted and told to pay 40 thousand dollars to the family of her employer.

A few years after, Sarah was sentenced to death due to the said crime. Many Filipinos rallied behind her and the leaders of both the Philippines and UAE tried their best to settle the issue.

Her sentence was reduced to one year imprisonment and she also received 100 lashes in 5 days as punishment for what she did.

In 1996, she went back to the Philippines. Arnold was one of the media personalities who was assigned to report about her case.

Galing ako sa kulungan noon and just imagine kung gaano ako ka-vulnerable noon pero hindi ko po ija-justify kung ano ang nagawa ko po, she quipped through a viral video.

Ang sabi kasi sa akin noon ni Arnold, walang aminan. Kahit ano raw ang mangyari, wag akong aamin. I was 17 years old noong mga panahon na yun at talagang napaniwala niya ako, she added.

As of this writing, Arnold has yet to issue a statement regarding the revelation of Sarah.

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As soon as the issue broke out online, Arnold Clavio became trending. Even netizens aired their reactions after learning about the controversy.

Sarah Balabagan praised the wife of the veteran broadcaster for being able to forgive them despite what happened.

Please like and share our Facebook posts to support KAMI team! Dont hesitate to comment and share your opinion about our stories either. We love reading about your thoughts!

Source: KAMI.com.gh




Iran's constitutional watchdog on Monday set June 18 as date for the country's next presidential election, a vote that will choose the successor to President Hassan Rouhani who has served two four-year terms in office.







The watchdog, the Guardian Council, approved the date, Iranian election headquarters chief Jamal Orf told the official IRNA news agency. Candidates hoping to run in the balloting are to apply in early April for approval; the final list is to be announced in early June.







Under Iranian law, an incumbent president cannot run for a third term if he has already served for two consecutive terms in office. Rouhani was first elected in 2013 and reelected four years later.







Rouhani has been under increasing pressure from the U.S. sanctions since President Donald Trump two years ago pulled America out of the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. The deal curbed Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.







Trump also imposed severe sanctions on Iran, sending its economy into a downward spiral. Iran is now grappling also with the Trump administration's push to impose so-called ''snapback'' sanctions over what Washington says is Iran's violation of the nuclear deal.







In February, Iran held parliamentary elections that saw a turnout of 42.57 percent _ the lowest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and a sign of widespread dissatisfaction and the state of the economy amid intense U.S. pressure. The newly elected house is dominated by conservative lawmakers.







Iran is also facing the Mideast region's largest and deadliest outbreak of the coronavirus, with more than 361,000 registered cases, including 20,776 deaths. (AP)






Description

GIS  24 August 2020: A

n awareness session on the provisions of the National Womens Council (NWC) Act (2016) was held, this morning, at the Town Hall of the Municipal Council of Vacoas/Phoenix. The Minister of Gender Equality and Family Welfare, Mrs Kalpana Devi Koonjoo-Shah, was present.

The session aimed at familiarising representatives of Womens Associations, who are the main stakeholders of the NWC, on the need to successfully implement the provisions of the NWC Act 2016. It was organised at an initiative of the NWC, which operates under the aegis of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family Welfare.

In her address, Minister Koonjoo-Shah emphasised the importance of promoting womens empowerment and gender equality which are at the forefront of Governments agenda. As regards the amendments brought in the NWC Act, she highlighted that these were paramount to provide for a more modern and appropriate legislative framework. The objective is to further promote the active participation of women in the social, economic and political fields, she indicated.

Moreover, the Minister spoke of Governments firm commitment in sparing no efforts to strengthen good governance practices at the level of parastatal institutions by ensuring that there is a fair representation of women on these institutions Board of Directors.

Mrs Koonjoo-Shah also lauded the key role of Womens Associations in raising awareness among women about their rights. Most of these Associations, she added, work voluntarily to support women who are victims of domestic violence and those who are victims of different types of discriminations or injustice. She thus encouraged young girls and women to join Womens Associations in great numbers to bring about a change in mindset with regards to gender equality and promoting the rights of women in society.
Youngsters started to return to classes across the North on Monday for the first time since the coronavirus lockdown started in March.

Some parents have expressed concerns while teachers unions say educators had not been given enough time to respond to rules issued earlier this month.

Justin McCamphill, NASUWT national official in Northern Ireland, said: The fact that 77% of teachers told us they dont feel their school is safe for pupils to return is very concerning.

Teachers and school leaders have worked hard to prepare their schools for young people to return, yet 61% of teachers have not been consulted on risk assessments undertaken in their school or college.

Ministers and school employers must do more to reassure the school workforce, parents and pupils that everything possible is being done to minimise viral spread, and that robust procedures are in place should any outbreaks occur.

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Northern Irelands chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride has insisted it is safe to return.

Strict social distancing between children may be relaxed if there are hygiene measures in place.

However three schools did not reopen following the detection of Covid-19 cases.

Ballyclare Secondary School is set to reopen on Tuesday following a deep clean and 72-hour incubation period.

St Kevins Primary School and St Louises College, both on the Falls Road in west Belfast, have also delayed their reopening following positive cases among the school community.

Some parents have taken to social media to express concern at their children returning to school.

Trevor, a father of five from Co Down, said he is worried as his wife had been shielding during the pandemic.

As a family, for us coronavirus is a life or death situation, he said.

His wife has been taking immunosuppressants and is labelled as vulnerable.

Trevor said the number of new daily cases was rising sharply.

He tweeted: I agree the risk to children themselves is low but that is being used as spin from politicians & school leaders to hide behind the fact that children are spreaders.

The issue is not that of children dying but of whom they will pass the virus too and the long-term consequences.

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Other parents have welcomed the return to school.

Maeve Kennedys 11-year-old son Jonnie returned to Olderfleet Primary School in Larne.

She said he was looking forward to being reunited with his friends but added his grandmother has been shielding with a lung condition.

She told the PA news agency: Hes looking forward to getting back and into some sort of semblance of a routine, its been a long six months without that.

I think he needed to get back. I have tried to combine remote working and home schooling with his younger brother going into P6, so the last six months have been really difficult at home.

She said because of the pressure of going into P7 and around the transfer tests, he has worked very hard, but the pressures have been a real challenge.

Education minister Peter Weir said: Very, very few, if any, children will come to harm as a result of attending school, but there is evidence of the long-term harm to childrens education, life opportunities, mental health and wellbeing from not attending school.

Pupils in Primary 7, Year 12, Year 14  whose preparation for exams was disrupted by the lockdown  and all vulnerable children were due to return to classes on Monday.

All other pupils will begin the new school year on the week beginning August 31 after months of variable levels of home schooling.

A total of 42 million has been spent on re-starting schools safely.

Separately, another 10 cases of Covid-19 have been reported across Northern Ireland in the past 24 hours, the Department of Health said.
There are two good things about growing old: you get new eyes through cataract surgery and you get to vote by mail.

That's right. Registered voters, age 60 and over, may vote by absentee ballot, according to Tennessee state law.

Hard to believe those in Music City managed to get something right. Most of the time they're devising new ways to promote guns or prevent women from exercising their reproductive rights.

I suppose they figured older folks would vote Republican. Of course, in the state that elected Marsha "I've got stars in my eyes for Donnie" Blackburn over Harvard-educated, moderate businessman Phil Bredesen, the majority usually votes Republican.

But that doesn't mean Dems should sit out the coming presidential election. We may not have a chance to beat Trump in the reddest state in the land of the free, but the national popular vote may figure in the election outcome when we have in the White House a President Strangelove who may be difficult to evict if he loses.

So seniors, call the Hamilton County Election Commission and request an absentee ballot application. You must have voted previously in person to qualify. The only other condition is that you be 60 or over.

Once you receive your application in the mail, fill out the short form and return it to the Election Commission. In mid-September you will receive your ballot in the mail.

Make your choices and put the ballot in your mailbox.

Here's hoping neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of Trump will stay our courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Carolyn Mitchell
Politicians have voted against a law calling for a public child sex offender register in Australia that would 'name and shame' paedophiles - as victims warn the scheme is in danger of 'withering on the vine'.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton announced the federal Government was putting $7.8 million toward a public register of convicted sex offenders in January 2019 - just before the 2019 election in May.

Under the policy, the names, aliases, photos and nature of sex offenders' crimes would be made publicly accessible, as would their general location. But the register hasn't become reality almost 18 months on.

Queensland Premier Annastasia Palasczcuk's government recently voted down a motion supporting such a register, in a move Mr Dutton's spokeswoman slammed as 'very frustrating'.

Meanwhile, child protection advocates Bruce and Denise Morcombe - the parents of Australia's most famous abducted boy, Daniel - have demanded to know 'what is going on' with the proposed register.

The pair are understood to be privately frustrated over the silence from most state and territory governments.

A Daily Mail Australia mock-up of how an online national child sex offender could look. Above are some of the most well known offenders in Australia - including Daniel Morcombe's killer Brett Cowan, notorious sex pest Michael Guider, Hey Dad!'s Robert Hughes, predator Robert Fardon and jailed 'Evil 8' rapist Ryan Clegg

Brett Peter Cowan (left) had already been convicted of sex crimes when he kidnapped, raped and murdered Daniel Morcombe in 2003. On right is predator Michael Guider upon his release from prison last year. He murdered Sydney schoolgirl Samantha Knight in 1986

Queensland's Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington introduced a motion on August 12 calling on Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk's government to set up a 'register to help parents protect their kids from serious sexual offenders' earlier this month.

Ms Frecklington's motion was defeated 49 votes to 42.

Labor MP Scott Stewart rubbished the idea, telling Parliament the Australian Institute of Criminology had found 'public sex offender registers do not reduce recidivism.'

'This government will always listen to and support the expertsunlike those opposite,' he said, crowing that his government already had the 'toughest' regime for sex offenders.

Former police officer and LNP MP Dan Purdie said: 'The system is broken and that is why the LNP government will introduce a public child sex offender register, giving every parent an effective tool to protect their children from paedophiles.'

But Ms Frecklington's motion had little chance of getting across the line in the first place as it was tied to the ALP supporting a list of a more than a dozen unrelated Liberal National Party priorities.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk's government shot down the motion supporting a public child sex offender register

That included voting to 'stop Labor's wasteful spending'.

Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath said there were 'mixed views about the merits of a public child sex offender register' and genuine concerns that any introduction on a national level could have unintended consequences.

'This includes that an increased risk of re-offending due to the likelihood that offenders would be driven underground.'

Ms D'Ath said there are 15 offenders listed missing by Western Australia's online register of high risk sex offenders.

She added that former police commissioner Ian Stewart last year wrote to Mr Dutton expressing concerns about such a national register.

Support from the states or territories for the proposal is critical for a public register getting up, Mr Dutton's spokeswoman said.

'The Palaszczuk Government recently voted against a register which is very frustrating.

'The national register only works if all the states and territories sign up, as it relies on the sharing of their data.'

How a name-and-shame register would work

Bruce Morcombe, whose son Daniel was abducted from a bus stop by a convicted paedophile in December 2003 and murdered, said state and territory governments have been very quiet on the issue recently.

'It's just withering on the vine and that's what I'm afraid of.

'I don't want it to wither on the vine - I want it to grow bigger and stronger and actually be delivered'.

Denise and Bruce Morcombe with Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton (left). The pair are believed to be frustrated with the slow progress of state and territory governments

Daniel Morcombe was abducted from a bus stop when he was 13-year-old and murderer

The Daniel Morcombe Foundation has issued its own plan for how a sex offender register could work.

Such a register would publish the names, aliases, geographical area, current photo, list of identifying features of offenders, and local statistics.

Mr Morcombe said his foundation's plan was modest and would only see repeat or recidivist offenders, or people who have committed hideous crimes, named and shamed.

That would give more minor, one-off offenders a chance to get help and be rehabilitated.

Mr Morcombe has previously lashed state and territory leaders as 'weak as piss' for their lukewarm response to Mr Dutton's $7.8 million proposal.

But the child protection advocate struck a more measured tone to Daily Mail Australia saying he 'hoped' it was still on the agenda.

'And if it's not, as a reasonable, level-headed citizen of Australia, please tell me why? Why am I on the wrong track.

'I see a lot of upside. It's all about kids, keeping kids safe and kids' rights to be safe all the time, that's what it's about.

'That should come before convicted multi-offending paedophiles.'
A major churning is happening within the Congress party ahead of its crucial Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on Monday. A day after Indian Express reported that a letter signed by 23 senior leaders including its sitting MPs, former Chief Ministers and senior party leaders was sent to the interim party president Sonia Gandhi asking for sweeping changes, huge support has poured in for her after she reportedly offered to quit.

While this is not the first time the leadership of the 134-year-old party is being questioned from within, what is significant this time is the number of senior party functionaries who have put their names expressing their dissent with the party leadership at a time when the Congress is arguably at its weakest. Though in their letter written in early August, the 23 leaders have assured that the Nehru-Gandhi family will always remain an integral part of the collective leadership of the party, with Rahul Gandhi unwilling to shoulder the responsibility for running the party and Sonia Gandhi functioning only as an interim president for the last one year, questions have clearly been raised on the capability of the Nehru-Gandhi family to mount a serious challenge to the Narendra Modi-led BJP.

In this piece, News18 looks at a few eventful moments in Congress history to look back at the instances when the party was shaken from within and to understand how the issue of leadership was settled.

January 1966: Indira Gandhi becomes PM

After the death of the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent after signing the historic Tashkent accord between India and Pakistan, it fell upon the Congress to immediately choose its successor. The main contender for the job was Morarji Desai, who had earlier lost the battle to become the Prime Minister to Shastri. Against him the old guard in the party pitched Nehrus daughter Indira Gandhi, Rajya Sabha MP and minister for information and broadcasting. The role of K Kamraj is said to have been essential in rallying support of party heavyweights to help Indira win the battle by over 180 votes. She was named as the party chief and sworn in as the Prime Minister a few days later.

November 1969: Indira Gandhi Tightens Grip Over Party

The mood in the Congress, which had lost elections in nearly half the states after losing heavily in the 1967 general elections, was similarly downbeat. After four months of several intra-party conflict, the then chief of Congress party S. Nijalingappa expelled Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from the party for "fostering a cult of personality" in November 69. The old guard, or the "Syndicate" as it was called, was angry with the "gungi gudiya" (dumb doll) for having a mind of her own.

Indira had earlier won a minor victory through some deft political maneuvering of VV Giri, an independent candidate, as the fifth President of India against the wishes of the Syndicate. After she was expelled, she received an overwhelming support in the following Congress Parliamentary Party meeting. The party split but Indira was able to save her government with some help from the Left and DMK. She swept the 1971 general elections and eventually won the battle of succession overwhelmingly.

May 1987: VP Singhs Revolt

Another big shake up happened in the party when Congresss Mr Clean, VP Singh, who had earlier supervised high-profile raids as the Union Finance Minister, resigned in May 1987 after the Bofors scandal broke out. After being suspended and expelled from the party, Singh founded Janata Dal to directly oppose the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Former Congress minister Arif Mohammad Khan, who had resigned from the Cabinet over the Shah Bano case, joined VP Singh. Important state leaders like Odishas Biju Patnaik and Karnatakas Ramkrishna Hegde volunteered to join. In the 89 general elections, Singh defeated Gandhi and, leading the National Front with support of the BJP, became the Prime Minister.

March 1998: Sitaram Kesris Ouster, Sonia Gandhis Entry

In late 1997, a few months before the 1998 general elections, Sonia Gandhi, who had since the death of her husband resisted pressure to join the party, suddenly announced that she would campaign for the Congress in the Lok Sabha polls. Sitaram Kesri was the Congress president at the time. Gandhi joined the party in December 1997. While Kesri had called Sonia a "saviour" and welcomed her entry, he was reluctant to hand over the party's reins to her, as demands for her becoming the Congress president grew.

On March 14, 1998 the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution asking the 82-year-old veteran to step down as the party president. An anecdote about that fateful day when Sonia finally took control of the party is that Kesri was reportedly locked in a room in the Congress headquarters, 24 Akbar Road, to prevent him from creating obstacles in Sonia entering the office of the Congress president. In a bloodless coup, which left Kesri befuddled, Pranab Mukherjee read out CWC resolutions thanking Kesri for his services and appointing Gandhi as the next party president.
English Lithuanian

AB Ignitis Grupe, (hereinafter  Ignitis Grupe or the Company) identification code 301844044, registered office placed at Zveju str. 14, Vilnius, Republic of Lithuania. The total nominal value of issued bonds 900 000 000 EUR; ISIN codes XS1646530565; XS1853999313; XS2177349912.

The Company informs that on 24 August 2020 the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Lithuania (hereinafter  the Ministry of Finance), the authority implementing the rights of the sole shareholder of the Company, submitted draft resolution of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania (hereinafter  Government) On the amendments to the Resolution No. 20 of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania On the dividends of company shares held by the State and profit contributions from state enterprises of 14 January 1997 and draft resolution of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania On dividends paid by AB Ignitis grupe to the Government.

Following the approval of the resolutions by the Government, the Company will approve the updated dividend policy. The Company will inform about further related actions in the manner set forth by laws.

For more information please contact:
Northampton County voters will have an opportunity to decide on whether discrimination laws should apply in the workplace for sexual orientation and gender identity.

Northampton County Council voted 7-1 Thursday to put a question on the May 2021 primary ballot. The voter referendum will ask if the countys Home Rule Charter should be amended to add protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.

The charter -- a document that defines the countys power, structure, privileges, rights and duties -- already includes language that protects against workplace discrimination.
WOOD RIVER  The Illinois Department of Public Health on Monday reported 1,612 new coronavirus cases, along with eight deaths, as another region of the state has hit a positivity threshold bringing more restrictions.

In Madison County, 91 deaths and 3,606 cases were reported Monday.

On Sunday the Madison County Health Department announced 65 new cases. No deaths were reported Sunday.

The positivity rate was 9.77 percent Sunday. The three-day average was 9.93 percent; the seven-day average 11.57 percent; and the 10-day average 10.24 percent.

A total of 665 new tests were reported, for a county-wide total of 52,855 tests. The health department listed 25 people in Madison County hospitals, six of them on ventilators.

On Saturday, 61 new cases but no deaths were reported. Fridays report included 76 new cases and three deaths. The deaths included two women in their 90s and a male in his 60s.

According to the IDPH website, there are now 221,790 cases statewide and 7,888 deaths. That is an increase of 5,861 cases and 31 deaths since Fridays figures were released.

In the past 24 hours, 36,155 tests have been completed, for a statewide total of 3,740,191. The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total test from Aug. 17-23 is 4.2 percent.

As of Sunday night, 1,529 people in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 334 were in intensive care units and 141 were on ventilators.

More Information COVID-19 by the numbers U.S - 5,682,491 (176,223 deaths) Illinois - 221,790 (7,888 deaths) Madison County - 3,606 (91 90 deaths) Jersey County - 229 (2 deaths) Calhoun County - 22 Greene County - 98 Macoupin County -301 (3 deaths) Montgomery County 223 (8 deaths) St. Clair County - 4,958 (166 deaths) Clinton County - 606 (17 deaths) Bond County - 107 (3 deaths) Monroe County - 402 (14 deaths) Washington County - 92 (1 death) Cases by zip code 62002 (Alton) - 531 62010 (Bethalto) - 144 62067 (Moro) - 35 62035 (Godfrey) - 213 62037 (Grafton) - 23 62022 (Dow) - 14 62012 (Brighton) - 79 62014 (Bunker Hill) - 23 62021 (Dorsey) - 10 62052 (Jerseyville) - 134 62095 (Wood River) - 115 62084 (Roxana) - 15 62048 (Hartford) - 8 62087 (South Roxana) 17 62018 (Cottage Hills) - 33 62024 (East Alton) -67 62025 (Edwardsville) - 471 62034 (Glen Carbon) - 212 62062 (Maryville) - 83 62294 (Troy) -169 62040 (Granite City/Pontoon Beach) - 585 62234 (Collinsville) - 534 62060 (Madison) - 89 62090 (Venice) - 29 62249 (Highland) - 207 62001 (Alhambra) 16 62281 (St. Jacob) - 41 62061 (Marine) - 20 62097 (Worden) - 27 62088 (Staunton) - 57 62069 (Mt. Olive) - 23 62056 (Litchfield) - 65 62033 (Gillespie) - 51 62626 (Carlinville) - 38 62685 (Shipman) - 6 62016 (Carrollton) - 8 62044 (Greenfield) - 8 62009 (Benld) - 6 62092 (White Hall) - 32 62082 (Roodhouse) - 38 Sources: Illinois Department of Public Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. See More Collapse

There are sometimes discrepancies in state and local figures as data is inputted and transferred between the two agencies.

Information by ZIP code shows additional cases in the Alton, Bethalto, Moro, Godfrey, Grafton, Dow, Brighton, Bunker Hill, Jerseyville, Wood River, South Roxana, Cottage Hills, East Alton, Edwardsville, Glen Carbon, Maryville, Troy, Granite City/Pontoon Beach, Collinsville, Venice, Highland, Marine, Worden, Staunton, Mt. Olive, Litchfield, Gillespie, Carlinville, Carrollton, Greenfield, White Hall and Roodhouse areas since Friday. The number of cases in Roxana reduced by one, to 15 from 16.

The IDPH is releasing case numbers by ZIP code for areas with more than five cases. Numbers are not released in ZIP codes with fewer cases to protect the privacy of patients. The information is online at www.dph.illinois.gov.

Additional cases were reported Monday in Jersey, Calhoun, Greene, Macoupin, Montgomery, St. Clair, Clinton, Bond, Monroe and Washington counties in the Metro East. An additional death was recorded in Monroe County.

Statewide, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities account for 26,357 cases and 4,319 deaths, up from 25,921 cases and 4,305 deaths last week.

In Madison County there have been a total of 477 cases and 75 deaths reported in 23 separate long-term care facilities.A large outbreak was reported at Stearns Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Granite City last week where there have been 91 cases reported and 12 deaths.

Jersey County reported 29 cases and one death, while Macoupin County reported 31 confirmed cases.

On Aug. 19-21, Region 7 (Kankakee and Will counties) had a rolling COVID-19 positivity rate of 8.0, 8.3 and 8.3 percent, respectively, according to the IDPH website. Per the Restore Illinois mitigation plan, three straight days above 8 percent in a region warrant further action from the state.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has called the metric a failsafe that would lead to added economic restrictions. Last week in the Metro East area (Region 4) he announced mitigation efforts less severe than previous phases of the states reopening plan.

They include requiring bars, restaurants and casinos to close at 11 p.m. and limiting seating in those establishments to six people per table. Bars can only seat people at tables and must remove bar stools to prevent gathering around the bar. Public gatherings, meetings and social events are limited to 25 guests or 25 percent of the overall room capacity. All reception halls will be closed and party buses will be shut down.

As of Aug. 21, the positivity rate in the Metro East was at 9.4 percent, while Southern Illinois dipped to 6.9 percent. East-central Illinois remained the lowest with a 1.6 percent positivity rate.

The other regions ranged from 4.9 percent in northwest Illinois to 6.7 percent in suburban Cook County. Chicagos positivity rate was 5.2 percent.

For the latest information on COVID-19 or coronavirus resources, visit the Madison County Health Department online at www.madisonchd.org or on Facebook @MadisonCHD. Also visit www.co.madison.il.us for more news and a daily update or on Facebook @MadisonCountyIL.

Some information provided by Capitol News Illinois
In an exclusive interview with Radio Farda, Brian Hook, the United States Special Representative for Iran, said the U.S. is hoping that all U.N. sanctions against Iran will be re-imposed in 29 days.

There are a lot of good things are going to happen after these sanctions are put back in place, Hook said. The arms embargo is going to be renewed and Iran will be prohibited from enriching nuclear material".

Hook stressed that Iran's violation of its nuclear commitments authorizes the U.A. to activate the "trigger" mechanism of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement, and to start the re-imposition of all sanctions on Iran.

The trigger mechanism, part of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, gives participating countries the power to claim that Iran has not fulfilled its obligations and subsequently re-activate or "snapback" the previous U.N. sanctions against the nation.

The United States started the procedure for the activation of the snapback option on August 20.

Iran has argued over the past months that the U.S., which pulled out of the JCPOA in May 2018, is no longer a participating country, while the U.S.' counter-argument is that the country is entitled to activate the trigger mechanism as one of the original signatories to the agreement. The remaining members of the JCPOA have taken Iran's side on the matter.

Emphasizing that both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Congress endorse the extension of the arms embargo on Iran that will be lifted in October, Hook explained, "We tried to do it the easy way last week but the [U.N. Security Council] did not pass our resolution so that forced us yesterday to begin the process of snapping back all the U.N sanctions that were lifted under the Iran deal".

Thirteen of the fifteen members of the U.N. Security Council abstained from the vote on the U.S. move to extend the embargo on August 14, with only the Dominican Republic joining the United States to vote in the affirmative.

"We are doing the right thing. The way we see it is national security, it's not a popularity contest. The United States has been down this road before, doing the right and courageous thing to enhance peace and security," Hook said and added that the JCPOA a "political commitment", is not legally binding and "does not even have signatures".

Hook also told Radio Farda that the Trump administration wants the remaining parties in the nuclear agreement to join the U.S. diplomatic efforts against Iran, claiming that U.S. diplomacy has been successful in weakening the Iranian regime and its proxies in the region.

Criticizing the European countries' approach to the issue of the Iran arms embargo and emphasizing that Iran is a threat to the security of Europe, Hook alleged that since 1985 the Iranian regime has conducted "dozens of tens of acts of terrorism in Europe and killed Europeans.

"I don't know who thinks it's a good idea to give this regime more weapons," he asked.

The Trump administration is seeking a comprehensive agreement in the place of the JCPOA that includes measures against threats posed by the Iranian regime, including its nuclear and missile programs, aggressive behavior in the Middle East and hostage-taking.

Hook cited the $200 billion impact that the sanctions have cost Iran as proof of the effectiveness of the U.S. administration's maximum pressure policy on the country, calling the current situation a result of the "Iranian Supreme Leader's choice," despite having been warned that Iran could either start negotiations with the United States or prepare itself for an economic collapse.

Hook also pointed out that the recent U.S.-brokered deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was a consequence of the United States' withdrawal from the JCPOA, with Israel and the UAE both considering the deal to be a betrayal of their security.
Karl Stefanovic doesn't have any misgivings about his former Today co-host Lisa Wilkinson's new memoir, which is set for release next year.

Despite reports he was 'freaking out' over what Lisa, 60, might say about him, a source close to the Channel Nine star insisted he's actually 'really happy' for his erstwhile colleague and is looking forward to reading her autobiography.

'There's no hard feelings between them. Any problems they had are now water under the bridge. I can say confidently that Karl is really happy for Lisa and will be the first person to congratulate her when her book comes out,' the insider said.

No worries! Karl Stefanovic (left) doesn't have any misgivings about his former Today co-host Lisa Wilkinson's (right) new memoir, which is set for release next year. Pictured in August 2009

It comes after Woman's Day reported on Monday that Karl, 46, was anxious about how Lisa might portray him in her book.

According to the magazine, he was said to be especially worried about his split from ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn, 49, and subsequent marriage to Jasmine Yarbrough, 36, being mentioned.

But another source from Karl's camp said this couldn't be further from the truth.

What feud? Despite reports he was 'freaking out' over what Lisa, 60, might say about him, a source close to the Channel Nine star insisted he's actually 'really happy' for his erstwhile colleague and is looking forward to reading her autobiography

Opening up the ex-files? It comes after Woman's Day reported on Monday that Karl, 46, was anxious about how Lisa might portray him in her book. According to the magazine, he was said to be especially worried about his split from ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn, 49, being mentioned

They said: 'Karl has been nothing but honest about the circumstances of his marriage breakdown. He and Cass just grew apart. He has nothing to hide.

'Lisa doesn't have any special knowledge about the split, nor does she have a score to settle with Karl. The claims are rubbish.'

Karl and Cassandra announced their split in mid-2016 after 21 years of marriage.

New flame: Five months after leaving his first wife in mid-2016, Karl fell in love with shoe designer Jasmine Yarbrough (left), whom he married in Mexico in December 2018

Five months after leaving Cassandra, Karl fell in love with shoe designer Jasmine.

They married in Mexico in December 2018, and are now parents to baby daughter Harper May, three months.

Meanwhile, Lisa's autobiography is also expected to address the gender pay gap dispute that led to her departure from Nine in October 2017.

According to New Idea, Nine executives are 'expecting the worst in her book regarding her pay parity protest'.

'They know Lisa will not mince her words and won't hold back regarding Karl and the famous "boys' club" at Nine,' a source told the magazine.

Nine has been accused of running a 'boys' club' of male executives and on-air talent for years, with Mamamia founder Mia Freedman (a former boss at Nine) describing the workplace culture as 'so toxic and so bad for women that it was the most distressing career experience of my life'.

Lisa is believed to have quit Today because her male co-host, Karl, was earning $2million a year, with a potential bonus that could take his salary to $3million.

Reports: Meanwhile, Lisa's autobiography is also expected to address the gender pay gap dispute that led to her departure from Nine in October 2017. According to New Idea, Nine executives are 'expecting the worst in her book regarding her pay parity protest'

Figures: Lisa is believed to have quit Today because her male co-host, Karl, was earning $2million a year, with a potential bonus that could take his salary to $3million

By contrast, Lisa was said to be on a $1.1million a year contract, and Nine was only willing to increase the amount to $1.8million.

The amount was reportedly not enough for the former magazine editor to stay with the network, prompting her departure.

Since joining Channel 10 in 2018, Lisa has landed sit-down interviews with the likes of Kim Kardashian, Kylie Minogue and Bradley Cooper on The Sunday Project.

Exit: By contrast, Lisa was said to be on a $1.1million a year contract, and Nine was only willing to increase the amount to $1.8million

In an interview with The Herald Sun in December 2018, Lisa applauded the 'integrity' and high 'calibre' of her colleagues at Channel 10, referencing Carrie Bickmore, Fifi Box, Amanda Keller, Julia Morris and Gorgi Coghlan.

'One of the absolute bonuses that I really hadn't anticipated in moving to Ten, is the calibre of my colleagues,' she said.

Lisa's upcoming autobiography will be published by Harper Collins next year.
El presidente @MartinVizcarraC, junto a representantes de las instituciones que integran el Acuerdo Nacional, suscriben el Compromiso de Dialogo por el #PactoPeru. pic.twitter.com/FQCgDVfcve
The Anlo Youth Council (AYC) last Friday paid a courtesy call on ex-President Jerry John Rawlings at his Ridge office.

The visit was aimed at discussing AYC's concerns on recent developments in the country. The visit was also to seek the former Presidents support for the Council's projects and activities.

Also, the group introduced itself to establish a more formal relationship with the former president, being the most prominent Anlo alive today.

During discussions, President Rawlings said AYC's mission and vision must be supported to achieve their objectives.

He spoke about Anlo and Ewe values saying that these values still exist, but are gradually experiencing a nose-dive and must be restored.

President Rawlings also used the occasion to debunk assertions made about him in a recently published book 'Working with Rawlings' and urged the youth to disregard the lies contained in the book and wait patiently for my book and for the truth.

The President of the Council, Mr Mayor Agbleze, indicated that as a Council, one of its values was to build a positive culture of self-identity among Ewes as a requirement for confronting the challenges we face and to engage the opportunities for development.

He expressed growing concerned about government's recent posturing towards Ewes across the country in the course of the voter registration exercise, particular and said it did not augur well for the nation's development.

His Excellency and former Trade Minister, Dan Abodakpi, who was at the meeting thanked the AYC for its noble cause and roles in the developmental agenda of Anlo and Ghana in general and urged them not to relent in their efforts.

Present at the meeting were Mr Donald Agumenu and Dr Senanu Dzokoto, staffers at the former President's Office.

The AYC's Executives present were Mr Ken Kpedor, Vice President responsible for Operations, Mr Kofi B. Kukubor, Vice President responsible for Development, Mr Philip Kwasi Banini- Acting Executive Secretary, Godsway Hanyabui- Vice President for Social Services and Ms Mary Kokui Hormeku a member.

----citinewsroom
Israel continues bombing of Gaza despite signing controversial peace deal

Israeli jets continued their assault on Gaza this morning, (16th August) with the latest round of air strikes injuring at least six Palestinian civilians.

The Israeli navy also fired a barrage of gunfire at fishermen before grounding their boats as the occupying forces imposed further punitive restrictions.

In a statement yesterday, the Israeli Defence Force said it had decided to entirely shut down the fishing zone of the Gaza Strip, immediately and until further notice, starting this morning.

Tel Aviv insisted that it was responding to incendiary balloons emanating from the Palestinian territory.

It attacked the northern region of the Gaza Strip, claiming to target Hamas positions including a military compound and underground infrastructure.

But these claims were dismissed after Israels warplanes targeted agricultural land and civilian infrastructure in daily bombing raids.

Last week a school was damaged by Israeli air strikes while an unexploded missile was found in its grounds, forcing it to be evacuated.

Speaking after last weeks attacks, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said: These aggressive policies aim to exacerbate the crises our people in Gaza are enduring to paralyse their daily life and to disrupt the efforts of combatting coronavirus amid international and regional silence.

Some two million Palestinians live in Gaza, which has been subjected to a 12-year-long blockade restricting access to food and medical supplies.

According to officials the Gaza Strips power plant will come to a halt on Tuesday (19th August) after Israel blocked fuel supplies.

Israel has intensified attacks on the Palestinian territory despite the signing of a controversial peace accord with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last week.

The accord, which will see both nations establish diplomatic, trade and security relations, has been widely condemned as an act of betrayal by other Arab nations.

The UAE claimed that the deal would end Israels plans to annex whole swathes of land in the occupied West Bank.

But this was scotched by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said the plans were firmly on the table, and merely paused.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) insisted that the deal underlined the need to escalate all forms of resistance against plans that targeted the land, identity and existence of Palestinians.

It stressed that it was necessary to confront all forms of normalisation and conspiracies practised by some official Arab reactionary regimes, at the forefront of which is the UAE regime, and called on all Arab nations to stand together in solidarity.

Morning Star
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has arrived in Iran for a visit aimed at improving cooperation on the country's nuclear activities.

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi is scheduled to hold talks with high-level Iranian officials over the next two days, including President Hassan Rohani and Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.

It is Grossi's first trip to Iran since taking over the IAEA leadership eight months ago and comes amid a mounting standoff between the Vienna-based UN agency and Tehran over access to two sites where nuclear activities might have occurred and with the United States pressing for reimposing UN nuclear-related sanctions against Tehran.

"My objective is that my meetings in Tehran will lead to concrete progress in addressing the outstanding questions that the Agency has related to safeguards in Iran and, in particular, to resolve the issue of access," Grossi said ahead of his trip.

The IAEA's board of governors passed a rare resolution in June calling on Iran to provide access to two sites where nuclear activities may have taken place in the past.

The resolution, the first of its kind since 2012, demanded that Iran "fully cooperate" and "satisfy the agency's requests without any further delay," including by providing "prompt" access to the two sites in order to clarify whether undeclared nuclear activity took place there during the early 2000s.

At the time, Grossi accused Iran of denying access to the two locations for six months, and said that for almost a year "it has not engaged in substantive discussions to clarify our questions related to possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities."

Iran maintains the IAEA has no legal basis to inspect the sites in question.

The IAEA-Iran standoff comes with the United States pressing for reimposing UN sanctions lifted as part of a 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers. Washington exited the agreement more than two years ago and reimposed unilateral sanctions on Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week formally launched the monthlong process of activating the nuclear accord's "snapback" mechanism aimed at reimposing UN sanctions on Iran, citing Iranian violations of the deal.

But the U.S. move faces opposition at the Security Council, where other members have questioned the United States' right to do it since Washington withdrew from the nuclear pact.

The United States claims it remains a "participant" in the accord because it was listed as such in the UN resolution that enshrined it.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 17:31:14|Editor: huaxia

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ISTANBUL, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Turkey expects to host as much as 15 million tourists this year, generating some 11 billion U.S. dollars of revenue, Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said on Monday.

"We think that we would catch 15 million tourists if there wouldn't be an adverse activity in air traffic, and achieve more than 11 billion dollars of revenue," Ersoy said at a live interview on the NTV broadcaster.

He noted that the tourism sector in the country began to gain momentum as of June as Turkey started to ease COVID-19 travel restrictions.

"Heavy air traffic began with countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Britain, and Germany," Ersoy said, noting that a total of 6.5 million foreign tourists have arrived in Turkey until the end of July.

"The tourism season started late, but it seems that it would end late," he added.

Ersoy also noted that Turkey's expectations for 2020 were very high, but due to the pandemic, there would be a grave shrinkage when compared with last year's figures.

In 2019, Turkey hosted 45 million tourists, prompting a total of 34.5 billion dollars of revenue.

Meanwhile, the ministry has so far granted 4,900 safe tourism certificates to tourism facilities across the country that defines an extensive series of measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus and ensure the safety of tourists both in accommodation and transportation, according to Ersoy.

Through this certification program, Turkey aims to relieve the COVID-19-related concerns of tourists, said Ersoy. Enditem
How do you calculate the right blend of in-office and at-home working while social-distancing measures and local lockdowns are still in place?

For Michael Colacino, president of real estate broker SquareFoot, the answer could be an algorithm.

Pre-pandemic, the company's Manhattan headquarters housed around 60 staff and the space was seen as a necessity for all of them, but returning to the office is likely to look very different due to social-distancing rules. "It's something that we have to allocate, the same way that you would allocate water in the desert," Colacino told CNBC by phone.

In May, right in the middle of New York's lockdown, business had largely ground to a halt because the company couldn't show space in the city. So, SquareFoot staff spent some of the time on a hackathon to create a piece of tech that would help ascertain who should return to the office once restrictions were lifted, and in what combination.

"We had each department head create an impact score, which was to think deeply about what the real value of the office was to their group  Then, we looked at the employees, and tried to figure out where people commuted from and how important it was for them to be able to get to work. And  we had department heads think about professional development, and which groups had to be onboarded," Colacino said. The business also considered how much people needed to use amenities like conference rooms and high-speed internet.

SquareFoot ended up with an assessment score for different teams. "For example, our real estate brokers  they only make up about 38% of the company. But because of the high level of value that they see from having offices  49% of the office capacity gets allocated to them," Colacino explained.

While offices and real estate companies have been permitted to reopen in New York City since June 22, most of SquareFoot's staff are still working from home and Colacino expects them to start to return in September. People will be able to bid for the amount of time they want in the office, and the algorithm will help determine how much they get.

Beyond a reduction in staff numbers for some downtown offices, Colacino also sees a move toward lower-density satellite workplaces that are close to transport hubs. This is a move that outdoor recreation company REI is set to make to reduce commuting time for employees.

Shorter commutes are also a consideration for former Goldman Sachs banker Sanj Mahal, who is hoping a new pitch to corporates will pay off: He wants to help fill underused hospitality spaces in London with large companies' employees  those who would usually spend upwards of 90 minutes traveling to and from an office.

"People are much happier with a micro commute over something that takes 45 minutes to an hour  and I think it's very difficult to take away time from people once they've experienced it  The issue is, what do corporates do about this?" he told CNBC by phone.

Mahal is co-founder of AndCo, a website that lists spaces in upscale hotels, restaurants and coffee shops to hire by the day, for a daily, monthly or annual fee. While it had been small businesses and freelancers who'd used the service pre-pandemic, Mahal is now in discussions with large companies that are looking to implement a "work from anywhere" policy.
Almost six months after it was first detected in Latin America, the coronavirus death toll has reached 250,000 and exacerbated poverty and inequality, threatening to undo a decade of slow social progress.

Among the 620 million people in the region, 6.4 million have been infected.

In marginalized neighborhoods the virus has spread alongside financial desperation due to the economic meltdown caused by lockdown measures, with thousands of families facing a stark choice between shielding themselves from the virus and trying to fill their stomachs.

In the worst cases, they've been unable to do either.

"Because of this pandemic I was left unemployed. There are days when we don't eat," said Milena Maia, who lives in a modest home in Heliopolis, which with 200,000 people is one of the largest favelas in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The 36-year-old single mother worked as a cleaner but now relies on handouts from an NGO to feed her three children.

She told AFP she knows people that died of COVID-19 and "many that are infected."

Priscila Tomas da Silva, her husband and six children had to leave the home they were renting and build their own makeshift accommodation from wood and plastic in a parking lot for trucks on the outskirts of Sao Paulo.

Within a few weeks, 700 such shacks sprung up in the parking area, creating a new favela.

- Set back 10 years -

Latin America represents nine percent of the world's population but has provided 40 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the last two months.

That "shows us how big the impact has been," Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva, Latin American director for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) told AFP.

Without effective political reaction, "at a regional level we can talk about a regression of up to 10 years in the levels of multidimensional poverty," he added.

Faced with surging cases, many governments -- such as Peru, Argentina and Venezuela -- have rolled back on the easing of confinement measures and pledged support for the poorest sectors of society, although it's often been meagre or failed to reach those that need it.

Story continues

Chile and Peru allowed people to withdraw money from their pension funds, providing much-needed immediate financial relief.

But some experts warn those measures could weaken already fragile social protection systems.

"The quarantine and pandemic are exposing deep realities: structural injustice is becoming more visible," priest Lorenzo de Vedia, from the sprawling Villa 21 neighborhood of Buenos Aires, told AFP.

"There's not enough State presence and it's disorganized," he added.

Throughout the region, people have set up communal kitchens to help those worst affected.

Yet anger is widespread. Chile saw violent protests a few weeks ago with road blocks and looting, while in Bolivia people marched demanding government solutions.

- 231 million poor -

The UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) predicts unemployment could reach 13.5 percent this year -- meaning 44 million people out of work, 18 million more than in January.

The regional economy is also expected to shrink by nine percent.

The World Labor Organization warns that two thirds of people have either lost their job, lost work hours or earnings.

As a result, the pandemic has pushed 45 million people out of the middle classes. There are now 231 million poor: 37 percent of the population, according to ECLAC.

Peru, which has enjoyed above average growth in recent years, has seen its GDP shrink by 17 percent, with the number of middle income families receding.

That's what happened to Sara Paredes and Raul Cisneros, who saw their income disappear from one day to the next.

"It's five months since anyone gave me a translation," said Cisneros, 46, a translator and Quechua teacher.

Paredes, 45, has been unable to perform in the theatre or give classes in Lima's School of Fine Arts.

They're struggling to feed their two children.

- 'Pre-existing conditions' -

On top of the health and economic crises there's also been an increase in deaths from treatable disease, such as dengue, and domestic violence and truancy.

In countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador, hugely dependent on remittances, gang violence has risen again after initially subsiding when the virus struck.

Lopez-Calva said that, just as those most vulnerable to COVID-19 are those with pre-existing conditions, "the most vulnerable economies and societies to the pandemic are those with pre-existing conditions."

"That's to say those with high inequality, ineffective policies and public institutions, with low trust in the institutions and fiscal incapacity," he continued.

ECLAC has pushed governments to provide a basic income and food stamps during the crisis.

It has also called for debt grace periods for small and medium-sized companies and greater access to finance under favorable conditions for middle income countries, particularly in the Caribbean.

burs-ll/lda/bc/st
Widespread use of facial coverings could save up to 70,000 American lives amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a researcher.

Dr. Chris Murray of the University of Washingtons Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told CNN it was time for local governments to enforce more stringent mask rules to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Murray said under the current U.S. strategy, IHME is projecting death rates would dip in September but increase in the fall with the total reaching 310,000 by Dec. 1. If there were widespread adoption of masks, however  about 95% of the U.S. population- the projections of deaths from now to December would drop by almost 70,000, he said.

Conversely, if regulations are relaxed and fewer people wear masks, the U.S. daily death toll could reach 6,000 by December, up from his current prediction of 2,000 daily.

More than 176,000 people in the U.S. have died since the coronavirus pandemic began in March. Globally, the virus has killed more than 803,000 people.

Florida tops 600,000 cases, 10,000 deaths

Florida has now reported more than 600,000 coronavirus cases and 10,000 deaths.

The Florida Department of Health reported 2,974 new COVID-19 cases Sunday with 51 additional deaths. To date, 600,571 people in Florida have been infected with 10,325 deaths.

There was some better news, however. Sundays coronavirus report showed a positivity rate of under 10% for the fourth day in a row. On Saturday, 8.61% of those tested were infected with COVID-19.

Greek house tied to Georgia Tech outbreak

Georgia Tech officials said 33 more students have tested positive for COVID on campus with 17 of the cases tied to the same Greek residence.

Officials with Sigma Phi Epsilon confirmed the outbreak was at their chapter house. The house is now locked down to non-residents and the organization is working to test all members and isolate those that were positive.

Students returned to class at Georgia Tech on Aug. 17. At least 251 students at Tech have tested positive for the virus.

Biden not tested for coronavirus

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden hasnt been tested for coronavirus, his aide confirmed.

Kate Bedingfield, deputy manager for Bidens presidential campaign, said he has not been tested but the campaign has put the strictest protocols in place.

And moving forward, should he need to be tested, he certainly would be, she added.
Horribly unfair, is how attorney Thomas Gerarde described a new police reform bill during the recent Board of Selectmen meeting in Darien.

The bill, which was passed the CT state house and senate and signed into law by Gov. Ned Lamont in late July, takes effect July 1 of 2021.

It contains an immunity provision, which could increase personal lawsuits against police officers who violate allowable practices.

The new bill also creates an independent inspector general to investigate police-related shootings, prohibits choke holds except in cases where cops fear for their lives, and trains police in better de-escalation tactics when dealing with crowds.

Additionally, the bill puts an end to the tactic of being fired from one department and then finding a police job elsewhere; mandates mental health and substance-abuse screening; and requires officers who witness coworkers abuse suspects to intercede and report the instances.

Read more about the bill here.

Throughout the meeting, Gerarde expressed his intense dissatisfaction with the new bill.

This bill is aimed at police officers only, said Gerarde, a managing partner at Howd & Ludorf in Hartford.

According to town attorney Wayne Fox, who recommended Gerarde speak at the meeting, Gerarde is an expert on law enforcement liability, specializing in defending the civil rights of lawsuits brought against police officers in state and federal courts.

This is an overreaction to what happened in Minnesota. Connecticut does not have the problem that we witnessed in Minneapolis, Gerarde said.

In attendance at the meeting were Fox and Darien Police Chief Don Anderson.

Hesitation factor

Gerarde spoke about the hesitation factor that the new bill would produce in police officers, by describing a hypothetical scenario of an armed gunman entering an elementary school.

[He] gets past the school resource officer and is running towards a classroom, Gerarde said.

Under normal circumstances, police officers would most likely shoot the gunman if he or she didnt immediately stop running, according to Gerarde.

That would be a justified shoot because it would be a reasonable perception, because those children were about to be in serious physical injury, he said.

With the new bill, he said juries will be told to consider if there was reasonable de-escalation attempts made by the police officer.

How do you know that he was really going to use the gun once he got inside the classroom? Maybe he just wanted to talk to someone. Maybe he just wanted to go in and scare the daylights out of that teacher, Gerarde said.

He added that the police officer will now be second guessed about why he didnt try to say something that might have made the gunman stop.

As hes running down the hall, the police officer is now thinking, Have I used everything Im supposed to for de-escalation? Gerarde said.

That line of thinking, and the feeling of doubt its likely to cause, is among the reasons he said he does not support the new bill, which, he said, can result in personal loss to the police officer.

The real sad message is the police will know that if I dont do anything, Im never going to face that series of questions. Im not going to lose my house, my job, my savings, my family, Gerarde said.

When it was his turn to speak, Fox referred to that as the hesitation factor, which, he said, will result in police questioning whether or not they should act or hesitate in shooting someone who appears to be about to cause harm to someone.

That can result in a dangerous situation, and unfortunately the potential for more serious injuries and death, Fox said.

Qualified immunity

Gerarde spent a considerable amount of time talking about section 41 of the new bill, which could allow a lawsuit against a police officer for unequal treatment based on some protected classification.

It could be race or gender, religion, national origin or sexual orientation, he said. Its overly broad in that regard.

At the present time, if reasonable police officers can disagree about the lawfulness of conduct, then the police officer gets the benefit of the doubt and qualified immunity applies, he added.

However, he said the Connecticut legislature did not like that. They thought that too many people were getting away with qualified immunity too often. They tried to make it harder to obtain and they added a good faith component to the qualified immunity analysis.

According to Gerarde, qualified immunity can be harder to win as a result of this bill. We might have to prove this at trial, he said. Thats a big step backwards for Connecticuts police officers.

Use of deadly force

Another aspect of the new bill that Gerarde spent time discussing concerns the ability for a police officer to use deadly force.

The use of deadly force was established by the United States Supreme Court in the Tennessee v. Garner ruling in 1985. The Supreme Court said whenever a police officer has a reasonable perception that he or another person is exposed to death or serious physical injury, then deadly force is justified.

That paradigm exists for good reason and has been debated for many years in the Supreme Court, Gerarde said. The Supreme Court recognizes that when deadly force is used, the situation is never static and calm. Its always tense, its always uncertain, its always rapidly evolving.

Gerarde said police officers should have the freedom to use their training and to make those split second decisions without worrying about being tagged by 2020 hindsight after the fact.

Dangerous instrument clause

What constitutes a deadly weapon has a specific definition in the Connecticut general statute, such as a gun, switchblade knife, bludgeon, or metal knuckles.

According to Gerarde, there are many objects that can cause death or physical injury besides the given list. Examples he gave are a regular knife with a six inch blade, and a car.

However, under the new law, if an individual doesnt use any of the items from the list, he said police could now get sued, have to pay a penalty from their own money, your job is on the line, your pension is on the line, and savings.

At the meeting, Chief Anderson also spoke about the dangerous instrument clause, saying he once took a beating by a guy with a 2 by 4, and there was nobody coming to help me. That wouldnt fall under the deadly weapon [clause], but it certainly was a dangerous instrument and I had a right to defend myself up to and including deadly force.

Darien police officers

While there were parts of the new bill that the experts disagreed with, other parts are already in use by Darien police officers.

These include implicit bias training, dash cams and body cams, badges and name tags required on outer garments, and civilian review boards.

This statute allows municipalities to create civilian review boards for police officers and police departments, Anderson said. We already have that.

Anderson further commented on many other parts of the bill, saying, We are ahead of the curve.

Our officers do a good job of being reasonable, being fair and being evenhanded, and none of our officers are out there looking to use force, especially deadly force, Anderson added. However, they will if they have to.

Going forward

According to Darien First Selectman Jayme Stevenson, the Board will be watching the new police bill closely through the next legislative session to see if any modifications are made and how those might affect the Darien Police Department

sfox@darientimes.com
Police top brass step in over Nong Mints death, student charged

PHUKET: A student at Phuket Rajabhat University is facing a charge of negligence causing the death of another person following the death of 20-year-old first-year student Pornpiphat Mint Iaddam at the campus north of Phuket Town last Wednesday (Aug 19).

deathpolice

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Monday 24 August 2020, 06:50PM

Deputy national police chief Pol Maj Gen Suchart Theerasawat announced the news at Phuket City Police Station this afternoon (Aug 24). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Police are also investigating whether any other persons are to be held accountable,deputy national police chief Pol Maj Gen Suchart Theerasawat announced at Phuket City Police Station this afternoon (Aug 24).

Maj Gen Suchart flew to Phuket today to be updated in person about the case. Present at the meeting this afternoon were Phuket Provincial Police Commander Pol Maj Gen Rungrote Thakurapunyasiri, Phuket Provincial Police Deputy Commanders Col Witoon Kongsudjai and Pol Col Arayaphan Phukbuakhao, Phuket City Police Chief Col Teerawat Liamsuwan and the team of police officers tasked with investigating Nong Mints death.

Maj Gen Suchart said today that he was representing the interests of the Royal Thai Police, and monitoring the progress in the investigation.

Nong Mint, a Phuket native, was enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts Thai-language program under the Faculty of Humanities. She began her studies at the campus in June.

She collapsed while running during a training session with the cheerleading squad, led by senior students, at the campus last Wednesday evening.

initial reports in the media consistently reported that Nong Mint collapsed after completing five of eight laps around the campus pond, as ordered by a senior in the cheerleading squad. Each lap of the pond is about one kilometre long.

However, a student yesterday gave a timeline of events that matched the universitys public statement, that Nong Mint collapsed after only a few hundred metres while completing several laps around the car park area where the cheerleading practice was being held.

Maj Gen Suchart said today that this particular factor was being investigated thoroughly by police.

There are no CCTV cameras covering the area in question [where Nong Mint collapsed]. There are CCTV cameras inside the building, but they do not cover the area in question, he said.

Students, especially those involved in the cheerleading practice, as well as doctors, had already co-operated with police and given witness statements, he said.

We cannot reveal what they said in their statements as the investigation is still ongoing, he said.

The statements did include testimonies about what activities were ordered and how far the students were ordered to run, he added.

"Now there is evidence to report that one female senior student has been charged with negligence resulting in the death of another person, Maj Gen Suchart said.

The student had already surrendered to investigating officers, but had denied any negligent action, he noted.

Whether the person will be allowed temporary release is at the discretion of the investigation officers, he added.

The senior student acknowledged that the actual activities [leading to Nong Mints death] were organised, but denied that the act was [culpable of] recklessness causing death, Maj Gen Suchart explained.

Officers have to investigate further and gather evidence to determine whether or not the act is to be deemed negligent or not, and whether it caused the death, he said.

Other people are also under investigation for their possible action or inaction that may have led to Nong Mints death, Maj Gen Suchart added.

At this stage, we do not know how many people it will be as the results of the medical examination are not finished and the questioning of the relevant students and faculty members is not yet complete, he said.

Maj Gen Suchart cautioned all people against making presumptions about the case.

It is the right of each person to testify, and the investigating officers must act in accordance with the law to determine whether the issues of forcefulness and negligence led to the death or injury of another person, he said.

This investigation requires subtlety. The person had no intention of [Nong Mint] dying, but there is the question of whether it was a reckless act and whether or not proper first aid was provided, he added.

As for [reports that Nong Mint was] running at the parking lot, and had run not more than 200 meters, instead of around the pond [before she collapsed], that is now under investigation.

Also, friends of the students and seniors have given statements confirming that the student had performed the same activity before and had no problems, but we must uncover all the evidence from others, Maj Gen Suchart said.

Maj Gen Suchart also cautioned against presumptions of the medical cause of death, as Nong Mints death has repeatedly been reported as heart failure.

This is a personal opinion, not a medical opinion. We will not know for sure until the medical examination is completed, he said.

"This case should take a short time to process, and if the medical results come quickly, the case can be prosecuted and closed, Maj Gen Suchart added.

This story is of great interest to relatives of the deceased and the media, he noted, adding that Phuket Provincial Police have been instructed to co-ordinate with Phuket Rajabhat University to prevent any further fatal incidents.

Guidelines must be laid out and presented to the Governor so they can be implemented at all educational institutions. The guidelines set out at Phuket Rajabhat University will be presented to the Ministry of Education to be applied as safety guidelines for activities at other educational institutions, he said.
At least one Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office deputy shot and killed a person after responding to a call about shots being fired in an upscale neighborhood near Alameda and Louisiana NE on Monday afternoon.

The shooting spurred an immediate protest by the Black New Mexico Movement and about 30 demonstrators marched toward the scene playing music through a speaker in a cart and carrying signs that said jail killer cops, no justice no peace and Black Lives Matter.

Sheriff Manuel Gonzales, conducting a one-minute briefing on social media, said that around 4 p.m. deputies were called to an armed subject firing rounds near Louisiana and Beverly Hills NE.

He said when deputies arrived, the person did fire rounds in the area of our deputies.

Our deputies did return fire, striking that individual, Gonzales said. Our deputies then rendered aid and were unable to successfully resuscitate that person and that person is deceased.

He said no deputies were hurt and there are no outstanding subjects.

We are currently in the preliminary stage of the investigation and will release information later in the week, Gonzales said.

Around 8 p.m., protesters gathered in the street, coming to a stop pressed up against the crime scene tape. They faced off with five deputies, who stood mostly motionless. The crowd addressed the deputies, played music and a recording that read the names of people killed by officers around the country.

Arthur Bell, an organizer in the movement, speaking through a microphone said the group had already been protesting when they heard about the shooting.

We dont know the person who you all shot, but hes a citizen just like us, Bell said. Were out here because we give a damn, because we know how his family feels. We understand that, unlike you all, tonight hes probably not going home.

He referenced a couple of recent shootings by the Albuquerque Police Department  including that of a well-known Nob Hill bartender two weeks ago  as well as the fear of being stopped by police unnecessarily.

What we want is equality, Bell said. We want you to treat us, the people out here, the same way youd treat your brother, your mom, the same way youd want your grandma to be treated.

Little additional information was released about the shooting Monday evening.

Deputy Joseph Montiel, a BCSO spokesman, would not answer questions about how many officers fired and whether the person who was killed was male or female. He said the sheriffs office will send out a press release Tuesday with that information.

BCSO personnel were joined at the scene by investigators from APD, New Mexico State Police and the Sandia Police Department. They could be seen walking around an overgrown expanse of land between Florence and Venice NE, near Louisiana.

Montiel wrote in an email that the location of the shooting caused delays relating to jurisdiction.

The piece of land that the shooting occurred on used to be the site of the old City of Albuquerque Sports Plex, Montiel wrote. The land is currently considered Sandia Pueblo property, but within the jurisdiction of Bernalillo County.

The protest wrapped up a little before 9:30 p.m. after protesters held a moment of silence for the person who had been killed.
Google Ireland has today committed to support 60,000 Irish SMEs as they recover from the financial impacts of COVID-19. To do so, the company is announcing a package of tools, supports, and partnerships in addition to funding.

'Grow with Google' aims to support businesses to adapt and thrive by learning how to operate online. This could mean reaching new customers online, selling online for the first time, expanding to international markets or learning how to run a team virtually.

Through the Grow with Google website people can access hundreds of training courses for free, learning everything from how to get your business visible online, to how to scale your business internationally and how to collaborate with your team online. Google say 8,000 Irish people have already enhanced their digital skills through the program, and Google have commited to help an additional 40,000 people by the end of 2021.

Google will also partner with Irish organisations such as The Dublin Chamber of Commerce and The Gaelic Players Association to make additional digital skills training free and easy to access for Irish businesses.

Welcomed by ISME, the representative association for Irish SMEs, Googles Grow with Google initiative has been specifically designed to help these businesses rebuild by enabling them to engage with new and existing customers online. SMEs will have access to free tools and training, as well as financial support in the form of 4 million euros of advertising credits and grants for NGOs.

Commenting on the initiative, Director of Small Businesses at Google Ireland, Alice Mansergh said, "Through our Grow with Google programme, we will help SMEs and NGOs grow their digital skills, empowering them to adapt and operate effectively within the confines of the current environment. Despite the ongoing uncertainty, we want to show that having an online presence can have a transformative impact on offline businesses, not just now, but into the future. I'm very excited for us to offer help and support to the incredible Irish business owners out there, to help them to succeed."

CEO of ISME, Neil McDonnell added, "We are delighted to endorse Googles commitment to Irish SMEs. The impact of COVID-19 has been severe for businesses across all sectors, and while we know that sentiment among businesses is rising, the future remains uncertain and the coming months will certainly be challenging. The Grow with Google supports and initiatives announced today will be invaluable for businesses to help them become more resilient as they recover from the Coronavirus crisis, and simultaneously prepare for the potential impacts of Brexit."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
The International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University, Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, the City of Kawasaki, and Fujitsu Limited have today announced that they will conduct a joint field trial of AI-based technologies to optimize disaster evacuation center management in Kawasaki City, Japan, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic with a drill on Monday, August 31. This project marks the latest milestone for the four parties, which have been promoting their Joint Project Aiming for Tsunami Disaster Risk Reduction Using ICT in the Kawasaki Coastal Area since November 2017. The field trial will rely on crowd flow simulation technology and AI image analysis to identify measures to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 infection for evacuees by helping decision-makers reduce exposure to the "three Cs": closed spaces, crowded places, and conversations in close-proximity.

Ahead of the trial, the four parties will use crowd flow simulation technology developed in advance to visualize infection risk, which varies depending on the volume and proximity of people entering the evacuation center. The simulation assumes that a certain number of evacuees are infected with COVID-19, offering disaster management decision-makers insights into how to alter their evacuation center management plans accordingly. On the day of the trial, Fujitsu's AI image analysis solution will be deployed on-site to automatically collect information including the number of inbound evacuees and their attributes from video data captured by cameras installed near the evacuation center entry points, delivering real-time information on the level of crowding at the evacuation centers. This data will be transmitted to the City of Kawasaki Disaster Response Headquarters, enabling early and appropriate responses to reduce infection risk from the "three Cs."

Field Trial Outline

Date/Time Monday, August 31st 13:00-16:00

Location Kawasaki Municipal Tonomachi Elementary School

Participants About 60

Trial Overview Employees of Kawasaki City will conduct a drill including the opening of the evacuation center as well as the reception of evacuees, in accordance with guidelines for combatting COVID-19 developed by the City of Kawasaki authorities. Evacuation center management plans and protocol will be examined with crowd flow technology that simulates the potential spread of infection, and the effectiveness of AI to count the number of evacuees entering the site will be evaluated. The trial will also offer evacuation center management personnel experience managing the process considering the additional safety challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crowd flow simulation technology to estimate infection risk

This technology, developed by the International Research Institute for Disaster Science at Tohoku University, the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., can simulate changes in the risk of infection due to differences in crowd flow by incorporating a COVID-19 infection risk assessment function into the existing technology, which reproduces crowd flow under various conditions. With this technology, it is possible to predict how infection will spread along with the flow of people, assuming that there is a person infected among the evacuees--people that remain within a certain distance of the infected person for a certain period of time are designated as a potential risk of infection.

The four parties will use this technology prior to the field trial to simulate various evacuation plans in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak. Specifically, they will evaluate how the risk of infection changes according to differences in the management of evacuation centers, including the number of evacuation center reception points and the number of receptionists, and consider the appropriate implementation plan for the management of evacuation centers according to the situation.

AI image analysis solutions that automatically measure congestion at evacuation entry points

The trial will leverage Fujitsu's AI image analysis solution Fujitsu Technical Computing Solution GREENAGES Citywide Surveillance V3. This solution makes it possible to confirm information including the number and other attributes of inbound evacuees regardless of whether they are wearing masks from images taken by cameras installed near the designated entry points, and to visualize the level of congestion at the evacuation center in real-time. The effectiveness of the system for accurately grasping the situation on the front lines is evaluated by collecting this data real-time at the City Disaster Response Headquarters.

Future Plans

The four parties will study measures to ensure safer evacuation while mitigating infection risk from COVID-19 based on the insights gained through this field trial. They will also investigate the possibility of detecting congestion and reducing the risk of infection not only during natural disasters but also at facilities and events where large crowds gather, as well as the applicability of the technologies developed and evaluated this time.
YEREVAN, AUGUST 24, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian Armed Forces army corps and military bases stationed in the south-eastern direction of the country are holding command-staff exercises.

The drill began at 05:00, August 24 in accordance to the 2020 Readiness Plan of the military, and are led by the Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces.

The purpose of the exercises is to check the combat readiness of the troops and take measures to reduce the timeframes of executing actions, check and perfect the commanding bodies abilities in preparing and executing operations, implement tactical-strategic drill scenarios of countering enemy aggression and eliminating enemy strike teams, as well as agree the partnership issues of the army corps and the backup forces designated for this direction, Defense Ministry spokesperson Shushan Stepanyan said on social media.

Editing and Translating by Stepan Kocharyan
Protesters held a rally outside the U.S. Postal Service offices in downtown Mount Clemens Saturday calling for additional support for carriers in light of reductions by the White House administration.

A group of protesters took part in the Save the Post Office Rally at the postal facility on Main Street, which also demanded the resignation of President Donald Trumps new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

Critics say DeJoys decision to remove sorting machines has led to mail delivery delays in several states and could create problems with absentee and mail-in ballots during the November presidential election.

The rally took place as the House approved legislation in a rare Saturday session that would reverse recent changes in U.S. Postal Service operations and send $25 billion to shore up the agency ahead of the November election.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled lawmakers to Washington over objections from Republicans dismissing the action as a stunt. President Donald Trump urged a no vote, including in a Saturday tweet, railing against mail-in ballots expected to surge in the COVID-19 crisis. He has said he wants to block extra funds to the Postal Service.

Dont pay any attention to what the president is saying, because it is all designed to suppress the vote, Pelosi said at the Capitol.

Pelosi called the Postal Service the nations beautiful thread connecting Americans and said voters should ignore the presidents threats.

The daylong session came as an uproar over mail disruptions puts the Postal Service at the center of the nations tumultuous election year, with Americans rallying around one of the nations oldest and more popular institutions. Millions of people are expected to opt for mail-in ballots to avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ahead of voting the president tweeted, This is all another HOAX.

More than two dozen Republicans broke with the president and backed the bill, which passed 257-150. Democrats led approval, but the legislation is certain to stall in the GOP-held Senate. The White House said the president would veto it.

Facing a backlash over operational changes, new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified Friday in the Senate that his No. 1 priority is to ensure election mail arrives on time.

But the new postal leader, a Trump ally, said he would not restore the cuts to mailboxes and sorting equipment that have already been made. He could not provide senators with a plan for handling the ballot crush for the election. DeJoy is set to return Monday to testify before the House Oversight Committee.

 From staff and wire reports
The Israeli army has intensified its near-daily attacks on Gaza since August 6, along with tightening the blockade.

Israeli warplanes carried out more air raids on Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip early on Monday, according to the Israeli army.

The Israeli army has carried out attacks on Gaza almost daily since August 6, along with tightening a blockade under which it has banned the entry of fuel for Gazas sole power plant, plunging the Palestinian territory into darkness.

Mondays attacks targeted a Hamas tunnel and some military points, the Israeli army said in a statement, and were carried out in retaliation for the launching of incendiary balloons from Gaza that Israel blames on Hamas, the group that rules the Gaza Strip.

No casualties have been reported so far.

According to Palestinian news agency WAFA, Israeli warplanes targeted an area east of the town of al-Qarara, in the southern city of Khan Younis, with at least three missiles, leaving behind a deep crater.

Moreover, Israeli artillery struck a site east of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, which led to its destruction and catching fire.

An Egyptian delegation has been trying to broker a return to an informal truce.

The Gaza Strip has a population of two million people, more than half of whom live in poverty, according to the World Bank. The Palestinian territory has been under a devastating Israeli blockade since 2007.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since 2008.

The latest Israeli attacks came just before US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo touched down in Tel Aviv, the first stop in a five-day trip to the Middle East.

His visit will focus on the United Arab Emiratess normalisation of diplomatic ties with Israel, seen as a betrayal by many Palestinians, and urging other Arab states to follow suit.
California's Supreme Court on Monday reversed the death penalty conviction of Scott Peterson who murdered his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son in 2002

California's Supreme Court has reversed the death penalty for Scott Peterson who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife Laci and their unborn son 18 years ago.

The state's highest court on Monday overturned Peterson's 2005 death sentence but upheld his murder conviction.

Prosecutors may try again for the same sentence if they wish in the high-profile case.

Peterson was found guilty in 2004 of killing his 27-year-old wife Laci Peterson and their unborn son Conner on Christmas Eve two years prior.

Her husband led the search for her for months but was arrested after Laci's badly decomposed body and the fetus of their son washed up on a San Francisco shoreline in April 2003.

Peterson, who authorities say dumped the bodies off the side of his fishing boat, has been on death row since 2005.

In the ruling on Monday, the court said Peterson's death penalty conviction was being removed because the trial judge made 'clear and significant errors' in jury selection that meant Peterson did not receive an impartial trial.

The court agreed with Peterson's argument that potential jurors were improperly dismissed from the jury pool after saying they personally disagreed with the death penalty but would be willing to follow the law and impose it.

'While a court may dismiss a prospective juror as unqualified to sit on a capital case if the juror's views on capital punishment would substantially impair his or her ability to follow the law, a juror may not be dismissed merely because he or she has expressed opposition to the death penalty as a general matter,' the justices said in a unanimous decision.

Laci was reported missing on Christmas Eve in 2002 when she was eight months pregnant with their son Conner

Her husband led the search for her for months but was arrested after Laci's badly decomposed body washed up on a San Francisco shoreline in April 2003. The couple married in 1997

Peterson, who is now 47, contended on appeal that he couldn't get a fair trial because of the massive publicity that followed, although the proceedings were moved nearly 90 miles away from his Central Valley home of Modesto to San Mateo County, south of San Francisco.

He also had contended on appeal that the trial court erred in deciding whether jurors and the defense were properly allowed to test whether Peterson's new boat would likely have capsized if he dumped the weighted bodies over the side.

'We are grateful for the California Supreme Court's unanimous recognition that if the state wishes to put someone to death, it must proceed to trial only with a fairly selected jury,' Cliff Gardner, Peterson's appellate attorney, said in an email.

His well-known trial attorney, Mark Geragos, said he objected at the time to what he said was 'clear error' in jury selection and said he does not expect prosecutors to retry the penalty phase.

California has not executed anyone since 2006 because of legal challenges to the way it would carry out the death penalty and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has a moratorium on executions for as long as he is governor.

Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager did not immediately say if she would again seek the death penalty.

Peterson was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his wife and the second-degree murder of their unborn son.

Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant when she went missing in December 2002.

Her husband had said he'd left their Modesto, California, home that day for Berkeley, where he took a small aluminum motor boat out for some fishing in San Francisco Bay. When Peterson returned home that night, he said he called his mother-in-law to ask if Laci was there before subsequently reporting her missing.

Investigators say Peterson dumped his wife's body from his fishing boat into San Francisco Bay the night they were reported missing

Peterson was eventually arrested after Amber Frey, a massage therapist living in Fresno, told police that they had begun dating a month before his wife's death

Investigators chased nearly 10,000 tips and considered parolees and convicted sex offenders as possible suspects after Laci was reported missing.

A massive search, bolstered by members of the tight-knit Modesto community, was organized while police investigated. Eventually, the bodies of Laci and her unborn son, who was to be named Conner, washed up on the shore of San Francisco Bay.

The fetus washed up first and had a nylon rope around the neck and a large cut on the body. Laci's body washed ashore a mile away the following day with tape wrapped around her torso.

Both bodies were too decomposed to determine cause of death.

Investigators later determined that Peterson dumped them from his fishing boat into San Francisco Bay.

Peterson was eventually arrested after Amber Frey, a massage therapist living in Fresno, told police that they had begun dating a month before his wife's death.

She told authorities that Peterson had told her his wife was dead.

A controversial six-part docuseries called The Murder of Laci Peterson the aired on A&E in 2017 appeared to suggest that Peterson was railroaded.

The docuseries pointed to witnesses who claim they saw Laci walking their dog the afternoon she disappeared, which is when her husband would have been off fishing.

The defense argued that Laci's death was likely connected to a burglary that occurred across the street from the house she shared with her husband.
Former president John Dramani Mahama is calling on Ghanaian youths to be concerned about the rate at which the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government is borrowing.



Describing the level of borrowing of the NPP government as a tragedy, Mr Mahama said the lives of the next generation is in danger if governments rate of borrowing is not curtailed, because a lot of the money being borrowed will be paid by the next generation.



According to him, Ghanas debt increased from 120.3 billion in December 2016 to 236.1 billion by 31st March 2020.



Speaking in an interview on TV XYZ and monitored by Graphic Online on Sunday, the former president said, A lot of these debts are not going to be paid by this generation, they are going to be paid by our children and our childrens children. And so the young people must be concerned about the rate at which the government borrows.



The tragedy is that the rate of borrowing and the money that have been added to the public purse one will expect that you will see a much improvement. One, items of social and economic infrastructure and two, items of economic prosperity but that hasnt happened he stated.



He added that President Akufo-Addo has nothing to show although he keeps borrowing. People feel more economically disadvantaged today than they did in the past. People dont see any new development. I mean, we dont see the schools, we dont see the hospitals, we dont see extension of electricity, indeed, this government in the four years has added just 1 per cent of electricity access. Water access, we are in danger of falling back.



Touching on the GH54 billion borrowed under his administration, Mr Mahama said it was used to expand the ports, we built railways, we did roads, we built schools, we did hospitals, we extended water, we extended electricity and people physically see what that money was used for. Unfortunately in this case, you dont see anything.



The question is that what do they have to show for the money they borrowed. They borrowed three times more than I did in my time...When you ask them they, say Free SHS but free SHS is not funded from borrowing. That is the mistake they make. It is funded from our share of oil revenue. So it cant be the cost of GH140 billion. What has happened is this government has borrowed for consumption and that is the tragedy, he lamented.

Source: graphiconline.com









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Convicted Murderer Scott Peterson Spared Death Penalty by California Supreme Court

Convicted killer Scott Petersons death penalty sentence was reversed by the California Supreme Court on Monday over his 2004 murder conviction of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn son, Conner.

The move comes more than 15 years after Laci, of Modesto, was killed. Authorities determined that Peterson dumped his wifes body from a fishing boat into the San Francisco Bay in 2002 before her remains washed ashore in April 2003.

Scott Peterson was convicted by a jury in Redwood City. In 2005, he was sentenced to death.

Petersons murder conviction will remain, but the California court ordered a new penalty phase trial. Its not clear if prosecutors will seek the death penalty again in the case.

Peterson contends his trial was flawed for multiple reasons, beginning with the unusual amount of pretrial publicity that surrounded the case, the court said. We reject Petersons claim that he received an unfair trial as to guilt and thus affirm his convictions for murder.

But the state Supreme Court ruled that the judge in the Peterson case made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection that, under long-standing United States Supreme Court precedent, undermined Petersons right to an impartial jury at the penalty phase.

The court found fault with the fact that some potential jurors were dismissed from the jury pool after saying they disagreed with the death penalty but would be willing to impose it.

While a court may dismiss a prospective juror as unqualified to sit on a capital case if the jurors views on capital punishment would substantially impair his or her ability to follow the law, a juror may not be dismissed merely because he or she has expressed opposition to the death penalty as a general matter, the justices said.

Previously, Peterson argued that he was denied a fair trial and appealed to the Supreme Court.

In the case, Peterson reported his wife, Laci, missing from the home they shared in Modesto, California, on Dec. 24, 2002, telling police he had gone fishing in San Francisco Bay early that morning and returned to find her gone. Prosecutors argued at trial that Peterson suffocated or strangled his wife on Christmas Eve or the night before and dumped her body in the bay, weighted so it would not surface.

Defense attorney Gardner wrote in the 427-page appeal that despite calling more than 150 witnesses, prosecutors were unable to prove how, when, or where the crime occurred and argued that the conviction came amid an extraordinary amount of publicity.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Dr Amjad Ayub Mirza, a human rights activist and journalist hailing from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) asked India to start extradition process to bring back some of these dreaded terrorists for their involvement in terror attacks in the country.

Days after Pakistan declared a list of 88 dreaded terrorists announcing sanctions on them, a human rights activist has asked India to start extradition process to bring back some of these dreaded terrorists for their involvement in terror attacks in the country. They include 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind and Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed, Jaish e Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar and underworld don Dawood Ibrahim.

Dr Amjad Ayub Mirza, a human rights activist and journalist hailing from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) said that the most important name was that of Dawood Ibrahim, who was known as the mastermind of serial blasts in Mumbai in 1993, more than 250 people were killed and over 700 people got injured. He added that those terrorists were in Pakistan and they were also aware of that.

He added that presence of Dawood Ibrahim in Pakistans Karachi city was revealed by media several times but it has now been officially declared by Islamabad in the list of sanctions.

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Dr Mirza said that India must start the process of extradition of Dawood Ibrahim after Pakistan had accepted about his presence in the country, he should be brought to India along with others and action must be taken against them legally. He further said that Masood Azhar, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Hafiz Saeed should also be handed over to India because they were involved in terror incidents in India.

He said that they had committed heinous crimes against the people of India, if Pakistan wanted to prove that it is fighting against terrorism then those dreaded terrorists should be handed over to India and be punished as per the law.

Paris based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) put Pakistan on the grey list in June 2018 and asked Islamabad to implement a plan of action by the end of 2019, but the deadline was extended later due to COVID-19 pandemic.

The Pakistan government issued two notifications on August 18 announcing sanctions on key leaders of terror outfits. Dawood Ibrahim, who heads a vast illegal business, emerged as Indias most wanted terrorist after the 1993 Mumbai blasts which killed nearly 250 people.

Dr Mirza said that if Pakistan failed to hand over those terrorists to India and not handover compensation to terror victims in India, then it was clear that this list of terrorists by Pakistan was just to impress the FATF.

Also read: Iran is to thank for peace in the Middle East
An estimated 3.3 million people in Burkina Faso are facing acute food insecurity, two United Nations agencies warned on Friday.

Citing alarming new data, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), stressed that "urgent and sustained action" is needed to address the worsening food and nutrition situation throughout the country.

Hunger trending upward

Since the situation in Burkina Faso was last assessed in March, acute food insecurity has increased more than 50 per cent, according to the latest analysis.

And in a country already reeling from conflict and climate change, the UN survey points out that COVID-19 has intensified people's inability to earn money to cover their daily needs.

"The COVID-19 pandemic is further exacerbating a crisis that was already deteriorating at a worrying pace, pushing more and more people into severe food crisis and acute food insecurity," said Dauda Sau, FAO Representative in Burkina Faso.

Emergency phase

Meanwhile, the provinces of Oudalan and Soum in the Sahel region have been driven into the emergency phase of food insecurity, as defined by the analysis.

Some three per cent of people in these northern areas are said to be experiencing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity and facing extreme food consumption gaps, which are also resulting in alarming levels of acute malnutrition.

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"We're seeing an alarming deterioration in food security across the worst-hit parts of the country," said David Bulman, WFP Country Director and Representative in Burkina Faso.

And many of those worst affected have been displaced from their homes by fighting in the region.

"We need to take immediate action to reverse this trend in the two provinces. It would be nothing short of a disaster were a whole generation to be crushed by conflict, displacement and hunger," he added.

Changing the course

Many of those most at risk are subsistence farmers and livestock herders.

While urgent humanitarian life-and livelihood-saving assistance is essential to address immediate needs, so too are longer-term investments in rural livelihoods and social services which, experts say can help reinforce social cohesion and contribute to peace.

"We can reverse this trend if we act now by supporting the Government to protect livelihoods, rapidly increase local food production and availability, and support rural populations to access food," the FAO Representative stated.

Both FAO and WFP have been responding to the crisis in Burkina Faso by providing food assistance coupled with livelihood protection and support for displaced people and the host communities that receive them.
David Daleiden slams Kamala Harris VP nomination: 'Everyone should be afraid'

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Prominent pro-life activist David Daleiden shared his thoughts Thursday on how the woman who authorized a raid on his home over undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood is now the Democrat Partys vice-presidential nominee.

Daleiden, the president of the pro-life investigative organization Center for Medical Progress, spoke with Fox News Tucker Carlson Thursday. He issued a stark warning about how Democrat vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris has a radical disrespect and contempt for the First Amendment.

Daleiden discussed his experiences with the California senator when she served as the California attorney general.

Carlson began the segment by recalling the moment when Harris first decided to take legal action against Daleiden and CMP after the release of undercover videos in 2015 that purport to expose Planned Parenthood officials willingness to engage in the illegal sale of aborted baby body parts.

Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

Back in March 2016, when she was attorney general of California, Kamala Harris met with several Planned Parenthood executives, Carlson explained. Records show that they conspired to target a journalist called David Daleiden, who was covering Planned Parenthoods role in trafficking fetal body parts.

Cops then raided Daleidens home in a violation of the First Amendment, Carlson added.

CMP released the videos documenting exchanges between undercover CMP investigators and Planned Parenthood officials beginning in 2015.

The videos captured footage of Planned Parenthood officials casually discussing the sale and harvesting of aborted baby body parts. It is a federal crime for any person to profit off of the sale of aborted babies' tissue for research.

Kamala Harris decided to target me and make me the first and only case of a criminal enforcement of the California video recording law, Daleiden proclaimed.

He proceeded to detail the raid on his home authorized by Harris in April 2016.

Kamala Harris sent 11 California DOJ agents into my one-bedroom apartment in southern California to raid my home to seize the means of publishing the videos, Daleiden recalled. They took the means of publishing speech critical of Planned Parenthood and critical of Kamala Harris public patrons.

After Daleiden finished telling his story, the Fox News host concluded that Harris used the power of armed law enforcement to crush someone who criticized her donors.

Does that make you worry for the country if she becomes the vice president? Carlson asked Daleiden.

Daleiden answered in the affirmative.

Everyone should be afraid of Kamala Harris radical disrespect and contempt for the First Amendment, Daleiden stressed.

In the years following the release of the first video, Daleiden has faced a multitude of legal battles.

In early 2016, Daleiden was indicted by a grand jury in Houston, Texas on charges of tampering with a government record, relating to the fake picture ID that Daleiden presented when he visited Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast regional offices. Those charges were later dismissed.

In 2017, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who succeeded Harris upon her election to the U.S. Senate, charged Daleiden over his criminal recording of confidential conversations.

During his interview with Carlson, Daleiden explained that the actions he and CMP took to film the undercover videos were fully in compliance with the law.

Undercover video is something that is widely practiced in the state of California, he said. Its legal and we were scrupulous to follow the law to a T, recording people  at open public restaurants, crowded public restaurants, where anybody could be expected to overhear.

While Harris has long since moved on from her role as Californias top law enforcement official, Daleiden continues to face legal consequences for his undercover journalism.

Ultimately, 14 of the 15 charges filed against Daleiden by Becerra in March 2017 were dropped.

However, Daleiden and his lawyers were fined $200,000 by a judge in 2017 for continuing to post undercover video footage as the legal proceedings continued.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge William Orrick, an Obama appointee who also imposed the $200,000 fine on Daleiden and his lawyers, ordered Daleiden, CMP and other pro-life activists to pay more than $1.2 million in damages to Planned Parenthood. Orrick, like Harris, has well-documented ties to the abortion provider.

The investigative journalist has filed a lawsuit of his own against Harris, Becerra, Planned Parenthood and others, accusing them of orchestrating a brazen, unprecedented and ongoing political conspiracy to selectively use Californias video recording laws as a political weapon to silence disfavored political speech.

Daleiden became the first journalist ever to be criminally prosecuted under Californias recording law  because his investigation revealed and he published shock[ing] content that Californias Attorney General and the private party coconspirators wanted to cover up, the lawsuit reads.

Defendants seek their pound of flesh from Mr. Daleiden and to chill other journalists from investigating and reporting on that same content.



Over the years, Harris has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations from Planned Parenthood and other womens issues lobbying organizations.
In search of a conservative sociology By Mark Wegierski

One of the most salient points about the problems of meaning and ideology, made by (among others) George Orwell in his dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is that semantics, far from being unimportant, are critical for the maintenance of a given social and political system of ideas i.e., "Newspeak is Ingsoc, and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The coherence or incoherence (in terms of definition), and positive or negative value (in terms of emotion), which are commonly associated with a term describing a political ideology, will tell one a great deal about the strength of that ideology in a given society. The words and language which are used to describe social or political phenomena (what Orwell called "the B vocabulary" in his Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four) constitute the primary instruments by which an ideology asserts itself in a given society. It should be noted that complex, multilayered political terms such as "conservatism" (or "liberalism" or "socialism") conjure immediate images and emotional responses in most people's minds. In terms of the unstated emotive content of the term "conservatism", these images and emotional responses can range, for example, from a wistful remembrance of the beauty of a Gothic cathedral, the green countryside, and the medieval Christendom from which it sprang (for a traditionalist conservative), to a visceral distaste towards a middleaged WASP corporate controller type luxuriating in his penthouse suite atop Manhattan, and the oppressive capitalist structure which he represents (for the average Left-liberal or leftwinger). Quite clearly, the term "conservatism" is today a veritable labyrinth of confused and contradictory meanings, many of them quite negative and pejorative. Even those who consider or call themselves "conservative" fail to appreciate a large part of that word's possible deeper or more subtle nuances. It seems that many such persons arrive at an overlysimple "pet definition" of the word, which they then seek to foist on their fellow "believers", often with a great deal of arrogance and intolerance. The situation is so bad that the ideological rivals of conservatism hardly need to exert themselves to introduce semantic confusion and chaos into the political battleground.



However, "traditionalism" has to be restored, renovated, and rejuvenated as a theory, before it can play any practical part in the future of conservatism, or of humankind. The following parts of this article outline some major theoretical steps which are necessary for this "rejuvenation", a small beginning for the vast amount of work which will eventually have to be done in both the theoretical and practical realms. The first major point to be made in regard to contemporary conservative intellectual endeavour is that almost all conservatives, especially of the "traditionalist" variety, have for far too long shunned the methods and language of social science.



The first goal of conservative theoretical endeavour should therefore be to establish could be called a genuinely "new science of politics". Among the first tasks of this "new science" would be the careful definition of certain terms key to political enquiry - power, ideology, ruling group, etc. This would be, in many ways, a continuation of the work begun by Orwell, Pareto, Michels, Mosca, and Burnham, among others. It would be recognized that every society is dominated by a narrow, exclusive circle of powerholders, regardless of what it claims itself to be. The task of the political scientist therefore becomes to identify who the effective (not only formal) powerholders are in contemporary societies; which ideologies are prevalent among them; and how these ideologies are transmitted and infused into society as a whole. The question of competing ideologies, and the evaluation of their comparative strength in a given society, would be very important. Political taxonomies or representations of the political spectrum would be drawn up with careful attention. The making of careful distinctions, as between Western neoMarxists (socially liberal) and orthodox Eastern Marxists (socially puritanical), would be imperative. Quantitative and empirical methodologies would be devised to more accurately measure the strength or preponderance of given ideologies. Ideology, and the semantics of ideology, would be a principal focus of this approach. The real, as opposed to the formal meanings of political pronouncements would be sought; the ideological underpinnings and presuppositions of modern political vocabularies would be laid bare; the unstated emotive content of political terms and discourse would be exposed and explained. The semantic tricks and devices which are employed by ideologies would not only be identified, they would be systematically classified, and applied to the current situation. The methods by which ruling groups exercise their control (coercive, utilitarian, and normative instrumentalities) would be analyzed; common legitimating devices and techniques shown; "the circulation of elites" - the displacement of one ruling group by another - carefully studied; the types of possible dissidence identified (including pseudodissidence). The effect of this emergent, right-leaning "critical theory" would hopefully be to deconstruct and demolish the ideological underpinnings of contemporary liberalism, building up to a general description of the overall "control system" and "shape" of our society. And, because of the care taken in defining the different ideologies, it would hopefully emerge that this control did not constitute rule by a "corporatefascistauthoritarian" elite, as the neoMarxists would have it, but rather constitutes rule by an agglomerate of urbanbased corporate, media, and adhoc minority coalition groups, who impose their ideology on the virtually unrepresented and leaderless mainstream of society. The media group in particular could be demonstrated to be a narrow, closed caste, having all the sociological characteristics of a class, and existing above and beyond any public scrutiny or "checks and balances" - able to impose its ideology on a hapless populace. This truly critical, socialscientific approach would have the potential of ripping open the ideological underpinnings, overweening pretensions, and selfrighteous hypocrisies of contemporary liberalism, initiating a new type of political struggle - a struggle for "the heart and soul" of our society - not mired in petty issues, but played for the highest worldhistorical stakes. It is not enough to criticize without offering a positive alternative. It may be noted, as a general supposition, that every social or political valuesystem, thoughtsystem, or ideology is ultimately based on some theory or view of human nature or existence. It is only by formulating a unified theory of human nature, society, and history, that conservatism can achieve a sense of ideological consistency and rigour, something which is in itself very appealing. (One of the reasons many persons are drawn to Marxism is that it offers consistent answers and solutions to the questions of social existence and the problems of society, however "wrong" those answers and solutions are often seen to be.) There are indeed problems which "traditionalist" conservatives face in ultimately justifying their tenets to the modern world. Their most common lines of argumentation, which are based on the religious, literary, and narrowly historical modes, can no longer appeal to any but the most obscurantist, pedantic, or archaic sorts of persons. These overwritten and over-flowery arguments, with their ceaseless invocation of what have really become meaningless codewords like "right reason", "virtue", and "the Great Books", have a certain staleness and allpervading sense of unreality to them. We're living in the year 2020, not the eighteenth century, after all! The success of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which stayed away from an overly traditional, scholarly, or stuffy approach to the issues, but rather contained a certain fresh zest and vitality, is good proof of the efficacy of that mode of social criticism. Tom Wolfe has also gotten great mileage from an intelligent critique of the inanities and stupidities of contemporary Western society, without necessarily being identified as a conservative. What has to be done is to bring this approach (or something analogous to it) into all areas of conservative theoretical endeavour. Every ideology, it might be argued, searches (or should search) for a theory or account of human nature which has "the resounding ring of truth", and which is consonant with the praxis of that ideology. Theology or literary criticism or picayune historical analysis are hardly credible modes in which such theoretical work can be done, especially in the modern, superscienticized, supertechnological world. The extent to which the people of a given society (implicitly or explicitly) accept a given theory of human nature and existence usually determines which given ideology is prevalent in the continuous, daytoday functioning of that society. The argument could therefore be made that it is by focussing on the most theoretical questions (i.e., by building on a solid foundation), rather than by fighting battles over petty policy issues, where truly significant social change could begin. Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher.

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Since late June, the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services at New York University (NYU) has been working closely with a small, student-led task force to make racially segregated housing a reality in undergraduate student dorms.

On July 20, Washington Square News, the weekly undergraduate student newspaper of NYU, published an article titled Student-Led Task Force Calls for Black Housing on Campus, in which it reported on the universitys willingness to help implement residential communities open solely to Black-identifying students with Black Resident Assistants. Since then, the university has officially given the project a green light, aiming to have NYUs first segregated residential floor established by Fall 2021.

A little over two months ago, a recently organized advocacy group called Black Violets created an online petition demanding that the university implement Black student housing on campus in the vein of themed engagement floors across first-year and upperclassmen residence halls. In its petition, the group argues that Too often in the classroom and in residential life, black students bear the brunt of educating their uninformed peers about racism. African American students, the group states, desperately require a safe space where they can escape from students, staff and faculty of other races.

NYU Washington Square Campus

At NYU, Themed Engagement Floors, also known as Themed Engagement Communities, comprise a network of theme-based floors, located in various undergraduate residence halls, which allow students living on a specific floor to explore a specific subject through various programs and activities planned by a resident assistant. There are over 20 Themed Engagement Communities at NYU, with themes ranging from film, literature and theater to technology, science and foreign languages. All floors are open to all students, who request residency on a specific floor prior to the start of the academic year.

The approval of a Themed Engagement Community open to students based on their race is new at NYU. However, it is not the first time that the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services has considered such a proposal. In 2002, an NYU senior submitted a plan to develop race-based housing for African American students, claiming that such a housing program would unite African American students on campus and better combat racial discrimination. This proposal was eventually rejected by the university after a brief review and discussion.

Now, despite signs of minimal support from the undergraduate student bodythe online petition has garnered a mere 1,105 signatures out of the 26,733 total undergraduates currently studying at NYUthe proposal for race-based housing has been warmly welcomed by the university administration.

There is nothing progressive about the establishment of racially segregated housing at NYU. It is irrelevant whether the segregation being implemented is voluntary or mandatory. Racial segregation, in all forms, is entirely reactionary.

The vile argument advanced in the proposal is that all non-African American students, staff and faculty are, to varying degrees, hostile and dangerous to African American students. Their animosity stems from an inherent antipathy towards individuals of different races. Therefore, to end discrimination and ensure true equality within the university, African Americans must completely separate themselves from the rest of the community and train non-African Americans to overcome their intrinsic racism.

This irrational and anti-scientific ideology lies at the heart of similar proposals made at several major academic institutions across the country in recent years. This includes the moves towards racially segregated housing at Syracuse University and the recent calls for the implementation of racial quotas at several elite American universities. These demands do not stem from an egalitarian and progressive desire to make education easily available for everyone and eliminate the real dangers that face the majority of students and youth (massive debt, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, poverty, etc.), but from a desire to advance the interests of a very small, privileged layer of the population.

It is no coincidence that a renewed push for race-based housing at NYU comes at a time of unprecedented social, economic and political crisis in the United States and throughout the world. This move is an outcome of the ever-intensifying racialist campaign being conducted by the sections of the ruling class and affluent middle class politically represented by the Democratic Party and its media mouthpiece, the New York Times. For over 50 years, these oligarchs and their obedient servants in the upper-middle class have relentlessly sought to defend their interests by dividing the working masses through the promotion of racial and identity politics.

Racism cannot be countered with racialism. They are two sides of the same coin. The fundamental division in capitalist society is class, not race. An individuals relationship to the means of production ultimately determines his or her position in society.

A review of studies on wealth stratification between the richest and poorest members of the African American community alone exposes the class interests behind identity politics. According to statistics from 2017, the top 10 percent of the African American population owns over 75 percent of all wealth owned by African Americans. The bottom 50 percent of the African American population has zero or negative wealth. Under Barack Obamas administration, the top 1 percent of African Americans saw their share of wealth double from 19.4 percent to 40.5 percent. Working class African Americans are worse off than they were four decades ago, while things have never been better for the rich.

The growth of social inequality and poverty has occurred across all racial groups. White workers, black workers, Latino workers, Asian workers and Native American workers have all seen their standard of living sharply decrease as that of the top 10 percent has dramatically increased.

Regardless of their race, workers face the same daily struggle to survive, laboring for long hours in horrendous conditions for dismal wages. Now, as a result of the ruling classs ruthless back-to-work campaign, they also face infection with and death from COVID-19 as they are herded back into unsanitary factories and workplaces to pump out the surplus value necessary for the ruling class to pay off its debts.

In the aftermath of the international, multi-racial mass protests against police brutality, sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the outbreak of wildcat protests and strikes across several major industries, the ruling class has pushed racial identity politics in an effort to misdirect growing opposition. Using the New York Times 1619 Project as a basis, it seeks to completely erase class consciousness and the progressive content of the two American revolutions in order to stifle movement towards the third.

Identity politics serve solely the interests of the wealthy and privileged layer of society that has profited from the suffering of the working class. Specifically, it is the primary mechanism through which the next 9 percent, directly below the top 1 percent, seeks to achieve a more equal distribution of wealth within the top 10 percent of society. This layer, the upper-middle class, has no more qualms over exploiting the working masses for personal gain than the corporate-financial oligarchs at the very top of society.

University campuses, dominated by the upper-middle class, have been breeding grounds of anti-Marxism and imperialist recruitment for many decades. NYU stands at the pinnacle of that section of academias reactionary position within society. The universitys subservience to the profit interests of Wall Street and its extensive ties to US imperialism drive its every decision. Over the last few years, NYU has carried out significant attacks on workers, subordinated student mental health and food insecurity to profit interests, and demonstrated complete contempt for democratic rights. NYU, like all institutions of higher education, is first and foremost a business and will do everything in its power to defend the profit system.

This includes full compliance with the ruling classs vicious back-to-work campaign. NYU, against the advice of medical professionals around the world, is one of the many academic institutions that has decided to hold in-person classes. Students from across the country are currently flying into New York City to undergo a mandatory two-week quarantine before the university opens.

The decision to hold in-person classes at NYU will prove to be disastrous. Over the last few weeks, several major US schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, Princeton and the University of Southern California, have been forced to revert to online instruction after explosions of COVID-19 amongst their students, staff and faculty. Despite this, NYU has decided to go ahead with a full reopening, knowingly sacrificing the lives of students staff, and faculty to increase its profits.

It is imperative that all students realize the danger they are facing in returning to school. What is needed is not the division of students along identity-based lines, but their unification against the present, barbaric social order. The fight against all forms of exploitation and oppression is inherently linked to the fight against capitalism. Students at NYU and universities around the world who seek to fight for genuine social equality must turn to the international working class, the great, powerful, progressive force in society. It is only by uniting workers of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations and nationalities behind a clear socialist program and perspective that capitalist barbarism will be overcome.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are at the forefront of this struggle, striving to provide the working class with the independent socialist leadership that is necessary to end a social order that prioritizes private profit over social need.
The FBI searched a storage facility located at 27 Liberty Street in Quincy on Monday in connection with ongoing federal investigation, according to the Patriot Ledger.

The facility, Extra Space Storage, was the site of court-authorized activity by multiple agencies that took place over the course of six hours on Monday, Kristen Setera, a spokeswoman for the FBI, told the Boston Globe.

The FBIs hazardous evidence response team and personnel from the Boston Fire Department were also on scene Monday, the Patriot Ledger reports. Police taped over the front of the building, and space renters were not allowed in.

Because of the ongoing nature (of the investigation), were not going to be able to add anything, Setera said told the Globe.
Teenage volunteers have unearthed a trove of early Islamic, 24-carat-gold coins during an excavation near the city of Yavne in Israel's central district.

Dating back to the Abbasid period around 1,100 years ago, the collection of 425 coins is an 'extremely rare' find, Israel Antiquities Authorities experts said.

The trove also included hundreds of smaller clippings, made from other gold coins, that would have served as smaller denominations of currency.

Stashed away within a clay vessel, the coins were discovered at the site  which is to be built into a new neighbourhood  on August 18, 2020.

Teenage volunteers have unearthed a trove of early Islamic, 24-carat-gold coins during an excavation near the city of Yavne in Israel's central district. Pictured, Israeli archaeologist Shahar Krispin displays one of the 425 gold coins that were discovered at the site

Dating back to the Abbasid period of around 1,100 years ago, the collection of 425 coins, some of which are pictured, is an 'extremely rare' find, Israel Antiquities Authorities experts said

'The person who buried this treasure 1,100 years ago must have expected to retrieve it and even secured the vessel with a nail so that it would not move,' said excavation director Liat Nadav-Ziv.

'We can only guess what prevented him from returning to collect this treasure.'

The treasure trove was hidden by its mysterious owner in an area that, during the Abbasid period, is understood to have been populated by workshops.



'It was amazing,' Oz Cohen, one of the young volunteers who unearthed the long-forgotten treasure, told Reuters.

'I dug in the ground and when I excavated the soil, saw what looked like very thin leaves. When I looked again I saw these were gold coins.'

'It was really exciting to find such a special and ancient treasure.'

The trove, some of which is pictured, also included hundreds of smaller clippings, made from other gold coins, that would have served as smaller denominations of currency

The coins date back to the late 9th century, at the height of the Abbasid Caliphate that once controlled the lion's share of the Near East and North Africa, explained Antiquities Authority numismatist Robert Kool. Pictured, one of the coins

Stashed away within a clay vessel, the coins were discovered at the site, pictured  which is to be built into a new neighbourhood  on August 18, 2020

The coins date back to the late 9th century, at the height of the Abbasid Caliphate that once controlled the lion's share of the Near East and North Africa, explained Antiquities Authority numismatist Robert Kool.

At the time they were stashed, the coins would have been worth a significant amount of money, Mr Kool continued.

'For example, with such a sum, a person could buy a luxurious house in one of the best neighbourhoods in Fustat, the enormous wealthy capital of Egypt,' he added.

'Hopefully the study of the hoard will tell us more about a period of which we still know very little.'

The Yavne discovery represents one of the largest collections of ancient coins ever found within Israel.

In 2015, amateur divers found around 2,000 gold coins  dating back to the 10th11th century Fatimid period  off the coast of the ancient port city of Caesarea.

Teenage volunteers have unearthed a trove of early Islamic, 24-carat-gold coins during an excavation near the city of Yavne in Israel's central district

At the time they were stashed, the coins would have been worth a significant amount of money, explained Antiquities Authority numismatist Robert Kool. Pictured, Israeli archaeologist Shahar Krispin counts some of the gold coins
Fraud Safeguards

Timing Is Key

(TNS)  When it comes to mail ballots, it's not fraud that vexes election officials. It's human nature.People procrastinate.That's a problem as California prepares amid the COVID-19 pandemic to mail a ballot to every registered voter in the state for November's presidential election.The ballots go out the week of Oct. 5 and have to be returned by Election Day, Nov. 3. Some people who wait until the last minute think that means they're OK if they put it in a mailbox on that date. But that's not the rule. Ballots have to be postmarked by Election Day, and they have to arrive no later than 17 days after that date at the county Registrar of Voters office or they won't get counted.During the March primary, this was by far the most-common reason mail ballots got rejected in San Diego County and throughout the state. They arrived too late.Out of 102,000 ballots disallowed statewide, 70,000 didn't arrive on time, according to statistics collected by the California Secretary of State. The next two most-common defects, which affected a combined 27,500 ballots, involved missing or mismatched voter signatures used to verify the identity of the person casting the ballot.San Diego County's experience was the same: Of 6,243 ballots rejected, 4,481 were impermissibly tardy. Signature issues invalidated another 1,747.Overall, these are small numbers. Statewide, about 98.5 percent of the nearly 7 million mail ballots cast were counted. In San Diego, it was 99 percent of the 652,000 cast.But in close elections, every vote matters, as several recent contests have shown. In the March primary for San Diego mayor, Barbara Bry edged Scott Sherman by less than 1,200 votes to earn a run-off spot against Todd Gloria in November."The average rejection rate in recent elections in California has been about 1.7 percent, which doesn't sound like a lot," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Sacramento "But I don't think people would accept 1.7 percent of their bank transactions failing. We shouldn't accept it for voting by mail, either."Elections officials are instituting changes for November aimed at decreasing the number of disallowed ballots. A majority of voters in the state  about 72 percent in March  already vote by mail and are familiar with the basic process. In San Diego County, 76.5 percent of the 1.8 million registered voters already get mail ballots.But for the November election, because of COVID-19 concerns, every registered voter in the state will get one. That means thousands of people will be asked to do something new.And they'll be asked to do it during a pandemic that is altering other familiar aspects of voting.Even though everyone gets a mail ballot, those who prefer can still vote the old-fashioned way, in person, on Election Day. Except instead of the usual 1,600 neighborhood precincts scattered around the county, there will be 235 "super polls," and instead of being open just on Election Day, they'll be open for the three days prior, too, starting on Oct. 31.It's a lot of moving parts."Voters are used to behaving in a particular way, so normally we wouldn't be introducing this kind of change in a presidential election year," said Michael Vu, the county registrar of voters. "But there's a pandemic going on, and we have to live in that world."Because of the novel coronavirus, California isn't the only state expanding the use of mail voting, which for decades has been backed by both Republicans and Democrats as a way to make voting easier and decrease costs.This time around, though, President Donald Trump is regularly criticizing the practice, calling it ripe for "massive fraud and abuse."The facts say otherwise.A recentanalysis of fraud referrals to law enforcement by election officials in three all-mail states (Oregon, Colorado and Washington) found 372 possible cases out of 14.6 million ballots cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections. That's 0.0025 percent.When two elections experts looked at a nationwide online election fraud database kept by the Heritage Foundation, they found 143 criminal convictions involving mail ballots out of some 250 million cast over the last 20 years."We are talking about an occurrence that translates to about 0.00006 percent of total votes cast," they wrote inVu said his office typically comes across a few cases of apparent registration or voter fraud in every election, and they are referred to law enforcement for possible prosecution. "But the notion that there is widespread, systemic fraud  there just isn't any evidence of that, in San Diego or anywhere in the nation," he said.All the speculation about fraud also ignores the safeguards in place to protect it, he said.Election officials regularly comb and update the voter rolls, removing the names of those who have died, updating the information of those who have moved, and adding the newly registered. That's why registered voters in the county have been receiving postcards lately, asking them to make sure the information on file is correct.Every ballot is mailed with a return envelope that has a bar code unique to that voter. Only that envelope can be used. That prevents anyone from voting twice, either on purpose or accidentally, Vu said. The system knows if someone asks for a second ballot by claiming the first one was lost or damaged. It knows if someone votes by mail, and then shows up on Election Day to cast a ballot again.The tracking system would also seem to render impossible one of Trump's claims: That someone could print thousands of counterfeit ballots, fill them out, and get them counted.In theory, someone could steal real ballots before they reach voters and fill them out. But each voter is required to sign the back of the envelope, and Vu said every signature is checked by computers and humans against a signature on file at the registrar's office.Any mismatch gets further scrutinized by workers trained in analyzing signatures. If the John Hancock still doesn't pass muster, an attempt is made to contact the voter to validate the ballot. If that doesn't work, the ballot isn't counted.California law allows "harvesting," which means third parties can collect completed ballots in signed, sealed envelopes from voters and turn them in to be counted. The law is aimed at making sure that elderly, disabled, home-bound and rural voters have a way to return their ballots, but critics say it invites fraud.Someone in theory could collect uncompleted ballots and fill them out, but they would also have to get voters to sign the envelopes or forge them in a convincing way. Election experts said there is scant evidence of that happening in a coordinated or widespread way, and instances of it  most recently by a Republican political operative in a North Carolina congressional race in 2018  got detected."People who worry about fraud aren't aware of all that happens on the administrative end to prevent it," Alexander said. "And people worry that we're making mail-voting too easy, but the fact is thousands of mail ballots get rejected every election. The rejections are evidence of the security precautions."The expanding use of mail ballots is tempting a shift in terminology, too. Some experts say it makes more sense to drop the "mail" or "absentee" name and call it "voting at home."That's because the mail is no longer the only way to return the ballots. It's still the most commonly used, past elections show, but with ongoing concerns about the U.S. Postal Service's financial health, and with recent overtime and equipment cutbacks raising questions about its ability to handle the pandemic-fueled onslaught of election mail, officials are encouraging voters to remember the other options.In San Diego County, that will include about 125 "drop-off" locations staffed by elections workers at libraries, recreation centers, and other facilities. That's about double the number available in the March primary. Officials expect to finalize the list and begin publicizing it soon.Ballots will go into the mail to voters starting the week of Oct. 5. Vu is encouraging people to fill them out and return them via the postal service, provided it can be done by Oct. 27, seven days before Election Day. The return envelopes have the postage already paid.After that date, he said, people should use the drop-off sites.The 235 "super polls" will also be an option for returning ballots, from Oct. 31 through Nov. 3, but those sites are likely to have lines of people who prefer to vote in person. Vu said social-distancing and face-mask rules will be in place, but he's encouraging older residents and those with underlying medical conditions to use the mail or drop-off options.By voting early, people can avoid the most common reason mail ballots get rejected: late arrival. There is no remedy for that after it happens.Issues with signatures can be corrected. Changes in state law enacted in recent years require registrars to contact voters if their ballots arrive without signatures, or if the signatures don't match what's on file. Voters can then file affidavits verifying the validity of the ballots.In about half of the signature cases, that process leads to the disputed ballots being counted, based on anecdotal evidence Alexander's group has collected. She said uniform signature-verification rules planned by the state for the November election could increase that "cure rate."Another new development: Voters can track their ballots by signing up for notifications through the county registrar's website, sdvote.com. The "Where's My Ballot?" system will send text, email or voice alerts at each step of the process. Officials will use the system to let voters know when there is a missing signature or other problem.The registrar's website also has information on how to check the status of your voter registration, update your mailing address, and cancel the registration of someone who has died, as well as instructions on how to register for the first time.
- The Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) had issued a statement on KEMSA scandal castigating the media for negative coverage over the matter

- This saw the opposition party receive a backlash from a majority of the public accusing the outfit of condoning graft

- Raila Odinga was forced to issue a statement clarifying the matter saying the party was committed to fighting corruption

- The former premier said the truth about the scandal could only be unraveled once an extensive audit was carried out

- The party leader also called out those condemning theft of public resources on social media saying they could be part of the cover-up

Opposition leader Raila Odinga has been forced to issue a statement over the Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (KEMSA) following an earlier one from his party which caused an uproar among Kenyans.

In the earlier statement, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) called out the media over negative coverage on the matter saying they "were doing more harm than good" in as far as the KEMSA scandal was concerned.

READ ALSO: Gavana Joho afichua umaskini mkubwa uliokuwa katika familia yao

Opposition leader Raila Odinga during a recent press conference at Orange House in Nairobi. Photo: ODM Party

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Kevin Omwenga: Slain businessman had bought brand-new KSh 14 million Porsche

The statement which was written by Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna went ahead to castigate Deputy President William Ruto for failing to support President Uhuru Kenyatta in the fight against corruption.

Unlike the previous party statement, the new statement which was issued on Monday, August 24, was specifically attributed to the party leader.

In his communique, Raila called for an extensive audit in the KEMSA scandal to unmask those behind the loot.

The African envoy clarified that the Orange party was committed to fighting against corruption and safeguarding public resources.

READ ALSO: Kevin Omwenga: Suspect says he shot businessman accidentally

"The position of the party in the current allegations of corruption in COVID-19 related resources is that the government needs to conduct a thorough and urgent audit of all the funds that have been put at the disposal of various state agencies, departments and ministries to fight the pandemic with a view to establishing the facts on usage of such resources," he said.

The veteran politician highlighted a number of cases in which the party had pushed for audit and successfully exposed the rot in government.

"In the Grand Coalition Government, the party successfully pushed for the systematic audit of the sale of Grand Regency Hotel and attendant consequences.

"ODM pushed for the systematic audit of Anglo Leasing Scandal by Kroll and Associates, leading to appropriate legal action on culprits," he said.

READ ALSO: Pasta na kondoo wake wamsukumia makonde mpangishaji kuhusiana na notisi ya kuhama

He also talked about the Kimwarer and Arror dams scandal and the 2016 National Youth Service scam in which he said some people were trying to mislead the public that money had not been lost.

While maintaining ODM would not defend anyone including members or relatives and friends of its officials found to have benefitted from funds, the political outfit maintained an audit could work better than political noise-making.

Raila said such political noisemakers on serious scandals like the KEMSA one were out to mislead the public with mixed-up truths and lies.

"It is with this background in mind that ODM wants a speedy professional audit that can lead to prosecution instead of a political shouting match that creates more confusion and end up clouding the issues and even covering up for the thieves," he said.

READ ALSO: Lawyer Grand Mullah shows off his adorable daughters as he enjoys family time

The former premier took issue with Kenyans castigating theft of public resources on social media saying they may be part of the cover-up campaign in the scandal.

"As matters stand now, none of the people taking to the podium or social media to condemn theft of funds has any evidence. The so-called condemnations of theft could well be part of a cover-up," he said.

Although he did not mention it directly, the sentiment may be interpreted to be targetted at DP Ruto who has often raised concern over the KEMSA scandal on social media platforms.

Do you have an inspirational story you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690. Follow us on Telegram: Tuko news

Source: TUKO.co.ke
There is something discomfiting about the idea of getting fantastically rich off someone elses misfortune, which is what happens when a short trade  or bet against a stock or industry  succeeds. The contrast is even more startling given that the pandemic, which has devastated the economy and hurt the livelihoods of millions, has turbocharged the bets that Mr. Icahn, Ms. McKee and others placed on the downfall of malls.

But on Wall Street, such brazenness is celebrated. Investors love little more than a contrarian bet that pays off, a combination of math and seeming magic that allows them to find a market disruption before everyone else and score a big win.

The trade Mr. Icahn and Ms. McKee met to discuss, known as the mall short in financial circles, is the latest in a longstanding Wall Street tradition that some criticize as bottom-feeding because it preys on failure and can push a business over the edge while contributing little to the economy. Most investors buy stocks and bonds with the expectation that they will rise in value. A short is the opposite, and their defenders say they can help expose corporate fraud or deflate a dangerously overvalued asset, which can aid the smooth functioning of markets. More than a decade ago, some investors famously profited off the collapse of the housing market, even as the United States plunged into a financial crisis. Their trade came to be known as the Big Short, inspiring a book and a movie.

We periodically do shorts, and this is one of the best that Ive ever seen, Mr. Icahn said in an interview last week, echoing what he had told Ms. McKee. The two, who were introduced by a former colleague of Mr. Icahns, have stayed in touch.

Daniel McNamara, a colleague of Ms. McKees, called it the Big Short 2.0.

Brick-and-mortar retail has been in distress for years. Trapped between the growth of online shopping and the popularity of discount chains, many retailers have struggled to find a foothold in the changing firmament. The nations roughly 1,000 shopping malls (excluding strip and outlet malls) have borne the brunt of the problems, with hundreds of them fighting low occupancy and the loss of major stores, known as anchors.
New Delhi: A Delhi court has dismissed the bail application of a man arrested for allegedly rioting, vandalising public and private properties and damaging CCTV cameras installed at Braham Puri during the communal violence in northeast Delhi in February.

Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Purushottam Pathak dismissed the bail plea of 26-year-old Rohit, saying CCTV footage prima facie showed that he was an active member of the unlawful assembly.

"Applicant/accused (Rohit) was an active member of the unlawful assembly as the same is prima facie evidence from the CCTV footage in which he is having a 'danda' (club) in his hand and on having apprehension of being captured in CCTV footage, he damaged the CCTV camera installed at Gali number 2, Braham Puri, Delhi," the court said in its order passed on August 19.

The court further said Rohit was also identified by Constable Deepak from the CCTV footage.

"The investigation is at the initial stage as the applicant (Rohit) has been arrested only on August 11. Other absconding co-accused persons are yet to be arrested. Keeping in view the facts and circumstances of the case, particularly active involvement of the applicant/accused in the present incident, I do not find any ground to enlarge him on bail," the judge said.

During the hearing held through video-conferencing, Special Public Prosecutor Salim Ahmad, appearing for the state, opposed the bail application saying he was allegedly found involved in vandalising, rioting, looting, and arsoning of shops and houses in the area.

The public prosecutor further argued that in the CCTV footage, Rohit allegedly had a stick in his hand and was seen breaking the cameras installed by the Public Works Department in the area.

Counsel for Rohit argued that he has not been named in the FIR and falsely implicated in the case.

Communal clashes had broken out in northeast Delhi on February 24 after violence between those opposing the citizenship amendment law and those supporting it spiralled out of control, leaving at least 53 people dead and around 200 injured.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday questioned the timing of the letter written by party leaders to interim chief Sonia Gandhi calling for sweeping changes in the organisation.

The former Congress president said during the crucial meeting of the Congress Working Committee that the letter was sent to the party chief at a time when she had not been keeping well. He said the letter came at a time when the party is fighting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Madhya and Rajasthan.

Gandhi was referring to the letter from 23 leaders, including former chief ministers, members of the partys highest decision-making body the Congress Working Committee and sitting members of Parliament, have suggested far-reaching changes including dissolution of powers to state units and revamping the highest decision-making body.

Before him, his mother Sonia Gandhi asked the CWC to relieve her as the interim chief of the Congress party as former prime minister Manmohan Singh urged her to continue. She asked CWC members to begin deliberations towards the process of transition to relieve her from the duty of party president.

Kapil Sibal, Shashi Tharoor, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Prithviraj Chavan, Vivek Tankha and Anand Sharma were among the leaders who wrote the letter to Gandhi.

Gandhi, in her reply to one of the signatories, expressed her wish to discontinue as the president and asked all the leaders to get together to find a new leader.
My experience says that no document has been signed after the April 2016 events because if it had been signed, they would have returned to the old positions and ratified the old agreement. Secretary of the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) Security Council Samvel Babayan stated this in an interview with the RFE/RL Armenian Service, referring to the remark that there are assumptions that a secret document had been signed which specifies the outcome of the April 2016 war.

"From the very beginning, when [Azerbaijan president Ilham] Aliyev called Moscow and said that We will not give up our positions, but we are ready to stop, not to continue,' it already speaks of the fact that they could not have signed a document. Even if they had signed, it would have been between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and it would not have worked, it would not have had anything to do with Karabakh. In 1993-1994, all the documents were signed with the participation of Karabakh; it will not give it anything. There he [Armenias ex-President Serzh Sargsyan] is right; I cannot deny it there," he said.

And to the reminder that at the time he used to say that Serzh Sargsyan was negotiating concessions in Nagorno-Karabakh, Samvel Babayan responded as follows: "No matter what he says, today we have the documents under our disposal that they negotiated [it]. It is very simply, clearly stated that we hand over five regions, then two [more] regions, then a corridor; the settlement of [the] Karabakh [issue] is not visible. And troops are deployed to ensure that.

Now I am asking a question: Is it a concession or not, is it a betrayal or not if it is clearly written in the constitution of the Artsakh Republic that the territories that are under our control are completely ours.

A question arises whether the people of Artsakh were asked when going to those negotiations. Has anyone empowered them or not?

I would just ask people to shut their mouths, not to talk anymore. And if they are interested in publishing those secret documents that we have today, what negotiations they conducted, we are ready to publish it as well; but that is harm to our national interests; that is why we are not talking about it. And if anyone wants to get closely familiarized [with them], they are at my disposal, they can come to the Security Council, we will familiarize them with what they negotiated, what document they were ready, where they should have signed, and why they amended the constitution of Artsakh, extended the 'life' of the President of Artsakh for three [more] years."
Actor Dylan Smith looked unrecognisable as he treated fans to a behind-the-scenes look at Amazon's $1 billion Lord Of The Rings' TV series.

The Canadian thespian took to Instagram on Sunday to upload an image of himself in prosthetic makeup and a matted wig as filming kicked off in New Zealand after the cast were granted permission to enter the country.

Original actor Orlando Bloom, who played Legolas in the film sequel, threw his support behind the new version of the iconic franchise as he revealed he intends to 'fan it up' when it's released on Prime Video next year.

Filming begins: Actor Dylan Smith looked unrecognisable (L) as he treated fans to a behind-the-scenes look at Amazon's $1 billion Lord Of The Rings' TV series (R out of character)

TV star Dylan pulled an animated facial expression from his dressing room, without giving away too many details as he simply captioned his post 'morning'.

It is unclear what role he will portray on the show, which is based on a different storyline to the famous movies and is set in the Second Age of Middle-earth.

Screen star Orlando, 43, recently shared his delight at the upcoming series and admitted he appreciates that it is 'not a remake'.

He said during an interview with Collider: 'I had a few questions for him to begin with and then I was like, ''You know, I don't need to know any more''. It's not, obviously, it's not a remake. So, I think it could be really, really interesting from that perspective.

'It'll be interesting': Original actor Orlando Bloom, who played Legolas (pictured with Viggo Mortensen in 2003) in the film sequel, threw his support behind the new version

Under wraps: The show, expected for release next year, is based on a different storyline to the famous movies and is set in the Second Age of Middle-earth (Elijah Wood pictured in 2001)

'I remember being on set with Peter Jackson and him saying, ''Can you imagine the day when they do a remake of this movie?'' And I was like [shocked]. And then of course here we are, 20 years later... but it's not a remake.

'The Lord of the Rings is a title for a world. But I think it's going to be interesting from that perspective  because if it was a remake I would be like, ''Are you going to take us back into Hobbiton?'' It was such an informative time, it had such an impact, so it's different what's coming and I think that's a good thing.

'They certainly paid a pretty penny to get it done, to get the rights to do that. No doubt there is a lot riding there on that.'

The script for the series is so heavily-guarded that its locked in a windowless room that requires fingerprint access to enter.

'I think it's a good thing': Screen star Orlando, 43, recently shared his delight at the upcoming series and admitted he appreciates that it is 'not a remake' (pictured in 2019)

Amazon Chief Jennifer Salke previously spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the online giant's future plans for its content when she revealed the measures used to keep the hotly-anticipated show's storyline a secret.

When asked if she could tell readers anything about the TV adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien's novels, she said: 'Theres a fantastic writers room working under lock and key. Theyre already generating really exciting material.

'Theyre down in Santa Monica. You have to go through such clearance, and they have all their windows taped closed.

'And theres a security guard that sits outside, and you have to have a fingerprint to get in there, because their whole board is up on a thing of the whole season.'

Wow: The script for the series is so heavily-guarded that its locked in a windowless room that requires fingerprint access to enter (the late Ian McKellen pictured in 2003)

According to Stuff, 206 cast and crew members have been granted permission to enter New Zealand over six months to film the new series.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment has allowed seven projects to enter New Zealand amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The series had started filming at a studio in Auckland earlier this year, but the country was forced into lockdown.

It is believed most of the crew remained in New Zealand, however others have been given border exemptions to reenter.

Last month, casting agents for the new TV series were desperately looking for people with 'funky looking' features to cast in the mammoth project.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 24, 2020 16:16 513 e22cd4161040e111d73a5626c40132e1 1 National Esemka,national-car,SUV,car-maker Free

Indonesian carmaker PT Solo Manufaktur Kreasi (PT SMK), known for its Esemka car brand, has started manufacturing its first SUV, the Esemka Garuda 1.

PT SMK spokesperson Sabar Budhi confirmed the production of the Garuda 1 but remained tight-lipped about the model's price.

"We have started production, but we have not yet determined the price," Sabar said on Monday as reported by tempo.co.

According to the Home Ministry's data on vehicle ownership transfer fee (BBNKB), the Esemka Garuda 1 is worth Rp 278.25 million (US$18,854) before taxes.

Prior to commencing production of the Esemka Garuda 1, PT SMK launched two pickup trucks called the Bima 1.2 and the Bima 1.3 in September 2019.

The company is currently developing two other cars in cooperation with state-owned weapons manufacturer Pindad: an electric double cab truck called Digdaya and an unnamed VVIP bulletproof SUV.

Pindad secretary Tuning Rudyati said earlier in April that the two companies were discussing the development of a new line for the President's official car.

"Pindad has the competence to build armored and bulletproof vehicles, but we need further research to domestically produce commercial bulletproof cars," she said at the time. "We're still discussing the technical aspects of the plan." (nal)
Opportunity Zones Attract $75 Billion, May Lift 1 Million out of Poverty

WASHINGTONNearly $75 billion in private capital flowed into opportunity zones as part of a bipartisan incentive provided by the tax reform of 2017 to spur investment in the poorest communities of the United States, according to a study by the White House released on Aug. 24.

Qualified Opportunity Funds raised $75 billion in private capital by the end of 2019, most of which would not have entered OZs [opportunity zones] without the incentive, according to an initial assessment report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).

Created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, opportunity zones offer tax breaks to private funds that invest in the economically underserved communities. The Treasury Department designated more than 8,700 neighborhoods throughout the country as opportunity zones in 2018.

These areas have an average poverty rate that is more than double that of other communities, and have a large population of African Americans, Hispanics, and high school dropouts, according to the report.

Many funds have been set up and raised money to support this new asset class since the second quarter of 2018. And real estate funds have been the first movers on this opportunity.

Besides real estate investments, the zones have also been attracting new businesses, according to a senior administration official.

There has been real estate investment. Theres been retail investment. But theres also been a great deal of operating businesses, in particular, after the final round of rules and regulations were finalized last December, the official told reporters.

For instance, in rural Tennessee, a manufacturing company built a tile production facility that will create more than 200 jobs in a city that has a population of just 1,391 people, he said.

The CEA predicts that the capital raised so far could lift 1 million people out of poverty, slashing poverty in these areas by 11 percent.

The program boosted the private equity investments in opportunity zones by 41 percent, according to the report. That was 29 percent higher than the investment that flowed into a comparison group of businesses in eligible communities that werent selected as OZs.

As a result of these investments, hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created, the senior administration official said.

A new independent study also found that these investments increased employment growth in opportunity zones by 2 to 4 percentage points relative to comparable tracts over the past two years. And the job growth happened across the board, benefiting a wide range of industries and a variety of skill levels.

The CEA also estimated that opportunity zone designation alone has lifted housing values by 1.1 percent over two years, which implied $11 billion in additional wealth for the nearly half of the residents in these zones who own their own homes, according to the report.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last year predicted nearly $100 billion in private capital could be funneled into opportunity zones over the next 10 years.

Were talking $75 billion in just two years, Ben Carson, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), told Fox Business, praising the pace and positive impact of the investments.

So these things are actually working extremely well. And they will continue to improve as time goes on. There are some who want to denigrate them and say all kinds of horrible things. You know thats the society we live in today, he said.

A HUD report estimated that revitalization projects have benefited 35 million Americans across the nations opportunity zones.

The COVID pandemic, however, had an effect on investment in these zones too.

According to a survey by Economic Innovation Group, 52 percent of investors reported that current economic conditions are negatively affecting their opportunity zone activities.

However, the investments are expected to rebound, since most investors remain engaged in the opportunity zone marketplace, according to the survey. Despite the pandemic, some are still actively looking for new opportunities to make investments in these zones.

The opportunity zones idea was championed by Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Reps. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) and Ron Kind (D-Wis.) in 2017, and was later included in the tax code.

With respect to tax benefits of the investments, the CEA predicted that capital gains would normally be taxed at a 21.3 percent rate, as opposed to an effective rate of 6.9 percent in 2019.

For funds invested in 2019, the present values of taxes paid on investments in an OZ are less than one-third what they would be if invested outside an OZ, the report stated.
MEXICO CITY - The U.N. human rights agency has called on Mexican authorities to thoroughly investigate the death of an independent journalist in police custody in a Mexican border city.

The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said Sunday that Juan Nelcio Espinoza was arrested Friday while covering a confrontation in the city of Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas.

Espinoza reported for his web page El Valedor TV. Espinoza was later taken to a hospital by police where he was pronounced dead. One of his last entries on his news site showed him cautiously painting the word Presson his car.

Authorities in the northern border state of Coahuila told local media Espinoza and another man were arrested after engaging in a confrontation with police, and that Espinoza choked to death.

The U.N. agency wrote that in Mr. Espinoza Meneras case, the circumstances that should be taken into account are the claims by the victims family of possible previous harassment or threats by police officers, and their possible relation to his work as a journalist.

At least five journalists not counting Espinoza have been killed in Mexico this year. More than 140 journalists have been killed over the past 20 years.

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This week, a Florida court will decide on a lawsuit filed by the Florida Education Association (FEA), which aims to block the states order that all public schools must be open five days a week by August 31. Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dobson will rule on the imposition of in-person instruction across all of the states 67 counties.

In early July, the union filed a lawsuit against Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, the Department of Education, and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran after the state passed a legal mandate requiring all brick-and-mortar schools host in-person instruction by the end of August. This edict, in line with the demands of the Trump administration, deliberately ignored warnings by infectious disease experts and scientists of the dangers posed to a premature reopening with the pandemic raging across the Sunshine State.

The FEA and its umbrella of local unions argue that Corcorans edict violates the state constitutions guarantee of safe and secure public education. The lawsuit also opposes the earlier intimidation tactics used by DeSantis to coerce school districts into reopening, including the risk of losing state funding if they did not comply with Corcorans order. The attorneys describe this behavior in the lawsuit as financial bullying.

In the face of teacher demonstrations across the state, the union has launched its lawsuit as a fig leaf, which the state and national teacher unions oppose any collective struggle to stop the homicidal return to school. But even in the highly unlikely case that the suit is decided in favor of the FEA, it merely vacates the state edict that schools must open and allows local districts to make the best and safest decisions on reopening physical campuses, without the threat of funds being withheld by the state. In other words, it does not mean schools will be compelled to switch to remote-only learning, only that district authorities have the right to close face-to-face learning.

For their part, DeSantis, Corcoran and state education officials hypocritically claim they are upholding Floridas constitutional requirement to provide high-quality education to schoolchildren. Judge Dobson heard closing arguments from both sides on Friday and is moving quickly to issue a ruling before the month ends since some school districts have already opened. Students have already returned to classrooms in Duval County (Jacksonville), the sixth-largest district in the state and 29 additional districts are planning to physically reopen over the next two weeks.

Lawyers for the state argued during the hearings that school districts still have the option to keep students enrolled in virtual learning programs and that health officials can make recommendations for schools to close. The same attorneys also claimed that if conditions within schools become unsafe for the health of educators, they can simply take medical leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

A biology teacher testified Friday that the medical leave given under the FMLA is unpaid, forcing him to continue working. David Wells, attorney for the state confirmed with Judge Dobson that such medical leave would be unpaid, which means that Florida educators, some of the lowest paid educators in the nation, could go weeks without receiving income should they take leave to protect their health.

Developments in recent weeks point to a disaster that is already unfolding because of the states homicidal back-to-school policy. Since the beginning of August, there have been more than 8,300 COVID-19 cases in children under 18 and 100 of those required hospitalization.

On Friday, when the circuit court was hearing closing arguments from both sides, the Department of Health reported an hour before the proceedings that a 6-year-old girl from Hillsborough County had died from complications resulting from COVID-19. She is the eighth child to die from the virus in the state, and the third to die in less than a month.

The FEA lawsuit, like the mass demonstration called in Tallahassee in January, is aimed at boosting illusions in the courts, which are not neutral arbiters but ultimately serve, like every other institution of the capitalist state, the most powerful corporate and financial interests. The reopening of the schools is of primary concern to both political parties because it is crucial to get children out of the homes so their parents can return to largely unsafe workplaces and resume producing profits.

The unions are opposed to any serious struggle because this would lead to a direct confrontation not only with Trump and his acolytes like DeSantis but the union-aligned Democratic Party. But nothing has ever been achieved without mass struggle. This includes the heroic 1968 strike by 27,000 Florida teachers, which forced the State Board of Education to increase funds for public education.

But the FEA has long repudiated any such struggles. In 2020, the FEA and its two parent organizationsthe National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)have worked diligently to prevent the opposition of Florida teachers from coalescing into a statewide and national strike. In the meantime, they have told teachers to place their faith in Judge Dobson along with Joe Biden and the Democrats, even though the Obama-Biden administration oversaw some of the greatest attacks on teachers and public education.

Two weeks ago, parents and teachers gathered at the governors mansion to demand that schools stay online during the fall. A little over a week ago, a group of teachers demonstrated in Santa Rosa County against a massive layoff of over 80 teachers. It is clear that educators and parents in Florida want to fight for their safety and in general for high-quality education.

For educators to defend their lives and those of their students, they take matters into their own hands. The Socialist Equality Party calls on educators and parents to build rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the unions, in every school and neighborhood to save lives and fight for what teachers, students, and parents truly need, not what politicians claim is affordable. These committees must appeal to and unite with every section of workersmanufacturing, logistics, food processing, health care, public and private sectorto prepare a general strike.

The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee will serve as a national coordinating body for this work, and all those seeking to carry out a genuine struggle should contact the committee today.
A state attorney general is expected to defend state laws in court, including initiatives passed by the voters. But in 2011, newly elected Attorney General Kamala Harris refused to defend Proposition 8s ban on same-sex marriage, saying it was unconstitutional.

Her decision proved crucial when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that Prop. 8s private sponsors had no standing to represent the voters in court, leaving the measure without a legal defense and erasing it from the books.

However, Harris responded differently in 2014 when a federal judge ruled that Californias death penalty law was unconstitutionally arbitrary because condemned prisoners had to wait 20 years or more to get legal representation and have their appeals decided.

Harris, now a U.S. senator, opposes the death penalty  her refusal to seek it as San Francisco district attorney in a police-killing case nearly cost her the 2010 election for attorney general. But she appealed the judges ruling on the death penalty, arguing that the states lengthy appeal process protected defendants rights.

A federal appeals court overturned the ruling on procedural grounds, leaving the death penalty law in place, though California has not executed anyone since 2006.

Harris record as Californias top law enforcement official from 2011 to 2017 is on the table now that Joe Biden has chosen her as his vice presidential running mate. Her choices of which laws to defend could become a campaign issue  particularly the death penalty, where her decision to appeal is cited by some on the left to question her self-description as a progressive prosecutor.

The Prop. 8 and death penalty cases have also rekindled debate about how much an attorney generals personal and political convictions should influence his or her legal decisions.

Theres a duty of government officials, particularly the attorney general, to defend the laws of the government, said Rory Little, a law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco and a former aide to Janet Reno, President Bill Clintons attorney general. On the other hand, he said, in some cases your ethical duty may be to oppose a law that you think is clearly unconstitutional or clearly unjust.

The dividing line is uncertain, Little said, but the general rule is that an attorney general should defend a law that he or she personally opposes, unless its constitutional defects are nearly indisputable.

And even in such a case, there are reasons for the states top lawyer to take the issue to court for resolution, said attorney Peter Scheer, president of the board of the First Amendment Coalition, an open-government organization based in San Rafael. Though he is among Harris enthusiastic supporters for vice president, Scheer said, he thinks she should have defended Prop. 8.

At the time, Prop. 8 certainly wasnt indefensible. ... Courts were divided on gay and lesbian couples right to marry, Scheer said. While Harris explained her decision at the time by citing the Supreme Courts numerous past references to marriage as a fundamental right, Scheer noted that when the court ultimately upheld same-sex marriage rights in a case from Ohio in 2015, the vote was 5-4.

Part of the function of the attorney general is to see that these laws may be tested in the courts, Scheer said.

But another function of an official who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution is to decide whether a challenged law is constitutional and should be defended in court, said Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean at UC Berkeley. He said he agreed with Harris Prop. 8 decision and wishes she would have sided with the federal judge who declared the states death penalty law unconstitutional, a ruling Chemerinsky endorsed.

Arguments on both sides is not enough to justify defending a law; there are always arguments on both sides, Chemerinsky said. If Harris had not appealed, I believe it would have ended the death penalty in California.

Another Berkeley legal analyst, David Carrillo, executive director of the schools California Constitution Center, said the attorney generals duty to protect the public interest gave her some discretion in deciding which laws to defend. Its a reasonable exercise of that discretion to decide to defend capital punishment (which is constitutional) and to not defend same-sex marriage bans (which are unconstitutional), he said.

Harris Prop. 8 decision was not unprecedented.

California Attorney General Thomas Lynch filed arguments with the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 backing civil rights advocates who successfully challenged Prop. 14, a 1964 ballot measure allowing racial discrimination in housing.

In 1979, newly elected Attorney General George Deukmejian tried to join a lawsuit challenging a collective bargaining law for state employees, but the state Supreme Court rejected the filing and said the states position was up to Gov. Jerry Brown, who had signed the law. The court upheld the law in a separate ruling.

Brown, who preceded Harris as attorney general  and who had signed the states first same-sex marriage ban into law in 1977  declined to defend Prop. 8 during a 2010 federal court trial in San Francisco, a stance supported by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The state Supreme Court upheld their decision to bow out of the case, rejecting arguments by Prop. 8s sponsors.

And at the federal level, the Trump administrations current support of a suit to overturn President Barack Obamas health care law has at least one recent precedent: Obamas support of a successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex married couples.

Similar disputes could arise with the election of Biden, who has promised to reverse most of his predecessors actions. Though only the attorney general would appear in court, Harris experience in weighing policy against precedent would make her a likely source of consultation in a new administration.

Unlike the attorney general, a county district attorney has broad leeway in deciding which cases to prosecute and what sentences to request. As San Francisco district attorney from 2003 to 2011, Harris, like other district attorneys of recent decades, refrained from prosecuting police officers who shot civilians, a record that has brought some criticism from the left. And like every San Francisco district attorney since 1995, she refused to seek the death penalty.

Now Playing: Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden has named California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. The Oakland native is the first Black woman and first person of South Asian American descent to be nominated for national office by a major party. See highlights from her barrier-breaking career. Video: San Francisco Chronicle

In an immediate test of her campaign promise, Harris declined to file capital charges in 2004 against the accused killer of Isaac Espinoza, an undercover San Francisco police officer.

While David Hills jury ultimately convicted him of second-degree murder, which could not have carried a death sentence, Harris decision was condemned by Sen. Dianne Feinstein as well as police groups, and was a leading issue for Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, her Republican opponent in the 2010 attorney generals race. Harris won the election by less than 1%.

Cooley, now a private attorney in Los Angeles, said in an interview that he believes Harris was obliged to defend state laws, including Prop. 8, regardless of what she thought of them.

The voters do dumb things, wrong things, all the time, he said. Then its up to the attorney general as their attorney to defend even their mistakes and let the court render a decision.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
Experts warn that Rapids and lab tests vary in accuracy and need to be interpreted separately to properly assess the spread of infection.

In June, India began using cheaper, faster but less accurate tests to scale-up testing for the coronavirus  a strategy that the United States is now considering.

These rapid tests boosted Indias testing levels nearly five-fold within two months. But government numbers suggest some parts of the country might have become over-reliant on the faster tests, which can miss infections. Experts warn that safely using them requires frequent retesting, something that isnt always happening.

Cases surged faster than labs could scale up testing once Indias harsh lockdown was relaxed. So far authorities have rationed the use of the more precise molecular tests that detect the genetic code of the virus. But on 14 June, India decided to bolster these with faster tests that screen for antigens, or viral proteins.

Albeit less accurate, these tests are cheap and yield results in minutes. Most dont require a lab for processing or any specialized equipment or trained personnel. The plan was to rapidly increase testing to identify infected people and prevent them from spreading the virus. Samples tested using both tests increased from 5.6 million in mid-June to 26 million two months later, and nearly a third of all tests conducted daily are now antigen tests, health officials say.

But Indias experience also highlights the inherent pitfalls of relying too heavily on antigen tests, at the expense of more accurate tests. The danger is that the tests may falsely clear many who are infected with COVID-19, contributing to the new spread of the virus in hard-hit areas.

Rapid test results can be backstopped with more accurate laboratory tests, but these are slower and expensive. Experts also warn that since the two types of tests vary in accuracy, they need to be interpreted separately to properly assess the spread of infection  something India isnt doing.

The US faces a similar need to strike a balance between speed and precision, with overburdened labs struggling to keep pace with the outbreak. Researchers at Harvard and elsewhere are proposing developing a $1 saliva-based antigen test for all Americans to test themselves daily, something that has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Harvards Dr Michael Mina says antigen tests dont catch as many patients early in the infection when virus levels are low. But these people arent considered the greatest threat to spreading the disease since its only after virus levels surge that they become more infectious, and by then they will be picked up by antigen tests, he said.

Because a negative antigen test doesnt guarantee a person is virus-free, people should be retested regularly, said Dr Ashish Jha, director of Harvards Global Health Institute. If their symptoms change, you want to think about retesting those people.

Indias strategy is different. Health officials have asked for those who test negative with antigen tests but have symptoms to be retested with the more accurate laboratory tests.

But India has largely been opaque about how many negatives were being retested, and what type of tests were being used.

Delhi state, which includes the Indian capital, New Delhi, and where the High Court is monitoring testing, was among the first to aggressively use antigen tests to screen patients for free. Centres were created in dispensaries, schools and government offices. But only 0.5 percent, or 1,365 of over 260,000 people who tested negative from June 18 to July 29, were retested, court documents show. Delhi conducted over 280,000 tests in this period.

That is abysmally low, said Dr S.P. Kalantri, a public health specialist in Maharashtra, Indias worst-hit state. He said the decline in the use of more precise lab tests by nearly half, from a capacity of 11,000 tests daily to just 5,400 tests per day, was a worrying trend

Under guidelines set by the World Health Organization, India should be conducting around 140 daily tests per million people in order to safely relax coronavirus restrictions.

Rajesh Bhushan, Indias top health official, has repeatedly pointed to Indias cumulative total of the two types of test to assert that India is testing more than the WHO standard. Authorities also use this to calculate the percentage of samples testing positive, which is a key metric for judging testing performance.

But Jha said combined data from the two types of tests cant be used to conclude that infections in India are going down, since using less accurate tests would automatically drive down the number of positive results.

Experts fear that over-reliance on antigen tests without retesting could impede efforts to contain the virus as it spreads to states with fragile health care systems, like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, with a combined population of over 300 million.

The two states now conduct over 100,000 tests daily, the most in India. But only a fraction  6,100 in Bihar and 30,000 in Uttar Pradesh  use laboratory tests.

Jha said the antigen tests were a way to expand testing for people who dont have access to laboratory tests, but that didnt mean the use of the more accurate tests should lessen.

I want both, he said. The rapid test isnt a perfect substitute.

Also Read: COVID-19 testing: How antibody, antigen, RT-PCR, TrueNat tests differ, their strengths and limitations
Nigerias Minister of State for Education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, says no date has been fixed yet for full schools resumption even though the federal government had continued to engage stakeholders.

Mr Nwajiuba said this during the briefing of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 on Monday in Abuja.

The minister, however, expressed optimism that the date for resumption was around the corner, adding, that we are not going to be brandishing dates.

Nigerian schools have been shut for over three months to prevent further spread of COVID-19 which has caused the death of over 1,000 people in the West African country.

However, students in exit classes, mainly JSS3 and SSS3 students, resumed earlier this month to commence their final examinations.

Many Nigerians had felt that the resumption of exit students was an indication that other students would resume soon.

Mr Nwajiubas comments, however, show that while the government is engaging stakeholders on how to resume schools, no date has been fixed yet.

On Monday, the minister also spoke on the situation of tertiary institutions.

He disclosed that he and the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, met some stakeholders in tertiary education earlier in the day on the issue of resumption.

Mr Nwajiuba said about 78 privately-owned universities were insisting that they were ready for resumption while the response from government-owned universities was still 50-50.

He said that after aggregating opinions, he would return to the PTF to review the situation and then go ahead to make a pronouncement.

The minister urged students of tertiary institutions protesting the continued closure of their schools to be a little more patient with the government.

However, even if the government allows tertiary institutions to resume, most public universities will not due to an ongoing nationwide strike by university lecturers, ASUU, over welfare demands.




(Global Times) "Turmoil 2020 means Australia's foreign policy is being cast in a new light," the Australian Financial Review (AFR) said in an article on Friday. The article quoted analyses arguing that Australia is not moving toward an independent foreign policy, but a "new" policy, or a distancing from some US politicians' extreme anti-China positions. For example, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said in late July that Pompeo's "positions are his own, Australia's position is our own."

Judged from Australia's overall diplomatic moves after the Cold War, its foreign policy is not substantially different from that of the US. Australia has closely followed the US and has never been neutral or objective on issues including the 1996 Taiwan Straits crisis, the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1999, and the 2001 China-US mid-air collision near Hainan. The situation is the same in terms of the Hong Kong affairs, South China Sea disputes, US crackdown on Huawei, and the COVID-19 pandemic blame game.

If there is any difference between Australia's and the US' policy toward China, it's because Australia wants to ensure that its exports to China are not seriously affected. This concerns Australia's national interests and is also a rigid demand for Australian people's life and employment. In terms of Australia's foreign policy, people need to focus more on its main thrusts instead of certain piecemeal moves.

In this context, the AFR article quoted the Lowy Institute's Richard McGregor who said that the Australian government is distancing itself not so much from the US "as from the extremes of the Trump administration." However, Australia has always been at the forefront of the Trump administration's suppression of China. Sometimes it even acts as the US' pawn.

Recent minor changes in Australia's foreign policy are mainly due to Canberra's concerns that its trade ties with China would be affected. This thereby damages its urgent need of economic growth.

In fact, a Lowy Institute special report says that the deterioration of Australia's relations with China could constrain Australia's post-virus economic recovery.

Indeed, Australia should pay attention to economic and trade relations with China. Australia's wine industry and international education sector, for example, have been affected by Canberra following Washington's lead to suppress China.

Some Australian politicians "thought their mission was to cheer on the Trump administration," even "making statements which suggest it should go harder on China," according to the AFR article. These right-wing politicians, out of ideological prejudice, hope that Australia will unite the US and launch a new cold war against China. They are trying to tie the entire Australian people to this crazy chariot. But these politicians are not the majority of the country. Many other Australian politicians have realized the huge threats to Australia brought on by a China-US new cold war.

However, Australia may keep on following the US in the foreseeable future for reasons of national security. The US is Australia's largest direct investor. It provides Australia with advanced products and technology to protect Australia's regional hegemony.

China should try to seek common ground with Australia. It is normal that different countries with diverging ideologies and political systems don't always agree - but they should always communicate through multiple channels. We should keep promoting China-Australia cooperation and the economic integration of the Asia-Pacific region. This is in line with both countries' short, near, and long-term interests.
LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / August 24, 2020 / The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, announces the filing of a class-action lawsuit against Ideanomics, Inc. ("Ideanomics" or "the Company") (NASDAQ:IDEX) for violations of 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."

Investors who purchased the Company's securities between March 20, 2020 and June 25, 2020, inclusive (the ''Class Period''), are encouraged to contact the firm before August 27, 2020.

If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate.

We also encourage you to contact Brian Schall of the Schall Law Firm, 1880 Century Park East, Suite 404, Los Angeles, CA 90067, at 310-301-3335, to discuss your rights free of charge. You can also reach us through the firm's website at www.schallfirm.com, or by email at brian@schallfirm.com.

The class, in this case, has not yet been certified, and until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. If you choose to take no action, you can remain an absent class member.

According to the Complaint, the Company made false and misleading statements to the market. Ideanomics' Mobile Energy Global (MEG) Division (the "MEG Center"), located in Qingdao, China, was not "a one million square foot EV expo center," as claimed by the Company. In fact, the Company used altered photographs to tout the purported MEG Center. The Company's electric vehicle in China was not performing at the high levels it represented to the market. Based on these facts, the Company's public statements were false and materially misleading throughout the class period. When the market learned the truth about Ideanomics, investors suffered damages.

Join the case to recover your losses.

The Schall Law Firm represents investors around the world and specializes in securities class action lawsuits and shareholder rights litigation.

Story continues

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and rules of ethics.



CONTACT:

The Schall Law Firm

Brian Schall, Esq.

310-301-3335

info@schallfirm.com

www.schallfirm.com

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24 Aug 2020, 9:41 AM

Coronavirus pandemic led to revival of technology, expertise, says Nandan Nilekani

The coronavirus pandemic has led to the revival of technology and expertise, and brought the realisation that for the future of the world, "deep knowledge and deep technology" are required, Infosys co- founder Nandan Nilekani said on Sunday. The former Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chairman was addressing the graduating students of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar.

Delhi Metro services should be resumed on trial basis says CM Kejriwal

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday said that the Delhi Metro services should resume on a trial basis as the coronavirus situation in the state was gradually improving. Kejriwal hopes that the central government would soon take a decision on resumption of Delhi Metro.

Coronavirus lockdown: 1.78 crore rail tickets cancelled in five monthsIndian Railways has cancelled more than 1.78 crore tickets since March this year due to coronavirus-led lockdown. Refunds amounting to Rs 2,727 crore have been granted to people whose tickets were cancelled, according to an RTI finding. In the RTI filed by Madhya Pradesh-based Chandra Shekhar Gaur, the Railways has said that no amount or cancellation charges have been deducted for cancellation of tickets for trains stopping due to COVID-19.

Digital payments to triple to Rs 7,092 lakh crore by 2025

India's growing digital payments market is expected to grow over three-folds to Rs 7,092 lakh crore by financial year 2025 on the back of government policies around financial inclusion and growing digitisation of merchants, reveals a research report. The country's digital payment market was worth around Rs 2,162 lakh core in 2019-20, RedSeer Consulting said in its report.

Govt issues SOPs for international travel amid COVID-19 outbreakThe Ministry of Home Affairs has issued standard operation protocol (SOP) for international travel on non-scheduled flights under Vande Bharat mission and air transport bubble arrangement. As per the SOPs, anyone who is willing to travel to India on Vande Bharat flights will have to register themselves with the Indian missions in the country where they are stranded or residing, along with necessary details as prescribed by the Ministry of External Affairs. However, such registration will not be required on flights operating under air transport bubbles arrangements, the SOP said.

Govt allows film, TV shoots amid coronavirus pandemic; issues safety norms

The government, on Sunday, announced a series of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for resuming shooting of films and TV programmes amid the coronavirus pandemic. Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar stated that the SOPs have been finalised after consulting the health and home ministry.

TikTok to take legal action against Trump administration over app's ban in USTikTok said it plans to file a lawsuit today against President Donald Trump's executive order prohibiting transactions with the popular short video app and its Chinese parent ByteDance, confirming an earlier Reuters report. TikTok said it had tried to engage with the US administration for nearly a year, but faced "a lack of due process" and that the government paid no attention to the facts.

CWC meet today: Crucial Congress meeting to decide on leadership
Felipe Sinisterra and his girlfriend Natalia Gomez and their dog Billy in Canton, Pa., Friday August 14, 2020 ROB COLLEY / For The Inquirer Read more

The 5-year-old Philly bull terrier who put his life on the line to protect his people from armed robbers last winter has been honored for valor by the state veterinary association.

Billy, whose story pulled animal lovers heartstrings far and wide, has been selected to receive this years Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical Associations Wodan Animal Hero Award.

The honor, named for a Harrisburg police dog who apprehended an armed suspect despite being shot four times, was announced Aug. 14 at the associations virtual state conference.

In receiving the Wodan award, Billy joins some pretty august company. Since the honor was created in 2001, its recipients have included the canine members of a search and rescue team from Ground Zero at the 9/11 terrorist attacks and an off-duty police canine who saved his family from serious harm during a tornado.

The award committee selected Billy because his story captured the spirit of the award, said veterinary association executive director Jennifer Keeler.

But Billys heroism was a little different from some past hero animals. Rather than in the line of duty, Billy just stepped up out of love.

We give a lot of awards to very deserving service dogs, but the whole committee was touched that this was just a dog who loves his owner, Keeler said. He was not trained. Instinct kicked in. We were all touched by the story.

Billys owner, Felipe Sinisterra, was happy to accept the award on behalf of his loyal pup. Speaking for them both, he said there are a lot people to thank for Billy being alive to get this accolade.

This award isnt just for Billy. Its for all the people who helped Billy, said Sinisterra, 25. I am grateful that he wins this award.

Dedicated veterinary staff, police, and an internet full of animal lovers from as far as California and France all came through with good wishes as well as moral and financial support for the brave but gravely injured dog. In words of Rachel Williams, one of the Penn Vet surgeons who helped save Billy, Hes really almost a miracle.

Around 2 a.m. Jan. 14, Sinisterra, an engineering student from Colombia, and his girlfriend, Natalia Gomez, 23, were walking Billy near their West Philadelphia home when they were confronted by two armed men.

Sinisterra, just off his job on the night shift at Royal Izakaya, a popular Queen Village sushi restaurant, handed over his cell phone. But Billy sensed his people were in danger. He started barking.

The gunmen opened fire, hitting Billy in the chest, and fled the scene.

Fortunately, police were nearby. Billy and his people got a police escort, shaving lifesaving minutes off the ride to the University of Pennsylvanias Ryan Veterinary Hospital.

Billy took a bad hit. The bullet ripped through his heart, left lung, diaphragm, liver, stomach, spleen, and out his left side. Saving his life required two surgeries, nearly two weeks in intensive care, and a team of about 30 people assisting in his treatment and recovery.

That kind of care doesnt come cheap. Billys veterinary bill came to $42,000. Again, goodness came through. Between the generosity of the many people who responded to a GoFundMe drive for Billy, Penn Vets Good Samaritan Fund, contributions from donors, and Sinisterras family, the dogs bill was paid in full.

The many Penn Vet staffers who gave their all to help Billy heal grew quite fond of the plucky pooch. They also were impressed by the devotion of his human family members who visited him every day he was at Ryan. They said this award is much deserved.

Were thrilled for Billy, and for his owner, Mr. Sinisterra, as this years recipients of the Animal Hero Award, said Martin Hackett, spokesman for Penns vet school and hospital. Their very special relationship is a triumphant, heartwarming example of the potency of the animal-human bond. And we couldnt be more fulfilled knowing that Billy and Mr. Sinisterra have a long, inseparable, and happy relationship ahead of them.

Billy and Sinisterra are indeed together, and happily so, despite the many unexpected turns the world has taken since the terrier got home from the hospital.

The biggest change is COVID-19. Like so many people, Sinisterra found himself without a job when the restaurant he was working for shut down due to the pandemic in March. Since April, Billy and his people have been living with Sinisterras mother in northern Pennsylvania. The young man hopes to get his old job back and return to Philly.

In the meantime, country convalescing seems to have agreed with Billy.

A good side of the coronavirus crisis is Billy now has the opportunity of enjoying the green areas, the dog owner said. He is recovered now almost completely. He has a lot of energy.

Another dog might have been made timid, even mean, by his ordeal. But not Billy.

I think he knows now hes more the center of attention, and hes a little bit proud. I can tell, his owner said. He pushes his chest open more, and his ears point to the sky.

Before he left Philly, people who heard about Billy from news stories or the internet would honk their car horns when they saw him on the street. Billy, hello! So great to see you! Or on the internet, I would post some pictures. Even people from other states, theyd say, Its great to see Billy recovered, back to normal, said Sinisterra, who got Billy as a birthday gift from his grandmother five years ago.

Now with the state award, who knows how far his fame will spread? The bucolic township where they are residing has fewer than 2,000 people, but theres bound to be some honks out there. Billy the hero dog has earned them.

Billy loves attention, and I love Billy, Sinisterra said.

I am so grateful for this miracle, he said. Im so fortunate to have him with me.
Technavio has been monitoring the church management software market and it is poised to grow by USD 126.48 mn during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of over 3% during the forecast period. The report offers an up-to-date analysis regarding the current market scenario, latest trends and drivers, and the overall market environment.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200824005065/en/

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Church Management Software Market 2020-2024 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Although the COVID-19 pandemic continues to transform the growth of various industries, the immediate impact of the outbreak is varied. While a few industries will register a drop in demand, numerous others will continue to remain unscathed and show promising growth opportunities. Technavio's in-depth research has all your needs covered as our research reports include all foreseeable market scenarios, including pre- post-COVID-19 analysis. Download a Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impacts

Frequently Asked Questions:

What are the major trends in the market?

Integration of church management software with email marketing apps is a major trend driving the growth of the market.

Integration of church management software with email marketing apps is a major trend driving the growth of the market. At what rate is the market projected to grow?

The year-over-year growth for 2020 is estimated at 2.32% and the incremental growth of the market is anticipated to be USD 126.48 mn.

The year-over-year growth for 2020 is estimated at 2.32% and the incremental growth of the market is anticipated to be USD 126.48 mn. Who are the top players in the market?

ACS Technologies Group Inc., Blackbaud Inc., Breeze ChMS, Church Community Builder LLC, Ministry Brands LLC, Nuverb Systems Inc., Raklet LLC, ServantPC Resources Inc., Tithe.ly, and Web Synergies (S) Pte Ltd., are some of the major market participants.

ACS Technologies Group Inc., Blackbaud Inc., Breeze ChMS, Church Community Builder LLC, Ministry Brands LLC, Nuverb Systems Inc., Raklet LLC, ServantPC Resources Inc., Tithe.ly, and Web Synergies (S) Pte Ltd., are some of the major market participants. What is the key market driver?

The growing number of churches globally is one of the major factors driving the market.

The growing number of churches globally is one of the major factors driving the market. How big is the North America market?

The North America region will contribute 40% of the market share.

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. ACS Technologies Group Inc., Blackbaud Inc., Breeze ChMS, Church Community Builder LLC, Ministry Brands LLC, Nuverb Systems Inc., Raklet LLC, ServantPC Resources Inc., Tithe.ly, and Web Synergies (S) Pte Ltd. are some of the major market participants. The growing number of churches globally will offer immense growth opportunities. To make most of the opportunities, market vendors should focus more on the growth prospects in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.

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Church Management Software Market 2020-2024: Segmentation

Church Management Software Market is segmented as below:

Deployment On-premises Cloud-based

Geographic North America Europe APAC South America MEA



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Church Management Software Market 2020-2024: Scope

Technavio presents a detailed picture of the market by the way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources. The church management software market report covers the following areas:

Church Management Software Market Size

Church Management Software Market Trends

Church Management Software Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies the integration of church management software with email marketing apps as one of the prime reasons driving the church management software market growth during the next few years.

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Church Management Software Market 2020-2024: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2020-2024

Detailed information on factors that will assist church management software market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the church management software market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the church management software market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of church management software market, vendors

Table of Contents:

Executive Summary

Market Landscape

Market ecosystem

Market characteristics

Value chain analysis

Market Sizing

Market definition

Market segment analysis

Market size 2019

Market outlook: Forecast for 2019 2024

Five Forces Analysis

Five forces summary

Bargaining power of buyers

Bargaining power of suppliers

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Threat of rivalry

Market condition

Market Segmentation by Deployment

Market segments

Comparison by Deployment

On-premises Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Cloud-based Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Market opportunity by Deployment

Customer landscape

Geographic Landscape

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

North America Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Europe Market size and forecast 2019-2024

APAC Market size and forecast 2019-2024

South America Market size and forecast 2019-2024

MEA Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Key leading countries

Market opportunity by geography

Market Drivers

Market Challenges

Market Trends

Vendor Landscape

Vendor landscape

Landscape disruption

Vendor Analysis

Vendors covered

Market positioning of vendors

ACS Technologies Group Inc.

Blackbaud Inc.

Breeze ChMS

Church Community Builder LLC

Ministry Brands LLC

Nuverb Systems Inc.

Raklet LLC

ServantPC Resources Inc.

Tithe.ly

Web Synergies (S) Pte Ltd.

Appendix

Scope of the report

Currency conversion rates for US$

Research methodology

List of abbreviations

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San Francisco, Aug 24 : Twitter has slapped a public interest notice on a tweet by US President Donald Trump, saying it could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting.

In the tweet, Trump claimed mail drop boxes are a "voter security disaster" and also said they are "not Covid sanitised".

"So now the Democrats are using Mail Drop Boxes, which are a voter security disaster. Among other things, they make it possible for a person to vote multiple times. Also, who controls them, are they placed in Republican or Democrat areas? They are not Covid sanitized. A big fraud!" he tweeted on Monday.

Twitter immediately flagged the tweet.

"We placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our Civic Integrity Policy for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting," the micro-blogging platform said.

Mail-in ballots, expected to be used more widely in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, have become a partisan issue leading up to the November presidential election, reports TechCrunch.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) however said mail-in ballots are "not thought to be the main way the virus spreads." Twitter Safety further said: "Per our policies, this Tweet will remain on the service given its relevance to ongoing public conversation. Engagements with the Tweet will be limited. People will be able to Retweet with Comment, but not Like, Reply, or Retweet it".

Twitter last month took action against Trump by removing an image he tweeted, saying the image violated the company's privacy policy.

It has so far flagged several tweets from Trump for glorifying violence or violating its policies.
Rio Tinto said on Monday it will cut the short-term bonuses of its chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques and two other senior executives following a review of the company's destruction of two ancient caves in Australia.

The world's biggest iron ore miner stopped short of firing any of its leadership for the legal destruction of two historically significant sacred caves in Western Australia state in May  against the wishes of Aboriginal Traditional Owners  which sat on top of a high grade ore body it planned to mine.

The destruction sparked public outrage and an Australian government enquiry that senior Rio leadership faced earlier this month and which also sparked calls from some investors for better senior accountability.

"The review found no single root cause or error that directly resulted in the destruction of the rockshelters. It was the result of a series of decisions, actions and omissions over an extended period of time," the company said.

Rio said it would reduce the short-term bonuses of Jacques, Chief Executive of Iron Ore Chris Salisbury and Group Executive, Corporate Relations, Simone Niven in 2020 by about $3.7 million in total.

Jacques' 2016 long-term incentive plan award, due in the first half of next year, would also be reduced by about 1 million pounds ($1.3 million). He was paid 5.8 million pounds last year.

Rio also flagged that it was reviewing the organizational structure of its heritage and communities function that would report to Mark Davies, who joined the executive committee in charge of safety and technical projects in July.

The miner also said that it was reviewing the terms of its existing 2011 agreement with two Australian Aboriginal groups, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP), in relation to consent to "reflect evolving practice."

Rio did not tell the PKKP, the traditional owners of the two caves destroyed to mine iron ore, about three alternative mine plans, Jacques told the government enquiry, despite saying it had won fully informed consent for blasting.
Earlier last week, Kangana Ranaut had shared an interview of Aamir Khan, accusing him of kattarpanthi (extremist religious views). Later, the interview was proven to be fake.

In the fake interview, Aamir was shown to be saying that even though he is a Muslim and his wife (filmmaker Kiran Rao) a Hindu, their children will only be brought up with Islamic culture and traditions. Sharing it, Kangana had tweeted that outcome of a marriage is not just a blend of genes and cultures but even religions, asking the actor to teach his children Allah ki ebadat bhi seekhayein aur Shri Krishn ki Bhakti bhi.

Hindu + Muslim = Muslim

Yeh toh kattarpanthi hai,outcome of a marriage is not just a blend of genes and cultures but even religions. Bachchon ko Allah ki ebadat bhi seekhayein aur Shri Krishn ki Bhakti bhi, yehi secularism hai na? @aamir_khan https://t.co/qo1ZOLNR7K  Kangana Ranaut (@KanganaTeam) August 17, 2020

In another tweeet, she asked when did Aamir become so intolerant.

Also Watch | Power of social media in Sushant case inspired me: Kangana Ranaut on Twitter debut

Also see | Khaali Peeli teaser: Ishaan Khatter and Ananya Panday are on the run in this action-packed thriller, watch

However, the interview was a complete fake. Back in 2016 itself, Aamir had said in an interview with Rajat Sharma that he had filed an FIR against the same. Aamir said he had been watching a conspiracy unfolding against him since a long time. I could see that people were being provoked against me. There was a weird interview in which I am shown to be saying that I am a Muslim, my kids will be Muslims, so what if my wife is a Hindu. These weird interviews that were supposed to be mine, were going viral in the media. My pictures were being shared that I am mingling with terrorists. So such rumours were being spread about me, he said. Aamir, therefore, filed a complaint with the police who caught two men in relation to the case. One was the one who created the fake video and the other was arrested for spreading it on internet.

Kangana, however, has still not deleted her tweet.

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SPRINGFIELD  After nearly six months of pre-recorded or Facebook Live home broadcasts, the DJs at WTCC, 90.7 FM, are coming back to the studio.

Were excited to bring back live broadcasts and get back in the studio, said Andrew Cade, WTCC business manager.

The radio station closed its studios in March due to the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to the closure WTCC operated live, 24 hours a day, seven days a week out of its studio on the campus of Springfield Technical Community College.

Starting this week DJs and talk show hosts will be broadcasting from the WTCC studio between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., seven days a week. The station will broadcast live on a condensed schedule to limit the number of people who come in and out of the studio.

Cade credited the DJs as well as the remote broadcast engineer Jim Malaquias for finding ways to engage with listeners and broadcast whenever possible.

The hosts have done a wonderful job creating remote broadcasts but we have missed being in the studio and providing listeners with the immediate and intimate experience that people love about radio, Cade said. We are ready to get back in front of the microphones, and feel confident we can do this safely now.

In order to maintain social distance protocols no more than two people will be allowed in the studio at one time, no visitors will be allowed and additional cleaning procedures will be in place.

STCC President John B. Cook said the station is a resource and strong voice for the Greater Springfield community for generations. The station which launched in 1969, today offers a diverse mix of programs focused on area Latino, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Polish, Muslim, Native American and Caribbean communities.

The volunteer staff have done a fantastic job with remote broadcasting. I know theyre looking forward to producing segments and broadcasting from the studios, and I know listeners are going to be thrilled to hear them live, he said.

Related content:
HAUPPAUGE, N.Y., Aug. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Veteran investment advisor Jordan Kimmel has joined Lebenthal Diversified Asset Management Inc. as Chief Equity Strategist and Portfolio Manager for Separately Managed Equity Accounts. Based in the firm's new Hauppauge headquarters, Kimmel will focus on high net worth individuals who seek to balance safety and reasonable growth during a tumultuous time.

Kimmel: "My association with the Lebenthal team enables us to offer even more customized, cross-industry investing strategies for individuals while maintaining their own comfort zone."

"This is another major step in the resurrection of the renowned Lebenthal brand," said Dominick Tavella, a frequent Fox Business commentator who serves as President and Chief Investment Officer of the Long Island-based asset management firm and sister company Lebenthal Global Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisory firm. "Jordan's arrival marks the latest stage in the expansion of the brand since fellow Long Islander Michael Hartzman and I acquired the trademark in 2019. Known for many years as a municipal bond powerhouse, Lebenthal has evolved into one of Long Island's largest Registered Investment Advisors. Bringing in Jordan, we have created a team that can offer high net worth clients separately managed accounts for equities and fixed income portfolios."

"Jordan shares our dedication to the welfare of our clients and the prudent growth of their core wealth," added Hartzman, CFP and President of Broker/Dealer Lebenthal Financial Services, Inc. "We welcome Jordan and his commitment to enhance the well-being of our clients, and the opportunity to utilize his well-known disciplined strategies to assist them in achieving their long-term plans."

The investment approach of Kimmel's actively managed equity portfolios complements Lebenthal's actively managed indexing strategies. "It's not an either-or decision," noted Kimmel. "Instead, my association with the Lebenthal team enables us to offer even more customized, cross-industry investing strategies for individuals while maintaining their own comfort zone."

Kimmel is known in the investment community for developing disciplined fundamental quantitative models, including the Magnet Stock Selection Process, one of the first to blend value, growth, and momentum. During his career, Kimmel has worked with families and corporations, and licensed his Magnet process to prominent institutions, including John Nuveen & Co., while managing and advising portfolios.

He also developed the FACTS Framework, which identifies companies with the highest "integrity rank" utilizing financial and non-financial quantitative indicators of integrity that go beyond traditional ESG, or corporate environmental, social and governance factors.; and the Growth with Income model, which focuses on a select group of 50 U.S.-based companies that collectively yield healthy dividends while increasing them over multi-year periods.

Kimmel's arrival also enables Lebenthal to offer the proprietary U.S. Elite process, which incorporates an analytical focus on large-cap stocks that typically occupy the top of the bell curve of returns.

"Meeting both Dom and Mike is refreshing," said Kimmel. "I look forward to joining this successful leadership team whose predecessor firms grew steadily over the last 30 years by taking a client-first approach, offering conservative and fiduciary plans for affluent high net worth clients, as well as retirement planning for thousands of clients."

Kimmel's financial industry experience encompasses 30 years of focus on the management of equity portfolios. His career began in the fixed income area at AG Edwards and continued with such firms as Paine Webber and Dean Witter. He holds a B.S. degree in Economics and a M.S. degree in Urban and Policy Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

About Lebenthal

The legendary Wall Street "Lebenthal" brand was first established in 1925 by husband-and -wife Louis and Sayra Lebenthal, and subsequently became a household name by the TV spots and print ads featuring their affable son, Jim, that ran nationally. In 2018, Michael Hartzman and Dominick Tavella  who first partnered and brought their practices together in 2012  were approached by Andy Grillo, former president of Lebenthal Wealth Advisors, about acquiring the legendary brand from the founder's grandchildren. The duo  who were already known on Long Island and in South Florida as successful independent advisors with high-touch, client-centric financial practices formally purchased the Lebenthal brand in 2019 and began the process of merging all of their activities under the Lebenthal banner. Hartzman had been President of Broker/Dealer Bristol Financial Services, which has since evolved into Lebenthal Financial Services, located in Jericho, N.Y. Tavella had served as President of Diversified Private Wealth Advisors, a Registered Investment Advisory firm that now operates under the Lebenthal Global Advisors name. Today, the combined firms represent more than $750 million of client assets, and employ 25 people in Hauppauge and Jericho.

For complete information visit: www.lebenthal.com

Media Contacts: At Jaffe Communications, Bill Parness, 908-789-0700, [email protected] or Elisa Krantz, [email protected]

SOURCE Lebenthal Diversified Asset Management

Related Links

http://www.lebenthal.com


NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian speaks at a press conference in Homebush in Sydney, Australia on August 17, 2020. (Brook Mitchell/Getty Images)

Australias Most Populated State to Maintain Limit on Overseas Arrivals to 350

Australia most populated state New South Wales (NSW) will not be increasing the limit on international arrivals after a second Sydney security guard tested positive to COVID-19 and breached self-isolation restrictions.

The guard, who worked at the Marriott Hotel in Sydney was tested on Aug. 20 and told to self-isolate for 14 days, the Guardian reported.

However, police allege he instead visited Burwood Westfields shopping centre and a government services building the next day on Friday. He received a positive test result the following day.

The 22-year old has now been issued with two fines while being transferred to a NSW Health quarantine facility.

NSWs hotel quarantine system has been reviewed after mistakes in Victoria led to the current stage 4 lockdown in the state.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the review gave her confidence that the processes in place were right.

But she wont be increasing the limit on overseas arrivals into NSW yet, despite recent reports 18,000 Australians overseas have flagged their intention to reenter Australia.

Berejiklian noted more than 48,000 people since March had gone through hotel quarantine in NSW.

We are still having the burden for the nation in terms of people we are welcoming, and I dont want to see those numbers go up at this stage, she told the AAP.

Western and South West Sydney testing blitz

The NSW government has initiated a testing blitz on Monday, urging residents in Sydneys West and South West to come forward for testing.

Berejiklian said COVID-19 is still circulating in the community, particularly in Sydneys West and South West.

This region is key to breaking the back of this wave of transmission and high testing rates in people with symptoms is crucial to stopping community transmission, Berejiklian said in a statement.

This is a call to anyone who lives in Sydneys West and South West to come forward for testing with even the mildest of symptoms.

If you run a local organisation, business, community centre, place of worship, radio station or newspaper in this area we want your help to communicate this message, she said.

Meanwhile, NSW Health is warning anyone who was at a Service NSW Centre in Burwood in Sydneys west between 2.30 p.m.-3 p.m. on Thursday or the nearby Westfield Shopping Centre between 6 p.m.-7 p.m. on the same day, including the KMart and Woolworths stores, to watch for COVID-19 symptoms.

Elsewhere, Tangara School for Girls in Cherrybrook in Sydneys north-west which has been linked to 27 CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, cases is due to reopen on Monday after being closed for two weeks.
The letter called attention to recent protests attended by students and others in which police pepper-sprayed, kettled and arrested demonstrators as an example of why youth say police do not make them feel safe in school. The safest schools are those that are fully resourced and empowered, according to the letter, which notes that police have at times been used to fill gaps at under-resourced schools.
Doctors at the Siberian hospital that first treated Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny said that on Monday they had saved his life but that they had not found traces of poison in his system.

Navalny, a long-time opponent of President Vladimir Putin, fell gravely ill on Thursday after what his allies believe was a poisoning and was airlifted to Germany for treatment on Saturday.

"We saved his life with great effort and work," head doctor Alexander Murakhovsky told reporters at a news conference in the Siberian city of Omsk.

"If we had found some kind of poison that was somehow confirmed then it would have been a lot easier for us. It would have been a clear diagnosis, a clear condition and a well-known course of treatment," said Anatoly Kalinichenko, a senior doctor at the hospital.

The Russian doctors denied they had come under pressure from authorities while treating Navalny.

Navalny`s allies had accused doctors of holding up Navalny`s evacuation to Germany. The doctors initially said Navalny was not in a fit state to be transported there for treatment.

Jaka Bizilj, founder of Germany`s Cinema for Peace Foundation, told mass tabloid Bild over the weekend that Navalny, who is being treated in a German hospital, would survive.

He said: "Navalny will survive poison attack, but be incapacitated for months as a politician."
Beijing universities to reopen, ask all returning non-local students to undergo COVID-19 tests

Global Times

By Shan Jie Source: Global Times Published: 2020/8/23 19:45:04

After almost seven months of suspended campus life, universities in China, with well-thought-out virus prevention measures, are set to reopen and welcome the new cohort of students, the latest sign of the country's achievement in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Universities in Beijing have informed students traveling from other provinces and regions that they must provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test in an effort to further safeguard the prevention work in China's capital city.

There have been no new cases of domestic transmission of COVID-19 in the Chinese mainland for seven consecutive days as of Sunday following sporadic resurgence of outbreaks in Beijing, Dalian and Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region since June.

"Every student from outside Beijing has to do a nucleic acid test," Song Laixin, deputy party secretary at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology, told the Beijing Daily on Sunday, noting that the requirement is because of the safety of the school and overall virus prevention.

Parents of students will not be allowed on campus, Song said.

If the students are unable to be tested in their hometown, they can return to Beijing with a health code and stay at the school's observation site. After receiving proof of a negative test, they can resume their normal campus life.

Military training, which freshmen participate in before they officially start university in China, can proceed normally this year as long as the prevention needs can be met, Li Yi, a senior education authority official in Beijing said Sunday.

Starting from August 15, the almost 1 million university students in Beijing started returning to campus. Beijing Municipal Education Commission said at a press conference on August 14 that university students returning to Beijing must have proof of a negative nucleic acid test, with the cost to be borne by the school.

University campuses will mostly be closed, with no unauthorized people allowed to enter, and students will be prohibited from going off-campus as much as possible, China News Service reported.

Li Yujia, a student at the University of International Business and Economics, received a notice on Sunday that she would have to undergo a test. Li, who has been in her hometown of Shanghai since January, said she would get tested four or five days before she returns to Beijing on September 5.

A senior student, Li is a bit worried about her internship, as the school campus could adopt closed-off management. "I heard that we need to report to those in charge if we want to intern outside the campus Maybe I should look for an internship after these conditions are lifted," she said.

"But my schoolmates and I all understand the necessity of doing the test," Li said.

A faculty member at a Beijing university told the Global Times on Sunday that the school has asked staff to avoid going outside Beijing.

Universities elsewhere in the country adopt similar prevention measures.

Wu Han, a university student in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province, once hit the hardest by the coronavirus outbreak, said his school has put in place similar measures to those in Beijing, such as requiring students to get tested and restricting campus access.

"I feel pretty safe back on campus," Wu told the Global Times.

While students in Chinese universities are ready to go back to campus, reopening plan of most universities in the US are still pending with many still having to resort to online courses. On Saturday, 44,600 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the US.

"Every day in my school there are confirmed cases," a postgraduate student in Georgia, the US, told the Global Times. "I can't see when it will return to normal."



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By Brian Niemietz and Nancy Dillon New York Daily News (TNS)

New York Lawyers representing porn star Stormy Daniels posted a court ruling online indicating that President Donald Trump has been ordered to pay $43,000 in legal fees to their client, who has claimed in great detail that she had an affair with Trump in 2006 after his son Barron was born.

"Yep, another win!" Daniels tweeted in response to her lawyers' tweet celebrating the payday.

The ruling handed down Monday seems to award Daniels for lingering legal fees tied to a 2016 payoff agreement involving Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen, Trump and Daniels.

Trump denied Daniels' claim of a consensual tryst between them, but his Cohen testified that he'd arranged a $130,000 payment to the adult performer, born Stephanie Clifford, so that she wouldn't speak about the alleged fling in the months leading up to the 2016 election.

Trump and Daniels have grappled in court on more than one occasion. In March 2018, she sued Trump to be released from the nondisclosure agreement prohibiting her from telling her story. The case was thrown out after Trump said he would not attempt to enforce the agreement. She wrote a book, gave endless interviews about the alleged incident and became a household name.

A court later ordered Daniels to pay Trump's legal team nearly $300,000 when a judge tossed out her libel suit against the president, which was based on his denial of the alleged affair.

Daniels' claimed after the purported fling that the president was obsessed with and terrified by sharks and that she watched "Shark Week" programming with him in his hotel room. He reportedly told her in 2006, "I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die."

Trump confirmed at a rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday that he was indeed no supporter of the big fish, according to The Washington Post.

Im not a big fan of sharks, either, he joked at a rally in Scranton. I dont know, how many votes am I going to lose? I have people calling me up: Sir, we wanted to  we have a fund to save the shark. Its called save the shark. I say No, thank you. I have other things I can contribute to.
Russia, Turkey 'agree in principle' on 2nd batch of S-400 delivery despite US opposition

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 23 August 2020 2:09 PM

A senior Russian official says his country and Turkey have agreed in principle on the second shipment of Russian advanced S-400 missile defense systems despite strong opposition from the United States.

Dmitry Shugaev, head of Federal Service of Military-Technical Cooperation, said on Sunday that Moscow and Ankara are in advanced stage of discussion on the delivery of the second batch of S-400 Triumf, but the agreement has not yet been signed.

"We are awaiting for the decision of the Turkish partners to sign another option contract", Shugaev said in an interview with Zvezda TV, which is run by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Also on Sunday, Sergei Chemezov, head of Russia's Rostec arms firm, said Moscow is likely to clinch a deal for the delivery of the second batch of S-400 to Turkey next year.

Chemezov announced the news in a statement, the Interfax news agency reported.

Rostec is a Russian holding based in capital Moscow that specializes in consolidating strategically-important firms, mainly in the defense and high-tech industries.

In late 2017, Ankara signed a $2.5 billion deal with Moscow to procure the S-400, a Russian-made mobile surface-to-air defense system designed to destroy aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles as far as 402 kilometers away, and can also be used against ground installations.

It has previously been sold only to China and India.

Ismail Demir, head of the Turkish Defense Industries Directorate, previously said that Russia and Turkey had reached an agreement in principle on the supply of the second batch of S-400s.

The delivery of S-400 launchers to Turkey began in July 2019, infuriating the United States, which had long warned that Turkey, a NATO member, cannot have both the S-400 and American Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter jets.

Washington claimed that the S-400 defense systems were incompatible with NATO equipment and could expose the F-35s to possible Russian subterfuge. Both Turkey and Russia reject the allegations and continued talks on an additional batch of S-400s.

The Russia-Turkey S-400 deal also envisages partial transfer of production technology to the Turkish side.

As Ankara did not yield to the US pressure, the S-400 deal prompted Washington to threaten sanctions and suspend Turkish involvement in its F-35 jet program. Washington further conditioned the supply of its Patriot missiles to Turkey on returning the already purchased S-400 systems back to Russia.

Turkey, the first NATO member to purchase Russian-made S-400 missile defense systems, has already received a regiment set of the advanced missile systems.

Ankara is striving to strengthen its air defense, particularly after Washington decided in 2015 to withdraw its Patriot surface-to-air missile system from Turkish border with Syria, a move that weakened Turkey's air defense.

Before gravitating towards Russia, the Turkish military reportedly walked out of a $3.4-billion contract for a similar Chinese system. The withdrawal occurred under purported pressure from Washington.

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France's public health service has reported 4,867 new Covid-19 cases in an increasing daily trend that has officials concerned. However, so far the rising number of infections has not translated into a rise in hospitalisations.

The 4,897 new cases reported on Sunday marked France's largest single-day tally of new Covid-19 cases since the height of the epidemic in April, and continues a trend seen in recent weeks.

While day-to-day fluctuations vary, the weekly average number of new cases has climbed from less than a thousand in late July to 3,480 as of Sunday.

The public health service, Sante Publique France (SFP), put parts of the Paris region, the Bouches-du-Rhone in the southeast, the Herault in the south, the Sarthe in the west and Guiana overseas among the most vulnerable of 38 administrative departments currently on a watch list.

However, the numbers and rates of hospitalisations, including in intensive care, and mortality are nowhere near what they were in late March and early April, the height of the epidemic that followed the appearance of the new coronavirus in France.

More tests, more cases

Part of the rise in cases may have to do with testing capacity. Health Minister Olivier Veran said Sunday that France was assuring more than 700,000 tests per week, a target set when the government announced plans to lift confinement in May.

But SPF noted the rate of positive cases among those tested was at 3.6 percent, up from 2.8 percent a week ago, and Veran warned the positive rate had tripled in August.

Veran also noted a slight increase in the number of patients with serious cases.

The number of persons hospitalised, including in intensive care, is increasing, certainly at low levels, but it is increasing, he tweeted.

We are facing a risky situation, the minister told newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. After having gently taken the lid off the pot, the water is starting to boil.

In its most recent weekly overview published Thursday, SPF indicated the virus appeared to be spreading most among young adults.

Official figures show overall numbers of patients hospitalised with Covid-19 has decreased steadily since 14 April, when 32,292 people were in hospital, to 4,709 on Sunday.

However, since falling from a peak of 7,148 on 8 April, the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care has remained in the high 300s or low 400s for the past month.

Economy, health 'on same level'

France's government has ruled out imposing another nationwide lockdown akin to the one that kept much of the country confined to home between 17 March and 11 May, preferring to consider measures at local and regional levels.

On the economic front, Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Monday the government was putting public health and economic recovery on the same level as the country approached a sensitive return to school and work after the summer break.

We're putting the health emergency and the economic emergency on the same level, Le Maire said, as the government postponed for one week announcements of how it would deploy a 100-billion-euro recovery package announced by President Emmanuel Macron in July.

The measures are ready, the recovery plan is ready, Le Maire continued. They will be adopted this year and come into effect next year.

On the economic front, the government held to a forecast of 11 percent negative growth this year, more than the 9 percent foreseen by national statistics office Insee, citing uncertainty over the outlook for the global economy.

While there has been a strong recovery in May and June, there is still much uncertainty between now and the end of the year, namely with Brexit, the US election and the new Chinese five-year plan, Le Maire said.

All that will weigh on world trade and therefore on French growth.
By Deepak Chopra, TM MD

The allure of living in the present moment is popular but also endangered. The pandemic lockdown has forced millions of people into cramped living conditions that disrupts normal life, puts strain on relationships, adds stress to families, and introduces depression and anxiety. Escaping the present moment is likely to be everyones dream.

But the situation will eventually change, and phrases like the power of now are embedded in peoples aspirations. The present moment has wound up being a problem and a solution at a same time. The most basic question needs answering, then. Why live in the present moment and how is it achieved?

Sometimes the present moment brings experiences of love, kindness, creativity, beauty, and insight. In those moments no one needs to ask why its good to live in the now. (The bodys trillions of cells, including brain cells, dont ask the question, because they are designed to only live in the present, occupied with thousands of chemical reactions and electrical signaling every second. Even when you recall a past event, your brain is strictly confined to the now in order to retrieve the memory.)

The first thing to notice when you are overtaken by the now is that you didnt have to work for it. The present moment is always present. The real question is why we arent in the present moment. Countless people ae working hard on themselves to stay in the now. But if it takes no work to get a glimpse of the beauty, love, and fulfillment that dawns in the present moment, can we expect that working to get back there is really necessary, or even effective?

If you break the whole thing down, the difference is between a temporary experience of the present moment and a constant, unbroken experience. The now is either sometimes or all the time. Sometimes is what all of us experience, those passing moments of bliss, love, beauty, etc. Id argue that these privileged experiences come and go of their own accord. They are as unpredictable as your next thought.

This doesnt preclude working on yourself to expand your awareness through meditation and yoga, going inside to heal old wounds, rising yourself of self-judgment, and all the other things people do in the human potential movement. If you are stuck in worry, depression, fear of aging and death, and other kinds of stuckness that create pain and suffering, then finding a way out is absolutely necessary.

But no amount of personal work is going to change sometimes to all the time. The healthiest, happiest, sanest person in the world doesnt necessarily live in the present moment, because the present moment is timeless. No matter how expensive our Rolex is, it doesnt tell the timeless. To be in the present moment all the time requires a shift in identity, which can be specified as follows:

I am me, a separate person changes to I am, without reference to a separate person.

I am here in this location changes to I am unbounded and have no location.

I am young (or old or middle-aged) changes to I have no sense of time passing.

I want changes to I am without desires, fulfilled in myself.

If there was a mechanism like a cars gear shift to handle these change, we would be machines ourselves. But in reality the I that wants to live in the present is a mysterious creation of the mind, which itself is a mysterious creation of God-knows-what (insert any theory you want here, religious or secular), and the God-knows-what transcends everyday life.

The normal approaches we take to explain I unfortunately were constructed by I, and therefore theres a true Catch-22. If I investigates itself with the intention of going beyond I, the result is simply to reinforce I, making sure it sticks around. Giving your ego the project of going beyond the ego wont succeed, because all youve done is add another project to a self that undertakes a hundred other projects (work, family, relationships sex, hobbies, vacations, gossip, and keeping up with the news are only the beginning).

In my forthcoming book, Total Meditation, I offer a way to escape this Catch-22. It begins with the idea that the whole bodymind is naturally set up to live in the present. When it is subjected to stress, the body adapts temporarily until the stress subsides, and then it returns to a dynamic state of balance known as homeostasis. The mind does the same thing. Between every thought or feeling, the mind returns to readiness for the next thought or feeling. This state of readiness is just as balanced as homeostasis. But we fail to notice it because we are entirely focused on mental activity rather than mental silence.

Yet silence is only a superficial clue. In a stressful world peace and quiet acquire a special value. But in reality, the state of readiness is the source of everything we value in our lives. Love, bliss, compassion, creativity, and insight all have the same origin in pure, unbounded awareness. The whole bodymind has the same source. Knowing this, you can consciously return to the readiness state the minute you notice that you arent in it.

This openness to let your mind regain its balance is the key to total meditation. Unlike occasional meditation, which requires a set time every day that needs to be set aside, total meditation keeps up with our life from moment to moment. You always keep your eye on the prize, which is to live from your source. Theres no struggle or effort involved. You simply allow your mind to obey its own nature.

Theres much to say about this topic, but when it comes to living in the present moment, total meditation changes sometimes to all the time. The beauty of such an approach is that you experience change with the support of existence itself. To be here now looks like some kind of deep spiritual challenge. In reality it is just the opposite. Living in the present moment involves a state of awareness that the mind gravitates toward if you leave it alone and let the nature of the mind be what it is. In fact, this is the secret behind all spiritual attainments. The less you try, the closer you get. One could hardly wish for a more propitious setup.

DEEPAK CHOPRA TM MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers.His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.
YEREVAN.  Second President Robert Kocharyan has sued Armeniarepresented by the Ministry of Finance; we learn this from DataLex Judicial Information System.

Kocharyan demands to confirm the violation of his right and to confiscate 2 million drams from Armenia in his favor as compensation for non-material damage.

The lawsuit will be considered at the Yerevan Court of General Jurisdiction.

Robert Kocharyan's lawyer Hayk Alumyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am that the reason for the lawsuit is that during an open court session, presiding Judge Anna Danibekyan had published information containing medical secrets about Kocharyan's health condition, without expressing the respective opinion of the defense.

Alumyan added that this information with such details was disseminated in an open court session which has a great public resonance.
Photo: (Photo : Instagram/ems1official)

A Virginia "Heroes with Heart" winner, April O'Quinn, now has her very own American Girl Doll. The doll company ran the contest, and they chose five national winners after a nationwide call for nominations.





Dedication to work

O'Quinn's niece nominated her because she is an ambulance worker at Richmond Ambulance Authority (RAA). Her niece, Lacey, lives in Texas, and she always tells people about her "Aunt April." The young girl explained to American Girl that her aunt got infected with the coronavirus.

After recovering from the deadly disease, O'Quinn chose to return to work. Lacey wrote on her contest submission that her aunt did not hesitate even for a moment to return to work. A month ago, the niece received a phone call to hear the exciting news.

See also: Ohio Newlywed Couple Donates Reception Food to the Homeless

No words to explain her happiness

O'Quinn told WTVR news that her niece was screaming on the other side saying that they won. She was in shock and could not find words to describe how she felt. She said she ended up crying and did not know what to say.

She explained that via video chat, she watched her niece unbox the doll after receiving it in the mail. She could not believe it because the likeness was pretty remarkable. O'Quinn said that the stars and brightness in the doll's face and eyes were amazing.

See also: Pregnant Colombian Woman Thanks People for Helping Her Raise Money for Delivery

Memorable moments

Not only did O'Quinn won a one-of-a-kind custom-made doll wearing the outfit similar to her uniform, but she also received a $250 gift card. She explained that her winnings are something she and her niece will never forget. She explained that it is a bond that she will hold forever with Lacey.

In June, American Girl started making and selling outfits for their dolls that are inspired by the outfit worn by medical workers. The doll company calls it "Scrubs Outfit." Each set includes a colorful nurse's top, pink scrub pants, a matching fabric face mask, and slip-on shoes.

See also: Appreciation to Everyday Heroes: American Girl Launches New Doll Wearing Scrub Suit

It is the doll company's way of thanking everyday heroes. For every outfit sold, the Mattel subsidiary will donate to the "First Responders Children's Foundation." It is a foundation that supports kids of first responders who sacrifice their lives to fight the coronavirus.

The buyer will also get free doll masks to promote the use of face masks. The company also released a video on how to make doll masks so kids could also make them at home. Jamie Cygielman, the company general manager, said that they love celebrating acts of courage and compassion.

They also proudly honor heroes and the dedicated healthcare workers because they put their lives at risk to keep everyone around them safe.
Britain's Home Secretary, Priti Patel, speaks to the media in Reading, Britain on June 22, 2020. (Peter Nicholls/Reuters)

Britons Can Be Fined up to 10,000 Pounds for Organizing Illegal Parties

The UK government on Sunday announced tougher measures against organizers of dangerous parties, whom the Home Secretary said showed a blatant disregard for the safety of others.

The new rule will come into effect from Aug. 28, before the August bank holiday, a long weekend during which many people enjoy partying.

Those who organize or facilitate illegal raves, unlicensed music events, or other unlawful gatherings of over 30 people in England can face a fine of up to 10,000 pounds ($13,000), the UK government announced.

Participants in these gatherings can be fined 100 pounds ($130). Fines for repeat offenders can double up to a maximum of 3,200 pounds ($4,200).

Home Secretary Priti Patel said the government will continue to crack down on the small minority who think they are above the law.

The announcement came after police disrupted dozens of unlicensed parties for the third weekend in a row in Birmingham in the West Midlands, which is currently on the governments watch list for its high and rising CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus infection rate.

West Midlands Police wrote on Twitter that they were called to break up 96 parties and meet ups on Saturday night.

Over 150 people were caught at an illegal rave near Blackburn, an area in Northwest England, where the infection rate of the CCP virus is second highest in England, according to the latest data (pdf).

The London Metropolitan Police has responded to more than 1,000 unlicensed events since the end of June, the government said.

Ade Adelekan, the National Police Chiefs Council lead for unlicensed music events, said that he welcomed this deterrent against those who irresponsibly put peoples health and safety at risk.

He added that these events are hosted without regard for the safety of those attending, and police have observed cases of anti-social behaviour, sales of drugs, and gang activity.

Police will increase patrols to prevent illegal gathering, especially in the lead up to the bank holiday weekend.

Fines for not wearing face coverings where it is mandated will also double for repeat offenses, up to 3,200 pounds ($4,200), on Aug. 28.
Fans have been awaiting the return of Strictly Come Dancing amid uncertainty of its future due to the coronavirus pandemic.

But Janette Manrara, 36, and Neil Jones, 38, led the pros arriving at a secret hotel in Buckinghamshire where they formed a 'bubble' in order to begin training for the upcoming series of the BBC show.

Katya Jones was also seen arriving at the accommodation 'where they will isolate for a fortnight to learn group routines amid the pandemic,' according to the latest reports.

FIRST LOOK: Janette Manrara, 36, led the Strictly Come Dancing pros arriving at a secret hotel in Buckinghamshire to begin training for the upcoming series of the BBC show

Janette put on a leggy display in a chic shirt dress and strappy stilettos as she rolled multiple hot pink suitcases into her new, temporary home.

Dancer Neil was all smiles as he pulled up at the hotel on his motorbike, clad in head-to-toe black, using a bandana hung around his neck as a makeshift face mask.

Anton du Beke, 54, and Dianne Buswell, 31, embraced in a hug as they reunited outside the hotel.

Reigning champ Oti Mabuse, 30, burst into laughter as she made her way into the hotel.

What an arrival! Neil Jones, 38, was all smiles as he pulled up at the hotel on his motorbike

Getting ready: Katya Jones, 31, arrived in a bold leopard print top as she prepares to isolate with her costars

Glam! Janette put on a leggy display in a chic shirt dress and strappy stilettos

Reunited! Anton du Beke, 54, and Dianne Buswell, 31, embraced in a hug as they reunited

Nifty! Neil used a bandana hung around his neck as a makeshift face mask

Stylish: Katya wrapped a shocking pink jumper around her waist as she took her belongings from the car

Preparing: The dancer wore fishnet stockings as she reached into the back of the car

As the professional dancers arrived at their secret hotel, BBC director of content Charlotte Moore spoke at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

She confirmed that Strictly was 'absolutely coming back' and the celebrity line-up will be be confirmed at the end of the month.

Charlotte added that it will be a 'special series' this year with a shorter run, and that due to the current circumstances 'the dances will have real poignancy.'

Strictly Come Dancing told MailOnline: 'As we continue to follow the latest guidance from Public Health England and industry guidelines, we are considering isolating the dancers and key production members to enable our much-loved group numbers to continue.

Reigning champ! Oti Mabuse, 30, burst into laughter as she made her way into the hotel

Here he is! Aljaz Skorjanec, 30, beamed with delight as he climbed out of his car

Unpacking: Katya pulled out a large suitcase from the Jeep she arrived in

Fashionably late: The star was one of the last to arrive at the hotel on Monday

Moving in: Katya carried her bags into the hotel as she prepares to spend a long time with the dancers

'We're incredibly proud of our professional dancers for their dedication to the show and their commitment to showcasing their love of dance to the nation.

'The safety of our cast and crew is of the utmost importance to us and further updates will be made in due course.'

This year's Strictly is set to start in October instead of the usual start in early September and will be several weeks shorter than normal.

Earlier this month it was reported that show executives are 'devising 100 different formats' to align with current guidelines as filming prepares to take place in Elstree Studios for a start date of October 24.

New digs: Janetta led the way, pushing her hot pink suitcases into her new, temporary home

Beauty: Strictly champ Oti looked stunning with her long locks styled into braids

The restrictions include putting a limit on the amount of people allowed on set, as well as excluding 'chemistry circles' in auditions, which sees contestants alternate in 'sexy' dances with professionals so producers can decide 'who look good together'.

A BBC source told The Sun: 'Preparing for this year's show is a huge headache. The goalposts keep moving, so the big decisions are being left to the last minute so we're as up to date as possible.

'But any concrete things we can decide on now, we are doing. Making one hit series is hard enough. As things stand, we are having to plan for hundreds.

Safety first: Aljaz put on a black face mask before taking his luggage inside

Chats with co-stars: Janette and Aljaz caught up while wearing face masks

'The slightest change to the rules could have a massive impact on how the show is filmed. Many [celebs] are weighing up their options, so Strictly still doesn't have a full line-up.'

The insider claimed the competition will be held in a near-empty, no-audience studio with a scaled-back crew consisting of only 25 per cent of the usual team for the first time in the show's 16-year history.

Another aspect of the series that is believed to have changed is the partnering process, which could be decided on height alone as opposed to the celebs performing salsa dances in a circle with all ballroom experts.

Let's go! Oti looked ready for action in skin-tight black leggings and bright red trainers

Ready for anything: Katya made sure to pack everything for her fortnight stay at the hotel

It's also been reported that BBC bosses have scrapped plans for celebrities and professional dancers to isolate together.

In a last minute change of plan, the couples will instead be in a 'bubble' system and there will be regular testing ahead of the live shows, The Sun reports.

However, the dancers are still said to be isolating together this month so that they can pre-record group routines.

A TV source told the publication: 'The idea of holing sexy dancers up with celebrities made it impossible to sign anybody up.'

Biker boy! While his colleagues arrived by car, Neil rode in on his motorbike

Doing it right: Diane stepped out of her car wearing purple leggings and a cowgirl style jacket

Heavy packing: Katya pulled a large box out of the boot of her car after arriving

It comes after judge Bruno Tonioli, 64, has confirmed he won't be appearing on the judging panel this series.

Bosses confirmed on Friday that the judge will make remote appearances from his home for the Sunday night results shows at the beginning of this series, as he is unable to travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But fans need not fear as bosses vowed they hope to have Bruno back in the studio towards the end of the series, alongside judges Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse and Shirley Ballas.

Executive producer Sarah James said: 'I'm overjoyed that we've found a way for Bruno to be part of this year's Strictly.

'His passion and enthusiasm are such a big part of the show, I'm thrilled we can continue to deliver that to audiences this year.'

Bruno added: 'I absolutely adore being part of Strictly and can't wait to see what incredible dancing this year has in store!

'Lockdown has resulted in me being in LA for the foreseeable, but I'm excited to be involved as much as I possibly can. There was no cha-cha-chance I'd miss out!'

He'll be back! It come after judge Bruno Tonioli, 64, has confirmed he won't be appearing on the judging panel this series (pictured during the TV BAFTAs last month)

Distanced: The judge will make remote appearances from his home for the Sunday night results shows at the beginning of this series, due to travel restrictions imposed by COVID-19

It was previously reported that Bruno could make a comeback to Strictly later this year after being unable to appear due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The judge usually jets between London and Los Angeles to sit on the panel for both the long-running UK show as well as its US counterpart Dancing With The Stars.

But due to the global coronavirus pandemic impacting travel restrictions it was reported that the Italian choreographer had favoured the US version when forced to pick just one of the shows.

Sources added that bosses were hopeful that Bruno could make an in-person appearance for the grand final in December.

He'll be back! Bosses also confirmed that they hope Bruno can return to the Strictly studio for the end of the series in December

A source told The Daily Star: 'Travel restrictions in place because of coronavirus meant he couldn't fly back and forth to do both shows this year, so he picked Dancing With The Stars.

'But Strictly's producers were still keen for him to make an appearance if it was possible.'

The source added: 'Dancing With The Stars usually ends a few weeks before Strictly's final. So the plan is for Bruno to jet back to the UK as soon as he's finished with his commitments in the US.

MailOnline contacted Bruno's representatives for comment at the time.

Back and forth: It was previously reported that Bruno wouldn't be able to travel to the UK due to his work commitments on US series Dancing with the Stars

The news also came after fellow Strictly judge Craig Revel Horwood, who has appeared on the show alongside Bruno since 2004, said he was confident the choreographer would make a 'triumphant return' in 2021.

He said: 'They might throw guest judges in for fun. Then when everything's back to normal, Bruno can make his triumphant return!'

In recent weeks, various big-name stars have been mentioned as a possible replacement for Bruno including Cheryl.

But Craig said he doubted whether the pop star would appear on the upcoming series, saying: 'Lovely girl, but I don't think it will happen.'

Plans: Earlier this month it was reported that executives are 'devising 100 different formats' to align with guidelines as filming prepares to take place in Elstree for a start date of October 24

It comes after Strictly Come Dancing bosses denied celebrities such as Michelle Keegan and Jessie J declined to be on the show this year because of the 'low' 60,000 appearance fee.

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline on Wednesday, a Strictly source has contested reports that several celebrities had turned them down and said only those who have signed onto the show were offered a fee.

The source explained: 'Everyone we have offered a fee to this year have been confirmed as part of the line up, so nobody has declined appearing in the show after we've begun negotiations.'
Genetic analysis revealed the second infection was caused by a different strain

Covid-19 survivors can get reinfected, according to doctors in Hong Kong who say they are the first in the world to prove a patient was struck down twice.

The 33-year-old man  who had no known underlying conditions  tested positive for the coronavirus four months after he recovered from his first bout of the life-threatening disease.

Genetic analysis revealed his second infection, which he caught on a trip to Europe, was caused by a different strain of the virus.

All viruses  including SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic  mutate over time. Analysing the DNA of pathogens can spot any changes, which can make them weaker or deadlier.

Doctors warned their findings prove 're-infection can occur just a few months after recovery'. They said it was likely immunity is short-lived and that antibodies against Covid-19 fade quickly.

But the unidentified man did not have symptoms of Covid-19 the second time  he was only discovered through screening at an airport. This may suggest he had some level of immunity that protected him from severe disease, experts say.

Covid-19 survivors can be reinfected twice, according to doctors in Hong Kong who report the first known case

WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT IMMUNITY TO COVID-19? Scientists still do not know for sure whether people can catch Covid-19 more than once or if they become immune after their first infection. With some illnesses such as chickenpox, the body can remember exactly how to destroy it and becomes able to fend it off before symptoms start if it gets back into the body. But it is so far unclear if people who have had coronavirus can get it again. Tests have shown that many people who recover have antibodies - which can produce future immunity - but it is not known whether there are enough of them. However, antibodies are only one type of substance that can produce immunity. The immune system is a huge web of proteins that have different functions to protect the body against infection. Others, including white blood cells called T cells and B cells, can also help the body to fight off disease but are more difficult to discover using currently available tests. Evidence is beginning to suggest that antibodies disappear in as little as eight weeks after infection with the coronavirus, scientifically called SARS-Cov-2. On the other hand, T cells - which target and destroy cells already infected with the virus - are 'durable', Professor Altmann said. A promising study done on monkeys found that they were unable to catch Covid-19 a second time after recovering from it, which led scientists to believe the same may apply to humans. The rhesus monkeys were deliberately reinfected by scientists in China to test how their bodies reacted. Because the coronavirus has only been known to scientists for seven months there has not been enough time to study whether people develop long-term immunity. But, so far, cases of people getting infected more than once have not been numerous nor convincing. Advertisement

Hopes of long-lasting immunity have been hampered in recent months by several reports that have claimed to show people being struck down with the coronavirus twice.

But until now, scientists have reiterated that cases of re-infection were more likely down to a fault with testing, or that inactive particles of the virus are still present in the body of patients months after they beat the illness.

With some illnesses such as chickenpox, the body can remember exactly how to destroy it and becomes able to fend it off before symptoms start if it gets back into the body.

Experts say short-lived immunity would hinder global efforts to contain the infection because it means patients are not protected for a long time, leaving countries at risk of a second wave of the disease this winter.

But academics said this one singular report  which will be published in a medical journal but has not yet been published  does not prove they occur.

Researchers from the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong say they are the first to prove a second re-infection of the coronavirus.

And they insisted the finding does not mean taking vaccines will be useless. Dr Kai-Wang To, study co-author, said: 'Immunity induced by vaccination can be different from those induced by natural infection.

'[We] will need to wait for the results of the vaccine trials to see if how effective vaccines are.'

In a press release, they described how an 'apparently young and healthy patient had a second episode of Covid-19 infection'. Reports say the man was an IT worker.

The man, of Hong Kong, was first diagnosed on March 26 after having a cough, sore throat, fever and headache, according to parts of the paper revealed by a journalist at the South China Morning Post.

He was hospitalised that day but all his symptoms subsided after three days. He was discharged on April 14 after two negative test results.

In his second episode, the man was tested on August 15 when he returned to Hong Kong from Spain via the UK.

He was hospitalised again but did not have any symptoms. It's unclear why he was hospitalised.

The researchers, led by Dr Kelvin Kai-Wang To, took samples of his saliva both times he tested positive and analysed the genetic sequence of the strain.

The process allows experts to identify what mutations coronavirus had accumulated over time.

These genetic variants can act as the fingerprints of the pathogen, to indicate where in the world it originated.

The press release said: 'The team showed the genome sequence of the virus strain in the first episode of Covid-19 infection is clearly different from the genome sequence of the virus strain found during the second episode of infection.'

The first sample he had taken is most likely related to strains from the US or England collected in March and April, the academics claimed.

While the second  which was different in 24 places  was most similar to samples found circulating in Switzerland and England between July and August.

The press release revealing the first known case of re-infection with Covid-19

ARE THERE DIFFERENT STRAINS OF COVID-19? Scientists have discovered various strains of the coronavirus by looking at its genetic mutations. Viruses mutate naturally all the time and it is not usually cause for alarm but should be studied in case they change so much they become unrecognisable to the body, as is the case with flu. A study by scientists at the University of Sheffield and Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, found that the original virus made up the vast majority of all Covid-19 infections in China, and Asia as a whole, and also seemed to be the first version of the virus to appear in the countries they studied. However, a mutated version started to appear soon after in Europe and North America in particular, before going on to take over as the dominant virus. Paul Tambyah, senior consultant at the National University of Singapore and president-elect of the International Society of Infectious Diseases, believes a strain of the coronavirus thriving in Europe, the US and parts of Asia has a specific mutation which makes the virus more infectious but less deadly. The variation in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the agent which causes Covid-19, is called D614G. Dr Tambyah said evidence suggests the proliferation of the D614G mutation in some parts of the world has coincided with a drop in death rates, suggesting it is less lethal. 'Maybe that's a good thing to have a virus that is more infectious but less deadly,' Dr Tambyah told Reuters. Dr Tambyah said most viruses tend to become less virulent as they mutate. 'It is in the virus' interest to infect more people but not to kill them because a virus depends on the host for food and for shelter,' he said. Scientists discovered the mutation as early as February and it has circulated in Europe and the Americas, the World Health Organization said. The WHO has also said there is no evidence the mutation has led to more severe disease. Previous research by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in Florida offers a potential explanation for the virus's altering traits. They found the mutated version D614G has four to five times more 'spikes' that protrude from the viral surface, allowing it to latch onto human cells. These so-called S spikes are crucial in how the virus invades a cell. They trick receptors called ACE2 on the surface of human cells into binding with the virus. This opens the door for the coronavirus to infect the cell where it thrives, multiplies and wreaks havoc. However, the original coronavirus which first jumped into humans had a spike which often snapped off when trying to fuse with the receptor. The mutated strain, they say, is more robust and less likely to snap, making it better at infecting cells. Although the mutation makes the virus better at infecting cells, it does not appear to make it any more potent or deadly. Researchers in the UK and US had in May noted that the mutated version of the virus had become 'the dominant pandemic form in many countries', including the then- hotspots of Italy, the US and the UK. They said it was first found in Germany in February and had since become the most common form of the virus in patients worldwide - it appears to force out the older version whenever they clash. Advertisement

'This case illustrates that re-infection can occur after just a few months of recovery from the first infection,' the researchers said.

'Our findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may persist in the global human population as it is the case for other common-cold associated human coronaviruses.'

The underlying reasons why the man got Covid-19 again are not clear.

It may simply be because his immune system had already forgotten the coronavirus entirely, suggesting short-lived immunity.

On the other hand, his lack of symptoms may suggest his immune system did recognise the coronavirus and was primed to attack, regardless of what strain it was.

Commenting on statements made by HKU, independent scientists admitted it is the strongest evidence of re-infection yet because it used genetic sequencing.

Dr Jeffrey Barrett, of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: 'This is certainly stronger evidence of re-infection than some of the previous reports because it uses the genome sequence of the virus to separate the two infections.

'It seems much more likely that this patient has two distinct infections than a single infection followed by a relapse (due to the number of genetic differences between the two sequences).'

However, he said it was very hard to draw conclusions without reading the full report.

Dr Barrett said: 'It may be that second infections, when they do occur, are not serious (though we dont know whether this person was infectious during their second episode).'

He added that given the number of global infections to date  23.5million  one case of reinfection 'is not surprising even if it is a very rare occurrence'.

Dr Simon Clarke, an expert in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said: 'The significant thing here is that being re-infected with a mutated strain demonstrates that it is more likely to be re-infection, rather than the same infection that has hung around because the virus has not actually been got rid of, as some people have suggested happens.'

He added that mutant strains are 'nothing to be shocked or surprised about'.

Professor Paul Hunter, of the University of East Anglia, said it was unclear whether reinfected people would pose any risk to others because they may have a smaller viral load  the amount of the virus in their body.

Dr Jonathan Stoye, of the Francis Crick Institute, called the report 'fascinating'.

Until now, it was unclear if people could catch SARS-CoV-2 twice for a number of reasons.

It's not clear how long immunity to the virus lasts  whether it be a few months or several years  and how this differs between people. For instance, people who only get mild bouts of the disease may develop less protection than ones who were left critically-ill.

Immunity against other coronaviruses that cause the common cold is known to last less than a year, with cases spiking in the winter.

But experts had hoped that the new coronavirus might behave more like SARS and MERS, two coronaviruses that the body seems to offer longer protection against.

Scientists have found SARS patients still have crucial disease-fighting cells 17 years after infection.

Evidence is beginning to suggest that antibodies disappear in as little as eight weeks after infection with SARS-Cov-2. On the other hand, T cells - which target and destroy cells already infected with the virus - are 'durable'.

Science is still trying to answer questions about immunity but it's been challenging because the coronavirus has only been known to academics for eight months.

Alarm bells have been raised about re-infections since the pandemic began.

In April, South Korean officials feared a group of almost 300 people had been reinfected after the country saw the virus fizzle out.

But later, a senior South Korean official said the flurry of cases were due to a testing fault  and not down to short-lived immunity.

Infectious disease experts revealed that dead virus fragments can remain within the body, possibly for months.

These lingering fragments may cause a positive result, even though the person is not sick or infectious anymore.

And in March it was revealed a Japanese man in his 70s tested positive for Covid-19 a second time. He was first infected while on board the coronavirus-ridden Diamond Princess cruise ship in February.

He tested positive two weeks after he recovered and tested negative. It is not clear how many times he had a negative result.

It may be possible someone can test positive for longer than two weeks as their body tries to clear the virus, and the negative result was false.

A Japanese woman was also diagnosed again two weeks after her recovery.

The woman, working as a tour bus guide in Wuhan, where the disease first emerged in December 2019, tested positive on February 26 after a negative result on February 6.

The details are sparse, but the woman had reportedly suffered no symptoms for at least a week between the two episodes.

Academics said it was a 'concern', but there was too little information to draw conclusions.
Woolworths has announced its full list of Disney Plus Ooshies collectables featuring iconic characters like Elsa and Anna from Frozen, Elastigirl from The Incredibles and Darth Vader from Star Wars.

Australian shoppers can start collecting the themed figurines from Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars with every $30 spent in store or online from Wednesday, August 26.

The collection features 36 Ooshies, which follows the success of last year's wildly popular Lion King Ooshies.

Woolworths has announced the full list of Disney Plus Ooshies collectables featuring iconic characters like Elsa and Anna from Frozen, Elastigirl from The Incredibles and Darth Vader from Star Wars

Australian shoppers can start collecting the themed figurines from Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars movies with every $30 spent in store or online from Wednesday, August 26

THE FULL LIST OF DISNEY+ OOSHIES AVAILABLE: * ELSA AND ANNA FROM FROZEN * MOANA FROM MOANA * HOLOGRAM LADY AND TRAMP FROM LADY AND THE TRAMP * GLOW-IN-THE-DARK ARIEL FROM THE LITTLE MERMAID * COLOUR CHANGING MINNIE MOUSE * SILVER MICKEY MOUSE * GOLDEN RAPUNZEL FROM RAPUNZEL * WOODY FROM TOY STORY * ELASTIGIRL FROM THE INCREDIBLES * RUSSELL FROM UP * HOLOGRAM BO PEEP FROM TOY STORY * HOLOGRAM DORY FROM FINDING NEMO * GLOW-IN-THE-DARK MIKE FROM MONSTERS INC * COLOUR CHANGING LIGHTNING MCQUEEN FROM CARS * SILVER BUZZ LIGHTYEAR FROM TOY STORY * GOLDEN SULLEY FROM MONSTERS INC * GOLDEN C-3PO FROM STAR WARS * CAPTAIN MARVEL FROM CAPTAIN MARVEL * HULK FROM THE INCREDIBLE HULK * BLACK WIDOW FROM BLACK WIDOW * HOLOGRAM SCARLET WITCH FROM THE X-MEN 4 * HOLOGRAM CAPTAIN AMERICA * GLOW-IN-THE-DARK GAMORA FROM AVENGERS INFINITY WAR * COLOUR CHANGING IRON MAN * SILVER BLACK PANTHER FROM BLACK PANTHER * GOLDEN THOR FROM THOR * THE MANDALORIAN FROM STAR WARS * REY FROM STAR WARS * DARTH VADER FROM STAR WARS * HOLOGRAM PRINCESS LEIA FROM STAR WARS * HOLOGRAM KYLO REN FROM STAR WARS * GLOW-IN-THE-DARK YODA FROM STAR WARS * COLOUR CHANGING STORM TROOPER * SILVER R2-D2 FROM STAR WARS

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There are silver, gold, colour changing, glow in the dark, and additional glitter edition Ooshies, which can all be kept in a special limited-edition box.

'We know many Aussie families have had a challenging year, so we're partnering with Disney to give our customers something exciting to look forward to from their everyday shop,' Woolworths Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Hicks said.

'Whether it's Woody, a hologram Princess Leia or a glow in the dark Yoda, we're confident the collection is something the entire family can enjoy and collect together.'

Woolworths has also teamed up with TerraCycle to offer customers a sustainable way to recycle their previous Ooshies.

The collection includes silver, gold, colour changing, glow in the dark, and additional glitter editions, which can all be kept in a special limited-edition Ooshies box

Woolworths has also teamed up with TerraCycle to offer customers a sustainable way to recycle their previous Ooshies

Every Woolworths store will have dedicated recycle bins so customers can drop any pre-loved collectables and wrapper to be recycled until January 31, 2021

Every Woolworths store will have dedicated recycle bins so customers can drop any pre-loved collectables and wrapper to be recycled until January 31, 2021.

The paper wrapper can also be recycled at home in the yellow bin.

Unfortunately there will be a delay on the launch for customers in Victoria until lockdown restrictions ease to focus on store operations and safety of team members and customers.

To keep Victorian fans entertained until then, Disney+ is offering eligible Everyday Rewards members in Victoria a 14 day free trial of Disney+, giving them access to thousands of hours of films and series.

Unfortunately there will be a delay on the launch for customers in Victoria until lockdown restrictions ease to focus on store operations and safety of team members and customers

'We know some customers in Victoria will be disappointed by the delayed roll out, but the safety and wellbeing of our customers, team members, and community remains our number one priority,' Mr Hicks said.

'The delay will allow our team to focus on operations and supplying customers with their everyday essentials during this challenging period.

'Once restrictions ease and we can safely roll out the program, we look forward to sharing the Disney magic with our Victorian customers.'
Joel Dodge, a Central New York native who now lives in New York City, is a public interest attorney, law school lecturer and policy adviser. He serves on the board of the American Constitution Society for Law & Policy, New York Lawyer Chapter.

Theres a new plan to make scientific and technological discovery the backbone of a new era of economic growth across the United States  one that could better position us to combat viral pandemics like the coronavirus. Its gaining traction with Congress and Vice President Joe Biden. And Syracuse could be at the center of it.

Once upon a time, the American economy reached new heights thanks to a post-World War II public commitment to funding research and development in science and technology. This spurred tremendous economic growth and a thriving middle class, both in Syracuse and across the country. From 1947 to 1970, when the U.S. governments investment in R&D totaled around 2 percent of our national economy, median family income doubled.

The gains from this era of innovation and discovery have reverberated for decades, and technologies we depend on today  including vaccines, GPS, the internet, and even the iPhone  can all be traced back to this period of government investment in R&D.

Since then, our commitment to investing in innovation has plunged  and in the last two decades, median family income has barely budged. Today the government spends about a third of what it once spent on R&D as a share of our economy. That has coincided with a stark geographic divergence, where job growth is increasingly concentrated in a handful of cities on the coasts. To try to lure employers, other communities compete against each other with lavish tax breaks and incentives. We saw this with Amazons HQ2 search  where the tech giant ultimately chose New York City and the Washington, D.C., area anyway.

As the United States has slipped from its former role of global innovation leader, other countries  especially China  are catching up. And while private industry can fill some of the gap left by the governments shrinking commitment to innovation, its just not enough: The private sector is too focused on short-term profits at the expense of research with broad social benefits. For example, the groundbreaking Human Genome Project almost never happened because the private sector would not fund it; instead, the government stepped up to invest in the project to map our DNA. That has created 280,000 new jobs with an average salary of $70,000  which means the governments investment has been paid back many times over in new tax revenue.

We need more discoveries like the Human Genome Project  and the good jobs that come with them  to chart a new era of broadly shared economic growth. Thats why a pair of MIT economists, Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson, have proposed to jump-start America by investing $100 billion a year to create new R&D hubs in dozens of cities across the country. They ranked Syracuse as the third-leading candidate for such a hub (behind only Rochester and Pittsburgh) based on factors like cost of living, education level, and the quality of its universities. Syracuse is one of five cities in New York to land among their top 20 contenders.

If enacted, this plan is projected to create 4 million new jobs  and possibly far more if it leads to major new scientific and technological breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs could be in disease cure and prevention, setting us up to better fight the next viral pandemic. They could also happen in important emerging fields like alternative energy, synthetic biology, and more.

If individual Americans are collectively making this investment, they should also get a stake in the profits that flow from discoveries funded by taxpayer dollars. Gruber and Johnson propose an Innovation Dividend that would be paid out to Americans annually as a return on their investment.

Vice President Biden has endorsed a version of this plan where taxpayers would reap some of the gains by retaining royalties on profitable products generated by government R&D funding. He would invest $300 billion over four years to create R&D hubs in 50 communities across the country, creating millions of new jobs.

There is also legislation in Congress right now modeled on the MIT plan: the Endless Frontier Act, which enjoys bipartisan support in both chambers. However, Rep. John Katko has not co-sponsored this bill even though Syracuse would be an ideal candidate for its technology hub funding (as Sen. Chuck Schumer has recognized). Dana Balter, Katkos challenger this November, said in a statement, Creating new, well-paying jobs in science and technology research would be transformational for our district. I look forward to working on this legislation in Congress.

Central New Yorks leaders should be at the forefront of this effort. It would allow the United States to reach new scientific and technological frontiers while creating good jobs for good pay. Syracuse deserves to be part of the mission to jump-start America.

Also in Opinion: Editorial cartoons for Aug. 23, 2020: Postal service uproar, Democratic National Convention
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Tue, August 25 2020

The police in Central Mamuju regency, West Sulawesi, have launched an investigation into the death of Demas Laira, 28, an online media journalist who was found dead by a roadside last week.

It is the second reported case of a media worker being found dead by a roadside in recent weeks. In July a video editor for private TV station Metro TV was found dead near the Pesanggrahan Jakarta outer ring road, the police concluded that the case was suicide.

Demas body was found lying at the side of Jl. Trans Sulawesi in Salobijau hamlet, Karossa district, Central Mamuju, at around 2 a.m. local time on Thursday, with stab wounds to his chest, back, stomach and arms.

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President Donald Trump has approved an emergency authorization of convalescent plasma treatment for COVID-19 patients, calling it a "major breakthrough."

Trump said the Food and Drug Administration had issued an emergency use authorization for the convalescent plasma treatment.

Trump said on a report that the said treatment is a powerful therapy that transfuses very strong antibodies from the blood of recovered patients.

Trump said that based on science and data, the FDA had made an independent claim that the convalescent plasma treatment is safe and very effective.

The president then urged all COVID-19 recovered patients in the United States to donate their blood plasma.

How Does Convalescent Plasma Treatment Work?

The immune system generates antibodies when people have been exposed to COVID-19. The said antibodies fight the disease.

These antibody proteins are in the blood plasma, which is the liquid component of blood that suspends blood cells.

The convalescent plasma treatment is done by injecting it into another patient sick with COVID. The antibodies it contains can help fight the virus in an early infection until the patient's immune system generates its own antibodies.

Convalescent Plasma Treatment: Is It Safe and Effective?

Around 64,000 patients in the U.S. have been given the convalescent plasma treatment. It is classified as a century-old approach to treat flu and measles before vaccines.

It's a go-to technique that is being used when new diseases come along. History shows that it works against some, but not all infections.

However, there is no concrete evidence that it fights COVID-19 and, if it can, how it can best be utilized.

The FDA said, on announcing the emergency use of convalescent plasma treatment, that its benefits outweigh the known and potential risk of the product, adding that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternative treatments.

Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Sunday that convalescent plasma treatment is possibly beneficial.

But the former FDA official dismissed Trump's suggestion of a deliberate slowdown.

"I firmly reject the idea they would slow-walk anything or accelerate anything based on any political consideration or any consideration other than what is best for the public health and a real sense of mission to patients," he said.

In Mayo Clinic's June data, it showed that convalescent plasma treatment is safe.

This was found after a transfusion in a group of 20,000 patients, including Black and Latino patients.

Another study released on Aug. 13 suggested that convalescent plasma treatment on patients with severe COVID-19 symptoms was associated with a lower likelihood of death.

However, the study is not yet peer-reviewed and has serious scientific limitations, which can interpret findings hard.

Besides, the nation's top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, discouraged the FDA from issuing an emergency authorization on the said treatment.

Fauci cited concerns over weak data on the convalescent plasma treatment.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn started urging Americans sick with COVID-19 to donate plasma as early as April.

The federal government has already spent about $8 million on radio and online advertisements for the donation of plasma, even though government agencies have not fully endorsed it yet.

Check these out:

Trump Eyes Unproven Plant Extract for COVID-19 Treatment

Manufactured Antibodies May Be Next Big COVID-19 Treatment

FDA Puts Emergency Approval for Blood Plasma as COVID-19 Treatment on Hold
In just over a year Venezuela, and the push to oust socialist leader President Nicolas Maduro, has gone from being one of the worlds hottest news headlines to obscurity. The popularity of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido is waning. As the December 2020 election date for Venezuelas National Assembly fast approaches it appears that Washingtons opportunity to initiate regime change in the pariah Latin American state is steadily slipping away. That is strengthening the hand of U.S. antagonists and their proxies in the region, notably Putins Russia. Moscow is in the process of achieving what the Soviet Union couldnt accomplish over four decades during the Cold War, seizing control of Venezuelas vast petroleum riches. The Latin American country possesses the worlds largest hydrocarbon reserves, estimated to total over 300 billion barrels or 12% higher than Saudi Arabias. Venezuela was once an important source of heavy crude oil for U.S. refineries with many, notably in the U.S. Midwest, being configured to process crude oil with an API of less than 40 degrees.

A combination of Caracas malfeasance, deteriorating infrastructure and a substantial lack of investment in critical maintenance and development activities caused Venezuelas oil industry to collapse. Over the last decade, Venezuelas oil production has tumbled precipitously to be less than a sixth of the 2.3 million barrels daily pumped during 2009. According to OPECs August 2020 Monthly Oil Market Report, Venezuelas oil output had fallen to an average of 339,000 barrels daily during July, or less than half of the daily average for 2019.

The collapse of the Latin American countrys economically vital hydrocarbon sector has caused the economy to essentially collapse. During 2019 Venezuelas GDP contracted by 35%, according to the IMF, and is forecast to shrink 15% in 2020 and by another 5% for 2021. As a result, what was the most advanced country in Latin America is now one of the regions poorest. It has seen Caracas, once regarded as the jewel of South America, fall on hard times and lose its status as the continents mecca for oil executives, businessmen and tourists. Related: Oil Rallies As Twin Storms Force Shut-Ins In Gulf Of Mexico

Venezuelas economic woes will worsen because oil production remains in decline. Even the governments efforts, with considerable support from Russia, have failed to tangibly boost petroleum output with July average daily production of 339,000 barrels less than 1% greater than a month earlier. By the end of July 2020, Baker Hughes data showed there was only one active oil rig in the Latin American country, compared to 25 for the equivalent period a year earlier. The economic dependence on oil will force the Maduro administration to seek further support from key ally Russia, particularly because formidable U.S. sanctions prevent Caracas from tapping mainstream international capital markets and selling crude abroad. Moscow has a long history of supporting Venezuelas dictatorship, supplying arms, loans and now mercenaries to prop up its erstwhile South American ally since Chavezs ascension to power. It also facilitates the sale of Venezuelan crude, allowing Maduros administration to skirt U.S. sanctions. China has become a key recipient of Venezuelan oil despite U.S. sanctions. Those sales were being expedited by Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft, which had lent over $6 billion to Caracas to be repaid in oil with around $800 million remaining to be paid according to some estimates.

To combat those breaches, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Rosneft but indicated that they would be lifted if the company were no longer involved in Venezuela. This saw Rosneft sell its Venezuelan assets earlier this year to a Russian government owned company to protect its shareholders. This underscores the closeness of the relationship between Caracas and Moscow. The alliance between the two countries will become stronger because of Washington tabling further sanctions in the wake of seizing Iranian fuel cargoes en route to Venezuela earlier this month. The Trump administration is also determined to choke off Caracas oil sales, the governments only source of hard currency.

This relationship and its growing intimacy, gives Russia notable geopolitical benefits, including increased leverage in what has traditionally been considered the U.S.s exclusive sphere of influence and control over the worlds largest oil reserves. Recent developments in Venezuela indicate that the bond will become even closer.

Related: German Scientists Find New Way To Extract Lithium



Venezuelas December 2020 National Assembly elections are fast approaching. This is an important event for Washington and its attempts to secure regime change in Venezuela, blunt regional Russian influence and dominate the Latin American countrys vast oil wealth. The parliamentary body, where the opposition to Maduros holds a majority, endows opposition leader Juan Guaido with his legitimacy. At the start of 2019, Guaido declared himself Venezuelas interim president and was backed by the U.S., Canada and many Latin American countries. Eventually, more than 50 countries around the world recognized the opposition leader as Venezuelas legitimate leader by the end of 2019. That support, however, is evaporating domestically and internationally.

Guaidos failure to deliver on the many promises made during early 2019 has seen many Venezuelans who initially supported him become disillusioned with the self-declared intermediate president. His popularity is declining further as the ever-deepening economic crisis forces Venezuelans to set aside politics and focus on managing day to day problems just to survive. A 2019 poll showed that Guaidos popularity had waned and he was in a statistical dead heat with Maduro. Guaidos support spiraled even lower after his alleged involvement in the abortive May 2020 armed raid on Venezuela, where two former U.S. special forces soldiers were captured. This along with Trump flip flopping on Venezuela in recent months and the growing pressures on ordinary Venezuelans because of the economic impact of harsher U.S. sanctions.

Washington appears to have lost the ability to spark regime change in Venezuela. Harsher sanctions and the Latin American countrys growing forced austerity has seen a hard-pressed Maduro seek closer ties with Russia, giving Moscow ever greater control of Venezuelas vast oil reserves and potential productive capacity. This not only boosts Russian geopolitical standing but gives Moscow greater ability to influence oil prices by increasing its bargaining power with OPEC, with which Russia has partnered since 2016 in a series of petroleum production cuts to bolster prices.

By Matthew Smith for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Are you and your credit union waiting for a new normal?

What if it doesnt return any time soon  or at all?

We will emerge from this COVID-19-fueled economic crisis to find that some things look familiar, but that nothing is the same. The safest, most productive way to approach doing business in the future is that there is no more new normal. There is only a New Next.

The concept of returning to a more stable state of normal is reflected in Kurt Lewins classic change model of Unfreeze  Change  Refreeze. The idea is that change occurs when you unfreeze a situation, effect the change, and then refreeze to a new state of relative stasis.

The idea that you can refreeze a change to establish a new normal was questionable before the COVID-19 crisis. You were already experiencing change and disruption in technology, business models, competitors, and member expectations. Rather than refreezing, things seemed in constant flux.

But the idea of refreezing to a new normal completely lost its relevance when COVID-19 showed up. In less than eight weeks 

The world economy was decimated.

The workplace has been transformed.

Member expectations for flexibility, access, and safety have been reinvented.

Change has happened as such a rapid rate that I imagine the virus boasting to friends, You think it takes years to change the world? Here. Hold my beer.

The result is an environment where there is no time to refreeze and solidify any change or new idea. The best we can reasonably expect to achieve is gelatin that wiggles around and then melts in a constantly evolving pattern.

How Great Organizations Will Continue to Flourish

The consensus going into 2002 was that it would be a difficult year. The dot com bubble had been bursting for months, the telecom industry was imploding, and the United States was reeling from the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Herb Kelleher, legendary founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, was asked what kept him awake at night in a Fortune interview that ran on January 8, 2002. Here is what he said:

So my biggest concern is that somehow  we [at Southwest Airlines] lose the esprit de corps, the culture, the spirit. If we ever do lose that, we will have lost our most valuable competitive asset.

Kelleher was right then, and it is true today. The culture always wins.

Peter Drucker is credited with saying, Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

In todays world, culture eats everything for breakfast.

A compelling culture that flawlessly executes while you anticipate, adapt, pursue, and even ignore change in pursuit of your New Next will be the difference between continued excellence and irrelevance or even extinction.

What a Culture Equipped for Constant Change Looks Like

The culture you need for your credit union to flourish is built on the foundation of what has worked in the recent past. It is (1) customer-obsessed, (2) values-aligned, (3) results-focused, and (4) people-centric.

Those elements alone, however, wont equip you to execute at the level you need today while remaining nimble to flourish in the future.

Meeting that challenge requires four additional elements. You might have already addressed two of them: being (5) data- and process-driven and (6) change-ready. These are accelerators for your credit union, and the COVID-19 virus is the ultimate stress test to determine the success of your efforts.

But, as we move into a New Next era, your culture will require two new elements. It must be (7) future-focused and (8) collaboration-enabled.

A future-focused culture resembles the scouts who worked for the wagon trains as the West was being settled. Every day they rode out over the horizon in search of two things: Where are the hostiles that have the potential to do us harm? Where is the water that will sustain and fuel us on our journey?

Likewise, a collaboration-enabled culture actively seeks and utilizes different perspectives and experiences to reach innovative solutions to challenges and work seamlessly together when crisis arises.

A culture that excels at these eight elements will set itself apart in the coming months and years.

Where to Begin

Stephen Hawking began his book A Brief History of Time with the retelling of an anecdote that has been around in various forms since the late 1500s.

After a presentation on the structure of the solar system by a leading astronomer, an elderly lady confronts the presenter to disagree with his assertions that the Earth is a ball orbiting the Sun. According to her, in the Hindu tradition, the world as we know it rests on the back of a giant turtle.

When confronted with the obvious question about the platform on which the turtle is standing, the lady confidently replies, Its turtles all the way down.

We know that this explanation of cosmology doesnt hold up in the face of reality. On the other hand, the first step in transforming your culture for the future might be as simple as this: It is leadership all the way down.

Equip leaders at every level with the expectation, definition, processes, and competencies to lead in the New Next. Great cultures can theoretically exist without universally great leadership. Experience shows, on the other hand, that great leaders are the catalyst for cultures that lead to positive change and exceptional results.

Weve survived uncertainty and upheaval before. We will do so again. When we do, well have a renewed awareness that a new normal could be years away, if it ever arrives. There will always, however, be a New Next.
Federal Department of Foreign Affairs

Bern, 24.08.2020 - Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis met with Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois-Philippe Champagne this morning in Bern. The official working visit took place against the backdrop of a shared intention on the part of Switzerland and Canada to intensify their bilateral relations. The two foreign ministers spoke of their countries' strong relations and discussed many other topical international issues such as the crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the situation in Lebanon.

Ignazio Cassis and his counterpart praised the strong relations between Switzerland and Canada. The COVID-19 crisis was a major topic of discussion. The two ministers summarised the situation with regard to the pandemic in their respective countries. They also touched on the current state of progress towards a vaccine and on ensuring supplies of such a vaccine. Both Switzerland and Canada, which is a member of the G7 and G20, hope to be able to rely on cooperation in international bodies in this regard.

During the visit to Bern, Mr Cassis and Mr Champagne also took the opportunity to review a wide range of other international issues. The discussions focused on the situation in Lebanon in the wake of the explosion that occurred in Beirut on 4 August, on the Middle East peace process and on Switzerland's and Canada's stance regarding the tensions surrounding the presidential elections in Belarus. The two delegations also discussed geopolitical matters relating to China, the United States, Iran, Venezuela, the European Union, the United Nations and the OSCE.

Close ties between Canada and Switzerland

This year, Switzerland and Canada are celebrating 75 years of diplomatic relations. The two countries have many shared interests and values, including federalism and multilingualism. Economic, interpersonal and cultural ties between the two countries are close. Canada is Switzerland's second-largest economic partner in the Americas. Last year, Switzerland exported goods worth CHF 4.4 billion to Canada. These exports were mainly composed of pharmaceutical products.

At the end of 2019, there were more than 40,000 Swiss citizens living in Canada. The two countries, which see themselves as natural partners in thought and action, intend to continue to intensify their bilateral political relations.

Address for enquiries

FDFA Communication

Federal Palace West Wing

CH-3003 Bern, Switzerland

Tel. Communication service: +41 58 462 31 53

Tel. Press service: +41 58 460 55 55

E-mail: kommunikation@eda.admin.ch

Twitter: @SwissMFA

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Ark Encounter gearing up to host massive 2021 Christian music festival lasting 40 days, 40 nights

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Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis announced Monday that the Ark Encounter will host the world's largest Christian music festivals for 40 days and 40 nights next summer.

Billed as 40 Days and 40 Nights of Gospel Music at the Ark, the festival is a collaboration between Abraham Productions and the young earth tourist venue that includes the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, which is based on the book of Genesis' account of the ark built by Noah and the global flood. The Ark Encounter was built according to the dimensions described in the Bible. Its 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high and is known as the largest timber-frame structure in the world.

Gospel music artists will perform live from the 2,500-seat Answers Center at the Ark Encounter, located in Williamstown, Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati, Ohio, from Aug. 2, 2021, through Sept. 10, 2021.

So far, 60 Christian artists are scheduled to perform during the music festival. Among those listed are several southern gospels acts such as The Hoppers, The Isaacs, Booth Brothers, Karen Peck & New River, Triumphant, The Martins, Greater Vision, Brian Free & Assurance, Lynda Randle, Ernie Haase & Signature Sound, Jeff & Sheri Easter and Joseph Habedank and others in gospel performers.

In addition, several speakers will be attending the event, including Pastors Robert Jeffress, David Jeremiah and Jerry Vines, Johnny Hunt, Tim Hill, C.T. Townsend and Barry Clardy. Ark founder and CEO Ken Ham will also be giving presentations.

Attendees will only have to pay the daily admission to the Ark Encounter and will be granted access to all the concerts and speakers as well as explore the museum.

The Ark Encounter reopened on June 8 after being closed for nearly three months due to COVID-19 shutdowns. The museum was asked to follow Healthy at Work guidelines given by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.

Answers in Genesis, the organization that operates the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, put together a COVID-19 Preparedness Plan. The plan follows guidelines put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as guidelines mandated by the governors office.
Korea should focus on protecting national interests



South Korea and China have agreed to realize a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Seoul as soon as safely possible after the COVID-19 pandemic dies down. The agreement was made during a meeting between President Moon Jae-in's national security adviser Suh Hoon and Yang Jiechi, a member of the Central Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in Busan, Saturday.



Suh and Yang concurred on the need for the two nations to cooperate closely in fighting the coronavirus, and to conclude a second-phase free trade agreement and a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) treaty within the year.



The agreement which was the outcome of six hours of discussions holds significance as it can be a breakthrough in long-stalled bilateral relations. China has yet to lift its economic retaliation against Korean companies and its halt to tourism here after Seoul allowed the United States to deploy a missile defense system, called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), on South Korean soil.



Xi's visit has been sought to upgrade bilateral relations by getting rid of the barriers between the two neighboring countries. Expectations have also been growing over Beijing's possible role in improving inter-Korean relations. The two nations also need to expand flight routes and the issuance of visas which have been contracting amid the pandemic.



For Korea, however, the meeting can be burdensome in light of souring relations between the U.S. and China. Bilateral tension has been intensifying over trade issues and military tension in the South China Sea.



The U.S. has been pressing Korea to join the Economic Prosperity Network (EPN) while seeking to expand the deployment of the missile defense system here, possibly to target China. Against this backdrop, experts share the notion that Yang might have asked Seoul to take a stance more favorable to the Chinese side.



This means the U.S. will likely put more pressure on Korea regarding the China issue. We call for the government to maintain the principle of "balanced diplomacy" without siding with a certain nation. Maintenance of the alliance with the U.S. is essential as the backbone of our security. Yet keeping friendly ties with China is also essential as it is our top trade partner, in addition to its role in inter-Korean affairs and regional stability.






Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:22:02|Editor: huaxia

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GUIYANG, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Liu Zili, former vice chairman and general manager of Kweichow Moutai Group, maker of China's famous Moutai liquor, was Monday sentenced to 11 and half years in prison for accepting bribes, a court said.

The sentence, handed down by the Intermediate People's Court of Bouyei-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Qiannan, Guizhou Province, also includes a fine of 1 million yuan (about 144,600 U.S. dollars) and the confiscation of Liu's illegally gained property.

The court found that from 2008 to 2018, Liu used his position in the state-owned group to seek benefits for others including franchise rights. In return, he received money and valuable worth 18.55 million yuan, either directly or through his family members.

The court said the sentence showed leniency, taking into consideration that Liu was cooperative in the investigation and has already surrendered part of his illegal earnings.

Liu pled guilty in the court. Enditem
By Sally C. Pipes

In a victory for consumers, D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichol just upheld a Trump administration executive order requiring doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies to be transparent about the prices they negotiate for health care services. Previously, those prices were closely held secrets. The lack of transparency contributed to the relative dysfunction of the health care market.

Consumers were unable to shop around for care. Patients and third-party observers couldnt question why one hospital was charging twice as much for a given procedure as its competitor across town. By giving consumers and payers more information, the Trump administrations price transparency order will yield a more efficient health care market, with lower prices and higher-quality services.

President Trump first announced the executive order last fall. It required hospitals to publicly post their negotiated prices in a user-friendly format. Providers and insurers, meanwhile, had to disclose estimated out-of-pocket costs to patients before they receive care. The American Hospital Association and other hospital groups sued to block the order, claiming it violated the First Amendment and would confuse patients. As the district courts ruling makes clear, such lawsuits have no basis in truth. The presidents order will empower patients to take control of their healthcare spending. And when patients have the necessary tools to seek out cost-effective care, everyone in the system benefits.

Consider the case of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma. On the facilitys website, potential patients can find a menu with the price of every service offered. Because of the ease of navigating the cost of care and comparatively low prices, patients have flocked to the center for their health care needs. These patients include a California resident who needed his patellar tendon repaired. In his home state, he would have paid approximately $30,000 for the surgery. Instead, he traveled to the Surgery Center of Oklahoma to have the operation, where it carried a price of $5,700. Such massive price discrepancies are routine in the U.S. health care system.

On average, Americans can expect a nearly 300 percent difference between the lowest and highest sticker prices for individual health care services. Fortunately, under the recently upheld executive order, patients will finally be on more equal footing with providers. To attract business, hospitals and more conventional health care providers will have to compete against lower-cost retail health and urgent care clinics. Such market competition will yield lower prices and better value throughout the health care system.

Critics of Trumps executive order dont have as much faith in the average consumer. Many argue that patients are not well-informed enough to weigh pricing discrepancies across providers  or that they dont want the responsibility for making decisions about their care. But consumers themselves beg to differ.

Recent polling from the Foundation for Government Accountability found that 82 percent of voters want to know the cost of health care services before they actually receive them. Patients want to shop around, whether to choose the most affordable provider or the one thats best for their particular health issue.

Its never made sense that consumers could instantly compare the prices of dozens of televisions, but could not get a straight answer about how much their knee replacement would cost. The district courts ruling recognizes that fact, and will allow the Trump administrations executive order to deliver on its promise for consumers.

Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and the Thomas W. Smith fellow in healthcare policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All (Encounter 2020). Follow her on Twitter @sallypipes.
"Preparing people for the unexpected is more important than ever," states editor Peter Geiger, Philom. "Our job as editors of the Farmers' Almanac is to pass down valuable tips and advice to help our readers thrive, no matter the obstacles."

The Cold and Snowy Side

The Farmers' Almanac forewarns areas from the Great Lakes and Midwest, westward through the Northern and Central Plains, and Rockies are in for a cold winter.

Snow will be abundant, possibly above-normal amounts for parts of the western Dakotas, northern portions of Colorado and Utah, as well as Wyoming.

The Southeastern part of the country, excluding the Tennessee Valley, will experience average precipitation levels, with temperatures chillier than normal.

The Dry Side

Areas across Arizona and southern California are predicted to have a mild but dry winter.

The Crazy In-Between

In New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma east into Arkansas, and Louisiana, Mother Nature will mix intervals of tranquil weather with occasional shots of cold and wintry precipitation.

Right along the Pacific Coastal Plain, from northern California and points north through western portions of Oregon and Washington, rainy and wet weather will be on tap.

Wild Card

The "winter wild card" belongs to areas around the Tennessee and lower Ohio River valleys, north and east up through New England. These areas will see a mix of intense systems that will keep delivering a wintry mix of rainy, icy and/or snowy weather throughout winter.

Snow Way Out

The 2021 Farmers' Almanac has an interesting forecast of a blizzard, bringing 1-2 feet of snow along the eastern seaboard during February 12-15.

Being Unprepared is so 2020

If 2020 taught us anything, it's that you "just never know." In addition to weather, the Farmers' Almanac includes useful advice on ways to raise chickens, save money, boost your immunity, grow food, and allow readers to live more self-sufficient lives.

The 2021 Farmers' Almanac, with its orange and green cover, is now available in bookstores and retail stores, as well as on Amazon and FarmersAlmanac.com

Contact: Peter Geiger, Philom., Editor 207-755-2246 [email protected]

Sandi Duncan, Philom, Mg. Editor 207-755-2349 [email protected]

SOURCE Farmers' Almanac

Related Links

www.farmersalmanac.com


Travelers wear protective masks as they walk through in terminal 5 at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on March 1, 2020. (Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo)

CDC Drops 14-Day Quarantine Recommendation for Overseas, Out-of-State Travelers

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed its recommendation for travelers to quarantine for 14 days after returning from trips out of state or overseas during the pandemic.

While updating its travel guidelines on Aug. 21, the CDC still advises that travel increases the risk of contracting and spreading the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, adding that staying at home is the best way to protect yourself and others from COVID-19.

You and your travel companions (including children) may spread COVID-19 to other people including your family, friends, and community for 14 days after you were exposed to the virus, the CDC noted, adding that even people who feel well and dont show any symptoms can still spread the potentially deadly bug.

The CDC urges travelers to take precautions, including maintaining social distancing guidelines, washing hands thoroughly, and wearing masks.

The agency notes, however, that some state, local, and tribal governments may have separate requirements on self-quarantining, and travelers are advised to review relevant guidelines.

A passenger checks in using a touchscreen at JetBlues terminal in John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York City on March 14, 2020. (Kathy Willens/AP Photo)

Entry into the United States from a number of locations remains restricted, including from China, Iran, Brazil, and most European countries.

The CCP virus death toll and case count have been climbing for months in the United States, with a Johns Hopkins tally reporting more than 5.7 million Americans infected and more than 177,000 deaths.

Hope has increased for a shift in the dynamics of the outbreak as pharmaceutical companies continue to work toward a possible vaccine for COVID-19, and after the U.S. government on Aug. 23 approved an emergency authorization to allow the use of convalescent plasma to treat patients. The plasma, which comes from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies, may help people battling the disease.

Meanwhile, University of Hong Kong scientists claim to have the first evidence of someone being reinfected with the CCP virus, after genetic tests showed that a 33-year-old man returning to Hong Kong from a trip to Spain had a different strain of the virus than the one hed previously been infected with in March, according to a microbiologist who led the work.

Whether people who have had COVID-19 are immune to new infections and how long their immunity may last are important questions, with implications for vaccine development.

The Trump administration is considering fast-tracking an experimental COVID-19 vaccine being jointly developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University in hopes it could be deployed in the United States to curb the spread of the virus.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-25 01:56:52|Editor: huaxia

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CAIRO, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and Secretary-General of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) Zurab Pololikashvili discussed on Monday the recent prominent tourism projects in Egypt amid the coronavirus outbreak.

During their meeting in Cairo, Sisi highlighted Egypt's strategy to resume tourism under precautionary measures set by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in coordination with all concerned parties, which aims at achieving a balance between the return of tourism in Egypt, and ensuring the safety of tourists and workers in the tourism sector, Egyptian Presidential Spokesman Bassam Rady said in a statement.

For his part, Pololikashvili praised the Egyptian efforts to gradually receive foreign tourists, as well as the unprecedented support provided by the government for the tourism sector, which is one of the pillars of the Egyptian economy.

Egypt resumed international flights in early July, after it lifted a partial curfew it has been imposing since late March, and reopened restaurants, cafes, theaters and cinemas, as well as hotels, museums and archeological sites, all with limited capacity.

The North African country, which has been witnessing sharp decline in COVID-19 deaths and infections, also decided to reopen archeological sites, hotels and museums in the monument-rich city of Luxor for tourists from the beginning of September. Enditem
Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan has declined to apologise for his tweets wherein he criticised the top court and Chief Justice of India, SA Bobde. The tweets represent his bona fide belief and retracting his statements would be an insincere apology, Bhushan said in a statement submitted before the Supreme Court on Monday.

An apology has to be sincerely made. If I retract a statement that I otherwise believe to be true or offer an insincere apology that in my eyes would amount to contempt of my conscience and of an institution (Supreme Court) that I hold in highest esteem, the statement said.

On August 20, the Supreme Court had asked Bhushan to reconsider his stance and offer an apology by Monday (August 24) while hearing on the sentence to be awarded to him. Earlier, on August 14, the court had ruled that Bhushan was guilty of contempt of court and kept the matter for deciding on punishment for August 20.

Also read: History will judge the court - Kapil Sibal on Prashant Bhushan contempt case

On August 20, Bhushan issued a statement in which he chose to stick to his tweets. He had posted two tweets, one against the Supreme Court on June 27 and another against CJI Bobde on June 29.

Bhushans first tweet read, When historians in the future look back at the last six years to see how democracy has been destroyed in India even without a formal Emergency, they will particularly mark the role of the SC in this destruction, and more particularly the role of the last four CJIs.

The second referred to CJI Bobde and said, The CJI rides a Rs 50-lakh motorcycle belonging to a BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] leader at Raj Bhavan, Nagpur, without wearing a mask or helmet, at a time when he keeps the SC on lockdown mode denying citizens their fundamental right to access justice!

Attorney General KK Venugopal, on August 20, asked the court not to punish Bhushan. The court is now expected to pronounce its order in the coming days on the sentence to be imposed on Bhushan.
Dhaka, Aug 24 : Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina once again alleged that former Chief of Army Staff Ziaur Rahman was involved in the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman while his wife Khaleda Zia was involved in 2004 Dhaka grenade attack.

"Ziaur Rahman was involved in the killings of the Father of the Nation, four national leaders...he killed army personnel through coups one after another. Khaleda Zia just did the same thing after coming to power," said Hasina on Sunday Morning during a programme organised by Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Birth Centenary Celebration National Implementation Committee at the International Mother Language Institute, marking the 45th martyrdom of the Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and National Mourning Day.

She said, war criminal of 1971 liberation war - Jamaat-e-Islami top leaders Matiur Rahman Nizami & Ali Ahsan Mujahid, who led the massacre and genocide of 1971, and the mass killing of the intellectuals were rewarded as ministers by Khaleda Zia.

Hasina said by selecting Ziaur Rahman as the army chief, Khandaker Mustaque had proved that they were together in the conspiracy.

She said the aim of the killers was to destroy the ideology and goal with which Bangabandhu had liberated this country. They never wanted the development of Bangladesh.

The PM said Ziaur Rahman had made collaborators like Abdul Alim, Maulana Mannan and Shah Aziz ministers, prime minister and advisers.

"They (Zia and Khaleda) always patronised those who were involved in terrorism and killing," she said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 15:47:58|Editor: huaxia

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NEW DELHI, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- At least two people were killed and one was feared trapped Monday after being hit by shooting stones in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, officials said.

The shooting stones drifted on the Rishikesh-Badrinath highway in Pauri Garhwal district, about 192 km east of Dehradun, the capital city of Uttarakhand.

"Early today shooting stones hit two people here, killing them on spot," an official in Pauri Garhwal said. "Another person is feared trapped under the boulders near the Kaudiyala area."

Following the incident, authorities rushed State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) personnel to carry out rescue efforts.

On Sunday night the Badrinath stretch of highway in the Chamoli district was blocked due to a landslide. The efforts to clear the debris were underway until last reports poured in.

A video aired on television channels showed a group of people running away from the spot where a large amount of debris was seen falling from the adjacent cliff on the highway.

Officials said the Rishikesh-Badrinath highway has been blocked at several points as rains triggered landslides and drifting rocks from the hillocks close to the road.

Reports said more than 100 roads, including four national highways, are still blocked owing to heavy rain in several parts of the state. Authorities have pressed in over 200 earthmovers and heavy machinery to clear the roads and ensure free movement of traffic.

Meanwhile, India Meteorological Department (IMD) has predicted heavy to very heavy rainfall in the state between Aug. 25 and Aug. 28.

The ongoing monsoon season in India is at its peak. The downpour accompanied with it has triggered floods in several Indian states. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2020-08-24 19:10:05|Editor: huaxia

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KHARTOUM, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chairman of Sudan's Sovereign Council Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan on Monday accused unnamed trends of attempting to "kidnap" the popular revolution in Sudan and dismantle the army.

"There are some trends which want to kidnap the revolution and we in the armed forces will not allow that. The armed forces have sided with the people not with a party," said Al-Burhan addressing the army officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers at Wadi Seidna military area in Omdurman, north of the capital Khartoum.

"We will remain to be patient because the Sudanese people chose to be patient." added Al-Burhan, who is also the Commander-in-Chief of the Sudanese armed forces.

He further said that after about a year since the establishment of the transitional government, no change has been made.

Al-Burhan said the armed forces will not carry out a coup against people's revolution or allow the revolution to be "kidnapped," saying "we are the protectors of the people."

A transitional government of military and civilian components assumed the rule in Sudan following the ouster of the regime of former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Enditem
In brief: Google's popular lineup of Chromecast streaming devices hasn't seen a refresh since the 3rd-gen model launched in 2018. Now, it seems a successor is on the horizon, which instead of being a simple streaming dongle, will run Android TV and come with its own remote to compete with the likes of Apple TV, Roku and Amazon's Fire TV.

The Chromecast has arguably been Google's most successful hardware to date, bringing the joy and convenience of streaming to TVs from browsers/phones at an affordable price point. The streaming dongle slowly gained more capabilities like 4K and HDR support with the 2016 Chromecast Ultra, but these features were absent on the later 3rd-gen model in a bid to keep prices down.

Rumors around a new model codenamed 'Sabrina' began surfacing earlier this year, and Google's recent FCC filings suggest that an Android TV dongle could launch alongside the Pixel 5 at the company's annual hardware event in October.

9to5Google reports of two new Google devices with model numbers GZRNL and G9N9N in FCC's listing. The former is described as an "Interactive Media Streaming Device" that supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, while the latter is simply listed as a "Wireless Device" that will have the FCC label "under the power cover," suggesting that it could be a remote control for navigating Android TV's UI.

In addition to 4K 60fps and HDR support, Google's Android TV dongle is expected to feature a low-latency gaming mode for Stadia that will automatically toggle a TV's built-in gaming mode to disable post-processing and reduce lag while streaming games. The dongle is said to have twice the RAM of the Chromecast Ultra at 2GB, which, alongside its more powerful internals and the new dedicated remote control, would likely make it a more expensive option to Google's current offerings.

To make it stand out from other streaming media players, the company could also offer free Stadia Pro subscriptions as it did for existing Chromecast owners a few months ago. We'll find out more when Google is expected to announce the device officially at its annual fall hardware event.